If you’re the founder of a growing agency, you’ll be all too aware of the range of challenges that agency growth brings – as well as the huge number of ways it can be interrupted.

There’ll always be external factors that do this, and they’re largely out of your control. But there are also plenty of internal factors that you do have control over – and these are the ones you really want to ensure do as little damage as possible.

One of the biggest internal blocks to growth that I see in my work with agencies are the sticking plaster solutions. These are the structures and workflows designed purely to manage the immediate scenario, rather than taking any longer-term view into account.

When agency growth takes a spurt, these solutions are often no longer fit for purpose, and all kinds of problems suddenly emerge. These suck the founder right back into the weeds to fix the mess. The stop-start growth trap strikes again.

The question agency founders need to ask

The good news is that there’s a simple way of avoiding the sticking plaster solution. Just ask this question whenever you’re considering an operational challenge:

What would we do if we were twice as big?

So, for example, if your challenge is around how your agency should manage projects, and you currently have a team of five, think about how you’d do it with a team of ten – and with twice as many clients and projects. 

Or, if you’re already a team of ten and are considering recruiting a new team member, when thinking through where they should sit within the agency, ask yourself what the answer might be if you had a team of 20 instead.

In both cases, you’ll almost certainly come up with a very different solution than if you were just focused on the current situation. You might decide it’s actually time to move away from using spreadsheets for project management entirely, and to invest in a dedicated tool. And you might realise that you’re going to need to implement a new team structure before too long, and that your new hire needs a different job title, responsibilities and line management to what you originally thought.

Make longer-term thinking a habit

Asking the question doesn’t mean you have to do anything differently, of course. Sometimes, sticking to the original plan and just knowing that there’s a potential issue that needs addressing in the future is enough.

Before too long this longer-term thinking becomes a habit. It’s also one you can embed across your agency – just clearly set the expectation that your team members consider problems from this perspective, too.

Ultimately, the aim is to avoid as many issues taking you by surprise as you can, so that there will be less to trip you up and absorb unnecessary time and energy. This will leave you free to focus on generating new business and handling the inevitable external challenges that will emerge along the way.

Paul Muggeridge-Breene is an exited agency founder, qualified accountant, certified coach, former international journalist and a member of the British Psychological Society. Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss how Thrive can help you.