Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hey, gang. So in this episode of the Agency Hour podcast, we're going to take a slight deviation from usual programming. There is no guest on this episode. It is just me and you hanging out together, talking about something that is very dear to my heart and hopefully will have a huge impact on your agency and the way that you acquire client clients and the way that you manage them and the way that you get clients great results. What I'm going to do is walk you through a concept, and then I'm going to show you how we use this concept here at Agency Mavericks. And hopefully this also will give you a very clear understanding about exactly what it is we do here at Agency Mavericks and how we help our agency owners grow in our various programs. One of the things we don't do a lot of here on the podcast is talk about the products and the services and the programs and the coaching programs and the mastermind that we have for agency clients. And so this is a way of just kind of getting that conversation out of the way and saying it once so that we can point back to it in the future. But also there's a methodology and a framework here that you can adopt for your agency. And so what I want to do is just set the scene for you before we dive into how we use this.
[00:01:16] The challenge, I think, with most of us who are in the agency or coaching or consulting or service based business space, is that if we don't have a way of communicating to our clients what it is we do, we end up just being a commodity. So if you think about any service based business, whether you're an accountant, a financial planner, a coach, an agency, a copywriter, a web designer, SEO, some kind of growth consultant, some kind of change management consultant if you don't have a unique way of talking about what it is you do. Then you're just competing on price. Or you're just using your own personal relationships and professional network to bring clients in. Which works to a point. But I think certainly in our experience, it's really helped us have a unique way of talking about what it is we do. And so the framework that you can adopt to break this down and you might want to make some notes about this or revisit the recording when you can make some notes, if you're listening to this in the gym or taking the dog for a walk or you're on the treadmill, just come back to this and make some notes in the future. The framework that we've adopted and that really works, is that we have what I call the three pillars of transformation.
[00:02:30] So what are the three big pillars that you use to help your clients transform some kind of result?
[00:02:40] Let's say you are in the web design digital marketing space so that you build websites for clients and that you might do some social media management and maybe some ad management for your clients or maybe some SEO. Well, the three big buckets really, that you are in the business of there is building trust, helping your clients build trust by having a really well designed, well thought out, easy to use, easy to navigate website.
[00:03:07] You're then in the business of driving traffic to that website, and you're then in the business of converting that traffic into leads and clients. So for example, your three pillars of transformation might be trust traffic conversion.
[00:03:24] If you're a business coach, which is kind of our business model here, your pillars of transformation might be helping your sorry. If you're a sales coach, let's start with a narrow scope here. If you're a sales coach, your pillars of transformation might be getting your sales process dialed in for your clients, getting your salespeople up to scratch, and then measuring the performance of your sales team to make sure they're hitting KPIs. So you could break your three pillars of transformation into people process performance.
[00:03:56] Our agency GPS scorecard is the way that we communicate our pillars of transformation. And at a rudimentary level, what we help our clients with is sales and marketing team and operations. The way that we talk about that is we help our agency clients grow their authority. That's the number one pillar of transformation.
[00:04:21] The second pillar of transformation is we help them package their IP. I'll talk about more of these in detail. And the third one is we help them scale their impact. So they're the three big pillars of transformation. Now, if I just say to you, if you're an agency owner, we can help you grow your authority, package your IP, and scale your impact. You might not understand why they're important and why you should be paying attention to those three pillars of transformation. So before I dive in to the details and what I call the stepping stones within those pillars of transformation, I want to talk about a tactical thing that you can do and a communication piece that you can use that encourages your prospects and your existing clients to pay attention and give some attention and focus to your pillars of transformation. And what I'm talking about here is the consequences of inaction. So, for example, if I say to you, if you're an agency owner and we can help you grow your authority, one of the first things I might say is, you don't need to grow your authority. You might feel like you have enough authority in your space, and that's fine. You might be living off referrals and word of mouth, and that's fine. And that's a good place to start. And referrals are great until they're not. And in my experience, they always dry up and they always run out at some point. So if you're not actively growing your authority, you may end up in a position from my experience coaching thousands of agencies over the last eleven or twelve years, you might end up in a position where the demand for what it is you and your agency do decreases to the point where you don't have constant leads coming into your sales pipeline. So if you're just relying on referrals, you're vulnerable because you have no control over that channel. And if you're not actively growing your authority if you don't do that then there is a high chance that eventually there'll be no demand for what it is that you do. So that's the consequence of inaction, right?
[00:06:24] If you are in the web design, traffic and conversion space that we spoke about before, you might say to a client we can definitely build a website that builds a lot of trust with your audience online. But then if you don't pay attention to the traffic piece you'll have this beautiful website that nobody visits and it will essentially be a sunk cost and you won't get a return on investment because we're not actively driving traffic. So you need to be driving traffic and then once you're driving traffic you need to pay attention to the conversions and we need to optimize the experience on the website to make sure that traffic converts into leads or clients or recruits or donors or whatever it is we're trying to convert them into.
[00:07:01] So first thing is to map out your pillars of transformation. The second thing is to dial in the consequences of inaction. If you don't do Pillar of Transformation number one, this is what happens. So in our world, Pillar of Transformation number one is to grow your authority. If you don't do that, there's no demand for your services. The second pillar of transformation for us is to package your IP. And if you don't do that then you're in the client services business. And unfortunately there's not a lot of leverage in the client services business.
[00:07:33] You're producing custom bespoke services for every client who walks in the door. There's no leverage in that business model. It's very hard to scale. And also as you do scale, your margins get squeezed because you end up just throwing more people at the problem because that's the nature of client services. You're essentially in the labor rental business and it's a horrible business model to be in. So you need to package your IP, which essentially means turning your services into products. The third pillar of transformation that we have is to help you scale your impact which is all about automation, team and processes. And if you don't do that, let's say that you've grown your authority. There's demand for what it is you do. You've packaged your IP so you've got these great products that you can offer. But then you don't scale through automation, team and playbook. Then there's no freedom in your business. You're going to end up being the one that does all the things. You'll be answering customer support tickets, you're onboarding clients, you're doing the delivery of the product, you're setting dashboards up for clients, you're reporting, you're managing client expectations, there's no freedom, and essentially you've got a job. So that's the consequence of inaction there. Does that make sense? Now, I know this is a lot and I know you're probably thinking, wow, how am I going to remember all this? It's okay. We're going to put a link under this video where you can download a PDF. It's our agency GPS scorecard and you can reverse engineer what I'm talking about and you can see how we've applied it. I believe even somewhere there might be the consequences of inaction listed in there. If not, we'll put a link to a second PDF, which is our agency GPS model. And the agency GPS model definitely has the consequences of inaction in it. And then you can see the scorecard and you can see how the two pieces of information play together. So the agency GPS model explains the concepts and then the scorecard gives you an opportunity to rate yourself against those various parts of the business. And also by the time this podcast goes live, there should be a digital version of the scorecard available where you can just go and answer a bunch of questions and give yourself a score based on the nine areas of the business that I'm going to talk about in a moment. And that should be at Gameplan Agencymaverics.com. So you'll get a personalized scorecard and a personalized game plan telling you exactly what you should do next to improve those parts of your business.
[00:09:51] Now, I mentioned three pillars of transformation, but I just talked about nine parts of the business. What am I talking about? What's the disconnect there? So within the pillars of transformation, we have what are called stepping stones. What are the small tasks or the small projects that someone can do in order to grow their authority package, their IP scale their impact? Or in your case, what are the three stepping stones someone can do to drive traffic to their website? It could be social media management, SEO, and paid ads. And what are the three stepping stones or three small projects they can bite off in order to improve conversions? Could be a whole range of things.
[00:10:32] So within each pillar of transformation, we have three stepping stones. So I'm just going to walk you through our stepping stones and the criteria for each of them for two reasons. One, so that as an agency owner, you can hear this and think to yourself, okay, over the next 30 days, I'm just going to bite off that one small chunk and focus on that because that's going to improve this particular part of the business that I need improving. But also so that you can see the framework that we're using here and start to understand how to apply it to your clients. If you get this dialed in, you really are operating in a blue ocean because no one can compete with you. No one else has an Agency GPS scorecard. If they do, they've completely ripped us off and copied us because we've had this for about five years now. And it's our intellectual property. It's our proprietary framework that we've spent a lot of time and a lot of money with consultants helping us develop this. And no one can compete with us. As I said, if they do, then they're a poor copy. And so all of a sudden, we're no longer just a business coaching company for agencies. We have the agency GPS model and the Agency GPS scorecard that people can engage with. And that's our proprietary framework.
[00:11:42] So within our first pillar of transformation, grow your authority. There are three things. There are three projects, if you like. We call them levers. There are three levers that you can pull in order to grow your authority. We call them expand reach. That literally means getting in front of more people and growing your digital Rolodex. Increase Influence literally means being seen as the go to expert by the people in your audience. So there's no point growing your digital Rolodex or your email subscriber list or your social media following if people don't see you as a trusted authority and an expert.
[00:12:19] And the third one is what we call upgrade your onramp, which is a fancy way of saying improve your sales process. So now we have this audience who trust us and see us as the expert. What's the process for turning that audience into paying clients? Okay, I'm going to give you some action steps in a moment that you can start to do right now that will help you expand your reach, increase your influence, and upgrade your onramp. And here's the thing. If you have an ever growing audience, our audience grows. Every single day. Every single day we have people joining our Facebook group. Every single day we have people opting into our email list for a free download. Every single day we have people watching our YouTube videos. Every single day we have people connecting with us on LinkedIn. So every single day of the year, whether I'm awake or asleep or on holidays or playing guitar or sitting in the hot tub, our audience is growing because it is systemized. We then are doing everything we can to grow our influence with that audience. So we are producing podcasts like this. We're producing YouTube videos, we are producing blog content. We are going on other people's podcasts. We are doing everything to increase the influence that we have over that audience. And then we have a sales process. We have a sales team and we have documentation and an entire sales process set up so that we can identify people in our audience who need our help. We have a conversation with them and onboard them into the right program, and that is systemized and driven by people. So I'm no longer involved in that. All I do is create the content. Okay, the second pillar of transformation, now that we have leads coming in and prospects to talk to and people converting into clients, the second part of our model is to package your IP.
[00:14:07] And the reason that we do this is, as I mentioned before, so that you're not selling custom bespoke services to everyone who walks in the door, because that's a business model that's impossible to scale. And so the three levers that you can pull to start a package or IP is the first one is to ignite your fire starters. And a fire starter is a diagnostic audit based product that you use to help a client understand what's on fire in their business. In other words, what's broken, what's missing, what needs work. It doesn't fix anything, right? Paid Discovery is a great example of a fire starter. A web audit is a great example of a fire starter. An SEO audit, great example of a fire starter. Once we're selling fire starters to help our clients understand what needs attention, the next lever we can pull is to what we call activate your accelerators. And I know these are kind of cheesy names, but the reason that we use these names is so that our clients and our coaches and our whole team here, our whole ecosystem, are talking the same language and can remember them. So when we're on coaching calls or in our squadron calls, or at our live events, and one of our clients puts their hands up and says, hey, I'm trying to activate my accelerators. And the challenge is this everyone in the room knows exactly what they're talking about. And accelerators are individual products that solve individual problems. And I'll give you some examples. Designing a brand style guide for a client in Canva is an accelerator. It solves one problem, which is brand consistency across multiple channels, and giving the whole team access to the brand assets in one place. Doing topic cluster research and presenting a report to a client on all the different keywords that they should be going after is an accelerator. It solves one piece of the problem. In fact, I would even argue that could be a fire starter, because it doesn't actually fix anything. It just highlights an opportunity or a problem.
[00:15:59] Doing some on page SEO and fixing the website. From a technical SEO point of view, that's an accelerator, right? Setting up a new landing page and driving ads to a new landing page for a new offer, that's an accelerator. It solves one problem. Accelerators good. Accelerators solve a problem, but then highlight the next problem. So driving traffic to a website from SEO or paid ads is an accelerator. Getting that website performing really well, loading fast, and then converting is a separate product. Okay?
[00:16:30] So that's the concept of an accelerator. It solves one problem and usually highlights the next problem. The third lever that you can pull within packaging your IP is to create your signature system. And your signature system is the sum total of everything that you do for your clients, including your fire starters, including your accelerators, and wrapping it up in some kind of unique framework or technology that really allows you to stand apart from your competitors. So, no prize for working this out, but our agency GPS model is our signature system. I know it's a bit meta, but that's how it works. Okay, again, I'm going to give you some very practical things that you can do in the next 30 days to keep you focused, to start moving each of these needles, and to start working on each part of the business. I will just caution you though, don't try and do all of this at once. Bite off the one thing that you think is going to give you the best bang for your buck or the best return on effort over the next 30 days and just focus on that. And again, if you go through our scorecard, that will help you figure out what you should do next.
[00:17:36] Okay, now, we are growing our authority, and we have an increased demand for what it is we do. We've packaged our IP so that we have some leverage in the business model. The next thing we need to do is to scale our impact. And the three levers that you can pull in order to scale your impact is to automate your intelligence. And what that means is to automate the way that information flows in, through, and out of the business.
[00:18:02] So collecting content from clients, giving client status updates, producing content for clients, producing content for your own marketing, automating the Notetaking on zoom calls, using any of the AI tools that are available right now to improve efficiencies. So automating the way that information flows within the agency, into the agency, and out of the agency is automating intelligence. The second lever within scale your impact is to elevate your team. And what that means is to make sure that your team are making their highest contribution or hire more people if they're at capacity. By the way, if you are wanting to elevate your team, but you are overwhelmed by all of the tasks that you need to deliver for clients, then you might want to check out E Two M Solutions. I'm going to put a link underneath it's. E two msolutions.com agencymaverics. These guys are the exclusive sponsor of our podcast. They are also very good friends of ours. They run an incredible white label development team based out of India. They have 180 staff in a state of the art building that they have there where they're all working together. They are delivering websites. They are doing SEO plans for our clients clients. So our clients are using those guys as a white label resource, I've heard nothing but good feedback, and I strongly suggest that you check out Etwem Solutions as a way of giving you extra capacity so you can free up your time and start working on the business. Okay? They may be a long term solution. They may just be a short term solution to plug a gap. You might find that it makes sense to work with them long term, which I know some of our clients are, and if so, that's great. As I said, it might just be a short term thing until you can hire your own team members. But if you are just stuck on the treadmill and you don't have time to work on the business, reach out to Manish and the team at E Two M Solutions and get some help. Etomsolutions.com agency, Mavericks. And the third lever is to write your playbook, and that is to document your processes and write the playbook of how we run the agency here so that you can step away and know that your team are going to make the same decision and deliver value and treat your clients the way you would if you were in the building. But now you no longer have to be in the building because you've written the playbook. And I'll give you a hint your team and some AI tools are the best option for you to write the playbook. The biggest mistake I see agency owners making is not hiring people quick enough because they haven't got their processes ready. And you'll never have your processes ready to hire people because you're one person. It's impossible from a time point of view, but also from a skill set point of view. You are not the best person to document how you project manage in the agency, unless you are a very good project manager, in which case you probably don't need to hire someone. You should hire someone to do sales and you should be the project manager. Or you should hire someone to do development or social media management, or ad management, and you should be the project manager. If you are not a great project manager and you want to hire someone to come in, please don't document your process and then try and train them how to do your process. Bring someone in who's got a process and have them document their process for your agency. It's the fastest way to get your playbook written is to have your team do it for you and encourage your team to leverage AI tools to help them. Okay, I know that's a lot, but guess what? If you scale your impact now, you've got freedom. And we suggest that you do things in this order and that you can do these things in synergy so you can be growing your authority, packaging your IP, and scaling your impact all at the same time. Just don't try and pull all nine levers at once. Because you'll freak yourself out and you'll eventually get to a point where you want to go and get a job at Walmart because it's completely overwhelmed. Okay? So let me give you some practical things that you can do right now.
[00:21:54] And within our stepping stones, by the way, so we have nine stepping stones or nine levers that you can pull in order to achieve those things in the agency, right, there are three stepping stones or three levers within grow your authority, three within packager IP, and three within scale your impact. And within each of those we essentially have a beginner, intermediate, and advanced set of tactics that you can deploy to achieve those results. We call them cadet Pilot top Gun. And so I'm just going to give you some examples. Now in no particular order, I'm going to give you some examples of things that you can do right now to, to help you in each of these areas. Okay? You ready? This is kind of like the speed round, okay? If you need to expand your reach, in other words, if you just need to get in front of more people right now and you are a beginner and you're just starting out, the fastest way to do this is to build credibility in someone else's community. Free Facebook groups are probably the fastest place to start. Or you can join free Slack channels or free Discord communities or wherever LinkedIn communities. Find out where your target audience are hanging out. Find a community, an online community either in Circle or school or a free Facebook group, as I said, where your target audience are and just go and be super, super helpful in that community and build credibility. More advanced version of this is to own the community. So to have your own Facebook group or your own Circle community, okay? A more really advanced version of this is to have the largest and most engaged community in your niche. So to have the largest Facebook group for digital marketing, advice for home contractors and Tradies, one of our Mavericks has that or have a referral system where you incentivize referral partners to bring leads to you, so it's not accidental. You might even have a leaderboard in a competition. I know guys that give away prizes every quarter to the referral partner that gave them the most business. So being more intentional and more proactive about generating those referrals and not just waiting for them to happen.
[00:23:55] If you have an audience and you need to increase your influence and you are brand new and you are a beginner, then what you want to do is just make sure that your website is set up in a way that it positions you as an expert in your chosen niche. Fastest way to do that is not have an image gallery on your website of projects that you've worked on in the past, but turn each of those images into a case study, right? And the case study, very simple case study framework is why, what, how now, why did this client start working with us? What did we do? How did we go about doing it? And now look at the results. That's a transformative story. You only need two or three of those on your website to add credibility. A more advanced version of this is that you might publish content on at least one primary channel every week, or usually three times a week. And that might be either your blog, a podcast, or a YouTube channel. A more advanced version would be to adopt the omnipresent approach, which is kind of where we're at now, where we're all over YouTube, Instagram, we have a podcast, we have blog posts, I'm guest speaking on other people's podcasts, I'm speaking on other people's stages. We're publishing multiple pieces of content to most platforms every day. That's an advanced kind of omnipresent approach, right? And what that's designed to do is position us as the authority in our niche. Again, if you're just starting out, make sure your website is credible and you have case studies and testimonials and social proof on your website. More advanced version is to start publishing content three times a week on either your blog podcast or your YouTube channel to help build authority. More advanced version is to do the omnipresent thing that we're doing now. And now once you've got that audience and you're building authority, you need to upgrade your onramp, you need to improve your sales process.
[00:25:40] The most rudimentary way of doing this is just to make sure that you've got a documented process for how you turn prospects into leads and leads into clients, right? So a prospect is someone out there who may be interested in what it is you do. A lead is someone who's put their hand up and said, yes, I want more information. And a client is someone who is paying you for an engagement and for you to help them solve a problem. So have some kind of documented process so that you know how to talk to prospects to turn them into leads. That's usually by giving away some kind of free resource and then how to turn leads into sales. And that's usually a pre qualifying call and then selling them paid discovery. A more advanced version of this would be having a sales pipeline set up. So using some sales pipeline software we use and recommend high level. Again, we'll put a link to that below this video. And yes, it is an affiliate link. And if you do use that affiliate link, you'll get a 30 day trial of high level instead of a 14 day trial. You'll also get our sales pipeline and automations hot loaded into your account. So you just have a ready made pipeline ready to go. You can start putting leads into it straight away. The link for that will be underneath this video. It's. Gohighlevel.com. Troy Dean the ultimate kind of top gun version of having a great sales process is having a sales manager or a team responsible for hitting sales targets so that you are actually no longer involved in the sales conversation, right? That's when you're really becoming a business owner and not just a technician working in your own business. So there are some very practical things you can do to start expanding your reach, increasing influence, and upgrading your onramp, all designed to help you grow your authority so that you have an ever increasing demand for what it is you do and that you're not accidentally just relying on referrals and word of mouth. All right, let's dive into packaging your IP. If you've never done this before, the first thing you want to do is have some kind of low risk entry product like a web audit or an SEO audit or a paid discovery.
[00:27:43] That is a no brainer for people to buy. Paid discovery is the absolute easiest one to dial in. We have a whole training called the paid discovery method. Again, we'll leave a link to that underneath this video. You can go check that out. We give you everything you need to run paid discovery sessions. We give you the workbooks, we give you the slide deck, we give you the scripts. We show you exactly how to sell paid discovery, and we show you exactly how to deliver paid discovery, and then we show you exactly how to turn those paid discovery clients into ongoing recurring revenue clients. In fact, most of our mavericks now are selling paid discovery for anywhere from 1200 to five grand for a paid discovery workshop and then converting 80% of those clients into ongoing recurring revenue clients. Simon Kelly, I think, at last count, has generated an additional $300,000 a year of revenue just by selling paid discovery workshops and then converting those clients into ongoing recurring revenue packages. More advanced version of Igniting your fire starters would be to have a low cost entry product that people can buy completely automated without even talking to you and without even needing any of your team to do anything. And that could be some kind of web audit or some kind of self diagnosis SEO audit.
[00:29:00] The ultimate advanced version of this is where your entry products like paid discovery automatically ascend your client to the next product. So where your fire starters are profitable, they're delivered in a way that takes very little time from you or your team, they're high value to your clients, and they automatically presell the next product, which will be an accelerator, right?
[00:29:24] Speaking of which, if you are looking at activating your accelerators and you are just starting off, then what you want to do is you just want to take one of your services and turn it into a product.
[00:29:38] Now, there's a whole other conversation we can have around growth plans, which is really your signature system and how to take all of your services and turn them into products. But just pick one. Social media management or ad management is a great example. Just taking one of those services and turn it into a product. And I'll tell you the difference between a product and a service. A product has very clear inclusions and exclusions. So when you buy a product from the shop, you can't customize it. It is a product, it's in a box. It is what it is. You buy it as is. Okay? So you want to think about the experience that your customer has. You want to think about the onboarding, the delivery and the reporting of ad management or social media management for example, or SEO, or conversion rate optimization, or copywriting or funnel optimization or email marketing or whatever it is you do.
[00:30:32] And document that process so that it includes everything that it needs to and nothing more. And the clients don't get to negotiate and say, well, we want to add this and we want to add this and we want to take out that this is what the product includes, this is how much it is. You buy it or you don't. Okay? A more advanced version of this is having team members who can profitably deliver that product without you being involved. So now you've got some leverage and some freedom. And the ultimate version of this is having a subscription based signature system or a growth plan where clients are spending five, 7812 thousand dollars a month for you to do everything for them that you do. And again, it's productized and templated. So it's not a custom service that you're delivering for each client that it's very standardized.
[00:31:24] Okay, talking about your signature system, if you have never done this before, the easiest way to get started with your signature system is just to document everything that you do for your clients and then kill off the it could be up to half of what you do. In fact, some people would argue that the 2080 rule. Look at the 20% that you do that delivers 80% of the value to your clients and that is super profitable for you and kill everything else off, right? We've done that systematically over the years. We've killed off most of our online courses that we sold on the website because for a whole bunch of reasons, we understand now that we get the most value, we deliver the most value and have the most impact and is the most profitable if we're working with our clients in a high touch, one on one coaching capacity. So that's really our business model these days. We've killed off a lot of the other stuff that we've done over the years. So write down everything that you do for your clients. Kill off what is not profitable and what doesn't add value, and just dial in the top services that you have that deliver value and are profitable and start to turn them into products.
[00:32:33] Then you want to understand how you can deliver those in a way that is unique or has some kind of unique framework or unique technology. I'm working with a client at the moment who's basically built out all these amazing automations in ClickUp and they install this in their clients business. As a machine, what is it that you've got that's unique that no one else can compete with, that you can turn into your signature system? And then the top gun version of this is that you have multiple pathways. So you might have a book, you might have an online course, and you might have done for you services. So people can read the book and do it themselves, or they can listen to your podcast and watch your YouTube videos and do it themselves. They can buy your online course and kind of have you show them how to do it, or they can hire you to do it for them, right? The more content that you give away for free in relation to your signature system, the more likely people are to want to come to you and hire you and pay you a premium to do it for them. Because it's the ultimate authority play. If you have a unique framework, it's kind of also why we're making this episode of the podcast, right? If you hadn't figured that out. Okay, now let's talk about the last part of our system, which is the scaling, your impact and the three levers here. The first one is to automate intelligence. Again, if you haven't done this before, you want to make sure that you are automating.
[00:33:56] The easiest way to start this is to automate reporting in at least one part of your business. So automate your marketing reports, automate your sales reports, automate your client reports. Use something like agency analytics to automate reporting to your clients if you're running marketing campaigns for your clients. Or use something like WP remote to automate the updating of all your clients websites if you're not already using something like that. A more advanced version of this, so a pilot version of this would be that you're automating client onboarding. So when a client signs on that you've got an automated process for getting everything you need from them rather than sitting on zoom for 90 minutes. And a more advanced version of this might be that you've got automated measurement of team performance and KPIs and automated team management processes. Okay? So I'm always looking as a business owner, I'm always looking at what we can automate on a tactical level and then how we can get the team to start automating things and now then how we can automate things to improve the performance of the team. So I'm constantly telling my team here to find AI tools to put themselves out of a job and then come to me and tell me how much spare time they have. And now we're having a valuable conversation because the most value, I think that our team and that your team has is the ability for them to sit and daydream and imagine and think of creative ways to help their clients design better products and do better marketing and use the robots to do everything else.
[00:35:23] The second lever that we have here in the scale your Impact pillar of Transformation is to elevate your team.
[00:35:32] The beginner's version here is just to design an.org chart outlining the key responsibilities within your business and what that chart needs to look like in twelve months time based on the expected growth that you are planning for in the business. A pilot version of this, it's kind of the intermediate version of this would be to have a system for recruiting onboarding and managing team members. If you don't have one of them, by the way, you should talk to us. We have an incredible recruitment system called the Team Accelerator. It is absolutely world class and almost bulletproof. That thing has helped so many agency owners hire their first or next team member. It's ridiculous. So if you want to have a chat to us about that, just reach out and have a conversation about Team Accelerator. And then the Top Gun version of this is that you have leadership team responsible for each of the key areas of your business sales, marketing, operations, finance and that they manage team members below them. Now, by the way, you don't have to get there if you don't want to, right? You don't have to build a team to a point where you have a leadership team managing the rest of the team. If you don't want to grow an agency that big, that's totally fine. But think about the Top Gun version for you, right? Maybe you've built a really strong and vibrant culture and you have a ready pool of candidates lining up to work with you. That would also be a Top Gun version of elevating your team so you no longer have to go looking for talent. That you've got people who are basically taking a number to come and work with you and you might only have an agency of three or four people and you got people who are dying to work with you because you've just built a great culture, right? You might have systems in place for reviewing performance and updating job scorecards every three months and maybe part of that's automated. So you don't need to grow a massive team in order to be successful is the message here. Okay? The final piece of this is to write the playbook and man, what a great time to be alive with all the AI tools available now, if I was starting an agency from scratch now, it wouldn't have taken me so long to get to where I did when I started out in 2007. We just didn't have access to this technology that we've got now. So please be leveraging AI and encourage your team to leverage AI to write your processes. If you're just starting out the number one standard operating procedure you need, by the way, if you don't know the acronym, it's SOP standard operating Procedure. That is the standard way that we do things here. The number one SOP that you need to have in your agency is the SOP for creating SOPs.
[00:38:02] It is a document, it's a template for creating SOPs, and you basically train your team, hey, this is how we create SOPs. Now we're going all in, or we have gone all in on Notion for our documentation. And so in Notion, we have a template for creating SOPs, and everyone in the team knows when you're creating an SOP, follow that template. Okay, that's the beginner version. The more intermediate version here is that you have a system in place to ensure that your SOPs get used and improved and reviewed every three months. Again, in Notion, or if you're using ClickUp, you can just set a reminder for the author of that SOP to go and review it every three months and make sure that it's still relevant. And if it's not, kill it off, change it, archive it, update it, whatever they need to do.
[00:38:46] The Top Gun version of this is that you have turned all of your SOPs into a master Playbook, which you either sell to clients who can't afford to hire you for done for you services. That's a great play, by the way. Hey, here are all the Playbooks that we use to help our clients. You're not in a position to hire us right now because you're just not there. You just can't afford to pay our fees, but we can license you our Playbooks so that you can use the exact same frameworks that we use with our clients. It's a fancy way of saying here are our playbooks in an online course. But we license those frameworks and you sell those to clients who can't afford to hire you. And you give those playbooks to your VIP clients who do hire you for done for you services so they know that you've got processes that you're following. And they can also in the future, they can look to take that in house and manage some of that themselves. So that's, again, just another example of when you get to Top Gun level, how do we think about building the ultimate leverage and the ultimate freedom into the business?
[00:39:50] All right, that's a lot, man.
[00:39:53] I get it. That's a lot. I just gave you a lot of stuff. A lot of concepts, a lot of theories, a lot of tactics, a lot of strategies, and your head's probably spinning. You probably feel like you want to go and throw up somewhere because you're just overwhelmed with information. So here's what I want you to do. Below this video, there should be a link to just go and download the agency GPS model. It's a PDF. Download it, have a look at it, get your head around it, understand it conceptually. Then go to Gameplan Agencymavricks.com, go through our scorecard. You just answer some questions. It's very easy to do. You're just clicking buttons on a screen. It takes less than two minutes. And then at the end of that, you put in your name and your email address, and you'll be given a personalized scorecard and a personalized game plan. We will email you a very detailed PDF with the exact action steps that you should take next to improve your scorecard based on the answers that you give us. So as much as I've given you a lot right now, what I want you to do is stay focused on the next thing you should do in the next 714 30 days to actually move the needle, get some return on effort. Then you can come back to the scorecard and improve the next part of the business. Don't try and improve all parts of the business at once. It's impossible, and you'll hurt yourself. Okay? Just eat the elephant one bite at a time. And look at the way that we've packaged this up and reverse engineer it and say, ask yourself, what are my pillars of transformation? What are the three big buckets that I help my clients with? And then what are the smaller stepping stones within each of those buckets? That my clients kind of the milestones that they need to hit in order to achieve the pillars of transformation. And then what are the questions I need to ask my client in order for them to diagnose themselves in a scorecard? And how can I take that and plug it into my fire starters, my accelerators, and my signature system? Okay, I hope this has been helpful. I feel like I just wanted to get this off my chest and lay it all out and let you guys know how we work. If at any point you just know that working with us is the right thing for you and that you want some one on one coaching and you want us to help you get all of this dialed into your business, then just click the link somewhere near this video book a call to have a quick chat with our team. It's not a sales conversation. We just want to see if you're a good fit. If you are, we'll let you know what working with us looks like if you're not a good fit. And the truth is, most people who we talk to are not a good fit. So we can't help everyone. If you're not a good fit, we'll let you know why and we'll point you in the right direction. But if you are a good fit, then we'll let you know working with us looks like. Okay, I'd love to hear your comments and your thoughts and your feedback. Leave me some comments here so we can keep the conversation going. I hope this has been helpful. Go check out the resources. Take massive, imperfect action. Don't overthink it. Just keep nudging forward, keep chipping away. Realize it's a marathon, it's not a sprint. And let us know how we can help. Have a great.
