Five Essential Agency Owner Resolutions for 2026 with Drew McLellan

Danyel McLellan [00:00:01]: 

It doesn’t matter what kind of agency you run, traditional digital media, buying, web dev, PR or brand, whatever your focus, you still need to run a profitable business. The Build a Better Agency podcast, presented by White Label iq, will expose you to the best practices that drive growth, client and employee retention and profitability. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew Mclellan. 

Drew McLellan [00:00:37]: 

Hey everybody, Drew Mclellan here from agency Management Institute. Back with another episode, actually the first episode of 2026. If you’re listening to Real time of the Build a Better Agency podcast. And what better way to start the year with it just being a solo cast, you and me hanging out, talking about something really important. I’ve been thinking a lot about this coming year about 2026, and that it really is going to be a watershed year for I think a lot of agencies. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute and what I think we need to do about it as agency owners and leaders to make sure that we are preparing our agency for the year ahead. But before that, a couple housekeeping things.  

Number one, as you know, on every solo cast, we give away a free seat to one of our workshops or the Build a Better Agency Summit. So all we ask is that you as a listener leave a rating or review on any site where you download your podcast. So could be Apple podcasts or Iheart or Google, wherever it is that you download it, just leave a rating and review for the podcast. That helps us get found by other folks who need to hear the podcast and need the information that we’re sharing. So we’re super grateful for that and in return we would like to honor you or grant you a seat at a workshop. . 

So here’s how it works. You go leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast site, you screenshot your rating and review and you email it to me at [email protected] the reason I ask you to do that is even though I personally read every review and I’m super grateful for them a lot of times, the name, the username you use for leaving the rating or review, the account that you have with wherever you download your podcast isn’t your full name and it certainly isn’t your name and email address. And so I have no way a of knowing who left the review in a lot of cases and B I sure as heck to have no way of getting a hold of you and letting you know that your review or Your rating was the one that won, so I need you to email it to me. And then we put them in a hat, if you will, a proverbial hat. And every solo cast. So every five weeks we draw a name and that person wins a seat at one of our workshops or at the Build a Better Agency Summit. Super simple.  

As you can imagine, we don’t have tens of thousands of names in the hat, so. And your name stays in the hat until you win. So sooner or later, here’s the deal. Sooner or later you can spend five minutes leaving a rating and review and sending it to me. And at some point in time, you are going to win. There’s no question about it, you are going to win a $2,000 workshop seat or summit seat. So seems to me five minutes for two grand prize, pretty good trade. So go ahead and do that now. But this week or this month rather, Ashley Cook is our winner. So, Ashley, I’m going to send you an email. I will give you the information about how you can turn in this winning for a free seat at either the summit or one of our workshops for agency owners. And we will look forward to seeing you in Denver one way or the other. So, Ashley Cook, congratulations. You are the winner this time. So super grateful about that.  

Last thing I want to do is I want to give a shout out and I thank you to our friends at White Label iq. As I’ve been telling you for the last several years, they are the presenting sponsor of this podcast. They make it possible for us to come to you every week and bring you podcast content to help you build an agency that is more stable, that is more scalable, that has less ups and downs and that is more profitable. So super grateful to them. I’m going to give you their web address in a second. So it’s white label iq.com and if you add the/ami, it’ll take you to a special page where you can learn about a deal that they have for you as a first time client. So whether you’ve worked with White Label before or you’ve never worked with them before, what I would love for you to do is to go to their website and send them a note and just say, hey, thanks for sponsoring the Build a Better Agency podcast. And they also sponsor the Build a Better Agency Summit. So let them know that you appreciate the support that they provide to you, really by making all of this content available to you. So one of the things I love about them is they’re very intentional. So I do a lot of work with the owners of White Label. So they’re in one of our peer groups and I do some coaching with them. What I, what I love and respect about them is they’re really intentional about being good leaders and about sort of making sure that they are prepared for guiding their agency, their employees, their clients into whatever’s coming next. So as you might imagine, they’re spending a ton of time on AI right now figuring out how to help their clients really wrap their arms around AI and leverage it inside their web presence and inside their business and all of their digital business. And they do a ton of work in, whether it’s design, dev or paid media, they will come alongside agencies and be a support system for them. They, in some cases they are their outsourced department. In other cases they’re just an extra set of hands. But they’re really intentional about the way that they show up as leaders, both inside their own agency, but also in the industry.  

And so I’m super grateful to them for wanting to constantly get better. And that’s actually the topic that I want to talk about today.  

So as I was thinking about what I wanted to talk with you about today, and I was thinking about 2026, you know, everyone is asking me what 2026 is going to be like. Is it going to be a good year? Is it going to be a tough year? For many of you, 2025 was a challenge. It was a hard grind of a year with the economic upheaval, with the tariffs, with a lot of the other things that were going on. And so you’re looking at 2026 with hope that it’s going to be easier. And I don’t actually think that’s going to be true.  

I think 2026 is going to ask a lot of us as agency owners and leaders. And so as I was thinking about that and I was thinking about how I could best help you prepare, I came up with a list of five things and I’m going to call these agency owner resolutions. These are the five things that I want you to, to focus on. 

So, you know what’s cool about January is we kind of get a slow start after the holidays. So I always call it holiday hibernation. That and really until here in the United States, Martin Luther King Day, so mid January, everybody’s coming out of the holidays, they’re still coming off vacation, they’re kind of getting back into the groove. And so for many agency owners and leaders, the first half of January is a great time to do some planning and to put some plans in place. 

And so what I want to talk with you about today is the plan I would like you to put in place for 2026. And I will tell you it is a plan that is pulling from lots of our different workshops and other things, a lot of our best practices around how agency owners should show up for their clients, for their team, for themselves. And it’s certainly not all inclusive. 

So I know that every New Year’s post, every New Year’s podcast is talking to you about taking care of yourself, making sure you get some exercise, eating well, sleeping well. So I’m not going to go down that path at all. I’m going to assume that you’re doing a good job of recognizing that you’ve got to keep the machine in great working order and that you are emotionally, mentally and physically taking care of yourself. So I’m going to call that a given. 

So I don’t want you to think that I don’t think it’s important, but it’s not in my list of five because I think it’s so foundational that I’m hoping that you are already doing that. 

So let’s talk about the five things that I want you to do. I want you to. And all of these things are things that I want you to schedule in right now before things get busy again. Towards the tail end of January. I want you to bake this stuff into your calendar, into your habits, so that you carry these five things out throughout the entire year. 

So I think 2026 is going to be challenging. I think a lot of agencies are going to be under a lot of pressure to show up, to show how they are showing up differently, to show how they are showing up more strategically. We can have a whole conversation about how I think AI is changing the world’s perception of how agencies should show up and what we need to be great at. But that I’ll put that aside for the next solo cast. 

But here are the things that I want you to do to get yourself in the agency ready for 2026 and to set yourself up for success. 

Number one. So resolution number one, I want you to open up your calendar and I want you to carve out four to eight hours a week that you are unavailable. So half day or two half days that you are unavailable. And it doesn’t mean you’re not going to be working. You are absolutely going to be working, but it means you are not able to be in meetings. 

If you’re in an office setting, it means you’re not coming into the office. If you are working hybrid or remote, it means you’re not answering email, you’re not answering Slack pings, you are unplugged for four to eight hours. 

So ideally it would be two half days. And by the way, they have to be in the morning because if they’re in the afternoon, you’ll never get to them because there’ll be some fire that will take you away from it. 

So two days a week, ideally, but at least one day a week, I want you to carve out four hours. So from eight to noon, one or two days a week. And I want you to be unavailable. 

And the reason why I’m asking you to do that is because it is very difficult for an agency owner or an agency leader to actually do deep work. It is difficult because we are constantly being interrupted by email, by Slack pings, by phone calls, by texts, and those come from clients. They come from team members, they come from wherever they come from. 

But you have a really hard time doing deep work. So one of two things happens. Either the deep work doesn’t happen, or you do it at night or on the weekends. And I want you to have time during your work week to do the deep work that is super important to you. 

For many of you, that deep work is going to be about new business. It might be about writing a book that you think will help you get on stages. It might be calling former clients and reconnecting with them. It might be working a list. We’ll talk about that in a minute. I don’t care what it is, but it’s. It’s the important work that you need to do that requires focus and attention. 

And I want you to mark that time on your calendar and say, call it deep work time unavailable. And on your calendar, if your calendar allows people to over. To schedule over meetings and things like that, make it that it cannot be scheduled over, that it is protected and pristine. 

And if you say to me, drew, I cannot carve four hours a week out of my week, that’s a big problem. And I want you to figure out why you can’t do that. Every one of us should be able to carve out four hours a week where we just hunker down and do really important deep work. 

So that’s resolution number one is carving out that four to eight hours. 

Now, it may be that you’re already scheduled up in January. Great. Find four hours. Find one morning a week as soon as you can on your calendar and then accelerate it to two mornings a week as quickly as you can and then explain to your team that it’s important that you have four hours or eight hours, ideally of uninterrupted time to do the deep work that only you as the agency owner or leader can do. 

And if you don’t carve out the time to do it, it just doesn’t get done. 

I think that many agency owners, it’s so easy, especially if you grew up in an agency, it’s so easy to get caught up in doing someone else’s work, doing account service work, doing the accountants work, being the creative director, whatever it is. It’s so easy to do a job that technically should be someone else’s job, that we don’t do our job. 

The problem is if we don’t do our job, no one does our job. 

So 48 hours a week, carve it out of your calendar. Starting in January, get at least four hours a week. And really by the end of the first quarter, please, please, please carve out eight hours a week, two half days in the morning where you are unavailable so you can focus on work. 

You know how sometimes you work at night or on the weekends and you’re astonished at how much you get done because you’re not interrupted. Same thing. You are going to be astonished at what you can done and get done in that big block of time. And it’s going to feel so good to be that accomplished and to really be moving your bigger goals forward. 

And it sets a great example for the rest of your team that it’s okay to be unavailable for a period of time to do the work that matters the most. 

So that’s it. That’s number one, number two, two hours a week. 

This is different than the four hours a week I want you to block off for new business. So that might be 30 minutes every morning, that might be an hour a couple afternoons. 

You know, we launched the Sales Momentum Learning Lab late in 2025. And it’s really. I’m super happy with the program. It’s. But basically what it is is I’m assigning the participants very specific things to do for people who don’t know who they are at all, for influencers and referral sources, for prospects and for clients. 

And I’m assigning tiny little micro tasks for them every week. They have to report back to me what they did and then I give them feedback. 

But the core essence of that program is that it’s going to take 60 to 120 minutes a week for them to do that homework. And I’m telling you that we just started this in November. So it’s been what, two months. 

And I’m telling you, the agency owners that have really committed to this, that have committed two hours a week, so again, not that much time and are actually doing these tasks, are actually focusing on new business and doing very specific things to move the needle with all those different audiences. 

And they’re very prescribed. Like I’m describing exactly what they need to do. But, but even if you’re not in the program, I want you to carve out two hours a week to focus on new business. 

So you might be building a list. So a lot of agencies are using clay.com, which is an amazing tool that if you want to build your, if you want to build your first party data list, Clay.com is the perfect place to go and do that. 

And then are sending a sequence of warm up emails to kind of warm that list up and then adding them to their, to their email list after they’ve sort of run them through the gauntlet and made sure that they haven’t unsubscribed clay.com 

You might be calling former clients and checking in on them. You might be calling current clients and scheduling time to grab breakfast or coffee or a drink with them. You might be writing some content, whatever it is, two hours a week to do new business. 

This is different than the four hours a week. 

So really what I’m asking you for is a total of 10 hours a week, four to eight hours carved out for your quiet, deep thinking time and two hours a week to focus on new business. 

So 10 hours out of 40 and most of you work more than 40 hours. So I’m asking for 25%. 

And the rest of the. Do I think you should be doing other things? Absolutely, but we’re not going to get into that. 

I’m asking you to schedule 10 hours a week at the most. And if you’re only doing four hours a week for your deep thinking, then I’m talking about six hours a week to block off and make yourself unavailable so you can focus. 

So this two hours a week, I want you to have a game plan and I want you to think about the audiences that are most important to you and I want you to have activities that you’re doing on a regular basis to just make sure that you are in front of those audiences. 

So again, could be building a list on clay.com and doing an email sequence. It could be. So those are people who don’t even know who you are. Right. 

It could be talking to people on LinkedIn that you have a connection with that perhaps you have not invested as much time in. It could be really working your Sweet Spot 25 list, which comes out of the sell with authority book, which is these are the ideal clients that you’d kill to have, right? 

Or it could be talking to current clients. But two hours a week focused on growing your business, right? Different than the deep work. This is just about new business. 

So that’s resolution number two. 

Okay, I’m gonna tell you about resolution number three in a minute, but first let’s take a quick break. And by the way, on the break, you might wanna actually pull up your calendar and start thinking about where you could schedule that half day, carve out time, that deep thinking work time, and how you could best do your two hours a week. 

Again, I don’t care if it’s 30 minutes a day, I don’t care if it’S a two hour block. But while we take a quick break, pull up your calendar, take a look, but make sure you come back. 

All right, I’ll be right back. 

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Hey everybody. Just want to remind you before we get back to the show that we have a very engaged Facebook group. It’s a private group just for podcast listeners and agency owners that are in the AMI community. And to find it, if you’re not a member, head over to facebook.comgroupsbabaPodcast. so again, facebook.comgroupsbab podcast. All you have to do is answer a few questions to make sure that you are an actual agency owner or leader and we will let you right in. And you can join over 1700 other agency owners and leaders. And I’m telling you, there’s probably 10 or 15 conversations that are started every day that are going to be of value to you. So come join us.  

All right, we are back and this is my New Year’s Resolution solo cast. And so we’ve Talked about the first two, which is carving out four to eight hours a week for deep work and making yourself absolutely unavailable. And I’m talking phone flipped over. I’m talking alerts turned off. I’m talking email shut down, Slack shut down what however people ping you or get in, get in your face. All of that shut off for 48 hours a week and then two hours a week dedicated to new business. 

And again, you can do that however you. Those are the first two. 

The third resolution is I want you again, a lot of calendar work. I want you to pull up the calendar and I want you to schedule all 12 monthly, all agency updates. So you might call them state of the agency meetings, you might call them all agency huddles. I don’t, I don’t really care what you call them. It’s typically a 90 minute or so meeting where you bring everyone together. 

But I want you to do two things. Number one, I want you to schedule them right now on the calendar so that everyone has them on their calendar and they can protect them. And you have them on your calendar and you can protect them. 

And then I want you to bake in this agenda. So put it right in the notes of the calendar. Here’s what we’re going to cover in every meeting. 

New business activity. I want you to hold yourself accountable that you, the agency owner, are going to report to the team what you’re doing to grow the business. You know, one of the best things about being an agency owner is you’re accountable to no one. But one of the hardest things about being an agency owner is you’re accountable to no one. 

You have to create your own accountability as an agency owner. And so I want you to stand up in front of, literally or figuratively, I want you to stand up in front of your team and tell them what you’re doing for new business activity. 

That’ll be a whole lot easier and you’ll feel a whole lot better about it if you did resolution number one. And number two, which is I’ve carved out deep work time and I’ve allotted two hours a week minimum to focus on new business. 

Now, you know, I think you should be spending 50% of your time a new business. So I’m cutting you a lot of slack by saying only a couple hours. But number one on that agenda is new business activity. 

Number two is client wins. Celebrating something we did that moved the needle for a client. One of the things that we know 2026 is going to continue to put pressure on us as agencies is clients Want to know what they got for their money? I gave you a dollar. What did I get back? 

I get. Did I get a lead? Did I get a sale? Did I get an inquiry? Did I get, uh, did I keep a client? Did I retain a client that I was at risk of losing? Whatever it is. 

So, new business activity, number one, client win. Number two, number three, is work to be proud of. 

In a lot of agencies, everybody doesn’t see the work we do, and it doesn’t have to be creative in the traditional sense, Although that’s always fun to show. It might be a dashboard that we built for a client, or it might be something else that we’ve done that we should be really proud of and something that everyone in the agency should be able to tell the story about. 

So for new business win, that’s you presenting for client wins, that might be an account person presenting a client win. For work to be proud of, it would be whoever did that work. 

So it might be a digital producer, it might be a art director, it might be an account person, whoever it is, but is presenting work to be proud of. 

The fourth thing I want you to cover every month is values recognition. I want you to review the mission of the agency, why we exist, why we’re different than everybody else, and our core values. 

And then I want you to celebrate someone who lived out a core value. So for some of you, you have peer recognition programs and you’re awarding the employee of the month kind of a thing. For others, maybe you’re not doing something like that, but at some level, I want you to recognize a team member for living, to make, for making choices, and for living out a core value that matters to your agency. 

Okay. Why? Because those need to be front and center. They need to be something that we’re constantly thinking about and that, you know, core values are real and they’re actually embedded in the agency when people use them to make decisions. 

So find a decision that someone made based on a core value. Right? So that’s. That’s number four. 

Number five is AI Win of the month. Maybe it’s a new tool, maybe it’s a way, maybe it’s a new automation that’s helping you be more efficient inside the agency. 

Every agency on the planet has got to be wrapping their arms around AI and the best way for you to emphasize the importance of the fact that AI is going to change the way your agency does work is to celebrate it every single month. 

So what is the win of the month again? It could be a new tool. It could be something we did for a client. It could be something we did internally. It could be something that saved us four hours a month or 40 hours a month. It could be something that helped us do a deeper dive. Or we think that our RFP response was so much better because we used, you know, Waldo or whatever it is. 

But every month in your all monthly all agency updates an AI win of the month and then Q and A. 

So in the Q and A, what I want you to do is I want you to open up the floor and let people ask you questions. I also think that for most of you, having a way for people to submit questions in advance is a really good idea. 

So you can either have them submit them anonymously, you could have them submit email you and say, I’d love for you to address this in the all Agency update, but you need to have an open dialogue. 

One of the things that’s going to be critical for you in 2026 is that you keep the best employees that you have. And the more open the dialogue, the more open the communication, the more comfortable they feel asking hard questions and the better you handle those questions. 

And by the way, it’s not about answering them perfectly. It’s about answering them honestly and with transparency. 

I’m working with a lot of agencies right now in our coaching work around really changing the way they communicate with their team members and really being more honest and transparent. 

A lot of you have been running your agencies out of fear. I don’t want them to know that because they’ll leave. I don’t want them to know that because they’ll worry. I don’t want them to know that. Fill in the blank. 

Well, the reality is, when you don’t tell them the truth, they make up their own truth. And I promise you, their own truth is way worse than your truth. 

And so now they feel like they’re unplugged and not trusted enough to be treated like a grownup, number one. Number two, they’re making up a horror story in their head around what’s going on inside the agency. 

So always closing with Q and A. 

And then the very last thing in that meeting should be, here’s what’s coming up. So what’s coming up in the next month, the next quarter, things to get excited about, decisions to be made. 

Maybe it’s an internal thing, like we’re loading up a new project management software, whatever it is, like just some updates. 

So that’s the agenda I want you to follow. And I want you to actually put that agenda in the calendar notes so people know they can count on that agenda every single month. 

So that’s number. That’s your resolution. Number three is to schedule those meetings to follow that agenda. 

All right. Resolution number four is speaking of AI, wrapping your arms around AI. 

So some of you are much further down the path than others. No surprise. But others of you don’t even have the basic blocking and tackling done. 

And what I mean by the basic blocking and tackling is that you have policies about how we use AI. Both you have an internal policy, like, here are the tools we use, here’s when we use them, here’s how we use them, here are the external policies. 

So this is what we’re going to say to clients. Hey, this is our belief about AI and where it should be used, how it should be used. Here’s how we are transparent about it. Here’s how we talk to you about. Here’s how we’re going to inform you of when we’ve used AI on your projects. 

That needs to be for sure in your master service agreement or, or your project authorizations or your contracts, whatever language you need to have all of that covered. 

Our good friend Sharon Torick, as you know, is a attorney that we reference often. She has a whole AI toolkit that you can customize for your agency. So we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. 

So if you’re like, I don’t even know what kind of language I need to have in my MSA or whatever it is, Sharon’s got a kit that you can customize that is really, really thorough and of course, done with brilliance, because Sharon did it. 

So we’ll include that. 

But you also need to be talking about how are we going to learn more about AI, how are we going to experiment with AI? What parts of our business are we going to start applying AI to? 

So, you know, in our AI peer group, where they’re focused on automations that make internal processes and systems more efficient. 

So even if you’re just doing that, even if you’re not using it for client work or new business or whatever, you’ve got to have a policy about how you’re using AI and how you’re communicating that to your team members, to your clients and your prospects. 

So wherever you are in that spectrum, if you’ve already got the task force and you’re using AI every day and everybody’s using it, then make sure that you’re really buttoned up in terms of how you’re disclosing that legally and that you have client approval to do the things that you want to do. 

And if you are further, if you’re not so far down the path, then I just gave you the basics of what you’ve got to get done. 

And by the way, that’s not a do it in the fourth quarter. That’s a do it in the first quarter. 

Agencies that are not embracing AI, agencies that aren’t talking about AI, agencies that are not leading the way with AI are going to fall behind, if they’re not already behind. 

The research that we did, the agency edge research that we did in 2025, made it very clear how clients feel about us and us having an expertise in AI. 

So we’ll leave a link to that executive summary also in the show notes. 

But I’m telling you, you have got to have a policy around AI and you’ve got to have transparency around your policies around AI and you got to have a plan. 

You’ve got to figure out how AI can make your agency better, how AI can make your agency dive deeper, how AI can change the way you move forward with clients and internal projects. 

It is not optional. 

Agencies that fall too far behind on the AI path are really going to struggle to catch up. 

You can read all the doomsday reports about how agencies are going to go away. I do not think that’s true, but I do think some agencies are going to go away. 

I think agencies that have their head in the sand and are not figuring out how to leverage AI and how they need to. 

What is the human element that we bring to the party that AI cannot replace? And how do you elevate that? 

Which, by the way, should be part of your AI policy too, if you haven’t figured that out, I do think you’re gonna fall behind, and I do think you’re gonna become less relevant. 

And I do think in a couple years you’ll be absolutely irrelevant if you’re not out of business. 

So this is not something to ignore. This is not something to be afraid of. This is something to run to and be excited about and to think about how you can bring it to life inside your agency to benefit your business and to benefit your client’s business. 

All right, the last resolution is I want you to deepen the connections that you have with your team. 

So if you’re in a super large agency, this might be just your leadership team. If you’re in a smaller agency, it might be with the entire team. 

But I want you to deepen the connections that you have with your team so that starts with, for sure, making sure that everyone has traditional one on one meetings. 

And we did a podcast on that. We’ve got a form that you can use on that. We’ll include both of those in the show notes. 

Everyone should get a one on one with their supervisor every other week. 

And inside that one on one, they should be setting quarterly growth goals, and they should own that meeting. 

The employee owns that meeting, and it is their meeting to connect with their supervisor and let them know what’s going on in their world. 

So that’s number one. 

And that may not involve you at all, depending on the size of your agency, but your direct reports should have a one on one, too. 

This is not something just for the rank and file. This is something for every agency employee. 

So if you are the, you know, chairman of the board, if you are the CEO of your agency, if you’re the president of your agency, your CEO should still have a one on one with you. 

Your CFO should still have a one on one with you. 

And so that’s really critical is that those are scheduled and again, may or may not involve you, depending on the size of your agency. 

But where I want you to develop a deeper connection with your team is in personally, I want you to do this. 

So agency owners do this in a variety of ways. 

I talked to you in a solo cast about what I used to do called dinners with Drew. 

When I was active in the agency, I would have dinner once, once or twice a month with a different team member. 

They got to pick the rest. It was not. It was optional. They didn’t have to do it. 

They got to pick the restaurant. They got to dictate the conversation. 

And some people came with a laundry list of things they wanted to talk about that were work related, and other people wanted to talk about baseball or being a dad or whatever it may be. 

But we just connected as human beings and had dinner together, which I loved back when we were all in the same office in the same city. 

So it might be that you share a meal together and it could be coffee. 

It could be that you. I have. I have one agency owner that does coffee with different team members every. Every week. 

And so everybody gets coffee with her, you know, two or three times a year. 

It could be if you’re really remote, it could be that you take walks together. 

And what I mean by that is you get on the phone and you walk wherever you live, and they walk wherever they live, but for 20 minutes, you take a walk together and you just talk about what’s going on in each other’s lives. 

This is not a substitute for a one on one meeting. 

This is a human to human connection, not a boss to an employee connection. 

This is talking about whatever they want to talk about. 

This is about getting to know them better. It’s about letting them get to know you better. 

Talking about what you did over the holidays or what matters to you. 

But I want you to create deeper connections with, with your team. 

And so again, if you’re an a hundred person agency, you’re not going to be able to do this with everybody. 

But figure out the 20 people or so that you could do this with. 

If you are in a smaller shop, I’d say 20 people or less, then you absolutely can do this with everyone. 

Maybe they only get it once a year, maybe they get it twice a year, maybe they get that time with you twice a year. 

But being really intentional about that human connection, about understanding what’s going on in their world, about knowing what’s going on with their kids or their spouse or their parents or, you know, their dream vacation or what they’re saving money for. 

Like just understanding who they are as human beings. 

And caring about that is really, really critical. 

And one of the things that we hear over and over and over again from agency employees is I want to know that the agency owner and my boss sees me as a complete human being, understands that I’m not just an account director or I’m not just a copywriter, but I’m also a mom or a dad or a sister or a daughter. 

And I’ve got stuff. 

I’m getting my mba, I’m taking a pottery class. 

I’m really struggling because my dad has dementia. 

Whatever it is, you understanding who they are as a whole person is very meaningful to them and should be very meaningful to you too. 

Makes us better bosses, it makes us better leaders, it also makes us better human beings. 

And so that time spent is going to be really, really valuable. 

And you talk about the importance of retaining employees, making employees feel valued and seen. This is how we do that. 

Do it with being authentic. Do it in your own genuine way. 

So some of you are super extroverted, some of you are introverted. 

Find a way to do it that is comfortable for you, but in a way that is meaningful to them. 

So the five resolutions for agency owners going into 2026, number one, carve out two half days of uninterrupted time to do deep work. 

Start with 1/2 day. It’s gotta be in the morning and by end of March, by The end of the first quarter, I really would like you to have two half days carved out that you are unavailable to anyone but yourself to do the deep work that you cannot get to on your to do list. 

Number two, carve out at least two hours a week to spend on new business like our good friends who are inside, inside the sales Momentum Learning Lab are doing. 

It could be half an hour a day, could be two hours on Monday morning. 

Whatever works for you and have a plan of how you’re going to use that time to actively cultivate new business opportunities to make sure your pipeline is fat and full. 

Fat and full is what we’re going for. 

Number three, schedule those all monthly, all agency meetings and follow the agenda that I gave you. 

Get that on the calendar for all year long. 

Number four, have an AI plan and policies and where, whatever you’re at, accelerate where you’re at. 

You need to get there faster, deeper, further in 2026 or you’re going to be left behind. 

And number five, create connections with your team members, meaningful human to human connections. 

If you do those five things, I believe 2026 can be a great year for you and for your agency. 

Okay. 

All right. I would love to hear how you’re implementing these things. 

I would love for you to send me a note and tell me what you’re doing, what’s working. 

I really do love to hear from you. 

Will I get back to you within 10 hours? Maybe not, but I promise I will get back to you. 

I really do want to hear from you how you’re doing this. 

What. What’s working? 

You know, that’s why we’re here. We’re here to support you and to help you. 

That’s the work that we love to do. 

So do not hesitate to do that. 

Couple other reminders. 

Number one, go leave a rating and review so you like Ashley can win a free seat to the summit or to one of our workshops. 

Number two, go thank our friends at White Label. 

Number three, please know that as I go into 2026 and we are know on episode, I don’t know, 5:50 or 5:60, I, I really do love these conversations and I am super grateful that you carve out the time to hang out with me every week. 

I know how busy you are and so please do not think that I take for granted that you listen every week and that you at least apply some of my recommendations. 

I know you probably don’t do them all, but I appreciate that you apply some of them. 

I am really grateful for you. 

I’m grateful that you’re a part of the AMI community. 

I’m grateful that you show up at the summit. 

I’m grateful that you show up in the Facebook group. 

I’m grateful that how you help each other. 

I’m grateful how you connect with Danyel. 

And I super grateful for all of you. 

And I love doing this with you. 

I love hanging out with you. 

So let’s. Let’s enter 2026 together, hand in hand, and let’s take this thing by storm. 

Okay. 

All right. See you next week. 

Danyel McLellan [00:42:33]: 

Come back next week for another episode designed to help you build a stronger, more stable and sustainable agency. Check out our workshops, coaching and consulting packages and other professional development opportunities at agencymanagementinstitute.com.