Bonus Episode: Stop Bashing Your Head Against the Wall of Growth!

Hey everybody. Yep, surprise, it's me. I am recording an extra bonus episode on this Tuesday morning because I am really excited to let you know that the doors to my signature program, the Self Running Agency Implementation Group, is now open as of today, Tuesday, and it's only open till next Friday. So I wanted you to be the first to know. Now, this program is born out of the fact that I see so many agency owners who started their agency with lots of great aspirations. They wanted to have control of their own destiny, but they also wanted flexibility and freedom, all those things that they didn't have in their 9 to 5 job. Yet as we grow, they find the need for control ends up being at the expense of flexibility and freedom. Indeed, all of their clients want them to work on their accounts and their staff, if they've got any, are looking to them to make the decisions and suddenly they find themselves working for a much tougher boss and working for much longer hours than 9 to 5. So first let me ask you, can you relate to any of that? Are you putting your hands going, yes, Rob, that's exactly what's going on for me. I just want to say that it doesn't have to be that way. And that was the basis for me starting the Self Running Agency Implementation Group. Because if you want to consistently grow a profitable and sustainable agency that's not 100% dependent on you, then you need to focus on three key areas. You need to develop a really exciting, living, dynamic plan that's reflecting what you know today that you didn't know yesterday. And if you've got a team, you want to get everybody on that journey with you, then of course you need to have a consistent flow of ideal target customers coming into your agency. And you need a system to do that rather than just hoping or relying on referrals. And of course, once you've got those clients, you want to make sure you retain them for the long term and you find ways of selling additional services to those existing clients. And then the third thing you need to do is you need to grow a team of really empowered, responsible team members who are accountable and take responsibility so that you can get work off of your shoulders onto other people, so that you can elevate your role to that of CEO and focus on the things that are really going to move your agency forwards. Now, it's interesting that last week I carried out a poll on LinkedIn and in my Facebook group to see how much time you guys, the agency owner, are spending every week working on the future of your agency. That is the strategy for your agency. And the results were quite surprising. But then maybe they weren't surprising. But 36% of people who responded said they spend less than 10% of of their week working on the future of their agency. So that's less than half a day a week. And only 23% said that they were able to spend 40% or more, which is probably the number that you should be aiming to get to. So there is a big kind of acknowledgement that people are still stuck on the client service hamster wheel of doom with no time to breathe, let alone plan for the future. And of course, this is a sure fire way of lurching from feast to famine and is especially risky when we've got a potential recession on the horizon. So we need to be implementing repeatable systems that are going to enable us to grow. And of course that's what we do in the self running agency Implementation group. Now it's called an implementation group because it's all about getting the work done. So yes, there is online content and tools and templates that you can download, but there's also a monthly group coaching session where we get together, we ask and answer questions, we share our expertise and we network. Then every two months we have an expert come and sit in the hot seat where they share their knowledge and again you get to quiz them. And so we've covered things such as business development, finance, HR, using LinkedIn as an outreach tool, and in fact, tomorrow we've got a session on partnership marketing. And then in November we're doing a session on making sure your agency is recession proof. So that's another dimension of the program. Then we have a closed discussion group where people can ask questions, they can network and refer, and of course all the work that you do gets reviewed and feedback from me. So I am with you at every step of your journey. Now, to make this program super affordable, I recently switched it from an annual fee to a monthly fee. So that means you can join the programme for as little as £137amonth or even less, £114amonth if you sign up for the whole year and pay for the year in advance. We have about 40 agencies in there at the moment. We're opening up for only 20 new members. So I would love you as one of my podcast listeners to come and join us. I'm sure you've had lots of value from listening to the podcast over the years and of course you're going to learn an awful lot more and get an awful lot more depth and direct access to me if you come and join the program. So just head over to dacostacoaching.co.uk the SelfRunningAgency and I will put the link in the show notes and I will hopefully see you on the inside. There's also a bunch of bonus content including some additional guides, a members directory and some standalone training courses that you'll get if you join before we close the doors. And this gives a total monthly value of around about £3,000, but you're only going to be paying £137 so super super valuable. And I'm also going to put a link in the show Notes to some other testimonials from current and past members of the program. So check out the show notes for both the link to the program and the testimonials and as I say I really hope I will see you on the inside. So a bit of a bonus episode today. I'll be back with you on Thursday as normal and in the meantime I really hope I' see you on the inside of the self running Agency Implementation Group.