Being A Strategic Agency

Think about your business right now. Where does all the stress come from? If I had to guess it would be one of four things:

• Staffing issues

• Lack of good clients

• Cashflow problems

• Complex project implementation

All of these are legitimate problems faced by a good proportion of agencies and I’ll run through ways to help solve them in future articles. However, today I want to tackle the growing issue of handling implementation in agencies.

First of all, what do I define as implementation versus strategy? Strategy is creating a plan, implementation is executing on that plan. It’s that simple. So in the case of a mobile app, the strategic work would be putting together a plan for the features, the marketing strategy, the way the app should be built technically etc. You would also do well to include some validation of the plan by carrying out some user testing, carrying out various market analyses and anything else you think is appropriate.

Once this work is complete and a scope defined, the implementation phase would be the hands-on design, development and marketing of the app itself.

Looking at these definitions, which category of work causes the biggest headache for you as an agency owner? If I had to bet, I would put significant money on the implementation phase causing the most pain. The bad news is, this is likely to get worse too.

Implementation work causes problems for us in a number of ways:

• It’s easy to commodify, creating a price war between competitors

• It is time and resource intensive

• By only handling implementation, you have a very limited effect on the success of the output

• Complex implementation carries a risk to the business’s profit margins

• AI is increasingly encroaching on implementation work

• Implementation has no ties to location, meaning the work can easily be off-shored to somewhere cheaper. In contrast, many aspects of strategic work rely on location-specific insights i.e. 'what will someone from X culture find engaging?’

Strategic work on the other hand (if you are a genuine expert) is a lot harder to compete with. Hundreds of thousands of people can competently write code for a mobile app, very few can put together a well thought through strategy for how to create a successful app in the health and fitness space based on five previous projects they have completed in the same sector.

Rarity of your skillset can therefore allow you to escape price wars and capture a market. Strategic work is also much less tied to hours spent physically working on a project which brings your head count down, further reducing headaches.

Having worked with a number of agencies, I can tell you with some authority that the companies that focus on implementation based on the commands of a client typically lurch from one crisis to another. Go and look at an agency built around strategic work and you find a company that seem to spend a lot of time having fun.

The last point I’ll make today is that despite everything I’ve written above, I still think implementation has a place in your agency’s service offerings. How to go about this is a topic for another day.

If you need help improving your agency’s performance, please send enquiries to agencyprofessional@outlook.com.