Most initiatives were hit (as shown in green) which means we should plan to be even more ambitious with our targets next year. Our revenue targets were our only miss but, although we fell short of our initial growth targets, I’m still happy with how we grew over the last year.

During Q1 and Q2 2023, we had 2 clients go into administration, which meant we lost around £100k of booked revenue (which we had to write off), but of course that also impacted monthly income moving forward. The good news is that all of that revenue was replaced pretty quickly, however, it was a call to action to:

1. 1. Ensure margins are at an appropriate level that means we can withstand any (one or even multiple at a time) clients either going into administration or leaving the agency.
   2. Be diversified enough to withstand this type of event, and be very selective with whom we work with.
   3. Change some of our accounting practices to account for bad debt proactively, so if it does happen, it is not a shock to the business.

While recruitment remains a challenge for us, it’s once again the most important aspect of our business right now. When we recruit correctly, we can create the teams that give us the best chance of meeting – if not exceeding – our client’s objectives. Currently, we tend to talk to around 30 people before we make an offer. One of our joint ambitions for 2024 is to ensure we continue to attract and develop the best talent in the industry.

We have maintained our 90% pitch win record in 2023, which we’re very happy about. We put a tremendous amount of effort into each pitch – it can be as much as 150 collective hours from our team members. While this may sound like a lot – and it is – it is reflected in our win rate.

Each quarter we send out satisfaction surveys to our existing clients and gather feedback, notes, comments, etc. Our NPS is sitting around 90 in 2023, and we’re stoked about this. Our client retention rates, which are incredibly high, speak for themselves.

During H2 we changed our onboarding approach for new clients. Because of the high demand we have seen and the amount of time, energy and effort that is required to onboard clients – we have implemented a waitlist for when we can have new clients join. We have done this to ensure 2 things:

1. 1. Existing clients do not lose out on our attention. We never want to be in a position where we shift focus from an existing relationship to onboard a new client.
   2. We want to be able to fully commit to onboarding our new clients, which can be an intensive process.

By creating a waitlist and staggering onboarding we have, so far, been able to balance both of these considerations.

We launched the 2nd round of our Early Careers Scheme. In the weeks after the roles went live, we received more than 300 applications. After a lengthy and involved process involving many interviews, projects, tasks etc, we ultimately welcomed 6 new starters. A lot of lessons have been learnt from our first iteration of the scheme (launched in 2022), and the current group – who are doing incredibly well. They have now each been through 50+ development sessions taught by our fantastic team.

AI has been a big global theme for 2023, and at WeDiscover it hasn’t been any different. We have utilised and developed systems to use AI to make us more efficient. Over the last 6 months or so we have developed our Shopping Feed Co-Pilot (a system to make shopping feed optimisations), AdGPT (a custom GPT to help craft new ad copy), used AI to help with software development architecture and automated testing. Of course there is a lot going on within this space and you can expect some public releases from us soon.

Something we’ve been exploring obsessively this year is understanding how we best work with our clients. Put another way; how do our clients get the best out of us, and how can we create structures, teams, processes and ceremonies to amplify that?

It’s our secret sauce. The combination of philosophy, skills and technology that make us unique.

Of all the things that we have achieved in the last year, I think this is the one I am most happy with.

We now have a much clearer understanding than ever before of the perfect clients for us, the ideal team structure, what rituals we need to follow, how to create clear expectations and how we need to communicate.

This doesn’t mean we get it perfect all the time, but we are certainly improving all the time, and in a more evolved place than we were 12 months ago. I’ve got no doubt that in 12 months, things will look very different for us.

This also feeds into our belief around ‘continuous review and feedback’: the bar we have internally is incredibly high. Our ambition is to be the best and as part of that, we are consistently reviewing our procedures and approaches to ensure they enable us to meet the standards we desire.