#71: How to Know If Your Team Can Actually Scale with You
There’s a moment every agency owner hits, usually somewhere between $500k and $3M ARR, where growth starts to feel harder, not easier. You’re signing clients, hiring people, and staying busy, yet profitability stalls, delivery feels chaotic, and your calendar is packed with problems you thought you’d already solved.
This isn’t a marketing issue. It’s not a lead gen problem or a pricing tweak.
It’s a clarity problem.
More specifically: a lack of clarity around your team.
In agency scaling, ambiguity is the silent killer. You can’t optimize what isn’t clearly defined. And when roles, responsibilities, expectations, and performance standards are fuzzy, growth doesn’t compound, it snaps back. This is how agencies end up on the classic roller coaster: scaling forward, then backward, then forward again.
The fastest way off that ride is getting ruthless clarity on your people.
Ambiguity Is the Enemy of Agency Scaling
Founders often say they want to “work more in leverage,” but leverage is impossible without clarity. If you don’t know:
Who owns what
Whether someone actually understands their role
If they want to be in that role
Or if they even have the capacity to succeed
Then every decision you make is built on guesswork.
This shows up as:
Re-hiring for roles you already filled
Founders becoming the bottleneck in operations
Client experience breaking as you add accounts
Profitability eroding even as revenue grows
Clarity isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s foundational to agency operations, client acquisition, and long-term profitability.
The Team Audit: A Simple System That Creates Leverage
To solve this, you need a repeatable mechanism that forces clarity. Not vibes. Not intuition. A system.
That system is a monthly team audit.
This isn’t a complex framework or software tool. It’s a simple audit, often just a Google Sheet, that gives you a clear, honest snapshot of every person on your team.
When done consistently, it becomes one of the highest ROI habits an agency founder can build.
Step 1: Role Clarity (What You Hired vs. What’s Actually Happening)
Every team audit starts with grounding in reality.
For each team member, document:
Official title
Original job description (what you hired them to do)
Actual responsibilities (what they’re doing now)
In agency life, roles drift fast. Someone hired to manage social ends up running email. A strategist becomes a project manager. A VA becomes a gatekeeper to your entire operation.
None of this is inherently bad but unacknowledged role drift creates confusion, misaligned expectations, and performance issues that feel “mysterious.”
Clarity here alone often explains why things feel off.
Step 2: Gets It, Wants It, Has Capacity
Borrowed from EOS, this section answers three deceptively simple questions:
Do they get it? Do they truly understand their role and why it matters?
Do they want it? Are they motivated to succeed in this role?
Do they have capacity? Skills, bandwidth, and mental space to perform?
Each is a yes or no.
If you don’t know the answer, that’s already a problem. Lack of clarity here means you need deeper conversations not more SOPs.
Across a full team, patterns emerge fast. You’ll see where performance issues are actually motivation issues, and where they’re capacity issues disguised as attitude problems.
Step 3: Measuring Real Impact on the Business
Not all roles are created equal when it comes to agency growth.
For each person, assess:
Is the Role Client-Facing?
Client facing roles require higher communication standards and stronger alignment with your client experience policies. If these don’t exist, that’s an operational gap, not an employee failure.
Criticalness of the Role (1–10)
Ask: If this role disappeared tomorrow, how broken would the agency be?
1: Nothing changes
5: Some disruption, but manageable
10: Operations grind to a halt
Impact of Success (1–10)
If this person performed at a 10/10, how much leverage would it create?
Roles tied to growth, delivery excellence, and operational leverage should score high. Founders almost always score a 10 which is exactly why offloading the right roles matters so much.
Step 4: Engagement Tells You the Truth
Engagement isn’t about happiness. It’s about energy and ownership.
Rate:
Engagement level (1–10)
How proactive they are
How energized they seem by their work
Then answer the most important question in the entire audit:
Would You Hire This Person Again?
Yes or no. No maybes.
Here’s the rule: If you’re unsure, the answer is no.
If you wouldn’t hire them again, the real question becomes: why are they still on your team and what’s your plan to fix or replace the role?
Avoiding this decision is one of the fastest ways to kill agency profitability.
Step 5: Performance, Communication, and Values Alignment
This section turns subjective frustration into objective feedback.
Score each from 1–10:
Quality of work
Communication clarity
Communication proactivity
Communication responsiveness
Values alignment
Values alignment only works if your values are explicit and operationalized. Otherwise, you’re judging people on unspoken rules.
A simple communication policy defining minimum standards for clarity, responsiveness, and updates removes emotion and creates fairness.
Step 6: Feedback, Growth, and the Issues You’ve Been Ignoring
Most agencies don’t have a feedback problem, they have a cadence problem.
For each team member, document:
Performance review cadence
Date of last review (or “never”)
Feedback frequency (weekly, monthly, rare)
Then list:
Unresolved issues you’ve been tolerating
Key gaps: skills, KPIs, values, or role relevance
Writing these down forces accountability, first for you, then for them.
Turning Clarity Into Actionable Decisions
Once you complete this audit for your entire team, the fog lifts.
You’ll know:
Which roles need to be hired next
Where engagement is breaking down
Which values gaps are cultural threats
Where you’re over-reliant on yourself
This is how you move from reactive firefighting to intentional agency scaling.
Your team becomes leverage, not a liability.
The Real Outcome: Predictable Growth and Profitability
Agencies don’t fail because founders don’t work hard. They fail because founders tolerate ambiguity for too long.
When you create an accountable team with:
Clear roles
Defined expectations
Regular feedback
Aligned values
Everything else improves: operations, client acquisition, delivery quality, and profitability.
There’s no ceiling on how far an agency can scale when clarity becomes the standard.
And it all starts with a simple, honest team audit done consistently.
If you want to go deeper, you can run the full version at agencyuplift.co/mini.
Even if you never book a call, the clarity alone is worth it.
