Author: Ashley Segura
Last updated: 08/12/2024
Fresh out of college with a degree in journalism, I had already submitted a few articles for publications like the Times-Standard, managed the university's Tumblr account, and had big dreams of becoming a National Geographic journalist.
But a simple call to cancel my rental insurance drastically changed that course and kicked off a new career path.
"Do you know how to build a website?" my insurance agent asked.
Being the yes woman I am, I quickly turned to every how-to WordPress resource I could find and built a website for that insurance brokerage.
"Thanks! Can you write blog posts and manage our Facebook profile, too?"
"Sure. Of course!"
Fast-forward several months of writing blogs and Facebook posts, and I had my very first contracted client. As I researched insurance topic ideas for new blog posts and social media content, I was asked to speak at the California Board of Insurance Agents conference in San Diego on how to do online marketing for insurance companies.
Of course, I quickly said yes and found myself on stage at my first speaking engagement. I taught what I had learned over the last six months about marketing an insurance broker. That event led to three more contracted clients and the opening of my first agency, Semplicita Marketing.
Since Semplicita Marketing, I have successfully opened four marketing agencies. This article is a collection of the many learnings I've encountered on this 14-year-long roller coaster ride of agency ownership.
If you are considering opening your own marketing agency, or are currently an agency owner, here are a few tips and strategies that helped keep my roller coaster on track.
My first agency quickly became a one-stop shop offering everything a brand could need to succeed online: website development, blogging, social media, graphic design, SEO, and advertising.
I spent years trying to stay current on every aspect of digital marketing, finding and hiring the best contractors in each field.
My days were spent working full-time in-house as a Marketer Director, or as a specialist at other agencies, trying to learn as much as possible about digital marketing. On evenings and weekends, I implemented what I had learned for my clients while continuing to find specialized contractors to help with the workload.
It was exhausting!
Thinking you need to offer it all is a common mistake new agency owners make; but with Meta and Google making their own rules (and changing them seemingly daily), it's simply not possible to be a true expert in every aspect of digital marketing.
I decided to restructure our service offerings to define who the agency was, and what we would specialize in.
If you already have an agency or you're thinking of starting your own, ask yourself the following:
Of course, you change, your interests change, and our online marketing efforts have to change frequently. As such, defining who you are and what services you will offer as an agency is not a one-and-done step. It should be revisited annually to ensure alignment between your most successful services, what you (and your team) enjoy doing, and what you want to continue to learn about.
Think of it as conducting a mini-audit on your agency values, conversions, goals, profit margins, and, most importantly – what inspires you and your team to want to keep working each day.
This is how you decide what services you will offer.
Speaking of your team, let's dive into recruiting tips as an agency.
Hiring team members and growing departments is one of the most challenging things to do as an agency owner. When you hire the wrong fit, it can affect an entire department — or worse, the whole company.
Before posting that job advert, there are a few things you need to do first:
1. Establish Who You're Looking For and What You Need Help With
Avoid running to Google and copy pasting a job description template. Instead, try this exercise to figure out what you need help with and the type of person you’re looking to hire.
Write down the tasks this new person needs to do and order it from high to low priority. Add to this list the estimated time to perform each task.
Then, write down the skills, experience, and attributes this person needs to have to be successful in this position. These can include things like experience talking to enterprise clients and proficiency using a variety of SEO tools. Slowly but surely, a job description will form.
2. Decide if This New Hire Should be a Contractor or Full-time Employee (FTE)
Working with contractors can be a great way to kick start a new agency or department. For example, if you're expanding your agency's services to include SEO audits, starting with contractors can be a safer route to take until you have a steady stream of SEO audit clients.
However, you’ll need to keep in mind that your contractors don’t only work for your agency. Nine times out of ten, they will have their own clients and/or freelance for other agencies or businesses, which means they may not always have availability to work for you.
If you have the financial means to do so, hiring an FTE could be the most beneficial option – then you’re in control of their workload.
3. Decide if this Position is Remote, Hybrid, or In-Person (Office Based)
As someone who has operated every single one of my agencies with a remote staff, I'm very pro-remote teams. However, I do recognize that they aren't ideal for every agency, every type of position, or every person.
If you already have leadership within the department you are hiring for, meet with them and ask what they need. Identify how, (or if), adding a remote hire will change the dynamics of the current department.
4. Have Onboarding Procedures in Place:
Don't wait for your new hire to start before building out your onboarding processes and company policies. You must have these ducks in a row before you start looking for a new hire. This way, the onboarding process will be smooth for you, and for them.
Here are a few essentials:
5. Do a Culture Audit on Your Website
Does your website have an About Us page? If so, what does it tell a prospective employee about the agency? Is there a section about the culture – i.e. a section without fluffy lingo which actually explains what it's like to work at the agency?
NerdPress does an amazing job of explaining their company values, showing their staff’s interests, and providing links to learn more about working at the company. As a prospective employee you can get a great feel for the type of people working there, and whether the culture matches your values.
If you want to attract talented, like-minded individuals as employees, you must showcase what makes you a great place to work. (Usually, we only think about attracting clients with our websites, and we forget that potential employees analyze our websites in just as much detail).
6. Look Outside of Traditional Job Hiring Boards
Communities like Women in Tech SEO, Superpath, and Women in Revenue are all great resources for finding qualified marketers. And if you haven't already, go to LinkedIn and create a post clearly explaining what you are looking for.
Your network is bigger than you think!
Establishing a positive company culture starts with hiring the right people but doesn't end there. It's your responsibility (alongside your HR function, if you have one) to continue to mold a positive company culture.
In my experience, a happy team makes for a happy company; and these are some of the things which make for happy teams:
I like to set core availability hours for employees, (so we can easily schedule meetings and collaborate), but other than those core hours I let them work the hours that work best for them.
Some days, I get to my desk by 7am, am full of creativity, and can knock out 10 tasks within the hour. On other days, I might not hit my stride until 10 or 11am, so I spend the first few hours of the day going through emails or more "mundane" tasks that don't require that fun, creative part of my brain.
Your employees are no different. So don't force them to work in uncomplimentary ways of working, or micro-manage them to the point that you're suffocating them. Take the time to hire the right people, then give your employees the freedom to work when they work best. I find that they produce their best work in a flexible environment.
In addition to providing a safe and open environment to work in, you also need to talk to your team regularly. This isn't about a twice-weekly all-hands meeting with the entire staff, these are 1-to-1 meetings that you have with individual team members.
For example, in one of these 1-to-1 meetings, I discovered that an employee wanted to grow into a more technical role – he wanted a new challenge. So, we listened and invested in education and training for him to move into a new role. He is now the manager of the technical SEO department.
In another instance, one of these meetings led to a new service offering. An employee had implemented a new strategy that delivered great results and she wanted to test this for other clients. The tests were successful and resulted in a new service offering that she now leads.
Of course, leaving your virtual or actual door open for communication and feedback will sometimes mean that you're made aware of things that aren't easy to hear. However, in my experience it’s better that these conversations happen sooner, rather than later, so you can work to resolve any issues, pivot, and adapt as necessary.
In addition to establishing a great team, and healthy workplace; you’ll also need to ensure that your clients are happy.
In order to satisfy clients, you must set clear expectations of what each of your services includes. This begins with the initial proposal, statement of work, or agreement (whichever fits your agency style the best), and should explain the following:
1. Each stage of the service: clarify exactly what is included in the service and in what order the client can expect things to happen.
2. The timeline: sometimes a service can take 4-6 weeks (or more!) to deliver, but to ensure a client understands what they're getting, include a breakdown of what will be happening throughout that 4-6 week period. Will there be a follow-up halfway through? State that! Will there be deliverables in weeks one and four? State that too!
3. Who they will be communicating with: most agency services come with a "dedicated account manager." Include who they will be communicating with (their main point of contact), and their availability.
4. How often there will be communication: clearly explain the frequency of communication that they can expect.
5. Where the communication will happen: at ContentYum, my newest agency, we communicate with our clients through a client portal. Explain where communication will occur, whether communicating through a dedicated Slack channel, email, or a client portal.
Setting clear expectations in the beginning is the first step to ensuring a great client relationship.
Sometimes though, you do everything by the book and still have a client who isn't happy.
When that happens, here are a few things you can do:
1. Document everything: if we receive a message from an unhappy client, the first thing we do is ask the assigned account manager to pull all the relevant communications and document them in order of occurrence. This way, we can read through the entire communication trail to identify what went wrong, and to prepare a solution.
2. Be honest and transparent: be upfront about any challenges or delays. Project delays happen, but the sooner you communicate any potential issues to a client, the more likely you are to be able to mend that relationship.
3. Have a resolution ready: are results taking longer than expected? Not only do you need to communicate that, but you also need to have a clear resolution to give to the client explaining why this is happening and what you plan on doing.
4. Explain the data and reports: sometimes a client isn't happy simply because they don't understand the reports and/or results. It is your responsibility to create reports that provide definitions of metrics and clearly state what is happening. Create custom reports using tools like Looker Studio and add plenty of text bubbles to explain what the client is looking at.
5. Stay calm and don't play the blame game: no one wants to see you point the finger at someone else, especially your client! Avoid the blame game and communicate solutions instead.
6. Know when to walk away: from time to time you will encounter clients who simply aren't a good fit, or, in some instances, are toxic to your team. When that happens, and you've tried all of the above, it's best to cut ties. That might mean providing a refund. Other times, it means ending a contract before it's supposed to. You are responsible for protecting your team from harmful clients while also protecting your agency's reputation.
Agency life is hard. Knowing when and how to scale an agency can make things even more difficult. This is where data from project management tools, proper accounting, and regular leadership meetings can help pinpoint when to scale.
If everything points towards consistent capacity, it's time to consider scaling. Don't take the shortcut and think adding new accounts to an already overloaded team will translate into more profit. This is where agencies begin to see results decline for clients, and client retention, as well as employee retention, drops.
Instead, take the data and feedback from your team and begin identifying how you can safely scale. Sometimes, implementing automation into processes can be a temporary solution as you work on recruiting new team members.
Meet with your leadership team twice a year to thoroughly audit workflows to identify repetitive and time-consuming tasks.
Remember that exercise you did when you were creating job descriptions? Specifically, the one where you assigned how long a task should take. Go back to that document and identify what tasks take the biggest amount of time and see if tools like Airtable can cut the time in half.
For example, is the onboarding process taking 25% of your account manager's time? That's a big percentage! Tools like Airtable can onboard a new client, create a new client Google Drive folder and dedicated Slack channel, and automatically assign an account manager to the task list, all with the click of a button.
Additionally, Zapier can automate data entry between different tools, and tools like HubSpot can help ensure client communication and check-ins happen independently (and on time).
Meet with the team, identify what time-saving opportunities are available, and which tools will help get you there. It's a hefty task upfront, but it will allow you to scale your agency properly and have a more efficient team.
Speaking of hefty tasks, owning an agency automatically makes you a leader. Not everyone is fit to be in that position, nor does a great job at being a leader. Don't let that be you!
Here are a few leadership principles for long-term success within your organization:
As a leader, your actions set the standard for your team. Show up prepared for whatever each day brings. That means meeting your own deadlines, being open to feedback, encouraging your team to speak up, and listening when they do – keep that door open!
A couple of years ago I implemented monthly educational stand-ups. This is an internal initiative where a team member (selected at random) will present something new they’ve learned to the entire company.
This could be a new tool, a productivity hack, an article about Google, a strategy, etc. We've found it to be a great way to empower the team to teach each other, and give them the autonomy to make their own decisions about what they want to learn and share.
With the kind of team we have, this works. Know your team and what truly empowers them. Then, give them the room (or stage) to become empowered.
Sure, sometimes we get a hunch and run with it. And it works. But when people's livelihoods rely on your decisions, you can't always lean into that hunch of yours. Instead, make decisions for your agency and the team based on actual data.
Create anonymous Google Forms to send out to the team to keep a regular pulse on the current culture. Meet with your team to determine what the best-performing marketing channels for you are at the moment. Dive into your CRM and proposal tools to get a pulse on what services convert the most and least.
By leading by example, empowering your team, and making decisions based on real data, you're more likely to lead your agency towards a sustainable success path.
From founding and leading multiple marketing agencies, I've learned that a successful agency is built on resilience, continuous learning, positive work environments, and adaptability.
For aspiring agency owners, my advice is to embrace the rollercoaster ride. Have a really good friend in the industry with whom you can vent, bounce ideas off, and get mentorship.
Women in Tech SEO has a mentorship program which is a great place to find that friend. Books like The Lean Startup, The Airbnb Way, and Let My People Go Surfing are resources to help you continue to grow as a leader and entrepreneur.
Never stop learning. Focus on building your networks at conferences and events. Find a marketing podcast or two that you can listen to regularly.
Build strong relationships with your team and clients, and always be open to change. You'll pivot a thousand times and then a thousand more times. So, buckle up and embrace this journey while staying committed to learning and evolving.
When you have a Rolodex of happy clients and a team that actually enjoys their day-to-day work, you’ll discover that the rollercoaster ride was worth every up and down.
Ashley Segura - Head of Marketing & Content Strategy
With 14+ years in content marketing, Ashley Segura is an author, top content marketing influencer, and entrepreneur. She's led global teams, launched successful agencies, and driven growth for B2B, B2C, and SaaS brands.
Oh, and she hosts the "Content in the Kitchen" podcast.