The Replacement Ladder: Part 3 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.

In this email I’m covering delivery.

Now when I say "get out of delivery," it might sound like one decision, it’s more like three.

The tell that someone has tried to do all three at once, or in the wrong sequence, is their churn goes up, clients start leaving, the founder gets pulled back in, and the whole exit stalls.

So with this rung, it’s vital that you get the order right.

First, you hand off the client work itself. The doing.

You find people you can delegate the day-to-day production to, and you teach them how to do it. This part is often the least emotional, most agencies are ready to be done with the execution - and it's also the least dangerous, because your name isn't on the invoice for every deliverable, your team's is. If you hand this off well, the client barely notices.

Second, you hand off day-to-day client management.

This is the harder one, and the one too many of you rush. Day-to-day management means the emails, the check-ins, the small-fires, the is-this-going-well pulse-taking. Two things about doing this well. One, keep two or three of your top relationships for yourself - not the day-to-day meetings, but a monthly or quarterly touch base outside the structured rhythm. Those clients came in because of you, and the human thread there is important to maintain. Two, when you do hand off, you have to do the thing I'm about to describe in the next paragraph - otherwise this is where churn spikes.

Third, and only third, you hand off quality assurance and strategy.

This covers where the success of the account is heading and what the client should be doing next quarter that they haven't thought of yet. This is the highest-leverage part of delivery, and it's the last part you exit - because it requires the person underneath you to already own the work and the relationship before they can be trusted to own the direction.

Now, the mistake underneath all of this 👇

Retention is almost so obvious that we never articulate it.

To me, keeping a client is the point, losing one is bad. Of course it is. It's so entrenched in how I think about the business that I don't think to say it. And that's exactly the problem - because the person you're handing the account to has no dashboard, no KPI, no written objective and no leading indicator that tells them their number-one job is to retain that client. Nowhere in their role description is it written down that the metric they'll be judged on for pay, promotion and everything else is churn/client retention/NPS. Pick your poison.

You didn't need any of that written down, you never did. Because you're the owner, and your alignment to what matters was one hundred percent - you kept the upside. Nobody else on the team has that alignment by default. It has to be built. Which means the reason your churn spikes right after you exit is because nobody has told them, plainly and in writing, what the game they're now playing is.

So when you get to the delivery rung, do these three things before you decide to step back:

The person taking over the client owns retention explicitly, in their job description, in their objectives, and in the data their comp reviews are anchored to.

They have a dashboard - churn, NPS or its equivalent, real early-warning indicators - so they can see problems coming instead of feeling them arrive.

To sum up:

Hand off in the order above (work first, management second, strategy third) and delivery will finally stop being the rung that keeps pulling you back into your own business.

Next email: sales.

As I was finishing up this email, I got a slack notification from one of our 1-on-1 clients🤯

Now these kind results are of course not typical, but if you’d like to lay the foundations that make this MRR 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) →

Come along if:

• You run an agency doing $150k to $1M per month

• Team says they're maxed out but revenue doesn't show it

• You're tracking 15+ numbers and still can't answer "are we winning"

• Growth is there, but margin is getting worse

• You want moves to make asap, not theory

Nick