43% Increase in People Performance

Part 1 of 2 of helping agency owners increase the performance of their employees.

Author

Nick Avaria
July 14, 2024

43% increase in People Performance

Part 1 of 2 of helping agency owners increase the performance of their employees.

Hey I’m Nick Avaria, agency owner, and founder of Agency Acquisitions. Every week I share a client story, insights, and tips into scaling your agency faster, in 300 words or less.

Peak people performance: The Objective → Metric → KPI System: The key to alignment

Misalignment = Friction

Friction = Underperformance

There are two primary requirements for alignment:

  1. Alignment between the company and the individual employee (role)

  2. Alignment between employees

If both are not simultaneously present there will be friction within the agency.

Examples of things you hear when misalignment occurs:

  • The task/project was done (technically) correct

  • That is not my job

  • “Key result” is not my responsibility

How do we get alignment between the company and the individual? Use agency objectives as the starting point. 

Lets use the Objective → Metric → KPI System to make it happen:

Objective = the thing the company requires

Metric = How we measure success in the rear-view mirror

KPI = Predicts the metric before it happens

Here is an example for a Digital Strategist and how I rank priority:

  1. Client retention

  2. Client results

  3. Productivity (hours or dollars)

Objective

Metric

KPI

Client Retention

Client Churn

Net Promoter Score

Client Results

ROAS (or MER)

CTR (Clickthrough Rate)

Productivity

Billed hours or $ billed

Utilization rate or $ under management

The logic on the table above goes like this:

  • If we retain the client at a high LTV (Lifetime Value) can we lose? Not likely

  • If they are staying with us a long time and are very happy with the results, can we upsell them and get testimonials and referrals from them? Yes, absolutely.

  • If each person is billing enough revenue (or hours),  we are getting great LTV, upsells & referrals, and our people are working on billable work 75%+ of the time will our agency have great profit? 100%, without a doubt.

In Part 2 I will cover how to get alignment between employees and remove all the friction from misalignment.

If you want a list of all the objectives, metrics, and KPIs an agency should have download my guide on scaling your agency annual revenue.