The recession is hitting most businesses.
If you’re lucky, your
agency might not have been hit too hard—but your growth has been impacted.
Growing a business is already difficult.
But scaling during a recession is playing on HARDCORE mode.
It’s not impossible though.
We’re going to discuss how to do so with industry-leading agencies during our upcoming DudaCon panel on Sept 15:
How to Scale Your Agency Efficiently in a Recession.
In the meantime, here are four strategies that should help you scale (yes, even during a recession).
1. DIVERSIFY YOUR REVENUE SOURCES
Diversifying your revenue sources should be a no brainer.
If one of your current revenue sources is performing poorly, you can at least focus on the others.
It’s basically like diversifying your investments.
You wouldn’t put ALL your savings into cyrpto-currency now, would you?
Here are the main ways you can diversify your revenue sources.
Offer New Services
A good way to diversify your revenue sources is to offer new services.
For example, if you’re only offering web design at the moment, you could start offering SEO services, content marketing, social media monitoring, advertisement strategies, visual assets, etc.
The pandemic was a good example of how offering different services helped a lot of agencies. If multiple businesses at first completely stopped their ad campaigns, which impacted agencies tremendously,
many businesses decided to use this time to create their online presence, create new
eCommerce websites, or work on their SEO strategies.
Offering not just ads but also
website building services and SEO was life-saving for some agencies in 2020.
Before adding new offerings, just make sure to choose services that align well with your current employees, their capabilities, and where you want to go as a business.
You can also hire new employees or freelancers to help you get started with these new ventures, or use a
white-label website building tool if you want to sell branded website building services easily.
Sell Recession Proof Services
You’re going through a hard time, but so are your clients.
Therefore, if you start offering new services, make sure they are recession proof.
Offer solutions that will increase their sales, reduce their spendings, help them stay afloat or even scale in a short period of time.
Sell services with crystal clear ROI e.g. business automation services that can allow them to reduce their headcount/hours paid, or battle-tested campaigns that drive direct sales.
Now’s not really the time to focus on TOFU, long-term, brand-building stuff.
If you help them go through the recession, they will keep doing business with you.
It’s a win-win.
Take Advantage of Affiliate Programs & Partnerships
Chances are the tools you use, your clients, your providers all have affiliate/referral programs and partnership opportunities in place. It’s a good idea to at least take a look and see if they might fit with your audience and help you get a new revenue stream.
If you have clients who need a service you don't offer, partner with other providers through revenue-sharing initiatives. A very design-centric, visual team could help you sell more branding and physical promotional material. A very developer-centric, technical team could help you sell more advanced automations and SEO.
It can also be as simple as adding a few affiliate links on relevant blog posts on your website.
For example, as an agency who offers SEO services, you could write about the 10 best tools for SEO and add affiliate links to different tools you partnered with.
2. BE PROACTIVE (NOT REACTIVE)
Don't wait for the recession to really hit you hard.
Anticipate and work on potential issues before they become a problem.
Here are a few things to keep in mind to be proactive:
- Solve your customers’ issues before they even know they have any.
- Put yourself in their shoes - anticipate questions or needs they might have.
- Look at what competitors are doing better or differently - turn that into service offering
For example, say there’s a new social media app where all the kids dance to trendy music, let’s call it
tic-tac-toe.
It’s getting more and more traction, but most companies don’t offer services related to this specific app yet.
Offer to create
tic-tac-toe campaigns to your clients right now. (Don’t wait for them to request it)
Maybe they were just thinking about jumping on the
tic-tac-toe bandwagon and needed a little nudge.
And now you have a new contract that will bring you a whole new revenue stream.
3. UPSELL WHENEVER POSSIBLE
Whatever the services you offer, you have to make sure that all the little extras and upselling opportunities are at least considered and offered to clients.
Say you offer 3 services: Web design, SEO, and ad campaigns.
There’s no reason not to offer all 3 to all your clients.
If someone came to you for some help with their SEO, maybe you can talk about how doing an ad campaign could help give their SEO a nudge in the right direction, or how a new website that’s better optimized for
Google’s Core Web Vitals could dramatically improve their rankings and conversions.
Clients usually need more than just one thing, and if you can show them how these new strategies will positively impact their business, they may be tempted.
One thing’s for sure; they won't buy if you don’t try.
Now’s not the time to be shy, you can’t scale without a few more sales.
So get in there and upsell.
4. BE FLEXIBLE
What type of businesses are bound to fail?
Inflexible businesses.
Don’t be that rigid, obstinate agency that won’t change its ways just because “It has always worked like that”.
That’s the worst thing you could do.
Everything changes: technologies come and go, steady jobs become irrelevant, new roles and businesses are created every day.
So why would your agency stay as is?
Take every opportunity into consideration, don’t just say no to potential clients, new projects, or new services just because you’re not used to doing it.
Change is scary, but necessary.
Particularly when there’s a recession going on.
In the wise words of Bear Grylls; Improvise, Adapt, Overcome.
