Operator vs. Owner

Hi guys, this is Juliana Marlondo, and today I want to talk to you about what does it look like to navigate your agency without you. Effectively, how do you completely and utterly replace yourself? Now to do this, we're going to do a couple of things. And what we're going to cover today, and for the sake of today's module, I'm use the analogy of a flight analogy, because

I love the idea of a traveling, and what does it look like to to think about your business as that plane, right, that's going to take your clients to their destination, right? Like how does it look like for them to have a a super amazing experience and a happy journey, and in order to do that, you need to know where that destination is. How are you going

to make sure that your clients are getting to where they need to go, and your business is getting to where it needs to go? Now, we're also going to cover what is the difference between being an owner and being an operator, and they might feel like one in the same right now, depending on how mature your business is, or how junior it is, but eventually you really

want to start thinking about how do these things start to separate? And then lastly, which is, you know, what we call like automated flights, and how does it that we are going to make sure that not only is your business being piloted without you, but really achieving that in a way that it would be as if you were flying the plane, and and having all of the

quality be there. All right, so first things first is knowing your destination. Now, why is it so important to know where you're going? Now, it's really, really, really difficult to replace yourself if you don't, right? Because you have to be able to give the instruction to let people sort of man the flight, if it were, as even if you're not there. Now, in order to replace yourself,

we really need to know, like, what in the business needs to be operated, meaning you're positioning, you're offering, you know, who in the business is operating, right? Like, what are all the different positions, and how is the business going to be operating? Exactly. How are you delivering your services? How are you interacting with clients? How often, you know, what are your frequencies, your cadences, all of that,

and really having that be very, very clear cut so that clients get an experience with your brand, not with you that is consistent, and every single touch point of them with that brand is consistent and reliable, so that they keep coming back and they can refer you. And something that I want us to think about, I always love, love the definition of an entrepreneur, but more importantly,

like, I love the etymology, right? Because it really starts off from old French, and it means to undertake, to start. And if any of you are anything like me, like, I'm an entrepreneur and I love starting stuff, I love creating, but however, it's really making sure that we have that follow through, making sure that, you know, even if you are replacing yourself, and you did start this

phenomenal business, that we have enough in there, not just to, you know, to start it, but to make sure that it's able to be sustained. Like, I have a client of mine who's a serial entrepreneur, and he's like, oh my God, Juliana, I love starting businesses. I can grow them really, really, really quickly. But, you know, after I've reached that seven figures, you know, and I might

be 18 months to maybe a year, you know, a little bit over two years in, I'm bored, I'm done. And, you know, I'm really good at exiting and maybe starting another one. And right now, he's so in love with his business, he's really looking to leave a legacy, and he's thinking about, how do I sustain this? So not only starting, but sustaining. So thinking about replacing yourself

with what is the end goal as well? Now, in order to really, really replace yourself, right, we need to figure out exactly where we're going and who are delegating things to. And as you start to do that, you want to think about like, who is your team, right? And if you have a team, is it the right team, right? And what happens if key team members leave,

right? How do you bulletproof your business? How do you make sure that that flight and that destination, everything that you have going, right, for that journey is as unimpenetrable as possible, right? And then with a clear vision, with a clear know-how in and with clarity around all of these things, then you're really able to delegate your operations. And this is really great because we start to think

about what is the difference between owning the business and being the operator, right? And I like to think about this as the owner is really flight control. When you own a business, you're thinking about that business as, okay, here is an asset. Here is where we're going. Here's, you know, who's on the manifesto? All of the things that belong to that flight. And as the operator, you're

the one in the driving seat. And in order to be the owner, you don't necessarily need to be piloting. And this is something that's really, really important for us to think about because in the beginning, most agency owners who are marketing are both owner and operator. But slowly, we want to sort of remove those two, like you would like, like a slowly increasing Venn diagram, pull them

apart so that you're not having to operate the day to day. You're not in the weeds. You're not just putting out fires. And really, you're taking control, light flight control of your business. You might be thinking, all right, how do we do this? So we can start by identifying all that it takes for you to operate the business. Now, as you're starting out, you might think about,

okay, what are the different things, you know, what are the different processes that have to happen? Now, sales, obviously, right, like you might need deep and sales calls right now after doing the previous modules. So that is something that you want to think about. And even in sales, like, what are all the different parts of sales, right? Because it's not just being on the phone and closing

those deals and being like, crushed it. I'm going to ring the gong. It is also, you know, all of the messaging, all of the follow up, all of the, you know, communication that you had to have your objection handling that you might have done, like new ideas that you think about for getting people onto a call. So everything that happens before your discovery call. And then you

have a call. And sometimes you're like, one call, close, nailed it. And other times you're like, Oh crap, I have to have more communication with this person. Or I might need, you know, depending on your type of sale, you might have a much longer sales cycle. You might need sales decks and collaterals. Now, what are all the different assets that you need to make a sale happen?

And really think about that. Because it might be you and you might have an SDR, a sales development rep. You might have a closer or several. You might have a bigger team. You might have someone that's spitting out proposals. So what are all these different items? And really think about, okay, do, you know, do I have this identified? Is this process, you know, there for me to

be able to delegate it to one person or to make sure that whoever's in charge of it now, like, what if you're not even doing sales? What if somebody else is? But if they were to leave, right, could they delegate it to someone else? Right? Can we make this process and all the teeny little bit of processes inside of this truly, truly delegatable? Then of course, there's

your production. You know, how are you delivering to clients? Right? What what is the, you know, how does it look like to fulfill upon a project and the engagement could be a course? Right? How is that structured? You know, where is that delivered? How is it delivered? What are the deadlines and milestones? And then account management. Now, account management isn't account management in the sense of like

your Facebook manager or maybe your Google AdWords manager, but actually, who is the individual in your business who is communicating with your clients? Now, let's say you do SEO, you might be communicating with clients once a quarter. And let's say you're, you know, doing this huge, huge launch for a client on Facebook, you might be communicating them with once a day. So really thinking about, okay, what

are the products that you're delivering and the services? And what is that cadence for communication? How often does that happen? Where are the notes that get taken down? Right? Like if you are the account manager, you know everything that's happening with that account and everything's in your head. But if all of a sudden you're like, holy crap, you know, I'm doing all these different things or sales

are blowing up or this is blowing out or I'm putting up that fires and I have to delegate to an account manager. Where does all that information get transferred to? And how does it get transferred? And then there's also cash flow management. And obviously this can be broken down into several things, right? You might have accounting depending on if your agency has ever had any type of

investment. You might have, you know, financials and performance statements. You may have, you know, more in-depth invoicing if you're using, you know, your client credit cards or if you're using your own for ad spend. So thinking about all of that and I just put cash flow here because at the end of the day, most of us who are under eight figures are, you know, and even over

eight figures, you're thinking cash flow. No matter where your finances are going or if you have a burn rate or, you know, no matter how sophisticated or unsophisticated your finance might look, the end of the day, you really want to be managing how much cash do you have on hand beyond the other metrics, which we'll talk about in our next module. All right. So thinking about these

different processes and where they start and of course, we also have marketing, the marketing part of the business and you might have other parts of your business. Like if you have any type of, you know, if you've ever had a storefront, I know this is like the opposite of what you guys are trying to do right now in terms of going completely digital and really having that

lifestyle. But if you, if you do for some reason or you have another business, think about, you know, what are all the processes that it really, really takes to get you fully functionally out of operating, right? So that you as the owner can have visibility into all of them and everything can be delegated, not only from you, right? Like if you're doing account management, if you're doing

production, if you're doing sales, there's that initial point of delegation, right? You to, you know, your first platoons. But afterwards, right, those individuals become really knowledgeable over these individual processes and they become the owners of those processes. And you might be in the situation where you have those critical team members that really own the sales process or really own the account management process, or there might be

a team's, you know, a team of account managers or teams of, you know, production or team of sales. And then you want to think to yourself, are all of these individuals doing this consistently, right? Is everyone facing the leads in sales the same way? Is it consistent? Is everyone who's doing Facebook management for in my team doing it consistently? And is there the ability to then train

others who come after them in a consistent way, right? So think about it as almost three points of delegation, you to your first critical team member and then from that team member to a group, that group to the others that come before them, because if not, what ends up happening is that we end up transferring delegating and training through osmosis. That's what I call it. And when

that happens, you just lost all of control. All right. So I want to go into step number two, which is like setting up your GPS for each. Now, believe it or not, you might say, Juliana, this is a flight metaphor. Guess what? I learned from my friend who does quality control for engines that there's like GPS's and that you can even get them on your mobile now

as you fly a plane, which is kind of crazy. But yes, you want to set up your GPS for all of these. And what I call that is really like, what are the goals, right? You know, and what are the milestones to get to where we want to get to in each of these processes? So as you are truly the owner, you're setting the standard, right? You're

setting the standard, okay, what is the standard in goal for sales? What are our targets? What are our goals for that? You know, what is our goals for communication and happy clients, right? How do we know that people are satisfied, you know, so that they will not only increase our LTV, but also send us referrals and we can really grow those accounts, right? Whatever your processes are

and the individual and teams that you're delegating to as you're stepping out of operator mode, we need to make sure that we're still able to visualize and understand whether all of these things are on track or not, right? Because it's really easy to think, okay, I'm piecing out, I'm delegating to this person and I'm good, right? Everything's going to run on autopilot. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

We really want to have that visibility and set it in motion in a way where we know we can course correct at any point. All right, now we've basically said, okay, here's the biggest processes, here's where our goals are in each of them, and now we need to know how much fuel is it going to take for us to achieve, you know, true liftoff. And in order

to do that, it's really understanding what are the resources and manpower that it's going to take for us to achieve those goals once we have clarity on our destination, right? How many, you know, do you need an account manager, right? Or do you need a project manager? Can we have someone AMPM up until we have maybe 10 employees? I mean, 10 clients. And usually we can start

to figure out, okay, how many individuals like do we pay for a full salesperson that's closing? Or do we get someone to help us list builds, you know, that is at a much lower rate, then maybe we can get a sales coordinator to help us with all that finicky, you know, correspondence and follow up. So we get to a place where we're like, okay, now we can

finally hire a full on salesperson. Do we take the plunge because we have reserves, right? Now, if we understand what our resources are and where we're going, what our destination is, then we can truly plan for delegating all of the pieces of the business and getting ourselves out as quickly as possible. But in a way, we're not losing control over our flights. And then lastly, we want

to talk about, okay, now we've got a game plan. Now, how do we achieve this game plan in the most automated way possible? And an automated isn't necessarily like, I know a lot of us are talking about automation and like, how do I get Zapier to work with all of my tools? And how do I make sure that, you know, things happen completely without me from a

technology standpoint? But sometimes automated is automatic. And what I mean by that is sometimes we have a sequence or steps and workflows in place that may not necessarily take technology. Now, wherever we can create those technological automations, that's amazing and perfect. And there's two tools that you can use right now. One of them is Zapier. The other one is Integromat. And, you know, feel free to play

with those and try to make your tools connect as much as possible. But we also want to talk about how do we create that reliable consistency with the humans in our business that we're delegating to and making sure that those individuals are doing things as automatically as possible so that they can really spend the time doing those high value, high level tasks and not really spend the

time in the nitty gritty as well, making sure that all the nitty gritty stuff is consistent and automatic. So the first thing is we talked about our processes and identifying them, right? Now, once you've identified them, I want to know where do they live, right? Is your sales in the CRM? Are your projects in a project manager, right? Where, when you onboard a new client, what are

the steps that it takes to do that? Where are those things being tracked, right? How do you track the statuses of things? Because if you're no longer operating, right, and you're really stepping into that owner position and you know that three clients have been sold last month or maybe last week, they're about to be onboarded. How do you know which ones have been onboarded and which ones

haven't? If you know that in the next week, you have four new campaign launches, you know, where are we in terms of backlog? Is anything missing, right? And that's why it's really, really important to have these processes laid out in their proper tools, with deadlines, with statuses, so that no matter who is working on anything inside of your business, you can pinpoint it completely out, you know,

where everything is. And if something would happen where an individual can't fulfill, right, let's say someone, and I've had this happen so many times, you know, I believe it was two months ago, a client of mine said, Juliana, my project manager decided to go to Venezuela, you know, she's going to go live that Yolo life. And she gave her like three days notice. So in that instance,

we had everything that we needed to make sure that we were able to replace that individual as quickly as possible. And no accounts were lost. We weren't vulnerable because our processes were bulletproof. All right, cool. So that's kind of what's happening at the moment, right, where you can track everything. But for new people, right, like, and you can think about it as when someone's coming into the

business, whether they're coming in mid-account or at the beginning of an account, or just brand new to help you with some internal stuff. Like, what are those playbooks? Where are the instructions to tell someone what to do? And as an operator, if you're doing something, you might think, okay, well, I know what to do. Air, I need to find someone who already knows what to do. But

when you're the owner, you want to make sure that, like, no matter who comes in, they're doing things not only correctly and not only, you know, with the best performance ever, but in the way that you want your brand in your business to do things, right? Because someone could be a Facebook manager who works at another agency or maybe they were freelancing for a while, and now

they want to work for you. What if the case may be? Like, you want them to do things the way that you do them. Maybe you have, like, special hacks for your audience creation. Maybe, you know, you have a very special way of doing project management, or maybe you have a very particular way in which you handle certain client requests. And so no matter where someone comes

from, you know, if they're very junior or super senior, you still want to make sure that you have that consistency. So those playbooks are very important. Okay. Now, there's a little bit of a difference between playbooks and instructions and documentation. Now, think about documentation or, you know, even assets or collateral as all those parts of your business that are repeatable and are supporting your processes. For example,

in sales, you might have testimonials, you might have a deck, you might have sales material, you might have templates for your follow-up emails that you send to clients. Maybe you have things that you send before to clients, right? So all that stuff is not necessarily instructions, but there are those things that are going to really, really add up in making sure that your brand is consistent and

that the communication with the outside world is consistent and really saving you time, effort, and energy so that no matter whoever takes on that role, you know, they're doing it in the way that you want them to. And lastly, it's our metrics, right? Now, we talked about, you know, what is the GPS and what are those goals, but now we actually have to measure them, right? And

we have to make sure that they're being tracked consistently, right? So not only do we have a target, but we have to make sure that we are tracking against those targets and also knowing when to change the targets, right? If we start to see that, hey, you know what, we've achieved that goal, now we've got to off the ante, right? We hit that revenue goal for the

most, right? Let's, now, all like crush it even harder or, you know, we used to have crazy backlog and now we don't, right? Now we don't have any outstanding tasks. Awesome. Maybe your team needs to spend that extra time on innovation, right? So being able to track in your business is going to give you a sense of the health of the business and also the individual teams

and the performance of your people. And that way you know when people are doing well and when they're not doing well. All right, guys. Now that you have all of this information to go from really, you know, flying the plane to being the one who's giving the direction and destination and really flight control, here's a couple of items that are just going to help you do that

as quickly as possible. First things first, write out all your processes that you need to delegate, all right? Let's just get them on paper, get them out of your brain and onto paper or pixel. Then I want you to draw out and you can do this with, you know, Google Draw. You can do this on a napkin. One of my favorite things to do is, you know,

bar napkins are a great thing. Take a screenshot, put it on, you know, a place where you can then go ahead and visualize it, do it on a whiteboard, but actually draw out how many team members for the positions that you need to get yourself out of operations mode. Now this doesn't have to look like an old school or chart, but just start to really visualize like

how do you want your team to look? And, you know, is it especially as most of you are digital nomads and you have teams that are completely remote, think about things of geography. Like, do you care if people are completely spread out? Do you need certain individuals to be in certain parts of the world so that you could communicate with them often and during the day? Or

do you need certain individuals to be in certain parts of the world because you need them to communicate with clients? So start drawing out your team members and what are your needs for those individual resources? All right, then we're going to write out our instructions for those processes that we're delegating out and for those team members. And this doesn't have to be perfect. And I know I

said write out, but I'm also a huge, huge proponent of screencasts. I think that's really easy. You can eventually get someone else to take the screencast and transcribe it so that you have proper instructions, but just start creating those individual step by step guides so that you can feel like you trust the quality of the work so you no longer have to touch it, right? And if

you have a couple of people who have and really own processes that you no longer own, but they're not written anywhere, I want you guys to task those individuals with doing the same thing because you want to bulletproof your business against anyone ever leaving. And lastly, I want you to start to identify the costs, right, of really navigating this plane without you. And this is going to

be your operating budget. I want you guys to take a look, you know, hard look at like what your expenses are. And also as you're doing this in your auditing, maybe your tech stack or the things that you're no longer using, start to eliminate some stuff because I always audit my tech stack about once a quarter. And I find things that I'm paying for on subscription and

I'm like, why is this here? And happens with everybody. So want to start to identify not only what the resources are, but what it's going to cost you in terms of your budget. And and really taking that leap of delegating and getting out of the pilot seat and into the owner's seat, which we're super excited about. All right, now for the next module, it's time to know

your numbers. Super excited guys.