Best practices – Creating & implementing a structure that works for growth agencies

ON June 5, 2021, the Manic team had its inaugural workshop and teambuilding session at Fringilla Lodge, Chisamba District.

During the one-day workshop, various topics and techniques were discussed at length on how to improve the organisational efficiency of a digital marketing agency.

In the company of expert business consultant and trainer, Tafadzwa Bete Sasa, from Goal Getter, team members were all given the opportunity to engage in several brainstorming sessions and workshops all designed to sharpen our understanding of what Manic Creatives is, its goals & objectives, but most of all its identity and values.

While we are a growth agency, designed to help businesses grow their sales volumes by increasing their visibility online through marketing automation, the overall theme was that of a need to have in place a structure to improve Manic’s operations and the company’s standards.
Team members realised that creating and implementing a structure of how each aspect of the business would be run was central to growing Manic Creatives and fulfilling its growth potential. If the company’s vision is to be a fully-fledged corporate entity on the scale and size of Google or Amazon by 2041, then there would be need to implement a clearly defined structure where team members would adhere to standards and procedures to achieve goals and objectives.

What structure (s) can growth agencies create & implement?

Arising from the extensive one-day workshop in Chisamba, the Manic team, in conjunction with Tafadzwa, drafted and approved a Team-building Implementation Tracker that clearly defined three key pillars that are the foundation to and underpin our business:

#1. Structure

#2. Communication

#3. Telling our story

All three pillars have a set of key tasks and outcomes, with the appropriate owner (of that task), deadline and status.

On structure, growth agencies ideally need to clarify the different roles and responsibilities; staff onboarding to ensure new team members understand the organisation mission, vision and different team members’ roles and responsibilities and hire a finance & administration manager for effective bookkeeping.

Under the communication pillar, the ideal scenario would be to establish procedures and timelines for escalating issues when a client has not submitted information or feedback and have clear communication channels and protocols for tasks and updates within different functions, among others.
Finally, in telling our story, the company essentially looks to formulate and implement a public relations policy that fits into the overall company policy as one of the key pillars. Here, marketers in a growth agency would look to provide timelines and budget for the PR policy implementation.

Expected outcomes

Implementing a detailed structure in this format illuminates where the company is and lends perspective as to how far off the team members are in achieving the company’s overall objectives. With consistent hard work over a defined period of time, the expected outcomes of implementing a Team-building Implementation Tracker are improved efficiency, meeting deadlines and drastically improved quality of content, which all lead to increased sales revenues.

Since the Fringilla session, team members have recorded improved communication and better, more effective coordination in achieving set tasks.