Agency leadership hats

Being an agency leader is an exhausting job. But part of that is because it's actually many jobs, which we tend to mistakenly see as one.

By combining them all in our head like this, we're adding to the feeling of chaos in the agency, and it can make everything feel overwhelming sometimes. It also makes it difficult to hand over jobs to others as your agency grows. Let's look at each of these jobs as clearly separate.

Think about each job role as a hat for you to put on when you do it, and how many hats you tend to have to wear in your agency.

The hats are grouped into five levels:

• Owner: Most founders do nothing in this role except take a dividend. But your business is an asset you have chosen to invest in, and you should think actively about it.

• Director: You have a legal duty as a director of a business, and most founders leave it at that. But really your role at this level should be broader than that. It’s about being able to climb up further out of the daily running of the agency to see more broadly and think long term. It’s really helpful to have regular advisory board meetings and retreats to operate properly in this hat.

• CEO: You may call this founder, managing director, managing partner or anything you like. Effectively this is the role you have as the person ultimately in charge of leading the agency. You nurture the culture, set the strategy, create accountability and more.

• AgencyOps: This is the day-to-day management of the agency, covering sales, people, action (everything you do for clients), results (including finance), and knowledge. Founders often have multiple hats at this level of the agency in its early phases of growth.

• Practitioner: You probably started out as a practitioner in your field

There are two rules of the hats: