Hi, I’m Brad.
I’m here to help you transform “the daily grind” into a leadership role that’s engaging and fun. Along the way, we might just find more hours in your day.
I’ve been helping creative agency founders steady their ship and chart their company’s course for the past 20 years. I love looking for patterns, solving problems, and finding simplicity on the far side of complexity.
Since founding Anchor Advisors in 2001, I’ve worked with leaders of more than 450 firms, so I’ve seen it all and know how to get straight to root causes. And, there’s nothing (or very little) I enjoy more than working alongside creative and talented leaders – developing custom solutions together.
Wondering how we can work together? Take our Business Growth Assessment to learn your agency’s stage of growth and get specific recommendations.
The firms we work with tend to fall into one of the following four phases of growth — our growth stage assessment will help you to identify exactly where you are and what you need to focus on to achieve the next phase of growth.
The Startup Phase
In this phase, the business owner’s energy and effort is the limiting factor in the firm’s growth. To continue to grow, you, as the founder, need to leverage your time and energy to enable the firm to grow further.
Your key areas of focus should be:
- Finding Service Market Fit.
- Building a predictable business development engine.
- Creating consistent and predictable cash flow.
I’ve created a series of curated resources along the most relevant topics for you to get to a million in sales without burnout or exhaustion.
The Growth Phase
The growth phase firm has settled on its service-market fit and is optimizing its systems to sell and deliver a specific service to a specific ideal customer. By specializing, they can implement more repeatable processes and raise prices. With that greater margin, they can add support staff to free the founder from getting bogged down in client delivery.
Your key areas of focus should be:
- Focusing on one core offer for one core client.
- Build a middle-management team to get the founder out of service delivery.
- Add systems to enable more predictable delivery of services to the client.
I’ve created a series of curated resources along the most relevant topics for you to blast past $2M in revenue with increasing margins and decreasing pressure on you, the founder.
The Stabilization Phase
You’ve got a machine that’s working; now you need it to grow. By taking the standard processes you’ve built for winning new business and delivering successful projects, you’ll focus on piling on growth.
Your key areas of focus should be:
- Consolidating systems to better track performance data.
- Developing your leadership team.
- Scaling business development by getting the founder out of the sales role.
I’ve created a series of curated resources along the most relevant topics that will give you a clear vision for how to get to $5M and beyond
The Expansion Phase
Now that you have proven that you can scale your sales process and your delivery process it’s time to ramp up growth by expanding geographically, or deeper into your ideal client. This often involves acquisitions.
Your key areas of focus should be:
- Identifying a growth direction, adding more services within your niche, or finding similar niches?
- Understanding how to use “other people’s money” to accelerate your growth.
- Leading through leaders — how your leadership changes now that your team is running the business.
To grow beyond $5M you are going to have to learn lots of new skills and shift your role substantially.