On 6 – 7 May 2022, AGN members in the West Asia & Africa (WAA) region met in Dubai for the AGN International Business Workshop.
The workshop allowed members to reconnect with AGN contacts in person, meet new faces and forge stronger relationships with some key European members, and discuss how to strengthen cross-border business opportunities.
Throughout the event, key areas for discussion included revenue generation and marketing, practice digitisation, and future regional collaboration and expansion.
Through analysis of AGN membership in each of the key areas, Malcolm Ward – Global CEO and Chris White revealed what we could learn from our most successful members and offered some innovative solutions and best practices.
Participants played an interactive game using fake monopoly money to determine the key marketing areas for WAA firms. A marketing budget of $26000 highlighted the top three big spend areas:
- Website development: This is where most WAA members were committed to spending the biggest part of their fantasy budget.
- External communications: Professionally produced direct marketing and communications campaign materials to engage international targets and referrers and generate leads.
- Internationally themed local events: A surprising result from the exercise was the need for support around internationally themed networking and business development events such as seminars and networking events.
A presentation, which included a case study, highlighted the challenges of digitising a practice and the consequent force field analysis. The three priority areas identified are:
- Resource: Obtaining appropriately skilled and experienced resources was considered the most beneficial and most achievable change a firm could make on its journey to digitisation.
- Business strategy: AGN already supports member firms’ business strategy through a series of tools and facilitated workshops.
- Audit – an ‘as is’ tool: An example of an ‘as is’ audit would be useful to members in understanding how they go about a review of their current systems and processes.
