Actus Consulting’s Post

📢 CALLING ALL UK INDEPENDENT AGENCY FOUNDERS & OWNERS 📢 Are you looking for your agency to Thrive in 2025? Join the Actus Consulting team for a timely breakfast meet-up in our Maximising Agency Value Series, where we'll address the key challenges holding agencies back and show you how to overcome them. What to expect? Our Actus practice heads were asked to address one question: “What’s the biggest challenge agencies are facing in your area, and how can they solve it to thrive in 2025?” Our panel will deliver focused, practical advice you can act on immediately, in a compact 90-minute panel session. Topics include: 🎤 Crafting a clear, actionable plan for 2025 🎤 Maximising agency profitability 🎤 Developing new business strategies that drive growth 🎤 Building a team that ticks like a Swiss watch 🎤 Leveraging purpose to strengthen resilience And why should you attend? 🔓 Gain Expert Insights: Hear from industry leaders who’ve helped over 100 agencies grow and succeed. Get straightforward, practical advice you can implement right away. 🔓 Expand Your Network: Connect with like-minded independent agency owners and leaders, fostering valuable new relationships. 🔓 Achieve Your Goals: Learn to balance growth, purpose and exit value, setting your agency up for long-term success. Actus Consulting proudly supports Magic Breakfast, a charity ensuring no child starts their day too hungry to learn. For every attendee, we’ll donate £50 to provide nutritious breakfasts to children across England and Scotland. Details: Wednesday 13 November 8.30-10.45am, central London (breakfast will be served!) I’m super excited to bring this event together on behalf of the Actus team; we’re looking forward to sharing our knowledge and engaging in all the conversation during and post this event. As always, we bring together a fantastic group of independent agency owners and leaders. So, everyone walks away from our events with some great new contacts… and a head full of ideas! To book your place to join us, then please message me directly for the event sign up link (we have limited places available for UK independent agency owners and founders). Alison Austen Chartered MCIPD Genevieve Lawrence Sarah Greenwood Treena Hales Adrian Tripp

Operations is massively under appreciated in the agency world – even though it's INTEGRAL to an agency's success. 👉 That's why it's been such a joy to read the submissions for our Agency Operations Leaders Top 50 🌟 (https://lnkd.in/eM9Cg5AM) We created these awards to celebrate the hard work operations leaders (and their teams) in our community are putting in to transform how their agency works. Some of the so far are responses are beautiful: 💬 “This person is our agency’s glue. No matter the change or problem, they always have a successful solution. Operations is a very broad remit and this person juggles the various responsibilities effortlessly, ensuring the must-do things always happen – without me having to worry about it!" 💬 “This person’s emotional intelligence is their secret weapon; it allows them to implement new team processes while staying objective yet approachable.” 💬 “I trust and value this person’s opinion. They help ground me when required, but also encourage me when they feel I'm onto something. My sales / commercial / marketing mindset is complimented perfectly by their operational / finance / eyes on the detail nature.” 💬 “This person was the best find in my agency history. In the last two years, they have reworked every single agency process, getting buy in from every member of the team. They’ve helped double the size of our agency from 15 people to 30 people, and helped grow our profit by over 50%. Just one of a kind.” -------------------- Here's how it works: > We’re looking for agency leaders and their teams who have taken bold, interesting or strategic steps in agency operations. > You can nominate yourself, or somebody you know. > We'll compile your nominations and the Top 50 will be selected by our industry judge – Ryan McNamara, from Rise at Seven | Search-First Creative Agency. Nominations are free – and for a limited time we’re donating £5 for each entry to Ryan's chosen charity: Keeping Digital Foundation. [More info here: https://lnkd.in/eUFdAVvw] The deadline for nominations is 10th May 2024 – so get nominating! 👉 https://lnkd.in/exccJ7gh #AgencyOperations #OperationsLeader #People #Processes #AgencyStrategy #Ops #AgencyTeams #Recognition #AgencyLeader #AgencyAwards #Awards #AgencyGrowth

As Simon Sinek wrote ... Start With Why. This time next week we will be just about to hold our panel Q&A, which will mark the end of the 2024 The Bulletproof Agency Network conference, over at HOME in Manchester. We will likely be both exhausted and inspired. Running these events is really hard, especially post COVID where in person events can feel harder to commit to, but it's something we are genuinely passionate about. Our WHY is to make sure agency owners don't get tripped up, or taken advantage of on their journey, as unfortunately we see that happen time and time again, and it is so frustrating. So if you own or run an agency, whether marketing, video, communications, or anything else creative, then this really is for you. The price is ridiculously cheap for the speakers we have, and that's because we do not run it for a profit. Instead we pay for the event with the help of our sponsors Nugent Santé - Your health in our hands Pura Vida Financial Planning Agencywise This means ticket money all goes to charity. If you want to be in the room with 100+ agency owner colleagues, then get your tickets while you still can - https://lnkd.in/e2DudKbU #agencygrowth #startwithwhy #conference

You can now nominate yourself (or somebody else) for the Great Agencies Growth Index. There's an official reason we're doing this – but also a "behind the scenes, unofficial reason" 🤫 if you scroll down. Both are true, but the second one is probably more interesting. First, the official reason: 🚀 Growing an agency is hard and lonely. You generally DON'T get celebrated for demanding more of people, for raising standards, and for generally changing stuff that "doesn't need to be changed". So we want to tell the story of people who are pushing their agency business forward and reaching for the stars, so other agency folk people can be inspired by them. Nominations are open now for 2 weeks and they're being judged by Kate Ross who runs eight&four – which has seen huge growth. For each nomination we're donating £5 to Kate's charity Gympanzees. ⬆️ That's the official reason and it's 💯% true! Here's the "unofficial" reason we're doing this 🤫 1. We need to be in the recognition business. As a business, "recognition" has been a huge missing piece for a long time. One thing we're trying to do with Agency Hackers is – as much as possible – just give people what they want. And what people crave is love and recognition ❤️. So we've Great Agencies as our new recognition brand. It's designed to be meaningful to clients as well as agency owners. So if you put it on your website, clients will be impressed. (If we called it "Agency Hackers", that wouldn't resonate with clients as much.) 🤷♂️ 2. Recognition is quite a natural fit for us. Most awards and "top lists" have a lot of categories and you never hear the actual story of why somebody won. Storytelling is quite a core competence for us, so we think we can do a good job of explaining why people are being recognised – and what the lesson is. 3. It'll help us grow 🚀 Finally, having an awards and recognition brand also helps us with "top of funnel" marketing. More people will discover us this way. And it's something that creates quite a lot of sponsorship opportunities. Hope this is interesting! By the way I got rid of the mullet in this picture. 💇🏻♂️

I'd like your thoughts, my wonderful #network. We seem to expect greater transparency in who is paying for what these days, in areas like politics, web content (affiliate commissions, sponsored search results), and news-looking advertorials (remember Australian radio's Cash-for-Comments scandal?). I have been to A LOT of conferences and those kinds of health and safety-focussed events in the past few years, having done more than 50 speaking engagements since 2018. It fascinates me how programs are put together. It's not an easy task. It fascinates me how people end up on the program. It also fascinates me how often a program is let down by... ...poor speakers, inconsistent themes, irrelevant or old topics, bias, undeclared interests, or stuff that simply doesn't hit the mark with audiences. I hope that's not overly critical, but that's what I see, and what plenty of people have mentioned to me consistently over the years. I am a professional speaker alongside my day job as a coach. Because what's of value is worth paying for. I have been asked to speak for free, on a few occasions have done this pro bono for a good cause, or because the exposure is valuable to me. I have shocked people when they find out what it actually costs to get good speakers/facilitators. Plenty of amazing professionals are generous in speaking for free. There are also conferences in which you can get a sweet keynote spot by being a sponsor. Or you can just get a gig because you fork out a lot of cash without being a sponsor (money-for-microphone? kash-for-keynote? dough-for-a-go?) 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙞𝙨 𝙗𝙪𝙜𝙜𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙢𝙚, 𝙞𝙨 𝙬𝙝𝙚𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙨 𝙬𝙤𝙪𝙡𝙙 𝙜𝙚𝙩 𝙗𝙚𝙩𝙩𝙚𝙧, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙖𝙪𝙙𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙚𝙭𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 𝙗𝙚 𝙗𝙚𝙩𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙢𝙚𝙩, 𝙞𝙛 𝙞𝙩 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙨𝙥𝙖𝙧𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙬𝙝𝙤 𝙥𝙖𝙞𝙙 𝙬𝙝𝙤 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩? Maybe not exactly how many dollars, but what if the program had a little legend, that indicated, for each person, something like: *this speaker has been paid for this session. ^this speaker is donating their time and expertise for this session. †this speaker is representing a paying sponsor. ‡this speaker has paid to present in this session. What do you think? A useful idea or a waste of time?

Isn’t a company or charity blog a bit 2000’s? 💭 No! ❌ Have you considered the following? 👉 A well thought out and written blog can increase website traffic, increased traffic can lead to increased sales. 👉 Effective blog content can be repurposed into Social Media content. 👉 Professionally written blogs can increase customer trust in your brand. 👉 You can use a blog post to answer common questions your clients may have. 👉 You can use a blog to promote new products or services you may have. Do you need a hand setting up a blog? I have had the privilege or writing a lot of blog posts for my clients and would be very happy to assist you in setting up a blog. Get in touch today to find out more! 💌 #outsourcing #business #virtualassistant

🌍 Finding the "just-right" price for consulting is an art—and a science. When pricing goes beyond numbers, it’s about defining your value, understanding client needs, and confidently setting rates that resonate with the impact you bring. 💼 In a field where prices can make or break client trust, consider these foundational strategies: -Hourly Rate: Clear but can make clients wary of the ticking clock. -Project-Based Pricing: Great for clarity but requires ironclad scope definition. -Retainer Model: Offers income stability yet demands a sustained relationship. -Value-Based Pricing: Tied to outcomes, not hours, but you’ll need to prove your worth. 📈 Are we, as consultants, undervaluing our expertise just to land the next gig? Should we set rates based solely on "market standards," or is it time to break the mold and redefine our own worth? 💡 "Knowing your worth and communicating it is what sets successful consultants apart from those who simply ‘charge by the hour. 🔎 Your thoughts? Is confidence or client expectation the real challenge in setting consulting rates? Should rates evolve as we do? 👀 Want more insights on finding clients and establishing a consulting price that sustains you? Head over to NonprofitFreelancers.com to learn more. #ConsultingRates #NonprofitConsulting #KnowYourWorth #PricingStrategy #Freelancers #Fractionalemployees #Consultants #nonprofits #CFRE

Justifying the cost of your digital investment shouldn’t be hard work. In today’s fast-paced digital world, investment isn't an option—it’s a necessity. Join our Head of Client Strategy Anna Dixon and Lidia Drane from Royal Voluntary Service as they chat over lunch with other marketers from #charities, #BCorps, #nonprofitorganisations and #purposedriven businesses at our next roundtable event on Wednesday 25th September. If you're looking to get a ‘YES’ from your CFO for your next digital upgrade, or need budget for digital updates, ongoing maintenance, brand evolution or are simply struggling to get investment to help you keep up with the latest market trends - all whilst juggling your ROI. This is the lunch for you. We'll be looking at why you need to make a compelling case for continuous investment in digital and how you can go about it. Join us and book your ticket to our next #yoyo event below. 👇 #yoyo #events #marketing #investment #digital

We've just hit 1000 fully signed up, subscribed members!!! Can't quite believe that we've got there, but here we are! That's 1000 people, working in marketing, across the South West (99% of the members are from the South West), and I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of people working in marketing in the area, who have never heard of Building Brands or who haven't signed up yet. Our goal is to get to 1500 by the end of 2024. Can we do it? Are you a subscribed member of Building Brands? If not, here are some reasons why it would be good for you to sign up: - It's free! - You'll get a marketing email newsletter every 2 weeks, covering everything you need to know in the area - jobs, events, news, social media and mental health tips, and loads of articles from experts everywhere (the newsletter's open rate now stands at 69%!!) - You'll be the first to know about Building Brands events - You'll get new whitepapers emailed to you written by south west agencies and experts - We run events for marketing professionals across the South West, with conferences, Heads of Agencies dinners, Marketing Manager Meetings, Young Marketer Meetups, Mental Health in Marketing events, and one or two new things that we're working on - We'll always do our very best to keep costs for our events as low as possible. Building Brands is genuinely here to help, not for us to make lots of money. And we'll never charge Young Marketers to come to their meetups - those are events that we're really keen to do, in order to help young people who are starting out in the industry or who are keen to push their careers forward. - We've got loads of marketing resources on the website to help you, including recommended podcasts, mental health help, whitepapers and training and educational help. Congraulations to Leah Erdbrink from Program in Exeter, who was our 1000th member last week, and wins a free ticket to the Exeter conference later this year! If you haven't signed up yet - you can do that here: https://lnkd.in/e-rrtXaq #MarketingCommunity #SouthWest #MarketingEvents #MarketingConference

🏹 🙌 Are you a socially responsible business, impact-driven entrepreneur, non-profit, or changemaker looking to make a difference? As a VA specialised in providing content and administration-related services, I’m here to help you achieve your goals more effectively. How I can help my clients: ➡ Creating engaging content tailored to your audience, whether it’s for your website, blog, social media, or marketing materials ❇ I can help you engage your target audience, amplify your message, and inspire action ➡ Handling day-to-day tasks that consume valuable time and resources. From managing your inbox and calendar, scheduling meetings, to conducting research, and assisting with document preparation ❇ I can help you stay organised and focus on what you do best: driving positive change and making a difference By crafting compelling content or/& managing the administrative functions behind the scene, I make sure you maximise your impact and your business thrives. Let’s embark on this journey together where every action we take is a step towards a brighter future and a better world! #virtualassistant #VAwork #greaterpurpose