Improving visibility and confidence with your agency's numbers

You are busy, the work is coming in, the bank account is not empty, and yet you rarely feel entirely in control of the numbers. You understand last month’s revenue, but possibly have less visibility on the more important profitability and likely less confidence still on the forecast. Most agency founders run on exactly that: a rough feel and whatever is in the bank. It was never that the maths is beyond you. No one has told you which handful of numbers matter most for your agency, or given you a way to see them while a decision is still in front of you rather than long after. So the big decisions, a hire, a price, whether to keep a difficult client, get made half in the dark. It is one of the most common things founders bring me, and one of the quickest to put right.

Are you making the big calls half in the dark?

You might be, if a few of these feel familiar:

• When a decision comes up, you are not sure which number you should be looking at.
• You judge how the business is doing by what is in the bank this week.
• You find out how a month actually went weeks later, once the bookkeeping has caught up.
• You could not quickly say which clients or services genuinely make you money.
• A tax bill, a quiet month or a big cost still manages to catch you out.
• You price work on gut feel and hope it comes out right.

My take on agency numbers

This is almost never about being bad with numbers (even when founders sometimes say that). It doesn’t take mathematical skill to be in control of your numbers, it takes an understanding of which ones matter and access to those numbers in a timely way. Both of those are easily fixable, but the usual advice does not help much: build a dashboard with a dozen metrics on it, or hand the whole thing to an accountant/CFO. Both have their place, and a wall of numbers you never actually look at is no more use to you than none at all.

The real wins come from narrowing down, not piling up. Every agency has a small handful of numbers that should genuinely drive its decisions, and they are not the same handful for every agency. A studio living on three big retainers needs to watch different things than a shop juggling forty small projects. Find yours, and you can mostly ignore the rest with a clear conscience.

Timeliness beats precision, most of the time. A rough number you can see on a Friday and act on is worth more than a perfect one that turns up six weeks later, once you have already made the decision without it. Your accountant and bookkeeper matter, for the year end and for keeping the records straight, but they are looking in the rear-view mirror by design. Whether you can afford to take someone on this month is a question only you can answer, in the moment, so you need to be able to.

Take turnover, the number everyone reaches for first. “We’re a million-pound agency” sounds like health, and it tells you almost nothing about whether you made a penny. What is left after the actual cost of doing the work, your gross profit, tells you far more. There are genuinely many million-pound agencies making less profit than agencies turning over 20% of that number. Turnover is just the number that feels nicest to say out loud. It is one example of the thing that catches many founders out: watching the number that flatters rather than the one that informs.

Setting the numbers up is the easy half and usually a quick job. It doesn’t change much in itself though. The most useful work is in having someone alongside you when you look at them, asking the questions you would not think to ask yourself. Why did the margin slip this quarter? Why has that client started eating more time than they used to? A number on its own only tells you something moved. What you actually want is to understand why, and what to do next.

What the data tells us

I run a quarterly survey of UK agency leaders called the Agency Loop, so this is not a hunch. In one round, 14 of 33 agencies had written off money as bad debt in the previous year: money earned and then lost, often with little warning. The median owner still personally delivers 20% of the agency’s revenue, a real cost of doing the work that stays invisible unless someone is counting it. When I asked what AI had done to their margins, 35 of 72 said it had made no real difference, even though most were taking on more work. Doing more is not the same as making more, and without the numbers in front of you the two are impossible to tell apart.

None of this means you are bad at running an agency. It means you have been making decisions without the information that would make them easy. That is fixable.

What working on this with me looks like

This is not part of every engagement, and I would not make a project of it for its own sake. When a foggy view of the numbers is the thing actually holding you back, the work tends to go like this.

We start with the decisions, not a dashboard. What calls are you actually trying to make over the next year: when you can pay yourself properly, whether you can afford to hire, which work is worth chasing, which client is costing more than they bring in. That is what tells us which few numbers you need, and lets us leave the rest alone.

Then we set up a light, timely way to see them, usually built on the accounts software you already pay for rather than some new system to feed. Something you can glance at yourself in ten minutes, without waiting on anyone.

From there, across the two calls we have each month with contact in between, we read them together, regularly, as the decisions come up. I ask the awkward questions so the numbers turn into decisions instead of a report that gets filed and forgotten. You own the numbers and the calls throughout. My part is the questions, and the steady pressure to keep looking, especially in the weeks you are too busy to want to.

The aim is calm and control, not more of either. “How are we doing?” stops being a feeling you carry around and becomes something you can answer in a couple of minutes.

If that is where you are, get in touch for an initial conversation. No pitch, just a proper conversation about whether I can help you get more control over the numbers that matter.

What changes

You can answer “are we making money?” and “can we afford this?” yourself, in a couple of minutes, without searching for or waiting on an answer. You know which clients earn their place and which cost you more than they bring in. The lean months and the surprise bills stop being surprises, because you saw them coming. None of that takes more numbers. It takes the few that matter, in front of you early enough to do something about them.