The One Magic Agency Business Metric

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a single metric that you could use to measure the health of your agency business? You could set one KPI to keep an eye on and ensure that you were successful.

Unfortunately, no silver bullet exists.

In this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast, Chip and Gini discuss some of the more popular “single number” metrics that some advocate — and then explain why they may not be the best for your purposes.

Don’t worry, Chip and Gini also talk about what you should be paying attention to and how you can leverage some of the popular metrics to help you get there.

Key takeaways:

* Chip Griffin: “A lot of folks out there will try to convince you that there is one simple formula, one simple plan, one simple metric that you can use in order to run a good agency. I fundamentally disagree with that.”* Gini Dietrich: “When you’re in a big agency, your team focuses solely on client work, but in your agency everybody’s going to be doing everything. And so you can’t compare yourself to the big agencies because it’s totally different.”* Chip Griffin: “If you ask me, do I want to have revenue or do I want to have profit? I’m always going to tell you profit.”* Gini Dietrich: “Is the business profitable? Are you making a profit margin on the client work that you’re doing? Are your clients profitable? Which ones are, and which ones are not? And if you figure that out, that will determine whether or not the business is successful.”

Resources

* Seinfeld clip

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 have the magic eight ball answer for everybody right after this.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we just could get that magic answer to our questions? It’s simple. It’s the, it’s the silver bullet. It’s the, the one thing we need to know. And after that, it all comes easily.

Gini Dietrich: I mean, listen, I would love it if I could live my life by the magic eight ball. Is today going to be a good day?

Yes. Am I going to make a lot of money? Yes. How much money am I going to make? More than a million dollars? Decidedly so. Great. Awesome.

Chip Griffin: You’ve spent a lot of time with the magic eight ball in the past couple minutes.

Gini Dietrich: I have a nine year old.

Chip Griffin: Ah, yeah. See, I haven’t seen a magic eight ball in a really long. So, so no, we’re, we’re not actually gonna bring out the magic eight ball, but, but I was struck by the fact that, that in my inbox, over the last 48 hours, I’ve gotten at least three emails with the general theme that here’s the one number that you need in order to track your business. A couple of them were agency related and, and one was not, but it just struck me. People are just hungry for that, that single KPI, that one number that I need to keep an eye on. And I will know if I’ve got a good business or not.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I mean, that comes as no surprise, right?

We’re generally as human beings, pretty lazy.