Welcome to the Get Your Act Together podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Reynolds, op strategist and agency coach at the Reynolds OBM agency. This podcast is all about building well-run and profitable businesses so that we can create lives and dreams.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 66. So today, I wanted to talk about something that comes up all the time when you are trying to grow an agency or you're thinking about an agency. And that is the idea that the clients only want the work done by you. They don't want anyone else touching their stuff, they just want you to do the work. And that is a big problem when you are trying to scale a business and grow an agency. So you want to be able to grow, you want to not be the only one doing all the things because you're tired, or you're overwhelmed, or there's nowhere to grow with only you doing things. And then you talk to clients about it, you approach them and they go nope, don't want anyone else on my account. Or you talk to new people. And they're like, no, no, I don't want to work with an agency. And I hear this a lot. Like I hear that this is a huge roadblock in growing agencies. So I want to talk about it today. Clients don't actually want you personally to do the work they think they do. What they want is the exact same result that you're giving them. So if you're the one who's doing it, it works right now, everything runs, and they don't want it to change. They don't want somebody to come in who doesn't know what they're talking about and mess everything up. They want the result. And that's a fair thing to ask for. Right? Like, Everything's been great. They love you. They don't want it to be messed up. That fear of things getting messed up also comes with the, I'm not special anymore. I feel like I'm being subbed out and pushed off by another team member. So there's all this stuff where they're like, I don't like change, I don't want people to touch on my stuff. I don't want to be passed off. And I don't want to feel like I'm not special anymore. All valid fears. They just want their stuff done well. And that's it, all of that comes back to I don't want my work to be changed, I want that same result. And what we have to do as agency owners is reframe all of that, so that they understand that their result, whatever that is that you do for them will stay the same or get better, their work isn't going to suffer because of changes that you're making. This is really a positioning thing. And it's very different, to talk about it in that way to clients sometimes. So I wanted to kind of go through that today. Understanding the fears they have, they're valid and then changing that positioning so that they understand what they're really getting. And that it's a bonus. Not a problem. So the biggest thing, especially when you are a freelancer solopreneur. And especially like ops, you're running things, right, everything runs really well, it's great. Or you do the website that's taken care of. And that person by the client just knows that it's taken care of. They don't want to have to go back to questioning everything, micromanaging things, all of that. They don't want to have to deal with all of that. And that's what's scary about having someone else come in, you need to reassure them that once, the work will still be fantastic. As long as they're assured that their work still gets done, that's all I really care about. That's all they care about, they just want the same result. So you will say this work still gets done the same way. I am the manager here, i The buck stops here, whatever you want to say, right? Like you are still gonna be responsible for the content and the quality of that work. Rest assured it will be fantastic. And then you have to explain all of the benefits that go with having a team when it was just me and I want to take off on vacation. It was so nerve racking, like how, how am I supposed to run things and take off a week and go on vacation? That was really hard because everybody wanted me running things all the time. Right? And I I can't be there all the time. But if I was sick for a day, but with a team that's trained and knows what's going on, and they're taking care of different parts of things, I can take off. Everything isn't based on whether I'm feeling well or not. Or if I'm in the office today and that gives more bandwidth and explaining that to clients is a huge bonus right like one person cannot be there all the time. But a team can help have coverage. A team can have people that are specialists that come in and fix things or do things. So you get this huge bandwidth job, you can get more done. Not only that you have coverage, but you can get more things done. Especially if you have different people on your team that do other things. Like I'm not a bookkeeper, I do invoicing and stuff like that. But I'm not a bookkeeper. But if I had someone on my team who was a bookkeeper, they could take care of that, too. So you can add services in that they didn't have before, that you didn't have before, or that maybe weren't that great app. So then there's this idea of us as contractors, we have many clients, that's the whole idea of being a contractor, right? You're you don't work for just one person, you're not an employee. So if you have a whole bunch of clients, and they all have different things going on, then what happens when this person, this client has a problem, and you're busy on somebody else's problem. Having that team or agency, then you have more bandwidth for that as well. So you have busy clients, and no one has to wait. That's a huge bonus. Some of you are going to have launches or major things like you're on a webinar or something and you can't help someone else right now. Like you're blocked out for a good amount of the day. And you can't even answer emails, because you're in the middle of something. But that other client has a problem today too. So having that coverage, not just for being sick, but also having multiple clients and being able to take care of them all. That's huge. And that's a huge selling point. You will be taken care of because we have that extra coverage. This is a big one. And I think it's it's extra helpful on project work. You can get up and running very quickly, when you hire a team. If you have a project that needs to be done, and you hire VA, and then you hire an OBM, and then you hire a tech person, and then a graphics, all the people, you have to find them, hire them, get them up and running all that. All individually, it's going to take a long time. And when you have to get a project done, you don't have time for all that. So if you had someone who already had a team, they all work together well already. And they all know each other well, that you could hire to come in to help you with your project. And you can start next week instead of in two months. So the speed because we already worked together, we already know all our stuff that like speed to be able to get up and running is a huge, huge benefit. And with that, there's also less management for the client, a lot of like solopreneurs, they don't really need a team, especially if it's project stuff, like they just need someone to come in, work on a project and then leave, they don't need to hire seven people to do something like that. And they don't want to manage it. Especially if they're like they're on their own. They have a very successful business, but it's very lean. They don't have a huge team and they don't want one. They don't want to be a manager all day. They want to go off and do whatever they do. So hiring someone who has an agency who has a team, they don't have to manage all the people. They get the benefits of having that team, maybe even on a short term project basis, without having to manage it all. So this is just few things on my list of reasons why it's a really big bonus to have an agency have a team come and help you. And you need to sell that as a thing that's a good instead of a thing that's bad. We want to make our clients happy. We need to coach them through this so that they understand that they're getting more, not less. So you're going to have clients who are going to feel like they don't want to have a team because their work is not going to get done. They're going to be subbed out, passed off, they're not going to feel special anymore. The person who's doing the work isn't going to know all the stuff. Clients a lot of times think that they want things that they don't want. They have ideas in their head of this is the way I should do it because someone else did it, or their mastermind told them that. And our job is going to be a lot of times to coach them through it and explain that's not really what they need. You don't want just me. So if this has been a thing in your head. That's been like a roadblock. I hope that this helps you. It comes up a lot. And if you are interested in agencies and growing an agency and you have questions like this, come join us and get your agency together Facebook group. It's my free Facebook group. I'm in there every day answering questions going live, explaining how I have this work at Reynolds OBM. So come join us in the Facebook group and I will see you guys next week.

Thank you so much for joining me this week. If you have an agency or want to create one, come join my Facebook community. Get your agency together where we talk all the things growing and scaling your agency. For show notes and more info on all the things head over to Reynolds obm.com. Follow me on Instagram and Facebook at Reynolds OBM. And finally, if you enjoy this podcast I would love for you to give us a review on iTunes.