Find Your Margin Before You Grow

Why capacity problems, messy data, and low profit are usually the same issue, and how to fix it without hiring more people.

When agencies start to feel a bit too busy, most say they’ve got a capacity problem and start recruitment. More people, more overhead, more complexity. It feels like progress, but it’s often just an expensive way to avoid fixing what’s actually going on.

In this session, Sam Wood (OTTESU) and Michael Wark (Trimline) will break down why solving “capacity” is often just resting a symptom. If you’re busy but not making the profit you’d expect, there’s a good chance it comes back to how your work is scoped, priced, and delivered. 

Alongside that, we’ll dig into the data (including some preliminary findings from Michael’s recent 100+ agency survey!). Most agencies are tracking time, but plenty still don’t trust what they’re seeing, which makes it almost impossible to understand client profitability or make good decisions.

We’ll walk through a number of ways to increase the yield of your current team before adding more cost, and how to get to a point where your numbers actually mean something.