Knowledge that once cost me a lot of money.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been thinking about what agency assets are and reading materials on the topic. Without going into details, I'll say that one of the main assets of an agency or any service business is the client portfolio.

And it needs to be compiled as carefully as a portfolio of stocks when investing.

You probably know about ABC analysis of revenue structure; it's available by default, for example, in Tochka Bank.

It looks like this:

All clients are divided into three groups depending on the number of payments:

A — ~70–80% of revenue. Ideally: 3–6 clients; if fewer, there is dependency and a threat: one client leaves and everything collapses.
B — the next ~15–25%. This is the client growth zone; there should be 4–8 of them, and you should strive to move them into category A. These clients are a source of upsell, promising folks.
C — the remaining ~5–10%. This is 0–5 clients, the tail, those who pay occasionally.


The structure should not be skewed, otherwise you are on shaky ground.

But I want to go a bit further and focus not on the revenue structure, but on the structure of the portfolio itself, the clients themselves.

We score each client and determine:

Predictability of money. How much budget the client has and how stable their payments are.

Market dependency.

Rationality of decision-making. Do they clearly set a task and know what they need, or did they come looking for solutions?

Growth potential.

After that, we make three breakdowns:

Foundation (50–60% of revenue) — stable clients who know what they want and have great potential.

Growth (20–30% of revenue) — those who are on solid ground and can be grown into stable paying clients.

Shaky (10–20% of revenue and no more than 1-2 in work) — unstable and small projects, startups.


As with ABC analysis, we see that we need to control the skew. Too many super-stable and foundation clients — the team will be overloaded, and at some point you will slide into being a "pocket" agency and boutique for specific clients. As my experience shows, such agencies are then very difficult to bring into the light (but we actively deal with this as PR specialists) and very difficult to scale — most often there are no cases, everything is under NDA, and the agency's name has already been forgotten while they were in the pocket of large clients. Too many shaky clients lead to the team constantly rushing around on a burning bicycle. Too many clients in the Growth category is a huge risk in the face of a crisis, as these are the clients who cut budgets for that very growth to stay alive.

If you are currently having sales problems, compile a retrospective ICP for the last year or two and draw conclusions.

Or come to me, I will compile it for you and tell you what to do now to sell in a falling market.