The Key to Growing Your Agency in Spite of Mistakes

<p>Do you feel like you've made so many mistakes at your agency you may never be successful? Do you find yourself trying to be someone else for your clients? Are you willing to accept any client and any project out of desperation for cash flow? Truth is, you can learn from your mistakes and grow your agency because of those experiences.</p> <p>In this episode, we'll cover:</p> <ul> <li>Why bigger clients aren't always better clients.</li> <li>How relationship-building helps retain clients.</li> <li>3 tips for healthy agency growth.</li> </ul> <p>I talked to Theo Fanning, the Executive Creative Director and President of <a href="https://www.tractionco.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Traction</a>, a digital marketing agency in San Francisco. Traction was started in the ruins of the dot com bomb of 2001. At that time, faced with few opportunities, Theo and three friends decided to start an agency of their own. "It was blind fury," he recalls. "We had no idea what we were doing. Many of us had not had management or operational roles. We just assumed everything would come our way and we made a lot of mistakes. We are an agency built on failure, but we're always failing up." Theo shares some of those mistakes and lessons learned so he could grow his agency to a team of 50.</p> <h2>Why Bigger Clients Aren't Always Better Clients</h2> <p>Traction was built on a freelance-based model, "because we had a lot of friends who were freelancers," Theo explained. However, this business model led to some of the agency's earliest mistakes: "Freelancers are flaky and you can't build a business off the backs of friends."</p> <p>What followed were several years of a truly organic agency experience that began without operational tools and timesheets. Along the way, however, the agency managed to break even and the team began to grow. In 2005, after having just relocated to new office space and with a team of 12-15, Traction lucked into the opportunity to pitch Apple. "We sort of jumped into it with no true strategy," Theo explaine