You Can’t Have It All

- Hey everybody! Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. This week, I'm coming to you from Kansas City, Missouri. You know, I was having an interesting conversation with an agency owner and I was sort of reflecting that one of the coolest things, one of the best things about being an agency owner is that we get a lot of choices. We have a lot of control over our business, over what we put into the business, what we get back out of the business, but those choices are interwoven. And sometimes you have to make sacrifices depending on what you want. So I was talking to this agency owner and what he said to me was, "I want to grow my agency. I want to double it in size. I want to take more money out of the business than I'm taking now. But I don't want to work more than 30 hours a week because I've got little kids and I want to spend time with them, and I don't want to lose those moments." And I said, "I totally get it. I understand all three of those desires, but you can't have all three. You can have two of the three, but you have to sacrifice one." So for example, if you want to double your agency size and you want to take more money out of the business, that does not happen if you're only working 30 hours a week. Why? Because you're going to have to replace what you would do in a normal 40 or 50-hour workweek, and the way you're going to replace that is by spending money. So you might get growth and you might have more time off but you're going to sacrifice money. If you are willing to take more money out of the business but you want to only work 30 hours, then guess what? You're going to sacrifice growth. And you can go all around that equation, and you can see that depriving the business of any one of those three things means that it's going to impact the other two. So if you want to have great growth and you want to have more money at the end of the year, then guess what? It's going to take a time investment on your part. And whatever that equation is, the beautiful thing is, you as an agency owner get to decide. So, for some agency owners we work with, time is the most precious thing for them so they're willing to give up the speed of growth or how much money they take out of the business, because the time is the most precious commodity. For others, they're young, they're starting their family and so money is really critical to them. So they're willing to work a lot of hours, nights and weekends if they have to, to grow that business so they can take more money out of the business. You get to decide where you put your emphasis, what choices you make and what consequences you are willing to accept as a result of those choices. So choose wisely, choose with intention, choose with caution. So don't just blunder into those choices, give it some serious thought. Have conversations with your leadership team, have conversations with your family, decide how your agency can serve you, the owner best, and your goals, and then decide what you have to put into the equation to make it happen. But we don't get it all. All right? I'll talk to you next week.