When you first set up an agency, it’s with a full tank-load of enthusiasm, oodles of motivation and the desire to work every hour of the day to get a foothold in your marketplace.
But as you get more established, and your clients start to really value what you do, you’ll want to start working less and earning more. After all, you didn’t found your agency to grind yourself into the ground, did you?
1. Delegate: keep your team busy
As the business owner, creative director or MD, your job should always be about running the company, not getting bogged down in admin and everyday processes.
So ‘delegation’s what you need’ (a pop reference there for those of you old enough to remember Record Breakers!).
Delegating tasks is what good management is all about, after all – using your team effectively and keeping your time free for more strategic thinking.
2. Eradicate: ditch those tasks completely
But before you start delegating, you need to ask yourself whether the task in question is beneficial to the business in the first place. In other words, could you eradicate instead of delegate? Rather than add to someone else’s to-do list, can this task be eradicated altogether?
If you can cut down the number of tasks, remove the unnecessary actions and streamline all your processes, that’s going to free up time for you with one wave of your agency magic wand (yep, those do exist… ask next time you’re in the office and we’ll get you one. They’re in our store cupboard next to the tartan paint and the sky hooks.)
So, review those tasks and think about whether they’re totally necessary. And if they’re all vital, ask yourself whether they can be automated – which takes us neatly to point 3…
3. Automate: make tech do the hard work
Rather than delegating tasks to your team, why not see if technology can give you a helping hand. You can use apps and software to automate tasks that don’t need a human being to complete them.
Automation is great, because it swiftly and efficiently frees up hours, if not days, of time. You’ll get far more value-adding contribution from your people if they’re not bogged down with menial tasks.
Think about software tools that send out automatic email replies to sales leads or enquiries from potential clients; debtor tracking software that chases your outstanding invoices for you; or data management tools that scan in paperwork and remove the need for data entry completely.
Don’t weigh your team down with the tedious, time-consuming things. Let ‘Timmy Technology, the Time-Saving Robot’ do all the heavy lifting. And watch your time come flooding back – time you can spend bringing in new clients, banging out the creative work and watching your profits go whoosh in next month’s sales figures.
Project Simply: a tale from the agency coalface
Wondering if this whole ‘work less, earn more’ thingamabob actually works? Just ask Christian Hill of Project Simply, a client who’s applied this ideology to great effect.
Project Simply had grown into a successful digital agency, but Christian was still completing the quarterly VAT returns for the business himself. This led to mistakes being made, and just a general headache each quarter when the return became due (we might love tax returns, but we know most creatives would rather use Comic Sans than file a return).
Then we introduced Christian to Receipt Bank, the amazing way to scan in all your receipts and paperwork, and also agreed to complete and file the VAT returns for them.
By automating their purchase ledger and delegating VAT responsibility to us, Christian is now able to spend more time on business development and networking opportunities, and is working more on the business rather than in it!
Back of the net!
You can hear it straight from the horse’s mouth in this video with Christian (not that we’re likening him to a horse, you understand).
Free up time and focus on profits
More free time for you and your team means more time to focus on finding opportunities to drive quality of service and profitability through the roof. And aren’t they the reasons you went into business in the first place? It certainly wasn’t to be busy!
So, here’s your homework. Settle down at the back and get out your notebooks.
Write a list of all the tasks and actions your agency currently does. Do a bit of head-scratching for a bit. And then think about which of those tasks can be:
- Delegated
- Eradicated, or
- Automated.
At the end of this process, you’ll have a much shorter list. And the tasks left on that list are the only things that you, as the business owner, should be responsible for.
And with far less on your plate, you’ve got the time, the motivation and the clarity to get out there and start knocking some profits into the back of the net (just make sure you’ve got some WD40 handy for Timmy the Time-Saving Robot – he’s a hard worker, but he does tend to get squeaky if you work him too hard).
