Clockwork London:
The Agency Process and Operations Forum
London: Tuesday 2nd May 2023, Hijingo, Liverpool Street
(Looking for our Manchester event?)
• Meet other agency owners (and operations leaders) making their business work better
• Hear real “warts and all” stories of process improvement
• Get inspired! Take away ideas to implement in your agency
For agencies, 2023 is a year of process improvement.
Clockwork is an afternoon where you can learn from – and be inspired by – other agency leaders who are making their agencies run smoother.
- You’ll hear candid stories of failure and success from other agencies on a path to make their business work better.
- You’ll also get to talk confidentially about your business with people who know what it’s like to walk in your shoes… because they’re currently doing it.
- You can hear how other businesses are creating processes that work for them – and getting people (even creative people!) to stick to them.
Who you’ll hear from
How Can Timesheeting Be Used in a Way That
Truly Values Time and Effort?
To combat Torchbox‘s timesheeting headache, Charmagne Rayman-Bacchus-Thompson set about improving the agency’s accuracy – as well as her team’s experience – to change the narrative around where the value is in the effort people are putting in.
“Now, we’re not asking staff to record anything about their time, other than that they spent it on client work on that particular project,” she says.
“With this, we might be able to move away from inaccurate scrutiny of the amount of time that is spent in delivering a thing, when really it’s about how effectively we’ve solved a problem.”
Read the full story.
Finding a Management System to
Navigate New Business Waters
During the pandemic, Rob Sansom’s agency pivoted dramatically.
When Broadsword switched, head of operations Rob had to find a management system to help the company navigate uncharted waters. But it was a struggle to find one that ticked all the boxes – until Scoro entered the picture.
“It’s great at keeping everything in one place. We used to have four different systems for one project; now we only have two.”
Hear more from Rob on how Scoro has helped focus the agency’s activities across three separate markets.
Read the full story.
“Why We Spent 18 Months Overhauling the Entire Structure of Our Agency”
Lauren Preece’s agency, Manifest, was profitable and growing – but the leadership team wanted to take it to the next level.
They set about overhauling the entire agency over the course of 18 months, implementing the ‘elemental’ structure – a system that organises team members vertically across seven disciplines.
It seems to have paid off – maximising productivity, improving quality of work, elevating their client roster and boosting internal development too.
“It does what it says on the tin,” says Lauren, associate director. “People are happier and more productive because they’re in their element.”
Read the full story.
How Can Visualising KPIs Create Efficiency and Progress?
Liz Male was regularly losing weekend time to manual KPI and performance tracking.
To win back this time, Liz brought in a ‘whiz’ to create a custom dashboard tracking profitability metrics for her agency.
By visualising these KPIs, the agency can now see real-time data on profit or loss for each and every client, plus the longer-term trends and patterns which might help with planning future years’ work programmes.
This allows them to make better-informed decisions about where to focus their energy, and where things need rebalancing – but this is just the start.
Read the full story.
“We Needed to Fine Tune Our Offering”
Matter of Form wanted to take things to the next level, but found they were working on projects without a fully unified system or optimal processes in place.
The team wanted to develop a more focused way of working, but to figure out the solution, they first needed to finetune the agency’s proposition & service offering.
To kick it off, head of operations James Doughty put all the agency’s services on the table, coming up with 20 in total. These were then filtered down into four top level buckets – brand development, digital experience design, product and service innovation, and strategy and optimisation.
By filtering this down, the agency was then able to start developing a clear and focused blueprint and delivery model for each one.
Hear more from James on how implementing this system helped take Matter of Form to the next level and what challenges he faced along the way.
Read the full story.
🎤
💬 These are the people we’re spotlighting so far. Like all our events, Clockwork is heavily participatory – when you get a ticket, we’ll capture your questions and include you in the afternoon.
Our venue is the incredible Hijingo, near Liverpool Street. It’s a multi-sensory, futuristic bingo hall – so expect game-show-meets-conference vibes.
You’ll rub shoulders with over 100 other agency leaders, and be privy to fascinating (and confidential) process and operations case studies.
You’ll see people brought up on stage, have intimate discussions on your table – and even enjoy a game of frenetic, laser-powered bingo. (Not bad for a Tuesday afternoon?)
How are other agencies making their business work better? Expect to cover time tracking, over-servicing (good or bad?), knowledge management, agency profitability, team transparency (how much?), and more.
We will also hear from you (if you’re okay with it!) This event is heavily participatory. When you register for a ticket, we’ll capture your questions and endeavour to include you in the afternoon.
Hope to see you there!
Clockwork is sponsored by Scoro.
Scoro is an end-to-end work management platform designed to help agencies streamline their workflows, deliver consistently and boost profitability as a result.
By linking your Quoting, Projects, and Billing in Scoro, you can go from quote to cash in one platform – while seeing exactly how each stage impacts your profitability in real-time.
Get started for free. No credit card required.
Meet people who are interested in your story
Clockwork is an afternoon that will helps you get inspired, and meet other people you can learn from. We blend interactive talks and group discussion.
- We dot you around the venue so you can interact – and we mix up the groups so you meet different people.
- We poll you before the event to see what you want to talk about.
- We make sure all the talks are original and interesting. We facilitate questions and reflections throughout.
Clockwork – FAQs 💬
Q: What actually happens on the day?
We start the event at 1.30pm, so try to arrive by 1.15pm.
The afternoon’s format is pretty simple: you will spend some time hearing from guests with interesting stories that you can learn from, and you will also spend some time in small groups discussing your journey with like-minded agency leaders.
The event is hosted by an Agency Hackers facilitator who makes sure that everybody with something interesting to say gets heard. (We poll attendees before the event, so we know who to ‘pick on’ on the day.)
We will serve tea, coffee and sweet things to keep you going, but please eat a sandwich before you arrive. The schedule doesn’t leave us time to serve lunch, unfortunately.
Q: Who will I hear from? Who are the speakers?
The people you’ll hear from are all agency leaders with interesting stories to tell about operations and process.
We also decide who to spotlight based on the information we capture in the weeks before. (Look out for our emails!)
We will publish the line-up a few weeks before, but mostly we hope that you will trust us to select interesting folk from our audience. We find that the people who choose to attend our events are overwhelmingly on fascinating journeys that will resonate with you.
Also, the ‘talks’ aren’t really linear presentations. They’re more like structured case studies, with lots of questions and reflections from the audience.
You could potentially call them ‘fireside chats’, but these are not rambling cosy conversations. They are planned and structured. We put a lot of work into researching our guests, out of respect for your time.
Q: Who can attend?
This event is for anybody in your agency who cares about process and operations.
That might be the founder or owner, it might be the Head of Operations, or it might be somebody else.
