I could knock on your door tomorrow and hand you the most brilliant social media strategy in the world.
But it probably wouldn’t make a difference.
Not if your team starts every week under a fresh avalanche of low-leverage tasks.
Purpose-driven small marketing teams are the most vulnerable to this kind of onslaught. I’m always consulting my clients on their marketing operations for this very reason! More often than not, everyone all the way up to the leader is busy managing work less valuable than their capabilities.
And that leads to:
Mediocrity becoming the norm. When the question is “Who can do this?” instead of, “What is the value of doing this well, and what expertise is needed?” — the work gets done, but the opportunity cost is massive.
Stalled talent development. When your best players are stuck doing 10 things they’re just “okay” at, they never get to go deep on the 1-2 things they could really master. This is classic “competence tax,” and it creeps in slowly.
Directors and VPs rewriting posts at 4:45pm. When output is chronically mediocre, the leader gets stuck doing $50-100 work on top of everything else. Then they’re too busy to mentor their team, build systems, or develop strategy.
If you’re that marketing leader, I don’t blame you. This culture of busywork is usually inherited — at most orgs, it’s a product of longstanding top-down-ism. And the longer it’s gone on, the harder it is to change. (Ask me how I know!)
But after leading small teams on both the agency and corporate side, and then launching my own micro-agency 8 years ago, I had an epiphany: the marketing and comms teams that struggled with this the most were operating the least like agencies.
And a funny thing happens when you start thinking like an agency owner: you shift how your entire organization sees and values your contributions.
So in today’s newsletter, you’re getting the framework I’ve used to help teams like yours grow their impact.
Create a culture where people can achieve great things
You know your team’s work has the power to be of the highest leverage for your org.
Your posts could be cited in board meetings and brought up by major donors or partners. Your education could be shaping conversations and building brand credibility. Your strategic oversight could be driving business growth!
But right now, every other department treats marketing like a service desk.
That’s in part because marketing ROI can be hard to see. Sales has pipeline, ops has efficiency metrics; their tasks appear more urgent. Meanwhile, you’re playing the long game — building a brand, fostering community.
So they dump casual asks on your team daily:
Design a one-pager for sales. Update a job description on the website. Polish these slides before the meeting — all without consideration for your capacity or timelines.
Sure, AI can now speed up a lot of those tasks, but that often just means you’ll be gifted with more tasks to oversee with the same amount of bandwidth.
And secretly, all of that activity can be as satisfying as it is annoying.
Checking 37 microtasks off your to-do list provides a steady stream of dopamine. High-leverage work, on the other hand, involves risk of rejection and failure.
So your objective here is two-fold:
Help your team break habits of overfunctioning so they can focus on what truly matters (and do their best work)
Make high-leverage work more visible so leadership understands what your team is actually capable of (and stops asking for menial labor)
Thinking like an agency leader can help you achieve both.
Prioritizing your team’s time according to value, assets, and impact will transform your culture and your output.
You and your team will finally be able to stop working late. Budget conversations will shift from “We need to cut expenses — does your team really need this software?” to “Here’s the ROI of our last campaign.”
And you’ll finally have bandwidth for work that moves your mission forward.
It’s time to run your team like an agency
Step 1: Know what every task is worth
Low-leverage work is linear and transactional: you do it once, you get one result. High-leverage work is exponential: you build it once, it keeps generating impact.
The Leverage Ladder (from James Schramko and Khe Hy) can help you rank tasks by long-term value:
$10 tasks are mind-numbing admin. Deleting spam DMs. Fixing broken links. Resizing images for different platforms.
$50 tasks are skilled but still manual. Responding to customer FAQs on social. Scheduling content. Updating event pages.
$100 tasks are smart execution. Drafting the monthly newsletter. Writing a press release. Managing paid social campaigns.
$1,000 tasks are systems that scale your impact. Building an automated email journey. Creating a Brand Voice Guide. Setting up attribution.
$10,000 tasks are big swings. Securing a multi-year corporate partnership. Developing a new brand strategy and positioning framework. Streamlining your tech stack to claw back hundreds of hours annually.
Step 2: Know what everyone’s time is worth (and where it’s going)
Have your team track their time for a week or two. And divide everyone’s salary by 2,080 to find their “hourly rate.” If your comms director costs $50/hour, spending two hours copying donor names between spreadsheets burns $100 on work an intern (or honestly, AI or an automation) could do.
Step 3: Match skills with responsibilities
Your coordinator might be great at community management but weak on copywriting — yet they’re writing all the posts. Your comms director has strategic chops but spends half their time on production tasks.
→ Ask: What skill mismatches are costing us quality? Who needs training? Who needs responsibilities shifted to play to their strengths?
Step 3: Train your team to prioritize deliverables
When you start looking for tangible outputs of your effort, you start finding them everywhere. Even an email answering a strategic question can be documented and shared. Strategy memos, process docs, content frameworks, rave reviews, training guides. “Merchandising” this work for internal use raises its perceived value.
Step 4: Build guardrails to protect high-leverage work
Without an intake process, every request feels urgent. Set up a request form and make sure the entire org knows what to expect. Create triage scripts for common scenarios, including playbooks to help other departments handle low-value tasks themselves.
(The Small Team’s Guide to Transforming Social Media goes into this in more detail, read it here free if you haven’t yet.)
Step 5: Inject expertise to fill gaps and build leverage
For example: a paid media consultant builds your campaign structure so your social media manager can run it. A freelance designer creates Canva brand templates your team uses repeatedly. A brand strategist develops your messaging framework and turns it into an actionable guide.
→ These projects produce deliverables — templates, guides, systems — that help upskill your team or free them from $10 work so they can focus on $100+ work.
You can lead culture change across your entire org
Marketing touches every corner of your org. It’s the glue!
When you tighten up your processes and build systems that scale, people notice. Other departments start asking how you’re doing it. Leadership stops seeing you as order-takers, and starts seeing you as high-value contributors.
Your team becomes the model of operational excellence. And you, the strategic operator who made it happen.
So tell me, what high-leverage work have you been dreaming of having the time to do? I’d love to hear what’s on your wishlist.
Until then,
P.S. Imagine easily approving your team’s posts because they’ve got custom templates and frameworks ready to go, with clear examples and standards, and you didn’t have to spend a month creating that documentation in your pockets of spare time.
That’s what you get in my Instagram Makeover — a quick injection of leverage to raise the bar on your team’s work and free you up to focus on bigger things.
Review the details and sign up here. And if you’re more interested in a LinkedIn Makeover, hit reply to this email.
