Thread by @ecomchasedimond

Our goal for our agency has always been to hit $10m+ in revenue for 2022.

I think we could've done it this year but we didn't.

We fell short of it.

Here's the biggest problem we faced and one of the biggest problems agencies face in general.

// THREAD //

Here's some quick background:

We have 4 departments at our agency (email, SMS, paid social, & content creation).

We're a fully remote team w/about 90 team members & about 150 clients.

I co-run our retention team (email + SMS) that has around 60 employees & serves 100+ clients.

The biggest problem we faced & one that most agencies face revolves around a few related things:

Supply and demand and how that ties in with forecasting and hiring.

Supply = People. In an agency business, people are everything.

Demand = How many clients want to work with you?

Forecasting = Being able to (hopefully) accurately predict how much demand you'll have in a given month or quarter, so you can be prepared for it.

Hiring = Being able to onboard at the right pace. Too fast and you have excess overhead. Too slow and you can't service demand.

Our big issue this year, which I understand is a fortunate problem to have and I don't take that lightly, WAS NOT being able to properly forecast demand.

This ended us in a spot where we had a multimonth waitlist for all of 2021.

Again, good problem to have, but our goal as an

agency is to hire as many great people we can to be able to help as many great brands as we can.

We got ourselves in a rut that we couldn't get out of.

UNTIL NOW.

Specifically on the email side of things, here's what we did to fix that problem.

Our email team is composed of 5

roles.

Marketer, designer, copywriter, account manager, and developer.

The biggest bottleneck for us has always been design.

Of all our team members, we have the most number of designers on staff.

When we assessed why this was, we figured out that it stemmed from the brands

we work with.

The DTC darlings of the world.

Brands that prioritize design over anything else.

As those were the brands we kept getting as clients, we inadvertently built our agency around these types of brands.

Which has been amazing -- we love these types of clients.

But

we also want to service other types of brands as well and be able to continue scaling.

So this is where it gets interesting.

We divided our email team into two teams.

An experiential team and a performance team.

The experiential team is our existing team, the one who will

continue to work w/the DTC darlings of the world.

This is our bread and butter and what we love and have done incredibly well.

And we just added a performance team.

Essentially working with brands who prioritize growth over anything else.

& we realize there's a middleground

so for those brands that care about both equally, we'll have a hybrid team.

By separating out teams and have specialized resources, we've been able to drastically decrease our waitlist.

From mulitmonths to now just a few weeks.

We've been able to hire dozens of new team people

and onboard dozens of new clients at a much faster pace than we'd been able to historically.

So bringing this back to the beginning, I think this will be the key for us to scale to $10m+ in 2022.

If you enjoyed this thread, please drop a comment and let me know!

Thanks!