104: Welcome to Season Two: Uplevel Your Agency
Welcome back to Season Two of the podcast! We are happy to announce that we have a brand spankin’ new name: UPLEVEL YOUR AGENCY!
Have you ever felt deep down like something needed to change in your business? Maybe it was an offering or a delivery process or a marketing channel? That’s how I felt about our podcast. We had recorded 103 episodes of Season One and while I loved the topics and interviews, something felt off.
After a lot of reflection, I realized it was the name! In this episode I dive into details around how I figured out what needed to change, what it felt like to “not know” – something I hate lol, and what to expect in future episodes.
I’m so glad that you’re here and I would love for you to share this podcast with anyone who is considering growing an agency or has an agency and wants to make it work better for ALL of their people (their clients, their team and themselves too!)
What’s in this episode:
- Key signs to look for when you need to make a change
- Strategies to figure out what actions you need to take
- The importance of adjusting frameworks to work for YOU
- What to expect in Season Two of the podcast!
Links:
Free Training: 3 Reasons You’re An Agency Owner Who’s Still Doing Client Work
Watch Episode 104:
EPISODE 104 TRANSCRIPT:
Hey everyone, and welcome back to season two of the podcast! I can’t believe it has been so long since I recorded an episode. For those of you who are new or maybe missed it, I hosted Season One of the Scale Your Way podcast, and I think we recorded over 100 episodes and then I decided to pause over the summer.
I wanted to rethink some things, and now we are in season two of the podcast, which has a completely different name, and there’s a reason behind that. So I wanted to explain about the new direction of the podcast and why I wanted to shift away from Scale Your Way, and then what you can expect coming up in this next season and kind of this next chapter of the podcast.
Back when I stopped recording episodes, I want to say it was probably about three months ago, maybe four months ago now. I was having this feeling that something needed to shift. And I don’t know about you, but when this comes up for me, it’s usually very subtle. And I was noticing that the podcast episodes, while I loved the topics that we were talking about, and I loved the interviews that we were having, something needed to shift. And what I realized is that I, I needed some time and space to be able to figure out what exactly that was. Anytime I’m going through, I guess you could even call it a transition, or I noticed that something might be off a little bit or that something needs attention.
And I can’t quite put my finger on it, I usually just take a break and depending on what it is, sometimes it can be a long break. Like for example, this podcast I wasn’t recording for at least three months. Other times when things pop up like this, it might be a shorter break. Like it could be me going out and taking a walk and getting some space or just like signing off for the day, and doing something completely different, like cooking or exercising or playing with my son or anything that just allows me some space. My tendency is to overthink things when I know that something needs to be changed. And what I have found is that overthinking does not work and it really. Causes me to be frustrated and I never really get anywhere.
I feel like I’m spinning my wheels. And so that’s usually when I know I just need to pause. And so in this instance, I was planning on pausing, I think for two months. And then I spoke with my team member and we decided to pause for an additional month to gain some clarity and then also to give us some time to prepare for the launch of whatever the next iteration of the podcast would be.
I knew that I wanted to have a podcast, I just knew something needed to change. And so after reflecting, I realized that while I loved Scale Your Way, the intention behind Scale Your Way was to help business owners grow their business in their own way, on their own terms and not feel like they had to follow a prescribed formula from someone else.
That was like the quote unquote, secret to success, and that they could really build a business that was true to them. And I fully believe in that. And I still believe in that. However, what I realized that I wanted was more focus in my area of expertise. And so while the content around the episodes was very much focused on helping agency owners build and grow their business and help them with team and operations and challenges that might come up while they are looking to continue to grow, I felt like the name really wasn’t true to that.
So my area of expertise was not helping people scale their way in terms of different business models and different types of services, it was really helping Agency Owners be able to get their operations in order so that they had a business that worked better, that worked better with team support. And that was a lot of the content that I was focused on. And so I think what I really needed was more of a name change, and also to clarify that for people.
So that’s what I’m here doing right now. And once I got that clarity, it was really helpful. I went through down a few different paths, to be honest. I was like, well, maybe one of my passions is to also help managers and to help managers, especially people who are transitioning into being managers or who feel like they have the manager title, but were never really trained on being a manager. Maybe they were really good at the skillset that they had before, their area of expertise, whether that was copywriting or graphic design or, I mean, I remember working with people in television who were engineers and they wanted to get promoted and the next level for them was managing other people.
And when they went to do that, they felt like they had no idea what they were doing, right, because it wasn’t their area of expertise. And you can see how there’s a lot of similarities to helping agency owners with this too. A lot of the agency owners I work with are in this position as well, where they’re really good at this skillset and then they want to grow an agency and they’re put in this position where they have to do so much more than their skillset. And there’s usually a discovery phase and a transitional period that goes along with that. So, I also have passion for helping managers.
And so I was trying to figure out is this the same podcast, a season two? Is it a different podcast? And I actually had a conversation with a friend Caroline Hull, she’s actually been on season one of the Scale Your Way podcast many times and she owns a podcasting agency and I was able to get a lot of clarity from my conversation with her. So, if you’re looking for some advice around podcasting or looking to get support, I highly recommend her.
But after our conversation, it became really clear that this was my focus. This was my direction. And so I share this with you because I know growing a business and not just figuring out what your services are, but also figuring out how you want to market and who you want to market to and how you want share your message… this is something that’s, we’re constantly, it’s constantly evolving. And so if you’re in a position right now, or you have been, or maybe you will be where something needs to change and you’re considering lots of different options and almost feel like for me, I was craving focus, but during the whole discovery process that I had when I had took my space and time for three months or so I felt very unfocused.
I felt like I was all over the place and considering all of these different things. And then eventually I got some clarity and, and was able to move forward. And so I share that because I think sometimes when you’re in the process, you feel like something is terribly wrong. I know I have, and I’ve worked with a lot of clients who have as well.
And so I just invite you to remember what I’m sharing and to trust yourself and also trust the process. I think a lot of times we are rushed or it’s encouraged to be rushed to take action, take action, take action. And, and I think oftentimes what we miss is that things do need to be digested.
And sometimes we need to sit with things after we have that awareness to really be able to decide what is it that I want to take action on and what, what direction do I want to go? And now that I’ve decided it’s great. I was able to meet with my team member, we created a plan, I was able to get support around what I wanted to talk about. Now everything is flowing. But I had to really go through that time period to get to where I am in this moment and I’m really excited.
So, what to expect in some of the episodes that are coming up is really around resources for agency owners. I’m going to be sharing new topics that I have not shared about before, based on the experiences that I have supporting agency owners now for over five years.
For those of you who don’t know about me, I started working with teams when I worked in television. That was my first job out of school. And I held project management roles. I was in finance in the purchasing department and really having to navigate working with a lot of different people from a lot of different departments who all had different priorities.
And so what I realized my skillset was, which took me a little while to figure out, was the ability to be able to work with lots of different groups of people, understand where people were coming from, be able to get on the same page and move projects forward, and really being able to help people who were moving into a manager role really be able to step not only into, you have the management pieces of managing people and processes and projects, but there’s also a leadership component.
And I believe that there’s not a difference between leaders and managers. Oftentimes they’re the same people. I think everyone has the ability to tap into their leadership qualities. It’s more of a set of actions and that’s what I was really helping people around me do when I worked in television, not really even realizing it.
And then when I stepped into running my own company, I started as a project manager. I was the only project manager and then I grew a team and ran an agency. And I made a lot of mistakes. I did a lot of things that were right. I made a lot of mistakes and I really learned from those and really, I never gave up on trying to figure it out. I think that’s the biggest piece of this. And even after I stepped away from my agency to support other agency owners, I’ve never stopped wanting to figure things out.
So I don’t believe that there’s a prescribed formula. I do believe that there’s a framework and there’s problems that pop up specifically for the agency model. And so what I really was determined to do was figure out why, what’s going on? I work with agency owners in different industries and I see that there are differences, but there’s also similarities.
And so being able to create a framework that works for agency owners and multiple industries was really important to me, but then also being able to cater it based on the specific agencies that my clients want to build. So what I have found is while we have frameworks and we have methods, right? When you actually go to apply it to your own business, you have to change it. You have to run it through your own filter. And it’s really helpful to be guided through this process, which is why I support agency owners and have programs to support agency owners.
And so I’m going to be sharing a lot of stories and information about my own journey and about helping clients that I just haven’t really opened up about before and so I’m really excited to be able to do that. And then also to talk about what I have learned, what’s working now, what hasn’t worked, what have we discovered through our learning process and then also interviewing different people who support agency owners. So my goal is for this podcast to be a place where agency owners can come to get support in their business.
We’ll be talking a lot about operations, but then, I also have clients who are looking at growing their revenue and they’re looking at how to figure out a marketing platform that works really well for them or wanting to expand their marketing platforms, to come up with content strategies and content plans so that they can continue to bring in clients once they have their operations in order. So I’m really excited about this.
I’m excited for you to be here. I would love for you to connect with me right now. The best place to connect with me is on Instagram. For now I am @nicolejacksonmiller that might change, but I will let you know if and when it does! Stay tuned to keep listening.
And if this has been helpful to you, if you have a friend or know of someone, who’s an agency owner that feels like they would love to have a place where they can get support for their agency, I would love for you to share this podcast with them!
All right, everyone, it has been a pleasure. I’m so excited about this new direction. I’m glad that you were here with me and I will see you next week.
