After stepping back from my own agency after 10 years, I’ve spent (and continue to spend) a lot of time reflecting on what I got right, what I got wrong, and what I would do differently if I did it all over again.
Part of the reason that I actively do this is because I want to offer the best advice possible to my clients and the truth is, I spent very little time thinking about this stuff when I was actually running the agency.
I’m sure that you know the feeling – it’s just so busy. All of the time. It’s the agency whirlwind.
So today, I’d like to share some of these learnings and I hope that they help you on your current journey. I genuinely believe that if I’d known these sooner, my agency and my own sanity would have been much better off!
1. Don’t let go or step away from things unless you really want to
One of the biggest, recurring pieces of advice that my co-founder and I got from multiple angles was along the lines of:
“Hire great people to replace yourself so that the agency doesn’t need you.”
It’s well intentioned and not “wrong” as such, especially if your plan is to exit and step away at some point.
But it’s not the only way to do things AND you can damage the business if you’re not careful. Not to mention that you can end up enjoying your own job a little less if you let go of the things that you like.
Let me share a concrete example from my own experience.
I am very good at hiring people.
I don’t say that I’m very good at much, but this is one area where I will stick my neck out and say that I’m good. I was taught well early in my career and those principles have stuck with me ever since.
As my agency grew, we hired more people, put in place more managers and the ownership of hiring people started to shift to them instead of me.
Eventually, I was told that I should leave hiring to my team leaders and focus on “more important” stuff.
Sidenote: I now strongly believe that hiring is the most important task that a CEO or founder can do. Plus, I never really learned what “more important stuff” actually was.
But I digress.
Letting go of the hiring process was a mistake because not only was I good at hiring, I enjoyed it.
And I didn’t do a good enough job of making sure that all of my team “got it” before stepping away.
Reflecting back on that time, I can see the hiring mistakes that we made and how they contributed to some of the struggles that we experienced. I’m not saying that I never made hiring mistakes (I did).
But I think it was too important a task for me to move away from because it’s “what you do” when you’re growing an agency. If I were to move away from it, I should have pushed for a far more compelling reason.
Another example is the sales process which is also right up there in terms of importance. As we grew, it was another area that I was told to “let go off” and give to someone else.
So I did.
Now, with this one, I was very fortunate to have someone who owned it and did a great job, along with a wider team that knew how to sell. But it was still something that I was good at and probably should have been closer to than I was for a few years.
So, whilst well intentioned, don’t blindly follow this advice like I did unless:
- You actually do want to step away from it – you have the right to not do things that you don’t like or aren’t good at as you grow.
- You have a solid plan to hand over things as you step away.
2. Repeat important messages over and over again
Have you ever had a moment when a team member asks you a question that you answered on the company all-hands last week? Or someone used a process that you emailed everyone about a month ago and told them wasn’t being used anymore?
I’m sure that you’ve had at least a few of these moments!
Unfortunately, people don’t listen.
That includes us by the way! We don’t, we’re human.
We get distracted.
We’re checking Slack or email whilst the all-hands is on.
We hear something and then forget about it when a client emails about a problem.
It happens and it’s not something to get annoyed about too much. It’s something that you have to account for and I wish I’d known this sooner.
This has always been a problem, but I think it did get worse during the pandemic when so much communication shifted to online video. Compare talking to a team of 25 people in a room vs. on a Zoom call. The engagement just hits differently.
In the last few years of running my agency, I got comfortable with the idea that not only did I have to repeat stuff over and over, but also with the idea that it’s okay if my team gets annoyed at me because of it.
If they’re annoyed, it means that they’ve heard what I’ve said, processed it and understood it.
This is better than the alternative.
3. No agency has nailed all of this, so give yourself a break
When running my own agency, I would open LinkedIn and see all of my competitors absolutely “crushing it”.
They’re hiring for 10 roles at once.
They just won a new brand who I’d love to work with.
They’re opening a new office in a city that I love.
Now, many years later, I know the reality. Not all of them were doing as well as I thought.
Or even if they are currently doing well, they’ve had their fair share of struggles along the way and probably have more to come.
This isn’t to say that there are no great agencies out there. Far from it, there are many. But it’s never, ever as easy as LinkedIn makes it look.
So we can often feel like we’re failing just by standing still or growing “only” 5% this year.
Now that I work with and speak with many agencies, I can tell you that no one is perfect and no one has figured it all out.
When you’re assessing your own performance, steer clear of LinkedIn or those agency network meetups and instead look inwards at what truly matters – you and your own agency.
Otherwise, the journey will always feel like a slog because there will always be someone who appears to be doing better than you, no matter how well you do.