It’s easy to get caught up in the chaos of day-to-day agency life. We all have a million things on our to-do lists, and they just keep growing. But part of being a successful agency owner is being present and open to what’s right in front of you.
Doug Fleener knows all about what it means to run a business intentionally. With history as a business owner and a rock bottom moment that led him into recovery, he’s had to learn some truths about life the hard way. But from that, he has developed some core principles to help business and agency owners live more intentionally.
His six core principles can help anyone start their day on the right foot to make incremental but powerful life changes. All it takes is one day to wake up and decide to make positive changes, and if you take anything away from this episode, it’s that intentional actions create intentional results.
This episode is packed with action items that are not only simple concepts but also easy to implement. I have no doubt that Doug will leave you feeling inspired and ready to start 2024 with a fresh set of eyes and a renewed inspiration to take intentional action toward making your year great.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- Learning to live in the day and making each day a little better
- Taking responsibility of yourself to make positive change
- Intentional actions create intentional results
- Practicing relentless simplicity in life and business
- Thinking of 3 things you can improve each day
- Micro habits that feed greater improvements
- Helping others to help yourself
- Mastering the ability to be present
- Having more intentionality throughout your day
- Implementing the 6 core principles and applying them to your business
Remote and hybrid work environments are here to stay. While some agencies have successfully returned to the office full-time, and some may have never even left, many agencies are still struggling to crack the code on hybrid work without upsetting their employees.
It’s a difficult balance, but it has become ever-important as these demands begin cementing into our work culture. And if you’re working with creatives, the conversation around a hybrid workplace has probably been even louder.
So this week, we’re joined by Felice Ekelman and Julie Kantor, authors of Thrive With a Hybrid Workplace: Step-by-step Guidance From the Experts, to teach us how to approach these conversations and transitions from a legal and psychological point-of-view.
We all know that as agency owners, there’s nothing more expensive or as valuable as our employees, and we just want them to be happy working with us. So tune in to learn how to have these conversations and set expectations around hybrid work environments so we can all have a better agency together.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- The making of the Thrive With a Hybrid Workplace book
- The shifts and trends of hybrid and remote work post-covid
- Creating a balance in a hybrid work environment
- The challenges for agency leaders in creating a collaborative hybrid work environment and maintaining communication
- What type of training agency leaders need to build a thriving hybrid work culture
- How to develop productivity benchmarks without the ability to observe in person
- Getting agency leaders out of the fear mindset and setting appropriate boundaries with agency employees
Agencies are under more pressure than ever to be innovative. While it used to be easier to solve your clients’ problems and wow them with a great solution, these days, it’s much harder to do that with the bar constantly moving. This is why it’s essential to develop an innovation strategy.
Wouldn’t it be nice to bring a lofty, innovative idea to a client and have them be over the moon and excited to be a part of the process? With the right innovation strategy, that dream can be a reality.
An innovation strategy can help your team jumpstart the creative and problem-solving process while leaving room for co-creation and collaboration with your clients. This streamlines the creative process and takes the pressure off you and your team to have all the answers while you search for the solutions to their problems.
Tune in to learn how your agency can become problem-solving and innovation experts by asking the right questions, enacting decisive decision-making, and building out a creative workflow.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- The hardest part of innovation
- Collaboration is key for driving innovation
- Boiling down the “how” of problem-solving and innovation
- Creating an upstream methodology — the question-asking stage
- Getting a client to buy into an innovative idea
- The importance of collaboration and outside input for an innovation strategy
- The landmines to be aware of in the upstream production stages
- Workshopping ideas to produce quicker outcomes
It’s no secret that 2023 has been a rough year for most agency owners. Between the elongated sales cycles, shrinking prospect budgets, and the need to re-evaluate some of our own expenses that have been piling up, many of you are feeling burnt out.
But it’s not all bad news. There’s still time to take a fresh look at how you want to run your agency in 2024 and pull yourself out of the trenches if 2023 has gotten the better of you. This episode will focus on what we can be doing differently in 2024 in our biz dev strategy, which will make next year a little less stressful for us.
We’re taking a look at the data that Lee McKnight Jr. and his agency have compiled from many agency owners about their experiences throughout 2023. And while many of you were plagued with lower-budget prospects, dried-up client referrals, and slowed client growth, this leaves a glimmer of hope that the pendulum will swing the other way for us next year.
So don’t miss this episode to learn how to dial in your biz dev strategy and prepare for what we hope is an exciting new year full of new prospects, bigger returns, and, of course, happier agency owners.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- The strain on obtaining new business in 2023 and its effects on agencies
- How agency owners have been coping with elongated sales cycles
- The importance of staying vigilant in business development even when work is abundant
- Shrinking prospect budgets and diminishing returns on new business
- Keeping up with client outreach, especially in an elongated sales cycle
- The biz dev strategies that still work to obtain new business
- What to expect from a new business manager
- The four prongs of biz dev that will still get you out of a rut
- What outbound efforts are still working on clients
- The biz dev strategies that are working and what to avoid in the new year