After three years of building a business from scratch, the founder of this web development agency decided they needed to ambitiously grow their revenue to break through what was starting to feel like a revenue ‘ceiling’.
The founder’s concern was that while they were focussing on winning and delivering great work for their clients, no-one had the time or the experience to look at the big picture of what and how they could grow. They asked me to look at how they could grow their top-line revenue. With this in mind I focussed on vision, proposition, marketing and new business.
At this point the business was three years old. It had 9 fulltime employees made up of project managers, designers, creatives and developers. Their core business was designing and creating websites, it had top-line revenue of about £1m and was comfortably profitable. Business was project based and mostly came from word-of-mouth.
It became clear the business was struggling to identify and celebrate what their clients valued. Another discovery was that while the team was passionate about great customer service and creating great web experiences, they were less so when it came to anything marketing and new business – there seemed to be an unspoken belief ‘their work should sell itself’.
I worked collaboratively with the team on their proposition, and then translated this into their culture, products & processes. I introduced a simple marketing framework that was achievable working within the agency’s existing resources and people.
This resulted in a new way of telling the business’s story. It focussed on the customer experience and product benefit. An important insight in the work was that ‘how they worked mattered at least as much as what they produced’, this insight led to us creating a new process that showed how their proposition was hardwired into their ways of working. Outputs included a new proposition, brand framework, values and product principles. We brought this work together in new credentials material that could be used in marketing and new business.
Immediately after this work the agency won its first significant retained client with a value of £1m over two years, giving them an immediate 50% increase in revenue. They have also joined a professional organisation and are using this as a platform to raise their profile in the industry.