I had a chat with a client this week - they are part of my Agency Kickoff VIP program (best for agencies that want to get past $50K/mo) and are still making their journey towards service market fit & operational excellence.

They fell into a regular pattern that I find with agencies at all stages:

EVERYTHING IS REALLY COMPLEX

This agency is, like every other agency, in a really competitive market. In order to make their offer “juicy”, they crammed a lot into it. Tons of deliverables - strategy, branding, custom video blocking, video scripts, video editing, social copy, branding elements, email copy….it has a TON of stuff in it. They don’t charge top of the market prices - they are VERY cost competitive.

In order to make the economics work, they use a ton of contractors for service delivery. At last check, they were managing nearly 20 contractors (all part time) to manage the work…

Their middle package has about 30 different items that would count as a “deliverable” (images, videos, reports, etc). Each account has an account lead and as many as 8 contractors that touch the deliverables.

THAT IS TOO MANY VARIABLES

When you are starting out as an agency, you often look more like a contractor who has help. The founder or founding team does most of the heavy lifting and the team supports them.

Since most of the thinking and decision making is housed in the founder(s), that is a pretty low level of complexity. It has 4 touchpoints.

But as you start to scale the size of your team, or add to your services, that low-level of complexity gets very complicated and messy.

Even if you are just adding things to make your offer juicy, your complexity increases exponentially, not incrementally. Complexity creates friction, friction diminishes speed, lack of speed diminishes capacity & capacity limits your potential.

COMPLEXITY IS YOUR ENEMY

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Complexity often arises from trying to have simple and clear processes. SOPs (Standard Operating Proceedures) often make things more complicated because they are usually built with a perfect world in mind. When applied to the real world, the SOP hasn’t accounted for edge cases or wrinkles, and your team is doing their best to follow the SOP. Or things get complex when we try to be comprehensive and account for ALL wrinkles and edge cases, so a simple task can only be found after eliminating that this situation isn’t one of the exceptions.

Every deliverable creates the opportunity for complexity. Every change in context represents an opportunity to increase complexity.

But even in today’s agency environment when omnichannel marketing and data-driven attribution and media mix models are the norm, there are way to create and maintain simplicity.

You can focus very deeply on one thing - a service, a kind of client, a stage of business, etc. As a leader, your goal is to enforce focus, because focus increases “craft quality”. Focus is a magnifying glass for efficiency.

My nephew is a high-end cabinet maker. The company he works for builds cabinets and custom shelving for folks like Martha Stewart and Bill Belichick. He had to go to a specific woodworking school. Then he was an apprentice where all he did for months was make the shelves inside the cabinets until he was perfect at it. Then he moved on to planing and shaping the cabinet faces. Then drawer fronts. Then the doors. He had to master each part. By the time he was done as an apprentice, he was a skilled woodworker. It took him 3 more years to become a project lead. For his first project as a lead, no one said “this is how you run a project”. He just knew because he was intricately familiar with all parts of the process. They made sense. Despite there being unique challenges to each design, everybody on his team was a master of some essential part and he could follow his years of doing the job to being able to lead the job.

There are thousands of steps to making custom cabinetry. But his work is simple because he and his team have mastery over the process. I am quite sure that they could build a kick-ass set of stairs. But if you were to ask him, he would say that unless its set of stairs that is actually a cabinet, he wouldn’t know how to it as well as he could build a cabinet…so why would he waste his time and your money building something that he couldn’t make the best it could possibly be.

Craft makes multi-step processes simple, but it only works if you realize that you are best at cabinet making, and you don’t try to build boats, houses and totem poles, too.

The other way to make things simple is to change your focus from developing the perfect process to developing the deepest understanding of the business levers that change outcomes. By so deeply understanding the mechanics of your client’s business, from awareness through retention, you get to see and engagement of a bunch a tactics that you do to drive traffic or awareness to your client, you see the parts of their business where your skills change the outcome.

In this realm, your aren’t quite so craft focused, but rather you are more experimental. You are maybe closer to an inventor rather than a skilled craftsperson. (Dive a little deeper into this in Kind vs Wicked - Agency Inner Circle #117.) What makes this so simple is that the work is largely test and learn based. You get feedback (outcomes) and make adjustments, or you get unclear or no feedback and you test something else.

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Focus on Focus: Focus requires, well, focus. Just like in cabinet making, to be the best email agency in the world you have to be really, really good at the craft of email. You need to understand how to execute precisely at every stage.

That means you can only hire people who WANT to learn a craft. You can’t hire people who aren’t going to share their mastery with others, and who aren’t going to continually improve their craft.

This requires discipline that shines process until it is beautiful.

Focus on Outcomes: Outcomes requires a more flexible way of thinking. Rather than being able to build a cabinet every time, you have to be able to assess a situation and be able to see where your shelves will add to the structure, the door-fronts to sustainability and where drawer-fronts will be a growth catalyst.

This is a different kind of thinking, and a different way of organizing an engagement. This is more like a Jackson Pollack painting - with drips and splatters that on their own may not represent much, but in the context of all the other pieces become an integral part an overall design.

This requires creativity that transforms what did exist into something more powerful because of the discipline of outcomes.

This is so freakin’ hard because there are so many variables that fight against your disciplines. Craft is challenging because it works best when the conditions are perfect (which they never are…) and the idea of better is acceptable. Outcomes are challenging because it only rewards what is measurable, and it takes real patience to see new tests.

When craft doesn’t work, you might want to expand and try something new.

When outcomes aren’t revealing, you might want to do fewer things so your sense of causality is sharpened.

In either case, allowing your focus to wander adds complexity, which is dangerously close to chaos.

Stay focused on your focus.

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