You Need To Beat Over-Servicing To Make Your Agency Profitable

You're celebrating winning an exciting new project. But soon the festivities will have to stop so the hard work can begin.

How will you make sure you protect your agency's margin by keeping this latest project on track, on time and within budget?

Good intentions threaten profits

When you've worked hard to win lucrative business, you want to do everything you can to make it right.Yet your good intentions could be in danger of turning your latest venture into a financial nightmare.

It's easy to end up over-servicing, where you spend more time and resources on the proje

Future forecast

This is because it's at the project scoping stage that things can often go wrong. It's at this phase that it's tempting to promise too much too soon, especially to impress new clients.

Turning to your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system will mean you can analyse historical data and work out what can be achieved, how and by which resources. It'll mean you can be sure you are drawing on concrete facts and not just wishful thinking.

Alarm bells

But once underway, project can easily veer off track. Prevention is always better than cure. Your system can give you valuable insight into past projects that have fallen to ill fate in the past. This heightened visibility will help you prepare for and avoid many unforeseen and costly circumstances that could require time and resources to overcome.

Great expectations

Pleasing you client is often the catalyst for over-servicing so keeping them informed of their project's progress with regular reports and updates.

By providing complete transparency into activities, they will be less likely to expect more than has been agreed - meaning the dreaded "scope creep" is avoided.

But don't waste even more precious time collating information from disparate spreadsheets and documents. Use a centralised planning system that will provide a real-time update of your project at the touch of a button.

Research shows agencies over-service accounts by more than seven percent. That's a lot of resource that is being given away for free at the expense of your agency. You'll want to do everything you can to fight it.

Find out more about the pitfalls of over servicing and how to tackle it by downloading the "Four ways to avoid the pitfalls of over-servicing" guide. It's free.