How Growit Group helped us reach our goals - Inbound Norway
Inbound Norway is an inbound marketing agency and HubSpot Platinum Partner, helping companies generate more traffic, leads and customers. A young firm, almost a year old, but they are seeing great results and have just merged with two other agencies in Sweden and Denmark creating the Avidly. Avidly is now the biggest HubSpot Agency Partner in the Nordic region.
Just like Penguin Strategies, they chose “the whole package” from Growit Group. They began with the “launch” package, then “rise” and now “expand” which are currently fostering great results and a successful mentorship.
Create a good baseline from the beginning
Inbound Norway started the collaboration with Growit Group right from the beginning. CEO of Inbound Norway, Ingunn Bjøru, states that it was crucial to do it from the start as the founders had experiences from other agencies and wanted to do things differently. They knew what they wanted to do, but not always quite how to get thereHence, having someone to bounce ideas off this time around, made all the difference.
“Some inside information from the industry was really useful in the very beginning to create a good baseline”. - Ingunn Bjøru
Having processes in place from the very beginning is really important to make sure things are done properly and resources are utilized as they should. You really can’t meet your goals if your processes and procedures won’t allow for it to happen.
In choosing to work with Growit Group Ingunn states that they already knew of the firm so no one approached saying; “You should work with us”. It was Inbound Norway asking Growit Group; “Can we use you”. They had already seen the work Growit Group were doing with other people and agencies, and so they really wanted to make sure they got to work with them as early as possible, to lay a good foundation.
“With our new agency we wanted to create a place where you love to go to work. Where you can be creative, but where there is a process in place so that you know how to do something and you can add your creative flare.”
How they got the financials in order
It is very important to get budgeting and forecasting right, because then you’re able to know when you needed to hire new people to keep up with the growing demand. “That was something that Growit Group really helped us with.”, Ingunn explains. “They assisted us in creating a budget where we could easily see when we needed to hire someone and when we needed to plan for buying equipment, so things weren't so ad hoc anymore. And we clearly knew where we were heading.”
In the early stages, Growit Group conduct workshops with clients to look over “the important stuff”, like budgeting and so on. Joakim takes a firm look at how things are with the agency in that department, so that you get an outlook of the state of your agency. If you are, like Inbound Norway was, planning on taking on a substantial team from the beginning, this is something you can’t look past.
You don’t necessarily have the luxury of being able to hire quite a few people from the start.
“With Joakims help on the budgeting and the planning of it, it was much easier. I think that’s a huge, both time saver and resources saver.” - Ingunn Bjøru
Created a playbook to get an overview of processes
Clodagh on the other hand helps you go through the other processes you wanted to implement and gives you the overview of what you may be missing. “As soon as she started to be on these video calls with us we kind of clicked and we knew that this was the right choice.“, Ingunn says.
She further explains that they got to work on an entire playbook together with Growit Group. A book of all the processes and procedures that is needed in an agency. They already had some things in place but some things were not there at all. With getting an outside expert’s opinion, Inbound Norway developed a good based of essential processes quickly and could get on with delivering quality work. That is saving both time and resources.
“Now i think we are really prepared for changes to come at us”, Ingunn says eagerly. Especially with monthly “Mastermind Calls” with the Growit Circle they are able to get feedback from how things are going in the US, Finland, Israel, Sweden, Denmark and the UK. And that is combined with almost daily correspondance with Growit Group. “Things are given to us straight, and that I love”, Ingunn says.
Growit Group care about our agency
“I also really feel like they care about our agency”, Ingunn states. She says that what she finds different with Growit Group is that they care about the people in the agency, not just the profitability of it. They look at how one person is doing a job and how that is working out and how to support each individual from the trainees and all the way up through the small organisation.
“They don’t just look at the balance sheet and go; okey yes this is going well and this is not, but look at each individual in the agency, which I find quite refreshing ”. Ingunn Bjøru.
Working with Growit Group is not right for everyone though, Ingunn states. You have to be ready to do the work, because it’s not someone coming in and fixing your agency for you. You have to be a part of the team. But if you are serious about growing your agency, then it’s definitely the only way to go. If you want to just stay being a couple of people plotting along, that’s fine, but if you’re going to grow you need to get some outside help, you need a second pair of eyes, and you need experience that you probably don’t have internally - which Growit Group provides.
READ MORE:
A need for change in processes - Penguin Strategies
Starting to focus on our own strategies - not just customers - Influence Agents
