41 – Designing Your Leadership Team (Book Excerpt)

The following is an excerpt on designing a leadership team intentionally from my Agency Overhaul book.  

For context, it takes place after discussing human psychology and the ideal agency environment. 

“In addition to a safe environment, you’ll want to seek out a diverse coverage of behavioral and thinking styles.

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. In their skills, yes, but also in their thinking, motivations, experiences, communication, ingenuity, and focus.

You will benefit immensely from building a team with a wide range of these elements and encouraging them to support and learn from each other. This is, perhaps, most important in your leadership team.

There are a lot of brilliant books and models designed to help you build a leadership team, so I’m not going to try to reinvent the wheel. Some or all of this may be review for you, but read on just in case. My take on things may provide an angle you haven’t heard or considered. 

You’ll want to make sure you have the following types of people on your leadership team. I’ve marked the “nice-to-haves” as “optional”, whereas any type not labeled should be considered essential. 

1. A Visionary
   This is the type of person who sees what is possible in the company, for your employees, and for your clients. Visionaries help set the course for your agency and are often coming up with lots of ideas about new services, ways to grow, marketing endeavors, etc.

   They are usually a “people-person” and love to connect others, help them grow and thrive, and they may have difficulty saying “no” to people, ideas, or opportunities. A Visionary is almost always a strategist as well, capable of rapidly drawing connections between data points and seeing the big picture. They can go deep into the weeds, but hate to stay there. They’re also great at starting things, but rarely finish them. 

2. An Implementer
   Just as a visionary is constantly coming up with new ideas, the implementor is thinking about what needs to happen to actually take action on the ideas and helps reign in the crazy ideas that should not be started. They are great at taking ideas and laying out the roadmap that will take them from start to finish.

   Often less of a “people-person” (though rarely bad with people), the implementor is a necessary “bad cop” that tells the visionary when an idea or opportunity is bad and when it is worth the effort. They’re also the ones that help finish the projects that are started by the visionary. They’re generally great at analyzing data and making tough decisions. They have the patience and focus to continue through “boring” work that needs to be done. 

3. A Sales Machine (optional)
   That’s right, I listed a sales leader as optional. Yeah, they’re nice to have, but not if you don’t know the direction your agency is going or have the capacity to fulfill the work you sell. That said, a visionary is often good at selling, so you may have acquisition covered if you’re one of the many agencies starting with a visionary. However, being good at selling doesn’t mean you’re good at filling a pipeline.

   There are two types of people such as cold calling, cold email, cold DMs on social, and most other sales activities one has to do while building a brand, lead gen system, and referral network. The hunt-and-kill sales machine is methodical and relentless. They learn from each experience and seek to improve. 

   When it comes time to hire a sales director, Chief Revenue Officer, or whatever you want to call them, you should find someone with a proven track record in growing an agency and growing a sales team. Make sure you give them a nice incentive structure, as sales professionals are more motivated by monetary reward than any other role and the good ones love both the challenge and the reward for overcoming it.  

4. A Money Manager (Optional)
   Often the implementor or an outsourced firm when starting out, you will benefit greatly from having a dedicated person in charge of your finances. As you grow, your priorities will shift from revenue to cash flow and you’ll have all sorts of fun tax, benefits, payroll, and other problems to sort out. Do yourself a favor and bring on someone to handle this whole side of the business so you can focus on being the visionary or implementer (most agencies are started by one or the other).
5. An Experience Manager (Optional)
   Possibly the final piece of the puzzle, you’d add an experience manager when everyone else is in place. This doesn’t mean they’re less important, though. An experience manager is like a Director of Client Services and a Chief People Officer. They observe, analyze, and optimize both the client experience and the employee experience and their job is to give everyone what they want and need without sacrificing the goals and wellbeing of the agency.

   Definitely a “people-person”, this leader should not just give employees what they want, but identify how to best justify their desires and design a path to make it happen. Sometimes that will be holding them accountable to do their work or coaching them on self-development if they have habits that hold them back from fulfilling their role optimally. Improving the client experience generally involves making sure the client-facing and behind-the-scenes roles all have smooth communication and enough empathy to serve each other and the client well. They identify gaps in the current service and/or processes and fill them with client-centric elements to increase retention.

In the beginning, your agency will probably only have a Visionary and Implementer. That’s enough to get you to 7-figures, and I’ve seen it done with only an Implementer, though it took 5-7 years. 

As you seek to grow your team, you’ll want to periodically review your capabilities and how well you’re able to fulfill your role. When you find that you have some financial margin and one of your leaders is spending a lot of time outside of their strengths, you’ll want to consider which of the “optional” roles to bring on. For many agencies, outsourcing finances is the first step toward freeing up time and attention for their leadership team to flourish. 

I generally don’t see the Sales Machine role as a serious consideration until the agency has passed the million-dollar mark, sometimes not even until $2M or so. It all depends on your lead flow, retention, confidence in your hiring ability and fulfillment, and your growth goals.

Regarding the Experience Manager, most agencies don’t have one. Even the 8-figure agencies I’ve worked with have only had a client-centric leadership role (e.g. director of client services) or an employee-centric leadership role (often lumped in with COO duties, which is a mistake, or HR). I would recommend waiting until you have a steadily growing agency with reasonable profit margins. It can help with client and employee retention, but it’s a good idea to hire one before you have retention issues if you can swing it.

Most agencies are started by Visionaries with an idea and some level of marketing understanding. Some of these Visionaries are good enough at lead generation and prospecting for themselves that they can get up and running quickly and get pretty far without an Implementer, but they’ll always do better when they have this leader to shore up their weaknesses and start bringing some order to the chaos that Visionaries tend to live in.

The few started by Implementers can get farther in their growth without needing a Visionary and many decide that they’re happy with slow and steady growth or a boutique agency with no excessive growth goals. That said, for those Implementers that want to grow their agency faster or larger, a Visionary will be incredibly helpful for coming up with ideas on how to grow and executing on the plans you co-create.

Whichever type you are, it’s important to understand your role and your strengths, delegating anything you can that others could do better. As you grow larger and larger, you should be doing less and less. If you feel like you should be doing more and you’re the least capable person in the agency you started, you’ve done a great job and should keep it up.

Seek to surround yourself with capable and autonomous leaders that will take their assigned role and responsibilities and run with them to create the best possible outcome. This will help you do what you do best and will all but guarantee that you succeed with your agency.

The right leadership is only part of the success equation, though. Let’s go over some things to keep in mind when hiring the rest of your team and working to retain them as long as possible.”