Challenge 1
Set your goals
Every escape needs an escape plan, and in order to design the best escape plan, you need to know what freedom looks like. Knowing and defining your goals forces you to clearly articulate your mission, and together we can then achieve those goals.
This challenge will help you question why you started an agency, and reconnect you with the self-belief you need to imagine and design the agency of your dreams, the one you always wanted to create.
Challenge 2
Commit to new behaviours
Your agency is stuck in survival mode because every agency gets stuck there. The behaviours and decision frameworks you adopted as a small agency owner make complete sense when you first started, and are actually the correct behaviours and decisions to help you survive. The problem is that this survival mode behaviour and thinking ends up keeping you trapped in survival mode.
If you want to escape survival mode, you have to understand the behaviours and decisions required to escape, and you have to know how to implement them effectively and consistently.
Challenge 3
Buy back your time
You don’t have enough time. You never have enough time. You might even already know what you need to do in your agency to fix things, but you still never have enough time. The problem is that you sold it all for not enough money, and the only way to get more time is to buy it back. You sold it, you want it back, well you need to buy it back.
In theory this is simple, but in practice you need to know what time you can buy back, how to get it back, how to afford the price of buying it back, and how complete the entire process without causing the agency to fall over.
Challenge 4
Allocate your stock loss
Your business buys and sells stock, but you may not actually realise it. You lose money because you’re either not selling all the stock you bought, or you’re not charging enough for the stock. All highly profitable agencies track, understand, and manage the efficiency and performance of their stock in such a way as to minimise stock loss and maximise profit.
There’s no easy way to say this, if you can’t manage your agency stock you’ll never make healthy profits. This challenge will help you understand your stock, and give you the tools to dramatically reduce your stock loss and increase your profits.
Challenge 5
Define your price positioning
The majority of small agencies get stuck charging far too low for their services. The truth is that if you want to charge more, you need to be able to justify that higher price, and match the higher price with higher value. So long as you are defined as “just another agency” you’ll be stuck charging lower prices, which means you can only afford cheaper skills, who deliver average work.
In this challenge you’ll learn how to create an upward spiral, where you earn better budgets, afford better skills, which deliver better work, which justifies the higher price and earns more budget.
Challenge 6
Design your dream team
Every agency is defined by the skill levels of the employees, and the structure of the teams that are built to service clients. All small agencies make compromised decisions when building teams because you can’t afford top skills. When you grow, you base the future teams and team structures on the original, compromised structure.
What you should do is design your dream team in the future - the best structure with the best people who will bring your agency dream to life, and all your current growth decisions must be based on the dream future, not the compromised past.
Challenge 7
Define your leads targets
You can’t grow without winning new clients, and challenge 7 is all about winning more clients, better clients, on better rates. This doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen without having the specific knowledge required. Selling is hard for many reasons, but the biggest barrier is wasting time trying to sell to the wrong people, at the wrong time.
You don’t have time to waste executing on a bad sales strategy. You have to know exactly who you’re selling to, that they’re ready to buy, and that they already want to work with you.
Challenge 8
Own your fears
Fear is a barrier. Fear is a BIG barrier, and one that has to be addressed in order for you to escape small. We all have fears, and we mostly share the same fears - so you’re not alone in facing them. Fear can’t be ignored, but it can be overcome. You can build your dream agency, you can act despite being afraid, and you can handle whatever comes along.
You first need to understand the fears, plan for them and mitigate them. You need to own your fears and accept that you can handle the consequences. And you need to build a team of people who surround you with support and strength.
Challenge 9
Complete your escape plan
Every challenge up to this point has seen you completing a section in your ultimate escape plan. You will have learned and built everything you need to execute your custom plan to escape small and build the agency you want. It’s now time to bring it all together, compile the escape plan you’ve worked so hard to create, and put it into action.
You’ve got the desire, the will, and the plan. It’s time to bring it all together and build your dream agency.
