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| ISSUE №150 - woohoo! · Agency Growth | Management |
I Want It Now, Daddy!
You’ve probably seen "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory". In case you haven't, there is a great scene where Veruca Salt totally loses it on her accommodating father and starts screaming, "I want it now, Daddy!"
Most Founders Are Veruca….
When you are trying to grow your agency, you are working at an immediacy that the world just can't match. You see a problem, identify the solution, and want the problem to go away.
More often than not, the problem sticks around much longer than you expect it to.
I know, I know. Rude.
Here Is A Rule That I HATE
The bigger the problem, the slower the solve.
That is it. That is the newsletter. You can stop reading now if you want, go enjoy your Tuesday
Ha - just kidding. Stay - please.. I’m not sure my ego could take a mass departure after so few words…
There’s Only Two Kinds of Problems
It’s true. right now in your agency there are:
small problems
BIG PROBLEMS
In order to keep growing and evolving, you got to fix both of them. But here's the problem about these problems…most of us treat small problems and big problems the exact same way.
Small problem: "Our keyword research sucks."
That’s a short fix. New process, new template, new checklist. The next time someone does keyword research, it’s way better. It's a short feedback cycle and it feels like fix and relief are standing next to each other. (BTW, here is a quick rule of thumb: a task-sized problem generally takes about as long as the task does to solve it. if the aforementioned keyword research process takes three hours to complete, it's probably going to take you about three hours to fix.)
BIG PROBLEM: "Our pipeline is empty."
That ain’t s short fix. That’s a "Holy shit, let's see what’s actually broken in here…" archaeological dig. And we all know that the cool shit or the monsters are never at the start of the dig. You've got to think about it in layers:
Who do we need in our pipeline?
Who is actually in our pipeline?
Why are they there and not the people we need?
What are we saying and doing to attract the wrong people?
Do we know what the people we need in our pipeline need?
You might be able to diagnose this on a whiteboard in an hour but in order to create a process that presents fixes, gets feedback, tracks results, and evolves, you solve that over a quarter or two quarters.
And here's the totally sucky thing:
When your pipeline is empty, you don’t feel like you've got one or two quarters to fix it. You often feel like you have hours…
So you start trying any stupid thing that comes into your head hoping for a miracle to create a bridge between where you are and where you want to be.
This this is just physics: big things take more time. Part of that is because it's a function of feedback cycles. A task-sized feedback cycle is fast: do the task, and the outcome is either better or it is not. A systemic feedback cycle means that multiple processes have to happen in order to create the outcome, and the length of that time creates the scale of time it takes to solve the problem.
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Stop Thinking This Way
My ADHD makes me see fully formed structures immediately. I understand the problem, I can see the solution. It's all bright and brilliant and delightful, but what my ADHD does is it makes me skip a bunch of the unpleasant shit along the way. Stuff you didn't think about, things you need to measure, second-order impacts of making changes, etc.
This is how we often want to have large changes happen:
Week 1: New plan. Big energy. "This is the one."
Week 2: Plan is mostly in motion. Team is adjusting. Some friction. Still feeling good.
Week 3: Numbers have not moved. Doubt creeps in. "Is this working?"
Week 4: “Nothing's happening. We've got to solve this problem again.”
Week 5: New plan. Different big energy. "THIS is the one."
Repeat for, oh, the entire history of your agency…
This cycle doesn't mean that you are bad at solving problems. In fact, in those five weeks, you've come up with two different solutions. That's awesome. What you are bad at is being patient enough for the feedback to accumulate so you know if you are on the right track.
Here's a sticky bit - having a plan fail miserably tells you so much more than you abandoning a plan.
When you give up too quickly and don't give your plan enough time to incorporate feedback from the system, the whole thing is wasted. When you have a plan that fails, however, you at least learn something that didn't work.
Back to that rule of thumb we had earlier: A task-sized fix takes about as long as the task to fix it. A big problem takes about as long as it takes you to measure it to fix it.
You had a bad quarter and you make changes. you are not actually going to know if those changes were truly effective until the end of the next quarter, and more likely because nothing ever works as quickly as you wanted to. The quarter after that is when you will realize the full impact of the changes that you made.
One brand built 30+ landing pages through Viktor without a single developer.
Each page mapped to a specific ad group. All deployed within hours. Viktor wrote the code and shipped every one from a Slack message.
That same team has Viktor monitoring ad accounts across the portfolio and posting performance briefs before the day starts. One colleague. Always on. Across every account.
5,700+ teams. 3,000+ integrations.
OK, Tim, Got It. Big Problems & Small Problems Are Different
OK. Cool. Now what?
Know The Problem You Are Solving: Let’s imagine that you decide sales is the problem. So you've got to fix sales. Sadly, sales and revenue are the outcome of a process. You can't solve a process; you can only solve pieces of the process. Sales and revenue are a lagging indicator of your previous effectiveness, so you are never solving a sales problem. You are solving pieces of the sales process. That puts a different spin on it…the fix could be as simple as a broken link between outreach and follow-up. That's a simple fix, or it could be a systemic mismatch. You can't solve a problem you don't understand. The only way to know the problem you were solving, its size, and its speed to fix it is by getting really good at diagnosing the problem.
Know The Relationships & Dependencies: With an incredible degree of regularity, when you fix one thing, something else connected to it breaks. That's because you have disrupted a system that you weren't aware of… Here’s a great example: a change in positioning and messaging on the marketing side of things probably means you need to change your sales process, your onboarding process, and maybe even your client management process. You aren't ever fixing a single isolated thing. You are making changes to an ecosystem - be prepared to look for downstream impact of changes you make.
If It Involves People, The Hard Part Comes After The Solution: despite all of our technological and AI wizardry, most of the problems that we are solving are behavioral. When you change a process, you have to change behavior. When you change a task, you have to change behavior. When you change the environment, you have to change behavior.
This is an important part of sizing the problem. You might be able to fix the process easily, but it's going to take a long time for your team to ingest, digest, and own the changes.
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Patience Is A Virture
I am not actually a very patient person. I want shit to happen fast, and I want it to be entertaining. I don't like being bored, and I don't like having to slog through a morass of friction.
If you are anything like me, sometimes you will let those small problems linger because you don't want to engage with the friction of fixing them right now. Here's perhaps the most devastating and disappointing thing that I could ever say to you…every single small problem is a big problem waiting to grow up.
when you are fixing a big problem that might take a quarter to get enough feedback and another quarter to evaluate the total impact, you actually haven't solved a big problem. You have solved a giant colony of small problems. For the most part, you ignored these small problems as they popped up.
When your time to close a client stretched from 14 days to 20 days, you probably didn't think much of it, but that change was a small problem that was just born.
You might think that your cold outreach is just fine when the reply rate goes from 2% to 1%, because you'll just send out more emails. Actually, no. You ignored a small problem, and if you do that long enough, the reply rate on your emails is going to plummet to zero.
Small problems can be a grind because they are frequent and persistent, and they may not seem like they are worth your time to fix. It is so much more effective to have everybody responsible for identifying small problems and then distributing the work to fix them, because otherwise every small problem that you have is going to grow up into a big giant fucking problem and punch you in the face all day, every day.
Don't let that happen.
Agency Studio Keeps Small Problems Small
If you are an emerging agency ($0-$40K/mo), every day, you are chasing down problems. If you are lucky, you keep the small problems small and you don't let them grow up. Most of us aren't that lucky.
Agency Studio is a coaching program that gives you a community of agency owners to problem solve with…and I'll be there too, working right alongside you during weekly office hours, helping you keep those small problems small.
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