Managing a delivery team for a growing marketing or digital agency is a constant balancing act. You need to be ready for the next client to come through the door, but run lean enough that your people aren’t sitting on their hands and eating into operating profit. This balancing act of retaining smart, capable people who make your clients happy at the right utilization rate and compensation that makes them happy is really most of the work of running a successful services business once you get past the initial push to find revenue.
Role definition, leveling, pay bands, staffing ratios and hiring practices are all key components for architecting an agency delivery team for growth, and each works in concert to support healthy employee retention, client satisfaction and allow your cost of services to scale with revenue. Planning how to scale your delivery team is a step that often feels too abstract when your team is small. But if you get this right early in your development as an agency, you’ll have an easier time scaling and do a lot less scrambling.
Role definition involves declaring the purpose, accountabilities and responsibilities of a role. It serves to describe how the role will contribute to delivering your agency’s services. This definition should include the qualifications required and what performance metrics will be used to evaluate success in the role.
Role definition is a crucial component of team design because it helps ensure there is a plan for selecting, evaluating and supporting employee growth. An agency’s effectiveness in these areas directly impacts speed to hire, candidate availability and employee retention. A scalable role is one that can be repeatedly and quickly hired for. The best way to ensure your agency's roles will scale is to adopt role definitions that are already commonplace in the market, rather than designing unique, cross-functional “unicorn” roles tailored to the specific needs of your agency or the skillsets of individual team members. To determine what is commonplace in the market, it’s important to look not only at similar roles with agencies, but also the equivalent in-house roles as defined by the skillsets.
Leveling is the classification of roles into a predefined hierarchy of job levels, based on scope, responsibility, skills, and experience. Levels for key roles i.e. junior, senior and principal titles differentiate employees based on the expectations and scope of the role and the experience and qualifications required to perform it. This differentiation ensures fairness, clarifies internal expectations for performance, hiring, career development and when paired with pay bands, equitable compensation.
Pay bands for each level of a given role, ensure the roles with broader scope that contribute more value to the agency are rewarded with higher pay, regardless of who is in those roles. Pay band transparency informs staff of how their next promotion might impact their compensation and assuming your paybands are competitive, they promote employee retention, create clear incentives for employee advancement and make your agency more attractive to job seekers.
Sometimes also referred to as spans and ratios, staffing ratios are critical for allowing your cost of services to scale with revenue and to properly support the members of the team as it grows. They define how vertical or flat your organization is.
You can implement all the other components already mentioned, but without staffing ratios you will lack a mechanism for governing the cost of your service team as client demand increases.
Staffing ratios - the number of senior-to-junior staff and manager-to-employees - help you create a team structure that can be expanded proportionately as revenue growth demands. Staffing ratios will help inform when you’re ready to open your next senior role and hire your next manager.
Each of the components for architecting your service team only work if you adhere to them. Your hiring practices have to reinforce them by hiring for predefined roles commonly found in the market, only opening headcount for senior roles and managers when your staffing ratios allow and structuring offers that fit within your agency’s paybands.
Hiring practices set upfront expectations about how employee performance will be evaluated, how growth will be supported and what opportunities for advancement can be expected. Consistent hiring practices that reflect your agency’s values and a commitment to a structured approach to growing the services team are extremely important, not just for acquiring top talent, but for retaining it.
Whether you’re an agency delivery lead responsible for scaling a service team or an agency owner who is thinking about how to grow a service team to get out of day-to-day of delivery, know that while creating a plan for how to scale your service team isn’t necessarily easy, it will create a foundation for more predictable, profitable growth. Growing the team will probably still be a bit of a balancing act but with good structure, you’ll have a safety net.
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