You don’t have a growth problem. You have a letting go problem.

Melissa Morris is the founder of Agency Authority, a project management and operations consultancy that helps small business owners scale without burning out. With over a decade of experience, she’s helped countless women step out of client work, build high-performing teams, and finally grow their profits without sacrificing their sanity.

In this episode, we unpack one of the most frustrating plateaus for women business owners: doing everything right… and still feeling stuck in the day-to-day.

What you will learn from this episode:

  • Why holding on “just a little longer” is actually what’s keeping your business stuck.
  • How poor hiring and “tool hopping” quietly destroy your momentum.
  • The one simple data point that will instantly show you where your business is leaking money.

“You’re not micromanaging because you want to — you’re doing it because there’s no clarity.”

– Melissa Morris

Topics Covered:

02:04 – Why you can’t let go (and it’s killing your business growth)

04:38 –  The delegation mistake that keeps you stuck in the day-to-day

10:08 – This one fix could instantly increase your profit margins

14:28 – Where your time (and money) is secretly disappearing

16:37 – The simple habit that reveals exactly how to scale faster

Key Takeaways:

“They are not equipped to fully let go of certain tasks that they actually need to let go of in order to grow and scale their business.” – Melissa Morris 

“…just because we’re creating something that feels more standardized does not mean it’s diluting value, quality, or transformation.” – Melissa Morris 

“Time tracking… will inform your pricing, it will inform your staffing, it will inform your capacity, and that is where the true profit comes from.” – Melissa Morris 

“Scope creep is one of the fastest ways to destroy your profit margins.”  – Melissa Morris

Ways to Connect with Melissa Morris:

Ways to Connect with Sarah E. Brown:

 

Full Episode Transcript:

(AI helped us put this together, so if you see any weird grammar or missed words—just know we nailed it during the actual chat.)

Melissa Morris

As you are growing a business and you are really trying to lift yourself out of the client work, really get your team taking ownership, some of the common mistakes and challenges I see are they are not equipped to fully let go of certain tasks that they actually need to let go of.

Sarah E. Brown

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women, where we talk about challenges senior female leaders face in being happy and successful at work. I’m your host, Dr. Sarah E. Brown. 

My guest today is Melissa Morris. She is the founder of Agency Authority. a project management and operations consultancy for small businesses. She’s done this for 10 years, and her experience helps business owners maximize their team, increase their productivity, and grow their profits.

She is firmly committed to breaking the long hours and bad pay stigma that plagues small businesses. Her team helps owners and their team members do the work they love without sacrificing client satisfaction, the bottom line, or their sanity. 

Welcome, Melissa. 

Melissa Morris

Hi, thank you so much for having me. 

Sarah E. Brown

So, tell me  just as a way to get started, let’s suppose that since I speak mostly to women in the business world, a woman who is a small business owner, what is the most common mistake she makes before she starts working with you?

Melissa Morris

That’s a great question. 

And I actually also usually work with women. So I love that about your podcast. 

So I did want to put that out there also. 

One of the mistakes they’re making is as you are growing a business and you are really trying to lift yourself out of the client work. Really get your team taking ownership. Some of the common mistakes and challenges I see are they are not equipped to fully let go of certain tasks that they actually need to let go of in order to grow and scale their business. 

And what that often looks like quite practically is they are making poor hires. Sometimes the person that they’re hiring isn’t a good fit. 

So they have found that they’re struggling with their team, a lot of hiring missteps. 

They bring someone on, they have to let them go. They bring someone on and keep moving them into different positions within their business until they fully settle in. 

And then another thing they might be doing is they start tool hopping. 

So what I mean by that are they’re looking for tools and solutions to help with delegation and help getting the support they need so they can truly focus on growing their business. 

And they find themselves switching from finding, I’m gonna try and use ClickUp to make my business run faster. I’m gonna try and use Asana to run. Maybe I’ll try this thing called Teamwork. 

And then this just creates more confusion and then we start getting a lot of redundancies. both in the team and in the tech stack that they’re trying to use.

Sarah E. Brown

OK, I can resonate with all of those things. Do you think this is unique to women?

Melissa Morris

I have seen men do it as well. I would say where I see men do it differently is in team. I think sometimes women are more likely to hold on to a team member and really work to find a good role for them or really try and make it fit because they know the individual is a kind person. They like that person. 

That person wants to do a good job. That person is showing up. And so they want to lean into those skills, which are very valuable. Like those soft skills are very valuable and an important part, I think, of most roles. 

But when it’s just not in alignment with the skill required for the tasks that they’re being asked for, I think I have seen women tend to let that more linger a lot longer. than men do.

Sarah E. Brown

Okay, so there is a slight tendency for women to hold on to employees that they should let go sooner. 

Do you see women, these are generalizations, but I’m just trying to establish the context, do you think women in general have a harder time delegating than men do?

Melissa Morris

That’s a good question, and I actually was just doing a LinkedIn Live with someone. She does a lot of mindset work, and we were talking about the conversation about how there’s two pieces of that question, right? 

Like, first, the comfort of feeling okay with letting somebody take over a task. And so sometimes we may self-label ourselves as a control freak and, you know, wanting to hold on to it. 

And also, though, what I’ve seen, too, is a tendency to want to hold that responsibility for their team member, to not put too much on them. They don’t want to ask too much of them. They don’t want to put too much of a burden on them. 

So I think when we’re looking at it from those couple of ways, I think, yes, it can be harder for them to delegate.

Sarah E. Brown

Okay. Do you find more women micromanage than men do?

Melissa Morris

Actually, I would say no. I wouldn’t call it micromanaging. I would call it more a desire, again, to not want to stress out or overwhelm their team so they keep injecting themselves where they should not be injecting themselves. 

And what happens is they end up micromanaging even though they don’t want to because they have not set clear roles, clear boundaries, and clear expectations. 

With again, I don’t want to hear an agency and business owner tell me, I don’t want to tell my team they have to check Asana once a day and they need to let XYZ know. I want to just let them, right? I don’t want to put too much pressure on them. 

Where I feel like the more men I’ve worked with, they are telling their team, you’re going to check Asana.. You’re going to do it at this time. And so they actually can step out and let go more because those boundaries are really clear.

Sarah E. Brown

Okay. 

So, of course, the incentive for getting the right people in place sooner and delegating to them and getting out of the day-to-day operations is that it enables you to grow fast. 

Melissa Morris

Yes, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. 

Sarah E. Brown

Okay, so I’m curious when someone comes to you and they’ve got one or more of these problems that is causing them to get stuck in the day-to-day operations, how do you work with them? What do you do to get them unstuck and out of the day-to-day grind?

Melissa Morris

So I have a top framework I’ve developed over the last few years, and it’s top T-O-P-P- P. 

And I work with business owners through this framework. And so we’re looking at their teams, we’re looking at their offers, we’re looking at their processes. their pipeline ultimately leading to profits. So there are certain benchmarks, if you will, that I know that if we can hit those and we can get these checkpoints in the framework met, ultimately it’s going to lead to an increase in profits. 

And where I start that is actually taking a look at the business owner’s offers. 

So that’s the O in the TOPPP framework. Because if you don’t have a handle on your offers, you are constantly making them up as you go. They change client to client. It makes it very difficult for the team to truly step in and execute that. And then it makes it hard to automate, to streamline and find other opportunities to create standardization. 

Sarah E. Brown

Right. Okay. Got it. Do you need to have a different mindset to go through your TOPPP process? 

Advertisement

Hi, this is Sarah Brown again, the host of the KTS Success Factor podcast for women. I hope you are enjoying this episode and gaining some tips and inspiration on how you can be happier, more successful, and experience less stress at work. 

If you would like to learn more about how you can take control of your career and do it your way, visit sarahebrown.com. There you will be able to download a free chapter from my book, Let Your Personality Be Your Career Guide. It contains information and exercises on how you can identify your unique interests, strengths, and needs, and translate that into career goals that are just right for you. 

Now back to this informative episode.

Melissa Morris

Mindset is a part of it. 

And I will say it can be a little bit difficult at first because you do need to look at things in a different way. 

And I feel the rub often comes against the offers and creating what we call a productized  service offering is something that feels more templated versus very custom. And this is where a lot of my business owners go, but wait, my clients want high value and they want custom and they want this really great experience. 

And I challenge them and tell them that isn’t a really great and transformative experience when that is delivered with clarity and ease and efficiency versus chaos and upheaval and a moving target. And so once we can work together and make that shift, that just because we’re creating something that feels more standardized does not mean it’s diluting value, quality, or transformation.

Sarah E. Brown

Okay. And when you got, I understand the importance of the standardized offerings, what correlation have you seen with the lack of that and profitability?

Melissa Morris

It’s tremendous, actually. It can be very tremendous. 

And there’s a couple of reasons for that. One of the reasons is what we call scope creep. And that’s where the business is doing work they’re not getting paid to do. 

And again, because it all feels fuzzy and things are living in the business owner’s head, It’s easy for the team. And a lot of people want to blame the client. Well, the client keeps asking for things that are out of scope. It’s also your team’s fault too, for not holding the boundary or having clarity on what is offered to them. 

So that’s one place it will really, really start to attack your profit margins. The second place is in a lot of additional administrative time, project management time. 

Because there is a lack of clarity, there is often extra meetings, extra Slack conversations, extra emails from your client, and this just starts to erode your profit margins.

Sarah E. Brown

So if you look at the, I’m thinking about the TOPPP framework and you’ve got the offer and then you’ve got your processes. And if you look at what has the most impact on profitability, do you find it’s the offer or the process or Is it equal?

Melissa Morris

Well, I think they’re peanut butter and jelly. They just have to go together, right? I think they’re so, you really can’t have one without the other. You really need both synced up. And so that’s why we look at both of those. 

And that’s why those are part of the framework is because they’re just so intermingled. 

I don’t think you can separate them out and just lean on one to create success.

Sarah E. Brown

Okay, and as you’re going through this standardization process with a client, have you found that their clients push back at all on this?

Melissa Morris

Actually, not usually. 

And here’s what is typically happening. As the business is growing, they’re moving through multi-six figures, they’re reaching and stretching and trying to get to that million dollar mark. 

They themselves are starting to understand that these type of clients maybe I used to work with are no longer a fit and I need to phase them out. These are the new clients that I’m working towards. 

And then I’ve got this middle of the pack group of clients also. And we put together a very careful plan. I’m never a big fan of coming in and blowing up anybody’s business. We put together a careful plan where it can look like stair-stepping these businesses into the correct program or offer. 

Maybe we’re just going to do pieces of it and make referrals and recommendations for them to have somebody else do another piece of it. But just the nature of it is usually that middle of the pack. They’re pretty close or moving in the right direction of what the agency owner wants anyway. 

So I can find we can often stair step and move them in the right direction. And then the group of clients that they had that we know would push back. 

The business owner is usually ready to release anyway because there’s other things that aren’t feeling good about the type of work they’re doing for those clients.

Sarah E. Brown

Mm-hmm. And what do you find is the impact of this work on the business owner’s employees? Like, what’s the impact on retention?

Melissa Morris

We just had a team meeting for a business owner we’re working on right now. We have spent the last few months working on standardizing their offers and getting things streamlined in ClickUp. 

And she shared with me, they were at a retreat and they were all supposed to put on the whiteboard what were the big ones for 2025. Every single one of them wrote down,

ClickUp is easier to navigate. I can actually find things in Google Drive. I’m more efficient. 

This feels better. Every one of them came up and had nothing but positive things to say about how this experience was improving their ability to work and just making it a lot easier for them.

Sarah E. Brown

OK, so we’ve been talking, we’ve been talking about how female business owners can think about getting out of the day to day so that they can actually focus on growing their business. 

And we talked about the fact that they got to let go of employees faster. They got to get comfortable with delegating and get out of the way. They got to standardize their offerings and they got to standardize and streamline their processes. 

So that’s four major things that they’ve got to do. Is there anything else that she needs to do to really get out of the day-to-day?

Melissa Morris

Yeah, this is one that’s a very practical tip. I like to share it. And it’s also one that makes most business owners go, oh, and want to push back the most on. 

And that’s time tracking. 

And the reason I always recommend this very practical tactic is because it will inform your pricing, it will inform your staffing, it will inform your capacity, and that is where the true profit comes from. 

So many business owners out there are doing best-guess pricing. This is what I think they’ll pay. It was probably kind of based on what they’ve seen in the market. It’s based on some feedback from their clients. 

But at the end of the day, they’re truly not sure how long it takes to deliver on the program and how much they need to charge for it. And you can get really clear on that through solid time tracking. 

It will additionally start to shine a light on training gaps. Maybe team member one is doing something much faster than team member two. This isn’t an opportunity to fuss at team member two, but it’s an opportunity to say, where’s the discrepancy here and why can someone do it a lot faster? 

What training do we need to create or process will support this other team member to moving as quickly?

Sarah E. Brown

I insist on my clients using time tracking just to get clear about where they’re losing time. 

Because the number one thing that clients say to me when they come to me and they’re not clear about where they want to go is that they don’t have time to think about where they want to go. 

The other thing I do is say, well, let’s see where you’re spending time now. 

So I’m with you on that. I do it myself. 

Melissa Morris

I do, too.

Sarah E. Brown

I do it periodically myself. 

Melissa Morris

I do, too.

Sarah E. Brown

Just, I mean, I don’t do it every day, all day. But I will routinely just do it for a couple days just to see where am I losing time, you know?

Melissa Morris

Yeah. 

And particularly if I am feeling in a moment where I get to the end of the week and I’m wondering, where did the week go? Why is time passing me by? That’s when I know I need to double down on time tracking.

Sarah E. Brown

So what should I have asked you that I didn’t that will help women think about where they can get out of their own way so that they could actually start growing their businesses?

Melissa Morris

So when we’re talking about the TOPPP framework and we have T-O-P-P-P and we’re talking about standardizing offers and we’re talking about team, this is often the point where my business owners start to get uncomfortable and they say, this feels like a lot. 

What do I focus on first? I’m never going to get there. I don’t have time. 

So what I like, exactly, so I like to mention to them, here are some first steps that we can do that is going to get you moving in the right direction. 

And to be the dog with the bone, time tracking. If you’re not doing that yet, do it. 

And then to second that, if you are doing that, look at the data. I also have business owners who are tracking, their team’s tracking, and nobody’s looking at where that time’s going and where it’s getting added up. 

So make an appointment with yourself to look at the data and get a feel for what’s going on. I think that alone will start to become really eye-opening on what you need to do, a great next step in your business. 

And then I would say step two, is look at your client roster, look at your packages and programs for them, and start to identify which you can use your time tracking data for, which of these are profitable, which of these are truly generating good revenue, because it’s not always the clients you think. I have also worked with business owners who said, Client X, Y, and Z, they’re our anchor client, they pay us the biggest sum of money every month, they get what they want. 

And then when we start actually looking at the time data, the drain on the team, what’s coming in, it can be very, very eye-opening. 

So get comfortable with your data, and that will start to inform the next best step.

Sarah E. Brown

Very, very cool. 

So Melissa, where do my listeners find you?

Melissa Morris

Yeah, if you want to head over to youragencyauthority.com, you can learn more about me there. I also love to connect with other amazing women on LinkedIn. 

So even if you just want to connect with me, please find me there at Melissa V. Morris. Feel free to shoot me a DM. Let me know that you heard me here and I’d love to hear more about who you are in your business. 

Sarah E. Brown

Great. So, Melissa, thank you so much. 

Thanks for listening to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women. If you like what you are hearing, please go to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave a review. 

And if you would like more information on how we can help women in your organization to thrive, then go to www.sarahebrown.com. You can sign up for our newsletter, read show notes and learn more about our podcast guests, read my blog, browse through the books, or contact us for a chat. 

Goodbye for now.

Sarah E. Brown
Sarah E. Brown