Small But Mighty Agency: How to Grow Your Agency

What’s one of the best ways to grow faster and avoid painful mistakes? That’s an easy one for me: getting a mentor.  As a business owner, having mentors helped me gain experiences not shared in books found on bookshelves; I’ve benefited from a better understanding of their wins and mistakes.  But mentorship isn’t just for a business owner; it's also for your team and helping them reach their...

Do you believe in planning for more happiness and joy in your business?  If you’re like me, you got your planning done in December, or maybe, January is the month you start planning. I don’t know a business owner who isn’t doing some sort of planning right now. Whether you do it at the end of the year or the beginning of the year, there’s no wrong or right time. But there is one thing many small b...

Here are the big four lessons I learned this year that helped me make money and grow my business by 30%.  Each lesson is a way of thinking and being as we head into 2023, where the trend points towards buying decisions taking longer because people are more careful with spending. Hear why these lessons make me a better business owner with an even greater potential to accelerate growth in the new ye...

What is a significant advantage of a small agency? It’s the ability to stay in its lane and go deep into a niche.  Today, we’re talking to an agency owner about her niche in cultural intelligence.  Cultural intelligence is not just a hot topic but a much-needed one.  Authentic representation matters because it empowers. I’m speaking from my own experience as an Asian-Canadian who grew up seeing ve...

Can I tell you about a scenario I’ve encountered many times? I speak to service-based business owners who get stuck spending 9-5 every day in client meetings, and there’s no space for other things that need to happen. On the one hand, there’s plenty to celebrate because they have a fully booked service business. On the other hand, they are at capacity and the bottleneck in their business. They hav...

A potential client comes to you with a project, and the scope (a.k.a objectives, requirements and outcomes) is unclear.  It happens to all service providers, and it can drain time, money, and your team  It can distract you from scaling what works well in your business.  The challenge is that unclear scopes can come disguised as opportunities, especially if you’re unclear about your business vision...

Let’s grow a complicated business that feels like a ball and chain. Said NOBODY.  I’ve been there. I learned this lesson as the second in command of an agency. I could not turn off my brain and relax because I would worry about what was and wasn’t being done.  It wasn’t until I looked at the business from a productized service perspective. It gave us more bandwidth to double the revenue and sell a...

What makes a service business high ticket and sets you up to get paid like an expert?  Here’s the thing to know, it’s not about doing more in your business; it's actually about doing less.  Hear why productized services and the agency model support you to do less while providing exponential value to your clients and how it gets you out of being the bottleneck in your service business  (hint:...

Do you want more time to work on the business rather than in it? When Justin reached out to me for help, he was the bottleneck in his business. His service delivery processes lived in his head, so he spent his day-to-day implementing services, managing clients, and providing client strategy.  He was doing it all with little time to focus on real business growth. It wasn’t sustainable, and he didn&...

What is the greatest asset for a multiple seven-figure agency? After ten years as the CEO of her agency and another 12 years before that working as a creative director – thats’ 22 years - Jenny Smith knows her team is the greatest asset.  In this episode, Jenny shares how transparency about her agency's profit and losses helped her team understand the financial basics and raise the level of t...

If you’re a consultant or marketer who hasn’t hit consistent $10K months yet, this episode demonstrates its possible by keeping it simple.  It requires effort, of course, but you don’t need to make it complicated. It's all about being persistent.  Why are we talking about consistent $10K months on the podcast today?  It’s the launchpad to growing a service business with a team. $10K months un...

So what’s stopping you from getting more help?  You might be thinking it seems like a risk to make another hire.  What comes first? Is it getting the new hire or the new clients? It’s the age-old chicken or egg question.  While every scenario has different considerations on who to hire and in what capacity, one thing holds, don’t wait till you’re overwhelmed to hire.  If your business is not growi...

You’ve reached capacity, now what?  Building your business requires different priorities, decisions and leadership at different stages of growth.  When you hit capacity, you need to put the brakes on and focus on building internal capacity. Internal capacity is processes and team members who can help you serve your clients and grow your business.  Ignore internal capacity building for too long, an...

How can you inspire your team to greater heights?  The short answer is to be a more effective leader who knows how to inspire the best in people.  But what motivates one person doesn’t always inspire the next. That’s why personality assessments can help inform better leadership.  We explore how personality assessments help you hire better, become a better leader and support you to reach your busin...

Do you know an opportunity when you see one, and more importantly, are you willing to take that risk?  Saying ‘yes’ led this service-based business owner from a 9 - 5 job to a seven-figure business.  There’s a saying in entrepreneurship: “you’ve got to jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.”  Today’s guest did precisely that  – with no experience in marketing, he quit his job to...

What inspires someone to buy an existing marketing business?  Meet Diane. After selling her successful first business, she decided to return to work by purchasing a marketing agency.  Diane shares her decision-making process and what she would do differently if she were to do it again.  Plus, hear the strategies she uses to become the go-to agency in her county and the marketing activities to get...

What pivots do you need to make in a business as it grows?  All businesses will at some point make a pivot - it's a strategic move that you take to ensure that your business remains viable and profitable.  In this episode of the Small But Mighty Agency podcast, meet Nanci, she is an entrepreneur of 25 years; she’s owned and operated an agency and has gone through multiple pivots, including he...

When you think of a niche for your business, you might naturally consider a specific industry or market.  But a niche isn’t always an industry; it can be a service you offer. Case in point, meet Allie LeFevere, the co-owner of Obedient Agency. Their niche is humor, and they help grow brands that make people laugh. In this episode, we explore the creative process to generate humour-driven marketing...

If there’s one constant in owning a business, it’s getting comfortable with change.  As business owners, we need resilience in the face of change, whether changing business models, shifting marketing strategies, or building a team.  Change isn’t just about us, “the business owner”; it affects the people in our business. Leaders effectively managing their teams in an ever-changing environment is vi...

Is it easier to start an agency when you’ve worked for agencies most of your career? The answer isn’t a straightforward yes or no.  Running an agency requires more than just doing the work of servicing clients; it requires building a profitable and sustainable business.   Taralyn and her partner went from solopreneur to an agency owner in 10 months with 23 clients and quickly grew to a team of six...

What is the fastest way to $500K in a service-based business?  Today’s guest shares how she and her business partner scaled to $500K in sales in their first year without using complicated marketing strategies or being on every platform to market their business.  Growth for this agency owner has also meant steadily growing a team and leaning into processes that have helped them grow to multiple sev...

The one thing you need to have a sustainable agency? Happy Clients.  Great client management can mean the difference between a happy client who stays for the long term or a frustrated client who churns.  And we know that it costs a lot more to find a new client than to retain one.  Nobody understands this better than our guest, Taylor McMaster, who owns an agency that provides fractional client ac...

This small but mighty agency owner used the Upwork platform to grow his animation agency to multiple six figures in under two years.  Going from solopreneur to a team of nine, Guillermo Chan went from a 9 - 5 job to building the business of his dreams, where he gets to do what he loves and make an impact on the lives of others.  In this episode of the podcast:  Using Upwork to grow a service-based...

How are creatives, consultants, and marketers making multiple six figures thriving in an increasingly crowded marketplace? The great resignation left a door wide open for more businesses to consider working with freelancers, contractors and boutique agencies because employees were leaving like never before, which created demand in the marketplace.  On the other side of that same coin, the pool of...

Are you stuck in your business feeling like client work is dependent on just you, and you worry it will all go down the tank when you stop working?  If you don’t know how to change that – or maybe you do, but it hasn’t turned out how you thought it would? Tune in to discover:  Why do some business owners remain the bottleneck even after getting systems and processes in place? Where do you start wh...