How to map the Organization Chart for your Digital Marketing Agency

What's up, digital marketing agency owners? On today's video, I want to talk about how to map out your company's organizational chart. One of the most powerful things you can do to scale your agency and to create more freedom into the future. So, if this is something you're focused on right now, you're going to want to watch this video. So as it relates to growing and scaling your agency and kind of developing an organizational chart, there's some amazing books I can highly recommend you look at. First is Scaling Up by Verne Harnish, Traction by Gino Wickman, and The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber. These are all great books. I highly recommend you check them all out. The one that we actually operate our business on today is Traction, which is EOS, the Entrepreneur Operating System. But all of these books, as you think about growing, as you think about scaling your digital marketing agency, it comes down to like step 1 is get clear on what the, the team structure looks like. These books call it an org chart. That's kind of the traditional term. EOS refers it to it as an accountability chart. But you want to get clear on what are those roles within the business and spend the time, regardless of if you're a small operation right now with you and a couple of people, or whether you're a large operation, it's, it's important to get clear, like, what are the roles within the company? Who takes accountability? Who's responsible for those seats today? And then as the company grows, what positions do I need to fill next? How am I going to make sure that I put the right talent, the right people in the right seats, so that we can serve our clients, so that we can grow our agency, so that we can take things to the next level? So as you think about the organizational chart and you think about how to plot it, you wanna get clear on what positions you wanna hire for in what order. And from my experience, what I've done and what I've seen a lot of other digital marketing agencies do through the 7 Figure Agency family is first of all, you wanna remove yourself from operations and delivery, right? So as agencies, we do websites and we do SEO, we do pay-per-click, we do content, we do Google Maps optimization. We do all of these different things, and usually we get pretty good, right? We understand how to do those things. Maybe we actually even like it, but if we want to grow, if we want to scale, if we want to have a true business that will grow and operate without us, we've got to make sure we're not the ones, first of all, doing that work, and second of all, we're gonna make sure we're not the ones project managing that work. And so one of the first positions you want to remove yourself from is that operations and delivery side of the business. So it might start out with you hiring a delivery person, right, that could do the websites and the SEO. From there, it's probably gonna be an operations manager, somebody that can manage the internal team, the freelancers, and maybe even the subcontractors that you work with in the business. But number one hat, kinda, that you wanna take off in your agency is that operations and delivery side of the equation. Second to that, the next position you probably want to remove yourself from is account management. So account management is as you get the clients, we know if we want to retain them, we've got to onboard them, and then we've got to check in with them on a monthly basis and show the value, explain what we're up to, paint the vision for where things are headed next. Usually as the agency owner, we are the ones selling the client, right? And we're usually the one retaining the client as well. So we're doing those monthly calls. If you want to grow and you want to scale, eventually you're going to need to remove yourself from that account management side of the equation. Because if you're the one that they're meeting with monthly, if you're the one that they're calling on Saturday afternoon because the site went down or because there's some issue with the results that they're getting, that's going to create cognitive stress. It's also going to bottleneck your capability to work on other things. And so usually I would say like around 17 or so clients, You have to decide, do I wanna continue to grow this business, or do I wanna stay in account management, right? So that's the second position you wanna remove yourself from. And then typically the third is a personal assistant and/or a marketing support person. They say that if you don't have an assistant, you are the assistant, right? And so all the administrative stuff that happens in your business, checking your emails, setting people up on payroll, Managing your calendar, managing your travel schedule, doing some of the marketing stuff that you know you should be doing, like setting up your webinars, syndicating your videos, doing social posting for marketing-related purposes. If you're doing that stuff, that's relatively high expense for you as the owner, but low, low actual value that you could be paying somebody on an hourly basis to do that. And so I would really encourage you, like, as you grow and as you scale, Take the administrative function off of yourself and free yourself up to focus on those things. And then fourth, if I had it, I don't think I have it on this chart, would be sales, right? So you've got operations taken care of, you've got account management taken care of, you've got the administrative and the marketing side of the business taken care of. Really, once the business has someone managing the sales on your behalf, you truly have a business that you can either be the CEO of or a board director of because clients are going to get sold because of the marketing and the sales. They're going to get onboarded correctly. They're going to, um, have the management of the account on a consistent basis in the delivery of the service. And you personally, as the business owner, didn't have to do any of it, right? You're going to be involved in it. You're going to be making strategic decisions about it. You're going to be kind of holding the team accountable. But ideally, you don't have to do it. It's a beautiful place to get to when within your business. So how do we get there, right? How do we get to that place where we get this scaled organization and we're delivering world-class results for the clients, we're retaining the clients at a high level, and we've created this freedom where we can do what we do best as the owner, where we can take the time to take the travels and do the things we really wanna do? It's really about mapping this organizational chart, recognizing what are the key roles, what are the key functions within the business. And if you take this from an EOS perspective, you got a visionary, and you've got an integrator. So the visionary, that's probably you, the person setting the goals, setting the targets, looking at the, like, the latest changes in the industry, innovating the business forward. And then you've got an integrator, which is somebody that's like an operations director, somebody that's high follow-through, high fact-finding, that will actually make sure that stuff gets done, make sure that that vision comes into reality. Kinda be your buffer between you, the visionary, and the rest of the team. So we've got a visionary, we've got an integrator, then we've got sales and marketing, right? And usually at the beginning, sales and marketing kinda go hand in hand, right? You're doing the lead generation, the webinars, the stuff we teach you in the Growth System, and then you're also talking to the clients, taking them through the constant sales process, and landing those deals. So you've got sales marketing, then you've got operations and delivery, right? Which is web dev, SEO, paid ads, all of the other things you might do within delivery. Maybe high-level configuration, right? And all the people within that function. You've got account management for retaining the clients, which as you grow past getting, let's say, 6 or 7 clients every single month consistently, and you've got over 30 clients, you might want to consider having a launch coordinator and an account management team. So launch coordinator, client comes in, that's somebody that's sharp, understands the launch process, on top of the ball, somebody you really want to be a shining example of what your company's all about. Because how you come out of the launch will dictate how they feel about you, whether they're with you 12 months down the road. So having somebody really strong in that launch seat, and then account managers— they can typically handle 25 to 35 accounts that are checking in with the clients on a monthly basis, answering questions, seeding the vision for where things are going, keeping those clients engaged and staying with you long term. And then over here you've got admin and finance. And so kind of, if you think about that, I would love you to do— I can share a organizational chart template with you in Canva and on Google Sheets. So just type in org chart here and I'll, I'll get you the link to that. What you want to do is, is write who's in these seats today, right? Is it you? Are you bottom line responsible for this? Do you have somebody in the organization today that's doing it? Um, and, and knowing who's responsible for what gives a lot of organizational clarity. It also helps you see the light at the end of the tunnel, cuz maybe you're doing account management and sales today. But you know that as the company grows, you don't want to necessarily do that. You say, okay, first thing I'm going to remove myself is account management. So I got to start to recruit, I got to start to look for that person, assuming I've got the financial capacity, that can step in and do that particular thing for me. Gives you kind of that light at the end of the tunnel. And so this is what our organizational chart looks like. It's actually broken into two sections, um, just as, as a visual, probably hard to see on this video, But obviously your organizational chart needs to scale as your operation grows. And I've got this great document that outlines the key positions you need to hire as you scale. Kinda walks you through your first 10 clients, who you really need. Once you get from 10 to 30 clients, once you've got 30 to 50 clients, and then ultimately at 50+ clients, it's gonna be you, maybe it's gonna be you, a partner, project manager, operations director, account managers. And then kind of what the incremental is as the company grows. So like 1 account manager for 25 to 30 accounts, assuming they're just playing QB with the relationship and letting the team do the work. 1 PPC specialist for 50 accounts. Any team leader should only have 5 people underneath them. That's a mistake we made as we grew our agency. We had like 1 or 2 people that had the entire organization rolling up to them. And it created issues, it created dead spots. So that's how you map the accountability chart. Hopefully this document will give you some context in terms of who you need to hire when so that you don't overhire, but so that also maybe that you don't bottleneck yourself 'cause you've got too much to do and not enough hands to get it done. I've got a great training called the 7 Figure Agency How to Scale document, and you can access that by going to 7figureagency.com/scale. It's got the organizational chart. It's got this list of key positions as you grow and as you scale. You can access that by going to 7figureagency.com/scale. So that's it for today. Cannot wait to hear how your business grows as you put this organizational chart in place, as you kind of map the growth chart for your agency. If you have follow-up questions, let me know in the comments. If you got value from this, please hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, and I'll see you again real soon.