Escape the Daily Grind in Your Agency: Key Processes You’re Overlooking

Small But Mighty Agency Podcast

Episode 98: Escape the Daily Grind in Your Agency: Key Processes You’re Overlooking

Speakers: Audrey Joy Kwan

Audrey Joy Kwan

Are you feeling overly involved in the day-to-day of your business?

If removing yourself from certain day-to-day processes or tasks isn’t getting easier, you might have overlooked some key processes.

In this episode, we share the concept of “invisible work.”

Invisible work is the critical yet often overlooked processes that you, as a business owner, might be handling because you don’t know how to get it off your plate.

Your invisible work wastes valuable time and keeps you working in your business instead of on your business.

If you can’t fully articulate the invisible work, it stays invisible and holds you back from scaling.

And when you uncover the invisible work, you also gain a strategic advantage by revealing more of your intellectual property.

So, tune into this episode to

• Get the invisible work off your plate and escape the daily grind.
• Plus, get five questions that will help you uncover your invisible work and grow your intellectual property.

Audrey Joy Kwan

Welcome to the Small But Mighty Agency Podcast. If you’re a marketer or consultant, or a creative on a journey of growth from solopreneur to agency owner, follow along because I pull back the curtains on the realities of growing and running a scalable, service-based business and building lean team. I’m your host, Audrey Joy Kwan, I know what it takes to build an agency, whether it’s from solo to three, five or twenty. I’ve done it, including supporting an agency owner to sell and exit. I’ve coached and consulted over 120 marketers, creatives, and consultants. And I’ve been behind the scenes of seven figure businesses. I also have a master’s degree in communications specializing in organizational development. All this to say, I know what it takes to grow lead and operate a multiple six, and seven figure small but mighty agency. And here on this podcast is where we’ll dive right in.

Audrey Joy Kwan  

Hey Friends, let’s discuss creating more space for you to be the CEO of your business today.

My business buddies and I are already talking about Summer and how to carve out more time in your business to enjoy it with family or be inspired.

Some of you might like to take more time off in the summer, and some of you might enjoy focusing on the business during this season. I know I love to be in business growth mode during the summer because something about warmth and sunshine inspires me to work on my business.

So, I wanted to kick off May with an episode on how you can regain more time in your business, whether that’s to take time off or to go deep into business growth

This episode is especially for you if you’re overly involved in processes that are about work quality and client satisfaction in your agency because you’re worried balls will get dropped if you let go.

Now, if you’ve been with me for a while on this podcast, then you’ve heard me say this before – When you start a solo marketing, consulting, or creative business and you reach capacity and want to scale, you have to let go of client delivery.

And it’s common to get stuck here because you’re juggling multiple balls and building a team for client delivery, which involves a number of challenges.

The challenge of trust is a big one; without trusting your team, you can’t let go.

So, how do you trust your team? It’s easier when you can identify, structure and communicate what we call the invisible work in your agency.

When you are clear about the invisible work, it can ease the transition of trust so you don’t have to be involved or worried about work quality or client satisfaction.

Right now, you might feel like you have the basic pieces in place – you think you have the processes and a few great people in place, but you still can’t let go of key pillars

The two most common pillars agency owners find themselves stuck in belong to the category of strategic decision-making, which impacts work quality and client communication, which impacts client satisfaction.

If you’re stuck transferring one or both of those pillars completely to the team, it’s because you know that mishandling these two areas can have significant consequences for retention and credibility.

And If I were to drill down to why even process-loving business owners—that is, business owners who aren’t new to the idea of processes and systems and consider themselves organized and detailed—get stuck here, it’s because they can’t see the invisible work.

Invisible work needs processes, too and these are often overlooked.

Many of the agency owners I work with struggle to see the invisible work and translate it into processes, systems and training.

It’s the invisible work that underpins the success of activities in work quality and client satisfaction.

The output or result is easy to see, but the invisible work is much more difficult. This invisible work often includes knowledge, skills, and habits that aren’t immediately obvious but critical to high performance.

The invisible work that happens in your head is the knowledge, skills, and habits. When invisible work stays hidden, it feels like there is a gap between what you expect and what the team is delivering, and that oftentimes keeps you stuck jumping back in.

If that sounds like you, I see you, and I want to help you identify that invisible work and turn it into your intellectual property.

It all starts with clearly identifying the invisible work, and I know that’s easier said than done for business owners with specialized skill sets.

Once it’s named, we can structure it so that it’s a process that you can strategically roll into current processes or establish changes. More often than not, you will see that intellectual property is inside this invisible work.

Then, you can set your team up for success by clarifying roles and expectations for the invisible work and communicating expectations.

If you don’t clarify the invisible work and instead pass the bottleneck role to someone else to police instead of empowering the team with the resources and tools to perform, you haven’t effectively solved the challenge of effectiveness and scalability.

When the invisible work continues to live in one person’s head—whether that’s yours or the person you’ve decided to pass the bottleneck to—it can put your business at risk of falling apart when that person leaves.

For example, I work with niche agency owners who often feel like they can’t pass strategy down the line because, as the owner and operator, they feel like they have a natural sixth sense or intuition that comes from their experiences, and nobody can do it like them.

Yes, nobody is you because of the time you’ve spent with your clients. Having a number of years in the industry has likely given you a front-row seat to inside knowledge, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be downloaded.

It can. The invisible knowledge can be structured into intellectual property for your team to not only use but grow.

The challenge is helping you let go. And you can. Our niche agency owners learn to let go by first integrating invisible knowledge into playbooks. Then, we help the team own the playbook by giving them ownership of testing new strategic hypotheses and tracking what works and doesn’t work.

It’s the structured transfer of ownership of the invisible work that sets both you, the business owner, up for success and the team to receive and deliver so you can let go.

The same is true for client communication activities that you may have a hard time letting go of in your business. The invisible work is identifying underlying concerns or needs that aren’t explicitly stated, knowing how to anticipate needs, and being a subject matter expert for the client.

I like to think of these challenges as opportunities to capture your business’s invisible intellectual property. This approach improves your agency’s performance and enhances its overall productivity and reputation because you gain tangible assets, or what we like to think of as intellectual property, to make your business more scaleable and enhance its value.

But if you can’t fully articulate the invisible work, it stays invisible, and that will keep you stuck in the present and make it difficult to enter the next phase of growth.

To help you get clear on the invisible work that keeps you stuck worrying about work quality and client satisfaction, here are a few questions to help you articulate and uncover invisible work:

Get your notepad out or the notes app on your phone and jot these down:

1. What do your clients thank you for?

The purpose of this question is to identify what is valued by your clients but not formally recognized or documented within the business.

Often, clients express gratitude for not the standard deliverables or contents of a service package but rather the subtle, nuanced things that make an impact on their experience.

When you pinpoint these elements, you can uncover invisible work that leads to client satisfaction and success.

2. What do you believe only you can handle, and what makes these things unique to your skills?

This question encourages you to reflect on specific tasks or decisions that you’ve subconsciously reserved for yourself because you believe it requires your unique expertise or approach.

And Don’t skip the second half of this question— “What makes these things unique to your skills?”—this part of the question helps you discern the invisible work.

3. What informal roles do you find yourself playing in your business?

Roles like a mediator or troubleshooter often have significant invisible work that maintains stability and growth.

When you acknowledge these informal roles, you start to see the hidden layers in your daily operations. Then, you can extract and document the key behaviours and strategies to maintain business stability and growth.

4. What kinds of recurring problems or challenges do you find yourself solving?

By reflecting on patterns, you can uncover tasks that you handle automatically without realizing that your approach could be valuable for documenting and delegating.

And solving recurring problems typically involves specialized knowledge and skills that may not be recognized or documented in formal job roles. Identifying these skills helps you convert them into teachable processes that can be transferred to other team members.

5. Describe a recent project or client situation where you had to intervene to ensure success. What did you do?

Leaning into specific examples helps trace back to the skills or knowledge applied, which might not be easy to see when you are in the moment.

By reflecting on specific instances where your intervention was required, you can pinpoint the exact actions and decisions (invisible work) that were key to navigating complex situations successfully. Think of it as a debrief to help you name the invisible work so that it reduces the dependency on you.

In summary, helping you scale a client delivery team isn’t just about hiring more people or assigning more tasks; it’s about transforming the invisible workload into structured, scalable intellectual property.

You can transform solo expertise into tangible, scalable assets when you uncover and document the knowledge, skills, and habits of the two most common day-to-day pillars agency owners find themselves stuck in:

So, these are

1. Strategic decision-making, which impacts work quality,
2. Client communication, which impacts client satisfaction.

When you identify, structure and communicate the invisible work, you empower your team, and you enhance the value and reputation of your business.

Then, you can transition from being indispensable in client delivery to establishing a framework where your expertise and strategies continue to guide outcomes, even when you’re not directly involved.

Do you want to get out of the day-to-day and build a lean team that gives you more freedom and helps you scale?

We can help.

Let’s help you grow a business that doesn’t have you stuck in the day-to-day. You know where to find me; click on the show notes.

Thanks for joining me, friends; I’ll see you at the next one.

Audrey Joy Kwan

Hey, there. Thanks for hanging out with me at the Small But Mighty Agency Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world to me if you hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app and share it with a friend and I’ll see you in the next one.