Over 1/3 of agencies frequently struggle with overservicing clients. You’ve likely felt the pain yourself.

When projects are going well out of scope and things are taking longer than your team planned, it can have a major impact on your agency’s profitability.

Alyson Caffrey, Founder & COO of Operations Agency, has identified the 5 biggest scoping mistakes across dozens of agencies that are often leading to this overservicing problem–and ultimately underperforming profit margins.

In today’s conversation, you’ll learn:

• What those 5 common mistakes are
• How to spot & avoid them (to improve your agency’s performance & profit)
• A talk track for managing revision requests that’ll make your team & your clients much happier (because what is agency life without those additional client demands?)

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Connect with Alyson on LinkedIn

Connect with Operations Agency on Instagram

An Agency’s Guide to Measuring And Improving Billable Utilization (Ebook)

How to Avoid Unprofitable Client Work (Webinar)

3 Steps to Simplify Your Capacity Planning (Webinar)

How To Drive Client Results 70% Faster w/ Kate Vasylenko

The Client (a film by Umault)

Want to watch the video version of the podcast on YouTube?

Check it out here: Agency Life Podcast on YouTube

Want to get more content to support your agency life?

Subscribe to the Agency Life newsletter, check out past episodes & find more content at teamwork.com/agencylife.

This podcast is brought to you by Teamwork.com.

Clients who are “happy” may still leave you. But clients who are seeing results–and seeing them fast?

Now, that increases the value you deliver and decreases the chances that new clients will churn.

So, how did this digital marketing agency drive client results 70% faster, increase customer satisfaction scores and start getting glowing feedback from more clients?

It was all about strategy.

More specifically, they did away with the old divide between their strategy and client services teams and introduced a new client-facing role solely responsible for consistently updating the client’s strategy and delivering client results.

By creating this new role that now works alongside their project managers, they’ve been able to decrease the feedback loop between performance data and the strategy the agency is executing for their clients.

In today’s conversation with Kate Vasylenko, CEO of 42DM, you’ll hear:

• Why they hired marketers with more in-house experience for this new role
• The questions they asked to find the right talent
• How they made this structural change to their client delivery team (so you can learn how to do the same)

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

An Agency’s Guide to Measuring And Improving Billable Utilization (Ebook)

Connect with Kate on LinkedIn

The State of Agency Operations Report

Hiring Secrets from an 8-Figure Agency CEO


Want to watch the video version of the podcast on YouTube?

Check it out here: Agency Life Podcast on YouTube

Want to get more content to support your agency life?

Subscribe to the Agency Life newsletter, check out past episodes & find more content at teamwork.com/agencylife.

This podcast is brought to you by Teamwork.com.

Isn’t it refreshing when someone further down the path is willing to share the successes AND failures they’ve seen along the way?

That’s exactly the type of conversation you’ll get from today’s episode with Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, Founder of Leveling Up and Co-Host of the top-ranked Marketing School Podcast.

Eric’s journey has taken him from having “no idea how to run a business” at 27 to now having scaled his agency into 8-figures, all while building a media brand, authoring a book and becoming a recognizable name in SEO and modern marketing more broadly.

Despite his successes, Eric does hold back from sharing his missteps along the way and (most importantly) the lessons you can take from them.

For instance, you’ll hear:

• What roles should be contractors vs FTEs in your agency
• The CEO’s actual role in hiring during times of growth
• Counterintuitive ways to identify and recruit new talent

In addition to sharing his hard learned hiring secrets, Eric shares:

• The 2 best operating systems you can steal from to make your agency run more efficiently
• When and where pay-for-performance pricing makes sense for most agencies

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

An Agency’s Guide to Measuring And Improving Billable Utilization (Ebook)

Connect with Eric on LinkedIn

The Agency Owner’s Association with Eric Siu & Neil Patel

Working Backwards by Colin Bryar & Bill Carr

Free Tool to Run Your L10 Meetings in EOS: Instant Agency Tools.com

The State of Agency Operations Report

Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss


Want to watch the video version of the podcast on YouTube?

Check it out here: Agency Life Podcast on YouTube

Want to get more content to support your agency life?

Subscribe to the Agency Life newsletter, check out past episodes & find more content at teamwork.com/agencylife.

This podcast is brought to you by Teamwork.com.