Why You Never Have Enough Time to Work on Agency New Business (and How to Find More)

I’m about to expound on a topic on which I’m not an expert—time management.

I wish I was an expert because, of all the new business challenges I can help a small agency owner solve, magically creating more time in their day is not one of them.

And time, or lack thereof, is so often on the list of reasons why an agency doesn’t pursue new business at the level it wishes to. I get it. I’m like everyone else, wishing I had a few more hours at the end of the day to accomplish what I’d set out for myself.

But I also know that when an RFP or an invitation to a competitive pitch comes your way, somehow, despite your tapped-out schedules, you’ll find a way to write a response or prepare for the pitch meeting.?

I think you do this because an RFP represents a tangible opportunity (and funny how that tangibility has a way of offsetting any concerns that it might not be the right opportunity). There’s not enough time to execute a proactive new business plan, which requires time and no small amount of faith before it bears fruit, but there’s always time to be found to react to an opportunity.

In that case, is something else to blame other than time? Is “no time” a convenient excuse and is fear (fear of rejection, fear of the unknown, fear of failure) actually the real culprit? If “fear” feels like too strong a word for you, try substituting anxiety or uncertainty or discomfort.

Before you start rolling your eyes and saying to yourself, “easy for her to say when she has no idea of the chaos around me!”, I confess that I am not immune to the “no time” excuse. In fact, recently I’ve been leaning on it heavily!

Like many of the agencies I serve, it’s been a slow year. Marketers are delaying short-term decisions to hire agencies or release funding for campaigns. Therefore, agencies are doing the same and seem hesitant to invest in building skills and structure. (This is purely my personal observation and I’m interested in hearing if your experience differs.)

The result is, I’ve got capacity in my business. What a gift! I have the opportunity to work on my business instead of in it and improve my programs, optimize my marketing, and create new tools that will help more people.??

And yet… I have so little time!

I dug into this paradox a bit to make sure it’s not based on just my own anecdotal experience and I found Cambridge University researcher, Dr. Itamar Shatz who says it’s not unusual that we always find time to do things we want to do or are highly motivated to do (like responding to an RFP because the potential for revenue feels real).

He says it’s the difference between the drive to act versus the drive to delay:?

“The drive to act represents how strongly people can push themselves to take action at the moment. Conversely, the drive to delay represents how strongly people feel pushed to avoid taking action at the moment.”

Aha! That’s why we’ll find time to answer an RFP even if it means neglecting other priorities or maybe working a long night or a weekend.

Shatz also says:

“People procrastinate because their drive to delay is irrationally stronger than their drive to act. This happens when their…motivation [is] opposed by issues like fear .”

Yup, that’s what I see, in myself as well as others. I recognize that anticipatory fear (or anxiety or discomfort or uncertainty—whatever terms fits you best) of proactively stepping into the unknown, whether it’s introducing myself to a new set of prospects, creating new programs, and generally making bold moves to exponentially grow my business. It sends me searching for all those other things that keep me so busy and it keeps me stuck.

You too? Here we are at the midpoint of the year—what are we going to do to control our new business destiny?

And thus we return back to my offering ideas for thinking differently about how we invest our time into agency new business. And, while I’m not a time management expert, I’ve seen the positive impact they can have on new businesses. Maybe they’ll do the same for your agency.

Are you doing what’s right for you?

If we avoid doing things we don’t like to do or aren’t good at, then let’s not do them. Or, more realistically said, let’s find alternative methods for achieving the same results that suck less.

Some time ago, I had a revelation that I was never going to get an agency leader to do what they didn’t want to do or weren’t good at. But, I still had a responsibility to help them win more new business. So, what should I do?

As I pondered that, I started thinking about all the agency leaders I’d worked with in my career and four personality profiles emerged:

The Hunter – the natural-born salesperson who is energized by making connections with other people and feels at ease when interacting with strangers.

The Communicator – the “big idea” person who can captivate a crowd whether on a keynote stage or in a pitch meeting.?

The Thinker – the introvert of the bunch, this person also has strong interpersonal skills they put to good use when armed with a sense of purpose and a strong story to tell.

The Promoter – candid, opinionated, and fearless, they cultivate a personal brand. Their business bleeds into their personal life and vice versa.?

(Which one do you think you are? Find out here .)

The tactics that feel right to one personality don’t feel right to another. And yet, it’s completely possible to build a robust new business strategy around each one of these types.?

Are you trying to do too much?

There’s a lot you could be doing to generate agency new business opportunities. So much in fact, that it’s easily overwhelming—and that in itself is enough to stop many of us in our tracks.

I look at an agency’s business development strategy as an ecosystem. In fact, I call it the New Business Ecosystem? (and if you’d like to play around with this idea, you can download a handy guide here ).

Just like a natural ecosystem is a network of interconnecting and interacting parts, a New Business Ecosystem includes anything you use to support the pursuit of agency growth, from a pricing proposal to a website to social media. Like any other ecosystem, it only supports growth as long as the interconnected parts are suitable for the environment and the external and internal factors are appropriate to their function.

In other words, not only the right stuff but that right amount of stuff.

There’s always more you could be doing. I’d rather see you do less more consistently than struggle to do too much.

Do you have the right technology and support??

As uncomfortable as it may be, times like these offer us an ideal opportunity to look critically at what and who we rely on to get the job done. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

“Can we automate more (any?) of the new business processes that we currently do manually?”

If you’re an agency that does bespoke work for sophisticated marketers in a well-defined target market, you may want to rely exclusively on a high-touch personal approach. But there may also be easy tasks to automate marketing or outreach that keep momentum going even when you must focus on something else.

“Do we have too many tools that are underutilized or not effective?”?

Perhaps there’s something that seemed shiny and cool 18 months ago that is no longer pulling its weight and it’s time to let it go.

“Am I getting the support I need (and can afford)?”?

New business success at a small agency starts at the top—the CEO is the best new business resource a small agency has. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t get support to do the stuff you’re not good at or don’t want to do. There are lots of talented contractors and virtual assistants to help you manage CRM data or optimize software tools or edit and format your content.

Can you be more efficient in reaching new business goals??

I have a theory that there are thousands of new business plans tucked away on hard drives or shared servers that, despite the hard work and good intentions that went into them, will never see the light of day.

Planning is easy and makes us feel like we’re accomplishing something, but doing the work is harder because often the goals are daunting and the plan doesn’t do a great job of setting out a roadmap. It's one of those times when the drive to delay is stronger than the drive to act.

A few years ago, I started working in quarterly sprints and then I started using them with my clients. There are two things I love about 12-week sprints. First, twelve weeks is long enough to get things done yet short enough to create a sense of urgency. Plus, it forces you to break down your goals into manageable tasks. I don’t know about you, but I am less likely to delay when I have a set of manageable tasks in front of me.?

Plus, I use a dashboard that gets scored every week—a high score if you did what you committed to doing and low score if you didn’t. The scoring adds an incentive but, if you’re consistently falling short of your numbers, it’s also an indicator that something in your plan needs to be adjusted.

What if you simply do one thing to start?

If setting up a quarterly sprint sounds almost as daunting as executing your plan without one, then keep it simple. Pick one thing and set aside time to do it weekly. In my personal experience, action begets action. I’m frequently amazed by how just starting sets a series of events in motion that acts like a flywheel.

Need help taking action? Talk to me about how new business coaching in either a group or 1-to-one setting might help.

?About the author

Jody Sutter is the owner of The Sutter Company , a business development consultancy and coaching firm that specializes in working with leadership at small ad agencies who are underperforming when it comes to winning new business and would like to win the right clients consistently but also make the process less chaotic and exhausting for their teams.?

Learn more here or contact me at [email protected]