Starting a talent management agency can be hard; running it can be even harder.
You will have to balance handling models and clients while nurturing a strong team that can handle all of the tasks that come with client requirements. Majority of the agency owners start this out with immense enthusiasm and passion; however, over time, they often grapple with this and the most crucial responsibility that arrives next: SCALING UP THE AGENCY.
This can be a make or break point for any talent agency. From this moment, some of them will take off like rockets while others will get off the ground without having enough knowledge of what ‘scaling up’ really means or what is the way to get over there.
Here, we’re planning to help you out right on that, so that you could eventually end up with a rocket!
What Does “Scaling Up” Look Like?
When it comes to start-ups, “scalability” is a phrase that is mostly thrown around.
But what exactly does it mean?
Once you have a few clients and talents on board, “scaling” is the approach of growing exponentially: making your agency capable enough to go from handling five clients to 50, ten talents to 100, and proportionately fifteen employees to 150. On the contrary, if your agency isn’t capable of scaling up, you are going to get stuck at some point along the way, being incapable of handling all that increased load.
So, more precisely, if you are a scalable agency, you will have the potential to adapt to a more massive workload without compromising its overall performance or missing out on revenue.
Why Attaining Scalability Is Difficult?
Beginning the journey as a new talent agency owner, your primary focus will likely be on how to get talents or models, and clients fast, while the requirement for you to grow your agency is something that occurs in the long-term. However, if your goal is to take off your agency like a rocket, you need to prepare for it rather early on.
While talents are the ‘heart’ of any talent management agency, clients are its ‘lifeblood’. So, failure to focus keenly on gathering enough resources to onboard, manage and retain rapidly growing numbers of these people, will make it highly difficult for startup agencies to scale up. Striving to grow them might be like working on expanding a truck tire with a bicycle pump!
However, there are actually some plans you may apply to what your agency is chasing today, to make it firm enough to uphold the massive growth that may happen anytime tomorrow. Provided below is a general outline of these.
NB: The end solution might not be cheap, but we can assure that it doesn’t necessarily need millions of bucks in funding.
Plan A: Create A “Data” Plan
If your agency has clients and models, you definitely will have data. So, there’s just no excuse for you, for not having the right plan to manage those data.
We know most of you might have a history of working with spreadsheets; however, considering the near-term future, when you might have a higher number of clients and models, these are poorly suited for your agency. Therefore, the plan here is to adopt more efficient technologies that will let you store and manage all your data and records in a logical way.
Plan B: Simplify Talent Onboarding
Talents are the greatest assets of your agency; as your business expands, you are going to see more and more talents coming in all the time. So, it’s inevitable to set yourself up for effortless onboarding processes now.
It’s all about finding the right platform that cuts out the typical wave of onboarding and digitizing the procedures, saving your time and cutting down the risks of manual errors. Allowing for self-registration of talents through online forms is also a fair way for not leaving them waiting for hours for someone from your agency to complete the registration tasks.
Plan C: Standardised Processes & Prioritisation
The more your talent agency develops, the more your employee turnover will become. Uniting all of them and equipping them to work as a unit is indispensable to your business’ success. So, another must-have for scaling your agency is to maintain systematic and transparent processes for everything, particularly client-related tasks.
Make sure that everyone from the team has a crystal clear idea of what job to work on at a particular time, for which client, and has the worklists with priorities front and centre. Without these, employees will pull in diverse directions, making it harder to deliver what the client needs to have, within an allotted time frame.
The better you are prepared to coordinate workflows throughout the agency, the simpler it will be for you to accommodate the increased number of projects coming in, as your client base grows.
Plan D: Track Time And Productivity
“Time is money” – this is perhaps the world’s worst business cliches; however, it’s still a fact, when it comes to fashion-based businesses. If you plan to scale your model management agency, you will definitely have to let go of most of the small things that eat up your time.
Setting deadlines for client requirements and monitoring the work progress to ensure that it is moving along on pace is essential. And with these deadlines to meet and goals to accomplish, your entire employees need to work as efficiently as possible in the time allotted. As an agency owner, you have to look for better technological headways to support your team members work better within less time, which will make a notable difference in the long-run and the overall profitability of your agency.
Plan E: Streamlined Communication
The more people involved in an agency, the more communication takes place there. So, keeping your agency ready with an ‘open door policy’, where everyone in the team can be easily approached, is an unavoidable necessity for scaling up your business.
Maintaining dedicated communication channels internally for your agency will help you to make sure that all your team members are working collaboratively towards a goal. This, in turn, brings better effectiveness to the overall working structure of the agency, thereby leading to improved client service.
Along with bringing improved openness and transparency this way, compelling internal communication is also a glue that supports employee engagement, by informing and inspiring every staff in equal measures.
So, It’s Time To Get Your Engine Ready!
Now that you have Plan A to Plan E, for formulating and managing initiatives to bring efficiencies into your business. The next action to take is to equip your agency with a platform that consolidates all the above-discussed ideas to prepare your firm to scale up. STARAGENT is one such comprehensive solution that combines all the features you will need for managing creative talent, models, clients and projects.
Along with nurturing your client contacts and managing a countless number of talent details, appointments, and bookings, this cloud-based all-in-one talent agency software provides you with additional capabilities to keep your entire team in the loop. With in-built communication channels and collaborative features, agency owners can, not only let everyone from the team stay aligned with a clear understanding on what to work on a particular time, but also create a focus on continuous and fast-paced delivery of services. The capability to create and send stylish talent portfolio packages with high-definition images to clients within a few clicks, and generating quicker invoices takes a lot of weight off your shoulders while involving a more significant number of clients.
And if you have a team that is either distributed overseas or across different locations (remote) to serve your global clients better, StarAgent’s specially designed remote working features can help you manage them productively.
Check out our short demo to see what more your agency can get done with StarAgent:
Grow, Scale, & Succeed!
The thought of scaling up your agency may seem overwhelming at times; but as we have said, you never have to do a huge leap from 5 – 50 clients, 10-100 talents, and 15-150 employees in a month, or ever.
All you have to do is to establish clear, digitized processes with an efficient model management software like StarAgent, and be ready with what your agency needs to be in the next two years, four years, and beyond.
From there, successful scaling is part right team members, and part your mindset to advance forward!
Better talent management
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