Are you overwhelmed with tasks that keep you in the weeds instead of working on growing your agency? Are you paying a salaried team to do things an hourly assistant could accomplish? STOP IT! Learn how you can increase productivity and save boatloads of time and resources. Plus, learn how to help your sales team be more effective so you can grow.
In this episode, we’ll cover:
- Ways to save time and increase productivity.
- How to help your sales team be more effective.
- How to get unstuck from doing everything yourself.
Today’s guest on the show is Jeff J. Hunter, founder, and Chief Freedom Officer at VA Staffer, the outsourcing agency he created to help businesses build virtual teams. With a background in IT and virtual project management he knows the ins and outs of getting projects done virtually. He’s here to give us strategies on saving time and ways to help salespeople be more effective.
How to Save Time and Increase Productivity
Agencies are always trying to land more clients, right? However, there always comes a point where they can’t take on more new business because they’re too busy servicing the clients they already have.
Jeff’s a big proponent of “don’t hire until it hurts” so his advice is to make more time for servicing clients and growing your business by understanding what you do and how it impacts your business. He compared it to Pareto’s 80/20 Principle from 1865 ~ the trivial many 80% and the vital few 20%.
However 150 years later, in a technology age, Jeff believes it’s more of a 90/10 split. He advises his clients to list out all the tasks and activities they do. Then decide which are the trivial many and which are the vital few. The vital few are the ones making the most impact on the business. For most entrepreneurs, Jeff finds 90% of what they do can be delegated while they focus on the 10% which impacts their business.
Similarly, I tell my clients to make a list of everything they do and then rank each item as to how much it impacts the agency – low, medium, or high impact. This is how you can find the major time sucks (check out my productivity worksheet here). and then work on becoming more productive with daily tasks and increase productivity overall. I find that most will usually tackle the low-impact items first because they offer immediate gratification and make us feel good in the short term.
The hard stuff usually seems to get procrastinated, yet that’s the stuff that makes the most impact on business growth.
How to Make Your Sales Team More Effective
A solid outbound strategy is one of the three sales channels you need to grow your agency. (The other two are inbound sales and strategic partnerships, by the way.) But are your or your sales team spinning their wheels on mining the information and making connections? That’s a major waste of time and resources. Why spend your own time or pay the sales team top dollar to do the leg work, when you could use a $7-$8 per hour VA?
Instead, let a VA do the mining. They can do the research, make contact and set up introductions. This frees you or your team up for setting sales strategies and building relationships.
Jeff says knowing what not to outsource is just as important as knowing what you should outsource. And relationship building is definitely not something you can farm out.
How to Get Unstuck from Doing Everything
Stop doing the things you suck at by eliminating, delegating or automating. Try doing the 90/10 exercise outlined above or check out Jeff’s webinar at 9010Life.com. Jeff says he guarantees you’ll find that 10% of what you do is actually the stuff you should focus on.
Also, a lot of the things you’re stuck doing because you’re the only one who knows how. So, start documenting what you do and how you do it. Use a tool like Screencast or TinyTake to record the what and how you do things. Because, the first step in delegating what you do is teaching others how to do it.
Need Guidance and Support to Grow Your Agency Faster?
Most agency owners struggle to scale. We’ve developed an amazing mastermind to guide you through the journey of implementing the right systems so you can scale your agency — instead of feeling overwhelmed by it.
We do this by bringing together successful agency leaders to share strategies, offer advice, and reveal what’s working (and what’s not working) in their agency. The truth is, whatever you want to accomplish in life, nothing will help you go further, faster than getting the right adviser in the context of motivated peers. If you want to GROW fast and smart, Digital Agency Elite mastermind will help.
Improving as a Digital Agency Owner
When you increase productivity, you will be surprised at what you can achieve for your digital agency and it will help you improve as an agency owner. Is this the only struggle you are facing at the minute? No matter what challenges your agency is facing, I can help you get through all of it.
Through my experience running my own digital agency and helping other digital agency owners, there are many topics I can offer guidance on whether you are an established agency facing struggles with new agencies unsure of what the different phases of growth you will experience will look like.
Growing your agency team can also be a major struggle for any agency owner and I can show from knowing when it’s time to hire a sales manager or expand your sales team to perfecting your business strategy with creating a process for performance-based pricing and how to keep your big-name clients happy.
Are you ready to create something cool and want more advice? Learn about my career and different experiences as well as tips, tricks, and insights by checking out my blogs that cover a wide variety of topics.
Check out more from my Ask Swenk series and more of my videos on my Youtube channel. There you will find advice from myself and other agency experts.
