How to Scale Clients (And Avoid...

Does your agency feel like it’s held together with duct tape and excitement? You wonder how your team will manage yet another account. The constant juggling act leaves you exhausted.

Today’s guest knows exactly how to transform that chaos into a well-oiled machine. Haydn Fleming , CMO of 2POINT Agency and Managing Partner of their Dallas branch, has built systems that successfully managed client programs simultaneously. As someone who’s plugged into countless marketing programs at any given time, Haydn brings practical, proven strategies for creating sustainable systems that scale. And he’s here to show how you can build an agency machine that runs smoothly, whether you’re handling 10 clients or a hundred. 

Can you paint a picture of what it looks like when agency processes start to break down?

Haydn Fleming: Yeah, it’s pretty much terrible in every meaning of the word. You’re experiencing problems with your team, your staff. You’re looking at being spread thin. Your clients are experiencing issues, maybe for the first time, clients that you’ve previously had great relationships with, or are starting to feel like you are not the same anymore.

Quality of output, dip frequency, speed of output, and dips. Your communication structures are broken. It becomes harder to track expenses. You get a lot of people involved or a lot of processes going on. More time is having to be spent on internal communication, which at the end of the day is just more expense, building on what you were previously doing.

Maybe you’re having to hand responsibilities off to people who don’t have the proper training that they need. And so that then causes more lack of quality, more issues to appear. And realistically, over time, it pretty much always goes the same way. You either figure it out and you get things back on track, or you end up back where you started, and your whole attempt at trying to scale and all that work that you did to grow goes back to the bottom, and you’re back where you started.

Mike Allton: I suspect a lot of folks listening might have been cringing a little bit. As I heard you describe problems that they’re probably going through now, I can recall being told by clients. It’s just you’ve gotten too big, and what they’re saying is they’re not getting the same kind of attention that they might have used to, because I or other agencies have been thinking, we’re not too big at all.

We want to be even bigger. But obviously, they’re not giving the same kind of handholding and care and attention that those customers deserve. 

In your case, what were some of the early signs in your journey that made you realize that you needed to build some better systems?

Haydn Fleming: I think it’s the sum of and a little bit of all of those things I just mentioned. You get to a point where you experience customers commenting on different experiences. Maybe an experience that used to be good is now not as good as it used to be, or an experience that used to be smooth or fast, or the quality used to be high.

They’re feeling like it’s not the same thing that they’re getting anymore. Or also just conversations internally, you’re going to have your staff raising red flags and saying, “Hey, I don’t have time to do that,” or “I don’t know how we’re going to get that done,” or “That person’s already busy, they can’t get this done this week.”

And so you see promises being made and then not being fulfilled, which is the golden sin in this round of business. When you make a promise, you have to keep that. And you see those signs early. But it’s also one of those things that if you’re seeing a sign, you’re probably already a little too late. And we’ve had experiences in the past. I’ve personally had experiences in the past of committing. And if you’re earlier on in your agency career. It’s easy to say, yes, we can do that. And then everything’s going great, and that’s good for you.

It’s good to say yes to a lot of things, but eventually you hit that wall and suddenly you’re realizing like you can’t do everything, or at least you can’t in your current capacity. And so you have to step back, reanalyze, and figure out how to do it. How do we build something so I can keep saying yes?

And that very quickly becomes less about you and more about the people and systems that you’ve built around you. And I think it’s a different type of skill. It’s a different part of building a business. Because I think in the early stages of an agency, it’s so founder-led.

It’s very often that there’s only one or two core people that do 90% of the work, and then there’s a lot of hiring VAs and hiring freelancers and doing things like that. And when you get to the point where. You no longer can be responsible for 90% and you realize you have to start relying on a team and systems and tools and all of this stuff to act as it requires a different type of leadership and a different set of capabilities that a lot of agency owners and operators don’t have when they get there the first time.

And so it’s hard, and you have to learn the hard way sometimes. You have to get punched in the face to know what getting punched in the face feels like and how to avoid it in the future.

What do you think would be the first step that they should take to start building a true agency machine?

Haydn Fleming: Yeah, I think, probably the most important thing and the not flashy, not pretty answer is you have to embrace that it’s hard and that it’s going to suck and it’s probably going to be chaotic and it’s going to be a period of your life, not just your career or your job. 

It’s going to be a period of your life when things are going to be a little harder. And it’s hard because that’s what doing good, impressive, difficult things is, if it were easy, everyone would do it. And so I think there has to be a part of you that knows that it’s going to be hard and is okay with that.

If you go in looking for a quick, easy way or here’s a proven 15-step framework. You’re going into it with the wrong mindset, and you’re a lot more likely to fail because you’re not cushioned, you’re not internally prepared for how difficult it is.

I think you have to go into it knowing that you’re going to be going through a very difficult, tight tunnel, but there is a light at the end, and you have to be prepared to build in that environment. You have to be prepared to work in that environment. And it might be six months, it might be a year, it might be two years.

But at the end of the day, if you aren’t going into it with that mindset, I think you’re going to be putting a handicap on yourself that’s going to make it that much harder for you to achieve what you’re trying to work towards. That’s the whole point.

What would some of those potential components be for an agency that wanted to scale efficiently and successfully?

Haydn Fleming: I think one of the first big things that helped me, there’s this book that the author is alluding to, but it’s well known when it comes to leadership. It’s called Who Not How . And I heard about this for the first time, before my work in marketing, I was a leader in a sales organization.

And I heard about this who not how concept, which, for those who haven’t heard it, it’s essentially, instead of thinking about how do I solve this problem, or how do deliver I this result, or how do I get myself out of this negative situation I’m in? It pushes you to think rather than who, as in “Who can I hire? Or who can I work with, or who can I partner with, that is going to be able to do this, maybe even better than I am?” 

And a lot of what this concept alludes to is the ability to save your own time and effort. Because if you can use the labor of others, if you can properly employ people and properly delegate and give the work to people who arguably are better than you at the thing that you need done, then the how doesn’t need to take up all of your mental energy and your day and your week or your expense, etc. By delegating out, by being able to think with a who mindset instead of a how mindset, you’re able to scale a lot faster.

And I can’t tell you how many times, we’re as an agency leader, I am, wall to wall every day, all day. I’m working with clients, I’m working with the team, I’m building a system. We’re doing all of this stuff, for somebody to come in and say, Hey, we have this new idea, this new initiative that we want to execute.

Depending on its complexity, that could be a month, two months, three months of for me to properly execute when I could hire somebody who could do it in two days because they already know how to do it, have been there, done that they can dedicate their every waking hour and every waking minute to it.

And so realistically, like if you think about that. Over a long enough time horizon, you’re able to move significantly faster and achieve significantly more by leveraging people around you rather than building it yourself. So that is probably one of the most important components is how do you employ people to know who the people are?

’cause you can’t just employ anyone, it has to be the person. And then how do you put them in a position where you show that they have your trust, they have freedom, they can fail, they can experiment, try new things, do things their way, and let them go at something.

And when you give people that kind of freedom, especially if it’s their area of expertise or their area of passion, you’re going to get 10 times farther, a hundred times faster. Working in that sort of mentality. And a second to that, in collaboration with that idea is also tech. And especially with AI and where everything is today and where it’s going to be next year and the year after that tech, and it already has been for the last two decades, but going beyond that, tech is getting more and more ingrained in our lives, both work-wise and personal every day every month, every year.

And so knowing when something is a human task rather than a tech task is also a very important skill set because there are a lot of things that you can solve with a handful of clicks on a button today that you needed a 20 hour work week on just a year ago or two years ago, or let alone five, 10 years ago.

So there’s also a, there’s also balance between how you understand the difference between employing humans and again, the humans who have passion, who have capability, who have expertise to do these sorts of things. And then also, when do you employ tech, and both for yourselves, but also for those people.

Because I think if there’s a ripple effect, tech is exponentially more valuable, the larger the team you have, because you can spread that value across more and more individual projects, time, mental capacities, capabilities, et cetera. So the one way that a team member is going to use a tech platform might be more or less valuable than another who might get 10 times the value or zero value out of it.

But when you extrapolate it over an entire team, you can suddenly get five human 40-hour work weeks’ worth of value in a day because you’re getting all this value spread throughout your entire staff. Knowing the balance between the who, not how mindset. And then also the sort of tech-minded aspect of how we then enable those who are capable.

And, it’s not an easy thing to get, and a lot of it is gut feeling, but you can build processes for this. There are some very simple frameworks that I use, or I guess rules that I would use to make sure that I’m doing this the way. So, most of the time when it comes to hiring, I’ll have a couple of simple rules.

Like one everyone’s going to at least two rounds of interviewing with different people. So you never just meet somebody by yourself and make a decision. And even if you’re a one-person agency, ask your wife or girlfriend, or ask your brother or your sister or your cousin or your neighbor, ask somebody, get second opinions.

Take a look at these things, get somebody, get a client, get a partner involved. But always have multiple rounds of opinions on people. Always a fan of doing more interviews rather than less. We have some important roles that we meet with five different people, three different internal meetings, each plus without the client, without the hire in the room we meet.

So we might be working off of 20, 30 meetings to make a single hire. But that’s how we make sure that we get the hire every time. And then that one hire immediately pays for themselves and all that time and whatnot that we invested in finding them, because they were the person, and they’re incredibly capable.

And that always unlocks sort of an exponential growth curve in our business. And then the other side of that is the tech side. There’s a matrix that I like to use. For people who don’t know what a matrix is, it’s essentially just like an x and y axis that you’d see in school. If you did statistics or algebra or any of that, you’d see the XY axis.

And your horizontal axis is the human benefit. And so on the left would be low to no human benefit, and then on the right would be high human benefit. And this is basically measuring an activity or an action. So maybe it’s writing content. We want to write an article.

I would put that probably somewhere on the higher side of human benefit. Having a human involved in that writing process generally is going to create a better product. So that would be something that’s higher on the human benefit axis. And then the other axis, the vertical axis, is human cost.

So how expensive is it fo,r us to use a human versus using tech? If the human cost is high and the human benefit is low, you pretty much always go to tech. It’s going to be expensive for us to have a person do this, and the fact that it’s a person who has little to no value. Then you would go with tech, and always solve that problem with tech.

But if you’re looking at the other side and you say the cost for a human to be involved is low, but the benefit for a human to be involved is high, you would always go with humans. And then the other two categories are always somewhere in between, and you kinda have to make that gut decision sometimes. But I always think of thinking of it through that model, and plotting things out that way makes it much easier to determine when you can solve your problems with humans versus when you can solve your problems with tech.

And do it in a way that’s conscious of the quality that you’re putting out to make sure that it’s consistent with what you’ve delivered up to that point. And what you hold as your values, what do you hold yourself to as a standard?

Mike Allton: And I couldn’t agree more with your perspective on technology.

I was telling you before we started recording, I just spoke at an event in New Orleans targeting digital marketing marketers for major AV manufacturers, and so on. And the entire premise of my talk was that we need to look at AI not as a replacement technology, but as an augmentation and a partnership.

Technology and using it to handle routine stuff so that we can free up our time and people’s time to focus on more strategic, valuable work. So love that feeling, and to the point about having the people. That was Dan Sullivan . Yeah, I put a link to that in the show notes. It’s terrific.

And I love that reference because you’re the first one to come on the show to talk about that book and framework specifically. We’ve talked a lot in this show about the EOS framework or business models, which I think mirrors that extensively. It’s an entire exercise inside of EOS where you identify all the people in your organization not by name, but by role.

And then you start to plug in the holes and make sure you’ve got the people in the seats in the organization, and that takes a lot of ego out of it. Maybe you’ve had to move somebody to a different role. Maybe they’re just not a good fit anymore, you need to hire. But it certainly identifies the gap in your current employment.

Okay. What, we’ve got a great visionary leader who’s running this agency, and he’s got terrific ideas, but there’s nobody in, but maybe we have to put someone in who can implement that role, who can say no once in a while, and control that person. 

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How do you balance automation systemization while maintaining that human touch that a lot of clients expect?

Haydn Fleming: Yeah, I think that my matrix approach helps me to avoid it upfront.

So, how do I first identify? Is this a task or deliverable, or project, or whatever the case may be, that I think would be severely, negatively impacted by using tech? So you can make that judgment early. So the common stuff is agencies, freelancers, internal teams, marketers at companies, et cetera.

Have flocked to ChatGPT , Perplexity , Claude , et cetera, all these large language models. And there’s a lot of content just vomit being written by large language models. And I think that is largely a mistake. And that’s a good example of the brand direction of a company.

The unique tone of voice, the heart of the brand, the essence of the brand, et cetera, is largely translated through the written word. And outside of obviously visuals and things of that nature. But at the end of the day, a lot of that stuff originates in written form. We have briefs, we have documents, we have internal letters to staff, et cetera.

And so much of this stuff is being. I think oversimplified into large language models, and that’s an example of an area where I think marketing is being somewhat watered down by the use of these large language models for, just instant one-click drafting. I’m not going to think about my entire social media calendar.

I’m not going to think about my entire blog calendar for the year. I’m just going to hit five buttons and post whatever it gives me. That I think is an example where we’re completely losing the human touch. Yet for whatever reason, that’s like when people think about AI or they start using AI for the first time, that’s the default.

That’s what step one is for a lot of people is great, let me go just hand my entire job off to this tool. And I look at that as a plague on our industry, and how do we combat that in a way that doesn’t necessarily negate the value or effectiveness of these tools, but uses it healthily, that uses it in a way that doesn’t diminish what a brand could be capable of.

And certainly doesn’t diminish what a brand’s perspective is from the perspective of the public? The customer, the prospects, et cetera. We don’t want them to be looking at a brand with disgust or disdain or resentment because of their use of various pieces of tech. So it’s important that tech is additive in a way that does not detract from our output, volume, or quality.

And so what I find most of the time tools to be very great at is efficiency, speed and rate of output as well as maybe qa, but not necessarily the creation of quality or the creation of unique value. Most of what I find our best work comes out of is, one or two creative minds sitting down, laser-focused for hours on end to create something unique and interesting and compelling.

And then tools and tech and AI and other staff and all of these things come together to then shape that creativity into reality, rather than using it as a one-click button to do the entire process. There still have to be these sorts of key checkpoints, or humans are the most important aspect in the supply chain of marketing creation.

Both strategically. As well as quantitatively from a like distributable perspective, there should never be anything published anywhere that hasn’t been heavily ideated and criticized by a human. I think the idea of letting AI or any tool, in general, run the show a hundred percent is incredibly flawed.

We’re at this early stage with agents, which is an incredibly interesting and deep topic. The idea of AI agents it’s some of the most innovative tech that we’ve had since the birth of the internet. But I still think that it’s going to be mostly used incorrectly in the beginning.

I think there’s going to be a lot of people who are phoning in their job, collecting the paycheck, and then letting an AI agent do the work. And what companies, people, brands, et cetera, are going to continue to experience is further watering down just the internet as a whole, ? Everything that we age with digitally is getting more and more watered down as these tools become more and more accessible and prevalent, and so on.

And so I see just the macro trend, big picture trend already shaping, but then also in the future, it’s going to, I think, only get more and more important, but this trend towards verifiable authenticity and genuineness. And the desire for a lack of professionalism or a lack of polish?

So how do we create things and experiences that the person in the perceiving chair, the person watching on their phone or watching on their computer, or sitting in a theater or whatever the case m, ay be. How do we make sure that we create an experience that they can know and trust is genuine and authentic, and not prescripted by an AI filmed by an AI post, produced by an AI, AI distributed by an AI?

Like, how do we keep humans in human interaction? How do we keep social and social s? That’s one of, if not the most important topic when it comes to mass media communications now, which is how do we prevent, or maybe not prevent, but take advantage of this trend in the watering down of what we all know and mostly love about the internet today.

Mike Allton: Yeah, you’re so. We’re recording this on May 20th, Google is just announcing and rolling out Gemini, baked into Chrome, specifically Gemini agent capabilities . So very soon, anyone with a Chrome browser will be able to ask Gemini to do anything that it could do using the internet browser, which is pretty. Terrifying and concerning when it comes to the kind of topics that we’re talking about. So that’s customer-facing content. 

Haydn Fleming: Yeah. I think every tool that we use has some form of automating this, automating that.

Helping us here, helping us there, and there are a lot of little things like that I think, we’ve learned to take for granted at this point. Making a file and it auto generates a name for that file and a description for it, or you make a Loom video and it automatically copies the link to your clipboard, so you don’t even have to hit command C, command B, there’s things like that are happening in every tool we use daily. There are these little updates all the time, and it’s created a ridiculous amount of efficiency where even just one second, two seconds, five seconds of time is saved here a. Throughout the day, constantly across teams, it’s incredible the amount of shifts in efficiency.

If we’re looking at big picture stuff, what are some tools that I think are maybe moving the needle more than others? Not just the little things that save a second here or there, but some that are doing interesting things. There are two that come to mind away.

One of them is Icon , which is fairly new. I think it’s less than eight months old, or something along those lines. It’s icon.me. So if you’re looking at a browser, go type in icon.me. And it’s an ad platform; it helps you create ads. And it uses a lot of things that it does, but it essentially is a combination of seven or eight different popular ad tools like Motion , CapCut , Facebook ad library , an ad spy for competitor analysis, et cetera.

So there are a lot of these tools that have been regarded as the go-to for a long time, and this company essentially made a version of all these tools, put them into one suite, and then tied them all together with AI, where all these different tools can communicate effectively together.

Everything that you do or create learns from itself. For example, we’ll go into a client account, identify three or four key competitors, and Meta will automatically analyze all of those creatives that those companies are running, identify any trends, but whether that’s from angles or do they feature promos or not?

Do they feature humans or not? Are they graphic design or are they real? Are they videos or images? It Analyzes all these data points and then basically comes back and says, okay, here are the three ad formats that have the highest performance across this competitor set over this period.

We should test creating an ad in a similar format. Then it has a large language model baked into it. So you can have a conversation with its language model that knows the client, Analyzes the client, knows the competitor data, and helps you work your way through creating ad scripts. Then it will automatically generate lots of variations from a real footage library.

So you upload, here’s 300 videos that we have in stock of content that we filmed for this client, or whatever it may be. It’ll automatically browse all of that and pull two seconds from this video, five seconds from that, four seconds from this, stitch them together, and it’ll form a whole ad.

And then it has a built-in editor that you can use like CapCut. If you’re familiar with CapCut, it’s very easy. Drag and drop editor, it does all this in one. Synchronized workflow, whereas this used to be 5, 6, 7 different tools that you had to go log in, download this report, and do some analysis.

Okay, I figured out what this is. Now I’m going to go over here. It used to be a very tasking process and now this is something that like, we can test and create 50 variations of a new ad idea with data behind why we made the decisions we made and what style it is and what scripting it is and all of that in, an afternoon, whereas that used to take multiple weeks to produce.

So I think that tool in particular is compelling. And the other one is a platform called n8n, which was somewhat on the forefront of the AI agent stuff. And then, it’s still, I still would say it is, but it was one of the first tools that allowed you to work across a bunch of different tech platforms and create your agent and teach it how to do tasks of whatever capacity. This is growing quickly. So we’ll see where it goes with ChatGPT’s operator agent, where Gemini goes with their agent, to where, maybe, this won’t be the tool anymore in a few months.

But up to this point, we found it incredibly useful for being able to give it essentially. A job description, like this, is who you are and what you do and what you’re responsible for, and then sending it in a direction and it coming back with completed work. And being able to browse the internet, access different language models, being able to access research databases, spreadsheets, client documents, the website, et cetera.

Like being able to access all this information and use it as a map to execute its tasks, it’s incredibly useful. And it honestly has infinite applications that I think we’re still barely scratching the surface of. But those two tools, I would say, above all, have unlocked a significant area for efficiency that I think any agency would be able to take advantage of.

Mike Allton: Yeah, that sounds fascinating. The first tool was icon.me. What was the second one? The URL…

Haydn Fleming: n8n, so it’s letter N, number eight, letter N.io. Got it. It’s like Zapier , so if you’re familiar with Zapier, it’s like that, but it’s a little bit like further down the food chain in terms of AI.

They’ve just taken the Zapier concept and integrated AI at a ridiculously good and in-depth level. But it’s still incredibly drag-and-drop. I would recommend having some solid understanding of how AI works and having some solid technical skills to be able to read this stuff and interact with it. I guarantee you it’s worth the 20 hours of education that it would take to be able to build systems.

So, for example, I’ll give you an example of a process that we have. I have an agent for his research for SEO. There are a dozen different SEO tools that you can use for research. You could run audits on a website. We’ve got a ton of databases of just backlogged information from clients in the past.

Basically, I have an agent that will read everything in a Google Drive that we have about a client. It’ll read every brief, every thing that’s ever been published, it’ll read every report that’s ever been generated, et cetera. So it knows this client better than I do, probably. It knows every punctuation point and number and stat and everything, and it takes all of that.

It can also browse the internet and use tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs to get keyword data, and then all of that sort of information. It can also do a Google search and look at competitors that are ranking for various keywords that we might target, and read every single page on there and diagnose what they are doing, what they are doing wrong?

Do they use certain scripts or not use certain scripts, etc? And then I have my concoction of what I look for when it comes to good SEO content. And so I have this 80-point checklist of all the things that I want to go through. And previously, I had a member of my staff who would always go through this 80-point checklist, and they would have to go do a Google search and look at the competitors, and they’d have to go in the database and look at the past data.

But now I can have an AI agent do all of it in 30 seconds, and then create a Google Doc. That is an in-depth, like very well put together, analysis and research of exactly what should be done to create a stunning page. And then he sends it to me in Slack. I get a little notification in Slack, and it says, “Here’s the link, go click it,” and it’s done. I can share it. I can do whatever I want with it. And that becomes the basis that then humans can go take this analytical research and turn it into something awesome for a client that customers love, prospects love, and generates performance. And something like that would take 10 hours easily for a good researcher to put that level of detail in. And I can have it done in 30 seconds, and I can do it a dozen times, I could do it a hundred times a day. I could do it over and over again. Yeah, it’s things like that. It’s just like one example. It’s the tip of the iceberg of what we’re going to be able to do with agents and all these other things.

What do you think the biggest mistake in your opinion is when you see agencies that are trying to scale and fix all these processes?

Haydn Fleming: I think it’s a two steps forward, ten steps back type of problem where agency owners, leaders, etc, are afraid to let go of things or let go of processes. They’re afraid to be too malleable. They want to follow the things they hear on podcasts like this, and they want to follow the YouTubers and all this stuff. And, to a degree, that all makes sense.

But I think every agency is so different. And every team is different. Every customer is different. And so I think you have to have your core kind of headspace in the direction. You have to understand the fundamentals, but you can’t necessarily go so far as to follow the step one through ten process that somebody’s perfectly outlined and had to scale to a hundred K a month or whatever it is.

I think that stuff is guaranteeing that you’re building somebody else’s business and you’re not building your own. And they don’t have your business. They have their business. So just because it worked for them doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you. What’s worked for me if I went into the super specific details, it might work for some people, but it also might not work for everyone because you have your own business, you have your problems, you have your pricing, you have your audience, you have everything different.

So I think like having the mindset of knowing it’s going to be hard. Knowing that you need people and you need good people, the people. Understanding the difference between when you need tech and when you need people. Being able to lose a little bit in the short term to gain a lot in the long term is a big thing.

And I think that’s often hard. I’ll give you an example of sales. I think I see this happen the most with sales. Often in the early stages, agency founders and owners and operators, et cetera, are also the ones who are doing all of the sales ’cause that’s how it started. That’s how it still is.

It’s one of the hardest departments to let go, I’ve found, because they’re so afraid that if I give sales off to somebody else and they don’t do a good job, then we’re going to go broke. And my life’s going to end, and everything’s going to be terrible, and I think you have to get out of that mindset of not being able to let go of things.

You need to set yourself up in a position by any means to be able to rest on your product. But what I mean by that is your customers should pay for your business. And if you stop doing everything and you spend a month in Cabo, your business would not blow up. And that’s, I don’t, you don’t have to be making a million dollars a year.

You don’t have to make a million dollars every five years. Like, you can have a fairly small agency and still get to that. So it’s not so much about whether I’ll rest when I get to this size, or I’ll do that when I get here. I’m too small for that, or anything like that. You need to get as close to that as you possibly can first, and then once you’re there, you can start to give up things and not have so much fear around it.

Because when you’re like a hungry dog that needs a bone, it’s hard to give things up. But when you are satisfied, and you’re not living in fear, and you’re not stressed, and you’re not spread thin, then it’s easy to say, okay, like I spend 20 hours a week doing this thing and now I’m going to spend two.

I’m going to give the other 18 hours to somebody else, and let’s see what happens. And if it goes terribly wrong, that’s okay. And you have that mindset going into it that bad things are going to happen because you only need it to work once. As soon as that works, you just earned 18 hours of your work week back, and you can now do exponentially more while also having that person do the thing that you needed them to do successfully.

And then you just do it again, and you do it again, and you do it again. And so you slowly just cut pieces of your work off. But you can’t do that if you’re spread too thin, and you can’t do that if you’re terrified of what’s going to happen or terrified of your bills or anything of that nature.

So you have to be in a personal point of security, you have to be emotionally secure and comfortable with the fact that it’s probably going to be hard and it’s probably going to be painful. And just be open to learning. Like, you don’t have it figured out. I don’t have it figured out. Like, people who make a billion dollars a year don’t have it figured out.

Like, we’re all just still figuring this stuff out. And you have to learn what’s going to work for you and what’s not going to work for you. So just be willing to be in a little bit of pain, get yourself in the best possible position so that pain is survivable. It’s not going to put you in a bad spot.

Be okay with, “I’m going to take two steps back, but because I do that now in three months, I’m going to be 10 steps ahead,” rather than most agency people, owners, etc, do the opposite, which is they take two steps back and then they micromanage this new person. They end up spending that full 18 hours just micromanaging in any case. So then why were they even here in the first place? And so then they let the person go ’cause they didn’t do very good or they weren’t operating independently. And so now you’re back doing it yourself. They get on the treadmill and jump off.

Sometimes you just have to jump on there and be willing to work it out, wait it out, give people room, give people breathing ability so that you can get to where you’re trying to go.

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