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Hi. Welcome back to another episode of agency life, uh, solo episode today. I wanted to talk about something that comes up, over and over again with clients and prospects. Some are having conversations when I'm doing a health check. With them is the concept of time in a professional services business. Sometimes agency owners say to me that they feel that their staff doesn't understand the importance of time or they're not time tracking consistently and or their moaning about it. So what we've actually prepared is, and this is part of the training that I have in the digital agency toolbox as well. But I just wanted to take it out and do a solo episode. If you want to see the visuals on this, you can go to YouTube, but you can listen along as well. Mhm. So for this you want to look at when you're in an agency, Really, your greatest resource is your time. So what I'm going to talk about here is the definition of time management time management in the numbers, how it's linked to your profitability, some professional services. Specifics, uh, typical time wasters. What can we do to manage it? better Kobe's four areas to focus on in time management and how should we prioritise our time? And then we can actually look at how it impacts your agency so you could maybe get somebody in, maybe get the team to listen to this or watch the actual, um, watch the YouTube video. So let's go on ahead and talk about it. So what is the definition of time management? It is the process of organising and planning how to divide your time between specific activities. Good time management enables you to work smarter, not harder, so that you can get more done in less time, even when time is tight and pressure is high. Failing to manage your time damages your effectiveness in the business, and it also causes a lot of stress. Let's look at some numbers around this. This is a fantastic survey by a benchmark. It's actually going to be out again very, very soon. There's a bench press or benchmark. I think it could be Bench Press. Based on the UK study of 500 agencies out of 100 those were actually digital and the average billable time was 63% at the top 25% of those agencies were actually well above 70%. And 70% is the number that we actually strive for when we work with agencies. And that's where we get them to. Is up 70 75% utilisation rate. Out of the 500 agencies, 65% of them worked with fixed pricing, e exceeding time spent on client account directly hit the result of the companies. And at a 500 agencies, the average profit ratio was about 20%. And this is also the target that we aim to get agencies at and above. In many instances, we can get them over that, too. So keep an eye out for this survey. It's going. I know I saw the questionnaire going out a few weeks ago, so it should be out again. And let's see what the numbers are like for 2019. How is time management linked to your profitability? So if you want to think about it, the profit per employee equals sales minus cost over a number of employees. Now, how this actually transcribe is you've got the price times volume, so things that impact the price are the change in market price, the price premium client consultation, retainers, customer knowledge and then where you can impact that is the growth and trends and percentage of market share. They all have an impact on price and volume. Underneath employees, you've got bill ability. You know, really, it is about the utilisation. Present, the motivation and availability. You've got to have the right person in the right place. You need people who are competent who have got great customer and internal relations because you know they're effective communication. That saves time. Your employees need to leverage the ratio and structure of the organisation and their attitudes culture, leadership, compensation and career path like they're all included in the employee section. When it comes to the cost of services, you know, two thirds of your agency's costs are actually in this utilisation rate. The productivity, standardisation, knowledge management and subcontracting, and then the other Third is OPEC's, like you're selling expenses, your general administrative expenses as well. So just in case you weren't clear about what the profitability is, that is actually how we run it. And I've got a quick example here. If you had an agency that had a revenue of $10 million right and their cost of goods and services was to USD, so they're gross. Results would be eight million. You take away their operating costs which is 5.5 million. You've got a beta of $0.5 million USD and then you have depreciation included in that that's 0.3 USD million USD and the net result would be 0.2. So I think sometimes like this is again something to remember. If you were working in an agency and you see big retainer is coming in like 50 grand a month, there are so much money that has to be spent in order to deliver that 50 that the agency owner isn't pocketing. You know the 50 minus your wages like there are so many expenses going in. So I think it's really important for everyone in the agency to understand how much it costs and that team nights out coffee in the kitchen, the desk, the computers that everything is all reliant on having great clients, great results with them and doing it in a profitable way. So let's look at the professional services specifics. This is how we spend time and what it costs us. And what are the typical time wasters? Telephone interruptions, poorly run meetings, misfiled information, inefficient delegation, poor planning, waiting delays. A lot of red tape, not sticking to priorities. Procrastination. Maybe come in and your big job to do. But you're like I'm not gonna do that until after lunch, and then it gets pushed off again to the next day and reschedules and changes changes in from the client side or changes from your side and it problems. These can all be incredible time wasters. So what can we do to improve them, right? The first place we've got to look at it is we've got to understand where the time goes. Tracking with the actual tasks is it's such an important thing to do. And if you're working in an agency and time tracking and like, you know, this is so boring, like you know, it's not something you want to do. There are so many tools out there that shouldn't have to mean that you're doing it manually. So the first thing is making sure it's as seamless as possible, and it is not as not making you take more time to track your time. So looking at the tools that are out there, it's very, very important. Focus on high impact value activities also consolidate smaller tasks. If we've got a group of little bitty things to do together, block an hour for those and do them all in one. And there's a lot of, uh, research coming out now that task hopping going from one big thing into a small thing into another thing and and and just chopping and changing, as opposed to blocking your time for 16 19 minutes to focus on one task or grouping them into a set of tasks that you're going to do for an hour. You need to develop your team. You know they need to be constantly training constantly, learning how to do things better. You need to work smarter, have the goals that are for the client and learn how to use idle time in between that, you know, have you got if you have a spare four hours in the afternoon because you're waiting for things to come back from the client, get onto a training course, do a certification using standards and having tools and best practises, we help agencies make an agency playbook so that everyone knows how to deliver in a consistent way that can really help with the time as well Get control of information flow like how? What is the process from sales to account management? Hand over what is the process from the account manager to the client on reports. Are they talking weekly? Do they talk on slack? Is it on phone? Is about email? Is it in the project management to really have to have a very clear way of processing information in and out of the agency taking time to plan, you know, not rushing into it, but actually taking the time to plan things out? Well, that's going to save time, reduce meeting time or improve the meeting. Quality agencies can be very a common thing where they will have a lot of meetings and there are meetings that are needed. But do they need to be for an hour? Could they be for 20 minutes? Could there be a standup? Could there be every two weeks instead of every week? Just look at the number of meetings and everyone come together and evaluate their outcomes. What are they for and how can they be made more efficient and make sure you organise all your information? You know, having it all over the place or not knowing which drive is that in spend an afternoon with the whole team to organise all the drives where things in Dropbox streamlining things and making a video so that when new employees come in, they know exactly where to find all the information in your company. So if we look at Cove is four areas of focus for time management, the the way they look at is like you've got notes and checklists, so you make sure you recognise the demand on energy and time calendars and project management tools. We've been working closely with the SELO, and they have some incredible project management, too basis and upset buckle and sync with it as well. You will focus on high impact activities in the future. Next, you've got to look at prioritisation. Will you make? How will you can compare to the relative value that you deliver? You have to make sure that you're not spending time on task. The client doesn't see any value in, or they are not going to get the results for the client because at the end of the day I've said it before and I'll say it again. An agency is only going to be around. If you have clients, let's see the value in the work that you're doing. You're doing it in the time allocated. It's profitable for your business and they are getting results and self management. Time cannot be managed only your manage yourself and how much productivity you can get done within that time. If we look at prioritisation, you would go. I have a graph here, but if you're listening, you can imagine a square with a T and, uh, cut off in a box and you've got on the left hand side. You've got high impact and low impact, and then on the top you've got urgent, not not urgent and urgent. And then you've got on the other side bad stress. So if we look at what's high impact and not urgent, it could be planning, relationship building and clarity. What's low impact on that urgent are back burners and things that are never finished. What you've got high impact and urgent or tight deadlines and firefighting and what you have low impact and urgent are interruptions and you know fires that have to be crisis is and just drama. You know that things haven't been done, so why focus on time spent and prioritisation? You have to have the ability to learn from past experiences to allow you to debug projects before they start. You need to define what are the high impact value points in our deliverables and our processes. For the clients, you need to improve the overall work climate and work towards best practise. Make sure you have, like a sustained an outperform your competition. That's where the agency playbook comes in. Some great training and training videos. Having a 90 day Onboarding programme, not cutting any corners when it comes to educating your team and bringing them on board, and also facilitate great work conditions, the quality on how you work and how you want to act and your your trips and like like you're getting people together into workshops and getting to do hackathons and training like facilitating that it's always be learning. And it's a great way to actually improve your time, um, management and prioritisation as well. So I hope that is being a bit helpful. Hope maybe you could share it with your team. But really, if you are just struggling with time tracking or you actually feel like the team doesn't understand what you do, maybe listen to this. Or if you would like to have a chat about anything more, what we do, you could just drop us a line at hello at growing group dot com. That's all for this week's solo episode from A Cloud A Have a Great day.