“If I stop doing the work, clients will be unhappy and leave. I can’t put my business at risk like that.”

In the past two weeks, I’ve heard this three times from young, successful agency owners whom I’ve spoken to in depth.

Let me tell this to you straight, as somebody who has lived your pain and embodied what you’re going through for 4 painful years (before I made the jump):

If you DON’T stop doing the work, you’ll never build the business or life you probably want to achieve. You’ll stay perpetually stressed, grow to resent clients, lose your competitive edge, and alienate people around you through the negative energy you exude.

I highlight probably in the above because the path to enlightenment starts by asking yourself one fundamental question:

What do you want out of this business?

From the answer to this question, you need to work backwards.

Seriously, go ahead and answer this question: what’s your goal with your agency?

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1. Are you obsessed with YOU (not your team) being renowned as the best practitioner in your industry who manages a small portfolio of clients (as you can never scale past this due to time constraints)?
2. Or are you desperate to build wealth, focus more on growing the business's profit and freeing yourself from the client work?

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If it’s the former, I want to make this clear: there is ZERO shame in that path.

For a long time, I wanted to become known as the best retention marketer in the DTC space for DOING the work (not just talking about it).

I actually believe I was probably in the top 1% of people in my craft for a long time pursuing this path, until one day I’d had enough, and I wanted something else from the business (and my life), and ‘evolved’ my focus into path 2.

Most people I speak to want to pursue path 2, but they’re scared about the steps it takes to get there.

This advice is for those people.

But before we dive into the practical steps, I want to share something that’s extremely important that will put you in deep discomfort when you’re pursuing this path.

You cannot grow your business by being the same person you are today. You must evolve and change your behaviour.

That sounds obvious to any intelligent person but change is actually one of the most deeply uncomfortable experiences for humans to go through.

We’re creatures of comfort, and anything that disturbs the status quo will drive us to return to type. You must consciously push against this to grow and have high self-awareness.

Shedding an old skin to grow a new one is the only way you can make this happen.

With that being said, I’ve got a practical 6-step process you can follow to free yourself from operations and get started on a new path to wealth.

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1: Institutionalise Your Methodology

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The number 1 reason most agency owners won’t let go of the client work is because they believe the person they hire won’t serve clients to the same standard they do and as a result, their clients will churn.

If this is you, I want you to know that this is your ego playing tricks on you and it’s actually not true.

Magnet Monster actually has much better client retention and LTV with me not doing the work than it had before.

This is because when you stop doing the client work, you’re freed up to focus on more important aspects of the business such as operations — and this is where you need to invest time in ensuring your methodology permeates.

Because if you’re like me, a ‘technician’ turned business owner, you’re probably worried primarily about the strategy and “way I’d do things” not being up to par.

But this in itself becomes a bottleneck as your attention becomes spread too thin and the quality of your work suffers, leading to churn and internal frustration.

The way to overcome this is to thoroughly document your belief systems in both written and visual format so that when you do hire somebody to replace you, it’s evident how the job should be done.

This is part SOP, part philosophy — it’s deeper than just a document people turn to when they’re stuck.

At its core, it’s a set of values and principles that the company is built upon. And eventually, your marketing and sales should exude this message as well, all the way through to the delivery.

Get super clear on this and make sure that anybody you’re hiring is aligned on “the way it should be done”. If they have their own way of doing things, don’t hire them, as it’s likely to lead to friction and you’ll end up back where you started with twice the workload.

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2: Rigorous Training

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Any new hire coming in needs to be set up for success on day 1 and beyond. You need three things to bring this to reality:

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1. Stellar onboarding: you should shadow your first hire in this position for at least a month, working WITH THEM, not over them (try to solve problems together; don’t dictate)
2. Consistent, ongoing training: training should be delivered at the very least monthly and be focused on both technical skills pertinent to their craft and operational skills core to the business process efficiency
3. Performance reviews: ideally tied to KPIs and not generic check-in sessions

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To emphasise how strongly I believe in training, I consistently return to this quote from Andy Grove’s (former CEO of Intel) classic must-read, High Output Management, where he dedicates a whole chapter to the importance of training:

“Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours of preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.”

Case closed. Train your employees!

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3: Shared Learning Sessions

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I believe each department within an organisation should have dedicated skill & knowledge-share lessons designed to drive innovation and learning. These should be overseen by the management, and conducted every 1-3 months with individual participants responsible for presenting an implementation from one of their client accounts for 10-15 minutes before opening up a Q & A.

When I was more deeply involved at Magnet Monster, I would control these sessions between our strategists. It was actually a great way for me to stay abreast of the changes in the industry as I started to become removed from client-work and keep my finger on the pulse. It also allowed me to get a pulse check on who was passionate about their work and who wasn’t truly committed.

I can’t speak more highly of these sessions when structured right. They’re fantastic team-building exercises whereby you democratise knowledge in the organisation in a highly productive, engaging way.

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4: Implement the 1:3:1 Rule

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One of the biggest frustrations I hear from fellow agency owners is bemoaning their team’s lack of problem-solving abilities. When I ask them for examples, they frequently go on to explain a scenario whereby a team member approached them with a client-facing issue, only to ask them for a solution.

Rather than push back and train the employee to think critically, the business owner deludes themselves into thinking “It’ll be faster if I do it.”

This problem compounds over time to the point where we end up spending most of our time firefighting other people’s problems and frustrated at them. It’s not sustainable.

As business owners, our capacity to make effective decisions each day is limited. The more we can delegate responsibility to capable individuals to take initiative the better.

I first stumbled upon the “1:3:1 Rule” around 2 years ago, and loved its simplicity. The framework is:

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1. You identify a problem (or your employee does)
2. You ask them to propose 3 solutions
3. You pick the preferred 1 to move forward with

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This empowers your team to take ownership over time to the point where you’re not burdened with low-level tasks.

Try it - it works!

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5: Aim for Perfection, Be Content with 8/10

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When this concept was first explained to me by a fellow agency owner, I refused to accept it.

He said that the only true way to scale an agency was to accept your team executing a role to 80% of the quality that you would deliver.

For example, if you consider yourself capable of delivering 10/10 strategy, training a team member to deliver an 8/10 (based on your teachings) is an exceptional outcome. Over time, I’ve come to realise that this is largely true (if you’re a specialist technician).

Think about it logically: a client is not going to leave an 8/10 service. They only really start looking around for alternatives when your performance drops below what could be considered a 7/10, and there’s a good reason for this. It’s incredibly time-consuming and expensive to switch agencies and no guarantee of success in changing partners.

Always aim for perfection, but don’t feel disappointed if somebody is executing at 80% of the effectiveness that you could do to 100%. The reality is you weren’t doing the job with 100% effectiveness before anyway as you were managing multiple clients and had other (business owner) responsibilities.

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Transformation is Hard But Not Impossible

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You can’t begin implementing this framework unless you’re truly committed to change. It’s like stopping smoking: most people SAY they want to stop but their actions suggest otherwise.

Until you’re truly willing to change your behaviour and become a different person, understand the limitations (or rather, find peace) in your current position and optimise for that model instead.