For young entrepreneurs out there, no thought is scarier than that of trying to scale your business up and continue to grow it without moving too fast and finding yourself in the red. Jon Zacharias, a co-founder of GR0 and long-time digital marketing expert, is opting to share some of his personal tips for how to successfully scale your agency, and how to do it with Covid-19 in mind. These include his own learnings from recent ventures and have helped him to grow his agency to over 30 employees and achieve one million new page views for his clients’ blogs since it was founded in 2020.
While the economy is hindered by the widespread effects of the coronavirus, there are actually some ways that the current working environment and culture can help you. At GR0 marketing agency, Zacharias has been able to move his team to working fully remotely, and as such is able to save money by not requiring expensive office space in LA. On top of that, he has realized that he can now utilize talent from across the entire country, which means he can hire people outside of California who can produce the same work for 60 percent of the cost. However, this is certainly not an excuse to be cheaping out on everything, and it is important to put some of those savings back towards your employees, whether that be with regular gift boxes, free meals, or other spends that can help bolster the culture of your workplace and connect your employees to your company.
Scaling your agency is more than just being smart with your money, and Jon Zacharias knows this well. As you work to acquire new employees it’s imperative that you hire not just for experience but with the culture of your workplace in mind. Ask prospective hires about who they are as people, and identify if they share the same mindset and mentality that the rest of your team does. This can be simple questions like asking what their hobbies are or if they have practices they can’t work without, or if you’re wanting greater insight you could check their personality results on a Meyers-Briggs test. If all of the members of your agency can’t properly gel with one another it can create rifts among them and impede your scaling, making the team apprehensive to increase in size, scale, and scope. But with careful, respectful hiring, you can craft a prosperous team that works in harmony with itself.
Another essential subject to keep in mind with scaling is the clients you take on and the size of projects they’re going to want from you. While the idea of taking on a large scale client in your early stages can certainly be enticing, it’s important to understand whether or not you currently feel equipped for that task. For instance, if a large brand approached your agency looking to collaborate, but would require you to take on many new hires to meet their demand, what would happen if they decided to end the partnership? With a surplus of workers and now a deficit of work to be done, you would likely have to scale back and make cuts, which would severely hurt your team’s morale. For these reasons, any agency looking to scale needs to respect the projects they take on, and ensure that they aren’t getting in over their heads for a single client. If you want to take on those projects you could perhaps ask yourself if there are other similarly-sized clients who you could look to work with in the future, or how you might be able to pivot and restructure your teams should a contract fall through. It can be difficult to resist the temptation of accepting a lofty contract, but by pacing himself Zacharias has been able to keep growth at GR0 more manageable and stable.
Jon Zacharias has spent years working in digital marketing and advertising, and his latest venture GR0 is clear proof of that. Since its inception last year, the agency has grown to over 30 full-time employees working together from all over the country in spite of the Covid-19 pandemic. This wasn’t done overnight and is certainly no accident, by working carefully and considering every decision Zacharias has attained sustainable growth for his marketing agency and is regularly thinking of how he can continue to expand his efforts. GR0 works to help brands improve their SEO rankings on Google and create quality online engagement between them and their customers.
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