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The Marketing Millennials
302 - How to Scale an Agency with Tess Voecks, VP of Ops at RicketyRoo
00:32:13
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- [00:00]
Tess Voakes
Foreign.
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Daniel Murray
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast.
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Tess Voakes
I'm Daniel Murray and join me for.
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Unknown
Unfiltered conversations with the brains behind Marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. Today we're diving into the backbone of every successful agency operations. Our guest is Tess folks, vice president of operations at Rickety Roo, an agency specializing in local SEO, ppc, social media, content marketing, and web design. Tess is the go to expert for setting up scalable processes, unlocking the magic of project management, and and of course, mastering ClickUp. They don't call her the ClickUp Queen for nothing. If you're looking to scale your agency, simplify your workflows, and turn chaos into clarity, this episode is your blueprint. Let's get into it.
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What's up, Tess? Welcome to the podcast.
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Tess Voakes
Hey, thanks for having me.
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Unknown
Let's get started and give a little quick intro of who you are to set up for this conversation today.
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Tess Voakes
Sure. So my name is Tess, folks. I am the vice president of operations at an agency called Rickety Rooftop. We specialize in SEO and PPC marketing for companies of all sizes. And I'm also an operations consultant for several other marketing teams and agencies. The TLDR is my jam is helping teams get organized, get efficient, and truly be collaborative so they can build a culture and a business at the same time.
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Unknown
Well, I think every business needs good ops, but we're going to dive into agency ops today. Let's just start over. What is the number one tip you would give someone to be more efficient in an agency environment?
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Tess Voakes
Yeah, so I think I'm a little biased. My background is is mostly project management, so I think I'm biased in saying project management. But project management touches so many different parts of an agency or really a business in general. And so I really see that as being the number one thing that somebody should be really, really tuned into and have dialed in really well to be successful in. Again, a marketing agency, but really any business. So starting there is always the place I start. It uncovers so many different issues and wins. I shouldn't just say issues, but all of the things that are hidden in the corners and in the closet kind of come out when you start to dig into project management.
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Unknown
I want to dive into the word project management because I think people just think project management means just following up on this, the bias people have a project management. But what does project management actually entail? So people know what successful project management looks like.
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Tess Voakes
Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. Usually when you say project management, people think, oh, okay, so a glorified assistant, you're just going to, you know, like, type an email for me or slack somebody and ask somebody. But no, it's not. So. Project managers are really. I kind of think of project managers as like mini CEOs within a division. So they are in charge of everything from setting up a project all the way to following up on the project, the success or failure of it, and everything in between. So really they have to know everything from the pricing, the setup, all of the things that go into creating the project, all of the stakeholders, all of the SMEs, the goals, the KPIs, the metrics, the expected outcomes, the timeline, all of these things, all these little things that go into project management. And then all the way down to the process that's actually going to be followed and making sure that process is communicated to the team. And then once you're into, you know, the, the actual project, it's communicating with the team. Communicating with. If you're an agency, you know, the client or, or a third party that may be involved or anything like that, it's just again, they're kind of a mini CEO and a mini owner of people, teams and products within whatever type of business it is that you're working in. And so, as you can imagine, if you're in charge of all of those things, things really come out of the woodwork pretty quickly.
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Unknown
If I was to come to you today and say, hey, Tess, I am stuck. I don't have the operations to scale my agency today. Where's the first place you would start?
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Tess Voakes
Yeah, so usually when people come to me and say, I need operational help, it honestly usually does start as to do with project management. If I'm being totally honest, it usually is something like that. And that is usually where I start, is, okay, tell me about, tell me about your business, tell me what you do, tell me about your clients, tell me about your team, tell me what processes you have going on, tell me how you manage all of that work, and tell me how you communicate that to your team. And those questions are usually, I don't know. And that is the whole underlying issue. So again, starting back at square one with project management, management is what? What are you doing? How are you doing it? And that is usually the entire crux of the issue is how are you doing it? How long is this taking you? Who is doing it? How long is it taking them? And all of that leads to, you know, like, greater things like utilization. Which leads to what? What is the margin on your actual business, the service or the product that you're providing? If it's positive, great. Could it be better? If it's not positive, which a lot of cases it's not. It's like, oh, well, you have no idea. The questions to the first questions that I've asked you. Like, it's no wonder that you have no idea what your margins are or that they're negative, and you had no idea. So it's really just, you know, diving into those things and answering a lot of questions before we can even get started on making it better or fixing it.
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Unknown
I want to go into specifically a marketing agency. So, I mean, your agency, you do ppc, you do SEO. So how do you set up the organization to be successful when you have, let's say, different services and different owners of services? And how are you scaling up each service? So. And make sure each service is successful on its own?
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Tess Voakes
Yeah, that's a great question. So usually how I approach this is again, start, you know, square one is process and project management. How are we managing these processes? Who's in charge of doing that? What is the actual process? If there is nobody doing that and the answer is, I don't know, then we start there. And first it's like, let's lay out the groundwork for whatever it is that you're doing. Let's lay out the process. From there, you can assign your team. I think a common issue that I run into with teams is they have one person trying to do everything versus siloing and having teams where you can scale and create teams that are great at one thing versus trying to have a jack of all trades. So assigning your team, assigning out your products and those kind of things lead you to understand your utilization of your team and your products and how that relates to your overall rev. From there, you can get really nitty gritty with product management. Understanding utilization lets you get really, really into product management and how at the end of the day, the cookie crumbles as far as, like, how long those things take you, which begs to ask, how much money is that costing you? Those kinds of things. And then from there, once you refine those things, you go right back into project management and reinvent that wheel a bit, communicate that to your team. The next thing that I like to do is really assess the team's skills. Once we have a nice refined project in place, like, are the right butts and the Right. Seats. And usually the answer to that question is kind of, there are some yes, and there are also some no. So that's always a fun issue to address when that comes up. And then from there, it's really about continuous improvement. And my favorite thing is learning how to buy back your time. A favorite mentor or somebody I follow is Dan Martell. I'm sure many followers are familiar with him. And he has this concept of buying back your time. So finding ways to buy back your time. Now, whether that's through when we're talking about an agency that might be through use of AI or automation or something like that, but it also can be through figuring out better use of your team's time or hiring, like new team members altogether to better consolidate. I won't say more, less meaningful, but less meaningful work than other work that your team may be able to do that may be able to free up their plate to do more meaningful work. From there, it's just creating repeatable processes and continuous improvements to be able to delegate and train your team so that they can run the ship for you. But the big part here is again figuring out the process and then focusing on continuous improvement. I think it's easy to do the first part. I say easy. It's not really easy, but it's easy to do that first part and then think that we're going to set it and forget it and forget about the continuous improvement part. Um, and the continuous improvement part is actually, I think, probably the most important part of all of this, because if you have a team that's naturally curious, that is the way that you're going to win. You're going to find better ways to do something all of the time. And that is the way to win and get ahead.
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Unknown
I kind of have like a overarching question and then one that goes into the weeds a little bit. So how does someone see, these are all the projects going on at one time? How are you supposed to set it up? And the second question is, what does the start of a project look like? If I was a project manager going to a project, what are the key details I need to make that project successful?
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Tess Voakes
So seeing your project at a macro view, I think is equally important to note that you should be able to see something at a macro view and a micro view, because we all have different stakes in the project, whether you're the CEO or the project manager or the SME. So being able to have some sort of a function where you can do that is the only way you're going to be able to do that successfully. Now again, I'm a little biased. My favorite is ClickUp. I'm a big ClickUp girly. Ben, dubbed the ClickUp Queen. It's my favorite tool because it has a definite way of being able to break down large milestones into actionable items and to track them throughout. But also I think the most beautiful thing about ClickUp is that you can visualize it in so many different ways without having having to do anything super custom or like rebuild anything. So it's just a really robust tool. And I actually think about it more as like a business tool versus just a project management tool. We do a ton of different things in ClickUp at Rickety Roo and I have several clients too that use it, that we've transformed their entire business using it from using it as an HR tool to a project management tool to a process wiki, a bunch of different things. But really that is the most important part in being able to understand projects from a macro view is having some sort of a tool that you use and know how to use well. And really that you get the buy in of the team and that the team is going to use well. Right? You can have a cool tool and a cool process, but if you don't have the buy in and the training for the team so that they utilize it, you're really no better than you were having nothing at all. So again, I'm biased to ClickUp, but whether you use Asana or Monday or a Google Sheet, I mean God forbid you use Google Sheet. But whatever it is that you use, find something that works for you and works for your team and that they will utilize and keep up to date. So that is, that is really key for project management. But to your point of laying it out in, in the system, it's going to really vary by whatever platform you use. I just recommend that whatever it is that you do, that you the largest level, you section out your, your different areas of your businesses. So for like for example, for marketing agencies, I usually say use a space for your client work, use a space for each team in internally, use a space for your leadership, use a space for sops and templates, so on and so forth. And then from there you should be able to drill down. So each client is a folder, each list is a service, things like that. You want to be able to build something in a way that you can kind of reverse engineer whatever it is that you need. You want to be able to get very specific details if you need them without having to Dig. And you also want to be able to have larger initiatives and a rollup if you need to, without having to like really put something together and it be time consuming. So however you build it, my, my key here is just build it so that it scales. Investing time upfront will always save you time in the end. So if you get sloppy up front, you're definitely going to get sloppy results in the end and have to rebuild the whole thing. So, yeah, that is really, really key advice.
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Unknown
The next question I have for you is, I mean, one thing you have to do is you have to create kind of a process of how you go to clients and pitch them or create a scope or statement of work, an SOW or an SOP to make that statement of work. So how do you recommend people operationalize, hey, now we're going to pitch this client a scope that is that we can handle internally. Because a lot of times in the agency that are getting started, every scope looks so different. And there's no really way to put a process inside because one scope has these line items, this scope has this line item. So how do you take a step back and say, hey, we need to operationalize this so it's templatized, so it's easy to put in our systems and it's easy for our account managers or the account director to look at this from a, a macro and micro level.
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Tess Voakes
Yeah, for sure. So one thing I, I noticed that a lot of agencies do is they charge hourly rates. I am always like, oh my gosh, don't do that, please, please create products and charge a retail price for a product. Because I think if you're doing marketing work in the way that I like to do it, I like the boutique route, but it doesn't have to be complicated. Right. Like you can have varying scopes, but make it easy. Like I'm, I'm a smart, lazy person. Like I want to do it the right way, but I also want it to be super easy. So something that I recommend is creating products. So if you have products you can charge a flat rate, you don't have to worry about squeezing all of these hours and figuring out, oh my gosh, now we're short two hours. What am I going to do for two hours of my client scope? It doesn't have to be that complicated or that, that customized. If you're really just creating products, you can fit whatever product into the budget that you have. Right. If you, you know, if a piece of content I don't know is a thousand dollars, you price it at a thousand dollars and your client has $10,000. Now we're going from I have eight hours of whatever to I have a thousand dollars of work. So it makes it really easy to be able to customize what you want or not. And then when you're putting it into your project management system it makes it easy because you should have a so there are subtasks that lay out that process so that whoever is working on it can easily do it. You understand again your utilization, who it's assigned to, the team it's assigned to, all those kinds of things, how long it's going to take them. So that's kind of my recommendation there. As far as like understanding the process of biz dev within the agency. I don't mind keeping a CRM and ClickUp or in a project management system, but I know that doesn't work for everybody because they use several different follow up tools. But whatever it is that you do, I highly recommend that whatever it is you use automation so that you're not missing steps and to make it easy. So for example and ClickUp we lay out our entire biz dev process there. We use our for a CRM as well as a biz dev project management tool and we tie several of the actions back to automations and those automations create tasks, create assignees, all of these things and it kind of just cascades and rolls out. But again the process is scale because nobody really needs to touch it. Somebody just needs to make sure that it's getting done.
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Unknown
That makes sense. I also have another question for the same I'm an agency owner, I'm scaling pretty well. I don't have a big team. I'm probably like me myself and I'm trying to scale. How do you recommend people start hiring and because sometimes you have to lose margin at the beginning to scale up. So when right time to start hiring first of all. And then how do you recommend people basically scale down to scale up the age old?
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Tess Voakes
It depends. SEO answer. It depends. It depends. I think a lot of it is depends on how much time you as an agency owner or a sole proprietor are willing, how much time you're willing to put into whatever it is that you have versus how much work life balance you want to have. So if it's me, what I'm thinking about if I'm a sole proprietor, my first hire I actually made this year and is just a friend that wanted part time work. But alas it was still an investment on my side, right. So I decided that I had reached my capacity in being able to both manage my work and manage my biz dev. So again, in buying back some of my time, I had to decide that it was worth the investment to invest in somebody to help me so that I could help myself by investing my own time into biz dev, I was just no longer able to support doing both of those things plus fulfilling the client work. And so at some point you have to decide when is this no longer beneficial for me or my client and what is the payoff or the payout for hiring somebody else or investing in some sort of remote assistant or something like that. So again, the old Dan Martel buy back your time theory, um, it's really a personal decision, but for me I just needed more work life balance and it made sense at the capacity that I was at to, to hire somebody to be able to manage some of my more menial tasks that I was able to train them how to do.
- [19:05]
Unknown
And I like the buy back your time Dan Martell mindset, but what are some interesting ways you've put it to use now that AI is here? What are some things are you using to, to help your team buy back their time?
- [19:20]
Tess Voakes
So that's a great question. So I mentioned the use of automation. We use a ton of automations, not specifically to create client deliverables, but to do the administrative work that quite frankly nobody wants to do anyway. Right? But it's time consuming and because nobody wants to do it, it's like it's mentally consuming. And so by implementing a bunch of automations, things like again, automating our CRM, automating our follow up process, we have several features within our ClickUp setup that will automatically plan and organize people's work schedules for them. And it does that from the input of the client work. So nobody needs to touch anything from inputting the work to scheduling after the strategist has just decided this is what the three month schedule is for the client. So things like that, that really honestly bought me back about 20 hours a month that automation alone. Now it wasn't 40 hours to set up. It sure was, but over the course of time it saves me, quite honestly my mental health. But also 20 hours a month in time that I'm now able to invest in doing biz dev work and marketing work, team strategy time. And also we, we didn't need to hire somebody, right? So like even if I wanted to get rid of those, those types of responsibilities and didn't find a way to automate them, I'd have to hire somebody and that's obviously a cost to the business and a hit to the margin. So finding ways to automate things is a super, super easy way to buy back some of your time without actually having to invest a ton of money into something. So again, I know I sound like a ClickUp. They actually don't pay me anything to talk about. They should really but.
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Unknown
And this podcast is not sponsored by ClickUp, so just everybody know, yeah, I'm.
- [21:10]
Tess Voakes
Not sponsored by ClickUp. They really should. But yeah, something I love about them is they have a ton of integrated automations and they have a ton of like integrations with other platforms. So it just makes it super easy to be able to tie together different platforms that we use outside of ClickUp. But there's also things like Zap Zapier that you know, they have some really great free functions that have solved some of the world's problems for some of small agencies and solopreneurs. So really leaning into automation if you can't make the dive into investing in a person but need to buy back some time also I know controversial because we're an SEO, but like chat gtp, I make it right. Like emails and drafts for me, I am a menace of the English language. I should not be allowed to like send things publicly but alas, that's part of my job. And so again I've created an entire like GPT setup for myself where I've fed it types of content that I've written myself and then I it has learned my tone, my language, my verbiage and I make it right emails for me to be honest, emails that I don't want to write but are meaning meaningful and still need to be done. And it saves me probably an hour a day of just like, hey, can you write me an email that this? Can you write me an email that that right. So then I just have my assistant go in and have her just put all those things in and then input them into my Gmail. I take a quick look through them before we send them and they go out the door. So you know, just little things like that can really, really help if you're not ready to make the dive into a full hire or a part time hire, but need to buy back some of your time and, and again, mental health and sometimes mental health is more important than your actual time.
- [22:55]
Unknown
I just want to double click on something that I think is really important that you just said is just because administrative tasks are supposed to take like three or five hours to say that mental taxing on an employee of yours that, like, really doesn't want to do. It creates a work life that they don't want to be a part of. And then you're. They're also dipping on things that they would be really good at. So, like, say creative strategy. Like, creatives should never do project management. Like, there should be a setup for creatives, because creatives doing project management is not a fun thing. You got to think of that as a business owner. Like, how taxing. So some people, you love it. Some people love the in the weeds, nitty gritty stuff. And some people want to buy, like, hate that stuff. They know it's part of the job and they need help figuring out that part. And that's why it's great to have a project manager or someone operationally to take that off their plate. One of the last questions I have for you is, since you are the ClickUp queen, what is like your favorite? The same hack or trick in ClickUp that someone could do right now.
- [24:01]
Tess Voakes
Ooh, that's a great question. I wouldn't say it's easy, but it's worth it if you build out your processes in ClickUp. So essentially, like, I'm just going to use writing content as an example because it's easy. So if you take that, make it a parent task, and then write subtasks for each of the action items under there, like write a brief, do keyword research, I don't know, write the thing, edit the thing, whatever it is, and you assign a due date and a time estimate to that. You have created yourself a nice little project management system. And if you do that for all of your processes and you save those as templates within ClickUp, you can easily create your client plans with essentially like a few keystrokes. Again, it's not easy. It is something that you have to go in and do and put some meaningful thought into it. But once you do it, you're able to create processes that you can easily replicate quickly. And the cherry on top of all of that is that if you are a team, you can assign each of those subtasks to a person. And because you've assigned a due date and a time estimate to it, you now have a comprehensive view of that person's week, their month, their quarter, or whatever, you know, timeline you want to look at. But doing that, it seems silly. I know that at face value that seems so silly, but actually I joined Rickety Roo a year ago and they did not do this. And this was one of the very first things that I did When I came in, because they had things that ran overdue, their team was burnt out, they had things that were late to clients, things that were not prioritized correctly. Every single month at the end of the month was a rush because things were forgotten. And this has immediately solved that problem. I came in in the beginning of October and at the end of January it was no longer an issue again. It took up like a month and a half of some pretty in depth and hard work, but it solved almost every issue that they had. In addition to finding out that hey, we thought we had to hire two more people and we don't, we don't at all. But we had no way to document how long the expectation was to communicate to the team. So they had no idea and they were just taking the time they thought they had. And we no longer even need to hire two people, we actually don't need to hire anybody. And we actually had time to do biz dev work, work on like ourselves. And so it seems silly and I know it seems like tedious and whatnot, but it really does save time, it saves heartache, saves you money, and honestly it saves your team their sanity, their work, life balance. They know exactly what they're doing, how long it's supposed to take them, you know exactly what they're doing and how long it's supposed to take them. And so it's just, it's an all around like net net win.
- [26:43]
Unknown
I'll double click on that too. Because I used to be in marketing ops and what I, and I used to be, I've done it at startups and I've done it at more like series D, series Z. And I realized just being at startups, it's so hard to even start hiring if you don't take the time to take what's in your brain and put it into, let's say like documentation or process. Because if there's one stakeholder that knows everything in their brain, but nobody else knows that and it's not in any template or any format, it's so hard to say copy paste this, hire someone under this person to do something because you're gonna, you're gonna have to do that anyway when you hire them. So why not do the heavy lifting while you're actually doing the process, then have to do it two years later and have to uncover all these things that are. You can also find a lot of duct tape and things that are broken when you do it two years later.
- [27:38]
Tess Voakes
Yeah, totally. Which was my point at the, at the beginning is that like you'll ask somebody like what are your processes? And they'll go, I don't know. And you're like, well there's the problem. But yeah, and I guess if there's like even a silver lining to a cherry on top is that now you have a documented process. So to your point, if you have a team member that you know, quits or leaves or takes a leave or unexpectedly or whatever, you have something to train somebody else with. But the silver lining is that if you are a person who is building something to sell, you now have something more to sell and you add value to your business valuation more than just a book of business, right? Like you have a process, a specialized way of doing something, something that's unique to you, that you've proven is valuable and you've just added instant value to your company. So being able to document those things again is silly and tedious and takes time, but it's worth it and it makes a difference.
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Unknown
The last question I have for you is what is a marketing hill you would die on?
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Tess Voakes
Oh my goodness. I think the hill I would die on is actually not something related to marketing, but just like a skill set is that you do not have to know anything about marketing to be a good marketer. You need to be curious and you need to be an open minded person with soft skills. So many of the people in my industry are actually not marketers at all, don't have marketing degrees and actually got jobs that are not related to marketing as their first jobs. And so really I think soft skills and having a curious mind are probably the most valuable things you can do to be a marketer. You don't have to be a mastermind of any kind to be a marketer. You just have to know what it takes to sell something, how to get somebody's buy in and how to communicate. And that's really all it is. We are all being marketed to. And so if you are being marketed to, you know what it takes to be a marketer. But finding a way to be different tactically is hard. But finding a way to be different in a soft skill area is so much easier and will win you a job so much faster than having an actual tactical skill.
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Unknown
I love that. I think that's a hot take. I also think that a lot of marketing is internal buy in of getting people to agree with your ideas. A lot of marketing is being a good teammate. A lot of marketing is being a good to say proponent to your client. You just need to be and that's the key of marketing is understanding people. So if you have the soft skills to understand people, you can translate in understanding people to what marketing is just understanding your audience at scale and how to get their attention at scale. So I think that's great. Lastly, where can people find you and what you're doing?
- [30:36]
Tess Voakes
Yeah, so I mentioned I'm the VP at Rickety Roo, so it's just Rickety Roo.com, nothing special there. Otherwise I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me. My name is Tess Voakes. You will find me as Tessa. My full name is actually Tessa, but most places I'm listed as Tess. You can find me on Twitter Tess Vokes. I'm also on Blue Sky. I'm terrible. I don't remember my actual handle something with Tess, folks. And they have like a weird like bluesky dot. Bluesky whatever add on on there. Otherwise I am also on Instagram, I'm private. But you know, if you DM me and mention that you found me here, I'll accept you. So.
- [31:15]
Unknown
Well, thank you so much. I think this is like a skill that's not talked about enough in marketing, but every marketing team, whether you're in an agency, whether you're in a brand, whether you're a solopreneur, you need to know how to like operationalize your process. So thank you so much.
- [31:34]
Tess Voakes
Yeah, yeah. Thank you for having me, Daniel. I appreciate it.
- [31:38]
Daniel Murray
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.