Automate Your Agency
Are you a founder dreaming of breaking free from the day-to-day grind?
Or perhaps you're looking to scale your company without burning out?
Welcome to Automate Your Agency with Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson, a podcast dedicated to helping you systemize and automate your business for more efficient, scalable operations that can run without you.
Join our hosts as they share battle-tested strategies and cutting-edge tools that take the guesswork out of systemizing your business. Drawing from their experience of growing their agency to 600+ active clients before their exit, Alane and Micah offer actionable insights on:
✅ Implementing effective software solutions
✅ Leveraging automation and AI to do more with less
✅ Creating workflows and systems that allow your business to run without you
✅ Preparing your company for a potential sale or exit
Each week, they take a deep dive into real-world operational challenges and showcase solutions they've implemented. Whether you want to double revenue without doubling headcount or build a business that runs smoothly in your absence, this podcast is your roadmap to success.
Subscribe to Automate Your Agency with Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson now on your favorite podcast platform and join other forward-thinking entrepreneurs as they transform their businesses into well-oiled machines that are primed for growth and ready for whatever the future holds!
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It's time to work smarter, not harder – let's automate your agency and unlock your business's potential!
Automate Your Agency
How do I 3X my project execution with time tracking?
If you're serious about improving your business operations, time tracking should be treated as a non-negotiable. Period. End of story.
Without it, how can you even come close to answering the questions that are most important to your business?
- Are my products or services priced correctly?
- Are my processes efficient?
- What are our most profitable activities?
- How can we improve our margins?
Join us in this 10 minute episode of Automate Your Agency, as Alane and Micah share how time tracking goes beyond its stigma of micro-management, offering you a wealth of knowledge to accurately steer and operate your business.
Interested in implementing time tracking in your business? We recommend a specialized timekeeping software like Toggl to ensure you can accurately capture and review all the data you need.
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0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to automate your agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations.
0:00:18 - (Alane): One of the things that we hear a lot when we start talking with a potential client or even somebody longstanding with us is, how do you track somebody's time?
0:00:29 - (Micah): Yes, that's a big, big question.
0:00:33 - (Micah): And, you know, we've done, done it in a bunch of different ways. And I really like, we use Toggl now currently, and we use it across our team, whether we need to be doing time tracking because it's for the client, if you're doing some type of billable time. But we also do it for team members that don't track billable time just so that we can sometimes get insight.
0:00:56 - (Micah): Oh, absolutely. You know, when we first started tracking our time, we didn't do time and materials with our previous business. We had a monthly subscription fee for our services. And I remember when we first started tracking time, we implemented it across the board. We tracked our own time, the teams tracked their time. And the improvement in processes and operations that that allowed us to do was far worth the pushback and the time it took to record. I think initially we got some pushback because people were worried that we were trying to micromanage.
0:01:38 - (Micah): Right.
0:01:39 - (Micah): But we explained to the team, and it was the truth, that we're tracking our own time, too, that we're using this to improve the business and understand what's working and not working so that it makes it better for everybody.
0:01:54 - (Alane): Well, and if you don't have that data, how do you know how to price things?
0:01:59 - (Micah): How do you know how to price things? How do you know how long things will really take? How do you know if there's an issue with the process?
0:02:05 - (Alane): Exactly. Things that we might think might think is a 30 minutes job and so valuable from that perspective, takes four, 6 hours for somebody to do well, then we have the data to reevaluate. Is that actually something we want our team spending time on, or is this no longer than something needed?
0:02:27 - (Micah): Yeah. And I think one of the things we uncovered when we implemented it, at least that surprised me, is the variance in time it takes different people to do the same thing. So one person it might take 30 minutes, another person it might take 3 hours. Well, is that due to lack of training? Is that due to skillset mismatch? Is that just due to somebody being slow? Yeah, if you're not tracking time and understanding how all this can work, how, like, I know before that I just operated, everybody was doing it equally was not the case.
0:03:06 - (Alane): No. Especially if you're the founder of your company. Most of the time you're going to do things faster than other people that you're hiring because it's in your head, you know, how you want it executed and your livelihood's on the line, you know, so early on, you're going to do things faster.
0:03:22 - (Micah): Yeah, you have the vision.
0:03:23 - (Micah): Exactly.
0:03:24 - (Micah): Yeah. So I think implementing a time tracking software can be so beneficial. It's an additional cost, but….
0:03:35 - (Alane): Project Management software, you know, a lot of them have time tracking components to it, like ClickUp, Asana, you can track your time. Even though we use ClickUp, we still have a time tracking software that we use outside of ClickUp.
0:03:47 - (Micah): Absolutely, absolutely. And our previous episode talks about why you would want to buy specific pieces of software and the strengths you work towards. The strengths or leverage the strengths of each piece of software that you have instead of trying to do everything with one piece of software. And time tracking is very, very, I would say, right in line with that. Because a software like toggle or harvest, you can get all the reports that you want. You get the integrations that you want, you get the APIs that you need.
0:04:16 - (Micah): You get the ability to integrate directly with a tool like Quickbooks. You get hierarchy, levels of projects and tasks and clients and estimates and all of the things that you actually need. A software that has time tracking added on can't supply all that. You're going to want to be able to know where the hiccups are, what's taking longer than expected. If you're starting a new project and you're getting into new territory, you need some sort of baseline.
0:04:51 - (Micah): Maybe it does take 10 hours this first time around. If you're not tracking that, then how do you know the next time around and you do it 8 hours, you improved, or the next time around you do it 12 hours?
0:05:04 - (Alane): Yeah.
0:05:04 - (Micah): What happened?
0:05:06 - (Alane): I just can't imagine pricing anything at this point without having some data behind it like that.
0:05:15 - (Micah): Absolutely.
0:05:15 - (Alane): Even if it's not billable time that you're tracking.
0:05:18 - (Micah): Oh, yeah.
0:05:18 - (Alane): But just for your company knowledge to know, is this something we should be selling to our clients?
0:05:21 - (Micah): Let alone how else do you understand your margins?
0:05:26 - (Alane): Oh, exactly. If you're only making 10% margins on it, then it might not be worth reselling in the future.
0:05:32 - (Micah): Yes. There was times, especially starting this out where we were really rough this business out, where we were really rough on. We didn't have a baseline. We didn't know how long things would take. When we tried to execute some of the services, it took way longer than expected. And across multiple people. If we weren't tracking that, we wouldn't have been able to look at it and go, wait a second, we're losing money on this.
0:05:55 - (Alane): Yeah.
0:05:55 - (Micah): And there's many businesses that are executing things and losing. What's the point of doing a project if you're not making money on it?
0:06:03 - (Alane): Yeah. You know, Micah, that, what you just said. I remember looking at the toggle reporting and saying, we, this stuff is, some of the things that we're doing here are costing our company money. We're not making money on it. But it was also insightful to see what team members, what we were paying them and what they were producing with work. And what we realized is we need more sophisticated people. Yes. We pay them more upfront, but it costs us less in the end.
0:06:35 - (Micah): Yes. Yeah. And we shifted to that because of the time tracking.
0:06:39 - (Micah): Exactly. Because we had that data. Yeah. And this conversation that we're having too, we don't look at it as, oh, this person is terrible. We need to let them go. It's, are they in the wrong position? Is it, you mentioned earlier, do we need to train them? A lot of times we found that it's process and training. The process is broken and they don't know how to do their job and they're just scrambling.
0:07:03 - (Alane): Okay, well, how can….
0:07:05 - (Micah): Nobody gonna say that.
0:07:06 - (Alane): Oh, gosh, no. Nobody wants to say, I don't know how to do my job. This sucks. They'll say it to their co workers, but they're not gonna say that to their manager or founder.
0:07:15 - (Micah): Yep. So I think all said and done time tracking is so important. If you haven't implemented it yet, do it now. A big piece of this is if you're trying to improve your operations, if you're trying to improve processes, if you want to make changes, this is a great metric to be able to make a change and then analyze it without having to ask everybody. You still want to get feedback, but this is data that you can make a change.
0:07:49 - (Micah): Did the, did that change make it better or worse from things that affect your bottom line?
0:07:57 - (Alane): Yeah. I've got a quick little story and then we can wrap it up. Is, you know, I have a PR Manager and she's not doing billable time, but I have her track her time. And when you're, she's a new position. So I don't know how long things take. I don't have that perspective yet. We're building a ton of stuff from the start. She's brand new. And so after the first month, we looked at her time, and I'm like, okay, you know, let's go through, like, what were the most time consuming things so we could look at the data of our time. And we said, okay, hey, this outreach piece was 70% of your time.
0:08:35 - (Alane): How can we reduce that? Then? It's a conversation with her and I. She realized that, you know, hey, that was a really big, time consuming piece. And honestly, I didn't love doing that. A 70% of my job. I'd love for your ideas on how we could reduce this. And so she had other things she wanted to do in the month. You know, it's about, hey, this took me a ton of time. I'm not saying it was invaluable, but I think, you know, I think we can make this faster and so we could have a conversation about that. Because she didn't want to spend 70% of her time on it. Cause she had 50% other things she wanted to be doing.
0:09:09 - (Micah): Right. And it's interesting you word it like that, because it's not 50% of other things you wanted her to be doing. You hired her because she was good at with her knowledge set and good at what you hired her to do. And so you're empowering her to give her an outlet to say, oh, man, I didn't want to spend that much time on it, how you're doing it collaboratively, which is awesome. Yeah, I mean, and so if you're listening to this, I would just think through what if that happened for every single one of your team members.
0:09:43 - (Micah): That's the power of implementing time tracking.
0:09:45 - (Micah): Yep.
0:09:47 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate your agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website, workdayninja.com.
0:09:59 - (Micah): And join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.
0:10:03 - (Alane): Bye for now.
