In AIC #178, I called out the difference between activities vs functions in your agency . And while the necessity for you as an agency leader to manage functions rather than do activities is pretty intuitive, until you have a clear framework to move you out of the activity of delivery into the management of the delivery function, you aren’t ever going to create an agency that can do amazing work, be profitable and not having it all rest on you.

Most agency entrepreneurs launch an agency because they are good at a “thing”…that could be design or paid marketing or email or dev. It doesn't matter. Chances are, if you are an agency founder, you or your co-founder were really good at some aspect of what your agency delivers.

So, in the early days, even if you had teammates, you were active in client deliverables. And almost certainly, the definition of which deliverables and what defined a good deliverable came from you. And in so many respects, that's exactly how it should be at the beginning. As a founder or a leader, you are putting your stamp of approval on what goes out the door. You are the arbiter of what should be delivered, what the minimum acceptable qualities of the delivery are, how it is delivered, how it is explained & how that delivery is assembled.

For many agency owners, this is where process dies - you have such insight and perspective as a founder that all of your founder magic gets intuitively imbued into the process, so the way that you actually accomplish something isn't well reflected in an SOP or a process description that you might give to a new employee.

But as your agency becomes a little more successful. You become busier, and you have got to get delivery off your plate. So you develop a process that outlines the mechanics of how you create deliverables.

When your team member, newly tasked with ownership of the deliverable proudly shows you the fruits of their labor, you throw up a little in your mouth. The deliverable might have all of the elements that you outlined, but it doesn't have any of the insight or magic that yours did. You probably give some frustrated feedback and tell them to try again, and they still return something that's not as good as you could have done. You might actually repeat this process five or ten times, and eventually you scream those five words that will kill your agency growth:

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I know, this all too well. In my second agency, as we started to build out a real team and real functions, I kept on running into this wall over and over and over again. I thought I was hiring bad people. But the sad fact of the matter was that I was a terrible manager.

I only focused with my team on the things that they should do. I didn't spend much time telling them about why they were doing this activity, about how it connected to the overall strategy that the client had, or even how their activities connected to the activities of the rest of the team were engaged in.

I had the picture of a facile, flexible, interconnected digital marketing production line in my head. But what I was building was a bunch of smart people working in relative isolation…

It wasn’t until I was chatting with my brother-in-law at Thanksgiving one year. He works, of all places, in a box factory. He had just been promoted from a machine operator to a process manager.

He was telling me about his new job when he said something truly profound…

He explained that the key to running an effective box factory line wasn't in making the end of the line more effective. It was about making sure that the raw cardboard stock got loaded in right. He explained that a huge amount of inefficiency developed when the huge cardboard sheets came off the loading dock into the assembly line. If they weren’t lined up perfectly, or all balanced perfectly on the transport cart, they wouldn’t get loaded into the first machine right…

That first machine cut the huge sheets into smaller chunks. But if the stock went in slightly askew because the stack wasn’t tight, or the loader had to wrestle an off balance stack on a cart, the resulting cuts wouldn’t be perfectly straight.

That meant the output of the 1st cuts weren’t all plumb…and the machines further along in the production line were high precision and they couldn’t accommodate something that wasn’t perfect.

The key, he said was to start making improvement at the stock getting loaded into the 18-wheeler. Then making improvements to how it got moved out of the container. Then improvements to how the stock moved on to the cart. Then how the cart delivered it to the loader, and so on…

Each step in the process relied on the previous step being done right. When the loading went askew and cut the first machine not square and true, the plant manager didn’t jump in and fix it. The shift supervisor didn’t come in and redo the load…the team that was working on the 1st cut communicated to the delivery team what was out of tolerance, and the loading team worked backwards and made incremental improvements until the 1st cut team was happy.

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He worked at the box factory in high school after he got fired from Wendy’s, and has been there for almost 40 years. But his circumstances forced him into becoming a guy who understands process deeply.

When a new worker is hired & comes onto the line, they don’t start with the “low level” jobs. They start by shadowing the teams who run the super-complex machines at the end of the line.

They need to understand the output of the entire line before they can start contributing to the line. Then they shadow teams all the way back to their job - unloading the stock from the truck.

This sets the stage so even the most junior talent has an insight into how their activities fit into the functioning machine.

In order for your agency to be able to deliver the output that your client needs, they have got to be able to understand:

Without that context, your team has no idea how to shape their process, their thinking, their time & their attitude to create the right deliverable.

In Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink sets up this idea of decentralized leadership or decentralized decisioning. The basic idea is that any team member can make the right, high-impact choice when they have the following things:

You are the manager of the delivery function. That demand that you are able to articulate each part of this framework.

Those are your jobs. of course, as your team is growing and changing, you might want to go and re-stamp your DNA on the activity inside of the delivery function.

But if you have done a good job in articulating what the mission is and working backwards from there, your team is going to have a much more exacting and granular understanding of the mechanics of delivery completion. That's the way it should be. You define the mission and the team creates the constituent parts and process.

Your entire focus needs to be on the output…namely, is it what our clients paid for, and are they getting a fair value out of the output?

But once you set up decentralized leadership and decentralized decisioning, the more you get involved in the mechanics of it, the more complicated and out of sorts it's going to become. This is because there is a disconnect between your responsibility of ensuring the output delivers the value that clients expect and you knowing all of the inputs to create it.

Think of yourself as an executive chef at a fine dining restaurant. You might look at a plate before it goes out to the server, or you might taste the sauce before service begins. If the plate isn’t perfect or the sauce doesn't have enough salt, you don't become the saucier or take charge of plating. You explain to your team where it's missing the mark, and you help make sure that they have the ingredients necessary to adjust.

A great chef doesn’t hover during prep to make sure that the mirepoix is diced appropriately. They’ve spent time teaching their staff what the right size looks like, and they've explained how that particular shape is right for the dish that is being made.

The chef wants to know that every plate that is served delivers exactly what will delight the diner. If someone sends a plate back. The chef might be frustrated, but they don't start creating the dish from scratch themselves. They identify what went wrong, help the team fix it, and generate another plate that is perfect.

That’s your job. Make sure the plate is perfect when it leaves the kitchen. When you've made the definition of the perfect plate clear to your team and given them the authority and autonomy to make decisions during the process so that the plate comes out perfectly every time, you’ll never be tempted to say, “Never mind, I’ll do it…”

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