Management lessons for small and medium-sized agencies from a fast-growing, billion-dollar business
Channel: Drupal Association
Date: 27/11/2023

DrupalCon Lille 2023

AGENCY & BUSINESS

"Successfully running a small agency is not easy. The CEO and their team (if they have one) usually have to wear many hats and juggle multiple roles every day.

Company strategy, recruitment, staff management, sales, operations, DevOps, client account management, marketing and much more usually falls to the same one or two people - and often they are also part of the project delivery team as well.

Most of the time, the people juggling all these roles have had to learn how to do them through necessity whilst on the job and can find themselves making it up as they go along. Does any of that sound familiar?

The good news is that those of us in smaller organisations can learn a lot from big players in the industry by understanding and replicating some of the practices that they consider ‘business as usual’. 

In this session, Julie Sheward, SystemSeed Chief Operating Officer, will share some of the key lessons that she brought with her from her previous roles leading regional and global business operations teams at Thoughtworks and show you how they were implemented at SystemSeed over a six-month period.

You’ll also hear from Anthony as CEO at SystemSeed about the pains and gains of taking these big business ideas and applying them to a much smaller team. He’ll share some facts and figures, and also explain how some key initiatives at SystemSeed are drawing on Julie’s experience for future growth.

What you’ll learn:
- What’s worked for us (and what hasn’t) over the past 6 months - with numbers.
- Three ‘big agency’ lessons you can employ at your small agency as soon as you get home.
- The mindset of a big agency operations manager, and how it can help you create a better business for yourself.
- Two things that many big agencies do that smaller agencies should ignore.
- What to watch out for as your agency grows - and how to overcome the issues.

This session is for you if you are an owner, CEO, CTO, Head of department, or a manager at a small or medium-sized agency. You will come away with a better understanding of how big agencies become successful as well as actionable tips to help you get out of the weeds in your own agency.
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