4 ways I got out of the day-to-day at the fastest growing agency in the country

I’m continuing my series of articles about getting out of the day-to-day by sharing four things I personally did at Rise at Seven, plus one more that anyone can do, if you don’t feel like you can go all in like I did.

Before I do share, I wanted to briefly touch on why I did these things (some of which might seem pretty ruthless):

• Rise at Seven hired 110 people in just over two years; opening 4 offices on two continents; expanding across Europe; securing more than a hundred contracts with household name brands around the world - there’s a longer list of achievements on my About page, if you’re interested.
  My direct supports, when we grew enough to have them, included Client Services, Strategy, New Business, HR, Operations, IT and Finance, as well as SEO and Data. Anything to do with legal, or policy in general, would typically come through me. In the EOS model, I played the role of Integrator. That’s just a lot to do, you know?
  …and there was a pandemic when we were 6 months old.
• When we were 4 months old, my little boy was born (I exited a month after he turned 3). Our reality until about the time Rise reached 110 people, especially during the three lockdowns, was me getting up with our baby at 4 or 5 in the morning and looking after him until I started work shortly after 8; handing him to my wife for the next 8 hours until she really had to tag out at about 6; taking over and generally sharing tea time/bath time/bed time; eating and then collapsing, with my wife getting up several times in the night to feed him again.

I was ruthless with my time at work because I had to be: there was no more time after work to pick up again.

4 things I did at Rise at Seven that got me out of the day to day

1. Delegated a lot of stuff that wasn’t mission critical. Last week, I wrote about decision levels (what should you decide that nobody else can?) - I’m a believer that your business should have some core strengths that it is (or could be) the best in the world at, and that things it’s weak at just need to be good enough. Rise had an abundance of people who were inexperienced managers but desperate to have a crack at it, so I would choose things that needed to be good enough and let them, allowing me to focus on the business’ priorities. If someone did a good (enough) job, they’d get another thing to do, and another, until they were contributing to our priorities too.
   Reflecting on this a few years later I would have a) delegated even more things and b) generally given more support (like scheduled milestones and check-ins) to the people doing those tasks.
2. Stayed away from Slack. Probably the single most common source of friction between me and my co-founder was that I could only be contacted on Slack a couple of times a day (first thing and last thing). From other colleagues, my DMs typically read like this:
   
   Turns Slack off at 9:15
   [10:00] I have an issue
   [14:00] Not to worry, I solved it
   Opens Slack at 16:00
   
   Slack contributes a number of bigger challenges than “staff bother the owner” (usually the biggest one is “owner bothers the staff”) and we eventually turned it off entirely. That’s probably an article for another day (or you can ask me about it).
3. Hired an Executive Assistant. The wonderful Ella joined us after about 18 months and was a game changer for me. She took over my email inbox and calendar pretty quickly and we’d have a call at 3pm until about 3:15pm every day where she’d tell me who wants to speak to me (and what about), then she’d organise the meeting if needed. The same applied to colleagues: she’d get them in immediately if it was urgent, or she’d direct them to someone else who probably should be helping instead of me. She project managed the Board’s roadmap; generally picked up most of my admin, like expenses; and reminded me every day when I’ve committed to delivering something.
   One more thing that isn’t obvious: me and Ella had lunch once a week. It’s pretty lonely running a business, but you have someone who knows pretty much every secret and knows what’s really going on (they read all your emails and sit in on board meetings). It’s nice to have someone around where you can let your game face slip. It’s not like they’re going to give you advice most of the time…but having someone there who can say “well that was shit wasn’t it?” and “do you need anything?” etc. was massive for me. You don’t get to do that around employees.
   Drop me a message if you have questions about what an Executive Assistant or PA might do.
4. Had standing meetings with clients. We divided all of our client relationships between Board members as the “sponsor” or ultimate escalation point, so I had ~10 companies whose staff I needed to maintain and improve a relationship with.
   I did my best to have a consistent scheduled meeting to check in with those clients, speaking to the main stakeholder at our largest clients once a month for ~30 minutes, and speaking to the Marketing Director/CMO/CEO once a quarter. In some cases, those were recurring meetings in the calendar, which is a selling point in the new business stage in and of itself: some of the prospects you’re speaking to assume they’ll never see you again and you are conveying that this relationship matters to you. I would (or Ella would) message that client at the beginning of the week to confirm that they want to have the meeting (they could move it, of course) and if there was nothing to talk about, they could have the time back (if I got cancelled on a few times, I’d message saying I’d call their mobile on date/time, because that’s a good signal something is off).
   This sounds like more work but, by having those 1 to 1s, I didn’t have to go to the monthly meeting or, in many cases, the QBR. I’ve written about the 4 weekly recurring meetings I used to run the agency: in Friday’s client status meeting, I’d let the relevant Client Partner know that the check in with the client was happening the following week and ask if there was anything I needed to know or anything they wanted me to raise…and I’d make sure the client was aware that I don’t know where the campaign is at but that I have confidence their team was all over it. The Client Status meeting made it clear how we felt performance was, but I wanted to ask the client how they felt about it. All in, one of these meetings might take 90 minutes to prepare for; attend; and follow up on, versus a monthly meeting which might take 90 minutes in and of itself, plus travel to the client’s office, plus prep so I’m not sitting there with nothing to say. All in, probably a time saving of 8 hours per client per month…and the clients got a better experience with me because of it.

One more easy one: the 3 As

The techniques I’ve outlined above became possible at 20+ people, when the team was big enough to deliver without me and I could afford an EA.

One technique you can employ at almost any stage is the 3 As, which I’ll credit to Karl Sakas (I’ve historically used a version which I got from Blair Enns - and he got from someone else - that basically goes “what role would you like me to play in this conversation?” - but Karl’s 3 As make total sense to me).

When you’re speaking with an employee, ask them to specify which of the 3 As is the most relevant:

• Aware: are they just making you aware of a problem that they’ve already solved, or are on their way to solving?
• Advise: do they want your steer on a number of potential solutions that they can go away and implement?
• Actively involved: do they want you to step in and help?

The temptation as a leader is to assume that all conversations are aiming for you to be actively involved when few actually are. Most of the time, you’re just being kept in the loop - understanding this in advance is going to save you time and make sure your colleague feels like you trust them.

Bonus points, of course, if you use this technique with your EA, so they can tell you that [colleague] wants 30 minutes because they want your advice on something/they just want to make you aware.

I am, as ever, curious what you’ve done to help you prioritise your time, so please drop me a message if there’s something you’d like me to add to this article!