When I was still working at my old agency, I spent many hours late at night, crawling through endless YouTube videos. Videos that always talk about how people are making money online or doing some kind of entrepreneurship.
Most of those videos were pretty rubbish. It’s always some spin on dropshipping, affiliates, or after 5 minutes, I can tell that they’ve never worked in an agency in their life.
Then I came across an interview with Brett Williams of Designjoy fame.
I shared this with Anton, my business partner and we had many months of conversations about this idea of a subscription service that could help businesses and their digital business needs. More notably, how an agency can make things easier for clients and the challenges they face from a pricing, transparency, and timeline perspective.
We outlined 5 key issues we aimed to resolve with our new agency – Ample Tech:
1. Many agencies will charge a monthly retainer for a certain type of service
A monthly retainer is generally nice and easy to understand, however, there are glaring issues with this.
If you’re doing something like SEO or PPC, a lot of the times the actual account work is very limited. The agency might spend an hour or so on analysis, make some changes, then the rest of the month is spent in meetings, updating budget trackers, creating IOs, or the worst one, “waiting to see what impact it will have on Google”. And you get the luxury of paying for that time.
Continuing on the SEO or PPC example, the agency will often recommend changes like schema, information architecture changes, or image optimisation, but then are also unable to execute the changes themselves. Therefore you need another agency to make those technical changes. More cost, more time to find another agency service, more friction to just get things done.
With Ample Tech offering a complete range of digital solutions, we solve both these issues easily. Firstly, we have a transparent task list where tasks get actioned one at a time. So whilst we’re waiting on Google to do its thing, we’re working on the next item in the meantime. Meaning there is no “dead time” that you’re paying for. Secondly, not only can we provide the strategy and recommendations for changes, we can also execute them for you.
2. Scoping, rescoping, quoting, re-quoting, revisions are messy
This is one of my biggest pet peeves, having to quote, scope, then re-scope. It’s hard to estimate what needs to go into a project, it takes a tonne of time, and most of the time, it’s not going to be accurate because things change, new problems arise. It’s just the nature of it.
Just look around at the Sydney Light Rail project, which was wildly out of budget and took way too long. Even big projects like this can’t stay on target with hundreds of eyes and hands to help out.
Whilst we do scope out a project initially, you do need a starting point after all, we don’t rescope and requote as that takes time, time away that could be used actually building the damn thing.
You want us to change direction on a project? Want to make amends? Actually it looked better how it was before? No worries, we’ll take the necessary actions rather than get back to with a revised quote.
3. Agencies charge a % of media fees
Media fees make sense for the agency. If you want to spend more, it must mean you’ve got more money to give away right?!
I’ve personally managed $9 million dollar accounts, and our % fee off that was 6.5%, meaning that business gave us $585K per year! And besides some nice powerpoint presentations and the weekly meeting, we barely did any real work on the account.
Agencies, then are always working to try and increase your marketing spend with them. Most businesses I’ve worked with, increasing spend is not one of their goals!
It also makes calculating your true ROI a pain in the a$$.
We don’t charge a % of media. We think it’s unethical, and refuse to do it. A flat monthly fee is fair for everyone and it means we can focus on what works for your account and business, and not what works for ours and Google’s bottom line.
4. You don’t know what your agency is doing for you
There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors with agencies. Most of the time, you’re paying for an end goal, but you don’t really know what’s happening behind the scenes.
Are they actually doing the work? Are they going to meet the deadline? What’s the progress on the project?
You need to chase someone, you need to ping them an email. It’s annoying.
We’ve solved this by having a transparent task list using JIRA Service Desk. This ensures all the tasks you want done are seen, itemised, and prioritised.
You have access to this, we have access to this. We’re all on the same page, all the time. Simple right?
5. Lock in contracts suck
If you were dating someone and you agreed to a date, would you lock it in with a marriage straight away?
Hell No!
That sounds dangerous and stupid. But I’ve seen it time and time again in the business and marketing world where an agency wants to lock you in for 6 to 12 months, then they don’t do anything for you. But you can’t get out and change to another agency.
This means your business could be failing because you can’t get out, and you’re wasting time whilst your competitors move forward.
At Ample Tech, we wanted to change this and remove any lock-in contracts. It doesn’t make sense. We want to fight for your business by delivering exceptional design, software and marketing services, month over month.
How does it work then?
We offer a month to month subscription service that provides you with all the digital services you would need in your business. Any sort of design such as Brand Guidelines, Custom Logos, Social Media Assets, you name it, that’s included.
All marketing services are also included, anything from Google Advertising, CRO, Facebook ads, all the way through to tracking it correctly in Google Analytics. That’s included.
Software development? Web Development? Need an App? All software related development is included.
There’s NO limit to how many tasks you load up. We’ll help you prioritise and get them done, one at a time.
And, after a month, if you want to stop, just send us an email and we’ll end the subscription. No hard feelings. You won’t even need to give us a break up note.
If this sounds like an agency you’d like to work with, let’s have a chat.
