Agencies generally focus on one ad platform, one main system or process, one way of doing things.

It’s important to streamline things and minimize how many offers you have, as it makes it much easier to scale your agency and much easier to deliver your services. This is often called “productizing your service” - structuring your service in a way that you can easily repeat it and scale with it by treating it like a “product”.

However, this can become a big issue if the technology or ad platform you are using goes down.

If all of your clients rely on you to be running Facebook ad campaigns and your Facebook account gets shut down, how are you going to make sure you can set up a new client? How are you going to succeed in the market when you can no longer offer your main product or service because of unforeseen issues in the technologies and systems you rely on?

This is why I like to always be innovating in some area, but to make sure that only, at most, 15-20% of the things you are testing in are “outside of your wheelhouse”.

80%+ of your agency should be productized services where you run similar campaigns that you are confident in, to similar niches and clients, and with the same ad platforms and technologies.

But to decrease risk, you should be spending 20% of your time testing in new areas and innovating. Find agency clients that are willing to have you run ads on TikTok, YouTube, or Reddit if you have never ran ads there before.

Test a completely new landing page design.

Sign on an agency client in a new vertical.

These tests will be risky and often fail so you have to recognize that. It can also take some time to make this 20% of your business work at all. Know when to cut losses and when to push through.

But the benefit of structuring your agency this way is that you will always be growing in some areas and derisking your agency, create a fallback service when you need it, and to open up the potential of slowly expanding into new territories or areas ONLY in the case that your little testing goes phenomenally well.

Things don’t stay the same forever so you want to be testing and trialling early, before you have to figure out something new when it’s too late and all your clients are ready to leave.

Sometimes the easiest way to install this culture at your business is to pick one day out of the week and make that your “innovation” and “testing” day. In a few months, you will have surely developed a completely new process or system that is getting results for you that may even surpass what you had originally.