Productive

When I started my marketing agency in 2020, I thought the hardest part of running a business would be getting clients... Turns out, getting clients is one thing. Building a business that doesn’t fall apart every time someone takes a week off is a completely different challenge 😂 Here’s something nobody tells you about growing an agency. Every new client brings more revenue, which is obviously great, but what you don’t always account for is everything that comes with it. You’re managing more people, juggling campaigns, keeping track of deadlines and making sure everyone knows what they’re supposed to be doing. When your business is small, it’s easy to stay on top of things because you’re involved in pretty much every conversation. You know what’s been approved, which clients need attention and what needs to happen next. Then you start growing and realise that having all that information in your own head isn’t a particularly scalable business model. 😂 I remember getting to a point where I was spending more time answering questions and chasing updates than focusing on the things I should’ve been doing as the business owner. Someone would ask where a brief was, someone else would be waiting for feedback, and I’d find myself scrolling through messages trying to piece together conversations from weeks earlier. But even when everyone was working hard, we just didn’t always have the visibility we needed across the business to actually see that. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that you can hire brilliant people, but if you don’t build the right systems around them, you’ll never get the best out of them. October is a perfect example. Everyone’s coming back from summer holidays, Q4 is in full swing and, for agencies like mine, we’re heading into one of the busiest periods of the year. The last thing you want is to spend weeks figuring out where projects were left and whether that deadline someone mentioned before going to Marbella was ever dealt with. 😂 Your team should be able to go on holiday, switch off and come back to a business that’s continued moving forward without them. That’s one of the reasons I like what Productive is doing. Having your projects, budgets, resources, meeting notes and deadlines in one place gives you a much clearer picture of what’s happening without constantly chasing people for updates. As a founder, one of the biggest mindset shifts is accepting that your job isn’t to be involved in everything. It’s to build a business where everything doesn’t need you. Which sounds obvious until you realise how many business owners have made themselves the most overworked person in their own company. I’ve definitely been guilty of that one. 😂 If your team’s back from summer and you’re still trying to get everyone on the same page before Q4 gets even busier, have a look at Productive: https://lnkd.in/eXDK-XM2

Back in November we were scaling the team really quickly, but I ended up burning out my existing team members in the process. Here’s how I make sure this doesn’t happen again: My existing team was training new team as well as managing their client deliverables. I thought I had a good handle on who was doing what, when, and why. I had mapped out who was responsible for every task... In a beautiful space that lived in my head. It worked when: 1. The new employees were at the exact level I needed them to be at. 2. When training took the exact amount of time I had planned for. 3. And when the client accounts were growing and converting well, no issues. Any agency owner knows that the above is not the reality. But the team member in question kept grinding, she didn't tell me that her trainee was taking longer to get the strategies, and that it was pushing her too far. She didn't tell me the allotted time we had verbally agreed for training was ridiculous when it came to this specific month. So instead, I one day woke up to a broken team member. After sending her off for a good ol' break in a jungle resort with no wifi. This is how I ensured this would never happen again: I stopped managing my team from inside my head and started actually tracking workload in Productive. Every task, every training session, every client deliverable assigned, visible, and time tracked in one place. Because the truth is she didn't fail to tell me. The system failed to show me. Productive improved her workflow so she would never overwork again. And it gave me a clear view of exactly who was responsible for what. You can't protect your team from overload if you can't see it coming. Start your free trial at Productive.io here: https://lnkd.in/gMDbQSXw

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