Leading Orchard through a year of growth

2024 was the first year of a three-year period aiming for double-digit annual growth for Orchard. Not unsurprisingly we started out by setting some goals (spoiler alert - we smashed our year-one target BOOM!) The agency's goals typically have many moving parts, and lots of things outside of my control have a huge impact on what we’re trying to achieve - these are things that make running an agency challenging but fun. Here is what I learnt:

• Hire people to keep you accountable.

Paying your own cold hard cash to someone external to do this means you (the leader of the business) are way more likely to stick to the plans or come up with an excellent workaround when you need to. Meet every 90 days to review and adjust accordingly.

• Be client-first.

We’ve always said this was a key agency value, but in 2024 we got serious about it. We appointed our first Head of Client Services (aka amazing Dan), devised a traffic light system that tracks client delivery weekly - anything that isn’t a beautiful green light gets senior time and attention, and we reviewed all our client touch points. But we aren’t stopping there; 2025 will see us launch a client satisfaction survey, and even more focus on our onboarding and retention processes – we are going to make being an Orchard client a club so special everyone wants to be part of it.

• Set your non-negotiable – ours is creativity.

This is important to our agency, we are asking people to buy ideas, so I don’t let anything go to a client or potential client without one cracker of an idea that will do the thing the client wants (sell stuff, drive web traffic etc.) With AI doing the basics everywhere and anywhere this has become even more important. Find your north star and stay on course. Pitch deck got an amazing idea in it = no notes.

• Don’t overlook operations.

Navigating change is much easier with the right project management system. Big and small businesses need processes, especially important to us as we have a fantastic growing team across Guernsey and Jersey. I accept no responsibility for this brilliance, thank you Chris.

• (Always) be a great place to work.

Growth is good, but you can’t do it without all your people pulling together, so don’t overlook them for the numbers. We invested in expert HR when we needed it, we spent more budget on ‘together time’, we played around with all-agency meetings to find balance and encouraged the team to spearhead initiatives to support mental health across the agency.

• Client work vs business growth.

Ahhhh the eternal balance of ‘are you working on the business or in the business?’ I mark myself a ‘could do better 5/10’ for this one and will strive to improve in 2025. We had two significant briefs that wanted and needed my time in a way we hadn’t planned for. But these challenges help us learn, grow and pivot where necessary.

• You get what you tolerate.

For us this is scope creep, which is nothing new in agency land, but if YOU allow it, it will happen to YOU. We continue to tighten up – how? Being clear and calling it out with clients, being super detailed on deliverables, and teaching our management team the right language to discuss it and honing a commercial mindset. (Scope creep = a bit like if you ran a burger shop and you let people build their own stack, adding loads of toppings and sauces they didn’t pay for, losing you money).

• And finally, be easy to buy from.

We sorted out our service lines (there are six, if you see me in the street stop and test me) and got a shiny new brand and website to reflect the Orchard we are today. We still don’t communicate our value proposition clearly enough (yes even comms people suffer with this), so that’s getting a big chunk of attention in Q1 of 2025. Maybe that one will become the tattoo I always said I wanted.

Happy growing in 2025!