How Much Time Should You Spend Managing Your Agency?
The time you need to spend managing an agency depends on the assignment, your internal capability, the number of approvals and how much coordination the agency has agreed to own. Estimate the work your team must perform rather than relying on a universal weekly-hours benchmark.
Download the editable worksheet (Markdown). Replace the bracketed prompts with your own details.
You should expect to provide business decisions, relevant information and agreed approvals. Repeatedly chasing routine work or explaining the same context can indicate a problem with the agency's process, your own process or the division of responsibility.
List the client tasks that the engagement requires.
Include preparation and follow-up as well as meetings. Common client tasks include gathering information, coordinating internal reviewers, approving spending and supplying specialist input.
Account for internal production. If your designer creates the assets or your developer implements recommendations, that time belongs in the engagement's resource plan even though it does not appear on the agency invoice.
Ask the agency to identify its assumptions about client availability before work starts. The expectations guide can help separate normal participation from work you thought the agency was taking on.
Estimate setup and ongoing work separately.
Onboarding, discovery and a major launch can require more client time than an established recurring program. A single estimate can hide those differences.
Build a schedule around the actual tasks. Identify which require a senior decision-maker and which can be delegated to someone with the necessary context and authority.
Check whether the work is concentrated around deadlines. A manageable monthly total can still be impossible if several agencies need the same executive's approval on the same afternoon.
Calculate a realistic example.
The following figures are hypothetical planning assumptions, not an industry benchmark.
Suppose a recurring week requires a 45-minute agency meeting, 30 minutes of preparation, 60 minutes of consolidated approvals and 45 minutes of internal coordination. The client commitment is 180 minutes, or three hours. If an internal designer also spends four hours on production, the engagement uses seven hours of internal capacity across those roles.
The three management hours and four production hours are not interchangeable. Check whether the people with the right skills can supply them. A founder's available hour cannot necessarily replace an hour of specialist implementation.
Investigate work that should not keep recurring.
Track avoidable rework separately from normal participation. Examples include correcting repeated factual mistakes, recovering lost decisions or chasing deliverables whose dates were already agreed.
Identify the cause before assigning blame. If the client sends contradictory feedback, a replacement account manager may face the same problem. If the agency does not maintain the plan, more client check-ins may only conceal that failure.
Tim's writing on client context argues that agencies need to preserve what they learn across handoffs. The client can reasonably expect the team to maintain a usable record instead of repeatedly rebuilding the same understanding.
Delegate without removing necessary judgment.
You can ask an agency or coordinator to organize work, maintain the schedule and prepare decisions. The business still needs someone who can approve material tradeoffs.
Give a delegated contact enough authority to resolve ordinary questions. If every answer must go back to the founder, the founder remains the effective manager regardless of the organizational chart.
For several suppliers, use the multiple-agency management guide to consolidate the decisions that require your attention.
Use this capacity worksheet.
Estimate each role's commitment and compare it with the person's real availability.
- [Role] must perform [task] to support the agreed scope.
- The task occurs [frequency] and takes approximately [time], based on [experience or planning assumption].
- Preparation and follow-up require an additional [time].
- [Person] has authority to make [decisions] and must escalate [other decisions].
- During setup or launch, we expect additional work for [tasks and period].
- We currently spend avoidable time on [repeated issue], which [owner] will investigate.
- We will compare planned and actual effort on [date].
- If capacity is insufficient, we will change [scope, staffing, timing or delegation].
Discuss the estimate with the agency before treating it as a commitment. If the arrangement consistently demands more supervision than agreed, use the underperformance process to identify a specific correction.