Full Service Agency vs. Specialist

What's good everybody. Greg Hickman here with all agency@allagency.com and in this video I want to break down why being a full service generalist agency is basically like being in quicksand and or handcuffing your own growth and at the end of this video I want to share a one page worksheet that if you work through it you'll actually go from generalist agency into becoming a specialist. Let's just jump right in. If you are an agency owner and you want to grow but you sort of feel like you don't have the bandwidth or your, your growth potential is capped, you might want to look to see if you are trying to do too much. Now most agencies that we work with typically come to us as a generalist and again that's one of the reasons why they are capped for growth and I want to kind of flip this on a on a different angle for you so that you can kind of look at why you might want to be a specialist and why your prospects are going to want a specialist as well....

If you go to the doctor and you find out that you need brain surgery, are you going to want to go to the general surgeon who operates on hips, knees, wrists, elbows, and all of that stuff? Or are you going to want to work with the person that's done thousands of brain surgeries? I'm pretty sure you're going to want to work with a brain surgeon and guess what? Not only is that going to be more beneficial for you, but likely it's going to be more expensive. So as you specialize within a particular type of skillset, so general surgery, brain surgery, heart surgery, the value that you create and the, the price that you're able to charge will go up. So as you specialize, you can charge more typically because you are solving more valuable problems. Again, brain surgeon or general surgeon, what are you going to want to work with if you need to operate on your brain?

So how does that play into your own agency? Well, one of the things that I find really interesting for agency owners is the fact that they, they do a lot of things manually and they don't have systems and they can't harness automation. They have an automated lead generation or systemize their fulfillment so they can serve as many clients as possible. And usually that that comes from being a generalist or a full service agency. And so I want to diagram this for you so that you can kind of paint a picture. So as a generalist, what typically it ends up looking like is you have a client that comes in the door and you're going to do some form of audit. I know a lot of people do that, whether it's a free audit or a paid audit doesn't really matter. And based on that audit, you're going to go in one of many directions. And within each of those directions there is going to be work that needs to be done. And what happens with the generalist agency, and we'll even add a little extra unit of work over here. What happens with a generalist agency is that you do the audit and you find out what the actual problem is and usually there is one of a variety of problems that you end up solving. And so they come in and whatever the problem is, the work that you do is unique.

So every single time you are solving a different problem, it gets really difficult to get good at any one thing when the one thing that you're doing is different every single time. It's like hitting a moving target. And so this is always going to be harder to scale because you're never going to do the same thing really more than once. That will allow you to automate and systemize it and make you more efficient. So you're constantly working hard every single time because you're solving a unique problem every single time. Whereas if you're a specialist, your client comes in and you already know what problem they have. You're not using an audit to figure out the problem. They come in and you already know and you say, here's my a to Z plan. Let's get started. And they say, yes, I want to get started and you're going to move forward and maybe the first client you have to do some hard work, but then every other client moving forward actually will benefit because you're going to be moving this.

The next client that comes to you, you're going to say, Hey, I got this a to Z system. Do you need help? Do you want to solve that problem? And they're going to say yes and they're going to go through the exact same process. You're not reinventing the wheel over time. What ends up happening is when you're a generalist, when you're a generalist, you're constantly working hard. Every single work, every single unit of work is, is unique, right? Every single unit of work is unique and it gets really laborious, but as a specialist you actually end up saying, Hey, I'm going to solve this specific problem. And it's more like, it's more like a funnel, right? You're taking people through a specific step by step process and you get to control the entire experience because you already have

a predefined problem. You know what, you're solving a predefined solution with a predefined scope of work so you're not reinventing the wheel every single time. Guess what happens when you solve the same problem over and over and over and over again. You become really good at it, which is going to make people want to come to you to solve that problem and it's going to allow you to raise your prices because you will be in more demand. And when you saw the same problem over and over again, more likely than not, you're going to get really good at solving that problem, which means you're going to become a better and faster and efficient and in doing so, you're going to become more profitable with each and every client that you serve. Whereas really over in generalist world, you are just doing the same thing with every single client, with every single client.

That's what's going to end up happening and you're never going to gain, sorry. You're never going to gain the efficiencies from solving the same problem more than once. So I highly encourage you, if you're an agency owner to become a specialist inside of your world, serving one problem that has a predefined solution with a predefined scope of, of deliverables. Ideally that's delivered in a fixed timeframe, right? So I want to help you. Below this video, there is a link to download a worksheet that is the beginning stages of how to unpack your generalist process and brain and run it through a framework so that you can actually start packaging up your process to become a specialist. Because right now, my friends, the opportunity for agencies to grow is for you to specialize, get really good at what you do. So people are coming to you and you have a playbook on how to solve the problem, which is going to allow you to automate things faster, lighter to remove yourself from the fulfillment, remove yourself from the sales and really start to watch your profits rise while your work hours go down. If that sounds good, click the link below this video, download that worksheet, and I'll see you guys in the next video.