Mat Bennett - Agency Advisor

The Oh Shit Document

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If you were suddenly out of the picture tomorrow, with no notice and no handover, could anyone else keep your agency alive until you were back? Not run it well. Just keep the lights on: pay people, chase the money, stop clients walking. For most owners the honest answer is no, and the fix is smaller than you’d think. It’s a single file I call the Oh Shit Document.

I’ve mentioned it for years, in emails, on podcasts, even in What breaks first, but never actually given it a home here. Which is a bit embarrassing for a document whose whole point is that the important stuff shouldn’t only live in your head. So here it is.

What is an Oh Shit Document?

The Oh Shit Document is a single file that one or two trusted people know about and can access if you’re suddenly out of the picture. Not a will, not a shareholders’ agreement, not a business continuity plan with an ISO number. Just the practical stuff someone would need to keep the lights on if you went incommunicado tomorrow: illness, accident, family crisis, or anything else life throws without an appointment.

Regular readers will know why this one isn’t theoretical for me. The full story is in What breaks first. The short version: when the worst arrives, it arrives with zero notice, and whatever isn’t written down and findable simply doesn’t exist.

Why you probably need one

In the last Agency Loop, we asked owners how confident they were that their agency could run without them for three months. Nearly half, 47%, said they weren’t. Only 22% felt confident.

And that wasn’t a one-off reading. It’s the third time in a year the same picture has surfaced through a different question: in mid-2025, half of owners weren’t confident in their long-term finances without a sale; at the end of 2025, roughly 1 in 5 were still personally delivering most of their agency’s revenue; and now nearly half say the business couldn’t run without them for a quarter. Different measures, but with the same structure underneath. Founder dependency is just how most small agencies are built.

The full fix for that, building a business that runs without you, takes years. It’s the deepest work I do with founders, and there’s no shortcut. But there’s a difference between the business can’t run without me and nobody can even keep it alive without me. The first is a structural problem you chip away at over time. The second is a single afternoon’s work you’ve been putting off. The Oh Shit Document fixes the second one.

What goes in it

The honest answer is: it depends on the size and shape of your business. That’s not a dodge. The data draws the line clearly. At one or two people, the founder essentially is the agency; by three to six, delivery starts moving to the team but the plumbing usually hasn’t. What breaks first is different at each stage, so the document is too.

If it’s just you, or nearly: this is mostly about money and access. Where the business accounts are and who can get into them. How your spouse or partner accesses funds if you can’t sign anything. Your password manager’s emergency access. Who to call, and what to tell them: accountant, biggest client, key supplier. What’s invoiced, what’s owed, what’s due out. Domain, hosting and email access so the business doesn’t go dark while you’re gone.

If you’ve got a small team: all of the above, plus the operational plumbing. Who runs payroll and how. This is the one I see fail first. Whether anyone else has signing authority on the bank account, and if not, why not? A short map of clients: who owns each relationship, what’s live, what’s promised. And a line on what the team gets told, and by whom, so nobody’s improvising a message while worrying about you.

If you’re bigger: the questions get more formal. Who acts as MD in your absence, and do they know it. Banking mandates. Whether any client contracts have key-person clauses that your absence would trigger. Shareholder and Companies House obligations that won’t pause for your circumstances. A basic line on external comms if the absence becomes visible.

The common thread across every size: someone else has to know the document exists and where to find it. The best document in the world is useless if it’s locked on a laptop only you can open. The test isn’t “have I written this down?”. It’s “could the right person find it and act on it within an hour, without me around?”.

Where the document lives

Somewhere secure but reachable. A shared drive folder with named access, a password manager’s secure notes with emergency access configured, or, old-fashioned but reliable, a sealed envelope with your accountant or solicitor. When I ran an agency, ours was in a locked safe with the password inside a tamper-evident envelope.

What matters less is the medium and more that exactly the right one or two people know it’s there. I hold versions of this for a few of the founders I work with, which tells you something about how rarely there’s an obvious person inside the business.

Version 1 can be done in a lunch break

This isn’t a project. The first version is less than an hour. A rough version that exists beats a thorough one you’ll write “when things calm down.” Things don’t calm down. That’s rather the point.

Start with one question: what breaks first? If you vanished today, what stops moving soonest? For most agencies it’s money: payments, payroll, invoicing. Write that section first. Everything else is refinement.

Then tell someone where it is.

You’re irreplaceable… and that’s the problem

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ask agency founders where they want to be in five years and the consensus is usually that they want to step back in some form. Sometimes selling up or stopping, other times it’s more about less time “in the business”. The common theme is “less of the day to day”.

I run an agency leadership peer research panel (The Agency Loop), which lets me ask questions like this en masse. When I did just that recently 56% of agency leaders expect to be out of the day-to-day business within five years, with another 12% within the following 5.

only 7% of agency leaders say they are completely confident their business can run without them for three months

Those aren’t surprising numbers to me. But in the same survey, only 7% of agency leaders said they were completely confident their business could run without them for three months, and 78% scored that confidence at 3 out of 5 or lower. That’s a worrying gap. Most expect to step back from the day-to-day, yet few are confident the business could cope without them for even a single quarter.

The Agency Loop panel covers agencies of many different sizes, and many of those who responded will not be building to sell, or are potentially early in that journey if they are. But 3 months is a low bar none the less. That isn’t forever, retirement or even particularly long term. It’s the length of break that life often throws at us in the form of grief, illness or other unfortunate circumstances.

I started with a survey about exits and future planning, but it mostly got me thinking about business resilience. A three month gap isn’t an exit. It’s a surprisingly common blip.

A three month gap isn’t an exit. It’s a surprisingly common blip.

Anyone who follows my writing regularly will already know that I had a blip like that myself. A couple of days before Christmas 2017 I got the most unwanted present ever: a surprise cancer diagnosis. I was on the operating table the following day and instantly out of the day to day of the business and at severely reduced capacity/capability for nearly 2 years, all with zero chance to plan or put measures in place for the business to function without me. I discuss that, and how we were able to survive it in another article “What breaks first”. The point though is that resilience is something I am acutely aware of and when I see figures like the ones above I hear alarm bells.

Put plainly: most agencies have a single point of failure, and it’s the founder.

It’s not really a size problem

The easy reading of that is “small agencies are fragile, big ones aren’t… so grow!” It’s the obvious conclusion, and one you will hear a lot. I think it’s wrong.

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The Agency Loop survey also asked how much of an agency’s revenue is delivered personally by the owner, broken down by size: At one or two people, the median was 99%. No surprise. At that size you are the agency. But by three to six people it drops to around 20%, and it doesn’t ease down gently. It falls off a cliff.

It’s tempting to read that as proof that growth buys resilience, but the commentary participants gave alongside the quantitative answers paints a more nuanced picture. Plenty of six-person agencies are still wholly dependent on the founder. Ten people, even. All of them busy, none of them able to make a call without you. What actually changes around that three-to-six mark isn’t how many people there are. It’s that, somewhere in there, most founders finally hire someone senior enough to take real work off their plate and own it. The cliff isn’t a size event. It’s a seniority event that happens to show up as a size.

This matters, because the two are easy to confuse (and confusing them is expensive!).

The two ways founders try to buy resilience (and why they don’t work)

When a founder feels like the single point of failure, there are two instinctive fixes. Both feel like progress. Neither tends to deliver it.

The first is to win more work. More clients, more pipeline, a salesperson, a better funnel. When I asked Loop respondents what would most need to change to give them more choice over their future, this was the loudest answer and I think it is counter productive.

More work doesn’t dilute your dependency; it amplifies it. The only person with the capacity and authority to absorb the overflow is still you. There is just more to absorb now. You don’t become less of a bottleneck by pushing more through the bottleneck.

The second instinct is to hire, but to hire cheap. More hands, junior salaries, affordable headcount. This looks like building a team, but it quietly recreates the same problem one rung down. A team of capable juniors (or increasingly, AI agents) still needs someone to make the decisions, carry the clients, own the hard calls. That someone invariably remains you, the founder. You’ve added cost and management load without adding a single person who could hold the business if you stepped out of the room.

One respondent in the survey summed it up perfectly: “I wasted years on people who were affordable but untested. It’s a false economy. It’s cost us millions in revenue and growth .” Cheap headcount is growth without resilience. It’s the worst of both: bigger, busier, and just as fragile.

The lever that actually works

The thing that buys resilience is seniority bought earlier than feels comfortable.

A genuinely senior hire of someone who’s done the job before, who can be trusted with a client relationship or a delivery call without you checking it, is the thing that removes you as the single point of failure. Not because they lighten the load, though they do, but because they become a second person the business can lean its weight on. That’s the whole game. Resilience isn’t one person doing less, it’s more than one person carrying the load. Reducing the impact of that single point of failure.

It almost never feels affordable at the time. A proven senior costs real money, and the maths rarely looks comfortable when you’re the one signing it off. But the founders furthest along in the Loop data said again and again that they’d have done it sooner if they had their time again. The expensive hire that scared them turned out to be the cheap option. The affordable looking ones were what cost them.

From experience, I would say there is a second way that it is uncomfortable that is also worth a brief discussion. Ignoring the cost, handing real responsibility to someone senior means letting go. Founders who have got to this point through strength of will and just getting shit done, rarely find it easy to delegate real authority, letting that senior hire apply their judgement and make calls that you would have made differently.

For many founders this is more difficult than the salary. I see it more noticeably with first time solo founders who are yet to understand the value of someone else taking the decision even if they think they could have made a better one themselves. Loosening the grip can be hard, but you can’t be replaceable and irreplaceable at the same time.

Where this leaves me

I started with a survey about exits and five-year plans. I’ve ended up thinking most of us are asking the wrong question, on the wrong timescale.

It isn’t “how do I grow?” Growth on its own can leave you exactly as fragile as you started, just with more people watching. And it isn’t “what’s my exit?”. That’s a question for a version of you that might be years away, if it arrives at all.

The question I’m hoping more readers are left considering is more immediate: who, other than me, could this business lean on if I couldn’t show up tomorrow? And then the harder follow-up, how soon can I afford to bring in someone good enough to be that person, and brave enough to let them?

Answer that, and most of the rest takes care of itself. The agency that can survive your worst quarter is the same agency someone would want to buy, the same one you could comfortably step back from, the same one that lets you take a proper holiday without your phone lighting up. The exit you’re half-planning for five years’ time and the resilience you need next Tuesday turn out to be the same piece of work.

I learned that the hard way, in an operating theatre two days before Christmas. Most people get a gentler prompt. Either way, the work is the same and it’s worth starting before life picks the timing for you.

The Agency Loop is a quarterly survey that surfaces exclusive data and peer insight from other agency leaders. It is free to take part of and every contributing agency leader gets full access to the resulting reports. Learn more and sign up here.

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The week that never comes

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Imagine a time when all the urgent work is done.

Clients are happy. There are no team dramas. The figures are together, you are ahead of the marketing, retainers are on track and every project is somehow slightly ahead of schedule. You have a full week to do work on whatever you want. How are you spending that time?

The best answer of course is something like “Take the week off and spend it with loved ones”, but let’s spoil that dream for a minute and say that you need to be “at work”. In fact you need to be working on something ‘on the business’ that makes a genuine positive difference.

Answers I get when I ask this are as varied as the agencies I speak to. But some of the real answers I have been given to this question by agency founders include:

One on one time to level up key people in the company
Update templates / design systems to improve delivery
Update (or create!) SOPs
POC that new product idea
Automating repetitive tasks
Learn a thing (let’s face it, usually AI)
Sharpen messaging
Do a long overdue migration

All worthy things. All things that could genuinely help move the business forwards. All things that really shouldn’t be at the bottom of the pile waiting for the planets to align and create time for them.

Narrator’s voice: “The planets never aligned”

The truth you probably already know (but is still worth saying) is that this mythical clear week of peace and calm will never materialise. And that of course means that you will probably never do these important things if you wait for that time to come.

The time does usually show up for most of us though, even if it doesn’t feel that way. A work-free week might not be realistic, but a slightly quieter Wednesday morning is, as is a flat spot on a Friday afternoon or a weird gap on a Thursday. These times do turn up, they are just fragmented and don’t arrive clearly labelled as “founder time”.

The default is often to fill these gaps with low value work. We clear out inboxes, we catch up on some admin, we dip into some promised reading and do various other things that keep us feeling like we’re being productive when the business is busy.

There’s a thornier problem underneath that too. A lot of what rushes in to fill those quieter pockets isn’t generic busy work. It’s the things that have been waiting on you specifically. The decision someone parked for when you had a minute. The supplier query that needs your sign-off. The bit of feedback the team can’t move forward without. Your quiet time isn’t just being eaten by admin, it’s being eaten by everything that only you can do. That’s what makes founder time uniquely hard to protect.

Unless we deliberately claim that time for what is important it gets invisibly absorbed into the daily triage of “everything”.

Founders who consistently get these most-important things done are very rarely claiming full weeks for them. They either block time or actively claim it as it appears.

Blocking is the cleaner approach. Even a few afternoons a month, properly honoured, can shift the direction of a business. But plenty has already been written on time-blocking (including by me) and it doesn’t suit everyone. Instead let’s talk about an alternative for founders who can’t, or won’t, block regular time: Time-snatching.

If you can’t block time, snatch it

Time-snatching is a term I coined as a short-hand for being pro-active about claiming time for that important founder work as it becomes possible. This isn’t the same as “getting around to it when I can”. The difference is subtle, but important and it starts with picking a single priority. One.

You almost certainly have multiple pressing and conflicting founder-work priorities, but you don’t want to be working from a list. The goal here is to identify the one thing you should find time for next to improve. Pick one. Name it. Write it somewhere you will see it every day.

Deciding that priority item in advance means being ready to seize the opportunity when it arises. When the client call you had time blocked for gets cancelled you are not left wondering how to fill the time best (and invariably settling for the predictable fallbacks), but instead are ready to put that time to work to chip away at your priority commitment.

One final thought. Whatever you’ve picked, treat it like you’d treat a client project. Name it. Give it a deadline. Check in on it. If you wouldn’t let a piece of paid work drift unattended for three months, don’t let this drift either.

The question isn’t whether the time will show up. It will. The question is whether you’ve decided what’s important enough to deserve it and whether you have the discipline to use it well.

Stop training your team to ignore you

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It’s a painfully familiar pattern.

An agency-founder walks into a Monday meeting with a new idea: A new service line / rebrand / new system to try / partnership that could change everything / Yet another AI initiative. The founder is giving it everything and the wheels begin to turn. Tasks get assigned. Someone sets up a Slack channel. Project Plan… Trello board… more spreadsheets than is reasonable.

Six weeks later it is the Mary Celeste of initiatives. The Slack channel has gone silent. The shared doc hasn’t been touched since week two. More urgent things happened. Newer, shinier things took over. No-one killed the initiative, or announced its demise. It just quietly faded to nothing.

I see this happen over and over in the agencies I talk to. In some it happens multiple times a quarter. The founders who even think about it often chalk it up to the usual reality of running a busy business. Things get started. Not everything works out. You move on.

But there’s a cost to this pattern that almost nobody talks about. It’s not the wasted effort, although that’s real enough. It’s what it teaches your team.

What your team is actually learning

Every time you launch something with enthusiasm and then let it quietly die, your team draws a conclusion. Not consciously or maliciously, but they still do. They learn that your priorities aren’t really priorities. That this week’s big idea will probably be replaced by next month’s big idea. That the safest response to any new initiative is to wait and see whether it survives.

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That sounds like laziness, but it is perfectly rational. Everyone is busy. Everyone has limited energy. They’ve watched the pattern repeat enough times to know that investing properly in the early stages of a new initiative is a risk, because there’s a fair chance it’ll be abandoned before it goes anywhere.

It’s easy to get frustrated when our team doesn’t buy into our ideas, but that lack of buy-in is often something we’ve trained into them. And the signs are usually there if you look: the slight sag in energy when you announce something new. The polite nodding that doesn’t translate into action. People going through the motions in the first few weeks, doing just enough to not look disengaged, but not enough to actually move things forward. You might see that as a “them problem”. Maybe it is, but it’s worth asking whether the pattern starts with you.

I’ve done this myself

I often write these articles wondering what my old team must think when I put them out there. The lessons I have learned have definitely come as much from what I got wrong as right. That was me for a number of years.

I’ve always been good with ideas. Full of enthusiasm I would start things with genuine conviction and then let them drift when something else demanded my attention or the inevitable obstacles cropped up. At the time I told myself I was being responsive and adaptive. In hindsight, I was often just being inconsistent. Inevitably my team started responding accordingly; with a polite “wait-and-see” that I mistook for a lack of initiative or motivation.

Why this keeps happening

The reason this pattern keeps repeating isn’t usually that founders are flaky or easily bored. It’s that they don’t have a clear enough plan. When you don’t know where you’re going, every new idea feels like it could be the right move. You start things reactively because starting feels like progress. And without a destination to measure against, there’s no framework for deciding what to commit to and what to leave alone.

When you do have a clear picture of what you’re trying to achieve and what needs to happen to get there it becomes much easier to say no to the things that don’t fit. More importantly, it becomes much easier to properly commit to the things you say yes to. Your team sees fewer initiatives, but the ones they see actually go somewhere. Over time that changes what they expect when you start something new.

What to do about it

There’s no five-step framework for fixing this. But there are a few things worth dedicating some thought to.

First, be honest about the pattern. Look back over the last year or two and count the things you started and never properly finished. Not the things that failed, but the things that just faded.

Second, understand that every new initiative spends credibility. You have a finite amount of it with your team. Each time you launch something and let it die, the balance goes down. Each time you see something through, it goes back up. Start thinking about new ideas in those terms and you’ll naturally become more selective.

Third, fewer things, properly committed to, will almost always beat a long list of half-started projects. This is what I mean when I talk about “Velocity not speed”: It’s not about doing less, it’s about making sure what you do actually goes somewhere. That requires a plan, a destination, and the discipline to stay on the road even when a more interesting turning appears.

Finally, if you do decide to stop something, stop it properly. Tell the team why. Acknowledge the work that went into it. Make it a decision, not a disappearance. Even killing an initiative well builds more trust than letting it fade into nothing.

Your team wants to get behind your ideas. But they need to believe those ideas are going somewhere first. That’s not their job to fix. It’s yours.

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What is an agency anyway?

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One of my favourite events I am involved with is Nano Day, a workshop day aimed at the smallest of agencies. Tiny agencies make up nearly 2/3 of the UK’s agency sector*, but get completely overlooked by most agency facing content. It’s no surprise that this causes a lot of imposter syndrome in small agencies.

One way this always shows at these events is in the question “Are we even an agency?”, the unspoken part being “… if we only have X people?”.

* Agencies with 1-2 employees account for 62.7% of the sector, per the Agency by Agency Industry Report, Spring 2025

The essence of agency

There’s a common assumption that “agency” is about headcount, or brand, or looking a certain way. I don’t think it is. It’s a delivery model and a commercial posture. There are one-person businesses that operate like agencies, and 50-person businesses with “agency” in the name that don’t. It’s not headcount and it is not status.

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My take is that an agency is an external team-function that sells outcomes through a repeatable delivery system, manages capacity and delivery risk, and creates value through judgement as much as execution. That’s a bit abstract, but essentially boils down to three things:

Judgement & strategy: you help decide what matters and what happens next
Delivery & execution: you reliably ship work that moves things forward
Leverage & capacity: the capability exists beyond a single individual, through a team, a bench, or a genuine delivery system

If you’ve got all three, you’re agency-shaped. If not, you’re something else (and that’s fine too).

The importance (and unimportance) of labels

Let me put that in perspective before anyone reaches for the LinkedIn comment box: Call yourself whatever you want. If you only tick one of the three boxes above and want to call yourself an agency, I have precisely 0% issue with that.

I’m all for people using whatever labels work for them. Many clients won’t have ever thought about the difference between agency and studio (for example) either, so use whatever is going to win you the work. However, that doesn’t change the value of us understanding the difference.

You can use the customer’s language all day long. But you still need to understand your delivery model and commercial posture because that’s what determines what you can promise, how you price, and where the business breaks as it grows.

Agency as a label is fuzzy, but the model isn’t.

A simple model

I was surprised how hard it was to find a clear, usable way to answer the question “Are we an agency?” So I built one.

This diagram is how I think about it: each circle is a capability you’re offering, and the overlaps are the common business models that fall out of that.

The labels in the diagram are intentionally rough. There are other valid names for most of these intersections, and the boundaries are fuzzy. For example, “Expert operator” could just as easily be “solo consultant”, “fractional”, or “senior freelancer”. Same shape, different badge.

Here is each segment in plain English:

Agency (strategy + delivery + leverage) – Team-shaped service with a method, not just a person doing work.
Expert operator (strategy + delivery) – High judgement, hands-on execution, capacity is the constraint.
Studio (delivery + leverage) – Strong production capability, lighter steering.
Consultancy (strategy + leverage) – Direction and enablement, often not owning delivery end-to-end.
Advisor (strategy) – Paid thinking, clarity, and decision support.
Freelancer (delivery) – Ships what’s asked for, typically person-dependent.
Collective (leverage) – Access to capability/people, without necessarily owning delivery.

Who cares?

I think those running these businesses should. Because this isn’t an exercise in identity, but an understanding of the model. When you’re clear on which shape you’re running, three things get easier:

1) It clarifies what you can credibly promise

Clients might find you through the label, but they buy expectations. Those expectations are mostly driven by whether you have leverage, not whether you have “agency” on your website.

If you’re an expert operator, you can promise depth, judgement and speed of decision, but your responsiveness and capacity will always have limits because it’s you. If you’re a studio, you can promise throughput and production quality, but you’ll struggle if the client expects you to constantly steer the “why” and “what next”. If you’re agency-shaped, you can promise continuity, breadth and a more stable service, but only if you’ve actually built the system and bench to back that up.

The model gives you a simple check: are you implicitly selling leverage you don’t have? Or are you under-selling leverage you do have?

2) It helps you price without resentment

A lot of small firms end up annoyed with clients when the real issue is pricing that doesn’t match the model.

Expert operators often price like delivery, then quietly do strategy in the gaps (and wonder why they feel overworked). Studios price for production, then absorb steering and scope churn because the client “just needs a bit of thinking too”. Agencies price like freelancers, then get crushed by the overheads and delivery risk they’ve taken on: coordination, QA, account handling, and the cost of variability.

Getting clear on the shape makes pricing more honest. You can choose to bundle strategy, choose to separate it, choose to cap it, but you stop accidentally giving away the thing you’re actually valued for.

3) It tells you what breaks first as you grow

When demand increases, different models fail in different ways:

Expert operator: capacity becomes the bottleneck. You drown in context switching, admin, and “just one quick thing”.
Studio: quality control and scope control become the bottleneck. Strategy creeps in through the side door.
Consultancy: the gap between recommendation and reality becomes the bottleneck, adoption, execution, follow-through.
Agency: coordination becomes the bottleneck. Consistency, utilisation, and delivery discipline matter more than talent.

Knowing which failure mode you’re wired for lets you respond deliberately: Through boundaries, packaging, hiring, partners, or process, rather than just working harder and calling it growth.

None of this is about being “a real agency”. Plenty of the best businesses I see are expert operators or studios. The point is simpler: call it whatever the customer calls it, but don’t let a fuzzy label blur the model you’re actually running.

I’ve shared the diagram on LinkedIn too (wish me luck!). If you have a view, let me know whether you agree or disagree with this take in the comments.

Traffic jams and sleepless nights

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A lot gets written about the idea of leaders being present; mindful, in the moment. It’s important, but it’s only half the picture. If you are always _in _the moment, you never truly see beyond it and you lose valuable perspective and that’s a surprisingly easy trap to fall into.

At the busiest points of my own term in agency leadership my brain was almost permanently occupied with what was on fire (or at least smouldering with menace). Client issues, delivery problems, cashflow worries, staff questions, the next thing that needed deciding now. None of it was dramatic in isolation. Collectively, it filled every available mental gap.

The only time I had any real space for reflection was when I was stuck in a traffic jam or when I was lying awake at night, both things I did more often than I wanted to. Those strange, quiet moments where you’re forced to stop reacting and your brain starts making connections. Pieces come together. You notice patterns. You replay conversations and suddenly understand what was really going on. These moments are valuable when they are all you have, but they are also a warning sign.

If the only time you’re able to think properly about your business is when you’re exhausted or trapped, something is wrong. That thinking space hasn’t been designed into your life or your business. It’s being stolen by the gaps left when your nervous system finally drops its guard.

Thinking by design

Today I deliberately build thinking time into my business. I leave gaps between calls and block time for activities where my mental coils unwind. Time to process the previous block of activity and join the dots. I can do this as my work today doesn’t require me to be permanently on call to react to the now. That isn’t a privilege though. It is by design.

The founders I work with don’t lack intelligence, experience, or ideas. What they often lack is cognitive slack. Their thinking is often consumed by urgency. Not because they’re bad leaders, but because their businesses still rely on them to be the glue holding everything together.

They’re always present. Always reachable. Always “on”. And as a result, their best thinking happens at exactly the wrong times: late at night, under stress, or not at all.

This is one of the less obvious reasons having someone on your side can matter. Not because they have better ideas, but because they have space. Space to reflect, to connect dots, to notice the things you can’t see while you’re inside the machine trying to keep it running.

This week I’ve been in the misty hills of northern Portugal at a retreat with Whitesmith. There’s plenty of work being done. This certainly isn’t a holiday. But the setting and the team’s working culture create natural gaps. Walking between buildings. Long meals. Quiet moments where nothing is demanding immediate action.

Those gaps matter. Not because they’re relaxing, but because they allow slower, more considered thinking to surface. The kind of thinking that never survives in a calendar packed edge-to-edge with calls.

The point isn’t that you need retreats, or rural Portugal, or hours of meditation (although I wound’t argue against any of those things either). The point is simpler and less comfortable.

If your business only gives you space to think when you’re exhausted, distracted, or lying awake at night, it’s extracting that capacity from you rather than supporting it. Likewise, if you’re always in the moment, always reacting, always dealing with what’s on fire, you might feel productive, but you’re slowly giving up the ability to lead with any real perspective.

Ask yourself where your best thinking currently happens. If the honest answer is “in traffic” or “at 3am”, don’t romanticise it. Treat it as a signal. Something in your business design needs to change before those moments dry up entirely.

No more word of mouth. No more referrals

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I often review agency pipelines with founders in order to better understand what specific actions we can take to fill that pipeline with more high-quality leads. The aim is to understand what is working and identify what is replicable, which starts by asking where each lead came from. Two phrases constantly get in the way of this: “Word of mouth” and “Referral”.

Agencies love to share how their work all comes from these two sources, but I’m on a mission to eradicate them from CRMs. “Word of mouth”, “Referral” : They sound positive. We are trained to think of them as the holy grail of marketing: free leads that close easily because we did good work. In reality they are both terms that are just comfortable ways to say “I don’t know where this business came from”.

These weak terms treat new business as something that happens to you, rather than something you created . This conveniently absolves us of responsibility when these loosely defined channels fail to deliver. We become gardeners watching our crops yellow as we wait for rain, when we should be picking up the watering can.

To be crystal clear: I am not questioning the value of these types of referral, just the value of these as labels.

I’m a firm believer that running an agency means “having Agency”, the ability to exert control over your own future. Market forces (our gardener’s weather) exist, but they shouldn’t dictate your survival. We can start getting that control back by better understanding what drives business now, which means recognising the specific activity that led up to an opportunity.

Labels like “Word of mouth” or “Network” don’t do that. Every lead labelled like this came about in some way because of some specific action you took. That is what we really need to understand, because it gives us an action we can replicate (Or potentially even delegate and scale).

Consider these two opportunities: Opportunity A was a friend of an existing client who recommended you after reading a newsletter you sent. Opportunity B was a recommendation from a consultant who periodically refers work to you. Most agency CRMs are set-up to place both of these in a “Referral” bucket, despite being the result of very different activities. This gives us no actionable information at all.

In the above example I would have labelled opportunity A as “Client nurture” and B as “Partner development”. This clearly aligns the outcome with the activity that drove it. I know what I need to do more of in order to create more opportunities.

There isn’t one perfect list of source labels: You need to pick labels that cover the activities that happen in your business. Enough of them to give you granular insight, but not so many that you end up with lots of “buckets of one”. I will though give you two special labels to include.

“Not yet known” : Not unknown, but not yet known. Your reminder to try to fill in those blanks.

“Organic inbound” : Because sometimes it just rains. Be careful not to overuse this, but if an inbound enquiry does come from your general reputation without any attributable action then you do need an appropriate label.

What’s the point? Isn’t this just semantics?

Far from it. Changing these labels isn’t just about tidying up a spreadsheet; it is about confronting the reality of your business model.

When you label a lead “Word of Mouth,” you subconsciously treat it as free. It feels like a lucky bonus that required zero input, freeing you from responsibility when it isn’t happening. But when you re-label that same lead as “Partner Development,” you are forced to acknowledge the truth: that opportunity came because you spent three hours at lunches last month, sent four helpful emails, and consistently nurtured a relationship (and that this business won’t come if you stop doing these things).

It didn’t cost zero. It cost your time, the most valuable resource in a founder-led agency.

Tracking the results you get from the time you invest throws light both onto where to invest time for more results, but also where your agency is still reliant on your personal efforts.

Your Next Step

You don’t need to overhaul your entire CRM history today. Start small with a retroactive audit. Look at your last quarter or two of won deals. Ignore what the dropdown menu currently says and ask yourself: What was the specific activity that made this opportunity happen?

Did it come from a client you actively checked in with?
Did it come from a consultant you took for coffee?
Did it come because you spoke at an event?

Once you see the real drivers, you stop waiting for rain. You pick up the watering can, and you go to work on the things that actually move the needle.

What breaks first?

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

If you disappeared from your business for a few weeks, with no notice and no laptop, what would break first? It’s not a fun question to ask, but it’s one I put to founders often, because the answer often reveals something far more important than a missing process. It shows where the business still depends entirely on them.

I know, because I asked myself the same question a few years ago. I was tired of never being able to take a proper break, the kind where you switch off completely and focus on family, not just check your emails from a different location. I had this picture in my head of pottering around Europe, squeezed into our camper van with the family for a month or more. I set a simple, clear goal: the business should be able to run without me for one full calendar month.

Why ask the uncomfortable question?

It turned out to be one of the wisest things I ever did, though not for the reason I expected. I didn’t end up heading off in the Wafflebus (all campers have names; sorry, I’m not explaining ours). Instead, I found myself in hospital for a series of prolonged spells following a cancer diagnosis. Suddenly that freedom project became a survival plan.

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The systems we’d built to give me time off ended up keeping the business alive. The team kept things moving, clients were looked after, everyone stayed employed, and when I finally came home, both the business and I were still standing.

If that diagnosis had come twelve months earlier, I suspect I would have lost the business. Possibly also the family home.

Resilience isn’t just for crises

That experience completely changed how I think about resilience. It’s easy to treat it as something for extreme situations, a word you associate with insurance policies and server backups. But it’s also about everyday freedom. The same steps that protect a business in a crisis are the ones that let a founder take a proper holiday, make your days your own and just stop you being the bottleneck for everything. If you are eyeing an exit one day, they’re also the same steps that make an agency more valuable and more saleable. It’s not about preparing for the worst. It’s about building a business that runs better when you’re not holding it together.

Tackling every founder dependency can feel like a big, abstract project, but the “What breaks first?” question is a simple way to cut through the noise and find the most critical points, the ones worth fixing first.

The “first point of critical failure” is often around finances. I speak to a lot of agencies where only the founder can make supplier payments or approve payroll, and things can grind to a halt surprisingly quickly when the money stops moving. But the real value of the question is in looking at your own business, identifying what would break first for you, and then putting something in place to stop it happening.

The “Oh shit document”

A great starting point is what I like to call the “Oh Shit Document”. It’s a single file that one or two trusted people know about and can access if needed. I hold versions of this for a few business owners I work with. The contents vary, but usually include key contacts, logins, infrastructure notes and a short emergency plan for covering an unexpected month-long absence. It’s a quick, simple job that instantly adds a layer of resilience to any business.

When my own absence came, it wasn’t the systems or the spreadsheets that kept the business running, it was the people I worked with. My team held everything together, made good decisions and looked after each other and our clients. I’ll always be grateful for that. The process we went through to reduce dependency on me just removed the barriers to them doing that.

In the end, that’s what resilience really looks like. It’s not just having the right documents or processes in place; it’s building a business that can cope, adapt, and carry on without you for a while. That’s the kind of freedom worth working towards, whether you’re planning a month on the road or just a week where you can finally switch off.

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Why agencies fail to do what matters

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I was recently asked what the one problem was that I’d like to solve for every agency I work with. I knew where the question was going. This person sells lead gen services and wanted me to say “lack of leads,” so they could pitch me on sending my clients their way. It’s a painfully common conversation, but it never goes how they’ve scripted it, because that isn’t the problem I’d focus on. The thing I’d fix is giving founders the ability to relentlessly and consistently execute on the things that matter most.

Yes, plenty of agencies do want more leads. But for some, more leads would actually be a problem. They’re already drowning in proposals and delivery. Piling more into the funnel just creates more chaos. And even for those with weak pipelines, fixing execution is usually more impactful than feeding in leads no one has time to manage properly.

What Gets in the Way

It sounds simple: do the important things, consistently. But in practice, there are four big blockers I see again and again.

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Clarity Without a strategic vision, it’s hard to know which actions will really move the business forward. Agencies can spin their wheels for months because no one has defined what success actually looks like.
Prioritisation Even if you know what matters, there’s always too much on the list. Founders tell me that there is too much to do, so they didn’t get the important thing done. Reality check: There will ALWAYS be too much to do, which is why it is so important to be intentional in deciding what will and won’t get done.
Noise Agency life is full of it. Clients shouting, inboxes buzzing, Slack pinging. Those urgent tasks drown out the important ones. If you don’t build ways to manage that then nothing important gets done.
Capability Sometimes the plan is sound, the priority is clear, but the business just can’t do it yet. You hit a blocker: Skills, bandwidth, money. Fixable, yes, but still enough to stall progress. Fixing these then become the priority.

The Founder Trap

Founder-led agencies are especially vulnerable. Many start life as a one-person operation, and the habits stick: you do everything yourself. Even as the team grows, that reflex doesn’t go away.

I know because I did it myself. When I was running my agency, I rarely gave myself time to think about the bigger picture. I look back now and see the obvious moves we should have made. Why didn’t I do them? Because I was too deep in the weeds and never took enough time to really think about what really needed doing, let alone actually execute on it.

It’s a pattern I see every week with agencies I talk with. Fear of delegation plays a part. But the bigger issue is simply lack of time set aside for strategic thinking. Without it, you’re not really leading. You’re just reacting. And reacting is exhausting.

Why It’s a Hard Sell

Execution discipline is vital, but it’s also a tough sell. Why? Because these things are never urgent, and agencies thrive on urgency.

If the pipeline’s empty, the knee-jerk response is to chase leads. If a client is banging the table, you drop everything to respond. Those immediate pressures will always feel more legitimate than stepping back to think.

The truth is you can’t ignore the symptoms. You do have to keep clients happy and keep work flowing. But unless you make space to fix the underlying causes, you’ll be stuck firefighting forever.

You have to do the two things alongside each other. Deal with the immediate, yes. But at the same time, carve out time for the bigger stuff. Because until you do, the cycle never ends. Yes, it’s hard at first. But once you start tackling the important issues the need for firefighting reduces and you free up more and more time to tackle what matters.

The Cost of Not Fixing It

When founders don’t break that cycle, the cost can be brutal.

I’ve seen people burn out. I’ve seen health and relationships suffer. I’ve seen founders so consumed by the agency that they lose the life they started the business to create in the first place. It’s not always that dramatic, but most of us can feel that we have skirted with all of those issues at some point.

And I’ve noticed something else: the mindset shift often comes with major life events. A child arrives, or a marriage, or a milestone birthday. I’ve lost count of the number of conversations that start with: “I am about to turn 40 and I can’t do this forever.”

The work is never “done.” There is no magical day where every client is delighted, the pipeline is full, and the systems all run smoothly. What you can control is your own definition of “enough” and then execute against that.

As I sometimes put it: I’ve never spoken to an agency owner who said, “the work is done.” I’ve spoken to plenty who said, “I am done.”

What It Looks Like When It Works

The difference, when execution discipline lands, is night and day.

It’s not that the agency suddenly has fewer problems; it’s that the founder is looking further down the road, steering rather than swerving. The business feels calmer. The chaos dials down. Counterintuitively, everything slows down. And yet, more gets done.

Like learning to ride a bike, it’s a discipline you have to practice. You’ll fall off at first. You’ll wobble. But over time, it becomes second nature if you just keep trying.

Practical Advice

So what can a founder do? For me, the answer is always the same: find a person and find a space.

The person might be a trusted advisor, a fellow founder, a peer group, or a formal board. You might even want to pay me to do it! The label doesn’t matter. What matters is carving out non-negotiable time to step back from client work and ask: what does this business need to look like in one or two years for me to be happier running it?

Don’t try to fit that thinking in between emails. Block the diary. Turn the notifications off. Tell your team you’re unavailable.

Be prepared to make the hard call: some things won’t get done. That’s the cost of making sure the right things do get done.

Your business, your Scorecard – Rethinking agency metrics

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve long believed that too many founder-led businesses fall into the trap of measuring success using the wrong metrics. It’s easy to see why: most business commentary centres around large, shareholder-owned companies, and we’re taught that this is what “business” looks like. So we inherit their metrics: revenue, growth, headcount, EBITDA… and use them as our own yardstick. But it’s nonsense. Very few of us started a business to overwork ourselves to make strangers rich. So why do we measure our success as if we did?

What really matters to you?

When I asked a group of agency founders why they started their businesses, only one of the most common reasons was purely financial. The rest were far more human. Their answers fell into ten loose themes:

Earnings potential (the financial one)
Life balance
The calling
Security
Autonomy
Legacy
Fulfilment
Validation
Opportunity
Love of the craft

(I’ve broken these down in this LinkedIn post, possibly my only LinkedIn carousel.)

Most of us are chasing a mix of these. Getting that mix right gives us a business we love to run and a life we actually enjoy. But too often, we sacrifice those outcomes quietly, incrementally, in pursuit of someone else’s scoreboard.

What else should we measure?

It depends, and that’s the point. The beauty of running a founder-led business is that you get to define what success looks like. Without shareholders or quarterly earnings calls breathing down your neck, your business can be a vehicle for the life you want. That only works, though, if you’re clear on what that life is and you’re actually tracking progress towards it.

A good place to start is by going back to why you started your business and writing what I call a Founder Statement: a short paragraph that captures what you were aiming to achieve at the outset. From there, ask: what could you measure that would show you’re on track?

Here are a few examples:

Founder Statement: “I started my agency to have more time for personal pursuits and family.”

Metrics: Track the average number of personal days taken per quarter, employee satisfaction with flexible working arrangements, and the percentage of projects completed within standard working hours.

Founder Statement: “I wanted my agency to have a lasting impact on our community and industry.”

Metrics: Number of community initiatives or pro bono projects completed, industry awards or recognitions received, and the number of speaking engagements or thought leadership pieces published.

Founder Statement: “I wanted to create a workplace where employees felt truly valued and engaged.”

Metrics: Employee engagement scores, retention rates, and internal promotion rates. You could also measure participation in professional development programs or employee NPS (Net Promoter Score).

You can tailor this approach to any goal: freedom, mastery, balance, legacy etc. Whatever matters most to you. That’s the real metric of success: building the business you actually wanted in the first place.

Measuring these things isn’t just feel-good fluff. Agencies that track what matters to their founders tend to make better decisions, stay more focused, and build teams that stick around. Clients notice it too. When your business is aligned to your values, people can tell, and that’s often what sets you apart.

So, abandon traditional metrics?

Not at all. Financial metrics still matter. Hugely. Any agency needs a solid handle on its numbers to make good decisions. If you are looking at these, then tools like my own utilisation and recovery calculator and retainer lifetime value calculator might help. Profit gives you options. Cashflow gives you peace of mind. Revenue trends can help spot problems early. I’m definitely not saying ditch the spreadsheet. I love a spreadsheet!

What I am saying is “Let’s add to it”.

Most financial metrics are a means to an end, not the end itself. They keep the business alive, but they don’t tell you if it’s working for you. They’re the engine temperature and fuel gauge not the sat nav. So yes, track meaningful financials such as your revenue, margin, and runway. But don’t let those numbers crowd out the things that made you start this business in the first place. If your goal is autonomy, creative freedom, or building something that matters then make sure you’re tracking that, too.

You don’t need a fancy dashboard to do this. Just get clear on what you wanted this business to give you, and start tracking whether it’s doing that. A business that hits its financial targets but misses the founder’s goals isn’t successful; it’s just busy.

The web is toast

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Here’s something people don’t want to talk about, but I have wanted to get off my chest for a while: The web is toast. Cold, burnt toast.

There’s a lot of noise about how LLMs are killing search, but that’s a narrow view that ignores the bigger picture. Google isn’t just worried about LLMs disrupting search. It’s worried about them undermining the entire web, and with it, the ad-fuelled ecosystem it depends on. That’s the real threat. And it’s starting to look inevitable.

The web has faced existential threats before. Apple’s app economy successfully shifted a huge chunk of user attention away from the open web into walled gardens. Meanwhile, governments are chipping away at the first two Ws of WWW with national firewalls and rising censorship. Now LLMs open a third front, one that’s evolving faster and cuts deeper.

We’re witnessing a fundamental change in how users interact with information.

Users aren’t browsing, they’re asking. Traditional search returned links and said, “Here’s where to find the answer.” But LLMs skip that step. They ingest the content, synthesise the answer, and deliver it straight back to the user. The website, in this exchange, exists only to feed the machine, not the human. And it’s easy to see the appeal:

Old paradigm:

→ Search → Scan results → Visit webpages → Navigate → Read → Synthesise → Repeat as needed

New paradigm:

→ Ask → Get synthesised response

The new paradigm isn’t perfect, but it’s easier. And ease wins, every time. The strange part is how human the machinery still looks.

We’re building tools to help LLMs browse websites like humans: Clicking, scrolling, parsing layouts, not because it’s efficient, but because that’s how the infrastructure is built. It’s like programming a robot to move a mouse and click a button, when it could just issue the command directly. A backwards, theatrical way of preserving the illusion that humans are still central.

That won’t last. As LLMs improve at structured ingestion, and as businesses begin exposing content through APIs, structured data, and machine-readable endpoints, the fiction collapses. Websites stop being destinations. They become data sources.

Where we once optimised for users and search engines, we’ll now optimise for machines that never visit, but expect structured content they can digest, repackage, and serve on demand.

This shift also breaks the business model that’s funded the web. If no one’s clicking through, who’s seeing the ads? Who’s landing on the blog post, the guide, the product page? Already, many publishers are reporting huge traffic drops; not because content is worse, but because LLMs answer before the user ever gets to the link.

The ad-supported web may no longer be financially viable for much of its long-tail content. If websites are just raw material for language models, the money shifts away from content creation and towards those who control the models and the data pipelines.

Control becomes the next battleground.

Publishers and platforms will push back on open scraping. Data deals, paywalls, and proprietary APIs will emerge. Open content becomes closed input. The web, once a decentralised and messy ecosystem, starts to become something more like infrastructure: privately maintained, selectively exposed.

Meanwhile, businesses already sense the shift. Many consumer brands now launch only on TikTok or Instagram, with a “proper website” seen as an afterthought, useful for margin on repeat purchases, not for discovery or engagement.

Marketing? That changes too.

Most websites still assume a funnel: homepage → category → product → conversion. That model doesn’t hold if the user never visits. In a world where the journey starts and ends in an AI interface, there is no funnel. Just a prompt that you don’t control.

This isn’t doom & gloom… it’s adaptation.

Marketing has always been about going where the audience is. Before the web, we still marketed. We’ll keep doing it after. For agencies, this shift might actually open up new opportunities, especially for those who move fast.

Brand and design might feel most under threat, but don’t forget we’re viewing this through the narrow lens of today’s text-heavy interfaces. Multi-modal AI is already here, and as it becomes native to more platforms, brand experience will resurface in new ways.

Yes, it’s a big shift. And yes, it’s more unsettling for those who earned their stripes during Google’s long, stable dominance than for those with longer memories. But that’s how it goes. BBS, Usenet and public FTP servers all had their time too (and yes… some of us old farts used them all as marketing tools!).

If the web does dwindle, it won’t be the end of digital marketing. It’ll just be another chapter. And for those willing to adapt, a chapter full of new opportunity.

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What did you actually lead yesterday?

Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Spicy opinion incoming: Most of what agency leaders do has very little to do with actual leadership.

We’re constantly busy with meetings, emails and firefighting. It’s sometimes difficult to find a time for a toilet break in our stuffed diaries. Work spills into the evenings and bleeds into weekends. We’re undeniably busy, but much of that activity has only the most tenuous link to the job of leading.

If we really boil it down to its essence leadership is just three things:

Vision : Setting a clear direction and a practical plan to get there

Steering: Aligning and guiding the team towards that vision

Betterment : Equipping ourselves with the knowledge and perspective to do the first two better

Everything else we do is a distraction. Everything.

I’m not suggesting that the other work we do isn’t important. The smaller the business the more hats we wear as leaders (and the more those hats compete for “head time”). As the business matures, and processes and people take over, that pressure eases. But it never goes away entirely.

So no, I’m not dismissing the importance of your “Finance Director” hat or your “Client Services Manager” hat. But we have to be clear: that’s not leadership work. And I think that distinction matters, because leadership work is rarely the most urgent. That makes it the easiest to neglect, even though it’s the most critical to long-term success.

How guilty are you? The 24 hour snapshot

Let’s spend a few minutes, right now, on some of that high-value “Betterment”. Grab a pen (or your preferred modern alternative). Split the page into 5 columns and give them the following headings:

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Task
Vision?
Steering?
Betterment?
Why???

It should look something like this:

Now list the main things that have taken your time over the last 24 hours in the first column under task then simply mark which of those things honestly aligned with one of those three core leadership tasks. For anything that didn’t write one line as to why you did it anyway. Don’t overthink the exercise, just spend 2 or 3 minutes on it now.

The point is simply to acknowledge the reality of the problem.

Understanding Why We Drift

Drifting from leadership priorities often happens quietly and incrementally. It’s easier to jump in and fix a problem than to delegate and trust others. There’s also comfort in being needed, even though it compromises progress (Blanket forts are welcoming places!).

However, each distraction or operational task reduces your clarity, dilutes strategic direction, and fosters team dependency rather than team empowerment. Avoiding short-term discomfort by drifting from leadership priorities can often lead to greater long-term difficulties.

Refocusing on the Real Job

Understanding issues like this is not the battle of course. Change is much harder, but it starts with increased awareness and understanding. Don’t rush to overhaul everything immediately.

Complete the snapshot daily for a week. Identify patterns.
Choose one distraction daily to delegate, defer, or remove entirely. Small, consistent changes compound significantly.
Set aside dedicated time, even if minimal, each week specifically for leadership activities.
Block out dedicated time each week for leadership. Not vague ‘working on the business’ time. Make it focused: Vision, Steering, or Betterment.

The Uncomfortable Reality

Leadership isn’t about your title, it’s about daily practice and choosing clarity over chaos, proactive direction over reactive firefighting, and meaningful growth (not just financial) over staying comfortable.

If you’re genuinely committed to leading rather than merely managing, regularly reflect with this question:

What did I actually lead yesterday?

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How much is a retainer client ACTUALLY worth?

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

It feels simple, but it can be deceptively tricky to work out your average customer lifetime value from ongoing relationships like retainers. Unlike project work where the value is clear and finite, calculating value for retainer clients means wrestling with uncertainty. Some clients have been with us for years and show no signs of leaving. Others departed rapidly. How do we balance these in our calculations? It’s important data to understand though, especially when it comes to understanding what it is worth spending to acquire a new customer.

To help with this, I have created a free client retainer calculator spreadsheet to help model this using an approach I have used with a few clients. If you just want to grab a free copy of the spreadsheet and take look then scroll straight to the bottom of this post. However, if you’re curious as to why this is even needed and how the spreadsheet works then read on! Before you start, you’ll need:

Start date for all current and past retainer clients
End date for any completed retainers
Monthly retainer value for each client

Two flawed approaches to calculating lifetime value

When I talk LTV with agencies, most don’t have a formal way to calculate it, but instead rely on one of two flawed methods:

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A) All Revenue / All Client Count This seems simple and logical, but ignores the potential long term value of current clients.

B) Off-boarded Client Revenue / Off-boarded Client Count This ensures we’re measuring lifetime value, but ignores all current clients. Those are potentially our most valuable.

Cohorts and Survivorship

The truth is that we will never really know the exact answer, but with some simple modelling we can get close and continue to improve accuracy over time. Having looked at this question with a number of agencies (including my own, which was >95% recurring revenue), I’ve come up with an approach that gives a good balance of accuracy and ease of calculation. The approach introduces two concepts into the calculations to help us model LTV in a more useful way: Cohorts and Survivorship:

Understanding Cohorts

By grouping clients by the quarter in which they start, we can make useful time comparisons. For example, looking at Q1 2023’s cohort:

Started with 10 clients
8 survived past 6 months
6 still active at 12 months This pattern gives us insight into typical client lifespans.

Measuring Survivorship

Survivorship looks at the likelihood of any client continuing to be active with us past key milestones. If we consistently see 70% of clients make it past the first year, and 80% of those stay for at least two years, we can make informed predictions about future value.

This combined approach allows us to:

Track retention patterns over time
Spot if newer clients behave differently
Make evidence-based predictions about future value
Identify trends in service value and pricing

Why Bother?

The spreadsheet make this modelling approach quick and easy, but why even bother? LTV is a fundamental metric for any business with repeat revenue from clients. Retainers is one example, but the approach can be applied to others. Knowing the lifetime value of customers helps us budget for client acquisition, focus our retention efforts where they matter most, understand how changes impact that LTV, make better pricing decision and understand the ROI of much more of what we do. As with any metric, it should not be viewed in isolation, but it is one that I think has a lot of value and well worth adding to your quarterly reports.

The Free Retainer Client Value Spreadsheet

I’ve created a simple spreadsheet that helps analyse your client data using this approach. It looks at:

Average retention by cohort
Client value and predicted Lifetime Retainer Client Value
Survival rates at key milestones
Churn patterns over time

The results can be eye-opening. One agency I worked with discovered their average client lifetime was twice what they assumed. Another found recent cohorts were lasting significantly longer than historic ones, validating their investment in onboarding.

Get Started

The spreadsheet is in Google Sheet format. The link will prompt you to make your own copy that you can then edit and change to suit your business. Even if the numbers aren’t perfect, they’re likely better than guessing. Give it a try. You might be surprised what you learn about your business.

Get the spreadsheet →

Have you tried calculating customer lifetime value before? What approach did you use and how did it work out? I’d love to hear your experiences in the LinkedIn comments.

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Agency CRMs – Analysis and recommendations

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

A discussion in an agency community piqued my interest about how agencies are using CRMs in their business. The thread was started by an agency owner looking for CRM recommendations and the responses were largely people responding with their favourite of the usual suspects. What struck me was how different the tools were that were being recommended and how no-one really considered what functionality the OP’s business needed. This tallied with what I often see in agencies: The term “CRM” now covers a lot of bases. There are some very capable tools that would be a very poor fit for many agencies and I frequently see time, money and opportunity being wasted in trying to adopt a poor choice.

25% of Agencies are not using a CRM. 60% of those that do say they are not utilising it well

To understand the space a bit better, I ran a survey that just under 30 agencies responded to. The responses from this confirmed my feeling that people are looking for very different things from CRM software and that many agencies are struggling to find value in the solution they select. They also really highlight the risks on selecting solutions like CRMs based on popularity, cost or “free” tiers rather than long term fit.

The most important features of an agency CRM

Modern CRMs now offer a wide range of features, with each having their own bias and mix. I started by asking respondents to rank the feature groups most important to them. The list below outlines the common areas of CRM functionality ranked in order of overall importance to respondents. The bullet points under each category relate to respondent answers about the most important features.

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Customer/Contact Management

“It enables me to systematically keep up with/nurture my network”

“Notes to my future self for further down the client journey. “
“Each client record shows personal notes about their business, which opportunities I have spotted in order of priority.”
Sales Pipeline Management

“Total visibility of our sales pipeline and visibility of warmer contacts”

“Sales pipeline management – new business and recurring so easy to track revenue forecasts “
“Keep track of when I need to contact someone in the pipeline.”
Outbound Communications

“Having everyone’s details in one place makes it loads easier if we want to message everyone or send an invitation/Christmas card. Previously this sort of stuff would be such a pain we just wouldn’t bother”

“High delivering emails and user friendly to allow is to push to our clients.”
“Being able to send targeted communications to different audiences at the right time”
Marketing Performance Tracking

“Alignment across Marketing, Sales, Client Services, with visibility of messaging and engagements.”

“I get to see exactly what content and what channels are driving revenue – not just driving clicks.”

I also asked how satisfied the respondents were with their CRMs support of these feature categories, and included pricing, support and ease of use in this question. What is evident from this is that people are not bowled over by the software they choose to manage their customer relations. The two marketing areas (outbound comms and marketing performance) score lowest, but largely as a result of these features being missing entirely from some CRMs (again highlighting the importance of fit).

Which CRMs are agencies using?

Even with the limited size sample group, a lot of CRM solutions were mentioned, resulting in “other” being the third most popular answer. The #1 solution wasn’t a surprise though as HubSpot is always the most mentioned solution when talking to agencies, often as a result of their free tier and perceived difficulty in migrating away. The #2 result was a bit of a surprise though with nearly a quarter of agencies not using any CRM system at all (I included people deceiving themselves by saying Google Sheets are their CRM in this group!). Other honourable mentions go to Pipedrive and Productive. One noticeable omission is Salesforce. Despite it’s global popularity, Salesforce didn’t get a single mention in the responses.

This is a difficult chart for me personally, as none of the top three named solutions are ones I would recommend to most agencies who asked me about implementing a CRM. Each solution has some very positive traits (and I would consider myself an experienced user in all three), but there are reasons I wouldn’t select any of them in the specific circumstances of an agency looking for a CRM. In short:

HubSpot is easily the most rounded of the three (and the only one with real marketing support), but only if you are willing to pay a very significant sum to enable the necessary features. With all the features enabled it is a very expensive option. Without them it is not a very capable option. Hubspot scored low overall on satisfaction with pricing and support being the key issues.
Pipedrive is simple but capable. It is really a sales management tool and the lack of marketing support makes it a poor fit for the way most agencies sell. When I work with agencies using Pipedrive we often need to have a second CRM running in order to answer even simple questions like which channels are bringing revenue.
Productive is an all in one agency management tool. Whilst I quite like it, the CRM is undoubtedly the weakest part of their line up. It’s a tool I have recommended in the past, but not when the specific need is a CRM (and again, I’d favour running a dedicated marketing aware CRM alongside it).

I’ll share a few recommendations that I do make lower down in this post. I think this reluctance of mine to recommend at of those leaders is reflected in overall scores from respondents. I don’t think any scored particularly well, but the three most popular choices above were all around 60% overall. Also worth noting that this includes responses from at least two HubSpot certified agencies whose scores definitely brought up the average but might not be representative of the average client experience.

A shout out here for ActiveCampaign for the highest overall score. I haven’t used ActiveCampaign for years and it was more of a specialist mailing tool than a full CRM back then. I will be checking it out again soon as a result of this survey.

How well are we using our CRMs?

Asking agency owners how well their agency utilises the capability of their chosen CRM turned up some interesting results. Only around a third of respondents said they thought they were using their CRM well or very well. We can also see correlation between how well we utilise the tools and our satisfaction with them, which I have shown in the scatter chart below. Although the data doesn’t show whether adoption leads to satisfaction, or satisfaction to adoption, the comments that accompany the score heavily suggest it is the former.

Why aren’t we using them more?

The comments suggest that time, complexity and frustration with the tools themselves as the main barriers to further adoption. Here are a few of those comments:

“It feels like hard work – nothing is really simple”
“Spending the time to set something up that does what we need properly. Nothing ever works ‘off the shelf’ so always needs a degree of customisation.”
“We’re using other stuff for email marketing (Mailchimp) and sales pipeline (spreadsheet and project management tool) so it’s just the effort involved with switching. Currently it’d be a bunch of effort for not a hugely noticeable improvement so further CRM setup is on the back burner.”
“The ballache of contacting support, and having to work it out myself. Seems like a task too far when its all so busy anyway”
“A lack of knowledge about the platform and how best to utilise it”
“Time (the most popular answer by far)”

Thoughts and conclusions

So, what are we to make of this? I have a few thoughts

We’re all looking for different things from our CRMs and the products are equally varied
Despite that variance, very few people are bowled over by their CRM
Most of us feel we aren’t using our CRMs to their full potential, but time and complexity stop us doing it better
The better we use our CRMs, the happier we are with them (although there are diminishing returns on that)
Under utilising our CRMs leads to significant dissatisfaction
With nearly a quarter of respondents not using CRMs, this feels like an easy improvement to make

How to find the right CRM for your agency

I’d strongly advise by starting with really considering what you need from a CRM. A well integrated CRM solution is not easy to migrate away from, so you don’t want to be changing too frequently (trust me… been there, got the T-shirt). Think about your immediate needs, but also how they are likely to change over the next few years. Every tool should do the basic contact management to a sufficient level, but think about your specific requirements:

Do you need your CRM to be marketing aware? Many aren’t
What channels do you use?
What other systems do you need to integrate with?
What will your usage (contacts, outgoing messages, users) look like in the coming year or two?

Don’t just assume that the cheapest or most popular option will be right for you because others like it, as your needs might be very different. Be sure to cost it for the future you are aiming for as well as today, as the costs can ramp up to an eye-watering level with some options (cough HubSpot cough) and following the crowd can get expensive.

This is tricky, because it really does depend on the needs of each agency and I wouldn’t give an unqualified recommendation without knowing more about what the business needs to achieve. I may sometimes recommend one of the top 3 mentioned above, but more often not for the reasons I already outlined. In particular, proper marketing support is an absolute non-negotiable for me. Managing the pipeline is fine, but I want to know exactly where each deal came from and what content and channels contributed to that. I personally think this is the MOST VALUABLE function of a good CRM yet many don’t support it, and I honestly don’t know a single CRM that does it as well as it should.

Recently recommended:

FreshSales : In my less kind moments I may have described FreshSales as “If Temu did HubSpot”. That’s rather unfair, but gets across the point that it really is an affordable way to get HubSpot like functionality for a tiny fraction of the cost. This is what I am currently using in my own business and what I have implemented for several Agency clients. It has a few odd UI and Product choices, but is a solid CRM that covers all the key areas pretty well. It doesn’t do dashboards as well as HubSpot and the marketing automation isn’t quite to the same level, but is a pretty solid choice for many. Support is also responsive and the pricing is good. It even has a free tier that is more functional than most. They have a few versions of the product, but most agencies will be looking at Freshsales Suite.

Zoho : We had greater success with Zoho in my old agency than any other CRM we used or trialled. It is very powerful, sensibly priced and can be made to do most things and comes with a huge number of add-ons. It’s a while since I used it now, but the downsides used to be that the system itself felt rather old and disjointed (it’s a suite of connected products rather than a single product) and can be very complicated to set-up. As such, I would only recommend Zoho when I knew there was resource available to dedicate to the more involved set-up and integration. However, if an Agency needed a CRM integrated with systems as diverse as e-signing, webinars, HR, and the hundreds of other parts of the suite, I’d still be looking at Zoho CRM as an option.

AgileCRM: Another CRM that probably deserves to be more popular than it is. AgileCRM is one of the nicer CRMs I have used (and probably the one I will switch to again if I change). It’s another CRM that covers all the main areas, and probably has stronger reporting and better UX than my current choice. The main drawback I see is reports that the support have worsened since I used it last. Find out more about AgileCRM here.

A few others to consider

ActiveCampaign looks interesting now, having developed from a email marketing platform to marketing led CRM. One I want to learn more about, although pricing looks higher than many. More here.
Odoo I have it on good authority that you can implement marketing tracking through a workaround in Odoo, which might make is a contender for me again. Main potential downside is it requiring more set-up work than most. More here.
Ontraport I know very little about this, but the feature set, reviews and pricing make it interesting to me. One I will definitely be learning more about . More here.

EDIT: As a result of doing this research and writing, I think I am going to switch CRM and try Agile again. I’ve been going back over the features and reviews of every CRM that has come up in this study and Agile’s stronger marketing toolset means that I want to give it another try. Fresh has ticked all the boxes for me at close to zero cost, but I’m interested to see if I can do more using Agile.

EDIT 2 : Agile seem to currently have an issue with their Gsuite integration which makes it a non starter for me. What a shame. I’ll remove this notice if they update me that it is resolved. I wasn’t bowled over with the way they handled this to be honest, so I may or may not be motivated to investigate further at that point.

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Leave cash on the table – Do your agency finances need to grow up?

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

When an agency is first founded, the finances are often handled in the simplest of ways, with the current bank balance being the main metric monitored. The founder knows they’re making money if the bank balance is growing, and knows they aren’t if it shrinks.. Cash accounting, as your accountant will call this approach, is simple, effective and seems to make perfect sense. Unfortunately, as your agency grows and becomes more complex, cash accounting quickly falls behind the needs of the business and can lead to a dangerous false sense of security.

The limitations of cash accounting often become clear to founders in painful ways. For me, it was a large VAT bill sometime in the late ’90s that left us struggling to make payroll to complete work we had already been paid for. We’d been landing bigger projects, the bank balance looked healthy, but deposit payments had masked the fact that we were not operating profitably, and everything got rather stressful for a while, especially when the late VAT payment triggered 3 days of VAT inspection.

This mistake feels naive with a few decades of hindsight, but is a pattern I see often. It often takes a situation like this to realise that the business has outgrown cash accounting, but it shouldn’t. This is a predictable path that businesses (and their advisors) should be ahead of. In the simplest of terms, cash accounting will usually reach the end of its useful life as more of the following become factors for the business:

Registering for VAT: When we start collecting VAT on sales our bank balances include money that is owed to HMRC. The relationship between cash and profit becomes looser and bank balances become a less reliable indicator.
Employees on Payroll: Employing people creates new liabilities that will not show in cash balances. By the time we near month end there can be significant sums owed in terms of Salaries, National Insurance, PAYE, Pension contributions and other benefits. Cash accounting might not provide a clear picture of these costs.
Larger Tax Liabilities: Higher profits often mean increased corporation tax. Cash accounting can distort your profit picture, leading to unexpected tax bills.
Investing in Assets: Significant purchases of equipment or other assets require depreciation, which is not accounted for under cash accounting.
Complex Projects: Long-term projects with staged payments or deliverables demand more sophisticated financial tracking than cash accounting allows.
Seeking Finance or Investment: Investors and lenders typically expect businesses to use accrual accounting as it provides a more accurate representation of financial performance.

Switching from cash accounting to the alternative of accrual accounting can make sense when any of the above triggers occurs, but makes increasingly more sense as more of those triggers come into play.

Accrual accounting explained in simple terms

Let’s start by demystifying the term “accrual accounting”: Lots of small business owners shut off when they hear terms like this, assuming they are more complex than they are. Like almost every industry, accounting and finance love to use fancy terms to describe simple things. Accrual accounting is simply the process of recording income and expenditure when they occur, rather than when the money actually moved. Here is a simple example:

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Example Project

An agency does some work on a website in December and uses a freelancer for some of the work, which costs £2,000. The agency pays the freelancer at the end of December and gets paid for the work by the client in January.

Cash accounting

December

Revenue: £0. No revenue recorded, as cash has not been received.
Costs: £2,000. Payment to freelancer.
Gross profit: £2,000 loss (revenue minus costs).

January

Revenue: £10,000. Payment received from client.
Costs: £0. Freelancer already paid in December.
Gross profit: £10,000 (revenue minus costs).

Accrual accounting

December

Revenue: £10,000. Revenue recognised when the work is completed.
Costs: £2,000. Cost recognised when incurred.
Gross profit: £8,000 (revenue minus costs).

January

Revenue: £0. Work already recognised in December.
Costs: £0. Freelancer already paid in December.
Gross profit: £0 (revenue minus costs).

The worked example makes the difference clear: Cash accounting records transactions based on when cash moves, where accrual accounting records them when they are earned or incurred. The advantage is that we get a more accurate picture of profitability per period.

Making the switch

Accrual Accounting is very much the norm in business, with the smallest businesses being those most likely to stick with cash accounting. Cash accounting does involve less bookkeeping, so will save direct costs, but the advantage of having a more accurate picture of the business performance will outweigh this for most. In short, the question for many will be “when to make the change” rather than “if to”.

I’ve explained the underlying principle of accrual accounting is recording transactions on the date they occur economically, not when cash changes hands. Let’s look in detail at both expenditure and revenue to see how that actually works in practice:

Expenditure

When recording expenses, the golden rule is to match the cost to the period in which it provides value to your business. Here are some common scenarios:

One-off purchases: Record these on the invoice date, not the payment date. For example, if you buy office supplies on 28th March but pay for them on 5th April, you’d record the expense in March.
Recurring services: For services like hosting, spread the cost over the period it covers. If you pay £1,200 for a year’s hosting on 1st January, you’d recognise £100 as an expense each month throughout the year.
Staff costs: Record salaries in the month employees earn them, even if you pay in arrears. Include any accrued holiday pay.
Prepayments: If you pay for something in advance, only recognise the portion that relates to the current period as an expense. The rest becomes a prepayment asset on your balance sheet.

Revenue

Recognising revenue can be trickier, especially for agencies with long-term projects. Here are some guidelines:

Time and materials projects: Recognise revenue as you complete the work, typically monthly. If you’ve worked but not yet invoiced, record the world in progress as accrued income.
Fixed price projects: Recognise revenue using methods like the Percentage of Completion or Milestone-based approaches to accurately reflect the work completed.
Retainers: Recognise revenue evenly across the retainer period, regardless of when you invoice or receive payment.
Deposits: Don’t recognise these as revenue immediately. Instead, record them as a liability (customer deposit) until you’ve earned them by doing the work.

If all of this is starting to make your head hurt, then talk to your bookkeeper. This is bread and butter for them and it is simple once you have the process in place (and if you don’t have a bookkeeper get one, as it is the first thing most people should outsource).

Why bother?

At this point, you might be wondering if all this effort is really worth it. I promise that it is. Accrual accounting isn’t just a fancy way to complicate your bookkeeping. It’s a powerful tool that is an absolute necessity to run a growing business well. Here’s why:

Clarity: You’ll get a crystal-clear picture of your agency’s financial health at any given moment. No more nasty surprises like that VAT bill that caught me out in the ’90s.
Better decision making: With accurate, up-to-date financial information, you can make informed decisions about hiring, taking on new projects, or investing in growth.
Attracting investment: If you’re looking to secure funding or sell your agency down the line, accrual accounting is essential. It’s what serious investors expect to see.
Scalability: As your agency grows, accrual accounting grows with you. It’s the foundation for more sophisticated financial management and reporting.
Profitability insights: You’ll be able to see which projects, clients, or services are truly profitable, not just which ones bring in the most cash.
Tax efficiency: The timing of profit recognition can help smooth out profitability and therefore dividends.

The switch to accrual accounting might seem daunting at first, but it’s a rite of passage for growing agencies. Don’t wait for a crisis to force your hand. If you’re hitting any of the triggers we discussed earlier (VAT registration, growing payroll, bigger projects), it’s time to make the leap. Talk to your accountant or bookkeeper about making the switch. They’ll be able to guide you through the process and set up systems that make it manageable.

Remember, your agency’s finances are too important to be left to guesswork or gut feeling. Accrual accounting gives you the tools to truly understand your business’s financial story, and to write the next chapters with confidence. If you have passed any of the triggers discussed at the start of this article and are still using cash accounting it is probably time to have this conversation with your FD, Accountant or Advisor.

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Give more. Take less.

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I think everyone should do more things that DON’T have an immediate and measurable ROI.

It’s sometimes tempting to look at everything as a line in a P&L: a cost in time, money, or opportunity that we need to have a measurable return from. Our time on LinkedIn gets measured in network growth, our attendance at events in the leads we uncover, the coffee chats we have in whether they move someone down our pipeline. It seems logical, particularly when times are tough, but I remain solidly unconvinced.

My approach has always been to give more and take less. I do this in my current business, I frequently give free support to those who need it, serve on the board of a charity, pass on leads and referrals freely and try to give value in some form whenever I attend an event. I try to do it on LinkedIn too, sharing thinking and observations rather than plugging my services (although scrolling through my recent posts now, I think I would file most under “nonsense”, sorry about that)

This isn’t just “exited founder privilege” either. We had a similar approach in the agency I ran. We qualified out 95% of our inbound enquiries, but tried to leave all of those outside of our target profile with value and a positive experience. We even produced a free guide aimed entirely at those we had no intention of doing business with, helping them grow to the point where we might. The same approach was the foundation of our marketing too. It was through openly sharing useful information that competitors treated as trade secrets that we built a name in a niche dominated by larger players.

Give not take

If you want to feel justified in working more like this, call it Brand Building. Being known for being helpful and having a chance to demonstrate your capabilities is never a bad thing. Neither is being liked. People are far more likely to do business with helpful experts they already like whether you can measure what led to that or not.

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The power of this approach really hit home once at an event that Google hosted to introduce partners like us to potential clients. Whilst our peers were thrusting their hands at prospects to introduce themselves, I had multiple people recognise me from my profile picture and thank me for help or information we had provided online.

So there is return, whether we measure it or not. Importantly though, it’s just a nicer way to work. Seeing everything in business as purely transactional is soulless and exhausting. When you run a small business, your passion and energy for it will be one of the biggest drivers of success. It’s difficult to maintain that when you see every part of the business as a transactional grind.

In the end, this approach may not always have an immediate, measurable ROI. But it builds something far more valuable in the long run: trust, reputation, and genuine connections. These are the intangible assets that often lead to the most significant opportunities and successes in business and life.

And here is the twist: At a time when many agencies are finding business difficult, I’m frequently asked about the patterns I see in those doing well. Whilst nothing is fool proof, I definitely see parallels between those businesses taking a less transactional view and those doing well and reporting that “leads just always seem to come in”. Take that, Bean Counters.

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Better not bigger: Rethinking growth as a goal

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

There are few things that make me question a LinkedIn connection request more than the overuse of words like “growth” and “scale” in someone’s profile. These people are often members of the Cult of Growth, which seems to be so popular on LinkedIn. I see enough of their regurgitated sermons without engaging with their DMs about “Ten Exxing your business” and asking me about my “Growth Goals”.

I struggle with their message because I believe that growth should never be a goal for owner-run businesses. Growth is a tool we can use to help us achieve our goals, but having growth as a goal in itself is a questionable way to think for the leaders of most businesses. Yet, when I talk to business owners about their business goals, the majority will start their response by talking about multiplying either revenue or headcount. Often both. Classic growth goals… and meaningless for most of us.

Where does this growth focus come from?

Growth makes sense as a goal when the owners of a business are removed from its month-to-month operations. When I invest in a business as a shareholder, I want to see a return on that investment either in terms of dividends or share price growth (ideally both!). Share price growth offers the biggest opportunity for substantial returns and, within certain ethical boundaries, I am not overly concerned with how that growth is achieved. Thus, it makes perfect sense that an organisation primarily serving remote shareholders is focused on growth.

However, businesses with a remote shareholder-focused model are a tiny minority. When we think of business success, we tend to think of the flagship PLCs, but they make up less than 0.1% of over 5 million registered companies in the UK. For the vast majority of the remaining 99.9%, which are often small, owner-run businesses, the value of their shares has little to no impact on the day-to-day lives of their owners. Share value only becomes a factor if the business is sold, which in itself is much rarer than most people realise. Even in those cases where the business is sold, the owners have often earned far more through salary and dividends during the life of the company than they do from the sale of the equity.

I attribute this growth obsession to four main causes:

Most business books and courses are written with large shareholder-owned businesses in mind, despite being read by owner-run companies.
Press and politicians always focus on that large 0.1% of businesses, with small businesses under-represented.
There is an industry making money from selling the dream of growth (which includes a lot of #1).
It’s more convenient to focus on something less meaningful but easier to measure than to do the difficult work of setting more meaningful goals.

None of this is to suggest that growth is bad. If my goals relate to profit, then that might require revenue growth. If I want to remove myself from the day-to-day operations, then I may need a bigger team, which also likely means larger revenues. In these cases, though, growth is a tool to achieve a more meaningful goal rather than the goal itself.

Setting More Meaningful Goals

The first three factors above are difficult for us to control, so let’s look at what I mean by the fourth and what we can do about it. I suspect that a lot of people simply set growth goals because they’ve never taken the time to think about and set better ones. The first three factors lead us to believe that this is what goals look like, so we pluck an arbitrary number out of the air and set that as our target. Being arbitrary and essentially meaningless to us, these goals predictably fail to have much meaningful impact. So, what’s a better way?

The greatest benefit to owning the business you work in is being able to align that business with the life you want, yet many of us fail to do that. Rather than building a business that will deliver what the owners want from life, they build one that is aligned with arbitrary growth goals, then wonder why they don’t have the money, freedom, or happiness that they dreamt of. It’s painfully common for me to have conversations with business owners where they describe what they personally want from their lives, then immediately describe a business plan that takes them in the polar opposite direction.

Setting meaningful goals for owner-run businesses starts with understanding what the owners want from life. When I work with clients, I’ll often get them to write a description of how they see life in five years’ time. We’ll drill into these imagined futures, putting meat on the bones of the dream, turning vague ideas into concrete numbers: How much will mortgage payments be on that dream house? How many weeks per year will those holidays take? What would the team need to look like to support that vision of your working week? I then like to work with the business owner to build a picture of what the business would need to look like in order to support that future.

It’s a process I would encourage anyone to do. The aim is to create a costed model for a future version of the business that can support the life the owners want; a version of the business worth aiming for. This usually involves growth. It often involves selling the business at some point in the future. Neither are goals though, just tools available in our arsenal to achieve more meaningful outcomes.

The idea isn’t to create an unmovable vision of the future that you can’t adapt and change. I review my own five-year view every few months, thinking it through further, adding and changing a few details each time.

Even meaningful goals mean nothing without a plan

With a credible and meaningful future business in mind, the next step is to create a plan that will get you there. The approach to follow here is to step backwards from that five-year vision and have credible, sustainable, and achievable milestones along the path to that goal. I tend to use two-year and one-year milestones, then break that one-year view down into quarterly steps. Doing that is where the work really starts, but it is also where this article ends. If you find the approach interesting, let me know in the LinkedIn comments, and I might write about the planning part as a follow-up.

The takeaway, though, is that we business owners are uniquely privileged in being able to build our businesses to support the lives we want. Why waste that on instead chasing someone else’s goals?

Helping business owners create and execute on a plan that aligns business and life goals is absolutely the best part of my job. If you run a digital agency and would like some help doing this, I’d love to have a conversation about that with you.

Beyond the craft: Expertise isn’t enough to build a successful agency

Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Many agencies are born from a talent for “the craft” they will deliver. A talented designer founds a creative agency, a gifted programmer starts a development shop or a PPC expert starts a paid media agency. Each of these founders (and scores like them) shares a common starting point: a profound expertise and passion for their particular skill. But as many quickly discover, having a deep understanding of the craft is just the beginning of their entrepreneurial journey and in no way a guarantee of success.

Turning expertise into a successful business requires more than just technical skills; it requires a fundamental shift from craftsman to entrepreneur. Even founders continuing to work “on the tools” in their new agency will find their role changes very rapidly and demands a host of new skills and knowledge. Most founders know this when they plan their change, yet most still either underestimate the size of the shift they are about to experience or lack visibility on the detail of what that means.

The priority gaps to fill

My role as an agency advisor often involves filling some of these gaps: bringing commercial and operational experience to complement the founder’s craft skills and vision. Through this article I want to lay out what I see as the most common overlooked areas that founders need to strengthen quickly. I’ve presented these in a vague order of urgency for most new founders; giving new founders a roadmap to beating the odds and making a success of their new venture.

1 : New Business

Priority one is New Business. Even if you are lucky enough to start up with a client or two in the bag, your new agency will not survive unless you can work out how to bring in more work. You can’t be over reliant on too few clients who could churn at any time and you probably have aspirations to grow beyond those initial clients anyway. New business becomes even more important if your model is project based rather than retainer based and requires a constant stream of new contracts just to stand still.

The demands of new business is often one of the biggest shocks for new founders, particularly those who have come from roles where they were previously sheltered from it inside a larger business. You’ll need a plan that can bring in quality leads at a suitable pace but that suits your skills and resources. You’ll also need a process to turn those leads into paying customers.

However much new business activity you think you need to hit your targets, I would advise doing 50% more. Building redundancy into this activity gives you the opportunity to select the best clients to suit your goals and also helps you ride through periods where issues in the wider economy suddenly tank your conversion rates.

2 : Basic Financial Control

Finances are the area that founders love to ignore. Don’t. Even if you have great support from an accountant you need to have your own eye on the basics. At the very least you need to have visibility on:

Cashflow
How profitable your clients/projects are
Your overhead and liabilities

These things can seem daunting if you are not used to dealing with them, but they shouldn’t be. Assuming you don’t have an Advisor or FD helping you with these things, have your Accountant or Bookkeeper set up clear reporting and explain how to use it. I frequently see businesses neglecting this aspect. A common issue is believing that because they have an accountant handling their annual return they have this covered. Unless your accountant is producing monthly management accounts and you are having a monthly meeting where they go through them, that almost certainly isn’t the case. That means that any issue can take months to come to light, after which it can be incredibly challenging to fix.

Getting control of your finances is vital, but doesn’t have to be complex. A simple spreadsheet could track all of these things, or learn how to read it from your accounting package. I advise agencies I work with to actively go over the numbers with someone monthly as the act of discussing them ensures they don’t get ignored.

3 : Strategic Thinking and Planning

When you own a business you also own the big picture. That doesn’t just mean having a vision of what it could be, but testing that vision, building a plan to make it happen and having contingencies in place for when it doesn’t. It’s common for businesses to pin down their vision quite early, but not connect it to the daily business as usual for some time. Sometimes even years. To connect the parts you need a robust vision, a realistic plan and process in place to make that plan happen. These things require a mindset that many people don’t learn until they run their own business, so get working on it early.

One way of tying vision to action is to use a system that encourages focus on short term goals that are aligned with the long term objectives. We used EOS (The Entrepreneurial Operating System) in my own agency, although I now favour a process based on OKRs. The method is less important than setting aside regular time to focus on this “Important, but never urgent” work.

What else is missing?

No matter how good you are at the craft of what you do, business will be tougher if you don’t build those three critical skills. 60% of new UK businesses cease trading in their first three years, and I wholeheartedly believe that blind spots in the three areas above contribute significantly to that number. As the business grows the need to build new skills will continue to grow with it. You’ll likely have to go deeper on the three areas above (or bring in others to do so), but you’ll also be called on to answer challenges in Operations, HR, leadership and more. It’s no surprise that many founders find themselves occasionally longing for the simpler life of focusing on their craft that they left behind!

The shift from expert to entrepreneur never really finishes, but it shouldn’t be overwhelming either. Start by using this guide to identify the gaps in your current skillset and prioritise what is most important and urgent to your business. Then dedicate time to closing them, a bit at a time. Honouring that time when clients get demanding is the hard part, and it is also the point. If you have gaps in these three areas, closing them might be the most valuable work you ever do in your business.

Rethinking the hustle: Should we really ‘Work hard, retire early’ ?

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Working ridiculous, long hours and failing to take holiday are almost badges of honour for many business owners. Whenever I ask anyone sporting those badges why they do it I tend to get a mixture of three common answers:

I do it because I love my job
That’s what it takes to run a business
I work hard now so that I can retire early

It’s the last of those points I really want to address, as it is both the most common answer and the one that is built on some very shaky logic. Let’s just get the other two, easily dismissed points out the way first.

“I do it because I love my job”

I love my job too, but it isn’t the only thing I love. It’s not even the thing I love the most (that would be my Cat… luckily my wife and kids don’t read my blogs). Doing just one thing, even a thing you love, is boring. It also makes that thing boring and makes you love it less over time. That aside, I’m not buying this answer anyway. People who say they’re working 70 hour weeks, 51 weeks a year because they “love their job” still talk about their dream holidays and their bucket list they never dip into. They just do it whilst repeating this line over and over to themselves trying to convince themselves it is true.

“That’s what it takes to run a business”

I hate to contradict the LinkedIn hustle, but this is not true and there are thousands upon thousands of people running their business in ways that prove it isn’t. Sure, there are times when all stops need to be pulled, but those should be exceptions not the norm. If “work every hour I can” if your long term plan, then I’d strongly urge you to re-evaluate that plan. There are definitely better options. Running a business isn’t like front line work. It isn’t an hourly rate job and what you get back from the business should not have a direct correlation with the hours you put in. If it does, you are labouring not leading and you probably already know that.

“I work hard now so that I can retire early”

The reason I wanted to focus most on this answer is because, unlike the two previous answers, I think people actually believe this one. If I am going to be completely honest, it’s also partly because I used to buy into this line myself. I was wrong though. In most cases it is simply a bad strategy to get the most out of life and I’ll demonstrate that through three arguments and an optional spreadsheet (There’s always a spreadsheet):

Counter 1 : The maths doesn’t stack up

Let’s consider two 30 year old business owners. Both are young enough to make whatever plan they choose work for them. Entrepreneur A has studied the lessons from every LinkedInfluencer and knows that the answer is to work minimum 12 hour days 6 days per week. If they holiday then the laptop will go with them and they’ll only have 7 real work-free holiday days per year beyond their one day weekend. They do this so that they can retire in 20 years time, on their 50th birthday.

Entrepreneur B is what our first entrepreneur calls “lazy”. He only works 40 hours a week, often doing those hours in 4 days so that he can travel, see friends and waste time on his hobbies. He takes and enviable 6 weeks a year out of work and barely checks in with the team when he does. This comes at a cost though. It’s going to take him 50% longer to afford retirement. He’ll work working up until his 60th birthday, a full 10 years after his more “driven” peer.

At first glace it feels like Entrepreneur A had it right, but if we look at how many hour each worked between turning 30 and retiring we get a clearer picture.

Entrepreneur A : 66,300 hours
Entrepreneur B : 55,200 hours . Over 20% fewer hours!

OK, the numbers themselves are slightly arbitrary, but it proves the point. In fact, even if Entrepreneur B had to work on at that same pace right up to receiving state pension at 65, he would still have done 2000 hours less work that A. He’d probably also be a lot happier, healthier and a much more interesting person to be around!

The older you get before making a change, the less impact it has of course, but then the same applies to increasing the work (the later you leave it, the less impact it will have on retirement age).

Want to play around with the numbers yourself? Try this simple Google Sheet

If the plan leans on a pension pot, my pension fee impact calculator shows what fund fees take out of one over the same sort of timeframe.

Counter 2 : The impact of Risk

In the above example, Entrepreneur A is effectively investing their time hoping to get a pay-out of more time back later. Like other investments, we need to factor in the risks as well as the potential reward. When I invest money I am happy for modest returns when risk is low, but expect higher returns when there is more chance of losing some of that money. It’s the same when I invest time.

One of our fictional entrepreneurs above is working 80% more hours for each of the next 20 years. That is time invested. The hoped for return is more time to themselves (or maybe nice things sooner), which our look at the maths already shows is questionable. However there is also risk that the plan could be disrupted. The worse-case version of that is that something happens to Entrepreneur A between the age of 50 and 65 that prevents them using that time in a quality way (Not an unlikely scenario of those taking no time out of the business). More likely is that those 80% extra hours each year don’t turn into the early retirement hoped for because longer hours don’t guarantee success. In fact there is a growing body of evidence supporting the fact that we become less effective at work when we work beyond 35 hours per week and that effectiveness continues to decline as the hours increase. This would mean that Entrepreneur A would be more effective for the hours he worked than his tired out peer.

When it comes to time or money, a bird in the hand is definitely > a bird in the bush (2 birds would be dependent on timescales and target returns!) and that needs to be shown in potential returns.

Youth is wasted on the young

I did retire at 50. Personally I think it sucked and I started a new business a few weeks later and am happier for it. My kids were at school, my wife enjoys her work (mostly) and possibly didn’t seem that enthusiastic about the idea of being with me 24/7 anyway. My friends are mostly distributed around the world and doing their own things, and a lot of the activities I used to enjoy doing in my spare time just bloody hurt now.

I’m not saying retirement is bad, even if I am not ready for it myself. I’m just saying that 24 hours in your 50s isn’t the same as 24 hours in your 20s, 30s or 40s. I don’t know many early retirees who wouldn’t gladly swap a bit of time off now for a little more time when their children were young, when their parents were around or when their then-stronger social group were doing far more interesting things together. We need to be careful of swapping out most valuable hours for less valuable ones later: They are not worth the same.

Figuring out what you really want

I think “retire at 50” is one of those goals that other people set for us. Business owners tend to be more driven people and driven people respond well to clear objectives. Knowing this we set objectives based on common ideas of success rather than taking time to understand what is really important for us and setting goals aligned with that. Retiring at 50 is a common goal because most people aren’t entrepreneurs. They have limited control over the job they do, the hours they work or the business they do that within. They’re passengers and the only option they have is to switch which ship they’re on. As entrepreneurs we’re not passengers. We’re not only captain our won ships, but own them too. If we feel we’re stuck on a particular route we can turn the rudder and sail off in any direction we choose. We have the option to build the business to give us our dream job and optimise for whatever it is we want from life.

Maybe early retirement is essential to your life plans. Who knows, you might have the dream of living off-grid in Borneo for a decade and refuse to be a Starlink customer. If so, great: Optimise for that. My point though is that “work harder, retire early” shouldn’t be the default answer. Don’t do it if it isn’t what you really want deep down, and definitely don’t do it if you are going to end up worse off by doing so!

Stop hiding in your blanket fort

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Running a business isn’t just hard; it can be relentless. We all have a finite capacity for the number of hard things we can deal with at once, and that capacity is often not enough. We all have different ways to cope when we feel ourselves reaching (or passing) that capacity, but I want to talk about one in particular: The blanket fort. I’m not talking about physically building a blanket fort under your desk and hiding in the warmth until a crisis or two pass (although I may have been tempted once or twice). I’m talking in metaphors, of course, and the blanket forts are the safe places and activities we create in our work that shield us from what is happening and give us a false sense of being in control.

One of my blanket forts is the spreadsheet. If you have worked with me, it probably won’t come as a surprise to know that the ordered world of spreadsheets with neat grey-bordered boxes full of perfectly rational calculations is a place of security for me. As I near my capacity for how much concurrent crap I can process, my natural response is to open up a wonderfully fresh Google sheet and start tapping some order back into the universe. If it’s really bad, I might even start creating SQL tables. Sometimes that is the right thing to be doing: The problem requires a spreadsheet (or database!). More often than not though, the spreadsheet is what makes me think I am taking control and feel like I’m doing something constructive.

Just like the blanket forts of our childhoods, the spreadsheet creates a space that I can control, feel safe and can ignore everything going on outside. That’s not always a bad thing… just as long as you aren’t ignoring the fact that your house is on fire just the other side of the blanket.

Most people aren’t building blanket forts out of spreadsheets. Everyone has their own preferred construction, using the most familiar and comforting parts of our work to build safe spaces to hide in. Activities we know we’re good at, that make us feel productive, and that we ultimately enjoy. Think for a moment about the activities that match that description for you and that you retreat to when under pressure. How much of a coincidence would it be if those activities really were always the answer to the tough times you have faced?

I have nothing against people having their blanket forts. I’m certainly not giving up my spreadsheets. We just need to be self-aware enough to know that is what we’re doing and that it is probably giving us a boost, but also probably not solving our problems.

“OK, I admit I’m hiding in my blanket fort… but I’m not coming out!”

These places of comfort in our work serve a purpose. We retreat to them usually when we’re feeling overwhelmed, and just acknowledging this fact doesn’t solve the problem and help us face what is outside. As a business mentor, it is not unusual for me to find myself coaxing people out of their safe spaces to take more effective steps to tackle a problem they are facing. Depending on the severity of the overload, I find one of two things works:

Do the one most impactful thing. This is the best approach. Consider the issue and all the tools and resources at your disposal. Prioritise the issues by importance and urgency, then focus efforts on the one thing that will have the most impact on the biggest issue. The boost from doing that will help you rinse and repeat the process until it all becomes manageable.
Do the easiest thing that has impact. If the overwhelm is too much, then focus on a single thing that will have some impact. Successfully making one dent in the issues helps us regain control and look at the other challenges more rationally.

Both approaches focus on a single problem at a time. Limiting the issues you are tackling then focusing on one impactful thing at a time starts solving problems. Importantly, it also gives you back the sense of control over what is happening. As you make progress on one thing at a time after another, there becomes less to hide away from. By contrast, multi-tasking when feeling overwhelmed invariably leads to starting a number of things that don’t get completed, which achieves nothing.

I guide this process of prioritisation and planning regularly with various leaders I work with as an agency mentor. In most cases, they already know what needs doing, but everything has felt too urgent to tackle things methodically. Approaches like this are sometimes used to coax people out of those forts, but over time the approach becomes a safe space in its own right: We learn to retreat to the framework rather than our old safe places. It’s still a tactical approach. It is far better to have strategic plans in place to avoid such overload. It’s a useful tactic to have though.

The takeaway here though is that many of us build such forts and we should be aware of them. They can be useful to a point, but you can’t live inside your blanket fort forever. So, who is prepared to admit what safe places they create or share how they tackle overwhelm? I’d love to hear from you in the LinkedIn comments.

Unplugging BossGPT: Why you need to stop being your team’s answer engine

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Have you ever counted up the sheer number of questions you field each day as a leader? Or calculated the hours you sacrifice giving answers to ‘quick questions’? While being available for quick questions might seem like the WD-40 that keeps your agency running smoothly, it comes with its own set of hidden costs. Once you become ‘BossGPT’, the font of all knowledge at the end of a message request, you’re not only failing to add your full value to the business, but you risk undermining your team’s ability to think critically and solve problems independently. In essence, your well-intentioned accessibility could have long term detriment to you, your team and your business.

Bad for you, the leader

I’m sure many reading this will need little explanation of the impact of constant questions. Having questions ping through on Slack, or shouted across the room all day is exhausting and can increase the stress we are under. I speak to many agency leaders who describe the frustration of being under pressure to provide a constant stream of answers and decisions. The stress comes on multiple fronts too. Not only from the questions themselves, but the fact they detract from what we should be focused on as leaders. When our thoughts are interrupted it takes time to return to focus on our original task, putting us behind and putting us under more pressure to work faster (see The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress – Mark, Gudith & Klocke).

Another cost to us comes in the form of decision fatigue. Our brain is not a limitless resource that can work optimally all day. The fact that the more decisions we make in a day the harder subsequent ones become to make is well documented with often worrying consequences. As agency leaders, our poor decisions are less likely to be life-changing, but it’s still important to get them right. The likelihood of making good decisions increases when we have fewer to make in a day. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos goes as far as trying to limit himself to three decisions per day: “If I make three good decisions a day, that’s enough, and they should just be as high quality as I can make them”. Three might not be realistic for most of us, but it does make you realise the cost of being overloaded with questions and decisions.

So, if too many questions is bad for us, why do we make ourselves so available to our teams? Aaah… to help them of course. One problem:

It’s bad for our teams too

We can kid ourselves that we do it to help our employees, but it’s often a myopic view. Whilst our timely intervention might unblock their immediate work, it probably isn’t as helpful in the long run. Possibly even harmful. Consider this slightly reinvented lesson: “Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Give a man a fish and he’ll ask you for another one tomorrow” (I’ll admit… RE wasn’t my strongest subject at school). When we provide easy answers we are depriving our employees of the opportunity to learn, grow and be better. We even risk making them more dependent on us, training them that the only way to find answers is to ask others. We’re also stifling innovation, always applying the answer we already know rather than seeking other answers and new thinking that could potentially be better.

Ultimately, it is bad for business

Anything that is bad for the leader and the employee is bad for the business, but there are more direct issues too. The time of our senior people is the most scarce of resources in people-first businesses like agencies. Having leadership answer a team question might seem faster, but could be an appalling use of that valuable resource if they could eventually have found that answer themselves. Particularly so when you consider the opportunity cost of the time lost to context shift. Ultimately though it becomes a barrier to scale. I’ve written here before about the communications explosion that comes as a business grows. Placing yourself at the centre of every decision creates a hard limit on how fast your business can move as it becomes more complex. To quote one of my favourite business books:

If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business, you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic! – Michael E Gerber – The E-Myth Revisited

How to stop being BossGPT

If some of the above seems familiar, and you are convinced that it’s not ideal, then you are probably wondering how to stop being your team’s answer engine. With that in mind, let’s explore some ways to break that reliance:

1. Set boundaries

The first step is to communicate the problem with your team and set some boundaries. You certainly don’t want to cut your team off from your expertise, but might want to limit it. A good way is to delineate time; either setting “office hours” where questions are encouraged or “focus time” when you don’t expect interruptions. Either way, clearly communicating the expectation is key. Making yourself available asynchronously also works. Turning off notifications for whatever channel questions usually arrive through and having the discipline to tackle questions at set times is an easy way to apply this.

2. Capture answers

Many questions surface time and time again. Capturing these questions and their answers in an internal knowledge base gives your team a new channel to find answers and can result in better answers too. See my thoughts on Building your business brain for other ways this can benefit you and your business.

3. Prioritise and filter

Encourage the team to categorise questions as “urgent,” “important,” or “routine,” to help you triage when time is short and the load is high. This will not only help you manage your time better, but also to focus where you can have most impact.

4. Empower and encourage

Encourage employees to think critically and solve problems independently. Provide tools and training not only in the craft of your business, but also in the soft skills that make individuals more valuable contributors. Build a culture of self-discovering and learning, calling out good examples and supporting those who demonstrate the principles.

5. Delegate

Identify key team members who can handle specific types of questions and concerns, and communicate this with the wider team. Make it clear when it’s appropriate to escalate questions to you. Doing this not only frees your time for higher value activities, but helps employees grow into ever more useful resources.

6. Coach and guide

Teaching frequent question-askers to find their own answers might take longer in the short term, but is an investment in your future. Asking where they could look for answers, who else they could have gone to and whether they could try to figure it out helps them find answers more independently in future and empowers them to do so.

7. Regularly review and improve

Take time to regularly consider how to make further improvements. What type of questions keep occurring? Who is asking them? Could they have been avoided? Are you truly supporting people to answer these questions for themselves? Ask all of these questions of yourself and of others in the organisation and look for ways to improve.

What is your next step?

By making changes like these, leaders can break the pattern of being overly available and cultivate a more sustainable, empowered working environment. This will not only benefit you but also contribute to employee growth and make your business operate more effectively. What do you think? Are you encouraged to do anything differently having read this? I’d love to hear your thoughts on LinkedIn, just click the button below.

How to land new clients with a single LinkedIn post

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

It’s every business owner’s dream. I recently signed two new clients as a result of writing a single post on LinkedIn. In fact, that post not only landed me great clients, but also triggered conversations with two other hot prospects keen to do business. This wasn’t fluke either. I was confident that I would win business from that post and confident that I could do it again today.

It wasn’t a fancy post either. 150 words. No video, images or carousels. Not even a tag or emoji. It didn’t even get a great deal of engagement: Fewer interactions than I usually see, just a single comment and less than a quarter of the impressions of my top post that month. So what’s the secret?

Not one secret, but two

What I’m about to share with you is equally powerful and… boring. But stick with me, it’ll be worth it. I pulled off this one-punch knockout thanks to two simple, repeatable tactics and I am not going to sell you a sketchy online course to share them.

Secret 1: Build audience and trust in advance

Secret 2: Ask for business

If you clicked on this post thinking that there’s some magic hack that will instantly get you clients, this is the point you should click away. But if you’re ready to put in the work to consistently get clients through your LinkedIn, please do read on.

Step 1 : Setting the stage

That LinkedIn post clearly wasn’t my first ever activity on the platform. I’m not as disciplined as I should be on LinkedIn, but I turn up regularly, I try to be helpful to people and I try to make it clear what I offer.

For me that means trying to be generous in supporting others on the platform, and posting content that I hope is genuinely interesting and helpful to the sort of people I would like to do business with. I also occasionally remember to connect to people who are close to my target audience and who I have had some form of interaction with (on or offline).

Together these simple steps achieve three things:

My network slowly grows with more targeted people
The people in my network understand what I do
I build trust with that network

Most importantly, I do this whether I am busy or not. I know that my network is something that I will definitely need to rely on at some point, so I invest time in it several times every week. This gives the algorithms what they want, but far more importantly keeps me in front of future clients in a way that demonstrates my knowledge, values and approach (albeit punctuated with regular nonsense posts too).

Step 2 : Turning on the lights

The post itself was simple. I was planning to take on one additional client once my children returned to school after the summer holiday. I posted that I would have capacity for a new client in September and encouraged people to make contact if they were thinking about an Agency Mentor and would like to chat. Result: the DMs started coming and the first new client was signed 2 days later with immediate start in August.

In fairness, I have one big advantage over many other businesses; My services are a very easy sell. I price very keenly, there is no ongoing commitment and very little barrier to getting started. Those things are not by chance though. They were all very deliberate decisions. I’ll write another times about how powerful having a low-friction offering can be.

A contrasting approach

Let’s contrast the above with how someone else might approach LinkedIn. Harold is a fictitious agency owner with a name carefully selected to stop any clients or contacts think I am writing about them. Harold, like many agency owners, is too busy to be wasting time on LinkedIn every day. His weeks are too full either dealing with delivery during “feast times” or panicked business development in times of “famine”.

Harold does use LinkedIn occasionally, but finds his neglected feed irrelevant. He’ll sometimes get a junior to post something on his behalf, or share a thought about delivery that is more relevant to competitors than customers. He’ll post something aimed at potential customers when the pipeline is empty, but it never turns into work as “LinkedIn is rubbish”.

There are an awful lot of Harold’s out there.

How to be less Harold

Writing this article I’m hoping that it doesn’t come across as smug or flippant. Neither is intended and the point I am trying to make is that anyone can do it. It just takes a little time and a little effort. The trick is consistency:

Turn up daily. Make it a calendar event if it helps
Talk about things that matter to your audience
Find other people’s content about those same topics : Comment, share, connect with the authors
Connect with those who interact with you and please please please don’t just immediately pitch to them
Share your thoughts and questions about this post in the comment thread here (this is definitely, really, the most important step… honest)

LinkedIn isn’t the right platform for everyone, but it is where my audience is and works for me and the lessons aren’t exclusive to LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to do business, being consistent, relevant, helpful and approachable is a powerful combination.

Luckscaping: Getting proactive about being lucky in business

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

It’s easy to dismiss the role of luck in business success. Many business books make business seem like a recipe that is almost guaranteed to succeed if you mix the right ingredients in the right way, but I don’t believe that is the truth. Tainted by the author’s own survivorship bias, these books often overlook the impact of luck and good fortune in the authors own success. Luck is always a factor, even if that doesn’t fit the narrative of an expert selling their particular “recipe” to the world.

Whilst I believe that luck plays an important role, I don’t believe that this makes us hostages to fortune either. No new-age “let the universe provide” beliefs here. I am a firm believer in solid plans and hard graft. Luck, to me, is just another variable that we have to work with. It might not be a variable we have complete control over, but we do have influence. Luck is something we can encourage, shape and learn to utilise. My, slightly tongue in cheek, term for this proactive shaping of fortune is Luckscaping.

What do I mean by Luckscaping?

Luckscaping is the term I use to encompass both exposing yourself to more lucky circumstance and, crucially, turning happy-circumstance into positive impact. It isn’t enough for lucky circumstances to just happen, you need to notice them, be ready to act then act. In essence, then, luckscaping is based on three pillars:

Increase your surface area for good fortune
Be ready to act on luck
Take action

Increasing your surface area to good fortune

In business, luck often comes in being in the “right place at the right time”: A lucky conversation with someone who’s friend needs just what you sell, someone calling you out of the blue after years of silence because they thought you might be right for a project, an overheard word than an incumbent agency is on shaky ground with a dream client, the market shifting to land exactly where you have placed yourself and a million other “lucky moments”. These things feel out of our control, but they’re not. It’s simply a maths problem.

If luck means being in the right place at the right time, then it stands to reason that you will be luckier if you are in more places more often. That’s true in a literal sense, i.e. attending more events, but also in the less obvious sense of your “thoughts being there”, having the right information and knowledge that a chance event becomes an opportunity.

Have more conversations: Networking, peer groups, events, public speaking, etc
Be curious: When you ask questions your surface area for good luck increases more as deeper conversation lead to more opportunity.
Have a clear proposition that rolls off your tongue: If every person you speak with has a clear understanding of what you do and what an opportunity looks like for you, you are far more likely to be the person who comes to mind when they become aware of an opportunity. There is a world of difference between “I am a copywriter” (“Oh, nice”) and “I write high-converting sales copy for e-commerce businesses” (“That’s interesting… my brother in law has a big e-comm site and their copy is awful”)
Be kind. Be helpful: These are great things to do anyway, but even if you are a cold-hearted mercenary there are practical reasons to be better. People like to help people they like and who have helped them.
Diversify your interests: Don’t confine yourself to too narrow a niche or specialisation. Explore different fields and areas of study to broaden your exposure.
Keep learning: Staying informed of industry trends and views, learning about new developments and going deeper on your knowledge all increase the touch points where opportunity can arise
Experiment often: Whether it’s launching a new project, testing a new tool, or just trying a new restaurant, every new experience increases your chance of encountering a fortunate break.

The list could go on, but the takeaway is that there are always ways to increase your surface area for good fortune.

Readiness to act on luck

Having great opportunities means nothing if you are not in a position to capitalise on them. Seeing a great opportunity pass you by because you aren’t ready to act doesn’t feel lucky at all to me. When I talk about readiness, I don’t mean being ready to act on a specific opportunity, but more generally having the flexibility, capability, and capacity to seize opportunities when they arise. What does that mean in practical terms though? Areas you can optimise in this regard include:

Financial preparedness: This point will be a frustration to those reading this article hoping for a lucky break, but having a war chest (or at least having some wiggle room in your finances) gives you greater ability to act when opportunity arises.
Maintain capacity: It’s difficult to act when you are already stretched. If you and your time constantly run at 100% capacity (or more!) it is difficult to seize an opportunity that arises. The biggest limiter I see if often the mental capacity of business leaders to take on another project. All the more reason to remove yourself from the day to day and create capacity to spot opportunities and make better decisions.
Practice flexibility: Opportunities often come in unexpected forms. Be flexible in your plans and be willing to deviate from your planned path if a good opportunity arises. That may come as a surprise to regular readers who know how much I value sticking to a plan, but it isn’t a contradiction. I am not opposed to creating new plans.
Actively look for opportunities: Cultivate the mindset of finding opportunities both in yourself and within your organisation. Have discussions around change and how changes that are happening relate to your business.
Maintain a growth mindset: Many opportunities come out of change, but change is disruptive. A growth mindset means looking at change as an opportunity to grow rather than a chance to fail.

Taking action

None of this is worth a bean if you do nothing about it. Business owners have more tales of the “one that got away” than the most exaggerating of fishermen. We don’t want to jump at EVERY possible opportunity of course, but we don’t want to miss the ones that could bring positive change. How do we find that balance?

Overcome fear of failure: The first step is to understand that failure is not only ok, but desirable. The only way to avoid failure completely is to never take a risk or push yourself, which is rarely the mindset of anyone who starts a business. Failing often is fine, perhaps even desirable. The goal is to do it without damage and before it costs too much.
Take calculated risks: How much damage we can stomach from a possible fail is of course proportional to the potential rewards. Learn to balance the Cost and likelihood of failure with the gains and likelihood of success
Think slow, act fast: Once you have weighed up an opportunity well enough to make an informed decision, act fast.

My own lucky break

I had a few lucky breaks in my agency business, but the most significant one led to my agency becoming the first UK company recognised and certified by Google in our discipline. This had a huge impact on our company, changing our direction, our identify and our fortunes and it took me a while to accept that we weren’t just passengers to dumb luck making this happen.

The opportunity came about when our Google Account Manager asked if we would be interested in becoming part of a new certified partner program they were planning to launch (Hi Amir, and thanks again!). Being part of that program completely changed the business and led to us growing and selling it. On the surface that looks a lot like a happy accident that we had little influence on, and that is exactly how I saw it for a while. Distance and hindsight make me see it differently now. Let’s look at how those three pillars influenced what happened:

Surface area: We had built product expertise and were gaining a reputation for being good in this new field. We were giving in our approach, publicly sharing our knowledge in the field. We’d built that knowledge through curiosity: first via a “side gig” then experimenting with new service offerings for clients. We’d also built relationships in this new area, including working as closely as we were able with our Google contacts, and were vocal supporters of the products.

Readiness: The business was financially stable. Although not doing great numbers we ran lean and had an enthusiastic team and a culture of experimentation and learning. We’d formed out of curiosity in the early days of the web and maintained that curiosity.

Action: It was a leap of faith. We didn’t know what involvement in the programme would entail or even whether it would last six months. We made a plan that would ease us into change without unbearable downside if it failed. Then we jumped.

We were lucky, but in hindsight we were also an obvious choice and in a great position to make the most of that luck. That wasn’t by chance.

A bonus pillar: Defensive Luckscaping

Being lucky isn’t just about having good luck, it is about avoiding the bad. Luckily you can luckscape for that too. Unfortunate things will happen, what matters though is their impact. “Defensive Luckscaping” is about reducing the impact of bad luck, and creating a resilience that allows your business to bounce back stronger from setbacks through tactic like:

Learning from mistakes: Understanding the causes of problems allows us to put measures in place to reduce the likelihood of them repeating or the severity if they do. Black Box Thinking is a great book looking at how the success of the airline industry in almost eliminating fatal mistakes can teach us how to bring similar improvements to our businesses.
Contingency planning: Having a ‘Plan B’. This provides not only an alternative path if things go wrong but can also reduce the stress of uncertainty.
Risk Management: Identify potential risks and create strategies to manage them. This could include anything from diversifying your income streams to insuring against potential business disruptions.
Constant Reflection and Evaluation: Regularly review your strategies, processes, and decisions. This helps to identify potential sources of bad luck before they fully materialise.
Build a Support Network: Having a solid network of advisors, mentors, and peers can help you navigate through tough times. They can provide advice, share their own experiences, or simply offer moral support.

“The harder I work, the luckier I get”

This rather long article could possibly be summed up by that well-known Samuel Goldwyn quote, but it doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head for me. I don’t believe that luck is simply the product of hard work, but I do believe that luck+work is what leads to great things. Where do you stand on it? Do you believe you make your own luck, or that we are essentially passengers to the universe? Do you believe you have the power to increase how much has positive impact on your business (or reduce its negative impact). I’m genuinely curious to hear other people’s thoughts on this.

Want a smarter agency? Get a brain

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Recent years have seen a rise in the personal productivity approach of building a “second-brain”. The idea involves capturing thoughts, notes, and ideas in one central software repository. The potential benefits of managing personal knowledge in this way are many, from reducing cognitive load, aiding recall, building connections and creativity to improved communication and decision making. I’m a big fan of the approach, but I also believe the benefits of building something similar for agency knowledge management are greater still. Enter the idea of the Agency Brain.

Anatomy of an Agency Brain

The idea of a central repository for company information isn’t new. Knowledgebases, intranets and handbooks are all established ideas. In less technological times filing cabinets stuffed with manuals, documents and SOPs performed a similar function. I see an Agency Brain differently though: More organic, with more connections and constantly changing and growing. Done well, your Agency Brain could quickly become the most powerful and valuable tool in your digital agency. So how is the idea of an Agency Brain different to these existing agency knowledge management systems?

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Truly collaborative : Your Agency Brain should be something that every member of the team uses, updates and adds to. It is not a tool built by management to show others what to do, but a way for the organisation to capture what is useful. It should be as easy to add to and update as possible. It should capture feedback and questions as people use it, encouraging continuous improvement. Improving the brain should be the responsibility of all, not just a few gate-keepers.

Unfinished by design : A staff handbook get completed before it is distributed. An SOP is finished and checked before it is signed off. No part of the Agency Brain should ever be seen as “done”. The idea of the brain is the capture whatever is likely to be useful in the future, not to define a few things well. Stub entries consisting of a few lines and a link, a quickly captured Loom video of an interesting problem that might come up again, an outline process that clearly needs to be improved and in fact anything that is better than nothing and remains useful is all good.

A single source of “probably” : “When your entire team knows exactly where to look for anything, great things happen. Time spent searching through Google drive, old emails, and long abandoned process documents is reclaimed for more productive things. Knowing exactly where to find the best answer to anything saves time even when that answer doesn’t exist or is poor because at least you don’t spend more time looking for a better one. It’s why I think less in terms of a “single source of truth” as a “single source of probably”.

Authentic, relaxed and organic : If you ever stop to wonder if it is worth recording something, record it. There should be no rules about what is in and out beyond basic decency. If it might be useful in the future add it. Never worry if it is complete, someone else could do better, whether it is perfect or whether it is “the right sort of thing” to record. Just get it recorded.

Has built in feedback loops : When users don’t find what they need they should not only be able to flag the omission, but ask questions directly in context. Those answers then become part of the retained knowledge, ensuring that knowledge captured grows, improves and remains current.

Sounds like work. Why bother?

Once you start building your Agency Brain, the benefits come quickly and in smaller organisations it is usually the most senior people who feel those benefits first. Being able to answer queries with “did you check the brain?” rather than demonstrating for the umpteenth time, can start freeing up leadership time fast and often a big enough benefit on its own to warrant the work. It’s far from the only benefit though. Let’s list some of the big ones.

New staff get good faster

By adding an additional page in the brain for “starter bootcamp” and linking to every page of essential information, you create a ready-to-go onboarding program. This approach covers more ground than if you were to sit down and design a program from scratch.

Reduced internal noise Reduce the time spent asking and answering the same questions over and over again. If it gets asked a second time, then the answer should be logged in the brain.
Knowledge is retained When staff leave, some of their knowledge stays behind, limiting the brain drain and impact on the wider team.
Continuous team development Having the team review, question, edit and add to existing content fosters both the culture and the mechanics needed for continuous learning
Fewer errors & more consistency The brain approach allows easy documentation of not only “what” the team should do, but also “how” and “why”. A quick screen capture that includes the thinking around how something was done can bring additional value that an SOP or checklist wouldn’t.
It’s as valuable a resource to add to as it is to refer to If you want to really learn how to do something, explain it to others. The act of documenting something forces you to think about it in a different way and has value in its own right.
Resilience Bad things sometimes happen. Having more knowledge shared can protect you from the impact of that.

What My Agency Brain Did For Me

My ideas of an effective Agency Brain have continued to develop since I sold my own agency, but the idea was conceived through our own needs. It is no exaggeration to say the ancestor of the idea that we implemented had three significant positive impacts on my own life.

When we made a big pivot I found myself with two very full-time roles. I still had the job I had before, but now I additionally had the jobs of growing the new business and managing out the old one. There were not enough hours in the day and I struggled with the mental bandwidth to manage it all. Putting in the extra work to document and capture knowledge was yet another job to do, but quickly began to give me time back to change the business into something that was ultimately better. I had less questions. I was less involved with on boarding and I spent less time fixing problems. The result was a more profitable business that was easier to manage.
When I got diagnosed with cancer life got very weird very quickly. My recollection of those days is cloudy, but I think I sent an out of hours “I might not be back for a while” message to the team and was effectively removed from the business from that moment for several weeks. My team were brilliant, but had that happened a year earlier they would not have had the tools to keep the business going. Too much of it relied on me or lived in my head. We couldn’t complete a calendar month without my involvement and I genuinely think the business would have failed through no fault of theirs. I dread to think what impact that would have had on my personal situation at that point. Instead things went well. The team were brilliant and clients didn’t even notice. It was almost hurtfully successful!
Our organisation brain was also pivotal at the end of my Agency Journey. Our commitment to documentation and process was a clear demonstration of how knowledgeable our team was to our buyers and there was a lot of enthusiasm both for giving their larger team access to our documentation, and to applying the same approach to their collective knowledge. It undoubtably aided the sale, but it was just as pivotal in my exit. Documentation helped me exit post-sale earlier than we had originally planned, giving me the time and capacity to start what I am doing today.

Sold! Where do I start?

Honestly, just pick a platform and go. The important thing about getting started is to start capturing knowledge now, not getting bogged down trying to find the perfect platform. Pick something that you and the team will find easy to work with. You can always port the content later. We had a couple of iterations of this build on WordPress using Knowledgebase theme like KnowAll and it is difficult to think of a faster way to get started than that. Teams that already use systems like Coda or Notion might be more likely to update and engage if it were built on those. There is also the option of dedicated platforms like Guru that bring more useful features out of the box.

Just pick a platform that:

Everyone will be comfortable adding content to.
Is quick, easy and convenient to use.
Is searchable and navigable.
Allows easy adding of rich media like screenshots (Awesome screenshot) and screen captures (ScreenPal or Loom).
Isn’t Google Drive (sorry, I love Google Drive and am frequently told by people “Oh we do that in Google Drive”. No you don’t. It’s a place you dump poorly organised information until it goes out of date. that is not the same).
Is secure.

This is a bit of a passion topic for me; partly because of the impact it had on my agency and my life, but mostly because of the benefits I see it bring even when tackled in quite a relaxed way by the agencies I work with as an Agency Advisor. It’s easier to do and more beneficial than most realise. If anyone would like to hear more about how to use your brain more effectively, how to manage it in a way that it continues to get better and how to get your team on board with the idea, leave some feedback in the linkedin thread that accompanies this post. If there is interest I’ll happily write a follow-up.

Discuss this article here on LinkedIn

Tick Tick Tick… here comes the communications explosion

Tue, 09 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

There’s a point in a growing business where things often take a sudden shift from “Wow, this is going well” to “Help, it’s all falling apart”. It’s rarely one thing, but instead a rapidly growing undercurrent of things being missed, inconsistent delivery and decreasing morale. A panicked leader might even try to fix it by adding headcount and be surprised that this actually makes things worse. The common thread is usually internal communications issues and I call this pattern “The Communications Explosion”.

Business leaders in the blast radius of this bomb will often ask themselves what they did wrong to cause it. They shouldn’t. This explosion is a mathematical certainty if you plan to grow your business. You can’t stop it happening, but you can put measures in place to stop it causing harm.

If you grow, this WILL happen

I stated above that this is a mathematical certainty, let me explain that bold claim. The explosion happens because lines of communication increase exponentially as the size of our team increases; i.e. more quickly than our head count grows and increasingly fast as it does. This is easily imagined as a diagram. A team of two people needs just one line of communication to connect everyone to each other:

Add one person to that team and you need to add two lines of communication to keep everyone directly connected. Hire one more person after that and you need three additional communications paths. As you can see, the lines increase more quickly than the head count.

For those who love a formula, that growth can be expressed as Lines of Communication = n * (n – 1) / 2. In chart form below you can clearly see that upward curve showing complexity growing more quickly that the number of people. Look at how quickly though: A founder only agency growing to 10 people needs to go from 0 to 45 lines of communication in that time. Growing to a team of 30 would theoretically mean a staggering 435 lines of communication. That is pure theory though as businesses either fix it or fail long before they get to that size.

Maths? Yawn! What does this mean for my growing business?

Let’s consider the impact of this with an example. Whilst the details have been changed to protect the innocent, the facts have not:

Company X grew rapidly during the pandemic. Pre-pandemic they were largely office based and the force of will of leadership compensated for many internal communication short-comings (Although they clearly existed and were having impact on both customers and team). A sudden move to being a fully remote team, together with continued growth multiplied the impact. The symptoms were clear: Endless internal meetings, frequent “blame storming” for missed issues and delivery failures, and a seeming inability to execute on decisions that had been made. Staff complained of living “half on zoom, half on slack” and constantly waiting on other people to get work done. The pandemic got the blame, but a look through historic customer and staff feedback suggested that the issues were there long before.

The real problem was that the team had grown without the systems and structure in place to support that growth

When is right to tackle this?

Before we talk about how to avoid this problem, let’s just take a moment to consider when you shouldn’t! Direct lines of communication are absolutely the right way to go when you are small. A small team in direct regular contact will always have the most efficient communications. Small teams planning to stay that way should embrace it and enjoy their ability to out-manoeuvre larger competitors. It only becomes a problem once the team starts to grow more.

The usual pattern I see is that teams grow to 6 or 7 people without problems, but the push from 8 through 10 presents far greater challenge. Another look at the numbers throws some light on why. 7 people needs 21 lines of direct communication. Adding the next 3 people more than doubles complexity, requiring 45 lines of communication. When this happens the leadership can often find themselves so tied up dealing with the fallout of worsening communications that they struggle to find time to fix the issues. I speak from first-hand experience here.

If you plan to grow past that number you have to build with that in mind. This is why it is so important to know what the agency you are building looks like. If you wait until you need structure and process in place, then you might not have time to do that. From that size on, staying ahead of this potential issue becomes an important and ongoing part of the leadership team’s work.

Getting ahead tends to focus on three areas:

Structure

Pyramid or Pod, or something less conventional, I don’t think there is one answer for everyone. Different agencies suit different approaches and I am sure this is a topic I will come back to. What is important is having a structure where particular work is owned by a group that is smaller than the whole. This has most impact where work is of the type with the most demanding communication needs, allowing that work to progress without adding volume to all lines. Structure becomes easier to think about in larger organisations where dedicated teams make sense., but lighter structure can bring impact early. Even a team of Leader+2 will benefit from having particular work where it is understood the business leader does not need to be looped in, freeing up time for more important leadership activities. The important part is having cle

Ownership

Closely related to structure is the idea of ownership. Having clearly defined ownership not only reduces the amount of internal traffic, but also helps everyone find the right person first time. Defining ownership requires three things: The owner, The Breadth of what they own, The extent to which they own it (for example, do they need eventual approval/sign-off).

Documentation

Build an internal library that your team trust and is easy to use and the communication noise will instantly reduce noise. An early version of this for many organisations will be what I call a “knowledge dump”: a single, unstructured and searchable place to store anything that might be useful again later. A quick way of multiplying the impact of you knowledge dump is to encourage everyone to contribute regularly in simple, informal ways. A favourite of mine has long been doing screen recordings of interesting points. Figured something out? Screen record it and share that. If your platform can also add transcripts automatically this becomes a valuable asset quickly. As the organisation grow that knowledge base will need to become something more structured, but the important step is to start capturing information early.

Technology (used wisely)

There are literally hundreds of apps and platforms that claim to improve internal communications; from messaging platforms like Slack to full suites like Zoho, Asana or Clickup. I’m yet to speak to any agency owner who has found a tool that works perfectly for them, but used well most of these tools can help ease the load by keeping relevant information, decisions and discussions close to the work being done. Each comes with risk too. Badly considered, these tools can add significant volume and be interruptive to work. This means that building a positive approach to using them is just as important and choosing the right tools for your organisation.

The usual objection to improving these areas alongside growth (as opposed to fixing later) is the belief that they add overhead. Each comes with a certain investment in terms of time, but can be improved slowly and continuously. When you do this the returns come quickly and the losses of not being ready for the next step can be avoided entirely. These are the foundations that you will build your agency team on top of. The good news though is that, unlike the foundations of a building, you can continue to strengthen these as you build.

Does some of this sound familiar? I love tackling problems like this with agency leaders. If you are trying to grow your agency and want to get ahead of the challenge I may be able to help through Mentoring.

Close it, Sell it or Die

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

All good things come to an end and your involvement with your agency will be no exception. It’s no more avoidable than death or taxes (and will possibly involve at least one of those things). Despite this, many agency leaders never give serious consideration to this inevitable business milestone. They should. Knowing where you want your journey to end is vital to planning how to get there. We avoid it because it sounds hard, but I’ll let you into a secret that makes it a lot easier: You only have three options to choose from: Close the business, Sell the business or Die.

If you consider all of the possible ways your involvement with your agency ends, they boil down to one of those three options. At first look, one of those sounds like the obvious preference, but there is nuance to consider. Let’s look at the three options in detail, getting the most final of options out of the way first.

Die

This might not immediately sound like the most desirable option, but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing (bear with me here!). Dropping unexpectedly and leaving everything in chaos is never good, and is possibly something you should have plans in place to cope with. On the other hand though, owning an agency that someone else runs and continues to make you money throughout your life will sound like a pretty good option to many. Let’s leave contingency planning for another blog and assume we’re talking about that second, more palatable version:

Successful business succession doesn’t just happen, it is something that is planned for. You need a person, or team, in place to run things and for them to be on board with the plan. You also need to remove yourself from the running before the time comes, preferably leaving yourself time to enjoy a long and happy retirement. These things all take money too, so you will likely need to improve the profitability of your business to support the plan. All of this takes effort and a strategic plan to make it happen.

Close the agency

Just like the previous option, deciding to shut up shop can be a good or bad thing. On one hand a business can close because it is no longer sustainable (bad) or even insolvent (worse). On the other hand the owners might decide they’ve had their success, made their money and want to walk away enjoying the benefit of entrepreneurs relief on what is left in the business.

That last option only really makes sense for very small agencies where the owner is the main fee earner. It can be a successful end when the owner has historically prioritised profit and planned with this end in mind. In any other situation, it would usually be preferable to sell and top up that retirement fund on the way out.

“Make your money then shut up shop” isn’t a bad plan to have, after all it is the one that most closely resembles a traditional career. It should be a decision that is actively made, rather than the only option you are left with though. When you make this your plan you can take action to make it a success: Prioritising profit over growth, maximising pension contributions and ensuring that you get money out of the business in the most efficient way over the years.

Sell the agency

Scouring press releases and LinkedIn updates for mentions of agency acquisitions and mergers it’s easy to be left with the vision of founders sailing into the sunset on newly purchased superyachts when the deal is done. The truth though is that agency acquisitions involving “significant” sums of cash are far less common than the PR stories would suggest.

Most agencies are not much more than teams of talented people delivering work for uncommitted clients under the leadership of a smart founder or two. It’s a great model for getting work done, but doesn’t create much inherent value. If the founders go, the team and clients often follow, leaving the acquirer with nothing more for their money than a pile of Macbooks and a ping pong table. No surprise, then, that smart buyers value those agencies accordingly.

There are proven ways to create greater value: Strong recurring revenue streams, proprietary tools, methodologies and IP, maximising client retention, achieving consistent growth etc etc. Similarly, there are pitfalls to be avoided that would bring that valuation back down such as over reliance on a few key clients, day to day dependence on the founders and high team churn. Balancing these variables with the need to grow and be operationally efficient is no mean feat and is unlikely to be something that just happens by chance without there being a strategic plan to make it happen.

It’s time to choose a path

All of the desirable options above share one trait: They are far more likely to happen if you deliberately work towards one of them. The business you build knowing that you plan to sell in five years is likely to be very different to one where you want to make your money and walk away. Knowing which you are aiming to do (and preferably when it will happen) is a powerful way to increase the odds of you ending your involvement in a positive way. Fail to make a plan and you risk finding yourself stranded without any good option in reach when you decide you want out.

In conclusion, planning for the end of your involvement with your agency is an essential aspect of running a successful business. By taking a proactive approach and considering your long-term goals, you can create a well-defined path that leads to a smooth and successful transition for both you and your agency. Remember, it’s never too early to start planning for the future; thoughtful decisions made today will pay dividends in the years to come.

Velocity not speed

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

It’s easy to get caught up in the pursuit of speed in our businesses. We all want to enjoy the fruits of our success sooner and it seems logical that moving more quickly will get us there faster. In fact the whole language of business emphasises the importance of speed: “Act now” “Move fast” “No time to waste” “Accelerate growth and expand rapidly”. Thrilling stuff.

Despite all the high-octane language around speed in business, I’d argue that speed alone means nothing. In fact it can be dangerous. It’s time we stopped all the talk about speed and focused on the far more important issue of velocity. For those who either left school a while ago (like me) or weren’t paying attention (also like me), let’s start with a recap of the difference between speed and velocity:

Speed vs velocity

Speed is the measure of how much distance we travel over time. We calculate speed by taking the total distance travelled and dividing it by the time it took to get there. The more distance we cover in a given time the faster we are said to be moving. Velocity is speed in a given direction: how far we travel towards a given point.

Discuss this in the LinkedIn thread →

To demonstrate the difference, let’s reimagine the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare. This version of the story starts the same way as the original, with both critters lining up for a race. When the starting pistol fires the Hare tears off at 100mph and the Tortoise slowly plods forwards. Unlike in the original version, our Hare never stops to have a sleep on the way. No lazy Hares here. Instead the Hare keeps running and running at 100mph until the Tortoise sends him a WhatsApp photo from the finish line with the caption “Where r u?”. Tortoise of course won because he took the shortest route to the finish line whilst Hare tore off at full speed without thinking about direction. The winner wasn’t the one who moved most quickly, but the one who reduced the distance to the finish in the shortest time.

School’s over. Back to business

What does it mean then to “Move with velocity”? It’s tempting to say this is just semantics, but there are practical steps you can take to ensure that you move with velocity so that more of your collective effort is applied to bringing you closer to your goals. I encourage agency leaders to consider four areas when it comes to adopting this principle in their business:

Define the outcome

It is impossible to measure progress if you don’t know where you are heading. Develop a clear picture of the business you want to run, write it down and have the entire organisation understand what it is you are aiming for. If you don’t know where you are trying to get to, it doesn’t matter how fast you go.

Plan the route

If you understand where you are now and know where you are going you can plan a route. Define the key waypoints on that journey and understand when you need to pass through each one.

Align effort

Understand what needs to happen for the business to reach each of those waypoints. Give those activities due importance, backing them with resources and prioritising to make them happen (ie, keeping focused on what is important over what is urgent).

Consistency and accountability

Regularly review progress against the route map and realign effort as needed to stay on track.

You can’t fix a lack of direction by moving faster

It’s common to see businesses try to fix velocity issues by further increasing speed. They measure where they are vs where they were and express unhappiness with the result. Rousing speeches are given, sabres are rattled, tiger-teams formed and lots of noise is made. Everyone is fired up and runs off at 200mph with no more thought about overall direction than before. Maybe some short term issues get fixed, but it usually isn’t long before new ones appear and the cycle is repeated.

It’s easy to see why this approach doesn’t work when we visualise what is happening. Let’s start with what “Perfect velocity” would look like:

Perfect velocity would be all energy driving us forwards on the shortest route to our goal. Simple, beautiful, but practically impossible.

A more realistic aim is to have progress look something like this. All energy is driving us approximately in the right direction, but not always with 100% efficiency. When we go off course it is noticed and corrected before we go too far astray. If we add more speed to this model we reach our goal more quickly.

When we fail to define our desired outcomes, energy expended will take us in different directions, sometimes reversing or backtracking on our path. We might end up in a different place to where we started, but this may or may not be a desirable outcome. Adding more speed to this pattern doesn’t fix it. It just expends more energy to get to an undefined place.

When we define our outcome, but not the route, we at last have a chance to get there. However the route we take will be longer and harder. Deviations happen and can be significant, and corrections can overcompensate or fail to keep us on the ideal path for long.

In this scenario the leader knows the outcome and how to get there, but the effort within the organisation isn’t aligned to staying on that path. There will likely be a sense of progress towards the goal, but it will be slow and hard and likely never get the organisation to its goal.

Even when a goal is defined and a route is planned, it can be hard to keep progress on track. Without consistency and accountability progress tends to follow patterns of diversion and correction. Progress is made, but not efficiently.

Finally the pattern I originally drew as a joke then realised how common it is in reality. What I call the “Chaos monkey” approach. Worse even than no goals being set are when goals are continually set then changed. Leaders with more energy than focus can run themselves and their team around in circles feeling busy without ever making long term progress towards anything of meaning.

Does any of this matter?

It might be tempting to look at those diagrams and wonder if any of this really matters. After all, most of them get to the goal in the end, and the others are still on some sort of journey. What the diagrams don’t show though is the cost those longer journeys have. Each dot on the path costs energy, enthusiasm, time and money. Long journeys that sap those valuable resources have a tendency to end long before the goals are ever reached.

So when a business feels stuck, the instinct is almost always to push harder. That instinct is usually wrong. The more useful question isn’t “how do we go faster?”, it’s “are we all pointed at the same place?”. Answer that one honestly and the speed tends to look after itself.

It’s time to focus on what is important to your agency, not what is urgent

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

High up on my personal list of “Mistakes agency owners know they’re making (but just keep repeating)” is allowing things that are urgent to take priority over what is actually important. Whilst this is a pitfall for any type of business, the nature of the model makes it particularly common in agency world: Constant deadlines, demanding client expectations and having people-heavy businesses are all factors that conspire against us. The result is a seemingly endless stream of issues to distract our time, attention and resources away from what would really make a difference to our business.

The result of not managing this is a familiar one: That “Two steps forward, 1½ steps back again” feeling of never making progress and the constant sense that you just need one break to get over the hump. Except it never seems to be a hump; just a series of false summits getting in the way of what we need to be doing. Exhausting.

Eliminating the inertia this problem causes can have an incredible impact on your business. Reliably achieving more of what needs to be done more quickly means hitting your goals sooner: Whether those goals are financial, personal or more nuanced, achieving them sooner and with more certainty has great value. No surprise then that the internet offers us no end of charismatic gurus willing to solve this issue for the right price. The truth though is that you don’t need to part with money to solve it. You just need three things, all of which are free.

Planning
Organisation
Discipline

That might sound like the sort of advice that is too simple to be useful, but it does happen to be true. When trying to tackle inertia in my own agency I bought all the books, attended the webinars and workshops and even checked out some of the pricey programs. They largely all boiled down to those same three points dressed up with large amounts of glitter and fluff.

Let’s step through each of the three points in a little more detail (but without glitter or fluff):

Planning

It’s difficult to make progress if you don’t know where you are going. Agencies tend not to be the type of business created with a strong vision in mind. They’re often started out of a genuine love of the work, which means the focus gravitates to the work rather than the outcome. “Vision” is one of those words that makes me cringe a little, but a clear picture of what type of business it is that you are building is important.

You should know what you want to achieve and by when. This doesn’t have to be cast in stone, but it should be clearly defined and written down so that any change to that objective is a deliberate thing. Knowing what you want to achieve by when allows you to set regular goals that you can then measure progress against. I’ll go into the process I eventually (after many tries) settled on for doing this in a later article. However you tackle it, your plan should define the outcome you want and lay down the path for how to get there from where you are today.

Organisation

With your plan made it is time to get organised. The best way to make your plan become reality is to set fixed, regular time aside to make that happen. This is what we should be doing when we talk about “working on the business”. Rather than firing up excel and moving a few numbers around from column A to column B we should be actively working on the tasks that need to be completed to make our plan reality.

When I do business planning the result is key tasks that need to be achieved each quarter to keep the business on its chosen path. I use the terminology of the Traction / EOS system for these and describe these important tasks to keep forward momentum as “Rocks”. This helps to distinguish them from all of the other tasks and priorities that unavoidably surface. Each Rock has an owner and that owner should have sufficient time blocked in their calendar to ensure those Rocks get delivered.

Time blocking is important, but not the only organisation needed to ensure that Rocks are completed reliably every quarter. Means also need to be put in place for progress to be tracked and blockers to be tackled: Usually through clearly structured monthly reviews.

Discipline

Few agency leaders are going to be surprised to hear that it takes planning and organisation to bring about change. Most will have even gone down that route multiple times, without ever achieving the pace of positive change that they were hoping for. The missing piece of the puzzle is more often than not discipline. Knowing what you need to do to achieve your goals might not be easy, but having the discipline to then deliver on that can be far harder.

The first step is to give this important work the respect it deserves. Constantly running from one fire to the next is a guaranteed way to stop progress on your plan. Sometimes you just have to decide what can be left to burn in order to get the important fire-prevention work completed! When we entered a period of rapid change in my own agency we talked very openly about “which balls we’d allow to drop” and the whole team understood the importance of that to bring about what we wanted to achieve. That wasn’t an excuse to do bad work, but it gave the team confidence to say “I can’t do that now. I have more important work that needs to be completed first”. That can be a difficult mental shift to make, but if there isn’t the time to bring about needed change then it might be the only way.

Learning to prioritise the business is only one part of the discipline needed to make change happen. Consistency and accountability also have important roles to play. Consistency means that once you set direction, process and schedule you stick to them. Changes to the plan should only be made in a considered way, never on the fly, and everyone involved should always understand what is expected from them and when it is expected. Accountability means everybody involved having someone to be accountable to in delivering their part. There is nothing like knowing you have to report on progress to ensure that progress is made! Those regular review meetings provide the perfect opportunity for this and each person reporting on their progress and blockers should be part of a fixed agenda.

Accountability doesn’t just apply to our teams, but to us too. If you don’t have someone who will hold you accountable for sticking to your part of the plan then find someone. I do this for a number of agency leaders as part of my agency advisory service, but it doesn’t have to be a paid advisor. Peer groups, business partners, and even senior employees who are confident to call you out can work. The important thing is to have somehow will ask you for progress and hold you to account if you are not sticking to the plan.

You know what needs to be done. Go make it happen.

I believe most agency owners have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done to improve their business, even if they haven’t yet found the time to think it through in detail and write it down. The bigger challenge is usually in actually making improvement happen. Defined goals and a clear plan help us see the path we need to take to get there. Organisational structure and discipline are then needed to make it happen. It’s not easy, but the reward is worth it: The business you want.

None of this requires a secret process or expensive x point system, but it can still be difficult to make happen. If these problems sound familiar and you would like some help in overcoming them in your business, I’d love to have a chat. These principles form an important part of my approach to the affordable mentoring service that I offer to agency leaders. You can learn more about that here.

I think I’m going to stop using the C Word

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

There’s a word that I and others have been using to describe me over the last few months, that I think I am going to stop using. It’s not an entirely inaccurate description of me, but it’s a C word with problems. The word is, of course, “Coach”.

When I exited my own agency in 2021 I had never planned to work supporting other agency leaders. That work came about as a result of helping a couple of other agency owners who then asked if I’d consider advising more regularly for a fee. Once I realised I loved the new role and wanted to do more of it I looked for a label and decided to call myself an “Agency Coach” as this was the term I was seeing most commonly used.

I’ve now decided to step back from that term. Whilst coaching is definitely a skill I used in the delivery of my work, I don’t think it defines it. Instead I am labelling myself as an “Agency advisor” and my core offering as “Mentoring”. I have three reasons for making this change:

Tension between coaching and mentoring : True coaching never offers solutions, but instead asks questions to help you find your own. This is appropriate for some areas of work I do with clients, such as setting and clarifying goals. However, many choose to work with me precisely because I have experience and can offer options and guidance from my own experience. If a client asks for an answer to a question I know, I’m going to give them that answer and not just reply “Why do you ask that?”.

Coaching as a technique not a product : I’m a big believer in coaching as a process, but to me it is one tool that I can use in my work. I don’t want to cause confusion that I am offering pure coaching as a service.

Association with the agency coaching industry : I’m not more aware of some parts of the agency coaching industry that I did not pay much attention to when I chose to identify as an agency coach. Whilst I know some great people who call themselves “agency coach”, there are growing numbers of no-nothing snake oil peddlers doing the same whilst flogging their programs and courses. Not my world.

So that’s that: Mat Bennett, Agency Advisor. If you want to call me a c-word you’ll have to find another.

The State of AI Use in Agencies

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Interest in, and experimentation with, AI text generation systems has exploded in the last 2 years. The catalyst for this was undoubtedly OpenAI adding GPT-3 to their open beta. GPT-3 is 117 times as powerful as its predecessor*. This quantum leap in capability combined with an easy-access API created a gold-rush of interest in AI content generation.

Keen to explore the uses and limitations of these systems, I have undertaken 3 pieces of new research relating to AI text content generation:

Agency leaders survey

A survey of agency leaders regarding their adoption of these systems, and future expectations for them (n 64).

End user attitudes survey

A survey of 853 end users regarding their attitudes to different types of AI content.

A blind split test of 289 users testing the difference in perception between human and non-human content.

* based on parameter count.

Why the report is no longer available to download

This research was carried out in 2022, before ChatGPT existed. A lot changes in a few years in the world of agencies, and far more in the world of AI.

I have taken the download down because people were still finding it and reading the numbers as current, without noticing how old it is. The data does not describe how agencies use AI today, and I would rather remove it than leave something misleading in circulation.

The report itself is still perfectly interesting as a snapshot of where agencies were before the tools most of us now use existed. If you would like a copy on that basis, ask me for one and I will send it over.

Are GenZ really replacing Google with TikTok? New data

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

When a senior Google Exec suggested that nearly 40% of young people favour TikTok and Instagram over Google when searching for a place to have lunch, I was intrigued. TikTok’s rise has been incredible to watch and it was clear that a shift was happening, but 40% seemed a strong number. Whilst I am certainly no longer one of those “young people” myself, the number didn’t seem representative of what I see with how younger members of my family find information online. Was I just not seeing it, or was the figure wrong? I’m no longer directly involved in online marketing, but I was still intrigued to find out, so I did what all good data nerds do: I set about finding some empirical data.

Do you run a digital agency? When I’m not satisfying my own curiosity with original research, I coach agency leaders to run better agencies. You can learn more about my “real work” here.

What was actually said?

It’s worth just recapping on where that 40% figure came from, as I have seen it misquoted and misrepresented. The quote came from Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech Conference. Google Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan, who runs Google’s Knowledge & Information organization, was talking on the future of Google products and its use of AI. He said the following:

“In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram.”

According to TechCrunch the 40% figure comes from an internal Google survey of US users ages 18 to 24. There is no further information currently available about the study. We don’t know whether this was a loaded question asked to the children of a handful of Googlers, a significant study of user behaviour or anything in between. This is important not only to ensure that businesses are directing their marketing spend accurately, but also because that figure is certain to surface in discussions about Google’s monopoly of search.

A new, independent, study

Curiosity got the better of me and I decided to commission a new, nationally representative study with the help of FindOutNow. I was already using FindOutNow for one of the studies I am using for my BrightonSEO talk on Trust in AI content in October. It’s an amazing tool for quickly collecting survey data that I genuinely believe that every UK focused SEO or PR person should have bookmarked. FindOutNow allowed me to quickly poll 2,401 internet users including a Nationally representative sample of 2,004 users to compare the results.

Caveat: One significant difference between this study and what we know about the Google study is that this new study is of a UK audience. TikTok adoption is slightly higher in the US than in the UK. According to Statista, approx 41% of the US population actively used TikTok in April 2022, compared to 34% in the UK. Incredibly figures in their own right and close enough to allow for some comparison between the two studies.

The study asked two questions. The first question was designed to as closely reflect the Google figure as possible:

Q1. Which of the following would you be mostly likely to use to search for a place to have lunch?

This was a single answer, multiple choice question with options of: Facebook, Google, Instagram, Maps (ie Apple or Google) TikTok, Other. The order of options was randomised. I was also interested to see how this compared to searches for a less TikTok friendly topic and chose something topical for the comparison question.

Q2. Which of the following would you be mostly likely to use to search for energy saving advice?

Key Results

Are Gen-Z really preferring TikTok and Instagram for lunch searches?

Those aged 18-24 are certainly more likely to use Instagram and TikTok to find a place to lunch than the wider population, but the results suggest that Google’s position is still significantly more dominant than the Google quote suggested. Instagram and TikTok account combined were the first choice for just 3% of the nationally representative sample, and 8% for those aged 18-24. That is a considerable swing, but nowhere near the “nearly 40%” that Google claimed.

In fact, with the increased use of Maps for lunch searches (11% Nat Rep, 17% 18-24), Google’s overall share of these searches is likely to be higher than it is for the broader audience.

In fact, Facebook have most to fear from this shift. Not a single respondent aged 18-24 answered that they would use Facebook for this type of search. Similarly, the “others” (which would include specialist platforms like Tripadvisor) saw a significant drop in share of searches from the 18-24 audience.

How this compares with a less lifestyle search

Search share for TikTok and Instagram dropped off even further for the “non-lifestyle” search on energy saving advice. It would be interesting to repeat this test with a broader range of topics, but the combined share of TikTok/Instagram for 18-24s dropping from 8% to 3% seems logical. Again, this is larger than for the broad audience (1%), but a very small proportion of overall volume.

My Conclusions

I am not at all convinced by the “Nearly 40%” claim made by Google. Although our methods will have differed, it is difficult to explain such a difference in results if the original internal Google study was done in a way that genuinely tried to answer questions about how the audience tackled such searches. My suspicion is that the original study had a different purpose and the figure about lunch searches was an interesting observation based on less representative data. It will be interesting to see whether more details are released about the original study.

As far as the adoption of TikTok as a primary means of search, it does not appear that this is mainstream. It’s likely a growing trend, but we are far off Google’s dominance being threatened. Don’t agree with my conclusions? Feel free to slice and dice the data yourself. FindOutNow has some great tools for segmenting the results in interesting and useful ways. I have shared the interactive links below. If you use any data from this study I just request that you link back to this page at matbennett.com/tiktoksearch. Let me know what you learn in the comments.

Source data and interactive segmentation:

Q1 : Lunch searches
Q2 : Energy saving searches

The TL:DR Take-aways

Users aged 18-24 are more than twice as likely to use TikTok or Instagram to search for lunch, but 74% of them will still go to Google or Maps first
Only 8% of 18-24 year olds said they are most likely to use Instagram or TikTok as their first place to search for a place to have lunch
These results are made up from a survey of 2,401 users, including a nationally representative sample of 2,004
Not a single respondent aged 18-24 said that they would start their search for lunch on Facebook
Only 3% of 18-24s would choose TikTok or Instagram for the non-lifestyle search. This compares to 1% of the broad audience

Did you find this interesting and/or useful?

It’s not unusual for me to get distracted with questions like this that I just need to find answers for. I’ll be releasing a more exhaustive study into AI writing in October and there are likely to be others too. Connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter and say Hi if you’d like to hear when I do anything similar.

The Referral Trap That Agencies Keep Falling Into

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

One of my favourite questions to ask Agency Leaders is how they build new business. Together with questions around size and specialism, how an Agency brings in new business tells you a lot about how the business ticks. When I do ask, there is no source most Agency Leaders like to talk about more than referrals. And, why not? Referrals are great. They’re not only a relatively easy and affordable source of high-converting leads, but every one is also testament to how great our work is. Business referrals are something to be proud of. After all, there is no greater endorsement than… well, endorsements.

Landing new business from referrals is undoubtedly a good thing, to be encouraged and grown. The problem with referral business comes when we become reliant on it. When agencies tell me “All of our new business is from referrals” I can see the pride they have, but I can barely hear the words over the sound of ringing alarm bells. In the words of a famous Admiral; “It’s a trap!”.

Referrals: The Convenient Excuse

Let’s tackle my most contentious issue with referrals first, and deliver some tough love: Sometimes they are just an excuse to avoid the work.

Most people who start Agencies start them from a position of doing the craft. We enjoy “doing the thing” and start a business to do that thing for others. Not to do business development. If you don’t love business development then “Our business all comes from referrals” can be a convenient excuse to tell yourself in order to avoid what needs to be done. Trust me, I speak from experience here and definitely hid behind this excuse myself in the past.

All of your new business may well come from referrals, but should it? Ask yourself this: If a perfect fit client dropped into your inbox today, would you take the work? If your answer is anything but “No”, your referral business probably isn’t enough. Even if you answered “Yes”, would you give that same answer every time if you were asked it every day for the next year?

Referrals are Finite

If we are relying on existing customers to refer new customers to us, there is a finite limit to the referrals we can expect. Most will only know a handful of suitable prospects and that list shrinks the more specialised or high-value our offering is. Factor in that many people just don’t refer and the list shrinks further still.

The pool of potential referrals is finite and frustratingly slow to grow. We only grow the pool by winning more business, which is exactly the problem we are trying to solve. This becomes most relevant when we are looking to grow, rather than just maintain a level. If we want to accelerate business growth then we need not to be reliant on factors that trail growth.

Referral Pools Stagnate

There is a tendency to think of referrals as being a pool that expands ever more quickly with each new customer: Almost a chain reaction of each new customer multiplying the size of our pool. When we rely solely on referrals the opposite tends to be true and we see ever decreasing returns from referrals.

When we ask for referrals we are asking our customers to find prospects from their network. By definition, the network of anyone they refer will overlap. An exaggerated example would be asking your doctor to list other Doctors they know, then asking each of those to do the same. The list that each Doctor gave you would contain many names you had already seen.

If we never add new customers from outside of those networks, the pools will stagnate.

Referrals Take the Targeting Out of Our Hands

The passive nature of referrals introduces another problem: We can’t effectively target the effort towards certain types of prospects. The slightly unkind way to think of this is that “Beggars can’t be choosers”. Whilst I don’t imagine many of us are actually begging for referrals, the truth remains that we get the referrals we are given rather than the ones we might dream of.

This can cause problems for any Agency, as it can leave us with the choice of either turning down work in a way that doesn’t seem ungrateful to the referrer, or taking on work that is less than ideal. For Agencies looking to change or grow the problem is worse still: Change means pushing boundaries, which the look-a-like audience nature of referrals makes difficult. Targeting more profitable projects, new niches and moving into new territories are not naturally the strengths of referrals, which gravitate towards “more of the same”.

Referrals are Becoming Less Important

If there is one point in this article that I am going to find myself having to defend online, it is this one: I honestly believe that referrals are diminishing in value. The ease at which we can now find multiple reviews of almost any business (and probably question the legitimacy of any without reviews), means that referrals have been demoted. Rather than being a decision making tool, they have become a tool of discovery. I’ll explain with an example:

Past-me needed an accountant. I asked other business owners I knew and booked a meeting with two that were recommended to me. I chose one of those.

If Present-me needed an accountant, I would still ask business owners I knew. I’d add their recommendations to the pool of candidates I had found from online search. I’d read reviews of them all, check their websites, and build a shortlist to speak to. The recommendations still played a part, but were a smaller part of the decision making process. Their other marketing played a part too both in creating the short-list then again in narrowing it down.

The higher commitment the purchase the more true this is likely to be (and the more channels are likely to play a part).The Real Issue: Control

The above are all issues to consider when relying on referrals alone, but the biggest for me is the issue of control. Referral marketing is, at best, passive. If you had to increase your referrals by 50% this year you have limited buttons to push: You can prompt your customers more, but everything else is out of your control. You might be able to increase by 50% this year, but if you did, could you do it again next year? What button would be left to push?

When we rely on referrals alone, we give up most of the control of our pipeline. That might be OK when growth targets are low and business is buoyant. If targets are more assertive, or the markets get tough due to outside factors it can leave Agencies unable to react and adapt to change.

Is Your Agency at Risk?

Despite the negatives I’ve listed above, there is a huge amount to be said in favour of referral business. Issues only arise when we become too reliant on any single channel for new business. That begs the obvious question of “What is TOO reliant”? As with most things in business, the answer is complex. But there is a rule of thumb that can give you a good idea whether you need to be thinking about this more:

Look back at your last 6 months of significant work and consider the source for each. If >50% came from customer referrals it might be wise to get other channels working harder for you.

If you have more time to look into it, then a more accurate approach would be to model how the business looks if referrals start drying up. Look at drops of 25%, 50% and 75% and see where that leaves you to get a good picture of how exposed you really might be. How practical an exercise that is will depend on how good your reporting is.

If this article has left you feeling exposed then the best way to address that is to pick another channel and start working on building it. Which channel is less important than the need to diversify. The good news about the passive nature of referral business is that increasing focus on other areas of new business is unlikely to detract from it. Building those channels will likely increase net new business as a happy side-effect of diversification.

Did you find this insight useful? Business growth and resilience are key areas that I work on with my Agency Coaching & Mentoring clients. By asking questions like these, then supporting the Agency Leaders to find and execute the best responses for them, I help them move towards their business goals more effectively. You can learn more about what I offer here.

Why are you even writing that blog post?

Thu, 05 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Do you ever find yourself looking at an article on a business website and wondering why they bothered to publish it? I’m not talking about the moment or horror of finding something entirely inappropriate on a company website. I just mean that vague “Well yes, but what was the point?” feeling . I do. A lot. Sometimes several times a day. Occasionally several times on a single blog index page. It’s like website owners have had so many years of being told that blogging is good (which it is), that many have forgotten the point. There is a vague notion by many that “It’s good for SEO”, but what does that even mean?

Writing well takes time, which means that it isn’t cheap. It’s important then that we get return on that investment, which is rarely the case when a business just blogs because they read online that they should blog X times a month and end up blogging for the sake or blogging. I encourage having a clear purpose for each piece of content published and defining that purpose through some simple questions:

Who is this content targeting?
How will they find it?
What outcome do you want?
What do you want them to do next?
How will you measure success?

Q1 Who is this content aimed at?

Not all content is aimed as prospective customers. Content can target recruitment candidates, journalists, existing customers, other bloggers/influencers or even investors. In fact any groups that you wish to influence in some way. Most content though is written with prospective customers in mind. In those cases I encourage you to narrow that audience down further by which stage in the buyer journey they prospect is: Awareness, Consideration or Decision-making.

Deciding the intended audience for each piece of content before you even choose a title is vital. A piece might touch multiple audiences, but having one defined audience in mind will help keep it focused and maximise its value.

Example: This article has been written with prospective clients in the awareness stage in mind. More specifically, those in charge of a business website who were probably already aware that I exist, but maybe not how I help businesses with challenges like content marketing. If that isn’t you, please do stick around for the rest of the article, but that will describe the majority of people who read this piece.

Q2 How will they find it?

Once you know who you are targeting with a specific piece of content, consider how you will reach them. Content built for social media will differ for that built with organic search in mind so considering the primary way it will be pushed will influence the content. Social media content can encourage discussion, organic search content may include more questions being answered and be more keyword focused. Content can still, of course, be promoted through multiple channels, but favouring one channel per article allows for better targeting.

The most common answers to this question I see are: Organic search, Social Media, Discovery through website, Email newsletters, and Direct email.

Example: This piece will mostly be discovered by users who I have directed to the website by other means who later discover it. I will though also be posting it to LinkedIn where I have a small, established audience. It’ll probably pick up a little search traffic, but that isn’t the aim and I am not targeting specific phrases in the content.

Q3 What outcome do you want?

This possibly the most important question, but probably also the one least often considered. To put it another way, “Why are you writing this piece?”. Much web content seems to have the only goal of having the reader land on the website. That might be a legitimate aim if the plan is to build an audience for retargeting, but that doesn’t often seem to be the case and mostly seems to be the result of bad SEO focused on the wrong KPIs. A better goal for that type of content would be “Make new potential customers aware of what we do”. That slight shift instantly reminds us that we actually need to include something about what we do. For example, I’ve already woven into this article the fact that I help businesses with content marketing. Twice now, in fact.

The possible answers to this question are almost endless, and closely tied to the intended audience. Below are some example using some of the target audiences previously described:

Recruitment candidates : Communicate values, Demonstrate culture, Communicate a benefit

Existing customers : Build rapport/loyalty, Demonstrate a beneficial feature, Educate about an upsell, Fix a frequent problem

Awareness stage customers : Introduce offering, demonstrate needs you solve, build trust, Generate interest

Example: Although I have made sure I am communicating the offering I have most closely related to this article, that isn’t the main purpose of this piece. The outcome I am hoping for is that readers just come away understanding that there is more to content marketing than just blogging about whatever comes to mind. This is an audience I intend to have multiple contacts with, so I’m very happy with that slow educational approach.

Q4 What do you want them to do next?

Most users won’t do the thing you want them to do of course, but more will if you consider what that it and encourage it. What is the ideal next step having read you content? Sign up to a newsletter? Check out a whitepaper? Give you a call? Read another piece of content? Knowing what that next step is means that you can have a clear call to action that encourages it. Almost as importantly is that you can prime the user for that through the content itself.

Example: The ideal next step for an article like this would be for a prospect to sign up for a tips email or similar. I don’t have one though. Likewise, I have only recently started blogging here again so don’t have a obvious piece of follow-up content. Instead I will be using the goal of having you, the reader, check out my Work with me page, just to build on that awareness of my offering.

Q5 How will you measure success?

Once you have a next step defined, you will often have the opportunity to measure that success. Goals in analytics will cover this in many cases, the solution will really depend on what your defined next step is.

Example: I’ll spot check the results of this article in Analytics when it has been up a while. I’ll simply look at the Navigation Summary for this URL for how many people click through to the work with me page having read this.

How I use this approach with clients

When helping clients with their content marketing, this frameworks comes in useful in two different ways: The first is simply to coach the companies I work with to be deliberate in asking these questions when planning content. Building that discipline keeps content more focused on business goals and brings more results for the investment made.

The second way is to reverse the process: Answer these questions for past content to inform what content we need to be producing next. Doing this helps ensure that the overall body of content serves all of our needs and audiences proportionally.

I advocate for including columns for each of these question in the website content plan. That keeps the answers in mind when the content is being produced, but also gives a quick visual reference of how frequently each audience, goal and channel is being served. You can learn more about how I work with different organisation to help them achieve more through their digital presence on my Work with me page.

Who holds the keys to your digital empire?

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

If I asked who had a set of keys to your home, I suspect you would give me a short list of trusted people without having to think too hard. If I asked who knows your banking PIN I’d imagine the list would be shorter still; maybe a partner of spouse, but probably no-one outside of your immediate household. Our login credentials are the keys to our digital lives, and certain credentials open up our business to risks at least as serious as our banking PINs do. Yet, we all have a tendency to be far more relaxed about sharing them and reluctant to “change the locks” despite how easy this is to do.

Over the years I have delivered a number of “rescue projects” to businesses who have somehow lost control of part of their digital business through some lapse in credential management. On one occasion this was a result of a deliberate bad-actor obtaining and changing those details. More commonly it has been the result of details being lost as trusted team members leave a business or the credentials being held by a third party (No one wants their domain name held to ransom by a disgruntled supplier).

Thankfully these rescues have always been successful. Some have been slow and time-consuming, but I have always managed to get the details back. It is though very easy to imagine situations where that isn’t the case. The issue is certainly common enough to have given rise to entire industries of expired domain squatting, hacked domain spamming and more.

These issues are all easily preventable. A few hours collating and organising credentials is all it takes to significantly reduce the risk of such problems for most small businesses. Below I prioritised steps to do exactly that:

Critical credentials

Certain systems are the gateway to others. At the top of that pile is your company’s domain name. Whoever controls your domain name controls your entire digital presence, having control to redirect website, email and more.

Domain name : The most critical piece. Your business should control its own domain name through a login to a trusted registry. That login should give you access to set the Name Servers for that domain. If it doesn’t do that you don’t have control. The account should use a valid email address that is monitored and should be protected by two-factor authentication. Auto renews should be enabled if possible. My top tip is to check your domain expiry date today and add a task in your calendar or task management system for two-weeks before to check all details, including payment details. Expiry dates can be checked here.

CDN – Content Delivery Network : CDNs sit between your domain name and your hosting/email so hold a lot of power. Despite the critical role they play, they are incredibly easy to implement so are often done so by a single technical person in a company. This means that it is not uncommon for credentials to be lost over time as teams change.

Email server : Email server credentials are slightly lower down on my list than domain & CDN, but not much. Email is the de facto password reset method for most systems. That means that a bad actor getting access to an email account has a way into numerous other systems. Most digitally minded small businesses now either use a Cloud service like Outlook or Google Workspace for their email, or just have email provided through their website hosting. As such, access to ultimately manage all email is often through a single login.

Website hosting : Hosting is the other critical element that provides access to numerous systems. To “control the hosting” for most companies means knowing who the host is, having logins and keeping contact details up to date.

Google account : It’s a good idea to have a single Google account that is the “owner” for the business in Google’s eyes, rather than having staff members set services up under their own accounts. Google accounts give access to a number of key systems from Google Search Console (which can literally control whether our websites appears in search or not) to ad campaigns, Analytics and more. Having a single account as the owner that then grants access to other users as needed keeps that overall control within the business.

Other key systems

When we stop to take stock, most businesses will have dozens, or even hundreds of other systems and logins they rely on. The list changes from company to company, encompassing social media, payment gateways, email list providers, SAAS tools, internal systems and so much more. Without a proper strategy in place we are mostly relying on luck and the good nature of people we work with to keep our business secure.

Tips for better credential management

Use two-factor authentication

Two-factor authentication (or 2fa) means adding an additional element to the login beyond just an email and password. Ideally this is the code from an authenticator app, but text messages are also commonly used (not as secure, but often more convenient). Using 2fa means that just knowing your username and password is not enough to gain access. This provides additional security on a number of fronts, but one I think is particularly relevant to businesses is lowering the risk from logins having been shared with old members of staff and old suppliers.

Don’t rely just on two-factor authentication

2fa is great for protecting against unauthorised logins, but no help when it comes to other issues like lost logins. Having 2fa on your domain name account is definitely advised, but won’t help if the domain was registered through a third party who’s name no one can remember and may have since gone out of business.

Use role based emails

I am a big fan of setting up role based emails for these types of credentials. Having a domain alias of [email protected] rather than using [email protected] removes the need to update hundreds of logins when Jane suddenly leaves under a cloud and joins a competitor. You just update the email alias so that techadmin@ points to Jane’s successors email instead.

Its inevitable that we have to occasionally share credentials outside the company. Pesky consultants (myself included) frequently kick off with a list of systems they need access to. Where possible they should be added as a new user with permissions restricted to only what they need to do the work. This allows that account to then be neatly removed again when the work is complete. Where logins have to be shared, the password should be changed again when work is completed. This is particularly important if 2fa isn’t being used or gets disabled. Good practice is to log a task to do this as soon as details are shared.

Have an offboarding plan

Team members and outside contractors do inevitably get logins. Having a system in place to catch and remove those when the relationship ends is good practice. I’m pretty sure that I could test logins I was given 10 years ago and they still work (The need to regularly update passwords is a topic for another blog).

Use a password manager

All of this becomes much easier if you use a password manager. A good team-focused password manager can help manage access, ensure use of secure passwords, keep them updated and help inform you if any get compromised. I use Dashlane, which I really rate, but I used LastPass for team password management for years without complaint and I know plenty of people who swear by 1password, bitwarden, keepass or others. Which you use is less important than using one.

What to do about this now

If you have made it this far down what has turned into a long post, then I have hopefully persuaded you of the need to take this seriously. The good news is that you can action this advice in less time than it has taken you to read this far. Start by reviewing the list of frequent Critical Credentials at the top of the post. Check these today. Then pick a date to review things fully. Put that in your diary but make is a recurring event, repeating at least annually. Paste a link to this blog post in that event!

Learning to love imposter syndrome

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT

People love to talk about imposter syndrome. From sharing strategies on how to combat it to the “humble brag” LinkedIn post that may as well say “I’m really great… I just have to remind myself how great sometimes… I’m really humble like that”. It’s a hot topic for sure, but the more I see and hear people talk about it the more convinced I become that Imposter Syndrome, that feeling of being a fraud when you aren’t, is a good thing. In fact, some people could do with feeling it a lot more often.

Like most people, I’ve had that imposter feeling all too often. One time that still burns particularly bright in my mind was speaking on stage at Google Singapore. Looking out at a global audience of my peers (many of whom had achieved far more than I had), left me with that classic “I don’t deserve to be here” feeling. I’ve spoken publicly often enough, including at a number of Google events, but there was something about having people in booths live translating my burbling that really triggered the feeling that day. More usually for me it is face to face meetings with people, whose work I really respect; “Why should this person, who knows so much, care what I think?”.

It’s all good though. We most frequently experience Imposter Syndrome when we are pushing ourselves further. It’s one of the discomforts experienced when moving outside our comfort zone. That means, to me at least, it is not something to be “beaten” or “conquered” and definitely not to be avoided. Instead it needs to be acknowledged and embraced. Imposter Syndrome is often the literal feeling of improvement.

Imposter Syndrome is often the literal feeling of improvement.

What’s more, it’s important to feel that discomfort as we push our own boundaries. That feeling of not being deserving reminds us that we’re reaching those boundaries and need to try harder to do well. That feeling is what saves (most of) us from arrogantly assuming we are great at everything we do and ploughing ahead accordingly. There are enough Confidently-Wrong people in the world without us trying to ignore or suppress the instinct that stops us joining their ranks.

There’s an interesting chart in Adam Grant’s Think Again that explains this well in terms of being a “Confidence vs Competence” issue. I particular like how this offers insight into to why it’s often people who the rest of us see as competent that are affected by it. Once we graduate out of that novice zone, it’s “confident humility” that we should be aiming for. However, when our competence grows faster than our confidence those imposter insecurities creep in.

Imposter syndrome : Adapted from the original in Think Again

Knowing what drives Imposter Syndrome, and how normal it is, helps us stop it holding us back. “I feel like an imposter, just like everyone else does. This is normal and good” is far easier to deal with than “I feel like an imposter, everyone must know I am”. Framing it as something to be avoided or beaten makes it difficult to turn it to positive use.

It’s right, of course, that I have Imposter Syndrome now writing this. Not only am I not a psychologist, but I wouldn’t even claim to be a great example of someone who “has their shit together”. I’m known for writing & talking about adtech, not the human subconscious. Why should you read anything I have to say about this? That’s fine though. That feeling made me think much longer about whether or not to write this than I would an adtech topic. It made me really consider whether I had anything to say on the subject and it made me do some fact checking to ensure I wasn’t just talking out of my arse (good news: Others agree with what I am saying: 1 2 3). The feeling of being an imposter drove me to do better. See… it’s good.

So, imposter syndrome demonstrates that we are growing, keep our egos in check and drives us to do better. What’s not to love?

The 5 Business books that changed my life

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I’m not a person who is naturally inclined to hyperbole, so it’s a bold claim to say that there are business books that have changed my life. It’s a true one though. Some of these are great books, others are good books that I happened to read at a pivotal time, but each of them changed the course of my work life in some way.

I have read scores of business and personal development books over the years. Most probably weren’t worth the time invested getting from front cover to back. There are others I thought were very good, or very useful. Even a few that were both, but the five I have listed below delivered more: Shaping my career and changing the way I worked.

The One Minute Manager

Kenneth Blanchard & Spencer Johnson

The One Minute Manager is the first “management book” that I read. I was a young overachiever in the hotel sector who, like many junior managers, had never been given any training in how to manage people. In a bid to ward off the imposter syndrome of managing older and more experienced teams I took myself back to college for some formalised learning.

The One Minute Manager was on the reading list for my course and immediately jumped out as being a lot shorter than the rest of the list. Much to the annoyance of my fellow students, I grabbed The One Minute Manager off the shelf and left the weightier looking tomes for them.

The principles of the book are simple and based around three “secrets”: One-minute goals, one-minute praisings and one-minute reprimands. I embraced those principles consciously for a while and I suspect the results from that helped give me confidence in managing people in less simplistic ways.

It’s probably close to thirty years since I read this book, and I probably haven’t given those “secrets” thought for at least twenty-five of those. I think that some of the underlying philosophy of “deal quickly and move on” has stuck with me though and still shapes the way I lead today.

Recommended for: Those starting to manage teams for the first time

Buy it on Amazon.co.uk

Don’t Make Me Think

Steve Krug

If you ever read this book you will instantly find yourself wishing that more people do the same. Don’t Make Me Think cuts to the absolute core of what usability and design are. It encourages us to think of usability as a courtesy to our readers and build websites and applications that are more effective by being easier to understand.

I first read Don’t Make Me Think in the era of Flash Preloaders when website developers were forcing users to sit through a minute of loading bars before they could even access their monstrosity of a website. The lessons from this short book shaped how I approached website design and development for at least a decade, helped my team gain a reputation for building “websites that work”. Those lessons continue to shape my approach to my work in less obvious ways today.

Don’t Make Me Think should be compulsory reading for anyone who publishes anything on the web.

Recommended for: Anyone who builds or owns a website or app

Buy it on Amazon.co.uk

Start With Why

Simon Sinek

Start With Why is by far the best-known book on this list and barely needs any introduction. For those living in a Sinek proof cave for the last 20+ years, it deals with finding and using your company’s sense of purpose as a more inspiring approach than focusing on what you do.

When I first read Starts With Why I found it interesting, but not particularly useful for me at the time. I enjoyed it, but soon forgot about it and forgot the name Simon Sinek. The idea behind it clearly left an impression somewhere in my subconscious mind though. Years later, when we were trying to pivot the company into ad monetisation, it came back into my mind and I read it again.

I don’t often read a book a second time, but it proved useful in this case. I was struggling with the idea of moving into ad monetisation as our core business. The opportunity made sense, but who wants to be the guy that throws ads in users faces? Re-reading Starts With Why helped me realise what it was about that work that I found interesting and rewarding: Not displaying ads, but supporting a free and open internet full of independent publishers.

Recommended for: Any business leader who somehow hasn’t read this yet

Buy it on Amazon.co.uk

Getting Things Done

David Allen

I came across Getting Thing Done at a point in my career where I was constantly struggling with the number of things I needed to be doing every day. The business was growing, we were trying to do too many different things, I was still stuck painfully in the centre of every business decision and I also had a young family making much more meaningful demands on my time. Like many people in similar situations, I was spending so much of my mental energy on either working out what I needed to do or dealing with things that got forgotten, that I wasn’t getting anything done.

I bought Getting Things Done to read on a much needed holiday with the family. I struggled with holidays back then, finding it difficult to leave work behind and be present with the family. Travelling with a pile of work-related reading helped me deal with the lack of WiFi and the guilt of taking time off work. Whilst that isn’t an approach I would recommend today, it turned out to be fortuitous for me. Having the time to quietly read and digest Getting Things Done turned out to be a great investment for me as this book has probably had more impact on my life than any other I have read.

Getting Things Done describes a whole personal productivity system, that is frankly way too hardcore for me. However, the core concepts make sense and are easily applied. I have ended up with my own system based loosely on what is described in the book. I’ll probably write more about that on another day, but in essence, my version is three things: 1) Recording everything I need to do as soon as I think of it (for me that means the Todoist app). 2) Checking those lists as part of my regular day, and 3) Clearing/recognising those lists weekly. That’s slightly simplified, but wow, what a difference. Even the simple benefit of never worrying about forgetting important things has so much value.

Recommended for: Anyone who is too busy to get everything done

Buy it on Amazon.co.uk

The E-Myth Revisited

Michael E Gerber

Don’t be put off by the uninspiring cover and truly terrible title of this book; it is a book full of valuable lessons for anyone running or thinking of starting a business. After years of people telling me to “Work on your business, not in it”, this is the book that turned that trite throw away into something useful.

At the centre of E-myth is the idea that businesses should be built on systems and processes that are stronger than the individuals who create them. Many small businesses struggle to grow as their founders face difficulties adapting to their changing needs. The E-Myth helps us avoid those pitfalls.

The lessons of the book are recapped through a conversation with a mythical client called Sarah. I have to confess that I didn’t enjoy this mechanic much and found some of those sections difficult to stomach. Nonetheless, it’s an excellent book that I have gifted to several people over the years as their businesses reached that difficult transition time.

I wish I had read The E-Myth Revisited a lot sooner than I had. The lessons are simple, but easily overlooked and had I implemented them sooner I am certain I would have hit my own business goals sooner.

Recommended for: Anyone starting in business or trying to grow their small business

Buy it on Amazon.co.uk

A few other business books of note

That’s my five. There are others I could have mentioned, but I wanted to keep the list short and limited only to those that have made a tangible positive impact on my business life. I could like scores of books that I definitely wouldn’t recommend spending time on, but I shan’t. Instead, I’ll quickly mention a couple of others that almost made the list.

In no particular order:

Traction – Wickman & Gino

The book I have gifted more than any other on this page, and so nearly made the list above. A full programme to transform you business and give it new momentum. [Buy on Amazon](http://I ran a technical agency for most of my adult life. Content was the centre of our business development, and I always remained at the centre of that content. I am not another content specialist who focuses on technical agencies. I am a technical agency guy who now writes. I know how to write, but more importantly, I know what to write to support your agency business. I help agencies in different ways, depending on what they need. For some I simply write regular articles (either under my name, or white-labelled). For others I develop the content strategy and direct the content, leaving the writing to others. I can also do both. Content strategies : What content will deliver results for you Process and tactics : A playbook to consistently turn out good quality to serve that strategy, using the resources you have available Execution : Website copy, article writing, blogging and social media posts For agencies that need help with their positioning and broader marketing strategy, I can also do this through a Mentoring relationship.)

Nudge – Richard H Thaler & Cass R Sunstein

The book about “making better choices easier” that became the favourite of politicians around the world. Buy on Amazon

Turn the Ship Around! – L. David Marquet and Stephen R Covey

Almost a better-written version of The E-Myth Revisited. Buy on Amazon

Zag – Marty Eumeier

The power of being different. Probably influenced me more than I am giving it credit for. Buy on Amazon

Squash and a Squeeze – Julia Donaldson

The seminal text on having perspective on our own lives. I have undoubtedly read this more than any other on the list. Buy on Amazon

Over to you

I’d love to hear any thoughts from anyone who has read any of the above, and likewise recommendations for what I should read next. It is so difficult to find good business books that I would love to hear other people’s recommendations.

Hello (again) world

Thu, 09 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Last week was a strange little work anniversary for me. I was doing some digital housekeeping and spotted that it was exactly 25 years ago that I registered my first domain name on behalf of a paying client. That domain registration marked the start of a journey for me that coincidentally is set to end / change next week as I step away from the company that I formed with my father a quarter of a century ago.

Starting a web business in the mid nineties wasn’t an obvious choice. The web was still in it’s infancy and most of the businesses that we wanted to sell services to had little idea what the internet was or why it would become important for business in the fast-approaching future. We built websites, we helped businesses with online strategy and we used the web to find them customers using techniques that would later get called “SEO”. None the less, we made a success of it and got a reputation for being good at both what we did and the way we chose to do it.

25 years is a long time on the web, so it is no surprise that the business changed with those times. Over the years our focus shifted to SEO, web-application development, e-commerce, before we eventually settled in the monetisation niche. A strangely circular journey considering that first paying domain was for an advertising website.

“Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.” Frank Herbert – Dune

I’ve never been afraid of change. The change the business went through over the years was always as much about curiosity as the need to adapt. It’s good to change when you have to, but better to be ahead of that moment. It’s time to embrace that change again.

Next week I step back from OKO, leaving it in the hands of others. There are things I will miss (Most particularly the amazing OKO team but also the Google team we worked closely with and some of our excellent long term customers), The change is exciting though. I have a blank slate before me at a time when the internet seems to be on the cusp of change again. I’m looking forward to being hands on again, earning from my own innovation and graft. Carving out something new. This blog is where I will explore what that might be.

It’s a new day. Hello again world.

Mat Bennett - Agency Advisor

The Oh Shit Document

What is an Oh Shit Document?

Why you probably need one

What goes in it

Where the document lives

Version 1 can be done in a lunch break

You’re irreplaceable… and that’s the problem

It’s not really a size problem

The two ways founders try to buy resilience (and why they don’t work)

The lever that actually works

Where this leaves me

The week that never comes

Narrator’s voice: “The planets never aligned”

If you can’t block time, snatch it

Stop training your team to ignore you

What your team is actually learning

I’ve done this myself

Why this keeps happening

What to do about it

What is an agency anyway?

The essence of agency

The importance (and unimportance) of labels

A simple model

Who cares?

1) It clarifies what you can credibly promise

2) It helps you price without resentment

3) It tells you what breaks first as you grow

Traffic jams and sleepless nights

Thinking by design

No more word of mouth. No more referrals

What’s the point? Isn’t this just semantics?

Your Next Step

What breaks first?

Why ask the uncomfortable question?

Resilience isn’t just for crises

The “Oh shit document”

Why agencies fail to do what matters

What Gets in the Way

The Founder Trap

Why It’s a Hard Sell

The Cost of Not Fixing It

What It Looks Like When It Works

Practical Advice

Your business, your Scorecard – Rethinking agency metrics

What really matters to you?

What else should we measure?

So, abandon traditional metrics?

The web is toast

Old paradigm:

New paradigm:

Control becomes the next battleground.

Marketing? That changes too.

This isn’t doom & gloom… it’s adaptation.

What did you actually lead yesterday?

How guilty are you? The 24 hour snapshot

Understanding Why We Drift

Refocusing on the Real Job

The Uncomfortable Reality

How much is a retainer client ACTUALLY worth?

Two flawed approaches to calculating lifetime value

Cohorts and Survivorship

Understanding Cohorts

Measuring Survivorship

Why Bother?

The Free Retainer Client Value Spreadsheet

Get Started

Agency CRMs – Analysis and recommendations

The most important features of an agency CRM

Which CRMs are agencies using?

How well are we using our CRMs?

Why aren’t we using them more?

Thoughts and conclusions

How to find the right CRM for your agency

Yes, yes, yes, but what CRMs do you recommend Mat?

Recently recommended:

A few others to consider

Leave cash on the table – Do your agency finances need to grow up?

Accrual accounting explained in simple terms

Example Project