5 Essential Skills You Need To Build A Successful Agency

Building a Business

When I was in college, I used every spare minute I could snatch to teach myself how to code.

It gave me the freedom to break away from technological limitations and the capacity to innovate.

I started looking for a software idea that I could turn into a company but, in the meantime, I consulted for other businesses.

I helped them find solutions to their problems with product and software development - which eventually turned into Jakt, the agency I spent growing for over 7 years until it got acquired.

Now, I’ve seen this is a fairly common theme with other agency owners:

Copywriters building copywriting agencies…

Facebook Ads experts building marketing agencies…

Graphic designers building design agencies…

But depending on your goals, you might have found out that just having that skill wasn’t enough.

Because the truth is this:

There’s much more to building a sustainable business than just that.

Here are just a few of the things you’ll need to learn in this case...

1. How to sell

Many things are important when you’re running a business. But if you want to grow, you have to focus on sales and top-line revenue. No business has ever survived or grown without revenue and sales.

But how, right?

My approach to sales is simple – I’m a naturally curious person. I want to help people. While I’m an introvert, I like to talk to and, most importantly, listen to them and their business problems and challenges.

When you know or uncover what someone needs, then it all comes down to whether you can help them or not. If you can, that’s when you offer your services. And if you can’t, my approach has always been to refer them to someone who can when possible.

But it all comes down to serving instead of selling.

2. How to foster a great culture & be a guardian of it

It works in a very similar fashion to a sports team. No matter how good your players are, your culture often is the main factor in whether you win or not.

I used to think that if a person was contributing and doing their part, they didn’t need to be a culture fit. Now, however, I understand that the long-term play is to prioritize the culture above all else.

What’s more, you have to preserve the company’s culture to grow. And every single person you let in will shift it, which is why it’s your job to be a guardian of the culture of your agency.

You see… culture is not stagnant. It evolves with each new person that joins.

But you can choose which people come in and influence your culture.

And once they are there, you can also maintain the standard and the importance of the core values and living them every day.

There’s no way around that.

If you are slacking, your team will too. If you accept mediocrity, that will quickly become the new standard. And if you don’t hold people accountable, no one will.

This leads to our next point...

3. How to hire well

Through interacting with business owners and CEOs, I’ve seen that some of them struggle to test cultural fit when hiring new employees.

People and culture are two extremely important elements. But it’s hard to tell whether someone will embrace and add up to your company’s culture or not.

You just never know how new employees will adapt.

But you as the business owner still need to take steps to put yourself in the best position.

The way I did this while growing Jakt was by adding one last interview to our process. By this point, we wouldn’t test them on hard skills. Or ask about previous working experience, etc.

All I did was share with them all of the core values we lived by at Jakt, explain each one in detail, and then asked them to talk us through a moment in their life where they did something that went AGAINST those values.

Our objective was to examine how they handled the situation. We listened to the language they used and to how they reacted. What they were thinking. How they felt. What they learned from it.

It was a great way for us to get to know our potential new hires and for them to learn our core values and about our culture a bit.

Moreover, it helped us get into much deeper conversations than regular interviews do (which puts you one step closer to figuring out whether they’ll be a good fit or not).

4. How to implement scorecards

When running a business, it’s easy to let your heart and gut drive your decision-making and forecasting.

If you aren’t measuring actions and results, forward progress is difficult and unpredictable.

Defining important metrics that you’ll keep an eye on, tracking them over time, and continuously analyzing them will help you monitor the health of your business.

Here’s where scorecards come to help:

Scorecards are documents used to track how your business is performing over a period of time. But it’s not just about measurement.

They are also management tools that help guide your actions and help you achieve your company’s goals.

Basically, they let you, the business owner, see “ahead of the curve” at what might unfold and back at the reason behind things.

Scorecards tell you how your business is going. Where it may be off-track, and where you may need to make adjustments so that each system is working efficiently.

Scorecards are especially useful when measuring leading indicators. Through them, you can see what will happen weeks, months, and even years in advance.

Leading indicators can help both your decision-making and forecasting.

Let’s say you check out your financial scorecards and realize that you have under-collected money from your customers. What does that tell you?

That you might run into a cash-flow problem in the near-term. So you might have to take out money from your retained earnings to make payroll.

Much better to know now than in a month when the water is up to your neck, right?

5. How to systematize your agency

I remember how ecstatic I was back when my agency started growing in the early days.

I also remember how I wasn’t as much when I noticed things began to break soon afterward.

More clients meant helping more people. which meant doing more valuable work, which meant having to hire more people to do that work…

And, little by little, I started to see how certain processes and systems would break and not work so well anymore for us.

This is one of the reasons why you need to look at your agency as a machine. A machine that consists of different systems that operate separately but are simultaneously intertwined.

These are:

• The new business system (sales & marketing)

• The production system (all processes, tools, and people that help deliver services)

• The back-office system (accounting, finance, HR, legal, rent, administrative work, etc.)

And if things are breaking, you need to take a step back to diagnose where is the root cause of the issue.

Is it that your production system is incapable of handling a recent influx of new clients? Is it that your back-office doesn’t have enough people to handle your current amount of administrative work?

The sooner you nail it down, the quicker you’ll be able to recover from the imbalance.

Now, I had to learn all of these skills all on my own while I grew Jakt. And while I certainly got better at them throughout the years, it was definitely a learning process.

Fell for lots of pitfalls, lost large amounts of time and money… 

At one point, I even thought of closing the business and moving on to do something else.

It took me a while but I finally understood that I didn’t have all the answers. That I could bring in help from people who had been in my situation before and that had a successful track record of experiences that backed them up.

That’s when I hired an executive coach.

To this day, it’s one of the highest ROI decisions I’ve made in my entire life. Working with her made me realize the power of having someone who:

• Truly knows who you are and where you’ve been…

• Wants to help you succeed…

• And keeps you accountable.

If you’d like to have that kind of person around and nearby to help you out as well, then join our community of agency owners.


More blog posts