Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
There are over 12 million female-led businesses in the US; a figure that just a century ago would have seemed impossible. However, this widespread revolution of women CEOs isn’t seen across all industries.
According to preliminary research, only 1% of digital agencies are led by women, leaving plenty of room for continued progress.
Ready to get started? We’ve put together a comprehensive guide full of tips to make scaling your female-led agency simpler.
Fund Scaling Using Passive Income Streams
When it comes to how to scale an agency, you need money to invest in your marketing, software, and expanding team.
By increasing your available capital, you can facilitate the rapid expansion that separates scaling from growth, transforming your business while maintaining the quality of your agency operations.
There are a few ways you can fund scaling including through loans, grants, and investing your own savings into your agency. You can also look at developing passive income streams, tapping into a lesser-used method to raise capital without generating debt.
As an agency, you could consider reseller hosting. This involves paying a monthly subscription to access established web servers, allowing you to sell them to other businesses whilst applying your desired profit margins.
You don’t have to directly manage the hosting or maintain the servers, generating income with minimal input and internal resource requirements. You’ll also be able to offer a new service to your clients, increasing your audience reach and improving customer satisfaction by meeting more of your clients’ needs.
Other passive income revenue streams that might suit your digital agency include; affiliate marketing, selling online courses and selling stock photos.
Create a Collaborative Community
Dr. Anne-Marie Imafidon MBE co-founded the social initiative Stemettes, and her crucial advice to female CEOs is “Don’t do it alone”.
She advises women to create a community of role models and peers who will “enhance your learning and growth” while improving your resiliency.
This is especially important when you’re scaling. At a time of rapid transformation, you need a supportive team to help manage tasks and drive innovation, with a collaborative community taking some of the stress of scaling from your shoulders.
This enables better delegation, too. Being able to trust your team enough to hand over important tasks is crucial for facilitating business growth.
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How to Build a Strong Team
To build a collaborative community of supportive peers that drive growth, make sure to:
- Identify roles within your agency that need strong leadership to enable scaling.
- Create a talent acquisition strategy.
- Invest in training to upskill members of your team who you already trust.
- Create a positive environment to retain talent.
It’s important to give your team autonomy within your business, too. It can be hard to hand over decision-making to others, but scaling businesses can benefit from different perspectives, specialist skills, and a CEO who encourages collaboration.
Evaluate Your Current Processes
Scaling requires an operational infrastructure that can support rapid growth, maintain efficiency, and deliver quality. For most agencies, this means reworking your existing systems to better suit your long-term goals.
But, before you start making changes, you first need to evaluate your operations to find the areas that’ll benefit from your attention.
By evaluating your current processes, you’ll make it simpler to pinpoint the weaker spots in your business that need to be improved. Kickstart your analysis by:
- Identifying any areas that aren’t efficient (such as repetitive, manual tasks that take up too much time).
- Identifying bottlenecks in your processes.
- Removing unnecessary steps.
You also need to analyze productivity across your agency, highlighting areas that need to be streamlined in order to maximize your output.
Streamline Workflows Using Technology
If you’re investing in software to grow your agency, begin by focusing on the processes that aren’t efficient.
For example, if you know that creating quotes for potential clients is causing delays in onboarding, you could explore options for quote-generating software.
This would allow your staff to input key details about the project (such as the project timeframe, services required, and resources needed) for an automatic quote calculation.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is also making it far simpler for digital agencies to scale. With a wide range of applications, you can use AI software to:
- Automatically generate email replies.
- Deliver personalized customer service.
- Schedule and automate content posting.
- Optimise resource allocation using predictions of workflows.
- Assign tasks to your team.
- Segment audiences for personalized marketing.
We also recommend looking into cloud computing, data analytics, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, all of which are well-suited to scaling infrastructure.
Final Thoughts
When looking to grow your agency, preparation is key to success. Hopefully, these tips have given you plenty of inspiration to begin planning your scaling and creating the solid infrastructure you need for successful growth.
