From 1.45M to 5.77M - An agency valuation story

How do you add over $4 million to an agency, without driving down the profitability, and driving up the stress of the owner, while also adding $1 million in EBITDA?

Let’s dive into it in this week’s edition of Scaling with Profit.

Hey I’m Nick Avaria, agency owner, and founder of Agency Acquisitions. Every week I share a client story, insights, and tips for scaling your agency faster, in 300 words or less. If you have questions or a case study you want to see featured, just hit reply and let me know.

The biggest challenge for this agency was inconsistent profitability month-over-month

Here are the 3 things that made the most impact for increasing profitability and EBITDA:  

1) Dashboards that Predict the Future

• Revenue + Capacity forecasts run weekly - Sales and delivery departments closely collaborate to ensure all internal capacity is used to the maximum benefit of the agency

• Client results & satisfaction measurements are pulled monthly - this ensures we know where the clients' headspace is at all times. We never think the client is happy, we know.

• Comprehensive weekly/monthly dashboard for ownership/leadership that shows how each aspect of the agency is going (sales, marketing, operations, forecasts, results, finance, etc.).

2) Peak People Performance

• Everyone knows their main objectives and how they are measured against them. This way people are working on the right things in the right ways. Transparency ensures that people know where they stand.

• Qualitative indicators that show the team if they are on the right track for all items that are not covered by dashboards. This eliminates grey areas when things are not done the right way.

• All managers have a standardized management/coaching methodology that eliminates favouritism and helps identify top performers and people in need of training. Training is done formally and in real-time.

3) Increasing Client Lifetime Value

• Onboarding that includes expectation setting, experiential elements, and education that is timed to the point of greatest results to maximize upsells and testimonials

• A client communication system that raises insights and underlying opportunities, how to capture them step by step, and how to anchor them in the clients' mind

• Systems to reverse engineer what the most successful accounts are doing, then passing that education on in the form of a standardized method the agency teaches clients

In total there were 5 major areas with 10+ sub-elements we worked on, the above are just the highlights.  If you want to check out the full breakdown, I’ve put it here on YouTube:

If you want to know the full scope of the items we worked on I’m doing 10 free one-to-one Scale & Profitability Workshops in August & September. 

Use this link to apply to see how I can help you scale your agency before the end of 2024.

Nick Avaria