How To Handle Project Implementation

Having spent the most of my last article urging you to move towards becoming a strategic agency, I signed off by saying that I believed project implementation still held an important place in an agency’s service offerings. So let’s dive straight into how this should look:

The key difference in how a strategy-focused agency should approach implementation is that they should keep the latter work at arms-length. This can be done in a number of ways, but the main two I recommend are by referrals to a trusted specialist in the field or by charging a ‘management’ fee to work with a third party to create the deliverables.

This sounds simple, but there are two mistakes I often see the agencies I work with make here:

1. White labelling - if you are referring work or managing a third party, do not be tempted to try and hide this from your clients. It can be amazing to see the operational knots agencies create for themselves trying to hide their secret partnerships. If you have won confidence in your expertise with your strategic work there should be no need to lie to your clients about this

2. Finding poor partners - the firm you refer work to or the agency/freelancer you manage the delivery through is a reflection of the quality of work you believe in. You must put in the time and effort to find a good, reliable partner. The litmus test here is whether you would let that partner work on a project if it was your own money. Do not make the mistake of going with the cheapest firm to fit a client’s budget or refer to those with the biggest referral bonuses

There are significant benefits with taking this arms-length approach to implementation that are fairly obvious including minimising fixed employment costs, reducing the stress of having to actively manage the day-to-day of production and avoiding the hassle of managing a bloated workforce. But there are other, more subtle advantages to this approach too:

Being solution agnostic in your strategic work produces the best final product for the client

A pattern I see being repeated across many agencies is the herding of clients down a particular implementation path, regardless of whether this suits the client’s needs the best. This is often done because there is pressure to feed the self-constructed machine built of full-time, in-house specialists in a particular discipline.

One agency I worked with recently who creates websites would push all their clients to one web framework despite them knowing that there were far better solutions on the market elsewhere. This led to poor-quality websites and ultimately unhappy clients.

Referring work can pay dividends

When you refer work, you have to be confident in who you are referring to. This forces you to network and find similar-minded agencies who are experts in their own spaces. Once a trusted set of partnerships are built across multiple agencies, this can quickly become your easiest way to find new clients as you send referrals between each other.

The additional benefit here is you can share best practices and you have to stay honest with your expertise to avoid breaking the network.

No need to replace whole departments when the market changes

The market changes over time and will likely do so even quicker as AI takes hold. As a strategically-focused agency, you need to keep up with the developments in your domain to continue giving your clients the best advice. This is straightforward to do with a pro-active and intelligent staff.

Where this is is not quite as easy is on the implementation end. An example would be where market demand suddenly moves between skill-sets, perhaps from React Native to Flutter. If you have an in-house React Native team, you can either spend time and money re-training the staff who are willing to change their skill-set or you have to go to market and hire a team of new developers. Neither option is good.

With implementation kept outside the core function of your business, you can be nimble and move with where you believe the best solution lies for your client right now.

I’ll end this article today by acknowledging that it can be scary for a lot of agency owners moving away from implementation. It can feel like leaving money on the table and can take agency leaders away from the work they love doing the most. My advice is to think hard about what you want your business to do for you (allow you to exercise your passion/generate money with the least stress possible) and take the leap with courage.

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