Smart Agency Podcast: The #1 Digital Agency Podcast for Social Media, SEO, PPC & Creative Agencies

Do you feel that your agency has hit a plateau? Are you wondering what steps you could take to reignite your growth? Maybe it’s time to get out of your comfort zone. Maybe you're not making your agency's needs a priority. Maybe you're just too close to your business and can't see the forest for the trees.

In this week's podcast episode, our Agency Scale Specialist Darby Copenhaver shares the common challenges he's hearing from agencies. In his role, Darby speaks with agency owners who are looking for a leg up, whether that means working with Jason or not, to identify their issues and create a game plan for overcoming them so they can achieve their growth goals.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

  • Overcoming the most common issues for agency owners.
  • How to get more clarity so you can scale.
  • Branding yourself vs. branding the agency.
  • Why the fear of missing out (FOMO) is holding you back.

The Most Common Reasons Agency Growth Reaches a Plateau

As agency owners, we put so much energy into our clients’ success and strategies and we forget to do the same when it comes to our own marketing and growth strategies. Because of this, many of the agency owners that come to us frequently feel stuck. They’ve plateaued and can’t figure out what comes next. In Darby’s opinion, this is rooted in a lack of prioritization.

We tend to put ourselves last because we want to do the best we can for our clients. This is very common, but we need to make time for the things that we want to accomplish in our businesses. Remember there’s a difference between making time and having time. There’s always time where you make it. You may not think you have time, but you must make the time to overcome the plateau you're on.

How Clarity Will Help Overcome the Plateau You're On

We’ve talked about the importance of niching down and the benefits it can bring for your business. However, it is still a very common fear, and understandably so. Agency owners feel they’re missing out on something or going in a certain direction will mean leaving many opportunities behind. This kind of thinking pulls you in many different directions at once. A clear vision of the goals you have for your agency will make all the difference.

Improving yourself and your agency will take dedication and intent. Reaching your goals is just as important as reaching the goals of the people you work with. This is something that we often discuss in the Digital Agency Elite mastermind when we advise members to say no to some things and delegate tasks to free their time for focus on what they really want to do.

Online Training for Digital Agencies

The Understanding That Comes With More Clarity

Once we start to cover some of the things that may be slowing their growth, agency owners start to recognize some small changes that could make a big difference for their agencies. One of the most common ones is capitalizing on their existing relationships. They realize they haven’t taken the time to recognize opportunities with existing clients and grow revenue from there. There’s so much low-hanging fruit there that they don’t realize. With the help of the mastermind team, they realize they need to go after those opportunities and empower their team to do so as well.

Many of them also overlook the importance of creating content and building authority. Having clarity about who you are as an agency, who you audience is and what you offer can lead to building content of value around that. This can only improve your business because providing value-driven content instead of generalized marketing tips will lead to better opportunities.

Should You Brand Yourself or Brand Your Agency?

Sharing your personal branding helps you align with the right clients. Remember that people buy from people and tend to not trust companies and corporations. Personalizing things will help you establish yourself as someone clients can trust. You can see bigger companies commonly offer a personification of the business (like the Geico gecko) people can relate to.  And in Jason’s social media, you’ll see posts about his adventures on the mountain, which personifies his brand and attracts the type of people that share his love of adventure.

Many agency owners believe that branding themselves will mean that they’ll be expected to do everything themselves. It’s a misconception that people need to get past because it’s just not realistic. If you buy a Tesla, you don’t expect to deal directly with Elon Musk in the purchase process, but that’s the personality that probably attracted you to that company and that product in the first place. It’s about investing in the leader and having the confidence that their team will work in consonance with what those figures represent.

Some mastermind members that took the step to do their own content on Youtube or their own podcast find that many times clients and employees approach the agency because they wanted to work with them. They are attracted by the personality and the values that they represent and now this content has become their main source of leads.

Lose The Fear of Missing Out & Start Taking Risks

The clarity that you need to continue your growth will come with losing the fear of saying no, niching down, and putting yourself out there. Mastermind members feel encouraged to make these changes and lose that fear because they can see it works for other agency owners. Once they see it works, they want to reach that same level of success.

As Darby says, anything in life involves some degree of risk. Every time you say yes to something you’ll be saying no to other things. Just take into consideration what you are really giving up and what are you gaining.

Want the Support of Amazing Digital Agency Owners?

If you want to be around amazing agency owners that can see you may not be able to see and help you grow your agency, go to the Digital Agency Elite to learn all about our exclusive mastermind.

Direct download: Why_Your_Agency_Hit_a_Plateau_and_How_to_Catapult_to_the_Next_Level.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT

Do you have a clear vision of your agency’s future and your role in it? Would you like to sell your agency or just transition out of the role of CEO, maybe to Chairman? We all have to confront these questions at some point as we consider our agency's growth trajectory and what's next. Today’s guest may help you start to think about how to structure your agency for your eventual exit.

Zach Williams is an entrepreneur and longtime mastermind member who founded Venveo, a digital agency that focuses on the building construction space. He’s been on the podcast before talking about the 2 strategies that grew his digital agency’s revenue by 4X. After many years in the business and growing his agency from just four people to over 65 employees, Zach started thinking about the best way to continue moving the business forward. He concluded it was time for him to step away as CEO, while continuing to contribute to the agency’s vision.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

  • How he made the decision to become a Chairman instead of CEO.
  • How he structured the agency to be able to get to that point.
  • What support Zach needed in order to get through the difficult times.

Redefining Success and Gaining Clarity In Your Agency

A lot of agency owners get into the business because they love the work and then end up hating it. For Zach, it was important that he built something that he loved while trying to keep a clear idea of his role in it and what he brought to the table. Once the company saw real growth, he started to redefine his idea of success. He started by clearly setting out his goals for the business and his personal goals. He found that what he brought to the business as an individual no longer served the goals for the business and it became clear then that he needed to exit for both the business and himself to thrive.

Zach was always very focused on business growth and getting the agency to be self-sustaining. He never wanted to be the type of entrepreneur that focuses solely on EBITDA. His goal was to create a business that could grow beyond him. Making the decision to really focus on that changed the way he and his team structured the company, the people he brought to work on the business, and even the clients they took, which made for a really smooth transition process when the time came.

How to Make a Smooth Transition Away from Agency CEO

Other than having a clear vision of what type of business he wanted to build, Zach credits these as the most important steps he took to grow his agency:

  1. Picking a niche. This is probably the most important thing you can do. You need to understand who you are targeting, what’s the value that you’re bringing them, and how are you going after them. Understanding this made all the difference for a company that business remained a small-scale operation with four employees for many years until they knew who to target and how to get better at sales.
  2. Improving sales. Looking back, Zach recognizes that he initially didn’t really like sales, which affected his agency’s growth. He knew he needed to improve a lot in that area and finally did so following Jason’s advice. He saw results right away, landing his biggest deal shortly after starting to implement Jason’s advice.
  3. Hiring a Director of Operations. Once he started filling the sales pipeline, and his confidence grew as a result, he started to build into infrastructure operations. He hired a Director of Operations and a counterpart to oversee the client strategy and continued to grow 20%-30% year-on-year. The turning point was understanding that filling your sales pipeline will lead to a waterfall effect where having more opportunities will get you to a point where you can increase your prices, which will lead to hiring the right people. This will all allow you to follow your vision.

Why You Must Trust Your Team and Empower Them Make Decisions

Agency owners can have a hard time giving up control, even when they say they completely trust their team and are convinced they have the right people in the right positions. You can’t really grow unless you give people the autonomy they need. This will not only give you more time to focus on what you really want to do, it will be good for the business and your team will grow more confident from that trust and the knowledge that you have their back. They are going to make mistakes and that’s ok. If your team doesn’t think they can take risks, then that’s on you as a leader. It will even help you get rid of team members who resist change and want to stay in a box.

Online Training for Digital Agencies

The Process to Getting a New Agency CEO Ready

For Zach, when it came time to select and start to train a new CEO it was a no-brainer to go for someone inside the organization. This person was already a team leader who had worked in the company for years and really knew the business, was a culture fit, and had a good rapport with team members and clients. As to the transition, he mapped out daily tasks that he could start to exit. He identified parts of the business where he was really involved and that would require either a new hire or delegating it to someone who was ready. This gave him more time to really think about how he wanted to position his new CEO and executive team for that transition. When it came time to announce it, the team was ready and saw it as a natural next step.

What's Next After You Transition Away From CEO?

After a successful transition, Zach now has two main roles in the company:

  • He continues to be involved in the marketing part of the business (attending events and appearing on podcasts).
  • He is still focused on finding new things the agency can build to offer new value to clients.

This will really depend on how each agency owner sees their life after transitioning out of the role of CEO. Some may want to have nothing to do with the business and focus on new projects or hobbies. That’s fine too. Zach really likes the process of building something and getting it off the ground. He found he really shines when it comes to creating things that can help the agency be more successful with clients.

In the end, selling the business is not for him. He loves his team and his business and can still play a part in helping the agency grow.

Remember that Jason always identifies 3 reasons why an owner should really consider selling their business:

  1. You need the money.
  2. You don’t like the business anymore.
  3. You’ve reached your max and you want someone else’s help.

In addition, transitioning away from CEO has created time for Zach to pursue new ways to create. He is working on a new project called The Untold. A podcast where he uncovers obscure stories about businesses we all know. If you like business, you really need to check this out to learn really cool stories that will entertain you and change the way you think.

“Words tell you something, fonts make you feel something” ~ Zach Williams, Font connoisseur

Why You Need the Support of Like-Minded Entrepreneurs

We’ve said it before but it’s always worth highlighting the benefits of having a group of people that you trust and who can offer valuable advice. Being an entrepreneur and trying to build and grow a business will be difficult and isolating. Very few manage to do it successfully, which is why you need the support of people who will understand and ins and outs of growing a business. Zach had the support of Jason and the mastermind, who offered their expertise to help him get through the tough times and keep him accountable for his goals for the business.

If You Avoid Discomfort, You're In Your Own Way

If he could go back and do something that could help his business grow faster, he would push himself to go in a direction that seems uncomfortable but that would ultimately help the agency. In his case, it would be sales. He didn’t like sales and subconsciously avoided it but it was the key element to grow his business.

Want the Support of Amazing Digital Agency Owners?

If you want to be around amazing agency owners that can see you may not be able to see and help you grow your agency, go to the Digital Agency Elite to learn all about our exclusive mastermind.

Direct download: How_To_Get_Away_from_Being_Agency_CEO_and_Remain_Part_of_Its_Future.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT

Are you starting to grow your agency and feel the need to keep adding services and saying yes to every potential client? Getting out of that startup mindset is difficult. However, you will be glad you did it when you start seeing better results for your agency by just learning to avoid complexity and focusing on the right things.

Kait Le Donne worked in marketing in her 20s and started to do brand consulting for small businesses on the side. She came up with a plan to help a client become a known entity and get more speaking engagements in their field by writing a book. The strategy was so successful she found a new career path and founded Brandwise Media, a niche agency specializing in helping business owners build audiences excited to buy their books and using those books as a vehicle to drive up brand awareness for themselves.

In this episode, we'll discuss:

  • Getting out of the startup mode.
  • Narrowing down services.
  • Why you need to raise your prices.

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.

Subscribe

Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM

How Would You Simplify Process If You Could Start Over?

Raise your hand if you can relate. When you start to scale and people want to work with you, you start to add more. You have more revenue, so you add more people and keep adding services. It becomes about asking yourself, what more can we do? What more can we add?

Two years after starting her agency and with other seasoned entrepreneurs around her, Kait realized the reality of growing broke. Her top-line revenue was increasing and expenses were increasing in correlation. In short, growth costs. At some point, you really have to ask yourself if you had to rebuild your business, would you do it in the same way? For Kait, the answer was no.

She realized she had fallen into the trap of thinking that the more she offered clients quantity-wise the better her agency would be. In reality, creating value is not a matter of more is more. It can come with pulling back and going back to what you do really well and establishing profitability there.  Then you decide if you want to grow that and how.

She started to question “do we really need these complex processes?” “Do we really need this many clients? Or do we just need less clients at the right price point?” She encourages any agency owner that has started growing their business to ask themselves these questions. The bigger the better is a truism that many entrepreneurs fall for.

When you’re in startup mode, it’s normal that you just throw a lot of stuff to the wall to see what sticks. With experience and growth, there will come a point when you start figuring out your path.

Online Training for Digital Agencies

What Can You Do To Start Narrowing Down Services?

There are many ways to go about it, but Kait identifies three main aspects that really helped her get on the right path for her agency:

  1. Start prioritizing the right clients. Letting go of clients that are just not the right fit for your agency may sound frightening, and you may expect it to be a really difficult conversation. However, most likely it won’t be as bad as you imagine. At the end of the day, anybody in a service business will respect it if you tell them “This is what we need to do to continue working together. And if we can’t, then that’s fine.” You can go your separate ways on good terms.
  2. Simplify the process. Kait and her team came up with what they call the Brand Turbo Charger Process, which in short contains the five or six parts of the process from the moment the client enters the door to the moment they leave. “There is a time and a place for a complex web of SOPs,” she acknowledges. “But this has been very illuminating for our business.”
  3. Figuring out the time to bring full-time employees. Not only the right time to bring in a new team member but also having the right employees in the right positions. When does it make sense to take this step vs. when your staff is largely compiled of contractors, which a lot of us do as agency owners, and there is a time and a place for it.

It may sound overly simple, but it is all about gaining clarity of where you want to take your business.

Lose the Fear of Raising Agency Prices

Once you have a clear vision of the future of your business and start prioritizing the right clients, it’s time for another difficult step. Ask yourself what was the last time you raised your prices? Raising prices may sound like a risky way to lose a lot of clients, but it is the next logical step for a growing business. You can double or triple your business just by making some simple changes instead of adding services. Kait let her clients know her prices would go up by 10% at the start of 2022. All the right clients already expected this move.

You may think that clients will walk out when you decide to raise your prices, but you have to trust that the right ones know your value. And if some do leave, then now you have space for the next right one. Kait even did this with her online course. Once she doubled the price, more clients showed up because now the pricing said “this is not like every other online course out there.”

What She Wishes She Had Known

As an entrepreneur, you will always have to exist in duality. You’re focused on operations and suddenly you have to focus on sales. There always seems to be a fire to put out. Maybe you ask yourself am I over managing? Am I undermanaging?

The sooner you accept that as an entrepreneur you actually thrive in duality instead of fighting it, the better. Never get comfortable. That’s when you start doing the same thing over and over again. And you probably chose this business because you like uncertainty and you are comfortable with the fact that there will always be an issue to fix and a puzzle to put together.

Want the Support of Amazing Digital Agency Owners?

If you want to be around amazing agency owners that can see you may not be able to see and help you grow your agency, go to the Digital Agency Elite to learn all about our exclusive mastermind.

Direct download: Why_Your_Startup_Mindset_is_Holding_Your_Digital_Agency_Back.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT

Are you looking for ways to improve your customer service? Have you implemented a customer success strategy in your organization? Nils Vinje is an author and leadership coach who founded the first-ever customer success firm, Glide Consulting, to help organizations improve their leadership skills and teaches the tools you may be lacking to implement a proper customer success strategy, which he details in his new book 30 Day Leadership.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

  • 5 keys to improving your clients' success.
  • Tracking where you stand with your agency's clients.
  • 4 Pillars to becoming a better leader.

Sponsors and Resources

Agency 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.

Subscribe

Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM

We’ve all had a bad customer experience some time in our lives. Maybe we feel exasperated by a customer service team and has failed to solve a problem several times or is slow to provide answers. As agency owners, we need to be aware of the consequences of inefficient customer service and how it will affect brand loyalty. It often boils down to lack of onboarding and a clear, no real-time assistance, and mostly the absence of a clear strategy. So how are you getting success for your clients? How can you improve your customer service?

5 Keys to a Great Customer Success Strategy

According to Nils, it is very common for organizations to lump customer service with other areas like sales. It takes a village to serve a customer and there must be a team responsible for this task. “You have a product strategy,” he tells owners, “you have a sales strategy, what’s your customer strategy?” He often gets blank stares. Because of this, he prepared his own 5-Step framework for customer success:

  1. Being Prescriptive
    Let’s say you ask for lawyer referrals to do some kind of business deal. You get two referrals, one that confirms his experience in the area and asks you what he should include in the contract and one that gives you a list of things you should cover, a series of recommendations, offers a perspective of the best scenario for you and finally asks how you would like to proceed. You should strive to be like the second lawyer. Clients are not paying you to be asked what they want to do. Be the trusted advisor right from the beginning.
  2. Transformation
    Clients are usually expecting some kind of transformation from buying a service. They are at point A and want to get to point B. It is up to you to define what is the absolute best transformation for your clients before they ever go through your process. Ask yourself how you could provide the best possible value for them. That is the destination because then they will very likely renew and expand their relationship with your agency.
  3. A Fresh Start.
    This is the moment right after your client signs up to work with you. Their openness, willingness, enthusiasm, and ability to get things done will never be higher than at that point so this is the moment to set expectations regarding how you will continuously drive value to that customer over time.
  4. Engaging Middle.
    There is a sense that all the intense part of the process happens at the beginning and then we get into a rinse and repeat the cycle. This rhythm is important. However, we must not miss the opportunity to continue to add value to our clients and come to the table with recommendations on what to improve and what to change.
  5. Crushing the Milestones.
    According to Nils, businesses need to architect the right milestones for their customer strategy and build stepping stones to get there. This way, you can understand whether you are on track or off track with a customer.

If you answer each of these steps in a very detailed manner, then you now have a customer’s strategy.

Keeping Track of Where You Stand With Clients

Client churn is going to happen, and that’s ok. It will be an opportunity for you to upgrade. The key is to know when it’s going to happen because it’s the surprise that kills you. When you have a strategy in place for your customers, you can know how on track or off track they are, and that can give you a very good indicator of how likely they are to renew.

If your client retention rate is not as good as you hoped, what are you doing to fix this? Jason likes to recommend a system of monitoring client satisfaction with a stoplight approach: red, yellow, and green.  Everyone starts out at yellow and hopefully moves to green once they start seeing results. Clients in the red are the ones in danger that need intervention because they're at risk. How can you communicate better with your red and yellow clients? How can you help them more? Or is there something they're not telling you? Intervention is the key.

Improving your customer retention rate by 5% would probably double your business and achieving that will require working on your communication with clients. It’s better to over-communicate with your clients than to under-communicate. As soon as there is a vacuum of information where there is not an answer to an issue, your customer will likely be thinking negatively and assume you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

4 Pillars of Becoming a Better Leader 

A lot of agencies start by accident and you suddenly find yourself leading several teams that rely on you to point out how they can improve at their jobs. When thinking about the complex world of leadership, we can’t just pick some random tips and expect to get a better result. We have to take a long-term view and apply it to develop our leadership skills.

As a first step, Nils came up with four fundamental pillars to become a better leader:

  1. Leading yourself. All about you and your psychology;
  2. Leading others. The interactions with your team;
  3. Leading with communication. The tools and techniques to communicate and send your message to the people that you work with and your clients as well;
  4. Leading with metrics, which is all about how we measure our progress to identify how we can improve.

The Most Important Leadership Tool

If you really want to improve your leadership skills, Nils suggest you focus on Feedback. Learning how to give negative feedback in a way that will help people get better at their jobs will be one of your most important qualities as a leader. However, giving negative feedback is something that most people try to avoid because it is uncomfortable and they don’t have a system to do so. Here’s a 3-step process that you can implement:

  • Here’s what I observe. Start with these words and follow up with an objective and very specific instance. This is not the place for generalities but rather for a specific event or behavior you witnessed.
  • The impact that had. Your interpretation of the impact of that behavior you observed.
  • Help me understand what’s going on. Invite them to share their point of view. We never know where someone else is coming from. But, if you choose to just share your observations and the impact they had and then ask them to explain what is happening, you will get them to share their side of the story, which you would never get on your own.

This is a fairly simple framework that anybody could start using today. “I guarantee your employees want that feedback” Nils assures. It will improve their lives, their jobs, and your relationship with them and you can even implement it with clients too. For more insight on the tools to becoming a better leader, go get Nils’ new book 30 Day Leadership.

Want the Support of Amazing Digital Agency Owners?

If you want to be around amazing agency owners that can see you may not be able to see and help you grow your agency, go to the Digital Agency Elite to learn all about our exclusive mastermind.

Direct download: 5_Keys_To_a_Great_Customer_Success_Strategy_to_Retain_More_Clients.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT

Build It and Maybe They Will Come?

Unless You Get Different and Stand Out from the Crowd

Do you want your digital agency to stand out from your competition? Putting together a compelling message for your audience is not enough to really make an impression. Differentiating your agency is an important part of getting your audience’s attention and getting your message across among the slew of marketing messages they get every day.

Mike Michalowicz is a small business author and entrepreneur who has devoted himself to making entrepreneurship simple and answering the question What makes entrepreneurship successful? He is the mind behind many great books like 'Profit First', a favorite among mastermind members, and his latest 'Get Different'. Mike has also been on the podcast before to discuss how to grow your business without constantly working in it.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

  • How to stand out from the competition.
  • Ideas that break the norm and introduce an unexpected element.
  • Ripping off other industries.

Sponsors and Resources

Agency 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.

Subscribe

Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM

How Can You Stand Out From Your Competition?

Ask yourself “are you better than the competition?” You have to have a definitive answer, and no, it does not mean better in all capacities, but there must be an area where you shine. If the answer is yes, then you have a responsibility to market yourself appropriately. You MUST be noticed. If you don’t, then clients will end up choosing a lesser offering and it will be your fault. Every business has the opportunity to be the best in its category. If you’re not, you may have some fine-tuning to do, but the opportunity is there.

Worst Marketing Examples

We tend to think bad marketing is marketing that doesn’t speak to us, that we don’t like or is offensive. But the fact you noticed it means that it was better than 99% of the marketing out there. There’s marketing all around us every day that we don’t even bother to notice. That’s the worst marketing. Being seen is the first hurdle.

The second hurdle is getting the audience’s attention for the right reasons. Don’t try to emulate something that isn’t true to your brand or the attention you get will be becoming a ridicule and an example of bad marketing.

How to Market Your Agency

For Mike, the way to be noticed is to be different, to break through the common noise that is always circulating in every market. Look at your competition and notice the same four or five things that everyone is doing over and over again. Those are the four or five things you should never do because they are easy to ignore. Why?

This is the result of Habituation, which is the action which our brains see something that is not relevant, qualify it as such, and ignore it from then on. Mike goes back to the “Hey, friend!” message. The first time he received that email he was curious, but as soon as he noticed it was just a cheesy marketing technique, he began ignoring it.

You never want to be the common “hey, friend” in your marketing, and the way to avoid it is to introduce something unexpected in your messaging.

Steps To Stand Out and Not Be a “Me Too” Agency

In the agency world, when you’re just starting out you may look at your bigger competitor and try to copy everything they’re doing. It makes sense because they have achieved the success you want, but this creates sameness in the industry. Instead, consider identifying whatever the common approach is and thinking, how can I flip it?

For example, Mike knew sending email blasts was a common practice in his industry and took a look at a couple to see the most common features. The look was almost always white background and black text. He thought, “how could I change this?” and came up with the invisible ink email blast, with a black background and black text and directions to highlight the email to reveal the message. The clickthrough rate was double that any other email he had ever sent, all because he did something different.

He also recommends doing a simple R&D (aka: "rip off and duplicate") by looking outside of your industry. Take a look at what people are doing in vastly different industries and find out what you could replicate in your own content.

Be Bold

“The reptilian mind tells you that doing different equals death,” Mike says, but in modern society, it is the way to get noticed. Also, “different” has an expiration date. It will last until too many people start replicating it, so milk it while you can and start working on your next approach. But don’t worry; it will take time before others dare to replicate it.

It’s also important to clarify different doesn’t have to be completely outside of who you are. It doesn’t mean a complete 180-degree change; it can be subtle. The trick is to dismiss ideas that don’t resonate with you and adapt the ones that do. It’s about amplifying who you are.

Remember, no one will have any idea about you or your digital agency until they do business with you. Until then, they will only know your marketing, so it has to be absolutely congruent with your brand. If there’s any incongruence, there’s mistrust.

How Can You Hold Your Audience’s Attention?

Speak their language. Show them you really understand their particular industry. Use language specific to that industry and use relevant data to get their attention. Using their language will instantly get you noticed above all the white noise.

“Marketing is the ultimate act of kindness. It is a necessity to be of service. The world is starving for good things. So if you’re doing good things, the world is starving for you.” ~ Mike Michaelowicz

Want more?

If you want to be around amazing agency owners that can see you may not be able to see and help you grow your agency, go to the Digital Agency Elite to learn all about our exclusive mastermind.

Direct download: Does_Your_Agencys_Messaging_Stand_Out_from_the_Competition_.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT

Are you having trouble selling yourself and getting prospects to see the value you can provide for them? In this episode, James Muir joins Jason to talk about closing more sales and his book, The Perfect Close. James shares the process leading up to it, 4 high leverage areas in sales, how to prepare messaging that works to get a high close rate, and the two questions that can improve your closing percentage without ever sounding pushy or manipulative.

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.

Subscribe

Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM

4 High Leverage Areas in Sales

The truth is there’s no messaging that will suddenly overwhelm people with persuasion and approval. You have to do your research and make your that you’re delivering the right message to the right audience and using the correct medium. James breaks down this process into four high leverage areas in sales that will you to improve your closing rate:

  • Market. The single best thing you can do to improve sales is sell only to ideal clients. Targeting the right customer will be pivotal because everything else falls below that in your funnel. If you get that wrong, everything you’re doing in sales will fall on deaf ears.
  • Message. Now that you figured out who you want to target, what is the message you want to send? It’s a very narrow window to get your message across once you have their attention, so you have to make sure that you’re delivering a high-impact message.
  • Medium. Now that you know who you’re talking to and what you’re going to say ask yourself where do these people hang out? Remember to meet the customer where they are (social media, trade shows, etc).
  • Motivation. This is about personal motivation, what gets you out of bed in the morning? Getting all these elements just right will require a lot of work and the right motivation will help you get through it.

Are You Talking to the Right Prospects?

For his part, Jason recommends thinking of N.B.A.T. before engaging in any new project conversation. These steps will help you save time and energy on the wrong prospects.

 Need:

Ask what the specific needs are and what specific end results they’re expecting. Ask how this project fits in with the overall company vision. If they need to pull in another person to answer that question, hold onto that nugget of information.

B – Budget:

Ask for the budget. More often than not, you won’t get an actual number so act like a reverse auctioneer… Start with a ridiculously high number saying, “Is your budget $500,000, or $400,000, maybe $300,000…?” They either give you a more realistic range or the name of someone who knows. Hold onto that nugget of information, too!

A – Authority:

Were they able to answer the questions about need and budget? If not, and they gave you another name or two, then you know who you really need to be talking to.

T – Timing:

Only you know what you can do and how long it takes. You might really want or even need this project but, if the timing has unrealistic parameters you are setting yourself up for failure.

Online Training for Digital Agencies

Messaging to Increase Your Agency's Close Rate

There’s really great research available on how to create effective messaging and identifying the different elements you should consider when crafting a sales pitch. Some of these elements include determining the Issues or problems the customer has, as well as the goal they’re trying to achieve.

Then there’s the Trigger event, which are occurrences that lead to a sales opportunity and will indicate the best time to sell your product or service.

The most challenging part will be the Insight or unconsidered needs, where you get your prospect to see a compelling enough reason to buy by tapping into their unconsidered needs, which are shortcomings, challenges, or missed opportunities that they haven’t considered yet. This will help you create a value proposal of how you can produce some results for them.

The natural outcome of this will be Skepticism, which is the perfect moment for you to reveal your mechanism of action, the thing you do for the customer that produces the desired results.

For this, you will need Proof. There are many types of proof you can present, but you can get the best results with third-party validation because it is the hardest to fake.

You don’t necessarily have to follow this order, but this is the mechanism that will get buyers to make a decision now and not wait.

Related: Overcoming the Top 5 Agency Sales Objections

2 Questions To Improve Your Closing Percentage

Before you go into any meeting, you should have an idea of what you want the outcome of this meeting to be. You should have an idea advance and a couple of alternate advances. If you have that prepared, then you’re ready for the two questions, which are designed to be non-confrontational or pushy:

  1. Does it make sense for us to X? (where X is your sales advance).
  2. What do you think is a good next step?

It’s all about really considering the possible results before you walk into the meeting. Think about, what’s the best thing that could happen for the client? And what other things you can do keep the ball rolling?

By doing this, you’re pacing the sale at exactly the rate that the client is ready to move. It’s when you try to move a customer faster than they’re comfortable with when it can feel pushy or manipulative.

Want the Support of Like-Minded Agency Owners to Help You Grow?

If you want to be around amazing agency owners that can see you may not be able to see and help you grow your agency, go to the Digital Agency Elite to learn all about our exclusive mastermind.


Have you made these common mistakes that hold back your agency? Our guest, Sandy Smith is the President of Smith Publicity, has grown her agency for over 25 years and she shares lessons learned from 2 common mistakes she made over the years. Sandy's agency is focused on book marketing and author promotion services publicity. At first, a one-person shop they have grown to more than 30 employees with offices in Los Angeles, New York, and Canada. Sandy and her Senior VP, Marissa Eigenbrood, are on the show sharing how their expansion process led them to open an office in London that ultimately brought more problems than business. They also share why you should act fast when an employee just doesn't fit with the company and why you need to find someone you trust so you can transition from owner to agency CEO.

3 Golden Nuggets

  1. Identifying the source of customer service problems. Although the agency is US-based, it used to have a London office. Susan later identified this as the source of 95% of their customer service problems. London was an important market for the agency and held 10% of its business. However, it took too much work to get their UK clients to understand how the business worked in the US and get them to a place where they saw the value in the agency’s work. In the end, these clients just weren’t the right fit for the agency, and closing the London office was an important step to move forward.
  2. Waiting too long to do what’s best for the team. Hanging on for a little too long after seeing someone just isn’t working out in their role is a common problem for small business owners who try to avoid these decisions. Sometimes the person is not a good culture fit for the agency; you never want someone to mess culture up, even if they’re great at what they do. For Sandy and Marissa, it was actually the opposite, someone was a great culture fit but who kept making the same mistakes in his job. After spending time and resources in retraining, they had to accept it wasn’t working out and make the necessary change..
  3. Transitioning from Agency Owner to CEO. With the help of Marissa, Sandy is in the process of doing something we know can be a difficult process -- transitioning to the role of CEO. We know by now that this transition is more of a marathon than a sprint. For Sandy, it has been about finding the right person to take over the tasks she no longer wants to handle and focus on the ones that she enjoys. “It's having trust and sharing, opening up our books, opening up our real thoughts,” Sandy says. “And it's not an overnight process. It's many years of trusting and slow steps of giving control and giving insights and allowing, and this is the hardest part, for difference of opinion.”

Sponsors and Resources

Agency 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.

Subscribe

Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM

Avoid These Common Mistakes in your Agency

Building Trust to Help You Transition from Agency Owner to Agency CEO

Jason: [00:00:00] Hey, all! How's it going?

Marissa: [00:00:04] Hi, Jason, how are you?

Jason: [00:00:07] Doing good. So I haven't done two people on the podcast in a long time. So we're on these little boxes. I apologize for these little boxes, but for the people listening and watching, tell us who you guys are and what do you guys do?

Marissa: [00:00:23] Oh, well, thank you. I am Marissa Eigenbrood. I'm the senior vice-president at Smith Publicity. We are a book publicity and marketing agency celebrating 25 years in business this year in 2022. We focus on working with, with authors and experts and publishers on building awareness around their launches and beyond. That's a quick summary there.

Sandy, pass the baton.

Sandy: [00:00:47] Yeah, I’m Sandy Smith, Sandy Poirier Smith, but no one can pronounce that, but Sandy Smith. And I'm the president here and co-owner of Smith Publicity. And we started off as like a one-person shop and now we have 31 of us, 32, Marissa? And we've grown pretty much every year.

We've learned a lot. We've made a lot of mistakes and we've done some really great things. So we're excited, Jason, to talk with you and, um, pick our brains and see if we can help some of the people here.

Jason: [00:01:19] Awesome. So, well, let's, let's jump into it. What's the biggest mistake you guys made?

Marissa: [00:01:28] Love that. Wow.

Sandy: [00:01:29] One I would say is, as we were growing, we expanded our offices. We are based in the US but we had a Toronto office, a Los Angeles office, a New York city office, and a London office. And this is back in the day where… while we have always been hybrid, believe it or not even 20 years ago we were hybrid, having that kind of a brick and mortar office kind of made sense. And people expected that.

And our London office gave us this great, like worldwide, you know, kind of brand appeal, which was fantastic. However, our London-based our English-based caused, because they probably were maybe 10% of our total clients, but they caused 95% of our customer service problems. And the reason for that is the education that took to get them to understand what we do in the US market was just so much work.

And one example of that is an author said “I want to be on Oprah.” Well, okay, that's great, and can't she just schedule me in that type of thing. They just didn't understand that the vastness. Even geography, there was one author who said I want to pop a new office for a meeting. I will be in a meeting in… I'm going to a wedding in San Francisco, can I drive over to see you in New Jersey this afternoon?

It just… like some people just didn't have the scope of the US market. So even though it looked good and they did, you know, 10% of business, we decided not to continue having a London-based office just because those clients were not the right fit for us.

We spent so much time trying to educate and get them to a place where they saw value in what we do.

Jason: [00:03:28] That's awesome. Yeah, I know I'm figuring out the perfect clients for you is, uh, I always tell everybody it's kind of like a Vegas buffet. Like you gotta kind of try everything and then you're like, oh, that thing made me sick. I'm not going to eat that anymore. So…

Sandy: [00:03:44] Yeah, Marissa, another mistake that you want to talk about, unless you have another idea is, um, our evolution of the longer projects rather than the shorter but more quick projects that were evolving to.

Marissa: [00:04:00] Yeah. I mean, I think this is, this has definitely been an evolution. And also, um, again, it was not necessarily a giant mistake cause it worked really well for us for a long time, but kind of having that moment of realization and I did I had to really connect to that as well, is they're having times over the years where we've tried to incorporate other types of services that haven't been the real meat and potatoes, the publicity that we, that we focus on and we're, we're, we're really great at.

We for a few years added in social media services and, you know, we, we dabbled in other areas too. And I think it's really kind of realizing when it's time to say goodbye. And sometimes you hold onto those, those things for a little too long and we were doing that with shorter-term campaigns. I think, uh, we had previously six-week-long campaigns, or maybe even four-week campaigns… We actually had three-week campaigns, which in today's world of publicity sounds absolutely insane to do just three weeks of work with someone and have it be impactful.

But, you know, it's been part of the changing landscape of the media that we've had to react to as well. The time things are taking, the delays. The publishing industry is phase two, so there's so many factors that have influenced those decisions, but, um, really giving our, our publicists, our authors, the time that they need and, and really kind of building that awareness of, of how much time is really needed to be impactful is something that has evolved.

And we've really learned and grown from over the last few years in particular and so at this time, you know, we've, we've eliminated everything that's six weeks and less, pretty much. And you know, two months is not far behind it, I think too.

Sandy: [00:05:41] And that’s hard too because we made money from that. It was a great place but it just wasn't in the clients are our best interest to continue with that based on the changes we saw. So that was interesting.

The other one, um, and I don't want to just harp on mistakes. I think it's all small businesses is when someone is not working out in their role. I think sometimes we hang on a little longer than we would because our emotions get involved. We like these people. We want it to work. And I'm thinking of someone, Marissa, who was in our business development coordinator and years, and years and years ago. This person was fantastic individual. And we just kept changing the job description and kept changing his focus. And it wasn't working and we probably should have, in hindsight, let them go a lot sooner.

It just wasn't the right fit. But as a small business, we get probably a little more connected to our team and that's probably a mistake. And fortunately, we don't have to do this very often. We have hopefully better hiring and onboarding and vetting before we get to that stage.

But that's something that we struggled with as a small business. I don't think it's unusual, but I know that that since reading, cause we read a lot of books here, you're supposed to hire slow and fire quickly in small businesses.

Jason: [00:07:03] Was it that this person was not a cultural fit?

Marissa: [00:07:07] I think it was actually the opposite. It really was the, I mean, he really got along so well with everyone, you know, really was a nice fit with so many, but the skills were hard to really build in the direction that we needed them to go. Um, Sandy, would you agree with that?

Sandy: [00:07:25] I do. And again, because we read a lot of business books, I know that 80% of people are let go because of soft skills, the culture, and 20% it can do the job, but they just don't fit in. But I think in this case, it was the, exactly what Marissa said, culturally, he showed up, was great, people liked him…

He was all in, just kept making the same mistakes over and over and over again. And we probably gave him too much grace and too much training, like retraining and retraining before we just said square peg round hole.

Marissa: [00:07:59] Yeah. I mean, we've, we face it the other way around too. I mean, just fairly recently, we had someone and I learned from another great industry partner recently that, uh, she started at Shake Shack. They have this phrase where they say there's no, skunking, there's no skunking of the culture.

So even if you're amazing at your job and you, you're just one of the best in terms of the skills, if you are skunking up the culture and you're creating negativity there. You know, you're not a right fit and they're looking at an exit plan and that was, you know, we've had to have those conversations recently.

And I think that, you know, that's just as hard to deal with, as, in terms of letting someone go or figure out an exit plan as it is for someone who does, you know, who has that connection from the emotional side, from that cultural side, because you're like, wow, this person's great at their job. They're great at the tasks.

It's just that on the other side it’s…

Sandy: [00:08:54] Person. Yeah, it's just not a team player.

Jason: [00:08:58] I have a question because you guys have achieved something a lot of people listening are wanting where the owners can kind of start transitioning a little bit out, right? Like have a life again and find someone to, you know, run operations and really just kind of take the baton and run.

So going back 13 years and knowing what you know now, how can people listening do that? Because I find that's a big struggle. They, they, they don't want to relinquish control. Was that tough for you guys?

Sandy: [00:09:35] No. Oh, it's really hard and it's hard for it for two reasons. One is the company is our baby. It's our livelihood. That's, what's going to be funding our kids college and our retirement and all that. So that's, that's important to us.

It's also too, and I've learned this from many of our authors. People will sell a company or they turn over control to the next generation. Three years later, they're bored and then they write a book because they want to connect back to what made them feel good and what kind of got them out of bed every day.

So while, and I'm just being very transparent. I am not necessarily looking to step out of the business fully. What I'd like to do, Jason, is pick and choose more of the things that get me excited rather than the things that I don't want to do anymore.

My husband on the other end, as we speak he's outside with our chickens.

Jason: [00:10:27] He is he's chasing chickens? Should that be the title? Can you send me a picture of him chasing the chicken? And that’ll be the thumbnail.

Sandy: [00:10:39] If you flip through my phone, for everybody at home, is the picture of him, which of course, like it's not coming up because the, our Google call is on here, but here he is sitting on his tractor this way, yes, sitting on a tractor in the backyard.

But he's excited. He's a few years older than me, but not that older, but he's excited to really dive into other passions outside of the work. And I am still like, oh, I want to do this, but I'd never had time sometimes to really dive into some of these other opportunities for us. I think the hardest thing is to, to trust in someone.

Um, and what made it easier is Marissa because she is, not to get her head big, but she is….

Jason: [00:11:23] Be closer to the screen.

Marissa: [00:11:25] Right, here I come.

Sandy: [00:11:44] And she’s tall. She’s super tall too. What are you, 6’3, Marissa?

Marissa: [00:11:33] 6’3, yes.

Sandy: [00:11:34] 6’3 and she wears heals. So she’s got a beautiful confidence. But…

Marissa: [00:11:39] I just intimidate people into letting me run their company. That's all it is.

Sandy: [00:11:44] Exactly. It's having trust and sharing, like opening up our books, opening up our, um, our, our real thoughts. And it's not an overnight process. It's many years and trusting and slow steps of, of giving control and giving insights and allowing, and this is the hardest part, is allowing for difference of opinion. Mistakes allowing for those mistakes and saying, I'm going to, I'm going to let, not just Marissa, but our team, they have a different view than I do… weekly updates, but I'm trusting the team and say, okay, you feel strongly about this. Let's go.

And that's worked for us. And, and we might talk about this in the future, but we're getting to that stage of size, where we need a lot more expertise than we have from running the day-to-day business than we have now.

We don't need a human resource person sitting in an office or a cubicle all day. But we need human resource expertise, the same thing for IT, the same thing for all the other functionalities, a CFO. And having someone like Marissa it's just so great because I don't feel like I'm in a vacuum doing it alone.

And that's something that for people who are looking to do this in the future is to find that internal person or someone new who, whoever to accompany, someone that you trust. But I’m just as excited to grow the business and a sounding board for the headaches and the challenges. So it's actually freeing because we're not alone.

Online Training for Digital Agencies

Jason: [00:13:22] 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 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. 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, 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 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.

Yeah, you know, I, I always tell our mastermind. You know, once you figure out as an owner or leader where the ship is going, then you can bring the right people on and delegate the outcomes rather than delegate the tasks because many people will do them very differently. And the reason why I've always liked to get a number of different, really smart people together is because you see things differently.

And I like how you probably did it in stages of, you know, this was not a quick fix. Whenever I tell anybody when you want to get to a point where you have the option to sell or the option to pick and choose to do what you want the agency, that's really when your agency scales, because now you've transitioned from owner to more of a, a leader because the owner does everything. Like, you can't chase chickens as an owner. Uh, well, I mean, I guess you, you chase different kinds of chickens, the pay you collect the checks.

Marissa: [00:15:59] I was just going to add in too, I think the fact that even as a small, smaller company and a smaller agency here, you know, having the 30 some people, but even in the years prior, if we were closer to 20, there's always been layers and having that in place with  Dan as CEO, Sandy, as president. We've had other vice presidents as well in there.

So there's, there is we're leadership-heavy, but in, in the right way, is that it feels like it's not an agency where you have the CEO and you just have somebody who's replacing that person. And there's no kind of other people around to support that.

So I think, you know, for me and I listen, I've again, 13 years, I've been here. It's my entire career. I started at Smith a year after college and it's intimidating at times to even think about running a business when I didn't work really anywhere else before, and this is all I've known.

And so it's just, it's so great to know that as I learn more things or take on new responsibilities and, and grow over time that I have others around me who are, who have a lot of them who have been through it just as long or longer than I have, but who are just there to support. And just especially when Sandy's role in having Sandy as a partner, so many things that we do together all the time, it's just doesn't feel as daunting of a thing that potentially take on whatever that looks like in the future when Dan wants to fully, fully go off the pasture and, and, uh, and seeing what's next from there.

But it's, it's knowing that you have these true, like partners that you're doing this with, you're not making the decisions solely on your own, and you've got these different opinions and ideas to loop into it. And I mean, that's always been something that we've, we've really just kind of stood by at Smith is that everybody has a voice at the table.

So we're always looking at, it's not just the leadership team, but new people who are joining. And what ideas do you have? How can we grow? What, what, what are you bringing in from wherever you worked before? Some of our best ideas and, and most profitable growth opportunities have come from the ideas that have come from those who are newer to the team too.

So it's just knowing you're not alone through all of it, makes it a little less daunting.

Jason: [00:18:10] Yeah. And I think, you know, I go back to, you know, Sandy, what you said too about now that I don't have to do everything, but I still want to be a part of it, and like how you were saying like a lot of owners that sell or whatever.

I was like that. When I sold my agency, for like two weeks I was like, yes, I can go chase my chickens or whatever, right? Um, I can't get this out of my head. This needs to be in the thumbnail. How you can chase chickens and grow your agency. But I was depressed after I sold because I didn't feel like I had that significance.

And then I also went through a depression in my agency when I was running it when I actually transitioned from the owner to the CEO, the person really leading the ship. Because I didn't have to do all the other little stuff. I only had to do like five different roles, which were like, you know, setting the vision for the agency, coaching and mentoring leadership team, blah, blah, blah, right?

And I always tell my mastermind members and the people that I work with and all the people listening on. I'm like, look, when you get to this point where you can pick and choose the things you want to do, you'll go through a depression. And then you have to realize, you go your role switched and like, you need to hand over the reigns and trust the people that you put in place.

And then once you do that, then it's very freeing. But in the very beginning, when you go into a meeting and you're like, hey, can I help? And they're like, no, Jason, I got this. And then you go to the next meeting. They do the same thing and you're like, I'm a piece of shit

Sandy: [00:19:47] No, we don’t. And that's the goal, but it's when you've been needed and you'd feel at the end of the day, like, wow, I helped, I did this. I need that taken away. That's a big shift for sure.

Jason: [00:19:57] Oh yeah. What's the biggest, most important thing you've learned in the business to date that you both have learned? And I'll let you go first, Marissa.

Marissa: [00:20:09] Wow. I mean, I really think it's and I'll shout out to, uh, Diane Eichenberg, that’s my mom because growing up, she’d always told me to be true to myself.

And I almost got a tattoo on myself at one point and did not do that. And she was very happy that I didn't do that, but it sounds so basic and cliche and, but I really, it, over my years, I learned that. I actually, I went through kind of a big personal transition about like seven years ago, six or seven years ago now.

And it was this moment where I personally had this like kind of moment where I'm like, I've got to just be true to myself. That was the time that I found that I could really come forward and encourage more transparency and just honesty and open communication about things and sharing my ideas more fluidly.

I think that was just such a big, big jump. And then it's, I feel like so much of the company has even changed, not just because of me that way, but I'm saying this as a whole, we've all just moved into this culture of transparency and we definitely had earlier years where there was a lot of walking on eggshells or trying to like kind of scoot around having to have tough conversations sometimes because of people's feelings.

I just feel like we are in such a great place now of all of this, knowing that if we're honest with each other, we have those open conversations. We state how we're really feeling about something. It's really making our work easier. It's making everything more productive and more efficient in a lot of ways too.

And that's just been kind of, like I said, it sounds so cliche in some ways, but it really has been such a big moment for, or it's a big transition for me and then understanding the company moving that way as well.

Sandy: [00:21:50] I agree with you everything Marissa is saying, and I'll take a different turn here and kind of a client service perspective. Something is to just pay attention to the details of what’s working and try to replicate that. And what I mean by that is many years ago, when I was working closely with Dan and he was working his 18 hour days, seven days a week, as new agencies owners kind of do, is to really pay attention to the nuggets of what's working and to try to replicate that.

And when you read something that Dan wrote about an author, you just want to read this book. It's like, damn, this is really good. It could have been the worst book or not the worst book, but a book that would be not appealing to me in the slightest, but he could write in a way that it's like, wow, I want to see that.

Well, how do you capture that spirit and duplicate, replicate that on all our projects? And the same thing for even onboard or communication. And when I first really got into working with Dan, what was exciting for me was finding his brilliance and what he was doing, and then making it happen more consistently across all our clients.

You know, for example, we have an author questionnaire that people have to fill out before they start working with us. We have, that wasn't standard when we first started and now we do what we've expanded it. And now our publicist and our team get the right information at the beginning and we don't stop.

And the same thing with our communication delivery, where we used to have monthly reports, and then we started having cumulative reports and then we started having standard calls and more sophisticated reporting. Just figuring out what makes one client happy, what makes one publicist efficient, taking that nugget and then replicating that, where it makes sense. I think that is something that we do well.

We never rest on our laurels that we, that we're as good as we can be. We want to keep learning and listening to our clients, listening to our publicist, because we want to be ahead of the service that we provide rather than trying to catch up with the trends. And I think that's one way is really listening and then picking out those golden service deliverables and trying to make it standard across where it makes sense.

Jason: [00:24:14] I like it. Yeah. You know, I, I think too many of us forget about the things that are working and we are constantly focused on new stuff rather than just going back to the basics. You know, I always joke with people when I was playing tennis in college, like if I was doing bad, my coach would yell out, go back to the basics. You're thinking too hard.

Marissa: [00:24:36] Yeah. I mean, we've definitely had, in our industry, there's always something new popping up. Whether it's, you know, Substack and Clubhouse and TikTok and new media. I remember when podcasts first showed up. I mean, that wasn't that long ago when they were really something that was worth paying attention to and adding in for our work.

And we're like, oh, what are these podcasts has gotten their basements, you know, doing their podcasts and is this going to be a thing? And, and it was something that we really had to, you know, we have to always kind of pay attention to what are those things that are starting to bubble under the surface and get some attention and how maybe impactful… but not kind of throwing everything resources, time, energy into, oh my God, how do we figure out how to have Clubhouse as part of our campaigns and make sure it's a staple in there and, and, you know, it's okay, well, we can dabble in it a little bit.

That's always kind of been, our approach was not running full force into whatever the next trend is, but really settling back into it. We'll say, hey well, traditional media is, is dying in a lot of ways. Certainly certain areas of it are not doing as well as they should when I started 13 years ago here, but there's a lot of other spaces that have, that have been booming with blogging and podcasts and video casts and whatever else it is.

So that's always has been something that we, we really tried to not let the trends dictate our, our decisions and our, the direction of our campaigns too much over, over time.

Jason: [00:26:01] Love it. And wrapping up, if there was a billboard, what would you guys put on the billboard? And it doesn't have to be work-related whatever it was, what would be on your guys' billboard?

Marissa: [00:26:14] Oh, I love that. Well, it's funny. I feel like, I feel like Dan would say we do good things for authors if Dan was on this with us, because that's always been the tagline for so long of Smith.

It sounds so basic, but we always say we do good things for authors since there's so many bits around that, but, um, I'll have to go back to my previous one and say, you know, be, be true to yourself, which Diane will get some credit there again.

Sandy: [00:26:39] I'll agree with Marissa. You know, one thing we say on our clients service, I think the answer to almost every question we get is it depends. And it's kind of a standard joke because for what we do, there's no one right answer. Whether it's a timeline, the length of service, how much you should be doing. So from a company perspective, I would say it depends because it really depends on you. So that's something from, from the service.

But I do want, Jason to, um, chasing chickens and running an agency. I think we might have to do something with that.

Jason: [00:27:15] Oh, yeah, you definitely should. Awesome. Well, um, what's the agency website people go and check you guys out.

Marissa: [00:27:24] It is smithpublicity.com. Tried to keep it pretty easy.

Jason: [00:27:28] Awesome. Well, I think everybody appreciates the easiness because a lot of times people make it very complex and misspell everything because they couldn't figure out the right domain. So we all appreciate the easy names, but, uh, thanks so much everybody for coming on. Uh, it was a lot of fun. I wish you guys tremendous success.

And if you guys want to be around other amazing agency owners on a consistent basis where we can help you be able to figure out if you want to chase chickens or not, and really focus on the things that you wanted to be doing, I'd love to invite all of you to go check out the Digital Agency Elite.

This is our exclusive mastermind for agency owners and agency leaders that really want to get better and be surrounded by amazing people. So you guys can grow your digital agencies faster.

And until next time have a Swenk day.

Direct download: 2_Common_Mistakes_to_Avoid_While_Growing_Your_Agency.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MDT

1