What to Do When Your Agency Hits a Plateau

In this clip, we're going to talk about what you should do when your agency hits a plateau. But before we do, if you're on YouTube, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and hit the little bell button too if you want to hear my beautiful voice. Subscribe. And it doesn't matter what channel you're on, don't forget to subscribe or follow wherever you are coming from if you enjoy clips on growing your business and just personal growth too and things like that. All right, so let's talk about this. Here's what you should do in the very beginning, and I recommend reading this book. It's called What Got You Here Won't Get You There. In the past, What I've looked at is when my agency has hit a plateau, oftentimes it's because I don't know what I don't know. When I first took over the agency and I took over my agency Single Grain, first thing that happened was I joined a group called Entrepreneurs Organization. And in the group you have seasoned entrepreneurs, they're all doing over 7 figures a year and everyone does things differently. And at the time I was the youngest person in the group. I think I was maybe 26 years old or so. Basically I was getting, I was downloading a lot of information from people because what was going on was my business was failing. Um, I took it over when it was a failing business and I made it fail even more. I was basically in disaster mode and yeah, I mean, I didn't just hit a plateau. I mean, I hit a plateau and I was going straight down. Um, so I was jumping off a cliff basically. Ah! And so at that point what happened was I talked to one of the guys that I knew in the group. His name is Alex and, uh, you know, he gave me some insight. He said, look, you gotta be looking at your cash flow. You gotta be doing, uh, looking at your cash flow forecast, things like that. You gotta be— here's what I do. Here's where I go crazy if, you know, we don't have enough cash in the bank. Here's all the tactics that I do. So one of the things I do when I hit a plateau is, you know, talk to the people that have already been there. They have the experience, they have the knowledge, and then they're willing to share it with you. So it could be a mentor, it could be a peer group like this, um, but go out there and try to seek help, right? There's other groups like Young Entrepreneur Council that you can join, um, and then you can talk to the people in there and then people often make introductions for you because what you do, what you need to do is When you look at things that are going poorly, like everything was going poorly. I was losing, I was losing employees. I was, my God, we had trouble generating leads and I didn't really build any rapport with anyone. I shut the, I shut the office down. I made like a million mistakes because I just didn't know any better. And what happened there was, you know, once I got to talking to a few people, it was like, okay, you need to do it this way. You need to do it this way. You need to do it this way. And from there I was slowly able to right the ship. So oftentimes in, in your company, what's going to happen is let's say you hit a plateau. Let's say, um, let's say you are the director or let's say you're the, you're, you're like the producer, the video producer on the team and you are in line to become the director of video and you know, that's what you've been promised right now. What happens here is if you are unable to, uh, from a business perspective, you look at that person and you say, okay, um, how's this person doing in terms of hitting numbers? How's this person doing in terms of, Um, you know, building just in general, like being an asset to the team, right? And you have to look at things from a sports team perspective. When you look at a sports team like the NBA or the soccer teams or the NFL, what happens there is even the best players, they get cut. Even the players that have been with the team for the longest time, they get cut because they can't perform anymore. Or what happens is they end up being relegated into a reserve role and then someone, they end up hiring some fresh talent or someone that's been there already, someone that's, that's very experienced. So, Good example of this would be Anthony Davis, bringing Anthony Davis to the Lakers. They had to trade 3 of their really promising stars, um, or the young core, and then they traded, I think, 3 first-round picks. So basically in sports, they're giving up a lot to get this one player, um, and they're paying this one player a lot of money. And so what happens here is when you look at a company, a company is a high-performance sports team. It isn't supposed to be, and even though I try to make sure that, you know, people are very happy, You got to make sure that it's about the business first and it's not about building a family because you already have a family, you already have friends, right? You're not here to go to your day to day and to build another family. So what you got to do here is you got to focus on, okay, what is going to help us get to the next level? If we're constantly hitting a wall, who do we go to for help? Whether it's contract help, maybe it's temporary help like a consultant, or who do you go to for full-time help, right? Who can you bring in full-time to help nurture and mentor the people on your team? Now here's the problem when you do that. In the NBA or in soccer teams, for example, if one star is there and they find another star comes in and kind of overtakes them, how do you think they're going to feel? They're not going to feel good, right? So now you have to deal with the human element, the part of this where you have an honest conversation with the people on your team and say, okay, look, this is what's going on right now. And you know, you can either come along for the ride or I can help you with something else. I can help you find something else. you should do that because you care about your people, right? Um, but at the same time, you gotta care about your business. This is, this is why doing a business is so risky because you are taking a risk and you have to deal with things like this. You have to deal with how do you appease the person that's been with you for a long time and what do you do next, right? Who do you go find next? So that these are 2 jobs in one and you have to do it. You have to make sure you do a good job and you have to make sure the new person fits too and you have to make sure everything's crystal clear on what's going on. The 3rd thing you can do is think about All the things that you're doing right now. Okay, so what we do is an exercise called start, stop, keep. Ideally, I'd like to focus on the stop because you're probably doing a lot of different things right now. What's actually not driving the most revenue for right now? And then also, what should you start doing? What are the things that you're seeing out there that you're drawing influence from that maybe you should start doing? And what are the things that you should keep doing? Like for example, videos like this. We're going to keep doing videos like this because they're great. We're going to keep doing the podcast. Um, we're going to keep doing the blog because those are the things that are proven to work for us. It's more important if you look at the top CEOs in the world, it's more about focusing. It's more about taking the things away that are not working and focusing on the things that are actually working and then continue to go from there. The other thing I'll add too is maybe this is number 4, is if you think about how big businesses are run, they're oftentimes just trying to protect what they currently have. Now if you're like, you're, most of us, we're going to be smaller businesses, right? Oftentimes there's going to be a lot of chaos. There's gonna be a lot of different things going on. So you have to learn how to straddle the line between jumping around from maintaining, like you're in defense mode versus like, you know, being on the attack, making sure that you are trying new things, right? So you know, that, that's kind of more on the chaos end. If you're too far on, on, on, on the defensive end, what's going to happen is the business is not going to grow that much anymore. But if you're too aggressive trying to do too many things, you're going to drive your people nuts, right? So you've got to focus on, on kind of, you know, straddling the middle. And then maybe sometimes when it's war, you focus on trying to, um, trying to maybe defend a little bit. And sometimes when it's, um, when it's in peacetime, maybe that's when you try the more aggressive things, right? So think about how you can, you know, dial things back, uh, from there. Number 5, it's not just about trying, you know, uh, it's not just about your product at the end of the day. It is ultimately about your people. So a couple of tools that I use to manage kind of employee engagement, I use a tool called 15Five. That's the number 15 and then the, the word 5 spelled out. From there, I mean, we have these 360 reviews, right? You can see how people feel about each other. Their peers are reviewing each other, upward reviews, things like that. And I'm sure a lot of you have heard of 360 reviews, but also weekly you can see the general pulse about how the company is feeling. Um, you can see how people are tracking in terms of things they got done. Um, people high-fiving each other, uh, things like that, right? So employee engagement, super important for us. And then also focusing on, Uh, the culture, because what are you— the only reason you're going to build a high-performance sports team that will stay here for a long time is you break— you build a great culture because people are going to talk about your culture. People are going to stay longer. Okay. And you're going to be able to get the things that you need to get done. Ideally what you want the people on your team to be aware of too is you want them to look out for themselves, right? Um, so I actually learned this from the Netflix book called Powerful. Patty McCord, I think she was their head of HR. And what she said was she always encouraged people to kind of look out for themselves, right? Um, and to make sure that, you know, everything they did was to, you know, perform for the company and make sure that they had the right people in the right seats and they're constantly out there, you know, on the lookout. And, you know, people weren't satisfied with things, you know, they would just go and talk to them and just be very upfront, be, be very direct. I think what happened when I hit a plateau was I tried to do everything on my own. I tried to, I tried to save the company on my own. I tried to, you know, um, all the marketing, all the sales, right? Um, you know, all the recruiting, all the big decisions, all that, it all fell on my plate because I felt like, You know, I didn't do it all on my own because I was the head of the company and no, like you bring people in to help you because you want to grow the business. You want to go further in the business. You can't do that by yourself. So what I learned was I didn't learn to leverage the people I had around me that were willing to help, that they wanted to help and they wanted to get better. So you got to learn if you're hitting a plateau, I'm talking more about people again, you got to delegate. Okay? When you hit a plateau, you got to look over who's actually been there, who's actually got the experience, And then bring those people in. You gotta talk to people that have experience. You gotta kind of measure employee engagement too. And this is all the stuff that we often put on the back burner. We think about it's all about the product, it's all about the service, but no, at the end of the day, every single business, every single thing you see around you, it's not just, oh, it's a business, it's people. Remember, it's also a business too. So you're building a high-performance sports team. Okay, so here's what I want you to do now. Click on the link below, could be the first link in the description, or the first link in the comments. It's going to help you grow your agency or your consulting business. It's a free video just for you. And let me know in the comments what you think below. If you think I'm right, if you think I'm wrong, if you think I missed something. Also, don't forget to check out the next video over there. Okay? And don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. And if you're on YouTube, hit the subscribe button below and hit the bell button too so you get more videos like this. That's it for today and we'll see you tomorrow.