| Your name and title | |
|---|---|
| Jordan Beynon, VP of Strategy | |
| How many total employees does your agency have? How has this changed over the last 2 years? | |
| 51 YTD. In 2022 we had a net gain of 13 team members. In 2021 we had a net loss of 2 team members. | |
| What are the total revenues for the agency (substitute & indicate billings if this is the only available number): | |
| $13,500 total revenue ($8.3M AGI) | |
| List your clients for the past 2 years (please group by industry category and indicate past/current clients). Cut and paste from another document if this helps. | |
| Agriculture + Manufacturing: Art's Way Champion Seed Rantizo Vermeer Forage Vermeer Forage Training Construction + Manufacturing: Hitachi DCI Group Martin Marietta New Way Trucks Precision Pulley Simonson Sage Oil Vac Vermeer Lifecycle Vermeeer Pipeline Vermeer Recycling & Forestry Vermeer Specialty Ex Vermeer Treecare/Rental/Landscape Vermeer Utility Vermeer MV Solutions Associations and commodity groups: Coalition to Support Iowa Farmers Iowa Assn. of Electric Cooperatives Midwest Dairy Iowa Corn National Pork Board Financial / Insurance: DLL FirstLine Funding ProAg IMT Insurance Bank Iowa Animal Science + Manufacturing: Kemin Corporate Kemin KANA Kemin MX Kemin Nutrisurance Higher Education + Family Education: Mercy College of Health Sciences Wilmington College Science Center of Iowa | |
| Bullet point the services you offer your clients: | |
| We are full service, so we don't list all the services you could imagine... Instead we say this: AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATION AND CUSTOMER PROFILING - The matchmakers bringing customers and companies together. BRANDING AND STORYTELLING - Polished, purposeful and consistent to resonate with your audience. CUSTOMER AND BRAND EXPERIENCES - Creating experiences so good you should charge admission. PAID, EARNED AND OWNED MEDIA STRATEGY - Who would have thought math and science would apply to marketing? CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING AND SALES FUNNELING - We’re like Google Maps for the customer journey. PRODUCT LAUNCHES TO TARGETED AUDIENCES - When it comes to product launches, this is Cape Canaveral. BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN SALES AND MARKETING - Teaching sales and marketing how to tango. SPEAKING YOUR CUSTOMERS’ LANGUAGE - Brand translators for technical language and industry jargon. | |
| What percent of new revenue comes from the following sources: | |
| 61-70% | |
| Expanding on your answer above, how has most agency revenue growth come in? | |
| In 2021, we landed a gorilla client, Hitachi. We landed Hitachi through proactive prospecting and relationship building. In 2022 (their first year with LF) we billed Hitachi $900,000 in AGI. In addition, nearly all of our clients (with the expectation of 5 or less) hit their AGI growth goals. Every client team at LF sets an AGI growth goal between 5-15%. Through our invest budgets we give each client team, they use that to proactively put ideas in front of clients to help solve their business challenges. | |
| How do you see these sources of revenue growth changing over the year ahead, if applicable? | |
| Our client budgets are feeling a bit tight for 2023/tapped from a max spend standpoint. We either need to sink deeper into additional segments or departments with our client to start tapping into new budgets or work to bring on new business that has great growth potential with LF. We've had the clients on our roster for over a decade at times. Some of those clients have hit their ceiling in terms of budget expansion. Certainly, a few clients have budget growth potential with LF and we will always continue to push and challenge them with new ideas and recommendations. While I don't think the percentages of sources will change, we will need to stay really focused on proactive prospecting as we currently do not have anyone on our radar. It's in the works though to develop our list and start attacking. | |
| Do you use any project management / account management software to help manage your accounts and/or production / billing? | |
| Workamjig (billing and project management) Client health dashboards (homegrown dashboard I can share as a file to review) | |
| What strategic resources are available to your teams? For example, do you have any proprietary strategy, research, data, tools, or any services you subscribe to? | |
| Sadly, not really. Our various departments (digital, creative, copy, PR) uses Moz, TapClicks, SEM Rush, Cision, Shutterstock and more. We've never invested in proprietary strategy or research. | |
| Are client leaders held accountable for executing and monitoring the initiatives and activities for client Organic Growth plans? Please explain. | |
| Yes, our account directors and account strategists are expected to push for organic growth monthly. We set what we call 'invest budgets' for each client every year. Essentially, we invest 5% back into the client based on their AGI spend with us in the previous year. This could mean client teams get anywhere from $5k - 60K annually to use at their discretion to build relationships with client, pitch new ideas to solve for X, become stewards of their business by attending a tradeshow and more. When invest budgets are shared with client teams, they are asked to prepare a plan on how they plan to use the invest budget for the year by client. We track usage + progress monthly in their Client Health Dashboards. In addition, we are tracking progress toward their AGI growth goals in their Client Health Dashboards monthly. Finally, their position profile that we rate them on in Threads (HR/feedback/review platform) has verbiage around proactively growing clients which rate each team member on annually. | |
| How would you rate your account teams’ effectiveness at driving Organic Revenue Growth — based on having documented plans, a methodical approach, and being assertive? Please explain. | |
| 75% effectiveness. I think our team is really motivated to grow the accounts they serve. Last year, nearly every account hit their AGI growth goal and I attribute a lot of that to our invest budget usage and strategy. They have great intentions to do XYZ. Many do proactively pitch year-long. However, many start off strong with annual planning and then get so busy with the day-to-day tactical jobs they lose sight of the next big thing they should be thinking about to help grow the client partnership. I don't think we always have a documented plan or methodical approach however. Many times, we start dreaming and scheming when we catch wind of a business challenge from a client in a meeting that we take back to the team and start solving for. I'm excited for teams to have a bit more methodical approach moving forward instead of waiting for the next nugget to drop in a meeting. | |
| When you consider Organic Growth, specifically, where does the team most need to improve? Where is the greatest opportunity for the team? | |
| We could do better at: Showing the value to the client to get them to sign off on the work/idea. Clearly articulating the plan and the approach. Bringing key insights or data into our recommendations so there is no way the client could dispute the idea. Being more proactive and activating year-round vs. annually. | |