Agency Leaders Share Optimism for 2022

The good news is that the collective attitude of these agency leaders, including CEOs, owners, and department heads, is essentially optimistic. The market recovery means demand for agency services (and, accordingly, budgets!) continues to rebound. In many ways, the year ahead has potential for more performance and profit than pre-pandemic times. This can be ascribed to a kind of “great awakening” we all experienced during the past few years. We collectively realized that operational efficiency and internal systems improvement had big bottom-line impact.
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It’s crucial to make sure your agency is working efficiently and properly nurturing the bottom line. Ensuring agency profitability isn’t as difficult as it may seem. Take these 10 actions and turn your agency into a well-oiled profitability machine.

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You want to give your agency’s project managers ready access to the information they need to develop an accurate, detailed scope of work. You also need to provide them with real-time information on burn rate and team efficiency so they are able to adjust fire, re-allocate resources, or, if necessary, to back to the client to discuss adjusting the budget if necessary.

Encompassing all these concerns, project managers also must know who on staff the best fit for a particular project is and whether or not they have bandwidth. The goal is to have the right person on the right project at exactly the right time. The consistent aspect for all of these concerns boils down to making sure your PMs have all the data they need to plan, staff and manage every project so that it satisfies client expectations while remaining as profitable as possible.
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Prospective employees can be choosy; current employees can comfortably pursue new opportunities. As a result, today’s agencies are compelled to create a workplace culture that attracts, trains and retains top-tier creative pros, otherwise they risk being trapped in a cycle of turnover and continual training that can decimate project quality and delivery.

Maintaining a strong nucleus of talent is critical to realizing the remaining aspects of Deltek’s Agency Roadmap. The reasons, once spelled out, are self-evident:
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Clients are continually looking for more transparent and cost-effective services from the agencies they work with, and it comes down to the agency’s finance team to ensure the company is meeting these expectations.

That’s why many agencies are adopting new technologies to help streamline their financial management and stay on top of fast-moving projects. But it’s about more than just finding the right technology to support your team—you also need to build the right finance processes to truly succeed.
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In order to maintain its high standards, build an agile and responsive operation from sales, and project delivery to back office processes, Mott MacDonald collaborated with Deltek to transform its internal business infrastructure with a cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

In this interview, Darren Russell, Chief Digital Officer of Mott MacDonald unpacked their rationale from back in 2017 when the firm embarked on their transformation.
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Leaders looking to level up their agencies often ask:


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Deltek surveyed more than 300 agency professionals at the start of 2021, and found 61% are producing more work and offering more services than they did a year ago, but only a quarter (25%) had seen profit margins rise.

Little wonder, then, that profitability was a key business focus for 58% of those surveyed, while 53% said that a more profitable business strategy was one area in which their agency could improve.
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Look at an efficient ERP system selection in 8 simple steps, prepared by Epicor specialists.

1. Evaluate - form a committee of top management, functional experts and end-users and get buy-in at every stage of the selection process.
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Along with the many opportunities this transformation promises, there are three significant challenges created by the approaches and technologies of Industry 4.0:
•    Widespread integration
•    Big data
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