How to have an agency that you love [Part 2]

Welcome back. Picking up from Part 1, I will be looking at more ways to finding a way back to the reasons you opened the agency in the first place,  so you can be excited about going to work each day and not dreading it.

If you following along then hopefully by now you will have read Traction by Gino Wickman and either decided to self implement or engage with a professional implementor who can help you create structure, processes and set clear goals for your team and your business to work on.

If you missed the first three steps to having an agency you love have a look at it here: Have to have an agency that you love [Part 1]

4) Do not skip meetings - improve them

Often when you are working in a small team there is a tendency to skip a meeting because you are busy or you see that person everyday. Ideally it’s a good idea to have a meeting at the beginning of the week as a team to discuss each of the clients, their status and work to be carried out that week. This meeting tendts to get confused with being a “team” meeting whereas it is not.

Another get together is necessary later in the week to discuss updates with the business, metrics you are measuring and updates from team members on any new information they have learned that can help the team. Have you got any team nights or lunches planned?

A great way of finding out what is happening with your team is to send out a weekly pulse check called Office Vibe. You can then address concerns weekly instead of them getting out of control. In addition to these two meetings you can then have a management meeting, sales meeting and one-to-one meetings.

Meeting with your employees are an essential part of running a successful agency so if you don’t like doing them, hire a manager who will. Instead of trying to eliminate non-essential meetings you can work on improving the quality of them and shortening the duration by implementing Level 10 Meetings.

5) Hire a person do do the invoicing & chasing payments.

These jobs are essential for you to do when you as the agency owner are starting out - you only have a couple of clients and it is easy to do. However as your grow, this job is one to get off your plate as soon as possible. You don’t need to hire a full time person - ask your accountant if they provide this service too, or hire a person part-time based on results not on days working. You need them to be focused on invoicing and collections.

Removing this role from you not only frees up your time, but is also important to reduce stress from your day to day work life. If clients are late with payment and you get on the phone because you are stressed, as the owner of the business, you might not be able to handle things in an objective manner.

Plus, being on a sales call or a one-to-one meeting with a team member after a heated payment call might not go as well as you would like, because you may be emotional.

Yes as business owners we love variety and pride ourselves on our ability to do lots of different tasks, however the invoicing and collection of money needs to be given to another person as soon as possible.

Is 2018 the year you should hire a coach for your agency?

6) Create an organisational chart for your agency

Yes, you may only be less than 10 people, but it’s important for you to have an overview of all the positions you have, and need, as well as the people filling them.

Draw out all the titles and roles in your agency on a chart (a great tool is Real Time Boards). Today you will be doing many roles in your agency, however in the future (because you made a list of what you like to do and don’t in part 1) you will be able to create a new agency chart. Perhaps 12 months time as a pictorial vision of where you see the agency going in the future.

By creating this organisational chart today, for either 12 or 24 months of what the agency looks like and sharing it with the team, people can see their potential career opportunities. They can plan for roles that they need to get better at with training and practise, because they can see you are going to release all the hats you are wearing. This is can also make them more likely to stay with a business, because they know it is growing, and they can grow with it.

Ok, that is three more tips in our series. The more I write about this the more that comes to mind. Especially since I not only I have my own agency, but also work with many other agencies on a daily basis and see patterns across fledgling businesses and well established successful ones. I hope you are enjoying my insights? Would love to hear your tips too. . .

Did you fall out of love with your agency and found your way back again? We would love to hear your story. Join our Digital Agency 2018 Transformation Challenge or let us contact you.