Free White Paper

The Agency
Margin Leak.

Most agencies know their margins are under pressure. Very few know exactly where the money goes. This white paper maps the leaks — and shows you how to close them.

Jobs don't fail at the invoice. They fail at the gap between the estimate you agreed and the actuals you never checked until month-end. They fail at the third round of client changes nobody wrote down as a scope change. They fail at the hours logged three weeks late against the wrong job.

The average agency running a 13% operating margin on work where overruns of 20–30% are commonplace isn't running a bad agency. It's running a well-run agency on badly connected systems. This white paper shows you where the margin goes — and the five principles that stop it.

What's inside

• The four invisible leaks that drain margin from every job — and how to spot them before month-end
• The three cracks in the estimate-to-invoice chain where scope, time and billing lose alignment
• A worked example: how a mid-size agency recovers £40k+ a year by closing each leak in sequence
• Five operational principles to fix the margin leak — with the specific features that make each one real

Published by Chase Software Solutions Ltd · 25 years of agency management expertise · Trusted by teams inside WPP Media and Miroma Group · PDF · 12-minute read