Make the right strategic decisions for your agency with built-in reporting

Growing your agency successfully takes a combination of factors. You need to have a strong team, a growing client roster, and the ability to manage agency fundamentals with no surprises or errors.

In smaller agencies, you can manage most of these elements directly. However, as your agency grows, it can become harder to get a comprehensive picture of exactly how your agency is performing, where the opportunities and threats lie, and what areas you need to improve to attract more profitable clients.

If you’ve been using spreadsheets and reports from various siloed systems to try to piece together a picture of how your agency is performing, you could be missing crucial information and making decisions based on erroneous or incomplete data. That creates a risk that you will hit a roadblock in growing your business that could be very challenging to overcome.

Therefore, as you look to grow your agency, you should consider an agency management solution with built-in business intelligence (BI) reporting capabilities that give you the insights you need to make smarter decisions.

There are five key ways that strong BI capabilities can help you gain insights into your business so you can make the right strategic decisions to grow your agency:

1. Forecast future demands, projects, and resources

One of the biggest inhibitors of profitability is failing to estimate jobs accurately before they start. With estimated margin reporting, you can see what the margin should be before you even start a job. This can stop you in your tracks if you’re about to underestimate the cost of a job, and it can also help you determine which jobs have the best margin (and are therefore most likely to contribute to growth.)
You can also report on which accounts people are selling at a higher margin, or which types of services make higher margins compared with others.

2. Identify bottlenecks in the agency to improve operational efficiencies

Sometimes it may seem as though everyone in the agency is busy and that revenue is increasing but profit doesn’t seem to be going up. To get to the bottom of this, you can run reports that show where time hasn’t been billed, which clients routinely go over budget, and whether retainers are profitable. This information lets you determine how to work with your clients to maximise profitability.

And, by reviewing which employees are contributing to revenue, you can see where productivity may need to be improved. For example, if an employee is routinely underbilling, you can address this with them to see whether they’re self-censoring their timesheets or if they genuinely don’t have enough work to do. If they seem to take too long on routine tasks, again, you can investigate to see whether they need training to help them improve their speediness.

3. Know which services clients want to buy

With an agency revenue analysis, you can see which types of jobs generate the most revenue. Based on this information, you can decide whether to put more effort into selling those services (or simply charge more for them).
You can also see which customers generate the most revenue and what type of work they’re buying from you. This can help you to grow that customer through offering complementary services.

4. Eliminate time-consuming spreadsheet management and manual reporting

With built-in reports, you can quickly and easily get an unprecedented level of detail to help you make smarter decisions, faster. At the click of a button, you can generate the data as bar charts or line graphs; whatever resonates most with you. This gives you more time to act as an advisor to your team, step in with high-value client relationships, and, most importantly, focus on ways to grow your business.

When you can get comprehensive reports at the touch of a button, you no longer have to spend time laboriously gathering all the facts to make decisions. Putting all the relevant information into a single repository dramatically reduces the risks of incorrect or outdated information being used to make decisions. With a single, integrated source of truth, you can trust the insights that are delivered and use them to make decisions that will drive real growth.

5. Hold teams accountable so the business remains profitable

With more detailed information on how each job, team and individual is performing, you can create a culture in which people take responsibility for their performance. Most talented staff members would prefer to be accountable for their performance and welcome the ability to measure it against their key performance indicators using accurate, real-time metrics. This can help motivate staff members to increase their productivity, which contributes to the business’s profitability.

Function Point releases new business intelligence enhancements that give agencies the competitive edge

Function Point has just released new enhancements to its agency management software, which include built-in business intelligence reports that deliver unprecedented visibility into agency performance. It lets you drill down into the details so you can see exactly how your agency is performing down to the individual level, as well as let you identify opportunities for growth and the threats to avoid.

Our solution includes pre-built reports that help you track the metrics that matter to most agencies. You can customize the reports to get the specific information that’s most useful for your agency. With Function Point’s agency management software, you’ll gain control and have access to the insights that will drive business decisions that lead to success.

To find out how Function Point’s all-in-one agency management software is designed specifically to help your agency grow, request a free demo.