Today’s business landscape continues to present many challenges. Cultivating financial literacy within your marketing agency should not just be for the C-suite anymore but should run throughout the whole organisation.
Creating a culture of financial awareness and transparency across the entire team can make the difference between thriving and surviving. Let’s dive into why this matters and how you can make it happen.
Why financial awareness matters
Financial awareness empowers your team to make informed decisions about resource allocation, understand the impact of their time on project profitability, contribute meaningfully to pricing discussions, and spot potential cost-saving opportunities. A study by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) found that financially capable employees are more productive and less likely to be absent from work due to financial stress.
This underscores the importance of financial awareness not just for the company’s bottom line, but also for employee wellbeing. Below we share eight steps to help create a company-wide culture of financial awareness.
1. Starting from the top
As an agency owner or leader, your attitude towards finances matters because it sets the tone for the entire organisation. If you have open, honest and transparent conversations, your teams will come to understand that financial knowledge is valued and important to the agency. Leaders who openly discuss financial goals and challenges create an environment of trust and shared purpose. There are many different ways that senior leaders can demonstrate this, including:
- Regularly share key financial metrics and industry trends with your team, and try to also be transparent about the company’s financial position.
- Explaining the ‘why’ behind financial decisions.
- Encouraging questions and discussions about agency finances.
- Building financial awareness training into your team discussions and strategic planning days.
2. Educating your team
Financial literacy doesn’t happen overnight, it requires ongoing effort and education. It is important to define a clear financial framework you need your teams to understand and provide training around this. Some ideas to bring financial awareness to your teams include:
Finance 101 workshops
Organise regular workshops or training that explains basic financial concepts relevant to agency life. Topics might include:
- Interpreting financial statements.
- Basic budgeting and forecasting techniques.
- Understanding profit margins and client profitability.
- The importance of time-tracking and utilisation rates.
Gamification of financial goals
Turn financial awareness into a team sport. Create friendly competitions around meeting utilisation targets or improving project margins. This not only educates but also motivates the teams to find creative solutions to be more financially efficient and improve the agency’s financial position, without compromising customer delivery.
Connecting day-to-day actions to financial outcomes
Help your team to understand how their daily decisions impact the agency’s overall financial health. For example:
- Show account managers how scope creep affects project profitability and where cutbacks may then have to be made as a result.
- Demonstrate to your employees how setting up workflows can improve margins.
- Illustrate to designers how smart use of resources can reduce costs.
3. Fostering a culture of ownership
Encourage your team to think like owners, this might involve:
- Profit-sharing schemes that align individual success with company success.
- Involving team members in the budgeting processes for their departments.
- Encouraging cost-saving ideas from all levels of the organisation.
4. Create a culture of openness and transparency
To help increase your team’s financial awareness, create a culture where employees can ask questions. Ways to do this may include Q&A with the finance team, anonymous suggestion boxes or an open-door policy with senior leaders. Make financial reports accessible and understandable. Consider creating simplified more visual interpretations of the data with dashboards that highlight key metrics relevant to each department or team.
5. Offer personal finance support
Wellbeing continues to be a focus in the workplace, a key wellbeing pillar that often goes unnoticed and that can cause huge stress is the financial pillar. If an employee is experiencing money worries at home the impact can ripple through both their home and work life. Providing personal finance training around managing the household budget, pensions, mortgages and saving for the future can not only help our teams work through concerns but can also help them apply these principles to the workplace.
6. Reward financial innovation
To encourage a culture of financial awareness introduce an incentive scheme that encourages our teams to think about ways to make sustainable cost-efficiencies. Parameters should be put around these ideas as they should not impact customer service or delivery.
7. Tools and systems to support financial awareness
The right tools can make financial information more accessible and actionable. Address this head-on through open communication and by emphasising how sustained financial health enables creative freedom and job security. Consider implementing:
- Project management software with built-in financial tracking.
- Real-time dashboards displaying key financial metrics.
- Regular financial health ‘check-ups’ for each department.
8. Measure the impact
As you embark on a journey towards greater financial awareness amongst your teams it is important to define the goals and metrics that will be used to measure success. Metrics you may track are:
- Overall agency financial performance.
- Improved client/ project profitability.
- Increased employee satisfaction and retention.
- More accurate budgeting and forecasting.
- Better decision-making at all levels of the organisation.
- Industry trend data to identify potential financial risks.
In conclusion
Building a culture of financial awareness is an ongoing process, not a one-time effort. According to Jason Blumer, CEO of Thriveal CPA Network and a thought leader in agency finance:
“Financial awareness in agencies is not just about understanding numbers. It’s about creating a shared language that allows everyone in the organisation to contribute to its financial success. When team members understand the financial implications of their decisions, they become more engaged and invested in the agency’s overall performance.”
Transforming your agency’s financial culture can be a complex undertaking, That’s where we come in. At CFO for Growth, we specialise in helping agencies like yours develop robust financial strategies, improve performance and cultivate financial awareness across your organisation. Get in touch to arrange a discovery call to explore how we can help.