Agencies are probably one of the most exciting places to work. In many cases their bosses come from the creative area, which makes them much more relaxed than other companies, creating a motivating environment for the creative facet.

But this relaxed environment often leads to lax and sometimes uncontrolled administrative processes.

Although the fundamentals of administrative processes are the same in any type of company, agencies have developed many particular processes to manage their workflows.
The way each agency manages these workflows is the key to its success, its profitability and also its growth.
If you want to increase your Agency’s efficiency, streamline work processes and win more projects, the following steps are a good place to start:

Clearly identify what your services are

Agencies are in the service business, a much more complex business than the physical products business, providing customized services, each client has unique needs, and the Agency has to develop a customized solution for each client.

Looking for patterns of similarities between the different services that agencies provide to their clients can be difficult, but not impossible, and it will make managing your workflows much easier.

Analyze the projects your Agency has worked on recently and study carefully what the characteristics of each one are. You will be able to identify quite clearly the major groupings of services that clients usually hire, for example: On/Off Media Planning, Advertising, Creative, Digital, Events, to name a few.

• Categorize your services
• Determine the types of projects
• Determine what services are normally included in the different projects.
• Estimate the average time it takes to perform each task.

By identifying and optimizing your core activities you can save hundreds of hours and improve your productivity drastically.

Perform Process Mapping

A good starting point is to map exactly how your processes currently work, which person or group of people work on each one, who is responsible, what the steps are, how tasks are communicated and how those steps are measured.

At this point you may realize that some current process is not the best, that this way of doing it worked at the time, but that as the Agency has grown and clients have become more demanding, a more global vision of the business is required, so it is a good time to design a better process for that work.

If so, this is a good time to design a new process or to modify the existing process.

How do you best track the process of your jobs, customers and collaborators?

There are many work process tracking tools available today, and chances are you’ve tried some of them.

Collaboration and small project management tools such as Trello, Slack and Asana, Basecamp, may have been useful at the time, but perhaps it is time to move to a global solution, which allows you to have integrated information of your Agency and which provides management, administration and control security.

Do you still manage or control your work with spreadsheets and emails?

Then it’s definitely time to move to a more efficient management tool that will solve all your agency processes.

• Service Request
• Proposal or Quotation
• Purchase Order
• Issue Order
• Media Stock Management
• Internal Work Orders
• Charging of hours on each Job
• Invoicing
• Management Reports

Identify the information you need to analyze

Do you know what information really matters for each type of service you provide?
Automating the business analysis without wasting valuable creative time, is what will allow you to have a comprehensive view of each area and thus promote early corrective actions whenever the results are far from what was planned.

Define the most important indicators for each area and let the software take care of showing them at all times to the people in your team.

The first step to achieving this is to make sure you are measuring what really matters. If you’re collecting data just for the sake of more charts, scrap that metric or replace it with one that actually helps the team be more profitable, more time efficient or improve the quality of their deliverables.

Automate processes

Automating work processes is not just for large companies.
The idea that we should automate as many areas as we can is nowadays a no-brainer. The question is, how can I do it?

To do so, you need to use a tool that:

• breaks down each job (however large or complex) into tasks in detail
• assigns members to each job/client
• assigns the tasks to the different members
• assigns deadlines to each task
• monitors deadlines and notifies
• managers of possible non-compliances
• alerts managers of possible missed deadlines
• makes available to those who need all the necessary information for their task
• keep track of the time used for each task
• cost the jobs, be clear about your main sources of income
• link all the documents of a job (traceability), from the work order to the invoice.
• Eliminate (or minimize at least) the hateful spreadsheets.

We must offer all employees tools that allow them to make their tasks easier, that the quality of their work is more standardized, that information is more uniform, more available and that methods and processes are controlled.

To do this we must try to take the most common tasks we perform to Templates, which contain the necessary tasks for each type of services we provide. We can have several types of Templates, one for each type of service. This way we will save a lot of time in planning our work, reusing over and over again the workflows and tasks that we always have to do for certain services.

Automating boring tasks with a system that takes care of them can be really important to optimize several processes in the Agency.

Eliminate interfaces or duplications of data entries.

The Enterprise Digitization process requires that you try to eliminate all unnecessary processes in the management of the company.
There are usually two important processes in which companies use auxiliary systems, sometimes connected through interfaces and sometimes not even connected at all, generating a great possibility of errors and in some cases fraud.

Human Resources Management

Nowadays a good administration of the company’s Human Resources is essential. The selection process, their personal information, their training, salary history and discounts, must be well stored and available at all times by the right people.
A perfect payroll every month, considering all the concepts agreed at the time of hiring and a correct and timely payment is vital for a perfect working relationship.
For this purpose, it is desirable to make the salary settlements with the same information entered by the employees, generate the payment in the system and thus have a perfect control of everything related to Human Resources in a single place avoiding double data entry.

Invoicing and Accounting

Whether you manage one or several companies, use the information entered in the system to generate the different documents needed in the different processes.
A customer Work Order will become one or several internal Work Orders and after executing them into customer Invoices, Receipts and Checks to be cashed or Bank Transfers. All linked, all tracked.

Automatically post each voucher, and accounting will no longer be a black box. And if your company, due to its size, requires it, introduce purchase authorization processes or payment orders.
Avoid entering the same data several times and truly have all your Agency’s information online, including all current accounts, accounting statements and all types of reports.

Promotes that everything is connected, consolidated in a single database.

Promotes the use of the Management System

Training of all company personnel is the key to gaining the buy-in essential for success at all levels of the business. Make it worth the team’s time to use the right systems to accomplish tasks. Efficiency and productivity increase both the team’s and the company’s bottom line.

Having a few key users in the company to help design work processes, recommend modifications, monitor new processes, accept them and support implementation is vital to the success of a company’s digitization process. Good horizontal and vertical communication is extremely important to captivate, convince and accept the use of the selected systems to manage the Agency’s work.

To obtain maximum involvement, staff must feel that they are participating in the process. With any form of change, if people feel they are kept in the dark, they will become resistant. Make sure employees who may be directly affected by the new workflow understand the reason behind this implementation and how it will benefit both them and the company.

Optimize Work Processes

Every process can be improved, so surely your agency’s can too.
A good behavior is to periodically generate meetings to exchange ideas related to improving the company’s process flows. Creating this environment of continuous improvement makes employees to be close to the solutions that the company is looking for to improve its processes in search of greater efficiency.

People do not like change. Be prepared to hear many complaints and grievances related to new work processes. We do not like changes in the tasks we perform on a daily basis, especially if they involve standardization of tasks and more administration. This is normal.

A successful implementation is a marathon, not a race. Many people will adopt the most efficient way of working and some people will want to cling to the comfort of the familiar. However, that resistance to change will gradually diminish if your company maintains a solid engagement strategy in the planning, implementation, monitoring and improvement process.

The benefits are clear

Completing projects on time and on budget will help make your agency more profitable, your employees happier, your staff less turnover and your customers happier.
You just need the tools to help you Digitize your Agency, and the determination and experienced support to make it happen in your company.