Avoiding Chaos to Expedite Agency Growth

Jason Blumer is CEO of Blumer and Associates, a CPA firm dedicated to providing strategic growth strategies to creative design, digital, and marketing agencies ready to go to “the next level.” Key areas of influence include transforming people to facilitate growth, leveraging teams to scale, and recrafting business models. Areas of greatest impact are pricing . . . and how a business is run.

Jason notes that an agency’s pricing reflects its value to its market or its niched expertise. It will take 2 to 3 years for an agency to transition from hourly pricing to value-based pricing – a process that starts with new clients. Legacy clients who refuse to abandon the old hourly-pricing model become “legacy baggage.” No matter the form, the co-existence of legacy systems (the old way of doing things)—whether pricing, organizational, or operational – and new, conflicting, growth-targeted policies and procedures causes confusion, and what Jason refers to as “chaos.” This kind of growth problem is often the result of an owner not letting go and letting the business become what it is meant to be – or the owner pulling rank and violating the new “rules,” destroying credibility.

Much of the focus of Blumer & Associate’s work is on moving toward simplicity, eliminating chaos (chaos inhibits growth), and transforming business owners into organizational leaders. These leaders are then charged with:

1. Developing relevant mission statements and defining how to live out those missions
2. Implementing core (foundational) values and effective patterns, processes, and rhythms
3. Caring deeply for their teams and the rhythms around their teams
4. Keeping people and teams accountable and leading them to all walk in the same direction.
5. Encouraging collaboration. Collaboration leads to strength

Jason warns companies not to hire people who are unwilling to collaborate and outlines a process to safely release an employee who refuses to collaborate or fails to follow an organization’s core values:

1. Recognize and acknowledge nonconforming behavior, with a friendly offer to help or explain
2. Make a less-friendly suggestion that the employee work on the problem
   1. The employee’s failure to follow core values
   2. That the employee must follow core values for the company’s health
   3. That the issue has been discussed
   4. That the employee knows the rules and knew them when hired
3. Meet facetime (in-person/virtual) with a manager pointing out:
4. Meet facetime (in-person/virtual) with a manager telling the employee that s/he has to follow the core values and then stating, “You will do it and this is the last conversation we’ll have asking you to do it.”
5. Let the employee go in a way that does not hurt the firm and or the released employee

Jason can be contacted by googling “Jason Blumer,” on Facebook, on Instagram, on his website at jasonblumer.com, @JasonMBlumer on Twitter, or on his company’s LinkedIn site at https://www.linkedin.com/company/blumer-&-associates-cpas-pc/ , or website at: https://www.blumercpas.com/.