Two wrong hires almost bankrupted our agency

Our agency was losing money month over month. 

And I knew exactly what the problem was, and how it got started. 

Two wrong hires almost derailed our entire agency. 

Here’s how we fixed it. 

I’m Nick Avaria, agency owner, and founder of Agency Acquisitions. Watch my latest Youtube videos where I break down the exact systems and tools I use to scale agencies to 8-figures and beyond.

Every agency goes through a growth period where you have to hire fast.

Me and my co-founder were overloaded, and needed to start splitting out the delivery to other people. At this point we were still trying to do it all from the tech, to sales, customers interface, and marketing. 

We were following the replacement ladder of hiring. 

(First admin, then client delivery, then marketing, then sales) 

So we hired two senior level staff to help us scale: 

• An Account Director

• A Digital Director 

And we invested well over 6-figures to get these hires in place. 

The hardest part of hiring for these types of roles is that most people at a director level know how to say all the right things in an interview. 

• They said they were team players

• Were excited to focus on the “bigger picture”

• And they wanted to support the business operations 

But it didn’t take long for the cracks to start to show through. 

Shortly after they started, the energy in our teams changed. 

“That’s not my job” became the #1 sentence around our office. 

Our teams got more siloed, and the two directors pitted their teams against each other. 

Digital was blaming accounts. Accounts was blaming the digital team. 

And no one was taking responsibility. 

It became apparent that the new directors were optimizing for themselves - and not the business. 

They wanted to make their lives easier, by taking the easy path out. 

Clients started to leave. 

At one point our churn was averaging over 15%+ per month. 

I had to put a stop to it before it bankrupted our agency. 

I knew that we had to get joint metrics in place for our business. 

Everything had to be judged by client retention. 

Nothing else mattered. 

Both teams needed to be held to the same standard. 

Client retention is #1. 

With client results falling next in line. 

We created one dashboard that everyone was held to - and it worked. 

Within a few months, both directors left our agency as they knew their way was not going to work anymore. 

And our overall churn dropped down to below 3% after they did.

It was a painful, expensive, but necessary lesson to learn as agency owners. 

Your takeaways to implement at your agency:

#1: You must implement triple net wins. Managers have to align themselves and their teams to win for the client, win for the agency, and win for the individual contributor. 

#2: You need people that are willing to optimize for the business, even when it means more work for them. We can only give decision making power to who are willing to optimize for the business. 

#3: Align the objectives and KPIs of the role so that you have team based wins, and focus less on the individual wins. 

Hiring managers and directors takes practice to get it right.

The faster you can get them to align to your business wins, the more effective they will be. 

If you want to connect on a free chat about how your agency can hire the right people and implement the KPI, book one of my free consults this week.

Nick Avaria