Why daily timesheets are an agency’s best friend with Drew McLellan

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

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

Running an agency can be a lonely proposition, but it doesn’t have to be. We can learn how to be better faster if we learn together. Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build, a Better Agency Podcast, presented by White Label, IQ Tune in every week. For insights on how small to mid-size agencies are surviving and thriving in today’s market with 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here with another episode of Build Better Agency. Super glad to be with you today. If you’re listening real time, early February, if you’re listening later than that, whenever I catch you, I’m happy to be with you. Today’s episode is one of my solo casts, so as you know, if you’re a regular listener, that means no guest today, just you and me talking about something that I think needs to be on your radar screen or I want you to be thinking about, or I wanna do a course correction or do a little teaching around. And today’s topic is one that Danielle and I talk to agency owners about almost every day, and actually employees as well. So it feels fitting that this is worthy of a solo cast episode.

Before we talk a little bit about what we’re gonna talk about today, a couple things. First of all, as you know, on every solo cast, we give away a seat to one of our live workshops. So how this works is super simple. You a listener leave a review. You could leave it at Apple Podcast, you could leave it at Google Podcast, you could leave it on iHeart, where wherever you download this show, you can go and you can leave a rating and review. And what we need you to do is go there, leave your rating and review, take a screenshot of it and email it to me at Drew at agency management Institute dot com.

I know longest email on the planet Drew at agency management Institute dot.com. And the reason why I need you to email it to me, we go to all the sites and we read all the reviews and and I, I do wanna tell you that it is, it is educational, it’s heartening, it is gratifying to see that you find the show valuable and to hear what you want to see more of. Always open for that too. You can always email us and say, gosh, I wish you’d do a show on and then fill in the blank for us. But the reviews are great and they’re very important for us in terms of getting in front of more and more agency owners and leaders. But however, to put you in the drawing, we need the screenshot.

And the reason we need the screenshot is because all of those different platforms ask you to create some sort of user ID when you create your account to download podcasts. And very few of you use your email address or your full name. It’s really like, you know, baseball Lover 92 or you know, cats make me sneeze 27 or whatever name it is that you use, but I don’t know who you are. And so if we draw your name and we’re like, oh, Katz, make me sneeze 27, I have no way of letting you know you’ve won and you have no way of coming to the workshop for free. So screenshot, email it to us, full name, agency name, and that’s it. You go in the drawing and you will stay in the drawing until you win.

So last week or last month’s winner, I think his review was something he posted during Covid, so you know, several years ago. So I promise sooner or later you’re gonna win. There’s not that great a universe of people out there. So sooner or later you’re gonna get a free workshop. So that feels like a worthy reward for five or 10 minutes of effort. So this month’s winner is Andre Hughes. Andre is the president of Proactive Agency, Andre, I’m gonna shoot you an email and let you know that you won and then we’ll talk about which workshop is best for you. Okay. Alright. So with that business outta the way, I also wanna remind you that one of the, our internal theme for 24 is all about leveling up how we serve all of you and looking for new ways or enhancing the ways we already show up.

So one of the things we’re committed to doing is once a month holding two standing meetings, one at these are live on Zoom, one is a what is a MI? How can a MI help me meeting? So for a lot of you, your podcast listeners, you might be in the Facebook group, but you’re not really sure how you could interact with a MI. And there’s lots of ways. There’s lots of freeways, there’s lots of ways you can pay to get services. So once a month, we take about 10 minutes to walk you through kind of the service offerings of a MI and where you might plug in. And then we spend the rest of the hour just answering your questions about what might be a good fit for you. So the meeting in February for that particular meeting or that topic is February 12th at 9:00 AM Mountain Time.

So I’ll tell you where to get the Zoom links for both of these meetings in a second. The second meeting that we’re committed to doing every month in 2024 is live q and a. So that’s just what it sounds like. No presentation, no guest speaker, just show up and ask us questions. So we might be talking about billable rates, we might be talking about staff utilization, we might be talking about a financial metric. You might have questions about niching, you might have read the book, sell With Authority and have questions about that. Whatever, whatever question you have around running your business, we’re there to answer your question. Most cases, we can answer it on the fly. In some cases we’ll have to say, you know what? I think I have a tool or a checklist or a thing for that, let me email it to you.

But in the most case, Danielle and I are pretty good given our seasoned level of experience. It’s a nice way of saying that we’re old. We can answer most of those questions or do some coaching on the fly and ask a couple questions and help you get some clarification. So that next meeting is February 15th at noon mountain time. So where do you find the Zoom links? So you can attend these meetings and where do you find out about the meetings if I’m not talking about amount of solocast, we announced these meetings and share the Zoom links in two places, well actually three. The first one is in our weekly newsletter. So if you’re not a subscriber to the weekly newsletter, head over to agency management Institute dot com and you can either scroll down to the bottom of the footer and there’s a link that says sign up for the newsletter, or you can just go to agency management Institute dot com slash newsletter and you just give us your first name and your email address and then once a week you’ll get the newsletter.

The second place you can always count on us sharing this information is in the Facebook group built for podcast listeners. So if you’re not a member of that group, head over to Facebook, search for Build, a Better, Agency Podcast, you’re gonna have to answer four simple questions, email address URL of the agency. And honestly, the reason we ask that is because we do not allow any vendors into that space unless they’re one of our preferred partners and we know that they’re not gonna sell inside the group. So it is pure agency owners and leaders and anybody who tries to sell gets booted outta the group. So it’s a really great environment to connect with other owners to connect with us. But it’s also a great place for you to get the zoom link for these two meetings. So would love to see you with us in February.

If those dates don’t work, guess what? We’re doing it again in March and we’re gonna just keep doing it all year until we think it’s not helpful. If it’s not helpful, then we’ll stop doing it, but in the meantime we’re just gonna keep showing up and we hope that you show up as well. Alright, so let’s talk a little bit about the topic for today. So I wanna tell you a story about my dad actually to start off with and I promise it relates directly to the, to the the work topic we’re gonna cover today. So my dad was a very typical guy. He did not enjoy going to the doctor. And his model was, you know, if it’s not broke literally then there’s no reason to go to the doctor and get it fixed.

And so he very rarely got an annual checkup. And my dad was for the most part in pretty good health. He had some episodic things that happen, which are irrelevant to the story, but for the most part he successfully avoided doctors for most of his life. And he felt great and he felt fine and my, he was fit and pretty healthy. And, and then in his mid to late seventies, he started having some TI symptoms that he just couldn’t ignore anymore. And so finally he went to the doctor and in a series of blood work and some other tests, what they discovered was that my dad’s left kidney was dead.

It was not producing anything, it was absolutely inoperable. And his right kidney was down to 20% production. So my father’s entire body was working on 20% of a single kidney. And what that meant for him was a pretty dramatic change in lifestyle. He had to go on a very restrictive diet and the whole goal of the diet was to delay, not avoid, to delay having to go on dialysis that at a certain, when his kidney got to 10% functionality, he would have no choice but to do dialysis.

So the the, I guess the happy news of the story, If, there is happy news to the story is my dad is a very disciplined guy or was a very disciplined guy. We lost him a few years ago, but he followed that diet to a tea. But it was miserable. I mean he, he all the things he loved to eat, he couldn’t eat anymore and it was very restrictive. It, it meant he was really hard for him to go out for dinner, he had to cook for himself. When he’d come to visit us, we had to cook a very prescribed diet for him. So it was not the way you wanna live your life. And what the doctor said to him was, if we had caught this earlier, if we had been doing routine annual checkups, we would’ve seen your kidney functionality beginning to wane.

And we could have fixed this in a lot of different ways that would not have been this dramatic. So fast forward to now here’s my dad on this restrictive diet. You know, they told him that at the most he was gonna avoid dialysis for a year. Good news is for him. He avoided it for several years, but he did eventually have to go on dialysis, which was miserable. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. And eventually it’s what he died from. So why am I telling you this story? I’m telling you this story because diagnostics matter, early detection matters, warning signs matter.

And in our world, the foundational tool that is your early warning sign that is diagnostic in nature, that tells you how healthy you are early enough that you can make course corrections that you means you don’t have to go on. The agency owner version of dialysis is timesheets, daily timesheets. Now I know two things. As soon as I said the T word, you had two concurrent thoughts and if you’re an agency owner, you had three concurrent thoughts. The first thought was timesheets suck. The second thought was, if you’re an owner, timesheets are great for everybody but me.

And the third thought was, but Drew, a lot of other agency advisors say timesheets aren’t necessary if we bill, if we value bill, we don’t need to do timesheets. And so we don’t do ’em. So I’m gonna answer all three of those. Number one, timesheets do suck. I’m not gonna sugarcoat that nobody is excited about doing a time sheet, but it’s also not like giving yourself a lobotomy. It is manageable and the value of it, the benefits of it far outweigh the inconvenience of doing it. And if you do it daily, it’s just not that big a deal. Number two, agency owners don’t need to do timesheets because they’re not billable or whatever your excuse is as both.

I cannot tell you how often when we help an agency owner do timesheets, they very quickly realize that they are not spending their time the way they thought they were and they are not actually doing their job. They’re doing other people’s jobs. Number three, with all due respect to the other advisors in the space, they’re freaking wrong. It’s not about billing. timesheets are not about how you bill, very few of you bill time and materials anymore. So yes, you’re right. timesheets are not always about the billing and if you value bill or flat fee bill, a retainer bill or what, however you bill timesheets, are not why our billing is not why we do timesheets.

S timesheets are a diagnostic tool and they help us know so much about our business. And if you’re an employee listening to this, I’m telling you one of the most important things you can do is do your timesheets daily. And I’ll talk about why daily in a minute. But it is your job. It’s one of the reasons you get paid is to track your time. And here are all the ways, think about all the things we know when we’re doing timesheets. Imagine you’re running a factory and the factory is not outputting either the quality of thing of items or at the speed that you think or the volume something is wrong, but all the lights are off in the factory.

And so you have no way of knowing if there’s a machine broken, if someone’s standing in the wrong spot in the assembly line, if you have the wrong person in the wrong spot, if there’s oil leaking from a machine, you have no way of knowing why something’s broken, but you know something is broken. So here are some ways that you know that. So there’s something broken in your factory, you’re not dropping 20% profit to the bottom line, no matter how busy you are, no matter how big you are, no matter what year it is. That’s diagnostic warning sign number one. Number two, your people’s billability and utilization are not where they belong.

They’re 30% billable or 40% billable. Number three, we are writing off a ton of time on projects and I’m just giving you the top level of the diagnostics di diagnostic problems that we see every day in agencies. And when I say, show me your timesheets, and the agency owner says, yeah, we don’t do timesheets, or you know what, we have 50% compliance and we only require them to get ’em done by the end of the month. We are literally in the dark. And now we have to start guessing and experimenting rather than having data that shows us in a heartbeat what is broken and how to fix it.

So there are a lot of reasons why timesheets really matter. And some of the things that timesheets show us daily timesheets show us are, our estimates are wrong. It doesn’t take 10 hours to do that thing. It consistently takes us 20 hours. And so we’re giving away, we’re writing off 10 plus hours every time we do this sort of project, we are writing that time off and losing that profitability. It might be that our workflow isn’t effective, that we have systems or processes or, or a lack thereof that makes us take longer than we need to or put more time into certain tasks or certain deliverables.

Then it makes sense again in the dark, we don’t know that. But when we flip the lights on and we watch, we can see, oh my gosh, why is he holding that for 10 minutes? We don’t need to hold that for 10 minutes. It runs through a cooler. It’s not hot to the touch. Like whatever it is. I don’t work on factories. So some of my factory analogies may be a little loose, but you’re gonna stay with me and you’re gonna get it right. It may be that the team mix that we have isn’t right. We need somebody more senior on the front end or the back end, or we don’t need all these senior people, these highly expensive people to do this kind of task that when we look at it, it’s actually the more junior employees that are more efficient and more effective or they deliver just as well as the senior people do.

It might be that somebody needs more training. Boy, when I watch Drew on the factory line and I watch the way he does his part of the assembly, I can see that he’s slower than everybody else with his job title. I can see that he has a confusion look on his face. He’s, he’s not sure, he’s not confident, he’s missing a skillset. He, he doesn’t know who to ask for help. There’s all kinds of things we can see. It might be that you know what, we just shouldn’t do websites. We can figure out how to do these profitably. These are not core to our business and we absolutely lose money every time we do this.

And I, again, I’m just scratching the surface of why timesheets matter so much, but when we see how everyone is spending their time, we can also figure out, okay, you know what, we’re not staffed appropriately. You know, Mary is slammed with work because she has a skillset and babbette, you know what? She’s billing 20% and I have no idea what she’s doing the rest of the time. Because by the way, we’ve also violated one of the most important time sheet rules, which is we have these big black buckets where people can stick their time and we have no idea what it means, which we’ll talk about in a minute. So this is all about staff efficiency.

This is about estimate accuracy, it’s about workflow, it’s about team mix, it’s about training, it’s about the staffing ratios. Can I afford another staff person? What kind of staff person do we need? Where do we need to beef up our freelance bench? Because these, this people with this skillset are slammed all the time. People with this skillset really we have a hard time keeping them billable and busy. All of these things, all of this data, all of these insights come from daily timesheets. There’s no other way for you to know all of those things no other way.

Now you may say, well I know those things. I’ve been running an agency for 20 years. No, you think you know that’s very different than knowing you think, you know, your gut tells you. And you know what? I am a firm believer that in many cases your gut is right, but when it comes to metrics and data, we get it wrong more often than we get it right? We talk about this in our Money Matters workshop all the time. Everybody, when they learn the right metrics, when they look at the right data, everybody underlined emphasized, everybody is surprised at something. And you know what? You probably run a pretty good agency and hopefully you are at least profitable if you’re not 20% profitable or double digit profitable.

But imagine having more information so you could make some minor tweaks and adjustments and double your profitability, double your team’s efficiency. Know who to hire next, know who needs the training, know who’s phoning it in. And you think they’re super awesome, but really they are phoning it in. I’m telling you, the only data source for much of this insight, much of this knowledge, much of this data, much of this fact is daily timesheets. There’s just no other shortcut to get to it. All right, so we’re gonna take a quick break and then we’re gonna come back and we’re gonna talk about the best practices of timesheets.

I’m hoping by now you understand the importance of timesheets and that this is not, by the way, employees are always like, this is you tracking me and then I’m gonna get in trouble. The most important element of daily timesheets is accuracy. It is not about being punitive. It is not about seeing that somebody is a slacker. It is not about looking for ways that you can beat up on your employees. It’s really looking for ways to make the agency’s systems and processes and people better. It is really about looking at workloads more accurately.

You know, if your employees are coming to you and they’re saying, oh my God, when you, if you win a new piece of business and your employees are like, oh my God, how are we gonna get that done? We’re slammed without timesheets. You have no way of knowing if that’s accurate or not. And by the way, most of the times it’s not inaccurate. It’s something else that is making them feel like they don’t have capacity. When they do, when you can diagnose where that capacity is, then you can fix it for them. So they’re as excited about new business as you are. And guess what? Nobody gets raises or bonuses or any of the other things. Promotions if we can’t grow the business. So timesheets are actually an employee’s best defense, best tool for demonstrating that they are doing a great job.

That demonstrating that we could get even better in other ways that would help me do an even better job that are demonstrating I really do need help. So timesheets are accurate. timesheets are an employee’s best friend. So an employee should be excited about doing their timesheets every day because it opens up conversations that they can have with their boss about how they can be even better at their job. All right, now we’re gonna go take a break and then I’ll come back and we’ll talk about how to do timesheets better, how to look at the data better and what to do next. Okay, I’ll be right back. I promise I’m only gonna keep you a minute before we get back to the show. But I wanna remind you that the Build a Better Agency Summit, the annual conference where we bring 350 agency owners and leaders together is coming up May 21st and 22nd.

May 20th is a AMI family day or member day. But whether you are a member or not, we would love to have you with us May 21st and 22nd to read more about the conference, see who the speakers are, or register head over to agency management Institute dot com. And the very first button on the nav is BABA summit. Click on that and all the information is right there and we would love to see you in Denver in May. All right, let’s get back to the show. Alright, we are back and we are talking about the dreaded T word timesheets. So first of all, I have said several times in the first half of the, of the episode, daily timesheets s timesheets that are not done every day are 67% less accurate.

Let me say that again. timesheets that are not done daily are 67% less accurate. And let’s admit timesheets are inaccurate at the get go. We’re human beings. We are not gonna remember in 15 minute increments to the amazing precision of a machine exactly how we spent our time. But we have a much better chance of getting it mostly right if we do them every day. And if we do them every day, they’re just not that big a deal. It’s, I, it’s eight hours, it’s 10 hours, it’s seven hours, whatever it is. It’s not that hard for us to remember and record what we did today or what we did yesterday by 10:00 AM today.

And so every agency should require daily timesheets. And I did a whole episode, episode 3 75 on how to incentivize and train your team to do their timesheets daily. And I’m telling you, if you follow that program to the T, to the T, you have to do all of it. You can’t do most of it. If you follow it to the t, I guarantee you within three or four months you will be at 95 or better percent daily time sheet completion. We have never, ever, in all the years we’ve been teaching that methodology, we have never had an agency fail at getting to 95 or better percent daily compliance.

Nor have we had an agency slide backwards every once in a while, every few years they might have to reimplement the program for a couple months. But it’s a very easy course correction to get everybody back on track. It’s usually if you’ve grown a lot and you’ve added a a bunch of new people that you have to go back and sort of re-implement the program. But I’m telling you, it is magic, it works. It, it is. It takes into account all the human psychology, good and bad and it leverages it to the benefit of both the employee, the agency owner and the agency itself. So episode 3 75, but daily timesheets are mandatory.

Your timesheets, if they’re not done every day are very inaccurate. You need to do, you need to record your time in 15 minute increments. So anything less than 15 minutes roll up to 15 minutes. And honestly that makes it very easy to do. Most of you spend more than 15 minutes on a thing. So you know, for most of you a time sheet entry is 10 or 15 entries. So the difference, probably project managers, ’cause they’re touching 85 projects in a day. So what they’re gonna do is you’re gonna implement, putting fif, you’re gonna create a program that says we’re gonna put a minimum of 15 minutes of time on every job on behalf of the project manager.

And depending on the size of the project, you’re gonna add more time. They’re the only ones who really cannot possibly record all the jobs they touch and all the clients they touch on a day. So they have to do their time sheet differently. Happy to talk to you about that at length if that’s of value to you in another time. But other than that, every other functional role inside an agency, including you owners, has to do the timesheets every day and 15 minute increments. So it’s critical that you have two elements in your timesheets, right? So you’ve got, you have your client job name and number for sure, that’s one. And then you’re gonna have the tasks and your tasks are gonna be broken up into two big buckets, billable tasks and non-billable tasks.

And so the non-billable tasks are things like, you know, doctor’s, appointment day, vacation day, holiday, you know, internal team meeting, you know, things like that. Okay? And then all of the billable tasks are gonna be the things that your team does that we’re gonna bill clients for. So it’s account service, it’s account supervision, it’s copywriting, it’s it’s concepting, it’s layout, it’s design, it’s coding for every, every one of you, you’re gonna have a different list of things and you wanna be pretty granular. You wanna probably have 15 or 20 things in the billable and far fewer in the non-billable, right?

But what you don’t wanna have is any category where someone can put their time that is the black hole of emptiness, like admin, email, things like that. Because guess what? Now everyone has the lazy way out, which is, I don’t remember what I did or I didn’t do my time sheet, so I’m just gonna lump five hours in admin. You have no idea what they did in five hours of admin. And by the way, anybody who regularly has five hours of admin and they can’t break it down right into functional codes. And by the way, in your non-billable codes, you need to have some functional codes for people like accounting people so you know what they’re doing, but no big black holes for timesheets.

All right? Then I wanted to make sure that both the employees and the owners are doing their time. So agency owners, this is critical for you. It’s critical for you because I promise you, you don’t know what you’re doing all day every day you think you do and you have a million interruptions and you have three things on your to-do list. And maybe you get one of them done. And when I say to you, well, what’d you do the rest of the day? You’re like, oh, well you know, there was a line at my office door and this and that and the other thing, and there were phone calls and email. Yeah, about what? What were you doing? I think you are gonna be stunned probably more than anyone else. The person who is most surprised by the data of timesheets in terms of how their job functions is the agency owner.

You have no idea how much time you are wasting or how much time you are sort of giving to other people where they should be doing the thing that you are doing. Or how often you allow interruptions to keep you from actually doing your job. I think you’re gonna be stunned. Remember, there’s a very prescriptive rule around biz dev and other things you should be doing, mentoring your team. I promise you, when you do your timesheets, you’re gonna see that you’re underperforming in those. So employees, this is critical for you to do timesheets because you are being held, whether you’ve been told or not, you are being held to a standard of how billable, how what percentage of your time is spent on billable tasks and what percentage of your time is actually billed to a client, what we call utilization.

And if you are not doing your timesheets accurately, I guarantee you, you are not recording billable time that you should get credit for because you’ve forgotten that you did it. You are, you are defaulting to the email bucket or the admin bucket ’cause you can’t remember what you did last Thursday. And no offense, I don’t remember what I did last Thursday. If we don’t do it every day, here’s the bottom line. If we don’t do it every day as employees of an agency, we are screwing ourselves out of credit. All right? I promise you. You are doing more billable work than you’re putting on your time sheet or you’re putting it in the wrong place.

So again, you can’t remember. So you’re like, oh, I spent about four hours doing that thing. And if we do that cumulatively, and if multiple people do it, what happens is we have too much time on that job that we can’t build a client. So yes, you look billable, but you don’t look like we can utilize those billable hours by billing them to a client. And guess what? That means you’re not effective. That means you’re at expense that I can’t make money on as an agency owner. And that means that when I start thinking about having to reduce staff, you’re on that list. It is to your advantage agency employee or agency leader. It’s to your advantage that your team does their timesheets. It’s how we protect our jobs. It’s how we demonstrate our value.

It’s how we show that we are overburdened and need some help. It’s how we show that the estimates are wrong. I legitimately spent 10 hours on this thing, even though the project management software told me I only had four hours and this keeps happening over and over and over again. So I need help or we need to fix the estimates or there’s a something broken in our workflow. timesheets are not punitive to an agency employee. timesheets are an employee’s greatest defense and greatest advocate that you’re good at your job, that you’re doing your job. Don’t think of timesheets as something bad.

Think of timesheets as proof that you are doing a good job and that you are being a good steward of both the client’s money and the agency’s money by helping diagnose when there’s a problem. Timesheets are the agency’s best friend. timesheets are an agency owner’s best friend. timesheets are an agency employee’s best friend. It’s data, it’s facts. When we know what’s going on, we can fix it. When we don’t know what’s going on, we end up on a dialysis machine. Our agency ends up on the agency equivalent of a dialysis machine because we’re bleeding money because we’re overstaffed because our team isn’t trained properly.

’cause our workflow is inefficient ’cause our estimates are wrong. Bottom line, we are not dropping enough money to the bottom line to take care of our people, to take care of the owner, to give out bonuses, to give out raises, to buy new computers to add to the staff, fill in the blank. Without the data, your agency is not healthy and you can’t diagnose why it’s not healthy. And so you keep guessing and trying different things and sometimes you guess wrong too often or for too long. And then there’s no choice but to do something dramatic like cutting staff or closing your doors, data, information, daily.

timesheets protect you from all of that. So I want you to rethink about the way you view timesheets. I want you to see them as your friend. I want you to see them as a valuable data source, a foundational data source for running the agency better and for running your career better. If you’re an employee, this is critical and it’s important for you and it’s important for the agency. You have to reframe how everyone looks at timesheets, how they feel about doing them and how they feel about the value. So if you want your team to do timesheets every day, three things. One, you have to start doing them every day.

Agency owner, you gotta walk the talk. Two, listen to episode 3 75 and implement that program. And then three in your all team meetings, bring back the data. Tell your team what you’re learning. Tell them how you’re making adjustments based on everybody doing their timesheets and how much better and more profitable the agency is because we have good data. Do ’em yourself. Implement the program so everybody’s doing them every day. And then share the insights and knowledge that the data gives you. Flip the lights on in your factory, see what’s going on so you can diagnose the problem and adjust and fix the problem.

Or maybe it’s not a problem. Maybe somebody’s super efficient and that’s something you can teach everybody else. And it magnifies the profitability of your agency. timesheets show you good and bad and ugly, and then you get to deal with the good. You get to magnify the good, you get to solve the ugly, and you get to course correct the bad. That’s important. It’s important for you as a business owner. It’s important for you as an agency employee. So daily timesheets owner, Dom, episode 3 75, share the data. I’m telling you, it is the way for your agency to stay healthy. Okay?

That’s it. That’s my rant for this time. Hey, I am always so grateful that you hang out even when I talk about things you don’t wanna talk about. I know that for some of you, when I said the T word, you’re like, oh, I don’t, I don’t wanna talk about timesheets. I know he’s gonna rag at me about timesheets. Thank you. If you’re still listening for sticking around and hearing me out, and hopefully for some of it making sense for you and you going, you know what we gotta do that. I have to take better care of my agency. I have to be a better contributor. If you’re an agency employee, an agency leader, and your owner doesn’t listen to this podcast and you don’t do timesheets, ask them to listen to this episode or download the transcript, the transcription from the show notes and highlight the points of this.

Advocate for daily timesheets. Be a good steward of the agency. Do the right thing for the shop, for the people and the owner. Okay? So thank you for listening. I’ll be back next week with a guest. I am super excited as always, to hang out with you and I’m grateful for you. I really am. I, Danielle and I talk every day about how lucky we are that we get to do work that we love in the service of people that we love. We we do not take that for granted. So thank you for being here. Thanks for being part of the AMI community. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next week.

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