Hey, everybody.
Drew McLellan here from Agency Management
Institute this week coming to you from Clearwater Beach, Florida.
We spent the week with a peer group here.
And, you know, for the last many months, we've been talking about the tough,
tough 2023 and the trend that we are seeing
with many agencies where they were either not as profitable,
they didn't grow their AGI or revenue or both.
They grew a little, but they weren't profitable
or in many cases they actually shrunk in size,
both in terms of gross billings, AGI, profitability and even headcount.
So I will tell you, I was delighted
and a little surprised with this group of people
that we were with because without exception,
they posted profit.
They posted growth might have been marginal growth
compared to how they normally grow, but almost every one of them, out of 13
agencies, almost every one of them grew in gross billings, grew an AGI
and showed at least a double digit profit
in the brutal year of 2023.
How did they do that?
They did that by running their agency by the numbers.
They did not allow emotion.
They did not allow discouragement.
They did not allow fatigue to take their eye off of the numbers
that tell them exactly how to run a profitable business.
Now, if you're saying, what are those numbers, you're not alone.
A lot of agency owners aren't familiar with agency math.
They don't understand what AGI is and isn't.
They don't understand 55, 25, 20.
And what that metric means.
And they don't understand that no matter how tough the year is,
no matter how challenging your biggest client is,
no matter what kind of staff attrition you have, if you run your business
by the numbers, you can be profitable every single time.
And so I want to tell you that if those numbers are foreign to you
or you don't have a dashboard, that you can rely on that in 5 minutes,
you can look at and know whether or not you're healthy,
then you need to get to Money Matters.
Money Matters is a workshop we teach twice a year and we will spend
two days talking about the metrics and the money of your agency
and how to make more money and keep more of the money you make.
The next – in 2024 – the workshops are March, I think it's 11th
and 12th, and September – mid-September 19th, 20th, something like that.
They're both in Denver. We have spots open.
But if you're if you came out of 23 feeling anemic, feeling unprofitable,
feeling like you didn't have enough cash to start the new year
and you weren't sure why and you're not sure what you're going to do
to make it different in this calendar year, come join us.
Come learn the numbers that allowed 13 agency owners
and literally agencies from size of 190 people to three people
post a profitable year
in a year when most agencies were struggling just to get by.
All right?
We'd love to see you at Money Matters.
We want to teach you this math.
We want you to know how to run
a profitable business no matter what's going on in the world.
And so join us.
We would love to see you. All right.
See you next week.
