As a Certified Management Accountant, a Certified Internal Auditor, and certified in Strategy and Competitive Analysis, Naten Jenson, co-founder of Agency Dad, is certainly the best person to help you establish a strong business and drive your agency's profitability. Today, he joins us to talk about scope creep, a topic that many agency owners struggle with but should definitely learn more about. Remember that if we can get a hold of scope creep, we're going to increase our profit. 3 Little Nuggets What gets measured gets managed. Many agency owners get so focused on that next client that they forget to measure and they are not managing the profitability of existing clients. First mistake, because you cannot identify a problem when you fail to measure. If you don’t have the data, there’s nothing to analyze. How to get those numbers. There are three numbers that you need to know. The first one is your bill rate. The second thing you need to know is your gross profit on a client, and finally, you need the number of hours that you spent on a client. The formula you will need is: gross profit ÷ bill rate. So let's say your gross profit on a client in a month is $1,200. If your bill rate is $120 an hour, you get an answer of 10. Now, what if we had 10 hours budgeted and we use 17 on a client? Well, we've now measured our scope creep. It was 7 hours, and 120 x 7 is $840 of revenue that you’ve lost. Is the problem coming from the client or the agency? Before doubling your rates, you could look at the origin of the problem. If you do this scope creep analysis over three months and clients are consistently using too many hours, then it’s time to look internally first and see if the problem is with the agency. Do I have an employee who actually doesn't know what they're doing? Do they need more training? Is it the wrong fit? Are some questions you can ask yourself before taking this to the client. Sponsors and Resources Agency Dad: Today's episode is sponsored by Agency Dad. Agency Dad is an accounting solution focused on helping marketing agencies make better decisions based on their financials. Check out agencydad.money/freeaudit/ to get a phone call with Nate to assess your agency's financial needs and how he can help you. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Understanding Scope Creep Will Help Drive Profitability Jason: [00:00:00] Hey, what's up agency owners, Jason Swenk here. And I'm excited, I have a repeat guest and a repeat guest where we're going to talk about scope creep. Right? You should hear that tun-tun-tun on scope creep, because a lot of us, we struggle with this and if we can get a hold of scope creep we're going to increase our profit. And we'll be able to afford those people to really come in and do the things we don't want to do anymore. So this is a really important episode and let's get into it. Hey, Nate. Welcome back. Nate: [00:00:34] Thanks Jason. Glad to be back with you again. Jason: [00:00:37] Awesome. Well, uh, for the people that have not checked out the first episode, tell us who you are and what do you do. Nate: [00:00:43] My name's Nate Jensen. Uh I'm with Agency Dad, our website is agencydad.money. And we are an outsource CFO firm, bookkeeping firm, accounting firm. And our focus is really helping agencies to drive their profitability. We do that by good accounting where we can actually measure profitability, measure what's going on and those metrics drive action, drive decision-making that leads to greater profitability. Jason: [00:01:08] Awesome. Well, let's go ahead and talk about scope creep and how to identify this, because I know there's a lot of agency owners. We're busy at bringing in new business and we really kind of take our eye off the ball a little bit. And there's a lot of, uh, what I call profit leaks in scope creep. So tell us how can w