Date: March 9, 2021
Overview
Paradigm Marketing and Design, an award-winning NJ-based digital marketing agency. Four years ago, Paradigm was struggling to achieve meaningful growth. While revenue was on the rise, profits remained unchanged, leaving more questions than answers about how to scale the business.
Challenge
In operation for four years at the time, Paradigm Marketing and Design had reached a plateau in growth. Though the four-employee business was consistently growing in revenue, profits were stuck in a plateau, which made it difficult to reinvest in the business. The current business model not only resulted in unsuccessful efforts to scale up, it was positioning the company for eventual failure.
President and founder Rachel Durkan knew she needed a new operations infrastructure but didn’t know how to get there. With a profit goal of $1M and aspirations to grow the workforce, the agency turned to Correa, Pearson & Associates (CP&A) for financial guidance.
Taking Action
Led by CEO Vanessa Correa, CP&A helped Paradigm understand which clients were profitable and why, how to achieve optimal billing rates, what to bill for each employee, and the profitability of each service line. A comprehensive pricing and job costing analysis found that the agency had been undercharging for their services in several engagements, which meant they were losing money.
The team built out a financial infrastructure that included automated monthly reports and forecasting models designed to inform more profitable business decisions to progress the business towards its seven-figure goal. By organizing and pulling insights from the agency’s existing pool of data and redefining its financial and operational processes, CP&A empowered the Paradigm leadership team to identify their profitability goals and make major operational shifts to achieve them—ultimately positioning them for long-term growth.
Results
In only one year of working with CP&A, Paradigm crested the seven-figure mark with profit and growth ratios reaching over three times that of the industry averages. Within three years, they’d added ten additional employees, and consistently grew by 70% year over year in both revenue and profit.
Today, Paradigm is firmly positioned to make consistently sound financial decisions that support continued scalability, reinvestment of profits into their business and sustained profitability.