How to Start Documenting Processes Without Feeling Overhwhelmed

Ready to roll, brother. Alright, here we go. In 3, 2, 1. On this episode of Happy Client Show, Ben and I are going to talk about how you can look back at the last few weeks at your agency and document those deliverables without being overwhelmed and actually put some repeatable systems in place. So let's dig in, guys.

Welcome back to the Happy Client Show. You might be totally overwhelmed right now. If that's the case, you've come to the right place. My name's Ben. That's Dimmer, as we call him on the street. And we're gonna dive straight in. Dimmer. Can you tell these lovely very, very good looking people what we're talking about here?

Yeah, we're trying to bring a little bit of happiness to your life. And the hard part about happiness is it takes some work and it can actually be hard at first, but after a while you can begin to feel the joy of that investment. And that is documenting your processes, the things that power your agency. It can feel overwhelming at times, Ben, when you think about documentation, just say, oh my word, I'll start that tomorrow. And tomorrow never comes. So today we're just going to break that down into some smaller pieces to help you digest it a little bit and over time get those documented processes that we know, Ben, are so important to running an agency.

Oh, the stress. Yeah, it is important. You know, the Happy Client show is all about making your clients happier, Making happier clients in general and really, you know, by. It starts with us as the agencies we need to be the Sherpas. We need to have the journey in mind. And by, you know, documenting your deliverables, your offerings, your journeys, you're going to make your clients happier because you have a roadmap to point to and you're going to be a smoother operator. But you can't improve on anything if you haven't documented it first. So that's just to set this off. This will make your clients happier when you do it. And it's going to make you happier because you're going to know exactly what to do when you dive into something that's really.

Yeah, definitely. And you don't have like, this is a pretty simple start. So all we want you to do is get your core servicing team together, you know, the folks that are working with clients on a regular basis. And look at the past eight to 12 weeks, depending on how big your agency is and how many clients you're serving right now, and look at that period of time and just start writing down all of the deliverables that you created as an agency, deliverables would be promised elements inside your contracts. So from an inbound perspective, as that example, that would be like, how many blog posts did we deliver in the last eight weeks? How many new content offers did we put together? How many database emails have we sent out? How many direct mail campaigns have we put together? So inside of each of those deliverables is going to be a whole list of tasks that need to be executed. Every time you create that deliverable, that's kind of where the repeatability of these things comes into play. But in this exercise, just think about those eight to 12 weeks and break down all of those deliverables. If you've got projects as well, list those projects like we did three website redesigns. List all those things down there and then just kind of have a conversation around that list bin. This is a good way to kind of take a little bit of a bite off without taking so much that you're overwhelmed.

Yeah, absolutely. And so by outlining all those deliverables, you know, see the past episode about not taking on things that are outside of your regular deliverable list. Unless you really know what you're doing, you know, you'll have a better scope of here's what we do, here's what we should do it for, and things of that nature. So that's a good, important first step. I'd say the second step from that is, is, you know, should we be doing this stuff, you know, once it's all out there, is there something on there that is causing more headaches than it's worth? It's causing, I believe the phrase you like to use is it's creating 90% of the headaches, but only giving 10% of the revenue. Is there something on there? And there's going to be a couple of these things that, you know, I'm going to say, but some of you, it might be causing your headaches. Big one that I hear from agency owners is hosting. They do website design development, and maybe hosting was something they started offering back in the day. And maybe it's just causing straight up headaches. I know Guavabox struggled with that for a long time, but, you know, for another, it could be, you know what, we don't do website design and development. Maybe we just do the inbound side. And this website design and development, well, it's really taking too much time. So what is really derailing your agency? And if you can't improve it or make it work, I would say get rid of it.

Yeah. Trying to Figure out, like, what are we world class at? Like, what sets us apart from everybody else? And if you're anything like me, when you look at that list, you might find I wouldn't say that we're world class at any of these things. And what I found is that looking at that list and feeling that way was a definite sign that stuff needed pruned off of it. Because you're investing so much time and spreading yourself so thin and as a delivery team that you can't dig in and become world class in anything and really separate yourself from other folks out there. So something that can help you out is when you list all these deliverables. Think about who are some agencies that we could partner with to deliver some of these things that we're not great fits for and how can we connect people with them? Not like I wouldn't set it up and this is an agency by agency thing, but I would not set up a white label thing where we do do growth driven design on the website side. And you can interact with this person over here who has a fake email address that just forwards to his actual agency email address. Oh, but he can't get on the phone with the client because he's actually in Pakistan. You don't want to do something like that because at the end of the day, we're still trying to take the client's journey seriously and help them achieve their goals. But get this list of deliverables down, break it down, talk about it, and then once you've figured out these are the things that we want to do, the next step now is to prioritize that list based on the frequency that you delivered those deliverables. So if you're on a whiteboard, just put next to it, like the number, how many times per week were each of these things created in the last eight to 12 weeks? And then rank that list based on that frequency. And what this does, Ben, is it shows you which are the most utilized deliverables on the team. And that's where you want to start standardizing first. Because you look at that list, for some people, it could be 100 different deliverables on that list. Because one, agencies are crazy. Number two, they do deliver a lot of stuff. There's a lot of knowledge in the mind that can be of value to the client. So we want to create these things, but we need to figure out what are we creating the most of and start documenting there. One thing that we've seen to be really helpful for people is that they look at that list and they document the top 20% of the deliverables they create. That list there covers about 80% of the workload that's coming out. Those are your most commonly used deliverables that you're using to service your clients. Dude, start with your documentation there. Because if I sit back and think I need to document every process I use for servicing my client, number one, I'm going to go freaking insane because there's so much stuff on that list. Number two, I'm not going to have time to service my clients, which means I'm going to go out of business in some time. So neither one of those two things, Ben, is a good place for us to be as agency pros. So that is kind of a step by step process to help you chisel away at this list.

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I love what you said about, you know, 20% of the documentation is going to give it 80%. And that is so true. I think that's a great place to start. And I just want to flesh out real quick, do a little rant on that. White, white labeling. You think you're going to make money, you're going to make your clients better, you're going to be more attractive, but what you're doing, I think it's not transparent to white label in today's day and age, especially when there are so many agency partners you can go to and it's going to cause headaches. See the past episode. Definitely do that.

Definitely. What are the things you need to stop doing? As we talked about on last week's episode of Happy Client show, so what you can do, if you want to add more processes to your workflow, if you want to streamline your efforts, and that's important if you want to eventually grow your servicing team, and if it's just you right now, you might not want to take the time to just document how you're doing things, but you need to pull yourself out of it. Start by just breaking down what are all the deliverables that we created over the last 12 weeks. Prioritize that list based on frequency and then start documenting the most frequently used deliverables first. The rest of them will take care of themselves if you start documenting as you go. We talked about that two weeks ago here. So if you can implement these little processes, these just little tweaks to the way you do business, over time, you're going to become more and more process driven as an agency. And that means freedom for you. Ben, anything you want to add in here before we wrap this one up.

I was going to start screaming freedom. But no, I would just say this is a must do. And a lot of agencies, they start up very fast. They start up very intensely and they start growing beyond their control. This is going to bite you in the tush if you don't get a control of it as soon as you can. So if this is you right now, if you almost ran a stop sign or a red light because we've really convicted you, then number one, we're not liable for that. We don't issue any insurances for that. But then I think it's time to dive in. And I would make this a priority right away.

Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you so much, folks for tuning in to this episode of Happy Client Show. Love to have you here and we will see you next week.

Thank you for listening to the Happy Client Show. You can find the notes for Today's episode@doinbound.com Happy that's doinbound. All one word. Happy. Today's show is sponsored by Do Inbound, the world's first process and project management platform built specifically for inbound marketing agencies. Learn more@doinbound.com if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe on itunes and leave us a review of the show to help spread the Happy Client show vibes. Until next time. Remember, life is a journey. Keep moving forward.