Four of the five numbers you need sit free at the National Bank. You need the company number and ten minutes. On IKAg's factsheets they are already calculated, with the market median beside them.
The five checks
- EBITDA margin on gross margin. Healthy above 22 percent, danger zone below 7 percent.
- Gross margin per full-time equivalent. Healthy above 76,000 euro, danger zone below 61,000 euro.
- Gross margin trend. Healthy at three years growing or stable, danger zone at two consecutive years of decline.
- Equity. Healthy when positive and growing, danger zone when negative.
- Share of the largest client. Healthy below 25 percent, danger zone above 40 percent.
The thresholds are the median and the first quartile of the Belgian agency market in financial year 2024. Everything in between is the middle half of the market: neither confirmation nor alarm, and by far the most common outcome.
The fifth has to be asked
The share of the largest client appears in no annual accounts. That makes the question doubly useful: the answer says something about their dependence, and the willingness to answer says something about how the relationship will run.
What to do with the result
Five greens? Then you probably have a supplier who will still be there when your campaign ends. It says no more than that, and that is not nothing.
One red line? That is a conversation topic, not grounds for rejection. An agency that explains and gives context is more informative than one that talks smoothly past it.
The context to read alongside
In financial year 2024, 85.4 percent of Belgian agencies earned back their own operation. The odds that an agency on your longlist is healthy are high. And even on the harshest signal in this set, two consecutive years of decline, nearly three in four agencies still post a profit: that can just as easily be one large client lost as a structural problem.
These figures measure continuity risk, not quality. So do not use them to reject, use them to know which question to ask.
See also: what a normal margin is and does this agency still exist.