Tips for Setting Growth Goals for Your Agency

As with many industries, certain time-tested methods have proven themselves to be essential in growing a successful music agency. Some of these strategies include developing a deep understanding of the agency’s music genre, advancing its reputation industry-wide as being reliable, professional, and well-organized, and last but not least, growing an agency by networking and making the right connections that will help the agency and its clients succeed.   

Beyond these time-tested techniques, the landscape of the music industry has changed quite dramatically in recent years. Agencies who want to remain relevant are wise to take the time to learn about all the newer tools and techniques available for running their business efficiently and effectively, helping grow their reputation for being a valuable asset to the music community and an agency artists want to do business with. 

When it comes to learning how to grow and be successful in today’s changing environment, agency owners must learn how to harness the power of these new tools to help them achieve their goals. They must also take the time to develop an organized framework that will set them on the right path to achieving their objective. But how do you get organized and make sure you’re on the right path? Let’s take a look at some things to consider.  

Elements of Growth

Before developing a framework to follow or learning about new tools and techniques to employ, it’s important to consider which elements are key to your specific quest for growth. Some agency managers may consider themselves a success if they achieve working with a specific number of clients. Other managers count success as being able to sign a particular list of clients. Still others may view growth as being able to book their current roster of clients at more widely-recognized venues.

Related: Key Elements for Successfully Growing a Booking Agency

Last, but by no means least, many view growing a business as looking for additional ways to provide stellar service to their clients. When you consistently help your clients achieve their own goals, your reputation within the industry will rise. In turn, as your reputation moves upward, it will invariably lead to additional growth and success for your company. 

All of these different types of growth are worthwhile pursuits. For your specific agency, it’s simply a matter of deciding which area(s) you want to focus your efforts on to achieve the desired growth. 

Tips for Developing a Framework for Growth

As with any endeavor, to achieve a goal one must develop a clearly-defined, organized approach that will show how/when/where one needs to place their focus. As an agency head, it’s a worthy task to develop a clear strategy for growing your business. In general, there are five foundational pillars to incorporate when developing a framework that will help you achieve your goal of growth. 

Precisely Define Your Goal

This was briefly introduced earlier. To develop a framework for achieving a goal of growth, you must be precise in defining what the goal of growth means for your particular situation.

Perhaps you’re satisfied with the total number that makes up your client base, nevertheless, you’d like to do some fine-tuning and expansion of your reputation, perhaps even expanding beyond your current niche. This is an excellent goal. If achieved, it’s likely to increase your opportunities for future growth. Another agency owner may want to take on more highly-rated venues to further their own growth, as well as the professional growth of their client base. 

In short, take some time to think about what the goal of growth actually means to you, then try to be precise as possible in creating your vision of what success will look like in terms of growth.

Define Your Metrics

Depending upon the precise definition of your goal, defining your metrics may be as easy as stating you want to increase your client base by x number of clients in x number of months or years. For others, defining a way to measure whether you’re making progress on achieving your goal may be a bit trickier. Nevertheless, it’s important to identify a measurable method, so you can track the progress toward your goal.

Make it Challenging Yet Attainable

There’s nothing wrong with asking yourself to stretch a bit — after all, that’s how real growth is achieved. In truth, you probably already instinctively understand that obtaining your target will require you to challenge yourself.

Even so, challenging yourself is one thing, while becoming discouraged and overwhelmed by setting an unrealistic goal is another. Try to set a goal that will ignite your enthusiasm and excitement about completing the project. It’s probably fair to say that genuine enthusiasm is one of the key catalysts for achieving any target, so make sure yours is guaranteed to inspire you into action. 

Stay Relevant

It’s easy to get side-tracked and/or overwhelmed when you sit down to brainstorm about the how/when/where that will help you accomplish your objective. If you notice you’re starting to get bogged down by distractions, go back to step one and focus on the desired finish line. If the scale of your vision seems too large, yet you’re convinced all aspects of it are necessary, break it down into a series of smaller goals and place your initial focus on completing step one.

Set a Deadline 

There’s really only one way to know whether you’ve reached your objective, and that’s through setting a deadline. When you’ve reached that mark you’ll know whether you’ve reached your target, whether you’re almost there, or if something went awry and you need to reevaluate. 

Track Your Progress

Let’s say you’ve completed the hard work of brainstorming and developed a framework for how you can achieve your mission as well. This is a great first step! Now comes the challenge of following through with real progress to reach your target. This is also the time when it’s all too easy to get sidetracked and bogged down by the day-to-day issues you address every day.

You need an intuitive, easy-to-use system to help you keep track of all of your agency workings in one place, so you don’t arrive at the finish line empty-handed. Not only will the right system free up time by eliminating time-consuming paper-wading and spreadsheet data sorting, but it will also allow you to easily track your metrics and understand what your next steps need to be in order to reach your goals. 

A good system will allow you to stay organized and focused on the details and benchmarks of your goals rather than keeping your focus on how to use and coordinate your tracking tools or trying to stay on top of multiple apps or docs for every client.  

Related: Introducing Prism Deal Tracker

Develop Some Goals, Get Organized, and Start Growing Today

The music trade has always attracted exceptionally talented, hard-working people. Now more than ever, it’s a great time to be a part of such a high-energy, exciting industry. There’s also no time like the present for music heads to begin working on and realizing their dreams of expansion. 

Thankfully, today’s power players in the music business have access to technology tools that go far beyond the disparate, unwieldy tools of the past. Today, managers have the option to use a tool that easily organizes information and streamlines processes — in essence, taking care of all the important details they must track every day, so they can focus on the mission-critical aspects of growing their agency. 

Prism was created by some of the best live music industry veterans in the business. Drawing from their real-world experience, they developed a live music management software product that intuitively provides the features and tools music agencies need to be successful in today’s competitive music environment.

Are you ready to turn the page and prepare your agency to start on its next chapter? Let Prism help you get started. Contact us today!