• A lot of our members are taking the reins right now – but it’s a tricky cross to bear.
• How can you fill your founder’s shoes and assert yourself as a leader, in your own way? How are you adapting to the challenges that come with leadership?
• This is a space for you to chat about your wins and worries in a safe space with others going through it too.

• Have you thought about growing your agency by starting a community?
• With sales cycles getting longer – and people harder to reach – having your own “house audience” can be a really valuable asset. It’s not something you can achieve in six weeks – but it is something you can just about do in six months.
• In this session, we’ll be sharing what we’ve learned building Agency Hackers – so you can decide whether a community would make sense for your business.

What problem does your agency solve? That’s what you should keep in mind when writing agency credentials, according to advisor Rachel Raphael, co-founder of Outskirt Collective.

In this session, Rachel and her business partner Caroline Sparkes will be taking you through how to create a set of creds that really showcases your agency’s value, and the things all leaders do, but really shouldn’t.

If you’re feeling uninspired by your agency creds, or perhaps you’re not winning as many pitches as you think you should be, come along to pick up some tips.

• Strong client relationships are key to an agency’s success. So, how can you get the most from them?
• Amie Hill, client director at Relationship Audits, will be sharing her insights into agency-client relationships, and how you can really make the most of them yourself.
• Come along to find out more about strengthening your current relationships, and how you could change the way you approach prospective ones too.

• WordPress has dominated the CMS scene for over two decades. But could you be using something better?
• In this session, we’ll be having an in-depth discussion about the current agency CMS landscape, as well as how it might change in the next decade with David Gilroy and Andy Osborne from Conscious Solutions.
• Come along to hear where others in your role sit in this conundrum and suss out whether your current CMS is the right one for your business.

• Ever felt that your team is overwhelmed, when on paper they shouldn’t be?
• Rob James, operations director at Footprint Digital, has introduced a new way of allocating time to reduce overwhelm among his team.
• In this month’s operations mastermind, he’ll be sharing this new approach – perhaps it could help you and your team too.

• Imagine this: what if your agency had NO line managers?
• At Seed, they’ve adopted a non-hierarchical structure, emphasising distributed decision-making and purpose over profit – essentially, they’ve eliminated bosses.
• Louis Perkins, the agency’s people and culture manager, will be sharing their journey to this flat structure. Would it work for you?

• Towards the end of last year, we started looking at how we could implement AI into our creative processes. 
• It’s been quite the journey…
• In this session, we’ll take you through how Agency Hackers is incorporating AI into our creative content processes. Come along to hear our triumphs and disasters with this new tech, and share your own tips and tricks for creating content with ChatGPT.

• Today, Head of Operations can be as much a people role as it is a process role.
• That’s why Sian Eddy – ModernB2B’s Head of Operations – is passionate about preventing burnout and fostering well-being within her agency.
• In this session, she’ll share how she’s trying to identify burnout and stress sooner – and get more accurate data on employee well-being.

• Headcount is vanity, profit is sanity – it’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s true. Today, agencies are putting profit first. They’re asking themselves how they can be more profitable now.
• If you’re interested in navigating the complexities of agency profitability, agency CFO Simon Collard will be sharing his insights on handling slowdowns, the importance of clear targets, and getting your pricing just right.
• Some of what Simon says will be new – some of it will be a welcome reminder. That’s good, because this is stuff you need in your bones.

“Our mentality isn’t that client services is its own thing, but that everyone is in service to the client. Everyone has a level of delivery that they need to be providing.”

When you’re the person with the most visibility in front of a client, it can easily feel like the pressure is all on you to manage expectations, relay changes to the team, and navigate the conversation between both sides of the table. It can be a lot. 

So, how can you make client services more of a team effort? Stef Lait, client experience director at OST, seems to have found the answer. 

In this session, Stef will be taking us through how she has instilled a client-first mindset throughout her entire agency, as well as some of the benefits it can have on your business – and your clients.

• “During the pandemic, nobody was moving around,” says Jo Carter, founder of Concept Personnel. “Then, people said we went through the Great Resignation – but actually we’re just going back to what it used to be like, where it was normal for people to be moving jobs every couple of years.”
• Agencies have been hoping that recruitment would get easier. Unfortunately, it hasn’t. Finding great talent is still hard.
• So in this session, recruitment expert Jo Carter will be sharing the motivations that are influencing candidates’ decisions today. Come along to stay ahead of the talent curve by understanding exactly what today’s agency candidates want.

• “I think sometimes owners get very tied down in the process, that they forget this is a person who’s about to lose their job,” says Helen Kirk-Blythe, co-founder of Complex HR. 
• No matter how great your team is, every agency owner faces a day when redundancy talks appear on the horizon. But if you’ve never had to do it before, or have never been told how to do it properly, it can be pretty daunting.
• In this month’s CEO Summit, the Complex HR team will show you how to navigate these tough conversations and remain empathetic while following the process.

• In the current climate, wellbeing funding is rapidly depleting. So how can you support your team and still remain within the parameters of your budget?
• This is the focus for this month’s HR & people mastermind. We’ll be joined by three panellists to hear how they are championing wellbeing in their agencies without breaking the bank.
• Come along to hear real-life case studies of how other HR leaders are making this work on a budget and contribute your own ideas to the group. If you’re struggling with low morale and some unhappy team members, this is definitely worth coming along to.

• Many seasoned marketers have been told their whole career that granular control over campaigns is paramount. But with the swift movement of AI and automation, that’s just not the case anymore. 
• Now, many are scrambling to understand how to implement it into their processes. But one thing that is still leaving a lot of marketing clients stumped in particular is PMAX.
• In this session, Realtime’s associate director Jack Tungate will be taking us through some of the best practices when it comes to using PMAX for creative, product feed management, measurement and conversion tracking. 

• A lot of our members are taking the reins right now – but it’s a tricky cross to bear.
• How can you fill your founder’s shoes and assert yourself as a leader, in your own way? How are you adapting to the challenges that come with leadership?
• This is a space for you to chat about your wins and worries in a safe space with others going through it too.

• ChatGPT boasts a lot of potential, but it can take months before you really get to grips with it.
• Heather Murray has created a ChatGPT ‘playbook’ for LinkedIn absolutely jam-packed with practical tips on how to utilise LLMs to help with sales, marketing, content creation and more.
• In this session, Heather will be drawing on her guide to show you how to create content in ChatGPT that actually sounds like you – or your brand.

• Absence and low performance seem to go hand in hand at the moment. Teams are stressed, leaders are stressed that their teams are stressed, and all the while quality of work is slipping.
• But the moment you finally get around to addressing someone’s low performance or lack of productivity – they go off sick! It’s a game you can never win. 
• In this session, the Complex HR duo will take you through what to do when you find yourself in this scenario, as well as some tips on how to handle these difficult conversations.

• The best time to think about funding is before your agency needs it.
• One day, your agency might need external funding to fuel operations, growth, or specific projects. But navigating the world of funding can be complex. 
• In this month’s CFO Surgery, Pam Phillips, founder of agency accounting firm de Jong Phillips will dive into the ins and outs of obtaining funding for agencies. We’ll explore the different types of funding available to businesses – everything from standard loans to equity funding and grants invoice financing – along with the significance of credit rating and the role of online brokers in the funding process.