🔥 This Week’s Agency Insight

From Jordan Ross @ 8 Figure Agency

January, 21 2023

97% of business owners that are at capacity F up their growth

They move too quickly

They say yes to all incoming business

This is NOT the way

Everyone telling you to say yes and figure it out on the way is wrong

Build your business the right way

Preface:

This is written for the companies that are hitting capacity, running out of slots for new clients

Here are the 6 ways to build CORRECTLY when you have consistent leads and sales coming in

1- Slow Down to Speed Up

The #1 thing that will F your growth is your unwillingness to slow down

Here is what will happen if you don't slow down

You will:

• Keep saying yes to clients

• Hit max capacity/burnout

• Create a worse service 

• Churn clients/talent

• Ruin your brand 

• Shrink 

Compared to:

• Putting a hard cap on new clients per month based on capacity

• Inform prospects of this hard cap & establish a waitlist

• Build based on how fast your operation can move

Being OK to slow down creates scarcity in the marketplace

It's an abundant mindset

You can delay clients or increase prices when you have a waitlist

None of your competitors have a waitlist, I promise you

2- Identify Cycle Time for Onboarding & Training Talent

From the moment you place a job post to the moment you have a team member fully trained, there is an average length of time for the full process

That is called cycle time

On average, to hire the RIGHT account strategist, it may take you 3 hires and training the right one may take 3 month

Hiring the right one may take 3 months

Your cycle time, based on hiring and training is 6 months

If you know the cycle time of hiring and training this one role to be ready to onboard talent is this long, you are going to begin hiring WAY earlier 

Knowing cycle time per role in your business is critical to getting out of the capacity constraint 

As you start the process to source, hire, onboard & train, and track the length of time so you can better forecast moving forward

3- Source Inbound & Outbound

A talent funnel is the same as a marketing funnel

You get leads inbound (job postings & ads) and outbound (DMs)

If you’re already constrained, ensure you’re deploying all strategies to get talent

Ads

Multiple job posts

Outbound DM targeting people in other companies

My simple outbound process:

• Build a list on LinkedIn of people you want to recruit (go to LinkedIn, search job title, add them”

• DM these people the following script when they accept connection:

“Hello, we are paying $500 to anyone who refers us a candidate for the following position:

I saw you’re in the same role, know anyone who may be interested? If this is you, we’re paying a $1000 onboarding bonus.

Thanks!”

4- Micro Hires

The majority of times someone makes the wrong hire, it can be avoided

My biggest hack for this is micro-hires

Onboard & train someone with the intention to work on 1 account

Inform new hires that you want to ensure the partnership is a win-win

If they’re in a job, have them stay in their role, go through your onboarding and training on the side to eventually work on 1 account

This is a win-win due to:

• The ability for the candidate to ensure they actually want to work for you

• The ability for you to ensure this candidate is the right fit

Society dates before they go exclusive

Let's make that the case in hiring 

Added note:

If you do this with 3 candidates simultaneously, you mitigate wasting time on 1 bad candidate

If you also know your hiring ratio is 3-1  (meaning for every 3 hires, only one works out), this enables you to play the numbers game the right way

5- Hire and Train

I wrote a thread on training in the past, instead of going deep here, I’m going to link it for you

Check it out below:

https://twitter.com/jordan_ross_8F/status/1506239293018152965 

6- Forecast 

Final step

Now that you understand how to get the candidates stood up, we need to ensure we don’t end up in this place ever again

Forecasting will solve this for you

Here is how to do it

A- Identify data factors to use in the calculation:

New clients/mo

Churn/mo

Capacity

B- Establish baseline

New clients/mo= 10

Churn/mo= 2

Capacity- calculate per role:

Account manager capacity: 15 clients

Project manager capacity: 20 clients

Account manager current clients: 10 clients

Project manager capacity: 10 clients

C- Math

In the above example, you will hit capacity for both of your roles in the next 30 days

You onboard 10 new clients a month, churn 2 and the net difference is 8

Based on these numbers, account managers get to full capacity within 2 months of being onboarded 

PMs get to full capacity within 3 months of being onboarded

Knowing these numbers, you’ll have to begin onboarding talent in cohorts

Above, I mentioned that you may have a 3-1 ratio for a given role

If you know that each role hits capacity within its first 2-3 months of being hired, and some roles take 6 months to get fully sourced and trained, you may need to be making 6-9 hires at a time to spread out onboarding and training

At 8F, when we make a hire and don’t have a current need for them we say something like this:

Our onboarding takes 2-3 months but we expect there to be demand for your role within 3-4

If you’re open to it, we would like to onboard you on a micro basis now, and put you through our normal training process with the intention of having you fully ready when we have a PT/FT business need

Would this work with you?

TLDR

Forecast and hire

Read the above thread, it's good I promise

Thanks for reading

If you need help with this, DM me to book time and receive a consultation to solve your business problems

Share this with a friend who may need help

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.

1. Talent- Talent- Scaling your agency is hard, finding the right talent is harder. MultiplyMii has helped source over 20 FT roles for 8F clients and more than 1K to date. Book time with them here to get help on sourcing any offshore role for your business.

   https://hubs.ly/Q01Z5n6Q0

    

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

• Podcast: Ultimate: How to Set Goal for an Organization

• Long Form Youtube: Your Business Will EXPLODE After Learning Amazon's Secret Strategy

• Short Form Youtube: Hiring a "Deal Closer"?

Stay Happy

Stay Hungry,

Jordan Ross

CEO & Founder @ 8 Figure Agency

Let's Stay in Touch!