New business is on the upswing, you’re experiencing shorter sales cycles, and your business is growing by leaps and bounds. All of that is great. But you’re still facing a crisis. An agency employee crisis. There just aren’t enough qualified people to fill the spots needed to service all that business. Or maybe you have [...]
Internal fraud. Two words that strike fear into the hearts of any agency owner. It’s not a subject that we want to talk about but it’s a real danger for agencies. And while most agency owners think that it could never happen to them, I know from my experience with hundreds of agencies that it [...]
One of the most heartbreaking realities in agencies today is what I call stale employees. These are employees that usually have been on your staff a long time and were a wonderful fit for your agency back in the day. But today, they really aren’t pulling their weight, their attitude is slipping or you just [...]
Whether you want to improve the skill, leadership and commitment levels of your current team to elevate them to be the best they can be or you need to add a superstar to your roster – you have to be able to assess their skills, attitudes, behaviors and motivations. How do you make increasing employee [...]
Never had a mentor? Not sure where to start or how to structure a successful mentoring relationship with your employees? In my podcast conversation with Mitch Matthews, he helps us to understand what great mentoring looks like. Mitch will show you how to mentor your employees with a wide variety of tools and specific solutions [...]
Agency owners are really good at a lot of things. Unfortunately, mentoring employees for growth is often not one of them. I get it -- you want self starters. You don't have time to micromanage people. You want someone who can think/behave like an owner. You know how you get employees like that? You create them. [...]
One of the most common struggles I hear from agency owners is that they're struggling with managing their millennial employees. For a bit of levity, I often share this video.[youtube]https://youtu.be/Sz0o9clVQu8And in case you're a millennial reading this -- here's the response about working with "older" employers.[youtube]https://youtu.be/C1a6M3dBNwc
I know you think you’re a good communicator but I’d bet you $100 that, when it comes to setting employee expectations, you aren’t as clear as you think you are. No matter how good you are -- you could be better. It’s not entirely your fault. You have several strikes against you. Agencies tend to [...]
Sometimes I think as agency owners we forget to connect the dots for our team in an agency management system. Remember when you were a kid and your parents started to talk about something and then in the middle of the conversation, one of them gave the other "the look" and they either stopped their [...]
Hiring the right employee is always the goal -- but so often -- not the reality. Many agency owners particularly suck at hiring. Worse than not hiring the right employee -- agency owners suck at firing the wrong ones. If there's one universal flaw among agency owners it's that they hang onto bad employees much longer [...]
