 Hi there, everybody. I'm Nathan Roach, the Marketing Director at Accelerant. I'm speaking to you from sunny Spain today. I'm super excited to be giving this session, and I'm really grateful to the Drupal Association, which has provided this excellent option of uploading content for their content library for those that aren't able to attend the event physically. I'm going to be speaking to you today about how agency partnerships are becoming the new normal in the Drupal ecosystem and beyond. I'll be sharing some data points. I'll be talking about my experiences speaking with agency leaders, and I hope that you'll find some of this valuable in your decision-making or at least that it's helpful to review when you're considering how agencies in the agency marketplace is changing. Okay, so are agency partnerships the new normal? So I'm, as I said, the Marketing Director at Accelerant, and we're an agency for agencies in the Drupal ecosystem. We've partnered with other agencies like Wonderman Thompson, Proctor and Stevenson, Blue State and many others, and we've learned a thing or two about agencies, how they operate, how they scale, fill talent gaps over the years. We've been doing this actually since 2017, where we gave at the Business Summit a talk at DrupalCon Vienna, how agencies are outsourcing how they are turning to global partnerships in order to fill gaps, and since that time giving that first talk, we've had all sorts of relationships established with others, and we've seen a real ramp up in agency-to-agency partnerships, and not just in Drupal, but everywhere. In between 2018 and 2020, we saw that agency partnerships were a new way to offer a blended rate to lower costs to ensure that a unique value proposition was, that a unique value proposition was more competitive in the marketplace, and then in 2022, we saw all of this accelerated. COVID changed everything, borders dissolved, minds were changed about how to hire or how to partner, and where one could find partners. It was no longer about who or which partners were in your city or in your state, in your country or region, offices in office life disappeared, and digital distributed models became dominant in our mid-market agency landscape. So, since 2017 to 2022, we've seen a major increase in how agencies approach partnership and the volume in which agencies approach partnership as a new normal. So, here's what I'll be giving you today, perspectives across this decade of working with agencies. Piyosh and I, my colleague at Accelerant, we've hosted lots of agency leader roundtables and dinners all around the world, and I'll also be sharing some points from some qualitative research like that of the Society of Digital Agencies, SOTA, and others so that you're able to see this data in an easy to digest table form, and you can draw your own conclusions based on these sources. So, let's look at revenue growth from 2017 to 2021 in the agency landscape. You see this dip in 2020, right? You have 16% in 2017, 20% in 2018, 18%, that's the dip in 2020, and then back up and beyond to 44% revenue growth. This is a pretty amazing reflection, and this is coming from the SOTA report, which is referenced below the table, and it shows that post-pandemic optimism among agency leaders, that has been realized through revenue gains. Profit margins have also increased. In 2021, there was a 36% profit margin gain for most mid-market agencies, which is phenomenal, and it shows that agency leaders are feeling more confident after this disruption. They're returning to pre-pandemic levels of optimism and maybe going even beyond that. In 2022, 87% said that they were far more confident and far more optimistic about the marketplace. If you were to ask these agency leaders what their top priorities were last year, 51% say operational efficiency, which is of course saving money and getting more done. We also see 49% say that attracting talent and retaining that talent is top priority for them, because of course we had this thing with the great resignation post-COVID, which really shook up retention and nutrition rates in mid-market agencies. There's a lot of focus now on employee engagement, increasing compensation levels in order to retain the talent base that they currently have in-house. And then 43% have said that sales and marketing resources, this is really important for them to ramp up pipeline in order to come back off the pandemic with a lot more rigor. We see at least in Europe, and I mentioned I'm sitting here in sunny Spain, that domestic hiring through online portal media buying is really increasing. In 2021, across 28 European countries, the number of online jobs, these ads were at 52%, which is a pretty big increase from the previous year, which means that unmet talent search, that this is on the rise as recovery progresses, businesses are becoming a lot more optimistic and they're looking to hire a lot faster. Agencies are addressing this gap differently, though, and it's not just in Europe. Agencies from all over the world are addressing these capability gaps differently. These are the actions taken in 2021, which shows that more agencies were using contractors, about 54%. Some agencies were up to half, were increasing salaries, this is a retention and marketplace correction move on their part. And then 33%, which is unfortunately a pretty lower number, they are upskilling and training their staff to fill gaps. We would like to see this increase, of course, but that hovers at around 33%. But 31%, actually, they turned away work, which is something you don't want to see. That means they've generated so much pipeline or so much work has come to them that they have been unable to deliver this work alone. But if you look here below, we have these two percentages, which are quite interesting. 29% say that they partnered with other agencies to deliver value. And 22% say that they used offshore or near shore vendor partnerships in order to do that. Now, if we club these two numbers, we get to 51%. That means agencies, 51% of agencies over half have invested in agency to agency partnerships from all over the world as a solution to filling capability gaps. And the question is why? Why the change or why is partnership becoming the new normal? Well, working models have certainly changed globally in the U.S. and across Europe. Employee expectation about remote work, fully distributed expectations, or at least hybrid models of workplace setups. This is forcing agency decision makers to change the way they operate. And it's changing their viewpoint in terms of where they can get talent from. Because if all of your employees are effectively telecommuting from the same state, what's to stop you from hiring people in the next state or in a nearby region or outside of one's country, right? So the pandemic actually forced this change and employee expectations were catalysts to this change so that major talent gaps today have to be solved differently. So in many ways, borders have sort of dissolved because in a fully distributed model, localization is no longer relevant. So agencies are ultimately realizing these three things. And we hear this from agency leaders at all sorts of conferences and roundtables that my colleague Pius and I host. First of all, local is old. Hiring employees in your city, even if you live in a metropolitan area, is no longer a really viable option for you. And those talent pools are drying up because people are moving outside of those metropolitan cities because they can get jobs working from wherever they like. Borders are becoming weaker. The pandemic showed us how connected we actually are for better or for worse. But in the case of for the better, we can see great opportunities in people hiring outside of their country. Borders in this sense are becoming weaker because agency decision makers recognize that they can hire contractors or forge partnerships outside of their own backyard. And third is that selling in this marketplace is now very different. Right now we're in a composable digital solution marketplace where you're not just selling one tech stack anymore, right? Even in the Drupal agency marketplace, we see different services are diversified, right? Different technology stacks are integrated, different service lines are being opened, even with small shops, right? And that's because when you're selling in this marketplace, which is demanding composable solutions, you have to be able to offer more, right? And you're not the subject matter expert at your agency over everything, right? So you have to bring together the right specialists to fill gaps. Even the speciality that you have, your bandwidth may be fully consumed with active projects. So you're going to have to bring in a near peer specialist in order to accelerate your growth. Either way, composability is really affecting the way agencies have to sell. The demands for these solution stacks are more complex today than they were a number of years ago. There isn't a one size fits all solution. In other words, which means there isn't a one agency solution for end clients today. So you have to do a lot of things. You have to hire more people. You have to keep those people, acquire more clients. You have to retain those clients and expand that business, stay profitable. All admits this changing complex composable demanding ecosystem that we find ourselves in Drupal and beyond. So what are agency decision makers to do, right? With all of this weight on their shoulders? What are they supposed to do? How do they approach this problem? I wonder if I could tell just a brief story. And I'm here in Europe. So I wonder if I could pull from a really old European story in order to illustrate a point. So a long time ago, and legend has it in 300 BC, the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great entered the city of Gordium, which is in modern day Turkey. And when he entered the city, he and his armies, they found this wagon, this golden cart, which was tied to a post with many complex knots, knots upon knots upon knots. This could be an allegory for the position an agency decision maker is in today. And he saw this knotted bunch of rope and this cart and he asks people, what what is this? He asked the local population and they say, well, this wagon belonged to Gordius, the father of the great King Midas. And there's a prophecy said that whoever could untie these knots, all of them would become the ruler of all Asia. So Alexander the Great is looking at these knots and he's thinking, he's thinking. And suddenly he says, it does not matter how it's untied. And he takes out his sword and he slices through the Gordian knot, right? He takes a radical decision to solve a complex problem in the simplest of ways. And if I could just comment that in many ways, agency partnerships are a radical and simple solution. They haven't been thought of often by decision makers in the past. But in today's marketplace, certainly, this is a simpler means of solving more complex problems. And we're going to see a lot more agencies in 2023 and beyond cut the Gordian knot by this means of agency to agency partnerships. I hope this was interesting that this data, at least you're able to take away something from it. If you want to contact me because you have some questions, please reach out. I've left my contact details there for you on the right hand side. For all of you at DrupalCon Pittsburgh, I hope you have a fantastic time and I hope to see you next time in person. Thanks so much for your time and attention.