How Seven Figure Marketing Agencies Structure Their Businesses | Organizational Chart

What's up, digital marketing agency owners? On today's video, I want to talk a little bit about the scaled agency organizational chart. And so, if you're in that place in your agency, you're trying to figure out how do I grow in a way that continues to deliver world-class results but doesn't require me to work 60 hours a week. Where I get more done without more of my personal time. You're going to want to watch this video. When it comes to growing and scaling your digital marketing agency, I'm a big student of the game. I've read a lot of the books on this particular topic, just kind of as it relates to growing and scaling in general. And I highly recommend you check out Scaling Up by Verne Harnish, Traction by Gino Wickman, The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber. If you've read any of these books, type yes in the comments. But really in my mind, you know, it started with The E-Myth Revisited, which kind of walks you through the idea that as you run your business, You can't be the technician. And in agency world, that applies. You know, you can't be the web designer, the SEO specialist, the Facebook ads person, right? You need to be the owner of the business so that you've got a business that can operate and grow without you. In order to make that a reality, you actually have to remove yourselves from all of the positions in the business. You have to operate as the CEO. And so with that thought, really in my mind, the number one book on truly scaling your agency today and kinda scaling a business is this book called Traction by Gino Wickman, which outlines the idea of EOS, the Entrepreneur Operating System. And so that's what we've rolled out in our agency, that's what we've rolled out in a lot of the agencies we work with in 7 Figure Agency, and it really is a great methodology for growing and scaling your business. But both of these books, actually all three of them, talk about the fact that the starting point for growing your agency is to map out an organizational chart. E-Myth and Scaling Up call it an org chart. Traction and EOS refer to it as an accountability chart. Like, what are the key accountabilities within your business? And so really that's phase one. Regardless of where you're at in your agency, whether you're at, you know, 7 figures, 8 figures, maybe less than that, you know, you really need to map out what does the organization look like as a whole. And so I wanted to share with you the key positions you're gonna need to put in place as you grow and scale and help you figure out where that sits on your accountability chart or your organizational chart and show you what a scaled multiple 7-figure agency org chart looks like. So number 1, as you grow and scale, the first thing you have to remove yourself is operations and delivery. Like, you need to remove yourselves from the position of doing the SEO, of doing the pay-per-click, of doing the actual work, and then you need to remove yourself from the management of that. You need an operations person that can take accountability and ownership of the delivery side of the business. Now, once you've got that squared away, you have to remove yourself from account management, which is meeting with the clients, doing the monthly review, seeing the vision, managing the retention process to keep those clients on board. And then ultimately, you're gonna wanna remove yourself from the actual sales process, the marketing process. I think you wanna hire a marketing support type person, and then ultimately sales. But usually that's the order, right? We remove ourselves from operations, then we remove ourselves from account management, then we get a personal assistant to help with our personal endeavors and the marketing outreach type stuff, and then you wanna remove yourself from sales. So in any business, Whether you're talking about the agency or anything in general, usually you're gonna have these key functions within the business, right? You're gonna have marketing and sales, which is how we get clients, operations and delivery, like the actual doing of the work, then you're gonna have some type of account management retention, and then admin and finance. That could be HR, admin, finance. If you think about this from an EOS perspective and you're running an agency that you wanna grow and scale, You're gonna have the visionary, also referred to in a lot of cases as the CEO. This is the person responsible for setting the direction of the company. What niche will we serve? How much will we charge? What innovative things will we do in terms of what we do for our clients to generate world-class results? Putting together the vision and the direction of the business. Second to that, you need an integrator. Could be referred to as your Chief Operations Officer, you know, depending upon how you're phrasing it and kind of what path you're looking at. From an EOS perspective, the integrator is the person that runs EOS, kind of manages the level 10s, and makes sure that all of the things within the business are happening on time. And usually, when I see an agency that's just chasing their tail in a lot of ways, they're trying to be the visionary and the integrator, right? They wanna set the vision, they wanna set the goals, they wanna be the one at all the conferences learning and kind of coming back with great ideas. But then they're trying to make themselves operate the business as well. So they're the one trying to project manage and put things in ClickUp and hold things accountable. And that's usually a recipe for failure. If you look at this on a Kolbe assessment, usually an entrepreneur, a visionary, is gonna be like very high quick start but very low follow-through, right? And that's almost all entrepreneurs, and we're good at that. We're good at like starting things and taking risks and getting things off the ground, But since our follow-through is low, you know, we can, we tend to fail, right? We tend to fail on the delivery side of the equation. And so an integrator is usually gonna be someone that's high follow-through but tend to be like lower quick start. So they're not gonna take the risks, they're not gonna roll out new services every day, they're not gonna try and jump from one niche to the next. They're very much like, okay, I've got the goal that the visionary has and I'm gonna carry that forward. And so if you're struggling in your business and you're not getting the type of momentum that you're after, you probably need an integrator that can be that person that keeps things on track, follows things through, does the meeting rhythm with the, with the team on a very consistent basis. So we get the visionary, we get the integrator, and then we need sales and marketing. So you could probably split that up at some point where it's— you get someone that's responsible for the marketing of the business, running the webinars, setting up the podcast interviews, doing the cold outreach, finding the events to exhibit at, um, filling the funnel, running Facebook ads for the agency, um, and then you're gonna have a salesperson or a sales team that takes the sales calls, takes prospects through the consultative sales process. Um, usually building that team is secondary to building the operation and account management side of the business. Because usually as the visionary, you step into this role, you're usually pretty good at sales, you're usually pretty good at marketing, And so you kind of sit in that seat until operations is fully fleshed out. So we've got sales marketing, then we've got operations and delivery. And this is usually the most important aspect. A lot of times your integrator in the early days will also be your project manager. So they're running EOS, but they're also kind of sitting in that seat of what do we have project-wise? What do we need to do with the website, SEO, pay-per-click, social media? And actually making sure that the work is getting done on time and they're holding schedules. This could be in ClickUp or Basecamp or whatever project management system that you've got. You've got somebody overall in ops that's responsible for getting the work done, and then departmentally, you've got the key functions that you run within the business. Like in ours, we've got web development, SEO, paid ads, and those are the main operational delivery. We've also got marketing automation, right? And you wanna have people in each one of those seats, or maybe it's somebody that handles all of them. So we've got sales, operations, the doing of the work. Definitely need to have a separate department for account management. So the account managers typically aren't the people that do the work. They're the ones talking to the clients, showing them what you're doing, setting the pace for kind of what the outcomes are, keeping those clients on board. And as you grow, you're probably going to have a launch coordinator Like if you're bringing on more than 5 to 6 clients per month, you probably want a dedicated launch coordinator that's managing that launch process. Hey, getting the usernames, getting the passwords, sending the welcome box, kicking things off in a professional way. And account managers, right, and that number is gonna grow over time, and those people are managing the relationship with the client. They're saying, hey, you know, here's what we did last month, here's where we're headed, here's what we need from you, here's why you're paying us this monthly fee. Usually you're gonna need 1 account manager per 25 to 30 clients, depending upon how complex your service offering is, depending upon how much you have your account managers do. For every 25 or so clients, you're gonna want another account manager to manage that process, to manage that relationship. And then you wanna have somebody sitting in the admin and finance side of the equation. So administratively, right, you've got paperwork to fill out, people have to be paid, The finances need to be reviewed, like are bills getting paid, are they not getting paid? And a big mistake I see with a lot of agencies is, and I'm gonna dotted line this, is the visionary, the CEO, you as the owner of the business, are trying to sit in this seat, right? You're the most important person in the company, you're thinking about the vision, but you wind up getting bogged down in admin work. Where you can definitely find a high-quality VA that understands this admin stuff and can be responsible for processing the payroll and running the books and keeping everything up to date. And so I want to encourage you not to put yourself in this seat. Get somebody that can step in and support you in this role. You know, on paper, this is, this is kind of what the org chart looks like. As you grow, you're gonna need more web developers, right? You know, maybe you're doing 10, 15, 20 websites a month, you might need more web developers. As you grow and you're kinda delivering SEO to clients where you're creating content and you're doing all of that work, you're gonna need more people to help in SEO, paid ads, right? And so these charts start to grow as you scale. So the most important thing, depending upon where you're at in your business, whether you're at $20,000 a month right now or $220,000 per month, you need to have an organization chart like this where you're clear These are the key functions within the business, and then you need to make sure that you and the team know who sits in each one of these seats. The rule is only one person per seat. You can't have two people trying to be visionary. You can't have two people trying to be the director of accounts, right? One person needs to hold that accountability. And so what I'm gonna encourage you to do is set up a chart like this and put your name in the spots that you sit right now. Maybe you sit in multiple spots. That's okay. Find the things that you do well. Find the things that you enjoy. Um, and figure out the things that you don't. The things that drain your energy and start to remove yourself from these positions over time. Again, the way I outlined it at first, usually first thing you're gonna remove is operations. You need someone to actually deliver from the clients. Second thing is gonna be account management, which is retaining those clients. Third thing is gonna be admin and finance, like get a, get a VA, get an assistant, get an executive assistant that can run that. And then fourth is gonna be sales and marketing. And it's a beautiful thing, once you've got all of these key functions in the business fulfilled, you really have a business that can start to operate without you. Where the clients are being sold, they're being onboarded, they're cert being delivered, and they're being retained at the highest level possible. I was just gonna show you guys as a point of reference, this is what our scaled accountability chart looks like, right? We've got Visionary, Integrator, Sales, Marketing, Client Relations, all of the Account Managers, Operations Support, it's on a whole separate page, Project Management, and then Admin and Finance. Hopefully this is helpful. I've got a couple of documents I want to share to help you think through this scaled process within your agency. One's called the Key Positions as You Scale, which is depending upon whether, you know, when you're at $10K versus $30K versus $83K plus, which of these roles do you really need to put in place? And I've outlined that on a document called How to Scale Your Agency. You can get it by going to 7figureagency.com/scale. It's a free document that walks you through like here are the key positions. Here's an organizational chart template that you can work from, that you can modify, um, and then here are the positions you're gonna need to fill in as you scale. Hopefully this has been helpful to have an example of how to really think through your organizational chart, your accountability chart within your agency. If so, hit the like button, drop me a comment in the comments below, share this with another agency that might benefit, um, be sure to hit the subscribe button so that you can get new videos like this that we're rolling out. And I'd love to hear what your plans are as you grow, as you scale. Again, step number 1, go build out your accountability chart, figure out who's in each of those seats today, and decide what you're going to replace yourself from next. Right, the goal is to make more money, but also to have more freedom. And you do that by removing yourself from the, the functions within the business so that you truly have a business that can operate without you. So that's it for now. Grab your accountability chart template by going to 7figureagency.com/scale, and I'll see you soon.