Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Most agency owners think their problem is workload. It isn't. It's latency, and the metric that fixes it is Speed to Informed.
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
Last week, a member of our community pinged me with a finance question. They're working through, like, how to restructure their own compensation out of the agency, moving from, like, a flat owner's draw to something that was tied to net income, I don't know, plus, like, profit distribution on a schedule, so that it doesn't destroy their personal cash flow. You can tell, and me talking about this, I'm not an expert on any of this, but they had like three to four moving parts, they're all interacting, and honestly, getting one piece of this wrong probably would have meant multiple months of pain afterwards. Now, five years ago, they probably would have handled this the way that most agencies like handle probably every question that lands in their inbox, right? You spent two hours reading some blog posts to, like, figure out all the details you can. I guess now you would just go to AI and talk to it a lot, but you're still going to be spending time just trying to figure out what you even need to care about within this situation. So, you spend a lot of time working through this, but last week I was able to just send two messages. Right, they had like a 15 minute call with someone who's built compensation structures for probably 40 plus agencies, and so that person has seen these patterns like that work. They know what this owner needs to do without that owner having to go do a ton of research, but they had the framework for everything that they needed to do very quickly. Total time was probably like 40 minutes, like less than an hour. They had everything they needed. Now, this episode is not just about owner compensation. The entire thesis of this episode is about something that I have been like optimizing for within my own business and within the community for a while, I call it the speed to informed. I think it is the most underrated lever in agency ownership, and it's something that I want to spend some time talking about today. No one was asking for another community, but I've made one anyway. So, what's different? The dynamic agency community is designed around access rather than content, access to peers who've done it before, access to experts who've designed solutions, access to resources that have been battle tested, and right now the price for founding members is only $97 a year. Join today, so your agency has immediate access to everything you need to grow. You can join at Dynamic Agency dot community. Now let's talk about the speed to inform. 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, you so the trap that most agency owners are in is that you think your problem is workload, right? You're working 6070 hour weeks, you're in every meeting, you're the bottleneck with every decision, your team just constantly waiting on you, clients are waiting on you fast, waiting on you. Right, at some point you start to believe that the answer is just to do more faster with better systems, but, but it isn't right, like it's not always. Sometimes it might be, I guess, but your problem often isn't the workload, it's latency, right? It's that gap between the moment that you have a question or you have something that needs to happen, and then actually getting it done, having an answer that's good enough to act on, that gap is where your week starts to get eaten, right. It's not actually in the work itself, like if you could just sit there and hammer out the work, you'd be fine, but it's this time that's spent figuring out what's the right thing to do here, that right, the decision making process, where you're, you know, you're waiting for more information, you're googling, you're second guessing, or you're asking all of these other people. I call that gap the speed to inform. It's how long does it take from the second, like a question hits, for the right information to reach the person who has to decide. Now, I will tell you something that took me like an embarrassingly long amount of time to figure out, I don't optimize my week around hours worked or like task close. I don't even optimize, optimize around revenue produced in a given week. I optimize around the speed to inform, because if I can compress the time between question and answer, everything else gets faster downstream, right? Decisions happen sooner, the execution starts sooner, like the next question comes up sooner, and that's where we start seeing this compounding like value. So that's what I want to talk to you about today, and it's why most agency owners are really slow to informed, and and I'm going to give you kind of two different things you can be doing to fix this. So first, why are agency owners slow to be informed. There's three patterns that I see, and I see them constantly in coaching work. First one is like the shallow network, right? When a question hits, you don't have a known specialist to call, so you default to Google, or you like ping a peer who's never actually solved the problem, and you end up eating their guests like. Data, I had this problem for years, right? I'd have a hiring question, and I'd ask, like, three other agency owners, and I get three different opinions, and none of which were based on anything except, like, their gut instinct, and so I'd make a decision that was really, like, an average of three guesses, and so that's not informed, right, that it's just noise. Second pattern is like when a team that kind of buries instead of surfaces, your account managers, they send your you activity updates instead of decisions needed, right? That's that's really what this comes down to. Your operators are sending you like a status report instead of recommendations. When we delegate anything within the company. Everyone focuses on, like, how can I get work off my plate. That's delegation, but really, we want to see how much can we bring back up. Like, we're the people have information, we want them to send it back to us, so that we can make faster decisions. So, when you delegate, you're actually looking at who is the best person to put in this seat, so that I get the information that I need quickly, so like ideally, right, you open Slack on a Monday, and you've got a list of messages that aren't just questions, but it's like information things that you need to be in the loop on, so that you can make your decisions faster. The third pattern is the DIY default. This one's probably the most self-inflicted one, you'll find right, you've like trained yourself over the years to just research everything personally. Usually this happens because we're like when we start our businesses, where we go into this like self-sufficiency phase, where we have to kind of figure it out, so that we're learning and we know better for next time and stuff. But when, and so we spend 10 hours trying to figure something out, when you could have just placed a phone call to the right person, found it out in 10 minutes, and then moved on with your day. So, if any of these sound familiar, rest of this episode's for you. Fix us two arms, so let's get into that. Arm one is your network, so let's start like outside the company, right? Your external speed to inform system, the principle is actually pretty simple, like for every category of question that you're going to predictably have, you need to know a person, right? Like, I wouldn't necessarily have, like, a retained advisor, like you don't need to put someone on your on your payroll just for this, but if you just know a person who, like, when this question hits, you know exactly who to call, and you know that they'll pick up, right. Ideally, you can be the person for them as well, for something else. And then you start building out this network, the categories that, like, I have a person for, like taxes, legal, hiring, operations, sales coaching, pricing strategy, M and A, right. These are all different things. Any marketing channels that, like, outside of kind of my area of expertise, I have other people that I can go to, and in my.. I have, I have them in Slack. I have direct access to them. I got their phone numbers, like it's very easy for me to just call these people up and get help when I need it. Now, this is probably where, like, we need some distinction, right? I didn't, I didn't just build that bench by collecting business cards, I was part of communities, and like working with these people, engaging with them, paying for like mastermind seats, and like learning from the people who are already there, so that we're building up like a relationship, and they actually want to see me successful, and same, I want to see them successful, so that relationship makes it very easy for me to pick up the phone, know that they're going to pick up, and I'm not just trying to like take from them, I'm also trying to give. This, this specifically is why one of the reasons why I build the dynamic agency community the way I did. I didn't just want another like forum where 200 agency owners are just trading opinions or chatting. I also don't want to ever have to validate my community by how many conversations are being had, right? That's not necessarily the most useful thing. I wanted to have a bench, and so that when someone comes in and they have a question, we can answer that question incredibly fast, because I can use my network to help them get that answer, and through some of it, like people have hired like other coaches, advisors, and stuff within my community, because that's exactly what they needed in their business, and that's what I'm trying to build for now. The it's probably important to, like, we don't want slow answers, because it's not just like the time that we spend finding that answer, right? It's like there are more decisions that are going to flow from this. It's a this, I call it a cascading dilemma, where like the real cost is the next three decisions that you didn't get to make because you were stuck on this one, and so we get, we like fall into almost a reactive status, where we can't, like, we don't have any say in these questions, like, they have been decided for us, because the time ran out, right? So, the slow answers, like, it's not a linear thing, it's like it's compounding, like, they are, if we don't get a quick answer to this, it means we have less time to make the next decision. And sometimes that is, that is crippling for a business, all right. So, the first arm is your network. Let's move to arm two, the delegation. I know I got ahead of myself earlier and got excited, but the let's go inside the company, right, because a lot of agency owners do miss us. Delegation, right, the way most people teach it is just about offloading work. You're trying to give your team more to do so you can free yourself up, and, like, I don't know, that's fine, but it's not really delegation, right? It's just task distribution, real delegation, right? The kind that that compresses your speed to inform, that makes it easier to make these decisions, is about filtering the world so that the right information reaches you in the right shape, like it's not about doing more work, it's about your team becoming the system that surfaces what matters and suppresses what doesn't. Actually, let me, let me show you three patterns of like high surfacing team. These are the things that I look for when I'm coaching an owner, and like, through any delegation issues. The first one is that the problems arrive with options, not just problems. So, like, when something hits a wall, right, the team doesn't come to me and say, "Hey, we hit X, what do you want us to do? Like that. That is where most agencies are, and it's miserable. It puts the entire weight of the situation, like on you, and it's almost like they're washing their hands of it while you figure it out, so you have to now gather context, you got to generate some options, evaluate them, and then you decide, but that's like 20 minutes of your time minimum for every single problem that they're bringing, but if the team could come to you and say, hey, we hit x, here are three paths that we see. Here's what we'd recommend. Here's why are we good to do this? Like, now your decision takes two minutes, right? It's the same outcome, but it costs you like nothing in the given week. We used to call this a six inch putt in our agency, where it's like we wanted everyone to bring you that putt that's like very hard to miss. Like, you just give me a yes or no, I'll tell you what direction, based off like my limited knowledge of the situation, and you can run with it, all right. The second pattern, weekly roll-ups that surface like anomalies, not just like all of your activity, like the things people are doing, or I think most, most operators will will write status reports, right? They're just going to tell you what happened, they're going to what they shipped, what they can complete it over the week, and I mean, there's probably multiple reasons that they're doing that, but, but it's just an activity log, right? It's not the artifact that we're looking for that actually helps us within the business. Sometimes we do need to see that, hey, they're taking the right actions, but ideally, what, like, what we actually need is a report that tells us, like, what's off trend, right? What is not working right now? What's changed? What's at risk? I don't need you to just tell me what happened if it's part of the plan. If we're following the plan and doing that, then I don't need, I can, you can give me a thumbs up saying, hey, we're still on track. I need to know when something is changing within this when something is either broken or it's not looking the way it needs to. When I switched my own weekly review to that format, like Monday morning catch up went from like 90 minutes to 15, because the same, the same information is going to surface, right? But it's taking this very different shape, and so we're actually able to see what's wrong and what we need to spend time focusing on. The third pattern is pre-meeting briefs strip everything except decisions needed. One, I really, really don't like doing meetings for meetings. I have had multiple clients who have that structure. The team has to get together, decide something, and then they go into the next meeting to actually make the formal decision. It's terrible, but what if, like, you walk into a meeting with the team, you know you already know why we're going in, what you're doing right, like what you would recommend, the cost of getting it wrong, all these different things. If you have this in a brief, right, just simple three lines, we're not talking like a slide deck, right? Just like you're showing up reading that, and you know exactly what the point of this meeting is, and what information is required in order to make this decision. It is now very easy to make sure all the right people are going to be in that meeting, so that you can make this decision, right? If we know it's in a certain department, I'm going to make sure the department heads there. I'm going to make sure any of the team members associated with, like, an account are there. But doing that ahead of time, doing that pre-meeting brief, is going to enable all of this to happen. Now, starting move for you, I want to give you something you can actually do this week, because it's just like thinking about speed to informed, and then actually changing your speed to informed are very different things. Don't try to fix both arms at once, like pick one and start. You're either going to do delegation or you're going to work on your network. Okay, if you're going to start external, looking at your network, here's a move: open up a doc list every category of question that you've - you've burned probably more than an hour. Are on in the last 90 days, not like something strategic, necessarily, just like something you got stuck on that's outside of your realm that you need to be an expert in tax stuff, right, hiring stuff, something like that. For each category, just write one name, the person you would call. If you can't write a name, right, that's your shortlist, you need to go find some people, you got to build a bench, so that you can, you can meet them. Something that was shown to me, and I really like doing with clients, is even using a, it's like a Kanban board, Kanban, however it's pronounced, and having different categories for all of the people within your network that you want to just keep communicating with, so they could be associates, affiliates, right, advisors. They just happen. I'll start with a, but you have all of these like listed out as little cards within this, so that you can one scroll through this list like once a month and say, "Hey, who haven't I talked to in a while? So you can follow up with people like that, can definitely help your referral game, but then also you can make sure that you're keeping strong relationships with all these people that you might need to count on at some point to help you through a challenge. Now, if you're going to start internal, I guess pick one person on your team and just like change a ritual with them, like make their weekly update surface anon anomalies and recommendations, ask them not to give you an activity log. Just tell, be very clear in telling them what you want, why you want it, and then just see what happens, like with that week. Like, tell them you're, hey, we're just testing something. I chose you to try all this out, so we can show the rest of the team here's what I'm thinking about, and just let them go, but like I have seen agency owners regain six to 10 hours a week just by changing some of these things and not having to jump into every single fire. Now this is not something that I like to coach on. I really like focusing on the demand side. How do we create the marketing assets that are going to drive more business, but if you're stuck, which was where I see almost every agency owner right now, it's like they're stuck in delivery, even if they don't have so many clients that they're at 100% capacity, they're still like stuck there, and you're always going to default to taking care of your clients before doing more marketing on your own, and so I think this is one of those solutions. If you can increase your speed to informed, pull that lever right, start getting the answer faster, so you can make your next decision sooner. That is going to help substantially and make it easier to do everything else in your business that you know you should be doing that you might not have a chance to do right now. So, all right. Thanks for listening. Another solo cast, so if you have ideas you want to, you have questions you want me to answer on episodes, let me know, and we'll get those done too. And we'll see you next week. That's the show, everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits you. Click the link in the show notes to subscribe to Agency Forward on Substack. You'll get weekly content, resources, and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward.
Unknown Speaker 18:12
You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai