How The Abrasion Of Hats Led To Hiring A Project Manager

The game of hats

Hats waiting for a head where they can perform their duties

My agency started back in 2012, when it was composed of nobody except me.

Many people started their agency journeys in a similar way; and as I scaled slowly and organically, adding a person here and a person there, I found that I was still wearing a lot of hats.

Perhaps you wear a lot of hats at the moment; I can certainly remember having a client-facing hat, a deep-dive-report hat, a trying-to-debug-sodding-jquery hat, a chasing-some-invoices hat etc.

As things grew, I added other hats like an interviewing-candidates-for-a-new-role hat, a making-sure-people-have-enough-work-to-keep-them-busy hat, and a making-sure-people-don’t-have-too-much-work-they-burn-out hat.

I can’t say which hat was my favourite because, in a way, they were all my favourites and in a similar way, they were all my absolute least favourites. (I suspect people with eight or so children would say the same thing).

The point is: you start out wearing a lot of different hats; and as things scale, the number of hats you rotate through goes up, not down.

Welcome. Have a hat

Men Without Hats "Greatest" album cover: a head and bowler hat inside a no-entry sign

As you grow and scale, and as the number of hats you own increases, you “delegate the hats away,” aka “hiring people”, which usually starts by finding someone to do the things you can’t do.

(In my case, the things I couldn’t do were the technical things. I was fortunate enough to have been able to find, and stay surrounded by, immense technical skill.)

So you get the situation where one person takes on the technical work; maybe someone else does the reporting; another does the data science. The founder then does -- if you’ll permit me to use regex -- .*

Yes, dot-star, or .*

(Regex recap: dot-star means “everything else”.)

So if you think about what dot-star entails in an archetypal agency of four people, it’s probably things like this:

Sales & presales, including sending out Proposals, new business, outreach
Client meetings, strategy sessions and progress reports
Scoping work, and giving it a realistic timeline so nobody in Delivery got burned out
Issuing and chasing invoices
Waking up at 3am in a panic
Motivating the rest of the team
Marketing your agency
Paying bills
etc

Or we might say: someone comes into your business. You give them one of your 100 hats, leaving you with a “mere” 99 hats to wear.

How many hats are you giving out at a time?

Caution here folks, as I am in danger of circling around the actual point that I’ve been threatening to get to for (checks) 804 words.

When my agency grew to a certain number of clients (I forget how many it was, sorry), it became apparent that I needed some dedicated Account Management people.

These people would wear two specific hats:

Client meetings, strategy sessions and progress reports
Scoping work, and giving it a realistic timeline so nobody in Delivery got burned out

The way I’d seen it when I was wearing all the hats was that these two were more or less the same skillset.

I’d talk to the clients about their situation, check in with the team on their workload, come up with a rough timeline to add to a Statement of Work, then when the client gives us the green light to start work, I’d assign tasks to people and block out their time for as long as was needed.

So: hire an Account Manager; and get them doing Account Management (which is the “client meetings, strategy sessions and progress reports” from earlier) and Project Management (which is the other bit.)

Two hats. But because I decided they were kind-of-the-same-thing, I hired one person expecting them to do both things.

Founders Are Idiots

The problem with doing this, of course, is that an Account Manager uses completely different skills to a Project Manager.

You want your Account Managers to share an infectious excitement with clients. They need to be super-positive, be able to improvise quickly on their feet, have a good head for remembering lots of things and (probably) be good at translating fluffy client sentences into detailed technical briefs, and then translating back again.

A good Project Manager, on the other hand, doesn’t need any of those skills. They need (a) amazing administration and number-juggling skills and (b) an ability to say No.

For too long at Data Runs Deep, I used to use the words “client management” and “project management” almost interchangeably.

I literally could not conceive of a person that’s good at one, not being good at another.

How dreadfully unfair this was! And what an idiot I was to have made such an assumption!

Reality is a funny thing isn’t it

I think a lot of frustration in the world comes from when your internal map of how things should be differs from how things actually are. You can see this in the behaviour of young children when they go ballistic because they can only find the wrong kind of yellow Lego brick, or when an unexpected traffic delay causes you to be four minutes late but many times more stressed, or when the prospect you totally clicked with super-well ends up rejecting your services and going with another provider.

The “expectation layer” of one’s perceived outcome and its contact-abrasion to reality is a cause of a lot of problems in life; agency life is no different.

And yet, I would contend that agencies (and businesses of all kinds, really) have a lot of “expectation abrasion” problems, many of which can fester and cause all sorts of bigger problems. Burnout, mass team resignations, client walkouts, quality of work slipping…

The change I made was to let account managers manage clients, and to hire a dedicated project manager.

So we had two dedicated roles. The Account Manager:

Was the dedicated contact person for the client
Ran WIPs, strategy sessions, QBRs
Produced and presented SoWs
Took their clients for lunch etc.
Got closer to more people within the client, and became a trusted strategy advisor
Gave me feedback about how clients see the world so I didn’t feel too cut off from reality

Meanwhile the Project Manager:

Forecasts workload and availability
Gives realistic timelines for work commencement and completion
Assigns work to people
Juggles annual leave, absence cover, etc.
Identifies project over-run or under-budget
Produces revenue reports
Forecasts activity for the next X months, helping input on hiring decisions

The Account Manager chats to clients. The Project Manager keeps the trains running on time. WTF was I thinking, assuming that someone good at the former would automagically be good at the latter?

To make it a better idea: a Project Manager doesn’t have to be one of your most expensive hires; skills are in demand, but they’re readily available.

And to make it even better: the cost of a Project Manager can be largely amortised in your business by adding a 20% Project Management line item to your statements of work.

The clear delineation of responsibilities makes for an acquirable business. The ability to report accurately on performance makes for an acquirable business. Being able to forecast one-ish quarters ahead makes for an acquirable business.

And all the while: hiring a Project Manager makes everyone else on the team breathe easy, makes your clients trust your estimates more… there are few genuine Win-Wins in life, but I consider this to be one of them.

A man in a suit with his head buried in the sand

No, surely this isn’t happening in your agency. Is it?

Before I hired a dedicated Project Manager, the first time we had a problem with one of the Account Managers, I (naturally) blamed the client.

The second time there was a problem, I blamed the individual Account Manager for dropping the ball.

The third time it happened, I blamed myself. I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d done wrong, or what I should have done differently, but I knew it was a shortcoming of my own.

That’s probably when I turned the searchlight inward, and figured that “expectation abrasion” was the problem, punished myself by forcing myself to wear a shirt made of thorns, and hired a Project Manager.

It’s only today, with hindsight, that I can identify the true problem: the structure of the business.

This is something I’m thinking a lot about lately: structural problems in agencies rarely manifest as such. It’s an idea I want to bash about a bit more before inevitably committing text to screen and writing something about it.

But until I do, here are three things to look at:

Where in your business (be it Account Management or elsewhere) is your founder brain expecting people to be able to wear more hats than is fair?
Which account managers are struggling, and which are thriving? Why?
Where are you blaming the performance of an individual when you should be blaming the structure they work in?

If the third one keeps you up at night, my apologies.

But hey, enough of my yakkin’. I’ll catch you next time!

Thanks for reading. No AI was used in the creation of the words you just read.

I do this for a living. I work with agencies and consultancies around the world, providing the support I wish I’d had throughout my journey of starting, scaling, and selling an agency.

If you think you could benefit from what I know how to do, I welcome conversation: drop me a line.

On this site, you’ll also find information about the Analytics Consultants Circle, a free monthly peer-group call that I moderate, where solo and small-team consultants share battle stories from the field, and we talk about the challenges you face when you grow and scale a business.

The last movie I watched: The Bodyguard (1992).