Why you are stressed in your agency – and how to fix it

Why you are stressed in your agency – and how to fix it

Why you are stressed in your agency - and how to fix it

After working with many clients helping them to restructure and automate their agency, we can see a very clear pattern in stressed teams and owners.

Some of our clients come from +80-hour work weeks before they start working with us. That main sound fun when your name is Gary Vaynerchuk, but for most of us that is -only- stressful and can cause serious problems in all areas of life – friendships, relationship, health, finances,… all of that get impacted by an unbalanced, stressful life.

So, what is the cause of that all?

Most agencies owner simply have no clear structure in their business. That’s it. There is more often than I’d like to see it a total lack of any kind of structure, to be honest. But let’s break it apart:

Internal communication:

WhatsApp, Slack, Email, and Project Management, all combined. This is the most typical scenario. What does that mean in real life? Chaos. Everything is everywhere but nowhere.

External communication:

Clients call, write emails, text on WhatsApp, and maybe Slack. Not necessarily all of that, but mostly a mix. Again, chaos and stress.

Not clear service structure:

Often we see agencies having more variations of services than anyone could handle. They try to fill every cap instead of having a clear, efficient running agency machine.

No clear onboarding flows:

The client signed, what now? Save the PDF somewhere, ask for logos via email, have another few emails to find a time for the onboarding call, brief the team and somehow plan what happens next. Yeah,.. that’s pretty old-school ways of doing it and pretty stressful and time-consuming, too. Did you know you can automate all of that?

Project Management:

This is mostly more a concept than something that actually helps someone – at least until we come in – and it comes with the lack of service structure.

No automation, for anything:

There is so much one can automate. Our clients spend literally 0 minutes onboarding new clients. The automation does the work. It creates the Drive Folder, uploads the PDF, creates the Time Tracking, sends the client the onboarding form, uploads its logos in the right drive folder, creates the project management – and then, as the last step, informs the team about the finished onboarding. Did I mention that the client also books the onboarding call itself?

Now that we covered that,..

How can you fix your agency and free up your valuable time?

Simple

Get in contact with us, and we’ll help you skip the years of a learning curve.

Hard

1. Get a birds-eye view of your business. Understand what your business is about and what your customers care about. We don’t want to waste our time and energy on things they don’t care about.
2. Understand where you currently are and what tools you use. This is important since we want to build the business on a digital structure that is efficient and lasts. Make a list of every tool that you currently use.
3. Map your current services into flow charts. Create flowcharts of the services that you offer. Understand what actions happen when. This is essential for you and your team.
4. Understand where you are heading towards. Without a clear future vision in mind, it does not make sense to optimize anything. Would you like to have a 10 people office or travel the world? This will clearly make a difference in your structure.
5. Build an efficient Project Management. Now it becomes a little more interesting. With the flow charts from step 3, we want to create a project management structure that makes sense. We want to create a flow of things, not projects. If you have 5 web design clients that are not 5 separate projects in your project management – it is one project “web design” with 5 clients at different stages. This is key. (Reach out and I’ll explain you further what the difference is)
6. Automate, everything you can! You would be surprised how much you can automate. We literally made half of our team jobless once after restructuring and automating a big part of our business. (Don’t worry, we found new work).  
Of course, this is a little more complex than it seems (if you try it on your own), but it will transform your life.

We know because our clients told us:

“Workflowed was our best investment!” – 5*
“Working with Fabio and his team has changed our lives!” – 5*
“Workflowed revolutionized our business” – 5* 

“[…] saves our team an average 8 hours of work per week per person. That’s BIG and the main factor behind our developments as a company over the last 6 months.” -5*

If you feel like having a chat, feel free to reach out.

Fabio