How to Grow Your Digital Agency Year Over Year

Are you knee deep in doing everything in the business? Would you like your current role to morph into this?

• Being the front facing person of the agency.
• Determining and communicating the vision of the agency.
• Creating growth strategies.
• Measuring the revenue and profit.
• Developing key strategic relationships.
• Executive coaching for vice presidents.
• Be able to leave on a 3 month vacation and the business be fine.

This is how the successful agencies are setup at the top. What would happen if you stepped away from your agency for 3 months? Would you be coming back to a sh*t storm or would it be business as usual?

For years I was deep into the business and not really able to be strategic and grow the agency. I was doing tons of tasks that did not provide big enough impact to justify. Once I decided that the above list was what needed to happen, I quickly converted my role within 6 months.

I will warn you that once you achieve success in this area and convert your role to this; you might be depressed at first. I was.

I came into the office one day and wanted to help on a pitch and my team said they could handle it and didn’t need me. I then went to my project team and started talking strategy and they said they had it covered and they didn’t need me. Huh….  I was irrelevant and not needed which for the first time in my 8 year career was hard to take.

I then stepped back and realized that since I started the process and communicated to the team what needed to happen for us to grow they understood my role better than I did at that point of time. They knew my time was better spent on the above list rather than in the weeds. I setup a great team and process that could run without me and in most cases better on the day to day operations. FREEDOM! This allowed me to step away, and the business would still grow. It also allowed me to focus on where the market was going, rather than chasing the market. Within the year, we doubled revenue, then grew 75% the following year, and sold the agency a couple months later.

One thing you can do to start the process is the following:

1. Make a list of everything you do all week on a spreadsheet.
2. The next column over, put the amount of time spent doing the task.
3. Next, rank the task on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the most impact on growing the business.
4. Create another column of which employees could assist or take over the item.
5. This will give you a great snap shot of everything you do, the impact on the business and who can help.

This is just one thing that will start to build the bridge for you. If you would like to know more, reach out to me and I can help you.