The Quarterly Review

Ran a quarterly review session with an agency leadership team last year. First proper one they'd done. The CEO had been talking about quarterly reviews for ages but they kept getting bumped for client work or new business pitches or someone being on holiday.

We sat down with the actual numbers. Revenue by client, utilisation by team, pipeline conversion, margin by service line. Straightforward stuff that should have been visible to everyone.

Two things came out of it that nobody in the room had known. The design team was running at about 115 per cent utilisation, which explained why three designers had left in the previous eighteen months. And the agency's largest service line by revenue was also its least profitable, which meant the more they sold of it the worse the margins got.

The CEO had a sense, vaguely, that something wasn't right. But he'd been too deep in the day-to-day to see the shape of it. The review gave him thirty minutes of clarity that six months of running the business hadn't.

They made two decisions that afternoon. They hired an additional designer within the month. And they restructured the pricing on the underperforming service line, which cost them one client who was only buying it because it was cheap, and improved the overall margin by about four points.

Quarterly reviews aren't complicated. An afternoon, the real numbers, the leadership team in a room with no laptops, and an honest conversation about what's working and what isn't.