The Self-Managed Agency

Imagine having an agency that runs itself. Imagine that you could step back and rely on your team to deliver client work, giving you time to focus on the future strategy of your agency or indeed time for you to have freedom to do other things well. That's what we're talking about today. I want to talk to you about the self managed agency. Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob Da Costa. I've been doing some research recently with my clients. In fact, what I've been doing is interviewing people on the phone, trying to understand some of the pains that they have, some of the gains that they're looking for and what jobs they're trying to achieve when they hire me. And it's been really fascinating and it's something that I would encourage you all to do because we all think we really know our clients. But it's when we start talking to them and really digging deeper that we understand why they hire us. Anyway. One of the reoccurring themes that came out of this is that an ultimate aspiration for many people is to be able to delegate a lot more of the day to day client work to their teams and to have more flexibility and freedom to either pursue some other interests they have, or probably most likely to have enough time to focus on the strategy that's focusing on the future of their agency. So that looks like the business development, new product development, marketing, sales and so on. And you know, people just don't have enough time to do that. They're run ragged delivering client work. They have issues where they're the bottleneck in their agency because all of the clients want to work with them because the brand is basically there. And I'm sure you can relate to some of this. And this applies whether you are just freelancing and aspiring to grow your agency, whether you are a two person agency or whether you're a 30 agency, 30 man agency. All of what we're talking about applies today. And so what people want is to have ultimately a self managed agency. That is an agency where the day to day running of the business happens without them and all the client work is done to a really great level without them and they have time to focus on the things that only they can do. I always tell my clients that you need to think about what your hourly rate is, sort of like a notional hourly rate, let's say it's £150. So. So if you're doing tasks that are below that level, you really shouldn't be doing them, you should be delegating them. If you're doing tasks that are at or higher than that level, then they're the things that you should be doing. I suspect that you get this and you understand this, but somehow you're just being constantly pulled back into doing that client work. And no matter what you've tried, you can't break that cycle, you can't delegate enough work, you can't leave that work and trust that your team will do it to a good enough level so you get sucked back in or you help win that business and then the new business wants you to work on the account. I'm sure, as I said, a lot of you will be able to relate to this. So ultimately, whilst you know you want the self managed agency, you want that flexibility and freedom, but sadly it kind of just remains a dream that's slightly out of your reach. So in this podcast I want to outline six steps you can start taking today to get to the point of one day having this self managed agency. And as I said, if you're listening to this podcast as a one person agency who wants to grow, then all the lessons outlined in this podcast you can get right from the beginning to stop yourself going through some of those painful growth spurts and to stop yourself becoming the bottleneck to growth. Now some of the advice I'm going to give may seem pretty obvious, but sometimes we just need to hear it out aloud or be reminded of it. So the first point I want to talk about is that you need to start building your brand to be your agency, not not just you. I recently did an interview with Pietro Ranieri who runs the Ranieri Agency. Now. Pietro was my first employee and he stayed with us for nine years and then he left to set his own agency up. And I don't want to steal the funder from that podcast which goes live next week, but I do want to quote a point that Pietro said which is are you building an agency or are you hiring a bunch of assistants to work for you? And this is a really good question. He made the point really well that if we are just hiring a lot of young people who can take admin tasks offers, then all we're really doing is building an agency full of assistance. So I'll talk more about this and staff in the second section, but it is a really good question to think about. Now I understand that you're always going to be the best salesperson for your agency and I never recommend my clients to hire external, expensive business development people or using sort of lead gen agencies because I think they very rarely work. And actually you spending time on business development is probably really good use of your time and it's going to be one of those steps that does take you towards being a self managed agency. I also understand that you may well do the best work for your clients and that clients probably love having you on your on their accounts. But you're never going to take steps towards extricating yourself from client work to create that self managed agency unless you start to let other people take the lead on client accounts. And that starts from the really early conversations that you have with your prospects. So you need to set expectations right from the very first conversations you have about the setup of your agency, about who would be the lead contacts and indeed about positioning those lead contacts as the best people to work on their account because they're the most knowledgeable person or closest to the media or have the best skills or whatever it is. So you really need to make sure that from those very early conversations you are managing the client expectations. Because if you're the ever the only person involved in business development, you're the only contact that they ever have, then they're going to be super disappointed if they find that Fred's working on the account instead of you. So make sure you're setting those expectations. So that's my first point which is start building a brand that isn't just you, but is your agency. The second point I want to talk about is making sure that you hire the best people that you can absolutely afford. As I said in point one, what you don't want to do is build an agency full of assistants and you at the top of the pyramid. And there's a big gap between you and the rest of the team because you will always be the bottleneck and you will never get to the point where clients are less dependent on you. And I understand of course, when you're first growing your agency that you're going to probably be hiring an assistant and that you won't be able to afford much more than that. But you obviously want to make sure you're hiring someone that feel has the desire to grow and develop and that you're investing time in their development and their training and so on. But what I would say is that you should hire the absolutely best people that you can afford because ultimately they will pay for themselves many times over. And if they have that ambition and hunger to kind of nip at your heels and take on more responsibility, then you will find yourself delegating more. So the message here is hire the absolutely best people you can afford. Take a risk on someone if you think it's a calculated risk that's worth taking. Don't just hire young people who are yes men and will, like I say, have this massive gap between your skill base and theirs and therefore you will always end up working below that notional hourly rate. So that's my second point. My third point is creating a management team. And I think you need to do this as soon as you possibly can. So this is really good practice. If you're even a two man agency, then you should still be doing this, provided that the second person isn't a very junior assistant. But you want to create this really good practice of having a management team that meets, let's say once a month and the sole conversation in that meeting is working on your business, not in your business. So that's talking about strategy in the future of your agency and that you're allocating projects to the rest of the management team to help move the agency forward. It's just not all falling on your shoulders. Now don't kid yourself that you haven't got time to do this because you need to make sure that once a month you're putting the pause button on your agency and that you are focusing on developing it. And it's much better done if you've got a second or third person in your management team. But even if you don't, you should still be working on your vision and, and having a plan, which I'll talk more about in a moment. So that's my second, my third point rather, which is creating a management team. Now the next point harks back to what I've already said, which is that you need to make sure you are a super effective delegator because it's not just about having fantastic staff who do great work, it's about you delegating that work to them and passing down as much as you possibly can to encourage your team members to work at the top of their game rather than in the middle or the bottom of their abilities. And if you tell yourself stories such as I don't have time to delegate or they won't do it as well as me or the client wants me to do the work, then you are never going to be a good delegator and you will never break this cycle. So if that's what you're thinking, I haven't got time. You have to slow down. You have to be a great delegator. I'm going to put a link to my ebook on delegation and the show notes, because there is a real art to being a great delegator. Delegation doesn't happen by telepathy, which is what a lot of people think. That is because I understand what I want you to do. You should understand it. It doesn't work through osmosis. You actually have to communicate really clearly with your team members. So grab a copy of my art of Delegation guide. And that talks about nine steps that you need to take when you delegate anyway. So you need to break that cycle. Don't tell yourself these stories that I haven't got time to delegate or they'll never do it as well as me. Or the client won't be happy unless I do it. Because if you don't break this cycle, you're never going to be able to push work down. And of course if you don't delegate work to your team and you've got ambitious team members, they're going to get bored and ultimately leave. That part of delegation is training and development as well. So that is the next point, which is be an effective delegator. And the next point I want to talk about is having a plan for your agency that you focus on every day to taking small steps towards delivering that plan. And again, I want to emphasize it doesn't matter whether you're literally just starting your agency right now or you've been running it for many years. Everyone needs to have a plan. Because even if you're a one man band, you should still sort of have management meetings with yourself, I. E. Looking at your plan and saying what's the next piece of that plan that I need to focus on? And then taking those actions and putting them into your diary. This is a really good way of making sure that you are moving your agency forward and not just focusing on he who shouts loudest from clients. And that you're sort of going around in circles and never really moving forward. Because trust me, one day you'll wake up and think what the hell am I doing and why am I doing this? Because I just don't seem to be moving forward. I just seem to be going around in circles. And my day gets dictated by what other people shout to me that they want or client demands and so on. So if you have a plan that it need and this plan needs to capture your bigger goals, which would probably be for the year, and then break them down into quarterly plans and then take each of those quarterly plans, break them down into a monthly plan and that is like a to do list for your business and then take those monthly plans and break them into your diary for each week. And then of course, when you are having this management meeting that I've already talked about, you will focus on reviewing that plan, updating it on what you know today, and then allocating actions to different people and then coming back at the following meeting and reporting on progress. Really important that you do that. Because of course one of the reasons why so many plans fail is because they're sort of done once a year or once every six months and they're cast in stone and cannot predict at all what's going to happen. I mean, coronavirus is the best way of saying we could never predict in February what was going to be happening in April. So it's really important that with your plans, you meet regularly with your team if you have one, or you allocate time with yourself in your diary to review the plan, update it on what you know now so it's not cast in stone, and then have this mechanism from taking your bigger picture year, translating into quarters, translating the quarters into months, the months into weeks, into your diaries, so that, as I said, you're taking small steps every day to actually deliver that plan. So my sixth and last piece of advice on creating the self managed agency is to get the structures in place in your agency today to create the growth that you want in the future. When you think about it, you can't build an extension to your house without first putting the foundations in place. Because if you try to build an extension without the foundations, it's just going to fall down. And similarly, you can't grow an agency without getting the fundamentals right. And this means putting robust systems and processes in place. And I always tell my clients that you should be acting today like the agency that you want to be tomorrow. So that means that you always need to be creating that infrastructure so that your agency can step into it as opposed to not creating the infrastructure and then creaking at the seams. So, you know, good example of this would be winning loads of clients and not putting enough staff in place to deliver that service, winning lots of business, having staff working remotely and not putting the tools in place to communicate effectively with your staff or even with your clients. And then everything starts to fall down. If we just keep using the systems and processes and infrastructure we have today, then it becomes really painful and growth feels really hard. And, and often what happens is we end up retreating back to our comfort zone, which is where our systems and processes and our infrastructure is today. That's where we feel comfortable. So part of your management meeting and part of your planning needs to be looking at what infrastructure investments you need to make. And they can be a number of things. I'd say there's all three areas. They can be in systems and processes. So this would be tool, software tools, or documented systems and processes. They could be in hiring new team members to create more capacity in your agency. And they should also be in training and upskilling your existing team members so that they can step up and take on more responsibility. So make sure you're thinking about those three areas now. You need to make this growth in an incremental way. If you think of a growth curve of any kind of business, it actually doesn't grow in that curved way. It grows in a stepped way. And that stepped away says put the infrastructure in place and then we can create growth. And then put the next piece of infrastructure in place and then we can create growth. How big those steps are depends on kind of what risk profile your business is. So a high risk profile would put a lot of infrastructure investment in place in order to create lots of capacity to grow into. And a low risk company, which is probably what most of us are, will put small incremental steps of infrastructure investment in place that might be hiring the next team member or investing in a project management tool like Monday or Asana or whatever. And then that enables us to be more efficient and effective and create growth. It's really important that you think about this because not only does this create pain free growth, or less the least pain free growth you can achieve, but it also means you can grow more rapidly as well. So part of your business plan for the year needs to be identifying where you want to be as a business and what infrastructure investments you need to make. And also what are the metrics that tell you this is when we should make that investment. If we have all of that pre planned out, then we make decisions with confidence and clarity. If we don't have that and we just have this sort of instinct that we should be investing in this, then we're never going to be able to make that decision with a lot of confidence. Okay, so that's my last point, which is get the structures in your agency today to grow into the agency you want to be tomorrow. So a short podcast today, but I thought it was worth recording something about that, because if I ask most of my clients, and probably you, what ultimately you would like to achieve. Yes, some people talk about selling, but a lot of people realize that when you sell a service based business, actually you're not going to get that much money for it. So what is a better solution is to get to a point where you can be less involved in the day to day. And if you've been running an agency for 10 years that's really important because your probably going to get bored if all you're ever doing is doing the same old kind of client delivery work. So my audience is telling me that ultimately they'd like to get to this point where their agency can run themselves a bit more so they can focus on the things that they are best at, the things that they enjoy, or even ultimately step away from the agency so they can pursue some other interests while still having some involvement in the agency as a chairman or non exec director. So if that is your aspiration, I hope you found some of these points useful. As I said in next week's podcast, I'm talking to Pietro from Ranieri and he's grown to a multinational agency so he's got some really good words of wisdom. So make sure you look out for that episode. And of course, as ever, please make sure you subscribe to this podcast and share it with your colleagues. And I would love you to leave a review as well if you found the content useful. But until then I will see you next week.