What’s New (and Next) With Agencies in the UK?

A few weeks ago, part of our team headed over to London for The Agency Collective’s annual Future Proofing Your Agency conference. This year, the overall theme was agency resilience. 

The Agency Collective is a bustling community built up of hundreds of independent creative agencies based throughout the UK. A good portion of its members joined the event to candidly share experiences and learnings with peers.

Resilience was tackled through all different angles, from business development to implementing diversity and inclusion efforts at the workplace.

The one-day event was opened by speaker, mentor and coach Marcus Thomlinson, who reminded us all: “You are what you think the most”. This set the stage for a day filled with positivity, motivation, and ideas on how to move forward in the agency space.

Generally speaking, it’s clear that UK agencies have been struggling to swim and thrive—just as equally as in all other parts of the world.
A year and a half into the economic downturn and agency folk are still sleepless over stale pipelines, which makes events of this type paramount for gathering insights from the wider agency network.

Embracing change, however simple of a concept it seems—was one of the main takeaways from a number of Agency Collective peers. Challenge your marketing strategies, your sales processes, your pricing model, and how you nurture your relationships with existing clients.

Katie Street, MD and founder of Street Agency, doesn’t shy from her life story, which in itself displays extreme resilience. She emphasized how showing up every day (on LinkedIn), helping clients understand how to buy from you, and embracing the inbound, outbound, and nearbound opportunities within your network can fuel growth.

For UK agencies, EDI isn’t an optional extra. Kindness and empathy shown towards colleagues of different life paths is a must. As per Mo Kanjilal, Co-creator at Watch This Sp_ce, diversity and inclusion aren’t something agencies can learn (or adopt) in a one-hour training session. A simple example of being more inclusive towards neurodiverse peers is sending interview questions ahead of the meeting so that they have more time to formulate their answers.

In his own, very personable way, Barrington Reeves, Creative Director and Founder of Too Gallus, shared his way off the beaten path. His take on using authenticity to find your agency’s niche is to find the flame that lives within your business.

Not all hope is lost when it comes to growth. Constantly optimizing processes and selling intelligently productized services were what built and sold Jellyfish last year. Rob Pierre, former co-founder of the creative giant, now an investor and advisor, made and sold what was allegedly the biggest independent agency exit in the history of the UK.

His inspiring take on creating a team that was as scalable as a vector image included dozens of strategies that led him to building a global team of 2,200 employees. All that, in only 19 years.

It’s unclear just how long this economic plunge will rule, and UK agencies are not the only ones affected. This is a global challenge for the entire industry. Creative service businesses need to ride the wave of change, instead of waiting for better circumstances of the past to return.

To maintain stability, intentionally growth and increasing profit margins are the two main pillars. As a North Star, what’s paramount to have at your fingertips is real-time data on: