Regardless of your business operations’ size – whether you are an individual or a thriving company with full-time employees on your payroll, building streamlined processes and ensuring their implementation can prove to be supremely beneficial for your business’s growth.
These processes are a masterclass on how to win clients and grow an agency efficiently. If you are running an agency, putting winning processes in place can seem like a daunting task at first, but once you cross the bridge, your business will become a well-oiled machine that can sustain itself.
The process we have outlined below will help you and your team follow a similar path. It will take a lot of work, shared buy-in from team members, and time to see results, but be patient and follow till the last; It's worth the journey.
Set A Clear Team Vision
Create a shared vision of business growth with your team. The reality of running any business, especially an agency business, is that everyone is trying to chase tight deadlines and do their job well. Amidst all this chaos, it becomes increasingly difficult to focus on the agency’s primary vision, the very reason why you started the business in the first place.
Taking time to interact with your team, reinforcing the vision, and discussing the possible route map towards achieving the vision is an effective yet underrated technique. Try to have open conversations with your team and discuss with them any roadblocks that they face on the grassroots level and ask them for possible solutions.
Share your vision with them and ask for their inputs. Note down all the ideas and come to an agreement with them. This will motivate them to participate in achieving the shared goals.
Prepare Defined Organizational Chart
In an agency, especially during the initial days, it is difficult to demarcate roles and responsibilities clearly. This can prove to be a major reason for conflict among the team members in the long run.
To avoid this, draw up an organizational chart with clear expected roles and responsibilities. Start by listing all the roles and then breaking them down. Proceed to distributing them among the employees and clarifying your expectations from them. This way, everyone will have defined responsibility and know what they are accountable for.
Outline Your Core Values
Defining a clear vision for the growth of your agency is the first step, and the second is to define your agency’s core values that enable you to achieve your envisioned goals. These values are the cornerstone of your business ethics, and they influence everything that you undertake as an organization.
A few examples of core values are integrity, loyalty, helpfulness, positivity, etc., and these values are the cultural DNA of your agency. Every single employee of your team, current, and future, is expected to abide by these values.
Create A Unique Approach
In the sea of agencies providing the exact same services as you, what is it that sets you apart? Your uniqueness lies in your approach, the way you handle a certain situation, and deliver clearly measurable results.
Create a detailed document clearly stating your agency’s approach towards handling and delivering the project and share it with your clients before beginning the task. This helps the client visualize the roadmap clearly and helps your executive team commit to a task and see it through to fruition.
This approach can also build trust among your clients. It is this strategy that can build your reputation and gain you recurring clients in the long run.
Set Up 12-Week Goals
It is good to have your annual goal in place at the beginning of a new financial year. But think about this for a minute – how long have you actually worked towards achieving your new year’s resolution?
Not too long, we know! Breaking down an annual, bigger goal into small, achievable tasks to be reviewed every 12 weeks is a better way to go about it. Of course, this entirely depends on the size of your organization and your discretion. It can be a bi-annual review as well if that’s more suitable for your agency. But the basic principle here remains the same, set up small achievable goals.
Final Thoughts
A little discipline and a lot of dedication can help you build and implement a winning process for starting an agency. Sure, it will take some hard work, but the results will be worth all your efforts.
Moreover, building a system that can be repeatable and scalable isn't easy. And, creating a system to run your agency is never complete as you're always going to have to tweak and adjust things as you learn through experience.
But implementing a standardized agency structure is freeing - and it's well worth the work!
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