Rob's Learning From 2020

Welcome to the latest episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. I hope you had a really restful break over Christmas and New Year and are raring to go for 2021. Now, in this episode, I want to share with you the lessons that I learned and the key changes I made to my business in 2020 in the hope that you can take some things from that and apply them to your agency as well. So let's get on with today's show. Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips, and interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob Dosta. Well, I can't believe that we made it all the way through a complete year, and I've been thinking about starting a podcast for a long time. But I thought to myself, rob, you can't start a podcast unless you're going to be really committed to it. I read a really depressing statistic that said when people start podcasts, the average number of episodes they create before they give up is seven. So I thought to myself, well, if I'm going to do this, I have to get beyond 7, because you're not going to get any kind of return on investment if you only shoot seven podcasts. And it's going to be a complete waste of time setting everything up to just do seven episodes. So I held off until I knew that I had the time and kind of the rhythm and ideas to create a podcast. Now, we started off by doing them once a fortnight, and that really quickly switched to weekly. And that's the plan for 2021 as well. To keep doing weekly podcasts with the idea of one episode is for about me talking about something, standing on a soapbox and talking about a particular topic around your agency. And then the second week having a guest who can provide some really interesting insights and as I learned in 2020, also have different viewpoints to me and we can dig in and explore them. And actually, that has broadened my thinking, and I'm sure that's broadened your thinking as well. So a good example of that would be episode 39, where I spoke with Jim James about virtualizing your agency. Now, I'd always led this belief that you really can't build an AGENC using freelancers or virtual stuff because it's like building an agency on quicksand. And to some extent, I still believe that. However, both Jim James and also an episode that I've got coming up with John Ashton talk about how you can build an agency using staff who are located all over the world and some of them who are virtual and freelancers. And I guess 2020 has taught us that we have to be really nimble. And this is certainly a good way to kind of ebb and flow your agency as you need more resources as you get busier. So. So that sort of changed my thinking from being very black and white to being much more gray. And I hope some of the other episodes that we recorded in 2020 would have had the same impact on you where you've got a certain viewpoint. But perhaps some of the interviews or some of the points that I've shared have actually changed your mindset and changed your thinking. If that's the case, then I'm definitely achieving my goals by running this podcast. So a good example of that would be episode 39, where I spoke with Jim James about virtualizing your agency is. Now, I'd always led this belief that you really can't build an agency using freelancers or virtual stuff because it's like building an agency on quicksand. And to some extent, I still believe that. However, both Jim James and also an episode that I've got coming up with John Ashton talk about how you can build an agency using staff who are located all over the world and some of them who are virtual and freelancers. And I guess 2020 has taught us that we have to be really nimble. And this is something certainly a good way to kind of ebb and flow your agency as you need more resources as you get busier. So that sort of changed my thinking from being very black and white to being much more gray. And I hope some of the other episodes that we recorded in 2020 will have had the same impact on you, where you've got a certain viewpoint. But perhaps some of the interviews or some of the points that I've shared have actually changed your mindset and changed your thinking. If that's the case, then I'm definitely achieving my goals by running this podcast. So let me share with you some of the key lessons that I learned in 2020. Some of the good habits, and, let's face it, some of the bad habits as well. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to share the five lessons that I learned that I think are really important about 2020 that I'm sure you will be able to relate to. I'm going to share five good habits that I've noticed in 2025, bad habits that I really needed to move away from. And then finally I'm going to share my goals and hopes for the 2021. Now, I'm doing this because A, I think you're going to be able to relate to some of this, B, hopefully there are some warnings that you can heed and implement. And C, I want to be really open and honest with you as well. So let's cast our mind back to the beginning of 2020. And I remember coming back from South Africa. I was really fortunate that I was able to spend a month in South Africa, part vacation, part holiday. But I remember coming back through Doha in the Emirates and seeing thousands of people in, it's a very, very big airport, and just seeing thousands of people with face masks on, and it really kind of freaked me out. And that was the beginning of the pandemic hitting home. And then of course, I got back to the UK and a few weeks later we went into lockdown. And I think the pandemic is almost like the grief cycle. I think the first thing everybody did was panic and get really stressed. And for me, what I saw was, was a number of my clients immediately cutting costs, which meant cutting their coaching support they got from me. So, like many of us, I immediately lost some clients. But what I learned through that is that there were clients that did that, and to be honest, they were some of my bigger clients. And then there were other clients who realized that they needed to carefully invest their way through the pandemic and that they needed external advice more than ever. I'm not saying that because I'm trying to sell my coaching services. I think it's just true for, for all of us. And it struck me that there were two or maybe three types of agents of agency. There were those who panicked and cut costs. There were those who did nothing because they thought this was going to be a short term thing that they could just kind of tread water and get through. And then there were the others who were really nimble and thought, okay, what do I need to change? And so that's my first point, which is people panicked and cut cost, but actually you needed to carefully invest your way through this. And that leads me on to my second point, which is those. Those agencies that realized they needed to pivot, and I'm sorry to use that awful word, but they started to tilt their axis and work out what they needed to offer differently to their clients. And one thing I've learned is that pivoting doesn't necessarily mean radically changing what you do. And I think that's why some people didn't do this, because they thought, oh my God, we've got to provide something entirely new. But it doesn't mean that. I mean, at the simplest terms, it meant having having Zoom in place so that you can't meet your clients face to face, but you can meet them online. And then it quickly realized that actually we don't need to have these big half day meetings anymore with our clients, but what we can do is we can have shorter half hour to an hour meetings and have them more frequently. I think working on zoom meant that we need to do interact slightly differently because it's very different to meeting clients face to face and you don't have some of the visual clues. And I think that you do when you meet them face to face. And I think that made it harder and why people get zoom fatigue, which I've certainly had. So my second point is that pivoting didn't necessarily mean radically changing what you do, but it meant tilting your axis. And that leads me onto the third point, which is in order to do that, you needed to really listen, like really, really listen to your audience and work out what they need and serve them. And that should have dictated how you pivot. So I think one of the first things people should do in a situation like the pandemic is talk to their audience and say to them, what is it you need? And then go away and change their messaging and change perhaps the delivery of their service to meet that need of their audience. And I think a lot of people didn't do that. Quite frankly, I think a lot of people just thought they knew what their audience needed or they continue to try and sell the same thing without pivoting. So my third point is that we needed to really listen to our audience and understand what they needed and then serve them with our slightly pivoted product or service. And point four is a really important one, and that is that people should not be cutting their prices. I think those people who panicked from my first point probably then also cut their prices because they immediately assumed that people couldn't afford them anymore, rather than thinking, how do I make sure that, that what I offer to my clients is really serving them? And it becomes indispensable because I am helping them navigate their way through this crazy time. And those are the people that didn't cut their prices. I didn't cut my prices at all. And I hope you didn't either, because that's a very, very knee jerk reaction. And it's kind of like back to that point one of panicking, oh my God, people won't be able to afford me. They'll fire me, so I better cut my prices. So I think my fourth point was don't cut your prices. And I didn't do that. And in some cases, people increased their prices not because they were tone deaf, but because they were making sure they were really serving and really adding value to their audience. So my fifth point of the five lessons I've learned this year is that 2020 taught us more than ever that you need a plan. And that plan needs to be dynamic. Imagine if you'd have done your annual yearly planning in February and you go off site for a couple of days with your senior team and you do two days of planning and you up with your strategy and your plan for the year, and then you go back to the office and you say, you share it with your team and you say, okay, guys, let's go and implement this. And then March comes along and everything's thrown out the window. And if you don't have a mechanism in place for constantly reviewing and changing your plan, then that plan would have just gone out the window. It would have been a two days waste of time, and you would have been ignoring it. And now what would be happening is you would be reacting to all the external situations that dictate the direction and the trajectory of your agency. And of course, that is what leads to stress, because it feels like we have no control. So my fifth point is that you need to make sure you have a plan and that that plan needs to be dynamic. Now, by dynamic I mean that you need to be reviewing it frequently, like every month with your senior team, if you have one, or just on your own. And you need to be saying to yourself, what do I know today that I didn't know last month when I wrote this plan? And then you need to be willing to update and amend the plan, even if that takes you on a slightly different direction. And then you need to work out what we're focusing on this month and communicate that out to your wider team and then get on and focus on doing that. So that's what my fifth point, which is having a dynamic plan is all about. Okay, so Those were my five key learnings or my five lessons from 2020. And I'm sure I could have come up with 10. And I'd be interested to know whether you can relate to those five or you have some different ones. So now the next thing I want to talk about is five good habits. So what are the five good habits that I put in place in 2020, either deliberately or just because. And these are the five I came up with. So first of All I learned to delegate more. This is something that I tell people all the time, and I tell people how they need to change that mindset of it's quicker to do it myself or I haven't got time to show someone. So I learned to delegate more. So I hired a good va, and I also hired someone that's working on some of my sales funnels and my Facebook advertising. And I learned to delegate more and perhaps stop doing some things as well. The second thing that I have always been focused on, which goes hand in hand with the delegation, is automating more. So I think there's so much good tech out there that can help us with automate some of those mundane tasks that we are constantly doing that isn't the best use of our time. And so if there's a way of automating it, then we absolutely should. And if you go back and listen to episode 46, which was my yearly review of the best tools and apps to run your agency, then you'll get an idea of some of the tools that I've used that help me speed up some of those mundane tasks. Now, as you'll know, I often talk about this concept of a notional hourly rate. That is, what is an hour of your time worth? And then to measure tasks that you do against that hourly rate. And if you're doing tasks that are worth less than that hourly rate, then you have to ask yourself, why are you doing them? And then you need to think about how you can stop doing them, or you can delegate them, or you can automate them. So that was my second kind of good habit that I put in place, which was to automate more. Now, my third good habit is to get focused. And I realized that I did a lot of things just because I do them. So what I need to focus on is doing more of what works and less of what doesn't work. And this is a bit of a journey for me, which I'm still very much at the beginning of, but I am trying to really look at the numbers and work out what is working and what is not working and don't just do the things because I've always done them. So that was the next good habit for me, which was to get more focused and do more of what works and do less of what doesn't work. I think another good habit, which goes hand in hand with point three, is to focus more on what I enjoy doing and focus less on what I don't enjoy doing. And for me, what I've really enjoyed this year is building up my online coaching program, the self running Agency Implementation Group, which has done really well and we're up to nearly 30 agencies now. And I really enjoy doing that because I enjoy reaching more people, but also because I really enjoy the interaction between the agency members and how connecting them with each other can result in referrals and networking and great learning. So I think a really important point for me was to get focused on what I enjoy doing and do less of what I don't enjoy doing. And the last good habit, and I think this goes hand in hand with 0.3, which is doing more of what works and doing less of what doesn't work. In 2020, I really focused on building my mailing list and I realized that the gold is in the list because that is a list of people that who know me and like me and hopefully trust me. And if I'm constantly providing great value to those people, then when they're ready to buy, they are reaching out to me and saying, hey, Rob, can we talk? And so I just realized that it's I'm building a really warm audience by building my mailing list. And you know, guys, I' spoken about this so many times. You should absolutely be doing that as well if you're not already. Okay, so those are the five good habits that I created, but there are also some bad habits. So I created a list of my five bad habits. And again, I'm pretty sure you're going to be able to relate to these. So me sharing them isn't just a cathartic exercise of honesty, but is actually, hopefully you can say, yeah, I can relate to that too. So the first bad habit for me was was realizing how important it is to get good boundaries because I didn't have good boundaries during the pandemic. And I think a lot of the time, especially when we were in complete lockdown, there really wasn't much to do and there's only so much Netflix that I can watch. So I ended up working long hours and I ended up working weekends a lot of the time as well. So that's kind of point one and point two, which is how I realized it's more important to get good boundaries. And as a result of not having good boundaries, I worked way too much and I kind of told myself stories. Well, I might as well do it. But the truth of it is, point three for me is that I headed towards burnout towards the end of the year. And I know this is a really common thing for a lot of people because I think as we headed towards the end of 2020, everybody was feeling absolutely knackered and exhausted and frustrated and scared and concerned and all those other emotions as well. So I think for me, it's a case of listening to your body and making sure that when you're feeling burnt out, you have some mechanisms to get away from work and have some distractions from that, whether that be watching tv, having a hobby, meditating, playing a game, whatever it is, just having something that distracts you, that gives you some mental and physical time away from the office. And the next point for me, which was a bad habit, is I think because of what was going on, I said yes to everything. And so I've realized that I need to say no more often, which is definitely one of my kind of business New Year's resolutions. So when someone would say, can you come and do a podcast interview? I say, sure. They say, can you come and run a webinar for us? I say, sure, of course, I'll do that. Can you write an article for us? Yes, I'll do that. And some of the time that wasn't the best investment of my time because their audience wasn't my ideal audience. So, yeah, of course I was happy to help. But was it the best use of my time? And saying yes to everything leads you to working too much and that leads you to burnout as well. So I realized I need to stop saying yes to everything. And then the fifth bad habit kind of summaries all of this really, is that I got too seduced by shiny new objects. I think when we are in a situation where we're thinking this isn't working, there's a tendency to, rather than diagnose why it's not working to see the other man's grass is greener and get seduced by the shiny new objects and go and do that. And what I ended up doing earlier in the year is creating a brand new product called Launchpad Online, which was a product to help people research, validate and test their online courses before they launch them. Now, whilst I think this is a great product, the reality is it's got nothing to do with my audience, which is marketing agencies. So I ended up creating a website, buying a URL, creating a product, trying to use Facebook advertising to sell this thing. And then of course people bought it and it was like a low cost product of 47 pounds. But then what? Well, I wasn't a course expert or anything else, even though I've got a whole bunch of online courses. So I just realized, Rob this is shiny new objects and at its worst. And I parked that product because you can invest a ton of time. And that took up lots of my weekends early in the pandemic. And it's kind of fun doing it, but it also leads you to that kind of feeling of burnout as well. So I think my last bad habit is to remind myself to not get seduced by shiny new objects and to make sure the thing that I'm focused on I diagnosed if it's not working and what I need to change, rather than just getting seduced by something new and shiny and sexy. So that was my fifth bad habit that I hope I can change in 2021. So my last thing I wanted to talk about in this episode was my kind of goals and hopes for 2021. And I'm not a big fan of New Year's resolutions because they seem to be made to be broken, but I do think we should have goals and hopes for our year. And so these are my five. So the first one is to delegate more, and I think I started that journey last year. But in 2021, I want to really delegate more, and I have a great VA on board now, so I want to sort of push him to take on as much as he possibly can so that I can get more stuff off my plate. So that means I can focus on the things that I'm really good at, you know, my superpower, and get other people to do those other things. So that's my first goal. My second goal is to use data to help me make better decisions. And this is something I'm really bad at. I think I'm a very typical entrepreneur that I'm really good at starting things and really bad at the detail and getting them finished and embedded. So I realized that I need to use the data to help me make better decisions, whether that be the data that a Facebook ad is showing me or the open rates on my emails and the subjects that work and don't work, or Google Analytics to show me what pages and amendments I need to make, and just testing more of headlines and pages and so on and so on. So I really need to get better at data, and that's one of my goals for next year. Now, a next goal for me is kind of an old but new initiative, which is to really focus on building my Facebook community. So I have a Facebook group called the Agency Accelerator, the same name as the podcast. We have about 300 members at the moment, but I have been very sporadic about putting content on there. So I'M going to be much more intentional now about building that community, getting them to engage more. And again, it's just another way of me reaching a wider audience. And that sort of leads on to the fourth goal for the year which is to focus on doing less but doing it better. So I've not taken a scattergun approach, but I've done many things in the past such as shoot weekly videos, post on Instagram, blah blah blah blah. And now I realize I need to do less but do it better and do it deeper. So the my key focus is for and next year's marketing will be the podcast, the Facebook group where I'll be doing some Facebook lives every week, doing some training and Q&As as well as my weekly email to my community to really focus on building up my email. I won't be producing loads of more gated content, you know, stuff that you can download from my website because I have so much stuff already. And in my self running agency implementation group where I have about 30 hours of online lessons, I'll also won't necessarily be shooting more content to add to that, but I'll be reviewing the existing content and improving it so that I can not give people more to watch, but just give people better stuff to watch and get my point across in a more clear, succinct way. So that's my fourth goal for 2021 and my last goal is get stronger work life balance. And let's hope that it won't be too long before we can actually all get outside and and start doing some of those normal things that we've all taken for granted. And that will enable me to go and see friends and travel more. But regardless of that, I realized that I needed a stronger work life balance. Now I'm fortunate to have an office at home so I can leave the office if you like and shut the door and have that demarcation between when I'm at work and when I'm at home. And I need to work really hard on that. And as you know, I use my morning and evening rituals as a way of full stopping the start and the end of my day. I just need to really reinforce that and do it more and make sure that I manage my kind of mental health and I get a stronger work life balance so that I'm not working all the time. Okay, so Those were my five good habits, my five bad habits, and my goals for 2021. I'm sure you'll be able to relate to them and I would love to hear what your goals are. I think it's a really good thing to do to write this down and actually print it off and put it somewhere so that I can remind myself constantly of the things that I have done well, the things that I could do better, and what my focus and my goals are. And that kind of fits hand in hand with having your vision and your plan for the year as well. So I hope this episode has provided you some interesting insights. I hope that me sharing my kind of warts and all honesty of my year will help you a bit as well. And like I say, I think it's a really healthy thing to do, to actually sit down and consider this and you know, as we head into 2021, making sure that we are in control of our own destiny as much as we possibly can be, and that we have an amazing year that is really focused and rewarding and we get a great work life balance. So in the show notes I will put references to the episodes that I have mentioned and I'll also put a link to my Facebook community. I would love you guys to join if you're not already a member of it. And of course, as ever, please consider leaving a review for this podcast, especially on Apple Podcasts, because it helps us go up the rankings and be found by more people. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please subscribe. We have some really exciting interviews in the pipeline coming up with some really interesting people who have great value to add to how you run your agency. So make sure you're subscribed to receive those future communications when the next episode comes out. But until then, I hope you have a fantastic rest of the week and a weekend. And I'll see you next week for the next episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast.