5 pieces of advice I would give my younger self

Hey everybody. I hope you are having a good week so far. I thought today I would do a podcast that's slightly different and this will be the first in a series of occasional podcasts where I talk about five tips or five ideas. And today I want to talk about five things that I wish I knew when I started my agency. Now, I don't do advertising or sponsorship on podcasts, but I did want to let you know that my book that has literally arrived today as a hard copy is available to you to download for free. And normally it would cost 5.99 from Amazon, but I want to give my listeners a copy for free and it's called the Self Running Agency and I know that you will find it useful. So you can go to www.dacostacoaching.co.uk the SelfRunningAgencyBook, which has hyphens between each of those words. So that's dacostacoaching.co.uk the selfrunningagencybook and I will put a link in the show notes and you can grab a copy of this page book for free. Okay, so let's get on with today's show. Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob Da Costa. I recently went to see Back to the Future at a drive in Cinema and apart from it being good fun, it made me think about if I could get in that DeLorean and go back in time, what advice would I give the younger Rob who was just starting out his agency? So that led me on to think, why don't I record an episode of the podcast and talk about the five things that I wish I knew when I started my business. And as I say, this is a bit of a different episode, but I think it's one that you will find useful. Because after all, I can't go back in time to the early 90s to advise that younger, naive Rob. But I can share my thoughts with you. So here are my five tips that I would give myself when I was running my agency. So tip number one is, hey Rob, have a plan so that you can stay in control and have a plan so that you can build an agency that you want. I think there's a real danger that we let ego get in our way or we let other people's opinion of what success looks like and what we should be doing get in our way. So there's a danger that if we don't have a clear plan that we are truly Excited to deliver. Then we end up following someone else's plan. And it could be some gurus in your industry. It could be a parent, a teacher, a colleague, a friend. But just be careful that you don't let ego get in your way and follow what they think or indeed how judging yourself of what you think success would look like. Because one of the things I've learned over the years is there's no blueprint to how to run an agency and what success looks like. But what you need to do is make sure that you are in control of it by having a plan. Now if you don't have a plan, you're just going to be at the behest of all of the external factors that go on in the world, which could be, you know, the coronavirus. It could be economies, things that are slightly less extreme than that. It could be client demands. It could be not really having clarity about who your ideal customer is. So you win customers that are less than ideal and are really problematic to serve. And so of course you end up over servicing them and you end up being less profitable and you end up filling your time with less profitable work. So by having a plan, you can kind of create a sense of control and you can certainly focus on controlling those things that you can focus on and let go of some of those things that you have no control over. Now, any of you that follow me know that I talk about planning in terms of having a vision, which is the bigger picture stuff, the longer term aspirations, then turning that vision into a strategy, which is kind of the how. If the vision is the why, the strategy is the how are you going to get to that destination. And then the business plan is the what. So those are the specific action steps that you need to deliver to hit the how and then the why. And if you take this kind of bigger picture thinking of the vision, turn it into a strategy and turn that into an action plan, then you've got a pretty sure fire way of making sure that you deliver a plan. Making sure that you have a plan that actually truly excites you. Making sure that you have a plan of destination that you actually want to go to. And like I said, there is no judgment about this. No one says you have to grow your agency 25% year on year. No one says you have to keep taking staff on. So if you have a plan, you can make deliberate choices and deliberate actions to deliver that plan. You know, I've been coaching now for 14 years, and when I started out, I just didn't want to have staff. You know, when I ran my agency, I had 25 staff and, you know, 25, well, 50 hands of stuff to deal with and a lot of grief. And I deliberately said I don't want to have a staff. But I also realized that if it's just me, then I'm limited by my time. So I have to think about other ways of earning money, which I do with my online programs. So today, 14 years later, I have a team of people that work with me who are people that have specialist skills like a VA and a social media person. But I will not employ staff. And that is my deliberate plan. And some years, you know, I don't increase my revenue and that's perfectly okay if I can get them that work life balance, right? So just know what's driving you, know what gets you out of bed every day. Have a plan, document it, follow it, update it based on what you know today, and then you're going to feel like you can stay in control. I certainly didn't have a plan when I started my agency. It was all kind of opportunistic and let's see what happens and be guided by this, that and the other, and, and, you know, naivety and youth was on my side, I suppose. But certainly if I could go back and do it again, I would do it differently. So that's my first tip. What will I say to Rob? And the second tip I would say to Rob is as you grow your agency, build a management team as soon as you possibly can. Because there's a real danger that when you grow your agency, you hire staff who are a lot more junior than you because that's all you can afford. And you think, I can develop them in house, which is kind of a good strategy, but it's also a risky strategy because there's a danger that you end up having this huge gulf between you knowing a lot and the rest of your team who are very young and inexperienced. So at some point you're going to have to hire some more experienced people, people that have other, other agency experience that they can bring to the table in your agency. And when you get to that point, create a management team. And that simply could be you and one other person initially. But if you've followed tip number one, which is having a plan, then you want to use the management meetings and you're going to do them monthly, and you're going to use the plan that you've created for your agency as the basis for the conversations in those management meetings. And that way you are Going to stay high level and strategic in your discussions and not get too caught up in the state of the kitchen or the Christmas party or an issue with client X, which are all valid but not relevant for your management meetings. So the point about starting a management team as soon as possible is that you can start to delegate aspects of running your agency and building your agency to other people so the pressure starts to remove from your shoulders and isn't constantly weighing you down. So that's my second tip. It goes hand in hand with the first tip, which is have a plan. And then as soon as you can build a management team, get into the rhythm of having a monthly management meeting, using your plan as the point of discussion and updating the plan on what you know today that you didn't know a month ago and creating clear actions which are like working on your business actions that you can start to delegate to other people. And my third tip, which is an interesting one, I think this has a lot to do with me being in my early 20s when I started my agency. But my third tip is don't be led by status and don't be led by thinking material stuff makes you happy. And I don't want to get too kind of philosophical or spiritual here, but it is true. I was very driven by status, by growth, by numbers, by things that I could buy because I was able to earn quite a decent living. And then one day I woke up and thought, all this stuff doesn't make you happy. And I had, I think I was about 39 at the time and I think I have my midlife epiphany, as I like to call it. And I just thought I'm not happy. And I was driving expensive cars, living in flashy houses, going on to nice restaurants, wining and dining clients and kind of showing off with them. And then I'd go home and feel a bit hollow about the whole thing. And that led me to sell my agency and reject a lot of that materialism. And don't get me wrong, I like nice things, things like the rest of us, but I feel like I have much more balance. I take care of my spiritual well being by just having time for myself and by really thinking about that first point of like, where am I headed? And I'm driven a bit more by my purpose now because like a lot of coaches, I want to make a difference in the world and I want to reach lots of people. And those things are equally important and definitely more fulfilling than just having money. And of course it's all about having that balance. So status and money don't make you happy. Having a business that you are proud of makes you happy and doing work that you feel is making a difference in the world makes you happy. And those are the things that are important to me now as a 50 something person that weren't that important to me in my 20s. Now if I could go back in time, I'm not entirely convinced that the 20 year old Rob or the 24 year old Rob would listen to the, the 50 something year old Rob because I needed to go and learn those lessons for myself. And of course, you know, we all learn lessons the hard way and you know, that was one of the things for me. But nevertheless, if I could go back and convince myself, then I would definitely say don't be led by money, don't be led by status, be led by purpose. The money will follow and that will make you much happier. So that's tip number three and then tip number four. I would say to myself, hey Rob, get your pricing right. I didn't know a lot when I started my agency. I didn't have any prior agency experience. And back in the early 90s I just followed the herd really. And most people were charging based on time. So they were charging hourly rates if they were designers, or day rates on retainers for PR and other marketing services. And so we sold a day rate. Now we sold a pretty decent day rate for back then. Some of the clients I work with now don't even charge that rate. So we got that right. And I think that's because we had a clear niche so we were able to show up as specialists rather than generalists. And I guess that would be my sort of sixth bonus tip. But we've talked about that many times before. But obviously as an expert, as a niched player, we were seen as an expert and therefore people would be willing to pay us higher fees. But I think selling on day rates is just a terrible idea because people buy time chunks from you and obviously different experience people can deliver different services in that amount of time. And clients start to measure you based on how efficient you are with the use of that task. But of course ultimately that's not what they're buying. They're buying outcomes, they're buying transformations in their business, they're buying awareness generation, they're buying the fact that they're in pain because no one's heard of them, to the fact that they're now an established top 10 player in their field. That's what they're buying. And we need to make sure we're measuring ourselves and communicating ourselves and sharing our results based on those outcomes that the client is after, not based on time. No one's judging the dentist who got rid of your really bad toothache in 10 minutes. They're not judging that dentist on how long it took or how much they're paying on time. They're basically paying for you to get rid of their pain as quickly as possible. And we should apply that same thinking in our business. And so I would go back in time and first of all explain to myself what value pricing and value selling meant. And then I would help me put a value pricing and value selling methodology into the business and then train the rest of the staff to have that kind of commercial understanding. So that's a big topic, one that I've spoken about before and I know it raises its head time and time again with the agency world because we live in this kind of over servicing epidemic and we also live in a world where clients want everything. So if we're not really good at getting our boundaries right and selling in the right way, then we open ourselves up for that. And of course that ultimately means that we are not very profitable. We'd run ragged running all over the place trying to serve our clients. And yet when we look at the books, we're not anywhere near as profitable as that craziness feel. So that's tip number four, which is get your pricing right. And then my final tip is all about succession planning. And actually I would go back in time and say, hey Rob, let me explain to you what succession planning is. I know you're fed up with running your agency, but selling it isn't the best option. In case you don't know, after running my agency for 11 years, having about 25 staff, turning over one half million, I put the agency up to sell and ultimately sold the business. But I think if I could do it differently, and I don't regret that, but if I could go back in time and advise myself and do it differently, I'd say, hey Rob, create a board of directors, get some other people to run the business for you. And realize that succession planning doesn't just mean exiting the business, it could be creating the self running agency that is an agency that can run itself, that that doesn't involve too much of my time. And if you get all the structures right and you have the plan that is tip number one, then you are going to be able to create a self running agency and one that can function without you or without you being completely dependent on you giving you rob lots more opportunities to go and do other things while still earning a decent income and still building this equity thing as opposed to just selling it and getting what feels like quite a lot of money in the first instance. But actually it's not really. And the thing about service based businesses is that they're quite hard to value because what are they buying? They're buying the people, they're buying the brand, they're buying the client base, they're buying your mailing list, they're buying all those lots of intangible things. And so it's much harder to put a value on it. So we can get seduced by what we think our agency is worth, but the reality is that we'll probably get 50% of that if we're lucky. And succession planning can mean other things besides selling. So that's my fifth tip that I would give to myself if I could go back in time. And I think I would have to do a bit of education there because I really didn't know any better. So there you go. There are my five tips. And it's funny that these themes are as relevant today as they were 15 years ago when I was thinking about selling my agency when I was tired and worn out and I wanted to do something different. And they are still topics that I frequently work with my clients on. And so no doubt some of these are issues for you as well, so really make sure that you are addressing them. If my journey as an agency owner has piqued your interest and you want to read more about my time as an agency owner and also get some tips and ideas on how to profitably and sustainably grow your agency. Then as I mentioned at the beginning of today's podcast, go and download my brand new book, the Self Running Agency. This book is part autobiography and part kind of step by step guide. It's 68 pages long and it's really an honest story of how I started, grew and then sold a 1.5 million pound agency. And as I mentioned earlier, it's normally priced at £5.99 but you can grab a copy of it right now for free. So look for that link in the show notes. If you thought this idea of these five tips was a good idea, then I'd love to hear from you about what five tips you'd like me to talk about. Like I say, I will make sure that I do an occasional series about these five tips or five steps. So please do drop me a message. And as you know, if you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, then please do. Please share it with your colleagues. And if you enjoy it, please consider leaving a review for me over on itunes. Thanks so much for joining me today. I know you've got lots of choices of other podcasts that you can listen to, but I appreciate my growing audience and I hope that you have a brilliant rest of the week and an amazing weekend. And I will see you next Thursday on the next episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast.