The work you do as an agency owner is hard. One of the prices we pay for the opportunity to own the agency is that we have to do hard things.
For many of you, you know what you need to do, yet somehow you convince yourself to delay it. You delay it because you don’t want to have a difficult conversation. You delay it because you know it’s going to impact some of your team members or be unpopular. Or you delay it because you hope that some magic is going to change the circumstance.
Owning a business is about managing and understanding the risks and making good choices. And I will tell you, in the almost two decades of consulting with agency owners, I can’t recall one time when an agency owner said to me, “You know what? I am delighted. I am grateful that I delayed that difficult decision.”
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Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute this week coming to you from Boston, Massachusetts.
You know I’ve had a couple conversations with agency owners this week that makes me feel like I need to remind you that the work you do as an agency owner is hard. And part of the consequence of the opportunity to own the agency is that you have to do hard things. And what I find for many of you is you know what you need to do, and yet somehow you convince yourself to delay it. And you delay it because you don't want to have the difficult conversation. You delay it because you know it's going to have impact on some of your team members or be unpopular.
Or you delay it because you are hoping that some magic is going to change the circumstance. Owning a business is all about managing
and understanding the risks and making good choices. And I will tell you, in the almost two decades of consulting with agency owners that I've been doing, I can't recall one time where an agency owner said to me: “You know what? I am really glad. I am grateful that I delayed that difficult decision.” What I do hear every day is: “Man, I was putting that off and now it was just as hard to do. But now there's additional consequences or it costs more money, or it was even harder.”
When you know you need to do something that is difficult, whether it's a staff change, whether it's a course correction conversation with an employee, whether it is firing a client that is not serving the agency in all the ways that it should, whatever that hard thing is. Typically, it's tied to money, typically is tied to people. Those are the things that are hardest for us. I'm telling you, once you know that you need to do it, you need to do it. The buildup, the worry, the anxiety around it as you as you move to the decision and actually execute on it is painful.
And it's actually more painful than just doing it. And the truth of the matter is it's going to have to be done. It's not optional. It's not something that's going to change. And so all you do is you elongate the consequences. You elongate the agony that you go through as you think about doing this hard thing. And in many cases, you elongate the anxiety on the other side, because odds are the employee already knows that their job is at risk or that they're not performing. Odds are, the client already knows that something's not quite right.
Whatever the circumstance is, everybody is sort of in this limbo state, and the only one who can put everyone out of their misery and get you back on a course of a better performance or better options or better outcomes, is you. And your lack of courage, frankly, your lack of, incentive to move forward is costly. It's costly for you. It's costly for the agency. It's costly for the other people involved. One of the truths of owning a business is that we have to be courageous. We have to have the hard conversations. We have to lean in to solving the problems. That's that's our job. That's actually the lion's share of our job is solving those problems, seizing opportunities, whatever it is. But they often come with challenging or difficult conversations, challenging and difficult decisions, impactful decisions to us, to the agency, to the other people involved. And we owe it to everyone involved in the circumstance to deal with it as kindly, but as quickly as possible. So if you are sitting on a decision that you are not sure about, or you're really sort of having a lot of angst about a direction you need to go, I'm telling you, rip off the Band-Aid, get it done, do your job by having the courage to face the hard things.
All right? I'll have a happier message for you next week.
