Overcome Your Biggest Operational Constraints with Leah Leaves

They're doing their best, but have no clue where you're heading. There's no map, there's no course. You might follow the stars, but it's a foggy night and there's a storm coming. Well, I'm going to upgrade

your rowboat into a yacht today because Leia pretty much focuses on solving that, taking your rowboat and actually upgrading it to a yacht. But without me butchering or adding more to this, Leia, can you tell us a little bit more about who you are, what you're doing? And you're doing it,

into those agencies that need to go from the rowboat mentality up to the yacht experience. and we help them with our aldera approach. which is goals, systems and team. We help you refine and clarify the goals of what you're actually here to do and build and refine the systems to help achieve that and then encourage and empower the team with an ownership mentality so that it's never on one person's shoulders. Typically the agency owner. So we're really focused on helping agency

founders and leaders focus back on the growth rather than on the grind.

first is your marketing and sales. That's the first constraint. Once you solve that, then the second constraint is your operations. Once you solve that, your third constraint is leadership.

When I work with teams, I focus a lot on all three, sometimes the operations is more on the mentality, the workflow, the approach and leadership approach, but the thing that I love that Leah does is she embeds the person in your agency for you and runs it where, so, you know, you have a solid, like that's the number one hack. That's the number one hire. I always recommend once you dial in your sales and you have things like turning pretty well, which is never, it's never a one and done.

The key hire is getting that ops person in there. That is the number one, like strategic hire, which will lessen your stress. Because I've personally done that. Just allow things to move fluidly. And I think the key thing is when you put something in that position, they have to know the chops. Cause if you're training

them it kind of becomes like they can only be at the capacity that you are. So you have to level up, but you're not able to level up because you're caught in everything. So let's dive into the process specifically, cause it seems pretty simple, right? You set goals, you create systems, sink it to the team. Same thing with like training for an Ironman. You swim, you run, you bike, but it's not easy. There's a lot involved to it. So you can kind of dive into the process.

practices and principles and foundational knowledge, you know, From the entrepreneurial operating system. So we like to call ourselves adjacent, meaning that we help the agency founder understand what those big picture goals are and how we do that is through specific tools, like clarifying their vision and putting that onto actual paper, not just digital paper, but actually onto paper, get them really connected. Back to Why they started their business in the first place.

Because most agency founders we find, and you probably heard the of the accidental agency owner where they were so good at what they did, and they went off on their own. they were doing a great job. So great that they got so many referrals that they started growing their client base. Then they started needing to bring in a few contractors.

It kept growing and all of a sudden they find themselves underwater, burning out, frustrated because the quality of the work is going down and they don't know how to fix it because they can't communicate with their team of like, why can't you just do it like me? And of course, the team's like, Because you're not telling me how to do it or what to do. And so we refine that original vision, that feeling of, again, why did you start doing this on your own?

was it to bring better quality work, and strategic level thinking, to the PPC, industry? Do you really like going deep into content? And you feel that there's a story that every small business owner should tell. We tap back into that, you know, and that's through annual planning, quarterly goal planning, or in the EOS system, quarterly rock planning. So We take the really big ideas and we start funneling it down to that next level.

So instead of just this 30, 000 foot view of like, there's this vision out there, you know, we'd love to have a yacht.

You know, it's like, okay, great. Well, then what needs to happen in order to achieve that in sequential positions? All right. And that's when we get into the systems and the systems are okay. Legitimately. Do you have the simple steps of client? Onboarding, client management and client off boarding defined. How about team onboarding, management and off boarding? Or even a favorite of ours is money in money management and money out. All right.

You can see I craft everything in as much of simplicity as possible in my three steps. It's goal assistance team, money in money management, money out so that Instead of it being in the systems phase of this massive project of having to like document every little detail and how are we going to do that when everyone is already over capacity and feeling burnt out.

It's like, well, you start getting them to record themselves, you know, start piping it through, you know, AI and automations to craft the SOPs, you know, start linking the dots together, you know, so that ultimately it's building that foundation to achieve those goals. And then once you're getting people in that mode of like, okay, there's a little bit of structure here. There's a little bit of standardization, there's, you know, a little bit of operations support

so that we can breathe again, that we can start thinking more strategically. So now, where do I fit in? Is what most team members are thinking at that point, because they've done, again, a little bit of everything themselves and so now if they're really there to be a creative strategist, if they're really there to be a PPC coordinator, we need to give them again a little bit of that standardization and that's when we lean into the team. We are collaborating and working with them.

This is why I love being embedded into the agencies and having our professionals there because we are building the plane as we're flying it right? We're in the trenches with them rather than. Just coming in giving a plan and then hopping out. and then rinse and repeat, right? Every time you hit that next level of Oh, yes, it's clicked. We get it. Let's realign with those goals. You know, are the goals now at a level that we can say we've got the annual plan. We've got the quarterly rocks.

How about the monthly milestones? How do those connect to our KPIs? What are the systems we're going to use to track our data that's not manual and who's responsible

making sure that that data is accurate, right? So it all connects, you know, back into, you know, the bigger picture system. But it really, in my opinion, is enhanced by having that ops professional, again, in the trenches, you know, with the agency founder, with the team members around them.

ask you around. The 1st is on, like, the vision and the why, and then the 2nd is around current trends that you're seeing right now in the marketplace with. The teams, the implementation, some of the roadblocks that we're facing. So there are two big, major, major questions with the first what are the themes or the trends that you're seeing specifically around when people start their agency, usually it's either a, I'm pretty good at this.

And I'm like, I want to make more, or this just grew into something that I didn't think it'd be possible. Like, how do you elevate people from going to It's like a circle. I'll give you a metaphor. When you begin your circle of influence, your circle of focus is around you and your immediate responsibilities or family like me or like dependence of me. But then from there you grow this thing. Now you got other people in a bigger community that you're supporting.

So how do you help founders elevate that thinking to? It's not just me anymore. Now I have a broader responsibility to the community and to others. And my impact can actually make a bigger difference now because we've been so successful.

And the level one is exactly what you mentioned It's all around the individual. the ecosystem. Like they're the sun. Everything is revolving around them versus being able to look at the universe as a bigger picture and seeing all these pieces moving on the chessboard how we help agency founders in general, go from Focusing in the trenches on the grind, to really elevating themselves to focusing on the growth, is first and foremost, helping them clarify what is it that they want.

And this is a little bit different than just saying like, oh, helping them clarify their vision, because the vision incorporates what they want for others, you know, and how they view the business being. Perceived, from other competitors. much like the vivid vision by Cameron Harold, right? It is 360 degree view of how they want their business, to actually operate. So we start baby steps, right? We start a few steps before that. just like, Hey, what do you want?

so helpful to go through a reflection process and a retrospective of where they originate from. And most times we see that it's because they were burned by a corporate experience, you know, where they were put in a box and they were told, stay in your box. These are most often, you know, creatives, you know, of some kind that we're talking about and strategists, you know, and big picture thinkers.

So to be in a corporate experience where you get to go from box to maybe this box or maybe go sideways to another box. It's stifling and it's just, it's heartbreaking and that's more often than not why they got out of it was so that they could explore outside of the box. They could explore what does it look like? What does it feel like? You know, that freedom to actually be creative rather than freedom from like, Oh, just punching the clock, you know?

So, so it's really embracing like a 10 X jump for them, you know, in a mindset and. What happens is they just get stuck in the grind. So they do this massive jump in their mindset, and then they do exactly the opposite of what they wanted to be, which was they wanted to have like all this freedom and all this creativity, you know, but they're so trained in the corporate experience, you know, that they have the same mindset, you know, toward their other team members.

They don't have really anyone that they can talk to and just let it out and like vent, you know, or sometimes just say like, hey, I've got this crazy idea and I have no idea what to do with it, you know, and so we come in from the operations perspective and say, that's the operators. position is to let you talk about what you really want. I want this person to do it that way. You know, I want us to be the best in the business for this. You know, I want great. Tell me more.

I want to hear that because then that connects to the bigger picture vision of what does it then mean to your team? What does it mean to your community? What does it mean to your customers? Yeah. and how does it connect to the greater industry? Right.

they're absolutely out there asking for more information and wanting to learn and grow. They just don't know where to look, and they just don't know how to realize it. So we're just, I think operations genuinely, you just have a little dash of operations and agencies. You can make literally everyone's lives, right? Because it gives you that space to feel a little more safe, a little more secure of like, okay, we have a structure for this. We have a plan and.

We still have that freedom to be creative. We still have that ability to think for ourselves, you know, as well.

But I think the way that you're defining it is, it's less of structure and like rigidity and more about enabling work, enabling thought, enabling people to move towards where they need to go.

They've built a team, you know, they've built a culture, you know, they've had core values and they're living them, you know, and likely even hiring on it may not, they may not be firing yet on them, but they're hiring, you know, because they have this like intuition, this gut that they are being led by But they just don't have the language with it, you know, and they haven't shared that language.

Then once it's typically defined, they haven't shared it with their team because they get a little nervous, right? Like, Oh, wow. Okay. I have a vision. I have what I want. You know, I know who we are and what we do best. Is my team going to be aligned with that? Like, are they going to be bought in? You know, like, how are we going to roll this out? And every time we start getting into the how, you know, I'm like, okay, how do we do this? You know, great. Let's talk about operations.

there you go. It's. You know, what are we aiming toward? Why are we here? And how are we going to implement it? so they all connect, but it's funny because we do get that question quite often. Like, so what is operations?

So I'm able to like, without being super nerdy in detail, like be able to identify, you ICPs and markets. And then from there identify their growth trends for the last eight quarters, depending on their hiring rates and what they're investing in. And significantly in some of the industries that we're tapping into that I'm seeing as a whole, just from my peripheral the cuts have been significantly in marketing specifically in. Probably because of the creative, the generative AI, et cetera.

What are you seeing right now? What are some of the, obviously this is not a thing that AI is replacing or changing. It is augmenting and changing a few things and it will continue to, especially this year. But what are you seeing now when it comes to the market shift with your clients? What are some of your market takes?

And 2025, like, I know that It's been a topic for many years, not just, since chat GPT popularized, generative AI in mainstream culture, AI has been around for a long time, and it's been evolving, and it will continue to evolve much more rapidly than I think we all are prepared for. We all are learning. We're growing, with it.

And so one thing that we are in particular focused on for 2025 with agencies and agency industry as a whole, is to lean further into it to make sure that we are catapulting that potential for creative input, creative insight and the strategic value of agencies to their clients. and there are so many agencies that, let alone, scratching the surface with AI, haven't even tapped into the value add of automations,

It will be increasing their value, it will be just giving the space, you know, for the strategist, the specialist, the agency founders themselves, you know, to ideate further and take it to that next level. Cause I'll be honest, I feel like agencies, you know, have gotten a little complacent, you know, with the cycle, you know, of just feeling like. Okay, you put clients in, you turn clients, you know, and it's just this cycle that becomes very rote and it's almost like a widget in a factory.

Not a lot of industries have that combined in one package, you know, that they can really say this is a partner of my business, you know, so, I fundamentally believe that agencies will continue to exist and evolve and iterate with generative AI with automations, you know, if they're truly embracing them, not just for all the busy work, I mean, don't get me wrong, like, we absolutely agree with getting some of the busy work out.

Like, that's the whole point of bringing us is, you know, Get some of that busy work out or just identify like what you need to delete, you know, or just stop doing, you know, there's so many things that we're just in habits, you know, and I get that it happens to all of us. And so having that structure, you know, again, coming back, maybe every quarter or every 6 months, you know, and really looking with a clean lens, you know, at what you're doing, how you're doing it.

you know, gives you that capacity to then evolve with that next space. So, so I do think that 2025 is going to be a massive year of change, you know, and growth and evolution for the agency industry, particularly on the smaller agencies. I think you'll see some that are going to be way more nimble, you know, Some of the bigger ones.

And, you know, I'd say within the next, you know, three years and, and this is just me putting out something that likely because of how it's, it's evolving, it'll be in one year rather than three years. But I truly believe that it's going to be that, that 10 X jump where the top 20 percent that get it and want it and are iterating with it. Will continue to exist in a fundamentally better way, maybe not different, maybe like the whole agency industry. And I don't think it's going to collapse.

I think it's going to be better. I think it's going to be so much more fruitful of what is actually developed and delivered and created. And, I get really excited about it because I see there are threads of that. You know, that are being explored in a lot of different industries, and we have the added benefit. I think most agencies do you get to see not just like the agency industry, but obviously like your customers industries.

Right and so you get to see how they might be utilizing it and where. You could potentially support them in that insight, you know, like, Hey, if this is working for us, it could work for you, not just on marketing strategy or advertising strategy, but business strategy, how it all connects back to the bigger picture of the business results.

So the third point is that anything with the word agent, insurance agent, real estate Agent will be replaced by an AI agent is what the future is gearing towards which a lot of people might disagree with that statement. I'm a futurist and I believe in the good that we can do with technology, not just in the bad that it might displace, but I think it will affect, like you mentioned, just like. Turn and burn agencies, or the ones that can't keep their promises, which is apparently very common.

It's kind of baffling to me. But I do see the gap that you're mentioning. And maybe we shouldn't call them agencies at the top because. I mean, I've been leveraging a lot of the deliverables that I'm doing just to help me 10 X my. My not just throughput, but quality in the way that I'm able to go deeper and faster and better. Obviously, it's not cheap. technology is getting it's almost as much as a one person. But my, my point is, like, do you think it's just a semantics thing?

Like, we're all categorizing those churn and burn. Don't keep your promises into an agency, but then you're also mentioning the strategic partner with the technical capabilities to really deeply integrate, which I find the beauty and the, not the simplicity, cause it's complicated, but I think that value is even more needed or required. Like, is it a semantics thing or is it just like a quality thing? We just need to talk about it.

You got to do quality work and you got to implement it well, or we should call those other training burden, not agencies, just like product services.

and what business is. And so they have seen from social media, they have seen, you know, from friends or other people online, what an agency is, and that's the turn and burn option.

I think there's so much value in the agency industry as a whole that, yeah, I'm getting a little bit on my soapbox of like, I want to help save some of that because there's so much in those turn and burn that. That's all they know. and every single agency founder that we've ever worked with, and I truly believe everyone that we will continue to work with. One of the first things that they ask us is like, well, how do other people do it?

What is everyone else working on that is going to level us up holistically and yeah, I 100 percent agree that the trajectory that we're on is not somewhere that I have any full insight into, three, 10 years down the line.

You know, and at the same time, like the short term, you know, looking at like the next year, like there's so much opportunity for digital marketing and advertising agencies, to really lean in and like have a fun time getting back to their roots, like why they got into this in the first place.

net new thinking is where it's heading. And one of the things, so this is like one of the final topic that I want to dive into with you is you hit on it. Strategic thinking, plus the technical capabilities. I'm seeing right now that just having one core service. Is not a viable business model in the agency space. you're doing a community on top of your core service. So like, that's something that I want to lean into and understand more about what you're doing there.

But I talked to agency guy over in Utah. And he was telling me that he does that. Plus he does like a recruitment thing, plus like a training thing to implement specific technical people on top of his services. So I'm seeing a combination of business models. I can even see right now with the SAS era, SAS went through it's recession a couple of years back. And I think right now, it's just getting brutally difficult To grow SAS companies.

Cause everyone's copying and anyways, that's a whole thing in itself. But what I'm going to expect is that we're going to see SAS players come out through a consultative front end where they do the consulting strategy. And then the SAS is part of the implementation plan and it's no longer SAS pricing and I'm not sure if you purchase software nowadays, like everyone's either huddled up and said, Hey, we're going to charge 700 bucks a month minimum for all of our tools.

I'm like, what is going on here? What happened to the 29, 30, a hundred bucks a month? But all that to say is that I think that the evolution of the business model is going to go beyond just a core service. It has to be something where you become deeply embedded in the partner or in the client that you're working with or even what you're doing here is combining two different business models. The fractional implementation model, maybe the strategic arm plus the community arm.

So share with me some of your thoughts around that because you're actually doing it

Break is that they have this big picture vision of like all these different things that they can do and they've got these ideas of how that value can help their customers But they don't even have their core service or their core offering solid.

service and the offering, not just you, the owner, you know, and your inputs. So like that to me is like, okay, now you can look outside and be a little creative because it could be that yes, you have ancillary services or product offerings, you know, that you can develop and add, you know, as value ads, you know, for your business to grow as well as bring the value to your clients, but it doesn't have to be just you. Right. It could be that you actually look at it from a partner perspective.

I know a lot of agencies have done this in the past with more of the white label model, right? They may say, okay, I want to offer this particular service, you know, but we don't have the right team in place or the right tools or the right processes. So we're just going to white label it out, you know, and have another company or another agency do that work. Honestly, I'm seeing the trends.

That that's still viable, and the customers really like transparency, especially in this day and age of using more generative. a lot of customers we see from our agency founders and some of the feedback they're giving us. And what we see, like, boots on the ground with our ops managers, you know, is that. The customers are asking like, okay, who actually made this? Did you do that? Like, where did this come from? Right?

There's going to be changes. So have a rough draft. We'll get something on paper. Right? And so absolutely. I think there is more. a slight impact with being transparent, and being honest that people are starting to move away from white label a little bit, you know, and, or if they continue it, it's not under this white label anymore. It's just like these are, this is my partner. And so, how?

They did a game that was a virtual game, and it was kind of like Pictionary meets, telephone game. three steps in, easily, it started changing. Right? All the way

Let me just say and absolutely like if you've got your core service offering, you've got things dialed in and you want to expand and truly add value or increase the quality for the sake of that, not for just like adding in, you know, a line item to the invoices for clients, right? Because if it's a money making, you know, endeavor, and that's the whole purpose of it, right? Again, I'm going to put that on the shelf with just the turn and burn.

And just start to collaborate. You know, I think there's gonna be more opportunities in the future to keep collaborating and expand. And I've been very lucky that, you know, in our business, you know, we have 2 very distinct and Amazing audiences. We've got the agency founders that, God, I know we can help them. We can get them back to having peace of mind and true work life benefit, right? And imbalance. And then we've got the operations professionals.

Who are almost always an agency is the only one of their kind. They're living out on an island, right? They're doing everything themselves. And very similar to the agency owner, they don't always know what they're doing. They're making it up as they go along because they have to. They're creative. They're problem solvers. They're go getters. They're driven to fulfill the vision of that agency owner. And that's where, like, our community comes in is it's actually specific to those operators.

Because a lot of agency founders, there are tons of amazing communities for them. And who knows where it'll grow for us, you know, in the future as well, because we've got amazing agency founders that we'd love to connect. But we have the community for the operators, and then we've got the fractional services specifically for the agency founders.

And then I'll give you a sneak peek, you know, that throughout this year, we're also building out our programs and having more opportunities where those two individuals can be in the same room and start sharing the same language and learning together. So we're going to master classes, boot camps, like, all that kind of stuff, but It's in the works that's coming in 2025 for us as well.