Why is my creative agency not giving me the life I want?
Why is my creative agency not giving me the life I want?
We all start our businesses for the same reason: to give ourselves a better life.
We all start our businesses for the same reason. To give ourselves a better life. To have more freedom, more time to enjoy our life and to have the money to do it. But somewhere along the way life takes over. We get busy with work and the reason why we started our business gets forgotten as we work long hours evenings and weekends trying to make our business successful.
This generally causes you to have the following problems
Working too long
Not earning enough money
Working too long
Not having the freedom that you want to enjoy life.
For a lot of you reading this, this will be your current situation. This can lead you to be frustrated and upset that you are not getting what you feel that you deserve from your hard work and that you are not having the life that you want.
How to get the life you want…
The first step in making sure that your agency gives you the life you want is to understand where you want to get to? What is the destination that you want to arrive at?
How much money do you want to earn?
How long do you want to work?
What do you want to do in your free time?
You need to write these down and keep them safe. These should be realistic goals but also at the same time make sure that they will require you to work hard and stretch yourself to get there. They need to keep you focused to work hard.
Some reasons
1. You don’t manage your team properly. Making sure that you manage your staff and employees properly means that you get the most out of them. That they can deliver the quality of work on time and in budget for your clients.
2. Your clients constantly ask for work to be added to their project at no extra cost – Scope creep. Scope creep will ruin your profits. Constantly doing work that you are not paid for will reduce the profits you make for a client. No matter how big a client is to you and your agency you have to make sure that you are paid for the work that you do.
3. You don’t know how to price for the work that you do. Not knowing how to price for your work will lead to you being undervalued and not getting rewarded for the work that you do. It doesn’t matter that you are not a big agency. If you are adding value to your client’s business and you are delivering the quality of work that meets their expectations you need to be paid properly for the work that you do. The size of your agency has nothing to do with the price. It’s just the quality and the value that you add.
4. You don’t know how much you make from your customers. Your best customers are your most profitable customers. They aren’t necessarily your biggest. When you know which ones are you most profitable and which ones are not you can decide if you need to adjust your prices for the customers that you don’t make money out of.
5. You don’t have enough customers. Pricing for work when you don’t have a steady stream of new work to be done puts fear in your mind. If you don’t price to get the work can you afford to manage your cash flow to the next payday? Having customers that want to do business with your agency means that you can charge the fees that you are worth. That you can be confident when telling the price to your potential client, that if it does not get accepted it will not be a disaster.
6. You are getting pulled in to doing client work. Your business will not grow if you don’t spend time working on it. You need time to spend getting new clients, building the processes in your business to make sure that it can function without you day to day and that you can deliver quality work to your clients on time and on budget. If you are constantly doing client work you will not have time to do any of this.
7. You don’t understand the finances of your agency. Do you look at a set of financial statements and feel your eyes glaze over? Do you understand where your money goes each month and can you be sure that you are spending your money wisely? You are a business owner you need to be business savvy and be able to understand a set of accounts and know what is happening to the finances of your business on a regular basis