Growing and expanding an inbound marketing agency is tough. Even with great employees and a top-notch reputation, you're subject to the same variables that threaten the profitability of any organization. Chief among them is customer churn . When clients choose to leave, agencies scramble to fill the revenue gap—and the process of onboarding new clients after you find them can be tough. This is a struggle we know very well at IMPACT. We have been a HubSpot partner agency for many years, working hard to deliver inbound marketing success to our clients. Like most marketing agencies, we have very low profit margins and invest a lot of time in pleasing customers.
We're a very successful agency - twice named HubSpot's Agency Partner of the Year. Still, sometimes we can't deliver the results our clients want. As a result, we are always worried that customers will leave. The instability of our business books meant that our salaries industry mailing list consistently low, leading to staff turnover. Staff churn leads to more customer churn, and we're stuck in a tough cycle. But we did well and we grew slowly. However, even as we get bigger, our profits are still small. As we hired more people, our overheads also increased - more employees means more managers and more office space - so our profit margins never expanded.
The transition from implementation to coaching In the years since, we've developed a different business model that has resulted in better results for our clients and healthier profit margins for us. We have found that the key to running a more profitable agency is to move from marketing services and implementation work to coaching and consulting. This mindset has revolutionized the way we work with clients - it has helped us avoid some of the most annoying pain points we've been experiencing. Free Guide: A Blueprint for a More Profitable Agency So, what does this look like in practice?