| What is the total number of employees (and total by office / location)? How has this changed over the last 2 years? | |
|---|---|
| Jason Mitchell, CEO | See chart here - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pCa5TRGA9QhaRkhIExXLeNzyKrWLoVXwg7XiNYgbdEM/edit?usp=sharing |
| What are the total revenues for the agency (substitute & indicate billings if this is the only available number): | |
| Jason Mitchell, CEO | $25.5m |
| List your clients for the past 2 years (grouped by industry category, indicate past/current client). Cut and paste from another document if this helps. | |
| Jason Mitchell, CEO | See chart here - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pCa5TRGA9QhaRkhIExXLeNzyKrWLoVXwg7XiNYgbdEM/edit?usp=sharing |
| Bullet point the services you offer your clients: | |
| Jason Mitchell, CEO | -Audience Research -Social Strategy & Planning -Community Management -Creative Development -Social Content -Social Media Campaigns -Influencer Campaigns -Paid Social Media (Full Funnel & Direct Response_ -Production (Video, Photo, Experiential, Live-Stream) -Data Analytics (Measurement Frameworks, Insights & Customized Reporting) |
| What percent of new revenue comes from the following sources: | |
| Jason Mitchell, CEO | 81-90% |
| Expanding on your answer above, how has most revenue growth come in? | |
| Jason Mitchell, CEO | The vast majority of our revenue comes from growing internal clients and internal referrals. For example, Amazon drives a huge percentage of our revenue. We got that opportunity because I (Jason) had previously reconnected with former Viacom client and come in for a capes. One of the people in the room shortly after got a job leading social for Amazon Prime Video. They did an informal RFP which we won and it was a huge client for us. We won it in large part because we had a ton of highly relevant category experience. At that time we were likely one of the best social agencies for streaming companies due to our work with Netflix. We started working with Amazon Prime Video and did a good job and both grew that account to probably double in size but also started getting referrals across Amazon and today we work with 4 large divisions of Amazon which drives a huge percentage of our overall revenue. This is a pretty common story that we get our foot in the door through a connection, win a pitch and then growing from there drives our ongoing growth. |
| If any, how do you see these sources of revenue growth changing in the coming year? Include Expected Revenue Change: | |
| Jason Mitchell, CEO | 11-20% |
| How many Competitive Reviews/RFPs do you expect to enter this year? | |
| Jason Mitchell, CEO | We have had 19 opportunities for new business projects this year, including those we are actively participating in now. Of those, 6 were not real “pitches” but went straight to proposal stage. Based on our pacing, I’d estimate we may participate in 1-2 additional “pitches” per month for the rest of the year, so approximately 20-25 RFPs for the full course of the year. |
| Do you have any qualification criteria for committing to a new business opportunity? Please explain. | |
| Jason Mitchell, CEO | Our most important qualifications are typically around fit in terms of services provided (are they looking for social media/adjacent services, or a wider range of work?), industry (if it’s one we want to get into or have experience in), and budget fit. We also try to think about the connection we have to the client and if we feel confident we have a strong chance of winning. We did create a more robust evaluation process in 2022 (linked here - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ss_t_3KnUVIPvGlM5Pzdb0lnXV_pfsNEvywutIjr1m8/edit?usp=drive_link), but only use it when we have multiple pitches occurring at once or if we’re feeling unsure about the opportunity, we don’t use it for every (or most) selections. |
| Have you done any outbound business development over the last 2 years? If so, please explain. | |
| Jason Mitchell, CEO | We historically have done minor outbound business development. We have always prioritized submitting for relevant awards shows (and attending those award shows), PR outreach featuring thought leadership from key leads, and pre-Covid, were often looking for opportunities to speak at conferences to get our name out. We do see results from these tools and will continue to utilize these methods. We also have always had a dedicated social media presence (since we are a social agency!), but it hasn’t always been geared toward new business specifically, but a more general approach that feels like a “business card” for people who come across us, as well as for culture for new hires and recruitment. That said, in the last few months we’ve been trying more of this approach. We have tested SEM (both search-focused and display), which did drive leads but never the quality of leads we needed that were in our budget and in our suite of services; we just launched a set of LinkedIn ads this week, and we have begun outreach to consultants and procurement teams to be a part of their networks and searches. We’re definitely open to more of this type of outreach moving forward. |
| What strategic resources does the agency make available to your teams? For example, do you have any proprietary strategy, research, data, tools, or services you subscribe to? | |
| Jason Mitchell, CEO | The strategy team has a membership to the Strategy Finishing School. The data team utilizes Brandwatch, GWI, and RivalIQ. The influencer team utilizesCreatorIQ to search for influencers and pull their metrics/audience info, create lists and one sheets for the client, as well as pull in campaign metrics. All of these are not available to the full agency but to those specific teams. |
| When you step back and think about new business, how does the agency need to improve? For example, are there stages in the pitch process where your teams experience particular challenges (whether internal or external)? | |
| Jason Mitchell, CEO | I (Jason) think that our new business is pretty broken across the board. We have grown to this point through referrals with our existing clients for the most part. We used to grow through getting incoming RFPs where people found us online through awards or SEO but more recently very few of those opportunities have resulted in wins for us. For the majority of our history we had very limited focus on proactive new business. We did good work and had strong relationships with our clients and that drove our growth. Our former head of creative and myself (CEO) would essentially tag team the pitches and we would win a lot of them. Over the past few years two things happened that changed this. First, we grew a lot and so for us to continue growing at a rate we are happy with, it felt like we needed to be more proactive with new business and we have been trying to do that, but haven’t found our footing yet. More on this below. Secondly, that head of creative left and we had a void that was filled recently by our new head of creative, Ly, who is fantastic in many areas, but new business at our agency hasn’t been her strong suit. And to her defense, she has been focused on restructuring her department and rebuilding her team so hasn’t had the bandwidth to truly focus on new business. Also we have brought in a lot of people to help create these RFP pitches but haven’t created a process for how we pitch. Typically what ends up happening is we have a fairly disjointed pitch where we have some strategy upfront, a bunch of ideas loosely connected to the strategy and then some bolt-ons like influencer, paid social, reporting. These pitches aren’t bad and we recently have been continually getting to the finals and losing out, but getting close on a pitch isn’t helpful and in some cases when there are multiple rounds that take a lot of bandwidth which can make all of that effort a big distraction. We recently hired Steph Alfaia to work under Chelsea to lead new business for us. Chelsea is split between new business and marketing. Steph has done a lot of sales, but not at an agency and so there is a steep learning curve. She has been here for about 90 days now. Training her is taking up a lot of Chelsea’s time. The goal with Steph is to have her lead a proactive approach to finding new contacts and working to turn those into leads. Also, when leads come in, for Steph to handle those and be a main point of contact to help drive those through the pitch stage or proposal stage under Chelsea’s guidance. We also have Karen from our marketing team who is mid-level and drives the day to day of our marketing. She has been here for about 18 months and in that time we have jumped around trying a bunch of things, but are not seeing anything really take off. It feels like we haven’t found and committed to the right strategy or tactics for how we are using marketing to drive leads. There are two exceptions to this. We have been focused on awards for the past couple of years and that has been successful. We have been winning a lot of awards. And, we hired a fantastic PR company that is getting us a decent amount of press. Both of those things seem to be working but its hard to know for sure to what degree any one thing is driving leads. Beyond this, one of the challenges we are seeing is a disconnect between Steph and the new business team bringing in deals and trying to scale up the business and our senior leadership team who is helping to scope out the business. It often feels overly burdensome trying to thread the needle between what we think these potential clients have for a budget and what our department leads say they need to do the work. This creates a pretty big rub between teams that we haven’t figured out how to solve for, although it is something we have been working on significantly. We have a new Head of Accounts, Joe, who is very seasoned starting on August 7th and so we are hoping that he can help us with this. We are operating right now w/o a head of account role and so that is one of our challenges around this scoping phase and trying to align a scope with what the new biz teams think we can realistically sell in. |
| Is there a particular practice area or capability within the agency that you think is exceptionally strong or a competitive advantage? Alternatively, is there a practice area or capability you think is weak or needs improvement? | |
| Jason Mitchell, CEO | We have teams that truly, deeply understand social media at a level that most other agencies do not. It is the bedrock from which we built this agency and while most agencies today work on social media in a variety of ways, the depth of our knowledge is just so extensive. However, we are going through a significant exercise of evolving our positioning because that alone isn’t enough to separate us as there are other pure play social media agencies that are great also and more and more of the more traditional or digital agencies have built deep levels of expertise in social. We are still fairly unique in that we have the depth of expertise that we have in social and full capabilities to support social across strategy, creative, production, media, influencer, reporting. At the same time, there are agencies who just focus on influencer marketing or social media buying and so those agencies within that specialization often have more experience, capabilities and expertise than we do within that narrow focus which also is a threat to us. |
| Is there anything else that would provide insight into your new business goals, opportunities or challenges? | |
| Jason Mitchell, CEO | There are two big things that I am thinking about. This year isn’t going to be a good one for us from a growth or profit perspective. Top line revenue will be flat and our bottom line is significantly reduced from last year because of investments we made to keep scaling that fell out from under us at the end of last year. But if some things had gone another way, this could have been a banner year. We made it to the final round of a big pitch for Corona that would have been highly meaningful to us in terms of revenue, prestige and opening up a new category. Same thing with Tinder and YouTube. Gatorade was interested in talking to us but our capes didn’t get us invited to the RFP. We had a bunch of great opportunities where we went to final rounds with the biggest gaming companies like Nintendo, Activision and Riot Games but didn’t win any. So when I look at all of that, it just feels like if we were able to figure out how to turn some of these into wins our entire year’s outlook would be vastly different. The second is that we are in the process of going through a big change in terms of how we position ourselves. We have always called ourselves a full-service social media agency. Our focus has been on running the day to day social media channels for our clients. We want to move beyond this. We want to sell new offerings and services but its a balance because while we are training people currently and trying to figure this out, it is going to take winning new business and selling in new services to truly get there. And so we need to strike the right balance between what we can do today, where we want to be ultimately and what we feel comfortable selling in and being able to deliver upon. |