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Agency Forward explores the future of agencies as tech and AI drive down the cost of tactical deliverables. Topics include building competent teams, developing strategic offers, systemizing your business, and more.
New episodes delivered every Tuesday.
Chris DuBois 0:00
Hey everyone, today we're gonna try something a bit different, and you're stuck with just me for a solo cast. In full transparency, I just got back from a couple weeks of training with the army, and I'm just behind on producing new content. So rather than rushing to get out another interview, I wanted to take some thoughts that I've had after just talking with dozens, if not hundreds of agencies at this point, and I want to try helping you with some of these common problems that I see and things that I faced while running an agency as well. And so today, I'm going to give you really the three reasons why your team might be struggling and what you can do about it, and hopefully that's enough to unlock you, give you some forward momentum, and let's just dive in. It's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward, all right? So teams can fail for a variety of reasons, right? It's obvious, but there are three that I see popping up time and time again, and you might actually be surprised by how common sensical these are once you hear about them. So first I'm going to share what they are. Then I'll explain how you can create a system that stops them from having such a large impact on your agency. First, communication. Often teams don't know what they should be doing because it just isn't properly communicated. There isn't like clarity around what's happening. They don't know what the end result should look like, and they don't know, you know, all of the different things that this project is tied to. So it makes it really hard when you don't have that clarity around the big picture that it's properly communicated, you're gonna see, you know, worse results overall. Second is motivation. If your team doesn't understand the purpose behind what they're doing, then they're not going to be as driven to get it done. The purpose is often more important than the task itself, right? An example I like using from from the army is if I get told to take a hill so that I can provide Overwatch for another unit. Right? Then I have a very I know my purpose is to provide Overwatch, and the task there is to go take a hill. But if I get to the top of that hill and I can't see, you know, that other unit that I need to be supporting, then, rather than taking time to call up ask my boss. Hey, what should I be doing right now? Instead, I can just go take a nearby hill that gives me that vantage point, and then I can call it up say, Hey, this is what I did because I knew the purpose was this, right? So I'm still achieving that outcome that we're only able to identify by having boots on the ground by the person actually doing the work, seeing that. Hey, this, this isn't actually going to work, and they can just shift very quickly because they have different information. And so often the purpose right is more important than the task. Then finally, the last reason is the skill set. Right? Sometimes your team members just don't have the skills to be able to accomplish what you need to be working on. They don't know what done looks like. They don't know what parameters that they should be working within. And so there are things that we can do in order to help them achieve all that. So how do we fix these three things? The way I approached it in in the agency I was running was at every single task. We used clickup right for all of our project management. And so every task that was created in clickup had three things. It was a what, why and how, and the description was simply those things. And I gave guidance to anyone on the team. If you were handed a task from someone and it did not have a what, why and how you were fully within your rights to kick it back to that person and say, Please fill this out so that when it comes to me, I know exactly what I need to be working on. They're right. There's no excuse for a lack of clarity. All right. So let's dive into how we can solve each of these. The first, the providing a what gets after the communication aspect, right? And we're trying to provide clarity around the actual task. So we're not saying, hey, this task is to build a landing page. No, we're saying we want to build a landing page for this specific offer that goes live on this date. We're trying to provide as much information within that what? So that someone who gets this task understands as much as they can around everything else involved. Okay, now the why provides the motivation. So, for example, saying this landing page is part of a campaign to drive people into this bigger offer we need leads. Us to generate from here to fill the rest of the pipeline, right? We're trying to give them that understanding so that when they look at this and they say, Okay, this is why I need to do this, that can influence how they approach the task. And then finally, the how is, what gives instructions, examples, processes any additional info, right? We're trying to make this as easy as possible so that even someone with no skills could take this task and just run with it. That's not going to always be the case, right? And it's not the easiest thing. Your more senior team members, who have done this a bunch of times, won't need to go into all of those details for the the how portion of this, but they they could if they needed to. So we're going to say, you know, like maybe here's a list of our highest converting landing pages, or here's some copy that we have from other offers that worked really well. Here are some pages we love. Here are some that we hate in this process, right? We show you exactly what done looks like. Maybe we're giving us an extra swipe file so that they could just go look at a bunch of other pages that have a similar feel or something. But we're providing all of these different resources to make it easier to get started right. Getting started is one of the hardest parts of any project, and so this is a way that we can actually get around that. Now, every task in your project management tool should include these three items. And again, I would stress, don't let anyone hand off a task without having these three things in there, because it is only going to lead to a lack of clarity, some confusion, and then things are going to start to crumble right, super easy way for you to get after it worked really well for our team with agencies that I've coached where we have implemented this, it has been extremely effective. And so I would strongly encourage you to give this a chance. And I guess in closing, if you have any other challenges that you're facing, and you would love some sort of content like this, just quick podcast episodes that can hopefully provide you the value you need to get unstuck in other places, right? Let me know. You can hit me up on LinkedIn. You can find me on dynamic agency, os.com let us know, and we will do we can to get you some content that can provide you some wins. Do.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai