Hey y’all today. I want to talk to you about one of the coolest things I learned in this agency game that I wish I knew earlier.
Most of the stuff I wish I knew years ago, um, it would have been very helpful. It would have been nice to know.
So my goal here is to obviously share with you the pieces. I wish I would’ve known in its simplest form.
And one of them is bucketing. Bucketing. Is this concept of how do I organize and think about the way I fund my firm.
Can you, when you run an agency, I don’t think a lot of us have broken all the parts of our agency down into buckets and thought about those parts as a percent of revenue.
So I want you to do that today. I’ll give you an example of how I do this, and then you can apply it to your business.
Okay. I take sales development, a E’s marketing, client services, operations, training, finance people, ops general overhead.
And I put all of those in columns on a spreadsheet. And then I look at how much we spend on each of those as a percent of revenue every month.
What I’m looking for and hoping for is where do I spend my money? And does it align with my values?
I know it sounds like a crazy concept, but it’s a simple one in the sense that oftentimes we say we’re all about X at our company, and yet you really fund all your money goes into Y.
So you’re saying you’re about X yet. Your culture, your people internally, they don’t feel that way. And you don’t know why.
What I found is awful. Sometimes it’s because that’s not what your funding and your culture is, what you fund your culture is your values.
It’s your beliefs, but your values and your beliefs operate, frankly, pretty shoddily. If they’re not funded, right? And so in its simplest form, how you fund your business traditionally says what your agency is good or bad out.
If you put all your money in delivering client success, you might have a really good product, but you might have to do layoffs because you don’t have enough pipeline.
Other people might focus all their money, effort and attention on pipeline, but then struggle with retention because they don’t really fund client services.
Right? So take the time, break your business into these buckets and look at them as a percent of revenue and then bake into that percent of revenue, your net income target.
And then you can allocate your money into different parts and you can run experiments. What if we funded this more?
What would it do to retention? What if we funded that more? What would it do to top line revenue growth, et cetera, right?
So play around with this break your business and its departments into buckets and see where you spend your money. I will imagine you’ll walk away with some new ideas, insights, and understanding how your business operates and what you fund.
Thanks. And hopefully that’s helpful. Bye everybody.
