How to Balance Time as a New Agency Owner
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Starting an agency is a ton of work. You have to juggle every aspect of the business while growing revenue and creating processes for new hires.
So how are you supposed to balance all aspects of a business and prepare for growth if you are a solopreneur or have a very small team?
We dive into some of the practices we used to grow GuavaBox during this episode of Inbound Sales Journey.
Define Strengths and Weaknesses
You aren’t good at everything. It’s a tough notion to accept, especially when you need to be at least good enough at everything to grow a company.
People often say that you need to know your own strengths and weaknesses. I would take that a step further and say that you need to write those down.
A great exercise Gray shares during this episode are the 3 lists you need to have.
The 3 lists are as follows:
- What I am good at and should do?
- What I can do but am not proficient at?
- What I am not good at and need help with?
Write down those 3 lists and begin to place your work activities into these columns. These will start to show you your strengths and weakness as an agency owner.
This list is also incredibly helpful for deciding who your first hire is going to be. If you are not good at selling and do not enjoy it, guess what, you need a sales person first or your agency growth is going to stagnate.
Documentation
When it comes time to make your first hire they are going to need to understand the process of how to do various aspects of their job. That is why being disciplined to document what you are doing is so important.
This is the most neglected discipline when starting a company because it is so hard to see immediate value. Taking additional time to document what you are doing can seem like wasted time, but if you don’t document you’re severely hurting the speed in which your agency can grow.
Create a process documentation template and use it over and over. It will help speed up your documentation process.
Planning
Equally important to documenting process is time management. Agency owner’s are constantly getting bounced around from one thing to the next. To help focus on what needs to get done start creating your “ideal week”.
The concept of the ideal week revolves around high-level concepts that need to happen to run your agency. Examples of these include marketing, sales, finances, and client work.
Take these concepts and block actual time on your calendar to focus on these different areas of your business. We do this by creating an extra Google Calendar and overlaying it with our actual calendar.
This helps us to visually see how much time needs to be devoted to each area in order to be successful.
If you have any additional thoughts to help out new agency owners feel free to share them below!
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