The Replacement Ladder: Part 5 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.

So far we've cleared admin, delivery and sales.

Today I’m covering the final rung, which is leadership (then the diagnostic I promised you in email one).

If you've cleared the first four rungs, leadership at this point is maybe five to ten hours a week, and most of that work is scalable because you're now working through other managers and leaders.

• You're not doing admin

• You're not doing delivery

• You're not writing scripts or managing DMs

• You're not on sales calls except the ones where you're deliberately the difference-maker.

What you're doing at this stage should be strategic direction, cultural stewardship, the biggest hires, the calls only the owner can make - working on the business at a high level, not in it.

The choice to clear this rung too - to install a second-in-command who takes over the leadership duties themselves - is a totally different decision than the first four.

The first four are structural, I’d argue that this one is personal.

You do it because you want to become a pure owner rather than an operator, or because you want to build another business, or because your energy is somewhere else now and you want to honour that.

It isn't the "final level" of running an agency but it is a choice about what kind of relationship you want with what you built.

So! That's the ladder:

1. Admin

2. Delivery

3. Marketing

4. Sales

5. Leadership

With that said, here is a link to the diagnostic I promised you in the first email.

(make a copy for yourself to edit)

It's a short self-assessment with thirteen statements about where you are on marketing, sales, ops and leadership.

You score each one from one to five based on how true it feels, and the total maps you to one of five stages: Product Market-Fit, Start-Up, Stay-Up, Scale-Up, or Big Business.

Each stage tells you what to work on next.

There's also a short question at the end about what kind of business you want this to be in five years - sell it, run it without needing to be inside it, or keep it as a lifestyle business you personally operate.

All three are legitimate answers, but which one you pick changes what the next rung means for you.

Thanks for staying with the series.

Nick

P.S.

If you want to sit through a more robust/all at once version of this process, with the specific systems that go underneath each rung and the opportunity to directly ask me questions, I'm running a workshop tomorrow at 11:30am PT / 2:30pm ET that covers exactly that.

Full details + how to secure a seat here

Come along tomorrow 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

Also:

If you've been reading all 5 emails in this ladder series over the last five weeks and thinking…

…"this is the year I clear these rungs and finally feel at peace with my business" 

this workshop will give you the systems you need to make the necessary decisions + speak to me directly and get my advice.

Come along and let’s talk it through