When you think of an office, you’re probably picturing something like this:
Or if you’re feeling fancy (and worth billions of dollars) like Google is, so you’re thinking something like this:
These days you can even think of an office as a rented, shared space like WeWork:
Thanks to 2021, more offices than ever before are looking like this, home offices that we’ve set up in the quietest corner of our homes:
Although let’s be realistic…how many of your home offices actually look like this:
Yep, I’m raising my hand too.
When you think about work in 2021 and beyond—we’re no longer just thinking of this:
We’re thinking about a hybrid or totally remote model:
And that changes how we build our agencies.
Our offerings and products can stay the same—but the way our agency works internally…can completely shift.
There are 3 organized models that you get to choose to run your agency from nowadays:
#1: Gig Model
Short-term tasks that can be managed by one, or at most, a handful of people. With the Gig Model, you’re the opposite of a stage 5 clinger. Your business runs project-to-project and you’re focused on excelling at each of those projects—and then moving on.
There’s no need for water stations or happy hours because your team is distributed. You’re entirely remote and all of your workers are freelancers. Chances are you’re the only person on your payroll.
This model works great for startups that can’t afford full-time employees yet and are still getting themselves off the ground.
#2: Corporate Model
Hire a team to work on long-term open-ended jobs that can last for years. This is what you picture when you think of an office—lots of computers and people. We’re thinking of water station conversations and in-person team happy hours (remember those?!).
This is how DigitalMarketer ran pre-March of 2020. We had some freelancers, but the majority of our workforce was in-person, full-time employees. And it worked!
This model used to be an inevitable transition once your business required some full-time staff. It usually starts by bringing on some sort of operations or marketer—and quickly turns into full-time HR people, office managers, and interns.
But there’s a model in-between that most of us have missed—and it wasn’t our fault. We missed it because pre-March of 2020…we just weren’t thinking this way.
We were all thinking home offices and gig workers → rented office space and full-time employees. That was success in terms of an agency. Especially if you could afford the *good* coffee and the fancy snacks for your team.
Having to figure out how to run our businesses entirely remotely for months and in some cases over a year has taught us that…
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