Why it's good to restructure your business

We have a 15 year old marketing agency and while we certainly have kept up-to-date with the latest marketing techniques and technologies, we have not once restructured or committed to redundancies until now. The reason has been that we haven't thought that far ahead, nor have we had a 'reason' to do so. At least that is what we thought, until the opportunity was forced upon us.

Outsourced Marketing 

Marketing Eye was once an outsourced marketing agency, providing SMB's with a extended marketing team that did everything from marketing strategy through to implementation. In-house we have marketing, public relations, journalism, graphic design, media, advertising, web and digital capabilities. Fixed fee. 12 months. Everything has been dandy and lucrative.

Until now. The market has changed significantly and we have not only mirrored this, we have led the field. The problem is that we have changed the way we do business so much and how we do it, that the previous skillbase of employees has been transformed. On top of that, our industry has been disrupted, with our company being one of the key leaders in doing so. Where we required people to undergo a lot of training to be able to write a marketing strategy for our clients before, this skill is no longer required.

Replace it with technology

We replaced it with technology that supercedes the capabilities of our marketers, keeps consistency in how we do marketing strategies and ultimately gives our clients a more effective outcome. For us, by using this technology we save about $5,000 in salaries by using the technology and a lot of stress. 

It's been transformational in every way and driven a new era of 'Marketing Eye' that is not only customer experience centric but also employee dreams focused. We were so hell-bent on our employees being able to write marketing strategies, that we didn't think about a world where that is no longer required. Where a computer in effect, can write a strategy better than our seasoned professionals. No more training required. Pweh!

Full Circle

Somehow, we have done a full circle. The 'agency' style that we tried not to emulate is now one that we are back-tracking frantically towards.

The types of jobs that we need are:

• Public relations experts that have integrated skills in social media content creation and digital advertising
• Data scientist that can add value to marketing strategies at every touch point
• Communications experts who can write content for basically anything
• Digital advertising specialists
• Visual marketers
• Creatives
• Martech consultants

Basically, specific jobs that no longer have to be generalists. I've always noted that anyone who has been at Marketing Eye for 2 years or more, should be picked up by any company. They can do everything. We have invested in their training and development, provided scorecards and adjusted their way of thinking so that they always bring something to the table. They tend to be entrepreneurial trained and are using this knowledge to improve an organisation. After 2 solid years with Marketing Eye, they are pooped. That means that they become exhausted in the billable hour quotas, the constant re-invention of client accounts and of course, our desire to really focus on 'unsexy' industry sectors. The latter pays the bills and not everyone is competing for the same client.

Over the past 3 months, we have commenced our evolution. No more generalists, just specialists. 

Bold Moves

This bold move has some tough decisions that accompany it. We have to restructure the company, hire different skills and expand the number of people that work in each office. Actively going back to a basic level and asking new employees to write their own job description after a few months on the job, with key performance indicators.

Let's see how this goes, but you will be seeing a lot of new faces!

BTW. We have also got up to 10,000 marketing strategies to help our sister company Robotic Marketer do over the next 18 months. That's a lot of data entry and creative workshops!