• How clued up is your team when it comes to numbers?
• For Simon Collard, financial literacy across an agency team is paramount to both success and creativity as your business grows.
• He’ll be talking you through what you can do to improve your team’s commercial understanding, and why it should be a key part of your agency culture too.

When it comes to numbers and profit margins, you and your CFO probably know the business inside out. But how clued up is the rest of your team?

Simon Collard works with agencies to improve their profitability – and a big step on that ladder is to increase your team’s financial literacy and commercial understanding.

“I love talking to agency teams, but they’re not recruited for their financial acumen,” says Simon. “They’re recruited because they’re good with clients, and their main focus is delivering for those clients. Sometimes in a distant second place is delivering profitability for the agency, but it’s not necessarily their strength.”

Simon says that financial literacy should be much higher up an agency’s agenda, investing in the right training and resources to improve this for everyone.

“Every decision has a financial implication,” he says. “Whether that’s how you price things, how you interact with a client or push a project back, what problems you spot in projects and retainers.”

He also believes that being clued up on the numbers should be a bigger part of your agency’s overall culture.

“Agencies love to talk about culture, but it’s usually focused on their clients, the business, or how they treat their people. Very rarely do they say it’s part of their culture to make a profit,” he explains.

“You can be as creative and client-focused as you like, but without a profit margin, you won’t be in business for very long. It’s very hard to be creative when you’ve got less time to come up with something for a brief, or you don’t have the ability to innovate or take a risk without the profit margin to support it.”

“The most creative agencies tend to have the best profit margin – and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

Simon will help you figure out what it is your team needs to improve their financial knowledge, in order to help both themselves and the agency get ahead.

“To build an agency that is sustainable and profitable, you need more than just the finance team banging on about profit margin. You need it to be within the DNA of the business.”

If you’re trying to get your team on the right track to being more commercially minded, this is the session for you.