<div class="gn-article"><div class="gn-hero gn-reveal"> <div class="gn-hero__image"><img src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/687a235da6861294eec73166/69089aa05a5378e229ffeacd_651d7ec866f052ea150a5e72_61c07fa59521075197c22348_Blog%252520covers%252520(36).png" alt=""></div> <div class="gn-hero__head"> <span class="gn-kicker"><span class="dot"></span>Event · Expression</span> <h1 class="gn-title">Agency Workshop: Building a &#39;Profit Culture&#39;</h1> <div class="gn-meta"> <strong>The GO Network</strong> <span class="pip"></span> <span>13 September 2022</span> <span class="pip"></span> <span>1 min read</span> </div> </div> </div> <div class="gn-event-meta gn-reveal"><div class="gn-event-meta__block"> <span class="gn-event-meta__label">When</span> <span class="gn-event-meta__value gn-date">Tue, 13 Sept 2022 · 09:00</span> </div><div class="gn-event-meta__block"> <span class="gn-event-meta__label">Where</span> <span class="gn-event-meta__value">Online</span> </div><div class="gn-event-meta__block"> <span class="gn-event-meta__label">Status</span> <span class="gn-event-status gn-event-status--recording">Past · Recording</span> </div></div> <div class="gn-body"> <h2>Why Profit Culture Is the Missing Piece in Most Agency Growth Plans</h2> <p>Most agency leaders know their numbers. They track utilisation, monitor margins, and review profitability reports each month. But knowing the numbers and building a team that actively cares about them are two very different things. The final session of The GO Network's Agency Profitability Series, run in partnership with specialist agency accountancy firm Wow Company, tackled the harder half of the equation: how do you turn profit awareness into a genuine, embedded culture across your whole agency?</p> <p>The answer is not a single incentive scheme or a one-off all-hands presentation. It is a sustained, structured approach to helping every person in the agency understand what profit means, why it matters to them personally, and what role they play in protecting and growing it.</p> <h2>Start With Understanding, Not Targets</h2> <p>The most common mistake agencies make when trying to build a profit culture is leading with targets before the team understands the underlying mechanics. Telling a project manager to "hit margin" means very little if they have never been shown how agency profit is actually calculated, or what erodes it in practice.</p> <p>Before any incentive or accountability structure can work, the whole team needs a working understanding of what profit means in the context of your agency specifically. That means explaining:</p> <ul> <li>How the agency makes money, from fee structures to retainers to project work</li> <li>What the real cost of a team member's time is, including overheads and not just salary</li> <li>Where margin is typically lost, whether through scope creep, undercharging, poor briefing, or inefficient delivery</li> <li>What a healthy profit margin looks like for an agency of your size and model</li> </ul> <p>When team members understand these fundamentals, profit stops feeling like a finance team concern and starts feeling like something they have direct influence over. That shift in perception is the foundation of a genuine profit culture. Without it, any incentive programme sits on unstable ground.</p> <h2>Tactics for Embedding Profit Culture Day to Day</h2> <p>Understanding is necessary but not sufficient. Agencies that successfully build a profit culture do so by weaving commercial thinking into the day-to-day rhythm of the business, not just into quarterly reviews or annual appraisals.</p> <p>Several practical approaches help this become habit rather than effort:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Make profitability visible at the project level.</strong> When delivery teams can see the margin on the accounts they work on, they make better decisions. Knowing that a particular client retainer is running thin changes how a team member responds to a last-minute request or an out-of-scope ask.</li> <li><strong>Build commercial awareness into onboarding.</strong> New starters should understand the agency's business model from day one. This is not about burdening junior staff with financial pressure; it is about giving them the context they need to make good decisions and develop as commercially minded professionals.</li> <li><strong>Create space for the team to flag margin risks.</strong> People closest to the work often see scope creep and inefficiency long before leadership does. Build a culture where raising these issues is encouraged and acted on, not dismissed as someone overstepping their role.</li> <li><strong>Review commercial performance as a team, not just in leadership meetings.</strong> Regular, transparent conversations about how accounts are performing build shared accountability. These do not need to be exhaustive financial deep-dives; even a brief monthly check-in on which accounts are healthy and which need attention creates the right habits.</li> </ul> <h2>Getting the Full Team on Board: Incentives and Accountability</h2> <p>Once understanding is established and commercial thinking is embedded in day-to-day processes, incentive structures become far more effective. The challenge for most agency leaders is designing incentives that feel fair and motivating across different roles, from account management to creative to strategy.</p> <p>The key principle is that incentives should reward the behaviours that protect and grow profit, not just the outcomes. Outcomes such as hitting a margin target on a single account are partly within an individual's control, but they are also shaped by factors outside it. Behaviours, such as proactive scope management, accurate time recording, and early flagging of delivery risks, are fully within an individual's control and are the actual drivers of sustainable profitability.</p> <p>Effective profit culture incentives typically combine:</p> <ul> <li>Clear, role-specific expectations around commercial behaviours, built into job descriptions and reviews</li> <li>Team-level profit sharing or bonuses tied to agency-wide margin performance, which builds collective rather than competitive motivation</li> <li>Recognition for commercial contributions that go beyond billing, including process improvements that reduce waste, or case studies of well-managed projects that protected margin</li> </ul> <p>It is also worth being honest about what gets in the way. Many agency teams resist commercial accountability not because they are disinterested, but because they feel they lack the information or authority to act on it. Addressing that through transparency and genuine empowerment is often more effective than any incentive structure alone.</p> <h2>The Practical Next Step</h2> <p>If you are an agency leader looking to build a stronger profit culture, the most useful starting point is a simple audit of awareness. Ask a handful of people across different teams and levels what they think the agency's current profit margin is, and what they believe most affects it. The answers will show you exactly where the gaps are.</p> <p>From there, the work is about consistent communication, accessible financial education, and the kind of leadership that models commercial thinking openly rather than keeping it behind closed doors. Wow Company's work with agencies through The GO Network's Profitability Series has consistently shown that the agencies with the strongest margins are not necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated financial systems. They are the ones where profit is genuinely everyone's business.</p> </div></div> <aside class="gn-related gn-reveal" data-auto="related-reading"> <div class="gn-related__label">Related reading</div> <ul class="gn-related__list"> <li class="gn-related__item"> <a href="/articles/an-introduction-to-looker-studio" class="gn-related__link"> <span class="gn-related__category">Expression</span> <span class="gn-related__title">An Introduction to Looker Studio</span> <span class="gn-related__excerpt">Connect GA4 to Looker Studio and build performance dashboards your whole team can use. 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