
What a Profitable Agency Is Made Of w/ Marcel Petitpas
About this episode
"The higher that gross margin is, the more optionality you have to make deliberate decisions about your agency." – Marcel Petitpas, Co-Founder & CEO of Parakeeto
Agency founders are often incredible visionaries when it comes to their core competency, but financials are rarely something they enjoy or excel at (pun intended). Between billable hours, shifting client scopes, clients scaling up or down, time-tracking, and pass-through costs, it’s no easy feat, either.
In that vein, today’s guest has seen seven-figure agencies being run fully out of spreadsheets (and he’s here to change that). Marcel Petitpas, agency financials guru (and Co-founder of Parakeeto) is here to break down the ABCs of agency profitability.
Marcel’s shop, Parakeeto, is a consultancy and SaaS company that comes in to help agencies pass the next growth threshold at the point where they need more structured data operations to run financials and profitability, but aren’t quite at the level where they can buy enterprise software or hire internal teams to manage all of it.
Corey and Marcel sit down to break down what a profitable agency is made out of. Agency founders, if there is one episode to earmark for invaluable financial planning advice, this one’s it.
Here’s what we cover in this episode:
- Marcel’s agency growth services from consulting to technology solutions.
- Typical financial and growth challenges agency owners face and how to solve for them.
- Why agency founders feel like there’s no profit even if they’re busier than ever.
- Using data and metrics as a guide to answer the important questions as a founder.
Here are some actionable key takeaways for agency founders:
- You need a tighter feedback loop on company financials so you can course correct quicker.
- Even custom in-house financial tools can end up costing agencies six figures to maintain; be careful of hidden costs.
- When you control your profitability, you can become a lot more deliberate about growing your agency.
- Why productizing services is good for the financial health of an agency.
The resources mentioned in this episode are:
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