The challenges of project-focused agencies

While many agency owners believe that recurring revenue is the answer to all of their problems, the reality is that a large number of agencies become quite successful by generating most of their income from individual projects.

However, project work comes with a unique set of challenges, especially as it relates to dealing with clients who may end up inadvertently delaying completion of a project.

The unpredictability of resourcing and revenue that these delays can create mean that agency owners need to find ways to account for that.

Chip and Gini offer tips for improving cash flow, minimizing delays, and increasing your flexibility to handle the ebbs and flows common with project-focused agencies.

Key takeaways

* Chip Griffin: “People shouldn’t turn away from project-based work simply because of the challenges.They just need to be thoughtful about how they go about doing it.”

* Gini Dietrich: “As the agency owner do not say, well, I’ll just do it myself.”

* Chip Griffin: “You need trip wires, fail safes, whatever you want to call it, to make sure that you don’t get In a bind because a client didn’t get you what you needed in a timely fashion.”

* Gini Dietrich: “Hope is not a strategy.”

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And I’ve got a real project conundrum for you right after this.

Gini Dietrich: Conundrums such a great word.

Chip Griffin: I, I, I really like conundrum.

Gini Dietrich: You like that word? Yeah. Yeah. It’s a really good word.

Chip Griffin: I don’t know whether it was the right word here, but That’s okay. It was, it works as, as every regular listener knows, I just make this stuff up literally on the fly Sometimes it literally works and sometimes it doesn’t.

Last week it did not work at all.

No, no. But you know, it is what it is, and it just adds to the adventure of this recording. That’s right. And really, as we said before we do this recording for ourselves, the fact that listeners come along for it is that’s just an added benefit. So let’s talk about agencies that rely mostly on project work.

And there’s all sorts of different kinds of agencies that might do this. You know, might have web development agencies, for example, design agencies, even some PR agencies, particularly if they’re more crisis focused or something like that, might have either all or a large chunk of their business in project work.

And I think this creates some unique challenges for agencies to think about because everything from cash flow predictability to resource planning to, I mean all sorts of different things are, are much more challenging when you are project-based. But I don’t think that people should turn away from project-based work simply because of that.

They just need to be thoughtful about how they go about doing it.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And, and I will say from my experience, one of the biggest challenges that we have with project work is they’re usually milestone reliant. So you hit a milestone, you get a check, right?