Business Planning

Are you planning for business growth, considering a trade sale or looking for investment?

We have over a decade of practical experience in business planning having designed and developed business cases for numerous businesses.

We have broad experience ranging from start-ups to larger businesses. We’ve worked directly with businesses owners, helping them design and plan their business objectives, giving them better control to structure and achieve their future aspirations.

Client Profitability Analysis

Getting the client in is one thing, but ensuring the account remains profitable is quite another.

Getting every campaign estimate accurate from the off is a complicated task, especially when there could be quite a few account handlers creating them.

Over the past 17 years we’ve helped many agencies to increase their client profitability, designing bespoke methods to fit within their unique business processes. Each method’s sole aim was to enhance efficiency thereby optimising income levels, campaign-by-campaign.

Talent Management

Planning the optimum resource structure for tomorrow’s demands is almost as challenging as achieving it.

The MarComms industry has experienced somewhat of a revolution over the last decade. Just when agencies became comfortable with pop-ups and click-throughs, along came a whole new way of connecting with the world, thanks to the explosion of social media and the iPhone’s omnipresence. Who knows where we’ll be by the end of the next decade.

One thing is for sure; the more engaged an agency is in resourcing the right expertise, the better they will be at servicing their clients’ ever-evolving MarComms needs. Let’s not forget, too, that this changing world presents fantastic creative challenges, which can motivate teams into producing increasingly innovative work.

So, getting the right people on board to meet your clients’ needs (and hopefully exceed their expectations) has to be planned scrupulously. From better deploying existing talent to hiring in new areas of expertise, a meticulous and objective approach is required. Resource planning is all too often done in reaction to change, which can result in a client’s brief receiving a less informed creative response. This clearly does little for the good health of your client relationship.

As commercial and HR professionals, with over 17 years’ experience in this field, we have successfully helped our clients achieve their goals and aspirations by helping them to plan their resource in the most effective and structured way.

Rate Cards Analysis

Are you finding that you’re not getting enough money out for the work you’re putting in?

For non-financials, knowing what to charge clients can be an overwhelming experience. Whilst it’s fair to say that hourly rates need to be unique to your agency’s cost structure, in order for them to make your business profitable, how are they best decided?

Governing bodies in the MarComms industry helpfully offer standard rate cards. Whilst these act as an excellent guide for larger agencies and their competitors, the truth of the matter is that if your business is not equipped to cope with those prices, you could be losing valuable profits.

We help businesses analyse their internal processes, costs and current pricing with a two-fold aim; to work more efficiently, and to ensure that each and every cost is accounted for, and then sold on.

As commercial professionals, with over 17 years’ experience in this field, we have successfully helped our clients achieve their goals by working with them to design bespoke rate cards through careful internal analysis.

Financial Planning

Finance for non-financials can be an overwhelming experience. We help business owners make insightful decisions by ‘translating’ numbers into English.

We have designed easy-to-follow Profit & Loss templates that link directly into existing accounting packages and files, helping business owners better manage their commercial affairs.

By producing easy-to-use, timely management reports business owners become more proactive in making business decisions. Issues can be tackled head-on and immediately, avoiding the all too costly style of reactive management.

We understand business and appreciate that ‘translating’ numbers into English makes working life far less frustrating, and it enables business owners to do what they do best getting on with running their business.

Restructuring

If you are considering a company restructure, we can provide you with the advice and guidance to manage the process successfully from start to finish.

Often after building a new business case, or in response to strong economic influences, there is a pressing need to make a business run more efficiently and effectively.

Our experience ranges from redundancy to organisational design and help you make the right decisions prior to ‘rollout’, ensuring you adhere to UK law. Most importantly, we help to make the whole affair a seamless one, minimising disruption at a sensitive time.

Organisational Design

Improving organisational design encourages communication, and enhances productivity, business performance and innovation.

We’ve helped agencies map their organisational processes by recommending the optimum structure to address all of their needs. This objective, blank-sheet-of-paper approach results in an agency which is easier to manage and much more cost-effective to run.