Building and growing an agency can be tiring and exhausting.
IF designed incorrectly you can easily find yourself feeling like an employee with as many bosses as you have clients.
If you’ve been there, you may be in a spot where you’ve thought of closing the doors, getting a job, or doing something entirely different.
We’ve had many clients that came to us on the brink of shutting the doors or going back to corporate because they just fell out of love with what they did for clients.
But, they USED to love everything about what they did.
What gives?
I know I’ve been there too, not gonna lie.
So, I put together a little video sharing some things you can do to get excited about your business again.
It’s your business. Design something that you’ll love.
It is a choice you can control despite what you think,
Reply or comment and let me know if this resonates with you.
Transcript / MP3
Have you fallen out of love with your work? Well, in this video I want to share some ideas as to how you can actually get excited about the work you do in your agency. Again, Hey guys, I’m Greg Hickman, founder of all agency@allagency.com and on this channel we share how agency owners, service providers, freelancers can start to grow and scale and systematize their business… without having to work nights and weekends so they can build a business that serves them and not the other way around. So if you’re new here and you haven’t yet subscribed, welcome click that subscribe button and check out all the videos that we have. We release a new one every single week. So real talk. Do you wake up every morning dreading what you’re doing? Do you wake up to fire drills from your clients? Do you feel like you’re in a situation where you’re, you own an agency, but really you’re, you’re kind of like a glorified freelancer? Well, I know how that feels because we were the same. We’re in the same boat. And I find that a lot of our clients come to us and in some cases they were either thinking about shutting down their agency doors, going to get a job or just completely doing something different. And I know how much that sucks because if you’ve spent so much of your time trying to build this thing and design a business that gives you the freedom that you wanted to have when starting your own business in the first place, yet you feel like you’re in handcuffs or that you’re really just working for 20 different bosses or five different bosses, then I can see how over time that you kind of just get beat up and exhausted. And so I want to share a couple of things that we did and also our clients have done to kind of reinvigorate the work that they do.So the first thing is to change how you work. Uh, for us, um, we created this tool that we use called the perfect week and we teach all of our clients this tool. And first it helps them redesign how they structure their weeks. Because if you’ve been in business for, you know, three to five years, like most of our clients you kind of fall into this routine of most of your days are reactionary to what’s happening in your client’s business and you’re so often, you know, helping your clients grow their business that you never spend enough time on your business. So the notion of the perfect week is really compartmentalizing each and every day so that there is time dedicated for you to be working on your business time dedicated for you to be working on your client’s business and any other important areas of your life like health and family. And it’s really just a way to reengineer and restructure your weeks so that you’re intentionally making time for working on the things that matter most. And also compartmentalizing when you work on your clients stuff. So it’s not just going to be wake up and check, you know, help desk or check what my client needs that day and jump into reactionary. You’re going to actually say, Hey, like I’m going to be working on my client’s work during these times on these of the week. And guess what, in the beginning, you might have to have a little bit of time every day to work on your clients’ stuff. But over time, as you start to apply this scheduling and an honor it, you’ll find that you can spend less and less time working on your client’s business and more and more time working on yours because you’re going to become efficient when you start honoring those scheduling blocks.And we’ve had many clients that literally came through our training and just redesigned how they show up each and every week to the point where they got five to 10 hours of their week back to focus on their health or to spend with their family or to actually start working on the growth of their business and doing the things that they’ve always done for their clients, but finally doing them for themselves. So first thing is to redesign how you work so that you’re intentional about when you show up versus just being reactionary. And every day is about just taking in whatever client requests come in. Number two is to launch a different way to serve your clients. I know that we were in this situation where we were serving enough clients that I would either have to work into the nights or weekends or work over time, um, or even have to hire one other person just to take on one extra client. And if you’re like most agency owners, you kind of get in this catch 22 of well I don’t have enough money to bring this person on and I would actually need another five to 10 clients for this role to actually be profitable. And that’s where we, I know for us started playing this game of well if we want to hit the revenue goals that we have, we just need to start hiring more people. And when I actually ran a numbers, I was building a traditional agency, like the ones that I have escaped in the past and that just wasn’t what I personally wanted. If that’s what you want, great. Most of the content on the channel probably is not going to be as helpful. But if you feel that there’s a way to serve more people without necessarily using more hours than trying to launch something new that is more productized or more packaged, more consultative, more coaching really can unlock another layer of revenue. And for us we did that very thing and we found that we were able to add, even in the beginning, early days of this like two, three, four clients a month into a, a more leveraged offering, like a productized service and even a coaching program that didn’t really require that many more hours. Again, cause we got five to 10 back from following our perfect week and we got to teach and we got to train and we got to work with people in a new way where it wasn’t just about our labor but it was about our knowledge. And that created a whole new level of excitement for us. The ability to advise a client and then them go to implement what you shared and they had a huge impact and a huge result and they came back and report that to you. Like there’s no, there’s so many levels of fulfillment, at least for me, and I know our clients that they get from those sorts of situations. It’s like paying it forward and helping others grow. And if all you’re ever doing is like being on the keyboard, helping your client tactically implement things that can get tiring. So adding in this new revenue stream that doesn’t require a lot more time but allows you to show up in a new way and challenge your brain and create new resources and tools for your clients, you’re going to spark something. Um, and at least I know a lot of our clients feel this way and we did too when we started doing it. So if you kind of just feel like you’re inside of your client’s business, think about how you can start maybe serving other clients in more of like a, an advisory or a training type role, showing them how to do what you’ve been doing for your clients over the years. And guess what? Some of you might be in a situation where there are other people just like you that want to learn from you and you might find the fulfillment in helping other people just like you. I used to own an agency. We did pretty well in the grand scheme of things, but I actually love teaching and training and helping other people. And so I found a whole lot more fulfillment in showing others what works for us. And this wasn’t the whole like, Hey, you know, I achieved, you know, one little layer of success. And I’m now teaching stuff that I’ve never accomplished. I only am teaching stuff that I’ve ever only ever achieved myself. Um, so I’m not like one of those gurus that whether you call me that or not, where like I’m teaching stuff that actually haven’t done myself. Like I don’t, I don’t play by that game. Like anything that I’m showing our clients how to do, we’ve done ourselves. And so if that’s like you, you’ll find again a whole new layer of fulfillment and excitement to show up each and every day because you’re going to unlock a new thing that you’re working towards, which is bettering your own brain and extracting all of that experience and knowledge and the skills that you’ve acquired over the years into bite size, consumable training that can help other people. And when you start seeing that actually work for you, again, you’ll start to your vision of what is possible will grow, which obviously will create a whole new level of excitement in and of itself. And we have a client, Chris, who’s been working with us for a little over two years now, who used to build just websites, used to build websites and still like we’ll build websites for churches and just got pulled into the, you know, building websites for churches thing like it’s just on repeat over and over and over again. And was getting really burnt out. And one of the things that he was really passionate about is helping these churches share their message with a larger audience using digital, using the online platform that they weren’t already doing. And as someone who used to be, it used to be a pastor, very tied to this community. Like it’s, it’s a mission for him to help these, these churches and his clients impact more people and connect with more people by harnessing technology and using social media and all of these things that he now teaches them how to do so that through his service he’s actually helping his clients reach so many more people with their message. And when he started doing that, he literally like the words came out of his mouth. I actually love what I’m doing again because I was just tired and burnt out of always just building a website and now I have a bigger mission. I have a bigger calling. And so if you’ve been exhausted and you feel like you’ve fallen out of love with the work in your agency, I think it’s time to revisit your vision and see, maybe explore some ways that you can kind of expand your vision to something bigger than what you are currently doing and ways that you could be doing that are one, restructuring how you spend and where you spend your time, packaging up the years of experience that you have into products and coaching and advisory and training that can help other people grow. That won’t be tied to your time for money. And I think you’re going to start to see a whole new way to look at your agency and look at your business that’s going to get you excited again. So I know this wasn’t a super tactical training, but a message that I really believe is important right now for people that serve others and have kept their own ability to grow because of how tactical and entrenches they are. Like many of our clients. So if you’re in, if you’re in this space and you’re looking to expand in new ways and get excited about work, again, leave a comment below and we’d be happy to chat with you and see if we can help. Until then, we’ll see you in the next video.
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