Agency Survey 2023

The results are in! In 2023, you told us about yourselves, your agencies, and the software you use. We are very grateful to you all.

  1. About Agency Professionals
  2. About Agency Work
  3. About Agencies
  4. Agency Software
  5. Your Predictions
  6. Methodology and Feedback

We're most excited about the agencies section. Who knew that you provide such a range of services to customers in so many industries!

About Agency Professionals

Who are the people who work in agencies? What is their educational background? How long have they been working?

The default is either bachelors or masters level education, but 20% of you have something different, and we congratulate you. It's tough in this industry even if you have a conventional university education, and surely more difficult without.

Not surprisingly, most of you started work since the millennium, but there are still some old-timers around. Kudos to those with more than 20 years of professional services!

About Agency Work

What's it like to work in an agency? How much travel is there? Is remote work possible?

It must say something about our network that so many of you are CEOs and C suite. We'll try harder to reach more of you in consultant roles next time.

We think too many of you work more than 40 hours per week. But in later findings, very few of you said you are planning to reduce your hours, so maybe you enjoy it?

We were surprised how few of you travel for work. Temporary pandemic effect? Or has the world shifted permanently? We'll ask again next year and see what changes!

About Agencies

How do agencies work? What services do they provide, and who for?

What a wide range of industries you all support!

Times are tough: lots of you have needed to take on low-value projects (under $3,000), and too many of you have that as typical of most projects. But in better news, the majority find multiple customers each month.

As well as typical customer spend, you told us about the high and low values

  • 64% said your lowest single project spend was below $3,000
  • 20% said your highest single project spend was in the range $100,000 to $499,000

Agency Software

What software does your agency use?

The standout, in the top 5 for multiple categories, is Zoho. We were surprised, because anecdotally we have heard about usability challenges! Other highlights are Xero, Trello, and Google Drive.

We asked you to name your all time favourite software. Here's what you told us:

  • BitWarden
  • Canva
  • Google Drive
  • Google Suite
  • Notion
  • WhatsApp
  • Zoho

Your Predictions

How are you feeling about your business and career? What's the hiring market like?

You are feeling upbeat. Hiring in general is easy - although some concerns around the quality of candidates. Some of you expect more business next year, and there's an answer option that isn't shown, because none of you expect less.

Methodology and Feedback

Privacy Policy

We have edited the survey data very slightly. In all cases, this was either to improve anonymity, or because there was insufficient data to give interesting results. There are very few edits overall. They are:

  • Whole questions left out
  • Specific answers left out -> implies there were 0 selections of this answer
  • Text from 'Other' field converted to a specific name
  • Percent values tweaked

We also asked you about the length of the survey. It looks like - for those who were still reading - we got it about right. We also had some incomplete responses and will look for a few questions we can drop next year.

We asked you what software we should ask you about in future. Your answer:

  • Password Manager

It's been exciting to hear what you have to say. Check back and we'll do this again next September!