50 Conversations Every Month to Grow Your Agency

A typical goal for most business owners is to grow your agency.

The challenge is that most haven’t set clear targets or metrics for this goal. It’s often wishy-washy-we want to get to £1m in rev, or £50k monthly recurring revenue, or maybe to a team of 20.

Generally, they’re missing the characteristics of a SMART goal. In other words, they lack an essential ingredient such as a time frame or any sense of whether they are realistic goals.

If you are currently turning over £500k per annum, getting to £1m in the next 12 months is going to be a stretch. But over five years, there’s no reason why you couldn’t.

You move from 100% growth in one year to 20% growth each year for the next five years.

I’m not saying that 100% in one year is impossible. However, it will be a significant challenge, and you’ll need a lot of luck.

If you are in the camp where you want to grow your agency but you have no set targets, this is the place to start.

Remember the SMART acronym:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Actionable
• Realistic
• Timebound

It’s a bit corny, but it just makes so much sense.

For example, we will grow Badass Agency Inc by 20% each year for five years to reach a revenue of £1m p.a. and a team of 10 full-time employees by year-end 2027.  

Once you have a proper set of targets, you can start thinking about how you will deliver them.

Work your way up from the bottom of your sales funnel, aligning metrics at each stage to monitor your progress towards achieving your goal.

I help agencies to plan this with my 7 Ways Calculator. Armed with the knowledge of:

• Target met margin
• The average value of a client
• Conversion rate from proposal to appointment
• Conversion rate from enquiry to proposal

You can use the calculator to determine how many leads you need at the top of your funnel to hit your sales target.

It’s not as simple as it sounds, but the work is worth the effort.

The challenge, then, is how you will acquire those leads to grow your agency.

Earlier this year, I met two agency entrepreneurs with a massive focus on networking—Kathryn Strachan from Copyhouse and Nathan Lomax from Quickfire Digital.

Kathryn and Nathan run high-growth agencies and do a lot of networking. And I mean a lot.

Kathryn meets 50 new people every month. With 20 working days a month, that’s 12-13 new people every week or 2-3 every single day. You can hear more on the podcast I recorded with Kathryn here.

Nathan meets 200 new people every month. Or ten new people every day.

I can’t even begin to imagine planning and meeting that many people daily and having the time to do anything else. But it’s working for Nathan and his team.

How many new people do you meet every month to help grow your agency? I would bet it’s a handful at best.

I’m not saying networking is the only route to leads.

There are many options, from speaking opportunities to hosting events, PR/thought leadership, and good old content marketing, to name a few.

What I am saying is that networking is a powerful tool that needs to be in your lead generation mix.

The Covid era made it easier to get a little time in people’s diaries–after all, a Zoom call is straightforward, and we all got used to the idea pretty rapidly.

Now that everyone seems to be settling into the new norm of hybrid working, see if you can get some Zooms set up alongside face-to-face appointments. Set a target of 20 new conversations a month and see if you can build up to Kathryn’s impressive 50 or Nathan’s insane 200.

I promise this will lead to new opportunities for you over the medium term. To grow your agency, networking has to be in your mix.