“To me a pipeline is the result of a wonderful marriage between business development and marketing - not sales,” said Andy West, founder of Westofcenter. He explained that the two combined will drive the pipeline forward, which will then lead to sales and shared these three pointers to building a healthy pipeline:

1. Positioning. The first thing about building a great pipeline, and working out what your business development and marketing should be doing, is knowing who you want to work with. Great clients attract great [talent] who do great work that attracts great clients.

2. Message. [You are probably] in this room today because you’re interested in growth. But is your message different to the person sitting next to you, and what are you saying that will enthuse or persuade a client to come to your agency over the person next to you? Agencies that standout have to have a signature methodology that shows its expertise.

3. Ideal client profile. Who is it that you are targeting, and... do you understand what [the client’s] buying decisions are made up of and what problems the client is trying to solve.? And do you have a stand out service?

For those wanting to give their financial KPIs an audit, Rachael Marshall, founder at Magic Digits revealed the six data-streams agencies looking to grow should target:

1. Third party costs (30%). Make sure at the start of the sales process you’ve got your budgets and you stick to them, ensure you're tracking all of the costs. There’s loads of accounting platforms that will help you. You should be doing this on a weekly or monthly basis.

2. Staff cost ratio (50-60%). Make sure this includes direct staff costs, so not finance or admin. If this is below 50% then you may need to be hiring, but if you’re overspending elsewhere you need to look at the processes to allow for additional hires. If it’s on the higher side of 60% and above, then you’re probably not charging enough.

3. Gross profit (40-50%). Some people may think this is a little bit high but if you make room for your overheads, tax and dividends and hit your profit and staff/cost ratio it will allow you to spend money on overheads.

4. Overheads (20%). Keep your ratios at this level and you’ll make a decent profit, and this includes subscriptions, rates, rent, basically everything that sits outside staff.

5. Net profit.

6. Debtor days. If you don’t have a finance team, set up an email and be the finance team. Chase people weekly instead of monthly, keep on top of it and have a process to ensure cash is constantly coming in.

During his masterclass session on how to build and scale an independent PR firm, Joe Walton, co-founder at PR firm Fight or Flight revealed how taking risks paid off. He explained that it is common practice in agencies to only make new hires after new client revenue had been secured.

“[They would say] go and get another £10k worth of client, come back and I’ll sign off the hire. But it would take months to hire, and by which point your team is knackered and the new clients are [annoyed] at the Q1 results. It’s easy to see why people do it, but if you invest behind the curve you wont get ahead.

“This is why we grew quick. We invested ahead of our revenue and we don't hire staff based on money we know we will make, we do it based on money we expect to make which is risky.

“Last year [2023] was a rough year for tech. The bottom fell out the market and our pipeline was decimated. We had an emergency meeting and modelled out losses we might make if we couldn’t make up the shortfall.” He said that they identified areas where they could pull back spending like their own salaries, awards budgets, freelance content writers and others to free up money.

“We didn’t have to pull those levers at all, but it convinced me more than ever that it's better to be out over your ski and take those hard decisions to pull back money.”