When your agency is managing multiple clients, it can be extremely busy around the office. Busy does not always equal profitable, however. This is especially true when it comes to the creative aspects of a campaign.
In order to properly price your services to remain profitable, you must know whether or not your teams are making you money or costing you money. Graphic design can be one area where agencies lose money, and most don’t even know that it is happening.
Just how profitable is your design team?
Do Your Project Fees or Retainers Account for Revisions?
How many times have you shown a design to a client and they approve it at first look? We’d be willing to bet that the answer is less than one. Even if designers get darn close on the first try, they rarely, if ever, hit it out of the park with one swing.
Clients will always have some type of change, edit, or suggestion to make when it comes to a design. Most will have many suggestions, and you’ll have to go through several cycles of edits in order to land on one they love. If your fee structures do not account for these multiple round
s of client revisions, your agency is losing money.
Is Your Team Missing Deadlines?
Missed deadlines can be a disaster for an agency. You never want to show up to a client meeting without all of the work that you promised for that day. It’s a surefire way to get your agency fired and to develop a bad reputation in your niche. If you employ a small team of designers it can be easy for them to fall behind, causing you to miss deadlines and potentially lose clients. When you’re just starting out, or if your agency is small, one lost client can have a huge impact on the bottom line.
Full Time Salary for Part Time Work?
If your designers aren’t busy, your agency is losing money. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to tell whether or not designers are truly “busy.”
Do you know what your designers are doing all day? If the answer is no, it’s probably time to evaluate your in-house design processes. Learn just how much work your designers have, and whether or not it’s enough to fill each day. If you’re paying full time salaries for people who don’t have a full time workload, you’ll have some decisions to make.
Consider Your Options
If your agency struggles with graphic design, it’s likely that you’re losing money. Between bloated payroll, benefits packages, client revisions, missed deadlines and more, your graphics team could be costing you more money than they should be. There is a better way to deliver strong work to your client base without bleeding money. Instead of spinning your wheels with a limited internal design staff, unlock your agency’s potential by partnering with a graphic design agency.
Many graphic design firms work directly with agencies to help them deliver high-quality work on demand. Agencies pay these firms by project, which helps control costs. When you know precisely how much each project will cost your agency, you can bill your clients accordingly to ensure profitability on each and every project. Your agency will also have access to a variety of designers who can be hand-picked to work on your client projects based on their specific talents and skill sets, rather than simply their availability.
If your agency is looking to make its design process more profitable, The NetMen Corp can help. We currently partner with agencies of all sizes, helping them deliver innovative design at a price that allows them to make money, rather than lose money on each client project. For more information about our programs for agencies, contact The NetMen Corp today.
About The Author: Ignacio Galarraga is CEO of The Netmen Corp.
