Running an agency on a fixed cadence: which numbers and decisions belong where

Summary

In small advertising and market research companies, staff are the largest expense item⁴, and that item keeps running even when a week is half empty. Whether a quarter turns out well is therefore decided early, by the utilisation of the coming weeks and by prices that cover your own costs. Then there is the question of whether invoices are paid on time. If you have fixed meetings with a few numbers for this, you do not find out from the month-end accounts. This article shows what belongs on the table weekly, monthly and quarterly, and who decides there. At the end there is a management calendar you can adopt.

A quarter of turnover, every month

According to Eurostat, advertising agencies in Germany (NACE class 73.11) had a net turnover of 22.8 billion euros in 2024 and spent 5.8 billion euros of it on wages, salaries and social security costs¹. That works out at 25.4 per cent of turnover, compared with 26.6 per cent in 2023¹. In Austria the figure for the same class was 20.8 per cent in 2024¹. For Switzerland, the Federal Statistical Office counts 4,933 advertising agencies with 17,093 employees in 2024; this table does not show turnover or staff costs³.

The German ratio is an average across 26,805 enterprises with just under six persons employed each¹. The picture is clearer for small firms: in the Bundesbank's financial statements statistics, staff costs in 2024 made up 40.0 per cent of total output for advertising and market research companies with a turnover below 2 million euros, more than the cost of materials at 32.4 per cent and other expenses at 21.9 per cent⁴. The basis is the financial statements of 203 companies of this size that are available for both 2023 and 2024⁴.

Small firms are the norm in the sector: according to Eurostat, 90.7 per cent of enterprises in the advertising group in Germany (73.1, advertising agencies and media representation) had fewer than ten persons employed in 2024².

Salaries are fixed in the short term. A week in which half the hours cannot be billed still costs full salaries. What you can steer, above all, is how the hours are allocated and at what price they are sold. The figures in this article are as of 2 November 2026.

Leading here means: decisions on a fixed cadence

A number that is not followed by a decision is just a report. "Utilisation was 68 per cent last month" is a sentence you take note of. "We are 54 hours short over the next two weeks, we are moving the concept for client C back by a week, and the project lead will tell the client by Wednesday" is a decision with a name and a date.

That takes three meetings, each with one guiding question:

• Weekly: Do we have enough people for what is coming up?
• Monthly: Are we earning money on what we do, and is the money coming in?
• Quarterly: Do clients, prices and team still fit together?

Each meeting has a few numbers, and each ends with decisions. Anything that cannot be decided moves to the next meeting with a date.

Weekly: capacity and priorities

Duration: 30 minutes. At the table are the people who plan and assign the work. In an agency of eight, that is often the managing director and a project lead.

Two numbers are enough. First, the planned hours for the next two weeks against the available hours. Available means working time minus holidays, sickness and internal meetings. Second, the jobs that are running over their hour budget.

A worked example: six people work 38 hours a week each, which comes to 456 hours over two weeks. Two days of holiday take about 15 hours, team meetings and internal work about 70. That leaves 371 available hours. 425 are planned. You are 54 hours short, a good seven working days.

This leads to one of three decisions, often a mix: postpone, decline or outsource. If you postpone, tell the client this week and not on the due date. How to set up the planning itself is covered in Resource Planning in Agile Teams. If hours are missing in the same place week after week, that is more likely a bottleneck in the organisation than a planning problem. That is the subject of The Operations Bottleneck: When Growth Slows Your Agency Down.

This article gives no target value for utilisation. There are no reliable, freely available figures for agencies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. What matters more than the percentage is whether the gap or the overload is on the table early enough.

Monthly: margin and cash coming in

Duration: 60 to 90 minutes, shortly after the month-end close. At the table: the managing director, whoever knows the books, and the leads for the large clients.

The first number is the contribution margin per client or project. The Gabler Wirtschaftslexikon describes it as the "surplus of direct revenues over the direct costs of a reference object" (our translation)⁸. In an agency this means: the client's fee, minus the hours worked for them valued at your internal hourly cost, minus freelancers and third-party services for them.

A worked example: client A pays 24,000 euros a month. 260 hours went into this client at an internal cost of 55 euros, so 14,300 euros, plus 4,500 euros for freelancers. That leaves 5,200 euros. Client B pays 9,000 euros and needs 70 hours, so 3,850 euros. That leaves 5,150 euros. Both contribute almost the same to overheads, A with well over two and a half times the turnover and almost four times the hours.

With A, you renegotiate or limit the scope. That includes writing down which services the fee covers and who tells the client by when.

The second number is open receivables by age: up to 30 days, 31 to 60, older. In the Bundesbank sample of 419 advertising and market research companies, trade receivables in the 2024 financial statements amounted to 13.7 per cent of annual turnover, with a median of 8.7 per cent⁴. Roughly, that is 50 days of turnover, or 32 days at the median. Because receivables usually include VAT and turnover is net, the number of days is more likely to be on the high side. For 2023, the Bundesbank states that its financial statements cover 1.3 per cent of the enterprises in this sector in the business register and 15.6 per cent of their turnover⁴. It still works as a comparison for your own list: how many days of turnover are outstanding at your agency?

The decision here is simple. For every invoice older than 30 days, it is fixed who follows up with the client or sends the reminder, and by when. More on metrics that actually get read is in Understanding KPI Logic as a Steering Instrument.

Quarterly: client mix, prices and team

Duration: half a day, with some distance from day-to-day business. At the table: the managing director and unit leads.

This is about the questions that the monthly meeting cannot answer. How much turnover and how much contribution margin depends on the largest client? Have your internal hourly costs risen since the last price round while prices have not? How much of the turnover for the next two quarters is already commissioned?

The last question carries weight. In the GWA Frühjahrsmonitor 2026, the spring survey of the German Association of Communication Agencies, the agencies surveyed reported that their gross income fell by an average of 2.7 per cent in 2025⁷. At the time of the survey in early 2026, 50.6 per cent of turnover for 2026 was secured or contractually committed, and around 62 per cent of gross income is based on project fees⁷. 92 owners and managing directors of GWA agencies were surveyed online, and the answers are weighted by turnover⁷. This is not a picture of small agencies. It still serves as a pointer: just under half of the year's turnover was not yet secured at that point.

The decisions here are the bigger ones: adjusting prices, filling positions or leaving them open, and clients and services you will no longer serve. Each gets a name and a date by which it is implemented.

Who decides what

A meeting without clear responsibility turns into a discussion group. A simple tool is a decision line in the minutes: what has been decided, who implements it, by when. If it is at the end of every meeting, you can check in two minutes at the next one what has happened.

Whether meetings are experienced as effective is not a side issue. In 2006, Rogelberg and colleagues analysed two online surveys of 676 and 304 employees working 35 hours or more a week. According to the abstract, perceived meeting effectiveness had a "strong, direct relationship" with job attitudes and well-being⁵. Perlow, Hadley and Eun report from interviews with hundreds of executives that many "felt overwhelmed by their meetings"⁶. Both describe associations and impressions, not causes. For the three meetings, it only follows that each should visibly lead to something, and the decision line makes that visible.

For the question of who decides and who is only consulted, the RACI matrix helps. If options have to be weighed, for example which job gets postponed, use the Decision Matrix. And if the numbers for the meetings only come together with manual work, the lever is in the processes behind them. That is the subject of Process Optimization: A Must for Every Agency.

Work aid: management calendar

How to build the metrics behind this table step by step is described in the Playbook: KPI System in 6 Weeks.

Frequently asked question

What if we do not track time?

Then the weekly meeting starts with the planned hours from your schedule and an honest estimate on Friday: how many hours went into which client? For the monthly contribution margin, that estimate is enough to start with. After two or three months you will see whether the deviations are large enough to make time tracking worthwhile.