For instance, this ad has started creeping in…

Luckily, I've never had a good hair day in my entire life, so IDGAF and this ad has no interest for me whatsoever. But I am seeing all kinds of ads for “functional movement” and “functional medicine” and all sorts of medicines for other bodily functions. At some point in my 50s, I went from someone who is at the top of their game (I used to see ads for wealth managers, exotic travel & sports cars) to someone who needs all sorts of supports in order to survive…

Anyhow, this idea of “functional movement” has popped up so often that I've been thinking about this idea of function vs activity. Functional movement is a workout based on things that you would do in your real life. Instead of doing lat pull downs, you might be doing something like the activities involved with climbing a ladder. If the “traditional” workout move is an activity designed to optimize one thing, the functional movement is a similar activity designed to optimize several things all at the same time.

As an agency leader or exec, your job is management. You can learn to manage people rather than tasks & you can learn about the Leadership Lever, you can read Extreme Ownership and do all sorts of of other stuff to turn yourself into a CEO. But none of it will matter if you don't realize that your job is to elevate above activities.

Activities are things like deliverables and sending invoices and having a client meeting. Functions are client delivery, account management, sales, marketing & admin.

So much of what we try to do as growing agency is manage the activities of the team. We pay careful attention to timelines and to deliverables and to reporting, all of the things that we need to do, but what we don't do is pay attention to the larger functions that those activities belong to.

And because we think about ALL of these things as activities, rarely can we create a systematic and systemic way for our teams to both learn how to accomplish the activities (eg, do keyword research, set up a win-back flow, or connect influencers, etc) and fulfill the function (eg, launch a successful campaign, onboard a client, create visibility, etc).

Have you launched your creator affiliate program this holiday season? Don't miss out on building demand and landing the best partnerships. Levanta's 90-Day Holiday Sprint breaks it all down. Download the Guide.

At the very beginning, you, as the founder, are likely the best marketer in your agency. So, you start setting up a way for people to learn to do the tasks the way that you do them. Suddenly, you are the owner and arbiter of that activity.

That’s not your job. You need to teach someone how to complete the activity, and then connect those activities directly to the function.

If you are under $1.5mm in revenue, this is what your agency probably looks like (BTW, you are the handsome hamster in this picture):

This stage is when your agency probably feels the most like a terrible job with an unrelenting boss who never lets you have a day off. But you do have control over this. At this stage you have concatenated agency activity with agency functions. You've made them the same thing.

Sometimes, this feels fiscally prudent - why would you hire somebody to do your bookkeeping or your taxes or manage your clients' accounts or do your sales when you could just do them “FOR FREE”! (I call this THE FOUNDER TAX.) Of of course, this work feels free because you don't give yourself a specific salary for doing all of these activities. But every minute you spend on doing something that is focused on an existing client is just revenue preservation. You are earning the revenue that you've already received, or if you are focusing on getting new clients, you are spending time in speculative activities that may not have any reward.

Every minute you spend doing activities is a minute that you don't spend learning how to optimize, grow, and increase the impact of your agency. In fact, the dollars that you spend when you do the activities of your agency are likely the most expensive dollars you'll ever part with…

Wispr Flow turns your voice into clean, professional text inside any app. Emails, Slack, client updates — speak once, send without editing. 4x faster than typing.

Try Wispr Flow free

Most agency founders call themselves CEO or something similar, and those letters, C-E-O, stand for Chief Executive Officer - they don’t stand for Chores, Everyday tasks & Overwhelming to do lists.

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, doesn't spend his days trading stocks or working as a teller in a Chase branch. Those are the activities that his company does. He manages the banking function, the stock trading function, the investment banking function, and all of the other business units inside of his conglomerate.

In fact, I'm sure if you threw Jamie Dimon into your local Chase branch, he most likely could not deposit your check or turn that crisp $100 bill into five $20s. It’s not that he's not capable of learning how to do those things. It's just not his job. His job is to run the global organization and make sure that the company is making money.

This is what your agency needs to look like when you elevate (again, you are the handsome hamster - or is it a gorgeous gerbil, or maybe even a cheeky chipmunk?):

This is the ideal, obviously. There will be times when you are both running a function and actively involved in the activities of that function, but you have to remember that your goal is always to be managing the function while other people do the activity.

This is hard because you have likely trapped all sorts of context about the function in your head. So you probably can't even explain the entire function and all of the activities inside of it, so you can have activity owners who execute.

Sadly, you are going to have to unpack that contextual logjam in your head, but the easiest way to stop owning activities is to think about those activities that aren't any more successful or valuable if you do them.

The example I always use invoices…just because you, as the founder, send out the invoice, it isn't worth more when it's paid than when a bookkeeper or director of services might send out an invoice. they are going to generate the same amount of money, and since your time is more expensive, you are going to want to make sure that somebody who costs less is doing a job where you do not add any additional value.

Over time, you are going to pull enough of these non-value-add activities off of your list, and you will have more time to invest in places where you can have an incredible impact:

Your increased focus is going to drive more revenue and more profit dollars, so you will be able to hire the gorgeously cheeky, handsome hamster, gerbil, chipmunk (maybe even a capybara?!) that you will need to, at first, take over the activities inside of a business function and then later manage that business function.

Sure, in the abstract, it makes sense that as an agency founder or CEO, you need to elevate above the activities. But I can tell you that agencies of all sizes still struggle with pulling activities away from the founder.

Over the next few issues, I'm going to dive into each one of the business functions and identify the core tasks and the core things that you, as a founder, need to have in place in order to effectively manage that business function.

Can’t wait to dive in!

The Inc. 5000 list launched today, and it was a real delight to see so many marketing agencies (almost 10% of the entire list 496/5000) being celebrated for their growth. I am especially proud of two of those agencies because I have had the pleasure of working with both of them:

If you’d like to get in a position to think about the Inc. 5000 list, I’ve had 16 clients make the list…maybe you could be next?

The WTF Agency Assessment runs through a lot of the functions and gives you a pretty detailed roadmap about what you need to change and where you need to work. This is in order to make sure that you are elevating and starting to think about your business as a series of functions that you manage rather than activities that you do.

Everyone’s hunting for the next Unicorn.

The type of “category disruptor” that grows fast and turns early believers into big winners.

59,000+ investors think that Mode Mobile could be one of those rare finds.

Americans spend 4 ½ hours on their phones daily, and Mode Mobile is monetizing that screentime. With $1B+ earned by over 490M customers and 32,481% revenue growth, Mode’s EarnPhone is turning smartphones into income generating assets.

Their previous raises sold out, and the company is now offering pre-IPO shares at $0.52/share with up to 20% bonus, exclusive to early investors.

Being early is everything, and this window is still open.

>> Review the offer before it closes

^{*Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com.}

^{Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.}