We’re here to protect your reputation. Having worked alongside you for many years we know that your relationships with the agencies are worth their weight in gold. At the same time, you also need to know someone is covering your back commercially. We can be that person.
We’ve worked alongside marketing teams for many years. So we know and understand that you’ve built up incredibly strong relationships with your key contacts in your agencies. The last thing you want to do, or we either, is damage any of these relationships. At the same time, we realise that a marketing team’s focus is on the next project, not always on the commercials and the underlying financial detail of what you are doing. On the one hand you have to trust your agency implicitly, on the other you need to have the assurance that you can trust them implicitly. That’s where we come in.
We will help you:
- Protect your reputation by giving you full transparency over your agency’s guardianship of your marketing budget
- Find extra budget by identifying where unused money is sitting in the accounts of the agency
- Have a clean bill of health from the internal auditors by helping strengthen your financial processes and controls with your agencies
- Have easier conversations with Finance and Procurement as you will be able to show them exactly how and where your agencies have spent your budget. This can often stave off an imminent budget cut.
- Protect your interests by analysing what you are signing up for and identifying any loopholes in the agency contract – which could come back and bite you later.
Do any of these situations ring true for you?
- ‘When it comes to money, I never seem to get a straight answer out of the agency. I sometimes wonder whether it really is as complicated and expensive as they seem to make out.’
- ‘I really want to make an impact during the next 12 months, but budgets are so tight. If we could find another £100,000 I could run that new digital campaign. I’m convinced it will work and we’ll get some really great data to demonstrate the ROI.’
- ‘The agency is continually telling me that it is over servicing the account and losing money, so why is it still working with us? It doesn’t make any sense: if it really was that bad, they’d resign the account. So what am I missing?’
- ‘The Board is cutting the marketing budget in the second half of the year and I need to find a way of getting away a quality Christmas campaign. It happens every year, so we load the first half with lots of activity and then don’t have enough left to do justice to Christmas which is key for trading. If only we could save money in the first half to deliver more in the second.’
- ‘The FD wants to understand in detail how the marketing budget gets spent at the agencies and I don’t have all the answers. It’s easy enough to understand the retainer fees, but how many people and hours do we really get for that? When it comes to production costs I can tell you the headline amounts, but where it all actually goes I couldn’t exactly say for sure.’
- ‘I went on a course recently and someone mentioned that not all of the budgets they give their agencies actually get spent, often because their suppliers are not very good at invoicing. How can that be? I have never seen any money refunded by one of our agencies, so that company must have a problem we don’t. That’s a relief!’
If some of the comments above resonate with you, we probably should be talking…
How can I get the best out of my collaboration with Financial Progression?
The clients who have had the best results after working with us share many traits:
- Prepared to implement our recommendations, so that when we audit the agency a second time all our findings are new ones
- Strong relationships with their agencies and the relationship is robust enough to withstand some difficult conversations
- Put themselves in the driving seat of managing colleagues and the agencies – personally taking responsibility for change
- Ready to do the work – as they realise there is no ‘quick fix’ or ‘silver bullet’, particularly where strong business relationships and large amounts of money are concerned
- Understand the importance of their reputation – continually seeking to show that they are in control of their agencies
- Forward looking – understanding that only the future can be changed
- It’s not personal, it’s just business – recognising that agencies are trying to make money just like everyone else