Blog

Looking ahead to 2025, the agency landscape is evolving fast, with trends like AI, operational shifts, and a focus on workplace culture reshaping the way agencies and consultancies operate. The big question for agency leaders is how to thrive and grow in the face of these changes. 

In our recent Q&A session, Leading Your Agency Into 2025: A Guide for Strategic Planning Through Uncertainty, Parallax’s Head of Customer Success, Grant Hultgren, sat down with Carl Smith, founder of The Bureau, to explore emerging industry trends and how to navigate them.

Table of Contents 

• How will Agencies Adapt & Evolve with Tech Trends?
• Will Specialized Agencies Thrive?
• Will a Human-centric Approach Will be Prioritized Over AI?
• Will Agencies Opt for a More Consultative Approach to Projects?
• How to Get Ahead of the Trends in 2025

How Will Agencies Adapt With Tech Trends?

The notion that “digital agencies are dying” makes headlines year after year, but industry veterans know this claim does not hold much truth. Instead, these orgs are constantly adapting, evolving their craft to embrace new challenges, agency industry trends and technology innovations. 

Like traditional advertising agencies adjusted to the craze of the internet, today’s digital agencies are taking advantage of new tools and advancements within their specialty fields. Tools like AI, automation, and data analytics help enhance their operations while honing in on being the best at and improving on their craft.

Digital agencies aren’t disappearing anytime soon. However, they may be redefining themselves. With every new shift, from emerging technology to changing client expectations, agencies are treating every challenge as a new opportunity for growth. 

Carl says, “When I hear somebody say digital agencies are dying, I think they don’t realize that we’re not dying, we’re evolving. We’re shedding our skins like a snake. We’re going to use all the new tools and big corporations are going to get to a point where they [can’t do it alone] and who are they going to hire? Digital agencies.”

Will Specialized Agencies Thrive?

Specialization is becoming a defining trend in digital agencies as we approach 2025. With growing demand for niche expertise in areas like SEO, digital design, and cybersecurity to name a few, smaller, specialized agencies are distinguishing themselves in a crowded market. 

By focusing on their specific crafts, these agencies offer a unique value proposition with a level of expertise that’s often harder to find in larger, generalist firms. These agencies are also able to adapt more quickly to shifts in the market, and get ahead of emerging trends whereas process changes in larger firms can get more complicated and time consuming. 

Will A Human-centric Approach be Prioritized Over AI?

AI is shaking up the agency industry as of late, offering digital agencies the chance to streamline and support the human insight that clients rely on (but not replace them). Tasks like data analysis and other repetitive tasks can be simplified through AI and automation, saving time and allowing teams to focus on project items that require personalization and context knowledge that AI can’t deliver.

It’s recommended to use AI softwares to compliment tasks and projects rather than rely on it, keeping humans involved in each stage of a project to ensure full alignment with client goals and unique project needs. Doing so ensures that agencies can still utilize the benefits of AI while continuing to build genuine relationships with clients as projects are delivered efficiently and with care.

Will Agencies Opt for a More Consultative Approach to Projects?

Alongside this trend, agencies are shifting towards a consultative, strategic partnership model. At Parallax, we encourage a productized service offering model as a best practice for efficient, scalable operations. However, it’s also important to nurture creativity and adaptability within each client project. This balance offers both predictability in operations, allowing professional service orgs to efficiently forecast and plan ahead while building the foundation for long-term client relationships that thrive on collaboration and shared goals.

Not only does this consultative approach contribute to healthy customer-vendor relationships, but it also gives more opportunity for agency employees to sharpen and build upon their skill sets. As new digital agency trends emerge in 2025, employees are able to explore new avenues to complete a project, nurturing their professional development and allow for exploration of new ways to improve operations. 

How to Get Ahead of the Trends in 2025

Planning for the year to come is hard enough as is – we get it! With new trends arising in software development, agency and consultancy industries, knowing what to prioritize and having an organized plan of attack is crucial to getting ahead in 2025. 

We created a 2025 Strategic Planning Guide for professional service organizations including helpful workbooks and strategies to help lean into the new year with confidence.

Have questions about agency planning for 2025? Send us a note hello@getparallax.com. We’d love to chat!

In challenging economic conditions, maintaining healthy project margins, team morale, and quality work can create challenges for many agencies. How can you do it all? And how do they affect each other? 

We sat down with digital agency, Creed Interactive, to chat about the four approaches they took to navigate these challenges and boost project margins with their current team.

Create Added Value for Clients as Their Strategic Partner

When the pipeline slows down, it’s easy to feel a bit of panic—don’t worry, you’re not alone. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Creed’s team decided to differentiate themselves by strengthening their consultative approach to client work. By positioning themselves as strategic partners, they created more meaningful partnerships that delivered value long after a project wrapped up.

As economic uncertainty raised, Creed recognized that their clients were facing tighter budgets and increased pressure to show return on investment. In response, Creed began offering smaller, lower-barrier projects to attract new clients and demonstrate their strategic expertise In their initial discovery sessions. Over time, these small projects built a solid foundation of trust, which led to larger and more profitable project margins as clients saw the long-term benefits of their partnerships.

Allocate Your Team Members Based on Their Skill Sets

To consistently deliver quality work while maintaining healthy project margins, Creed took the initiative to understand which projects would set their teams up for success, as well as bring profitable margins for the business. They aimed to match team members with projects that aligned with their skill sets and would enable them to deliver their best work, ultimately driving up both efficiency and profitability.

Using a resource management platform like Parallax, Creed was able to assign team members to projects where they could make the most significant impact. By forming specialized, dedicated teams allowed them to maximize each team member’s unique strengths, whether that meant pairing developers with specific technologies or aligning designers with particular industries. This led to higher-quality project outcomes and healthier project margins by ensuring that resources were used effectively.

Focus on the People, and Your Margins Will Thank You

As a people-first agency, Creed has always prioritized employee well-being, knowing that happy and engaged team members are more productive and creative. In the hectic agency environment, it’s easy to assume that a 40-hour workweek is the norm. However, Creed found that scheduling time for collaboration, admin tasks, and professional development led to better project outcomes and higher margins in the long run.

To combat burnout and support meaningful work, Creed adjusted their utilization baseline to 32 billable hours a week, intentionally leaving time for deep work, training, and collaboration. This shift not only allowed employees to grow professionally and within their roles but also encouraged them to find ways to be more efficient in their teams. By building in time for non-billable activities, Creed empowered their team members to continuously improve and produce quality work, ultimately benefiting the agency’s bottom line.

Understanding Your Project Health: Creed’s Secret Weapon 

Pinpointing where to start when looking to increase project margins isn’t so black and white. Creed was able to utilize insights from Parallax to monitor key metrics that helped guide them to make strategic decisions around reaching their goals. 

Want to learn more on how Creed did it? Book a demo to see more of Parallax. 

In the professional service industry, we often see organizations stuck in a reactive state. When demand is constantly fluctuating and last minute projects get thrown into the mix, it can be difficult to align organizations with strategic growth goals (not to mention actually achieving them!). Along with slow growth, this constant flux can even result in employee burnout and poor engagement. 

Believe it or not, a recent Gallup study found that only 17% of US employees feel their company has strong and open communication around goals and priorities. Even more shocking, only 32% of US workers say that they feel engaged at work. What does this mean and how do we solve it? (Another pizza party isn’t going to do the trick…) 

We sat down with Parallax Founder, Tom O’Neill, and OKRs expert and Founder of So Sunny Consulting, Reid Koster, to talk about the OKR goal setting framework. 

Developed by former Intel CEO, Andy Grove, the OKR framework gained popularity when used by Google, for its ability to focus and engage teams on ambitious growth goals. 

What are OKRs?

The OKR (Objectives & Key Results) goal setting framework is a process for a company’s goal setting, review and evaluation that emphasizes frequency and transparency in regards to employee alignment, check-ins and evaluation. 

The OKR acronym describes how the goals in the framework are written and is broken into two parts: 

Objectives: are clear goals that describe a future state. 

Objectives are typically aspirational qualitative in nature. They are written to encompass a vision of where you want to be at the end of the goal cycle. Because objective goals describe an outcome, they are then supported by 3-4 key results to help guide teams to completion.  

Key results: are measurable goals or milestones that support the completion of the associated objective. 

KRs (Key Results) are more quantitative and hard measured by numbers, dates, and percentages. KRs are a way to visualize how to successfully reach your objective and measure progress along the way. In theory, completing all KRs will mean you have met your objective goal.

Understanding how objectives and key results differ and work together is key to crafting impactful goals. If all goals are written in a metric driven fashion like key results, teams are able to understand what success looks like, but not the “why” behind it. On the other hand, if all goals are outcome based and aspirationally written, they will create excitement, but lack the guidance that’s needed to actually pursue them. 

Setting OKR Goals 

Focus & Alignment 

The beauty of OKRs lies in the framework’s ability to cascade a common goal throughout an organization, increasing engagement and guiding focus. The way that organizational OKR goals are structured typically align with the levels of a company org chart – each set of proceeding OKRs support those above. This structure ensures that each department, all the way down to an individual employee, is contributing to an overall success of the organization.

At a company level, leadership will need to align on 1-3 company goals to focus on throughout the goal cycle, typically the duration of a quarter. 

Commit & Track

Once your OKRs are set, the next step is to ensure that everyone is committed to achieving them and that progress is being tracked consistently. Regular check-ins and transparent communication throughout the organization helps all teams stay on track.

Tracking OKRs isn’t just about ticking boxes and marking tasks complete—it’s about identifying what’s working, what’s not, and adjusting as needed. This helps teams solve and approach challenges that may arise as circumstances change.

Weekly or bi-weekly check-ins can be a great way to keep the momentum going and hold teams accountable. Doing so provides opportunities to discuss progress, share insights, and tackle any roadblocks as a team. Keeping everyone in the loop like this not only boosts engagement but also ensures that each team member understands how their work contributes to the bigger picture.

Stretch

OKRs are all about pushing boundaries, which is where stretch goals come in. These are ambitious targets designed to push your teams to achieve more than they might think possible. Stretch goals challenge the status quo and inspire teams to innovate and think creatively.

However, it’s important to keep a balance between a “moon shot” and what’s realistic. Stretch goals should be challenging, but not so unrealistic that they end up creating uncertainty. The sweet spot is where a goal feels just out of reach but still achievable. Incorporating stretch goals into your OKRs can drive higher performance and foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Benefits of OKRs

Increase team focus and alignment

With the unique structure of OKRs, all teams throughout the organization are able to zoom in and work together to accomplish similar goals.

High team engagement

When employees understand how their work contributes to the company’s success, it boosts engagement and motivation. OKRs provide clear communication and expectations throughout teams, reducing burnout and helping employees feel more connected to the company’s mission. 

Company growth

OKR goals allow organizations to set aspirational yet strategic growth goals. Combined with increased focus and engagement, organizations see 70% of OKR goals set are completed successfully.

Get Started Crafting your OKRs

Download the OKR Crash Course to get started crafting your next set of OKR goals.

Align teams for growth 

In the professional services industry, where change is the only constant, the OKR framework is a way to keep teams focused, aligned, and motivated on the strategic growth of the organization. 

When it comes to strategizing and measuring the progress of your goals, we’re here to help. Parallax is a resource management platform built to provide professional service teams with the insights and alignment they need to identify key growth opportunities and measure the outcomes. 

Want to learn more? Watch a quick demo of Parallax.

Resource planning vs. task planning. What is the difference and how can you efficiently manage both tasks and resources? 

We’ve all been there—juggling deadlines, managing client expectations, and ensuring our teams are set up to do great work. But amid the chaos, there are clear benefits to separating resource plans from task plans.

Uncoupling the two planning methods allows professional services to plan ahead, reduce team burnout, and create a feedback loop for improvement.

Understanding Task Planning

In the world of professional services, task planning has become essential to managing multiple projects, deadlines, and “to-do’s”. 

Creating a task plan requires a great deal of subject knowledge to understand what needs to be done, how to get it done, and when it needs to be finished to propel the project forward. This involves breaking down projects with key objectives, detailed task overviews, precise timelines, and the hardest part, finding available team members to deliver them efficiently and effectively (project managers, we hear you – it’s no easy feat).

Challenges of Task-Based Resource Planning

Having a detailed task plan is a large contributor to the success of a project. Although task plans are highly intricate, they can’t account for all components of a project. So, what are they missing?  

Lack of insights on resource capacity & availability

Through task plans alone, it’s difficult for a project manager to coordinate schedules, availability and capacity when assigning tasks to team members. Not having this visibility when project planning can lead to improper team utilization, resulting in missing project margin goals or employee burnout.

Lack of flexibility

When challenges arise, budgets are tight, or a last minute client request comes up, task plans are highly detailed and difficult to adjust mid project. With task dependencies, strict deadlines, and booked schedules, adjusting one deadline may affect an array of others.

Lack of ability to view overall project health

When hours are billed down to the task, it’s hard to view the project’s overall health until after the project has already been billed out. When one task runs an hour beyond planned time, it doesn’t have a huge impact on the overall success of the project. However, when 7-8 tasks go hours beyond the plan, it starts to seriously affect your margin. 

Lack of ability to forecast & plan ahead

A granular task plan is difficult to build out for more than a couple of weeks at a time. With a limited view into the capacity of delivery teams and the projects in the pipeline, it can be hard to forecast where and when there are gaps in demand. Sales likely isn’t sure what project types will have the capacity to be sold, team leads aren’t confident as to whether they should or should not hire for a role, and delivery teams are stuck in a reactive state.

So how do we address project planning challenges that task planning alone doesn’t solve for? Let’s look at resource planning, another method digital agencies use to tackle these challenges. 

Understanding Resource Planning

Unlike task planning, resource planning is people-focused. It looks at the big picture plan rather than the nitty gritty details of each task. Resource planning involves strategically managing and allocating your team’s time, skills, and expertise to meet the demands of current and future projects. Rather than assigning team members to specific tasks, resource planning encourages identifying and allocating project resources via duration across the entire project.

For example, project “A” will need a web designer from July 10th – July 15th for 3 hours a day. This would be a piece of the project’s resource plan. A team member with the right availability, capacity, and skills will then be assigned to the project. Then, a task plan will break down each task in detail.

A resource plan is a high level initial project plan and is separate from a task plan. Adding this method to your project planning cadence allows for insight on resources, project health, and the ability to forecast.

Resource Planning Key Components

Documenting team member skills and expertise to create an inventory of team resources.

Allocating resources based on skills and availability to match employees to appropriate projects. 

Forecasting demand trends by integrating your CRM and resource planning tool to anticipate shifts in pipeline and plan for future resourcing requirements.

Task vs. Resource Planning. Should I do Both? 

Resource planning and task planning offer unique benefits that contribute to a successful project. However, relying on one planning strategy over the other can create obstacles in delivery.

Task planning provides a granular view into project logistics while resource planning ensures the right people are available and have the capacity to carry out those tasks. Think of resource planning as making sure you’ve got the right players on the field, while task planning is calling each play. If you forget to assign players to your team’s offense, winning the game becomes a challenge. 

Decoupling Task and Resource Planning Allows For: 

Visibility into the demands of current and future projects

Having a holistic view of required roles and level of commitment needed for in-pipeline projects allows you to confidently staff projects and hit utilization goals.

Capacity and utilization forecasting

Know ahead of time when there is a change in demand. Resource planning allows for forecasting utilization weeks to months in advance so leadership can advise when to get ahead of hiring curves or which projects to sell based on team capacity. 

Creation of a feedback loop

Resource plans are used as a baseline, guiding project plans based on trends from past similar projects. An overview of time trends, role requirements, and project costs are able to be constantly refined to create streamlined and efficient project delivery. 

Increased focus and quality of output

Undivided attention to the project at hand decreases burnout caused by juggling multiple tasks on different projects. Less multitasking encourages increased focus and timely, high quality work that your team is proud of. 

Take Control of Your Resource Plans

Decoupling resource planning and task planning allows for visibility and flexibility to forecast capacity, manage workloads, and prevent team burn out. Developing new operational processes is never easy – luckily, resource planning is our expertise! With resource planning tools like Parallax, teams are able to organize, analyze and strategize for success. 

Want more information on how to start resource planning? Book a demo.

As a founder, leading your company’s sales efforts can be exhilarating. In the early stages, wearing multiple hats and being involved in every aspect of the business is both challenging and rewarding. We know – it’s difficult to take a step back from something you’ve worked so hard to build; however, as your business continues to grow, it’s important to distribute those hats so you can focus on strategic growth and allow your team to specialize in the operational execution of your business model. 

During the webinar: Scaling Beyond Founder-Led Sales with RevOps, Tom O’Neill, CEO and founder of Parallax, and Kurt Schmidt, Consultant and founder of Schmidt Consulting group, shared their experiences as founders doing just that. They explained the importance of building a solid GTM strategy by utilizing revenue operations best practices and building habits that allow for growth beyond founder-led methods.  

Why Move Past Founder-Led Sales?

In the beginning, founder-led sales work well because of the founder’s passion, vision, and deep understanding of the product and market. However, as the company scales, this approach can become unsustainable. The constant need to juggle multiple roles—sales, delivery, HR, strategic planning—leads to burnout and limits well deserved attention to the strategic growth of the company. 

Professional service organizations often experience a continuous cycle of too much work or not enough work, making revenue streams unpredictable. This uncertainty affects the ability to pay bills, manage payroll, and scale operations effectively.

Because of this, founders are constantly switching between roles or “wearing a lot of hats”—selling, delivering, hiring, and strategic planning, trying to level out waves in the pipeline. There isn’t enough time or resources to track efforts, improve processes, and forecast financial health. This reactive approach prevents founders from focusing on long-term growth and strategic initiatives, ultimately, causing passion to fade. 

To enable growth and scalability, it’s essential to transition from founder-led sales to a more structured go-to-market approach. This is where Revenue Operations (RevOps) comes into play.

What is RevOps?

RevOps is the strategic approach that aligns sales, marketing, customer success and other operations to drive revenue growth in a consistent and predictable manner. 

RevOps ensures that all teams are working towards common goals and are equipped with the information, tools and best strategic operational procedures to help the organization succeed. With this, revenue operations aims to reduce the occurrence of unpredictable revenue streams through analyzing and implementing operational best practices that make a measurable impact on the organization’s revenue growth initiatives.

Responsibilities of a Revenue Operations Manager:   

• Align Cross-Departmental Teams: Ensuring that sales, marketing, customer success, and other parts of the organization are working towards common objectives such as revenue goals, project timelines, and resource requirements.
• Streamline Revenue Operations: Identifying key opportunities to streamline operational processes that impact the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization’s revenue operations. 
• Connect Revenue Trends: Connecting key revenue trends in customer acquisition and delivery, recommending areas of improvement that aid in the organization’s current objectives.
• Enable Team Success: Providing teams with the data, tools, and insights they need to perform efficiently and effectively.
• Strategic Planning & Revenue Forecasting: Working with finance to align revenue operations with financial goals, providing insight on operational costs to maintain and plan for profitable operations.

Steps to Developing a RevOps focused GTM Strategy:

1. Distribute the Hats: The only way to allow leadership to focus on strategic initiatives, is to pass off the many “hats” or responsibility ownership. Start by defining supporting roles and responsibilities across the organization to help distribute the hats and encourage efficiency in each business function. 
2. Define a Cadence: Establish clear expectations for each role. Define how and when responsibilities will be delivered, how teams will work together, and which goals are independent to each function. Creating standardized operational best practices streamlines your workflow and makes it easier to see where adjustments need to be made or where you are seeing success! 
3. Measure Success: Determine how success will be measured in these new roles. Set clear, achievable goals and establish metrics to track progress. RevOps ensures these metrics are aligned with overall business objectives.
4. Empower Your Team: Build a healthy foundation by empowering your team with the necessary tools, feedback, trust, and support. A well-supported team can exceed expectations and drive the company forward.

Getting Started

We’ve developed a guide that includes helpful and inspiring resources, designed to help set leaders on the right path to scaling beyond founder-led sales methods and on to a strategic GTM strategy.

Plan for Future Success

Developing a strategy to ditch unpredictable revenue streams and encourage growth may seem daunting – we’re here to help get out of the unpredictable cycle in revenue and get ahead of unpredictable revenue trends before they occur through resource forecasting.

If you want to chat about professional services operations, reach out to hello@getparallax.com.