Feeling Overwhelmed in Your Agency?

If your career as an agency owner has you feeling overwhelmed, here is a great post from a friend of mine, Sherry Holub, who runs a successful digital agency called JVM Design.

“If you’re just starting out either freelancing or starting a full-fledged design business you’re probably going to fall into one of two categories: utterly overwhelmed, or so full of confidence that you think you can take on the world and win. Either one of these extremes is an unstable place to be at any time, let alone in the beginning.

I made this mistake myself, multiple times over the years before it really sunk in. In fact, it got to the point where my health was actually suffering from working 14+ hour days 5-6 days a week because I honestly believed if I wanted something done right, I had to do it myself. Wrong.

I’d say this might be one of the biggest pitfalls to entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small business owners. Either through thinking that they’re the only ones that can do exactly what they want, or thinking that they don’t have the budget to bring on some help (or a combo of both), they’ll go it alone. Trying to wear the hat of sales person, project manager, designer, programmer, accountant, etc., is a sure-fire way to feel overwhelmed and burnt out. It doesn’t have to be like that.

On the other hand, if you’re so full of confidence that you feel you don’t need to bring in anyone else, it’s still a mistake. As time goes on, you will either be sitting around with nothing to do (because you’re not the rockstar sales person you thought you were or somehow work isn’t magically falling into your lap) or you’ll find yourself overwhelmed with all those things you have to do to keep your business running.

To run an effective business beyond single freelancer you absolutely must bring on competent people to work for you or to partner with you. Find them on the open web, through friends or other business contacts, or through a talent sourcing agency, but by all means, find them. When you have a solid team, your agency can run like a well-oiled machine from the sales end, all the way through the project process.

If you’re not in a position to hire a full team just yet, you can benefit from the knowledge and experience of others and consider signing up for something like Jason’s Agency Playbook course. Having someone who’s “been there, done that” can be invaluable. I wish I’d found someone like that early in my business as I could have avoided a lot of those pitfalls and burnouts.

You don’t have to do it all yourself!”

Growing as an Agency

Growing the best agency possible moving forward is being able to recognise when you are feeling overwhelmed and how to offload tasks and projects to better suited members of your team. Take a step back and look at the bigger picture of your agency for what you need to do next.

From my own experiences, I can provide advice on many topics from how you can increase your agency profit margins to how you can build authority for your agency.

That’s not all, I have the best ways for your business to stop losing money on projects, how performance based pricing models can be the best strategy for your agency and why including remote teams or freelancers in your team can be beneficial in the long run.

Learn more about my career as well as tips, tricks and insights by checking out my blogs that cover a wide variety of topics.

Find more from me like advice from other successful agency experts in my Ask Swenk series and more of my videos on my Youtube channel.