Tip #6: Find Your Integrator

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Every great business has two people at the top: a visionary - someone who is always thinking about inventing something amazing - and an integrator - someone who puts out dumpster fires and makes sure employees get paid on time and that the company is hitting its financial goals.

While I think the term “visionary” sounds a bit pompous (for the record, I got the nomenclature from the Entrepreneur’s Operating System or EOS), I do believe that every great company needs some people who are dreaming about the future and some people who are making sure the trains run on time.

By nature, however, almost all entrepreneurs are visionaries, not integrators. For the majority of entrepreneurs, the entire point of starting a company is to do things differently. Few founders leave a comfortable job and risk everything because they want to start a business with better spreadsheets to manage their finances and with a cleaner hiring process!

A visionary founder of an agency will have a really hard time scaling the agency without an integrator. Visionary founders are typically really good at consultative sales (they are experts and are passionate about what they do), and they are also good at attracting talented team members (who doesn’t want to work for an inspiring boss?).

As I mentioned in the first article in this series, agency growth requires PPC - people, process, and culture. Visionaries care about the people and the culture but not the process. The end result: many visionary founders can scale their agency to 10 or 15 team members - and then the wheels fall off.?

Among the issues that arise with agencies led by a visionary without integrator support:

• Finances - missing payroll, signing unprofitable contracts, not having a clear picture of current and future performance;
• HR - failing to hire ahead of need, not firing bad performers, a lack of consistent salary bands, no review cycles, inattention to potential employment liability issues;
• Operations - Poor planning around office space, no consistency between the same services provided by different teams, constant reinventing of the wheel for the basic functions of the business, no written guidelines, no training staff, a lack of a clear org chart;
• Sales and Marketing - lack of accountability and measurement, allowing sales teams to negotiate terms and pricing without prior approval, no coordination between sales, client services, and operations to plan for new clients.

All of these are ticking time bombs for agencies, which is why most visionary-only agencies can’t scale beyond a dozen or so team members. Eventually, no matter how mercurial, passionate, and caring the visionary is, operational issues will prevent the agency from scaling.

So, if the point isn’t abundantly clear, to scale your agency, you need an integrator (the title is usually COO or President).?

Armed with this knowledge, you now need to go find a great agency integrator - unfortunately, this is easier said than done. There are only so many people that have held an integrator role at a growing agency.

For this reason, having agency experience is a “nice to have” not a “must have” for this position. You need industry expertise for your client-facing roles (client services, sales, and maybe marketing) but operational roles really require organization, attention to details, and sound financial and people management. All of these attributes can be found in someone who has never worked in an agency.

Of course, you want this person to be a good cultural fit, and to quickly understand the nuances of an agency business, but trying to find those attributes in a person who has also worked as the COO of an agency is likely to be a fruitless endeavor.

?Just find someone who you can trust and who loves dumpster fires, enabling you to do what you love - coming up with crazy ideas for the future, building a loyal cadre of team members who love your vision, and wowing clients in sales pitches and quarterly reviews.

Next Week, Tip #7: Fire Yourself from Jobs