43:4 Cancel a subscription

Welcome to episode number 4 of season 43. My name is Lee and you’re listening to Trailblazer FM. In this series, we’re looking at slight changes you can make to create spectacular results in your agency. Today’s action is to cancel at least one subscription that you no longer need. This is to help us take steps towards better financial management. If you imagine with a busy pace of agency life, it’s really easy to let things slide, and before you know it, you’ve probably amassed a range of subscriptions that are costing your agency money, eroding your profitability, and probably not adding any real intrinsic value.

Before we engaged in this exercise in our agency, we had tonnes of subscriptions for different tools all purchased by different members of the team. You can imagine that was quite a mess. These are subscriptions going to different emails on different cards within the company.

I guess one of the big problems is it’s so easy to do. There’s a remove background service, which is free, but you can upgrade to a monthly subscription to get high definition images. This is probably something that a designer’s going to want to jump on quickly to avoid hours cutting images out in Photoshop. Very quickly, you can imagine that all these single use services, which may solve a problem we have at the time, can really add up.

Let’s jump into the why. It’s important as an agency that we manage our finances well. If we want to be profitable, sure we can raise our prices, but one of those quick wins is to look closer to home and look at the purchasing decisions that we’ve made. Have we got a whole load of subscriptions that we don’t need? Are we paying for things that aren’t adding value? Are there certain tools we’re using for a specific feature that we could be using something else for?

Now, the how doesn’t have to be that hard. I’d say, first of all, get a report of all regular payments. You can get this from your accountant. Then go through and find at least one or more subscriptions that you definitely don’t use. I’d recommend that you first sanity check all of the use cases, and you can do that with your team. Make sure there is no reason you might really need that particular tool maybe once a year or whatever that might be. Backup any data out of that tool if you definitely don’t need it, and then, of course, go ahead and cancel.

The second thing I’d suggest you do is find one or more subscriptions where you feel you don’t utilise all of its features. Then, again, do a sanity check of all the use cases, get the team involved, and then see if you can find alternatives. Perhaps you already have a subscription that includes some of the features you’ve been paying separately for.

Once you found your solution, transfer the data where possible, and of course cancel the old subscription. I then encourage you to review at least quarterly. What we’ve done is we’ve made an air table where we track every single expense that we have. We review that as a management team quarterly, and we question every single line item. If it doesn’t add value to the company, if we don’t have any use cases for it anymore, it’s going to get cut.

We’ve looked at why, we’ve looked at how, the results in our agency have been astonishing. We have saved thousands a year on software and subscriptions that we weren’t using, and we are way more efficient and effective with the tools that we do have because we are really aware of their use cases. We want to get the most out of the software that we are investing in rather than trying to solve lots of disparate issues with lots of random tools.

Now, there are a few resources in the share notes. You can check them out over on Trailblazer FM. In the resource section is a profit and loss template that you can use. There’s also a podcast on managing your personal finances, because your personal finances do put pressure on your agency. Also, there’s a podcast on managing your agency finances.

If you’d like to deep-dive into this topic, go ahead and check them out in the show notes. Whilst you’re there, please drop us a comment and let us know how you are saving money as an agency and how you are increasing your profitability. We also have a Facebook group which you can check out over on trailblazer.fm/group. Finally, we are meeting in-person here in the UK on November the 10th. That’s Agency Transformation Live. You can find out more information on agencytransformation.live. Folks, if we don’t see you in the comments, if we don’t see you in the group, if we don’t meet you in-person at Agency Transformation Live, how about we see you in the next episode?