Increase Your Profitability – 3 workshops with Chris Merrington

Maximise your profitability and pricing. Get Better Briefs and Budgets. Retain and Grow your Clients. All in 3 x 90-minute workshops.

Back by popular demand! Following the success of last year’s ‘Setting Yourself Up for Success’ workshop series and your stunning feedback, we have engaged once again one of the UK’s leading creative industry advisors and the author of  ‘Why Do Smart People Make Such Stupid Mistakes?’, Chris Merrington, to deliver a new series of 3 workshops focused on ‘Increasing your Profitability’.

What do you need to know and do to maintain clients, prices, sales and profitability? 

Do you have an efficient business growth strategy?

Are you positioning yourself to grow your profit margins in today’s economy? 

In this series of three workshops – ‘Increase Your Profitability – Chris Merrington is back to build up from last year’s learnings and shares his strategies on how to maintain a profitable business in the face of inflation, get better briefs and budgets and grow stronger and better relationships with key clients to grow your business revenue and success.

Book Your Tickets for the full series or individual workshops.

Maximise Profitability and Pricing in 2023/24

June 28th, 10am to 11.30am

Your pricing and profitability are likely to be under more pressure than ever before.

Clients are likely to be wanting more for less whilst your operating costs are still rising.Fear and lack of confidence often prevent us pricing our services for what they are worth

In the current world of economic uncertainties and rising cost of living, it is even more crucial to price effectively, handle price challenges and understand our value, to maintain our business and keep our business profitability growing. 

Chris Merrington will share his strategies on how to maintain a profitable business and navigate the following pricing challenges:

• The art of successfully increasing your prices, fees and rates and strategies to increase your profitability.
• Avoiding the 3 most classic pricing mistakes

• Pricing more effectively with 7 behavioural science strategies – NEW this year  

Retain and Grow Clients

July 5th 10am to 11.30am

Did you know? A 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by up to 95%. 

It is estimated that the cost of retaining an old customer is five times lower than that of acquiring a new one. 

While there are advantages that come with capturing new clients, especially if you are only starting your business, keeping customers coming back will result in a greater return on investment — and it costs up to 5 times less. 

Holding onto your best clients and then growing them is, therefore, an obvious strategy  – but it’s easier said than done.  And, sometimes, the longer you’ve worked with a client the more likely you are to lose them! 

In this 90-minute workshop, Chris Merrington will teach you how to increase your business profitability by investing in the growth of your relationships with your existing best clients and working with them to plan for the future, help them see and capture opportunities, while ultimately growing your own revenue. 

The workshop will cover:

• Why by growing your best clients you are likely to substantially increase your overall profitability
• How to identify which clients should you invest in
• Spot the warning signs that you might be about to lose a key client.
• The top 4 growth strategies you should consider
• Chris Merrington’s 5 practical, proven techniques to retain and grow your clients.

Better Briefs and Bigger Budgets

July 12th, 10am to 11.30am

According to the Project Management Institute, almost 50% of projects encounter scope creep, while nearly 40% of agencies surpass their project budget because of it. 

Creative businesses have all been there. You’re a dozen and more revisions into a client project, when you promised only four. You’ve now spent almost triple the time you intended on the project, which gives you less time (and energy) to devote to other clients. 

There’s an important fine line between providing good service to your clients – which sometimes does require going above and beyond; and over-servicing your clients – which leads to lower profits, giving away your services for free, setting a precedent of unrealistic expectations for your clients and puts your agency’s reputation at risk, especially if you’re now struggling to meet other clients’ deadlines. 

So what can you do if you’re not generating as much profit as you should, are being offered a lower budget than the work is worth or dealing with dissatisfied clients? 

In this 90-minute workshop Chris Merrington will teach you how to obtain a better brief and budget from your clients and prevent brief and budget scope creep. 

It will cover:

• How to help your clients to “Give you the freedom of a tight brief” from the start
• The real skill of extracting a great brief from a client.
• Manage your clients when they say “That’s all the budget we’ve got”
• Specific techniques to get closer to understanding the real budget and maybe even get the client to spend more
• The proven techniques Chris uses regularly in his own work with his clients to get better briefs and bigger budgets

Book by Friday, June 24th to avail of early-bird prices.

Eligible Members of IDI, ICAD, IAPI and 100 Archive can avail of our member rates. Find out more about Design Skillnet’s member rates.

Book Your Tickets

About the trainer

Chris Merrington

Website

Chris Merrington is the founder of Spring 80:20 and one of the UK’s leading creative industry advisors.

Chris helps creative agencies and designers grow profitably, have stronger senior client relationships and become more successful. He’s studied what the most successful and most profitable businesses do to grow, and what the least successful do to stay stuck and uses these insights to help his clients grow.

His book Why do smart people make such stupid mistakes? has been specifically written for agencies and creative businesses to improve their negotiation effectiveness.

He has also produced 2 major studies in collaboration with Moore Kingston Smith (UK top 20 accountants) into agency profitability, success and turning underperforming agencies into those delivering astounding results.

Chris has worked with over 150 agencies and creative businesses in the UK, Europe and the across the rest of the world from the USA to Australia and South Africa. From small businesses to major groups such as Publicis and Omnicom.

His approach is practical and action-orientated, showing you techniques you can apply the next day to improve your business, your success and your revenue.