The agency owner’s game plan for 2024 with Drew McLellan

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. This is one of my solo casts. So for those of you who are seasoned veterans, what you know is that what this means is no guest this week, just you and me hanging out talking about something that is on my mind that I know is on a lot of your minds. And we’re gonna just work through it together, just the two of us. But before we do that, I do want to announce the free workshop winner. So as you know, at every solo cast, we go to all of our ratings and reviews, and we do a drawing for a winner. And that winner gets to go to one of our live workshops.

The agency owner gets to attend one of our live workshops anytime they would like. So here’s how this works. Here’s how you make sure you’re in the drawing. So you go and you leave us a rating or review on wherever you download this podcast. so it might be iHeartRadio, it could be Google, it could be Apple Podcasts, it could be a plethora of places. But wherever you go to get your podcasts, you’re gonna go to that website, you’re gonna search for our podcast, build a Better Agency, and you’re gonna leave a review and, and this is the important part, you’re gonna take a screenshot of that review and then you are gonna send it my way.

You’re gonna send it to Drew at agency management Institute dot com. Why? Because on most of the podcast sites, you have a username. And we cannot tell from the username if it’s, you know, I love Kittens 92. I can’t tell who that is, and I certainly can’t tell the agency. So a lot of you use your personal Gmail account or something else to download those. So to identify you, what I need is a screenshot of the review emailed to me, and then you’ll go in the drawing and you will stay in the drawing for as long as it takes for you to win a seat. So these seats are about two grand if you’re not a member.

So it’s, it is well worth the five minutes to go ahead and leave a review and then email it to me for a shot at the $2,000 free workshop seat. So this month, the winner of the free workshop is Josh Rogers. Josh comes from the agency Wizardly. So Josh, I’ll be reaching out to you and letting you know that you won. Good news is this don’t expire. So if you can’t make it this spring or this fall, that’s fine. You just come when you can, when you can get to us. But we are happy to have you to host you at our workshop. So all you have to do is get to Denver, put yourself up in a hotel, and we will take care of the rest. We’ll feed you and we will teach you.

And hopefully we’ll have some good fun while we’re doing it. So we’d love for you guys to join the drawing. Again, super easy to do. Review screenshot, email. All right, so Josh, congratulations. So what are we gonna talk about today? If you’re listening to this in real time, you, if you’re in the us you just had a long weekend for Thanksgiving and the holidays, the winter holidays are right around the corner. And so you are thinking about all of that. And I think about all of that. Of course, I’m doing my Christmas shopping and all of those things. But what I also think about is that we are about to enter into what I call the holiday hibernation.

And what that is is from about December 10th or 15th through Martin Luther King Day here in the US or around January 15th, things get very quiet. Clients, quiet down. A lot of our employees are taking time off, we’re taking time off to be with our family and friends, but it’s actually a great time to do a lot of thinking and planning. And so I have a laundry list of things that I want you to be thinking about and planning over the next six weeks. So this is, this is your homework assignment. This is how I want you to get into the tail end of January, 2024, is by doing these things.

And honestly, if you follow this recipe, if you follow this formula, you are gonna start the year in really good shape with a clear vision of where the agency’s going, what work needs to be done, and everybody’s gonna be kind of tuned up and ready to go. So this is definitely an episode where you are gonna want to take notes, but also you’re gonna want to go to agency management Institute dot com slash 2024 planning. So I’m gonna talk to you about a bunch of different tools. We’ve got some checklists and some quizzes and some other things for you.

And on that page, so agency management Institute dot com slash 2024 planning, I’m gonna have all of these resources for you to download. Yes, they’ll be in the show notes as well. But this will make it easy. It’s a one-stop shop. You just go there, you download all of them, and you’re set. You don’t have to pay any money, you don’t have to give us a secret code, you don’t have to do anything. Just go to the website. You download all these tools. So this is gonna help us get ready for an amazing 2024. I know for a lot of you, 23 was a little brutal. And so our goal with this is to kick off the new year well and right, and with a clear vision of what we’re trying to get done.

Okay? So buckle up, ’cause this is gonna be a lot of different things I want you to think about. But when you add them all up, it is, it is a sort of a game plan for 24. All right? So that’s, that’s what I would call this episode. It is The agency owner game plan for 2024. All right, let’s start. What we’re gonna start with is you, we, you’re gonna start with why you’re doing this, what matters to you, how does the agency serve you? As you know, I’m a firm believer that if we’re gonna take all the risks and if we’re gonna stay up late worrying about making payroll, and we’re gonna worry about biz dev and we’re gonna worry about team members and we’re gonna worry about cash flow and all of those things that come with owning an agency, then we should also get the reward.

And so we’re gonna start with the very first thing I want you to download and do is called an agency owner life plan. And the reason why I want you to start with this is because this asks you questions about you. What matters to you? What do you wanna get out of the year? What is your focus for the year? You personally, not the agency, you. And so if you’re an agency leader or an agency owner, start with The agency owner life plan. And if you’re a leader, the plan works just fine for you too. But it’s gonna ask you questions like, who are the five people you should be spending more time with? What is the legacy that you wanna leave? And what are things, things you could do in this coming year to start the seeds of that legacy?

I don’t want you to get to the end of your career and look back and say, gosh, I wish I would’ve written my novel while I own the agency. I wish I would’ve built wealth outside of the business. I wish I would’ve taken Thursday afternoons off so I could spend time with my wife. Whatever it is, whatever matters to you, I want you to be really clear about what it’s, because guess what, we’re in a very rare position to be able to actually do the things that allow us to have a great life. Because we control our schedule, we control the business, we control how we take money out of the business. So start with agency owner life plan.

I want you to look at it. Probably what you’re gonna do is marinate on the questions for a day or two and then sit down in a quiet space and just answer the questions enough to show it to anybody. You don’t have to do anything with it other than it’s gonna force you or allow you, and maybe that’s a better way to say it. It’s gonna allow you to think through what really matters to you and make sure that you have room for that in your 2024 plan. Alright? So after you’re done with that, after you’re done sort of doing that introspection and, and sort of looking at what matters to you, the next thing I want you to do is the one page business plan. You know, so often agencies don’t have a business plan because it feels really onerous, feels like a heavy, heavy lift to put together a whole business plan.

And we’re thinking about, you know, the three ringing binder business plan. We’re thinking about the 25 or 30 page business plan with charts and graphs and data. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about a, you know, your business, you, you can do one of those plans if you want, but honestly, you know your business and you know that the levers that if you move those levers, you could have huge influence on your business. And so that’s what I want you to do is this one page business plan asks you to identify some key growth areas, some huge hurdles, some big opportunities in some key areas. So what is the most important thing I could do around my finances?

What is the most important thing I could do around process and systems and getting the work done? What’s the most important thing I could do around my team? What’s the most important thing I could do around biz dev? All of those things. It’s gonna ask you for one thing that if you did that one thing in those key areas, it could be a stellar year for you. And you know what? Honestly, some of these things are gonna be holdovers from 23. Others are gonna be things that you’ve been thinking about. Whatever they are, it’s gonna ask you to identify what they are, ask you what obstacles are in the way of you getting to that goal, whatever that is. And then it’s gonna ask you for the first couple steps on how you get started.

But the most important piece of this business plan is down the left column and down the left column there are little lines. And what I want you to do on the little lines is I want you to rank in order of importance to the business or to you, which of those things comes first. So you’re gonna rank them one through six because we historically bite off more than we can chew. We start too many things. We start and don’t finish too many things. So what I want you to do with this plan is I want you to identify in order what matters most and then you tackle number one until it’s done.

And then you go to number two and so on. So I’ve got my owner life plan, I now have a one page business plan with prioritization because honestly this won’t work if you don’t prioritize it because you can’t do all, these are gonna be big things, these are gonna be important things. You can’t get it all done at once. And, and you don’t have to do this by yourself. In fact, you shouldn’t do it by yourself. Involve your leadership team, involve your whole team. Make this part of your, if you do traction or what we call agency edge, our version of traction, if you’re doing that, make these your big rocks for the first quarter or two but or prioritize them and start tackling number one, ideally before the holidays.

But if not, then after you get back from the the winter holiday. Alright, so got the over owner life plan, I’ve got my one page business plan. The next thing I want you to do is create a budget. I’m astonished at how many agencies do not have a budget. And so what it starts with is looking at what do I know for sure is coming in the door in the first quarter of 2024, extrapolating out the rest of the year based on history, based on pipeline, based on all the other things. And then making sure you’re in alignment. So remember you’re gonna have your gross billings, whatever you think you’re gonna bill everybody, you’re gonna subtract your cost of goods, which is all of your hard costs that you incur on behalf of clients, including contractors.

And then what’s left is your adjusted gross income. Your adjusted gross income, as you know, should be spent on people. So it’s loaded salaries and benefits, it’s overhead and there is profit. And the way that AGI should be divided is ballpark 55, 25 20. So 55% of your AGI should be spent on your people. 25% of your AGI should be spent on overhead and 20% should be left for profit before taxes. Now for some of you, your people are getting more and more expensive and your overhead is shrinking a little bit, right? Because maybe you’re not going into the office as much or you don’t have an office or you’ve just trimmed the budget.

So that’s great. But I want you to work with an 80 20. So 80% of your AGI should be spent on people and overhead 20% should be profit. Don’t steal from the profit if you have to steal to pay your people, steal from overhead, manage your overhead expense. So that’s budget number one. So, so once you do that, that’s, that’s the hard part is figuring out am I overstaffed? Am I spending too much on, on overhead expenses? The rest of the budget, you can go back historically and look over the last few years of what you spent on, you know, the car payments and the lawyer and you know, professional development, things like that. But budget for all of those things so you know where you’re at and you need to do that, do it annually and then break it down quarter by quarter.

In theory, you’re gonna have more money towards the end of the quarter at the fourth quarter than you are the first quarter. So you’re gonna wanna do an annual budget, but then you’re gonna kind of wanna go back and work it so that you are staying in budget for each quarter. So allow yourself a little more elasticity towards the tail end of the year when you’ve had more time to win new clients and grow the current clients but have a budget. Alright? Then the other thing I want you to do tied to money is I want you to pull the last six months of your checking account statements and your credit card statements. And your goal is to identify expenses that you don’t need.

And if you are on our newsletter, you know that this summer I told the story of how our accountant asked me a question about an expense, which led me down the rabbit hole of digging through our credit card statements and our bank statements. And I was horrified at how much waste I found software seats. We weren’t using anymore software, we weren’t using anymore donation that I thought was a one-time donation that turned out to be a monthly donation. So there were, there were just some ridiculous expenses and none of them were ginormous, but they added up to a chunk of change. So I want you to, to go through while you’ve got this quiet time, go through and eliminate.

So then I had to go and I had to email all these people and unsubscribe and change the things. so it actually took a while to get that done. But when I did, I saved a serious chunk of change. I mean it was tens of thousands of dollars that I was able to save or at least stop spending that we didn’t need to so that we didn’t keep spending it. So I want you to, I want your, your goal is to reduce your overhead expenses or those sort of incidental expenses by about 10%. And I think you’re gonna be surprised how easy that is to do so, and that may trigger other things like how you track software subscriptions and not other things, which I’m not gonna get into. But our goal is have a budget and then trim the budget.

And you’re not, I’m not asking you to trim to austere measures, I’m just saying stop paying for things you’re not using. Okay? Alright, so after that, then what the next thing I want you to do is we’re gonna turn our attention to our people. So that was big plans. Where are we going? Where am I going as a person? Where’s the agency going? What are the big boulders we need to move in 2024? And how are we gonna spend our money? Are we overstaffed? Now, if you’re overstaffed when you do the budget, that’s a whole different discussion you have to have with yourself, which I’m not gonna get into today. ’cause you know the drill, you know, you need to have $175,000 of AGI per FTE.

So if that’s not the case and you’re overstaffed, you need to make some decisions around that. But so owner plan, biz plan, and then we’re gonna do the budget and we’re gonna trim unnecessary expenses. So once we have that done, I want you to turn and I want you to start thinking about your people, your team. So first thing I want you to do is if you’re not doing one-on-one meetings, so what a, what a one-on-one, one meeting looks like is me the employee having a meeting with you, my direct report, my direct supervisor. So it may not be you, it may be a a department head or something like that. But every two weeks I sit down for 20 to 30 minutes and I have an in-depth conversation with my boss.

And the way the conversation always starts is, Hey Drew, what is your quarterly growth goal? What are you working on right now? What are you gonna get better at? One of the things that, we’re gonna talk a little bit about this in a minute when we talk about career pathing too, one of the things that we owe our employees is we owe them the opportunity to get better. We owe them the support to get better. And so sometimes support means some the time to do the class or get the certification or shadow somebody who’s good at something that we’re not good at. Sometimes it’s money paying for those things. But most important it is about the focus. It’s about making sure that our employees understand that it’s their job, it is their obligation to keep getting better.

That for all of us, if we’re gonna stay in this business and we’re gonna stay relevant, we have to keep getting better. So one of the conversations that every employee should be having with their direct supervisor is what is my growth goal for the quarter? And so every quarter I should be working on something to make myself better and more valuable to the agency, to my teammates, to our clients. And what that affords me is the opportunity to grow in my career. So the one-on-ones start with what’s your quarterly growth goal? And then it asks questions like, are there any red flags you need to tell me about with clients or team members? And it, and we have a form for this that the employee fills out and shows up to the one on one meetings with that form filled out.

If they show up with the form empty, send them back and ask them to reschedule the meeting. Make it very clear that this is their meeting to run and let them run the meeting. Don’t you run over the meeting? This is not a project review meeting, this is not you tell me what’s on your plate work-wise meeting, this is you. When you see the form, you’ll see this is a meeting about bigger things. It is about red flags. Is there any concerns around clients or the work Is there, are there things I could be doing as your supervisor to help you be more successful? Are you worried about any work that’s coming up? Do you need any extra support? It’s asking questions like that. And what you’re gonna find is, and and we hear this every day from agency owners that start the one-on-ones, they cannot believe how much more connected they are to the employee.

They cannot believe all of the things they hear about much earlier. So I’m a firm believer in no surprises. I don’t like surprise parties, I don’t like surprise presence. I don’t, I don’t, I’m not a surprise guy. But in business I really don’t want surprises. I want my employees to know that as soon as they get a spidey sense about something, we should be talking about it. And these one-on-ones really create the platform for those conversations. It also teaches your employees that every two weeks they’re gonna have your undivided attention for about a half an hour. so it, what they do is they start saving all the things that they want to talk to you about. So rather than pinging you all day, all week, they sort of gather it up for their one-on-ones.

So this will also tell you which one of your employees is in it for the career versus the job. The ones that blow off the one-on-ones, the ones that kind constantly keep moving. The one-on-ones. ’cause by the way, they’re, they’re responsible for scheduling those with you. But in the beginning you may have to schedule a few of them for them to understand that you’re serious about this and that it matters. But they’re responsible for scheduling them, they’re responsible for showing up prepared, having the form filled out, and they’re responsible for sort of keeping this running list of things they wanna talk to you about. I have never, ever had an agency start one-on-one meetings and then stop them or say to me anything other than, gosh, I wish we’d started these earlier.

These are incredibly valuable. The employee feels seen and heard, the employee feels validated. And I am learning a lot about what’s going on in my agency with our clients, with the team, all of those things. And by the way, everybody on my team has a growth goal. Everybody’s working diligently to get better, pretty good outcomes, right? Alright, so that’s employee task number one for this season, this holiday hibernation season. The next thing I want you to do is I want you to make sure that you have a career path for every position, not person position.

And so what that looks like is, if you’re a junior woodchuck, here are the hard skills and the soft skills that you need to master to become a woodchuck. If you’re a woodchuck, here are the hard skills and the soft skills that you need to master to become a senior woodchuck, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things in, in smaller agencies, and when I’m talking smaller, I’m talking a hundred people or less, is sometimes we lose really good people because they can’t see how they can stay and keep growing professionally. We need to show them that we have a plan and there’s a path. And that if they wanna keep getting better, if they wanna keep getting a promotion and a raise and adding more value, we have a path or a plan for them to do that.

It’s also a great conversation to say, especially to younger employees, okay, you’re a junior woodchuck, so the natural path for you is to become a woodchuck. But you know what, I’ve noticed that you have this skill or that skill. So if you wanna shift from junior woodchuck and instead you aspire to being a tiger and then a senior tiger, here’s the path from going from junior woodchuck, maybe to junior tiger to tiger to senior tiger or whatever it is. But having, having those mapped out and honestly it really is as simple as hard skills and soft skills. And then Identifying how they learn those things. So guess what, that ladders back to the one-on-one meetings and their quarterly growth goals.

So if one of the hard skills is a certification or an ability to do better estimating or whatever it is now in the one-on-ones, you help them decide identify resources. That could be a class, it could be a workshop, it could be a podcast series, it could be a book, it could be a mentor inside the organization, it could be a like a key exec group that where they’re being mentored by peers. Whatever it is, depending on the skillset or depending on what you’re trying to teach them, you’ll be able to help them identify some resources to get better hard skill and soft skill. So now they have a path and now you get to watch if they walk the path, remember, professional development is a shared responsibility.

You have some responsibility as a leader or owner of the agency to create those opportunities, to give them some time to spend some money. But sometimes some professional development, some portion of that has to be done on the employee’s time and the employee’s time. And it’s very telling when you watch which employees get better and which employees don’t pursue the opportunity to get better. So career paths for all roles and again, hard skills, soft skills and some resources where they can learn those skills. Okay, the next thing I want you to do around your people is think about your leadership team and ask yourself, because by the time they’re a department head or they’re sitting on a leadership team, they’re probably pretty good at their job, right?

The at the, the hard skills of their job. But where they may be struggling is the soft skills. I’m a real, I was a really good senior woodchuck, but now I am the department head of all the woodchucks. And what I am not great at is growing people or encouraging people or holding people accountable. Usually by the time we get to the leadership level, it’s soft skills, it’s people skills. It’s an, it’s better knowing. It’s knowing myself better and knowing how I show up knowing, you know, when I am frustrated or tired, how do I show up when I am having to have a really hard conversation with an employee?

Am I good at that? Do I need some help learning how to do that? Do I need to learn how to, you know, do you know I’m a huge proponent of the book Radical candor. Am I learning how to, how to talk in a way that is candid and kind, but still really straight to the point and all about the outcomes? So for your leadership team, it’s about assessing each of your leaders. And still you should be doing one-on-ones with them. But now we’re talking about harder things to learn, things that are much more nuanced and they’re gonna need coaching and encouragement. So again, might be a peer group, might be more mentorship time with you, might be a podcast series, might be some self-reflection and some self-diagnosis and more practice opportunities.

Whatever it is, you need to be looking at your leadership team and helping them get better. And you need to have a structure of your leadership team meetings where they actually get to be leaders. So often when I hear what a, about what a leadership team meeting is, it’s basically a department head meeting talking about work. And yes, there should be some of that, but that’s not what leaders do. Leaders talk about the organization leaders step out of their department role and look at the agency as a whole and try and focus on how to make the agency better. Are you doing that with them? Are you giving them opportunities to make hard decisions? Are you coaching them about how to make hard decisions?

And then how to deliver those decisions to the rest of the team. If you want the freedom to do your job, the agency owner’s job or the COO’s job, if you want the freedom to actually do the work that only you can do, it means the team underneath you, the leadership team, has to take the things off your plate that they can. And they’re not gonna do that if A, you don’t let go of it. And B, they don’t know how to do it. Okay? I know this is a lot, but you have six weeks, you and, and honestly it sounds like a lot, but you have most of these answers in your head. You just need to organize them and put a plan on how to take action against them.

So the next thing I want you to do around your people is I want you to rank them. I want you to give them a letter grade. Are they an A player, AB player, AC player, AD player? So first what you’re gonna do is identify for your agency, what does that look like? So is it that they live by the values? Is it that they are really good at their job? Is it that they show up to help others? Is it that clients rave about getting to work with them? Whatever your criteria is for an A player, AB player, or AC player. And by the way, in your first meeting in January, your first all team meeting, you’re gonna say, one of the things I was thinking about over the holidays is, A, how much I value all of you, but B, what makes a great team member for this agency?

And you’re gonna walk them through that criteria, okay? You’re gonna tell them exactly what you want from an A player and what AB player looks like and what AC player looks like and that the agency cannot tolerate C players. And so you, one of the things I want you to do over the holiday hibernation is I want you to rank, first of all, identify what makes an A, B, and C player. And if you have AD player, shame on you. What makes an A, B, or C player? And then I want you to grade or rank each employee the A and the B players. A players obviously love on them, thank them, appreciate them.

The B players invite them to become an A player and talk to them in their one-on-ones about how they can become an A player. The C players, you have a choice. You either recognize that they are always gonna be AC player and your agency can’t tolerate C players. So you’re gonna go on the hunt to replace them and replace them. Might be a new hire, replace them, might be outsourcing, replace them, might be divvying up the things on their plate to other team members who aren’t as busy as they need to be, whatever it is. But you have a plan to move things off their plate so you can move them out or you have a plan to grow them into AB player.

And you sit down and you talk with them about the fact that they’re not living up your expectations. You like them, they’re good human beings, you know they have potential but they’ve been dialing it in lately or whatever the problem is, right? And you need to talk to them about how you need them to elevate to AB player and that you’re gonna have a timeline to it and you’re gonna hold them accountable to it. And if they can’t elevate to AB player, then they probably can’t stay at the agency, right? So let’s review what we’ve done so far. We’ve done the owner life plan, we’ve done the one page business plan, you’ve set a budget, you have gone through your finances and you’ve found places to cost cut for wasted money.

I’m not talking about, again, I’m not talking about austerity, I’m talking about just stuff that you just are stupid to buy anymore. Again, subscription seats you’re not using, whatever it may be. You’re gonna create career paths, you’re gonna focus on your leadership team and what they need to grow. And you’re gonna create a criteria for what is an A, b, and C player for your team. Raid your people and start having, I would call it remedial conversations if you need to with the people who are not leveling up where you want them to level up.

Okay? So that’s money and that’s people. And you’re gonna have a plan for the C players. If they don’t level up, they have to go. Alright, so we’re gonna take a quick break and then we’re gonna come back and we’re gonna talk about clients and growth. Hey, sorry to interrupt, but I wanted to make sure that you are thinking about how to connect with your clients by figuring out what they love and maybe a few things that they’re not so crazy about with your agency. So at AMI, one of the things we offer are client satisfaction surveys. We do both quantitative and qualitative. So an online survey, but also interviews with some of your key clients.

And then we come back to you with trends, recommendations, what they love, what they don’t love. Lots of insights around how you can create an even tighter relationship with your clients. So if you have interest in that, you can go under the how we help tab on the AAMI website and very bottom choice on the how we help tab is the client satisfaction surveys. You can read more about it, but Whether, you have us do it or you do it yourself or you hire somebody else. It is really critical that you be talking to your clients about what they love and what they wish was different or better. So do not miss the opportunity to tighten your relationship with your client whether we help you or not.

All right? All right, let’s get back to the show. Alright, welcome back. This is my solo cast leading us into marching us into 2024 with some planning and some things to think about as you go into this six to eight week window where honest to Pete, everything just slows down. We know that we have at least four if not six weeks of what I call holiday hibernation ahead of us, which is a great time for you to be reflecting on all these things. This is not, none of this requires, it sounds like a long list, but honestly none of it requires hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. You don’t have to do it all by yourself. And these are things that will set your agency up for success in 24.

Alright? So for clients, the first thing you’re gonna do is you’re gonna have a growth plan for your existing clients. Too many agencies do not think about this. When we think about new business, we think about new clients and new work. When we report to the team about new business, we talk about new clients and new work and pipeline. The most important new business focus for you and every agency is your existing clients. How do I grow those clients? How do I grow their business, which grows my business? How do I get more wallet share from my clients by helping them be even better at what they do and helping them lock in their clients and their growth goals.

So most agencies do not have, if I said, Hey, show me, show me the growth plan you have for client X, Y, Z. Most agencies could not go and pull up on their computer a document that talks about how they are focusing on the growth of that client. We just let it happen. If a client happens to be opening up a new location or launching a new product or whatever, then great, we’re probably gonna grow with them. But that’s them doing it to and for us, I want us to be focused on client growth. How can I grow our clients? And by the way, your AEs are ill-equipped to do this. First of all, they don’t know it’s their job. Secondly, they don’t know how to do it. So you’re gonna have to teach them how to put together these growth plans.

And there is, we’ve done several episodes in podcasts that I will list for you in, again, remember we’re going to agency management Institute dot com slash 2024 planning. So I’ll list for you some, some specific podcasts you can listen to that’ll talk about how do we think about growing our existing clients. But we have to do this diligently and we have to do this deliberately. And we don’t, most agencies do not have a plan for growing their existing book of business. Remember, and we’ll talk in a minute about setting growth goals for the agency in terms of new business. But remember that 60 to 70% of your net new income, 60 to 70% of the money that you don’t have today, that you should have by December of 24, should come from your existing clients.

And I think if you do the math, you’re gonna find that you are outta whack on that ratio that almost all of your new business, for a lot of you, 23 actually was a better year for growing existing clients. Just ’cause new business was such a bear to get. So you didn’t have much choice. So you’ve learned a lot of things in the last year about how to get more work out of your existing clients. Also remember that our 2023 agency edge research project was all about how, when, why do clients give their existing agency more budget? So I’ll include a link to where you can download that tool that that executive summary and you can, and also where you can listen to the podcast around that as well.

So you’ll have all that, but you need to have a plan and most of you don’t have a plan. So let’s put together a plan and, and the plan for you may be how am I gonna start working with the AEs in December and January to put together these growth plans? ’cause remember it’s holiday hibernation for your team too. By December 15th or so, things have slowed way down and they now have 3, 4, 5 weeks before clients gear back up, wake back up, climb out of the hibernation cave. So this is a great project for you, you to work with your AEs or your director of account service to work with AEs where everybody’s working on a growth plan for 24 for your existing clients, 60 to 70% net new revenue should come from these folks.

Alright then I want you to, after you do that, I want you to set a growth goal for the year. And so my last solo cast, so early in November, again, there’ll be a link on the webpage. I walked you through a budgeting exercise. There was a budget worksheet. I will actually walk you through the math of how you can realistically set a growth goal for the next year. The truth of the matter is for most of you, you are very unrealistic and it’s sort of pie in the sky. It’s like, oh well we were at a million, so I wanna be at 1,000,004. You don’t really think about what those numbers mean and I want you to do the math so you really realize what you’re asking of yourself in the organization.

So I want you to set a realistic growth goal. And for most of you remember you’re gonna have some attrition. We don’t factor that in of course. But for most of you, a growth goal of 20% is really a growth goal of 35 to 40% when you figure your attrition. And so you have to be realistic about what you’re capable of doing, what any agency is capable of doing. An agency that can grow even 10% a year, year over year is a really healthy agency. And you’re, you’re that slow steady growth, which by the way is not gonna feel slow to you ’cause it’s really about a 20% growth for most of you with attrition. But a 10% year over year growth is a really healthy goal.

Now when you’re small or you’re a startup and you’ve only been around for a couple years, yeah you’re gonna double in size for the first few years, but by the time you get to 10, 12, 15 people doubling in size is really hard and really hard on the organization. It’s actually not healthy. So sometimes a gorilla client lands in your lap and you just grow. But for the most part now you can start managing your growth and an agency can grow about 10% a year in a really healthy clip without putting so much strain on the organization that you start making mistakes that you start losing people, either employees or clients.

So set the growth goal for yourself, go back, listen to that podcast, set the growth goal and then figure out how you’re gonna get it knowing that you wanna get a portion of it. And by the way, most of you’re nowhere near 60 or 70% of net new income coming from your existing clients. So you’re gonna figure out where you’re at and then hopefully improve it. But if you’re at 10% of your net new income is coming from existing clients, don’t set your sites up 70%. Don’t set yourself up to fail. 20% would be a great increase, right from 10 to 20. So growth plans for clients and you’re gonna have a budget, a realistic growth budget for what you wanna get in 24.

Okay? Now how do I go get that? How do I go find those new clients? Well now what I want you to start thinking about, and I wanna start you start asking up it asking yourself is how do we show up when somebody searches for us? When somebody asks someone else about us in the industry, when somebody bumps into one of my people, how do we show up? How do we introduce ourselves? How do we differentiate ourselves? You know, from hearing, you know me preach about this for years, you know, if you’ve read the book Sell With Authority that I wrote with Steven Wener, you know that I believe that it is really hard for agencies. I don’t believe I know I see it every day.

I know it’s really hard for agencies who are not differentiated, who look like all the other agencies who are a full service integrated marketing agency, even though there are eight people you know that you look just like everybody else. You sound like everybody else. You’ve heard Mercer Island Group say it. You’ve heard me say it, you’ve heard Steven say it, you’ve heard Susan Byer. And I say it when we talk about research. So how do we show up? How do people identify us in a sentence? How do they describe us? What are we best at? How do we differentiate who we are? How do we define who we serve? Who is our sweet spot client? Who are the clients that we can delight time after time, after time?

And how do we find those people? So how do I show up? Meaning, does the website really tell people who we are and how we’re different? What niche do we serve? So again, a niche could be an industry, a niche could be an audience, a niche could be a deliverable. But what do we do better than anybody else? What are we experts at? What are we an authority at? And by the way, just a reminder, I’ll also include in this laundry list of tools, if you have not bought or been given a copy of Stevens and my book Sell With Authority, we’re happy to send you one for free. I’m not gonna charge you for postage, I’m not gonna ask for a credit card.

If you’re international, I’m gonna send it slow or I will send you a digital copy so you get it faster. But if you are in North America, we will drop a hard copy of the book in the mail to you. I’ll mail a hard copy to anybody but just know it takes forever to get outside of the US or outside of North America. But we have digital copies as well. So if you want those, there’s gonna be a link in the laundry list of tools that I’m putting together for you and you can just get a free copy of the book. It is a how to guide about how to really define your difference and how to go to market with your difference and how to actually attract RightFit clients to you. Okay? So how do we show up?

How do we differentiate? How are we niched? How do we talk about ourselves? What is our point of view? How, what is our philosophy about the work that we do? What are those things? How are we gonna show up? And if you have been poo-pooing that or putting that off, it’s time for you to get serious about that. We also have a great tool, it’s sort of a niche report card where you can grade different potential niches against what we think are important criteria about being niched and it’s audience size, it’s spend, it’s, is it recession proof? It’s a whole bunch. I think it’s like 12 or 13 criteria. And you can look at all the potential niches that you could choose. ’cause by the way, your niche is not gonna be something that’s shocking to you that you’ve never done before.

It’s gonna be one of the things you’re really good at or one of the audiences you’re really good at, or one of the industries where you have a lot of experience. So this report card will help you identify which niche or niches makes most sense for you. It’s a great objective way to look at niching. Alright, so I want you to identify how we show up point of view, niche, who we are, how we talk about ourselves. And then I want you to go through all of the tools that you have, the website, the case studies, how, how you introduce yourself, how the team introduces themselves, right? Your social media channels, your content strategy, all of that. And make sure to own mines.

So basically this is your marketing plan for the agency. Who are we? Who caress who we are? Who are we the right fit for? And how do we talk to those people? How do we attract them and bring them closer and closer to us so that when they’re ready to hire an agency, because we don’t get to decide that they do, there’s no, we don’t get to have a coupon, we don’t have a buy one get one free. There’s no Black Friday for agency work, right? So we just have to be present and on their radar screen when they’re ready to hire an agency. So how do we do that? How do we market ourselves? And then I want you to think about who you’re gonna go after. So we also shouldn’t just sit back and wait for people to walk in the door.

We should have a targeting strategy as well. And again, we spell that out exactly how to do that in the Sell with authority book. So we call it, you know, your top 25, right? So you’re gonna look for those sweet spot clients that are at least 10% of your AGI and you’re gonna go after them with a vengeance because you have something to say to them. You can actually help them by being valuable to them long before they hire you. So what is my marketing plan and what is my sales plan? What’s my go-to market plan? Okay, again, this sounds daunting, this whole laundry list sounds daunting, but you’ve got all this stuff in your head. You just have to sit down and and and get it written down and make some commitments and make some plans.

And this is the perfect time of year to do it. Okay, ready for the last three. This is, this is gonna be, this is the cherry on top. This is the reward, this is the pumpkin pie for breakfast, which by the way, I believe we should all be having the week of Thanksgiving every day. Pumpkin pie for breakfast. But these last three things that I want you to do are worth doing. All the other things to get to the first one is how are you gonna love on the clients during these six weeks? How are you gonna let your clients know how important they’re to you, how much you value them, how much you appreciate their trust and confidence in you?

So everybody sends holiday gifts this time of year, totally get it. But how are you gonna have conversations that let them know that they are important? How are you gonna set up a schedule in 2024 where you’re spending time with clients, loving on them, celebrating them, being a thought leader to them being a thinking partner with them? How are you gonna do that? You know, again, not all clients are created equal. So what clients get more of your time and attention, hopefully you’re not spending a lot of time at all with them doing the work. ’cause you know that’s not your job, but it is your job to cultivate relationship with them. So how are you gonna do that A, in the immediate six weeks, how are you gonna appreciate them and let them know that they feel that they are valued?

And B, what is the plan for 24 20 24 to love on them to create relationship, to spend time with them? Some clients should probably see you once a quarter. And again, cu you is not in a meeting. See you is over drinks or breakfast or on the golf course or at the theater or whatever it is that they love to do. But how are you gonna do that? So that’s fun thing number one. That’s pumpkin pie for breakfast, number one. Number two, how are you gonna love on your team? Are you gonna let them know how valuable they are to you as human beings, as team members? You know, I’m not a fan of thinking of your team as family.

I think, you know, that gets us into all kinds of unhealthy relationships. ’cause we tolerate a lot of things from family ’cause they are family and we don’t get a choice. Uncle Bob comes to Thanksgiving dinner every year and he gets drunk and we let him come and we tolerate his bad behavior. We don’t need to tolerate bad behavior in our employees. They’re not our family, but they’re our team and they’re an important part of the agency. They’re actually the most important part of the agency for many agencies. So how are you gonna let them know how much you appreciate them and not in a, everybody gets a, you know, hat with your agency logo on it. Yes, that’s great. I’m all for that. But how are you gonna let each person know that you see them, that you value them, that you’re grateful for them?

That’s enough. That’s a really powerful way to connect with your team and take this time to be really grateful to them and celebrate them. And then the last thing I want you to do is I want you to think about if you could do one thing in 2024 that would make it an unbelievably good year for you, what would it be? Would it be golfing every Friday afternoon? Would it be taking a two week vacation with your spouse? Would it be being invited to speak at a huge industry event? That would sort of be a huge feather in your cap.

Like what would make 24 a really memorable year? Like if you’re writing the holiday letter, it would be like one of the first things that you would think about. Like, oh, I gotta talk about our trip to Antarctica. Or I have, I wanna mention the fact that I won an award or I got to speak at a thing or I, you know, we won best place to work. What? What would make 24 amazing for you? And what do you have to do to make it happen? Buy the plane ticket, book the hotel research. How many of your clients love to golf and, and start getting the golf schedule built out for the year so you can golf every Friday, whatever it is, whatever’s gonna make 24 something.

You look forward to something you’re proud of, something you celebrate, something you remember with joy in your heart. Think about what it’s, and get it on the schedule. Whatever that means. So that might that. That might mean figuring out when the best place to work applications are due. It might scheduling that vacation, it might be signing up for that course because you really want to get started on your NBA. It might be carving from 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM every morning off on your calendar because you wanna write that novel, whatever it is that would make 24 magic for you. Schedule it as you know what the, the truth of the matter is, we can wait for serendipity to happen or we can make sure it happens.

I don’t know about you, but my life is pretty scheduled and even my no scheduled time, like chill time is kind of scheduled. And so if something is important to you and it’s big, it’s not gonna just naturally fit into the year for you, make room for it. Make it a priority. Make yourself a priority. Why? You know what? We don’t get guarantees. And I have seen too many people put things off for someday or later or when I retire or when the kids are out of school or fill in the blank and then they’re robbed of those opportunities.

Don’t do that to yourself. We’re lucky. We are lucky. We have a lot more control over our schedule. We most, we have freedom to do our work in different places around the globe. So whatever it is that’s gonna make 24 magic for you, for your team, for your clients, that’s the pumpkin pie breakfast. That’s the last three things I want you to do during holiday hibernation is to make sure that you love on the clients and you have a plan for doing that into 24.

You let your team members know how awesome they are and how much you appreciate them. And then you look in the mirror and you say, okay, what would really make me happy in 2024? And figure out how to give it to yourself. Okay. Alright, that’s it. I know this seems like a daunting list of things to do, but I promise you all of these things are within your capable hands of getting done before mid-January. It’s not gonna take hours and hours and hours and hours every day. It’s gonna take some forethought, it’s gonna take some, let it cook in the back of your head and it’s gonna take some quiet time, which you will have during the season.

So give yourself the gift of walking in a 24 with a plan and with a vision. And then in your all team meeting in January, share this stuff with your team. You know what our employees want from us? They want a vision. They wanna know where they’re going, where we’re going, and how they can contribute. So let’s give that to them. Let’s celebrate where we’ve been, but let’s be really clear about where we’re going and set a path. Okay? So I wish you the happiest of holidays. I don’t think I’m back with you on another solo cast until after the new year. So, or right around the new year. So I wish you the happiest of holidays. I wish you quiet time to do the thinking you need to, to do.

I wish you peace in your heart knowing that you’ve got this, that you are going to have a good year in 24. And you don’t have to do it alone. The a AMI community is here to support you. Danielle and I are here to support you. We’re in the Facebook group answering questions. We’re at workshops, we’re, we’re doing the q and as every month now, so you can come and ask us anything you wanna come ask us. We have the what is AMI meetings every month, which is just telling you other ways you can plug into AMI and get some help. Many of them are free, some of them are not. But we’ll walk you through them all. You are not doing this by yourself. So go through this checklist, get these things done, be thoughtful about them.

Have an amazing holiday. Love on your family and friends. Soak in gratitude for all that you have. I know for a lot of you, this has been a really hard year, but you know what? Even in our hard years, we have a life that most people would kill to have, and we have to stop and be grateful. It’s so easy to focus on what didn’t work or what we don’t have, or that fact that we had to do some layoffs or we had to do hard things, that sometimes we have to take one more step back and say, yep, all of that happened. I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. I’m not gonna ignore it. But even with all of that, I’m blessed beyond measure.

I’m luckier than most. I’m the captain of my own ship and a lot of people follow me gratefully and gladly because we have somewhere that is important for us to go. So soak in all of that gratitude. Be proud of what you’ve done this year and in the past, and get excited about where you’re going. Okay? Alright, before I let you go, huge shout out and thanks to our friends at White Label IQ, the presenting sponsor of this podcast. So they do white Label, design dev, and PPC for many, many agencies. You can learn more about the work they do at White Label IQ dot com slash aami.

So go check them out. If you talk to them, please tell them that I sent you. Tell them I said hello. I, I am super grateful to them. They’re good human beings, good friends, and good supporters of a mami. So I’m grateful ’cause they let me do this with you every week. Alright? Please know that I’m grateful for you, Danielle and I are grateful for you. We talk about you every day. We think about you every day. We’re trying to figure out ways that we can be better for you every day. But we’re so grateful that you allow us to walk alongside you and that you allow us to be of support, and that you invite us into some of your hardest days, and you trust us enough to let you help them.

So we’re super grateful for you, and you know, we’ll be celebrating you this holiday season, and we too will be doing all these things as we think about how we can show up even stronger and better for you in 2024. Thanks for listening.

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

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