Hey friend!
We’re now into the second half of the year! Where have the first 6 months gone?!
If you’re new here, welcome! Every month I write about what we’re doing in the agency to grow and improve it. I try and share what’s worked and what hasn’t worked. Warts & all.
If you’ve missed any of the previous reports, you can access them here:
January 2021
February 2021
March 2021
April 2021
May 2021
Before we dive in, it’s worth mentioning I took around 10 days off in June to travel and see my parents, so we didn’t get round to all that I had hoped. Nevertheless, it was a great month!
Let’s dive in.
Client wins & business growth
June has been, by far, our best month in terms of new clients signing up this year. We signed up 4 new clients for our Facebook ads management services.
This is absolutely fantastic as it shows the work we’ve been doing over the last few months is starting to pay off.
If you remember a few months ago, I spoke about how our pipeline had ground to a halt. We were busy working through a rebrand and had zero capacity to do any sort of business development.
But since getting the rebrand out the way, we’ve put real effort into growing the business (vs “building” the business) and that work is starting to pay off.
Everything is looking positive.
For me, it’s crucial that we keep this momentum up and don’t let “getting busy” stop us from continuing to do biz dev.
Now – as you can imagine, 4 new clients means A LOT of work, so our main focus this month has been to ensure we get our new clients onboarded successfully, providing them with a great experience.
Everything else has taken a bit of a backseat.
Hire Account Manager
For a couple of months now, we’ve been trying to hire an account manager to help bolster our client delivery team.
This has continued to be a struggle.
Pretty quickly into June I decided to hire a recruitment agency. I was spending far too much time trying to find the right person.
I spoke to one of the consultants in an agency mastermind I joined (more on that below) and recommended we speak to the team at KnoWho.
After a quick chat, I knew they were going to be a good fit (apart from the Scotland football banter…).
They’re a brand that I feel resonates really well with Yatter. They’re taking on an industry but doing things differently.
So far I’ve loved working with them and they have been able to find us some brilliant candidates. At the time of writing, we’re arranging interviews for the next couple of weeks, so (like I said *cough* last month) I hope I can tell you next month that we have found and hired the right person!
Joined an agency owners Mastermind
This month we signed up to a 12-24-month agency growth mastermind with Cactus.
In the mastermind there are 16 agency owners from across the world – in all shapes & sizes.
I’m super excited about this, as the Cactus consultants have years and years of experience running & growing agencies.
They’ve also been involved in multiple acquisitions, mergers & exits too which is of particular interest to me.
This is hopefully going to be a big win for us going forward as it’ll give a real sense of direction. (ie, I won’t just be winging it!)
Website Launch
The website, as expected, has been quite a large project this month. We’ve continued to build out the pages on it, such as:
- https://weareyatter.com/facebook-ads-management/
- https://weareyatter.com/landing-page-design-build/
- https://weareyatter.com/about/
- https://weareyatter.com/case-studies/
- https://weareyatter.com/careers/
Although they’re live, I’m not 100% happy with them all. I currently have my proofreader running through them all to improve the copy & layout of them.
At the same time, we’re still working on adding new pages to the site – mostly in the form of case studies.
There will always be work on the website, because a website is never “finished”, but soon salgen.it we’ll have the main sections done.
Referral Programme
To be honest, we’ve not done a huge amount of work on the referral plan this month.
I had hoped to really promote it this month, but that’s not been the case.
We sent it out to people last month and got a huge amount of feedback back which was excellent.
We then made a ton of changes to the plan and got it live: https://weareyatter.com/refer/
Now that it’s live, we need to promote it.
What’s next?
There we have it – that’s my June. A great month of business growth… and a great month for me personally being able to take some time out to see family.
Here’s what we’re going to focus on in July:
Hire Account Manager – This really is the priority this month. Getting the right person in. To hire well though, is to hire slow. So, although it’s a huge priority, it’s not something I’m willing to rush.
Referral Plan Promo – Now it’s all created & set, we can finally get this out there to the world.
Holiday – We’re taking some time out this month again.
Content plan – Over the last year or so, I’ve totally neglected my content. Yes, we’ve been writing articles for the agency site and doing a lot of guest blogs but I don’t have any real plan for when it comes to LinkedIn etc. I’m getting the itch to start creating videos again.
Client growth – It looks like July could be another successful month for us, with deals currently in the pipeline. If that’s the case, our main focus is going to be keeping our clients happy.
If you’d like to keep up to date with these monthly growth reports, pop your name and email in the form below and I’ll email you with the report each month. You won’t get any other emails from me (unless you opt in to those separately, of course!)
See you next month!
Gavin
