Packing five pounds of work into a one pound day with Terry Ogburn

Speaker 1:

If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too? Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build a Better Agency Podcast presented by HubSpot. We’ll show you how to build an agency that can scale and grow with better clients, invested employees, and best of all more money to the bottom line. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultants. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Build a Better Agency. Drew McLellan here, ready to help you expand your business, grow your business, tweak your business, I know that odds are there. A lot of good things happening in your agency but there’s always room for a little bit of improvement. And that’s where we’re going to focus our time today. Let me tell you a little bit about our guest and what we’re going to be talking about. So Terry Ogburn is the owner and lead business coach of Ogburn’s Business Solutions. So, Terry has a long history of business ownership. Back in 1979, he dropped $118.42 to launch his air conditioning service business. And 10 years later, he had built it into a big business, sold it, then went into the travel industry for many years and help several businesses grow themselves as a director of operations and director of training and development.

In ’05, Terry decided to go back to sort of his roots and start serving entrepreneurs and business owners by helping them launch and grow their businesses. And so since ’05 he’s been coaching and leading businesses to greater success. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Terry, welcome to the podcast.

Terry Ogburn:

Thanks, Drew. And thanks for having me on your podcast. I’m looking forward to this.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, me too. So when you engage with a client, I know that my audience is probably a little more specialized than you. I’m sure you work with businesses of all kind. But what do you find are some common ailments that are present when you first engage with a new client? What do business owners struggle with universally, do you think?

Terry Ogburn:

The answer to that would be a, it’s like they are building their businesses from the ground up, which they do. And what happens is when you do that you grow to a level to where you actually form a glass ceiling between where you want to be and where you are. And we get into this adolescence state of business where we think we know it all. And at this point, is when they start to stagnate and their sales become rocky, they go up and down. Kind of like a hamster on the hamster wheel. And the idea would be for them to build their business from the top down to take a step back, and take the employees that they have and team members and empower them to get their jobs done instead of micromanaging. Use a new form out there, which is empowering.

Drew McLellan:

So in theory, you would think that we would see that in our own businesses, that we would see that in some cases we are or our old process. I find that in many cases as an agency grows, a lot of times their system and process doesn’t grow with the business. And so they’re sort of wearing toddler pants but they’re in the fifth grade.

Terry Ogburn:

Correct.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Terry Ogburn:

And just like you said, the infrastructure of business, some people when I talk to them, “Hello, I’ve only got three people, I don’t really need an organizational chart.” Or, “I really don’t need job descriptions.” Or, “I don’t need a plan of action on this. I’m too small.” And my other favorite word is, “Terry, you don’t understand.” And I probably don’t understand the technical side of their work. But I certainly understand the infrastructure side that you must have the systems and processes in place, even if it’s only you know three or four people working.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and I think the other part of that is when you’ve got a system or a process in place, it also has to keep growing up with you as your business changes, evolves and grows. And I think a lot of agencies will have sort of the most rudimentary of systems, but that was something they put into place five years ago and everything… And it’s not that the system hasn’t changed. It’s just hasn’t been documented and shared with everyone. So it’s this tribal knowledge that lives in everybody’s brain and the owners believe that everyone are doing it the same way. But in reality, everyone is doing it the way they interpret the tribal knowledge.

Terry Ogburn:

Exactly. And we see this many times. You used to be, Drew we were in a business world that knowledge was power. And we got hooked up on that. And so the knowledge is up there. And what you describe to somebody just doing the same thing as telling a joke, and through 10 people that joke is going to be different when it gets back to you. How you disseminate this information downward, should be in training manuals or it should be in some kind of documentation that everybody says the same thing and performs in the same way.

Drew McLellan:

So do you believe that there is a single process or system inside a business that is in the hierarchy of importance more important than the others?

Terry Ogburn:

I do. I think that we should have eight… And my program is also [inaudible 00:05:48] that. There’s eight steps to business development, and it can be applied to any business that’s out there. First, you have us have a primary aim, you have to have your goals. And I like to do 90 day goals because of the way the markets and things change so rapidly, it’s hard for us to stay on focus for a year because of the technology that’s around us. We also need, including this primary aim we need to have a set of core values and a purpose that surround our goals. These are things we eat, live and breathe every day so that we form a consistency with throughout our business. Then we need principles to live by, the business should be founded on principles. Two that like, one time in the air conditioning business one of my dispatchers was arguing with a customer. They argued for like 45 minutes, and then she gave the store away so to speak. And I said, “Well make up your mind either stand on a principle or not. But don’t waver back and forth.”

Then we have to have an organizational strategy. How are we going to organize our business? Who reports to who and who does what? And so forth. And then we have to have a people business. How are we going to treat the people that work for us? You have a management plan on how we’re going to manage the business. Our systems, what systems are we going to need to put in place to make these happen? What is our marketing strategy, how we’re going to go to market? There’s several ways to go through. Social media, direct marketing. What would we be like, Drew if we never embraced social media back in the early 2000s? Right? And then we have to have a service strategy, as well. And this is where I think most businesses start to drop off is, they don’t understand the importance of the customer. And that the customer is the one who’s paying our bills. Even if I was designing an organizational chart, I put the customer at the top, and the frontline the people who are actually dealing with the customers, they should be the ones who are empowered to solve the problems.

We had this same situation in Radio Shack days. We didn’t give enough leeway to the managers. And they were causing a lot of the district manager to get involved in a little petty, little things that could have been handled at a much lower level and saved us a lot of money.

Drew McLellan:

So do you believe that a business has to develop those eight sort of pillars, if you will, in that order? And/or do they do it based on the most urgent needs? So when you work with a client do you walk them through? “Okay. First, let’s set the goals, then let’s have our core values? Or is there a right or wrong way to do this, I guess is what I’m asking you?

Terry Ogburn:

Well, I think the course that works for me, and I guarantee my work. So I’m probably one of the only people that you’ll ever have on your show that actually guarantees my services. And it’s because I have developed a recipe. And then you Know, Drew if you follow the recipe, the recipe produces the same cake or a recipe that you’ve set out to do. So yeah, I do believe it goes in those eight steps. But I do believe that customer service is paramount. So even though it’s last on the list of things to do, it’s first in our hearts.

Drew McLellan:

So I’m guessing that a lot of the agencies owners that are listening are like, “Okay. We got the customer service thing down. In fact, we give away the farm on a regular basis. That’s not my issue.” So when you think about… To me, where I think a lot of agencies get caught up is in the systems part. So, is there a right or wrong way to develop a system for a small business do you believe? Is there a, as you called it a recipe or a process inside the idea of, I have to develop systems? And are there universal systems that everyone has to have?

Terry Ogburn:

Well, think of it this way. When you’re looking at your business, well take Drew’s agency. Okay? Now when you have accounts payable, you have accounts receivable. Is that fair?

Drew McLellan:

Yep.

Terry Ogburn:

Okay. So what I teach is that you go out online and you get a job description for each of those positions. You pick the things out, reword them the way you want them to be reworded but those are all tasks that have to get done. That’s fair to say, right?

Drew McLellan:

Yep.

Terry Ogburn:

Okay. Same thing, when you’re looking for marketing. There you can go out and do job search for job descriptions and any person you need. Whether that person is you wearing multiple hats, or it’s positions that you want to feel. The way I teach it is that you’re going to need a bookkeeper in the future anyway, so might as well go ahead and develop their job description. So you’ve got a bookkeeper actually balances the books between the receivables and the payables. So you have customer service, you have all these different positions. Like in my company, it takes 15 of us to run my company. Now there’s only three virtual assistants and myself, and one other coach. So, I don’t need 15 people I just need 15 organized systems or job descriptions that will get my work done each and every week.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. That’s an interesting point that a job description doesn’t necessarily equate to a full time equivalent or even an employee.

Terry Ogburn:

Exactly.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Terry Ogburn:

Some of the people I work with, they will have two and three job descriptions based out with tasks and then we’ll see how long it takes to get those tasks and we make sure that each team member has got 40 hours worth of work.

Drew McLellan:

Right. Right. So when you are working with a business owner, and I love the, “Terry, you don’t understand.” Because I do think no matter who the business owner is, they want to talk to somebody who understands their business. So I get that. But what are the barriers? Because what you’re talking about… So everyone listening is going, “Yep, absolutely. Yes, of course, we should have that. Yes. Aha.” But they don’t. So what gets in the way and how do they get over whatever that hurdle is?

Terry Ogburn:

Good. First of all, we have to remove the ego. Okay? Ego is fear based. As most people should know that. What we want to evolve to is result based. I had a client, a few years back she said, “Okay. I got my website up. I got everything is going now, I’m going to order my business card, should I put CEO or president on my business card?” I said, “You put neither.” I said, because you don’t… If you run into a CEO or a president and they start asking you those types of questions, what’s going to happen is you’re not going to be able to answer them. So just don’t put anything on your card. Vaden, your name is Vaden. It’s Vaden. Inc, I think they’ll get it. So let’s remove that little ego thing. The other thing is, for those of people out there that have children, when you get your first baby and you’re cuddling it and your mom comes into the room, and she’s raised five kids and she wants to take it and you want to hand it to her and there’s this little bubble.

And that little bubble causes your heart to fall into your stomach. And this is, the mom gets it and everything’s okay. The point is that, it’s when they’re handing their baby off, whether to me or to somebody who can help them, we go through this little bubble stage that says, “Oh well, I’m not sure I want to do that.” But about the third kid, what are you doing? It’s that you’re tossing it at the mom.

Drew McLellan:

Right. Right.

Terry Ogburn:

You’re not even caring about it. Yeah. So once you get break this, I need to hold on to the baby concept and empower. So, like for example, there are many corporations out there today that they’re not the owners of the corporation, there’s not the CEO of the corporation. Find it what it is you do best, whatever that is. If it’s marketing, then dive right into the marketing and then hire the other people to do your work for you. I have, I’m looking right now this week I will be looking at hiring a CEO for my company. Because I’m not the CEO, I’m a good coach. I need to be in a pivot point in my business and that pivot point is making sure that the material that I want delivered is delivered correctly. I can hire somebody else to take the direction of the company.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I just think you just made a whole bunch of listeners very uncomfortable. The idea of letting someone else run their company. It’s one of those things I think a lot of business owners want to have their cake and eat it too. They love… So a lot of the old E-Myth model right? So you were a great baker and you love baking the cakes, but now you own a bakery so you can’t really spend time baking the cake, because you need to run the business of the bakery. So, what I’m hearing you say is sort of in counter to E-Myth teaching, which is go ahead and bake the cake, hire someone else to run the bakery. Is that what you’re saying?

Terry Ogburn:

In part, I believe in the E-myth. And the E-myth is one of the books that I use to build my business and help businesses grow. What I just want to add to that is that if you’re the best baker, if you’re the one that can develop those recipes and get that product sold… I’ll give you a quick story, Drew. When I was first in the air conditioning business, there was a guy who was a mentor to me, his name was Dick [Petini 00:15:59]. And Dick was a four color printer. So I’d go by and hang out with him and get lessons learned and all the stuff from him. And every time I’d go there by there, before it’d be after four or five o’clock in the afternoon. And he’d be back at the cutter, cutting the projects and cutting the deals and you know cutting the paper and stuff. And asked him one day, I said because I’d met him in networking meetings. I said,” Dick why don’t you change into your workflows here and go to work?” And he goes, “As soon as I get back from the office.” He said, “I got my front end is handled by my sales team. My wife handles the books. I got a great front gal and I sit back here and I cut and I make sure the quality of my product goes out that door and delivered is perfect.”

He says, “You pick a pivot spot in your business where you’re good at, where you can watch the quality control of your business. And then you hire good people to do the other things that you don’t want to do.”

Drew McLellan:

See, that’s interesting because I will tell you that for me, and the advice that I give agency owners that’s counterintuitive to them but it’s pretty tough for an agency owner to scale their business, if they are baking the cakes. Because the truth of the matter is, most of them have no one on their staff who’s as good as baking a cake, but it doesn’t mean they don’t have people who are good at baking cakes. But there’s no one who’s going to run or mind their business the way they need too. No one’s going to mentor their people. So one of the challenges for agency owners is, so I guess I’m respectfully disagreeing.

Terry Ogburn:

Okay, that’s fine.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, right. But for agency owners, if they don’t get out of the day to day, their business is stuck at about eight or 10 people and they can’t grow beyond it.

Terry Ogburn:

Well, that and we’re just debating that a little bit with you. Again, that’s the micromanaging side of it. If any person, wouldn’t matter to me what business that you’re doing. If you can get out of the the micromanaging and get into the empowering, and the empowering means that I’m going to set you off on a mission. Here’s your managed by objectives. Okay. Here’s the objectives that I need. Here’s the course that we need to take. Now you explain to me how long it’s going to take you, can you do it, what resources do you need to get this to subjective turn? And then I’ll check with you halfway through the project or set up three checkpoints along the way. This is working backwards. And this is again, what the E-Myth teaches us is that we have to learn to work backwards. Work with the end in mind, that’s [inaudible 00:18:41] teaches the same thing. If you build from the bottom up, I’m not saying you won’t build a great business because there are people out there who’ve built. I was one of those people that built my business from the ground up.

However, I’d learned so much that now I fully understand that it’s far easier to build your business from the top down than it is to build it from the bottom up. In fact, you have a 90% success ratio, when you build your business from the top down. And then you do versus a 20% chance of being able to grow your business or maintain a business for longer than three years by building it from the ground up.

Drew McLellan:

So it kind of sounds like maybe we don’t disagree.

Terry Ogburn:

Okay.

Drew McLellan:

Right. Because-

Terry Ogburn:

I hope we don’t.

Drew McLellan:

Well, I’m okay if we do i think that makes the conversation valuable in its own right. But it doesn’t sound like you’re saying you should be baking cakes every day. What you’re saying is find other good bakers and teach them how to bake the cake as well as you do.

Terry Ogburn:

Again that and, if you don’t have a… I run into entrepreneurs all the time. “So I’m an entrepreneur.” But most of them aren’t. I run into CEOs all the time that say, “I’m a CEO.” But then when I ask them what a CEOs responsibility is, they usually give me the director of operations or the chief operating officers job description. See, a CEO of a company is only responsible for two things. First is the vision of the company. And some people are not visionaries. They just don’t have the wherewithal to become a visionary to be able to see. For when we were in the travel industry, John Curran, the CEO and visionary of our company saw that the decline in travel was going to happen because of the internet. He was able to visualize that, he was able to escalate our going public, from a five year goal to a two and a half year goal.

And we were able to go public before the travel industry collapse. We had invested at that time, about two and a half million, and we accelerated our growth to where we needed the total of five billion. And then we put our IPO out, and we got 13 million. But if he hadn’t seen that the decline in the travel industry, we would have been stuck with a $5 million loser.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Well, when I’m listening to you, I think one of the realities from a lot of agency owners is, I think most agency owners did not really choose entrepreneurism. I think most agency owners, quite honestly are accidental business owners. So what happens in the agency world is somebody is working for an agency. And this is not true of all of them, but probably 90%. Someone’s working in an agency, they either get downsized or they get hacked off at their boss or whatever. Or they decide, as I did back in the day, 25 years ago. I looked at my boss and I thought, “Well, if he can do it, I can do it.” So I left and then all of a sudden I had to learn how hard it was to run a business. But I’m not sure that they would have chosen entrepreneurialism. It just sort of all of a sudden, they were freelancing or consulting. And then they had a couple employees, and now they have five or 10. And all of a sudden they look around and they go, “Oh, crap, I own a business.” And now they’re trying to figure that out. So I want to dig into the idea of how you help someone identify the right role for themselves. But first, let’s take a quick break. And then we’ll dig right into that.

One of my favorite parts of AMI are our live workshops. I love to teach, I love to spend two days immersed in a topic with either agency leaders, agency owners, or at AE’s in our AE Bootcamps. But most of all, I love sharing what I’ve learned from other agencies, from 30 years in the business and all the best practices that we teach. If you have some interest in those workshops, they range from everything. From money matters, which is all about your financial health of your agency to best management practices of agency owners, to new business, to AE Bootcamps and a plethora of other topics. Go check out the list and the schedule at agencymanagementinstitute.com/livetraining. Okay, let’s get back to the show.

All right, we are back. Thanks for sticking with us. I am here with Terry Ogburn, from Ogburn Business Solutions. And we were talking before the break about how everyone who owns a business has sort of a right place for them to spend their time. So Terry, when you’re working with a client, and they aren’t sure how to spend their day, how do you help them dissect that and figure out where their sort of greatest strength and purpose is?

Terry Ogburn:

Well, it’s done first of all, through a series of questionnaires that I go through in the beginning, the onboarding process. Because I have to understand the technical side of any work in order to lay out a strategy that’s going to work for them. But that’s how I started finding out what their personality is, we go through a personality evaluation. And if I find out that their personality happens to be more controlling, then we move them into roles or suggest roles to them that come from the controlling aspect. If they are more expressive, than maybe they should be more in marketing and sales. There are only four personality types and once we figure out what their strong suit is, then we move them towards the things that in their business that represent their personality. Like an analytical person would probably be far better being more of the chief financial officer, the chief operations. Because of the detail that it takes to get those things working. Expressive is sales. As you don’t fusely find business owners that are more amiable, unless you get into-

Drew McLellan:

I’m sorry, it just makes me laugh to think business owners are not amiable. But, I understand what you’re saying in terms of their personality typing.

Terry Ogburn:

We all have-

Drew McLellan:

So all of you out there listening, you’re nice people that’s not what you’re saying. Yeah.

Terry Ogburn:

Yes, yes. No, right. Exactly. It’s just it’s most of the business owners probably don’t have a lot of sugar to give with their messages.

Drew McLellan:

Perhaps, right?

Terry Ogburn:

And the other thing that I wanted to touch on too with this is just like you describe before the break, that most of your agency owners are probably technicians that really just created a job for themselves. And now they’re finding themselves where they want to grow or they want to get bigger or they want to do things different. And that’s where I come in or where people like me that are out there. That’s where we can come in and help him break through that barrier. In fact, my purpose is bridge the gap between dreams and reality. Once I understand what your dreams are, then I can create a bridge by working from both sides. From the top down and from the bottom up, so we can get those that bridge to merge somewhere in the halfway point.

Drew McLellan:

So most agency owners are not going to fall in the super analytical side. There are certainly some, but most of them came up through the business. And so either they’re more strategic thinkers, they came up on the account service side or they’re creatives they came up either writing or art direction, that sort of thing. So one of the challenges for many of them is, they don’t love looking at the numbers and the metrics and all of that. So when you have a business owner that doesn’t love that. So first of all, obviously they’re going to hire a good accountant or CFO or whatever that may be. But it’s their business and they have to stay engaged. So how do you help them stay connected to the numbers when numbers aren’t really their stick?

Terry Ogburn:

The system is called a performer. And a performer is not past accounting, it’s future accounting. This is easy… It’s easy numbers, it’s not like diving deep into the analytical side of the numbers. This is just forecasting your future income. You take your different income streams, and you can forecast that based on your pie and your demographics. Then you put in your cost of goods sold, your variable costs. And then you put in your expenses, and then you… Whatever you have left you add in your amount for your taxes, and then you should be keep 10% of what you make. See, it’s not about how much you make that is important is how much you keep. And most business owners that I’ve come in contact with, they are not taking the bottom line as the 10% that they need after taxes. A lot of times they’ll be struggling to pay their taxes, because they haven’t paid that.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Terry Ogburn:

So the way you teach that is it’s a very simple concept. It’s based on 100% is revenue, 30% should be your cost of goods sold, leaving you 70% to run your business on. And then you pay your expenses, then you have a 10% net after taxes. And we need to work those numbers out so they come into that formula. Now that doesn’t mean every business has a 30% cost of goods sold. When I was in the air conditioning business I had a 60% cost of sale. Okay. So-

Drew McLellan:

But even in the agency space, that’s going to vary dramatically. So if I’m an agency that buys a lot of media, I’m going to have a much higher cost of goods sold than if I’m a PR shop where I’m going to have a minuscule cost of goods sold. So in our world, the agency metric is kind of what you describe. So gross billings is what it is. Minus cost of goods and then we look at what’s left and we call it adjusted gross income or AGI. And the metric we shoot for is 55% gets spent… 55% of your AGI gets spent on your people, 25% gets spent on overhead and 20% drops to the bottom line before taxes. And so again, it’s probably right around that 10%. In fact, in the Money Matters Workshop that we teach every December, one of the things that I talk about is that whole idea of Profit First. Which sounds kind of like what you’re talking about. Have you read that book?

Terry Ogburn:

No, not yet but I will now.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, it’s a great book. But it talks about taking the profit out first, and putting it away somewhere different. Because what happens is exactly what you’re talking about, is many business owners get to the end of the week, the month, a quarter of the year, and they’ve spent down to the point that they can’t afford their taxes, let alone the proper compensation for themselves for the risk of owning the business.

Terry Ogburn:

Exactly.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Terry Ogburn:

And remember that when you’re dealing with QuickBooks, and you’re dealing with accountants and CPAs. You’re giving them their information, your information and then they’re deciphering that and giving it back to you. And that can be sometimes 8, 10, 12, 15 days, and you won’t even realize that you’ve been losing money. And you’re already halfway into the next month doing the same thing over and over again. And you’re just digging the hole, right? So I don’t, unlike the performer concept, because you can keep up with that weekly. So I can know on a weekly basis where I stand and if I’m on target and if I’m missing a piece, if one of my income streams drops down then I can focus, I can shift my marketing to that segment if it’s an important segment. But you have to realign because the bottom line is, we have to continue to get that revenue in the front door.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, But I am a firm believer as you are in what you said earlier which is, while it is important to pay attention to what you make it is much more important to pay attention to what you keep. Many business owners in my world, agency owners are only focused on the gross billings and they’ve got a target goal every month but there’s a lot of fat and waste that, or inefficiency that happens throughout the month which leaves them very little to actually keep.

Terry Ogburn:

Exactly. And another point that I was going to make there as well is, are the people in your world and in business. Are they adding in and getting the customer to pay for their taxes? Or pay for their… One of the first things I learned about, when the air conditioning was there was a charge. There was like a 3% charge for American Express. Well, I had to add 3% to all of my revenue prices, my job prices, because for fear that everybody was going to pay with American Express. All of that cost analyzed then is passed on to the consumer. I mean, I wasn’t the lowest priced air conditioning company by no means. I was fact the one of the highest price air conditioning companies. But I added value by figuring out what my… what I want to say here is my USP. My USP turned out to be my guarantee.

And that’s again, why I’ve put a guarantee on my work because if that is unheard of, of anybody in my world guaranteeing their work. People told me early on 11 and a half years ago, “Oh Terry, you’ll be out of business. That you’ll never be able to survive that.”

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. It is about figuring out how you can look different, which is I think a challenge for all businesses, agencies too. As I’m listening to you, I’m thinking about hidden costs. And so you’re talking about the American Express fee. I think one of the things that we do in this workshop is, we have everybody start digging through all of their cost of goods, and how many of them whether there are subscriptions. So for example, if they’re a media shop, a lot of times they have to subscribe to certain software that allows them access to different pricing in different markets, or different demographics tied to different television, or radio stations or whatever the digital platform they’re using. And a lot of agencies assume that that’s a cost of doing business, as opposed to figuring out well, you know what? I’ve got 22 clients and 15 of them access work that we do through that software, therefore, I’m going to divvy up that expense over those 15.

Or I’m going to figure out some way to make sure my customers are paying for the tools that we use on their behalf. That alone, just that exercise of walking through what you spend money on every month, and making sure that again being reasonable. But if it’s something you’re only paying for, because it helps you serve a client, then there’s no reason why the client shouldn’t pay for it.

Terry Ogburn:

Exactly. And also if you were in the, I know we’re drifting here but if you were in the landscaping business, you’d have to have even more thought. You’d have to put in maintenance, and you’d have to put in replacement of lawn mowers and equipment, because they only have a certain age.

Drew McLellan:

Yep. Well, and in the agency world, that’s computers, right? And those are practically disposable these days. So where do you find when you work with your clients, what’s hardest for them to wrap their head and heart around in the things that you teach? Where they struggle to accept a new reality, or an evolution in their business the most? What’s hard for them to… Where’s the hardest place for them to change?

Terry Ogburn:

Well, unless you show somebody a benefit in the change, then they’re not going to change. So one of the first things that we do is we take them through a exercise called Limited Beliefs. So I take them through a basic exercise of changing a belief system right there, in about 10 or 15 minutes. And once they can see that they can get their belief system changed on a particular matter, then they can start to open their mind up. Well we have, all of us have this frame of reference that we can go by, it’s all based on our belief systems and who’s put them there. So the agency owners and different people who have molded the people that now have agencies, their frame of reference is based on what they know and what they they’ve come to learn. There are other things out there that they need to expand their mind, they can’t be… This is when you bring on somebody and they say, “Well, we’ve been doing it this way for 25 years, why do we have to change?”

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Terry Ogburn:

Why do we have to change because there’s new software, there’s new this, there’s new that. So, finding people that are willing to understand that we need to move away from their limited beliefs and create new belief systems. And that’s really easy to do, but we have to really get down into their psyche and get them out of these trenches, that they’re in. So my thing is taken care of in the first, by simply putting them through this exercise. And I usually do it with time management because the first obstacle that they’re going to have is finding time for me. Now you would think that only one hour a week with me is undaunting, but along with that comes homework and sometimes the homework that you have to do is maybe two to four hours a week. Okay? So if you are have a 24 hour clock. So I go through this time management assessment with them. And I take each person through the, give me due process. And at the end of it, I have not yet found anybody that didn’t have an extra 20 to 25 hours a week that weren’t unaccountable for.

And I tell them upfront, “I know you got a 24 hour clock, I know you’re busy and all this stuff. But you gave me your timeframes, and now we have an extra 20 to 25 hours. So where’s those hours going?” So I have to get their mind wrapped around that they have extra time for me. And so the way we do that is teaching them how to prioritize their schedule first and then, oh excuse me schedule their priorities and then prioritize their schedule.

Drew McLellan:

So I have no doubt that everyone listening is like, “Okay. Well, I don’t have time. I barely have time to work out or I’m not getting enough sleep, or I don’t see my kids and my husband as often as I should.” So are there tricks? Or are there tools that you use to help entrepreneurs carve out more time to… Because, again, everyone’s so busy working in the business, it’s hard to work on the business. And working with you or anybody else like you that you’re asking them to elevate and work on the business. So how do you help them find that time?

Terry Ogburn:

Well, it starts with a one hour, and Drew I’ll be glad to offer this to you at no charge. Just to show you then maybe you can pass it on to your guests. But it’s sitting down with you for an hour, and then we just look at it from a realistic point of view. And what we decide is that you only have 168 hours in a week. Now in order to do that, you must have goals within those things that you need to get done. Whether it’s go get your haircut, or go to the dentist or all of them are goals and priorities.

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Terry Ogburn:

And then once we, one of my secrets is to actually sit down and close your day. So this will pick up so much time for anyone, if they just take 30 minutes every day and close the day out. That means that they take part of that 15 minutes and they look at, “Okay. What did I do right? What did I do wrong? What could I have done better?” Then you lay out what you’re going to do the night before, and then you put minutes to that. So you say, “Okay. Well work to do this task, it’s going to take 20 minutes so I’m going to block off 30 minutes for that.” And then at the end of the day, at the end of that 30 minutes so to speak, you have a day laid out for the next day. And if you’ve got eight hours worth of work scheduled on a six hour day, then we need to rethink how are you going to get that extra two hours? You may then start to delegate. You may say, “Oh, I can get this delegated or I can move this to a different day, whatever.”

But the idea is to line up your day so that you have the exact number of hours, that you plan to work and the exact priorities that you need to get done. And well, with the fact that you’ve given yourself extra time, you oftentimes finish the projects a lot easier. But you also might find out that you can only schedule four hours worth the work every day, because you’ve got two hours worth of interruptions every day. And then you’ve got to do the other two hours, it’s got to be something else that you’re doing. So you have to realistically look at a downward view of how much time it’s going to take to do these different tasks and projects that need to get done, and assign them. And then the other thing is by setting it up at night, the night before you give your subconscious a chance to work on those issues or those problems or those goals. And oftentimes the subconscious will make your day go a lot faster the next day.

Drew McLellan:

So I think it would be two things. One, I’m a firm believer in knowing tonight what I have to get done tomorrow. So I’m right behind you on that. I think it would be a little fascinating and also a little frightening, to record that out. I’ll let you look at my calendar and figure out if there’s fat in my schedule. But it would be interesting to record it and then let everybody listen in.

Terry Ogburn:

Okay.

Drew McLellan:

That would be really fascinating. If you’re game to do that. I think that would be really interesting.

Terry Ogburn:

Drew I just got thrill bumps because this could be what helps me catapult my vision into play. I would love to record it.

Drew McLellan:

It could be horrifying for you and me, and everybody listening but I’m game if your game.

Terry Ogburn:

Oh, I’m totally for it. Because I think this is… I know it’s my own little child so to speak. But I think this could be very helpful to a lot of business. A lot of individuals out there if they just took of this little recipe of how to manage, I call it instead of time management, learn to manage your time.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, yeah. So okay, so well, we’ll put a pin in that and you and I’ll talk offline about how to make that happen. Because I think that’ll be, again, both frightening and fascinating. So as we’re getting to the top of the hour, I want to be mindful of, ironically your time and I know that the listeners probably are getting off their treadmill or getting close to work by now. So, give us a couple, boy here are things if you want to grow your business, if you want to take your business to the next level, what are some things that regardless of what kind of business you own, you have to sort of step into or lean into to make that happen? What are the listeners… What do they need to start thinking about or exploring in a different way, if they really do want to level up their business?

Terry Ogburn:

The first thing I would, that comes to mind would be to create their business development plan. A plan on how they want to develop their business, their agency, what would that business look like, five years from now. Then chunk it down to, what do I got to get done this year? So then you set up what I refer to as your priorities. So, and your priority to me is set up based on using an objective, the purpose and the outcome. And you set 10 of those for the year. And then you’re taking those 10 and you’re going to break them down quarterly, so that you can have little quarterly steps that by the end of the year, you have basically divided your priority into four equal parts and then you manage those four equal parts throughout the year. And that right there will help them.

But the key is to be able to takes the objective with the desire, and then back it by a definite purpose of why. Because we don’t have a why, if we don’t understand why we’re doing something or we just won’t do it. And then we must see the outcome of what it looks like, so we know what the picture looks like when it’s completed. And we do those three steps. And then we break those things down into bite sized little pieces. Taking our priority, to its potential.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. So working in quarterly sprints, not unlike the traction system.

Terry Ogburn:

Correct.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Terry Ogburn:

My whole program is based on… And I’ll just tell you a quick story. I was working with this financial planner. And his boss came to me and says, “Okay. Lance tells me that you want him to have a goal this year of 50 million.” And I said, “Yeah.” And he says, “Well, Terry, nobody’s ever done anything close to that.” And I said, “Well, what’s the best number?” And he says, “Well, 26 is shooting high. Very few wealth advisors could get to 26 million.” And I said, “Well, let’s leave it at 50. And let’s don’t tell Lance that he can only do 26. Let’s tell him that he can do 50, and let’s just go there. And let’s see what does it hurt?”

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Terry Ogburn:

You know he did 44 million that year because we didn’t tell him that he could do 26.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Well, I think there’s huge reality in setting a lofty goal. And even if you fall short of the goal, you’ve escalated yourself significantly. So, I think you’re right about the limiting beliefs and some of those things that a lot of times we get in our own way, because we’ve never done it before, it can’t be done that way as opposed to, “This is the goal. And I got to figure out how to get there or get as close as I can.”

Terry Ogburn:

And doing it by the quarter, what happens is your mindset is only for 90 days, “Well, you can do this for 90 days. Right?”

Drew McLellan:

Right. Right. Right.

Terry Ogburn:

And they do that. Yeah. And then they hit their goal, and they go, “Oh wow, I could do that for… Let me do this.” Yeah. And it’s just chunking it up. Sometimes you have to chunk it down, sometimes you have to chunk it up. But it’s always better if we do it in chunks for sure.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I know that when I work with agencies, we do attraction like coaching with leadership teams. And it’s fascinating to stand with them a year after we’ve started and look back, and they’re always astonished at how much they got done. But again, I think you’re right part of it is because you’re only looking 90 days out, and you’re knocked down those pins and then you set up new pins for the next 90 days and you knock them down, and it feels much more manageable than big, heavy annual or multiple year goals.

Terry Ogburn:

Well, I can sure that you would agree also coming out of the agency world and being in that world, most of the businesses done, 30 to 40% of our business is done in the last quarter.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. For agencies that kind of depends on the niche that they’re in. So they sort of live by their clients calendars. So if their client, for example, does a ton of work in the first quarter, then the agency is going to be really busy in the fourth. But for, if they’re for example, if the client’s business is really rocking in the summer, then agencies are really busy in the winter and spring. So they cycle a little differently but you’re right. Typically, there is a busy season if you will. Yeah.

Terry Ogburn:

One of the companies I have is a boat company and their year end September 30th. Now, Radio Shacks year ended on the regular year, but we had what we call the fifth quarter which was the 10 days after Christmas.

Drew McLellan:

Sure, of course, right.

Terry Ogburn:

We did more business in that in that 10 days after Christmas, than we did in probably the whole month of December.

Drew McLellan:

It speaks to the importance of understanding your business cycles. That’s for sure.

Terry Ogburn:

Exactly. But anyway, yep.

Drew McLellan:

Terry this has been awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. I know that you… First of all, if folks want to learn more about your business, what’s the best way for them to track you down?

Terry Ogburn:

Terryogburn.com is my favorite website. I have three but that’d be the easiest. It’s easiest to remember, terryogburn.com. Check out my testimonies, check out the information there. It’s a lot of good stuff on there.

Drew McLellan:

Okay. And we’ll of course put that in the show notes. And then I know that you wanted to extend an offer to the listeners. So do you want to explain that?

Terry Ogburn:

Sure. Thank you. Any of your listeners, Drew, I would be happy to spend one hour with him working on their business, not a sales pitch about my business but actually taken on issue and spending, or a couple of issues whatever, spending hour with them one on one we use Go To Meeting. Just reach out to me through my website, terryogburn.com. Just go into the email capture box there and send me a little note, tell me you want my help. And we’ll schedule something and you will walk away with tools and/or system or both, that will solve your problem.

Drew McLellan:

Beautiful. Thanks so much for your time. Appreciate it. All right. That wraps up another episode of Build a Better Agency. I can’t tell you how much I love spending this time with you. Thanks so much for listening. Hey, speaking of thanks. Another way we want to give thanks, is we’ve built a new tool that I would love you to check out. We’re calling it the Agency Health Assessment. And basically, you’re going to answer a series of questions. And based on those answers, the tool is going to tell you in which aspect of your business, maybe you need to spend a little extra time and attention to sort of take your agency to the next level. We’ve identified five key areas that really indicate an agency’s health, and we’re going to help you figure out where you need to spend a little more time. To get that free assessment, all you have to do is text the word assessment to 38470. Again, text the word assessment to 38470.

And we will send you a link so you can do that at your leisure, and hopefully that will give you some new insights and some direction in terms of your time and attention in the agency. In the meantime, as always, I’m around if I can be helpful. [email protected]. And I will be back next week with another great guest and more things for you to ponder. Talk to you soon.

Speaker 1:

That’s all for this episode of AMI’s Build a Better Agency, brought to you by HubSpot. Be sure to visit agencymanagementinstitute.com, to learn more about our workshops, online courses, and other ways we serve small to midsize agencies. Don’t miss an episode, as we help you build the agency you’ve always dreamed of owning.