Agency Forward

Chris DuBois 0:00
Hey, everyone, today we're going to dive into 10 questions that I use with clients, with myself, to kind of unblock our business growth. These are questions that I've collected from everywhere, from podcasts, from books, from anywhere you can possibly imagine as I consume and I wanted to take an episode to share them with you, and so that is what we're going to dive into today. No one was asking for another community, but I've made one anyway. So what's different? The dynamic agency community is designed around access, rather than content, access to peers who've done it before, access to experts who've designed solutions, access to resources that have been battle tested, and right now, the price for founding members is only $97 a year. Join today, so your agency has immediate access to everything you need to grow. You can join a dynamic agency dot community and now 10 questions that can unblock your agency. It's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward. There's a quote from someone that says, if you want better answers, you need to ask better questions. And I took that to heart years ago and started collecting all of the different questions that I thought were helpful in whatever way in order to help me with that, through life, through business, through any challenges that I was facing, if it's a if I find it somewhere, I'd add it to this list. So now I have this running list of questions, and over the past probably a couple months, I found myself coming back to a handful of questions for myself, for my clients, and I wanted to share that list because I think it would be helpful for everyone to just kind of go through these right? It doesn't hurt to take 20 minutes while on a walk or while you're brushing your teeth in the morning, hopefully you're brushing your teeth, to just pick one of these questions and go through it, sort of like start that thinking. You can also take whatever question and run it into chatgpt and have a conversation with it, right? Give it the instructions of, hey, this the question I want to ask. Do not repeat this summary back to me and for every response, just ask me the next question to get me to think deeper and then turn on the voice mode and just go. You'd be surprised that how deep you can go on some of these questions and what you can learn for your business. So another potential tactic, I guess, before we dive in here, is every week, I choose a different question that I want to almost make the theme for the week. I throw it and I have a calendar event on my Sundays, and I will just update the description there. So at any point during the week, if I forget what the question is, or I need to go back and look, I can just open that up and that question, anytime I have an opportunity to bring it up, I will ask myself about it, like throughout the day. And so as we go through some of these questions, you'll see how that could work. But yeah, I guess, without further ado, let's just dive in here. So the first question that I ask is, what do I want to learn from this? I think too frequently, we just jump into execution without really understanding the purpose behind what we're doing. And even if we understand like the why behind the task where, when you can understand what the lesson that you want to learn from that task, it means even if the task fails, you're still coming away with something beneficial. I think a lot of times, people don't learn the right lessons, and it's because they're going into situations without knowing what they should actually be looking for in learnings. And so now any situation that you're going into gets framed as discovery, not just like problem solving. So you can actually start pulling things from this. You can measure like progress against learning. You're not only looking for the results of everything you're doing. So now, right? There's two ways to benefit from this task, either you're successful and you do learn something positive on how we can keep getting more efficient, keep executing on this, or it's the wrong task, but we know what we did wrong and why we should be changing tactics moving forward. So number two, what would this look like if it were easy, I think a lot of times, and I've written about this a lot in LinkedIn content and some different sub stack articles and stuff. We have a habit of just adding more and more to everything that we do, things become complex. We are addicted to complexity. But when we can start to take things away, everything becomes a lot easier to solve because of that simplicity, right? If you, if you have something in the simplest form, it is very easy to follow this plan into to actually. Get the result, because you can see where things are breaking within that process. So what we are looking at here, right? What would this look like if it were easy? We're asking that because a lot of times we are over engineering solutions. We're throwing all these different things in to make sure something works, when, in reality, you know the going back to like the Pareto Principle, right? The 20% solution would actually get us 80% us 80% of the results here. And so you have to figure out with within this question, it's like, what is that 20% what is that first domino that if we just knock this down, everything else becomes much easier? This? What I like about this is that it also creates a bias towards action and not perfection. You'll spend less time planning and more time just doing, because most things that are easy don't require a ton of planning. You can just go execute. And then, I guess through this, there's a lot of times you can identify, like, some MVP version. You'll find some version of what you're doing that is just, it's the simplest version. You're like, Oh, I could have launched with this. And if you can get in the habit of launching with that and then tweaking over time, you're going to find that you can get much faster results. Usually they're better results too. Number three, if I had unlimited resources, how would I solve this problem? There is an artificial constraint that comes that, like, limits creativity that we need to remove as we go through work. Okay, when you can remove some of those constraints, you start to surface this, like, ideal state for the solution, like, what are we really after with this? Because, you know, like, right now, as you're thinking through this, right? You're processing every single constraint that you have that's going to stop you from achieving stuff, but in a lot of ways, those things aren't constraints, all right? And sometimes, well, let's get into a little sidebar. Here, you have enabling constraints and governing constraints, which both can be positive, right? A governing constraint is like lines on a road if everybody follows those lines and stays on their side. Everybody gets where they're going faster. That's a governing constraint. Enabling constraints are things that actually get you to think more creatively so that you can, you know, get a better result. So you might actually add a budget constraint or a timing constraint just to say, hey, if we had to do this faster, what would this look like? And you start, you start thinking differently, but a lot of times, we're actually using like resources to or to our detriment, because we're going through and just showing up in whatever, whatever question we're asking, whatever situation we need to solve, and we're applying those limited resources to say we cannot do these things, when, in reality, if you know what resources right, and you know where those resources will matter most within whatever you're trying to get done, you can go find the people who have those resources in abundance, right? This is the whole like joint venture kind of program. If you are struggling with capital, go find someone else who only has money and doesn't want to commit some time, right? And now you can find a way to do something together. If you have someone with an audience, but they don't have a great offer to sell, you go start that joint venture with them in order to make this happen. And it doesn't have to be a joint venture in the like, whole, hey, we're going to start a company together, and you're going to like document like, or create this whole business. It could just be a simple engagement where you both find a situation where you're going to win and and then you're good, right? Positive sum games are are the way to go. So let's see. Number four, what would have to be true for this to happen in half the time. I like running this question whenever I just have any goal that I'm setting. So, like, it could be an annual goal for revenue, it could be number of leads, it could be any type of goal just asking after I've set everything. Like, what would have to be true for this to happen in half the time? Sometimes it just means doubling down on one area of the business, right? Well, if I had twice as many leads, and then I would be able to essentially close as many deals, which leads to twice as much revenue. So how can I just influence that? Now, what I love about thinking this way is that it doesn't mean you're going to try doing this in half the time. What it means is that you're guaranteeing that you can hit this at the full time. Obviously, if we can achieve our goals faster, that's great. Like, there's no reason not to want that. I guess I can't think of a good one right now, but if we could do it in half the time, it also means that we could probably definitely do it, like we have more certainty that we're going to be able to accomplish this in the long run. And so it really helps actually make this happen. There's a book Dr Ben Hardy, 10x is it's

Chris DuBois 9:50
faster than 2x is better than 2x I'll have to go look that one up after but the idea is, if you're looking to make huge reaches on your goals, you. You have to think, like, completely outside the box. You have to find all these different ways you could do it, where, if you were just going to 2x any of your targets, you could just be kind of working, doing some of the same things and doubling down, but those same things you're doing to double down and achieve a little more probably aren't the same things that'll get you to 10x so you got to find, like, this very specific task to 10x your business. And so this question, right? What would have to be true for this to happen in half the time does the same thing to what you're thinking like, you can't just always do more, because if you could just do more, you probably would be doing it. So there has to be something different that you could do. And so I love that out of the box thinking where we shift from like incremental progress to something more exponential, but okay. Number five, what does my gut tell me, and why might it be wrong? I was actually listening to a podcast this morning. That's why this one made it on the list, because it was one of those questions that I asked myself all the time. But it came back up because this was like an intuition expert, I guess, like someone who just knows when to trust your gut. But I think what they failed to bring up in the podcast was that trusting your gut is like understanding that there is, like a you're recognizing patterns from past experiences and like, that's what we're aiming for within our agency space, right? We want to, if you have one audience that and you're solving one problem with one solution, you get a lot of reps doing this one thing, and so you're able to spot those patterns really fast, like you just keep getting faster. That's what makes you more strategic and a better like, more of an expert than a lot of these brands that are seeing this problem for the first time in that given year, right? And so we want to be able to be able to lean into that pattern recognition, but a lot of times, so we hit that level of wisdom where it's like, we just know because we've seen the pattern, we don't need to think about it. It's like, it becomes intuitive because we can just roll with it. And I think the development of that pattern recognition often comes out. And so a lot of times when we say, like, what does my gut tell me? We might actually say, Oh, I'm seeing these patterns. But then by asking ourselves, and Why might it be wrong, right? A lot of times, we have access to data that we just completely ignore because we're trying to do other things a lot of a lot of times, especially as we're creating offers agencies might have, you know, out of the first 10 people that come into into sales conversations, you know, half say yes, I want that offer. Or maybe it's even more, two different examples, seven say yes, I want this. Three say no, but the three come all at the same time, and it makes them want to change that offer, because they just had three, you know, back to back. And if that's the first three, then, yeah, it's really hard to stomach that and say, my gut selling me, I got to change. But if they just hang on and the next seven are all closed deals, it's great. And so if we can set up the the parameters for decision making to say, right, we're only going to decide after 10 deals. So even if your gut is telling you something, you can think about what it's actually telling you, right? We want to, we want to test our intuition, because there are tons of, like, biases, fears, our ego can often distort those gut feelings. And so yeah, I guess that's, that's number five. Let's move on to number six here. Who has solved a similar problem before? And what can I learn from them? There are very few problems that we are facing within the business world that have not already been solved. Someone has done it. They've done in some way, and there's tons of things we can learn. I really like listening to the founders podcast. You get a lot of great ideas from there. Check out failure.com there are lots of reasons why companies fail, but as you go through that site, you'll see a lot of them are the exact same. And so you can avoid reinventing the wheel here by just looking at what did people do for different solutions in order to get over that hump, solve the problem. This also gives you those opportunities for like mentorship right, to find some shortcuts just by talking to these people and understanding what they did, keep in mind the context around when they solved that problem is likely different from when you're doing it. If they did it 20 years ago. The entire business world is very different right now. And so something that worked for them might not work for you. It is still valuable to learn those lessons and and apply some of those learnings. But you can't just run into this saying, like, I need to follow you know how Apple created their company, step by step, because I promise you that will not work today. Let's go to number seven. What would need to change for this process to run without my involvement? This one has been coming up quite a bit more as I work with a lot of smaller teams, and they need to start delegating. They need to start handing things off, because the business has been built around them. And so by asking this question, you start revealing those tasks. That depend on you personally. And you can start pushing towards systemization automation, right? You can start building tools so you can build workflows everything to start making this happen, but you have to keep asking this question. We want to create scale within your business by removing bottlenecks. And when I say scale, I don't mean just growing your company, I mean being able to find those opportunities to leverage whatever the resources that you have, if you can leverage your time so you can focus on other problems, right then you are able to do more with the business. We want to turn your business, your agency, specifically, into an asset, not just a job that you have. When you have it as an asset, it means you have options. If you know you don't have to sell your agency, you can keep it as a lifestyle business forever. But if something in your personal life changes and you decide, hey, actually do want to sell this, then having your agency as an asset means you can, if it's a job dependent on you there, you are not getting away from that. So number eight, what patterns keep repeating in my challenges, and what's the common root? Think a lot of times, we don't go back and look at like recurring challenges to find the systemic problems that we're finding. Because when you have recurring challenges, that is a signal that there is a systemic problem, right? If we see the same problem day in, day out. Every week, we're seeing these patterns where whatever band aid we have put on it before is not the actual solution. And so by looking for the root cause, we're going to start preventing wasted cycles. We're going to be able to start moving faster, because we don't need to keep going back to the same problem and figuring out what is the issue here? You'll see a lot of times, business owners will grow their company to a certain point, and then they sell it, and then they start a new company, and they're able to grow it to a certain point, and then they sell it, and that they're never able to actually grow it larger than that, because they hit these same problems, and they never take time to find that common root of the problem, solve for that and then advance or become whatever's necessary to grow it. And so they just keep repeating those same challenges. They get to the point where those challenges match what they know they've slapped on whatever mandates to get to that point, and then they just move on. And so I guess the goal of this one is to be able to find those durable solutions, rather than just some temporary fixes. Number nine, what information would make this decision easy? This one comes up with so many clients more often than not. You don't need more debate. You need better data. We are rarely limited, like in a decision where someone says, like, if I have more time, I can make a better decision, but that's not actually time. That's the resource they're looking for. It's the information that's necessary. And so right? Because if you had all of the information that you could possibly want for the decision, you can make the decision tomorrow. You can make it right now, if you had all the information. And so what I try to prioritize with clients, is our speed to inform. It's how do we set up systems so that we are pulling in as much information as possible for it to be able to use at any given time? And this isn't like a constant flow, but it's being able to just reach in and pull that information. One of the reasons you have department heads, I see this issue a lot with agencies. They give someone a title just because they feel that person deserves it. Maybe they do, but a lot of times, that person just starts running whatever department, but they don't realize that there's also this upwards, like I need to be presenting to the agency founder, CEO, that like whatever information I have, so that they don't have to come down to me to see all of this, right? The if you have a head of operations or a COO within your agency, they should be able to feed you any operational data when you have to make a decision. So when you sit down at a table and say, All right, I got to decide. You know, for x, the COO, your CFO, like, whether these heads of finance right, whatever, whatever you want to give them for titles, they should be showing up with the right information, so that you don't have to go search for it. They just provide it to you because they are fully like focused on that one area of the business. And so now they can bring all of that data up to you. You should also have dashboards. You should have any like summary updates. You should have weekly meetings just to collect whatever information they're tracking across the board, but you want to have your like data sources to be able to do this, because that is really the only way you can transform like this uncertainty you have in making the decision into clarity so you can make it Okay.

Chris DuBois 19:42
Last question is, what value am I creating that I'm not currently capturing, especially in the agency where a lot of times we're doing things for our clients, we're thinking through problems, we're being strategic in ways that we're not actually capturing this value in any way. But. I don't necessarily mean you're not charging for it, like, yes, you could charge for some of these other things that you're doing, but also getting a testimonial, making sure the client knows that you're doing these things and they see it, so that they you can expand that relationship, either through time or potentially through, you know, more revenue. There's a bunch of different ways, but we're often just not seeing all the different ways we're creating value that we're bringing it to whatever our engagements are. You could package this into new offers, right new products, upsells. You could also just build this entire testimonial like reputation engine to keep feeding your lead gen by people saying all these nice things about you and how you're helping them in all these ways that weren't necessarily obvious at first. And so yeah, with this, we're just really, how do we capture that value to make sure that we're not leaving anything on the table? So okay, 10 questions for you. Thought of this at the start while I was talking for this episode, but I'll create a GPT that along with a list of all of these questions, so that you can go through any of these with the GPT, and it'll help you just work through whatever the question is. I'll set that up link will be in the show notes, so you can just grab that. And otherwise, I do plan on doing more of these solo cast episodes with like top 10 lists, different things, capturing some of the problems, doing deep dives in different areas. If there are topics that you are interested in, shoot me a note. Chris at Dynamic agency, os.com and let's get some more content created. That's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on sub stack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward. You

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