When an agency experiences rapid growth, it is crucial for it to maintain a high level of expertise and consistently deliver quality service to find sustained success. One of the biggest challenges for a fast-growing agency’s leaders is ensuring they have enough well-trained team members on staff who are capable of handling escalating client workloads in various practice areas.
Here, 18 Forbes Agency Council members dive into tactics leaders of rapidly growing agencies can employ to address this critical issue. From providing ongoing training opportunities to fostering a culture of continuous learning, the tips these experts share below explore how agencies can build expert teams equipped to meet the demands of an ever-expanding client base.
1. Prioritize Continuous Learning
To handle increasing client workloads, you must prioritize an agency-wide mindset of continuous learning, from top to bottom. Provide access to training and resources, embrace natural and informal mentorship and leverage automation and technology to streamline tasks. Embrace agile work practices, and allow your team’s workflows to evolve to changing demands to ensure they deliver quality output. – Richard Cornell, RGC Digital Marketing
2. Define Roles And Responsibilities Clearly
To maintain not only enough staff, but also a positive company culture, it is critical to have clearly defined roles and responsibilities and your finger on the pulse of the workload and resources required for each project or function. Two other critical factors are setting up ongoing training and scalable processes for your staff. Doing so will allow you to forecast and prepare for future growth. – Bahram Moshrefnoory, Rizer Technology Solutions
3. Focus On Onboarding In Small Groups
The onboarding experience is key. Onboarding at our company is built on three principles: 1. Hire small groups rather than individuals to create a shared learning experience; 2. run a full-time, structured curriculum for each “class” (we even have a graduation party); and 3. assign each new starter an experienced “onboarding buddy” to act as a guide through the process. – Neil Bedwell, LOCAL
4. Combine Experience With Fresh Talent
Our strategy combines seasoned leaders with 15-plus years of experience and fresh talent, bridging age and experience gaps. This unorthodox approach accelerates learning, as younger generations eagerly absorb wisdom and direction, ensuring our team can handle growing client workloads effectively. – Cagan Sean Yuksel, Dreamspace
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5. Understand Your Staff-To-Client Ratio
To efficiently grow your agency and develop your staff to handle increased client loads, it’s important to understand your staff-to-client ratios. How many staff members do you need per client? How many clients can each staff member effectively manage? While having strategies for training and recruiting in place is essential for optimization, your staff-to-client ratios are the foundation. – Alex Valencia, We Do Web
6. Have An ‘Always On’ Recruiting Strategy
Securing top talent is about setting a high bar of excellence, top to bottom. In today’s fast-moving digital world, continuous learning and collaboration are nonnegotiables. An “always on” recruiting strategy, not urgency, is key to hiring for talent—because rushed hires often lead to mistakes. – Laura Meyer, Envision Horizons
7. Hire Knowledge-Rich, Passionate Experts
After founding, growing and then selling my own agency, here’s what I know about ensuring you have well-trained staff: It’s about building a team of any size steeped in the knowledge of our clients and the expertise areas of our firm. That’s when efficiencies of scale are realized. Three knowledge-rich, passionate experts will deliver more, and deliver faster, than six laypeople on a learning curve. – Bess Winston, Winston Agency, a FINN Partners Company
8. Prioritize People, Products And Processes
The first priority is our products: We stick to the basics of what we do well and don’t deviate from that. The second is our people: We hire based on character and competence. We primarily value a high rate of learning and good judgment. Third is processes: We trust our team to work together to ensure the best processes are being developed continuously. – Cedrick Webb, Smart Digital
9. Don’t Stretch Employees Too Thin
There is a temptation among many agency owners to keep costs down by stretching team members too far and across many accounts. This makes it hard to budget time for team training. The result is stressed-out staff, subpar service and fewer results for clients. – Nathan Miller, Miller Ink, Inc.
10. Create A Network Of Trained Champions
We have a network of trained champions who have worked with us for years, sometimes decades. Some are former staff members who started their own practice; some are former clients who have mastered our methodology over the years. Flexibility and cost-effectiveness are at the heart of this strategy. – Merrie Spaeth, Spaeth Communications
11. Focus On Process Documentation
Process documentation isn’t the flashiest solution in the toolbox, but it is highly valuable. Documenting your standard workflows and procedures helps to ease staff onboarding, ensure consistency in execution and streamline operations. By clearly defining how your agency works, both internally and with clients, you can scale more efficiently and effectively. Do this before you really need it. – Cooper Munroe, The Motherhood Inc.
12. Be Mindful Of When It Is Time To Grow
It is important for an agency to know when to walk away from a potential client and focus on clients that help them grow. Establishing a well-defined process for each service is key to the solid onboarding of new staff, but it is also crucial to have a balance of contractors and full-time employees working per project so that the team can be nimble if needed. – Daria Gonzalez, Wunderdogs
13. Cultivate Cross-Functional Talent And A Culture Of Learning
Having a mix of team members who wear different hats helps agencies to be agile when they need to be. Ensuring that ongoing learning and training are at the core of the agency helps to continually empower people to do what they need to do—and feel confident about it—as their workload evolves. – Courtney Hiller, All Points Social
14. Prioritize A Structured Training Program
Agencies should prioritize a structured training program that blends onboarding for new staff and ongoing professional development. This includes cross-training, mentorship and investing in relevant certifications to ensure a skilled and adaptable team ready to meet growing client demands. – Andriy Chumachenko, Netpeak
15. Don’t Build Capacity You Don’t Need
We’ve seen hiring ahead of contracts ruin agencies. Focus on building a training-and-development flywheel that keeps upskilling and an active recruiting engine so that you know who the next five people you want to hire are. Be able to demonstrate how you recruit and onboard so that potential clients will have confidence that you can handle them. – Lee Caraher, Double-Forte
16. Review Training Schedules And SOPs Often
Something we do often is review our training schedule and standard operating systems to ensure there are no loose ends. Having those two things nailed down, crystal clear, ensures that when new team members join us, we are able to train them properly. – Victoria Kennedy, Victorious PR
17. Balance Expansion With High-Quality Standards
Ensuring that a fast-growing agency balances expansion with maintaining high-quality standards is key. Strategies include hiring strategically to fill gaps in key practice areas, cross-training to develop skills across staff, allocating resources to training and development and establishing mentorship programs and solid retention strategies. – Jodi Amendola, Amendola Communications
18. Prioritize Transparency
Honesty and trust are paramount in our approach to staffing. We prioritize transparency in assessing our capacity and client workload. By communicating with our team and clients, we ensure a realistic understanding of our capabilities and set clear expectations. This fosters an environment of trust, allowing us to make staffing decisions that support growth and deliver exceptional client service. – Jessica Kopach, The JKO Agency, LLC.
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