The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

Some of you may have been wondering, “Where’s Mike? I haven’t seen an article from him in a very long time.” The last article was on August 21.

I have to admit that I never intended to take this much time off.

But, as many of you know, my day job is CEO at Square 2. In fact, I’m one of the few agency coaches and mentors that still runs an active agency.

That means sometimes the agency comes first. I’m sure all of you can understand and appreciate those priorities.

I try to give agency owners a lot of practical advice. I know many of you are technically capable of doing what you need to grow, but there are just forks in the road, potholes, unforeseen challenges and decisions that seem to slow down your growth.

One of the biggest challenges is simply working IN the business, instead of working ON the business. If there was a single piece of advice I could share with agency owners it would be to carve out at least 2 hours every month to stop working in the business and work on it.

This would allow you to consider how you differentiate, how you can add a few new tech partners, how you can improve your delivery, what new services you can offer, and how you can help your client services team be better consultants.

How To Get Your Agency Ready For The NOW

States and countries are starting to allow businesses to open up. I headed back to our office this week for the first time since the middle of March. But our agency will never be the same and neither will yours.

If you think you’re going back to how you worked in January, you are mistaken. If you think your clients are going to want the same thing from you as they did at the end of 2019, you’re also mistaken.

The business world and the agency world is now changing faster than ever before. You have to accelerate your own change to keep up and stay ahead of the curve. 

Adjust, Don’t Scrap Your Strategic Planning Work

My leadership team and I met earlier this week to revisit our strategy and plan for 2020. During the conversation, we all agreed doing any long-term planning right now seemed like a waste of time given the general uncertainty facing everyone right now.

But we’ve come to lean on strategic planning as a core value at Square 2. We meet regularly, plan regularly, and create annual, quarterly, and monthly plans. We develop an annual theme to keep the team focused and energized. We identify rocks and key initiatives and then roll those down to the team aligning execution.

It has served us well for years and years. But, in the face of the obvious uncertainty, what’s an agency to do?

HINT: It Should Be The Same At Any-Sized Agency

As October wraps up, you’re probably starting to think about 2020 planning. Everything you read or watch between now and the end of the year is going to be encouraging you to do your 2020 plan.

But at Square 2, our 2020 plan is almost done.

No, I’m not an overachiever. Our company-wide meeting in Philly is in mid-November this year, so we had to get our planning done early.

You might be wondering what annual strategic planning looks like at Square 2. I’m happy to share with you how we do this, what we did this year and some tips on how you can make your 2020 planning easy.