Eric Deeran explains the vacation test: if your agency stops making money when you take two weeks off, you're the bottleneck. Fix it by adding recurring retainers, hiring a closer for sales, and building a fulfillment team with SOPs so the business runs without you.
This is the vacation test. If you were to take 2 weeks off tomorrow and you had no calls, no emails, no check-ins, what would happen to your revenue? There's really only 2 answers. Number 1, it keeps coming in, or number 2, it stops completely. If it's number 1, congrats, you own a business. If it's number 2, then unfortunately you own a job, not a business. And here's what actually happens. Let's say you take these 2 weeks off. The first couple of days are good, and then it starts to taper off a little bit, and then it completely crashes and burns. Your business can't operate without you, and so when you stop working, your business stops working. And here's why your revenue stops. It's because you are the sales department, you are the fulfillment department, and you are the operations department. All of these departments intersect at you. You send all the proposals, you do all the sales, you do all the invoices, you do all the filming, all the editing, all the delivery, you do all the client management, you do all the scheduling. And if you do have one or two people for one of these departments, if they don't do something correctly, you have to jump in and fix it. So what this means is when you go on a vacation, your sales stop and your pipeline dries up. If you get sick, your delivery stops, your clients are unhappy. If you scale, you burn out and the revenue caps at you. Sound familiar? The business cannot grow past your capacity. And unfortunately, this is the harsh reality for many, many agency owners. But I am going to show you how to flip this answer and how to fix this. There are 3 main things that you need. Number 1, you need recurring revenue. This is the floor of your revenue. So every single month you have a certain amount of money coming in. This looks like 5 to 10 monthly retainers that build consistent revenue. Number 2, you need a closer to close deals. This means sales can run without you personally taking all the calls yourself. Qualified leads book in, the closer takes the call and you get a new client. Number 3, a fulfillment system. This means delivery runs without you doing all the work. It's based on SOPs that you built around your process. So then you can hire a videographer, an editor, a CSM, people to manage and deliver for the clients that your closer up here sells. And so what this looks like is that you have consistent revenue, you have somebody who's consistently focusing on only doing sales, and you have people who are consistently focusing on fulfillment, and you're just simply managing these people. Meaning if you want to take 2 weeks off, you can. And the result is a vacation without stress, and you have revenue consistently coming in. Once you can install these 3 things into your agency, your agency actually becomes enjoyable again. I see so many agency owners who hate their job, they hate their agency because it feels like a job at the end of the day. And so if you want our help doing this, just click the link below, apply to work with us. We've worked with over 828 agency owners up to this point, and we'd love to see if we can help you as
