Wed, 29 December 2021
Are your wondering how to get bigger clients and grow into a multi-million dollar agency? Mary Ann Pruitt has a background working in media and was unsure about starting her own agency. Now at her agency, Mosaic Media, she works hand-in-hand with other agency owners, business owners, marketing departments, and media buyers to provide a multi-pronged strategy supporting clients' marketing goals. On the show, Mary Ann talks about the early days of having a full-service integrated media agency and how things changed once she took the step to niche down. She also shares why agency owners should trust their team and stay in their lane to focus on business development and growth. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesGusto: Today's episode is sponsored by Gusto, an all-in-one people platform for payroll, benefits, HR where you can unify your data. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Head over to gusto.com/agency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Growing To a Multimillion-Dollar Agency By Focusing on What You Do Best and Staying on Your LaneJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here and I am excited, I have another amazing woman that owns an amazing agency on today's podcast. And we're going to talk about how she's grown to a multimillion-dollar agency in the past decade, what she's learned, what you can learn and learn it faster, right? So let's go ahead and get into the episode. All right, Mary Ann. Welcome to the show. Mary Ann: [00:00:31] Thanks, Jason. It’s so great to be on. Jason: [00:00:33] Yeah. Excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what you do? Mary Ann: [00:00:37] Yeah. My name is Mary Ann Pruitt and I'm with Mosaic Media. We are a media firm that partners with agencies in the paid media space, uh, anything with traditional, digital, and even in the PR and crisis comms space. So that's what we do. Jason: [00:00:52] Awesome. And so how did you get started? I always like to ask people why they got into this industry. Mary Ann: [00:00:59] My background. I mean, it's so funny. My background was in media, actually. I was in media sales for many years as a top sales agent for some of the largest media firms in the nation. And frankly, I fought going agency side for a long time, just because there was an image that went with that, and a… Jason: [00:01:17] What image is that? Mary Ann: [00:01:20] Yeah, is that you go from that side just because, and you're never going to be actually a successful agency. So, yeah. So I fought that for a while and frankly it, I realized, okay, you've reached your peak. You're still young. You can keep making great money for the rest of your career and stay comfortable, but you'll never be challenged. You'll never feel excitement like the new sale and the next sale, everything. It's just gonna be the same thing over and over and over again. So I took that leap of faith in myself and started an agency. Uh, we started really small. We started, like most agencies, we started full service where we were very broad and we're the full service integrated media agency. Jason: [00:01:58] We don’t want to seclude anybody. Mary Ann: [00:02:00] Yeah. We don't, no, we're going to… We serve everybody. And then we realized, really honestly about six years ago is when we made a huge shift and focusing on what we were good at. It's an amazing thing. Focus really on the one thing you're good at. And we started to see our revenue, frankly, start to double year over year. Jason: [00:02:19] So before you got the focus, where were you at in revenue, head space, and number of people? Mary Ann: [00:02:28] We were at, in a very, very good year we were having a million like year over year. You know, when you first start, it's pretty easy to double your revenue because your first year's revenue is 250, 300. Then you're going out 300 to 600. That's such an easy, easy jump. And then really, truly, probably in 2016, we were hitting just at a million. And now we are projected eight times that. So where was my head space in that? I felt like I was banging my head against the wall constantly. It was this… why do I feel like we can't ever land the big brand? Or why can't we ever do this? Or why, you know, it's that frustration. And in our team, there was five of us? And actually, the wonderful, amazing thing about that, it would, we still have to have those employees with us today. They were with me from the beginning and now they're our senior VP team. And it's amazing to see how they have grown as we've evolved as an agency. Uh, so yeah, so the headspace, the revenue, it was frustrating. It was, uh, you felt like, okay, how do we break through? And then frankly, I had, I called them come to Jesus moments where I was just like, look, what are we going to do? How, how, how am I going to build this agency to what it needs to be? And I frankly locked myself in a room for a couple of days. And what are you good at? What are you the best at? And what's a business model you can build. That's where we went and it was a leap of faith. It was scary to niche down, but we did it. And now we've seen that revenue just multiply every year. Jason: [00:04:05] How long did it start until you… When you committed to that decision, when did you feel that you started getting momentum? Mary Ann: [00:04:13] It really takes a good, well, almost right out of the gate within the first three months we caught one client that was, all right, this is part of our niche. And I was like, all right, this is great. It's going to work. Then I started testing it with other people of how I was using that language and how I was using that elevators speech and all of a sudden things started to happen more and more. I'd go to a conference and I test something and… more and more. And really that first year is where we saw it grow significantly, probably that 12 month period. And I think that's one thing for agency owners is patience is a good thing, and we have to have faith that we know what we're doing. We're planting the seeds. Things are happening. Decisions are not made overnight. And we have to continue to cultivate that. Probably within… so the first year and two years, it's then refining the systems. You're going from being small mom and pop to now, okay, I've got decent sized revenue. How am I growing the team? How are we building our efficiencies and building the processes a whole new level of challenges come. And then when the pandemic hit, actually, we grew even more. Part of that was our inbound and our thought leadership was pretty strong going into the pandemic and people were looking for answers. And frankly, that's where we started to just evolve from there and get more and more out of it. But really I'm a big believer in helping people and when you have that mindset and you're not going in for the pitch all the time, but you're there for the relationship and to help… That makes a big difference. Jason: [00:05:53] Taking care of your employees has never been more important than right now. And while paydays are great, running payroll is a major pain, from calculating taxes, deductions, compliances. None of it is easy. Unless of course you have Gusto. Gusto is simple, online payroll benefits built for small business. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Plus with their help, you can offer benefits like 401ks, health insurance, workers' comp, and a lot more. And because you're a smart agency master class listener, you're going to get three months free once you run your first payroll. Go to gusto.com/agency. That's gusto.com/agency for three free months. I'm so glad that you said that because people have such an angle of going, well, I want to scale. Well, first they don't know why they want to scale, and there's no reason, I guess it's just a brag. I mean, I remember, when I had the first agency, I remember we would brag by how many employees we would have. And then if someone was like, I have 50 employees. Oh, fifty. I have a hundred. And then you're like, what's wrong with me? Or, you know, like when you were at 10 or 20 and, uh… So I'm glad you mentioned that because that's, you gotta have a direction, but I'm glad too, that you started focusing on the brand and doing your own marketing. I think too many people think that they need to hire a sales hunter right off the bat. They don't give them a clear call to action of who to contact, but I'm like if you build the brand and you build a brand that's helpful for a particular market, you can create all this business that a closer can come in and close and it makes it so much easier.
Mary Ann: [00:07:54] That's exactly right. And frankly, a lot of agency owners and we primarily work in the agency space. That is what we do. We help agencies. So we help you build your media team, we help assess your media team. We help be the relieve pressure for a big agencies and their media. But then also helps supplement anything that you can't offer currently and actually become a revenue source for you. That's what we do. So I'm in contact with agency owners every day, and a big thing that I say regularly that they know they need to hear, but probably isn't too popular is business development falls on us as the agency owners. And we can try all day long to go get that magic salesperson or go get somebody to go get the sales for us. We need to be building our own brand and we need to be building our own funnels. And frankly, it's the expertise that we offer. That's our job as the business owner and as the agency owner. Um, frankly, we shouldn't be in the weeds all day long of doing the actual work. We need to be, if you're, as you're scaling and as you're growing. 50% of your day should be going towards business development. That is how you grow. And that is how you focus and get your company back onto a growth path, frankly. So I'm with you on that of you have to be patient and you have to cultivate those seeds. Uh, but also don't look for a magic bullet. Know what you're good at. Niche down to that. And don't be scared to niche down to that and focus. I mean, I live in Anchorage, Alaska. Okay. We're a small. 95% of our work is not in Anchorage, Alaska. We are in all 50 states doing work. How are we doing that? Because I didn't get caught in the market that I live in. I didn't get caught into a small mindset. I got, I let myself and the company then evolve to think bigger than where we lived or where we operated out of. Now I have employees all over the place. I live in Alaska. It's amazing how, honestly, frankly, the last 18 months have taught us all a lot of you don't have to be in a brick and mortar anymore. And we all knew that, but now we're so much more comfortable with it. So there's all these different elements as an agency owner that we have to be honest with ourselves and we have to know what's holding us back. And sometimes it's us. That's the bottleneck. Jason: [00:10:17] Truth be told we're always the bottleneck until, until you realize you're the bottleneck and you get out of your way, you know, like we had, um, a couple of weeks back, we had our agency experience where we had 25 of the best agency owners come out to Colorado. And a lot of us were taught like a lot of the takeaways were, man. We, we have the best like they're multi-million dollar agencies. We've done this over the years and the owner is still crippling their team for making decisions. And they're like the toll booth that everything's flowing through them. And we're like… I literally stole the computer of one of our members so she couldn't be emailing all day and like hid it. I was like, no, like your team will be fine. Like go, go on vacation. And that's a lot of advice I give to people a lot is, hey, go wait for a week or two weeks and come back. Mary Ann: [00:11:15] Yep. And honestly, so if we look at it and we realize and recognize where we're holding things up or what we're not doing on our end, we need to question, why are we doing that? What control am I trying to gain back from my team or from the product? What am I afraid of? What's holding me back? What anchor is holding me back there and what anchor do I need to cut? I often say this and is that anchor serves a purpose. They are things that are supposed to keep us grounded. There are things they're supposed to keep us steady, but anchors also can hold us back. So what is it that I need to work on that I need to cut back because we are the bottlenecks. So before COVID, I had this rule that I'd actually work out of the office one day a week. And what I found was that was the most productive day for my team because I wasn't there and they got so much done and they knew exactly what they were doing. And like, you know, this is a true testament to let them be, let them do their job. They'll come to you when they need things. So when we feel like we need to control, or we feel like we need to be on top of everything, is there a trust factor there? We hired them, we trust them. We know our executive team, so we know that we can trust them in that element. I'm not saying be completely hands-off. That is not what I'm saying in any way. We just need to know where our strengths are and our lane is, and stay in that lane and not get in the way of everybody else doing the work. Jason: [00:12:41] Yeah. And, and when you start getting out of the way, and I always warn people on this… When the agency doesn't need you for the small things that you used to do, it's all pretty hard thing to swallow because you're like, oh, crap business doesn't need me anymore, but I want you to remember it needs you for something else. So you're transitioning from an owner to a true CEO. Then that's when you can scale. That's when you can sell it, if you want, or you can take long vacations. I've had clients that have come to me in the past that never took vacations. And I'm like, that's the number one thing we're going to work on. Like, why the F are you working so hard if you can't enjoy it? Like, this is crazy. Mary Ann: [00:13:32] Well, and I think… We also get caught in our growth mode of where we want to be, right? So we're on that trajectory. We keep going, we keep pushing and, you know, it's the, it's the oxygen mask. We have to take care of ourselves first, we have to put the oxygen mask on first and then put it on the others. So we're building this team in order for us to be able to then transition, like you said, transition into something else. So when, when they no longer need us for the little things it's actually a great moment of we've grown as a company. I'm now a CEO. I'm no longer just a small business owner. Now I'm a CEO working at an executive level, thinking visionary thoughts of where I need to go with the company. What do I need to do next? What new offerings do I need to be researching? How can I then take this to the next level and continue to grow? So it actually opens up so much more opportunity for us as agency owners to have that growth trajectory and mindset. It's a total mindset shift. Jason: [00:14:32] It is, it is. Well, this has all been amazing Mary Ann. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Mary Ann: [00:14:38] You know, I think we always just have to be honest with ourselves of how are we getting in the way for our own good, but for others and our team. And making sure that we are doing everything we possibly can to just grow our team, but nurture our team and take care of ourselves in the process, as well as grow the company and stay into the, and get out of the way mentally, physically get out of the way. It’s fine. And now I've heard about it. Don't worry about it. Jason: [00:15:08] Awesome. What's the agency website people can go and check out? Mary Ann: [00:15:12] You can go to mosaic.agency/contact that comes straight to me. Jason: [00:15:16] Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Mary Ann, for coming on the show. Lots of amazing information for all of us to take in. Hopefully, you guys go start executing it. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe, make sure you comment as well on your biggest takeaway. And if you want to be around amazing agency owners on a consistent basis, and be able to come out to Colorado and do the digital agency experience, go to digitalagencyelite.com and see if you qualify. This is only for experienced agency owners that are really wanting to scale fast, have fun and just, you know, create an amazing agency and amazing life. So go to digitalagencyelite.com and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Grow_a_Multimillion-Dollar_Agency_By_Staying_In_Your_Own_Lane.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 26 December 2021
Want to build an amazing agency culture and brand? After running his own agency, Historic, for eight years and leading teams of creatives, Ted Vaughn took on the task of co-writing the book on all aspects of building your agency's brand and how leadership shapes its culture. Ted is on the show talking about how you can use culture to help further grow your agency. He covers the six parts of marquee culture established in his book, Culture Built My Brand, the biggest gap he’s noticed in company culture, and how to align your principles and values to attract the right people. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesSharpspring: Today's episode is sponsored by Sharpspring, an all-in-one revenue growth platform that provides all of the marketing automation, CRM, & sales features you need to support your entire customer lifecycle. Partner with an affordable marketing automation provider that you can trust. Head over to sharpspring.com/smartagency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Shaping Agency Culture With the Six Layers that Build an Effective Brand{These transcripts have been auto-generated. While largely accurate, they may contain some errors.} Jason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here and I have another amazing episode for you where we're going to talk about culture and how you can get the right people. Who do you need to bring in? How do you evaluate them? All that kind of good stuff, so you can grow your agency faster. And so let's go ahead and get into the episode. Hey, Ted. Welcome to the show. Gotcha with the water. Ted: [00:00:28] You did. That was so fast. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Huge fan, uh, really have been inspired by your work and your network. And, uh, just a real honor to be on the show. Jason: [00:00:40] Awesome. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what your agency actually does. Ted: [00:00:45] So I've spent most of my life leading in non-profit circles, leading teams of creatives. Um, started an agency with my business partner, Mark Miller about eight years ago, called Historic. We thought it would be just a cool idea to serve some of our niche clients. Bootstrapped it, and, uh, you know, eight years later, we're, uh, we're doing over a million dollars in business and have a staff and a brick and mortar. And we've learned a lot in the journey, both about who we are and about what makes us tick. And I think that's why we wrote a book and it's why I'm talking to you today. Jason: [00:01:19] Great. Let's talk about building a culture within your organization. You know, I look at it as everyone's building a culture… Matters of, are you building the culture that you actually want? Ted: [00:01:30] Yeah, I mean we... believe senior leaders are shaping culture as the most significant contribution to their organization. I mean, if you are leading an agency, the how of your leadership matters more than the unique skill that you bring to the table. Unless, it's a boutique lifestyle brand and literally you are an employee of one, but if you want to scale, if you want to grow, the single greatest question you have to wrestle with is the how of my leadership more than the what of my technical skill or talent. Jason: [00:02:05] So give us a little bit more about what's the difference between those. Ted: [00:02:09] Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of times, you know, even for Mark and me, we each have really unique skill and technical ability that offers value that our agency still really needs. But as we've taken on staff and as we've grown and as we've had to empower our staff, the company culture that we shape and that we lead becomes our brand in ways our skill and talent alone could never fully embrace. Our brand, the touchpoints of our brand, our growth, and this will certainly be true if we go beyond, you know, our current, you know, one point, whatever million-dollar mark to 5 million… exponentially becomes the case. Then you go even further and it gets even more important. Your leadership, the decisions that you make, the ways in which you operate become more critical than your technical expertise or unique ability as a designer or as a strategist or as a PR person. Jason: [00:03:06] Now I've had people on to talk about culture from Zappos, who so many people modeled, you know, Tony Shay and all those guys did. So what are ways where agencies listening right now… How can you start shaping the culture in order to scale your agency faster? Ted: [00:03:26] Well, we've the book that we wrote, “Culture Built My Brand”. It was really written on the back of our learning. We have sweat a lot of blood made a ton of mistakes. And I think the idea for us in the book is, is a marquee culture and a marquee culture is like that marquee sign. It's that well-lit banner. That is the forefront. It is the thing that galvanizes and draws attention, attracts great people, keeps great people. So in the book, we talk about a marquee culture, having six layers or six dimensions. And the single most important is the first, which we call principles. What we find often in our, in our own agency it was true and the clients that we serve it's true. And I would assume for many of you listening it's true. We have these values or these ideas that hold us together that become our riverbanks or our guiding ideas. But they're so vague or abstract or unclear they don't actually translate into behavior shaping principles for the people who are a part of our organizations. And I would say probably one of the first places to start the first layer in our book on culture and brand is principles. Taking your values or recreating your values so that they're actionable, applicable culture-shaping principles that really give those who are a part of your team, clear behavioral guidelines, so that they know how to be on-brand, how to operate, how to make decisions in ways that will really further your brand in unique ways and not just have abstract ideas. Jason: [00:05:01] So one of our principles in our culture is really being resourceful. So give us an example of… all right, that's kind of the, the layer here. How do we take it further. Ted: [00:05:14] Yeah. I mean, we often will work with brands that have some version of innovation as their value, right? Maybe it's stated that way, or it's stated with a really sticky phrase. But then when you look at how people behave or you begin to ask questions around decision-making, or you look at how money is spent, you quickly realize that the organization's not structured in a way that actually takes the value of innovation seriously. It's because they haven't actually taken that value and then integrated it and baked it into decision-making in all sorts of different ways, which really is the second layer of our book and culture, which was architecture. We don't believe that HR systems and structures should simply be healthy or unhealthy. They really need to be built in a way that furthers aspects of your brand value. So if you articulate innovation, that should absolutely show up and shape how HR functions and how decision-making and power and governance take place in your organization. Jason: [00:06:16] So like with, you know, our organization being resourceful. Like how would you bake that in even more and kind of take it up a notch? Ted: [00:06:25] Well, I'm assuming that when you say resourceful, you're talking about resourcing others, right? Being a part of something larger than yourself? Jason: [00:06:32] No, I'm talking about being resourceful is like figuring out like, all right. You know, we normally do it this way, but we could do it another way. Or, oh man, I don't feel like we have enough resources, you know, just figuring out a better way to do things more efficiently. Ted: [00:06:51] Yeah. I mean, again, I think what's interesting is even, you know, I, from the outside of hearing that word immediately took it in a different direction. So I think one of the questions that I would have would be when you say resourceful, what are the specific behaviors or ways in which that value translates to how your people lead, behave, are asked to budget how they solve problems. You know, I think there'd be fantastic ways for you to approach problem-solving in more bootstrapped, organic lean ways where you create heroes or you reward people who approach problem-solving through resourcefully challenged opportunities versus just throwing money at problems or thinking everybody needs to have support staff or, um, but I mean, there could be so many different ways that that value shapes the brass tax of your agency. I think it'd be a fun conversation to figure out how you're doing it today. Jason: [00:07:45] Gotcha. And so what are the other layers now that we have the principal. And then I think the second was architecture, if I…? Ted: [00:07:50] Architecture. Yeah. So principles being the idea that you want your values to be actionable and really shape all sorts of practical aspects of your people's behavior. Architecture being the structures that support your people. We talk a lot about Frank Lloyd Wright and the architecture that he did intentionally around the environment he was in. Third layer would be rituals. We talk about the experiences that energize your people and the best rituals and organizations are those that are organic. Not just top-down staff retreats or all staff meetings, but those rituals, like we talk a lot about the pumpkin carving contest in the jet propulsion lab and NASA. The next layer would be lore, the sticky stories that shape us. There are some really fantastic ways you can shape story, do storytelling in ways that further your brand value that help provide differentiation to your brand. Next layer is vocabulary, having phrases, words, ideas. We talk a lot about Netflix and some of the great language that they have from “Sunshining” to, um, different terms that they use to shape their culture. And then the last layer would be artifacts, which are everything from clothes to your physical space, to brands that we've worked with that set up unique opportunities for people that have private space in a shared workspace. One brand that has a football field mini version of a football field in their environment because they have a value of leaving it all on the field, all sorts of ways that you can physically shape your brand value in your space.
Jason: [00:09:34] Is your agency struggling to deliver real revenue growth results to your clients? You know, agency marketers can consolidate data and align marketing and sales teams goals to achieve real results for your agency and clients using revenue growth platforms. Sharp spring is an all-in-one platform built for agencies like yours to optimize digital marketing strategies with simple, powerful automation. Manage your entire funnel all in Sharpspring. Now for a limited time, my smart agency listeners will receive your first month free and half off onboarding with SharpSpring. Just visit sharpspring.com/smartagency to schedule your demo and grab this offer. That's sharpspring.com/smartagency. Very cool. So give us some more examples of each of the layers, just so people can start going oh, okay, cool. This is what we can actually do. Like once we form the principles, how can we build a better architecture and so on? Ted: [00:10:41] For sure. So these layers are somewhat, uh, permeable, right? They're not just independent ideas that operate independently from the others, right? Your, your principles should absolutely shape vocabulary. As a matter of fact, a lot of times in brands, we see those, those values, those principles show up in their vocabulary because they get phrased in ways that become really sticky and interesting and helpful. Uh, architecture is absolutely informed by your principles. The way that you conduct HR hiring, onboarding. Rituals, uh, those again, in the book, we talk a lot about rituals being organic. When you have people that love your brand, they will often create their own experiences of the brand. One practical example for us at our agency, we do staff camp, we do Christmas gatherings. We constantly ask our staff how they want to participate and engage and be a part of those experiences. And in the process we've gotten all sorts of rituals in our agency that have been organic from our people, but mark and I would have never dreamed of. From cool patches and stickers and badges that have been developed in previous years that continue on to this day to other activities and games and things that operate within our agency. And another great example is we had a member of our staff want to do a music club, right? That's a great example of a ritual. We were like a music club! Awesome. Why not? That's becomes such a significant part of our agency that any new staff person is given a Sonos speaker so that no matter where they are in the US they can be a part of music club, be on Spotify, be a part of this experience. It's a way that we want to honor that because it's become such an important ritual within our organization. And we have no formal authority over music club. It's just an organic thing that our people develop that's become a key part of their… I think they would say a key part of their positive, satisfactory experience of working with us. Jason: [00:12:45] So are rituals more kind of like experiences and then like architecture is more like systems and…? Ted: [00:12:51] A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, you think about architecture, right? Like no architect designs a home and simply says, well, it's safe, it's stable, the plumbing works. You're good. That's not an architect, right? An architect is very, very interested in the design and shape of that structure, matching its external and internal audience and environment needs. It's not just safe or not safe. There are so many other dimensions to architecture. We think HR, the systems that support your people. should be the same way. You know, a lot of agencies, when we were a young agency and even today we cannot comp like 52 or 72 and sunny, not 52, 72andSunny, or, you know, name the agency, right? That has fantastic compensation plans. But there are so many different ways that you can do comp. One for us, one of our architecture branded ideas at, at historic is travel pizza. What is travel pizza? Anytime somebody on our staff has to be gone overnight, we provide a $50 stipend for meals for their family. It can be Ubereats. It can be pizza, it can be whatever you want it to be. Travel pizzas become an unbelievable way that our people feel valued and their families feel valued because they get a cool night out whether it's out or it's brought in on us because their person that they care about is gone. Lots of other ways to do compensation, to structure, to architect compensation that deliver unique value through your agency. That go way beyond annual salary. Jason: [00:14:32] Yeah, I like that. Remind me, what's after ritual and let's talk about examples. Ted: [00:14:38] There's a lot. It can be complex. So the, the layers of culture, somewhat in a linear order would be principles, architecture, rituals, and then lore. Lore being those sticky stories, right? Every brand that we’ve a part of I've been on staff that has had those stories that echo through the hallways and often they're incredibly toxic. Jason: [00:15:01] So would that be like, like what a story…? This happened at our agency where we were sent these lounge chairs that were double-sided and they sent it like 10 of them from China in these boxes with all these packing popcorn. But when we opened the boxes up, we had so much packing popcorn. It literally went down a hallway. And so we were like, let's keep it. We'd literally kept it until we sold the office. There was a whole hallway of packing popcorn that you could run and jump and do flips in and lose articles of clothing. So is that like a lore? Ted: [00:15:39] Well, that sounds like an amazing ritual, but I would say the minute, the minute you cleaned up that popcorn, I believe that was probably an incredible story. A lore that is a positive example of how your agency describes its culture through story. And if I'm you, you know, Jason, I want that story to continue echoing through the halls. I want new staff to be told that story when they're onboard, because that says something about who we are, what we value, how we behave, that goes way beyond any HR manual or onboarding. That is a great example of lore. A great example of toxic lore would be when I got hired as a C-suite leader in a non-profit and the second day in I was told by one of my colleagues, you know, you're just a plane flight away from losing your job. And I was like, huh, tell me more. He's like, well, the person that you're replacing was hired when the CEO sat next to them on a plane and before the plane landed, they were hired on staff and a negotiated salary. So just remember if he sits next to somebody who does your job better than you, well… Now that story had existed for years in the hallways of this organization. I, dumb enough thought I'm going to ask the CEO about that. So I brought it to the CEO and said, hey, I heard this crazy story. Is that true? He's like, well, it's kind of true. Not really true. Who told you that story? I was like, well, this is where I heard it in multiple places, but, um… He's like, you heard it in multiple places? Like a lot of people told me the same story. Point being, that negative story, toxic story shaping this leader's culture had been told for years and he had never heard it. The idea here is the more senior you are in the brand that you lead, the more self diluted you probably are as well. The more people are saying things about you or about the brand that you don't know about just by nature of your power and position. It's incredible how often senior leaders and brands we serve are clueless about stuff multiple people on the ground talk about and say on the routine. Jason: [00:17:55] Oh, yeah, yeah. And one of the things just going back to that story that I'm thinking about now, is the only time we cleaned up that popcorn was to put all of that in my VP of operations sunroof in his car. And we filled up his whole car. So when he came out to his car and just literally went… Ted: [00:18:16] I mean, to me, that's the epilogue, that's the, like the story, the story lives on there's layers to the story, right? I mean, you know, I would say like, Jason, that's a great example of how a story could very well create a sticky idea, vocabulary, which is the next layer, and that sticky phrase becomes a principle that now… This is how these layers work together. Sometimes principles create stories that create rituals. Sometimes the way in which we have the principle or value shapes our architecture, which creates it, these layers work together. But the point is there's a reason why Southwest and Netflix and Zappos, and many of the brands we know and love and talk about in this book are as successful as they are. It's not a happenstance coincidence they hit the market at the right time. They were aligned intentionally from the inside out, right? We have a philosophy of brand that your brand is your culture, your story, your product, your experience, and your identity. Don't start with identity. Start with culture. Defining that from the inside out is always far more sustainable and effective and long lasting, and has far less drama than starting with identity. Jason: [00:19:36] I love that. Well, this has all been amazing, Ted, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Ted: [00:19:42] Well, you can't talk about company culture and brand and agency life without addressing power. I think maybe one of the tangential elements to this conversation today has been the dynamic of power. And I think anybody listening who's a leader or being led, understands that power is a thing. I would say that one of the biggest gaps that we experience in company culture are leaders, is leaders who fail to understand the reality of their power and build bridges over that power to the people they lead so that they can actually get the truth. They can actually be told that toxic lore, they can actually be given feedback on how to reshape their HR systems or their values. It's amazing how, again, self diluted senior leaders are because of the power gap and their failure to build a bridge over that power. I would just challenge all of your listeners, if you have power of any form, be aware of it and build a bridge over it for the purpose of shaping a healthy company culture. Jason: [00:20:49] I love it. What's the name of the book and where can they get that? Ted: [00:20:53] Yeah, the book is Culture Built my Brand. Originally we wanted to call it Culture Ate my Brand, but the publisher thought that was a little too, little too negative. So they scratched it out and we have built, you can get it at any bookseller near you from Amazon to Barnes and Noble to… They just started shipping. We had some shipping-related challenges as I'm sure everybody's experienced. Um, but, uh, you could also visit culturebuiltmybrand.com to get access to a whole suite of tools that I actually think as agency owners… You may or may not ever want to take culture seriously as a part of your service group as a brand, but I guarantee you, if you apply some of the thoughts and ideas we have either to your agency or to how you serve clients, it'll make you a better agency. So take advantage of these tools, CultureBuiltMyBrand.com and then our agency is just Historic Agency. Jason: [00:21:47] Awesome. Well, Ted, thanks so much for coming on the show. And if you guys enjoyed this episode, make sure you guys subscribe, make sure you like it, comment and share it with a friend. And, uh, if you guys want to be around other amazing agency owners, sharing what's working and being able to see the things that you might not be able to see. I'd love to invite all of you to go to digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind, just for experience agency owners that are trying to just grow faster, have a lot of fun and just build an amazing culture. So thanks so much. And until next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: 6_Layers_of_Shaping_an_Agency_Culture_That_Wins_More_Clients.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 22 December 2021
After working for big agencies for part of her career, Josy Amann decided that starting her own business and getting rid of the commute would align more with her plans to have a family, so she co-founded Media Matters Worldwide. Today, her agency is an experienced, independent media strategy, planning, buying, and analytics partner that has grown beyond the eight-figure mark. In her interview with Jason, she talked about the "scrappy" first years of starting an agency, how she realized they needed layers and strategy to beyond the 3-million mark, and the three pillars to build your pipeline. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesGusto: Today's episode is sponsored by Gusto, an all-in-one people platform for payroll, benefits, HR where you can unify your data. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Head over to gusto.com/agency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM What Are The Pillars of Building Your Pipeline & Attracting Bigger Clients?Jason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here, and have another amazing episode coming from an amazing agency owner that's grown her agency to well over eight-figures. And we're going to talk about how she's done it. So let's go ahead and get into the show. Hey, Josie. Welcome to the show. Josy: [00:00:24] Thanks, Jason. Nice to see you. Jason: [00:00:26] Yeah, you too. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Josy: [00:00:31] I am Josy Amann. I'm one of the co-founders of Media Matters Worldwide, and I started the business with a business partner, Taji Zaminasli. Jason: [00:00:40] Awesome. And are you guys still business partners? Josy: [00:00:42] We sure are, since 2005. Jason: [00:00:44] That’s amazing. Josy: [00:00:46] We've been working, talking every day for over 20 years. I feel very blessed. Very lucky. Jason: [00:00:53] Well, tell us, how did you get started? I'm always curious why people, like, where were you accidental? Did you guys have a mission to do? How'd you guys start? Josy: [00:01:02] I, you know, I, we both had worked at the big agencies. That's how we got our start right out of college. We’ve always been in media. That was, that was the beginning. And then I think it was 28, we were working at an agency together. That's how we met. We were working at a performance agency and I said, how are we ever going to work at this pace and commute and all of these things and have a family? Like I knew I wanted to have a family, had just gotten married, at 26 I knew that was on the horizon. So that was a big piece of kind of the thought around starting our own agency. We also had really unique backgrounds in that Taji was in buying and broadcast. And I was in planning. We just had very different backgrounds that came together. So we knew we could create a holistic solution for a media company. Jason: [00:01:51] Awesome. And what was it like the first couple of years? Now you're where a lot of the listeners are wanting to be right now. You guys have an independent agency that's doing really well, it's growing. But obviously, it didn't start that way. Josy: [00:02:08] Yeah. The scrappy days, right? Uh, so Taji and I both, when we started the agency, we didn't, we didn't raise money. We didn't have any… we weren't like trust fund babies or anything like that. It was all kind of bootstrap. So when we started the agency, we said, why don't we become a freelancing team. And we’ll become an arm of some of the bigger agencies. We've worked for Gyro and they did all of their media and it was a really great way to get our foot in the door and it kind of bought time so that we could get our clients of our own. So that's kind of how we started. Then we started getting clients of our own. Then we moved away from the agency model and that just kind of built upon itself. And as we grew and as we saved money, that's when we started to hire. And I think that's why it's taken 16 years. Jason: [00:02:55] Exactly. Overnight success in 16 years later. Looking back, especially, uh, I always talk about, it's easy to get to the million mark by accident, or maybe even the two or maybe even the $3 million mark by accident. But really kind of scaling it from there, you have to have the right systems or the right team member in place. What systems or teams or rolls did you feel that you needed in order to get you to the level you{re at now? Josy: [00:03:26] Yeah, you've obviously done this before. I could have used your advice years ago, but by trial and error. We learned that as we grew, we needed layers. We were a very linear organization for a long time and that served us well. And to your point, got us to the million, 2 million mark. But to grow the business, we needed more layers and also a leadership team. And that has been pivotal to our growth. So having a leadership team, having the layers, it a hundred percent key cause Taji and I needed to get off the business so we could run the business. And the leadership team has really allowed that. Jason: [00:04:04] Yeah. What were the layers? Like, give us example of some of the layers. Josy: [00:04:08] Yeah. So instead of where we started our business, we would just have, say like an analytics lead. Now we have someone that minds the data. We have an analytic storyteller, and then we have someone that does all the business intelligence and dashboarding. So in ways business has become more expensive cause we need three people to do the job that one person did years ago. But the services and the level of customer service we're able to provide. You need those layers. Jason: [00:04:39] Yeah. And talk about a little bit about the team structure. Like, because obviously, you guys have gone through many different levels over the years, right? From, you know, the infancy of getting the $2 million mark and so on. If you had to go back and do it over again, or if you're chatting with someone that's at the two or $3 million mark and they really want to excel past the eight figure mark, what would be some of the important things that you would tell them? Josy: [00:05:08] Hm, come up with a strategy for new business because I think that's one of the things when we really… We knew we could scale the team. We knew we were ready for growth, but how are we going to get the bigger clients? Because the bigger clients are what bring the bigger dollars. You can use the same team that you have built for a client half its size and really scale the agency. So coming up, we came up with this marketing flywheel we called it. And really a three-pronged approach to getting new business. And I think that really started to fuel the funnel and get us in front of bigger names.
Jason: [00:05:50] Taking care of your employees has never been more important than right now. And while paydays are great, running payroll is a major pain. From calculating taxes, deductions, compliances, none of it's easy, unless of course you have Gusto. Gusto is a simple online payroll benefits built for small business. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Plus with their help, you can offer benefits like 401ks, health insurance, workers' comp, and a lot more. And because you're a smart agency masterclass listener, you're going to get three months free once you run your first payroll. Go to gusto.com/agency. That's gusto.com/agency for three free months. I like that you said bigger clients because a lot of agencies, when they think of scaling, they think of, I need more clients. That's a possibility. If you want to add a ton of people and make a lot less profit. So when you started saying I want to target bigger customers, did you get specific and going, like let's start naming them and coming up like a hit list or did you start picking a particular market? Josy: [00:07:10] Yeah, it was kind of twofold. Yes, definitely picking up names, but it was also thinking about industries. And we've always been an agency, we've had half of our clients, B2B and half B2C. And I feel that has given our agency strength, just the people working for, uh, the agency specifically, but it's also given us the ability to kind of ride through difficult times. So in COVID, for example, the beginning of COVID, we had some of our retail clients that only, they don't even have e-commerce, shut down their stores, shut off their budget. Who was still up and running? All of our B2B clients. So that really helped us weather the storm. And we've learned over 16 years, you know, we've made it through the 2008 crisis and different ups and downs of the business through the years, that kind of balance of portfolio has always helped us. And in the B2C realm, same thing, you know, looking at the industry, looking at what the hot challenger brands are is really key too. When you look in the FinTech space and the beauty space, they're really changing the world of media and that's exciting and it builds your portfolio. You're not just doing the same same. Jason: [00:08:20] And now you have a bigger team that you can kind of focus on multiple industries. Would you have done it different? Do you think if you picked one particular industry in the very beginning, laser focus, do you think you could have gotten to the level quicker, or are you glad that you were spread out. Josy: [00:08:37] I'm glad we were spread out. There was a moment in time before really it was popular to be women-owned at the time, but we said, you know, why don't we embrace kind of who we are instead of always hiding that we're women-owned business, which we did early on. Why don't we embrace that and focus on only, you know, women focus brands, sustainable brands, eco brands? So we thought about going in that direction and then it just seemed too limiting from where we came from, but it actually opened up the doors. So I think just that like opening up of the universe to say, we want to go in that direction, opened up those brands for us. Um, so, you know, whether it worked or not, but I don't think I would've done anything differently because again, it's so exciting to learn about all the different industries. And I think our people love it too. It's constantly making you think about different audiences and how to reach them. Jason: [00:09:29] And I think you mentioned kind of three pillars and building that pipeline, what were they, or what are they? Josy: [00:09:36] Yeah, the first was put your money where your mouth is and do all of the lead generation run retargeting campaigns, run on LinkedIn, run on all the lead gen sites that are out there. So that when people are looking for you paid search, you're there. Step number one. Step two is identify similar culture like creative agencies, marketing agencies, and marketing consultants that you can take time and really build relationships with and be there for each other over time. So not just a meet and greet, but really have brainstorming sessions and really be there to help each other. That, that has brought in a lot of business as well. And then the third is really get serious about PR and hire a PR agency and get out there, do things like this and be on panels and write articles and really be more involved in the ad community. Jason: [00:10:32] Yeah, I totally agree. And because there's so many agencies that just depend on one channel. And you know, they look at well, we're just relying on all the business coming on a Facebook. I’m like what is Facebook changes, right? You need all the other… Josy: [00:10:48] What if it changes? Jason: [00:10:50] Yeah. And I love that you built strategic partnerships too, because not many people do that and they just… You know, I get those emails all day long going, hey, you got a big audience of agencies. You send out my email. I'm like, how is that a relationship? That's just a, it's a transactional thing. It's like, Hey, why don't you try to help someone and then become friends and then you could both take over the world together, a small part of the world? Josy: [00:11:18] That's business, right? I mean, that's what it should be about, should be about relationships. It should be leaning on each other. It should be about transparency. Jason: [00:11:25] Yeah, exactly. Well, Josy, this has been amazing. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Josy: [00:11:32] Maybe advice around, uh, we've been a remote agency since 2005. That's when we started the agency, that was one of the ways that, like I said earlier, how are we going to have a family? We're still gonna work our tails off, but taking away the commute might help. So we started a virtual agency back in 2005. Which, you know, we didn't have all the tools we have today. So people, I get a lot of other agency owners calling saying, how, how can you give me advice on how to kind of weather the storm and how to create this remote agency that we've now, you know, we've canceled all of our office space and now we have a remote agency. How do we fix it? Cause people aren't super happy. And, I would say hire people that love to work from home. And I think that's what we've always done. We've always hired more senior people, people that don't need handholding trailblazers. That's created a different kind of agency culture, which we love, but hire people that really love to work from home. Cause if they don't, they're never really going to embrace it. Jason: [00:12:40] Yeah. Yeah. And I know. And when you're a virtual agency, it really kind of takes the handcuffs off of you for finding talent because there's amazing talent all over the world. In a lot of remote cities, we were, I was chatting with some of the mastermind members and people are like… And they're all over the world. And, and some of were in California and New York, and they were like, are your employees coming to you asking for raises because everything's costing more? And everyone was like, yup, yup, yup. But one person and he was in Kentucky and were like, we all need to recruit from Kentucky. Josy: [00:13:16] Yeah. I love having our employees all over the country. It not only helps with hiring, but it also helps with times zones. We have a lot of global clients. So being able to kind of have people pinch hit early in the morning or late at night is super helpful. Jason: [00:13:29] Yeah, it's awesome. What's the agency website people go and check you guys out? Josy: [00:13:34] Oh, mediamattersww.com. Jason: [00:13:36] Awesome. Well, everyone, if you guys enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe. Make sure you go to their website. Say a thank you to Josie for coming on and giving you guys a lot of value. And if you guys enjoyed this and you want to be around other amazing agency owners where they're sharing out strategies that are currently working right now and having fun and, and a lot of times it can be your shrink when things go blow up. We all need that, right? Because who else are we going to go to? I'd love to invite all of you to go to the digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind just for agency owners. We'd love for you guys to apply. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: 3_Pillars_to_Fill_Your_Pipeline_and_Grow_Beyond_the_3-Million_Mark.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 19 December 2021
Would you like to successfully bootstrap your way into a thriving agency? Rich Kahn has been fascinated by the internet since its very beginning in the 90's. He started a newsletter to talk about new internet developments and grew his audience to a point where he got offers to advertise products. He realized with a relatively small investment in hardware and his home internet connection he could make profits of thousands of dollars. From that point, he made sure every little success in his business could lead to further success by testing his ideas small and not going over budget. In his conversation with Jason, they talked about his formula for bootstrapping a business into success, why a bootstrapper should always be willing to learn everything they can about a business, and the importance of differentiating between profit and profit margin. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesSharpspring: Today's episode is sponsored by Sharpspring, an all-in-one revenue growth platform that provides all of the marketing automation, CRM, & sales features you need to support your entire customer lifecycle. Partner with an affordable marketing automation provider that you can trust. Head over to sharpspring.com/smartagency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Be Willing To Learn Something New and Bootstrap Your Way Into a Thriving Agency{These transcripts have been auto-generated. While largely accurate, they may contain some errors.} Jason: [00:00:00] What's up, everybody? Jason Swenk here. And I have an amazing guest where we're going to talk about bootstrapping your agency and how to grow it. I'm excited to get into it. So let's jump into the show. Hey, Rich. Welcome to the show. Rich: [00:00:18] Hey, thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:20] Yeah, man, excited to have you on. How have you been able to bootstrap a lot of these companies? So let's talk about some of the companies that you've done and how you bootstrapped them and grew them over the years. Rich: [00:00:32] I guess bootstrapping is done regardless of the business. So we've done everything from email newsletter, right? And email marketing, basically back in the nineties, early nineties, like 93. I ran an ISP out of my house with 300 phone lines coming in. I've ran click networks, I've ran contests search engines, and now an ad fraud solution. And the bootstrapping technique for me has always been the same. Take what little resources you have, and most of my companies have had just a couple thousand bucks to get started, and really do as much of the work as you possibly can yourself. Even if it comes to web design, learn it yourself, or you hire some people that can do it very inexpensively because you've got to protect that what little budget you have. And get the company started, right? As I've started to see a little bit of success in small pockets of each of the different companies and each company's a little different. But when you start making a little bit of profit from something that I zero in on that, to make sure it's actually profitable and it's not just a fluke and slowly start to scale that up. As I was able to scale up stuff like that, go back to 93, my email newsletter. I was writing a newsletter because… it actually, it wasn't for profit. It was just fun. I was thrilled with the internet. It was launched in 91 for public consumption, I think it was September 1st of 91. 93 I got started and I started writing articles on all the new things that were happening and what was making it… Because I knew this was going to change the world. I just, I was hooked day one. And so I started with just writing a letter because I thought like a newsletter that I thought it was interesting. And I thought people would be interested in it. Back then with a couple of months I had over 20,000 subscribers, which back then was a lot, considering the makeup of the network and everything, there was more… Jason: [00:02:14] Were they all AOL email addresses? Rich: [00:02:17] Yes. Yes. What ended up happening was I was a big chatter in the AOL chat rooms and I would jump to the chat room, just say, hey, I've got a newsletter talking about the changing internet. If anybody's interested, sign up here. And that's all I did. And I ended up getting 20,000 subscribers that way all up. Back then they didn't call it opt in, but it was all opt in. I just started writing because it was something that I found interesting. And I'm not a writer by any stretch of the imagination, but it was something that I wanted to do. And probably once I broke about 10,000 subscribers, somebody said, hey, can I advertise in your, in your newsletter? I thought, sure, why not? And so I tested it on one article. I wrote in, I had one person advertise in it and obviously it was all profit, cause it was, there was no cost to my part. I was just my internet connection. And that was pretty much my total overhead for the month. And it made money. I'm like, wow, this is pretty cool. And as I'm analyzing saying, wow, this might be a business model, because the Ms model didn't really exist back then. Also, after the first article opposed I got three or four more people said, hey, can I advertise in your newsletter? So, again, I started the company buying some software to help me manage the list. I had my AOL connection, my normal internet connection, some hardware upgrades that I needed to do. So that was my initial cost. Put a couple hundred bucks into it, nothing crazy. And before you knew what I was making a couple thousand a week, just from people wanting to advertise in the newsletter. That started the growth from there. And then what was interesting, again, bootstrapping the whole way. Somebody again said, hey, you know, the worldwide web is out now. Maybe you can start a mall. I'd be happy to sign up and have a store in your mall. Cause that was kind of the thing back then. So I put a newsletter, I put a newsletter out, said, hey, we're going to put together a web mall. I'm going to basically build your website, give you three pages, do all the design work, host it for X number of dollars. If you're interested, you know, send me money. It was, it was that poor of a campaign and I got something like in the first week I got like eight or 10 grand. So it took a week off from work, because of course it was still working full-time, and read 2000 pages of HTML and then graphic design and put together the whole mall, wrote all the 50 or 60 websites, whatever it was. When it was all said and done, I finished it up in a week and the mall was launched and we were up and running. And that, that's how I bootstrapped into that. And all of a sudden we started growing a web development business. Then the next thing was people like, hey, I see that you guys do web development services. Do you offer a way to connect to the internet? I'm like, all right, I'm sure I could figure this out. So I, I ordered a couple hundred phone lines into my house from Verizon, got a T1 routed to my house. There was a big story behind that, but. You, just kind of take one success and roll it into the next. And that's how I've always done my stuff. So if I came up with the idea and not all the, not all my ideas were successful. But you came up with an idea, you test the waters small. And if there's approvability, then run a bigger test and that, that if continues to prove itself, just keep growing that and scaling that as fast as you can with budget you have naturally, you know. You don't want to start taking loans and bringing on partners. I have not had any luck, you know, going after funding and stuff like that. That's, I've always had to bootstrap and you just continue to parlay your success into the next success, until the next success. Until next thing you know, we end up selling that company. So, again, I'll start bootstrapping. You know, one of my more successful companies, we started with five grand and just took a while to parlay each little success into the next and trying to find out what campaigns worked until the next thing you know, you're doing really well. You know, you’re winning 500 awards, you know, winning Ernst & Young awards. I mean, you start winning all this other stuff and people recognizing what you're doing. And it all started with $5,000 investment. So you can definitely bootstrap your way to big money, but you gotta be very careful with how you do it. It's always just testing the wins and like, I'll remember the first one, I'll give you an example. I ran a campaign that I was testing and I made 10 cents and I was flipping out. I was like, this is great. My wife's like you made 10 cents, big deal. I’m like, but you don't understand. I only spent two and a half cents to make that 10 cents. Now, if I could multiply that by a factor of a hundred thousand or a million, we could make some money, but this looks like a scalable... And like, she couldn't understand like initially why I was jumping up and down about seven and a half cents profit. But when it's 75% profit and you start doing the math and you start, and then you start proving that it is a scalable solution, things get a lot more exciting. But again, testing something as simple as, as a 10 cent campaign. You know, with a seven and a half cent win. To me, I get excited about as a bootstrapper
Jason: [00:07:11] Is your agency struggling to deliver real revenue growth results to your clients? You know, agency marketers can consolidate data and align marketing and sales teams goals to achieve real results for your agency and clients using revenue growth platforms. SharpSpring is an all-in-one platform built for agencies like yours to optimize digital marketing strategies with simple, powerful automation. Manage your entire funnel all in Sharpspring. Now, for a limited time, my smart agency listeners will receive your first month free and half off onboarding with SharpSpring. Just visit sharpspring.com/smartagency to schedule your demo and grab this offer. That's sharpspring.com/smartagency. That leads me to kind of think about, because… Yeah, I mean, in the early days, I'd be like, well, yeah, who cares about the couple of cents. But how are you able to kind of multiply that by a million? Rich: [00:08:15] That's the trick. Whenever I talk to clients from an agency voice, I always, I explained to them, there's two things. There's your profit margin. And then there's profit, right? You pay your bills with profit, not with margin. So a lot of times people are so hung up with trying to kill the margin and make, you know, 60, 70, 80% margin on a campaign that at that campaign, at that margin level, there's just not enough room to scale it. So maybe you're making two bucks on that campaign for the month. You can't do any with two bucks, even though you have a killer margin. So what I was trying to talk to my agency guys about, and the buyers is there's a good balance between your margin and your profit. You pay bills with profits. So I would rather have give up margin so I can scale it versus focusing on killing the margin and not being able to scale it. So depending on the campaign, depending on the business model, there's a lot you have to contend with. And again, each there, you know, it's hard to talk in generalities because there's just so many different business model types, but you got to prove something that works and find, find the scaling point. Like, don't worry so much about the margin. Worry more about how much cash you're going to put in your pocket that month. Because that's how you pay your bills and that's how you make money. Jason: [00:09:29] I always tell everybody it's like… When you're scaling, you don't have to worry about that as much. Like, there'll be like, oh, if we dip below this certain percentage, then you know, hey, we're in the red, but you're doing this for the longterm. And you know you're investing in the number one resource, you, that you can rather than putting it in the stock market or putting it somewhere else. So I'm like, hey man, go do it. So this has all been amazing, Rich. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience listening in? Rich: [00:10:04] Uh, you know, I've seen lots of companies do very well with bootstrapping. I've seen lots of companies do very well with investors getting, you know, raising capital. And I always point to like if you have a really good, unique idea, that's hard to enter into the marketplace because you've got some unique IT, IP or something like that. Sometimes going after funding is the right way to go. Like look at the big companies that we all know how many of them bootstrapped? Very few, right? They always got to a certain inflection point where they said, okay, now it's time to bring it. And there's a certain point where it makes sense to bring on outside money so that you can really scale something fast. If Facebook didn't bring on investors, we may not have heard about it. They may not have been as big as it is. They blew up once they brought on their investors who had, you know, different relationships, different ideas, different experience in managing a company at that level. So for a bootstrapper, you know, in the very beginning, when you're first figuring out your business model, first, figuring out your margins and everything else, you gotta be a sponge and you gotta be willing. It's not like, hey, I own a business. I can sit back and work the hours I want. That doesn't work with bootstrapping. You got to bust your ass. You gotta be working 70, 80, 90 hours a week to learn everything and do everything that needs to get done because you can't afford to bring in a high-end CFO to help you manage funds. Can't afford to do that. You have to do that yourself. Maybe you have that skill, maybe you don't, but you have to sit back and learn as much of the areas that you don't know about. Maybe you don't know about content marketing, maybe don't know about SEO. You need to learn it, because you can't afford to pay someone else to… The only thing you do have is time and you don't have a lot of money to invest as a bootstrapper. Well, most bootstrappers don't have a lot of money to invest, so you really have to focus on learning everything you don't know. And the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know anything. So you've got to really spend the time a good chunk of your time, learning every aspect of your business in order to how to grow it. Podcasts like this are awesome because... When I was growing up in the business, there were no podcasts, there were no… People that you can turn to, you couldn't connect with people who knew the space very well easily. Unless you knew their phone number, you weren't getting in touch with them. So today's, you know, entrepreneurs that are coming up in this space that are bootstrapping have access to all this great content, you know, tidbits like this, you know, 10, 12-minute podcasts they can absorb and pick up some information from experts who've done it for years. That is invaluable information. And you really gotta get plugged into the right places to learn as much as you can about the areas that you don't know. So you can grow your business without having to go hire somebody to do it. Jason: [00:12:28] Love it. What's a website, or how can people get in touch with you if they want to chat with you? Rich: [00:12:33] I'm on LinkedIn. I got a huge following and I post almost on a daily basis on LinkedIn, just Rich Kahn. Or you can find me all the contactinformation@anura.io, which is the current company that I'm growing. Jason: [00:12:45] Awesome. Well, everyone go check that out and, Rich, thanks so much for coming on the show. If you guys enjoyed this episode and you want to fast-track your agency a little bit more, and you want to know some of the systems, some of the framework that's working for agencies that's worked for me and what I would actually use again, I want you guys to go to jasonswenk.com/playbook and request an invite and check out all the systems that we have. That's jasonswenk.com/playbook. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Successfully_Bootstrap_Your_Way_Into_a_Thriving_Agency.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 15 December 2021
Is your agency constantly innovating and evolving in order to stay relevant? Clients needs are constantly changing as technology evolves. Are you keeping up with what clients need? Julia Smith has worked in digital advertising for over 25 years and has made a name being her client's mouthpiece. They even call her "the voice." She took that concept and formed her agency The Digital Voice, a B2B boutique PR agency that brings brands to life through engaging PR campaigns, awareness-driving communications, and immersive virtual experiences. Julia sat down to talk to Jason about how her agency has changed over the years, especially after the pandemic, and how this has ultimately had a positive impact on the agency. She also discusses the transition from being just a PR agency to being an experience agency, and what she wishes she had known when she first started. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and Resources Wix: Today's episode is sponsored by the Wix Partner Program. Being a Wix Partner is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Be Your Client's Voice and Make a Transition from Just PR Agency to Experience Agency{These transcripts have been auto-generated. While largely accurate, they may contain some errors.} Jason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here. I'm excited to have another amazing episode for you. We're going to talk about how a PR agency is really morphing to an experience agency. And even if you're not a PR agency, you're going to benefit from this episode. So let's go ahead and get into it. Hey, Julia. Welcome to the show. Julia: [00:00:27] Hi, Jason, how you doing? Jason: [00:00:29] Yeah, I'm excited to have you on, so tell us who you are and what do you do? Julia: [00:00:32] So I'm Julia Smith. I'm the founder and MD of a B2B PR agency called The Digital Voice. Jason: [00:00:40] Awesome. And how long have you been doing your agency? Julia: [00:00:44] Well, you know what I suddenly realized that I've just gone over a quarter of a century last year in working in digital advertising. But I set up, which is shocking in itself, but I set up the digital voice it's going to be 10 years next June since I set out. Jason: [00:00:59] Wow. Congrats. And, and how did you get started by starting your own agency? I always like to know that origin story. Julia: [00:01:06] Yeah, but you know, it's strange because actually the name of the company is based upon… about 11, 12 years ago I was working for a company and they couldn't think of what to call what I did. And we settled on the voice, because almost that’s what I was for them. I was the voice, the mouthpiece of that business. And I did everything for them from represent them on stage and the press. And I was their mouthpiece and sales and throughout all their business. And that's when I then a year later decided it was time to set up on my own. And so The Digital Voice was born. It's kind of out of how a lot of people know me as the voice in this industry. Probably stems from the fact that I have a very big mouth as well. Jason: [00:01:50] Awesome. And, um, how has your agency changed over the years? Julia: [00:01:56] Do you know what? It's been a complete change at every year. But more so in the last 18 months that we've had to, as everybody has had to is evolve their businesses. And I think it's, it's had strangely hugely positive impact for us and for our clients. It made us stop. It made us think a little bit more about how we can use every platform possible. And we had to stop being so reliant on networking events, standing on stage, getting our clients speaking slots, being able to set up wine and dine, networking, physical events. And you actually took a step back and went, hand on a second? We can make this complete, an experience in everything that we do and on every platform. And it ended up as a company we went from being… So I think 10 years ago it would just have been about content. It would have just been about press and content and every year is added on more and more. And this year, I was thinking about before coming on here, Jason, and thinking, what do we do? And it’s actually press concept, thought leadership, SEO, social media, newsjacking, virtual experience, speaking, awards… It’s everything. And it becomes very much of taking, uh, the voice, being the voice for clients in the new way of communicating. So big changes. Jason: [00:03:24] Oh, yeah, definitely. And tell me, you know, because our industry is really, there's a ton of… Kind of male owners. And there's far fewer, you know, woman-owned agencies. Why do you think that? And tell us a little bit more about that because I always love having women on the show because I'm like, oh, another woman, this is awesome. Julia: [00:03:50] Well, you know, it's strange you say that. Cause I, I know quite a lot of female owners of agencies, actually, over here of PR agencies. And lucky, I'm lucky enough to be co-founder of Digital Leading Ladies. And I'm a member of Bloom. All of these different organizations. So I kind of don't see it. I see a lot of women actually running their own companies. I'll tell you why this also it's a massive benefit. I did it 11 years ago because I had young children. It enabled me to work the hours I wanted to work. And I still work strange hours that I do 6:30 AM to four, because at four o'clock my children, who are now teenagers, they walk in the door then. And my rule was that I'm then… They don't really need me, but should they need me, I can open that door. I can be there for them after that. So running your own company actually gives you complete flexibility to choose how you work and what you work. Interesting enough, we were a team of nine, 10 women. We've now changed and we've got three and seven now. And so my, the, the, my head of content, Adam was delighted, he was like, thank goodness he was getting so outnumbered. But to my mind, I'm still one of those believers that it's about who does the job right and nothing more. And I don't think it should even be, I don't see it, or I've never felt in any way that I've missed out or been treated unfairly for being a female. Um, I actually feel quite positive and I've had, I believe, quite a positive experience. And it's what you make is how. If you don't make it in too much of an issue and you're strong in what you do and what you say, and, and you're, um, reviewed based on what you deliver. Jason: [00:05:34] Yep. Exactly. And that's, that's how it should be. Tell us about kind of the transition from the agency to delivering more of an experience. Julia: [00:05:44] Yeah, this is an interesting one. So I describe it like this. So I was saying to my clients, you know we get them… we ended up last year investing in a virtual experience platform called Rainbow. And I love it. It's fantastic because what it did was we create virtual experiences. And it is just that, it's an experience. You can do live, you can bring people up on stage. You can do live voting polls. But it goes to, we have 3d networking floors, where you actually mix and mingle in bar rooftop lounges. We've got, we've done campfire settings. We did loads of Christmas parties and what we always discover… that kind of that's one part. So you create an experience, but then we also said to our clients that everything you do needs to be off of one thing. So say you speak at an event. That's an experience. But let's look, go further. How do we take that experience and keep the engagement going on social media? You take snippets of that video of you speaking and you pop it on to your social, but you then do a poll saying I've got three other topics that are going to be talked about. Which one do you want to vote on what comes up next? You take comments and news jack. You then write a news story based on what I said at that event, what the clients said. You then take it into a thought leadership piece and then you do Q&A's and then you do a podcast with Jason Swenk. And all of it is kind of building up though… It becomes not, it's not so two-dimensional then, is it? It's everything is about the experience. How do you feel, how does the audience feel? How much engagement…? That's the experience. How are we engaging? And can we make it into more of an experience? Jason: [00:07:26] I love that. I love creating things and an experience. And I want to take a brief 20 seconds to have a mastermind member come on and tell you about the digital agency experience, which you kind of set it up pretty well. So let's go ahead and hear what Justin has to say real quick.
Justin: [00:07:43] I was just talking to one of the other members a little bit ago. And I was like this event is absolutely incredible. And I've been to a lot of events and I think I have like 19 pages, something of notes. And we're only part of the way through day two. And I came at it with no agenda, but I came at it because I'm, we get holed up in our little bubbles. You know, we go through the grind. We're in the office every day, or, you know, we're working with our employees, we're working with our clients and I really just wanted to be a group of people that have been there and done that, that can speak the same language, have some of the similar problems that I have. And I have found that to be the case, meeting a lot of great new friends now and making a lot of great connections and learning a whole heck of a lot that I'm going to take back. In fact, I've been messaging my business partner non-stop like, Hey, it's go time when we get back, because I've got a lot of good things to him. Jason: [00:08:37] When you're an agency partner with Wix, you unlock an entire digital ecosystem for creating, managing, and growing your agency. Get the full coding and design freedom to create anything your clients need along with the tools to manage and collaborate with your team seamlessly from anywhere. And when it comes to growing your agency, you can get matched with new leads every day and earn revenue share for every website you guys create. They're backed by the Wix industry-leading security and site performance. You'll also have a dedicated account manager on standby 24/7 so you can reach your goals and start setting new ones. See for yourself, head over to wix.com/partners and re-imagine what your agency can accomplish. Awesome. Well, thanks, Justin. If you guys are interested in more of the digital agency experience, go to digital agencyexperience.com and check it out. All right, let's get back to you, Julia, and talking more about what are some of the things that you wish you knew about five years ago? That would benefit you in your agency. Now today Julia: [00:09:52] Vanity metrics meant everything five years ago, and that's how we were perceived. And I didn't have the confidence then to go it doesn't have to be that you've got to be seen in the big types lists and obviously in the US the Bloombergs and the CNNs and the Forbes. And they’re great. But what I wish I knew is I had the confidence to go, you know, in the same way that I work with advertising and companies. And they're trying to always say, we're all about targeting. We can take your brands and we can talk at the exact user at the right time, right place. That should follow through in PR. That we now work with titles that are so wide-ranging and we don't care necessarily on their huge reach it's about who they are? Are they right for the message? What are you trying to say and who do you say it to? And then match that up and, and then make it count and make it measure. And make it show that the value is there. It's not all about the scale and the reach. And I wish I'd had the confidence to do that. Cause I think, I think you start to, you get that imposter syndrome when you're not appearing in those big titles. And for a lot of our clients, we work with Adtech and MarTech companies predominantly. We love working with startups. Two of our clients have been one of them has been with me seven and a half years. They went from a smaller company and they're about to IPO next year. Another company doing the three years there was, starts out, they're about to IPO next year. I love those companies. Now for them, they're startups. They were never going to get into those big mainstream titles. But what we have the confidence now to do, and they love it and they get. Is that it's about what you're saying and the audience that's buying that. And the same goes for social. It doesn't matter if, it's not about how many, it's not about how many followers you necessarily gained through. It’s who followers are and how engaging they are and what your percentage of engagement. Wish I’d known that. It would have saved me a lot of heartache. Jason: [00:11:50] I know, I, I think there's a lot of us that have that imposter syndrome, right? It's kind of like, or, and we look at the wrong metrics and we look at those vanity metrics. I mean, I always tell agencies, you need to be creating content and really building your brand. And a lot of times for the first couple of years, they get discouraged. They're like all the a hundred people checked it out. What if they were the perfect hundred clients for you? Julia: [00:12:16] A hundred percent. We always say this and it's, uh, you know, you just go, it only takes one. It needs just one person to actually responded and go pick up the phone and make that sale, you know, for a lot of these companies. And that's what we're enabling going actually let's look and see what, uh, how it worked and how it responded. I also try to explain to people it's about the mix with anything it's trying different things. See what works, see what fits and the same way you do within your day to day, life of trying on clothes. You then find what fits and what works. The main message I always say is Be loud. Be brave, be you. Do not try and change, do not to try and be like somebody else. It will ultimately fail. And especially for agencies who are looking at, with their own with trying to advise the brands. Those that can be consistent in their tone and their message and ultimately make it resonate. It makes it far easier for the whole company to get behind you when you going, oh, I get it. I'm just, that's who we are. That's what we do. Be loud, be brave, be you. It's kind of my big mantra that I try to… Jason: [00:13:20] I love it. If people want to know more and check out the agency where can they go? Julia: [00:13:24] So they can go to thedigitalvoice.co.uk or check us out on LinkedIn. So what we do, we almost use our LinkedIn, the digital voices, our runbook, and see all the different pieces of content from our brilliant clients. Or link in with me, Julia Smith. I'd be delighted set to meet with them as well. Jason: [00:13:42] Well, awesome. Julia, thanks so much for coming on the show. You rocked it. Thanks so much. Make sure you guys go check out the website. Ad if you guys want to come to the next Digital Agency Experience, I want you guys to go to digitalagencyexperience.com and apply, and maybe you'll be with us at the next experience. Until next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Is_Your_Agency_Constantly_Evolving_to_Stay_Relevant_to_Clients_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 12 December 2021
Scott Harkey had a rocky start in the agency business, having to keep other jobs while he tried to get his agency, OH Partners, off the ground. It took time, but he built his reputation and now runs a stable of agencies, as he says. Scott talks about how the first years of agency growth are always difficult and why new agency owners should give themselves a long runway to get their business off the ground. He also reflects on the mistakes he made and why he should have focused on strategic growth and talks with optimism about the future of the agency business, where he sees tons of opportunities for independent agencies that are starting out as well as opportunities to rebuild trust with clients, which is at an all-time low. 3 Golden Nuggets
Stop Wasting Time on Bad Pitches & Earn the Confidence to Get Your Agency Off The GroundJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here, and I have an amazing guest who's grown a really big agency well over the eight-figure mark. And we're going to talk about his path to starting the agency, to growing it, to scaling it. So let's go ahead and get into the show. Hey, Scott. Welcome to the show. Scott: [00:00:24] What up? Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:25] Yeah, man. Excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you guys do? Scott: [00:00:30] My name's Scott Harkey, I run a stable of agencies. You know, anything from a film company to a research company, to a digital social agency. And been doing it about 13 years. We have 170 ish employees corporately based in Phoenix but also have an office in Las Vegas. So, uh, I do a lot of clients within entertainment, casinos, hotels. And then, you know, other stuff, CPG, healthcare. Faking it till we make it, uh, until they keep hiring us. Jason: [00:01:02] We all do that. Scott: [00:01:03] …continue to hire us for 13 years and then sometimes we get fired too, but that's okay. Jason: [00:01:08] That's awesome. How did you start the agency? Scott: [00:01:12] Funny story. So I started the agency with my second cousin once removed. He was in the agency business. I was selling radio. His dad, my uncle was in the agency, great uncle, was in the agency business for twenty-five years. And, uh, I wanted to be in the agency business and literally like, no one would hire me because they thought I was a radio sales guy or a billboard sales guy. So he and I talked and he just lost his biggest client and his partner left. And he had one other small client that I think produced like $8,000 in revenue, it was the Arabian Horse Show. And, uh, he filed the paperwork next day and we started an agency in his kitchen table and worked out of his little condo in Scottsdale with the two cats. So I had a lot of motivation to get more clients so we could have an office and I wasn't in the condo with cats. Jason: [00:02:04] There's nothing wrong with cats. I mean… Scott: [00:02:07] Yeah, I love cats. It was fine, but like you have like a meeting and you have to, like, this was before like meeting for coffee was like, cool. We had to like fake it to like the, okay, you want to meet for coffee? Because they couldn't come to our office. It was embarrassing. Jason: [00:02:19] Oh yeah, the cats would jump on them? Scott: [00:02:23] Yeah, it was like what? You're in a kitchen table. This is like a, you're like in an apartment, bro. Like, what’s going on? Jason: [00:02:28] I remember my first address for Solar Velocity. It was 9 25 Canterbury Street, suite 250, because I was in apartment 250. Scott: [00:02:40] Exactly. Yeah. So we, we got an office after that. Like, you know, there was like bail bondsman and like some weird clientele. I was just happy to have an office. Like I didn't, I did not care. So, uh, it's funny to see like what we've come now. Like we're all have high-end tastes now in office and stuff. Like we've scrapped this out. Jason: [00:02:59] Exactly. Let's talk about the different couple stages that you've probably gone through. So how long did it take you guys to get over the million mark? And what was the biggest challenge for getting over the million mark? Scott: [00:03:10] Yeah. That's the hardest part, honestly. I think it took us… I mean, I, I remember like leaving radio and I was like pretty confident. Like I was like, oh, I've got three or four clients I know are going to come with me. And none of them did. And I can remember, like my first client was like a personal injury attorney that I like had to like beg to hire us. And he would spend a lot of money in the market and he was, he was insane. But it probably took us three years to get over the million mark in fees. It was so hard, dude. That's why I always tell people, like, when they're starting out, like give yourself a runway. Give yourself a long runway because it's not smart… And I think to make it an entrepreneurship, I think it's just the people that like have the longest amount of time to get this big plane up off the ground. And then once you get off the ground, that's where people… You know, I think it's overstated, but like hockey stick growth and it can like go. But like getting that sucker off the ground is it's horrible. Like you need other jobs. Home hosts, you know, like I was still selling billboards like part-time. I had like some rental houses, like I was hustling. Anything I could get to like scrounge money just to like make sure that we had enough longevity to like, get this thing going. Jason: [00:04:23] What were some of the different things that allowed the plane to take off? Scott: [00:04:27] I think there's something inside of us that like, you almost have to earn confidence in this business. Because people are freaking smart and they smell your bullshit. And like, if you don't believe your own bullshit, like no one else is going to believe it. So I think for me, it's about doing the work and failing enough times to where you know, like you're up, gonna bat. You're in a pitch or like, you know, a business so well, like, you know you're going to make somebody money. Like until you are sitting across from a client and you are so confident that you can drive a business outcome, then I don't think you're going to get any business. And for me, that stupid personal injury attorney, like I knew everything about his business. I had studied everything. I knew how I was going to buy the media. I knew how the spots were going to be different. I knew everything I got and he knew it because I was, I literally told him that like, if we didn't improve his business, I would give all my fees back to him. I was like, I had to beg this guy. And then the same thing happened when we won the Arizona Lottery account. It was a, it was a $55 million account in Phoenix in Arizona. And, uh, I studied the lottery business for two years before the pitch was up. Like I had lottery consultants. I literally have a master's degree in lottery business. So when the pitch was up, I had talked to like every former marketing director. I talked to everyone, I looked at every form of pitch. And I think like in pitches, there's just a, there's a vibe of confidence that you've done the homework and that's when you're going to get business. And when you get business obviously that's when you start becoming profitable. You can't cut your way into profitability in the agency business. It's about getting business and then keeping it. But initially, it's about gaining business. And I think you have to have like a real sense of confidence when you're going into a pitch like that. Jason: [00:06:17] Yeah. I mean, we were talking kind of the pre-show it's kinda like, we think we do the best work. And I was like, we should all think that because if you know, you don't do the best. That's the problem. Like so many people come to me, they're like, Jason, how do you scale an agency? How do you grow? How'd you get to where you're, you're at? I was like, we knew how to do something really well. And then we positioned that to the audience that we could do it really well for. And then that's how we were able to get the plane taking off and off the ground. But then it's kind of like, all right, now you've got the turbulence, right? The smack and the plane back down, or it's hitting the tarmac. So what was the hardest part of scaling the agency for you to date? Scott: [00:07:03] I think just in general, dealing with failures and. And I think in our business, the worst thing is perfectionism. And that's hard to say, right? Because in one hand, we're like, we need to do the best work. But on the other hand, I think perfectionism is a real disease in this business. And you can't be in this business if you have that, because nothing's going to be perfect and there's going to be tons of stuff broken. And so I would say every year there's like a new failure learning that I have, um, that we've seen. And it's always different. And so I think the hardest part of scaling an agency is not being prepared for like the new failure you're going to face that year. But having some maybe general skills or maybe some personal development that will just allow like perseverance through the failures that come. Like this year for me, it's been, you know, agency turnover and the great resignation. Last year, it was a major partner, minority partner fight. You know, the year before that it was a ton of client loss year before that it was like mid-level managers that I was trying to empower and get less hands off on certain things and working more on the business, not in the business. So it's like every year there's like something you want to… In the early stages, it was like just trying to literally get business, anything. In some years it was… I think I lost in one year, like 60 pitches. Like why was I pitching 60 pieces of business? I don't know, but I lost 60 pieces of business. And I think like each year the learning from those failures, catapults, like to the next form of growth. And I think like, we all want like just a steady Eddy kind of growth, but this business is so volatile it typically is like this, but like the trend line is like this. And I always notice like my worst prior ends up being my best year, the next year, right? Like it's preparing me for the next step that I think we need to get to. So I think that's the hardest thing is that you're like in an octagon and you don't know what punches are going to be thrown, but you know, you've got to like figure shit out and, and, and kinda like get counselors, get mentors, get coaches, listen to the industry. And like figure out your move and your counter punch when those come through. I think that's the hardest part. Jason: [00:09:22] Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, it's like Mike Tyson says, you know, you never know how you're going to take a punch until you get hit. Scott: [00:09:28] Yeah, for sure. Jason: [00:09:28] And, you know, we get hit all the time. It's just… Scott: [00:09:32] All the time. Well, people are smart in this business. Like theirs. I, I'm not sure there's a business where there's more smart people that I've ever worked with. Well, there's been clients' side or other industries or lawyers or doctors. I talked to really smart agency people and they blow me away. They're freaking smart. And I think, um, and they’re planners, like, like a lot of us are, or will be, we want to have a plan. That's the business we're in, we plan for clients. And so just to your point, when you're in the fire front, you get punched, the plan’s out the window and you're scrapping. And I think, I think that can really rattle people. And I think just the tenacious kind of scrappy, kind of street fighter mentality people end up pushing through that and the perfectionism like, hey, I have my perfect plan and now I need a new plan. And like the freak out people, like, you're not gonna, you know, this business isn't for you and you're not going to make it. Jason: [00:10:25] Is your agency struggling to deliver real revenue growth results to your clients? You know, agency marketers can consolidate data and align marketing and sales teams goals to achieve real results for your agency and clients asing revenue growth platforms. SharpSpring is an all-in-one platform built for agencies like yours to optimize digital marketing strategies with simple, powerful automation. Manage your entire funnel all in Sharpspring. Now for a limited time, my smart agency listeners will receive your first month free and half off onboarding with SharpSpring. Just visit sharpspring.com/smartagency to schedule your demo and grab this offer. That's sharpspring.com/smartagency. Yeah, you know, I never… I'd always have a north star, but I would never have a plan, right? Like I'm the type of person that when I'm building something, I always have extra parts because I'm more efficient. That's how I like to look at it. And I look at the agency business for me, even the community that we've built over the past seven years, it's always excelled when chaos has happened everywhere else. And the same thing, like what I was telling you on the pre-show. I'm like, I really don't have anything planned to ask you. It's more, just a conversation. I'm really better at that. If I have to plan it out, I'm kind of like, oh, what's the next question I'm answering? And I can't be in the mode now. Now that's just me, but I think kind of the moral of the stories is you have to figure out what's the truth or what's the north star of where you think you want to go. And then you start bringing on the right people to help you with that and realizing, and I think you probably will say this too… You're not going to be able to do everything, like your agency has grown to the multiple eight figures of where it's at now is probably because you brought the right people in and you probably said, who do I need to bring in rather than how? Am I stretching or is that right?
Scott: [00:12:32] Yeah, I think, you know, I think for me, like, certainly we've done like every two years, we'll do a branding workshop for ourselves and we'll reevaluate mission, vision values, and, um, what we're trying to do. And certainly that's been successful. But I think when I'm at my best, I know when our agency's at our best, it's, we're open to a reset every day, every month, every year. And I think people think when you, when there's a reset, like you're starting over. And I think like a reset, like I remember we were playing like, you know, Nintendo I'm, I'm older, but like, you know, I used to play Nintendo. Jason: [00:13:08] I was Atari. Scott: [00:13:10] Yeah, ok. So you’re older than me. Nintendo there's a little reset button and you would get to a point in a game and you're just like, screw this. And you like hit the reset button. You just start over. You don't start over, you know, where the little points in the game are that like trip you up and so you can get through. And I think for even my life personally, my business life, like when I'm okay with like a reset and knowing I'm not fully starting over because I have, I have a wealth of knowledge. We have a wealth of knowledge and agency and processes and clients, and, and we're just, we're just resetting, it's more like a digital campaign and like an optimization kind of, kind of piece to it. So I understand the north star and I agree, I think there should be a north star. But I, I also think kind of being willing to just reset things like everybody, hey, let's freaking reset real quick. Like, you know, what are we doing here? And not be so, you know, not like die on the sword on some plan or some north star that you think is like, perfect. Like if we would've done what mirroring the industry would have said, we, we should have done, we would have no casinos and hotels clients. Like on our Vegas office, we'd like be doing CPG, you know? And now have like 60% of our businesses that, so I think just being open-minded to where the world and energy and your capabilities and your purpose, like is going to take you. Jason: [00:14:31] Very cool. Now that we've talked about kind of getting the plane off the ground, let's talk about there's a lot of people listening, going alright, I'm in the multimillion-dollar mark, but I want to get over the eight-figure mark. For some odd reason. They want to do that because they think there's sunshine and rainbows over there. But if you had to go back to yourself, when you were around the 3 million mark, what's a single thing that you would do in order to get to the eight-figure mark? Scott: [00:14:59] It's a great question. I think I could, uh… I'm a wild card, I think I could have been a little bit more strategic on growth. I think I've wasted a ton of money on bad pitches. I think I've convinced myself so many times that we can get a piece of business, which we couldn't. We had not, we didn't have the capabilities. We didn't have the experience. Didn't have the relationship. And I think I could have got to eight figures... So that's like, okay. So like you're talking, like I get confused on the, I know that's kind of your terminology, but like I'm at like 5 million in fees and I'm trying to get to 10, right? How would I got there knowing what I know now? Jason: [00:15:36] Yep. Scott: [00:15:36] Yeah. I wasted money pitching. I should have only pitched what we had business pitching or key relationships that I had. And every time I can convince myself that we can get any pitch. Jason: [00:15:47] Where you doing RFPs? Scott: [00:15:49] Oh, yeah. Oh, hell yeah, I've done it all. Jason: [00:15:53] You know what RFP stands for right? Scott: [00:15:55] What? Jason: [00:15:56] Requests for fucking punishment. Scott: [00:16:00] Actually this digital agency we bought, Nomadic. They like, they laugh at me. They have so many brands within Fortune 1000 companies that came and talk about. Cause they’re like, they're like, here's the here's, it's 500 grand. You want us to do this, this and this or not? We don't report hours. We don't do RFPs, kind of blew my mind. Jason: [00:16:17] That's how we were. Scott: [00:16:19] It's smart. It's how it should be. Like people, you know, you need to build confidence with CMOs and people, you know, they… Just doing blank RFPs, rarely works. And even when you get them, you know, they're bad clients. Although I have had good success too. I mean, it's gotta be the right ones. Like I pitched Monster and it costs me probably a million dollars. And then, you know, like everybody it's like, oh, you finished second. And I was just, I was devastated. Jason: [00:16:44] A million dollars on a pitch. Wow. How much of a engagement would that have won you? Scott: [00:16:51] Oh, man, it would have won me probably… three or maybe three to 5 million in fees. I mean, I this business is like, uh, you know, we have a lot of casinos, you know, resorts is our client, Virgin’s our client. Jason: [00:17:04] Put it all on black. You did it, you did it on that one. Scott: [00:17:09] Exactly, bet on red. You know, but I do think… So I say that, but I do think you have to have some bets. You know, you have to have, if I wouldn't have made some, some crazy bets, like we wouldn't be where we're at. So it's hard to, but there's, you know, there's definitely some really crazy bets that I think if I would've taken back, especially early in our cycle. We weren't ready with the processes. We didn't have the talent capabilities. I think we could have got to that five to 10 million faster. And then the second piece to that is I think I've held on to unprofitable accounts. That 80/20 rule always exists, right? You know, I've probably had three to five unprofitable, low-dollar pain in the ass clients that I didn't let go quick enough. Jason: [00:17:51] Walk me through the mental on… Because I find that I'm guilty of it. We're all guilty of it. What was the turning point? What was the switch that you were like, dude, I'm losing too much money on this client. Get rid of them. Scott: [00:18:03] I just think more data and awareness for internal operations, right? Like we had better systems to identify it more and you're not making biased decisions. You're making more data-driven decisions. So we have an analytics group that really, we nail this shit really well now. So it's not like, oh, this is a $500,000 client. No, this is a $72 an hour client, you know, and we only make money at $92. So you're, you know, $200,000 client, you make $250 an hour on they’re actually great. So just having better awareness for that. And I think, I think agencies should go through this process monthly and really have their finger on the pulse. And most likely everyone has the 80/20 rule. I, every year I've done it, I've had it. And I think I was losing out on organic opportunities with my big clients that I'm holding on to shitty low dollar, low dollar amount clients and low dollar per hour clients. Um, that also were a pain in the ass and it was just killing us. And I was burning people out… If I'd figured that out earlier, probably even more so than pitching bad business. I could've got to eight figures faster. But if I would have both those things dammit. Man. I, I probably would be at like 50 million in fees right now. Now that I think about it. Jason: [00:19:15] Well, we had mastermind members all the time… they're always looking to scale faster. And one of them, we do this exercise quite often and we identified for one of the mastermind members there was a number of different clients that he needed a literally double the rights in order to make it profitable. And so literally we came up with a game plan and we just said, hey, just chat with them, double the rates. If you lose half of them. Okay. And that's what we were fully expecting. He retained all of them and literally by just talking to them, he increased his MMR by 60K. Scott: [00:19:51] What's MMR? I'm not used to that terminology. Jason: [00:19:54] Monthly recurring revenue. Scott: [00:19:55] Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Jason: [00:19:57] So just doing nothing. So that turned out to be what, 700,000 extra a year. And if you just do that, like, I'm glad you walked us through all of that, because at the end of the day, it's about pricing. Scott: [00:20:10] And we suck at pricing. We suck. I've learned a lot around. And just what you said. I agree with, like you just go to the clients and be like, dude, here's the… I'm getting crushed. Like I'm out. Or we got to change and either they go away or you get, you get the rate. Jason: [00:20:25] Awesome. Well, Scott, this has all been amazing. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Scott: [00:20:30] I, I do think that the industry is changing a lot right now. And like you said, I, I think that's when… That's our time to shine, honestly. I think this year, this has been my best year ever, you know, with all the chaos. But I do think that our client dissatisfaction rate in this industry is still at an all time high. I think it's in the 80 percentile. Basically our clients say we suck as a, as an industry at serving their needs. I think we've got to solve that better. I think there is a real opportunity. And I, I think for the first time ever, we're seeing CMOs and VPs in marketing… We're seeing our clients and us have more in common than ever. They all have agencies and we run agencies. So I think we can learn a lot from each other. And I think the new model is really trying to find gaps that they have, we certainly have. And being respected in the industry, I think it means a lot more. And it's really interesting, I think time for the business. And I think the people that really run good agencies are doing things the right way have a ton of opportunity. Cause I, I think a lot of the, the bad practitioners are getting weeded out of the business. It's getting too hard for them to survive. So I would, I guess I would just leave the audience with like a sense of real optimism and encouragement. And especially for independents, especially for independents, especially people grinding it out. The publics are, are so fucked right now. Good friends of mine run, run a lot of great agencies and some of our amazing agencies. And they're not going away. Let's not kid ourselves. But I think for the first time in our business, there's never been a better time to be an independent agency and to offer real solutions in a humble, cool vibe way to brand marketers. And the playing field is probably more level than it's been in a long time. So that's, that's a lot of fun. That's what gets me really excited. Jason: [00:22:22] Yeah. I interviewed someone and they're doing a lot of research and agencies fell… For trust levels, agencies fell between politicians and car used car salesmans. So let that all sink in guys. It's, it's about building trust and reputation that, you know, it takes years to build, but seconds to knock down. Think about that. So what's agency website people go and check you guys out? Scott: [00:22:50] Yeah. So our, our main agency is ohpartners.com. A couple of our big sister agencies would be nomadic.com and a matteroffilms.com. And so you can see some of the additional agencies we have, but the main one is the ohpartners.com. Jason: [00:23:06] Awesome. Well, Scott, thanks so much for coming on the show. And if you guys enjoyed this episode and you want to be around amazing agency owners that are constantly chatting about the industry, sharing what's working. Sharing what's not working. Be able to see the things that you're not able to see. I want all of you to go to digitalagencyelite.com now. This is our exclusive mastermind that is only for amazing agency owners. So go to digitalagencyelite.com and until next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Start_With_Confidence_and_a_Long_Runway_to_Grow_Your_Agency.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 8 December 2021
Ben Worthen was a journalist for most of his professional career. During those years, he heard many marketing pitches and grew to dislike the type of marketing that focuses exclusively on selling a product. That's why, when making the transition to creating his own digital agency Message Lab, he focused on combining journalism, data, and design to create content that resonates with people. In this interview, about how he has focused on marketing that creates meaningful interactions. Ben also shares his agency’s growth strategy and why it's important to grow smart rather than growing fast. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesGusto: Today's episode is sponsored by Gusto, an all-in-one people platform for payroll, benefits, HR where you can unify your data. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Head over to gusto.com/agency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Focus On Creating Meaningful Interactions and Grow Smart, Not Fast{These transcripts have been auto-generated. While largely accurate, they may contain some errors.} Jason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here. And on today's episode, I bring on an agency owner that's only been doing the agency for three years and has already grown a huge agency where a lot of you would like to be and created this singular mission. And we're going to talk about it a lot of what's worked for them and what's not worked for them. So this is really good episode. I hope you enjoy it. Hey, Ben. Welcome to the show. Ben: [00:00:32] Thank you for having me. Jason: [00:00:33] Yeah, man. I'm excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Ben: [00:00:38] I'm Ben Worthen. I'm the CEO of a company called Message Lab. And we are a content agency, which can mean all things to all people, but we have a very narrow focus, um… Specifically, we're focusing on using journalism and that kind of storytelling to help our clients communicate with the people that they want to reach outside of a sales opportunity. So if you think about the world in terms of when you want to buy something and when you don't want to buy something, a kind of binary reductive way of thinking. If you're anything like me, I want to buy something five, 10% of the time. And when I do, having someone come to me and give me a product information is really valuable, super helpful. But most of the time, I'm just a person in the world who wants to be entertained, want to be informed. I want to be engaged somehow. I want to flip through stuff on the phone. I'm going to have to search around to listen to something cool. And our belief is that, you know, companies that are focused on trying to sell you something all the time, which is like, you know, most companies all the time, they're just missing so many opportunities, 90, 80% of the chances that they have to engage with you and have some sort of meaningful interaction around an idea. So that's where we come in and that's where this background that we have in journalism and some other things that we do, which I'm happy to talk about, come into play. And where we think that we can create opportunities for meaningful interactions that over time are going to pay off for the companies we work with. Jason: [00:02:03] Yeah. You know, I mean, that's a good mindset and a good north star to kind of follow because, you know, I would always, as I was training my sales team or as I’m you know, helping out the mastermind members… I'm like, look, you're not selling anybody anything. You're positioning what they actually need. But if you're trying to sell them something you've already lost. You got to ask the right questions and really kind of position it in a way where… Let's just jump on a call. Let's see if we can work together, see if I can help you out. See if I understand your problem. And then if we do, and we both agree, then I'll tell you how we can work together. And it just kinda just takes down everybody's fences and then be like, all right, cool. That sounds good. Ben: [00:02:47] Yeah, exactly. And imagine doing that in the digital environment where it's a one to many interaction. You know, there's the, the point, the number of times, you know, like a banner ad, as an example for a product is like the ultimate spray and pray, you know, experience. It's super cheap. It doesn't cost much to make, and it doesn't cost much to get in front of somebody. But if you're lucky, 1% of people are going to be interested in it at any given time. So our whole mindset… And so I'll back up for a moment. Early in my career, for most of my career as a newspaper reporter, a journalist. I worked in the Wall Street Journal and I was someone who day in and day out, had companies come in and just try to pitch me. And it was always this schlocky marketing message. And I would sit there very politely. But in my head of thinking like, you know, nobody cares, how on earth is this going to be interesting to people? And, you know, and I was the one who was being paid essentially to listen and hear out people. When I made my own transition to marketing, I think I brought with me some of that disdain for the way marketing has always been done. And in particular, this notion of like, people just don't care, we don't care about what you're trying to say most of the time. And if you think about what you try to do as a journalist, you're really, you're sitting there trying to think about like, well, how can I make someone care? You know, what's the story? I think this thing is cool. I think this guy, Jason has this great story. How do I tell it in a way it's going to be interesting to people? And that's sort of the filter through which you run everything. And as I spend more time in marketing, what actually happened was I gained a huge amount of respect for the rigor, the discipline, the analysis, the, the process, everything that goes into doing marketing on behalf of a big entity. But I still couldn't let go of that notion of like come on, let's just make something people care about, you know, that can be valuable too. And when you're describing, you know, working with your team, you're talking about trying to create a moment that's valuable for the person on the other end of the phone call, uh, in that moment. And what we're trying to do with our clients is do that same thing digitally. Do that same thing in a one-to-many scenario where you're making stuff and putting it out into the world. But the goal of it is to be cool. The goal of it is to be valuable. The goal of it is to, you know, find someone who has a problem and give them an answer that's going to help them. It's not really about your product or to find someone who's curious about a topic and inspire them. You know, they don't know that they're looking for it, maybe, but it finds them and it creates a moment of value for them. And then, you know, from there, that's where the marketing part kind of kicks in, you know, what do you do with it? How do you make it part of your go-to-market motion? How do you integrate it into, you know, the data collection and aggregation of everything else that you're trying to do? So that you can not just like make cool stuff and pat each other on the back, because like, wow, that was so cool. We love it. Shiny. But it's doing something for you. It’s valuable. And you can, you can look at… You can go to your boss at the end of the year, put up a slide that has some data points that shows what you've accomplished through making that kind of content. Jason: [00:05:57] Taking care of your employees has never been more important than right now. And while paydays are great, running payroll is a major pain. From calculating taxes, deductions, compliances. None of it's easy. Unless, of course you have Gusto. Gusto is simple, online payroll benefits built for small business. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Plus, with their help, you can offer benefits like 401k's health insurance, workers' comp, and a lot more. And because you're a smart agency masterclass listener, you’re going to get three months free once you run your first payroll. Go to gusto.com/agency. That's gusto.com/agency for three free months. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, when you're trying to reach out to people and, you know, why is it important and share and care? It's not about caring for everyone. It's actually about like, trying to push the people that you don't care about away and create this little segment that you actually care about. And then show them empathy and understanding and a little bit of authority and show them a plan. And I think you can destroy it. I think most people try to be like, I'm this for everyone. And I'm like, you're this for no one when you actually try to do that. They just have a hard time wrapping their brain around it. I mean, that's, you know, we were talking to the pre-show like, you've grown your agency fairly quick and you're like, what was that impressive? I was like, yeah. Some people wait a decade to get to where you're at. Some people never even get close
Ben: [00:08:05] Yeah. Well, the funny thing listening to your description is the thing that I feel has propelled our growth is just looking at this challenge of you know, how do you effectively communicate with people in these non sales moments? And it's doing exactly what you said, which is, you know, you don't care about everybody. You care about people that you're trying to reach, and those people are somewhat narrow. My mom, I always use this example, but my mom loves me dearly. And if I do something, she's going to read it. She's going to check it out. She's going to watch the video that… Jason: [00:08:35] My mom is the same way. Ben: [00:08:05] Yeah. You know and she's going to listen to this podcast. But, she's not going to buy something… Jason: [00:08:41] Say hi mom. Ben: [00:08:42] Hi, mom. She’s not gonna buy for most of our clients, right? You know, like our, our clients run the gamut from like B2B companies. It's just like, there's no way she’s gonna buy a million dollars worth of software. You know, it's just not plausible. And so it doesn't matter to them if my mom sees it and likes it. But that's where, you know, to go back to our growth, that's, what's been driving it. You know, it’s not… I mean, yes, it's hard to make something cool, but it's not hard to make something cool. Lots and lots of people make cool stuff. And yes, we have our own way of doing it. We have our own way of positioning it. We can talk to about the skills that we use in order to make cool stuff. And, and that's part of it. We have to bring together and our side people who are journalists and people who are designers in order to create experiences. But then like, let's go back to that question, right? Like how do you know that it's reaching the people that you want to reach? That's hard because it starts getting into how you promote it effectively, you know, how do you target? How do you do segmentation? And then how do you know that that's working? And it gets into analytics and like, oh my gosh, now this is getting crazy, right? Because how do we, you know, page views for the web? That's like the first thing everybody looks at, right? Page views, because right. Well, if you're getting a million moms coming in, giving your page views, and if that's all you're looking at, you're going to think you're killing it. When in reality, You're not reaching the people that you're trying to reach. And then it gets even more complicated because, you know, we're not really trying to sell something. We don't want you to, to click and buy. You know, what we're trying to get you to do is we're trying to create an impression. We're trying to prime the pump. And that means that the key thing isn't, you know, did you click on the buy now button? The key thing is that you come back. You know, the key thing is if you came back another time where you more likely than somebody else to do something that we want? Then that's what you had previously had an interaction with our content. And to do that you got to mix together a lot of different people with a lot of different backgrounds. And so for us, that meant like you got, we got to get people who can create the content. So we brought in a bunch of people who were journalists. You know, we needed people who could make experiences that people wanted to consume, so we brought in a bunch of designers. And then we needed people who could do the promotion and the audience development and all of that, so we had to bring in into those people. And then analytics. It's like, well, if the traditional way of doing analytics, isn't giving our clients the kind of data that they want, we kind of have to invent our own analytics. And so we did, you know, we hired a bunch of people who understood analytics, were able to grapple with this challenge of how do you do analytics specifically for content that isn't meant to sell people anything. So our team just started to grow and grow as we introduce these new capabilities. And every single time we're introducing a new capability we didn't really have a market for it. We didn't have someone who wanted to buy it. We just felt like in order to do this work well, we needed to be able to do this. So we effectively brought on a team, built the team because we thought that the proper way to do this work needed to include the skills that they brought to the table. And then something that we've had as sort of a through line in our experience was once we had the team in place, we could go either to our current clients or other clients. And we could begin to have conversations about the, hey, you know, it's cool. What if we were able to do this? And then only after we had the capability and the capability, would it be good to have a market opportunity to do it? Jason: [00:12:15] Very cool. What's a big mistake that you made that you wish you could go, go back and redo? Ben: [00:12:22] For me. And it's so laughable at this point was just thinking that this whole agency thing was really, really easy. Yeah. We had had this experience where in 2018, I walked into the coworking place and it was like, all right, great. Now we're a company. Let's see what happens. And I was lucky that I knew some people who want to take a chance on hiring us. I say I was us even though, initially it was just me. You know, where able to pull together some teams, ran the whole business that first year on a spreadsheet. I had this enormously complex spreadsheet, but everything worked. The cells always added up. And, you know, and things were growing. People were coming in. We're adding more people and very quickly at the beginning of year 2, 2019, we went on a huge hiring spree. And I think we convinced ourselves that we had the business model of a high growth startup, meaning that all we had to do was just bring on the people and no problem, no problem, no problem. So we didn't grow smart. We just sort of found people that we thought were cool. And we brought them in and we also had simultaneously, we were going really fast, but I don't think that we were growing strategically. In the sense that we weren't selling the same set of activities, the same product over and over again. People were coming to us for a really broad range of things that broadly fit the skills that we had. And we were saying yes. What ended up happening is I think it was what is called weak growth. We had pockets of revenue that if we took a step back weren't services that we would really ever sell again. And in that meant that we weren't staffed deliver it. We weren't, we weren't investing and through training through time through search strategy and making that service better for our clients. And we weren’t creating a path for us to take the effort that we made, developing that and sell it to somebody else. And so when those projects went away, they just went away and we weren't able to take that and transition to some something else. So it took a little while to retrench our growth, also vastly exceeded our operational capabilities. We out kicked our coverage, to use a football analogy. And it, it meant that we had to do some catch-up from a process standpoint, from our financial understanding of the business. Like they just didn't have a great read of what was happening. We were surprised at the end of every quarter, uh, which is not a place to be. So we did a lot of work to fix those things, to have a, to refine what we did to narrow our focus a bit that. You know, it's tough because I think we look at the world through a lens of possibility and opportunity. And I still believe that to do the kind of work that we want to do is we want to do well. It requires more skills, more people with unique capabilities working together towards this one vision. But now we're just having to be a little bit more smart about when we add that capability. Why we add it? Where does it fit in a roadmap? Versus just a like, yeah, come on. Let's do it. Jason: [00:15:39] Awesome. Well, this has all been amazing, Ben. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the digital agency owners listening in? Ben: [00:15:47] I don't think this is going to be relevant for everybody, but it's what's got us to where we are, which is there's a lot of things that matter as an agency and revenue is certainly one of them, profitability is one of them. And we've adopted the mindset of looking at those factors as market validation for what we're trying to do. You know, if we are trying to put in place a new product. If we're trying to put together a new capability. If we’re trying to combine data and journalism and design and experiences in a way that people haven't done before, you know, the way that we're going to know is working is if we’re growing, if more people want the thing that we're doing. And so rather than thinking of revenue as something that we're targeting and, you know, and, and designing around a revenue number, taking the model of saying, well, we have to hit this kind of growth as an indicator that what we're doing is what people want and looking at it that way. And then designing the service that we think that we believe is what’s going to be the thing that drives us forward and then looking at that, you know, revenue profitability as the market telling us, yeah, you're right. This is, this is the thing that you want to do. Jason: [00:17:04] Awesome. What's the agency website people can go and check out the agency? Ben: [00:17:08] messagelab.com Jason: [00:17:10] Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Ben, for coming on the show. And if you guys enjoyed this episode, I want you guys to make sure you comment. Make sure you hit that like button and subscribe button. I have a question for all of you. If you are wanting to grow and scale your agency faster, do you think it's easier to do it with people that are ahead of you that are in the digital agency world? Because there's lots of opportunities that you have from working with a number of different people out there. But if you could be in a mastermind with amazing agency owners that are a lot further along than you, do you think you can grow faster? If the question is yes, I want you guys to go to the digitalagencyelite.com. I would love for you guys to apply after you check it out. And if you meet the criteria, then we'll have a conversation and see if it's right for you. So make sure you go to digitalagencyelite.com and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Grow_Your_Digital_Agency_Smart_Instead_of_Fast.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 5 December 2021
Do your clients have trust issues with your agency? How can you go about creating an honest rapport to build trust? Working at a larger agency Bob Bailey started to notice a trust problem. Clients are losing trust in their agencies. This trend has actually increased over time, with clients moving to in-house services. This is the opportunity he and his partners saw when they created their agency Truth Collective. They wondered "wouldn't it be great if a marketing agency could thrive by just telling the truth?" Then they set out to have honest conversations about strategy, creativity, and relationships. In his conversation with Jason, Bob spoke about all-time low trust levels in agencies, how he tries to build trust with potential clients from the first meeting, how he has built leadership teams in his agency, and why agency owners must themselves from being the fixer to empower their teams. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesSharpspring: Today's episode is sponsored by Sharpspring, an all-in-one revenue growth platform that provides all of the marketing automation, CRM, & sales features you need to support your entire customer lifecycle. Partner with an affordable marketing automation provider that you can trust. Head over to sharpspring.com/smartagency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Creating an Honest Rapport With Your Clients to Address Low Trust Levels in AgenciesJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here. I have another great episode and we're not going to talk about frou-frou shit. We're going to talk about rebuilding trust in our industry, and we're going to go over some really cool things. And I didn't know, he was telling me in the pre-show Bob was telling me that agency trust is ranked between Congress and I think something else. He’ll tell us, I can't remember, but like it's pathetic. So we're going to talk about what you can do in order to build trust. And if you have that trust, you can make more money, scale faster. and have the life that you want, where you have the freedom. So let's go ahead and get into the show. Hey, Bob. Welcome to show. Bob: [00:00:49] Hey, Jason. What's up, man? Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:51] I almost forgot which buttons to hit. We were talking about frou-frou stuff before. I'm so messed up. Bob: [00:00:58] I'm just going for the ride. Jason: [00:00:59] Yeah. Tell us who you are and what you do. Bob: [00:01:02] Jason, my name is Bob Bailey. I am one of the three founding partners of a creative company called Truth Collective. And my role here is the CEO, which I have sort of reframed from chief executive officer to the chief everyone officer. And I don't know if that's frou frou stuff to you or not. But for me, it sort of keeps me focused on, you know, my most important thing and that’s my team. So thanks for having me. Jason: [00:01:27] Yeah. As long as you're having fun and you guys are doing impact, I don't care what you call it. So how'd, you guys get started in this crazy industry that we’re in? Bob: [00:01:38] It's a good question. I've been listening to some of your shows and you know, a lot of folks, they tend to see a, a problem or a gap out there and they feel like they can fill that. And it was, it was similar with us. We were working together at a, at a larger agency. And at the time, like there was just getting hard. Like it was, it was getting really, really hard. And we started seeing these patterns where consumers were trusting brands less. Agencies… clients were trusting their agencies less. And even like inside the agencies, people trusting each other less. And so we said, man, like… Wouldn't it be just really easy and wouldn't it be awesome if a marketing agency could thrive by just telling the truth? Like, what if you were just honest about everything? What if you weren't like out there inflating case studies, inflating agency credentials presentations? What if you could just go out there and like be yourself and tell people the information that's going to really help them? And it was a really like novel, like silly idea at the moment. But we really got behind it and, um, we've built, we built a business on that. And so it's been really fun. Jason: [00:02:47] Well, how do you separate yourself? Because there's lots of agencies out there that are full of shit and they're not truthful. But they say they are. So how do you guys do that? Like, tell me about the stat that you were talking about in the pre-show. And I kind of teased in the intro, like the agency industry is between Congress and what for…? Bob: [00:03:12] Yeah. It's, Gallup does this annual survey on like trusted industries and they go through all of them and there is like pretty far down the list used car salespeople, advertising industry, Congress. So we're sandwiched between those two, those two industries. And like, I don't, if like, for me, like that's not a place that I want to live and after eight years or so, it, hasn't not only as it hasn't gotten better. I think it's actually probably getting a little bit worse. I mean, especially when you look at how clients are responding to it and in housing, everything. And it's really, it's a pretty interesting situation. And so I think we have some stuff to fix. Jason: [00:03:55] Well, you know, when, when we chat and we interview agencies to join our mastermind, we ask lots of questions around their delivery and the results that they give to their clients. And you'll be so surprised about how many that they don't know it. And they started by accident. They took a Facebook course on ads, and then they started like, they were really good marketers, but they could never deliver their own service efficiently. And like, it just blows me out of the water that, and people always ask me, what's the one thing you have to do to scale your agency? I'm like, well, you have to do something really well for your clients. Bob: [00:04:34] Yeah, for sure. I think that the work that we tend to do tends to focus on something we actually changed during COVID. But we got really focused in, on the stuff that we love to do and the stuff that we're truly like sort of brilliant at: creative strategy, insights, and big idea platforms. And we really tend to focus on like high-impact tactics, like the stuff that's going to really like move the brand forward. Sort of gradually moving away from a lot of the activation kind of things. But, um, for us, it's really important that, you know, we're setting up. How are we going to know if this works? How are we going to be happy? Like, yeah, there's the qualitative stuff. But a lot of times there's not business metrics in place. There's not foundational stuff in place on the client-side. And so we do all that we can to build those baselines so that we know for if we're helping them improve their business brand and in the behaviors of the customers. It’s all we care about. Jason: [00:05:32] What are some keys in order to build trust with your clients? Bob: [00:05:37] I think it starts from the initial conversation. And I think that that conversation has to be different than anything that they felt from other agencies. I don't have a PowerPoint that I use to introduce me or my agency to clients. I have a conversation. I feel like if you show up with your deck, then the meeting is about me and not them. And so I feel like squaring the meeting centrally right on their business and what they need is the place to be. And you'd be surprised how different that actually is. So I think it starts there and, you know, it sort of quickly goes into the things that we do and the things that we will not do. And so, you know, I think that's also been a disarming thing where clients will, they'll say, you know, well, I know, you know, as the owner, like you want to do all my stuff. Uh, because you know, you're money motivated and I'm like, well, actually, no, like I don't want to do a thousand banner ads. I don't want to do all, I don't want to do your emails. I don't want to do those things. Like I want to help your internal team be successful with that stuff. I think there's just like those sort… of known who we are and being okay with just like being okay with having a conversation about that. But I think it really just sets a tone for this is the kind of partnership that we're after, and this is how we're going to help you be most successful and help the other agencies in your network be more successful too. Jason: [00:07:03] Yeah. You know, I always use the analogy of the creepy guy in the conference. Like, do you have the creepy guy in the conference come up to you and they just start throwing up on you about how cool their company is and how amazing he is. All that. You're like, you're the creepy dude. Get away from me. The other guy comes up to you and starts asking you questions. And by asking questions, the whole attention is on them. People are going to like that conversation because it's about them. And that's what we always liked when we would come and have initial calls with our prospects. We were the same way. And I, and I always hate when agencies are like, well, we don't have our portfolio or our deck ready. What is that…? I'm like, you don't need that shit. The companies that want that, that means you're going to be doing an RFP, which really stands for request for fucking punishment. You shouldn't be doing that. So I love that approach. Let's kind of switch focus a little bit and talk about because you have over 30 people, um, you know, multimillion dollar agency. A lot of people can hit the million mark by accident. But when you start getting in the multiple millions, you have to get a lot of things right. I mean, you still haven't figured out everything. I don't have everything figured out. No one does. If they do, you should shoot them with a water gun and be like, you're lying. But how are you building better leaders? Because I feel that in order to get to the level that you're at, you have to build a really amazing team, which it starts with the leadership. Bob: [00:08:43] Totally. You're right, man. Like we, gosh… We've been in business for eight years now and you know, I always think about us like a version. You know, the current version of Truth Collective, and you know, we've been through, we've been through a few and we've tried some things and we didn't get it exactly right. Whether it was, you know, you talked about the leaders and the leadership team. I think in some cases like the people weren't quite right. But then also we weren't quite ready as sort of new owners to really understand what that even meant. We were very much in a mindset of like we're modeling the behaviors we expect and why don't you just understand that stuff? And that's not fair to anybody. And it also, you know, to your point, like you'll hit a cap and the cap… Our cap was like right around like three and a half to 3.8 million where… We can do that. Like kind of with any team, with any set of clients, like that's, that was what we were. And we, you know, we did that and we said, geez, you know, it's us. Like we looked in the mirror and said, okay, like we got to get out of the way here. And we got to get really serious about the leaders on the team, but how we going to do it? And it was about the people, but we also just needed some real structure and we were growing and growing rapidly, but we weren't growing in like an organized way. We started as an account guy, a strategist and a creative guy. And as we grew, like, we just hired more people like us. But what we weren't doing is growing from the standpoint of like the functions of the business. Like I wasn't, we weren't thinking about, okay, how are we going to staff new business growth? How are we going to staff client service? How are we going to staff creative? How are we going to staff the administrative stuff? And, you know, people just looked at all three of us all the time for decisions. And we were just, we just became the bottleneck that was holding it back.
Jason: [00:10:50] Is your agency struggling to deliver real revenue growth results to your clients. You know, agency marketers can consolidate data and align marketing and sales teams goals to achieve real results for your agency and clients asing revenue growth platforms. SharpSpring is an all-in-one platform built for agencies like yours to optimize digital marketing strategies with simple, powerful automation. Manage your entire funnel all in Sharpspring. Now for a limited time, my smart agency listeners will receive your first month free and half off onboarding with SharpSpring. Just visit sharpspring.com/smart agency to schedule your demo and grab this offer. That's sharpspring.com/smart agency. Yeah, you were the toll booth. I always like to kind of say. Bob: [00:11:43] Yes, you've talked about that before. Jason: [00:11:44] Yeah, and you kept mentioning a keyword: how? You're like, how do we do this? How do we do this? When did you start realizing who? And giving them the power in order to make the decision? Bob: [00:11:58] Yeah. It was actually in the fall of 2019. So we, we decided we needed to try the leadership team again. We selected people, you know, not by title. But by, like, if you run a function in the agency, you're on the team, like that's how we made the decision. So it was very clear and specific. We got that group together, we got super transparent. We shared everything about the business. All the numbers. So no more like close to the vest ownership. If these guys are going to lead, like they need to know stuff and they need all the information so that they can also learn how to become leaders too. So we started sharing that we met weekly every Monday, same agenda for 90 minutes and we just, we got into a cadence. And thankfully we did because, you know, we all know like what happened in March, you know? So we had made about six months, five months worth of momentum together as a team when, uh, when COVID hit and sort of through everything… Um, hit the brakes on everything. And so we had to respond to that. Jason: [00:13:05] You said you meet once a week on Mondays for 90 minutes and the same structure. And what was that structure of that meeting? Bob: [00:13:12] The structure was, it was actually, are you familiar with a organization called EOS? Jason: [00:13:18] Yep. There's lots of mastermind members and I've had Gino on, on the show a number of times. Bob: [00:13:24] Yeah. We adopted that, that framework in the beginning, just because we needed a consistent framework. And that seemed to be, it seemed to make a lot of sense. It was pretty straightforward and simple. And so it's you come in and you talk about like, what are the key? You know, you have a scorecard and so our scorecard is new business leads and prospects. It's how are we doing on our financial forecast today? You know, month and quarter, how are we doing? Um, we measure our, we call like remarkable creative briefs and opportunities, like of all the work in the shop how many of those have the potential to be really remarkable? And then we, um, there's some, some accounting metrics that we measure. And so we sort of quickly hit those. We talk about any employees, uh, or client issues that are going on. And then we devote about an hour of it to like issue, discussion and resolution. And so some weeks there's a handful of stuff that you have to move through some weeks. There's one thing. But the whole point is to use that brainpower in a really concentrated focused way to, to keep us moving in the right direction. Jason: [00:14:32] I love it. I love how, you know, and thanks for going over some of the KPIs or I guess what they call rocks or, or, um, I don't know what they call it. But I get the gist of it because there's a lot of people that don't really know what to measure and they just go into a meeting. Hey, how's it going? And, uh, really kind of it. I's like none of them, what's the agenda that you have for the week and let's, let's rock and roll. So… Bob: [00:14:59] We went from having no sort of across-the-board KPIs to implementing way too many. Jason: [00:15:07] Yeah, yeah. Bob: [00:15:10] To getting it down to like now there's like five, that really matter. You know what I mean? Like, and if you get enough insight from those five to, to hit like 90% of the business. So we're, we're learning as we go, like, it gets you really hands-on. But now we've especially with COVID like, I think when she had the right team and the right sort of flow… I think letting go is actually been like a key and helping us grow and scale. You were talking about that a few minutes ago. Jason: [00:15:38] Yeah. It's very challenging. We had our digital agency experience at my house in Colorado, a couple, uh, two weeks ago. And a lot of the agencies here, multimillion, they have a hard time letting go on stuff. I’m like, you just got to trust your team! Like, it's kinda like your baby, like let the baby fall and then they'll learn to walk. If you're going to be the crutch and you're always going to catch them, well, expect to catch them for the rest of your life. Bob: [00:16:09] It's true. You know, a lot of people, and I think a lot of agency owners, you know, you start an agency because you were really good in another agency or like maybe you were the fixer. And you know how to fix it and you know how to move on, but that only gets you so far, right? You can't be the fixer, like you have to, to your point, like you got to like help him walk. You got to coach them, not do. You got to direct, not fix. And so that's, that's been a real, it seems really subtle and it seems really obvious, but it's not so easy. Um, but it's been a real game-changer, like you said. Jason: [00:16:43] Yeah. And when it happens too you get depressed, cause then they're doing the decisions and doing all the stuff without you, they don't need you anymore. And then you're like, what do I do? And you're like, well now you're the CEO, dummy. This is your new role. And this is what you're doing. Bob: [00:16:57] Yeah, figure out what’s next. Jason: [00:17:00] Yeah, exactly. So I went through that and I always make fun of my mastermind members when they go through that. I'm like, hey, dummy, this is what you wanted now. Let's, let's do it this way. Life will be better. Bob: [00:17:15] It is, you know, I love it when people bring stuff that I would've never done or couldn't have done. My whole goal is I want Truth to be something that I couldn't make. I want it to outgrow me personally. And I, like, I think that's when you're really into some exciting, like durable stuff as a business. So it's fun when that happens. It is intimidating though, sometimes. Jason: [00:17:39] Oh yeah. Well, Bob, this has all been amazing. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Bob: [00:17:45] I think agency owners like... You put out a LinkedIn post the other day about you made a game out of it, but like, there was like… Jason: [00:17:53] Yeah. Never have I ever? Bob: [00:17:56] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, I've done all that. Every one of them I've done… Jason: [00:18:00] Multiple times. Bob: [00:18:02] Right. Habitually, right? I think like a key to happiness as an agency owner and the growth is like just, you know the answer. You know the answer is not to chase that stupid thing. You know the answer, you know what I mean? But the industry wants you to do that. Like there's so much crazy industry inertia out there. I think follow your gut. You know, I just, I think have the courage to follow your gut because you're going to be way happier. You're going to make room for the stuff that you really want to be doing instead of falling into those old traps. And you're going to wind up differentiating your agency as results. So your post got me really thinking about that. And I think that's helpful for it's been helpful for me. Jason: [00:18:48] Goog. Well, that's what it was designed for. What's the agency website URL people can go and check out the agency? Bob: [00:18:55] Sure it's truthcollective.com. All one word is until the truth. It's not like some weird UFO tracking organization. It's not some church, you know, we, we'd get all kinds of crazy stuff, but truthcollective.com and we're all over social. Jason: [00:19:13] Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Bob, for coming on the show, we really enjoyed it. If you guys liked that episode, make sure you like subscribe, tell a friend, tell a fellow agency owner that you'll help them out because look, we all know we're struggling a lot of the times they will help out. And if you want to be around amazing agency owners on a consistent basis and really what they're doing in order for you to scale faster. And you know, sometimes it's a shrink session. Sometimes it's a fun session. Sometimes it's like, oh my God, this is the best strategy I've ever heard. I'd like for all of you to go to digitalagencyelite.com and check out the mastermind. See if it's right for you. If you feel it is, apply. We'll have a conversation and we'll go from there. And, uh, so go to digitalagencyelite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Get_Over_Trust_Issues_and_Retain_Agency_Clients_Longer.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 1 December 2021
Dmitriy Pisarev became fascinated with computers and started building his first website at a very young age. He never lost that fascination and eventually got interested in direct response marketing, copywriting, and e-commerce marketing optimization, which is what led to starting his agency Conversion Whisperer. However, with diverse interests and a wide range of skills, Dmitriy has had a hard time choosing a specific niche. In this conversation with Jason they talk about how he changed his perspective on what his agency is, the struggle between niching down or going wide, and how figuring out your 'why 'should always be at the core of everything you do. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesWix: Today's episode is sponsored by the Wix Partner Program. Being a Wix Partner is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Choose Your Path Between Niching Down or Going Wide and Figure Out Your Why{These transcripts have been auto-generated. While largely accurate, they may contain some errors.} Jason: [00:00:00] What's up, everybody? I got another amazing guest and episode for you. One of our mastermind members. And we're going to talk about, should you niche, or should you go wide? He's been debating about this for a long time and it's going to be a really cool episode. He's a lot of fun, very smart. And let's get into the episode. Hey, Dmitriy. Welcome to the show. Dmitriy: [00:00:27] What’s going on, Jason? Jason: [00:00:30] Yeah. Tell us who you are and what do you do? Dmitriy: [00:00:33] A marketer aspiring to be a great leader. Run an agency that's focused on traffic, funnels, and email nurture sequences. And, um, we work with cool people. That's the qualifier. Jason: [00:00:47] Well, why do you work with me? Dmitriy: [00:00:52] You're, you're kind of a cool guy sometimes. Jason: [00:00:53] Sometimes. Sometimes. Dmitriy: [00:00:54] Yeah. When the moon aligns. Jason: [00:00:56] That's right. So tell us, how did you get started in this agency life? Why did you start an agency? Dmitriy: [00:01:02] Has anyone ever given you like a linear answer where it's like, oh, I went to school for this. You know, took a course and graduated and… Jason: [00:01:11] No. No one has. Dmitriy: [00:01:12] Yeah, I don’t think it works that way. Jason: [00:01:13] Yeah, it doesn’t. Dmitriy: [00:01:15] Yeah, man. I, I got fascinated with, uh, computers when I was, when I was nine years old and I built my first website right around then. And just, I discovered the magic of the internet. Just been fascinated with it ever since. Got really big into, uh, or deep into direct response marketing, copywriting. Then e-commerce marketing optimization. I feel like I'm, uh, collecting coins along the path of like different skillsets that will help me in the future. So really the agency was the evolution of not being able to handle the opportunities that were coming in. And for the longest time it's been like, we're an anti-agency agency where, you know, we we're, we're not what other agencies are. We worked with a very limited amount of clients and it's, uh, you know, service, integrity and dedication to delivering on the promises that we set is really important. And then just out of necessity, hiring a team, and then all of a sudden it's like, well, you guys are an agency. So I guess we are. Jason: [00:02:18] Yep. Awesome. Why do you say anti-agency? You know, there's so many people that kind of say that. Like they think agency means something bad. And I get it, cause I'm the same way about coaching. I think coaches are full of shit. I think most coaches are the ones that have never done anything. Why do you think so many people are, they'll be like, oh no, I'm not an agency. I'm like you get paid for services, marketing services…? Dmitriy: [00:02:44] Yeah, man. And like, you've, you've really helped me change the perspective on that just last year. You know, I feel like there's a presupposition to what an agency is, or like a, a misunderstanding. And it's, it's just based off of the bad taste that's been left in people's mouths working with people who are more focused on the recurring revenue than the, the value of the relationship. So, you know, in a weird way, it is kind of like a, a way to reframe the relationship and just help them better understand that things are going to be different around here. And one of our qualifiers is that clients had to have fired at least three agencies before working with us. So they know that it's not a fluke, right? So they know that it wasn't just a, the person didn't get me or they didn't pay attention or they didn't understand. You know, it's like, no, this, this is really difficult, right? Just past having a plan of action and then being able to execute on it. When you are working in an agency environment, having that leadership in place, the processes, the systems to support communication and milestones and targets. If you're looking at it purely from a hitting a certain goal of recurring revenue, it feels like what we're doing is a little different. And part of that is also the complexity of some of the messes that we've gotten ourselves into by really me leading us into the unknown of like the complexities of, hey, this client has this specific need. No one's been able to solve it for them. This sounds interesting. This sounds really fun. It sounds like a difficult problem. I love puzzles. Let's try to figure it out and let's set clear expectations that we haven't done this before. We do understand kind of what it encompasses and how to approach it, and we're able to pivot quickly. So if you're up for it, let's try to figure it out. And that's been, you know, part of the distraction. Jason: [00:04:36] Yeah, totally agree. So let's get into kind of the colossal decision for, you know, niching down or going wide. Walk us through kind of what you've been through, you know, with trying to make this decision. Cause I've, I've witnessed it firsthand. Dmitriy: [00:04:53] Yeah. It's like, uh, we get those flashbacks of PTSD. The war images. Jason: [00:05:00] I'm trying to make you cry. That's my goal. Dmitriy: [00:05:06] Yeah. Yeah, man. So look… There's this concept of building a business and an assembling a business that, um, I've been made aware of just very recently. And I think building an agency is, is… You've told me when we first started working together, like pick a market, pick a service and focus on that, which is really easy to say. And I think there's been a lot of experience and realizations that are, have become so true to you that it's almost like not an option to go down the other path. In a way, this is the difficult. Playing the video game on difficult, because you're, you're forced to do things that are not necessarily repeatable that are not scalable by not picking a market. But you're able to learn so much in those ventures because we serve e-commerce. And e-commerce itself is a very interesting and really broad space. Like we've done supplements, which are some of the most restricted things to, to market online, like the amount of compliance and crossing the T's and dotting the I's required there. So I've enjoyed the learnings that we've been able to achieve by not niching down. And I feel like the realization now, when I'm looking at the efficiency of the team and our… Certain tasks that haven't been done before causing drag and lag on finishing a project that I would have been able to do. So let me back up for a second then helping make sure I don't lose focus. One of the things that I heard is sometimes agency owners believe that they can teach other people to be the unicorns that they are. And effectively it's like Superman teaching people how to fly. They don't have that skill. They don't have that experience. They don't have the, the width of knowledge to be able to comprehend even what you're talking about. So when you have a lot of talents and a lot of experience, and can pretty much solve any problem better than most of the people out there… In my experience, I became fascinated with that, just the, the joy of solving a complicated problem. So in that transition to an agency, I built a team to support me in that. And what I found myself doing is expecting them to be able to read my mind of like, hey, go do this. And it's like, well, I expected them to end up here. And they ended up in a totally different area. So having those kinds of realizations that it's about assembling, creating an assembly line that a process could be followed from start to finish without many tangents in an expected way with everything to set it up, to request everything that's needed to deliver on it. The only way to do that is to niche down. So my realization it's been 13, 14 years of, of doing this formally, is that in order to get to a certain revenue goal while keeping services at a specific level of excellence… You have to standardize, you have to have, create a process that's bulletproof. Kind of like cars’ quality assurance. Like when Tesla started out, their QA was kind of shoddy. Cars were coming in, the panels had too many gaps between them or inconsistencies or like Ford's got it down. So…
Jason: [00:08:24] Not on the Bronco launch. Dmitriy: [00:08:26] Yeah. I heard about that. And you got, you got one, right? Jason: [00:08:28] No, no, I'm still waiting. I ordered a year ago. Dmitriy: [00:08:32] Okay. Okay. Yeah. I'm waiting on my Tesla. Hopefully I get it before I turned 60. T Cyber Truck. So in a way it's been something that has been kind of like a worm eating away at the fruit. Where I know that I have to do it, but there's also this joy and excitement and fulfillment of solving complicated problems and loving marketing, loving the technology that supports advertising, marketing, and sales that prevents me from, you know, really picking a, a narrow space. So what we've done is we've said we help with demand generation by building conversion driven funnels, which we send highly optimized traffic to. And then the people that don't take that don't convert right away at the ideal level, we have a nurture sequence that joins the prospect exactly where their mind’s at in the conversation and making that decision to take that next step forward. So we haven't really niched down, but we are streamlining a type of service and a type of focus. And then it's about qualifying the prospects that we work with and kind of like figuring out our north star as we make our way down there. Jason: [00:09:45] When you're an agency partner with Wix, you unlock an entire digital ecosystem for creating, managing, and growing your agency. Get the full coding and design freedom to create anything your clients need, along with the tools to manage and collaborate with your team seamlessly from anywhere. And when it comes to growing your agency, you can get matched with new leads every day and earn revenue share for every website you guys create. They're backed by the Wix industry-leading security and site performance. You'll also have a dedicated account manager on standby 24/7, so you can reach your goals and start setting new ones. See for yourself, head over to wix.com/partners. And re-imagine what your agency can accomplish. Yeah. And everybody listening, it just takes some time. I mean, it takes some time in order to figure out the direction, who you're going after. And the biggest thing is, is just figuring out who can you help the most and putting criteria around it. And it doesn't have to be a particular industry. You just have to know that particular person and know how to find them as well. And then when they do see you, it's kind of like… I always love to hear people are like, man, I, I started listening to your podcast and it felt like you were tapping into my office. That's kind of by design, right? Like I do have really good technology to tap into your office and here… Dmitriy: [00:11:21] You’re a spy. Yeah. Jason: [00:11:22] I’m a spy, yeah. Dmitriy: [00:11:23] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jason: [00:11:24] Dmitriy sets up the technology and I was the mastermind behind it. Well, this has all been amazing, Dmitriy. And I think this really will help some people out with figuring out like, you know, especially if you've hit a certain ceiling, a lot of times it's just a little adjustments. Sometimes if you haven't picked a niche and really got really clear at your audience, sometimes that allows you to go to the next level. So is there anything I didn't ask you, Dmitriy, that you think would help the audience? Dmitriy: [00:11:56] One of the things that I feel like is a great, great pre-phase to this conversation is what is your reason in growing an agency? You know, and you talk about this a lot too. Are you building a lifestyle? You know, you're trying to get a mega yacht? Are you trying to, you know, make sure that your kids and your grandkids don't want for anything? Are you just trying to get a bunch of skills so that you can buy and flip companies in the future? Like Simon Cenex, why I'm like, man, I, so many people recommended that book to me and I'm like, I've seen the Ted talk. I've seen his YouTube videos. I get it. But it really is at the core of everything. Like, why are you doing this? Why are you pushing through this? Because if the trophy is worth it, maybe you'll do something that's not as exciting but drives revenue creates value for the people that you serve and gives an opportunity to create jobs for people and value and give them a place to learn. So yeah, figure out your why. Jason: [00:12:50] Yeah. I love that. Because you know, there's so many people that are running digital agencies that are kind of just going through the movements and the motions and they don't know where to go. They're just… Dmitriy: [00:13:01] You can hit a million doing that. Jason: [00:13:03] You're not staying consistent. You're going down, so… Dmitriy: [00:13:07] Yeah, man. And look, you can hit a million dollars figuring things out, right? Like that's, that's the thing. It's like a million dollars in revenue is not this next worldly goal. Uh, you can do that stumbling along and figuring things out. But like once you get there, what's going to push you forward to standardize, to create processes, to do all these things that are going to help you scale? So, yeah, to the guys listening, if you have a why, revisit it. Figure it out, you know, make sure it's aligned. Talk with your partner about it with your team, your leadership, just so they're all aligned. Yeah. Jason: [00:13:41] Awesome. Dmitriy: [00:13:41] Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Jason: [00:13:43] What's the website for the agency where people can go and check you guys out? Dmitriy: [00:13:47] So Business Jet Pack is going to be the one that's going to be rebuilt, uh, by Q1 of 2022, depending on when this gets released, it might already be live. But, uh, you can learn more about us at conversionwhisperer.com. Or, you know, really, if you just want to connect, find me on LinkedIn, Dmitriy Pisarev. So, yeah, I think you'll spell my name correctly on the title there… Jason: [00:14:07] But spell it this one more time for the people listening. If they can remember. Dmitriy: [00:14:12] They won't remember. It'll be we, we'll include a link forum. Yeah, Jason: [00:14:18] I know it is difficult to spell, so awesome. Well, Dmitriy… Dmitriy: [00:14:22] Appreciate it, Jason. Jason: [00:14:24] Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Make sure you guys go check out both websites and really connect with Dmitriy. He is an amazing person. Really, really smart. And I love having him in the mastermind. And if you want to be around other amazing members like Dmitriy and be able to hang out, ask them questions, see what's working. I'd love to invite all of you to go to digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind for experience agency owners that are wanting to grow faster that have a team and that are not douchebags. So you're not a douche bag, if you're a digital agency owner, you want to scale faster, go to digitalagencyelite.com. And until next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Do_You_Struggle_Deciding_Between_Niching_Down_or_Going_Wide_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 28 November 2021
What metrics should you track to create a successful lead generation strategy? Kara Brown had been working on a string of supply chain corporate jobs where she oversaw IPOs and eventually decided to create her own business and focus on lead generation. She believes filling the top of the funnel now will be the first to capture market share in the recovery. With LeadCoverage, she focuses on B2B revenue operations and acquisition strategies for scaling companies. In her conversation with Jason, they spoke about what she has seen working for lead generation, what every company should be measuring to keep a profitable business, and how you can save time on prospects that won't become customers. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and Resources Sharpspring: Today's episode is sponsored by Sharpspring, an all-in-one revenue growth platform that provides all of the marketing automation, CRM, & sales features you need to support your entire customer lifecycle. Partner with an affordable marketing automation provider that you can trust. Head over to sharpspring.com/smartagency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Measure Your Way to a Successful Lead Strategy and Stop Wasting Time on the Wrong Prospects{These transcripts have been auto-generated. While largely accurate, they may contain some errors.} Jason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here, and have another amazing digital agency podcast guest for you. We're going to talk about lead generation for your digital agency. It's going to be a fun show, so let's go ahead and get into it. Hey, Kara. Welcome to the show. Kara: [00:00:22] Hey! Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:23] Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Kara: [00:00:27] Yeah, I'm Kara Brown. I'm the CEO and founder of LeadCoverage and we do B2B lead gen for supply chain, heavy industrial, and tech. Jason: [00:00:35] Awesome. And so how'd you get started in creating an agency? Kara: [00:00:40] Yeah, that's a funny story. So I was the 12th employee at a company called Echo Global Logistics. Very sexy, all the trucks. Uh, actually a super sexy, the guy that started Echo Global Logistics also started Groupon. So I got to send the first Groupon email. It's a true story. It came from my inbox. Got to watch them grow like crazy and then ended up being on the team that took the company I was working for went public. So I did an IPO at about 25. Uh, I was asked to move to Nashville to do another IPO for a private equity company, for another supply chain management company. Sort of a stream of, of supply chain, corporate jobs. And then ended up back in Chicago, popped out two kids, moved to Atlanta, moved here for a sort of a garbage brokerage jobs. So it was sort of similar to supply chain but in a different space. Instead of going public, that company raised $95 million in equity. When I exited that, the question was like, what to do next? And someone told me the statistic that less than 2% of female founders will ever break a million dollars in revenue. And I said, well, that doesn't sound that hard. So I did it with an all female team. It took us about 10 months and now we're on the path to ten million. Jason: [00:01:54] Awesome. So is Groupon still around? I haven't heard anything from them. Kara: [00:01:58] Yes. They're still around. They're a publicly-traded company. Please buy some Groupon things. Jason: [00:02:05] So you must have some stock. Kara: [00:02:08] Yeah, I think… They still exists. They're still out of 600 West Chicago and sort of a Chicago tech darling from the early two thousands. Jason: [00:02:15] Very cool. Uh, funny story, my wife got me a Groupon in a helicopter, like 10 years ago for my birthday. And I’m like, I'm not doing it. I'm scared to death of helicopters. That's right. Let's talk about lead generation. You know, I find a lot of digital agencies, they take on the wrong clients and they take on the wrong clients because they haven't been building their pipeline. They haven't been building their pipeline because they don't have a really good lead generation source in order to really kind of tap on because they’re based on word of mouth. So what have you seen working for lead-generation? Kara: [00:02:55] Sure. So we have nine lead gen strategies, but I'll start sort of at the top. So at the top is share good news, track who's interested, follow up. Most companies that we interact with, either customers or people that would just help out as friends. Are doing one or two of those and almost none of them, almost none of them, of the companies we talked to are tracking any of it, right? Like really, truly measuring what's happening inside their funnel. And so one of the things that we've found successful for Lead Coverage is getting as niche as possible. So our niche is supply chain management companies over a hundred million in revenue or venture-backed. And basically, if you don't hit one or two of those criteria, we may take you on as a client, but we may not. We may say no, thank you. And that's been very successful for us. So in terms of lead gen, when your niche is small, you can be hyper-targeted in your approach. If you're wide and not very deep, it's really easy to end up talking to a lot of folks that aren’t super valuable. The other thing that we like to measure, which we can definitely talk about later, we do a lot of measurement in our company, is we measure volume, velocity and value. And I think most important for agencies is value, right? So a very smart man part of the Groupon kickoff team in the very beginning of the early days said to me, hey, Kara, it is… it costs to you, just as much money to run a $250,000 account as it does a $2,500 account. So get upstream and get as big as you can. Get your, get your retainers as big as you can, as fast as you can. Because that's where the real money-making happens. Jason: [00:04:48] You mean you don't want to race to the bottom? I see a lot of people when they initially talk with us, we really kind of determined that pricing is one of their big issues. And they're like, well, my competitor is actually cheaper. We're actually more. I'm like, what does that matter? Do you want to win that race? I was like, I don't. Kara: [00:05:10] We just decided to raise our minimums. I went to a trade show last week for our very specific niche industry, right? So every single person at that show could be a customer for us, which I think is super important. We went to the show and the number that I told everyone, nobody said it was too expensive. And I came back to the office after two days in the trade show floor. And I said, we need to increase our minimum because no one told me it was too much. And when no one's telling you, you're too expensive, you're not charging enough. Jason: [00:05:40] Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yep. Totally agree. Get in a little bit more about kind of the velocity and the volume and the, the value. Let's talk a little bit more about that. Kara: [00:05:49] Yeah. We love measurement. So we are not a creative agency. We don't have a creative director. We don't do creative. We don't do color theory. We're probably very different than most of the folks that listen to your podcast. But I still listen to the two Bobs and I'm all about agency work. And I'm like all about sort of consulting and how do I make this business as profitable and valuable as possible? So when I think about how valuable my consultancy or my agency is, I think about volume, value, and velocity. So how fast are my customers finding me? And then how fast can I get them to close the deal? Velocity story is a funny one. I have a client that we have been or potential client we've been talking to for over two years. And I think I may tell him it is time to stop talking to each other. Like it's nice. But, um, I've sort of sent him enough info. I've done enough. We've had enough phone calls. I've talked to enough of his people. It's been two years. If you're not going to buy, you're not going to buy, right? So that's velocity. But we also had a few weeks ago, our first one call-close. So we were introduced to someone, they came through a LinkedIn post that I wrote, which I should definitely mention how we do LinkedIn because it's really interesting. And one call the guy was like, great. Let's do it. And our minimums, Jason, are $15,000 a month. And the guy was like, I don't want your minimum. I want to be a big fish in your pond. We were like, all right, let's do it. So those are really exciting. So velocity is how fast are they getting in your funnel? Volume is how many deals can you handle any one time and how many deals are going to fill your, fill your actual pipelines? This is all about close ratios, right? So you can have a whole bunch of conversations, but if they're only closing 5 to 10% of them, you're spending a lot of time on deals that aren't going to close. So I have a thing that I do… fair it may not be nice, but it helps me save a lot of time. I will look at who I'm talking to before I get on the phone. And if they're not in our box, I will open the call with something to this effect: It's so nice to meet you, Jason. I want to talk a little bit about what we do and who we do it for. I'm going to tell you how much. If we're not in your budget, we'll use the next 25 minutes. I'm going to give you 25 minutes of free advice. My minimum is $20,000 a month and my core market is supply chain technology and heavy industrial. Does that feel like something that you can afford? And if they're like, oh my budget's like $2,000 a month or something crazy, then I'll say, hey, no problem. Let's use the next 25 minutes and I'll give you all the free advice I can. That's really helpful. They also don't call me again. So I don't have to like go down the rigor mortise of like giving them a proposal for $20K a month. And they're like, uh, we're not on the same page. So that stops that and then value, right? What is this potential customer going to be worth to me? Like really, truly going to be worth to me. And I don't do the work you do. So I don't work with agency owners. But I would imagine that there are a lot of folks out there who overvalue potential customers, right? I think this product is going to come in at 80 grand and it comes in at 20. I think that this customer is going to stick around for two years and they stay for three months, right? So being really, truly honest with yourself on values really important. And the best way to check out value is just to have someone, probably not you, if you're the CEO. Go back and look at your, at your previous customers, right? Like take a deep dive and really be honest with yourself on how much is each customer actually truly worth to you?
Jason: [00:09:21] Is your agency struggling to deliver real revenue growth results to your clients? You know, agency marketers can consolidate data and align marketing and sales teams goals to achieve real results for your agency and clients using revenue growth platforms. Sharpspring is an all-in-one platform built for agencies like yours to optimize digital marketing strategies with simple, powerful automation. Manage your entire funnel all in Sharpspring. Now for a limited time, my smart agency listeners will receive your first month free and half off onboarding with Sharpspring. Just visit sharpspring.com/smartagency to schedule your demo and grab this offer. That's sharpspring.com/smartagency. Yeah, I love it. And I love that you get right to the budget in the very beginning. There's so many people, you know, when I'm speaking to a crowd, one of the two questions I'll ask is all right, how many people get the budget every single time or almost every time? And then, you know, how many people ask for it? And by the it's about 50% of the room than ask. And then 50% of that, it's only a quarter of the percent of agencies are actually getting the budget. And that's before they put all that work in it. I would always go to them and say, I just need a range of what you're trying to stick around. Because here's the deal, especially on pricing, and I learned this the hard way when I talked to a small company, I never heard of called Berkshire Hathaway. And I pitched them like a $20,000 website. They were expecting 30,000. So like if I started out, like I would always try to lead with what's their expectation and then match them there. But I would also even have a floor. Uh, so pricing is very important. Kara: [00:11:12] So I actually disagree. I lead with our pricing. Because if they're willing to pay you $30,000 for a website, there's probably $120,000 somewhere in their budget, right? And I think as a woman, this isn't necessarily agency owner, but as a woman, knowing other women in business, we tend to undervalue ourselves. And what I've found is, as my retainers have gone from 5 to 7 to 12 to 15 to $20,000 minimums, no one's saying no, right? Like very few people say to me, I can't afford you, right? Unless they're like just out of the box, but if they're in the box and they understand the value and I've done a good job of delivering what we do and showing them what we do and how we do it and what the value is we bring. As long as I lead with my minimum… Actually, it's not even the minimum. I learned something at an EO event, the entrepreneur organization that the human brain anchors on the first number that you tell someone. So when someone says to me, Kara, how do we work with you? I say, well, our average retainer comes in between 30 and $40,000 a month, but our minimum is 20. So instead of them saying, oh, I can get this person for five grand a month because I say something like our minimum is five grand. They're already like, oh, well she's like, she's really expensive. Like, can I afford her home? Like, oh, like maybe I should find another $30,000 a month somewhere to pay this person. So I think it's really important that you set your own standards and there's always money in corporations. I have worked for enormous corporations in my corporate career. There's always money. Always. Jason: [00:12:58] Yeah. Yeah. I call it the reverse engineer effect when you're going over the range, because so many people, when they go, I just need to know a range. A thousand, fove thousand? I would literally start at a billion and then a million and then a hundred thousand and 20,000. So they echo that first number going, holy cow, no one else said that. What makes you so unique? And you can really separate yourself. And switching focus a little bit. You hinted a little bit to the LinkedIn post. Tell us how you do that. Kara: [00:13:28] Yeah, so we can attribute $480,000 to two LinkedIn posts. And that's just in 2020, not in 2021. So super proud of this whole process. I post super regularly on LinkedIn. Sometimes I post about being a woman in business. Sometimes it's about marketing. Sometimes it's just like, I don't know thoughts of the week that I've decided that I want to share. I have a ghost writer. She's on my team. Should we speak for about an hour a week. Now, because we've been working together for a while, she can get almost four LinkedIn posts out of that one hour. I also write for Forbes and Entrepreneur and other magazines. So she does those for me at the same time. And she writes the post themselves. They're my words, but she physically crafts them. They go to my team, my team adds the emojis and make sure that they're, if people are tagged and then they go into a file for me to approve. I approve. And then they get scheduled. So we have posts that are going out. We're recording this in September. We've got posts going up through the end of November and I'll be gone the entire month of October. So I'll still be posting even though I'll be in Europe, which is really nice. And so we can see attribution of almost $500,000 to LinkedIn. And this is LinkedIn thought leadership. And it cost me probably 2000 bucks a month to do this. So it's my most ROI driven piece of, of lead gen that we do for myself. And it's been a terrific way for us to meet people. You can't always track every single lead back to LinkedIn, but it was a, it was a funny story. I was at this trade show I just mentioned in our niche industry. And I ran into some guy that I had known from a million years ago. And he said Kara, I read every LinkedIn post and I was like, awesome. And he said… Jason: [00:15:11] Stalker. Kara: [00:15:12] Stalker, right? Well, that's the whole point, like, please stalk me. And he said, may I please introduce you to my CMO? I think that I'd really like to make sure that you two meet each other and now they're going to be a client. So you never know who's reading it. They may not be liking, sharing and engaging, but put it be putting yourself out there is super important. Jason: [00:15:31] Yeah. I love it. And these are just regular posts. Do you have a call to action on there or is it just helpful? Kara: [00:15:36] Yeah. So we're trying to, the LinkedIn algorithm changes pretty regularly. We do this for clients as well. So we have a human being on our team who is regularly trying to sort of like bust the LinkedIn algorithm. Not in an ugly way, just in a, how do we use it to our advantage? So one of the stats she told me that I was really surprised is that less than 2% of people that are on LinkedIn are actively posting. So just by actively engaging in LinkedIn, they're already in the top 2% of folks that are sort of voyeurs only, right? And so, as long as you just put anything out there, you're going to be sort of doing better than other folks. If you get into like exactly what, you know, doing posts, doing polls calls to action links, links back to landing pages. Links to, to form fills and video. We can, it's a whole another podcast we can do just to talk about how to like optimize LinkedIn. In my professional opinion, that this is specifically for my market, which is supply chain, heavy, industrial and tech. I don't need to put video out there. I don't need to be super complicated about it because no one's buying from LinkedIn, right? LinkedIn just keeps me front and center for the folks in my world and in my universe. That when I see them at the trade show or when I send them an email or when they see something from me that's interesting and they have a need. They're like, oh man, there's this woman who posts all the time on LinkedIn. She's really interesting. I'm going to reach out, right? So it's just about staying in the conversation. Jason: [00:17:03] Yeah. It's about consistency. You know, you mentioned you were chatting with someone for two years. Holy cow, like if I was chatting with them, but when I look at my, our stats, most people don't buy from us for about a year and a half to two years. They're digesting that content, which isn't a sweat off my back and if they never buy it and they just get helpful content, I'm perfectly fine with that as well. But, but yeah, just to go through the proposal process for two years, that is a yeah. Shit or get off the pot dude. Kara: [00:17:34] And yeah, this particular human is such a nice guy and he's so kind, and I know he does want to work with us and he is very specifically strapped by, you know, investors and sort of what these investors want to do. I get it. And it doesn't bother me to like, have a relationship with this person. He is also well connected. He's a good human, but we are going to have to at some point, be like, hey, I can't do one more deliverable for you, right? Like I can't, I can't put together another email or send you another proposal. Like they're all the same. Like, it hasn't changed. Like the same proposal you got two years ago was going to be the same one I'm going to send you now because what we do, hasn't really changed. Jason: [00:18:13] Awesome. Well, this has all been great, Kara. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience listening in? Kara: [00:18:19] You know, I think one of the things that's really important to us, Jason, is the combination of failed the market. That sales and marketing, including PR and AR analyst relations, which I know a lot of folks in digital marketing don't really touch analysts at all. Cause it's kind of boring, but really important to your senior leaders, right? So if you're going up market, and this is not small business, this is enterprise. So we're very fortunate in the, in our niche. We have sort of along the spectrum, small business, all the way up through sort of big corporate enterprise, even publicly traded companies. And so we get to touch everything from analyst relations to public relations, all the way through, but long story short, the deeper we get in the niche, the higher our prices can go and the more we get integrated with both PR AR and sales. And the stickier you get, the more you can deliver math back to your client that goes to their boss, that goes to the board. The longer you'll stay in the organization, the more valuable you are and the more sticky, just the stickier that you get in inside those orbes. And so that's my sort of best piece of advice is if you can deliver math back to your clients, specifically math that goes to the board or to some sort of senior executive, you will be very, very sticky. So find something that's meaningful to your customer that you can deliver on a regular basis. That means something to their boss. Jason: [00:19:46] Awesome. Love it. What's the agency website people can go and check you guys out? Kara: [00:19:50] Yeah. We're lead coverage.com and we'd love to hear from anyone who wants to talk more about lead gen or anything about supply chain. Jason: [00:19:58] Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Kara, for coming on the show. Make sure you guys go check out the website, connect with Kara. And if you guys want to be around the most amazing agency owners in the world, where they're sharing what's working currently to be able to see the things you may not be able to see as well as have fun scaling your business. I'd like to invite all of you. Go to check out digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind just for digital agency owners. So go to digitalagencyelite.com and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: What_to_Measure_to_Create_a_Successful_Lead_Generation_Strategy.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 24 November 2021
Do you know how using AI and data-driven algorithms could help you save money on inefficient positioning? Anne Cheng is an entrepreneur that started her business with an idea in mind: what if she could get inside the heads of people and understand what information they required to make decisions? Supercharge Lab is a cognitive artificial intelligence company that uses AI and data to try to understand what goes on inside customers' heads, or rather listen to the voice in their head. In this episode, Anne sat down with Jason to explain how this AI technology works, why business owners should embrace that it is the future and use this innovation to their benefit, and how agency owners could use it to create specific targeting and sales and marketing content that resonates with its audiences and find their sweet spot in the market. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesGusto: Today's episode is sponsored by Gusto, an all-in-one people platform for payroll, benefits, HR where you can unify your data. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Head over to gusto.com/agency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Stop Wasting Resources and Use Data-Driven Algorithms to Find Your Sweet Spot in The MarketJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here, and we've got another great episode coming to you. And we're going to talk around AI and what you can do with really kind of targeting the right audience, as well as having the AI tool, write the copy for you to convert faster. So I'm excited to get into this episode. Uh, so let's jump in. Hey, Anne. Welcome to the show. Anne: [00:00:31] Thanks for having me, Jason. Jason: [00:00:32] Yeah. So tell us who you are and what do you guys do? Anne: [00:00:36] Well, my name is Anne and I'm the founder and CEO of Supercharge Lab. Supercharge Lab is a cognitive artificial intelligence company, which means we take AI and a lot of data and we attempt to understand what goes on inside your head, or rather listen to the voice in your head. And we do that for the purpose of applying it to sales and marketing. We try to improve the ROI as far as our clients. And so far it's been quite a ride. Jason: [00:01:04] Cool. And so how did you… how'd you, how'd you all come up with developing this? Anne: [00:01:11] Well, I guess it started with the idea that we said, what if we could get inside the heads of people and understand what information they required to make decisions? Uh, and that way we could make decision-making more predictable, uh, less noise and biased. And, well, improve results across all kinds of positions that are being made. Whether it's medical decisions or diagnosis, whether it's sales and marketing, uh, purchase behavior. Um, so, well we decided to try to figure out how people, what information people take in, in order to make decisions. And we came up with an algorithm that profiles, the information, uh, that people take in the site, the cognitive style of people, what we call or the psychological profile. And, uh, well the rest is history. After we applied it to sales and marketing, we've seen significant lift in our customer ROI. Um, we have had customers who literally renew their campaigns with us so often that they tell us they cannot see a day without, uh, using our solution. Jason: [00:02:20] Awesome. And tell us kind of, how does… How did you guys really kind of write the algorithm in order to get inside our heads? I mean, how does all that work? That's always fascinating. Anne: [00:02:34] So I think that's a great question, Jason. So a lot of people look at what we write because when we, when we write, um, whenever we write the contents of what we write is driven by who audiences is what we want to say. Uh, but a lot of people fail to realize that what, what really gives us away is how we write. The tones, the structure, the number of emojis or bullet points, or the kind of words that we use. That actually is the voice inside our head. That's the tone of the voice inside our head to tell gifts, clues into things like, you know, your emotional state, your, your personality style, your social styles of interaction. Or even your style of conflict management. Um, by understanding how it be right to be basically we're able to take these language models, parse it into an algorithm. And well, uh, we have been able to put everybody in some categories of psychological profiles or what we call cognitive styles, um, and hopefully using rules based and data-driven, uh, algorithms, were able to cut out a lot of the noise that actually, you know, gifts written comes from manual advertising and marketing. Jason: [00:03:57] I feel, I feel dirty. You're profiling me. Anne: [00:04:02] No, I don’t do that. Jason: [00:04:04] Um, so. How would someone… As an agency, you know, they, and I'm talking more about not for their clients, but really for themselves, right? So we just got done as we're recording this, this week, our digital agency experience, where we have, you know, 28 of the best agency owners come out, um, to my house in Colorado, when we brainstorm on strategies and what's working. And the common theme, and this is among most digital agency owners. And if… If, uh, if you don't admit this you're supporting terrorism. But we, they struggle with doing their own marketing and creating themselves as their own clients. Um, and a lot of them struggle with just identifying who their audience… Cause they try to go after everybody. So how could, you know, AI really helped them out in order to reach more of the audience? Because they may not know who they're targeting yet. Anne: [00:05:08] Yeah. So I think one of the biggest struggles as a… well a marketing organization is actually understanding where your sweet spot is. And, uh, you know, using algorithms, you can actually do a lot of experimentation. Uh, one of the biggest things that, um, AI does, is that it gives you a score of how much you are able to resonate, how accurate, you know, your targeting is. So if, for example, you think you would like to go after, you know, a medium-sized business with revenues between 10 to 50 million, and you don't really know whether this is really the sweet spot for you. You can actually test, um, the, the targeting and you can test things like, you know, what we call your, your outbound messages as well as your response rates. And if you see that your response rates are lower than another particular industry, you know… It's possibly time to change and don't throw good money after, you know, a bad result all the time. And so that's what Einstein says is stupidity, you know, expecting a different result by doing the same thing, all, all the time is insanity. So what I would do is use algorithms, use artificial intelligence, or what may be called big data, uh, to understand what your audience is and test the vigor at which they will respond. Now, I've done that a lot with myself, with my own audience. Um, and I've noticed that, you know, we try to grow, uh, our customers by, you know, going after bigger companies. Well, it doesn't work. Um, we, we realized that we were not getting any conversions. We were not getting any customers inquiring. So we said, you know, maybe we should go back to, uh, the smaller businesses. And at the same time, we change up the different industry. So algorithms are great ways to experiment and it's cheap. It's fast. It, it takes me three days to identify whether, you know, this is the right market. You're not wasting time. So yeah. Jason: [00:07:28] Taking care of your employees has never been more important than right now. And while paydays are great, running payroll is a major pain, calculating taxes, deductions, compliance. None of it's easy. Unless of course, you have Gusto. Gusto is a simple online payroll and benefits built for your small business. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Plus, with Gustos help, you can offer benefits like 401k's health insurance, workers' comp, and a lot more. And because you're a smart agency masterclass listener, you're going to get three months free once you run your first payroll. Go to gusto.com/agency. That's gusto.com/agency for three free months. Very cool. So will AI… Will AI replace what agencies are doing for clients? Like I look at it as, and I've been telling agencies like this for a long time. And if you think about kind of the car industry, you know, many, you know, many, a hundred years ago, I guess, you know, the car industry created dealers or the manufacturer created dealers, and they were the middlemen selling to the public because you can't go to the dealer. Um, and forever, it was that way. And then, you know, Tesla came out and you, you don't go through a dealer… You buy it right from the manufacturer. And I kind of see a lot of this starting to happen with agencies that are just doing a particular service where, you know, Facebook and Google would always promote agencies. But I kind of see them starting to kind of pull back from agencies a little bit because now people can go directly to them and not use the middlemen. Anne: [00:09:33] Yeah, for sure. I think, uh, one of the things about technology is that is becoming very quickly democratized. Artificial intelligence just a few years ago, was all about, you know, building training models, you know, putting in a lot of data, huge massive slices of data. Today it costs me $16 and 39 cents to run a learning model. Uh, it takes maybe about an hour to, to train a model. And you know, it, it can be really, really quick and easy, um, with a high level of accuracy to train a, uh, artificial intelligence model. Is, um, the technology strong enough to completely replace a human? I think not at this point. I think that is still a way to go, uh, where, you know, copy is not going to sound like it's artificially written. Uh, so that's, that's something which I think is going to, uh, have to develop a little bit more. But to understand your audience, to predict the audience with a level of, um, certainty, it’s starting to become quite democratized. So I think, yes, logic-based artificial intelligence is going to upend the advertising industry. But that being said, artificial intelligence to going to upend almost every industry, if you let it. Jason: [00:11:01] Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s, you know… That's what innovation is. It should always challenge the status quo and make us better. And you know, the one thing I always tell agencies is use the new technology, the new innovations to your benefit, and to benefit your clients, you know, going forward. Um, this has all been great, Anne. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Anne: [00:11:24] Yeah, I think, you know, the biggest question that we have as marketing organizations is how can we use that wastage? Um, today up to 26% of ad spend… It's wasted on inefficient, uh, positioning and efficient messaging. And I think a lot of us have to try to learn that, you know, data-driven algorithms and rules-based algorithms can… are not the enemy. Our enemy is embracing… um, the, the innovation that is coming. So I think our enemy is truly ourselves. If we get over ourselves, we can definitely grow the business, um, in a massive, in a major way. Jason: [00:12:09] Awesome. What's the website people can go and check you guys out? Anne: [00:12:14] Well, it's superchargedlab.com. Remember as supercharged lab without an S at the end dot com. Jason: [00:12:20] Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show, Anne. You did great lots of great insights. And if you guys enjoyed this episode, make sure you guys subscribe, make sure you comment. And if you guys want to be around the best agency owners out there and really tap into their heads, because maybe you haven't tapped into the AI yet, um, I want to invite all of you to go to digitalagencyelite.com and apply. And, uh, if we feel that you're right and the group's right for you, we'll have a chat and… So good at digitalagencyelite.com. And until next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Using_Data-Driven_Algorithms_To_Find_Your_Agencys_Sweet_Spot.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 21 November 2021
Do you know how relationship equity could help you grow your business and establish yourself as a category of one? Michael Stamatinos has always thought of himself as a connector. His love for building bridges and connections led him to the business development, marketing, and sales world. He founded Omorfi, an agency that empowers individuals to take a leadership role in their community and he focused on his passion for the healthcare sector, the role of leadership in communities, and helping people make connections. In this episode, he sat down with Jason to talk about how relationship equity became the core of all his interactions with the people in his life, how agency owners could use this concept to improve their relationships with clients and peers, and how being passionate about your business can really help you establish yourself as a category of one. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesSharpspring: Today's episode is sponsored by Sharpspring, an all-in-one revenue growth platform that provides all of the marketing automation, CRM, & sales features you need to support your entire customer lifecycle. Partner with an affordable marketing automation provider that you can trust. Head over to sharpspring.com/smartagency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Investing in Relationship Equity and Establishing Yourself as a Category of OneJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Excited to have another amazing episode. We're going to talk about relationship equity, and you're going to want to really hear what we're going to talk about and I got an amazing guest. So let's go ahead and get into the show. Hey, Michael. Welcome to the show. Michael: [00:00:22] Hey, it's good to be here. Jason: [00:00:23] Yeah. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Michael: [00:00:27] Uh, so Michael Stamatinos. Managing partner of Omorfi and we work with clients that are focused on growth. We work on strategic growth initiatives with some execution services. So it really boils down to one word: access, access to the right people, access to the right strategic partners, and in some cases, access to the right growth capital. So we really view ourselves as bridge builders and connectors at heart. I am a connector and that's really what we're focused on. So come from a pretty humble background. Parents are both immigrants, so grew up working in restaurants, being Greek, and just love working with people to the point where I wanted to be a clinical psychologist. And after my training, I realized that I didn't want to be in living receptacle to people's stuff. I still wanted to help people. So gravitate it into the world of business development, marketing, and sales, and been there ever since. Jason: [00:01:18] So I'm dying to ask you and you. And you probably get asked this a lot just based on how you did the intro about your family being Greek and in the restaurant business. Is your family like the Big Fat Greek Wedding? Michael: [00:01:29] 100% Yes. Jason: [00:01:33] How many cousins do you have? Michael: [00:01:35] We have several cousins named Nick and Peter and Costa, and it's very family-oriented. And my dad is quite a character, you know. When he talks to people, he's very animated, loves to tell stories. My mom's a little bit more of sort of the, just a homemaker, very peaceful, very calm. So sort of the ying and yang there. But my dad was a really hard worker and just grinded for a long time and stayed consistent. I think if there's anything that I've taken from him, it's that. Staying consistent and having discipline. Jason: [00:02:07] Awesome. Well, let's talk about relationship equity. How do you view this? Michael: [00:02:13] So I have an interesting story of how that kind of came about. So as I mentioned earlier, yeah, I'm a connector. I've always been a connector my whole entire life. I get a lot of joy out of putting people together, regardless of whether something's in it for me or not. And I was in a meeting one day with a client… And I don't know if you've ever had, if this has ever happened to you, but I got a stream of thoughts that were so clear that I had to excuse myself from the meeting. And I call it, I got a memo from that office, if you know what I'm saying. And that hadn't happened to me up until that point in my life. So I left that meeting. I always carry a little notebook with me. So I jotted down three sort of overlapping circles with a circle in the middle that intersects all the other circles. And I called it relationship equity, and really relationships are very similar to a bank account. When you initially start a bank account, you deposit some money. Well, if you want to go out and purchase something after you've started your bank account, you would draw some money. The reality is that if you continue to withdraw and you want to make a big purchase and you don't have enough money in there deposited, it's going to say insufficient funds. And that's really how I'm seeing the world now is that there are folks that are very quick to make massive withdrawals and they haven't substantiated. They'll do withdrawals by putting in deposits into that account. And sort of the three circles within relationship equity, that makeup relationship equity rather is trust. How do you build trust with people? Well, you have to have some level of authenticity and I'm not here trying to be someone that I'm not. I'm a real person, normal person. And there has to be some sort of a connection. In our case, it was through, you know, one of your members, Pete, Pete Cunningham. And that's how we really kind of transferred that relationship equity. And so there's that trust that. And then how do you build that relationship? Well, you take that trust and you multiply it over time. And it doesn't necessarily have to be long stretches of time. It could be short, such as it's on there's some folks that have gotten really close to in short amount of time. And then how do you build equity within that relationship? Well, you take that relationship and you multiply it by value. And the way that I define value for me is helping someone for the sake of helping them not having a hidden agenda. And when you do all those things, you build relationship equity. So when people ask me, what game am I in? I'm in the game of building relationship equity all the time. Whether it be with my wife, with my kids, with my friends and family and with clients and prospects. That's what I'm doing. And that's look, that's what got me here today. I didn't reach out to you and ask you to be on your show. It was through a series of activities of trying to add value and trying to be helpful and building relationship equity, which inevitably was transferred to this particular moment here. So this is something that I'm going to be doing until I'm not here anymore, regardless. Jason: [00:05:10] Yeah. I love the term and I've always told people, you know, especially cause they're like, hey, let me, uh, you got the audience I want. I'll give you this amount of money. I'm like, no, it just doesn't work that way. I'm like, you got to make deposits before you're withdrawing. I mean, a great example… It's always been, since I've been a kid, my grandfather worked on the long island railroad and I've always wanted to ride in front of the steam engine. And I met this one guy, Greg, that a mutual friend introduced us because he usually takes off a lot of time. We go play. And so we started kind of a couple of weeks ago, epic Fridays. So we just go out, climb mountains, do some really cool stuff. And I was telling him, you know, we were talking about like bucket list items and stuff like that. And I was like, man, you know, I've always wanted a ride in a steam engine. He's like, I know the owner of the Durango Silverton Railroad. Let me call them up for you. He surprised me. And so in the next couple of days, I'm going to get to ride, hit the whistle and everything. So just, just from relationships, like I didn't ask for that. So… Michael: [00:06:17] It's amazing. It's amazing what doors can be opened when you try to approach the world from a place of abundance and not to sound all woo or anything. But when you really try to add value and try to really help people for the sake of helping people, not only are you advancing society at large, but I dunno, it just, there's more opportunities that have come across my desk that I could ever take advantage of. It's just trying to be, be that way. So I think I'm going to keep doing that. Jason: [00:06:41] Yeah. I mean, there's so many examples. I, you know, I think of, you know, in our mastermind, you know, some members like Dunkin or Ian or Jeremy. They provide so much value to the membership, but they get so much business back and that's not their whole intent. Like they don't go in it saying like you were saying, well, what can I get from this? It's like, I'm going to give, but then whenever they need anything, like people are like, I'll give you the shirt off my back. What do you need? And they're just people that recognize that you really start scaling… You know, I was very minded, many years of my career, like, oh, you're in this business, I'm going to take you down. And then I'm like, no, no, no, you can build relationships and work with people. And even if you never get anything back from it, you feel good by doing it. Michael: [00:07:30] Yeah. The currency that I play with is relationship equity. And I get, as I mentioned earlier, like I view myself as a bridge builder. And what better way to live life than to continue to build bridges, show people how to build bridges. In other instances, you're doing the bridge building for them. But then you're also building tools to show people how to build bridges. I mean, I didn't go to a fancy school. I don't have any of these fancy degree. I didn't go in and I didn't do any of that stuff. And somehow I pinch myself sometimes when I find myself in some of these meetings with people, quite frankly, that sometimes I'm like, wow, how did I get here? Oh my gosh. And I did. And it has a lot to do with knowing how to get access to just scale. And it's all about building relationship equity. Jason: [00:08:18] Yeah. So the agency owners listening in, is there any steps or there's no trickery here, but if they're thinking, well, man, I would like to build more relationships and I'm thinking back, you know, a couple of years ago for me, I was crappy at building relationships. Like it's very hard to get in with me. Once you're in, you're in, you know, I was always closed minded and that kind of stuff. So how can agency owners benefit from this? Michael: [00:08:47] The way that agency owners can benefit from it is as follows is, understand who it is that you're trying to serve and know what it is that's going on in their environment and in their world and know it's so well to the point where they're like, wow, this person really understands me.
That's how you connect with people. You having been a former agency owner and knowing the growing pains, the ins and outs you'd been there before. And when you're trying to serve a specific niche or market and you understand problems that are very… And I'm not talking about just surface level deep, I'm talking about going four or 5, 6, 7 levels down. That's when there's a connection that allows you the opportunity to start building and cultivating that relationship and building that bridge. So it starts there. And then the other thing that you really are trying to do is you really are going to have to position yourself as being, you know, that category of one. That truly understands that market. I mean, you have quite a niche and I'm assuming it wasn't, it was, it didn't happen by chance. This was done by design. And it had a lot to do with how you position yourself and how you understood the pain points that agency owners were going through. Jason: [00:10:00] Is your agency struggling to deliver real revenue growth results to your clients? You know, agency marketers can consolidate data and align marketing and sales teams goals to achieve real results for your agency and clients using revenue growth platforms. Sharpspring is an all-in-one platform built for agencies like yours to optimize digital marketing strategies with simple, powerful automation. Manage your entire funnel all in Sharpspring. Now, for a limited time my smart agency listeners will receive your first month free and half off onboarding with SharpSpring. Just visit sharpspring.com/smartagency to schedule your demo and grab this offer. That's sharpspring.com/smartagency. Yeah, I always tell everybody I'm like, you have to know your audience you're going after and understand what they're feeling. Not their problem, but yes, you have to understand their problem, but how does that problem actually make them feel? And then empathize with them. You know, there's many people that do what I do that has no empathy and they just, they just kind of go shouting down from their fake mountain going, hey, I can help you, you know, look at what all the shit I've done. Versus like, I've been what you're going through. I totally get it. How can I help? Who can I connect you to? You know, one of the things I always tell people after I, I meet with them, like, is there any back connect you with? Because I do believe, like you were saying, you're a connector, you know, I've seen that, like the people that go, hey, you need to meet this person. And then whenever they're like, man, that relationship was amazing. Thanks so much, Jason. You know, and then just keep building on that. So I totally agree with all this. It's so easy. It's not like rocket science. I think you have to be aware in order to do it and kind of almost, you're almost kind of changing yourself a little bit because I think early on, I think we're all takers versus givers and when you give yeah, you get more. Michael: [00:12:10] And there's a great book called The Go-Giver and it's, I'm looking at something that I've described to as a kid, that there's something that when you shift from everyone defines success differently, by the way. For me, it's about being able to have the time and money to do what it is that I want to do and do it with the people that I want to do with and having great relationships with those people. I mean, at the end of the day, I'm not a slave to money. Don't get me wrong. It's, it's an important aspect of things that it's not the end all be all. And when you really place your identity outside of that, you start to make this shift from being successful to then being significant. So the shift from being successful to significant is it's a long journey and it takes a lot of work. And I can't say that it was a smooth ride for me, and it's not, I'm not done. I'm not done by any stretch, just so have a lot of growing to do. And the best is yet to come. Jason: [00:13:03] Yeah. And I think when you make that shift to significance, I remember when I sold the first agency, I was depressed and it was because I didn't have that significance. And then when I was able to create the community that we've created and really connect all these amazing agency owners together. You know, then I was like, oh man, I feel like I'm on top of the world. Versus before I felt like I was on the top of the world by myself. And that sucked a lot of people look at it from the outside and they're like, oh, that's awesome. I'm like, no, man. Like I enjoyed the journey. I enjoyed the climb. And now I feel like when you're connecting all these other people, you can be on their journey as well. And that's really pretty cool. Michael: [00:13:46] It's like, you know, like, a Sherpa. Jason: [00:13:49] Yeah, exactly. But I just, I can't climb as much. I can't climb as fast as, as those guys. That's amazing. Whenever you watch any of those Sherpas on Everest, I'm like, how are they doing this? And why would they want to do it? Michael: [00:14:06] It's crazy to see that happen. But I think it's metaphoric too. The hardest clients usually have the best views does. But sometimes those climbs might not necessarily be successful. I mean, I have to tell you that, you know, part of my growth story , and I'd be remiss if I didn't say this, came through a failed startup. I had placed everything into this, everything, you know, some people spend money to go do their MBA. I dropped every single thing that I had saved into this thing. And it didn't go well. And my identity was wrapped up into that. So having visions of grandeur, you know, making it and had, I knew just kind of looking back now because you know, you get kind of depressed when you lose everything. It's, it's not a fun place. You learn a lot about yourself. Jason: [00:14:56] But it makes you appreciate everything so much more as you're moving forward, because I was hiking the mountain yesterday and I was going through this thick brush and it just kept getting thicker and thicker. I couldn't get through it. So I had to backtrack. I had to go back down. And then find another route up. And that's, that's everything. We do everything in business, in life, everything it's never a straight path. It's always the zigzags and knowing when to turn back, I mean, I could have probably made it through, but I would have been bloodied and banged up. I was like, kinda like walking. So, awesome. Well, this has all been amazing. Michael, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Michael: [00:15:42] I think just to, just around knowing and taking that niche that you feel like you can be the best in the world. I mean, I didn't say this, but you know, we have a really big presence in the digital health space. And it's sort of done by design in that aspect. And we've really positioned ourselves and placed ourselves to being in a category of one and pick something that you believe that you can be in a category of one and name it, name it, and tame it and proclaim it is the reality is that there's a lot of digital agencies that are out there and it's hard to differentiate. So do your damn best to be able to do that and pick your claim and work it and work it and work it and work it and stay consistent over time. Consistency over time wins. I'm telling you that there's, you know, people may think that we're pretty successful at what we do, but I got a lot of scars on my back to showcase that it's been a long journey and we stayed consistent throughout the whole entire time. Jason: [00:16:49] I love it. Yeah. You know, and you have to be passionate and whatever you pick don't choose it based on money. Like we were talking in the pre-show, why you chose healthcare and why you started working with other industries, like in plastic that you were like, oh, that's healthcare as well. Cause you're passionate about it. And the more passionate about it, the more you're going to do, and it's going to resonate with your audience that you're going after. Versus just kind of getting a stupid course out there that says here's the most profitable niches for agencies and pick one. Michael: [00:17:20] Um, I care about two things that I'm very passionate about, you know, relationship equity kind of really factors into this notion of access. And the way that I view access is around customers, partners, etcetera, but on a broader scale access around access to care, access to things like food. I mean, there's 50 plus million Americans now that don't know where their next meal is going to come from. That's an access Golproblem, access to, you know, so access is something I care very, very deeply about when I see people that can't get access or maybe someone that wants to try to get into a job and necessarily can't get in and, um, you know, that's an access problem. And then the second thing that I believe that things hinge on is leadership. And there are leaders right now that are coming into some very influential roles that they're not necessarily tech savvy, they're tech dependent. They grew up with an iPhone. They grew up with a smartphone. And they view innovation as, as a differentiator, the view innovation as a way to generate more revenue. And when you're working with a digital agency and aspect of what they do is innovation. And the way I define innovation is providing value to many. Then you can do that incrementally over time. So those things kind of combined, you know, really hinge on whether or not people are going to be accepting of adoption of some of these innovations that come through. And that's exciting to me because you interact with people that you just problems that they're solving can inevitably make a pretty big radical shift and be part of that journey is an absolute privilege. Jason: [00:19:00] Yeah, exactly. Awesome. What's the website people go and check you out if they want to reach out to you? Michael: [00:19:06] Well, I'm on LinkedIn, so people can check me out on LinkedIn, Michael Stamatinos, and they can go to our website, michaelstamo.com and they can hear from us there. Jason: [00:19:15] Awesome. Okay, everyone, go check that out. Michael, thanks so much for coming on the show. And if you guys want to build relations that equity and be around them, amazing agency owners all over the world that are sharing what's working. Having a lot of fun, passing a ton of business back and forth. I really never talked about that, but just really elevating each other along the way over the years. I’d love for all of you to go check out digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind for agency owners that want to grow and scale faster and just be transparent and have a lot of fun. So go to digitalagencyelite.com and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_Relationship_Equity_Establishes_Your_Agency_as_a_Category_of_One.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 17 November 2021
Are you looking for the right formula for quick agency growth? When Ellen Jantsch was working as a head of growth in a small tech startup, she felt there was space for an agency focused on testing and executing strategies into long-term sustainable growth. She held on to that idea while she worked as a freelancer and when she started Tuff, a remote growth team for hire. They work with teams in nearly every industry to deliver actionable strategies to attract and keep more engaged customers. Today she joins the podcast to talk about how she found the right formula for quick growth for her agency, her strategic move to grow the agency's most valuable asset, and the moment she started thinking of a more repeatable formula to generate new business. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesWix: Today's episode is sponsored by the Wix Partner Program. Being a Wix Partner is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Finding the Right Formula For Quick Agency Growth and Generating New BusinessJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here. And on today's episode, we have an amazing guest, uh, fellow Coloradan, if that's a word, I don't know. I just moved here so I don't know. But we're going to talk about how she's grown her agency so quickly. And, uh, go over some of the strategies that have worked for her and some of the things that might not have worked, so it helps you avoid them. So let's go ahead and get into the episode. Hey, Ellen. Welcome to the show. Ellen: [00:00:33] Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:36] Yeah. Excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Ellen: [00:00:39] I run a business called Tuff. We’re a small, fully remote growth marketing agency partnering primarily with startups, scale-ups, helping them get traffic and grow their revenue. We focus on tactics like Google ads, technical SEO, content, creative, Facebook ad, CRO, and email. Really trying to figure out how to test quickly and then operationalize small wins into long-term sustainable growth. Jason: [00:01:04] Awesome. And so how did you get started creating your agency? Ellen: [00:01:09] Primarily through freelancing. I think that's probably a common story, but I had done in my career prior to freelancing corporate marketing worked at an ad tech startup worked at like a really small startup as a head of growth. And I knew… Felt like there was an opportunity to, to start an agency like Tuff. But wanted to hone in on my own kind of experiences, primarily from an executional standpoint. So I freelanced for about a year and a half. Some consulting to strategy work, but a lot of executional work running Google ads, running Facebook ads, writing email copy. Trying to just kind of hone in on the services that Tuff was going to provide initially. And then got to a crossroads where it felt like I had enough money in the bank. I knew I didn't want to ever take capital as I started Tuff. And so I, I pretty much planned to have enough, enough money to pay myself a salary as well as two other people for six months, even if we didn't sign a single client. And at that point about three years ago, decided to start Tuff and put the freelancing work to the side. Jason: [00:02:11] Awesome, and so what were the roles of the two people that you hired first and why? Ellen: [00:02:16] Yeah, two people. Um, the first one was a PPC strategist, somebody to take over a lot of the day-to-day executional work I was doing for clients, Google ads, Bing ads, YouTube ads, that type of work. It allowed me to take off one hat and pass it to somebody else. The second hire was crazy to think about now, a non-revenue generating employee. Somebody to help us with people ops. I do think that if you're serious about building a remote team and a small team, you have to put a lot of foundation in place. We worked on a career framework. We thought about hiring processes. How do you set up benefits? How do you think about compensation? What's equitable? How do you create an inclusive hiring process? Just spend a lot of time getting that in place before we started actually thinking about building a team. Jason: [00:03:00] That's great. No, that's really great. That's first time I've heard someone bring on like an HR-type person as their second role. I thought you would say like project manager. And everyone always thinks they're not billable. Like, they're billable. I don't know why no one thinks that, but I usually tell people around the 10 person mark to get the HR and people usually are shocked. They're like, I thought you had to do that much later on. But I think a lot of people think they're just doing paperwork. And they're not doing all the other things to make sure you get the right people. Because the people in agency are the most valuable asset. Ellen: [00:03:36] Especially in a service-based agency, you know, I think it's people work with Tuff because they like the experience of the team members here. And if you don't get that right, then you have a lot of employee turnover. The cost of hiring the wrong employees is astronomical, if you ask me. And so I'd rather get it right the first time around. Jason: [00:03:54] Yeah. Well, do you guys feel that you've got it right on the first couple of hires? I know. Man, I hired so many of the wrong people. I got rid of a lot of the right people too. Many, many years. Cause I didn't have that person. Ellen: [00:04:06] Yeah, we really struggled in the beginning, mostly because we had a strong process for hiring, I feel, but didn't really know what we wanted. And I think that goes back to as well as being the kind of first-time founder never working on an agency before. We hadn't really established our playing field. So we were kind of like saying yes to every opportunity. We were doing any type of service that we could offer. We were just trying to generate revenue. And I didn't have a clear enough picture around what we actually need out of team members and what kind of like the long-term vision and who the right client is for Tuff. And we've kind of paralleled those. And as it became more clear around where we get the right results and the types of clients we want to work with, it becomes a lot easier to hire because you know exactly what you're looking for. But in the beginning it was a cluster. I was just shocked anybody wanted to work with us, to be honest.
Jason: [00:04:50] Yeah, I think everyone has to go through the cluster. It's like that Vegas buffet, you're trying out everything. What was the pivotal moment where you got that clarity? Ellen: [00:05:00] Yeah, I think it probably happened about 18 months ago. And two things became really clear if I was going to continue to have any chance of growing Tuff, we had to figure out how to hire talent that's adaptable, autonomous more senior in position. So not people that we'd have to train extensively in the beginning who had experience working on small teams. So really honing in on characteristics versus job responsibilities, and that's been really helpful. Um, the second thing would be how do you create a more repeatable formula for generating new business? I think when you have a more predictable look at revenue and growth, it becomes a lot easier to then make strategic hiring decisions early. Versus waiting to kind of like feel the pinch in the stress of like, oh gosh, we've got a lot of work. We've got to hire somebody else. Or this whole thing is going to collapse. You can get to a point where you slowly get out of that and get ahead of it with hiring and you can't do that unless you can predict what the next six months is going to look like. Jason: [00:06:03] When you're an agency partner with Wix, you unlock an entire digital ecosystem for creating, managing, and growing your agency. Get the full coding and design freedom to create anything your clients need, along with the tools to manage and collaborate with your team seamlessly from anywhere. And when it comes to growing your agency, you can get matched with new leads every day and earn revenue share for every website you guys create. They're backed by the Wix industry leading security and cyber performance. You'll also have a dedicated account manager on standby 24/7 so you can reach your goals and start setting new ones. See for yourself, head over to wix.com/partners and re-imagine what your agency can accomplish. Yeah. Building a predictable pipeline is everything, right? Like if your business is built on word of mouth, which I always joke around saying that's just not scalable. And you're relying on other people, then you're going to take on work that you probably shouldn't be. Because there's no such thing as a bad agency client and only a bad prospect or a bad process. And, and so when you can build that predictable pipeline, it makes things a lot easier where you're picking and choosing. So let's transition to that. What's worked for you for building a more full pipeline? Ellen: [00:07:25] I think more than anything, what hasn't worked. I have found at least with Tuff, testing and experimentation was a much quicker route to finding, finding what was going to work. And I think in the early days we relied a lot on word of mouth. Um, larger agencies. We tried to kind of like create partnerships for any clients they didn't want. Jason: [00:07:43] That doesn’t work. Ellen: [00:07:45] No. Let's see, I put on workshops, I went to events. I would like get in touch with people that had been connected with LinkedIn. We tried outbound sales, um, saw some success there, but definitely not like a natural skillset for me. So a bit of a stretch. So we tried a whole bunch of different things for about a year. Um, got exhausted. And finally realized how do we generate more inbound leads then have, have healthier conversations and get people knocking on our door and getting curious about working with top and wanting to work with us. And so we started getting really specific with an SEO strategy. So that took, you know, that's a slow burn. It's not a, it's not like paid acquisition. It's not like referrals. It takes a long time to build it was a schlep. But now when you go into Google and type growth marketing agency, you're going to see Tuff in the number one spot. If you type content, strategy, agency, technical SEO agency, YouTube ads agency, we're going to be in the top three. And now we're lucky and humbled enough to have 75 leads knock on our door a month. And we maybe take on one or two. And I couldn't have predicted that level of scale ever, but the organic acquisition has really been important for us. Jason: [00:08:52] Very cool. Yeah. You know, I always tell everybody, it's kind of like, as you're building and growing the business, you got to experiment with what's not working. And then kind of go back to kind of the basics and really build on that foundation. And what we found too cause a lot of times. In the very beginning, when we were growing our agency, we grew it from being in the search engines and people coming to us. Then when we started getting, wanting to get to the next level, we started realizing, man, we need this outbound channel. Man, we need this strategic partnership channel. You know, Google changes one thing, we're toast. And then we're laying off a lot of people. So it's always… always a work in progress. Ellen: [00:09:37] Yeah. I couldn't agree enough. And I think we kind of, you know, like we partner with clients every day to think about growing revenue and acquiring new customers or users for them. And we try to apply the same process for Tuff. So we do quarterly growth marketing strategies. We stay pretty committed to it, but I would say we're like in that moment right now, Jason, where 75% of our leads come from organic traffic. And when you think about having all of your eggs in one basket, it's terrifying. And so we're starting to get to this point where we're capturing a lot of existing demand, how do we start to create a little bit more demand? And how does that look like for us long-term? Jason: [00:10:12] Yeah. I almost even look at it too of like, when I hear 75 leads a month, I'm like, okay, good. How can I make them even better? Or how could I even convert them more? Like I was talking to Darby or skill specialist. I'm like, well, out of the conversations that you set up, how could we have the ones we want… How do we increase that conversion rate? Just a little bit. That's always those little fine tweaks that work. I'm going to ask you something I've never really asked anybody that I'm gonna start doing the show. What's the thing that you've regretted that you haven't done in the agency yet? Ellen: [00:10:47] For the agency. Hmm. That's such a great question. I think, um, this is very tactical, but I apologize. It's top of mind. We didn't add on our creative team until recently. And in the growth game, we're really metrics driven data driven, thinking about tactics and the strategies behind those. But if you don't have really good creative, you're not going to get very far. And for so long we outsourced that. Not really trusting in our processes, not really understanding what that would look like in house. And we didn't bring it in house until about three months ago. And now I'm like, oh shit, we need to triple that team tomorrow. And so I think I would've just looked a little bit more holistically at our services and figure out… Again, it just goes back to how do you exchange the most value? And where can you team be the strongest? And I was slow to, I was slow to pick up on that. Jason: [00:11:34] Awesome. Well, Ellen, this has all been amazing. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Ellen: [00:11:40] No, I think you've covered it. Jason: [00:11:42] All right. Perfect. Uh, what's the website people go and check out the agency? Ellen: [00:11:46] tuffgrowth.com. Jason: [00:11:48] Awesome. Very easy. Everyone go check it out. And if you liked this episode, make sure you guys subscribe. Make sure you hit the like button, comment. And uh, if you guys want to be around amazing agency owners on a consistent basis. Where you can grow your agency faster because you can get their opinions and then they can share what's working for them. So you can scale and grow faster. I'd like to invite all of you to the digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind where the agency owners are growing very, very quickly and having a fun time doing it. So make sure you go to digitalagencyelite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_To_Find_The_Right_Formula_For_Quick_Agency_Growth.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 14 November 2021
Are you looking to start your transition to the role of agency CEO? David Anderson started living the entrepreneurial dream more than twenty years ago when he started Off Madison Ave, a full-service marketing agency he founded with his partner after getting fired from his agency job. After two decades as a business owner, David has experienced success and failure. Having learned from many successes and the hard knocks of business and life. In his conversation with Jason, he talks about the many challenges and mistakes that helped him learn, why taking a step back from day-to-day operations is a marathon, not a sprint, the importance of building your leadership team and letting them make their own mistakes, and what he has learned after many agency acquisitions. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and Resources Sharpspring: Today's episode is sponsored by Sharpspring, an all-in-one revenue growth platform that provides all of the marketing automation, CRM, & sales features you need to support your entire customer lifecycle. Partner with an affordable marketing automation provider that you can trust. Head over to sharpspring.com/smartagency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Building Your Leadership Team & Letting Go of Day-to-Day Operations is a Marathon, Not a SprintJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here with another amazing episode and amazing guest. We're going to talk to an eight-figure agency owner who's going to talk about how he really kind of transitioned out of really doing everything and transitioned more to a leadership role where he doesn't have to make all the decisions, which I think a lot of us like. We're also going to talk about M&A, growth, getting bigger, so sit back and let's get into the episode. Hey, David. Welcome to the show. David: [00:00:35] Hey, Jason. Thank you for having me. Looking forward to it. Jason: [00:00:38] Yeah. Excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? David: [00:00:42] All right. So Dave Anderson, I live here in sunny Arizona, where it's still a hundred plus degrees here, today when we're recording this anyway. I am in Arizona. I have been an agency owner for about 23, 24 years now and worked at another agency for a good three years before that. The name of the agency is Off Madison Ave. We are a full service, kind of going back to the old terms, full-service agency that does everything from creative media, public relations, social media, digital. All of the kind of stuff that we've had. We're about 35 full-time people but our business model is really evolved to where we're with a plethora of great talent out there now of how we're using a real combination of full-time people and people with specific skill sets to do our diverse client work every day. Jason: [00:01:41] And so tell me kind of how did you guys get started or why did you start? David: [00:01:45] Ah, that's a great question. So I have one business partner. Roger Hernie, a great friend of mine. So we were both working… Jason: [00:01:52] Still, still business partner? David: [00:01:53] Still business partners, 23, 24 years in October years later, still business partners. And I can, I can give some insights if you like, why I think that has worked overtime. But we were both working at the same agency. And to be honest with you, I got fired one day. First time I'd ever been fired in my life from a job. Um, my wife and I were one month pregnant with our first child on the way. I still remember going and telling her and picking her up at work. And she said, how'd the day go? And I said, well, they got fired today. That'll stress out your wife in any situation. Jason: [00:02:26] Was it Friday? David: [00:02:27] Uh, it was Monday. I started the week off the right way for her. So… Jason: [00:02:33] I've always been fired on Fridays. David: [00:02:35] Yeah, no, this was a Monday. And it's a story that needs to be told over alcohol. The agency kind of turned into, um, the culture was bad and the CEO asked me one day why it was bad. And I told him my honest opinion and I didn't last long after that. So I come from the PR side of things. Background in politics, PR. My business partner worked for McCann Erickson, he is the creative guy. And we just working together, saw the value… Again, I'm an old guy way back then were PR and creative, but didn't really work well together, they were more siloed. And we really wanted to bring that together to bring a total marketing picture. So yeah, 23 years later, we've done three small acquisitions over the years to help us grow. And like every one of you, we've had our best of days on our absolutely worst of days. Um, I'm a lot grayer now, but you know, we've survived. Jason: [00:03:32] Very cool. And, um, tell me what's been the process…? How long did it take you? Or if you kind of remember some of the key elements or key things that happen to get to a point where you don't have to be in the day-to-day operations anymore. David: [00:03:50] Yeah. It's a great question. And I'm going to be honest with you. I severely messed it up two times before I got it right. And it's a thing that I work with kind of both other business owners now, and agency owners. The process of working on the business every day, not in the business. And then ultimately be able to move where I am now today, where I don't really have any day-to-day role in the company. I'm still involved from a financial side. If we do an acquisition, like we did last November, I'm very involved. Um, but I work directly with our GM. So the first time I messed it up, I hired a person from the outside who supposedly had a lot of agency experience, bigger agency actually. And after going through the process, what I did horribly wrong was I didn't have a solid onboarding process for the new person that was coming on. Honestly, I kind of said, this person's hired, he starts on Monday. And by Monday afternoon I was like, good luck! You know? And within six months, we've lost clients. Most hurtful was I lost, I think, three of our top-five leadership team members because of that person's leadership style, how they were doing. Just a bad, bad time. So I had to come back in and fix that. The second time, I had a leadership team and we implemented EOS to be honest with you, which I'm a big fan of. But I chose not to be the visionary or the integrator and I left it to our executive team and the partners that were involved in the business. And that went really bad too, because when you kind of pick the integrator to lead, the other people didn't agree. There was no solid decision-making. There was not clear definition on when to bring it to the owners or me as the owner of decisions. And, again, it completely fell apart and I stepped back into fix it again. Now this time, I think I have finally gotten it right where we brought somebody up through the ranks, worked on a transition plan, clearly defined authority. I am holding that person accountable. The biggest thing where I failed was lack of accountability as I kind of turned the day-to-day operations over to others. Now there's a level of accountability. I still am very involved at times on the EOS part of it on our rocks and making sure where we are. And we are more than a year into it now and the person who runs the bay, they, her name is Sasha has done a fantastic job. The agency is growing. Our clients are happy. Our culture has improved. So what I would say is it's a process. It's a marathon, not a sprint, and you will have your failures in it. Jason: [00:06:47] Is your agency struggling to deliver real revenue growth results to your clients? You know, agency marketers can consolidate data and align marketing and sales teams goals to achieve real results for your agency and clients using revenue growth platforms. SharpSpring is an all-in-one platform built for agencies like yours to optimize digital marketing strategies with simple, powerful automation. Manage your entire funnel all in SharpSpring. Now for a limited time, my smart agency listeners will receive your first month free and half off onboarding with SharpSpring. Just visit sharpspring.com/smartagency to schedule your demo and grab this offer. That's sharpspring.com/smartagency. Now I've seen it all kinds of different ways where… There's two ways I've seen it work out well. One is to bring in… One of the first guests actually brought in someone as a consultant to work with the team and to really kind of get to know them. And then eventually they hired that person as the CEO and it was kind of like, oh, well, you're part of us. You've been working with us for six months. That kind of stuff. I've seen that work. And it's a good test. And then I've also seen kind of going through the ranks. But a lot of times what people struggle with is if you don't have people through the ranks, what do you do? And that's why I wanted to kind of give you option number one, that I've seen work. I've also seen it not work where they brought in someone temporarily, and then it doesn't work, but that's fine. They're not the CEO yet. You're testing out the waters and then you can kind of go… Let's talk about a lot of times when agency owners get over the couple of million mark, right? Like you can get to the million mark by accident, I feel. And then you can kind of get to the 2 million mark by accident and a lot of luck. But then to really kind of take it up from there, you have to build out a really good leadership team. So let's talk about how did you build out your leadership team? Like not particular names, but what were their roles? What did you learn from that? Like, what did you… what didn't work? David: [00:09:05] Yeah, so great question. And again, I feel we're in a good spot now, but lots of mistakes along the way. So how we do it, we call them group heads in our organization and we put people at the lead of like our account service team, our creative team, our PR team, and our media team and creative team. So we put a person at the head of all of them, and then I made them the leadership team that they were the ones to work collectively. Um, you know, we're not big enough to, and never have been. And I, quite frankly, I don't think I agree with having people that are just managers and not… So they're working directors is what we call them. They were directors that head of their group, group heads. But they were the ones who were responsible for making sure we weren't siloed and the workflow and functioning like that. And that has worked very well with us. But as agency owners know, actually any CEO leadership knows… The challenge there is managing the personalities, the issues, the finances. You know, one of the biggest mistakes I made was tying my group head’s compensation to the financial bonus to their financial income. And then it was a question of how much money do I get? Because I get to put more in my pocket on that. And so what I did was their, and still is, their compensation of bonuses and stuff like that is based on the overall performance of the agency, not of an individual. Otherwise, you'll always have people looking out for their own personal wellbeing that they go through. So it's really that… Now also as a business owner, agency owner, what you need to do, two things is one is you need to let go as you bring on those senior people. You don't hire senior people and micromanage. They don't want to come in and be told what to do, but you as an owner have to relinquish that. And with that, you have to accept, there's going to be failure. There's going to be things that don't work. These are how people learn. And we as owners, when the first time something goes wrong, we jump back in to save the day and tell everybody else what they did wrong. And believe me, I, you know, if you can see me, I've lots of gray hair. This is how I got to that point. But I think, and I've seen, you know, in entrepreneurs, business people as general, we hate to fail we're as competitive. But I believe if you really want to grow your team and you have to let them fail, just like our kids, you know, you have to learn lessons the hard way. So I hope that's helpful. Jason: [00:11:39] Yep. What was your first leadership role that you hired and second and third? David: [00:11:44] I still remember that when it was Roger and I. Well, the first full leadership role that I hired was in our media group because it was the area that we were most knowledgeable in. Roger being a creative guy, me being a PR person. So we brought that media expertise and was one of the very first things.
Jason: [00:12:06] Gotcha. And why the media role if you guys had expertise in it? David: [00:12:11] Well, we really didn't. We were faking it. We were using a lot of outsiders to do the work for us. And when we got to a certain point in billings of media, we realized that we needed that expertise of not only just for placing and all of that, but the analytics behind it. And that's where we really needed the expertise. That's why we started there. Jason: [00:12:35] Gotcha. I always like to see when, uh, when people are like, well, so many people hire based on things that they don't know. And I'm like, I think the best thing is, is like hiring on the things, you know. Cause then you can actually, you know, are they full of shit or not, you know? Going there. Kind of switching focus a little bit… This focuses on growth, mergers and acquisitions and buying agencies. You know, with our agency Republics, that's how we've been able to grow, we've done 10 acquisitions so far in the past year and a half, and just had tremendous growth. So, and you've said you've done some MNA as well. So what do you look for? What's worked what hasn't worked when you bought agencies? David: [00:13:21] Yeah, that's a great question. Our philosophy right now is to find things that complement the services. We aren't necessarily looking for another full-service agency. That's going to come in with creative teams, PR teams, all of that. Like the acquisition we did, um, in November of last year was a PR agency based out of San Francisco. And we wanted to really bolster our PR capabilities. It was also a step in over 20 something years and probably something I would do different, maybe do different is… We've always been more of a generalist agency. We've had some core areas of focus and we really want to move to a much deeper focus in two areas specifically. And this was a great way to bring in a book of clients that fit into that area where we want to be more specific. So I would say is, you know, an M&A there's two types: financial, which you're just adding revenue dollars, and they're strategic. And we're looking more strategic with the one we just did. The one before that allowed us to get deeper into technology. How do we use technology more in our marketing? As a result of that, we've also started another startup, um, a SAS-based product in the marketing space that we've also done that. And if I go way back to the early two-thousands, we were a very traditional agency and we didn't have the digital capabilities that the whole marketing world was going to. And we made an acquisition to get us really deep into that space also. So they've almost all been very strategic for us. Jason: [00:15:05] Awesome. And when you're looking at buying an agency or when you bought these agencies, is it a roll up? Is it cash? How are you evaluating them? David: [00:15:18] Yeah. You know, we do the typical valuations stuff that we have. And I'm sure you've seen more than once or twice that people in their minds have a much greater valuation for their agency than what the numbers… I can tell by your face you've seen that a couple of times. And I've had, you know, while we've done four acquisitions, I've probably had 20 where we got to a serious conversation that we do. So we really look at the numbers. I'm actually a finance major coming out of school. But then you also have to take the intangibles into it. So it's always, usually a combination of some upfront money earn out that, you know, goes with it from there. Jason: [00:16:01] How do you evaluate how much they're worth? Is it on EBITDA? Is it on top line? What are some of the factors that you put in there? David: [00:16:08] More EBITDA. More is EBITDA. And then, you know, you play the whole add back game of what to, you know, really kind of goes to… From my country club membership, to my Ferrari, to my vacation home in there to get to where, it's a game. I mean, you know, as well as I do, it's a game. What I would tell… and I'm sure you've had similar experiences use people who can help evaluate a potential acquisitions organization who understands our industry. One of the big mistakes I made on the first acquisition that we did is I used my regular attorney who knew nothing about the marketing industry. I overpaid without a doubt because of that, the, you know, you know what you're doing. Because it does, it does become a game with add backs and you know… How owners are willing to structure their compensation. Jason: [00:17:04] Well, if you're selling you don't mind, if the person buying you is uneducated. Make sure you tell us that lawyer so all the sellers can use that versus David: [00:17:14] Yeah, I totally agree with you. The other thing, I had this happen once as we went through a whole valuation. We were moving forward and then it came back and I had this owner. It was a PR agency said… I think the valuation of their company came back and like 1.5 million, something like that. You know, pretty small agency. And the agency said, well, just our contacts are worth a million dollars alone. Who we know in the media is worth just a million dollars alone. So I would never sell for less than $4 million. And I was like, well, I guess we won't be moving forward. Jason: [00:17:47] Yeah. I always like to tell that person I'm like, well, you can wish in one hand and crap in the other, it gets filled up first. David: [00:17:53] I love that. I'm going to steal that if that's okay. Cause that’s very well said. Jason: [00:17:58] Yeah, Well, I stole that from cousin Eddie on Vegas Vacation. David: [00:18:04] Love it. Absolutely love it. Jason: [00:18:06] Well, this has all been great, David, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? David: [00:18:11] No. Well, a couple things. One is, you know, as agency owners and entrepreneurs, make sure you have a great network around you of advisers is what I would say. Find like-minded… I'm a member of EO Entrepreneurs Organization. It's, you know, provides the CEO forum. Vistage. I was part of Vistage. Get people around you who know more than you, have more experiences that you, that you can experience share. Because that's how we learn and grow. And that's what we do best. I would also say, do whatever you have to do to work on the business every day, not in the business. And I fully understand when you're a smaller agency crossing that first million-dollar mark, $2 million mark, and you're finally making good money. And then the thought of hiring a six-digit leader, a six-figure income. Oh my gosh, that's going to set me back again. That's how you grow, you know, and it's just what you need to do um… If you want a growth the company. If you want a lifestyle company then, you know, that's perfect. And neither one is right or wrong. It's just, you have to marry it up with what you want to do. And the whole process I went through of getting out of the day-to-day, it's absolutely a marathon. It's not a sprint. I would say you need at least 18 months to plan properly for that. That's just my experience to do it in the right way. Jason: [00:19:36] Awesome. And, uh, what's uh, the agency website people go and check you guys out? David: [00:19:40] Uh, Off Madison Ave. A V E, not avenue. So offmadisonave.com. Jason: [00:19:46] Awesome. Well, thanks so much, David, for coming on the show. It was awesome. And I totally agree with you on surrounding yourself with amazing people that are further ahead, so they can actually help you and see the things… And kind of setting me up for that, that was perfect. I want to invite all of you to go to digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind just for experienced agency owners. So I understand that there's other groups out there that have all kinds of different industries. But if you want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners on a consistent basis, I want all of you to go to digitalagencyelite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Why_Becoming_the_Agency_CEO_is_a_Marathon_Not_a_Sprint.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 10 November 2021
Forbes has called Nancy A. Shenker a “bad girl” because she selectively breaks rules and takes calculated risks to help companies innovate and grow. Nancy had worked as a CMO for big brands like MasterCard and Citibank when she ventured to start her own business, TheONswitch. That was more than 18 years ago and she credits her client side work for providing the insight needed when she first started. Those experiences are what contributed to her still being in the agency world today. In her conversation with Jason, they talked about how staying in business through the years has meant adapting to different challenges. They also touched on some of the lessons learned in more than 18 years of owning her business, and why people shouldn't underestimate experience and the wisdom that can come from it. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and Resources Gusto: Today's episode is sponsored by Gusto, an all-in-one people platform for payroll, benefits, HR where you can unify your data. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Head over to gusto.com/agency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Lessons Learned After 18 Years in the Business & Why We Shouldn't Underestimate ExperienceJason: [00:00:00] All right. What's up, agency owners? Today I have an amazing guest who has been in business for over 18 years. Actually, today is their 18th birthday. We're going to talk about the lessons learned about growing their agency. And let's go ahead and jump into the show. Hey, Nancy. Welcome to the show and happy birthday to the business. Nancy: [00:00:25] Thank you. How are you doing? Jason: [00:00:28] So, uh, tell us who you are and what do you do? Nancy: [00:00:32] Sure. My name is Nancy A. Shenker. And as you just said, today is the 18th birthday, so it's fortuitous timing, um, of my consulting company slash agency called TheOnswitch. Um, I was an early-stage entrepreneur. I left corporate life and started my own business long before it became popular to do that. Um, and previously I was a CMO at a company called Reed Exhibitions, the producers of Comicon. And then before that I was at MasterCard and Citibank. So the first part of my career was on the client-side. So when I got ready to start my own consultancy, I sort of knew what things look like from the other side of the desk, which gave me tremendous insight and probably contributed to my still being around 18 years later. Jason: [00:01:26] Yeah. What were… Going back to when you were the CMO and working with a lot of different agencies over the years, what were some things that really pissed you off? Nancy: [00:01:39] Um, I think that, um, account people who had never really worked in or on the business, um… Always seemed sort of whimsical to me. Like if you couldn't tell me specifically what was going on with a project or why I should be spending my money on direct rather than conventional print… Then you were really just like a host or a hostess. So that was like number one, that stuck in my craw that I didn't really need somebody to take me out to lunch or invite me to parties. I needed a person who was going to give me creative ideas to grow the business. Jason: [00:02:22] A strategist. Nancy: [00:02:22] Um, yeah. Yeah. The other thing, um, was, um, paying for people who weren't actually working on my account and the recession was a tipping point for me when I really had to take a long, long, hard look at my overhead as a business and to say, whoa, whoa, like my clients are paying for my equipment. They're paying for my toilet paper. They're paying for, you know, all of this stuff. And when the economy takes a downturn, you're sort of stuck throwing all of this stuff overboard that you just bought in the previous 10 years. So I was actually really in great shape to handle the pandemic. Because I went with this minimalistic virtual model back in 2008, which suddenly became popular in 2020. And I'm like, whoa, I've been doing this for 10-15 years. I'm all good. I don't have any stuff to throw overboard at this point. I'd been co-working for the last decade. I have been managing a virtual team for the last decade. So I was, I was good. I mean, no one was really good in the pandemic, but I was better than most. Jason: [00:03:47] Yeah. I saw a lot of agencies growing actually in the pandemic, just because, you know, there were so many businesses that… Traditional, their traditional way of getting business they couldn't get anymore. And they really needed, you know, that digital, um, expertise in order to reach their customers and really kind of make, get, get them through because you know, the, the loans of the government only goes so far. Nancy: [00:04:15] Yeah. I mean, I would say probably, you know, 20% of clients said... Oh my goodness, the world is changing. Human behavior is changing and my customer's changing and I'm going to get first-mover advantage by dealing with that. And then there was a whole other swath of the population that went into this like inertia state. So the nimble, the strong, the… I hate the word pivot, but the pivoters are surviving and thriving. And those people who sort of… pause. I mean, I just saw this statistic that was shocking that two-thirds of companies, you're talking about major companies, postponed or canceled market research during the pandemic. And I would argue that that was the time to really be all over how are my customers behaving? What are they buying? What are they clicking on? How are they shopping? Because if you understood that, like, if you really understood, basic human behavior, which shifted largely to digital... Um, you were way ahead of the game if you were on top of that. Which is what taught us this lesson that, you know, I've learned starting in, when I first started my career in the 1970s. You know, our tagline as a business is bright and timeless marketing. I've seen media change radically. Um, but, um… What has stayed the same is your understanding of basic human behavior. Um, that's timeless, whether it's B2B or B2C, if you really are inside the head and heart and wallet of your customer, you'll never be wrong. Jason: [00:06:08] Yeah. What were, what were some of the things that you've learned over the years of running your business?
Nancy: [00:06:15] Um, well, my lesson number one for today, I'm doing a series of nine lessons learned over 18 years. And lesson number one, which is live on my LinkedIn profile today is trust your gut. You know, and I think that it's very easy when you're a business owner to be swayed by clients, by your team members… But at the end of the day, you know, if you're a successful business owner, your intuition is usually pretty good. So if you have the heebie-jeebies, as I say, about a client or about a prospective employee or a current team member. You know, the chances are probably better than even that your gut is right. So, um, you know, the biggest mistakes I've made or learning moments I've had in the last 18 years have been when something didn't feel right to me and I moved forward with it anyway. Jason: [00:07:14] Yeah, exactly. Cool. And what are, what are some of the other nine? Obviously we, we don't have time to go over all nine. Um, and I'm not gonna put you on the spot for that, but look, give us a hint for some other ones. Nancy: [00:07:26] Um, always watch your P&L. You know, especially if you're a creative, um, and a storyteller, it's pretty easy to delude yourself and say, well, things will turn around tomorrow. Or, you know, I'm, I'm spending $10,000 on this because I think it's a good, calculated risk. But, you know, that's one of the big lessons I learned from the recession is that, um… Hope is great, but money in the bank is better. Like always have that cushion. Also because you never know when things could go south and you don't want to be too leveraged when that happens. So, you know, as I like to say, especially for women, business owners, PNL does not stand for purses and lipstick. Um, when you're in a service business and your biggest expense is people, um, you really have to spend very, very wisely. Jason: [00:08:34] Taking care of your employees has never been more important than right now. And while paydays are great, running payroll is a major pain. Calculating taxes, deductions, compliance, none of it's easy. Unless of course you have Gusto. Gusto is a simple online payroll and benefits built for your small business. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Plus, with Gusto’s help you can offer benefits like 401k's health insurance, workers' comp, and a lot more. And because you're a smart agency masterclass listener, you're going to get three months free once you run your first payroll. Go to gusto.com/agency. That's gusto.com/agency for three free months. Yeah, I always, when I work with agencies, I'm always surprised about how low their profit margins are. And they think in the agency business that 10% is good or 15%. I'm like the average is over 30%. And then they kind of get shocked a little bit and I'm like, that's the average. I was like, you can go over. And they're like, but when you get bigger, it goes down. I'm like, no, it doesn't. Only if you're, if you get dumber. Nancy: [00:10:02] Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And, um, you know, when I first started my business, I think I was more into the creator comforts. Um, you know, I'd mentioned to you that I just moved to Arizona about three, four years ago. And I was kind of shocked at how many agencies have big spaces and their names on the door and big staffs. A lot of them did have to do some serious bloodletting when the pandemic started, you know. And you're right, there are some who didn't miss a beat and whose clients really needed them. And there are others that just could not sustain their expense base when things took a turn for the worse. So I'm a, I'm a minimalist both personally and professionally these days. Jason: [00:10:52] Yeah. I, I would always invest in anything that would be for the long-term that they would generate. And then personally, I would only invest in things, um, that were related to experiences. I would never buy a $50,000 watch, but I would buy a $50,000 experience. Nancy: [00:11:14] Oh yeah. I mean, you're talking to a woman who spent an insane amount of money on a 12th-row seats to see the rolling stones when they came through, um, a few years ago, pre-pandemic. And I will never, ever regret that expense. So, yeah. Memories, travel, experiences… And talent, you know, if you find people… I'm working with a couple of women now who I've known for years who are worth every penny, I pay them and then some. Because they are helping me scale the business and deliver great quality work and enabling me to sleep better at night, which at this stage of my life is super important. Jason: [00:11:58] Yeah, exactly. Uh, give us two other tips that you've learned over the years. Nancy: [00:12:04] Um, build a really… Another people tab is build a really strong inner circle. And that inner circle can change or evolve over time, but you really have to have people in your life who will tell you the truth, who aren’t just bobbleheads. Um, operations is really key. You know, you could be doing the best creative in the world, but if stuff isn't happening on time and on budget, you're screwed. Um, and then, you know, this isn't one of my nine tips, but it's my, you know, one mini regret, in terms of how I started and scaled the business… I think having product, having tangible product is super important. Because being exclusively in a service business, no matter how much you productize your service, it's still a service. So, I mean, I'm not done yet. I have another 18 years at least ahead of me. And I have a few product concepts that I hope to launch over the next five to 10 years. Including, you know, I, I'm a writer and I have a bunch of books on Amazon and I have, um, some courses I’m developing. So yeah, I'm really into passive revenue these days. Jason: [00:13:24] Well, let me, let me tell you, the grass is not always greener on the other side. It's greener on the side you water. When I sold my agency, I thought just like you, I was like, ah, I've been in the service business for 12 years. Let me go develop a product. And I developed an iPhone app and I hated it. I literally wanted to… I put a gun to it and just blew it up behind the shed. And… Nancy: [00:13:46] Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why I haven't launched my… I have one product idea that's actually a physical, tangible product, a household product. And when I started delving into manufacturing and trademarking and distribution, I'm like, nah, I'm not, I'm not doing that. So I think that there is an opportunity and I think you've actually done it really well. You know, and I'm not just being, you know, a sycophant here. But like developing products that people in your industry truly need, you know, it's productizing your service, which is also a form of a product. I think smart, digital marketers are doing more and more of that these days. So kudos to you on that. Jason: [00:14:32] Thank you. Well, uh, is there anything Nancy, I did not ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Nancy: [00:14:39] Um, yeah, I mean, something that I think a lot about these days is, I turned 65 last February. Um, I have been very often told that I don't look 65, but what I say is this is the new 65. I would like to see the agency world and the marketing world become more age diverse. Um, it's something that I'm passionate about and you know, I now bring to the table wisdom that I didn't have even 18 years ago. So when you see that person who's old enough to be your mother or your grandmother, don't assume that they don't understand technology. Because I challenge any millennial to a social media strategy contest because I've been in the social media and digital media realm since the late nineties, early two thousands. I helped build the first website for MasterCard. I was on Twitter day one of the Twitter launch. And it’s funny cause I recently said to one of our associates I've been using social media since 2005. And she said, oh my God, I was only six years old then. So yeah, don't assume that because somebody is older doesn't mean that they can't understand new tricks. So that's my final bit of anti-ageism bad-ass wisdom. Jason: [00:16:15] Awesome. And what's the URL. People can go and check the business out? Nancy: [00:16:20] theonswitch.com, T H E O N S W I T C H.com just like a light switch, but not. Um, my daughter actually helped me name the company and, um, feel free to follow me on LinkedIn because I'm, as I said, I'm a storyteller and that's where a lot of my content goes. Jason: [00:16:39] Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Nancy, for coming on the show. And if you guys want to really be around an amazing inner circle, kind of like Nancy mentioned, where they're all digital agency owners and we're all wanting to grow and scale up faster. I'd love to invite all of you to go to digitalagencyelite.com. Go and check that out and apply. And if we think it's right for you and vice versa, we'll have a conversation. So go to digitalagencyelite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Why_Adapting_to_Change_Is_the_Secret_to_Longevity_in_Agency_Life.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 7 November 2021
Do you know which levers you can pull in order to scale your agency faster? Greg Bond believes his purpose in life is to add value to other people's lives. He is the head of revenue at SharpSpring, a company that aims to help businesses better understand their customers so they can maximize their value proposition. Greg oversees the sales function and works really close with the marketing team. He understands what it is agencies, and end-users, are really trying to do with that platform. Greg discussed the levers agencies need to pull to scale faster, some of the challenges agencies face, and what works for showing ROI and continuing to grow. 3 Golden Nuggets
YOUTUBE AUDIO LINK Levers You Can Pull To Scale Your Agency Faster and Why Agencies Are Bad at Their Own MarketingJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk and I have another amazing episode with my friends at SharpSpring. We're going to talk about what are the levers you need to pull in order to give your clients better results to scale your agency even faster. We all want to know this, so let's go ahead and get into the episode. Hey, Greg. Welcome to the show. Greg: [00:00:25] Hey! Thanks, Jason. Happy to be here, man. Jason: [00:00:28] Yeah. Excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Greg: [00:00:32] Yeah, so my name is Greg Bond and I'm the head of revenue over at SharpSpring, which very recently we were acquired by Constant Contact. So, um, a lot of really cool integration stuff going on there between those two companies. And yeah, I just kind of oversee our entire kind of sales function and work really close with our marketing team. I actually, I've been with the company a while and I came from VP of customer success. So very close to our customer base and really understanding what it is that our agencies and even our end users are really trying to do at the platform and kind of what their pain points are and what they're struggling with. And I've been able to bring a lot of that into the revenue focus of the company. So… Jason: [00:01:13] Awesome. Let's get into it. Let's talk about some of the levers that agencies can pull in order to kind of scale their agency faster and get better results for their clients. Greg: [00:01:25] Yeah. And I, I think, you know, when we talk about this, especially in the context of SharpSpring, I think what a lot of it focuses in on for us is tool consolidation. I think is one of the main things. Over the years, the technology revolution of the past 10 years, you know, the past decade. Um, has brought a lot of different point solutions to market that are fantastic tools. But the problem with them is that you end up with siloed databases and all this information that, that sits in each individual tool. And you almost have to have a whole team of operational wizards to connect these things and pull all that data together. You've got all this different reporting that's ended up end up in silos. And you can't really work to unify that customer experience and report on where exactly what attribution is the attribution that you should be pointing towards for your clients that you're working with to say, hey, this is where that sale came from. And at Sharpspring what we really focus our customers in on is ROI and being able to report specifically on this piece of revenue, where did it come from? We talk a lot about being a full-funnel marketer, and I think that's really the space where we want to play and where we think agencies can leverage to improve their own results. Jason: [00:02:45] So ROI has always been very important. And I think a lot of… You know, when I talk to agencies, one of their biggest challenges that they have is well, I can't afford to hire someone right now. I'm like, well, why don't you charge more? They're like, well, I don't know if they’d pay that. Um, and then my next question to them is, well, how much value do you deliver your clients? And a lot of them go, I don't know. And which is really freaking scary. So depending on your industry, sometimes it's hard to show an ROI. How have you found... Or what are some of the things that have worked for agencies for showing ROI in order for them to, you know, have the client stay with them longer, as well as to charge more? Greg: [00:03:29] It really is about showing that value at the bottom of the funnel. I think agencies in the past and marketers, just digital marketers period, they… They bought into this inbound marketing approach where you have the lead magnet. Somebody fills out a form and that form gives you somebody's email address in a really nice tidy bow of, hey, this is where this person came from. But the new customers, these days, there's multiple interactions before they actually make a purchasing decision. And so you have all of this noise in the system. So being able to track all the different interactions across the entire funnel, sometimes people move into the middle of the funnel and then back up to the top and then back down. And, you know, they may not necessarily be ready yet when they talk to your sales team. And to be able to kind of… Keep all of that data in one place and be able to map it to a singular campaign and then show when this deal actually does close. That's the place where I can now track all of those interactions back and say, whether I want to look at first touch or last touch or any different number of touches and attribution. I can tell you what contributed to that, that sale and be able to report on it in a way with confidence, right? Like being able to go to your client with confidence and say I am 100% sure that our marketing efforts drove this sale. As well as your sales team, right? Like, I don't want to take the sales team out of it. The sales team has a role to play as well. But marketing runs alongside the sales team and helps enable them to be able to close those deals. And you need a singular system that can track all of those interactions without some sort of XL ninjitsu happening there in the middle of it. Yeah. Jason: [00:05:14] You know, Dean Jackson always talks about out of a hundred percent of the pie. Like he always draws like this square and then he basically draws a line down the square and says 50% will never buy from you. And that out of the other 50%, they'll eventually buy from you, but maybe like 10% are ready to buy now. Then the other 40% is over time, right? And so it's really important to really kind of think about it in that way, because a lot of people just go after the 10% and they forget about the 40%. Like, when I look at our data and the different things… There's a lot of times people don't engage with us or, well, jump into the mastermind or buy a, our framework for like two or three years. Which I'm like, that's awesome. Like we held their attention that long, but you know, some people. Yeah. Greg: [00:06:07] And I talk a lot about it with our teams. I talk a lot about the buyer's journey. And there are plenty of people who fall into the bottom of your funnel, who are ready to buy right now. It's the first time you ever talked to them, right? But that's where they are in their buyer's journey. And they just happened to find you at that time. I think so many people look for that, you know, zero moment of truth, that, that place where, you know, that's all marketing is like targeting that person. But there are so many other people, like you said, there's a, the vast majority of the people who will buy from you in the future are not at that point yet. And how do you nurture them to get there? And how do you drop them in at the top of your funnel? Where at the top of your funnel, it's damn near impossible to keep them accurately it attributed to the right campaign over a long period of time. But you still have to fill that top of the funnel and help nurture them down. But with a unified database and behavioral tracking and a tool like SharpSpring, you now have that ability to get all those different touch points in and have them all in the system so that when two years from now three years from now, they actually do convert into a sale, you know exactly how to attribute that marketing spend.
Jason: [00:07:19] You've been working with agencies for a long time. Why are agencies so bad at their own marketing? Greg: [00:07:25] That's a great question. I mean, I think one of it is, it's, you know, the cobbler shoes. They've spent a lot more time and effort working with their customers and in collaboration with their, their clients. So they don't do a great job of marketing for themselves. And I, and I think the other one is the number one way that agencies get businesses through word of mouth. Word of mouth is about delivering results, right? If you deliver results above and beyond the expectations of your clients, that's where you get that word of mouth from. And so they spend all their time and I believe rightly so, they should spend all their time trying to blow their clients away and just deliver those results. Again, being able to point back to the ROI and say, hey, this marketing spend this effort that we drove, drove these results. And if you do that over and over again, you'll get word of mouth. And so it'd be great if you could also fill the top of your funnel with a bunch more content, but if it comes at, at the risk of losing the results for your clients, then I don't think it's worth either. Jason: [00:08:28] Yeah, I see that, you know, I, I just had, um, as we're recording this. A week ago, we had 28 of the best agencies over at the house for a three-day experience. And we all talked about like, where were the biggest challenges? Some of them were, you know, we're not doing our own marketing. And they thought, well, in order to scale my agency, the lever I need to pull is the sales. And I need to find a hunter. I, I started asking more questions as well, why? I was like, well, what about the business coming to you? And they said exactly what you're saying, most of their businesses generated by word of mouth. I said, well, congratulations, you're doing a great job. That's prerequisite one for scaling an agency. Right? Like, because there's a lot of people that take a stupid Facebook course and go, I'm a Facebook ads agency. They can't deliver shit. And then it screws it up for all the legit people out there. But what I told them, I said, what if you actually hired a hunter in order to scale? They're like, what about the leads? I'm like, well, that's the other thing, you pull the marketing lever, you can start generating and building your pipeline. Because what I found was there's a lot of owners that the better they do in marketing, the more meetings they have. Soon they get overwhelmed and then they start self-sabotaging themselves. And a lot of you listening right now, you're doing this shit right now. I can promise you. You're self-sabotaging yourself, but if you hired a hunter, then they can start closing that business. They're not going to sabotage you. They want to do well. And then you can scale. Then you can raise your damn prices because when you're built on referrals, you can't raise your prices because they're like, oh, I paid 10,000 a month. You can't charge a hundred thousand to a guy that just referred you 10,000. It's just a different playing field. Greg: [00:10:16] And I think agencies, it's such a unique business because it is a professional service. And, in professional services businesses, it's the expertise that people are buying, right? And the agency owner and the principal is that main source of vision and creativity. So you have to have them involved in the sale. And you also want them involved in every client engagement. That's what the clients purchased, right? So it becomes a scalability issue for your agency, right? Like there's only a certain amount that you can scale yourself. And so you have to hire people who have that ability to cast a vision and be that sort of thought leader as well alongside of you. And you need to be able to share the spotlight a little bit with them. Or at least have, like you said, that hunter that goes out and brings people in front of you and does it in a way that doesn't require a ton of your time so that you can spend the time delighting your customers with incredible results. Jason: [00:11:09] Yeah, exactly. And, and I look at it to have going, you know, as your business scales and you scale the agency, you better damn well start putting the people in place for this, right? Like you should have someone like the director of happiness, making sure you're delivering the results, right? That's what we have. So I don't have to. Like, my attention to detail is probably like everybody else's, that's why I was telling you, like our shows use like 10 to 15 minutes. Like we're all like attention to detail, like bird, where's the bird? So… Well, this has all been amazing, Greg. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think our audience needs to know about? Greg: [00:11:47] I don't think so. I mean, I think we kinda covered all the, all the main topics that I think are worth really focusing on. But I think one thing that I want to make sure is clear here is when we talk about tool consolidation… And I think everyone hears cost savings, right? They hear that, oh, I can make my life a little simpler, have fewer log-ins and things like that. And that's not really what we're saying. What we're saying is the consolidation of tools and bringing all that data into one place and being able… For that CRM, that centralized data repository to be the thing that drives your automation engine and all that behavioral tracking, being able to make your message more relevant. The right person, the right message. The right person, the right time. That is what gets you those extra conversion rates. That is what helps you grow your revenue. And it's not just, oh, you get to save some money. Yeah. Okay. That's cool. Yeah. That's another benefit. But the real benefit here is... It's actually the right way to build a customer experience that people will go nuts for. Jason: [00:12:52] Awesome. I love it. Now, Greg, you guys have a special offer for our audience for a short time. So tell us about. Greg: [00:12:59] We do. We want to offer anyone that that's a listener of your podcast series a half off their onboarding and their first month free. So big offer here for, for you guys, um, especially for, for this podcast and your audience, Jason. Jason: [00:13:13] Sweet. Thank you very much. Where can they get this? Cause now they're, you know, if you want to get… right? Like, we need to tell them. So where's the call to action, so you can give me attribution for it? Greg: [00:13:24] So head over to sharpspring.com/smartagency, and you can schedule a demo right there and that will help us secure that offer for you. Jason: [00:13:35] Awesome. And you'll be able to schedule with one of their cool strategists that can walk you through everything and set you up. So I highly recommend SharpSpring, go check it out and get your half month or the full month and a half off the onboarding. That's a tongue twister. Greg: [00:13:52] It is a tongue twister. You know, it's about a $1,600 value right there. Jason: [00:13:55] Ooh, go get it, guys. Go get it while it's hot. But, uh, thanks so much for coming on the show and uh, until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Which_Levers_Do_You_Need_to_Pull_to_Scale_Your_Agency_Faster_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 3 November 2021
Do you know the importance of building relationships to help your agency scale faster? Brian Cosgrove was doing well at a big agency but felt it kept him from doing what he really wanted to do, which was starting his own business and bringing innovation to the way the services are provided. Once he founded BrainDo, they started scaling and, within a year, had already grown from two to eight employees. In this conversation with Jason, he talked about the important role that building relationships & collaborative culture played in getting his agency off the ground, why he was always confident that they could run a big program, and what bringing value to his clients really means for him and why it is one of the guiding principles for everyone working at his agency. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and Resources Wix: Today's episode is sponsored by the Wix Partner Program. Being a Wix Partner is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Building Relationships that Will Help You Scale & The Guiding Principle of Providing ValueJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swank here and I have another amazing guest for the podcast so you can grow your agency faster. We're going to talk about building relationships and creating a collaborative culture within your agency so you can scale faster. So let's go ahead and get into the show. Hey Brian, welcome to the show. Brian: [00:00:25] Hey, how are you? Jason: [00:00:26] I'm excited to have you on. So this is your first podcast. I'm honored you picked me to be your first podcast. But, uh, for the people that have not heard of you yet, tell us who you are and what do you do? Brian: [00:00:39] Yes. I’m Brian Cosgrove. I’m the owner of BrainDo Interactive Consulting, and we do a lot of work across the board, uh, focusing in analytics development and different areas of digital marketing. Jason: [00:00:53] Great. And so how did you get started? Brian: [00:00:55] Interesting story. I was in aerospace engineering and I was looking for as some side money during the holiday season and I applied for warehouse job. And found out I wasn't the best at doing packing boxes, but I was a bit overqualified. And the owner of the company asked if I could help out with some things related to their SEO program. So I read a bunch of like white papers. I read a bunch of like academic papers on people that were actually developing these engines. I tried to figure out, okay, who's the talent? Like how they did it? And then figure out what we should do and came up with a plan. And implemented it and started ranking top. In my other career I was like, okay, I can see where I'm going to be at in 10 years. And that's cool. But this is like amazing growth and I'm able to have a huge impact and I'm still in my early twenties. So I got into that and that kinda got me to crossover into this digital marketing thing. Worked in that space for a little while, went to my first agency Razorfish and started off in SEO. And then I had to fix analytics. Was there for about three years and then went into another company another comp company to help them build out their digital practice when they were doing all kind of like direct mail TV, pretty much all traditional marketing. I went there with some, you know, one of my colleagues from Razorfish. And then that went really well and kind of grew that. And then struck out with a good friend of mine on our own in 2013. Jason: [00:02:38] What made you want to leave? Since the one agency was going really well and you were leading that. What was that itch? Brian: [00:02:44] I already knew, like, I kinda knew since I was young, that I wanted to kinda like start my own thing or make my own thing. I always kind of had a sense of, you know, we could do things a little bit differently. We could innovate a bit in how these services are provided or culture. So for me, it was kind of like I liked doing what I was doing. But it was almost like a trap because it was keeping me away from what I really wanted to do, which was kind of start something fresh. Jason: [00:03:10] Gotcha. Awesome. And when you started the agency, how long did it take you to really kind of start bringing on and building a team? Brian: [00:03:20] So it was just myself and my partner for, I guess, February to November. And then we hired our first employee in November. And at that point we figured out how to get benefits for them. We figured out how to do payroll. We figured it out, we made everything official and we got all that squared away and that made it a lot easier. And then we went after a kind of big contract to kind of do all many different digital channels in, you know, a year two and ended up hiring eight more people that year. That kind of allowed us to build out a lot of different services that we needed someone to run point on. So I'd say within a year and a half, we were at 10 from, you know, two. Jason: [00:04:05] That's great. So what do you think contributed to that growth? Like how did you have that fast growth? Because a lot of people for a couple years, they're just kinda, it's kinda them, their business partner, maybe a couple of contractors. Brian: [00:04:18] It's an interesting thing. So while I was still working, before I even started, I really cared about the relationships with my clients, with my colleagues, with my management, with team members, with vendors. So I had a pretty big network at that point. And it was… You know, there's an interesting thing that happens when you kind of let people know like, okay, I'm going out to do this on my own, you know. People that you've built relationships with that care about you they kind of want to figure out how to work with you. So it helped out tremendously just to kind of lean into that. As soon as we left the place that we were working on asked if we could do some contracting with them. And I was like, we can, but you know, it's gotta be at our contracting rate. You know, it will give you somewhat of a discount for a period of time, but this is how we have to work for our business. And we were able to end up converting our former employer into our client, which was based on the fact that it maintained good relationships. We also took a lot of care in transitional work. Backfilled our roles sort of before we left. We left them in a good place to be like, okay, they’re good. All of our big retainers are renewed. Our team they're fully staffed. They can run without us. And then they still wanted to contract with us afterward. Other agencies reached out, they wanted to partner with us because they knew that just individually, myself and my business partner had some expertise in certain areas. And they said, hey, we need help there. Can you guys help us out? So we ended up building relationships with other agencies that were in the area, you know. And then it was like someone who was a former client, you know, went to another agency, brought us in. I'd say a lot of it was kind of just relationships that got us off the ground. I think a big thing for us is we're kind of confident we could run a big program, like an enterprise program. And so, while we took on some smaller clients, we kind of just always positioned ourselves to be ready for that. Like we always kind of really played that role that we're ready to do enterprise work at a moment's notice. And we knew that that would get us a six-figure contract or something like that from a client, which again is sort of like a game-changer when it comes to hiring employees and say, I already kind of have your salary on contract. Like I can afford to pay you in the future without worrying about that. Jason: [00:06:37] Yeah, I think so many lessons in there that I want to make sure people don't skip over. It's you know, the one is you gotta be really good at what you do. Like a lot of people are like, how do you, how do you create a successful agency that’s growing? And I'm like, well, you have to know how to do something better than most. And to actually get people results. That's rule number one. But I also liked that you talked about building relationships and really not just going, you know, what's in it for me, you know, like a lot of our mastermind members, they do this amazing… where they're like, look, I don't have any problem today, I just wanted to show up and help. Like help other members, right? And then when they do need help, everyone will… Here, here's the shirt off my back. Here it is. And it's not like I'll do this for you, if you do this. Like we get, you know, all those slimy emails that you get? Like, oh, you have my audience, can you just blast this out? Brian: [00:07:43] Yeah, there's a lot of that going on. Honestly, it's, it's building a tighter circle with people that you don't have to… You know, there's no fakeness to it. There's a lot less agenda. It's sort of like let's all rise together, to me has always been important. Jason: [00:07:59] Yeah, iron sharpens iron, right?
Brian: [00:08:04] And I also really care about doing good work. So that point, and so I think that was another thing was that we were kind of committed to making sure we did great work no matter what. It wasn't like, uh, maybe we'll do well, maybe we won't. It was like, we're going to do great work no matter what, because of that relationship. I don't want to leave the client in a worse place. I refuse to do that. And that, and that was just sort of a… an important lesson, I think Jason: [00:08:34] When you're an agency partner with Wix you unlock an entire digital ecosystem for creating, managing, and growing your agency. Get the full coding and design freedom to create anything your clients need, along with the tools to manage and collaborate with your team seamlessly from anywhere. And when it comes to growing your agency, you can get matched with new leads every day and earn revenue share for every website you guys create. They're backed by the Wix industry-leading security and site performance. You'll also have a dedicated account manager on standby 24/7 so you can reach your goals and start setting new ones. See for yourself, head over to wix.com/partners and re-imagine what your agency can accomplish. And I think a lot of people forget that, you know, we kind of ring the bell. Or the gong, you know, ring the gong when you sell a deal and you're like, yeah, that's good for you. But you know, the client is already thinking, like having buyer's remorse, like you should be thinking about… Like, I was chatting with Darby, our agency scale specialist yesterday, and he's been bringing on a lot of really amazing members. And he's like, look, I'm so invested because I want them to have the best experience because it's, it's my word of what they went on. And I'm like, that's why we get along so well, we will do anything to move people along rather than like yeah. You gave us money. Yeah. Good luck. Brian: [00:10:10] Yeah, exactly. I mean, the way that I've seen it. So usually when we take on a contract, there's occasionally if it's smaller company, we might be dealing with the owner or upper executives. But usually when it comes to day-to-day, we're dealing with the manager that they have on their end. That's managing the relationship with us. And I've always told my team and, and this is kind of been a guiding principle… I want to see that person be in a position to get promoted. Just for working with us, they're doing so well, but they're now getting promoted. They're fully engaged. They love what they're doing and they're helping break down barriers within the organization to provide value. On top of that, the way that I see it, especially in the bigger organizations is I need everybody on my team to say everything that we do has provided value. Obviously, like it provides value to the brand that we're doing this work for… We're, we're billing for it. And that works out and ultimately it should be contributing to our culture. But after that, the client, that first person, that first line of contact or the person on the front lines, make sure that we're doing everything we can to help them. Make sure that what we're doing not only helps them, but helps them help their team. Make sure what we're doing not only helps them and helps their team, but helps their whole company and organization. And make sure all of that ends up helping their end customer. Because like, if you can follow that, that thread all the way through, and there's no conflict anywhere along the way, let's proceed. Let's move forward with this project and give it everything you've got. If there's a conflict on the way, maybe that's project we don't want to take on. Maybe there's a different reason that we, you know, maybe we want to propose something else. But if you can't follow that all the way along the way, then you can't have confidence that what you're doing is going to provide value. Another thing, I think that was important for us is... And this came up after working in other agencies was, you know, I remember a gentleman said to me said, look, I want to be able to be proud of who I see when I look in the mirror. I want to be able to be proud to tell my kids, the clients and the projects that I work on. And so another thing that we took on very early on was like to be picky. And so it's picky not just on the clients and the projects we work on. We want to do things that provide value to the world, but we also care about kind of like… Are we providing value to that organization? And so the how is just as important as like specifically what we're doing. And I would say, I want to add too, that team members put a lot more energy into it. Jason: [00:12:26] Oh, yeah. I think a big part of why you've gotten to grown so fast too, is you have belief in your team and you. And you said that we knew right away we could take on enterprise clients, right? There's so many of us that didn't start that way, right? We didn't start with at a big agency, like a Razorfish or go to... Like me, I was accidental. I remember I joke with people. I'm like, my first client asked me for an invoice. I didn’t even know what an invoice was. I didn't know all these terminologies. And so for many years I had kind of that, um, imposter syndrome. That I could do a website, but I can't do anything else. And I see a lot of people that way. So I just want everybody listening, even if you have that… Look, I even feel like the imposter syndrome too. And I've been in the agency space since 98. And so you got to kind of go look, I'm really good at this and I can dominate this part and go do it. And build relationships like Brian has talked about… Correct me if I'm wrong, if you make all your managers and all those people rockstars, they get promoted and where do they go? Other companies, and then they bring you along. Don't they? Brian: [00:13:43] Yes, exactly. And so, in fact, I just received an MSA for a sneaker brand I'm super into, you know, like huge brands that I liked already loved are now like our client base. And I feel like… This morning, just from work, doing, working hard with some people while they worked in other companies before that. And so the way that I say it is just, that should almost be the end goal. That should be the expectation. Like we're all kind of in our careers together. We are all sort of like at certain points in certain stages. Our clients should be going to other companies, and when they do, they should want to come into work with us. And we should be sort of a secret tool that they bring to the table. Is that it bring that success along with them. Jason: [00:14:26] Exactly. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Well, this has all been amazing. Brian, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience listening in? Brian: [00:14:34] I just want to touch briefly on the collaboration part. One thing that helped out was that a lot of our brainstorming sessions early on, and what helped us grow is that we, you know, this person was a graphic designer. This person is doing SEO. This person is an analytics and that person's doing paid media. We would do a lot of like collaborative work early on to say, you know, kind of all hands on deck. Like how do we solve this client's paid search need? And get ideas from a lot of different people and made sure that everybody on our team knew Google analytics, knew kind of some of the mechanics of how the other channels worked. And that went a long way to them building relationships, them doing sort of cross-channel collaboration. And then being able to offer solutions to clients that were kind of like a bit more thought through. A bit more holistic or integrated, and a bit more defensible, maybe from different angles. So I would just say like, if you have a few different disciplines, like make sure to figure out how those two go together to be better than if you only worked on just one discipline alone. Jason: [00:15:38] I love it. I love it. What's the website people go and check your agency out? Brian: [00:15:43] Uh, brain.do. Jason: [00:15:44] Awesome. Well, everyone go check that out. Thanks so much, Brian, for coming on the show. Lots of amazing stuff. And if you guys want to be around amazing agency owners and you believe that iron sharpens iron, where other agencies are sharing the strategies that are working for them, and they're able to see the things you might not be able to see. I want to personally invite you all to go to digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind just for experienced agency owners. We only take a few every couple of months. So go there now, fill out an application and maybe we'll chat if we feel it's right for you. So go to digitalagencyelite.com and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_Relationships__Collaborative_Culture_Help_Agencies_Scale_Faster.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 31 October 2021
Do you know how you can improve client-agency relationships to scale faster? Joe Koufman has worked in the agency world for over 20 years. He was actually a guest on the podcast during its first year. In 2014, he decided to use his experience in marketing, business development, and management to create Setup, a company that works to connect brands and marketing agencies by helping companies find the right agency to meet their needs at a given time. Today he returned to the podcast to discuss what clients look for in an agency, how does a successful client-agency relationship looks like, why you shouldn't be afraid to challenge your clients, and more. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesGusto: Today's episode is sponsored by Gusto, an all-in-one people platform for payroll, benefits, HR where you can unify your data. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Head over to gusto.com/agency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM The Byproduct of Being a Real Challenger is Better Client-Agency RelationshipsJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Got another exciting show for you. One of my good friends from Atlanta that was actually back on the podcast the first year we've done this. And we're going to talk about building client relations so you can scale your agency faster. So let's go ahead and get into the show. Hey, Joe. Welcome back to the show. Joe: [00:00:27] Hey! Thank you. It's been a long time since I've been on this show. Jason: [00:00:31] Yeah, I mean… seven years? And that back with the intro in the, in the video with the cup. I was like, oh, I'm here. Joe: [00:00:42] We, uh, we haven't aged a bit in seven years. Jason: [00:00:45] No, I've, I've just gotten a lot more gray in my beard. Um, a lot more gray. Yeah. No, you've always been kind of peppered. I think… Joe: [00:00:56] Yeah. Just more so. Jason: [00:00:57] Exactly. Well, um, tell everybody who you are and tell them a little bit about your, uh, your background of working with the agencies. Joe: [00:01:05] Sure. So I'm Joe Kaufman, I'm the founder and CEO of Setup and we are marketing matchmakers, meaning that we connect brands and marketing agencies together. So from an agency perspective, um, what that usually means is that we connect agencies with potential clients. From a client perspective, they look at us as a search consultant or a, an augment of their team to help them find agencies that can fill gaps in either capacity. Like they don't have enough arms and legs to do the work they need to do. Or capability, they're missing some capability that an agency could fill. Jason: [00:01:43] Very cool. Awesome. Well, let's, let's kinda talk about what people are listening in for is like building better relationships and, you know, and re-engaging. You know their client year after year, you know, because you, you've worked for, you know, many agencies in the past before doing the matchmaking service. We've had a lot of those guests on from Hill Meyer. It's, uh, you know, uh, Sims and those guys. So I guess let's, let's get into that. How can agencies build better relationships to scale better? Joe: [00:02:15] We, we think a lot about that agency-client relationship. And to that point, we actually do an annual marketing relationship survey. Um, Ad Age actually picked it up, uh, earlier this year, which was pretty cool. But basically what we wanted to do is understand what the reasons are that clients look for agencies. Why do they hire agencies? What do they expect out of their agency relationships? And, um, and we also actually did an event earlier this year, where we were calling it group therapy for the agency-client relationship. And we add a bunch of agency people and a bunch of clients on a Zoom call and we talked through that relationship. Um, you know, as I mentioned before, the clients often look for agency support because of an issue with capacity or an issue with a key capability that they're missing. And, um… That survey that we do annually to understand that relationship, we ask clients, what are some of the things that matter to you in your agency partner? When you're looking for a new agency partner. And the things we didn't hear, the things that came up really low on the list were things like proximity. You know, I don't care if my agency is down the street. Particularly in the days of a pandemic I really don't care where my agency's located physically. I don't care so much about the size of my agency. Smaller agencies can do amazing work for larger clients. Um, I don't care so much about what awards they’ve won. Just agencies often… Yeah. Agencies often think awards are important. And for some clients, they really do care, but most don't care about… Jason: [00:04:00] Well, those clients are idiots. Did I ever tell you that…? Did I ever tell you the story of, um, we were pitching Mellow Mushroom and, uh, they… If you've ever been to their office, it's like in the middle of nowhere and they were joking around about oh, here's a map to find her office. And like, I want you to show you how, how, how I want you to show me how creative you are. So I showed up at their office in full camping gear. Like they thought I was a homeless person. And like I had like the portfolio in this bag… like, and they were like, we loved it, but we're going with… You mentioned in the pre-show. I won't, I won't bash them now. Um, so I won't bash them on the show. But they were like, we're going with so-and-so because they won a ton of Addy awards and we want to win an Addy award. And I tell them, I go, I'm never eating your pizza ever again. Joe: [00:04:56] You don't want to sell pizza. You just want to win awards. Jason: [00:04:59] Yeah, I've never eaten your pizza. Joe: [00:05:01] That's right. You, you reminded me of a time that I wore an entire cowstume to the Chick-fil-A headquarters. Um, and my goal was to not smile the entire time. I was just going to be deadpan serious. Everybody would cut off pointing at me when I was walking through the lobby and walking through the… The women that check you in at the front desk did not think I was funny. Uh, and in fact, the client told me two or three times during the meeting to please keep my utters underneath the table. He said he found them a little bit disturbing. Jason: [00:05:33] What you should have done is started messing with your utter… utters. Joe: [00:05:38] I, I may or may not have done that. Maybe that was the reason he said that. But, um, I did think it would have been really fun to get some camelbacks or something and have like chocolate milk come out of one and strawberry milk and vanilla and whatever. But… Jason: [00:05:53] And then could be like just tap me. Joe: [00:05:57] Right. But it was an innovative idea for a client. I mean, dispensing cow milk dispensing cow on site. Uh, but anyway, so, uh, we, we found through the survey that, you know, those, those things are less important to clients. The awards, location, size, et cetera. What they really care more about is some of the soft and intangible things that the client can do well. Like… I'm sorry that the agency can do well. Like, um, they're looking for chemistry and relationship and transparency and, and good communication. And they're looking for, um, you know, creativity, uh, th, there are not… Many of those things are things that are within an agency's control. Um, and you know, we did, I mentioned, we did an event where we asked the questions, what things… What do you wish agencies knew? You know, we ask clients, what do you wish agencies knew? And they said things like we wish they were more strategic partners for us. We wish that our agency would help us navigate some of the bureaucratic red tape within our organization. Um, we want them to act as an extension of our team. We want them to I understand that not all ideas can be executed. Sometimes agencies come with these big glossy, creative ideas, but there's just not realistic for, for this client. And they wished that the agency would just understand their business better. Um, we built a series of resources for clients, um, in our resources section of our site. And, you know, there's a complete guide to finding a marketing agency in there. There's a scorecard in there that... There's two versions of the scorecard. One version is if the client is trying to decide between three or four different agencies, how do you choose in a pitch kind of situation? But the other scorecard is made for agency or for clients to evaluate their agency on an ongoing basis to see if they still are feeling the love. Jason: [00:08:05] Yeah. And what are some of those…? What are some of those questions that the clients are actually looking at? Joe: [00:08:12] Yeah. I mean, how, how creative is agency? How, how innovative are they in terms of, you know, finding new ways of doing things? How good is their, their, their communication? How good is their project management, their service? Um, you know, uh, uh, how are, how tech savvy are they? Even if they're not a technology agency, or, you know, a CRM agency or something like that. You still want to know that they're leveraging the best tools and that kind of thing. Um, and you know, we do it like a scorecard. I mean, they can rate each category and section and then decide is this agency is still the right one for me in the future? Um, the flip side of that conversation that we had about what, uh, you know, clients wish agencies knew. We asked the agency people what they wish clients knew. And I'm sure some of your listeners will, you know, feel some of these things. They, they wish that the clients would be patient and answer also, but also answer all the questions that you ask. When, when an agency asks a lot of questions, it's usually to uncover some insights so that they can deliver value for the client. They wish that the client would lean on the agencies for their expertise in a bigger way. They wished that the client would provide all of the crucial information upfront. I think sometimes there's a hesitancy for a client to open the kimono and give you everything as an agency. But if you truly want your agency to be a partner and not a vendor, then you gotta be really. You know, up front about all of the, the, um, information that might be useful.
Jason: [00:10:00] Taking care of your employees has never been more important than right now. And while paydays are great, running payroll is a major pain, calculating taxes, deductions, compliance. None of it's easy, unless of course you have Gusto. Gusto is a simple online payroll and benefits built for your small business. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Plus, with Gustos help, you can offer benefits like 401k's health insurance, workers' comp, and a lot more. And because you're a smart agency masterclass listener, you're going to get three months free once you run your first payroll. Go to gusto.com/agency. That's gusto.com/agency for three free months. Well, you, you, you know what, like… I'm glad you're going over this part. Because if I had one of my agency clients go to me going, and I wished they could do this, I'm like, well, hey, dumb ass, they could. You're taking on the wrong prospect. Um, you know, I, I did a video, I think back around when you were back on the show, and I remember it was the worst background. I looked like Oompa Loompa in it. And the title of it was like, there's no such thing as a bad agency client, there's only a bad prospect or a bad process. And if you don't have the right, if you don't have the right qualification to check, if that prospect is legit or going to be a nightmare client, or it was going to be good. Because like, you've been on so many pitches, like I have, right? Including the cow utter or, or the campaign… Joe: [00:11:54] That, that was planning for cow appreciation day. So it was very appropriate to wear a cowstume. Jason: [00:12:00] Of course, of course. I mean, right? So we've been on all these pitches and like, if you can look back at when the guy was offended by your utters, right? It'd be like, you're probably not going to be a really good client for us. I don't care if your Chick-Fil-A. Uh, like, I need to pick. And then the other point, I think that you mentioned, you know, like kind of like to sum it up is that the end of the day, the agency needs to be the advisor. You can be a really good advisor if you really get laser focused at what you're going after. And having a niche or a specialization rather than a generalist and going after all the big brands. Like when we did that, it was just challenging. But when we started going after automotive, I could talk to Porsche, I could talk to Lotus, talk to Maserati. Like I was like, hey, I speak your language, guys. I race cars too. Like, I'm one of you. So… Joe: [00:12:53] Yeah. Super cool. Yeah, we, it is interesting that, um, they both sides of the equation were talking similar language though in terms of what they were looking for when it came to strategy. And I thought that was interesting that clients were saying, I wish my agency were more strategic. And then the agency people were saying things like, I wish my client would let me be more strategic. So, you know, we, we started that conversation like the old book from the, I guess it was the 80s or something. Men are from Venus & Women are from Mars or whatever it was. And that was sort of like the agencies and clients. But the reality is the best agency-client relationships have shared goals. You know, do you have shared and common KPIs, your key performance indicators that you're trying to achieve. And, you know, sometimes clients will give their agencies skin in the game and, and tie their compensation to, you know, some metric that is important to the larger business. But at the end of the day, those best agency, client relationships, you know, there's no surprises. There's a high level of transparency between client and agency. There's some vulnerability there in terms of sharing, more than you maybe should on purpose. Um, and then just being super clear with expectations about, you know, and that goes on both sides. I mean, the agencies setting clear expectations and being completely transparent and candid about what they do well and what they don't do well. Uh, a big frustration for a lot of clients that we talk to is, you know, my agency says they're good at everything. And I know that they’re not. Jason: [00:14:35] Yeah. Yeah. They're full of shit. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, it's even if you have the client that like when… Going back to I wish I could be more strategic and I wish you were more strategic… Well, it sounds like, you know, if you find the right client, like it's about the communication or the process in order to show them that, rather than going, you should go do this, but then you can't back it up. I'm like… Joe: [00:14:57] Yeah. There's a, there's a book that I've always loved since I first read it. And I recommend it to a lot of people in The Challenger Sale. And I think you've probably read it. But the concept of The Challenger Sale, the biggest concept to me is you're looking for tension in the relationship. You're not looking for harmony in the relationship. Or relationship… people think they want to hire a relationship builder as a sales guy or saleswoman. The reality is a relationship builder. You can be buddies with your sales rep, but never buy anything from them. But those that really challenged… So the idea of the challenger sale in the book is you push the client, you bring them an insight that's not obvious to them. You get them to nod their head that, yes, that same issue happens within my organization. And then it only, then that they've nodded their head and said, yes, this happens within my organization, you can present your solution as the best. Or maybe the only way to solve that specific challenge or problem. And, um, and I had always been that way with clients where I was constantly, you know, pushing them and looking for tension. And there's a fun byproduct of being a real challenger and the by-product is relationship. Um, because I think that the clients will appreciate... I don't think clients hire an agency because they want order takers, usually. They hire a client, they hire an agency because there's some unmet need. You know, we talked about capacity or capability need, and they feel that the agency could not only solve that problem, but help them think through the future and, and overcome challenges that they haven't even anticipated yet. Jason: [00:16:48] Yeah. We, we were talking about this in our mastermind. We were helping a member out. Um, and they just, their close rate just kept going down and down. And everyone, a lot of people were starting to focus on the end. Like what, how are you asking for the close? We're like, let's start at the very beginning and let's, how are you setting up the meeting? Like, how are you starting the meeting? Are you letting them know…? Like whenever I would do a sales call, I'd be like, hey guys, I'm like, I'm going to build rapport really quick, but I'm not going to be their friend. The friend can come later on, but if they look at me as a friend, they're never going to buy from their friend, they have to, I have to position as an advisor. And then right after I do that, I'm like, hey, I have this quick little framework I'm going to go through to make sure we stay on time and make sure I can really figure out what your biggest issue is so we can fix that out. Can we, can we stay on track? And like, if you audit your process, like start from the very beginning a lot of times people get off track there. And then what do we have happen? The prospect just won't shut up for 40 minutes. They tell you this crap story that you don't need right now. Um, I'm being nice. Uh, but among … Joe: [00:18:00] Yeah. Well, or even go back further. I mean, you know, and to you, you kind of made this point earlier a little bit, which is, are you prospecting the right kind of opportunity? You know, before you even get to the meeting or the conversation, is it the right person? Uh, back when I was at a small digital shop, when I began, you know, my, my mark, my agency career, I had four criteria to determine if I wanted to pursue an opportunity. One was, do we want their logo on our logo slide? You know, is it a brand that we just really need, we really want? Number two was, is it a hundred thousand dollars in revenue and profitable for us as an agency in terms of opportunity? Third was does it teach us a new skill that we need to have? We just don't have today. And then fourth was, are there hungry mouths to feed within the agency? And we just, we'll take it even if it doesn't meet those three criteria because the thing that they need is the exact thing that we have some capacity on right now? Over time, we became part, we were acquired and became part of a kind of medium-size full service agency. We went from 50 people to 250 people. And that number, that second criteria, which was a hundred thousand dollars, became 200 became 500,000, became a million. And by the time we sold to a massive holding company in 2013. Um, I was… if I didn't see a million dollars in revenue in year one, they were too small. And it wasn't just size, but it was just the commitment of does this client…? Are they committed to marketing and working with us on a larger scale than just, we want to give you a little project here? And that doesn't mean we would never take on a project if it was a foot in the door that meant, you know… We would get in and get an opportunity to earn the larger piece of business. But we were really careful about that. We wanted to know that there was a path to a million dollars in revenue in year one. Um, and, and I think, you know, setting those parameters upfront, you know, if you're talking about an agency business development standpoint… You need to have your criteria. I have, an agency we work with that, um, that also has a PITA criteria. Do we think that the client is going to be a pain in the ass? And if the answer is yes, I don't care how many… you know. There are some red flags that sometimes occur upfront. To your point, when you're first having the conversation that the money looks attractive, but maybe you should run away. Jason: [00:20:43] Yeah. Trust your gut, your gut never lies. Joe: [00:20:46] And I'll give you one other piece that you probably experienced in your days running an agency. But nothing is motivational to the team in a positive way, in a very positive way than you firing a pita client. Um, you know, if a client truly is abusive or, you know, doesn't treat the agency like a strategic partner and treats the agency like a vendor or something like that, um, it's not worth the revenue. It's just not. And, and nothing, nothing helps your team be more supportive of the overall mission of the agency than when you say, look, we won't tolerate… You know, a client that's not supportive, not, not, uh, that that's abusive or… Jason: [00:21:36] Yeah, we. Yeah, I can't agree with you more on that. I mean, we literally, there was a… There was a member in the mastermind, not too long ago, that was doing stuff that we didn't agree that we asked to leave. Um, and then it just rallies the other, the other people. They were like, oh wow, they're not just, just taking for the money. They'll defend me. Um, and, uh, yeah, I think it says a lot about your company and character in that. So… Well, this has all been amazing, Joe. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Joe: [00:22:13] Um, I would just say that if there's an agency that's interested in growth, um, there are certainly… We can offer some services that help growth. Um, the four primary services can be found at setup.us/four-agencies. And I can send you a link to that. But essentially the services are around how do you help the agency position itself for growth? How do you, um, really uncover insights about the agency, that'll help you do that. And then we actually do help agencies grow through business development services on our sustainable pipeline. So we do have some pretty strict criteria about the kinds of agencies that we'll take on to work with. So we're not working with really small agencies. If they've got fewer than say 50 full-time employees, we probably won't we'll work with them on an ongoing… You know, sustainable pipeline basis. But happy to have the conversation with, with anyone that might be interested. Jason: [00:23:14] Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Joe, for coming on the show and everybody go check out their website. If you have more than 50 employees and you need help, go check them out. And if you want to be around amazing agency owners on a consistent basis where they can see the gaps that you're not able to see. Help you climb that mountain a lot faster, prevent those falls from crashing in the crevasses. Uh, I want you guys to go to a digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind for experienced agency owners. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Build_Better_Client-Agency_Relationships_to_Scale_Faster.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 27 October 2021
Do you know the importance of focusing on the who, rather than the how, to get your agency to the next level? Dallin Cottle had a degree in political science and was heading to law school when he started working at an agency and discovered a knack and passion for advertising. He quickly felt that he couldn't continue to grow at that company and decided to branch out and start his own business, Roar Media. Now, after scaling his agency and getting through the many difficulties that COVID brought for business owners, he sat down with Jason to talk about how he got his first clients, how getting his agency to the next level meant focusing on the who, rather than the how, and how he realized when it was time to start transitioning from his role of agency owner to being a CEO. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesNinja Cat: Today's episode is sponsored by Ninja Cat, a digital marketing performance management platform where you can unify your data, create beautiful, insightful reports and presentations that will help you grow your business. Head over to ninjacat.io/masterclass to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Focus on The Who To Get Your Agency To The Next Level And Transition To The Role of CEOJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? I'm excited to have another amazing guest. We're going to talk about the who, not how, which is real important when you're growing and scaling your agency. So let's go ahead and jump into the episode. Hey, Dallin. Welcome to the show. Dallin: [00:00:21] Thank you. Thank you. Excited to be here. Jason: [00:00:24] Yeah, me too. Tell us who you are and what do you do? Dallin: [00:00:27] Yeah, so I'm Dallin Cottle. I own a marketing agency in Salt Lake City, Utah, Roar Media. We specialize in Facebook ads, Google ads for the real estate niche, fitness and personal development spaces primarily. So, yeah, excited to be here. Jason: [00:00:47] Yeah! Tell us, how did you get started? Like why create an agency? Because, you know, as we all know, it's, it's a hard life for a number of different years. Dallin: [00:00:54] Yeah. So my story is actually really, you know, unconventional. I actually got a degree in political science and I thought I was heading straight to law school. And, you know, I got, I graduated and I was looking around and I'm like… Man, I don't really actually see the type of job that I was thinking I was going to have right here at the end of the road here. And looking at a lot of years ahead with law school I'm like, man, I don't know if this is it for me. So I took this job at an agency and, you know, day one, I was like, man, I, I'm home. Like, this is what I love doing. And a lot of parallels from just human psychology and everything I've learned, I learned in political science of how people vote is very similar to how they respond to ads and different things. So it was kind of a, you know, it's definitely a match for me. And from there I, just about a year later, I realized that I had I've reached my destination at that company. I had… making the six figures. I bought the Beamer. I bought the house. Bought the 4runner. I mean, we had a kid, I felt like, wow, this is, this is a great life, but I'm like, man, I'm tapped out in here. I can't continue to grow. And so I decided to jump and to branch out on my own and start, start my own thing. It was the dumbest thing I ever did. No, I'm just kidding. Jason: [00:02:13] Oh no. That was probably the best thing. Yeah. So how did you land your first client? Dallin: [00:02:19] All right. This is a, this is awesome. So my first clients came from… Being at an agency, I realized there's a lot of unqualified leads. And they were just throwing them out like garbage, right? At least the agencies that I was familiar with here locally. And so I was just, I mean, I had made really great connections. Even the, you know, the place I previously worked, like I was, you know, all on good terms and everything else. So I just started reaching out to some of these local agencies and the people that we had partnered with or worked with. And I just said, hey, I'm just kind of doing my own little thing here, freelancing. Would you mind if I just shoot me like 10, like crappy, crappy leads that I could just call and just cut my teeth out on, right? And that's how I made my first a hundred thousand dollars in like six months, right? It was from calling all the leads that nobody wanted to work, right? And just put in some serious time to learn the ropes and started from there. So… Jason: [00:03:14] Did you find that the first couple of clients that you got that made the, you know, the first hundred thousand… Do you still have those clients or did you, did the agency outgrow them? Dallin: [00:03:24] Yeah, that's a great question. So it's really interesting because the first out of my first four clients, the three of them I've had up until this last year, one sold their business. One, unfortunately, had a partner in the business passed away and they actually kind of just shifted gears and decided not to do advertising anymore. And another one, we stopped working together a couple of years ago, right? And I think that for that person, I think that, yes, that one probably was a little bit of a we've, we've kind of outgrew that modelers the expectation at the beginning of, you know, what you're charging and what you're doing. It's hard for that kind of growth. But for the most part, there's kind of a little bit of everything there, right? From the ones that we saw kind of continue with us. And then there's the other set kind of fell, fell off. So... Jason: [00:04:20] Well, let's talk about kind of the who rather than the how. Because a lot of people are always kind of focusing on, well, Jason, how do I get over the million?Or how do I get to the multi-million? Or how do I get to the eight figures? How to get to the next…? And I always tell them, you're kind of focused on the wrong thing. So tell us a little bit about what that means for you. Dallin: [00:04:41] Yeah. Well, when you first start out building an agency, there's so many things that you are learning. And there's so many things that you start to realize there's kind of that unconscious competence at first, where you are like the… where you feel like you're kind of there. And you are, you kind of have that ego in you and you're like, yeah, I can do this. Like, I'm good at this, right? And the more you start to learn, the more you start to realize that, wow, I really have no idea what I'm doing, right? And it's at that point where you realize you actually have no idea what you're doing is, I think, a really pivotal moment for most agency owners. And it's in that moment that I was really grateful that I've had mentors and coaches that, you know, I've spent a lot of money to surround myself with those people. But in those moments, that was the counsel that I was given, right? The council was, hey, perfect, you recognize that you don't have it all figured out. And what you need to do is start looking around at who's done this before. Cause it's not an impossible task. Like I'm not a surgeon, I'm not, you know, working on someone's brain or whatever it is, where I'm going to have, have, have to know the how of all of this. I just have to know someone who's actually done it before, or who's done something similar and go and find that person. And that principle is served me, so, so well, and… I mean over the years and when COVID hit, we've had the seriously change the who. Like we had to change a complete who. I had to let go of 12 employees at one point. And it was like the hardest decision I ever had to make in the business. But, you know, you, you look at where the business is at, where you're going… And you have to surround yourself with the people that are going to help get you there at that moment. Jason: [00:06:28] Yeah. I always tell everybody kind of what got you to the point you're at right now is not going to get you to the next level. Like for example, getting to the million mark, you can get there by referrals and marketing. But then, you know, that's not going to get you to the next level, which you really need kind of a system in place where, you know… All right, I put this amount of money in. I know if I can get this amount of people through this. This is how much we're going to, you know, build in the pipeline. Or even looking at kind of on the sales part, right? A lot of times what got you to a certain point is a person. And that person could be you doing the sales or maybe one salesperson. But you need to build a sales system, a sales team that can operate without just one. And it just goes on and on and a lot of people don't realize that. They go, I've grown really quick to this one point and then they go, well, I'll keep going this way. I'm like, no, no, no, you got to constantly adapt or you're going to reach a level. And then you're going to constantly go up and down. And when you're going through that roller coaster, which gets you through that is luck and determination. Depending on how many times you go through that, you know, that takes away a lot of energy and sometimes it puts you on a downward spiral or you're like, I'm just tired, man. And I, I can't tell you how many people I talked to that just like… Can you just by me? I’m like we don’t buy dying businesses.
Dallin: [00:08:01] Exactly, yeah. No, exactly. Well, and then, you know, what's interesting with, with all of that, I mean… Being an agency owner, most of the time, the agency owner started the agency because they're really good at marketing. And if you're really good at marketing, chances are you're really good at a lot of different things, or you can wear a lot of hats. And so you're typically good at sales because you know how to write copy for a great ad to get sales, right? You know how to do a webinar. So you're great at presenting things. And so you help do sales presentations, right? And you can kind of do a little bit of everything. So it's one of those things where if you're, you know, if you're selling real estate or you're doing something else there where you're like building a house, like… You may not know how to do all of the, you know, you may not be a good electrician, there's plumbing. Like there's so many other factors where you're going to have to rely on the who and not, you know, just the how to do all of that. With an agency owner you're kind of in this like really awesome pocket where you have so many capabilities. It's really hard to just be like, you know, I'm not going to do that myself. I'm going to find an expert that can actually help me scale it to the next level. Jason: [00:09:09] Do you feel like you have to come through mountains of data, jumping between multiple platforms to spreadsheets, to slide decks and back again, in order to create performance reports for your clients? It's a constant drain on your agency's time and resources. And that's where our friends at Ninja Cat can help. Ninja Cat is a digital marketing performance management platform that really unifies your marketing data and empowers your agency to automate insightful, beautiful client reports that scale. Now, Ninja Cat keeps your marketing performance and presentation tools in one place, freeing you up from manual data wrangling. And it really gives your team more time to focus on strategy and growing your business. And for a limited time, my smart agency podcast listeners will receive $500 ninja credit. When you go to ninjacat.io/masterclass to claim your offer and schedule a demo that's ninjacat.io/masterclass. Yeah, and I find a lot of people get to a point where they're okay at everything. That's what I'll put. And they go, well, Jason, I don't want to become a big agency and a big agency to them might be 40, 50 people. They are like, yeah, I already have 10 or 20, and that means I'm going to have double or triple the amount of pressure on me. Or, and I'm like, no, no, you don't get it. The more people you hire and the more of the right people you hire, the less you have to do. Like one of the things when I'm working with mastermind members or clients, is once they get the right system set up, I tell them, take a month off. And then don't even pick up the phone, don't check, email. And then come back and what you'll find a lot of times is now you're ready to kind of change your position from an owner to a CEO. Because the CEO role is really going to setting the vision for the agency, communicating that to the team, coaching and mentoring and leadership team. And really being the face of the organization and a couple other ones, but that's really it. Then you can have all this free time to do, like we were talking pre-show… We were joking around about I'm researching building a teepee and putting on top of the mountain. And then you talked about buying real estate, all kinds of stuff. So, you know, it's like you have time to do other things. So I want you guys to have time to research teepees and go buy your own teepee. Dallin: [00:11:55] We're going to wait to post this episode, right? So you can get this teepee. Jason: [00:12:00] I'm going to corner the market. I'm going to corner the market because I'm checking out these websites and they do a piss poor job at marketing. So there might be, if you could be the number one agency in the world for going after the teepee niche. Dallin: [00:12:16] That’s right. If you learn one thing from this episode today, it's that. Um, no, but to your point, I, this last summer, we've been an agency, route four and a half years now. And so, you know, it's always, it's been a grind, a huge grind. I haven't done a lot of vacationing, okay? But I told my wife that that's the danger it's like next year, next year, right? In a month or so. And then pretty soon I was like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm going to force my hand here. And I said, we are going to go to Hawaii for six weeks this summer. So we left the first part of June and got back the, the end of July, um, this summer. And man, the lessons I learned from that, just exactly what you were saying. It was absolutely insane because the preparation, knowing that you're leaving in a couple of months. Everybody, at least most people that I know. And I've talked to you about this. When you go to leave on vacation, even if it's for a weekend or a week or whatever, the house is clean. All the, you know, the bills that were on the counter are paid. All the things are kind of cleaned up and you kind of leave… You try to package things as nice as you possibly can cause you're leaving. And so that same principle, like when I'm thinking, leaving for two months in my business or six weeks like that. Man, I, all these certain things that I would have just normally done, I started handing off. And I couldn't believe the difference that it made in my business. And then just like you said, just stand back and like put my hands up and be like, Hey, it's on you guys. Like, keep it going, right? I don't want to get that phone call, right? And so that was an awesome experience. And coming back, just like you said, I was able to really shift that direction. It also forced the team to be able to do that. And I think sometimes we don't let the people that are, that could step up and be leaders in the company, we don't really give them an opportunity to step up and be the who. We just focus on them always being the how, right? And so in that moment, we're like, hey, can you do this while I'm gone? Because if I got hit by a car and I was out for six weeks, they totally would've, right? They would've stepped up in a big way to make sure that things continued on they're on that path. So it's, uh, it was a huge lesson for me this year. I'm like, man, should've done that a lot sooner. Just planned it out and did it. Jason: [00:14:31] Yeah, you should never look at like tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. It's like. You know, it's like today living today, don’t live in the past. Don’t live in the future either. I make that mistake. I, I make that mistake all the time. You know, it's like, we've always done it that way. And then I'm like, I quickly slap myself in the face going that's the kiss of death and… Or I'll say, oh, I'll do that tomorrow. And be like, no. I've always been really good at executing if we have an idea… And my team always laughs. They're like, oh, Jason has another idea. When's it going to be done? Probably in like two seconds. Dallin: [00:15:08] That’s right. Jason: [00:15:10] Like buying the teepee. Uh, I think that's what the title is, how you can grow your agency to afford a teepee. That’s right. Dallin: [00:15:18] That's all you need, is the teepee. Jason: [00:15:21] Exactly. Perfect housing, right? That's all you need. Well, this has all been great. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Dallin: [00:15:31] No, I just, I mean, just to kinda summarize that. I think that, you know, you, you look around and like where you want to go, right? Find the people that have that have done it, you know, keep continuing to listen to this podcast and, and see all the, you know, all the different stories and learn from that. And you’ll find the people that are around you. It's so crazy how close those people really are. If you don't mind, I'd love to share one more thing with you. Jason: [00:15:58] Go for it. Dallin: [00:15:59] I recently was watching, um, Undercover Billionaire. I don't know if you've seen that show on the discovery channel. But, uh, man, what an awesome, just like… Jason: [00:16:08] The second season or first season? Dallin: [00:16:10] Both. I watched both of them. But I thought they were both amazing in their own kind of way. But yeah, no spoilers, but Grant Cardone in the second season, you know, agency directions, right? And so looking at kind of that whole approach, there's no fear in, well, I don't have money to hire, I don't have money to find the who. I don't have, like, you know… There's no resources that are like they're building, you know, a million-dollar evaluation business in 90 days... With literally they have no contacts, no resources, no nothing. It's literally just asking people and trying to find out what their passion and their drive is and how they can help contribute to the, you know, a greater vision, right? So you sell that vision and you build the life and the agency that you want. So I highly recommend plugging that in there. No, I wasn't called to plug that in from the Discovery Channel or anything. But it was a pretty cool, um, you know, kind of looking at it from a, just a straight-up business standpoint. But it's good entertainment too. Jason: [00:17:13] It was really good. I, I just think, you know, people are like, I remember watching something, um… A Tony Robbins video and Al gore was in the front row. And I guess that beforehand, he was like, if I had the Senate or Congress, I don't, I don't know the, uh, you know, I would've won the presidency. And Tony was like, no, it's never a lack of resources, it's about a lack of resourcefulness. So I just want to leave everybody with that of going, if you can dream it, you can build it. You just need to figure out the who can actually help you and just build that community, build those relationships and that's really everything. So what's a website people can go and check the agency out? Dallin: [00:17:59] Yeah, roarmedia.io, and basically you can find us anywhere on roarmedia.io on social media as well. Jason: [00:18:08] Awesome. Well, cool. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. If you guys enjoyed this episode, make sure you go check out their website. Make sure you subscribe. And if you want to be around amazing agency owners that are constantly challenging you and constantly motivating you to push harder and be more resourceful. I want to invite all of you to go to digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive community and mastermind for only the experience agency owners that are really wanting to change the game and really take it up a notch and have a lot of fun and share what's working with other amazing people. So go to digitalagencyelite.com and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Get_Your_Agency_To_the_Next_Level_By_Focusing_on_Who_Not_How.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 24 October 2021
Would you like to land big retainers of $50,000 to $100,000? Spencer Brooks is the founder and principal of Brooks Digital, an agency that empowers health nonprofits to build engaging digital platforms that improve the lives of patients. He has worked to create an agency that brings a new perspective to the nonprofit sector, which is very one-time project-focused, and tries to bring a more agile approach to help them adapt to changes in online health information. With this in mind, Spencer has created a system where the agency looks for opportunities for a longer-term relationship with the clients in 12-month retainers. In his conversation with Jason, he talked about choosing a niche, how he goes about offering retainers, and the point at which the working relationship can lead to bigger retainers. 3 Golden Nuggets
Gusto: Today's episode is sponsored by Gusto, an all-in-one people platform for payroll, benefits, HR where you can unify your data. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Head over to gusto.com/agency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Choosing a Niche and Creating a System to Land Bigger RetainersJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? I'm excited for another amazing episode. We’re going to talk about how to land bigger retainer. My guest on the masterclass today is going to talk about how he sold 30,000 to 100,000 dollars plus retainers, which all of us want to do. But a lot of times we're doing it the wrong way. And, uh, so let's go ahead and get into the show. Hey, Spencer. Welcome to the show. Spencer: [00:00:32] Hey. What's up, Jason? Glad to be here. Jason: [00:00:34] Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Spencer: [00:00:39] Sure. So, like you said, my name is Spencer Brooks. I run Brooks Digital. We're a digital agency. We do a lot of strategy, like user experience, as well as design and development for nonprofits. Specifically, those nonprofits that focused on a health condition like cancer, diabetes, something like that. We take the perspective that their digital presence is a product, not a project. Because there's certainly a lot of one-time project-based thinking in the nonprofit sector. So we try to bring a more agile approach to help them adapt to changes in online health information and things like that. Jason: [00:01:15] Awesome. And so how did you get into doing this and how did you wind up picking this niche? Spencer: [00:01:21] Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I, I stumbled into it to be honest, I think as many people do, or at least other agency owners I talk with. I started as a, as a freelance web developer. And so over the years, I started hearing about, oh, you need to niche down and you need to choose a good position and things like that. I began by just honestly examining the clients that I was working with already. I looked at them and I went well that 60 or 70% happened to be nonprofits. And so for a while, I focused just on the nonprofit niche. And I made a decision, hey, this, this is still quite large. There's like a million, you know, there's a million nonprofits that are seven figures plus in revenue, that's still quite large. So took another look at our client roster and realized we just happened to be doing work with a lot of organizations that focus on health issues. And so that was much scarier to do because that's a, it's, it's a much smaller. You know, you're, you're talking about maybe 50 or 100,000 tops. Uh, you know, more realistically the, the ideal client is somewhere in like that 10,000. There's probably 10, 20,000 organizations and in that space, so it was a little bit scarier to make that decision, but, uh, I went ahead and did it. And so that's, that's sort of how I ended up in this space today. Really, by just sort of looking back at what clients happened to be working with us, what clients happen to uh, you know, the clients have the highest revenue and making those decisions with a whole lot of courage. And, and, you know, some help along the way to, to get to where I am right now. Jason: [00:03:09] Awesome. So let's talk about how are you landing such big retainers? Spencer: [00:03:14] Yeah, that's the mega question, right? I, I think I'll start by saying that the biggest retainers have come, in my experience, from a working relationship with a client that matures to a point of a big retainer. So it's not necessarily from day one that I'm getting a retainer that's six figures. I'm sure that there are agencies out there that have developed a market position and that, that claim to expertise where they could theoretically do that on day one. But I think much more commonly and certainly in my case, that that develops over a period of time. So I'll usually start with smaller projects and that's usually the case with clients is that they come and they have a very specific project or something that they want to do. And I evaluate their organization as a whole and say, okay, this is what you want to do right now. But in my head, I'm sort of thinking, is there an opportunity for a retainer here? Do they have ongoing needs? And so I'll, I'll take that. I might take that small project and do some sort of strategy or examination of, okay, what are your needs? Do a discovery and then pitch them a, a little bit of a larger project. And then telegraph that there's probably a longer term retainer here. And that's just how we work. So it's a progressive process, but I telegraph that that's usually how we work and then I build the client relationship into that place. Jason: [00:04:48] Yeah. I mean, I, I totally agree with that just because I see so many people that they're pitching marriage right off the bat. And I don't think it works for either party because it's a big commitment. Like for example, I remember many years ago, and this happens all the time as well. I had a client that came to me and said, hey, you know, charge $5,000 a month on a retainer. Um, and, uh, it's month to month. I'm like, well, why is it month to month? They're like, well, it's easier to sell. And I was like, well, why wouldn't it be 12 months? And they're like, well, that's big decision and a lot of risk. I said, well, do you want to kind of eliminate that? So I like kind of what you, you probably do the same thing, kind of start with a strategy and really figure out like a, like you said, kind of figure out where they're wanting to go, what their biggest challenges are. And then, you know, we put a high-level plan together and then that probably leads to a project, I presume, or a smaller project? Spencer: [00:05:46] Yeah, exactly. So if… let's say someone, I had a, a lead come in the door and they want to do a website or something like that, right? So I might start to examine, okay, what, like what's the context in which this project happens? It's usually not just a website. That's like a lot of the work that we do ends up being website-related. But talking to them about what are the organizational goals? What, what is this, what are your challenges? What is this solving for? And then laying out a plan for, okay, maybe a website's part of that, but have you considered all these other things that you might want to be doing, right? Have you, you want this website, but have you actually even researched your audience at all? Like the people… You're thinking about it this way, but you know, we take the perspective that your website is a product. So are you thinking about this like a one-time project and it's going to be, is it going to be done? And how are you going to then adapt to that over time, right? And sort of, and take their project and bring our perspective to that. Then that usually… our perspective, of course, being that the website is a product naturally leads into a retainer-based relationship. So then we'll say, okay, we'll build out your, your MVP, you know, this, uh, the, the initial version of the website, and we'll help you do that. But then here's our roadmap for post-launch for this website. So we'll do the build, but then know that after that, here's what we're trying to do. So here's the retainer that's gonna come along with that. And usually, by the time we get done with the website, I don't think a website project has ever been finished without a phase two wishlist at the end. And so it's just very natural to just say, all right, like we’ll, I’ll scope control the project by bundling all of the stuff that comes up during the middle of it into retainers. It just, it flows really nicely just through the course of the project and helps me say yes to a lot of the stuff like strategy-wise or helps the project manager say yes to that during, um, you know, during the build-out. But then say, yeah, well, yeah, phase two, yeah, but this is the retainer.
Jason: [00:08:08] Taking care of your employees has never been more important than right now. And while paydays are great, running payroll is a major pain, calculating taxes, deductions, compliance. None of it's easy. Unless of course you have Gusto. Gusto is a simple online payroll and benefits built for your small business. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Plus, with Gusto’s help. You can offer benefits like 401k's health insurance, workers' comp, and a lot more. And because you're a smart agency masterclass listener, you're going to get three months free once you run your first payroll. Go to gusto.com/agency. That's gusto.com/agency for three free months. Yeah, I, um, I like that you kind of start selling the retainer while you're in the first engagement. I find if there are people where they wait until the project's done, then I think it's sometimes too late. Because they're already kind of like checked out, right? Like, do you see that as well? Spencer: [00:09:33] Yeah, I think it's super hard if you're, if you're acting as if you're just this super project face company agency. And then all of a sudden at the end, you're like, hey, by the way, uh, I am... I'm going to recommend that you spend a hundred thousand dollars a year. They’re like, wh…? You know, it's just like a truck hits them. Uh, and so I do think that telegraphing, that that's the way that, that we work, that you work as an agency, helps them prepare over time. And I, and I phrase it in a way that says, you, you, if you want to continue working with us, then this is how we work. If you, if you, for whatever reason you don't like this, that the product that we put in. If you don't like the experience of working with us, then after the project, like you can take it and you can go and you can find someone else to do it. And so that sort of relieves them of this pressure of committing to the, uh, effectively committing to a retainer at the beginning of our project. But also telegraphing to them that this is the conversation that's going to come after the project's done. And then it just leaves us as the agency in the position to just deliver a great experience. So that, that conversation is easy when the project is done. Jason: [00:10:51] So what is your close rate percentage or have you been tracking that of when people come to you for all this? Spencer: [00:11:00] Yeah, no, that's a, it's a, it's a good question. Um, I don't have like a hard number off the top of my head. So I'll give you my, my ballpark guesstimate. It's very high. Usually, like, frankly, if someone, if I get a sense that a prospect is just interested in a project and there's not even an opportunity of a longer-term relationship there, then I'll probably pass. So I mean that in itself takes my retainer close rate up a notch because I'm not trying to funnel people through that. It's kind of part of my qualifying process. Uh, so like that being said, I I'd say it's at least 50% or 60% uh, that go into a retainer, if not more. And then the folks that don't go into our retainer, they typically stick around, but they're still thinking about the project-based kind of work. So as a fallback with the, with the clients that just say, no, I'm not going to do a retainer. Then I'll probably do the more standard, you know, account management, follow up every couple months and generate some more projects. But typically those kinds of clients, they know that we work on retainer and if we're not available, we're giving priority to our clients that are on retainer. And so that, it's kind of a nice way to you prioritize the people who are on retainer and then the clients that don't end up closing on a retainer, like you can sort of nurture them to fill any gaps that you might have in your pipeline. So that's how I think about it. Jason: [00:12:31] Yeah. I mean, that's huge. Because I see when people are pitching retainer, run off the bat. They're less than 25% because it's a big commitment, right? And now you said 50%, but I want everybody to hear this is 50% to a retainer. So they've already gone through strategy and projects and to the retainer. So the close rate for, you know, what I call the foot in the door or a project is going to be skyrocket much faster. And then also what is typically the timeline for closing, for getting that client to pay you right up, like for the first time? And then also what's the trend, like how long is the timeline to get to the retainer average? Spencer: [00:13:12] Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. So initially, when you're doing like the, I think you mentioned like foot in the door, that initial project. That, that my entire goal with that is like, how, how do I craft a, uh, like some sort of quick wins strategy engagement? And then we're talking like two weeks, right? It's usually very easy. It's either like they're going to probably pay up within two weeks and sign, or I'm going to chase them for months and never hear back. Um, it's only that middle, you know, when you get like that three-month close or six-month close, where... Those are in my experience, usually always tied to these huge, mega, you're trying to sell the retainer upfront. You're trying to sell the six-figure seven-figure project right off the bat. And those, of course that takes months and months to close because that's huge. But it's a much smaller… it, the idea is that they can make that decision in a few weeks or on the spot. Jason: [00:14:05] Exactly. Spencer: [00:14:06] Then we'll typically go through a process that's about three months. If we're going to do a project like a website build or a relaunch I'm shooting for about three months. There are three or four months. And then after that, I'm looking to close a 12 month retainer on the back of it. So really it it's actually fairly accelerated. And usually, once we get past that initial project, that the foot in the door and then ladder it into a larger project. Then by that point, they've gone through two projects with us, essentially. There's a lot of momentum behind the relationship… they’re, they're in a position where they're liking what they see. And so then when you're like, yeah, let's just keep working together. Like we've all these things that we've been talking about, the strategic roadmaps we just need to now do that work. And so it just makes the, the retainer conversation very, very easy. Jason: [00:15:02] Yeah. Well, I mean, you build trust, you made it an easier decision. And then you're building trust as you show them little wins, you show them the plan. You know, one of the things I always told people is people chose us because we made it easy for them to choose us. We explained exactly how our process worked rather than hiding or stra… or secret strategy soft… You know, like all this super-secret shit. And then, you know, we did a little commitment on their end. And we also too, we were evaluating them and we let them know we were evaluating them. Just kind of like you, like, if people are wanting to go right to the retainer. Yes, that's exciting. But it's also should be a red flag. Do you really want to commit to someone for 12 months and be miserable? You know, you gotta, you know, we, uh, and, and I can't tell you how many members in the mastermind I chat with that, uh. You know, in the very beginning when they join… There's so many clients that they need to get rid of because they're not profitable or they're a pain in the ass and it's an easy... And we walk them through our offering ladder and the foot in the door and all of this. And it really solves a lot of their pain. It doesn't solve everything, but it solves a good portion of it. Um, well this has all been amazing, Spencer. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Spencer: [00:16:29] No. I think that maybe the one comment that I would add to kind of, to flesh out your point, Jason. Then, um, then I think that's, it, is that yeah, the, the... The foot in the door in the larger offering is absolutely, uh, that chance to evaluate a client. And over the years, that's certainly the thing that I've discovered with retainers is that great, okay, you get awesome at closing retainers that… But if you close a client that you don't really like working with it, then you're stuck with them for at least 12 months. And then of course, everyone knows, it's really hard to say bye-bye to revenue. Even if there's so much pain associated with that. And so you really got to think about it from that perspective as well is give someone… Just progressively unlock your services to them so that you have that experience, that opportunity and experience with them to just say, no, thanks. I don't think this is going to work out and save yourself a lot of pain. Jason: [00:17:29] What's the website people can go and check out the agency? Spencer: [00:17:33] So it's brooks.digital. Not.com, but the fancy new dot it's not new anymore, I guess. But… Jason: [00:17:47] At least you didn’t do like some of my guests going WWW… I'm like, wow. You just aged yourself. Spencer: [00:17:50] HTTPS colon forward slash forward. Jason: [00:17:55] Well, I used to do that for many years and then someone made fun of me and then I'm like, ah, maybe I need to switch that. So, but uh, well, amazing. Uh, thanks so much, Spencer, for coming on the show. Make sure you guys check out his agency’s website. And if you guys want to know more about really crafting your own foot in the door and really how you can start selling bigger, bigger retainers, faster, closing, more, making it easier, getting paid for the proposal. I want you guys to go to footinthedoorframework.com. This is our exclusive program that I did with my good friend, Ian Garlic aka Sasquatch. He makes a lot of cameo appearances on our videos. Really good friend. And he's been doing the foot in the door framework for many, many years, and perfected it. And he's been really helping out a lot of mastermind members... In the mastermind walk through this and we just launched this program. So go to footinthedoorframework.com and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_the_Right_Foot_in_The_Door_Offer_Helps_Land_Bigger_Retainers.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 20 October 2021
Are you looking for ways to boost your team’s productivity while also improving your work-life balance? Jason Berkowitz was working as a personal trainer in NYC when he discovered SEO and decided to become a freelancer. He grew his business and started hiring and building his team to create a legit agency, Break The Web. Now that he has a team, he has been implementing a few ways to boost productivity and morale. In this conversation, he talks about the key roles he hired to start growing his agency, why offering unlimited PTO has worked for his team, and how a special summer schedule allows the team longer weekends 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and Resources Wix: Today's episode is sponsored by the Wix Partner Program. Being a Wix Partner is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Growing Your Agency, Work-Life Balance, and Boosting Your Team's ProductivityJason Swenk: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here and I have another amazing guest and, uh, his name is Jason. He's also from New York. So don't get confused. He's probably better looking than me, but, uh, we're going to talk about growing his agency, life balance, and a lot of cool stuff. So, uh, I'm excited to have him on. So let's go ahead and get into the episode. Hey, Jason. Welcome to the show. Jason Berkowitz: [00:00:29] Hi! Thank you so much for having me, Jason. It's a pleasure and, yeah, best name ever. Jason Swenk: [00:00:34] I know. I was like, don't get confused. You're the newer and better version of me, I guess. But tell us who you are and what do you do? Jason Berkowitz: [00:00:42] I am the founder of the search marketing agency Break The Web, and we specialize primarily in SEO and paid search. We help in-house marketing teams, integrate SEO, which is always nuanced and confusing and annoying, into their existing marketing practices. So it's seamless all around. Jason Swenk: [00:01:00] Very cool. And so how did you get into this space? Jason Berkowitz: [00:01:03] It was probably by accident. I used to be a personal trainer, way back when in New York City. And I was tired of working for a gym and basically working off the leads that they gave me, which were new membership signups. And I had the idea of what if I can get people to come to me? Is there a demand? So of course people are going to Google typing in personal trainer NYC. Saw the acronym, SEO started implementing it on my website at the time. And then I was like, screw personal training. Uh, this SEO stuff is fun. Of course, SEO was way different back then anyway, but it was kind of a paradigm shift. That's where the journey started. I worked as a freelancer for a while, but that's where it started. Jason Swenk: [00:01:39] How long ago was that? Jason Berkowitz: [00:01:42] Around 2009, 2010 is where I started actually getting into the practices of SEO what's involved? What does everything mean? What's the methodology? So about a decade now. Jason Swenk: [00:01:53] Very cool. I remember when you could get right for any term by just putting that keyword in the background at the same color. So I might be dating myself on that one, but that was a really… Jason Berkowitz: [00:02:04] The good old days. Oh yeah. One among the many different things that would work really well and really fast back then. Jason Swenk: [00:02:13] What made you decide to go from a freelancer to hiring people? Jason Berkowitz: [00:02:18] Yeah, I think I wanted to have a certain income. The problem with being a freelancer is that you're managing everything. When it comes to admin, selling, project management, execution, client management. All these different aspects. And some people are comfortable with that, but I felt like I needed to delegate certain aspects if I wanted to increase my own personal income. So then I started bringing on VAs to help with some of the smaller things. And then before you know it I'm like, wait, I can let go of this one thing too and not have to worry about it? And I can let go of this one other piece? Then before you know it, you just look up, you're like, oh shit, we're a boutique agent. Jason Swenk: [00:02:59] Yeah, it's exciting to let go of the stuff that you don't necessarily want to do anymore or have to do. And then other people actually start doing, you know, a better job. And I'm always curious, who was the first hire? Not the person's name or well, please list out their social security number. I'm just kidding. What was the role? What was the first role that you hired? Jason Berkowitz: [00:03:23] The first unofficial, non US-based was a VA in the Philippines. That was to help with link building as one of the big, uh, time-consuming aspects related to SEO. The first US in which we officially, you know, start with like, hey, we're going to be legit and grow a real agency was an account manager. I found myself just taking a lot of time speaking with clients and trying to relay information, setting expectations. So the account manager was our first hire.
Jason Swenk: [00:03:51] Awesome. There's always a debate around kind of PTO. Well, there's more and more people now kind of giving unlimited PTO. Why did you go to that? Jason Berkowitz: [00:04:04] I think if I wanted to take unlimited vacations, if it made sense or just take off when I wanted to take off, it was only fair to allow that as well in the team culture. I think just people are going to enjoy work if they could also enjoy pleasure. And if you restrict them by X amount of time that they have for that pleasure, they may not enjoy work as much. So if they just needed an extra three or four days on a certification or an extra trip. Or maybe they were capped out throughout the year for the amount of days, that just gives them a bad taste in their mouth. So we'd rather if you're doing great work, if things are looking good and we won't be set back, if you take an extra couple of days off by all means, go for it. We just care about the output more. Jason Swenk: [00:04:48] Yeah. Some people are always concerned about can people take advantage of it? Like, have you ever had anybody try to take advantage of it? Jason Berkowitz: [00:04:55] No. They still have to put in requests for PTO at least 10 business days beforehand. And they still could get approved and denied. I don't believe I can recall offhand recently I have denied someone. But we do have it in our knowledge base internally and our SLP is that it is based on performance. So yeah, technically, if you want to go ahead and request. One thing we'll be looking at is how much time they've taken off previously, a culmination of hours. But also the performance and the output overall, as well as what things might look like around the time period in which you plan to take off. But yeah, I don't think I've ever denied someone and no one hasn't taken advantage yet. Surprisingly, I find what might be, if you do have, for example, two weeks or 80 hours of paid time off towards the end of the year, people want it. So then you've got people taking off just for the health taken off and they may just sit on their couch. Jason Swenk: [00:05:53] When you're an agency partner with Wix, you unlock an entire digital ecosystem for creating, managing, and growing your agency. Get the full coding and design freedom to create anything your clients need, along with the tools to manage and collaborate with your team seamlessly from anywhere. And when it comes to growing your agency, you can get matched with new leads every day and earn revenue share for every website you guys create. They're backed by the Wix industry leading security and site performance. You'll also have a dedicated account manager on standby 24/7, so you can reach your goals and start setting new ones. See for yourself, head over to wix.com/partners. And re-imagine what your agency can accomplish. Yeah. You know, we had that in the very beginning of our agency where everyone, like, we would say, hey, it doesn't rollover. You got to use it or lose it. And then they wouldn't use it until the very end. Then literally right when all the clients want all the work they’re like, I'm taking time off. And it really screwed us majorly and it was pretty hard, cause sometimes we had to deny it. I do like how you have, hey, we have unlimited PTO. But you have to put in like, and you're a lot nicer than I would have been about 10 days. I'd have been like, at least give me a month. Or like, if, if there's emergency, like your parents need you or something or kids or something like that, obviously go. But if it was like, hey, I forgot to tell you about my Hawaii vacation. I'm gone for two weeks and it's happening next week. I'd be like, well, you might not want to come back. Jason Berkowitz: [00:07:37] Yeah. You know, I know we were just talking about New Yorkers and whether New Yorkers are mean. And I guess that's, you're in New York attitude right there. Jason Swenk: [00:07:45] Yeah. Well, I think I was telling people, I was like, and I could say this cause I was like, yeah, cause we're brutally honest and a lot of people do take that as mean. But you definitely know where you stand with the New Yorker. There's no beating around the bush. Jason Berkowitz: [00:08:02] No sugarcoating. No. Jason Swenk: [00:08:04] Is there any other interesting things that you guys do around making your team happy? Uh, you know, incentivizing them or anything like. Jason Berkowitz: [00:08:14] Yeah, we tested out in the month of June as the intro to summer half-day Fridays. And everyone loved it. So it's just half the time you normally would be estimated for that hourly output of the day. I loved it. So I was happy with it. And after interviewing every team member, they loved it too. And I think it's something we might do recurring every June, maybe even possibly thinking about just doing four-day workweeks, the month of June. Just to see and everyone loved it because they were able to take, they didn't need to put in for PTO or maybe half day PTO on that day. Uh, which was nice. And just having a longer weekend as the summer rolls in, especially after the last year and a half or so. It was nice to boost morale a little bit. Jason Swenk: [00:08:55] Yeah, I see more and more people doing that. And actually, if you think about it's probably should do it for the rest of the year, honestly, half day on Fridays, or maybe even one a month be like Fridays are completely off. I've seen some of our mastermind members actually do it on Monday because everybody hates Mondays and… right? And it's a little bit easier, but a lot of times on Friday afternoon, people are just messing around. I remember walking around the office, like they're not getting shit done. Uh, you might as well, hey, here's the benefit. Go home. But, uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's definitely pretty interesting. Jason Berkowitz: [00:09:31] Yeah. I dunno if I will be able to do Mondays. I feel like Monday is like the first half that they are catching up from what you might've missed over the weekend. But good for them. I appreciate it. Jason Swenk: [00:09:40] Yeah, well, they were just like, and how I do my schedule now is I don't do any meetings on Monday, even though I'll work Monday. And then I take off Fridays. I never work on Fridays. And just by doing that, it just eases you into that, that week. And it's amazing how much more you get accomplished in the shorter week, rather than just sitting around. Because I remember seeing some employees, they were just sitting around and they like, like looking at the clock. Jason Berkowitz: [00:10:12] Yeah. Well that's was one of the things we noticed with the half-day Fridays is that productivity during the week, Monday to Thursday was actually up. Deliverables and stuff were executed much earlier. According to like our time tracker, which I don't know how they gauge productivity, I guess, user movement on the mouse and stuff. Uh, productivity went up and everyone was saying that like, yeah, I was actually getting stuff done quite quicker and sooner and probably more efficiently. Jason Swenk: [00:10:34] Yeah, exactly. Awesome. Well, Jason, this has been amazing. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience listening in? Jason Berkowitz: [00:10:42] I don't think offhand. Um, maybe where to find us in case you're curious about learning more about Break The Web, always a shameless promo, uh, breaktheweb.agency. Jason Swenk: [00:10:50] Awesome. Well, what's a website people can go in and check you guys out? Jason Berkowitz: [00:10:54] Yeah, breaktheweb.agency or you can just Google "break the web." Jason Swenk: [00:10:57] Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. And you guys go check out their website. If you guys enjoyed this and you want to be around other amazing agency owners that could really help you scale faster and share what's working with you. So, uh, we all can grow together. I want you guys to go to the digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind. That's only for a select few and not everyone gets in. So go to digitalagencyelite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Boost_Productivity_by_Supporting_Your_Teams_Work-Life_Balance.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 17 October 2021
Do you think that growing and scaling your agency means always going for more in every aspect? Will Russell is the founder and CEO of Russell Marketing, an agency focused on product launch marketing, crowdfunding, e-commerce, and Amazon. Through his experience with his agency, he created a five-step launch process meant to enable anyone to validate and pursue an idea in an affordable manner without taking a massive amount of risk. In this episode, he'll talk about how to prepare for the launch, why you should never ask family and friends what they think about your idea, and how he approaches the idea of scaling his agency while staying lean. 3 Golden Nuggets
Gusto: Today's episode is sponsored by Gusto, an all-in-one people platform for payroll, benefits, HR where you can unify your data. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Head over to gusto.com/agency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Continue to Scale Your Agency While Staying Lean With this 5-Step Process for a Successful LaunchJason: [00:00:00] What’s up, agency owners? I'm excited to have another amazing guest in the masterclass. We're going to talk about the five-step launch system that you can follow for yourself or for your clients. We're going to talk about how Will's actually grown and scaled his agency while staying lean. And having a lifestyle that he's always wanted, where you have the freedom to pick and choose to do the things that you love doing rather than being forced to do everything. So let's go ahead and get into the episode. Hey, Will! Welcome to the show. Will: [00:00:39] Hey, Jason. Thank you for having me, pleasure. Jason: [00:00:42] Well, um, thanks for coming on. Uh, tell us who you are and what do you do? Will: [00:00:48] Absolutely. My name's Will Russell. I'm the founder of a launch marketing agency, Russell Marketing. We specialize in product launches, idea launches, uh, such as crowdfunding, Amazon, e-commerce, and so on. Essentially we have a five-step system that we, we bring to our clients and help them successfully launch their, their big ideas. Jason: [00:01:12] Awesome. Well, let's go ahead. And, um, you know, before we kind of jump into it, how did you start the agency and why? Will: [00:01:21] I used to… About six years ago, I, I was working at an organization and the organization relocated. That would have meant a kind of a 19-minute commute, either way for me. And that was not what I wanted to be doing. You know, my, I created this business and I wanted to always wanted to have a lifestyle or life outside of work. And so three hours every day commuting wasn't my cup of tea. So I decided if there was ever a time to pursue something myself, then, then that was it. I went ahead, just kicked it off with some freelancing work. So, if, if the business was viable, if I could start bringing in clients like that and. And it was able to, and we successfully just continue taking steps since then really. Jason: [00:02:07] Very cool. Well, let's go ahead and jump into kind of the five-step launch process. Uh, tell us a little bit about that and walk us through it. Will: [00:02:17] Absolutely. So this five-step launch process is all about swiftly and, and affordably pursuing an idea. Lots of people have big ideas. In my early work as a freelancer, I saw how costly mistakes can be when pursuing a bad idea or pursuing an idea in the wrong way. And so what I did is I created this five-step system, which if follows like a recipe, uh, should enable anyone to validate and pursue their idea in a, in an affordable manner. Without taking a massive amount of risk. I'm a pretty risk-averse person and my, my processes and my in my business, uh… reflect that. So the, the system is, as I say, five steps. We start with validation. Validation is short period, which I'm sure many of your listeners know, know well. You know, product market fit. Understanding how this product, how this idea resonates in the market. Steps two and steps three a then a curve between the validation period and the actual launch. And it's all about acquiring prospective customers and getting them excited. Getting them ready to buy. And essentially a key is resolving sales objections. If you're launching a new product, you're not going to know what those sales objections are until you actually start selling. So this prelaunch period is really about trying to understand as many of those objections as possible and getting them resolved in advance of the, of the launch. Step four is once the launch occurs, you build your prospective customer audience. Now you've got to convert them. So we're going to focus on converting them into customers. And step five in this system is scale. So most folks, when they're launching, we'll have a call launch period, and I'll go with our clients is to scale as high as possible as many units sold as much revenue, whatever that goal is… As possible during that, uh, during that footstep scale, during that pre-order period. So we'll set and done. That, that five-step system can usually take around four or five months. And coming out at the end of it, a client has, uh, early customers, early adopters, uh, engaged communities around their product and knock on wood, they'll be ready for a real ramp up on their e-commerce. Jason: [00:04:39] That's awesome. I love it. I love how simple it is and I love, um, you know, the step number two, kind of around overcoming objections. Uh, yeah. Like I totally agree with you, you can't overcome objections until you've actually tried to sell and exactly convert people, uh, to figure that out. Cause everybody, like I remember, you know, I, I did many, many companies and came up with many dumb ideas. And I remember telling people, like, hey, this is idea, what do you think? They're like, we love it. And then you get to, you know, selling it and like no one buys it. I remember doing this one thing. It's when I did a lot of triathlons. And I just thought of like, as gag gift, I was like this beer trainer. It was like a helmet with a big, uh, little, like, like a wire that hangs a beer out in front of you that you never could reach... it was the dumbest thing. Will: [00:05:37] Yeah. I mean, it’s little funny, it's funny that… It's obviously, it's impossible to predict. Otherwise, you know, apple and Google wouldn't launch products that fail. You can't predict them. However, there are a lot of things you can do to really understand, uh, the potential of an idea well before you have to invest. And so a lot of folks do come to me like you might have, have with, with your idea, which was kind of, you know, kind of unusual… Jason: [00:06:07] You can say it’s stupid. Will: [00:06:11] And, and… they've been told by their family and friends. Oh yeah, I would definitely buy this. But there's a great book called The Mom Test. I can't remember the author but, you know, you don't ask your family and friends. If your idea is good, you got to get it into the market and got to get that feedback. And sometimes you get told by the market your idea sucks. And that sucks. Uh, but in my opinion, it's better to find that out before you've invested thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars in pursuing it. Jason: [00:06:45] Taking care of your employees has never been more important than right now. And while paydays are great, running payroll is a major pain, calculating taxes, deductions, compliance. None of it's easy, unless of course you have Gusto. Gusto is a simple online payroll and benefits built for your small business. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Plus, with Gusto’s help, you can offer benefits like 401k's health insurance, workers' comp, and a lot more. And because you're a smart agency masterclass listener, you're going to get three months free once you run your first payroll. Go to gusto.com/agency. That's gusto.com/agency for three free months. Yeah, there, there was one situation where a company came to me that was starting out and they're like, hey, we're going to… We want to develop this little, this book and this little elf that sits on the shelf. And, uh, and I was like, no, that's a dumb idea. And then every Christmas I've been doing it. Will: [00:08:10] Yeah. Elf, exactly. You, you… the strangest things can unexpectedly take off. Uh, so it's an interesting business to be in launches because you do see, you see some products you think a slam dunks face some really big objections and vice versa. So it's all about, it's all about what the data's telling us. Uh, and that's what the system focuses on. Jason: [00:08:32] Exactly. Well, let's switch focus a little bit. Um, how have you been able to build a lean team and keep scaling the agency? Will: [00:08:41] Yeah, that was a particular goal of mine in the last couple of years. This year more so. You know, over the… I think most agency owners will they'll grow.
And the solution to growing is okay, I need to hire more, bring in more team members. So we got to eight or nine and of last year, middle of last year. And I was having spending more time in meetings and check-ins, and I, then I, then I wanted to frankly, and, and, and what I'm… How I'm looking to live ,y life is a key guide of the business. So I didn't want to live my life in meetings with, with the team. And so I said, okay, no more hiring. What are we going to do this year to grow without hiring? And that, I think a lot of the answers aren’t surprising to people when we talk about productizing your services and making everything as systematic as possible. Uh, we talk about, uh, avoiding scope creep by really understanding and allocating kind of time allowances or bandwidth allowances for each, each role in the business and which role in the system. Uh, we talk about… Having a great lead pipeline so you can pick and choose the higher value leads that come in. But as essentially too, I think you, you really set that goal hiring is such an easy solution to increasing revenue. And so while you might know, you know, the key, the key ways to avoid that and to grow while staying lean. When you actually force yourself to enact it, and you really start seeing the details and specificities for your business rather than the generic kind of best practices of doing so. Jason: [00:10:31] I hit my mute button. Will: [00:10:32] Yeah. Do you know… I listened to, I listened to Seth Godin's… the podcast you did with him a while back. I listened that recently before this show and he said something that I felt really tied into our philosophy around that. And he said, the goal should not be more, the goal should be better. And he was speaking about that with regards to the type of people you work with I think, the clients. But I think that applies to pretty much everything. You know what, whether it's the, how many hours we're working a week or the value we're providing. It's not necessarily always do more, do more, do more, but it's how can we do it better? And that's a good, uh, philosophy to work off of when we scaling, uh, leaning too. Jason: [00:11:17] Well, it's also doing it better and then doing it your way, right? I talk to so many agencies that they have goals of going, you know, like a lot of agencies on our mastermind. They go I want to go from 3 million to over eight figures. I'm like, well, why? And a lot of them have issues with saying that they just go, I don't, it's just a number. It's, it's a goal. Like, well, what if your goal was to do it better, to do it more efficiently where you actually can create more time for yourself, right? Like in the pre-show we were talking about how you work maybe 20 hours, and then you spend a lot of work on your nonprofit and it's about how can you create the right systems, have the right people- because you have to have people, um, in this business in order to be able to pick and choose and do the things that you love. Like, you know… In this business, you know, the, you have to figure out what is like Dean Jackson says, like you're the cow, all you do is produce the milk. So what is the milk? I don't need to produce the cheese. I don't need to sell the cheese. Those that's what other people can actually do. Will: [00:12:34] Yeah, absolutely. That does saying I think applies to, uh, being a generalist versus a specialist, a lot of agencies early, early on, myself included, try to do a lot of things and quickly realize you can't do that well. So focus on a couple of things that we do really well. And that is limiting when you have people coming to you saying, well, we need SEO help. Uh, we've got a lot of money to spend on SEO. I mean a lot of money sounds, sounds good in the sense that it gives me safety net protection. But we don't do SEO. So, so, and we've got to stick with that and we want to be the best that the launch system we do have. And so, yeah, I completely agree with that. Jason: [00:13:19] And I look at it as kind of, when you start out, you have to try everything and you have to figure out what are you really good at? It's kind of like, you know, in sports, you know, you got to try basketball and football and soccer and tennis, swimming, whatever it is. And then by the time you get toward the end of your high school and you're wanting to go to college, well, you have your sport. Um, that's kind of how it was with me. That's kinda how it's going with our kids. It's like try everything and then see what you really like, what you're good at, what you don't like. Do more of the good stuff. Will: [00:13:55] Yeah. And from an agency standpoint, I do remember early on one of the... The key things I was looking for is what, what marketing can, uh, or what service offering can quickly show results. Because there's especially early on, if you have no credibility and no case studies, you can have a hard time with sales. So SEO is a long-term game. It might be a long time before we have that evidence. But paid ads, which are a big piece of our launch system, I can get results tomorrow and I can have a case study tomorrow that shows that results. So that was a big piece of it. You know, what can we do to build that foundation of credibility as quickly as possible, so that did direct or choose of services. Jason: [00:14:37] Awesome. Well, cool. Well, this, this has all been amazing. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Will: [00:14:45] No, I guess the, the main thing I often like to leave people with is, is just to focus on the validation… Is kind of what you pointed out, Jason, why, you know. A lot of people come to me and I'm sure a lot of folks are coming to your listeners with, with ideas, with things to pursue. Uh, but understanding the why and, and validating that is the right thing to pursue saves a lot of heartache money and time in the end. And it's been a well worthwhile focus for us. So it's always something I lean on others to consider. Jason: [00:15:18] Awesome. And what's agency website people can go and check you out? Will: [00:15:22] Sure. russellmarketing.co, russellmarketing.co. Jason: [00:15:26] Awesome. Well, everyone go check that out. Russell,uh, Will, thank you for so much for coming on. And, uh, if you guys want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners that can really see the things that you're not able to see and be able to open your eyes to things you may not have heard of. So you can grow and scale faster and really get to the point where you can pick and choose to do the things you love while your agency’s scaling, which is really pretty cool. I'd love to invite all of you to go to the digitalagencyelite.com. It's our exclusive mastermind for really experienced agency owners that want to be transparent and share what's working Go there now and, uh, and meet the, meet the other members there. There's a great video where the, you can check out the members, but go to digital agencyelite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Can_You_Continue_to_Scale_Your_Agency_While_Staying_Lean_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 13 October 2021
Hollis Carter is an entrepreneur and avid skier who, after founding many companies in his career, recently became the co-founder of the Baby Bathwater Institute, a membership-based community of entrepreneurs with a focus on cultivating natural, mutually beneficial relationships. Since his business relied on many in-person events, it was quite affected by the Covid 19 pandemic and subsequent restrictions. During this time of cancellations and being stuck at home, Hollis thought of a way to add value to the members during this new situation and started to offer a series of services with a performance-based model. This model quickly grew and he ended up selling it before actually having to fully build an agency. In this interview, he talked about the process of building and growing an agency to over $4 million and then selling it, all during a pandemic. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and Resources Ninja Cat: Today's episode is sponsored by Ninja Cat, a digital marketing performance management platform where you can unify your data, create beautiful, insightful reports and presentations that will help you grow your business. Head over to ninjacat.io/masterclass to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Growing an Agency Fast to Over $4 Million and Selling QuickJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here. I have another amazing show guest. We're going to talk about how when COVID hit, they formed an agency and ramped it up to over $4 million and sold it, during COVID. So it's a really cool episode and you're going to enjoy my guest. So let's go ahead and get into it. Hey, Hollis. Welcome to the show. Hollis: [00:00:29] Hey, man. Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:30] Pleasure to have you on. So for the people that have not heard of you or met you at one of your cool events, tell us who you are and what do you guys do? Hollis: [00:00:39] Yeah. My name is Hollis Carter. Living in Boulder, Colorado, but originally from Georgia, where I kind of got my first start in internet marketing stuff. I was like early in college and built a couple of online businesses and luckily had one that did pretty well and sold that. And then I moved to Colorado and did this skiing thing for a while and, uh, living in the mountains and it was great, but I could only talk about skiing and snowboarding and mountain biking with people. So, I’m now a front ranger living in Boulder and enjoy it and got back in the mix of things. Our main business is called the Baby Bathwater Institute. You've come out to one of our events that we had at out mountain. And, uh, I started, my other businesses based on the thing that I use to learn… Like no one was really teaching relevant stuff in the late nineties, early two thousands. So to do it, I thought let’s sit at the bar and a lobby at a conference and got most of my nuggets. And so when we had some free time, me and my now business partner who were lobby con buddies for like a decade… We started hosting these events and the whole idea was curating nice people who are in the grow and scale phase and the actual founders of their business. And in a lot of different industries that we could draw knowledge from different places, less of a kind of echo chamber mastermind of people doing the same thing. Cause there's a lot of value in those, but it's very linear. This was more of organic group meetings to have fun and, um, draw things from other industries and stuff. But we have agency people, we've got guys from hotels, we've got guys from e comm businesses… I guess I say people, not guys, cause we have plenty of girls too. We’ve been doing it for about eight years and I love it. Compared to the businesses I've done before, it's probably the dumbest business model. Cause it's overhead-intensive, time-intensive, relationship intensive. But I actually like it. So we're doing it for years and we'll probably do it for a very long time and really enjoy it. Jason: [00:02:37] Very cool. And COVID hit you guys really hard because your whole thing is about live experiences and that kind of stuff, uh, which are a lot of fun. And so tell us about like… cause we were talking a couple of weeks ago, you were like, man, I couldn't do these live events and that's really what the membership was for. So we gave all this money back to the members because we couldn't do live events. But I started an agency kind of by accident and it quickly grew. So talk about how did you grow the agency so quick? What did you do? Because a lot of people are looking at going, and I've seen a lot of growth in agencies over during COVID, but yours was really pretty, pretty good. So tell us a little bit more about that. Hollis: [00:03:18] I think it was, it was different because much of it was born out just starting that momentum sort of grew versus sitting with a very particular plan. Where Baby Bathwater came less out of need more out of want, this came out of need. And so there… Also, we are locked in our house and I could stay focused on, cause I wasn’t doing… Going to conferences or traveling or doing things. But I think the main frame was okay, just postpone slash canceled, who knows a handful of events. We basically lost about two and a half million bucks in that decision. Which happened before people in the states even believed that this COVID thing was gonna affect us because our president was in Italy. And so we saw it a little early. We knew we didn't want to let people go. There was no PPP stuff yet. And me and my partner, Michael, we always knew we could always fall back on our marketing skills, which is kind of what got us to a place to even know what people wanted from a mastermind. So our personal interests has been in the health and wellness sort of space. We see lots of stuff that's crap. And we see lots of stuff that's good. And we happened to know a few people who have amazing products that are members. But they’re product guys, they're not marketing people at all. And so we kind of went in with the thesis of how do we enhance the people who are already members value and we can't do anything for 'em, but also don't run any risk of screwing up the relationship if we get in bed with them and do something different than what we already have a good relationship with. So, I mean, it basically started with four products. I knew we had people in the group who had platforms. That love the products, cause they give them out at events. They love them. And I know they have a lot of traffic and I knew these people have great products. Didn't even know what I'm talking about. Like you should just set up this campaign and get them on the podcast and set up an email. You can track it with affiliate links… And all like, can you just do that for me? Kind of thing. So, I mean, it was actually super, super simple. Essentially, out of a network license for post affiliate pro so that we could track all of the clicks and conversions and build it very slowly, not a lot of overhead. It costed maybe like five grand or something we spent getting set up and all that automation and tracking. We did have a really hard time finding someone to help us run that once it worked. We ended up finding the guy who made the tutorial videos for the original version of it and tracked him down. And it was the first hire because it was complicated and how he set up the company structure. But the basics of it was we had people get podcast, email lists and content sites. I mean, people have great products that had a unique hook. It couldn't just be like, like we did have a CBD, which is a crowded market with a bunch of people at all look the same. But this had clinical trials, some studies, so I could go get functional medicine doctors to say something unique about it and they could write a real piece of content. So really we just took the friction out of the middle, which was, it's hard for the product owners to focus on these things that are ancillary. Then buy an ad that are not doing very diligent tasks that can scale these like one-off promotions and managing people is hectic. Like if I had a brand, I wouldn't want to do stuff we were doing because I know the costliness of managing all these relationships and getting it on the calendar and getting all the stuff they need. But in our unique situation, we had time. We… the money. We wanted to serve the people who we wanted to have back when things came back online. And so it made sense to keep calling them chatting and working it out and figuring it out. So our deal is that we took... it’s very minimal, it's just an average, about 10% of the revenue for 12 months of the customer. And we would do a, you know, a multi-tiered campaign where, you know, perhaps the person to get on a podcast and do an interview about the product that was very educational and content-heavy. So it didn't just come out of the blue of this promotion. It was like ease into with good questions and then we’d do an article. And then eventually kind of like an email with a special offer and a landing page just for that person. And like something I've been back in early on was when one big person promotes the rest. So we usually just go for, you know, one or two people we have a good relationship that have a big audience and then their affiliates would see it happen. And we'd get a few more of those. But we did, because it was so hands-on, mess around with people who could send, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of clicks and had an audience that already trusted them. So very boutique, very niche, but where it worked, very effective. I'd say the biggest bottleneck was calendars. You could lock in a deal and they might not have three months so they could do it. But we hit a point where we were going to have to start hiring more people, we had a tech guy, an administrative helper in an industry that me and Michael were putting together. Then we hired someone to go start recruiting more promoters, and then we need to start hiring writers and creatives. At that point, we actually ended up selling the business so that we didn't have to build an agency. The hard part of building an agency, managing the creatives, training, we never really hit that point. Although it looks like I’ll go back to the trough and do it again. But I mean, really it was about that simple. It was like performance-based so we couldn't mess up relationships. And also we didn't want anyone to ever tell us, hey, you have to do this for me. Uh, it usually mostly came from the merchants with the products. They'd be like, hey, where are the traffic? And we’re like, hey, we don't, we don't work for you. We’re not on a retainer, but it's coming, it's coming. Then we'll get paid. Well, we only get paid when we make sales. So that helped us not get stress out.
Jason: [00:09:32] Do you feel like you have to comb through mountains of data, jumping between multiple platforms to spreadsheets, to slide decks and backing in, in order to create performance reports for your clients? It's a constant drain on your agency's time and resources. And that's where our friends at Ninja Cat can help. Ninja Cat is a digital marketing performance management platform that really unifies your marketing data and empowers your agency to automate insightful, beautiful client reports that scale. Now Ninja Cat cat keeps your marketing performance and presentation tools in one place, freeing you up from manual data wrangling. And it really gives your team more time to focus on strategy and growing your business. And for a limited time, my smart agency podcast listeners will receive $500 ninja credit. When you go to ninjacat.io/masterclass to claim your offer and schedule a demo. That's ninjacat.io/masterclass. Yeah, I see a lot of people going the performance route. You know, one of our mastermind members, David, he was always constantly under the million mark and just trying to figure out how to get over it. And he switched to this model and got a million dollars last year during COVID, just from one client for the performance deal. Kind of like what you guys are doing, or you guys did or about to do again. I guess we can talk about that. But I liked how, when you're the performance model, they can't tell you what you can and can't do, or a timeline. You're just like, I'm putting a campaign together on our own dime, our own resources. This is what you're agreed to pay. I really like that. But I also like too, that, you know, this is a home run. Like it's a good product. I want people to not kind of overlook that and just don't go up to anybody and go give me 10% of all your sales. And plus too, you guys had relationships with them so you knew you could trust them. Because it gets really tricky sometimes when you're like, yeah, give me 10% of sales and they could the books however they want. Hollis: [00:11:54] Yes. So that was an interesting piece of... The one thing that I guess is there is we did have these relationships we've built over almost 20 years now. Which, if you just do it on the street, we couldn't start from scratch with that. So that was like our one… competitively used to do something here, but the book side of things, we actually knew how bad that can get. So we control that this was a bottleneck and business model, as far as administration and just workload. I kept everything clean, but we were starting to get super risky. So we invoiced the merchant for the payments and wrote to the affiliates. We did everything. So we essentially became a bank taking the money, moving the money versus paying out of their own affiliate program. It started to get pretty hectic. You get one monthly payment. We're trying to keep the relationships paying on time. We never ran into any issues, but you could see it coming as things got more complex. Jason: [00:12:52] Well, I'm sure the IRS probably set up red flags of all the money moving around. Hollis: [00:12:57] Oh, it was crazy that was passing through and yeah… And so like in hindsight, if we do this again, won't do the complicated equation where we have 12 months tail customer. We also calculated a refund risk thing. You know, now it's going to be one time upfront with a small fee for us that continues, but like the calculating the refund piece to try to mitigate risks. Like I think we went into it wanting to be like a no-brainer where it's like, hey, we've taken all the risks where X, Y, and Z, that you won’t have to do anything for. Our contract is like the nicest thing in the world. If this was the only thing we were doing, and we were focused on it that thing would have sort of bit us in the ass, as it started to grow. But it worked well. It was boutique small. And we only did this from March to October. So it was like a significant period of time, but you can see all the forethought we didn't put into it with, oh man, the amount of time to calculate these things if I would’ve... There's a bunch of things we do if we really want to scale it simpler. If we do this again, you know. Jason: [00:14:05] What are some of the other things that you do simpler. Because most people listening here, this is their full-time gig. They weren't just looking at like, well, let's just try this project out, which that's really pretty cool that you guys are able to do that. Hollis: [00:14:19] Yeah. I think, you know… fed the horse because we had all the relationships and we knew this I'd stayed up drinking wine with every person in the thing all night. I knew we could do well with good products, which you highlighted, is like products that kind of sell themselves. And then the owner of those products, I think this is the simplest thing is don't just take a good deal. We only took people who were so product-focused that we were going to get the content and the angles we needed. All they cared about is being the best. But they didn't care about was telling us how to market it, that they actually wanted us to tell them. They would use the campaigns to inform all of the rest of their staff. One thing we did do well and make it easy was, hey, use the work we're creating. We don't need any cut of it. You can take our landing pages, reuse them. If you get your own affiliates, you can run them through your program. You know, just do that. Cause we only focused on that 10% that drove our revenue. The things we probably would have done different or not such a complicated calculation of the things. I remember when I first started in some of the affiliate stuff, people would hold back a percentage for refunds. There was like a whole equation. But we made everything else so simple for them. We didn't need to go, that… We could have just said here's a flat fee. Here’s a number. Honestly, it would have saved one employee 40 hours a month in weird stuff. And in places where ambiguity… where also the customer on both sides has to read a spreadsheet that's complicated versus like here's the number that came in and here is the cut… over. I think simplicity would have helped a lot in that sense. And then other simplicity things, I think just figuring out how to set expectations of timeline. Even though we didn't work for those people, said it on the phone, in the conversations of like, hey, we might get a campaign locked in that’s going to be out this far. But then they get in their own world. Like, where's the stuff? And I'm like, no, we already told you this. And so, one outline. Here's how this works, one the phone. Before you email me any questions, reread this. This is the rules of engagement and how it works. But that I would say once it worked and had momentum, changing the relationships from I work for you to we work together changed the whole dynamic of it versus, you know, just collecting a flat fee. Jason: [00:16:49] Yeah. I love that of like we work together rather than you're the dog barking orders to me. And even if you don't do a performance model. Hollis: [00:16:58] Yeah. It feels like you kind of got to do that sometimes. Cause I feel like that's how we like learned. If you worked in a restaurant going up or we… Whatever, like that’s how it was. When you’re getting paid, you just got to say yes, please, and as you wish. Which honestly doesn't even serve the client that well. Sometimes you’re doing shit that they don’t even need to get done. They just wanted to show that they tell you to do something. But we're only going to focus on brings in dollars. It doesn't bog down either of our teams. And that's why we switched the contract that you can leave whenever you want. You know, the psychology there was great because it was like, we're paying equally versus that, you know, walked into some long retainer and some big set up fees and things like that. Obviously you have to have some results for that to be worth it, um, for the relationship to stay. But if you know you can deliver on it, then it's probably better to be in a, a mutual relationship where either party can leave in 30 days notice versus trying to lock in really long-term deals. Jason: [00:17:58] Yeah, exactly. Well, awesome. Well, this is amazing, Hollis. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience listening in? Hollis: [00:18:05] Listen, I mean, it's funny just because it's a friend of mine that just got off a call with one of our members who, who set them up on like a little dinner in the same town. And I forget the book references basically it's about taking knowledge from other industries and bringing them into your own. So what I saw was great was a lot of the product companies who were here like some of them were in retail and other things. They just didn't know how to pull stuff from other areas. There's always like these levers that you can pull from other industry practices that might not exist in a niche that you're opening that you're trying to mark it as that in. And so I was really, all we did was just start reaching into other tools that there's no way they're ever going to get to this. So obviously we can take over this part for them and we’re not also dealing with the dynamics. So there's someone in the house already being paid to do this or anything like that. It's pretty clean that way. But I think we just learned that from sitting in these events from people like, you know, we have some hiring stuff we've learned from guys in the hotel space, which I never would have thought to learn that until I sat into that at one of these events or whatever. So I've never seen through blinders. Like it's good to be focused and linear, but I think there's just so many cool nuggets in different industries you can pull and bring in that we all just kind of forget to take a glance at. Jason: [00:19:30] Awesome. Well, cool. Well, what's a website people go and check you guys out? Hollis: [00:19:35] Just babybathwater.com. Jason: [00:19:37] Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. If you guys enjoyed this episode, make sure you go to their website. They have really cool events. I went to the one in, in Utah. And it was really pretty amazing. And if you guys want to really grow and scale your agency faster, what got you here is not going to get you to the next level and you need to do a number of different things. Because probably what got you to this level is from referrals and word of mouth, or maybe you selling, or maybe one salesperson. The biggest thing that you need is systems in place in order to grow and scale faster and get to the point where you can pick and choose. If you want to do that, I want you guys to check out our agency playbook. Go to jasonswenk.com/playbook and check it out. And it might just be the thing that will get you to the next level. So go do that now. And until next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_an_Agency_Grew_Fast_to_Over_4_Million_and_Sold_Quick.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 10 October 2021
Do you want to know how to land major brands? Bill Durrant had been working for a big agency for years when he decided to leave and work freelance for a while. That's when opportunity knocked and old Nestle client asked him to work on his new account, Clif Bar. This is the client that really started his agency Ex Verus, which helps brands develop a paid media strategy that drives visible sales growth and merchandise those results to leadership. In today's episode, he sits down with Jason to talk about how good timing has as much to do as being good, what is it like to work with major brands like Coca-Cola, why it is so important for him to develop a relationship with clients, and 3 Golden Nuggets
Gusto: Today's episode is sponsored by Gusto, an all-in-one people platform for payroll, benefits, HR where you can unify your data. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Head over to gusto.com/agency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Landing Major Brands and How Good Clients Will Take You EverywhereJason: [00:00:00] What's up, everybody? Jason Swenk here. I am excited I have another amazing guest on the show. We're going to talk about the landing big well-known brands. Because a lot of you have been reaching out, how do we get these big brands? Like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and all these major brands? Well, on today's episode, we're going to talk about that with this amazing guest. So let's go ahead and get it. Hey, Bill. Welcome to the show. Bill: [00:00:34] Hey, thanks so much for having me, Jason. Jason: [00:00:36] Yeah, man. I'm excited to have you on. So for the ones that have not heard of you yet tell us who you are and what do you do? Bill: [00:00:47] Alright, I am Bill Durrant and I'm the president and founder of Ex Verus Media. We're based out in Los Angeles and we are a paid media agency focused in that space, uh, really designed to create culture, creating growth-stage brands. Um, to work with those brands, to build them, to grow them from a media standpoint. Uh, and not just their brands, but also immediate demand as well. So the performance side of the world as well. Jason: [00:01:12] Awesome. Well, tell us, how, how did you get into this space? I'm always curious and like, what was your first project or deal? Bill: [00:01:20] Yeah. You know, I think our origin story is a little… You know, it's a little funny. It shows you how important it is to be a lucky and good, not just good. Um, I had worked for a number of years at a big agency and worked on, uh, the Nestle accounts. I worked with a number of grants from Nestle and, uh, I had decided to leave, um, just start doing some freelance work. And while I was doing that, I got a phone call from a former Nestle client who said, hey, I'm running a part of the marketing organization at Clif Bar now. And we'd love to know if, uh, you might be able to be a one-person media agency, um, for us. And of course I had no idea how to do that. But found myself saying yes. And, uh, that turned into an incredible and a very long run with Clif Bar, um, which started the agency. So from very small projects, um, to consolidating all of their media and advertising across the organization and using that as the launchpad for what we are today. Jason: [00:02:24] Well, shit, dude. You went and straight to the, a huge brand. Um, yes, that was, uh, that was good timing and, uh… I don't know, luck, but I think that was just good timing. Bill: [00:02:39] Yeah. You know, I, I think so. And, and I think, you know, like I said, it shows you it's important to be good. It's important to be ready when opportunities come up. But it's also important, you know, at that point in time, Clif Bar was not investing very much money into paid media. So it wasn't a stretch for me to do the work and to bring on one or two team members. Um, the real stretch was I think, in people's imaginations when they understood like wait Clif Bar, I mean, that they've got to be a billion-dollar brand. And, you know, taking advantage of, you know, essentially the credibility that that gave us. I didn't have to tell anyone, you know, hey, they're not necessarily spending $10 million a year in media. Um, they're not a massive account, at least right now. And being able to do that and to leverage that credibility, um, is ultimately what started to land us our next relationships. Jason: [00:03:31] Yeah. And I, and I think really kind of… Talk a little bit about, cause a lot of times people think these big brands are so intimidating. Like they get so nervous and I'm like, they're just people like you and me. They just got, but they got to get a thousand different approvals and they make decisions on committees, you know, and all that kind of stuff. But like, talk a little bit about that. Like I remember when we landed our first big one, I was just naive. And I didn't even, I didn't even know they were big. Like I remember, and I even lost it a really big account cause I didn't even know who they were. Which I always tell on the show Berkshire Hathaway. I was like, who are you guys? Bill: [00:04:16] Yeah. It's um, I can't believe you told Warren Buffett to screw off, but that's a, um, that's definitely a story. I, you know, I think you're absolutely right. These are people who put their pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us. And particularly if you're a creative agency or an agency where, you know, everything isn't continuously trying to be consolidated, like it is on the media side. Um, there's a lot of opportunity for them to, you know, really want to stand out and break through just within their organization, let alone to consumers. So, you know, there are folks that are going to be more willing within those organizations to work with an agency of any size, uh, if it brings them the right, the right kind of breakthrough work. And what we also found is that within those organizations, these large organizations, there's a Coca-Cola and sure everybody would want to work with Coca-Cola or with Sprite, or, you know, even with minute maid or some of the larger brands. But from our standpoint, you know, working with Coca-Cola doesn't necessarily mean working with those massive brands and trying to take on the largest agencies in the world. Um, there are folks that are brand managers on really interesting growth stage brands. They really need our help and creative thinking. Um, and there's huge opportunities to not only do great work with brands like that, and then have the benefit of saying, you know, I get to work with, with a fortune 100 company. Um, but to actually get work out of that, that then becomes part of your calling card to future opportunity. Jason: [00:05:49] Yeah. Yeah. I remember I did an interview, our Four interview. So if you guys want to go check it out, it's jasonswenk.com/four. The number four, it's a pretty long URL. And I interviewed, uh, Del Ross of IHG International Hotel Group. And at the time he was director of... He's not there. So don't hit Del up anymore. And, uh, I asked him, I said, how can smaller agencies that haven't worked with bigger brands get into bed with bigger brands? And he was like, look, just like what you said, be innovative, call me up and tell me something that is new. That's changing. Don't just say, hey, I take you out to golf or send me a stupid, you know, puzzle that I have to solve in order to get, get his attention. And he's like, look, just say, hey, I was wondering like… And this was as example when Facebook was coming out with his pay-per-click and saying, hey, have you heard of power editor? And the remarketing possibility that you can do in the hospitality space? I'd love to do a test project for you. And that's, that's what we did with Lotus Cars. And that's what we did with Hitachi Power Tools and a number of different, bigger brands. And once you got in there, I want you to tell us about this too, about, especially with Clif… You know, uh, the Clif Bar. There are so many different side businesses or divisions in those. So how did you start building relationships in order to grow that account? Bill: [00:07:18] Well, I think the point that you just made is a really important one. And, uh, you know, I think our success is a testament to this strategy and the strategic approach, because it, it really is a win-win for everyone. And when you can show that client how they're, they're winning by doing something or learning something that they wouldn't have experienced or been exposed to before, um, your business is going to grow, right? And I think with Clif Bar, you know, we were kind of… It's funny, I came from Nestle where, you know, there's typically one agency group that runs all Nestle brands regardless of where they are in the country. And so portfolio management was very important. And so we came into the Clif Bar relationship really saying, you know, this is going to be about portfolio management. Even if there's one or two brands that spend the most. And this is going to be about building relationships with as many people within the organization as possible. Now, an organization like Clif makes that really easy, just great people, uh, all the way through. And what we found was that not only were we, you know, picking up and, and working with additional brands within Clif, which, which ultimately I think helps the bottom line. Um, what we also found was that those folks would then progress in their careers and move outside of the walls of Clif and move to other organizations. And in fact, that's, that's exactly what happened and we've kind of evolved our relationship. We now work with, uh, Premier Protein and PowerBar and Supreme Protein, which is literally down the street. But as people progressed in their careers and moved to other organizations, um, we then had new startup brands and new opportunities to work with. So it raised the tide of the boat and it helps us diversify as well away from one kind of main client comprising the bulk of our revenue. And so we saw that strategy paying off, not just right away. Um, hey, could you introduce me to such and such at such and such brand we'd love to chat with them. You know, you're already an insider, so you've already got trust and a reason to be there. Um, so you're not just a cold call, uh, when you're asking for introductions to the other brand managers. But even when you're not necessarily getting work from them today, you may be getting work from them tomorrow. It's still important to continue to build those relationships
Jason: [00:09:47] Taking care of your employees has never been more important than right now. And while paydays are great, running payroll is a major pain, calculating taxes, deductions, compliance. None of it it's easy. Unless of course you have Gusto. Gusto is a simple online payroll and benefits built for your small business. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Plus, with Gusto’s help, you can offer benefits like 401k's health insurance, workers' comp, and a lot more. And because you're a smart agency masterclass listener, you're going to get three months free once you run your first payroll. Go to gusto.com/agency that's gusto.com/agency for three free months. Yeah, one of our mastermind members, um, does a lot of work with Facebook and some of the key people at Facebook. She was telling us this and some of the other members are like, oh, that means you're going to lose Facebook? And she was like no, no, no. And I was, I knew it was coming. I was like, I'm getting new business from all these other companies. And it was like, you build relationships with these people, you know, they take you everywhere. We saw that as well, but it's about building that relationship, not just being transactional. And I think so many, like one of our other mastermind members, we always have a digital agency experience in Colorado. And I remember I'm already talking about we always make it one of the things in the first month we have to go physically, this is pre-COVID… Go visit them and just build rapport and help them out. And always, rather than just sending stupid reports, like, why do agencies just send reports? Like, you know what happens to your report? It just… They look at it first month. They might ask the question and then all the other ones it goes in the garbage. And then they forget about you. Bill: [00:11:58] Oh my goodness. That's exactly right. And you're right to talk about how to differentiate yourself and creating that personal communication is, is, is really one of the top ways to do it. We still have a very limited client base, uh, here in Los Angeles. We still only had one or two clients over the last six years that we could actually drive to. And we made it a point to fly and to be in person with people. So I've had status with Southwest Airlines for 10 years Because of that, because it's so easy to fly from, from Burbank to Oakland and to be there in person and to continue to cultivate those relationships. And, and to do that with people that I genuinely like and genuinely consider friends now Jason: [00:12:52] What, um…? Switching focus just a little bit, because you have about 30 people that you were telling me in the pre-show, your people will leave sometimes. They build relationships with your clients. Um, I know one of the hard things that people have an agency, let's say you have a project manager, account manager leading like a major account, and that person decides to leave. How do you maintain that relationship going forward with that client as a key person left? Bill: [00:13:26] That's a great question. You know, I think what we do is we try to make it like a three-tiered approach. So you've got folks that are at a senior leadership level. You know, we've got 30 people and, you know, maybe four or five people kind of fit that, fit that descriptor. And that's even a growth from where we were just six months ago. Uh, so we've got a senior leadership level. We've got, you know, uh, an associate director manager kind of media planner core team. And then you've got your kind of junior planners and associate planners, and that's kind of how our structure works from a client relationship standpoint. We're I think continuously thinking about where's the relationship at all three levels. So that if a person who's core, especially this day where there's been so much turnover just in general across the industry. You know, there's still going to be someone at the other two levels with whom the client has a strong relationship. And then we know that mission one, once we get a new person in to replace who's left, is for them to build that relationship with the clients. That's just as important as it is for them to build a relationship with the folks internally as well. Um, we take that very seriously. So the first thing we do is we look at what are these three levels? How can we always have two strong points of contact at different levels? Uh, regardless of who's left, um, because you'll find that sometimes clients just really love a particular associate planner or someone who's at a more entry-level role, because that's the person that's getting them, the information that they're asking for on a daily basis and doing a great job. And not just showing up every week or every month, um, for other things. Uh, the other thing that we like to do from a relationship standpoint is, again, to prioritize those relationships. And to understand that this really is a relationship business uh, first and foremost, and a results business as a very close second. Um, we always have to be mindful of results and the innovation that we're bringing to clients. But we know that we don't have a business long-term if we're not cultivating relationships and keeping those strong. So it's very important to us as an organization to hire properly. We're not just going to hire someone who's got the particular skillset that our client is looking for. We're also going to hire someone that we think that they're going to blend well with and to work well with and to enjoy on a personal level. Um, and somebody who's articulated enough to maintain that level of relationship with them and not just a technical expert. So that's the other big piece that's so important and foundational to everything is that if you're hiring correctly, you're really setting yourself up to be successful in that. Uh, without even necessarily having to have a strategic approach after that. Jason: [00:16:21] Yeah. I mean, we're in a people relationship business, both hiring, like you were saying, and, and managing those relationships. I love that. And I love that the three points of contact and always having two points. It's kind of like climbing a mountain. You never want just one point of contact. I mean, you know, I watched that free solo in my hand still… you know clam up when I'm thinking of him just holding on with one hand. I'm like at least two points and you, you're, you're going to make it. Uh, well, depending on which mountain you choose, I guess. Bill: [00:16:56] That's the perfect analogy I'm going to steal that analogy. Yeah, exactly. Jason: [00:17:00] Well, we, we love mountains here, right? So that's why I live in the mountains. Well, this has all been amazing. Um, tell us a little bit about the book called Digital Stone Age. Bill: [00:17:11] Yeah. So Digital Stone Age was a book that was designed to, uh, essentially have a conversation, um, at more of the readers pace that we found ourselves increasingly having with brands over the last couple of years. And that conversation was really around this idea of… Uh, you know, I'm a growing brand, I may have a decent media budget. Uh, I may not, I may, you know, be kind of bootstrapping, uh, with a smaller budget, at least compared to my peer set. And as a result, everything that I do has to be digital. And we found a lot of brand managers coming in with this mindset or everything that I do has to be social. And, you know, they weren't necessarily wrong in wanting to be in those places and to utilize those tactics. But what we found is that they weren't being neutral about it, and they weren't truly understanding what is going to truly grow my brand based on where consumers are now. And, you know, essentially the thesis of the book is you have to take care of generating that immediate demand. But you also have to take care of building a brand simultaneously. And as important and critical as digital tactics have been, you know, tactics that were kind of native to the digital space. Uh, what we also found was that people are still watching TV. People are still viewing… Now post-COVID, hopefully, post-COVID doesn't even make sense. But people are still viewing, um, out-of-home advertising. So we're seeing that grow again in 2021 and then beyond, um, people are still utilizing tactics that might feel old-fashioned to a very modern digital marketer, and they're using them very successfully. Um, simultaneously you've got folks who are doing the same thing of, uh, you know, I I've always been in TV. I've always been on a radio. I've always been an outdoor. And I would like to just continue with what's worked and we know that that's not what works best either. There truly is a synergistic effect by taking different kinds of media channels and different approaches, um, and using them simultaneously than trying to double down on one particular approach or tactic. So writing a book about that and essentially laying out the evidence that proves that over studies that have been done by people far more, far more intelligent than I… Over thousands of brands and over the last 10 years, it's really powerful and exciting to see that and to know… Hey, I now have a blueprint or a path forward and a strategic framework on how to be successful in growing a brand in this modern era where even if a particular channel isn't a digital channel. It's still becoming more and more digitized. And being able to lean into those trends and be modern, but also simultaneously driving, uh, results with your budgets. Uh, that's a very powerful thing to be able to say you can do as a marketer. Jason: [00:20:15] Well, I lied. Last question. Has the book gotten you a lot of business with some of the brands that you want? Bill: [00:20:22] You know, I think what it does is two things. Um, number one is it immediately drives credibility that we know what we're talking about. Um, so we don't use it as a lead magnet per se. We use it as a compliment to, uh, our introduction process and our proposal process, um, with clients. And so it's a little bit harder to quantify. But we know that, um, the book and some of the work that we've done as extensions of that from a PR standpoint, just getting our message out to the press, um, have generated interest and inbound leads. And have generated clients for us. That's, I think, the most satisfying thing to know is we were able to obtain a client by doing things the right way and leaning in on thought leadership. Not just having to rely on referrals of course, which are important, but you can't just rely on them, uh, or other channels or tactics that might've felt less, um, true to who we are. Jason: [00:21:23] Well, I, you know, we have a lot of mastermind members that have written books and what they'll do is they literally send it out to their top 100 list. And they'll actually have like a bookmark and a special note on the page they want them to read. And it's customized to them, right? And then they get this book. If they like reading, then it's gold. If they're like me and they're like, ah, kryptonite throw it away, right? So you got to make sure you know your audience. Um, but, uh, yeah, some mastermind members crush it on that. So if you're not doing it, try that part out. Bill: [00:21:58] I love that. I love that idea. Uh, the idea of shipping out a hundred packages is a little scary. But the, I, the idea of physically getting something into their hands is so powerful. Love it. Yeah. Jason: [00:22:09] Awesome. Well, cool. Um, what's the website for the agency? And then obviously, you know, the Digital Stone Age, I think you can get on an Amazon Barnes and noble all over. So congrats on that. But what's the website address people will go and check the agency out? Bill: [00:22:25] Yep. exverus.com. It's just E X V E R U S means from the truth in Latin. Jason: [00:22:31] Awesome. Glad you spelled that out because I bet a lot of people would have messed that up. But thanks so much for coming on the show, uh, loved having you. Um, and if you guys liked this episode, you'll make sure you get subscribe. Uh, however you're listening to it. And if you want to be around other amazing agency owners that can really elevate you faster. And these are experienced agency owners that are pushing you and they're growing at a rapid pace. I'd love to have you guys go to digitalagencyelite.com and go apply. Um, we make everyone go through an application process, interview process just to make sure help you out. And that you're right for the group, but these are the best of the best agency owners sharing what’s working and be able to see the things that you might not be able to see. So go do that now. And until next time, have a Swenk day. Related: https://jasonswenk.com/work-with-big-brands/
Direct download: 01_How_to_Land_a_Major_Brand_Client_and_Kick_Start_Your_Agency_Growth.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 6 October 2021
Are you thinking about the ways you could use NFTs for your digital agency? After working in nine agencies, Kent Lewis decided to start Anvil Media in 2000, which is nowadays one of the oldest search engine marketing agencies in the Pacific Northwest that specializes in analytics, SEO, paid media, and organic social media strategy. Last year, during the NFT boom, Kent wrote a not so serious press release about this phenomenon and got the attention of companies wanted to learn how to use these one-of-a-kind digital assets. Just like that, he got into the NFT world and is developing some projects around them. Today he joins Jason to talk about what are NFTs, how some companies started using them, the possibilities to further develop their potential, and how can digital agencies get in on the action too. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesWix: Today's episode is sponsored by the Wix Partner Program. Being a Wix Partner is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Using NFTs Like Gary Vee To Create Brand EngagementJason: [00:00:00] Hey, what's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here and have another amazing guest for you. We're going to talk about how your agency can use NFTs. That's right. And we're going to tell his story and so you can do that. So let's go ahead and jump into the episode. Hey, Ken. Welcome to the show. Kent: [00:00:25] Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:27] Yeah, man. I'm excited to have you on. So tell us who are you and what do you do? Kent: [00:00:32] So my name is Kent Lewis. I am based in Portland, Oregon since 95, you know, marketing PR background. But in 96, I got involved in the internet, started optimizing websites before Google was a thing. And I've been a part of nine agencies, founded two, co-founded two. But when I was fired the second time from an agency that I was a key manager in, I decided I'm probably unemployable. Better do my own thing. So started out in 2000 with Anvil Media, as a consultancy and started bringing in employees in 03. And have been active and keeping it a relatively boutique-sized digital marketing agency since then. And when I'm not doing the agency thing, you know, I'm trying to get outside. That's the great thing about Portland, we're an hour and a half from the ocean, from the mountains from rivers, you name it. Jason: [00:01:20] Awesome, so are you a fly fisherman? Kent: [00:01:23] My first ever fly fishing experience was on the Deschutes River in Central Oregon, about three months ago. Gal, one of my friends, she gave me the rod and said Kent, and one just keep throwing it. And I caught a least solid three and a half-inch steelhead. So I didn't eat it. It was probably good for a pizza. And I guess you could say I was maybe hooked. So I think I might try more of that later, but I'm mostly like bike cycling, snowboarding, skiing, kind of guy. Jason: [00:01:50] Very cool. We'll get along very well. That's, that's all me. That's why I live in the mountains. But, um, we're not here to talk about the mountains. Let's talk about… I'm curious, because I've been fired from almost every job. Why were you fired from that one agency? Kent: [00:02:05] Well, so the first time I was fired was an agency I co-founded in 99. And by fall of 2000 we had a disagreement about equity and our role. There were two junior folks. I was like 25, 26 at the time. And there was the founder who used his 401k to fund it and we helped grow it to three and a half million, 35 people in less than two years. But, you know, we had gone in… much as I should ran of myself, my other young partner who ran the PR side and I ran the internet side. She was like I'm going in to get more equity. Are you in? I was like, I guess, yeah, because I helped build this thing. And he was offended by that and instead of firing just her he fired both of us. And by the next week, uh, October, 2000, I created Anvil as a, as a placeholder. Interestingly, the name Anvil Media comes from an easy I'd been running for four years. I thought I'll just sell the easy for a million dollars and retire. It's still archived at @anvil-media.com, but I haven't touched it since 06. Not worth a dime now, but that team that I left in late 2000 was acquired by another agency. And then my boss, who was my mentor and, you know, it was tragic to me that we had a falling out. He died of a massive heart attack at 42. So they needed somebody to run my own team. So this old school agency asked me to take my team back over and I tripled revenue. Then, in the end, my girlfriend decided the Creative Director was more interesting than I was, even though he was married. And since he was on the board and had been there 20 years, he had a little more juice than I did and canned my ass. And then I decided I better do my own thing. So it was about a girl the second time. Actually, it was about a girl both times. The other was my business partner and she was very amazing and also made a lot of bag mistakes. And I got lumped in when she and I united. So there's a whole book there somewhere when I have the time, but it was never about my performance. It was never about my abilities. It was always about bad judgment. I'm not innocent in it so much as I picked the wrong horses. Jason: [00:03:56] Yeah, gotcha. I do want to get to how you tripled revenue later on, but I do want to get into the NFTs. So explain for some people that have… I mean, if you've been living under a rock, what an NFT is and then how can agencies use NFTs to really benefit their agency?
Kent: [00:04:15] Yeah. So it's actually a great story, but I'll just answer your question directly. If we have time, I'll go into the backstory because it exemplifies the timing in my career. Um, I'm not that smart. I'm just tall male with a short name and I'm not unattractive. And I think that's been as much of my success as hard work and smarts. So NFTs. So I'd been reading about, you know, what Pizza Hut and Pringles and all these brands were messing around doing these little PR stunts, basically. Creating these little non-fungible tokens, being their little digital assets that you can own. And, you know, buy, sell, trade. And because they're probably of blockchain, you can have a whole history of that item. So brand we'll get into, you know, why it matters to marketers. But to back then, we're talking March, 2021. I was like, this seems like second life. You remember second life, the virtual world. I was consulting with HP on that like however many, 14 years ago. And I realized for the first time in career, I could be one word ahead or one sentence ahead in the book. I didn't have to write the book. I didn't have to write the chapter, I just needed to spend a little more time on it and think about it just another 30 minutes longer than my client, and then help guide them through how to create a second life experience. Same thing with, uh, it's all over again, right? The world repeats. It’s a spiral and a circle, historically speaking, even in tech. I read about these non fungible tokens. You create this asset, like these virtual tacos or virtual pizzas, like Pizza Hut or these Pringle gold chips. And then people get excited because you're an early adopter, even if there's a fairly worthless asset. But it wasn't because people were reselling these on the secondary market. They got them for free and they were selling them for 10, 20, $30,000. And I was like, this sounds a lot like Bitcoin for brands. And so I wrote a press release April 1st, as I've been doing the last 15, 18 years. I write a fake press release on April every year, and this one was about NFTs and, you know, NFTs, you might know as most famous things, digital watches from Jacobson and Company or digital sneakers. And so I took the idea of a digital sneaker because we're in the backyard of Adidas America and of course, Nike and I said that these other agencies are building digital sneakers. We're 10 steps ahead where building virtual shoe boxes to story of virtual sneakers to put in a virtual closet and a virtual house that we build you just to store your digital sneakers. Just totally full of it, right? Totally riffing off of a core concept. And low and behold, a very large social media platform with a blue logo reached out to me and said, hey, we need help. We've got… We're getting a virtual sneaker build for one of their communities. And we can, would, they could tell that we're very serious about it by reading that press release. So they didn't read the press release that closely, bless their hearts. And that led to another conversation. So basically what I did is I would hopped back a second and I was like, shoot, if they're serious, then I'm serious. So I read up on it. I wrote an article that's on a website called thinknorthwest.org. It's a big ad networks for the West Coast, Portland, San Francisco. Uh, about what is NFT and why does it matter? And we can talk more about that in a second, but in the end I've been talking to three large brands, including a sneaker brand about how to use NFTs. Including one of the brands that's a big technology company with a black and white logo that basically is trying to use it for B2B. How do you get into the tech community? And can we use NFTs to incentivize behaviors for deep tech clientele. Even the OEM channel reseller channel, very complicated, convoluted, not theoretically as sexy. And I love the challenge. So I'm talking with them in an hour, then try and see if we can finalize a project. So long story short, we took this, what was a press release joke into a reality of an offering to clients. And we're having these multiple discussions with larger brands. So in the past, I've evangelized mobile marketing, video marketing, podcasting, voice search, Amazon marketing. And I evangelize it as a, with my PR background, speak about it, write about it, and then develop through my articles, a concept or a structure for a service, and then sell that service. I've done that for most of my career. And the NFT happened to start out as a joke, skeptical, healthy skepticism, that it was really something. As I did the research, I realized it's extremely powerful. Because it solves… NFTs, non-fungible tokens, unlike Bitcoin, where if there's equal value, one Bitcoin equals one bitcoin. I own one, you own one. It's the same value. And a non-fungible is a one-off item that you can pay me for with Bitcoin, but it's non-replicable. Non-scalable. And so the idea is you're, you're owning an asset for something. And that's why you can say that's 30 grand to own this. Or the meme of the fire girl, the little girl with the blazing fire out of her house. And she's staring at the camera and they sold… That gal, now that she's going into college, sold it for half a million dollars and helped fund college and gave some to charity. Just for some rich person to own the digital rights to that, right? Beeple’s $69 million collage. Um, he's arguably not a good artist, but he's a first-mover developed a lot of credibility in the space and had enough of a following that some very wealthy art collector, using the term loosely, decided to get a bidding war and spend crazy money. But how does that relate to brands? So there's a couple things to keep in mind for NFTs. And that is there's, because it's blockchain, it's trackable, defensible. There's no fraud, theft, or manipulation possible with an NFT, you can create as many copies as you want. You can sell them, you can give them away. But it allows… In the end, it allows for a few different things for brands. One is just general awareness. So the things that you've seen in the, in the press related to these predominantly quick-service restaurants or manufacturers and retail, lifestyle brands, Pringles, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut… Charmin has an NFT-P as in "TP." So they're just creating brand awareness. And if you like the brand, you might love them for that, if you're technologically savvy. But what I think is the next phase, because that's really what's happening in the last year. What's happening in the next year is brand engagement brand perception management. So luxury brands are getting into it. Hoochie, Jacob & Co., like I said, Jacobs & Co. are obviously a very expensive watch brand and sold an NFT watch for $100,000. Again, fairly worthless other than to the buyer, right? So brand engagement. Uh, what I think is really the secret sauce is, and this is where it gets into the B2B world, where it can apply is in the engagement for the customer. And customer retention is using it for gamification and incentives. So tokens, loyalty reward programs, earn certain tokens. Those tokens can be exchanged for things, art, music, whatever. And so it's just a clever way to up your ante and see, be seen as a forward-looking brand or an agency that creates this stuff for clients. Because a lot of like the top shot, NBA, virtual trading cards of the top 10, most expensive trading cards of all time up there with Honus Wagner is the Dallas Maverick, right? And his car traded for almost $3 million and it's a digital card. But in my backyard, Damian Lillard with the Portland trailblazers, he's added special access to groups, discussion groups, VIP access to certain events, or just access to him. So you're getting, you're paying a premium, but you're getting something that's very exclusive. That's really what NFTs are about right now, or now is exclusivity. I think also that the next phase, which will be one plus years out would be the product extensions. Agencies helping brands create products that are natural extension of their current offerings, especially in a post pandemic world. There's a lot more of this remote work, remote communication. So creating products that are more digital and interactive, it's particularly interesting right now. And then the last component would be the tokenization of time. So as an agency, you could tokenize your time where it can be bought and sold on the secondary market. Why people might do that? Hard to say. But, uh, there's a Reuben Bramanathan who's with IDEO CoLab Ventures. He's tokenized his time. And one token is equal to one hour of his time and the guy might trade his time. He might, I might have to pay him 500 or a thousand dollars. But if I get a good deal on a token, I might save a ton of money more than likely to pay right now, paying more for a token than it's worth. And then relate to that is just creating that digital ecosystem. So when I mentioned second life, there's a new version of that. And that is, there are many of them actually, but one of them is popular. It's called Superworld, where you can own the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel tower in a virtual recreation of the world, the planet. Using satellite imagery, you could add things into that world. You can develop things like second life, but mainly if you want to say I own the Eiffel tower, you can go in Superworld and buy it. If it's not already been purchased since I last looked. The Great Wall, Taj Mahal, etcetera. Those are just some of the ways a brands are using it today. One that I glossed over that's product extension. A good example is gaming. So you've got Ubisoft has a game called Rabbits. F1 has Delta time. So what, what F1 has done well with their reality show on I think Netflix. And then this, uh, F1, uh, Delta time NFT assets related to kind of gamification of F1 is they're extending out what is a very elite wealthy following. Most people don't fly to Monaco to watch the race from a yacht, but there are other ways to interact with the brand. And F1 has mastered that. Uh, and then even Microsoft has a fairly ghetto Minecraft-like game called Azure Space Mystery. That is, um, kind of remedial, but it has, it's in the NFT world. So, um, how that relates is Fortnight, if it stays relevant for another year or two, or other games like it, you could buy and sell armor and weapons and other customizations. That's one way you can buy, sell, and trade your gear within the games would be through NFTs because of the trackability that you need to do the anti-fraud protection. And then brands can obviously create assets and then know that they've protected that asset through NFT. Jason: [00:14:41] When you're an agency partner with Wix, you unlock an entire digital ecosystem for creating, managing, and growing your agency. Get the full coding and design freedom to create anything your clients need, along with the tools to manage and collaborate with your team seamlessly from anywhere. And when it comes to growing your agency, you can get matched with new leads every day and earn revenue share for every website you guys create. They're backed by the Wix industry, leading security and site performance. You'll also have a dedicated account manager on standby 24/7. So you can reach your goals and start setting new. See for yourself, head over to wix.com/partners. And re-imagine what your agency can accomplish. Now my head's spinning, which I… with ideas. And I mean, it's just to comprehend all of this is a, a little overwhelming figuring out. But that's, it's really pretty fascinating that's where a lot of the world is actually going. And, uh, those are some great examples, you know, from F1, Microsoft, and even how some of the agencies are selling their time for NFTs. It's crazy. Kent: [00:16:02] Yeah. For now it is and it will settle down. It's, it's more profound, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk has doubled down. So if you want to figure out how does an agency monetize NFTs just look at what Gary Vaynerchuk has done with NFTs. And I've had the luxury to seen him speak twice. And I thought he was just a grade-A douche bag and nothing better. And he's far more than. In fact, I firmly believed that it’s, his, his character his act and he really has a huge heart and does a lot of good things. You just wouldn't know it because he has a potty mouth, which I have no problem with. And, uh, just the way he kind of yells and preaches at people. But he has a lot of good things. I never disagree that he's a smart guy and he's on point, but he's doubling down on NFTs in ways that make me look like a troglodyte. Like I'm, you know, like, I don't get it. And he's built a whole marketplace and a bunch of assets and that's cool. Cause he can do that. Cause you know, he shouldn't even be working anymore, but he's never going to stop. So look at what he's done. If you want to see what a true agency pioneer that started out just as a small wine dealer has done, it's pretty remarkable. Jason: [00:17:00] Give us one example of what you really liked that he's doing in his agency using NFTs. Kent: [00:17:06] Well, I like that he's giving back. So with his NFT agency and I, we're going to apply cause we're doing an NFT mural fundraiser here in Portland, in September. But we can apply once we build the NFT and what do you call mint it, then we can apply. If we put it on the right, uh, marketplace and use the right technology, he can use some of the proceeds and resources he's developed with his NFT company. You know, like it basically an NFT agency to help you build something better, especially if it is for a nonprofit or cause-driven social responsibility sort of thing. And, and you can get some horsepower. So he's already built giving back into his model, which I really appreciate and admire. Look at what he's doing there. So he's not just riding the money train, he's pivoting that to provide opportunities to do social good in the process. Jason: [00:17:55] Awesome. Well, this is been very educational and, uh, and really pretty cool to listen to. What's the website people can go and, uh, check the agency out? Kent: [00:18:04] Uh, you can go to anvilmediainc.com or just Google Anvil Media. You'll find me with Anvil, Portland, anvil, Kent Lewis, whatever. And then if you just Google Kent, Kent Lewis NFT, or just go to thinknorthwest.org and their blog, you'll find my article, NFT Marketing: How brands can use NFTs to engage consumers and generate revenue. I think that's a great read. And then just also look at what Gary Vaynerchuk and NFTs looked that up and news and, um, Google search generally, and you'll find a lot of great information. Jason: [00:18:36] awesome logo. Everyone go check that out and thanks so much, Kent, for coming on the show. If you guys liked this episode, make sure you guys subscribe. Also, if you want to be around other agency owners who are on the cutting edge and they're sharing the stuff that's working and be able to see the things that you might not be able to see. I'd love to invite all of you to join our exclusive mastermind. It's called the digital agency elite. So go to digitalagencyelite.com and apply. And then if we feel that you're right for the community and the community is right for you. We'll have a conversation and see if it's, uh, uh, double-check that. And so make sure you go there now. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Can_You_Use_NFTs_To_Create_More_Engagement_For_Your_Digital_Agency_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 3 October 2021
Are you wondering how to go beyond the six or seven-figure mark and continue your agency growth? After graduating college with a Liberal Arts degree and an interest in advertising, Ben Wiener jumped at the opportunity to work at Wongdoody, an advertising agency that specializes in UX, as well as customers experience and employee experience. He continued to work there for 28 years and is now the CEO of the recently sold agency. He sat down to talk with Jason about the importance of the pipeline to keep your agency going beyond the million-dollar mark, how he goes about building the leadership at his agency, how to recalibrate your ambition to keep going after reaching eight figures, and his current role at the company. 3 Golden Nuggets
YOUTUBE AUDIO LINK Gusto: Today's episode is sponsored by Gusto, an all-in-one people platform for payroll, benefits, HR where you can unify your data. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Head over to gusto.com/agency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Building Leaders and Recalibrating Your Ambition Will Help You Continue Your GrowthJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here, and I have an amazing guest on today's show. We're going to talk about what is the milestones that you'd go through in order to build an over $80 million agency. Yes, $80 million. I want you to sink that in because a lot of you are trying to get to the eight-figure mark or the nine-figure mark. So we're going to talk about the milestones that you go through. And I have an amazing guest who's been in the industry and been with Wongdoody for over 27 years. So let's go ahead and get into the episode. Hey, Ben. Welcome to the show. Ben: [00:00:45] Hi, how are you? Jason: [00:00:47] I'm excited to have you on, so tell us who you are and what do you do? Ben: [00:00:52] I am Ben Wiener. I am the CEO of Wongdoody, which is, as you pointed out a 28-year-old at this point, um, former advertising agency that has evolved into a global experience design company. Jason: [00:01:09] That's incredible. And so we were talking in the pre-show that you were employee number four. So talk about the progression and you know, how did Wongdoody get started? And first off, just tell people how you guys came up with the name. Uh, cause I'm sure people, you know, I was very interested before. Ben: [00:01:31] Um, it's a really funny name. It's a really boring story. Um, Wongdoody was founded by two people. Mr. Wong and Mr. Doody, otherwise, why would you ever call a company that? And for the most part, you know, we've survived the credibility problem that we start with. But there's still a couple of clients that we've had over the years that have said, you know, there's no way our board of directors is hiring Wongdoody. Can we just call you WD? And we're like, sure. Whatever it takes for you to get Ben Wiener from Wongdoody employed. Jason: [00:02:09] That's just so great. Um, well tell us, uh, when you were employee number four, like how did you start? And kind of walk us through your progression through the agency. And then we can jump into kind of the different milestones that you've seen over the years. Ben: [00:02:25] Uh, in college, I was a big fan of the show Melrose Place. Which dates me and dates anyone who gets that reference. Jason: [00:02:31] Oh, I loved that. Yeah. I think we’re the same age. Ben: [00:02:33] I graduated from… I graduated from college with a useless Liberal Arts degree and a short attention span. Um, advertising seemed like a really fun, interesting thing to do. And yeah, through a friend of a friend of a woman who was in book club with my girlfriend's mother, which is how all good things happen. Uh, I happened to get introduced to this guy, Pat Doody, who had just started this agency. We had lunch, we hit it off and he offered me this amazing opportunity to come work for him for free. So I, I took him up on that. Um, and, uh, you know, 15 years later or so I became CEO of Wongdoody and then three years ago we sold the company. But it was a pretty interesting evolution from, uh, Pat, Tracy, and two other people and me in one room to over a thousand people. Um, and I guess the biggest evolution is going from doing kind of every job in the agency, which you do as an intern, to having no clue what half of the things we, we do today are. Um, yeah, which I guess is management. So it's really, how do you go from a business where your fingerprints are literally on everything to thinking more about structure, thinking more about strategy, to thinking about how you deploy resources. As opposed to how you just get everything done yourself. And that's probably the biggest evolution and continuing evolution of a company is it's a gradual process of figuring out what you can let go of. And more importantly, how you can find the people to let go to, because at a certain point you definitely come up against the limits of your own knowledge, intellect, and ability. Jason: [00:04:16] Yeah, let's talk about kind of the milestones, right? I find a lot of agencies can hit the million mark, but they really can't maintain that. Or they can't figure it out how can we get to the multiple million mark? And that's kind of the first milestone I look at. Um, what, what do you think, what, what's the shift in your mind? Because I really kind of think it's a mind shift, more than anything else to getting to the two, three, $4 million range. Ben: [00:04:52] It comes down to I think two things. One is pipeline and the other is people. And both of them require a leap of faith to get to where you want to be. When you're an entrepreneur and you are hustling and you were trying to make payroll and pay the rent every month, revenue is revenue and it's really hard… All revenue is good revenue. And at a certain point, what you want is more clients that are bigger than your biggest client. Not more clients that the size of your smallest client. What you start to recognize is that the small clients take as much time as the big clients. Um, and what's holding you back from focusing on big clients and bigger clients is confidence or a lack thereof. And so as entrepreneurs, when you were living with that nightmare of today's the day when my phone rings, all of our clients, fire us, and that never rings again, it's very, very hard to say, you know what? We're not going to talk to local businesses anymore, or we're not going to talk to regional businesses anymore. Or we're just going to say a hard no to any client below a certain revenue threshold. No matter how nice they are as people, or they don't have any money this year, but man, next year, next year, they're going to budget. There are all these stories we tell ourselves as agency people to rationalize, doing things that we know deep down, we shouldn't be doing. If we want to grow our business. Jason: [00:06:26] Or they say, give me a discount and I'll refer you to all my other businesses. Ben: [00:06:32] Who'll also expect a discount. Also don't have enough money to change your business. That’s what you get. Absolutely. Absolutely. So these are, so, I mean, that's the pipeline piece. It's really, how do you have a clean vision for what you want your client roster to look like. And how are you actively making decisions that shape that roster and how are you making the painful decisions to not pursue things that don't fit that? Uh, so that, and the other thing that you have to recognize is that, you know, clients have aspirations as well. They look at the other clients on your roster and they say, do I want to be in that club or do I not want to be in that club? And so, you need aspirational clients to find aspirational clients. And by the same token, you know, of all if your clients are discount seeking small scrappy companies… They may be a blast to work for, but they're never going to provide you with the stability and the growth that you need to get to the second point, which is people. And at some point you got to make that transition from doing things yourself, to sort of doing things by delegating, to doing things by bringing in a next tier of leadership. And that's very, very different. Because I think the first step is you hire people who can do your work for you, or can do the things that you do, but more of it. And at a certain point, you've got to hire people who know things that you don't, who do things that you can't and need to be empowered to take some responsibility for the business. So it can't all sit on your shoulders for better or worse. Those people are excited. Those people are taking a leap of faith by joining you and those people are going to make you uncomfortable. But you're never ever going to scale your business until you can start to not just delegate, but assigned true leadership responsibilities that people who can build your organization. Jason: [00:08:28] So I think a lot of people struggle with, I can hire for someone to do my job because I can evaluate them if they can do it. So when you get to that point and you're building your leadership team and you're hiring people that know how to do things you don't, and you're kind of clueless on those. How do you evaluate and how do you make sure they're not blowing smoke up your ass? Uh, right? Like, I mean, I hear that all the time. Ben: [00:09:02] Um, it is hard. And, you know, as far as things that create discomfort. Absolutely. Because we've all been sold a bill of goods by people who claim expertise in the emerging realm that you have to be in. You know. We need a, who's going to own our influencer marketing strategy? I don't know that person's seemed to know what YouTube is, perhaps they can. Um, hiring is the hardest thing that we do. It's the most important thing that we do. There is, um, you know, to me, there's always a value in pedigree, you know, there's that saying no one ever got fired for hiring IBM. So generally if people have come from bigger, better places and have been there for a while, um, at the very least they'd been well-trained. So, you know, where are you sourcing your talent from? And, you know, we generally look to the places that we want to be, you know, for our talent. Places, you know, companies that are five years ahead of us on the journey that are a few hundred million dollars ahead of us on the growth curve. And so that gives you some element of credibility. Um, some of it's got… Look, I mean, we all get conned from time to time. But the longer you've done this, the longer you can separate the, okay, you just threw every single jargon word at me, but what have you actually done? And go, where is the work product and where are the references? And the other thing is, yeah, who have, who have people worked with that you can get to that you know and trust. Or that know and trust someone that, you know, that can give you a real reference. As opposed to the, uh, I fired this person and feeling guilty about it, reference that you'd get some times. You hear great things about a person that you're not sure about. Jason: [00:10:59] Oh yeah. Well, I, you mentioned one thing, your gut. Usually your gut’s never wrong. Um, you know, because you, you feel it, whether you take on the wrong client and you're like, like my gut just told me to run, but I needed that money. Or, you know, you hired that amazing… I remember doing this. I, I got so close to hiring this amazing 3D artist. I mean like the most amazing 3D world I've ever seen, he built, but he was the biggest jackass. And my gut was like, do not hire that guy. And, and the rest of my team was like, man, there, he's amazing. Well, we'll put up with any shit. I'm like, no, we're not going to do it. Ben: [00:11:43] Yeah. So we spend a lot of time rationalizing decisions that go against our gut, whether it's clients or people. Um, part of that's also a mindset shift, you know, as I think we're all naturally optimistic. As entrepreneurs, you need to be, because the only way you can dust yourself off whenever you have a setback. So what I've found is people… You know, the assumption is every candidate's amazing and every client is perfect. Versus, yeah, why should we take this client? Why should we really be hiring this person? So if your default is always, they're great until proven otherwise, um, you know, your, your mind overrides your gut more often than it should. Jason: [00:12:28] Yeah. So let's talk about building leaders, right? Like we talked about, we got to build the right pipeline, so then we can pick and choose, right? And, and I think. You know, you've got to get to a point where, like, I think when we first start, we're building our business on referrals, really. And then, then it, you're building it on marketing. And then you have to build it on a machine that's producing two sales, and then you talked about your, the people. So how can we build better leaders? Because what I find is a lot of agencies I chat with, and I remember going through this in our phase as well. We can get to a certain point and then everything kept flowing through me like a tollbooth. And I'm like, no, no. Like we have to build a leadership, the right leaders in order to take over the stuff. And like my, my goal, and, I’d like… Answer this and then I got a question for you to follow up, to be like, what do you do every day, now that you have a thousand people and a big leadership team? I want people to know like, what, what that looks like too. Ben: [00:13:33] So, um… In the first phase of the agency, everything I did really boiled down to sales. It doesn't really matter what you're doing on any given day, your focus is driving revenue in the door. I never had sales in my title. I never had business development or new business in my title. But everything I was doing was in service of how do we get more clients and more revenue flowing in this place? Um, at a certain point that shifts and now I'd say everything I do is HR, which is not in my title. Another thing I've never really formally had a job in, and I've never been trained in. But I spend my day trying to get things out of the way of the leaders that we have hired to drive the business to the next level. So they can do… I want them to be able to do their jobs. So there are spear that I need to catch. There are obstacles that need to be eliminated. There are sources of confusion that require clarity, and it's really about clearing the path. So there's no glory in it. And some days you feel like you're doing absolutely nothing. Yet what you're doing is the most critical thing. Because it allows the people that you care about and the people that you empowered to drive your business, to do what they need to do to be successful for themselves and for you. And so all the most unpleasant tasks, uh, are the ones that fall to you and all the really good, fun business building stuff that you used to do falls to them. And that’s a difficult but necessary adjustment. Jason: [00:15:19] Yeah. Taking care of your employees has never been more important than right now. And while paydays are great, running payroll is a major pain, calculating taxes, deductions. compliance. None of it's easy, unless of course you have Gusto. Gusto is a simple online payroll and benefits built for your small business. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Plus with Gustos help, you can offer benefits like 401k's health insurance, workers' comp, and a lot more. And because you're a smart agency masterclass listener, you're going to get three months free once you run your first payroll. Go to gusto.com/agency that's gusto.com/agency for three free months. So when I was, um, when we started really getting traction in the first agency, I started realizing there was kind of like four or five roles, right. One, setting the vision and communicating it to the team. Uh, coaching the leadership team. Understanding the financials, I hated spreadsheets, but I needed to understand like here are the KPIs that we're going after. You know, support sales. Um, and then, you know, be the face of the organization. Do you find that now, like have those roles changed? Because I bet you probably had those roles or do you still have some of those roles? I know, you know, like me, I'm always trying to like, like you, I'm trying to take away stuff so my guys can have a clear path. But do you find that those roles still fit what you do? Or does that change at a certain level? Ben: [00:17:26] You've summed it up pretty nicely. Um, what I've found is that the balance changes over the course of decades, but also on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, the financial piece is interesting because somewhere between you, you do sales and you do an HR. The other thing that I've discovered is half it's also accounting. Um, and it's not just, you know, because how do you recognize revenue? When do you want to recognize revenue? Where are you actually profitable versus where you… where you're earning revenue and where you're actually profitable are very, very different things. There's a whole understanding of the business that you need to have that goes beyond… Early days, is there money coming in to cover expenses? We got payroll and rent done, uh, is there enough left over that? I can take some money out of the business? Is there enough leftover that we can think about, you know, investing in more senior leadership who could theoretically help us grow the business? Now that's the basics. And then at a certain point you realize, okay, I'm not sweating the basics anymore. Now, what do I need to know about my business? Because I want to grow the profitable parts, not the unprofitable parts. I want to fix the unprofitable parts so I can grow them. And so it's not just about what's coming in and what's going out. It's where we really truly making the money? Where, where are the leaks in our business? And that's the other thing that people don't really understand, which is what's all the stuff that they're doing that's um, producing activity, but not results? So you got three or four lines of business. One of them is probably a great. One of them is probably a loser. The other two were in the middle. You know, if you can figure that fast and stop doing the stuff that's losing you money… flows right to the bottom line, finds your growth. But you need to have a level of insight into your numbers before you can start to look at it that way. Jason: [00:19:23] Yeah. So, I mean, basically you're just still a problem solver for your team. Uh, and, and just saying here's, here's the direction that we want to go. You guys figure out the, how. I'll support you however. You just tell me what you need, is that right? Ben: [00:19:41] Yeah. It's a lot of what, you know, figuring out what's missing. And also, um, just because you want to take the business in a certain direction, doesn't mean everybody wants to go with you. And so then you get faced with a far more difficult set of choices, you know. Um, how do you persuade the people that you need to come with you, that this is the right journey? I know that what we're doing and where we're going seems weird or sounds scary, or isn't what you signed up for, or it's not at all what you saw on Melrose Place. And that's okay. Um, because here's where we're going and why. And I have… come on board. Uh, it's finding people who, you know, can come in and understand that vision and help make it understood inside the organization. Uh, change is scary and difficult, and we've got people at Wongdoody have been there since 1994, 1995. Um, and so part of the balancing act is we have changed radically in that time. We've, we've reinvented ourselves multiple times and that's great. And then there are some fundamental things about the business that cannot, should not, and will never change. And those need to be protected. And that's, uh, figuring out what, figuring out what the real core of your businesses versus what's just sort of comfortable or habitual. That's another challenging thing because you want to, you want to know what's up for grabs and there should be more things that are up for grabs and you're probably comfortable with, but you can't sell your soul for anything. Jason: [00:21:19] Yeah, well, yeah, you have to, you have your beliefs and the beliefs of the company and, uh, that, that always stays true, I find. Even though your services, your solutions, who you target may change. Um, but, uh, talk a little bit about… Because you guys have been around, I mean, I started solar went out in 99, so you guys are, you know, a couple of years ahead of us. And we went through a lot of different changes. I mean, I remember going through the yellow pages going, you want a website? And they're like, what's the website? And I was like, I'll put it on Netscape composer. Um, so talk about how do you know when the company outgrows an employee that's been there for so long with you? And how do you… How do you get past that? Because I think people hold on to people too long as the agency outgrows that individual. Or how do you bring those individuals along? Um, you know, make them better. Ben: [00:22:28] Oh, I mean, these are hard, hard things, particularly when, you know… My goal has always been to have the agency changing faster than our clients so that, you know, changes never being dictated to us and that we're ahead of the market. And by that same token, I need people who can change as fast as the agency. And so when you realize that people have a fixed mindset or they are nostalgic for what the agency was. Um, or they can't contribute to the growth. It's a very, very difficult decision to help them find a place where they're going to be better off and happier, but ultimately they're going to be better off and happier. We've had people who came to us and said, we want no part of this digital thing. And we're like, that's great. Uh, I don't agree with you, but I value everything that you have brought to this company for the last X years. How do we find you a better place to be together? What's our plan? We have an obligation to the careers and the growth and the progression of the people that choose to work with us, whether or not that work happens in our company. And so our responsibility to mentor and find opportunities doesn't stop when people start getting a paycheck from us. So I think if you take that attitude of you want the right people in the right place, whether or not that's inside your organization. Then it becomes a different conversation than sorry, Suzy, you know, we're moving on and you're not. Jason: [00:24:11] Yeah, I liked, I liked that approach and I think that's the right approach. Um, because look, I always joke around. I've been fired from every single job. Uh, I've ever had other than two and my best friend owned the company, own the businesses. That was when I was little. But, um, but yeah, like at the end of the day, I, and I figured it out. I just never liked quitting. But when someone would come along and say, no, you need to go do this, I was like, oh man, thanks. That's very freeing. And the lesson I learned there, I was like, you know, when you have the people that are not the right fit, find them the right fit. And there'll be so much happier rather than thinking that their life is over. Um, and it's, it's a good mentality because like agency changes so many times it's gonna outgrow a lot of people, including owners. Um, it, I see that a lot at times happen and the owners have to stop out. So it’s great. Um, last question, uh, before we wrap up, talk about what is it like, to like, how did you get from the eight figure mark to where you're at now? Like what… If you had to pick two things outside of people and the right clients, because we've already covered those. Is there anything else? Um, or is it just boom, boom, boom. Ben: [00:25:35] You have to recalibrate your ambition. Jason: [00:25:40] How so? Ben: [00:25:44] When you get to seven figures, you think, oh my God, you know, here I am at seven figures. And many people think I never thought I was going to get here. Wow. Isn't great? Versus, okay, how do I use eight figures as a platform to get to 10 figures? And what are the next set of changes that we are going to make? It's like a, you don't want to be George Bush on the battleship. You know, there's no, the mission never accomplished, which is not to say you can never step back and enjoy where you've gotten. But you need to be looking at all of it on a path to where you want to be. And not everybody has eight-figure nine-figure ambitions. We had a… Wongdoody was a great lifestyle business until we realized it was unsustainable and that we were not going to keep our good people challenged. We were not going to be able to attract and retain the best talent as a lifestyle business because ambitious people want growth. So massive amounts of growth… It's a choice. And you need to be ready for that choice and recognize that it's not the only valid choice. But if you want to get there, it's also believing that it's possible. You know, we would often look at bigger, better agencies and say, how can we be like them? And you go to, oh, we can't be like them. And they've got this and that and this and that and whatever. And you make this list of why it can't be you. That's another example of our ability to rationalize ourselves into bad decisions or no decisions, uh, or selling. So I don't want to be like an inspirational poster and be like it's 99% attitude is not, um, it's attitude is luck. It's hard work. It's being smart. All of those things in equal combination and don't discount luck. Um, you know, and you have to make sure that you want to get there because the other thing is a lot of what you love about running a $5 million business. Is not there when you're running a $50 million business, there are different things to love, but it's not the same job with more zeros at all. Jason: [00:28:02] I like that you said be careful what you wish for. Because you know, uh, and we're even going through that right now, for us, personally, in this consulting and education business of like, man, life is good. We're serving all these amazing people. And we're like, do we want to blow it up and, and take it to, you know, a gazillion dollars and, uh, you know, it's, it's a challenge. Um, and I think it just takes some time to think about, and I think you can kind of constantly change your mind. But I, I do believe what you said is like don't um, don't show shortcut yourself of what's possible. Just really kind of dream it and then just start figuring out who do you need to hire? What do we actually need to do in order to get there? And, uh, you know, once you get there, then, then you live in the bed that you made. Ben: [00:29:00] Well, I think the other thing is, you know, generally starting a company is a culmination of your career. I worked for a bunch of other people. I worked for a bunch of other people. I learned this, I learned that I saw all this stuff I could do better. I saw the opportunity my last boss was missing. I started the company and now I'm done. And I think that's also a dangerous attitude or thought. Because you don't stop growing and evolving, like you have the same obligation to yourself as you do to your employees, which is how do we keep getting better? How to keep getting smarter? How do I keep learning new things? And how do I keep challenging myself? And so whether, you know, you don't want to go blow up a business for the sake of blowing it up. But once again, if you're not continuously trying to reinvent yourself, you're going to get reinvented by the market, by your clients, by forces, beyond your control. And that's nowhere you ever want to be. Jason: [00:29:46] Yeah, I love it. Well, this has all been amazing, Ben. Is, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience listening in? Ben: [00:29:57] that is not the conversation I was expecting. This is like, this was a people conversation and a leadership conversation. Much less a, you know, what is the future of UX and touchless retail experiences and, you know, what are you seeing about global trends? Which is great, um, because. Yeah, for better. The people are kind of why I show up every single day that the work is incidental. Pat and Tracy and I always said that we, whether we're running an agency or running a carwash, we would do it the same way. So thank you for letting me think about and focus on what really matters. Jason: [00:30:28] Yeah, definitely. Well, thanks so much for coming in. Uh, what's the website people can go and check you guys out? Ben: [00:30:35] Uh, www.wongdoody.com. Uh, and we have a zillion open roles. So any disgruntled employees from other agencies that are watching this, please go see if there's a fit for you here. Jason: [00:30:48] Awesome. And you date yourself by going www. No one does that anymore. Ben: [00:30:53] HTTP. Jason: [00:30:56] Uh, I love it. I love making fun of my friends that do that. Cause I used to do that until someone razzed me. I was like, oh my gosh, www. Ben: [00:31:05] I am, I will own that. Jason: [00:31:10] Well, awesome. Ben: [00:31:10] I got that going for me. Jason: [00:31:14] Well, awesome. Thanks so much for coming on the show. And if you guys enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe. Make sure you comment. And if you want to be around amazing agency owners who are constantly pushing you to be better and sharing what's working for you and are sharing what's working for them. So you can actually build on that foundation and grow and scale your agency faster and be around amazing people. I want to invite all of you to go check out digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind that only a select few get in. So go there now. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Why_an_80_Million_Agency_Owner_Had_to_Recalibrate_Ambition_to_Grow.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 29 September 2021
Are you willing to start saying no to wrong customers to see real change for your agency? Kerrie Luginbill is a partner and Chief Strategy Officer at Old Town Media, a Colorado-based agency that since its beginnings offered a unique and agile approach to web design, development, and marketing by providing customers a business-driven approach. Now they partner with companies to create and implement marketing strategies that connect with their audience and inspire action. Kerrie discusses how she increased revenue by 4X in under one year. And now, after 15 years in the business, her agency crafted a "no-fly" list for customers, identified their target client, and the growth that resulted from this move. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesNinja Cat: Today's episode is sponsored by Ninja Cat, a digital marketing performance management platform where you can unify your data, create beautiful, insightful reports and presentations that will help you grow your business. Head over to ninjacat.io/masterclass to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Saying No to the Wrong Customers and Shifting to Value-Based PricingJason: [00:00:00] Welcome, agency owners. I'm Jason Swenk and here's another episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass. And on today's episode, I have an amazing guest who went from $500,000 in revenue to over $2 million in just under a year. And we're going to talk about the one thing that she actually did at her agency in order to accomplish this. Now, before we jump into the episode. I want you to do me a favor. I want you to take a screenshot of the podcast. And then I want you to upload it to social media and tag us so I can give you a shout-out for listening to the show. Let's go ahead and bring Kerrie on. Hey, Kerrie. Welcome to the show. Kerrie: [00:00:43] Hello. How's it going? Jason: [00:00:45] Awesome. I'm excited to have you on, so tell us who you are and what do you do? Kerrie: [00:00:50] Yeah, my name is Kerrie Luginbill and I am a partner and the Chief Strategy Officer at a creative agency in Fort Collins, Colorado. So just about 45 minutes North of Denver. Jason: [00:01:03] Awesome. I'll uh, we, we just moved to Colorado in Durango, so I'm starting to just try to figure out where everything uh is, but, uh, uh, I'm… Let's go ahead and jump into it and talk about what's the one thing, you know, that took you from 500,000 to over 2 million in less than a year? Because there's a lot of people that spend years, sometimes decades. Um, and they hit that plateau and they can't figure out what do they actually need. Kerrie: [00:01:34] Yeah, and full disclosure. It was more than one year. It was a couple of years, but there was a really distinct difference that we, we took a different direction that we took with the agency that really catalyzed a lot of that growth. And it was really identifying the right target customer for us and saying no to the customers that were not in that target. It's really hard as an entrepreneur to say no to business and to work. But what we found over the last couple of years is that when you say yes to the wrong kind of client, you are really creating, you're reducing the amount of space that you have for the right client. And that was really inhibiting us. And so we had to kind of fight ourselves. Our, the ownership, there are three of us that are partners and, you know, so we'd have to question each other and serve as checks and balances for each other so that we could stop taking in what was not helping us grow. Jason: [00:02:34] What were some things that you did in order to kind of really narrow it down? Because I always look at, you know, when you start an agency, you're just reactionary. Like you got a pulse, you got some money, like I'll take you on. And then you, you know, there's a, there's a switch like you guys went through, like, how did you start evaluating going this is the people I need to say no to? Kerrie: [00:02:58] Yeah, absolutely. It's funny you say that. I remember the first couple of years, uh, trying to launch the agency and literally taking anything. Um, and I think you're, we're all there at a certain point. And I think there's a level of professional maturity that comes with being an entrepreneur for a specific amount of time and starting to get things under your belt, bigger clients that give you a little bit more confidence to say no to some of those smaller clients. But what we did was we actually started creating a, like a no fly list and we would write down the similarities that would cause, you know, clients to maybe not be that ideal target customer. And started to find a lot of correlations between them and then started to build out the correlations between the clients that were really strong for our company and really fit with us well, and then between those two, we started to create essentially a target persona for our client list. And the biggest thing that we focus on is our client's customer value. So when you hire an agency, you as a, as any kind of business product or service, you must have the amount of margin that allows you to work comfortably with an agency. So, you know, businesses with really tight margins, uh, independent restaurants, salons, things like that are actually really challenging for us to work with. Because they don't have the margin in the day to day to be able to have a large enough engagement with to create a lot of value for them. So we started to tease that out and it really comes down to our ideal client is a client that has a lifetime value customer that can afford them the margin to have an engagement with us that's large enough for us to drive value. Jason: [00:04:51] Yeah. I love that. What are, what are some of the criteria? So obviously that's probably one of the criteria is of the no fly list. And I like that. I've never heard of that. I, I always treat it as kind of like a Vegas buffet. Like you try everything out and then the stuff that you were like, ooh, I don't like that. Like, you're not going to go back to that section anymore. But, and then by the time you come back to the, well, I guess a smaller buffet, the time you come back, the second time, you probably be like, ooh, I like this stuff. So what was some of the criteria on your no fly list at first? Kerrie: [00:05:25] Yeah. So I think at first it started, it wasn't very sophisticated. It was, you know, the little things that we were identifying. Um, typically one of my big red flags is if a client comes to us and they, they want help, you know, defining their brand messaging, creating, you know, creating a place for them in the market and they reference other company's visions to explain their own vision. That's usually a pretty big red flag because I start to, you know, it's almost like, well, is it your idea? Or did you see somebody else had a great idea? And now you're trying to replicate that. And so we really look for that strong vision from the client, whether we're working with the business owner, operations director or marketing director, it's really important that they have a vision for where they want to go so that we can work together to tease that out and really hone it in. But if they're referencing someone else's vision that has been successful, that's usually one of those red flags. Jason: [00:06:27] Oh yeah. Like I, I remember getting all the time, hey, I want to build… I get this great idea that no one's ever thought of, it's Facebook, YouTube, and Google put together. But I have a budget of like a thousand dollars. And I'm like, holy cow. Like, get me off the phone. Kerrie: [00:06:45] Yeah. You know, um, we, we were known for building websites in the, in the beginning. Because Old Town Media started creating websites before WordPress was, you know, really taking over the market. It was a much higher barrier to entry. And so everybody had to go hire a professional for their website. It wasn't something you could kind of go figure out yourself very easily. And so that created a reputation for us where we were known as a web shop for a lot of years. And people would come to us wanting a website for an idea before they had a business plan for that idea. That was another one of the big red flags on that list is if you don't know how you're going to operate business and you want a website because you think that that's going to solve all of your problems, that's typically not the answer. Jason: [00:07:42] Do you feel like you have to comb through mountains of data, jumping between multiple platforms to spreadsheets, to slide decks and backing in, in order to create performance reports for your clients? It's a constant drain on your agency's time and resources. And that's where our friends at Ninja Cat can help. Ninja Cat is a digital marketing performance management platform that really unifies your marketing data and empowers your agency to automate insightful, beautiful client reports at scale. Now, Ninja Cat keeps your marketing performance and presentation tools in one place, freeing you up from manual data wrangling. And it really gives your team more time to focus on strategy and growing your business. And for a limited time, my smart agency podcast listeners will receive $500 ninja credit when you go to ninjacat.io/masterclass to claim your offer and schedule a demo. That's ninjacat.io/masterclass. Yeah. Yeah, I know I, I love that you make sure that… I love the criteria because I think a lot of agencies we take on certain industries that have a low margin. And then they're like, hey, I'm at my cap. Like they can't spend anymore. I'm like, well, are they really? Like, how can you actually add value? And they're like, and they keep their pricing the same. Like, there's so many mastermind members that we, we, uh, they come in in the very beginning and they're like, oh, I'm at my cap. And then by the time we're like, no, no, no, this is who you actually need to go after… And as we're raising our prices and, and you tell me when you actually did this, when you actually started kind of implementing the no fly list and then your target persona that you're going after. I presume that you were able to probably charge more, which meant probably that you could hire the right people, which meant you had more freedom. Am I on the right path? Kerrie: [00:09:48] Yep. Absolutely. You know, and people still get through the no fly list every once in a while. And we actually we've broken out, you know, our ideal target to incorporate a percentage of clients that we’ll take on that don't have the margin that we work with a little bit differently, but they have to be passion projects for us. It has to be something that we're really passionate about as a team. Um, but you are exactly right. Once you start saying no to those low-margin clients and, you know, you'll start to identify that the people that you have a really strong engagement with and a really strong relationship with, they're usually easier to work with too. And so you start to, you know, reduce some of the stress on your team, which increases, you know, how long your team members stay with you. You're reducing turnover. You're reducing that chaos in the company. And you can start shifting to value-based pricing. That's kind of the buzzword, I think, in the agency world is everybody's like, you know, time and materials versus value-based pricing. And it's really hard to get to value-based pricing when you're working with such a small margin. You're really, you know, serving as more than just a like brand or creative partner, but also a sales partner and like an advocate for smaller businesses. And I think it's just a very different relationship. Jason: [00:11:11] Yeah. How, uh, what are some things that you guys do in order to demonstrate, you know, the value in your pricing? So you can charge on value-based pricing rather than time and material. Kerrie: [00:11:24] Yeah. So it really comes down to making sure that you have really, really clear objectives and key metrics for your clients. And so it's actually kind of interesting. We use KRAs for our employees. So key result areas where you basically, you define an objective, you have actions that then will help you achieve the metrics that achieve your outcome. So, you know, you start with an outcome actions metrics. We've taken that KRA approach to actually how we look at our client engagements and we define them the same way. We say, okay, we're working with a client. We're doing content creation for them. What's the outcome we're trying to achieve? What are the actions we're taking? And what are the metrics we're looking at? When you can tie it into the data for them, and you can say, hey, when we pull this lever, you have more sales. And you can start to look at what outcomes you're achieving based on the actual actions that you're taking. That time of material dollar amount is not as relevant because there's such a strong value to actually achieving those outcomes. Jason: [00:12:36] I see a lot of agencies, they really don't focus on the results or they don't focus on kind of the leading indicators that will actually get the results. And, and like, and it amazes me because a lot of times when I'm chatting with an agency owner that wants to scale faster, um, it really kind of, and like I was chatting with an owner not too long ago, they had resentment for their clients. I was like, well, let's get to the real problem. And I told him, I said, the real problem is you're resenting your clients because you're too dependent on the clients. He's like, well, what do you mean? I was like, well, you're dependent on the wrong types of clients that aren't paying you the right amount. And I asked what's the value that you deliver to them? He didn’t know. And I was like, well, how could you ever charge value-based pricing if you don't know the value? Like how are, how are they? So, um, I'm glad there's, there's agencies that are focused on the results. Cause I, I see when, when our mastermind members and the people that go through our frameworks, when they start kind of understanding the results that they deliver. And that's the key part is you gotta be able to deliver the results to your clients. There's so many people that go well, I took a course on how to start an agency from Joe, Joe. And I'm like, well, they taught you Facebook ads, but did they teach you like how to deliver the results and all that? Like, and they're just learning on other people's dime, which always frustrates the heck out of me. Kerrie: [00:14:05] Yeah. You know, and I think in those earlier days where you're working with smaller clients that maybe it's a solo preneur or some, you know, small margin kind of business, a lot of times they don't have their own data figured out. And so it becomes even more challenging for that agency to tie their outcomes to their results, because they're not getting the same kind of data back from the client. And that is… That's something that we've started working on. How can we actually help our clients get to more sophisticated reporting internally so that we can tie our, our actions to their results and start to get a little bit farther into that? But it's a lot of client education too, you know, a lot of times, um, it's explaining the difference between lead and lag indicators and trying to help them see that, you know, by the time you're looking at this number, it's already too late. And we should really be looking at these lead indicators and some of these numbers over here, because they're ultimately going to influence these lag numbers. So I think it's, it's really just marketing, especially in today's age, is getting a lot more sophisticated when it comes to data and being able to correlate activities to actual outcomes. And it's something that I think agencies are, are really, they need to be more responsible in getting there and focusing on that. Jason: [00:15:31] Totally agree. Well, this has been amazing. Is there anything Kerrie that I did not ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Kerrie: [00:15:40] You know, I think the biggest thing I wish that somebody would have told me like three or four years ago is it's okay to say no. It is okay to say no. If it doesn't feel right, or if you know, a client is not respecting your team or your time, it's okay to say no. Because when you open up that space, you are creating space for something better and a better fit and a better relationship. And that's what will grow, grow your agency. Jason: [00:16:08] Yeah. And, and those troublesome clients that you should say no to, like, if they're treating, mishandling your team, you're not making money on that end. Like, and I don't even care if you're making money on that. It's going to cost your team and your employees, which then just makes you have to do everything all over again, which is a complete nightmare. Um, and you go back and then you're just… Then you get to a point where you're selling for penny on the dollar to someone that's going to take advantage of your client portfolio. And I don't want that to happen. So awesome. Um, what's the agency website people can go and check you out? Kerrie: [00:16:45] Yeah, oldtownmedia.com. We're on Facebook and Instagram, but we probably put the most of our, uh, fun stuff on Instagram, so… Jason: [00:16:56] Awesome. Well, everyone go check out their website and Kerrie, thanks so much for coming on the show. If you guys enjoyed this episode and you want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners that are on a fast growth pace and really scaling their agency fast and they want to be surrounded by other amazing people. Um, so you can scale your agency faster, go to digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive community our mastermind, uh, members where we just have so much fun together going through, you know, the frameworks that are working for other agencies. So go to digitalagencyelite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_One_Agency_Increased_Revenue_By_4X_in_Under_One_Year.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 26 September 2021
Do you want to create a machine that ensures agency growth? David Butler was working as a special ed teacher when he decided to try his luck in the real estate business. He later created an agency looking to reinvent himself during the 2009 financial crisis. With Jason's help, he was able to grow and ultimately sell his business. David now enjoys a new lifestyle and focuses on his family. He joined Jason on the podcast to talk about how he implemented the "Netflix model" to prevent client cancellations, how he streamlined the company's hiring process to put the right people on the right roles, and how making a white label agreement with a larger company was the key to really grow his agency. 3 Golden Nuggets
Gusto: Today's episode is sponsored by Gusto, an all-in-one people platform for payroll, benefits, HR where you can unify your data. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Head over to gusto.com/agency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM White Label Your Sales Team to Create a Machine and Streamline Your Hiring ProcessJason: [00:00:00] What's up, everybody? Jason Swenk here. And I got one of my friends that ran an amazing agency for a number of different years. Now he went from being a special ed teacher to owning apartments, to owning an agency, to selling it. And now he's financially free and just travels and does what he does and has a ball doing it. And today we're going to talk about his journey. So possibly you can learn a couple of little nuggets from him and do the same thing. So let's go ahead and get into the show. Hey, David. Welcome to the show. David: [00:00:38] Hey, Jason. Good to see you. Jason: [00:00:39] Yeah, man. I'm excited to have you on and uh, and tell your story. So, you have a pretty fascinating story that always amazed me and everyone else that heard it. So, and I'm not going to give you justice on telling it. So tell us kind of who you are and tell us a little bit about that trajectory from special ed teacher, apartment, to owning an agency and then selling it. David: [00:01:02] Gosh, I’ll try to keep it into a nutshell. I was a high school special ed teacher for about 10 years and coaching high school sports and then a good friend of mine gave me the, um, the really famous old infomercial Carleton Sheets… Uh, how to buy real estate with no money down. And, uh, I listened to it on cassette tape in my car as I drove to work and I use the basis of that to buy my first house in England of all places. And it was a real, uh, let's just say fixer-upper. And, uh, so we fixed that up and we sold it, I was teaching special ed there. Came back to the US and bought my second house and bought another three houses with that and a fourplex. And I was still teaching high school. Then my buddy said, hey, think you got some skills here. Let me introduce you to some people. So I got a couple of angel investors together and, uh, we start buying apartments in 2004 or five. Bought apartments for about three years, all in Arizona. Bought a few thousand apartments. And that's where I, through the process of buying and owning and asset managing the apartments I kind of... Well, and then the 2008, uh, downfall, right? 2009. You know, we were doing amazing until then and then, uh, everything crashed. I distinctly remember 2009 with my friend who got me into everything. He was like, man, I'm really sorry I got you into all this. As we were talking about our loan workouts and stuff. And I said, yeah, I said, I got to make some other lemonade, man, because this lemonade isn't working for me. That's when I looked around and I just really kind of discovered… Websites were kind of new for apartment buildings back then. Not everyone had them. And so I started getting into the technology world of apartments and that industry of managing and operating and operational of apartments. And I was like, I kept on asking our, um, my own property managers and stuff to manage our social media. And, uh, they would just never do it, right? Like they couldn't do it. They’re too busy to do it. I was like, I got to hire someone to do this for me, right? And so I looked around. I looked at other agencies and you know, they were going to charge me like a couple thousand dollars a month or something to manage the social media for my parcel. That's like nuts, right? Like I can do this for better and cheaper. So that's how I started my first marketing agency, right? Like, I didn't know anything about owning an agency or anything. I just started to do it myself. Jason: [00:03:49] Yeah. And talk about how it progressed. And I loved what you used to charge. And I used to kind of get onto you. But obviously, I mean, I literally would try to make an example out of you of how little you actually charged, and then you were a volumes game. So talk a little bit about that. David: [00:04:07] Yeah. So I had one employee and we were running the social media, you know, Facebook mainly for my six apartment communities. And the property management company that had about a hundred apartment communities under their management said, hey, can you start doing this for our other clients? And so that's how it kind of started to organically grow. Was, you know, then we went from like, you know, 10 clients to 20 to 30, 40, and I just said, you know what? I'm just going to make it so cheap that people will sign up and they'll just never cancel. That really was the play. It was just straight-up Netflix type of play, right? It's just like, so we charge $99 a month, right? It was just classic. Under the hundred. So that anytime anyone would think about canceling they'd be like, wait, the property manager would be like, wait a minute… That means I gotta do it, then? Like for 99 bucks, they probably paid out of their own paycheck for us to do it for them, right? Just so they wouldn't get in trouble with the owners and their bosses for not keeping it up to date, right? So that was the play. I mean, it was just a straight-up $99 play. Yeah. Jason: [00:05:23] Yeah. And I remember just being like David, if you could just raise the prices and then obviously, you know, you're like, dude, we're a factory, we're a machine. We just have all this. And, and now knowing you like, it would be stupid for someone to cancel, which is such the opposite. That's why I wanted to have you on like talk to you about like... What was that mentality around it? Because there's a lot of people listening that may be in the same boat of going I want it to be like, I'd never want to lose a client because it'd be stupid. But I also want it to be like, I want to create a factory like this machine. So how did you make sure that it was profitable? And how did you create this machine? Because you had a lot of people too. David: [00:06:06] Boy, that's a good question. I mean, again is kind of based on the Netflix kind of play, right? I knew that property managers in that were just so overwhelmed that they probably wouldn't utilize us as much as they thought they would, but they still needed us. And so I knew some people would, it's just like Netflix. There's probably some people that binge Netflix, you know, a hundred hours a month. And there's probably people that don't watch one hour a month, right? But the people that don't watch one hour a month don't ever cancel because they just want it there. So when they do want to watch it, right? So it was like that. I mean, I never went to business school and never got an MBA, you know, any of that stuff. So, I mean, it was really kind of back of the napkin, just like, hey, how many hours, how many clients do you think someone can manage? Like, it was really, you know, it was not fancy and the, hey, is this profitable or not? It was just like, yeah, I think I can make it work. Jason: [00:07:09] What were some of the things that helped you build the agency and get it to a level where… in a little bit, we'll talk about, you know, the process of selling it and what's life like now. But what were some of the things that helped you along the way? Like from the different people that you've hired on the management team that kind of stuff. David: [00:07:28] Yeah. So I would say there's a few, really big things. One was, uh, I've been a member of Entrumpeneurs organization for since, uh, 2007 and being a part of that organization has been life changing, right? Being around the other entrepreneurs and learning from their mistakes and learning to build on my strengths versus tackling my weaknesses. That's been like... Hire out your weaknesses, do what you're good at and hire out the weaknesses. Like if they only taught that in school, right? I think that was a key. And then also one of the foundational pieces of my company was building what we did around Wow Customer Service. So the Zappos model, also a Ruby receptionists, a local company. We amaze people by answering the phone when it rang, like with a live person. And we responded to emails like… Our customer service, our ticketing. We would respond within 20 minutes, right? And in the apartment industry, that was just unheard of in the vendor piece. Like you would send out an email to people's customer service and not hear back for a week. And so people would hear back from us within 10, 20, maybe five minutes, right? And they would like, when they called, like, they'd get a live person. Like they were just amazed. And we were actually hopeful. We hired people that love to help people. Like it was stupidly simple. Jason: [00:09:10] It's kind of like, like, you know, people ask, I think like Walt Disney was like, how do you get people to smile all the time? He's like, well, I hired people that were happy and smiled all the time. Like we didn't train them to do that. We just… we did it. David: [00:09:25] Yeah. I became a huge believer in the Jim Collins, you know, get the right people on the bus and put the right people in the right seats. I really, really focused on streamlining our hiring process. And my key to hiring was we hired recent college grads with degrees in journalism and communications and media, and we screen the heck out of them on writing, right? We made them write and write and write like the initial application had like 10 questions that they had to write answers to. And because the job entailed a lot of writing on the behalf of clients, I knew the clients wanted people that could write in like full sentences and spell and… again, really simple stuff. But that screening process of screening out the people that would, you know, write like two word answers and, and their punctuation and like, and then, you know… Young college graduates that were just hungry for their first job and wanted to be involved in the field that kind of, I think they had to learn a little bit in the hard way that there's not a lot of paid jobs in journalism, and it's very hard to make it on your own as a blogger. I mean, hard to make a living, right? I'm sure some people do but most people, uh, have a difficult time. So the hiring piece was another piece. Yeah. For sure.
Jason: [00:10:56] Taking care of your employees has never been more important than right now. And while paydays are great, running payroll is a major pain, calculating taxes, deductions compliance. None of it's easy. Unless of course you have Gusto. Gusto is a simple online payroll and benefits built for your small business. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Plus, with Gusto’s help, you can offer benefits like 401k's health insurance, workers' comp, and a lot more. And because you're a smart agency masterclass listener, you're going to get three months free. Once you run your first payroll, go to gusto.com/agency. That's gusto.com/agency for three free months. Awesome. And then let's talk about the selling process. How did that come to fruition? Because you sold to one of your big clients and a lot of people don't realize that, that you could do that. And it's also kind of dangerous sometimes too. David: [00:12:13] Right. Right, it's definitely walking the tight rope. So what was interesting was I built a company up to, I think about four or five, 600 clients. And we built our systems and that, and what I realized was at $99, it was not, where it was not profitable was it was not profitable to hire a highly paid sales team. And I would say out of all the things that I failed at, that's what I failed miserably at was whenever I tried to hire a salesperson and get them to perform. And just make what I'm paying that, like, it was just like, it never worked, right? So the big change there was, you know, I'm a big Costco shopper and Kirkland Signature and this and that. And then with entrepreneurs organization, I was like, hey, I think there's something to this white label thing. I think that might even been learning some from you. And I partnered with a larger company to do a white label agreement with them, which took probably gosh, maybe two years to put together and formalize and all the, you know, it was a big company and all the legal and this and that. But that was the key to the growth was because they had 350 sales agents around the country that I didn't have to pay for. That was the biggest thing, right? And I still got to charge them what I charge my regular clients on the wholesale side. And so my profit margin was still there, but that's where the magic happened, right? I mean, we started adding a hundred, 200 clients a month and all I could do was focus on hiring great people and increasing our systems and scalability and everything. And we got to a couple thousand clients with them. We’re about 65 employees about at that time, right? Just like you said, it was a factory. And, um, that was when they came to me and just said, hey, we're, you know, we're interested in buying your company. And I said, well, that's not really why I built it, but I said, sure, I'll listen. And I also knew that if they didn't buy me that, you know, they were probably going to recreate it or do something else. Like you said it's a dangerous spot to be in when you're… That's the whole piece is when you, right? When your client concentration goes to 60 and 70% of your clients come from one source, you know, you live by the sword, you die by the sword, right? Jason: [00:15:00] I've known people where they've done this, where they'll outsource to an agency. And they'll become 90% of their business and say, I want to buy you. And they'll say, if you say, no, we'll just go away. And then you're like, crap. Now that didn't happen to you. You're the lucky one. But, uh, walk us through the process of like, so they say, okay, well, here's what we're thinking. All this kind of stuff. A lot of people are thinking, how long did it take in order to come to a deal? In the due diligence phase, maybe to, you know, the, the term sheet and all that kind of good stuff. David: [00:15:41] Oh boy. You know, when you're dealing with a bigger, bigger company. That has a board and everything from them saying, hey, we're interested to actually getting serious. You know, I think was probably three to five months probably? Which that gave me enough time to kind of like, kind of get my head around the process and start talking to people. And I hired an M&A consultant at that point to kind of represent me. And I think that was, looking back, that was a huge piece of it because it took me out of being the direct guy. And so when we did get to term, he, and on into due diligence, he got to be the middleman and he got to be the, you know, he got to be the bad cop and I get to be the good cop. Because the other piece was, they were still my client, right? So if everything fell out, I still needed to have a good relationship with the company, right? And so it kind of allowed us to play that good cop, bad cop piece. But I think it was probably, you know, 10 months or so. But the piece that made that go a lot quicker was, you know, they were a majority concentration in my company. And so they kind of knew the backend financials and due diligence kind of, because they knew all the moving pieces of that. And so that took a lot of the uncertainty out from their side, I think, and helped move it faster than normal. Jason: [00:17:20] Very cool. And it's always a kiss of death. I always tell everybody going until the check is deposited and the paper is signed. Sometimes people go, oh, well, my life's going to change and I can kind of kick back and, and kind of relax. Did you just go, hey, if this happens great. If not, I’m good. David: [00:17:42] I've been through some big real estate deals before. So I think that helped. But the other piece is I knew I needed to make it to the finish line for this to happen. Because if it fell apart, like you said, they were gonna be the 1600 pound grill and take some drastic measures against me, that would not have ended up well, right? I mean, is this classic North Korea, right? Like you don't want to be the first person to push the button and send the missile. So you're just kind of waiting and you're just your head down, making everything perform, you know, they're looking at your metrics, like crazy as you're getting ready to close, and you're just trying to. And you're trying to keep your team together, right? I think that's the other piece in the sale piece is... So who do you tell, when do you tell them? Who knows? Right? Jason: [00:18:38] And when did you do that? When did you start telling people. David: [00:18:40] So when I sold real estate apart, big apartment buildings what I learned was to not tell people. When you tell people for whatever reason, I think it's just human psychology, they tend to jump ship. I mean, they're just like, oh, this boat is sinking or not going to my direction. I'm going to go look for it or something else. And you start losing key people left and right. So I learned not to do that. I only told one person in my company, which was my CFO, because I had to, because I relied on her for all the financials and there's just no way that I could keep it from her. So she was my inside person up until we needed to negotiate key employee contracts for the upper management team. Because that's… in a acquisition, they want to secure all your top-level management to make sure they come over on the transition. And so that was a big piece was… I mean, part of that sale processes is that you have to tell people, tell the executive management team at the last minute what's going on and get them to sign employment agreements with the new company, to make sure that there's going to be a smooth transition there. And a lot of times that's a key piece to closing the deal, right? Because at the very end, if all your top-level management walks off the job and the company… I mean, if you're selling a service company, right? I mean, that's what you're selling is the people and the processes. You lose a lot of that, and you could be subject to a whole renegotiation at that point. So that's a really stressful time. And then also you got to make sure that those people don't recognize the leverage they have in that situation and over leverage their position and to extracting what they would like to extract from you during it, right? So that's really stressful point. Jason: [00:20:44] Yeah. I remember going through that as well, and that is not fun. And am in the same vote of going only tell when you need to. Uh, because yeah, when, when we made the announcement, some people don't like change and they just, for whatever reason, they don't like change, even if it's going to be better for them. Because that's how I judge, when we sold it, I was like, look, same type of culture. Not much is going to change. They're going to have a little bit more resources. I think it actually is better for everyone. And a lot of people advanced, but there were some people that were like, nope, I like the mom and pop mentality, even though we were kind of the middle, you know, we were not small. But, um, they still like, you know, kind of the, they can come to me for anything and they knew everyone, so… It makes some things. So what's life like now for you after selling? Because I see your Facebook, you’re just traveling around the world. David: [00:21:45] Yeah, it's been kind of interesting. Uh, I volunteer, I'm the president of the PTO at my kid's high school now. Really involved with my kids' lives. You know, I got a freshman, a university and a sophomore in high school and a seventh grader. And so a lot of focus has turned to them. I try to really provide a lot of really unique, fun travel experiences for them. That's my go-to thing is I just love travel and stuff. I mean, with the pandemic, it's been kind of a bummer. But at the same time, I've kind of rediscovered, you know, traveling in the United States to national parks and hiking and river rafting. We rafted the grand canyon this last year. Due to the pandemic, they had openings, right? When's that ever happened? So taking advantage of that lemonade piece, right? Taking advantage of what life gives you when it does and figuring out what that is and going with it. Jason: [00:22:42] That's awesome. So, well, I'm so happy for you to see, where, where you started and where you ended up. It's very well-deserved with, with all the hard work. So congratulations for that. David: [00:22:53] Thanks. Thanks. And I got to put a plug in here too, with you, Jason. Because gosh, we met at, uh… What was a social media…? Jason: [00:23:02] On the aircraft carrier. David: [00:23:04] On the aircraft carrier. And we were in line for the virtual ride and we just started a conversation, right. So I was like, who are you? Who are you? And what do you do? And we started the conversation and I hired you as a consultant, uh, over the last couple of years of the company, you know, it was just really, really helpful to have you and your experience in selling your agency in the background to be able to bounce things off of and ideas and like, hey, this is happening now. Like kind of, you know, or things with employees or just that. Your experience with the agency, uh, selling your agency and being able to, um, have your guidance in that was a big key, I think those last couple of years. So, uh, I don't think I've ever really gotten a chance to thank you formally for that. So thank you for that. I appreciate it. Jason: [00:24:01] Well, it was my pleasure, you know, I just wanted to be the resource I wish I had, right? So, that's all we can do is keep paying it forward and that kind of stuff. So well, thanks so much for coming on the show. It was, it was awesome having you. Can't wait to have you come out to Durango and be ski bums together and go explore because I love the experiences too. So awesome. Well, if you guys enjoyed this episode, what I want you to guys do is share it out with your fellow agency owners. I would help them out and help us out. And if you want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners and you want our help to really kind of see the things you might not be able to see, so you can navigate and get to the places where, you know, uh, have the opportunities to do what David has had, I want to invite all of you to go digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive community and mastermind, and it's just amazing people. So go to digitalagencyelite.com and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Create_a_Profitable_Agency_Machine_That_You_Can_Eventually_Sell.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 22 September 2021
Drew Hendricks was a philosophy major who started in the agency world after building his first website in the 90's and never looked back. Today, he owns Nimbletoad, a full-service digital marketing agency that specializes in website design, SEO, and PPC. Recently, Drew expanded by founding Barrels Ahead, an agency where he adapts his love for wine and developed an organic growth marketing framework to address the unique needs of the wine and craft industry. Drew's conversation with Jason is filled with useful tips from all his years as an agency owner. He shares his secret to convert more proposals as well as why you should be quick to respond when potential clients reach out to you.
Sponsors and ResourcesAgency Dad: Today's episode is sponsored by Agency Dad. Agency Dad is an accounting solution focused on helping marketing agencies make better decisions based on their financials. Check out agencydad.money/freeaudit to get a phone call with Nate to assess your agency's financial needs and how he can help you. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Become an Authority on Your Agency and Use This Secret Sauce for ProposalsJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Uh, excited to have you listening to the show today. I have one of our long-term mastermind members who has grown several agencies over the years, and really has taken… Today, we're going to talk about the amazing things that he's learned over the years and applied them to his current agency that he's doing right now. I think you're really going to love this episode, so let's get into it. Hey, Drew. Welcome to the show. Drew: [00:00:35] Thank you, Jason. Thank you for having me on. Jason: [00:00:37] So you're the first guest to, uh, actually be in the intro on the mountain, waving back to the drone. So I was just watching that. I was like, oh, there's Drew. So well I digress. Yeah. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Drew: [00:00:58] Yeah. I'm Drew Hendricks. Right now I'm running two agencies. One’s Nimbletoad, which is a generalist agency. And the other one is a brand new venture called Barrels Ahead, which is sort of the culmination of everything I've learned over the last 30 years of running agencies. Jason: [00:01:12] Yeah, that's awesome. Uh, and you actually started an agency before me. So tell us kinda how did you get into it? And, uh, it tells us kind of the origin story. Drew: [00:01:24] Yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's kind of an interesting story. So in college, I majored in philosophy and ancient Greek with the goal of becoming a professor of philosophy. And upon graduating, I ended up, um, finding myself in San Francisco and, um, kind of biding my time until I could go get a PhD. And ended up getting a job as a stock boy at a winery and realized I had a really good palate for wine. And from then on, I just sort of started reading everything I could about wine and learning everything I could and figured out that, um, it’s super interesting, and there was just so much knowledge that could be done there. So I ended up sticking around for 10 years in that wine store, revamped it to, um, change the name, rebranded it. Wrote one of the first, um, websites back in '90, '95 or so. Wrote a wine auction site. And from there in '98 started the first, um, agency, which was, um, Intellect; which helped independent wine stores compete with, um, better-leveraged chain stores. Like right then BevMo had just started launching, Trader Joe's was coming up in the ranks, and then Total Wine. So we helped wine stores with their marketing. Jason: [00:02:33] Wow. That's incredible. And especially going back to '95. Hell, man, I remember back in 95, we were all getting the AOL CDs for the free internet. Drew: [00:02:44] No, it was, it was, that was definitely the time. Jason: [00:02:47] What was it? Progidy? Drew: [00:02:52] Oh, wow. Pardon? Jason: [00:02:23] Or, or it was Prodigy, right? Like if… Drew: [00:02:56] Oh my God. Before that, no, in college it was Prodigy. I had a Prodigy account that was, you know, there was… In college, I remember the first day that I, that we actually got connected to the internet and I found it so interesting. I went to the school library and I was able to connect. I went to Gonzaga… went to Gonzaga and I was able to connect to the UCSD library down in California. And from there I could get out to a library in Europe and it blew my mind that I was able to go from Gonzaga, to UCSD to Europe. And from then on, I kind of caught the bug and right then HTML, it just started coming into it. And we actually wrote one of the first, um, one of my first philosophy, um, presentations actually at hyperlinks in it back in '92. Jason: [00:03:38] So Front Page or Dreamweaver? Or just plain text editor Drew: [00:03:45] Dreamweaver. It was Dre… but it was, this was precursor to Dreamweaver. Jason: [00:03:47] That's true. Yeah. I guess it was like Netscape Composer. Drew: [00:03:51] Yep. Yeah, it was making… My mind doesn't go back that far as far as the tools, but yeah, it was a lot of, um, Pearl scripts and CGI scripts. Jason: [00:04:01] Yeah. Well awesome. Well, let's, let's talk about kind of the journey or what are, what are some of the lessons, since you've had several agencies over the years. What are some lessons that, um, you'd like to share with the audience listening in? Drew: [00:04:17] I think one of the biggest ones that, and this is one that I only recently have come to the realization of... And it's actually been through this mastermind group, your mastermind group that really helped me realize the difference between an entrepreneur and an agency owner. And the importance of what an entrepreneur is. Because we usually start… most of the agencies that I've founded were the result of a problem. Like, I'd see a client would come in, they'd have an issue and I'd figure out how to solve it. We'd build them a site. We build them like a web platform. And then I figure, man, well, I can sell more of that. And then I become an authority in their problem, but not really even an authority on the actual agency. So what happens is we end up building, we have 10, 12, 15 clients, all, all very different problems, authority in all these different problems, but not an actual authority on running the ads. And I think this last iteration, we took the best of what we knew about and what our skillset is at Nimbletoad. And we're finding experts now to actually perform the processes that we do. Whereas I can now sit back as an entrepreneur and solve the problem of what actually can make that agency grow. And I think too many people are stuck in actually doing the work rather than kind of treating in the agency as the project. Jason: [00:05:36] Yeah. I mean, isn't that so true with, you know, I look at running an agency and kind of like six stages of climbing a mountain, right? So from the staging part, before you embark on, you know, making the climb to base camp; to the climbing, the crux, you know, the crest all the way to the summit. And right in the middle, right? Like it's kind of right in the middle is where you actually start working on the business. Like, that's how you can kind of get to the next level rather than in. And, uh, like I was saying in the mastermind, it's like in the very beginning you're constantly, always thinking about the what and how, and I'm like, no, no, no, you should be focused on who, who can do it? Who do I need to hire? … everyone else but you. Drew: [00:06:24] Yeah. That was a huge learning curve for us and, and for our agency. Figuring out actually that I, I, although I can do it, I'm not the best person to be doing. It was, it was a huge, huge step. Jason: [00:06:36] So how did you get over that? Because there's a lot of people listening right now that they struggle with that. Like, they're literally like, well, no one could do it as good as me. Drew: [00:06:48] You know, it was learning. It was learning to say no. And learning about where do you want to go? Cause really, like you said, would that plateau, if you're trying to be the authority in everything, you're an authority in nothing. So you really have to pick your battle. And if you want to be the best web developer out there, or the best SEO person, go get an in-house job at another agency and you can be the top dog for SEO. But if you want to run a company, that needs to be your top priority and you can't do both. Jason: [00:07:17] Exactly. Yeah. I, I tell people too that like 80% is better than you doing your full thing on it. Because cause you're doing a thousand different things, even if they're not at your a hundred percent, they're still ahead of you because you're doing so much, so many other things. So I'm like just, if you can find someone to do 80% that you know, to get there. Or I was interviewing someone not too long ago, um, who was also the mastermind Canopy guys. And, uh, he was struggling with, you know, delegating, um, and everything had to flow through him. He was like the toll booth of everything that had to go through on operations. And finally, uh, Brian, his partner went to him. It was, his name is Brian as well. So I was like, how did you guys start an agency, Brian and Brian? And he goes, look, I just need you to document 50%. And then that's a good foundation the team can take and build. And it's changed everything for them. And now they're, you know, their, their agency is well, you know, into the summit and beyond. Drew: [00:08:23] Yeah. Those guys are rocking it.
Jason: [00:08:24] Yeah. Um, one thing I want to ask you and you, you talked about this, uh, I was just thinking about it. I know, I didn't tell you to pre preplan for it, but you did a incredible what's working now. Um, you know, at the digital agency experience, not too long ago, about proposals, um, of what you've learned. So tell, tell the listeners a little bit about that. Because I thought that was brilliant. Drew: [00:08:49] You know that I'm glad you brought that up. So we, over the years of writing proposals, we, I have figured out, now I don't want to say it's a secret sauce. But it's something that's worked real well to help, um, position the, um, the proposal and defray the pricing and justify it through, um, very, um, objective terms. So what happens in the, um, pre-talk and this is the secret sauce guy. So, you know… Jason: [00:09:17] Listen in. Drew: [00:09:20] So what happens in the pre-talk is you always ask who are your biggest competitors? So if it's an SEO person you're going to ask, um, who do you want to outrank? Or if it's a, um, pay-per-click or if it's even a local business, you need to get a list of the top three or four people that they want to actually outrank and compete against. So then in the, in the proposal stage, you take those three competitors and you run them through your tools, whether it's SpyFu or any of those business intelligence programs; which will give you a good idea of what those competitors are spending on SEO or spending on pay-per-click. This allows you to come up with a proposal and a pricing of that proposal with instant justification. So then when I walked in person through the proposal, a list of the competitors is the first thing. I'm like ok, we went back to our desk, put pencil to paper, you guys want to compete against these people. They're spending X on SEO. This guy's spending X on SEO. And this other third competitor is not spending anything on SEO, but he's spending a ton of paper. So, if we want to compete against these three people, this is where you need to be. And instantly, suddenly the… if the retainer is 10 grand a month, that may be what it is. And if they go, whoa, that's way too much. The instant objectification is, well, you may need to play in a smaller pond cause these aren’t your competitors. Jason: [00:10:46] As an agency owner, it's hard to know when you have to make those big decisions. And I remember needing advice for thinking like hiring or firing or re-investing and, you know, when can I take distributions without hurting the agency? You know, we're excellent marketers, but when it comes to agency finances like bookkeeping, forecasting, or really organizing our financial data, most of us are really kind of a little lost. And that's why my friend Nate created Agency Dad specifically to solve these exact problems. You know, at Agency Dad they help agency owners handle the financial part of their agency so they can focus on what they're really good at. Nate has spent years learning the ins and outs of agency business. He understands everything from how to structure your books, to improving the billing process and really managing your financial efficiencies. Agency Dad will show you how to use your financial data to make the key decisions, you know, from making your agency more successful and most importantly, more profitable. If you want to know how your agency finances stack up to the rest of the industry, Agency Dad can tell you that you know how to do that. A lot of my listeners have already gotten their free audit from Agency Dad. If you haven't yet, go to agencydad.money/freeaudit before August 30th and get your free financial metrics. Also, just for smart agency listeners, find out how to get your first month of bookkeeping or dashboarding and consulting for free. It's time to clean up your agency finances and listen to dad. Go to agencydad.money/freeaudit that's agencydad.money/freeaudit. I think it's so brilliant. It's such punching him in the mouth. Uh, you know, I feel like, well, you know, it's kinda like shit or get off the pot. Um, you know, it's like, do you really want to compete against them? Because, and it's, and it's really compelling. Like I never thought about when you, when you shared that, like, that's really interesting. Like, I wish I did that on their proposals. Like if you really want to compete against them, because at the end, like I used to, like, I don't care who your competitors were because, you know, we were in the design business, right? Like, I didn't want to be sidetracked with designing something that looked like someone else. But like with the SEO or the pay-per-click, like you're talking about, like in comparing them… And then hitting them in the mouth going you know what? Maybe, maybe you need to go play in a smaller pond. Like that's fine. +Drew: [00:13:30] No one wants to hear that either. So it's, it's the best objection saying well, that's our pricing. Or it's the best refusal or rebuttal? Jason: [00:13:38] Oh, yeah, no, I, I love it. I mean, uh, we can end the interview now. I think everybody would be happy. Um, what's, what's another strategy, um, that, that you've learned over the years, uh, that you want to share with the audience? Drew: [00:13:54] You know, I would say be quick to respond. So many people worry about, oh, if I'm too quick to respond they're gonna think I'm too anxious. Or let's set up another date, I want them to know that I'm busy, but that's never worked out for me. I think you gotta be genuine. And if you really want it, show your enthusiasm. And actually the other thing is, and this ties into anybody outside of the agency, even applying for a job. We've been interviewing for an operations manager right now. And I've been through so many interviews, I cannot tell you the last time someone actually ended the interview saying I'm really excited about this position. I feel like I'd be a great fit. I can't wait to work for you. And the same thing when you're seeing a proposal or you're talking, everybody plays hard to get. If you're excited about winning the client, be honest and be enthusiastic. Let them know that you are stoked to be doing this. And I don't see that too often. Jason: [00:14:47] Yeah. It's such an easy thing. And like, if I wish we could actually have the permission to use, uh, the cut from Vince Vaughn in Swingers, when, you remember? When, when the one guy gets the girl's phone number. And he goes through his friends with how long should I wait? And they're like seven days, eight days, two weeks. And he's like calling her like over and over again. Like we've all seen that. And, uh, you know, I took, I took the approach you took, Drew. So if someone reached out on our website, I literally would call them while they're still on the website. And I would always call and I would say, hey, this is Jason from Solar Velocity. I'm so sorry. It took me so long to call you back. They're like, I just hit submit. I'm like, well, that's how pumped we are. Like, we really want to chat with you. And like, thinking back, we won so many deals. Like we are almost a quarter way done the deals when they actually would be like, hey, you know, we're still getting proposals. Like the first proposals from reaching out to people. I’m like idiots, you guys watched the movie swingers. Drew: [00:15:57] Yep. Yep. That is definitely did show enthusiasm and ask, ask for the sale. Jason: [00:16:03] That's an important thing too. Ask for the sale, you know, um, I'm doing training for you guys coming up, uh, around sales and like one of the parts that as I was doing this training, I was like, when we're auditing our salespeople, um, which you should be doing weekly. You know, one of the things you should be looking for is, is your sales person asking for the sale? Like that's the most important part. That's kind of like giving away everything and then going all right, well, chat with you later. Like ask for the freaking sale. Brilliant, awesome. Drew, this has been amazing, man. I don't know. What's taken me so long to get you on the podcast. So I'm so glad. And I'm glad that we actually saw you on the podcast on the mountain waving. Drew: [00:16:55] Oh, yeah. That’ not….for listeners that don't know Jason's got a mountain's house, Swenk mountain. It's quite the climb, but beautiful view looking over the, over the lake and that's awesome. Jason: [00:17:10] Yeah, it was, it was fun. Especially the first year, you've been out there twice. And the first year it was kind of fun. No one really knew what to expect hiking up and at high elevation. And, uh, it was kind of fun watching… Drew: [00:17:23] Yeah, cause you were at like 10,000 feet or no? Jason: [00:17:25] Uh, no, the, the, the top of the mountain is, uh, 8200. Drew: [00:17:31] 82? See, I get the elevations all messed up. I was talking with another member of the mastermind about going over engineer paths on, on, on my podcast. Jason: [00:17:39] That was 13,000. Drew: [00:17:42] On the podcast. I talked about how we went over a 10,000-foot peak. I think it's a little higher. Jason: [00:17:48] Yeah. So the one we took the ATVs? Uh, yeah, that was 13,000. Um, so you were way up there above the… Drew: [00:17:56] That was an incredible experience. Jason: [00:17:58] Yeah. I'm so glad I can't wait for you guys to come back out. Um, is there anything I didn't ask you, Drew, that you think would benefit the audience? Drew: [00:18:07] I would say just figure out what you don't know. Figure out what you don't do and start there. I think there's a TV commercial that… maybe Matthew McConaughey was talking about that, but. Don't say yes to everything and figure out what you don't want to do, and then find a referral partner to refer that out to. That's so important because you don't have to actually lose the business. You can get the business back with a referral to another agency. Jason: [00:18:33] Yeah. Awesome. Or I'll say all right, all right. Um, where, uh, where can people check out the agency? Drew: [00:18:41] Go to barrelsahead.com and you can find me on Twitter at @DrewHendricks. Um, Facebook @DrewHendricks. Jason: [00:18:50] Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Drew, for coming on the show. You've rocked it. You killed it. A lot of really good, uh, information and strategies that people can go execute now. So if you guys liked this and you want to hear more of this and be surrounded by really cool people like Drew and so many others. Uh, I'd love to have you guys all check out the digitalagencyelite.com. Should be scrolling up or for the listeners. I mean, it's pretty easy name. That's why we picked it: digitalagencyelite.com. Go there, check it out. And it's an amazing group of people growing and sending the mountain faster together rather than all alone by your lonesome self. So, and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Convert_More_Proposals_Without_Doing_a_Ton_of_More_Work.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 19 September 2021
Are you creating a solid recurring revenue stream for your agency? Dan Sundgren has been involved in the digital marketing industry since he became one of the first employees at Google around 2003. After years of witnessing the rise of that tech giant, he eventually started his digital agency, FreeGren, which specializes in SEM, SEO, SMM and Website Development and Maintenance. He sat down with Jason to talk about the lessons he learned at Google about breaking the rules and how there's always a different way to look at things. He also talked about his decision to work with contractors rather than having employees, and why recurring revenue is the goal. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesWix: Today's episode is sponsored by the Wix Partner Program. Being a Wix Partner is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Contractors vs Employees and Remember that Recurring Revenue is the GoalJason: [00:00:00] Hey, agency owners. Welcome to another episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass. I am Jason Swenk and I have an amazing guest, Dan. We're going to talk about his building his agency over the past four years. But also what he's learned. He's one of the very first employees at Google. Um, I think he was telling me back in 2003 or 2004, he can correct me in a, in a second. Um, and we're going to talk about really amazing things. So I can't wait. Um, but before we get into the episode, I want you to do something. I want you to take a screenshot of the podcast and then upload it to your favorite social media. Tag us, so I can give you a shout-out for listening to the show. And let's go ahead and jump into it and talk to Dan. Hey, Dan. Welcome to the show. Dan: [00:00:53] Thanks for having me, Jason. Jason: [00:00:54] Yeah, man, excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Dan: [00:00:59] Uh, my name is Dan Sundgren. Uh, I started an agency over four years ago with a partner of mine, Scott Freeborn. The Genesis of our agency is FreeGren. After a long and laborious naming process, we mashed our names up at five o'clock and decided to call it good. And we named our company FreeGren because we're a 50-50 two-headed beast. And we've just had a blast last four years building our little agency up here in the Northwest. Um, Scott came from Dexcom Media. Um, my experience was with Google, and AOL, and Merkel. Uh, worked in-house and built teams for 20 plus years. Done quite a few things. And, uh, managed, in my estimation, over a billion dollars in paid advertising. Which at the very least gives me some scars on my back to figure something out, uh, you know, in the future. So, so that's what we're doing. Jason: [00:01:58] So I have one question that I have to ask, are you the one that would send out the AOL CDs to us? Dan: [00:02:04] Yeah, no, I, I think, I think, yeah, those were the… Jason: [00:02:09] For all the old people. Uh, for us to get on the internet, AOL literally used to send out CDs so we can get on the internet and they give us like 50 hours. Dan: [00:02:18] Yeah. The stacks of CDs, just carpet bombed in, in the mailboxes. Yeah. Jason: [00:02:24] I love it. Well, um, tell us, uh, you know, what, what did you do for Google? Um, and tell us a little bit about the early days. And did I get it right in the intro? Was it 2003 or four? Dan: [00:02:39] Yeah, I started, um, towards the end of 2003. Jason: [00:02:43] Wow. It must have been crazy seeing all that growth. Dan: [00:02:48] It, it was wild. Um, we were, obviously, we weren't public yet. Um, we would go down to campus in Mountain View because we started the Seattle office, a handful of us to really support the sales operation. The engineers weren't even here yet. And, um, we have these global sales summits down there every year for the first three years, I think. Which were, we would like rent, Google would rent the village of Lake Tahoe and just run wild and engineers would be running around with bottles of booze and it was a, it was a wild time. It was a very wild time. Um, got to meet chef Charlie who's, I don't know if you know the backstory, but Larry and Sergei hired The Grateful Dead chef. So chef Charlie was the guy who invented the entire food ecosystem at Google with just this gorgeous spreads and sushi bars and, you know, the works, right. That was his Genesis of, of like taking extra good care of people with their, you know, their stomachs. So it was really crazy to watch them reinvent the way companies even think about employees. Really, that's what they were doing. Jason: [00:03:56] I love the movie Internship that features Google like pre-show. Is it really like that? And you're like, no, it's just a lot more drinking. Dan: [00:04:07] I was, again, I was in the sales team, so, yeah. Um, so there was definitely, there was a definitely a class system at Google. Um, and I think there's still, it's very engineering-run. Um, sales is sort of, I think in the big picture at the company sales and marketing and sort of a nice to have, I guess we've got to have those folks. But really the brain it always has been is with engineers. It's an engineering-driven company. Um, not all tech companies are though, right? Some are very sales rooty. You know, um, some are a little of both. But they're still the hardcore… The engineers are running it. We know what's best for the user, blah, blah, blah. And I, you know, I don't know what it is today because it's so big, but… Jason: [00:04:53] Yeah, well, I remember, um, my dad was my stockbroker for many, many years. I remember when Google was about to go public and I said, I want to buy stock. I want to buy a lot of stock. Um, and he goes, no, no, no. $45 is way too much. Dan: [00:05:12] Reverse Dutch Auction. Yeah. I remember they came out with that and the engineers again decided, and Larry, and so you're like, we're smarter than the market. We're going to do a Reverse Dutch Auction and all the brokers were like, you can't do that. Like why not? And they did, they've constantly done things that are contrary to what you're supposed to do. Which I always found super refreshing, especially when I was working there. But I've watched them for the last 17, 18 years… geez. Continue to do things that sometimes you scratch your head and like… There's always something, right? Like Jason, like, oh, no broad match modified is going away. Or there's a big algo(rithm) change. I'm like, yeah. Okay. They're, they're just going to keep, I mean, of course, they’re constantly…. Jason: [00:05:58] So, what, what have you learned from them and your years at Google? And did you guys call each other Googlers? Um, what did you guys…? Dan: [00:06:08] Googlers, yeah. I got my… Right behind me is my hat. See the new that's called a Noogler hat. Jason: [00:06:11] Oh, it is true. Dan: [00:06:16] You had to wear it your first day. It had a propeller. Jason: [00:06:19] Oh, that's funny. That's… Dan: [00:06:21] Yeah. Around campus. So it's, it's a real thing. Um, I think what I've taken away is that you don't necessarily have to have hard and fast rules. There's, there's always a different way to look at things. Um, there's always a different way to flip things on their head and kind of think about it differently. But, um, they inherently do obsess over their employees. They, they take ridiculously good care. And again, now it's 150,000 people, definitely different company, but it was clear from the get-go that this was a new paradigm of corporations. Of… We want to take care of every need you have. And your personal life as well. I mean, nursing station and dry cleaning and like… All that stuff, it all kind of adds up to you feel like you're in a very comfortable environment that you don't have to worry about a lot and you can just do great work. And really they have the 10, was it the 10 per 10% time or 20% time? Sorry, 20. Which again, one of those little Google things like take a day every week and just spitball stuff. Like, you know, that was unheard of, really. HP and Dell weren't doing that. Jason: [00:07:31] No, no, they were too corporate. Dan: [00:07:36] Yeah. It, you know, and so we, we try to like, with our little agency, we don't have any employees, actually. Um, we built a virtual agency from day one, Scott and I, um, have very, very deeply in, in trusted partners. And we rely on them to do a lot of the heavy lifting and the nitty gritty. But that's for, with 20 years of vetting really good partners that we've entrusted those people as part of our company. But they're independent contractors. Jason: [00:08:07] Yeah. Well, let's talk about that because I mean, you're, uh, a couple of million in revenue. And it's just you two, but you guys use contractors and strategic partners. And a lot of people are like, well, how do you do that? Right? Like what, like walk us through that a little bit. Dan: [00:08:27] Yeah. That's probably the hardest thing to do and also the most important. Um, luckily I've been very involved for 20 years in, uh, marketing, uh, networking groups. So, um, we have a group up here in the Northwest called Seattle Interactive, and, uh, um, I've been on the board of that since the inception. There's another group in Portland that's fantastic. It's um, they, they throw a search fast every year. It's SCM PDX, and I'm sort of the Seattle liaison there. So over the years. Um, I've slowly built this base on, you know, LinkedIn for instance of four or 5,000 people that I've met and talk to and, you know, kiss babies and shook hands and work the floor and how it got out there. And, and through that Genesis, you start to build, um, a couple things, a big, big network. But also, B, uh, sort of the spidey sense of people that you would want to work with and you can inherently trust and, um, you can feed off each other in a positive way. So you can kind of weed through a lot of that. And the metamorphosis of that great network is when we started this, I had just started calling people and I was like, so-and-so is really good. We should talk to them. And putting those p… those building blocks in place, and those partners are with us today, four years later. So, yeah, but it's hard and there's challenges, right? Not having employees versus outsourcing. Um, I'll be the first one to admit that when we were looking to scale a little bit and, you know, when people tap out, as far as their time and what they have to give you, because they have other clients too. We have to find some bench strength and that's, you know, we were very, very careful and meticulous about that. Jason: [00:10:21] Um, so how are you always recruiting that talent then and making sure like you can fill…? Dan: [00:10:30] Yeah. Uh, it's through, through my network, um, asking, you know, just literally asking around and talking to different folks, remembering people. Oh, you know that, I remember that guy was a WordPress developer. I met him. He was solid. Kind of, we interview and vet them like you might an employee, but for what they do as a contractor. And we have some hard and fast rules. We are myopic; I'll admit it, like we are US-based. We, uh, we just are myopic that way. I want… and even selfishly I'd like them to be on the West Coast. And even more, it would be great if they're in the backyard in Seattle or Portland. Because there's just so much great talent and good people. And then, you know, there's sort of that affinity. And, um, when you build a big network, you have a reputation to uphold and you know this as well as anyone, right? Um, your, your name is your brand, is your worth, uh, to sort of the greater… thing out there, which is business. And, uh, I take that pretty seriously. Like you, you know, if you spend 20 years nurturing a career, you don't want to sabotage that going, you know, by going out and doing crappy work and not taking care of clients. And, you know, because the word kind of gets out and you just don't want to be that person. You just want to continue to keep that bar high.
Jason: [00:11:56] When you're an agency partner with Wix, you want unlock an entire digital ecosystem for creating, managing, and growing your agency. Get the full coding and design freedom to create anything your clients need. Along with the tools to manage and collaborate with your team seamlessly from anywhere. And when it comes to growing your agency, you can get matched with new leads every day and earn revenue share for every website you guys create. They're backed by the Wix Industry, leading security and site performance. You'll also have a dedicated account manager on standby 24/7. So you can reach your goals and start setting new ones. See for yourself, head over to wix.com/partners. And re-imagine what your agency can accomplish. Well, it takes what? 20 years to build a brand? And one second to tear it down. Dan: [00:12:56] Yeah, right? Yeah. Good adage. Jason: [00:12:59] Right? Like, we've seen that with many, I mean, I used to work for Arthur Anderson out of school. Right? And so we saw, you know, that was one of the biggest brands out there in the consulting practice. And then foom! You know, gone. So it's, uh, it's, you gotta be very, very careful, um, at that. Um, what is, this has all been amazing. I love to kind of see the origin story and how you kind of tapped into that. Is there anything else that I didn't ask you that you think, you know, the audience would benefit from of what you've learned over the past four years of have grown your agency, and congrats, very quickly? Dan: [00:13:45] Thanks. Um, well, a few, a few nuggets. I think that, um, and again, uh, I'm super transparent and love to share like you, so nothing's sort of off the table there. Um, but some nuggets that we picked up, um, from the get-go and still hold true are… Like the recurring revenue piece to me is the goal. Um, I just don't, I don't know how these web development shops go out and build their book every year. I, it's a head-scratcher it just seems like a nightmare to me. That's just my 2 cents. Um, so we built, um, really solid recurring revenue streams in for PPC, SEO, website maintenance and hosting. Um, where it's very repeatable it's, um, we can, we can forecast with it pretty well. Um, let me, I can tell you probably in 12 months where we'll be, you know, in the big picture and, um, it continues to build on itself. And we built our agency purposely pretty slow where I, I call it like we’re, like a snake, right? Like we'll eat a big mouse and then we'll just, we'll take some time and digest. And, you know, we won't worry about getting a new client until we get that one dialed in and really plugged in and make their phone ring. Then we'll move, we'll move into the next, next mouse. And so we built it really slow on purpose with that recurring revenue in place. So that we have a predictable business model and that's, that's kind of been something that's been really critical to our success, I think. Um, and then do, you and I were talking before the show, uh, one of the best things you can do is figure out what you don't know. Like what are your blind spots? Um, and what's, and what's coming, right? Because, um, I was selling 88 x 31 banners in 99. And that was it. And 468 x 60s. So clearly things have gotten a little different Jason: [00:15:40] A little bit. Little change. Dan: [00:15:43] A little bit. Uh, yeah, it's always changing in, in social media and like, um, all the new flavors of media. You're still trying to reach an audience, but there's just different ways to do it. Different platforms, what's up and coming? Um, You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet. And you know, if Pinterest is something that we should try for our clients, let's give it a chest. Let's not be afraid to just, I don't want to stay like, this is what we do. These are the four channels we, we only know. Um, but also not, you know, spread yourself too thin and try and stay in your lane a little bit. So it's that balance, right? Jason: [00:16:16] Yeah, it totally is. Yeah. I mean, I totally agree with you on recurring revenue. Like it’s… We all want, like, we all get into the agency space or create a business for predictability and freedom and money. But a lot of times we create this kind of prison around us and we don't have predictability. We don't have freedom, we don't have money. Right? Like, and we keep hiring more people. Um, but, uh, you know, when you actually start figuring out some of that. Like our, our agency, we were 80% project-based. And how we got through it and how we create a predictability is we just created a huge pipeline. Like I was chatting with a good buddy of mine a little while ago, and he was talking about how he's starting to resent some of his clients. And I told him, I said, look, buddy, like you're resenting your clients because you have a lead generation problem because you're too reliant on the existing client base. Rather than having a over abundance of people coming to you. And then you just pick it up. And then charging what you're actually worth. Um, so, but I, I agree with you on the recurring revenue. And also too, like, if you're not always learning… Like that's always been a core value in our agency and our business now. Even when we bring on people in the mastermind I’m like, you have to always be like, am I, what am I learning today? What are the lessons that today taught me? Or what are the lessons that the mistakes that I made last week or two seconds ago? Which happens a lot. That's what my team tells me a lot. Dan: [00:17:56] No, absolutely. And knowing when to say no and stay, when I say stay in your lane, Jason, is like… If a client came and said, hey, do you guys do TV and radio? We just, we trust you implicitly with the digital. I would be the first one to go. You know, we absolutely don't have any core expertise. That's just that staying in your lane, you know, that's, it's hard enough to stay on top of what we do do. Um, but maybe I could find a partner or, you know, maybe I could, I could vet, ask around that around town, whatever. Um, I think a lot of you get in that trap of no, let's do everything, you know, let's do 15 different disciplines. Um, and if you do want to get into that, you know, subject matter experts, either employees or contractors and get someone good to really do the work. Don't pretend you can, you know, learn on the fly sometimes if you're going to slot that in. Jason: [00:18:50] Yeah. And when you go to your clients that like, they give you that great honor, and be like, we trust you explicitly to do this and you go, hey, we don't feel comfortable with it, but let me connect you to two or three people. Like you, like, you're the connector. Like they will always come to you and they're coming to you for a problem and they'll keep coming rather than you take on a project that you just totally botch. And then it's just, it's over. Dan: [00:19:20] Yeah. Yeah. And then you're setting yourself up really, if you, if you take that, that other path, I think. Um, and trust, is it, I mean, that's, I guess if one, I mean, that's the big one, right? That's the cornerstone of everything is, is trust. And you probably hear time again from the best client relationships are that just it's like relationship. Like you've gone through the fire, you’ve broken some eggs to make the omelet. You've, you've fixed things that have broken. But you know what? That's good because it's like the Nordstrom thing, right? When, when you go to Nordstrom, I dunno, I haven’t been in Nordstrom for years. But their whole mantra was you don't like it? We'll, we'll take care of it. Like we're just going to take care of it, and you just know that when you go in. Um, it's that white glove service, you know, things are going to go haywire, but we will fix them. We'll make it right. We'll, we'll answer our phone. Um, I can't tell you how much negligence we continue to run into in the agency world. It's kind of, it's kind of disturbing, still, to take a client from an agency off the road and… They have no idea what they're getting. They just been stroking a check for 10 years. The guy won't call them back. They don't, they don't know where their Google analytics and their data is. They have no idea what's going on and they're paying like eight grand a month for 10 years. And the guy that won't courtesy call them back and it's still happening. And that's kind of why we started our, our shop because, um, Scott, uh, worked at a company and a lot of that was happening and you’re just like, that shouldn’t still be happening. Jason: [00:20:59] Yeah, I, it's amazing. So many people go to me as they're starting out and they go, uh, what's, what's the secret to scaling fast? I say, you have to be better than everyone else in the service that you deliver. Like, because I see so many, uh, these people will be nameless, but there are so many people that are really good at marketing themselves and selling. But then on delivering they fall down. And they're like, why can't we grow? But then they keep putting out content to show people that… I'm like, good gosh, like, your model is broken. Like, take that dog behind the shed and shoot it, like stop. You're not built for this, so… But, uh, yeah. It's uh, yeah, so it's a, it's always a breath of fresh air when I find people that can deliver results and that actually care, you know, uh, about that. So congrats on your success. Um, what's the website address where people can go and check out the agency? Dan: [00:22:05] It's free. freegren.com. Jason: [00:22:09] Awesome. Dan: [00:22:09] Or, or Jason, you can go to nobullshit.agency. Jason: [00:22:14] Oh, I like that one better. You should lead with that one. Dan: [00:22:18] And, and you'll, and you'll end up on our, on our homepage. Jason: [00:22:21] There you go. No bullshit dot agency? Oh, I love that. Yeah. Go there. Use that URL. That's way better. Dan: [00:22:29] You know? Um, it's, it's, it's a little, I guess, you know, it'd be a little bit, yeah, you know, in your face. Jason: [00:22:36] No, no. Like, like the people that you want to work with, just since you said that, like the people that you don't want to work with, they'll be the ones that get offended. It's kind of like what I say on the mastermind, like on our mastermind page, like our first core value is no douche bags. And if you're offended by it, well, you're probably not going to do well. Dan: [00:23:03] Yeah, yeah. We use the Tommy boy quote, you know, I will, you know, I can trust the butcher and put my head up cow's ass, but I might as well trust the butcher, you know, that, that old quote. Jason: [00:23:12] Exactly. I can quote that whole movie. Guarantee it’s the best part. I got time. Dan: [00:23:23] Yeah, the movie quote. I can talk and movie quotes probably for a good five minutes. Jason: [00:23:27] Um, I think we should just come up with a podcast just to talk movie quotes, do it. Dan: [00:23:33] We should do it. We should do it. That'd be a challenge. Can you, how long can you talk and movie quotes? Jason: [00:23:36] Oh, I could do it for a long time. I mean, I just go back to the eighties and nineties movies that I grew up on, you know, exactly Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison. Dan: [00:23:49] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jason: [00:23:51] All those. Sorry. We're so derailed. What about hosting? Dan: [00:23:56] I like derailing. Derailing is good sometimes. Jason: [00:24:01] Well, awesome. Well, everyone go check out, um, nobullshit.agency. I love that URL. See, I even remember it. I don't even remember the other one. So, yeah, that's memorable. So go check that out. And um, if you guys want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners, because look… We all have blind spots like we talked about and other people can see them a lot better. I want to invite all of you to go to the digitalagencyelite.com and, uh, see if you qualify to be with the best agency owners all over the world, sharing what's working now. So you guys can grow your agency and scale it a lot faster and create that predictability, that freedom and the money that you want, and really the impact that you can have on the world. So go do that now. And until next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Why_a_Solid_Recurring_Revenue_Stream_is_the_Key_to_Agency_Growth.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 15 September 2021
Brian R. Johnson has served as a leader in online advertising and conversion rate strategy for nearly two decades. He had been offering professional training courses in the Amazon ad space for years before opening his own agency with his partner. Now, Canopy Management is an eight-figure agency and the leading A-to-Z, full service Amazon agency. He joins the podcast to talk about how he built his platform and community before being an agency owner, how he learned the importance of documenting processes and giving new team members access to them from day one, and how he encourages everyone in the team to build each other up. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesAgency Dad: Today's episode is sponsored by Agency Dad. Agency Dad is an accounting solution focused on helping marketing agencies make better decisions based on their financials. Check out agencydad.money/freeaudit to get a phone call with Nate to assess your agency's financial needs and how he can help you. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Create a Platform and Build an Eight-Figure AgencyJason: [00:00:00] What's up everybody? Jason Swenk here. And I have an amazing episode with Brian who runs an eight-figure agency. Um, and we're going to talk about what it's like to run operations for an eight-figure agency. Cause I know a lot of you are trying to get to the summit to get to that next level. And so we're going to dive into this in this episode, so let's get into it. Hey, Brian, welcome to the show. Brian: [00:00:30] Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:31] Yeah, man. I'm excited to have you on. So, uh, tell us briefly who you are and what do you guys do? Brian: [00:00:37] Of course. So my name is Brian R. Johnson. I throw that in there cause there's a lot of Brian Johnson's out in the world. So, um, yeah, Brian Johnson out of, uh, based here in Austin, Texas. I am currently traveling on the West Coast with my family. So I am in the Amazon space, uh, running an agency, actually co-running an agency, uh, that handles, um, multimillion-dollar sellers brands that are brick and mortar brands, as well as, uh, sellers who sell on the Amazon sales channel. And so we handle all their advertising and, uh, quite a bit of their marketing that goes into moving more product for them. So, that's kind of the short version of what I do. Jason: [00:01:24] That's awesome. And so why would you partner with someone else named Brian? It’s got to be so confusing. That's the first question I got for you. Brian: [00:01:34] Yeah. He actually recruited me. Because he tracked me down because I happened to be, um, I was the subject matter expert in, in my subject, you know, in the advertising space, within Amazon. You know, the niche within the niche, right? And, um, he tracked me down a number of years ago and hired me to consult for his own account. And he says, okay, you obviously know a lot more than you think you do. I want to partner with you and work on… We originally came out with, cause I had already created like a community and… software. He’s like okay, next thing you need to do is produce, you know, a professional training course. We did that. And that eventually evolved into the agency because everyone said you guys obviously know what you're doing. You've got a huge success record. Just do it for me. It's like, okay. Obviously that, you know, that kind of begs the need for the agency level of service, which is, as you already know, a huge learning curve by itself. Jason: [00:02:35] Yeah. Well, I love how you guys, I didn't know, um, how you got your start that way. And that's actually a really good… Thinking about a lot of other agencies in the mastermind and people I've worked with. Some of the most successful ones have actually started from a training course. People like want to know how to do something and then they're like, just do it for me. And then it just kind of takes off. Brian: [00:02:59] Well, I got to tell you just that, the… I've created a lot of my own competitors. Jason: [00:03:04] Of course. Me too! Brian: [00:03:06] Because of my training. You know, but I mean, that's just kind of a by-product of, you know, just, just giving to the community and just, you know, sticking your neck out there. And just saying, look, here's, here's what people need to know. If that creates competition, so be it. Jason: [00:03:19] Well, and the thing people have to realize. And it took me… Man, and sometimes I still try to figure it out, right? Like, literally people, you can put out everything that you're doing, but it will never be the same as you. Because we're all unique. We all have our own personalities and we're constantly, always, I know I am, I'm always thinking of new stuff. So even if you copied my old stuff, I'm like, oh crap. That stuff was two years ago. Like… Brian: [00:03:48] Exactly, exactly. Yeah, you got to keep moving. You got to keep innovating. That's something where I've done that before. I did that in the software side, where if I didn't innovate within six months, everybody caught up to me. I was like, oh there, hold on, you know, they're there, they're all your tail lights, you know, constantly. And so if you're not continually moving, continually innovating, then you're gonna get past. Jason: [00:04:10] So let's talk a little bit about the operations, right? So an operations of a bigger agency. You know, let's talk about kind of the structure that you guys have, uh, within the agency. Because, you know, a lot of people listening, you know, some people, or most people trying to crack the eight-figure mark, some people are just trying to crack the million-dollar mark as well, right? So, talk about the different stages that you guys have gone through on an operations front. Because usually most people I bring on, they're always kind of the, the ones doing sales and marketing and that kind of stuff. So I'd love to get your perspective on the ops. Brian: [00:04:48] So, yeah, so, so, um, the, the relationship that my partner and I had was that he was the sales and marketing guy, right? He had all the Russell Brunson experience and all the funnels and the, you know, the, the two commas and all that kind of stuff, right? And he, he obviously had that side of it. I had the technical knowledge. I was a subject matter expert. And so, we kind of blended those two together. Now, just because you've got sales and marketing and you've got expertise, you know, you can fill the roles. Doesn't mean you can execute on those roles. People need to recognize that as like, you need to recognize when you need to step out of your own way. Because you might be holding the company back because you think you can do everything. Which is, in my opinion, foolish. But I know only know that because of hindsight, not because I didn't think the same thing when I was there. Um, and so certainly the first year, um, it was, it was pretty easy because of the reputation I had built up over the years. It was, it was pretty easy, actually, from the sales and marketing standpoint. We just had to let people know that, hey, we were available and we, you know, got out there. That's not a common challenge I think among a lot of agency owners who are like, I have this expertise, but nobody knows who I am. Because they didn't spend years and years and years, um, to become an overnight success. Um, they didn't, they didn't put in the time in order to build up a reputation and a community and an audience and those kinds of things to then translate that into, okay, here, here are my leads. So the part that was the easy part was like we had, we had new clients that were coming in. The problem we had was we didn't have everything pulled out of my head as far as the processes. As far as like here's the checklist, here's how somebody, I can hand it off to a team of people. Um, and they can just execute and they can execute consistently, okay? So is that consistent execution of a laid out plan wasn't there. And so we constantly, we stumbled. We, you know, we hit our face on the wall, you know what I mean, whatever analogy you want to use on this. It was a, it was a struggle. Caused a lot of pain. It caused a lot of tension between my partner and I, and so, um… Well, I recognize that like, first of all, I had to get some kind of documentation. I was trying to, you know… In my head, I had, okay, I can solve a hundred percent of all problems on Amazon when it comes to advertising. But really what the agency team needed was, you need, they need like 50% of that, Brian. You need to get that documented. And you're the only one who has that knowledge. And so once I got that first, first iteration, I guess, of the, the process, the documentation, the checklist out, then they looked at it and say, well, can we do it this way better? It's like, then they start innovating on their own because now they have control and you kind of like… You know, for me, I had to let go of the, the, I guess the feeling that, that I wanted to say, no, no, no, we can do all these other things. And it wasn't until we acquired another agency, brought in somebody who had a lot more experience on the operation side and said, okay, we're going to actually have you do run operations. That's when we made a huge shift between, uh, between here's all of the knowledge that we can do. Here's all the things we could do, versus here's all the things we need to do in order to run profitably as an agency and consistently as an agency, because that's what our clients expect of us. Jason: [00:08:26] Yeah. You know, I see so many times, you know, people for the longest time they go in, like, I'm glad you explained it and be like, look, I can just do it. Like I can solve anything, just give it to me. And you pull it back from people. And you're really crippling them. Like you're giving like huge crutch that if you take away, they're screwed. But I love how you put it and go if I could just get them 50% there. It's kind of what I call like, and also learn, I'm not delegating tasks, I'm delegating outcomes. And like when you learn that, that is so freeing, because I love the story that you were like, hey, I gave him 50% and then they were like, well, let me innovate on top of this to make it better. And then the, and then how much pressure did that take off your shoulders? Brian: [00:09:13] Oh, it was good because, because I was in a state of, you know, full on just overwhelm. You know, where you wake up and you're kind of like, you wake up panicked, like, oh, what do I need to do today? It's like, oh, you know, I mean, there was conversations where I had, um… Jason: [00:09:26] Did you have a full head of hair like me before? Brian: [00:09:34] Yes. Yeah, unfortunately, that was, uh, yeah. That, that was gone long time ago. Yeah, the um… Yeah, it caused a lot of stress, uh, for sure. Um, you know, of course that kind of stuff always translates back to your family. Sometimes as entrepreneurs, we don't even recognize that. And we, we do need to, uh, because it creates it, echo creates an echo stress and echo attention from your family. And that's exactly not what any of us want, but I think it's a by-product of trying to take on too much, trying to not hand the reins off. Mostly because I had enough ego there, I was like, well, I'm the one who knows all these things. And what it took me… it probably took me a good year and a half before it finally sunk in. Like that long. Is we don't need your a hundred percent of knowledge, Brian. We need your 50% of what's executable. You know, and consistently and applies to everybody, not, not all these fringe examples of, uh, here's an exception, here's the advanced tactic and all this kind of stuff. It's like, that's all great and everything. We'll pull you in when we need, we need that. But to run the agency, you got to get that you got it's Pareto, it's even 20%, you know, of that. You know, is what we need in order to, uh, have a functioning agency that doesn't just burn through clients and staff. Jason: [00:11:03] So what was the, what was the mindset shift? Because I remember when I transitioned from an owner to, you know, the CEO, there was a huge… Like for a while, I was depressed. Because I was like, all right, I'm not needed anymore. Like, um… And I did have an ego back then. Uh, and I was like, no, I know more than everybody, which is the dumbest thing. Like, literally, after I learned what I learned, I was like, man, I want to be the dumbest person in the room. Brian: [00:11:38] Yeah. Well, and we think that we, it was like, oh, well, I'm so clever. I'm going to hire people smarter than me. But ultimately if you're the one who came in with the knowledge came in with the experience, the tendency, uh, certainly I experienced the same thing as, as you and many others, is we still have a certain amount of control. We're just like, I'm not a controlling, well, yeah, you kind of are, you know, when it comes down to it because this is your baby. This is your, your, your expertise. And if somebody comes in or a team comes in and says, hey, we could execute on this better than what you taught us, you’re kind of like wait, what that's not possible, you know? And it's like, it took me the first two years to finally step back. When I finally actually stepped back and said, okay, I'm going to completely let go of… Like, one of the things I did recently, um, late last year is I completely stepped away from the software that I had invented years ago for this space. And that was extremely difficult because that was my baby, you know? Um, and so while I still have plenty of value to the team and to clients and to, you know, audience. As far as, hey, here's the latest tactic than, you know, the, the advanced tactic, here's the exception. You know, also I can step in and do coaching at that point. But I am not the thought leader within the, I might be a thought leader within the community, but I'm not necessarily a thought leader within the agency. And that's exactly what we should get to. Because if you're that one person that gets hit by a bus and the whole agency fails, that's your fault. That is your fault because you let it happen. And at this point, like I could disappear and honestly this agency will continue to grow and succeed. Because of the teams that we have in place because of the knowledge base that we have in place. Um, and the pool of experience and the, and the level of collaboration within the, the culture of our, of our agency is very important. Jason: [00:13:44] As an agency owner, it's hard to know when you have to make those big decisions. And I remember needing advice for thinking like hiring or firing or reinvesting and, you know, when can I take distributions without hurting the agency? You know, we're excellent marketers. But when it comes to agency finances like bookkeeping, forecasting, or really organizing, you know, our financial data, most of us are really kind of a little lost. And that's why my friend Nate created Agency Dad specifically to solve these exact problems. You know, at Agency Dad they help agency owners handle the financial part of their agency so they can focus on what they're really good at. Nate has spent years learning the ins and outs of agency business. He understands everything from how to structure your books, to improving the billing process and really managing your financial efficiencies. Agency Dad will show you how to use your financial data to make the key decisions. From making your agency more successful and most importantly, more profitable. If you want to know how your agency finances stack up to the rest of the industry, Agency Dad can tell you that you know how to do that. A lot of my listeners have already gotten their free audit from Agency Dad. And if you haven't yet, go to agencydad.money/freeaudit before August 30th and get your free financial metrics audit. Also just for smart agency listeners, find out how to get your first month of bookkeeping or dashboarding and consulting for free. It's time to clean up your agency finances and listen to dad. Go to agencydad.money/freeaudit. That's agencydad.money/freeaudit. Well, you mentioned something important there too. You, your role really kind of shifted to from, uh, you know, coaching and, and really kind of coaching the team. And then as, as I found that we stepped into that, well, now you're not as emotionally attached to a lot of the decisions that they may have. Where then you can actually help them out a lot more. Whether, you know, being from when you were coding, I used to be the world's worst coder, just cause I outsourced everything in college, right? So, but, but that's why I could lead development teams because I wasn't emotionally attached because I didn't care about the syntax. Like literally I was like, I just understand the logic that needs to happen. Brian: [00:16:19] You could design it. You saw, you saw the direction it needed to go, but it's like, yeah. Don't make the code, because I'm just going to slow you down.
Jason: [00:16:26] Oh yeah. I'm like, there was no semi-colon there. Like I used to have people sitting over my shoulder and be like…They would yell at me. I'm like, yeah. I'm like, I don't give a shit about your stupid semicolon. You hire some joker that wants to put the damn semi-colon there. I don't give a shit. I would get so mad. And that's when I, you know, we voluntarily, uh, or maybe forced out Arthur Anderson, uh, to start this. So, but, uh, all good. What…? On let's, let's switch to kind of the team, like a building a team around you, right? You talked about, uh, going through a lot of people, right? Probably because you were maxing them out. Um, and we talked about, you know, that 50%. What other things did you do and what type of people… Was there a different type of people that you look for as well? Brian: [00:17:21] Well, so the, the. And initially it wasn't a case of like, we had a lot of, uh, we, it wasn't like we had a lot of turnover as far as our staff, we had a lot of people who were stuck with us for a long time. It was more a case of, you know, the client turnover and that creates stress, you know? Um, but ultimately there was a couple of things. One is, again, the training that I put out there trained not only some competitors, but also some of my best employees as well. You know, and so they had started their own practice where they applied it to their own business. And so they already knew of me. So when they saw that we were hiring… that seems even better because now I can actually get in with the team that I have respect for. And that's the best way to interview. You're not going to tell. Yeah. You know, it's like, you know, they could be. You know, they could be a fan of whatever, you know, we've, we've taught in the past or whatever, but really it's like, what, at what value can you add? What experience do you have coming in? Um, and we continue to get that to, to the, you know, to this day. We have people that we have to turn away and say, okay, get a little bit more experienced before you come in. Because our bar is pretty high. But that also helps us to hire smarter people than us. You know, people who have got their own ideas of their own experience executing on, uh, on my training and saying, hey, I'm going to do something a little different. That’s totally cool you know, they don't have to conform to everything because I want them to contribute to a growing innovating team, a team and culture. Rather than, you know, cause otherwise I would just hire a bunch of, you know, VAs that were task-based out of the Philippines or something. And then just say like, okay, they're going to do it, but I have to manage each and every one of them. I don't need that. I don't want that. Don't want to have to manage every single person. I want to have people who manage their own teams. And within that team, they've got a culture of collaboration and support and innovation and they get the job done and then they, then, then we celebrate their success every single day, every single week. They charge themselves, you know, I don't need to be constantly propping them up. That is a drain on me. And that's something that, you know, once we have, um, I'm not sure what, what our, uh, what our total headcount is at the moment. I want to say it's probably north of 60, probably. Um, but you know, it started out where we were just hiring people who were specialized in here's the service. Here's the first service we provide and we started building out teams like that. Um, and we had a very low employee-to-client ratio starting out. And part of that was like, oh, we're, you know, we're boutique. And, you know, we were very specialized and we're expensive and that kind of stuff. That was all great and everything until you got to the point where like, okay, we can't grow. We can't scale because we can't find the people that we need because all these other competitors that we created or, or popped up in the environment, they're also out there recruiting, you know? And so then you start having a knowledge glut in your training, you know? So that's when you have to really refine your training to make sure that each employee has access right from day one of the onboarding and they can shadow somebody and they can learn, how do we do things? Where do I get the information? So that they're not sitting around on their hands going, like, I don't know who to ask or where to go. You might as well just, just shoot them and send them out the door, you know? Cause they're gone if that's the case. Jason: [00:20:43] Yeah. I'd love too that, and it sounds like you have your employees go through the ones that haven't started for. Like, I love how you recruit from the training course. That's brilliant. That's worked for a lot of my clients in the past. They were like, we just take the best. And we’re like, you want, you want to, like, you want to do this, but you don't want to do it on your own. Like, we'll sell everything. So that's brilliant. But do you also, and I also like how you have, it's a training program for them to follow the process of going through it. Um, talk, lastly, let's talk about… What is the kind of the requirement for building bringing in people that will lead their own team? I think some people listening are struggling with that rather than going, like you were saying, hire in the Philippines. Brian: [00:21:33] Right. Well, I mean, you know, we looked at, we look at other agencies not for their book of business, not for the clients or the revenue that they have, but the people they have. And so we, that's the acqui-hire model, you know, where you basically are looking for, like, what kind of talent do you have in your company that is worth us investing in or acquiring? And so I think that was where I, one of the early best decisions we made. Is we picked up, um, an agency that, um… Like I said eventually became our director of operations and then eventually our COO. Um, you know, because the owner of that agency had so much, they weren't sales and marketing. They did it, but theirs, their, their, their best skillset, their best talent was everything has got to be a process. It doesn't exist unless it's in a process. And then everything needs to be compared against what, how, what does that provide as far as a, a profit margin, you know, or a revenue per employee, and what's the efficiency of it. You've got to have somebody who looks at it from an engineering mindset like that. But can look at it along with the numbers, with the financing to say, this is correct. This is not correct. We need to change something here. And constantly just be, um, the quite aggressive. You can't have somebody who's running operations. Who's a passive like, hey, I'm a team player. Like, is that? No, no, you need a driver. You need somebody who knows how to, like, how do we make this into a machine? Um, let somebody else worry about sales and marketing and HR and, you know, whatever. Jason: [00:23:11] Yeah, I love it. I love that you, uh, that they said, uh, or that you said, uh, it doesn't exist unless it's kind of written down. Like I remember one guest was saying, um, we didn't do it unless we communicated it several times to the client. Right? It's kind of that same mentality. Uh, you know, I love it. Um, well, Brian, this has all been amazing. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Brian: [00:23:38] You know, there was two things that we, I do. Yeah. There's, there's two things that we do with than our agency that, um, I think that give us an advantage. One of them is, um, uh, what we call a daily huddle, which is basically like a, like, like a 10 to 15 minute call with all hands on a zoom call. We literally have everybody on a zoom call for like 10 minutes, 10, 15 minutes every morning. And we don't get into the business. We basically say like, Hey, who had a win yesterday? You know, and people go around like half a dozen people will say, hey I had this win and that win and whatever. Um, and then we say, okay, are there any critical issues that everybody needs to know about? Nope. All right. Who got caught being awesome? You know, that's something I learned from, uh, from a CEO coach. You know, who got caught being awesome? They shout each other out to build each other up and say, this person helped me help me succeed yesterday or last week, this week or something like that. And, uh, you know, every single time we do that, every single weekday. And we, we leave and we're charged up and people feel good and people look forward to the calls. It's not a drag on them because they know it's like, hey, you know what? I might get shot out. Cause I did some awesome yesterday and I really helped somebody and I get a little kudos. You know, I get a little bump, you know, from, from the group. And everybody gets to see, you know, that there's a collaborative environment. Especially when you've got new people who come in and their first week and they see that. They're like, oh yeah, I landed in the right place. And that, that, that turns out great. Jason: [00:25:06] I love that. You know, I've never. You know, that's kind of what we do on our mastermind calls. And a lot of times what I'll do in my coaching calls, I'll always talk about what's your past wins since we last chatted? Because you have to, you know, a lot of times when the reaching out to a coach or they're coming to their meeting, they want to solve a problem. And they're not in that resourceful stat. They're in that stress state. And when you switch it to something positive, it switches that state to make them more resourceful in order to figure it out. But also too, I love that. Who did, what was it? Who did something awesome for you? Brian: [00:25:42] Who got, yeah. Who got being caught? Who, who got caught being awesome? Jason: [00:25:46] That’s. Oh, I never thought about that. I'm so borrowing that. Brian: [00:25:50] Yeah. We first do it. You know, when we first did it, it felt a little bit cheesy. But you know, we've done it for, uh, you know, at least two years now. It's like, it's expected. You know, and people love it. And on Friday, you know, we usually like try to bump it up and we'll play some funny videos like that. And just get people just excited, you know, like, hey, it's Friday and it's fun, you know? So those kinds of things, um, are, are certainly great. Um, if we have time, I have a second one too, if you'd like. Jason: [00:26:14] Go for it, man. Brian: [00:26:17] So the second one is, um, I will go through and I will talk to, uh, employees that, you know, starting obviously with the people it's like, okay, I don't want to lose this person, right? I want to make sure that they are, you know, firing on all cylinders, pointing the same direction. They're happy and they're, they're fired up to wake up each day and do the job. Um, but one of the, there's a couple of things that I'll ask and that is, you know, what is it, if that energizes you in a day? What tasks do you do each day that give you energy and it builds you up that you're happy about, you're excited about doing? Now on the flip side of that, which ones drain your energy? Which ones do you try to avoid? That kind of stuff. Because there's somebody else on the team that is excited about the tasks that drain you. Shift some things to make sure that every single day you're going, there's going to be an awesome day. This is cool. A lot of, a lot of times, as, as an agency owner, we want to, you know, we look at the money and we think it's like, oh, I need to give people, you know, bump a little bonus, you know, a little more money. It's like, no, reduce the drag on their life so that they're not drained. So they're happy, their family is happy. You know, they feel energized every single day. And you can do that simply by saying, you know what? This particular thing is part of your job description. But if it's not right for you, if somebody else over here is excited about doing that, then let's move it over. And then every, then both of you are happy. Jason: [00:27:45] Yeah. You know, I, I learned that lesson the hard way. I remember when I would bring in project managers, cause I originally used to manage projects, right? And I hated it. Like literally I didn't want to talk to a clients ever. And I'd go to him in the interview process. I'd be like, hey, you're going to sit in this job for about a year and a half. It's going to suck and then I'll move you up. Well, what I realized was some project managers love repetition. And they love the same thing over and over again. And they're like, I just want to stay here. Like, why are you pushing me to the next…? Just be, and I portrayed, like I figured, like everyone's like me, like everybody wants to move up. So I love that you go to them all the time. Like which one you get extreme, a lot of energy, kind of like looking on iPhone battery, right? Which one drains you, you know? Cause I do a… Coming up in the mastermind, I'm going to talk about like auditing your time and really getting rid of those, uh, things that just suck your energy. Because then if you have no energy going into a meeting, like, especially from the top, like, like don't you realize, like if you, if, if you come in and bad mood, your whole team… and it just propagates all the way down. Brian: [00:29:03] It absolutely does. Yeah. I love the idea of time auditing. We've done that a few times and it's one of those things that needs to be done more often. You know, it feels like micromanagement. It's like, no, no, this is not for me. This is for you to know what you're doing. For you to recognize that you spend four hours every day doing something that is painful to you. It's like, that's not correct. Don't continue to do that. Jason: [00:29:27] We had a mastermind member that, uh, always would talk to their employees every week and going, they wouldn't ask the energy level, but they always said every time we chatted, hey, if you ever have anything that you do in the agency that puts you off that I guess they may be said, drains your energy. Like, like, like literally come to me and we'll solve it right away. Because what happens a lot of times with your team, if they're constantly that way, and they don't feel that they can come to you. And you're not constantly saying that, they're going to go get another job. And then if you're trying to save them, it's already too late. Brian: [00:30:05] Yeah. Well, yeah, you could broadcast that out and just say, hey for everybody, um, that's probably a good idea, but ultimately it's the one-on-one conversations is where you get people, to be honest. You know, and they're like going well, there's this one thing, you know, maybe, you know, since nobody else is listening. I'm not going to come to you as I, you you've got an open door policy, but, um, you know, like I still don't feel comfort. I feel, I still feel like you're up on a pedestal somewhere. It's like, no, I don't want to be on a pedestal. I want you to hear as they come to me, but they don't. So go to them. Jason: [00:30:38] Yeah. I love it. Awesome. This has all been amazing. Um, where can, uh, what's the website people go check out the agency and maybe even check out the training too? Brian: [00:30:48] Yeah. Well, so the, uh, focus on the agency I guess, is, um, you know, it's canopymanagement.com. We do focus in on the, uh, the Amazon space, but love to see how, you know, you know, if you kind of want to see as far as like how we lay out, how we present our team and you know, our success stories and that kind of stuff. It's a good little format that we're using that works for us. Uh, yeah. That's canopymanagement.com. Jason: [00:31:13] Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. That was a lot of fun and I learned a lot as well as all of you. So make sure you guys subscribe to the podcast, leave a comment. And if you guys want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners on a consistent basis, I would love for you guys to go check out the Digital Agency Elite. This is the mastermind that we put together. Put the most amazing agencies together that are sharing what's working for them right now. And then be able to see the things that you might not be able to see, um, in your, uh, in your trajectory. So until next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Build_an_Eight-Figure_Agency_by_Training_Your_Competition.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 12 September 2021
Chris Leone was playing drums in Japan trying to figure out his next step in life when a keynote by Gary Vaynerchuk inspired him to enter the agency world. He ended up working an entry-level position in a small agency and worked his way up to being president and CEO of WebStrategies Inc, a multi-million dollar agency that focuses on mid-low funnel, lead generation, SEO, PPC, social advertising, and inbound marketing. Chris sat down with Jason to discuss how he worked his way up from the bottom of the totem pole. He also shares his experience with an agency acquisition just as he was named CEO and how he built a culture of learning. Chris's team is encouraged to speak up and take ownership of their ideas, which goes a long way. 3 Golden Nuggets
Gusto: Today's episode is sponsored by Gusto, an all-in-one people platform for payroll, benefits, HR where you can unify your data. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Head over to gusto.com/agency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Rise to the Top of the Totem Pole By Building a Learning Culture for Your TeamJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here and I have another amazing show where we're going to talk with an agency CEO and also owner who started out at the ground level couple of years ago as an entry-level employee. Worked all the way up to a CEO. And we're going to talk about what they did. How did they become a multi-million dollar agency? Lots of amazing things. And also talking about how they went virtual in the past year. So it's packed, it's packed and let's go ahead and get into it. Hey, Chris. Welcome to the show. Chris: [00:00:38] Hey, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:40] Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what you do? Chris: [00:00:44] Yeah. So my name is Chris Leoni. I'm CEO of WebStrategies. We are a digital marketing agency based out of Richmond, Virginia. We focus on kind of mid-low funnel, lead generation stuff, SEO, PPC, social advertising, inbound marketing, that sort of thing. I got about, 30 employees that are located, uh, both in central Virginia and, uh, increasingly scattered throughout the world as we start to shift towards more of a full remote model over here at WebStrategies. Jason: [00:01:15] Awesome. So let's kind of back up to where, when you started with the agency. You know, as probably the low guy on the totem pole, it sounded like, and walk us through how you went from that to CEO. Cause it’s fascinating. Chris: [00:01:29] Yeah, it's been quite a, quite a long journey. So that was, we're going back 13 years here, so 2008. I was actually a year out of school. I was playing drums in Japan in a marching band, as kind of crazy as that sounds, trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. And I stumbled across a keynote that Gary Vaynerchuk was giving. This is 2008. This is like Wine Library days for anybody who follows Gary V. And I was like, yeah, that's what I want to do. Jason: [00:01:55] I remember that. I remember going to see stuff that he did. Chris: [00:01:58] Yeah, I was at, I was at web 2.0 in, in like late 08 when he kind of made his big break onto the scene. But I found him on big.com when that was like the place to go to find interesting things on the internet. And I immediately clicked. I'm like internet marketing is place I want to be. And so I started kind of figuring out what I was going to do and I was interviewing, uh, I set up interviews at like Ogilvy in New York city and a couple other agencies up there. I thought I wanted to be up in New York, do all that kind of thing. But then one of my former neighbors living down the street from me in Central Virginia, come to find out that he started internet marketing company. And so I reached out to him with the plan of talking to him and just as a learning experience and maybe even use it as like practice to go and interview at the big places. But after talking to him, he was like, hey, I want to offer you a job. And he explained it and I'm like this actually sounds really interesting. So I kind of abandoned my original vision of going to New York City and I stayed in Central Virginia, which is not what I had planned to do. And I was like bottom guy on the totem pole. I was really only full-time marketing person at the agency. We were primarily web development back then. And we kind of realized that the recurring revenue model was a really nice one and we wanted to get more into the lead generation side of the equation. So I was the first one coming on, doing that, making like, you know, nothing a year, but it gave me some ownership over the position and what we were doing. And I really had a passion for this kind of work. So as we shifted more towards, uh, digital marketing and, and, you know, retainers with clients, I was always kind of the person there at the top. And the team kind of came out from under, uh, built out from underneath me, I should say. Went up, uh, director of digital marketing and then CMO, COO, president. And eventually CEO with a, with an acquisition kind of sandwiched in there as well. Jason: [00:03:49] That's fascinating. Let's kind of skip ahead to the acquisition, right? Because you were telling me when, when the acquisition happened that's when the owner was like, all right, you're now the CEO of both entities. So we'll just do that. Chris: [00:04:04] Yeah. And, uh, the founder and CEO at the time, he's been a mentor to me and he's never been afraid to throw me into the fire. And I'm the kind of person who thrives in that kind of situation. He very much did that on my first day as kind of being president CEO and it was the day that our two teams met for the first time. So our existing team, and then the team of this company that we had acquired. And as anybody who's been through an acquisition before knows, that first impression that you make on the new team is so critical, right? Cause they're coming. I mean, put yourself in their shoes. You know, a lot of these acquisitions don't work out for several different reasons, right? And one of which is the team, the new team comes in, they look around and they're like, yeah, I don't like this. I'm out. This is, I was maybe already on the fence or I was considering going somewhere else. And they just kind of need that exposure to a new culture, new people to be like, yeah, it's time for a change. So, yeah, those teams coming together in the same room for our quarterly retreat, which is like a full two day immersion thing. Which is already kind of tough enough to manage, especially for an introvert, like me was exceptionally difficult with the teams coming together. But I just kind of kept my mind on the most critical thing at the time, which was, I need to make sure everybody believes that this is the right place to be going forward. Jason: [00:05:23] And so how did you do that? Right? Because I feel that agency owners need to do that on a consistent basis, honestly, right? If you think about it, like, and I'm glad that you had that vision going in, of going, like, this is the main goal, right? This is all that matters. So what were some of the things that you did in order to make sure you kept the right people in the right, you know, on the bus, really? Chris: [00:05:44] Yeah. Yeah. And we were just talking about this before we went live, as well as you know. In an agency, hopefully, you have processes, hopefully you have these things in place so that you're not dependent on any single individual for any of the services that you sell. But nevertheless, I mean, you still need people to do all this work and good people are hard to find. So it's not like we have machines running and we can swap people in and out and the machines keep running. Like you need people to do this stuff that they're critical, right? So to answer your question directly, you know, the first thing that I did was actually kind of a small thing, which is we literally spent like 20 minutes of putting faces up on the screen and having everybody memorize the name of everybody in the company coming in. Because I wanted every person in my company to be referring to people on a first-name basis immediately. And there's so much power in just saying somebody's first name. So, that was like something I thought of at the last minute. Is like, everybody's got to know everyone's name here. And so when they walked in the door immediately shaking hands saying names. And then all of our retreats since are very much built on this. But especially in that particular retreat. It's not necessarily a company strategy stuff or whatever. It's, I want to spend a lot of time. Building trust, having vulnerability with each other. There's so many studies out there that say that teams that are willing to be vulnerable with each other are closer and tend to perform better. And so there was a lot of awareness building, a lot of trust-building in those first meetings so that people could immediately see, hey, this is not a performance culture where we're stepping on each other’s throats. This is a learning culture. This is a place that's psychologically safe to express your thoughts and opinions. And we attack ideas. We don't attack people. And we just really exemplified that in the first two days. So people could see, this is a place where I could be myself. I can be open and I can be honest, and I'm not going to be penalized for that. So I think that set the tone right away and maybe created a sense of relief for some people who are looking for something a little bit different. And, you know, we've just been building on it since then. Jason: [00:07:48] Taking care of your employees has never been more important than right now. And while paydays are great, running payroll is a major pain, calculating taxes, deductions compliance. None of it's easy. Unless of course you have Gusto. Gusto is a simple online payroll and benefits built for your small business. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Plus, with Gustos’ help, you can offer benefits like 401k's, health insurance, workers' comp, and a lot more. And because you're a smart agency masterclass listener, you're going to get three months free once you run your first payroll. Go to gusto.com/agency that's gusto.com/agency for three free months. I like what you said. We attack ideas, not people. And I like that, you know, the vulnerable. When I'm interviewing agency owners for the mastermind, one of the biggest things that I'm looking for is are they vulnerable? And are they transparent. If they can't be transparent with me? Like, I don't want someone coming in thinking they know everything, right? And same thing with employees. I want someone to say, look, I want to learn every day, I want to help people, right? I want to be surrounded by amazing people that inspire me. And especially if all of us have a similar belief, right? Like when I was hiring people, you know, in the agency, I'd be like, here's where the ship is going and here's why we're doing it. And then people believed in that and so they would stick around. And then especially if they could show their vulnerability to the team… I see this with the mastermind members, as soon as they're like to, man, man, I just want to quit. Things are down. I really don't know what to do. And then they're able to get help, then other people can open up and they'll be like, yeah, you know, I actually have that too. Then they can work together on it. And it's almost kind of like, I've never been in, in war. I've never been in the military, but I love watching those things. Like, you'll see the comradely of people when they're in intense situations. And the bond that they create. And I even remember that too, when we're working on really extreme projects, like with tight deadlines when we're in the office, like we still remember that stuff.
Chris: [00:10:23] Right. Well, and, and I wonder too, what the last 14 months have done for teams that really had a buckle down together. When everybody was feeling the pressure of their job. There was an existential threat outside. There was the kids being at home. And there was, we were all kind of going through something pretty heavy together. And I sense that that has created stronger bonds within our teams. I would imagine it's happened in several other places. But just to just go back on that 1.1 more time, I had, so I just finished reading this great book “Think Again” by Adam Grant and I really liked how he framed this, which is there's like two ways of having a discussion. One is you have somebody who immediately becomes a preacher, a prosecutor, or somebody who's politicking for a certain idea. So preaching, prosecuting or politicking, right? That's really trying to impose your idea and your mindset onto somebody else versus more scientific thinking. And the studies that he cites in that book show that leaders who think more as scientists. Here's a theory. Here's our hypothesis. Let's test it. Let's observe and then implement from there, way outperform people who are much more rigid in their thing, right? So going back to attacking the idea, not the person when we attack the person, obviously that starts to become pretty personal. We're really clinging the ego. We're clinging to our set beliefs on something. But when we're looking at the idea and we separate ourselves from that, now we can just say, hey, let's test this. Let's run it. Let's look back what happened. And as long as nobody feels like I'm going to be looked down upon, because my idea didn't pan out. If they don't feel that way, then everybody's continuing to contribute to the next stage in the process. But if somebody feels like they're going down with that ship, that's going to do a lot psychologically to them, morale, everything like that. And you see that in performance cultures especially because everybody is looking for an opportunity to stump on somebody else. And as soon as that campaign didn't work and that idea didn't work, they stump on them. That's a really toxic culture. And so we really, we want to avoid that and be more in a learning culture where we look at ideas where we test ideas, where we give people ownership over ideas. That's another thing that our team really likes. And we see this in the surveys that we run. When somebody comes to me and they say, hey, Chris, I have this idea for this new thing, or there's this new service, or we want to test this thing. I say, go for it. Let's test it. And look at what happens. They get a sense of ownership over that. And they're not afraid if the idea is not going to work out. They like it. Having that sense of ownership and then be able to see if it actually contributes to something in the long run. So yeah, the book is Think Again by Adam Grant and it talks about how we eliminate biases in our own thinking and the openness and the scientific method that could be applied to basically anything. And ultimately how that affects long-term performance. Jason: [00:13:17] Yeah. Well, and too, when you attack the idea, not the person you're taking out emotion out of it. And that really just screws us all up as human beings, if you think about it. Like I tried my damnedest to not make a decision based on emotion, but it's easier said than done. Chris: [00:13:37] Oh, sure. Yeah. Jason: [00:13:38] I probably fail at that 99% of the time. Chris: [00:13:42] But, hey. At least that 0.1% is maybe the awareness that you shouldn't, right? One of the other books that I've been really into lately, cause I'm, don't always read business books is so Eckhart Tolle has a great book, A New Earth that was pretty hot in the last maybe 10 years or so. He talks a lot about identification with form and he explores it from a lot of different angles. But we have too much personal identity attached to our ideas and our opinions on things. And we've seen that no more than in the last 12 months with everything going on, right? So any attack on the idea automatically becomes a personal attack, right? And that's going to bring us all down and it's going to make us a lot more combative and it's going to make us a lot more miserable. So we have to find a way to separate ourselves from our opinions and our ideas. Um, and I think we're going to be a lot happier if we do. Jason: [00:14:30] Yeah. Let's switch a little bit of focus and let's talk about how you guys have gone remote. And how do you keep your team inspired? I won't say motivate because I always tell people if you have to motivate your team, you have the wrong team. Like you should be worrying about de-motivating them. So like, how do you keep people in this going in the same direction? Because you had a physical office, you've gone virtual, and lots of people are doing that. So, you know, how are you going to kind of replace some of that in office culture, going to lunch that kind of? Chris: [00:15:06] Yeah, this is the question of 2021 right now. And we're seeing a lot of opinions on it, but they're just opinions. And, you know, to be honest, if this was a podcast where we were advocating, or you guys were like advocating fully remote. I would be bringing up the ideas of why you might want to consider an office. So I'm not overly committed to any setup here. I'm committed to kind of learning from what we have in the last 12 months and figure out where do we go from here and what's the best thing to do for our team. Jason: [00:15:35] Yeah. Well, what was the decision that made you guys go virtual? Chris: [00:15:39] Okay, so some of it was just timing. We had an office and the lease was expiring in end of April, 2021. And I closed our office in March of 2020. So people were not coming in. And then at some point in the summer, I said, if you want to go and you can just communicate so we don't have too many people in there at once. But people really were not going into it. So I was thinking, all right, why rea… I didn't want to stay in that space anyway, so I knew that we were going to let it go. But why sign onto something in March of 2021 when people still can't go into the office or still don't want to go into the office. So part of it was timing to say, hey, let's let it go. Let's reinvest what we're saving from that into the team with benefits and people and the like, and I could talk about that if you'd like. Then wait to see what happens and how does the team adapt to being fully remote. And by the way, this is something that they overwhelmingly said they wanted to do. And two, you know, what happens to the commercial real estate market? Because I think anyone can piece together it's, you know, rent is going to become a lot more affordable. So if we feel the need to go back, that's something that we're going to have to learn over several months. Then let's kind of take advantage of the market situation at that time and get something that could be even better for us than I could find right now that would be a lot more expensive. So that was the original impetus to going fully remote, at least at this point in time. Jason: [00:17:07] And so how has it been going? Like, is there anything that you would change? Chris: [00:17:12] I mean, there's certainly going to be things that I change based off of what we learn as we go, right? At this point, I can't say that there's like, oh, I wish I could have that back. I mean, we gave away our office furniture. Like we raffled it off just out of a hat, gave it to people, you know, we gave them a thousand dollar home office allowance, which at this point, like is the equivalent of like three years of rent. So it's to anybody saying this is like a cost-saving move, it ain't. Trust me. It's not. So, no, I wouldn’t take anything back. It's just kind of learn and adjust and get better. The next decision you have to make. Jason: [00:17:50] Very cool. Awesome. Well, this has been amazing, Chris. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Chris: [00:17:58] You know, the one thing I say, Jason, at this point is we all have to be in learning mode right now. Because I'm sure there's a lot of people out there looking at how all 2020 went and how 2021 has gone so far and probably believe this is what's best and this is what we should do from here. But all the remote work that we experienced in 2020 and into 2021 was not happening in a normal setup for anyone, right? There was a lot of pressures, external pressures and lack of social interaction that we had just with our friends and family. So I don't know that we can look at everything proceeding, everything, opening back up and say, hey, we were better that way. Or we were not better that way. We just have to be in learning mode and accept that the rest of 2021 and going into 2022 is going to be maybe the real test of how well remote work can really perform for your team. There's no right answer for everybody here. Talk to your team, communicate, observe, do all the things a good leader has to do to make sure that the people are coming first. But you're also taking care of the company so that you can continue to employ your people. And then, you know, make the right decisions from there forward. Jason: [00:19:08] Yeah. I love it. And what's the website. People can go and check out the agency? Chris: [00:19:13] Yeah. Yeah. We're WebStrategies Inc, I N C, webstrategiesinc.com. Jason: [00:19:18] Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Chris, for coming on the show and make sure you guys all go check out their agency website. And if you guys enjoyed this episode, and you want to be around people that are transparent, sharing, growing open to new ideas, having a lot of fun. I want to invite all of you to go to digitalagencyelite.com and see if you qualify for this exclusive mastermind. And if you do, we'll actually have a conversation. And, uh, talk a little bit more and make sure you're the right fit for it. But, uh, it's an amazing group of individuals that run agencies and, uh, we'd love to invite all of you to go check it out, go to digitalagencyelite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Build_the_Best_Agency_Culture_by_Attacking_Ideas_Not_People.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 8 September 2021
After working on his own using his experience in the agency world, Chris started specializing in the project management side of the business. Eventually, he decided to form Genius Digital Marketing with a partner and they have been growing ever since. Now, they work with growth-focused companies to accelerate their digital marketing strategies by operating results-driven campaigns. He talks a bit about how to make the jump from being a freelancer to having his own agency, how breaking sales and breaking operations is a normal part of growth, and how sales fix everything. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesAgency Dad: Today's episode is sponsored by Agency Dad. Agency Dad is an accounting solution focused on helping marketing agencies make better decisions based on their financials. Check out agencydad.money/freeaudit to get a phone call with Nate to assess your agency's financial needs and how he can help you. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Keep Growing While Sales Bring New OpportunitiesJason: [00:00:00] What's up, everybody? Jason Swenk here and I got another exciting episode about how an agency owner went from freelancer to bringing on a partner to a thriving agency. So it's a really good episode and I hope you enjoy it. Hey Chris, welcome to the show. Chris: [00:00:26] Hey, Jason. How's it going, man? Jason: [00:00:27] Yeah, man. Excited to have you on, um, and, uh, talk about, you know, your journey as a freelancer to agency owner, to, you know, successful agency owner. So tell us a little bit about who you are and what do you do? Chris: [00:00:41] Yeah, sure. So, uh, my name's Chris. I work out of, uh, our office here in, uh, the Dallas area. And, uh, I didn't always live here, actually. I just moved here six months ago. And the reason I moved here was, is for this business and for this partnership. I had been living in Las Vegas before that it's kind of where I'm from and where I grew up. But, uh, Aaron and I, Aaron's my business partner, we formed an agency about a year and a half ago. And have been working on the agency this whole time, you know, kind of forming the partnership, getting all the business stuff going, and earning clients and new business. And, uh, eventually it got to the point where we were like, hey, you know, let's actually own a building. Actually, we bought a building and let's run our, our office out of the Dallas area. That's where he lives, where his family's at. And I moved down here. So, um, yeah, that was about, you know, like I said, about six months ago and you know, we've been, we've been doing pretty good work since then. So it's exciting times, you know, moving around doing different stuff and trying to grow the agency and, and deal with all those hurdles and, and having fun while doing it. Jason: [00:01:46] Yep. What, uh…? Kind of take us back kind of… what made you think about transitioning? Cause there's, you know, we have, uh, quite a bit of probably, I would guess, you know, freelancers that listen to the show that want to go into creating an agency one day. Um, where were you at? Like in like going well, let's, let's make this legit. Let's, you know, let's kind of like, let's start hiring people. It's like bring on a partner. Where were you at? Chris: [00:02:18] Yeah, sure. Great, great question. Um, you know, we were… Well, I was, recently out of the agency world. I had worked for a couple of different marketing agencies, a few different people. And realized that, you know, I could do all this stuff on my own and, you know, get to keep all the money as opposed to splitting it with somebody else or only getting paid a commission or something like that. So I, I did, I did freelance for a couple of years after, uh, my agency world. You know, it got to the point where you kind of start to feel like you've niched up a little bit. You have a few little bits of expertise and mine was kind of the project management side of the equation. I was really good at coordinating efforts. I was really good at finding, you know, subcontractors to do certain bits of work. Uh, Aaron had actually been one of those people. So I had a client that needed, you know, really expert level paid search management. And that was not me. Um, I've gotten better as a result of working with Aaron, but, uh, that was not me. So I actually contracted him and he does a fantastic job. And I was like hey, man, I have other projects that I need help with. You should totally check these out. And we, uh, kind of just kept working together. And he did the same for me. So it was like, hey, you know, I have a few projects where coordination is really needed. Uh, you know, why don't you hop over here? And we started communicating with each other's clients. It kind of happened, you know, by osmosis. But the problem we were running into is scale. You can only do so much as an individual and you want to try to make more money and you want to try and scale and have more freedoms and the more and more we talked, you know, our answer to that scale problem was hey, why don't we work together? You know, we'll both kind of champion these different sides of the business. And, you know, if we need to subcontract that more, we will. But then, you know, we have a brand we can put behind, it will look more official. We'll have a couple of people, maybe we'll spin up a website and we'll earn more business that way just by kind of pretending to be an agency, so to speak. And then it became, hey, this is actually working. You know, if people are buying into what we're doing, hey, we need to hire someone. Let's do that. And then when you start hiring people, you actually have to legit, you have to file with the state and, and all that stuff. So, uh, we went down that road and, um, it's been working. So it's just been kind of a road of, hey, if it keeps working, let's keep doing it. Jason: [00:04:31] What's been like, if you could look back at last year, right? Like as you guys were getting going and that kind of stuff, what was the main focus of starting the agency that you felt like you had to kind of get over? Chris: [00:04:49] Um, I mean the main focus, you know, big thing we've had hurdles with is like delegation. You know, feeling that you don't have to do everything and, you know, trying to be okay with that. So, you know, getting tasks out, trusting that, you know, there's somebody else that can do some of that stuff. Uh, really operational, you know, internal things are challenging. Because you have a relationship with a client. And if you come from the freelance world, you're everything to that person. You're the relationship. You're the fulfillment, you know, you're the invoicing person, you know, you're, you're everything with that. And it's almost like your, your children or your pets or something like that and dealing with. So, trying to step away from that and focus on like, you know, what your true expertise is inside of the team is, is a challenging bit. I think it's, it's oftentimes overlooked a little bit. But once you break through that, then, you know, scale comes a lot more easy because now you're doing your thing and other team members are doing other things. And, uh, that was a big part of it. Also, you know, earning business was, uh, was a tricky thing too. Um, because you know, we're lean, right? So you don't have a ton of money to be advertising and, uh, you have to try to really leverage your relationships and try to make that stuff work. I mean, I can't tell you how many Upwork, uh, you know, proposals I've put out in my lifetime. It's, it's an ungodly amount and same with Aaron that you grind up, you earn new business, you earn your relationships and then those roll into other relationships. Then you, you know, be part of cool groups like, you know, uh, the one we're a part of where you learn even more tricks and tactics and strategies, which is cool. Jason: [00:06:32] As an agency owner, it's hard to know when you have to make those big decisions. And I remember needing advice for thinking like hiring or firing or reinvesting. And, you know, when can I take distributions without hurting the agency? You know, we're excellent marketers, but when it comes to agency finances like bookkeeping, forecasting, or really organizing, you know, our financials data, most of us are really kind of a little lost. And that's why my friend Nate created Agency Dad specifically to solve these exact problems. You know, at Agency Dad, they help agency owners handle the financial part of their agency so they can focus on what they're really good at. Nate has spent years learning the ins and outs of agency business. He understands everything from how to structure your books, to improving the billing process and really managing your financial efficiencies. Agency Dad will show you how to use your financial data to make the key decisions. You know, from making your agency more successful and most importantly, more profitable. If you want to know how your agency finances stack up to the rest of the industry, Agency Dad can tell you, you know, how to do that. A lot of my listeners have already gotten their free audit from Agency Dad. And if you haven't yet, go to agencydad.money/freeaudit before August 30th and get your free financial metrics audit. Also, just for smart agency listeners, find out how to get your first month of bookkeeping or dashboarding and consulting for free. It's time to clean up your agency, finances and listen to dad. Go to agencydad.money/freeaudit. That's agencydad.money/freeaudit. Yeah, I look at it as kind of, as you're starting the agency, that really the main focal point is. Because you have to get to a point where you can actually afford people a lot of times. And I look at it as you need to focus entirely on lead gen and converting sales. Then I look at, you know, then, then you get to a point where… and, and tell me if you guys have gone through this, where now marketing and the lead gen or the, I like to kind of say, especially in the very beginning, you're creating this automated lead generation, right? You have this pipeline coming to you. And then you have to start going, man, I can't handle all these sales calls. I can't handle, you know, the follow-up. You know, like literally marketing's breaking sales. And, and I, I find like, as you kind of keep going up, you know… marketing's job is to break sales. And then sales’ jobs is to break operations. Then your job as like the owner is really to kind of fix the stuff that the teams are breaking constantly. And it's a constant like, boom, boom, boom, boom. Because as you just keep going up and up, you know, what got you, there is not going to, you know, get you to, to the next part. Have you guys found that yet?
Chris: [00:09:39] Yeah. So, you know, it's something we, we deal with constantly, you know. You have to have the pipe running and you have to have, uh, new opportunities coming through. And, you know, I was in sales for a long time and sales really do fix everything. It's kind of the motto is if you can just get more sales then you can afford more people and you can afford to potentially lose something. And you never really want to talk about losing a client. But, you know, it's always a fact of, uh, running an agency and being in the industry is that, you know, you, you lose clients and it hurts when you don't have a pipe coming, you know, feeding new opportunity. It hurts worse. So if you can have sales coming in and the potential loss, because maybe something wasn't fully optimized, somebody didn't have the time to move to something or, you know, you know, something, the relationship just didn't work out. Or you have a toxic relationship that you've been hanging on to because you need it. Now you have the confidence to say, well, you know, I don't have to spend my time there. I can, I have confidence in the pipe. And, uh, that's like really the key. So we're actively in that process right now and trying to optimize the funnel. A lot of our growth has been because of our relationships and our ability to kind of grow those clients and do more work in those areas or get referrals. Uh, you know, so the pipe now. Like a lot of my focus actually is on that right now. So we have things we're going to try to bring those in and it's working, you know, and sales will fix everything and then we'll solve our, our next big bubble of, of growth. Jason: [00:11:07] Yeah. Yeah. The, and the, the big thing I find is pricing. And so a lot of times you go, well, let's just do more sales. But we don't think about raising the prices and increasing the pricing and looking at going, well, if we bring on more sales, we're going to have to bring on more levels, more people. And so they bring on more people, but they didn't raise their price. And then at the end of the year, you look back and you're like, holy cow, I made less than I did last year. And we actually were. Chris: [00:11:40] You did more work. Jason: [00:11:42] Yeah. We were bigger, we did more work. Like… I'm so confused. And it really comes, you know, to the pricing and, and that's one of the easiest things. I find that when agencies really can kind of get from one level to the next level. I look at it as kind of like climbing a mountain, right? Like you got base camp, and then you get like the climbing level, and then you get to the crux, and then you get to the crust. And then the summit. You know, most people kind of, as they're building and climbing, they're not laying the right foundation or putting kind of the safety nets on, in order to hold you up because, you know. It just like, I remember I went through this many times and maybe you're going through this now. It seems like, were like, you'll self-sabotage yourself in sales because, you know, uh, and this is why you need to bring on a salesperson. Because they don't care about operations. They just they're like, I just want to sell. But you're, psychologically as the owner of the agencies actually selling you're going, holy cow, I don't know, like I don't want to break operations. But it's a natural progression. You've got like when you're working out, you're constantly breaking down the muscle in order for it to rebuild. And you know, in the very beginning, I look at turnover as a good thing because your original clients are not going to be your, you know, probably the clients for you in the next couple years. Do you see that as well? Chris: [00:13:08] Yeah, you kind of have to run before you walk in a sense, you know, bring people on and break operations. I think that's a great way to put it, uh, cause you, you have to force yourself into that position. Even though, you know, it's not going to be comfortable. And it goes back to the pipe too, is having confidence that there's going to be another opportunity. And I think that relates to the sales thing as well is, is that you can be confident in the pricing and the higher pricing you need to be charged. Even if that person says, no, you're confident you have another opportunity. That's going to happen soon so that you can afford to be picky and say, look, but this is what we charge. And by the way, when you have more team members in your, your, you know, having a more robust team, you're doing better work, you're providing a better service. So you should charge more for that service. It's not just you individually. And hopefully, by this point, you've learned a lot and you've become, you know, an expert in your field. You should be charging more for that because it's, it's value. And that's one of the, that's another really big hurdle we've faced over our start here is pricing. What we were charging a year ago for services is not even close to what we're charging now. I mean, we joke about all the time. If you remember, when we used to just be happy for like 500 bucks a month? You know, for a client now, it's like no way we would even, we wouldn't even be in the room to talk to that person for that much. It's, you know, it's, it's not really an ego thing as much of it as like a recognizing that you really do have value and you really do provide a great service. And having confidence in that. Jason: [00:14:36] That's awesome. This has all been amazing. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Chris: [00:14:44] Um, no. I would just say, you know, keep at it, you know. If you are one of those freelancers that's trying to grind up, you know. There is light at the end of the tunnel and there are plenty of niches out there for you to find something to work on. There’s lots of problems to solve. So keep at it. Uh, keep listening to Jason because he's full of great info. Jason: [00:15:01] Aww, thanks so much for coming on the show. What's the website people can go and check the agency out? Chris: [00:15:07] Yeah. So we're Genius Digital Marketing. The website is geniusdm.com. Jason: [00:15:13] Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. You guys, uh, you provided tons of value to, uh, you know, our listeners. If you guys enjoyed this episode and you really want to kind of step up your game in your agency and really understand what exactly you need to focus on, what are the systems in place? Or what are the systems that you need to actually build in your agency to actually get to the next level and to get underway where the whole business is not depending on you. My whole goal is for you not to be, you know, in the business. I want you to work on the business and if that's the case, I want you guys to check out the agency playbook. So go to jasonswenk.com/playbook. Request the invite to it and we'll break down the eight systems for you to go check out. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: 01_How_to_Grow_Your_Agency_By_Filling_Your_Sales_Pipeline.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 5 September 2021
Have you had a few failures in the agency world? Everyone is afraid of failure. But when you change perspective and treat it like a lesson instead of a defeat. That's the lesson from today's guest, Frank Kern, a well-known marketing consultant and agency owner who has ventured to start several agencies over the years. In this episode, Frank discusses some of his failures from these past businesses, the lessons learned, and what he would do differently. He offers valuable advice for anyone starting a digital marketing agency. He offers an honest and upfront take on every stumble, from starting in the advertising world without really knowing the rules, not listening to his own advice, and taking on every client, even the bad ones.
YOUTUBE AUDIO LINK Sponsors and ResourcesWix: Today's episode is sponsored by the Wix Partner Program. Being a Wix Partner is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Don't Be Afraid to Start Over in the Agency World, Just Like Frank KernJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here, and I have another amazing guest, Frank Kern. If you guys haven't heard of, uh, he is amazing. I've learned so much from him over the years on writing copy and marketing and direct response. Kind of the godfather of direct response marketing. A lot of you guys know Frank Kern and he's done a bunch of agencies in the past, so we're going to talk about his experience with marketing and his agency. Let's go ahead and get into the show. What’s up, Frank? How's it going? Frank: [00:00:40] Dude, I was just watching the intro roll. I love the just two seconds of pensive staring off into the distance. Jason: [00:00:47] Well, I don't want to lose anybody's attention. Especially people with ADD like us. So, you know, you got try to keep them there. Frank: [00:00:55] I didn't tell you this pre-interview. So if I don't make any sense today it’s because I have dyslexia and ADD and I woke up at 12:52 and… No, or 12 something, and my dyslexia… I mean, I have the biggest font size ever on my watch. And I thought it was, I thought it said 4:52. So I took my ADD meds, which I keep right beside the bed. And they kicked in. I've been awake since 2:00 AM I’m just like… so stupid right now. Jason: [00:01:24] There you go. Well, that makes it fun for a podcast. Frank: [00:01:28] Yeah, that's my disclaimer. Jason: [00:01:30] Awesome. Well, um, for the people that have lived under a rock for a little bit… Tell us kind of a little bit of your origin story about how and why you've wanted to create an agency over the past couple of years. Frank: [00:01:45] Uh, okay. I'll be mercifully brief because this isn't even remotely interesting for anybody. Um, sold credit card machines door to door. Hated it, very bad at it. Um, Googled or there wasn't Google back then, it was 1999. Did a search for how to sell credit card machines on the internet cause I didn't wanna have to talk to people. They were all mean to me because I was going door to door and interrupting their, uh, place of business. Discovered direct response marketing and advertising that way and started selling courses. Sold one that got me in trouble with the government. Um, it's important to learn the rules of advertising if you want to do advertising. I did not learn them, but, uh, after that I did. And um, then, sold stuff about dog training and kind of cut my teeth on that and sold a lot of marketing-related information. And always felt like… It's going to sound really weird, but I always felt like it didn't count, you know? Like that's… to use my, uh, my late grandfather’s term it’s Mickey mouse BS. And I was like, I need to do it for real. I need to actually build campaigns and do stuff with real businesses. So it was for that reason and because I absolutely love advertising and I get to hit refresh on other people's stats besides my own. Um, that's why I did it. Jason: [00:03:00] Yeah. Well, um, you, uh, like I told you a couple of years ago, you kn… I found you and Jeff Walker and a couple other people through a Tony Robbins event I went, where they sent out the, I guess the money masters or something. And that's right when I was coming off selling the agency and I’d never heard of direct response at all. And I was like, wow, if I could put this together with what I know here… I was like, man, this could be a pretty good machine. Uh, so I want to thank you for, for, for doing what you've done over the years. And, and, uh, you've been… Someone that has really figured out how to make someone kind of respond to you. You know, especially in the marketing front. What what's kind of like, how did you go about figuring that out? Or was that just kind of intuition? Like I know you were saying, well, I just hated getting kicked out of strip joints and all these kinds of restaurants I was going into. I needed to get them to come to me. You know, how did you figured it out? Frank: [00:04:05] Well, I started by making horribly egregious unsubstantiated claims in advertising because that's what I responded to. And of course, I didn't realize there were things like regulatory bodies. This is again in 1999. And then I learned that you really can't do that and it's frowned upon. Um, so I wanted to see, well, what, what if you don't do that at all? And, um, I kind of stumbled over the whole philosophy of results in advance, which is the easiest way to convince somebody you can help them is to actually help them in advance of asking for their business. So that's always been my big secret, you know, and it was just doing that. Jason: [00:04:43] Yeah. And so when, when you started the first agency, what were some of the challenges that you experienced? Uh, and how did you overcome them? Frank: [00:04:57] Dude, so the first one… I think this is number four for me. We've got it right now, finally. But I've been attempting this since 2010, all right? So we're 12 years into your boy, Frankie, trying to make, trying to work 30 times harder for way less money, basically. When you, I know, but I like it. I can't help it, you know, and I would rather do this and make less money than do the other stuff. I don't know why. But anyway, the first one was a partnership between my cousin, Trey Smith and I and Jordan "Wolf of Wall Street" Belfort. And we had a plan, Trey and I mainly had this plan, which was we would create lead gen pages for home services companies and then manage their Google PPC accounts. We would charge a flat fee and then like, you know, let's say it was 600 bucks a month or something. And we'd spend 400 bucks on traffic and we'd keep the $200 bucks. It, uh, we did roughly 15 seconds of research, you know, and were convinced that we were geniuses. And Jordan's job was to, uh, hire and train salespeople. Cause neither Trey nor I are qualified to do that at all. So, um, that failed spectacularly, you know? So we, uh, by we, I mean, I leased a bank building in, uh, on Prospect Street all the way in California that… You know, we hired, I wanna say 40 people off of Craigslist. You know, and Jordan was training them up and then he had to go on tour to sell his stuff. And then like, nothing really happened. I got to, I got to have a lease on a bank building for a couple of years. So that was fun. Jason: [00:06:41] So why did that fail though? Like what, looking back, what could you have done to make that work? Frank: [00:06:48] Um, I could have, uh, used ads to get them, you know. So for whatever dumb reason, uh, I oftentimes fail to heed my own advice, which is all right if you want to grow the business, take the thing that's working real good and do a whole lot more of that. And then find a way to systemize and automate and scale from there. So we had this method of getting customers, which was internet ads. But when we partnered with Jordan, we were like, nope, we're not going to do that, we're going to do something we have no idea how to do, which is to call them out of the blue and then, uh, try to sell them something, you know, and so that was dumb. Uh, I mean, I’m sure people make it work, but we didn't know what the heck we were doing. And of course that model, I think would probably have ultimately doomed us because there wasn't enough margin in it. Jason: [00:07:42] Yeah. So what was version two? Frank: [00:07:46] Uh, let's see. Version two was current branding. It, that was so close to working. That's where, uh, we would do video campaigns for people. So we'd script their videos. They would shoot the footage. We would have it edited. We would run them. Excuse me, I'm losing my voice already. That's what happens in the wake up at two. Um, we would run their Facebook media for them and everything. And that actually was going pretty good. Um, I did what, uh, what I think a lot of people who are creative types do is I immediately outsource the operation. And I outsourced it to someone who didn't understand advertising. Really good understanding of operations, but didn't understand advertising. And all of this is on me because I never sat down and said, here's how the business works and here's how all the moving pieces work. So we ended up over-hiring tremendously and didn't make any money, you know, but that was, that was pretty close. Jason: [00:08:46] Okay. And then what about option three or version three? 3.0. Frank: [00:08:50] So version 3 was, uh, we tried, um, in-house again, uh, current branding once again. But instead of doing all that production for people, we were like, you know what, man? We're just gonna run their media for them at a pretty decent price. I just arbitrarily pulled 2,800 bucks off my butt. You know, like seems like an easy yes. And, um, that was going great. And then I decided it would be a good idea to partner with Grant Cardone and, uh, form Cardone Kern. I did that because I made a lot of assumptions that I'd never discussed with Grant. Uh, so again, I, I want to take full responsibility for this. I'm not here to say Grant is a bad guy or anything. So I partnered with him thinking that they would have the infrastructure that we needed to grow the agency. Cause you know, you go down to his operation, it's pretty impressive. They got meetings and stuff and… you know, meetings and stuff and people wear suits and they, they really look like they know what they're doing. And they do, but not for an ad agency. So when we partnered together, oh, and I also thought his audience was primarily business owners like brick and mortar people. So my vision for that, and this was incidentally, a conclusion that I drew after going to one event and talking to one attendee who was a roofer. And I was like, this would be the easiest client to win forever. This must be what all of his customer base is like. We should partner up, you know, and so zero foresight on, uh, on my part. So we, it, it blew up. Um, well it blew up in a good way. We got to walk clients really fast. We grew it to damn it, it was $895 a month, just under $900, a grand. And then, uh, we started hemorrhaging because the operations were bad. We, uh, by we, I mean, I, uh, had to hire a team. And then I had one dude to help me manage them. And he was good, but he was inexperienced too, in terms of trying to manage a team that big. So we just did a bad job, ultimately. Mainly is a result of operations, like missing calls, you know, like dumb things that operations people know how to do. Jason: [00:11:04] So what were some of the… I don't want to put words in your mouth about some of the assumptions, like thinking about, you know, if you were going to partner… Because a lot of people listening on the show, they, they reach a, a plateau or they're, they're kind of an inner plateau and they go, I need a partner because I can't, I don't, I feel like I've reached my max and I need to work with someone. And then they were like, well, let's just join together. So, you know, so many people are doing this and then it blows up in their face. So what would, what would have been some of those questions or assumptions to check with your partner and go, and then be like, oh, well let's kind of try this out or no, this is probably not going to work out that you could have avoided. Frank: [00:11:48] Yeah, I probably should have said, okay, I'm operating under the assumption that you're going to provide this team. Is that a true assumption? And he would have said no, because he doesn't lie. You know, he's not a bad person. Just, I've never had the damn sense to ask him. And Grant so busy he's like, all right, cool. Don't mess it up. Sounds like a good idea. Let's go. You know, so it was, we didn't really talk it out. So that probably would have been the first question was, you know, here's my assumption is this accurate? And, um, that would, that really would have been it. I think we could have overcome everything else. You know, he would've said, no, dude, I don't have that. And I'm not going to give you that you got to go build your own. I would have said, oh, I could do that on my own; I don't need us to partner together for this. We would rather keep all of the money and… You know, if I'm going to have all the headaches anyway, I might as well keep all the money. Jason: [00:12:38] Yeah. And so what, what are we looking like at version four now of, you know, post, you know, kind of making that partnership go away? I think this is the version you're on right now. Is that right? Frank: [00:12:53] Yes. Yeah. So we're looking great. What I learned is number one, don't try to grow too fast. So our target is five clients a week, you know, where it used to be as many as you can get, let's just hire more people, right? Nope, five a week. That's it, you know. So that was lesson number one. And that enables you to not be reactive and building out your operations. And lesson number, whatever number we're on is most of this stuff, I mean, I don't know about you dude, but ads are easy, you know? It's not, I mean, don't, don't tell clients it's for God's sake, but it's not really that hard. But the operations behind it, especially when you do it, we do, which is we're full service. So we'll, you know, the first thing we typically do is go fix their email. Cause that makes everything work better and they get immediate sales and then they're happy, you know? So that requires so many tiny little things to go right. That, um, that's just been a tremendous. Um, a lesson it has been that big of a learning curve, really. It's just more. Okay. Let's just keep drilling into this process, you know? And make sure there's checklists and yada yada, yada, yada. So it's been good. And then inner team communication is still we're good at it, but we could really be better at that. Um, but with clients we're good. But between ourselves, you know, we’re doing…
Jason: [00:14:28] When you're an agency partner with Wix, you unlock an entire digital ecosystem for creating, managing, and growing your agency. Get the full coding and design freedom to create anything your clients need, along with the tools to manage and collaborate with your team seamlessly from anywhere. And when it comes to growing your agency, you can get matched with new leads every day and earn revenue share for every website you guys create. They're backed by the Wix industry, leading security and site performance. You'll also have a dedicated account manager on standby 24/7. So you can reach your goals and start setting new ones. See for yourself, head over to wix.com/partners. And re-imagine what your agency can accomplish. Yeah. When I, when I look at kind of the stages of agency owners that go through, they go through, there's like six. And I look at kind of the first stage is like, figuring out, like, how do I get the clients? And then the next is like, how do we get the right clients? The next is like, like, how do I replace myself from not being the salesperson or being the account manager for the clients? And then it's like, how do I build the team? And it's just like all these little stages you have to go through or systems that you need to actually set up in order to kind of, you know, get you to a point where you can pick and choose and do the things that you love doing. Like, cause I was telling you years ago it was like most agency owners are accidental. They don't want to get into it. They just, they knew how to do something really cool in marketing. And someone's like, hey, do you do this for me? And they're like, okay, you're going to give me money to do this? Like, all right, let me go do more of that and, uh, you just kind of fall into it. And then, like you're saying you're being reactionary. Um, one thing I, I have a question and probably a lot of people have a question on is, let's say you have a partner now. You got in, we didn't go over the assumptions that we figured out. Um, how can they actually go to their partner… Like how can we make a pleasant split up? Uh, you know, in order for us to go our own ways, because a lot of people, even including me, I had a partner and I looked at it like, if you don't know the bad partner, you're the bad partner. Um, that's kinda how I looked at it. And that's one of the reasons why we sold, um, you know, it was a good offer, but still I probably would have been still doing it. Um, I'm lucky that I had did have a partner that we disagree. But like what, what, what would you suggest to these people listening? Like how can you do a, a good breakup? Frank: [00:17:17] I have no idea. Um, I just ended up giving everything to the partner. I'm like, okay. Like, well, our very first one, you know, it was clear that it wasn't working and everything was in my name. So I was able to be like, all right, guys, this isn't working. Um, I'll keep paying the lease. It's in my name. See y'all later. And nobody, you know, no one cared, uh, because they're like, oh, thank God we have to mess with this anymore. This was way harder than we thought. With Grant, I just gave him the agency. I was like, we were still doing, um, I can't remember, maybe half a million a month or something in billings? At the time, I was like, you can have it. And I never talked to him, actually. I talked to other people in the organization. I voiced some things that I needed and I wasn't able to get them. And I was like, well, this isn't really gonna work for me. Um, y'all can just have this, if you want. We can just be cool. And they're like, alright. Jason: [00:18:18] So how do you get to a point where… I love that, because a lot of people would spend years and years fighting back and forth. No, I did this, my name is on blah, blah, blah, all this kind of stuff. And like tons of resentment versus you're like, fucking take it. Like, let me restart. Like, how do you do that? How do you, how do you get rid of those emotions that a lot of us would struggle with? Frank: [00:18:46] Well, if things are your damn fault, you have to realize they’re your fault. And so like if it was a different scenario and Grant had misled me. And said, yeah, we got this, dude. Here's everything I'm going to do to the letter and then just didn't do it. And then it was like F you Frank. Then I would be mad, you know, we'd have a really serious problem. Um, but he didn't, I just didn't ask. So I had to, it was my damn fault, you know. It wasn’t his. So what am I going to do? But you know, pitch a fit? If some dude, you know… he's got other stuff going on. He’s gotta roll on out. But also in our business, it's like, it's easy to just to start another one. There's this, this is what I love about the advertising business. It's, it's never going away. You know, it doesn't matter what the economy does. It's like we ain't going anywhere. It could be world war three, you know. I've always made this joke and it's old by now that the world war three could happen and there'd be like seven people left. One of them selling cockroaches or something. And he's going to go to the guy with a bigger cave wall and be like, hey, I'll give you five cockroaches. If I can advertise my cockroach sales on your wall there, you know, like in, it'll take off from there. It's just never going anywhere. So I have no scarcity around it. Jason: [00:20:10] Well, you know, that's how I look at agencies is, you know, when we had the big gold rush, right? And the people that got the richest were the ones selling the stuff to make gold. That's kind of how I look at agencies. Um, especially as when COVID hit and everything started shutting down, I was like, you know, hey agencies are going to get a lot of business because people can't do what they used to do anymore. And, uh, and I, I guessed right on that. But I love how you, you say take ownership in your own mistake. It's like, it was my fault. And I, I think too many times, including myself, probably, I mean, that's a hard thing to do. Admitting, going, hey, I could have avoided this. This is my mistake. Let's just move on. And hit the reset button. And it's kind of like monopoly, let's play another game, here we go. It's like, I screwed up that one. Frank: [00:21:05] Yeah. I'm glad I screwed up that one. Cause this one's great. And I get to keep all of the money. So like, okay. You know, this actually worked out pretty good. Otherwise, it'd be giving most of the money to Grant. Nice enough guy. But, um, I'd prefer that I keep it. Jason: [00:21:22] I think he's got enough money too. Frank: [00:21:25] Oh, yeah. I think he, I hope they're doing well. Jason: [00:21:28] Yeah. Well, awesome. Well, Frank, this has been amazing, man. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Frank: [00:21:37] No. I want to ask you something. Because you said something that really hit me at the beginning. You were like, I've never even heard of direct response until after I'd sold the agency. And I think me and you were joking around about this by email. I was like, if I didn't have this damned, uh, I guess like moral compass and inability to sell something that is not measurable. I would be a zillionaire, you know, but I just can't do it. And I don't even know how to attempt to do it. Because I know there was some value to it and like having cool stuff and well-branded things. I don't know how to make those things, but that's why God made other people, you know. Um, how do you sell that kind of stuff? Not with a clear conscience. I, I don't think there's anything wrong with doing it as long as a client knows the game going in, you know. But how…? Jason: [00:22:25] Well, we… Yeah, our agency, we developed, um, user experiences, you know, from websites and then we built applications. So if you think of sites like Legal Zoom, we built that, uh, you think of Hitachi Power Tools or Lotus Cars, their website, like none of those websites back then had really caught actions other than find my dealer, you know, Legal Zoom did about getting in, but we never really ran ads. Um, so we always said, you have to have this amazing, like when someone comes to your website, you have to have this amazing experience and tell the right story in order for them to, um, you know, build an trust you. You know, we never really, we, we, we didn't get their people's email addresses; even though looking back at the agency, we were one of the first to build e-commerce stores. We were one of the first to build an email marketing system. So our clients could broadcast to their clients. Like, and we were one of the first to build a CMS system, but we did what typical agency owners did was we kept working on our clients that kept paying the bills and we couldn't keep up. And then we, uh, started using other partners, like MailChimp. Like, we started all that before MailChimp. So, you know, everyone, uh, misses the boat. Uh, I think we missed the boat, but at the end of the day, I'm right where I'm supposed to be. I'm loving life and doing everything, so… Frank: [00:23:54] You get to have the pensive view off the balcony in your opening for the Podcast, man. The only way is like, we will make you more than you pay us or we'll refund the difference plus 20%. I mean, the company is called Grow Ads for God's sake, but that's like hard work. I mean, it's actually not because you just choose the right clients, but you know what I mean? It seems to me, hey, the grass is always greener, but I'm like, man, these dudes that are getting paid half a million bucks to make a commercial. Those are the ones that are the smartest people in the room. Jason: [00:24:24] Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, you got to do what you enjoy doing, right? Like you said, the grass is greener on the side that you water. So, you know, whatever side you want to water, like it's going to be, you know, you're going to enjoy it. I always just hate when people do something that they don't want to do in the agency just to make money. I think that's a big, big mistake. I'm like the money will come. Like all the, you know, the mastermind members and the clients I've worked with over the years that have had, you know, the best lives, it's the ones that they, they didn't care about the money. They just cared about doing the right thing and doing what they wanted to do. And that made all the difference. So… Frank: [00:25:03] Well, you've made a whole boatload of it. And I've made, spent a whole boatload of it. At the end of the day. That's really it, you know, am I going to have a good time today? Jason: [00:25:15] Well, I look at it as like you make money to save time in other things. So you have time to, um, you know, one of the things when, when I ask our mastermind members… I probably shouldn't tell people listening because now you know my trick question, but I ask them the first question usually is what do you do for fun? If they say I work all the time, I don't let them in. Frank: [00:25:37] Oh, dude, you wouldn't let me in then cause I really do all the time. But I love it so much, man. But because it's because I'm finally doing. Jason: [00:25:44] Yeah, but you surf and you do all… or do you still surf or no? Frank: [00:25:49] Seriously. Like, I'm in this little room right now and it's my pool house.And so I get up kind of pool house, go back. Um, I've gotten that routine, you know, during COVID and everything. But really, I really like it, you know, like to me, it's so cool. But I’m an addict. Like I'm a hard core ad person specifically with direct response. So I get to hit refresh a whole lot of other people's stats all the time. I get the dopamine hit constantly. You're like, ooh, hit, refresh on this to see how this is going. Okay. Is it refreshing over there? Hot damn. Moving on. What else can we do? You know? So to me it’s not work, really. Jason: [00:26:27] Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, that's, that's the whole thing. But I still, I do want you to take some time off. Gotta have some time. So... Frank: [00:26:37] Well, you know, weekends and stuff. I'll sit around and walk over to the other house, the main house. Hang out there. Jason: [00:26:44] Well, awesome. Well, what's the website people go in and check out? Is it growads.com or…? Frank: [00:26:49] It’s .org. I didn't have the money for the.com. Actually, I never even looked to see how much the.com costs cause .org seemed cooler to me. Jason: [00:26:58] Well, I think .org usually ranks higher anyway .org ranks higher in Google anyway. Frank: [00:27:04] Oh, I don't even know about that stuff. Jason: [00:27:06] Claim that. Frank: [00:27:10] I have no idea about SEO because I have ads. You know, it’s like, you want to get known? Run ads. Yeah, or go to frankkern.com. Both of those sites will cure your insomnia pretty well. I think if you have it. Jason: [00:27:26] Whatever. Everyone goes, check out both those sites. And thanks so much, Frank for coming on the show. And if you guys want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners where, you know, we have a lot of fun, we're going over constantly what's working, what's not working. Sharing and being able to see what you're not able to see because we're too damn freaking close to it. I want you guys to go to digitalagencyelite.com. This is our inclusive mastermind. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: What_Did_Frank_Kern_Learn_from_His_Failed_Agencies_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 1 September 2021
Is your agency as profitable as it could be? Are you successfully forecasting agency finances? Nate "Agency Dad" Jenson has built his business around helping agency owners drive profitability. Nate is a certified management accountant and internal auditor who focuses on offering the tools and accounting practices necessary for a thriving agency, with his business Agency Dad. On his second visit to the podcast, Nate talks about forecasting and the importance of managing the future, instead of wishing you could change the past. He explains why you, as an agency owner, are very in tune with your business and can make a pretty good forecast of where it will be in three months. He also offers valuable advice on how you can take that first step to start managing the future. 3 Golden Nuggets
SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Stop Focusing on the Past and Start Managing the FutureJason: [00:00:00] What's up, everybody? Jason Swenk here. I am excited for another episode. On today's episode, we're going to talk about why it's important for you and how you can actually forecast your agency so you can actually be more profitable. I have a repeat guest, Nate, who is amazing at all of this, and let's go ahead and jump into it. Hey, Nate. Welcome to the show. Nate: [00:00:29] Jason, thanks for having me on again. I appreciate it. Jason: [00:00:31] Yeah. I'm excited to have you back. Uh, so for the ones that haven't checked out, the, the first episode that we had you on, uh, tell us a little bit about who you are and what do you do? Nate: [00:00:43] All right. So I'm Nate Jenson, uh, the owner and founder of Agency Dad. Our, we're an accounting firm. We focus on helping, uh, marketing agencies become more profitable. That's really, that's really, our niche is how do we, how do we drive profitability? Uh, we don't do any tax work. We don't do anything like that. We do bookkeeping. We do, uh, financial reporting. So everything we do is geared to make you more profitable. Jason: [00:01:06] Well, we all want that, right? Because I think too many agency owners always focus on, you know, just top-line revenue. Hey, Jason, I want to make it to the million mark. Then I want to make it to the eight-figure. Mark. I'm like, well, what's the profit? Nate: [00:01:20] Yeah. If you could work less and make more, I would rather just have a lower top line and more profitability. So… Jason: [00:01:28] Exactly. Well, let's, let's talk about like, are there, like, how can we create forecasts? Because, you know, I think a question I get asked often, and I think as you do as well, like, can I afford to hire someone? Or what does it look like when I need to hire someone next? Like how do I figure that out? Nate: [00:01:47] Yeah. That's, that's probably the question I get more than anything else. Can I hire somebody to, when do I hire somebody? And if somebody asked me that my, my response is, well, what are your sales going to be in the next three to six months? And if we can't, if we can't answer that, then we really don't know if we can hire somebody. So, so for me, the forecast is where you start. Jason: [00:02:06] And so if that's where we need to start for, like, what is our sales look like for the next three months? How can we forecast that out? Nate: [00:02:14] Okay. So there's, there's a lot of methods, right? Uh, if you're like me and you're really into accounting, you can use linear regression. You can use exponential smoothing. There's a lot of, kind of analytical tools like that. If you're an agency owner and I say linear regression, you're probably tuning out and... Jason: [00:02:33] Yeah. I kinda, I kinda almost passed out when you use those big words cause I've never heard those before. Nate: [00:02:39] Yeah. So there's, there's a method that, that… If you're an agency owner and you just want to sit down by yourself and, you know, do your own forecast there's a method I would recommend. And I've, I've heard it called different things, but the term I like is the Dilbert method. So if you're familiar with Dilbert the comic strip, uh, there's a lot of, uh, let's say questionable business practices used in that comic strip. Uh, but the idea is you sit down and you basically say, hey, what do I think it's going to be? You know, what's my best guess? And so I've actually found, Jason, most agency owners are pretty in tune with, with a lot of the ins and outs of their business. You know, so I can do, I can do the linear regression, but if, if someone says, hey, I happen to know that every December our sales go way down, because you know, the seasonality of the business. Uh, a business owner or an agency owner, they can, they can say, well, my, my sales were, you know, they're 500,000 in November. I'm expecting them to be, let's say 400,000. Just because that's what happens. And for a, for a simple kind of first pass, I think that's a totally appropriate way to set up your first budget or your first forecast. Jason: [00:03:51] True. And then now that we kind of set out the future forecast for sales for the next quarter. What's the next step in order to, you know, making sure we're profitable or when we can actually hire? Nate: [00:04:04] Uh, similar again, if you're using the Dilbert method already, uh, the next step is… Think of a forecast, like your profit and loss statement, right? You look at your PNL for the prior month, what did I sell? What are my costs of goods sold? What are my expenses? And so you're setting up a PNL, but it's in the future. What about, what am I going to sell? What are my costs of goods sold? What are my expenses? Okay. Get your rent, get your payroll and get all that in there. And what am I expecting my profit to be? And it's hilarious, Jason. A lot of people will say, hey, well, I'm, I'm, I'm not good at this. I don't really know how to do this. Uh, having a plan is, is, is the first step, the, the number of times that I've actually set up a forecast for a client and I've come back to that client and said, hey, if everything goes according to plan, you're going to lose $10,000 a month, right? Uh, that it, that happens all the time. And the one thing that we know about a forecast is it's going to be wrong. No matter what it is, it's going to be wrong. You're going to be high. You're going to be low. But if you, if you do the forecast and your plan is to lose money, you know, you've at least got to take some action, make some changes. Jason: [00:05:17] Yeah. You know, one of the things that we did, uh, that I think is really easy for all of you guys listening, is we had our bookkeeper export out all of our expenses on a spreadsheet. And literally, you know, like, like you were saying, and then we had, like, we basically put out 12 months, so he said January, so here's what it is fixed. And then we copied that all the way through December. Then we added a couple of columns to the spreadsheet above and said, well, here's what we think we're going to bring in revenue. Kind of like what you're saying for the quarter. And then we could play with the model, uh, because then we did all, you know, we put in the easy formulas, you know, minus income minus expenses, and then, you know, divided that by, you know, to figure out our profit margins. So if we wanted to hire someone in the future, let's say three months from now, we would put in their salary under payroll. We would add them in there. And then it was really easy to figure out going, well, man, okay, we can afford this person because we look like we're bringing in, you know, a million more dollars this quarter and we can afford to do this, this and this. And it still keeps our profit margins at X. Is that what you’re saying? Nate: [00:06:37] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Um, you can always go deeper, right? You can always go and say, hey, we can't afford it, but should we afford it? Should we maybe look at raising our prices before we do it and so forth? There's all that stuff. But just for a first pass. Yeah, exactly what you said as you build out your model, say, it's say it's only three months, right? Maybe it's the year, but maybe it's just a few months. And you say, hey, we're making this, you know, this net income at the end of the, each of those months. Like you said, play with the model. What if we add one person? What if we reduce expenses here? What if we can get one more client? And again, you’re never going to be right, right? It's just a forecast, just a guess anyways. But if you're looking forward and you, you can play with that model and say, can we hire, can we, uh, you know, can we, should we reduce our rent? You know, should we not renew our lease? All these kinds of things. Uh, you've just got to look forward. So many, so many people manage just historically, right? They see how did we do last month? Oh, we didn't do as well as we thought we would, well, what are we gonna do different this month? Well, let's just, let's work harder, right? That's not a plan, you know, you, don't working harder is well… You're gonna just gonna work yourself to death. And that's when you say let's get more revenue because we don't really know why we're profitable or not profitable. Jason: [00:07:52] Yeah. I, I remember one time I came into, you know… we used to do our budgeting and our forecasting really not existed. And I remember coming, looking at the bank account right before I went into a leadership meeting and I was like, holy cow, this is the lowest it's ever been. And I was like, we're not going to be able to make payroll in the next two weeks. If nothing changes. And we were able to, we made payroll for all 12 years. Um, we just made it that one. But after that I realized I needed to do forecasting and build a performer out to really show me, is it like… Because you're always going to have in the future. Like if you do this modeling, right, you're going to see where you actually start losing money where you don't have money, right? And it's just about how far out is it, and then it gives you that time of going, wow, man, I got six months to get my act together in order to make a major change. Especially if a big contracts about to end. And that's going to take a really big dip in your income. You know, let's say, Nate, you probably deal with, you know, these, this all the time where some clients have a huge contract, that's like 40% of their revenue.
Nate: [00:09:16] Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And, and when, uh, when business comes in kind of in a lumpy way like that, uh, that's much harder to, that's much harder to deal with. Um, like one of the things as I was preparing for this podcast, and I was thinking about… Is there's really two kinds of, of revenue that I see and predicting the revenue for each of those kinds takes a different sort of mindset. One is the retainer revenue. If, you know, if you have a book of clients and you're like, hey, I know who my clients are and how much they pay me. Your revenue forecasting is actually pretty easy. And if you have, uh, you know, if you have, your, you know what your payroll is, uh, it's pretty easy to say my retainer is enough to cover my payroll, my other expenses, and so forth. If you're a more project-based, you know, say you're a web developer, uh, you're, you're much more reliant on, hey, how much business do we think we can pick up in a given month or a given quarter? And it's interesting, Jason, I've actually seen, I don't know if, I don't know if I'd call it a trend yet. But I've seen quite a few of my clients who are on that, uh, in that project-based kind of revenue. They've actually, as they're doing their forecasting and I'm helping them with their forecasting. Some of them have actually moved from a, uh, traditional employee type model on the expense side to contracting a lot of that. Because… Yeah, well, yeah, predictability. When your revenue is so lumpy, it's very nice to have your, your, uh, cost be a lot more variable, you know? Even if a contractor is more expensive per hour… Might be cheaper overall if your revenue is, is way up and way down. Jason: [00:10:59] Yeah. You know, the, the other thing, I have a lot of mastermind members that… In the past couple of months, and even right now, they're going through acquisitions and they're getting bought. Uh, like I'm thinking of one of our masterminds Dean that just sold maybe three months ago and… uh, you know, very successful business, you know, in the multimillion-dollar range. And he never really did forecasting. He never put a performance together. And when they actually, and this is why it's good too… Especially if, if you guys are listening both, it's good for predicting out and profitability when you need, and to make yourself a little more relaxed rather than that volatil… volutary…? Nate: [00:11:41] Volatile. Jason: [00:11:43] Yeah, there you go. Big words I can't say. I went to Florida State, guys, come on. Um, but uh, all the people that are looking to buy you are going to look for the future cast. And they want to know because that's what they're buying sometimes. And if you don't know it, that's going to send up red flags. So for your sanity, for your predictability, and especially for, if you want to be able to potentially sell one day, please make sure you do these on a regular basis. Nate: [00:12:17] Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's again, it's driving that profitability right? Managing to the future instead of just wishing you could change the past. Um, but, Jason, there's something you mentioned a few minutes ago that I wanted to get back to. You talked about that time when you were almost out of money for payroll, right? We actually, and I recommend this as well, but we actually do for our clients, uh, multiple kinds of forecasts. So the first one is the PNL forecast, but we do a separate cashflow forecast. So we'll usually have that, like a rolling eight week forecast. And the payroll is a perfect example…. Is if it's, if it's Monday morning and that's when you run your payroll and you're out of money, you're like, do I have personal money I can throw in the business? Do I have a really good banker friend that can somehow can be aligned really fast? And even if you do, you know you're going to pay through the nose on that rate to get the money. Uh, it's, it's a totally different experience if you're looking ahead and you're like, oh my gosh, eight weeks, our bank account goes negative. Uh, what can we do? Well, if you need to get a loan, you have eight weeks to get it. But you can say, hey, maybe we can reduce expenses. Maybe we can not take that owner distribution I was planning on. You have a lot more options. So the PNL forecast is where it all starts. Uh, but you need to take that and go to the next step and say, how's my cashflow going to change based on, you know, based on my expectations of sales and expenses and so forth? Jason: [00:13:43] Yeah. You know, um, that reminds me, I tell our mastermind members and I tell people in agency playbook, the first thing I want you to do is get a line of credit. And they'll be like, hey, Jason, I'm good. Like, I got a ton of cash I can operate for over three months. I'm like, things are not always going to be that good. Um, and so get a line of credit when you don't need it. And so if you ever do come into hard times, you don't have to miss payroll and you don't have to be embarrassed. Because if you miss payroll and you tell your employees and your team that, or your contractors, they're jumping ship. And finding the best talent is very, very hard. And I always say, get a line of credit. I don't care if you don't need it. Like, I think we tapped into it one time when we actually need it. And then here's the other trick with the line of credit. They will cancel it all the time if you never use it. So every month I would just take out like 5,000 for one day, put it back in so they see some movement. Because it doesn't cost you anything, if you don't use it. Nate: [00:14:49] Absolutely. Totally right. So it's, but the point is, I think you, you have that use it when you need it. Uh, have, you know, get it before you need it, like you say. But just, you've got to look forward, again, the number of times I've seen people who they just, they have no idea where they're going. They just know where they've been or where they are. And, and then they want to know, hey, should I do this? Should I do this? And should I do this? You got to look at the future. And I, I know this can be an overwhelming thing for people. And that's why I say, hey, if you can't do a 12 month forecast to a three month forecast. You know, look at your sales for three months and then once a month, sit down and add on that next. That's gonna, that's gonna get you way ahead of where you are if you're not even doing that. And it's just a great place to start. Jason: [00:15:35] So awesome. Well, Nate, this has been awesome. Is there anything I didn't ask you before you tell the listeners about this cool, special offer? Nate: [00:15:46] Uh, let's see. I would have one thing I guess, and this isn't just with forecasting. This is with, you know, kind of bookkeeping and reporting in general. One thing I wish my clients understood more, uh, when they, when they became clients, was the difference between what a fixed cost is and a variable cost. Uh, if you have a lot of what we call it, fixed costs, and that's a cost that just you pay every month, it might change, but it doesn't change because you sell more. So you have rent, you have insurance, uh, you have your payroll and things like that. A variable cost is a cost that does change with sales. And so if you have sales commissions, that's going to go up the more you sell. Any direct media spend obviously is going to go up the more you sell. Uh, so if you're contracting your work, that kind of stuff's going to go up the more you sell. Uh, the more you can move your fixed costs into variable costs, the easier it is to be profitable. Because the more fixed costs you're like, I've got to sell this much every month just to break even. And then when I go above that and that's my profit. If you can change those fixed cost to variable, uh, your, your breakeven number goes down. And so as soon as you hit this number, you're going to hit that profitability sooner each month. So your sales can be lower and you're still gonna make more money. Jason: [00:17:06] Awesome. Yeah. You know, I, I didn't really learn that until kind of the very end and, uh, you know, it, it makes a big difference, so, uh, great advice. Well, Nate, this has all been amazing. Um, if people want to know more and you know, possibly work with you and, uh, because they they're like me, they look at numbers and they go, uh, dizzy. Um, what can they do to reach out to you? Nate: [00:17:32] Oh, thanks. Uh, first of all, one thing we actually do is we... We take most of the numbers and we put them on charts, graphs, and we make them really easy for people to just see a picture and understand it and move forward. So that's number one, but if they want to get a hold of me, uh, agencydad.money is our website. We do have a free offer for your listeners. It's agencydad.money/freeaudit. And what we do is we actually do an audit of their financials, uh, comparison, compare their financials to some industry benchmarks. Jason: [00:18:03] I like that. Yeah. You guys better take Nate up on that offer. That's uh, that's crucial. I mean, because we all want to know where we stack up and where we actually need to go. So make sure you guys go there. Say the URL one more time. Nate: [00:18:16] It's agencydad.money/freeaudit. And, just because of the topic of this podcast, I'll mention that's a third, a forecast that we do is we actually forecast people's metrics. So they can see in the future, if their metrics are getting out of whack, based on what they should be. Just another way to give us a red flag on something. Jason: [00:18:38] Awesome. Well, everybody go check out that and get that free audit. And until next time, have a Swenk day. Nate: [00:18:45] Thanks, Jason.
Direct download: How_to_Manage_the_Future_and_Skyrocket_Agency_Profitability.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00pm MDT |
Sun, 29 August 2021
Can you identify some services that might be holding your agency back? Maybe it’s time to consider getting back to the basics. Phil Blackmore and his agency Create Health are really passionate about bringing back something the world of health marketing was really lacking: creativity. Recently the pandemic helped him reflect on the agency’s true core and what they should be focusing on. This is how the agency recently re-launched with the motto “creativity is the cure”. Phil joins the podcast today to talk about how that move reenergized the team and made running an agency much easier. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesNinja Cat: Today's episode is sponsored by Ninja Cat, a digital marketing performance management platform where you can unify your data, create beautiful, insightful reports and presentations that will help you grow your business. Head over to ninjacat.io/masterclass to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Getting Back To The Basics And Figuring Out The Backbone of Your AgencyJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? I'm excited for another episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass. Now, before we get into it, I want you to do me a favor. If you're listening, obviously you’re listening to the podcast, take a screenshot. Upload it to your favorite social media channel and tag us, so I can give you a shout-out for listening to the show. Today we're going to talk to an amazing agency owner across the pond over in London. Um, because that’s the only city I actually know over there. He said he was outside of it and he was trying to explain it to me. But we're going to talk about getting back to the basics and a lot of things that we're ignoring and we're not doing for ourselves, but we're doing it for our clients. So let's get it to the episode. Hey, Phil. How's it going? Phil: [00:00:54] Really good. Thanks, Jason. How are you? Jason: [00:00:55] Hey, man. Awesome. Well, I'm excited to have you on, uh, so briefly tell us who you are and what do you do? Phil: [00:01:03] Yeah, so my name is Phil Blackmore and I'm one of the agency owners of Create Health, which is a specialist advertising agency that, uh, yeah, by the name, as you can probably guess, does everything in health care. Jason: [00:01:14] Awesome. And so in, in kind of pre-show we were talking about really, you know, getting back to the basics. And so what, what have you found in scaling your agency? You guys have been doing it for a while, um, and... You were telling me a little bit beforehand about when COVID happened, it kind of made me rethink something. So what happened? Tell us that story. Phil: [00:01:41] Absolutely. So, I mean, we obviously spoke, I think, about 14 months ago. And, um, I think we felt we were doing pretty well as a business. But obviously COVID, I think is certainly the most, testing period of time I've ever been through as an agency owner. And, you know, as I'm sure anyone listening to this can empathize. You know, a lot of things, I didn't think I'd have to face I have. With regards to decisions on staff, services, all kinds of things. But I suppose, through all the darkness, there was a real opportunity to actually reflect on what it is I'm trying to build and what it is we're trying to do as an agency. And I think one of the things I found really interesting was I've always believed that we're really good at what we do. Um, but actually we were probably guilty of hiding that by trying to come up with a clever way of explaining that to potential clients and prospects. So yeah. The, the pandemic and the last 12 months has given me a real opportunity, I suppose, to reflect back on what is it we like doing? What is it we're respected for? And how on earth do we just kind of simplify the story and get that back out to existing clients to expand them? But also to new clients we want to work with? Jason: [00:02:48] Yeah, I think we all kind of fall into that trap. Especially the ones of us that have been doing it for a while, right? Like it's, you know, we just get reactionary to everything. And then, uh, you know, I remember doing this when we were building an e-commerce platform back in 2001. You know, like, clients would call and we'd be like, okay, like they're paying the bill, let's take our foot off this. Or when we were developing a CMS system in 2002, like I was like… Go on. Phil: [00:03:22] Absolutely. And I think the really funny thing, if anything is, in some ways you… I don’t know, I think you'd get so obsessed with the novel, trying to come up with something new and cool that hasn't been done before. And actually as much as that's wicked, that can get you a bit of exposure. It's not the backbone of your business. It's good for that awareness, but actually it's not what you're going to be bought for. Um, you know, people want a good solid foundation and want to know that you've got the goods to back it up. Jason: [00:03:48] You know, one of, one of my favorite movies is Moneyball. Now I'm not a huge baseball fan. Um, but I love, you know, sports stories and, like, what you just explained is kind of like us getting up to bat and trying to hit a grand slam every time. And what's going to happen is we're going to strike out more than we're going to score. And what you know, why I loved Moneyball was they were like, we just need to get the right players that can get on base. I don't care if they get hit and they get on base or if they get walked or whatever it is. I just want them to get on base. And I think agencies really need to focus about how can we just get on base? Like stop over-complicating it. So what were some of the things that you did to make it not as complicated? Phil: [00:04:42] So I think, um, we fundamentally went back and looked at, firstly, what is it that are, why did I set the business up in the first place? In terms of why did I and my partner Bill, why we started and it was because we believe that in our sector creativity was massively underrepresented. Um, in the healthcare space, it's a very safe, conservative kind of sector as you'd expect because of the subject matter. But it's also the most, uh, emotionally rich from, I suppose, a story perspective, you know, health touches us all. And what I thought was interesting was that, looking back at all the pitches we'd won. Looking back at kind of the business, historically, the one thing clients kept saying about us is that they love was just how creative we were. And how we were bringing, I suppose, broader thinking into a sector that they hadn't seen before. So we went back to basics and was like, well, you know, what's wrong with this sector? And then came up with this kind of, I suppose, positioning that I'm very pleased with, which is creativity is the cure within healthcare. And we then, having got that basic kind of sentiment, went out and found scientists who specialize in behavioral psychology and other such areas to really help back up our belief that creativity is the cure. So yeah, we have this really lovely line, but then we made sure it was grounded in the science. And yeah, we stripped back our services. Um, actually got rid of certain departments so that we could focus and invest more on, I suppose, the creative and the planning side of things, which is really resonating with, with our clients. And the team and the energy is just so much better now. Jason: [00:06:16] Oh, and you probably do things a lot more efficiently too, if you started stripping away some of the things. And a lot of times I find agency owners have a hard time of getting rid of some services. Um, so what was kind of the step or like, especially if you're doing some services for legacy clients, did you just say, hey, we're not doing this anymore? Or did you just stop marketing it for new ones coming? Phil: [00:06:42] Yeah. So I think one of the biggest, I suppose, shocks was we turned off building tech internally. So we used to have a department that, that built the apps and the websites, the CMS is all this sort of stuff. And we made really good money off it, historically. But we got to that juncture where it's like, you're either going to be a tech agency or you're going to be a creative agency. You can't really be both and didn't have the, I suppose, capital to, to try and do both properly. Um, so as I said, we realized that we preferred creative more, that we were better at it. So we turned off those services for tech. We still think digitally and techno, technology, but we've partnered with agencies that are really good in that space. So they do the build and the maintenance and all the stuff that we quite frankly, weren't that good at. We have the upfront strategy and ideas. Um, and yeah, and that's for the clients that we had on board. Uh, and we went to great lengths to make sure that we handed them off to partners that we, we felt had the same values as us. So they didn't feel like we'd, we'd kind of left them high and dry. We'd done the right thing. And we sell, felt immensely kind of cleansed and relieved that we had one less thing to focus on. Um, as I said, creative is what we're good at. And it's what clients… what's lovely when you talk to procurement, you know, you go in with a really niche offering of, this is what we do, and this is why we're great at it. This means, again, you, you get rather than being a generalist, being that specialist really does get you higher up the list.
Jason: [00:08:10] Do you feel like you have to comb through mountains of data, jumping between multiple platforms to spreadsheets, to slide decks and back again, in order to create performance reports for your clients? It's a constant drain on your agency's time and resources. And that's where our friends at Ninja Cat can help. Ninja Cat is a digital marketing performance management platform that really unifies your marketing data and empowers your agency to automate insightful, beautiful client reports at scale. Now, Ninja Cat keeps your marketing performance and presentation tools in one place. Freeing you up from manual data wrangling. And it really gives your team more time to focus on strategy and growing your business. And for a limited time, my Smart Agency podcast listeners will receive $500 ninja credit. When you go to ninjacat.io/masterclass to claim your offer and schedule a demo. That's ninjacat.io/masterclass. And when you do that too, I mean, you can demand so much bigger on prices. It's kind of like if you just go see a general, your general doctor and they're checking the oil and checking your temperature, they get paid so much. But if you need to have brain surgery, you know, they're going to be getting paid so much more than, uh, someone that's a generalist. Um, so when you started peeling back some of the services and getting rid of those, how, how quick? Cause a lot of people listening are like, well, how quick did you start to see a change and growth and profit and also revenue? Phil: [00:10:05] Yeah. So, I mean, it was obviously a frightening to have to turn things off. Because as I said, we've made historically good money. But then when you start to turn off all the other things that you don't need to have suddenly, you know, all the different platforms, the hosting. Everything else that actually was, unbeknownst to us costing us tons of money behind the scenes. In terms of, and not necessarily being recharged back as it should be. There were a lot of clients that we weren't charging the hosting. On to, you know, silly little things that I think a pandemic certainly sharpens your eye on. Um, but yeah, I mean, in terms of a change, it's certainly taken about six months for it to kind of wash through. Um, but yeah, the last sort of six months have been tremendously good in comparison to the others. Because, yeah, we've, we've just had more time to focus on the stuff that we enjoy doing. And because we enjoy it, we do it better. Jason: [00:10:51] Yeah. Yeah. I almost look at it as you're climbing a mountain and you realize the trek to the summit is really like… you could die by going this one path. But if you backtrack, you can get on an easier path. And then you can get up there, um, you know, eventually without little risk. I, I kind of look at it as like, that's kind of what you've done is like, all right, this is the risky pass is going up there. And then when you start again you’re like, man, this is really pretty easy, a lot easier, you know? And now you probably see a lot faster growth too. Phil: [00:11:30] Well, I think it also just makes it so much easier for us thinking about staff in terms of who you're hiring. Um, having that clarity of focus has meant that we've been able to change culturally in our kind of our processes. You know, creativity is very much at the heart of everything we do. Um, we're really clear on where the opportunities are and things like CGI now and other areas to amplify what we do creatively. So yeah. Uh, in some ways it's just made it really, really simple for us. It's also meant, I mean, we're, we're based in Bristol. It's a big tech city. So we were always competing against people who could outbid us for the best talent anyway. So yeah, in some ways it's, it's nice not to have those kinds of HR headaches either. Jason: [00:12:10] Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, when, when I'm talking with our mastermind, we're always talking about recruiting, right? Because we're at levels. You know, everyone in the mastermind is at a level where they're getting tons of business. But it's, it's harder to keep up. And they're trying to get out of the day-to-day operations and really build the leadership team and really transform from an owner to a CEO. And it really comes down to talent. But now if you've stripped back a lot of the services you know exactly what you need. Because a lot of times I find agencies hiring people to do things that they have no clue about because they want to add more services. And I actually think that's actually a mistake in most cases. Because how can you measure someone on something you've never done? Like you're going to be a horrible manager rather than look, I've done millions of websites. I can measure. And I know if someone is BS'ing me in the interview or BSing me for the first six months. Um, you know, it'd be like, you're gone in the first week. Phil: [00:13:19] Yeah, absolutely. And as you said, it's, it just, I’d say, I think that the thing I struggled with is probably the biggest shift in terms of becoming a, an owner is the, your time is, it's so precious. And you can end up doing tasks, which, you know, are not really reflective of the, of the value that you have on the business. So, yeah, the more you can do to, as I say, get back to basics. Strip away the things that you think are doing you favors... But really aren't and actually just, just focus on, on, on the bits that you enjoy. The business is going to do so much better. Jason: [00:13:50] Yeah, exactly. Well, this has all been amazing, Phil. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Phil: [00:14:01] I think, uh, the key thing would be whatever your point of difference or proposition is, just make sure that it's something that really runs through the core of the business. Not something that just sounds nice on a flyer or a website. As I said, creativity is something I'm very passionate on. And so, you know, having that as a driving force for the business means that it's infectious. And others pick up on it because it's coming from the top down. Um, and I think the key thing then is to nurture it. Uh, and just make sure that it then comes back up towards you in more interesting ways as well. That's, that's how the business will grow through the, the great people that we hire. Jason: [00:14:34] Well, I think, you know, the reason why it's worked for you so well is you have such passion and the belief in it. Versus choosing it based on, well, I think we can do this to make more money. I think the make more money as a byproduct, right? I think when people start just focusing on the money, I think they start making bad decisions. Um, and, uh, it gets a little bit more challenging. So, awesome, uh, what's the website people go and check out the agency? Phil: [00:15:03] Uh, is createhealth.com. Jason: [00:15:06] Awesome. Well, everyone go check that out. Thank you so much, Phil, for coming on the podcast. It was a lot of fun and yeah, we just got to go back to the basics. And if you guys want to be able to really kind of see the things you might not be able to see in front of you and you want to be surrounded by the best talent. Uh, from all the agency owners all over the world, I want to invite all of you to go to digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind just for agency owners that are going through a rapid scaling of their agency. And they want to get to a point where they have the opportunity to sell it one day or to exit in the things that they don't want to do anymore. And have that freedom that we all really wanted. So make sure you go to digitalagencyelite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Is_Getting_Back_to_the_Basics_the_Boost_Your_Agency_Needs_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 25 August 2021
Every agency owner needs solid negotiation skills to feel more confident when dealing with clients. Mori Taheripour is an executive and award-winning educator who focused her career on negotiations. She currently teaches at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and works privately with entrepreneurs, corporations, foundations, and universities. She wants to make negotiations more accessible and help people realize it's a skill we all have and are better at than we realize. In this episode, she discusses why negotiations make people anxious and how you can get better results by being prepared and understanding motivations and your values. Mori also explains why you should be curious and avoid just wanting to be right, plus her new book, and much more. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesHighLevel: Today's episode is sponsored by HighLevel, an all-in-one marketing platform that will give you the tools, support and resources you need to succeed with your agency. Head over to gohighlevel.com/swenk to enjoy an exclusive 30-day free trial. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Learn to Negotiate Successfully and Never Have to Lower Your PricesJason: [00:00:00] Hey, what's up, agency owners? I'm excited to have you back for another episode. I have an amazing guest and we're going to talk about negotiating, which is always a fun topic, and I'm really excited to get into it. So let's go ahead and start the episode. Hey, welcome to the show. Mori: [00:00:25] Hey, Jason. How are you? Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:27] Yeah. I'm excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Mori: [00:00:32] Um, so Mori Taheripour. I teach at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, uh, for part of my life. I teach in legal studies and business ethics department, and largely I focus on negotiations. So, um, apart from Wharton, which is where I do most of my teaching, um, I've worked with entrepreneurs and, um, corporations and foundations and universities. And spend most of my time focused on teaching people how to negotiate successfully, um, and, and doing so from a very different perspective than most negotiation classes. So that's, that's really the focus of my work. I do some work in sports. I'm also focused on teaching, um, working with athletes and, and helping them as they think about transitioning out of the sport. And some diversity and inclusion work. Jason: [00:01:22] Very cool. Awesome. Let's talk about negotiating and kind of, you know, everyone listening is obviously done negotiating, you know, their whole career. Um, so talk about kind of the first step in negotiating. How can you set up where you're positioned better? Mori: [00:01:41] So let me go back just a little bit. I think it was funny when I heard the intro and you said we're going to talk about something fun: negotiating. Most people don't think about negotiations and think it's fun. Um, in fact, a lot of people are very anxious about it. And that's because, um, they have bad experiences. They think about that one negotiation that they had, that they thought they did really poorly in. Or a divorce or whatever negative experience that they've had around negotiations. And oftentimes they think about it as such, because they, they think about negotiations as being a mere transaction. Somebody wins, somebody loses. Black and white, that's all it is. And so people who, a lot of people are this way, they're not very combative, right? They don't really want to argue and bicker. So they think, oh, I don't want to negotiate, right? Whatever they can do to avoid it, get an attorney, whatever it is. Um, but the truth is that that's really not what negotiations is. I mean, it's a small slice of the pie. But negotiations is something we do all the time. And each and every person who's listening to this, or, you know, parents, um, daughters, sons, uh, teachers, right? These are individuals, all of us who negotiate from the moment we get up in the morning to the moment we get to sleep at night, right? So the reason I want to start there is because I want people to understand that this isn't a skill that they're not familiar with, or they have a bad memory of. It's a skill that they use daily that they're probably a whole lot better at that they even think they are, right? But they don't think of those conversations as being negotiations. And so what, you know what, I just wrote this book that I terribly launched, um, right at the beginning of the pandemic. So not the best time to release a book. But putting that aside, um, the, the reason I decided to write this book was really sort of at the heart of this conversation was to make negotiations something that's really accessible and, and a lot of people are really good at. And so they're using this opportunity to just become better, um, and, and doing so by better understanding themselves. So long answer to your question. Fundamentals are important. One of them is preparation. And, um, most people who learned about negotiations, read a book, see an article, listen to a podcast are taught, you know, that you are best when you prepare really well. That's absolutely true. What we often don't talk about, though, is the sort of the earliest step in preparation, which is the better understanding of yourself. Taking some time before every negotiation. And thinking about things like your values, things that you don't want to compromise. The things that are really important to you that if you did so then there is not doing well because you've sort of left on a table the very things that are really important to you, your convictions, right? Um, and, and to create those sort of personal boundaries. And remember how is it that, you want people to remember you after this conversation, right? What's, what's most important to you beyond just an outcome that you want? I feel like because a lot of people don't talk about that in preparation, I'd love for your listeners to understand that it's actually, the very first step is a very personal step. And everything after that is so like, what I'm sure most people have learned. What do you want to get out of the deal? What do you want the deal structure to be? And all those things are really important and there's ways to do it and do it well. I just wanted to sort of drop that in there because it's a part of the conversation that a lot of people leave behind. And I think it's fundamentally one of the most important parts. Jason: [00:05:20] Yeah. I totally agree with that. And I, and I, um, I love that you pointed that out. You know, I've always looked at negotiating is it's in most, I, I think maybe a little bit different and maybe not all the time. But as I got later in my years, I started realizing that both parties need to win. It's not a winner or a loser, right? I think if you go into it that way, then it's even harder to negotiate. Um, you know, like case in point. I remember when I was building my house in Colorado. If I just kept beating them up, literally they're not going to want to work with me and they're just going to watch it and just get it. Versus I want you to make money and I want to get a good deal and I want to get a good end result, you know? And, uh, do you see a lot of people look at it that way? Mori: [00:06:09] Well, I see a lot of people who think about it and that sort of win-loss scenario, right? Because again, it's transactional for a lot of people. But, but the, I mean, that's a perfect example that you just gave because you want to incentivize your counterpart, right? So if it's a house that you're building, um, a project that needs to be completed by a certain date. So it’s the negotiations with your employees or contractors, um, negotiations with your client. Because, you know, if, if you don't take it away to account that this is more, uh, sort of a collaboration or a partnership, then you stop thinking about the value of this particular client or business relationship in the long-term. So I think about it from a long game, right? I think about every interaction being part of something that becomes more of a journey than just like the sprint to the end. Because, you know, people like doing business with people that they like, right? They don't pick a business, they pick people that they like. So, you know, I think that the less we focus on the end game. That the, you know, whether you win or lose a focus more on the process, then I think there's a natural extension of this relationship. That's based on collaboration, problem-solving, um, creation of values as opposed to extracting values. So we don't use the term winning in my class too much, because it almost gives us a sense of competition, that's not necessary. Because it's not about competition. You're really only competing with yourself, right? To maybe get the better deal than you did the last time. Or what can we do better? But to think of your, your counterpart, as competition eliminates the opportunity for you to come up with sort of innovative, um, long-term deals that’s focus on anymore our relationship. Jason: [00:07:57] What are you… And maybe, um, I want to ask you this cause there's a lot of people this way. Um, and even with, with me, and I want to know if I'm missing out. Um, so when someone comes to me and they go, Jason, I want to join the mastermind. And, uh, and I tell them, hey, this is the investment. And they go, and then they try to negotiate with me. And I say, the price is the price. Like if I didn't give you enough value then, you know, and then I try to tell them. And, and at the end of the day, if it's not right, it's not right. Like I never negotiate on the price. Am I missing out with that? Like… Mori: [00:08:40] I don't think so. Um, because part of that is to understand your own value, right? And, and to know that in some ways, when people negotiate, things like that. And this is sort of, I'm going to take this somewhere I wasn't planning, but I see it a lot in people that sort of enroll in courses, athletes, whoever like these self-development self, um, sort of help type of courses. They don't always sort of jump in with that investment. And it's so strange to me because it's an investment in yourself, right? We're quick to buy a car to buy a house, but this is sort of where you can reap the rewards of this journey for years on end, right? And so part of what you are doing with mastermind is to create an opportunity for, for people to sort of make the investment, but they reap the rewards of that investment in perpetuity, right? So what's that worth to people? That's usually the question, right? First of all, why are you here? Right. So what was your why? And if your, why is his success evolution development, then what's that worth? And I would, I would like to think a lot, right? So I don't think that there's anything wrong with that. I think that that part of where people go wrong is that they want to go right to the price point. They want to know somebody's budget, which I inherently disagree with. Um, or they want to list out their pricing. And the truth is that that immediately makes it a transaction. The sort of the piece before that. There's like four steps to the negotiations process. So it was like the preparation then when we call information exchange, which is when you first get to know somebody, right. That building rapport. Understanding more about them. They get to know you better. You're building sort of affiliation or connections. And it's during that time where you want to understand their why, right? So why are they even here in the first place? What are their long-term needs? Well beyond just the transaction, right? And you want to sort of explain to them your why, right? The reason why you do what you do and why you think you've been successful. And so to move it away from a black and white sort of somewhat superficial, visual, transactional conversation. And it's also during that time where you talk about your value, right? Why you were so to the people listening and like their agency is, is better positioned to, um, you know, help this client than their competitors. And, and these are what we offer, and this is why we stand by our product and, and here's some of our success stories. But you've not yet talked to anything about pricing, right? So this is this sort of long educational process. That's demanding sort of connectivity and really human connection, human connections. It brings, it brings humanity into the conversation. So by the time you're done with this piece, when you arrive at that next stage, which is the bargaining that transaction, right? Then you're your client, your counterpart is, is far more educated at this point, right? They, there shouldn't be any surprises. Usually, if you do this well, an opening offer is not like, oh my God, how did we get there? Because you've spent the whole time sort of educating them and vice versa. And so I would just say that, that it's important to put off the money conversation as long as possible. It's the most painful part of the process anyway, but you put that aside and then you educate and then you educate and then you answer questions. And you get them on the same page as you, and you better understand their wants and needs. So going back to, or are you doing something wrong? I don't think so at all, because I would, I wouldn't assume that by the time somebody gets to you in that point. Where they’re wanting to sort of enroll and be a part of, they've learned so much about it. Uh, but, and so at that point, you're not taking that piece for granted. You just feel like you've done enough to, you know, sort of explain and express your value. It is no longer your job at that point to undercut yourself, right. Because if they haven't understood what this can do for them, then it's the reeducation as opposed to the okay let me drop my pricing. Why, right? So I think that there's a lot to discussions that are far more enjoyable to end the pain of talking about pricing. If that's what negotiations was, there was no way I'd be teaching it, right? Because it's, it's dreadful. It's, it's not fun. It's uncomfortable. Right? So you just put it off as long as you possibly can. Jason: [00:13:22] What's the fourth step? Is that the decision? Mori: [00:13:25] No, that's when you come basically to a deal, right? So either you come to a deal or you don't, right? That's sort of the commitment and implementation of the contract with deal. Or if there's no deal at all, then that's really sort of that decision point. And then, you know, for a really great, um, negotiations that end up being something long-term, then that end become sort of very fluid. Because every time you go back to the table, you're thinking about how do we make this better? How do we enhance this opportunity for one another? Let's revisit it. We're both in a better position now. And so if the first three steps go rally well, now that end is no longer the sort of as hard end. It's sort of this very fluid ever evolving opportunity.
Jason: [00:14:14] Hey there. Quick question for you. Is your agency paying a fortune for software? Do you have to stack multiple softwares together to deliver success for your clients? You know, if so there's a new platform called HighLevel that you should really check out. HighLevel is an all-in-one marketing platform for agencies that has an insane amount of features. And really replaces tools like click funnels, active campaign, Infusionsoft, Calendly, Kajabi, CallRail, and a lot more. The best part is you can white-label, HighLevel and sell it to your clients as their own software. Opening up a new super sticky revenue stream for your agency. Normally high-level offers a 14-day free trial. But as a member of my community, you have access to an exclusive 30-day free trial, which can you take advantage by going to gohighlevel.com/swenk. So head over to gohighlevel.com/swenk to save yourself hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per year on software costs. Love it. Um, let's switch gears a little bit and let's talk about… Let's say you're in, you're in bed with this person and you really can't get out of it. And you need to try to go, well, it needs to be this way because, you know, hey, you're paying us for, to being the expert, but they want to do it their way. How can both parties win or like, and these guys are stuck. You can't just, sometimes you can't fire them. Like it could be, it could… Well, let, let's, let's use it as this example. Cause I think, let me, let me switch this. You have a business partner, right? In your agency and you guys are not seeing eye-to-eye anymore because the agency has grown at a different pace. What steps would you take? And let's say their lives are not matching anymore. What steps would you take in order to fix that? Mori: [00:16:23] Um, so I've never been married, but the one divorce I've had is one from my business partner. So I, I get that example really well. Um, and I think that… First of all, you have to have the courage to look at yourself and figure out why it's not working anymore, right? Is it that you are, you know, not looking at growth and they are? Your long-term goals have changed, or you have to understand your own why first, right? And, and because these decisions are not easy. And worse yet, they're sort of like become, you know, little knicks, but you keep sort of pulling out and then now it's a scar and it's really bad and you can't get rid of it, right? So you sort of want to just confront the situation the earlier the better. And you want to know very clearly what it is that's not doing for you anymore, right? Because if you're not happy, and I think we undervalue personal happiness and gratification, especially in business, right? There's a lot easier ways to make money than to be an entrepreneur. So, so for the blood, sweat, tears, the work that you put in, the no vacations, the no sick days, right? What is it that you want to get out of it? And sometimes we realize that we've gotten into, out of touch with the things that we have wanted originally. Maybe even burnt out. Maybe there could be a variety of reasons, right? Or I don't see eye-to-eye with this person anymore. And what seemed like, um, a real match just doesn't really work anymore, right? We're so going into very different directions. The point behind why people, and I include myself in that, why comes up to this head that it doesn't need to get there. Is that people A put out the conversation and they keep putting it off. And then in that case, it comes out some other way, right? There's anger, there's animosity, there's disrespect, whatever it is. So you don't want that because, I would assume, unless your partner is a horrible person, right? They’re, they’re dishonest or whatever it is. You don't want to blow up this relationship. And you kind of want to avoid all the lawsuits and all that kind of stuff, right? So the earlier you start having these conversations the better. You may find that they're exactly the same place and that now the negotiation becomes how to untangle this relationship? So that nobody's losing and in fact, you are now both well on your way to finding your own fulfillment and happiness, you've outgrown this. But when people don't talk or they avoid the conversation, in the long run it builds resentment. Resentment in yourself because you didn't have the conversation and resentment of your counterpart, who you are now blaming for everything. And I, I just, I just think that because there's such a depth of relationship involved. The worst thing you can do is actually to not have a conversation. And it doesn't have to be one conversation. Generally, it won't be. If you've been in business for a long time, you could be friends. You could be family members, you could be, I mean, there's so many other aspects to consider that this isn't like, okay, I'm going to build up the courage to go happen to one conversation. No, it's, it's sort of a process that has to be revisited over and over again. I feel like there's a great opportunity actually in untangling these relationships in a way that could be beneficial to both parties. When it doesn't ends up that way, it's because there's A sort of ethics issues become involved. Or B that people have put off the conversation and now there's anger. So there's less emotionality when you treat it as, you know, we've been around the block a few times. I want to go a different direction. How do…? I sense maybe you're not happy either. Can we talk about this? Maybe, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's something else, but this is sort of what I've been getting from you. So let's talk. And I think that's, it really, really simplifies a very complicated issue. But because I've gone through it, I know that it would have been far less complicated had I had the courage to actually talk about what was bothering me a whole lot earlier than I did. Jason: [00:20:55] Yeah. I, I've, I've found over the years I've done it sometimes good. Sometimes very bad. Um, whenever you push, I think we're just like, if I'm pushing on you, your human nature is to push back. And then it's just a constant battle. Unless you can do something like you were talking about kind of pull them along a little bit. And then there's not that friction or that angst. Um, but what do you do if you're at a point where, hey, you're pretty tangled up. I mean, it is a ton of knots and, uh, there's not much like… Is there certain things you can do to try to untangle? Like if you've gotten, just, let's say you, you do want to work it out. But like, you've both been building up. You both hate each other right now. Is there a way to kind of come out the other side and both people win. Mori: [00:21:49] So you can always get an attorney, but I never think that people when they get attorneys, but it just sort of escalates everything. Especially if there's a relationship. Um, we can kind of talk about this. We call it going to the balcony, which means that sort of you know, you almost… Jason: [00:20:55] Push one person off. Mori: [00:21:49] Yeah exactly. No, not quite. But you do create a third person, right? You get sort of this imaginary third person. And all it means is that when we’re on the heat of debate and conversation our egos don't allow us to be curious anymore, right. We're sort of drive hard. And then when they disagree, we drive harder and then harder. And we want to be right and we can't really hear the other person. And so you have to allow yourself to stop and be like, well, like… This is, not only is this not getting better, but what are we doing? Right. So why is it that we can no longer even have a conversation? And what they mean by going to the balcony is that you actually have to sort of lift yourself out of this conversation and become almost like a third party that's saying, okay, let's start again. And you go back to the why's, right? Why are we here? What is it that you want? What is it that I want? Let's press reset. This is becoming only harder if we doubt. And if you can do that, then what it means is that you're now, first of all, you can hear each other, right? You're not sort of talking over each other. But that level of curiosity can allow you to see somebody's perspective that you've been so blind to, right? You know, a lot of studies show that, that, first of all, being curious as is not an easy thing for a lot of people, right. We want to come into conversations without minds already made up. When we know people really well, we’re even less curious, right? We're sort of filling in the blanks when they talk. I know them so well, I don't have to ask. This is what they want. Truth is people grow, people change. So if you can then change that mindset from I'm right, they're wrong. To that's not getting us anywhere. But maybe turning it to how about we just, we engage in this discussion from the place of… What if we started from zero? What if we just better understood each other? Because in that situation that you mentioned, you're not changing somebody's mind, right? This isn't like I'm right, so let me make you understand how right I am. It’s neither of us is frankly trying to be right. We're just trying to untangle, which requires understanding. And we're not getting there because we're too far into this from an emotionality perspective, right. Taking breaks in those conversations is so important. Um, it doesn't always have to be done. And like I said, these conversations aren't normally addressed and fixed in like three hours, right? It's over time. It's many times. When things get heated, you take a break. Um, because if you don't, again, then I would say you need that other party, that's going to keep you sort of, um, level-headed and less emotional. But now you've removed the very thing that made you business partners in the first place, which was your relationship. Jason: [00:25:07] Yeah. I love that. And I, I want to point out kind of the, what you said on curiosity. I think if we do have curiosity on what that other, how that other person sees it. And kind of almost like a lot of times too, because emotion just clouds judgment. And it's very hard for me. I get very, very emotional when people come after me, um, to a point where I'm like death to you all, right? And so, I'm talking mainly about my HOA. Maybe you get me, right. Um, but you know, if I think if you kind of step back and go, if I was going to give this advice, to my friend that was going through the same situation, what would you give? And I, and I always felt like you can kind of take emotion out of that. And especially too, if you're curious about what's their point of view. And then look at it kind of like what you were saying is like, how can both, all parties win and we just come out. Versus… Mori: [00:26:09] Right. It's hard, by the way. It's really, to be curious, it's not easy, right? Because we want to be right. And so to have the humility, have the confidence to say, I'm very prepared for this conversation. I know what I want, but the humility that says, but I can't know everything. There's no way that I know every part of what's going to sort of fix this, this issue. And I don't want anybody to think like, oh, she's just saying, oh, she makes it sound so easy. It is the last thing from easy, right? Starting at what would appear to be easy, which is just being curious because you have to take your ego out of it. I will tell you something about emotions though. I'm not that person who thinks there's no room for emotions in negotiations. We're human beings, right? Not robots and emotions inform us, right? They can, they can tell us what's important. What's worth fighting for? What makes us unhappy should be addressed? What makes us happy should be embraced, right? Emotions go wrong when they get ahead of you. Right. And so, again, don't disconnect, just be super aware so that you know, what's happening. And like you said, when you get angry, you can just say, hold on a minute. Okay. I just need a little break. Let's, let's just let me go walk around the block for a minute and, um, and I'll be back or it let's just move this to Friday. Cooler heads prevail. We'll come back to this. And so I think just to understand that, that you don't want to shun emotion because they inform you. You just don't want your emotions to get the best of you. Jason: [00:27:49] I love it. Well, this has all been amazing. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Mori: [00:27:58] I think that, um, and you know, I talked about my book, um, the, another reason why I decided to write a book in the midst of a million other negotiations books that are out there is that I didn't want to write something that was prescriptive. I don't want to say, do this, do this. And you're guaranteed a good outcome because that's not how things work. And I don't want people to memorize formulas. How to say a certain thing. Um, I think that, that the, the best outcomes come when you're completely authentic. Both to yourself, as well as your presence in that conversation. And whether it's a client or a relationship, um, when, when you really have worked on showing up as the best of you, right? Who you are and you honor that, then there's no reason to memorize how to’s, right? The only thing that you have to navigate is, first to be really prepared and that sort of one the most important things. But also all you really have to do then is first of all, show up as you want to be remembered, right? And as you want to be treated so with kindness and dignity and respect. But also to know that in order to be really, um, true to, to your presence as well as theirs, to kind of disconnect from the outside world. Get rid of all the distractions and just be really present in this conversation. Because you'll get emotional cues, you'll get information about your counterpart. You'll better know how to answer questions, right? So in a world that we're distracted all the time, this is even harder and yet more important. So I would say to people sort of celebrate yourself, right? Be confident in who you are and what you do. Nobody does it better than you. Nobody knows it better than you, right. So to come in with that level of confidence. Have the humility to be competent, to be curious, engage in a way that is humane, right? Is, is, is, is empathetic and kind and open. Then, you know, I don't see anything but success at the other end of it. Because even if that one deal doesn't work out, you so enjoy process and maybe they have as well that this will be a relationship that they can go back to when they do get more money or when the economy changes. So you leave an indelible mark on people and it could be good or it could be bad. And so your value proposition comes when it's really, really good. Jason: [00:30:28] Awesome. Well, this has all been amazing. What's the name of the book again and where can they go to get it? Mori: [00:30:35] Let me show you so that you can see. It's called “Bring yourself: How to Harness The Power of Connection to Negotiate Fearlessly.” Do you see that? Jason: [00:30:42] Yup, we do. Mori: [00:30:44] Not your ordinary negotiations book title. But yeah, it's on Amazon. It's on every online retailer. But it's, it's all about stories. It's like an autobiography, actually. So it's not academic. It's just, about human connections. Jason: [00:30:57] Very cool. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. Mori: [00:30:59] Thank you so much for having me. Jason: [00:31:00] Exactly. And if you guys enjoyed this episode and you want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners who can help you navigate through emotion and make sure you're prepared and really set you on a path for scaling your agency faster, I'd love to invite all of you to go apply at the digitalagencyelite.com. So, go there. And until next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Negotiate_Successfully_and_Stop_Lowering_Your_Agency_Prices.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 22 August 2021
Having your own agency and the responsibility for people’s livelihoods can be an isolating experience. Darren Fox says he fell into the agency world unexpectedly. After a while of offering freelance web design services, it became clear he could not continue solopreneur. So, Darren founded Idea Marketing Group. and started building a team. Even though he loves building relationships with his team, as the agency grew, he had to separate himself to maintain his leadership role. “You definitely feel like you’re on an island,” Darren says. In this episode, Darren is candid about the loneliness of agency ownership. He also talks about ways to overcome isolation in order to grow a successful agency. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesNinja Cat: Today's episode is sponsored by Ninja Cat, a digital marketing performance management platform where you can unify your data, create beautiful, insightful reports and presentations that will help you grow your business. Head over to ninjacat.io/masterclass to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Learn to Deal With the Isolation of Agency Life and Find the Right Pace to GrowJason: [00:00:00] What's up, everybody? Jason Swenk here. And I have an amazing guest coming on the masterclass to talk about the doom and gloom of owning an agency. The things that not many people really talk about that you need to be aware of and to make sure that, you know, look, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. So we're definitely going to have a lot of fun. Um, but let's go ahead and jump into it. Alright, Darren. What's going on, man? Darren: [00:00:33] Hey, thanks for having me. It's awesome to be here. Jason: [00:00:36] Yeah, man. I'm excited to have you on. I was, I had Drew on last week and he was one of the other ones on top of the mountain with us. That was in the intro. So you're the second guest on the intro. Tell us, uh, before we jump in and talk about, you know, all this amazing stuff that we wish we knew about, tell us who you are and what you do? Darren: [00:00:58] Sure. So, uh, Darren Fox, president and founder of Idea Marketing Group. Uh, we're a full-service agency that is known for custom web development. So that's been our core focus and we work with all types of industries, but we've really been, you know, narrowing that down to food and beverage within the last year or so. Jason: [00:01:19] Awesome. Well, I'm excited to have you on, so let's, um, let's go ahead and jump into it. Let's talk about what are some of the things that you didn't expect, you know, creating an agency. Because a lot of times we come in and we think, you know, creating an agency there's low barrier to entry and we're going to have all this freedom, uh, you know, to do whatever we want and have all this money. So let's, let's talk about what did you not expect? Darren: [00:01:45] Oh, yeah. So, I mean, I guess a lot of it is time initially of like how much time it really takes. Everybody thinks that, you know, because you have your own business, that you're just going to be, you know, going out, doing whatever you want, getting the work done. And I feel like when I first started, I was probably working almost double the hours that I was previously for like a fraction of the price. Probably like my first job, like pushing shopping carts at a retail store is essentially what I was making, but working so much harder and longer. And, you know, I kind of fell into the agency role unexpected. I was really just going to kind of do it as like this freelance thing and do it on the side. And it all just kind of happened. Then, you know, it started to snowball and I was getting bigger and I was like, I can't do this by myself. I need to start hiring. And, you know, just learning about the challenges of hiring and trying to bring on the right people. And I think, you know, I obviously learned some mistakes early on that the best thing to do is, you know, spend that money and hire the best talent that you can early on. Um, so that was probably like one of the biggest mistakes out of the gate is I was just trying to hire like what I could kind of afford. And just learning early on that, you know, that's not the right type of mentality that you need to have to make the agency successful. Jason: [00:03:14] Yeah. I, um, I see a lot of times, and I even did this as well. Like in the very beginning when you're hiring someone, you're hiring them to do something that you don't know how to do. That you're really trying to sell them on working with you versus the opposite. And I look at it now looking back and I think you do too of going, if I could go back again, I would actually hire someone to do something that I already know how to do really well. So then I know how to manage them and they're actually doing the things that I don't need to be doing anymore. So I can go on to the next. Darren: [00:03:51] Right. Yeah, because I mean, every agency owner should constantly challenge themselves to, you know, do professional development and just keep growing. Because as soon as you stop, you die. Like, yeah, this is just kind of the nature of the beast, especially in this industry with how fast everything changes. Jason: [00:04:10] Yeah. What about like, when things go wrong? Like, what's your, what's your thoughts of, uh… You know, can you go to your team? Can you go to your employees? Like, I mean, it's pretty, I remember it was pretty isolating. Darren: [00:04:25] Yeah. Yeah. You definitely feel like you're on an island. Like, you know, you want to share these things with people. But at the same time, they're putting their trust and faith in you as a leader. And you don't want to jeopardize that either, because then they start to question what you're doing. So, yeah, it's an extremely lonely position to be in. And it's tough too, because I'm the type of person like I like to develop like really solid relationships with my staff. And then there's also that fine line too, of like, well, you still have to be the boss. You can't be somebody's best friend because you may be put in that position to where you'd have to fire them. And I've had to do that and, you know, it's, it's a hard position to be in. So I think just kind of knowing that fine line of like, wanting to bring on people that fit from a culture standpoint, because they share the same values as you do. But you also have to kind of, you know, keep that line in between of not becoming friends. I mean, you can be, but it's like, it's a different type of friendship. Jason: [00:05:32] Yeah. How have you gotten around that? Because, you know, I've, I've struggled with that in the past. And even on this go around, you know, it's, it's really, it might, like with Stacy and her team, like they're, they're like family now. Um, and I know what you're saying about like, you know, if you get to a point where you have to fire someone because they're not doing something, it makes it that much harder. But I guess elaborate a little bit more about, because most people don't realize this and it does get very, very difficult. Darren: [00:06:11] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when you say family, you look at it and the people that you work with are probably the people that you see more often than your actual family. So in essence, they are your family because, yeah, you're around them so much. And, you also, like, as you've grown, you add staff, I remember, or a smaller, we would do everything. It was like a, a tight little group too. We would do like launch outings and everything. But then as you get bigger yeah, it's like, oh, we can't really just bring everybody out to lunch or we can't do this. And then you have to start to be selective of like, well, if I go out to lunch with this person, is it going to piss off the other person? And people start to see that you're playing like favoritism. Um, so that's also hard too. So, you know, a lot of times like the team would go out on lunch outings and I'd be like, yeah, I'm going to sit this one out because you guys will be able to bond more without me there and present. So those are some of the challenging things too, is just pulling back and sometimes it puts you or paints that picture of like, oh, you're this guy that, you know, doesn't want to be around the staff when really you do, you just have to like… Yeah, it's, it's hard to say. It's like, yeah, you've got to kind of just separate yourself. You can't do after hour get-togethers or those types of things. Jason: [00:07:33] Yeah. I remember when I had, I think we're about eight people at the time and a lot of the people at this level, um, I remember having them over at my house, like a bonfire behind and I just treated them as like friends. And then I remember the culture really started shifting a little bit in the wrong way, um, for like listening to us. It was kind of like, they didn't look at you as the leader anymore, but like, oh, I can do whatever. I remember having to get rid of a lot of those people. And I remember coming back at it going I can't do that anymore. And it's like, one of my favorite movies is miracle right there about the 1980 hockey team. If any of you have watched or hasn't watched it, you got to go watch it. It's really pretty amazing. And, uh, Herb, I think it was Herb Green was that w was that the coach's name at the time? And the whole, this whole committee wanted to put all these a, a, you know, all these, a, um, star people on the team. He was like, no, I want the right people on the right position. Um, it's not, they're not the best player, but the best player for the team. And I remember him separating himself from his team. Like… and I remember the doctor and his assistant coach was like, has he ever done this? It's like, no, never, but there's always a reason. And, uh, it is, you know, it is pretty lonely at the top. Um, what are some things that you've done to kind of make you sane because you are on an island? Darren: [00:09:15] Yeah. Um, so actually probably the best thing was joining the mastermind group too. And just being around other agency owners and just being able to share with them directly. Because those are the stories that we haven't been able to share internally. And then you have somebody that's in the same boat as you, that you can be like, all right, I get it. Like, let's just talk through this. So I think that's really valuable too, because, yeah, I see it with every agency owner where they start to have second thoughts of like, do I get rid of the agency? Do I keep going? Is this the right thing for me? Um, so yeah, I mean, we all battled depression too, which is an unfortunate thing as a business owner, but, it's something that everybody should be aware of. Jason: [00:10:03] Well, I think, I think the depression comes because we do feel like everything's on our shoulders. And there's, you know, there's, it's like these people are going to eat or they're going to die, you know, with us. And that's, I think we put too much pressure on ourselves. You know, I've always joked about, I've always been fired from every position I've ever had, other than the ones I create. Um, and it's always been the best thing, right? So I can go on to the next, and I could eventually find this. And I look at, look, even if you make a wrong decision as an agency owner. That's okay. Like you get a reset, even if it does take down and you have to lay people off. That's okay. People are going to be fine. They're resilient. They'll actually go do it. So it's not a life and death situation. Um, yeah. And you know, I hear so many stories, kind of like yours. I was many points in my agency where I just wanted to throw in the towel. I was, uh, I was looking through some of the stories and old emails, um, to kind of look at some of the successes that our clients have had over the years. And, you know Jack well, and I remember Jack, he sent me an email many years ago. He goes, should I shut down the agency or push on? And like there's so many times, and I remember sending him an email. I was like, uh, no, you should push on. And I said, whenever you feel it you're at the max kind of the Navy Seals have this motto that you're only at 40%, you still have 60% to go. I'm so glad he continued, cause now is a multimillion-dollar agency, uh, you know, owner. And he's picking and choosing doing what he wants, but it's just like, sometimes you have to disconnect and get the emotion. Like how do you… in your agency, I think a lot of times I would, even in my company now, uh, you make emotional decisions. So how do you take emotion out of it when you're making a decision?
Darren: [00:12:04] That's the hardest thing, because I feel like I make a lot of decisions based on emotion too. So I think the best thing to do in that case is don't decide right at the moment. Like, digest it, take, uh, take time. Um, like I think another thing that agency owners fail to do is they don't take vacations. Like, especially early on too. And that was something that I started to do, because just as you said, it's kind of like a reset to get away and be like, all right, recharge, think about it. And really just like reflect on where you're going, what you're doing and think about it. Because I've had those moments too, too, where it's like, all right, what do I do? And sometimes that is it's like, you just need to get away. Jason: [00:13:01] Do you feel like you have to comb through mountains of data, jumping between multiple platforms to spreadsheets, to slide decks and back in order to create performance reports for your clients? It's a constant drain on your agency's time and resources. And that's where our friends at Ninja Cat can help. Ninja Cat is a digital marketing performance management platform that really unifies your marketing data and empowers your agency to automate insightful, beautiful client reports at scale. Now, Ninja Cat keeps your marketing performance and presentation tools in one place, freeing you up from manual data wrangling, and it really gives your team more time to focus on strategy and growing your business. And for a limited time, my Smart Agency podcast listeners will receive $500 ninja credit when you go to ninjacat.io/masterclass to claim your offer and schedule a demo. That's ninjacat.io/masterclas. I love that you said take a vacation, get away, because especially for the first couple of years, or decade for some people… You work around the clock because you're like, this is my time I got to grab as much as I possibly can. But it's almost kind of like, you know, my son, um, he runs the mile at track and a lot of kids take off just sprint the first two, and then they die at the last two. You got to pace yourself. And I find, I found, you know, especially in doing this business… You know, I, I felt like I wanted to get all the market share, but I knew I was like, well, why, why, why do I need that? And I said, I need to have some time to self-reflect to do my own thing. That's why I only work Monday through Thursday, you know, from a certain time to a certain time. And that's the firm's goal of each quarter is around my time goal. And that's a rule. I don't break it. I think so many others, if they did that, then they enjoyed a lot more. And yeah, you might not grow as quick but who cares if you grow a thousand times, you know, every, every year, if it's going to get you a shitty life? Darren: [00:15:22] Exactly. Yeah. I mean, if it's consistent and you're still seeing that growth, even if it's small, I would much rather have that than… You know, early on we did some significant growth and scaled up, probably too quickly, and had it take some time back and just like, all right, we, we need to work on process. We have to do this, get this set up. So yeah, I think that's the other thing too. Everybody's always so impatient to like, just as you said, cover everything. And it's like, you don't have to. Jason: [00:15:56] Yeah. What, um… one of the things like, how did you kind of change the impatientness, uh, of kind of giving yourself more time, because I see so many agencies they rush. Like how did you know…? Because everything in your company is designed to break, I look at right? Like think about, uh, marketing should break sales. Sales should break operations, right? And so how did you know what's the right pace for you to grow? I think not many people really talk about that. We just talk about 10X, 20X, 2X, whatever it is. Like, how do you find the right pace for your growth in order for it to work for you? Darren: [00:16:42] Um, really, it was the ability to learn, to say no, which is like one of the hardest things too. Because you can look like, just, as you said, you had access to production schedules, like, you know what's happening. You could easily take another job on top of it and kill your staff or you can say, all right, you've identified this, you, you mentioned a couple of red flags and it's probably not the right fit. So even though you have the money and you're ready to go, we're not going to take on the project. So that's been like the biggest thing to like slow it down. And just make sure that, you know, selecting the right type of work. That took me years to figure it out. Um… Jason: [00:17:30] Was it because of process, process of elimination? Or why do you think it took you many years? It took me many years as well. Darren: [00:17:40] Yeah. It's really, it's just, um, saying no to the money, because just as you said, early on, it's like everything's on our shoulders to make sure that we're paying salaries. We're making sure that we're providing. So when you have the money there and you see it and like, okay, this is going to help everybody out. But at the same time, you start to look at it, is it really going to help everybody out or is it going to put them in a different type of mental state that you don't want them in? Um, so yeah, it was challenging because yeah, when we first started, we were taking on any project that we could get because it was just a project to put in the queue. Um, so I think that was probably one of the biggest things and it's hard to learn and to, you know, say no. Jason: [00:18:25] How… last thing I want to ask you, um, is your team is always going to say you're maxed out or they're maxed out. So, and I don't think many people talk about this either of going, how do you really truly tell if your team is maxed out or not in order to figure out when to say no? Like I know you're saying when to say no to the wrong client, or when you can say I need to bring on someone else to help. Because that's a, I think that's an, that takes, you know, years and years to figure that out too. Like, cause I remember my team going. Man, we're, we're maxed out. We can't take on any more work. Darren: [00:19:08] Yeah. Now you hear that a lot. And, you know, there's things like time tracking that you can look at and everything, but really the best way is just to sit down with your team one-on-one and just ask them outright. Like, how are you feeling like you want to go through it together? Like, let's talk about it. Because the other big thing too is like, you know, we're in the agency life, we're not in the ER. Like we have projects that, you know, sure they may have a deadline, but it doesn't mean that somebody is going to die because we can't get it done on that day. Like, so that's the other thing too, is like just setting expectations and going through that. I think that's, you know, another hard lesson for agency owners is, you know, they do one project at this time and then figure that's what it's going to take for every other project. But every client's different, you don't know what it's going to like, be like to work with them. Um, so really setting those expectations and letting your staff know that you've got their back and be like, all right, here's the deadline? What can we do to hit it? Can we pull in other team members? Or is this even a realistic deadline? Do we have to stretch it? So yeah. It's just really that transparency and just, you know, talking to your staff, like they're humans, because really they are the most important piece of the agency. Jason: [00:20:31] Too it's, it's relying on them, right? Like I always tell everybody it's like delegate the outcomes you want, not the tasks. And a lot of times too, you can delegate the problems to them. Um, without divulging that you don't have a clue about it, right? So if you went to your staff going, uh, I don't know how to grow this damn company, can you guys help me out? They're all going to do, they're all going to jump ship. But if you can kind of go, hey, what do you guys think? I want to get your input on, you know, what do you guys think we need to do in order to get to this point? They're going to be like, wow. You know, Darren's asking me for my input. So I feel significant. I can contribute. I can be a part of something bigger than myself. It's just about reframing that. So just, and the other thing too, and I think you've realized this, you know because look running an agency's tough and you're going to have a lot of days where you wanting to quit. How you come into the office, if you guys have an office or how you show up, when you chat with your team, directly impacts them and their mood. I remember when I would show up to the office, if a client screwed us or whatever happened, uh, or if I was mad at a business partner. If I showed up pissed or in a bad mood, it, it rained down. Did you see that as well? Darren: [00:21:56] Yeah. Yeah, because my team knows me well enough that they can tell as well too. And I'm the type that likes to do shenanigans and pranks at the office to keep everything light. And cause really it is… it's like, we're all supposed to have fun. Like, just take it easy and just do good work and rely on each other. I mean, it's just simple rules. Jason: [00:22:22] And Darren really means that like he showed up at the digital agency experience with, uh, what was a balloon launcher? Um, he was the first one when we found that creepy tunnel in the old mines. I was like, I pulled like literally guys, we found this old mine when we were on these ATVs and it wasn't locked. And I opened this and I look at Darren, I go, you want to go in? And before I knew it, he was in and we kept one person out in case we all died, like an avalanche happened, but, uh, it was so much fun. Darren: [00:22:54] Yeah, exactly. I mean, we only get one shot, so just make it count. Jason: [00:22:58] That's right. Well, awesome. Darren, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the people listening in? Darren: [00:23:06] Um, I would just say just, if you start to doubt yourself, just you know, talk to family and talk to loved ones, take a break. Um, because you're going to be able to push through it. Like, don't feel like it's all on you that you do have a support line that's out there Jason: [00:23:24] And what's the website people can go and check, uh, check the agency out? Darren: [00:23:28] Yeah. So it's an Idea Marketing Group. And then, then it's ideamktg.com. Jason: [00:23:36] Awesome. Everyone go check it out. And if you guys liked this episode, you'll make tape. Make sure you take a screenshot. Shut us out on Instagram saying, hey, got a lot of value from it. Thanks for sharing your perspective. We'll give you a shout-out back as well. And uh, if you guys want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners like Darren and come to, uh, the mountain to have an amazing time and just be able to talk about the stuff you can't talk about with your crew. Um, I'd love to invite you guys together to digitalagencyelite.com and see if we're the right fit for you and if you're the right fit us. So make sure to go there now. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: 01_How_to_Overcome_Isolation_as_an_Agency_Owner_So_You_Can_Grow.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 18 August 2021
Ever wondered if you could make money on performance-based pricing? Kyle Sulerud was a Google ads expert with many years of experience in the space. He even had a training program teaching others his Google ads methodology. That was until he was presented with the challenge of running YouTube ads. Today he runs AdLeg, an agency specialized in this niche. Kyle joins the podcast to talk about his experience with the pay-per-performance model, how it has worked for him, how he refined his criteria to work with clients that he could ensure success, and the hurdles he has found in his learning experience. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesHighLevel: Today's episode is sponsored by HighLevel, an all-in-one marketing platform that will give you the tools, support and resources you need to succeed with your agency. Head over to gohighlevel.com/swenk to enjoy an exclusive 30-day free trial. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Refine Your Client Criteria and Profit With Pay-Per-Performance PricingJason: [00:00:00] Hey, what's up everybody? Jason Swenk here and I have another amazing episode for you. An amazing guest coming up, he’s in the mastermind, Kyle. And his agency is all based on pay for performance, you know. And we're going to talk about how you can do it. What are the benefits? What are the disadvantages? And let's go ahead and get into it. Hey, Kyle. Welcome to the show. Kyle: [00:00:29] Hey, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:31] Yeah, man. Excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Kyle: [00:00:37] Yeah, so, uh, the names Kyle Sulerud and I live in the great sunny state of North Dakota. Um, and I run an agency called AdLeg. We, uh, did Google ads for a long time. About seven and a half years, um, in the space. But for the past couple of years, I've really been focused on YouTube ads. And, as you mentioned in the intro, we focus on pay for performance, meaning we only get paid when our clients get paid. And, um, it's been a great model. I've been able to grow the team pretty quickly with that model. So I'm excited to talk about that today. Jason: [00:01:15] Yeah. So tell us kind of… How did you discover this model? Or why did you choose this model? Because there's a lot of different models that, you know, you could have done, you know. What was… What attracted you to the performance model? Kyle: [00:01:33] So, when we were just doing Google ads, it was all retainer-based. And I'd kind of always wanted to do performance-based. I've heard Dean Jackson talk about thinking about if you only got paid for results, what would you get paid for? And I've always thought about my agency that way, but when you're running Google ads for roofing companies, that's, that's pretty hard to do. Um, obviously there's certain pay-per-lead models that can work for that, but. Um, it just never really worked out. Once I got into YouTube ads, I found that it, it could work out. For starters, because I didn't know what the results were going to be. And I really didn't want to get paid for my first couple of clients unless I was bringing them results. So they knew that, they knew that I was, I was fresh with YouTube ads and they were willing to give me a shot. Um, especially since they weren't going to have to pay me if it didn't work. They just had to pay for their ads. So we worked out a percentage of profit and because they are selling digital products, that was easy to track. And, um, from there it worked, the profit was there. My percentage was there. Everyone was happy. And that's the model that I've stuck with. Jason: [00:02:51] That’s awesome. Tell us kind of a couple of scenarios to watch out for, like, if you had to go back, right? And take on some clients. Cause I've, I've seen it work extremely well, and I've also seen it blow up in people's face. But it's blown up there in their face because of certain criteria. So can you talk a little bit more about that? Kyle: [00:03:10] Absolutely. We really refined the criteria. And that has been extremely important. And at first we didn't necessarily know what the, what that criteria had to be. So we would take on clients that looked really promising. It looked like they had a product that was going to sell well through YouTube ads. And if we just sent traffic to that, then it would be profitable. And it didn't work for, for a number of reasons, either their product wasn't quite ironed out or they were in the middle of pivoting to something new, or they didn't have the sales team in place to handle the leads. Um, for the most part, it came down to, to newer products. People that didn't really have something that was proven out fully. So our criteria now is you have to really be proven out. You have to have, um, we have a pretty high threshold for monthly revenue from the product that you want us to advertise. That doesn't mean from your whole business, but from the specific product that you want us to send traffic to, you need a certain amount of monthly revenue coming in. Um, you need a sales team in place. If you're, if you're selling something with sales calls and we've found that that's pretty reliable. Because it's at that point and you have a machine. It's well-oiled and we just need to send more traffic to it and we'll make you more profitable. And then we can, we can actually take our cut. Jason: [00:04:46] I love it. What is the, what's the typical kind of you think of a good percentage to have, or do you have a sliding scale? Cause a lot of people are like, well, how much should I ask? And I think sometimes people ask for too little. Kyle: [00:05:03] Yeah. Um, that's something else that that's evolved. Um, the, the very first client got a really sweetheart deal. Um, and since then I've learned the value that my agency can really bring and… It varies, but it goes as high as 25% right now. And maybe, maybe that can go higher, but I don't know. I think 25% is a pretty high number. Not everyone is on that level. It kind of depends on the client. Um, but yeah, anywhere from 20 to 25% is pretty reasonable for, for this. Especially with the types of clients we have, where they already have everything going on, all we need to do is send more traffic to something that's already working. So it's pure profit for the client at that point. Jason: [00:05:52] Yeah. And, and I would, I would gather and especially, you know, from, from hearing from you in the mastermind talk about it. It it's more like they're auditioning for you rather than you auditioning for them. Is that true? Kyle: [00:06:07] Yeah, it, it really is. Um, we don't even talk to about 90% of people who apply to work with us. And, uh, once we talk to them, that's really just our way of verifying the numbers of going really deep and making sure that it's something that we think will work with our model and that it's something that we want to work on. So yeah, we, we reject far, far more people than we accept it. It really is them applying to work with us. Jason: [00:06:41] Yeah, it's, it's just an unbelievable model, you know? Cause a lot of times we're all, you know, the thing about… There's a lot of people listening that are at a point where they're like, and I came to this realization a little while ago of going, I remember chatting with… There was like maybe three agency owners I chatted with in a row and they all were like, I resent my clients. And I'm like, I was like, well, you're in the wrong business. Like, why do you resent your clients? And they couldn't really tell me. They were just like, well, they always ask for these dumb requests, all this kind of stuff. And I, and then I, the last person I said, you know, actually you probably have a lead, um, a lead generation problem. Because you resent your clients because you depend too much on them. And I said, if you had a ton to come in and you could pick and choose from them, that basically eliminates that. Then you're only working with the ones that you truly want. And they're like, yeah, that kind of makes sense. And I love that you discovered that through this. Um, tell us the story about, I'm sure you probably had… where there's a client that they probably keep sending you checks and you're like crap. They're, they're probably like they start looking and going, how much money am I sending to Kyle?
Kyle: [00:07:55] Yeah. So the, the pay for, pay for performance model sounds really great to a client before they send you any money. You know, this, this sounds amazing. Um, this agency they're putting their money where their mouth is and, um, great. I'll sign up. I'll pay them a percentage of profits. Where that starts getting questioned is when is when a client is paying you 20 times more than they paid someone to run ads for them before, you know? Because yeah, people are out there willing to, to run ads for whatever, whatever kind of business you have. That's not really what we do. We don't run ads. We partner with you. We're, we're in this as much as you are to try to make it as profitable as possible. Um, so yeah, once, once they start sending those, those bigger checks, five figures, multiple five figures a month. Now they're thinking, hey, I used to pay my Facebook ad guy $2,000 a month. Um, maybe I can find someone to do it for that. So, yeah, it, uh, I can think of a specific situation where that happened. And the client was actually very transparent with us. They said, you know, we're, we feel like we're paying you a lot. And we're actually testing out a different agency right now who's just willing to charge us on a flat retainer. And, you know, we said okay. I'd seen that happen before where, uh, a different agency came in and results just weren't there. And you know, that's not to brag, but I've, I have a really great system here and we're able to bring in results for YouTube ads like no other agency I've seen. So in this case they were testing this other agency. Uh, they were about a month in with them. It, it wasn't profitable with them. Uh, they were told they just need some more time, you know, need more time to optimize. That's always the story. Um, even though we had been profitable in month one. They got a couple of months in and it still wasn't profitable. And with the retainer they were paying the agency, they were losing money. And, um, finally they, they said, all right, you know, we're getting rid of this other agency. We're just going to go with you. Um, we get it now. And that's… think, they have to think about it like it they're paying the money somewhere, right? A lot of people don't think twice about doubling their ad spend and paying Google twice as much money. But what we can do is actually save a client that money that they're paying Google. We get some of it, they get the rest of the savings and, overall, they just are way more profitable. And once they realize that they're happy to stay with us. So it's very, very rare that we lose a client. Jason: [00:11:01] Hey there. Quick question for you. Is your agency paying a fortune for software? Do you have to stack multiple softwares together to deliver success for your clients? You know, if so, there's a new platform called HighLevel that you should really check out. HighLevel is an all-in-one marketing platform for agencies that has an insane amount of features and really replaces tools like ClickFunnels active campaign, Infusionsoft, Calendly, Kajabi, CallRail, and a lot more. The best part is you can white-label, HighLevel and sell it to your clients as their own software. Opening up a new super sticky revenue stream for your agency. Normally high-level offers a 14-day free trial. But as a member of my community, you have access to an exclusive 30-day free trial, which can you take advantage by going to gohighlevel.com/swenk. So head over to gohighlevel.com/swenk to save yourself hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per year on software costs. I think too, like, it's about the client not realizing that the time, time is more valuable, you know, especially going to a new agency. Now I want to know, and I, I hope you did, but you're too nice of a guy, so I don't think you did. Um, did you charge them a pain in the ass fee for coming back? Kyle: [00:12:32] No. No, they're actually, you know, they're good clients. And like I said, they were, they were up front with us. They, they told us. They asked for a discount. Um, we, we stuck to what we were charging, you know? Um, yeah, well, I guess I'm too nice of a guy. Jason: [00:12:50] I already knew the answer. Kyle: [00:12:52] They’re still getting the same rate they were. Jason: [00:12:54] I know I was like, I’d been like, all right, well it's 30% now. Um, suckers. What, uh, what have you learned from them leaving that you would have been like now that you have in your head, would you recall this story to them and saying, hey, you can go try them. But look, you're more than comfortable paying Google, but why not us? Like it's a cer… it's a percentage, like we never make over this percentage. Kyle: [00:13:21] Yeah. There's different ways to frame that. And I think each client kind of thinks about it a little differently. One thing we've really learned is to be just really involved in communication. Um, for a while we were rarely meeting with clients. Uh, we mostly communicate by email. Now we're meeting with clients once a month or once every couple months, at least just to talk about, okay here's where you were. Here's what we've done. Here's where you are now. Here's the plan going forward? Uh, here are some new changes that Google, um, that from Google, you know, that we're on top of, don't worry, we're taking care of this kind of stuff. And just kind of over-communicating so that they know that we're, we're on top of it. We’re their partner, and it would be almost silly for them to look elsewhere. Jason: [00:14:17] What about…? I know some people are listening in are going… All right so you set up this great system on YouTube. I presume this is under your account that you control or is that under theirs? Kyle: [00:14:30] Yeah, it's, it's under our account that we control and we do get some pushback on that. Uh, we've lost some clients, um, who probably would have started working with us if that wasn't the case. But it's been really important for me. Um, partially to just preserve our system. I don't want an outside party, even if it's a client having access to see everything that we do. Um, and then partially just because a lot of it is in the setup, I'm sure someone could take a campaign that we've set up and that we've been running for a few months and run with it and it would do fine for a while. So we need to really just preserve our work. Uh, we don't require contracts, so that's just one way that we ensure that our work is protected. Jason: [00:15:23] Yeah. I love it. Cause I know a lot of people are thinking, well, we'll set up everything on the client side and they have access to everything. And then like, like you were saying, a lot of the work is upfront. And then, and I like how you overcame that objection to them as well of going I don't want you guys going in there and messing it up. Like we got to protect what we're doing. Rather than saying, if you leave, then you can run with it too. It's like how you, how you frame that. Well, this has all… Kyle: [00:15:50] Actually, we invested some money in, in building out a portal that clients have access to so they can see some data in real time. They can see how their ads are performing in real time. It's linked directly into the Google ads account. It's software that I hired developers to build for me. Um, so they can see the, the data, the performance data. They just can't see how everything is set up and how everything's being run. Jason: [00:16:17] I love it. I love it. Kyle, this has all been great. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Kyle: [00:16:25] Uh, no, I think we pretty much covered it. I think pay for, for performance is great. If you can work it out, there's huge upside. It'll probably take you a wild and some downside to kind of figure out who you want to work with, who you don't want to work with, how much you needed to charge. Um, but it's, it's been great for me. I'm definitely not going to be changing it anytime soon. Jason: [00:16:50] Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Kyle. Um, oh, before I forget, what's the website people can go and check you guys out? Kyle: [00:16:58] Yeah, it's adleg.com. That's A D L E G.com. You can also find me on YouTube. I have a pretty active channel. Just search my name on YouTube and that'll come up for you. Jason: [00:17:10] Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Kyle, for coming on the show. And if you guys enjoyed this episode, make sure you take a screenshot, upload it to Instagram, tag us and say, hey, I really. The episode. Thanks so much. And we'll give you a shout out back. Also, too if you want to be around other amazing agency owners on a consistent basis, I'd love to invite all of you to go check out the Digital Agency Elite. This is our exclusive mastermind where we're constantly ascending all of our members up to the top of the summit so they can get to a point where they can exit, whether it's sell their agency or exit of doing all this stuff that they hate doing. So make sure you go to digitalagencyelite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: 01_Can_a_Pay-Per-Performance_Pricing_Model_Work_for_Your_Agency_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 15 August 2021
Do you have the crystal clear vision needed to take your agency to the next level? John Quinton-Barber describes himself as a visionary and accidental entrepreneur. He had 30 years of experience in the media and communications industry when he decided he wanted to set up his own business. After eight years, Social is now a top 20 UK agency. He joins Jason to talk about how he remained focused on the future and the crystal clear vision needed to continue growing your agency, some of the hurdles he has found along the way, and the importance of investing in leadership to focus on the key aspects of your agency’s past, present, and future. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesNinja Cat: Today's episode is sponsored by Ninja Cat, a digital marketing performance management platform where you can unify your data, create beautiful, insightful reports and presentations that will help you grow your business. Head over to ninjacat.io/masterclass to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Trust Your Crystal Clear Vision Begin Investing in LeadershipJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? I'm excited to bring you another episode of the Smart agency Masterclass. I have an amazing guest all the way across the pond in the UK. And he's going to talk about how he's been scaling his agency over the past eight years and some of the trials and tribulations. Now, before we jump into the episode, I want you guys to take a screenshot, tag us on Instagram. And we'll give you a shout out, um, when the episode, uh, when, when you actually do that. So we can, uh, recognize you. So let's go ahead and get into the show. Hey, John. Welcome to the show. John: [00:00:42] Jason, pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Jason: [00:00:44] Yeah, man. I'm excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? John: [00:00:49] My name is John Quinton-Barber. It's quite a posh name. It's a UK name, John Quinton-Barber. And I'm the founder and chief executive of a marketing digital agency called Social, here in the UK. Jason: [00:01:00] Awesome. And so how did you get started? John: [00:01:04] Well, I've always… I’m 50 years of age. So about 30 years in media and communications and PR. And when I hit about 43 years of age I had this urge that I wanted to set my own business up. And probably quite a few of the listeners will be relating to this quite now. I had this urge but in the back of my mind I felt, I can't do it. I can't do it. And I just took the leap and did it. So eight years ago I set up Social. Um, and what I wanted to do was just bring a different type of agency to the UK market. Because the agency world had gotten a little bit stale. It was offering PR, but it wasn't offering much else. Social was just about social media was just about emerging as the next big thing, next best thing. So I took the plunge and set up the agency, um, with not, not, not a lot of money in my pocket, to be honest. Um, but a whole scope of confidence. And yeah, eight years on, we've gone from what I said about, talking about the dollars, about $10,000. To now about $5.5 million dollars after eight years. So it’s been one journey from two people to 48 people right now. And there's a whole host of learnings. Jason: [00:02:11] Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, it's… I remember kind of doing that jump, uh, you know, and there's many stages that you go through. Uh, if you think about it. And I always look at it as kind of like the stages of like climbing a mountain. Like at first you’re kind of like surveying of like, do I really want to climb that mountain? Or, you know, which mountain do I want to climb? Um, what were, what were the stages that you went through over the past eight years that, um… were a point where you were like. I mean, were you ever at a point where you just was like, nah, this is not for me? Like, I want out. Or what… like describe some of the hard parts and how'd you get through them? John: [00:02:51] I’ve never had that. Never, never had that moment, Jason, where this is not for me. It's always, I've always felt it's for me. It's quite, almost like a mission, really a zeal within me to make this work. Um, the pain points. So as we know, when you set an agency up, it's about survival. You know, I've got family, I've got two young children. They were two young children at the time. It’s about survival. I need to bring the income in. And you find yourself doing everything, you know, planning the business, servicing the clients, uh, wiring the, uh, the IT of the desk, sorting out the HR and the finance. So, um, in the first two years, that's what life was like. And we hit a million, a million pounds, so about $1.5 million, in about a year three. And that's when, for me, um, not the fun… Well, it was no longer, it wasn't fun anymore. But it was just like, oh my God. When it was about 10 people in the agency and we're bumping along about 1 million, life was good. You know, we could, we could, we all knew each other. We all knew each others’ strengths. We could work together. But as soon as we hit that million-pound mark, that was it. We then had to refocus on actually, this is a business. And I had to make some decisions. Because I decided then it wasn't a lifestyle business. I was plowing back every bit of penny, every penny, back into the business. And taking a very modest salary. Because I had this vision that we can make this business into something really big and really special. And that’s something I carry within me all the, all the while. And I’ll keep all the while until the end until the big events at the end. Jason: [00:04:19] Well, I think… Yeah, no, I, I think you're, you really hit something I want to point out. You had a crystal clear vision. A lot of us, when we get started in the agency, it's kind of accidental and we really don't know where we're going. We're just reacting to all the work coming to us. And, but when you… and then I remember going through a pivotal point too, like you did of going all right, wow. It's like, you make this certain threshold and you're like, man, it's kind of not fun right now. Because the whole business has changed. But if I, if you don't have that vision of where you're going, you can't make it to the next part. It's kind of like, if I want to reach the summit and you kind of get up to like what I call, like, you know, the, the crux, right? That's kind of like in the middle, right? You're in the climb and you're like, well, I kinda liked it back at base camp. Like that's where the party was. But, uh, you know, talk about, you know, when you're at kind of that crux and you're going to like, Brett the million and a half, or, um, dollar mark. What did you have to do? Was it about building the team or…? John: [00:05:31] It was, I mean, my, my kind of like epiphany came when who is my chairman now, and he's in his sixties, late sixties. And he's not a PR man. He’s a, he's a financer. And he said to me, he said, John, you created something special here. And you could, you could actually float this in years to come. And I was like float with it? I mean, I had to Google float it. What’s that? Float it? You know, man, I'm trying to survive here. And that probably sowed the seed for actually the ambition I got. The belief I got in myself. So what I decided to do was okay, we, we, we’re hitting the million mark. I'm now going to have to invest in a team around me to do the HR, to do the finance, to do the day-to-day. And I describe it like this, Jason, it's a… It’s my, I always, when people say to me, I want to set up a business I say, okay, you need somebody to look after yesterday. You need someone to look after today. And you look after tomorrow. And what I was doing, I was doing yesterday, today, and tomorrow. What do I mean by that? Yesterday is basically someone that can sweep up after you. So basically all the kind of processes and the HR, the IT, and all the legals that on a business side becomes all consuming. Find somebody to look after yesterday. The today is about ensuring you're creating great quality campaigns, working with clients, giving them the best service, and ensuring that clients are happy. Clients are alright. And the tomorrow is about strategy. It's about a vision. It's about where you want to go. And I just, again, as I said by year three, when this hit me and my God between a million and probably 2 million, the pain hit me. It hit me where it doesn't hurt. I mean, made loads of mistakes, loads of mistakes. We’re in the UK, I’m in Manchester, which is in the north of England. And you know, the, the eye on the prize was let’s open a London office. You know, why? But, you know, we, we, we need to open a London office. And we opened a London office in year four and we shut it down in year five because we got it all wrong. We got the wrong people. We didn't have the right business strategy… We just approached it completely wrong. Delighted to say today in 2021, we now have another London office and it's doing really well. So we live in those lessons. Jason: [00:07:40] Yeah. I, I look at it as if you look at kind of three lines that an agency can be on, right? The first line… especially, you know, it happened what lasts last March, right? A lot of people panicked and they kind of went into, you know, a fear-based mentality. And I look at those businesses. They're barely surviving. Like they've just gone straight down. And then I look at other agencies, and I've been in this spot in the agency world for a couple of years of running the agency. You're kind of on this unfocused line and it's kind of the rollercoaster line… Let's call it the rollercoaster line, right? And these are the preppers, uh, you know, these are the preppers of like saving up all the money and all that kind of stuff. And then you have, and I'm glad you mentioned focused on the strategy to the tomorrow. Let's call that the strategy line. These are the people that are in kind of positioning mode of going, like, how do we, um, how do we take over, uh, you know, more market share? How do we, um, acquire more talent? How do we acquire, which we've talked about in the pre-show acquire more agencies, right? And you’re really kind of taking up another level. So I want everyone listening or watching to go, what line or have you been on and what line do you want to be on? And hopefully you guys want to be on the strategy line, but you may be like, you have to be honest with yourself of going, are we on the rollercoaster line? Because the only difference you said was leadership. John: [00:09:17] Yeah, no, we all, Jason, we're all on that. We all, we're all, you know, we all default back to those positions. You know, it's not, it's not all rosy and that's a model world, but I have to, you know, you have to dig deep. You have to dig deep in, in three things, in confidence, in your reserves, so your own health and wellbeing, because it’s a big journey. But then you have to dig deep into your pockets and you'll have to invest in people, the right people. And I, you know, my, if you looked at my business about four years ago, you'd go, John, you know, you're barely making a profit. You're growing quickly. You're making it. You're spending quite a lot of money on the setting, so, business development team, finance, team, HR at a really quality number two guy. But you know, is costing me, uh, you know, it's a decent salary. Um, but that was that investment is now starting to pay off. We have got in our business now, eight PNLs. So we've had to really bolt on PNL's and you know, we're now starting to see the world. But the, the mindset for that is, you know, is sacrifice. You have to make the sacrifice. It's almost like when I hit year four, it felt like year one again, because I was having to kind of on this cycle of sacrifice. And now I'm on year eight and I am reaping the rewards. And so my, my message to anyone listening is if you've got a growth journey and growth plan, just go for it. Get the right talent. No, not the talent, not necessarily gonna deliver, you know, the, the, for the clients. The talent that is going to deliver for you sitting by your side to help you grow and scale your business. Jason: [00:10:50] Yeah. I love that. You said kind of invest in your company. And, and a lot of times people will misunderstand me a lot of times when I say, hey, the only thing that matters in your agency is your profit margin. And are you making money? That matters when you get closer to having an exit or, you know, liquidity event later on. But in the middle or in the beginning, I'm like, invest as much as you possibly can because you totally control everything. Like you can put money in the stock market, and I encourage you guys to do that as well, but that's you don't control any of it. It's like literally bet on red bet on black, you know, it's, I mean, it's a little more calculated. But with your agency, you can totally control the situation way better than anything else. So if you're listening, make sure you're investing heavily. You don't have to have 32% profit margins year over year. I know a lot of people reach out and they're like, I'm worried I'm at 15. Like, well, you're not even close to selling, so don't worry about it. John: [00:11:56] Awesome. No, it's true. It's true. And it's, um, you know, I, I do a lot of reading, obviously around some of the most successful companies. And you know, the successful companies didn't make a profit until, I said, you know, two years for listing or, or selling. And profit isn't really important if you… and I keep telling colleagues if you want to makes it grow. But you know, my, my mindset when I, it's interesting, my, my pits, some peer agencies in the UK that I… I would have a drink with and we chat too. And, um, sometimes I look at them through real kind of like, uh, envious glasses because you know, they're out having holidays four or five times a year, pre-COVID and… And that’s great, you know, I'm all for that. I'm all for the lifestyle business. I think that's fantastic. You made a decision. But for me, it's just, as I said before, Jason, is quite a mission with me. I've got a mission and I'm going to make it, it's going to happen. I will scale this business and I'll take it to the UK A market. Uh, because I believe with that we've got a great proposition for investors. The one thing that, um, Jason, again, you'll be, you'll be so familiar with this is that culture of people. So while this is all happening with today, tomorrow and yesterday and invest in the center, um… we ha, I had to make sure that that Social probably has to be one of the best agencies to work for. Um, to say we invested a lot in the culture is wrong. It sounds like it's forced. We nurtured the culture that we were creating and we've got fantastic culture now. And I know every business owner says that and that, you know, generally have. And we continue to invest in that now with our people. Um, so the pandemic, uh, for, for us, didn't really hit us. You know, we, we grew through the pandemic, both financially… and we added nine new people during the pandemic year. So, but kind of how I think the… all that, all that groundwork in the first five years helped us through this tricky year. Jason: [00:13:56] Do you feel like you have to comb through mountains of data, jumping between multiple platforms to spreadsheets, to slide decks and backing again in order to create performance reports for your clients? It's a constant drain on your agency's time and resources. And that's where our friends at Ninja Cat can help. Ninja Cat is a digital marketing performance management platform that really unifies your marketing data and empowers your agency to automate insightful, beautiful client reports at scale. Now, Ninja Cat keeps your marketing performance and presentation tools in one place freeing you from manual data wrangling. And it really gives your team more time to focus on strategy and growing your business. And for a limited time, my smart agency podcast listeners will receive a $500 Ninja Credit. When you go to ninjacat.io/masterclass to claim your offer and schedule a demo that's ninjacat.io/masterclass. Why I know some people, like, you know, they're on the strategy line and usually you can accelerate your growth in a time like this. And they're literally, like, we don't want this to end because we're like, we're just reaping the benefits, uh, you know, for it. So let's talk about kind of like the transition from building the right team, right? So I look at that as kind of when you're building the right team, you're, you're in the crux. But then, kind of the next level up, I look at the crest and you're starting to build the leadership team. So let's talk about that because not many people do. Um, what are you, what… what does your leadership team look like? And, and how did you go about building it? Like what was, and would you go in the right order? The same order? So a lot of times people go marketing sales or do sales and marketing, you know, operations, that kind of stuff. John: [00:16:03] Well, for me, the first, the first kind of… the first again Eureka moment or epiphany moment for me was, uh, the operations side of it. Um, and so I brought in who is my number two now, Rob, managing all of the operations side of operations side of the business. And that was the, the first kind of key hire in this space. We are now a leadership team of nine across the business, um, head solve and directors. Um, and you know, that that team has taken time to build. And that team is, you know, we're a trusting team. Um, we work well together. We also get friction, which is, which is healthy I see. Uh, and I believe in, but yeah, the, for me, it was very much about operations, operations, you know, the business had to operate, um, and had to operate effectively. So bring that person in. I had a mantra about, and this is a really good test for anyone who's listening, the mantra is if you weren’t in the business for three months, would it run? And would it grow? B. And obviously your priority is it has to run, so get it right. Make sure. And it's a good exercise to do is visualize. But just don't be happy with it running, it’s got to grow. So what do you need to make it grow? So to make it run, I brought the right people in and then to make it grow, I've empowered the people in the business. They need to make it grow. Not just me. Um, and again, I'm off after next week for a whole month now. I'm taking a sabbatical. My phone is off. My everything's off. They can’t get ahold of me unless it’s burning down and that's the first time in eight years. But again, um, and again, I really want to reach out to anyone who's listening who's in that, in that probably two, three, four year phase. Just stick at it, because you get the right people and the right counsel and advice as any business, you can make it. Jason: [00:17:55] Yeah, I look at it as… And, um, and I'm actually showing a lot of our mastermind around this now of going, what are the things, if you audit your calendar for the past couple of weeks… What are the things that totally drain you? Which are the things that give you energy? And then when you look at the ones that drain you, because that's the things that like, you have too many of those that's when you're like, screw it. I'm outta here. Like, I don't want to do it anymore. All right. Or let me sell for this low valuation. I'm just, I'm done. Um, which you benefit from when buying. You know, you're like, oh, you've got low energy? I'll buy you, right? So if you guys are in the UK, obviously, go check them out. Um, but what I tell people is look at the low energy and then outsource or delegate or hire for that stuff. Like, I, I don't know why we always hire for things we don't have any clue on… like on. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, I've been guilty of this. I'll be like, I know nothing about pay-per-click. Let me go hire someone to do pay-per-click. Rather than like, I know everything about UX so let me hire UX, because I can manage that. And then figure out a process like it's just, it's just goofy. Um, what are some things… switching focus a little bit, what do you do in order to build your leaders within the organization? Because you know, at our top level masterminds, we're always talking about that. And also recruiting, recruiting is a really big thing. Like we cannot find enough people, it seems like. So how are you building leaders and then is recruiting your biggest issue too? John: [00:19:34] Uh, on building the leaders. It's, uh, it's important that we've got the program. So if you there's a few ways, we went with an external provider who does a year-long leadership course and I send… I, I want to say congratulation to my leaders that I'm dead proud of them. Uh, got the card here… the cards are there. Um, so I went through it, I went through it, uh, three years. And now quite a lot of my, well, all my leads will be going through it. Um, and that's a day, month commitment for them. And they have, you know, they, they, they, all the topics are from culture to finance, to leadership, to behaviors. Um, I make people go through that process and I see them during the year just grow and blossom which is fantastic. And then I encourage them individually to find a mentor that's not me, someone that I can confide in probably about me, you know. If you want to moan and groan about me and they need someone external so they can have that. Again, we have identified a person for them in their life. Um, and you know, the, the company pays for that, it, it's a paid thing. So that you can never get enough, all the external kind of like counsel. Myself, I have a mentor, I’ve had one for five, six years. I belong to a board, the top of the alternative board, which when I was in America, I sit on the alternative board every month. And I just sit there and cry about people and money, cause that's always come up. But, um, but yeah, so leadership for me is I want to just, you know, embrace that. I said to my, one of my colleagues today, my strategy here is to get you working less and your reward going up every year. And that's what we've got to get through as a leader. And if you're working less in the business, then you know, you're, you're winning for me. Jason: [00:21:24] Yep. And then what about recruiting? Is that a, a big challenge for you guys like finding enough talent? John: [00:21:30] Absolutely. It really is. It's a, you know, to the point where it depends on the, it depends on the, on the area you’re recruiting. So imagine digital social that's really, really sought after for obvious reasons. And that's challenging to recruit in them areas. So we want to, we want to do a blend of three things. We want to grow our own, um, so grow our people that we've already got into business. Because, you know the’re very valuable to us, not just in monetary terms, but, just in, in their futures. We want to, I think mentioned before we were looking to acquire an agency. So we're looking, you know, where we can’t, where we can't build a team because the talent pool, looking for jobs or employment isn't there. We're looking now just to, to hire, to, to acquire a boutique agency, particularly in the digital space. Um, and the third, the third area is looking at apprenticeships. So we're looking at bringing kids out of school and instead of kids going to, we call it school, university straight to us and we'll run a program with them. So that's something we're looking at for the next, for the next eighteen months. I I'm glad to hear, or we shouldn't be really glad to hear, that it's the same in America. But the talent is just strange. We’re going through a strange time. Jason: [00:22:45] Well, uh, what we found, you know, in our agency and, and all the other agencies in the mastermind is when you get to a certain level… And it's around about 3 million you're you're cause you've, you've built an amazing team, you're building the leadership team. But it's hard to continue to find really, really good people. And it takes them a while in order to adapt to all the processes that you have. And so a lot of times what we'll do is we'll say like, kind of like, we’ll bring someone in on the junior program and show them a couple of tracks. You can go kind of the skilled track, or you can go the manager track and then show them the different layers or levels that they can go up, you know. And it makes a huge difference because you know, like I'm thinking of, of Zach's agency now, like to train their account strategist, it usually takes about two years. Right? Like, so you got to start thinking two years prior, like how do we get all these people up? And it makes a really big difference. So, yeah. It's, I always love when I chat with people all around the world. And they're like, yeah, it's very different over here. I'm like we get all the same issues. John: [00:24:02] Good to know. Yeah, it is, I imagine. And it’s about to how much, I mean, one of the things is obviously pay reward is very important. Isn't it? Of course, but actually culture again, progression L&D. If I'm honest, you know, our lead in development is just catching up, you know, we've, we've got, we've made huge strides in the area. We've got so much more. So we working on that, so we're just, we are catching up the, this the, you know, the, the high growth of the last eight years, um, to make sure we've got all that in place. Jason: [00:24:30] Awesome. Well, great. Well, um, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? John: [00:24:37] Um, I think, I think for me it's about looking after yourself, you know, and I think again, just, just it's really part resilience is really, really key. And nothing more has been mentioned, so I, what's been mentioned a lot more of the last 12 months is wellbeing. Um, second is acknowledging that, you know, you are human. Acknowledging that you are… You know, you haven't got all the answers. Acknowledging that it’s lonely then, and obviously you've got a mastermind course, which is fantastic, Jason. And, and again, if, if you can find something like that, or find something where you can find a buddy or a mentor for yourself, absolutely take it on. Because it, you know, you've got to have that in your, I think, in your life, if you want to grow, grow big, because it is a challenge. Jason: [00:25:24] Yep. Well, John, where can people, uh, what's the website address people can go? Especially if you're in the UK and you're going, hey, I want to, I want to be a big, bigger part of a team and you can buy me, John. So where can they go? John: [00:25:36] Oh, knock yourselves out, if you will. Um, well it's very simple. It's social.co.uk. Jason: [00:25:41] That's great. That's awesome. I mean, that's a very easy URL. I've had some guests on that literally they spell it out like five times and you still wouldn't even get it. So congrats on getting that. And thanks so much for coming on the show. And if you guys enjoyed this episode and you're in the UK and you want to possibly sell, go check them out. And know this is sponsored, uh, but he did drop a lot of amazing bombs. So go check that out. And if you guys want to be surrounded by amazing people on a consistent basis, I would love to invite all of you to go to digitalagencyelite.com. This is for agencies all over the world. Where we share the strategies that are currently working and little shrink moments, right? Like we can like cry on each other's shoulders to get us through. But go there and until next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_One_Agency_Grew_to_5.5_Million__By_Investing_in_Leadership.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 11 August 2021
After the life of digital nomad led to the failure of his first company, Dean Dutro started Worth eCommerce. Since then, found the Digital Agency Elite mastermind, learned the importance of having a mission and values, and grew an amazingly successful agency that helps eCommerce stores drive new and repeat sales with email & SMS marketing. He recently sold that company and today he’s here to talk about how his early failure led to having a strong belief in the agency’s values and mission, the process of getting ready for an opportunity to sell your agency, and what he advises everyone to do in order to enjoy a successful agency acquisition. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesHighLevel: Today's episode is sponsored by HighLevel, an all-in-one marketing platform that will give you the tools, support and resources you need to succeed with your agency. Head over to gohighlevel.com/swenk to enjoy an exclusive 30-day free trial. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM How to Prepare for the Opportunity to Sell and Enjoy a Successful Agency AcquisitionJason: [00:00:00] Hey, what's up agency owners? I'm excited to have another great episode. I have a good buddy and a Mastermind member, Dean, who just recently sold his agency. And we're going to talk about the process of how to get there, how to get to a point where you have the opportunity to sell. And then also, what is the process like and what is life like after? Uh, so let's go ahead and get into the episode. Hey, Dean. Welcome back to the show. Dean: [00:00:36] Hey, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:38] Yeah. Well, for the people that haven't checked out the first episode, uh, tell us who you are and what do you do? Dean: [00:00:44] Yeah. Um, my name's Dean and I am the CEO of Worth eCommerce, which is an email marketing and SMS marketing agency for e-commerce companies. Jason: [00:00:56] Awesome. And let's kind of jump into it because I was so excited for you. You know what… You know, I know we were chatting for a long time about the opportunity to sell and the process there. Let's talk about kind of getting to that point. What do you feel…? What's the level you are? What are were the things that you had to do in order to get you to the point where people wanted to buy you? Dean: [00:01:22] Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's a lot that, that went into it. And a lot that's happened over time and, you know, kind of going all the way back to the start of my agency career. You know, the first agency that I started in and kind of co-founded with my current business partner, um, was a UX design agency. And we had this idea that we were going to be like digital nomads travel worlds. Go to Thailand and Australia and Asia and all these places and make a lot of money and live on beaches and drink beer. Uh, and we did that for like a year, but then we ended up just essentially broke and in debt. And both of us ended up living at our parents, or in my case, my grandparents' house for about six months to a year, um, on and off afterwards, cause we just failed. And at that point that's actually when I discovered you guys, the Jason Swenk masterclass. I ended up stopped, stopped doing business with Ryan who's my co-founder and went on my own path. And one of the things that you guys taught was you got to have a mission and values, right? To get people to join you in order to work with the people that you want to work with. And that, to me, it was like the first foundational step. You know, before it was like very selfish and self-centered, and there was no sense of like community anywhere I went. So when I moved back to Oregon and kind of decided like, hey, I want to build something where I can have a team around me. I have a mission, there's people I want to impact. And my mission was very personal. It came from, uh, you know, my family, like my parents and grandparents were both small business owners and entrepreneurs. Uh, my grandma had a kitchen design business and ended up selling it when she retired. And my mom had a, a vintage clothing business before Shopify, like when Etsy was blowing up. But that didn't go well for her in 2008 hit and, you know, kinda hit them hard. But, so I kind of had this vision of, I wanted to do something where I could help small and medium-sized businesses grow. And I want to do that with a group of people that I loved hanging out with that I thought were superstars and wanted to do it locally at first. Um, and just kind of grew that over time Uh, fast forward. That company is called Instant Email Copy, which is what it was called when I joined you. And Ryan approached me and he was doing e-commerce himself. He was actually building stores and I was doing email for e-commerce. He's like, hey, like, why don't we join forces and use our skills to like grow again? And by that time, like our skills have leveled out where, when I first joined, he had all the digital experience and I, I was doing like enterprise sales. So we kind of felt like a power balance and we went and created Worth eCommerce. And we did like two weeks in my hometown of Bend, Oregon. Uh, where we just like, figure out, like, what are our values, like who we want to be? What kind of people do we want to bring on? What type of people we want to work with? And setting that was like the first step for us, um, to, to continue to grow over these last few years. Two years actually. Jason: [00:04:24] Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, I love that. Uh, I love that story and I love that, you know, there's so many people that talk about being a digital nomad and doing agencies. And I'm like, Yeah, that's good to kind of start and I'm sure that was a lot of fun. Dean: [00:04:41] Oh yeah. Jason: [00:04:42] But it's like you said, it's just centered around you rather than like… When you start realizing, and I think what you guys realized was how can I elevate my team? Which will, right? Like you get to the top of the mountain, but it's kinda lonely at the very top. Like it's more, I actually had more significance of growing our team than actually growing the agency. And you have to have a purpose, like you were saying behind that. A lot of times it takes people a while to figure that out. Um, because you're just like, well, what am I good at? Like, what do I like? What, what do I believe in? And how do I surround myself with those, those people? What were some of the other things, now that you had a purpose and you were building the right team, um, you know, that you felt that you had to do in order to get to the point where you had the opportunity to sell it? Dean: [00:05:36] Yeah. So I think it was really important, and one of the things I figured out was that at least in my space, in e-commerce, you know, I started working in a vertical niche, both from a service perspective, a client perspective, and software perspective. And it's a little bit of a risk from the software side, but basically I chose a software company that I loved working with. Who had great customer service, great customer experience. They weren't the best at what they did at the time, but they had a similar vision of wanting to help similar types of customers and clients. That company is called Klaviyo and I joined them when they had like 400 customers. Um, now they have like 60,000. And so we got to really ride that wave, uh, and become experts in that specific skillset, that specific software, helping specific companies. Uh, which led us to be able to charge a premium, uh, created better processes systems. We’re kind of like first, first, maybe not first to do email marketing, but like first to market using Klaviyo. And now we're, we're a platinum partner. We're on the advisory board. We're connecting with their leadership, learning about email, learning about SMS. Like it's this very like positive relationship. They send us clients, they help us with marketing. And that itself has been a huge boost, uh, in terms of sales and revenue. Um, it all started with a simple system, like I built a basic system that worked. And over time it's, it's like, whenever I bring on new employees, I'll show them, hey, here's the first original document from Worth… for Instant Email Copy of like what we use to serve clients. And then it's like, here's what it is now. And it's like, holy shit. Like it's crazy. How much it evolved. Jason: [00:07:24] Pretty big difference. Dean: [00:07:26] Pretty big difference. Yeah. Um, but what's really cool about it is as like, going back to building the team, is like most of the changes to the document weren’t done by me. They were done by people on the team who started to become better at what they do or, or more experienced in, and kind of committed to that. Which is, which has been really cool to see. Jason: [00:07:46] Yeah. Over the past couple of years in the mastermind, I've seen you really kind of transition from the owner to the CEO. Um, and you know, I talk a lot about that to all the agencies, right? Like, because ultimately the end goal of every agency is the exit in some way. Whether it be like you selling the agency or like, you know, other members that exit their current role, right? They exit to a chairman so they can go do other things. That kind of stuff. Um, what, and it's sometimes difficult when people actually on your team start getting better than you. And you feel really done, right? Like, and the goal I tell everybody the goal is for you to be the dumbest person in the room, um, for your team. Did, was that a challenge for you? Um, I'm not saying you're dumb obviously. But, uh, you, you, you sold for a lot of money, so obviously laugh, laugh on me if I'm calling you dumb. But I remember going through that going, oh my God, the agency doesn't need me anymore. Because everyone else is better, that the things I used to do. Did you struggle with that at all? Dean: [00:08:58] Yeah, I think, I think initially, you know, like I had positioned myself as like the email marketing guy, right? Like people would come to work with me. People would come, clients would call me. Like everyone would, would want to work with me, right? And I got, it just wasn't, I even built like a course or like I was like advertising email marketing, and I was the main face. And that was great. Um, but it didn't allow other people to flourish. And so when we, when I ended up merging what happened, and this is actually feedback I got from my team was like, Dean, we feel your presence too much. Like you're in here, like throwing curve balls to like a process we're trying to build. And it's kind of messing things up cause we feel like we have to listen to you. And I remember like taking that feedback and being like, well, this is like, like, is this like what ideas better? You know, is it better to do it this way or the way they want to do it? And there's times where it's like, I have the experience. And I kind of like, as a business owner, like, you know, I don't know if that's going to work, um, because I've tried it before versus like, hey, I think you should just do it this way. There's like a, like a, a difference there. Uh, like a, a fine line to kind of cross where you're giving advice versus like commanding. Um, and something you don't know about. Uh, and so I always tell people, and I even tell my leadership team, like, there's a point where you go from like, becoming the email marketing expert or the XYZ expert to, like you said, the CEO or to a leader and your responsibilities and roles change. And that's something I learned from you and from the Mastermind group, different agencies and something I'm teaching to my leadership team as they're going from like copywriters or designers or, you know, admin, even to leadership role. It's like, hey, like your main job isn’t to always do email, like you gotta grow and help build the team, just like you've grown and built. And, um, totally different skillset. Jason: [00:10:50] Oh yeah, definitely. And some people can't do it. Um, you know, it's a, so I applaud you for being able to do that. So let's talk about, now that we've kind of talked about getting there and, and that, uh… Let's talk about what was it like when people started coming to you, offering you money for the agency? Dean: [00:11:10] Yeah, it was, um, it was interesting. Like it was a long process and my mindset on it was I just kind of want to know what the market's like, see what's out there. And see, like, what are people purchasing for? Like who is selling? Why are they styling? Like, I, I kinda wanted to soak that knowledge up. So we actually ended up working with a broker and, uh, I think you referred him, Todd Tasky, uh, over in DC. And, you know, when I first connected with him, we were, we were still pretty small. You know, my main fear was, hey, like, are we too early to do this? And he was like, no, like just like, get to know people, get to know what's going on. And you know, you'll kind of figure out what you want. Are you still there? Jason: [00:11:57] Oh yeah. Yeah. I just put you on solo. I was featuring you. Dean: [00:12:04] Featuring, ok. And, and so, you know, we started the process early and started connect with companies and, and usually it was like, hey, you guys are too young. You're less than two years old. Like, we don't feel comfortable with it. It was a lot of nos. Right. Um, but a lot of like, hey, come back to us in a year or two, because we see your growth curve. We see the potential. E-commerce, you know, blew up during COVID. It's still blowing up. So a lot of people saw it, but we are just a little bit too early, right? But by being too early, we kind of learned, okay, what are they actually looking? Right? Because every company before they would do like a letter of intent or anything like that, they would send like a list of items they wanted to know about. So over time I built up this list. And by that point we were ready and our EBITDA was high enough and people were more interested, uh, I had everything ready, right? And EBITDA is obviously one of the most important pieces. Um, the age of the company is important. So that was a hurdle for us because we'd started worth in 2019. And we had to justify our experience, you know, before that was built. Um, and at that time, it was just a matter of like, okay, these guys are growing. It's very clear. And my, my worry was still, hey, we're a little too early. Like if we wait six months, maybe we'll get a lot more. So that became kind of a part of the negotiation piece was just like, just look at the growth curve and tendency of things and, you know, we'll get to a number that makes sense. Um, so I feel like I'm missing your original question.
Jason: [00:13:30] No, th that was perfect. Um, what were, what were some of the important things that people were asking for outside of EBITDA? Dean: [00:13:39] Yeah, they, they wanted to know like our forecast and budget and model and like what that looked like. Um, they wanted to know our, uh, like our leadership team. It's like, who's in place and who's at the helm. And like, what's their experience. That was super important. Um, they wanted to know our plans if we were going to expand in any other market sets or stay niche. Uh, so that was an interesting one. And we started doing SMS marketing, which helped with a lot of things. Um, and they wanted to know like, was our shipping order. Like, did we have valid contracts? A big piece we learned about was like, if you have contracts with customers, are they transferable or not? Right? Because if they're not, that kind of changes the entire setup of the deal structure and takes a ton of time. So we get to like a hundred customers or partners or clients, and it's, non-transferable like you're in for a lot of extra work. It kind of things like that. Like our employment agreements, they want to kind of look at some of those things. But the biggest one that they always focused on was EBITDA and age of the company. Jason: [00:14:51] Hey there, quick question for you. Is your agency paying a fortune for software? Do you have to stack multiple softwares together to deliver success for your clients? If so there's a new platform called HighLevel that you should really check out. HighLevel is all in one marketing platform for agencies that has an insane amount of features and really replaces tools like click funnels, active campaign, Infusionsoft, Calendly, Kajabi, CallRail, and a lot more. The best part is you can white-label HighLevel and sell it to your clients as their own software. Opening up a new, super sticky revenue stream for your agency. Normally high level offers a 14 day free trial, but as a member of my community, you have access to an exclusive 30 day free trial. Which you can take advantage by going to gohighlevel.com/swenk. So head over to gohighlevel.com/swenk to save yourself hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per year on software costs. Yeah. No, it's, those are all real important. And especially, you know, like I always tell you in the mastermind members. When you signed clients and in your agreement, make sure they are transferable. Um, or because a lot of times when agencies are bought, most people don't know this is it's an asset purchase. So they're buying your contracts. And if you, you know, I've seen some master my members in the past where they've actually had to go back to their key clients and go, hey, and they have to share their hands saying, hey, I'm about to be bought. I need you to sign this. So it allows you to transfer the agreement over to the new agency. And then if the new, if you, if the client doesn't sign it, the deal may not be done. Like it's literally so many loops. Which if you could just throw that in the agreement saying, hey, I can transfer this clause just with written notice to you. Dean: [00:16:52] Yeah. And to be honest, I think we just got lucky. Like we just happened to have that in the beginning and we didn't have to worry about it. I don't think I would have ever thought about that before. Jason: [00:17:03] No, no one does. No one does until someone tells you, so it's crazy. Well, let's talk about, um, let's say after you get the letter of intent. What was that like? What did you go through and how long was that process? Dean: [00:17:20] Um, man. So get just getting the letter of intent was pretty, pretty tough. From like… another thing they wanted to know is like your market position and what are sort of the areas where you feel you're weak? Because they really want to know where they can add value, right? So they want to know, like they don't want to find something that's broken. They want to find something that's working, that they could put fuel on and create a bigger fire, right? That's kind of the mentality. So they would ask these questions where I felt very exposed. And like very naked in the business. Like I, like, I don't know these things or, you know, we don't really do that much marketing. It's more outbound sales. And so they're like, oh, we're a marketing agency. We can help there. So they're really like, they're not picking you apart, but they're trying to like identify, is this a worthwhile time investment? Because once you get the, the LOI, something comes in called schedules and it's like, it's hell. Uh, for us, they were ready to close quick. They were ready to make a deal. So it took about 45 days or 50 days, actually. Usually take, can take anywhere from three to six months. But what schedules are is this document you get from lawyers, that's like 50 questions, right? But it's not just 50 questions. It's like, give me every single contract you've ever signed with every client, right? And pull it up and list any that are missing. Um, give me every single employment agreement you've signed with every client, with every employee you've ever had. Give me every single complaint any employees ever made against you. Give me any single complaint any former client has made against you. All your, your liabilities and insurance documents. Give me your financials, you know, for the last five years and all of your tax returns. Um, it's just like... It's hell. And then they want to know your, your projected forecast, right? For the next year. So you have to build a budgeting model, which I'd never done before. Um, and I ended up hiring a CFO. Who was referred by someone in the mastermind, Matt food truck, who had built out this budgeting model. But then every, every week they'd want an update. It's like, oh, where'd you hit this week? And you're like, Jesus, like, I don't do this till the end of the month. You want to know every single like hour? And then the lawyers get involved, right? And they're battling stuff back and forth and like, is it an asset sale or a stock sale? Where do you want to be incorporated? Are you registered in every state that you hire correctly? Which we weren't. Um, so we had to like go back and do all this stuff. And negotiating, you know, price points. Um, you know, the LOI they give you what the, what they want the offer to be. So a lot of the cash sort of conversations happen, pre LOI. Then they give you the LOI. And then all the legal negotiations, which I had no idea what most of it meant, right? Like what is an asset sale? I had no idea. Um, how are you going to set it up so you can get taxed, you know, like a crazy amount? Uh, and they have to battle that back and forth. So it was, it was hell it was like a second job. Um, to be honest, it really took my eye off the ball of growing the agency, um, in retrospect. Because most of my day was focused on gathering this information. Like living a double life of like, I'm not ready to tell employees I'm not ready to tell clients. I'm stressed out of my mind and no one knows why. Uh, you know, and, uh, keeping it under wraps was, was kind of strange. But, uh, yeah, it was like, you gotta be prepared to basically work another 20 hours a week, just gathering information. Um, and then phone calls after phone calls with your broker and your lawyer. And, uh, being ready to invest in a lawyer who's good. Who can... Jason: [00:21:00] Yeah, you mentioned two really big things. One, don't tell anybody, right? Like, if it gets out, people jump ship. People don't like change. They’ll like change after they kind of witnessed it. And a lot of times when you're looking for the right person to buy you as you're evaluating, you got to make sure the culture fits there. And is it right for the team as well, right? Cause you know, they're the ones that got you here. You wouldn't be here without them. Um, the other thing is, is you mentioned is you kind of took your eye off the ball. So a lot of times what I've found is, I mean, this happened to Justin, one of our members. He took his eye off the ball, he was going through an acquisition. Uh, they pulled out the last minute and almost went under. Because they were like, oh, I'm going to get all these millions of dollars. I don't have to do anything. It'll be your problem in six months, who gives a shit? Right? Because everything we do is a li you know, a lag of a quarter or six months out. And then the deal doesn't go through. Or, and I think too, I think when agencies go and buy other agencies, I think they do this on purpose to be like, then they can change the deal at the last minute. And be like, I gotcha. Dean: [00:22:22] Yeah. That was my big concern and cause right... So the deal was supposed to close on a Friday. Didn't close. There's some legal issue that the lawyers were battling about and everyone was getting deal fatigue, like on both sides. Everyone was like, fuck, I'm tired. Excuse my language. Like, sorry, I'm tired of talking about this deal. It's been, you know, 45 days of this every day. Um, and so I always felt like at any point the deal would be done and I just wasted, you know, 45 days. At the same time, I felt like I got a masters of business, you know, in 45 days. Because, like the private equity guys… And I think what was really nice about this deal is like the, just like you said, the culture fit was huge. Like we just got along so well that even with the deal fatigue and the stress and like the money at stake. Like we can get off, like we could have a private conversation with no lawyers, no one else present and it was like, like we were in this together. That was a super important to me. And, uh, those guys are, are, are awesome, but they taught me all these things about accounting. For example, a lot of larger companies, they use gap accounting, uh, which I never even heard that term ever in any sort of business article I've ever read. And, uh, and none of my bookkeepers ever told me about gap accounting. And it's a pain in the ass, like it sucks to do, and it takes a lot of time, but it's really important to see like, you know, an accrual method versus a cash method and how that affects the deal, especially when you sell. Um, cause there's things called. Uh, deferral. Revenue deferral, right? It's like, if you get paid up front, this is another huge learning lesson for me, which is like, so hard to get around. If you get paid up front for work, in gap accounting that's not counted as revenue until you do the work, right? So all of a sudden, you think you have all this cash in your bank, you go to sell. They're actually like, no, you actually are less. Uh, and you're like, what the hell? Like, I don't understand this at all. Uh, so the lawyers and the broker had to in the PE guys had to walk me through. Like, I'm not actually being screwed, it just feels like it. Um, Jason: [00:24:28] Yeah, and usually, and that's a good point. I'm glad you brought that up because that happened to us as well. Um, because I mean, hell I always tell the story on the podcast of one client that, you know, we, we changed our payment terms. And one client came to us eight years later. But we… and we're like, hey, I'm ready. But they paid up front, right? Like, you know, so, you know, we all think of agencies getting paid upfront is awesome. And it is, and you should continue to do that, um, as much as you possibly can. But when you do go to sell, there is going to be a reckoning and you're going to be like, whoa. And that, and usually they do that right at the end. They know it's coming. The bastards know it's coming and they do it at the end and go, oh no. And then you're like, fuck it. Awesome. Um, well, Dean, man, I'm so happy and proud to see how, how have you've grown over the, the past couple of years. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? If they're thinking about doing something like you've done. Dean: [00:25:42] Yeah, I would say, definitely get a broker. You know, it feels expensive, but they get better deals and they find good fits. You know, and, and Todd, to his credit, like we probably spoke with 10 or 15 companies and most of them were not the right fit. And, you know, he told me early on that, like, we're gonna, we're going to talk to a lot of people. It's gonna be a lot of time and you get a lot of like deal ideas. And then all of a sudden you'll be presented with the deal and your gut will tell you if it's right or not. And that's kind of exactly what happened was, you know, there, there are always companies I was like, this is not the right fit. I don’t like these guys. There's something off for they're too huge and I don't want to be like just a cog. And with this one, it was like, met them, got the offer, felt good, felt good to my partner and we went with it. Um, to get a broker and get a good lawyer and a good accountant. Hopefully they're all a team together. And they've worked together. Uh, I couldn't imagine doing it without, you know, acquisitions experience. Jason: [00:26:40] Yeah, I know having a good broker is key and all the other assets as well. And if you guys want to know more about Todd, just hit me up and I'll do an introduction for you guys. Uh, well, Dean, I'm so happy for you, man. Um, and this has all been great. And for everyone listening, if you guys want to be in a point where you can scale your agency to a point where you have the opportunity to exit. And have a number of different agency owners, including me, you know, helping you get to there and, and advising you to get to the next level. Hopefully, that next level is to sell for the number that you actually want. I'd love to invite all of you to go apply for the Digital Agency Elite. Go to digitalagencyelite.com. This is the mastermind that as Dean has been in for the past couple of years and is still in, make sure you go do that now. And until next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_To_Prepare_For_a_Smooth_and_Successful_Agency_Acquisition.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 8 August 2021
Would you consider having a laser focus niche in a way that you create such a demand you have a waiting list? This agency did just that and has grown more than they ever imagined. When Ryan Redding and his agency DP Marketing.Services built a website for a plumber who suggested that he should only work with other plumbers, he could have never guessed how that would change his business. Today he joins the podcast to talk about how having a laser focus agency makes everything else easier. Ryan also shares why he has felt bad about turning away business and the customer loyalty that has helped him grow his agency. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesNinja Cat: Today's episode is sponsored by Ninja Cat, a digital marketing performance management platform where you can unify your data, create beautiful, insightful reports and presentations that will help you grow your business. Head over to ninjacat.io/masterclass to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Improve Client Loyalty With a Laser Focus Niche and ExclusivityJason: [00:00:00] Hey, what's up everybody? I have another amazing episode coming your way. We're going to talk about how one agency owner had a pivotal moment where a client actually told them something changed everything for him. Where, you know, he was kind of figuring out no one's opening up my emails. But now everyone's calling them, which is pretty cool. We all want that. So let's go ahead and jump into the episode. Hey, Ryan. How's it going? Ryan: [00:00:33] Hey, man. It’s going good. Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:35] Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on the show. So, uh, tell us who you are in. What do you do? Ryan: [00:00:42] Dude, I am Ryan Redding. Most people probably don't know or care, uh, but I, uh, have founded and run DP Marketing.Services. We are a full service digital agency that specializes, uh, for home services companies. Jason: [00:00:56] Awesome. And so take us back about how did you start the agency and why did you jump into running an agency? Ryan: [00:01:04] Yeah, it was entirely not on purpose. So I, uh, I have a background working at a big boutique advertising agency in St. Louis. Did that for a while and learned a lot of experience, but kind of got out of the marketing world for almost a decade. Um, it was just kind of out of sight, out of mind and moved on to a different life. Got more into business consulting and in the process started realizing that all these guys were like main street, small businesses. And so think of any main street USA, you know, bakers and chiropractors and whatever. They all had really crappy websites. They were like awful. And some of them just didn't have the knowledge. Some of them didn't have the budget. So originally it was, hey, we'll just do websites that don't look crappy for a really affordable price for these guys. And so it started off doing web design, um, and trying to do like super, super low, low dollars. And frankly, I'm embarrassed to say it out loud. Like, our, our, we still have some of these guys in the book at a hundred dollars a month to get… Jason: [00:02:07] For, for hosting or for maintenance. Ryan: [00:02:09] For, well, there's not really much maintenance cause these are guys are gonna like set and forget. So it essentially becomes hosting and nothing? Um, but yeah, a hundred bucks a month and these guys got a website that didn't look awful and just really basic, but it's something for them. Um, so yeah, for a while, that's all we did. Jason: [00:02:31] And so how did it, how'd you kind of pivot and, and start doing more and more outside of websites. You know, because, you know, that was kind of my start. Like I started designing websites and then we started adding on other services. Ryan: [00:02:45] Yeah. So, this is kind of crazy and it's actually, it kind of dovetails into how and why we're niched like we are. So, uh, we early on did any main street small business. So literally think about bakers and chiropractors and self-storage places, and… We, to this day, have a lot of those guys still on our books paying a hundred bucks a month. One of the guys who picked up in this time was a plumber. There was nothing special about him. He was just another one of these guys. But in a matter of about six months, um, he went from a guy working out of his garage, making 150 a year to the first page of Google in his target market. Um, I think right now he's got 16 trucks on the road. He spends his time golfing and on his boat with his, uh, on the lake with the boat, with his family. And he doesn't work anymore. And he, he was literally the first one to say, uh, Bro. you only need to work with people like me because we don't know what we're doing. We're comfortable paying for it. Uh, you can obviously do what you say you're gonna do. You should totally do it. And he kind of lumped in HVAC. But the crazy part is, is as he grew, he literally started paying me more money without me asking for it. So we start off with a hundred bucks a month and then he's like, bro, I made whatever I made $80,000 off you this month here, here's 300. And I'm like, well, crap, here's 300 bucks. What am I going to do for 300 bucks? And then it turned into here's 1,000 and it turned into here's 2,000 and just kept paying me more. Without asking for more. And so as he kind of raised his voluntary contribution for the impact it made on his business, I started having figured out ways to add value to the services that we were doing. So then it came into like real SEO, real social, real reputation. Like all the things you think of like a full stack digital agency would. So that kind of became the way that we… Well, I started building out our services that we do now. Jason: [00:04:57] How long did it take you to, because there's a lot of us that struggle with, well, I don't want to turn down all this other work. You know, if I'm just going to dedicate it to this particular, you know, market. Um, how long did you struggle with it and what were some of the things that allowed you to kind of make that decision and go all in? Ryan: [00:05:20] So I, yeah, there's a couple of layers on that. Because early on when, when this plumber was like, bro, just work with plumbers… It it's not a, you know, I keep saying it, it, it wasn't sexy. It wasn't appealing. It was like, who wants to walk around being like, yeah, I do marketing for plumbers. Um, and it, it maybe took three months of me just kind of wrestling with is he crazy or is he onto something? Um, once he, once I kind of swallowed the pillow. Okay. I think he's onto something. It was kind of all in. So we kind of rebranded. We started like building out collateral for that specific niche. Um, and then that made it where it was much easier for him to refer plumber number two. Because when plumber number two came and visited our website, guess what? All he sees is language that he identifies with. Um, when he sees our social and our reputation, all he sees are guys like him, like sharing their own personal experiences. And so it, it really quickly came from, and I say quickly, maybe within six months came from something where we're trying to talk to anybody who wants a website on Main Street, right? You get crappy ones and you get the weird ones and you get the crazy ones and whatever. And guys who think a hundred bucks a month is too much for their budget.To in most markets in the US we have guys on our waiting list, because we work with one contractor per service area. So we've got guys wanting to work with us who we can't, cause we've already got someone there. And they come to us, we don't go to them. So it's, it's kind of in a really fundamental shift. But to, to answer the question about like, how do you say no? If we, at any point would have said, hey, we're going to start taking on this chiropractor or whatever in a meaningful way to build it out. It would absolutely break our processes. It would break our, our strategy for actually attracting new clients. It would be a significant, um, it, it would disrupt the momentum that we have in a really difficult to describe way. I've never found that turning away business is bad. In fact, I feel like it gives you the clarity to maximize that momentum moving forward. Jason: [00:07:36] Yeah. And talk about the waiting list. What I found is when we've created waiting lists, it literally makes them want you even more. And they're constantly, always like, hey, you guys, you got any opening? Got any opening. Hey, I want in, I want in. So, and obviously it's, it's real too, right? Like you can't fake it. You know, a lot of people are like, oh, I'll just fake that part. But, um, talk a little bit about how do you do that? How do you remember that? Because a lot of agencies will be like. Oh, yeah, who reached out to me in this particular marketthat now we have an opening? Ryan: [00:08:13] Yeah. So it starts with like scarcity and exclusivity, right? Because we have really big competitors who will work with anybody. They don't really care. So you can pay someone $3,000 a month and you're like, man, this is amazing. And then you realize, well, they're working with the guy right across the street. And then the guy two buildings down. And it takes, it makes a lot of friction for these guys because they feel like who's getting the best efforts? What we've learned about this particular niche is these guys are very jealous and very territorial. Um, so, okay, cool. So when we say, hey, we're going to protect their service area. We're only going to work with one contractor per service area, that gets us a lot of loyalty from them. When guys in their market reach out to us. We notify the guys we're already working with, hey, so-and-so reached out. Don't worry about it. We're not going to talk to them. We just want to let you know, you're getting noticed that creates a sense of loyalty with the guys we're already working with, which strangely results in more referrals to other markets and all these trade groups. But the guys who would say, hey, we can't work with you. And they're like, well, what if he did this, this and this. Sorry, we, we really want to protect our client's interests. We hope you understand. I know it's not fun to say, but that's the reality. It absolutely creates a sense of respect and integrity with these guys coming in that everywhere, everyone else feels like second place, right? Cause they don't really have that sort of value in the client. So we I'm, I'm a digital hoarder. So I literally track all this in just Gmail. So when someone comes in, it gets logged into our system. But when I talk to them, I note that the email record that has all the chat, the lead information, and I say, hey, waiting lists for whatever the city is. And so I just kind of can search my Gmail archive pretty quickly to find whatever's there. It's. And it just goes back to me being a digital hoarder. Jason: [00:10:11] Now a lot of people may be thinking to be like, well, Ryan, why don't you set up a separate brand? You know, in order to do the others, what do you say to them? Ryan: [00:10:22] Uh, that's a good question. And it's something that we've actually are actively debating doing. Probably what we would do, uh, is not a separate brand. Just to kind of do the same model, but just with a different logo and design and whatnot. We'd probably subdivide our niche even further. So, uh, into like an enterprise level or somebody that actually is a franchise. That now we're going to have different rules because we do have to cross markets. So we've had like alpha tests in the work of how do we actually structure it, where we can cross markets? Uh, we’d probably work without the appearance of conflict. Um, but part of it comes up to even, how do we structure our teams? Like how do we let her SEO guys be separate and not share practices or insights?How do we let our PPC guys be separate and not share insights on who's doing what? Um, yeah, but it's, it's a legit fair question that we're trying to figure out how to do.
Jason: [00:11:24] Do you feel like you have to comb through mountains of data jumping between multiple platforms to spreadsheets, to slide decks and back again, in order to create performance reports for your clients? It's a constant drain on your agency's time and resources. And that's where our friends at Ninja Cat can help. Ninja Cat is a digital marketing performance management platform that really unifies your marketing data and empowers your agency to automate insightful, beautiful client reports at scale. Now, Ninja Cat keeps your marketing performance and presentation tools in one place, freeing you up from manual data wrangling. And it really gives your team more time to focus on strategy and growing your base. And for a limited time, my Smart Agency podcasts listeners will receive $500 ninja credit. When you go to ninjacat.io/masterclass to claim your offer and schedule a demo. That's ninjacat.io/masterclass. You know what we talk about in the mastermind that you're part of too, that you may want to look at, or people listening in. If you get this exclusivity and you have this, this opportunity is find strategic partners that can help with these people. And so you refer them, the business, since you have exclusivity, but you also get a commission from it. So you're not losing anything. So let's say, you know, like, uh, Chris in the mastermind, he'll refer out. He'll get 20% and he's like this is awesome. Like, and he just any refers it to, you know, let's say three people. And, you know, he always would talk about it,he'd be like, hey, we don't want to refer it just to one. Because if they have a bad experience, then it's on them because you referred them. But if you refer to them more than one, you know, more than one, well, it's their choice. If they picked the wrong one, well, they can't really blame you because you gave them options. So I always thought that was pretty neat when some of the members were going through that strategy. You may want to, you may want to steal that too. Ryan: [00:13:39] Yeah, we do that to a certain degree. Just not quite, uh, it's more selective. It's like the ones that we refer, we, we really believe like, hey, these are really great clients that we want the people referring to have good success with. Uh, the ones that were like, this is a problem client, like nobody wants them. We really don't pass those on. Jason: [00:14:00] Yeah. Oh yeah. Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. I remember when, uh, when we got to a point where we couldn't take on some calls. I would always just be like, look, here's what to look for. Well, we even came up with a packet that we were like, here's all the questions to ask people that we're referring to. So then when we would, you know, um, you know, whenever they kind of made it upscale and they would come back to us, then we would crush it. Uh, cause they were always like their goal was to get back to us. Ryan: [00:14:30] Yeah. Interesting. Jason: [00:14:31] Kind of like what you, what you set up because you're like you elevate them so high. Ryan: [00:14:37] Yeah. It's, um, it really is crazy how I know a lot of other agency guys, when I talk to them, are they freak out at the exclusivity. They freak out over like being very niche into it. You know, when we say, hey, we're home service. It’s like, okay. But we go, yeah. But right now we don't do landscape. We don't do pest control. We literally do plumbing, HVAC, we have a handful of electrical. But usually the electrical is part of plumbing. To have that sort of like very narrow, very streamlined laser-focus um, even with the way you do referrals, like it absolutely makes everything else easier. Jason: [00:15:15] And you can charge a lot more too with exclusivity. I mean, you could charge really whatever you want. Do you find that sometimes, um, people come to you and then you're just like, oh man… Like this happened to me one time, we were doing, what was the client? I won't say the name, but they did the buses to the airport. So they would re restructure all the buses, you know, like with the TVs and all the things. And we were working this with this one client, I think they were paying us like 5K a month. And I remember the big competitor came along and was like, hey, uh, we want to work with you. So then they were like, we'll pay you 10K and we want this. So what we did was we went to our original client, said, hey, if we can grow your account to 10K and we'll do this, this and this, we'd like to help you. Um, but if not, we're going to have to cancel and go this way. And we were able to kind of keep elevating, you know, doing that, you know, over and over. Um, which was always a, you always had a backup, right? Ryan: [00:16:25] Right. Yeah, and that's something that we're, we're also trying to figure out how to do. Even like, uh, like one of the weird complications too to that point is, as these companies grow, these are not literally all the time, but their service area businesses, right? So they have a physical brick and mortar, and then they have a service area that they do their work. If we do our job well, their service area expands, right? It gets bigger and bigger. So if they're in Denver and they get bigger and bigger and they go, you know what, let's go up to Fort Collins. And they start another division of the company, or they go down to Colorado Springs. So their territory, it keeps expanding too. And it's creating weird logistical things of guys growing into our competitors, right?Of guys we already work with, but now they're competing. Yeah, so we're trying to figure out, like, how do we even start threading that needle? Jason: [00:17:14] It's good, it's a good problem to have. Ryan: [00:17:17] It's a good problem. Jason: [00:17:17] Right? Like, you know, a lot of times I find that the different stages of where people are in their agency. It's like in the very beginning, it's like, how can I work on lead gen and close as much business as possible? But then it starts switching to, you know, kind of like operations, like, how do we deliver? You know, how do you know, how do we pick and choose? How do we get selective? And all of that, which is a, a testament of, uh, scaling and growing in the right way. Well, this has all been great, Ryan. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience listening in? Ryan: [00:17:52] No, other than… this sounds really dumb. I'm, I'm really old school with like the value of exceptional experience with the clients. Because I would say, I think in 2020, 92% of our growth came from our clients referring us to other people. Like, so it's just kind of nuts sort of thing of… Yes, we charge a lot. Yes, we're proud of what we do. But taking care of our clients to the degree at which they feel like they want to help us in return.It's, it's pretty crazy. Like the amount of social proof that's available for us anywhere these guys look. I mean, it's, it's a lot of fun. Um, yeah. Yeah. But I think this is a really cool opportunity for me beyond here. So thank you for the invite. Jason: [00:18:42] Oh no, I'm thrilled you came on. Um, well, uh, what's the website people can go and check the agency out? Ryan: [00:18:50] Yep. dpmarketing.services. Jason: [00:18:52] Awesome. Well pretty easy. Well, everyone go there and check it out. And if you liked this episode, I want you to do me a favor. I want you to do a couple of things. I want you to take a screenshot of it, upload it to Instagram or any of your favorite social media. And just tag us and say, what you liked about that episode is what we'll give you a shout-out back and thank you for listening. And then other thing is, is if you want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners like Ryan and so many other mastermind members, I'd love for you guys to go to digitalagencyelite.com. Request an invite. And, uh, we'll, we'll put you through the paces, make sure you're the right member that we're looking for and that we can actually help you out. So go to digitalagencyelite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_To_Grow_Your_Agency_With_A_Laser_Focus_Niche_and_Exclusivity.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 4 August 2021
Shaun Clark is the co-founder and CEO of HighLevel, a company that offers an all-in-one sales and marketing platform for agencies and marketers. HighLevel gives the tools, support and resources marketing agencies need to succeed all in one place. Today, he joins the podcast to talk about how marketing agencies can reduce churn rate by becoming an all-in-one solution. And, how the future for agencies will be to tack on software to the services they already offer. 3 Golden Nuggets
SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Tack on Software to Your Solutions and Reduce Churn RateJason: [00:00:00] What's up agency owners? Jason Swenk here. I have another amazing guest today, where we're going to talk about how can you add more revenue to your agency as well as improve the churn rate of your clients? Because, look, if we lose clients, you know, it's going to be harder to scale your agency. But it’s going to be a lot of fun episode. Let's go ahead and get into it. Hey, Sean, welcome to the show. Shaun: [00:00:34] Hey, thanks for having me, Jason. It's great to be here. Jason: [00:00:36] Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what you do? Shaun: [00:00:40] Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Shaun, I'm a co-founder and CEO of a company called HighLevel. Um, so we work with over 10,000 marketing agencies and we have a software platform that's sort of a combination of marketing automation, CRM, uh, calendaring. Pretty much every, uh, sort of, if you're stitching together six or seven different apps for your agency, we kind of bring them all together into one platform. So that's, that's kind of what we do. Jason: [00:01:03] Nice. Awesome. Well, let's go ahead and jump into it. Let's talk about how can agencies and implove…? Implove? Did I make up a new word? I think I made up a new word. How can… It's been a long day. How can they improve their churn rate? Shaun: [00:01:21] Yeah. So, um, I think that we've, you know, working with so many agencies now, what we've discovered is churn is often a function of, uh, of, of price point. You know, if you're working with a lot of small businesses and you're trying to run on a retainer model, for example, and you're charging thousands of dollars, every month. What we find is no matter how great of a job you do, oftentimes the client just can't get over this perceptional problem of, hey, wait a second, two or $3,000 a month is a lot of money to us. And so what we did at HighLevel is that we looked at all of the different companies that are out there serving the same space. And we looked at it from a software angle, cause that’s the kind of people we are. What we realized is there's this massive opportunity out there for agencies to tack on software, to what they're already doing. What I mean by this is if you think about the types of tools that exist out there. And it could be, there's like the Podiums of the world, the Bird Eyes of the world. These are functions like reputation management, two-way text messaging, all of this stuff. Imagine that you tomorrow could add a $300 a month software-only product to what you're doing. And you would, you would very quickly find that as an agency, you're going to be able to sell this into your existing client base. So if, and when they decide that they're no longer going to be using your services because they're, they can't get over that price point issue, you're not going to lose them as a customer. And then you're going to add a $300 a month recurring software product to your revenue stream. And the effect is really simple. Let's say I'm running Facebook ads for you as the dentist office, and I'm running the software and I've got the Facebook ad service. And I decided, you know, those Facebook ads, I'm not sure they're kind of expensive. Let's quote unquote, pause them, right? In the past that means like, sorry, Jason. You're a nice guy, but we're going to have to fire you. That’s what that means. But now with the software, the software is incredibly sticky. So what it turns out is that the Facebook ads still get turned off. But then two months later that when they realize how silly they were doing that, and they watch all their leads fly out the door and vanish, they'll go. They'll just call you back up and turn it back on. Because they didn't let you go as a vendor, they don't have to feel so bad coming back to you. So it's an incredibly good way to add revenue to the agency and reduce churn kind of all in one step. Jason: [00:03:31] What um…? When we were running our agency, we created our own CMS system. Long time ago before, uh, WordPress and all of these. And one of our selling propositions back then was, hey, you can manage your own website on our unique platform because there's no one really doing it. And it really did create such a stickiness where even if they wanted someone else to design the website, they would lose that functionality. And it was just such a huge, like, like we would hardly lose any clients because they knew they were going to lose that functionality. And they'd have to pay thousands of dollars to some other agency to manage all the changes that they're actually doing. Um, and so it just made it really sticky. And I found, you know, over the years, too, of looking at some of our clients of our mastermind members. When they're able to find tools and software and case it into their offering, a lot of times I tell them don't like, especially if they're white labeling and I think what you guys do, I'm like… Siri: [00:04:41] I’m not sure about that. Jason: [00:04:44] Siri is talking to me. I don't know. It’s not, Siri. I can't say her name from Jeff Visa's company, but weird. But, uh, she actually agrees with me. But, um, what, uh, what I've found is just like, don't tell them who you're using and it just creates a really sticky and be like, hey, if you leave... Shaun: [00:05:07] Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I really think this is the future of agencies. So if you think about it from a practical sense, you know, if you're the dentist, the doctor, the whatever, you, you want somebody to help you market and grow your business, right? And if we're realistic about it that means that there's going to be services that need to come in and help with that. But there also needs to be technology. And today, if you think about how this is offered, that small business owner has to kind of like go find you as an agency or you have to find them. Then they have to go off and find software and they have to try to glue it all together. It's a real pain in the neck and all this time, they're also trying to like run a business, right? And oftentimes operate that business because they tend to be the people doing the thing, whatever that may be. So as an agency, imagine tomorrow you could walk in and say, hey, listen, we have all the services you need. We have all the technology you need all in one spot. So you don't need anything else outside of my agency, right? And you have, you have a price point on the software side and you have a price point on the services side. I think you're going to find that those small business owners breathe a big sigh of relief and are thankful that you're there. Because now they don't have to go off and figure this all out for themselves, which what they already weren't doing very well. And it's only getting harder every day. As we know technology on the marketing side only continues to expand and get bigger.
Jason: [00:06:17] Yeah. There's I mean, there's the easier that you can make it for your customer and your clients the better. Because that's what they're really coming to you for. Look, I think all clients can figure out what you're doing, right? Like you figured it out, so they should be able to figure out. But it's just saving them time and saving them the hassle. So if you can make it really easy to be like, look, I got you covered here, here, and here. They’d be like, great. Cause a lot of agents like, like you were saying, they come in and saying, uh, you know, hey, you need this tool, this tool, this tool go here, go here, go here. And then it, and then it's just so it's like, I'm overwhelmed, man. Like you've lost me. Shaun: [00:06:58] Well, totally. And in fact, this is how we got started. You know, when we first started working with agencies, um, and we see this still everyday today, it's hey, what are you currently using your agency? Well, I'm using this over here for calendaring and this over here to build a funnel and this over here for my CRM and this over here for my analytics. And it's like, okay, great. Well, what if we gave you an app that it took all of those functions and put them on one spot? So that was kind of where we got started and that's how we got to 10,000 agencies. They're like, oh my gosh, that'd be amazing. I could see it through Zapier. It's all in one spot. And then what we realized is, wait a second. If we, if we look at the agency's customer, they have that exact same issue, right? It's like, oh, well, uh, I have, you know, I have this text messaging platform and I have the CRM platform and I have this website over here. And now you're coming in as an agency to help me. And I need you to learn all this stuff as well. Um, and it's like, wait a second. What if the agency could come in and say, look, we have an end-to-end solution. And these are for things that every business needs, like, think about it two way, text messaging, Google my business messaging, web chat, um, you know, reputation management, text to pay. Like these are the types of technologies every small business will have. It will be table stakes five years from now. And my position is the agency is the best person to come in and provide that solution. Not some venture-backed software startup calling, you know, calling their phone day and night, trying to get them on a demo. It should be the agency, because the agency can not only provide the expertise they need on that software, but they also can provide all those other services that the actual small business owner truly needs. If we're talking about a 360-degree view on what they need to grow and market their business. Jason: [00:08:26] Yeah. And the, and the more that you control the strategy and the software and the implementation, you just really surrounding that account. Um, and especially if you're going after small business. Because like, if you're going after enterprise-level like I understand like it's, it's totally different. Or if you're going after bigger clients, totally different. But if you're going after small business, they want a very simple. They want one bill. They really want to just be like, hey, I want more leads or I want more sales. Like, can you help me with that? Like, yeah, we can do it all. Shaun: [00:09:02] Exactly. And that, and that is the idea, you know, and you, and honestly, as an agency, you need that, right? So like, where we got started with HighLevel is we're working all these people generating leads and they're putting them on spreadsheets. They're handing it to their customers and their customers are like, what the heck is this? These aren't, this isn't what I wanted. I wanted more business. I wanted more people buying. Well, turns out the problem is clients don't follow up with leads. So HighLevel automated the entire lead follow-up process. And that is what really fundamentally changed the game for anybody running Facebook ads or Google ads. And so this is what your clients need, right? They need a system where they can bring it in. It does everything they need end to end. And the great thing is that they have a problem or a question or an issue they can lean back on you as the agency, as the expert, right? Because a lot of these questions, aren't just technical. They're also strategic and you're the best person to answer those question questions. You're the best person to help them with those issues. So I think being the one-stop-shop, you get more revenue and you, you gain a lot of expertise dominance, and they're like, oh great. Why would I ever get rid of this person? They're amazing. They provide all the tools I need and all the service I need in one spot. Jason: [00:10:08] Yeah. That's awesome. Well, this has all been amazing, Shaun, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience for increasing their, uh, or decreasing their churn rate? We don't want to increase it. Shaun: [00:10:22] Well, I think that just trying to find ways to create these, to put systems in place for your customers and make it really slimline and easy and scalable for you as an agency. Those are the ways that you're going to win because you don't, you don't want to be running all around all over the place, learning six or seven different tools. Trying to learn your clients tools. You need to come in as an expert and say, hey, listen, we solve the problem you need solved. And these are the tools we do, we use on the job. Um, so that's why you're hiring us. You're not hiring us to learn your tools that you're hiring us to solve a problem. And that's what we do. Jason: [00:10:54] Awesome. Tell us a little bit more about HighLevel. You know, briefly about, you know, how you guys take, you know, kind of an all-in-one solution and how it works for agencies and then tell us the special URL and, um… Shaun: [00:11:08] yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, so HighLevel is awesome because we only sell to marketing agencies. That's the only people we sell to. So as a result, it's all white label out of the get-go. So you get your own URL, you get your own, you know, all of your own branding. Um, we even have custom white-label, mobile apps. So all of a sudden, imagine tomorrow as an agency, you could be like, oh yeah. And just pull out your iPhone there and go to the app market and you can download our mobile app and you can do two-way texting with your clients and contact management and CRM. It's a pretty powerful offering. Um, and then, so, um, and then as I wanted to put out a special offer here, if you go to gohighlevel.com/swenk. You will find that you get a special offer for signing up by listening to this podcast. Um, and so definitely go check that out. It's gohighlevel.com/swenk. Jason: [00:11:54] Awesome. Well, everybody go check it out. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Um, but you know, it is, you know, if you can combine technology with the strategy and the limitation, it really connects that small business market to you. And it really can't go anywhere, which is always pretty nice. And that's how you can decrease your churn and really keep and grow those accounts. And then if you ever do get to a point where you do have the opportunity to sell your agency, you can be like, hey, we don't lose that many clients. So… Shaun: [00:12:26] And you’ll have that revenue stream that just grows every month instead of coming up, going up and down so much. Jason: [00:12:31] Exactly. So go to a highlevel.com/swenk and until next time… Shaun: [00:12:36] gohighlevel.com/swenk. Jason: [00:12:39] And until next time, Have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Can_Adding_SaaS_to_Your_Agency_Reduce_Churn_Rate_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 1 August 2021
How can agencies prove value to their clients and eventually charge more? That's the solution Paul Deraval offers in this episode about founding NinjaCat. After entering the agency world later in his career as a software developer and finding the competition was everywhere, Paul shifted his focus. As Paul says: Who makes money in a gold rush? It's the guy selling the pickax." So he decided to offer his unique data reporting technology to agencies and created Ninja Cat in 2014. They are a digital marketing performance management platform built for agencies, media companies, and brands and help agencies create a . He joins the podcast today to talk about how agencies can prove their value to retain customers and the benefits of having automated reporting. 3 Golden Nuggets
SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Using Data Reporting to Tell the Story of Your Agency's ValueJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Got another great, amazing podcast interview coming right up. This guest has a really interesting story and we're going to talk about how can you really prove your value, prove your worth, your ROI? So you can actually charge more and hold onto your clients better. Because a lot of times, if you don't know the value your clients don't know the value and you're probably not going to hold onto them. So let's go ahead and jump into the episode. Hey, Paul. Welcome back to the show. Paul: [00:00:36] Hey, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:37] Yeah, man. I'm excited to have you on. So, uh, tell us who you are and, uh, tell us a little bit about your background. Paul: [00:00:45] Yeah, sure. Uh, my name is Paul Deraval. Um, currently I'm the CEO and co-founder of a company called Ninja Cat. We help, uh, large scale agencies and media companies prove value to their customers through, um, automated and highly effective, um, data stories as we call it dashboards as well as, uh, automated PowerPoints and PDFs that really help you as an agency prove value to your customers. Jason: [00:01:11] Awesome. Very cool. And so tell us, how did you come about starting this? And, you know, I know it's an interesting story. Paul: [00:01:21] Yeah. So, long story short. Um, my background is a software entrepreneur. Prior to this, built a SAS company called uh, Easy Facility, an all-in-one platform for health and fitness clubs, like a YMCA or yoga studio. The one tool you needed to get all your different jobs done from member payments to personal trainers, scheduling, mobile apps. Everything. Very big product. Um, was fortunate enough in, did that from 2003 to 2009, uh, when we got acquired, and that, enabled me to do some angel investing. And, uh, one of the investments I made through a, a referral from a, a family friend was, uh, to two brothers starting, um, a digital marketing agency primarily focused on auto dealers. Uh, I'm a software entrepreneur and was looking to make software investments. I was like, ah, you know, I don't understand the agency business. Um, you know, really shouldn't invest in what you don't know, but, I'll take the meeting. Um, but what caught my eye during the meeting was, uh, a digital marketing agency focused on auto dealers, but had their own unique selling proposition, which was two parts. One was an ad creation technology that would scrape an auto dealer’s website, find out what inventory they had in real-time. Take that 2010 Honda civic and create a Google ad for it and take it down when the, when the, um, car was removed from the site. I thought that was pretty nifty. Um, and another component of some technology that they built to help them differentiate was, uh, some really nice reporting dashboards. Uh, that basically offered transparency to these auto dealers. Showing them exactly here's where your dollars are going and here is here's the impact it's having, right? Here's how many map views it’s driving, how many phone calls it's driving. Um, so that got me excited to the point where I said, all right, I don't understand the agency business, but, um, I'll make a small bet. Um, from there, the agency for about two years, uh, they grew, it was a boutique agency with, with a handful of clients and just run, run by two brothers. Um, the things that we learned in that journey of those first two years was a couple of things. Some of the challenges we faced, uh, was one the segment we were serving, um, back then around at that time that the 2011, 2012 was, you know, customer education. Working with auto dealers in the Northeast who were, you know, more traditional used to advertising in print and, uh, you know, radio and TV. And convincing them they should be putting dollars into Google and Facebook, uh, was one thing. Then the harder problem was convincing them to do it again, right? Retain, expand, and spend more on these digital marketing channels. So, um, we, we were making progress, and definitely, our unique technology helped us. Uh, but another challenge we faced was, um, that was pulling us back it's just how competitive, um, we, we found ourselves in the markets that we were in. And so many agencies out there, right? From, you’ve got your enterprise agencies, your mid-market. And then you have your solopreneurs out there, you know, slinging, PPC, SEO services, some very qualified and some very unqualified. And we were battling all of them and would just go walk into a dealer or for cheaper clicks. The dealers wouldn't know what that meant. And then there was a battle to like, retain that customer. So it was okay. It just wasn't going, it didn't seem like it was on a trajectory to scale into anything, um, meaningful of an agency. Thankfully, um, around the end of 2013, a competitive agency actually was trying to push one of our auto dealer clients. And, uh, our clients show them the dashboards that we were providing to them. Um, and that agency, uh, actually came to our team and said, hey, would you ever consider white labeling those dashboards? Um, I've seen them, you know, I'm in the business, but have you ever thought about that? The team came to me and said Paul, what do you think? And that was really, uh, one of those true light bulb moments for me. It was like kind of everything going on at once. Like what's our challenges here, right? One of our biggest challenges is, um, that the agency space is, is so competitive, right. And we're fighting with, with everybody out there and the thought was all right, well, we have this unique technology, this reporting ad creation. Who makes money in a gold rush, right? It's it's the gal or the guy selling the pickax. So instead of fighting with everybody, what if we became the arms dealer, right? And sold our unique technology to the agencies out there, giving them a chance to, to compete, uh, and thrive. So, um, I got really excited about that thesis, went home, uh, executed a textbook execution of a lean market validation experiment. Created an Unbounce landing page. I just tested the reporting first, automated reporting from the ad creation. While it was cool, it really wasn't delivering on all the promises of some of that, um, you know, automated ad creation. So I wanted to test out the value prop of, you know, automating report improved value to your customers. One week I came up with a ridiculous name. Created the Unbounce page, uh, got the leads. And then I just did a bunch of discovery calls and found out where the market was being underserved. And what I kept hearing was like, the Acquisios, the Marins, these big black box algorithm platforms helped automate. But the biggest challenge I kept hearing was they were using those platforms for the reporting capability. You know, they weren't so much delivering on some of the promises of campaign automation optimization. But they were not… they were still paying for those tools, using it for reporting capability that was super limited in scope, not really designed for that use case. And paying a ton of money for it, like a large percentage of their media spend. So I was like, wow, there's, there's an exciting opportunity here. There's a crack in the fortress, right? For somebody to come in here and focus on a specific problem, be the best in the world at helping agencies prove their value, uh, to, to clients by just knocking client report out of the park. And then from there, there's a grander vision of helping them take over some of the other jobs from reporting to monitoring, to contribution and such. And we've grown since, but that's, uh, I just made a long story longer. But that's, uh, that's our founding story of Ninja Cat. So we've been at it since 2014. Uh, we pivoted, I came on as CEO. After that experiment, we, we sold off some of those customers and have been, uh, just running, running for that sense. Jason: [00:07:37] So I, I love that story. And I do believe that, you know, proving your worth is showing your clients reports. Now, one of the challenges I've seen over in, in the past is, you know, you're… You know, we've all had these clients, like you're giving them amazing results and then they come to you and they're like, I'm switching. And you're like, what the heck? Right? And you're like, I've been sending you reports. And they're like, well, and what I've seen is they'll check out the report for the first week and then they'll ignore the rest. So what's the best way that you've seen agencies present the reports? Or how do you, how do they, how does, how does the client understand the reports and the first off? Cause a lot of times I've seen I've, I've seen reports from a lot of different tools and I'm like, man, I'm confused. So, what have you seen work for agencies? You know, that are using your platform for really kind of showing the client the value and then really taking it up a notch?
Paul: [00:08:46] Sure. So some general things, uh, we've seen and we've done to help our customers elevate their client reporting so that they can achieve the objective of a better proving value. So they can retain and expand within those customers. I'd say the ingredients, the key ingredients is like… First and foremost, I would say, know your audience, right? Um, know their appetite for data, right? Uh, and then deliver it to them on a silver platter a data story that says here's what we did for you. Here's the impact that had on your business. And here's why you should not only continue doing business with us. But here's why you should do more business with us. Look at all these opportunities. High-performing campaigns limited by budget, whatever it might be. So it is not a one size fits all solution, but I think those ingredients of like knowing your audience and their appetite for data and delivering on a silver platter. And if I, if I break that down, what does that actually translate into from like best practices is. You know, um, everyone thinks dashboards first for client reporting because we're data geeks, right? We love dashboards. They’re sexy. They're cool. I can access them on my mobile phones, whatever. We've been doing this since 2014 and we have stunning dashboards. Like you can recreate any dashboard on our product. One of our first finding than we thought we were screwed as a company, cause we started off dashboard-only, was like, oh my God, less than 10% of clients ever logged into these dashboards on a given month. We're screwed. We can't sell this, right? We're selling snake oil. You shouldn’t be doing reporting dashboards. So I think that's a reality. I think even Google is this data studio blog post published something similar. Like, you know, 10% of clients or something, uh, on average, uh, ever log into dashboards, right? So, one, it's a mix dashboards are critical and kind of table stakes. They offer a sense of comfort and transparency that I can access my data whenever I want and see where my dollars are going and you're not doing anything shady. But the reality is while you might be able to win them with a dashboard. With the transparency and building that trust that's so essential to any client relationship. To truly then retain and expand it's that deliver on a silver platter, right? It’s push methodology versus a pull methodology. Which means a push report, some form of a PDF or PowerPoint or web presentation that is less dashboardy, right? Dashboardy is more kind of exploratory. Like data vomit, as I call it, meters and gauges and stick your clients into that and they'll probably misinterpret that data, which I think is one of the big problems. So you give them a dashboard with meters, gauges, data vomit, leave it up to them, to interpret the data for you. To say that you're doing a good job for them. And, you know, probably at least eight times out of 10, they're going to misinterpret that data, uh, in that data vomit. And it's not doing you any, any justice. So it's finding that balance of a dashboard that gives comfort and transparency mixed with on a silver platter, a data story that covers those bullet points. As I said earlier, here's what we did and why you should continue doing business with us and more. And it looks different, right? As an agency, you got to figure it out. You might have different, um, sizes of clients. We have some agencies and media companies that have thousands of very small span clients. And you've got to invest the appropriate amount of time to your client reporting for that segment versus your, your high spend, you know, uh, enterprise clients, right? And what we've seen is you need to automate on the low end, right? But make it feel high touch. If it's just a dashboard and expect them to log in, that doesn't feel as high touch as I can log into a dashboard. Oh, and I also get this beautiful weekly, monthly PDF or PowerPoint with a very digestible story. And then at the high end, right? Walk your customers through it. Or at a bare minimum, don't just send a report. Like in Ninja Cat, and I'm sure you do this and other products, we have workflows that is either set it and forget it, fully automated. Or set up a don't forget it, where the teams can come in at the agency, look at the data and then add their insights, their recommendations, and next actions. And then send it to the client. So those are just some of the best practices. Don't lean… My first biggest suggestion, be aware of data vomit, right? Uh, to be aware of dashboards as your primary, medium of communicating value to your customers. When statistics just over overwhelmingly show that, you know, they hired an agency because they want it to be white glove full service. Don't make them go find the data and expect them to tell you why they should continue doing business with you. You need to be the one telling your customers why they should be continuing to do business with you. Jason: [00:13:09] Yeah. Yeah. I love that you said you got to know your audience too, right? Like really read them and be like, is this person really analytical? Is this person visual? Does this person just be like, I just care about the results. I don't care about how you do it. Just go do it. Or like, you know, do they want to know all the details? Like I think that's so important. A lot of people skip that. And you should really concentrate on that, on the onboarding process of your clients. Like, because I had a, we have our digital agency experience, which is at our house in Durango where our mastermind members come in. And I had, um, a keynote speaker come in, Joey Coleman and he talks about how the first hundred days is the most important if you're going to keep this client for a long time or not. And if you could put that in your onboarding process and really figure out that, like, do you want to know all the intimate details that we're doing? Do you just want to know the results? Like how do you want me to show you that we're working for you? And I think if you just do that, then you could use a cool tool, like Ninja Cat, where. You know, if they want just a basic report, automate the crap out of it, or if they want to meet every week. Okay. Do that. You know, whatever it is. I think that's so important that I think too many of us miss. We have a huge tool. Paul: [00:14:29] One hundred percent. Yeah. That's that's, it's like a report should have, yeah, layers to it, like an executive layer, more strategic layer than a more tactical. And if you're excited about that tactical, but your, your audience isn't, you show up to a meeting and you start overwhelming them with the details. You know, and, and they are like CML or somebody that's high level that doesn't care. They're not actually paying attention to the thing they cared about the most. Why did I spend time on that executive-level first page thing when I should have spent time on the first page? Did I sell more cars? Yes or no? Uh, should I continue doing this? Yes or no. Don't spend an hour talking about negative keywords with me if I don't care about that, right? So, uh, more data isn't always better, and it really… Just ask the customer, what is the best way? What, what level of detail do you want? Uh, and then just, you know, deliver that to them. Jason: [00:15:13] Yeah. Well, I think we covered a lot of the mistakes. Did we miss any mistakes that agencies do with reporting and upselling and growing those accounts or keeping them? Paul: [00:15:25] No, and just… you know, aggregation. Um, it's a really important thing, right? Is, uh, looking at things, making sure you aggregate. I know it's hard, uh, when you have so many different channels. But making sure you really nail that, um, executive layer of a report, that should be the, the answer to the question that they're, they're seeking. The so what. And then backed up by the, the details under it. But, um, we've seen that too common and it's like, wait, you're giving your client this 80-page report? Jason: [00:15:49] Oh, my God. Oh, that hurts my head just thinking about it. Paul: [00:15:52] Really, really. I, I, no. We, we've had a hundred plus, uh, and some of our clients today still do it. But you know what? They're actually, to your earlier point, my earlier point, there are some audiences that need and want the hundred-plus page report, right? Because they need to see the data broken out. Hospital system by department, by all these different things. If that's what they need, that's what you should deliver to them. So it's not a don't ever give a hundred page report. It's, it's know your audience, but, uh, tell that holistic the holistic story, right? I think when you, you can't fill in the blanks and you show up to a call. And you can't connect, you know how all these different channels are impacting other channels. It's not as good as if you can, clearly. So do your best, find tools, solutions that can really allow you to tell that holistic story and show how every channel impacts, um, each other, even channels that you might not manage, right? Like, why am I ads not performing? Well, look at your reviews, like your reviews on Google. If people saw your reviews, they people probably aren't clicking on your ads. So what impact are your reviews having on your, on your adwords performance? Jason: [00:16:50] That's awesome. Well, Paul, this has all been amazing. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience before we tell them about where to go? Paul: [00:17:00] Uh, geez. Good question. Um, that you didn't ask. No, I mean, that's… I think that's, uh, uh, I think we covered at least what we're most used to helping agencies, right? There's lots of jobs to be done. But, you know, the thing where we've focused on being the best in the world that is helping prove value through your client report. And I think we hit a, at least the, the cliff notes and hopefully there's a couple of actionable takeaways that everyone got out of this. Jason: [00:17:27] Awesome. Uh, where can people go to learn more about Ninja Cat? Paul: [00:17:32] Yeah. So, uh, we have a dedicated landing page for, for this podcast. Uh, you can go to ninjacat.io/masterclass. Jason: [00:17:42] Awesome. And, uh, and tell us, what's the number one thing agencies love once they switch over to you guys? Paul: [00:17:52] Uh, that they can focus on the meaningful instead of the monotonous, right? So, instead of data chaos and data wrangling and client reporting. When you can automate that at an effective level then that's meaningful. Really, let's spend more time actually optimizing campaigns and building client relationships. But when you don't have automated reporting and you spend 60 to 70% of your time, which we've seen is common, right? On client reporting because you need to do it. Well, what if you can automate that? What then will you do with that time shifted from, from the monotonous to the meaningful and, and see what impact that has? Jason: [00:18:32] Awesome. Well, Paul, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. We really do enjoy. And, uh, for all of you guys that want to really improve the value that you're doing and really streamline the reporting and just be able to run a better agency. I want you guys to all go to ninjacat.io/masterclass. Go do that now. And until next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_Do_Agencies_Create_a_Data_Story_to_Show_Value_and_Charge_More_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 28 July 2021
Vasa Martinez is the founder and CEO of Growthbuster, a remote marketing agency that has helped food and beverage brands reach new heights with community, creative, and innovation. After years of CPG experience working with many brands, Vasa started building his own company focused on the outsourced marketing department. Today he joins us to talk about his experience with brands, how he positioned his agency as the solution clients need, and why you need to follow your north star. 3 Golden Nuggets
Follow Your North Star and Position Your Agency as a SolutionJason: [00:00:00] Hey, what's up everybody? Jason Swenk here, and I'm excited to have another really good episode, a really amazing guest. He's going to talk about how did they position their agency as an outside marketing solution for companies coming in. So let's go ahead and jump into the show. All right, Vasa. What's going on, man? Vasa: [00:00:25] What's up. What's up? How are you? Jason: [00:00:27] I'm excited to have you on, so tell us who you are and what do you do? Vasa: [00:00:30] My name it's Vasa Martinez. I'm the founder and CEO of Growthbuster, an outsourced marketing department. I'm also the CMO of Outer Aisle, which is a food brand that creates cauliflower sandwiches and pizza crust. Jason: [00:00:43] Very cool. And so with the agency, how'd you get your start? Why did you guys jump into this world? Vasa: [00:00:48] Well, I found that I had some ideas that I wanted to see brought to life, and working as an employee wasn't the best way to do that. So in the back half of 2017, I started consulting rather than being a full-time employee. And that turns into, uh, you know. At the beginning of 2018, I incorporated what became Growthbuster and started building from there. Jason: [00:01:06] Awesome. And talk about kind of, why did you choose to kind of position? Or why are you guys going after the outsource marketing department? Vasa: [00:01:17] For me, it's, it's nice to have a group of specialists and a group of generalists all on the same team when we work with different brands. I’m typically running point on, on the account. So we never pass it off to an account manager that's just out of college or anything like that. So having that team behind you, that support, is the most helpful. You know, having the graphic designer or having, you know, an email marketer or a copywriter, uh, rather than just focusing on being a paid agency or a social media marketing agency. It just wasn't enough for me and part of it was, you know, I treat GB as a CPG company. We work mostly with CPG companies, food and beverage, and I was listening to a lot of our potential clients, what they wanted. And wherever we could, we solely tacked on, you know, those, those resources. Jason: [00:02:00] So, how do you position yourself different than all the other agencies out there? Vasa: [00:02:04] Well, I don't really look at too many other agencies, to be honest. I, I focus on what we do and what we do best. Um, you know what my background is at Quest Nutrition and creative and community was one of our main focuses in the marketing department. We also, you know, as my first stint in marketing, I left a previous industry. Really enjoyed it, and we had our own creative department as well. So we never worked with any agencies. So I've kind of learned like the project management systems, you know, all the copywriting, everything as a generalist at first. And I went into content marketing for one of the arms. That's kind of why we went in that direction, is simply because it's what I started with. It was nice to have and I love it. Jason: [00:02:40] Very cool. And so what are some things that really you guys do really well that you've figured out over the past couple of years of running the agency? Vasa: [00:02:50] So we've always been known for our creative. Uh, we work with a couple awesome brands like Magic Spoon. In the past, we've worked with just some of the coolest CPG challenger brands out there. So we're definitely known for our creative. But early on we used to be known for how quickly we can escalate social growth. We don't buy followers, we don't use bots. We don't do anything shady like that. So we would literally have bets with new clients that we would double their social within the first four months, one month onboarding three-month execution. And we won a lot of bets that way. Since then, you know, everything's always changing on IG and Facebook. So we've really made adjustments and evolved along the way. So, um, back then, community and creative, 100% we were known for, we still are, but since the pandemic, we really dove into our innovation department. What that is, is basically acquisition and retention with an emphasis on SMS. Jason: [00:03:37] So when you would go to your clients and you would bet them, hey, we can double this. What were some of the things that you did that would help get more engagement, double their, you know, numbers and all that? Vasa: [00:03:50] I can think of one good example. And we're still currently with them three years later and that's Outer Aisle. They have 18,000 followers when we first started and 93% of them were in Rio de Janeiro. Interesting part there, is that Outer Aisle doesn’t ship to Rio de Janeiro. And we really had to displace those followers that cannot be buyers and bring in a lot of folks who could be buyers. So what we did was run our playbook on the content marketing, identifying what the RTBs are, our reasons to believe. For Outer Aisle that’s low-carb, gluten-free, grain-free bread that's delicious. And easy. So, and it's virtually of pretty much anything. So the goal of ours was trial. Our influencer funnel, we work on just constant trial. We call it targeted trial. And from there, we bring them down the funnel to five different ways to win. That's, you know, sentiment. What do they think about the product? They hate it. Hey, thanks. We'll see you later. They love it. Well, what else can we do together? Can we send you more? Um, do you want to be an affiliate? You want to be activated for our next paid campaign and retail rollout? Uh, do you want to be an ambassador? Things like that. So the trial, like product in mouth, was 100% a main focus for us. Um, really honing in on what the messaging was at that time. It was a little bit different. We did a rebrand in 2019 and the messaging at that point, was always focused on low carb, grain-free gluten-free. That's what people care about. And we focus our influencer efforts there. People started seeing it. We started attracting the social proof using that on the back end, using that in ads. The other component of that was, um, brand partnerships. We worked with a lot of different low carb keto brands, grain-free brands. And what we did was by, I think it was, was actually like two months that we doubled out their following from 18 to 36K. And when we looked at the displacement where the original was 93%. It was now closer to 40, 50%. And at this point today it's 93% US for the 142,000 followers. Jason: [00:05:38] Oh, wow. Yeah. You know, not too long ago or maybe, maybe this? I don't know. I keep losing track of time. Two years ago, I had Facebook reach out and was like, hey, we're reaching out to influencers in this space that we want to grow your account. I was like, sure, you can grow it. And the next thing I knew, I had like 40,000 more whatever likes on Facebook. And then I started looking at the names and I'm like, what is going on? It was all like, I couldn't even pronounce the names and I couldn't believe Facebook would do something like that. And so, yeah, that kind of perked me. I really like your, your strategy of how, uh, how you've grown it. Vasa: [00:06:18] Yeah. The tough part about that too, is what stakeholders don't realize. And we don't work with brands that buy followers or have bought followers. We've done it in the past. We've literally switched their accounts and started fresh. What they don't realize is that what to them is a vanity metric like, oh, investors need to see a hundred thousand followers or my peers need to see a hundred thousand followers and know I'm legit. When you start passing your accounts off to a paid agency and they, they believe that these are real. There's not much for them to work with. But on top of that, let's just say that they’re, they make it look like audience for engagers and you just bought engagement. They're making it look like audience of people that are ghosts that just don't exist. So, um, that's one thing that people don't realize when you, when you tell them, hey, you're wasting money and this is why then they're like, oh, buying followers isn’t that cool.
Jason: [00:07:05] Oh, yeah, definitely. Well, I'm still trying to, I'm so complexed at what Facebook did. I'm sure they probably outsourced it to someone to do that, but I kind of laugh. I kind of leave it because everybody kind of uses me as the lookalike audience. I'm like, oh, you're going to target to the wrong people, suckers! Vasa: [00:07:22] Yeah. That's very true. Jason: [00:07:25] Awesome. Well, what's your guys' North Star? Like what, what really kind of drives the agency for, uh, you know, getting to the next step? Vasa: [00:07:33] Yeah. So our north star is being human first business, business second. Always has been, always will be. There's a lot of times in my history where my career, where ethics, weren't the number one thing that I've come across. So for me, I learned a lot about how to be from learning and watching people and seeing how I don't want to be. So that's how I run the agency. What our north star is, it's not necessarily growth. Yeah. Growth is nice, you know, to be a $10 million agency instead of one half for 2 million. Yeah. That's great. But at what cost? You know, employee, um, mental health is important to me. Like we worked 40 hour weeks. I never had hit people up on the weekends. My, my signature literally says, hey, I work weird hours. If you see this at the time, when you're not working, just reach out to me when you are working, don't think about responding to it. So for me, the north star is running a solvent business, working with some really cool brands and not sacrificing employee's health as a result, I can tell you this, I didn't look like this when I first started GB. So I I'm like the first-hand experience of what I don't want my employees to feel like or turn into. But at the end of the day, you know, another, another north star of ours is, uh, we don't work with brands that don't solve a problem. We've said no to a lot of brands that, yeah, we could have done so much more in revenue. But we love working with brands that are solving a problem for people. And that really starts, again, going back to my experience at Quest Nutrition, we solved the problem there. Not me personally, but it was solved before I got there. And that was creating a bar that was actually good for you. And we've turned down lucrative offers with brands where they just weren't as… we'll say, just their north start was a bit skewed, you know, there's ingredients in there that, that weren't very good. So that's our second north star is working with brands, helping brands grow that are really solving a food problem. Jason: [00:09:18] Did you start off that way? Because a lot of times it's hard to, you know, especially when you're getting, getting started of go or really kind of figure out who you actually want to go after, right? To gain that clarity. So what were some things that did you just take your past experiences at sound like, and be like, I don't want to do this, this, this, and kind of process of elimination, to figure out the north star? Vasa: [00:09:40] Well, yeah, so I working with, with a low carb company and… My last role at that company was senior influencer marketing manager. So I had a lot of relationships that influenced the world, brands that were reaching out or, you know. Once I left, um, you know, there was another, vegan low-carb protein bar that reached out. Consulted for them for a little bit, a low-carb vegan chip reached out. So having the experience with the product, but also the influencers I would reach out to. Couple that with being a one-man show then. And also having just a really focused laser precision on I'll help run, you know, like social and I'll run an influencer, I'll put the content calendar together, um, and we'll grow your social. Those are the really like the box that I put myself in as a consultant. As we've grown and as I've grown, I'm working more as like the outsourced CMO, whereas my team serves as the department. So, um, how I worked with those brands is just... Again, I, I picked and choose. There was, I think my first two brands were those, no carb, but they were called Dee's naturals back then, K Shake, which is a keto shake. And they were all very second nature to me because I was just working on all of those products at the time I was there. Jason: [00:10:47] Very cool. And when you started, you know, obviously when you were, when you started, it was just you, so how'd, you decide who to hire as you were growing? Vasa: [00:10:59] Yeah. So I worked with a couple of freelancers at the time I brought on one of my other closest friends. He was freelancing and just helped me out with influencer, what we call influencer partnerships. Organizing the influencer calendar. His name's Simon. But the first, first hire hire was my friend, Danny, who I brought on his VP of growth. And he helped Halo Top really hit that next level as a unicorn. And that was a really intentional choice because I needed another me in the field. He was previously an engineer before he got into marketing. So he has that engineer mind where he can really set the structure of things. And that was important to me because it was very complimentary. But we also had similar skill because we literally sat next to each other at quest. So that was the first hire. Once that happened, you know, the next thing I brought on was a creative director. Maybe it was a bit early, but we quickly started hiring in 2018. We brought on a, a retail marketing manager in 2019, which is different for an agency, you don't typically see those. But when we start working in our innovations, um, tactics, you know, manufacturing, coupons, digital coupons, those sorts of things that all helps. So bringing on that one, anchor that could support me was the priority. Jason: [00:12:06] Yeah. I always tell, uh, all the people I'm coaching of like, hey, well, you got to kind of hire based on the things that you're currently doing now that you don't want to do anymore, rather than hire though things that you have no clue about. I'm like, no, no, no, you'll do that later on. But in the very beginning, you need to replace yourself. Not your exact twin, but you need to replace kind of those smaller things that you're doing, that we all have to do when we're first starting out. Vasa: [00:12:37] Yeah, a good place for me to be eventually that I'm working towards is really focusing on the finances personnel, some, some higher-level strategy for similar brands, but fully cognizant. Eventually, I shouldn't be the, the reason that the business kind of runs and stays afloat, you know? Jason: [00:12:53] Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I always tell people, you know, as you're building the business, you're in it. And then, uh, and you're going like the what and the how, and I'm like, no, no, no, no. All you have to do is be like, this is where we're going. And this is the who who's actually going to go do this. Who do I need to hire? And then that kind of transitions to, you know, working on the business, which then you have that freedom to do what you want. Because I can promise you this, um, we're not all about hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle. It's like, hustle, have fun hustle, have fun, right? So, uh, and a little bit more in between. So is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit audience? Vasa: [00:13:36] Not that I can think of. Jason: [00:13:38] Perfect. Well, what's a website people can go and check you out? Vasa: [00:13:41] That’s growthbuster.com, www.growthbuster.com. There's no S at the end. Dan Akroyd and all those guys, aren't part of the team. Um, so that's Growth Buster, singular one word, .com. Jason: [00:13:56] Well, I was going to be like, hey, we need to create a really good theme song, you know. Because while I was in the agency I wanted to create an app that eventually turned into an iPhone app called Goldberg. The first name was called Chubby Busters. And we used to, we had a theme song that I would sing. We'd be like, when you're feeling fat and your pants don't fit. Who are you going to call? Chubby Busters. But then we were like, no, one's ever going to say we're going to be with Chubby Busters. Vasa: [00:14:22] Yeah. That sounds like, that sounds like an agency I would own right now, too. Jason: [00:14:27] Awesome. Well, go check out the website and, uh, if you guys liked this episode, so, and you want to hear more of it and make sure you actually subscribe so you don't ever miss out on a new episode that we're pumping out all the time for you guys. So you guys can scale faster. And also, make sure you guys leave us comments or review the podcast that will help us reach more people. And if you guys want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners on a consistent basis where we're constantly talking about what's the strategies working. So you can scale your agency faster and not work all the time and have that freedom that you really want. Make sure you guys go to digitalagencyelite.com. That is our exclusive mastermind go there now. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Position_Your_Agency_as_the_Solution_Clients_Need.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 21 July 2021
Jason Yormark realized the job stability he always hoped to find behind a desk was waiting for him as an entrepreneur. That's when he decided to take the risk and founded Socialistics, a B2B social media agency. Three and a half years later his agency, based in Seattle, helps tell businesses stories in ways that not only drive audience and engagement; but more importantly, real business results. Today, he joins the podcast to talk about how you should treat your agency, the benefits of long vs. short-term contracts, and more. 3 Golden Nuggets
SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Don't Forget to Build Your Brand and Treat Yourself Like a ClientJason Swenk: [00:00:00] What's up everybody? I have another amazing guest coming for you in just a second. We're going to talk about why you should treat your agency as the number one client. As well as we're going to talk about long-term or short-term contracts, the benefits, the disadvantages. We're going to argue back and forth. This is going to be a really good episode. Now, before we get into chatting with Jason, our guest, I want you to do something. I want you to take a screenshot off your phone of listening to the podcast and upload that to Instagram and tag us because I want to thank you for listening to the show and do a big shout-out to you. So let's go ahead and get into the episode. All right, Jason. Welcome to the show. Jason Yormark: [00:00:44] Thank you for having me. Jason Swenk: [00:00:45] Yeah, man. I'm excited. So let's start fighting. No, I'm just kidding. No, tell us who you are and what do you do. Jason Yormark: [00:00:53] My name is Jason Yormark. I'm the owner and founder of Socialistics. We are a B2B social media agency. Jason Swenk: [00:01:01] That's awesome. And so how did you get started? How'd you fall into this crazy-ass world? Jason Yormark: [00:01:06] Well, I thought, I mean, I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit my entire life. But, uh, I was always searching for stability in my life professionally, and I always thought that that was, you know, a nine to five or sitting behind a desk with my paycheck and my benefits. All that good stuff. But, uh, marketing is a pretty volatile career path, I learned. And once I started to kind of see other folks experiencing the same thing I wasn't. So I didn't feel so bad about myself, you know, jumping around job to job, whether by choice or not. So that's stability I was always looking for was right in front of me all the time. Which was doing my own thing, controlling my own fate. And I just reached a point in my life. You know, I was a little bit later for me, where I could make that leap, take that risk. And get it right. And that happened about, uh, three and a half years ago. Jason Swenk: [00:01:52] Awesome. I love it. Well, let's talk about long-term contracts and short-term contracts. Tell us kind of how you started, where you're at now and what have you seen work? Because, you know, I have my own point of view and we'll see is we come together. If not, that's good. That's probably… that builds interests. Jason Yormark: [00:02:10] I've always been hesitant to admitting this to my other agency, friends. But, and this is going to be a little bit cringy, but, uh, we predominantly up to this point, we've done month to month contracts. And for me, it was a couple of things out of the gate. Number one, everybody's got a different agency story in terms of how they start and what they have to work with. I, you know, I had nothing, you know, I had to. And a lot of folks, I'm not the only one, a lot of folks, you know, start with nothing. You have to scrap and you have to get, you know, some clients up in the beginning and kind of make some decisions that maybe you otherwise wouldn't later on. But, you know, I just wanted to disrupt, I was always fascinated by companies like Uber, who just disrupted transportation. All they did was create this awesome piece of technology to connect drivers and, and people that need rides. And all, you know, I can imagine them sitting in a room and thinking like, what, what are the things that people hate about this? And I thought about that from an agency perspective. Like, what do clients really dislike about what they experience with agencies? And I thought, you know, long-term contracts and I knew this would be a way to disrupt. And I knew it would wait to create some momentum. I knew there'd be some risks with it. You know, the value of an agency is obviously can be dictated by that. But at the time I was like, I didn't care about that point. I just wanted to create something that would allow me to never sit in a car for two and a half hours, three hours every day and sitting behind a desk. I just wanted to create something with some momentum. So we launched with month to month, and it definitely created some instant momentum for us. We were able to maybe win some, some projects that we otherwise maybe wouldn't get. And my theory, my philosophy with it has always been a couple of things. Number one, if you do great work, if you treat clients well, if you deliver results, they're going to stick with you. And if they can't, it's going to be for reasons out of your control. And the pandemic was a perfect example, right? Some clients, look, I don't want to be the reason why an agency has to let go of some of their employees. Like, if they have to press pause on something, then I'm okay with that. So it really worked for us out of the gate to kind of create the momentum that we needed to build a foundation to stick. And to be able to have a business that I could have for the rest of my life. So it worked in the beginning. Jason Swenk: [00:04:11] I see that point and I really do agree with it because at the end of the day, like, think about it this way. Selling agency services is very different than like coaching someone, right? So a lot of times when I'm actually going to someone and saying like, well, you got pretty big goals, right? Like over the next year, it's going to take us awhile in order to accomplish that. Because I'm always looking, like I want to be what I call the chasee or the, I want to be the one getting chased, right? Rather than pushing sales, I want them to be pulling me towards you. And a lot of times what I'll do, and agencies can do this as well. Going, all right, well, we want to make sure you're the right fit for us. And for what you need to do, we believe it's going to take a long time to do, a year. We want to see your commitment level in order to do it. And so that's why I've always talked about doing longer term, and then it's more predictable, right? But I also agree with you. You know, it's easier to sell something that's out. Because it's less risky, right? You can make a decision. All right, I blow a month, two months here. Okay. But like you were saying, if you deliver amazing work, they're not going to want to leave. And then if they get in a situation like we just went through with COVID, right? Let's say you're going after the restaurant industry. The whole industry was shut down for months. Are you really going to stick it to them because you have a contract? No, you're going to let them out. At the end of the day, it's kind of like. You're just trying to figure out, do you really have that commitment level to me? Because I have a commitment level to you and I need to know that. That's the biggest thing I look for. Jason Yormark: [00:05:54] Yeah. And for us, I just feel like. We're growing, you know what? Even at the time, it's like, look, if somebody doesn't want to pay you, they're not going to pay you. Like, even, even the best contract language in the world doesn't mean you're going to see that money. And like, you know, in the beginning, especially the first year, like where are we really in a position where we're going to hire somebody, a lawyer and go to court? I’m like, no. If somebody doesn't want to pay you, they're not going to pay you. And I think in the entire history of our business, one client didn't pay, uh, an invoice. I, you know, I tried going after it and it, we didn't get it. So at the end of the day, it's not, it's just semantics almost. Because, again, if you do great work, they're going to stick with you. And if they can't, then they're probably, they weren't a good fit to begin with. We've had plenty of clients that would come into a relationship with us and I vetted them out the best I could. I think they've got good potential, but they get in and either they treat my team like crap or they weren't ready. And we didn't know that. And there w it wasn't a good fit. I'd rather grow a scalable business with the clients that makes sense for us then just trying to trap people into long-term contracts. Because even if they do sign a long-term contract and they're not a good fit, I'm just the kind of guy that's going to be like, look, this isn't working and we're going to go our separate ways anyway. So it really hasn't impacted our agency not having that. And certainly, you know, it's evolved for us, you know. Now we, my, it was funny, an interesting story. My, my team came to me and they were a little bit frustrated because some clients left because they weren't a good fit. And they said, well, what if we, you know, we think maybe we need to reconsider this. We kind of had a back and forth with the team. And ultimately what we decided is why don't we just create options, right? Let's give them the option of, okay, here's, here's your month-to-month price. And here's a long-term contract price discounted. It's your choice. We give the client the choice. What do you care about most? And a lot of what's happening a lot is some of them will take us up on the month, a month. And then after a couple of months, oh, these guys are awesome, actually deliver results. I like these guys. Hey, could we switch to a long-term contract? And then we kind of move into that. So we give them the option. So that has really actually worked really well for us. And now our balance of clients is shifting. Whereas like, you know, a hundred percent of them are month to month. Now that those numbers are changing. It's becoming like 70/30. I expect it to be half and half, which is good for us because, you know, I want an exit strategy. I'm not ready yet. I'm a couple of years away, but I know by the time I'm ready for that. I think that a good percentage of our clients will be long-term contracts. Jason Swenk: [00:08:18] We’ll get you there quicker than you think. Or so you have the option. I mean, it's, it's kind of hard to interview, cause I know so much already I'm being in the mastermind. But that's a great point, Jason, too, of what you were saying about we give the option. Because at the end of the day, you got to think about how can I remove friction from them, making a decision? And then whatever, if, if they're like, hey, I still don't trust you yet. That's kind of why, you know, like in the mastermind and the playbook, we always talk about the offering ladder. Do the foot in the door, then a project. Show them value, and then they're going to want that retainer, but I like how you have, hey, if you want short-term contract. It's kind of like a SAS model, if you think about it, like on a technology, it's like, it's this, if you pay month to month, it's this. If you pay, you know, if you commit to a year… And I like to hear that a lot of clients are going to that, because that was going to be my next question for you. For people listening, going well, do you have an exit strategy? Because I know as a buyer of agencies, that's one of the things we look at. Because we need that predictability.
Jason Yormark: [00:09:31] Well, plus, I mean, for me it was, I felt like, well, if they look at the history, if they see. Because honestly I could go back to a good percentage of our clients right now and say, hey, you know, I want, uh, for the, you know, I want to kind of solidify our agency a bit, build the valuation up. You've been on month to month for a year or two. You okay with just sliding into a year-long contract? Most of them are going to say yes. So I think that it's just building those foundational clients over time. I'm not worried whatsoever that when I start thinking seriously about an exit strategy, that I'll be able to transition a good percentage of the ones that we have. And this new approach that we're taking, you know, we'll get there. But as a, as a young hungry… If you're just starting out and you don't have anything, that's a great way to disrupt because it eliminates a lot of the barriers to saying yes. And what's interesting is it's almost kind of like a foot-in-the-door offer by itself. Because the whole idea of in my opinion, the foot-in-the-door is to get them to say yes, more easily. Like the commitment’s lower, they get a taste of who you are. And that month a month approach… I mean the first month is strategy. So they're in essence getting a foot-in-the-door offer in some capacity. But ultimately I'm just trying to get them to yes more easily and more quickly. Jason Swenk: [00:10:39] Yeah, I love it. Well, I love that strategy and there's so much to take away. So if you guys are listening, we'd love to know your comments on that. You know, because I think all of you should do that offer if, uh, if you're charging month to month now. See about giving them the option at a, I wouldn't say at a discount, I would just say, we're going to charge you more if you're on month a month, right? Jason Yormark: [00:11:00] Exactly. Jason Swenk: [00:11:01] Let's change, focus a little. Because I feel a lot of agencies don't dedicate enough time to building their own brand, their own marketing, treating themselves as a client. So what have you found working for yourself? Jason Yormark: [00:11:14] Yeah. So I, you know, it was interesting. Every agency it starts out and like, you're just, you're so busy with like business development and selling and getting clients. It's, the first thing to get pushed to the side is your own stuff. And it's very easy to do and most do that. And we did, to a certain extent, we didn't take it serious. We just kind of dabbled, oh we'll put a blog post out. Then, you know, a month later, oh, we probably need to put another blog post out. And it just doesn't work. I found that. You know, we were… as a startup, I didn't have a tremendous amount of money to just throw out stuff. And I knew I had the luxury of creating a runway. I created the brand when I had another job. You know, I, I knew that it was going to take a couple of years for the name and our website to permeate on the web and kind of start to get some organic reach. That takes time, you know, it just takes a long time for that to happen. And I just consistently made a commitment to putting know blog posts out and putting content out and putting social media content out. And it gets frustrating because it's like, it's the sum of all that effort over time that really eventually gets you to a good place. Then, now we're three and a half years in or so, and we're getting about 20 to 30, you know, inbound, organic leads. Just from people searching. And that doesn't happen overnight. You have to treat yourself like a client. You have to prioritize. And the, the minute that we realized that, you know. I just, you know, I got someone on my team, Socialistics is their client just like anybody else. The accountabilities are there, the expectations are there. We don't let it slide no matter how busy that we get. We do not, you know, we just don't move away from what we need to commit to. And now that consists of, you know, weekly blog posts, right now, bi-weekly podcast episodes. Certainly social media every day. But it's just, it's just the sum and the consistency of that. Or, I mean, yes, it's got to be strategic and you need to pick keywords and phrases and work that in and, and be smart. But it's just that consistency that you have to kind of stick with it. And the best advice I can give is, you know, if it's just you, then it's gotta be you. But when you start to build a team, make sure that somebody is responsible and accountability is around your business, as a client. That's the best thing that you can do if you're serious about, you know, building a pipeline for yourself that doesn't require you shoveling money on paid ads all of the time. Jason Swenk: [00:13:34] Yeah, I look at it as if it's just you or you're going all right, Jason and Jason. Which, uh, we'll call it the J&J show, I guess. Then we’ll be like, all right, that's all good, but I'm already too damn busy or anything. And I always go back to my motto. If you're saying you're too busy, you're not charging enough. It's the leading indicator for most challenges. If you can charge enough, then you can start hiring the right people. And most of the time we hire the wrong people. I want you guys to start thinking about you in the center and thinking about all the stuff you do, right now. The $10 tasks, the $100 tasks, the really cheap tasks. And think about who can you hire to do that stuff, to get some stuff off. And do only like, you know, Jason's talking about like he's doing content development. He can only create that if he's doing the podcast, right? That's what he should be doing and that's what I want all of you to focus on. Because it has to be like three pillars, inbound, outbound, strategic partnership for building a sales system or a lead generation system for your agency. So hopefully you guys get that. Jason, this has all been amazing. And I actually agree with you. I was hoping we would disagree. So I guess I hooked people in on the intro, but, um, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Jason Yormark: [00:14:58] You know, just based on what we talked about and you kind of touched on it just now. You know, just because when you're doing the content, that doesn't mean that you can't outsource, whether it's somebody internally or whether you hire somebody. And a perfect example of that is like the podcast, which I love doing podcasts. It's easy. It's easier to me, right? You’re just getting in front of a microphone and blab for 20 to 30 minutes with somebody. Not to mention it's awesome to just to meet other people in that way. But I don't do the editing. Like I don't do the editing. I don't, you know, I don't want to do any of that technical stuff. I did it at first just to kind of get a feel for it. But you know, a couple hundred bucks a month. There's plenty of resources out there that'll take on all the heavy lifting. So literally all you have to do is put the microphone in front of your face. Talk for 20 minutes, send it to somebody else they'll edit it. They'll publish it. It's fantastic. You know, it's a really low investment in time. The same thing with blogs. Like if you're a great writer, then write it, then send it to somebody to edit and SEO optimize it and publish it on your website. Like don't spend your time doing all of those extra things that make it feel too heavy. Like you can outsource a lot of that and really just focus on your expertise and putting it out there. And the minute that we kind of got those systems in place, it becomes a repeatable process and we're able to make it work. Every day, every week. And it's worked really well. Jason Swenk: [00:16:07] What's a website people can go check the agency out? And what's the podcast name that they can search to go, uh, listen? Jason Yormark: [00:16:13] Yeah. Well, our name's unique, so just search for Socialistics. But you can find us at socialistics.com. The podcast is called Socialistics, social media agency stories. And, uh, you know, just type in the name, you'll find us. Jason Swenk: [00:16:26] Awesome. Well, go check that out. And if you guys enjoyed this episode, I would love for you to do me a favor. We haven't asked for going to iTunes or whatever platform you have and review it. And then also, if you want to be surrounded by other amazing people, I want to invite you guys to go to our free Facebook group called the Digital Agency Owner Insiders. You can go to jasonswenk.com/insider. So that should direct you right there as you a couple of questions and only agency owners are in there. So go do that. And until next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Why_You_Shouldnt_Forget_to_Treat_Your_Agency_Like_a_Client.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 14 July 2021
Mike Poznansky was still in college when he started working at Red Bull's college marketing division. Since then, he realized the need for agencies that understand students and deliver at the scale and quality necessary to keep up with large consumer brands. That's why Mike founded Neato and now works alongside the world’s best brands to design and run creative marketing programs that bring new value to both brands and students. He's here to talk about pre-qualifying leads so you can separate the good ones from the ones who are just fishing. 3 Golden Nuggets
SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM How to Qualify Leads and Stop Wasting Time on the Wrong OnesJason: [00:00:00] Hey, what's up, everybody? Welcome to another great show. The smart agency masterclass. I have a really good episode today coming up with Mike, who's built a really amazing agency and we'll get into that in a second. Now, before we jump in, I want you guys to take a screenshot of the show. And then I want you to post on Instagram and tag us so then we can give you a shout-out for being a loyal listener. So let's go ahead and jump into the episode. Hey Mike, welcome to the show. Mike: [00:00:33] Hey! Thanks for having me, Jason. Jason: [00:00:35] Yeah, man. I'm excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Mike: [00:00:39] Yeah, my name is Mike Poznansky. I'm the founder and managing director over at Neato. We're a full-service marketing agency that helps brands connect with young audiences with a focus on gen Z and college students. Jason: [00:00:51] Awesome. And so how did you get started in doing this and how did you connect to that particular niche? Mike: [00:00:59] Yeah, I actually was pre-law. When I was in college, I had the, I had every intention of going to law school. I was thinking about being a sports agent or maybe working in intelligence. And through a strange set of circumstances, I connected with Red Bull. My passion work was in the action sports world and a company I was working with partnered with Red Bull on an event. And the employees over at Red Bull said, we have a job for college students that we think would be perfect for you. So, I was a senior, I became a student brand manager for Red Bull. At the time, I wasn't a big fan of marketing. I just saw it to be as something that was too disruptive or annoying, you know, kind of pestering. And through my work with Red Bull, even as a student, I discovered that it could be something that actually doesn't take away from your experience, but adds value to your day or to your life. And I ended up continuing with Red Bull and working for them full time. I spent, uh, over a decade there and eventually was running their college marketing program for North America. While I was at Red Bull, we were one of the first brands to invest in marketing to college students. We had a, a really large program that was very scaled. It was a well-oiled machine. So a couple of things happened that inspired me to get in the agency space. One, we started saying, how could we utilize this program to not only build the brand, but build the business? We had over 300 really capable well-connected students across the country. So we started experimenting with ways we could utilize them. And some of the programs we add to drive traffic into retail or pull product off the shelf or support our business in the on-premise. We were really blown away by the results. And then as we scaled, we needed some external help. And just, I realized that there weren't any agencies out there who were focused on the space that understood our business and that had high standards of quality. So just realized there was this void that I set out to fill with Neato. Jason: [00:02:56] Yeah, I see that so much where people are looking for something and they have no agency experience. And there was just like, let me just go into it, let me just create it. And a lot of times you don't take that bad baggage with you from some of the bigger agencies. What has it been like over the years of growing it and scaling it? You know, when it comes to your team or like, have you moved upmarket with your audience? Because agencies are always going through different cycles. Mike: [00:03:25] Yeah. Yeah, it's tricky because I think we started solely focused on college marketing and it's a very core part of what we do today. But one of the challenges we found with college marketing, in particular, was that it's very tactical. So a lot of the briefs you would get, there's an existing strategy. There may be even an existing campaign and they're just looking for someone to really execute. And it may be something that you don't think necessarily works for the brand, or even worse, works for the audience. And one of the big differentiators for us is saying the needs of young people and the needs of brand's ambition don't need to be mutually exclusive. So we believe young people are happy, happy being marketed to as long as it adds value to their lives. So sometimes when we get these really tactical briefs, we feel like they weren't a great fit for the audience. Or they weren't a good fit for the brand. And we found ourselves in a tricky position. And, of course, then you would naturally say, well, share your point of view and that works. But if you, if you have a tactical brief, and sometimes if you're working with some of the folks at that stage who are just there to execute the program. They aren’t the one setting the strategy. And they're not the ones who may necessarily be part of those discussions and all that. So for us, I'd say the biggest challenge has been working ourselves, I guess, as you say, kind of upstream a little bit to be a more part of those strategic discussions. And to change some of the perceptions of what college marketing or youth marketing or field marketing could look like. Jason: [00:05:00] So what are some things that you've done that you've seen work to fix that? Because I saw that a lot and I think a lot of agencies do, where they get this tactical thing in and they need to really move upstream to really talk about strategy. You know, I remember we were working, um, I can't say the name of the brand. But I can say it's a large beverage company in Atlanta with a red logo. And, uh, so we were doing a campaign for a young urban market. Well, the guy that was making all the decisions was a fat white guy. Old white guy. And he was like, I don't get the campaign. And we're like, we know you're not going to get the campaign. Like you're not even, you're not, you're so far removed from even relating to them. So what are some strategies that have worked for you in order to going from tactical to more strategic? Mike: [00:05:51] Yeah. For us, it's tricky because if someone comes to you with this baked brief and strategy, and they aren't even hiring you to be a strategic partner, you're not really in a position to credibly say, we don't believe in this or this won't work. I mean, most likely, the outcome of that would be you just won't get the business, right? They find someone else who's onboard, especially if it's a new relationship and you don't have that existing credibility. So what has helped us in the past? First of all, saying… look, we have a ton of experience in this space, but I'll call BS on anyone who says I am a, I am an expert in youth culture. I'm an expert on young people. Because the more you do it, the more you realize it's always evolving. So the first thing we'll always do is we'll talk to the audience. Have conversations with young people about the category, about the initiative, about maybe even the strategy and the campaign. And then I'm not sitting there in a position going up to anyone on the client-side and just saying, look, this doesn't work. We don't like it. We're saying, hey, you know, we talked to a bunch of young people about what you're setting out to do and here are some of the things we learned along the way. So it's much more credible and it's puts you in a position to be a little bit more of a, of a partner. And someone who's collaborating with them than someone who just has a big ego and a strong point of view that's different from theirs. So everything we do is really driven by insights and we fundamentally believe that that's a critical part of our process. Jason: [00:07:24] Yeah. And I also see it as a lot of times, I would walk away from business that if they were just so driven by that. I would actually take it a step further. You know, I interviewed, um, one of the Harmon brothers who does all the funny viral videos or ads on the internet. And they only take on the ones that they actually believe in the product. So they've done like Squatty Potty. And I was like, you believe in that? They're like we do, right? Like we saw the science, and tested it out. I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting. But they were like, we only do work of products that we know we believe in that we actually can go do and prove, and actually have results. And I think that's a big departure from a lot of agencies out there that just say, oh, you got a check? Oh, you need to find someone? I remember many times where we would actually walk away from an RFP and be like, look, this is not our process, we're not going to do it that way. And them coming back and being like, why would this one company, this small company pull out versus, you know, Tribal and DDP and Grey? And all these big agencies are giving us free work. It would make them think in order to, I really get to the next level. Mike: [00:08:38] Right. Yeah. It could be a little bit more provocative, right? But if it's grounded in truth, I think it works. And it's something we've, I would say, wrestled with a little bit is just how honest and straightforward you are and the initial part of that conversation, right? Because you have a strong point of view, but it's tricky because you have this incentive. Look, you want to work with them and not just because they're going to pay you. But for us, we could say this is a powerful brand. Like they have some really cool resources and assets, and we think they could bring a lot of value to young people's lives. We think they could have a really positive impact. So for us, it's just saying, you know what, let's go through a little bit of a journey and figure out if they can and are willing to get there.
Jason: [00:09:25] Yup. Now, do you do that through a small paid engagement or are you doing that on your own dime? Mike: [00:09:32] That was the first thing that came to my mind, right? Because that's hard work and it's a lot of work. I mean, even if you want to find people, interview them, synthesize those insights, share them. Ideally, we'll do that and we're getting paid. Usually, what happens? This happened recently with an organic foods brand. We came in, they came to us and they said, listen, we want to market to students. Here's what we're trying to do. Give us ideas, best ideas win and win the program. And, you know, give us the best ideas and you'll become our agency partner. And I said, listen, I could pull a bunch of stuff out of a hat, but I haven't talked to young people about organic foods. I haven't talked to them about your brand. I’ve been having a ton of conversations with them lately, but not about this subject. So what I would propose is that we go and do that and then we'll put together a scope and we'll get paid to make sure that it's at least worth our while. And it, it helps the client too, because we could say at the end of this all at the very least you will have these insights and you'll have something you could work with, whether it's something you do on your own or something you do with another partner. So ideally we're, we're getting paid. Earlier on, when someone was coming up with us, uh, to us with a tactical brief, we had to do it for free because we didn't earn their trust and respect yet. Jason: [00:10:44] Yeah. Yeah. I was talking to a couple agencies a little while ago and literally, I was like, if you're just starting out, you're going to have to do the grunt work. You're going to have to take it on the chin and do some of the free work. But once you start getting a little bit momentum, then you can actually be more selective and say, no, I'm not going to take it on the chin. We're going to do it this way. Then I'd always tell people, like, treat it this way and say, look, you're going to pay us to develop you a really good strategy. Here's three outcomes. You'll love the plan and you'll go execute it yourself, which you were just talking about. You'll love the plan you want to work with us, which is the most common. Or third, you don't like the plan. I'll give you your money back. So you really have nothing to lose. And then it literally takes them from like, are they really a qualified prospect or are they really just effing you up, right? Like just trying to get free work. And I found that by doing that, that separates the fishers or the, uh, the people just fishing from the real buyers. Because I look at it too like, I think it was Dean Jackson that said, uh, you know, 50% of the people will never buy from you, but the other 50% will. But you have to figure out when. Like, there's a small percentage that will buy right now, which are like 15%. And then the other 35 is like maybe 90 to two years down the road. And you have to kind of figure that out. So like I'm trying to eliminate the non-buyers right away. I love that you get, you're getting paid for it too. Mike: [00:12:14] Yeah. And I think one of the things that's helped us in that process too, is that I'm not a big fan of, um, you send us a brief, we go away for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, whatever it is. We come back and do this whole dog and pony show with a bunch of ideas. And then in that process, we learn that there's a bunch of other things that have happened since then. Or a bunch of things that were maybe missing from the brief or there's other decision-makers in or departments who weren't a part of writing the brief. So what we like to do is co-create with our clients and have a bit of a collaborative process and creative development. Because in real-time you're getting that input and that feedback. And like I said, it just, it's, it's impossible for them to capture all that on paper. In that process, you could see what they're really up for, right? Because we'll have a client that will come to us say we want big ideas “we want huge disruptive ideas.” And we… this happened to us very early on and they came to us and they said, these ideas are too big. Well, you wanted big ideas. That's what you asked for, right? So I think bringing them along in that process, in the creative development process, and turning it into a conversation instead of everybody working in silos could help you feel that out too. Jason: [00:13:27] Well, they don't want big ideas. They want results, the smart ones. And so I totally agree that you have to do it with them. Yeah. The, the time of what is it like Bewitched? Was it? The show Bewitched, when Darren would pitch the work for Larry, which was his boss, right? Like those days are over, like literally if you're not building with them, because then they have more skin in the game. And you can ask them, be like, what do you think if we did X, Y, and Z? And if they say no, I think it's a dumb idea. You find out why is it a dumb idea for in their head, especially if you believe in this. And then you get them to a point where they’re like, oh yeah, I like that idea. So then when you present the ideas, they were all there. Like they feel like it was all theirs. And then they're like, man, I really feel like we're connecting. We're like, well yeah. Like we just did this, this engagement together. And then, you know, we found that they're 20 times more likely to engage with you if they have a good engagement or the first, rather than just going, oh, let me give you a bunch of ideas. Like, oh, I hated that. We got away from that very quick. Mike: [00:14:32] Yeah, it's full of assumptions, right? I mean, you just, it's a tricky process. And then sometimes you could spend a week or two going down a path. And if you would just learn this one thing, that path may not be viable for them. Or it may be a trigger point for someone who is the decision-maker there because of a bad experience that you just, you don't know those things. Yeah. And on results, I agree with you. I mean, one of the things we like to do, especially with the people who are paying for it, or running the departments that are part of this program or experience or process. Is just say, okay, let's pretend it's December or it's the middle of the year. We're all sitting in a room and we're looking back on this program and we're celebrating. What would we be celebrating? What do we really want to get out of this? Because sometimes you'll find that people will bake in all these goals and KPIs and objectives that don't align with the needs and wants of decision-makers. Jason: [00:15:25] Yeah. I always looked at when a client comes to you, like if you think of kind of the past, the present, the future, when they come to you, it's because they're stuck. And then, right? That's in the past, they're stuck, they've tried a bunch of things. Then in the present you think about, well, they have a problem. And the future is, they just don't know what they need to do. And so we have to do, as agencies is we really have to kind of look and go, how can we switch their state? Like get them to a resourceful state rather than a stuck state, right? The past. And then in the present, we really need to pinpoint what is the real issue. Like we need to be urgency detectives. Because the clients like they, sometimes they don't know and they, they're like, they don't really know the problem. And so really we need to identify what's the actual issue. We need to kind of paint that picture. Then, in the future, it's just. Let's just shrink the scope and let's just make it really simple for them to understand. And when we do all that, now we can take that prospect to, you know, someone actually believing us. Rather than just saying here's all these big ideas, but that's what we've seen work really, really well. Well, this has all been amazing. Is there anything I did not ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Mike: [00:16:41] Yeah, it's a good question. The only thing I would say is just how you identify those problems. I think has been a little bit of a learning for me and I, you know, I've just getting ahead of it. I've just found that the most effective way to do that is through real human conversations with the people on the, on the brand side, on the client-side, to really figure out what they're challenged with. Because it could be something that they haven't even considered. You know, I think a lot of people can get almost in a little bit of this like automated mindset where they're just they're writing briefs around specific campaigns. Or they have, they have a line item in their budget they're trying to fulfill. And then through conversations with them, you could identify things that they're really struggling with, that you could potentially help on. And maybe it's not a good fit and you could pass it on to someone else or whatever it may be. But I think, I think those real human natural touchpoints are really important to understand what the needs are of your clients and figuring out if there are ways that you could support them in navigating those issues. Jason: [00:17:42] Awesome. What's the website that people can go and check you guys out? Mike: [00:17:47] Yeah. We're at neato.agency, n-e-a-t-o.agency. Jason: [00:17:51] Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. And if you guys enjoyed this episode, I want to make sure you guys subscribe. It's just so you are always notified when we have an episode. And then if you guys want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners, where we get together on an ongoing basis to really work on the business, rather than in the business. And really be able to create that freedom where you can pick and choose and do the things you want to do in your agency, so you can eventually get to a point where you can actually sell it or exit the stuff that you don't like to do anymore. I want to invite all of you to go to digitalagencyelite.com. That is our exclusive mastermind. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Qualify_Leads_and_Stop_Wasting_Time_On_the_Wrong_Prospects.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 7 July 2021
Kevin Daisey works hard to stay on top of changing trends in digital marketing. He is the founder & CMO of Array Digital, a digital marketing agency specializing in search engine optimization, social media, and digital advertising; and also Rival Digital, a digital agency niched in the HVAC market. Today he joins us to chat about how to create a recurring revenue machine. And also how establishing tight processes will not make you lose clients if they’re the right clients, and how his agency benefitted from eliminating the least profitable services. 3 Golden Nuggets
SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Secrets to Becoming a Recurring MachineJason: [00:00:00] What's up everybody? Jason Swenk here and on today's episode I have an amazing guest from our mastermind who runs a really amazing agency. And we're going to talk about creating a recurring machine, but before we get into it, I want you to do me a favor, take a screenshot of listening to the podcast. And upload it to Instagram and tag us, because we want to reach out to you and give you a shout-out. So make sure you go do that now and let's get into the episode. Hey, Kevin. Welcome to the show. Kevin: [00:00:36] Hey, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:38] Yeah, man. I'm excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Kevin: [00:00:42] So my name's Kevin Daisey and I run two agencies, one called Array Digital and, Array Digital is a full-service digital marketing agency that primarily focuses on working with law firms. Also, I have another agency that we started in September of 2020, which is niched in the HVAC market. So HVAC contractors, companies around the country, uh, with websites, SEO, social media, and on, on advertising. Jason: [00:01:12] Awesome. I love it. Well, let's go ahead and get into it. How can people listening, how can they create a recurring machine? Kevin: [00:01:21] Well, let me, uh, I guess start with kinda what led to where we are and obviously where we are is a far cry from where we want to go. But, uh, in order to get there, we had to have recurring revenue. And so back about a few years, my business partner, Eric J. Olson, who’s actually a member of the mastermind as well. Me and him formed Array Digital together, after both running our own agencies for quite a few years. And we both struggled with one thing, which took us a while to figure out, by the way. We didn't have predictable recurring revenue, we had lots of projects. Now we have some small services and hosting and maybe some support to some degree. But it was never enough to actually operate the company, pay payroll and things like that. So it was really just kind of a way to supplement and maybe have recurrent customers in the future. But on a monthly basis and cash flow, we didn't really have a lot to stand on. And so we were really focused on software and mobile apps at one time and we had a lot of software developers that had $100,000 salaries and up. And we just really saw, when we had a slowdown at one point in sales, which was Eric and I at the time, how are we going to have the payroll is massive and how are we going to pay this if we don't have projects this month? Around the same time, we were meeting with a, an accountant who actually ended up being the worst accountant we've ever had… ever. Like we fired the guy, his, it was a terrible experience. But he did this one life-changing thing, which we sat down with him to plan. We tried to start having a budget and we were just at a million dollars in revenue and we're like, hey, it's time to kind of get a budget and start to plan out things a little bit better. He asked a question: what are you guys predicting for next month's revenue? And then next quarter's revenue? And we were just like blank stares. Like, how are we supposed to know that? We don't know that, we have no clue. I guess we can assume if we get these projects to this point, then we should expect to build this much and whatever. But we really had no good answer for him. That just made Eric and I think a lot about that question and how we were going to even grow and scale pay payroll. Like we're, we're this close to going out of business. Tomorrow. So that kind of really got us thinking. We got, we got serious about it. And he proposed that if we're doing a $100,000 software project, what if we took it and extended it to a 12-month payment plan instead of, you know, $25,000 a month for the next four months? Even though the project would be done in four months, they can pay us 12 months and we collect that revenue. So this, the concept right there was kind of like, well, how are we going to pay payroll? If we collect $7,000 a month instead of $25,000 a month or whatever. And so we had to take baby steps that ultimately led to us investigating all the services that we offered and which ones were recurring and which ones were not. Digital marketing, which was at the time a smaller piece of our business, SEO, and website support stood out as the only ones that we had that were recurring and they were very profitable. We have the website done and we're still collecting money every month for support. SEO was an ongoing service, which is in-house. So we didn't have to, there was no cogs, really. So we looked at that and we're like, wow, it's just such a small piece of our business though. It was like, you know, 10% of our revenue, but it was predictable revenue. So after a lot of thinking, a lot of thoughts or, I mean, a lot of thought on our services and then the challenges with sales on the software side, it ultimately led to us cutting software, cutting mobile app development. And digital marketing was the winner at the end of the day. And so we put all our focus on that. We up the ante, and we made sure to secure the other services like social media and advertising, which is something we didn't do. We did websites and SEO. So we started hiring in that department. We actually had to let go or our software people, we made sure they got other jobs and had other positions. And then we started hiring and learning digital marketing more than ever. We grew from… our overall revenue did not change in the year. So we were a million dollars. But we went from, I think, 17% recurring revenue to a 100% in eight months. So where we were having a hundred plus thousand per month on contract that we could predict every single month for services that we were rendering. So that was kind of the major change. And then any questions about that, but then I can go on to kind of now how we refined and fine-tuned to become more of a machine and a process. That continues to allow us to grow. Jason: [00:06:34] Well, I love, I mean, there's so many agencies that are in that similar boat, right? And they're, they want that predictability or that peace of mind. Because I remember going through the same thing, you know. Our out for more predictability was just building a pipeline, but we never even thought back then, because 80% of our business was projects, and it was extremely profitable. But we just created a huge master pipeline, so that was our main focus. But I like the approach that you guys took because there's a lot of people that are going, I want some predictability. And I'm glad that you had a really good experience with a bad CPA to make you guys change that focus. And I also like, and I don't want to skip over it, because a lot of agencies try to do too much. I like how you audited, what are the most profitable pieces, you know, in your agency? What should we eliminate? What should we actually go all in? Because too many people just try to do everything. And they think, well, if we want to double in size, we need to do double the amount of services or double amount of the things. And that's actually very incorrect. Like a lot of times in the mastermind we talk about, look, if you can focus, you're going to be so much more successful in that one thing. So I love that. Now, let's talk about, you talked about how we got there right on the recurring. What did you learn from that? And like, what's changed since then to now? Kevin: [00:08:10] Sure. Absolutely. I think so that's a big part of it. So, getting there was at first going to our existing clients and trying to convert them into a, more of a monthly plan, um, upselling them on the other services that we did offer and focusing on that. So we had to convert a lot of clients and of course we signed on new clients with new offerings, so there was a sales effort as well, but we did it pretty quickly and pretty easily. And we didn't expect it to work that fast. But then we started to look at how do we collect the money? How long does it take to collect the money? What's our expenses out and how do we refine this, this whole process to be very focused? And then, you know, with the least amount of, I guess, manpower as possible. So we're really sort of looking at efficiency. At first, we were mostly paid by check and so we started to realize, okay, well man, 30 days. Jason: [00:09:05] Checks in the mail! Checks in the mail! Uh, hated to hear that.
Kevin: [00:09:11] Yeah. So, okay. If you have recurrent revenue, that's great. But if you're not collecting it in a timely fashion, it doesn't matter. So next thing you know, your payrolls are on top of each other. You're, you're coming out of pocket for, uh, expenses. So basically you're, you're floating the bill for your clients and you're, you're paying for your staff and all these other things, and then you're expecting them to hopefully pay you back. So there's another, uh… your mastermind I'm pretty sure is where we got this from is getting that money in the door faster and how important that is. And so, at first, it was like, well, we, you can't build people… expecting to pay in 14 days, but we did it and we tried it and it worked. And then we had some people saying, well, try that in seven. Well, that's insane. No, one's going to pay net seven. And so what we did is the extreme. We started offering a discount for ACH, or a penalty if you pay another way. We also put in a net seven terms with a late fee if you were later than seven days. If you want to pay by check, that's fine, but here's our rules. And we have a very swift process for turning clients off, which was never fun to do. It’s not something we want to do. But say, if we have a website for you and you're three weeks late, so the 30 days is not even reached yet, your site goes off, your servers are stopped. Uh, we have a very strict process. And then when the client calls and says, I can't believe you guys would do this. We have a really solid outreach and communication process for they know, many times over that they're going to be. You know, get late fees or get turned off. And so then we always say, hey, we offer ACH. That's how we run our business. If you don't decide to go that route, you know, you can choose these other methods. But they have their downside. So how about we get you on ACH? So we avoid this problem completely and, you know, we have predictable invoicing too. Our bill is the same every month. We have what we call all-inclusive service, where we never charge a dollar more, and whether or not, we make more ads or we, we talk to you more or whatever, it's just built into our costs. So we say, hey, it's ACH, same bill every single month. And then we can continue working for you. We have the ad funds we need all that stuff and we don't have to worry about it. Jason: [00:11:37] I love it. You know, it's um, you never know what people are going to say until you actually do it. I, I remember many years ago a client, one of our first clients, I think this is probably in like 2000 and they didn't pay their invoice and they just kept giving me the run-around. And I took down everything and I just literally put unpaid bill, you know, and then I put their contact info. Because what I didn’t want to have happen was that client going well, you took down my whole business. People couldn't reach me, even though the internet was websites were fairly new. But as, as like unpaid bill to your designer, but you can contact them here. So when we actually did, when he did try to, when I did take them to court, they were like, oh, you take down my business. I was like, no, no, all the contact info is right here. So I don't suggest doing that, but that's what I did when I was a young punk shit. I just didn't care. I was like, well, you can sue me for it, I don't have any money back then. Kevin: [00:12:42] Oh no. It's, I've been in some situations before. And I think, you know, all those, those moments that you remember make it easier to do some of the things we do now. But we love our clients. We want to give them the best service possible, and to do so we need to be funded by what they agreed on. Which is in contract in a timely manner, so that nothing goes down, nothing stops. And so it's very easy to say, hey, listen, we love working with you guys, we want to perform for you guys. If this bill is not paid, the performance and results are affected. So ACH, we give you a discount, we encourage it and it helps us perform better for you. So we have 80 some clients. And it's funny because some of my sales members will be like, we can't do this. Like, this is absurd that we could give them no net terms and that they have to pay upfront for a service like agencies don't do that. Well, we do. And we have 80 clients that have no problem with it. We rarely have a problem. And if we do have a problem, it's because we signed on the wrong client. Jason: [00:13:50] You nailed it on the head. Uh, and it's also, it really starts from, I feel, the very beginning. Like traditionally you think of an agency or the salesperson for an agency is they're the chaser, right? They're chasing that prospect, the chasee. But what you have to do is you have to kind of flip it where you want them to be chasing you. And the only way to do that is by flipping the conversation, asking the right questions and kind of pulling them versus push. Like, I always tell people if I start pushing on you, like, I literally come up to you, Kevin, I start pushing you. What are you going to do? You're going to push back. And that's what salespeople do versus, you know, if you think about like telling a story of a client that you've had for a lawyer, right. And then, or let's… I only relate to agencies because that's the world I live in. So I was like, I'm not going to make up a lawyer thing and there's no lawyers listening anyway. Kevin: [00:14:48] That’s right. And if you are, call me. Jason: [00:14:51] But, uh, like if I was exactly, I hit, hit Array Digital up for him. But, um, if I'm talking to an agency, I'll be like, hey, you know, one of my, um… I was talking to agency the other day and they are basing their whole business on word of mouth and referrals, which just isn't scalable. That's what they told me. And I'll be like, well, what we do is we show you the exact framework that's working for my agency, other agencies, like with that, and then I ask a question, this is what pulls them in. Does that resonate with you? Does that make sense? Do you have any questions on that? Like I'm pulling them closer rather than pushing, being like, well, let me talk about my service. And I'm taking breaks between like me throwing up on them. I think too many salespeople do that. Like they don't take those breaks. And when you do then, uh, you can be the chase, you know, or they're chasing you. Kevin: [00:15:44] No, I love that. It's where we want to be. We don't want to be the cheap option. And we don't want to be the ones that, uh, well, you can pay us whenever you want and don't have any process. We want them to realize that we have a tight process. We have a plan, we're focused on the results. And in order to do that, this is how we operate. If you want to work with a company like us, that charges maybe more. We have what we call professional services, which is basically an extra fee that weeds out a lot of potential customers or clients and whoever questions that line item, “well, why do I have to pay for this?” They're probably not going to be a fit and we don't need to jump through hoops on telling them why they need to pay for that every time. So it's clearly stated in that line and that it's really. You want superior service? Communication, unlimited, uh, responses and all the help you're looking for? That's what that line is for. So yeah, it costs extra to work with us. And we want the client that says, that's what I want. I want a Mercedes, not a Kia. There's a different service level when you, you buy a car like that, that a dealership. So we're not for everybody, but. My biggest fear is honestly signing a lot of little clients at a small amount per month that are, you know, we have some, you know, client can come in for a pretty low amount of with us. We don't have any kind of like crazy tiers because a lot of them lead to larger business over time. But at the end of the day, my concern is a lot of small clients that, you know, really break operations. Jason: [00:17:16] Exactly. Well, I love how simple this is to create a recurring machine because a lot of us just try to over-complicate things like it. Literally, the simplicity of it is going, look, we're only going to be in recurring and you have to pay us on these terms. And if we do this, we're going to have more predictability and we can grow and we can scale and, and, and all of that. So that's fantastic. Is there anything I didn't ask you, Kevin, that you think would benefit the audience? Kevin: [00:17:45] Yeah. I really think being part of the mastermind. The Digital Agency Elite is, is really allowed us to test these things, ask questions and, uh, being part of a mastermind has been a huge thing for us. So a lot of these questions and things that we've done, you know, we haven't done them in just. It's like we have someone, a sounding board, hey, we're going to do this. What do you guys think? We might still do it if it's I want to do that, but we at least got some opinions and we can share our thoughts and insight with them. And it's a great way to get where do you want to go faster. So just think, maybe you have a process for billing and have a process for onboarding, uh, have some rules in place for your clients. And again, if they're the right clients, they're going to have no problems with it. Jason: [00:18:32] Awesome. And where can people reach out to you guys? What's a website address where people can check both agencies out? Kevin: [00:18:38] Yeah. So you can check out Array at, arraylaw.com. And then Rival Digital is the HVAC company that we operate is a rivaldigital.com. Jason: [00:18:48] Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Kevin, for coming on and, uh, giving us a really simple strategy that can be a real game-changer. Because if we have that predictability in our agency, we can bring in the right people, we can have the confidence, we're not making decisions from a scared point of view. And, uh, it's just a, really a great strategy. And if you guys want to be around other amazing people like Kevin and his partner, where you can have them act as your sounding board and see the things you're not able to see, I want to invite all of you guys to go check out the digitalagencyelite.com. Now this is not for everyone. So go check it out and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Create_a_Recurring_Revenue_Machine_for_Your_Digital_Agency.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 30 June 2021
Anna Shcherbyna is the CEO of Remotivate. And, leveraging her decade of experience in Business Operations and International Recruitment, Anna's recruitment agency helps online businesses hire remote staff worldwide. They handle all the due diligence relating to candidate communication, arranging interviews, discussing salary expectations, and conducting reference checks. Today, she joins us to talk about how to find and attract your agency's dream team. She shares why some job search platforms are better than people may think, why it’s better to invite candidates to apply for your agency, and why you should never hire for the fire. 3 Golden Nuggets
SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Jason: [00:00:00] What's up everybody? Jason Swenk here and I have another amazing episode for you where we talk about re, remote recruitment. If I can actually get that out, I don't know why that's so hard. But we're going to talk about how to find the right senior-level managers and hiring them remotely, as well as how can we evaluate and make sure that the right one. So, it's a really good episode. Let's go ahead and get into it. Hey Anna, welcome to the show. Anna: [00:00:32] Thanks so much for having me, Jason. It's a pleasure to be here. Jason: [00:00:36] Yeah, I’m excited. I almost wasn't able to say remote recruitment. I don't know why it's such a tongue twister this morning for me. But for the people that don't know who you are, tell us who you are and what do you do? Anna: [00:00:48] Yeah, absolutely. So my name's Anna Shcherbyna. I'm actually originally from Ukraine and I help online businesses all over the world, help them hire remote staff internationally. Uh, it's been an incredible journey and the experience to work with companies that have all kinds of needs. And I believe, as you mentioned, we do focus on managerial and leadership positions, but we've always get some fun roles and fund requirements. So it's kind of the, uh, the new age of headhunting, so to speak, uh, at times that's what it really comes down to. Jason: [00:01:17] Awesome. Well, let's go ahead and dive into it. Let's talk about where can we find these people, right? So, you know, we're, I'm an agency owner. I'm looking to get some more help, so I don't have to make all the decisions. I need, like I already, I'm maxed out at managing these people. I want to build my team up. I think a lot of times people just default to going to LinkedIn or Craigslist or wherever. So what is your recommendation for people listening of how can they find some of these amazing talents? Anna: [00:01:46] Yeah, absolutely. I do think that a lot of people, when they're transitioning, especially into hiring remote staff, that's where the challenge comes in because they still go back to the old websites. As you mentioned, LinkedIn is very popular Craigslist, things like that. And it just doesn't work for remote stuff. You want people who know what they're doing and really have the right skills and abilities and understanding of the remote space. They're not going to be there. I mean, you can find amazing people on LinkedIn, don't get me wrong, but in terms of what we love to do, Upwork is actually one that surprises everyone. I'll say this because a lot of the times people assume that Upwork is for projects, just for projects for short term. But actually if someone's new to the platform, they haven't really realized how it works properly, and so you can find some incredible people who are just looking for that opportunity. And a lot of them are looking for more consistency. So Upwork is an amazing one. Um, AngelList has been incredible for us. We've loved that. And also with AngelList, you kind of upgrade, there is an upgrade on there where you're able to get access to their database, which is awesome. And then be able to go out and invite candidates. We use Indeed, it's actually been a lot better for remote hiring as well. Most recently, they've really done a lot of growth in that sense. So Indeed has been quite good. I'd say those are our top three, though we’re, we're constantly experimenting. So right now we're trying out Dynamite Jobs, we're trying out We Work Remotely. And I just say like, it's really good to experiment. I've heard great. Like We Work Remotely is one that I've heard, works wonders, but not for all positions. Those three that I mentioned is just, those have worked the best for us for the type of positions, like the managerial leadership type positions that we're normally hiring for. Jason: [00:03:25] So I thought AngelLists was really more for, and maybe they've, they've changed it. Or was it Angie's list? Or am I thinking of the right? The same one. Anna: [00:03:36] You definitely are. The same angel.co like I think before it was very much for startups like tech world, all of that. You have the right idea in mind. They definitely have evolved to now where you can find professionals of all kinds. They're very remote-focused because, again, a lot of companies are going remote. And so it's definitely an amazing, amazing website for finding great candidates. Jason: [00:04:00] So let's say we go on Upwork because, you know, I've, I've found really good designers on Upwork and, and stuff like that or people actually doing the work. But if we're looking like I know a lot of people listening in, they're thinking, well, I need a manager. I don't need someone to actually do the work. So like, how do I post something on Upwork going I need a Director of Ops or a Manager of Operations to come in. So do I post something like that on Upwork? Because usually, it's like, hey, I need this for what I understand. Like, I need someone to do, you know, this landing page or this logo or whatever it is. Anna: [00:04:33] Yeah. I mean, here's the thing, again, Upwork has incredible potential because it's all about the mindset. When you go to LinkedIn, you're trying to get people away from potentially those that already have jobs, whereas upward people are going on there already with the mindset of, hey, I need a job. And as I mentioned, a lot of them, they are getting in there and they don't really know how to break through, they don't want to deal with the hassle of all these different clients. And so something we do and something I always recommend is, it's all about how you filter. So filter for the ones that don't have a lot of success on Upwork, which is counterintuitive because most people are looking for the ones that have earned the most, have the best reputation… But those people are already successful, why would they go from client work back to full time? It's, you know, they're making a ton of money, they've made it on the platform. It doesn't make sense for them. So we'll go ahead and post those types of high-level positions, head of ops and all of that. But the ones that are going to be inviting are usually the candidates who have limited experience on the platform. They are hungry for an opportunity and they are much more likely to take on that opportunity. Jason: [00:05:36] Oh, that's clever. That's clever. And so let's say we're hiring a director of ops. What would you post on Upwork to in order to attract them to click on? Anna: [00:05:47] So, okay. Two things here I want to say. So first of all, in the job description. I'd say definitely make it very personable. We get a lot of feedback that the more personable a job description is the better candidates react to it. But I want to say that the trick that we have found really works isn't about just posting and waiting for candidates to apply. We actually go out and invite candidates because then we take control of the narrative. Who's applying the type of candidates, the quality, and also a lot of candidates are not checking every single day what's, you know, what's live. And so you're actually missing out on a ton of opportunity. So if you go out and that's why I love, we love AngelList network, you can actually invite those candidates to apply and get so much better results rather than waiting around and getting candidates who maybe have the wrong motivations or just not good quality candidates, because they're just, they're applying because they need a job and they're just clicking on everything. Whereas when you're inviting, there's, you know, there's a quality control there. So sometimes we even put a job post as private and so people won't be able to actually apply unless we invite them. Jason: [00:06:50] Oh, I like that. And so when you go into the search on Upwork or AngelList, is there other than, are you new? And like, you know, it's actually a really good point of like, I don't have much experience on the platform. They're new. What else are you looking for?
Anna: [00:07:07] Uh, requirements. It always comes down to the requirements. And I'll be very honest, I think a lot of business owners don't take the time to truly understand who they need and what will make those people successful. When you have a clear understanding of what success looks like, like, okay, I'm going to need someone who has at least three years of experience in operations. They have, um, a background in recruitment, they have experience with running a SAS business or being an operation specialist in SAS, and you, if you're looking through applicants and applications, you'll be able to see those things. So figuring out your requirements of what success looks like, and then really searching for those among the applications is going to make a huge difference. Jason: [00:07:46] Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of us, and I've done this in the past, or I might be doing this right now. Who knows? I probably am. Thank you for beating me up because there, there's a lot of us that we probably go, we just need a marketing associate. But we really haven't thought about what… we just want them just a marketing associate. We'll just put them in, but really hasn't identified what success looks like for that marketing associate and like, what do they have to have? I think that's really very crucial that a lot of people actually skip over. All right. So, so now that we've come up with the requirements, like, as we've done our homework, so you don't yell at us, we don't want you to yell at us. And then we've gotten creative by using Upwork and AngelList and Indeed, and we're starting to invite people to apply, which I, I've never thought about. Like, that's brilliant. So, when people start applying, is there any special thing that I always try to bury something in the middle. Like, hey, you got to do this weird thing or put this to the subject titles, see if they actually read it. Is there anything that you do like that? Or how do you evaluate to make sure that they're not just padding their resume? Anna: [00:08:58] Absolutely. Absolutely. So I always say create a process. And again, start at the beginning, right? Because let's say you identify your top five kind of things for success, right? Your top five requirements for success. You can then translate that to, like, for example, for us, we do a questionnaire, a skill test, a video, you know, you can put steps in place that test for those initial requirements. And that's going to be so important to really identifying, not only do they have what it takes to be a great team member or a part of your team and really solve your problem, but it's going to be able to also identify their motivations. So being able to see that they're going to jump through quite a few hoops before even having an interview. And a lot of people don't want to do that. They're like, yeah, thanks, I'm interested in this role, yeah, when can we chat? And we're like, well, right after you go through our process. Apply here. And that actually filters through a lot of people who don't really care too much. I would say I'm not the biggest fan of adding like those little trick questions in job descriptions. Because people who are looking for jobs, they're not as consistent in reading the job description, I would say. So definitely having the, the steps is a lot more of a thorough process to see, not only do they qualify, but they are really interested in the position and they're going through and following through on the different steps. Jason: [00:10:16] So walk us through the steps that you would take someone. Anna: [00:10:18] Yeah, absolutely. So the, what we do is we have a questionnaire. So for example, let's say you need five years of experience in Facebook, running Facebook ads. So we'll ask: How many years of experience do you have in Facebook ads? What's the budget that you have handled per month? Uh, we’ll ask about what types of businesses have you done Facebook ads for? And there'll be like a dropdown or check the boxes of which industries you've done. So we we’ll add the requirements in the questionnaire, because that way, even if they didn't read it, which sometimes happens, we'll be able to filter through that. Because candidates say, hey, I actually don't have this. Or I only have three years of experience. So the questionnaire and yeah, like the questionnaire really helps assess that. Now we have a small skill test that we've created that tests for the hard and soft skills. We have done this internally and we've created what works for us. But I talk about this all the time. Like I do a webinar now and again, and I talk about how there's so many tests out there, like personality tests, hard skill tasks, like let's say you even need to test somebody's abilities with Facebook ads. There's so many different tests out there. Do a bit of research, find what works for you and incorporate that in the process. So having some sort of questionnaire looking into there, the requirements, if they meet them, having some sort of soft and hard skill test. It doesn't have to be crazy long. Just a few questions here and there to understand and better filter those candidates. Then we have a video, which again, we're asking a few questions. We're asking for a two minute video, super easy and straightforward. But again, we're looking at, can they follow directions? Right? Can they actually respond at like, what are they saying? How are they saying it? What what's the attitude that we're getting? Is this something that they just put together, walking your dog on the street. Which actually happens like we've either had like a girl in a farm. She's walking around in her, like near her farm. She's showing the farm. She's like, hey, this is where I am. Absolutely not. But walking the dogs, driving in the car to work, I mean, we've got some crazy videos. Oh, a guy eating sushi. I think that was one of my favorites. He's like, I'm going to wing this. So I just ordered some sushi, but it helps stand the mindset of candidates, how they work, like who they are as human beings, and really understand if that's going to be a culture fit. And it just says so much, their video say so much. And so, that really helps us understand. And it not only does it kind of test for their personalities and interests and things like that. We're also looking at their English abilities. So we're seeing, I mean, we're hiring internationally and so we don't want to waste time having an interview. If we don't like it, they might be great at writing but then when it comes to speaking, they might not be able to, don't have the abilities. So that video really ticks a lot of boxes and a candidate usually doesn't always, like they don't really anticipate it, I would say, in terms of what's really being expected. But that's what we're looking out for, great communication skills and interest for the position, honest responses, a great environment. And then we'll do the interviews and move into that phase. First interviews, client interviews, and then towards the end, we'll do reference checks. So it's quite a thorough process and it helps really collect all the information you need for a successful hire. Jason: [00:13:27] Yeah, that's crazy about the videos. You know, we, we ask for that as well. And I remember there was this one guy that we got a video I was getting so dizzy because he's walking around his pool, like holding this and I'm like, h my God, and the shaking like, oh, stop. Anna: [00:13:46] Yeah. Make it stop. Stop. Absolutely. Jason: [00:13:50] That's funny. Well, this has all been great, Anna, is there anything that I didn't ask you that you think would help out the audience with their remote recruitment? Anna: [00:14:00] Yeah, absolutely. Twister tongue twister of the day. I would just say that start from the very beginning and put the time to truly understand research the position you're looking to hire for. Don't hire for just a fire like that. And we do all have fires. I have fires. We all have fires in the business that we need to take care of, but don't hire for the fire. Okay. That's not, I got a rhyme in there. Don't hire for the fire, hire for the long term. Jason: [00:14:25] It was like a Billy Joel. A Billy Joel song. Anna: [00:14:28] Yeah. So definitely take the time to understand who you're hiring for, what are the requirements, and what will they do once they have, you know, taken care of that fire. What's that long-term plan? And when you have that, everything becomes so clear. So start from the beginning and best of your time from the very start to have a successful hire at the end. Jason: [00:14:49] I love it. What's a website people can go and check you out? Anna: [00:14:52] Absolutely. So it's, letsremotivate.com. Jason: [00:14:56] Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. And if you guys enjoyed this episode, I want you guys to do something. Take a screenshot, go on Instagram and tag us and say, hey, I liked the show. And then we'll give you a shout back. Also, if you guys want to be around other agency owners, we have an amazing Facebook community. It's free. It's totally free. Just go to jasonswenk.com/insiders and request access into it. We asked a couple of questions just to make sure you’re an agency owner, and you have a team. That's the requirement in order to get into there so you can ask the relevant questions and protect the community. So go to jasonswenk.com/insiders and you'll go to that page. And until next time I have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Attract_and_Hire_Your_Agency_Dream_Team.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 27 June 2021
As co-founder and creative visionary at Harmon Brothers, Daniel Harmon uses storytelling and humor to create ads that convert. Since 2014, he has helped create videos that changed the way we do advertising today, and that at the time were confused with funny sketch videos that had to assure audiences "Yes, this is real. This is a real ad." Now, he joins us to talk about how the Harmon Brothers found their comedy niche, how they find the right creative thinkers to write their unique ads, and how the company teaches their entire system through the Harmon Brothers University. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesSweetProcess: Today's episode is sponsored by SweetProcess. If you're looking for a way to speed up processes in your agency, SweetProcess will provide the systemization you need to scale and grow your business. Check out sweetprocess.com/smartagency and get your productivity up. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM How to Create Amazing Ads that Convert More ClientsJason: [00:00:00] What's up everybody? Jason Swenk here and I have an amazing guest on the show. One of the Harmon brothers who is going to talk about how you can turn your poop into gold. Literally. Their videos are so funny and their ads reach so many people. And I'm happy to have them on. So let's go ahead and get into the show. Are you frustrated with how long it takes you to get stuff done in your agency or tired of your team missing steps or falling through the cracks? You know, you may be looking for an easy way to capture SOPs to scale your agency faster and easier. Now, our partners that Sweet Process have created an amazing tool to help you overcome all these frustrations. Sweet Process really lets you create a step-by-step instruction from every task in your agency. From writing proposals to executing client work and responding to client requests. So everything gets done more easily. No more mistakes or missed steps. Plus you'll have a central place where everyone employees, contractors, or even VAs can access your procedures anytime from anywhere. The best way to learn about how suite process really can streamline your agency is to start using it. So exclusively for the smart agency masterclass listeners, you can try it out for 28 days free of charge. No strings attached. Just go to sweetprocess.com/smartagency. To start your free 28-day free trial today. That's sweetprocess.com/smartagency to get your SOPs down and your productivity. All right, what's going on? Welcome to the show. Daniel: [00:01:49] Thanks for having me, Jason. Glad to be on. Jason: [00:01:51] Yeah, man. So for the people that have been kind of hiding under a rock a little bit, tell us who you are and what you do. Daniel: [00:01:57] I'm Daniel Harmon. I'm Chief Creative Officer at Harmon Brothers, and we're known for ad campaigns like Squatty Potty, Purple, Chatbooks, Poo-Pourri, FiberFix Lumē, Kodiak Cakes, Camp Chef, all these different campaigns that have, um, helped companies generate over 1.5 billion views and over $400 million in sales. And anyway, that's, that's kind of what we're known for is mixing some elements of sort of direct response advertising stuff that gets people to act and buy immediately with really traditional branding elements of storytelling. And that's kind of our sweet spot. Jason: [00:02:36] Yeah. And I love that. How did you guys kind of fall into that sweet spot? Because a lot of agencies, they start off and it takes them forever. So how did you guys progress through that? Daniel: [00:02:49] Sure, for us it started a little bit with a company called Orabrush. My brothers were co-founders of Orabrush, Orabrush is a tongue cleaner that, um, helps remove the gunk off of your tongue. And that's where 90% of bad breath comes from is the, uh, is the gunk out of your tongue. So in trying to market the Orabrush, they weren't having any kind of retail success at all. And the co-founder, the inventor of the Orabrush. Dr. Bob approached my brother about, um, being able to sell, um, online. Then with the Orabrush, they made a video that not only educated about how the Orabrush was cool and how it worked, but it also entertained at the same time. And a lot of the elements that we use in our videos are drawn from just classical sales principles, right? Things that you would use in a door-to-door scenario, things that you would use in telesales, email marketing, it's all very kind of problem/solution-based advertising. And, um, that was the case with Orabrush, where it was all based on the fact that people have a problem of bad breath. They don't want to breathe that onto other people. It's embarrassing. And then the Orabrush provided a solution where it would clean the gunk off of your tongue. And most people didn't know that good oral hygiene would include your tongue and not just your teeth, right? Most people know to brush their tongues, but the toothbrush wasn't really designed for brushing your tongue and this product was. And so it was educating about that, but then, um, adding the twist of the entertainment value and kind of a personality and character with it and some, and some branding really. I think that is a lot of what was missing traditionally through the years on things like food commercials, right. That they all kind of felt a little bit cookie-cutterish, but they all were in sort of a, such a similar pattern that they, they were mostly distinguished by how different the products themselves were rather than by the personality that was pitching it or the story that was being told around it. So with the success of Orabrush they ended up getting distribution in places like Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, Boots, I mean, international stuff all over the place. The company ended up actually being sold to a company called DenTek and, um, that's kind of where that started. I actually was an employee of Orabrush as an art director there, where we created, uh, over a hundred videos over the course of a little over two years. And so kind of learned the craft of that. Then later on, when we resigned from Orabrush, we, um, the first campaign we did was, um, with Poo-Pourri. And that one people know for the girl, that's the British girl sitting on the toilet saying all those terrible candid things about her bowel movements and how much they stink and that kind of thing. But that's kind of where that formula for us started to solidify. And then later on it was Squatty Potty. It became much more so, and then Purple and so on. But yeah, hopefully, that answers the question. Jason: [00:05:55] Yeah, definitely. I want to know more about the blooper reel. Like you guys have to have the best blooper reel out there for Squatty Potty and the Poo-Pourri Daniel: [00:06:04] When we were filming Poo-Pourri and we were listening to the lines that she was saying, of course, this is 2013. And so most of us, our perception of what can kind of be done in the advertising space in this way has changed a lot. I mean, obviously, Harmon Brothers has done a lot to change that perception, right? In how you can kind of joke your ways through certain taboo subjects. If you're writing the right line, you don't want to get super offensive it anything. But as I was listening to the lines that she was saying, as we were filming them, I was, as I was saying to myself, no, one's going to believe this is a real ad. They're, they're going to think this is a College Humor sketch. They're going to think this as an SNL thing. No one's going to think this as an actual ad. And so my brother Jeffrey was like, well, okay, think of a solution. What do we do? And I was like, well, I think we have to tell them. Jason: [00:06:57] “This is an ad” Daniel: [00:06:59] Well, we didn't do it exactly in that way. While we were on set, um, I came up with the line that, yes, this is a real product. And yes, it really works. And it became kind of a catchphrase in our advertising to some degree where people, we see them use it all over the place. We don't use it as much ourselves anymore because we think it kind of sets the viewer off a little bit or can even be distracting. But to some degree, we feel like that's a good space to be living in is if you kind of have to remind people “no, we're not just joking around.” This is, this is real what's going on right now. And it was very effective. Um, I can't remember how many people told me that when they were watching the ad right up until that moment when we said, yes, this is a real product. And yes, this really works. They had actually believed that they were watching some sort of like a spoof or sketch or some sort of just comedy gig of some kind. Jason: [00:07:48] Yeah. Walk us, um, because a lot of people want to understand kind of the framework of how. Because we all want to create including myself, so all of my audiences, agency owners, and I always like to say we exist to provide a resource. We wish we had, so we can scale faster, right? And 90% of our content is educational, but 10% is supposed to be funny, you know, like humor, like we talk about what is an RFP means, Real Fucking Problem, Request for Punishment. Like all these different things we try to put in there. And a lot of people struggle with, you know, finding a way to stand out and you guys have really have a formula or a framework. Walk us through a little bit of that. So the people listening can have an idea and be like, okay, this is how I can start. This is how I can kind of morph it and see if it actually works. Daniel: [00:08:40] Yeah, for us standing out has a lot to do with just asking ourselves, have we seen this before in the way that we're doing this? I am not one to, admittedly, I'm not one to really follow a whole lot of what's going on in the advertising industry. Meaning there's a lot of advertisers that are really into things like the award shows and… Jason: [00:09:05] oh, don't get me started on that. Daniel: [00:09:07] I just think you end up advertising to advertisers. You ended up trying to please your peers. Rather than actually speak and relate to customers. And so, um, I don't really go down that road and I, I ask myself more as we're doing the content, have I seen, have I seen something like this or are we doing something fresh enough as we approach this, that it's going to make them stand out? And it's not necessarily that it's always, that the character is always something that's just never been done before. I'm sure there's been a prince used in advertising before in some way, right? Um, in the way that like we have the Squatty Potty, we have the unicorn, there's never a pooping unicorn, I don't think, prior to that point in advertising. But using a prince I think had been done before, but in the way that we used it maybe it was a little bit different, right? Or the girl on the stall talking directly from a toilet perched on a toilet. That was something that was very, very different. Or Goldilocks releasing some eggs that fall down on a bed. Those were all kind of things that we felt like, um, hadn't really necessarily been seen before. A French woman singing, um, kind of in a Broadway style, uh, play-type environment for Lumē. All these things we felt like were just different than anything we'd seen before. And so for us, the basis of coming up with a lot of those ideas is really coming, um, is involving really creative thinkers into the writing process. And, and, um, a lot of that is for us centralized on comedians. So we're looking not as much for people that are extremely experienced in advertising and marketing. We're looking for people that have a lot of reps and a lot of skill developed in the areas of stand-up, improve, and sketch comedy. And then we feel like we can better guide the marketing and advertising language around that. That it's going to we're, we're going to be much better off teaching a comedian to be a marketer than a marketer to be a comedian. And that gets us some very different thinking because their jobs are like on a day-to-day basis are like, okay, what kind of cool thing can we come up within in the sketch? Or what kind of thing can we make fun of? Or what's some observational thing that I've seen that I can use in my standup that I have never heard anyone say before. That's kind of just second nature to them. And then that's kind of our, our starting point for being able to stand out. I'd say. Jason: [00:11:32] I love that. And so for the people listening, I guess, do they need to go and find their funny friends that are doing standup? Daniel: [00:11:43] Short answer? Yes, that's what I mean in Harmon brothers university in our courses, that's one of the things we teach is the idea that a community it's easier to turn a comedian into a marketer than a marketer to a comedian. And so we do recommend following funny people on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, that kind of stuff. Wherever you get your stuff. Facebook, I don't, I don't care. And then kind of looking at the patterns of what they use in their humor and things, but even maybe reaching out to some of these people and seeing if they'd be available to get involved, or maybe going to your local standup club or improv group or whatever it is. There's usually somewhere nearby in your state or your, or your area that, um, some sort of a culture or a community that you can tap into of people that are already in that world. And, um, I think using them as a resource is, is really good. And it's not always easy. There are, there are comedians that approach it very much from the standpoint of like, well, this is art and I'm doing art. So don't tell me what to do with your advertising stuff. Well, at the end of the day, it still has to sell, right? It has to move the product, it has to brand. It has to do all those things. Then it can't just be funny and it can't be tangental all the time for the messaging. Um, there's, there's ways that you can kind of channel that creative energy to be more productive for what you're doing. But yeah, I think it's a really good idea to go. Go involve people that are already funny rather than trying to teach yourself to be funny in order to get it done. Jason: [00:13:14] Oh, yeah, that would be horrendous. That would be, that would be really bad for a lot of people. Daniel: [00:13:20] Yeah. Like for myself, I'm, I'm not even like the funniest person around. I do have a good sense of humor, I have good comedic timing and mine more applies in the way that I go about filming and editing and enhancing what's there in, in writing. I mean, I can write jokes and that kind of thing, but like, I might be able to write one joke in the time that it takes some of these other guys and gals that we get involved. Um, like they can write 10 in the time that I write one. It's just not as efficient. And I'm pretty darn good at making that stuff that they write be funny in the end product. But as far as like originating that on paper, that's not going to be. There's going to be other people that, that have more superpower in that area. Whereas it would be a lot of toiling for me to do that. I can help out a ton in the advertising language and the sales persuasion and all that kind of stuff. And I'll all writing zingers here and there. But as far as like that really creative stuff that's needed. Yeah. We're always looking to outsiders to help with that. Jason: [00:14:18] I’m going to guess, you know, I'm in Atlanta today and there's obviously tons of improv and all kinds of places all over. And I bet if you went to some of those and you went up to someone and be like, hey, do you want to be involved in this? I bet they'd be like, heck yeah, I want to be involved in this. Daniel: [00:14:35] Yeah, they'd probably in most cases be over the moon excited because what you'll find is that most comedians aren't actually making a living being a comedian. They are developing it as a skill set on the side and they're passionate about it and they'd love to make a living with it. But as far as it's their full-time living. Ooh, it's, it's a small subset of that community that is actually making, making money and not waiting tables somewhere or, or not working in some sort of a warehouse job or in a kitchen or whatever it is. Like, most comedians are very happy for the opportunity to write something funny and be paid for it. Like that's probably going to be really exciting to them. Jason: [00:15:19] Oh yeah. After we find the talent or the creatives to help you with the idea. What's really kind of the next thing that we'll, will shape what we do to get these ads to convert or get people's attention.
Daniel: [00:15:32] Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of going backward here, but the starting point for us is finding a product or service that we're passionate about. That if you can speak from the perspective of the customer, meaning that you've been sold on the product yourself, you've kind of had that aha moment of you as you've used it. Then you will be much more effective at communicating that to other people because you’re sold, right. You're not just selling people because it's your job. I really feel like, and I repeat this around here all the time that nothing sells better than the truth. And so if you get to that authenticity, that's a much better starting point. So for us, we're very choosy about what kind of clients we partner with, especially on our big campaigns. Because we want to really ensure that we have passion for it, that we have someone that has actually has belief in it. That's heading up the project that are whatever creative directors on it is really, you know, wants to, to sell this thing rather than just I'll has to, because it's part of their job. And so that's for us as a good starting point is finding a product or service that's offering real value, solving a real problem for people and is genuinely making the world a better place in some way. Jason: [00:16:45] Yeah. I remember, um, we were talking in the pre-show about Daryl Eaves, your producer for Squatty Potty. And I remember him telling me he was he how he was trying it out before. He would actually do it and he's like, it actually works. And it was pretty funny. Daniel: [00:17:01] That's essential to it. We have people that are mailing us their products, um. You know, fairly regularly we see new stuff come through the door and just so we can get our hands on it and start experimenting with it and start falling in love with it, or just being like, you know what, this isn’t for us. I remember a food product that came through the door the other day. And I, I, it was several different flavors of this particular kind of, uh, it was a, it was a snack cookie or something like that. And I, I tried one and another, another one and I was just like, nah, I just can't get behind this. I just am not, I'm not liking this. I'm not seeing how, how we can sell this because this doesn't taste great to me. And anyway, that's kind of the process we go through. Jason: [00:17:41] Very cool. So now that we have passion behind the product, we've hired the creative team, what are the things that you've seen that will make, make something sell, make an ad actually work. Daniel: [00:17:54] Yeah. So some of them are to relate with the customer in their pain. If you can dive into the problem that they're experiencing and you can effectively capture in video what that pain looks and feels like, then, um, you're relating with them and then they're perfectly set up to the solution, which is what your product or service that you're, um, that you're selling is going to be providing. So I think in the case of, for example, let's just take FiberFix, for example, when we did our ad for FiberFix FiberFix is a fiberglass a wrap or tape that essentially can fix almost anything. And it's in its a hundred times stronger than duct tape. And it's, um, it's stronger than steel by the time it all sets and hardens. We go through this scenario of a guy on a Saturday that has a broken sink underneath, like something leaking underneath the sink. So he goes to get the part to the hardware store and he comes back and realize it doesn't, it doesn't work. So he goes back to the hardware store and he misses all this time with, uh, where he could be watching football. As opposed to, if he would've just had the fix there with FiberFix where he could have just immediately taken care of that on the spot, then he would have been in really good shape. And so that made the pain very relatable to the situation that people that people face. So I think that's one of the best ways to speak to people is the specificity of what the customer goes through in the way of the problem that they face on how the solution of the product relates to them. Jason: [00:19:27] Yeah. You know, that's one of the things that we always ask when people engage with us. Or whenever we chat with them or in any of our Facebook groups is like, what's the things that are keeping you up at night? Or one of the things we did in one of our communities is like, what's the dumbest request you've ever gotten from a client? And then they'll just, oh, I mean, it's literally, you're reading some of these and you're like, yep, checkmark, checkmark, checkmark. So I guess my next question from you, and don't obviously don't name the client, but what's the dumbest thing someone's ever asked you for as a client. Daniel: [00:20:00] Oh, gosh, I try to erase those moments from my brain. Oh, the dumbest request. I think sometimes some of the dumber requests come when they try to force. It's and it's never actually, I don't think happened in our case, but when they try to say, oh, you should really cast this person as the lead in a role. And specifically, they're thinking of like a celebrity and we're like A, that is nowhere near your budget so you can't go there. B, whether or not they'd even want to be involved that's a whole other question. And C, they're probably not even right for the part, even though they, you think they are kind of a thing. So I'd say that's one of the funnier things that sometimes happens is that when the client's like, oh, we should, you know, if you really got, um, Tina Fey. Jason: [00:20:52] Or Tom Cruise. Daniel: [00:20:55] Well, yeah. That’d be awesome if you can do that. You know, maybe we should ask American Express how they pulled that off. Oh wait. They had billions of dollars. That's how they pulled it off. So that's kind of one of the funnier requests that comes through. And sometimes I'd say. I'd say the bigger mistake that we sometimes see clients make is just focusing on the wrong things. And by that, I mean a feature or an aspect of their product or service that's really important to them and they think is really cool. But when you actually listen to the customer base of what's the most important to them, what's the problem is solving, might be almost a little bit distracting. It's might maybe not even something that needs to be brought up and they're just like, oh, we really want this to be a part of it because you know, doing this long form ad and we're, we're, we're going on record two or three minutes so surely you can find a way to fit this in. It's like, it doesn't matter about the length. You still got to keep things focused, right? And so that's, that's another thing that happens sometimes is people just want me to stuck everything possible into it. Jason: [00:21:56] So, and that happens to all of us creatives, right? The client thinks they actually know better than us. Daniel: [00:22:04] Yeah. Sometimes they do. Jason: [00:22:06] Sometimes, but I remember we were doing a campaign for Pro-Line Boats and this was in 2003 when Flash was really popular, but we still had dial-up and they wanted to put a four-minute video of us chasing their boats on a helicopter on the homepage. And I was like, you gotta be kidding me. Like, how long is this like going to spin? If you remember the spinner, right? So how do you get around when clients do ask for something that you know is way off? How do you reel them back in? Daniel: [00:22:43] Primarily, I usually try to explain it in terms of data. So if we have any data from prior campaigns, that can point to the fact that they're going down a direction that's not going to be good for them. Then we can illustrate that with stuff we've done in the past. And then that kind of takes some of the subjectivity out of it. It makes it a little bit more objective. So if you have data to rely on to show the client, okay, that's not quite right. And the other one is sometimes it is on a gut level and you just kind of know, like, no, that's, that's not going to work out. And I think it's worth having those discussions and falling on the sword on behalf of your client to some degree, because they're hiring you to do something that they can't do themselves. That's the reason they're hiring you in the first place is because they know that they, they only have a certain level that they can get to and they need you to take them to the next level. And you essentially bend over or just kind of tower to every request that they have because they're the client, I think you're actually doing them a disservice. So what I ask myself, when we have those moments is. Am I falling on the sword just because on the creative and this is my art and that's, that's what I want? Or am I doing this because I think the client is genuinely going to hurt themselves? And if it's that I really feel, or especially if I have the data to show that the client is going to hurt themselves, then I'm going to fight that battle. If it's more of a preference kind of thing, then there might be areas where you can compromise. And like I said, sometimes the clients are even right. Sometimes they'll have an insight of something legally that you can't do, and they know about that and they can kind of steer you right in that way. Or some other aspect of things that will be more factual or whatever it is. And you need to be able to listen to those moments. But I'd say more so the real question to ask yourself is, am I doing this because I'm on my high horse a little bit, because I'm the creative and they're not? Or am I doing it because I genuinely want to protect this campaign? I want to protect their brand for them. If that's the case, then it's, it's a battle worth fighting. Jason: [00:24:50] Yeah. I love it. Well, this has all been great. Daniel, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit, you know, the agency owners listening? Daniel: [00:24:58] Um, yeah. So one thing is for us where we do so much of the direct sales and direct response style of advertising, and then the branding. I would say when it comes to branding and comedy and being funny and storytelling that you want to go further and further and further down that road and have maybe less and less direct response elements, the bigger you get as a company and the more competitors you have. When you're early stage, and you're very differentiated in your market, then you need to be a lot more clear and a lot more direct. In a way, um, I mean, you can be funny at the same time and stuff, but you need to be really focused on that sale when you're kind of in that startup phase, because you're just educating people on something that's brand new. You're maybe telling them about a product or service that they've never heard of before. And you need to kind of gain that trust initially with communicating clearly about how you solve a problem for them. But as you get further up into the market and you, and you have more competitors, if you think of someone like Nike, or, um, Ford or Apple doing a redirect response out of some kind, they would feel really out of place, right? Or red bull. Like it doesn't make a lot of sense at that place. You need to be just telling really great stories and you need to be relating with people emotionally and just highlighting a benefit in a clever way. But, um, you can't be going through and be like, I know it can't be the exact same format then because you're in a different place at a different time. And so I would say depending on the stage of the company, there's different ways to focus your advertising on that spectrum of, from direct response, clear, over here to branding. You want to be careful of not getting ahead of yourself in trying to be too clever and too funny and too, too many bells and whistles too soon, as opposed to kind of focusing in on the message that really matters. Jason: [00:26:55] Yeah, I totally get that because you know, a lot, what happens in the agency world is we look at the biggest agencies in the world. And then the little guy, or even the medium-sized guy, we go, well, we got to do what they do. You know, perfect example is looking at their websites. If you look at a big agency's website it is the ugliest. It is the worst thing. There is no conversion point. You can't figure out how to have a conversation with anybody. Like. We need a big H on our homepage. I'm not talking about Harmon Brothers. Daniel: [00:27:29] No, I got the dig it's okay. Right. Yeah. Jason: [00:27:32] Right. Got it. You got it. You got the punchline, but we need to model, like you were saying model how someone actually got there rather than looking at where they're at now and try to duplicate that because, yeah, you're going to look kind of silly. Daniel: [00:27:47] There's a time and a place. And you've got to kind of move along that path as the brand grows. Jason: [00:27:53] Yep. Tell us a little bit about your, you guys' amazing course where people can go. Daniel: [00:27:59] Yeah, so essentially we've developed an entire internal train that we use for our writers, for our editors, for our creative directors, for everybody to be able to create the kind of advertising that we do, brand the way that we do, sell the way that we do. And it's all on harmonbrothersuniversity.com. And it's our entire playbook. We don't hold anything back. We, we've put it all on there. The exact same internal training that we give here is what we put out on there. And so for anyone that wants to learn how to do this themselves, as opposed to hire it done, they can go to harmonbrothersuniversity.com, and they can sign up for the courses that are there. There's things like the 14-day script challenge, which is basically two weeks to get you from a blank page, all the way to a script that's ready to film. Um, which is a really cool course. And there's other things like the easy ads that sell course, which kind of gets you into a bunch of different little forms of ad formats that you can put out there on, on Facebook, Instagram, and so forth. Anyway, it's just been a tremendous resource for people where, um, literally the, our students have driven millions and millions of dollars by following the principles and learning from these courses. And, yeah, I, I would for sure say, uh, for people to check it out and they might even dive in and learn enough to be like, you know what? I just want to hire you guys instead. And that's fine too. It works both ways, but anyway, that's, that's our entire playbook there for people to learn from, if anyone wants to do this and hopefully it can help some companies out. Jason: [00:29:28] Awesome. And, uh, and yeah, they're not sponsoring me, but I just think what they do is really pretty amazing. So go check it out. I do have one last question, because I think that this, especially of what you guys have done with Harmon Brothers University. So a lot of people are like, well, why would you put your whole thing out? A lot of agencies think about the same thing. I look at it of going, I think it's a smart decision because everyone wants to know how, but a lot of people don't want to know how to do or to actually do it. And then the second part, I think. And hopefully, I'm not answering your, taking your thunder from this. The other part is, I bet you probably could pick like the people go through it and you're like, man, this guy is really good or this gal's really good. Let me just hire this person. Has any of that happened? Daniel: [00:30:14] Yeah, both those things we knew, we knew when we were seeing the success that we were, that people were going to copy us either way. And so we just said, why not just put it out there? And educate people on how to do it, right. That eventually some of them will come back to us and we've seen that for their own campaigns. And then I just have a little bit of the altruistic attitude and I think we, we do here internally of, you know, kind of you reap what you sell, right? If we put things out there that it'll come back to us in some positive way, even if it's not always measurable. And so I would say we haven't regretted that in the least in going that direction. Jason: [00:30:47] Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. Lots of great takeaways and a lot of fun, making fun of each other back and forth. And if you guys enjoy this episode and you want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners on a consistent basis where we're making fun of each other, we're seeing the shit that you're doing wrong, and we can actually point you in the right direction. And you want to have a therapy group. I think a lot of it it's that so that we could feel sane and we can actually scale a little bit faster rather than have the shit between our ears, and you know, block our growth. I want you guys to go to digitalagencyelite.com. Check it out if it's right for you, do the application and maybe we'll chat and then maybe we'll see you on the inside. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Create_Amazing_Ads_that_Convert_More_Clients.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:00am MDT |
Wed, 23 June 2021
Duncan Alney made the decision to focus his agency on social media back in the late 2000s when MySpace was still a thing. Now he's running a 7-figure agency and is has niched it down even further. As founder and CEO of Firebelly, Duncan juggles the roles of catalyst, program overseer, problem solver, and strategist within the organization. Today he joins us to talk about how he accelerated his social media agency, the benefits of letting go of your fears, and why you have to let go of your ego to reach the next level. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesAgency Dad: Today's episode is sponsored by Agency Dad. Agency Dad is an accounting solution focused on helping marketing agencies make better decisions based on their financials. Check out agencydad.money/freeaudit/ to get a phone call with Nate to assess your agency's financial needs and how he can help you. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Getting Past Your Ego and Put Clients in the MiddleJason: [00:00:00] Hey, what's up everybody? Jason Swenk here, and I am excited to bring to you an amazing agency owner who's going to talk about how he accelerated his social media marketing agency. He's in the mastermind. He's always a bundle of joy and always makes me laugh when I chat with him. So welcome, Duncan. So, for the people that have not experienced the Duncan effect, tell us a little bit about who you are and what do you do. Duncan: [00:00:28] I am Duncan. Much like Prince or Madonna or, you know, with this Duncan nothing else is needed. I'm the founder of Firebelly, and, um, we were a social media marketing agency. I'm also a dad and a husband/partner and a son. And yeah, I have a lot of joy in my life, so I try to bring it to everyone else around me. Jason: [00:00:51] Awesome. And so talk about how did you get started with your, uh, social media agency? Duncan: [00:00:57] So we started doing social media marketing in the late 2000s, really like 2007, because we were a branding agency and there wasn't any real differentiation. And I already had noticed at that point that SEO was moving very quickly. You know, websites were becoming more and more technical and I really wanted Firebelly to own a space. And so we decided, hey, this social media thing is new, let's, let's jump into it. So that's how we got into it initially and then over the years, you know, my business has, has really gone from being a lifestyle with some employees to being a real business in the last really two to three years has been, you know, with profit incentives and a social impact and thinking about ourselves seriously as a business, as opposed to, hey, get some people in here to do some work. Jason: [00:01:50] So let's kind of dive into that a little bit. So what were you going through at the time when you said, hey, I want to make a switch? And then what did you do? Duncan: [00:01:59] At the time, the company was sort of an extension of myself. You know, I had been like a lot of people a solo player with a bunch of freelancers and contractors. And what I was really good at at the time was actually doing the work. And so I did some exceptional work for brands. You know, whether it was tactics or strategy, well, probably mostly tactics, but you know, if someone wanted PR done for a launch or a trade show, or they needed a video made or email marketing campaign or a website like I was the guy I brought the right people to the table. But what I realized is, with all of that there's a reliability issue when you're working with freelancers and contractors. I mean, I don't care who they are. They're not your employees. So I was looking at employees mainly because I also wanted to start sleeping. Cause I was working with the development team in India and I didn't know how to say no. And so there were no boundaries and really, like, getting started in social media was sort of like saying, okay, we just kind of picked something, actually. It was in the MySpace days and we did a launch for a restaurant and I did the PR launch with the local media. And my colleague who we've been working together for 14 years, Chad, said let's use My Space and we'll geotarget the people that are within a 10-mile radius. So those people, you know, 10 miles is not far to drive to a pub for a good shepherd's pie and some, and some Guinness and the PR got on all the TV stations, but the social media created, and I'm not kidding a line of 300 people when they opened. And so we thought, hmm, I remember sitting in our tiny conference room and I, and I said to Chad, I said, we should just do this all the time. He looked at me like I was nuts. Like, he looks at me like that a lot. And that was it. That's the story. We… at the time there was no category, right. Nobody was really doing social. So we couldn't get anybody to talk to us. So the first few years, you know, if we wanted work, we bought the work. I mean, meaning, like we said, we'll do it. You know, cover some expenses and we'll just do it. Cause we were trying to build case studies and build, I guess, experience and expertise in the space. And so we did that and, uh, we were humble about it. You know, we, we acted like we knew what we were doing, but that we were figuring a lot of things out, which was kind of the situation in social at the time. Jason: [00:04:24] That's how we all are in everything. Duncan: [00:04:28] And then, uh, you know, then we found that, I mean, that we got a, you know it was a slow news day in Indianapolis and I got on the cover of the business section and Tony Dungy, who was the coach of the Colts at the time, had a photo on there that was one fifth, the size of mine. And it talked about, you know, us doing social and a couple of alums from my college called me and one thing led to another. We were doing crazy good work for a little restaurant chain and they hired us to do work for Qdoba. And next thing you know, we went from one brand to another and we were working for the blue chip nonprofits. And I think at the end of the day, those days of social media have come and gone. There was a lot more hype in those days and we probably got caught up with some of the hype as well, but these days it's, you know, it's definitely very different. It's all moving the needle, you know, and actually creating some outcomes. But there were years where we had, you know, what a lot of agencies do that say they’re social media marketing agencies. They can't really make a goal for that social media marketing, because either they don't have the focus or the expertise or they, they can't make the commitment, right? And so they fund all that work with some behind-the-scenes email, or they're doing websites or they're doing other stuff, but they're hanging their hat on social. We decided it was probably like five or six years, six years ago, like, you know, screw it. We don't care if we go broke, which we nearly did go broke. We're only going to do social. We're going to turn any other work away. That was a major, a major transformation. So that was like, what eight years in? And we decided, you know, we basically, I should have put a referral agency in place or talk to Chris Dryer about an incubator agency or something like that, and, you know, send all. We just gave up most of the work and, uh, we started off and, um, I think the experience and the expertise was definitely tested because now you got to do it all the time. And that's all we did. We focused in and we started doing ads and extended into influencers. We were ahead with a lot of that stuff. Actually, we were doing influencer work in 2012, and we've done it the hard way. You know, we've built frameworks and we build winning relationships for brands and their audiences and the influencer. And so I think that that kind of like commitment and focus isn't easy, but that's what it takes to win. Jason: [00:06:51] Yeah. What are some things that you attribute to the growth? That looking back you're like, that was a pivotal point for really kind of catapulting us to where we are now and where we're going. Duncan: [00:07:05] That's a great question, Jason and I, and I think that there are a few things that come to mind. I think the pivotal moment, if there, if there was a pivotal moment was losing the fear and saying, okay, we're… I think there's a quote about burn the boat, so you can't leave. It's like basically, we said, okay, we're either going to succeed or we're going to go down trying. And so I think losing the fear in terms of doing other work and also losing the fear of taking all business. You know, understanding that all businesses not good business, those things were critical. And I also think like we switched from doing, we've never, I've never been good… our company has never been good at following, you know, blind best practices. So we've always just followed our own compass and like saying we're not going to be afraid of doing what we want to do, and we're going to follow our compass on what we think the right way to do it has been. And it's a learning experience. The learning has not stopped. Even today we're constantly learning new things, but I think that embracing fear… as we're going to be afraid but we're not going to be afraid to do it. Jason: [00:08:15] I love it. There's so many agencies that they're so crippled by what they don't know that they can't push through and make that next step that's so needed. And I love that quote, I think that was from Tony Robbins about, you know, if you want to take the island then burn the boats, because then there's only one path forward. Because if you have a backup plan, well, you're not going to go at a hundred percent and then you're actually going at it as kind of half ass of going well, I succeed, I succeed if I don't that's okay. Like it's like, no, you live or die by succeeding. Duncan: [00:08:49] And I think part of it has been, at least we have a small team. Even now with massive growth we still have a small team. And I think part of that has been to lead from the front and not only lead from the front, but you know, this is where our stories start converging. Where when I first met you, you know, we read you a playbook, we read your book and we thought core values? Hmm. You know, we have a vision to be very good at what we do, and what are our core values? And so having core values really changed the way we saw the world and the way the world saw us. Suddenly, like. we had a framework for employees, well for colleagues, for partners, you know, for clients. And I've been several occasions where we have said no to clients based on our values. So… I lost the original question, so you’ll have to remind me. Jason: [00:09:40] Oh, I lost it too. I love hearing your answers. No, we were, we were talking about what was the thing that really kind of catapulted you to the next, the next level. Duncan: [00:09:51] So I think that looking at the values and looking at where we wanted to be was really great. I think also like finding a community of agency owners has changed the game for me. So, you know, I wasn't going to the best HR person. I was going to the best HR person for agencies, I was going to the best finance person for agencies. I was talking to agencies that had gone from 300,000 to 600,000, you know, or from 600,000 to a million. And I was surrounded by people that had walked my path before. And, you know, I think that community of, from a leadership standpoint, for me, that was a huge change. I think for the company seeing me confident about the future and seeing me say that there is no question about whether we're going to succeed. We're going to succeed or we're going to go down trying. I think that made a big difference. But then I think also a place where people started to find out about our successes. I think we won an award. In late 2018, uh, we won Sprout, which is sort of the defacto social media management system, in my opinion. And, uh, we want to Sprout award and suddenly like people were looking at us differently and we were applying for awards and winning them, and we won so many awards and then getting ranked by so many different organizations as being a serious contender. I think those were all moments when suddenly we went from toiling and basically in an invisible place to being very visible and, and, you know, that has given us a voice. And I think using the voice has been really important, like, you know, to help other agencies to help people that are looking I'm very active in Sprout channels and I think, you know, teaming up with other agencies, talking to them about the role of social and helping them and them helping us. Those are the things. So I think maybe it's like claiming knowing our point of view, knowing where we want to be and where we are then claiming our space in the world have been sort of like, I think critical components of like all of that, but I think the key piece was saying, okay, I don't care what we're doing. I can't give people as a leader. I can't give people a dependable, safe place to work if I don't operate from a value standpoint and protect them and enable them to do a great job with definition and clarity, but also running a profitable enterprise. Because at the end of the day, and maybe crass to say that, but we have to balance people's lives and people giving people the environment they need to succeed with making money. Jason: [00:12:29] Yeah. I mean, I love that you said that when you had more confidence your team, and especially, I noticed that over the years of building the first agency is whenever I would come in negative or whenever I would come in worried that would portray through the whole company. But when I would come in excited, vibrant, like this is what we're going to do, like just, you know, anxious, it would inspire everybody and then it would take the emotions or add the right emotions to the company. And when I look at running an agency or building an agency, I look at it in kind of four phases. I look at it as the first phase is really kind of building. So let's say we're building a race team, right? We got to build the car, but the only way to build that car and get to being able to drive it is you have to know what kind of car do I want? I have to have that direction. And you talked about that a little bit of like once I had that direction and like the direction of these are the values that I want to surround people with, this is what I actually want. Then you started catapulting you to the next level, which is kind of driving the car. And then I look at kind of driving the car is the only way to get to the next level is through systems. And putting the right systems in place for your team. So now you can take that car and go to the racetrack. A lot of people try to skip levels and I've raced against them and they wound up very on fire or hurt. And they've just tried to jump to the racing level too quick and they don't have the right systems in place or they don't have the right crew members in place. Then, the only way to get to the next one is through delegation. And over the past couple of years I’ve seen how you've progressed through the levels of building, setting that direction, setting up those systems, learning how to delegate. That's hard for a lot of agency owners or any, any entrepreneur, honestly, to delegate something that you're like, ah, let me just do it. And then once you have all that, you have alignment, your team's winning races and you're onto the next level. Duncan: [00:14:38] I subscribe to that thinking. Or did you call them phases? Jason: [00:14:41] Phases. Duncan: [00:14:42] Yeah, I mean, I think that how I interpret that for our world is you live dominantly in one phase, but it's very good for you to be in all the other three phases at the same time. So, you know, in our case where I'm looking for new service areas. And in that situation, you know, going back to one, and then when you have a new service area going into two, and then the agency as a whole, you know, we're going through a ton of systems work and I'm beginning the delegation work, you know? So there's lots of things I don't know, which is a win. And for example, like going from 12 one-on-one meetings to three one-on-one meetings, you know, things like that. And also, like, I think people want to be challenged. They want clarity and metrics, but they also want a challenge and say, hey, can you do this? I, I believe you can, but can you? And I think that that has been, you know, I mean, it's interesting. I know it's a tough economy and you know, everyone's getting a lot of applications, but we've had jobs that are requiring five and six and eight years of work experience and literally, we're getting 500 applicants and just going through the freaking applicants, is heavy lift. But I candidly like losing a lot of the rules, like, oh, you know, we have to have an office. Well, do we? We have to have employees in one place. No, with the pandemic we just threw that rule book out that playbook out. And now we have employees in Miami and Tampa and New York and Michigan and LA, you know, with more to come. And I think that people see that and they see like, hey, I can be a part of this. Not that people are everything, but they are a major component. Right? I mean, people need processes and protocols, and infrastructure. So, but I think that that's what has attracted people. And going back to the phases, I definitely think we're in phase three. I hope we're going to get through phase three soon. Jason: [00:16:46] As an agency owner, it's hard to know when you have to make those big decisions. I remember needing advice for thinking like hiring or firing or reinvesting. And when can I take distributions without hurting the agency? You know, we're excellent marketers, but when it comes to agency finances like bookkeeping, forecasting, or really organizing our financial data, most of us are really kind of a little lost. And that's why my friend Nate created Agency Dad, specifically to solve these exact problems. You know, at Agency Dad, they help agency owners handle the financial part of their agency so they can focus on what they're really good at. Nate has spent years learning the ins and outs of agency business. He understands everything from how to structure your books, to improving the billing process and really managing your financial efficiencies. Agency Dad will show you how to use your financial data to make the key decisions from making your agency more successful and most importantly, more profitable. If you want to know how your agency finances stack up to the rest of the industry, Agency Dad can tell you how to do that. A lot of my listeners have already gotten their free audit from Agency Dad. And if you haven't yet, go to agencydad.money/freeaudit before August 30th and get your free financial metrics audit. Also just for smart agency listeners, find out how to get your first month of bookkeeping or dashboarding and consulting for free. It's time to clean up your agency finances and listen to dad. Go to agencydad.money/freeaudit.
Jason: [00:18:31] Oh yeah, you definitely will. And then the only thing that I feel that keeps the successful companies and the winning stage is alignment. Everything has to be aligned. But like you were saying, you're constantly, always resetting on different things. Like I tried it this weekend. So, this weekend I played a game, one of the strategy games, Clash of Clans or whatever, some strategy game. And I was telling my son that I used to play this game, Age of Empires. Clash of Clans it's just too many damn options. Like I was like, I can't, I'm frustrated. I'm not playing anymore. Let's go play football or basketball, but they did empires. It was pretty basic. And it was just like, get more wood gold and food. And as you get more, you progress from the Stone Age to the next stage, the next phase, the next phase, right? I was like, that's just simple. And that's kind of how I look at as you progress up. That's why I always tell everybody, look, when you get the agency playbook, you gotta keep going through it every year, because you're going to have to, self-assess where you're at. And there's going to be different areas that you might be like, oh, I'm good there now. But next year you have to kind of go back and go pull that lever in order to really kind of scale. Duncan: [00:19:43] Agreed. Agreed. I mean, it's interesting. I'm about to start reading it again and I'm looking forward to that. Um, it's also interesting to see one of the things that I think a lot of people think is that bullshit get rich quick gospel that's out there. You can read that gospel and it will take you wherever you are qualified to go. It is not a silver bullet. It is not any system that those get rich quick people. You know, those epistles are not sincere and authentic. And I think that there's a lot of people that think, yeah, you know, anybody can start a social media agency. Sure, anybody can do anything. I mean, I think, I mean, we live in America and it's the land of second opportunities and you can have a second opportunity for the 60th time and you can post a picture with your beachfront property with a boat, and then you can like ask everyone in the community for help and you can't spell words properly, and you're basically, you have no model. And so I think that that thinking is out there. But I think that the thinking that wins is when you have a community around you, of people that are going to tell you when you're wrong and tell you when you're right. And you know, you need to have processes and protocols and alignment and mean you need to have a plan, you know? So I think that, starting a social media agency. Anybody can start a social media agency, but I think being a player in any space comes with time and experience and expertise. And in fact, even we are now saying, even if someone's a great lead for us, you know, I got a meeting set up with the defense contractor and that's not good business for us. You know, we are now wanting to work with food and beverage brands and beauty brands. Do we have a drawer of miscellaneous clients we're passionate about? Certainly. But for the most part… so that's another step forward, you know, which, you know, part of my journey. That's a very difficult step to make, you know, saying, okay, I'm only going to do this, but it also comes with. No, it does liberate you because suddenly you're on a, I'm on a call. You know, I still handle all the business development and I'll be on a call and I'm like… learning the space is going to be so challenging. We're not going to make any money for one year. You know, whereas if we work with the CPG food brand or a wine brand, it's like, we're going to kill it in month two. And so that I think is another piece about like accelerating your agency. It's like our common friend, Jonathan Jacobs. He is the undisputed king of thoughtful social for authors and for books, you know, and for kind of like literary things. That's a very specific niche. And he does some other things, but that's what he's known for. So I think that that is almost like the next step, right? It's you can't dominate unless you know what it is you're going to dominate on. Jason: [00:22:39] Yeah, I must, I must break it up into kind of three things or actually three major things. And then each major thing has three things. So if you want to get to a point where you can exit the business from the day-to-day operations or exit from selling it, right? That's usually what I see a lot of agencies that they chat with me about, or they joined the mastermind for. And if you look at it as kind of three things, how am I attracting people to my agency? And then out of those three things, it's kind of like, do we have a specialization? Are we building authority? And do we have a lead generation system coming to us from outside of, you know, word of mouth? And then I look at, you know, on the other side, you have to have kind of convert. Do you have a sales team? That's the next thing we're going to work for you, Duncan, right? So you're not doing all the sales. Are we having a high converting quick offer, right? That we talk about with the foot in the door and then are we selling on value? Right? Like you do an amazing job at selling on value. That's why you're so profitable. And then on the other side, the scale part. Because there's so many agencies that can actually attract, like, do amazing job at marketing and sell, but then they really drop the ball at the delivery one. Like, can they set up, you know, is the agency running without them? You know, are they profitable? Are they growing accounts? And so when you get those nine things all working together, that's really where you get to the point where you have that freedom, that predictability you're making the money that you actually want. And a lot of times people just have to do a self-assessment and go, okay, well, let's just work on this one part. Then it kind of stems to the next part, the next part. And then you just move up stages. Duncan: [00:24:29] I really do think, I mean, I think you can live in different parts, but if you're trying to get to a place where you have, I was having this conversation with someone a couple of days ago and they were talking about that business and I said, hey, isn't it just, you? And she said, yeah, I said, I didn't say this to her, but I talked to myself, well, it's not really a business. It's like a job you do at home, right? And so if you want to get to a place where you grow your business and your vision is basically capable of working without you, I think that's, that's one of the first signs that you really got something that works. You know, whether it's you leave for two weeks and no one needs you or whether it runs all year without you with limited input. I think that that is a difficult place to get to, and it is really, you have to get past your ego. And a lot of us agency owners have an ego where we want to be needed. You know, we want to think that we're the only one that can solve this problem. Well, they're not going to talk to you, they want me. And it's like, it's not true. They just want the problem solved and they want the outcomes. And at the end of the day, they may like you, but if they don't like you they're going to work with someone else anyway. So I think so I think there is letting go and, and saying like, what is, and it doesn't matter if you're at the agency world or any world, right. It's like a sustainable business has to be able to run without you. Like, look at Apple. So many people thought, even with Apple’s scale, that Apple could never continue without Steve jobs. Tim cook didn't have the vision. Tim cook didn't have the operations handle. And obviously, that's not true. Again, how, it's been almost 10 years since Steve jobs died a little bit less, I guess. But I think that that's the piece that you advise people really well on. And that's what people need to do to accelerate is you have to actually decelerate as an agency owner for the agency to accelerate. Jason: [00:26:30] Yeah, you have to decentralize like you cannot be this, you're not the center of everybody's universe. You kind of have to kind of step outside and put your clients in the middle. And if you could put your clients in the middle and then build everything around them that's when you can truly create something amazing. And even if you're listening and you're a one-man person, and that's what you want and you're happy with it. Perfect. Don't let us lead you down a path of hiring a team and all that kind of stuff. But, but if you're at a place where you have team members and you feel like you're at a place where you're kind of just stuck and you're like, oh, I can never add double the employees because there'd be double the headaches. That's the incorrect interpretation of what's going to go. Because if you hire the right people, it can actually give you that freedom that you've always wanted. And I love what you pointed out, Duncan, about the ego, right? Like I'm actually going through this right now. I'm about to hire a salesperson and a lot of times when I get on a call, people are kind of sometimes surprised that I'm on the call and they're like, well, I don't want to be like those other people, but like, you just literally made me think going, man, I got a big ego. Literally, it's like, no, like you said it, they want their problem solved. They want to be able to scale their agency faster, regardless if I'm on the call or not. And I think if that resonates with everybody, like, that's a huge takeaway. If you guys are listening. Duncan: [00:28:00] I mean, and I, and I think it's fine for the ones that don't want to do that. They either don't have the vision to see the path ahead of them, or they don't want to be on that path. And I think that's fine. I think that you have to be realistic about where you are and whether or not that's what you want to be or not. And so if you want to be the practitioner that works on it every day, and you know, you're the copywriter who runs the business and it's like you’re also the main copywriter, that's totally fine. But I think it's also a risky place to be, because if something happened to you, you know, what happens to all your employees? What happens to those people? Those are all lives that are reliant on you as a leader, and also what happens to your clients? And I don't want to seem like old thinking, but I mean, it's like you have like a responsibility and you have a, like a responsibility to those people and those groups, and also to your own legacy, like, you don't want to leave people in the lurch. So those are not easy things to think about. Just like writing a will isn't an easy thing to do, but it's like, almost like you have to say, what's my obituary for myself going to be? And what's my obituary for my business going to be? Like, if Firebelly died today, what will people write about? Thinking about that though, I will say, does raise some uncomfortable questions. It's like what you set out to do? And if not, what are you going to do about it? Right? Jason: [00:29:19] I mean, it goes back to like what, also too, what regrets would you have for not taking action quick enough? Well, great insight, man. Duncan, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience listening in to really help them scale faster? Duncan: [00:29:35] You know, I recently launched my Firebelly podcast. Jason: [00:29:43] Yes, finally! I should find the applause button on this software. Duncan: [00:29:47] Yeah. And I think it's interesting because, you know, we had what I thought was a very clever name and I told you the name and you said to me, I don't know what that means. It was so nice and I was like, what do you mean? He goes, you said, I think it's a shit name. You know, you need to communicate who you are. And so we said, well, we are Firebelly and we're social media. So maybe we'll just call it the Firebelly Social Show. And it's focused on mission-driven brands in the food and beverage space. But I think that if anyone has an idea on a great… my son is here to say hello. Jason: [00:30:24] I know, hello! I saw him peeking in. Duncan: [00:30:29] That’s the famous Jason Swenk that I always talk about. If I say Jason, he'll actually say Jason Swenk? So, who are you? I think that, you know, as we're trying to make our way in this world of like being a leader, one thing that you have to do as a leader, whether you're a, uh, one-person show or whether you're an 80-person show. I think that people want to hear from you when it comes to stories. You know, the leader. Um, honey, it’s a podcast. Jason: [00:30:58] Gotta love the pandemic. Duncan: [00:31:05] On stories, and I think the reason you got to keep going on the stories is when you stop telling the stories, it's like, you don't exist anymore. And so regardless of your scale, you know, you gotta be somewhere present in those stories. So I think that's, that's a piece that I've been talking about a lot. Where do we stand? Whether you're Francisco Serrano running a nine-figure agency or you’re someone else running, you know, a six-figure agency. It doesn't matter. It's like as a leader, you have to really tell the stories. Jason: [00:31:37] Yeah. I love it. Well, what's the website people can go and check that agency out? And then also tell us where we can check out the podcast as well. Duncan: [00:31:44] So the Firebelly Social Show is everywhere. It's on YouTube, it's on Spotify and Stickler and Google Play and everything like the Apple music. So the Firebelly Social Show, if you have some ideas of who should be on the show, I'd love to hear them. And then we are firebellymarketing.com and DuncanAlney.com is soon to be launched. Jason: [00:32:06] Awesome. Well, so exciting for you on that, and thanks so much for coming on. And if you guys enjoyed this episode, which I know I did, and you want to be surrounded by other amazing people like Duncan. And Duncan is always usually the first one to greet every mastermind member that comes in. So I appreciate you so much for doing that. And you want to be in a mastermind where people really have a lot of fun. They care about your success. They want to share the wins, you know, share the lessons that we have because it's not always sunshine and rainbows. We'd love to have you fill out an application because we want to make sure it's right for you and you're right for the group. So go to digitalagencyelite.com and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Should_You_Burn_the_Boat_To_Achieve_Agency_Success_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Sun, 20 June 2021
Stephan Spencer made himself too essential in his agency, resulting in working to exhaustion. After a much-needed break, he was able to gain clarity on the best way to scale his agency. In the 1990s he founded the SEO agency Netconcepts and in 2010 it was acquired by Covario. Stephan invented an automated pay-for-performance SEO technology called GravityStream. He is co-author of "The Art of SEO", co-author of "Social eCommerce", and author of "Google Power Search." Today, he joins us to talk about how he scaled his agency to the point he could take a sabbatical. Learn how he intentionally worked himself out of a job by building a leadership team that could take over the thought leadership role. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesSweetProcess: Today's episode is sponsored by SweetProcess. If you're looking for a way to speed up processes in your agency, SweetProcess will provide the systemization you need to scale and grow your business. Check out sweetprocess.com/smartagency and get your productivity up. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Avoid Becoming Indispensable and Working Yourself to DeathJason: [00:00:00] What's up everybody? I have an amazing show coming your way. If you want to know how one agency owner built an SEO agency over $6 million and sold it. And even before that got to a point where they could actually go on a sabbatical and the agency keep running without them. Which is total freedom. And, and to come back. This is the episode for you. So let's go ahead and get into it. Are you frustrated with how long it takes you to get stuff done in your agency? Or tired of your team missing steps or falling through the cracks? You know, you may be looking for an easy way to capture SOPs to scale your agency faster and easier. Now, our partners that Sweet Process have created an amazing tool to help you overcome all these frustrations. Sweet Process really lets you create a step-by-step instruction from every task in your agency. From writing proposals to executing client work and responding to client requests. So everything gets done more easily. No more mistakes or missed steps. Plus, I have a central place where everyone, employees, contractors, or even VAs can access your procedures anytime from anywhere. The best way to learn about how Sweet Process really can streamline your agency is to start using it. So exclusively for the Smart Agency masterclass listeners, you can try it out for 28 days free of charge. No strings attached. Just go to sweetprocess.com/smartagency to start your free 28-day free trial today. That's sweetprocess.com/smartagency to get your SOPs down and your productivity up. All right, welcome to the show, Stefan. How's it going? Stephan: [00:01:52] It’s going great. Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:01:54] Yeah, man. So, uh, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Stephan: [00:01:58] Yeah, well, I've been doing SEO since, uh, the nineties. If you can believe it. Even before Google existed, I dropped out of a PhD. Jason: [00:02:07] Yeah. That was probably back when we could, uh, put all the keywords in the background and put it the same color. Stephan: [00:02:15] Yeah. You know, I never did that. I always thought that was a little sketchy, but yeah. That did work kind of for a little while, uh, back in those days. But the idea of having eight or 10 different search engines that you had to optimize for was a little nerve-wracking back then, if you recall, there is Infoseek and… Jason: [00:02:35] Lycos. Stephan: [00:02:36] Lycos, AltaVista Dogpile, MetaCrawler, Web Crawler, Excite. Yeah. It was just… Jason: [00:02:43] I remember all of them. Yeah, it was crazy. Stephan: [00:02:46] Yeah. That was an interesting time, but then Google changed everything and became the 800 pound gorilla. And I knew that I needed to reverse engineer that algorithm and figure it out. So I did, and our agency went from being more of a web agency, interactive agency to being a specialist SEO agency. And we really made a name for ourselves. Even I developed a technology platform for, uh, doing an end run around all the technical, uh, roadblocks that most SEOs face with regards to things like, uh, implementing URL rewrites and, and, uh, fixing architectural issues and so forth. I used a reverse proxy technology and created this software as a service. We had clients like Zappos and Nordstrom using it, and we charged on a cost-per-click basis, which was brilliant. Because we could go head to head with pay-per-click, you know, like, oh, well you're paying 50 cents a click on average or a dollar per click? We only charge 15 cents a click. So you should buy as much traffic as you can from us and if we don't deliver, you don't get the traffic, you don't have to pay. So it was a no brainer. Jason: [00:04:01] I love it. Now, was that part of the agency when you actually sold it or was this a spinoff? Stephan: [00:04:06] It was. Jason: [00:04:07] Very cool. Stephan: [00:04:08] It was. Yeah. So that technology was really the main reason why our company was valued at what it was valued at and, and we, we got, uh, the nice exit. In fact, I don't even know if we were just a traditional agency, like everybody else. If we would even have been approached, I have a feeling we wouldn't have been. Jason: [00:04:28] Now, do you feel that having that, and I've been talking to a lot of agency owners, you know, in the mastermind and over the years about, you know, if you can build that little black box that only you have. Because I saw part of that as well as our agency, we were one of the first to build our own CMS system because we started in 99, so a little behind you. And we built the e-commerce system, email marketing system. Now we probably weren't as smart as you and a lot of other people that are like WordPress and all these, because we didn't turn it into a SAS product. We installed it every time and we were always working on our clients. But do you feel that more agencies, especially the specialized agencies. If they could try to figure out how to build a technology that makes them unique. Does that really separate them? Stephan: [00:05:18] It does. It does. And I think figuring out what can be automated or scaled with some artificial intelligence technology and to not have to kind of, you know, brute force it. Because there's some really incredible AI tech out there already. Like for example, GPT-3 is a game-changer and you could sign up for their, their beta and start using it and incorporate it into your product and have a real competitive edge. Jason: [00:05:49] Fantastic. I have not heard of that, but I'm not in that realm. Uh, so everybody go check that out or tell us a little bit more about that. So people know. Stephan: [00:05:58] Yeah. Yeah. So there's a company called Open AI, openai.com and their flagship product is GPT-3. And GPT-3 stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer… three. In case you're curious. But the idea of it is that it can take your input. Let's say you, you ask for a GPT three to write you a poem. Write me a poem about Elon Musk and make it like a Dr. Seuss poem and lo and behold, it actually does it. It's, it's amazing. You could ask it to catalog and sort images based on the kind of animal it is. You can just ask it questions and it will answer those questions. It's phenomenal. So somebody who asked GPT-3 to write a poem about Elon Musk, like Dr. Seuss would write it. This is really hilarious. Uh, you can, you can Google it or you can drop this link into the show notes. I'll just share one stanza from that poem with you, “but I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll send my Mars Rovers to red planet you.” Jason: [00:07:15] Oh, that's… man, that would've been awesome for college, for me in college. To be like, do this paper for me and do it this way. Stephan: [00:07:25] And it seems to have a sense of humor. Yeah, it’s like, really outstanding. Jason: [00:07:30] This is a free tool right now? Stephan: [00:07:33] It's not free, but it's not prohibitively expensive. Jason: [00:07:38] Wow. Okay, everyone go check that tool out and they're not sponsors or anything. So that's just a really pretty cool tool. I'm going to go check that out. Let's talk a little bit about, now we talked about you built a particular technology that was your own, you know, four year SEO agency that enabled you to, to sell it. But what were some of the other things that you did in order to get to a point where you could go on sabbatical and the agency keep growing? Stephan: [00:08:07] Yeah, well, it's important to work yourself out of a job. If you are relying on your own steam, your own initiative and skill sets in order to do all the selling and to manage the client relationships. To help with a higher level projects, activities, and so forth, then by being indispensable, you become the biggest roadblock to the growth of the agencies. So I didn't want that for myself. I wanted to be the visionary and not the integrator or implementer. So I brought on COO and, uh, different VPs. And even to the point, I brought in a CFO to help with the growth and even a CEO so that I could just step back. And if I had my company acquired and I had to go with the company that defeats the whole purpose, because I want an asset that I can sell, I don't want. To go from being self-employed to employed by somebody else. That's the wrong direction. So I wanted to build a company that I could be able to run, but without having to do the day-to-day work and I wanted, uh, so to own it, but not operate it. And I wanted it to be an asset that I could sell at any point. I didn't have golden handcuffs that would keep me at the acquirers’ premises for very long. So I negotiated down the earn-out. They did want me to stay for a period of time, but I, the maximum I would do was six months. As soon as that six months came and went and then the check cleared, they were surprised that I, I gave notice. I'm like, really? How, how could you be surprised by that? I would just, I don't get that. Anyway, so that was, uh, uh, you know, kind of a quick story about how I went on and did other things. I, I started another agency. It started more as a lifestyle kind of business where I could just take months off at a time, even with a very small team. And I did do that. I signed up for Tony Robbins platinum partnership, which was amazing. I followed Tony all around the world. All these amazing life-changing experiences. Platinum partners pay a lot of money to Tony Robbins every year, but they get incredible experiences in very exotic places all around the world. So I did that for three years and it was incredible. It was life-changing and I was able to do that because I had a successful exit. Jason: [00:10:53] Yeah. That's great. A lot of times people want to hire for things that they don't know, right? And to bring into the agency. You know, I was chatting with a buddy of mine, Dan, and he was talking about, you want to hire people based on what you don't want to do anymore first and start, right? Like if you're at the center, so you start looking at the under-hundred-dollar tasks, email bookkeeping, account management, project management. All these things and going, how can I hire so all of that is done? Because that's working in the business and then you got to look at what's the other side, on the business. Well, that's content creation because you know, like what we're doing now only us can really create this, but we shouldn't be doing post-editing, or editing it, right? That's kind of why I'm trying to do this all in one take. Stephan: [00:11:44] Well, you're doing a great job of it. Jason: [00:11:47] Well, I hope. You just jinxed it now. And just do like strategic planning, leadership development and work on those things in order to, you know, surround yourself. So, when you go back at looking at the first agency and even the agency now that you have now, what was the order of people that you started bringing in? And would you, you know, obviously don't name the names, but tell us that the titles or their, their responsibilities and like, who did you hire first, second, third that started making this to a point where you could have that freedom in the agency.
Stephan: [00:12:23] Yeah. Well, when I started, I wanted to bring on contractors first. I wasn't sure to what scale I would get and how quickly and I was bootstrapping. And I didn't have any money to speak of, I, I was up to my eyeballs in student loan debt. I was studying for a PhD and I dropped out in order to start the agency. So I started with contractors to deliver on the client work and the, the very first event that I, I networked at to get my first big clients, it was, I don't know if I'd call it dumb luck. It was maybe a mix of, of that and, and gumption. I was pretty cheeky to go and I talked my way into this event as conference called How to Market on the Internet. It was a very premiere event, costed several thousand dollars to attend. And I wasn't a speaker. I didn't even have the money to afford to attend at that point. Because, remember, I was up to my eyeballs in student loan debt. But what I managed to do is I got in for free by being a volunteer and they gave me the job of being a mic runner. So, imagine this, is 1995 and this is my first conference that I, uh, in my industry that I'm, uh, I'm at. And I'm the mic runner and one of the, the rooms and I, as a cheeky 24-year-old, I think that I know more than the people on stage and so I have the mic and I start chiming in. And I ended up getting a big stack of business cards by the end of that day. Two big accounts came from that, both of those each worth, uh, over half a million dollars in customer lifetime value to me. I didn't have to get funding. I just had to put myself out there in a very daring way. Now I did get uninvited from volunteering on day two. Apparently, some of the speakers didn't think this was too cute when I was doing, but I didn't know any better. I was, I was just trying to add value in a way that, um, you know, many people would, would be pretty nervous about doing. Anyways, so this is how I got my start, with contractors to help deliver on that work. And then I started working on a more kind of permanent situation. In those early days, I hired developers and, um, uh, systems, administrators and stuff like that to handle a lot of the technical stuff. But where it gets really interesting is when I decided, you know what? I'm going to move to New Zealand, because why not? Now everybody else has gone, I was in Madison, Wisconsin at the time. Everybody else was moving to Silicon Valley to make their fortunes. I'm going to do the exact opposite and go halfway around the world to New Zealand. I'd never been there and I just knew intuitively that it would be a fantastic place to live. So I applied for residency, permanent residency, and I got in. So then I convinced my wife at the time and my kids to make this huge move. And we did, and I had to start all over again, pretty much, because I wanted to keep the US business running, but I wanted more of a skeleton crew. I had an office manager at the time. We were like seven staff or something like that, or maybe it was nine and we scaled it down to three. Three staff. And the main person that I left in the Madison-Wisconsin office was the office manager. I promoted her and made her a managing director so she could get in to exclusive meetings with, with C-level executives and stuff like that because she had the title. And I went to New Zealand and I started with nobody there, no… uh. It was very stressful for a month or so, but the very first hire there was a, a general manager. That general manager I have found through a recruiting firm and then I was able to, using that same recruiting firm and the guidance of that general manager, find I think we had seven other people that we brought in within a two or three month time period. So we had to build the team fast, because we had a lot of work and we didn't have anybody to deliver on it because I, I scaled down the other, uh, office to just three people. So that was stressful, but really rewarding and fun. And once I had that general manager, it was just so much easier because he was the equivalent to a COO. And so if you have to find one person, it should be your COO. Maybe the very first person should be your EA, so that, that can free you up from a lot of the tasks that are bogging you down and are not high value tasks. But after that, for sure, the COO I think is the most critical role set that allows you to stand back and be the visionary and, and speak at conferences and write books and write columns for magazines and things like that. And not have to worry about the day to day of operations. Jason: [00:17:47] You know, the, the one thing that I see is when you're on the side of the fence of working in the business. You're always kind of thinking of what and how, like, what should I do and how should I actually do it? But if you're on the other side of the fence of working on the business, the only thing is, is like, where are you going? Why are you going there? And who. Like who do I bring in to figure out the what and the how and all of that. It makes things a lot easier. I see, like that operations person as crucial, just like you. But I also see like with certain agencies, it depends on the situation, right? I look at it as the first hire almost, you know, after like a project manager to manage some of the stuff. So you can keep doing sales because you got to think of like, when you're starting out, you're doing sales. But you also have to figure out how can I get leads before I hire a salesperson in order to help them? So I look at it as hire a marketing person to produce leads. Because you're probably already doing a lot of marketing things that you can get off, right? And then after that, bring in a salesperson to help you, because as you get busy with, you know, delivering all that work and building the relationships. You start dropping the ball and you actually start, you might've gone through this, I know I did, self-sabotage the deal. You like, you try to grenade the engine because you're like the car can't go any faster because I know we're going to do really bad. And then I look at it as like, how do we bring in that ops person in order to, to really help out? But everyone's in a little different situation. Like if you're getting a ton of leads and you know, you're in a good spot, then you can bring in that person. So you've got to self-evaluate, there's no one solution every time. Stephan: [00:19:32] That's a great point. And if the lead flow is what needs to be addressed first, you don't have to necessarily hire a salesperson. You could go with an outsourced firm that can help you with the appointment setting or with the closing or with all of it. For example, there's a… one company that comes to mind is called Meta Growth and they will recruit the salespeople. They're going to be commission only, and they become your team and you pay Meta Growth, a monthly retainer, and then a percentage on top of that, of the sales that, uh, their team generates or the team that becomes yours. But they continually train and, and if somebody leaves, they'll replace them and so forth, and that's a way to build an outsourced sales team pretty quickly. Jason: [00:20:26] Exactly. Let's talk about the GM and the operations person. What were their responsibilities to enable you to step away? And what were the other team members that you had to have in place so you could go on the sabbatical? Stephan: [00:20:43] Yeah, so it was a few years later after I went on sabbatical. We built up the Madison office again to one that was at one point we got to 35 staff over there. And, uh, we had a CEO and the CFO, or no, we didn't have the CFO yet with the CEO, we had the general manager the same one that was my first hire in New Zealand. And I ended up taking six months in New Zealand and yeah, it was just, uh, worked great. It was really refreshing and I, I was burned out at the time. This was back in, I don't know, 2004, 2005. I had just worked myself to exhaustion, really, and I was needing a break. So, uh, everyone was very supportive of me to just take that time off, which I needed. Jason: [00:21:35] Let's talk about that because there's a lot of agencies that work themselves to exhaustion. So how did that happen? Especially since you had, you know, everyone thinks hiring an operations manager. You know, like you don't have to do anything anymore. So how did you work yourself to exhaustion and what would you avoid going through it now that you know what caused it? Stephan: [00:21:59] Yeah, well, I, I made myself too essential to the marketing of the business, being the thought leader, the thought leader, right? It wasn't like there were five or 10 of us. I was the one who was, uh, writing books and, uh, writing columns and so forth. It wasn't until after I had the sabbatical and I kind of realized I needed to have that function of the business, be distributed out across multiple staff, that we encouraged other team members to start writing columns and, uh, speaking at conferences as well. But yeah, that was pretty much just my job was to keep going from conference to conference to conference. So I was on the road all the time. I was based in New Zealand, but I was spending probably a quarter to a third of my year in the US, and I had small children at the time, and it was not easy for me to spend all that time away from them. And that took a toll on me and, and on my happiness. So that was a big part of it, and then I was a workaholic. Maybe I still am to some degree, but I'm way better, way better than I used to be. It's, it's like, it's a socially acceptable addiction. But it's not okay. It doesn't help your health or your family in the long run. It's just a way of numbing out, I guess. And if this relates to you and you're feeling like you're kind of a workaholic, then you got to take some powerful action to address it. Don't just think, yeah, that probably is something I should get to someday. You know, you got to address it because it doesn't break the camel's back until it does. And you don't know when that's going to happen. So just preemptively address it. Jason: [00:23:52] I've learned that the hard way as well. And the only way that I've found through that is creating kind of rules on your time and really goals around your time. That is first, I feel. For many years I taught people in the agency playbook the framework for us that, hey, set your revenue goals first, then your create goal, and then your time goals are last. Well, when you do that, you're going to sacrifice your time because everything else should be leading up to the time. And thinking about why, you know, like one of the exercises I walk people through is going all right, write out your perfect week and what does that look like? And then tell me why, like, do you want to take your kids to the swimming practice or track? Or, you know, do you want to be home when they get home from school? That's why we work so hard, but then we sacrifice it. I've been breaking my rules on, on health. I've just working, you know, until I get back to Colorado and literally just, you know, kind of skipping, you know, the health stuff. So what worked for you? Do we have to go away for six months to do that or…? Stephan: [00:25:04] No, you don't. Here's the key. If you're chasing after, whether it's your health or your relationship or career, family, whatever it is, it becomes elusive because when you're chasing after one thing, you can't chase after all of the things. The only way that you can win at all of it, the business/career. And your health and finances and family and significant other, all that, is to chase after just one thing that has it all. And the analogy I give you is, I learned this in Kabbalah class, actually. It's, it's a prism and the white light shines in to one side of the prison and outcome all the colors. And the colors represent all the different aspects of your life. Friends and, and the business and family and health and all that. So stop chasing the colors and chase after the white light. So that's the light of the creator. Like whatever your spiritual beliefs are, just that encompasses everything. That's where I had the biggest breakthroughs is by stopping chasing after those individual things and just worked on me as a spiritual being and everything just seemed to fall in line. It's just like life was happening for me not to me, once I started focusing on the bigger picture. Jason: [00:26:44] I love it. I mean, that's, uh, it's so true. And, I think we always have to remind ourselves that. Because we'll say it now and we'll do it for a week, two weeks, maybe a month. And then there's something that breaks our cycle. You've got to constantly be disciplined and I think also kind of self-aware of when that triggers in order to go back. Because it's a, it's like that one, that one story I heard one time, it was a guy that was working himself to death, running a business so he could sell it and go buy a fishing boat. And then he wanted just to be a charter boat captain. Well, he didn't have to waste 30 years of working around the clock. He could have just been a charter boat captain from the start. And I think a lot of times we have to kind of learn those lessons the hard way, but that's why you guys listened to the show to hopefully speed up that success or avoid those, those failures from others. That's why we, uh, we have those conversations. Well, this has all been amazing. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Stephan: [00:27:56] I do think if, if you can establish your authority in a very powerful way, that is going to make a huge impact. So for example, a thing that really put me on the map, not only did, uh, the gravity stream technology really help with this, but I co-authored a book called “The Art of SEO”. I ended up coming up with other books as well after that but the big one is The Art of SEO. And if you can find a niche where you can write a book, maybe even get a publisher for it. O’Reilly was my book publisher. We have three editions of The Art of SEO and I'm working on a fourth edition right now. And that is a huge game-changer. If you don't have the time for that, maybe hire a ghostwriter to help you write it. You don't have to be the one to write it. You just have to be the author of it or co-author of it. So that, that can be a game-changer. Another thing that is along those lines that really made a big impact in the early days was when we went from building search engine optimized e-commerce websites to doing consulting for even bigger companies that didn't want us developing the sites. They just wanted us providing the guidance like SEO audits and all that sort of stuff and they had their internal teams implement it. Our first big account. We didn't actually make any money off of, and that was strategically on purpose. We wanted to get a really big name right out of the gate as a, a, a client for SEO auditing. So we approached Target, target.com and ask them if they would like a free SEO audit in exchange for use of their logo and a testimonial, assuming that they were happy with what we produced. And they said yes, and they loved what we produced made. Made them a lot of money and they were happy to give us a testimonial and use of their logo. So once we had that on our, uh, clients page and, and our testimonials page, it was a lot easier to sell, uh, other, other accounts that was, that was just super ninja. Jason: [00:30:14] Yeah. I, I remember landing the first big account and then it just, they kept rolling after that. They want to hang out with others, even though it doesn't matter. It, it really. It's just a name, but people think, oh, if the biggest companies work with you, they're the smartest. Which that's not true either, they're just, uh, they're just big. So, that’s awesome. Stephan: [00:30:37] Yeah. And so, but you come preapproved, it's like social proof and if you can shortcut that process, if you haven't worked with a really big name company. Imagine somebody so huge that everyone will have heard of it. And that could be one of your clients. Yeah. There's just a, it seems like a no brainer to me. Just offer them something irresistible for free in exchange for a testimonial. Somebody's going to bite somebody going to say yes to that and hello. Jason: [00:31:06] I love it. I love that. It's just grassroots stuff too, right? Like this is easy stuff we all can go do. So make sure you go do it. Where can people find out more about you and check out the books? Where can they go? Stephan: [00:31:20] stephanspencer.com. I also have two podcasts. So you were on one of them. You were on Marketing Speak. That's at marketingspeak.com. And then my other podcast is a biohacking and spirituality podcast. And that's Get Yourself Optimized, which is at getyourselfoptimized.com. Jason: [00:31:38] Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. And if you guys enjoyed this episode and you want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners on a consistent basis where we can see the things you might not be able to see and also help you get over those hurdles, because we've been there before I want you guys to go to digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive so community where we provide you the tools, coaching community. Everything you need to scale your agency faster so you can get to a point to exit one day if you want, whether it be exiting your current role or exiting the business. So make sure you go there now. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: _How_Can_Agency_Owners_Stop_Working_to_Death_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:00am MDT |
Wed, 16 June 2021
Roger Bryan has worked with some of the world’s largest companies as an SEO consultant. He sold his first website in 1998 before he knew what SEO was, and spent years working with nonprofits. His agency Enfusen was recently acquired by Growth Foundry and now he joins us to talk about how he has led agencies to great success and failure, and analyzing both. Roger also explains why generating revenue is the real focus of SEO. He also shares tips from his book and even a few crappy jokes. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesAgency Dad: Today's episode is sponsored by Agency Dad. Agency Dad is an accounting solution focused on helping marketing agencies make better decisions based on their financials. Check out agencydad.money/freeaudit/ to get a phone call with Nate to assess your agency's financial needs and how he can help you. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Why Did One Agency Owner Fire His Entire Team?Jason: [00:00:00] All right. I have an amazing interview with one of my old clients who has sold a couple of agencies in the past. And we talk about a lot of the mistakes he made in running his SEO agency. Then we go into a lot of different tactics about how he fired his whole team in one meeting and then a year later he was at $3 Million. And what are the three major roles that he brought in to help? What did he pay them? What was the framework that he used for success and how he really positioned his agency from just being an SEO agency, to being a revenue agency for his clients? And that was a huge, huge thing. You're not going to want to miss out this episode. It's really great. Roger did an amazing job. So let's jump into it. Hey, Roger. Welcome to the show. Roger: [00:00:54] Hey, thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:55] Yeah. I'm excited to have you on, you know, we were reminiscing about how many years ago was when you came out to Atlanta for a workshop with me. Can't believe how long ago that was. But, uh, for the people that don't know who you are, tell us who you are. And, uh, tell us a little bit about the agency. Roger: [00:01:11] Perfect. Uh, my name is Roger Bryan. I'm an SEO consultant. My former agency, Enfusen, was just acquired by a company called Growth Foundry. We do enterprise-level marketing, a lot of multi-location, franchise marketing, a lot of lead gen, SEO pay-per-click, specialized in healthcare, nonprofits, all across the gambit on the different industries that we work with. Jason: [00:01:35] Awesome. Well, let's kind of jump into it and we're kind of trying something new and you're the, you're the first guinea pig. So welcome to being the first guinea pig. And it's really kind of a thing of like a how-to series to figure out, you know, if you're an SEO agency because your agency that you sold was that, talk about how did you specialize in that? Because a lot of times people will start an agency and they start trying to do everything. You know, design pay-per-click, everything under the sun. How did you pick SEO? Let's start there. Roger: [00:02:10] I sold my first website in 1998 and it sold pagers in long-distance service. And what I found was is then I didn't know, I had never heard of SEO. I don't know that I even had met someone that had ever said the term before, but you're putting on content onto those pages to try to get people to find them. Uh, to me, it was no different than making your company AAA in the phone book a hundred years ago, so that people knew, would find you first. It was just as kind of simple. I got into the auto auction industry after that, and we had a website and we were working with nonprofit organizations and it was like, well, how do I get us to come up first so more people find us? I didn't get into paid traffic until 2005. So I spent seven or eight years just living off of organic traffic, not even knowing that that's what it was called. I've always just been… I've stayed focused on it, and always hired people to do everything else. Because I was good at it. To me, my left brain works. It's a science to me. And if you follow certain rules and you do the right competitive analysis, it's easy. Jason: [00:03:14] Walk us through some of the team structure, because obviously, you got amazing results for your clients because you were able to sell the agency. So walk us through, how was the team structured? Roger: [00:03:26] Yeah. I've gone through a couple of different iterations of this. So my first agency, when I sold it, we had 12 people on the team, but we also had a call center and we're taking in calls for the leads that we were generating. So it was a little bit more robust than just SEO services. Typically, when I think of an SEO agency, let's say sub-seven figure versus seven to eight-figure the, the differences between the two. The sub-seven figure, really you are the thought leader. You're the one that's looking at the data. You might have somebody else doing the research. You're making strategic decisions and you're allocating resources to certain people on your team. For me, that would be a content team, whether you have full-time, or part-time, outsource a link-building source that compliments your content team. Uh, one good web developer. We tend to, I used to tend to stick to WordPress until I started working with Growth Foundry. Now it's a whole different game with the clients they deal with and then one person that's going out and doing some type of syndication. So syndication means taking that content and putting it out into places. I've tried all of the different tools out there for social syndication or engagement syndication, or even manipulated social signals, a little decent outreach to the right outlets never, it never worked better. So especially in today's world where everybody uses automation on those things. And I think Google has found most of those. Getting one blog post picked up by one real news article is going to give you a hundred times the results of all of the automation tools that are out there. So I think I hit like 4 different people there. When you get into a larger agency and you're working with larger clients, say your retainers are six figures or more per year, you're going to have a strategist in there. You're going to have an account manager in there and they're going to be different. The account managers dealing with the relationship, the strategist is dealing with the success. You're going to have the same underlying. Four core sections that you're going to deal with, but those teams might be larger and have different points of interaction. I don't like having larger teams for the sake of larger teams, but you have to provide a level of service that demands the type of revenue that comes from working with those larger clients. Jason: [00:05:34] And then how was it structured? Like where you guys broken up into pods? Did these a strategists and the account managers, did they report up to an operations director? How was all that, you know, once you get above the seven-figure mark. Roger: [00:05:48] Yeah. What's nice is I've done this successfully once I've and done it completely wrong once. So I can compare and contrast. Jason: [00:05:55] So let's talk about the wrong first, like, and then get into the right way. Roger: [00:05:58] Absolutely. The wrong way is for you as an owner to be in the mix. And I there's a period at the end of that statement. There's no if ands or buts about it. So when I went and I sold my first agency, my team dealt with the customers. I signed checks and I looked at monthly reports. And if my team had a problem, we would talk about it. I had very little interaction with clients other than conferences, or once in a while, maybe I would chat with some of our larger clients. Now fast forward to my last agency Enfusen, I did everything wrong. I kept hiring kids straight out of college or interns, which there's nothing wrong with that, but I would want to be the point of contact. I didn't trust them enough. I didn't go out and hire the best people. Now with that being said, some of, one of them now runs Halle Barry's e-commerce business. So they've gone out and done amazing things. And if I would have trusted them more, Infusion would have probably flourished more. But I had, every week I was talking about each and every client to some extent, and it was exhausting and we never scaled that agency, no matter how hard I tried, we would scale and we would implode, we would scale and we would implode. So the worst part was I knew what I was doing. I look back now and I'm like, why the F, I don't know if you swear on your podcast, was I doing that? And the nice thing about Growth Foundry is I'm the Chief Revenue Officer, so I'm responsible for growth and strategic alignment within the SEO team between our software and services. So they've taken me away from the thing that I was doing bad in the last agency and giving me a chance to excel at what I'm good at. Jason: [00:07:33] No, you can always cuss. Uh, no kids are listening. You know, I look at it as. Thinking back at all the agencies I've chatted with and all the agencies we've done. I look at it like the first stage is like the doer, right? Like you're doing everything. And then you get to another stage. You're like the barker, like you're barking orders to everybody, but you're still the only one making decisions. Then you get to the delegation stage, and this is where you're delegating and you're trusting people. And then there's one above that where I see only a select few actually make it there. You know, one of our clients, Zach has actually made it there where he's starting to transition out of being the CEO and more to, you know, the chairman. And it's exciting to get to that leadership stage where now all you're doing is coming up with the vision and direction, passing it to your leadership team and that's it and you're hands-off. And that's total freedom where you can scale. You have the freedom, you have profitability, like let everybody else worry about all that shit. Cause there's always shit. It’s just a matter of who's doing the shit, right? There's always like, I guess we use another analogy of like cleaning out the barn. There's always someone that has to take the shit out. Like it just doesn't evaporate. So let's talk about kind of the right way that you, you've seen it. Now you've kind of talked about like why you guys were going through that roller coaster, right? The ups and downs, because that's where you're focused. What do you think the better model for SEO agency is? Roger: [00:09:13] Yeah, it focuses almost too simplistic of a word. But when you focus in on a specific type of client in a specific service with a specific deliverable, that problem kind of works itself out over time. If you allow it, of course, if you're arrogant and your ego is this big, you're going to make that problem exist forever. But when I look at those ebbs and flows, I could see them dictated on the partnerships that we were in and the service that we were providing. And it was different enough each time that it created that need for like a recalibration of the underlying offer and then the implementation and the systems and procedures, if that is not a way to scale and grow an agency. When you get to that point where you've got a dependable, predictable revenue stream from the service that you provide, and you know that every client you sell it to has a 100% chance of success, then you have this model that people can go implement. And there's bumps, there's hurdles, there's hiccups. It's not perfectly easy every time, but you can overcome them better if you're working towards the same strategic goal each time. So starting with that focus element is going to make things so much easier. Jason: [00:10:16] Then how is the team structured? The right way. So, you know, a lot of agencies listening and be like, all right, man, that sounds like me, Roger. Like, man, I'm doing everything. I'm the doer. I'm the Barker. Like we're in this red zone here. So how do we get to the yellow and the green? Roger: [00:10:32] Yeah, the campaign managers a big part of it. You can call them client success, managers, campaign managers, cat herders, whatever you want to call them. But they're the, they're the face. They're the ones talking to the client. Whether some large clients, you have weekly calls with most clients you have monthly calls with and their responsibility is to gather up all of the information. And make sure that as they're going into that call, that they're presenting success, not problems. And if they're focusing in on that, then they spend the whole month building up their data, looking at the reports, making sure everything's going well. And then most importantly, we've got 10 data points that define success for every campaign. They go in and they look well, this one wrong, is this one-off? Why is this one going down? And they're talking to the team, they're talking to the people running paid traffic. They're talking to the people that are building links or writing content and saying, why is this data point off of what are we going to do to improve it? And their questions are what drives success from the underlying team doing the work. Jason: [00:11:27] And these people, are they acting as an Account Manager and a PM or are these two different people? Because there's a lot of, a lot of people struggle with, and I have my own kind of 2 cents on that too. So like, are they the same person? They’re different, they’re the unicorns, what are they? Roger: [00:11:43] The unicorns are nice. I have one that I wish I could get back. But they are managing both. Now, I've scaled up to right around $5 million. I don't know, at $10 million, if that dynamic would change, I'm going to assume that it will. And with the work that we're doing at Growth Foundry and the trajectory that we have, um, you do have an SEO department that's responsible for SEO, that reports up to the campaign manager now. But the campaign manager still needs to reach down at certain points and find when things need to be done. Now, there's a head of SEO, there's a head of Facebook and there's a head of, um, Google marketing, and then there's a head of IT and software development here. So I knew into that with them and I see that different structure. And it's interesting for me, I'm not an exact, I mean, I'm Chief Revenue Officer. I'm not involved in any of that now. So as I bring my clients over and I bring over relationships, I'll probably see how I fall into that mix. Jason: [00:12:39] Yeah, no, I love that. And I always saw like, I guess it would work really well for where you guys were with if they had really good SOPs to follow. But I guess you would have to probably find that Account Manager that really understood this and understood the strategy and could actually probably challenge the client. I mean, that's kind of why a lot of us as agency owners, we've kind of fallen into that role because we know exactly how to help them. Like we're not order-takers. If you hire like an order taker, you're just going to get a Big Mac, like, you know what to expect with a Big Mac, but you're not getting that most amazing burger that like, you start smelling it and your mouth starts watering and foaming, right? Like we can like taste that burger. And that's really what we want those Account Managers. So I presume that and you learn your lesson from the first one where you probably hired experienced people. So. Where did you find these people? And then, you know, what was the kind of levers that you would pull in order to make sure that they were right? And how did we move them out? Roger: [00:13:45] Yeah, it's interesting because this was, it was not a smooth process. So I started my last agency in Summer of 2005. And I remember coming in, it was April of 2007 and we were growing exponentially. We had, we were in one niche. We had one product offering. It was a home run. We were trying to scale. And I, it was just, the wheels were coming off. Like everything was wrong. So I walked in one day and it just, the tension was there. One girl in the office started an argument with me and I'm like, you know what, that's it, everyone just leave. And the entire company was fired. And then I spent the next six months going out and finding the right people. At that time I was based in Washington DC, and I don't recommend that anyone walk in and fire their entire staff in one day, but it was, it was a year in the making. And we went from that year doing $1.2M, and remember that was the beginning of the year. The next year we did $3.2M. So it was the right decision to make. Now there was a lot of fresh out of college. In fact, the girl that I brought in her, name's Amy to run marketing for us at the macro level. I sold that company in 2012, nine years later, she's still there running marketing for that company. And they've grown exponentially since then. The Office Manager that I hired in that timeframe, still there, the General Manager that's running the company since I sold, was my GM. So those right people helped me get to the point scale, sell, and then they continued to run the business for the investors that bought it. Where did I find them? I plugged into the universities. I would go and do the job fairs, but I wasn't looking for like interns. I was looking for the people that had gone out and done something. In 2005, 2007, when you're trying to hire digital marketers, there wasn't a lot that they could have done. So if they had a LinkedIn profile and they were doing any type of content creation online, they were, they were first in line. Jason: [00:15:34] Yeah. I mean, I remember when we hired designers. You didn't have to like, and this is where I kind of failed at school. I didn't really kind of create any side hustle while I was in school. But the people that we would bring in, if we brought them in right after they got their degree, which wasn't really a requirement with us. They had to, or had that side hustle and they were already having a portfolio that they could show us. They weren't just like this is their first pony, you know, the first rodeo. Was what I was trying to say, right? I was like first pony? Like where did we get a pony? Roger: [00:16:11] Like, I don't know. You got cows behind you. So maybe the pony’s not too far. Jason: [00:16:14] That might be it. Maybe it was because I was watching Seinfeld. And, uh, when Seinfeld was at the table, he was like, I don't like anybody that has a pony. And then the, this, the old lady was like, I had a pony. Why don't you like me? So maybe I think of that. I don't know, listening on the show, make sure you guys come and go to the website and tell me if you have a pony or not. Roger: [00:16:36] We won't judge you. Jason: [00:16:38] We won’t judge you. But getting back to, I don't even know where we were actually going since the pony. I guess that's where I show you my ADD, like pony, what? Go over here. Roger: [00:16:47] You took me for a ride on your pony and now we're lost in the woods. Jason: [00:16:50] We are so screwed. We were talking about hiring out of college. So I like what you were talking about. Like they already had the expertise there. They were already doing it. How did you make, after you evaluated that, what was kind of the first task that you had them do to make sure that they're right? Because I'm sure you probably hired some people that, you know, like, oh man, that was a wrong hire. Following this method when you reset the whole company. Cause that's fascinating. Like that's so fascinating. You come in, everybody get out and then a year later you bring on new people. So let’s talk about that. Roger: [00:17:24] So there's been a couple of different iterations here too with the last agency and this was good or bad. The first 30 days that someone was hired, they would go through a whole set of tests, whether that be the digital marketer tests, some of the HubSpot certifications. And only about 70% of them would be able to complete the first set of tests. So a lot of them, it was just a natural, you know what? You can't pass these tests. You can't work for us. Including my brother, he tried to come work for us. He couldn't pass the test. He didn't get to work for us. Jason: [00:17:51] That's probably a good thing. You never had friends or family. Roger: [00:17:53] Yeah. I hired him in other businesses before. I don't even know why I tried. But that was a decent way. So you had something to show me now, can you do what we do? I had tried in the past, letting them launch a campaign. That was always a disaster because I wanted, I didn't want to spend money on my stuff. I wanted to spend money on customer stuff. I had one guy, he had a $250 a week budget to generate leads. You spent like four grand in the first week and didn't generate any and it was on my credit card. That was when I learned that that probably that wasn't going to work anymore. So every person is going to be a little different. Now we're trying to hire people that are coming from other agencies. That have been in the game for a little while. We don't have the luxury of time to train up from the beginning. If you can come in, maybe there's a little bit of retraining, but we need to put you in a role and we need you to go and then we'll figure out how to make it better and how we can scale. I learned that by watching one agency grow from like nothing to like a hundred million dollars over the last seven years. And I've worked with them on a couple of projects. I'm not going to name them because I don't want to say it's a good or a bad thing, but most of the projects I worked with them on failed. But the same people that were working on those projects five years ago are still there. And I bet you they're better now, now that they're a nine-figure agency. But that says it's, it's a choice, they chose to just take on every client, take on every project and then they found their niche once they hit scale. Again, not recommending that, but that's just another dynamic that I've seen people do. Jason: [00:19:20] Yeah. I probably know who they are. They will be nameless, but, um, let's talk about when you reset the whole darn team, who was the first three people and why they brought on. Like, the role, the roles. Roger: [00:19:35] Yeah. The first role was the office manager, because I needed someone to handle like the HR side. Obviously, if you go in and you fire everybody, you probably aren't thinking about HR too much. So they came in and their job was to help me systematize everything that I was doing in the business. From the way the clients are coming in. We had to have like insurance policies in every state that we were working in because of the space we were in. Getting that done, then the general manager to hire both divisions of the business, because there was a service and there was an e-commerce business. By the way, I didn't fire anybody in the e-commerce business side, they were fine. This was just the office and service staff. And then I needed someone that knew marketing and sales a little bit. Uh, I didn't expect them to go out and sell. I was the one going to the conferences. I was the one in the booths, I was the one building the relationships. And I enjoyed doing that, taking people out to dinner, buying them drinks and like, it's not that hard. And when she came in and got to work, and then she started managing our outsource vendors and our content teams, and at that time we were using a third party to do our paid traffic. It was just, it was like a light bulb went off in my head. Like, why did I ever try to do all this myself? But finding that person's hard because it, especially today, because in 2007, entrepreneurship wasn't as hot as it is now. And people weren't as willing to take as much risk as they are now. So there's that balancing act of if you're going to find that person now, you're going to need to pay them very, very well. You can't ask them to bootstrap with you as you're growing this thing, you're going to have to give them all the money, even if it means you're taking less. Uh, to grow the business because what's stopping them from going out and doing it themselves? It’s not that hard anymore.
Jason: [00:21:13] As an agency owner, it's hard to know when you have to make those big decisions. And I remember needing advice for thinking like hiring or firing or reinvesting. And when can I take distributions without hurting the agency? You know, we're excellent marketers, but when it comes to agency finances like bookkeeping, forecasting, or really organizing our financial data, most of us are really kind of a little lost. And that's why my friend Nate created Agency Dad specifically to solve these exact problems. You know, at Agency Aad, they help agency owners handle the financial part of their agency so they can focus on what they're really good at. Nate has spent years learning the ins and outs of agency business. He understands everything from how to structure your books, to improving the billing process and really managing your financial efficiencies. Agency Dad will show you how to use your financial data to make the key decisions from making your agency more successful and, most importantly, more profitable. If you want to know how your agency finances stack up to the rest of the industry Agency Dad can tell you how to do that. A lot of my listeners have already gotten their free audit from agency dad. And if you haven't yet go to agencydad.money/freeaudit before August 30th and get your free financial metrics audit. Also, just for smart agency listeners, find out how to get your first month of bookkeeping or dashboarding and consulting for free. It's time to clean up your agency finances and listen to dad. Go to agencydad.money/freeaudit. I love that you said pay them what they're worth. Because there's a lot of people that I see. That are like, well, just we'll give you equity. I'm like, no, like you believe in this, right? Do it all yourself. But like you were saying, it's very easy for other people to do it. So walk me through, like, we don't know who they were. So can you walk us through, what were you paying the office manager? What did you pay the GM or like, what would you pay right now? I guess let's do that since we're in 21. Roger: [00:23:26] So right now, I'm in Ohio and our agency's based in Pennsylvania, not in a big city, so we do have a little bit of luxury there. You're not going to get quality under 52 a year. And this isn't even people working remote. Jason: [00:23:40] For an Office Manager. Roger: [00:23:41] Oh, well, when we talk about people now? Jason: [00:23:44] Well, let's talk about the office manager, the GM and the marketer, the three roles, and then you can go into the other roles too. Roger: [00:23:51] So right now we pay our office manager probably makes around probably in the 46 to 48 range. We do and, it's interesting, I'm trying to not get sidetracked. We've got three service businesses here. We have two 20,000 square foot buildings here and play 65 people. So it's a little different, that's not agency work. On the agency side, I don't even know what they pay anyone yet, which is interesting if I think about it. Jason: [00:24:18] Well, go back to like when you hired those three people. Roger: [00:24:21] Those three people all started at 52. Jason: [00:24:24] 52, wow. Even the GM. Roger: [00:24:25] That was in 2007. Yep. Jason: [00:24:28] Wow. Of you had to do that now. Roger: [00:24:30] I’d probably be 80ish. Jason: [00:24:32] Good. I'm just trying to give someone a context. Roger: [00:24:34] Yeah. There's a part to that too, that no one stayed at 52. Within a year you were dramatically different. In fact, at 90 days, things started changing, uh, especially for the marketer who was handling all the client business. You figure if she was managing millions of dollars a year in revenue, I think she was getting dropped like 10 K every quarter, as long as our numbers were going up. And I'm sure she's a six-figure earner now having been there so long. Jason: [00:24:59] Yeah. And that's the crucial thing is, is like pay them a fair salary. That's what we always did. Fair salary and then do bonuses on performance quarterly. And you know, you'll get them above, you know, rather than pay someone, you know, some people come in for a GM and be like, I want 200K I'm like, sure. You know, crap in one hand and wish on the other. See which one fills that first. Roger: [00:25:24] You know what’s interesting about this? My first mentor was a gentleman named Patrick Morsillo, he was a really old-school Italian guy. He's about 80 now. He owned the Greater Cleveland Auto Auction, which was the first real job that I had after the military. And he kind of trained me on business. If it wasn't for him, I'd probably always have the employee mindset coming from where I came from, but he told me he's like the salary that you pay someone is what keeps them at their desk. And he's like the money that you pay them after that is what you pay them to help you earn more. And he's like, not everybody wants more. Some people will take their salary and they'll sit at a desk and they'll plug, plug, plug, but there's a few of them in there that will bust their ass to make you money and you'll compensate them in return. I mean, and I've had that mentality. I mean, that was 2001 when I first started working for him, I was 23 years old and that never… they have something about cows going down and having sex in the field. Those two sayings have always stuck with me. Jason: [00:26:16] You just keep looking at the cows behind me. Roger: [00:26:20] I know, I can’t. But it really was. You'd have this thing about patience and cows having sex, but it was a whole ordeal. Jason: [00:26:25] I kind of want to go there. I kind of want to go there, but I won't because it was such a good, like, I loved the saying that, that he said about like, people stay there because of what you pay them, but they'll make you money for what you pay them above that. That's brilliant. I love that. Let's talk about. Was there a framework that you guys used at the agency in order to get people success? Because a lot of times I talked to some agencies that they're just kind of winging it and they really don't have a framework for specifically for rankings. Can you talk a little bit about that? Roger: [00:26:59] Yeah, it comes down to a deliverable. So what we had then, the compelling offer with a guaranteed deliverable. So we did non-profit fundraising. So I could walk into a Goodwill and I could say, hey, I want to help you raise money by doing car donations online. Here's the deal, you're never going to pay me a penny. I'm going to invest all of my own money in advertising. If it works, we're going to split the profit 50, 50 after expenses. If it doesn't work, you just wash your hands of us and I walk away and never problem. The offer dictated the implementation strategy. Over time, we had a campaign for Goodwill, we had a campaign for Red Cross, we had a campaign for Salvation Army. They were different enough to be representative of the brand, the markets and the style of marketing that they were willing to do. But every Goodwill I walked into and there was 140 Goodwills at the time and we were working with 52 of them. So we were almost at 50% of Goodwills in the US were working with us. We made that offer and then it was a dependable, predictable model. We knew you set up a landing page, you launch a separate website. You set up a landing page on our site, you set up a separate website, you set up a landing page on their website. You rank all three of them, the top of Google, so that no matter where they donate, it's coming through us. And then you later on paid traffic for broad keyword terms. And it's the same keywords every time, just in a different market. And then you adjust your bids relative to the competition in that market. And that was it. I mean, there's intricacies of how you got them to rank, but we're going back to 2008. If you sneezed your websites ranked, it's a little bit more complicated today. Jason: [00:28:30] Yeah, it was so frustrating back then. Roger: [00:28:33] I know. Well, I had eight websites on the first page of Google ranking for Goodwill car donation. You could not donate a car in the United States without it coming through us. And three of them are still on the first page today. I mean, that's, that's all you had to do to win. I mean, that was, that was, uh, that was a seven figure ranking campaign right there. Jason: [00:28:52] I like that you had the success. What are some of the gotchas that you've learned with that? Because. I love that strategy. That's very easy for them to commit and especially of how you phrased it too, which I elegantly picked up on. I was like, well, we'll split the profits after our expenses. So probably it was maybe they were getting 30%, but they're 30% is better than zero, which was really good. So walk us through some of the gotchas there. Roger: [00:29:21] So some of the, the, some of the gotchas there is at a macro level, the only way that an SOP or a campaign strategy works is if you have a defined outcome, like you can't go into SEO with the idea that your job is to rank websites, you've already failed. If you even started that. In fact, internally in our organization, we kind of, we don't use the term SEO. We use organic revenue optimization. Our job is to deliver revenue to our customers. So any task has to be correlated to a data point that leads to revenue. And if somebody starts talking off tangent about this thing, okay, how does this get me to revenue? Nine times out of 10, that will bring them back. And honestly, they'll realize you went, I don't even need to be worrying about this because it's not revenue-related. It's just busy work. In so much of what I see SEO professionals doing is busy work. They read something in a Facebook group. They want to go try it to see if it works, but they don't sit down and write down, okay. How is this going to get me from where I am today to more revenue because the client's being need for revenue. Very rarely does a client pay for rank. And I say rarely because there are some doctors and lawyers that will actually pay for it because their ego says they just need to outrank the guy down the street. They don't care about money. They're few and far between, but they do exist. Jason: [00:30:31] And there are bad clients. Roger: [00:30:32] They are bad clients. They stick with you until they get there. Then they fire you and then they yell and scream at you six months later when they're not there anymore. So you know that there are short ride, six-month to 12-month client, which isn't what you should be going after. Anyways, if you have a dependable, predictable model that leads to revenue, your scaling capabilities completely open up. If you're chasing a different result for each client on a different traffic strategy on a different type of offer, you will continue to be stressed out. You will never scale, no matter how much you try to put SOPs and people in place. It's that, that single, dependable, predictable deliverable that makes business scalable and repeatable. Jason: [00:31:09] I love that you focused on the revenue. Because a lot of times an SEO agency will be like, we'll get you on the first page. We'll get your ranked. But you're doing things after that to control that. Because a lot of times, even with a pay-per-click agency, right, will be like, let's use dentists. They're a great example of a very hard client to work with. Right. We send a ton of leads to them, but their, their dumb staff never answers the phone. They never get back and they’re like the leads are shit. Right. But you're kind of taking that out of going, like, we'll take it to here by picking the right market too. Right? Like it's very important. That's important. You pick a really bad market you have to be resourceful and figure it out. Like, I'm sure someone's going to figure it out. And I have some clients that really rock the dentist world, but they are a little bit more challenging, but I like how you did the solution. Roger: [00:32:06] The big thing that we needed to do in the nonprofit space that we're repeating now in the space that we're attacking right now is that we started answering the phones warm. So we set up a call center and answered the phones, got all of the information and went right into their scheduling system and put people in. It's not that hard to do. It's not that expensive to do. It can actually just be a couple hundred dollars a month. And if you've got multiple clients in the same space, that's nothing relative to the overall value that it creates. And it completely eliminated, like I remember one of my first clients when I moved back to the Ohio area after selling my agency, because I wasn't allowed to work in the nonprofit space for a certain number of years was a dentist. And to me, it was, it was a breeze. He went from said he was getting five phone calls, of course, no tracking in place. So like one week I generated like 76 phone calls, you know how many he answered? Three. So I drove to his office an hour away and I went in and I talked to his secretary or assistant, and I realized she wasn't there to answer the phones. And I was like, you know what? We should probably just stop spending your money cause we both wasting our time. But now we see like we're, we're scaling really large in the septic industry right now because we have the largest residential septic company in the state of Ohio. Jason: [00:33:14] Is it a shitty client? Roger: [00:33:16] It is. I get crappy jokes like that all the time. Jason: [00:33:19] Oh, I had to like, literally everybody listening was like, when is Jason going to say shit? Roger: [00:33:25] And the first key was setting up a call center. We quadrupled the number of conversions by adding in the phone calls. That means we didn't change anything with the marketing. But four times more end result just by setting up a call center and we use answerconnect.com. They're great. They're inexpensive sort of, we're kind of at that point now where we're asking ourselves that we want to have our own people doing this, but 24 hours a day, seven days a week you can get a live voice. If you call for services through any of our websites or partners, and in most cases we can direct schedule, not all of them, we're working on that. Jason: [00:34:00] I can only, I can imagine the call center would be like, you got shit? We'll help you with your shit. Roger: [00:34:06] I should throw that up on our tagline. We just, we just bought septictank.com. So we're going really heavy into growing this business. Jason: [00:34:15] The tagline should be like “we help you with your shit.” Sorry. Roger: [00:34:22] I don't know if that'll fly with like the Facebook mods or anything like that. Jason: [00:34:26] I know, I kknow. I just, hey, I got. Roger: [00:34:27] And when the team did their brainstorming under taglines for septictank.com. Don't worry, a lot of those came out. Jason: [00:34:33] Oh, I'm sure like how it would be such a fun project to be on. Roger: [00:34:36] Our engineers call themselves poop inspectors, so. Jason: [00:34:38] Oh, that's brilliant. Oh, that's awesome. That should be the title of the podcast. Let's talk about your book that's coming out or it's already out now, so, yup. “Local SEO secrets” Tell us a little bit about it. Roger: [00:34:53] So we've been putting out content for a long time and I'm pretty vocal in a lot of the Facebook groups that I'm in. We decided to take our top blog posts and put them together into a book and then reformat on them around a specific goal. And then I reached out to a couple people that I knew in the space that might be better at things like we got one guy to come in and talk about GMBs. Another one to call in and talk about the Google My Business, or Google Guarantee Program. One on e-commerce landing, page optimization, and one on PR for SEO. And we put them all together and just kind of packaged it so that we could give our customers a premier on SEO. So if you read this book, you're probably not going to be ready to do enterprise SEO, but you're going to be able to have a conversation with us about the different tactics that we're doing. Uh, it's the same thing. I published a book called “Data-Driven Marketing” in 2017 and it was written for the Microsoft partners that we were working with. It was like, hey, last year we generated $56 million in sales leads for Microsoft partners. Here's how we did it. Do you want to do it? Here's the book. It sold 10,000 copies on its own, but it was never really designed to be like a revenue stream from sales. It's, hey, I want to educate my clients cause educated customers actually stay around longer. I always hear agency people say I don't want to make them too smart because they might fire me. And you know what that happens from time to time, we had a customer paying us a quarter-million dollars a year for four years. And they're finally like, you know what? Roger, we got this. We'll come to you for one-off consulting. And I was like, okay, that's awesome. I just trained a multi-billion dollar company and how to do their own SEO. It took four years. They made me a million dollars, but. They moved on and that'll happen. Jason: [00:36:28] Yeah. Everything transitions. It's, it's kind of like when I work with people, like even yourself, like you bake it in, you, you help them out. And then they transitioned, they graduate and they get to the next level, they sell. You know, it's just, it all happens. And, and everybody should celebrate that. Not like I always hate when I hear, well, I don't want to teach them everything I know. I'm like, then what are they paying you for? Like, what are you even helping them for? Like, why are you throttling it? Like literally, it as much pressure as they can take, give it to them. And then they'll be your biggest advocates when they have a success, because that's why we're doing it. Right? Roger: [00:37:07] The head of marketing at that healthcare organization, it actually worked with me at a different company before that and brought me in because he's like, I like the way that you teach what you're doing, you don't just do it. And you know what. He left there and went to another company and guess what they hired me to. And another person from that health care company texted me over the weekend. He's was like, hey, I'm at a new organization. These are the problems I have. Can you come in and help consult? You actually get more business by training your customers to fire you. Then you do less. Jason: [00:37:34] Exactly. Give us one really killer thing in the book. And then we'll tell everybody where they can get the book. Roger: [00:37:40] Perfect. If there's one killer thing from the overall strategy in here, it's like flip it upside down. Don't try to read it upside down, you'll get a headache. But SEO, isn't about ranking websites. It's about generating revenue. So the one strategy that I tell everyone before you even start SEO is implement call tracking. Now, again, this is local SEO. So we're usually talking about a conversion path that is calls. I probably wouldn’t work with the pizza shop. I can't track the revenue that comes in from that. Implement call tracking and figure out where you are before you do anything else. It only takes 30 days. If your customer is telling you, they're getting 50 phone calls a week, you implement call tracking. They're probably getting five and you're going to have a real benchmark set now you're also going to listen to do they answer their calls. If they get a hundred calls and answer five, you've got to fix that. There's so many things you have to fix in order to make SEO successful. And we charge, we charge maybe 1500 or $2,500 a month for our additional audit roadmap and data capture. But after that, you will know for certain, if you can help that person and what agencies chase money. Most of them do and it's why their lives are so stressful and so miserable. Because they'll take money from anyone. Be willing to say no. If the data doesn't tell you, you can make them successful. Uh, Travis Saga has a great thing. He's like you only take on someone if he's willing, and this goes back to poop, to give them a bucket of poop that they can dump on his head if he, if he doesn't make them successful. And knowing that he only works with a certain number of people and the ones that work with him and brag about working with them. But pretend there's a bucket of poop sitting next to you. Don't take that customer on if they're going to dump that bucket on your head. Jason: [00:39:15] I love it. I love that there's so many different things to break down, but I love how you were like, just do one thing to see if they're going to beat an amazing client and do that in early on, rather than invest all your time and you getting paid a great deal from them. And then you're like, this is miserable. You're gonna lose your team. Right that you're going to get bad clients and it's just a constant rollercoaster ride. But if you do it and you reset it and you think, how can I make sure? And even going to the prospect, I want to make sure you're good for us. You know, it goes back to an interview I did with Seth Godin, where he was like, look, there's this one agency that only want, doesn't want to hire over 50 people. And if they only have 50 people, there's only so many clients they can take on and they tell the clients, if you ever do anything, if you dump a pile of poop on us, we're firing you. Talking about shit the whole episode. Roger: [00:40:11] Going back to poop. Jason: [00:40:13] You like how I came back to the poop. That's what I did. That's what I do. Where can the audience go check out the book? Roger: [00:40:17] I mean, I'll give you a link. They can go to rcbryan.com/localseobook. And I'll just leave it up for a limited amount of time, but they can actually get the digital copy for free. So we took the whole book. We turned it into like a course format on teachable. And what's nice is we're actually there's conversations going on in there. There's been tweaks. There's been additions. Some chapters have been dropped to the bottom because people didn't find them useful. Some chapters have been moved up, we've redone some of the intro stuff, things that you can't do once you have a hard copy, but there's a great community building around it of SEO professionals and amateurs, just learning and trading, uh, skill sets and, uh, swapping ideas in order to create the best strategies for people. Jason: [00:40:56] Awesome. Well, this has been amazing. Everybody go to that URL, go to it now and go check it out. And, uh, is there anything Roger, I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Roger: [00:41:09] No, but I think we did 3 million, no, 300 billion cubic feet of poop last year. You forgot to ask me about that. Jason: [00:41:19] All right. Well, if, if all you listening, if you enjoyed this episode and you want to stay away from getting the bag of poop thrown on you, you need to be surrounded by amazing agency owners. And we're only looking for five agency owners that are over 500,000 and under 20 million. If, if that is you and you guys want to add multiple millions on, we want to invite you to go check out the Agency Mastermind. This is where we share the strategies that people are crushing it on and you'll be able to see the bags of poop that you can throw away. So make sure you go to, you guys can tell it's not a script cause I'm putting poop in there. But make sure you guys go to digitalagencyelite.com and request the invite, put in your application. And if I feel that we can help you out and you'll be amazing for the mastermind, we'll invite you to come on and uh, so you can stay away from the shit. All right, until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_One_Agency_Hit_3_Million_By_Firing_the_Entire_Team.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Sun, 13 June 2021
Michael Begg began as an Amazon seller and quickly saw an opportunity in e-commerce marketing. He figured how to successfully sell products online. That led to the idea of creating their own agency, AMZ Advisers, full-service, e-commerce, and digital marketing consultancy partnering with brands to evaluate and develop their e-commerce strategy. Today he joins us to talk about how he started scaling his agency, how he used third-party platforms to get his first clients, and how he stays on top of his niche. He also shares tips on how has had great success near shoring his team. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesSweetProcess: Today's episode is sponsored by SweetProcess. If you're looking for a way to speed up processes in your agency, SweetProcess will provide the systemization you need to scale and grow your business. Check out sweetprocess.com/smartagency and get your productivity up. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM How Near Shoring Your Agency Team Helps ScaleJason: [00:00:00] I have a great guest today and we talk about how he's grown his Amazon agency. And really he moved down to Mexico, created a team down there, and is really scaling it very fast. Really interesting episode. I hope you enjoy it. Are you frustrated with how long it takes you to get stuff done in your agency or tired of your team missing steps or falling through the cracks? You know, you may be looking for an easy way to capture SOPs to scale your agency faster and easier. Now, our partners at Sweet Process have created an amazing tool to help you overcome all these frustrations. Sweet Process really lets you create step-by-step instructions for every task in your agency. From writing proposals to executing client work and responding to client requests. So everything gets done more easily, no more mistakes or missed steps. Plus you'll have a central place where everyone employees, contractors, or even VAs can access your procedures anytime from anywhere, the best way to learn about how Sweet Process really can streamline your agency is to start using it. So exclusively for the Smart Agency masterclass listeners, you can try it out for 28 days free of charge. No strings attached. Just go to sweetprocess.com/smartagency to start your free 28-day free trial today. That's sweetprocess.com/smartagency to get your SOPs down and your productivity up. All right, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Michael: [00:01:42] I'm good, Jason. Thank you for having me here. Jason: [00:01:44] Yeah, I'm excited to have you on, so tell us who you are and what do you do? Michael: [00:01:48] Sure. My name is Mike Begg. I'm one of the co-founders of AMZ Advisers and we're an agency that specializes in the Amazon marketplaces. We help brands increase their sales, manage their advertising, and just maximize their visibility on the Amazon platform. Jason: [00:02:04] That's awesome. So how did you get started? And then tell me kind of the origin story about how did you transition to Amazon. Michael: [00:02:11] Yeah, so we actually started as, uh, myself and my two partners, we actually all started as Amazon sellers ourselves. Before that, I was actually working in retail. I was working at Sears in retail real estate development. And this was in like 2014, 2015. So it was a very interesting time for the business because a lot of things were, you know, the stores were really struggling, trying to figure out ways to make money. And at the same time, we kind of saw what was happening in e-commerce and saw an opportunity there. So originally we just started selling products for ourselves to make some money on the side. And we found out we were really good at doing that. And we realized that a lot of other companies, a lot of big brands, were really bad at it. So that kind of led to the idea of creating the agency, AMZ Advisers, and yeah, from there, we just went out and got our first clients. And it's been six years now and we just keep going forward. Jason: [00:03:03] So that's great. And so walk us through kind of, how did you start getting your first clients? Did you just go, hey, I see your position in Amazon. It sucks. Like, do you want our help or what? Michael: [00:03:15] Yeah. So the original way we started getting clients was, well, two different things. The first, I guess, sales meeting that we went on, uh, was with a distributor in Long Island. I'm originally from Connecticut. And I think we saw his, uh, job post on like Indeed for like an Amazon expert. And we just like reached out to him and we were like, look, you're not going to be able to hire anyone for this position. Uh, and then we kinda got the first meeting that way. But beyond that, platforms like Upwork, FreeUp, ODesk used to be, I think was part of, it was a part of Upwork, now freelancer.com. All of those, uh, we just started putting our profiles and our company on there and started taking jobs, even if they were low costs. Just to, to start moving up the ranks. And yeah, that's really how we started building and getting those initial clients. Jason: [00:04:04] You know, we had a mastermind member talk about how he generated like over a hundred thousand in monthly recurring revenue from Upwork. And I was like, there's no way, because I just always looked at it as like a platform like Fiverr, like find cheap labor. He's like, no, no, no. And he walked us through a strategy. I'm like, wow, that is really pretty clever. I was like, if that existed, I was like, I would have done that. Like, that was great. Michael: [00:04:29] Yeah, no, it was awesome. I mean, for growing a business, it was perfect to get started because we didn't really understand exactly what companies we were going after or what companies really needed this service. So it was kind of a way for us to learn and figure things out. And yeah, I mean that, it just kind of developed into building out a real sales and marketing strategy from there. Jason: [00:04:49] Yeah. Let's talk about a little bit about how have you been able to start scaling, you know, the agency, you know, I look at, you know, the first part. It's just really getting started, you know, going after the clients, knowing where you're going, getting that, you know, that direction. So as you're in that building phase, and then you get to that systems phase. So talk about a little bit about how have you guys been able to scale. Michael: [00:05:13] Yeah, I think you bring up a really good point there. And in that initial phase where you're kind of just getting those clients, it's really important to play to your strengths and what you're good at, what you're not good at. So the great thing about having partners in the agency business is that, you know, we each compliment each other. So like, I'm very good at marketing and advertising. I have a partner who was very good at sales. I have another partner that's very good at project management. So between all of that, that really helped us execute initially to get to the point where we could start figuring out the processes to go forward. So that's always important, I think when you're in that initial phase, and then when we're looking at that next level of building the processes, it's okay. Which way do we approach it. What are our high-value tasks? What are our low-value tasks? And can we start by getting rid of some of these low-value tasks to other people? So the way we started with that, at least from my perspective on the marketing side was, you know, blog writing. I started outsourcing blog writing instead of doing it myself, content marketing, coordination. So doing the outreach to other people, you know, I started outsourcing that to a VA. SEO link-building like started outsourcing that to a VA. So it started with those low-value tasks that really allowed me to focus on the higher value items. And then from there it's more of right now, how do I train someone to take over some of this higher value stuff? Because I mean, I think a VA is great for that low-value stuff, but getting them to execute on the high value is definitely harder. Jason: [00:06:43] Yeah. It's really challenging. So, you know, I like kind of the process that you went through of going like, hey, how do I get rid of a lot of the stuff? So what were some of, outside of just VA is like, let's talk about kind of the management level. What was kind of that first person like you guys are around 30 people now, so you got some structure in place. And a lot of times people look at it going, man, I would never want 30 people. Because there are kind of that process of like five employees and they're already maxed out and then they think all 30 are going to report to you. Which is, obviously that's a mistake. Like that's a bad, that's a bad structure to have with 30 people. So talk a little bit about the structure that you guys put in place and then how has it evolved? Michael: [00:07:26] Yeah, so I think originally the first people that we brought in that, you know, weren’t ourselves to help where, I guess I call them Amazon experts, the people that understood the platform and how to sell on it. And you know, that allowed us to start taking on more clients because now we can leverage their bandwidth to help with. Then we got to a certain point where we realized, well, we need someone to kind of oversee a lot of what they're doing to make sure it's consistent between what each of them are doing because everyone has different levels of knowledge within Amazon. And I mean, just with anything, you know, some people that are more experienced are going to have more knowledge than others. So we called them the Director of Account Management, uh, was the one that really helped oversee everything. That was our initial kind of manager position. And that handled the, the client-facing side of the business and it worked for a while. And then we figured out it didn't work. We had to kind of evolve a little bit more. And then on the back end of the business, you know, we obviously have a lot going on with, you know, coordinating marketing. I have a marketing manager that handles all of that for me. Content creation, that's a big part of our business is, you know, graphic design, SEO, copywriting. And we brought in a project manager to really help oversee that process. We promoted a designer to really lead the design and make sure designs were consistent across everything. And those are kind of the management positions we started, we started filling start helping us manage things better. Now that Director of Account Management role has kind of faded out to the point where now we have, you know, a real client success team and we have an advertising team. So now the account managers are responsible for managing the relationship. The client success manager is making sure that that's responsible for working. And then we have the advertising team making sure that they're actually getting the results. So, there's definitely an evolution there and I'm sure there's a lot more, that's going to come, but from failing a lot, that's kind of where we got to where we are now. Jason: [00:09:19] Awesome. And then, is there a framework that you've developed over the years for making sure that you deliver, you know, the value to your clients that are on Amazon? Because I always find with successful agencies, there's always kind of a methodology or a framework that they actually follow. Michael: [00:09:39] Yeah, I agree with that. I think there kind of needs to be, we call it a playbook or, you know, just something that you can implement. That's going to get consistent results across clients. I mean, you need to be organized in a way, especially if you're going have people working for you. So yeah, we have implemented like, something like that. I mean, we focus on, uh, an initial 90-day plan to get, make sure every client, we hit these things in the first 90 days from during that period, we're collecting a lot of data and that's going to help us formulate our strategy beyond there. But yeah, I think having an initial, uh, methodology to make sure that they're getting the right results in the beginning with all the setup and you know, all the fundamentals. And then from there seeing where the data is taking us and then implementing the strategy then. Jason: [00:10:21] So let's dive a little bit more into kind of the 90-day plan. So let's say someone goes, hey, um, I want to, you know, be a big dog on Amazon. This is what I want. Right. And, uh, like walk me through that process. Like, are you selling them a 90-day plan or are you selling them something different? Michael: [00:10:39] Yeah, we're selling them. I mean, we obviously want this to be a long-term partnership. We want it to last longer than 90 days, but in our opinion is that, and our view on it is that if you don't see the value within the first 90 days, then like what's the point of working with us. So, you know, initially, we just got to make sure that everything is set up in the account correctly. A lot of times within Amazon, people are doing things incorrectly there, you know, it's just costing them money or making them look not as good as it could. Uh, from there, you know, doing content, making sure everything is optimized. From there, starting advertising and like, yeah, moving down the line, but starting like really with the basics and the fundamentals. And then we think after, you know after we do those things within the first 90 days, you're already going to start seeing a pretty good return on the investment. And that's like what we call the window to show the value and beyond there it's just continuing to show value primarily through advertising and you know, other marketing strategies. But yeah, that's kind of the way that we approach it. We don't sell them on the idea of a 90-day plan. It's, you know, we just have that internally.
Jason: [00:11:39] Yeah, I love that you do that the 90 days, you know, I had a guest on, uh, Joey Coleman who will link up in the, in the show notes. If you guys go there, as well as we had him speak at our Digital Agency Experience, and he talked about why the first one hundred days is so important when you're onboarding a client. Like we all think of, hey, we got a new client. Yeah. Celebrate, ring the gong, ring the bell. That's it, but it's all about like retention, you know, like when I'm chatting with agency owners and we talk about, you know, alright great you're good at attracting. You're good at converting, but are you really good at streamlining the operations where, which, you know, part of that is retention and upsells to other things. So it's yeah, you could be like, there's a lot of companies I know that will be nameless. I won't call out anybody that we're really good at sales and marketing, but they sucked at operations. And you have to kind of get all three of those together. This has all been great. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Michael: [00:12:37] Yeah, I mean, I think there's something interesting when we're talking about, you know, running a business and an agency in general, and I think this last year has made it more relevant than ever. It's just the ability for remote work and that's something that we really leveraged within our business. I mean, you know, virtual assistants are pretty common, but, uh, I actually moved, left the country. I live in Mexico now and, you know, what's helped us build our agency is by building a team down here. So, you know, now I'm leveraging not only the cost savings but the ability to scale faster by hiring more people. And, you know, I'm hiring. Like I talked, like I talked about the range of low value, high value, again, you know, the great opportunity is now that I'm here with them and I can train them on the high-value tasks. So, having the ability to hire a team like that, international, that's not virtual assistants that are on the other side of the world is definitely been very important for us. It's really allowed us to improve the product quality as well, because I think a lot of agencies generally go that independent contractor route where you definitely don't have as much control versus actually having an employee. Jason: [00:13:39] And let's talk about this a little bit, because we actually bought a company on our agency in Costa Rica that did the very easy development work. You know, it was only one time zone away. We were on the east coast at the time and in Atlanta and they were, you know, on central time. So it was really easy, but we always had a struggle with giving them more qualified or thinking tasks. And you just mentioned like you live in Mexico, which is great. I'm sure the weather's a lot better from Connecticut. I grew up in Long Island, so I know how bad the weather gets up there. So Mexico is like, yes. So if someone was hearing this and going, man, I'd love to get a lower-cost labor, but really good. Does it require them having to move there or what have you found is the musts? Michael: [00:14:31] I don't think it requires them having to move there. But I think a lot of times, and this is a big challenge where I think a lot of agencies struggle and I know we struggled with it, is transitioning from I'm hiring someone where I think I know what they're doing to transitioning to I'm hiring someone that I need to train to do what I want. And, you know, that can, all it can be done virtually. I mean, a lot of companies succeed like that one example, you know, we, I have another company down here that's a US-based company. And what they do is they have literally a live camera in the office. So it's like in a TV screen. So it's just like, two-way communication live. If someone has a question, they answer it there. It's almost like being in the physical office. So I think there's a lot of ways to tackle that problem. But if you don't, aren't in that position to really train them, if you don't have, I always say documentation, good SLPs build on how to do things, it's going to be that much harder for them. And I think that's really where a lot of people will probably fail with that. You know, for us being here in the office was great initially, because, you know, we were able to hire people. I mean, when it comes to thinking of people that can think critically. Yeah, we've hired some engineers. We've hired MBAs, uh, people that have really helped us scale in that sense because they have more business experience. But yeah, if we weren't there supporting them, we weren't training them. Like we were, we probably would've just set them up for failure. And then, you know, we wouldn't have seen the return on it. So, and now, again, being remote with COVID, I'm the only one in my office, out of all my employees. So it's definitely still possible to do it. You know, we, we've trained over the past year. We've trained another five people completely remotely up to the point where they're able to, you know, take clients. Uh, handle everything, you know, understand all the strategies. So it's doable, but obviously, that training piece is the key to it. Jason: [00:16:17] like what you said about the TV and the two-way. I just keep picturing the Wizard of Oz. Right? Like the guy, you know, the guy always watches me. Like, I'm watching you, like, you got a question? You're not working? That's pretty funny. That's when you mentioned that, I was like, oh my gosh. Michael: [00:16:35] It's definitely like strange in a sense that it's kind of like big brother watching you, but at the same time, it actually, I think it's really an interesting idea if you're collaborating between your team and a different country. So like for example, a good example of this is let's say you're the marketing head. You're the CMO. And you hire everyone down here. So you have your entire marketing team here, but you're based in the US so you hire a CMO to have a team down here. That's a great way to collaborate. I mean, yeah, I kind of, it still has that big brother vibe to it, but now you can literally direct them in the office and be like, all right, just have this call. This is what I figured out. This is what we need to do. Whatever it is in real-time, instead of dealing with time zone differences, you know, outsourcing stuff to Asia. I mean, you already know from Costa Rica, but yeah. Central time zone for us is huge too. Jason: [00:17:24] And let's talk about the people and then we'll wrap it up. Are you bringing on people that already have the experience or are you training them from the ground up? Michael: [00:17:36] It's very tough to find people that have Amazon experience. Luckily we have a mix of some that do some that don't, we've found some employees that are Amazon sellers themselves down here that sell primarily on Amazon Mexico, that we've been training to, uh, you know, do better. I mean, they understand how the platform works, but they're not massively successful on it. And that's kind of what we've been able to. That's a, that's a much shorter training timeline than it is for other people. We've also hired engineers. Uh, engineers have been very good mainly because their, their problem solving, you know, if there's an issue, they can kind of figure it out when it comes to learning how the platform works. That's something that's very interesting to them. And we've also hired, uh, people with digital marketing experience, even though if it's not, even though it might not be related to Amazon specifically. So, uh, we've hired a couple of employees that had backgrounds in, uh, SEM, uh, other paid ad types, social media, uh, and they've been able to understand the advertising concepts very well and pick that up very quickly. So yeah, I mean, it's very hard to find exactly what we're looking for in our niche, because Amazon is fairly new and there's not a lot of talent out there. And the people that do know what they're doing usually are creating their own agencies or. Or doing consulting themselves. So yeah, that training piece is just massive. Jason: [00:18:51] And then I guess I lied. I have one more question, especially with, you know, something rather new or, or just staying on top of your game. Like, I feel a lot of agencies, you know, they knew how to do something cool. They got into this by accident, but they're not able to stay on the top of their game and, and, and get it to a point where they can actually train others. So, what are some things that you guys have done to stay on top of your game that enables you to train someone that has no knowledge in it? Because I feel that if all the agencies could really understand that and then do that, their work would be so much better. Michael: [00:19:29] Yeah. It's definitely a tough one because once you take a step back from the actual implementation and doing things yourselves, you know, things are constantly changing, whatever, whether you're using Google, whether you're using Amazon or Facebook, whatever platform you are on, if you're not constantly doing it, I think that's going to definitely have a negative effect on your ability to train other people, or you need someone that is doing it to have that knowledge to train other people. So. The way that we've kind of, I guess, avoided that problem is that, you know, and we're still selling products ourselves. So we have an entire separate business that, uh, is selling our own brands online on the Amazon platform and on other platforms. So we're constantly testing and trying new things within that account first to see how it works. And then, you know, we're, we're the Guinea pig and then we're implementing it to all of our clients. So. I think that's one really good way that we're kind of staying on top of what's happening on the platform. I mean, it's definitely getting more and more competitive, but by continuing to do it ourselves we're making sure that we're not falling behind. Jason: [00:20:29] I love it. I see that all the time. And I love using the agency as kind of an incubator or having other, or other companies as an incubator to test out and to really kind of, because a lot of times clients don't want you to test out stuff, but some do like if you go after the right ones, they do. But I like that. So awesome. This has all been great. What's a, what's an agency website that people can go and check you guys out. Michael: [00:20:53] Yeah, sure. So, uh, the best place to check us out is our website, amzadvisors.com. If you or any of your clients are looking for help where we're always going to help, or if you just want to email me directly, you can get me at my email mike@amzadvisors.com. Jason: [00:21:08] Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on. And if you guys enjoyed this episode and you want to be surrounded by other amazing agency owners that can see the things that you might not be able to see and really work on attracting the ideal clients, work on converting them at a high rate and also work on streamlining your operations, where. You're constantly building that talent where not everything has to flow through you, which is pretty frustrating. I would like to invite all of you to go check out the digital agency elite. This is only for experienced agency owners that want to grow and scale fast. I mean like double in the next year, go there, go to digitalagencyelite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Scale_Your_Digital_Agency_By_Near_Shoring_Your_Team.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 9 June 2021
With around three decades of experience running professional services firms, Don Scales understands first-hand how to make them successful. He is currently the Global CEO of Investis Digital, a global digital communications company that helps world-class businesses manage their corporate brands. Today this industry veteran joins us to talk about his experience in the business, the reasons behind failed mergers and acquisitions, and share some funny stories. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesAgency Dad: Today's episode is sponsored by Agency Dad. Agency Dad is an accounting solution focused on helping marketing agencies make better decisions based on their financials. Check out agencydad.money/freeaudit/ to get a phone call with Nate to assess your agency's financial needs and how he can help you. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Avoid a Failed Merger by Staying True to Your Agency's ValuesJason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners, Jason Swenk here, and I'm excited to have an amazing guest. Now, this guest has been in the agency world for a very long time. He started when he was one and he's grown several agencies and the current agency that he's, a global CEO has over 500 employees. They're approaching $90 million in revenue and they've done over 40 acquisitions over the, his lifetime. And I'm really excited to get into it. So let's jump into the episode. Hey, Don. Welcome to the show. Don: [00:00:39] Hey, good to see you. Glad to be here. Jason: [00:00:42] Awesome. Well, I'm excited to chat with you and learn from you because you've been in it for a long time and you have a lot of experience. So for the ones that have not heard of you yet, tell us who you are and what do you do? Don: [00:00:54] My name's Don Scales. I am the global CEO of a company called Investis Digital, which is a UK-based company. It’s private equity-owned by Investcorp. Uh, we just recently exited from, uh, a six-year relationship with the company called ECI out of London. Uh, so we're very excited about our Invest Corp relation. Then prior to that, I was CEO of a company, I'm sure you heard of, called iCrossing, iCrossing, we managed to take that to, um, some $140 million, exited several years back. So I was there for a good eight years, nine years. And then prior to that, I was CEO of a company called Agency.com, which is a pioneer in the web development space. And it's one of the, if you will, one of the founding companies of web development. So that takes me back all the way to 1999 in the digital age, that's kind of like dog years. So I've been around a long time. Jason: [00:02:00] I started our agency in 99 and yeah, I used to love those days. It was kind of like no one knew what websites were, and I could literally go through the yellow pages and go, oh, you don't have a website here, so. Don: [00:02:10] And in fact you'll, you'll get a kick out of this. Back in the day, people would send us RFPs and we, we'd send them an invoice for 50 grand just to read their RFP. Jason: [00:02:25] I love it. Don: [00:24:10] And that was good business. Jason: [00:02:25] I love it Well, I think we're going to get along well, because I always looked at RFP as, um, you know, stands for a couple of things, Request for Punishment as one of them. Other ones, I probably won't name on this show right now. I don't know if I can talk to you that way. But, uh, let's jump into that because that's interesting. Why would you send an invoice for 50 grand to respond to their RFP? Don: [00:02:47] Because, like you said, you could go to the yellow pages. It was just such a demand, and we had very limited resources of people who could do those kinds of work. And so we had to make sure that, uh, every, every minute of every day was, uh, paid for in some way, shape or form. And so if the market would take it, and they did, and they'd pay, it would, we'll invoice. Jason: [00:03:12] That's the biggest foot in the door I've ever seen. So I always believe in like, charging something as a slice off of your core offer, you know, in order to kind of see if they're serious and also kind of prove like the relationship back and forth, but you guys have the win right now of the highest foot in the door yet. And, and you guys said you converted too. That's awesome. Don: [00:03:34] Yeah, we did. And then, you know, then, then everything changed in 2000 and now it was like, it was. Just, the whole market would be evaporated on me. Jason: [00:03:47] Well, that’s what helped us little guys back then when the market crashed, I was like, all these big guys going down, here's our opportunity. You know, let's get on what I call the strategy line, where everybody else is kind of cringing and kind of like they're on that roller coaster. And that's what allowed us to really grow. Don: [00:04:05] You know, it was one of those times when there was so many bigger companies. Yeah. The biggest thing that hit people back down was when it got bigger, they all invested in real estate. And then after that, you had all these fixed commitments and real estate, then the market just evaporates and they're stuck there with all that office space. Jason: [00:04:23] So, what's the key…? You've seen so many agencies go from a certain size and just blow it up. And a lot of people listening, you know, they're in the million mark, they're trying to get to the eight-figure mark. Some of the eight-figure guys are trying to get to the nine-figure and tens and so on. And you've gone through many, many levels. So what are some things that if you're right in the middle of like, let's say a $5 million agency, what do you need to do in order to really kind of, to accelerate your growth that you've seen. Don: [00:05:00] Yeah. So I think there's an evolution. So when there, when you get to the $5 million mark, and then when you're a very small agency and you're a founder, the biggest thing you have to learn in order to get to the next level is you have to learn to delegate. And so if you can find the right people and if you have, if you continue to have to do it all yourself, then you'll never scale. But if you can find the right people and you, and you're willing to delegate and you may make some mistakes and, uh, if you do, but you, you can still move on from those mistakes and you'll have a chance to delegate. And then beyond that, as you continue on, you have to bring in more discipline in your organization's structure. They, you know, there's a lot of research that shows that most agencies sort of tap out either, one, right there where the owner has to start delegating, that's, that's one key point. And then there seems to be another flex point, right around 75 to a hundred employees. For some reason, that’s when the organization becomes, uh, not as flat and it gets a little bit more widespread. And so you have different players involved. And that seems to be a place where organizations have hard times as well. Once you get past a hundred employees, I think you can scale up for, you know, you can do a pretty good job of getting scaled. Cause you have the, if you manage to get the structure, you have the discipline and you have the management team in there and you've got a lot of the right parts. Jason: [00:06:31] I always look at, in our agency mastermind, especially with the guys that are close to that, we're always talking about recruiting and really, how can we make our leaders better leaders. Like, that's our major focus rather than how do we make ourselves better. Right. Because we're literally kind of replacing ourselves. So what have you seen working well, or what's worked for you in the past to make your leaders better? Like you brought them in at a certain level. How did you keep getting them up to the next? Don: [00:07:04] First of all, you have to be willing to let them grow with you. So, like you have to give them something that maybe, that you know is not necessarily in their sweet spot, but it's, it's a growth opportunity and you have to be willing to let people might make a mistake if they're going to make a mistake. If you're not the type who can deal with the issues of making a mistake or a client failure of some sort, then it's going to be difficult because then you have to take these people, dust them off, tell them what they did wrong, pat them on the rear end and send them off and go do it again. Eventually, they start building up a real good experience, basically, they can do this stuff on their own. And that's how, that's how you build a team. And then once you build that team, you stay with it. Now, I’ve found that the best way to build a team and hang onto the team is, I'm a firm believer that as an executive you have to be very consistent in your leadership style. And so if you go to work every day and one day, you're just, just a normal guy. And the next day you're ranting and raving and you want to shoot anybody that walks in the door, nobody's going to work for you. But if you're, if people can say I know, I know Don, he's always this way, you know, consistent and you're, and you're consistent in your thinking and you make decisions so that it's almost transparent to these people, how you're making your decisions. Then they're going to learn how to make decisions very much akin to how you make decisions. And that's how you get a team that sort of has staying power. Jason: [00:08:42] Yeah. I looked at it too of going, uh, someone shared with me many years ago, it's called the one, three, one method, or I think it's called that. But whenever your team would come to you and think about as you're building an agency, your team's always coming to you because, especially in the beginning, you're like the toll booth everything's flowing through you. Whenever they would say, you know, hey, here's the challenge? What do you think we need to do? Like they would ask me and I'm like, no, no, no. What are three options that you think we need to do? And then what's your recommendation. If they do that enough, then they're just going to stop coming to you for these things and they'll start solving it. And then they'll do that with their team. Because I looked at our whole goal was. My job is to coach and mentor my leadership team. And then they should, it should trickle down. I love that you said consistency too, because I was talking to an agency the other day. I'm like, man, you're all over the place. Like one day you're up here, another day you're a tyrant here and it's just. Don: [00:09:46] As an employee, you come to work and you don't know who you don't know which boss is going to show up today. That's not the kind of place you'd probably want to work at for the long run. Jason: [00:09:55] Yeah, exactly. Well, let's kind of switch focus a little bit and talk about why do you think, you’ve obviously you've gone through, you know, over 40 acquisitions. Why do you think a high percentage of mergers or acquisitions actually fail? Don: [00:10:13] Uh, it's a great question. And it's probably on page one or two of my new book coming out. I believe if you look at the diligence process that people go through and you start looking at what people really examine when they look at potentially buying a company. What you find is that they don't spend a whole lot of time looking at the value set of these companies that they're looking to buy. So you don't really have a good keen understanding of whether or not the value set of the people you're buying is in alignment with the value set that your company has. So I talk about in my, in the book, this whole thing called value compatibility profile. And what kind of alignments you see in these values, and then when these companies fail and if you go read in the press, you're reading the literature, the first thing people say, well, you know the values weren't in alignment, the cultures were off. Well, It shouldn't be a big surprise to anybody that, uh, these things failed. If you didn't spend enough time on the front end that if, when they do fail, these are the cause on the backend. So my belief is that we spend too much time on the hard stuff, like the financial stuff, and we don't spend enough time on the values, compatibility and the alignment of values, because that is going to dictate much of how these two companies come together. Jason: [00:11:36] Yeah, I always tell everybody, and I did this when we were acquired. I wanted to sit in their office for a couple of days, like a fly on the wall. And I wanted to see, you know, are these people happy? Do they joke around? Like, I'm obviously not a corporate type. So if we were going to be acquired by someone, very corporate. It would've just been a complete, utter disaster. Don: [00:11:59] Well, I had this good story I tell that back in the day, uh, when I was at iCrossing, there's this amazing agency, AKQA that, uh, and Tom Bedecarré who used, you know, it was a CEO there for years. And at one point GA, who own them, and then, we had gone with some other people that they had this idea that we were going to possibly merge the two and it would create this really powerhouse in the marketplace, a creative powerhouse, like AKQA, and then a performance media powerhouse like iCrossing, you could bring that together. And I think it would have reshaped some of the agency business. Well, so they were talking about merging it. And the first thing you have to do is you have to look at it and say, well, you know, can people get along and the CEOs even get along. So, uh, you know, uh, Tom and I get together and the board calls us up and says, look, we want to know if you guys can make this work. We want you guys to, uh, take a weekend and go to go to Sonoma County or Napa Valley for a weekend, have some wine, just sit around and talk. So that's what we did. We went up there and spent the entire weekend up there just to see if we even liked each other. I found out about his kids. He finds about my life. At the end of the day, you know, I found out what was important to him. He got to know what was important to me and we, and we figured out a way to stay to the word. Now, but the deal fell apart for other reasons. But that part of I would I think would have worked its way through. And that's just because we put in the time upfront. Jason: [00:13:32] Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. Now, outside of values and matching the culture, what are the numbers like when you were acquiring agencies? What are the numbers that really matter to you to make sure or what's a good acquisition for you? Don: [00:13:50] Well, experience has shown me that if… you're going to get what you paid for, right? And, and so like, if you, if you're looking to get something on the cheap, then chances are, you're going to get something cheap, right. You're going to be spending a lot of time fixing it. And so if you’re into reclamation projects, that's a whole different world. If you really want to grow. You don't want to spend all your life fixing what you just bought. So I'm, you know, I'm a firm believer that you pay a fair price and you gotta be willing to walk away. So for me, it's understanding what, what the true… and, I'm not into, since we're talking about services businesses, it really has to be more EBITDA-based then it's going to be revenue-based as opposed to a lot of these technology businesses that we see, but, uh, so on that base, you know, I know what multiples are to be in play. So, you know, if, if people are willing, then what you, what you really find, and you know this because you've seen it, as many times as I have is that most of these owners think they're the unicorn out there and they have, they want the one-off multiple that nobody's ever seen before, and that's just not going to happen. So you have to get people to get, take a dose of reality, and come down to earth. And if they get real. Then you have the basis to starting at the discussion about getting something done. Jason: [00:15:29] As an agency owner, it's hard to know when you have to make those big decisions. And I remember needing advice for thinking like hiring or firing or reinvesting. And when can I take distributions without hurting the agency? You know, we're excellent marketers, but when it comes to agency finances like bookkeeping, forecasting, or really organizing our financial data, most of us are really kind of a little lost. And that's why my friend Nate created Agency Dad specifically to solve these exact problems. You know, at Agency Dad, they help agency owners handle the financial part of their agency so they can focus on what they're really good at. Nate has spent years learning the ins and outs of agency business. He understands everything from how to structure your books, to improving the billing process and really managing your financial efficiencies. Agency Dad will show you how to use your financial data to make the key decisions, from making your agency more successful and most importantly, more profitable. If you want to know how your agency finances stack up to the rest of the industry Agency Dad can tell you how to do that. A lot of my listeners have already gotten their free audit from Agency Dad. And if you haven't yet, go to agencydad.money/freeaudit before August 30th and get your free financial metrics audit. Also, just for smart agency listeners, find out how to get your first month of bookkeeping or dashboarding and consulting for free. It's time to clean up your agency finances and listen to dad, go to agencydad.money/free audit. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned EBITDA because that's how we've always based it on. And I always used to love when people would say. Oh, we're a $10 million agency. We're a $20 million agency. And I'm like, well, what's the profit? And they're like, oh, we're like a 5% margin. I'm like, oh, that's horrible. And I also agree with you too. A lot of times when we actually we at Republics, we started buying agencies. Like we don't buy anybody under a million and EBITDA. There's the same amount of work. A lot of people are like, especially when the pandemic happened, they're like, oh, we're going to grab up all these people that are struggling. I'm like, I rather grab the people that are growing. Don: [00:17:52] Yeah, you know, I'll tell you a really, a really funny story was, uh, when I was at Agency.com and I was sitting in there talking to John Wren, who’s the head of Omnicom, and he's bought more companies than anybody I know. And he's, uh, so he was telling me one day he said, uh. He said: Scales, let me give you a piece of advice on how to deal with acquisitions. He says until a company gets over a million dollars in EBITDA, he says, you just fly over, fly over the top and you wave to the airplane. Don't ever go visit until get over a million dollars, then you'll stop.
Jason: [00:18:36] That's awesome. Oh, definitely so. Right, because I feel that businesses can hit a couple of million by accident, but to get to a million in EBITDA, it's a little bit more challenging. Don: [00:18:47] and they can lose a couple million by accident too. They can go both ways by accident, too. Jason: [00:18:55] Exactly. What are the multiples that you're seeing for, let's say, one to about 3 million in EBITDA. Don: [00:19:01] Uh, you know, I wouldn't pay it from one to 3 million. I meant, like you said, some of that could be by accident. But I'd say probably it's, it's still single digits from me. Uh, you know, I'm not going to be paying at, I'd probably pay six to eight, maybe somewhere in there, but not much more. I can't see much more than that. Jason: [00:19:23] Yeah. When does it really start jumping up to the double digits? Don: [00:19:27] I think one, when you get a little bit of scale to it. So, you know, once you get to a point where there's not 50 other people that look just like you. So, I mean, if you get a, I can recall when we hit, uh, at iCrossing. And we actually merged with Proxycom and that got that, that took us over a hundred million dollars in revenue. We were at, I forget, like 20 some odd percent on EBITDA. That put us into some rarefied air in the agency business. First of all, you don't see that many agencies go over a hundred million and then you don't see that many agencies making that kind of EBITDA. That got us, you know, we ended up making in the high teens. And so it's really the scarcity factor that drives it. So if you are a three or $5 million agency, Then you better have a real unique proposition is going to be able to get something in the marketplace is going to be differentiable because there's, there's a lot of those out there. Jason: [00:20:34] Yeah. Do you look at specialization as something that separates agencies rather than saying know the typical we're a full service “me-too” agency. Don: [00:20:43] Well, there are two things that... One is, we're a full service and two is, yeah, we deserve it because we have such great people. We have unique people. Everybody says that. So when I hear that, I'm thinking they don’t even. Jason: [00:20:58] Or what is it? The three Ps: Process, Portfolio, and People. Don: [00:21:02] Okay. But so when you start hearing that, then you wonder what their strategy and what their story is. But if they cannot in a minute, if they have that 32nd elevator speech cold, and they can tell you exactly who their market is and what they're trying to accomplish, then you pay attention. Jason: [00:21:20] Yeah. So when you guys merged and you took. Your guys' revenue, you guys became a hundred million and 20 million in EBITDA, right? How long did you guys have to stay merged together before you exited? Because I found, and what we're finding too is like, just putting all these companies together, you have to make it work for some time for a buyer to treat you seriously. Don: [00:21:43] Yeah, I think what you, what you have is typically have, you know, right after something like that you're going to take at least a year to get all the kinks out. So you're going to have turnover. You're going to have this, you're going to have that. You're going to lose some clients. You've got all these kinds of issues you have to work your way through. And then you've probably got after that, you've probably got another year of sort of demonstrating that you can manage it and run it right. So you're looking at, probably at least two years, uh, before you can really do something with something like that. Jason: [00:22:16] Yeah. And let's talk about kind of margins. Because a lot of people, especially on, on the lower end, the people that you're flying over and waving to. I love that the flyover. Don: [00:22:30] I love it. That is a great story, and he said it was such a straight face too. Jason: [00:22:34] And he was a part of, uh, the CEO of Omnicom. Was that right? Don: [00:22:38] Omnicom, Omnicom is, he's probably done… He's probably done past some acquisitions. I don't even know. Jason: [00:22:47] That’s hilarious. I love it. So the people that were flying over a lot of times, you know, their margins are at 10, 15% and they're like, oh, that's good. Or even 20%. And I look at that going that's I feel that's below average. So what do you think average is for profit margins? Don: [00:23:06] Yeah. Since I, I spent enough time and Omnicom I'll quote John Wren one more time I met John Wren used to say, if you really want to be an exceptional agency, then your overhead’s 20%, your direct cost is at 60% of your margins are 20. He said, then that's what, it's a very simple business, Don. He said, you make 20% every year, he says, I'll never, you'll never hear from me. I'm happy and I will never bother you. So I mean, that’s kind of the way I looked at it, it was it's. Uh, and you have to, you have to take that, but there's so many CEOs that just don't have that kind of. That makeup to focus on that number and be focused on that 20% or better. And now, you know, over the years, because we've gone more from services and now it's sort of this mix of technology and services. And now when 20 years ago, we didn't hear about recurring revenue and now there's all this talk about how much your business is recurring versus repeat versus, all of this. It’s all the same, you know, now you have to be a little bit more focused and you do have the opportunity to get higher margins as a result of all this, but yeah, pure services business, you ought to be shooting for at least 20%. Jason: [00:24:27] Yeah, I love it. And you kind of alluded a little bit to, you know, the reoccurring model, because when I did the first agency, about 85% was just project-based. Like we would go into Lotus Cars and we'd go into Tochi and right. And just exactly, but we had a machine for our pipeline. Like it was predictable for us. Now going around it's kind of a little different. I actually kind of love reoccurring cause it's predictable, especially when we're buying someone. So what's your thoughts on that? Don: [00:24:59] Right, and that's where you're gonna get margin. That's where you're going to get margin. So nobody's going to pay you for project-based businesses. Now, even if you have, like you said, even if you have a machine that can crank out new opportunities. Nobody's going to pay you because they, they can't look forward. They can't see it beyond a certain amount of time. So what you're going to have, what your business is, no matter how… you could have five years of great project-based business results. But because they can't see more than three or four months in the future, they're not going to pay you the higher multiple, but as you get more recurring, and a word we call repeat, which is meaning that, you know, you're not necessarily going from contract to contract your own more or less 12 months kind of contracts. They may be on auto-renewals, those kinds of things, where you're not having to go out and renegotiate something every three months. Uh, then you can start, people are, you know, then people respect your business a little bit more than they value visible more highly. Jason: [00:26:00] Yeah. And you know what I've always seen, especially when we're going in and doing valuation of going well, you might get your valuation, but most of it's going to be tied into an earn-out because there's no predictability. Don: [00:26:13] Yeah, exactly. No, that's exactly right. And then depends on what the, if you're a fan of or not, but. Jason: [00:26:23] I was screwed by that one, I wish I read your book. Don: [00:26:27] I've been screwed on both sides of that one. Jason: [00:26:29] I know. I've been on both sides and, you know, especially what we're doing it now is like, we've always structured the earn-out now to make it fair. And we're like, we're not going to base it on time. We'll base it on when you hit this. So like, if an agency comes to us and says, well, I'll hold off, Jason. And you can buy us next year because I feel we're going to be double. And we’ll be like, okay, well, if you feel that, why don't we put an earn-out on that? So when you hit the double, we'll give it to you. There's no set time so we can screw you. Like it has to… like, it can be a win-win I'm tired of people taking advantage. Don: [00:27:07] And generally takes them twice as long to get to double, right? Jason: [00:27:13] Exactly. They're just, I think they're trying to buff up. And then they also where they tell us, they go, well, we want to stay on for long haul. I'm like, no, you probably be the worst employee. I know I was the worst employee ever. Don: [00:27:26] I man, especially it's really hard to you get a successful entrepreneur who started an agency, or started two or three agencies, uh, yeah, they make the, they're not the best employees and the guy, the guy I had the most respect for. Started with that iCrossing and he could work for anybody else. Jason: [00:27:46] Yeah, that's, that's me. Last question I have for you, Don is as a global CEO of one of the big agencies. What are your roles? Like, what do you look at as your role in the agency? Like if you had to pick like three or four roles. Don: [00:28:15] Uh, I think really my role is to provide two things. One is depending on what the, you know, you have to articulate what the strategy is, and in some cases that's a little easier than other cases. But I have to articulate what the strategy is and then I have to provide a culture and environment by which people can go accomplish, you know, accomplish those goals. But you have to get people, you have to show them the direction. You have to give them the tools by which they can go do it. And you got to get out of their way and let them do it. And, those, those are the keys. Jason: [00:28:41] Yeah. That's, that's kind of what I looked at when, when I started getting up in a little, the gray hair, as I started figuring out that part of like getting out of people's way. And it's more of… Don: [00:28:52] Uh, and the good ones, you know, I have some people who've been with me here Investis Digital I've had people who've been with me for 20 years. This is their third company we worked at together and they're, and they're some of the best people in the world. And that's the reason is because I'm smart enough to know when to get out of their way. Jason: [00:29:13] Yeah. I always said I wanted to be the dumbest person in the room, at the company, and that was not hard for me. Don: [00:29:22] I think Reagan said that too. One time. He said you want to be the dumbest guy in the room one time when it was, he said something like that. Jason: [00:29:30] Oh, that's funny. Well, Don, this has all been amazing. Is there anything I didn't ask you before we tell people where they can get the book? Don: [00:29:38] I think, uh, you know, I probably. You know, I thought maybe you might ask me, like, give me one funny story that came out of doing one of these acquisitions I had one before I was going to tell you. Yeah. So the first acquisition that I ever did at iCrossing was a company called NewGate Internet, it was in Sausalito, California. And we had spent all this time and effort getting this right. We had dotted all the I's and cross T's and we wanted to make sure that the board was really standing behind this and. So we got all excited. We got this deal done. So, uh, we went out there, uh, myself and the CEO of iCrossing at the time we went out there and went to Sausalito. And so we meet, we meet the CEO of NewGate Internet at the front door. We're talking to him and I said, okay, is everybody ready? Yeah. I got the whole team together and we're going to introduce you guys is going to be great. So we walk in and the. And the CEO stands up in front of his group, which is probably about 50 to 75 people. And he says, well, uh, he says, uh, I have some news for you guys. He said, you don't know this, but for the last six months I've been, uh, trying to sell the company and he says I've actually been successful at doing so. And so, uh, your new owners here, Jeff and Don they're from a company called iCrossing. They're going to be your new bosses. And today's my last day. Uh, I'll be leaving as soon as I finished speaking here, it's been great working with you for the last six years, and I hope to see you guys soon. And they literally picked up and walked out the fire escape and never came back. And Jeff and I are looking at each other like, holy cow, what are we going to do now? So we had to figure this out on the fly in front of 75 people who didn't even know they were being sold and we made it work this way through, but there was a, oh my God moment there where it was like, my gosh, what are we going to do next? Oh, wow. That was our first deals at iCrossing. Jason: [00:31:51] It's awesome. I mean, literally he got the mic, he dropped it and then just bounced and walked right out the fire escape too. Was he afraid that you guys would go to stop the elevator? Don: [00:32:05] I think he was, I think he was so embarrassed about just pulling a fast one there. He just didn't even want to wait to go out to the front door. He didn't want to say goodbye to anybody, he just left. Jason: [00:32:16] Wow. So was it a good acquisition or did you find a lot of skeletons? Don: [00:32:21] Yeah, it turned out really good. I mean, they, they were really, uh, experts in paid media. Uh, and they really set the tone for iCrossing for years in paid media. And we got some really fantastic people out of that, but it was, it has bumps in the early days, that’s for sure. Jason: [00:32:37] That's crazy. I mean, literally like. Don: [00:32:43] It was pretty funny. Jason: [00:32:43] I can only imagine, like, I'm picturing, I know what you're talking about a fire escape, but I, I see like the New York fire escapes, like him sliding down. With the ladder. Don: [00:32:53] With the ladder and everything. They don't have those in Sausalito. Jason: [00:32:58] I know, but that would be. You should embellish that a little bit. Like be like, yeah, he just slid down like was James Bond. Don: [00:33:08] I need to build this up a little bit more. Jason: [00:33:10] Yeah, definitely. Well, you got to sell it, like your, sell it a little bit more. Don: [00:33:14] Exactly. It is in the book though. You can read about it in the book. Jason: [00:33:19] Cool, what's the name of the book? And obviously, we probably can get it anywhere, right? Don: [00:33:23] It's from Forbes books. It’s out Amazon for pre-sale right now. It comes out June 6th and it's called the M&A Solution. Jason: [00:33:30] Awesome, well, everyone go check it out. And then, uh, what's the agency URL so people can go and check out the agency as well. Don: [00:33:38] The agency that I’m at right now. It’s called Investis Digital, and like I said it's London-based and we just got bought by Investcorp, so yeah, check us out. Jason: [00:33:50] Awesome. Well, Don, thanks so much for coming on the show. It was a lot of fun hearing some of the old stories. Make sure all of you go check out the book. Check out the agency as well. And if you guys enjoyed this episode and you guys want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners that are sharing what's working now, so you guys can scale faster and really know that you're doing it in the right way. I'd love to invite all of you to go to digitalagencyelite.com. Check it out, apply if you're right for us, we'll have a conversation. And until next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Avoid_a_Failed_Agency_Merger_By_Focusing_on_Culture.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 6 June 2021
Todd Taskey has over twenty years of experience as a founding investor, board member, and management team of several business ventures. Now, as M&A at Potomac Business Capital, he helps CEO's and entrepreneurs develop a successful exit strategy by understanding the mid-market investment banking process. Today he joins us to talk about roll-up strategy, the mergers and acquisitions red flags you should avoid, and what you should be offering as an agency if you're thinking of selling. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesSweetProcess: Today's episode is sponsored by SweetProcess. If you're looking for a way to speed up processes in your agency, SweetProcess will provide the systemization you need to scale and grow your business. Check out sweetprocess.com/smartagency and get your productivity up. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Secrets to Implementing a Successful Roll-Up Strategy for Your AgencyJason: [00:00:00] Hey, what's up everybody. Jason Swenk here and I have an amazing guest today. A repeat guest, Todd, where we're going to talk about a roll-up strategy because there's a lot of things out there right now that are going on and this market is growing very quickly with, uh, mergers and acquisitions and, Todd is going to provide a lot of value to you. So let's get into the episode. Are you frustrated with how long it takes you to get stuff done in your agency? Or tired of your team missing steps or falling through the cracks? You know, you may be looking for an easy way to capture SOPs, to scale your agency faster and easier. Now, our partners at SweetProcess have created an amazing tool to help you overcome all these frustrations. SweetProcess really lets you create a step-by-step instruction from every task in your agency. From writing proposals to executing client work and responding to client requests. So everything gets done more easily, no more mistakes or missed steps. Plus, you'll have a central place where everyone employees, contractors, or even VAs can access your procedures anytime from anywhere, the best way to learn about how Sweet Process really can streamline your agency is to start using it. So exclusively for the smart agency masterclass listeners, you can try it out for 28 days free of charge. No strings attached. Just go to sweetprocess.com/smartagency to start your free 28-day free trial today. That's sweetprocess.com/smartagency to get your SOP is down and your productivity up. Hey Todd, welcome to the show. Todd: [00:01:50] Happy to be here, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:01:52] Yeah. So for the ones that have not checked out our other interview, which we'll actually link in the show notes, make sure you guys all check that out, but, uh, tell us who you are and what do you do? Todd: [00:02:04] Yes. My name is Todd Taskey, T-A-S-K-E-Y. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to connect Potomac Business Capital is our group and we do, uh, investment banking primarily in the digital marketing and digital transformation space. Jason: [00:02:18] Awesome. Well, let's kind of jump right into it. You know, there's a lot of crazy things going on at this moment with, you know, different deal structures. What are you guys seeing since you're in the mix of it with a lot of digital agencies? Todd: [00:02:32] Yeah. You know, it's interesting. We've got one client. I'll give you just a couple of anecdotal pieces. I've got a client right now that is small, you know, they're actually under a million dollars of EBITDA, which is usually an important cutoff, but these guys are very focused in terms of the work that they do. They provide email marketing in a very specific vertical. And that becomes a, a really good bite-size piece for an acquirer. And in fact, both of, we expect two LOIs this week for them, and both of those are very sizable companies, but I think they viewed this opportunity as, like I said, a bite-sized piece that they can build out a practice from and then cross sell across to their other brands. We've also got, you know, we closed the deal right at the end of the year where our client is about 2 million of EBITDA. They're a partner in the HubSpot space, has long time been there. And we were able to put them together with the business, very similar to theirs, probably about twice the size. And that now becomes one of the larger premier players in the HubSpot space. We've got another client now that’s in the video intelligence space, again, they're a little bit under a million dollars of EBITDA. But because they're so specific in their, in their offering, it becomes easier for us to find, uh, a very specific or curated fit for them really, you know, from the, almost from the network that we already have. Jason: [00:04:15] And so what should people know about the possible roll-up? Because there's a lot of people listening in that their intent is to have option to sell. And let's say they're to a point where they do want to sell, but they might not be over the certain threshold in order to see the real money that they really want. Like you and me. We always discuss kind of the million in EBITDA is kind of the, the starter, right? Like you got to get to that level in order to really start to entertain some healthy offers. And so talk a little bit about how can the people listen and get a little bit creative. Todd: [00:04:53] So, two things I would say. Don't think of it as a roll-up, think of it as an arc of services. And so when people put together, when larger buyers put things together, they don't want an SEO shop and another SEO and another SEO so that they can become a bigger shop. What they want to do is become a destination, a one-stop-shop if you will, for their clients. So what a lot of, for example, there was a lot of news. People want to check in Tinuiti, which was a, a Mountaingate Capital company that was acquired in January by new mountain capital. And it's very, very, uh, nice data point for the space, but they had spent the last four years building an arc of services. So for an example, they acquired a company four years ago called Elite SEM they added paid media, they added social, they added content, they added analytics, a delivery system and a platform and everything else, and had a wonderful exit from that. So, one question for your listeners is, am I providing a, a really specific piece? Right, to that arc of services. And am I really, really good at providing that to folks? So that would be one. And then I think, you know that the second thing, when you look to be acquired, private equity is driving a lot of the activity in our space today. And so for private equity to get the returns that their investors want, they always will have some debt in their structure. To be able to borrow from an institution they need $2 million of EBITDA. For most lenders, that is the minimum that they'll do. So from that standpoint, I'll give you an example, we've got a bunch of private equity relationships. The transaction that we did with HubSpot, I reached out to three of the groups that we work with and that we know pretty well. And I said, hey, you know, if you don't know about HubSpot, you should, it's a fragmented industry. There's a lot of smaller providers in that space. And it's a great software for inbound lead creation. So two of the groups said to me, Jesus, you know, if you can find me, uh, you know, an a million and a million or a million and a half. You know, any pieces that you can put two together so that we can become a diamond or an elite partner, and we can, we can lend against it. Then we would be excited to do that. So that's a project that we're working on now where I've got actually two kind of in the early stage companies that are both, uh, around a million that will get us to that amount that private equity can, you know, can sponsor. So there's lots of opportunity that's out there for, and it's a little bit easier if you're smaller to solve a very specific issue, if you will. Jason: [00:07:58] So if you're putting two kinds of agencies together, right? Like you're taking one plus one equals two. How long do they have to be together before you can kind of go to someone and be like, yeah, it's a proven model, right? Like, like what you were talking about is looking at like, all right, it's not just adding services to add services. It's adding services to come up with a full solution for getting the max results. So I just want everyone to be clear on, on that, but how long do you feel like if you do take, like, let's use an example in our mastermind, we have tons of agencies and some specialize in one particular service and that's it. And same thing with another one. Now, if they come together and they're like, Hey, we're both going after this industry, we put these two together. Wow. We'll make it over the threshold, but how long do they have to be together? Because I know with Republics we're putting, you know, last year we bought eight agencies and I still look at it going, look, we still need to make sure everything fits together before we talk about exit and all that. So what are your thoughts there? Todd: [00:09:08] So couple of great questions. The first is when you were putting agencies together. Here's what I find, that without cash, the deal oftentimes will break. So for example, Jason, you and I are roughly equals. We're going to put our business together. Let's say we have about a million bucks of EBITDA. A million bucks is, you know what it means. I have a very good life. You have a very good life. Now I'm going to give that up and I'm not going to be in control of my agency anymore. And, and who's going to be in charge. Who's going to make the decision to, you know, a whole bunch of questions that make it difficult. So, real-world example, when we did that transaction at the end of the year with two HubSpot agencies, we, one company had the larger company of three owners and my guy was a single owner. We put them together. Now they all have roughly 25% of the business. To make that work, my guy got roughly $3 million. The acquiring company wrote a check. They had it on their balance sheet and they wrote a check for that amount of cash. So now, that happened December 31st, our expectation is that we'll spend most of the year doing integration, picking up efficiencies. And then we will get credit for that. So the combined businesses, about 6 million, we would expect at the year-end, it would be about seven and a half million of EBITDA. And then beginning of next year, we'll take that to the marketplace, right? With the other project I mentioned where we're bringing those $2 million businesses together. That's going to work because we're going to bring a private equity group together at that time. So each of those owners will get cash at close. Probably somewhere in the two to $4 million each in cash. And then they'll also have somewhere between 20 and 35% equity in the new company, the larger company, and all of these things need to be worked out. The private equity group is going to get a little bit better value on that business because it's not as valuable because it's smaller and because they haven't harvested the efficiency yet. So in, in that deal, it, when we start, it will be agency one agency, two and private equity all coming together at the same time. Whereas the other deal that I mentioned, those guys are going to just do it themselves because they were strong enough and they had enough cash to be able to do that. So that we'll have a little bit of an impact on the answer from that standpoint. But I would think. You would want to be able to show a full financial year cycle to prove to somebody this is real. And it takes that long, right? For things to be humming along that everybody's familiar with the system and move on from there. Jason: [00:11:55] What are the things to look out for that you see as big mistakes when. Because there's a lot of people, you know, I see a lot of people go into my mastermind members and clients are like, hey, let's roll-up. Let's roll-up. Like, what are some of the gotchas to be like, or the red flags for people to avoid? Todd: [00:12:13] Yeah. You know, uh, giving an example, Mountaingate Capital has had tremendous exits so far with Olsen and Sierra and just recently with Tinuiti and, and the, the guys that drive that private equity group say that the number one most important criteria for them is culture fit. Secondly, is culture fit, and I think third is also culture fit. So they also established leadership because there was somebody who writes a check, right? Whoever writes a check is in charge and what I see oftentimes. Uh, in, in kind of failed combinations is that nobody writes a check nobody's really in charge. Everybody's kind of given up their autonomy and aren't completely comfortable and they do it almost without a lot of forethought. So that would be one. I think the second thing is the notion of two companies coming together. If they're smaller, they should add certain capabilities. So for example, in, in a transaction that we just closed at the beginning of the month, that hasn't announced yet. These guys both do digital marketing focused on the SMB space. My guys had really good technology, but not a lot of sales infrastructure. The buyer had great sales capability. They didn't have technology and to add the technology to their sales process should have a tremendous impact. And that will, that will cover both sides. So from that perspective, it shouldn't be just, you know, two companies that are identical and feel like they belong together. There should be something that you add to each other. Jason: [00:14:05] Love it. Well, this has all been amazing. Todd, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience. Todd: [00:14:10] Um, no, not from a question standpoint. I just think it's interesting when I have conversations, which I do pretty regularly. People are surprised at the type of opportunity that's out there because oftentimes they think, well, I got to sell my business, I guess some cash, I get an earn-out and then I become an employee. And there are so many more exciting opportunities than something like that. That extent, that A gets liquidity, B hopefully a better upside and gives entrepreneurs an opportunity to focus on just the things that they are best at that they enjoy the most. So, so maybe it's just opening up their aperture a little bit to consider what they would like to do. Because I, I believe that we'll see a really strong next two or three or four years in this space where good companies will get strong valuations and have the opportunity to do, you know, what gets them excited. Jason: [00:15:12] For the ones that are interested in chatting with you. They're, they're over the million in EBITDA or close to it. They're wanting to really kind of exit or have a bigger opportunity to take some chips off the table. Where can they reach out to you? Todd: [00:15:26] Yeah. So find me on LinkedIn is the easiest way to do that and just reach out there. But one last thing that I would say, which I think is interesting. You see, I have lots of conversations with clients or prospects, that they do not want to go through this process of putting a deck together, getting their financials right, going out to the market and let's see if somebody will buy us. But I have a lot of them that say, listen, this is how I'm thinking about the future. Here's where I see our strengths and weaknesses. This would be a really great fit for me. And, and so for example, I've got two deals under LOI now. The video intelligence company was exactly like that. When I sold to my client, Arie, he said here's, this is what would help accelerate us and the people that would benefit most from our capability set. And he's been on my board here for a while. One day I had a conversation about a completely different opportunity. And turned out that potential buyer is a great fit for him. So I'm always interested to talk with people that are doing interesting work that want to explore what might be out there for them. Whether that's something that they want to do in the Spring of 2021, or just to be exposed to ideas that are interesting as they come along. So I'm always happy to do that. Uh, our website is potomacbusinesscapital.com and you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty easy to get to. Jason: [00:16:55] Man this new software, I'm waiting for the little keyboard, but, uh, make sure you, uh, tell him, uh, you heard of, uh, him from the smart agency master class and they'll hook you up. And, uh, if you guys enjoyed this episode and you guys want to be around amazing agency yeah. Owners to really help you scale faster, create that predictability, that, that growth, and really achieve the money that you really want in your business. I want to invite all of you to go to digitalagencyelite.com and check out our exclusive masters. Todd: [00:17:26] I will tell you some of the, a few of the guys that I've spoken with have been thrilled, maybe a little bit surprised at how much they have ramped up their agency as being part of the mastermind group. Not just the stuff that they've learned from you, but being around other people is forcing you to think bigger and to do bigger and you know, all those exciting things. So keep up the good work. Jason: [00:17:46] Oh, yeah, we, we love it. You know, if we can, uh, speed up people's, uh, sales process and get them to where they want to go faster, that's our whole goal. So thanks Todd for coming on, everybody go reach out and, uh, until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Implement_a_Successful_Roll-Up_Strategy_for_Your_Agency.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 2 June 2021
As a Certified Management Accountant, a Certified Internal Auditor, and certified in Strategy and Competitive Analysis, Naten Jenson, co-founder of Agency Dad, is certainly the best person to help you establish a strong business and drive your agency's profitability. Today, he joins us to talk about scope creep, a topic that many agency owners struggle with but should definitely learn more about. Remember that if we can get a hold of scope creep, we're going to increase our profit. 3 Little Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesAgency Dad: Today's episode is sponsored by Agency Dad. Agency Dad is an accounting solution focused on helping marketing agencies make better decisions based on their financials. Check out agencydad.money/freeaudit/ to get a phone call with Nate to assess your agency's financial needs and how he can help you. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Understanding Scope Creep Will Help Drive ProfitabilityJason: [00:00:00] Hey, what's up agency owners, Jason Swenk here. And I'm excited, I have a repeat guest and a repeat guest where we're going to talk about scope creep. Right? You should hear that tun-tun-tun on scope creep, because a lot of us, we struggle with this and if we can get a hold of scope creep we're going to increase our profit. And we'll be able to afford those people to really come in and do the things we don't want to do anymore. So this is a really important episode and let's get into it. Hey, Nate. Welcome back. Nate: [00:00:34] Thanks Jason. Glad to be back with you again. Jason: [00:00:37] Awesome. Well, uh, for the people that have not checked out the first episode, tell us who you are and what do you do. Nate: [00:00:43] My name's Nate Jensen. Uh I'm with Agency Dad, our website is agencydad.money. And we are an outsource CFO firm, bookkeeping firm, accounting firm. And our focus is really helping agencies to drive their profitability. We do that by good accounting where we can actually measure profitability, measure what's going on and those metrics drive action, drive decision-making that leads to greater profitability. Jason: [00:01:08] Awesome. Well, let's go ahead and talk about scope creep and how to identify this, because I know there's a lot of agency owners. We're busy at bringing in new business and we really kind of take our eye off the ball a little bit. And there's a lot of, uh, what I call profit leaks in scope creep. So tell us how can we identify these? Nate: [00:01:33] Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. What I, what I see is when, when someone's in growth mode, they're, they're so focused on that next client, that next client. That they're not measuring and they're not managing the profitability of existing clients. Peter Drucker is famous for saying what gets measured, gets managed. So identifying scope creep, the first thing you've got to do is measure it, where's it happening with clients is that happening with? And, and how bad is the problem? And so I want to talk today a little bit about how do we measure it? What are the numbers that we need to know? And, uh, after we go through that, we'll get to, what can we then do about it? Jason: [00:02:09] Cool. So, yeah, let's get into how do we measure it? Nate: [00:02:12] Ok, First, how do you measure it? There's three numbers that you need to know. And most accounting systems you should be able to pull at least one of these numbers out of there. You need to know your bill rates, which is, hey, if we think we're going to spend 10 hours on a client project, we're going to bill them, let's say, $120 an hour. So we're billing $1,200. The $120, that's your bill rate. Second thing you need is your gross profit on a client. This is the one that you should be able to pull out of QuickBooks or whatever accounting software you're in. And your gross profit is what you build a client minus any direct costs. So if you're, if you're spending money on ads for your clients, it's going to be what you bill the client minus what you spent for those ads. That's your what's left is your gross profit. And then the last thing, the third number that you need is how many hours. In a given month, did you actually spend on that client? So the way you measure scope creep, I'm going to give you three formulas there. They're simple formulas. If you're driving don't, you know, don't stop and try and do the math. Jason: [00:02:09] We'll put them in the show notes for you guys. Nate: [00:02:12] But the first thing all you're going to do is you can take that gross profit by clients in whatever month you're looking at and divide it by your bill rate. So let's say your gross profit on a client in a month is $1,200. If your bill rates $120 an hour, you get an answer of 10, right. 1200 divided by your, your bill rates, 10 hours. And that 10 hours. That's how many hours you have available for that client. You've said based on my bill rate, you've got 10 hours. So one of those other numbers that you need is how many hours you actually used. So if you look at that client and you say, h, okay. Out of 10 hours, we only used, let's say six. Well, I have four extra hours, so there's no scope creep. I had 10 hours budgeted. I only use six. I have four leftover. Great. Now what if we had 10 hours and we use 17? Well, we've now measured our scope creep. We have in that month, we have seven hours scope creep, which is, you know, if you've only budgeted 10, that'd be pretty significant. And then the final thing you want to look at here is what did that cost you? Okay. So if we know we're seven hours over and our bill rate is $120. 7 hours x $120. We've actually lost out on $840 of revenue. Does that makes sense? I know it's a lot of math. It's a lot. Jason: [00:04:34] yeah, it definitely does. You know, what we always did and what I've always told everybody is, is you should be tracking all of your hours for everything that you do. And so how we had it in our software, we use a really cool project management software back in the day called My Intervals, but it works like ClickUp or Teamwork or any of those and what we would do after we had a baseline of projects or engagements. We'd be like, okay, well we know this normally takes a hundred hours to go do, and then we would break it up into segments or phases. And then we would actually get a visualization of each of the deliverables and each deliverable had allocated hours to it. So then, then on a weekly basis, our project manager, or on daily basis if they wanted, they could look at it and then it would show green. If they're under, you know, yellow, if we're getting close red, if we're over. And so then we could go, all right, well, why are we going over? Or why, why are we getting close? And then we can make our adjustments. Nate: [00:05:35] Yeah. Well, one of the things that I tell people and I, I've totally made this statistic up, but I use it anyways is I say 95% of your data analysis is new data entry. The number of clients that we work with when we start working with them, who don't actually track their time to clients, uh, it continues to surprise me. I'm like, if you're not tracking the data, if you don't have the data, there's nothing to analyze. And, well, it's no wonder you've, you've spent a year growing your business and you're working twice as hard and you're making just a little bit more money. Jason: [00:06:05] Actually. They're making less. That's what I see a lot of times. Nate: [00:06:09] They are making less, I was giving the benefit of the doubt. But, yeah, that's why you've got to track the data. You got to track the time. And so if you, if you have the numbers. And again, throw them into these simple formulas. It's really easy to see, Oh, I've got this client, this client, and this client, they're each using, you know, seven hours per month too many. And it's really easy to see where you, like, what you call the profit leaks, right. Where it’s easy to see where those leaks are. Jason: [00:06:35] I find scope creep actually starts before you even actually sign up the client. I find it happens in the sales conversation. It's about setting the expectation with the client and not trying to oversell them. I think a lot of, especially if you're an agency owner and you're doing the sales, which that should stop immediately, right? You should find a salesperson, but a lot of times you try to go like this is what we're going to do. And we're going to do this, this, this, and you're just piling all this stuff that, you think in order to close the deal, or if you have a really bad salesperson, you do that. And it really starts there. And, but I totally agree with you on data entry too. Nate: [00:07:15] Well, no, you're absolutely correct. Because whether you bid the job wrong, you know, in the beginning or whether the client has just taken a little more time, a little more time, a little more time, the problem ends up being the same. It is you're not, you're not billing for the amount of time you're spending on it. And so regardless of what caused it, you're still able to measure it and identify where is this happening? So it's amazing. Let's say, let's say you have 20 clients and you find that three of them are using seven hours per month too many. Well, that's only 21 hours per month, but what you bill, times your $120 hour bill rate, and you're losing $2,500 per month in revenue. You should be charging, somebody should be charging, whether it's this client or if they're not using it to pick up a new client, and then you have that bandwidth to take care of them. Jason: [00:08:04] Yeah. One of the things that we found that pointed it out to me, because yeah, like, like you said, you’re like, oh, it was only three hours here, or it's only an hour here, but if you do this one thing and I can promise you you'll change your idea about, because when the client comes to you and go, Oh, can you do this? And you always say yes. You should implement a $0 change order. I talk about this and the agency playbook all the time and we actually give you guys a template for it, but it's really when they come to you for something very small, I want you to print them out a change order. That shows the original price that you would actually charge for it. So if it's a hundred dollars an hour, let's just say easy math, put that down and then cross it out and have them sign it and send it back to you. So you're training them that this is additional. So when they actually come to you for the big items, then you can actually go, oh no, no, no. My digital agency can't do this. Again, we already gave you this free stuff over here. And then the client is programmed to go, oh yeah, it's it's additional. And when you start acting, like, I literally started adding up all the change orders and I was like, oh my gosh, like I gave away $10,000 last month.
Nate: [00:09:19] Right. Yeah. It's great if you've taken the time to train your clients that way. And anybody that's not, they should get started. Right. But if you were to do this analysis and say, oh my heck, I'm giving away three grand a month in free services. We need to talk about, okay, what can I do right now? Okay. It's great. I'm going to start changing my process with my clients, but what can we do right now? The first thing I would say is I would not go to a client after one month of analysis and say, hey, we're going to charge more money because that month may be an outlier, right? That month. Maybe you're doing a lot of prep work that's going to pay you over the next several months. But if you do this analysis over, let's say three months, and clients are consistently using too many hours. Then I would go and I'd look internally first and I would say is the problem with me? Okay. Do I have an employee who actually doesn't know what they're doing? Do they need more training? Is it the wrong fit? Etcetera. So what's, what's kind of generating it. If my employee who's done this work, if I asked them, what, what are they spending their time on? And they say, every time he put up their Facebook ads within two hours, there's a phone call. They want the copy change. They want the image changed. Then we know the problem is more with the client than with us. But even then, it's not necessarily that we go to the client and say, hey, look, we're changing the contract. You've got to pay us more money. It might just be a trust issue, right. It might be that they don't really believe that we're the experts. And if they don't put themselves into the process, we're not going to do it, right. So it might just be a conversation of helping them to actually trust that we can do the work. And so we're in, instead of charging them more money, we're helping them to take less of our time. And then again, that frees up our bandwidth and we can then. With those additional hours, we go pick up a new client and build that client instead of giving those hours away for free. Jason: [00:11:06] Yeah. I always, I like how you said kind of look back at your internal process first before you kind of blame the client. Because a lot of times the clients, they'll just, they don't know they're ignorant. They've never gone through this process and they don't know what's in scope or out of scope. When I would talk about scope creep, I would always kind of default back to when I was building my house. Like, I didn't know. The process of building a house. I was like, oh, can I make my room bigger after they do framing? And they're like, you could, but we have to kind of tear down these walls and like all this other stuff. And they were like, well, that would be additional. Or you want a waterfall? Okay. We can do like, like I was just like, it's not included? I thought you said you'd built my dream. Nate: [00:11:51] Yeah. And like, I think it's a good point you brought up earlier is. It is it maybe in the, in the bidding process. And if you're, if you're looking at this on a regular basis and you can… It's gonna, it's going to help you identify that problem, right? If, if you're saying, if you're seeing client after client, where simply their expectations were not in line with what the reality was going to be as an agency owner, that that may be on you and that's, that's fine, right? If you, if you learn that fantastic and let's fix it going forward, but if you're not measuring it and you're just saying, hey, new business, new revenue is going to make me profitable. It's not always going to do it. Jason: [00:12:28] Yeah, I can promise you all of you listening now, before I actually started tracking all of this and actually measuring our time and looking at scope creep, we were losing money on 60% of our engagements, 60%. That's probably what you, Nate, lot of times when you guys probably get an under the covers of a lot of agencies, you probably realize, wow, you're losing a ton of money on these clients. Like, why are you still doing this? Nate: [00:12:54] Right. And I would say sixty maybe high. 60% is, is a high percentage of clients to actually be losing money on. But, but almost guaranteed. There are very few agencies that I do this kind of analysis for that aren't losing money on at least a few clients. And keep in mind, it's not just about, is the client actually profitable or unprofitable, you know. One of the questions you should be asking is, is the client profitable enough? So we may have a profitable client, but because of the scope creep. We're spending so much time that they're, they're just barely profitable. When really if we're going to run a, a good, solid, profitable agency we need to have those boundaries. We need to be able to say, you know, our, our bill rate is 120 an hour that finds you this many hours. And if we're consistently spending too much time, we've got to change that. We've got to fix it. Jason: [00:13:42] That's another good point about like how profitable are they? We had a mastermind member not too long ago. Uh, had a bunch of legacy clients. We showed them a bunch of systems in the mastermind where they really kind of quadrupled their sales, but then they had all of these existing legacy clients and we started looking at it and they were, some of them, all of them were profitable. But just like you were saying, they were barely profitable. And we went to them and we're like, well, how can we get them up to par? And the only way we can actually get the mastermind member in order to do this was to have them calculate the opportunity cost. Like, what was the difference between the new clients coming in? Like how much money were they making there and the old ones. And that actually forced them, like, as they started looking at the data, he was like, holy cow. Well, like if I could just double the rates, and we're like double those rates, and even if half those clients go away, the other ones will make up the difference. But you want to know what happened, Nate? Every one of them said yes. And he made 60,000 extra every month. By not having to sell anything more or deliver anything more just by literally going, hey, we need to be more profitable. Nate: [00:14:56] I'm glad you brought up opportunity costs because some people would say, hey, let's take an example of we're spending seven extra hours on this client every month. And what I said earlier is you're losing $840. Cause it's those hours times your bill rate. And some people would argue, well, no, cause I'm really only losing what I'm paying my employees. I'm not losing the whole bill rate. I'm like, yes, you are because you should be invoicing that. Right. You're spending that whatever it is, 40 bucks or 30 bucks an hour on your employee, regardless of where it's spent or not being used on a client at all, you've got to look at the opportunity cost. It's that's really what, you're what you're losing. It's not just money out of pocket. So yeah. Perfect point. Jason: [00:15:36] Well, this has been awesome. Nate, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience listening in? Before we go over to the, the cool thing I want to, I want you to tell everybody about right. Nate: [00:15:48] Really, it really comes down to just taking the time to measure this stuff is so easy. Like you said, if you are, if you're an agency owner and you're doing your own sales system, if you're an agency owner and you're doing your own bookkeeping, your own financial reporting, which means you're probably not doing any financial reporting. You should stop, right? You've got to look at this and you've got to look at it consistently. If you're not measuring it, it's going to get out of hand. There's, there's no question. So I don't think so. I think we've pretty much covered it and I'll make sure that you've got the formulas and you can disseminate those out to your listeners, however makes the most sense. Jason: [00:16:23] Great. Yeah. I mean, if, if you guys are not measuring and if you guys are doing this, then you're not doing the other things that only you could be doing, which, you know, it makes me very worrisome. If that's a word, I don't know. I mean, maybe making up words now. But, uh, Nate, tell us about kind of the special offer where you can, uh, you know, help identify this, you know, for them. Yeah. So we do, we do a free audit on some, some various metrics for agencies, just to, just to have a phone call, just to get to know you and see if there's maybe a fit for us to work together. And so we, we offer a free audit of, of your, your profitability and different metrics. And so for this summer, we're actually offering a free first month, if you do want to do some business with us. Nate: [00:17:06] So, there'll be a link. It's that fact, it's the agencydad.money/freeaudit. And there'll be a link there to have a phone call with me and we can, we can talk to see what your needs are. Jason: [00:17:16] Awesome. Uh, repeat the URL one more time for everybody. Nate: [00:17:20] That's agencydad.money/freeaudit. Awesome. All right, well, everyone, uh, go do that now. You know, I really do appreciate Nate coming back on the show. Make sure you guys go get your free audit, because if you can identify that scope creeps are happening, then you actually have an action plan of what you actually need to go do in order to fix it. So make sure you go there. They're incredible. We've said a lot of mastermind members and a lot of listeners over there. And they've all had amazing things to say about Nate and all their crew. So go do that now and until next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Calculate_and_Eliminate_Scope_Creep_to_Drive_Agency_Profitability.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Wed, 26 May 2021
After deciding to leave the mean streets of LA, where he worked as a police officer for 13 years, Jason Smith started working at the leading Facebook and Instagram advertising agency Tier 11. He eventually moved to create his own company Spotlight Social Media Consulting in 2016. Today, he joins us to talk about the key factors that have helped him grow his team and making the decision to bring a VP of Operations. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesOribi: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Oribi. Check out Oribi.io/smartagency for a free trial. Plus when you sign up for Oribi get 20% off the first three months with promo code: Smart Agency SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM How Hiring a VP of Operations can be the Best Call to Grow Your AgencyJason Swenk: [00:00:00] On this show. I talk with an agency owner who talks about how he has grown his team, how he's grown his agency. And when is the right time to bring in a VP of Operations and how did he do it? So let's sit back and check out the episode. Hey, Jason. Welcome to the show. Jason Smith: [00:00:24] Hey, how are you doing? Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Jason Swenk: [00:00:27] Yeah, man, I'm excited to have you on, I've gotten to know you over the past couple of years, but for the people that have not heard of you yet tell us who you are and what do you do? Jason Smith: [00:00:35] Yeah, my name is Jason Smith, owner and CEO of Spotlight Social Media Consulting. We're a, uh, Facebook and Instagram only, I say only because we're not an all-in-one, we're Facebook and Instagram only ad agency. So we do paid media for Facebook and Instagram. Jason Swenk: [00:00:52] Awesome. Now you have a quite interesting story of how you became an agency or really even what you were doing beforehand. So, yeah, I think it's interesting just to tell people kind of where you came from. Jason Smith: [00:01:05] Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Crazy story, actually. When I tell it, people take a 360-degree turn and they're like, wait, what? So I was a, a policeman for the Los Angeles Police Department for, gosh, just about 14 years before I became an agency owner. And the reason why it's kind of crazy is because I went from getting shot at, chasing gang members, getting into shootings, all this stuff, and the mean streets of LA. And literally, I mean that literally, I mean, we're talking about 250 homicides in six square miles in a year, and very violent places in, in Los Angeles. And, uh, went from that to, you know, the thing that kinda drove me to look for something else was number one, I was never home, was in court all the time. My days off were filled with court and overtime and it was just, you know, I never get to spend time with my family and I just, it was getting old, real fast. And it sounds cool when you're up on the stand testifying as a gang expert or weapons expert and all this stuff. But in hindsight, personally, it's not that fun. So, and you know, I've been involved in tons of, and literally tons of stressful situations. I've been in shootings and been shot at and all that stuff. And, man, for making $80,000 a year doing that. I just wanted to start looking for something else. And I stumbled across an opportunity where, you know, running Facebook ads was a core part of one of my friend's businesses originally, like with a supplement company. And he just kind of asked me buddy to buddy, like, hey dude, do you want to help me do these Facebook ads? I'm like, yeah, I don't, I'm a dumb policeman. I don't know how to do this, but let's try it out, you know. So I ended up getting some good results and then I did a little bit more research and ended up finding a certification course. And gosh, the rest is history. And next thing you know, I have, I had 10 clients, not even a year later and making, you know, 30,000 a month, which I never thought possible from home. And yeah, it was pretty cool. Jason Swenk: [00:03:05] So which is more stressful running an agency or getting shot at? Jason Smith: [00:03:09] Man, I don't know. I’m just kidding. Well, it's funny because people will. You know how clients are sometimes. They'll try to intimidate you or something or say something to you. I'm like, dude, relax. Okay. It's not that doesn't work on me, okay. So, and when I, when I shoot back stuff to them, they're like, Oh wow. This guy is not going to take my usual agency fluff here, right. You know, so it's pretty funny. Jason Swenk: [00:03:33] I interviewed an ex-Navy Seal and he was basically was like, look, we just went over so much of training when we get in situations. Like, we weren't stressed. And I was like, that's a great principle to apply, like in your agency, like go over this scenarios is over and over again. And it shouldn't be that stressful. Jason Smith: [00:03:52] Right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't get stressed too much. Even my wife tells me like, man, you don't stress over anything. And I'm like, well, you know, after being shot at and being all these stressful situations, not, not much more in life is going to stress me out, you know? So. Pretty funny. Even the guys on my team, stress out about stuff. I'm like, guys don't, don't stress out about that stuff. Just everything will work out, so. Jason Swenk: [00:04:16] How has your agency grown in the past couple years? Like, what are some things that have worked for you that you wish you knew back when you were just getting started messing around with Facebook? Jason Smith: [00:04:29] Yeah. Well, I mean, number one, I think having great people behind you and supporting you. That's probably the number one thing. I mean, you know, I'll never forget how I found you was through Ralph at Tier 11, but it was funny because the first time I applied to work with you, you denied me because I wasn't big enough, right? But that was great motivation. No, no. And Hey, I mean, that's, and that's why you have an elite mastermind that you do because you get to pick and choose the people in it. And that's very important. And, um, I mean, I think number one, support and people behind you, I mean, Ralph and Deacon, those guys at Tier 11 have, you know, and still helped me today. I mean, those guys have been an integral part of why I've grown and there's no, like, even though we're the same, we do the same thing. There's plenty of business to go around. They're just cool guys. They've helped me a ton. Um, I could call Ralph right now and say, hey, you know, what do you think about this? And he would, you know, he would tell me and we could talk about it. So, that's I think probably the number one thing that's helped me the most and then being a part of, you know, probably your mastermind and the group and the support there. I can go to you or anybody else. And I mean, gosh, I just went to you recently, right? About some stuff and was, and you helped me out. So that probably for me is the number one thing. And number two is having a great team, you know, having a great team of people who you can, you know, like, and trust. And not get bogged down with people you can't trust or waste your time or whatever. Those are probably the two things that helped me the most grow the agency and where I'm at today. And I mean, I literally started from nothing. Like I had no clients, you know, and I tell the story on my podcast and Deacon from Tier 11 is the one that gave me, like my first two clients. And then it just kind of went from there. So, having that support structure and those people in your life. And I say your life, because it's not just all about business and you know, you and I could go out and have a drink or something. And we're good friends. I think outside of the business world, you know, we also like the same things, right. You used to ride motocross, you're a big Jeep guy. So that's very important, so. Jason Swenk: [00:06:34] Yeah, we'll party this summer. Jason Smith: [00:06:37] Can't wait. Jason Swenk: [00:06:38] I know. Talk about your team because a lot of people listening, they may be trying to scale their team, trying to grow their team. Where did you find them? How did you find them? How'd you evaluate them? You know, because, you know, that's an integral part. Jason Smith: [00:06:53] Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, most of my team came from recommendations from the mastermind, um, your mastermind and, um, Ralph actually helped me out. Ralph and Deacon over there at Tier 11 helped me on how to kind of screen people, give them a little bit of a test, have them record a loom video. You know, you can tell a lot about a person when they record a quick video. And of course, they're going to be nervous and I think I'm a pretty fair guy. Like I can kind of read through the bs and the nervousness and stuff like that. But when it comes down to the core values of who they are as a person, you can tell a lot by just a five-minute video and it's, we send them basically a little test and say, hey, I want, give me a five-minute overview of this test. And it's not so much of a test. It's really just like an aptitude test of how much they know about Facebook because I. We all do it on resumes. We all overcompensate for all this stuff, right. And, um, for them going through this competency test just shows me how much they know. And then what I do is send them over to my VP of operations. And actually my VP of operations came from a referral from a friend of mine. He used to be a professional skateboarder was, was in the upper ups of Ogio. You know, the company, Ogio, big company. He used to work for them because he was a pro skateboarder. And then when he hurt himself, he went to work for Ogio and loved the operation side. So I got to know him. And just a cool dude, you know, and that's really what comes down to it in my opinion. And yes, they have to have a good work ethic, but if they're going to be part of your team, like, you gotta like them, right? You really do, you know, and people say, oh, well, keep your personal side out of it. Well, I mean, I tend to think there has to be a personal side in it to make a team really solid, a good culture and a team that you can trust. So that's kind of how we evaluate stuff and really it's me talking to them or interviewing them. I have a pretty good, from my background and experience as a policeman, I have a pretty good idea of a person, right. When I talk to them. Jason Swenk: [00:08:50] When they're lying or not. Jason Smith: [00:08:52] Yeah. Just slap them around a little bit, you know? Jason Swenk: [00:08:55] So, are you the good guy or the bad cop or good cop? Who would you play? Jason Smith: [00:09:00] You know, it's funny. A couple of people that I've met, like clients have said, oh man, you're, you're such a nice guy, but then when I saw you in person, I was like, oh man, like this dude, could do some damage. I mean, I'm not the tallest guy, but I, you know, whatever it is, what it is, I'm all tatted down. And I don't, I definitely don't look like the normal marketer. And I do talk about that in my podcast, how I went into this Facebook ad agency world and I don't look like your normal agency owner, and it's pretty funny. But I try to be the good guy, unless the bad guy has to come rear its ugly head. And if it does, you better watch out cause you may get pistol-whipped or something, you know. Jason Swenk: [00:09:36] I love what you said about, yeah, you have to like them. I think it's… and you have to have that similar belief in the values that you share as an individual, because I used to hire the wrong way where I would try to hire my identical twin because I'm hiring someone to pick up the clack for the stuff I suck at. And then if I hire my twin. Well, now we're going to have two people that suck at this one thing. It makes it a really big challenge. So a lot of times you have to figure out what do we personally believe in. Like, do we believe in resourcefulness, do we believe in failure and success and all this kind of stuff. And then, and it's not just about quizzing them and saying. Jason Smith: [00:10:23] Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Jason Swenk: [00:10:25] Coming up with scenarios that you can have them describe that a little bit with that.
Jason Smith: [00:10:32] Well, and too, I actually made the mistake one time of hiring somebody who is too entrepreneurial. If you know what I mean? Like when you're an owner of a company and you're trying to hire like exactly what you said, you can't hire your identical twin because that twin is then going to want to take over and be too entrepreneurial and almost do his own thing, you know. Which, you got to follow the systems, you got to follow the policies we have, right. And an entrepreneur will not follow that. They need to be out doing their own thing. Um, and so I look for that as well. Like especially being a team player. And that's one of the, my biggest red flags is they say anything about me, me, me, then I'm like, then I kind of, have to side-eye them a little bit and say, I don't think this is going to be the right fit. So. Jason Swenk: [00:11:19] If you're like many agency owners, it's very hard to show results and show value to your clients for the hard work that you've done. And up until now, you've probably been using Google Analytics, which is really kind of clunky and hard to use and just been around a long time. And there really hasn't been an alternative until now. And I want to tell you a little bit about Oribi. Now I've checked out this tool and it's really pretty cool. It doesn't require any code for you to track interactions and conversions. There's no more jumping from different platforms. You can track your social and paid media really all in one place. And it really allows you to build smart funnels and get tons of insights. I mean, literally, I've even set it up where I could say I want this visitor to get to this particular page and it will tell me what's the likely chance that they're actually get to this page and what pages are actually coming from. It's really pretty cool. So if you want to really kind of get away from Google analytics, I want you to check them out, go to Oribi. oribi.io/smartagency. And just for my listeners, you're going to get 20% off for the first three months using coupon code smart agency. Let's talk about your VP of Ops of when you were looking to bring them on. Like, walk me through that scenario because a lot of times people don't know when to bring on that person. So what was the scenario of like, what was lifelike like in the agency and then we'll talk about the next. Jason Smith: [00:12:58] Yeah, well, actually I had come to you about that probably what a year and a half ago, and was like, hey, I had a couple account managers that were managing accounts. And what I noticed really quickly was that there was all this information in my head and things that I was trying to disseminate to them and balls were being dropped. You know, client communication wasn't the best. And they were coming back to me often saying, hey, Jason, I don't really know what to do here. And I'm like, what do you mean you don't know what to do? But it was in my head. It wasn't on paper, in an SOP, in any operations was not in the agency. And that's what I needed at the time. And you're like, Jason, you're just going to have to drop the money because I was worried about, do we make enough as an agency? Like how much does one of these guys costs? I mean, all the things you don't really know about. And then when I finally found Eric and it was almost, it was a referral, I didn't really know he was good at operations. I kind of hired him to be a video editor because he's a high level video guy. And then he's like, oh, by the way, I'm also really good at operations. And I'm like, oh shoot, really? Awesome. And then he's like, hey, I've been looking at all this stuff at the company. And I could really come in and help out with SLPs. And, you know, we didn't have a project management system at the time. Like we didn't have Trello or. Uh, I mean, we had Slack, but Slack is not a project management system. It's a communication tool, right? And we kind of talked about it and he came in and all of a sudden, next thing, you know, six months later, we actually have things documented and hey, this is what you do to like reach out to Facebook and, and appealing an ad account that's been disabled and everything started coming down in writing, and it was really cool to see that process evolve. And it's still evolving today. But it makes it easier for when we bring on somebody new. Hey, okay, review these videos. This is the kind of first step here. And, uh, yeah, we've evolved a lot as an agency since then. It's been pretty cool. Jason Swenk: [00:14:50] And walk me through when you actually started onboarding him or when he started, did you just kind of give him like, here's what we need to do, go do, and then he'd just go execute. Or did he start coming up with all the, you know, hey, getting off Slack as a project management tool and that kind of stuff. Jason Smith: [00:15:05] Yeah, no, he was great. I mean, he, he had the experience from Ogio to be able to come in and say, okay, these are the top-level things that we need to integrate, which is SOPs and what happens in this scenario and, you know, Facebook's pretty complicated. So there was a lot of things and we kind of sat down one day for half the day and he just went through and picked my brain on everything and just kind of wrote it down. What are the most important things when we onboard a client, like we need to have a system for this stuff. So, you know, the account managers, when they onboard somebody, they can just check the boxes, which is really cool. And I mean, honestly, he's been probably one of my biggest assets in the, in the company and the growth right now. And he went in and went in lucid chart and like mapped out, okay, you guys, we're going to have 10 account managers by this date and we're going to be doing these things. And. It's really cool, you know, to have somebody like that. And, um, at first I thought, man, I gotta pay him all this money, but look how much money we're making now. It's pretty awesome. Jason Swenk: [00:16:03] Yeah. I mean a lot of people, they go, well, I don't know if I can fill up this person full time, because I think the holdup in their mind or their, their mindset is I need to come up with everything that they need to go do. Which I think is a mistake, and a lot of people don't really. Jason Smith: [00:16:18] Right. Well, not really, but yeah. Jason Swenk: [00:16:20] Yeah. It's just like, I have to detail everything I want you to go do, rather than just saying here's where the agency's going. Now you're the how person. I'm the where and why you're the how, right. And you just go execute it. And like you said, you hired the right person. It's going to be amazing. Jason Smith: [00:16:38] Yeah. And you may not hire the right person the first time, you know, I mean, and don't get me wrong. We've had our ups and downs and we've had our disagreements and, but that's just, I mean, that's life in general, you know, and you just gotta get through it. He's a great guy, great person, very organized. He's an operations dude. That's exactly what I needed. You know, cause I am not an operations guy and I do not know how to go into Trello and build boards and cards and all that. Like, I hate doing that stuff. So I'd rather be talking to somebody about our agency and how good we are at Facebook ads and, and running high-quality Facebook ads. That's what I'm good at. Jason Swenk: [00:17:14] Awesome. Well, this has all been amazing. Jason, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the listeners? Jason Smith: [00:17:20] No, I just, uh, the only thing I do want to add is, is when you're ready to hire an agency for your Facebook ads, make sure you interview them. You have some great questions for them. If you have a resource that you can reach out to, to ask if, hey, if this agency is good or whatever, don't blame the current agency coming in for all the stuff that happened before, because chances are, you know, if you hire the right agency, they can be a good partner. And I want to stress the word partner because a lot of times. Business owners don't think a Facebook agency is necessarily a partner, but we're helping you grow your business triple and quadruple your business. And that's what we've done for companies. And that's why they'll never leave us is because we've grown them so much. And we're such an asset to their brand. They'll never, they'll never leave. So it's pretty cool. Jason Swenk: [00:18:06] That’s awesome. And where can people reach out to you if they want to chat more about Facebook and I highly recommend they do an amazing job. So where can they go and check it out? Jason Smith: [00:18:15] Yeah, they can go to, um, spotlightsocialadvertising.com or reach out to me. Jason at spotlightsocialllc.com. Jason Swenk: [00:18:23] Awesome. Everyone, go check them out. Reach out to Jason. They do an amazing job. And if you guys want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners, like Jason and many others, and just really be able to have that sounding board, that board of advisors to show you or see the things you might not be able to see and just have a lot of fun doing it. Make sure you guys go to digitalagencyelite.com. That's digitalagencyelite.com apply and maybe we'll have a conversation and then maybe you get to hang out with Jason and I and a bunch of other really cool people. All right. Till next time, have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Is_it_Time_to_Hire_a_VP_of_Operations_to_Take_Your_Agency_to_the_Next_Level_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Sun, 23 May 2021
True to his gambler style when it comes to making business decisions, entrepreneur Eric Siu bought a failing marketing agency for $2 back in 2014. By refocusing the agency's vision from an SEO agency to a full-service digital marketing agency, Single Grain has grown into a full team of expert marketers who share Eric's vision and passion for constant growth. Now he joins us today to talk about how you can use a game mentality to grow your agency by constantly leveling up. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesWix: Today's episode is sponsored by the Wix Partner Program. Being a Wix Partner is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM How to Grow Your Agency By Constantly Leveling UpJason: [00:00:00] On this show, I bring on a past client where we talk about how he's grown his agency and he has a great book called “Leveling Up” and going through the stages and talks about e-sports, and we talk about sports and how you can use this in order to really grow your agency. We talked about Clubhouse, all kinds of stuff. It's a really cool episode. We jump all around and we talk about a $75,000 Pokemon card. Crazy stuff. So, you're going to love this episode. Let's get into it. Hey Eric. Welcome to the show. Eric: [00:00:36] Good to see you, Jason. It's been a while. Jason: [00:00:38] Yeah, man. It's been a while since we worked together. So tell us, uh, for the people that haven't heard of, you tell us who you are and what do you do? Eric: [00:00:45] Yeah, thanks. So my name's Eric Siu. I helped level up the world through marketing. I have a couple of marketing businesses. I have an agency called Single Grain, a software company called Click Flow. And then, uh, we got a whole, you know, marketing education stuff and marketing school and the events tied to it. So a bunch of stuff. And I also invest in different MarTech SAS companies, which is my background. And then, um, other than that, I have a podcast called Leveling Up. I have a book called Leveling Up right here, coming out, and then I have a podcast called Marketing School and that's basically it. Jason: [00:01:12] Very cool. And so how'd, you get started in all this? You haven't been in the agency world too long. And so how did you kind of jump into it? Eric: [00:01:21] Yeah, so it's pretty unconventional. So the agency that I took over and, you know, the story already, I bought the company for $2 out of pocket because it was a failing SEO agency at the time, because the Google algorithm updates basically made the business model invalid overnight. And I was brought in as a number two to help save the company. Because I'd previously had helped turn another company around, which is a startup. And so this was a different challenge, you know, different service, like the plane's going down, right? Like, can you put the plane back together while flying it? I was like, okay, this will be an interesting challenge. About six months into it, the four other co-founders said they wanted out. And Neil Patel was my podcast co-host he was like, hey Eric, you should get out as a friend. There's no brand equity. There's nothing here. And I was like, okay, why don't we do this? I'll give it a shot. I'll buy it. I'll pay $1 for 10% of your shares and another dollar for another 10% of another partner's shares. The rest through the profits of the company, with contingency that the company failed and owned nothing. So asymmetric bet, you know, I'd have unlimited upside with my downside would be it's basically an MBA, right? And so fortunately it worked out, but I almost lost everything. I'm happy to go in that direction, but that's how I got started. First year, had no idea what I was doing dropped all the way down to one employee. Jason: [00:02:28] And so, you know, a lot of people are listening. They're like, what was the point where you almost lost everything? Let's go to that story a little bit. Eric: [00:02:36] Yeah. So two thousand... what was it? Thirteen or so, something like that. New year, I'm like, okay, look at me. I'm the CEO. Now I own a hundred percent of the company. Look at me. And I ended up reading this book called “Let My People Go Surfing” from the Patagonia co-founder. And I was like, yeah, let my people go surfing. Nobody wants to be micromanaged, whatever, stop showing up to the office. So I'm like, you know, I hired some senior people I'm like, yeah, let them do their thing. Whole thing implodes. And then I have people calling me saying, you know, people are showing up to the office and like just wearing like, almost like pajamas and eating like chips while watching Family Guy. Whole thing is just blowing up in front of me. And then my outside accounting firm calls me and they're just like, hey, it might be time to shut it down. Basically I went from bad to worse just because I didn't build a rapport with anybody. I let them do their thing. I had no vision. I had no sense of what culture meant and the whole thing just fell apart. And I almost took another job. So I was at a crossroads. I had said yes. And then I basically, the next day I was like, I can't do it. And I continued on with Single Grain. Jason: [00:03:31] And so that's the all-time low and your accounting firm says, you know, let's throw in the towel, Eric, what did you do to turn it around? Eric: [00:03:40] Yeah, when I first started at Single Grain, because my background's in SEO, we were getting about 4,000 visits a month, which is okay for a blog. I had started to focus on a lot of guest blog posting, a lot of, um, you know, building more relationships. And we started publishing a lot more content. We had good domain authority on our website, which is just how strong our website is. And throughout that first year it started to increase rapidly. So we went from about 4,000 to about 50,000 visits a month. And then we got that number one ranking for the agency keyword that you know about digital marketing agency, right. I have nothing to hide. And so that's how we started getting all these leads, and unfortunately I couldn't fulfill the leads anymore. So what we started to do was we started to refer the leads out and I would take 25 to 30% commission for the lifetime of the customer. That kept us afloat. And then I realized that these other agencies were, they couldn't retain the client. And so from that point on, I was like, okay, let's take on some contractors. We have some more money to play with. We took on some contractors and then from there we're like, okay, the contractors are good, but they're not, they're mercenaries throughout fully embedded with the culture. So then we started hiring full-time people. It really started to take off again, once we hired that integrator and I'm sure people have talked about it on this podcast, visionary integrator concept, rocket fuel. And that's when things started to blow up. And my thesis has always been with the agency. If I were able to make it work, the services business is not super interesting to me, but the cash flows to be able to take that and go reinvest in more exponential or durable sources of income. That's more interesting. And fortunately, that worked out and then now, you know, combined with everything, we’re at about eight-figures. We’re over eight-figures. Yeah. Jason: [00:05:08] And so what's kind of the percentage that you would reinvest and did that number go down over time? Like, you know, in the very beginning sometimes, or did it go up over time, but everybody's probably listening are like, well, how much should I reinvest in the company? Or should I rate the company? Eric: [00:05:26] Yeah, that's a great question. I would put an asterisk by this because I come from a gambling background. So all in, you know, if I'm betting on myself, best investment ever, right? Warren Buffet. I don't recommend this for everyone because your mileage may vary. You might have a mortgage, you might have a family to take care of. Who knows? Like there's a lot of other commitments. I was fortunate enough where I didn't have any of that to worry about at the time. So I continued to press every single year. I put everything back into the business. I think it's fine to pay taxes. Absolutely. But if you have a good sense of what you can do with the business and you can create more jobs from it and you don't have a lot of other overhead to worry about, then, you know, for me, I kept pressing. And so for me, it was a hundred percent and I didn't necessarily want to raise money because, you know, I've seen that game before. Right. And there's nothing wrong with that. And in some cases I might raise money for other stuff and we have, but at the time I just wanted to bootstrap my way up to, to prove that I could do it before, you know, thinking about anything else. Jason: [00:06:17] So let's talk about, you know, Leveling Up. Why did you write it? Eric: [00:06:21] Yeah, that's a good question. Uh, I remember on another podcast, this guy, uh, Anthony Pompliano was asking me, why are you doing a book? Nobody reads books. And I'm like, well, I read books. So I started writing this book, and I don't recommend this, while I was trying to save the agency. Stupid. And people are like, yeah, it's going to take you probably five to six years to do it. It took me six years, probably seven drafts. I was like, it probably will probably take me two. Took me seven. And so, I come from an e-sports background. All I was really good at growing up was games. And you know, there's a stigma towards games, right? Parents always looked down on me, friends, maybe didn't respect it. And then it was just like, I wasn't seen, and now you see e-sports taking off, but you have 3 billion people in the world that are playing games and then feel like they have a stigma. They feel unseen, but in sports and I'm sure you've played sports. Right. But just understanding that look, sports foster teamwork, communication, resilience, all that, all that I got from games. And my point is, you know, I think business is the ultimate game. Life is a game and I wake up every day and it's the same feeling I've had growing up. It's fun. Right. I'm just going to keep playing until I die, which is why I have a fundamental kind of buy and hold model where I just want to go buy other businesses. And so. That's what it is. I just do this, have fun. I've treat life as a game there's level-ups, right? In the book I talk about, you know, one of the chapters is thievery. If you think about Apple, you know, Apple, as an example, by the way they stole this from Xerox, this mouse, they stole from Xerox, Steve Jobs himself said everything in life is a remix. And so if we think about Elon Musk, the rockets, they look fundamentally the same, you know, you just add on the 10 to 20%, that's unique. They come back to earth. And so I think encouraging people that like. That chapter talks about where I ethically learned to steal, right? And people have a there's cognitive dissonance there because we all like to think that we're original. And so the book is about treating life as a game and going out throughout life and collecting power-ups and from a business perspective, just understanding that there's levels to the game. Right? So, Jason used an example, you had the agency, you sold it and you started doing the training. And then now you're back in the agency game, but you're buying other businesses you're investing. And so you’re consistently leveling up and that's what it is. And you don't have to get to the next level. But if you want to get to it and you don't get to it, it's just because you didn't beat the current one. Jason: [00:08:23] Have you ever played the game Age Of Empires? Eric: [00:08:25] I haven't, but I played a lot of StarCraft and Warcraft. Jason: [00:08:29] Okay. So there was a game in college that I would play with a bunch of my buddies where the kind of start off in the stone age and you have to acquire wood, gold, and I think food, and as you acquire so much, you actually start moving up to the next stage and then your weapons get better. Your houses get better. Your technology gets better. And that's kind of how I have always looked at, and that's one of the reasons why we created the agency playbook and that framework of kind of like you're talking about you're going, all right, once you get to the next level, you have to kind of reset a lot of, you know, the gold, the water, the food, and you have to kind of almost start over. Is that kind of what you're talking about with leveling up? Eric: [00:09:10] It's exactly that. So StarCraft, Command and Conquer, you know, Warcraft and I'm not familiar with Age Of Empires. It's, it's a strategy game, right? We're all, what we're playing is it's a resource game, right? You decide how you want to use your resources and you can go get more resources than those that do the best job they get the most. Right. And that's not saying, we, you need to go get the most necessarily, but that's how you do it. That's how the game is played. Jason: [00:09:29] So, you talk about is the first level kind of a, I don't like to use steal. I like to kind of like reenergize it, like you were saying, you know, Apple wasn't the first that came out with MP3 player, they were the ones that made it better. Right? They kind of took something, you know, and the mouse you just showed me, I'm surprised he's still using a mouse. Like, who are you? Like he's still using them. But they made it out of like a soap thing if, uh, from the story that I heard, uh, which is kind of cool. So is that the first level of the 15 that you're talking about is kind of like. Eric: [00:10:04] No, it's not, I mean, you know, it starts out with, uh, you know, newbie mindset, right? So whether you want to call it newbie mindset or beginner mindset, understanding that let's say you, Jason, you're continually learning, you're getting better and you have an open mindset. I think, as you become more and more successful as you, you gain levels. Sometimes it's easy to get cocky and let your ego get in the way. And so, you know, there's just those types of concepts. And again, if you compare it to a game, if you get a sword, for example, you keep using it, you're gonna lose durability. Some, some you have to keep sharpening, right? So on the spot, just because you wrote yesterday, it doesn't mean you don't have to write again. It's to keep training your mind, you know, your physical body. All that stuff. And your life is like just going around, collecting power-ups to make you more efficient as a person. And, you know, it might be a very kind of, you know, neurotic way of looking at it. But at the end of the day, life is just a lot of, “if this, then that” statements. So we're, we're in essence robots. Jason: [00:10:57] When you're an agency partner with Wix, you wanna lock entire digital ecosystem for creating, managing, and growing your agency. Get the full coding and design freedom to create anything your clients need along with the tools to manage and collaborate with your team seamlessly from anywhere. And when it comes to growing your agency, you can get matched with new leads every day and earn revenue share for every website you guys create. They’re backed by the Wix industry, leading security and site performance. You'll also have a dedicated account manager on standby 24/7. So you can reach your goals and start setting new ones. See for yourself, head over to wix.com/partners. And re-imagine what your agency can accomplish. Yeah. I'd see a lot of people trying to over-complicate things, you know, like when I work with someone or when they come into the mastermind, they're trying to think so far ahead. And I'm like, you sometimes just got to go back to the basics. I grew up playing tennis and I played in college. I remember one time, and I tell this story I think a couple of times on the show, where I was getting crushed by this one kid that I was so much better. And my coaches yelled at me go back to the basic stupid like I was trying to overthink this complicated thing of going. I was like, ah, just, hit the ball over the net and wound up beating them. And I think we do a lot of that in business. We just overcomplicate it. And if we just went back to the basics. That's kind of why, you know, with technology and you see this all the time, it's a great responsibility and we have all this power. But you can really send people away. If you don't just kind of go back. And I think what Gary Vaynerchuk talks about, you know, the Jetsons going back to the Flintstones and then you can separate yourself from everybody else. Eric: [00:12:54] Totally. Yeah. That's well said. Jason: [00:12:56] What are some other levels in the book that you talk about? Eric: [00:12:59] Yeah. So one of them is about thinking long-term. So I'm just looking at this Pokemon card. You just mentioned Gary V. So one of the guys that used to work for me is now on his brand team. He actually just told me this Pokemon card over here. So it's like, okay, I'm looking at this piece of cardboard. I paid, there's like $75,000 Charizard cards. I paid like two grand for this one.
Jason: [00:13:16] What? So wait, wait, wait. There's a $75,000 Pokemon card. Eric: [00:13:21] Yeah. So I'll tell you how this all relates. Right? So you're in business. I mean, you can definitely, you know, take a look at trends. What's trending, but also thinking about the long term. So when I, when I buy this thing, if I think about the markets a little bit, if I think about what's going on in the world. Where should I be putting my money? Okay. I'm not trying to get a return on this immediately. I'm just going to store it. Right. You know, this thinking about art, think about collectibles, so A I'm looking at trends, but also I'm thinking long-term like, I'm totally okay with losing money on this. So. What type of long-term decisions can you make? Right? So for example, you mentioned profit a little earlier. Can I defer profits for as long as possible so I can build enterprise value in my company, right? And this applies directly to agencies as well. Can I think long term where, you know, maybe I want to work with people. Can I build the right culture? Cause a lot of agencies that you might talk to, maybe you don't wanna work with these people because they're too short term focused and there's a lot of ego and they just want to make money, right? That's not long-term thinking. So that applies directly into life, and in business in general, you want to work with long-term people and play long-term games with them. Jason: [00:14:19] Love it. What else? So I'm still blown away by, uh, you know, I look back at all the baseball cards I collected over the years. I mean, I have, Hank Aaron, Mark McGwire, all these amazing ones. I don't think there was anything close to that. Eric: [00:14:32] One just sold, that's the record, 5.2 million bucks baseball card. A couple, I think a couple of weeks ago. Jason: [00:14:37] Babe Ruth? Eric: [00:14:38] I don't think it was a Babe Ruth. I think there was a Mike Trout card that sold for like over a million. Jason: [00:14:42] Who's Mike Trout Eric: [00:14:44] You, you, Angels Slugger. Jason: [00:14:47] Oh, I've been out of the baseball card games since '91. Eric: [00:14:52] Yeah. Well, but let's see, like now it's like, okay. Maybe it makes sense to get that hooked. The Rock has a U of Miami card. It's worth 45 grand right now. When he, when he was playing in college, right. Jason: [00:15:02] It's crazy. Well, I'm Florida State. I would burn it even though I do like The Rock. I still like you, Dwayne, but I would burn anything with Miami on it. Yeah. I was listening to something with Gary Vaynerchuk and he was talking about collecting business cards as baseball cards. Of going, if you could get the original Steve Jobs business card or Jeff Bezos card, that would be interesting, right. And thinking about that. So we're totally off track. I just got so screwed up by the $75,000 Pokemon card, but that's my ADD, what are some other levels that you talk about in the book? Eric: [00:15:41] Yeah. So, you know, one thing I want to touch upon is the concept of the wealth ladder. And this actually comes from the CEO of ConvertKit, Nathan Barry. And so, you know, when you start out in life, you go to school and then you try to build great habits, right? Whether it's playing sports or games or whatever, and then it's like, you go get a job. And then the next level after that is maybe you start freelancing on the side, right? Maybe you kind of hold the job to kind of keep you safe a little bit. And then it starts going well, maybe you start the agency, right? Or you can start with dropshipping first. It's not the best e-commerce business model, but then it starts going while you start to hold inventory. So you're constantly leveling up in your career. And the next thing is maybe have productized services for your agency who knows, right? Or maybe you do go on a pay-for-performance model. You can do that too. It scales really well. Right. Revenue per employee, is super high. Then it's like, Oh, you know what? I got out all this extra cash now. Why don't I go build a network of X business, right? Or why don't I go build like a platform business? Or why don't I go build less space X? Or why don't I just become an investor. And not all of these are mutually exclusive, but you can see there's levels to everything. And so that's what we were talking about earlier about, that's the concept of the wealth ladder. So I think those that are listening right now that maybe might be starting out, or maybe doing a couple million bucks a year, just understanding that there's levels to everything. And, you know, I think Jason, I can both attest to this stuff takes a lot of time. So that's another concept. Jason: [00:16:54] When do you know you've reached the top of the level that you should be? Because I see sometimes people get to a certain level and then they go. Man, I liked it back in the day with like the typical situation with a lot of people, like they're an accidental agency owner. They got kind of thrown into this because they knew how to do something well. They were like a freelancer and then they were like, well, I don't want to do everything myself. So let me hire people. They hire people. And then they realized that the business is making more money, but they're making less. And they're like, I just want to go back to where it was. And so some people go back to freelancing, which is perfectly fine, and it's just, you've reached that level of where you want to be, or you go find a different level or some people implement the right systems and then they can kind of break through and figure out what's the next step. So how do you know when you're at the right level or. Should we move? Eric: [00:17:51] Totally. Yeah. So I think there's two things. There's contentment. And then there's congruency. I think when you're waking up in the morning consistently, maybe three days in a row, and then you're realizing that Holy crap, this agency behemoth that I built, that's maybe doing 20 to 30 million bucks a year. And maybe I'm not making as much as before. Maybe this is a pain in the butt and this is not congruent, but you still keep finding yourself doing it consistently. So there's no congruency there. Right. So asking yourself, okay, there's something off there. But then also asking yourself to like, am I content? Forget about the future. Forget about the past. Like, am I happy right now? Am I content with what I have right now? Right. So we're getting philosophical here, but ultimately that's what matters right? In life. Like your operating system up here. If it's not content, then why are you doing what you're doing? So I think taking the time to reflect, I used to just work the entire time, seven days a week. Now I block out my Fridays and those Fridays are typically just reserved for thinking. I might have conversations with a couple of friends or whatever, but. Block out that time, like, what should I start doing? Stop doing, keep doing what, what really pisses me off right now. And it's just constantly like, you know, kind of updating my operating system, my brain, you know, that's at least what so. Jason: [00:18:56] Very cool. Let's talk about what are some key strategies that every agency owner needs to know about? Eric: [00:19:03] You know, I, I think still, like we want to talk about mergers and acquisitions. I think unfair advantage agency owners have, you know, people are like, oh, SEO's dying, whatever, but like, okay, Google, YouTube, hello. Like, they're still one of the biggest companies in the world. As long as there’s search, there'll be SEO. And, um, the fact that some of the smartest founders I know are really, really good at SEO because it's the compounding effect is so strong. So, let's say you don't really understand SEO right now. That's fine. Can you go use a tool like Ubersuggest or Ahrefs these SEO tools, go find a website in your niche that's ranking for all the keywords you want. Go buy it, right? And then all of a sudden you have the advantage. You're going to collect all these leads and you can retarget all these people hitting your website. And you can buy these websites for, you know, I wouldn't say pennies on the dollar, maybe dimes on the dollar, but a lot of these websites are, are under-monetized, right?. So I just think it's people going back to long-term thinking again, if you start with SEO, it forces you into long-term thinking because all the short-term stuff I tried in the beginning, it gets torn up, but the hit, the long-term stuff, it just keeps compounding and it forces you to think like an investor. So how can you take the MMA mindset that maybe Jason's been talking about on this podcast or in his mastermind, and then using it from a marketing perspective? That's one thing. Jason: [00:20:13] Yeah. You know, I, I love that you brought that up cause, uh, a mastermind member we've been talking about that quite a bit about buying certain assets that rank really well, and he's been crushing it, you know, on it. So it's, uh, it's not necessarily just buying the whole company it's buying, you know, assets in order to fit into, you know, those things that you're missing out on, rather than just trying to build it up from scratch. Eric: [00:20:44] Well, by the way, like, I think that's what you and I are. We're kind of nerding out on before. It's not now it's just buy versus bill and there's a book called “Buy Then Build”, right. And there's another one called “Buying a Small Business”. It's a lot more complicated than it seems. And not saying it's easy, but it's, um. Look, I think if I can do it at least I think anybody can do it. So. Jason: [00:21:02] I agree with that. No, I'm just kidding. Eric: [00:21:05] But the other thing too, by the way, I don't know if you've been hanging out, hanging out in the Clubhouse. I've been spending quite a bit of time there. So I I'm investing 20 hours of my time a week in it, but like I'm meeting like two or three amazing people every single day. So I just think the organic reach on that is super strong. And, um, you know, obviously with these social channels, the bigger they get, the less organic reach there is. So. Jason: [00:21:26] On Clubhouse, I have been, I like it. You know, my thing is I'm at this stage of my life right now, where I don't have 20 hours a week to invest, or I don't want to invest 20 hours a week in it. And you don't have to invest that much, but like Eric's saying is you can get that much more back. So how are you utilizing it? Are you just utilizing it to build, you know, relationships? That's what I've been seeing on Clubhouse. What are some strategies around that? Eric: [00:21:56] So, for those that haven't tried it, I mean, you know, audio-based social network. So for me, it's networking at scale. It's building relationships at scale right now. We're not able to kind of, you know, meet in person as of this recording, but that's what it is. And so you see a lot of these people, like let's use Grant Cardone or Ty Lopez love them or hate them, they're spending a lot, a lot, probably more time than I am on these apps. Like there's one guy that I'm friends with, um, he was part of this rap group called Pretty Ricky. You know, he's on the app all the time, but it's some of these people, I were, I was just like acquaintances, what's in the past, but we've interacted quite a bit and we start interacting afterward. So it's reinforcing or building new relationships. Like I never interacted with Grant Cardone before the app, uh, Ty Lopez, same thing. Now I do, right? And then a lot of other influential people. But what I'll say is this too, what kind of came full circle for me was when I was about 24, 25 years old, I reached out to this guy, Dave Capernaum, he runs this agency called Likeable. And, um, yesterday he was in room. And he introduced himself and I just came. I tried to and I said, hey, like, you know, you actually got on the phone with me when I was 25 for 30 minutes. And you'd talked about this organization, entrepreneurs organization. And I, I owe that all to you because you brought it up and, you know, thank you for that, right?. And then all of a sudden he's like, oh, by the way, like with your upcoming book, I have 700,000 followers on LinkedIn. Let's do a Live. Okay. And let's also get you an article on ink as well. But that just came from me, like talking about him for like 15 seconds. So it's a lot of serendipity and it's a lot of relationships at scale. You get what you put in. Jason: [00:23:16] Totally agree. Yeah. I mean, I, uh, I love obviously the audio and I love that it's not recorded and you have to attend live. What I find working really well on Clubhouse is getting in a room with a bunch of people. I mean, if it's just two people talking, not good, might as well listen to a podcast. I mean, if you can get a ton of people and they're just having a conversation, it's kind of like it amplifies it where it's like you're listening in to someone's dinner conversation around something you're really interested in whether it be growing an agency or whatever it is. Eric: [00:23:51] Some these conversations like, you know, legit people would be paying 10 to 20, $30,000 for a mastermind to learn. And I hate using that word because it's become kind of this, not saying yours is, but it's dirty and in a lot of different ways, but, um, you know, it's. So let's say, peer group. Right. But being able to listen to this advice and some of the stuff I listen to, I'm like, oh crap. You know, I'm going to try it. So I have gotten some really good stuff on it, by the way, like the peer group that I do with, you know, Neil, my podcast co-host, we had a live event. And through Clubhouse, I learned about this thing called a shuttered venue type of grant coming out as part of the coronavirus relief. I didn't know about that. But some guy talked to about, he's like, yeah, you can get this. And like, yeah, we had a shut to our event last year. It's going to come back. But you know, that's what it is. So just little micro-moments like that. Jason: [00:24:31] Very cool. Awesome. Where can people go and get the book? Eric: [00:24:35] Yeah, you can go to levelingup.com or you can just go to your favorite online retailer. It's Leveling Up Eric Siu and you'll find it. And yeah, that's basically it. Jason: [00:24:43] Awesome. Well, everyone go check out the book. Uh, Eric's a really cool guy. And if you guys enjoyed this episode and you guys want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners on a consistent basis where. We have a ton of fun. We're able to see the shit that you're not able to see right in front of you. And a lot of times we'll talk about strategies that we don't talk about anywhere else. And it's pretty amazing. So if you want to scale your agency faster, be surrounded by amazing people and have a lot of fun doing it. Make sure you guys go to digitalagencyelite.com and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Grow_Your_Agency_By_Constantly_Leveling_Up.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm MDT |
Wed, 19 May 2021
With just a little over two years as the CEO and co-founder of The Influencer Marketing Factory, Alessandro Bogliari and his team have built an amazing global influencer marketing agency. They help brands and companies launch influencer marketing campaigns on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube. Alessandro joins us today to talk about how to identify trends and what to do in order to really separate your agency from everybody else. 3 Golden Nuggets1. Starting on a budget. Growing his company from just two workers to 20 in a short amount of time, Alessandro highlights the importance of being able to grow your agency on a budget. You can still get amazing results on a budget rather than spending money you don’t have. 2. Don’t just hop on a trend. Every time you create content for social media you should always take into account the specific medium, demographics, and type of user experience. Don’t just hop on the new hot thing before you understand it. 3. Be curious. Dedicate some time to research, listen, and read about what’s trending right now. Engage with the new generations and given let them show you how they use social media. You have to keep up. Don’t just read about the new thing in the newspaper, because by the time it gets there, it’s already been happening for a month and it's old news. YOUTUBE VIDEO AUDIO LINK Sponsors and ResourcesOribi: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Oribi. Check out Oribi.io/smartagency for a free trial. Plus when you sign up for Oribi get 20% off the first three months with promo code: Smart Agency SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM HEADLINE Jason: [00:00:00] On this episode, I talk with an amazing agency owner who's grown his agency to really big and in a very short time for really looking at the trends. And so we go through, how can you identify the trends and what do you actually need to do in order to do that major land grab and really separate your agency from everybody else? It's a really cool story. I hope enjoy it. Hey Alessandro, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. Alessandro: [00:00:30] Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Jason. Jason: [00:00:32] Yes. I'm excited to have you on and tell your story. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Alessandro: [00:00:39] Sure I am the CEO and co-founder of The Influencer Marketing Factory. We are a global influencer marketing agency. We specialize mostly in TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Um, we are based in the States, but we also have people in Europe I'm from Italy originally. So I understand the importance of having people both in the US and Europe. And we mostly help the brands and companies from Fortune 100 up to, you know, direct to consumer stuff of companies, get in front and engage with gen Z and millennials on like major social media. So that's what we do. We help them from the beginning of the like, understanding the KPIs up to reporting and digital analysis. Jason: [00:01:17] That's awesome. Now, how did you get started? Alessandro: [00:01:20] Uh, I started a couple of years ago. So the agency is like, you know, fairly new. Uh, started no funding, no VC, just a couple of people. Uh, both Italian and because we started that as a new journey and we understood before I'd say anyone else I think is like, you know, one of the few agencies that understood the potential of TikTok, back in late 2020, early 2019. Although other agencies and companies were still thinking that like, you know, TikToK was a kids app. It was just something for lip-sync and dancing, but I was a big fan of Vine and it was discontinued, but I was so love with it. When I saw TikTok and I was watching so many videos on YouTube about TikTok compilations, it was a different environment. It was a little bit more cringy, let's say that, you know, with furries and gamers and everything, but I saw the potential. I was seeing Instagram going down in terms of organic creation. And TikTok was giving the opportunity in a really democratic way to give like in a meritocratic way for everyone to get the spotlight that they did deserve. And so we said, let's really focus on that and invest on that. And we, we, we have done that. We started growing, we started getting amazing clients on like Sony Music, Universal, Warner Music Group. And then we got Google and some others. And these friends. And yeah, from two people now we're 20. Again, between Europe and the States. And, uh, so again, it started like, you know, uh, just totally like organic and we're actually growing in that way. And I'm so proud of what we have achieved so far. Jason: [00:02:51] Tell me a lot of people listening want to understand, because there's always new shiny red objects out there. Okay. And so kind of what you described is going after the shiny red object and it actually working, which is amazing. And there's always, you know, new apps coming out like clubhouse is out and everyone's talking about it and you know, saying, oh, that's the next big thing and all that kind of stuff. So tell me the, kind of the, the story about. How did you go, all right, let's go all in on this and not just get distracted by all those other things. And then how did that turn into landing the Fortune 100 companies that you're talking about. Cause a lot of people are going well, how do you land some of these big brands? Like I remember that's how, you know, my agency brain worked many years ago going, man, how does this one company get, you know, to work with Coke and how does this one company get to work with Home Depot and that kind of stuff. And then, so tell that story a little bit. Alessandro: [00:03:51] Yeah, of course. I have to say that I have to mention that I've done many years as a growth hacker and a growth marketer, as you want to call it. So it's a lot of like out of the box marketing ideas, it's a lot of like data scraping, SEO, both like white and black and gray, you know. It's understanding how you can be on a budget. And still get amazing results also without adding maybe millions in your pockets. Because when we started, you know, we, we started at zero in terms of investments. So you have to think about like, okay, what is the typical way we don't have the money to do that. How can you start in a little way? And so, to be honest, like I spent a lot time doing SEO since day one and, um, thanks to that, we got the majority, like we get 95% of our clients, maybe now 90 because of a lot of it it's retention and word of mouth. But we've got those thanks to SEO, good positioning, referrals, the position we’re on listed. I mean, now just today we are fourth on Google for in terms of marketing agency. And, again, we started two years ago. If you look for TikTok, like, marketing agency, we are second in the US. So what we have done is that, while we saw for that opportunity especially for TikTok, we created a landing page. And we started doing some backlinking and the competition was zero, right? Like no one had anything about TikToK. And we went all in. We had nothing to lose. We were not like in, in this for two-three years, we were starting from a few weeks. So we said, you know, why go, yeah I mean, we were doing Instagram and YouTube of course, but it was so competitive. So we said how we can get like an advantage on that and getting in on SEO where no one is dealing there. That was TikTok, we thought. We did that, we did our landing page, easy one. We created some really good backlinks. I've been also working a lot with journalist that we'd did a lot of for free. That's why we have been featured on a lot of publications. Writers, Wallstreet Journal. I personally write on Forbes and many others. We got on ID week and so on. So, you know, those really good backlinks at Google understands that they are valuable and you start getting the right positioning. And what happened is that managers at these big companies, they, what did they do, they, our people hopped on a ride, so they go on Google and they look for a solution and they find you. And then after that to start creating case studies, you build up your credibility, your awareness of your branding, your positioning, and after that. If Sony is doing something, Universal Music and Warner Music Group, are going to look at that and say, hey, they are doing this, can we do that? They do some digging and then they found out about the company or the agency behind that, and we start growing. So it's, step-by-step, it's super long. It's super like, you know, sometimes probably it takes a lot of energy, but again, you can start for some action. I think the SEO is an amazing way to start, especially if you think about budget. Jason: [00:06:54] If you're like many agency owners, it's very hard to show results and show value to your clients for the hard work that you've done. And up until now, you've probably been using Google Analytics, which is really kind of clunky and hard to use and just been around a long time. And there really hasn't been an alternative until now. And I want to tell you a little bit about, Oribi now I've checked out this tool and it's really pretty cool. It doesn't require any code for you to track interactions and conversions. There's no more jumping from different platforms. You can track your social and paid media really all in one place. And it really allows you to build smart funnels and get tons of insights. I mean, literally I've even set it up where I could say, I want this visitor to get to this particular page and it will tell me what's the likely chance that they actually get to this page and what pages are actually coming from. It's really pretty cool. So, if you want to really kind of get away from Google analytics, I want you to check them out, go to Oribi oribi.io/smartagency. And just for my listeners, you're going to get 20% off the, for the first three months using coupon code smart agency. I think it's really, really smart. Like you said, there's nothing for you to lose. Like let's just go after TikTok, there's no one doing it. And especially if a big company comes to you for TikTok, they're going to want Instagram and all the other ones out there. So it's just a really smart strategy. And I like how you systematically went through it. Let's kind of switch focus a little bit, and let's talk about Instagram Reels and TikToK, and let's have some fun about how agencies could use it, because I see a lot of agencies using it very poorly. So let's talk, what's working, you know, when it comes to developing that kind of content or content strategy around it.
Alessandro: [00:09:01] Definitely. Yeah. Good question. I can see a lot of companies that are trying to understand the differences. We just released one week ago, uh, an infographic about basically Reels versus TikTok. We have scrapped and analyzed the 60 active influencers on both platforms that, that, you know, like uploaded at least many videos. And what we noticed is that in terms of the average views it's pretty the same, like the same in terms of like, you know, of course, like, you know, there are some people getting 50 million, others are getting less, but on average we saw the same. Instagram Reels, Instagram is definitely pushing a lot Instagram Reels, but just because they want to be like, you know, still they're the cool kids, right? They want still to be in a way understanding, especially gen Z. But what we noticed is that this is that, this is what I say all the time. Instagram Reels is still, in my opinion, even if it's pushing, Instagram, it is still network-oriented, you know? So you follow your, your friends and friends of friends, but at the end of the day, it's mostly about like the people that you start following. While on TikTok, it's a sort of an inverse funnel. No matter what we're following, you're going to see all the time, new content, amazing content from people that you do not follow. Based on the content that you liked. So it's more content-oriented. That means that, um, what we see is that we can see on TikToK, a better engagement into sub-community. Whenever you go to a TikTok video and there is a trend, or there is a meme on that video, you're going to find tons of people commenting on that and making references to maybe a sub-Reddit that they saw like, you know, some time ago. Or they are talking about now, like, you know, the Game Stop, everything that happened there. While, um, Instagram it's, a bit more still on the likes, but the comments are more like, you know, I want to say didascalic, but, um, they have less engagement and community, like no type of things. So again, they are pushing a lot on that. But TikTok, the big difference is the strong community. So brands, I think that they should understand that, that difference. What I say all the time is that you, if you're a brand, you cannot expect to take it on YouTube video, cut it, putting it vertical and put it on TikTok. It's a different medium, different demographics, different type of user experience. You should shoot all the time a video thinking about the type of medium is going to go. The same also goes for Instagram reels and TikTok. Just one week ago Instagram said, if you're going to put videos with TikTok watermark on it, we're going to show it to less people, right? They want to have original content on that. So I think that a lot of brands sometimes fail it because they make cringey media started to jump on trends, but they have the opposite effect. They try to be cool, but actually they don't understand what happens. That's why I think that only few brands, whenever they give the opportunity to gen Z employees in the company to jump on that and actually really like make content, in that way they kill it because it's not trying to recreate something that is cool, but actually it's sending someone that understands their own generation and make that type of content. So long story short, make a content all the time for the right type of audience, the right type of medium, and try not to repurpose the same on different social media, because the majority of times it's just not going to work. Jason: [00:12:17] Yeah, it's kind of like doing a commercial for CNN and then running that same commercial on the Cartoon Network. Alessandro: [00:12:23] Yeah. Exactly. Jason: [00:12:24] Or Nickelodeon, I would be like, people are going to be like, what, what is this? Alessandro: [00:12:29] Yeah, exactly. Jason: [00:12:31] Awesome. Well, this has all been great, Alessandro. Is there anything I did not ask you that you think would benefit the agency owners listening in? Alessandro: [00:12:40] I'd say, try all the time to understand what is trending. Like not only of course reading the different newspapers out there. Whenever you read the news, it means that it's already been happening for a month, you know, in the communities. Go on, uh, different apps go on the app store, like, and see what apps are trending. What is going to be the future of things. Whenever possible, talk with gen Z and millennials to understand what is really happening in the background, you know, behind the scenes, because they're gonna go and look for the next app. Right now it's TikTok, what is it going to be next. Personally, I'm watching a lot closely what is happening in China for such a commerce. And I'm pretty sure that we all know what is happening there. Uh, like, it started already two years ago. It's going to be now in the US and after in the, in Europe and then after Latin America. So instead of just watching what is happening on, in the US and only closely, like, reading the newspaper, try to get like really in the work in progress. Talk with people that are creating the next trends. And if you jump on those and you're going to be, as we have done in the past, that the agencies that are going to not just understanding those. But understand a blue ocean market getting there before the others and you're going to have a super competitive advantage. So yeah, listen, read a lot that talk with people, do surveys, getting the game there because at the time that you see that in the newspaper, it's already old. Jason: [00:14:03] I love it. I love it, man. And, uh, what's the website people can go and check you guys out. Alessandro: [00:14:08] Sure, uh, they can check on influencermarketingfactory.com. It's our website. They're going to find, find the case studies. We also trying to keep up like it with different blog posts about of course, like, you know, TikTok, but also now more and more on social commerce, we're going to also work now in our reports. So yes, that is the best way to do that. And I need to want also just to connect with me. Uh, you know, they can find me on Instagram with @alexeidos, that is my username, if they want to. And I'm always open to like, you know, get, if they have any questions super epic to like, you know, help anyone that wants maybe to start agency or some young people that want to understand more about what does it mean to be an entrepreneur. Jason: [00:14:44] Awesome man. Well, thanks so much to go check out those resources. And if you want to be surrounded by amazing people that can see the things you might not be able to see that understand the agency world, and you want to be in the know and really see those trends. I would like to invite all of you to go check out the Digital Agency Elite. This is our exclusive agency owner mastermind, where we're constantly scaling faster. We're growing and having a lot of fun. So make sure you guys go to digitalagencyelite.com and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Keep_Your_Agency_Relevant_By_Staying_On_Trend.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Sun, 16 May 2021
When Ben Childs founded Digital Reach in 2011, his mission was to create an agency that operated with integrity, honesty, and skill. Over the years, he has grown to become a leader in the B2B digital marketing space throughout the country, leading a team of 38 people. Today he's here to talk about the things he wishes he knew in order to scale his agency faster. 3 Golden Nuggets
YOUTUBE VIDEO AUDIO LINK Sponsors and ResourcesWix: Today's episode is sponsored by the Wix Partner Program. Being a Wix Partner is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM
How Does Ben Solve Big Agency Problems?Jason: [00:00:00] On this episode, I chat with one of my mastermind members that has grown a really nice size agency. And we talk about culture. We talk about some of the things that he wished he knew about in order to scale his agency, to close to 40 people, and really still enjoy it and create that freedom that he wants, rather than that prison. So. Let's get into the episode. I think you'll enjoy. Hey Ben, welcome to the show. Ben: [00:00:32] Good to be here, Jason. Jason: [00:00:33] I'm excited to have you on. We've known each other a while, you've been in the mastermind. So tell us who you are and how did you get into this crazy agency life? Ben: [00:00:42] Yeah. So my name is Ben Childs. I'm the president of Digital Reach Agency. We're a revenue-focused B2B digital marketing agency focused on SAS, tech, startups and enterprise, search, marketing automation, design development, and Account-based Marketing. How I got into it is not too dissimilar than I think most people. I had a job at an agency that was pretty crappy. I kind of woke up one day and realized they were pretty churn and burn. So I moved up to San Francisco with a lot of my buddies and I got a job, this is dating myself, at a Daily Deal startup back when those were a thing and they ran out of money and didn't have a lot of prospects. So I took the, uh, computer. That was my severance package from that job, went to RadioShack next door and got a Magic Jack. And just started calling people from my grandma's dresser that I used as a standing desk saying that I could do their digital marketing. I had sold it before, but I had never done it, so just, I knew the holes in the market and just said, "Hey, I'll be doing the work. I'm going to undercut everybody on price. And you can trust me because I need the money for rent." Sold my first few people without a website, cause they were like, yeah, I love it. Let's do it. And that was nine and a half years ago. And now we're 38 people and. Doing bigger stuff than that. Jason: [00:02:00] I love it. I always tell everybody when they come to me about starting an agency and they're like, what do we need? I'm like, you need to know how to do something really well. Ben: [00:02:09] Yeah. One of the things I like about the podcast is there's no real like service kind of education, because if you're not good at what you do, there's not a lot that you can learn from an operations or client management standpoint. And so I think that's something that, you know, when I talk to people about starting businesses, I'm like, well, are you like good at it? And they're like, yeah, I guess it's like, well, maybe you should. Look, I learned on the fly and I was up at 12:00 AM, blowing up Adwords accounts, learning on the fly. And I, you know, I wished I had known better, but the fact is, is you're going to learn some hard lessons along the way, either way. Jason: [00:02:44] Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, you never do it perfect. And especially too, when we look back and we go, oh man, I wish I knew this before I hit the million mark or before I hit the 2 million mark. So, what did you wish you knew back then that you know now. Ben: [00:03:02] I wish I knew that I can raise my prices. Raising prices still is terrifying, but I hired a Director of Sales from a bigger agency. Gosh, like five years ago. And the first thing he did is just like doubled my prices. And I was like, that's scary. You can't do that. And he just goes, just shut up, Ben, just watch this. And honestly, people took us more seriously. We started getting more kind of rarefied clients and got taken seriously at the table. And we've just found that raising our prices, you don't want to make it too necessary due to expense creep, but just kind of the more we charge, the more seriously people take us. And you get to the clients who expect that and expect to get longer contracts and expect to have a more gentlemanly relationship than, um, a lot of the riffraff that you're going to get undercutting everyone's prices. Jason: [00:03:54] Well, yeah, I mean, I was kinda like you in the very beginning. It's like I was on a race that I didn't want to win, a race to the bottom. I'll be like, oh, I'll like he said, I'll undercut anybody just to make rent. But I feel that a lot of times you have to do that in the very beginning in order to really kind of cut your teeth to figure out. It's kind of like, I always use it as like a buffet. Like you got to try out all this stuff, but it's almost like figuring out which buffet to try. Like, you remember when you're in college or really young, you go to like the $5, all you can eat buffet and then like you would leave feeling really, really bad. Ben: [00:04:34] Yeah. It's, um, but you don't know how to do it. And I know you had someone on a while ago who I think they were doing PR. I remember that person who like. Bought a warehouse to like ship a bunch of stuff and it was insane and she knew what she was doing. And she was like, I started off boutique and I started off charging huge prices because we are good. And I started off like many people kind of owning a job being like, I guess I'm doing this now. And I was 23, 24, whatever it was. So it's been a ride. It's amazing. Looking back. Jason: [00:05:06] Yeah. And now with a team of almost 40 people, you know, a lot of times probably looking back too, and some people listening are like, man, that just seems like. A lot of headaches. And I remember kind of thinking back because I looked at it in phases. Right. And you probably look at it in phases as well. Like, you have five people and they're all reporting to you, you know, it's overwhelming. And then you start getting up to 10 and they're still all reporting to you. And you're like, how do people do it with more people than this? So, did you go through that situation? Ben: [00:05:38] You know, what happened was, is about a year and a half on, I brought on a couple buddies who were just kind of looking for either. One of them had gotten cut from minor league baseball. One of them, uh, was a professional poker player looking for an additional revenue stream. They're both geniuses and we've been friends since we were kids. They're geniuses. And I brought them on and, um, we ended up kind of doing it together. And so I had a pretty good team from day one in terms of people that could handle stuff. So I would say that the issue for me is they do still handle stuff, and this gets into culture, but talking to the 37th or 38th person here, I just can't handle their problems. And I'm such a people person, and I just radically validate people, which I think comes across to clients and it comes across to employees too. But you get to 38 people and you kind of have to focus what your time is on and be okay delegating to other people. And I know there was a person who was afraid of us hiring someone over him. And normally I would have been on like a two-hour call with them, you know, saying it's all going to be okay. But you know, you're at 38 people and I told you earlier, our biggest client raised their spend to a lot of money with us. And I can't spend two hours on the phone with this person talking about their job. They're either going to leave or they're not. And that seems cold, but it's not because I have people that deal with that and I need to delegate to them. And they're very good at their job and they're better at that than I am. But choosing where to spend your time just becomes more and more imperative because I just love talking to everybody. It just makes me feel good and doesn't make me any money. Jason: [00:07:15] Yeah. There's like a mind shift that I feel you go through when you really truly start scaling where you go. Well, I could do it this way. And I could do it myself and save money, but then you're like, well, all my time is in this. Versus just outsourcing it or bringing on someone to go do that where you might make a little less profit, but you know, at the end of the day, you're trapped. Ben: [00:07:40] Yeah. I think of the book "Built to Sell." Where he talks about owning a job. And he talks about almost like a cause that's about the difference between an entrepreneur and someone who has an entrepreneurial seizure. A lot of people that start agencies have an entrepreneurial seizure where they're just like, I'm going to do my own thing. And then you end up owning a job. And the fact is, is he says, it's better if you don't know how to do the thing you're doing. I have that benefit. This world passed me by, I'm a caged lion who forgot how to hunt. My partner, who's a genius, is deep in a lot of this stuff with clients. And that's something that I've worked on because he needs to work on other stuff, but he keeps getting pulled back in because as our clients go up and he just gets better and better at this, you know, we need to take a step back and work on processing and scaling. And it can be difficult because it's always easier to just say, I'll do more myself. Great. I'll do it. And it's a tough mindset. And also you just have to make that decision over and over again. It doesn't just happen once. Jason: [00:08:44] So when did you start realizing the role that you needed to kind of transform into in order to really scale the agency? Ben: [00:08:53] Probably, uh, just recently it took me a very long time to get out of, um. Well, I'm still very involved in sales, but it took me a very long time to get out of every fine detail of sales. And that was a process. I think you remember you posted to the group, Marty chiding me in his legendary. Jason: [00:09:14] Oh, I remember that day. I was like, oh wow.
Ben: [00:08:53] I, um, Again, I just love to love if you're listening to this. So, I interviewed a salesperson who I just loved and we had a great time at like an arcade in Seattle and it was great. And I was telling the group, I was so excited and, I just did not do my due diligence. And Marty from Bad Rhino just, just gave a 15 minute. Just tongue lashing. And I just sat there and took it because he was right.
Jason: [00:09:44] It was out of love too. Ben: [00:09:46] It was, it was honestly, he was like apologizing. I was like, no, this is great. This is why I'm talking to others. Jason: [00:09:48] He called me, like, after he was like, man, I kind of feel bad. I was like, no, no, no. I was like, that's why we're all in the mastermind to hear the honest truth. It's not all sunshine and rainbows. Ben: [00:09:58] Well, and Jason, I think, you know, I'm super transparent and super honest. So I'm not there defending myself saying that what I did is amazing. Cause I have an ego. It was very educational. But to that point, I ended up, uh, having another Sales Director come in, that was at a different agency. I actually think it's valuable that they weren't sales-focused before. I like to see my sales team as almost more like project managers, kind of, that are just like very consultative and then getting our subject matter experts involved. That can end up being a little bit more expensive, but you just show people that you're the real deal. And so that's only recently happened. And so if you're talking about what role I fill, I'm kind of learning that every day. Being an entrepreneur, you can wake up in the morning and just stare into the abyss and you could do anything, which is kind of awesome, but kind of terrifying. So I'm learning more about culture. I'm learning more about process. I'm learning more about integrating the 39th and 40th person. I'm learning more about finances. You could be at a premium and lose money. You can be dirt cheap and make money. What happens on the backend matters. So I'm learning more about that. I'm trying to shed my kind of fun character that I play when I'm just ignorant of the day-to-day business and just here for fun. Because, you know, if you're down 10% at a million. Yeah, it's a little bit. If you're down 10% at 4 million, that's a lot. And if you're up 10% at a million, it's a little bit. And if you're up 30% at 4 million a heck of a lot. Jason: [00:11:36] When you're an agency partner with Wix, you wanna lock entire digital ecosystem for creating, managing, and growing your agency. Get the full coding and design freedom to create anything your clients need along with the tools to manage and collaborate with your team seamlessly from anywhere. And when it comes to growing your agency, you can get matched with new leads every day and earn revenue share for every website you guys create. They're backed by the Wix industry, leading security and cyber performance. You'll also have a dedicated account manager on standby 24 seven. So you can reach your goals and start setting new ones. See for yourself, head over to wix.com/partners. And re-imagine what your agency can accomplish. Love it. Well, let's talk about the benefits of niching down and not niching down. Because we see this a lot and I always chat about it. What are your thoughts on this? Ben: [00:12:38] It's easier at the beginning to not niche and it's, you just need the money. You take everything, all money is good money, and you just kind of need to learn your lessons along the way. If you start niched, that's great, but it can be difficult to find the right opportunities. For us, we went hard B2B like five years ago, but like, if an e-commerce company wanted to pay us money, like, okay, super top secretly, I'll take it and not tell anybody. So we niche down to a persona. Really. There's usually niching verticals and there's niching services. We've just decided to niche down to a persona. So, in our industry, B2B SAS in tech, the director of demand gen and the CMO, we just want to like wake up in the morning and know what they're thinking. And any service we provide, we need it to be, you know, we, we do a great job at marketing automation and it's in direct response to enough of our clients saying, we will pay you for marketing automation, because no one does it good. Just being like, okay, let's do it good. And then we can here with them. They tell us what's wrong, what needs to happen. And we build and build, and now like you present it to someone and they're like, holy crap. Like, I didn't know, an agency could do that for me. That has its own downsides. You know, the Chris from Rankings.io, we always joke that he does SEO for personal injury lawyers that are 40, that have two kids that live in this specific zip code, and he charges a heck of a lot of money. And he probably doesn't have to worry about the utilization rate of different people and stuff like that. But there's benefits to some niching. As we've seen, it's a differentiator. So we're not entirely a me-too agency. And there's benefits to doing a lot because you can fulfill needs. And, you know, I mentioned the client that's spending a lot of money. I can pivot a lot of different ways to make sure that they're getting value. So last year our churn rate was positive just because of upsells and various people getting involved. But. You have to, this is one of the reasons why I'm trying to get a better handle on the backend and the finances. It's you run a little thinner, you know, we're awesome at chat, but it's like, okay, do I capitalize that department to basically get ready to go out of the gate? Do I make it run on its own revenue? All of a sudden you have several little digital agencies that you need to be an entrepreneur on. Jason: [00:14:58] Yeah. It's, I always tell everybody in the very beginning, you got to kind of try out everything. Unless you really know what you're meant to do. And then even as you do it for years and years, and you see a lot of the bigger agencies doing this, they become the masters for that vertical or that horizontal niche. And then they start creating other practice areas. Ben: [00:15:20] Yeah. Yeah. Jason: [00:15:21] And they can actually grow. And I always tell everybody too is like, look, when you pick a niche, you still can take on work outside of it as long as it fits it. It's just, you're just marketing to that. And it's weird. When you market to a particular niche like a lot of us have seen, we'll have people from outside that they were like, we've heard your stuff. We want you to help with this. And we're like, you came off the website? Like most of this. So I just want to kind of get rid of a lot of people's worry because so many people fight it for so long. Or don't fight it. Like just keep going after all of them, but it just, when you can get a little focused, it makes things a little bit easier in order to, uh, to grow. Ben: [00:16:03] Yeah. And it makes sales easier. I mean, if you're doing one service on one vertical teaching someone to sell it and be able to speak words that the other person just jumps at is real easy. You know, for what we do, I need someone to come in with a little bit more experience who's done it. And that costs money. But, you know, the idea is that makes money, but things get a little simpler when you niche down and we're continually niching down on who we work with and what we do. Jason: [00:16:32] That's awesome. And tell us some of the benefits, because I always joke that when I ran the first agency, I was in search to kill mode. Like I would have never talked to any other agency owners. I would have just like searched and destroyed. And I always joke, like I would have never let myself into my own mastermind, which is the wrong mentality. And I've learned that over the years. And I want everybody regardless if it's our best run or whoever's mastermind, or you guys create your own, what's the benefit that you get from chatting with other owners? Ben: [00:17:04] Yeah. I've never considered myself to have competitors. Even people that we go up with. If I do, like, I should just be more different. I should just look at what I'm doing and make it different than they are, because if they're doing what I'm doing. Like from the prospect, why are we different? I think there's a major benefit because it just frees you up. And this is just from an entrepreneurial perspective, it helps justify some of your decisions and make you more confident. I was giving the example, like we were having trouble getting paid from a client and I brought it up to the mastermind and you gave a great, great answer, which was like, yeah, you can do whatever you want. Why don't you like send them flowers? And I was like, I didn't know. I could do whatever I want. And that seems like a silly thing to say, but you get into your routine of day-to-day. And honestly, like, that's a lot of my job now, now that you mentioned it, as president, is I talk to people on the team and they have this problem. And I say, well, why don't you just stop doing that? And they're like, I can? And it's like, yeah. And I don't expect them to wake up in the morning and stop working on a client just because they want to, but I have the opportunity to say, why don't you just not work on them and let's fire them. And that's the benefit of talking to a mastermind group is they're able to just be like, Hey, why don't you just not do that? I'm like I thought I had to. Jason: [00:18:28] Yeah, I know. It's just getting that outside perspective. You're so close to it. And I think a lot of times we're so emotional. Mostly connected to it where we just can't see the solution that's really apparent. Like you talk about something and like literally the other 10 people are looking at you going, you know exactly what to do, and then you hear it and you're like, Oh duh, that's so easy. Ben: [00:18:52] And, and that gets to the other benefit for me is I just realized I had something to offer. There's just been several questions where I go, oh, I absolutely know this answer. I did it. The prospect said this, it went great. Or just people have different personalities. So I can open up someone to be a little bit more direct, a little bit more transparent or something like that. But to your point, yeah, I mean, we're talking and someone in the group was like that wasn't the first time I blew 30 grand. And I was like, oh, that guy has his stuff together. And he makes mistakes too. Jason: [00:19:24] A lot of times what I've found too. Uh, even when I'm leading it or been in other masterminds myself, I'll give someone advice and then I'll have to ask the question. Do I do that? Ben: [00:19:38] Yeah. You almost like put on a brave face and you're like, why don't you tell the client this? And then it's like, you get on a call and it's like, whatever you want, Mrs. Client. How high? Jason: [00:19:48] Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Well, awesome. Well, Ben, this has been amazing. Thanks so much for coming on. Is there anything I did not ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Ben: [00:19:57] Yeah. I just want to say, as you scale culture becomes more and more important, and that is like such an amorphous word. I'm a big football fan and culture is just being used over and over again to where it's overused, but really it's, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably started an agency and the agency is really you. And the goal of culture is to just scale that out to where people make decisions you would make. They act in ways that are congruent with how you would act, even if it's not exactly how it's to where, you know, the 39th and 40th person can come into a, oh, this is how this works. And it's different than my previous agency. And it gets to everything in your agency from employee experience perspective that clients can tell that you have a great culture and your client wants to be there. So, that's something that I'm really working on and I've just found it more and more important because when you do that, all of a sudden employees give you the benefit of the doubt. All of a sudden employees buy in and want to help you throw out a goal and people use their creativity to help you. And it's not an adversarial relationship. They're part of something. So that's, um, it's something that I'm working on and I've seen the value of. And, maybe next time we talk, I'll give you an answer as to how I found it. Jason: [00:21:14] That's awesome. Well, I mean, it's always accidental and I always tell everybody, as, as you're building your culture, it's what you believe in. And you have to figure out and let everyone on the team know, you know, where you're going and why. And that gives them the power in order to make those decisions. And it's, it's great to see you figuring that out. And that's why you've come so far along. It's like, you know what to focus on now and you've been focusing on it and that's great. Ben: [00:21:40] You also have to pay attention to your habits, you know, how you live your days it's how you live your life. And so for me, I've had to really guard because scaling, you can just like, oh, just work more. Or, oh, sorry, you're going to have to work the weekend. And then you start building those habits and that just quickly becomes how things are done. And expectations. And so you really have to be on guard for getting in front of the right habits and taking a stand and be willing to lose a client or be willing to give someone a break for screwing up. And you learn it when you learn it. Jason: [00:22:15] Exactly. Well, awesome, well, thanks so much Ben for coming on. And if you guys enjoyed this episode and you want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners on a consistent basis where we can see the sh*t that you can't see. And we can, uh, help you along. And so you can scale a little bit faster and have a lot of fun doing it. I want to invite all of you to go check out digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind where it's only for experienced agency owners. So go to digitalagencyelite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Double_Your_Digital_Agency_Prices_Without_Losing_Clients.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm MDT |
Wed, 12 May 2021
Chris Dreyer is the founder and CEO of Rankings.io which is an agency specializing in SEO for personal injury law firms. Chris believes in being super niched in order to be successful for his clients. He says it takes extreme focus to deliver great SEO results and therefore his agency does not offer any other services or work with clients outside the legal industry. Chris is on the show to talk about how he's grown his agency beyond the first million and is now looking at an 8-figure revenue. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesOribi: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Oribi. Check out Oribi.io/smartagency for a free trial. Plus when you sign up for Oribi get 20% off the first three months with promo code: Smart Agency SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM How Did One Digital Agency Grow to 8-Figures?Jason: [00:00:00] On this episode, I bring back a repeat guest, friend, member, client on the Masterclass, and we're going to talk about how he went from a million in revenue all the way up to eight figures in the past couple of years. And we go over all kinds of really amazing stuff. So I think you're really going to love this episode and let's get into it. Hey Chris, welcome back on the show. Chris: [00:00:30] Yeah, thanks for having me, Jason. Jason: [00:00:31] Yeah. I'm excited to have you back on. It's been a while since you've been on the podcast. Obviously, we chat all the time in the mastermind and back and forth about Star Wars and all goofy stuff. But for the people that haven't listened to the first episode, tell us who you are and what do you do? Chris: [00:00:49] Yeah, my name's Chris Dreyer. I am the CEO of Rankings.io. We own a personal injury law firm SEO agency. So very hyper niche, both horizontally and vertically, and yeah, just excited to be here and happy to discuss it. Jason: [00:01:05] Yeah. So last time you were on, you were just kind of cresting the million in revenue, and now you're a much further, so kind of take us through that journey a little bit about where you're at now and what are some key things that kind of looking back of going I wish I knew this time and I could have even gotten to your level now faster. Chris: [00:01:30] That's a great question. That's also a really loaded question. Jason, still try to talk about all the areas. I feel like I had my white belt and then I put on, I don't know the jujitsu levels, but I felt like I had my white belt and then you kind of get your brown or whatever the next level is at a million. And I think, you know, we're, we're approaching that. I don't even know that I would say black belt, but. Yeah, we're probably on target for our goal. This year is $9 million, stretch 10. And so it's, it's been a huge change across the entire company. I feel like we have a real business now. I think the difference is when you go to that million mark. The owner can wear a whole bunch of hats and really hustle and get to that million mark and just fill, you know, use their, their sphere of influence and kind of depend upon referrals and get there. But I think that you actually have to do marketing, have to generate your own brand, your own inbound leads to really transition towards that, that eight-figure mark. There are, if you think about the main components of a business, so you've got finance, you've got marketing, you've got sales and you've got operations. Finance wise. We implemented Profit First because I found out the hard way. I took my licks. The first three or four years of my business, we kept growing a hundred percent, but my revenue wasn't increasing now, it was investing back in the business. But for me, it was becoming more stressful in those times. I'm like, well, why do I need a $2 million business when I'm making the exact same? So I had to learn how to be financially healthy. And as we grew, also, our profitability would grow. That was a big one. It took some time. Anyone that's read the book Profit First, it's this lean mentality of working off of less and considering profit. And when you're don't have any profit to create those percentages, it takes a lot of work. So I would say that was a big learning lesson. The second on marketing again, we were depending upon referrals, our entire staff. I think I had one marketing individual and. Which is funny. We still have one marketing individual, but our marketing spend's way higher because we used strategic partners, but everyone was centered around operations and doing great work. And that helped us get referrals from our clients and helped us build to that seven-figure mark. But continuing off of that, it's feast or famine on referrals, which I know you've talked about. Jason: [00:04:02] But I like the way that you do referrals. And I love that, you know, at the experience you were like, I want to call you out, Jason, about referrals. Cause you know, I always joke with people. And I'm serious about referrals aren't scalable if you're waiting for them. But the way that you do referrals is you're not waiting for them. You're giving ammo and you're building strategic partnerships where that is scalable and you've built an amazing business from that. Chris: [00:04:31] Right, right. But yeah, we kind of joke back and forth. You and I, and. Basically is anytime you put attention towards something and you're intentional, it can create something and activates it. So we, after reading Chet Holmes book, the Ultimate Sales Machine, where he talks about his dream 100 clientele list. I'm like, well, what if we did our dream 100 referral partners and were because we were so niched that there were a lot of services that our clients needed though, that we didn't provide. So I went and sought out individuals that we were trying to find and identify the best Facebook ads individual, the best pay-per-click the best, everything, video production, the services that our clients needed and really develop those intentional relationships. So that, that really was very powerful. I think a lot of people have a scarcity mindset when it comes to competition in air quotes. When in reality, there's a lot of abundances. There's a lot of opportunity and you can actually have this rising tide type of effect, where we refer a PPC company, PPC leads, and maybe they don't do SEO and they can refer us SEO leads. So it's, there's some mutual benefits there. Jason: [00:05:43] Yeah, I love that. I mean, yeah, that's something I wish I did better at the first agency because I was just trying to murder everyone. If you had agency in your title, like, you know, you were my enemy and I felt like you were trying to take from me. But I liked how, you know, after I sold, I realized seeing a lot of what you do and what other members do and all that. About how that's has helped you and just also seeing how much work is actually out there and only taking on that perfect work that you look for is really big. In switching focus a little bit. I think too, one of the main things that really changed a lot for you. I remember lots of conversations around this, was pricing, figuring out charging the right amount. Because I feel a lot of people are way undercharging and you've kind of take it up a notch even above that. Chris: [00:06:41] Yeah. It's a great question about pricing and. I think one of the benefits of niching, particularly as niche as we are with just personal injury firms, you can really understand the market and understand the levels of competition. I know the SEO specialists with giant egos listening are probably thinking, Oh, I can just go to Moz or SEMrush and do a competition analysis and know exactly what I should charge. No, that's probably not the case. There are, there are intangibles that play into competition, and really understanding those intangibles and what it takes to create leverage to rank a particular industry is different. And that's the thing that we started understanding is, by working with just personal injury law firms, we could model the individuals that were successful and apply that to the other firms. Because the legal vertical is a very fractured environment. They're geography, they're there in all different places around the country, around the world. They have different practice areas. It's a very fractured type of environment. So the competition in Los Angeles is entirely different than St. Louis. And in some cases, Atlanta and the, uh, Orlando could be more competitive than a Los Angeles or Chicago, it's because of who's there. And who's investing in their marketing. Several years ago, Louisiana from a digital standpoint, had no competition. Now you've got Morris Bart. You have Gordon McKernan, and you've got these individuals Labrador Earl's investing a lot in their marketing. So the dynamic has shifted, but that was a very long-winded way of saying it really helps to understand your market. But we started, I think in our first conversation, we talked about that foot in the door, the audit. It basically allows us to set strategic targets and really understand who our client is, what their assets are, what their unique selling proposition is and what their competition truly is on a deeper level. And a lot of our competitors, they kind of try to play that against us. They'll say, Oh, well, we do an audit for free and other people charge $5,000 - $7,500 bucks. Well, guess what? Your audit sucks because if it's free, you're not putting a lot of staff and time, and effort into that audit. It's automated by some tool. And it's garbage. So that's the difference. And the discoveries really helped us determine what we needed to do to get results from clients. Jason: [00:09:16] Yeah, I love it. And the last thing I want to chat about, that I, I feel that you've done really well is kind of the structure and the different levels that you've created within the agency. Because a lot of people are like at the million, I feel that anybody can get to the million mark and a lot of people can maintain the million mark, but getting to the next level like you are, it's very challenging. And a lot of times we go, well, who do we need to hire in order to get further along and really scale the agency rather than just kind of hit that glass ceiling? So what were some of the roles or what was the mindset that you had a couple of years ago in order to make that transition and really start scaling? Chris: [00:10:05] It's a great question. And I obsess about operations and the right people in the right seats, more than any other thing. I think it's the most important aspect of running a business, particularly in having the ability to scale and scale with quality. The things that we've done is we've created, there's this big controversy, right? You've had the pod people on and let's do the nomenclature really quick. So a pod is a cross-functional unit. That is cohesive. They're self-governing. Each individual has their own function in the pod that contributes towards a goal. And then you have, what's more traditional; the traditional hierarchy and the teams where a team has individuals all in one function. So you have all the developers together, all the account managers together. And there are pros and cons to each. The pros of a pod is communication, collaboration. It's, they're self-governing, they can operate in their own P&L. That's kind of the pro. The con is they're harder to start up. You have individuals who don't have soft skills. It's harder to, uh there are a lot of challenges and those situations, um, then with the team. The pro and I'm kind of getting long-winded here, but the team is you have a deeper level of expertise, but there's challenges in those communication silos. So, we really embraced after a lot of time and energy and reading about the biggest organizations, whether it's GE or a Ford motor company or Toyota, or Apple, we really embraced teams. Functional teams. Because even though there's the downside of communication silos, you have extreme levels of expertise, deep level of expertise. Which by the way, Apple who is gigantic, that's how they operate is, they have teams, not pods and they have this deep level of expertise and they talk about their challenges. There's a great article on Harvard business review that talks about their organizational structure that I really encourage individuals to read. Jason: [00:12:16] Love it. Well, this has all been amazing, Chris, and I appreciate you taking the time for coming on the podcast and everything you do to help out the mastermind. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience listening in? Chris: [00:12:29] Geez, I think the most important thing is to, you know, think about your operations. Right people, right seats. And then also one thing that's not talked about as much as to eliminate waste, where are you leaking money? What tools should you not be using? What individuals aren't truly driving an impact for your organization? You need to evaluate those situations too. Jason: [00:12:50] What, uh, I guess the last question, since I lied. In figuring out how to eliminate the waste, what's the best way to figure out where you're wasting money? Chris: [00:13:00] Yeah on the tool and software aspect as an owner, or if you have a CFO or Director of Finances to do consistent reviews of your P&L and your vendor expenses. That's a big one that you can bring your leadership team. Uh, from a utilization standpoint, it depends on if you're using vendors or if you have in-house labor. If you have in-house labor and you're doing almost everything in-house, you need to track it to see if individuals are really contributing for utilization. If you're using vendors, you're paying for a unit. So it's a little bit easier to track that. And, um, it's having a scorecard or jumbotron, whatever you want to call it, to have this top-level view of your metrics, to understand where there are leakages because you can see on the scorecard where they exist. Jason: [00:13:46] Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Chris, for coming on, everybody, go check out Rankings.io and follow Chris and what they're doing, they do an amazing job. And it's been an honor to see how far you've progressed year over year. That's why we do what we do. And if you guys want to be surrounded by amazing owners like Chris, and figure out the things that you might not be able to see in front of you because you're just too close to it I want you guys to go to DigitalAgencyElite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind for really experienced agency owners wanting to scale faster, do really cool things, and be surrounded by even more amazing people. So go to DigitalAgencyElite.com and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Grow_Your_Digital_Agency_to_an_8-Figure_Revenue.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Sun, 9 May 2021
Brent Weaver is the CEO and founder of uGurus. He leads the vision for the company and creates educational programs that help agency owners work on their business to drive additional revenues, increase profits, and create freedom in their life. Brent is here to share his insight on referrals and the importance of choosing a niche for your agency. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesWix: Today's episode is sponsored by the Wix Partner Program. Being a Wix Partner is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Is Your Digital Agency Fishing in the Right Pond?Jason: [00:00:00] On this episode, I talk with Brent Weaver about why referrals just aren't scalable and why it's so important to pick a niche. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hey, Brent, welcome to the show. Brent: [00:00:13] Good to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to have you on, so tell us who you are and, uh, a little bit about the agency that you're in and what you do now. Yeah. So, uh, my name is Brent Weaver, CEO, and founder of uGurus. We are a business school for digital agency owners. We primarily work with agencies that are kind of 1 to 10 person range, really helping them to track more leads, win more deals, delivering delight for their clients. They can profitably scale their agency and achieve some freedom in their business in life. Before, uh, we're coming on into the ninth year doing this business. But before that I ran HotPress Web, which is a digital agency based in Denver, Colorado for about, I guess, about 13 years. And, uh, grew that from, uh, my business partner and I from, uh, us in our bedrooms and high school to a 14 person thriving agency in downtown Denver, uh, serving over 300 clients. And, uh, we had clients like Dish Network and Anheuser Busch Inbev and all sorts of, uh, smaller and medium-sized businesses across the board. Jason: [00:01:17] Awesome!. Did you sell the agency? Did you were like, Oh, we don't want to do this anymore? What's the what'd you do? Brent: [00:01:23] Yeah. So we did the business did get acquired by another shop in Denver. We had probably about two years before we sold the business. I started to blog and build some training programs for agency owners, and we had done some deals with Adobe. And so we, um, Kind of started kind of riding two horses at the same time we had the agency business, which was growing really well. And then we had this thing that, uh, myself and my business partner would do, you know, a day or two a week. We'd go and, you know, create videos, we'd go do our own thing. And, uh, and so we kind of felt like we were starting to run two businesses at the same time, but also I think just as I'm sure, you know, right. The impact that we had on. Other agency owners that were like following our processes and our methods, like we were getting all of these, thank you letters in all the time for people that we'd really helped them transform their life and their income and their freedom. And after a while, it was kinda like, Hey, we really enjoyed doing this. And we wanted our agency to go and be in a good place. So we had some really great opportunities to get that business acquired. And so we pursued one of them and it turned out really well. Jason: [00:02:24] Awesome. Let's talk about after high school, um, and do an agency, right? Because I think I know how, how it goes in high school. It's like, dude, I can, I can get some money for a year. Brent: [00:02:37] I was basically working uh minimum wage $6.25 I think an hour, at the time, at a fabric store and somebody paid me $500 to build them an order form for a candy store out of Michigan. And it took me about a day and I was like, cool. When I went to my boss at the fabric store and said, I'm going to go ahead and do this other thing. Cause I basically made like, you know, two months wages in a day. So, so that was that. Jason: [00:03:03] That's awesome. And so if you could go back to when you were starting, what would you have done differently? How would you grow the business? Brent: [00:03:14] I think for me, it's, you know, finding that audience, a high-value audience that you can leverage your skills to get really great results. For, as I mentioned, our first project was a candy store in Michigan. The only reason we got that client was because my business partner's dad would go hunting in Michigan and, you know, he'd go buy at this candy store and he'd pick up, you know, they'd order stuff. But then they'd grab these order forms, uh, to order stuff. When they came back to Dallas and they would have to fax the order form in, and Shernis, uh, the woman that owned the store would always, you know, have to call it. Well, I can't read your handwriting, you know, there's this like whole thing, a community that supported this business. And we just happened to kind of be a solution for that business. Right. But this tiny little candy store in Michigan, right. I mean, she wasn't making massive money. And so yeah, we built this thing, but the value of it right. Was great for her, but like, you know, it wasn't like it was worth $50,000 or $500,000, right. Or something like that. But I think that we could've, our same skills could have easily fetched us a lot more money sooner, but because we were fishing from this pond, that was kind of like the local neighborhood pond. Right. Like we only had the network that we had access to. I was making a lot more money than I would at the fabric store. Uh, I think there were other high-value ponds out there. And I think that's the thing that. Um, when we eventually figured that out, right, let's go hang around businesses that are, you know, making millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars or like Dish, you know, billions of dollars. And it's just a totally different way to do business. Right. I mean, I remember when we got Dish Network as a client, I mean, they'd come in with these like last-minute deadlines, but they'd basically give us a blank check. They'd be like, Hey, as much as you guys can work over the next two weeks like we'll take all of your team's hours for the two weeks, and we'll pay you a premium on that time because, you know, we have some big deadline or whatever, right. And so it was just fundamentally a different type of client to work with versus where your, your skills might not be as valued. So I think that the audience component is something that we eventually learned. And once we started hanging out with businesses who, you know, in the millions of revenue, like budget became not like inconsequential, but it became a much less deciding factor in terms of like who you were, you know, what kind of work you were doing.
Jason: [00:05:36] Yeah. I always found that when you first start out and I started out doing websites for 500 bucks too, I don't know why it's always, you know, 500 bucks, but you always think, well, that's the max someone will pay. Or if I charge them twice the amount, I have to do twice the amount of work versus figuring out that audience, like, you know, Dish Network. Like our first one, I think our first big client was like Wter.com. And they were a billion-dollar water brand, like Crystal Springs, Hinckley Springs, Belmont Springs, all these different Springs. And it kind of changed our mindset of going, Oh, there are these bigger companies that will pay for value rather than pay you for the amount of hours that you actually work. Brent: [00:06:20] Like a lot of people, I got convinced that your prospects sometimes start to dictate your mindset a little bit. And when we first opened our office in Denver, we were trying to, you know, we're in a conference room, we were thinking about, hey, where should we get new clients? And we thought, hey, maybe the chamber of commerce, right. Or something like that. And they were running these classes for brand new businesses. We thought that was a prime audience, right? People are like, ah, you know, all these new businesses, they all need websites. Right. But the problem was, they weren't established. They were $0 revenue. They were sole proprietorships. You know, these businesses that maybe had 10, 20, $50,000 a year in annual revenue, which is, there's a lot of businesses out there. There's like, almost 20 million businesses in the United States that are making $50,000 or less per year. So there's a lot of them out there, which is why Wix and Squarespace and GoDaddy and all these major brands are going on volume. Like they focus on that market, but for us as a small services shop, not a huge market like that. And so I was going and teaching these classes and I'd have all these people come up to me and say, oh yeah, maybe you can help me build a website. And so we'd go through the proposal process or I'd go through even qualifying and they'd say, well, yeah, well, we only have $500. We only have $1,000 dollars. And while we had done some projects for $20 or $30K, I started to convince myself that that was the market now for websites that like getting $1,500 for a website was like becoming really, really difficult. And, and I started thinking, okay, well, we should build our business based on volume or this or that. Like we were trying to solve the problem. And the only issue at the time really was. I was fishing in the wrong pond, right? Like, no matter how many cool sales methodologies I could use, no matter how much, you know, value-based language, right? Like if the pond that I'm fishing from literally has businesses that are, you know, $50K a year in revenue, like, you know, selling a $10,000, $20,000 website to them, it doesn't really make sense. Jason: [00:08:13] Very cool. And so how did you figure out the pond that you wanted to the fish after? And like, how would you do that over again? Cause I find that a lot of people struggle with that. And like you were saying, you kind of go to the chamber of commerce, you get a couple of clients and then those referrals actually dictate how your next couple of years are going to go because it's always the same or lower. Brent: [00:08:35] So I think once we sat down in a room and said, okay, this is not working. Right. So we looked at, you know, where was all of our money coming from, which I think is a really good exercise. There's this concept of the pareto principle where 80% of your yield or revenue comes from 20% of your inputs or originally it was like somebody looking at, uh, land ownership. Right. But this concept is, has played really well in business. So somebody had kind of taught us that we looked at our client base and we looked at who you're making the most money from. And yes, we did have a lot of clients that were small potatoes and they were taking up all of our time, but they weren't really getting us the results. So we looked at all of our clients instead of, hey, who's actually driving results for us. And it was, by and large, it was organizations that had, you know, had been established for five or more years. Had over a million dollars in revenue. Uh, for the most part, they had dozens of employees, whether it was a nonprofit or whether it was a business, you know, some of our clients had tons of employees. So we started looking at this and saying, look, let's just at least start saying no to anybody that hasn't been established for more than five years, it's less than a million dollars in revenue. And, um, you know, that has less than, let's say, 30 employees. So that was step one was at least identifying, Hey, here are some qualities, some constraints that this audience has that is actually driving revenue for us. And let's start saying no to all those other things. So which created some capacity for us to look at other types of businesses. The second question to that though is we started asking ourselves well, okay. So these are the clients that are driving all of our money. We know who is helping us make more money. We want more of those clients. So the second question is where do they hang out? Where do million-dollar businesses hang out? Right at that time, I really wasn't super educated on like verticals or really this idea of niching. To me, it was like a foreign concept. And if anything, it evoked a little bit of like resentment or disgust like, Oh, I could never niche. Right? Um, but we at least started asking ourselves that basic question, right? Where do these million-dollar businesses hangouts? And we start identifying organizations, there's organizations like EO. YPO in the Denver area, there were organizations like it was called Diner. It was like Denver Independent Network of Restaurant, uh, something. Right. And we started identifying these groups that these businesses hung out. And so for example, I went and gave a talk at the Diner Organization, which was basically this group of about a hundred Denver-based restaurants that were all roughly over a million dollars a year in revenue, right. There were the most successful restaurants in Denver that were independent. So I wouldn't give a talk at this group about how to leverage their website and social media to get more butts in seats. And there was like the same number of people that were in my old Chamber of Commerce classes. You know, there's about 15 restaurants, right? Except in this instance, I gave this talk, and then, you know, half a dozen restaurant owners came up to me and said, Hey, I love what you're doing. We don't have anybody that can do this. It's great that you're teaching me this, but can you just come in and do it for us? And every single one of those clients turned into a 10 to $20,000 initial project with ongoing, you know, 10, 15, 20K a year in work. So like one talk in the right audience. And it was a fundamentally different conversation afterward. And so that was where a real light bulb I think happened for us, was like, Oh wow. We can go in. Share do the same thing, right? The dynamics are the same, go teach stuff, share stuff, give tons of value. And if the pond is just a fundamentally better pond than, you know, we're going to have different results. Jason: [00:12:02] Yeah. I love to teach how to do it because there are so many agencies that think if they do that well, you're giving away the secret sauce. And at the end of the day, there's no secret sauce, but people will actually decide to work with you if they actually understand the plan. Like, I always tell everybody when I used to race cars and I would teach people how to go through a corner at a hundred miles per hour, like a 90-degree turn. And they'd be like, there's no way. But if I could actually communicate and show them, there is a plan for them not to die and then actually demonstrate it to them. Then they're going to always. Be able to like, Oh, I can do that. And then like, I'd always laugh with my other buddies and be like, oh, now they're faster than me. I was like, crap. I need to tell him, be like, hit the brakes harder there. Brent: [00:12:54] Well, I think that the fundamental, like, I mean the classic agency business model of staff augmentation, where at the time we had, let's say a dozen people working at our agency for a company, even an established company to go up there and hire a team full-time to be a part of their organization is a lot of money, right? I mean, if you're going to go hire three people to be part of a digital department, I mean, that's $50K in salaries a month, plus all the other stuff that comes with having a team. Right. Whereas you can pay an agency, you know, maybe even, it sounds like $50,000 is a lot of money, but when you put it in the context of the alternative for most businesses, or maybe they hire a, a jack-of-all-trades person that has 19 responsibilities within the business, and one of them happens to be maintain a website. Right. And they don't have the experience to, you know, really do like hardcore SEO or pay-per-click or build funnels. Right. Uh, so I think at the core, right, like agencies. Want to showcase their skills, uh, almost like a job interview, right? I mean, it doesn't make sense for most businesses to go out there and hire an entire team. Right. That's why agencies exist. Cause you can snap in those skillsets for a fraction of the cost. I think going out there and teaching what you do showing the results, uh, also is a big part of that showing your potential clients, Hey, this is what you can get with this kind of, to your point, right? Demo-ing, I think is a big part of that pre-sales process. Jason: [00:14:14] When you actually start doing this and you're, you're growing your agency, what's the mistake that you see a lot of agency owners make, or a mistake that you guys made with, you know, in terms of referrals. Brent: [00:14:27] I mean, look, referrals are, referrals are great. I mean, who doesn't love a referral, right? Uh, when, when somebody sends you an email and says, Hey, you got me great results. And here's my friend. You know, Joe and Joe need your results and you should, you guys should talk. Right? Cause then you get that a little bit of that credibility passes on. Right. And so referrals are, are great. Uh, the problem is they're not really predictable. Uh, they're not really scalable. Now I've published content. We've published blueprints about how to create systems around referrals, but even that right is kind of dictated based on the size of your network. Right? How many clients do you have? If you have 10 clients, you probably can't go to all 10 of them every day and be like, Hey. Can you give me another referral, right? Whereas, you know, with something like Facebook ads, right. I can go to Facebook every day and they will take my money and they will put my ads and in front of audiences. Right. So I think that referrals as a strategy, I call it kind of a non-strategy. Uh, it's hope marketing. It's, you know, referrals are table stakes. You should be out there doing good work and that should create referrals for you. And that will be like one leg of marketing, you know, game plan. Right. But you're, you can't really sit on a one-legged stool, right. It's not super comfortable. So we need to have a couple of other legs on that stool. And so I call those marketing engines, right. We want to have a couple of additional marketing engines outside of referrals. To help, uh, your business get those consistent leads that are predictable, repeatable, and scalable. Those are kind of three qualities that we want to see out of them. When I, when I say marketing engine, we should be able to put in a fixed amount of money, money, or time and get a predictable result on the backend of that. So the biggest mistake kind of back to your original question is that I think agencies, a lot of times they're so busy doing the work. And building stuff with their clients that they forgot to go out there and build awareness for themselves because they're so comfortable. With referrals because referrals are so easy. Like it's like the difficulty from relying on referrals, actually building marketing engines, uh, for the first time is actually a pretty big jump because referrals require you just to focus on your clients, which is what a lot of people are used to. Right. But going out there and proactively building a marketing engine feels like a lot of work. And so they don't do it. And I think that that was the biggest shift for us, right. Where we went from being passive, passively engaged in our marketing to going, Hey, you know what we need to actually. Really invest in this. We need to put somebody in the business. That's in charge of this, of the marketing component of the business. A lot of agencies out there treat themselves as they're, you know, they try to treat themselves as their own best client, uh, which is just, I mean, it's a recipe for disaster, right? I mean, we know that, that just doesn't work typically. And so we started this to shift resources, right? Both hiring internal staff members, dedicated to marketing the agency and then also hiring other agencies. To help us market our agency. Jason: [00:17:14] Very cool. And so what's one example of a marketing engine that you see really working well. Brent: [00:17:21] So I think there are three kinds of categories of engines. One is content. I mean, you're definitely awesome at this, right? You publish a ton of content. You're super consistent. You've got the great frequency of it. Another engine kind of category is partnerships. So finding other people that have your ideal client, either as their own clients or on a list. And then the final one is a paid advertising. So I kind of focus mostly on a track-based strategy where we're putting out. You know, the information we're putting out messaging and then the right people are coming to us. I'm not a huge fan personally of operating outbound and no, it's a great strategy out there. But I think for, if you're trying to get into a position of authority with your clients, I think that publishing becoming an influencer in your niche is the way you create raving fans. Right? It's really hard to create a raving fan through, uh, through outbound connection where somebody has never heard of you before. So in those three categories, I mean, one example of a content-based strategy. One of my clients does is they, um, they speak on stages. So it's pretty simple calculus day. Every time they go and speak on a stage where they're virtual or physical. Right now, right now, the physical is not really happening. So they've moved a lot of their stuff to virtual. They get anywhere between five and 15 qualified leads. These are longer sales cycles. But they have found that if they get about 20 to 30 qualified leads a month, that gives them enough energy to like to keep their sales pipeline like over full, right. They always have plenty of opportunities for them. Their marketing engine is really simple. Get on two stages a month and that's a solved problem for them. So their only marketing activities are really. Booking out those stages. So at any given time, they might have four to six months of stages booked sometimes even more now, before COVID hit, I think they were up to like 12 months of stages. And then all of a sudden, a lot of it evaporated and they did have to kind of rebuild that in the virtual space, but you know, that's a marketing engine, right. They know that if they go put their hour or two hours a week into outreach to, you know, other associations or organizations in their niche, that they're going to get that next stage book. Right. And they just keep kind of putting some time into that engine. No, they're not out there doing Facebook ads. They're not out there trying to publish blog posts. They're not out there on social media. Like their whole engine is just getting those stages, uh, booked onto their calendars. And then they're, they're just done. Right? So that's an example of content, right? Where you're out there, gigging in your market. Jason: [00:19:50] Awesome. Very cool. Well, this has all been great. Brent, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Brent: [00:19:58] You know, I think that I mean, just on that last point of gigging, I think that this is kind of back to that. The core of what agencies can be doing for them. It's probably one of the one areas that I spend the most time coaching, which is. Helping people get out there into their market and building that confidence to share their content, share their expertise, start running ads, those types of things. And, um, I think that's probably one of the areas that I think people could always spend more time on or, or spend more money. Right. I've got clients who, before they came to us were like a Facebook ads agency. That's not spending any of their own money on Facebook ads. Right. And so, so trying to figure out how to fuel your engines and being confident that if you do that, You know, you're going to get results. I once had a client that before we started working together, you know, they're trying to attract $50,000 clients and they were scared to spend $500 in advertising. And that's one thing that I think. You have to think about it in the context of your client's value is like, if you're going out there trying to attract $50,000 clients or a hundred thousand dollar clients, right. The amount of effort that you need to put into that engine is probably at least somewhat proportional to, uh, to the output. So that's something to think about as you're starting to build your marketing engines Awesome. And, uh, you have a book out that everybody can go check out on Amazon. Or tell us a little bit about the book. Jason: [00:21:16] Yeah. So the book is called, Get Rich in the Deep End. And, uh, the basic premise is how to overcome that dependency on referrals and word of mouth as a digital agency owner, uh, how to identify your audience, build those awareness channels, attract the right clients, establish yourself as an authority in your niche, and then build systems and processes to acquire. Those prospects and leads. So we walk you through basically those five A's of audience awareness, attract authority and acquire. And the book is a little bit different in that we follow an agency on our story. This is kind of an amalgamation of a bunch of different clients that we kind of created a narrative in the story. So it makes it really easy to read. It's a pretty simple concept. And, um, yeah, we'd love for you guys to support that it's called get rich in the deep end. I think your viewers would love to read that book. Awesome. Well, everybody go check it out. And if you guys enjoyed this episode and you want, and to be surrounded by amazing agency owners that can, you know, really see the stuff that you might not be able to see, and really know what it's like in order to grow above the eight-figure Mark or beyond. I want you all to go to a DigitalAgencyElite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind where we're always looking for the right. Agency owner that can have fun that can share that'd be transparent. And that really wants to scale very quickly. So go to a DigitalAgencyElite.com, and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Is_Your_Digital_Agency_Fishing_in_the_Right_Pond_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm MDT |
Wed, 5 May 2021
Fran Biederman-Gross has grown her firm Advantages from a local printing business to a global end-to-end communications agency. As the CEO and founder an Inc. 500 company, she leads her clients on an invaluable journey of brand discovery that reveals their 3 keys: Purpose, Values, and Story. She joins the Smart Agency podcast to get really deep with understanding your purpose and communicating it in a way that gets your team and clients behind it. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesOribi: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Oribi. Check out Oribi.io/smartagency for a free trial. Plus when you sign up for Oribi get 20% off the first three months with promo code: Smart Agency SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM How to Unlock the 3 Keys of a Values-Based AgencyJason: [00:00:00] Hey on this episode, I talk with an agency owner friend who talks about the real importance of having that North star, that why. And what are some of the things that you can do in order to figure your why out. Or make sure that your North star is the real deal. And then you have that complete clarity to make the right decisions that your team has the right decision. So I hope you enjoy. Hey Fran, welcome to the show. Fran: [00:00:32] Thank you Jason so much for having me today. What a fun time we're gonna have. Jason: [00:00:36] So, uh, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Fran: [00:00:40] My name is Fran Biederman-Gross. And I am the CEO of an agency called Advantages. I'm a co-author of How to Lead a Values-Based Professional Services Firm, wife, mother, all those other titles that go in there. But most proud of my professional work on the Three Keys and the agency that we have that in this demand generation bringing ROI to close the gap between marketing and sales. Jason: [00:01:07] Awesome. Well, the mother is the hardest job. Uh, that's what I've learned. And, uh, the thankless job. Fran: [00:01:17] You know, it gets better as they get older. I'm going to say not easier. Just better. Jason: [00:01:21] Yeah. Well, I'm still waiting for the easy part. Fran: [00:01:26] Yeah. I don't know when that comes. Jason: [00:01:28] Exactly. So tell us, how did you get started in the agency life? Fran: [00:01:32] Oh, in short, my late husband and I started a printing company pretty much out of college. It actually started as like a stationary business of taking overruns and pedaling, if you will, all over the streets of Manhattan and Queens, because there was a stationary corner virtually in every store, you know. There was a store on every couple of corners, if you will. And in the back, there was a printing company where you could order stuff that you need. And then in the early nineties, I'm going to say that Staples opened up and really revolutionized how we bought things and then the internet exploded and how we bought things. So there wasn't really that need, but we really evolved into this incredible agency because I asked a lot of questions. Like, why do you think you need that? Or why do you want that print quote? Or what are you going to do with that? So that whole curiosity of why really resonated, especially when I met Simon Sinek back in 2004 or five. And really, and pretty much as an innovator of taking the golden circle and bringing it to life. And that's how the agency, of course, I bought one and took that apart and created this really phenomenal Inc 500 agency in New York. That's very, purpose-driven. Jason: [00:02:48] Let's talk about why did you buy an agency? You already had a business because you know, I'm always very curious on why people buy when it's pretty easy entry to get in. But I'm also on the flip side, like the agency that we're running now is like, that's all we do through growth is buy. Fran: [00:03:04] So it's, you know, it's actually a really great question and I'm going to say that. If you just isolate my life experience just as a matter of fact, not to get emotional in any way, but my late husband passed in 2001 and he was the debonair, very suave, very emotional, very friendly salesperson, and he would walk all the buildings. We went through 5,000 business cards, literally in every three months and he passed his card out and was so personable and was so memorable that we helped people all the time. Not only in stationery and supplies and print, but we began to solve problems. And when he passed as you know, his voice still rings very clear in my head. You're such a waist behind a desk. I had to get out there and figure it out. But what really resonated with me was the, problem-solving it wasn't what form do you need, or what brochure do you need or what trade show are you going to and how do I help you? But like, how do I really solve that problem? And what do people care about? And I needed, um, it was a very expensive education. That's really why I bought the agency so I could actually dismantle it, which is what I did. Jason: [00:04:18] Yeah, I see. So many times people will buy their first agency and then they just shred it apart. But it's just, it's a process like anything, and it's exciting to see and see where people have, uh, you know, taken it. Let's talk about like, I love Simon Sinek. Like I haven't read any as books, but I love the Ted talk. I don't read any books. So. Fran: [00:04:40] Hey, listen. As long as we're open and honest, I read my book probably more than any other book out there as I was writing it, but I'm not a big fan or a love of, you know, just reading. I don't think I get so much still time either. So I'm right there with you. Ted talks are amazing. Jason: [00:04:56] Yeah. I love them. So people always struggle with figuring out their why, and it sometimes takes them a very, very, very long time. And they always think like, well, let me like, just jot something on a piece of paper and that's my why. And I checked the box. What was the process that you went through legal? I feel it's so important. You know, as I talked to thousands of agencies over the years, A lot of us were accidental kind of like you, right? Like you open up this printing shop, stationary shop, and then you start asking questions. Right. And it was an expensive education for a lot of us, rather than coming from the agency world and knowing exactly what not to do from the big firms. Right. And going to go do it. And we never spend time figuring out that why or getting that clarity. Until five years later or sometimes, or how long did it take you to figure out that why? Fran: [00:05:56] Well, I was in a unique situation. I was married to a very dynamic best friend who was very clear that he just loved when other people would get attention and they would stand out for all intents purposes, get noticed. Right. As our tagline still states to this day. And while that attention is really important, the question is how do you manage through the clutter of it? But it was very clear to him and I, as we founded the company, you know, that's really what we love to do. When you really can connect with that, and I'm going to be honest with you, sitting down to do a wide diagnostic is a slog. That's the best four-letter word I can use to describe it. And until you surrender to it, you're just not going to do the deep work that it requires. And what's amazing is when an entrepreneur does it and goes through that slog doesn't matter what business they own. It doesn't matter what industry it's in. There is an overarching thread and commonality between everything that they do. And this has really been my life's work because you know, the book is all about the three keys on how to unlock purpose and profit. How do you get to profitability? Well, the quickest way is to do what you say we're going to do attach the dream. Cause that's where you know, all of your emotion and your drive really comes from, cause it's what excites you. So when you can articulate that really simple statement, that has a cause and an impact. And sometimes "so that" in the middle of it, it guides everything. And it, look through the pandemic, it's made us almost infamous on mergers and acquisitions and how we can get people to come together. And how we can get people to pivot. And what's the next thing they should do. It's such an unlock, right? So you have to discover it. You have to unlock it and then figure out a way to infuse it. Everything we do is always in those that three-step process discover, unlock, and fuse. But honestly, Jason, you gotta surrender to the slog. Jason: [00:08:02] Yeah. When I start working with agencies, I tell them like, look, this could be a long process of figuring this out. We'll keep doing other things, but it's very hard to figure out what's the next move when you don't have this. I was working, uh, I was telling you in the pre-show, started working this one agency that goes after nonprofits. And I was like, why do you do this? And they just kept repeating the typical BS that agencies... we want to make a major difference in the world. And I was like, no, that's not it. That's not, it. It has to be that North star, which gives the ability to your team to get excited, to make a decision behind it. And then he was just mentioning, he was like, well, I would love in the next five years to help nonprofits raise a hundred million dollars. I'm like, You're getting closer. It's measurable. People can get behind it. And then I was starting to tell them about ours. I was like, look, I just wanted to be like our whole why, our North star has to be a resource we wish we had when we were running the first agency. And then enabled our whole team to be like, what do we need to do? They don't have to come to me as the toll booth and everything flowing through me, which is, this is just stressful shit. Fran: [00:09:21] Here's a really good news. Jason, we have synthesized this so succinctly that you can pick up a copy of the book and read the appendix and it'll give you the whole outline and the theory and the things that you need to go through if you want to DIY it. Or inside of pretty much, I'm going to say between six and eight hours, we get really clear. And you know, for us, when we, when we take on any client, we have to really identify these three keys that we talk about, right? Your purpose, your values, and your story. Now, a story there's a million books written and how everybody can tell a great story. But the bottom line is it has to be memorable and you can't be the hero in it. Right? That's the big takeaway from story. And values to me, you start with that because you can actually separate the things that you value, that are wired to you as an individual. And that we can almost have another session on values, but when you just talk about purpose, like that's right, that the two, the fragment of the two sections of the equation of what this formula looks like, you're talking about the contribution and the impact. And once we can identify what those two things are and not confuse them with the things that we, that we truly treasure and, and value, then you really get somewhere. And that will help any agency owner really get very clear on where the organization is going and how to rally the teams around them. Like you said, it's really important to do that. Jason: [00:10:52] So for the people listening that don't really have their North star, maybe they have a North star, but it's really it's like the East star. They're not there. Right? Where can they start? Like, what are some of the steps? You know, the actively people listening, they'd be like, all right, let me get the sheet of paper. What do we need to do? Fran: [00:11:09] So the first thing is you need, you need your mindset. There's one famous exercise that I'm really infamous for is, you know, on a sheet of paper, write 1 through 28, and just tell me what motivates you to get out of bed every day? And just keep going down. And for some, it's funny, why 28? Because that's the page that we designed that had enough space between the lines, it was just an arbitrary number. The point is, is to get to the place where it's actually hard because people. You know, we'll start with the easy things or like, Oh, I got a bed 'cause my alarm clock rang or I have to go to work today. And I have to brush my teeth and I get out, I get out of bed because, you know, I want to make the world a better place for my kids. And then you start getting to the hard stuff and the stuff that you don't, they can't really articulate. And there's a good reason for it. Right? So this is science. This is biology. You know, your brain has a has a section. That doesn't have the ability to speak and you have to actually force the feeling to articulate the feelings, right? Like as, as agency owners, as marketers and branders, our job is to articulate how other people feel, if we're purpose-based anyway. So if you think about it, we have to do it for ourselves. So the way that I want to make people feel, how can I articulate that? Even though I don't have the words. So that's one of the reasons why it's such a slog. Now, being an outsider. Right. I've done thousands of these. And it's really easy for me to see viscerally, emotionally, where somebody's going, what's hard, help them through this slog to kind of like, I wouldn't say babysitter handhold, but just make it easier. Because you know what happens. Right? We get stuck on something. We struggle. We procrastinate. And like, yeah, we'll pick that up later. Yep. It's going to take a long time. So I'll give myself permission to do that. But if you really want to get a headstart, you will sit down. And you will work through the hard stuff and you will really well slog through it and you will get to a place that it's in the ballpark. Might be not wordsmith might need, you know, you would get the essence and the essence is really all you need. Cause that will manifest differently depending on what you're doing. The essence never changes. Jason: [00:13:22] So after you write down these 28 line items and really like, really spend some time on it. And I love that you have, you know, go past the easy part because people are like, cause I want to make a difference. Like, yeah yeah. Well, and then tell me more about that. Right. It's kind of like the Larry King, like tell me more, tell me more, tell me more and then tell me that again. And then you really kind of drill down into it. What's the next thing that the listeners need to do? Fran: [00:13:48] So it's the same thing, but instead of telling me more, it's just why. You got to go five deep probably. Right? Because one, two is probably surface. You know, if you're really self-aware, you're gonna, you're gonna nail it and you're going to get clear or you can answer in less than five. But the fuzzier you are, the more it takes and there's no right or wrong. There's no judgment on how many times I have to ask you that question. It's just about getting you to think and ponder to tap into the emotion of what feels right. And then what I like to say is we have to pressure test it. Okay, great. So there's just, again, a series of other questions that I would think about, but what you're looking for is the secret sauce of looking through the patterns of your life, on anything that comes to mind. There's no right or wrong. So it's like, if I ask you to do this right now, like Jason, if I said to you, I'm going to ask you, tell me three different points in your life grade school, high school, college, you know, the most memorable event. You could tell me something different today and something different in a week from now. And it wouldn't matter because I'm looking for the pattern. Trying to understand why, what were you doing? Were you so excited about something you accomplished? Somebody else, you know, you attributed somebody else to accomplish it? We're just looking to identify those patterns. And once we can really articulate those patterns, we can decipher. And that's a very important word, right? Is it the way you do it? Or what you believe in. So deciphering that, and that's where a lot of people get really super fuzzy going through core values. Like I was, I hate the word "core values". I believe that values are individual to a person or shared to a team organization or a community. So help me understand how I contribute and align to the organizational values as opposed to, what I call pin the tail on the visceral verb, right? How are you feeling today? Because if I had a really crappy day or somebody, something really traumatically impacted me the way I go into that exercise with my team would suck and would totally influence it. And this is why people, you know, redo their values every few years. And this is why they put them on walls to remind them, but they don't live them because they don't... Jason: [00:16:01] Yeah. I hate the exercise that people do around core values, because it is like total BS, like, you know, as we're recording this, you know, over the weekend, Tony Hsieh from Zappos passed away, which is horrible. But he was a big believer in really living the values. And I had a number of different people from Zappos on, and we talked about how those values actually go throughout the whole company. And it all is like you were saying, it's you mentioned the key word believe. Right. And I think even Simon Sinek talks about it in his Ted talk is like, people don't follow you because it's you. They follow you because of what you believe in or something. I might've butchered it or something. Fran: [00:16:45] I'll give you the quote, cause I say it a lot. "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it." So when there is an emotional connection Between people, there's a commonality, chances are and something they align that they believe in, even if they can't articulate it. Right. You feel it, you feel it with your best customers, you feel it with your best clients, you feel it with your best employees, you feel it. Right? It's this unspoken feeling again, going back to the biology of it. We can articulate it. The famous the Groundhog Day. What gives you the most energy? That's definitely a tip and trick to, to pressure test. Like, did I get it right? And I want people to be complete when they build a why statement, you know, you talked earlier about your own. Right? Creating a place I wish I had for myself and that's mission-driven. But what's the impact on the other side? Right? So that these agency owners can have the life that you had or could have the life they want. Jason: [00:17:45] Yeah. And so, yeah, we always talk about like, so they have the freedom to pick and choose and do the things that they love. Fran: [00:17:50] Exactly. So that's a complete statement. See, I knew you had it. I just didn't get it earlier, but I, you know, when you remain focused, you know, the clarity that brings. Every program you do every, whatever it is podcast episode, everything is anchored to will this serve that or not? And that's when you have a permanent North star. And when you get clear on that really early on. The exponential hockey stick growth, you can get to profitability really clearly. Jason: [00:18:18] And so after now do the 28 things we asked the why, right? Like we have real core values, which I believe they're just your core values because you surround people that believe in those not that are your identical twins. So then what's next after that? Fran: [00:18:33] So, I mean, there, you have it right now. How are you going to tell that to other people? So breaking it down a little bit on the three keys, purpose inside purpose is your why. This is exactly Simon's point. Everybody has one. You only have one. I don't care how many businesses you have. I could debate that with anyone and show you the common thread. And you also have your vision. So you were very mission and vision-based inside that permanent North star. Jason: [00:18:59] Describe the difference between vision and mission. I think that's important. Fran: [00:19:03] So a lot of people get this really confused. Right? So tell me the dream that you have and tell me what you're going to commit to doing or dedicating yourself to doing every single day to achieve it. So it's easy to look at a nonprofit that says I want to eliminate hunger, right? That's the vision, that's the dream. And what is this nonprofit going to do to actually contribute to that? You know, move the needle effort. Are they going to open a soup kitchen? Are they going to raise money to feed starving children? There's all of these different missions that strive for that bigger vision. And by the way, we might have one organization dedicated to that vision and we might have different divisions that activate it in different ways. So common vision, differentiated mission. Right. Someone's physically feeding children. Someone's physically taking care of vaccination. Someone's, you know, there's water, right. You can get so, so detail-oriented on what that vision could be. That's another reason why people partner together, right? We both want, we have common vision, but we go about it differently. And then you go into the vision into the values. So like you said, right, everybody has our own individual values and this is really why I try so hard not to use the word core. Yes, they are core to each of us as an individual. But when you look at an organization, we have to share them. We might go about them differently. We might believe there are different aspects to them, but again, we'll go back to essence. The essence is the same. So when you can discover what these values are as an organization, you can really unlock them. We've built a really great framework, which is also easily identifiable in the book. Right? Very simple path. They can't be aspirational. They have to be actionable. And you will use them as a decision-making filter for everything you do. And when you can empower your team and align them on what I call the underpinning of your brand foundation, which are these three keys, which is the verbal side of your brand. You will empower your entire team to mobilize further, faster with greater efficiency, hence the result of profitability. So the way that you do that is the third key is through story, again. You know, starting with the emotional, why is this important? Like I've rewritten the way that a case study should be rewritten. Why, how, what -very simple Simon Sinek golden circle rule. Start with why this is important because nobody cares. What's the opportunity, or I wouldn't say the problem, but what's the risk? What's in it for me? How can I identify to the problem that you were having and what was the result? Right. Because we all want the results. Nobody really cares about how we did this. Oh, we built this website and did it with... no one cares about that. We just want the result of whatever it was that achieved this common opportunity or problem? Jason: [00:22:04] My really good buddy. Ian Garlic, AKA Sasquatch, he calls me his little friend and I'm 6'3". He's bigger than me, but, uh, he calls them case stories and I hated case studies. But you know, how he taught me over the years is like you were talking about, is start with the results. Do you want to know how one person did X, Y, and Z? Yes. And, really go into it and tell a story around it about around, like you were saying, you know, the emotions. Cause that's why people really buy or engage with you is to fix something that they feel or to get something that makes them feel good or something. Fran: [00:22:41] Achievement is very fulfilling. And when someone can call me and say, wow, I had the same problem that this guy did on your, in the cases of, you know, that I see, or I heard about this, or someone told me about that. It's like a double brand validation because they're coming to me to solve that same problem. And they understand that we understand how to solve it. I mean, that's the work of a case study, case story. And I love that word. We also call them, you know, like story sharing, story, doing story, being so almost to take case stories to a 2.0. How does the brand play out the story that they tell, right? How does their culture, how are they being, how are they doing? What are they doing in the world? And what are the story that they're telling? So it's, um, it keeps going and going and giving and giving if you will. Jason: [00:23:35] Yeah. Well, Fran, this has been awesome. Is there anything I did not ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Fran: [00:23:40] I would just look at the pandemic as a really interesting opportunity. As I sat down, like most of everyone else in the shock and awe of what the world was starting to experience thinking like this wasn't real. And then it was, and then for some businesses, it was much more impacting than others, but it's like follow the money and follow the opportunity. We talk about results-driven and performance-driven, but the money is now from the government side is really going to be repairing these small businesses. So how can you activate, you know, a grant in the marketing space, in the branding space to upgrade your team's skills so that you can actively participate? And we've really stumbled and proven a number of times now in the last few months, how well that's working. And for the smaller companies and I mean $25 million and under, a quarter-million dollars of budget and under, there is local and state grants that we have triangularly figured out how to actually help you. So as an agency, you can unconventionally figure out other programs where you can add other lines of business that you can expand on your own. Like we have. Jason: [00:24:52] Yeah. I love being resourceful. You know, I always, when people come to me, they're like, I've tried everything. I'm like really tried everything? Tell them to start listing. And then I tell them, make a list. And it was like two things I'm like really? That's it? And then they start laughing. I'm like, got to keep going, man. There's a solution out there. Somehow. Fran: [00:25:13] There always is. It's like Jason, if I had more time to just, you know, go down my own list, I would, I'm sure I could learn a few things myself, because I don't know. I guess resiliency, I've been through a lot in my own life and we've come up from the ashes a number of times before 2008 to 2010, there was a whole revolution in what's needed. And 9/11, you know, took out a fair amount of manufacturing and businesses that we were very involved in. And we've been there, done that. So this time the belief and the historical understanding, knowing that there is opportunity out there. I just had to find it. Jason: [00:25:51] Oh yeah. Yeah. I always tell everybody I'm like, this is the perfect time to really kind of grow. Like I know everybody freaked out in March 2020. And then I think like a month later, then it was just like, you know, everything just kind of just kept skyrocketing in agency space. You know, because everybody started realizing how important agencies are to them and how digital and online and all of that. And there's, there's always opportunities. So, and, uh, when I look back at, you know, when we started in '99 or 2001, or like you said, '08 and even, you know, I guarantee you're looking back in five years from now at this point, right now. It's a golden opportunity, even though there's lots of people hurting right now, you know, medically and that kind of stuff, but economically there's huge opportunity. So hopefully all of you figure out your why, your value, you guys tell the right story and you guys can get there. What's the title of the book and where can people go buy it? So the title of the book is how to lead a values-based professional services firm. The three keys to unlock, purpose and profit. Fran: [00:27:02] They can go to 3KeysBook.com and explore a download the intro, et cetera. See some videos why we wrote the book. You can also find it on Amazon and pretty much every other book reseller. And I would say, check it out. Jason: [00:27:02]Awesome. Great. Well, everybody go do that. And if you guys enjoy this episode and you guys want to be surrounded with amazing agency owners that share the same values that you do share, probably the same why about growing their agency and scaling agency. I want you guys to go to DigitalAgencyElite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind for experienced agency owners, where we're sharing what's currently working, we're the support group, we're are the ones that you can share the wins and we'd actually get it right? Like if you fired that awful client, you can't really tell your spouse - they'll be like, okay, good. But everyone else can celebrate with you and just have a lot of fun with it. Go to DigitalAgencyElite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day .
Direct download: Unlocking_the_3_Keys_of_a_Values-Based_Agency.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Sun, 2 May 2021
Mark Sullivan is an agency owner who has also spent over 22 years in public safety. He has seen people in the best and worst of times. When he’s not working as a firefighter, he is the founder and creative director of the 7-figure agency he started in 2014. Mark is on the show to talk about the similarities between fighting fires and running an agency. He’s also sharing the #1 lesson he wishes he had known much sooner. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsor & ResourcesWix: Today's episode is sponsored by the Wix Partner Program. Being a Wix Partner is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Is Owning an Agency Like Running Into a Burning Building?Jason: [00:00:00] On this episode, I talk with a firefighter who also has an agency and has built a really amazing agency. And we talk about one of the number one lessons that he wished he could go back over. He actually learned the lesson from listening to the show. As well as what you can do in order to really keep and build an amazing team and really be that right leader and what you should really focus on in your agency that can make all the difference, not only in your agency but also in your life. So I hope you enjoy this episode with Mark, the firefighter slash agency owner, and now let's get into it. I'm excited to have you on, so tell us who you are and what do you do? Mark: [00:00:45] Well, my name is Mark Sullivan. I'm the founder, creative director of Lime Biscuit Creative. We're a branding and design agency, just outside of Atlanta. We do a lot of web design, logos. We love to do startups or total rebrands for companies. Have been doing that for six years now, working on year seven. And I also serve full-time as a Lieutenant at a fire department, just outside of Atlanta and been doing that for 23 years. So stay pretty busy. Jason: [00:01:11] Yeah, it's a definitely interesting story. So what made you want to kind of do the agency biz? How'd you get into it? Mark: [00:01:19] Well, it was kind of a backward, a way that we got into it. I ran a music agency where we basically would help bands and speakers get events and get into like car shows, where they would sign autographs and stuff and get reimbursement for it. They would do a concert, or stuff like that. That kind of rolled into us, working with some talent from A&E and the History Channel. And through that process, we learned real quick that, uh, those guys become divas really fast and it's not worth the hassle to work with them. But in that process, we learned that so many of them didn't have any kind of brand awareness. They didn't have any kind of design, uh, understanding of how it worked. And so we pretty much started learning on our own, how to create a brand for someone, a personal brand, a company brand. And from that, we started doing what we're doing today and as they got more difficult to work with, uh, we decided we were just going to kind of abandon that part of our business and strictly focus on the agency side. And, was turned out to be a really good decision for us. Jason: [00:02:23] Very cool. And what made you get into the fire department? Mark: [00:02:26] Well, I was, an ADD sufferer from day one. I knew the traditional school route was not going to work for me. And, uh, I'm one of the kids that, you know, from kindergarten, my mom's got these books. What do you want to do when you grow up? And mine's been a firefighter ever since I can remember being in school. It's always just been attractive to me as something to do. And I love the whole idea of you never know what's coming next. So for somebody with ADD, it works really good. It keeps you changing up things on a regular basis. And, uh, just set out to do that. And I got about two to four more years of that hopefully I should be able to retire from that. So looking forward to that now, especially my body is. Jason: [00:03:07] I bet. I remember when I sold my agency, I didn't know what I was going to do after. And I went to, you know, I was talking about it to my cousin-in-law, being a firefighter is what I've always wanted. I thought that would be the coolest job. And then he kept telling me stories about most of the things are car wrecks and involving very, uh, disturbing stuff. And I was like, I would pass out for that. So I kind of nixed the volunteer fireman route. Mark: [00:03:35] Yeah, it is. It's definitely not what you see on TV, but it does have its moments. But it has been a culture change in the 23 years I've been doing it. It's nothing like when I first got into it, but, uh, still wouldn't trade it for anything. Jason: [00:03:49] Okay, cool. So let's talk about kind of the agency. You know, you're a Lieutenant in the fire department. Is there some parallel between the agency and fighting a fire or saving people's lives? Mark: [00:04:02] Ironically, there is some, it's been a very unique journey to kind of see how those things kind of correlate. But you see a firefighter on TV, you know, going into these house fires or going into a building that's on fire and the camera follows them around and they can see everything that's going on and they walk right up to somebody and grab them, throw them over their shoulder and walk out. But, in reality, when you enter a fire, most of them are zero visibility. So you're basically feeling your way around the whole time, trying to figure out where you're at, trying to find out if anybody's in there, if there's anybody that can be recovered or saved that's in there. And through that process, you learn, you know, which direction to go first based on the time of the day. And it is a lot like working with a company. People will come in here in total darkness. They have no clue where they're at in a house, so to speak. They have no clue how to get out. And so their message is stuck. And so it's easy to relate a lot of those things. So it's actually been pretty cool to be able to talk with clients and just say, look. You know, it sounds like what I was learning how to fight a house fire and going in, I have to learn these certain patterns to keep me on target of what I'm supposed to do. In a business is that same way. You know, there's certain things in business that if we forget to do, you know, we can stray away and wind up completely lost. So, uh, there's a lot of, of, uh, similarities with that. But then at the same time in the business realm is keeping those people at the firehouse close to you and trusting you is a huge, huge thing. And you're literally, depending on someone else. Doing their job for your life to be safe. And, uh, a lot of times in what we do, I think we forget that we're entrusted with a lot of people's livelihoods and, uh, they want to trust us and know that their best interest is at our heart all the time so that they know their business is safe, their finances and their family are safe. So that's kinda the two ways that I see that they kind of go side by side a lot of times. Jason: [00:05:58] Yeah, I was, um, yesterday as we're recording this, I, uh, chatted with Nick a former Navy SEAL. And he was actually saying, look, I'm more stressed out running a business than I was getting fired at and in combat. And I was like, really? And he was like, I was just more prepared. And he also said cause I asked, I said, well, was there ever a time that you didn't trust your teammates? Or how did you pick your teammates? And he goes, well, they, they were always assigned to us, but they had to go through a rigorous process that was proven. Versus a rigorous process for hiring an agency employee. Cause everyone does really well in the interview. And then they all go to shit, you know, after that versus, you know, having a hell week and B.U.D.S. And probably the same thing at the fire department where you're, depending on someone's that your life is in someone else's hands. But I like your analogy with, the same thing with an agency, right? Yeah. Your livelihood for a lot of your clients, especially in these crazy times of going, you know. Of going, hey, if they have an extra 20,000 to spend and you spend it incorrectly, you know, they could lose their house, they could go homeless, you know, and there's all kinds of repercussions that go into there. Mark: [00:07:16] And that's caused a lot of sleepless nights here lately, for sure. Jason: [00:07:19] Exactly. As you're growing your agency, how do you reassure? And I like that analogy that you use with the fire department to your prospects, how do you reassure or what's the process that you walk people through to reassure them that they're making the right decision? Mark: [00:07:38] It seems to differ from person to person. The one big thing that we're lucky about here is almost all of our clients come exclusively from referrals. We do very little advertising. We do very, and when I say little less than $5,000 a year, total in advertising. So one good thing we have is that when they come to us, they already have a little bit of trust because somebody, they trust refer them to us. But once they get to us. And we're talking about this marketing package or this brand package and launching this. Either a new company or whether it be just rebranding or a marketing idea for a company. A lot of times they'll get those cold feet right at the end. And we get a lot of clients that come in here, as you can imagine with our name, Lime Biscuit. We don't do things the normal agency way a lot of times. And so when they come in here and they talk to us, they want it to be kinda like us and that I want a crazy name. I want to do this. I want to do this. But then when it comes down to it, they're like, no, I can't do this. It's just not in my DNA to do this. And so they go back to their, their old path and stuff. And so we have to kind of just sit with them and say, look, this is something we have proven results with. It's something we've done before, it's something that we're comfortable with. And our goal is not to be a one-time check for me. Our goal is to continue a relationship with you and build with you. And we wouldn't lead you down this path if we didn't think it was also going to turn into revenue for us at the end of the road. So they kind of understand that this is a process we're walking through with them as they stay in business. We're not just somewhere that wants to launch a logo on a website for them and walk away. And I feel like once they understand that we're kind of their partner in that, they tend to trust us a little more and they get a little bit more gumption to kinda go forward with it. Jason: [00:09:29] Very cool. What would you wish that you knew toward the start that you know now that you would tell yourself? Mark: [00:09:36] That's an easy one. Uh, and I actually learned this from listening to the Smart Agency podcast. So credit to you for this, because I have told this to so many other business owners. It's all right to fire somebody. And to say no to them. And for the longest man, we were just like, you know, we thought we had to take everybody. We thought that it was, these people were coming to us. We have to do this with them. We have to take their money. We have to help their company. And man, it drove us just crazy. And we were working with clients. We knew we didn't align with, and it was just a struggle the entire time. But I remember specifically the day I was listening to the podcast and I was actually sitting at the firehouse. It was about eight o'clock at night. And you were talking with somebody just about how, you know, we're not made to work with everybody all the time and that it's okay to fire a client. And man that from the beginning, it would have saved a lot of years and a lot of wrinkles on these eyes. Because that was the thing that, you know, I've learned that my gut instinct, when they come in and I'm like, I really don't think they're a client for us. And I don't think we're a client for them. I've learned to just trust that and just chance offending them and just saying, we're not right for you. And man, I wish I'd have known that from the beginning. Jason: [00:10:57] Oh, I'm glad that helped. Um, how do you tell if they're the right fit for you in the very beginning? Like, I think it's different for everybody. Is it like a gut feeling or is it more of like, oh, you have to check the box for these four things? Mark: [00:11:13] I think for us, a lot of it is gut because when we have somebody come in, like each client obviously starts at a different process, but like I said earlier, we do a lot of either rebranding or startups. And so our first process in that is beginning their visual identity and how their logo is gonna look, how their colors are gonna flow. And if we come up with a really cool concept and just right off the bat, they're like, I don't like this. I like this. And they show us something that is so far removed from us. That's generally an immediate response of, we're just going to give you your check back and you can go somewhere else. And we handle it with a lot of tact and we try to even give them other contacts to reach out to. But for us, we do, honestly operate differently. Like you don't go into many agencies where, you know, you got a firefighter with only a high school degree that's this coming in here doing this. So, we tend to, to act differently with our clients. We like to have fun. We like to cut up with them. We like to show up at their office on announce with ice cream and stuff and whatever. And so if we don't see that they're going to enjoy that and something, that's going to make them feel more comfortable with us then that stomach just tells you this isn't right. Jason: [00:12:35] That's good that you really kind of found the lane and, you know, who your ideal client is that you want to work with. It took us many years to figure that out, takes many. Sometimes people are still figuring it out. You know, maybe if there's someone else sitting into, you know, their own firehouse or somewhere else, listening to this and be like son of a bitch, like I can get rid of the pain in the ass client? Like it's very helpful. Mark: [00:13:01] We've learned that there's usually somebody else there to give you a check, so to speak. So, for the long time, it was just terrified to fire 'em because where's the next revenue stream going to come from? And then we've learned. And like I said, it's compliments to you, man. It's been a lot of our staff listens to the podcast and it is the only podcast that we all listen to and that they're required to listen to. And it's just been one of those things where, and you just got a grin and bear it and say, We're just not your team. Sorry. And after you do that, a couple of times it does seem to get easier, but you still worry about that income. Jason: [00:13:39] Yeah. When, uh, I always tell everybody I'm like, your team is your number one asset. And, uh, I will always stick up for my team. If someone comes along, I don't care if they have a billion dollars. I may, I may think of it a little bit different. But it would be a little harder to have that decision, but I would still choose the team because team's, everything. So if someone gives you a billion dollars and then you have no team to execute on it. I mean, you're on the Island, you're on this little Island that you can't get off and you're imprisoned. And we really, uh, we don't create our businesses to be in prison. Most of us are, uh, unfortunately without figuring out the right systems and, and figuring out that, you know, that getting that clarity. For, hey, these are the clients is, really kind of step one. Right?
Mark: [00:14:25] Right. We empower our team to make decisions without asking. Like I'm gone every third day to the fire department. Most of the time they can reach me by phone. But yesterday for instance, I just got off this morning. Hadn't slept. So if I sound groggy, that's probably why, but uh, sometimes they can't get in touch with me and I want them to know that you've got my blessing to make this decision. If my lead designer says this client is just not having it, then she's got full power to tell them to go somewhere else. And I try to make sure that they are equipped with that, and that gives them a buy-in and they understand that I trust them. And I believe that goes a long way. Jason: [00:15:04] Well, I think he hit on something that most of us take for granted, right? As we're being leaders and we're leading our team, most of us, we don't tell our team that we trust them, literally. Like, I trust you to make the right decision and whatever decision you make, I will stand behind you. And like, I think when your team members hear that, because you got to think of as like human beings, we all want to be part of a community. We all want to have that significance. That's why they're probably working for you. They're probably not working for you because of what you're paying them. Right. Like, honestly, probably go somewhere like at the agency, like they could go work for a huge agency or a huge business and make more money, but they're not going to get all of that community, the accomplishment, the recognition, all of that. And I think we forget a lot of times, like, I was talking to my buddy Gene and he coaches a lot of people on the business side. And, uh, we were talking, it was like, when's the last time you went to some of your team members and said, hey, I trust you. I really appreciate you. And a lot of times, most people will be like, I've never done that. But they talk to their are other people like us coaches or advisors, and like, oh man, I could not do this without them. And I was like, why didn't you tell them that? Mark: [00:16:21] That reminds me of The Office. I'm a huge fan of The Office where Michael Scott, you know, says behind Pam's back. He said, she's actually really talented artist, but I'd never say that to her face. Jason: [00:16:32] I've watched one episode. I was kinda like that with Seinfeld when it was on, I thought it was probably the dumbest show ever. And then I watched it like the last season and then I've been hooked ever since. Mark: [00:16:42] Exactly. But it is the team. If you don't have them to support you, especially with my schedule, it's not going to go anywhere. And, you know, we try to do little stuff for them. It's, they'll walk in and there's literally something as simple as chocolate bars are laying all across their desk and keyboards and stuff like that. And it'll be on their Snapchat story later. My boss knows how to get to my heart by chocolate. And it's just little stuff like that, but I'll make sure I send them a text or Snapchat when I'm at the station frequently, that just says, thank you guys so much. I love you guys. You don't have any clue how much it means to me and my family that I can trust you at the office. And just to let them know that I don't take them for granted. Jason: [00:17:23] Awesome. Very cool. Well, this has been amazing, Mark. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Mark: [00:17:30] And I think coming from the firefighter side of agency owner, uh, side of it is, is that we spend so much time, uh, sometimes investing in our clients and in their lives and, and what they have going on. And we obsess over what we can do for them. And. I think sometimes you just gotta stop and think about yourself. Think about your own agency. And I think about your own family. And I have seen hundreds and hundreds of times, people who never planned on their life-ending on a certain day. And it's so easy in the agency life to get wrapped up and even sitting at home, watching TV in the back of your mind is spinning like, well, what are we going to do for this client? Or what are we going to do for this client? And. It gets so easy to rabbit trail and forget that we have our own lives and our own agency that we have to protect and watch out after. And I think it's just that as, you know, watch out for your family, watch out for your own employees, your own agency, because, if you don't do that, it doesn't matter what kind of clients come in. Eventually you're going to falter. So take the time to stop. And you know, like you said earlier, spend time with your own clients and your, or your own employees and just say, hey I appreciate you and you know, how do you think our agency can be better? And you might be surprised the answers you get. Jason: [00:18:48] Yeah, no, I totally agree. It's a crazy world. And, uh, you know, we all, we try to work ourselves to death and we're like, well, in 10 years, when I sell the agency, then I'll be able to spend time with my family. I was like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, because I think there's certain people out there that really preach work all the time and hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle. And I don't agree with that at all. I agree. There's times to work hard and put your head down, but if you dictate your whole goals, all based on revenue and growth, rather than think about why are you trying to get that? When people talk to me a lot of times about, you know, my goal is to sell an agency like you did Jason. I'm like, why? Well then, so then I can have fun. I can do. I'm like, you can do that now. I was like, you don't need that. Yes. It's a couple of little more zeros at the very end, but, but why do you want more zeros at the end? Right. And I'm like, look, if you start with a time goal and maybe keep it very simple. I want to take off Friday afternoons and not work on the weekends and just start there and think about in order for that to accomplish what systems do we need in place? What team members do we need? What different types of clients, what do I need to charge? And you start there. I think a lot of us listening will be a lot happier rather than just chasing money. I heard something too. It's like maybe, maybe this was from the hustle King, Gary Vaynerchuk, which he is very brilliant. And he talked about don't chase the gold, sell the pickaxeto the people going after the gold. I was like, that's kind of, that's pretty smart. Mark: [00:20:27] I like that. Yeah. I listen to Gary all the time, but there's certain parts of that I just, I can't go along with, on the nonstop all day long. Doing what I do. It's just, I'm already working 60 hours a week doing that and, this is kind of my segue to retirement. I want to retire early from there and this will be my full-time career. And it just went a little quicker than we anticipated. So luckily surrounded with great family and great staff that, that helped me keep it going. So, uh, I'm just blessed in that part. Jason: [00:20:56] Awesome. Well, great. Uh, what's the website people can go and check it out? Mark: [00:20:59] Uh, they can check out our agency at LimeBiscuit.com, just like the food.. And then my personal one on the fireside, my blogs and stuff is MarkTSullivan.Me and they can check it out there as well. Jason: [00:21:13] Awesome. We'll go check it out. And if everyone listening enjoys this episode and you really want to know what are the right systems that you need to put in place in order to really get a hold of your agency, where you can scale it on a consistent basis where not every decision has to go through you. You're getting consistent leads. You're charging the right amount. You're not getting crushed on scope creep. I want you to guys go to check out the Agency Playbook at JasonSwenk.com/playbook request an invite. And check out the systems that have worked for thousands of agency owners over the past couple of years. If you do jump into it and you get a lifetime access to it and we're always updating it and it will show you that framework that you can follow. So you can really scale and grow the agency that you really want. So until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Is_Owning_an_Agency_Like_Running_Into_a_Burning_Building_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm MDT |
Wed, 28 April 2021
Steve Pockross has been the CEO of Verblio for nearly five years. As CEO, he applies leading marketplace and SaaS principles to create an industry-leading content creation platform with 3,000 U.S.-based writers supporting the creation of premium content at scale in every niche. Verblio has grown over 400% in the last four years. So, Steve is sharing his insight on why it's important to lead by putting people first and how that contributes to your agency's growth as a whole. 3 Golden Nuggets
[smart_track_player url="https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/jasonswenk/How_to_Lead_Your_Agency_Team_By_Putting_People_First.mp3" ] Sponsors and ResourcesVerblio: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Verblio. Check out Verblio.com/smartagency and get 50% off your first month of content creation. Our team loves using Verblio because of the ease in their process and their large pool of crowd-sourced writers. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Leading Your Agency Team By Putting People FirstJason: [00:00:00] What's up beautiful agency owners! I'm excited. I have another amazing podcast guest who actually has been back several times. I don't know why we keep inviting you back. No, I'm just kidding. He's a good friend of mine and, uh, we'll provide lots of value. And we're going to talk about leading with people first for your agency. Now, before we jump into the show, I want you to do something. I want you to take a screenshot off your phone, listening to the podcast, upload it to Instagram, tag us. And give us a shout-out on Instagram. And then I can shout you back and say, Hey, thanks for listening to the show. So let's go ahead and get an episode. Hey Steve, welcome to the show. Steve:: [00:00:40] Hey Jason. Good to be back. Jason: [00:00:42] Yeah. I don't know. Like I said, I keep inviting you back, I guess you do well each time. So now we'll welcome back for the people that have not checked out the other episodes and we'll link those. Into the show notes of the episodes to make sure you guys go to JasonSwenk.com and check those out. Tell us who you are and what do you do? Steve:: [00:00:58] So I'm Steve. I am the CEO of Verblio. Oh, we are a Denver-based marketplace, content creation platform. So we have a network of highly curated, fantastic writers that we put together with our unique business model and put it on our platform so that we can do high quality content at scale for any niche. And we work primarily for agencies. Jason: [00:01:19] Awesome. Well, welcome back. And let's kind of jump into it, right? So, Let's talk about what does it mean to lead with people first and a growing company? I mean, you guys are, I think, 30 plus employees on your team. And I think a lot of agencies will relate to this. Steve:: [00:01:37] We've been fortunate to have some really high power growth in the last. So I took over as CEO four and a half years ago, and we were talking about what are some of the lessons that we could really pass on to agencies to help them with their growth as well, that can relate between the type of business that we do and the type of work that agencies do. And so one of those big strategies is putting people first. And that might sound like the most cliche strategy of all time. Going back to "Good to Great." Put the right people on the bus first. I think we took a really, well, we think about it and brought it to every aspect of our business. And so I think bringing it to life is really interesting. And hopefully, some of these nuggets that helped us can really help others. And has helped us grow 400% over four and a half years as a bootstrap startup. So with no investment in order to fund that growth, all being organic growth. And it's also helped us grow when I first started, we were 11 people for the first three years. And over the last two years, we've gone from 11 to 30. So how do you accelerate that growth with the right people strategy? And then also, how do you ensure that it continues to build, even as you're expanding rapidly? Jason: [00:02:38] Yeah. A lot of times I see kind of people, they get to certain stages of climbing the mountain, and they kind of backtrack. Right? And like, I'm looking at growing any business or really growing an agency. And it kind of like six phases, right? Like you got staging base camp, the climb, the crux, the crest, and then obviously the summit. And each one of them you're focused on different things. Like at the very beginning, you're focused on how do I build this company and then like, what do I need to focus on? How do I get further ahead, all that kind of stuff. So when you came in and you guys were 11 people, what was the main thing that you were focused on? And what was the big challenge that you were trying to overcome? Steve:: [00:03:18] Well, it's hard to boil it down to just one, considering anybody who's ever taken over a company or a division knows that you're kind of moving into somebody else's house. It's kind of like this: I'm very grateful to have this house. It's really beautiful. I'm excited to live here. And then you question every single choice made about that house. Why are the carpets on the floor? Why are their sconces all over the place? And so I think a lot of those decisions are really frequent to that. So number one is to keep an keep in mind that a lot of people put in a big deal in order for you to get there. And the second is to question everything. So the first thing that was most important to me was instilling my values in the company and then making them not like imposing them, but creating an, "our values." So I knew that whatever I started with, there are things that are just deal breakers for me, like follow up on what you say. If you commit to it, you're going to do it, or you're going to create a natural distrust throughout your organization. And so the very first thing I said at the meeting when people ask me: What would new leadership be like? We started creating those values. And the most important thing was less to say what they were, but really to exhibit them. That I follow up on everything that I'm standing for. That I bring enthusiasm and excitement to my meetings and my projects. That I plan them out. And my very first hire was Paul, who, you know, very well. Whereas partially 'cause I knew he was an amazing marketer, but we really invested very little in marketing at the beginning because we wanted to focus too much on the product. And the most important piece was that Paul exhibited all the values to every other new member of the team. This is what good looks like. The CEO can be there all the time and having members of your team that just emulate those values for you and can start bringing them to life is critical. So that was my first big investment. Jason: [00:04:55] Well, I think you just brought him on because he looked like Will Ferrell. Well, you said a couple of really cool things and a lot of us, I think, you said question everything. And this was for you coming in from an outsider with no emotion coming into it. Now, most people that are listening to the show, they've created it from the ground up. And a lot of times, kind of, what I want you guys to unpack is: you should question everything that you've made the decision to get here. And question everybody on your team as well on an ongoing basis. I mean, I almost think it's kind of quarterly. Like, I live and die by 90 days rather than the year. Sure. We have yearly goals, but I'd rather be able to adjust quicker and, you know, I try to question everything as well. I think that's really good. And then the other thing I love that you mentioned was, you know, marketing. That's one of the first things I tell people is like, you gotta bring in marketing, you know, in the early stages, in order to really build that pipeline. And then, you know, marketing should break sales and sales should break operations and blah, blah, blah, and so on and so on. So I love it. What are some surprising things that happened to you about, you know, building this culture? Steve:: [00:06:13] I think one of the most surprising things was that the values that I, that I set out to create took their own form. They really bonded with the people that we brought on board. So I always talk about my management style as being, I want to run my company like run my ultimate Frisbee team, so I want it to be incredibly, it's funny cause the ultimate Frisbee teams are the maximum size of 30 people and I just hit 30. So I don't know what I'm going to say now. But it's being super collaborative. It's rooting on for people. It's focusing when you're in your huddles and you're down 12 to 2, you get into the huddle and you talk about how much fun we're going to have and how much enjoyable this is gonna be. And cheer for each other. As opposed to going around and talking about all of the different processes you're going to create to win the game. It just brings everybody down. And so I really wanted to call it the spirit of the game value and the rest of my team. Uh, there are almost no athletes and they all refer to it these sports is "sports ball," so they captured it. And they basically said that even we, we played like can ultimate Frisbee team, even though 73% of our company doesn't know what a sport is. And then kind of wrote it up in our own really distinct way. It's really interesting how culture is not you. Culture is how all of you make it together. And then when, before we leave the 90 day feedback thing, I think you said something really important. One of my favorite, most important concepts to me of 90 days is every new person, especially if you're an agency owner. You started this place, you're going to have a very distorted view of your reality, because this is yours. This is your baby. And so 90 days is such a great time. Every new hire that comes onto your company, to ask them a really explicit. What happened to the company that wasn't what you expected to happen? How was the setup for you ahead of time? How are we not living up to the things we talk about? Cause I can't see these things. So the question that I asked my teammates and every one on one. And I talked to, I have a one-on-one with everyone in the company, at least quarterly is what are the things that you're seeing that you think I would want to know? Jason: [00:07:59] I love that. Well, you know, I talk with someone recently and we talked about everyone says they have an open door policy. But most of your team members are not going to step through that door. You actually have to go out after them and ask those direct questions like you just did. Be like, what are you seeing that I'm not? Because they're going to see things differently than management and leadership. Talk a little bit about, you know, especially coming in from the outside and having a team of 30. Are you more the mentality now, like when you came in, were you focused on kind of like the what and the, how? Or were you focused on the who? Like, who do I bring in? I know you mentioned bringing in, you know, Will Ferrell. Literally. I wish I had a little overlay right now. I could pop side by side. Like everyone would like, yeah. He's Will Ferrell. I really don't think he looks that much like Will Ferrell, but.. Steve:: [00:08:52] I know you're the only one that doesn't. Jason: [00:08:54] Could we do a vote on your podcast to have people write in. We should, we should. We we'd literally. What we'll do is we'll put a picture of a, him and Will on the very bottom. And then, uh, or maybe we'll put it on Facebook when we post it up. I think that's what we'll do. Steve:: [00:09:12] So back to your actual question. Yes. So you get the what, the how. A lot of people refer to that in another business framework for the exact same question is, do you focus first on the people, the product or the processes? Because these are the three ways you can address all problems. To me, you have to focus on the people first because they decide the processes. They decide the product. They're the ones who are going to be taking your vision 10 levels down and making every decision to bring it to life. And so hiring became our absolute priority of making sure we were bringing on the right people and not making mistakes. And then our second became making sure we kept these people. So our churn levels are just ridiculously low. We waste very few cycles. They say that every person churned might be worth double the amount of their salary in lost time. And the third benefit of having a great culture is you get incredible amounts of productivity and excitement out of it. So we definitely focused on the who first.
Jason: [00:10:04] Very cool. Which leads me to kind of the next question is, how do you find really good people? And how do you know when you find really good people? I think that's what a lot of people, you know, in the agency, world struggle. Steve:: [00:10:19] So our hiring strategy and a couple of the things that have that I think have been keys to access. And a lot of these were learning and iterative as we went along. Uh, one of the things that's really important to me that I think everybody can do. And it's all in your power, is to write the most unique killer job description that just attracts the type of people you're looking for. Our job descriptions are fun. I want to read them. I want to laugh at least three times is what I tell my people as they're running them. But I also really want to feel what the job is. So we write killer job descriptions and they'll stand out. How many people actually put that in. That's a big part of your marketing. You are marketing to talent. Most people only market to the roles and responsibilities and the experience. That's a huge way to stand out. The second is to create the criteria of what you're looking for. And if you can be very specific on it and also make it different from what others are looking for. So the hardest way to get talent is to hire, been there, done that. Those are the most expensive, they're most of the competitive. You're going to be fighting in a red ocean for the exact same people. All the other agencies are looking for. Are there qualities that you like in people? For us it's curiosity, creativity, and passionate about something that is not their work. So my number one question in an interview is, if you're ever interviewing with me is what's a class that you took an undergrad that you didn't think you'd be excited about, that you became unbelievably passionate about and why? And somebody who can be passionate about something that's not the job function to me shows distinct curiosity. And I think that's particularly important to marketers out there. So there was a study like most of the skills in marketing in the last three years are different than they were the five years before. Which means you need people who are going to constantly looking for how to improve their skillset. And to me, curiosity is that way to get there. How do you find somebody who just wants to do it and be passionate? So find your unique skill set that other people looking for, make yourself unique, market to them, and then have those as your criteria when you're interviewing. Jason: [00:12:14] Yeah, I would have failed that question. I'd been like, Steve, I hated every class I ever had. Steve:: [00:12:20] That's not true. I refuse to believe Jason: [00:12:23] it's pretty true. But then again, I tell people, I still want to get this shirt going "I'm retired because I'm unemployable." I'm retiredfrom working for someone else. So that would be a good t-shirt. Now that Verblio is 30 plus people. What are some things that you're doing to maintain? You know, the environment, maintain the culture? Because it starts to get out of control. Steve:: [00:12:49] It gets completely out of control. So it's interesting there. Um, so startups like agencies, I mean, we're all kind of at the same ilk, which is that we start at a certain size and we go through these growth phases, which you coach a lot of your agencies on. So there's the right amount of process for each phase. And someone told me that when you're, uh, when you're a startup, it's like wearing the wrong size clothing all over your body all the time. You either have too much or too little at all times. And so we're working on our people in culture processes really diligently. We brought in a couple of much more process driven people who are much better at this than I am to focus on how do we bring it to life? And we're focused on a few areas. One is we just had to have a platform it's all consolidated in one area. We found an ingenious, one called Leapsome. If anybody's looking for one that brings together so many of these disparate HR platforms. As everybody only seems to be able to do one thing on an HR platform, which I don't know why. One of the most critical factors was be really clear about reviews. What we're looking for are. Creating a much better goal setting platform. So everything rolls up in our OKR style, to very top five goals of the company. So everyone knows what their role is. They update them quarterly basis. It's really process driven and it's way outside my sweet spot. It's not what I like to do. And the last is it has cultural surveys. Every month we send out 10 questions that takes less than 10 minutes to get the feedback from our team. We started this there was no one more than two levels below me. And now there are people five levels below me. How am I going to get that information? How are we going to make rational decisions about what we think is our culture? What we think our communicating, conveying versus what people are actually feeling at different levels of the company. And the last for me is those one-on-one meetings, which is I meet with everyone at least quarterly. But we do probably more one-on-ones at Verblio than anywhere I've ever been. It's a huge investment in time. It means that you're putting people first. This is really key to how we bring this to life. We could be spending that time doing more sales calls. We could be spending that time doing more platform, but we're making sure that we're empathizing with our team or understanding where they're at and we're really communicating. So we're, so we're all working more coherently together. And I think that's an investment that pays off. Jason: [00:14:55] Yeah. You know, it's kind of like when you start having a bigger team or as you start to grow that team, you're all thinking about like, how do I build the right team? And then once you build that right team, you're kind of like, how do I become that leader to them? And then, you know, the next is, is like, how can I actually grow the leaders? Especially when you have that many different layers of going well, I need to make the decision-making spread out. So it's not all flowing to us, you know, and then I'm the toll booth or even my leaders. It's like, how do I create many layers of decision-making power and freedom? And, you know, I was chatting with one agency, and, uh, he was the biggest bottleneck on the operations for a while. And he said, for many years, it was a big struggle on it because on himself, on his family, even on the agency. And then finally, he just got to a point where it was like, I'm going to document 50% of what I know. And then the team could use that as a foundation to build upon and then innovate from that. And it changed everything for him. Uh, and now they're well in the eight-figure mark and just flying to wherever they actually want to go. So, love it. What are some three tips for the listeners who want to make a decision to focus on culture and really kind of catapult them to the next level? Steve:: [00:16:21] I'll see if, I'm going to start talking and see if it ends up being three. So the first tip is what are you sacrificing when you say you want to put culture first? You're going to have to deprioritize something. We invested in an executive coach. When I'm investing in people. And I'm basically trying to find junior talent that has never done it before. What's the one area they're not, they're going to lack is that level of executive coaching. So I sacrificed the salesperson. We didn't bring on a professional salesperson until last year, after growing 300% before we did. So then we focused on an executive coach first. Cause I thought that was more important. That's a big call. That's a hard thing to tell, if you're the owner, then it's a hard thing to tell yourself. And if you have a board like I do, it's a hard thing to argue to them. So how much time is it going to take and work backwards? It's really easy to say, this is my number one priority. It's not easy to say this is my number one priority, and I'm not going to do these three things because of it. So that's my number one. My number two is to get constant feedback. It's really similar to your 90 days, like check in, do surveys. How do you keep yourself honest so you don't believe it? Come up with the right set of questions of celebration. And then number three is every opportunity you can. One of my favorite podcast guests recently, he was telling me about the hardest thing to be a CEO is to not just say one thing once. You have to say it a hundred times and keep repeating yourself until you're bored, is to keep repeating your values. This is an example of why this reflects my values, reward the people publicly. If somebody comes to you with criticism about your culture, where you're not living up to your own values. And you worked really hard to ask people, to give you a feedback, call out that person at the all hands, give them a reward and say, thank you. You are right. You're going to get a better culture, a more curious and critical thinking culture. And you're going to get less yes-people in your company. Jason: [00:18:10] Yeah. I mean, you said it. You got to kind of stand by your values. You know, just literally a little while ago, I was chatting with one of our team members and we, unfortunately, had to ask one of the mastermind members to leave. A new member over two months, there's just too many red flags, just didn't mesh. And we just didn't want it to pollute the rest of the culture. And so it hurts to say no to reoccurring revenue, but at the end of the day, you gotta know you're gonna stand on your values and not sacrifice that. And be kind of a whore for sacrificing it, which a lot of people, you know, do. Steve:: [00:18:53] There could be very few things that are more powerful to a company than fire a client that's been abusive to your people. I think one of the things I've gotten the most positive feedback on is when there was a client that was kvetching about my, uh, some of my people while they were in the room. And I just told him that was absolutely unacceptable on the call. And I think it really, like everyone on the team felt supported. Like they could do whatever they wanted and I'd have their back. But it's hard. I feel that in the moment, especially when somebody is paying your bills and you really need them. Jason: [00:19:21] Oh, yeah. But you know, you get to the kind of the next stage where you're like, I'm not going to sacrifice us. We'll figure it out. And it's just going to be that much better because yeah. Your people are everything. And if you don't have their backs, well, then they're not going to have yours. Like literally they'll hang on until they find the BBD, right? The bigger and better deal. Steve:: [00:19:46] So we've talked about kind of hiring as a people strategy, investing in people and bringing culture to life. And I think the last piece is thinking of, uh, thinking of all of the people related to your company, as your stakeholders, as your clients. For me, it's my writers. We need to treat them special. And like, I want them to have the best writing gigs in the industry so that they feel like this is the place they want to be.. Cause the more excited they are about their job, better the writing and the product will be for our clients. And all around. And so if you it's a virtuous cycle, you bring on the good people who are empathetic and excited and creative and passionate. And they start feeling all the other stakeholders in your business the same way. Jason: [00:20:22] Love it. I love it, steve. Where can people check out more about Verblio? Especially if, uh, if they need some help around content writing, which I highly recommend you guys. You guys rock and are awesome and use you guys for so many years. Steve:: [00:20:36] Cool. Thank you so much. So you can find us at Verblio.com. And you can find my podcast, the Yes and Marketing Podcast, about 54 episodes, which is a broader marketing leadership and people who bring creativity into marketing. And then we have a special offer for jason Swenk listeners out there: get 50% off your first month at Verblio.com/smartagency telling me you heard about this on the Jason's Swenk show, and we'll give you two months of free onboarding as well to help you out. And which we hope is an easy process, but we know that's a big lift for some of you. Jason: [00:21:09] Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Steve. And thanks for coming on the show. And if you guys enjoyed this episode, make sure you comment below. Make sure you subscribe, so you don't miss out a new episode and make sure you actually take Verblio up on that offer. I mean, that's killer, they're giving you 50% off the first couple of months, so it's amazing. Thanks so much for doing that. And if you guys want to leave a comment or review, that will help us out to reach more people, especially if you listen to the whole way through. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Lead_Your_Agency_Team_By_Putting_People_First.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Sun, 25 April 2021
Laura Tolhoek is the owner of Essential HR, the business she started three years ago in order to provide HR relief to small businesses. Her company provides an ultra-flexible way of managing HR so businesses can focus on their core operation and growing their business. Laura shares the best practices and tips on how to hire and fire digital agency employees. She covers everything from creating your employer brand to the details of the offer letter and how to protect yourself when letting someone go. 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesOribi: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Oribi. Check out Oribi.io/smartagency for a free trial. Plus when you sign up for Oribi get 20% off the first three months with promo code: Smart Agency SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM 47 Laura Talhoek Jason: [00:00:00] On this episode, I talk with an HR agency about what's the importance about building your employer brand? What's the importance of the offer letter and how it can actually protect your agency later on. And also making sure you follow a process in your interview process, which, I just said process a couple of times, but that's okay. I think you're really going to like this episode, especially if you're in a growth phase and you're bringing on more team members. So let's get into it. Hey, Laura, welcome to the show. Laura: [00:00:36] Thank you so much for having me. Jason: [00:00:37] Yeah. I'm excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Laura: [00:00:42] Yeah, so my name is Laura Tolhoek. I am the owner of EssentialHR and EssentialHR is a business that was created to help small business owners with their HR systems and structures. So a lot of times when you're growing a business, You would really benefit from the help of a professional person who understands the legal, the risk side of things, as well as best practices. But you often don't need somebody who's there full time. So we come in and we help small business owners with those small retainers and HR projects where they could use an HR professional but don't want to have one on their team full-time. Jason: [00:01:15] Awesome. What's your theory of wind to bring someone in full-time? What's the employee count? Laura: [00:01:22] You know what I would say about 50, you could use somebody, you know, at a moderate level. I don't think you need, you know, the, the pinnacle director of HR. But you could use somebody, certainly, because at that point you already have someone in admin doing a lot of your recruitment things. You probably have somebody in admin doing payroll. And if you bring all of those things together to one, one system, it might be a little bit easier. Jason: [00:01:48] I always looked at a lot of our HR people also did recruiting as well. Not just, you know what I used to think when I would go back and I'd be like, oh, HR is just making sure I don't get sued. Making sure people don't get hurt. Like I didn't really look at it as making sure employee retention's there, you know, recruiting new talents. So I don't have to interview all these people and just try to keep up with the amount of business coming to us. So do you feel the same way, like HR is more than just pushing paperwork? Laura: [00:02:20] Well, of course, yeah. I'm actually not a huge fan of the paperwork side of things. And automation is a big part of what I like to implement, but there's so many facets of HR. You know, you have the benefits side, the compensation side. Are we paying our people appropriately? Is there other things we could do, you know, for a smaller boutique operation, you know, maybe the top salary isn't what's there. What else can we provide in order to build that culture? So we're not competing on price alone? Recruitment, obviously health and safety onboarding, and bringing on new team members. And just the general upkeep of employee engagement is a lot of what we do with our clients and what I did previously in my former life within operations. Jason: [00:03:03] I gotcha. Why is it important for employers to kind of build their employer brand before they go into, you know, kind of scaling their agency? Laura: [00:03:13] So employer brand, we obviously all know what branding is and we put a lot of effort and a lot of time into making sure our branding is on, on par, and on spot. But what sometimes we don't think about is what is our employer brand? So if you think of those big companies, you know, the Targets, the McDonald's, the Southwest Airlines, and you kind of think immediately, you know what their brand is. You know, what to expect as a customer and so on and so forth, but then when you think about your, like, what do you think about when you think about Target as an employer? Or what about McDonald's as an employer and those are the employer brands. So what is the employee experience or what do you think of when you think of them as an employer? So you may think, well, I'm just eight people. Why do I need to worry about my employer brand compared to McDonald's and target? Let me tell you, you are competing for the same talent. So just because you're eight people and they may be 800 at one site doesn't mean that you can't compete for that same talent. So I'll, I'll give you an example. I have a client and they were competing for a fresh out of university graduate. And the things that made the difference at the end of the day, because she offered her the job and the young lady said, I just, I have one other interview I want to take. And she's like, it just won't feel right unless I, you know, follow through and take this other interview. And that was on a Monday and by Monday afternoon, right after lunch, she emailed, she's like, I'm accepting the job going through the other interview only solidified what I thought was the right decision, which is going with you guys. And that comes from the employer brand, which is the experience that you're giving clients as customers and your employees before they even start coming on board. So there's a lot of things that go into employer brand. It could be just first understanding who you are as an employer. If you can put into words who you are as an employer, you can start explaining that in your copy and you can start standing firm in that when you advertise your job postings. So that's why I say level one, you got to know who you are as an employer. Jason: [00:05:18] One of the exercises we make people do in our Agency Playbook is be like, how do you want your internal team to view the brand? It's not all about outside. I even remember too, like even in our interview process, we would make it kind of, I think at first started, it was just fun for me. Um, but then I think it was the conversational starter. So a lot of times when they would have the first interview with me, I would walk into like with my full race gear, from the race caron. I had a tutu on over jeans, one time seeing if like, would they want to take pictures with me? Are they going to share it socially? Like just to see how people react or are they just going to ignore it? And like if they just ignore it and don't mention like the big elephant in the room, like there's no way I want them working for me. Laura: [00:06:10] Well, and that goes into your culture of candor, you know. Do you want people to talk or do you want them to just say, Nope, this is the way we're going. We're going forward. No questions asked. And a lot of that works right into who you are as an employer. Jason: [00:06:28] Is it important to have like an interview guide? Like I see a lot of times people are all over the place in interviews. So what are you talking about? Like with an interview guide? Laura: [00:06:39] Right. So let's go back to the elephant, you know, the tutu over top of the race car gear. So if that is something that's important to you to understand how people are going to react in unusual situations, we need to make that consistent within how you're hiring. Because if you do that for one person, but don't do it for all three that you're interviewing all of a sudden, you have a disjointed view of your candidates. So the first thing that the interview guide helps with obviously is consistency. The second thing is going to help you with is really narrow down what it is that you're looking for in your role. So if you're looking to hire flexible and adaptable people, or perhaps you're looking for a part-time role. So for example, we only hire part-time as part of our culture and our practices. And the reason for that is I believe very strongly and having a workforce that is passionate on, on a multitude of levels. So whether that be family, whether that be, you know, rescuing animals, whether that be building your side business. We want to make sure that that time is available for our team. So when we hire and we're looking for that adaptability and that flexibility, there are certain questions that we ask. Because what we don't want is somebody to come on board who actually wants a full-time job, but it's just taking the part-time work until they can get there. And that's, in all honesty, it's happened before. And I'm sure anybody who's looked at that has seen that happen as well. All of a sudden, you know, four weeks in and the full-time gig shows up and the person who apparently only wanted part-time has gone. So how do we really dig into those questions? And, that all comes from the interview guide. Jason: [00:08:16] Gotcha. Very cool. And what's, let's say they pass the test. They tweeted about the tutu. You know, they ask questions, all this what's important about an offer letter? Laura: [00:08:28] So gone are the days where you can shake somebody's hand and. Hire them and move forward. And it's unfortunate because a lot of people build that environment of trust and they build that, you know, idea of just a very informal atmosphere and they don't want the heavy paperwork. But as an employer, you have the responsibility to protect your business. And you also have the responsibility to be clear and upfront with the person you're hiring. And that offer letter is going to do both. It's going to explain the vacation, the salary, the hours of work. You know, what, if it wasn't clear that, you know, you have a 48-hour workweek and they thought it was 35, that's going to be a big misunderstanding upfront. The most important thing that an offer letter's going to do for you is, though you're in the romance stage of your relationship. And though this person could do no wrong ever, or perhaps your business is in such a good place you could never foresee the opportunity that where you might need to let somebody go. There is going to be a time where that relationship needs to come to an end. And that offer letter is going to outline how the end is going to go. And that as an employer is the single most important part of the offer letter. Jason: [00:09:41] Gotcha. Let's say we hired someone they've been working for us for four months and we realized this cat's not the right person for us. And, you know, we need to send them on their way. What's the best way for us to do that without putting our agency in danger. Laura: [00:10:01] The single best way is to make sure that you have a solid offer letter four months before. That's going to be, you know, whether it's by a seasoned professional, whether it's by a lawyer providing you with that information. That's very, you know, each state probably has certain things that needs to be included. That needs to be required on the offer letter. But that offer letter is what's going to make that four-month termination go a lot easier. Jason: [00:10:24] Gotcha. Okay. I see a lot of times people are just like, Hey, you're gone. And they don't have, you know, whenever we were, terminating a relationship, we would always have to make sure that we had multiple people in the room. Uh, so it wasn't like, Oh, you know, well, you did this. And they're like, no, that didn't happen. Laura: [00:10:47] We just had that last week, actually with the client who, you know, they wanted to terminate the person early, cause they always came in early. So before I even got there, cool, that works. But I said, make sure you have someone else in the room. Well, who? Nobody's here. And I said, well, just, just make sure that there's somebody, it's all glass walls. I said just, you know, outside the office, even. And lo and behold, we did not expect this person to turn. And it was like, Oh, thank goodness somebody else was there. You know, as just a frame of reference to say, Nope, this is exactly what went down. So yeah, definitely having that second person is important and providing the person with paperwork as well. So when they go away, they're not interpreting what you said, but they actually have it written down. Jason: [00:11:30] Yeah. We've had people go kicking and screaming, like literally like the most calm people that you would never expect it. It was almost like going up to like this little baby Chihuahua and then this Chihuahua turning into like this Wolf, trying to like kill you. Like, literally I'm like, I did not see that one coming. Laura: [00:11:50] And then the ones that you think in your all prepped for and, you know, perhaps even on, you know, very rare occasions, we've, you know, had the police on speed dial in case need be. Those ones are like, all right, we'll see ya. Jason: [00:12:02] I think those are the ones that they're just used to it. Like I've been fired from every job I've ever held. Like okay. Yep. Sign this. Okay. Here you go. I'm good. Cool. Awesome. Well, this has all been great. Um, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Laura: [00:12:25] You know what I think at the end of the day, understanding who you are as an employer and making sure you're hiring for that, building yourself an interview guide, that's actually going to dig deep for that, and then making sure that you're protecting your business with that offer letter. Those are the three most important things you can do as you build your team. Jason: [00:12:43] Awesome. And, uh, where can people reach out to you guys? Laura: [00:12:47] So you can find me at www.essentialhr.ca and then if you go essentialhr.ca/swenk, we have a great little five steps to finding and aligning your employer brand with your HR systems. So people can grab that there. Jason: [00:13:03] You don't look old enough to use www that's only for old people. Laura: [00:13:08] Well, I appreciate that. And so would the person who sells me my skincare. Jason: [00:13:14] I always laugh when people are like www. I'm like really? Usually, my 70-year-olds always say that I'm like, no, no, no, no. Laura: [00:13:23] Yeah. So I was talking to a friend, who's building a business and I said, well, make sure you start building your email list. And she's like, I don't check my email. I was like, and there's the generational gap. Jason: [00:13:33] Awesome. Well, cool. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. If you guys liked this episode and you want to know even more systems for really being able to truly scale your agency. I'm not talking about growing your agency because growing is just growing your revenue. But if you want to know how to truly scale and what are the right systems you need to put in place, make sure you get a JasonSwenk.com/playbook. And that will show you all the systems that you need. So then you can have that freedom in your agency that you always wanted rather than be that prisoner and be that toll booth owner for everyone coming to you. So go to jasonswenk.com/playbook. Until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Whats_the_Best_Way_to_Hire_and_Fire_Digital_Agency_Employees_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm MDT |
Wed, 21 April 2021
Lacie Edgeman is a Partner and VP of Finance at PrograMetrix. She has extensive experience in finance within the marketing and creative industry. Lacie prides herself in helping hold her agency to high standards while keeping their projects on budget without sacrificing vision or quality. She is on the show to share the importance of niching down in order to scale. She also explains the difference between growing and scaling and why both are important. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesVerblio: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Verblio. Check out Verblio.com/smartagency and get 50% off your first month of content creation. Our team loves using Verblio because of the ease in their process and their large pool of crowd-sourced writers. Jason: [00:00:00] On this episode, I talk with an agency owner about the difference between growing your agency and scaling. And there's a big difference. And I think all of you will really like this. She comes from a finance background, she's a co-owner at an amazing agency. And so she gives us a really good perspective of what you need to do in order to scale your agency. So, enjoy. Hey, welcome to the show. Lacie: [00:00:30] Hi, nice to be here. Jason: [00:00:00] Yeah, I'm excited to have you on and tell your guys' story. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Yeah, so we are PrograMetrix. Lacie: [00:00:30] We are a PrograMetrix media buying agency and programmatic is such one of those terms that is a little bit confusing to people, but it's really just simply the automated buying of ad space. So think about Hulu. The commercials you see on Hulu or Spotify, or even those display ads you see on forbes.com. And I am a partner here at the agency and I have a background in finance and operations. And I know we're going to be talking about niching today, which is very important. And my career path has been a little bit of a niche as well. So I started out in a traditional creative shop. Moved into a B2B agency, then finally made my way to digital and then niched a little bit further into programmatic, which I'm very excited about. I really do feel like it's the future of advertising. Jason: [00:01:31] Awesome. So tell us, how did you get started in the first agency? Lacie: [00:01:35] What was that story? Yeah. So somebody took a chance on me. I think, uh, probably a lot of the viewers have nonlinear paths into marketing or were into advertising and mine was very similar. So I was actually in the construction industry and was getting my degree in finance and wanted to move to Austin, Texas, and had an agency that kind of just rolled the dice on me with my finance background and, uh, started working there. And I just love, I love agency world. I think people either love it or hate it. And I just absolutely love it. Fast-paced, exciting, never a dull moment. Jason: [00:02:14] That's awesome. So let's kind of jump into it a little bit about specialization. You know, a lot of people struggle with this because they feel that they're going to miss out. But you know, how did you guys go about specializing? And not per se, just picking programmatic, but how did you guys have the confidence, and what were, kind of, some of the steps that you guys went down in order to specialize? Lacie: [00:02:37] Yeah. And I know this I'm probably preaching to the choir here. The specialization is so important. So one of the things we looked at when we specialized is, you know, what were the advantages and disadvantages. And we just felt like we weren't going to be able to scale the business. So there is a difference between growing and scaling and, I want to talk about that a little bit later. But that's one of the reasons we really looked at it and programmatic specifically because it is at the forefront of advertising. And really what we feel like as the future of advertising. We also, our co-founders kind of grew up in the ad tech space. So it was kind of a natural fit, but I think there was a year there where we kind of experimented with the whole full service and it just wasn't working out. So what we found is that it is very counterintuitive that people think, Oh, I want to capture this revenue going out the door and I don't want to let it go. But what they don't realize is it really hurts their business. You can not deliver at a high level to your clients. So you're, you're hurting your reputation by taking on work that you're just not specialized for. Jason: [00:03:44] Yeah, I totally agree. What's the difference in your eyes about growing and scaling? Because it is a pretty big leap between the two. So can you talk a little bit more about that? Lacie: [00:03:56] Yeah, of course. Growing and scaling. I think a lot of agencies don't really understand how big of a difference it is. Right? So growing is where you add revenue at the same rate as you're adding expenses. And so what happens again? He'd been in finances there's less leftover at the end of the day. If you can scale, if you can be efficient, if you can put in those processes, you can scale meaning that you're adding more revenue with less expenses. And you're really making that amount at the bottom, that kind of you're left with, a little bit bigger at the end of the day. Jason: [00:04:31] Yeah. There's so many people and me, and I've gone through it in the past where, you know, we kept growing and I was like, oh my gosh. And agencies are notorious for this. Be like, Oh, we're, you know, so-and-so millions in revenue. And everybody's like, Oh, that'd be nice. But. Can you look at, you know, oh man, I'm actually making less this year and we grew. Rather than figure out those efficiencies and those systems. So what were some of, I presume you guys probably learned this the hard way, is that true? Or did you guys just pop right out and be like, we figured it all out. Lacie: [00:05:07] Well, I think there was, like I said, about a year of us experimenting, but it was pretty, we like figured it out pretty soon. It was like, okay, we know what we're good at. We know what we're not good at. And. If we just realized we were using a lot of extra time to do those things we weren't good at. And it just wasn't sustainable for long term. Jason: [00:05:27] For the people listening, because a lot of them are in a growing phase, but not a scaling phase. Or a lot of them say, I don't want my agency to be any bigger because they really haven't figured out the growing part or the scaling part. Right. So was there steps that you guys took that made this process easier that they could be like, Oh, let me look here. Lacie: [00:05:51] Yeah. So I think first of all, you need to identify what you're really good at, right? And what you can do at a high level, deliver great results. Where you can be the best in the industry, go with that and then create partnerships. So one of the things we've done and we do believe in true partnerships, both on the client-side and the vendor side, create those partnerships where you vet those companies. And you can feel very confident that if you don't do that, you're not good at it. That you have a partner that can do it. Our clients love that. Right? When we commit to doing something, we're going to do it very well. And if we can't, we're going to let them know, Hey, that's not something we specialize in, but here we can actually help facilitate that process for you. Make it easy for you. Again, I think that the hardest thing is that fear. That fear of that revenue going to another person. But, you just get more if you are collaborative and have those partnerships. So that would be one of the first things; a partnership level. The other thing that's really important is that process, right? And I know we actually use the Agency Playbook and so looking at those processes. So a lot of the things we do is we have daily huddles. So we're always on the same page. We have weekly meetings and then we use a project management tool. It's very important. We have, um, I know you talk a lot about having those automated systems in place. We do as well. We have intake forms. Where somebody fills out a form and then all of the tasks are created in the project management tool. So that's very important for that scaling as well, instead of just growing. Jason: [00:07:24] Yeah, no, I, I love that. I mean, it's, it's the little things that you do. A lot of us, you know, as we're trying to scale agency, we just look at kind of the shiny red objects and we think. Well, the cure or the end all, be all is to just get more revenue in the door and sell more. But it's, if you don't have the right foundation, you know. Kind of like when you guys probably jumped in the Playbook, you know, you got a video from being like, hey, focus on the first three systems. These are the most important. And then you can go on to all the other ones. Cause we all jumped to prospecting and sales and think that's it. Or, we don't even think about kind of the delivery part. What were some of the other efficiencies that, or processes that you guys put in place to make you guys more efficient? Lacie: [00:08:14] Yeah, so kind of going back to that form. So one great example is the project management tool, right? And, and I think people don't utilize that. First of all, some people don't even have a project management tool. Jason: [00:08:26] Yeah. It's more like task management. Lacie: [00:08:27] Yeah, right. So using, using that to its full capacity is one of the best things I can recommend. And there's a lot of really great tools out there, but the tool we use, we can actually have our clients submit a request form. Um, again, it automatically schedules all of the tasks for us. So there's, there's no question about when something's due, how we go about it. And then we're able to actually organize all of the internal stuff as well. All of those internal projects we have. And, I think prioritizing those internal projects, um, to your point, you know, spending that time on those first three sections of the book is really important. Like people don't think about that. They're worried about everything else, but, um, until you do that, you will not have that, that scaling capacity. Jason: [00:09:15] So I'm not very good at finance at all. So I love talking with people and surrounding myself that are really good at finance and having that kind of background. Because like you start putting spreadsheets. I'm sure you probably love spreadsheets. Like I look at them and I feel kind of a little dizzy, you know, looking at them, but it's awesome. And I think all of you guys compliment each other from, you know, the other owner and owners that you guys have. So what are the things on, um, a weekly or quarterly basis that you're looking at from finance to make sure that they didn't cease going in the direction that you guys want it to go? Lacie: [00:09:52] Yeah. So we do have like executive meetings, bi-weekly executive meetings, which again, I think it's important to get that time. But one of the things that I keep a pretty close eye on, is the revenue, right? I think that's, that's one of the things that you have to keep an eye on. And we have like a revenue forecast sheet and I created that. And again, in the efficiency lens, you can pivot all of the data. So it makes it very easy to see what's going on. What are we doing next month? Where do we need to fill the gap? We have it split out by, you know, revenue that's under contract, revenue that we expect to get, and then revenue, that's kind of up in the air so that we can, um, go after that. And that's very similar to your process, right? That, you know, kind of keeping those in sections and then focusing there so we can very easily see just with a glance. Okay, we need to go get some more new business. Or we need to double down on what we think we should expect, get those contracts signed. So from a finance perspective, where we look at that a lot, we know that revenue isn't the important number. And I know you would agree with that as well. Right? The net profit is the important part, but it does start somewhere. We've got to make sure you've got that coming through. So we look at that. We also look at our client roster, right? We want to make sure that we're not too heavy on one client versus another client. We're very lucky here that we have a very diverse portfolio, but I have worked for other agencies where you have that one big client and it's just, it can be very detrimental to the agency. For the staff and for the management, I think everybody's constantly looking over their shoulder saying, okay, I hope the client's happy. And, um, it also gives us a lot of flexibility to be honest with our clients, which is really important to us. I don't think a lot of agencies get that opportunity because they're worried about that revenue, you know, going out the door and I can't speak honestly. And, and that's really important to us so that, that we actually have that flexibility is nice. Jason: [00:11:49] There's so many people that they do, their budgeting kind of looking at their bank account. But with, you know, when you guys do kind of the proforma or projections. You know, can get a really good snapshot of, you know, like you were saying. Like when the bad times are going to come and usually if you have six months to plan for it, I think that's more than enough time. Sometimes even a quarter to plan for that. Cause I always found that what we do today actually affects us three, four months down the road. So if like, if you're looking at your pipeline and it dried up. You know, the next quarter is going to be hard to start. Lacie: [00:12:28] Yeah. I think that's a great point and something that we, you know, do very well is keeping an eye on that. And what I always say is because I know there's a lot of philosophies out there and people really care about cash, which you need to be concerned about cash don't get me wrong. But I always say that your P&L or your proforma is the canary in the coal mine. Right? It's going to tell you what is happening. And, and so, you know, cash is important, but it's the end of the day, your P&L and what you're forecasting is going to tell you what's going to happen with cash. So we do focus most of our energy there in the forecasting piece. And I will say, you know, when the pandemic hit, I think a lot of agencies had a hard time and we were able to pivot very quickly and we kind of knew what was coming down the line. We were able to make some changes, communicate those changes to our team. And we came out even better, I think after that because we had that battle scar. I think everybody has, uh, has those battle scars now? Jason: [00:13:26] Yeah, I think I, I saw, um, a huge step for a month, like in March for everybody where it was just. It was so new. Everybody was panicking. Everybody was stopping their marketing, which I always loved that quote by Henry Ford. He was like, stopping your marketing is, like stopping your watch to save time. And then people were like, Oh, well, stopping marketing is the dumbest thing because especially digital marketing because we need to reach our people, but we're not. We're not able to right now. And so I've seen so many agencies like yourself have such huge growth through such a hard time. Um, you know, for certain businesses, because, you know, we offer a unique solution. They're kind of the frontline people for business. You know, I'm not taking anything away from the doctors and nurses are, the first responders and that. But, you know, for business, like all agencies are really kind of that first responder. So it's, um, it's exciting to see what people are able to do and really create. If an agency's listening right now, you know, since you've worked with a number of different agencies and you own, you know, part-owner of this agency, what's a good margin that you guys are shooting for, or that you think people should shoot for in the agency space? Lacie: [00:14:47] Yeah, that's a great question. What I would say is it kind of depends on what you're focusing on, right? If you're a creative shop, I think your margins are going to be a little bit lower. If you're just doing digital advertising, specifically social and Google. I think your margins are going to be a little bit lower because again, that tends to be more commoditized. And you have to try a lot harder to be kind of out in front of the pack. Um, but if you are able to niche again, this is the whole part about niching. If you're able to really niche, you should be able to get those margins close to 25 at a minimum 25% is what I would say. But if you're not niching, you're probably at the 10% range, that's the importance of niching. So I think, you know, you have to stop looking at the revenue, going out the door, and think about the ability to really, to get those net profits up. Jason: [00:15:38] Yeah. I mean, when you have that specialization, you know, like, this weekend, my poor son was playing flag football and uh, snapped his shoulder. And so, you know, we're not going to go to a generalist. Right? Like literally, and it's, it's the same thing. Like we're going to go to a specialist that he's literally right there right now, going to a specialist to figure out what we need to do. And they make a ton of money because they are the specialists because they know that one craft better than everyone else who's like, oh yeah, your temperature's high. Take this and call me in the morning. And that's what I tell agencies all the time. And they fight it for so long. And then once they make that decision, they're like, why did I wait so long? But I think it's a process that you have to go through and it takes some people a decade. Sometimes longer, sometimes years, months. You never know. So let's switch focus and kind of wrap up a little bit about, and I love to interview women on the show. Especially women owners, because there's far fewer than men. Why do you think that is? Lacie: [00:16:49] You know, that's a great question. I don't know the answer to that question. What I know is that it seems to be getting better. That's what I know. I know there's a 3% conference that happens every year and that I think has brought some attention to the problem. I am also a part of a group called Together Digital, which is a women's group for digital specifically. So there are some new avenues for us. Um, and there's a lot of agency owners there. I don't know the answer to that question. All I know is that I feel like women, in general, are working on it. Right. We're trying to figure out why we're trying to create the solutions to be more present in the space. Jason: [00:17:32] And I, I see a shift coming and I get real excited because more and more, the people that we interview are women. And I'm like, this is awesome. And so, that's always really good. So I'm happy for that. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Lacie: [00:17:48] You know, I, I think we did a really great job today. Just covering off on just that, that niching and I know again, you and I think very similarly, I just wish I could encourage everybody out there to really take a look, even if you're just want to take a piece of your business and try to niche there and see how it goes. But it's so powerful and you can be doing so much more with your agency. If you could take a lane, stick to it, and you will see those revenues go up. Well, you'll see the bottom line go up really. And that's the most important part. Jason: [00:18:21] Yeah, I just had to commit to it for a while. And I always tell people, but I'm like, look, as soon as you pick a specialization or a niche, whichever you want, you'll still get work outside of that. It's just, you're marketing to that particular audience and you know them better than they know themselves. So they're going to listen to you and, and then you really stop being that commodity or that "me too" agency, I always tell everybody about. They have a problem, they come to you to solve it. It's kinda like that Vanilla Ice song. You got a problem. Yo, I'll solve it. Awesome. So you guys don't want to hear me say, obviously. What's the website address that everybody can go and check the agency out? Lacie: [00:19:05] Yeah, it's a PrograMetrix.com and, um, definitely check us out on LinkedIn. We have a ton of marketing content out there. Even some things that you can use to learn and, and even go back to your clients with too. Jason: [00:19:19] Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on the show. And if you guys enjoyed this episode and you want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners, where they can see the things that you might not be able to see, that can challenge you to hold you accountable, have fun with, I want to invite all of you to go to DigitalAgencyElite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind for agency owners that really want to grow and scale faster, and they want to do it with a group that understands and empathizes with them and likes to have fun. So go to DigitalAgencyElite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_Can_You_Scale_Your_Agency_and_Grow_Net_Profit_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT |
Sun, 18 April 2021
Jacque Spitzer is the CEO of Raindrop, the direct-to-consumer marketing agency he founded in 2014. He's committed to bringing fresh, new creative to his agency and their clients. Jacque's been involved in some of the most creative and entertaining videos on the internet. And he's sharing some of the lessons learned and insider secrets on making great videos for your agency brand. Generate more leads when your video ads don't suck! 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesOribi: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Oribi. Check out Oribi.io/smartagency for a free trial. Plus when you sign up for Oribi get 20% off the first three months with promo code: Smart Agency Jason: [00:00:00] On this episode, I talk with an agency that's been a part of some of the funniest videos on the internet from like Dr. Squash to you, name it. And we talk about how do you not make your video ads suck? How do you really take your videos and make them entertaining? It's a lot of fun in this episode and I hope you enjoy. Hey, welcome to the show. Jacque: [00:00:28] Thanks for having me. It's an honor. Jason: [00:00:29] Yeah. I'm excited to have you on, so tell us who you are and what do you do? Jacque: [00:00:34] So my name is Jacque Spencer. I'm CEO of Raindrop. I started the agency pretty young, about decade in now and, we are D to C focused, about 80% DTC. We do about 20% B to C. So very consumer brand-focused agency. And where we really kind of come into being known nationally is for our top of funnel, social creative. So we created ads for brands like Dr. Squatch and. Crossrope, Omigo, Shady Rays. Jason: [00:01:05] Wait, you did the Dr. Squatch one? Jacque: [00:01:07] Dr. Squash, yeah. We had been on a tremendous journey with these DTC clients over the last three years or so. And it's a thrill. It's amazing to see these companies grow by 10 times, 20 times, 30 times their revenues, and being part of a creative engine behind it. Jason: [00:01:24] That's awesome. Well, let's go back a decade. How'd you get started? Jacque: [00:01:29] Well, I was working at NBC, as a journalist and, um, one of my colleagues now, my wife, asked me if I would help shoot a video for her personal trainer. And I started shooting videos for him. And one thing led to the next, I started getting referrals and I didn't have a plan to own an agency. I didn't, I'd never worked at an agency before. I didn't know anything about marketing per se, but I just followed my instincts for storytelling into problem-solving for businesses. And yeah, I was 24 at the time. I had a bunch of roommates and so I was fortunate to not have a lot of life responsibility and I just went for it and it started slow. To say the least. And, um, you know, this year we're at about 50 employees and I've grown tremendously and have had a lot of fun along the way. Jason: [00:02:19] Well, take me back to the point when, cause there's a lot of different things that we go through from accidental agency owner, like we are right. To you know, actually bringing on a team to growing, thinking that growing is the better option versus scaling. So walk us through some of the phases that you went back. If you can remember, like, I know, I remember when, if I was interviewing myself like about like the first agency interview, I'd be like, I don't remember anything. Jacque: [00:02:49] Yeah. I mean, you know, it's interesting how much, like, just how much self-reflection is involved. Because I think about the fact all the time that I started an agency, well, I started a business, I shouldn't say I started an agency. I started a business. It became an agency. And I didn't have any direct background in the agency world, or life. And in this type of structure, I've never had managed anyone directly. And now I'm partially responsible in some way for all these people. And so for me, there was different like milestones where I was like I remember the first one was when we started having actual overhead. So like an office and health insurance, and starting to realize like, Oh, this is why you can't charge $50 an hour for your time all the time. Jason: [00:03:32] Like what year was that? Jacque: [00:03:35] For me? That was like year three. Yeah. So, I mean really the first couple of years, and it was enough to feed myself and then, um, you know, a couple of subcontractors and then our first employees were year three and the hockey stick growth has come in the last three years or so. Jason: [00:03:52] And what was the mindset shift? Because there's a lot of people listening that they go, well, I'm kind of doing everything from three years and below of like, I'm kind of doing everything myself. I'm using contractors, that kind of stuff. What was the shift of going, Hey, let me get an office, let me start hiring people. And then like, how did that go? Jacque: [00:04:13] I was really fortunate. I have a business partner named Madame Wagner and Adam had worked for two other very large agencies at the time. And so it was kind of a nice mix of my creative storytelling and just passion and hard work and desire. And his ability to see what was missing in terms of structure, even in the way we contracted things. Introducing service lines, that weren't just project-based. And we still do a lot of video, photo, and web work, but it was just so many project based things. So every year we started at zero. And so that was a big aha. Um, and he was like, I can help you get there if we work together. And so we made an agreement that at a certain revenue number, we would form a partnership and we were able to do that. And so once we had some annual contracts in place that were a little bit more steady, we felt better about making the leap to taking on some of the overhead. Jason: [00:05:06] Awesome. Let's talk about video, you know, many years ago even before I started this podcast, I wanted to do video because there were so many people out there just putting out blog posts. Right. You remember years ago? Yeah. There are so many people outsourcing it. Like you never knew what, like, what were their tone? What was their personality? And I was like, look, I just, I don't care how bad I look on camera, whatever it is. I think my first video I was trying to be serious at first. And, we'll link up in the show notes or you go on YouTube. It's like one of the first videos. I remember seeing, cause this was in '14. So you remember, like, the Dollar Shave Club video? Jacque: [00:05:47] Of course. Jason: [00:05:48] You guys didn't do that, did you? Jacque: [00:05:50] No, but like, if we were creating our own barbecue sauce, that was like a main ingredient of the barbecue sauce. Like, no, you need what they have. Jason: [00:05:57] Yeah. So I was recording this video, trying to be serious about like, hey, you know, my strategies work and that kind of stuff, but my cat kept coming up and bugging me. So finally I was just, I picked up my cat. I was like, my tips are effing. Awesome. And, and literally it was like a parody off this one and it was got really successful. So let's talk about how agencies listening. How they can use video. And then I also definitely want to get into the Dr. Squatch video. Cause I watched that all the time. Cause I just, I think it's hilarious. Jacque: [00:06:29] No, I appreciate your enjoyment of it. We enjoy making them just as much as people enjoy watching them. So the question is more so the idea around video for agencies? Jason: [00:06:39] How can agencies really use video and really get to the next level. Right. So yeah, people are just using video and whatever it is, or just putting like these awful ads together. So like how can we step it up? Yeah, I think Jacque: [00:06:53] one of the kind of secret starting point tips that I would give to people when it comes to video storytelling is to, and you mentioned earlier, like, not to take themselves too seriously, because when you think about the different mediums where you're consuming the video, cause you can't just think about video in a vacuum. It's like, where are you actually watching it? You're probably watching it on either Facebook, LinkedIn, maybe even Tik Tok these days, Instagram. And so it's like the other competing videos in that space that you're watching are usually a dog that is really well-trained and bouncing a bone on its nose, or some girl talking about her political affiliations while she does her makeup, or, you know, it's like the, the world that you are swimming in is a world of entertainment. It's not a world of information. And so when I think about making video, it's truly table stakes to be entertaining when you tell your story via video, then that's what you were talking about with your cat. I mean, you experienced it firsthand and you're like, oh my gosh, of course like, cause this is what I would want to watch if I were on the other end. As much as we all want to sound like we have some kind of PhD in brand or something. People want to see the guy with the cat that says, you know what, or in some cases, the guy with the Tesla or whatever it is on YouTube where these videos start and people have these fancy cars. Bottom line is when it comes to video storytelling, uh, for anyone, but particularly for service line businesses like an agency or anything else is you have to be entertaining and otherwise it's like, why exist on the internet? If you want them to have your own coursework or something, that's like, you know then, okay. Be serious all day. But if you want to keep people's attention and grab people's attention, you have to be interesting. Jason: [00:08:32] So it's easier said than done. So let's say you're an agency. Cause I always tell agency as I'm like, look, just start off doing it. Like you're going to suck in the very beginning at video. And if it's just like telling someone how to do something, do that. And then like, how can they go from just educational content to more entertaining content? Like what's that process that you walk your clients through in order to create the Dr. Squatch video? That's a Jacque: [00:09:05] great question. I will, here's what I will do. I will go macro to the micro. So the macro is that certain people think in a way where they understand attention and entertainment and what will connect. So our business, we work with five full-time comedians and we pair them with our writers internally as well. And the reason is, is that we see people who are on one extreme or the other. So sometimes people make something really, really funny that doesn't sell. Right. And like people will watch, but it's like at the end of the day, maybe the product seems like a joke or the service seems like a joke. It doesn't, it's not structured right. But then if you have all these people that understand the structure of how to tell a story, but not how to hold people's attention. So we pair our comedian with our internal writers. Our internal writers are fantastic. Like, I don't know that they could probably write one of these types of scripts on their own, but that added spice of having someone who's professionally entertaining, it does make a difference. And we learned that. We learned at firsthand by what happened was we watched the Dollar Shave Club video and studied it, some of the very early Harmon brothers stuff. And, you know, I literally made a recipe out of it. I was like, what is going into this? That seems to work. And we'll tweak it from there. The first video we did, did not do well. It was a dud and we tried to write it all internally. It was like half my jokes. Like it just wasn't that good. And when I went back, I learned that the owner of the Dollar Shave Club, who, the guy who stars in the video. He was an improv comedian. And he talks about in one of his articles, he talks about that being like the most underrated component, but like people are like, you have to understand comedy in order to pull off the timing, in order to make a video work. And that's what led us to, uh, finding James Schrader, who is a star of the Dr. Squatch videos, that he was a local comedian. And he was doing all right, but we saw him and we were like, that guy is perfect. It was actually our senior videographers bachelor party that we were at. And so we tracked him down and the rest is history in terms of that. But that's, that's where it all started, where we realized if you want to make professionally entertaining content, you should probably talk to professionally entertaining people and not just try to be something that you're not. And to your point earlier, when we were talking offline about putting people who are smarter and more creative around you. Well, that's a great example. People that are in front of people every night, they know the pulse of America. What people are laughing at, they're touring America. They're great. So our comedians are definitely a big part of what we do. Jason: [00:11:44] What other ingredients, like when you were deconstructing the Dollar Shave Club video, which is so instrumental to so many different things, what other ingredients did you find? You know, obviously one of them's use a freaking professional comedian that will help. So what were some of them? Jacque: [00:12:01] I think one of the things that, um, what's fascinating to me about like, again, going back to the micro is. I actually don't see Dollar Shave Club as the beginning of this. What I see Dollar Shave Club is the first to do on the internet. But what I went back and we've really realized, especially in working with a company like Worx power tools, we've made like eight or 10 videos this year just for works. They got their start in direct to consumer power tools through infomercials. And what I realized is that, you know, Jason, you and I grew up watching infomercials and they keep our attention for 30 minutes on television. Even though we didn't want the ad, we knew it was an ad. And we're like, well, why? Why are we spending 30 minutes of our life watching an ad for something we'd probably never buy, especially as like a 14 year old? Like, why am I watching this like toaster oven that can do it all or Oxiclean, like why am I watching this? And so for me, I look at it like the attention has shifted online, but the overarching human interest in something like an infomercial always existed and it exists now. And these three minute type videos that we make is the infomercial of the internet age. I mean, so for me, it's like, when you talk about those specific ingredients, it's like the numbers of call to actions. The ability to remain entertaining, but not make a joke of the actual product. But I think is the biggest rookie mistake we see, is that people, you can make jokes around the product, but the product itself is not a joke. Right? You want people to buy it and you want them to take it seriously in some capacity. And so I would say that's, if you were to look at infomercials, they are the predecessor of the online, they call them, uh, you know, anchor videos or, or hero videos. And then from there, I mean, like, I would say that like anything, the structure's there and then the rest of it is freestyle. And sometimes something just really resonates with people. Jason: [00:13:56] How many call to actions? You mentioned like how many call to actions. So what have you seen works the best? Jacque: [00:14:02] You know,, we do about three to four throughout. And then we usually end out with making sure that we're like, okay, you've spent three minutes with us, you gotta click the, like, you gotta go. Like you gotta check out the site. And the beauty of these longer videos, like I think about. You know, if you're paying for an impression, I'm gonna get a little, little, little agency meta on you here. But if you're paying for an impression, it's like, okay, I'm paying a couple cents for an impression. And let's say someone watches your video and they watch 90 seconds or two minutes of it. They go from, I've never heard of this product or service to I now I'm pretty educated on it. And not only am I do I know about it. I know enough to potentially refer someone else who might actually need it. Like maybe I'm not the target audience. So in other words, I watch a video on a gasless leaf blower, and maybe I have a gardener and I don't need it. But I see my neighbor with the gas leaf blower and they're like, oh there's an ordinance and you have to have electric leaf blowers now, which is really happening in my city. I can be like, oh, you should check out the Worx leaf jet, it's I saw a commercial for. It's it's electric. Oh, Hey, thanks neighbor. I mean, that's the power of actually understanding the product or service and spending time with it. And it costs the same to reach someone for three minutes as it does for 15 seconds. And so at scale, it really works well. Jason: [00:15:25] What's the best way to start off these videos to capture their attention. Right? Like I, I look at it as the first couple of seconds are literally going to engage you. You're going to be like skip next or whatever it is. So what have you seen works the best? Jacque: [00:15:43] Yes. Great question. So, the answer to that is partially, you don't know, which is why we create multiple openings and we test them on YouTube unlisted to find the winner. Because statistically, they can be very, very different. Um, in terms of the openings, typically we're doing something that grabs people visually and, or challenges their own perception of the reality. Like I love the original Dr. Squatch where we say the soap you're showering with is shit and then we go into, you're probably using the same bar your mommy bought for you. Well, if you are, in fact, someone who's using the same bar soap you've been using for 10 to 15 years, like you have my attention because you're like you called me out about something I didn't even know I was doing. And so we try to create those types of moments where like for instance, we made a video for, We Ship Floors and I didn't realize until we started getting into their video, like how gross carpeting is like, it's disgusting. Like when you realize like how much stuff gets trapped in carpet, like you'll never, you'll never enjoy carpet the same way ever again. Jason: [00:16:50] That's why my wife, uh, when we built our house, she was like, no carpet, all hardwoods. Jacque: [00:16:55] I know it's the way to go. So, and specifically We Ship Floors because they're water resistant, no just kidding, but a little random plug. But yeah, no, I mean, that's, that's what we see. It's like challenging people's perception of the reality and giving them something entertaining. I mean, look, if you can make a video better than the video that we're about to watch. They'll stick around. Jason: [00:17:15] Yeah. You know, I like calling them out on something. I know one of the videos that was really popular for us is like, Hey, are you, do you constantly keep sending proposals only to have people go completely silent on you? And they're like, yeah. Or like you think of that guy on Instagram. I think it's like, I think he's in New York, but like he never says anything. He just holds up signs. Signs of shit we think of but never say. And I think those always work, you know, the best because it's like, Oh, finally someone said it, but you had the freedom to call it out. Jacque: [00:17:50] What's funny is I remember your ad. Like, I didn't realize it was your ad, but when you just said that, I was like, Oh my gosh, I've seen this guy before. Was that on YouTube? Where'd you run those? Jason: [00:18:00] On Facebook. Yeah. But you got to call someone out on it and then, you know, and then I think too, it's what suspense, so it's kind of, what, what are some other other elements I see is, is like going well, here's probably what you're doing now. And then here's what you could be doing. And it's a little suspense about like, Oh man. Like you were saying, it's a story. It's like, they want a happy ending to all kinds of funny stuff on that one. They want a happy ending, but they don't know how to get there. So they're going to keep watching or listening to what's going on. Jacque: [00:18:37] So I think. We use them as like, we call it like problem solution statements and going all the way back to our predecessor, the infomercial. One of the things that they do so well is they'll say, Oh, like you can do these three obvious things. Right. But then here's 10 things you've never thought to do with this thing. And all of a sudden you're like, Okay. Like, I can see myself getting some Oxiclean because I could, I don't own a boat, but like I could wash it if I had one. Like, you know, it's like, you're just, it's crazy. But like, if they do it and it's like, Oh, you can cut through this and that. And like, watch me cut through a shoe when you're like, why are you cutting through a shoe? But if I needed to, I can cut through a shoe. And so it's like a, to your point that suspense and that like, It's an art and think about like, when you go to a fair and there's someone doing a live demonstration, same idea, right? Like they just suck you in. They're just so good. I feel like I should go to the local fair and get some of those people, man. That can make some great videos. Jason: [00:19:30] Oh yeah. I mean, like this summer I got a boat for the family and I was going to buy a Boston Whaler and I was talking to the salesperson and he goes, well, you could cut the boat in half and it's still gonna float. I'm like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And they literally have a video of them cutting a boat in half and still working. And I'm like, all right. As I started watching, I'm like, wow, they're going to cut this boat in half? Like, I want to know what happens, but it's just talking about like, you know, no one's ever going to do it. Well, I'm sure people like you will do it demonstrating this. Jacque: [00:20:08] I think that's brilliant because it's like taking safety to an extremity and you're like, you're not going to sink in this boat. It's like, let me prove it. And I've had it in half. It's pretty good. Jason: [00:20:18] Yeah. Or, calling out something that really gets their attention. Like I love if I can remember right on the Dr. Squatch video, it's like you're using the same ingredients as like dishwasher or something like that. Like I'm like, oh, that's gross. Jacque: [00:20:33] Yeah, no, I mean, it's, uh, we've played with so many different like intros and hooks and what matters to people and to your point, those, like, I never thought of that type of moment where it's like, it's, it's the same ingredients inside your dish soap. And you're like, oh, yeah, you're right. Like it happens to be Old Spice and it's called like tropical breezes or something, but it is the same type of formulation. Again, it's like challenging people's perception of their own reality. And you can't unhear that. Right? It's like, I never knew that, but then I can't unhear it. Jason: [00:21:07] Yeah. I'm just trying to think, like how could we help people really kind of position this more like, like when I'm working with someone and I asked them, I'm like, hey, walk me through the process of how you're pitching to people. And then I kind of go, well, this is how we did it. Like, we did a lot of web design back in the day and I would say, just to get the person to really compare everyone else to us, I would say, well, you probably get asked the question all the time. What websites do you like? And they're like, yeah, it'd be like, do you want to know why? They're like, yeah, this is because they're going to copy someone else's work because they're freaking unoriginal. And that's probably why your whole industry looks the same. And then they're like, Oh, that makes sense. I'm just trying to like break down a little bit more of what we can give everyone listening. Like how can they come up with moments like that to really kind of stop someone in the tracks. And then they can kind of go or, or what do you see like, I don't want to obviously stop the creator in these people too. Right? Like they think I have to start off with the dollar shave club video, or I can't release it, or I can't start off with, you know, the Dr. Squatch video. Like I need to come up with something that good and then they never release anything. Jacque: [00:22:24] That's a great point because with all of these brands, I would say with half the brands we work with, we don't start with an anchor video because what we're trying to figure out is, what kind of messaging are people resonating with? So I call them doors to knock on, like, we're trying to figure out like these four to five doors even early on, we talked about when you said, well, what openings work? And I'm like, honestly, I have my guesses. And then I'm always surprised by what does and doesn't work and we call them doors. And so those doors are usually created by really looking at those problems, solution statements. So some of those best statements can come from people's either their salespeople or their customer service team, or even just combing through reviews and seeing how people talk about the product. Because people will give you like, oh, I expected this, but this is what I got. And that was even better. Or, you know, it's right there. Right. And so. We find it more challenging for people that are more startups because they don't, they haven't narrowed their number of doors. They haven't gotten that feedback. So people have been doing this it's more so they just take it for granted, like the thing that makes them give them that moment. It's just so obvious to them or they don't even see it anymore. Right. It's like, Oh yeah, of course. People know that. And I was like, no, they don't, you know, like if you're a, a do it yourself installation thing, and you're like, oh, we've already made 15 videos about how to install it. Why do I need to show it in this one? It's like, because fundamentally your brand. Like you'd have to show people that easy to install and they're like, Oh, I see what you mean. Because like, we're assuming that people saw our ad before. I'm like, correct. And so it's like creating those problem statements, like for instance, for, soap. It's not the fact that like, the reason that Dr Squatch is reaching the scale and the meteoric levels that they are isn't because it's an all natural soap. It is all-natural soap, but like if we had gone into this like it can cure psoriasis and in all seriousness, like some of the early messaging was posed that way, you know, it was very like almost clinical and like it's going to cause you cancer if you don't. Like that kind of stuff, it's like, okay, look like, I think we can all appreciate that. Like we deserve better than laundry detergent out of our bodies. And so just trying to find a way to really like take this more clinical thing, but put it in a way that people can appreciate. But ultimately I hope I've answered the question, but it's really to create these doors and you never know which one's going to open. And I think that's important. Cause I feel like people are trying to like their mindset sometimes is, I have to pick the perfect door and then, then they get stuck to your point. It's like, no pick five and like, see which one's open. And if none of them open, then figure out why didn't they open? Like, why are people not resonating with this? Jason: [00:25:12] So let's use me as an example to kind of wrap up. So. I agree with the multiple doors, but like a lot of times, like we're just having a challenge. And I think you're talking about with doors for maybe the opening of the video. So how do you guys test it out? Like a lot of times, like how I test out and just put it out there, but how can I put the same kind of five of the same videos out in order to see how it works at the same time? Or like, how are you guys testing that? Jacque: [00:25:43] Well, okay, so. I'll give the more complicated answer and the more simple answers. So the more complicated answer is most of the brands we're working with are spending tens of thousands, if not millions of dollars a month on social ads. And so they're very, very savvy. And so they can, they can find out in 48 hours, which one of these are going to be statistically relevant or different. And so we're talking about like, at that scale, at that production level, like. It's kinda like they say ball don't lie. Like the numbers don't lie, but for more, what you're kind of, I think where you're coming from, which is like, look, someone's just trying to get started. And they're just trying to put content out there. There's an interesting, I don't know if you've ever seen this show. Uh, what is it? It's like Master Chef or something. Jason: [00:26:27] Yeah. And you know you're old when you start watching the home and garden, right? Jacque: [00:26:31] Yeah. I know they have, um, the food network. They have this show well, the whole time what's my POV? What's my POV? What's my POV? Because I realize that like, at the end of the day, you can't be everything to everyone. So like, what's the thing that you're going to like to hang your hat on and not give up after like one or two, but like, to your point, like plug away and have like, chart a course on what it is that you think you can provide the most value on, of course. And when it comes to capturing people's attention, being like, what is authentically me, but I think also don't be afraid to take some risks. What I mean by that is it's like, I think people feel goofy or silly or, dumb, like being animated and like being like to your point, grabbing their cat and saying something they wouldn't normally say. And it's like, that's okay, because people are expecting to see something extraordinary, not something ordinary like they're expecting to see something that is different than what everyone would do with the same energy. And so don't feel bad about getting deep about performing, because I think people are like, oh, it's inauthentic. And it's like, you can be authentic all day, but if people don't want to watch like you're not helping them. So, you know, it's okay to ramp up your energy a little bit and give yourself permission to do that. But I learned that back to my news days because they say that the camera adds 10 pounds and it takes, takes away about 20% of your energy it's lost, in the vapor. So it's like you have to ramp yourself up at least 25%. And that would be something that would, I would pass on to anyone making a video. Jason: [00:28:06] Yeah. I heard that about the camera adds 10 pounds and then I would go to people. I'm like, how many cameras are on me? Take them off. Give me half a camera, so I look half as fat. Oh, awesome. Well, this has all been great. Is there anything I did not ask you that you think would help out the listeners? Jacque: [00:28:24] Oh man. I could talk about it for hours, but also I'm like, I don't know. No, no problem. You already put a bunch of bombs on them. So the biggest thing everybody is is you got to go do it. You got to start somewhere. Remember everything big starts off small. So go back to some of our original videos and, you know, we look like a hostage from Iran. You know, it was really, really bad, but. They worked. They, they did what they needed to do in order to get us to the level we are now, which is still very low, but it will keep going up. Jason: [00:28:56] What's the agency website, people go and check you guys out? Raindropmarketing.com and you can also find me on LinkedIn, pretty active there. Jacque: [00:29:05] Awesome. Well, everybody go check that out. And if you enjoyed this episode and you want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners that can really push you along, see the stuff that you might not be able to see, really understand what you're going through. Jason: [00:29:19] I want to invite all of you to go to DigitalAgencyElite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind where we get together on a regular basis, have a lot of fun. Grow and scale our agencies and just not have to go through all the pain, even though you will go through pain. That's inevitable. There's no silver bullet, but go to DigitalAgencyElite.com and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: How_to_Make_Agency_Video_Ads_That_Dont_Suck.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm MDT |
Wed, 14 April 2021
Building Your Agency Brand Is Easier Than You ThinkJuju Hook was a corporate brand strategist for over 30 years, both on the client-side, as well as agency-side. She built a successful boutique agency from scratch in 2000. Her agency developed a reputation for smart, creative work with solid results working with big brands in the banking and auto industries. Today Juju shares lessons on the dangers of letting clients negotiate prices and how you can stop it. She also shares how to be more strategic and get paid for strategy rather than allowing clients to treat your agency like a commodity, and why branding your agency based on your values will help land the best clients. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesVerblio: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Verblio. Check out Verblio.com/smartagency and get 50% off your first month of content creation. Our team loves using Verblio because of the ease in their process and their large pool of crowd-sourced writers.
Jason: [00:00:00] On this episode, we talk about how you get more strategic rather than being an order taker? And how can you build your brand around what you stand for? A lot of us struggle with, how do we start, even though we actually do this for clients, but it's a really interesting conversation. And I think you'll really love it. Hey Juju, welcome to the show. Juju: [00:00:28] Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Jason: [00:00:29] I'm excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Juju: [00:00:33] So I am Juju Hook. I've been a brand strategist for 30 some years. I started out on the corporate side and financial industry and then opened my own agency in 2000. And in 2015, I closed my agency and made a move toward helping women in midlife build theirs. Jason: [00:00:52] Awesome. And so how did you get started in 2000? Like I, I started our agency in '99, so it was kind of like the wild wild west. Juju: [00:01:01] So I worked in the financial industry for some years. And then I became a marketing director for Jacuzzi and ran their brands worldwide, 63 countries. And that was a wild ride. I started in banking and automotive. So yeah. And was raised with car dealers, but hot tub dealers was a whole other deal. That was just a completely different perspective on branding. And then I got pregnant and I had an international job. I was flying all over. It was really, it was just the kind of thing where I knew I was going to either need to take time off work or make a switch on what I was doing. And so I decided to become a free agent and ended up working for Jacuzzi as a consultant and launched an agency. When my son was an infant. Jason: [00:01:50] Oh, that's cool. So Jacuzzi was your first client? Juju: [00:01:53] Jacuzzi was my last job and my first client. Yeah. Jason: [00:01:56] Oh yeah, I've done that a lot. Like they don't want to lose you. They're like, well, just you're a consultant for us. Juju: [00:02:03] And strategy is a funny thing, right? Because if you're the one that's been writing the plan, oftentimes that's what they'll ask you to come back for. Right. It's a plan and somebody else can implement it. And I've always been keen on that. Anyway, I've always been more interested in the 30,000-foot view than, than the minutia. So, which I think helps an agency owner. Jason: [00:02:21] Yeah. And that really separates a lot of people. You know, my background was kind of the complete opposite. Like we started the agency basically from doing websites and it was very hard and I find it very hard for people once they're the doers and they're getting paid to do something it's hard to go to the strategy. They're just like all project-based, even if they do recurring, they're still basically just trading time for money, but they're not really getting that intellectual property. So, for those people listening. How do you think they can be more strategic rather than kind of the order takers? Juju: [00:02:57] First of all. I think that kind of thinking, to be honest is something that you're, you have a proclivity for. So I think interestingly enough, the first time I took the strengths finders, strategy was my number one strength. And it said, this is something you're born with. Right. So I think, I think we all have a proclivity towards certain ways of thinking. So if you can take the time to understand your client's financial statements and the financial goals and struggles that your clients have, it'll put you in a more strategic role. It's not about managing the project. It's about how does the project contribute to whatever their overall goals are. And I don't know that that is a comfortable position for everybody who works, especially on the creative side of the agency world. But it is the difference between, you know, rising up through the ranks and staying where you're at in project management. Jason: [00:03:47] Yeah. I was thinking about it. It's about asking the right questions in order to figure out the end outcome. That's kind of how I got out of that, that mindset of going damn. How do I get Lotus cars to come to us and be like, this is the problem I have other than go design me this micro-site or this website or this. Juju: [00:04:09] Yeah, I think, you know, tactics are, we pulled together tactics to employ a strategy. And if you don't understand what the strategy is, right, and the strategy is not really driven by goals that you understand, then you're always going to be separated from where the action really is. And I think our value in terms of being able to implement the strategies that our clients want is directly related to how long we get to serve them. Jason: [00:04:33] Awesome. Take us through kind of the 15 year journey in the agency. And then, you know, tell us about, you know, at the end kind of, why did you close up? Juju: [00:04:44] So I started with a virtual sort of organization before things were really virtual. And I had a ton of agency exposure, had hired a lot of agencies. And so I knew a lot of super-sharp creative people. And initially, I teamed up with folks I had worked with before and started to produce for. The two industries that I knew best, which were banking and automotive, which is a pretty dry, it's a pretty dry slate, but it worked for me. Jason: [00:05:11] We tried to break into banking. So I don't know how you did it. Juju: [00:05:14] It's rough. And I'll tell you, it's so interesting because the disclosure side of that in terms of having to, you know, disclose and validate and be transparent about everything you do is as difficult as. The strategy side, right? Like the artists, the designers used to go crazy that you'd have, you know, these amazing pieces. Right. And half of it would be disclosure at the time. I was very heavy in direct mail and in merchandising. So we spent a lot of time on things that folks don't do much anymore, but, and I guess 15 years, you know, it doesn't seem like that long ago, but it was, and, and I worked my way up to the point where I employed a staff. Pulled people in. I had a professional photographer on board. I had a full-time designer. We still subbed out a number of different things. I had a media buyer who was working full time and then 2008, 2009, the recession hit. We had a lot of clients in-home development at that point as well in banking, automotive, and home development. And so it was a real quick slide over a period of time from about 2008, until about 2010. I treated all of the folks who were working for the agency and went to a full virtual model and like I said, stayed with it until about 2015. At that point, my biggest client was Auto Nation.. We were running their, they had a concierge program that went hand-in-hand with the financial industry. And so they were working with insurance companies and credit unions and all different kinds of, of companies to provide this sort of white label concierge product that we just syndicated again and again and again and again the branding for. And they took that model into their showrooms. And so we could see about six months before it was going to happen. Okay, we're going to, we're going to lose this book of business because they're going to take this model under their showrooms. And, um, at that point I just knew I had been in the game long enough and I was, I didn't want to do it anymore. I didn't want to go into any more boardrooms and, and fight for any more business that I think the agency businesses, it takes a toll on you. And so I decided to shift my, my work toward women in mid-life, which I was. I was struggling with a lot of the questions that midlife women have around getting older and, and your value and your worth and your level of contribution. And so I decided to sort of shut it down as projects closed and, and help the team move on. And that's what I did. And now I have, um, an immersion program where I help 15 women a year build their own personal brands and, and get out in front of what often our agency type businesses. Jason: [00:07:59] Very cool. And so, let's talk a little bit about kind of building a brand. One of the things I tell agency owners is one of the key roles out of the five roles that when you transition to being the CEO, rather than the owner of doing everything is being the face of the organization. And you really have to build a brand around you rather than being a faceless company. And it's kind of funny too, right? Like if you think about it, like these agencies do this for other people, but they have a hard time doing it for themselves. So what can they actually do in order to build their brand or what are some things? Juju: [00:08:35] So, first of all, I think we have all have a hard time doing it for ourselves because it's, it requires a fair amount of chutzpah and it feels in your face. It's unnatural for a lot of people to do this. I think there are a couple of ways that we can emerge. Number one is we have to really get in touch with our essence. And a lot of times I meet people who will say, Oh, I don't really have anything to brand. I don't have a differentiator. There's nothing different about me. But everybody is literally imbued with an essence, right? With whatever's your sort of concentrated flavor, concentrated scent. And if you can get down to that, it's all about attraction, right? Attraction as a singular thing, I'm attracted to a person, a person's attracted back to me, same thing with an organization, but an organization can't really make a decision about you and about your agency unless they can see you completely. Otherwise, they're making a decision on some kind of watered-down version of you, right. Or some piece of you they can't see. And so I really, really encourage people to go out and get in touch with what is it that you're about, right? What's that combination of strength and skill and personality and, you know, tendencies and all those things that make you who you are. And I think when you then attach that to your values, which is becoming more and more common in terms of branding and, and really being a values-based brand, people really have a chance to connect. And that that connection happens in a very real way. That builds long-term relationships. Jason: [00:10:01] Yeah. You know, I totally agree with that. When I first started doing this business or really even going back to the agency business, I really didn't put my personal brand out there. Not at all. It wasn't a thing, right? Like until Gary Vaynerchuk came along and I was like hustle, hustle, hustle, which I'm like work hard and show up, you don't have to work all the time. And then after I sold the agency, I really was like, okay, let me start doing videos like Gary. And it just wasn't clicking. And it was only up to maybe a couple of years ago, I started just putting out a little bits and pieces about my journey or what I love doing like mountain biking, or we started, you know, we built our dream home in Colorado and I started documenting that a little bit. Not like the checkout, our Ferrari's or yeah. And so, but we started attracting people that loved the outdoors. They love the adventure and all of that. And it's just like, when we've been growing the mastermind, it's like, it's all these amazing people. And then I think back at what we started putting out, I was like, that's why, yeah. Juju: [00:11:07] That's what you attracted. Yes. And you know, it's interesting because early on when I was building brand strategies for organizations, everybody talked about mission and vision, right. It was very common to do these mission and vision and values. Sort of, you know, seminars or weekend sessions for these big corporations, but there was never any question about whether the agency that was leading them or, I shared those values. Right. That just wasn't the kind of thing that anybody talked about. And then as the internet made things more and more transparent, and everybody came to want to know who is it that I'm doing business with things really shifted. And you can see that now from big agency to small agency, I'm watching it happen in the arena of social justice right now. You can see agencies really clamoring to get a handle on how do we deal with this? How do we guide our clients through this? Right? And on all different sides of the spectrum in terms of what you believe. But that connection is more important than ever. And, you know, we marry people who believe what we believe. We hang out with them, we date them. We, we vacation with them. Right. We follow them, we've read them and it's just become, you know, to, to some extent, I suppose it creates an echo chamber. Right. But on the other side, it creates really strong relationships that allow your clients to talk out loud about the things they want to talk out loud about knowing that you're invested in the outcome. I would never be invested in the outcome of my client's businesses early on. Right. That wasn't part of it. Now I show up and I'm in it with the client. And so it's a very different world. I think agency-wise than it used to be. Jason: [00:12:43] Well, it's, it's hard, like looking back at some of the clients that we worked with if I was doing a campaign for women's purses, I couldn't get behind it. Cause, cause I don't have it. But if we were doing a campaign for Lotus cars, you know, I'm like, yeah, I totally, I totally get it. So it makes a huge difference. You've got to, you know, I was watching a video and probably everybody has. I think it's from Simon Sinek on like, start with why. He talks about like, you, never hire, or you work with people that are your identical twin, but you, you surround yourself with people that believe in similar things. And it allows you to really build that brand. Because when I got into this business, you know, helping agencies. I saw everybody just doing blog posts and it had no personality. And I was like, I'm gonna do video. I'm gonna do a podcast just so people can hear the tone or the joking around or whatever, the, whatever it is. And then, you know, when they meet you, they're like, I know you. Which is kind of freaky. Juju: [00:13:44] Yeah. And what you stand for. I think standing for something, you know, the world has shifted in, in so many ways in America, right. And, and business and life are so intertwined now and all of the money and the influence, it's things have just taken on a different shape. And I think people are much more inclined now to speak out loud about what they stand for. And I also think at a certain point in life contribution takes on a different meaning. And I see this happen to a lot of people as they get older. And it definitely happened to me as I started to push 50. The kind of contribution that I wanted to have in the world was different. And it wasn't enough for me to just help corporations stuff, dollar bills into their pocket. Right. And support my lifestyle. I wanted to feel at the end of the day that I had made a difference in someone's life. And that caused me to step forward and say, okay, these are the things I believe in. These are the topics I'm willing to give voice to. Right. This is what I stand for now. How do I find clients who stand for the same thing so I can help move them forward? And I think not to say that that doesn't happen for young people, I think it does, but I think there's a point in our lives where it, it happens for everybody. You start to really rethink things. And that definitely happened for me in midlife. Jason: [00:15:01] Oh yeah. I mean, you know, when you're in your twenties, all you're thinking about is what you don't have. Juju: [00:15:07] Yeah. And how are you going to survive? How are you going to make it? And what's your trajectory going to look like? And, you know, we all start out with this idea of, this is what my life's going to look like. I'm going to go to school here. I'm going to do this. I'm going to create this. I'm going to marry this person. I'm going to build a family. We don't have a lot of discussion around what happens after I do all that. Right. What happens when I'm 50, I've checked off all those boxes. Now, do I start again? Do I, how do I pivot? And I think those of us that are in branding and advertising and messaging and marketing, there's a way to sort of pivot that mastery to something new and midlife. That allows you to stay in the game and contribute on a different level. And a lot of that is very values-based stuff Jason: [00:15:51] Yeah, I realized after I sold the agency, I was like, I was craving that significance again. And I was like, well, how can I contribute rather than, you know, it felt like before then I was just a taker. Juju: [00:16:06] Yeah. And well, and I think that's part of the game, right? I mean, that's the way it's all set up is you, you gotta sort of, you gotta make your way, you gotta figure it out. And I think when we're young, we're not as, yeah geared toward, how can I be useful? As we are toward -- and, you know, maybe it's not fair to say it's old and young. Maybe that's not really the way it breaks out, but I know when I was younger, I was much more interested in what it would take for me to get where I needed to go than I was in, how do I be of service? Right? And I think that's one of the things that happens the longer you've been in the game. You realize that it's really, it's really the service side and the purpose side that keeps you in it. Right. That's what gets you to wake up every day and go, okay, I'm going to show up and I'm going to do this, the money side and the significant side. It lasts so long, but it feels a little hollow after a while. And I think that's, I noticed that search trajectory for a lot of folks. Jason: [00:17:02] What are some things. You know, let's say there's, a lot of people listening right now that are in the middle of their career, they're just kind of getting by. What are some of the things that they can do and building the brand and getting to a place where, you know, it means a lot more to them? Because, you know, I talk to so many people all day long. They're just like I did this agency. I'm ready to get out because there's no real meaning behind it. Juju: [00:17:27] Yeah. So I would start with manifesto work. I do manifest it work with tons of people and I'm not talking about just around, you know, making something pretty that you say out loud, but really understanding what are the things that you want to feel on a daily basis. Right? How do you want to feel, how do you imagine the perfect life being, you know, for you and for other people? What do you believe in? What are you willing to stand for? I very often ask my women clients, what are the issues that you're willing to give your voice to? And what are the issues that you would never give your voice to? Or what are the things that you stand against? And then go find clients that are making inroads in those areas. Go find clients with the money and the clout and the push to ride. What matters to you because that's going to change the nature of the work. It's not about completing a project and getting paid, while that happens, it's about completing a project and changing the world or moving things forward. And I think when we're surrounded by like-minded people who are in a fight that we're in everything shifts and in my mind that really starts with manifesto work. Jason: [00:18:35] Yeah. I love kind of the, you know, just that simple concept that you mentioned of kind of like build your brand for what you stand for. Because, like you were saying in the beginning, a lot of people are like, well, how do I build a brand? Like, well, you've already have a brand. Juju: [00:18:47] Of course. You live it every day. Jason: [00:18:49] I'm like, it's just about communicating it and figuring it out. And I always like to tell people, it's not just with the written word, like, please do a podcast or a video. Juju: [00:19:00] Yeah. It's who you are. And we get this idea that we're creating it. We're building a brand, we're creating a brand. We're not creating it. We're showing it. Right. This is what it is. How do I show it? How do I show people who I am, what I'm about, what I'm worth, what I stand for, what I want and all of that can be really polarizing. It doesn't have to be. Right? But it can be. And we're also afraid of that, right? If I show myself completely, there'll be people who don't like me, but there will also be people who love you. People who get you, people who want to be next to you. People who want you to fight for them. And it's much easier to maintain longer, big money, intricate relationships if people love you. Right? Then if there are lukewarm around about. Jason: [00:19:44] It eliminates the bad clients later on and like you going, man, I, you know, I took this client on because, you know, I was a little strapped for cash, but now it's a complete nightmare and blowing up in my face, which is making it even more miserable. Versus, you know, maybe I didn't win as much business, but at the end of the day, you're going to win way more business and have a lot more fun working with the people that are in the similar boat. Juju: [00:20:11] And you're going to be able to stand up for yourself, you know, that, but the biggest emotion for me that was a killer in my agency curve is resentment. Because it would have these clients who would come at me and the very first thing they want to do is negotiate. And they wanted to negotiate on my value as a human. Right? So it's, well, I don't want to pay you this. I'll pay you this. And in early on in my career, I would negotiate that, I would talk about that. It was only when I got to a point where I did the head work around, this is what I'm worth. This is what I stand for. I don't want to take that. Right? I don't offer bad marketing. Oftentimes, I would have clients who say, well, you know, we don't want to do this and we don't want to do the strategy work. We just want to do this. And when I finally got to the point where I would say I did it, and I don't offer that as a service, like, I don't know, offer quick and dirty marketing. I'm sure there are people who do I don't sell that. That everything started to shift for me and that resentment, as soon as we sign on to a client or a relationship where we haven't properly set boundaries we are in this resentful position until the relationship ends. And I watch agency owners do that over and over and over again. And they feel out of alignment with themselves all day long in order to take the money. And it's, it's just a practice learning not to do it. Jason: [00:21:25] Yeah, I have people all the time they're like, we'll give you this amount for your online program. I'm like, no, it's this or the other day I just was skimming through emails and this one person was like, I read it. Like, I just want to give you $500 cause you helped me out. Like we get that all the time. And then a couple of days later, he was like, I haven't got access to the Agency Playbook. I'm like, so I go back to the email and read it. Yeah. Skimming it. Right? Like my ADD is kicking in and it was like, I'll give you $500 right now, and you do the Playbook. And I was like, sorry, I read it wrong. I'm refunding your $500. You know? And then he was like, well, really, like, you don't have to do anything. I was like, but you're not going to value it. Like you're already devaluing it. Juju: [00:22:08] Exactly. And I didn't offer you that, right. That's not for sale at that price. And I think, you know, back to that original question we talked about around, how can I be more strategic? How can I be a person with creative skills or project management skills who's more strategic? When you invest your time in that, like, I had to force myself to go to MBA school and I wasn't great at MBA school. It was not a natural state for me, but I did it right. I really had to go. I am fully driven by intuition. Right. So data-driven exercises are work for me, but I did the work. And when you make that shift, when you really can lay that strategic piece over top, it eliminates some of the discounting that people do about the creative side of things that they don't understand. This is very easy for people to discount. That creative side of the work. Right. And that messaging side and all of that understanding of human psychology people don't value it. And so when you can lay that strategic piece over top, I think you eliminate some of that, or you put yourself in a position where you can push back harder. Jason: [00:23:13] Yeah. I mean, once you start negotiating, um, and lowering your prices, you're never going to get out of that because they're always going to think you're coming out high. I mean, even when I was buying a car, I remember I went in, I did not want to buy a Jeep a couple of years ago. And I went in and I just low-balled the crap out of them for this new Jeep. And they said, yes, I'm like, crap. I should have said lower. Like, I didn't feel like I got the right deal. Juju: [00:23:37] Yeah. And you know, here's the thing never, ever, ever negotiate on your own hourly rate. I'll work less hours for you. Right. And if we work less hours, this is the work product you're going to get, but I'm not going to work the same number of hours for less money because it's, this is my business. Right? This is my business. This is what I do. Jason: [00:23:57] Yeah. And what people don't understand and especially what they'll do is they'll come back and be like, well, so-and-so over there on Upwork can do it for $20 an hour where, and I'm like, well, you don't value your time as much as I thought you did. And they're like, what do you mean? I'm like, well, sure you can go to them, but you're gonna probably spend four times amount of time managing this person in order to get what you want. And there it's still a 50/ 50 shot on this versus going our way. And you probably get there 90% of the time and you'll have to require this amount of time. Juju: [00:24:35] And I don't know for that service. So I don't offer a service for clients cycled through the internet and randomly choose me with no ramp-up and no relationship and no understanding of their product or their goals or their financial statements, so that I can do a four-hour job. I don't, I don't have that service. I can see if you want to buy that, but that's not what we sell here. Right. And I think that that tie back to this is the relationship. This is why we're working together. This is what we're in together. This is what we're trying to accomplish. That's what an agency does. An agency doesn't present itself on the web and, you know, blind of any relationship deliver creative product, Willy nilly. That's a different business model. Jason: [00:25:17] Well, I even think like, even if you go back to the, kind of the origin of an agency, like they're the, they were the middlemen. I remember I was doing a video a long time ago about you're in the car industry. Right? So remember, well we know no one remembers when cars first came out, I was like, put my, you know, my foot and be like, you remember this? So when they actually came out with cars, they couldn't go direct. They had to create car dealers. So they were the middlemen. But even now the car dealers are probably going to start suffering because of the manufacturers can go direct. Same thing with, you know, Facebook, when they came out with advertising, they went to agencies. You know, Facebook is more going directly in there. And so the whole point of being the agency, it's about not just being that middleman, but being strategic and building that relationship with those people, like you were saying, and that's really how you can be strategic and then they can never really leave you until you say buzz off. Juju: [00:26:17] And understanding how the industry works. You know, for a very long time, I made the lion's share of my personal money, negotiating advertising for people, right. This is how this works. This is the space you're going to get. This is how many people are going to see it. This is how we're going to use it. This is, you know, who's gonna see it. Right. And those were all negotiations that our agency made on behalf of the clients. And for that, we got paid, we didn't get paid by the client. We got paid by the media company because we were professionals who understood the industry and understood those demographics and understood that region. So I think since all of the freelancing has started. And all of this sort of talent inside an agency have been broken off. Clients have lost sight of the value of having someone stand in between what I'm trying to accomplish as a corporation, or, you know, as a business, as a person and what this creative person is supposed to deliver. There's a translation there that happens in a real agency model. And without that, that relationship suffers. You got a different relationship. Jason: [00:27:25] Awesome. This has all been amazing. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Juju: [00:27:31] I think there's some benefit around understanding the way creative people work for agency owners for people who are listening, right? Like you said, you came up, you know, from, from that project management side or down in the project. I think one of the things that makes a really amazing and profitable agency is understanding that creatives are constantly and always giving a piece of themselves. Right. Every, every job that a creative professional does, whether I'm a writer or a photographer or a designer or whatever is an extension itself, that at least the folks who are good, right. Every time they're putting on a piece of themselves. And that's really difficult, it's a tender process to manage. And when CEOs or business owners go direct to the creatives oftentimes that process ends in resentment as well. And so that's a piece of leadership, I think in the agency world that gets, sometimes get kicked to the curb. And, and I think there's a real sweet spot in there. There's a real understanding, of human potential there that separates one agency from the next. Jason: [00:28:45] Awesome. Since you only work with women in their midlife, if you're a woman in your midlife, where can they go? Juju: [00:28:52] So you can find me at jujuhook.com. I have a download always at free.primetimejuju.com that helps with personal branding, always with personal branding out in front. And I have a, I have a group of 15 women every year who I take through a nine-month immersion branding program called The Cut. Jason: [00:29:12] Awesome. Well, everybody go check that out and thanks so much for coming on the show. And if you guys enjoyed this episode and you want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners on a consistent basis where we can really build that relationship with you and see the things that you may not be able to say and help catapult and grow your agency to where you want it to go, rather than where it's going to dictate you to go. I want to invite all of you to go to the DigitalAgencyElite.com that's DigitalAgencyElite.com. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Building_Your_Agency_Brand_Is_Easier_Than_You_Think.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Sun, 11 April 2021
Manuel Suarez is the Founder and CEO of AGM. Founded in 2015, AGM is a full-service, social media marketing agency that focuses on helping brands acquire the most valuable commodity today: attention. Manuel is sharing how he rapidly grew his agency over $3 Million in the first five years. He attributes a lot of his success to being the face of his agency and exporting his knowledge both to build authority and to train his client. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesOribi: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Oribi. Check out Oribi.io/smartagency for a free trial. Plus when you sign up for Oribi get 20% off the first three months with promo code: Smart Agency
Jason: [00:00:00] On this episode, I talk with an agency owner. Who's grown over 3 million in revenue in three years, and we talk about. What you need to do as an agency owner in order to really have rapid growth and how you need to get and be that front face for your agency. I know a lot of you want to sit and back, but what his strategy is and why he has people knocking down his doors. So it's a really good episode. Yeah. I hope you enjoy it. Hey, Daniel, welcome to the show. Manuel: [00:00:33] It was great to be here, Jason. Thanks for having me, man. Jason: [00:00:35] Yeah, I'm excited to have you on, so tell us who you are and what do you do? Manuel: [00:00:39] All right. My name is Manuel Suarez. I'm the CEO of a marketing agency called AGM Marketing stands for Attention Grabbing Media. And I've been doing marketing for probably about seven years now, accidental like many of us agency owners over the last four years. That led me to, I had a lot of success with a couple of businesses, uh, and that led me to create an agency. When I got bored with the ones that I was having success with and said, you know what, maybe it's time to explore disability and help some other companies out there. Jason: [00:01:08] Awesome. So how did you get started? Like what were your first couple of businesses and walk us through that story. Manuel: [00:01:15] First business, I come from a pretty dark background of no career, no path, no future, no potential, a small little Island in Puerto Rico, a lot of criminality, drugs. That was my environment. I got lucky along the way. And I discovered opportunities. Um, I, I think that like all of us, we have a lot of, uh, stories. Uh, in my case I was a part of the subprime mortgage market in the U.S. So in 2007, bought my first property somewhere around the peak of the markets. Lost the house and, um, had three children already. So I had to figure something out that led me to try and try and try things out, fail, fail, fail. Uh, and at one point, somebody talked to me about my first ever business was my brother-in-law coming to me and telling me, you know, there's this thing called FBA fulfilled by Amazon. And you can sell your own products on Amazon. And that was like a big wake-up moment for me. And, my first official business was launched in 2013. Uh, so that was seven years ago as of the time of this recording. And that particular business became a really, big powerhouse that, um, it's a great story for a lot of people that I can summarize in just a few sentences. I saw the opportunity on Amazon. I looked at, uh, one of the guys that work with me, uh, on my 9 to 5, and I saw him that he was selling bedsheets on the road, on the weekend. A brand called Clara Clark. I said, let me look at your bedsheets. I opened them up. I saw no labels attached to the bedsheet and I said, perfect. We're going to create our own brand. I created an idea of a brand it's called Cosy House Collections, c-o-s-y. And I printed a horrible design, which we're still using today on the bedsheet. And, um, I started selling my own private label and within 18 months, a lot of work, a lot of obligation. We were doing $6 million a year and it became a big wake-up call that, Oh, wait a second. I have potential in marketing. And at the same time, I started helping my father, which is basically my it's a big part of the story is, the special side of my story that I worked on making my father a social media massive influencer, and one of the biggest ones in the world of Latin America. So those two things were happened concurrently, uh, along the way. Jason: [00:03:41] Awesome. And so then people started asking you to do this for their business and that's how kind of the agency? Manuel: [00:03:49] Yeah. So from 2014 or so. Uh, until 2017, I took my dad from complete unawareness of the health industry world to generating 50 million views a month across social media channels. Uh, we took a brand called Natural Slim, which my dad and I are partners in. And we turned that into from a small little, um, business in Puerto Rico doing a few hundred thousand dollars a year to now, um, do other in '20, we're probably going to break $50 million a year. Um, so somewhere around 2017, that was already rolling. It was established. Uh, my dad had a YouTube channel with, we had just crossed, I think at that point, a million subscribers, uh, Facebook millions of followers that were doing great. And people were asking me questions and I was invited on a few stages to talk about what I had done with the bedsheets brand, with my dad. And that led me to, okay, I got people that want to get some help. I don't know anything. I know there's something called an agency, which means that I'm supposed to service people and show them how this thing is done. I seem to have a marketing mind. I know how to position a company and create a strategy and okay, let's do that. Let's open up the doors. And I got together with two, two of my family members, friends. My brother-in-law who's the one who presented to me the Amazon opportunity to begin with and another friend of mine. And we said, let's build an agency. Let's go. And that's how we started. Jason: [00:05:15] What were the steps, because as we're recording this right now, you guys around 65 people in a three-year period, is that right? Manuel: [00:05:24] Yeah. We officially got structured beginning of 2017. So we got we're on our fourth year right now. Jason: [00:05:31] So if someone's listening now, because, you know, obviously we just kind of jump into the fire and we just start servicing people, but we're not really being proactive, we're being more reactive. So what were some of the things that you did that made a difference that you may think some other agency owners are not even seeing? Manuel: [00:05:52] I think the most important thing, Jason, that, uh, I don't, I don't think it's clear enough, even though it's obvious and we all talk about it. Uh, it's what you do. It's what I do. We are out there communicating all the time and we're out there positioning ourselves. In my case, I delivered seminars and webinars nonstop. I just gave value. Aggressively. If you look at my agency right now, I have a lot of, um, I have a lot of clients, we're at 70 staff as the time of this recording right now, and we're growing fast. I'm still looking for more talent, always adding more talent to the team. And also we have an ever-growing list of clients. I have celebrities, I have social media influencers, I have e-commerce brands, I have Amazon brands. We have all kinds of different clients around different niches, but I can tell you that if I wouldn't have done what I have done of getting on all these stages. I will be like a lot of different clients, a lot of different agencies, which are struggling, trying to find clients. And, I believe, and this is something that I'm really, really adamant about. Jason. I insist the difference between a successful agency and a failing one or one that has a tough time finding clients, being able to scale and get new accounts is that the successful agency has a leader. That's out there putting themselves in front of the world as much as possible. In my case, I do a lot of content. I am in social media and I have been in social media, for several years now. I created a personal brand out during the world of social media. I call myself the Facebook marketing Ninja. I have a podcast around that subject. I have, um, getting deep into the world of social media advertising and I teach people and I have a group of people and students, and this is basically what I'm known for. So whenever people think about, okay, I think I need an agency now to help me, we have that positioning. So I think the main thing that everybody has to if you're trying to build an agency, you got to let people know that you're an expert. That you do want to push forward and helping people first, just giving value, that at some point, if they need to get services, you're the first one that they think about. Jason: [00:08:02] What do you think holds some agencies back that, that you see? Because obviously, you know, like many agency owners, we always chat with other agencies and we're like trying to figure out what's working. And I know when I'm talking to agency owners on a consistent basis, a lot of them are like, I don't want to be the face. Right? Like, I like the behind-the-scenes because I don't want everybody always coming to me and then I won't be able to sell my agency and I go, have you ever heard of Gary Vaynerchuk? And they're like, yeah. And they're like, do you think he actually does people's social media posting and all of that? I'm like, no, I was like, he's built this brand. And you know, it's just following their methodology. Manuel: [00:08:42] Right. It's built on his own name, but he has nothing to do. Like he says, Gary says himself that he's still the CEO. And I believe that because I have a similar way of operating my organization. The last time Jason, we have a social media advertising agency. We do a lot more than that. We do a lot of strategy and do many different things like Google advertising, etc... But the last time that I created a campaign myself. Myself. Like I went into the Facebook business manager and I clicked on create and I selected an audience and an ad easily two and a half years ago, Jason. I stopped doing that quite a while ago, but you know, if, if you don't want to do that route, if you feel uncomfortable with, uh, putting yourself on camera and talking to the world, you got to figure out your marketing strategy because my marketing strategy, it's not the only one. It's a successful one. It's the quickest path to expansion and social media has presented that opportunity. Having a podcast. It's another opportunity because you get a chance to position yourself like back in the year, 1997 or whatever, you didn't have the ability to communicate to the world for free. And now we do, like with these platforms. So it is a marketing strategy. It's not the only one, the example of something that's not an agency. My father he's, his name is Frank Suarez. We have a YouTube channel and a Facebook page called MetabolismoTV. His content is what drives the engine. If I take it away, then I have to get really smart about coming out with a new marketing strategy. It's not the only strategy it's the quickest path to expansion. That's all it is right now. So if you don't feel comfortable doing that, then you got to find something that makes you feel comfortable, but you got to know that it's going to be a struggle more than in my case. Like if I look around my agency, uh, and the staff that I have going on in my day to day operations of my clients, I am servicing people that are my followers that are my fans. Whenever I jump on a call, they're doing a zoom call, like a strategy session or whatever. And I jumped on it. I see their excitement and their emotion because they're actually in my world because they follow me. That's the road. If you don't go down that road, if you don't present yourself as an expert, then many times you're met with skepticism. Like, people don't know if you're for real, because they haven't traveled a journey with you. -People that are at my agency. They traveled the journey. So they're there and they trust me and it's pressure on me because they have a certain expectation, but they went through a series of steps before they presented themselves in my organization. And they gave us a big fat paycheck that included retainers and set up fees and all those things because they trusted me. If you don't have that in place, you're going to be met with skepticism or the best-case scenario, uh, when it comes to, uh, building an agency, if you'd done a job really well done it for a couple of accounts, then those accounts like old school, traditional word of mouth is successful. And you, you can get other people that say, Hey, I went with X, Y, Z agency, and these guys were awesome. And they helped me out a lot when they come, you're not met with the same skepticism. So that's the challenge. So you either go the traditional route, doing a high-quality product for a couple of clients that allows them to start spreading the word about you. Or you go down building your own brand with a podcast, with social media, with a YouTube channel that is going to leave people to, Hey, can you guys help me with my marketing? And that's an important positioning right there because people will trust you more. Jason: [00:12:27] I love it. Now let's kind of go back toward. Maybe a couple of months into it, because if you haven't like, if you've been around for three years and two and a half years, you've stopped doing the, who were the first couple of people. Cause there is a lot of people are going like, all right, what do we need to do? Like, what's kind of the structure. What was, kind of, the steps that allowed you to get to the point where all your job is really is the vision, creating content, being the face of the organization, and probably a couple of other little things. Manuel: [00:12:56] Well, I don't another not-that-little thing, Jason will be training. One of the main things that I've done. I have a weekly training of my staff and I haven't dropped back for one single week. For years, every single week I keep them trained. So even though I am not creating campaigns myself, I know exactly what's going on. And I'm always clicking around sometimes, I get surprised as social media platforms change so fast that I'm training something. I'm like, well, they changed it on me this morning. Oh no, they changed it four months ago. Oh, wait a second. You know, so that happens quite a bit, but if I had to, I could probably go back and break down the most successful things because I can tell you, Jason, I've probably done more unsuccessful things than successful ones. So it's an interesting thing to go back and figure that out because, um, it's been a lot of random disorder. Like, give me, let me give you an example. So when I started, I had a team of virtual assistants that were on my previous brand, uh, that I was selling bedsheets on Amazon. Uh, I sold that company in 2017, and that's the money that I used to start creating this agency. But you don't really need much to build an agency. In all honesty. You don't really need a lot of money in this world. You need an internet signal. Uh, you need a lot of knowledge, intellectual properties, like the number one most important thing. But I actually use that money to bring in some talent. And, um, some of the first things that I did was that I brought this team of like six virtual assistants and I brought them with me and I said, you guys are coming with me. And I started just getting going with like, the accounts that I had, that I had, what I had, I had my dad's account, which was my business. And then I had also another big influencer reach out to me because of my dad's recommendation. And that's, this guy is still a powerhouse. He's one of the biggest influencers on the subject of the ketogenic diet, which is Dr. Eric Berg, four million subscribers on YouTube, a big powerhouse. So he came in shortly after I formed the agency. It was six of us back then. And now it's 70 of us and we're grown with him step-by-step. The major thing that I had that was different. I didn't really have a connected team, Jason, like we will not meet consistently and everybody was operating on their own. One thing that I implemented along the way was daily staff meetings. So every day it's 9:20 AM. as I'm recording this right now. At 9:30 AM we have a staff meeting every single day. And, uh, we have a lot of people that are local, about 25 of us right now. And then we have the rest of them that are all over the world. Many of them in the United States, many of them overseas, the Philippines, uh, Europe, etc. And then we all get together at 9:30 AM. So it's almost like getting everybody on the same page every day. One of the challenges of building a remote team in this new environment, especially in the COVID-19 world is the fact that you have to make sure that everybody is connected as if they were operating in the same building. You try to replicate the feeling of having people next to you, desk by desk. So you can have an eye over their desk or their computer. So you know what they're doing. So systems like that are very important to build within your organization. So you can monitor the activity at all times and not let people run their own show. Because that's not what you're trying to do, because if you own an agency, let people run their own show, it's going to just stain in your brand because people are going to want to think that they have freedom to create whatever the heck they want. Instead of you, as the leader, as the founder, you are guiding the strategy and you're telling them what to do, what not to do. And what is the correct sequential steps to take on a particular account for them to have success? There are many things that we've done wrong Jason, but I can tell you definitely there are a few key points and that's one of them is training staff, for sure. Very important. Keeping them trained and yourself trained, never thinking that, uh, you're already extremely proficient in the world of advertising or whatever, because that attitude is going to lead towards a decline. So just stay in yourself at top of the game, but then export that knowledge into these people. So they can also themselves increase their own skill along the way. Awesome. And what are some other things that help catapult you outside of training, staff meetings, that kind of stuff. So, so I've never done lead generation ads for agency clients. Uh, what I can tell you that I have done is that I have done a lot of lead generation for my own personal brand and education. Of these people in my own world. So what I have been doing over the years is that for example, I have a series of mini-courses, mini trainings on subjects that are important. I have a mini-course on building your business with Facebook ads and also finding your ideal audience on Facebook and Messenger marketing, uh, which is another big deal. Which is my agency just won the award for the top-performing agency for ManyChat 2020. So this is something that we have gone really deep into, uh, over the last few years. So I take very specific training, let's say four or five lessons, and I say, I'm going to show you about this. This is an opportunity, and I'm going to detail you the roadmap to be able to have success. With ManyChat, for example, with Messenger marketing, with chat marketing, or whatever the case may be. So I do ads to promote that. So Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Instagram ads, whatever to bring them into my world. And once they come into my world, uh, Jason, I, I have a sequence of nurturing and, uh, I just keep on presenting the opportunity and I keep on enlightening people along the way. And this helps me create, uh, people interested in what I have to offer and many times how a lot of these people are not qualified as you, as you probably know, Jason, I would say that I'm out of a hundred leads that I have potentially I get one or two people that are qualified to be an agency client. And that's okay. Because the qualification process is very, very important for your organization. There are, I think you're the one that says something as there's not. No such thing as a bad client? Jason: [00:19:10] No, there's only a bad prospect or a bad process. Manuel: [00:19:13] Exactly. Right? So that's 100% a fact, guys. It's a, it's true because if you have a good process in place, you can make sure that these people are not coming into your lines. And that happens on the way. So you're, you're desperate at first as an agency and you taking everything like I started with no contracts and that's okay. Hey, I'm going to, you're going to call me, you're going to get results the first month. Overselling yourself, like crazy, which is absolutely a mistake. Uh, if you ask me, Jason, what is the, what is one of the biggest mistakes that I've made in my career as an agency owner is overselling, over-promising people, over-promising. Now I go in the opposite direction and if they don't like it, I shake hands. And I say, I wish you, well, go ahead and kill it you're not in my agency. Currently, we're at a really good level right now. We are really profitable as an organization. We do great. So I can actually be more selective as to what comes in and what doesn't come in. But right now we have a six-month agreement. So somebody has to be willing to agree to six months. Now I want to get rid of that and I want to go towards a year. As, as you do that, but I'm not that, that ready yet, Jason, because that really scares people off. Like a year, especially if you're not ready, but you know, it's pros and cons, right? Cause you want to have people scare off like, as an agency owner, you want to have people that are with you. And if you have people that are too tight that if they give you a few thousand dollars a month in my make or break them, and they might not be able to feed their families. You want to try to skip that and just hold on tight because otherwise the branding nightmare that can occur for your organization and the effects that it can cause, go way beyond that cycle. So one of the biggest lessons that I've learned. And I, and I apply that one, 100%. I sometimes I get on a call and I said, are you sure you want to do this? It's you gotta be willing to grab the money and put it in the garbage bin. All right. Because marketing is, is an ever-growing landscape. It changes fast. And I wish I could tell you that I will always succeed, but I don't always succeed. If you're coming into this game, we are both sacrificing. And I'm putting myself on the line. You're putting yourself and we're going to add this. You have to be willing to shake my hand and say, okay, it didn't work out, and walk away. If you're willing to do that sign. If not, let's walk away from each other. Jason: [00:21:30] Yeah. I always love when people ask for the guarantee and I always tell them a couple of things. I go, well, I can guarantee you if you keep doing the same thing, the same way you're going to get the same results. But I can guarantee you I'll give you our best effort and that's all I can promise you. And I like, you gotta be willing to throw in the garbage. I always felt uncomfortable because it is always, it's not a guarantee. Like if I'm working with someone that this is their last dollar, it's just too much pressure on me because then I start making decisions based on money and it's just too stressful. And then you kind of, kind of screw it up. But you, you unpacked a lot of amazing things in there. You know, the other thing too, like. You know, when we were, I think you were speaking in New York when I was doing the same thing and I remember asking everybody there, I was like, how many of you agencies have a podcast? And it was like 850 people in the room. And there was like 10. And I think you were one of them that raised the hand and it's like, we have a podcast. And you know, I look at the amount of value that people podcasting put out. Like even when I look at the numbers of our podcasts, we're filling a stadium every month, a stadium. Just to let that sink in. Like, I keep like holy cow, that many people are listening?! And then like you were saying, then you have a waiting list or people they like and trust you. Now here's something I'm going to tell you, Manuel, how you can get the year contracts. If you actually structure the deal where you have like a foot in the door, like some easy service to build trust, they go into a project, and then you'll see how, like, if you like working with them and then commit them to a 12-month deal. It would change everything if you do that, we'll talk offline on that. Manuel: [00:23:10] I could, I could probably steal that. I like your guarantee also. I will, I will probably steal that, Jason, and won't give you any credit. Jason: [00:23:17] There you go. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Manuel: [00:23:22] I think that, um, one important question is. Uh, what does it really take to succeed as an agency owner? And that's a pretty deep question. And, because I, I believe Jason, therefore for every. I dunno if you have better numbers than me, but I have seen a lot more people fail at it than succeed. And when I look at the ones that have made it, that's the ones that succeeded. They work aggressively on building a process and a system. And they were, uh, building a team around them that they can export their abilities to. If you stay too concentrated on you doing every single task yourself and not training your staff along the way, then you can't grow, you can't scale. So that's one thing. What, what does it take? It's determination. It's uh, persistence it's working hard. You know, if you, if you wake up every day and you put the energy on it, and even though you fail and you stand up and you keep going, I mean, that's the way to go. Like eventually you will be able to breakthrough. It's not always pretty. There's a lot of downs. There's some ups. And downs and that's all part of the game and its part of the business. But at this stage, you get to a point that you can experience freedom. And I have a lot more freedom. I have a lot more staff now and, they run the show. And at this point where I'm at right now, I'm the visionary. I call them and I get them to execute a vision. And as simple as that, I'm not doing the micro details of my day-to-day operations, but it wasn't always like that. So it takes a lot of hard work. You know, every successful entrepreneur will tell you, but staying yourself on top of the game and pushing hard and, building a team around you and, uh, exporting your own abilities with training. That's what it's all about. Jason: [00:25:03] Yeah. I saw a stat. There was, I think somewhere at 9% of agencies survive six years. Manuel: [00:25:10] Wow. 9% Jason: [00:25:12] That people just go call it quits. And like you were saying, it's all about the systems that they put in place and making sure that they're communicating that vision and putting the right people in the right seat is everything. So that's awesome. What's the agency website people can go and check out? Manuel: [00:25:29] AGMagency.com. AGM stands for Attention Grabbing Media so you guys can check it out. Jason: [00:25:35] Awesome. I love it. Everybody go check that out. And if you guys liked this episode and you guys want to be surrounded by amazing agency owners, that can show you their systems and be able to show you or see the things that you might not be able to see within your agency. I want to invite you guys to go check out the DigitalAgencyElite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind where we have tons of fun. There is no egos in the door. These agency owners have all become my really close friends and have grown at a rapid pace because they've put in the right systems and they have a support network to help us through all the crying that we do as agency owners. So go to DigitalAgencyElite.com and until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Why_You_Need_to_Export_All_Your_Knowledge_to_Grow_Your_Agency.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm MDT |
Wed, 7 April 2021
Nick Norris is a former United States Navy SEAL, now the CEO and co-founder of Protekt Products. He is a graduate of both the United States Naval Academy and Basic Underwater Demolition / SEAL (BUD/S) Class 247. Upon completion of SEAL training in 2004, Nick assumed progressively higher positions of leadership within Naval Special Warfare. Nick is sharing how his leadership training in the SEALs can help entrepreneurs excel in business. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesVerblio: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Verblio. Check out Verblio.com/smartagency and get 50% off your first month of content creation. Our team loves using Verblio because of the ease in their process and their large pool of crowd-sourced writers. Show TranscriptsJason: [00:00:00] On this episode, I talk with him former Navy SEAL, Nick, who goes through how they would make decisions, how they apply that to the civilian world, how you can be a better leader and get out of stressful situations. It's a really amazing episode. I'm so honored to have Nick on the show and you guys are going to really love it. Hey Nick, welcome to the show. NIck: [00:00:29] Well, thank you for having me, Jason. Jason: [00:00:31] Yeah, I'm excited to have you on, so tell us who you are and what do you do? NIck: [00:00:35] Oh, my name is Nick Norris, I guess I would be known as a former SEAL by a lot of people, right? That's why I've connected with people, but I currently am an entrepreneur. Uh, I have a company called Protekt Products and, and we are in the wellness space, producing supplements and sun care products. And our supplements are geared toward improving people's hydration and helping them sleep better. Jason: [00:01:04] Awesome. Fantastic. Well, first off, thanks for your service, especially for all the people that I've ever served. So thank you very much, but what made you decide to be a Navy SEAL? NIck: [00:01:15] Uh, so I wanted to do something difficult, you know, when people ask me that question and I've thought a little bit about it now because the question comes up often, I always was looking for something that was personally challenging. I wasn't the most naturally talented person athletically growing up, I had to really work hard and I wanted to find something that I could apply myself to that required a tremendous amount of personal discipline and that commitment and personal discipline would be. The thing that would drive success, not necessarily innate athletic ability or just innate talent. So I gravitated towards the SEAL teams because it was really difficult. I knew I could apply myself diligently in a disciplined way and get results. And that happened, I kind of fixated on it early in life or right around seventh grade. When a friend of mine had told me about the community and how difficult it was to enter that community specifically. Did someone tell you if you can never do it, is that what pushed you to do it? So my, the initial friend, a guy named Mike Hurley, who's a police officer in Chicago. He's the one that brought it up to me. He was a big fan of the Marine Corps. He wanted to be in the military and he mentioned the Seal teams and he was always super positive. But the second that I latched onto that concept and I was actually pretty vocal about it, you know, growing up seventh, eighth-grade high school. But I, I definitely had people close to me that told me. Dude, you're crazy. There's no way you're going to do that. And if it added fuel to the fire, right, that's typically what happens, right. People that are very driven get told that they can't do something and then you want to prove them wrong and improve that you're capable of controlling your own destiny. Jason: [00:03:02] Yeah. I remember, uh, I came back from college one time and my dad used to run all the time and we used to run this like one and a half-mile loop. And he was like, Hey, can you with me? I was like, yeah, I'll run with you. And literally, we passed right in the very beginning, we pass this old guy just walking. And when we got back around this loop, my dad was way ahead of me. And I was so embarrassed. I remember walking by the old guy and the old guy was like, well, you better get them next time or something. And then. I saw something where people were doing this triathlon. And I told my dad, I said, I'm going to do a triathlon. Or maybe I told him I was going to do an iron man or something. And, uh, and he was like, Oh, you can't do that. And literally it fueled me and I was like, I just finished under the cut. NIck: [00:03:49] Yeah. Yeah, it's good. Right? That, that external motivation is, is motivation and powerful motivation on the left. Yeah. Jason: [00:03:57] So I heard something, I guess you guys have, or maybe it's a rule it's like a 70/30 or something where you feel like your body's like completely shot, but you still have a ton to go. Is that true? Or is it there's a 70/30 rule? NIck: [00:04:13] So I, I haven't heard of it specifically like that, but it definitely makes sense. I mean, generally speaking, we're limited by our mind, not by our body and you know, I, I've gone through a bunch of stuff in my personal life that has shown me that, I mean, growing up as an athlete and not being as talented as everybody else and knowing that I could dig deep and that my, you know, my mind wanted to tell me to stop. And, and to keep going and then going into buds was another very pointed example of that, that whole program, you know, the SEALs, selection and training program, which is called BUD/S., Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training is structured to break every single person down to a point where you are not physically capable of doing it on your own, and you're not physically capable of just crushing it the entire time. It gets you to a point where you have to dig deeper, you have to face kind of those mental barriers and then draw, I passed them. And in doing so you find out that. You are capable of doing so much more than your mind is telling you you're capable or your body's capable of, uh, so much more than your mind thinks it is. Jason: [00:05:32] I can only imagine that's gotta be a humbling experience because I would think obviously I was not in the military and it's a regret I've had, but I can only imagine. The people that go through BUD/S, they're probably at the top of their game, on the physical ability. And then just to be broken down and to have to depend on other people, I guess that's the whole design of it. So that's, um, it's really pretty cool. We had to, I mean, a huge amount of people that were tremendous athletes, I mean, very talented, like Olympic caliber athletes that faltered, when things got really tough. You know, and, and not necessarily the, on the physical side of things, but immersion in cold water is something that's a big part of our pipeline, our selection pipeline. And, you know, there's really nothing you can do. It's like physically, yeah, you might be a bigger guy and you might be more insulated than, than the guy that's, you know, 130 pounds next to you. But both of you will get to a point where you're going to get cold. And that's where like you really have to dig deep. I mean, that's where kind of that mental toughness and kind of that ability to kind of drive past discomfort and push yourself beyond where you think you can go, uh, comes in. So I saw guys that were tremendous athletes, you know, falter in that regard. And then I, you know, the counterpoint to that is I saw guys that you would have bet everything they would have failed because they just were not. You know the most impressive physical specimens and they were the toughest guys that I went through training with and the polar opposite of what you would imagine a SEAL candidate to look like. You know, they were maybe 15, 20 pounds overweight, not athletic, you know, struggled in most of the physical evolutions, but could just crush it when things got extremely tough. That's awesome. So let's talk about high pressure situations because obviously, running an agency is very different than being in the military and you guys have gone through a lot of high pressure situations, being a SEAL and a lot of agency and entrepreneurs that think they're in high pressure situations for their business. And I've always found when there's emotion or a lot of stress, or I guess stress creates emotion, which emotion creates bad decisions. How did you guys learn how to deal with that and to get that under control in order to make the right decision? NIck: [00:07:56] Yeah. I mean, so just dealing with stress, right? I mean, stress is stress regardless of where the origin of that stress is coming from, you know, whether it be high-risk financial decisions as an agency owner or an element leader in a SEAL platoon in combat. I mean, you're still going to be exposed to stress and in our community, you know, we, we train a lot. We train significantly more than the time that we actually spend in direct combat operations. Um, I mean there's guys pre 9/11 that didn't really get to see any combat and spent 20, 30 years in training, basically preparing for that opportunity to excel in kind of the high-stress kind of game-day scenario. And I would say that that extreme level of preparation or commitment to preparation, uh, becomes a stress inoculator. The training that I went through and I've referred to this example several times and it, and I will continue to refer to it. Jocko Willink, who is a very well-known SEAL owns Echelon Front, which is a consultancy here in the States. Jocko was my sister troop commander. He also put me through training when I was a platoon commander and he was running our training detachment on the West coast. And I specifically remember multiple times during my training where I felt significantly more stress because I knew I was being critiqued by someone that I respect. And I was being critiqued by my peers in that kind of a high-performance training scenario. I felt more stressed there than I did an actual combat operations. And I have memories of being in uh, direct engagement with the enemy, you know, receiving incoming enemy fire and making calls and making decisions on the battlefield and feeling more comfortable and more confident because of the training that high stakes, high level, high stress training that I went through. So, you know, it's a testament to the fact that you know, preparation breeds inoculation distress. And will allow you to control those emotions that seem to overwhelm people that are ill-prepared. Jason: [00:10:16] Yeah. Whenever I think about the points in my life, when was the most stressful, it was really, it came down to being prepared or not being prepared. Like I just was like, ah, kind of wing it. I'll be good at that pitch. And then I would go in and be like, Holy cow, but then if I look at situations where I felt totally relaxed, it was, I've done this a thousand times. Like you were saying that repetition and I was just prepared and I was just like, No. Now I can get on, like, I look at getting on stage because a lot of people fear getting on stage. And I remember when I ran the agency, I would get on stage and I would talk about stuff I really didn't know about just to get on stage. But then now I get on stage and talking about, you know, running an agency I'm like, ask me anything. Like, I feel totally prepared. Like there you can't throw me any curveballs. That is so true. NIck: [00:11:09] There is no easy solution. Right? You got to put the work in, you have to be well-prepared and it was evident in every single thing that we did in the SEAL teams. You know, whether it was the training scenarios, uh, whether it was our mission planning and kind of the preparation prior to going out on an actual real-world operation, you know, we prepared diligently. Uh, we exhausted every scenario that we possibly could think through in order to contingency plan, plan, and really try to have, have the answers before the tests. You know, we, we tried to go through everything and come up with theoretical problems and solutions and did it in a manner where everybody on the team understood what those scenarios could be and how we would potentially address them. And 99% of the time, we never even had to address those contingencies on the actual operation. The operation, typically it would just be easy, right. But it's that 1% opportunity where something bad goes wrong and you have to deal with it. And if you know what you are going to do ahead of time, because you've already talked through it with your team. Emotion doesn't even play into it. You go into autopilot and you just start addressing the issues and taking care of business. Jason: [00:12:35] Other than just putting your team through repetition, repetition, and let's think about it on, on a business front, right? Because a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of leaders, you know, they hear that, you know, they hear you talking about them and they're like, well, it's a life-death situation. Like they have to do it all. But a lot of business leaders and including me sometimes, and I'm actually going to think about the way I do it is like, we don't have time to plan for every single result. We'll just go. We'll react and then we'll react to however happens, which is probably the wrong way. Cause if you told people like, Hey, your life depends on this. Don't you want to think of every result? Like what do you say to those people? NIck: [00:13:17] Yeah, I mean, but I mean, even as a, as a business leader, you have the opportunity to put systems in place, right? I mean, you know, let's say on the sales front, you know, you can put together your targets, you can talk about how you approach those targets, the way that you're going to pitch certain people. Cause it's different. Every single time you're going to bring different people on your team to certain pitches because they're going to be received better by certain demographics that you're pitching to. And. You can plan all of that stuff. And it's not a waste of time and energy to do that. I mean, you're going to know your team better by doing that by digging in and understanding what strengths each and every person on your team has. You're going to be able to tap into those strengths easier. Uh, more fluidly and be able to apply those strengths from your team appropriately in the right pitches. And then, you know, the, the actual pitch itself, it becomes pretty robotic and pretty structured. You know, it's not like there's a tremendous amount of variance in kind of pitching to a new client. You can really lay that stuff out well, and, and even, you know, you should be practicing that you should huddle as a team. You should have people practicing their pitch, the way that they converse with you as the way they converse with the client. So, you know, I know people may say, yeah, you know, we, we just read and react and, uh, and we don't have the time to do this, but I don't think you have time not to do that because if you get in front of somebody, That's a decision-maker. I mean, that's life and death, financially. I mean, people will downplay it and say, Oh yeah, well you're in combat. Yeah. It is life and death. Yeah. True. You know, you're not going to die in a pitch if you lose, but you know, if you lose a big pitch and you're in financial dire straits, I can say this. I said this before we started our call, I would be more stressed. And I probably would allow that to impact me more emotionally if I was in a situation where I, I felt out of control and I lost my financial security and I couldn't take care of my family. That still produces an extremely high level of stress. So I think it all, it's all relative.
Jason: [00:15:29] Yeah, I totally agree. And I remember one time we, we over-prepared for this one pitch going in and I remember just going in there, like yeah, we'll decide with you. I'm like, but I was thinking in my mind, we were so prepared. You need to ask us this question so we can like it. Wasn't waiting for time. It wasn't wasted. We made us that much better for the next pitch, the next campaign, the next, you know, initiative that we needed to do. Let's change, focus a little bit around building your team and being a good leader. How did you guys select who you wanted on your team and really kind of get them to the next level where everybody was in sync, because it's the same within business. Like you have to get the right people in the right seat, all that believe in that certain vision or mission ahead of you. NIck: [00:16:17] Well, so in the SEAL team, it's actually easier because we all go through the same selection process. For the most part, you get a tremendous product. On the backend of that selection process, and you get sent to a SEAL team and you get put into a platoon and there's really, you don't want people in the, in the background picking these people out, like handpicking them, you just get a bunch of SEALs. You get like you get a rough cut SEAL that has made it through the same selection process that every other SEAL has made it through. So you know what you have to start with. So as a leader, you know, that's easier for me, you know, I think it's actually the leadership in the SEAL teams was easy because of that, you know, as opposed to being in the civilian world where you don't necessarily get that high-level selection process, you know, you get to interview somebody, maybe put them on as an intern and get to see them perform for a period of time, but you don't get to vet them for a year, a year and a half. And, uh, for us, the leadership really. I mean, leadership is always important, but it became critically important in the way that you grew your people, you leverage their strengths and their weaknesses, and you slotted them into the right role with the right responsibilities as part of that team. So. I didn't have a choice as to who I got, but I did have a choice as to where I put those people on my team. Jason: [00:17:48] Man, maybe I need to create BUD/S for agency employees. NIck: [00:17:54] Put them through like a six-month just grinder and just like every like high stress all day. But, but you know what, from a leadership standpoint, to give you more of a granular answer, you know, we trust and respect are two big things. As far as leadership is concerned, successful leadership in the, in any team and also humility as a leader. So being humble enough to know that you don't have all the answers. And even if you're in a position of leadership where you are accountable, you still. Should never say I need to be the end all be all. I need to know everything. I mean, it's great. You should tap in and try to learn as much as you can, but be humble enough to know that you're not the expert. You got people on your team that are absolute experts in the role that they're there to execute. And in the SEAL teams, you know, we had people that breached doors, we had people that were snipers. We had people that were communicators. We had people that conducted all of our medical training and, and cared for our unit from a medical standpoint. And, you know, as a leader, I wanted to know the capabilities that each of those people brought to the team, but they were the expert and I needed to be trusting enough. And confident enough in their ability to perform and to be experts in their field to allow them to do their job effectively, let them lead in their own right in their lane. And then be able to apply those strengths at the appropriate times in order to put together a successful operation. Jason: [00:19:31] Yeah. I think the perception too, and I learned this the hard way, and I guess a lot of people listening, you know, they think of Navy SEALs, all alphas, right. And you probably alphas in your own realm, but I think you mentioned the keyword humility and being humble to know that they don't know everything because I remember. I was looking for this graphic designer many years ago. And I remember coming across, they were the most amazing designer I've ever, ever seen on this one particular thing, but they were the cockiest son of a bitch I've ever met. And I was like, I cannot put this poison in this company, even though they're the best. They're not the best for the team, you know, going forward. Now I heard a story. Now this is not around me, but I want to understand how you guys make decisions as a team. As well, as, as a leader, I was listening to a podcast and Scott Kelly on the, you know, the astronauts lived in space for a year. And I think they had some problems with the heat shield and NASA was like, Hey, you know, it's your decision. And he said, I could have asked everyone in a group setting, you know, what do you guys think we should do? Should we go out and do a spacewalk fix it? Or should we just, which could actually damage it more? Or should we just come down? And he said, he goes, we actually, um, I went to everyone individually and asked them rather than having committee make the decision. What were kind of like your decision process when you were leading your team? NIck: [00:20:58] So I'll refer back to kinda my Afghan deployment, my last active duty deployment as a SEAL, you know, I went into a platoon that had some leadership issues. And I was replacing a, another officer that had been removed from the platoon. So kind of a broken scenario, a lot of distrust, a lot of, uh, internal conflict. And I was showing up from a different theater. I came from Iraq and I was going into Afghanistan and. What I did initially just sit back and listen. I mean, I think it's important when you have the time when you're not in the high-stress scenario is get to know the people that are in your team. Listen to them. Don't just talk, right? The more you can shut your mouth and listen, you learn a tremendous amount. And what I learned in listening is who are the trusted experts, who are the people that really have a finger on the pulse and know how other people in the team are feeling. And, you know, I, I was able to gauge the level of credibility of each individual that I listened to. And by doing that, I basically formed. This, uh, abstract advisory board within my team where when things were, I guess, getting more high pressure and we needed to make some serious decisions and decisions that were going to be high stakes, you know, we're going into a dangerous area, or we were going to do a certain type of operation. I could always go back and I could talk to some of these critical leaders within my element. Because I've already vetted them. And I knew who I could go to, uh, who was credible and who was capable of giving me sound advice. And I think in doing that, I was able to confidently make decisions because ultimately as the leader, the top person in a unit, I'm accountable for the decision. So as much as I want to take the advice of everybody else and the council. When it comes down to it, I need to be confident in making the decision. And I gotta be the one that falls on the sword, if things go wrong, uh, because I'm definitely the one that's getting the credit when things go right. You know, so I need to be willing to accept that level of accountability and stand on my own two feet. Jason: [00:23:17] What were some of the questions that you would ask when you were coming in in order to get them? Just because a lot of times I would think, you know, as a leader comes into an organization that has a little, little fun going on, some people are going to be a little standoffish or be like, what are you going to do for me? What were some of the questions that kind of disarmed that? NIck: [00:23:38] Well, I think empowering people, right? So like giving people the opportunity to say, Hey, like what have you seen go, right? What have you seen go wrong? What are things that you would change or what changes would you enact? Uh, if you were given the opportunity to do that, and then not just kind of hypothetically talking about it, but actually empowering people and letting them make decisions. As the leader, you don't always have to be the one that's making kind of you're accountable for the final call, but you don't have to be the one that makes that final call. There was a lot of the times that I mean, I say typically our mission planning process was allowing each individual kind of unit or element within the bigger element to actually run the planning process and make decisions as to where they're going to place themselves, how they're going to execute a micro portion of the plan. And they actually go through brief that. And they would brief all the contingencies associated with that micro portion of the bigger plan. So in essence, I'm allowing them, I'm empowering them as leaders in their own right. To make decisions, to build confidence. So they already are like, Hey, you know what? I'm not only the leader. Isn't, uh, you know, the, the high-level leader, isn't just asking me for my opinion, that leader is actually allowing me to make decisions and trust me to make decisions that he's cool with, he's ready to execute on. So I think that's important. It's like, don't just be talk, don't just be kind of, don't give people the warm and fuzzy actually trust people, show that you are confident in their ability to make decisions and execute on things. Jason: [00:25:17] Yeah. I love that. What was the major decision for really kind of leaving the SEALs and going kind of the corporate, the civilian route. NIck: [00:25:29] Uh, so, so I have a bit of an unconventional transition, I guess I came off my last deployment and I think two things for me happened that really changed the dynamic as a SEAL officer. I knew that I was 100% committed to my job to be in a combat leader, leading men well in combat and making sure that I make sound decisions that are going to put them first and bring them home safe. And. My wife got pregnant with our first child, our daughter. And that was, it was a big deal. And not necessarily the. The linchpin catalyst that led to my decision to leave, but it definitely weighed in. And the second major event in my life was my younger brother. My middle brother, Chris was killed in an inbounds avalanche in Winter Park, Colorado. So my little brother left behind a wife and two young kids. And, you know, they were the first ones to know that my wife was pregnant with our first. And it really was a perspective shift for me. You know, I got to see what my brother's family went through in losing him and knowing that I was about to become a father, you know, it was much easier for me to visualize the very real possibility of, of me. You know, being killed or just frankly being taken from my family for long periods of time and training, um, with the, the level of commitment that I owed to the SEAL team. So it was a perspective shift there that led to me saying, okay, I'm going to get out. I want to focus on my family. I want to be there for my family and other loved ones in my life. And at that point I said, I, you know, I wanted to reinvent myself. I wanted to prove people wrong. I wanted to prove that I could do something besides being a combat leader. I wanted to prove that I could actually be successful in a career outside of the military with direct kind of gun toting skills that I was coming to the table with. Jason: [00:27:39] I totally get that. You know, I, I used to race cars and, you know, I started seeing some of our, our friends that I would know would get injured. And I was just, you know, right when I had my second son, I was like, I was like you, I was like, if I get hurt, I get hurt, but it's going to affect my family going forward. And so that's kind of why I kind of hung up the race suit. NIck: [00:28:01] It's always a good exercise to step back and kind of evaluate your priorities at any point in life. And I think the more frequent you can do that exercise the better off you are, because it makes sure that you're staying on track. Right? I mean, if you don't do that exercise. From time to time, you're going to slowly but surely deviate from course to a point where if too much time elapses, you know, you may find yourself in a pretty bad place. And, uh, You know, and I, I wouldn't say I am immune to that because I have, I have spoke very openly and very freely about my own personal struggles and kind of losing course post-transition and it kind of losing focus on the priorities that led me to transitioning from the SEAL teams in the first. Jason: [00:28:51] No, that's great. Last question I forgot to ask was around, have you ever had to replace a teammate? NIck: [00:28:58] Well, so yeah, I mean, in my, on that last. Deployment to Afghanistan. I replaced a teammate that was removed relinquished from a leadership role over in Afghanistan. And that was the biggest learning experience for me as a leader, to be able to step into a broken scenario and have to figure it out, right. Have to win people over that don't necessarily know you very well. And, and kind of when that confidence and that trust, you know, in a short period of time. Well, when you came into that environment though, was there anybody that you had to replace, you know, going in or make that hard decision to be like that person on the team is not the right fit? Yeah. So let me think about it. I, so in that scenario, I was not the one that had to pull the trigger and, and replace that person. We did replace, uh, people in previous platoons and it's never easy. Right? I mean, it's you know, I think the things that we did, right, and we often did this because it was protocol in the SEAL teams is we brought the issue up early and often it was never a surprise for the person. If it was a surprise, it actually tied our hands in our ability to remove that individual from a position, regardless of whether it's a leadership position, a high level leadership position, or just a, a position within a, uh, a SEAL platoon, you know, we, we executed counseling multiple times and everything was recorded. And the person was very clear as to what our expectations were, where they were falling short, because if you don't give people clear expectations and you don't give them defined objectives for them to hit that, our metrics of their performance, how can you hold them accountable? How can you -- I think you are failing as a leader if you're not clear and you're not giving them those well-defined objectives. You know, you should be looking at replacing yourself or counseling yourself if you're not doing that. So if ever if you're pulling somebody into your, office to tell them that you're going to let them go, and that person is surprised or has his hearing those things for the first time, it's absolutely the wrong way to approach that scenario. Jason: [00:31:11] Yeah, looking back, I've done that so many times in the very early years and I'm like, man, why did I have to surprise them? Like if I just kind of let them know my expectation, the whole way and kind of just seed it the right way, it could have turned out totally different. NIck: [00:31:27] Yeah. It's always tough. Right? To be direct. Communication is scary for a lot of people. People don't like confrontation in the outside world. It's difficult to sit face to face with somebody. And tell somebody that they're failing at something, you know, or that, you know, you're disappointed in them. It's easy to tell them when they're, you know, they're... hey there, you're doing a great job and you're exceeded expectations, but people just, they shy away from confrontation and conflict. And, you know, I've noticed, and I've learned this myself because it's tougher on the outside because I, I am dealing with people that I did not. Have go through a selection process, right? So, you know, sometimes I'm bringing people in and I think they're going to be the best person ever to fill that role. And three months later, I'm finding out that they are inadequate, you know, might not have had the skillset that they, they came into it saying they did. And they might even have personality traits that are cancerous within the unit. And, direct communication. The times that I've been direct and very clear with my expectations and kind of clear in their critique of their execution in their role, it's been so much easier than those times where I've shied away from it and they don't know, they can't read your mind. They don't hear the conversations that you're having with your business partners about how you're disappointed in somebody. And it's like, you got to tell people, or they're never going to be able to fix it. Jason: [00:32:57] Well, I think as, as leaders, if I think back at kind of the early years, I think it was, comes down to a couple, I think two things it's comes down to, you don't know the solution that they actually need to go do to fix it. Or you feel like a, a bad leader because you don't know the solution for them. And then just this resentment builds up and then it just pops one day and then you surprise them and then it's just, it's not good for anyone. So it's yeah. It's crazy. Well, this has all been amazing. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the listeners? Oh, I mean, I, it's tough. There's so much to talk about. I mean, we could, we could talk leadership and, uh, in various scenarios all day long, so I'm happy to do it anytime, brother. Awesome. I appreciate it. If anybody ever wants to reach out to you or go to your business or charity, where can they go? NIck: [00:33:51] Yeah. I mean, so for me personally, I'm on Instagram, pretty easy to find there. I think I'm @Nick_Norris1981, and my business is protekt.com protect with a K. And we're @protektlife on Instagram. And then for the charity, I would say the C4 Foundation. It's a charity that I am intimately involved with. I am currently filling the executive director role in combination with my, my efforts as an entrepreneur. And, uh, so I have a little bit going on, but a C4 foundation was named after Charles Humphrey Keating IV. Who was a friend of mine that was killed in combat in the SEAL teams, uh, about four years ago in Northern Iraq. And, the foundation is building a 560-acre ranch about an hour and a half outside of San Diego in order to be a sanctuary for Navy SEAL families to kind of grow connection within their individual family unit. And grow connection amongst kind of other families to kind of build that organic support mechanism for guys and, and their families as they go through their deployments on active duty. And then when they finally leave active duty, they have people that they can lean on. So C4foundation.org is a phenomenal organization that I'm involved with. And, uh, if you want to check it out, there's some really cool videos on the website. Jason: [00:35:19] Awesome. Well, everybody go there. If you guys enjoyed this episode and you want to support the great cause that they do, please go there. That'd be great. Thanks Nick. For everything that you've done and you're doing currently and giving us your most valuable asset your time. And if you guys liked this episode, make sure you guys subscribe. Make sure you guys give it a good rating. And until next time have a Swenk day.
Direct download: Digital_Agency_Leadership_Lessons_from_a_Navy_SEAL.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Sun, 4 April 2021
Iris Shoor is the founder and CEO of Oribi, a web analytics tool. After two successful startups, she is growing her third startup. Oribi, an AI-based web analytics tool dedicated to making analytics easy for everyone, without the help from analysts and developers. (And, no code needed!) Iris is passionate about simple products, creative marketing, great UX, building a unique culture, and most of all—people. She's on the show talking about how she helps her team aspire to reach their goals with personal development. She also shares how your digital agency can show clients success on their funnels and campaigns by using a new analytics tool.
SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM 3 Golden Nuggets
Sponsors and ResourcesOribi: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Oribi. Check out Oribi.io/smartagency for a free trial. Plus when you sign up for Oribi get 20% off the first three months with promo code: Smart Agency Show TranscriptsJason: [00:00:00] On this episode, I talk with an amazing entrepreneur that's in her third business. She's a rockstar. She talks about personal development of your employees, how to keep them. But most importantly, we talk about how to prove your value. To your clients, so you can actually charge more. I think all of us need to do that. We're always constantly wondering how do we prove our value to our clients? Well, this is the episode for you and it will prove your worth. Hey, Iris. Welcome to the show. Iris: [00:00:40] Hey Jason. Jason: [00:00:41] I'm excited to have you on and, so tell us who you are and what do you do? Iris:: [00:00:46] Okay. So I'm CEO for Oribi. I'm a serial entrepreneur. This is my third startup for the other two companies that have been leading the product and marketing. Um, I love marketing and I was always amazed that with how difficult it is to measure marketing. And that's why I started the Oribi and we raised 27 million dollars today. And worked with thousands of customers around the world. And we were doing marketing under the tech set, hopefully, better than other tools. Jason: [00:01:19] Oh, it's awesome. Yeah. Definitely check out the tool and it was very cool. But before we get into the tool, I wanted to ask you because a lot of agency owners, obviously everyone listening, we're hiring people, we're always hiring people. And I read a blog post that you had on your blog. And I was like, Oh, that's interesting. Tell us a little bit about, you know, just giving people pizza and feeding them is not really what will keep them. Iris: [00:01:43] Yeah. I feel it's something like I find that baby ironic about this is that we want to hire the best people, the smartest vehicles, the most innovative people and treat them like a small children. And you need to be very cautious with them and you need to give them beer and pizza. And do you want the smartest people? And they usually want to, to lead interesting innovations, they want to grow. They want to learn new things. And for some reason, most of the work environment are mostly about just conquering people and their employees. And it's something that you really trying to do at Oribi, is to focus more on the personal development and giving them more independence. And. The way I see my role as a manager is to really let people shine. And to find their unique voice and to help them do it rather than having like lots of Ben and Jerry's and the kitchen. So, yeah, that's how I see it. Jason: [00:02:48] Yeah. For many years, you know, I thought it was like, Hey, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll bring in lines, you know, like the Googles of the world, right? Like, especially that one movie of the internship with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson right there, like I can have five bananas it's free. And I think. That will draw in the wrong people. Sometimes it won't keep them. Iris: [00:03:10] Yeah. Also we can like, um, it's all standard. So it's not that you have like a free pizza and ice cream and everybody will stay because of it. So, yeah, I agree with like, we have nice food over here, but this is not the main thing that we do. And they see that people are looking for something more personal and more deep. Jason: [00:03:32] Yup. Let's talk about a little bit about personal development, right? Since we're on the topic of keeping our employees, right? Like we're attracting the right ones. How do you guys help out with personal development? Because I feel, you know, when people come in, if you're just expecting them just to do their job, right. They're going to be like, okay, like, they're going to be excited for a little while. Like I remember when I sold my agency, I was very motivated. To help out with the new company. And then when the dream squashers came in and started, you know, squashing our dreams, I started getting de-motivated and I was an, A- player. And I literally went to like an F- player. I'm like, you know, you better sell this company or I'm going to be the worst employee ever. And I find a lot of people are like that. So what's some things that you can help out employees with on personal development? Iris: [00:04:24] Yeah. So, so that's a very interesting question. It seems like for me, the main thing that I benefit from being a certain type of entrepreneur and going fast was a rollercoaster every day is that I feel that it really challenged me with, learning new stuff all the time, inventing staff being creative, and they really feel that a huge part of my personal development is, me being forced to learning, uh, sales and marketing and different types of marketing and then managing and firing people. And I really wanted to give this experience to my employees. So instead of thinking of it as a funnel for rollercoaster also, it's something that they can step up using this platform. And an interesting story is that when it started at Oribi a few years ago, we actually had the budget for each employee for personal development. And I asked each one of them, what do you want to work on? If it's like a writing, public speaking, learning how to design. And then I have a list of like 50 things that they want to learn. And I was amazed to see that like half of their flow is new, what they want to work on, but we didn't have a clue. So they said, okay, so as a developer and not interested in public speaking or writing or anything else. So funny that they did learn is that most people don't really understand what they want to work on, but they do want the encouragement and the platform. When something arrives to, to really go in-depth . So tell me to do this change, how this program and receive the results have been really worked out well. And today it's more about working with employees on their personal challenges. Yes. Within the professional environment, what do they find challenging? How do they want to work on it? And sometimes we, we do help with them with top coaching. Is there internal or external? And, but the main thing is just about seeing them. Like for me, it's about things that unique voice of each one of the employees, and really try to encourage them to speak in this voice rather than being part of the company and where we are within the same box. Jason: [00:06:34] Awesome. Great. Let's kind of change, focus. And let's talk about, because I know a lot of agencies because I chat with them all day long. A lot of times they have a hard time showing their clients results. And I think that's, if you look at it like a stoplight, that's a red light. That's something that you really need to work on because if you can't show your clients results, then they don't know the value, which means you're going to lose them. And you're just literally trying to hold onto them rather than going. This is what's working. This is not what's working. So talk to me a little bit about how did you come up with the current company now of really making it very easy for agencies to see what's currently working. Like, you know, when I was going through the tool and going through the funnel, I was like, that's pretty cool. Like, I could literally go, hey, here's the starting page and here's the page I want them to get to. What's my percentage and all that. So talk a little bit about that. Iris: [00:07:34] Yeah. So, yeah, I do agree. This is like the main challenge. So today about 30% of our customers are agencies and probably most of the other 70% of the customers are working with agencies. So we hear those from agencies that they're unable to communicate their amazing work to the customers. And we also hear a lot from customers of agencies. If they're, they don't trust the agency, they don't really understand what they're doing and in my opinion, the main, the main challenge is how big can the agency go ? Cause something that happens a lot is agencies want to deliver the best results, but in many cases, they really stay up the funnel. So they drive traffic or they drive sign-ups and they're sure they're doing like amazing work. That's e-commerce show up or the companies that don't see an increase in sales. And the immediate result is a distrust. And they don't understand what they're doing. And they said it's the key thing for, for both parties to work well together, to understand which results they're measuring. And in most cases, it will be the sales-qualified leads. And in most cases, it's not very easy to track it. So the dimension that we're doing it really different things than other tools. It's creating a very simple solution. For defining all the different events. So instead of using code, you can easily understand what is the qualifying lead, how many people requested a demo? How many of them paid later? How many of them churn? How many of those approaches, which product, how many of them returned? And they say that once the agency can then create a high-level picture and can go into the entire funnel, the entire flow, understand all the different metrics. The communication is much better. They can understand what's working well. Does there, like an example I can give you is like two years ago where I was working with an agency and they manage my Facebook ads, I've been on maternity leave. So I haven't used the results for like months. And they told me it's doing amazingly well. They managed to reduce the cost by 50%. Then I entered the numbers and I saw that the sign-ups are actually. The cost per signup is much lower but that, hardly no one converts and it's so that they use like ads of like kittens. Everybody clicks sign up it very simple, but nobody really converted. And if they could have seen like the entire funnel easily to understand what's converting, who isn't, and compare it with other time periods, they would have been able to understand what they're doing wrong. So it's mostly about creating like a very solid ground for communication and for seeing all the important KPIs.
Jason: [00:10:23] Yeah. I totally agree with you. It's you know, if I was an agency right now, You know, a lot of times you need to test out the waters with your prospects. And I remember this and I see this all the time. I would take on the wrong clients and the client would tell me one thing. They'd be like, oh, we're driving, you know, this much traffic and we're converting at this. Like, we can get them to this page. They're going to convert. And if it was me, what I would do now, And I guess you can sort of do it through Google tag manager, but that's very, it's kind of like, you have to be a mad scientist. I feel like they'll make that work. Uh, like I don't understand. I'm like, wow. Like I throw up in my hands, but I haven't been in the weeds in a while, but like, if you could set up the tracking and the measuring ahead of time and you do like a test project with the client, like don't even do anything other than just set up analytic tracking and the dashboard and then go back to them and go, here's our recommendation based on the past 30 days, then I think you could blow your competition out of the water. You both probably have a lot happier clients, because you're only taking on the right ones rather than taking on the living, breathing ones for now. Right. There'll be dead later. Iris: [00:11:44] Yeah, definitely. So yeah, I really like setting up the goals and mutual goals is super important and how to measure them. And now to see that they feel that it's doing this injustice for both parties is attribution and which became much more challenging from one year to another. And then in many cases like the agency and things, they're doing amazing work, how are they in the conversions, the agencies, so that, okay, everybody we're exposed to your brand from Facebook ads and, that they both met her via direct as a company says that the hard content in convert and coming from Facebook ads over here as well, I've seen that, um, there's many companies or agencies. They try to really like try to attribute to every single conversion it's really, really hard today. So, and when you facing the numbers coming from Facebook and Google, it's becoming even more challenging. So it's more about understanding the trends. If you're doing like a massive change, even if you can attribute everything, you can see how impacted, if you're working with different channels, you can understand the correlation between them. Jason: [00:12:56] Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about like, when someone can dive deeper into the analytics and amazes me too, or maybe it's just because it's been complex up until this point with really. Kind of diving into the analytics, like why do you feel that more agencies don't really dive into that to really understand it, to deliver the best value? Because I truly believe that people want to deliver their best stuff, but sometimes they just, they don't. Iris: [00:13:26] Yeah, I think it's mainly because it's a, it's a lot of work.. And as I told you before, like the, the main goal for me with Oribi is to help companies answer is the very trivial questions in a simple way. So it always amaze me that I try to answer questions, like where do my best customers come from and how is campaigns really doing. So the other, like exactly the same question that every company asks and today it's still lots of work. So you need developers to define events and every time it changed the website, you need to change it into maintaining and, um, So I seen it today. It's mostly about if the process is pretty complex, we need developers, as it takes time. I don't believe it's because people don't want to see the full picture or the people don't want to be data-driven. I say that today, something that we really see that even marketers, that they're not really into numbers and they love writing content and be more on the creative side, they really want to understand what is the impact of the work and to measure it and to understand what to do home. Jason: [00:14:38] So tell us a little bit more about why people need to check this tool out? Cause I checked it out. It was really pretty amazing. I was like, Oh, I didn't know I needed to change this and that. And it gave me some insights that weren't available to me before. Iris: [00:14:55] Yeah. So today, I guess it's most of the listeners are using Google analytics. It's always fascinated me that with Google analytics, we choose the market and there are other like very high end tools, that are very, very extensive require local integrations. And you can find some tools that are more around like max or just like landing pages, but there isn't like a good solution for marketing. And what they're doing at Oribi is creating marketing analytics that doesn't require developers, so he can define all the events without using code. You can do it yourself. You can get to more interesting events that we can create different rules for different rules, and then you can easily create finance and correlations and to analyze a user behavior and to do everything yourself, it's very simple. And also to export this data, to Facebook ads or to Google ads and to email automation, so you can create better audiences. And yeah, our main goal is to really give the power to the marketing team. And two they're very dependent on developers. If you're a part of a small company, usually we don't have developers. If you're part of a larger company, usually you need to wait like two months until they have time to, and the new event or, or change something. And is it for me, like the inspiration or company, like Shopify for where you can build your own e-commerce store, to change it, and to do the same for, analytics. Jason: [00:16:32] Awesome. Is there a special offer that you have for our audience listening in if they want to check you guys out, which I highly recommend everyone go do. Iris: [00:16:41] Yeah, definitely. So can enter Oribi.io then sign up for the free trial. The installation is super simple. If you're using like Wordpress or Shopify, it's just plug-in. If not, you can edit scripts, you can enjoy a free trial. When you decide to purchase Oribi, you can enjoy a 20% off discount for the first three months. And just write us on chat or email that you arrived via this podcast, and we'll be happy to provide a discount. Jason: [00:17:08] Awesome. Well, great. Well, everyone go check that out. Iris, is there anything I did not ask you that you think would benefit the audience? Iris: [00:17:15] I would say that something that I find pretty amazing is that most people will put tons of time in creating like the best content and videos and a stunning website. And we'll hardly measure it.. So I think there is much to do with like funnel optimization and website optimization. Okay. And let's say for example, that you invest a lot in writing content for SEO and getting direct traffic, and you probably can find out with two weeks of fare, changing the website, making some AB tests and changing the messaging and the call to action. You will be able to increase the conversion rate by 70%, by 50%. So I would say that most people's they're really into the content itself and the efforts themselves. And don't put enough time in optimizing the funnel, like the conversion. So there are a lot of low-hanging fruits over there and lots of opportunities to get you to great results. Jason: [00:18:19] Awesome. Well, Iris, thanks so much for coming on the show and everybody listening. If you guys want to check out Oribi, go to Oribi.io and check it out, do the free trial. And then, uh, if you guys want to take it on, uh, even more, make sure you reach out to them and say, Hey, I heard of you guys from the Smart Agency Master Class, and they'll give you 20% off for the first three months. And, uh, until next time have a Swenk day. Thanks, Iris. Thank you.
Direct download: How_to_Retain_Agency_Clients_By_Showing_Them_Success.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm MDT |
Wed, 31 March 2021
Want to work with big brands? Curious how other agencies get massive opportunities? Wonder how you can find top talent to take your agency to the next level? Amazing opportunities might be right in front of you and you don’t even know it. In this episode, we’ll cover:
In this episode, I had the opportunity to chat with Colin Moffat, co-founder of Artemis Ward the branding agency he started with a former colleague. The two met while working for a big agency. However, six years ago, they decided to start their own agency after seeing a lot of cool work going to agencies smaller than theirs. Colin is on the show to talk about strategies that have gotten Artemis Ward opportunities to work with big brands How to Get Opportunities With Big BrandsColin says great business development effort comes down to relationships. Strong relationships are the key to success, so don’t take any of your relationships for granted. Always be cultivating and maintaining relationships. What kind of relationships can help grow your agency? All of them! Current clients, former colleagues; remember no one stays where they are forever. Keep up with people and be cool to them. Getting a foot in the door with big brands is about having the right relationship and doing good work every single time. Don’t Keep Your Head Down Too LongAs a small and new agency, Colin says they were dedicated to the work but kept their heads down and grinded away at it. Most people do this thinking the hustle will eventually pay off. But Colin says it wasn’t until they lifted their heads that ideal clients started to really take notice. People may know you and like you but they aren’t thinking of you every day. Sometimes you have to pick up your head and make sure you’re getting noticed. People may think you’re great but you’re not going to be top of mind all the time. Artemis Ward engaged prospects with an email newsletter, social media and putting efforts into their own marketing. While there isn’t an immediate payoff this creates opportunities down the road. Colin’s advice: showcase the work, be helpful, and show the world what you can do. 3 Strategies To Help You Win More Agency Business
2 Tips for Hiring Agency Team Members to Help ScaleArtemis Ward makes every effort to stay small and nimble. Therefore, it’s important to have really good people on your agency team in order to scale. Colin says he hire for culture fit, keeping two criteria in mind: 1. Smart and adaptable. They want agency team members who can stay fluid. Some people need more structure and that’s OK but not a fit for the agency. Colin hires people who can be flexible and embrace unpredictability. 2. Diverse background and experiences. They don’t just hire the “typical agency person” or someone with tons of agency experience. Colin wants team members with different perspectives. When you’re solving unique problems you need a team that is unique. Looking for a Content Creation Solution?Verblio has been a long-time supporter of the Smart Agency Masterclass and a trusted vendor we've been using for over two years. They are an amazing content creation solution designed specifically for agencies; their writers can help with all your content creation needs across a variety of industries. If you're interested in trying Verblio for yourself check out Verblio.com/smartagency for 50% off your first month of content. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM
Direct download: How_Can_Your_Agency_Work_With_Big_Brands_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Sun, 28 March 2021
Have you ever struggled with upselling? Would you like to expand revenue from your current accounts? Want to get your team more involved in upselling? All it takes is some strategy and a change of mindset to reap the benefits of upsell opportunities. In this episode, we’ll cover:
Today I chatted with Daniel Hodge, Head of the Wix Partners. Danny and his team build relationships with digital marketing agencies. Over the years, he has seen and heard it all from digital agencies. Everything from what is work to what doesn’t plus all the good and bad strategies for growing digital agency business. He’s sharing some great ways you can improve your upsell strategies right away. #1 Worst Agency Sales MistakeThere’s a ton of experts out there sharing best practices, but Danny said he’s actually seen a lot of “worst practices.” The top among them is the mistake of making it impossible for site visitors to get in touch. The site design might be amazing, but oftentimes the call to action is lacking. Either it’s unclear, buried, or simply non-existent. Sure, the big agencies can get away without a call-to-action because they already have a reputation. However, medium and smaller agencies tend to model them even though what works one doesn’t necessarily work for others. What Works for Digital Agency Upselling?Danny says he is seeing agencies the size of 5-50 employees growing fast over the last year or so. He believes this is largely due to their ability to be flexible and work quickly during the pandemic when a lot of businesses need to increase or improve their digital presence. But, how can you take existing clients and turn them into more revenue? It all starts with not disguising the upsell but understanding the opportunity from day one. The best way to do this is to ask questions like:
When you understand early on, you can put together a plan with 3, 6, and 9-month check-ins. Then look at the client’s business with an eye to the future. So when you make a recommendation it doesn’t sound or feel like an upsell. It’s simply executing another part of a long-term plan in order to meet their goals. Then position it like: If we’re successful with “this”, then you might need “that”. Then it’s just a natural next step instead of an upsell. 2 Ways to Make Upselling Less Salesy
Are You Selling Your Agency Short?The key to strategic upsells is positioning your agency as an advisor. But, Danny believes agencies are selling themselves short. Clients end up viewing them as a commodity instead of an authority. Agencies often market themselves as being good at web design, development, and SEO. But they leave out the part where they can also remarketing, lead generation, and much more. You don’t have to be a full-service agency. However, you can explore different tools and technologies that may help you broaden the success of your service offering. How To Get Your Agency Team to UpsellIt’s very common that the agency team is resistant to upselling to clients. They feel weird or awkward getting salesy. And let’s be honest, Project Managers are finishers or completers. They like to check items off their ‘to do’ list. They definitely don’t want to add more tasks. So it is against their nature to bring on more by suggesting an upsell. They are really good at execution but usually not so good at generating more work or upselling. Danny says you have to make upselling more about client services and less about “selling”. Your PMs might be resistant to make a sale, but when you reposition it as enhancing client success they may be more receptive. Another way to get team buy-in is to get them aligned with your agency goals. If they believe an upsell just puts more money in the agency owner’s pocket they aren’t motivated. But if you have a bigger picture goal about ways your agency can impact the industry your team will care more about sales successes. Agency Partner Program wix.com/partners Want to Learn More About Partnering with Agencies?When you join forces with Wix agency partners, you'll unlock a community of agency partners that can help you grow and scale your agency faster than ever. The Wix Partner Program is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free.
Direct download: How_to_Increase_Digital_Agency_Upsell_Opportunities.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm MDT |
Wed, 24 March 2021
Are you still not convinced your agency needs a niche? Are you tired of spending your time on free consultations that don't convert? Converting a lead into revenue for your agency requires careful planning. If you want to convert and retain more clients, beware of these common mistakes. In this episode, we'll cover:
I talked with Bob Sparkins, Sales and Marketing Manager for Leadpages. Known as "Bob the Teacher," he provides instruction to agency sales teams through podcasts and webinars. Bob has a ton to share about the biggest mistakes he sees agencies make when it comes to lead generation. 1. Failing to SpecializeIf you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: Find a niche for your agency. Bob says many new agencies make the mistake of believing they can do all things for all people. However, Bob says beyond the benefit of doing work you are passionate about, specializing in one industry or service offering will actually help increase revenue and attract more clients. Why? Because most clients don't come to your website looking at the big picture of all the solutions you provide. They come looking to solve a single problem with their marketing plan. If you specialize in solving that sort of problem, then you have a foot in the door to provide additional solutions to the client in the future. 2. Overpricing or Underpricing Your ServicesBob says determining a fair price for the services provided is a common problem for most agencies. Some agencies underprice their services in the hopes of attracting a client looking for a deal. While others set a higher price without having built the trust and proving the service is worth the investment. The problem with underpricing your services is you're not communicating the value of your team's skill set. Overpricing can lead to making promises you can't keep and could cost you the client. 3. Offering a Free ConsultationBob encourages agencies to remove the free consultation from their website. "A person off the street should not be able to stumble on your website and get access to your calendar," Bob explains. The problem with free consultations is they only have about a 30 percent conversion rate. What this means is when you provide free consultations for ten people, only three of those people will return for more information. That equals a lot of time spent on conversations where the prospect is more likely to say no than to say yes.
4. Ineffective Lead MagnetsInstead of providing free consultations, Bob encourages agencies to convert leads to clients through the use of lead magnets. An effective lead magnet is one that considers the context of why the lead is on the web in the first place. Providing a short video or article with information on how to accomplish a task, along with a call to action for more information, is much more effective than simply advertising your services in the traditional way. "Teach people the steps that are involved in doing what you do," Bob says. But, also show them that the task demands a level of knowledge and expertise that you can provide. 5. Holding Your Clients Hostage With Their WebsiteOne mistake Bob sees agencies often make after they've worked with clients is holding deliverables hostage. This is particularly true with creative and design agencies. They keep all the information and work under lock and key. If the client leaves, they lose the work. "You need to evaluate if that is really in service to your client," Bob says. He notes allowing a client who wants to leave access to the work they paid for and to exit with a positive vibe provides a better chance of getting a good referral. Additionally, you leave the door open if the client wishes to return. Looking for a Content Creation Solution?Verblio has been a long-time supporter of the Smart Agency Masterclass and a trusted vendor we've been using for over two years. They are an amazing content creation solution designed specifically for agencies; their writers can help with all your content creation needs across a variety of industries. If you're interested in trying Verblio for yourself check out Verblio.com/smartagency for 50% off your first month of content.
Direct download: Is_Your_Agency_Making_These_5_Lead_Generation_Mistakes_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Sun, 21 March 2021
The Agency Visionary and IntegratorAre you a visionary or an integrator? How do you know, and how do you use it to grow your agency? Check yourself on these: Got big goals for your agency but no idea how to get there? Spending too much time on the day-to-day operations when you would rather be leading? The world is filled with visionaries and integrators. With effort and understanding, you can harness the strength of both to grow your marketing agency. In this episode, we'll cover:
I talked to Mark Winters, co-author of the book, Rocket Fuel. Mark is an entrepreneur who has been directly involved in fourteen different businesses of varying sizes and industries throughout his life. He has started, sold, and even acquired businesses. During that time, Mark has learned the importance of having a visionary and an integrator in your agency leadership and how the two can work better together. What Is the Difference Between a Visionary and an Integrator?Many agency owners are visionaries. Visionaries are individuals with big dreams and goals. They're the ones that can look at the big picture and determine where the agency should be in the next five years. However, visionaries often struggle with the day-to-day details of enacting a plan to reach their goals. That's where an integrator comes in. Integrators are individuals capable of focusing on the details of operations of your agency right now. They are usually the general manager or operations manager tasked with building the road between where the agency is now and where the visionary owner wants to be. Can an Agency Visionary and an Integrator Work Together?When they work together, the visionary and the integrator offer a complete management package. One minds the overall mission while the other ensures success of individual tasks. However, these two personality types are so different they often have a difficult time working together. In his book, Mark discusses the five rules between a visionary and an integrator. The rules can help the two accomplish what needs to be done for the agency without driving each other crazy. 5 Rules Between a Visionary and Integrator
Finding the Missing Piece to Your Agency PuzzleSo how do you find the right piece to the puzzle? Mark says it is really a three-piece puzzle. You need to understand your business. Then you need the insight to know your strengths and skills. And finally, you need to identify the gaps in your team structure. Only then can you find the right person to close those gaps. Caution: You might not understand this person. The way they think and approach problems will be different than yours. That's the point! And, all of that is less important than the ability for you and this person to work together. The goal is to use your individual superpowers to build the best agency possible. Are you looking for a unique web design tool?Editor X is a platform built specifically for designers, where you can create complex sites while feeling like you’re working on a visual design software. Picture stepping into a wide workspace where you get total CSS control powered by smooth drag and drop. Editor X's canvas is so intuitive it feels like a physical space where you can move things around as you want. It’s a platform where every tiny detail has been considered so you can let your creativity run wild and build your most creative sites yet. I can describe it to you all day but you should really go see it for yourself, at EditorX.com—and discover the new standard in web design.
Direct download: Does_Your_Agency_Have_Visionary_and_Integrator_Roles_Filled_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm MDT |
Wed, 17 March 2021
Do you feel like you are working with tunnel vision? Are you only focusing on one small aspect of the agency? Are you wondering which direction to take your agency? Do you spend too much time on the wrong projects? Time moves quickly in the agency world, and success often rides on your agency continually evolving; otherwise, it could die. In this episode, we'll cover:
I spoke with Scott Addison Clay, the Founder, and CEO of Addison Interactive, a digital marketing agency that works with the entertainment industry. The 10-year-old agency is the culmination of a number of Scott's passions. However, along the way to finding these passions, Scott built the interactive department at another agency from two people to thirty. He's here to offer some tips on how to evolve your agency from a job into a passion. 3 Benefits of Surrounding Yourself Within a NicheBuilding a team from two people to thirty in a relatively short period of time seems like a difficult feat. How do you create the need to grow so fast? Scott says one of the biggest reasons the agency grew so quickly was because they were in a building full of others in the entertainment industry. Surrounding yourself with others in your niche provides benefits such as:
Finding Passion in Your NicheMany years ago, a news producer gave Scott a piece of advice he has always remembered: Pick something -- anything -- and just do that thing. However, passion is not simply about having a goal. It is also about the journey you take to get to the goal. For Scott, passion evolved from a love of entertainment and a curiosity about how things work. From there, he went to building an agency that started with website building and evolved to offering services like video editing and social media content for the entertainment industry. While it is important to choose a niche reflecting your passion, it's also important to remember chasing those passions is often a long-term commitment. It usually involves doing jobs you're not crazy about in order to grow your agency.
Why Staying the Same Is an Agency's Kiss of DeathWhen Scott started Addison Interactive a decade ago, his first projects involved building websites. Then he started learning to do content for Tumblr. "We just kept figuring things out and then staffing for those things." In order to grow your agency, Scott says, you have to always be evolving. This is particularly true with digital marketing, where technology and trends are changing rapidly. Evolution includes a lot of listening, both to clients about what they need as well as experts in the industry you serve. It also includes the ability and willingness to adapt. "The kiss of death is saying, 'We've always done it that way,'" Scott explains. Through the Agency Playbook, Scott learned being open to possibilities and expanding involves not just asking the question: What do you want to do? It also involves asking yourself what you don't want to do. While there are many reasons for this, perhaps the best reason of all is the point where Scott now is. It's the point where you can start turning down small jobs you don't want because they don't fit into your goals. Looking for a Content Creation Solution?Verblio has been a long-time supporter of the Smart Agency Masterclass and a trusted vendor we've been using for over two years. They are an amazing content creation solution designed specifically for agencies; their writers can help with all your content creation needs across a variety of industries. If you're interested in trying Verblio for yourself check out Verblio.com/smartagency for 50% off your first month of content. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM
Direct download: Is_Your_Agency_Continually_Evolving_Or_Will_It_Die_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Sun, 14 March 2021
Is your team struggling to keep up with client communication? Having a hard time managing all parts of agency projects? Many agencies need project management dedicated to communication and details. How do you know when or if your agency needs a project manager? How can you find a great project manager? Having a project manager is crucial for some agencies and absolutely unnecessary for others. The challenge is determining your agency's need in order to grow successfully. In this episode, we'll cover:
I talked with Bea Bonte, Co-owner of Hook Agency, a digital agency that provides services for small to mid-sized businesses in the construction industry. In less than three years, the agency has grown to a team of 12. Project management is part of Bea's job description. Hook also has a project manager for its website design team. Bea says it has been a learning process determining what types of services need project management and which don't. When Should Your Agency Use a Project Manager?Project management is a frequent topic of debate among agency owners, with strong opinions on both sides. However, Bea says the discussion really shouldn't be as much about whether you do or don't need a project manager. It comes down to the types of jobs where project management helps deliver the service more efficiently. For example, Hook uses a project manager for website design because it requires extensive information-gathering with the client. A project manager handles communication while the design team is busy on creative work. Large projects involving the output of different parts of your team are the type for project management. In those cases, the manager is able to coordinate the different aspects of the work. While creative projects often need a project manager, Bea believes in letting her team communicate directly with the client as needed. If a designer has a specific question for the client, it does not make sense to run the question through an extra layer. When Project Management Isn't NecessaryFor small agencies and agencies that offer very specific services, it is often not necessary to have a project manager. For example, Hook's SEO team requires specific information from the client and without running through a project manager. The rule of thumb Hook uses in determining whether project management is necessary is whether the communication required will take too much time away from the work they were hired to do. If so, then it's time to hire a project manager. However, if there are instances where involving a project manager slows down production and delivery. Finding the Right Project ManagerIf you decide your agency needs a project manager, how do you go about hiring one? Bea says Hook places a higher priority on tenacity than on a heavy resume. She and her husband took a risk on an individual at the start of their agency who was so passionate about wanting to work for a marketing agency he was willing to work for free. He is now transitioning from the agency's SEO lead to the General Manager. One of the most important things to remember when hiring a project manager or adding other new members to your team is finding a match to culture and values. New skills can be acquired, but finding someone whose goals and work style match those of your agency is a bigger task. Are you looking for a unique web design tool?Editor X is a platform built specifically for designers, where you can create complex sites while feeling like you’re working on a visual design software. Picture stepping into a wide workspace where you get total CSS control powered by smooth drag and drop. Editor X's canvas is so intuitive it feels like a physical space where you can move things around as you want. It’s a platform where every tiny detail has been considered so you can let your creativity run wild and build your most creative sites yet. I can describe it to you all day but you should really go see it for yourself, at EditorX.com—and discover the new standard in web design.
Direct download: How_to_Decide_When_Your_Agency_Needs_Project_Management.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm MDT |
Wed, 10 March 2021
Are you constantly trying to get prospects to tell you their budget? Do you spend too much time managing client expectations? Not sure which projects to prioritize? Contrary to my opinion, some agencies find success by putting agency pricing on the website. And, there are some benefits. It solves some client budget issues and helps the team prioritize projects. Do you agree? In this episode, we'll cover:
I talked to Tory Smith, Co-Founder of the Texas-based B2B and SaaS marketing agency, Bay Leaf Digital. He and his partner began the agency without a playbook or even a solid grasp on what their niche would be. However, they were able to turn to their professional connections to get their foot in the door. Tory believes in being transparent with prospective clients about the price of agency services. Contrary to my beliefs, he is here to tell us about the rather unconventional way his agency addressed the issue. Does Agency Pricing on the Website Work?Tory began researching the idea of placing a price page on the agency website during the year before the pandemic. What Tory found is the practice is common with software companies, however, very few marketing agencies display their prices. He and his partner decided to give it a try. They decided f they didn't see a quick benefit, they would take it down. Within two days, Bay Leaf landed its biggest client to date. An established overseas company found the agency's website. The CEO called Tory asking to obtain even more services than what was offered in the highest package price. What Tory learned was the price page worked for the agency and the top-tier package needed to be open-ended. The Pros and Cons of Publishing Your Agency's PricesIn addition to disclosing prices on their website, Bay Leaf created a point system for billing their services. The benefits Tory found with the price page and point system include:
The downsides of the price page and point structure include:
What Is More Important Than Pricing to Some Clients?During the recent economic downturn, Tory wondered whether his clients would still be able to afford the agency's services and considered lowering agency prices. However, instead, he discovered clients weren't hung up on price, but rather the long-term contract. Because of this, Bay Leaf began offering a six-month service commitment for clients and finds even that is too long for some. Since the pandemic, Bay Leaf had a promising prospect walk away who likely would have stayed with a shorter-term contract. Instead of lowering your pricing, consider lowering the commitment level. Additionally, remind your clients the transparency of your pricing page is just a starting point. It is the stepping stone to a larger conversation that can lead to providing exactly the services the client needs. Looking for a Content Creation Solution?Verblio has been a long-time supporter of the Smart Agency Masterclass and a trusted vendor we've been using for over two years. They are an amazing content creation solution designed specifically for agencies; their writers can help with all your content creation needs across a variety of industries. If you're interested in trying Verblio for yourself check out Verblio.com/smartagency for 50% off your first month of content.
Direct download: Should_You_Put_Your_Digital_Agency_Pricing_on_the_Website_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Sun, 7 March 2021
What does it take to truly grow your agency? Could your pricing structure be holding you back? Are you giving away your strategy for free? There's a lot to consider when growing an agency, but it a lot of it comes down to 3 basic things every agency owner struggles with. In this episode, we'll cover:
I talked with Wendy Covey, Co-Founder and CEO of Texas-based Trew Marketing, an agency that works with technical audiences such as small to mid-sized engineering companies. She is here today to talk about three of the issues that often cause a lot of worries and stress for agency owners. 1. Choosing Your Agency's NicheWendy and her business partner started Trew Marketing after working together in the engineering industry. What they discovered was small to medium-sized engineering companies often have horrible websites. This was a challenge they could help solve. Wendy says the partners had conversations in the beginning about what their niche should be. Just as they were starting their business, the 2008 economic recession hit. A blessing in disguise, the recession placed even more importance on the two deciding what type of agency they wanted. They made a list of who their ideal next five clients would be and it always came back to their past connections in the engineering industry. "As soon as we narrowed our focus to just one type of client, our business took off," she says. Trew Marketing regularly receives interest from potential clients in other industries. The partners do not venture away from their niche, however, due to the inefficiency of trying to learn a whole new market. Instead, they have continued to hone their expertise in one area so they are able to provide the best services for their clients. 2. Determining Your Agency's Pricing ModelDetermining how to price your services is one of the biggest considerations for a new agency. Like most new agency owners, Wendy says Trew made peanuts off its first client. The partners considered billing hourly, but quickly realized their profits would decrease as their efficiency increased on an hourly structure. Trew's pricing is derived from an hourly rate, but there are considerations given to the market rate as well as the value of their service. Your pricing structure can evolve and change over time. If you're too busy, you're not charging enough. 3. Helping Clients Understand Your Agency's ValueIt doesn't take a new agency owner long to find themselves in the never-ending debate over whether marketing agencies should pay for the pitches they provide to prospective clients or offer the strategy for free in hopes of landing the project. Wendy is on the side of the debate that says you should never offer strategy for free. Trew's clientele consists of engineering CEOs and executives who often have no idea what marketing really is. A lot of the strategy the agency provides for its prospects includes education on need as well as how it is going to be executed. Wendy believes "strategy sets the tone for everything else." Trew generally requires their clients to participate in the strategic process before delivering services. This is especially important if there is no internal marketing department. Trew finds more success by involving the client early on in the strategy process. When clients are involved in the strategy they understand more about the value of the agency's execution. Growing an agency is not one-size-fits-all. However, Wendy says one thing is true for every agency: they underestimate the value they bring to their clients. Learning that value is one of the biggest keys to thriving as an agency. Are you looking for a unique web design tool?Editor X is a platform built specifically for designers, where you can create complex sites while feeling like you’re working on a visual design software. Picture stepping into a wide workspace where you get total CSS control powered by smooth drag and drop. Editor X's canvas is so intuitive it feels like a physical space where you can move things around as you want. It’s a platform where every tiny detail has been considered so you can let your creativity run wild and build your most creative sites yet. I can describe it to you all day but you should really go see it for yourself, at EditorX.com—and discover the new standard in web design.
Direct download: 3_Things_Every_Agency_Must_Know_In_Order_to_Grow.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm MDT |
Wed, 3 March 2021
Are you struggling to scale your agency? Is it a challenge getting clients to understand and value your strategy? Do you feel like there's a missing piece that will help you grow faster and easier? Success requires solid systems for positioning, pricing, and selling your agency services to your ideal clients who trust and value your agency's expertise. In this episode, we'll cover:
I talked to Dean La Grange, Founder of the direct consumer advertising agency, La Grange Digital. Dean helps brands with Facebook and Instagram advertising. This is Dean's second time on the show and this time, he explains there are two major ways companies attract customers on social media: through organic posts and paid advertisements. Dean focuses on the paid advertisements, freeing up his clients to focus on organic posts. He is here to explain the importance of relying on a system and valuing your own time to grow your business. Why Digital Agencies Must Be AgileIn spite of the rumors you've heard, Dean says Facebook and Instagram are still viable ways to reach your audience. He regards these platforms as a way to get his foot in the door with new clients. Even during the peak of the pandemic, Dean and his team were able to meet clients' needs by focusing on consistency in posting on the platforms they use. As a result, they doubled the agency's revenue during a tough financial environment. However, he says digital agencies have to pay attention to the trends and go where the attention is. For example, Tik Tok is widely viewed as the newest fad in social media. In order to ensure that Tik Tok advertising is something he is able to offer to his clients, Dean must familiarize himself with the platform.
Why Your Agency Should Charge for Strategy"One thing I've learned," Dean says, "Is to understand what you offer and not accept anything less." What this means for La Grange Digital is that they've quit giving away their strategy for free. It's easy for an agency just starting out to begin offering free work and strategy to get its name out there. In fact, Dean is quick to explain that -- for the right client -- he is still willing to provide free strategy. Most of the time, however, he prefers to work with clients who are willing to pay right from the start. This "trains" the client to place a value on the services they're receiving, and to view the agency team as the experts. How the Agency-Client Relationship is a Lot Like DatingSo how do you know if the prospective client is going to work without giving them a bunch of free work to prove yourself? By making your agency's values known from the start. Dean says the agency-client relationship is a lot like dating. If you fail to communicate your values and needs to the other person from the beginning, you cannot really wonder a few years down the road why it isn't working out. Do You Have the Right Systems to Scale Your Agency?Dean says having a successful agency relies on one very important ingredient: a commitment to serving your clients. Having that focus ensures that you're going to do what is needed to keep them happy. He credits the systems in the Agency Playbook for providing his agency's framework. It includes 8 systems for everything from growing your team and determining your offering to building your sales pipeline. Through this, Dean created a repeatable process that not only solidifies the expectations for his team but also for his clients. The pandemic was a good time for Dean and his team to take stock of what they offer to their clients and to move forward with a fresh focus on their commitment. That is important, he explains, as the time is coming when those who are in business for the wrong reasons will be discovered. "Those who love will shine," he says.
Direct download: Does_Your_Digital_Agency_Have_the_Right_Systems_to_Scale_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Sun, 28 February 2021
Wondering if it's time to hire an agency president? If you're feeling like the burden of the day-to-day is holding you back, it might be time! Are you being stretched in too many directions? Are you wondering how to find the right person to help run your agency? Every agency reaches the point of choosing to stay on that plateau or hire a leader capable of reaching the next level. In this episode, we'll cover:
I talked to Doug Joseph, the Founder and CEO of Serif Creative. Serif started as a video production company, before adding additional services including brand strategy, creative storytelling, and digital marketing. There came a point in Doug's journey of founding and leading Serif when he realized he needed help with certain aspects of the agency. He is here to talk about why he chose to hire a president and how he found a great person for the job. Signs It's Time to Hire an Agency PresidentDoug's strength and desire have always been creative storytelling. This is what led him to create an agency in the first place. However, "I'm a big picture guy," he says. "I'm not good with the day-to-day details." It's that self-awareness that led Doug to the conclusion that he needed to bring on a president. What Doug realized is by finding someone with strengths opposite of his, each of them was able to focus their time and attention on the aspects of the business that they were passionate about. Meanwhile, there is peace of mind knowing the other parts of the business are being taken care of by someone who is equally passionate about what they do.
How to Find an Agency PresidentWhen Doug decided it was time to hire a president to allow his agency to grow, he was looking for someone to handle the aspects of the agency he was less passionate about. A large part of hiring for the position was giving the person flexibility to create his own position based on the needs they identified. Serif Creative's President brought a keen ability for acquiring new projects and a strength in providing digital services. Both were welcome additions to the business. "It's all about desire," Doug explains. "If a person is passionate about the work they are doing, then there is less management of that position required. When there is less desire, more management and more accountability are required." A great resource for finding someone to help lead your agency is through your professional network. However, Doug says to use caution when hiring friends or friends of your team members as it can create awkward situations if they're not a good fit. Onboarding an Agency President Your Team Will LoveSerif Creative's President had mutual friends with Doug and was doing freelance work at the time the two met. Doug hired him to provide consultation on certain agency issues. This resulted in an increase in business, including a retainer from a Fortune 500 client. Doug felt comfortable offering the consultant the permanent position because he was confident in his skills and ability. Additionally, it allowed the team to all become familiar before adding him on at a management level. Bottom line, Stop being Chief Everything Officer. Find a way to do what you're good at, whether that involves acquiring work or producing work. Find someone who shares your goals for the agency and passion for clients but brings different strengths. This can help your agency land new clients, produce new service offerings, or otherwise grow and thrive. Related: https://jasonswenk.com/digital-agency-ceo/ Would you like a 90% close rate on the deals you want?It took my agency years to develop a solid foot in the door offer that converted at a high rate. And, Ian has spent the last 10 years developing his too. That's why we decided to collaborate and create the FITD framework to share with other agency owners. If you want to learn more check out FootInTheDoorFramework.com. You can discover the exact framework that Ian and I created so you can be successful. Close deals faster, stop giving away strategy for free and win the deals you want. When you have the right framework, you will find your sales process is scalable. You can even step away from sales and so you can spend your time working on the best.
Direct download: How_Do_You_Know_Its_Time_to_Hire_an_Agency_President_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00pm MDT |
Wed, 24 February 2021
Are you tired of losing time and money on RFPs? Do you want to start charging for creative strategy? There's a long-standing debate in the agency world about whether or not we should pitch for free. It all comes down to knowing when and how to position a paid strategy. In this episode, we'll cover:
I talked to Aleena Mazhar, Vice President and Managing Director of the Experiential Division of Fuse Create, a marketing and ad agency based in Toronto. Aleena is a self-admitted addict to the fast-paced nature and constant problem-solving of the agency culture. Aleena has experienced both organic growth in her agency as well as growth fueled by pitching the agency's services through the traditional RFP process. She is here to talk about both methods and when it's ok to give your ideas away for free. Pitching New Clients Vs. Organic Agency GrowthAleena says she and her partners at Fuse were fortunate that when they created their agency, they each brought clients with them. This fueled a lot of organic growth, as the agency leaned on these existing clients for input on how to expand their services to meet their needs. This helped build a stronger relationship with their clients. By being responsive to their needs Fuse was willing to grow alongside their clients. It also brought new business through word-of-mouth from those satisfied clients. How Your Agency Can Get Paid for the PitchAleena feels you should not be pitching for free. Pitching for free is essentially giving away your creative vision to a company that could ultimately decide they don't want to work with you. Your time and your agency's creativity deserve compensation. How do you get paid for the pitch though, particularly in an industry where free pitches are commonplace? One way involves assisting an existing client in developing a strategy for their RFP on an upcoming launch. By getting your team involved in strategizing with the client on what they are looking for, you ensure your team's work isn't being given away. You also position your agency to win the proposal since you have been involved from the early stages and have helped develop the proposal requirements that you must meet. Additionally, there is comfort for the client in working with a team they have already become familiar with. Should Your Agency Ever Work for Free?While the preference is getting paid for creativity, Aleena says there are projects the agency will pitch for free because they are simply so enthusiastic about the work. They're willing to take the risk just to be involved in it. As a smaller agency, very selective with the clients they work with, Fuse can't afford to do free pitches often. However, if it's the right fit; the right size, the right niche, and the right service needs - it's a no-brainer. "In your heart, you know when it's the right thing to do," she says. With those unicorn opportunities too big to risk putting the client off with a paid pitch, Aleena says it's important to involve all levels of the agency team. This reinforces the feeling of transparency that builds trust between the client and the team and helps the client feel that his or her needs are of the greatest importance to the agency. Would you like a 90% close rate on the deals you want?It took my agency years to develop a solid foot in the door offer that converted at a high rate. And, Ian has spent the last 10 years developing his too. That's why we decided to collaborate and create the FITD framework to share with other agency owners. If you want to learn more check out FootInTheDoor.com. You can discover the exact framework that Ian and I created so you can be successful. Close deals faster, stop giving away strategy for free and win the deals you want. When you have the right framework, you will find your sales process is scalable. You can even step away from sales and so you can spend your time working on the best.
Direct download: Should_Your_Marketing_Agency_Pitch_for_Free_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Mon, 22 February 2021
Are you struggling to attract new clients with your outbound marketing? Do you need to build deeper connections with your prospects? The key is creating an outbound strategy that is worthy of prospects' engagement. In a time when we're all bombarded with multimedia and social media, what are you doing to make your agency stand out from the rest? In today's episode, we'll cover:
Today I had a really fun chat with Jonathan McFarlane, Director of Strategy at Hybrid Marketing Company. His agency deals almost exclusively with cannabis and hemp companies. The agency hasn't experienced a lot of the challenges many other agencies are facing during the economic downturn. That said, Jonathan still works hard to look for opportunities to grow his agency. He is sharing what he's done to reignite his agency's outbound marketing strategy and how he's using humor to connect with prospects during this difficult time. How to Send Emails Your Prospects Actually Want to OpenHybrid Marketing Company started three years ago. During that time, the agency has relied heavily on referrals to bring in new clients. But while referrals are great, they are not a scalable approach for continued growth. Recently, Jonathan decided to switch things up. Now, the agency does a lot of LinkedIn networking and cold emails to build up their network. The problem with email campaigns is most people won't even open an email unless they already have a personal connection with the sender. Yet Jonathan averages a 55-60% open rate. How? Jonathan says his goal is to create funny, witty emails. His emails feature his new work-from-home "assistant" — his two-year-old daughter who says, "it's time to build new connections." Each email features a link to a case study and a picture of his assistant doing something cute and irresistible, like "sleeping on the job" :) Jonathan's advice is to get creative, have fun, and try to connect with prospects on a personal level. You also want to do some research and personalized the email. Be relatable and unique so your emails are read instead of ignored. How Personalization Can Help Your Agency Win ClientsEven if you can get a prospect to open an email, it can still be a hard sell to get a client to reach out to you, especially in today's climate. This is where personalization can set you apart. Every now and then, Jonathan will check out the websites of prospects who he thinks might be a good fit. Then he'll email them with specific ways his agency can help. Obviously, most agencies don't have the time to personalize every email they send out. Focus on prospects who align with your agency's strengths or those with an existing connection. Even if they don't need you yet, when they do decide to hire an agency, they'll remember the extra work you put in. Should Your Agency Outsource Outbound Sales Research?If personalized emails are so effective, then wouldn't it make sense to outsource your research so you can maximize outreach efforts? The choice is up to you, but Jonathan says he likes to keep the research in-house. When you bring in a third party to gather information, there's an extra level of communication. Think of it like the game of telephone — you risk losing valuable information with every layer that stands between you and your potential client. When your team is doing the research, you'll have a better idea of what makes your agency best suited to meet the client's needs. When you're trying to build new connections, it can be difficult to get people to pay attention. Find ways to stand out and show you're invested. Even if a prospect doesn't reach out to you right away, there's a good chance you'll leave an impression. Looking for a Payroll and HR Solution for your Agency?Payroll and benefits are hard. Especially when you're a small business. Gusto is making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for small businesses. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. For a limited time, Gusto is offering a deal to Smart Agency Master Class listeners. Check out Gusto.com/agency for 3-months FREE once you run your first payroll with them.
Direct download: Do_You_Send_Emails_Your_Agency_Prospects_Want_to_Open_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Wed, 17 February 2021
Are you having trouble scaling your agency? Considering a merger as a growth plan? Have you been approached about merging with another agency? A merger can be a great way to scale up faster by adding a new, complimentary service or a bigger piece of the niche. On the other hand, agency mergers are just as risky as starting the business the first time. If you're considering a merger, there are ways to ensure it is successful In this episode, we'll cover:
I talked to Lisa Vielee, who merged her small, 4-person team with a larger full-service agency 15 years ago. Initially, she was seeking a mentor to learn how to scale. He agreed, but also asked her to consider merging the agencies and succeeding him when he retired. The two now have a team of 30 people, and Lisa is President of Well Done Marketing. She is here to explain how the agency has thrived since the merger. Three Plans You Need to Make When MergingLisa agreed to merge her agency with Well Done Marketing because she had reached the point with her four-person team where she either needed to let them go and return to freelancing or scale into something bigger. She chose a mentor who had successfully grown his own full-service agency. Instead, the two decided to merge agencies. This isn't a simple process, however. It involved developing plans and getting on the same page in three different areas:
Why Some Team Members Might Not Follow Your Agency MergerOne of the scary things involved in a merger is the notion that your existing team may not agree with the new direction. Part of Lisa's own growth was learning the importance of giving her team the information they need and letting them decide to stay or not. When Lisa's agency merged with Well Done, she did lose some team members. However, because she was able to realize they had a responsibility to choose their own career path, she continues to partner with those former employees on projects. Lisa turns to them when she needs freelance work and has the opportunity to see them continue to grow and contribute to the creative community. Creating Team Trust Through VulnerabilityBut wait, the work isn't finished once the merger itself is complete and the teams are working together. Lisa explains you must create cohesion and a unified vision for the team. A few years ago, some young team members requested to add empathy to the team's culture. However, what Lisa realized, was in order to receive empathy, they needed to first become vulnerable to one another. Vulnerability, she says, is the act of letting go of control of the outcome and trusting others in their role. It involves talking to people, not just about the work but about outside things that impact their work. This was something she learned as President of the merged agency -- a role that allows her to step back, view how the agency is functioning, and create a culture without micromanaging the work being done by the team. Would you like a 90% close rate on the deals you want?It took my agency years to develop a solid foot in the door offer that converted at a high rate. And, Ian has spent the last 10 years developing his too. That's why we decided to collaborate and create the FITD framework to share with other agency owners. If you want to learn more check out FootInTheDoor.com. You can discover the exact framework that Ian and I created so you can be successful. Close deals faster, stop giving away strategy for free and win the deals you want. When you have the right framework, you will find your sales process is scalable. You can even step away from sales and so you can spend your time working on the best.
Direct download: How_to_Make_Sure_Your_Agency_Merger_is_Successful.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Mon, 15 February 2021
Does your agency have the right people and the right systems in place? Do you want to work smarter, not harder? If it seems like no matter how much time and work you invest, you just stay stagnant, it may be time to review these four basic things. In this episode, we'll cover:
Today I sat down to talk with Robert Craven, founder of GYDA Initiative and author of Grow Your Digital Agency. Robert works with digital agencies to help them figure out what they want and the life they want to live. He's here to talk about what he thinks is working right now (and what's not) and why so many smaller agencies struggle. 4 Things Successful Agencies are Doing Right NowThere's no doubt many agencies across the globe are struggling right now. While the pandemic has hit some industries harder than others, Robert says there are a few things he has noticed some agencies are doing right to stay afloat in today's economic climate. So what can you do to grow your agency today and when the economy gets back to "normal"?
Naturally, Robert has also noticed things that don't work, regardless of the economic climate. This includes:
Why You Shouldn't Compare Yourself to Larger AgenciesRobert and I have both worked with many smaller agencies that attempt to replicate the success of larger agencies. They'll go in and copy the website or a marketing campaign because "if it worked for them, it will work for us." This simply isn't true. The successful agencies are the ones who take time to do the boring stuff. They measure time and profitability and have long-term contracts in place. But they're also the ones who are able to be a solution to their client's problems. Remember, your client doesn't want to hear about how great you are or what awards you won, they want to hear how you will make their life easier. How Do You Measure Your Agency's Success?How does your agency define success? Most agency owners look at margins, EBITDA, or how many clients they have. But profits are variable and can depend on a variety of factors. As such, they aren't always the most reliable indicator of success. At the end of the day, most of us got into the business to be able to do what we want and pick and choose who we work with. But you can't just skip to the end and have a million-dollar agency. To find success, you need to go back to the basics. Understand how to manage a business and people and figure out how to get the right systems in place. Success doesn't just come down to the numbers. It's about fulfillment and significance. Are You Planning to Sell Your Agency Some Day?I tell agency owners I work with, start with the end in mind. What do you want to get out of your agency and how do you plan to get there? A lot of the time, the end goal is to sell the agency for a profit. But what if you didn't? If you run a successful agency, selling it isn't your only option. You may be tired of the day-to-day grind now, but as agency owners, we're creators. While the idea of selling your agency and living off the proceeds may seem great, in actuality, it can quickly become boring. Instead, why not take a step back and bring on someone to run the agency while you continue to pull a paycheck? Then when you are ready to sell, you have allowed your agency to grow even bigger. The agencies that have the most success are the ones who have a good understanding of the basics. Understand your agency and make yourself a trusted advisor. When you do, you'll find it easier to have the freedom to pick and choose what you want to do. Looking for a Payroll and HR Solution for your Agency?Payroll and benefits are hard. Especially when you're a small business. Gusto is making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for small businesses. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. For a limited time, Gusto is offering a deal to Smart Agency Master Class listeners. Check out Gusto.com/agency for 3-months FREE once you run your first payroll with them.
Direct download: 4_Things_Successful_Agencies_Are_Doing_Right_Now.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Wed, 10 February 2021
Worried about your agency's future? Do you second guess every decision you make? There's no doubt, things are uncertain right now. But what if you took this moment to focus on the opportunities available right now, instead of the challenges that could get in your way? In this episode, we'll cover:
Today I sat down for an informative chat with Rudy Fernandez, CEO of Creative Outhouse. Rudy started his agency in October 2001, right after 9/11. Less than 10 years later, Rudy faced another challenge, the death of his partner during an economic crisis. And now, Covid-19. He's here to talk about how his agency has survived when many people would have given up and what you can do right now to protect your agency's future. 3 Tips to Help Your Agency Survive AdversityRudy has seen his share of adversity over the past 20+ years. But through every twist and turn, Rudy has managed to push through and grow his agency into what it is today. So what's his secret?
Why You Should Build Relationships with Fellow Agency OwnersWhen I first started my agency, I had the mindset of 'seek and destroy.' If I won, that meant somebody else had to lose. But this isn't how it has to be or how it should be. In fact, your fellow agency owners can be some of your biggest allies, mentors, and friends. Other agency owners have the same unique perspective and it benefits you to build those relationships, not destroy them. Rudy says the agency owner community is a unique one that is always looking out for one another. Sometimes we compete for a client, but ultimately we want to see each other do well. Rudy and I agree, we're all in this together. If you're facing a challenging time, chances are, one of us has been there. Learn from the mistakes of others. I've grown so much by working with those around me. Create those win-wins and build your network. When you do, they'll be another person there to support you when you need it. Can Your Agency Grow In An Economic Downturn?Believe it or not, you can grow your agency during an economic downturn or challenge. Now is the perfect time to self-reflect and evaluate your agency. Your number one client should always be yourself. Figure out the stuff you like to do (and the stuff you don't). Take a close look at your vision. Are you working with the type of clients you want to and doing what you love? Do you have a clear vision? Your vision is the foundation of everything and yet it is a step so many of us skip. If you expect to have any sort of longevity as an agency owner, inevitably you will face adversity. When that happens, challenge yourself to do what you love and focus on the wins, big and small. When you do so, you'll find it easier to keep moving forward, and not just survive, but thrive. Would you like a 90% close rate on the deals you want?It took my agency years to develop a solid foot in the door offer that converted at a high rate. And, Ian has spent the last 10 years developing his too. That's why we decided to collaborate and create the FITD framework to share with other agency owners. If you want to learn more check out FootInTheDoor.com. You can discover the exact framework that Ian and I created so you can be successful. Close deals faster, stop giving away strategy for free and win the deals you want. When you have the right framework, you will find your sales process is scalable. You can even step away from sales and so you can spend your time working on the best.
Direct download: How_Can_Your_Agency_Survive_and_Thrive_in_Difficult_Times_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Mon, 8 February 2021
Is your growing team in need of more structure? Do you feel like you're too caught up in the little stuff? Or does the small stuff turn real big, real fast? Too often, as owners, we hesitate to give up any sort of control out of fear. The truth is, when you are willing to delegate and bring in support, you free up time to focus on your agency's growth. In this episode, we'll cover:
Today I sat down with Ben Askins, owner and managing director of Verb, a full-service agency based out of London. In the six years since Ben has been with the agency, Verb has gone from a project-based structure to a retainer-based model. The agency has subsequently grown from a small team to a team of about 65. Ben's here to discuss how he keeps such a big team motivated and what he's doing now to make sure they feel comfortable about the agency's future. Does Your Team Have the Tools to Succeed?Any good leader knows, your team is your biggest asset. So it makes sense, if the team is unmotivated or disorganized, you're going to have a problem. Ben says one of the best things his agency did was create an HR department. Here they were able to develop their brand pillars and create incentives to keep their team motivated. While individual programs like peer-to-peer recognition and limelight awards help build morale, one of the biggest investments has been in manager training. Ben says, no one ever sits down with you and tells you, "this is how to be a manager, this is how you train, and this is how you can increase morale." So, when it comes time for annual reviews, there's a disconnect between what the manager expects and how the employee thinks they are actually doing. Verb devotes half of their training budget for the employee to spend on enrichment programs of their choice and half on what the manager deems necessary. This helps everyone be on the same page and allows for self-improvement and re-investment. Is it Time for Your Agency to Hire an HR Person?Not enough agency owners recognize the value of a strong human resources presence. While we often look at HR professionals as paper pushers who deal with insurance and employee discipline, HR is actually a vital part of any organization. Think about it this way, as an agency owner or CEO, you may have two, three, or even four layers between you and your lowest level employee. This makes it hard to know what's going on in your agency. Something may start as a minor problem, but by the time it gets to you, it's too late. The purpose of HR is to sort out these problems and identify them before they become something bigger. So when is the right time to bring in HR? Ben says if he could do it all again, he'd bring on HR as soon as there was more than one layer of seniority away from the team. How Transparency Builds Trust With Your TeamLike so many other agencies and businesses right now, Verb has furloughed several members of its team. And while this is never easy, Ben says one of the things that has really helped is transparency. Everyone at the agency has complete access to the business financials. At a time like this, there is no benefit to hiding information. Your team needs to make decisions just as much as you do, so knowing a layoff may be coming can help them prepare. The same goes when you hire people back on. When you support your decisions with margins, your managers can better understand your decisions and what benchmarks they have to meet. Margins become less arbitrary, allowing your managers to appreciate these guidelines are designed to promote agency growth, not pad profits. Do You Need to Learn to Trust Your Leadership Team?Bringing in HR and being transparent only go so far if you are constantly being a toll booth for your team. I've worked with many owners who think everything needs to go through them for approval. Give your team autonomy and let your managers run their departments. When you do this, you'll have time to focus on growing the agency and doing the things that will help your agency succeed. Trust in yourself and the team you've built. When you do this, you'll find everyone is more motivated to help the agency continue to grow. Looking for a Payroll and HR Solution for your Agency?Payroll and benefits are hard. Especially when you're a small business. Gusto is making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for small businesses. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. For a limited time, Gusto is offering a deal to Smart Agency Master Class listeners. Check out Gusto.com/agency for 3-months FREE once you run your first payroll with them.
Direct download: Is_It_Time_to_Hire_a_Human_Resources_Role_for_Your_Agency_Team_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Wed, 3 February 2021
Would you like to close deals faster? Are you tired of giving away strategy for free and only getting paid for execution? If you want to convert more prospects into agency clients you need a solid foot in the door offer to make it an easy decision to work with you. In this episode, we’ll cover:
On today's show, I chatted with my friend Ian Garlic who founded Authentic Web and StoryCrews. Ian is on the show to talk about how his foot in the door framework has helped him grow and scale both businesses. If you want to get a 90% close rate on working with the clients you choose, this is the guy to learn from. 4 Big Benefits of Selling a Foot in the Door Offer1. Speed up your sales cycle. A foot in the door is a no-brainer. It’s an easier “yes” and therefore, doesn’t take as much time for a client to decide on. 2. Future pacing. It’s like dating before proposing marriage. It gives both parties the chance to see what it’s like to work together on a small project before committing to a longer-term project at a higher cost. 3. Charge more in the long run. The key is finding the sweet spot for your FITD price point. You want to charge enough that it keeps the time-wasters away, but also charge enough that serious prospects can easily commit. 4. Set up your team for success. When you sell the foot in the door offer it is easy to get your team involved right off the bat. The client can see how awesome they are and will be ready for you to hand them off for the bigger stuff later on. What Are the Components of a Great Foot in the Door Offer?Ian says the best foot in the door (FITD) is a small, low cost, no-brainer offer that provides something of value and is a splinter of your agency’s core service. It’s an easy and secure decision. The key is keeping it simple, valuable, and affordable. When it is easy to understand the benefit and there’s little or no risk involved, it’s much easier to say ‘yes’. Plus, you get a sense of what it’s like to work with each other on a small project before you take on something much bigger. And if they’re a PITA client, you’ll know sooner than later. ( PITA = pain in the a$$ :) Don’t just do an audit and review it with them. You need to build something for them that demonstrates your agency’s strengths and makes them want more. However, it needs to also be easily repeatable so you're not reinventing the wheel every time. 2 Mistakes to Avoid with a Foot in the Door Offer1. Starting a new service. Your FITD offer needs to be a slice off of your existing services. It should be an obvious continuation to the next project with you. If your offer is not a natural lead-in to the rest of your offering that defeats the purpose. 2. Not being hands-on. The point is to give the client a taste of what it’s like to work with you. You need to interact with them during the foot in the door process so the client can feel and see what it’s like to work with you (and you with them). How to Sell a Foot in the Door Offer that ConvertsHere’s the thing, you can’t just go sell a FITD offer. You need to have a solid process in place. You need to help the client build something. Think about how you can get their answers to these questions: Where are they now? Where do they want to go? How can we get you there? I like to tell prospects, there will be one of three outcomes from the foot in the door.
They literally have nothing to lose. Ian says a successful FITD provides alignment with your prospect’s end goals. You need to position it as a small step toward their goals and when you are successful at that small step, there is a natural tendency to continue onto the next step. This positions you as a strategist instead of just an order-taker. Would you like a 90% close rate on the deals you want?It took my agency years to develop a solid foot in the door offer that converted at a high rate. And, Ian has spent the last 10 years developing his too. That's why we decided to collaborate and create the FITD framework to share with other agency owners. If you want to learn more check out FootInTheDoor.com. You can discover the exact framework that Ian and I created so you can be successful. Close deals faster, stop giving away strategy for free and win the deals you want. When you have the right framework, you will find your sales process is scalable. You can even step away from sales and so you can spend your time working on the best.
Direct download: Agency_Foot_In_the_Door_Framework_with_90_Close_Rate.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Mon, 1 February 2021
Does your team come to you for every little decision? Not sure how to empower your employees to take more initiative? A lot of agency owners find themselves in this frustrating position. There's actually an easier fix than you think. The answer may be as simple as setting a clear vision. In this episode, we'll cover:
Today I sat down with Luke Kempski, president and CEO of JPL, a marketing communications agency based out of Harrisburg. Luke started at the agency 30 years ago as a production employee and took over the agency roughly 15 years ago. He's here to talk about some of the mistakes he has made along the way and how he has created a team that supports the agency vision. How to Build a Cohesive Agency TeamWhen I asked Luke about some of the mistakes he has made at JPL, one of the first things he brought up is his team. Luke says when you run an agency, you have to be careful about creating hard lines and segmenting departments. Instead, you want everyone on the same team, working towards the same goal. When you divide goals and incentives by department, you inevitably create competition. While a certain level of competition is healthy, it becomes a problem when it interferes with the agency's goals as a whole. Luke says he uses profit sharing based on the agency's profits (not each department) to incentivize his team. This way, each department is more apt to work together instead of against each other. How to Create and Fulfill Your Agency's VisionDo you have a clear vision for your agency? If not, you're not alone. Luke says it took him about 5 years before he realized he needed to create a vision his leaders could follow and buy into. One of the main reasons so many agency owners put off creating a vision is they don't know where to start. The truth is, it's a lot easier than you think. When your team knows and believes in the vision, it will be easier for them to make decisions without you. Luke decided to look at multiple resources to create his agency's vision. Not only did he involve his team, but he also talked to his clients. Luke meets bi-monthly with his team regarding initiatives and progress. Every two years, the agency brings in a third-party to interview the clients about what they expect from the agency, what their experience has been, and how JPL stacks up compared to other agencies the clients work with. Luke says this insight is invaluable because it gives the team a different perspective and makes the agency's vision less arbitrary. How Important are Core Values During an Acquisition?Core values and vision go hand-in-hand. To grow as an agency, everyone has to be on the same page. This is easy when you're building your own agency, but what happens during an acquisition? Do core values of the two agencies have to align? Having gone through several acquisitions, Luke says there does need to be good alignment between the two. When you're bringing creatives together, it can be difficult to find cohesiveness and build collaborative relationships. The more your values align, the easier this process will be. Your success as an agency will be based on the strength of your team and their ability to follow your vision. But your team can't do their job if they don't know what the agency's vision actually is. When you take the time to create and share your vision with the people in your agency, you'll find everyone's job becomes a lot easier. Looking for a Payroll and HR Solution for your Agency?Payroll and benefits are hard. Especially when you're a small business. Gusto is making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for small businesses. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. For a limited time, Gusto is offering a deal to Smart Agency Master Class listeners. Check out Gusto.com/agency for 3-months FREE once you run your first payroll with them.
Direct download: Is_Your_Digital_Agency_Team_Empowered_to_Make_Decisions_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Wed, 27 January 2021
Are you looking for a way to stand out as "the choice" instead of "a choice"? Do you want your agency prospects to view you as more than just one of the "me too" agencies? In a space where everyone's the same, you have to figure out what makes you different. Then leverage that difference to win more agency clients. In this episode, we'll cover:
Today I sat down for a really important discussion with Robert Pepper, strategy partner and co-founder of PSLondon, a 13- year old digital marketing agency based out of London. After nearly 20 years working on the client side of projects, Robert and his partner decided to start an agency of their own. He's here to talk about what his agency has done to stand out in such a competitive field. How to Stop Being One of the "Me Too" AgenciesWhen Robert and his partner started their agency, they knew they needed to find a way to make clients choose them above everyone else. There's no shortage of options for clients when it comes to choosing an agency. And often, price is the only thing that separates one agency from the next. So what can you do to make your agency stand out from the rest?
How Your Agency's Vision Can Help Land More ClientsYou can go into a pitch meeting promising the world, but guess what, other agencies are doing the exact same thing. However, when you tie your agency's vision and purpose into the pitch, you will stand apart. This is why it is so important to understand who you are as an agency. Robert says he's never had a problem getting clients to buy in at the early stages because everyone is interested in the future. When you can go into a meeting and tell a client "this is what we do and this is how we can help you," they're going to have an easier time signing on. How to Position Your Agency as a Trusted AdvisorThe real challenge comes when you sign on a client and have to figure out a way to measure and deliver results. A lot of clients don't know what they want or how to define it so it's your job to help them figure it out. The most important goal of an agency is building a relationship which helps your client achieve their goals. You provide a service, and ultimately, it's the client who makes the final decision. Too many agencies focus on themselves when most clients just want to know you share the same goals. When you make the client the superhero and not you, they're more likely to stick around. There are so many ways you can help your agency stand out from the crowd. But ultimately, the most important thing you can do is know who you are. When you understand what makes you valuable and different from anyone else, it will be easier for your clients to see it as well. Ready to See How Your Agency Financials Stack Up?Agency Dad is the accounting and forecasting solution designed specifically for agencies. And for a limited time, Smart Agency listeners can get a FREE AUDIT so you can compare your agency's financials to the industry benchmarks. When you know your numbers you can make smart decisions in order to grow your agency. Agency Dad will take you to the next level with bookkeeping, financial dashboarding, and forecasting built specifically for agencies. Head over to AgencyDad.money/freeaudit/ to receive a free audit on your agency's financials.
Direct download: 2_Things_to_Separate_You_from_the__Me_Too__Agencies.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Mon, 25 January 2021
Do you want to know what pricing model is right for your agency? Do your clients understand the value of the services you provide? Are you doing enough to make sure your clients stick around? Performance-based pricing can be a great model to help grow your agency, but only when clients understand the real value your agency brings to the table. In this episode, we'll cover:
Today I sat down for an informative chat with Justin Buckley, partner at ATTN, a performance and growth digital marketing agency. After spending years working in affiliate marketing, Justin and his partners realized they were spending too much time and money building other people's brands. Two years ago they decided it was time to make something of their own. Justin's here to talk about how their unique pricing model and aggressive goal setting helped grow ATTN fast. Is Performance-Based Pricing Right for Your Agency?One of the most important decisions you'll make is how to charge for your services. Whether you charge on value or performance, there a few things to consider:
When ATTN chose a pricing model, they chose to go with a hybrid approach. What this looks like is a combination of a flat fee and a percentage of ad spend. ATTN chose to build a performance model into their pricing structure since they are a performance agency. Ultimately, when they perform well, their clients perform well and want to spend more. The more their clients spend, the more the agency makes off the ad spend. This helps balance out the lack of control the agency has on the backend of operations as well as offset the cost of working with clients who aren't as focused on growth. As you grow, you'll quickly learn what works for your agency. Don't be afraid to charge what you're worth and be willing to put the measure of your agency's performance on the line. How to Help Clients Understand Value and PerformanceThere's a risk that comes with performance based pricing. If the clients don't get the expected results based on your performance, you aren't going to get paid what you need to. At the end of the day, it's up to you to get your clients to see the value of your services and make sure your agency can achieve the right outcomes. Justin says the number one thing they rely on to help their clients understand what they are getting is communication. If you don't show your clients what you are doing and the results you're achieving, how else are they going to know? While it's important to have regular meetings to review benchmarks and create goals, it's also essential your clients know you're invested in them. Talk to them about what they want to achieve and get a real understanding of their vision. When you know what your client wants and what they are working towards, you'll have an easier time delivering results. Why Your Agency Needs to Set Big GoalsIf you're not setting goals at your agency, you have nothing to work towards. Whether you're creating an exit strategy, improving cash flow, or building your team, you need to have goals. Don't be afraid to set goals that make you uncomfortable. The best way to meet your goals is to break them into manageable chunks. Want to be at $10 million in profits after 10 years? Where do you have to be at year five to make this achievable? Now break it down even more. What does year three look like? Year one? Finally, figure out what each quarter, each month, and each week looks like. When you do this, not only do you have a way to hold your team accountable, but you can also start putting the right pieces into place and deploying the resources you need to hit your goals. As an agency owner, your job is to provide a service. And with this, you continually have to prove your worth. Talk to your clients, create benchmarks, and schedule regular check-ins. When you and your client are on the same page, you'll both find it easier to find success.
Looking for a Payroll and HR Solution for your Agency?Payroll and benefits are hard. Especially when you're a small business. Gusto is making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for small businesses. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. For a limited time, Gusto is offering a deal to Smart Agency Master Class listeners. Check out Gusto.com/agency for 3-months FREE once you run your first payroll with them. Building Your AgencyI have advice for challenges you will face building your agency including recognizing common agency mistakes, how to keep great agency employees in your team as well as fostering the connections made with clients. If it’s challenging growing your business, I have agency growth hacks, the best ways to improve management of your business as well as why building a remote team can be beneficial in the long run. Learn more about my experience, as well as tips, tricks, and insights by checking out my blogs that cover a wide variety of topics. You can learn more from my experience from my Ask Swenk series and my videos on my Youtube channel. Check out the advice and learn even more from other successful agency experts featured on Smart Agency podcast twice every week.
Direct download: What_Agency_Pricing_Model_Helped_One_Agency_Grow_Super_Fast_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Wed, 20 January 2021
Are you considering starting an agency but worried now's not the right time? Are you afraid of failure or the added pressure of these uncertain times? It's totally understandable! Starting a business is scary, but especially during an economic downturn. So you might be surprised to learn now may actually be one of the best times to start an agency. In this episode, we'll cover:
Today I sat down for a timely conversation with Scott Cullather, co-founder and CEO of INVNT, a live-branding storytelling agency. Scott started his agency right at the start of the economic downturn in 2008 and says doing so helped define who his agency is today. He's here to talk about how his agency thrived during a poor economy and what agency owners need to know today. Should You Start an Agency During an Economic Downturn?There's no doubt we are in one of the most volatile economies in our lifetime. Stocks are in flux, businesses are closing, and realistically, we have no idea what is going to happen tomorrow. But did you know now is actually the perfect time to grow an agency? Scott says one of the reasons his agency found success in 2008 is because there was literally nowhere to go but up. They had no employees, no overhead, and yes, no clients. But this meant every account they gained was one to be celebrated. And each one after was a sign they were moving up. When you have nothing to lose, it takes away your crutches. You don't think about what a certain decision might cost, but rather, what you have to gain. Does Your Agency Have a Challenger Mindset?Scott says starting during an economic meltdown set his agency up with a challenger mindset. Where larger, slower, flatfooted companies were making cuts and avoiding risks, INVNT was able to develop messages, strategies, and campaigns that were not only on brand but were designed to shake things up. Scott says this challenger mindset isn't one the agency has simply moved on from. Instead, it is what pushes the agency to grow. Being scrappy is everything. When you become complacent, that's when you're in the danger zone. Why Self-Awareness is Key to Your Agency's Continued GrowthAn agency owner must be self-aware of the decisions they make and their approach to business. Naturally, you should change your processes and systems as your agency evolves.. While you should always be willing to adapt and grow with the market, never lose that spark and drive you had when you first started your agency. It's like a football team who is up 21-0 that decides to change their strategy. If they lose their drive, they'll quickly find themselves down 28-21. Scott says he's always challenging his team to stay focused and grounded to the core principles that got them to where they are today. Often the ones who find the most success are the ones who aren't afraid to take a risk. When everyone else is stepping back, this is your opportunity to step up. Be scrappy, take chances, and don't be afraid to make big moves. When you start with a fighter attitude you'll discover it's likely a mindset that will stick around. Ready to See How Your Agency Financials Stack Up?Agency Dad is the accounting and forecasting solution designed specifically for agencies. And for a limited time, Smart Agency listeners can get a FREE AUDIT so you can compare your agency's financials to the industry benchmarks. When you know your numbers you can make smart decisions in order to grow your agency. Agency Dad will take you to the next level with bookkeeping, financial dashboarding, and forecasting built specifically for agencies. Head over to AgencyDad.money/freeaudit/ to receive a free audit on your agency's financials.
Direct download: Should_You_Start_a_Digital_Agency_in_an_Economic_Downturn_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Mon, 18 January 2021
Has your agency recently experienced major changes? Is it time to transition away from how you used to do things? Is it time to promote key employees or buyout a partner? Being able to adapt to the market and the needs of your individual agency is one of the best ways to find long term agency success. In today's episode, we'll cover:
Today I sat down for a talk with Cherie Hebert, owner and CEO of BBR Creative out of Lafayette, Louisiana. Cherie has owned her agency for over 23 years now and has naturally seen her agency experience a lot of change. She's here to talk about how she's found longevity and why it's important to be open to changes as they come. Why Your Agency Should Always Be Open to ChangeWe've always heard that one person say, "But this is how I've always done it." This, for me, is always the kiss of death. If you want to be successful, whether you're running an agency, or just in life in general, you have to be open to change. Cherie says she started her agency as a creative. For the most part, they offered design creative and eventually PR. But as things do, the agency realm began to change. When BBR lost a major client and gained another who focused more on digital outreach, they knew they needed to make a change and evolve with the times. Cherie hired a digital strategist who was able to train the team on the basics of SEO. SEM, and paid search. This new person was also instrumental in helping the agency launch into the digital arena. He was also the right person to hire more digital marketing talent and be the catalyst for the change the agency needed. Should You Promote a Key Employee to Agency Partner?The answer is, maybe -- it all depends on timing. Cherie says she has never lost an employee to another local agency. Where she loses team members is to other markets and bigger agencies that offer more opportunities. That is why Cherie regrets not offering her digital strategist a partnership role in the agency before he left. Here are 2 reasons why you might want to offer a key player a partnership role:
Does Your Agency Have a Succession Plan?In the beginning, we have a tendency to focus on the short game. Thinking about who will take over the agency or how your legacy will live on isn't something that typically comes at the early stages. But at 56-years-old, figuring out a succession plan is something at the top of Cherie's mind. Cherie has bought out one partner, with another soon to follow. She's soon to be the sole owner of the agency. What comes next? That's something Cherie is trying to figure out. As an agency owner, it's something you should always keep in the back of your mind. For starters, Cherie has decided to offer her VP's a partial stake in the agency. I usually suggest a Key Employee Program -- which protects your key employees with some profit-sharing yet prevents you from giving away ownership. (There's more detail about this in the Agency Playbook.) Whether you have been in the business for 5 years or 25 years, one of the best ways to find success is to be willing to adapt and make changes when necessary. Don't be afraid to try new things, but be true to yourself. If you do this, you're more likely to be satisfied with how everything turns out in the end. Looking for a Payroll and HR Solution for your Agency?Payroll and benefits are hard. Especially when you're a small business. Gusto is making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for small businesses. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. For a limited time, Gusto is offering a deal to Smart Agency Master Class listeners. Check out Gusto.com/agency for 3-months FREE once you run your first payroll with them. Building Your AgencyI have advice for challenges you will face building your agency including recognizing common agency mistakes, how to keep great agency employees in your team as well as fostering the connections made with clients. If it’s challenging growing your business, I have agency growth hacks, the best ways to improve management of your business as well as why building a remote team can be beneficial in the long run. Learn more about my experience, as well as tips, tricks, and insights by checking out my blogs that cover a wide variety of topics. You can learn more from my experience from my Ask Swenk series and my videos on my Youtube channel. Check out the advice and learn even more from other successful agency experts featured on Smart Agency podcast twice every week.
Direct download: Why_Embracing_Change_Leads_to_Longterm_Agency_Success.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Wed, 13 January 2021
Do you know what separates your agency from competitors? Are you looking for a way to attract new clients and hold on to the ones you have? Clients have a lot of choices when it comes to choosing an agency. So how did a fourth-generation, 90-year-old marketing agency continue to adapt and thrive? In today's episode, we'll cover:
Today I had a really fun talk with Jamie Michelson, President and CEO of SMZ, a digital advertising agency. SMZ was founded by Jamie's grandfather in 1929 and has made it through the great depression, numerous wars, and of course the challenges we now face with COVID 19. As a third-generation agency owner, Jamie has seen a lot. He's here to talk about how his agency has persevered and what they are doing now to continue to grow. Why Your Agency's Story is ImportantI always tell agency owners I work with, you have to have a unique story that separates you from everybody else. For SMZ, they have been around for over 90 years and have been able to leverage that history to build and foster relationships that last for decades. But it's more than just their history. Jamie's philosophy is to do all the stuff their clients expect of them and then throw in a little extra. Not taking anything for granted and focusing on people first is what helps SMZ maintain energy and keep clients around. Your story doesn't have to go back 100 years. You simply have to figure out what makes you different. Are you a small firm? Use this to your advantage. Do you provide a service most agencies don't? Showcase it. Find what connects you to your clients. How a Podcast Can Help Your Agency Find New ClientsI am always surprised at how many agency owners don't have a podcast. A podcast is one of the best ways to expand your reach and gain authority. Jamie started his podcast just over a year ago and is still learning the ropes. But he's already reaping the rewards. Jamie says, some of the people who appear on his podcast wouldn't even give him the time of day if he approached them from a business development angle. But with the podcast, these same people have become great prospects. When you create a podcast, it's so much more than vanity metrics. Focus on your audience and the relationships you can create and foster. 2 Ways to Protect Your Agency's FutureIf you're wondering how many agencies have been around for three generations, the answer is, not that many. Jamie says this type of longevity is extremely rare. So what can you do to create an agency that can be passed down for generations?
Longevity isn't something that comes by accident. It's a lot of resilience and hard work. Keep your foot on the gas and continue to foster relationships. When you do this, you'll find it easier to find long-term success. Ready to See How Your Agency Financials Stack Up?Agency Dad is the accounting and forecasting solution designed specifically for agencies. And for a limited time, Smart Agency listeners can get a FREE AUDIT so you can compare your agency's financials to the industry benchmarks. When you know your numbers you can make smart decisions in order to grow your agency. Agency Dad will take you to the next level with bookkeeping, financial dashboarding, and forecasting built specifically for agencies. Head over to AgencyDad.money/freeaudit/ to receive a free audit on your agency's financials.
Direct download: How_a_90-Year-Old_Agency_Continues_to_Thrive.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Mon, 11 January 2021
How well do you connect with your clients? Do you know what your clients really need? Do you have a system in place to solve clients' problems? Sometimes we automate things to be more efficient, but we lose connections in the process. Personalization can bring back the human element, make your clients feel valued, and help you get to the heart of what your clients need. In today's episode, we'll cover:
Today I sat down for a chat with Anthony Baxter, owner of Firefly, a performance digital marketing agency based out of New Zealand. Anthony started his career in telemarketing sales and has implemented a lot of what he's learned from his past position into how he runs his agency now. He's here to discuss how agencies can benefit from getting back to the human connection. Why Agency Automation Needs More PersonalizationIn an age that's highly digital, it's easy to automate everything. Chatbots can answer questions, email systems can send out automated replies, and CRM's can make it simple to manage clients. So it's easy to ignore the human element. While these tools do make things easier, they often don't take into account what matters the most — your client. Anthony says he's a big fan of picking up the phone and having a conversation. When you have that one-on-one connection, it's easier to understand what your client truly needs. Don't just go all-in with one way to reach out to your clients. It's important to have multiple touchpoints. I suggest using automation to make routine tasks easier but not to replace personal interaction. Have automation but also have personalization. Do your own marketing, but don't be afraid to pick up the phone. By testing and trying out various strategies, you can figure out what approach works best for your clients and your agency. 2 Reasons to Treat Your Agency Like a ClientWhen Anthony first started Firefly, his team spent 50% of their time working on internal projects and creating strategies to help the agency grow. Anthony says, if you're a digital agency, you're good at digital. So why not use your own resources to grow your agency? Firefly has seen two major benefits from this approach:
How Systemization Can Help Your Agency GrowAnthony says systemization has been the key to growth. In the beginning, he held all the agency knowledge himself which created a bottleneck. But over time he has learned the importance of systemizing processes in everything from operations to fulfillment and even sales. In fact, Firefly's systemized sales process has created efficiencies and sped up their sales cycle. This helps them deliver a predictable result every time. This results in happy clients and an efficient agency team. Change is inevitable. And as agencies, we are competing against talent. So Anthony says we must take our systems and bottle them in order to adapt easier and grow faster. To be a successful agency, you have to figure out what works. A lot of that comes from looking within. When you focus on your process and building those key relationships, you'll find it easier to have the freedom to focus on what you want to do. Looking for a Payroll and HR Solution for your Agency?Payroll and benefits are hard. Especially when you're a small business. Gusto is making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for small businesses. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. For a limited time, Gusto is offering a deal to Smart Agency Master Class listeners. Check out Gusto.com/agency for 3-months FREE once you run your first payroll with them.
Direct download: Does_Your_Agency_Automation_Eliminate_Personalization_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Wed, 6 January 2021
Do you use your bank balance to gauge how well your agency is doing? Do you know and understand your key marketing agency financials? Or are you making business decisions blindly? A solid handle on financials and forecasting is one of the best things you can do not only to see where your agency is at but also to make decisions for the future. In today's episode, we'll cover:
[smart_track_player url="https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/jasonswenk/Do_You_Know_Your_Key_Marketing_Agency_Financials_.mp3" ] Today I sat down for an informative discussion with two men who really have a handle on agency finances. Adam Stoker is the president and CEO of Relic and EKR. Nate Jenson is partner at an outsourced CFO agency and the founder of Agency Dad. Agency Dad is an accounting solution focused on helping marketing agencies make better decisions based on their financials. They're here to talk about the key numbers your agency should be looking at and how you can use this data to help your agency grow. Does Your Agency Make Proactive Decisions?When Nate started working with Adam, his agency was struggling. He had a revolving door of bookkeepers who could barely keep the books straight, let alone help him plan for the future. Nate says one of the biggest flaws agency owners have is making reactive decisions instead of being proactive. He says when you understand finances and what you are actually looking at, you can make better decisions. You have to establish benchmarks. This way you know what you should be spending, where you are actually spending, and where you have room to make cuts. In the same line, you need to stop making decisions with your gut. Say, for example, you notice one of your teams is running a little ragged — they're obviously stretched thin. The gut-jerk reaction is to hire more people to take on some of the extra work. But is this the right choice? With metrics, you can see whether your team is busy because you're not charging enough, people are misusing their time, or if you really do need to hire more. 5 Financial Benchmarks Every Agency Should MaintainNate says having cash on hand is an important metric to look at, but it only tells you where you are at this exact moment. Benchmarks and KPI's help you plan for the future. In general, there are certain benchmarks all agencies should work towards. If you are way off, it's time to make a change. According to Nate, these are the percentages you should be hitting in each business expense category.
Sure, there's a little wiggle room. But you really want to stay as close to these numbers as possible. This is why having a good bookkeeper is really important. These numbers mean nothing if the data entry is not accurate. Don't skimp in this area. How to Use Benchmarks to Plan for the FutureA lot of the time, agencies think they are at a certain level. When, in reality, they have no idea what will happen tomorrow. When COVID hit in March 2020, Adam and Nate sat down and looked at where they had room to cut. The sudden change in economic conditions greatly affected the agency's clients. They made the decision to cut employee wages (and their own) by 10%. But because they had this foresight and were able to track their metrics, at the end of the year, the employees got all this money back, plus profit sharing. Proper forecasting helps agencies make proactive decisions, rather than reactive ones. Without planning, you can't make good decisions. Sit down, look at your metrics, and see how close you are. And don't be afraid to invest in a good accountant. Knowing where your money's going is the best way to help your agency grow. Ready to See How Your Agency Financials Stack Up?Agency Dad is the accounting and forecasting solution designed specifically for agencies. And for a limited time, Smart Agency listeners can get a FREE AUDIT so you can compare your agency's financials to the industry benchmarks. When you know your numbers you can make smart decisions in order to grow your agency. Agency Dad will take you to the next level with bookkeeping, financial dashboarding, and forecasting built specifically for agencies. Head over to AgencyDad.money/freeaudit
Direct download: Do_You_Have_a_Handle_on_Your_Marketing_Agency_Financials_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Mon, 4 January 2021
Do you struggle to get agency clients to understand your value? Wish you could be paid what you're worth? Have you ever considered a value-based or performance pricing model? The simple fact is, some clients need to see performance results in order to appreciate value. So if you want your agency to get paid what it's worth, you need to present your agency as an authority. In today's episode, we'll cover:
Today I sat down with Todd Juneau, co-founder of Vuja De, a digital media agency. Todd got started in the agency world during the dot-com era and has subsequently seen a lot of change in the industry. But at the same time, he says, a lot of things have stayed the same. He's here to talk about what this means to agencies today and why his agency is so focused on results. Do You Have to Niche Down to Grow Your Agency?If you have listened to my podcast more than once, you've probably heard a recurring theme — niche, niche, niche. It's no secret, it's my belief you have to specialize to grow your agency. But does that really mean you can't be a full-service agency? In our discussion, Todd says, the main thing he has seen over the past 10 years is specialization. The funnel is becoming narrower and narrower. Clients want an agency that is the best at what they do and to put it simply, it's hard to be a jack of all things and be great in any one area. Start with one thing and become the best in your field. Then, as you grow, you can build different practice areas, bring in new people, and move towards being a full-service agency, if that's what you want. Why It's Important for Your Agency to Build AuthorityToday, Todd says many agencies have transitioned to a more specialized, highly skilled model of service. But one of the biggest challenges agencies face now is things haven't evolved as much when it comes to how clients view agencies. In the 60s, traditional media agencies could get away with 15% commissions because there was less work to do. But now, campaigns require more technology, more specialization, and more human capital. The 15% model just isn't feasible to be profitable and find success. So how do you get your clients to see the value in your work? It's actually pretty straightforward —build your authority. Start a podcast, create videos, or just go out and speak. When people see you as a trusted advisor instead of just another "me too" agency, they're more likely to pay you what you are worth. Are You Leveraging Results to Gain Trust?Todd's built his agency on results. In fact, his agency is so confident in their results they even have a performance-based pricing model. He says clients don't spend money because they want to, they do it to acquire customers and sell their product. When a client can look at the P&L and see, "Wow, we actually did sell more product," they typically have no problem paying you more. The key is to get your clients to stop looking at the vanity metrics and focus on how you are actually helping them achieve more. The good news is, agencies are beginning to shift in this arena and communicate the value of human capital and expertise. At the end of the day, clients will get what they pay for. It's not your job to undervalue your services to attract new clients. When you narrow your focus, build your authority, and produce results, you'll have no problem getting clients to see how much your services are worth. Looking for a Payroll and HR Solution for your Agency?Payroll and benefits are hard. Especially when you're a small business. Gusto is making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for small businesses. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. For a limited time, Gusto is offering a deal to Smart Agency Master Class listeners. Check out Gusto.com/agency for 3-months FREE once you run your first payroll with them.
Direct download: Do_Your_Agency_Clients_Value_the_Results_Youre_Achieving_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am MDT |
Smart Agency Podcast: The #1 Digital Agency Podcast for Social Media, SEO, PPC & Creative Agencies
Categories
general#PODCAST
#AskSwenk Show
business
Archives
AprilMarch
February
January
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |
Syndication
