093: When You Should Turn to Coaching for Agency Growth
When it comes to coaching as a means to help you grow your agency, there are times when it’s supportive and times when it’s not. How do you discern whether or not coaching will help you transition from done for you service provider to agency owner and CEO?
In today’s episode, I am sharing how you’ll get a better idea of if coaching is the right move for you and your business. You’ll learn why it’s not always the best place to start!
I also discuss what my program AGENCY does to help done for you service providers who are in this transitional period and how a program like mine can support you, your team and your clients.
What’s in this episode:
- Why coaching isn’t always the answer
- My recommendations if you are in the place of growing an agency
- How I developed my Foundations Method
- How to make the Delegations Method work for you
- Why commitment is critical for Agency Owners
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EPISODE 93 TRANSCRIPT:
Download the Episode 93 Transcript
Welcome to the Scale Your Way podcast episode number 93.
You’re listening to the Scale Your Way podcast, where we share simple, proven strategies just for fun for you service based companies. Here, you’ll learn how to scale your business on your own terms so that you can have more time money, create a bigger impact and a better life. I’m your host, Nicole Jackson Miller. Let’s dive into today’s episode.
Hello and welcome. Today, I want to talk about the support that you need as you grow your agency, and so specifically, I want to chat about coaching and if coaching is supportive when you’re growing your agency, because sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s not, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about today.
So for those of you that don’t know me. Hi, I’m Nicole, and I help done for you, service provider step into the role of agency owners. If you are in a position where you have a great service offering, you have a few team members that you’ve worked with, but you know that you need to make some changes in order to be able to continue to grow and not be the bottleneck. I’m your girl. I’m here for you.
So today I want to talk to you about coaching and when coaching can be helpful to you and when it might not be helpful to you as you grow your agency. So this is what I have found as I have coached and guided and mentored lots of different done for service providers in growing their businesses.
Coaching can be helpful in some ways, but it’s just one component. So I believe that in order to truly be successful in growing your agency, it’s helpful to have more than just coaching. So this is what I mean by that, as I have coached dozens of done pretty service providers now. There are certain things that are different about everyone in their businesses, right? That we there’s different people, different service offerings. There’s definitely differences between companies and between the people who are running the companies and between the team members, right?
And we want to be really mindful of that and help you build a business that works for you and for your particular service offering and for the people that are on your team and the clients that you support. And they’re going to be things that are different about the you in the way that you do things versus another company.
And what I will also say is that there are definitely frameworks that can be super supportive as you go to build a team and really step into the role of agency owner that gives you some guidance along the way. I had a client, I was talking to her. It was actually, I think it was a sales call. We hadn’t started working together yet, and she was like, I see all of these testimonials. I talk to people. They said that they’ve had amazing results with you. Like, what are you doing? How is this working? Right? And luckily, I had a framework that I could explain how I help and support people.
And so this is really beneficial because as much as it’s it’s very helpful to have a coach right? And coaching is really somebody asking you questions to help pull answers from you out of you. And while that is very important, it’s not everything.
It’s also really helpful as you grow and step into an agency owner role that you have frameworks and you have steps and processes to help you to help guide you along the way. So this is what I recommend if you are in a position where you’re growing your agency right now.
I recommend first that there is a teaching component to the program that you buy into, meaning that there is some curriculum that teaches you how to make an agency model work for your business. So, for example, inside of my program AGENCY, we have curriculum that first off in the foundations method helps to make sure that your business is set up to have a team support you.
So when you are starting your business and you are operating with either yourself or like a very, very small team of people, you set your business up to make it work in that way, right? And it works and works. And then it’s like, OK, well, I want to either bring in more team members so I can step out a little bit or I want to bring in more clients, right? There’s going to be some things that need to shift specifically when it comes to your packages, your ideal client, your processes and your numbers, your financial numbers.
And I know this because I’ve been there. I had a project management agency. There were some things that worked great about around it. There were some things that did not work great and I did the things that worked well and didn’t work well. I was really able to pull out like, “Well, why didn’t this work well or why did this work well?” And then after working with done for you service providers now for over five years, really supporting them and guiding them through some of these frameworks, it’s very clear what makes certain things successful and what doesn’t right?
And that’s really where this foundations method came into play was understanding, Oh, you know, it’s not just about the packages, it’s also about the clients and the processes that you have can’t they can’t be built off of non-ideal clients because then they’re not going to work for ideal clients, right? And. It’s like years of really refining these methods, and I’m just going to continue to refine this so that I can provide this information to more done for you service providers that are looking to step into the role of agency owner so that they can take these things and again, customize them to their business.
Then we move into delegation in the delegation method, which is teaching people the strategy, the delegation strategy, which you’re going to use over and over again to figure out who do I need to hire? And when do I need to hire them? Or do I have somebody on my team right now that could step into this role?
And then based on that, what are your next steps? So is it creating the standard operating procedures? Is it hiring someone? Is an onboarding someone new or onboarding a current team member into a new role? Is it learning the, the skill set of delegating and the things that I have found to have worked really well and things that have not worked well? Right. And then we step in to the management and communication methods, right? And all of these methods are teaching you strategies for being able to apply this to your own business, right? And then it’s the work of the client to figure out, OK, how do I apply this to my business and then get feedback on that? And that’s where coaching can be really supportive.
So for example, if you have, let’s say you go through our delegation task assessment and we have an awesome spreadsheet that helps people with this and you find that the next thing that you have to delegate is account management or operations management, and you have someone in your team that could be a fit, but you’re not sure. And you might need to hire someone else, right? That’s where it might be really helpful to step in to getting coaching support. Right? Because then the coach who moves me inside of my program AGENCY can ask questions to be able to uncover what the right next step is based on you applying this to your business. That’s where coaching is really helpful.
And then the last piece that you have to have in order to be successful in all of this in growing an agency is is the commitment which comes from you. So there are going to be times where things flow really well. Everything is in alignment and there are going to be times where things are hard and difficult and challenging. Right? We all go through it. It does not matter how much money you’re making. It does not matter how many clients you have. It does not matter how many team members that you have, right? If you are growing in any way, shape or form, there are going to be times that flow and times that are super challenging, right?
And that’s where it really takes the commitment and the reminder of why you’re doing this in the first place. And so with those three things, you can really flourish as an agency owner. So the reason why I share in the title of this video that coaching could be a waste of time is that, you know, if you don’t have the frameworks to know, wait, like, well, what is the next step and the guidance then? You know, coaching is always helpful and it’s helpful. Like, of course, you have so much within you. And having somebody help you tap into that knowledge and inner knowing is so valuable. But at the same time, it’s I think it’s even more valuable when you can pair it with a framework that teaches you the how right or teaches you the strategy so that you can continue and continue to apply it.
So people who are in my AGENCY program, they keep going through the content. So I talk about the concept of spiraling up. And every time you spiral up, you kind of have to address similar things. So the foundations of your business, your team, your operations, your own leadership. Right? So we circle through these themes, and as you circle through them, you can reapply the strategies using our frameworks and then get that coaching feedback and support to be able to have you apply it to your own business.
Thanks so much for tuning in. If you are ready to stop settling for being a done for you service provider and really fully step into the role of agency owner and CEO and lead a team that you love that just delivers excellent client Thanks so much for tuning in today, if you are listening and know that you are committed to stepping into the agency owner role, whether you are a done-for-you service provider that’s working with a few contractors right now or you have a full team of employees and you’re ready to up level your leadership and make the changes in your business that’s needed to create a better and more enjoyable experience for all of your people, your clients, your team and yourself. Then, I invite you to check out my program Agency. You can head over to NicoleJacksonMiller.com/apply to look at the details and apply if it looks like a good fit. If you are accepted, I will send you a brand new free private training only for people that we’re accepting into the program to share with you the details of how we work and how we help remove you from client delivery and allow you to step into that leadership role of your agency again. The link is NicoleJacksonMiller.com/apply. I look forward to seeing your applications.
