Break Your Agency's Bottlenecks
What is a Business Bottleneck
The term “bottleneck” refers to how the neck of a bottle limits the flow of liquid. It doesn’t matter how thirsty you are — the slim bottleneck determines how quickly you can quench your thirst. Similarly, bottlenecks are also present in businesses. These limitations reduce the flow of work, causing demand to exceed capacity. Business bottlenecks are easy to identify, as they have a longer wait time than other aspects of your workflow. Ever been stuck thinking, “Why is this taking so long?” That’s a good indication that your business has a bottleneck.
My goal with this article is to help you identify and remedy bottlenecks that may be hindering your ability to grow.
Agency Bottlenecks
There are generally 3 types of bottlenecks that you’ll encounter in your business:
1. Team Inefficiency — A task requires a certain amount of time — but someone on your team (or you) consistently spends more time than necessary to complete the task.
For example, let’s say your rule is to always send meeting summaries to clients within 24 hours. However, one of your account managers takes 2–3 days to send it over. This situation causes your client to remember the meeting from their perspective instead of how your agency understood the meeting. This is a recipe for scope creep.
2. Systems Inefficiency — There is an inefficient system or process in your agency limiting your ability to reach full capacity. You really feel the pain of an inefficient system when it comes to service delivery.
Here’s an example: let’s say that your account team goes through a checklist when delivering SEO-related services. Different team members have started to include their own workarounds because the checklist hasn’t been updated with new learnings over time. This is an inefficient system — the agency is not adapting or benefiting from each successful case of working with a client on SEO.
To determine if you have an inefficient system, ask one simple question: Is the team using the system? If there are workarounds or people have invented their own process, then you have an inefficient system.
3. Approval Workflows — When a project workflow constantly requires management approval, we start to see hiccups. In these cases, the bottleneck quietly creeps up; you have so many other projects on your plate that you slow down the team’s ability to execute their work. Approval workflows highlight how some bottlenecks are created due to a desire to control. Overcoming these bottlenecks is usually a matter of incorporating intelligent systems and control(s) in your agency. It’s tough to scale any business when there’s a bottleneck on output — yet many agency owners often mandate that they sign off before anything goes to the client. That’s a manageable arrangement for a small shop with fewer “promise keepers” in operations. But the need to review, revise and oversee everything production-related means that agency owners are working in the business instead of on the business.
Control vs Controls to Remedy Bottlenecks
Many agency owners unknowingly have built their business for control, primarily based on their personal production. This arrangement causes you, the agency owner, to be the bottleneck in your business.
Control says, “I need to be the second set of eyes. Then I will decide whether we need another round of revisions.” Control is all about you, and doesn’t allow the agency to scale without you working directly in the business.
Be honest: have you shared some of these sentiments before with other business owners or mastermind groups?
I make the key decisions
I land the big clients
I manage most of the day-to-day operations
There is nothing wrong with any of these statements or beliefs. However, in order to scale the business, we need to move control of the business from your purview to a different place. Set up the business for success — allow it to police and control itself through smart systems and processes.
Controls with an “s” says “Check Basecamp (or your project management tool of choice) and follow the outlined process.” Controls are processes and procedures that safeguard your business from uninformed or careless actions by your team members.
Agency owners often struggle with one core misconception: the need to handle everything finance-related.
This is because we’ve unfortunately heard one too many stories about embezzlement. To protect your business from embezzlement, controls can be incredibly helpful. For instance, one person could provide you with a list of all monthly deposits, while another person reconciles your books. With these safeguards, you can give your team the feedback it needs to make smart decisions without them constantly filling up your to-do list during status meetings.
Controls are important in your agency — not because they magically help your business run more efficiently, but because they provide crucial feedback. In our example above for team inefficiency, we had a team member who consistently sent meeting summaries late. A smart control in your agency, which might be as simple as a checklist, gives that team member the feedback and drive to send that summary to the client in a timely manner. Oftentimes, it’s not that the team members are negligent; rather, they don’t have a dashboard giving them information on what needs to be done and when.
The process of identifying and remedying bottlenecks in your business is all about continuous improvement. When I work with clients, they typically believe they need to carve out countless hours to get all their standard operating procedures on paper. Trust me on this one — you’ll never have the time to do all of this. Instead, let’s deal with the realistic approach: to look at individual services in isolation, and ask yourself how we can get better at delivering this service.
If you want to learn more about how to remove bottlenecks to grow your agency, then check out our Agency Ops service.