How to Grow Your Agency Through Strategic Delegation

Are you too busy working in your agency to grow your agency? Wondering how to reclaim time to strategize?

In this article, you'll discover how to free up valuable time by strategically delegating parts of your role to trusted team members without sacrificing client satisfaction.

A Radical Solution for Exponential Growth: Insights From the “Video Content Superman”

As an agency owner, lack of time and capacity to personally handle all production likely thwarts your growth ambitions. Despite long hours, you may feel frustrated by stagnating revenue and criteria preventing you from promoting staff into leadership roles. 

However, video marketing expert Atiba de Souza reveals his methodology for rapidly expanding your agency by strategically making yourself obsolete every 120 days.

Atiba explains his “replace yourself” philosophy, which he credits with facilitating his agency’s year-and-a-half run of 50%+ quarterly revenue increases. Counterintuitively, he ascribes his exponential business growth to systematically handing agency responsibilities to staff through an intentional “10-80-10” process. 

Although initially uncomfortable delegating tasks and integral operations, Atiba soon experienced the power of this self-replacement model, which enabled him to focus on innovation and client relationships. He details practical steps for identifying expertise to transfer, upgrading communication abilities, fostering a culture supporting empowered specialists over generalists, and measuring successful delegation so you can ultimately direct your agency through strategic planning rather than daily production. 

Whether seeking more free time or rapid scalability, Atiba convinces agency leaders that radically replacing themselves sets the stage for accelerated expansion.

Strategic Delegation for Agency Growth 

As CEO of Client Attraction Pros, a video marketing agency primarily serving medical clinics, Atiba utilizes video to build client relationships and trust. This reliance on relationship-building is common across high-ticket service industries. His agency helps clients produce trust-building videos optimized for search engines—a skill Atiba has honed since 1996.

The “Replace Yourself Every 120 Days” Philosophy 

Several years ago, Atiba attended an event where real estate investor Kris Krohn revealed he operates a $100 million business while only working two days each week. Kris credited this efficiency to his philosophy of replacing himself in the company every 120 days by handing responsibilities off to team members. At first, unconvinced at the idea of relinquishing control, Atiba realized adopting this strategy could allow him to scale his overloaded agency.

“The key here is for you as a CEO, as a high-level executive, whatever your title and position is, to look at yourself and what you bring to your company, and figure out how to compartmentalize what you do and hand it off to other people every 120 days,” Atiba says.  

First, examine your current responsibilities and create a plan for categorizing and delegating them to staff. Next, implement these hand-offs every 120 days to force this transition. Then, Atiba recommends using the “10-80-10” rule he implemented after having a conversation with Richard Lindner of Digital Marketer:

• Perform 10% of a task to set direction.
• Delegate 80% to staff.
• Review the final 10% to ensure alignment. 

For example, let's imagine you wrote a report that's about to be released. You would start by creating an outline of how you envision the report—the chapters, talking points for each section, etc. Then, you’d hand that outline off to your team for them to draft the full report based on your direction. 

Once they write the report, you’d carefully edit it before sending it to design. This allows you to guide the direction and key messages while delegating the actual writing to others. Your final review ensures quality control before the report gets designed and published.

Atiba says it's essential to accept the need to improve communication and effective delegation skills to direct staff and set expectations. You want to create an agency culture that fosters open, clear communication among staff, especially regarding problems.    

“Your pursuit then becomes learning how to better communicate, because in that process of learning how to better communicate, their 80% just keeps getting better and better and better and better to the point where you can just say, ‘okay, you all got it,’” Atiba says.  

Turning Art Into Science 

Atiba says an artist is someone who takes an innate talent and turns it into a piece of work. Like an artist, you bring a unique perspective that others can't easily copy, making it hard to trust that someone else can replicate your “art.”  

But Atiba believes you can make the creative process more structured. For example, ask your team to explain their thought process when a report goes well or poorly. This reveals the unspoken steps you take when applying your talent. Over time, it transforms an abstract gift into a repeatable methodology your team can model.  

Rather than saying, “Only I can do this,” explain your artistic approach. Poetry originated from science, not art—even subjective skills often have an underlying framework. By uncovering and teaching that structure, you coach your gift to others. The result: better trust, teamwork, and proper delegation while preserving what makes your contribution unique.

For example, Atiba has a natural talent for SEO. You can give him a list of 1,000 keywords, a website, and a company, and he can quickly pick the top 10 terms that will rank them #1. It seems like magic, but he’s taught his process to others. Atiba explains how he evaluates keywords, has them try the process, and reviews where they went wrong. 

As they walk through their logic, Atiba points out gaps. Like, “Why did you go that way? Think this way instead.” Bit by bit, they illuminate the unspoken rules he internally follows but have yet to explain. Extracting those into concrete steps allows others to replicate the “magic” through a defined structure versus raw artistic talent.

This organizational restructuring forced Atiba to delegate tasks through an operational lens that illuminated work processes, transforming his inherent artistry into a replicable science. Implementing this biannual replacement strategy facilitated Atiba’s agency expansion as he handed off responsibilities to his team and focused more on innovation.

Building Trust Internally 

However, Atiba admits initial attempts at replacing himself failed due to struggling to trust that staff could complete responsibilities to his standards. Yet, recognizing that this distrust stemmed from falsely viewing his talents as irreplaceable “art” allowed Atiba to continue perfecting the replacement process. 

He recommends agency owners accept that they likely communicate inadequately first before blaming staff performance issues. Having ongoing conversations with your team about their work process is essential—not just when things go wrong. If you only review things when there are mistakes, people will be afraid of feedback conversations.  

Instead, make it a regular practice to understand how agency employees approach delegated tasks, regardless of the desired outcome. Ask them to walk you through their thinking and decision-making. This allows you to provide constructive input on their process, identify where alignments and misalignments occur, and coach them through improvements. 

Normalizing these discussions means your team will feel safe from messing up. Evaluating processes without placing blame becomes a collaborative effort. This refinement ultimately allows staff to improve performance until they approach your capabilities.

Additionally, Atiba’s agency focuses on hiring specialists, not generalists. With narrower scopes, specialists often happily focus on their niche rather than vie for broader control. This allows his team to ramp up tasks and delegate effectively, transferring responsibilities across a dedicated expert team.

The Outcomes of the Replacement Approach

After applying this self-replacement philosophy for over two years, Atiba’s agency experienced over 50% revenue growth quarterly for a year and a half straight. Some clients even emailed to express appreciation for Atiba stepping back because the agency’s services improved. His senior team reports feeling empowered by the level of trust placed in them. 

However, some clients value Atiba as their sole point of contact, but this can block scaling. So when he signs new clients, Atiba immediately introduces his head of client services. This team member joins the onboarding process and copies Atiba on subsequent communication so clients still feel his presence. But his client services manager handles day-to-day outreach.  

If he needs guidance, he slacks Atiba questions, and Atiba tells him how to respond in his voice so clients feel like Atiba is still involved. They also keep “dossiers”—researched info like company, role, website, how they met, social media details, meeting notes, follow-ups, etc—capturing prior conversations with each client and prospect. So, if Atiba meets someone, he can quickly review their history and make them feel personally known, even if his manager handled recent interactions.

The key is bringing in his manager upfront, not as a surprise replacement. Atiba’s contract states he'll be their contact, setting expectations. This process retains access to Atiba when necessary while empowering his manager to build his own relationship with clients. It lets Atiba strategically engage while his head of client services manages tactical communications.

Regarding current responsibilities, Atiba holds brief weekly meetings to remain updated through scorecards but avoids day-to-day operations.

For example, he has a 30-minute weekly meeting with his client services manager to review scorecards for each client. The manager raises any client issues that need my input. Next, Atiba has a 15-minute meeting with the client services manager and the production manager overseeing getting work done. They cover cross-functional topics. Then, Atiba has an hour-long managers meeting on Fridays. All managers present scorecards on their department's status.

Atiba focuses more on guiding department heads to eventually fill CEO-level roles and directing innovation initiatives rather than production. Empowering his team to replace themselves happens on both ends—for managers and frontline staff, Atiba says.  

His frontline employees follow Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for their roles, and he encourages them to improve these documents continuously. When they master their jobs, Atiba hires new frontline workers to train as their replacements. This process lets them move up as new people take on their former responsibilities. It creates a cycle where people scale into leadership roles while ensuring someone is always ready to fill their old ones.

The team feels ownership over constantly evolving their systems because they make it clear: We want you to work yourself out of a job so you can advance into more significant contributions. Atiba believes replacement is the path forward, not a threat.  

Surprisingly, Atiba measures success by his boredom level; if departments run smoothly without needing his input, it affirms staff readiness.

Innovation Council 

Atiba regularly asks his team, “What’s on your mind?” When Atiba asked one of his managers this question recently, she said she couldn't envision the advanced level of innovation the agency achieved a year ago. However, the agency continuously iterated and improved. Atiba believes they are doing cutting-edge work combining video and Google search. 

Rather than getting comfortable, Atiba and his team started an Innovation Council. Their mandate is figuring out what's next and pushing the envelope again. Atiba’s manager reflected on how, in just 120 days, they’ve had incredible business growth by living their ethos of constant replacement and advancement. When people scale themselves, it creates space for nonstop organizational evolution to the next level.

While admitting the first six months proved difficult, Atiba firmly believes agency owners must evaluate whether their current business model facilitates their desired growth and freedom. With many unable to sustain 50%+ quarterly revenue increases like his agency, change may be essential even when initially uncomfortable.

By implementing a biannual self-replacement approach, agency owners can shift from direct operations to innovation and accelerate their business expansion. As Atiba summarized, what do you have to lose when your current model isn’t delivering your growth goals anyway?

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