📊 How to prevent agency issues BEFORE they start

Ever had someone take advantage of you?

They thought you weren’t paying attention so they started to slack off?

That’s exactly what happened to me this year with my customer success admin.

Before I went on paternity leave in May, I knew he needed to be let go.

He’d been trained properly, but tasks were still being missed. However, it wasn’t bad enough to take immediate action.

When I returned from my leave, he was letting all kinds of things slip through the cracks:

• Clients were billed incorrectly

• Some weren’t invoiced at all

• End-of-day checklists weren’t being sent

• Tasks were consistently missed on his daily checklist

Here’s how it all unraveled, and why this matters for your agency:

I hired this admin from a Belize staffing firm.

The owner of the firm highly recommended him, and he seemed like a great fit—a recent college graduate with plans to pursue accounting and finance.

• He spoke perfect English

• He learned quickly

• He seemed awesome

From the start, I told him this role required autonomy, and he assured me he could handle it.

Each time something was missed, I made new training materials, recorded Looms, and added tasks to his daily checklist.

But nothing worked.

When I began training his replacements, I realized the situation was far worse than I expected:

• He was definitely committing time theft for months

• He had been lying for months about tasks he said he’d done

In short, he took advantage of my paternity leave and my lack of auditing when I returned.

I let him go and onboarded new admins, who have been amazing.

Here’s what I would have done differently:

Hire from a referred vendor

I was set on hiring someone from Belize because English was their first language.

But I didn’t have any references to check the staffing firm’s reliability.

For EAs and assistants, I always refer clients to these trusted vendors:

• CipherHQ: https://www.talenthq.co/

• Go Carpathian: https://calendly.com/recruiting-specialist/discovery-call

Both have consistently delivered great results for clients.

Implement an auditor

For many clients, we implement an auditor in key roles to ensure tasks are being completed. I should have done this for the admin role, too.

This also ensures that someone else is trained in the role, ready to step in if we need to replace them or cover for time off.

Time tracking

This admin never tracked his screen time in a way that aligned with his tasks.

While time tracking can be gamed, it’s much harder to do, and requires someone to intentionally conduct time theft.

Trust my gut

I knew I should have fired this guy months ago, but because the issues weren’t severe enough, I didn’t.

If you know someone needs to go, trust your instincts—even if it’s a distraction from your main mission.

Use this as a reminder: we all make mistakes.

The key is to learn from and correct them!

Is Your Agency Protected Against Costly Mistakes?

We've all experienced the pain of trusting the wrong person or missing crucial red flags.

In business, these oversights can be costly.

But here's the thing: most agency problems aren't about individual mistakes.

They're about systems.

At 8 Figure Agency, we've seen it all.

And we know that the difference between struggling agencies and thriving ones often comes down to their operational foundation.

It’s not wishful thinking to build an agency where:

• Projects run like clockwork, with or without your oversight

• Your team consistently delivers high-quality work

• You have the freedom to focus on growth, not day-to-day fires

We've helped over 800 agency owners transform their businesses from chaotic to streamlined.

How?

• By implementing robust systems and processes

• Creating clear accountability structures

• Optimizing team performance and productivity

Ready to take your agency to the next level?

🗓️ Schedule a call with our team here…

We'll look through your specific challenges and help you make a simple plan to help set your agency up for sustainable growth (with fewer issues).