Your role as an agency founder with less than 10 employees

Lessons from Growing a Small Agency.

When I first started my agency, I didn’t really set out to build an agency with 40+ employees or attempt to grow it at all. I was a freelance web designer, like most practitioners who first get into starting an agency business. In the beginning, I was coding, designing, project managing, QA-ing, and invoicing. It was a one-man show, but I was working for myself and loving it.

My story is not uncommon. Most agency founders start this way. After handling most of the work myself, I began to hire for the tasks that took the most off my plate. In my case, it was the designing and developing of websites. First with freelancers, then by hiring full-time team members.

The most impactful hire I made was a project manager. Once this happened so much was taken off my plate I could focus on selling. But before I was completely out of managing projects, I needed to create systems.

Now that I had a couple of employees, my role became focused on processes. Of course, sales were still a priority, and to some extent will be so forever. But I needed to ensure we had high-level procedures for the team to operate.

That leads to the first responsibility you have.

Building systems and processes

One of the most important responsibilities until you have someone to oversee operations. You need to get everything that’s in your head, all of that experience and process you followed as a freelancer or solo entrepreneur documented.

• Project Management
• Delivery
• Scoping
• Sales
• Time tracking
• Change requests
• Design Process
• QA Process
• Contracts

These are just some examples of what should be documented as early as possible. When one of my early hires would ask how to do something if I needed to provide instructions, I would open up Loom (screen, video, and voice recording tool) and walk through how I would do the task. Then I would quickly document this in a Google Doc.

Today there are tons of tools for documenting processes like Notion, Asana or Monday. Regardless of the tool, make sure you can have a reference for them in the future.

When we hit about 8-10 people we had a company-wide documentation plan, which took weeks to organize. We then shut down for about 2 days to train the entire team, get feedback and ensure we were on the same page.

Sales & Marketing are paramount

Processes are important when you have a few employees, but you can’t hire unless you have revenue, and obviously, revenue comes from sales. You need to be focused on generating business and closing deals.

My approach to drumming up new business and sales processes is a whole other article, which I’ll release at a later date.

Sales and generating leads will always be part of your job. Honestly, even after 40+ people, you’re not completely out of sales. Of course, you can hire someone if sales are something you don’t do well.

Hire for the things you don’t do well

This doesn’t mean hiring for the things you don’t?like?doing, it means hiring for the things that don’t bring as much value to the business, or the tasks you're bad at.

In my case this was operations. Many founders focus on the bigger picture and are creative. I did not love being detail oriented and well-organized when it came to delivery and operations. That’s why I trained someone to oversee delivery and really understand the process. After about a year she was promoted to oversee operations and took the half-baked processes that I started, and turned them into a real system and structure for the agency.

You need to hire people you can train, but more importantly, trust. When your team is less than 5 people you likely don’t have the revenue to hire seasoned veterans. Train smart people and get out of their way. Trust them to do those things you can’t do well. Sometimes that means taking a risk. At worst, you need to fire them. At best, they become an integral part of your organization.

You’re going to make mistakes when hiring. Sometimes it’s the wrong person. Sometimes it’s the right person but in the wrong role. You need to be able to spot this and act accordingly.

People management

At this size, you’re still at the point of escalation after a project manager. Perhaps you have an account manager, which would be ideal, but that’s not something we introduced before 10 employees. AM roles are not always revenue-generating and can be tough to add at the early stages. You want to keep overhead as low as possible, so you’ll likely need to take on this role. As you grow, adding an AM can absolutely help take things off your plate and become a source of revenue from existing clients. It also depends if this is a hybrid role of a sales and account management person.

Your goal should be to get out of delivery as fast as possible. Of course, if you like delivery, you can stay involved. But if you want to run an agency, you need to be out of the day-to-day of delivering for clients.

However, you’re going to need to put out fires. You need to be the one who can solve problems for both employees and clients.

• Employees are over-delivering
• The client is not happy with a deliverable
• Client is difficult
• The team missed a deadline
• The client is unreasonable
• Employee is overworked

Your job is to identify the problem and solve it while keeping the client and employees happy. When you reach 10+ people, you start to become a people manager. Which is the bulk of your job as the agency grows, until you have managers, directors, and HR. You’re managing people from sales, client relations, employees, and all of the issues that come along with them.

Conclusion

Developing processes, sales, marketing, people management, and hiring are just some of the responsibilities when running a small agency. Of course, there are many other smaller things you’ll need to focus on as you grow, but in my experience, there are the core areas.

Every agency owner is different, and you might be better at one thing over another. Focus on what you are most effective at, and hire for what you cannot do well. That doesn’t mean you should avoid learning new things. I needed to learn how to sell, as well as handle finances. You need to know the ins and outs of the business, or you won’t be able to train new people.

Running an agency with 2-5 people is very different once you hit 8-10. Yes, it’s a small jump but it’s not the same. Once you hit 20 it’s a whole other world, and generally the same from 40-100.

Ideally, you get to a place where you’re primarily dealing with 5-6 people who lead teams. Finance, Operations, Sales, Client Services, Delivery.

If you have questions or want to learn more about my experience running an agency, let’s talk.

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