Part 2: 43% Increase in People Performance

Part 2 of 2 of helping agency owners increase the performance of their employees.

Hey I’m Nick Avaria, agency owner, and founder of Agency Acquisitions. Every week I share a client story, insights, and tips into scaling your agency faster, in 300 words or less.

Last week’s email talked about using agency objectives to drive alignment with employees and individual performers.

Peak people performance: The Objective → Metric → KPI System: The key to alignment Part 2 of 2

Misalignment = Friction

Friction = Underperformance

Remember: There are two primary requirements for alignment:

1. Alignment between the company and the individual employee (role)

2. Alignment between employees

How to get alignment between employees and remove all the friction from misalignment: Have a singular focus across all teams: client value.

The best way to measure this is client retention as measured by LTV (Lifetime Value)

Here’s where agencies create friction. They put client retention solely on the Accounts team or only on client-facing individuals. 

The result? People who are not accountable to client retention, over time, will begin to optimize towards things that don’t drive client value. 

I break this down in more detail in this YouTube Video on People Performance:

In the worst cases they optimize for ego which creates the trap of being technically correct, but losing the client over time in the process.

This is what will be the pushback from your employees:

1. I’m not client facing

2. I have no control over the client

3. It’s not my job (and other variations of “I’m not responsible for the client”)

So how do we make the shift to being client value centric? 

Here’s the 6 steps we implement for our clients:

1. Get everyone’s feedback on why they should not be responsible for client retention and compile it

2. Thank everyone for their feedback and explain that it has been incorporated into the follow system:

   1. NPS (net promoter score) dashboard

   2. Client results dashboard

   3. Client churn dashboard

   4. Quarterly Brainstorming

3. NPS - you run this every quarter and after all major initiatives and projects over a threshold amount.

   1. This means that you can now measure creative and other less measurable functions within the agency

4. Client results - everyone has a metric or KPI. In some cases it will only be NPS

5. Create a client offboarding document and interview process that will generate feedback for reasons for leaving

6. Quarterly team brainstorming session to create client value - that way everyone has a chance to affect the results

If you want a list of all the objectives, metrics, and KPIs an agency should have, download my guide for taking your agency to 10M+ in annual revenue.

- Nick Avaria