Episode 58

January 11, 2024

(Part 1) 2023 in Review and Operating Priorities for the Year Ahead w/ Brian Williams and Andrew Howlett

View Show Notes

This episode of The Professional Services Pursuit is part one of a two-part series taken from a recent SoDA (Society of Digital Agencies) webinar. Brent interviews agency leaders Brian Williams - Founder and CEO at Viget, and Andrew Howlett - Partner and CEO at Struck. They provide some great insights on how their agencies fared in 2023 and where they plan to focus their efforts in 2024 from an operations standpoint and beyond.

Other topics covered in this episode include:

  • The unique challenges faced in 2023
  • How each agency handled uncertainty
  • The impact big tech had on the agency space
  • Balancing staff against profitability
  • Striking the right balance of hybrid work for optimal creativity and productivity
  • The critical importance of revenue forecasting and utilization in 2024

Be sure to read the State of Agency Operations Survey referenced in this episode for additional agency trends and priorities in 2024.

Host

Banoo Behboodi

Vice President, Success Engineering

Banoo Behboodi is a 20+ year software and services leader with extensive experience executing change initiatives with oversight of Customer Success, Professional Services and Delivery and Consulting functions. Banoo’s earlier experiences with AT&T Mobility, Coca-Cola Company and Ernst & Young leading key transformational and compliance projects, provided the foundation needed to be an effective leader and a change agent with a customer first mindset. Banoo is passionate about driving continuous improvement through sharing best practices and empowering resources through technology and analytics to optimize performance and job satisfaction while driving business outcomes.

Host

Brent Trimble

Vice President, Value Engineering

Brent brings more than 15+ year’s of leadership experience in Management Consulting, Strategic Delivery, Marketing services and product development firms to his technology role at Kantata. As the VP of Value Engineering and the Managing Director of Marketing Service & Agency Vertical, he specializes in identifying process improvement potential, business optimization and key health metrics for alignment and orientation.

With deep business understanding through an operator lens - Brent works with Kantata partner firms to refine intrinsic and extrinsic value drivers - giving firm principals the focus required for adoption, mobilization, value realization and ultimately - success.

Prior to joining Kantata, Brent was a client of the platform and held positions at Interpublic Group, Accenture, WPP, and independent marketing consulting firms.