One solution can address two of the biggest problems agency owners typically have.
Use our SOP Template For Managing Contractors.
Who is it for: Who is it for In Charge: Ketan.
Follower: Darshan
Prepared by: Ronik
Outcomes:
- Achieve maximum results for SEO each month.
- To stay consistent in our efforts to help the XYZ team deliver results.
- Measure progress
- Effective use of budget
- Improve SEO by implementing ideas/suggestions/tactics faster
Critical Steps:
- What is the deliverable of what they are working on right now?
- Check all open tasks or email to see if they are waiting on us to provide information or assist with the website.
- Ask questions where you have it to keep them on their top performance and active.
- Budget: $500 per month.
- Timeline – Ask yourself, is the timeline being followed to reach the goals of the quarter?
- Results – Check on results.
- Record results in Scorecard
Time is a precious commodity. For digital agency owners, it’s doubly precious.
There is a fundamental tradeoff between time, revenue, and the quality of work you put out. When the creation and development of digital web assets and WordPress tasks are involved, that tradeoff can be difficult to manage successfully.
Anyone familiar with programming knows that a small oversight in an application’s code can turn into an expensive, complicated, function-disabling bug later on. Similarly, anyone who produces technical content for non-technical clients can understand the time-wasting impact of scope creep and imperfect communication.
Digital agency owners have both of these problems and many more. Any small disturbance in your workflow can turn into a time-consuming problem that defies easy resolution.
Unfortunately, losing time necessarily means losing leads. Lead generation is the first task that suffers when you have to spend too much time putting out fires, dealing with unhappy customers, and fixing broken web assets.
There are two solutions to this problem, and they both revolve around the ability to confidently delegate tasks to others while efficiently managing both your time and theirs.
Delegating Tasks Is Your Most Important Skill
Anyone who owns and operates their own business has to learn how to delegate tasks effectively. Make no mistake – the ability to delegate tasks effectively is a skill that gets better with preparation and practice.
The easiest way to determine which tasks to delegate is to look at the ones that cost the most time and generate the least value. Bug-hunting, WordPress maintenance, and fixing things that plugin updates break are almost certainly going to find themselves on this list.
Digital agency owners who find ways to delegate these types of tasks are going to have more time to dedicate to their highest-value job-generating and cultivating leads. This is the approach that makes all the difference.
Whether you delegate WordPress tasks to an employee or to a third-party service provider, you need to structure your expectations and provide solid guidelines about how you wish the tasks to be completed. This critical step is the one where most agency owners stumble.
Whether You Hire New Team Members or Outsource WordPress Tasks, Your Job Is the Same
We’ve already written a great deal about the advantages and disadvantages of hiring new members vs. outsourcing to a white label WordPress partner. But these two options are by no means exclusive. You can definitely hire new team members for some tasks and collaborate with white label WordPress solutions for others.
In fact, in most cases, this is the most scalable and user-friendly way to achieve sustainable agency growth. As your agency grows, the task of managing your team and its various subcontractors will become incredibly complex.
There is a big difference between managing four or five client contracts a month and managing forty or fifty at a time.
As the owner of a digital agency, your job is not only to delegate tasks in the most efficient way possible, but also to communicate your expectations clearly to everyone involved – employees, outsource partners, and customers alike.
Use our SOP Template For Managing Contractors.
Who is it for: Who is it for In Charge: Ketan.
Follower: Darshan
Prepared by: Ronik
Outcomes:
- Achieve maximum results for SEO each month.
- To stay consistent in our efforts to help the XYZ team deliver results.
- Measure progress
- Effective use of budget
- Improve SEO by implementing ideas/suggestions/tactics faster
Critical Steps:
- What is the deliverable of what they are working on right now?
- Check all open tasks or email to see if they are waiting on us to provide information or assist with the website.
- Ask questions where you have it to keep them on their top performance and active.
- Budget: $500 per month.
- Timeline – Ask yourself, is the timeline being followed to reach the goals of the quarter?
- Results – Check on results.
- Record results in Scorecard
The first part of this challenging job is delegating the right tasks to the right people. The second part is ensuring that everyone involved knows exactly what you expect them to do. You must cover both steps in order to build a self-sustaining system for your business to thrive on.
1. Choose the Right People for the Tasks You Need Completed
We don’t doubt that there are some tasks best kept in-house. The question digital agency owners need to ask is whether they are spending the optimal amount of time on those tasks.
In most cases, generating leads and interacting with customers is high on the list of tasks that generate the most value. Since your customers are the source of your business’s success, it stands to reason that dealing with them first is the best way to maximize revenue.
Once you identify what your highest-value work is, you have to compare the amount of time you spend on high-value work with the amount of time you spend on low-value work. Low-value work isn’t unimportant – it just doesn’t produce the same kind of return-per-hour as your other jobs.
In general, the costs of hiring make adding new team members a viable solution only for higher-value tasks. This includes the task of managing third-party freelancers and subcontractors.
If custom-coding WordPress plugins are not part of your agency’s core value, then the amount of time you would spend completing unlimited WordPress tasks for your clients will never provide a greater balance of value than delegating those tasks to a technically oriented white label WordPress agency. There is always going to be something else you could be earning more revenue doing.
2. Use Standard Operating Procedures to Communicate Your Expectations
Once you start filling out your team with in-house hires, outsourced white label partners, or a mix of the two, you will have to take on the challenge of organizing all of their work effectively. This is a demanding, high-value task that directly impacts how efficient your team members work with one another.
Standard operating procedures (SOPs) establish a highly detailed set of expectations that correspond to your agency’s goals. They predict and comprehensively cover all of the questions your employees and third-party providers may have, allowing them to complete their work unimpeded.
Digital agency owners who make the mistake of neglecting this critical step often have trouble managing their team and communicating with their white label WordPress providers. They then have to spend more (low-value) time dealing with the mistakes their teams make and end up losing important opportunities to serve their customers and earn more revenue.
The more solid your system of resolving tasks is, and the better able you are to communicate your expectations to others, the more time you can spend interacting with customers and earning the revenue that makes your entire agency possible.
Use Our SOP Use Case As a Template to Manage Third Party Contractors Easily
Whether you are actively looking for a white label WordPress maintenance provider or you are just looking for ways to boost in-house efficiency, creating comprehensive SOPs is an excellent place to start. Use our third-party management use case as a starting point to reduce the time you spend on your most time-consuming tasks and find out how a solid, optimized workflow impacts your bottom line.
The more SOPs you create, the longer it will take team members to find the specific ones they are looking for. Start building your SOPs now. When the time comes to outsource those tasks, you’ll already have a reliable set of standard operating procedures to work with. Here’s the link to Download our SOP for managing contractors.