Business leaders: how the work of the agency Notamedia
Hi, Habr! Over the past months, we raided the offices of leading digital agencies and collected a series of very detailed interviews with the leaders of these companies. Today we are opening the series “Business leaders of the digital market” with a story about the agency Notamedia .
The full version of the interview of Sergey Oseledko can be read on Ruvard , and especially for Habr I prepared a number of my own comments on the results of the conversation - for the most interesting issues of organizing the life of the Note.
')
Let's start with the most important indicators / record of Notamedia :
In general, quite impressive indicators for the agency, which started 6-7 years later than the “old-timers” of the market. Now let's move on to the business organization issues. Notes:
Sergey, hello! Let's start a brief introductory conversation about Notamedia, about the current situation, what the company now is, how it is positioned, what services it provides - such a common basis. - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Hi. At the moment, Notamedia is an agency, which employs about 80 people, the main office is in Moscow, plus a development office in Krasnodar. We mainly do two things. The first is brand design, identity, development of corporate styles, printing. The second and main one is the development of digital-media. We position ourselves as a company that develops media projects in different market segments - mass media, social media, personal media, corporate media. In other words, everything that is somehow “media” is our job.
I believe that we are one of the leading agencies specializing in this segment. We understand the very essence of media projects, namely, the consumption of content by the user. Regardless of the kind of content, this is somehow our positioning. We are trying to keep within its framework, and in our portfolio there are less and less projects that do not fit into this framework.
Among our features, we can highlight the fact that we practically do not involve external specialists, almost all the work is done inhouse. In addition, we have a special management system: in any project there is a manager, whose task is to make the project as profitable as possible, and there is a producer, whose priority is customer loyalty.
Continuing the conversation about positioning, can you formulate a key point in the style of “Notamedia is ...”? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Notamedia is media. If it is very short.
That is, I correctly understand that from simple production sites you gradually moved to some more complex marketing things? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Still, more than half of our work is production. Now we are trying to reduce this percentage in favor of increasing the number of services, including, for example, mobile development, strategizing, analytics, audience management, traffic, and so on.
A typical task from which a client comes to us is “we have a good print magazine, for example, about cars, and we want to move to digital. How would you help us here? ”And we, from beginning to end, work out the entire strategy of positioning and exiting the media in digital.
My comment : If we talk about the external field, the Note is one of the few companies in the “classic” web development market that has fired in the last 2-3 years. As it seems to me personally, a serious alignment of the processes (about this later), and a fairly clear positioning - with its wide coverage in the information field, served as the key to success. Explicit focus on the "media" customers (even in naming) immediately highlights the Note among competitors. On the one hand, detuning from competitors is being implemented, on the other hand, the chosen segment is large enough to leave the breadth of the maneuver (well, of course, the potential financial capacity).
People often ask me how to estimate the agency’s capitalization (there are quite a few cases on the market). Maybe you were evaluated, and there is some kind of formula? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Yes, there is a formula that we have adopted within the company. We estimate capitalization either at 3 annual turnover, or at 10-15 net annual profits (which in our case are approximately equal values). At the same time, it should be understood that much depends on the specifics of the investor’s business, negotiations, since the cost of the agency is, in many ways, speculative.
My comment : Actually, this is a rather important question that small studios often ask me. How to assess the capitalization of the agency, for example, when selling part of a share? If everything is more or less clear with the start-up mass market, then there is another story with agencies - business does not imply a quick take-off ten times over a year or two, this is B2B with not the highest margins. For these reasons, studios and agencies are not part of the outlook for investment funds and venture capital investors. And since there is no ecosystem, the evaluation criteria are not very clear. We asked a similar question to other large companies (including those that went through the sale process) - and, I hope, we will soon release separate material on this subject.
You said that now in Notamedia there are more than 80 people, and a unit has appeared in Krasnodar. How is the company, what is the organizational structure, what are the units? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Notamedia is a holding, its structure includes several companies. At the moment, these are three legal entities: two production structures and a service company that deals with support and promotion.
Globally, the company is divided into two divisions - production and project office.
The project office consists of producers, each managing between two and four project managers and account managers. By the role of an account manager, we understand rather the American interpretation - not sales and not customer interaction, but the provision of documentary support for projects. The project manager performs traditional functions, and above all is the producer, about the functions of which I have already spoken.
The second big division is production. Probably, it is arranged, as elsewhere - these are departments: design, front-end-development, back-end-development, etc. Moreover, we have two production parts: one works according to the traditional waterfall model (with conditionally “normal” projects) , the second is a team of “testers” who implement projects using unconventional schemes (a typical example is serious government customers).
There is a separate service division “Digital-Sector” - these are services for support and promotion. In addition, the agency has HR, a lawyer, an accountant - a full-fledged administrative unit.
Where do you get strategists? This is one of the problems in the market - they are categorically not enough. - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: When we decided that the producer’s interests in our company were upheld by the producer, we placed the responsibility for the breadth of expertise, visionary and other aspects on him. Producers are a team of agency tops who have gained considerable experience: Alexander Makarchuk, Tatyana Greshnova, Maxim Malyshev, Ivan Bormotov, Sergey Adonin. They are exempt from project management, so they are fully engaged in client management - in terms of strategy, in terms of its tasks.
So every project has such a producer / mentor? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: More precisely, not every project, but every client, and his task is to be above the projects, to ensure their normal interconnection and effective solution of client tasks.
The main producer KPI is a certain indicator of “loyalty”, which we measure according to 12 different criteria.
My comment : The Manual of Notes is very proud of its built-in KPI system. And Sergey himself is the manager who initially came to the company as a hired employee. In many ways, therefore, the company initially built a rather flexible and efficient scheme for organizing processes. In a sense, and this is read in the framework of the conversation, is such a “fad” of the agency.
If we talk about the classic “Sales-PM-Account” triangle, then we see a situation that many large agencies of our market have come to. Customer management is recognized as the most important task of the business - and project managers are directly subordinate to the accounts (in the terminology of the Note - producers). They are grouped under the supervision of producers - top managers of the company. Sales are primary screenings, and after that are given to the responsibility zone of producers.
Thus, we have a scheme: Sales / Accout - a management, PM - the allocated role in submission of client managers.
And who sells? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Producers are engaged in sales. The commercial offer is prepared by an account with a project, but the development of a common direction, the presentation of us to the client is the task of the producer.
How is resource planning organized? How do you determine when someone does what and by what project? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Resource planning is carried out using Redmine and CRM. We have a sales plan, we see the sales funnel at different stages, and if at some point the funnel begins to “swell”, we have time left to attract the necessary resources. That is, the situation is excluded, when “tomorrow we need to launch a project for 50 million, and where can we get people?”.
Is there a general scoreboard for resource utilization? What happens if two projects with one stage of projects, for example, want the same designer? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Such moments are run by producers. We have weekly meetings where they review tasks for key projects. This is where resource allocation conflicts are resolved.
How is pricing and the process of noting the work? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: There is a budget calculator, in which the rates of employees are entered, there is a base price, which is the normalized rate (including payroll taxes) multiplied by a factor of 3.3. We get this coefficient based on the number of people employed in the project office, in production, the share of payroll, taxes and other items of expenditure.
Moreover, we are fairly well in the assessment. We have two dozen KPIs that we regularly monitor, including "accuracy of getting into the assessment." Now this figure is on average 125% - that is, we average the project is only 25% higher than in fact spend resources.
My comment : The used overhead ratio = 3.3 is not a very high indicator for the market. Many large agencies work with k = 5, k = 6. You can save margins with such a ratio only by optimizing the production process (do not forget about the production office in Krasnodar), and the high level of “back orders” for current customers (reduces the costs of attracting new ones). Well, the whole pricing scheme. Notes are similar to most other major agencies.
In our market, support is traditionally a problem. How is your support unit? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: We have a separate company. Moreover, she is responsible not only for support, but also for testing. We include the item “testing and implementation” in the estimate, and this money is sent from production to the support unit. By the way, he has his own balance, his own life, his general director, his managers and his resources. The only time is that he may not have, for example, his own designers (they are better kept under one art director), but managers and programmers have their own 100%.
There are other KPIs in this division, otherwise trained managers. One of the project indicators is the cost of warranty support. During the year, we estimate what budget we spent on warranty support and how much it reduced our profitability. It is clear that the post factum, we can no longer affect the bonuses - but we can draw conclusions about the work of certain people.
And if we are talking not about warranty support, but about ordinary new small tasks? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: In any case, the task first comes to the support in the “Digital-sector”. From there, she either goes into production (in case it is large, more than a million rubles) and then proceeds according to the standard scheme, or is decided on the spot.
My comment : Support is the Achilles heel of our market. She decided it radically, singling out the division into an independent company. This is a rather unusual decision (personally, I see quite a lot of potential costs here), but, of course, it allows you to build processes that are perfectly tailored to the process of support and minor works.
You have already called the state, media clients - who else can be distinguished from client Central Asia? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Corporate Media. A typical example is Evraz. B2B, shareholders, disclosure, social responsibility.
With corporate media, it is often a question of assessing the quality of the product. If everything is clear with e-commerce, you can measure conversions and a funnel, then in the case of corporate websites this is an image effect and communication, how to evaluate efficiency? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: We are not trying to invent something fundamentally new to solve this task - we have 12 loyalty parameters, and we interview a client for each of them. Simple and understandable criteria, as a rule, give the most accurate indicators.
My comment : Most of my comments are very positive, and, I will not hide, I personally am very impressed with the approach to organizing the business of the Note. But, probably, I must say about the thin places that I personally saw during the conversation.
The voiced model with the producers - the agency’s top managers do not even fit into the matrix structure (linear managers and project teams are slightly confused) - therefore, the pitfall is visible with the further scaling of the company. The second is a certain risk of distancing support from the main agency (however, now this problem is being successfully solved through processes and automation). The third point is that the share of “standard” production is too high, but within the chosen positioning, I think diversification will come pretty quickly.
On this, probably, we have everything - you can ask questions in the comments, we transmit them to Sergey. And success Note in the development! Soon - the release of new materials in our series .
The full version of the interview of Sergey Oseledko can be read on Ruvard , and especially for Habr I prepared a number of my own comments on the results of the conversation - for the most interesting issues of organizing the life of the Note.
')
Let's start with the most important indicators / record of Notamedia :
- Year of foundation: 2004
- State: 80+ (Moscow + production in Krasnodar).
- Technologies: 1C-Bitrix, UMI.
- Turnover for 2013: 130 million rubles.
- Number of projects for 2013: 70.
- Number of key loyal customers: 20.
- The number of incoming calls per month: 100.
- The number of tickets in support for 2013: 5000.
In general, quite impressive indicators for the agency, which started 6-7 years later than the “old-timers” of the market. Now let's move on to the business organization issues. Notes:
Sergey, hello! Let's start a brief introductory conversation about Notamedia, about the current situation, what the company now is, how it is positioned, what services it provides - such a common basis. - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Hi. At the moment, Notamedia is an agency, which employs about 80 people, the main office is in Moscow, plus a development office in Krasnodar. We mainly do two things. The first is brand design, identity, development of corporate styles, printing. The second and main one is the development of digital-media. We position ourselves as a company that develops media projects in different market segments - mass media, social media, personal media, corporate media. In other words, everything that is somehow “media” is our job.
I believe that we are one of the leading agencies specializing in this segment. We understand the very essence of media projects, namely, the consumption of content by the user. Regardless of the kind of content, this is somehow our positioning. We are trying to keep within its framework, and in our portfolio there are less and less projects that do not fit into this framework.
Among our features, we can highlight the fact that we practically do not involve external specialists, almost all the work is done inhouse. In addition, we have a special management system: in any project there is a manager, whose task is to make the project as profitable as possible, and there is a producer, whose priority is customer loyalty.
Continuing the conversation about positioning, can you formulate a key point in the style of “Notamedia is ...”? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Notamedia is media. If it is very short.
That is, I correctly understand that from simple production sites you gradually moved to some more complex marketing things? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Still, more than half of our work is production. Now we are trying to reduce this percentage in favor of increasing the number of services, including, for example, mobile development, strategizing, analytics, audience management, traffic, and so on.
A typical task from which a client comes to us is “we have a good print magazine, for example, about cars, and we want to move to digital. How would you help us here? ”And we, from beginning to end, work out the entire strategy of positioning and exiting the media in digital.
My comment : If we talk about the external field, the Note is one of the few companies in the “classic” web development market that has fired in the last 2-3 years. As it seems to me personally, a serious alignment of the processes (about this later), and a fairly clear positioning - with its wide coverage in the information field, served as the key to success. Explicit focus on the "media" customers (even in naming) immediately highlights the Note among competitors. On the one hand, detuning from competitors is being implemented, on the other hand, the chosen segment is large enough to leave the breadth of the maneuver (well, of course, the potential financial capacity).
People often ask me how to estimate the agency’s capitalization (there are quite a few cases on the market). Maybe you were evaluated, and there is some kind of formula? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Yes, there is a formula that we have adopted within the company. We estimate capitalization either at 3 annual turnover, or at 10-15 net annual profits (which in our case are approximately equal values). At the same time, it should be understood that much depends on the specifics of the investor’s business, negotiations, since the cost of the agency is, in many ways, speculative.
My comment : Actually, this is a rather important question that small studios often ask me. How to assess the capitalization of the agency, for example, when selling part of a share? If everything is more or less clear with the start-up mass market, then there is another story with agencies - business does not imply a quick take-off ten times over a year or two, this is B2B with not the highest margins. For these reasons, studios and agencies are not part of the outlook for investment funds and venture capital investors. And since there is no ecosystem, the evaluation criteria are not very clear. We asked a similar question to other large companies (including those that went through the sale process) - and, I hope, we will soon release separate material on this subject.
You said that now in Notamedia there are more than 80 people, and a unit has appeared in Krasnodar. How is the company, what is the organizational structure, what are the units? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Notamedia is a holding, its structure includes several companies. At the moment, these are three legal entities: two production structures and a service company that deals with support and promotion.
Globally, the company is divided into two divisions - production and project office.
The project office consists of producers, each managing between two and four project managers and account managers. By the role of an account manager, we understand rather the American interpretation - not sales and not customer interaction, but the provision of documentary support for projects. The project manager performs traditional functions, and above all is the producer, about the functions of which I have already spoken.
The second big division is production. Probably, it is arranged, as elsewhere - these are departments: design, front-end-development, back-end-development, etc. Moreover, we have two production parts: one works according to the traditional waterfall model (with conditionally “normal” projects) , the second is a team of “testers” who implement projects using unconventional schemes (a typical example is serious government customers).
There is a separate service division “Digital-Sector” - these are services for support and promotion. In addition, the agency has HR, a lawyer, an accountant - a full-fledged administrative unit.
Where do you get strategists? This is one of the problems in the market - they are categorically not enough. - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: When we decided that the producer’s interests in our company were upheld by the producer, we placed the responsibility for the breadth of expertise, visionary and other aspects on him. Producers are a team of agency tops who have gained considerable experience: Alexander Makarchuk, Tatyana Greshnova, Maxim Malyshev, Ivan Bormotov, Sergey Adonin. They are exempt from project management, so they are fully engaged in client management - in terms of strategy, in terms of its tasks.
So every project has such a producer / mentor? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: More precisely, not every project, but every client, and his task is to be above the projects, to ensure their normal interconnection and effective solution of client tasks.
The main producer KPI is a certain indicator of “loyalty”, which we measure according to 12 different criteria.
My comment : The Manual of Notes is very proud of its built-in KPI system. And Sergey himself is the manager who initially came to the company as a hired employee. In many ways, therefore, the company initially built a rather flexible and efficient scheme for organizing processes. In a sense, and this is read in the framework of the conversation, is such a “fad” of the agency.
If we talk about the classic “Sales-PM-Account” triangle, then we see a situation that many large agencies of our market have come to. Customer management is recognized as the most important task of the business - and project managers are directly subordinate to the accounts (in the terminology of the Note - producers). They are grouped under the supervision of producers - top managers of the company. Sales are primary screenings, and after that are given to the responsibility zone of producers.
Thus, we have a scheme: Sales / Accout - a management, PM - the allocated role in submission of client managers.
And who sells? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Producers are engaged in sales. The commercial offer is prepared by an account with a project, but the development of a common direction, the presentation of us to the client is the task of the producer.
How is resource planning organized? How do you determine when someone does what and by what project? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Resource planning is carried out using Redmine and CRM. We have a sales plan, we see the sales funnel at different stages, and if at some point the funnel begins to “swell”, we have time left to attract the necessary resources. That is, the situation is excluded, when “tomorrow we need to launch a project for 50 million, and where can we get people?”.
Is there a general scoreboard for resource utilization? What happens if two projects with one stage of projects, for example, want the same designer? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Such moments are run by producers. We have weekly meetings where they review tasks for key projects. This is where resource allocation conflicts are resolved.
How is pricing and the process of noting the work? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: There is a budget calculator, in which the rates of employees are entered, there is a base price, which is the normalized rate (including payroll taxes) multiplied by a factor of 3.3. We get this coefficient based on the number of people employed in the project office, in production, the share of payroll, taxes and other items of expenditure.
Moreover, we are fairly well in the assessment. We have two dozen KPIs that we regularly monitor, including "accuracy of getting into the assessment." Now this figure is on average 125% - that is, we average the project is only 25% higher than in fact spend resources.
My comment : The used overhead ratio = 3.3 is not a very high indicator for the market. Many large agencies work with k = 5, k = 6. You can save margins with such a ratio only by optimizing the production process (do not forget about the production office in Krasnodar), and the high level of “back orders” for current customers (reduces the costs of attracting new ones). Well, the whole pricing scheme. Notes are similar to most other major agencies.
In our market, support is traditionally a problem. How is your support unit? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: We have a separate company. Moreover, she is responsible not only for support, but also for testing. We include the item “testing and implementation” in the estimate, and this money is sent from production to the support unit. By the way, he has his own balance, his own life, his general director, his managers and his resources. The only time is that he may not have, for example, his own designers (they are better kept under one art director), but managers and programmers have their own 100%.
There are other KPIs in this division, otherwise trained managers. One of the project indicators is the cost of warranty support. During the year, we estimate what budget we spent on warranty support and how much it reduced our profitability. It is clear that the post factum, we can no longer affect the bonuses - but we can draw conclusions about the work of certain people.
And if we are talking not about warranty support, but about ordinary new small tasks? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: In any case, the task first comes to the support in the “Digital-sector”. From there, she either goes into production (in case it is large, more than a million rubles) and then proceeds according to the standard scheme, or is decided on the spot.
My comment : Support is the Achilles heel of our market. She decided it radically, singling out the division into an independent company. This is a rather unusual decision (personally, I see quite a lot of potential costs here), but, of course, it allows you to build processes that are perfectly tailored to the process of support and minor works.
You have already called the state, media clients - who else can be distinguished from client Central Asia? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: Corporate Media. A typical example is Evraz. B2B, shareholders, disclosure, social responsibility.
With corporate media, it is often a question of assessing the quality of the product. If everything is clear with e-commerce, you can measure conversions and a funnel, then in the case of corporate websites this is an image effect and communication, how to evaluate efficiency? - Andrey Terekhov
Sergey Oseledko: We are not trying to invent something fundamentally new to solve this task - we have 12 loyalty parameters, and we interview a client for each of them. Simple and understandable criteria, as a rule, give the most accurate indicators.
My comment : Most of my comments are very positive, and, I will not hide, I personally am very impressed with the approach to organizing the business of the Note. But, probably, I must say about the thin places that I personally saw during the conversation.
The voiced model with the producers - the agency’s top managers do not even fit into the matrix structure (linear managers and project teams are slightly confused) - therefore, the pitfall is visible with the further scaling of the company. The second is a certain risk of distancing support from the main agency (however, now this problem is being successfully solved through processes and automation). The third point is that the share of “standard” production is too high, but within the chosen positioning, I think diversification will come pretty quickly.
On this, probably, we have everything - you can ask questions in the comments, we transmit them to Sergey. And success Note in the development! Soon - the release of new materials in our series .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/206650/
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