How much time do you spend servicing clients?

Hey everybody, I hope you are having a fantastic week. Now in today's episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast, I want to ask you a question and I want you to think about what the honest answer is. And that question is how much of your time do you personally spend servicing clients? Just have a think about that while the intro runs and then we are going to unpick this and I want to help you start to change your mindset and give you some thoughts around how you can make sure you're using your time in the most effective way to service your clients well and drive the future of your agency forwards. So let's get on with today's super practical podcast. Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob DaCosta. Now if you're listening to this episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast live, then I am super excited to announce that today we are opening the self running Agency Implementation Group for the next round of enrolment. Since launching this program about six months ago, we have had some really fantastic success and one of the biggest benefits I think that the members of the group find is our bi monthly calls where we get together as a group, people sending questions and I provide my input to the answers to those questions. But then everybody else shares their experience, their wisdom and I think there's a lot of comfort in just knowing that you're not alone and being able to hear from other agency owners in a very safe, supportive environment how they're tackling challenges and just hearing that everybody else has the same challenges as you do. Now not only do members get access to those bi monthly calls for life, but they also get access to some online resources which is split into three modules which is all about planning, all about new business and all about managing staff. And in each of those modules there's lots of video content, tools and templates that you get access to for life that will help you support your agency's growth. But not only that, you also get a training library which a lot of the the members are using as part of their staff's personal development plan. So currently training courses include things like being a great client and account manager, customer service, presentation skills and value pricing and selling. Together with all of this, you also get three one to one private coaching calls with me and if you were to book directly with me, you would pay more for those three one to one calls than the whole programme. So joining the program is a bit of a no brainer. And the final component of the program is a slack community where people can ask questions, can talk about some of the obstacles that they need some help getting over, and also share successes. This is also where we publish previous call recordings as well. So if you are interested in finding out more about the program, hop over to dacostacoaching.co.uk the selfrunningagency each of those words has a hyphen between them. You can read more about the program and you can also book a call with me if you want to discuss more about the program and your suitability for it and exactly what it entails. Enrollment's only open for another week, so please do make sure you check it out. Okay, let's get on with the show. So the question I asked you right at the start of the podcast was how much time are you spending servicing clients? And I hope you had a chance to think about that and be honest and let me just put my mind reading cap on a moment and let me try and guess. I bet you that you wrote down 60% or more. And if you're the agency owner and you're spending all of that time servicing clients, then this can be problematic. And so in today's episode I want to explore that, unpack it, and provide you with some thoughts around a number of things that you can actually do. Now let's just for a moment explore why I think 60, 70, 80% of your time spent servicing clients is going to be a problem. I'm sure you've heard of the famine and feast cycle, and I've written much about this in the past, recorded some podcasts on the topic, and certainly blogged a lot about it. And the feast and famine cycle goes like this. We get busy because we have won a bunch of clients, so our attention switches from new business to client service. And we're doing a super good job at servicing those clients. As the owner, we're getting sucked in a lot because of course they want to work with you and you know what, projects come to an end and because you've been so focused on that client service, you haven't put the attention you should have done into new business. And so we swing from the feast right down into the famine. Now when we're in a famine space, it's a really not a very nice place to be. And we end up making poor decisions. And those decisions often entail either taking on a client at a discounted rate because we need the money coming in to pay our staff and pay the cost and so on, or or taking on less than ideal clients now, both of those are issues because when we take on unprofitable clients, obviously we have to work hard to service them and we find that the profit margin's going down and numbers just don't add up in the end. And similarly, if we take on the wrong kind of client because we just need any kind of business to get out of this famine trough, then we end up really over servicing them and we end up creating a lot of stress in our agency because we don't understand them so well, because they're not in our ideal target client and they don't understand what we do. So there becomes a friction between us and the client and the relationships are short. We have to massively over service them, and guess what? We lose them in the end. So if you're spending a lot of your time focused on client delivery, there is a real danger that at some point in the future you're going to fall into the trough. Which is why I said as the owner of the agency, if you're spending 70, 80% of your time in client service, then you just don't have the time to focus on the other areas. And let's just split that down for you in a really simplistic way. And I really like this, that we can split our time into three components, three buckets, if you like. So the first bucket is revenue, and that's what we've been talking about so far. So revenue simply means the money that as an agency, we are earning this month. So that's all the client work, all the projects that you have on your book. That's quite a simple definition to understand. The second bucket is strategy. And the simplest definition I've ever heard of strategy is how is your agency going to earn money in the future? So revenue is money today, strategy is money tomorrow. So strategy looks like everything to do with business development, with sales, with marketing, with pitching, proposal writing, and everything to do with how you're going to win business in the future. And then the third bucket, the last bucket, is admin. And admin is everything that you do that is a cost to your business that keeps your business running. So this will include things like invoicing, finances, HR and so on. It's all the stuff that as entrepreneurs and agency owners, we don't really like doing. But if we don't spend enough time on that, then our agency is going to fall over, we're going to have cash flow issues because we're not getting invoices out the door, and we might fall foul of legal requirements because we haven't submitted our VAT return or something, so we need to make sure we're getting that right. So as an agency owner, you need to make sure you have the balance of revenue, strategy and admin, right? And if you're spending 80% of your time in client delivery, I.e. revenue, then you really don't have enough time to focus on strategy or admin. And guess what? You're going to fall foul of falling into the famine, the trough at some point. And at that point you're going to end up making really bad decisions, as I've already talked about. So we need to get those numbers shifted a bit and there's a number of things that we need to do in order to do that. And the very first thing you need to focus on is mindset. And this is a conversation that comes up a lot. It's something that we talk a lot about in the self running agency implementation group. Because you can't start making changes to your organization. You can't start putting systems and buying expensive IT systems if you don't have your mindset, right? So the mindset change that you need to make goes something like this. If you think that if you don't work on a client account, the client will be unhappy and leave. If you believe that you can do it better, quicker, faster than anybody else, if you believe that if the client can't speak to you, they're going to be disappointed. If you believe any of that, then you're going to never be able to relinquish control over client management. And you need to start, first of all, changing that mindset and realizing that actually my staff can often do a better job than me for a client because they have more ability to focus on it. They're closer to the work, they're closer to the media or if you work in PR or whatever it is than I am. So actually they're going to do a good job. And the question you always want to be asking yourself is, will they do well enough to keep the client happy? Not will they do as well as me or the same way as me? Because of course we're all arrogant enough to believe that we do it better than anyone else. So the number one thing you need to do is start changing your mindset and start challenging that thinking. When you think you have to do it because otherwise the client won't be happy or you think, look, the clients just sent me an email, I better respond to it immediately, then you are going to be stuck on this client service hamster Wheel of Doom, which is something I wrote about recently, and you're never going to be able to get off the hamster wheel, but instead it's just going to run faster and faster and faster and you're going to find your percentage of time spent servicing clients is getting bigger, not smaller. And you will quickly find yourself a bottleneck to growth. If you aspire to build a self running agency, if you aspire to grow your agency, if you aspire to have more flexibility and freedom, then you have to start letting go of some of this stuff. You have to start building a team that will be able to take on some of this client responsibility. And you have to be able to communicate with your clients and train them. Yes, I said train your clients so that they have a realistic expectation and they don't always expect to hear from you at the end of the phone. Now, you may well be listening to this episode and thinking, yeah, but Rob, I don't currently have any staff. And if you are currently a one man band and you aspire to grow your agency and then you also have to start thinking about how you can delegate some of these tasks. And of course ultimately that would look like hiring someone, but in the meantime, you need to think about how you can outsource some of your work. You know, I've spoken many times before about this concept of a notional hourly rate, like what's an hour of your time worth? And if you're doing a task that's worth less than the notional hourly rate, you should be delegating to somebody else. So start thinking about how you can get some freelancers to work with you, how hire a VA or whatever else it is so that you can start delegating work. And then of course, when you find yourself constantly hiring a, for example, a designer to do some work and you're spending £50,000 a year on that designer, then that is a good indicator to bring it in house. And that kind of emphasizes the importance of having a plan really, because that will tell you how many months you need to be earning a certain amount of money before you think about hiring someone. So this concept of not being the sole person doing all the client delivery works, whether you are a one man band, you have two staff or you have 20 staff. Okay, so now if you are buying into this concept that actually I need to find a way of delegating some of the client facing work to other people, then that will free up some time in your diary. And of course that time needs to be taken up with the Strategy bucket. But in my experience, one of the reasons why people don't focus on the strategy enough is because they don't entirely know what to do. And this sounds a bit stupid, but if they're not confident about what their new business strategy is, if they don't have a proper plan for their agency, then it's very easy to get diverted onto doing client work because that's what they're comfortable with, that's what they know about, and they feel like they're making a positive contribution by doing that client work. But that sort of thinking is going to really hurt you in the medium term and it's going to put you into the famine trough at some point in the future. So when we're talking about strategy time, let's just think about some of the things that this makes up. So broadly speaking, it's going to be business development, but that's going to break down into your sales and marketing activities. And as ever, in order to be able to really identify the best sales and marketing activities that are really going to resonate with your audience, the first thing you need to do is have a super clear niche. I've been doing a lot of work recently and a lot of work with my self running agency implementation group members to help them define their niche. And just this week one of my PR clients had a big breakthrough because they realized that their niche wasn't in a sector but was a problem that they solved for their clients. And as I talk about many times, you can break your niche down into a number of areas and by a number of areas. So it can be by sector and it can be by geography, it can be broken down by the thing that you can you deliver, but it also can be broken down by the problem that you solve for your clients. And this was the breakthrough that my client had this week when they realized that what they do is they help drive more traffic to create more sales for their clients. Now once we've got super clear on our niche, we can then start to identify exactly who our ideal target customer is, what the pains are that they're trying to move away from, and what the gains that they're trying to move towards. And that's the transformation that we sell to our clients. And so now if we understand our niche and we understand our ideal target customer, we can start to create really great marketing campaigns. We can understand the best places that our ideal target customer hangs out, we can understand the best channels to reach them, and we can produce some sales and marketing campaigns that are really going to engage with them because we're showing that we really understand them and we can build that know like trust journey, which of course we have to take everybody through before they'll buy from us. So if you're not sure about niching and so on, then make sure you grab a copy of my book, the Self Running Agency, which you can get off my website, because that drills down a lot more into niching and will really help you identify your niche, identify your ideal target customer, and then start to think about some of those sales and marketing campaigns that you can put together that will engage with your audience. Now my advice to people always is do a few things, do them really well and do them really consistently. Don't get seduced by shiny new object syndrome. Don't get seduced by spending loads of money on business development agencies that claim they can generate you loads of leads and loads of appointments, but completely fail to do that because you are always going to be the best person in your agency to be your salesperson. And that is entirely why you can't be spending 80% of your time in client service. Now, if you can get the balance right between servicing clients and focusing on strategy, the future of your agency with these sales and marketing campaigns, then you're going to make sure that you avoid the peaks and troughs of the feast and famine, but get consistent revenue, have an understanding of what the life cycle of your clients looks like. So you're ready to replace clients that are coming to the end of their journey with you for whatever reasons, because projects are finishing or just because they've been with you for five years and you're ready to replace them with a new ideal target customer, who you're going to get the pricing right with, who's going to really appreciate the work you do, and therefore you can have this great partnership relationship with them and your team will enjoy servicing them because they are delivering services in a sector in an area that they really understand. So that sort of brings me onto the question, maybe it's the question you've been thinking about. So, okay, Rob, if there's these three buckets of revenue, strategy and admin, what should be the split of my time across them? Now, of course it's going to be different for every single agency and for every single leader, but I would say something like an absolute maximum of 60% of your time in revenue, but ideally a little bit lower than that, maybe 50%. Then you want to be spending 30 to 40% of your time in strategy. That's focusing on the future of your agency, driving your agency forward, making sure you're winning those ideal target customers to feed the mouths of your team and to have enough money coming in so that you can invest in the development of your agency. And then no more than 10%, but probably more like 5% of your time should be spent in admin because a lot of those tasks will be lower than your notional hourly rate. Therefore you really should be delegating them to somebody else. So if you want to work this out for yourself, the way I tell my clients to do it is start off by keeping a timesheet bit of finger in the air. End of every day, work out how much time you've spent in each of those three pots. Add it up over two weeks of a typical two weeks and you'll probably surprise yourself. And then you need to think about that's where you're at, where would you like to be and what's the strategy for moving to the from A to B? If you can get the amount of time you spend servicing clients down to at least 60% maximum, but ideally maybe 50%, you are going to free up time to focus on the future of your agency, to focus on driving the development of your agency forward. And remember, as the agency owner, you are the person that has that responsibility. You're the captain of your ship. You need to be standing on deck plotting the course moving forward so that you can avoid the iceberg if you turn right, but head to the beautiful desert island if you turn left okay, so I've shared lots of ideas, concepts and thoughts with you in today's podcast. I hope that you have taken some notes. I hope you found it useful. Make sure you check out the links in the show Notes where I'll link to all of the things that I've talked about today, including a copy of the book which currently is free but usually retails for £5.99. And of course, don't forget the Self Running Agency Implementation Group is open this week and next for enrollment and I would love to see you on the inside where we dig much, much, much deeper into all of the topics that I've talked about today and indeed in all of the Agency Accelerator podcasts. So meanwhile, as ever, if you've enjoyed the episode, please make sure you subscribe, please share it with your friends and colleagues and please consider leaving a review since as you know, that helps me be found by more people. Other than that, I hope you have a brilliant Thursday Friday, an amazing weekend and I will see you next week for the next episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast.