A “Full” Agency Isn’t Good

I hate to break it to you, but having a full agency is nothing to celebrate. It's not going to really help you. And I'm going to break down why that is the situation for most small agency owners in this video. So let's just jump right in ...

Walking back,

Greg Hickman here with all agency@allagency.com. And in this video, like I said, I want to talk about this notion of client capacity and why having your agency kind of full max capacity is not that great for you and what you can do about it. So, uh, before we jump in, so we're going to be jumping into the iPad if you're new here. Welcome. Uh, we just recently crossed the 5,000 subscriber Mark, and we are on our way, my friends trying to get to that 25 K Mark. So if you're new here, uh, welcome, make sure you click that subscribe button because we release a new video every Thursday. And if you've been here and helped us cross that 5,000 Mark, thank you so much. We really appreciate your participation in your comments. Say hello in the comment section below. And I also put together a free training for you linked up below, it's called the agency prototype.

It is a workbook and training that you can go through. I'll walk you through how to use it. And it is really the first few steps that we take any of our new clients through that want to productize their service, add on a coaching program or design a two day workshop, essentially start to get paid for their thinking. And they want to design what that offer is going to look like and include. So click the link below. You can download that workbook with a walkthrough training, uh, right there below. So I hope you enjoy that. All right. So here's the deal. Here's why having a full calendar and, or not full calendar, a full client load is not always the best thing. So here's the deal yet we have on this graph, the number of clients across the bottom right here. And we have revenue obviously here.

So obviously as we get, you know, each and every new client, our revenue should grow, but here's the deal. We reach this point. We'll just put it right here. And so lemme change the color of this wonderful point. We'll make it gray. We reached this point, that is the capacity ceiling. And I want to give a shout out to my pal, Yuri Elkaim. Um, he actually drew a graph like this for, uh, in one of his Instagram stories and I'm kind of adding to it and modifying it. So check him out. Um, he's actually at Healthpreneur on Instagram. So he drew this graph and he was talking about it from his clients because he works with health practitioners. Now, you, you hit this point where we have this client capacity ceiling, where we obviously have a specific number of clients. That number might be unique for you. Um, each and every one of you might be 10 for some of you might be 20 for others might be 50 for others, but we all have this point where you max out your revenue and the number of clients you can actually handle. But the problem is that there is this whole section over here, which is really people that you can't actually help or serve because you don't have the bandwidth, right. And then there's over here lost revenue.

So we're missing a lot of opportunity above this line and kind of over in this yellow zone over here. So how do we capitalize on that? Well, first I want to address why this is a problem in the first place. So what I've noticed and my view on this is coming from the fact that in this last year alone, we've worked with about 150 agency owners, helping them prioritize their business streamline. And in the last handful of years, we've now served about 350 of them. So I'm talking about those people, as well as the thousands that we talk to each and every quarter that are inquiring about our services. Now, what I've found is that when you have this kind of revenue up here, most agencies, unfortunately run really high, have really high overhead. They don't have a really great profit margins and their costs.

Doesn't give them a lot of room. And also with the number of clients, they have their bandwidth. So like let's say that this purple line here is now looking at the, you know, the expenses and this other line is the bandwidth. You don't really have much bandwidth. And sometimes guys, unfortunately, you're maxed out and you're working overtime. And this, this bandwidth line is more over here and you're working overtime, you're working nights, you're working weekends and you really don't have that much left to show for it. You kind of have this, this section where you're like maybe making a tiny bit of money. And again, we talked to so many agency owners, creative service professionals that they're, in some cases, losing money on some clients, yet they have no more bandwidth to take on the newer profitable ones. Well, this leaves us in sort of a predicament where how do we grow?

Because we're at this point where we can't take on more, we're maxed out. We're not even making enough money to pay ourselves what we want to be making and hit the targets that we have. This is why at all agency, we talk about expanding your revenue streams beyond just selling your time for money. Many of you watching have kind of a core service, but your core service has really just done for you. Anytime you get a client it's custom work. Well, what we want to help you do is add on a new revenue stream and look at the body of work that you've done over the last few years and focus on solving a specific problem for a specific type of person, ideally within your existing clientele, that you can package up into an end-to-end experience. That could be a workshop that could be training.

It could be an online course. It could be a group coaching consulting program. We can help you extract that out of your brain and add a new revenue stream that will allow you to take on clients with out adding tons more hours that doesn't require you, uh, or at least a lot of you, uh, to show up for fulfillment. I'm talking, you know, maybe four to eight hours a week of fulfillment, whether you have one client or 30. And so imagine that you can spend four hours a week in fulfillment for serving 30, 30 people. When your done for you services could only maybe max out at like 10 or 12. Now you have two ways to make money. This group experience, this leverage offering and your done for you services. It gives you more options and having more options, especially as we go into the new year 20, 21, you don't want to only be stuck making money.

One way we saw it all this past year in 2020 with COVID where people pull back on labor, but they still need to grow their business. So they still need help. And that's where getting paid for your thinking really starts to help. So if you are in a situation where, you know, you've been celebrating, Oh, like, or we don't have any room, we're at max capacity, but inside you are not satisfied with the money you're taking home or the hours you're working, something needs to change. And that's fundamentally your business model is broken. Your economics of your business model are broken. So we want to change that. And again, we went through this, I know it stinks. And the way we got out of it outside of, you know, raising our, even raising our rates only helped a little bit. We needed to start getting paid for things that didn't require adding more hours.

And that's where things really started changing for us. And I think it can change for you. So if this sounds interesting, again, check out that workbook below this video, the agency, prioritizer, it's going to get your brain working on how you can get paid for your thinking so that we can break that ceiling on the number of clients we can serve. And we actually start thriving because we're able to serve more people over here and have massive impact and capitalize on all this loss of revenue that we are going to be, uh, that we've been missing all this time by only selling our time and our labor. So I hope you enjoyed this video, catch you in the next one. We'll see you soon.



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