I saw a LinkedIn post earlier this week that inspired the topic of this week’s Founder Focus newsletter. The key line that stuck with me was:
“As an agency owner I do struggle with time to put in just as much strategic energy and focus into our own business – clients always come first.”
This is something that resonated with me and I’m sure that it resonates with many of you as well. It’s the classic problem of not having enough time, headspace or energy to work “on” the business” rather than “in” the business.
Over the years, I’ve come to call this the agency whirlwind. It’s the thing that exists all around us and pulls us into the day-to-day business more than we’d like.
Today, I’d like to share some thoughts on the agency whirlwind and give you some ideas for how to escape it.
What is the agency whirlwind?
I first came across this concept in a book that I’d highly recommend called The Four Disciplines of Execution.
In it, they define the whirlwind as:
“…the urgent, day-to-day work required to keep the organization running. 4DX does not aim to eliminate the whirlwind but to create a system that allows for the execution of new, strategic goals alongside it.”
It’s worth reiterating a key point from this definition – we’re not trying to eliminate the whirlwind. Doing so would mean that your agency doesn’t function correctly.
The kinds of things that make up the agency whirlwind aren’t actually bad or unimportant things. Far from it, they are things that need to be done otherwise your agency wouldn’t function.
Here are a few examples:
- Jumping onto a call to help talk down an unhappy client.
- Helping a Head of Department deal with a team member who is thinking of leaving for another agency.
- Working with a project lead to diagnose a technical problem on a client project.
- Setting up a laptop for a new starter.
All of these are important and need to be done.
But before you know it, a whole week could go by and all that you’ve done is these kinds of tasks.
They’re necessary, but there is an opportunity cost here in that you’ve lost the opportunity to work on bigger, more impactful tasks that affect the agency as a whole.
For example:
- Spending time understanding AI trends and how they could impact your agency in 2-3 years time.
- Working on a process to make your sales qualification more efficient and effective, leading to higher conversion rates.
- Building your network of possible partners and referrers of work.
These are also important tasks, but the impact goes far beyond a single client or member of staff.
The goal is to split your time between these two types of work. Typically, I’d recommend that you have at least an 80/20 split between them – 80% working in the business and 20% working on it.
As you grow, this may change (if you want it to) but aiming for this means that at the very least, you spend a day a week or ~4 days a month working on the business.
How to be effective in the midst of the agency whirlwind
If what I’ve talked about so far resonates with you, I’d reiterate my recommendation for The Four Disciplines of Execution. This book goes into far more detail about this whole area than I can in the context of this newsletter. It presents a solid system for working on your big goals and avoiding the whirlwind.
In the meantime, here are some actionable recommendations for how to be more effective on your big goals and projects.
List your big projects that will move your agency forward
You have zero chance of escaping the agency whirlwind and working on the business if you don’t know where to start. Instead, you’ll find yourself with some time spare and then spend most of it figuring out what to do!
So, the question becomes – with limited time, what can you work on that will have the biggest impact on your agency? What can you do that will increase the chances of you hitting your goals sooner rather than later?
You could consider things like:
- Doing an in-depth review of your service deliverables and looking for ways to improve their quality, make them more efficient or add more value for clients.
- Thinking hard about the long-term goals of the agency and working backwards from there to engineer how you’ll get there. For example – if you want to go from £1m to £2m turnover, work out exactly how many clients you need to retain and how many new ones you need.
- Putting in place training plans for your most senior team members to enable them to take some responsibilities off your shoulders.
The list really is endless, hopefully this gives you some inspiration.
These are things that aren’t necessary for the business to function day-to-day, but they are things that have the potential to improve performance of the team over the long-term.
The problem is, because they aren’t necessarily important or urgent in the day-to-day, they can get pushed down the to-do list and never worked on.
Ultimately, whatever projects you think will improve performance of your team in the long-term, make a big list as a starting point.
One more note to help guide you here – lean heavily towards ideas that excite you. This will make it easier for you to escape the whirlwind.
Get clear on how you can actually spend time on these projects
Each of us is different in terms of how we work best. But the one thing that we all share is that to be effective at these types of projects, you’ll need some focused, dedicated, uninterrupted time.
So, the question becomes, how do you get this?
Think about the environment where you’re most effective
Again, everyone is different but here are some examples of what may work for you:
- Working at home rather than in the office (or vice versa).
- Blocking out time each week in your calendar and not letting anyone book meetings over the top of it.
- Putting on a big pair of headphones and listening to your favourite music.
- Closing down Slack and email for a few hours, whilst setting your phone to do not disturb mode. (Honestly, the world won’t end if you do this).
You should also think carefully about when your mental energy is at its best and try to align this time with that. For me, I work best from early mornings until lunchtime, so I schedule this kind of work early in the day and it’s also something that I like to end the week with, so a few hours on a Friday morning works for me.
Break down your projects into smaller chunks and tasks
The chances are that at least some of the projects that you’ve listed will take more than a few hours to complete. As a result, you need to be realistic about how long it will take to work on them. If you sit down to try and complete a 10 hour project in the space of 2, you’re not very likely to succeed.
For example, rather than saying that you want to “improve the sales process”, you could say:
- Review a sales proposal from the SEO team in the last 3 months.
- Review HubSpot call and email notes for each proposal to find patterns and trends.
- Check how closely the final proposal reflects sales conversations with the client.
These aren’t tiny tasks, but they’re not the biggest either – and they get you closer to the overall project goal of improving your sales process.
Don’t be afraid to say no to the whirlwind
Most of us want to help our team. So when they come to us and ask for help, we’ll almost certainly drop what we’re doing and say yes.
There are all sorts of reasons why we shouldn’t always drop everything to help a team member. But in the context of this topic, the core reason is that if we’re always saying yes to our team’s requests for our time, we’ll never be able to carve out the time we need to step out of the whirlwind.
When you get asked for help when you were actually planning on spending some valuable time on your own projects, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask if they need your time immediately i.e. is their request urgent, or can they wait a few hours or until tomorrow.
In most cases, what they’re asking for isn’t urgent. Yes, it may be important, but most tasks are not urgent + important. Therefore, you don’t need to drop everything to work on them.
If this is something that you find yourself worrying about or struggling with and would like further help, just hit reply and send me a few details – I’ll get back to you with some ideas.