It’s All About the Data: How to Analyze Agency Performance to Make Smarter Business Decisions

Tweet it:'Gain insights from agency operations expert, Vincent Dong, where he shared how agencies can leverage technology to better control people, projects, and profits.'

There has never been a more important time to connect valuable data to improving the operations of your agency.” So says Vince Dong, founder and top-caliber mind behind Ad-Vice Software and Consulting. Vince was the featured expert in a recent Deltek-hosted webinar, Future-Proofing Your Agency for People & Profit: Part 1. Vince’s session set out to help agency leaders better understand how to aggregate and analyze data. Furthermore, it followed through by trying to help them realize what data they might be missing, and how finding and capturing that unrealized information could translate into better agency performance and, accordingly, profit.

There was more than a slight sense of urgency in Vince’s insights, which drove toward his assertion that there has never been a better time for agencies to make the connection between the value of their operational data and improving the overall operations of their agencies. The catalyst of his urgency is, as you probably expect, the economic roller coaster we’ve all been on for the past two years. Getting through tough times, as Vince notes, has given us a rare opportunity to see how good we can be at future-proofing our agencies. Today, as in right now, is an ideal time to assess whether or not we are truly prepared to endure similar cycles in the future.

And how do we get started with that assessment? For Vince, it has to be data driven. There’s too much at stake for decisions to be made based on intuition. Going with your gut, he insists, won’t cut it.

Your agency leadership can start by asking some straightforward, tough questions, such as:

• What data should we leverage?
• What are our KPIs?
• What is the true definition of investment time?

Vince also delivers a serious gut check on how agencies report their performance. Most shops understandably think that Financial Reporting is the beginning and the end of evaluating agency health. He suggests, however, a more detailed dive into what he calls Management Reporting, a way to see what the profit and loss is, not just for the agency overall, but for each specific client. It’s a data-intense, more granular way to analyze performance that can reveal whether or not a particular client is profitable for your agency.

It’s an arresting perspective to pursue -- finding out if a client might be costing you more than they are worth, or whether there are easy, organic opportunities to get more money from top clients that account management is missing. It could reveal whether or not you have the right staff at the right salaries servicing clients at the right price.

The point is that it’s now possible, and today even imperative, to generate a more accurate picture of your shop’s internal business growth potential, and profitability. As we all work to make sense of how to thrive in an economy that continues evolving at breakneck speed, and simultaneously absorb just how much operational data we now have at our disposal, it’s definitely worth making time for Future-Proofing Your Agency for People & Profit: Part 1.

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