What are the options for owners of digital marketing agencies?
That’s a question I’m hearing more and more from agency owners. On one hand, there are some many opportunities to invest and grow the agency. On the other hand, uncertainty around the economy, constant changes by Google and of course AI are real stressors for owners.
At it’s core, there are 4 options for owners of digital marketing agencies:
1. Stay The Course – for many agency owners, they have found the perfect balance between clients, workload and income. They may lose a customer, gain a customer, lose a team member, hire a team member. But for the most part, things are great and they will remain great for the foreseeable future
2. Grow Organically – these agency want to / need to grow and are committed to doing that via organic means i.e. just winning more customers than they lose.
3. Grow Through Acquisitions – a great way to expand into different product offerings, different geographies or just gain scale
4. Sell – exit altogether, or be bought to be part of something bigger and access resources, capital, talent to help take the agency to the next level.
Over the course of the next few blog posts, I’ll dive into each of these, examining the pros and cons of each. At the end of it, my hope is that agency owners, wherever they are in their journey, will have a much clearer sense of the path forward.