How Long Will It Take to Get ROI on Coaching for Digital Agencies?
Potential clients often ask this question. I understand it can be important for a business to know the answer before investing their time and money. However, working out how long it will take to get an ROI on coaching for digital agencies comes down to a few factors. (examples/benchmarks below)
For those who do not know, ROI stands for return on investment. It’s what we all want when we invest in our business, don’t we? The one thing you cannot know when you take on a specific type of ROI product is when or if your business will grow from it.
The same goes when looking at ROI on coaching for digital agencies. Without digging a lot deeper, it can be near impossible to work out exactly when your business may benefit from a positive ROI.
Knowing Where You Currently Are
When working out potential ROI on coaching for digital agencies, the first thing to consider is where you are currently. By this, I mean having a clear picture of exactly where your company’s strengths and weaknesses may be. Things to consider here could include how many staff you have employed, how profitable you are, how efficient your team is, or how many people in your leadership team. There are several different questions I ask my potential clients through a thorough discovery process to get to the bottom of this. It’s only when you have a clear snapshot of where you are currently, can you know for sure your starting point. Think of it like going on holiday. If you’re flying to Australia from the U.K, you first need to understand where you’ll fly from, how many of you are going, which airport to fly from, how to get to the airport etc.
Where Do I Want To Go
ROI comes from executing a strategy for your agency
Having a starting point is the first step. The second step is knowing where you want to point your arrow. Many businesses these days flounder around with no clear direction. Unless you have an absolute rock-solid idea of where it is you want to go, it may be difficult to calculate the ROI on coaching. But when you have these two things locked in, you are halfway there. i.e Do you want to sell? Do you want the best agency? If so, what does best mean (most profitable, award winning, best team etc.). These are all questions I’ll tease out with you whilst working through our discovery process.
What’s the Plan Of Attack?
Next is having a clear plan on how you are going to get to your end goal. To work out how long it will take to get an ROI on coaching, you must have a solid plan in place. This is where I start to add intrinsic value, helping to formulate the strategy, tactics, KPI’s and milestones to achieve your vision. This plan could include getting an investor on board, increasing your market share, customer growth, or customer acquisition, recruitment, cost cutting, delivery productivity improvement (and much more) - it all depends on where you’re going, and where you’re starting from.
How Much Help Do I Need?
Next, it’s important to know what kind of coaching you are wanting. Do you want someone who will be there to guide you when you falter? Or do you want someone who will hold your hand as you take each step?
Naturally, the more time I invest in your business, the higher the cost will be. Getting a return on your investment may come quicker if I am more hands-on. This also depends on the pace you want to proceed at.
Until you’ve looked closely at these questions and done the work necessary, providing the answer to how long before I get an ROI on coaching may be very hard to decide.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
If you are a small digital agency (let’s say nine staff) and you are the boss. Your business may be making very little profit currently, so investing time and money may be difficult. This scenario could take up to 18 months to see an ROI on coaching for your digital agency. This is simply because you are time-poor, and making significant changes may need to be done a little slower. The last thing you want to see is your business collapsing because you went too fast.
Compare this to a larger company, say, 25 staff, two founders, and a management team. Let’s assume this company is making a 20% profit, and they wish to scale to 30% year on year. This will make the process quicker because they have money in the bank and a leadership team to delegate work to. So, the timeframe to positive ROI on coaching for digital agencies in a business this size may only be six months. In fact, the larger the company, the quicker the process could be.
But again, it all depends! The 9 employee agency may just want to be a lifestyle business, to turn a profit and free up some time for the agency owner. That’s cool! And the process may be a quick one. Equally the 25 person agency may have aspirations to become a 160 person agency, doing £15m turnover and to exit in 3 years, this is equally as cool, but seeing an ROI may take a little longer.
So if you are still wondering how long it may take for you to get an ROI on coaching for your digital agency, then start by looking at these questions above. What I’ve put above isn’t everything you need to consider. However, it will give you a ballpark figure on the time you may need to allow.
Use this form to get in touch if you’d like to explore when you’d see an ROI with your agency.
