Top 5 Tips to Accelerate Agency Growth with Chris Spears

Top 5 Tips to Accelerate Agency Growth If you have your sights set on your agency breaking 8-figures this episode is a must. Do you want to know how you can accelerate agency growth? Today's guest is an agency owner who's gone from $0 to over 8-figures and he shares his top 5 tips so you can grow too. In this episode, we’ll cover: Why you must niche down to accelerate agency growth. How to reward key employees without giving them ownership. Ways to stop doing all the agency stuff you hate. Our guest today is Chris Spears, co-founder of Arke Systems the agency he started in 2006. Eleven years into the business he's seeing steady growth, has 80+ employees and loves his job! Chris and I go way back to my digital agency days when we were working as strategic partners. His agency has crushed the 8-figured ceiling and he’s on the show to share how you can do it too. 1- The More Niched, the Faster the Growth Chris attributes a lot of his agency’s growth to an early appreciation of niching down. If he could do it all again, he’d specialize even sooner. Once Arke became #1 in a specific technology and marketed themselves as the pros in that arena, they had a full pipeline with tons of inbound prospects. A lot of agency owners are afraid to become too specialized because there’s a fear of “losing” clients or “turning off” prospects. However, Chris believes buyers are much more sophisticated than we give them credit for. They won’t be your guinea pig for a project you’ve never done - they want an agency that's proficient in a specific skill or experts in an industry. 2- Get the Right People in the Right Seats Surround yourself with people smarter than you and you will grow. Most entrepreneurs don’t think any one can do it (whatever “it” might be) any better so they end up being control freaks about everything. But when you get the right people in the right positions their skills and experience will help your agency grow beyond what you could do alone. When you have key people in the right roles, you can stop doing the things you suck at and spend time on your business, instead of in it. Equally important to having the right people, is empowering them to do their good job. First, make sure they understand their role within the agency. Next, make sure they’re educated on all facets of the business so there are no missed opportunities for up selling, cross selling or obtaining referrals. 3- Keep Your Team Motivated Once you’re surrounded by all the right people it’s important to keep them motivated. Chris says it goes beyond just having fun together at happy hour. An engaging culture plays a big part in keeping a team motivated. And a motivated team produces efficient, effective work yielding faster agency growth. In terms of employee incentives, Arke Systems has a Stock Appreciation Rights Program. This program protects both the agency and the employee with built in contingencies if either party terminates the relationship. It’s also a great way to publicly recognize stellar employees without offering regular equity in the agency. (That’s a BIG no no!) 4- Stop Doing Things You Hate How many hours do you spend doing things you hate? Invoicing, chasing payments, scheduling meetings, etc. Whatever those things are - eliminate them by delegating to your team or outsourcing. And if it’s something you can automate, even better! Chris also says not to build things from scratch if they already exist. Don’t make more work creating a solution for a problem if a solution already exists elsewhere. Things like this are a distraction and derails your focus from the important things. You can’t grow your agency when you’re spending time reinventing the wheel. 5- Know Your Exit Plan Getting focused and staying focused is important. What does your end game looks like? If you know your long term goals and avoid distractions while trying to achieve them, you can grow your agency much faster. I like to tell my clients: build your business to sell, but treat it like you never will. Need Guidance and Support to Grow Your Agency Faster? Most agency owners struggle to scale. We’ve developed an amazing mastermind to guide you through the journey of implementing the right systems so you can scale your agency — instead of feeling overwhelmed by it. We do this by bringing together successful agency leaders to share strategies, offer advice, and reveal what’s working (and what’s not working) in their agency. The truth is, whatever you want to accomplish in life, nothing will help you go further, faster than getting the right adviser in the context of motivated peers. If you want to GROW fast and smart, Digital Agency Elite mastermind will help.   What Happens After You Accelerate Agency Growth? With these tips, you should be able to make changes and accelerate agency growth for your business. However with this increase in growth, unless you are prepared it can cause more issues for your agency. This is why reviewing your agency consistently for areas of weakness or improvement will allow you to become a better agency owner and run a better business. During my time in the industry, I have had my own experience running my own digital agency and helping other digital agency owners so there are many topics where I can offer guidance. Whether you are experiencing challenges as an established agency or a new agency unsure of what the different phases of growth you will experience will look like, I've got you covered. As you continue to grow your agency team, I can show how to recognise when it’s time to hire a sales manager or expand your sales team to perfecting your business strategy with creating a process for performance based pricing and how to keep your big name clients happy. Are you ready to create something cool and want more advice? Learn about my career and different experiences as well as tips, tricks and insights by checking out my blogs that cover a wide variety of topics. Check out more from my Ask Swenk series and more of my videos on my Youtube channel. There you will find advice from myself and other agency experts.