How Agency Owners Can Provide the Structure Their Team Members Crave with Clodagh Higgins

Alright guys, welcome to another episode of Agency Journey. I am so excited to have Cloda on the line with us. Cloda, would you mind taking a minute, minute and a half and share a little bit about your background story, how you got into the agency space and what brings you to where you are today.

Cool. Thank you Andrew. And let me just say this has been a long term goal of mine to be on your podcast. I've a listener for a long time. I've been following you guys since quite a guava box, since doing Bound, since the whole thing. So thank you for having me on the show. You fulfilled one of my little dreams anyway when I got the email from you. So my background is I have been in the inbound digital agency business for 12 years. I had an agency in Sydney in Australia when I lived there for five years. Then I moved home to Ireland and I set the business up again and a business partner took that over for me while I went in and spent four and a half years with HubSpot speaking to about 400 agencies on their business and how to implement HubSpot into their agency. And then naturally the conversation kind of grew out of sales and marketing into how do I run this business, is it profitable? Who should I hire, when should I hire? And then that led me into growing into an agency that does full time agency consulting. Just that's all I do all day long now is just help agencies with their business challenges.

That's perfect because that's like everyone listening right now. So that's awesome.

Well, we're in the right place. Awesome.

Yeah, that's great. So what I want to do is just kind of COVID three main questions today and as, as we go through those, we'll like dive deeper. But first of all like what is one recent win that you have had and you've got your foot in like your agency consulting business. You're still in the agency world. You just published a book so like you're pretty busy. What would be like one recent win that you'd love to celebrate? Maybe some lessons you could share from that.

Yeah, I just was on a call right before speaking to you. So I'm living this and breathing this all day mindset, how they work, when they work. I wrote a blog and read books and understand that they need these employees. They can't have a room full of entrepreneurs chaos. But the personality of a manager, of a team manager is entire. It's like trying to change their DNA. It's changing. I can't change an agency owner's DNA. We sit down and we figure out how much do they need to sell in order to hire a person to take over all of that. And that's the work that I do. I just go, you are very good at doing these things. Sometimes agency owners go, I think I'll manage the team. Very rarely works because if they were good at it, they would have been doing it, you know. Yeah, we all gravitate to what we're good at. Yeah, it's human nature. So the answer is, Andrew, I do not try and change them. I, I give them an awareness and I show them a way out by getting the right person to manage their team in the right way. Cause even agency owners, what they love is variety. When I lay out a team leader role and I go, that means you have to be in the office at nine o' clock on a Monday. You have to have a team meeting, you have to have five one to one meetings. You have to report on it. They crack up, they're going, but I'm not in the office every day or at every time. And I'm like, yeah, you know, so.

Exactly. That's the problem.

And there we go.

Nice. Okay, so that's, that's helpful. And like, you can see how when you get people in the right seats, both your team and you as the owner, like, things are going to move in the right direction. What is kind of a hiccup or a bump that you've hit in any of the businesses that you're involved with that has caused you to kind of step back and reconsider or step back and say, like, oh, we need a process for something, or I need to change a behavior in myself. Kind of a lesson learned that you could share that people would learn from.

Well, I know we don't have a week for this podcast. The lessons that I have learned, I have covered a few of them. As you mentioned in the book that I've written, especially in the beginning on my own personal journey, I think the big thing that is not a strength of mine is attention to detail. So you could come in and give me the high level sales figures, the high level capacity figures, and I'll kind of accept them and I'll move on from that. One of the big things that I've learned, because agency owners like big picture and they're already onto the next thing. I've had a huge lesson learned where I took things at face value because it suited my personality and I needed to hire somebody who questions attention to detail and has the specifics. And now I Have that person in my agency so very much I need attention to detail people to cross double check things because I look too big picture sometimes and I'm always ready to accept the the big picture because I want to do the next thing. So I'm like, oh great, that's okay, I can do this. That was a big lesson and I think a huge thing that I learned with the professional services business. Probably two big lessons. Since I've been working with the consulting I work with avidly, which is a large 4 country, 5 language inbound agency. The big thing I've learned is 2/3 of the costs of an agency should be in your people. If you have not got 2/3 of your costs spent on wages, high quality people, you can't charge those big premiums. And I did not realize that when I was starting as being a full blown agency consultant. That was a huge revelation to me and another massive revelation that I had which I instill in agency owners all the time. You know how we're really good at coming up with new ideas. Right. You know that, you know, great. We go to a conference like inbound. Right. We come back into the agency like fizzy Coke bottles. Oh, let me tell you this idea, Let me tell you. Oh, we're going to launch a new service. It's going to be great. The team gets fatigue over time with agency owners fizzing around with new ideas that never get completed.

Yes. Yep.

So I have a new policy for agency owners and if I think I have it actually part of the book and one of the templates, if you have a new idea and this will, this will give you a heads up, Andrew, if you came back into your agency tomorrow and said we're going to launch a new service in order to properly execute one new service in your agency, there's about 26 steps involved in order for that to be a success. That is from where's the landing page, where's the internal documentation? Where's the external documentation? Where's the price list? There's 26 steps on your. Just a new idea.

Yeah.

Now the rest of the team knows that there's all those steps and the rest of the team knows that there's probably about 10 ideas that are sitting kind of half baked. So when your team doesn't jump up and down and full of excitement about your new idea, that's why they have already got a trail of things that have not been finished. And they also know how many steps are involved to fully execute. So I was a huge believer on just Make a landing page, Just sell it. No, no, it doesn't work like that.

Yeah, that's so true. Because at the end of the day, like, everything needs to revolve around your client experience. Because if they start getting sour, that bleeds into your team. They're, like, moody with your team and they're not happy with their results. Then your team gets kind of ornery to each other and it just. It's a downward cycle because you had an idea, but you didn't think through. Like, what are the real implications? Like, how does this impact how the process flows? Like, how it affects capacity? Like, are we even good at this thing that we want to sell now? Like, are we going to deliver the results? So that's awesome.

Yeah. And a part of that links back to the first part as well. About the mindset. Entrepreneurs are very comfortable with starting things, not finishing them, starting something, not knowing where it's going to go, being in the middle of something and just going, changing direction or at the end of something, not really even stopping and celebrating or pausing, just moving on. Right. So if I was to give myself as an example on a simple level, I have about 15 books in my Kindle right now that I've started.

Yep. They're just sitting there ready to be finished.

They'll get there and then I'll start the book on Kindle. I'll listen to it on audible. I'll finish it. Very comfortable with that. 99% of employees do not like that. When you make a statement into your business with a, we're going to start doing something just as, like children, like a start, middle and an end of a storybook, Employees want to see. Well, they want to know the details.

Yeah.

They want to know, well, where does that, how does that affect me? When will the middle bit. What's in the middle? When will it end? And this is, again, this whole relationship of, well, it's my business. I can decide what I'm going to start. No, these people need structure and you need to be able to communicate that. So it kind of comes back to full circle into that again.

Yeah. So true. Dang. That's awesome. So what then? My third question.

Sure.

What. What are you learning right now? Like, you just, you're involved in a lot of different businesses. You just published a book. Like, what gets you excited right now to keep, like, moving forward on all this stuff.

Yeah. The big thing that I had a huge awareness of, which I was so busy finishing the book. And I love what I do. I love helping agency owners. But it's only me. I have a small group that I help, maybe 10, 12 that I speak to every week. I think the big thing that I've really got to appreciate and I would highly recommend anyone who's thinking about taking their knowledge and sharing it with others to make a difference. The book is touching other people that I would not get to. So I woke up this morning and I had messages from people going, thank you. Your book has helped me. Or I read this chapter and it's helped me. So what I'm really excited about at the moment is about being able to help more agency owners. It's a very difficult world. It is a very difficult world when you have family and mortgage and children. And sometimes it can be so stressful that your partner at home is probably going, why don't you just get a job? Because this is very hard. But we've chosen this life and it can be very good for us if we get certain things right. And I think for me, the big thing at the moment is I kind of really realized that it's almost like this is my vocation. It's like I have a business. It's been tough, but. But I think I can help more and more people in a small way for a long time. And I'm really loving that. And the other thing that's kind of weird is I seem to be gravitating and working with a lot of husband and wife teams. Do you know how many digital agency owners are out there in a husband and wife team? Like, I think we need to do a poll. There are loads. There's a lot. Right. I'm talking to them right now. I have the wife going, oh, my goodness. I didn't realize this was normal. I thought this was just us. And then a lot of husbands we would see out in the front, but the wives are doing finance or copywriting. So that is actually a really exciting. And it could be the second book, digital Agency Marriages or something. I don't know.

There you go.

Yeah. Who knows how to have a success, successful marriage and a successful digital agency.

All at the same time. That's great.

Yeah.

Awesome. Well, Cloda, thank you so much for coming on and sharing so much of so much insight into the lessons you've learned, like what you're seeing out there in the field every single day. If people are listening and they want to learn more about you, they want to check out your book, like, where should they go?

Yeah. So I actually into Amazon. It's a happy, healthy digital agency. So it's on worldwide Amazon. Or if you go to growitgroup.com, i blog and share information on there regularly for agency owners to help them have a happy and healthy business.

Love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on. We look forward to having you on again sometime.

Oh, count me in for the next book, the Marriages one.

I love it.

All right, Andrew, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. We'll see you very soon.

See ya.