🔥 This Week’s Agency Insight

From Jordan Ross @ 8 Figure Agency

January, 14 2024

I’ve seen thousands of entrepreneurs miss out on tens of millions in revenue due to missing this one thing

It blows my mind every time

A generation of CEOs that don't know how to make their company better

Everyone is focused on growing revenue

But the thing everyone missing is costing them a fortune

Skip this and you’ll be wishing you mastered this company skill in 2024

Preface:

There are two ways to grow a company:

• More sales

• Higher LTV of existing clients

The first will make you a millionaire faster 

The latter is what will make you a decamillionaire faster

The sham with entrepreneurship in the 2020s is that no one really knows how to build a business that can get better on its own

The process that solves this issue is called continuous improvement

Continuous improvement is the concept of making a process or segment of a business better every week/month

Oftentimes, a churn rate of 12%-20% per month is not a reflection of one thing going wrong

It is a reflection of dozens of things going wrong

Here are the 2 different ways to implement this to build a machine of a company

1- On-the-fly improvement

Oftentimes the biggest improvements in a process are the ones that sum up tens of small improvements

At Amazon, we called these JDIs- Just Do Its

This one is simple to begin, hard to sustain

When you, or a team member sees an area of a process that can be improved, and if it's a quick fix….JUST DO IT

Sometimes the only way to make this clear in a company is by having the founder fix a small issue and communicate to the team that they should have fixed it

Example at 8F:

Over 2023, some clients came in and were getting a little confused about our onboarding process

• We onboard clients and build a custom plan

• We present that plan and get alignment forward

• We begin consulting, and sometimes, this starts in the middle of the month

For these accounts, we would run a prorated experience and then set them up on their auto subscription on the first of the month

For whatever reason, this was causing confusion

I jotted this down as an issue, went in, and built a new email onboarding process

This still did not solve the issue

Then, I improved the flow by adding a picture

Then, I began having consultants review this onboarding email with clients on their initial call

These were all small tweaks, but the focus was on the process and as a last resort, the people 

Oftentimes, these small adjustments are what keep clients bought in to work with you over the long term

2- Intentional improvement

An intentional improvement process will help your business be a market leader

There are a handful of ways you can implement this into your business, but two of them are simple and highly effective

A- The AAR

After every time a client churns or something major goes wrong, an AAR should be conducted

This stands for after action review

This process can be its own meeting or a subset of a meeting

In its simplest form, it's a process of asking why something went wrong, and how we can improve it

Follow these 6 questions to execute an AAR:

1. What were the intended results?

2. What were the actual results?

3. What will we do the same next time?

4. What will we do differently next time?

5. What are the actions we must implement?

6. Who owns these actions?

Here are places you can implement this 6 question process

• During operational meetings

• During end-of-day or end-of-week reporting

• During its own meeting (when clients churn for example)

Slowing down as a group to review the issues and solutions is the simplest way of improving your business processes

It's also the one thing that as you do it consistently, turns your business into a self-sustaining and self-improving machine

• Increasing LTV

• Increasing profit 

• Increasing overall experience 

B- The issues list

This one can really lead a company in the right direction or wrong direction

When done well, this will change your business

If you have a process that continues to deliver sub-par results, I would recommend you aggregate all the issues you are seeing

It can be overwhelming to complete an AAR or a JDI because there are so many things going wrong

When compiling multiple issues in a list, you can order that list from the highest priority and the biggest potential issue to solve to the lowest priority

When done well, you can compare the issues in relation to the data of the business

This would be a process to implement when  a company is really struggling

Conduct this process over the course of 3-6 months, and watch the business turn around

TLDR

Build a business that can get better on its own

It will make you a lot of money and make your life easier

Thanks for reading. 

P.S Want to build an hands off, no stress profit generating agency? 

Harness the power of processes, and systems to build a profit generating team that function with or without you. Click here to schedule a meeting

The 8F team will be ready to give you a free consultation.

Killer Content (My favorite pieces of content from last week):

• Podcast: Ultimate: How to Think About Selling Your Agency

• Long Form Youtube: The Ultimate Guide to Conducting an Effective Annual Performance Review

• Short Form Youtube: Why Getting Out of Operations is Crucial for Sale Success?

Stay Happy

Stay Hungry,

Jordan Ross

CEO & Founder @ 8 Figure Agency

Let's Stay in Touch!