Agency owners, it’s time to move beyond the day-to-day curse of not having enough time. We tend to start as freelancers and entrepreneurs, doing dynamic things other business people are attracted to and bringing in new clients. Then, we hire staff to help us manage the workload until one day we find ourselves at the head of a full-blown business. Our goal is to get you to shift your mentality from entrepreneur to CEO. Welcome to the InWork Guild Podcast.
Dave Valentine 0:08
All right, agency owners and leaders what is up Dave Valentine. So excited to chat with you today. Today, I want to talk about the way that you get out of day to day operations from your agency. Here's what happens with most agency owners that I talked with, and I talk with dozens every single week. This is this, the same refrain is what I keep hearing, Dave, I don't have enough time, I don't have enough time, I don't have enough time, I don't have enough time. And a lot of times when this I don't have enough time, it's around things that are important. Okay, so I say something like, Hey, we need to start getting some lead generation going, you don't have any, I don't have enough time to take calls, I don't have enough time to do lead generation, hey, you need to work on some of these processes and systems because they're actually holding you back. I don't have enough time I've got onboard my staff. Hey, we really need to focus on how we can get you out of client calls so that you can be freed up to work on the business and really solve some of these bigger problems. I don't have time, Dave, I have to just do the client work. This is a common theme for agency owners in particular, and it's unique to the creative space, I'll tell you a couple reasons why. One reason is, agency owners tend to be a freelancer, that gets enough business, they start to hire people to work with them, okay. So you may be a consultant, you may have an experience or a background in branding, you may be a great digital advertiser, you may have an amazing content, writing capability, whatever it looks like for you, you are doing things, honestly, that other people are attracted to you, and you're probably a very dynamic person, on top of that most agency owners, very charismatic, very deeply knowledgeable, and so you're able to pick up some clients. And over time, what ends up happening is you bring in those other staff, because you just can't work all the time. The issue is very many agency owners, it's a challenge to take a leap from being a freelancer to being an agency owner, the gap, there is actually a chasm that's really hard to go across. In fact, I remember experienced this as well in my first agency, where I just figured, hey, if I have everything put in place, and I have a basic project management system, and I do some hands on training with staff, they're going to figure it out, what ended up happening was I would bring people in, and I would always have to fact check, approve and work on their work. So while I had a agency that was doing $700,000 in revenue, at the time, I was working absurd number of hours, busting my tail trying to get the work done, meeting with clients, putting out fires, you name it, it was a lot of work. The reason why I can run seven different companies at this point and work less and make way more money is because I focused on my processes and procedures. So some of the ways that you can fix this right away is by going to start a loom loom is a great company that we use when they first started, I mean, literally, I think that were user like number 12 or something. And you can record how you do each and every process. So if you're putting together if you're doing web design, right, go through and do a screen grab using a loom and just as you're doing your work commentate your way through it. Okay, now I'm taking this, I'm logging in, and this is the page where I go to log in, and now I'm on the back end, and we use Divi to build this or we're in Shopify, or whatever that is, right. This is where we build this, go through each step as you're just doing your work. video recorded and commentate on it again, as you do that, one of the things that you can do is have it transcribed. Then you can take that transcription usually charge $1 a minute to have it transcribed and most of your processes shouldn't be more than 10 minutes honestly, have it transcribed and then you can run it through chat GPT and it will make a very simple, easy to understand SOP for anyone that comes in. This works in a whole bunch of levels and I recommend that you take some of the administrative tasks off your plate first. Are you an agency owner that's tired of being tired? You're trying to find the next client, make sure that your client success team is actually doing their job and generating results for clients. And you can't keep going. You haven't taken a vacation a while You're tired. And you know this isn't sustainable, but you're not sure what to do next. If you're ready to grow and scale your agency without killing yourself, and to actually enjoy your life, go to dream agency quest.com. And check out the dream agency quest program. The Dream agency quest program is designed specifically for you by yours truly, I've done this with multiple agencies now over the years. And as you all know, I've built and grown and scaled my own agencies with great success, it's time for you to experience the same. When I was in your shoes, I remember hearing similar pitches from different people. And I didn't believe it, the thing that I didn't realize was that even though I was a really smart person, there were some things that you can only learn through wisdom and experience. Now, I've been doing this for 10 plus years, and I want to give you everything that I've learned, the best part is, it's not just the courses or being a part of a mastermind, it is all those Plus, we're actually going to write your cold email outreach, cold LinkedIn outreach for you. And we're going to show you the very same tools that the STR agency that I own, actually uses to book its own meetings for their clients, if you're ready to grow and scale and then find operational efficiencies so that you can exit and work as little as possible in your agency, go to dream agency quest.com and click on the Schedule A consult button for more information. So if you're trying to teach somebody how to be a project manager, this is a thing that I hear a lot of people struggle with, go ahead and tell people how you want to do that first and demonstrate it on a video. How do you set up the project management system? Why are you making some decisions? Explain it, you have to be world class at training, if you're going to grow your agency. And if you want to get out of the day to day, you're gonna have to get really good at this. Okay. The next thing that you can do after that is billing invoicing. Hey, this is how we do invoicing. Let me show you how to do it. Right. It's just the thing to take off your plate, taking these small things off actually add up over time for not having to worry about billing Oh, so and so hasn't paid, they're three weeks behind, I gotta track them down, you end up spending a good amount of time, 20 hours a month, perhaps just tracking down getting your bills paid. This is part of the challenge of being a business owner, in particular for agencies. So as you're going through this, just remember that everything that you do is duplicatable. I remember whenever I was going through this, I was like there's so many nuanced things that I do that I make that I go through. And I'm not sure that especially when I on the digital ad agency, there were decisions that I was making that were unique to every situation. So for that particular circumstance, if you're a person who's saying, I've got that I've got some serious complexity,
Dave Valentine 7:53
create a playbook. So I would what I did was actually put together a playbook of here's how you run Facebook and Instagram ads. And there were essentially 12 plays, and there were 10 audibles. Okay, so 12 plays being like, here's how you run a brand awareness campaign. Here's how you run a conversion campaign for E commerce. Here's how you run a lead generation campaign. Here's how you run a retargeting. I mean, like, going through the whole thing. Now, the audibles were unique and interesting, because they were things that like, Okay, what happens if you're not seeing the results that we expect for lead generation? What are the variables that you can play with in order to get the results that you need? If you're running a, any sort of ad, for any type of thing, here are the ways that it can work. So the audibles were all different, they're unique, but that gave people ideas and jumping off points for how to solve some of the problems they encountered. What this did was it took me completely out of having to run Facebook and Instagram ads, I never had to do it anymore. What instead would happen is that every week we'd have a whiteboard session, and people would bring me their problems, problem clients, and we'd look at them together. Hey, as a group, we'd sit around couches and chairs and and eat pizza and drink beer and talk with whiteboards. Hey, how can we get better results for this client? What do we need to do when we need? Like, what's the targeting set? What's the creative look like? What if we threw this off? Right? Why don't we I mean, just all sorts of how can we make this work? But it wasn't me laboring through it with them. And then going well, no, I'm not getting any results. But I don't know what to do I change the targeting. Well, once you change the targeting to oh, look, I just did this other thing. And it's like, yeah, you weren't thinking smart. And the reason why they weren't having success is because I was failing them as a leader. I didn't give them the tools that they needed to have success. And so it's gonna be absolutely vital that you start to codify how you do what you do, and putting it into a system that people can easily access and understand. My favorite for you to use when especially when you're getting started is Google Drive. It's an easy system
Dave Valentine 10:00
to use and to label and manage effectively, if you're a little bit bigger purchase an LMS teachable is a great one to use in house. And it allows you to see how far people have progressed and where they've gone. The other thing this will do for you over time is that when you hire new staff, you have SOPs, people can just come in and be like, hey, what do I need to do to do to do this? Or I'm not sure how to do the tasks you just gave me, Dave? Cool. Did you check the SOP folder? No, fish, go do that. Okay. You're able to then say like, Look, you gotta go check this stuff out. It's there. It's, it's already in the bag. It's waiting for you to use it. If someone says, Hey, I tried the SOP and it's not working. Ah, ding, ding, ding. Let's fix it together. Okay, that's where you can step in. But the idea that you have to do everything is false. Honestly, it's making you elevated and its meaning that you're paying people to do work that honestly, why are you paying them? Right? If If your agency is so big, that you are holding it back, because you've capped out I can't do any new business development. I can't work on the processes and procedures, I can't work on the things that are going to move you forward. It's time to go back to the basics. Figure out how to communicate, how to do everything that you do, so that someone else can take it off your plate. If you found this helpful today, do me a favor, go leave a review and a rating in iTunes. And it really helps to grow this show. Tell people about it. Share this with a friend that maybe could use it and I look forward to getting into your ears in the next episode.