<div class="gn-article"><div class="gn-hero gn-reveal"> <div class="gn-hero__image"><img src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/687a235da6861294eec73166/69089aa055861454f8bf50b2_651d7ec9d45bdee457b85f26_61c06186b31efc6fe7950927_Blog%252520covers%252520(34).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: Managing Projects For Profitability</h1> <div class="gn-meta"> <strong>The GO Network</strong> <span class="pip"></span> <span>16 August 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, 16 Aug 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>Winning the work is only the start: how agencies protect profitability through project delivery</h2> <p>Most agencies are good at pitching and winning. Fewer are consistently good at making that work profitable once it lands. The gap between a signed contract and a healthy margin is where time leaks, scope creeps, and profitability quietly erodes. Rory Spence of Wow Company tackled this directly in a workshop session hosted by The GO Network, sharing a practical framework for agency owners and growth teams who want to stop leaving money on the table at the delivery stage.</p> <p>The central argument is straightforward: profitability is not determined at the point of sale. It is determined by how well you scope, manage, and defend the project after the brief is agreed. Understanding that distinction changes how agency leadership thinks about operations, resourcing, and client relationships.</p> <h2>Scope your projects properly before a single hour is logged</h2> <p>Scope creep does not usually happen because clients are difficult. It happens because the original scope was not specific enough to hold the line when pressure arrives. Vague deliverables, undefined revision rounds, and loosely worded approval processes all create the conditions for overservice before the project has even moved past briefing.</p> <p>The fix starts at the scoping stage. Every project should be documented with clear deliverables, defined outputs, an explicit number of amend rounds, and agreed sign-off processes before work begins. This is not about being rigid with clients. It is about giving your team a baseline they can reference and giving yourself a defensible position if the conversation about scope shifts later.</p> <p>Practically, this means investing more time in the pre-production phase than many agencies currently do. A scoping call that surfaces ambiguities before kick-off is far less expensive than a difficult conversation three weeks into delivery when the team has already overrun. Build scoping templates for your most common project types, and make sure project leads are trained to use them rather than relying on instinct.</p> <h3>What to do when scope creep happens anyway</h3> <p>Even with tight scoping, scope creep is a regular feature of agency life. The question is not how to eliminate it entirely but how to manage it without sacrificing margin or damaging the client relationship.</p> <p>The most important habit is early flagging. When a project starts drifting outside agreed parameters, the worst response is to absorb the extra work silently and address it at the next renewal conversation. By then, the pattern is established, the hours are already lost, and the client has no reason to expect anything different going forward.</p> <p>Instead, agencies should create a culture in which project leads flag scope changes as they arise, with a clear internal escalation route. This requires a process, not just an instruction. A simple change request log that project managers update in real time gives account leads the data they need to have a confident, evidence-based conversation with a client about additional fees or adjusted timelines. Clients generally respond better to early, factual conversations than to late, emotional ones.</p> <h2>Managing amends and keeping processes tight</h2> <p>Amends are one of the most consistent sources of margin loss in creative and marketing agencies. When amendment rounds are not capped in contracts, or when the cap is not enforced in practice, they become an open-ended commitment that your team absorbs without additional revenue.</p> <p>The first lever is contractual: define the number of amend rounds in every project agreement and make sure your account team knows what that number is. The second lever is cultural: your team needs to feel empowered to reference the contract rather than simply absorbing extra requests to keep the client happy in the short term.</p> <p>Operationally, consolidating feedback before actioning amends makes a significant difference. Agencies that allow clients to send amends in multiple batches across email, phone, and shared documents spend a disproportionate amount of time managing communication rather than delivering work. A single, consolidated feedback document per round reduces rework, reduces the risk of conflicting instructions, and gives both sides a clear record of what was agreed.</p> <h2>Using your team and technology to run projects efficiently</h2> <p>Profitability at a project level depends on two things working together: the right people doing the right tasks, and those tasks being tracked accurately enough to identify where time is being lost.</p> <p>On resourcing, the principle is to match seniority to task complexity. Over-resourcing a straightforward production task with a senior team member is a margin problem as much as a capacity problem. Agencies that have clearly defined roles and escalation paths can allocate work more deliberately rather than defaulting to whoever is available or most familiar with the client.</p> <p>On technology, project management and time-tracking tools are only valuable if teams actually use them consistently. Adoption is the real challenge. Agencies that build time tracking into the daily rhythm of the team, rather than treating it as an end-of-week admin task, get more accurate data and therefore better insight into which project types are underpriced, which clients consistently overrun, and where process improvements would have the most impact.</p> <h3>The practical next step</h3> <p>If your agency is winning good work but struggling to translate that into consistent margin, the place to start is not pricing. It is process. Audit one recent project that underperformed financially and work backwards: where was the scope unclear, where did amends escalate, and where did the team absorb work without flagging it? That single exercise will surface the process gaps that, once addressed, compound across every project you deliver.</p> <p>The GO Network regularly brings together agency operators to share practical expertise on topics like this. Connecting with peers who have solved the same operational challenges is one of the fastest routes to raising the baseline across your agency.</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/managing-projects-for-profitability" class="gn-related__link"> <span class="gn-related__category">Growth</span> <span class="gn-related__title">How to Manage your Agency Projects for Profitability</span> <span class="gn-related__excerpt">Use a pre-quote scorecard to vet every brief, control scope creep, and protect margins before the work even begins.</span> </a> </li> <li class="gn-related__item"> <a href="/articles/the-fundamentals-of-agency-new-business-for-2026---february-session" class="gn-related__link"> <span class="gn-related__category">Expression</span> <span class="gn-related__title">The Fundamentals of Agency New Business for 2026 - February Session</span> <span class="gn-related__excerpt">Frameworks from 1,500+ selection processes show what winning agencies do differently. 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