A short YouTube interview/transcript where James (host) interviews Marklin (agency owner) and Sam. They discuss challenges of managing client relationships as an agency scales: delegating client-facing work, maintaining client satisfaction, time management, prioritizing top clients, and outsourcing tasks like email. Practical tactics include assigning top-10 clients to the founder, passing other clients to team members, using a PA/office manager to screen email, and protecting deep work time (reference to Cal Newport's Deep Work).
Chapters
And as an agency, obviously yours is recruitment and this is Marklin. But like when you say you started it by yourself, you were the one obviously that was having the meetings with clients. I assume that's still the case. But when you start delegating and the clients have different, you know, points of contact and then they're no longer talking to you 100%. What was the.
How did you fix that?
Or set it out first and like you still want to take everyone home, you can't. And just that. That side. Because I'm starting to. Well, I say outsource, but it's obviously employing people where I'm no longer doing a lot of the marketing materials. But I know it's providing more value to the client but trying to. To balance that where it's no longer you, you know, it's no longer 100 me, you know.
But.
So, yeah, just how did you.
Good question. And we're still doing that now, to be honest. So we've got.
Finding the balance.
Yeah, finding a balance between me managing the client and winning the client and then passing that on to the team. It's very important again, because the business can't just be reliant on myself. It's important that we let others grow and evolve and get that client experience as well. But it is tough, particularly when you've had a client for two, three years and they're used to speaking to you or emailing you and picking up the phone. I physically can't do that anymore because as we're growing, we've got too many clients to manage. So you need to be quite clever with the time. So I value my every hour of my day very highly. So I will try and focus on probably our most important top 10 clients. So that's when I'll still go out and see them a lot of the time and I'll respond quicker and give them a lot of love and attention because they are very important to us. But that doesn't mean that the ones lower level aren't as important. It just means that that needs to be spread across the team and they'll deliver as their top 10 client and give them all the love and attention that they need as well. You have to have a cut off because, for instance, I don't manage my own email anymore and that's been one of the biggest tasks that I got off my plate about a year ago now. So my PA office manager manage my email and then only forwards me the most important urgent response emails to a separate private email address that no one knows. So then I'm not in my inbox anymore and I'm not reactive to soon as an email pops up, you think, oh, I need to open it. Then you sort of type a reply, then you don't send it. And that wastes much time. And for deep work focused, as Cal Newport talks about in his book Deep Work, the focus time, when you're in the state of flow, you need to be in that. You don't want a distraction of an email, a phone call jump in. Because then all of a sudden everyone's dictating what you do and all of a sudden you get loads of nothing done. Yeah. It's very important to try and outsource that as much as possible. Yeah. And I'll try and pass the clients on as much as we can, but in an ideal world, it's not always the case. So I'll be honest with, I probably still got too many clients that are relying still on me. Yeah. Direct to me. But eventually, as the business grows and we hire more experienced consultants, then I can, I can pass those off. Cool. Well, thanks for that and I hope you guys enjoyed that catch up. So if you have any got any questions or comments, please comment below. What you would like to see more of what type of questions that you would like me to answer in this series and I'll catch you soon.
