Optimizing agency operations with 90-minute business ‘sabbaticals’ with Alyson Caffrey

Hey, before we get to the show, I just wanna remind you that we have created a private Facebook group just for you, our podcast listeners. There are almost 1500 agencies, agency owners inside that Facebook group every day talking about what’s going on inside their shop, asking for resources, gut checking decisions, talking about everything from pricing to hiring, to biz dev. All kinds of things are happening there. We’re starting conversations. You guys are starting conversations. What I love about it is the community’s coming together and sharing resources, encouraging each other, and just sort of having a safe place to talk about what it’s like to own an agency. So all you have to do is head over to Facebook, search for a Build, a Better, Agency Podcast group, or Build, a Better, Agency Podcast.

And you’ll find the group. You have to answer three questions. If you don’t answer the questions, we can’t let you in. But they’re simple. It’s, do you own an agency or do you work at an agency? And if so, what’s the URL? What are you trying to get out of the group? And will you behave, basically? So come join us. If you haven’t been there for a while, come on back. If you haven’t joined, join in to the conversation. I think you’re gonna find it really helpful. All right, let’s get to the show.

Welcome to the Agency Management Institute community, where you’ll learn how to grow and scale your business, attract and retain the best talent, make more money, and keep more of the money you make. The Build a Better Agency Podcast, presented by a White Label IQ is packed with insights on how small to mid-size agencies are getting things done, bringing his 25 years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. Super glad to have you back. If you are a repeat listener, welcome. If this is your first podcast, our goal with the podcast is pretty simple. We know that agency owners are often accidental business owners, and it’s super helpful for them to hear from people who can help them think about how to run their agency more profitably, more sustainably, in a more stable manner, and ideally in a way that you can sell it down the road if you want to. And so every week we bring guests to the show to help you just think about the business a little differently. And, and This week, we have a great guest who’s gonna challenge us to figure out how to be more productive by resting more.

So I’ll tell you more about her in a second. I do wanna remind you before I tell you about our guest that a couple years ago we put together everyone. It was back when everyone was that conversation around diversity, equity, and inclusion was really hot. And, and hopefully you’re still thinking about it. You still have a plan in place and you’re still working on it. But during that time when it was really the the hot topic for a period of time, we put together a racial equity report card that you could sort of self-evaluate how your agency is doing around equity and diversity and inclusion. And so for some agencies, they take that every quarter, others once a year, and many actually publish it on their website to sort of celebrate the successes they’re making on this journey.

So if that is of any interest to you or it’d be helpful, or you just wanna see it, head over to agency management institute.com/racial equity. So agency management institute.com/racial equity. And you can download that report card and use it to your heart’s content for free. So hopefully that is helpful. Alright, lemme tell you a little bit about our guest. So Alyson Caffrey owns an operations agency. So she helps agencies and other small businesses improve their operations. And Alyson just wrote a book called The Sabbatical Method, how to Leverage Rest and Grow Your Business. And so I find that to be an intriguing topic.

You know, so many of us are feeling the weight of the last few years. You know, as we talk to agency owners, we can feel and hear their exhaustion. We see it in the staff, you’re seeing it if, even if you’re not seeing it in yourself, you’re probably seeing it in folks on your team. And so I think the idea of how do we rest better and rest more fully and give ourselves some breathing rooms so that we can accomplish big things is a noteworthy and timely topic. And so I was super excited to hear about Alyson, to read her book and to really think that some of her ideas and methodologies are going to be challenging for us, but I think in a really good way.

So I’m excited for you to meet her and learn from her and for all of us to take some takeaways from this episode that perhaps will allow us to restructure how we work in a more restful, smart way. Okay. All right, let’s get around the show. Let’s go. Alyson, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us,

Drew. Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

So tell us a little bit about the book, your background, what prompted you to write the book? What do you know that we need to know? That’s, that’s where we wanna get to today.

Yeah, sure. I have to

Get all that outta your head in an hour.

We’re just in a quick clip here. Yeah. So really what we’re here to talk about and how I can serve is tying ROI to rest. And one of the big reasons that I wrote to the sabbatical method, and I really felt like this needed to come out is because a lot of folks who achieve anything in a high performing capacity, they have moments of extreme, you know, discipline and moments of, you know, a lot of energy, right? Whether they’re training for a marathon or summiting Everest or all those things. And woven into that plan is also strategic rest, so that our muscles can rebuild and be able to be stronger for the next phase of the ascent. And business owners don’t allow themselves that time, and it’s super important for the longevity and the sellability of a business, right?

So whether you’re building to own this business and succession plan, you know, within your family or within your community, or whether or not you’re gonna proposition this, you know, for sale down the line, you know, your agency is gonna be super valuable to any outsider if you can get this particular function right. And so I am an operation strategist. I firmly believe that rest as it relates to your business, is developing really clear systems and processes so that next time you go through a big website redesign, or next time you launch a a brand new thing, it’s a little bit easier and a little bit less friction filled for your team, for your clients, for anybody involved. I’ve been doing this for eight years in the industry. I serve agencies predominantly. And what we really do is we try to nail down, you know, what are the core processes that make this thing, this agency, this team, and all of the key components of how it works, really work seamlessly together so that it’s not so cumbersome to a run.

And B, if you want to scale it, if you want to serve more people, you feel like you have a good solid baseline to be able to do that.

Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. We do a lot of m and a work and valuations, and one of the core elements that either increases an agency’s value or decreases it is how integral is the agency owner to the business. And so, you know, what agency owners forget is that the reason you’re selling the business is so you don’t have to go there every day anymore. And so if you’re really integral and the business can’t thrive without you, then it diminishes the value of the, of the business pretty significantly. To your point.

Yeah. I mean, you can say goodbye to a work life balance or anything close to it, right? Right. I mean, it feels good, especially in the beginning to feel needed. I always say this, you know, my business is my baby thing. Right? Right. You know, it feels really good to be needed all the time and to be, you know, at the, at the behest of what the agency needs. And you feel like you have all the answers, but there comes a time where if your business is thriving, it shouldn’t need you. Right? Your, your toddler shouldn’t be asking you for specific things. You shouldn’t have to tie your kids’ shoes when they’re in high school, right? It’s, it’s very much, you know, a growing stage. And I think sometimes as business owners, we forget that, right? We forget that putting our head down and grinding isn’t actually what the business needs from us right now.

Right. It actually needs us to ascend to a different level of leadership that might require us pulling back and allowing our team to demonstrate their skills.

Yeah. Yeah. So important. So let’s talk a little bit about, ’cause when you say sabbatical, people are probably like, I don’t have time to take three months off and go to India and hike, you know, so what do you mean by sabbatical?

Great question. Often when I get this question, folks come to the table with kind of two preconceived ways that they think about this. The first is the one you’ve just described, right? Right. Access to lots of resources, six month Parisian sabbatical. You’re just kind of kicking your feedback and laying on a beach type of deal. And the second, which actually is talked about pretty frequently, but not acknowledged enough, I think is the voluntold sabbatical, right? I’ve hit the brick wall and I’m experiencing this, this burnout, right? Yeah. I can’t actually work and create inside of the business because this thing has just sucked the life outta me. Yeah. And a lot of times what we’ll see is, you know, physical health will start to decline, mental health will start to decline, and overall, you know, you’ll really need to just pull back from what you’re doing, right?

The business can’t grow. And I think it’s John Maxwell, right? Talks about the leader lid and he says, you know, the business will only grow to the level of personal and professional development of its leader. And I think at this time we almost feel like we can’t develop ourselves, right? Because we’re so drained of resources, of time, of energy, our personal relationships might be completely obliterated. And so sabbatical to me is that time in between how can we access the benefits of a traditional sabbatical, right? Weaving rest into how the business operates because we’re just human beings. We’re not machines, right? We do need rest, right? Burning, burning the midnight oil and fulfilling on client projects until 2:00 AM is gonna bring us closer to the second sabbatical I’ve described, and way farther away from the first, right?

But if you take too much time off from the business at its critical point, now if you’re an agency running a team of under 10, right? That’s 10% of your staff, right? Right. That you’re losing and probably more depending on what your capacity is as the owner. So it’s a really, really challenging time to try to balance. So sabbatical to me is the cadence of rest, right? Think of Sabbath, you know, you take the Sunday off. That is something that we can weave into our business daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly, so that we can rebuild ourselves as founders and our systems to support the business as a separate entity of us. Because ultimately what we wanna do is we wanna tease the founder out of those day-to-day operations as much as humanly possible to have our business just thrive independently of us.

So talk to us about the ideal daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. And then let’s back up to, I suspect most people listening are like, yeah, that’ll never happen. So let’s, let’s back up from that and show us the steps we take to actually make it possible.

Yeah. So daily ideal, I have this principle that I break down in the book called the 90 90 principle, and this is biz dev, right? This is something that you’re working on to push the business forward. Yeah. 90 minutes a day for 90 days straight, right? You, you should have one focus. And that’s how, as tactical as it gets in terms of implementing the sabbatical method, I actually used this to break away from my agency to write this book and market this book. It is fantastic. And being able to do this and block this time in will unleash the power of being able to develop your business into its next phase of growth as the founder. So absolutely, that is ideal for daily, weekly, for me, is taking a look at the key metrics.

So if you don’t have metrics and some blocked available time each and every week, it can be during your 90 minute session to just review how is agency, you know, profitability, how is our fulfillment, how is our sales pipeline, how is our marketing, right? Just making sure that we have a good solid indicator of how things are working and what key decisions need to be made. Again, another chapter inside of the book around positioning yourself to make the fastest and most informed decisions possible. That way we can spend way less time in the weeds of our business quarterly. This looks like doing some quarterly planning. My team and I take two full days completely away from the business. We tell all of our clients. Oftentimes we’ll piggyback a company retreat on that, depending on budget and depending on size of our team at that current time.

And that is something that is absolutely invaluable. It allows us to kind of get up out of the business and just consider what is next, right? What’s the path we’ve been on for the last quarter? Have we been implementing the 90 90 principle? Because all my team actually does this too, now that we’ve kind of advanced inside of the sabbatical method. And this is our second quarter in a row starting here in Q four.

And And how big is your team?

Yeah, we have three internal employee team members, and then we also have about 12 contractors that we work with on almost a full-time basis. Some of which who have been with me for four or five years. Okay. So we

Do have three. And the reason I’m asking that is because people are like, oh, well she’s got a team of 50, she can do that. So again, you are an agency under 10.

That’s exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. We’re an agency under 10. And you know what it, it changes and, and here’s the thing that I think that is super important too about the sabbatical method at at large, right? Is that if we give ourselves this time for breaks, right? I mentioned before, if you’re a high performer and you’re training for a marathon, those rest periods are actually meant to rebuild your muscles and your cardiovascular system so that when you go back out to run the next training period or make the next phase of the ascent, you actually are stronger. I firmly believe that using this rest time to business develop and create additional operational function inside of the business, it will actually help you create a system for repair, which is what at a baseline operations needs to be for an agency team under 10, right?

If we’re finding new ways to do things, we should be breaking things in our business all the time. We shouldn’t create this shiny, beautiful operating system that nobody ever touches that is really cumbersome to update. We should just create a system for repairing stuff. Oh cool, we found a better, faster, and more efficient way to onboard our new customers. Let’s create that process. Right? Right. Let’s whiteboard that out. And I think that’s the thing that a lot of folks are scared of is they say, well, if we write down the process, then that means we can never change anything. That is absolutely false. And if you build in this cadence of rest, you’re gonna give yourself opportunities every day, every week, every month, every quarter to be able to revisit these procedures and make sure that you’re actually, you know, accurately, you know, how do I put this?

You’re actually accurately, you know, describing what is going on and what is true for the agency to be successful today.

Okay? So sabbatical for you is every day 90 minutes of protected time to do the big thinking things I have to do 90 minutes once a week or sabbatical once a week is, and it can be within one of my 90 minute days, reviewing the KPIs that matter to the business and then dealing with whatever those KPIs tell me. Sabbatical for the quarter is two days whole team. So all attraction, we have our own version of traction called Agency Edge, but two days of heads down, bigger picture, both looking back and, but also planning for the next quarter.

Right? So do I have that? So sabbatical is not Drew sitting on a beach with a fruity cocktail.

It can be Drew if you really, really want that sabbatical. Yeah, I’m, and so that’s the great thing.

I’m not, I’m not good at sitting on a beach, but, but I get the point. Yeah.

Transparently, neither am I. Yeah. Honestly, one of the big reasons why I wrote the sabbatical method and how I came up with this idea is when I took maternity leave with my very first son, and I remember sitting in the hospital and my husband had just snapped this photo of me and my first baby, and he was sleeping in my arms. I was super happy and transparently very relieved that the birthing process was over. I’m sure in the next frame, I had put my son down in the bassinet and picked up my phone to start answering emails from clients and Slack messages from my team. And as the systems person, this felt super confronting to me because I was like, oh, great systems person can’t even create systems to be able to take a maternity leave for herself.

And I think what I realized through the postpartum process and really weaving myself out of the day-to-day operations, is considering that this is a muscle, right? We can’t just go out for three months, right? And expect that everybody’s going to be able to take care of everything, even if we have systems and processes in place, right? We need to build that muscle, we need to instill that trust and give our team the ability and opportunity to be able to wrap their heads, their brains around this, this new function that they’re performing. So we begin with this cadence of rest, but it can certainly build up to a three month period where you take some time off and you go focus on another project or you know, a a two week period where, dare I say, you don’t pick up your phone while you’re on family vacation, right?

Right. This can safeguard a lot of the really important things that make you a whole human being, not just a business owner.

Right. Right. Okay. So how, how do I start this? So I’m guessing most people listening are like 90 minutes, I’m looking at my calendar and lady, you’re on crack 90 minutes a day, not possible. So how, how do people start this?

Yeah, great question. First and foremost is with boundaries. And I think boundaries can look as simple as shutting the computer at 6:00 PM and not working in the evenings. I think if we can build a muscle where we create the boundaries around when we expect our business to operate versus when it actually operates, Hmm, that’s the first step. I see so many founders as they grow their team and they grow their agency at large, right? The clients that they serve, you know, the, the eyeballs that they’re attracting over to their work and their portfolio, they train their business too early on that it needs 80 hours a week from one person to be able to operate, right?

Right. And that’s first and

And they train their clients that they’re always available.

Exactly right. The lines of communication are always on. There are no boundaries, texts return at, you know, 8:00 PM and all those things. So first and foremost, just establishing, it’s almost as simple as like setting those working hours in Google, like we probably do for all of our clients, right? Right. When we build their website and all that stuff, we’re like, okay, here are working hours. And just establishing that on the front end. Because let’s be totally frank, every person I’ve ever communicated with, client, partner, you know, anybody otherwise, and I said, Hey, listen, I actually don’t work on Fridays because I really feel like that time is important for me to be present with my family before we jump into the weekend full of chores and tasks and all the stuff. So I actually will be slow to respond on Friday.

But if you need someone to touch base with, here’s somebody at my organization who you can do that with. I have never been met ever with a, how dare you take off on Friday, I’m paying you my good hard-earned money, right? They respect the boundary and transparently even more. So they probably are looking at their schedule being like, I wish I could create that for me. Right? Right. So they al they almost even intriguingly ask me how I can do that, right? So creating that boundary, clearly communicating it with your clients and then inviting your team into the fold on this as well. Because if you can show your team that you prioritize rest for everybody at the agency, not just you, that’s gonna send massive goodwill through the entire culture of the business.

I tell my team that we need to create boundaries for them every single quarter. We reevaluate these every single quarter. So what does it look like? Are we working late consistently? Are we in a position where we feel like we have to clean out our inboxes on the weekends? Like that was totally our situation when I first, you know, was postpartum with my first son. And it was challenging for folks to be able to trim that down and consider how we could get our work done a little bit bit more efficiently. But I’ll tell you what, once I invited them to consider that we could take half days on Fridays, if we got all of our work done, ideas, ideas, ideas, ideas just kept coming out of the woodwork of how we could be more efficient in the way that we fulfilled and we ended up with some incredible nuances to how we were delivering on clients that ended up being cheaper.

Our team members were so much happier. So even just inviting them into the fold to consider, hey, what would it look like here if we did a four day work week? What would it look like here if we actually closed our laptops at 6:00 PM and didn’t work in the evenings? What would need to be true right about our workday? And what could we do to make sure that that’s more efficient and more effective? So I, I think inviting the team in to consider that and to consider the 90 90 principle, right? They’ll maintain their focus, they can work on developing systems inside of their specific department, whether it’s your account manager, anybody who’s building web property for your SEO manager, right? Right. They can consider what it might look like to become more efficient during the day-to-day and actually leverage those breaks.

So as I’m listening to you talk and we’re talking, you are using the word sabbatical and because most people when they think about sabbatical, they do think about that I’m gonna go to France and sit and have a cup of coffee and a Caffrey and watch the world go by. And really what you’re talking about is protected big thinking work time. So how do you help, how connect the dot for us between those 90 minute blocks, the reviewing the KPIs once a week, the quarterly two day offsites, or however those are structured? How is that rest? Because it’s work, I’m still working, right?

So how is it rest?

So it’s rest for your business, right? So if your business needs times of incredible pushes, right? Whether you’re launching a new thing or you know, creating a marketing initiative or you know, opening the doors to one of your programs, you know, bringing a, a big web design project over the finish line. Those things are sprints inside of the business, right? If you’re traditionally training for a marathon, but rest for your business is taking that time to business develop, right? Crystallize quarterly plans, crystallize core habits to get us to those places, create core systems and processes that make the work inside of the business a little bit simpler. And in the meantime, the founder can be adhering to that rest cadence, right?

Whatever it is they feel like they can access right now personally as well as the team to be able to meet those blocked times for rest, quote unquote in the business a little bit easier, right? Because what happens is we’ll block those times right into the business to work on the business, and then what happens, every agency owner tells me this, almost every single call I book, every single workshop I do, they’ll say, oh, but all of a sudden fires come up, right? Right. Client fires and I hear that all the time. Time, right? Client fires, client fires. And my opinion is, is that we can’t say that client fires are never going to happen, right? But if we build the muscle around responding to client fires at a specific time during the day and business development during a specific time of the day, and we make that our cadence and our habit, our business is gonna actually show us the results of those inputs, right?

It’s going to show us that it’s easier to run client fires may actually become fewer, right? Sometimes fighting a fire isn’t about just spraying the specific fire. Like sure that is true, but also let’s take some preventative measures to make sure fires don’t crop up again, right? That’s business development, right? And so I think rest for our business, right? Are those kind of times that you mentioned 90 90, our weekly review of our metrics, our quarterly plans, making sure that’s all crystallized and a rest cadence for the founder and their team looks like at first shutting the computer at 6:00 PM taking the few we the, the full weekends off, being able to step out for a week on a holiday, whether that’s a team member or a founder or whomever, and feel like we still have a really solid, you know, system to be able to follow on what that person was specifically doing and the ball’s staying in the air and we can invite that person back with excitement instead of here’s all the stuff right that you missed while you were away, right?

So I think it helps, helps develop the business overall and it also helps keep people in the game longer, right? We, we have less employee turnover. Sure. We don’t have founders that grow to frankly just resent their business because they’re just tethered to it 24 7, right?

Okay, I want to take a break and then I want to talk about what you were just saying, which is great. I block off the 90 minutes and then sure as God made little green apples, the fires start coming. And so I end up just working through the 90 minutes like I do the rest of my day by putting out fires because I, I do think agency culture is whatever fire is hottest that I, I have often said no one’s day at an agency is what they think it’s gonna be as they are heading into work, literally or physically we think we have, oh, we look at our calendar and we’re like, oh, I have two meetings, but I have that big block of time and I’m gonna get that work done and blah la la and then we get to the office and we just run from fire to fire to fire to fire.

So I wanna take a quick break, but then I wanna come back and have you help us sort of deconstruct how do I go from that reality, which for most agency owners and employees is the reality today to actually doing what I’m supposed to do in the 90 minutes. So we’ll take a break and then we’ll come back and we’ll chat about that. Hey, just wanna take a quick minute and tell you about a resource that we have on the website that I don’t talk about as often as I should. So it’s an exercise called My Future Self. And the reason why you would do this exercise is if you are in planning mode, and this is really for you as either an agency owner or an agency leader, but you really wanna think about what your future looks like, not the agency’s future, your future.

I find so many agency owners struggle with how they are spending their days and is it fulfilling and is this what they wanna do? You know, in five years that we created an exercise and I, I will tell you a a very brief story, but I first did a version of this exercise probably 15 years ago and it basically walks you through some thinking and you have to do some journaling around what your future self looks like. And you have to sort of give yourself into it. You have to really suspend like the reality and talk about what it is today. But I’m telling you when I did it, how it was different from my current moment in my life was pretty dramatic.

And I was working with a coach at the time and I said, this is great and this is the life I want, but it doesn’t look like my life now. And we talked about just sort of being open to the possibility of transitioning in some of those directions. And I will tell you for the last 10 years I have been living that life, the life that I created in this exercise. So it can be very powerful and very eyeopening and I’m not a woowoo kind of guy, but once I understood what I wanted as opportunities presented themselves, I just took advantage of them in different ways than I would’ve had I not done this exercise. So head over to the am I website and go to agency management institute.com/my future self and you can read more about it.

There’s an intro, a video intro where I tell you all about it and then some questions. It’s $197 if you don’t like it or you don’t want, you don’t end up doing it, happy to give you your money back. But I’m telling you, it can be really transformative if you give yourself into the exercise and really do it with an open heart. So just wanted to tell you it was there. Hopefully it’ll be helpful for some of you. Okay, let’s get back to the show. Alright, we are back and we’re talking about sabbaticals, but a different way of thinking about sabbaticals. We’re really talking about, you know, we, I, all of us have taken some sort of time management class and you look at the grid and there’s the urgent and the important and all of those things. And we spend a lot of time in the urgent box and of course time management.

I can remember doing this in my twenties and you know, them saying, well, you have to spend more time in the important box. And me thinking that’d be great if the urgent box would be quiet. So before the break you were talking about these 90 minute blocks that agency owners and it ultimately, eventually their team should carve out of their day for sort of what I would call deep thinking, heads down work, whatever, whatever that might be for the owners, it’s probably biz dev. For other people, it may be core things inside their company, but there are fires. So how do we, how do we learn how to ignore the fires? Because I don’t, I don’t know that we can just not have fires.

And if you know that, then I wanna talk about that. How do we, how do we, how do we ignore the fires for 90 minutes? How do we, how do we really protect that time? And because I suspect once you do it for a period of time, the value of it feels so amazing that you would do anything other than give away your firstborn to protect that time. But absolutely before we’ve experienced that magic, we think 90 minutes, I, I can’t do that. So how do we, how do we retrain ourselves and our team to actually protect that time and use it for its intended purpose?

Yeah. So first and foremost is to communicate this with the key stakeholders. So this is for sure your team and it’s also for sure your spouse or partner or whoever your living situation is, you know, with at home. Because for me specifically, when I started doing the 90 90 principle to write my book, I told my husband, Hey listen, I’m gonna wake up and write my book every single day from 5:00 AM to 6:30 AM I’m gonna do that before the kids wake up. That way I know the most important thing has been completely checked off before I walk into my day of all the other stuff that I need to work with and tackle. And he understood. And I created a specific space for me outside of my working area.

So A, communicate with people and B, create a specific space for you to work on your 90 minute function, perhaps outside of your normal working area. So if you go into an office or if you work from home, for me, I sat downstairs in my home, my kids were still asleep at the time. And so I would just work and I actually still keep my 90 90. So I work from five in the morning to six 30 in the morning. I do the most specific things that I need to get done during my focus time. I personally like the morning session because I feel like it’s kind of cheating, right? Like everybody’s still asleep. I can kind of skate in and tackle those most important things. And then I know that my day when I have the most crossover in time zones with my clients are available for them to be able to book me, right?

But that time nobody wants like up at five o’clock in the morning to meet with me. So I’m like, well this is cheat time, right? I get to like access additional time during the day, which is amazing for me and for the folks I’ve known who have done this because they can jump in and their mindset in terms of approaching things during the day, they feel way less guilty when they’re putting out client fires because they’re not like, oh, I have this other thing that I need to be doing. Right? That’s important, quote unquote, right? Like in that important category. So first and foremost is get that knocked out as soon as humanly possible during your day. If that means that you’re in a position where you actually don’t go into the office until 9:00 AM in the morning because from seven to eight 30 you’re in a position where you’re doing your 90 minutes either from your home office or from a coffee shop or whichever you know, location you feel like is best for you.

I found in the beginning it was good to separate those. Now that I have the muscle built, I can actually come into my home office and do my 90 minutes focus time in the office, right? So that feels really, really good for me. But make sure you’re communicating that in the beginning. Like, Hey listen, I’m piloting this really cool principle I learned from this operation strategist, here’s the deal. I’m gonna work during these times. Can we just make sure that my calendar is clear? It’s really important, at least in my experience, to try to have it at the same time every single day and as early on in the day as possible. Because if we consider the bandwidth for strategic thinking, for decision making and all that, right? We wanna give some amazing strategic thinking to the project that we’re working on.

And sometimes when we’re responding to client fires, it feels really administrative and reactive. And so we can totally leave that bandwidth for later in the day. Same thing with my email. Like I literally don’t open up my email until about three o’clock in the afternoon because that’s when I hit my lull in my day. Hmm. And I’m like, okay, during my lull in the day is when I can dedicate this minimal amount of energy to my inbox because it only requires that much thinking bandwidth from me. And I start to do that. So block in the 90 minutes, make sure you communicate. And then with client fires, you’re right, they are always going to happen. Yeah, I still experience client fires. We have some of the best systems and processes around the ways that we support our clients and we’ve helped our, our clients do the same thing.

But that still comes up. And it’s funny, I think about a conversation I had with a design agency once and we were talking through like his core process for serving his clients and he didn’t bring up revisions. I thought it was really interesting and I was like, Hey Josh, I didn’t see anything about revisions in here. Like, you know, what’s, what’s the deal? Do you guys, you know, offer revisions to your clients? Or you know, did you guys just knock it outta the park every time? And he was like, no, actually we have a ton of revision on our projects all the time. You know, they’re asking us for things and sometimes it actually does, it throws a big wrench in things. And I said, well, why don’t we optimize your client journey for revisions and consider if clients are always asking for revisions, right?

If that’s a standard, then like how are we tackling that and how are we accelerating them through the process? Are we giving them prompts for what type of feedback to give us? Are we giving a limited timeframe for that? Are we giving, you know, a limited back and forth, right? So we’ll do three revisions, we’ll do two revisions, et cetera, et cetera. And so I’ve actually found that this is super, super helpful for client fires, right? So even just being aware of what are the traditional client fires that show up that will do so much for reducing the types of client fires that you have. Because you can take a look at the last month and consider who emailed us and all of a sudden we felt like we had to respond, or who hit us up on Slack all of a sudden said that something was broken, right?

If we could be in a position to at least standardize the types of requests that we get throughout the day, we can block time to address client fires and every single day if we have that time blocked, we can address the common things that are coming up for us. And then also as that, you know, kind of request list starts to dwindle, we can use that client fire time to start to make some systems and processes around addressing client fires. One of the really, really impactful ones that I’ve helped my clients with is just a proactive communication schedule. How many times have we been hit up by a client? Like where is blank? Right? Right. If we’re updating them at a cadence that feels really helpful and tells them, Hey listen, I don’t have that thing done yet, but you are top of mind for me and I’m gonna get back to you.

Oftentimes we don’t get replies like, oh you know, this stinks, I’m so upset that I don’t have it today. They’re gonna say, great Alyson, thank you so much for touching base with me. I’m looking forward to see what you’ve got. Right? And so a Blocking client fire time consistently addressing what types of client fires you have. And then the third thing will be to obviously just get out in front of your client communication and consider that creating a proactive schedule for them, even if it’s a two week turnaround, right? Just don’t leave them leave like in the lurch, right? Understand that they’re wanting something, they wanna understand that they’re top of mind, that there’s momentum on the project and just go ahead and touch base with them with a two, you know, two line email.

So when you talk about from five to six 30, I’m guessing some people are like, well that’s not a sabbatical, that’s just adding more time to my day. So talk about, so like are you done at two?

Yeah, I finish up at three. I’ll, like I said, clean up my ml MM inbox from like three to four o’clock. Honestly, sometimes I’m even just done at three o’clock because my assistant will take on some of my emails, but for the most part I do, I shorten my day because I realized that I am not an evening worker. Right? When the company was young, like, well younger, right? We’ll celebrate six years here this month when it was younger, I would stay up until like eight, nine o’clock

And And you were younger.

Exactly. Right. You know, the, you could, you could burn them in at oil, you could stay up super late. I didn’t have the kiddos waking me up in morning. I was gonna

Was say the pesky children are a problem with that too, right?

Oh my goodness. Yeah. They, they need lots of fun attention in the morning. And so that’s one of the big reasons why it’s, you know, crazy for me to stay up late these days. So what I did was, I actually just trimmed the evening time off and I said, if I’m not gonna work in the evenings, I’m actually way more productive in the mornings and it allows me to be more present with my kiddos at breakfast. ’cause I do, I take that seven to eight o’clock timeframe to really be there with them and hang out and do all the things. And I do. So knowing that I just don’t have this mounting task list in the back of my brain, right? Because that really does cannibalize the time. Yeah. And it’s a shame when like you actually come to that realization that if you’re not prioritizing what’s most important in your business first thing in the morning, that it’s gonna bleed into your family time.

Especially if you work from home and you’re kind of, you know, in and out and doing the remote work thing, which a lot of us are now, it’s really, really challenging to establish those boundaries. So I find that really jumping in in the mornings is helpful for me. And then in the afternoons when my kids wake up from their naps, I just wanna be there with them. I just wanna be able to play and not feel like I’m just seeing the kids at the most hectic times, which is like pickups drop offs, you know? Yeah. Meal times. Like it, nap times. Like, it just feels right. Exactly. It just feels hectic. So instead we get to like dance in the front yard and do, you know, things in the mornings and it just feels a little bit more like I have a, a more intentional relationship time built in for them.

And that also makes me feel great as a professional because now I feel like my kid cup is full. I’m able to spend time with my family and I don’t come into my business leading my team, leading my clients and feeling guilty for the fact that our kids are, you know, hanging out with our amazing nanny because she’s playing so well with them and doing such incredible things with our kids. So like, it just, to me it feels like, you know, kind of, it really does balance both sides of the scale, which is a, is a fallacy in and of itself, right? Balance is only a momentary mo sorry, excuse me, a moment in time. But it helps me, I think, and, and, and my clients really feel like they can be present where they are.

So let’s talk a little bit about, ’cause I, one of the things you said early on is this idea of there is a required obsolescence for the agency owner. And I think you can extend that to say any business. I, I was just with a client yesterday and they have a, I would call him a mediocre performer, but he’s in such a pivotal role that they can’t imagine they feel sort of held hostage that they have to keep him. And so the whole idea of being your business, being independent of any individual, let’s talk a little bit about how do I, how do I get, whether it’s me, the owner or it’s another key leader or key contributor, how do I get my business to the point that it can survive and thrive without relying on one specific person?

I mean, it’s systems and processes point blank, right? I think that’s one of the reasons I talk about the book, and I’d be silly if I didn’t mention McDonald’s in a book about operations, but you know, McDonald’s is one of the reasons why they’ve been able to have some of the highest turnover rates of, of any company in any industry is because their process is ironclad, right? Their onboarding, their training, right? Everything that they’re doing, their visibility into their metrics, their costs, their efficiency, everything they understand in the first two weeks whether or not somebody is actually going to be successful because of the fact that they just follow the procedures. And if somebody comes there to get one day’s work of pay, and then that’s fine for them because the business in and of itself, right, operates independently of its people, right?

And so I’m not saying that people aren’t fantastic accelerators for the business because that is absolutely true, especially when you look at a team of 10 in an agency versus McDonald’s, right? This gigantic, you know, global multi-billion dollar organization, right? But I think it’s incredible to consider, right? What are the key components of the agency and how do we need to set up systems and processes to make sure that if somebody goes out or if somebody leaves the agency, that we feel like we at least have a head around tapping somebody else on the shoulder and placing them in that spot that they can do the job until we fill it again with the next right fit. And I think a lot of agencies, I mean transparently, someone will come to me and be like, my account manager just left and I have no idea what I’m doing.

And the fact of the matter is, is we can reframe that, especially with the sabbatical method to be a really cool opportunity, right? Someone just left my agency now my opportunity is I need to go in and fact find and write down all of the standard operating procedures and systems management that actually exist inside of this role so that the next person I pipe in here will be super successful and it won’t be as dependent on this person walking out with all of the knowledge on how to do the things in my agency, right? So we can position it to our team. I’ve seen this go really wrong in the past. We can position it to our team like, hey listen, we really, really want to foster incredible work-life balance here.

So let’s put in these 90 minutes every day to create some systems around how you are currently doing your job, around how you are, you know, performing your role. And I would love if either daily or weekly you came to the table with a couple of ideas on how we could create some more efficiency in how you’re doing what you’re doing so that you don’t have to work on the weekends, you don’t have to work a full day on Friday if you don’t want to. Right. Position that benefit in front of them because not only does it benefit your people, but it also benefits the agency, right? If all of a sudden your account manager is working two thirds of the time that they were working, guess what just happened? You grew the capacity to get more clients and grow your revenue while maintaining the same profit margin.

So that’s incredible, right? That’s, that feels like you have some freedom and some autonomy to be able to grow the business at will, right? Instead of feeling really trapped and really dependent on either one person or one particular system, you feel like you’ve kind of unlocked this, this new level of the agency.

Yeah. So how do you know, because I, I think it’s also easy to get into the weeds of system development and pretty soon, you know, you have a, a document on how to make coffee in the morning and how to blah blah blah. So how do you, how do you identify what are the right systems and processes to document? How do you break them down into manageable sized systems and processes? Because for example, workflow, there’s probably five processes inside a workflow process, right? So how, how do we know what is and isn’t important to document and what’s sort of a manageable cadence of that?

Yeah, great question. So when I work with companies on this, I’ll typically first and foremost ask them like, what is your vision for the next 90 days, right? How, what do you plan to do in terms of your client load? What do you plan to do in terms of your growth strategies? You know, that sort of thing. And just really just kind of lay the groundwork for, okay, what is the state of the union at the agency at this current moment? And so what we wanna do is we wanna consider that there’s basically two sides to every agency, you know, at this kind of stage of growth, right? We’ve got the growth section of the business and we’ve got the delivery section of the business, right? And so growth is how are we attracting new people, new marketplace notoriety, you know, filling our sales pipeline with prospects that we can actually serve.

And then the delivery is how are we actually delivering on those, you know, promises that we’re making. Yeah. And how are we creating systems to make delivery on those promises a little bit simpler in the future, right? So those are the two pieces of the business that we really need to focus on. And so what I always encourage my clients with is that there’s usually only like one or two strategies in each of those sections that actually are going to be really, really effective for you. So let’s just say for example, the way that you get new prospects into your world is by, you know, doing some outbound and, and doing website audits, right? Let’s just say that activity needs to be documented, right? Right. It’s a core habit in the business that brings new people in the door and that new thing is gonna drive a lot of other things inside of the business, right? Your core strategy for conversion, if that’s booking a, a call, if that is doing a chat sequence back and forth, if that’s going and speaking at live events and positioning your offer on the stage, those things need to be documented, right?

How you do that and what the workflow looks like to prepare for those certain situations. And so I consider, again, one to two core strategies in every single, you know, area of the business that’s in marketing, sales, fulfillment, systems and operations. There’s really only a couple and we don’t need to overcomplicate things. So just consider, even if you have a couple of strategies, what’s the one, right? The one that’s moving the needle, the one that is actually being most effective. We can tackle that one first and then also consider that down the line, right? Once we have our muscle built, once we block in our 90 minutes of biz dev of time, we can tackle additional processes. So the level of specificity and granularity that I expect agencies of about 10 to go into is really at the workflow level, right?

Because if you’re in a position where, let’s just say you’re ma managing Facebook ads, right? Let’s just say you’re setting up Ads manager, that platform is gonna change 900 times before you end on this episode you’re listening to right now. Right? Right. So it’s really, really futile to actually document a lot of the granular SOPs for a lot of the technology that we’re using because guess what? It’s gonna go out the window. Can we create a workflow for how we set up, right? High level here’s how we approach, you know, Facebook Ads manager and the things that you need to be focusing on. Yes, absolutely. That to me looks like a high level workflow or a checklist of sorts, right? For people to be able to follow. And then you can just link to the ads manager help section. Like how do I set up a new campaign that’s focused on, you know, lead generation or whatever, right?

So you can really be in a position to get that high level documentation out. Now when your team grows to 50 to 70, then yeah, let’s start talking granularity. Let’s start, you know, getting things a little bit more dialed in. But like I said earlier in our conversation, it’s about repair, right? Right. It’s about breaking stuff because we’re growing and then having a process for repair. So we don’t want this really cumbersome thing to be able to maintain if we’re going to be growing, you know, at, at a really quick rate

And we’re gonna be continually evolving it.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Alright, last question. So I, I, this all sounds great. So first system from first steps for me, I just wanna review this with everybody are set some boundaries, right? And if I look at my calendar and I’m like, there’s not a 90 minute block for two months, then what do I do between now? So I, I get that I can go two months out and start setting the 90 minute blocks. What do I do now though for the two months where that’s just not possible if I’m not willing to start at like, you know, four in the morning?

Yeah. Start where you are, start at 30 minutes, whatever time that you’re willing and excited to begin. I know a lot of families who frankly don’t have the situation I have where my kids will stay in their beds happily until 7:00 AM So some moms and dads are getting woken up at five 30 by their children and so they don’t have that focus time. So I would say block the time, make it as at a specific time and you know, earlier part of your day if possible, and block the time that you currently have, right? If it’s only 30 minutes between nine and nine 30, that’s excellent. Do that. It’s 30 minutes more than you focused yesterday, right? And it’s a step in the right direction, right? I always joke about this, like when you go out to train for a marathon, you don’t run the marathon on day one, right?

That’s not the game, right? The game is you run the first mile and then you just make, I think you put

Promise to yourself, I think put your shoes and then you sit on the couch trying to talk yourself into going outside to run, right? That’s step one.

Yeah. You like drive to the parking lot of the gym’s and like sit there and eat your breakfast’s. But yeah, went through McDonald’s, right?

Start where great,

Start where you are and just really be honest with yourself. ’cause I think at the end of the day, right, and I think I read Atomic Habits almost every year. I think there was like one year, it’s a sense that came out. It’s excellent. Yep. And a lot of what he talks about right, is making it easiest possible to be able to get momentum in the right direction. And so if you can create that time for yourself again, even if it’s 30 minutes, just make sure it’s consistent, right? Because your brain will start to believe that you can do this, right? If you are consistent with it if you see the evidence of that thing happening moving forward. So Blocking the time and I think just become excited about the idea of this new version of your agency. Because ultimately, if you can’t understand what you can do today to make this happen and what the promise is out in the future, right?

Of you being able to have a really solid grip over the agency and make sure that you can, you know, just make decisions, make the right decisions for you, really feel independent of your team. Feel independent of being pulled back into the business. Reluctantly. If you’re working on bigger strategic initiatives, this is something that only few businesses that I’ve actually come in contact with can do really, really well. And you will rise to the top 2% through a crazy uncertain year through an absolutely kind of draining, you know, situation in our economy and, you know, in agency life in general. I mean, it’s a grind sometimes. Yeah, boy. And I think, I think sometimes too, like we forget that we hold all the power, right?

Right. We forget that, that we can kind of change the direction and it’s not gonna be easy, right? It’s not gonna be easy to change the direction, but it is gonna be worth it. And I think when we’re looking from the top of the mountain and looking down and being like, whoa, this is how far I’ve come. And it started with just Blocking 30 minutes a day to focus on my systems. Now I have this really well-oiled machine, this team that knows exactly what they’re doing. I have solid profit margins and the ability to grow if I want to, or get out if I want to. And so having those options at your fingertips is really, really, really important and will be so incredibly valuable to you. Yeah.

Yeah, you’re right. It’s, and so again, just want everybody here, you’re, you’re in essence giving everybody permission to start small and make incremental steps. Okay. So this has been, this has been great. It’s been practical. It’s, I think hopefully it’s inspiring people to help their f not only themselves, but their folks find some mental respite in the business so that they can bring a better version of themselves every day to work, but also a better version of themselves to the rest of their life too. Which, you know, again, the reason, the reason we own our own business is to have a different kind of life. And so we should be able to do that. If people wanna learn more about the work you do, they wanna get a copy of the book, they want to follow you on social, what’s the best way for them to track you down and to learn more about your work?

Yeah, totally. Send me a DMM on Instagram at operations agency. I’ll send you my quiz that you is, is really like the foundational function of figuring out, can my business actually go on without me, right? Like, right. Will everybody be able to keep the balls in the air? I’ll send it. And I think it’ll be a great way for you to kind of self-identify, like, what do I need to focus on first? Right? Do I need to focus on Blocking that time? And really just kind of giving my team an opportunity to thrive without me? Do I really need to kind of decide to pull myself away from the business? I think that’ll be a great first step for everybody. The book is available on Amazon. If you search the sabbatical method, you’ll find it. That is really, really exciting.

And I also launched a free toolkit alongside it. So if you’re feeling stuck on some of the exercises around developing systems, I’ve created critical actions at the end of every single chapter because I love, I have a bias toward action. I love helping people kind of grease the wheels of, of some of these results. ’cause I know that operations doesn’t come naturally to a lot of, a lot of creatives and a lot of agency owners. So I’m excited to get some folks some wins and it’s really important to me that we build businesses to last. So I hope that everybody finds information helpful.

Awesome. This has been great. Thank you for your time. Thanks for sharing your expertise. And I, I’m grateful that you, that you spent the morning with us, so thank you.

Yeah, of course. Drew I had on some time as well. Appreciate you having me.

You bet. Alright guys, so lots of action items in this episode. I too have a bias to action. As you know, I like episodes where you can take content that you heard and actually start doing something, stop doing something, do something different. And Alyson gave you a lot of those things. And so she also gave you permission to go slow. And most of us are not ready to block 90 minutes every day today. But you probably can find 15 minutes and maybe you start there. So I encourage you to start playing with these ideas, talk with your team about it, see what’s viable, and do something, do something different that that gets you that mental respite that I think all of you’re kind of hungry for.

So, great episode, great action items. Would love to hear what you do with them. Huge shout out and thank you to our friends at White. Label IQ. As you know, they’re the presenting sponsor of the podcast, and so we are super grateful to them. They do white Label, design dev and PPC for agencies all over the land. Head over to White Label IQ dot com slash aami if you wanna learn more about them. And I’ll be back next week with another episode. So thank you for listening. Thanks for coming back, and I’ll talk to you soon.

That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of Build a Better Agency. Visit agency management institute.com to check out our workshops, coaching and consulting packages, and all the other ways we serve agencies just like yours. Thanks for listening.