The Handbook: The Operations Podcast

New tools and processes can transform your workflow. Especially when they’re well communicated, properly tested and correctly implemented. Successful change management motivates your team to adopt new practices. And makes them productive and happier - now and into the future.

In this episode, we’re joined by Claire Quansah, an ops expert in the agency space with nearly two decades of experience. Claire shares the steps to consider when implementing change within your agency. She gives advice on how to promote continuous improvement and set your team up for success.

Her 6 steps for successful change management include:

1. Communication
2. Planning & Preparation
3. Implementation
4. Testing Workflows
5. Documentation, Training & Support 
6. Continual Improvement 

This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to implement a new platform or process change within their agency.

Follow Claire on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-quansah/

Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/

Stay up to date with regular ops insights. Subscribe to The Handbook: The Operations Newsletter.

This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system.

Easy access to reports and dashboards is a game changer. But if your data is siloed in different systems, replicating data can be a daunting task, let alone accurate reporting. And with manual data entry, there’s the risk of human error. 

Imagine if you could consolidate tools to improve automation - gaining visibility, accuracy, and efficiency within your team. 

In this episode we’ll hear from Tyler Caskey, a chartered accountant and founder of TheBeanCounters. You’ll learn what to look for in a new tool to centralize more of the workflow and how to introduce this change to the business. 

Tyler will share: 

• The challenges agencies face with disjointed systems
• The importance of user-friendly and well-integrated technology
• Examples of successful consolidation

Link to SPI Research's Service Maturity Levels: https://spiresearch.com/psmaturitymodel/service-maturity-levels.html

Link to the May 2024 Agency Hackers State of the Nation webinar where Harv presented on business maturity (starts at 10 minute mark): https://bit.ly/4dQ4kvT

Follow Tyler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylercaskey/

Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/

Stay up to date with regular ops insights. Subscribe to The Handbook: The Operations Newsletter.

This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system.

Forget about revenue for a moment. Consider how much more profitable your agency would be if you optimized your team’s time and improved utilization. If you could reduce hiring costs by keeping staff for longer. If you understood the leaky buckets in your outgoings and reduced losses like over-servicing through improved best practice. 

Manish Kapur, who has over 25 years of experience in creative ops, explains how he streamlines agency operations and boost profit within agencies of all sizes. 

You’ll learn how to improve these 4 pillars within your agency:

1. Leadership - develop your leaders and improve staff retention.
2. People - create consistency in performance reviews and offer clear career progression.
3. Financial Management - plan for the future using forecasts and leading indicators.
4. Process - be agile and get your team following best practices.

Follow Manish on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manishkapur/

Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/

Stay up to date with regular ops insights. Subscribe to The Handbook: The Agency Operations Newsletter.

This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system.

Our new podcast The Handbook: The Agency Operations Podcast endeavours to create more community for agency operations people – a place where we can hear from our peers and other experts on best practice, experiments, successes and sometimes failures – and also a place to celebrate our journeys into operations. 

Before we kick off with the interview series, Harv Nagra, our host, and former agency operations leader talk about his own journey into operations. 

Agency ops can be lonely – you might be the only person in your agency that works in operations, and you might end up having to figure things out on your own – rather than having a team of people to support you and bounce ideas off of.

That’s where our new podcast, The Handbook: The Agency Operations podcast comes in. 

We’ll be talking to fellow experts and operations leaders about agency life – discussing the challenges keeping us up at night, as well as strategies that help make things run a little bit smoother.

Each episode, we'll have a guest speaker who brings a fresh perspective and gives us plenty of food for thought.