Welcome to the Get your act together podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Reynolds, ops 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 the lives you dream of. 

 

Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 86. So I have a question for you today. Do any of these sound familiar? 

 

Number one, you have grown your business as a service provider, and you're to the point where you are overwhelmed, you have no more time in your day, and you cannot take on any more clients, no bandwidth left. The problem is you still want to grow your business, and, you know, bring in some more money. And you've thought about maybe building out a team. But the idea of where to start totally freaks you out. 

 

Number two, you are having a hard time scaling your service offer whatever you offer as a service provider because everyone only wants to work with you. And you need to be involved in everything because it seems like things are on fire all the time. And you're the only one who could put out all the fires. 

 

Number three, you have started building a team. But it is chaos. It is chaos all the time. And it's hard to keep all the balls in the air and everything running. There are clients to deal with team members to manage and so much to follow up on all of them all the time. Do any of those sound familiar to you? Because I have been there, I have been through all of these things. Actually, at one time or another in my business, I have been all three of these. I was the one with the last time on vacation with my family, just answering one more email before we went to the museum or the beach or whatever. I was the one with too many clients. So we're always on fire. Everything was always on fire, which as you can imagine, stressed me out. And I was the one that really wanted to bring on help, but had no idea where to start. I didn't have any friends that have done this before and really built out their teams. I didn't know how to do it. And since I started coaching, I've seen these things happen over and over. These three things that I just mentioned happen all the time, I would see overall business owners trying to start an agency or bring on help in some way. And without any idea what to do next, there would be chaos, there were no systems in place, and there will be times when the agency owner would be working so hard and couldn't pay themselves. Because all the money that they were bringing in from the clients was going right back out to their team. And all of these ideas of having freedom and working less and making more money. Were like a myth. Right? You're like, How can this be happening? I'm bringing more money into the business, right? Like there's more revenue, and there's more revenue, I've got this help making all this money, and I'm making no money. How is this possible, overwhelm, micromanaging, not getting to pay yourself, or making any kind of profit? These are the kinds of things that happen in agencies a lot. And it really gives agencies a bad name. And I found that some people will come to me for private coaching and really needed to figure these things out. And they needed more structure. They needed to kind of walk through step by step to figure out how to do this well. And that can be hard in private coaching when you have all of this content that you would love to just give them but that's not what private coaching is. Private coaching is more about asking questions to help guide someone to figure out their own path. But a lot of people really need to know the how and the why, like, what systems do I need? How do I get out of micromanaging all of those little things, they needed to be told a little bit more about how to do it with an enormous amount of support. And that is why I have created the Get Your Agency Together group coaching program. I didn't want to just ask questions and coaching calls in private coaching. I can't exactly give them a list of things to do. And then the other flip side of that, I also did not want to just record some content, some videos, stick it into a course, and send people on their way. I wanted to offer this incredible support and I wanted to be able to personalize this within a small group so that everyone got the attention they needed so that they were building their own agencies instead of just a copy of mine. I was very adamant. I mean, I've been on a soapbox about this before on the podcast that I don't like people saying well I've done it successfully. And I'm going to tell you exactly how to build my thing again. Because that's what a lot of courses are. I didn't want to tell people how to build my agency, because I don't think most people would like running my agency. You have to be me. It's built on my life, how I work, what I like to do, and who I like to work with. So I wanted to be able to help people grow their agencies, so not just like, throw some content, add them and be like, Alright, good luck, buddy. I wanted to get into this coaching. Really, I love coaching. I love getting into a call and just hot-seat coaching. It's one of my favorite things in the world. Really? I never thought I'd like being a coach at all. I thought that I don't know, I don't know, I didn't really ever think about it. And then when Natalie, the director of ops asked me to be a coach for her agency section of her program, I loved it. I love getting in and having someone go, Okay, here's my problem. Let's figure it out. I'm it. I love that part. So that is why I wanted to create this program. I wanted to create content, to show people how you could do things, but then the support behind it helped show them how they could do it. I wanted that hybrid program. I wanted it to be personalized, and I wanted to be able to help people where they were. And then I wanted to also focus on the things that I really thought were important. Because I think agencies, you know, there are a lot of the same things in business, right? You want to be profitable, you want to be sustainable, but you also want to like, have a good team, have a good culture, how are you doing offers differently? Because that's going to be different when you have to manage a lot of people. It's not exactly the same thing. Right? So I wanted to focus on things that I thought were important. First, it's why you're why and values. And I think some people want to skip that part. But it is the most important part of the program, as far as I'm concerned. Because I want you to create your business. So I need you to find out what you want. I can't tell you that part. So it's a little bit of a journey of discovery there. What is your reason why do you have this? Is it pandas or preschool? Is it? You know, why? What do you want to do with this business? And then what are your values? What do you really hold dear? Why do you want to do this in this way? And all of that stuff will really show you where you want to go. And then the business, the stuff the offers, and the systems that come from all of that. So the why and the values are so important. And then the next thing is offers. agency offers are different for service providers than regular just sole proprietors on your own kind of things. You can offer service, do it, and be done. And that's it. But when you are, especially if you're an OBM, or VA, things like that, where you are going in and doing daily work, that can be really hard to manage. When you have a huge team of people doing that. There are a lot of things that are on fire. Sometimes it's easier to offer things that are more processed and more packages that are much easier to manage and easier to scale. So that's what we look at a ton. We look at systems because I am against all micromanaging. I hate, hate, hate micromanaging, I don't think anyone likes it. But a lot of people do it. I don't like having to chase people around to find out what they've done. I'm not their mother, I don't need to check in and make sure they did their homework. You know what I mean? So we are building systems that help the business run itself. And the team runs itself instead of having you have to do all the stuff. 

 

Next is the team because you can't really have an agency without the team. I mean, an agency is a team, but as client-facing has its own work to do deals with those clients directly. So you're going to need that team, how are you going to hire them? How are you going to manage them? How are you going to build that culture that everybody loves working for you? And they want to stay? That's a huge thing, too, right? We have a lot of people that have teams that have huge turnover. And that culture, right, there is a big, huge part of that. And finally, we really work on clients. How are we going to talk to clients about what this looks like, when it's we versus me kind of thing? How are we going to market that, like how we're going to talk about it, where they feel loved and welcome and happy to have more bandwidth and more support versus just you? 

 

Oh, one last thing, mindset. It's not actually a module, it's kind of through all the modules, going from being a sole provider for these services, or even starting to have a little bit of a team to running an agency is hard on the mindset. It's really hard to get your mind around it sometimes. That is gonna be a big thing that we talked about throughout. We all work at it. I work on it every day. So it's definitely something that is woven through the entire program. I gotta tell you as we started, what's hot, what's it's April 2022 now and we started the first beat around in January 2022. And I just love this program. I love coaching in it. I get so excited when someone figures out something for the first time like that big aha moment. It's my favorite. And I have to say in January, I was walking into the first time doing a group coaching program, I'd launched for the first time, and it was messy. I didn't know that the passwords weren't being sent out. Right, right, because I didn't hit the right button. Everything was a little messy. And I was really unsure of how it was all going to work. And I am now we just started our fourth month in the program of this first beta round, and I just love it. Helping someone figure out their offers after they've been so stuck for so long, is just the best. It is the best. And it's the reason I love coaching. Like seeing that spark. And that transformation is incredible. And being a part of it and helping someone figure out that transformation. I can't even tell you, it's so exciting to me. 

 

So if you are looking for that kind of spark, that kind of transformation, you better hurry, enrollment is open until April 15 2022 to reach out to me if you have any questions about the program, and I hope to see you inside. 

 

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 about all the things growing and scaling your agency for show notes and more info on all the things head over to Reynoldsobm.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.