Can Creative Agencies Scale?

A conversation I’ve had many times is around applying processes to creative work. This is usually a contentious issue with creative teams, so I’ve written below about how I would approach this.

My wife works in the logistics industry and we often talk about the differences between our professions. Recently, there has been a push towards trying to implement Lean Six Sigma analysis and practices into her operation. For those of you who don’t know, Lean Six Sigma is a process formed of a combination of Lean Management and Six Sigma practices and is typically used to increase operational efficiency.

A key component of Lean Six Sigma is controlling variances across the process which has enormous benefits for most businesses as you can imagine including:

• reducing waste

• greater efficiency

• reducing errors

Problems applying operational efficiencies to creative agencies

As someone with a strong analytical streak, the idea of applying these practices to creative agencies has great appeal. Anyone who works in one, particularly the smaller entities, knows how loose the processes often are.

Expense accounts get eaten into with long client lunches, large chunks of time are dedicated to ‘brainstorming’ and everyone does everything. Time tracking is very much a taboo subject. And yet, this is often where you find the most creative work, the kind of work that those larger companies with endless bureaucracy stifling free-thinking are looking for.

The problem is that these kinds of companies will have a cap to their growth. They live and die by their talent and their weak processes mean that any growth is built on shaky ground. The ambitious leader of a firm such as this realises this after reading the same books and blogs we all do and decides to try and fix these problems. This is how it goes:

1. You begin by tracking everything, especially people’s time. This announcement is typically met by stony silence and is ignored by approximately three quarters of the senior staff and a quarter of the junior staff. The person with the thankless task of enforcing this policy has to send increasingly threatening messages to get compliance and receives escalating passive aggression in response

2. You decree that all services must be productised as per the guidance from the oracles of our industry. What are the inputs we need from our clients? What precise checklist items must be followed by the team to complete this product? What shape must the output take? You hold repeated brainstorming meetings with the creative teams to define this but no-one seems particularly engaged. Eventually you hand off this task to a project manager or do it yourself instead because done is better than perfect.

3. You work to systemise everything. Every item of work must be accounted for somewhere. Documentation is required for anything needed. Enormous Miro boards are constructed showing process maps for every eventuality. You add these systems to a folder online that is read by precisely zero people.

4. You map out your cost centres and task people with reducing these. Low hanging fruit is quick to go - “Did you know we’re spending £X on drinks for the staff each week?!”

5. The truly creative people leave the business and you find it hard to replace them with good staff. Morale seems to have fallen off a cliff

6. You notice work quality is decreasing and clients are increasingly unhappy. Negative reviews start appearing about your firm

7. Inbound leads reduce and repeat business dries up. Utilisation rate decreases and you now obsess over what people are using their non-billable time for

8. More people leave the business/are made redundant

9. At this stage, the founder usually either folds the business or goes back to what gave them a relatively successful firm in the first place and abandons their new processes and systems.

Some of the above is from painful, hard-won personal experience. Most of it is from witnessing the above in multiple firms who have reached out to me when they’ve got to somewhere between stage 5 and 8.

The problem is that efficiency is the natural enemy of creativity. Creative people typically hate to be told to follow a prescribed series of steps and there is a strange reality to the fact that the best brainstorming often occurs when a group of rowdy people congregate in a room after a boozy lunch. Creativity comes from chaos and systemising and productising removes the chaos.

How to make your creative firm scaleable without killing it

This puts agency leaders in a catch-22; if scaleability requires order and order reduces creativity, what do you do?

The answer is that you have to be creative with how you improve efficiency. This is an art in itself and as the leader of a creative agency you are living far away from the well-trodden paths of business efficiency traveled by people at my wife’s logistics company or Toyota.

An overview of the approach I usually take with clients is the following:

1. Map out your entire current client journey start-to-finish

2. Circle the areas which need creativity

3. Create a system for all areas outside of these circles and find ways to build these systems into the way you currently work. DO NOT hide these systems in a drive where no-one visits

4. Now look at the creative areas:

   1. Track the time it takes to complete a service a few times and then use that information to price and plan resourcing correctly

   2. Work with your senior team to define how they can ensure high quality repeatedly

   3. What are the ‘boring’ parts of the work that need to be done often which can be templated/outsourced/removed in some way?

The goal should be to quickly systemise the areas that aren’t creative and slowly build a framework for the creatives that frees them up to do their best work while productising and systemising as much as possible.

A real life example

Let’s look at a simplified example from a client of mine recently:

The client offered visual branding to their clients. We mapped the process out as follows:

1. Enquiry received

2. Sales process

3. Client confirmed

4. Requirements gathering

5. Creation of moodboards

6. User testing

7. Visual branding created

8. User testing

9. Project concluded

Immediately, stages 1-4 can be heavily systemised. There should be a clear process for initial engagement, proposal creation, follow-ups etc. Emails can be templated, auto-follows up set, requirements gathered using an online form and many other efficiencies.

The creation of moodboards requires creativity and therefore requires more sensitivity. Speaking to the senior designers, we found that they were creating different moodboard templates and client presentation decks every time. We agreed on the best one they had done so far and this became the default approach for all branding work going forward. Tracking the time taken to do a few moodboards we found it took between 2-3 days to produce them. This helped with pricing and resource planning.

User testing was outsourced to a specialist company.

We tackled the visual brand creation in the same way we looked at the moodboards.

We systemised the project conclusion to make sure all clients received a great off-boarding

Now, everyone is happy. The business is less reliant on key people as large swathes of the business is systemised and is therefore far more scaleable. The creatives have given up the mundane work that got in the way of the work they really cared about.

Final thoughts

If you’re a leader of a highly creative agency, be extremely careful in how you implement practices that you believe will help you scale. Creative firms rely on flexibility in the key areas and eliminating this will torpedo the reason your firm exists. Good luck!

If you need help improving your agency’s performance, please send enquiries to [email protected] to hear more about my agency improvement packages.