The Agency Operator: Issue 03

I want to tell you about a pattern I see constantly inside agencies at the $15K–$50K/month mark.

The founder is overwhelmed. Delivery is slipping. Client relationships are getting strained. So they do the logical thing: they hire.

They bring on an account manager. Or a project manager. Or a senior strategist. Someone who can "take things off their plate."

And then — almost without fail — six months later, they're just as overwhelmed. But now they have a higher payroll.

The hire wasn't the mistake. The sequence was.

PS we added a new tool recommendation section (at the bottom) for tools you should consider in your systems ops.

Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're in growth mode:

A new hire doesn't absorb chaos. They inherit it.

When you hire before your systems are documented, here's what actually happens:

→       The new person asks you how things work. You tell them verbally.

→       They do it their way. You correct them. Repeatedly.

→       You're now spending more time managing the hire than you were doing the work yourself.

→       They either burn out from the ambiguity, or you do from the handholding.

→       Within 8–12 months, they're gone. And you start over.

This isn't a people problem. It's a systems problem wearing a people costume.

The agencies that hire well — the ones where new team members ramp in 30 days instead of 6 months — all have one thing in common before they post a job description:

The job exists on paper before it exists in a person.

That means the core tasks of the role are documented. The output standards are defined. The decision rights are clear. The 30/60/90-day expectations are written down before day one.

Without that, you're not hiring an employee. You're hiring a student — and you're the teacher, on top of everything else.

Before you write a single job description, run every potential hire through these three gates. If you can't pass all three, you're not ready to hire — you're ready to document.

Can you hand this person a written process for the core tasks of this role on their first day?

Not a conversation. Not a Loom video you'll record "when you get a chance." A written, step-by-step document that a competent person could follow without asking you a single question.

If the answer is no: document before you hire. This is a two-to-four week project, not a six-month one. We'll get to how in the Action section.

GATE 2 — The Output Standard Is Defined

Does this person know what "good" looks like before they start — not what they'll figure out over time?

This means: what does a well-run client account look like? What does an excellent media pitch look like? What does a properly scoped project plan look like? These standards live in writing, with real examples, not in your head.

If the answer is no: define the standard before you hire. Pull three examples of your best work in this area and document what made them good. That document is your quality benchmark.

GATE 3 — The 30/60/90 Is Written

Do you have a written 30/60/90-day plan for this role — what they'll own, what they'll learn, and what success looks like at each milestone?

This is not just for the hire's benefit. It's for yours. Writing the 30/60/90 forces you to articulate what you actually need from this person — and often reveals that you need a different kind of hire, or a different kind of support, than you thought.

If the answer is no: write it before you post. It takes two hours. It will save you six months.

Pull up any role you're currently considering hiring for — or a role you've hired for in the past that didn't go well.

Run it through the three gates above. Write yes or no next to each one.

If you have two or three no's: don't hire yet. Spend the next two weeks building what's missing. The documentation sprint is the real work — the hire is just the deployment.

If you have three yes's: post the role. You've done the pre-work that most agency founders never do.

One more thing:

The documentation you build for this hire doesn't disappear when they eventually move on. It becomes your agency's institutional knowledge. It's the difference between "we lost the person who knew how to do that" and "we have the playbook, we just need to find the right player."

Build the playbook first. Always.

The most common reason agencies don't document their processes is time. Here's how to remove that excuse entirely.

Open a Claude conversation. Paste this prompt:

Talk to Claude like you'd explain it to a smart new hire. Ramble if you need to. It will clean it up, structure it, and give you a Notion-ready SOP you can paste and refine in under 20 minutes.

Use this once a week for a month and you'll have more documented processes than most agencies build in a year.

Members of the Agency OS Skool community get the AI + Claude install files, skills, SOPs and workflows [Get on the waitlist →]

📊 BY THE NUMBERS

A number that comes up consistently when I audit agencies on hiring outcomes:

The documentation doesn't just make better hires. It makes better hiring decisions — because writing the playbook first forces you to get clear on what the role actually requires.

🛠️TOOL OF THE WEEK: Notion

Every time I work with an agency that has a solid team operating without constant founder involvement, I find the same thing somewhere in their stack: a well-built Notion workspace.

Not because Notion is the flashiest tool. Because it's the one that's actually flexible enough to hold all the different kinds of information an agency needs to operate — and simple enough that your team will actually use it.

Why agency owners specifically should use it:

→       It replaces the "it's in my head" problem with a shared, searchable brain for your agency

→       Client portals in Notion let you share project updates, assets, and approvals without email chains

→       SOP wikis in Notion become the answer to "how do we do this" — searchable, updateable, and actually used

→       Internal knowledge bases mean a new hire can self-onboard through Notion before they ask you a single question

How to use it for what we talked about today:

Build your SOP library in Notion before your next hire. Here's the exact structure I recommend:

Agency OS Wiki (top-level page)

↳  Client Delivery SOPs

     ↳  Onboarding a new client

     ↳  Monthly reporting workflow

     ↳  Scope change process

↳  Internal Operations SOPs

     ↳  New hire onboarding

     ↳  Weekly team meeting structure

     ↳  Tool access and offboarding

↳  Role Playbooks

     ↳  [Role name] — tasks, standards, 30/60/90

Start with five SOPs. That's it. Pick the five things your team asks you about most often, document them in Notion, and share the link the next time someone asks.

Notion is free to start notion.com — no referral code needed, no catch. Just a genuinely useful tool.

📣 A QUICK NOTE

If you've been reading the last two issues and thinking "I know I need to do this but I don't know where to start" — that's exactly what the Agency OS community is built for.

Inside Skool, you'll find the SOP templates we've built for agency client onboarding, delivery, and internal ops — already formatted for Notion and ready to customize. Plus the Claude install files we've referenced in the AI Corner sections of all three issues.

Founding member pricing is still open at $97/month. Once we hit our target, it moves to $147. [Join here →]

See you next week.

Work smart. Enjoy life harder.

Founder, Agency Owner Lab

When you're ready, here's how we can work together:

→ Agency OS Community (Skool) — SOPs, Claude installs, tool stacks. $97/month. [Join here]

→ Agency OS Core — 12-week coaching for $8K–$50K/month agencies [Apply here]

→ Agency OS Accelerate — 12-month program for $50K–$150K/month agencies [Apply here]

→ The Boardroom — mastermind for founders at or approaching $1M/year [Apply here]

→ Implementation Sprints — done-for-you systems builds, $8K–$15K [Book a Systems Audit]