What It Takes To Become A Successful Agency Owner

As you've developed and, like, progressed through your business career and sort of financial career, have you found you've had to focus on different aspects in terms of your mindset and almost keeping your head screwed on different points. It's like stresses and pressures and like everything just suddenly starts to change a lot when you've got a lot more. Almost too many options in life.

Yeah. There's a lot of distractions as you progress in life because it's easy just to enjoy the summer. Like Jim Rohn, a previous mentor of mine, used to, like, put it into four seasons of life. So obviously you've got your spring, autumn, winter, summer. And I was. I went through a stage probably the last few months where I've made the most money I've ever made in my life and pretty much do anything I want. And I was enjoying those summer moments. So, like holidays, relaxing, still working, but probably not working to my full potential. But because I built the systems, the team, the structure, I was just enjoying those moments. And then now it's like getting ready for autumn again. And because obviously, obviously I've reaped what I've sown and then now I want to build again, to go to the next stage. And I think it's good to sometimes settle down, enjoy the next mountain, as it were. So you climb one mountain, then there's another. You want another peak. Yeah. So that's sort of where I'm at now.

You seem to have, and I think I mentioned this before, you've got very like, calm aura about you. Is that always something you've had or something that you've developed over time? Because a lot of entrepreneurs, I would say myself including that can be very like too high octane and too like over the top sometimes. And they're like, I. Sometimes I've started meditating now to try and like, like bring in my focus, to not think about a billion different things at the same time. Like, singularity of focus is like, thing I'm trying to imprint in my brain now to focus on one thing. Have you done anything to sort of focus on that for yourself for the last few years?

Yeah, good question. Yeah, I started meditating like eight years ago. It was very similar type of personality. Just always doing it, doing it, doing it. Just forward thinking, full of ideas, doing everything. And meditation definitely keeps you calm, grounded. I think over time I've learned to always in my mind, it's simplifying things, whether it's business. So like, I only started my second business like three years ago after my first Business was successful for five years running doing seven figures. Then I saw my seven, my second seven figure business and it was a lot easier. I got there a lot quicker because I'd learned from previous mistakes. But also it's not getting caught up in just hyper growth all of the time because then you've got so much complexity, then you get more stress and then you get more on top of things. So it's like I always want to make sure that the businesses don't really affect me personally as much and then I can turn on the pressure when I want to. When I want to go like hypergrowth and go into something, then I can come back and be calm. So meditation definitely helps for sure. And I think it's just like you said, focus on one thing. There's a good book called the One Thing by Gary Keller. I just was reading it again actually last week. But that always sticks in my mind is like trying to keep things simple in business is very important. A lot of people get distracted and I see that all the time where they invest in other businesses, start up the fifth, sixth, seventh business. Like instead of just focus on one or two core businesses because as humans it's impossible to focus on four or five different ideas and projects at the same time.

Do you see that with a lot of say like I see some of the business coaching students I teach and other entrepreneurs, they try and have too many different programs, too many different offerings and it's almost too complicated complicate from their point of view. And even the end consumer doesn't even know what to buy. Like do you see that happen a lot?

Yeah, well they call it like you want to have one product, one problem to solve. Like get to 1 million on like one thing first, one funnel, like one offer, one offer, one channel. Alex Omoise that sticks with me as well because you see people adding on too many different offers, too many different products. Again I'm always simplifying. Like even in our online education company we have like three products but really it's like two because obviously we have the mastermind. But it's really. And then now I'm trying to put it just into two from the three because again to give customers a choice, you don't want to overcomplicate. I think the maximum is really want to give them three offerings, ideally two. Yeah, a lot of people create probably too many offerings at the start and.

Complicates things coming back to you and some of your routines and how you keep yourself so organized and, and calm as even like this podcast is coming across very like controlled. What would be, how do you structure your day in that aspect to keep things under control. And you mentioned as well that you are quite limited with the amount you let yourself work to some degree. Like, and that's all built upon systems and structure. You talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, sure. So like my every day is. I always start like with a journal. I never check emails, go on the laptop before realistically probably 11:12, 11:00am 12:00pm The Morning Ritual for me is get up, leave her, go for a run, go to the gym, have a protein shake, coffee. And then I'll normally go to a coffee shop, my journal, go through my day, plan what projects I need to work on, brainstorm ideas and then yeah, probably start work at like 11:12 and then it's probably sprint. So like a 90 minute sprint, rest, do some lunch, another 90 minutes, then maybe another 90 minutes. So like I think the core focus, time is important. So realistically, three lots of. Yeah, three lots of chunks of 90 minutes. If I haven't got a mastermind Q and A or something on that day is is normally how I best work. But I like floating around and having freedom. I think think just a lot now like because one decision can make a big impact. So there might be two, three days where people might think I don't actually do work as such, apart from maybe catching up with some, some of the team in Slack. But a lot of the time I'm thinking about recreating my offer, what value I can bring, whether it's a new ad campaign, whatever. I'm just doing a lot of the thinking stuff because that's when the best ideas come rather than tasks all of the time. I don't really like sticking to them anymore, but I had to do that to get to where I got to. So that's what a lot of people try and skip to the point of how can I automate and delegate and systemize my business from day one and not be working in the business? Like I worked in the business for the first like three years or so at least. And it did the extra 60, 70 hours a week while systemizing the business whilst delegating. Because that's what it takes to be successful. Yeah.

At what point did you realize you could suddenly start to delegate and system, systematize things more and did you have any point struggle to give things off? Because like one of my favorite sayings is like you can either have like growth or you can have control. Control. You can't like do everything yourself and let the business grow within itself.

Yeah, very true. Just learning from lots of mentors at the start of reading a lot of books, YouTube, podcasts, attending different seminars and then understanding I understood automation. So like LinkedIn automation, email automation. Then it was like outsourcing to virtual assistants back in the day, years ago when four hour work week was a thing of Tim Ferriss. All of those things was a framework of like how I could do things slightly differently. And then it was systemizing the business with the E Myth by Michael Kirber. I got to meet him a couple of times. So that was a systems mindset of like any repeatable process inside the business. Can we get a standardized sop? Can we do video tutorial step by step, own source it to either VA or someone in the team and delegate, which is important. But again, control. Yeah. So probably the first two or three years I controlled a lot and then over time I've delegated everything to my recruitment agency side. I don't do anything in that business and it still does very well even though I know if I went back in that business and spent time in the office for two weeks, I would probably go nuts. Why are we doing it this way? Why am I not doing that? Why am I not doing that? The more hands off you are just you've got to. Once you've got a team of a players, you can trust them. They might not do it the way you want to do it and if you were in the business it might perform a little bit better. But then I couldn't focus on my other businesses as well and it's probably not a high leverage task. So it's all about like making sure that you focus on high leverage tasks and the low value tasks you always want to try and outsource and delegate as soon as possible.

Would you say one of the keys to your success? I find myself doing this sometimes, like you mentioned there, like you go into office if I go into Slack or I start looking at things like for fuck sake, why has this been done with this? And I start like overly micromanaging things. Is that something you try and keep yourself back from to try and focus on the overall rather than too many specifics?

Sometimes yeah, but I think I'll end up getting down a rabbit hole as soon as I dive into something like that. And then I'll either just fix it there and then like say if we've got an outreach campaign using LinkedIn for organic outreach and the messaging isn't right or we're not getting good reply rates or we haven't seen set things up right, I would rather just go in, do Google Doc, do step by step and then boom, that's the training, that's it done. But as humans, what you tend to find with employees as well is they don't follow process anyway. So I spent a lot of the time, probably year two, year three, literally trying to systemize everything in the business and you just realize people, humans just don't follow it. Like they're never going to be entrepreneurial like you. So. And they're never going to do it as good as you. So you've got to be prepared that if you're going to do it nine, 10 out of 10, they're probably going to do it six or seven out of 10. So you've got to make sure that there's, there's things underpinning that that's going to at least get them to that standard. Otherwise you'll be working tirelessly all the time trying to get them up to 8 out of 10, 9 out of 10. And I think just like if you lower the expectations a little bit around when you do delegate, it's never going to be done as good as you. No matter how much you shout and scream and build step by step processes like things are naturally always going to break to a certain point.