The hardest thing I ever handed off in my agency

I recently posted on LinkedIn that one of the keys to breaking through the $100K to $150K MRR plateau is building a leadership team within your agency.

This is something I see all the time with agency owners, and it's something I experienced firsthand.

Our agency sat around $100K/month for at least a year before we finally started growing again.

We'd push up toward $140K/month, something would happen, and we'd find ourselves right back around $100K.

It felt like no matter what we did, we just couldn't break through. We'd make progress, get knocked backward, and repeat the same cycle over and over again.

Until we finally discovered the unlock.

We started turning our senior talent into actual leaders.

We took the standout people who were already on our team, formalized their leadership roles, and gave them greater ownership, authority, and accountability over their areas of the business.

This created an entirely new layer of ownership within the agency. People we could trust to get shit done, make decisions, solve problems, and manage the people within their departments.

And most importantly, it allowed me to start focusing on bigger problems, the future of the agency, and the things that would actually move the business forward.

Because until you have that layer of leadership, you're constantly getting pulled back into the urgent work that keeps the agency alive but doesn't necessarily move it forward.

Now, here's what's interesting.

Recently, another agency founder asked me a question:

"What was the most difficult function for you to hand off to leadership?"

I had to think about it for a moment, and my answer actually surprised me.

None of them.

Creating a leadership team wasn't particularly difficult. It was new, sure, but by the time we were ready to do it, the natural leaders on our team had already become pretty obvious.

It was largely a matter of formalizing their roles, giving them more authority, and making them accountable for outcomes.

The hardest thing I'd ever handed off actually happened well before we built our leadership team.

It was account management and client relationships.

And when you think about it, there are very few functions of an agency that are more consequential than that.

These are the relationships that keep your business alive. You're putting the people who pay your bills, who trust you, and who ultimately determine whether your agency succeeds or fails into someone else's hands.

That's a big deal.

But once you've successfully handed off that responsibility, you've already crossed one of the biggest hurdles in learning to trust other people to run important parts of your business.

And suddenly, handing off larger functions doesn't seem nearly as daunting.

This is why I think there are two incredibly important milestones in an agency owner's journey:

1. Handing off client relationships. Proving that your agency can successfully deliver and retain clients without you personally managing them.

2. Building a leadership team. Creating another layer of ownership so the business can grow without every important decision, problem, or opportunity coming back to you.

The first allows your agency to begin operating independently of you.

The second allows it to begin growing independently of you.

And if you're finding yourself repeatedly hitting the same revenue ceiling, there's a good chance one of these two milestones is standing in your way.

If one of these is the next big milestone in your agency and you're not quite sure how to get started, just reply to this email.

I'd be happy to help you figure out your next steps.