As your agency grows, you and your employees tend to become increasingly specialized.
For instance, a designer might stop doing project management on top of their design work. Or instead of handling account management and client strategy, you’ll handle just one.
Every agency role fits into one of six categories—and your choices impact team structure, profitability, and more.
Eventually, you might choose to delegate day-to-day work entirely, so you can focus on working “ON” the business. But in the meantime, you and your team might need to make some compromises.
What’s “normal” for agencies? I’ve identified several combinations to consider… and a specific “checklist” order for dropping your extra duties. What do I recommend? Read on!
Can agency employees fill more than one role at once?
In a smaller agency, employees will often serve in 2–3 roles at once. It’s a common practice—but it’s not always a good idea. Here are some common “wearing multiple hats” combos I see at agencies:
- Account Leader + Strategist: Here, the day-to-day client contact (Account Leader) also creates the client’s long-term strategy (Strategist). Clients like having continuous access to their strategist, but this can make the strategy seem less valuable because you’re so familiar to them.
- Account Leader + Specialist: Here, the client contact also does the execution work. This is especially common within PR agencies, where an Account Leader is also doing Specialist work like media relations, copywriting, and press release distribution. I see it at many paid media agencies, too—where the person running PPC campaigns is also the client’s direct contact. Clients like the access, but agencies tend to make a compromise—an Account Leader-oriented person may not be a great Specialist, or a Specialist doesn’t love that clients keep interrupting their focus time.
- Account Leader + Delivery Leader: Here, the client’s day-to-day contact (Account Leader) is also coordinating everything with the internal team (Delivery Leader). This is efficient—because there’s less “lost in translation” between client requests and the internal task assignments. But it’s not always effective—since employees tend to lean toward keeping clients happy (Account Leader) or doing work as-scoped (Delivery Leader), they tend to do well in one role and poorly in the other. I strongly recommend splitting this role as early as possible, to avoid creating profitability and/or client retention problems.
- Delivery Leader + Firm Leader: Here, someone does internal coordination (Delivery Leader) and operations (Firm Leader). It tends to be a good match, because PMs and Operations people tend to have the same “detail-oriented” profile. I did this as an agency Operations Manager—where I reduced my client work and increased my internal operations work. The risk is when client work leads to neglecting internal work, or vice versa.
- Account Leader + Growth: It’s normal for Account Leaders to focus on upsells with existing clients. But in this combination, Account Leaders also do sales for new business. The biggest risk is that employees ignore current clients in favor of sales opportunities, or vice versa. Be extra-careful about incentive alignment if you choose this combo.
- Account Leader + Delivery Leader + Strategist: I did this role as a Director of Client Services at a small agency. Since we didn’t have dedicated strategists, I did strategy… and was a client-facing Account Leader… and did internal Delivery Leader coordination. After hiring an account coordinator, I reduced my client workload so I could focus on helping larger clients (Account Leader) and improve our profitability and enterprise value (Firm Leader).
These combinations are often out of necessity, rather than desire—when you know it’s “better” to have experts but you can’t currently afford to hire more people.
As you grow, you’ll want to increasingly “split out” the roles so that people can specialize—from three to two categories, and from two categories to just one. This helps people focus on what they do best, which helps you grow your agency. Here’s more on how agency structure changes as you grow, and I can help you customize this to your agency via a single consulting call.
What about agency owners? Where might (or “should”) they focus their time? Read on.
Why isn’t there an “Agency Owner” role category?
There isn’t an “Agency Owner” category in my list of six—because as an owner, you get to choose what you do. Your ideal role typically combines work from 2–4 role categories. Here are some common combinations for agency owners:
- Account Leader + Delivery Leader + Specialist + Strategist + Growth + Firm Leader: When you started your agency, you were covering all six roles yourself. Ideally, that’s no longer the case.
- Strategist + Growth: This is like the Don Draper character on Mad Men—doing sales and high-end client strategy, as the team handles day-to-day client details and execution.
- Strategist + Account Leader + Delivery Leader: You’ve offloaded self-marketing and sales to a business partner, and you focus on doing client work—including strategy as well as account and delivery leadership.
- Account Leader + Strategist: You’re the client contact and strategist, and your team helps with PM, specialist billables, and operations. And someone else is doing marketing and sales.
- Firm Leader + Growth: You’ve offloaded all client billables, your team handles Account Leader and Delivery Leader work, and you focus on agency strategy and self-marketing (and potentially sales). This is especially helpful if you want an Equity-oriented agency—to prepare for a future exit—since you’re increasingly Optional.
It helps to have a strong #2. Need to hire someone as your right-hand person? See my articles on the topic.
[Checklist] Priority Order: How to Delegate Day-to-Day Work
Speaking of making yourself “Optional” at work—if you want to reduce your day-to-day involvement as an agency owner, consider dropping things in this “checklist” order.
- Specialist (since you typically can hire or outsource this work without impacting client-facing relationships)
- Delivery Leader (even if you’re detail-oriented, there are more important things for you to run… and if you’re not detail-oriented, delegate this sooner rather than later, because most owners either under-prioritize it or over-manage it)
- Account Leader (clients love coming to you with requests, but this won’t scale; start by introducing a backup contact, and then move smaller clients to them over time; see this article)
- Strategist (it’s hard to find qualified strategists who aren’t you; at many agencies, the owner continues to be the senior strategist, after they’ve first delegated Specialist, Delivery Leader, and Account Leader work to other team members)
What about Growth and Firm Leader? That’s up to you; I’d certainly delegate lower-level operations work, but you’ll likely hang onto aspects of Growth (especially thought leadership marketing and the “sales closer” role”). But if you dislike operations, marketing, and/or sales, you can certainly delegate them sooner.
Question: How do you approach multiple roles and other “combo” jobs at your agency?
