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Build a Better Agency Podcast - EP 360: Thinking toward the future in your succession planning strategy with Drew McLellan

EP 360: Thinking toward the future in your succession planning strategy with Drew McLellan

08/29/22 • 27 min

Build a Better Agency Podcast

When you’re running an agency, you know you will not have it forever. While your goal could be to sell it eventually, you must consider retirement, career pivots, or plain old ownership fatigue as part of your succession planning strategy. Most of us aren’t thinking about what’s happening 3, 5, or even 10 years down the road in day-to-day agency operations. But, it’s very important to understand how your decisions today could impact the future value of your business. Today’s solocast covers everything you need to know about what you should focus on to increase your valuation and why it matters to start thinking about your succession planning strategy right now.

For 30+ years, Drew McLellan has been in the advertising industry. He started his career at Y&R, worked in boutique-sized agencies, and then started his own (which he still owns and runs) agency in 1995. Additionally, Drew owns and leads the Agency Management Institute, which advises hundreds of small to mid-sized agencies on how to grow their agency and its profitability through agency owner peer groups, consulting, coaching, workshops and more.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:
  • Why your agency isn’t as valuable as you might think
  • The importance of thinking toward the future when making current agency decisions
  • The recipe to increase your agency’s valuation when it’s time to sell
  • Why profitability and where it’s coming from matters
  • Why you should be making yourself irrelevant as your agency grows
  • How agency culture plays a role in your succession planning strategy
  • Why you should avoid “gorilla clients” that make up too much of your AGI
  • Where else you should invest your money outside of the agency
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When you’re running an agency, you know you will not have it forever. While your goal could be to sell it eventually, you must consider retirement, career pivots, or plain old ownership fatigue as part of your succession planning strategy. Most of us aren’t thinking about what’s happening 3, 5, or even 10 years down the road in day-to-day agency operations. But, it’s very important to understand how your decisions today could impact the future value of your business. Today’s solocast covers everything you need to know about what you should focus on to increase your valuation and why it matters to start thinking about your succession planning strategy right now.

For 30+ years, Drew McLellan has been in the advertising industry. He started his career at Y&R, worked in boutique-sized agencies, and then started his own (which he still owns and runs) agency in 1995. Additionally, Drew owns and leads the Agency Management Institute, which advises hundreds of small to mid-sized agencies on how to grow their agency and its profitability through agency owner peer groups, consulting, coaching, workshops and more.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:
  • Why your agency isn’t as valuable as you might think
  • The importance of thinking toward the future when making current agency decisions
  • The recipe to increase your agency’s valuation when it’s time to sell
  • Why profitability and where it’s coming from matters
  • Why you should be making yourself irrelevant as your agency grows
  • How agency culture plays a role in your succession planning strategy
  • Why you should avoid “gorilla clients” that make up too much of your AGI
  • Where else you should invest your money outside of the agency

Previous Episode

undefined - EP 359: Agency management system with Juliana Marulanda

EP 359: Agency management system with Juliana Marulanda

Now that we’ve discussed what systems and processes are, the tools we can use to implement them, and how to integrate them into team culture, let’s talk about what happens when we start to use these processes as we scale our agencies.

This week, Juliana Marulanda of ScaleTime shares her 20+ years of knowledge with creating systems and processes in agencies and how it frees up more time to do what we love. We discuss how to get your agency unstuck from bottlenecks in productivity, reduce day-to-day chaos, and, most importantly, how to stop leaving money on the table from disorganized management.

Featured by Forbes and Entrepreneur, Juliana helps uplevel businesses into lean, mean, profitable machines. On average, she and her team create ways to free up at least 30 hours per week for her clients so they can have successful agencies that run without them. Agency owners can find themselves saying, “I do what I want, how I want, whenever I want — now, that is freedom.”

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:
  • How to free up more space in your business for creativity
  • How to create systems and processes that work whether you’re in the office, hybrid, or 100% remote
  • The clearing of the storm after you establish systems and processes in your agency
  • Where money is being left on the table without proper procedures in place
  • The trajectory of emotions agency owners experience as they change their day-to-day
  • How Juliana helps agencies wrap their heads around management, HR, and hiring challenges
  • The importance of creating culture in your agency and why that affects day-to-day operations
  • How to get unstuck if you’re stuck in a loop of unchecked chaos

Next Episode

undefined - EP 361: How to write a creative brief with Tim Brunelle

EP 361: How to write a creative brief with Tim Brunelle

If you’re in a creative role at your agency, you’re probably familiar with receiving creative briefs that just don’t measure up. Instead of getting inspired to do great work, you’re left wondering where to start or what the point of the project is. If you’ve ever created or pitched a brief, on the other hand, you’ve probably worked from a template or simply checked off the boxes of the bare minimum — it happens to the best of us!

This week, I’m interviewing Tim Brunelle, a creative director with decades of experience in marketing and advertising. Over the years, he has seen hundreds of creative briefs that span the whole spectrum between gold and garbage.

When our brief falls flat, it won’t inspire our creative minds to do great work. In this episode, Tim challenges us to think bigger and better rather than checking off the boxes and reading from a sheet of paper in our briefing meetings. When we think creatively about our creative briefs, we get a wealth of inspiration in return.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:
  • Why creative briefs often fall flat for creative teams
  • Why brief-makers should care about the project just as much as the creative team they’re hiring
  • The two core functions of creative briefs
  • What the pipeline of the creative briefing process should look like
  • How to mentor and inspire creativity across teams to collaborate on the briefing process
  • Why location is important when discussing your vision
  • Determining when a creative brief is necessary to inspire a team to do ground-breaking work

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