Decoupling from the day-to-day grind as an agency owner with Lien De Pau

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 U R L? 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 from Agency Management Institute, back with another great episode of Build a Better Agency. So glad you’re here. Today’s topic is one that I have talked to with literally hundreds of you before, and I have a great guest who’s gonna help us uncrack the code to this challenge that you are facing. But before we do that, I wanna remind you, I haven’t talked about this for quite a while, but we have a tool. It’s an assessment that you can discover the health of your agency in five key areas, how your account execs are doing, sales, credibility, staff, and transforming your business, your agency, into a business rather than a lifestyle, which is ironic given the topic that we’re gonna talk about today.

So it takes you five minutes to answer the questions, and you’re immediately gonna get an email back, sort of telling you where your weak spots are and your strengths are. And then we’re gonna send you some resources. All of this is absolutely free. We’re not trying to sell you anything that will help you strengthen some of the areas where you have some room for improvement. So all you have to do is go to agency management institute.com/assessment 2023. So again, agency management institute.com/assessment 2023. And then give it five or six minutes to answer the, the questions. I think we estimate it takes six minutes and we will immediately give you your results and then email you some tools that will help you improve things.

So hopefully that’ll be helpful. So speaking of turning your agency into a real business rather than a lifestyle, for many of you, you struggle with the idea of how do I get myself as an agency owner or leader out of the day-to-day enough that I can actually do my job because I’m not doing the things that I need to on the administrative side, on the sales side, on the growth and innovation side, because I’m so busy serving clients or doing something that honestly is not in my job description. So I’m sure a lot of you recognize yourself in that. So we have a guest today. Linda Paw is former agency owner who figured out how to crack the code, how to step out of the day-to-day and become the owner operator, the founder, the visionary of the business, and spend a lot more time working on the business than in the business.

And so I wanna learn from her for all of us, how we can do that better. And so I’m gonna pick her brain a little bit about some methodologies that she’s developed from her own experience and now working with other clients, helping them do the exact same thing. So I think you’re gonna find this super useful. You might wanna grab a pen and paper, ’cause I think it’s gonna give you some ideas of what you can do if this is something you wanna do. And again, certainly up to you, if you wanna stay entrenched in the day-to-day work, you own the joint or you help run the joint so you can make that decision. But if you wanna get out of the day to day and you wanna have more time to do the work that is unique to you, then this might be just the episode for you.

So let’s get to talking to Lynn and start learning from her. Okay, let’s do it. Lynn, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Drew. It’s such an honor.

So will you give everybody a little sense of your background and your expertise before we, before we dig in?

Yeah, absolutely. I currently assist online entrepreneurs and, and agency owners how to scale their service-based business to sell. But my backstory is I, I am a little bit of a, how do you say, unexpected entrepreneur. Like I, I don’t come from an entrepreneurial family, but at some point in my career, I gained a few skills that I thought were useful for other people and other businesses. So I started as a freelancer, turned very quickly into a consultancy business slash agency. And as I think a lot of your listeners might recognize, I really struggled to scale the business beyond myself.

And the consequence of that was, you know, I started a business and an agency because I wanted to have the personal freedom and the flexibility, but I didn’t have any of those,

Right? You didn’t give that to yourself.

So I was like, I must be doing something wrong, but I have no idea how to change this. And then this is back probably 2010, 2011. So we’re talking quite a long decade ago. And the change for me came when I actually read the book, the Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris, where he explains a very different way of doing business with like automations and outsourcing and delegating and all of these things. And that was a turning point for me to really make a change in the way that I was running the business. And for me to be able to scale it beyond myself and beyond a very small, small core team basically.

Now I don’t have that agency anymore. I have moved into being more of an online educator and a coach ever since then. But that’s kind of like where my story started.

So what was the biggest aha for you when you sort of looked at how you were running the business versus the outcome that you wanted?

Yeah, so I, I always wanted to, or my intention with being my own boss was having more freedom, right? I think that’s one of the reasons why a lot of people become either a freelancer or, oh, most of us start off as being a freelancer and then we grow into building an agency when we become a little bit more successful, right? Right. But, but my intention was always personal freedom. But the reality of running a business is that, I mean, I, I never knew how to run a business. Nobody taught me that I was an engineer from backgrounds. I didn’t have any entrepreneurial friends. So basically I went with the hustling grind mode that you see everywhere, right?

Which is just like, you’re just trying to cope with the work and do your best and, and hope your clients are happy and satisfied and even raving about you. And that’s kind of like how I went along. I didn’t know any other way. And back in those days, there wasn’t much information around growing or scaling an an agency. So all I saw around me from the few entrepreneurs that I knew was it’s just all hustle and grind and, and you’re not in it for the freedom basically.

Right? You’re pretty tethered to the work then all of a sudden.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think on top of that, for those of, of us or or the listeners that you have, when you start an agency from a skillset that you have built up up previously, maybe in the corporate world or from your career, your main goal is to serve your clients. But when you do that well, there’s just more and more clients showing up, and then there’s more and more admin that shows up as well on top of that. And, and then it becomes really so much of a bottleneck because there’s just so many hours that you can actually get the work done in order for your clients to be happy.

So obviously you cracked that nut, you’ve figured out how to get out as an agent, as an agency owner, how to get out from under the daily grind. So what’s the, what’s the way to begin thinking about how to do that?

There’s a couple of things that are, I think there’s, there’s both, like there’s a five step framework that I always use, and I’m happy that for us to dive in a little bit deeper there. Yeah. But that’s like the practical, how to get started on doing this. And then there’s also the mindset work that I think you have to do as an agency owner. And one of the things that I really had to get myself comfortable with was the idea that I’m not that important.

Hmm. That sounds uncomfortable.

It’s highly uncomfortable. Yeah. But I think a lot of people will recognize that, right? Like, because we start from a skillset that we have, we have raving clients and that gives us the idea that we are the only person in the business that can get the job done, right? Whatever the job is that needs to be done. But really realizing that you are not as important to the success of this business and the growth of this business, realizing that and and being comfortable in that space will allow you to grow beyond basically your wildest dreams, I would say.

So that sounds like one of those things that is easy to say and hard to do. It’s so how’s, how does someone begin down that road of sort of seeing themselves differently inside the business?

Yeah, I think for me it has always been around asking myself the question, how can I hire people or get supported by people who are better than me?

Hmm.

And that’s something that you need to learn like Hiring for for better rather than for people that you think you can teach or still mentor or have possibilities, but still need to live up to those possibilities. For example. So this was one of the things that I had to learn as an entrepreneur is to hire my weaknesses out basically, right? And to hire the best that I could get.

So that solves the, I’m not good at accounting, so I’ll hire an accountant. But to your point, if your skillset is, let’s say an agency owner is really great at strategy, right? So that’s their, that’s not a weakness for them. That’s their strength. How do they begin to shift the mindset that someone else, because I think a lot of folks get stuck in this, which is there are certain things that we do as an agency that I’m the only one that can do at the level I do it. Yeah. And a lot of times it is a strategy kind of play. So how do I, how do I shift my mindset even if I hire, well, how do I shift my mindset that, that Bob is as good at strategy as I am?

Yeah. So one of the things that helps there is that it’s accepting the fact that Bob might be as good in strategy as you are, but he might do it differently,

Right?

And that is one of the things that we often struggle with. It’s like, if it’s done my way, that’s the best way. Right? And, and that might be true. I’m not even challenging that that might be true. The question then to ask yourself is, what is my way, right? How do I work? What is my unique capability of like a mixture of like passion, a skillset vision that I have that I bring to the table? And kind of unraveling that approach that makes you, you and what some people might call the magic that someone has. But I’m a ne I’m an engineer from backgrounds and I do believe in magic.

But on the other hand, I also do believe that each and every single one of us has a specific way of getting things done and helping our clients. Yeah. And once you can get around what that specific way is in how you serve your clients and really start thinking of My magic follows a specific process of how I get things done for my client, once I see through that process and I start to understand what that process looks like, I become in a position where I can either train someone in that process so they become like me, or I’m, I’m Hiring someone who’s better than me.

But often a lot of agencies and agency owners, they have their own approach on doing things, right? That’s what makes them unique, right? Right. So if you can kind of nail that process down, fine tune it, then you have the keys in your hand as to scaling your business beyond yourself.

Yeah. Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about the roadmap. So you said there’s a five step roadmap to, in essence, kind of decouple ourselves as owners from the day to day of our business. So if you will walk us, walk us through those steps.

Yeah. So it’s a five step framework that is easily, I think, easily understood, maybe not as easily implemented. It requires a couple of iterations.

Again, an easy to say, hard to do,

Right? Like if, if it would be easy, everybody would be doing it and know one would be listening to this podcast, right? So, right, right. But I, I love how you phrase it. It’s about Decoupling yourself from the business, right? And I think the first step that you should do as, as an agency owner is to audit your time. What are you really spending your time on on a day-to-day business? And I’m not talking like just on a high level helicopter view, but really like take your agenda if you’re using Google Calendar or, or Outlook calendar or whatever calendar that you’re using, is to really audit what you’re spending your time on and to look on on that.

And the second thing that you then do is kind of catalog or sort the things that you’re spending your time on. So is it sales? Like maybe you had like a one-on-one meeting to close a deal with a client. Okay, that’s the sales category, right? And then maybe you spend 15 minutes on shooting a video that is gonna be turned into a reel to be posted on your Instagram account, for example. Okay, that’s 15 minutes of marketing efforts that you did. And then maybe you spent an hour looking at your invoices that weren’t paid yet and you’ve done all the payments that needed to be done. That’s an hour of accounting work that you did and so forth and so on. So you’re kind of like gonna really put the time that you spent and that you, you, that is eating up your day-to-day hours into specific categories.

That’s step number two. Because that will help you to kind of do step number three, which is the prioritization of what to tackle first, right? And some people go about tackling the thing that takes the most time up in their calendar, which is a good approach because if you can take these things out of your calendar, you will liberate a lot of free time in your calendar, which is amazing. Other people choose to tackle the things first that they don’t like. Yeah. Maybe they don’t spend a lot of time on it, but it’s a really burden and they keep on like, like procrastinating on this thing. Yeah. It doesn’t take a lot of time, but it really just feels very disaligned with their skills.

So there’s not a good way or a bad way, way in prioritizing you. You can choose whatever. And then the first step is to kind of, or the fourth sorry step is to draft an S op. This is what I was telling you earlier on. It’s like, what is the thing that I’m actually doing here? Like how is the process actually looking like

This is, this is where your engineer brain comes in. Right?

Exactly. So back in the days, there is a a gap between me being an entrepreneur and me graduating as an engineer. I used to work as a process optimizer for big corporations. And I think this really was the key for me to be able to scale my agency because I could think in a process, and a lot of creative agency owners struggle with that. Like they don’t see the process behind the work that they do. But if you think about this, if you’re doing an activity, let’s say like you spend an hour doing accounting work, ask yourself the thing, what were the F five steps that I did here, right?

That I followed through in order to get this job done, which was like getting these bills paid or whatever the job was done. So you write down the five steps that you did and each time you do that activity yeah. You see like is, are these five steps still the same five steps that I take? Yes they are, or no, they don’t. I’m gonna tweak them a little bit. Yep. And those five steps kind of become your way of doing this thing, your procedure, if I can call it that way. Right? And once you have that thing, you can move into step number five, which is either you’re gonna look at, can I automate this thing that I just did?

Can I automate these five steps that I did? And if not, could I delegate them to someone else? And if I delegate it to someone else, then well here I have it written out what actually the job is that needs to get done. Or like, right, the five little tasks that are important in order to get this job done. And you could do this for accountancy, things that you do. You can do this for marketing stuff that is in your agenda. You can do this to team leading stuff that is in your agenda. You can do this to basically any single task that is in your agenda. So you kind of reiterate that process over and over and over again. You always go back to the next task that you can then write an ss o p and then either automate and delegate.

Once you’ve done that, you kind of go back to another task and then you go through that thing over and over and over again until you liberate yourself basically.

So that sounds great. If the task is, if whatever I’m doing is very task oriented, like, like you said, paying bills, right? I, you log into bill.com, you, you look at the list of bills you, you know, like that to me is very, is that left brain, right? Left brain, like it’s like things, it’s like to-dos, right? But for a lot of agency owners, the thing that they spend a lot of time in is they’re creating something or they’re creating a strategy, or they’re coming up with a creative concept, which is, I think, harder to articulate.

’cause a lot of it is just things banging around in your head until some good ideas come out. So how do you help people who create, create an s o P around that creation when it’s not so obvious? I mean, without a doubt, they’re still doing things to get an outcome. So I, I know there’s a way to create an S o p, but it’s not as linear or task oriented as some things that we do.

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s a great question to ask. And I think one of the, the biggest hurdles on that journey is when you have an agency that does a lot of, all of the projects that you do are tailor made and custom made for your clients,

Right? Right.

Every single one of them. And that’s where the biggest challenge lies. So what can help there? I mean, I always say you can’t really scale or outsource tailor made, custom made work. ’cause by definition it doesn’t do that, right? It doesn’t allow that. Yeah. So if you are really thriving on that creative work that you do and it has your unique juice in there, then scaling that will always be a tough nut to crack right Now, if you feel comfortable with really figuring out whether there is some scalability in that process, one of the things that can help a creative person to do is to, it’s what we call like kind of productizing your services.

And for a lot of creative people that sounds like horror. They’re just like, oh my God. Like I’m just gonna be like a little robot doing the work and all the creativity disappears. And that’s so a limiting belief because with the clients that I have been working with, helping them do that actually enables them to be way more creative than they were before. Because creativity most often comes from having a few boundaries around your creativity because it sparks creativity even more than before. So what I help these business owners to do is to really dive into like, what’s the main outcome that you always try to achieve with your clients?

Like what’s the main result? And that could be that you’re always writing a strategic plan for these kinds of clients around their marketing, for example. And really defining that and then working backwards again to figure out what the process is that you are taking and how long that process is. And really start to work from taking a look into how you can kind of productize that. I, I don’t like to use that word because it makes people nervous, but that is actually what, what you can do in order for you to be able to scale beyond yourself as the creative person in the agency.

Alright,

So what’s the fifth and final step?

So the fifth and final step is to delegate or automate step. So the first, first fourth one is to draft an s o p. And then the fifth one is to either look for automation options or look for delegation options. And for the very tactical, practical stuff, there’s probably software out there that can get the job done for you. Yeah. Right, right. Specifically nowadays, like there’s just so much options that we have as small entrepreneurs to just get software due to very tactical, practical things in our business. Yep. Yep. And then if, if you can’t automate it, then that you should be looking for a way to delegate that. And then we move into the space of Hiring, the right people, training them, coaching them, giving the right kind of feedback back so they can step into that process partially or even fully once you get ready for doing that.

Okay. I have lots more questions, but I think let’s take a break and, and we’ll come back and talk a little bit about the difficulty of delegation, right? It’s hard to trust somebody else to raise your baby. And also sort of the motivation for doing this. ’cause I, I think a lot of people are conflicted. Like they, they know their days too crowded, they know that they are tethered to their desk. They know they don’t have the freedom they wanted to as a business owner, but it’s also really challenging to sort of give that up. And so I wanna, I wanna talk a little bit about the psychology of that, but first, let’s take a quick break and then we’ll come right back.

Just a quick reminder that every week we send out a newsletter. We brilliantly call it the weekly newsletter, comes out every Wednesday and it is filled with just some ideas that I have around something that’s important to you. So I of the lead story is always something that I’ve been talking to a lot of agency owners about or something that I wanna sort of put in front of you to get you thinking. A lot of times there’s questions to think about or, or some resources. And then there’s always a link to the weekly video and then a list of the workshops and whatever else is going on. We also, we get a lot of promotional offers from, you know, friends who are running agency programs like Macon or other folks like that with discounts.

And so that’s also where we share all that information. So if you’re not hearing from me every week in your inbox and you wanna do that, just go to the a ami website and scroll down to the footer and you’re gonna see a link to our newsletter. Just click on that. All you have to do is give us your name and email and we’ll start putting that in your inbox. Okay? We would love to be a resource for you every week. So if that would be helpful, sign up today. Thanks. Alright. We are back with Lynn and we’re talking about this idea of how do we as agency owners or leaders begin to decouple ourselves from the day to day work so we can actually do the work that’s ours. And so many of you have heard me preach for years.

The one of the challenges for agency owners and leaders is, you know, you are, you got into the agency business ’cause you’re really good at something that’s typically client facing. And when the agency is small and everybody’s wearing all the hats, you do a lot of work that is client facing and in the service of clients, which means that no one’s actually doing your job. Your job, if you’re the agency owner or the c o o or sit as a department head probably isn’t to be in a bunch of client meetings, isn’t to produce a lot of client work. It is unique responsibilities, which we’ve talked about before. And I’m sure we’ll talk about again, that if you don’t do them, nobody else in the company can do.

So right now for many of you, your job is going undone or you’re doing what I did in my early days as an agency owner, which was, I thought of it as two shifts. Like, I worked in the business in the day and at night and on the weekends I worked on the business, right? I was the accountant, I was the, you know, new business guy, I was all the things, but I had to do that around my day job, which was serving clients. And so I think a lot of you’re are in that spot. So Lynn, before the break kind of walked us through the, the framework of how do we begin to decouple ourselves from the daily work. And I’m sure a lot of you were listening and saying, well, yeah, that’s obvious.

Of course I’m, I’m gonna think about what I do and I’m gonna lump all the things together and I’m gonna figure out how I do it so I can teach someone else to do it, and then I’m gonna give it to them. The mechanics of that are easy. The psychology around actually letting go I think is much more complicated. So Lynn, talk to us a little bit about the roadblocks that if we decide, yep, I want to do this, what are some things that we can expect to have in the way that gonna, are going to make it harder for us to do this?

There’s a few things, but I think the main thing that makes it the hardest is our own ego. Our own ego that makes us believe that we are, we are the best, we are the only person who can do this thing, whatever this thing is Yeah. That we are the best at it. And, and that could be the client facing work, it could be other kinds of things, but often there are specific jobs in the business, and that might be the client facing work or the sales, for example. I see that very often as well where we are in the belief righteously or wrongly, but that we are in the belief that we are the best person to get the job done.

And that,

That’s a ego thing. That’s a, as you say, that’s a tough nut to crack, right?

It is. And I think the first step comes from awareness. Yeah. Awareness of whenever those things happen where we say to ourselves, there’s no one else that can do this better than me. Right? And, and create And what if that’s

What if it’s true?

It might be true actually. So I’m not here to challenge that. And I think for some of the things that you do, you probably are the best not only in your agency, but maybe even in the world, right? You are the best at this particular thing. Now the question you should be asking yourself is, even if I am the best, is this holding me and my company back to grow into being the best agency in the world? Do I wanna be the best thing? Like do I wanna be the best person in the world to do this thing? Right? Or do I want my agency to be known as the best one in this thing?

Yeah. Yeah. That’s a tough question to answer. Right? All right, so, so one of the roadblocks is my,

And there’s no good and bad.

One of the roadblocks is whether it’s accurate or not, my own belief that nobody can do this quite as well as I do. I do. Yeah. And I, and I, and probably the question, the follow-up question to that is yes, but can someone else do it well in a way that will satisfy the client’s need? Right,

Exactly. So that is actually a better reflection to make because to, whenever you make the reflect, reflection, no one can do it as good as me. That’s just a showstopper. Like you won’t be able to move forward. You as a human being, as the business owner or you with you business will not be able to move forward as long as you keep saying that. Because like that’s, it’s not just a roadblock, it’s actually a wall that you cannot overcome. So a better question to ask is how can I enable people to do this job good enough so my clients are satisfied?

Right.

Because that question will enable, that will open up opportunities rather than closing the opportunities.

Yeah. All right. So that’s roadblock number one, my own ego. What else am I likely to get derailed by if I’m not aware of it?

I think what a lot of creative agency owners struggle with, not only creative business owners, but in general, what owners struggle with is, is that they get lost when they start building up an s o p, they get lost in the details. They get lost into like, like how many details should be in there? They start writing literally an an essay of 50 pages that is describing how the things should be done, right? And it is in such a level of detail that they just, either they gave up halfway through the process or it’s not actually capable to be a training instrument to help anybody to get the job done, right?

And so a lot of people get totally derailed when they try to give it the go to write some form of procedure,

Right? So we overcomplicate it

Often we do. And that doesn’t help literally no one. And I think the main consequence of that is you probably never finish it. You’ll probably never write a decent s o p that can be learned or used for delegation or automation purposes. You lose your confidence in doing it and, and you end up probably confirming to yourself that you see this thing is so complicated that I’m the only one who can do it.

Ah, so, so roadblock two feeds roadblock one, right? It does. So, so I’ve, I see this thing as such magic that only I can do it, but partially that’s because I’ve made it a bigger deal than perhaps it might be.

Yeah. Or I’m diving into such a level of detail, this

Is hard on the go that I lost in this, this is hard on the heart to hear this.

My intention is not so much to be

No, but it’s true. You’re absolutely right.

So yeah, that’s, that’s where the, the work comes in and I think at, at every level of letting go, there’s an exercise of of kind of like putting your ego back in check and making sure it’s not holding you back on your growth journey. That you’re, you’re act which is the main reason why you’re actually doing this work. Right? Right. And I’m not saying you can do it like instantly. It’s a personal development journey when you’re really scaling your business beyond yourself.

Yeah. Right. So, you know, a lot of this is, you can choose to keep the business small and for you to be sort of the heart of the business, but if you really do aspire to the, to all of you listening to this podcast, you, you’re not gonna see the video. But what Lynn is seeing is my cap right behind me climbing up a bookshelf. So if you hear one of us say something, well welcome to, you know, work in, when work in the post covid world, when we work at home with our children and our pets. So, love it.

So part of the reality of this is I have a choice, but if I’m gonna make the choice that I do wanna scale, I do wanna have more autonomy, I do wanna have more freedom as a business owner, I do wanna take advantage of all the things that are unique to being an entrepreneur as opposed to being someone’s employee. I have to actually act like an entrepreneur or a business owner, not an employee.

Correct. Yeah. And I think for some of us to, to scale beyond ourselves, I mean we, we’ve talked about this already before. It’s about creating that personal freedom. But I think one of the other things that it does is it really empowers your team. For those of you who have smaller teams that you work with, once you kind of step or let go of that idea that you are the best person to get this job done, once you kind of step away from that idea, incredibly, but what will, what will happen is there’s just so much more empowerment that you put into your team and what will happen, not always but often is that your team will step up its game as well, right?

But you need to kind of step back first in order for them to be able to move forward. And I think this is one of the learning opportunities that we have as well as, as business owners is I hear often from business owners like, oh, I don’t seem to be Hiring the right people, or, you know, they’re, they’re not up up to my standards or they, you know, yeah, we hear all of these things and it’s not always the case, but I’m a very firm believer that when we put our eagles in check and when we take a step back, it actually helps us to empower our team as well in order for them to step up.

So I think that’s another really big benefit when you step up from being maybe the, the expert in your field to the agency owner that works on the business, you empower your team to step up as well. On top of that, I think the other benefit that it gives you is that you make your agency way more, more attractive to potential buyers as well. Maybe some of your agency, no doubt owners and listeners are thinking about that as well. But like when you run the show of the agency at whatever level it is, you will find it hard to define some form of an exit strategy for yourself.

And maybe that’s something that’s not on the top of your mind right now, but probably in a couple of years or decennia that might become on top of mind for yourself as well.

Yeah. You know, it’s really interesting. So many times I’ve had agency owners who have been gotten sick or ended up in the hospital or had a family emergency or whatever, and often I will hear them say, man, my team really stepped up. Yeah. And so to your your point when we get out of the way, ’cause they’re not gonna push us aside to do the work, right? They’re not gonna say to the agency owner, I can do that as well as you. They’re, I mean, that’s, we’re, we just have, we’re just not gonna create an environment where that’s gonna happen. We think we have open door policy, we think that we’re have a lot of communication, but very few people are gonna, are gonna push on that sort of boundary.

And to your point, so I think 0.1 is our team is more capable that we give them credit for, but they haven’t been invited to prove that to us yet. And 0.2 is, you’re absolutely right. One of the things we do a lot of m and a work and we do a lot of agency valuations and one of the key elements is the less involved the agency owner is, the more the agency is worth because nobody wants to buy a business that is dependent on the person who wants to walk out the door.

No one wants to buy a job. That’s what I always

Say. Right? That’s right. That’s exactly right. Yeah.

People wanna buy a business, not a job. Yeah,

Yeah. So for the people that you’ve helped successfully decouple themselves, what does their new reality look like? What, I mean, this sounds hard. So is it worth the hard work?

I think it’s a whole new level of, of being an entrepreneur. And I think what happens for most of the clients that I work with is they come into a whole new world that they haven’t experienced before, where they really become, first of all the c e o of their company. It enables them to have way more personal freedom. It enables them to really, I I think also like loosen up on like how tight their grip needs to be on this company in order for it to be successful. So often they, they blossom from that experience as well.

On top of that, the business grows into a revenue level that they actually never thought was possible. And they’ve hustled their way through a specific number, but it’s only once they start letting go more and more and more, the act the actual thing that happens is that the agency thrives.

Yeah. So a lot of, a lot of value in doing the hard work.

It is, yeah. And some choose not to do that and I fully honor that and respect that, right? And for those who are willing to go on that journey, I mean, it’s a massive leap to move from the day-to-day heavily involved agency owner into really becoming the CEO slash founder. And I think one of the things that you can do to help you step into that role is, is really to start seeing yourself and labeling yourself as the founder and the owners of this company.

So this also sounds like it doesn’t happen overnight.

It doesn’t.

So what’s, what’s realistic for us to think about when we think about making this shift, if we are entrenched in the business, this, this, first of all, it sounds like a evolution rather than a revolution. Secondly, it’s not a snap your fingers and it’s done. So, so how do we set realist realistic expectations for ourselves in how quickly we can do this?

Yeah, I think that there’s no such thing as like what’s the quickest way on getting this done? Right? Right. I think the downside or the, the challenges that agency owners have is that we don’t have, or they don’t have scalable business models, which basically means that the more the revenue grows, the high, the bigger the team number becomes and the more team you have, the higher the revenue. It’s a very linked business model, right? So, and on every step of the way there are challenges for the business owner to go through the, the challenges from zero to 10 are very different than from 10 to 25 and are very different from 25 to a hundred.

Right? And the challenges are just really, really, really very different. So it’s not so much on, I mean we could ask ourselves the question, how long does it take to decouple ourselves? But a better probably question to ask is like, how long does it take to grow from this amount of people to that amount of people? And what does my role translate to when I’m doubling the amount of people? And then how fast you can do that often depends on not so much your ability as the founder, but more on the profitability of your business. Mm. Because it’s a not so much scalable business model, and I might be getting a little bit technical here, but in general, the pace in which you grow depends on how much profit you can redistribute in Hiring new people to make your next growth spurt.

So that’s kind of like more than your willingness to step out of the business and release responsibility. There’s also the factor of the resources in terms of financial resources that you have in order to keep Hiring, to keep growing your revenue as well because they go hand in hand.

Well, and in some cases you may not have to to hire, you may have people on your team who have skill sets you haven’t completely tapped into, right. So, but you’re right. I mean for you to really offload 20 or 30 hours of work a week, it probably isn’t all gonna go to your existing team. So it’s probably a mix of how do you help other people step up into a new role, but then work is gonna have to keep shifting somewhere around the way. So to your point, you also have to be willing to, to hire it out. But you know, again, for agencies, if they actually have more time to do their job, which a lot of that is biz dev and growing the business, that’s gonna generate more revenue for them to be able to do that as well.

Right?

Exactly. Yeah. And once you move into the role of c e o and founder, you start looking at your business. I remember when I made this shift mentally for myself a couple of years ago, where first of all, I considered myself a freelancer that became an agency owner and then I considered myself an agency owner who became the C E O and then I considered myself not the C e o but like the investor or the one that was owning the company. And it’s really a trajectory that we go through. And I think once you start looking at your business as an asset, just as any other asset that you have, yeah, you really start playing the game very, very differently.

And I think, I mean this is not for every single agency owner or c e o to go on that path, but that’s kind of like the path that you can walk yourself onto. And once you look at your agency as, as an asset where you have invested a bunch of resources in and then you will start managing it very differently. So, and then that might also be an asset that maybe at some point you feel like it would be better off to give it to somebody else or to sell it to somebody else in order for it to grow to the next level as well because there’s so much you can do as a founder in terms of helping the business grow.

Yep. You know, it’s interesting, I think a lot of agency owners sell the business when they get to a certain age or they wanna retire. But I think there are other owners. So I, I think about my wife who sold an agency and you know, she was in her forties when she sold it and, and and now is working with with a m i and with me. So it’s not like she was retiring, but she felt like the people she was gonna sell the agency to who were three key employees could take it to a different level than she was gonna be able to lead it to. And so for her, to your point, it was a, I see what this company can be if I actually step out and let them do it.

So, you know, you have two choices there too. You could still be the basically the investor and still own it or you could sell it and then go do something different. But you have to create that opportunity for yourself in either case, by not being indispensable inside the business.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Hey, this has been fascinating and I know folks are gonna have more questions for you or wanna learn more about the work you do now. So how do people, how do people track you down? How do they reach out to you? How do they learn more about what you’re doing now as a coach in this space?

Yeah, so the best way to find me when it comes down to social media is probably on LinkedIn. So if you type my name Linda Paul, then there’s only one person with a really weird name like me anywhere in the world. So you should be able to find me very quickly. So I’m on LinkedIn, you can reach out through, through that network to me for those of you who are wondering if their business is actually sellable and where the opportunities lie for them in order to grow a little bit or decouple themselves from their company. We have a quiz, which is called Is Your Business Ready to Be Sold?

And it’s a free quiz. It’s kind of like a five minute assessment that you can do and you will get not only what we call our big exit score, but you can get three actionable tips on how you can grow beyond your own agency or beyond your own business, which is one of the things that is required if you ever wanna get your business sold. For sure. If you go to, to the big exit.co/quiz, that’s where you can take the free assessment and you will get some actionable tips on how you can decouple yourself from your business and make it easier to sell.

Okay. So we’ll put all of that stuff in the show notes too. So you guys will find links to the quiz and to Lynn’s LinkedIn and the website and all of that. If you are driving or someplace where you can’t jot that down, just head over to the show notes and you’ll be able to find it there as well. This has been really fascinating. You know, it, it’s the takeaway for me in this is the doing it is easy once your head’s in the right place, but until your head’s in the right place, it feels probably pretty daunting to think about how do you change the role that you play, the critical role that you play in the business to a different critical role.

So I appreciate you walking us through both, both the framework, but more important than that sort of the mindset shift that we have to make to, to make this possible.

I’m so happy and honored that I was able to share this with you, Drew, and with your audience. So thank you so much for having me as well.

Oh, our pleasure. Thanks. Thanks so much for being on the show and sharing your expertise and your own story. I think it’s always when an expert can speak from personal experience and talk about what they help other people do, ’cause they did it. I, I just think the validity of that is heartening. It’s like, oh, okay, well she did it. She, she accomplished that so I can do it too. So I, I appreciate you telling us your own story as well. My pleasure. Alright guys, this wraps up another episode of Build a Better Agency. So if nothing else, I think the takeaway here is step one anyway, is decide do you love being in the day-to-day?

Do you love being at the center of your agency? Do you love being a practitioner of your craft? And if so, guess what? One of the privileges of owning the joint is, you get to keep doing that. But if you’re frustrated by the fact that it is hard for you to break away, that it is challenging to be able to step into the job that you know you need to do as the owner of the business because you’re so busy delivering for clients. Maybe it’s time to rethink that mindset and start to experiment with the framework that Lynn outlined. Again, not gonna be easy, not gonna be instantaneous, but even if you could buy 10 hours a week, even if only, even if you only do this partially and you get a 25% of your week back, or you could get down to working 40 or 50 hours rather than the 60 or 70 or 80 hours that you’re working now because you’re trying to do both, which was the mistake I made early in my career when I was an agency owner back in the day before I sort of decoupled myself from the day-to-day work.

That’s probably worth it too. So this is, doesn’t have to be an all or nothing. It could be a, this is this, I can do this partially and by myself some time. Or you may say, you know what, I’m ready. I am ready to get out of the day-to-day work so I can act as the agency owner and eventually think of this as an asset that I invest in to either keep or sell or do whatever you wanna do. So step one is decide. And then from there Lynn really outlined a, a very simple but not easy framework that you can follow to get to the point that you want to get to. Alright, so go forth, give that some thought, come back next week and I will be here with another guest.

As always wanna give a huge shout out and thank you to our friends at White. Label IQ. As you know, they are the presenting sponsor of the podcast. So White Label IQ dot com slash aami. You can learn all about them. They do white Label dev design and PPC for agencies and a lot of agencies that are trying to find a partner who will help them with PPC. But your clients don’t have big budgets are saying that white Label is the absolute go-to for that. So if you’ve got clients that have a smaller spend, but you want somebody else to give you a hand with that, you might check that out. If you’ve never worked with them before, as you know on on the website, they’ll give you some free hours on your first project.

So worth kicking their tires. Really good people that is born out of an agency, as I’ve told you many times. So they get that how you have to make money and how they can wholesale price their services to you. So you can do that. So check that out. In the meantime, I’ll be back next week. Always grateful for you. Love that you keep coming back and listening. Totally get why you keep coming back and listening while we have guests like Lynn who deliver such great content for you every week. So I’m always grateful that we keep finding such great guests. I will do my best to find another one for you next week as well. All right, thanks for listening. 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.