When was the last time you took a break from your agency? Do you stress out just thinking about taking time off? Do you feel like everything will fall apart with you? This is usually the case when agency owners need to create SOPs and delegate more to their team. Getting serious about SOP documentation levels up your agency, sets up the team for success, and increases its overall value. It starts with an important mental shift and understanding your agency will actually benefit from you taking a step back. Today’s guest is a process and systems expert who focuses on establishing all the necessary systems and procedures to make sure you have something to lean on. If you're doing all the agency work, you’re rarely able to put 100% into anything. This is why she focuses on teaching how to leverage rest and create simple systems to increase your agency's longevity. Alyson Caffrey is a systems and process creation expert and the founder of Operations Agency. She helps founders get their agencies out of their brains and centralized to help them be more impactful. She’s also the author of The Sabbatical Method: How to Leverage Rest and Grow Your Business, a guide to help return business owners back to their families. With it, founders learn that taking a break can increase your business’s longevity, uncover some inefficiencies, and professionalize operations. In this interview, we’ll discuss: Taking a step back increases your agency's value. Simplifying SOP creation to have an immediate impact. 3 keys to successful digital agency processes Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM   Why Agency Founders Need to Be Intentional with Their Time  Like many service-based business owners, Alyson hadn’t planned to start an agency. She was working as an Operations Manager in Colorado when her husband got a career-defining opportunity that meant moving cities. Not long after that, she was approached by several former clients to continue providing some services, and she was suddenly an accidental agency owner providing SOPs and operations support. With no children and her husband occupied in the military, Alyson had a ton of time to dedicate to her business. This meant she was able to serve clients at a really deep level in the beginning. However, when she became a mom she was confronted with the need to take time off. As the operations expert, Alyson knows she should've had her processes documented, but like the cobbler's children with no shoes, she had not prioritized it. She now attributes the birth of her son to finally being more intentional about the time she spends working in her business and making sure she can spend time away from it, too. Taking a Step Back Helps Increase Your Agency’s Value Agency owners work very hard to build a business with the idea that at some point, they'll have freedom and the ability to take breaks. However, once the agency starts growing it never seems to be the right time to take time off. Many agency owners are they're forced to decide between their agency and their personal life. That means missing important events and strained relationships. Alyson says for her it was a high-stakes moment when she realized there was a problem. It all starts with a mental shift and understanding you’re selling a transformation, not your time. Many agency owners think they’re the only ones that can lead their business to success. However, once you remove yourself from the equation of day-to-day operations, the agency's value instantly drives up. When you can step away from the agency to recharge, or even just to work on the business and not in it, that single benefit is a game changer. Three Steps You Can Take to Start Empowering Your Team Where can you start to systematically take action to make the necessary changes? Alyson started by changing how she performs inside her business. Screen recording. Instead of just going in and doing the work, Alyson started to screen-record while she did it. Becom