Organisational structure inefficiencies, lack of documented processes and standardised service packages, no plan for new hire training and onboarding as well a lack of visibility into overservicing are some of the key challenges that agencies face when they start to scale.

We covered them in part 1 and part 2 of these series.

Today, we'll look at the last set of agency growth challenges, namely: 

• Stepping back as the agency founder or CEO and allowing team members to make decisions on their own is an internal struggle that can stall sustainable growth.
• Growing the team, the customer base and the service offerings often leads to a leadership and an identity and positioning crisis internally that inevitably has the potential to slow growth as it expands externally too.
• Showing the real value the agency brings to clients is a constant struggle, particularly with year two or three renewals, so agencies need to think about developing a delight programme that also includes the identification of upsells.

Let's take a look at each challenge in more detail.

My start-up Smile Arty has now been live for about three months. 

Painful months. It was hard, really hard in the beginning. Things like getting the company registered, getting a bank account, setting up everything for accounting, revenue etc. were nerve-racking. 

The one thing that was easy was the website and all the content. 

I say easy because I have a PR background and I now work in inbound marketing so I didn't have to start learning any of this from scratch whereas the whole administrative thing for a new business was completely new to me.

I have to say, though, in less than three months, content started working. 

Inbound PR is two years old!

I can't even believe it. Time flies... 

The other day as I was looking at some past blog posts on the topic for my book (yes, I'm writing a book about Inbound PR), I saw that I have written quite a few pieces about it.

But shifting through them wasn't that easy. Yes, I can go by topic and search in my HubSpot software, however, wouldn't it be great to have it all in one place instead of clicking to the next page again and again? 

This is what this post is all about - the entire collection of everything I have written about Inbound PR over the past two years, everything you can read to learn about it. 

Everything You Need to Know About Inbound PR

Organisational structure and time inefficiencies, service packages development and new hire training and onboarding are three challenges that agencies face when they start to scale. We covered this in the first part of this series, if you missed it, read it here. 

Today, we're going to look at three more challenges that agencies face when they've grown past five people and have a good number of clients on retainers or long-term engagements. These include:

• over-servicing but being underpaid and failing to ask for what their worth is;
• lack of a documented account management process so that each new account manager has a blueprint to start doing their job and the leader doesn't need to be involved in everything from scratch with each new person on that team;
• lack of a renewal management process and a structured way of securing that the client is happy and agrees to your plan for the future to stay with you.

Let's get started. 

When Agencies Start to Scale: 3 More Key Learnings & Fixes 

PR skills are still lacking and the gender pay gap is still heavily prevalent, especially in agencies. 

These were two of the findings that struck the most out for me when I was reading the results of the eight State of PR survey done by the CIPR - the largest professional PR body in Europe. 

When we look at what PR people do daily, the research reveals a 10% jump in the number of respondents spending most and some of their time on strategic planning - going up to 60%.

No surprise, though, that content creation and media relations are at the top of this list, respectively at 82% and 73%. But what's surprising is that measurement and evaluation hasn't moved much since last year and is still at the 50s.

I've always said that PR people are the best content creators but are really bad at measurement even though they all say that's the area they need to improve. However, if you're not spending time on time on it, how are you going to improve it? Reading this research makes me feel like Inbound PR is making more and more sense. 

To that point, quantitative and qualitative data analysis are among the top weakest skills and competencies.