I’m just watching to video on building an SEO agency from Nathan Gotch called, How To Start An SEO Agency As A Beginner In 2024.
At around the 19-minute mark, he starts delivering some interesting gold nuggets on how to scale your agency into becoming the CEO instead of the SEO worker.
The first realization is to NEVER do the same task twice and instead, start delegating tasks that you find yourself doing over and over.
What it sounds like is if you’ve done a task successfully once, then you know the system.
Once you know the system, then you can start acting like a CEO and begin figuring out WHO is going to do the work, instead of figuring out HOW you’re going to do the work.
Even if you do not know HOW specifically to do something, the idea is to go and find an expert to teach you HOW to do the task.
Then once you know how to do the task, you can start building systems to start delegating these specific tasks.
Eliminate Fear Of Delegation
In my last post, Biggest Challenge In Building A $100M Cannabis Marketing Agency #1, I was going to write about the reason why hiring was the current biggest challenge is hiring contractors.
From reading between the lines and confessing authentically, I do have a massive fear of delegating tasks.
One way Nathan explains how to overcome this fear of delegation is to look at people as an investment.
Even though I know how to do all these tasks within my SEO agency — very well — and recent experiences have the challenge of not only hiring consistent quality contractors, but also doing so profitably with the income that I’m generating that can not only pay my cost of living, but also exceed my cost of living to consistently grow my income at fast rates.
Based on previous bad experiences with hiring contractors, I believe one major mistake I made was waiting to hire contractors only when I had a client who demanded fast turnaround times for large projects.
Instead, I should have already been ready to receive the large projects that require fast turnaround times and already have systems in place to handle this massive increase in demand on the system.
I should have already tested and vetted contractors through the simple tasks, all the way through the more complex high level strategy tasks.
Nathan keeps reiterating that even though bad hires DO happen, it’s not necessarily BAD PEOPLE, so much as it is problems with the system.
You don’t need to hire someone to handle multiple roles
Nathan continues by explaining that you can hire people to handle specific individual tasks.
The few areas he quickly said to hire are.
- Strategy – Overal strategy of the SEO campaign
- Data entry – Virtual Assistant who does all the grunt work of data entry.
- Content – Someone to write all the content.
- Technical – Handles all the website development tasks.
Don’t make the contractor just figure it out
Leadership is not about having the contractor figure out the problem, it’s about setting up your team members for success.
To do this, you need to have systems in place to make their job easier.
A system in which we can go in a optimize to make it better.
Don’t make the contractor figure out the system.
Systems appear to be the job of the CEO.
How I understand it, is systems are required to effectively scale your company for consistent success.
Final thoughts
I feel like another step in overcoming this fear of delegation is to have enough money set aside to learn as you’re building these systems.
It doesn’t make sense to try and scale if you’re just barely making ends meet with the current clients you have.
However, I agree that you should always be working on building and refining systems to get more efficient in delivering quality work to clients, faster.
The hardest part in all businesses is sales.
If you don’t have sales, you don’t have a business.
I feel like you should always be ready to delegate work, while you’re optimizing your systems with the current amount of income you have with your current clients.
Then, when you’re approaching your capacity to deliver quality fast work to clients, you’ll already have standardized systems in place to hire contractors to step right in to start taking over some of the tasks that don’t require higher level thinking and problem solving.
