SPARK AgencyOps

Ensuring the agency runs smoothly day to day is the first level of founder achievement.

Without this, you’ll keep getting pulled down to low-altitude work, constantly dealing with questions and problems.

Once you have a healthy agency that runs smoothly at the operational level you can:

• Focus your work at a high-altitude, more proactively, in your leadership role (using the FLAME agency leadership framework). Being a founder and CEO, rather than an operational manager.

• Enjoy the wealth of being a founder. Not just earning good money, but having a valuable asset. Also having an agency that is the vehicle for achieving what you want to achieve. And having a business that supports the life you want to live.

So, this is the place to start, to ensure you design and grow a healthy agency.

AgencyOps

AgencyOps is, of course, short for Agency Operations.

It covers the essential day to day management of your agency business.

This is what most founders think of as their leadership work, but it’s actually about management.

Too often agencies try to grow with the founder handling all of this in their head every day. Making decisions on the fly. Being needed in every area.

Healthy agencies establish their AgencyOps work outside of the founder’s head.

They have a management team as they grow, yes, but it’s more about having common ways of thinking, supported by well designed processes and templates.

That enables the founder to relax and focus on higher-altitude work, knowing how things will be done at the operational level.

SPARK AgencyOps

SPARK is a framework for AgencyOps.

It is the fastest and most reliable way to get your agency running smoothly day-to-day.

That’s because it provides the structure for thinking about the agency, supported by well-designed processes and templates.

It guides you as the founder in embedding these processes in your agency, ensuring all areas are covered.

The framework divides AgencyOps into five core areas:

• Sales: Finding and growing clients

• People: Building, supporting, and managing a team

• Action: Everything the agency does for clients

• Results: What the agency needs to achieve for everyone (money and more)

• Knowledge: An agency exists to sell its knowledge, so it must focus on developing it mindfully. (This is overlooked too often in managing agencies)

Each of these areas is then broken down into objectives that the management team can focus on. And each objective then has a collection of actions to take to achieve it.

So the structure of SPARK is like this:

Framework > Areas > Objectives > Actions

In this section you can drill down from the core SPARK framework, all the way down to practical actions. It helps to give a structure to managing agencies, which can otherwise feel chaotic.