Empower Your Team and Become the Leader You Wish You’d Had with Lauren Von | Ep #734

Smart Agency Masterclass with Jason Swenk: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies

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Have you ever questioned your effectiveness as a leader? What steps have you taken to enhance your leadership skills and empower your team to independently address challenges? Today’s featured guest experienced significant growth and had to learn to evolve her leadership skills. She has grown a team of now 110 people and built a business that can run without her, all while maintaining the necessary work-life balance. Hear how she went from executive assistant to paving her way as an agency owner in an unconventional niche.

Lauren Von is the founder and CEO of Quintessa Marketing, a unique agency that connects individuals who have been injured in accidents with personal injury lawyers. She shares her unexpected journey into the world of personal injury law, starting as an executive assistant and evolving into a pivotal role in sales and SEO for a company serving lawyers. She discusses the challenges and insights she gained while working closely with legal professionals and how these experiences laid the groundwork for launching her own business.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

• Hiring for cultural fit.

• Becoming the type of leader you wish you’d had.

• Team empowerment - building confidence.

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Sponsors and Resources

E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design, and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.

How Corporate Experience Can Shape Agency Success

Working with personal injury lawyers wasn’t exactly Lauren’s dream. She started as an executive assistant working in sales for AT&T, where her skills quickly shone through. One day, she successfully persuaded a hesitant customer to retain his phone instead of returning it, leaving such a lasting impression that he invited her to join his team.

Transitioning into the realm of personal injury law, Lauren honed her sales abilities over six years, ultimately spearheading the development of the company’s SEO division. Her proactive approach led to a significant increase in sales, transforming SEO into a cornerstone of the business. After gaining valuable agency experience, Lauren returned to Oklahoma as a new mother, figuring it was the perfect moment to start her own business.

She credits her time as an executive assistant and her gradual ascent within the company for equipping her with the insights necessary to run her own business. If something’s going wrong in the business, she’s probably seen it happen before at her previous workplace so she appreciates the experience that made her a better owner when the time came.

Scaling Without a Roadmap: A Key to Agency Expansion

One aspect of ownership that presented the biggest learning curve for Lauren was bringing on outside leadership to help scale and grow her business. Since she built her agency on a relatively new niche, she couldn’t just go to a competitor and pluck out their leadership. There was no blueprint so she needed to figure it out.

There was also a constant battle between allowing her team to make mistakes and giving them time to learn while running a profitable business.

Ultimately, Lauren needed to acknowledge the need to ask for help. No leader has all the answers and a key element of getting beyond a certain point in your growth will be accepting that and having the humility to seek guidance and advice from others.

Aligning Values: Hiring for Agency Culture Fit

Lauren’s hiring strategy relies on hiring individuals who align with her agency’s values. To this effect, she clearly defines her core values and conducts survey assessments that explore candidates' innate characteristics.

These assessments provide insights into candidates' personalities and their suitability for specific roles, particularly in a sales context. For instance, a potential hire might have all the best traits to fill a position, but if they don’t care about the company’s philanthropic values their motivations will not resonate with the agency's mission. This nuanced understanding of individual capabilities allows Lauren to make informed hiring decisions that prioritize long-term success over immediate financial gain.

Becoming the Type of Leader You Wish You’d Had

Lauren has felt like a bad leader many times during the agency's growth process, but she never stopped striving for improvement. As the business grew, she instated an open-door policy to encourage employees to have open communication with her and the leadership team and make herself more approachable.

As she tried to become the type of leader she’d wanted to have in the past, she realized that she needed to be a different leader for each worker. For instance, she believes the way she leads her accounting team should be different than how she leads her sales team. In this sense, she strives to really understand them to be able to inspire and lead them naturally.

Nowadays, Lauren is proud to say her company continues to thrive and grow, even when she is not physically present. This autonomy is crucial; it demonstrates that the organization is not solely reliant on the founder for direction. Instead, it cultivates a sense of resilience and adaptability, allowing teams to navigate challenges effectively. With this, her role has now evolved to be someone who removes obstacles, solves problems, is a subject-matter expert, and leads their philanthropy mission by investing in the community.

Team Empowerment: Building Confidence for Problem-Solving

With her team now equipped to address 99% of potential issues in her absence, Lauren is now able to enjoy more time with her family, promote the agency brand on podcasts, and meet clients in person.

For agency owners who have yet to reach this level of operational autonomy but aspire to empower their teams, it's essential to train them in a way that encourages independent problem-solving. This is something you can achieve using the one-three-one approach. Instead of coming to you with a problem and expecting you to provide a solution, have them already come up with three possible solutions of how they would personally solve this problem and why, and ask them which of these three solutions they would recommend. Eventually, they’ll stop coming to you because they have internalized that they are capable of coming up with an effective approach.

Although agency owners usually dream of accomplishing this level of agency autonomy, it can be hard to adapt to not being needed anymore. In these cases, agency owners should remember that they don’t have to let go of the part of the business they truly love doing. If you love being a part of a client’s first call then continue to do that. You don’t have to be part of the entire process. Just stick to the part of the business you truly enjoy and where you can have the biggest impact.

The two-week audit. The easiest way to figure out what you truly want to continue doing in the agency and what you want to delegate is to do a two-week audit. Take a screenshot of the past two weeks in your calendar and highlight each activity in either red – for the activities that drain you, or green – for the ones you truly enjoy. If you do this while being truly honest with yourself, you can start building the business around you.

Mastering the Art of Balance and Reclaiming Your Time

As a mom of five and an entrepreneur, Lauren manages to balance her personal and professional lives by having clarity and alignment. Together with her husband, she establishes clear goals and daily priorities, which allows them to effectively share responsibilities. She is intentional about her time at home, implementing boundaries that enable her to fully engage in family moments.

This principle extends to her business as well. When entrepreneurs and their teams engage in work that aligns with their core values, they tend to feel more energized and motivated. Such alignment not only boosts productivity but also cultivates a sense of purpose within the organization.

By figuring out how much time you need to focus on your agency to feel fulfilled yet have enough energy to dedicate to your family life, you’ll be able to have the proverbial “balance” entrepreneurial life promises and experience the luxury of buying back your time.

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