In this episode, Kirsten goes over the 7 things you need for a peaceful 7 figure agency. Kirsten shares the mistakes she’s made in her agency, how she’s helped her agency owner clients get on track for a 7 figure year while still retaining profit and peace, and more.
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*Please Note: This transcript is based on an outline and may contain typos, word switches, abbreviations, etc. These are provided for your convenience and are not proofread prior to being made available.
Hey Peaceful Millionaires!
Today we are going to talk about creating a peaceful agency that earns $1M a year.
There was a time where I didn’t believe a peaceful, 7 figure agency was possible.
The only examples I had of 7 figure agencies were ones with huge teams of 20-30 people, were underpaying their team members, the CEO was burned out, they were a bunch of different services, and had template shops lol
After running my own multiple 6 figure agency, and making every possible mistake in it, I’ve learned what NOT to do when building an agency.
However last year, I had an Agency Owner come that hit $400K that year and wanted to hit a $1M year.
She joined Million Dollar CEO because she had multiple team members and still was heavily involved in client work and communications, she had services she retired because she didn’t like the clients she was attracting, she had projects that took months to complete (making it hard to onboard new people smoothly) and she didn’t have a team that could 100% support the clients without her involvement.
We streamlined her service and improved the delivery process, going from taking months to weeks. We hired someone to support the management of the agency team and clients so she didn’t have to. We re-trained her team to deliver the level of service she expected.
Now, she is on track for a peaceful $1M year.
She has had more happy and high level clients filling her roster.
She has taken multiple offline vacations this year already while enrolling more clients than ever and offloading it completely to the team.
She has been investing more in her self care and life by hiring more support.
And more
So, how can you achieve what this client has?
I’m going to give you 7 steps for a 7 figure agency:
We have a rule inside the MDC program: No one stop shops
I had a one stop shop and while it got me clients, it also forced me to hire a ton of team members just to deliver to one client. It was also hard to set boundaries around deliverables. So oftentimes, I’d end up paying just to have a client.
Your team member to client ratio should not be 3:1 (3 team members to 1 client). The mark of a scalable, peaceful agency is actually 1:5 or 1:10 (1 team member to 5-10 clients) depending on the style of service you offer.
You can achieve a 1:5 or 1:10 ratio by having a 1 skill service.
A 1 skill service is a service that can be delivered by 1 team member.
It doesn’t require multiple specialists to deliver the service.
We’ll get more into this later.
Your agency should not have more than 2 offers. 1 retainer based offer, 1 project based offer. This changes if you’re an Agency Owner and Coach, then you would only have 1 offer either retainer or project based.
In order to scale peacefully, you cannot over customize your offers. You need to have repeatable offers that your team knows exactly how to deliver. Agency team members will underperform consistently because it’s not really possible to train them when you’re customizing for every client. This keeps you as the CEO heavily involved in client work.
You need to simplify your delivery process. If you have a project based offer, your delivery should not exceed 4 weeks. If you’re consistently going over deadlines, then you have a delivery issue. If you’re currently doing 90 day projects, that’s an issue too. You’re just promising way too much. And many times Agency Owners will do this for the MRR. they’ll make projects go across a few months so they have consistent revenue.
But this is why you need a retainer offer, not just a project offer.
You need to have an Agency Manager that takes care of the operations and clients for your agency. They are the ones making sure your team is hitting deadlines and your clients are happy and supported.
My client that I’ve been referring to in this episode said her Agency Manager has been a life changing hire. She said that was worth the entire investment in the MDC program.
Your clients will fall in love with your Agency Manager. I remember my clients preferred mine over myself.
You need to have 1 Delivery Assistant per 5-10 clients. This shouldn’t be an issue if you have a 1 skill service, 2 offer structure, and 4 week delivery process.
But let’s say you have a unique service that requires multiple skills.
For example, when I had a funnels agency, I used to have a copywriter, a graphic designer and a tech VA.
Funnels require multiple skills, so how could I make that more scalable without needing multiple specialized team members?
The way to do this is to get clear on how you want to deliver your service.
You can do this a number of ways, let’s keep using funnels as an example.
Option 1: I could make the client responsible for copy and design work and only have my Delivery Assistant responsible for mapping out and automating the funnel.
Option 2: I could change the way in which we provide copy and design work. For example, instead of writing copy from scratch, we can have a copy framework document that helps my assistant know how to repurpose copy for a funnel and then we can have an audit framework to know if it’s good copy or not. We can only edit existing design assets like sales pages.
So even if you think you have a service that needs multiple skills, there are still ways to make it to where 1 assistant can deliver it.
You need SOPs that teach your team how to onboard, deliver, and offboard a client. Your SOPs should also include how to communicate with clients and handle different scenarios.
Also, you should have smooth systems including for your clients.
A 3 week, fully offline (no laptop, no clickup or slack or email on the phone) vacation will help you have a peaceful 7 figure agency. You’ll get much needed rest after probably years of delivering for clients and you’ll be able to accurately assess how CEO optional your business is.
The agency owner in this episode took multiple offline vacations and her agency clients were fully supported. Even posting about the agency on social media and how happy they were while she was away.
To recap, the 7 things you need for a peaceful 7 figure agency are:
I can help you achieve these 7 things in just 90 days.
Inside Million Dollar CEO, we will audit your agency service, structure, delivery, team and systems to get you to a $1M year with more calendar space than ever.
