Elevate To Innovate

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The Founder/CEO Dilemma

There is SO much stuff for a founder to do. And because entrepreneurs have such an incredible bias towards action, we often do before we think. (That is my MO all the time, and it drives my wife, the executive function coach, absolutely bonkers.)

When we jump into action without a plan, we often work on the completely wrong things. I find this rampant amongst agency owners. Typically, the agency founder is the most experienced marketer on the team until you hit maybe 25-30 people on staff.

So stuff needs to get done. And you, dear reader, might be the person who is able to do it the most quickly & at the highest quality.

Should you do it?

This is going to sound silly, but your eventual goal should be to only do the things in the agency that no one else can do. Obviously, at the early stages, you are likely the only one who can do most things. But you have have the right attitude about growth.

When one of my agencies was starting to grow quickly…

I simply would not get out of managing the campaigns & meetings of our biggest client. I convinced myself that since I had created the strategy and serviced the account throughout the relationship, I was 100% necessary to the success of the engagement.

My focus on this client was extreme. I was so attached to the success of this client (we were on a rev share…) that I wasn’t leading the team that was responsible for the delivery. I was in their way. I would make adjustments and not inform the team. I would do a test without getting feedback on it.

Unintentionally, I had boxed out that pod. And during Q4, this client was spending more than our other top 5 clients combined. So I worked MORE & HARDER on this account. During this time, I was “too busy” servicing this client to be fully available to help our team manage other clients well. I was “too busy” to keep up on my late Q4 biz dev activities because I was prepping for a Boxing Day & January Clearance sale.

Luckily, my team was good enough to handle everything reasonably well - but they didn’t get better. Our pipeline was barren in January and that client that I obsessed about - they ended up churning in March because our rev share was too high during the holiday season.

What should I have done?

Well, honestly, I should have looked at the title on my business card. It said CEO. It didn’t say account manager, or rev share obsessor, or absentee manager. I wasted an opportunity for team growth (better performance, more capacity, better strategy) because I made myself ESSENTIAL.

Sometimes you just have to get above the work in order to make the work better. I should have taken that time to ELEVATE, you know, get above the details and look at the whole enchilada. When you have a staff that works with you, your attention is like a lever. You can move incredible things with a simple lever. A Greek mathematician, Archimedes, said “Give me a place to stand, a lever long enough and I shall move the world.” It is counterintuitive, but your goal as a CEO is to get away from the work, so that you can truly see the nature and function of the work, so that you can make it better.

Innovation & Growth

A benefit of getting above the work is an ability to see what is missing from your work. In your early stages, when you are developing workflows, your goal is to get the work done. When you have a team executing the workflows, you can see what is missing in the workflow. And when you have a team that can own, modify and deploy improvements to the workflow, you can start seeing what else you can do.

My friend, Jon Morris from Fiscal Advocate, contributed his success in growing and eventual humongous exit from Rise Marketing to focusing on R&D from the very earliest days. He says that he always committed 10% of his operating budget to figuring out how to do things better & more effectively. Even when he didn’t have tons of resources, he focused on INNOVATION. Today, innovation and adapting new technology is table stakes (…hello, ChatGPT, can you help us…).

Your innovation creates growth & it creates a moat that protects you from being JAFA (…just another f’ng agency). At my last agency, we focused on predicting LTV by campaign and ad creative. At the end of the day, it turned out that there wasn’t much a difference in LTV amongst different campaigns and ad creatives, but that investment in innovation allowed us to punch above our weight and do business with billion-dollar brands, and, eventually, get acquired.

You don’t need to invent some new technology. It could be as simple as integrating attribution technology like Triple Whale into your tech and reporting stack. It could be rapidly testing UGC ad voiceovers by using 11 Labs for AI-audio to help your clients find the right messaging faster. But leveraging innovation keeps you looking forward and creating new opportunities.

You can’t INNOVATE until you ELEVATE

Stuff Around The Web

1. Do Brands Have To Get Freaky? Have you seen Nutter Butter - OMG.

2. Big Agency Predictions for 2025 - TL;DR: All ai all the time.

3. Software as a Science: Marcel Petitpas from Parakeeto & the financial guru in the Agency Inner Circle Slack community has co-authored a new book. Check it out.

4. LinkedIn Automation Guide: Tim Keen, our resident LinkedIn guru has his Black Magic LinkedIn Automation Guide out. You should take a gander.

5. Charm.io: For those of you who want the very best research and data on ecommerce marketers to assist with strategic decisions, competitive analysis & amazing prospecting data, I have truly stunning annual pricing available. Set up a call to discuss how this can transform your lead gen stack. The video below is a Charm & Apollo walkthrough to help you get a flavor of how high impact this combination can be. Limited time.

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