Recession-proof your agency with Drew McLellan

Speaker 1:

If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too? Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build a Better Agency Podcast, presented by White Label IQ. Tune in every week for insights on how small to mid-size agencies are surviving and thriving in today’s market. We’ll show you how to make more money and keep more of what you make. We want to help you build an agency that is sustainable, scalable, and if you want down the road, sellable. With 25 plus years of experience as both as an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey, everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. Welcome to another episode of Build a Better Agency. This week, unlike most of my shows, where I have a super smart guest and we get to pick their brain together. This week it’s just you and me, and I want to talk to you about something that’s on my mind and that I know is on a lot of your minds as well.

Before we get into that, if you are watching the video, you have noticed that my bookshelves are pretty empty and there’s a bunch of U-Haul boxes behind me. That is because I am moving. I’ve lived in this amazing townhouse, it’s probably the house I have loved the most of all the homes that I’ve lived in. I’ve lived in this townhouse since my daughter went to college, which now is about, gosh, almost 10 years ago, and I thought this was going to be the house I lived in forever. It sits on a body of water. It’s the right size. I love the layout. There’s really nothing about this house that I don’t like. And so I couldn’t have imagined, unless my daughter moved to another place and I wanted to be near her, I couldn’t have imagined at least in the near run that I would move.

And then if any of you who follow me or are connected to me on social media of any kind, as you know, two months ago, my life changed a little bit when I adopted a charcoal lab named Heather. Heather is still a puppy, she’s just about four months old as of the recording of this video. And she already exceeds my townhouse’s weight limit for dogs at 30 pounds, and there is no signs of her stopping her growth. So I’m guessing she’s going to be about 75 pounds. So for that reason, and some others, I decided that it was time for me to move, and so I am.

It’s amazing how we think we’re on a path, and we think we’re heading in one direction. And then all of a sudden, some event triggers a change for us. Some unanticipated, and honestly, if you would have asked me a year ago, if I was going to adopt a puppy, I would have told you no, because of my travel schedule, but I was wrong. And so now, Heather and Maggini, the cat which many of you have seen walking across the camera when I’m doing podcasts, and I are moving at the beginning of December. And you know what? I think work is that way too. I think sometimes change surprises us or it comes in a package that we didn’t anticipate. And that’s actually what I want to talk to you about today.

But before I do that, I want to remind you that we are now in early bird pricing for the Build a Better Agency Summit, which is AMI’s is first conference specifically built for small to mid-sized agencies. There are a ton of conferences out there that teach you new skills. There’s Content Marketing World, there is MAICON which teaches us about artificial intelligence, there is MarketingProfs great B2B Forum. There are lots of conferences out there that teach you how to do your craft better. But there really are no conferences out there that talk about the business of running your business, which happens to be an agency. And as you know, that’s the AMI focus.

And so I’ve known for a long time, that there was this hole in the marketplace that needed to be filled. That agency owners and leaders needed to be able to come together and talk about everything from how to make sure your agency is profitable, to succession planning, to building an agency that has a true value that someday if you wanted to you could sell, to how to diversify your revenue streams and have money coming in from different places, to biz dev, to imposter syndrome, which I know a lot of people struggle with. There was no conference that talked about that specifically to the small to mid-sized agency owner.

And keep in mind, the average agency size in the US is eight people. So if you sit there and you think, “Oh, I’m a super small agency. I’m 10 people.” Actually you’re not. You’re above average. So there’s no conference out there that really talks to the issues that an agency of 100 people or less face. There are other agencies that call themselves small agency this or that, but their definition of small is 300 plus people, and they live in a completely different world than you and I do. Anyway, I’ve known for a long time that the conference needed to happen. Honestly, it’s a really scary proposition to sign those hotel contracts and make those commitments, but I just decided that now was the time.

And people have said to me, “The US might experience an economic correction soon. Why in the world would you sign those big contracts now?” Honestly, I signed them because I know we need it. I know we as an industry need it. And I know that, thanks to all the amazing people I’ve met who serve agencies, that I could bring together a group of people who would really rock your world, who would get you thinking in a bigger, better way, who would set you up for success no matter what’s coming down the road in the economy. And that’s how the Build a Better Agency Summit came to be.

Anyway, it’s May 19, and 20th. If you’re an AMI member, there’s an AMI family day the day before on the 18th. But it’s going to be amazing, I’m super excited. I’m thrilled that the people who have agreed to speak and be presenters there and share their expertise, most of them are giving presentations they have never given before. I’ve asked them to step out of their sort of regular routine presentations and talk to you as an agency owner, about their world.

And so it’s happening in Chicago. We are at early bird pricing right now. I am pretty confident that we will sell out and I don’t want you to miss out. So please grab your ticket now while they are as inexpensive as they’re going to be. Book your hotel room right now, because it’s also National Restaurant Week Association in Chicago that week. So hotel rooms are going to be hard to come by. We’ve got a big block for you already to help you with that. I hope you join us. I would love to meet you in person if we haven’t met before. And I’m proud of the fact that we are in a position that we can bring this to the industry and that we can serve you in the way that we do in this new and exciting and quite honestly, candidly between you and me, frightening sort of way. So if you want to ease my worry, and you want to really set yourself up for success in 2020 and 2021, buy a ticket. All right.

Let’s get back to this idea of change. And the fact that oftentimes it comes when we are not expecting it. That’s what I want to talk about today. Specifically, what I want to talk about is when I am hanging out with agency owners, which you know I do pretty much seven days a week, there are two conversations that I can always count on no matter what the year is. It is conversations around finding and keeping great talents, and it is around biz dev. But there’s a new conversation that I’ve been having with agency owners for probably about the last year or so. And the tenor and the veracity of the conversation is getting higher and more fever pitched in the last six months. And that’s around the recession that everyone is expecting, the economic correction here in the US that everyone is expecting.

I don’t know if it is because of the election. I don’t know if it is because of the political climate of our country. I don’t know if it’s just the economic pattern, where things can only do well for so long before there has to be a correction. Everything I read says that it is not going to be like the recession of 2007, 2008, but there is going to be some sort of a correction in 2020, 2021. Most people are saying 2021, but I want you to start thinking about how to prep for that now. Because I think there are ways for you to ready yourself so that no matter what happens, good or bad, maybe there’ll be no recession at all. Maybe there’ll be no correction at all. Or maybe the recession will be as bad as ’08 was. But regardless of where on the spectrum that falls, I believe I know that you can prepare yourself and your agency so that you can ride through it. And that you will come out on the other side, strong and stable and ready to carry on.

Remember that in our world’s history, it’s not just in the US, in our world history, every country goes through economic ups and downs. And many businesses not only survive, but thrive in those environments. You think about back to ’08. If you’re in business now, and you were in business back then, you are running a really good shop. You are a hearty agency owner, and whatever is coming down the road, you are ready for it. But there were some upsides to having to be more mindful about our money. Certainly the talent pool got greater, it got less expensive to agency owners, or certainly on the other end of the pendulum on that right now, where employees are super expensive. And an economic correction changes that, because all of a sudden the marketing departments of all of the big corporations who have been stealing our employees, the very first thing they cut is their marketing department. And so all of a sudden those people are available for us again at a more reasonable salary level. It’s also a way for you to trim back your C and B players, and really keep your superstars, invest in them, grow them.

So just like good times bring challenges, bad times also bring opportunities, and I want you to focus on that. However, there are some things you can do to ready yourself. Think of this as your emergency survival kit. These are things I want you to start thinking about now I want you to start doing now so that you are ready.

My dad lived down in Sarasota, Florida before he passed away. And one of the things that he had to do, because he was right on the coast, was he had to have sort of a hurricane readiness protocol. Everything from special covers for the windows to all kinds of other things. What that allowed him to do was feel confident and comfortable that when a hurricane came, because it was inevitable one was going to come sooner or later, when it came, he was going to be prepared and he was going to survive it and get through it and be fine on the other end. So think of this as your survival kit for whatever economic correction is coming. And even if there is no economic correction, none of these things are going to hurt your agency, they’re just going to make you stronger.

Let’s first talk about what I want you to do in terms of your existing clients.

One of the ways you can survive any change in our economy is to have a nice stable base of clients. So the first thing I want you to do is I want you to look at your client list. I want you to make a list of all of your clients, of the AGI they represent to your business, and the profit margin that they provide. So company ABC, the AGI is this number, and which represents 12% of my overall AGI, and they’re 13% profitable. So four columns: client name, dollar amount of AGI, percentage of AGI they represents, and profitability of that client. And if you don’t know how to get those numbers, that’s homework assignment number one. Is I want your financial reporting to give you that data on a regular basis. Now that requires that you do timesheets, and that requires you do other things, which I’m not going to get into in this episode, because I have hounded you about those things forever. But I want you to prepare that list.

And then what I want you to do is I want you to look for a couple things that are red flags. Number one, I want you to stop working for anybody who is less than ideally 10% profitable. Now, I’m not saying fire everybody tomorrow, and then as a result impact your cash flow. What I’m saying is, I want you to have a plan for those clients to grow their profitability. I don’t care if their AGI grows or not, I want you to make them more profitable. I want you to partner with your AEs to look at those clients and say, “Why are we only making 2% on this client?” Or, which I am sure you’re going to find, “Why are we actually in the red on this client? We’re actually paying for the privilege of working for this client.” That’s number one. Is I want you to look at the profitability, and I want you to put a plan in place to raise the profitability of each client to a minimum of 10% profitability.

The next thing I want you to look at is I want you to look at that percentage of AGI. And any client that is bigger than 20 or 25% is a gorilla. And a gorilla can kill an agency during a recession or economic downturn. The reason why is because you’re running so thin when times are slower, that when somebody big pulls out, you are left with a gaping hole and everything is in slow motion when the economy slows down. So biz dev, moving people through your pipeline, moving people through your sales funnel, is going to take longer if things are tighter economically. So I want you to identify if you have a gorilla. That’s any client that’s 20 or 25% of your business. You absolutely need to turn up the heat when it comes to biz dev.

I know that oftentimes what happens is when you have a gorilla, they’re so consuming and they’re so demanding that it’s really hard to step away and do biz dev. But the number one thing that you can do to recession-proof your agency is to balance out that client base so that no client is bigger than 20 or 25%.

Now, I’m not saying say to the client that is the gorilla, “Stop giving us money.” I’m not saying that. No agency would do it, even if I did say it. What I’m saying is, you’ve got to understand the risk that you’re in and mitigate that risk. That is you going through the hurricane without covering the windows. Of course, the windows are going to blow out. And of course, it’s going to damage your house sooner or later. You don’t know if the hurricane’s coming today, or in three years, but I promise you that your windows are going to blow out if you don’t have the proper protection. And for you, if you have a gorilla client, the proper protection is to mitigate the power that they have inside your agency by growing business around them. And that could be your existing clients growing them up and getting them stronger, or it can be setting your targets higher in terms of prospects. All right?

So client list, AGI by dollars, AGI by percentage and profitability, and fix those couple corrections.

The other thing I want you to do is I want you to start investing in your existing clients. I want you to figure out what you need to do to love on your clients, to have them know that they are incredibly important to you. That you as an agency owner or leader value them in a significant way. And I think that’s a couple things.

Number one, I think is pouring yourself into the relationship a little bit, deepening the relationship. I’ve talked to you before about my idea of what a client love meeting is, where you are spending time with a client socializing or just hanging out together, learning more about what’s going on in their business. And that’s a leader-to-leader thing, that’s not AE point of contact thing. So I want you to have more client love meetings, I want you to deepen the relationship, I want you to make relationships inside your clients with more people.

When there’s an economic downturn, one of the things that happens is our clients start laying people off. And if you only have one point of contact inside that client, then all of a sudden you’re at risk. So the next column I want you to add to that chart I’ve already had you start is how many people could you pick up your cell phone and call their cell phone? Because that’s a sign that we have a personal relationship. That’s a sign that we have a connection beyond just sending the CEO an email, or the head of HR an email. If you have their cell phone number, you have a relationship with them. I want you to have these relationships at multiple levels. I want you the agency leader to forge more relationships. And by the way, outside the marketing department.

I want you to be looking for opportunities to create relationships with HR, with sales, with R&D. All of those people, number one, have budgets and have projects that you could be helping them with. And number two, in many cases, they are the ones that are going to keep their jobs while the marketing director loses his or her job. So I want you to forge relationships inside those existing clients and I want you to have them at all layers. So again, I want you the owner or leader to have them at the C-suite. I want your AEs to have them with the department heads inside all of those departments I listed. But I want you to have a bigger presence inside your clients and I want you to surround them with agency folks, and agency help, and agency love.

The other thing I want you to be doing is I want you to be thinking about financial metrics. I want you to be living your agency life by the 552520. So for those of you that have not heard me wax on about this for eons, let me give it to you very quickly. Gross billings are meaningless. It’s a vanity number. I don’t care what your gross billings are, because your gross billings are dramatically impacted by your cost of goods. If you’re a media shop, you have a huge gross billings, but the lion’s share of your gross billings goes right back out the door as a cost of goods for media expense. And what’s left is your adjusted gross income. If you’re a PR shop, you may have much smaller gross billings, but you have hardly any cost of goods. And most of that falls down to the AGI line, the adjusted gross income line, which is the money that every agency owner has to run their business. So the AGI should be spent on three things: people, so loaded salaries, overhead, and hopefully profit.

Now, your contractors, anybody who gets a 1099 from you is a cost of good. I don’t care what they do, unless you have like an outsourced CFO or lawyer or something like that. Somebody who only serves the agency, they don’t serve your clients, then fine, put them as an overhead expense. But for the rest of you, all your 1099 are cost of goods. So 55% of your AGI should be spent on people, 25% of your AGI should be spent on overhead, and 20% should be profit.

Right now, many agencies are struggling to hit the 55 number, they’re at the 60 or 62%, because employees are so expensive right now. So what I really care about is 80-20. So your salaries, loaded salaries and overhead should not exceed 80% of your AGI, which leaves you 20% profit, which covers everything from your taxes, because odds are you’re an S-corp. It covers your bonuses for your employees or your profit sharing or whatever you’ve got to retain the good employees that you have. It covers you getting a bonus as a leader or an owner. And then it covers the money that you need to reinvest in the business. So 80-20.

If you can’t hit the 55, that’s okay. You just got to take it out of the overhead, not the profit, which is not what most agencies do. And what I don’t want you to do is going into a slow time with no margin for reductions. I want you to go in super healthy with a 20% profit margin or as close as you can get, so that you absolutely can survive whatever’s coming economically.

The other thing I want you to do is I want you to look at those numbers every month, and I want you to watch very, very carefully that you are not overstaffed. That is the most egregious mistake you can make as we go into whatever’s coming in the economy. Honestly, it’s the most egregious mistake you can make when the economy’s awesome, but the risk to you, the threat to you is so much more when things start to tighten up, when budgets start to shrink, or clients are slower to make decisions. Carrying additional weights in the boat will sink the entire boat. You’ve really, really, really got to manage your staffing to the 55-25-20 ratios.

The other thing, the other ratio that you can pay attention to is you need to make sure that you are trying to get to somewhere between 130 and $150,000 of adjusted gross income per full-time equivalent. If you manage your business to those numbers, you will be ready for whatever comes. All right?

So I want you to pay more attention to your existing clients. I want you to build the little list that I talked about. I want you to invest deeper into the relationships that you have and create relationships with other people inside the company so you’re not only having a single point of contact, because especially if they’re the director of marketing or the VP of Marketing or whatever their title is, if a recession comes, they’ve got a target on their back. You want to have multiple relationships inside that organization. And I want you to start much more than you probably are now, I really, really, really want you to start running your business by the numbers.

Now if you’re an AMI agency, and I hang out with you a couple times a year, I know that you’re looking at the numbers because we make you do that. But if you’re not an AMI agency, you can download the AMI’s spreadsheet that helps you calculate that. We’ve got all kinds of calculators and tools for you, which we’ll include in the show notes that will allow you to build your business based on the numbers and really manage the business based on the numbers. Now is not the time to be heavy when it comes to people. All right. I’m going to take a quick break. And then when I come back, we’re going to talk about some other things that I want you to do to recession-proof your agency. I’ll be right back.

I promised we will get right back to the content of this week’s podcast, but I wanted to chat with you for a quick second about the Build a Better Agency Summit. As you probably know by now, we are launching our first, what I hope will be annual conference in May of 2020. It’s May 19 and 20th in Chicago, and it’s going to be incredible. I can say that with all humility, because it’s not about me. It’s about the amazing speakers that are going to be there. And it’s also about the amazing owners and leaders who are going to be there who I know will share as generously as the people on the stage. We’re going to talk about everything from how to create multiple revenue streams from your agency, how to get out of the selling stuff business and get back into the C-suite, how your agency can tweak your biz dev just a little bit, and what is the tipping point that we have seen that has earned agencies over more than $25 million of new AGI just in 2019 alone. So, that’s just some of the topics we’re going to cover.

Right now, all the tickets are on early bird pricing, so it’s not going to get any less expensive. And I am confident that we’re going to sell out. So it’s a pretty small venue. We’re going to have room for about 225 agency owners and leaders, and I want you and your team to be there. So please spend some $2019 on yourself in 2020. Grab your tickets now while they are on early bird pricing, and book your hotel really quickly, because it’s a very busy time in Chicago. I want you to take advantage of our room block, rather than having to go out on your own and find a hotel room. All right. With that, let’s get back to the content.

Welcome back. If I lost you for a couple seconds and you forgot what we were talking about, we’re talking about how to get your agency ready in case there is some sort of an economic shift or downturn or recession or whatever it is. I know here in the States, there’s a lot of talk about that, but honestly, I also know there’s a lot of talk about it all over the world as well. So, couple more things I want you to think about.

First, I want to tell you that as you know, for the last five or six years, we have partnered with Audience Audit and Susan Baier, the owner of Audience Audit, to do research that we call the Agency Edge Research Series. Every year we pick a topic that we think is really relevant to you, we go talk to people who hire agencies and we ask them questions on your behalf so that we can give you some direction and some guidance. One year we stepped away from that pattern and we talked to over 1,000 agency employees. But other than that, we’ve been pretty consistent and we’re talking to business owners, CMOs, directors of marketing, anybody who’s hiring and working with agencies.

Well, the 2020 study, we are going into the field and the first quarter of 2020 is going to be asking clients about how they’re feeling about the economy, what they’re doing to ready themselves, how they believe downturn is going to impact their relationship with agencies. So we’ll have that data for you and we will give you those insights as soon as we get out of the field. Just know that that’s coming, know that we are as focused on it as you are, and we want to get you ready for that.

The other thing that you can do to ready yourself is we know that when the economy softens, and again, whether it’s a dip, a little dip or it’s a big recession, anywhere in there. When the economy softens, clients take a longer time to make buying decisions. So people are going to sit in your sales funnel longer. And so the math of that is you have to have more people in your sales funnel so that even though they’re moving slowly, you’ve got more activity. And you can constantly be feeding the beast in terms of still earning new clients and new opportunities, no matter what the economy is doing. So you’ve got to get better about being disciplined about biz dev. You’ve absolutely got to have a sales funnel that you know exactly how it’s working, who the target audience is, what you’re going to say to them, not only today, but in March and in June. You’ve got to have that all mapped out because you know how crazy busy you get. And if you don’t have it mapped out and you don’t have a plan and it’s not inside your project management system, you’re not treating yourself like a client. Then you go into feast or famine mode.

Feast or famine mode is when you only chase after biz dev when a client goes away. While in a recession, that can be the kiss of death for an agency. That can bring an agency and the agency owners to their knees because when times are good, it’s easier to go out and sort of beat the bushes and find a client. And more quickly… I don’t believe it ever happens quickly, but more quickly convert a prospect to a client. In an economic challenging time, that doesn’t happen. Everybody takes longer to make buying decisions. So you’ve got to have an aggressive, consistent biz dev program going.

Couple things that we’re doing to try and help you with that.

In January 2020. If you’re listening to this in real time, in late January 2020, we have a workshop called Build and Nurture your Agency sales funnel, and you literally are going to sit with us and for two days, we’re going to make you build the funnel, we’re going to teach you how to do it. And then we’re going to give you time and tools to actually do it. And then we’re going to give you feedback on your sales funnel. So you’re going to leave the workshop with a built-out sales funnel. You might have to flesh it out a little bit because there’s only so much time in a two-day window, but you’re going to have something you could go back and execute the very next week. Again, you’re going probably have to add some nuance and flesh it out and you’re going to want your team’s input, but I want to set you up for success in 2020. I want you to have a sales funnel where you know exactly who you’re targeting, how you’re targeting them, where you’re going to find them. Remember, more than 75% of clients find their agency, not the other way around. So we’re going to talk about not only how to make yourself findable, but also how to go out and find good prospects.

That workshop is, I think it’s January 23 and 24th. It’s in Orlando. We’ll put a link in the show notes. But if you head over to the Agency Management Institute website, go under training and workshops, and you’re going to see the Build and Nurture your Agency Sales Funnel, I promise. And this is true of all of our workshops. If you think it sucks or you didn’t get anything out of it, I will write you a check back, I will give you your money back. I’ve never had to do that, but I’m happy to make that offer because I am confident that we are teed up to really help you step up into the next level.

That workshop is on Thursday and Friday. Then on Monday and Tuesday, we’re partnering with the Mercer Island Group folks, the agency search firm. They’ve been looking at how prospects move through their own buyers journey before they even call an agency, and then what happens after they’ve started to interview or chat with agencies. So they’re going to walk us through what that buyer’s journey looks like, and how agencies can win at every milestone of the buyers journey, even if we don’t know that the client or the prospect is looking at us. That’s going to be Monday, Tuesday. I don’t remember the dates… Yeah, 27th and 28th. In the meantime, there’s a weekend, which is awesome because the workshops are a Disney property. So you can play for the weekend if you want to attend both. But anyway, you can read about both of those conferences on the website.

So absolutely, you have got to step up your biz dev game. Whether you come to the workshop or not, you’ve got to step it up, you’ve got to figure out how you are more findable. I have lectured you till I’m sure you want to just reach through your earbuds and strangle me about specialization. I did a solocast on that, a couple solocasts ago. So go back and listen to that one because you can specialize in a lot of ways. You can specialize in a vertical or an industry, you can specialize in an audience, you can specialize in a region of the country, lots of ways to specialize. If you are super technical, you can specialize in a deliverable. If you are more of a branding or PR or shop like that, that is not a specialty. Too many other agencies do that. But if you are a PPC shop or an SEO shop and you’ve got the data to prove that when someone gives you $1 they get $3 of value back, that can be a specialty, but you absolutely have to know how to differentiate yourself. And then you need to go to market and you need to go to market consistently.

Honestly, this is mostly about making the time to do it. You know how to do it. But making the time to put together the plan. And by the way, putting together a plan that is not so ridiculously complex that nobody’s ever going to execute it. But putting together the plan and working the plan every single day. But what happens is, you if you’re the agency owner or the agency leader, you get sucked into client work, you get sucked in the internal drama, you get sucked into something and the one thing that never gets taken care of is the biz dev. In an economically challenging time, that cannot happen. You have the luxury of allowing it to happen when times are good. You do not have the luxury of not having biz dev be a huge priority for you when things get tight. So you absolutely need to develop that muscle and have a plan and execute the plan. And some of that is just about clearing your own schedule to make sure you get it done. But biz dev, more people in the pipeline, more people working their way through your sales funnel, and a process for continuing to touch them and nurture them is critical. Because as you know, even in good times, somebody can sit in your sales funnel for a day or a decade and you have no control.

We are in an industry where there is nothing we can do to encourage someone to hire us before they’re ready. There’s no buy one get one free coupon, there’s no Black Friday sale, there’s nothing we can do to get someone to bite on the bait before they’re ready. So we constantly have to be putting the bait in front of them so that on the day they’re ready to hire an agency, fire theirs, hire a new one, hire an agency for the first time, whatever it is, give out a project that is the door opener that leads to an ongoing relationship. Whatever it is, on the day they’re ready to do that, we have to be top of mind. Ideally, we’re the only choice. But we certainly want to be one of the three agencies that they are willing to carve out time to meet with. So your biz dev has got to be strong.

The other thing I want you to think about in terms of recession-proofing your agency, is I want you to build up a cash reserve, but I want you to build it up outside of the agency. So if you do not have a gorilla client, every agency should have two months of operating expenses. In other words, you could pay salary and overhead without any problem. I want you to have two months of operating expense inside the agency. And then I want you to have another two months of operating expense outside the agency. For many of you, you leave too much money, too much retained earnings in agency, and then you pit a little bit away with bad decisions. I want you to force yourself to make good financial decisions, especially when the economy is challenging.

So what I want you to do is I want two months inside the business. And then what I want you to do is I want you to take some of those retained earnings, which by the way, you’ve already paid taxes on in the US. I want you to write yourself a check and put it outside. I want it to be in your personal name. Open up a money market account or something else that keeps the money liquid and have it as your own personal line of credit. So it’s your money, it’s earning a little bit of interest, but you can lend it into the agency if you need to. You will make much better business decisions if you have it outside of the agency.

Because I’m telling you, it’s a very different thing to keep someone on staff even though the numbers tell you that you need to reduce by one or two headcount, when you have retained earnings in the business. But then what you’re doing is you’re burning through all of your safety net. And you’re burning through it out of your heart rather than out of your business mind. When the money is in a money market account, in your name, and you have to loan the business back the money, you have to write a check, personal check to the business and you need to create loan documents, which I want you to do so that if you ever sell the agency or whatever, you can recoup that loss. But when you have to pay into the business, it’s a very different emotional and mental exercise and you will make much better decisions.

Let me recap for you what I want you to do. I want you to deepen the relationships with your clients. I want you to build a chart that shows you exactly what your existing client base is, who they are, what dollar amount of AGI they represent, what percentage of your AGI they represent, the profitability, and how many points of contact you have inside that agency. I want you to fix anything that’s broken, that we’ve already talked about. I want you to deepen the relationships you have with clients. I want you to invest more in being so invaluable they can’t imagine running their business without you. And I want you to give them all of the client love that we’ve talked about in the past. I also want you to start managing by the numbers. So make sure you have financial metrics. And again, in the show notes, we’re going to give you tools. All you have to do is plug in some numbers, and it’ll give you a snapshot of your 55-25-20. And it’ll also give you a snapshot of where you’re at in terms of AGI per FTE ratios. So run your business by the numbers. Build two months of operating expense inside the business, build another two months of operating outside of the business.

Now if you have a gorilla that is more than, I’d say 35%, then you’ve got to have four months of operating expense in the agency. Because if that gorilla breaks up with you, you need time to react to what’s going to happen to your agency.

Then I want you to think about biz dev and I want you to recommit in a big, bad, bold way that this is going to be your number one priority for 2020, and I want you to build and nurture your sales funnel. If you want some help with that, come down to Orlando in January and we will teach you how to do it and we will walk you through doing it so that you leave the workshop with it. If you don’t need our help, great. Just build it and do it. But you’ve got to make biz dev a priority because everything’s going to slow down. And so you’ve got to have more fish in the pond, so you can catch enough fish that you can feed the family.

Here’s the bottom line. If there is one consistent thing that is true about agencies, is that stuff changes. I never thought I’d leave this house, and I’m packing all weekend to leave the house. That’s very true of our business. When I think about what my agency was like 25 years ago when I started it, versus the work we’re doing today, they are two completely different businesses. Are they built on the same foundation? Yes. Are they built on the same values and principles? Yes. Do we do some of the same things? Absolutely. But do we do them in dramatically different ways? Oh, my gosh, yes. So change is inevitable. We have to be able to weather good times and bad. We have to be able to be innovative and bring technology into our business. We have to understand all these new channels that crop up every day. This is not new stuff for us.

The bottom line message that I want to leave you with around this whole economic downturn, recession conversation is you will be fine. Do the things that you know you need to do, be smart about preparing your business, get the proper protection for your windows so that when the hurricane comes, whether it ends up just being a little bit of a rainstorm or it’s a full-on hurricane, you and your house are protected. You have time to do that. So don’t just sit around and worry, don’t sit around and Google recession. Don’t sit around and listen to all the naysayers. You are in a unique position, you own your business, or if you’re not an owner, you have great influence inside that agency and there is absolutely no reason why you cannot be 110% prepared for whatever is coming. Because the reality is, we always have to be prepared for what is coming.

So whether the economic downturn happens or not, sooner or later, there’s going to be one. The things that I’ve told you about, don’t just apply to 2020. They’re best practices for always protecting yourself. Hurricanes come and go, recessions come and go, employee shortages come and go. We have to be ready every day to not only protect what we’ve built, but to fortify and actually make it stronger so that it can withstand whatever comes. I know, I know there’s no one out there who is more capable, or smarter, or better equipped to get their business ready for whatever is coming economically. I promise you, you can and will be okay if you get prepared now. So don’t be afraid. See it as an opportunity to strengthen your business, see it as motivation to get up and go to the gym or whatever analogy you want to use. But this is an opportunity for you to take something that you’ve built that’s really good and make it even better. And if the hurricane comes, you’ll survive it and actually thrive in it. And if the hurricane doesn’t come, big deal, you’re just stronger and better. So either way, I’m hoping that you will follow these ideas, these tips, this recipe for building a better, stronger, more stable agency, so that you’re ready for whatever comes.

All right. Hopefully that gave you some food for thought. Hopefully, you can play this with your leadership team and you can walk through and put some plans in place. Hopefully I’ll see some of you in January. And I’m hoping I see a lot of you in May at the Build a Better Agency Summit.

Many thanks to our presenting sponsor, our friends at White Label IQ. They continue to save the day for more and more agencies. I hear accolades about them everywhere I go. So whether you need a white label PPC dev, design, they are a great outsource partner for you. And by the way, outsourcing is another great way to weather a recession. Is to reduce your fixed cost and move it to a variable cost. So another great possibility for you is to partner with those folks. If you want to see what they’re up to, you can head over to whitelabeliq.com/ami because they have a special deal for you there.

Just another couple of reminders and then I will let you go. Please, please, please keep leaving those ratings and reviews. Send me a screenshot on them so we can put you in the drawing. As you know, we give away a workshop, which is about a $2,000 value. Every single month, we’re happy to do that. And in fact, this month’s winner is Rich Conover. So Rich, I will reach out to you. Congratulations on winning one of our workshops. Again, you can do one of our live workshops, or you can participate in one of our on-demand workshops as well. So super happy to make that available to all of you.

Again, leave me a rating and review, take a screenshot because your screen names, although I’m using… Don’t tell me who you are. And then shoot me an email with it. We will put you in the drawing. Rich, congratulations for November. Happy to have you at one of our workshops.

And as always guys, I am around. So shoot me an email at [email protected] if I can answer a question for you. I hope that I see you in 2021 at one our workshops, at the conference, at one of the workshops or conferences where I’m speaking, where it’s not an AMI event but I’m there. Always love bumping into podcast listeners and chatting with you about your business. So have a great rest of the month. If you are in the US, happy Thanksgiving to you if you’re listening to this real time. Please know that you are absolutely on my list of things that I’m thankful for. So I’m grateful for all the interaction with all of you and the fact that I have the privilege of sharing what we learn from folks every day and helping you build your business to be better and stronger. With that, I’ll see you next week. Next week I promise I’ll have a guest who will make all of us smarter. In the meantime, have a great week. Talk to you soon.

That’s all for this episode of AMI’s Build a Better Agency Podcast. Be sure to visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to learn more about our workshops, online courses, and other ways we serve small to mid-sized agencies. Don’t forget to subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode.