The five things agency owners do that block agency growth with Drew McLellan

Hey everybody. Drew here. You know, we are always looking for more ways to be helpful and meet you wherever you’re at to help you grow your agency. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve produced this podcast for so long, and I’m super grateful that you listen as often as you do. However, there are some topics that are better suited for quick hyper-focused answers in under 10 minutes. That’s where our YouTube channel really comes in. For quick doses of inspiration, best practices, tips and tricks, head over to youtube.com/the at sign Agency Management institute. Again, that’s youtube.com/the at sign or symbol.

And then Agency Management Institute, all one word. Subscribe and search the existing video database for all sorts of actionable topics that you can implement in your shop today. Alright, let’s get to the show.

Running an agency can be a lonely proposition, but it doesn’t have to be. We can learn how to be better faster if we learn together. 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 with 25 plus years of experience. As both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute with another episode of Build a Better Agency. Thanks for coming back If you are a regular listener and if you are a brand new listener, this is a rare podcast for me. Well, not rare, every fifth podcast, podcast, so I guess it’s not rare, it’s just less than common, which is a solo cast. So normally on the show I have a guest or guests with me and we talk about some aspect of owning and running an agency. And every fifth episode, it’s just you and me, no guest, just talking about something that in most cases has been something I’ve been talking to a lot of agency owners about or is something that’s kind of been on my mind that I wanna make sure I get in front of you.

And so that is, this week’s episode is one of those. So we’re gonna talk about that a topic in a minute. But before we do that, a couple quick things. I wanna remind you that fall is upon us. Like it or not, I dunno about you guys, but in Denver it’s been so hot. So I am ready for sub 90 degree weather. So bring, bring on the sweaters is my attitude. But anyway, falls on its way. And for us, that means the workshop season is kicking off. So we’ve got four great workshops coming up in September and October. We have the Advanced AE Bootcamp in September. So that’s talking about things like delegating and negotiating and growing your client’s business, things like that.

Two days for your more senior account people, I’d say four years or more of experience. And we also have our very popular workshop called Money Matters. And that’s where we spend two days talking about nothing but money, pricing strategies, taxes, financial metrics that you should be running your agency by. All kinds of everything related to money for two whole days. And so that’s also in September, that’s really meant for agency owners, maybe your CFO, your in-house accounting person, but that’s a super senior level discussion. We’re gonna talk about owner’s comp and things like that. So that’s in September. And then in October we have the AE bootcamp.

So that’s the entry level AE bootcamp. So we’re gonna talk about the skills that’s required to be a good ae. So it’s everything from sort of understanding your client’s perspective to Mark working, moving, work through the agency, to time management, to the documentation of changes and the growth of the client. We’re gonna talk about how to have business conversations with your clients rather than just marketing conversations or taking an order. So that’s in October. And then, oh, I lied. We have five workshops in September and October. And then we’re gonna have another workshop called Build and Nurture Your Agency Sales Funnel. So that is two days of actually building out a marketing and sales plan for your agency.

You will leave with the skeleton of that marketing plan. You’ll have to do a little bit of work when you get back home, but the lion’s share of it is done actually in the workshop. It’s based on the book that Steven Wener and I wrote together called Sell with Authority. And then the last workshop that I’m super excited about in October is a workshop on writing proposals that win. So our friends at Mercer Island Group will be joining us. They teach that workshop and they talk about all the different sort of written elements that win or lose accounts. So everything from bios to case studies to cover letters to proposals to RFPs to pitch decks.

And they walk you through every one of those written documents and, and we look at some great examples, some bad examples, some horrific examples, and they point out all the ways we can improve. We literally have agencies changing proposals on the fly while they’re in this workshop. It’s so good. So that one’s in October. The way you find out about all of these workshops and register for them is head over to agency management institute.com and under the How We Help tab, you’ll find workshops and they’re all listed right there and you can register for any of those that would please you. Those workshops all happen in Denver, so we would love to see it. So, all right, with that out of the way, I wanna talk about what I want to talk about today.

So for many of you, 23 was a brutal year, is dev wise, but so for some of you, 23 was just the continuation of this challenge where you’re sort of banging your head against the same wall, which is you can’t get past a certain threshold. So it might be a gross billings or an AGI threshold, you know, might be I can’t get over a million dollars or I can’t get to $2 million, I’m stuck at 1.3 million to 1.5 and I can’t get past it. Or it might be a size like I can’t get past six or seven people or 10 people. And I would say this is typically for agencies that are smaller than 25 people. But all of the things we’re gonna talk about today are true for all of you at some level.

So I wanna talk about the five things that agency owners do that actually block their agency’s growth. So what are the five things that we’re doing that we are, we think we’re doing the right thing for the business, we think we’re doing the right thing for our clients and our team, but really what we’re doing is we are stunting our business’ growth and let’s talk about how to, how to change that. All right, so the first one is your way is the only way. I think one of the reasons why you are either an agency leader or an agency owner is ’cause you’re good at this and you’ve been good at it for a long time. And it is easy to assume that how you’ve always done it or what you think is the right way to do it is the only right way.

I’m not suggesting your way is not right, but what I am suggesting is that when it all has to be done your way or the highway, when you believe that you have sort of the secret sauce to all of the answers, then you become the bottleneck. And anybody who doesn’t do it exactly the way you do it gets super frustrated that they don’t have the opportunity to sort of stretch their wings to grow, to, to try a new way of solving a problem and or they have to keep running back and checking with you and getting your approval or getting your guidance. And so that’s, that’s works fine when you’re two or three or four or five people because you know, even in today’s world where you may not be in the same physical space you are in each other space all the time.

And so you can course correct when the employees aren’t doing it your way, but the minute you get past probably a half a dozen employees or so, it’s impossible for you as an agency owner or leader to know what everybody’s do is doing at all times. And so you have to keep jumping back in and course correcting and oftentimes they’re halfway down the path when you’re like, oh no, not, don’t do it that way, do it this way. And they have to circle back around. So number one, it’s gonna impact your profitability because you’re gonna be repeating billable hours that you can’t build a client. And number two, you’re not building a a bench of people who are independent thinkers, who are problem solvers and who are always looking for new ways to solve clients’ challenges.

I don’t, you know, I’ve been in this business a long time, decades and how we used to do the work and what I thought back then was the best way is no longer the best way. And so when we get in our heads that we have all the answers and that our answers are the only good answers, what happens is the agency gets stagnant and the agency doesn’t evolve and grow and nobody can move past you. They have to, they have to work with you or work around you and then come back to you. So it really is a challenge that eventually just sort of withers the agency down to 4, 5, 6 people. And you can’t get bigger than that. So your way is the only right way is an achilles heel for many agency owners and you have to get past it.

And the the sort of second kiss of death, if you will, the second thing that you do that stunts your agency’s growth is related to that which is everything is kept in everyone’s head. So tribal knowledge versus having documentation and process. And what happens with tribal knowledge is, so let’s say you’ve gotten to the point where you’re at the, nope, my way is not the only way. I’ve got three or four super smart people working for me or eight or 10 super smart people working for me and they can figure things out. So you’ve catapulted above the my way is the only way problem. But now what you’ve created is everybody’s way is the right way and that actually is not much better. It it from the bottleneck perspective, it’s a little better, but it’s not from the agency’s profitability and performance and consistency, it is not much better.

So having tribal knowledge where everybody solves it, so it’s ba bet’s way of getting it done or Bob’s way of getting it done or Drew’s way of getting it done and no one’s client meeting reports look the same, no one’s proposals look exactly the same. No one is solving some problems in the exact same way. In other words that there’s no agency way of doing something. So this is a two-part. Mistake number one, we allow that tribal knowledge of everybody sort of doing it their own way exist in the agency where there’s maybe some light documentation of process but everybody sort of modifies it and does it in their own way.

So that’s problem number one. And that problem number two is there isn’t documentation that it lives all your work processes, all your systems, all your best practices live in everyone’s heads. So the challenge with that of course is number one, you haven’t codified it. So there is no official agency way of conducting a meeting or doing discovery or doing a quarterly touch base with a client, whatever that may be. There’s no codified uniform way of doing those things. And number two, you may have an employee that does it better than everybody else, but it’s not recorded and that employee leaves or gets hit by a bus or is out on paternity leave for two months or whatever it is.

And that tribal knowledge walks right out the door with them. So you haven’t captured it in a way that you can all benefit from it. And so much like my way is the only way is a problem, the tribal knowledge and not codifying your systems and processes. So there’s an official agency way is another one. The other reason why this is so important is as you start to grow, onboarding new employees is painful because you don’t have anything documented. And so it literally is they’re waiting around the new employees waiting around for a team member or you the owner to teach them everything they need to know to be good at the work. And they’re looking for guidance on what is the agency way.

And by the way, after you’ve told them twice and they don’t remember it because you know, the first week at any agency is like drinking from a fire hose, they’re kind of embarrassed to ask you again you for a third time how to, how to do a meeting report. So they don’t ask. So they re they do what they remember but they don’t have anything to check it against. And so again, pretty quickly now it’s Travis’s way because he heard it twice, he remembered some of the basics, but in the end of the day he didn’t really remember them all. And so he’s making it up as he goes. So having your key systems and processes documented and that you recognize that those documents are living, breathing entities because let’s say you’ve been doing client discovery meetings a certain way for a year or so, get a new employee and they add something really great to it.

They’re like, Hey, you know what, at my old agency we used to do this. And you’re like, I love that. Let’s try it. You try it a couple times, then you have to go back and change the document because otherwise you all who were experiencing that great new addition, you’ll remember it at least for a while. But the next round of employees that you add or when you replace somebody, they’re not gonna have had that experience and they won’t know which means that either A, they’re gonna do it the old written way or B, they’re gonna make up their own way. So super important that you identify the most important processes and systems that you have and that you get them documented in a way that is accessible to everyone.

And then you have a schedule for modifying checking, have we changed this? Have we improved this? Have we decided we don’t want to do it this way anymore? Whatever it may be. You know, at least once a year that you’re updating those documents. And for a lot of people they just keep ’em in, you know, a Google doc and that way everybody can amend them, but they have to, they have to note who’s amending them and why. ’cause otherwise everyone’s changing ’em every time they have a meeting. That also is not helpful. So number one, make a list of the most important systems and processes in your agency. Don’t have to do them all. You don’t need to record how you make coffee in the morning or you know, there there’s, we do a lot of things that, it doesn’t have to be the agency way, but the basic core tenants of the work we do for clients.

And by the way, some of the core tenets of how we onboard new employees, what employee reviews look like, what employee one-on-one meetings look like, those should be documented as well. So make a list, prioritize them and just start working through them so that you have a library of best practices that everyone can do it the agency’s way, that consistency so that clients, if you change account service people or somebody new comes onto the team, that clients don’t feel that bump of somebody doing it different and that you can continue to tweak those processes so they get better and better as you use them. And you know, it’s, it’s like any sort of exercise, right?

The more you exercise that muscle, the stronger the muscle gets, the smarter you get about the muscle and you can keep making those systems and processes better for everyone. So that’s mistake number two. Mistake number three is how you spend your day. You the agency owner, if you are serving clients rather than serving the agency, you are going to get stuck. There’s only one of you. And let’s face it, odds are you are the most senior and the most experienced person in the agency. If clients think that they can have you versus one of your employees, and I don’t care how great your employees are, I don’t care how smart they are, I don’t care how old or young they are, I don’t care how experienced they are, everybody wants to work with the boss.

And so if you are available to serve clients, a couple things are gonna happen. Number one, all of the clients are gonna want you. And so now if somebody, if somebody knows your agency and knows that some clients get you and other clients get, you know, your most senior account person, they’re gonna feel like that most senior account person is the B team, not the A team. ’cause they want the owner. So already you’re sort of degrading the experience or their perception of what the experience would be like working with your team. So that’s problem number one. Problem number two, there’s only one of you. All the clients can’t have you. And if you think all the clients need you, I promise you, you are going to be stuck at a certain size.

You just don’t have the capacity to be of service to that many clients. Number three, if you are doing account service work or you are the creative director or you are, fill in the blank, whatever role you fill, the role that’s not being filled is agency owner. No one is doing your work. If you’re doing client work, your client is the agency. You need to be spending time, spending time doing new business. You need to be spending time running the agency, the administration of the agency looking over the finances, managing to the numbers, doing the right reviews with your senior level employees. You need to be spending time mentoring your team. You need to be spending time thinking about the vision of your agency.

You need to be spending time being the voice of the agency if that’s your role. But if you don’t do those things in most agencies, nobody else is doing them. Which means the agency is sort of running itself and it’s running amuck. So your job as owner and that this is a hard one for a lot of you because the reason you most of you’re accidental agency owners, you, you, you love the work, there’s some aspect of working at an agency that you love, whether it’s the strategy and account service or it’s the writing or the art direction, whatever it may be, you love the work. And so it’s hard to stop doing what you love to do, the stuff you have to do. And for many of you running the agency, the administrative stuff and all of that, that is not what fills you with joy.

And so it’s easy to fall into the trap of doing what you’re really good at and be what you really love rather than what the agency needs you to do for you as the agency owner. And for many of you, if you’re on the leadership level, at least half of your job is to serve the agency. And that might be serving in a new business capacity that might be serving the employees by mentoring them and and helping them get better at their job. But it is not day-to-day clients facing for the most part. Do you have to see the client sometimes? Absolutely. Do you have to spend some time on what we call client love? Like really getting to know the client outside of the work and making sure that you are a sounding board for them and a confidant for them?

Absolutely. But if you are doing billable work, then odds are you’re not doing your job and that’s a problem. So all right, so that’s the first three. So again, remember first one is my way or the highway, right? I am, my answers are the only answers that work. The second one is tribal knowledge, like we have not documented our systems and processes so that we can scale one of the critical things. So remember you’re trying to build an agency that is stable financially, that it is sustainable, meaning that you have a growth plan. And we’ll talk about that in a minute. And that it is scalable. The scalable means that your agency has systems and processes in place that allow it to grow and evolve over time.

And that the systems and processes do that too. It’s impossible if you don’t document those systems and processes. And then the third mistake of course is that you, the agency owner are not doing your job because you’re doing somebody else’s job. You are doing client work rather than serving the agency. All right, we’re gonna take a quick break and then we’re gonna come back and talk about the last two things that we do that accidentally stunt the growth of our agency. Hey everybody, just wanna remind you before we get back to the show that we have a very engaged Facebook group. It’s a private group just for podcast listeners and agency owners that are in the AAMI community. And to find it, if you’re not a member, head over to facebook.com/groups/baba podcast.

So again, facebook.com/groups/ba podcast. All you have to do is answer a few questions to make sure that you are an actual agency owner or leader and we will let you right in and you can join over 1700 other agency owners and leaders. And I’m telling you, there’s probably 10 or 15 conversations that are started every day that are gonna be of value to you. So come join us, we are back and you know what I forgot at the top of the podcast. So with every solo cast we do something different, which is we give away one seat to one of our workshops. And so what we ask podcast listeners to do is go to wherever they download the podcast.

So might be Apple podcast, it might be iHeart, wherever it is, and leave a rating and review for the podcast. And what we ask you to do is take a screenshot of that rating and review and email it to me at [email protected]. So again, just go leave a review for the podcast, take a screenshot of it and send it to us. And the reason we ask you to do the screenshot is because even though we read all the reviews, a lot of times on most of those sites you have some sort of a username and you know, country music lover 42 doesn’t tell me who you are or that what your agency is. So I, I need you to send it to us so we can identify you.

We put that in a drawing, you stay in the drawing until you win. So you know, we’ve been doing this podcast for eons now and so we still have names in there that have probably been in there for five years, but sooner or later you’re gonna win. The pool is not that huge so sooner or later you’re gonna win. So from 2021 this, this winner is Eric Morley. So Eric, I’ll reach out to you. Congratulations. So Eric now is able to attend one of our live workshops in person. All he has to do is get his his butt to Denver and find a hotel room and we will host him for the two days. Our workshops valued about $2,000.

So this is no small prize for just doing a rating and review. So hopefully Eric will see you soon. I’ll reach out to you and let you know that you won. So you can maybe grab one of the workshops that we’re doing this fall and for the rest of you go ahead and leave a rating and review, send it to me and we will put you in the drawing as well. Alright, so before the break we talked about, we’re talking about things that we as agency owners or leaders do that accidentally get in the way of the agency being able to grow. And if you remember we talked, we the first one was I’m right my way is the right way. And not being open to the idea that your employees are smart and capable and letting them help you evolve the agency and by you not being a bottleneck, that you have to check everything that they can’t go on independently and serve your clients.

So that was mistake number one. Mistake number two is everything in terms of the operations of the agency is held in everyone’s brain. So it’s all tribal knowledge. When someone leaves or even is gone for a few weeks on vacation or however that may be, that knowledge kind of goes with them, especially around systems and processes, specific clients needs and wants. What they, you know this, this client hates orange, this client spells healthcare as one word or two words, all those sort of things. All of that needs to be documented, your systems and processes, the things you do every day. You need to have an agency way of doing those things. And the third one was when the agency owner is serving clients rather than serving the agency.

So your job is not to be so client facing that you can’t do the work that only an agency owner can do. And, and this is a really achilles heel for a lot of you. It’s tempting and it’s easy and it’s fun frankly to do the work that we’re really good at the strategy work or you know, the high-end, you know, logo design work or whatever it is that is your core skillset that you had as you grew through the ranks of agency life. Super tempting to do that and it’s super tempting to think you do it better than everybody else and that’s a hiring issue. But if you aren’t doing your job, nobody is. And that’s super important.

Alright, so fourth one is that you do not run the agency by the numbers. And like I said earlier in the intro, we do a two day workshop on KPIs and all kinds of financial metrics, but the one that is the holy grail for agencies is 55, 25 20. And that those three numbers are how we should be spending our AGI. So quick review, we have gross billings, that’s everything we bill a client. You take out all your cost of goods, so all your hard costs including any contract labor, right? So you’ve got your gross billings minus anything that basically you spend on behalf of a client that you’re gonna get reimbursed for.

So it might be media, it might be photography, again, it’s contract labor. It might be access to certain software that you would only use because a certain client needs you to, but you take out all those costs and what’s left is your adjusted gross income. That’s the money that you as the agency owner get to keep to run your business. And how you spend that money breaks up into these three ratios. 55, 25 20. So 55 is loaded salaries, so that’s all your people cost. Payroll, taxes, benefits, all of that sort of thing. Obviously income, salary, income number two, the 25% is overhead.

So rent, car, lawyers, all the things. And then 20% is profit. If you are not looking at those numbers every month and you don’t know where you’re at in terms of your 55, 25 20. And by the way, that’s the gold standard. If you live in a place or you’ve got your, your overhead expenses crunch down to 15%, great. Take that extra five or 10% and move it into payroll if you want to. You can have more people, you can have more, you can have more expensive people. The number I don’t want you to change is the 20%. There is no reason, no reason why an agency of any size can’t hit 20% profitability on a consistent basis.

The only reason why you don’t do that is because either one, you’re not looking at the number at all or number two, you’re ignoring what the numbers tell you. And that’s really the part of that this that I wanna talk about for this mistake. Many of you are looking at the 55, 25 20, but you’re ignoring what it’s telling you. You’re ignoring the fact that it’s telling you you’re overstaffed, you’re ignoring the fact that it’s telling you you have your overhead expenses are outta whack and you’re at 3%, 5%, 10%, whatever it is. In most cases. What it’s telling you is that you are overstaffed. When Danielle and I get called in to do some consulting with an agency, when we start running the basic numbers, 90% of the time what we find is the agency is overstaffed.

And when you’re small, it’s really hard because everybody’s trying to wear a bunch of hats. You need a lot of different skill sets coming out of very few people. So in many cases you have, you are like, well I really need half of bill and I really need three fourths of Amy and I really need, you know, eight tenths of Drew, but they don’t have the same skillset and so I have to have all three of them on staff and I pay them all full-time wage obviously, even though I don’t need them full-time. That’s a problem you have to solve. But in general, you need to be looking at that 55, 25 20 every month and running the business with the understanding that the whole reason why you own the business is for the business to be profitable.

I’m not saying that you have to get stinking filthy rich, but I am saying that it makes no sense to run a business that is in the red or barely breaking even that’s not, that’s not inspiring to anyone. It doesn’t allow you to give raises, it doesn’t allow you to add to staff, it doesn’t allow you to invest in new equipment. So your job, one of the core jobs of the owner is to run a profitable business so you can keep growing the business. It’s hard to grow a business when you don’t have any money and you’re not profitable. And for many agencies that that comes sort of it it, that bangs right in the head of the fact that a lot of times when you’re small, you’re growing really fast.

It’s not hard to double your AGI in a year when you’re two or three people and all of a sudden you’re five or six people and you double one more time. But if you’ve gotten into some really sloppy habits of your finances, when you get to that eight to 10, now all of a sudden those sloppy finances are gonna bite you in the rear end and you’re not gonna be able to keep growing because you just don’t have the, you don’t have the room to finance the growth. Growth is expensive. So you really do, if you want to grow your agency, you really do have to run a profitable business that gives you the wiggle room to invest in the growth. Otherwise you’re gonna just be stuck over and over and over again.

I can’t tell you how many times people have said I need a higher level account service person than what I have. I have mostly junior people. I need somebody more senior that has great experience in our industry or our niche, but I can’t afford it. But you can’t afford it because you’re not running the business by the numbers. And so if you want to be able to grow past whatever hill you’re sort of stuck on right now, understand that profitability is a big part of that, right? And then the last one is that you are winning business based on personality rather than performance. So smaller shops often have very charismatic, very outgoing, super smart agency owners.

Not that big agencies don’t have that too, but the owner’s personality is big. They’re usually well known in the market and a lot of people hire the agency because of the owner. And again, that’s a problem because when you hire a company because of a specific person, guess who you wanna work with, right? That specific person. And so this gets back to the, if you’re doing client work rather than agents serving the agency, it’s a problem if, if you, if your new business wins are personality wins, if they are, gosh, I really wanna work with Drew and his team, then what happens is you can’t keep growing.

Number one, you only know so many people. And number two, they’re gonna want you on the team. And what you want is performance-based growth. In other words, you wanna be able to show prospects how and why you have served clients well. What have you delivered to those clients? How have you helped them hit their KPIs? How have you helped them increase market share? How have you helped them stop the slide of client retention, whatever their problem was? How did you help them do that? How did you perform against the client’s KPIs and needs? When you can talk about those sorts of things rather than being smart and being great in the room and being very charismatic and they hire you for that, now what you’re able to do, you’re able to say, okay, if you need online sales growth, if you need to hire more truck drivers, if you need more people coming to your cardiac unit, if you need whatever it is, we’ve done that before.

And let me show you how we’ve done that based on our performance. You can have confidence that we can do this for you as well. If, if you are a lot of you’ll say, boy, if I can get prospect in the room, I can win. What that tells me is that means you’re be selling based on personality. That means they like you. And it’s not that they shouldn’t like you, of course they should like you should, they should like you, they should trust you, they should have confidence in you. But they have to like and trust the agency and have confidence in the agency. And the way they have confidence in the agency is when you can document performance and you are not leaning so heavily on the charisma of the owner or the owner’s Rolodex and who they know and the fact that they, you know, go to chamber meetings or fill in the blanks.

That’s not a way to grow your business sustainably. You have to be able to show what you’ve done and that you can do it consistently for clients that look a lot like the prospect. So again, really quickly in review, here are the five things and there are more, but these are the big five. Here are the five things you’re doing that may be accidentally stunting the growth of your agency. Number one, consciously or unconsciously, you believe that your way is the right way. You become a bottleneck. You haven’t defined the agency way of doing something and you’re not allowing your employees to grow and learn and try new things and bring new ideas to the agency because they’re not yours.

Number two, everything lives in everyone’s head. It’s tribal knowledge. It is, it exists in everyone’s head, which means that everybody does it slightly differently because they’re not following a playbook. You need an agency playbook, which is the agency way of doing the work. And again, that could be onboarding a client, it could be onboarding a new employee, it could be the way we present marketing plans. It could be the way that we have quarterly strategy sessions for clients, whatever it may be. You need to document those and make those best practices that get reviewed regularly and get edited as you come up with better new ways to do things. Number three is that you, the agency owner, are serving clients rather than serving the agency.

If you are doing a lot of client work, most agency owners should not be more than 10% billable. If you’re more than 10% billable, what that means is no one is doing your job, no one. And if you don’t do your job, then it doesn’t get done. And some of the most important work is running the business of the business. It is biz dev, it is mentoring and growing the team. Those are things that don’t get done by osmosis. They have to be done intentionally. And it’s your job to do them. Speaking of running by the business, running the business, you have to be running the business by the 55, 25 20 gold standard of how you spend your AGI.

Knowing those numbers every month and being committed to running a profitable agency so you can afford to grow is critical for growth. Gotta do it. And last but not least, you cannot sell on personality or charisma. You have to sell or reputation, you have to sell on performance. You have to be able to document the good things that you do for clients. You have to be able to show that the spend that your clients have made has been a great investment and that they’ve gotten an ROI on that investment consistently over time. And if you cannot do that, then basically you’re being hired because somebody likes the agency owner and that’s great.

They should like the agency owner, but it shouldn’t be the only reason you get hired. And by the way, it’s that if you have a problem with retention of clients, that’s the problem because they fall in love with the agency owner, but they only get so much of the agency owner’s time and you’re not really geared towards performance, which means that they, the client can’t document to their boss why they keep giving you money. And that’s how agencies get fired. So those are the five. If you’re doing any of those five and you are struggling with growth, you now know exactly what you need to do differently to get out of your own way and be able to grow your business. So hopefully that was helpful, would love some feedback. If you have questions, you know how to get ahold of me, don’t forget to leave the rating and review and send that in so that you can be in the drawing.

Eric Morley, again, congratulations on being this month’s winner. I will, I will reach out to you and let and let you know that in case you don’t listen to this in real time. And last but not least, a huge shout out and thank you to our friends at White. Label IQ. They are the presenting sponsor of this podcast. They are a company that was born out of an a MI agency. Actually, they were struggling. They had a ton of web work and they couldn’t find, they couldn’t hire fast enough and they couldn’t find a partner. So they actually built a sister company that all it does is it does white label design dev and PPC. And so they now come alongside agencies who either don’t have those, those skill sets in house or maybe like they were in their origin story, they were just so slammed that their one or two web developers couldn’t possibly do all the work.

They come alongside agencies and they partner with them to get that work done on behalf of their clients. They, because they’re, because they come from an agency, they understand how to price in a way that is effective for, you’ve known these people for 20 years, good human beings, very client centric, very agency centric. They, they get your world, they come in seamlessly and help you accomplish what you need to accomplish. So check them out at White Label IQ dot com slash aami. They have a special deal for you if you’ve never worked with them before, a first time, I think it’s some free hours on a project that will allow you to give them a test drive.

All right? Okay. This was fun. I know sometimes this stuff is hard to hear. I know that it’s difficult to be listening and go, oh shoot, I do that. Oh yeah, I, I kind of do that. I get it. I know it’s hard and I know the work we do is hard. And so our goal is to make it easier. And sometimes part of making it easier is holding the mirror up and reminding you that maybe there are things you could do different or better to benefit your agency. And so hopefully this episode was one of those for you. And that you’ve got a plan, or at least the kernel of a plan of how you can get out of your own way. Don’t, don’t be the reason why your business doesn’t grow. That is not why you started to own a business or started the agency or bought the agency.

You bought it to grow it. And so make sure that you’re giving it every shot it can to keep growing and don’t be the problem. Right? Get outta the way and be the solution. So, alright, with that, I’ll see you next week. Thanks for listening.

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