The Replacement Ladder: Part 2 of 5

This is part of a five-email series on how to get out of the day-to-day of your agency - the specific order to hand things off, and the traps at each rung. If you're jumping in mid-arc and want the context first, read the explainer here.

This email we're on the first rung, admin.

Admin isn't an exciting rung by any means, it's not going to change how the business feels to run. It doesn't fix your margin, it doesn't reduce your churn, and nobody is going to write a book about the founder who finally handed off their calendar. Which is exactly why I want to talk about it.

What do I mean by Admin?

• Bookkeeping

• Payroll

• Calendar management

• Invoices you personally send

• Receipts you personally file

• Vendor emails you personally reply to

• Signatures you personally chase

• Travel you personally book

• Subscriptions you personally cancel.

None of it individually seems worth naming, that's the whole point.

The rule for the admin rung is simple: you should be reviewing your books, not doing them.

Same principle for payroll, same principle for calendar. Reviewing is a fifteen-minute act; doing is a two-hour one.

Now, the reason you may resist 👇

The first is that you realise how much of it there is. Most people I run this audit with are astonished - the true figure lands somewhere between eight and twelve hours a week, spread thinly enough across the day that no single one of those hours felt worth naming. It's not like it’s a four-hour bookkeeping block; it's the six-minute-here, ten-minute-there texture of the whole week. Which is why many of you consistently under-report it, and why "I don't really do that much admin" is almost always wrong. The test: for one week, note every task you handled that a competent assistant could have handled. The total time spent at the end of the week is your admin rung.

The second is that admin is cheap to hand off. Cheaper than any other rung by a wide margin. A good part-time executive assistant costs a fraction of what you'd pay a mid-level delivery hire, and the leverage is enormous - because the person you're freeing up is you, and your hourly value to the business is not the assistant's hourly rate. So the ROI here is massive.

It's definitely not a question of whether it pays back… so why do most agency owners not do it?

My answer to that is a small cluster of very human behaviours.

Some owners have never had an assistant before and don't quite know how to work with one -they underuse the person for six weeks, decide it isn't working, and let them go. Some owners feel a residual guilt about handing off "small" tasks, as though it's precious. And some owners are attached to the busyness itself - the movement of admin fills a shape in the day, and clearing it out means you have to look at what the important work is.

The way to clear this rung, practically, is:

Get a good assistant, part-time is usually enough at this stage, ideally someone with experience of an agency environment. Give them the four or five recurring things first - calendar, expenses, travel, vendor management, basic bookkeeping handoff to whoever does your books. Add one thing every fortnight for the first three months. By the end of that window you should have a person who owns everything that isn't a decision, and your rung one is functionally clear.

Clearing this first ensures that cleaning the rest of the ladder is possible.

You cannot see the delivery rung clearly, or the sales rung clearly, or the leadership rung clearly, while your working week is full of six-minute administrative interruptions.

Before looking at hiring, try the one-week audit. For one week, note every task you handled that a competent assistant could have handled. The total time spent at the end of the week is your admin rung.

Next email: delivery.

Nick

P.S.

New YouTube video is live! 👇

How Shane Hohenstein from Voyageur group 10X his agency profits in one year

If you’d like to see how these kind of results might be possible for your agency, I’m running a live 90-minute workshop covering:

• How we grow team capacity when they swear they're "maxed out"

• How we choose which clients to upsell, fire, and grow to maximize profit

• Q&A. Bring your toughest agency questions and get them answered live.

Details are here (plus an opportunity to secure an early bird pricing seat) →