Useful resources for starting Agency & Consultancy businesses

Tips and tools to help you get moving faster

Here are some resources and tools that are useful as a baseline to develop best practice from. The more quickly you can identify the core mechanics in the business, the more quickly you can grow.

Strategy

• Ignition Group (a US consultancy) have some excellent content on positioning and pricing. Both are topics that are often glossed over but they make a huge difference when you get them right.

• Scale at Speed by Felix Velarde is a practical guide for delivering sustained growth. The author was the non-exec chair of my first company and we successfully used some of the techniques. It’s aimed more at scaling than starting out, but the principles are worth bearing in mind from the start.

Finance

• Cash flow forecasting is key, especially when you are growing rapidly

• In £1m+ turnover businesses 20% net margin and 40% gross margin are considered rough benchmarks

Sales

• From day one I recommend running a sales pipeline to track opportunities and your win rate. You can also use this as a CRM to track your contacts. My preferred tool to do this is Pipedrive. There are others available, often integrated with CRM tools such as HubSpot.

Founder communities

These tend to be more agency than consultancy orientated but the business models and tactics are very similar.

• Convivio

• Agency Hackers

• Agencynomics

• Polymensa

Team Handbooks

Operating manuals that cover core company policies and practices

• Deeson (from my previous agency, now sold)

• Human Made

Tools

• Xero (accounting software, pick a partner with a fixed cost package)

• Harvest (project time tracking)