Pam recently went to the Good Agency Summit in London run by Agency Hackers. If you’ve not heard of it, it’s an event for agencies who are interested in using their business to positively influence the world. 

Panels covered topics like sustainability, diversity and inclusion, purpose, pro-bono work and the B-Corp process. 

Here are Pam’s top 5 takeaways from the summit:

1. Sustainability Is the New Digitalisation

Maddy Cooper, the founder of the sustainability specialist marketing agency Flourish, made a powerful statement when she said that sustainability is this decade’s digitisation. 

Much like digitisation changed the landscape for business in the last decade, those businesses that don’t put sustainability at the heart of what they do will be left behind. 

If you’re a marketer and want to do better when it comes to sustainability, check out Maddy’s initiative, Marketing Declares.

2. Inclusive recruitment

An award-winning agency, Platypus Digital, are working hard to become an anti-racist and inclusive employer. As part of this, they’ve introduced an anonymous recruitment to help reduce unconscious bias from the process. 

If you want to find out more, Platypus have very helpfully shared a blog outlining their full recruitment process.

3. Ecologi and Carbon Offsetting

We learned that, whilst still a great initiative, tree planting isn’t the golden ticket for a company looking to offset its carbon emissions. 

Trees don’t sequester carbon until 10-20 years after they’ve been planted. This means that in the short to mid term you can’t just plant trees to offset your carbon footprint today.

This blog by Ecologi goes into more detail about why this is the case.

Ecologi are on a mission to inspire SMEs to start their own climate action journey. They’re doing this by giving them the right tools, information and advice for each stage of the net-zero journey.

4. Aim for 60% Gross Profit margins

In their ‘The State of Agency Operations Report 2023’ Teamwork surveyed over 500 agency owners about what’s working (and what’s not) in their business. The survey found that a surprising 38% of agency owners over-service their clients and (perhaps unsurprisingly) 33% have difficulty keeping jobs on budget.

The advice from Teamwork is for agencies to target a gross profit margin of 60% to protect their bottom line. To do this they recommend building in an extra 30% of billable time into pitches.

5.Healthy profits = Better decisions

Jaye Cowle from Launch Online talked about the link between healthy profits and good decision-making. Protecting your bottom line ultimately empowers you to make the decisions you want to make – those that align with your purpose and values.

It’s far easier to turn down a client whose ethos goes against your own when you have a large pot of cash in the bank and the business is making plenty of profits.

The Good Agency Summit is an annual event, if you didn’t make it this year, I recommend signing up for next year.