After doing a bit of research - I started to rebuild my agency... from the ground up.
I had no idea how to structure my agency and assign responsibilities.
All I knew how to do was working a prospect list for clients.
But I thought back to my life as a restaurant manager... And I was NOT going back.
Here's what my day looked like BEFORE achieving these breakthroughs:
1. Cold calling, messaging and doing manual outreach to drum up some new business. This happened when we NEEDED clients and were short on time already, and the process for this wasn’t really optimized at all.
Some months were easier than others, but we didn’t know whether it would be 'feast or famine'. It was common to waste DAYS OR WEEKS tediously customizing messages and then trying to start a productive conversation with the rare few prospects who respond.
2. When we finally did get positive responses, we often had to play phone or email tag trying to find a time on the calendar that works for us AND the necessary decision-makers. Sometimes it would take MULTIPLE meetings to get anywhere… and responses could take even more days (if you run a traditional agency you know how this goes!)
Ultimately, many of these prospects stopped responding, or never showed up to the call.
3. Our seat-of-the-pants 'process' involved manually walking clients through our offer on an individual basis, trying to customize and personalize our services to land the deal, and negotiating heavily on our fees to close them, because we needed all the clients we could get.
4. Because of this, what we ended up doing was manually dependent, inconsistent and definitely unoptimized. When we did land a client, we now needed to manually edit and send contracts, before attempting all the client onboarding steps (that was different for every one) and then deal with all the customized services we had promised them.
5. Then we were faced with actually DELIVERING the services and trying to do so in an efficient way. What should have been a solid success at that point, usually turned into a calamity of confusion, staff working at cross-purposes, early client dissatisfaction and a loss of control.
The delivery steps usually took priority since our revenue was shaky, and we dedicated most of our time to delivery of services - so our client-getting fell by the wayside.
As a result, we were constantly chained to our computers, phones, and desks - working evenings, weekends, and even during vacations just to keep the agency afloat!
And no matter what we tried, we couldn't seem to break through the $20k in revenue every month consistently, let alone $40k, $60k, or $100k, because we just never have enough time to do it all at once and consistently.