Scale Simplifier - How to Build a Multi-Million Dollar Agency

Scale is sort of an overused term these days, but when I speak of scale I’m speaking in the terms of making your life easier, getting more results with less work, making your life more fun and enjoyable, and making all the effort that you put into your business pay off in bigger and bigger ways.

I think the reason that you probably got into your business in the first place versus getting a job is the freedom that you hope that you would receive from having your own business. If you’re reading this, you may not have that freedom just yet, but what I’ll show you here today is how you can get there.

First you’re thinking who is this Scott guy and why is he qualified to teach on scaling an agency?  Well, from 1989 to 2014 I was an agency owner just like you. In fact, we were the #1 agency in our space, regarded as the go-to experts in marketing food ingredients which led to a multi-million dollar sale in 2014.  

Now I’m sure you’re thinking “well that all sounds good, but will it work for me?”.  Honestly, I don’t know.  But what I do know is that what I’ll show you in this training worked for us as an agency through our evolution.

And what I do know is that it’s worked with dozens of agency owner clients since.

So I’ll let you hold your reservations on whether or not it will work for you and your business, but I encourage you to enter this with an open mind.  

Let’s kick this off by breaking down the meaning of scale and diving into that a little bit further.  

Scale Equals Freedom

Freedom is what you'll end up with if you work hard on each one of these projects -- the freedom to not only call your own shots, but also call your own hours, call which clients you want to work with, call your own rates and fees, and so forth.

One of the things that will help you buy the scale and the freedom that you want is money.  I’m not super driven by money, but we have to pay the bills right? And one of the ways that we can measure whether we're scaling or not is whether we're increasing the amount of money that we're making, and ideally decreasing the amount of time that we put into making it.

Scale Equals Meaning

Another really important measure of scale is whether you are getting meaning out of your life. Whether your life is having the meaning that you wanted it to have. And this is especially true as compared with a job, whether you're really able to call your own shots, not only financially, but in terms of the way that you manage your business, the way that you manage your clients, your employees, the kind of work that you're able to do, the caliber of work that you're able to do and so forth.

Scale Equals Less Stress

Ideally agency owners strive to have less stress in their lives, not more.  But, if you're like a lot of our clients, you probably have quite a bit of stress in your life. So, we're definitely going to work on that, but that is the objective around scaling your business -- to increase the amount of freedom, increase the amount of money, and try to reduce the amount of stress and to buy back a level of peace, a level of meaning that you really wanted to get from the very beginning when you set out to build your business.

The 3 Core Elements of Scale

The reason our clients, our agency owner clients, come to us for in the first place are for three things:

First, the main thing that our clients complain about is not having enough time. This is certainly my experience when I was in the agency business.  I simply didn't have enough time to do the things that I wanted to do. I wasn't able to run my business quite the way I wanted to run it, wasn't able to do the caliber of work I wanted to be able to do, and ultimately I wasn't able to have the amount of time for the things I really cherished in my life, such as my family, my health and fitness, my community and so forth.

Time is I'm a big deficit for most of us. So we're going to be working on getting you more time in order to have more time.

Secondly, most of us also need more clients. Not just any clients, but great clients. This requires a shift in thinking of it more as an audition, rather than a cattle call for you. An audition process for you where you're auditioning great clients and you're able to determine the clients that you want to work with.

The third thing that most of us want as agency owners is additional profit. We can't spend anything else but profit. Increasing profit really is the fuel for scale. Increased profit gives us the freedom to make some decisions that we probably wouldn’t be able to make right now.

These three things -- time, clients, and profit -- are what we want to create as a result of doing this scale simplifier exercise.

If you’re still with me here, it means that you’re likely experiencing a few things that our clients experience…

First of all, you probably have a lack of clarity. And by that I mean you may not know exactly what it is that's impeding your progress. You’re not crystal clear about what it is that's missing -- you know that something isn't right, but you're not absolutely crystal clear. The nine projects in the Scale Simplifier program are specifically designed to give you that clarity.

The other thing that most of our agency owner clients report is they feel as though there is a lack of efficiency in their agencies. It’s certainly something I noticed in my own agency -- a lot of hamster wheel-type activity, a lot of spinning wheels but not a lot of results. And it kind of goes back to clarity. If we were clear about what we were trying to achieve, and if we were clear about our goals and what our problems were, we could design systems that were more efficient.

Another lack that most of us have as a result of lack of clarity and efficiency is a lack of dependable systems for ensuring that we have enough time, enough clients, and enough profits. In other words, a lack of sustainability. And this is the thing that certainly kept me up a lot at night and I'll bet it keeps a lot of you up at night as well, knowing that you don’t have the systems in place that produce dependable, consistent results time after time, week after week, day after day, month after quarter, year after year.

That’s really what sustainability is all about. It’s key to not only increasing your time and increasing your clients and your profit, but to reducing or eliminating your stress and maximizing your peace.

Sustainability is the end result of successfully scaling your agency.

The Nine Scale Simplifiers

So, in the service of all of these objectives, we've developed nine projects that we’ve used to scale our own agency before our sale. These are the same nine scale simplifiers that we use to de-mystify and achieve scale for our agency clients today.

Scale Simplifier #1:

The first of those tasks is that we want to make sure that we have your goals very, very, very clearly defined. We need to make sure that you're crystal clear about all of your goals.

We talk about goals like top line sales and revenue, EBITDA, net profit, gross profit margins, adjusted gross income, those kinds of financial measures, and lots of other key performance indicators as well.

That may mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people…

For example, how long do you keep your clients? What is your client longevity? What are your net promoter scores?

What is the level of engagement and the likelihood that your clients are going to stay with your agency for longer than a year? What are your employment employee engagement scores? How likely are your employees to stay with your agency over time and so forth?

So, the first step is really to get crystal clear about these goals because once we're crystal clear about the goals, really that drives everything else. Everything else that we do in driving your agency is in the service of making sure that the measurable Quantitative Goals we've established do get that.

Scale Simplifier #2

The next scale secret that we need to work through is roles. By that I mean the role that you're going to play and that everybody else organization is going to play to maximize, scale, and leverage to your organization.

It all starts with you as agency owner. There are a lot of things that you could do — and probably are doing — in the service of agency.  But there are only two or three (maybe four) things, tops, that you ought to be doing. Things that are in keeping with your effective hourly rate.

What is your effective hourly rate?  Well, if we divide your net profit by how many hours you personally invest in your business, that is your effective hourly rate.

There are a LOT of things that could be done by other people at a tiny fraction of your effective hourly rate. And they absolutely should be done by others if they can be done at a lower cost.

Anything that can be done better, faster or cheaper than you can do them, we want to be sure to delegate those so that we have you working “on” your business versus “in” your business so that you're only doing the things that make maximum contribution to the health, profitability, and ultimately to the scale and the sustainability of your business -- not things that suck your energy, suck your soul, and distract you from growing your business.

Scale Simplifier #3

Once we have your role very clearly defined, it’s time to move onto shedding anything that doesn’t fit the role you should be playing as an owner -- delegating, divesting, and otherwise re-assigning roles that you should not be working on to people who can do them better, faster, cheaper, and in some cases eliminating roles that shouldn't be done by anybody under any circumstances.

These first three Scale Simplifiers are essential to the growth of your agency because they take everything away that's not essential to your running your agency and sets you up to get you in the place where you need to be in order to achieve maximum scale.

Scale Simplifier #4

Now that your foundation for scale is set, we start engaging in the activities that are truly the most profitable for your agency. One of the most important ones is messaging.

What is the message that you want your agency to be known for? By that I mean the value proposition, the specific information or the specific benefit that you bring to your clients.

Think about your current clients, your prospective clients, the media, your community, and all of your employees -- how do you want them to be thinking about you? What sentence do you want them to be able to repeat about the specific value, the specific ROI that you bring to your clients? That's the message. And so we want to make sure that that's crystal clear throughout all of your audiences.

Scale Simplifier #5

Once we’ve solidified a message for your agency that is unique in the marketplace, we need to turn our attention to your lead generation process.

What we're really talking about here is a process that produces quality leads day in and day out, week after week.

Some of you reading this will have a lead generation process in place, and others won’t.  But, it’s most likely that you have a process in place that you execute maybe one week out of the month or two days out of the month because you lack time.  Once you shift to a process that you're executing everyday of the month, every day of the year it will make a huge difference for your business.

Scale Simplifier #6

In other words, When you move a lead through your funnel from unqualified to qualified and then to interested, we want to ensure you are speaking ONLY with clients who have the right staff, has met all of the criteria around who you want to work with, has met the culture task, has met the sniff test, has passed the asshole test, and is a good person overall.

Enter the discovery/audition process.

The discovery or audition process that you take them through not only allows you to absolutely qualify them to the point where you're willing to do business with them, but also to take them through a discovery process which ensures that your agency is uniquely qualified and that your agency is the exclusive and only agency that they could choose.

Scale Simplifier #7

The next piece is to maximize profits, so the seventh scale simplifier is about onboarding. One of the things that I really learned in running my own agency, and certainly in working with my agency owner clients, is that onboarding is the difference between profiting from all of the marketing/business development work that you've done or not profiting.

In order to profit from your biz dev, you need a specific on boarding process that ensures that everybody in your agency and organization are crystal clear about what the working relationship is going to be like.

This does a couple of things: it insures against scope creep and it ensures client satisfaction and profitability for the long haul.

Scale Simplifier #8

The eighth Scale Simplifier project centres around organic growth. The most profitable growth there is in any agency is in organic growth or growth from existing clients. That's the most profitable and the easiest growth area. Yet, most agency owners don’t have a process for maximizing this profit center inside their business.

Scale Simplifier #9

Of course a discussion about scale wouldn’t be complete without a focus around cash flow — which is why it’s our final Scale Simplifier.

They say that cash is king.  But cashflow is a matter of survival and sustainability.

Most agency owners know how much money they have coming in and out at any given time.  However in order to scale effectively, you need to take that a step further. In order to scale, you need to be able to predict cash flow, project cash flow and manage cash flow.  Otherwise every step of your scaling journey will feel like a risk, instead of a calculated piece of the scale puzzle.

Is your agency ready to scale?  Grab a free Scale Session here to discuss how to apply the Scale Simplifiers to your business and maximize your results.

How to Implement the Scale Simplifiers

You’ve probably thought some about the Scale Simplifiers that I’ve listed above.  And maybe you even feel you have a good grasp on the concepts themselves. However, if you’re reading this I know that it’s because you want to scale your agency further — and you haven’t yet been able to do so.  This is a clear indicator to me that you either haven’t implemented these projects or that you haven’t implemented them as well as you need to.

You’re probably strong in a number of these tasks and weaker in others.  And what I know about you is that if you own an agency you’re definitely short on time.  This means it’s nearly impossible to implement all 9 Scale Simplifiers at once.

So which ones should you start with?  Which will make the greatest impact on your goals?

Every agency should work through these differently.  To determine which you should start with, I recommend spending some time critically thinking through all 9 of the projects and how they’re applied within your own agency and rating them as follows:  

• If you’d say you have about 80-100% effectiveness in that scale project, rate it a green.
• A yellow would be where most of us are, let’s say 40-70% effectiveness.
• And then red would be a 0-30%, so where you're really struggling.

Most agencies that I have found have at least a decent idea about their goals. They know where they want to be. However, I think you'll find that you could get much clearer about your goals than you are right now.

A lot of agencies tell me that they have a fairly decent idea about organic growth, which is a wonderful thing. They spend a suitable amount of time on their current clients and that they work hard at retaining their clients.  But they don’t have a process that helps them predict and control that organic growth.

One of the areas that I found a lot of our clients are someplace in between failing and succeeding is in the roles piece. They are wearing a lot of hats or at least more hats than they really should have.

A lot of agencies report that their messaging not quite as strong as they'd like it to be, that it's too generic. In a lot of cases that it could be tighter, or not everybody in their universe is aware of it.

A lot of my agency owner clients will tell me that a lot of their clients don't even know the length and breadth of the services that they provide.

Some clients report that their cash flow is not as good as it could be, or at least they can't project cash flow with as much accuracy as they could be.

I also have a number of clients say that they've got some kind of a discovery process in place but maybe not as effective as they would like it to be. And again, this is different for every agency, but this is a lot of what we see.

The nine tasks are designed to really go to the very heart of what we've discovered are the biggest challenges that our agency clients have in scaling their agencies.

Is your agency ready to scale?  Grab a free Scale Session here to discuss how to apply the Scale Simplifiers to your business and maximize your results.