“We had department heads who had meetings.  Until Drew came in and showed us how to evolve from that model, the entire agency rested on my shoulders.  But not anymore!”

The workshop Growing Your Leadership Team is built for agency owners who know they can’t keep being the answer to every question, the tiebreaker on every decision, and the last one out the door every night.

Here’s the thing. Most agency owners don’t have a leadership team. They have a group of really good doers with fancier titles. And there’s a big difference.

You know the difference because you feel it. You feel it when you come back from a week off, and the inbox is a graveyard of decisions that waited for you. You feel it when a senior person brings you a problem instead of a recommendation. You feel it when you look at the org chart and realize the only real leader on it is you.

Let’s be honest about why most agencies don’t have a real leadership team:

  • You promoted your best doers into leadership roles and never taught them how to lead
  • You’ve been burned before, so you took the authority back and never fully gave it away again
  • You don’t have a clear picture of what each leadership seat actually owns
  • You confuse “smart and loyal” with “ready to lead,” and they aren’t the same thing
  • You’ve been waiting for the perfect person to walk in the door instead of growing the person already sitting three offices down

And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud. Building a leadership team is lonely, slow work. It takes longer than you want it to. You’ll get it wrong a few times. You’ll promote someone who isn’t ready, or you’ll wait too long to promote someone who was ready a year ago. I’ve done both. More than once.

But the truth is this: your agency will never outgrow you until you build the people who can run it without you in the room. Not “someday when I sell.” Now. So you can take a real vacation. So you can go to your kid’s game without your phone buzzing. So the agency serves your life instead of the other way around.

This workshop is about building that team one seat at a time — deliberately, humanely, and with the accountability required to make it stick.

We’ll cover:

  • How to define the actual leadership seats your agency needs (not just the titles you’ve been handing out)
  • How to spot leadership potential in the people you already have — and how to spot the “great doer, not a leader” mismatch before you promote them into a corner
  • The conversations to have with a potential leader before you hand them the keys
  • How to groom a leader over 12–18 months so they’re ready when the seat opens, not scrambling after it does
  • When to hire from outside vs. grow from within, and how to tell the difference
  • How to give real authority — not just responsibility — without losing sleep
  • The accountability structures that keep a leadership team a team and not a group of siloed department heads
  • How to have the hard conversation when someone you love isn’t going to make it as a leader, and how to protect their dignity on the way to a better fit
  • Building the rhythms — one-on-ones, leadership team meetings, scorecards — that make leadership a practice, not a personality trait

Of course, there’s a ton of interaction, so each workshop is unique to the participants. You’ll walk away with a clear picture of the leadership team your agency actually needs, an honest read on the people you already have, and a step-by-step plan for growing the next leader — starting with the one you’re going to invest in first.

Workshop Schedule is 9 am – 3 pm (Mountain Time) on October 21

Sign up for the Growing Your Leadership Team Workshop Today!

The workshop is taught virtually.

Click here to Register Online – October 21st, 2026

Tuition: $1,295 for non-members. $995 for members. Each additional registrant gets an additional $200 savings.

Our cancellation policy is here.

Money-back guarantee: If you are not completely satisfied with this workshop for any reason, just call or email us, and you will be refunded 100% of your tuition — no questions asked. In all the years we have offered this workshop, no one has ever asked for a refund.

About Drew McLellan: Drew is a 25+ year agency owner, nationally renowned speaker, AdAge-ranked blogger, Agency Advantage facilitator, coach, and CEO/Partner at Agency Management Institute.

He has written several books, including Sell with Authority (2020), and is often found quoted in the pages of the New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fortune Small Business. The Wall Street Journal called his blog “one of 10 blogs every entrepreneur should read.”

Drew works with the owners and leaders of over 300 agencies a year, helping them increase their bottom lines.