What does an Agency Coach do?
Growth is a great thing, but it can also bring about new challenges for businesses. As your agency scales and grows, you may find that you're faced with challenges you've never faced before, or you find yourself in situations you've never been in before. This is completely normal, you're not the first and won't be the last agency owner that experiences this. Each level of scale brings new challenges for any kind of business and digital agencies are no exception.
As you grow from a freelancer into a small-scale business, your role grows from marketing manager to business owner, to employer, to manager, and then into a leader. You most probably are great at marketing anyway, but you might need to learn new skills to build, manage and grow teams, achieve sustainable growth, and scale your company. You just need timely expert guidance and advice to help overcome these challenges.
The pathway to growth isn't just conversion rate optimization, dominating search engines, or pushing out better marketing campaigns to land more customers and create more revenue.
This is where agency coaching can come in. A good agency coach will help you navigate the challenges of agency growth and provide valuable insights and advice that can help you achieve even greater success. After all, in this new situation you find yourself in and the tough challenge you're facing; your Agency Coach most probably has been there before and can give you the expert advice to advance you need to move your business forward.
Agency coaches are experienced small business owners that have been through the ups and downs of agency growth. They can help you overcome the challenges you're facing and help you continue scaling your agency.
At Agency Growth Events, we're incredibly lucky to be working with some of the best Agency Coaches in the world. We've asked them: "What does an Agency Coach do?" and you'll find their answers further below in this post. Be sure to check out the full list here -> Agency Coaches
But before we get started, here's our Agency Growth Book and its launch event where you can hear from 17 expert Agency Coaches, together for the first time! Check out ->
In this post we'll cover the following:
What are business coaching services in general?
What is an Agency Coach and what do they do?
Do you need an Agency Coach?
How to find, choose and hire an Agency Coach?
What do the coaches say?
Let's dive in!
What are business coaching services in general?
A talented business coach is usually an experienced entrepreneur helping other business owners achieve their goals. Although there is lots of online advice on how to start and develop a successful business, everything is generally generic and does not apply specifically to your company. Business coaches help you get personalized advice that will benefit your company and your personal life as an entrepreneur.
A business coach's main goal is to help entrepreneurs focus on their leadership skills, work through weaknesses, and create a plan that will lead them to make wiser business choices and achieve their long-term objectives.
What does a business coach do?
Business coaches can assist small business owners in many ways, but the overarching theme of business coaching services, in general, are achieving personal growth as a leader, understanding the (often invisible) bottlenecks businesses may face, and circumventing potential costly mistakes before you even get there.
Great coaches can help you achieve business success by helping you with:
Guidance in defining long-term business goals and actionable short-term deliverables
Strategic planning for the sustainable growth of your business and you as an entrepreneur
Professional advice based on their own experiences, not business books
Implementation of processes and systems that have been tried and tested with many clients
Team Building for future-proofing your business
Principles of Financial Management for exponential growth
Leadership Development for you and your team and organization in general
Benefits of working with business coaches
Small business owners can be very lonely, but they don't have to be. With a mentor and accountability partner, you can push yourself to achieve even more than you thought possible. Teams are developed by leaders, and leaders are developed by business coaches.
All Olympic athletes have coaches. Think of your business coach similarly. They are there to identify your limitations and consistently help you outgrow them. They'll push you hard, ask the hard questions and speak the hard truths, but you'll enjoy it!
Another key benefit of working with a coach is having someone to help ensure you're achieving your goals in your own business. Just like a gym buddy! Promises made to others carry weight, whereas it's way easier to break promises to oneself.
Remember, this is an investment into your business, your success, and life in general.
What is an Agency coach and what do they do?
Simply: All of the coaching services above, but tailored for marketing agencies.
Agency coaches are entrepreneurs who have successfully launched, scaled, and in many cases sold marketing agencies. They understand the agency growth journey and can help you overcome the challenges you're facing and help you continue scaling your digital marketing agency. They'll have invaluable expertise for any type of challenge you might face from the small business grind phase all the way to your eventual exit from your business! (so don't look for help with your marketing campaigns!)
Browse our Agency Coaches page and read through the bios to see for yourself, the wealth of first-hand Agency experience the authors of The Agency Growth Book have accumulated.
Do you need an Agency Coach?
At first glance, it may seem like agency coaching is only valuable for larger agencies that are facing growing pains and can afford expensive luxuries like business coaching services (read Tony Robbins). However, agency coaches can benefit businesses at any stage of growth, regardless of the agency's size or industry and you should treat this as a business development investment.
Some early signs that your digital marketing agency might benefit from agency coaching include a lack of progress on sales processes and pipeline management, stagnant growth, difficulty hiring and retaining talent, limited forward visibility, or other various challenges in managing agency growth.
If you, as the founder are experiencing any of the following signs, it may also be time to bring on a coach:
You're feeling overwhelmed and don't know where to start, or what to prioritize.
You're not sure how to attract any more new clients
You're not sure how to keep your current clients happy and retain them
You're having difficulty hiring the talent you need into your team
You feel like you've hit a plateau and can't seem to grow your agency any further
Like any other service business, Digital Marketing Agencies face many generic growth challenges at the start. Let's address the main ones:
Lack of resources is a common challenge for any business. This can be financial, human or material resources. Financial resources are limited when you're starting out, and it can be difficult to get the money you need to grow your agency. Human resources are also limited at the beginning, and it can be difficult to find good employees who are a good fit for your agency. You may also find that you don't have all the skillset you need in-house to grow your agency.
Lack of experience is a common challenge for any business, but it can be especially difficult for small businesses that may not have the same level of experience or expertise as their larger competitors. This can make it difficult to compete in certain markets and can stunt the growth of your digital marketing agency. However, this lack of experience can also be an opportunity. Small businesses can learn from their mistakes and grow faster than their larger competitors.
When it comes to market reach, small businesses are at a disadvantage to start with. They may not have the resources or experience to compete with larger businesses in their industry, which can affect their new business acquisition. Limited brand recognition and customer referrals might also make it difficult for you to attract new customers and grow your agency.
Lack of a clear business strategy is often one of the main reasons small businesses don't grow. Without a clear plan, it can be difficult to make consistent progress and grow your agency. You'll quickly need to start choosing your niche either in business models (B2B, B2C, DTC, etc), markets (your city, your country, your region, etc), industries (health, aviation, travel etc), or services (Are you an SEO agency, or a social media agency or are you content writers?). When you set your business strategy and define your niche, you'll start focusing on your deliverables and achieving better results, build up your brand recognition and start to dominate your market. You talk about this to your clients as part of their marketing campaigns anyway right?
How to find, choose and hire a digital marketing agency coach?
If you're considering searching for an Agency Coach, a good place to start is our listing page here where you can find short bios and websites -> Agency Coaches
You should also come and listen to the coaches represented speak at our event here -> The Agency Growth Book Launch
Attending the event will give you access to the book, so you can read about these coaches' approach to Agency Growth.
When you are getting ready to choose your coach, remember, like any other one-on-one business coaching experience, this is a very personal choice. Your coach will help your business by giving you the right tools to make the right decisions. So perhaps the most important thing to get right would be chemistry. You can expect your self-awareness, core values, confidence level, company, and even your life goals in a broader sense to come up in the strategies and action plans you'll create together.
Then there are several factors to consider. Some key areas would be the coach's experience, credentials, track record, and proven results with other clients. You should also consider whether the coach offers tailored programs, packages or strategies that are designed specifically to meet your agency's unique needs and goals.
What do the coaches say?
So much for what we think they do; Now let's hear it directly from the coaches themselves. We've literally asked, What does an Agency Coach do? Here are their answers:
Jonathan Leafe
1. Get agency leaders to focus on what matters most
2. Give them the confidence to 'let go to grow
3. Give them a longer-term view of development and growth.
4. Keep them sane!
Chris Simmance
"An Agency Coach listens and supports the personal and professional growth of agency leaders. We unpack difficult problems and because we can step back from the day-to-day, can see solutions with fresh eyes. Always supporting leaders to make the right choices for them."
Jody Sutter
"My superpower as an agency coach is x-ray vision because I see the underleveraged assets that agency owners overlook. And once we can identify them, we can monetize them. As an agency coach, I see my role as offering essential peer-to-peer advice that allows my clients to make good decisions quickly, shortening the time between nurturing a prospect and converting that prospect into a client."
Karl Sakas
"When you find the right coach for your agency, you accelerate your progress. With their support, you can reach your goals faster, more smoothly, and more profitably than going it alone."
Kelly Campbell
"An agency coach may help you grow a sustainable business, and you might find that your own self-perception and leadership is transformed in the process."
Jason Swenk
"An agency coach is responsible for showing you a proven framework, offering advice, and analyzing the agency to identify weaknesses and strengths. Your coach will help you reach your goals, working with you step by step to define what you want and how to achieve it. A great agency coach will provide you with a method of training, counseling, and instructing an individual or a group on how to develop skills to enhance their productivity or overcome a performance problem."
Marcel Petitpas
Marcel specializes in helping agencies measure and improve their profitability. His firm Parakeeto helps agencies design, implement and run world-class agency operations reporting systems so they can take control of their profitability and scale with confidence.
What can you do today to make a difference?
You need to register for The Agency Growth Book Launch right now! This way you'll get your free copy of the book and hear from 17 expert Agency Coaches, together for the first time! Check out -> The Agency Growth Book launch
Browse our growth enablers page to identify other types of contributors that can help your Agency scale.
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This free ebook is packed with everything you need to know to grow your agency faster, including insights from world-class Agency coaches and technology and service providers. You'll learn how to scale and grow your agency sustainably, and find out the latest trends and best practices in digital agency growth.
