what's goin' on with agency owners 🤔
I've been doing market research calls with creative agency owners for the past few months.
I wanted to know the words they use to describe their work, what they think they're doing really well behind the scenes, and what's actually broken.
Basically, I wanted to ask: what's going on with agency owners?!
Here's what I found!
What's going really well:
Every agency owner I interviewed said some version of: They're organized and have some version of processes in place. They also picked a great team and communicate well with that team. What they didn't say out loud but I surmised: they are great leaders!
However, as I synthesized the results of my market research, I realized something a little bit ironic: great team and great communication might be exactly what's creating the weak spot.
What's not going as well:
To push projects forward, the team is in constant contact with the agency owner.
Which means the owner becomes the bottleneck. The "octopus," one gal I talked to called it. She constantly has to pause her own work because someone on her team needs something from her.
As her team grew, Slack and email and texts as the main project management system stopped working. She ended up stuck in the weeds instead of running her business.
What I find with most creative agency owners I talk to (not just the past few months, but always) the processes and systems that got them to having a small team cannot get them to whatever their next level is.
And because these owners ARE organized, they try to fix it.
They sign up for project management tools, create checklists and projects. They record Looms! Determined to create new systems that mean her team relies on her less.
And the team... kind of uses all this.
The SOPs exist... somewhere. Getting the team to actually follow them, that's the part that's hard.
So what's the fix?
I find that most agencies have most of a process, but are missing important links that bring it all together.
For example,
They might have a checklist.
And they might have SOPs.
But the SOPs aren't linked to that checklist - and when things are moving fast, team members might not think to search high and low for the SOPs, or even remember that they exist.
This means they are asking you questions - or worse - not asking questions and you are re-doing their work before shipping something off to the client.
So instead, let's have the SOPs linked inside of the tasks.
An SOP with, not just the process, but also quality criteria.
Now every team member is following the same SOP, every time. They don't have to ping you for questions, and your QA before sending something to a client is just a cursory glance.
Work moves faster and you can focus on saying yes to the next client.
The octopus gets her arms back.
This is one small example of the bigger work I do with my clients.
We sit down together and map out the entire process for delivering work, start to finish.
From there, I can spot the inefficiencies and bottlenecks so we can improve the entire process.
Removing you as the bottleneck so you can have a team that just handles it is the operating layer I build with clients over the course of six months.
