How SAGA helps small agencies grow

This SAGA Member Webinar is available only to individuals with active memberships. Login or join to gain access.
Webinar presented live on December 4, 2024

In this webinar, SAGA Founder Chip Griffin provides a guided tour of all of the free and paid resources that SAGA provides. 

Since 2018, SAGA has been producing a large volume of free content, including articles, guides, webinars, podcasts, and videos. Chip will help show you how to uncover the resources that you need and explain how to get the most out of them.

In addition, Chip is often asked how SAGA works with individual agencies, so he will provide an overview of the paid 1:1 services offered, including an explanation of which ones tend to work best for specific agency needs.

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The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Hello and welcome to today’s SAGA webinar on How we help small agencies grow. I’m your host, Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and today we’ll be going over all of the different resources that we have available, most of them free, but also some paid help that we provide as well.

It’s a good overview for everything that we’ve got because over the last six years, we’ve created more than 700 articles, videos, podcast episodes, workbooks, other resources. We’ve got some interactive things. And so there’s just so much out there that I find that a lot of folks sometimes don’t know all that we have to offer.

And so I thought this would be a good opportunity as we come into the end of the year and people are starting to think about planning for the year ahead to understand what we have available and what we might be able to use to assist you. So, with that, let’s start by going into some of the housekeeping items, that we have today.

And so, as always, a replay of this webinar will be available to you. If you’re watching this live, you can go back and watch it after the fact so you can see whatever is there that you missed. You don’t have to worry about taking detailed notes today. If you are watching this on replay, well, you already know that the replay is available.

If you are here live, you can use the Q& A function at the bottom of your screen in order to ask questions. And you can use that at any point during the course of the webinar, but I’ll package all the questions up at the end for a Q& A session for the live attendees. If you’re watching this on replay, you won’t get the Q& A, but you’re welcome to email me at chip@smallagencygrowth.com with any questions that you may have. And if you’re here live and simply want to ask a question that you don’t want others to see, again, feel free to use that email address and I will try to get back to you as quickly as possible. If you talk about this webinar on social media, we’d love it if you use the hashtag agency leadership to make it easily discoverable.

And of course, all of these resources that we’ll be talking about, in fact, I’ll be taking you on a tour of our website at smallagencygrowth.com so you can see right where everything is located. So with that, we’ll, I’ve already said what I’m going to talk about primarily are the free resources, then some of the paid help that we do.

And I’m also going to talk a little bit about what the future might hold and, and, also solicit your feedback on that, whether you’re watching live or after the fact, I would love to hear your suggestions and feedback on what we’ve done and what you’d like to see from us in the future. So with that, what I’m going to do now is I’m going to switch it up and instead of the presentation, I’m going to bring up the There we go.

The SAGA website. And so the SAGA website really is the hub of all of the resources that we have available. And apart from getting harassed by my ugly mug when you show up first on the website, there are a lot of things here that you will find very useful. So let me kind of give you a little bit of an understanding of the overall layout.

The How We Help…this is the all of the paid things that we do and so I’ll go through that later, but I really want to focus mostly on the free resources today. The Who we help is just a little bit more information to help guide you. So if you see yourself in any one of these things you can go in there and there will be suggestions about what you might want to look at first.

Next up are the insights, and this is really the core of the free resources that we’re offering. We have articles, we have podcast episodes, and we also have our YouTube channel, smallagency.tv. And I’ll take you over there in just a moment so that you can see what we have there, but there’s a lot of resources that you can consume.

You can con consume them in whatever format you prefer. So if you like to read, we’ve got you covered. If you like to listen, we’ve got podcasts. If you like to watch, we’ve got tons of videos, so there’s a lot of different options available to you. We also have some interactive tools available. So we have the Agency Health Assessment, which I’ll show you.

But basically that’s a short quiz that allows you to walk through different aspects of your business and understand where you might want to be focusing your energies, what challenges and opportunities you should address first. It’s very quick, very high level, but I found that it’s very helpful with a lot of agency owners to get a head start on meeting the challenges that they have ahead.

We also have a PR agency evaluation calculator because we have a lot of folks who come to us and say, how much is my agency worth? And so this calculator gives you a very quick, very dirty estimate of what your firm might be worth. And it also shows you some of the components that go into evaluation.

Obviously this is not something that you should rely upon. If you want to actually have a proper valuation, you should get that done through the correct channels and make sure that it looks at comparable sales and things like that. It looks at the specific circumstances of your firm because there are always things that will cause your value to go up or down beyond just the raw numbers.

But it’s a good starting point and gives you a good idea of the neighborhood where you might be expecting an acquisition to take place. We also have a resource library full of workbooks and templates and I’ll go through some of the most popular of those. Then finally we have the email newsletter that, it goes out every Friday and it has a summary of what new things we’ve put out as well as other things, and I’ll walk through all of that with you as well.

And then finally up here we have events. So we have webinars like these, we have some workshops coming up, we have roundtables from time to time where it’s more of a conversational aspect with, amongst agency owners and a lot of different things, and we’re trying different things there as well. So that might be an area that you have suggestions on things that you would like to see in the future.

So let’s go ahead and we’ll start taking a look at some of these things in more detail. And so let’s, let’s start by showing you on the homepage where you can find the absolute latest that we have available. Obviously we have articles. Just today we released, if you’re watching this in real time, or you’re attending live, you know that we just released the agency owner survey results for Q4 of 2024.

Lots of good data in there on the outlook for the industry from your fellow owners, but also a deep dive into talent issues, compensation, recruiting, retention, benefits, etc. Lots of useful things in there. We show all of the upcoming events here. So, again, this homepage is a great place to go just to get the latest.

And, of course, the latest podcast episodes, here as well. Primarily focused on the Agency Leadership Podcast that I host with Gini Dietrich. And then the rest of this, talks more about some of the, the paid opportunities. It talks about my philosophy. Sort of the normal things that you would expect on an organization’s homepage, but then we also have some of the most popular resources. So the valuation calculator I already talked about, but we’ll go over there and take a look at it in a minute just to give you more of a flavor. The agent project, the Agency project profitability guide is probably the most popular resource that we have.

It’s an Excel template along with a guide that goes along with it that will help you to figure out how profitable your specific projects or clients are. It helps you to estimate what you should be doing for pricing going forward. It lets you play with a lot of what if scenarios. Incredibly popular.

Really encourage you to download that if you haven’t already and it is completely free. Now we also have a free Community on Slack so you’re encouraged to go over there and join as well. Good conversation takes place there. It’s a place to ask me questions, no charge again. It’s just an opportunity for us to all communicate with each other and learn from each other’s experiences.

And then of course the Agency Health Assessment that I mentioned before. We also have replays of all of the webinars that we’ve done over the last six years. So there’s a lot of resources there to look at. I’ve got information on the AIM GET framework, that we use in the work that we do with agencies.

So this is something I created probably five years ago to help really think about the different aspects of your business and how you pull them all together. And there’s, there’s actually a webinar that walks you through in more detail, the whole framework and how to use it. So I’d encourage you to check that out if you want to learn more.

And of course, I also offer a free coaching call. So if you’re a small agency owner, you can get a free 45 minute coaching call with me at any time so that I can help you out however I can. No strings attached, no sales pitch, none of that kind of stuff. I’m really, my goal here is is to be helpful to agency owners as much as I can.

Yes, obviously we want to generate revenue. And so we do have things where we work one on one with agencies or we have paid workshops. But the vast majority of what I do is free because I believe that if we help everybody, enough folks will come and work with us, that it will be worthwhile. So. All right, let’s go ahead and dive into some of these specific resources that I’ve mentioned.

So we’ll take a look at that Agency Health Assessment. Because this is a good place to get started if you want to just try to figure out what’s working and what’s not at your agency. And as you can see here, it’s a very simple interactive questionnaire. There are going to be 50 questions on here that allow you to really quickly go in and just answer each of these questions, yes or no.

And then at the end, it will provide you with a summary of the results and a score. That score is not something you should be comparing to other agency owners, but it’s something that you can use in order to benchmark yourself. And so if you were to take this assessment once a year and come back and review it, hopefully your overall score would be increasing, which means that you’ve addressed more and more of the issues that you have.

Nobody’s going to get 100 on this. This is not that kind of quiz. It’s not designed to be used that way. It really is designed to surface those things that you probably want to be focused on most immediately. Great place for you to start if you’re starting to take advantage of our resources. The valuation calculator that I mentioned earlier, it’s again very simple, bordering on simplistic I suppose, but you put in your revenue, your expenses, how much you pay yourself, and then answer just a couple of questions about the trajectory of your business and the overall performance of your business.

And then it will give you an estimated range for what your agency might be worth. Again, not something that you can take to the bank, not necessarily something that you would even present to a potential buyer, but a good starting point for you to have in your head, roughly where you’re at, because my experience is that most agency owners really don’t have any idea, even the ballpark range that they should be thinking about for the value of their business. And so this calculator is designed to give you at least a starting point, to work from. So if you’re thinking about selling anytime in the future, this is a good thing to, to utilize. It’s also a good way to play what if games. You know, what if my revenue were this, what if I improved my profitability to this margin?

You know, those are the kinds of things that you can do in order to try to figure out what the impact would be. If you go, if you add another 500, 000 in revenue, what does it do to your valuation? If you’re able to improve your profitability from 15 percent to 20%, what does that do to your valuation? And you can kind of see all those different things so that you understand where you maybe want to focus your efforts if you’re looking to sell in the future.

Workbooks and templates. So, these are all guides, that I’ve put together over the years, in response, usually to specific questions and challenges that agency owners have. So, the Guide to Project Budgeting, that’s the, as I said, the most popular. and a great place to start, but there are guides here to help you on different aspects of the AIM-GET framework.

There are sample documents, so employee handbooks, various types of contracts, NDAs, etc., performance reviews, all sorts of different things that can help you get a starting point. For anything that’s a legal document, a contract, I would encourage you to make sure that you take it to an actual attorney who is familiar with your own localities, rules and regulations, your agency’s specific legal requirements and can make sure that whatever is there is, is appropriate for your business and has been properly vetted by someone with a law degree.

I am not a lawyer. These are documents that I’ve accumulated over the years. Many of them are ones I’ve used in my own agencies and they’re provided as an example, just so you see what it’s like. Understand what’s typically included in some of these documents that perhaps you’ve never even seen before.

And then finally, as I mentioned, we have the SAGA newsletter. If you are not already subscribed, I would encourage you to go over there and subscribe to it. We don’t spam you. We don’t hit you up for stuff. We’re just, we’re trying to share information with you. And so it’s very simple and straightforward and again, a great way to get resources because you not only get my perspective each week, but you’ll also get a roundup from Jen who looks at all of the different aspects of what’s being said throughout the agency advising community.

on new business, on human resources, all sorts of things. And we’ll share those links to other people’s resources for you. So you don’t have to spend a lot of time surfing the web to get it all. She serves it up to you every week, right into your inbox, along with the rest of the SAGA content in that newsletter.

Alright, so those are some of the, the, the deeper depth resources, but we also have the standard fare. We have articles, and so if you click on the articles tab, you’ll see all of the, the recent articles. You’ll see we talk sometimes about evergreen topics like employees versus contractors. We talk about news updates, things that, that impact you.

In this case, we were talking about some of the overtime rules, that got blocked by a court that, that would have impacted how much you had to pay, employees at a minimum in order to avoid paying them overtime. And so there’s a lot of things like that where we try to give you timely things, evergreen data.

And of course, we’re also collecting our own data with things like the quarterly survey of agency owners. And so all of this is designed to give you a lot of, of additional information, and things that you can use to make your own business better, how you can help your own agency grow. For those of you who like podcasts as I do, we have two different podcasts.

We have the Agency Leadership Podcast and the Chats with Chip podcast. Agency leadership podcast is Gini Dietrich and myself. We, we talk every week about different management leadership issues for agencies, and it’s all based on the experience that we have running our business and advising, agency owners.

Gini of course is the creator of the PESO model and runs Spin Sucks. So she brings a lot of additional perspective and, and value to the conversation in addition to my own. And then Chats with Chip is my interview series. So typically I’m talking with agency owners or other experts in the field to tap into their knowledge and share that with all of you.

So I would encourage you, to check these out, particularly if you enjoy listening to podcasts, but they all have video companions as well. So if you’d prefer to watch the conversations that we have, you’re welcome to do that as well. And if you’re doing that with the Agency Leadership Podcast, you’ll probably see some of Gini’s pets, maybe her daughter, all sorts of things.

We try to keep it entertaining and informative at the same time. Alright, smallagency.tv, that is our YouTube channel, and so over here you have access to, as I said, all of the podcast things, but you also, we put a lot of the webinar replays up here, sometimes I’ll do Q& A sessions, there are some live streams that I’ve done, there’s a lot of different kinds of content that you can find here.

There’s an old podcast show that I used to do, called the Small Agency Talk Show. It was a panel discussion where we had, a variety of different experts. It’s on hiatus right now. I don’t know whether it will come back or not, but you can go through the archives and listen to everything that all of the experts have had to say, over the years there as well.

So tons of resources. And of course you can use the search box here to search just within our channel on YouTube so you can find the exact resources. that you want to have without any fuss, muss, or bother. Similarly, while we’re talking about search functions, we have a great search function here on the SAGA website.

You can type in anything that you want. It will search everything in the archive. It will search articles, workbooks, podcast episode transcripts, video transcripts, webinar transcripts. It just searches absolutely everything we’ve got so you can find whatever resource you want on whatever topic you might have. And I, I would wager that there’s not any challenge that you face that we don’t have some kind of resource available for because we’ve just covered so much over the last six years.

And so I really encourage you use this search function very aggressively as you’re doing your planning as you’re meeting day to day challenges. The Join SAGA button here is what you use to join the community on Slack. And we also offer, special invitations to roundtables and those sorts of things.

So if you are a free member of the SAGA community, we try to make sure that you are accommodated first on anything that we have to cap attendance at. Speaking of attendance, let’s go ahead and click over here to the events. And so you’ll see on the events tab that we have webinar replays, which, as I mentioned, is an archive going back six years of all sorts of different topics.

Most of them are evergreen, so there’s going to be, again, probably an in depth webinar on just about any topic that you want to cover, whether you’re talking about employees or business development or management issues, M& A, all these different things we’ve covered in extensive detail, and you will find some great resources here.

So I encourage you to check out the archive, but I also encourage you to check out what we have for upcoming events. And so right now we’ve got four events on tap. A couple of the, well, one is obviously this webinar today. So You’re already here. You don’t need to know about that. But we have one coming up in January, which we’ll be talking about selling your agency and some of the things that you need to be thinking about if that’s something that you want to do in the years ahead.

And then we’ve got two workshops that are coming up in January and February. So if you’re watching this before they take place, I’d encourage you to check them out. The first one is on agency business growth strategies. It’s focused on, primarily business development issues. And then the second one is in February and it’s mostly focused on client service.

And it’s called Managing client accounts for results and profit. So, really check those out whether you’re an owner or maybe you’ve got some employees who are involved in business development or client service who would benefit from these. They are, they are paid workshops, but they will be very much worth it.

They’re each done in three parts, two hours in a chunk, for three straight weeks. So really manageable for most people’s schedules because we know you all are busy and want to try to balance it out as much as possible. So, that’s the events side of the equation. And if you have questions about any of this, do feel free to, to share them.

I know I’m sort of hitting all of this at a, a very rapid pace, because I want to try to show you as much of what we have as possible in as compact a period of time as possible to make your time best spent. All right. So from a free resource perspective, I think I’ve covered most of what we have available.

Although I do, my wife, Jen, who is the community manager is also, , in attendance here. And so I’m sure she’ll send me a chat message if there’s anything that I have overlooked, from those free resources that I ought to be sharing with you. I guess the only other thing I would add is that on LinkedIn, on my personal account, I do share a lot of information, there as well and sort of top of mind thoughts that maybe will evolve into an article or a video or something like that.

So I would encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn, as well since you can participate in that and, and hopefully shape some of the content that we do going forward. So now let’s talk about the, the core ways that I work with agencies on a paid basis. So, sometimes the free resources aren’t enough, and sometimes folks want to engage with me more directly on things.

And there are basically three different ways that you can engage with me for help with your agency. The first and most common is short term projects, primarily the Agency Business Checkup. And so the Agency Business Checkup is something that I created when I first started doing SAGA six years ago, and it really is designed to come in and over a short 60 day period or so walk through, the critical aspects of your business and identify those immediate challenges and opportunities.

It’s an opportunity for you to ask me about specific aspects of your business that you may be questioning or that you know is already problematic and you want to address it. And so we dig into these through a series of virtual work sessions in order to try to solve those problems. And within the Agency Business Checkup, we also have, ways to, to, to mold it so that you can, adapt it to your particular needs.

So you can, do the standard checkup, which is what most people do. But then sometimes folks want to take a deeper dive on positioning, and they know that that’s something that they really want to adapt, refine, adjust. And so we can include that in the checkup process as well. We include some positioning in the general checkup, but this is really that deeper dive where we start looking at actual data on that sort of thing to really refine it.

And then, of course, we also have an intensive one where we really go top to bottom. This involves, interviewing members of your team, getting their input, and really turning it into a, a much deeper project that gives you much deeper insight. So, it’s really something that, that usually I will work with you to figure out what’s the best solution for you at this stage in your agency, at the size of your agency, because I know that even within small agencies, there’s a difference between a two person team and a 20 person team.

And so we want to try to make sure that we’re tailoring it to meet your needs and get you the results as quickly, as efficiently and as cost effectively as possible. So that’s the first big way that we work with agency owners to help them on the steps to growth.

The second is ongoing coaching. So this is working with you on a monthly basis, to, or I’m sorry, on a regular basis.

In some cases, it may be monthly calls. In some cases, it may be biweekly. Some cases we may even do weekly. It really depends. We have different options that are available here as well. And so we can do everything from just general maintenance conversations where I’m just a sounding board, filling in gaps here as needed, to being a much more in depth, unlimited style of support where whenever you have a challenge, you just, you ping me with an email or a phone call or whatever, and we’ll solve that problem. And then I also work with agencies, at a team level. So, where I may not be a resource just for an individual owner, but for a group of partners or, you know, even the senior leadership within an agency.

So if you’ve got 20-25 people and you’ve got two or three senior folks who help you on big things, I can often be a resource for them as well because most of them could use a little bit of help in navigating things just as much as you can.

So we have different coaching solutions to meet the needs of different agencies again, at different stages.

And then finally, we have the a la carte options. So these are just mini engagements. You do, you, maybe you want to just kick the tires a little bit. Maybe you’ve got a very specific challenge and you don’t have challenges all that often that you need help with, but when you do, you want to reach out.

And so, I’ve got a couple of different options here, depending on the intensity of, of the challenge, the difficulty of it. And again, we can figure out what the best solution is for your particular need, but it’s one of those, no obligation. You simply just come in. We have that, that individual call, that individual work session, or maybe a short little sprint over a couple of weeks on that.

That’s all there is to it. And then you can come back again down the road if you need it. So we’ve really tried to structure this one on one help in such a way that it gives you the flexibility to get the help that you need when you need it and within your budget. Because again, my goal here is to help agency owners however I can.

Most of it is free, but we do have the paid ones for when you need a little bit more intensive, maybe a little bit more confidential help than is available through the free options.

So I know I’ve talked at an even more rapid pace than I usually do, but hopefully I have covered lots of useful ground. If you’re not sure what the best solution is for you, whether it’s free or pay, just drop me a note and I’m happy to try to point you in the right direction.

If you need help navigating the free resources that we have, Jen really is a concierge for the community. And so I think you can, particularly if you’re in the Slack channel, you can just message her there or just post a question in the Slack channel and she’ll jump on it and help you find what you need. Or you can email her as well or email me and we’re always happy to point you in the right direction as best we can.

So, with that, that will draw to a conclusion the prepared portion of today’s presentation. If you’re here live, I’ll be moving into the Q& A here in just a moment. For those of you who are watching on replay, this is where the replay will end, but of course you are free to email me any questions you have at chip@smallagencygrowth.com. And as I mentioned at the start of this, I’d, I’d really love to hear, any suggestions that you may have for the future, any feedback on the resources that you come across on our site, but what would you like to see us do? Would you like to see group coaching options?

Would you like to see more workshops or different formats for workshops? Are there specific topics that you’d like to see covered? I love any of those suggestions because we really want to be as responsive to the community as possible. And if you spent the time to watch through to this point, then clearly you are interested in what we have to offer.

And so your opinion is extremely valuable to us. So thank you for attending today and we’ll move into the Q and A as in a moment, but thank you for watching. And we look forward to seeing you at a future SAGA event.

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Hello and welcome to today’s SAGA webinar on How we help small agencies grow. I’m your host, Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and today we’ll be going over all of the different resources that we have available, most of them free, but also some paid help that we provide as well.

It’s a good overview for everything that we’ve got because over the last six years, we’ve created more than 700 articles, videos, podcast episodes, workbooks, other resources. We’ve got some interactive things. And so there’s just so much out there that I find that a lot of folks sometimes don’t know all that we have to offer.

And so I thought this would be a good opportunity as we come into the end of the year and people are starting to think about planning for the year ahead to understand what we have available and what we might be able to use to assist you. So, with that, let’s start by going into some of the housekeeping items, that we have today.

And so, as always, a replay of this webinar will be available to you. If you’re watching this live, you can go back and watch it after the fact so you can see whatever is there that you missed. You don’t have to worry about taking detailed notes today. If you are watching this on replay, well, you already know that the replay is available.

If you are here live, you can use the Q& A function at the bottom of your screen in order to ask questions. And you can use that at any point during the course of the webinar, but I’ll package all the questions up at the end for a Q& A session for the live attendees. If you’re watching this on replay, you won’t get the Q& A, but you’re welcome to email me at chip@smallagencygrowth.com with any questions that you may have. And if you’re here live and simply want to ask a question that you don’t want others to see, again, feel free to use that email address and I will try to get back to you as quickly as possible. If you talk about this webinar on social media, we’d love it if you use the hashtag agency leadership to make it easily discoverable.

And of course, all of these resources that we’ll be talking about, in fact, I’ll be taking you on a tour of our website at smallagencygrowth.com so you can see right where everything is located. So with that, we’ll, I’ve already said what I’m going to talk about primarily are the free resources, then some of the paid help that we do.

And I’m also going to talk a little bit about what the future might hold and, and, also solicit your feedback on that, whether you’re watching live or after the fact, I would love to hear your suggestions and feedback on what we’ve done and what you’d like to see from us in the future. So with that, what I’m going to do now is I’m going to switch it up and instead of the presentation, I’m going to bring up the There we go.

The SAGA website. And so the SAGA website really is the hub of all of the resources that we have available. And apart from getting harassed by my ugly mug when you show up first on the website, there are a lot of things here that you will find very useful. So let me kind of give you a little bit of an understanding of the overall layout.

The How We Help…this is the all of the paid things that we do and so I’ll go through that later, but I really want to focus mostly on the free resources today. The Who we help is just a little bit more information to help guide you. So if you see yourself in any one of these things you can go in there and there will be suggestions about what you might want to look at first.

Next up are the insights, and this is really the core of the free resources that we’re offering. We have articles, we have podcast episodes, and we also have our YouTube channel, smallagency.tv. And I’ll take you over there in just a moment so that you can see what we have there, but there’s a lot of resources that you can consume.

You can con consume them in whatever format you prefer. So if you like to read, we’ve got you covered. If you like to listen, we’ve got podcasts. If you like to watch, we’ve got tons of videos, so there’s a lot of different options available to you. We also have some interactive tools available. So we have the Agency Health Assessment, which I’ll show you.

But basically that’s a short quiz that allows you to walk through different aspects of your business and understand where you might want to be focusing your energies, what challenges and opportunities you should address first. It’s very quick, very high level, but I found that it’s very helpful with a lot of agency owners to get a head start on meeting the challenges that they have ahead.

We also have a PR agency evaluation calculator because we have a lot of folks who come to us and say, how much is my agency worth? And so this calculator gives you a very quick, very dirty estimate of what your firm might be worth. And it also shows you some of the components that go into evaluation.

Obviously this is not something that you should rely upon. If you want to actually have a proper valuation, you should get that done through the correct channels and make sure that it looks at comparable sales and things like that. It looks at the specific circumstances of your firm because there are always things that will cause your value to go up or down beyond just the raw numbers.

But it’s a good starting point and gives you a good idea of the neighborhood where you might be expecting an acquisition to take place. We also have a resource library full of workbooks and templates and I’ll go through some of the most popular of those. Then finally we have the email newsletter that, it goes out every Friday and it has a summary of what new things we’ve put out as well as other things, and I’ll walk through all of that with you as well.

And then finally up here we have events. So we have webinars like these, we have some workshops coming up, we have roundtables from time to time where it’s more of a conversational aspect with, amongst agency owners and a lot of different things, and we’re trying different things there as well. So that might be an area that you have suggestions on things that you would like to see in the future.

So let’s go ahead and we’ll start taking a look at some of these things in more detail. And so let’s, let’s start by showing you on the homepage where you can find the absolute latest that we have available. Obviously we have articles. Just today we released, if you’re watching this in real time, or you’re attending live, you know that we just released the agency owner survey results for Q4 of 2024.

Lots of good data in there on the outlook for the industry from your fellow owners, but also a deep dive into talent issues, compensation, recruiting, retention, benefits, etc. Lots of useful things in there. We show all of the upcoming events here. So, again, this homepage is a great place to go just to get the latest.

And, of course, the latest podcast episodes, here as well. Primarily focused on the Agency Leadership Podcast that I host with Gini Dietrich. And then the rest of this, talks more about some of the, the paid opportunities. It talks about my philosophy. Sort of the normal things that you would expect on an organization’s homepage, but then we also have some of the most popular resources. So the valuation calculator I already talked about, but we’ll go over there and take a look at it in a minute just to give you more of a flavor. The agent project, the Agency project profitability guide is probably the most popular resource that we have.

It’s an Excel template along with a guide that goes along with it that will help you to figure out how profitable your specific projects or clients are. It helps you to estimate what you should be doing for pricing going forward. It lets you play with a lot of what if scenarios. Incredibly popular.

Really encourage you to download that if you haven’t already and it is completely free. Now we also have a free Community on Slack so you’re encouraged to go over there and join as well. Good conversation takes place there. It’s a place to ask me questions, no charge again. It’s just an opportunity for us to all communicate with each other and learn from each other’s experiences.

And then of course the Agency Health Assessment that I mentioned before. We also have replays of all of the webinars that we’ve done over the last six years. So there’s a lot of resources there to look at. I’ve got information on the AIM GET framework, that we use in the work that we do with agencies.

So this is something I created probably five years ago to help really think about the different aspects of your business and how you pull them all together. And there’s, there’s actually a webinar that walks you through in more detail, the whole framework and how to use it. So I’d encourage you to check that out if you want to learn more.

And of course, I also offer a free coaching call. So if you’re a small agency owner, you can get a free 45 minute coaching call with me at any time so that I can help you out however I can. No strings attached, no sales pitch, none of that kind of stuff. I’m really, my goal here is is to be helpful to agency owners as much as I can.

Yes, obviously we want to generate revenue. And so we do have things where we work one on one with agencies or we have paid workshops. But the vast majority of what I do is free because I believe that if we help everybody, enough folks will come and work with us, that it will be worthwhile. So. All right, let’s go ahead and dive into some of these specific resources that I’ve mentioned.

So we’ll take a look at that Agency Health Assessment. Because this is a good place to get started if you want to just try to figure out what’s working and what’s not at your agency. And as you can see here, it’s a very simple interactive questionnaire. There are going to be 50 questions on here that allow you to really quickly go in and just answer each of these questions, yes or no.

And then at the end, it will provide you with a summary of the results and a score. That score is not something you should be comparing to other agency owners, but it’s something that you can use in order to benchmark yourself. And so if you were to take this assessment once a year and come back and review it, hopefully your overall score would be increasing, which means that you’ve addressed more and more of the issues that you have.

Nobody’s going to get 100 on this. This is not that kind of quiz. It’s not designed to be used that way. It really is designed to surface those things that you probably want to be focused on most immediately. Great place for you to start if you’re starting to take advantage of our resources. The valuation calculator that I mentioned earlier, it’s again very simple, bordering on simplistic I suppose, but you put in your revenue, your expenses, how much you pay yourself, and then answer just a couple of questions about the trajectory of your business and the overall performance of your business.

And then it will give you an estimated range for what your agency might be worth. Again, not something that you can take to the bank, not necessarily something that you would even present to a potential buyer, but a good starting point for you to have in your head, roughly where you’re at, because my experience is that most agency owners really don’t have any idea, even the ballpark range that they should be thinking about for the value of their business. And so this calculator is designed to give you at least a starting point, to work from. So if you’re thinking about selling anytime in the future, this is a good thing to, to utilize. It’s also a good way to play what if games. You know, what if my revenue were this, what if I improved my profitability to this margin?

You know, those are the kinds of things that you can do in order to try to figure out what the impact would be. If you go, if you add another 500, 000 in revenue, what does it do to your valuation? If you’re able to improve your profitability from 15 percent to 20%, what does that do to your valuation? And you can kind of see all those different things so that you understand where you maybe want to focus your efforts if you’re looking to sell in the future.

Workbooks and templates. So, these are all guides, that I’ve put together over the years, in response, usually to specific questions and challenges that agency owners have. So, the Guide to Project Budgeting, that’s the, as I said, the most popular. and a great place to start, but there are guides here to help you on different aspects of the AIM-GET framework.

There are sample documents, so employee handbooks, various types of contracts, NDAs, etc., performance reviews, all sorts of different things that can help you get a starting point. For anything that’s a legal document, a contract, I would encourage you to make sure that you take it to an actual attorney who is familiar with your own localities, rules and regulations, your agency’s specific legal requirements and can make sure that whatever is there is, is appropriate for your business and has been properly vetted by someone with a law degree.

I am not a lawyer. These are documents that I’ve accumulated over the years. Many of them are ones I’ve used in my own agencies and they’re provided as an example, just so you see what it’s like. Understand what’s typically included in some of these documents that perhaps you’ve never even seen before.

And then finally, as I mentioned, we have the SAGA newsletter. If you are not already subscribed, I would encourage you to go over there and subscribe to it. We don’t spam you. We don’t hit you up for stuff. We’re just, we’re trying to share information with you. And so it’s very simple and straightforward and again, a great way to get resources because you not only get my perspective each week, but you’ll also get a roundup from Jen who looks at all of the different aspects of what’s being said throughout the agency advising community.

on new business, on human resources, all sorts of things. And we’ll share those links to other people’s resources for you. So you don’t have to spend a lot of time surfing the web to get it all. She serves it up to you every week, right into your inbox, along with the rest of the SAGA content in that newsletter.

Alright, so those are some of the, the, the deeper depth resources, but we also have the standard fare. We have articles, and so if you click on the articles tab, you’ll see all of the, the recent articles. You’ll see we talk sometimes about evergreen topics like employees versus contractors. We talk about news updates, things that, that impact you.

In this case, we were talking about some of the overtime rules, that got blocked by a court that, that would have impacted how much you had to pay, employees at a minimum in order to avoid paying them overtime. And so there’s a lot of things like that where we try to give you timely things, evergreen data.

And of course, we’re also collecting our own data with things like the quarterly survey of agency owners. And so all of this is designed to give you a lot of, of additional information, and things that you can use to make your own business better, how you can help your own agency grow. For those of you who like podcasts as I do, we have two different podcasts.

We have the Agency Leadership Podcast and the Chats with Chip podcast. Agency leadership podcast is Gini Dietrich and myself. We, we talk every week about different management leadership issues for agencies, and it’s all based on the experience that we have running our business and advising, agency owners.

Gini of course is the creator of the PESO model and runs Spin Sucks. So she brings a lot of additional perspective and, and value to the conversation in addition to my own. And then Chats with Chip is my interview series. So typically I’m talking with agency owners or other experts in the field to tap into their knowledge and share that with all of you.

So I would encourage you, to check these out, particularly if you enjoy listening to podcasts, but they all have video companions as well. So if you’d prefer to watch the conversations that we have, you’re welcome to do that as well. And if you’re doing that with the Agency Leadership Podcast, you’ll probably see some of Gini’s pets, maybe her daughter, all sorts of things.

We try to keep it entertaining and informative at the same time. Alright, smallagency.tv, that is our YouTube channel, and so over here you have access to, as I said, all of the podcast things, but you also, we put a lot of the webinar replays up here, sometimes I’ll do Q& A sessions, there are some live streams that I’ve done, there’s a lot of different kinds of content that you can find here.

There’s an old podcast show that I used to do, called the Small Agency Talk Show. It was a panel discussion where we had, a variety of different experts. It’s on hiatus right now. I don’t know whether it will come back or not, but you can go through the archives and listen to everything that all of the experts have had to say, over the years there as well.

So tons of resources. And of course you can use the search box here to search just within our channel on YouTube so you can find the exact resources. that you want to have without any fuss, muss, or bother. Similarly, while we’re talking about search functions, we have a great search function here on the SAGA website.

You can type in anything that you want. It will search everything in the archive. It will search articles, workbooks, podcast episode transcripts, video transcripts, webinar transcripts. It just searches absolutely everything we’ve got so you can find whatever resource you want on whatever topic you might have. And I, I would wager that there’s not any challenge that you face that we don’t have some kind of resource available for because we’ve just covered so much over the last six years.

And so I really encourage you use this search function very aggressively as you’re doing your planning as you’re meeting day to day challenges. The Join SAGA button here is what you use to join the community on Slack. And we also offer, special invitations to roundtables and those sorts of things.

So if you are a free member of the SAGA community, we try to make sure that you are accommodated first on anything that we have to cap attendance at. Speaking of attendance, let’s go ahead and click over here to the events. And so you’ll see on the events tab that we have webinar replays, which, as I mentioned, is an archive going back six years of all sorts of different topics.

Most of them are evergreen, so there’s going to be, again, probably an in depth webinar on just about any topic that you want to cover, whether you’re talking about employees or business development or management issues, M& A, all these different things we’ve covered in extensive detail, and you will find some great resources here.

So I encourage you to check out the archive, but I also encourage you to check out what we have for upcoming events. And so right now we’ve got four events on tap. A couple of the, well, one is obviously this webinar today. So You’re already here. You don’t need to know about that. But we have one coming up in January, which we’ll be talking about selling your agency and some of the things that you need to be thinking about if that’s something that you want to do in the years ahead.

And then we’ve got two workshops that are coming up in January and February. So if you’re watching this before they take place, I’d encourage you to check them out. The first one is on agency business growth strategies. It’s focused on, primarily business development issues. And then the second one is in February and it’s mostly focused on client service.

And it’s called Managing client accounts for results and profit. So, really check those out whether you’re an owner or maybe you’ve got some employees who are involved in business development or client service who would benefit from these. They are, they are paid workshops, but they will be very much worth it.

They’re each done in three parts, two hours in a chunk, for three straight weeks. So really manageable for most people’s schedules because we know you all are busy and want to try to balance it out as much as possible. So, that’s the events side of the equation. And if you have questions about any of this, do feel free to, to share them.

I know I’m sort of hitting all of this at a, a very rapid pace, because I want to try to show you as much of what we have as possible in as compact a period of time as possible to make your time best spent. All right. So from a free resource perspective, I think I’ve covered most of what we have available.

Although I do, my wife, Jen, who is the community manager is also, , in attendance here. And so I’m sure she’ll send me a chat message if there’s anything that I have overlooked, from those free resources that I ought to be sharing with you. I guess the only other thing I would add is that on LinkedIn, on my personal account, I do share a lot of information, there as well and sort of top of mind thoughts that maybe will evolve into an article or a video or something like that.

So I would encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn, as well since you can participate in that and, and hopefully shape some of the content that we do going forward. So now let’s talk about the, the core ways that I work with agencies on a paid basis. So, sometimes the free resources aren’t enough, and sometimes folks want to engage with me more directly on things.

And there are basically three different ways that you can engage with me for help with your agency. The first and most common is short term projects, primarily the Agency Business Checkup. And so the Agency Business Checkup is something that I created when I first started doing SAGA six years ago, and it really is designed to come in and over a short 60 day period or so walk through, the critical aspects of your business and identify those immediate challenges and opportunities.

It’s an opportunity for you to ask me about specific aspects of your business that you may be questioning or that you know is already problematic and you want to address it. And so we dig into these through a series of virtual work sessions in order to try to solve those problems. And within the Agency Business Checkup, we also have, ways to, to, to mold it so that you can, adapt it to your particular needs.

So you can, do the standard checkup, which is what most people do. But then sometimes folks want to take a deeper dive on positioning, and they know that that’s something that they really want to adapt, refine, adjust. And so we can include that in the checkup process as well. We include some positioning in the general checkup, but this is really that deeper dive where we start looking at actual data on that sort of thing to really refine it.

And then, of course, we also have an intensive one where we really go top to bottom. This involves, interviewing members of your team, getting their input, and really turning it into a, a much deeper project that gives you much deeper insight. So, it’s really something that, that usually I will work with you to figure out what’s the best solution for you at this stage in your agency, at the size of your agency, because I know that even within small agencies, there’s a difference between a two person team and a 20 person team.

And so we want to try to make sure that we’re tailoring it to meet your needs and get you the results as quickly, as efficiently and as cost effectively as possible. So that’s the first big way that we work with agency owners to help them on the steps to growth.

The second is ongoing coaching. So this is working with you on a monthly basis, to, or I’m sorry, on a regular basis.

In some cases, it may be monthly calls. In some cases, it may be biweekly. Some cases we may even do weekly. It really depends. We have different options that are available here as well. And so we can do everything from just general maintenance conversations where I’m just a sounding board, filling in gaps here as needed, to being a much more in depth, unlimited style of support where whenever you have a challenge, you just, you ping me with an email or a phone call or whatever, and we’ll solve that problem. And then I also work with agencies, at a team level. So, where I may not be a resource just for an individual owner, but for a group of partners or, you know, even the senior leadership within an agency.

So if you’ve got 20-25 people and you’ve got two or three senior folks who help you on big things, I can often be a resource for them as well because most of them could use a little bit of help in navigating things just as much as you can.

So we have different coaching solutions to meet the needs of different agencies again, at different stages.

And then finally, we have the a la carte options. So these are just mini engagements. You do, you, maybe you want to just kick the tires a little bit. Maybe you’ve got a very specific challenge and you don’t have challenges all that often that you need help with, but when you do, you want to reach out.

And so, I’ve got a couple of different options here, depending on the intensity of, of the challenge, the difficulty of it. And again, we can figure out what the best solution is for your particular need, but it’s one of those, no obligation. You simply just come in. We have that, that individual call, that individual work session, or maybe a short little sprint over a couple of weeks on that.

That’s all there is to it. And then you can come back again down the road if you need it. So we’ve really tried to structure this one on one help in such a way that it gives you the flexibility to get the help that you need when you need it and within your budget. Because again, my goal here is to help agency owners however I can.

Most of it is free, but we do have the paid ones for when you need a little bit more intensive, maybe a little bit more confidential help than is available through the free options.

So I know I’ve talked at an even more rapid pace than I usually do, but hopefully I have covered lots of useful ground. If you’re not sure what the best solution is for you, whether it’s free or pay, just drop me a note and I’m happy to try to point you in the right direction.

If you need help navigating the free resources that we have, Jen really is a concierge for the community. And so I think you can, particularly if you’re in the Slack channel, you can just message her there or just post a question in the Slack channel and she’ll jump on it and help you find what you need. Or you can email her as well or email me and we’re always happy to point you in the right direction as best we can.

So, with that, that will draw to a conclusion the prepared portion of today’s presentation. If you’re here live, I’ll be moving into the Q& A here in just a moment. For those of you who are watching on replay, this is where the replay will end, but of course you are free to email me any questions you have at chip@smallagencygrowth.com. And as I mentioned at the start of this, I’d, I’d really love to hear, any suggestions that you may have for the future, any feedback on the resources that you come across on our site, but what would you like to see us do? Would you like to see group coaching options?

Would you like to see more workshops or different formats for workshops? Are there specific topics that you’d like to see covered? I love any of those suggestions because we really want to be as responsive to the community as possible. And if you spent the time to watch through to this point, then clearly you are interested in what we have to offer.

And so your opinion is extremely valuable to us. So thank you for attending today and we’ll move into the Q and A as in a moment, but thank you for watching. And we look forward to seeing you at a future SAGA event.

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