2023 industry primer
Today we’re launching an updated version of our digital agency industry primer.
It’s a high-level overview of the themes, statistics, and drivers shaping your industry. This primer is a great summation of how we think about this industry. We’ve also included historical data going back to 2015.
I love chatting industry stuff, so if you’re reading through it and want more context, feel free to reach out.
| Digital Agency Industry Primer |
A new coat of paint
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We’ve grown a bit since our last brand refresh back in 2019. The way we operate has also evolved pretty substantially. And while we were still doing some great work, the old design, copy, and service mix weren’t a fit anymore.
About a year ago, we set out to change that.
And, like all good things, it took time.
The new design is more consistent and better reflects who we are and where we’re headed. To mirror how we give advice, we targeted a mix of sophistication and candor for the design and copy.
Against my natural introvertedness, I moved closer to the forefront. Hopefully, this will give owners a chance to get to know me a bit before we work together.
To cap off the transformation, we also restructured our services and pricing methods.
It’s been a busy 2023…
Service structure refresh
When we started the brand refresh, I had no intention of reorganizing our service mix. Why fix what wasn’t broken? Unfortunately for me, it quickly became obvious that we needed to rearrange some things.
We’ve become far less transactional and far more focused over the years.
We used to offer a bunch of custom engagements around all kinds of research and strategy work. If that sounds nebulous, it’s because it was. While there were some general guide rails, we performed a pretty broad definition of “consulting.”
Over the last few years, those guide rails narrowed.
I phrase it like that because it wasn’t exactly on purpose. We naturally shifted towards a few project archetypes where we excelled. As we did more of those, word must have spread, and we picked up additional similar projects.
About a year ago, we got intentional about this in our sales calls, and now we’re doing it everywhere else.
So, here’s the new simplified structure of working with Promethean.
We offer three services. They’re each uniquely designed to identify, optimize, or transform digital agencies.
- Agency Benchmarking – Used to quickly identify performance gaps and areas of opportunity.
- Agency Assessment – Used as a deep dive to fully optimize and align your strategy with your operations.
- Custom Strategy Creation – Used to transform an agency by crafting and implementing a new data-driven growth strategy.
Pricing updates
As we head into our eighth year doing this, we’ve gathered a good amount of data on how our work impacts our clients.
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This insight makes it possible for us to estimate our impact before a project.
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Instead of a flat fee that could either be too low for some or too high for others, we can now tailor a project’s price to perfectly fit the expected impact. Because perfect predictions are impossible, we’re basing our project fees on the lower bounds of our impact range. So even if we exceed expectations, the project fee is fixed from the beginning.
This unlocks upside potential while limiting downside risk.
The catch is, we’re going to be a bit pickier about the types of shops we work with. The new criteria are detailed under the “Required Agency Attributes” section on our services pages.
We’re implementing this for both our Agency Assessment and our Inflection Point Creation services starting today.
Thanks for reading
I don’t write these kinds of updates often, but so much is changing that it seemed important to put this out there.
Soon we’ll be back to the standard “Promethean Perspective” essays on various industry topics. If you have anything you’d like me to dig into in these, feel free to reply to this and let me know.
Best,
– Nick
