Twenty per cent growth is standing still

A 20% growth target sounds ambitious. It is barely treading water.

Run the numbers on your own agency. Take off inflation. Then take off wage inflation, which in this market runs ahead of your ability to raise prices. Then ask when you last put your rates up by anything close to RPI. In my experience the honest answer, for almost every agency, is not this year, not last year, and not the year before.

Now lose one small client. Not a whale, just an ordinary account that resigns for ordinary reasons. There goes the rest of your 20%. The agency that hit its stretch target ends the year exactly where it started, and the founder cannot work out why it feels like a grind.

This is why I named the programme I designed 2Y3X: two years, three times. Not because tripling is easy, but because anything much less ambitious is not actually growth once the arithmetic has finished with it. Agencies plateau because they optimise themselves, very competently, for staying the size they are. Getting past that takes a transformation programme, a team responsible for running it, and a founder willing to get out of the way.

Plateaued at the same revenue for three years is not stability. To a buyer it reads as decline that has not started yet.