How to Avoid Agency Growing Pains

When I recently tried to enter our agency, Partners & Napier, in Ad Age's Small Agency Awards, I came to a realization: In just five years, our agency had tripled in size, outgrowing the "small" category. With $15 million in revenue and nearly 130 employees, we are still too small to be a big agency but too big to be a small one. Yet it feels like the right size for us. In 2004, my partners and I set out on an adventure to buy back our independence from the Wolf Group, and rebrand the agency Partners & Napier. At the time, we had 40 employees, and a few great clients that were ready to make the journey with us. While there have been a lot of successes along the way, it hasn't always been easy. Once we reached about 70 to 75 staffers, we noticed very real growing pains. We had to learn how to scale our services to a broader range of clients. Our strong regional clients were and continue to be very valuable, but it was critical to land stellar national agency-of-record relationships, too. We also realized how critical it was for us to rapidly expand our capabilities; find the right talent to lead the charge; and -- this is a big one -- realize when we'd made horrible mistakes, learn from them and move on. A lot of these lessons aren't specific to a small or midsize agency. But they represent some of what we discovered along the way and serve as key tenets as we continue on our quest to realize our vision and expand our impact on even more national clients. Find your North Star We've found that having this kind of purpose-driven vision galvanizes employees, attracts talent and serves as our "North Star" when faced with important decisions such as whom to hire, which capabilities to invest in and which clients to pursue. If we had focused solely on achieving revenue or growth numbers (other than in short-term spurts), our employees wouldn't be energized to do their best thinking and develop the most creative solutions for our clients. They'd be focused on what they could sell. Overcome your inner control freak With all these pieces in place, we've managed to maintain our relationships with all the clients that made the journey with us to Partners & Napier five years ago. That's not to say we haven't made some mistakes -- most vividly the creative director who refused to wear shoes and refused to fly, for instance. That bizarre experience helped us get better at recognizing whether a potential candidate will be a good cultural fit, embodies the values we stand for and will lead us where we want to go. Mind the recipe for the 'secret sauce' One of our most powerful (yet least expensive) activities is our annual Thanksgiving breakfast, where each member of the agency tells us what they are grateful for. One of the hardest things about going from a small, intimate shop to one that's a bit bigger is having to evolve the management of some of these cultural drivers. We realized that "inside jokes" don't make 130 people feel included anymore. We also quickly learned that we needed new guidelines for our popular "Beer Friday" when we found one of our employees celebrating "Beer Monday" in his office at 11 a.m. Ultimately, in great culture, everyone needs to find time to play, both in the office and out. Play has to be welcome and celebrated. Everyone in the agency knows their CEO runs every weekend, goes biking with our agency team and won't miss one of her daughters' basketball games. That gives everyone permission to share their passions in the workplace. Whether it's bashing with the Rochester women's roller-derby team or racing cars, we welcome it. Build the plane while flying it At our agency, we built shopper marketing into our offerings from day one, because our clients needed it. We expanded it as we went, and now it's about a quarter of what we do. We started building digital capabilities three years ago and, needless to say, digital has morphed significantly and is critical to our offering. Ultimately, driving and managing this kind of growth is like being on a high wire in the rain. But it can be done. We think the key to that balance is threefold: instituting strict financial controls from the start; developing lasting relationships with vendors and clients; and being open and honest with employees whenever there are bumps in the road.

How to Avoid Agency Growing Pains

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