Smart Agency Masterclass with Jason Swenk: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies

Are you planning to sell your agency at some point in the future? How are you preparing to make the process easier for yourself and your team? Our guest for this episode created a lifestyle business that allowed her to lead the life she wanted. When she decided to sell, she realized the business was already set up to work without her, which made for a pretty seamless selling process when the time for an acquisition came along Jodie Cook is an entrepreneur, writer, and athlete who started as a freelance social media manager. She created and successfully ran her social media agency, JC Social Media, for ten years -- even growing it during the pandemic. She's sharing the story of how she grew her agency and sold it, without an earnout, in 2021. In this episode, we'll discuss: Why she decided to sell her lifestyle business. How she prepared for the selling process. Why you should hire a broker. Sponsors and Resources E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions. E2M is a web design and development agency that has provided white label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Building and Growing Her Agency As often happens with agency owners, Jodie started as a freelancer and went on to create her agency once she had too much work to handle on her own. To promote services, she went to networking events telling people she was a social media manager until she got a few clients. After a while, she got to a point where she had a full-time job worth of work for herself and could choose between continuing as a freelancer or building a team. As for hiring, Jodie says she stuck to hiring other social media managers. It was a role she knew and could evaluate and train for and as a result, she developed a successful training process. However, she also sees her agency could only ever grow as far as her own knowledge would allow. And in hindsight, it would've made sense to scale by hiring for roles that are not her strength. Setting Up a Lifestyle Business Agency owners get into the business for various reasons but at some point, we can all expect to have some degree of freedom. Jodie found herself as the owner of a big agency where everything relied on her and didn't feel happy. This is when she did something that would change her life and her agency. She created a document with four columns where each column represented a step for how the business would start to change to a lifestyle business that could run without her. This was a very important exercise that would later allow her to be better prepared for a sale later on. The four columns contained: Every single process that happened at the agency Who was in charge of every task (at that moment, it was pretty much all her) Who would be in charge in the future (either by getting promoted or looking for a new hire) Her plan (actions she needed to take and even dates) Growing the Agency Through the Pandemic and Beyond Back in March 2020, just as the world changed with the pandemic, Jodie had been running her agency as a lifestyle business. She usually traveled for a couple of months of the year and the business ran very well. She was no longer needed there all the time for things to work correctly. This all came crashing down with the start of the pandemic. Clients in the hospitality and travel sectors were suddenly out of business and the agency shrunk by about 25% in one week. The shift meant Jodie got back to being very much involved in the business. Initially, she tried to figure out how to make a shift in the changing economy. This included a decision on whether or not to lay off part of her 16-member team. After a team meeting, they decided to carry on, secure the clients they still had, and work to look for new clients. The agency offered online webinars, replacing all their in-person events, and started to build the business back up. They not only managed to get back to where the business was before March 2020, they actually grew past it. Preparing to Sell a Social Media Agency With the agency back on track, Jodie asked herself what was next. She could easily go back to having a lifestyle business, but she really didn't want to be pulled back by another emergency like this one. So she made the decision to sell in August 2020. Once she got intentional about an acquisition, Jodie started to reach out to people that knew more about the subject and could point her in the right direction. The key is not discussing an agency sale with your team and just having a small group of trusted people who can help you navigate the process. Keeping it quiet until you have signed agreements saves you from hearsay and speculation by your clients and team. She eventually started working with a broker who clarified how to prepare for the sale process. Basically, i

Does your agency's branding stand out from the competition? Is your offering and positioning unique? Does it establish your agency's authority in your niche? Today's guest explains how he turned his speaking career into a thriving agency thanks to smart branding. Travis Brown is the founder and CEO of Mojo Up Marketing+Media, an agency focused on building unstoppable personal and company brands. Travis has been building his brand since long before stepping into the agency world. Now, with his diverse and talented marketers, he helps others figure out and grow their brands. In this episode, we'll discuss: Getting started with public speaking Leveraging speaking engagements to grow the agency What works with branding. Sponsors and Resources E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Taking the First Steps in the Public Speaking Space Before ever thinking about starting his agency, Travis began a successful career as a motivational speaker. One of the most valuable lessons he learned was that the hardest part wasn't the speaking itself, it was getting people to pay him to get on their stage and speak. He hired a coach early on who taught him to invest time in figuring out his brand and unique positioning. Once he learned to do that for himself, it led to more than 2,500 paid talks over 10 years. Travis started out speaking about leadership, management conflict, and corporate training and eventually turned to youth speaking. Later on, he got a creative position as America's anti-bullying coach, where he could use his experience while also having a big impact. This new role was an opportunity to get to another level as he toured the country and had interviews on national TV. In hindsight, this taught Travis the power of creating unique positioning in the market where, instead of competing with anybody else, he was complimenting them. After many years in that industry and working as VP of marketing in a bank, he decided to start his own agency to help other people build their brands. How Can You Start a Speaking Career? It is a powerful feeling to get up on a stage. It's the sort of experience which changes how people see you. In fact, Travis now rejects invitations to tradeshows without a speaking engagement. He recognizes the moment you step on a stage people will look at you as an expert, which is a game-changer for elevating your brand. Try to link speaking engagements to your area of expertise and your core beliefs so you really come off as an expert. Travis always takes the topic he's asked to develop and links it back to his branding, which is his specialty. How can you start? He recommends starting local. If you have a niche, look for an opportunity to do a breakout session. For example, if you specialize in marketing for dentists, reach out to the local dentist association. Once you do find an opportunity, build the presentation thinking like a marketer: Have video and engaging content. Offer valuable nuggets of info. Have a free offer to get them into the funnel. Following that, focus on leveraging the first speaking engagement into another and then another. Before you know it, you'll be on a big stage with an audience filled with your ideal customer avatar. Being on stage will put you in the position of being the expert who can help them. They'll get in line to hire you and your agency. Turning Speaking Career Into a Thriving Agency Travis says he has done it both the right and the wrong way. When he started his agency, he had accumulated a lot of experience in elevating himself and his brand. However, he didn't know how to grow an agency. He got out there and got a lot of business for the agency with his brand. He soon learned it couldn't be all about him. It had to be about the team and the focus really needed to shift to showcase their abilities. His first attempt to do this didn't go as well as expected. It was done too quickly and it didn't make sense to remove him so fast when his personal brand was driving all the revenue. He had to start over and get to a point where he transfers the knowledge and credibility over to the agency. A perfect example of how to do this right is Gary Vaynerchuck and Vayner Media. Gary is the brand, but clients never expect to work directly with Gary himself. Travis has started to introduce his audience to his team, instead of just making it the Gary show. This is how Travis is rethinking his model. Building your personal brand can be the fastest way to bring in revenue for the agency. You just need to know how to do it correctly so the agency can shine as well. What Has Worked for His Agency's Branding Right now Travis and his team are

Is it time to pick another niche for your digital agency? There are tons of benefits of niching down. However, there are a lot of concerns about making big changes and focusing on a specific industry. The good news is there are ways to test out a new niche instead of going all-in. Alano Vasquez is the founder and CEO of Cyberwhyze, an agency that helps cyber security companies become brands that scale. Although he found success and even more room for opportunity in this space, he has had other failed attempts at niching down and understands it can be scary to choose a new market and fail. However remember, failures are just lessons to help you move closer to success! In this episode, we'll discuss: Failures that become lessons learned when niching down. Testing out a new niche, rather than going all-in right away. Having the right team in place to give your freedom in your agency. 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 First Steps and Lessons Learned When Niching Down Alano was working in sales at a tech startup right out of college. He was laid off, unfortunately, but when another startup hired him, he soon realized they had no marketing. He decided to use what he had learned and focused on becoming a full-staff marketer. After learning the tech industry and creating his own agency, Alano started working by with any client in the B2B space. He worked with education, healthcare, and fintech companies trying to offer as many services as he could. Within 3 or 4 years, the agency hit a ceiling of about $1.5 million in revenue. In trying to work out a solution, Alano noticed a lot of density with the agency's cyber security clients. However, at the time he actually decided they would focus on the tradeshow space. It seemed like the right choice at that moment. Unfortunately, this happened right before the 2020 pandemic and the end of all in-person events for quite a while. They had spent time and resources on experiential and interactive marketing when everything went virtual because of Covid. How to Identify a New Niche for Your Agency After his first failed attempt, Alano and his team went back to the basics and turned to the opportunity in the security space he had noticed before. They focused on branding and content creation for cyber security companies. Before you pick a niche you pretty much start working with everyone so you can start to see what you like and do really well. You can see where you have success and start weeding out the things that you don't like or do well. To his surprise, Alano quickly realized this new market presented a big runway of opportunities and was dealing. His agency Cyberwhyze started working with big brands sooner than he thought. He has rushed to create the capabilities in order to keep up with what the clients wanted from his agency. Now sees a possibility to double down on this niche. You Can Test Out a New Niche Instead of Going All In In hindsight, his agency would have niched down much sooner had he followed the advice he now gives to his clients. Some of his clients have a few verticals and try to put out a lot of broad-stroke marketing, trying to make it a one-size-fits-all. He finds clients tend to do this to avoid going through the process of creating an entire website for each vertical. Instead, Alano suggests creating a funnel with positioning that speaks to each specific persona. Agencies can also apply this same principle. There's no need to build an entire website for a new niche, just build a funnel, test it out on LinkedIn and run some Google ads. It serves as insurance to make sure you're not going down the wrong path and it might help you feel more at ease when you eventually decide to go all-in. The Value of The Cheat Sheet as a Lead Magnet Coming from sales, Alano and his partner knew very early on they did not want to give away strategy for free. They found a way to productize strategy and sell it as a core component of their work. A good way to attract new clients to your strategy is a cheat sheet. CMOs love them and even bigger brands use them. Cheat sheets come in many forms and you can use them as an opportunity to offer something really valuable while capturing data to continue marketing to your prospects. Cyberwhyze offers a cheat sheet paired with a video webinar that explains how companies can use it to their advantage. This has helped them build trust and led many people to their website. Even some big brands have contacted him based on their cheat sheet, so the agency didn't have to jump through hoops to get their attention. It's all about realizing there's really no reason to offer strategy for free and later feeling remorse for it.

Are you measuring your client retention rates? Do you trust your team will build good relationships with your clients? A lot of agency owners focus on making the sale but neglect customer service. Today's guest will talk about why you may be losing clients and why it's important to have someone dedicated to client success. Khushbu Doshi is a customer service specialist with a passion for strategizing, making realistic actions plans, and following up on their implementation to get real results for agencies. She leads the customer service and sales division at E2M Solutions, a full-service white label partner that helps agencies scale their business. In this episode, we'll discuss: What works when it comes to improving your retention rates. Effective agency-client communication. How you should structure your customer service. Closing the Gap Between Sales Promises And Customer Service Reality Agency owners commonly focus on signing the deal and ringing the bell when they finally get that client. As important that is, you definitely don't want to drop the ball when it comes to following through in customer service. If you do, you'll end up losing clients and wondering why you have a high turnover rate. Why is this so common? As a customer service specialist, Khushbu believes many agencies rely too much on the newest tools and miss the human-oriented approach. In a world of modernization, we all lean on technology to do things for us. This can be great for freeing up more time to focus on the things you do best. However, when it comes to customer service, it can lead to paying less attention to new customers and turning your attention to getting new sales. It's common to see a discrepancy between the possibilities that agencies present to customers during the sales process and what actually ends up happening. To begin bridging the gap, we should focus on the fact that the values you show on that first call with the client should be consistent in their journey with your agency. This is the only way to really earn their trust. Managing Client Expectations After the Sale is Made We're not saying you shouldn't try to improve sales or use new technological tools available to improve operations. However, once the deal is closed and you have a new client, make sure all the promises made during the sale are actually met. If you promise the client they'll have tons of communication and feedback calls and then you don't really do that, you're already starting on the wrong foot. Clients may be very skeptical at the start of the relationship and may even start to question the decision to work together. They need to feel reassured that you're a trusted partner who looks out for them and their interests. Think of it this way, if you don't communicate it -- as far as the client is concerned, it didn't happen. Take immediate action whenever is required and immediately act once the client expresses concern or raises a red flag. Make sure that their journey with your team is seamless. Structure the different stages of your agency sales process. Once a client gets to a new stage, introduce them to the team members they are going to be working with, rather than just having a salesperson just disappear. That same salesperson can be the one to explain from now on, they will be working and communicating with a different team. Also, as part of the onboarding process, define the process and roles within the agency. Let clients know who on the team is responsible for each part of the process so they know who to turn to when they have a question. How Often Should We Communicate With Clients? This will obviously change depending on the stage of the client's process with your agency. In the beginning, clients need more frequent communication until they trust your methods and see results. Khushbu says her clients start with weekly meetings with the customer service team to ensure a seamless journey. This allows her team to meet clients' expectations and learn about their concerns as they move through the first stages. Apart from the weekly calls, she underscores the importance of letting clients know exactly what the team is doing. They should know the research they are doing, the number of team members working on it, something new added to the pipeline, and the time dedicated to these details. Additionally, try to personalize communication with each client by offering alternatives and asking what they prefer (email, Slack, etc.). Remember sometimes a phone call is the best way to let your client know you are invested in the work you do for them. Nothing replaces a personal touch. Communicating to Clients in a Monthly Newsletter Khushbu suggests creating a monthly newsletter for clients detailing what the team has been working on that month. Rather than being skeptical about your work, they will start to trust that you know what you are doing and will be glad to have all details about the next moves. In fact, many agency owners who started

Are you a proactive or reactive agency owner? It's common to come into the business not having a full understanding of what it takes to grow your agency or the type of issues you could face. Today's guest tells us about the process of growing his agency, ditching the competition mentality, and how he wants to help agency owners prepare to grow their businesses. Bear Newman founded his agency Bear Fox Marketing with the belief that running a digital marketing agency specializing in SEO wouldn't be as difficult as it actually was. Years later, he says it was one of the best things he ever did but admits he wasn't quite prepared for some of the challenges. He has overcome a lot of obstacles, including losing clients that accounted for more than 50% of revenue. Now, with a full staff of employees and as he starts to step away from day-to-day operations, he crafted The Bear Fox Principle, a book to help prepare agency owners for what they should expect in the path of growing their business. In this episode, we'll discuss: Running an agency is more than just knowing how to do the work. Why one client shouldn't be more than 20% of total revenue. Why winning doesn't mean crushing every other agency. 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 Running an Agency Is More Than Just Doing the Work Bear was doing SEO work as a freelancer when he decided to open his own agency. "I may not have fully thought through that career move," he jokes. At the time, his reasoning was just, why not? How difficult can it be? He soon realized there's a lot more to running an agency than just being able to do the work. For starters, he had no idea what he should charge clients in order to run a successful business. For his first SEO account, he planned to bill $750 a month. That has definitely changed by now. He also had to figure out every side of the business, from sales to servicing and marketing. Now his agency has great client reviews and is the #1 rated agency in Idaho. He has employees that are much better at selling the agency's products and work on marketing, ads, and creative content to keep the pipeline full. There's a Lesson in Every Experience While Growing Your Agency A lot of agency owners live by the words "if you fail to plan you plan to fail." Bear does believe in the importance of planning, but he also knows that you can't plan for everything and tries to figure it out whenever he can't. For example, he once got a meeting to pitch for the largest pest control company in the Valley. The marketing director quickly let him know he was just meeting with him as a courtesy because he was never getting that account. Instead of feeling bad, he decided the experience of pitching the project would be enough. With that in mind, he went ahead with the pitch, trusting it would at the very least help him improve. In the end, he ended up winning the account. Once he did get the account, however, he had no idea what to charge. Some people may say he should have anticipated that, but for him, the beauty of the agency world is also having the confidence to say "whatever comes at me, I'll figure it out." Stages of Starting to Build Your Digital Agency Team For Bear, his search for an agency team really began when he realized he was unable to keep up with the workload. He wanted to maintain the quality of work and didn't want to be everything to everybody. Like many agency owners, he focused on specific challenges. Bear knew needed a team of specialists who were really good at what they did so he could start to delegate tasks. When he started his search for employees, the most important quality for him was having the right attitude towards hard work and never choosing to do the minimum. Candidates were offered a client brief and the opportunity to create 2-3 Facebook ads and landing pages. If they only did two, he knew it wasn't a right fit for him. It was important to find people who always strive to do everything above and beyond for clients and the agency. The Worst Thing His Agency Overcame The first year of Covid was the hardest for his agency. Two of his clients were making the transition to handling their marketing in-house and they accounted for about 53% of his total revenue. It was a really hard time, but he had to come up with a solution. He could either downsize and prepare for the loss in revenue or he could face the problem head-on. He decided to hire a sales team to get that revenue replaced. Of course, the team was going to need time to set in and build the funnel. Bear made the bold move of hiring two salespeople, just in case one of them failed. If this didn't work, he wou

Are you thinking about buying an agency? What about just buying one department of agency to compliment your service offering? There are many reasons to consider acquiring another agency, like client lists or intellectual property. However, buying one for its resources made the most sense for this podcast guest. When a few red flags made him take a step back, he found he could structure a deal in the form of buying just the department he was most interested in rather than acquiring the whole agency. It takes the right circumstances and aligned interests, but it worked for both agencies involved. Like many agency owners, Antoine Gagne started his agency, J7 Media, by accident. He hosted events that drove a lot of people in and realized he was good with social media. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram were still sort of new in Canada, so he started off selling social media management packages. He saw a lot of success in this market and eventually niched down to specialize in Facebook advertising. More recently, he has ventured to buy other agencies to expand his services. In this episode, we'll discuss: Niching down to grow the agency. When to raise agency prices. Buying an agency department for the resources. 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 Getting to the First Million in Revenue and Beyond In his beginnings, Antoine started an agency that offered social media management and content creation services. He eventually decided to focus on an area that was most profitable and where the agency really shined. As a Facebook ads agency, they were so specialized it was easy for clients to refer them to people looking for these exact services, which led to a stable sales cycle. Antoine really recommends figuring out one service that you're good at and you're able to sell repeatedly. Once you settle on this, the key is to not give up, he assures. Keep going until it becomes easy for you to get more and more clients. At this rate, you will get to your first million in revenue. For Antoine, once you figure out how to keep it simple and go all-in on one service you do really well, you find that getting to the second million is actually easier. When To Raise Your Agency Prices Failing to recognize when it's time to raise prices is a common problem for agency owners. Additionally, most fear this move will make them lose out on prospective clients. To be clear, the point where you find a service you can sell repeatedly while improving and consistently getting better clients should also be the point where you get ready to raise your prices and think about your profit. If you have an agency and you're not focused on profit then you may be in the wrong business. The sooner you realize agency owners should not be looking primarily at just top-line revenue the better. In Antoine's case, the shift began with looking at the different parts of the agency and using this information to structure its prices. He figured out how much the agency was making from each department and then decided he wanted to make 40% net revenue from those parts of the business. Next, he needed to decide what the agency should charge and how many clients it would take to meet the goal. It basically took some backward math to figure out how the pricing. As to the fear of losing clients, all new clients agreed to the new price without further pushback. For their part, existing clients were gradually moved to this new price point at a different pace. Why You Have to Focus on Net Margin Instead of Revenue Getting J7 Media on the path to growth required a clear vision of the net margin Antoine was hoping for and adjusting the prices around it. A lot of people tend to start with the revenue in mind and plan around that. The problem comes when they don't make any profit. This is a much more advisable way to go about it, especially if you plan to sell someday because your agency is valued on EBITDA. It's normal to start out with the revenue in mind and slowly get to the point where you realize you should be focusing on net profit. It'll change the way you look at your business and the way you approach your agency growth. This mindset prompted Antoine to create new services to improve the profit margin instead of thinking about revenue. It was the starting point to grow into a healthier financial situation. Why Buy an Agency Department, Not the Whole Agency There are various reasons to acquire a company, like their client list or intellectual property. For Antoine and his agency, it was about resources. On one hand, they noticed their clients needed more from them. On the other hand, a lot of things had cha

Do you know how good branding establishes your agency as an authority? As a result, you will grow your agency faster. The fact is, being relatable and establishing yourself as a trusted advisor to prospective clients gains their willingness to let you help them solve their challenges and achieve their goals. Our guest today shares how branding helps establish authority and how she turned her agency from a side hustle to a full-time priority. Annie Scranton had worked at several media companies when she founded her own PR agency, Pace Public Relations, focused on getting their clients media attention and placement to highlight their work. After losing her job as a producer at CNBC, Annie sent an email to her network and got an answer asking if she could help get media for a client. It came natural to her. She got that person an interview and knew this was the path for her future career helping actors, CEOs, and authors get access to media. In this episode, we'll discuss: Turning a side hustle into a full-time opportunity. Branding yourself vs. branding your agency. The importance of a solid pitch. 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 Turning an Agency From a Side Job to Full-Time Priority Annie's PR venture began as a side job that wasn't really her number one priority at the time. After years of working in several media outlets, she knew many influential producers and reporters. This was her currency to take the business off the ground and allowed her to offer clients access to the media. Nevertheless, she admits she undercharged for many years, a common issue for startups. This may have slowed her growth a bit, but eventually, Annie's pricing model evolved to monthly retainers. She finally made the decision to focusing on her business full-time once she had enough of a safety net to take the risk. Twelve years later, her monthly retainers are now up to 10K and she has offices around the world. First Steps to Growing an Agency Annie was lucky to have a big network of people answering her questions about the first steps she needed to take with her business. Since PR is a service industry, she didn't have to manufacture a product or answer to investors. Once she made the decision to fully focus on building her agency, she hired a web designer to put together a website, opened a corporate email, and was ready to start growing her business. She quickly learned the importance of hiring a good accountant, since she hadn't realized how much money she need to put away for taxes. It was a rough reality check. As soon as she couldn't handle the amount of work on her own, she started looking for her first employee. She started by delegating the low-level admin work to dedicate more time to getting new business. For this, she decided it would be best to hire and train someone who already had a background in media. Ultimately, overcoming the anxieties that come with being responsible for payroll was one of the best decisions she could make for her business. The Difference Between Marketing Yourself vs Building Your Brand Annie is a big believer in the power of building your own brand. In the debate between branding yourself or branding your agency, she thinks we should all do both. However, it is also a matter of your needs and your particular industry. For her business in PR, it really is all about the image she presents of herself as someone that can get you access to the media. Therefore, her branding is about 75% focused on her. Your prospective clients want to work with you and your team, not your "company". People want to work with people that are relatable and that share their values. It can be aspirational in a way. You want to follow their journey, career path, and success. Remember that this is why it is so important to brand yourself. It attracts people in a way that just branding your business won't do. No, Branding Yourself Doesn't Mean You'll Do Everything It's true that creating a situation where clients strongly identify your agency with your personal image may lead them to expect to work directly with you. However, Annie says it is true to a much lesser extent than people may imagine. At the startup phase, the owner is doing pretty much everything, which is why you should really love what you do. However, if you hire really smart people that you train well then you won't have to do everything. It's natural to grow and evolve within your agency to the point of being focused on growth and your vision for the agency. When it comes to building your brand, Annie recommends posting and interacting on LinkedIn. It's a very powerful tool if you use it well and it's where she has gotten tons of new bu

Are you doing your own bookkeeping? Are you paying too much for someone else to do it? You might be wasting valuable resources that could be focused on growing your agency and your profitability. In most cases, it's not an agency owner's area of expertise and CPA's charge a ton for this service. It's worth it to hire someone who understands the scope of what you do and how to keep your books. Today's guest is an expert in accounting for agencies and his company, Agency Dad, helps agency owners forecast their finances and establish a strong fiscal foundation for their future. Nate Jenson is a certified management accountant, internal auditor, and fraud examiner who founded Agency Dad, an accounting company that focuses on profitability for agencies. He offers bookkeeping services for agencies but their main focus is helping agencies understand financials and what's driving profitability. Nate has been on the show before talking about the financial benchmarks and KPI's that can help you plan for the future of your agency. In this episode, we'll discuss: Why you shouldn't do your own bookkeeping. The high cost of bookkeeping mistakes. How tracking time will help you improve profitability. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM YOUTUBE AUDIO LINK Why You Probably Should Not Be Doing Your Agency's Bookkeeping Bookkeeping is not the sexiest topic and most creatives are not interested in it. However, a lot of agency owners do their own bookkeeping, even when it typically isn't their area of expertise. Nate advises against this for several reasons, although he admits there's a point in your startup when it's OK. There is a situation where handling your own bookkeeping makes sense. If you're just starting, have only a few clients, one invoice a month, and no employees, then it's perfectly fine. It can also be the best for you as you try to scale your agency and need to keep costs low. Once you start growing, the complexity of the data grows exponentially. You get to a point where maybe you just hired your first employee, have several clients, and diversify your service offering. Then tracking that data becomes more important and more difficult. And, knowing the data leads to making better decisions for future growth. Finally, you should also consider opportunity cost. If you started an agency, maybe you're an expert on SEO or getting clients. Imagine how much money you could be making if you focused on what you're good at instead of bookkeeping, which is most likely not your greatest strength. 2 Reasons Not to Use Your CPA For Bookkeeping A lot of people use their CPA for bookkeeping because they lump all the "financial stuff" in the same category. But a CPA and a bookkeeper are drastically different. And, Jason and Nate agree this does not provide the best results for your agency. This solution keeps your books clean and reconciled but Nate says there are several reasons he does not recommend it: It is the more expensive option. Most likely, you will overpay to have your accountant do your bookkeeping. However, more importantly -- CPAs usually keep books based on their tax knowledge. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, however, on the backend, it doesn't help you make good decisions for running your business or to move forward.It all starts with the data entry and your vision for the agency. If you want to make smart growth decisions you need a good bookkeeper to help you with the data. What do you need to know from the data to make good decisions? Can you hire a new employee? How much should you charge? Can you give your team a raise? Imagine you want to sell your agency soon, you would probably have very specific questions about valuation and how the decisions you're making right now will affect your business. When would you like to sell? In one year? Five years? In terms of the data, you have to know what you're putting in and why so you can answer those questions in the backend. If you are planning to sell and do not know this information it could be a red flag to potential buyers. You should know the financial outlook of your agency at any time. If you want to have an opportunity to sell you should have everything in order. And if you want to sell in the future, you want to know what you can do as of now to maximize your value. The High Cost of Making Bookkeeping Mistakes According to Nate, 96% of data analysis happens at your data entry. This means that if you don't know how to properly enter the data you will run into trouble. Overall, you want to do everything right in your bookkeeping from the beginning. Nate has been hired to "clean up books" and fix years of improperly kept data which sometimes takes months. If it's too complex, he even prefers starting from scratch and rebuilding everything. Having the right systems and the right processes in place can even help save money you're already spending in bookkeeping. In one of the worst cases he's ever seen, Nate rebuilt his c

Do you have a clear agency vision? If so, have you shared it with your team and have their full buy-in? It takes courage to make changes that will help you scale faster. You need clarity to define your vision for the agency and a team that shares that vision. It may rock the boat a bit too much for some in your team. However, when you surround yourself with people that believe in your vision you'll see results so much faster than working with those who resist it. Arti Sharma is a marketing and business leader who had worked for 15 years contributing to the growth and success of several start-ups and Fortune 500 companies when she created Measure Marketing Results Inc. As a marketer, she felt a lot of people were talking about marketing but no one was measuring it. She saw the opportunity and started reaching out to some old clients offering to build a campaign for them. Her business has changed a lot since then, but the most significant change came about five years ago when she redefined the agency's goals and created a vision script. In this episode, we'll discuss: Why finding clarity is the first step toward change. Your mission statement and vision script. The importance of surrounding yourself with the right people. 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 To Find Clarity for Your Agency Digital agencies nowadays find themselves in a very crowded space. In order to stand out, agency owners must answer the question "how do I differentiate myself from everyone else?" Usually, agencies go to Jason with a variety of problems that are standing in the way of their growth. The majority of those problems stem from a lack of clarity which affects the agency owners' ability to focus on niche, services, pricing, and even leadership. Five years ago, Arti ran a successful company that had changed between building websites and offering SEO and SEM services. She started to question what she was building and whether it aligned with her personal and business goals. In essence, the agency's mission statement "influence, inspire and impact" had not changed. However, she realized her clarity was lost somewhere along the way. As agency owners know, sometimes this can happen as you worry about all sorts of issues like building a team, getting new clients, and maintaining sales. Holding Your Agency Team Accountable to the Mission The real change began in January 2020, when the team met to discuss the mission statement and create a complete vision script establishing how they would operate based on that mission. From then on, they made the commitment to hold themselves accountable to the mission by measuring operations, serving customers, hiring, and sales and marketing. Turns out it was perfect timing. The company navigated the pandemic by serving its customers and building a niche based on the new commitment. Looking back, those were uncertain times for any business, but their new commitment was the push they needed to think outside the box and actually live their mission in daily actions. Arti's team is still working on their changes, but so far they've become Hubspot partners and changed their offering to be more of an account-based marketing and sales enablement company. They've even built another business, an agency for agencies that wish to outsource some of their services. The Importance of Creating Your Agency's Vision Script Measure Marketing Results' mission statement remains the same and continues being true to its goals. The next step Arti took was redefining the vision statement in accordance with its goals and creating a script. To do this, they got really specific and identified, among other things, who their ideal clients are, where they would find them, what sort of impact would they have on their business and growth. They broke that vision down as much as they could and this provided much-needed clarity for the agency. Creating this vision script ultimately impacted their systems, sales scripts, thinking about where they would find clients and partnerships. It became clear that the agency would need to align itself with companies like Hubspot and leverage its tools to expedite the agency's go-to marketing strategy in the world of inbound marketing. Crafting your Value Script entails: Defining your core values. Having a vision of where you want to be in 2 years, 4 years, and 10 years. Big action items for each year to move toward your goal. The Vision Can't Stop with the Leadership Team Defining your agency's vision is another important step, but you need your team's commitment to make it a reality. The problem many agencies have is the vision stops at the

Do you want to start charging for strategy instead of just execution? A lot of agencies out there are getting paid for execution and giving away strategy for free. They end up being viewed as a commodity instead of for the value and expertise they bring their clients. It's mostly about learning how to cross that bridge. Our guest today specializes in helping business owners make this transition. It involves a lot of trial and error, trusting your experience, and learning to listen to clients. Stephen Houraghan is a brand strategist who helps businesses amplify their brands and teaches designers and brand builders how to specialize in this area with his Brand Master Academy. He started his career working in finance and stockbroking and eventually left that world to start his own agency offering web design services. With the rise of freelancer platforms, Stephen saw clients wanted more value, so he tapped into strategy, which in time opened the doors to a different type of business and relationship with clients. In this episode, we'll discuss: Stop giving away strategy for free. The thought and process of selling strategy. Listen to clients to create authority. 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 Figuring Out How to Charge for Strategy When Stephen started working as a freelance designer he tapped into his professional network and was getting lots of referrals. He was doing what he loved and money wasn't a worry. However, this started to change with the rise of freelancer platforms. Clients were pushing back on his prices and he realized he needed to offer more value to retain customers. He started his agency and thought about how to compete with freelancers. Being more competitive would require solving the right problems for clients and offering more. He turned to branding, something he really loved to do. Eventually, that led to piecing together the puzzle of brand strategy. Brand strategy is the key to making competitors irrelevant. Offering all the pieces of building a brand to clients put Stephen on another level, no longer competing with freelancers who just offered a logo or website. It took years of developing and improving his process but now clients do not compare based on logos and brochures but rather based on long-term success based on the strategy behind these items. How to Test Your System for Selling Strategy No matter how you fell into the agency world, there comes a point where you have to turn what you've learned into something which proves value to your clients. The bridge you need to cross to get to that point is experience. You need to realize you already have the building blocks to shift to this model. No one jumps into a creative project and just drags pixels around. It takes thought and a process. This process may be more or less detailed and, for some, it involves research and building a brand persona. Begin by documenting it and you will slowly develop it from there. Usually, freelancers and new agencies will not charge for the labor involved in the process. Taking this step will really make a difference in your growth because there's no ceiling to what you can charge when you sell strategy. For his part, Stephen started by splitting up his services. He increased his design prices but made sure to sell them as the product of a comprehensive process. At first, he included the strategy for free as he slowly transitioned to taking his clients through his system. With time, his system became much more comprehensive as he tested and refined it. A big part of doing this was pushing the impostor syndrome away. Of course, you have to be very careful to not just slap a title on yourself as you start to sell brand strategy but trust your experience. It is about building the system, but it is also about building confidence in yourself, your system, and knowing that clients need that system whether they know it or not. What are the Elements of Brand Strategy? Knowing the concept of brand strategy is a start but you need to understand its elements and how to tie them together to create more value for clients. Stephen identified a lot of common elements, including buyer persona, competitive analysis, positioning, storytelling, brand personality, brand mission, etc. The challenge was to figure out if every single one of these elements applies to every business, in what order, and how he could go about developing them. Asking these questions was the start of putting together a system to build a brand. It all starts with the customer, naturally, but it goes beyond the persona. You have to dig into their journey and understand each of the challenges in that journey. From there, it's about

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. 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

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: 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. 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. 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. 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 par

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. 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: 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. 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." 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 cl

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: Being PrescriptiveLet'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. TransformationClients 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. 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. 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. 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 retent

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

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. N – 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. 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 quest

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 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. 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.. 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

Are you afraid to niche for your digital agency because you think it means saying no? Are you scared niching down will pigeonhole your agency and limit its potential? Think again! There are so many benefits when you choose to focus your agency services on a specific market. Joe Giovannoli worked for a full-service agency right out of college and decided to replicate that model when it came to building his own business. Like many agency owners, he was hesitant to focus on a specific market. But once his agency, 9Sail decided to niche down to just SEO for law firms and construction, they started to grow quickly. Joe is on the show sharing about niching down twice, life after learning to say no, and the most exciting deal his agency has landed. 3 Golden Nuggets Niching down twice. There is a lot of fear associated with niching down and making the switch to only go after a specific market or provide a specific service. Joe did this twice, once to change their service offering from a full-service agency to an SEO & SEM agency. Then again to focus on two specific industries with law and construction. Both times it was a scary step and he found himself relieved at the results. "We started getting more referrals. We've started getting more qualified leads, and we actually started to establish a name for ourselves in those spaces," he says. Clients that take you with them. When asked about the most exciting deals they've gotten as an agency, Joe thinks back to the times they get referred by past clients. This is a testament to their work as an agency. Some of former clients have worked at several different companies over the years and each time they get to a new company they call 9Sail to work with them again. "That's the really exciting stuff," he assures "the deals that we get referred in from a past client, or we get referred in from somebody that's happy." Life after learning to say no. What is life after learning to say no to being the agency that does everything and choosing a niche where you can be an authority? "The word relaxed comes to mind," Joe told Jason. For starters, the team feels comfortable learning the space and knowing they're going to use this knowledge time and time. Rather than always needing to learn the nuisances of different industries. Also, niching gives them an opportunity to build their pipeline where they chose the clients that are the right fit for the agency. This results in a more predictable means for growth. Sponsors and Resources E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Saying No to Trying to Be Everything to Clients & Finding Success After Niching Down Twice {These transcripts have been auto-generated. While largely accurate, they may contain some errors.} Jason: [00:00:00] Hey, Joe, welcome to the show. I'm excited to have you on. Joe: [00:00:05] Yeah. Thanks. Excited to be here. Jason: [00:00:07] Tell us who you are and what do you do? Joe: [00:00:11] Uh, yeah, so, uh, my name's Joe Giovannoli. I am the founder and CEO of 9Sail. We are a search marketing company for law firms and construction companies. So we work on both the SEO organic side, as well as the paid search side of a marketing strategy that a law firm or construction company might have. Our goal is basically lead generation for those, those companies. Jason: [00:00:35] Awesome. And, uh, tell me a little bit about you and how you got started in the agency. Joe: [00:00:40] Yeah. So I actually, uh, had started a company while I was in college. Uh, that was a social media marketing agency. And then coming out of college, I decided to work for a full-service marketing firm, you know, really just to get more experience. I did sales and, you know, moved from there to another agency and realize that, you know, I love this agency world. I love the pace of it. I loved working with different clients and speaking with different business owners and, and marketing leaders. And I decided to start my own thing. So kind of fell into the industries that we are, that we're in now, you know, law firms and construction companies were just two really interesting spaces for us to be in. And we identified some opportunity in the market so we went for it. Jason: [00:01:24] Awesome. Joe: [00:01:25] Yeah. We didn't set out to be just an SEO and SEM company. We were a full-service agency cause that's what I, only thing I knew and frankly, I didn't know that I could break off services at the time when I started the company. So we've been an SEO and SEM company for the last five years. Jason: [00:01:43] What made you kind of drill down? Like what was the turning point or what was the aha moment? Joe: [00:01:50]

Do you struggle to embrace automation in your agency's operations? Jordan Bell was already an ads expert that taught the ins and outs of creating successful ads when he started his agency Agency Bell, where he applied his knowledge to offer direct response ad mastery with AI-powered automation and retainer-level audience insights for law firms. In his interview with Jason, he talks about why it was difficult to embrace automation which ultimately became a game-changer for his agency. He also chats about the importance of really understanding what you're doing and not fully relying on technology as the ultimate solution, and why it takes a solid structure, more than just new technology, to get your agency through difficult times. 3 Golden Nuggets Embracing automation. Jordan was the guy when it came to ads. He could calculate the exact bid that we would need at a common conversion rate in like a specific keyword or targeting group. It was all manual. This is why it was very hard for him to embrace automation. In the end, it wasn't about getting into machine automation, but actually turning it into a competitive advantage for them, which became a massive milestone for his agency. Can you find your way through a problem? We all need to get back to the basics at some point to remember what's important. As Jordan puts it, you should learn to fly a plane before turning on automated navigation. "There's so much technology available to us that it often becomes the solution in people's minds," he says. They forget that, in order to be reliable, efficient and successful you should be able to understand what you're doing in the context of what we're trying to achieve or the larger vision and goals. At the end of the day, regardless of what task management program you use, can you write down what outcomes you need to be able to achieve when you know, you've got like 20 or 30 tasks due that week? A solid structure to get you through. These have been difficult times where many have had to learn to adapt to new circumstances. There are solid frameworks that protect any kind of business and Jordan has learned that it's not about getting to the new tech. It's more about the management side of running a business, being in charge of the outcomes, having a vision for the future of the business, designing the lifestyle. These years taught him to really consider what work he should be doing versus not doing in the business as an agency owner. Sponsors and Resources Verblio: 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. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Using Automation as a Competitive Advantage & Really Understand the Context of What You're Trying to Achieve {These transcripts have been auto-generated. While largely accurate, they may contain some errors.} Jason: [00:00:00] Hey, Jordan, welcome to the show. Jordan: [00:00:04] Hey, thank you. Jason: [00:00:05] You know, the funny thing is, is whenever we record these shows, it's like we have chatted before, which we've been chatting for like 10 minutes, but I guess we have to do that for you listeners out here, making it believe this is the first time we're chatting. But, um, tell us who you are and what do you do? Jordan: [00:00:20] Yeah. So my name is Jordan Bell. I run a digital ad agency called Agency Bell. I've been doing it for about five years, but my experience in advertising and agency-type services is about over a decade or so. I'm a builder type of agency owner. I kind of classify them as like, kind of like the builders and engineers, the service people, the sales focus ones. I'm a true builder and a service type of person. So I built the agency really from a service perspective as a guy who was cutting his teeth in Google ads on large accounts for a long time. And getting really involved in the technology side of it and really enjoying the customized integrations. And so, you know, I ran an agency or I helped run an agency as a junior partner for a little while after my last corporate role, seven years ago or something and, um, after that I was teaching digital marketing courses, advertising courses at coding academies and stuff, and a couple of colleges and a while also consulting and taking on like really not really like, um, you know, corporate, not a lot of corporate projects. I had a couple like Fortune 500 ones, but, um, a lot of like, uh, hit the hammer, strike the from hammer to anvil, get the outcome type of in the trenches types of roles. I always enjoyed that. And, um, the consulting gigs came from teaching adults in CMOs. Good to go digital, stuff like that. And then eventually the consultancy, it just kind of became more and more until it became time to start an agency again. I'm an individual agency o

Do you want to sell your agency in the future? What strategic relationships can help you grow and possibly sell your agency? Roy Chong was working in the music industry for many years before deciding to make a drastic change and start over in digital marketing. Now with Noodle Wave Media he helps companies in the healthcare space thrive by developing meaningful strategies and tactics that move their marketing efforts towards success. In this interview with Jason, Roy discusses the most important decisions he made for his business, how he always envisioned a strategic partnership for the future of his agency, and why you should always take your passion wherever you go. 3 Golden Nuggets The most important decisions for his business. Roy never really saw a reason to rent an office space he could not afford at the time, so very early on he invested in having a remote working model with a team that could work from anywhere in the country. It shaped the way his agency works and its culture because he acknowledges that not everyone likes or can work remotely. Finding those types of people that shared this vision really helped build their culture. The second biggest decision was niching down to focus on the healthcare vertical, where the agency really found its footing and scaled to the point where he could sell the agency. Making the decision to sell. Roy always envisioned a strategic partnership for his agency. He knew it was in his future but just needed to figure out how it would work and what would be the right time to pursue it. Jason helped him by pointing out some things he needed to work on, which provided some time to add another layer of value for clients. He also had time to consider what he didn't want to lose with the deal, and the type of relationship he expected from this partnership. All of this ultimately led him back to Jason and to the partnership that would enable him to still be in charge of day-to-day operations. Taking your passion wherever you go. If you ever have to start again from scratch remember to take your passion with you. Passion is commonly depicted as what we do, "that isn't necessarily true," Roy says, "It's who you are." At one point in his career, he made the transition from the music industry to digital marketing. There is seemingly no correlation between both, but Roy argues what made the difference and helped him succeed in a new industry was taking a passion for helping people with him. Sponsors and Resources E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Finding a Strategic Relationship That Fits Your Agency Growth Goals {These transcripts have been auto-generated. While largely accurate, they may contain some errors.} Jason: [00:00:00] Hey, Roy, welcome to the show. Roy: [00:00:04] Hey! Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:06] I'm excited to have you on the show. So, uh, for the ones that have not heard of you yet, tell us who you are and what do you do? Roy: [00:00:13] Yeah, so I'm the CEO and founder of Noodle Wave Media. We're a full-stack digital marketing agency focused on the healthcare vertical. I've been doing that for 11 years. Prior to that, I was in the music industry as a music producer, and I've got kind of that entrepreneurial spirit so I flipped a couple of the businesses along the way. Father of two amazing boys and a passionate creative and marketer. Jason: [00:00:44] And how did you get started and how long ago did you start your agency? Roy: [00:00:49] Yeah, so I started it probably in 2000, around 2010. I had just kind of rotated out of the music industry and I'd spent 10 years there writing music for artists and I got signed to a production deal in New York and I was running the artists for my idols, and then I did a stint in Korea. And then I decided, you know what, I'm kind of done with this it's time to start something new. And I realized at that time I'd been in the content game for 10 years. I thought, boy, combine that with using ability to create content and find a thread that resonates with people and tie that to helping small businesses, cause I had a marketing education and experience already, that could be something. And so I started that 10 years ago with that exact premise of leveraging content to help brand build brand equity for clients. But at that time, like, and you'll know this, Jason, like that wasn't a thing, really. Large brands we're doing that, leveraging YouTube and all kinds of other platforms, but the small business owner didn't really have access cause they just didn't know how to do it. So I started it at that time with that premise in mind. And I just remember people thought, yeah

Quinn Zeda had been running an agency for six years when she decided to start from scratch and focus on conversion rate optimization with Conversion Crimes. She and her team help clients identify mistakes in their website's design, messaging, and navigation that is stealing revenue from under their nose. Quinn is really big on user-testing and customer research. In her interview with Jason, she explained the roadmap strategy she implemented to get the type of projects she could execute the way she wanted to, how this strategy helped her slowly educate customers on why they needed much more than just a website, and how she learned to appreciate the importance of systems and operations. 3 Golden Nuggets The roadmap strategy. When she first started her agency, Quinn was charging $1,000 for a website. One of her frustrations was with those $1,000 - $2,000 projects was that she could never execute them in the way that she wanted to. To be able to deliver the results that she knew she could, without scaring clients off with a $180K budget, she started with a 10K retainer presented as a roadmap of things she could accomplish for the company. After a couple of months, clients were seeing some really incredible results and excited to go on to phase two. More than a website. Creating her roadmap strategy was a great way for clients to understand that they were not paying $250,000 for a website. It may be what they thought they needed, but going step by step and getting them to approve a foot in the door project Quinn was able to educate her clients to see that they needed much more. They would gather information on who their most profitable customer was and who was draining their teams of resources and, with those insights, create a plan of action for the branding, the marketing, and the strategy. The importance of SOPs. Once you start bringing in more customers you need to make sure operations run smoothly, especially with the new hires you will probably need. Quinn acknowledges she didn't really see the importance of systems, processes, and SOPs and the value they brought to the business when she first started her agency. It was only after her team started documenting some of these processes, even if it was in a very basic way at the beginning, and gradually became more detailed that she saw it was really a game-changer that saved them a lot of time. Sponsors and Resources Verblio: 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. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Raising Prices With a Roadmap Strategy and Why SOPs Are a Game-changer {These transcripts have been auto-generated. While largely accurate, they may contain some errors.} Jason: [00:00:00] Hey, Quinn. Welcome to the show. Quinn: [00:00:04] Hey, thanks for having me, Jason. Jason: [00:00:06] Yeah. Excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and, uh, tell us a little bit about the agency that you started. Quinn: [00:00:12] Yeah, so my name is Quinn Zeda. I started freelancing right out of college, which then turned into too much work than I could handle. I started hiring more freelancers, which then kind of morphed into an agency where I started then kind of hiring my first full-time employees that were like really dedicated to me. And after running the agency for a few years, maybe five or six years on, then I shut it down and now I run a startup, um, Conversion Crimes, which is like a user testing SaaS. And yeah, when I ran the agency, we were doing user experience, conversion rate optimization really focused on helping basically businesses around the one to 5 million mark scale. You know, people kind of get a business to a certain point. They reach a glass ceiling and they kind of duct-taped everything together. They found product-market fit. They started making their money and they're like, yeah, but now like what we built doesn't represent who we are anymore. So we come in and kind of restructure that. So… Jason: [00:01:15] Very cool. And what was the biggest accomplishment that you had at the agency before you closed it down and why? Quinn: [00:01:25] Yeah, the biggest accomplishment, I think, was kind of really getting with the value-based pricing that we went on. So when I first started, I was charging like a thousand dollars for a website and I ended at a quarter of a million for a website. So originally, like when I started that, it was like, this client is like a thousand. The next one was 2,000. The next one was 4,000. Then at 8,000, I just kept doubling it every time I would send a proposal out. Granted, the deliverables definitely changed from each one of those jumps and kind of gave me more resources to get more clarity on the kind of projects that we wanted to do. And then I went from like

Are you thinking of adding funny videos to your sales strategy? This eight-step framework may be just what you need to create successful sales videos. Joseph Wilkins has been creating sales videos since the half-hour infomercials that appear on TV. When his clients stopped getting the results they used to, he knew it was time to change spaces and switched to making videos for social media with his agency FunnySalesVideos.com. In his interview with Jason, he explains his eight-step framework to making successful sales videos, the process to make a solid video script, why you want professional comedians and actors involved in the process, and why you should never prioritize the comedy over the sale. 3 Golden Nuggets Eight steps to making funny sales videos. Joseph has been producing funny videos that sell for many years and has developed a list of eight steps that have worked for him and that will surely serve as a very good framework for anyone that wants to create these types of videos. These steps take you from really understanding who your audience is before even starting to think about ideas for the videos, getting in the habit of writing down at least 50 bad ideas before thinking about the ones that could actually work, the process of making a script that works and adding the comedy punch, hiring the rights talent, and more. And that's just 50% of the process. You're not trying to make the funniest videos. When it comes to videos like these, and as Daniel Harmon when he spoke with Jason about video ads, remember that you're not trying to create a video that is just funny. You're looking to create a video that creates sales. The comedy has to support the sale. If it doesn't, if it distracts from your main objective, then you should cut it out. "Some of the funniest jokes never end up in the video," Joseph confirms. This is why the creative director will always have to push to get a video that is different and new for the brand, while also being laser-focused on the sales aspect. On agency owners appearing in these videos. "Don't do it!" Joseph puts a lot of emphasis on this point. This kind of video is a top of funnel first impression video. You want to give it a good chance of grabbing the audience's attention and keeping it and getting them to click into your funnel. It's not completely out of the question for the company CEO to appear on a video at a later point in time, but always keep in mind they should not be the comic relief. Comedy takes true skill and Joseph prefers to leave it to the pros. Sponsors and Resources E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Leave The Comedy To The Pros & Follow These 8 Steps Funny Sales Videos {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 and guest where we're going to talk about how to create funny sales videos that don't seem salesy that really get people's attention and convert. So let's go ahead and jump into the show. Hey, Joseph. Welcome to the show. Joseph: [00:00:24] Thanks, Jason, it's good to be here. Jason: [00:00:25] Yeah. I'm excited to have you on, so tell us who you are and tell us a little bit about your agency. Joseph: [00:00:30] Sure. So I own FunnySalesVideos.com, which is kind of a recent breaker or rebrand to my original agency, which was Procreative. For 20 years we've produced videos that sell, and I'll give you a quick background. We started primarily in television. So back in the day, our very first project, we were focusing on infomercials. So, you know, those huge 30 minute long infomercials that people would find in the middle of the night flipping through their channels. Our very first project did over $200 million in sales and that kind of got us hooked and for the next 15 years that was our main focus, was television. But as you and I well know the way that people watch television, if they even do anymore, has dramatically changed in the past decade or two. And so about five years ago after producing, you know, tons and tons and tons of TV commercials, infomercials and web videos and we'd work for, you know, some of the biggest brands on the planet, Google, LinkedIn, Chevrolet, McDonald's, um, we're a very small boutique agency, but we like to pretend to be clients that we're not so that we can compete with the best of them. But anyway, after about 15 years, our clients basically said we're not getting the results that we used to, you know, we're spending the same amount of money running the creative we're spending sometimes even more for the media buying

Are you struggling to retain employees? Do you know how to keep scaling without burning through talent? When Robert Glazer started Acceleration Partners, he always had a vision of working with an international team. Now, his agency, which is focused on managing partnership and affiliate programs for high-growth brands, has 300 employees in eight different countries. Robert joined Jason in this episode to talk about how he avoids burning through talent, how he trains his employees to ask why, and what he invested in to get beyond the referral stage. 3 Golden Nuggets Beyond the referral stage. Robert ran a referral-based agency for about 15 years. Of course, it couldn't last forever and eventually, they started focusing more on sales and marketing so he and his partner would be less overwhelmed by the sales aspect. It's a stage every agency will go through and they faced it by investing in leadership, having great marketing, and great delivery. In the end, they have exponential revenue growth from the time they started scaling the sales and marketing team and hired a fully integrated sales and marketing team. On not burning through talent. With an agency that has been in Glassdoor's best places to work, what have they focused on when building their culture? Robert says they always had a vision of working remotely with employees from different countries. They have also focused on offering a work environment where employees can grow professionally, which is one of the main reasons people leave their jobs. In the end, agency life is not for everyone, some will love its unpredictable nature and others won't, but Robert made sure to create a culture that does not reward overworking employees unnecessarily and offers flexible hours. Asking why. On the subject of them not rewarding working extra hours with little results, Robert explains they have resorted to training employees to ask why. Why does the client need this data by tomorrow? Could this be solved any other way? Do they really need everything they think they need? "Don't assume, because they're asking for something that it's the right thing or you can't explain to them the trade-off or explain the consequences," he says. Sponsors and Resources Verblio: 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. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Scaling Your Agency Faster Without Burning Through Talent {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 great episode where we're going to talk about how you can scale your agency rapidly without burning through a ton of talent, because all of us have been going through and going, how do we keep employees and how do we find the right talent? And on today's episode, I have a guest that's going to talk exactly about that, that's done this. So let's go ahead and jump into the episode. Hey, Robert, welcome to the show. Robert: [00:00:32] Thanks for having me, Jason. Jason: [00:00:33] Yeah. So tell us who you are and what you do. Robert: [00:00:36] Uh, yeah, I'm Bob Glazer. I'm the founder and the chairman of the board of Acceleration Partners. Acceleration Partners is the largest global independent agency focused on managing partnership and affiliate programs for well-known and high-growth brands. Uh, we have almost 200 clients and, uh, I think, uh, getting close to 300 employees across eight countries and we manage programs across 25 different countries. Jason: [00:01:02] Very cool. And so how did you start the agency? What made you fall into this? Robert: [00:01:08] Uh, like most agency owners… No, I don't know anyone who started the agency intentionally. I just, you know, I started doing some work in the affiliate space. I found a lot of problems with it. I started helping a company fix its program. Uh, that company ended up being a huge success. It was called Tiny Prints. Sold them to Shutterfly for $300 million. People then spread out from that and start saying, hey, can we do that thing that you helped us with there? And then I couldn't do enough of those. So I hired some people, so, and sort of the rest was history from there. So we were very, for years, just all referral-based, uh, word of mouth, you know, 15 years. It's really in the last five years that we've had kind of sales and marketing a little bit before. Jason: [00:01:47] So, what were some of the stages that you went through, you know, in order, like, obviously go through the referral stage, right? And you only can get to a certain plateau. And I feel a lot of people listening to the show right now, you know, are at that level, right. They're kind of plateaued, you know, it could be

Can you effectively communicate what your business is about? With a 30-year background in marketing, Chris West noticed businesses normally handled their visual identity very well but need help when it comes to using their language. He started his agency, Verbal Identity, and has helped clients create a distinctive and impactful tone of voice for their brand. He is a big believer in the power of language and in this interview, Chris discusses the three levels of communication he teaches his clients, why humanity wins over corporate in social media, and his new book. 3 Golden Nuggets 3 levels of communication. As a digital agency, you need to differentiate yourself from your competition. When looking at how the world's biggest brands communicate, Chris identifies three levels of communication. At the 10,000 feet level, we have a vision of the world you want to create. What do you stand for? And even more powerful, what do you stand against? At 1,000 feet, we have the personality, which is a very important piece because customers buy into the personality of a business. Finally, at ground level, it's all about the details, especially when it comes to the language. Establish the language your business will use and identify with and communicate it to your team. Humanity wins. Even when it comes to some of the world's biggest brands, like Microsoft, people would rather follow Bill Gates on social media than his company. That is because they want to follow a person, someone they can relate to. It's important to be more than a corporate blank face that only speaks in business terminology and communicates merely in announcements. Dare to get personal, to share your likes and dislikes and you will attract like-minded individuals. And, perhaps more important, identify the ones that will reject you and cannot relate to you. Writing advice. When it comes to writing, some of the best advice Chris has ever gotten is "write like they're walking away". Be very intentional about your message and try not to rely on context and details to get your point across. Write like you don't have time to warm up your reader because you're already losing their interest. Sponsors and Resources E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM These 3 Levels of Communication Will Help You Differentiate Your Brand From The Rest {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 and I have another amazing show for you and guest. We're gonna talk about the three levels of communication or language that you can actually check out in order to position your agency to be the choice. So let's go ahead and jump into the show. Hey, Chris. Welcome to the show. Chris: [00:00:25] Hey, Jason, how you doing? Jason: [00:00:27] Hey, tell us who you are and what do you do? Chris: [00:00:29] Certainly. I run a business called Verbal Identity and it came about because I have a 30-year background in marketing. And what I noticed was a lot of clients, business owners were really sweating their visual identity, but they were forgetting about their language. So really what we do is we help businesses use language better. Jason: [00:00:48] Awesome. Well, in pre-show we were talking about kind of the three different levels that you need to kind of really kind of position your agency. So let's kind of jump into it and talk about it. Chris: [00:00:59] Yeah, thank you very much. So I think the thing that really kills and bogs down agency growth is how are you different from every other agency? So you're a digital agency, so are a hundred other digital agencies. So how on earth can you stand out and be differentiated? And I think that when we look at how the best brands in the world and the best businesses in the world communicate, whether it's a small, you know, super fast grain startup, whether it's a big brand, like we've worked with like an Alphabet over in Silicon Valley, their communication really works on three levels. So if you're like at 10,000 feet, they're very clear and consistent always in their narrative. This is the world we believe in. So this is what we're going to stand for. And even better, this is what we're going to stand against. So if you're a digital agency owner, you can't just be a digital agency owner. You can't just believe that the world needs kind of better digital, whatever, whatever, you know, everyone's saying that, right? You got to say that we do it fast. We do it better. We understand our clients better, or we, you know, what is the truth about you, about the world that you were trying to create when you se

Are you struggling to get your agency beyond the million-mark? What benefits await beyond seven figures? Erik Olson merged companies with his current partner four years ago and they started Array Digital, an agency that, in its beginnings, focused on website development and mobile application services. They introduced digital marketing services as a smaller branch and then realized it became more popular than expected. In his conversation with Jason, Erik spoke about making the decision to niche down and why reaching the seven-figure mark made such a difference. He also talks about his book about the journey to a million dollars. 3 Golden Nuggets Why seven figures? It took Erik 11 years to break a million dollars in revenue but he really saw a difference after that point. Why seven figures? "It's a nice round number," he says. It's not random at all, only 4% of businesses reach the million-dollar mark, so reaching that number meant, to him, that he crossed the threshold of success. Once he did it, he realized that running the business became a bit easier. He finally had extra money to invest in their own marketing, getting clients gifts, a mastermind, and things that were unaffordable in the beginning. Invest in your people. A huge component of any business is its people and Erik knew this was another area that could see significant investment once the agency started growing. "When I hired my first employee, the only benefit that I had was paid time off," he recalls. As time went on, they were able to offer more benefits like dental, medical insurance, and even retirement matching. He's giving his staff what they need to be whole when it comes to their finances and the work itself. What he would do differently. If he had to start over from having a 300,000k business trying to get to one million, Erik says he would quickly focus on the ideal prospect. This is something that took him a long time but now he says he would 100% niche down at that point. "First and foremost, I would certainly identify very clearly who it is I'm talking to or want as a client. And then I would be pretty rapidly going towards niching." Sponsors and Resources Verblio: 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. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM What Are The Benefits Beyond the Seven-Figure Mark & How You Can Invest in Your Team {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'm excited. I have another amazing episode. I have one of my mastermind members who runs a really successful agency. His partner has actually been on, so I thought I would bring him on as well. And we're going to talk about scaling to seven figures. I know a lot of you watching or listening are constantly trying to battle and you're really trying to get there. And it took me a number of different years to get there and he's going to talk about it as well. So let's go ahead. Get into it. Hey, Eric. Welcome to the show. Erik: [00:00:37] What's up, Jason? Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:38] Yeah. I just realized too. I've had Drew and Darren on and, and Kevin and you. Now you're the fourth person on the intro that you can see the drone, the drone flying out from experience. I see them, I see them, I could see the shining head off the edge. Erik: [00:00:57] Hey! Why'd you have to go there, man? Now that was awesome. As a matter of fact, uh, one of the pictures from the experiences my Twitter profile, picture up on the mountain, it was like the, I guess it's the first full day we hiked up Swenk mountain. Yeah, that was amazing, man. Jason: [00:01:14] It was fun, yeah, at sunset. So yeah, it was fun. And then obviously the ones we did on the ATVs, since you guys were the suckers in the back, you guys got dusted, but… Erik: [00:01:25] Yeah, I definitely should've brought goggles to that trip, that's for sure. Jason: [00:01:28] Exactly. Well, tell us who you are and what do you do? Erik: [00:01:31] Sure I'm Erik. Online I go by Erik J. Olson. I am the CEO of a digital marketing agency in Chesapeake, Virginia named Array Law. We have been in business for about four years. We, um, we've gone through a bunch of different iterations and I've run several previous companies. And so about four years ago, my business partner, Kevin Daisy, who was also on your show recently and also a mastermind member, we merged companies. And at that point, we decided that we were going to rebrand as Array Digital. And at the time we were focused on website and mobile applications, and we did this little thing called digital marketing off to the side. We had one person that we were just like, just go take care of that

Would you like to 4X your digital agency in less than 3 years? Joe Shelerud is the co-founder of the Amazon advertising agency Ad Advance. Joe was on the podcast two years ago talking about using automation to retain agency clients. Since then, he and his partner have managed to 4X their agency and have really seen the results of the processes they were just starting to implement two years back. In this new interview, Joe talks about growing the team, the agency's first key hires, the processes they implemented to train new team members, and much more. 3 Golden Nuggets First key hires before scaling. It has been two years since we last spoke with Joe and he has managed to 4X his agency in that time. According to him, one of the key things that he was focusing on back then was building out the automation, the systems, and the structure for his agency. He and his partner were still managing all accounts and the first step for them was to look for ways to reduce the amount of time they spent on daily tasks. Because of this, some of their first hires were developers to make sure they were building those systems and that structure. Hiring for culture first. When it came time to start building the team and start growing, Joe decided that the priority would be hiring people that were a right fit for the team. "Experience is great," he assures "but at the end of the day, if you get that one wrong fit within your agency or your group, they can take down the entire group." This is why the agency has mainly focused on 1. People who meet the culture bar, where experience is an extra piece of the puzzle, and 2. Hiring locally, which has worked better for their team. Establishing a training process. As they started hiring new team members, it was time to put together processes that would help them get up to speed efficiently. They started analyzing what day did every day in terms of client interactions, picking apart different pieces of tasks that we knew that they could no longer support in the long term. As they were able to do that, each of these little pieces became documents or little training videos, and eventually will be an entire training course. Sponsors and Resources E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM 4X Your Digital Agency in {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 another amazing episode for you. We're going to bring on a past guest from two years ago, who 4X their agency. So we're going to talk about how they've 4X their agency, grown, outgrown, many offices and lots of cool things. So you can grow faster in your agency. So let's go ahead and get into the episode. Hey, Joe. Welcome back to the show. Joe: [00:00:31] Yeah. Thanks for having me on again, Jason. Jason: [00:00:33] Yeah, man. I'm, I'm excited. So for the people that have not listened to the first show and we'll link that in the show notes if you go to jasonswenk.com, but, um, go ahead and tell us who you are and what do you do? Joe: [00:00:44] Yeah. So for those who don't know me, I'm Joe Shelerud. I'm located up in Duluth, Minnesota. So we're up, but kind of on the tip of Lake Superior on the Western edge. You can take i35 up to where it ends and that's where we're based out of. I got my start in e-commerce actually selling on Amazon. I've got a chemical engineering background. And so I was selling these organic chemistry molecular model kits, and they're used for organic chemistry courses when you go through something like chemical engineering. And as I was going through that journey of building out my seller business, um, started really focusing on the advertising side. And as I was reaching out to different agencies to try to manage my own what I found is that the tools that I had built up in the strategies I put in place was actually a lot more complex than what I was seeing these other agencies that they were offering. So at that point I got this idea that, you know, maybe, maybe I could help out other sellers. So that was about five years ago. I combined up with, uh, Matt Wicklund who's our co-founder at Ad Advance. And since that point we've been really focusing on first on Amazon advertising, but now really branching out into all forms of e-commerce advertising. So, yeah, now we've had a lot of growth in happy to talk to you about it today. Jason: [00:01:58] Awesome. And yeah, I mean, well, I mean, the big thing that I want to know more about is, you know, it's been two years since you've been on the show, so, and you were like, we've 4X our agency since then. So what were

Are you looking for opportunities to make more connections? You could be just one conversation away from your next big client success that leads to scaling faster. Tom Schwab started his agency Interview Valet in 2014 with the theory that targeted interviews on established podcasts could be used much like guest blogging. This podcast guest strategy has grown into a business that provides the fastest way for authors, speakers, coaches, consultants, and brands to maximize the benefits of podcasting. In his interview with Jason, Tom expands on how to start conversations that lead to success in your business, how to get the contacts that will lead to those conversations, and why you should look for a true connection to get people interested. 3 Golden Nuggets Conversations that lead to success. The idea behind Tom's podcast marketing service is that everything great in his life has come from a conversation. He believes that in your personal or professional life you owe your most important connections to that initial conversation, it could be a customer you really wanted to work with, a business partner, a great employee, your best friend or spouse. "It wasn't a funnel. It wasn't a, you know, social media strategy. It was conversations." Because of this, he wants to emphasize the importance of human connection as something that can't be replaced by automation. How to get more conversations. Remember that more is not better, better is better. Tom tried to keep in mind that you can never say enough of the wrong things to the right people or the right things to the wrong people. So you should always make sure that you're talking to the right people in the first place. Are they interested? Make sure they're interested in having that conversation and then make sure it is a conversation by asking their thoughts on something, as opposed to just asking the same five questions and them just giving talking points. Look for a connection. How can you get the connections that will lead to the conversations you want to have? Try to figure out who you're going after and who's connected to them and see if they can connect you to them. You should look at putting together a targeted list and go over this with your sales team. But whatever you do, don't just treat it like a spam list. Figure out what's the connection? What's that degree of connection? And then ask. Remember that people usually want to have their friends, their friends of friends and people they want to be their friends on their podcast. So figure out how to fit in one of those groups. Sponsors and Resources Verblio: 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. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Being One Conversation Away from Scaling Your Agency Faster {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'm excited to have another amazing guest. And we're going to talk about how you can scale your agency faster through one conversation. You're one conversation away from scaling faster. So let's go ahead and jump into the episode. Hey, Tom. Welcome to the show. Tom: [00:00:26] Hey, Jason. I am thrilled to be here. Jason: [00:00:28] Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? For the people that have not heard of you yet. Tom: [00:00:34] I am Tom Schwab. I'm the founder of Interview Valet, a podcast interview marketing service. We help authors, coaches, speakers, brands, get their message out on targeted podcast interviews. And I'm here in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which proves if you could do it from Kalamazoo, Michigan, you could do it from anywhere. Jason: [00:00:54] Oh, that's awesome. Well, let's kind of jump into it. You talk about kind of you're one conversation away from really hitting it out of the park. So I guess elaborate a little bit more for us. Tom: [00:01:05] Yeah, as I look at it, everything great in my life has come from a conversation. And that could be that big customer that you acquire. It could be that partnership that you have. It could be that great employee. Heck, take it personally, right? Your spouse. It was probably a one conversation that connected you with them. It wasn't a funnel. It wasn't a, you know, social media strategy. It was conversations. And I think one of the things, while I'm a big proponent of automation, I think it can't replace human connection. And I think the bigger the sale, the bigger the relationship, the more trust is involved in it. We need to focus on conversation as opposed to just automation. Jason: [00:01:48] Yeah. You know, I just got off a sales mastermind call. So for our mastermind, we have our own little mastermind

Do you know the value you provide to your agency clients? Is your agency getting paid what you're worth? Do you always ask for the budget before presenting a proposal? Stephen Brown used to think that just doing good work would get clients to pay the right value, but his position at Cookerly PR, a public relations agency based in Atlanta, helped him understand a lot about charging what you're worth and how to ask the hard questions to determine if you are budgeting the right way. Today he sat down with Jason to discuss how to charge what you're worth by understanding the value your agency provides, how to get your first big clients, how being rich in process will help you keep your deliverables consistent, and much more. 3 Golden Nuggets Charging what you're worth. Stephen used to think that just doing good work will get clients to pay what he's worth, but eventually he learned that he needed to have a sense of that worth first. You should always have a pulse on your industry and an estimate of what others in your sector are charging. Also, one of the most important things he learned with experience is that you should always ask for a budget or at least a minimum amount of what the client is expecting to spend. In Jason's experience, less than half of agency owners do this. Getting the bigger clients. A lot of small agency owners want to know how they can get their first big client. It depends. Some of our guests did so through connections in the business, others target a couple until they get a big brand. Stephen believes that doing great and consistent work will lead you to the bigger brands you want to be working with. "Start small," he advises, "and it will start laddering up". Start with something you can handle. People will start seeing what you did for a smaller brand and start and ask if you could you pilot that for our bigger brand. Keeping deliverables consistent. According to Stephen, his agency is very rich in processes, which is a big part of how they can keep their deliverables consistent. Things don't change depending on who is in charge of a certain department. Instead, everyone is kept accountable and communicates new developments in their weekly meetings. Also, at the end of the month they send each client an account summary that contains details about each campaign being put together so that no client will ever have to ask what is their agency doing for them. Sponsors and Resources E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Are You Charging What You're Worth? {These transcripts have been auto-generated. While largely accurate, they may contain some errors.} Jason: [00:00:00] All right. What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here and I have another amazing show for you and an amazing guest where we're going to talk about how do you know what to charge? And charging what you're worth and budgeting and making sure that you're extremely profitable. I have a great person on that's going to get into this so let's jump into the show. Hey, welcome to the show. Stephen: [00:00:27] Jason, it's a pleasure. Wonderful to see you. Jason: [00:00:30] Yeah. Awesome to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Stephen: [00:00:34] Absolutely. So I'm Stephen Brown and I am the President of Cookerly PR. We're based in Atlanta, so we're a one-city agency that represents national campaign. So we do a lot of national and global work, but we are strictly based in one city and have our staff of about 22 here that do crisis work and creative work, depending on which client you've got. Jason: [00:00:57] Awesome. Well, let's get into it because, you know, we were talking kind in the pre-show, you know, a lot of my mastermind members when they come in or a lot of agencies when I chat with them I find out they're not charging enough. They're really bad at budgeting and really they're not profitable. And you guys are extremely profitable, which congrats on that. So what are some things that you've learned over the years in order to do that right? Stephen: [00:01:21] Sure. Well, the naive me, the one that worked at a bunch of multinationals over the years was always like, oh, just do good work. Do good work and the money will follow. And I learned my lessons over the years and under the tutelage of Carol Cookerly at our firm, learned a lot about charging what you're worth and actually stepping back and asking all the hard questions to determine if you are budgeting the right way for a project. For instance, we do some work that is project-based fixed fee base that is very predictable. Um, it can be a media relations or social media campaign where you know you're doing it for a

Do you want to get your agency to the eight-figure mark and beyond? What are you doing to get to that level? Erik Huberman had started a few e-commerce companies and was unimpressed by the agencies he had worked with, so he decided to form a small team that could assist his clients. He quickly saw a positive response and created Hawke Media, an outsourced CMO and marketing team that customizes data-driven, performance solutions to help launch, scale, and invigorate businesses. In this interview, Erik talks about how setting financial goals helped him grow his agency to over $40 million. He also shares his marketing methodology and his book, The Hawke Method. Plus the mistake many agencies make when they start growing, and much more. 3 Golden Nuggets On goal-setting. During the first year of his business, Erik saw things were going well and decided to set financial goals for the next couple of years. He met every one of them, so he believes there's a lot to be said about setting a goal and striving to hit it, and having incremental goals to get there. This will force you to step up when you're falling behind and keep you proactive in the market. In his case, he mainly used it as a scoreboard, as an indicator of growth. It really helped during the agency's first years and he noticed a difference when he stopped doing it around year six. Agency mistakes. According to Erik, some agencies tend to protect themselves a little too much once they get good and do it too soon. "They start throwing out long contracts, high minimums, they go upmarket, they only want to work with fortune 2000," he says. He believes that this behavior alienates the people that got the business to that point. It is a solid way of doing business and works for many agencies, but Erik decided it wasn't for him and went on to build his business model on challenging himself to consider can you be one of the best marketing companies out there and still work with small and medium businesses too? Understanding the purchase cycle. A lot of marketers and agencies fail to understand the idea of a sales cycle or a purchase cycle. Many times agencies advertise for clients that ask for daily performance reports. "The problem with that," he explains, "is that what we've seen in e-commerce is that for a $50 average order value will be about a three-week purchase cycle and about five weeks for a hundred dollars," so understanding the purchase cycle will be critical for the agency-client relationship and a big part of setting realistic expectations about the work. Sponsors and Resources Verblio: 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. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Getting to $40 million by setting financial goals & understanding the purchase cycle {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 and I got another amazing guest. And we're going to talk with Eric of Hawke Media and how they built an almost $40 million agency, or probably by now, they're already over 40 million and cresting the many, many commas, whatever in there. So, excited to get the episode. Let's jump in. Hey, Erik. Welcome to the show. Erik: [00:00:29] Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:30] Yeah, man. Excited to have you on. So tell us who you are and what do you do? Erik: [00:00:35] Sure. Uh, Erik Huberman, co-founder and CEO of Hawke Media. We're basically an outsource CMO and marketing team to companies. So we go into brands, identify full-time marketing and spin up different experts. All à la carte month to month. So it could be a Facebook marketer, email marketer, web designer. We've been around about eight years up to 70 full-time people. We run marketing for about 600 brands. And then we also have a venture fund and a financing arm as well, amongst many other things. Jason: [00:01:01] Awesome. And so why did you guys start an agency? What got you into it? Erik: [00:01:06] I built and sold a couple e-comm brands and through my own experience, as well as then I started advising and consulting for a lot of other brands found out that 99% of agencies out there for lack of better word are full of shit. And kept getting frustrated over and over again and went screw it I'm just going to hire my own small team to help these companies. And so built my little SWAT team and immediately saw the benefits. Like my clients started to like what we did. They started to grow and we started to need more and more people and just started to grow from there. Jason: [00:01:35] Awesome. So you guys have been doing it for eight years. You guys are almost 40 million or maybe over it. Talk about some of the progression that you guys went

Are you growing your agency to sell it in the future or prefer the idea of building a lifestyle business? Maybe you don't have to choose. When Anna Mannerfelt created Wired Mustang, an agency specializing in brand development and equine marketing, she decided selling her business was not the ultimate goal. Instead, she created a business to support her lifestyle. In today's episode, she sat down with Jason to talk about her negative experiences with agencies and why she fired a few plus the two-fold job of agencies. She also discusses why creating a lifestyle business doesn't mean you can't one day profitably sell it. 3 Golden Nuggets Why clients fire agencies. Before starting her own business, Anna dealt with many agencies and even fired some after growing tired of a common mistake: the over-promise. Agencies assured they had the capabilities and experience to take on the task and then ultimately would not deliver. "It's like dating," she says, "anyone can be a good salesperson, but can you actually deliver what you promise?" Make sure you're really good at something before you find yourself in a situation where you can't deliver on promises to clients. The two-fold job of agencies. In her opinion, an agency should, first of all, make their clients look good, whether by brand design or website or billboards. But most importantly, an agency should increase their clients' sales. Analytics is all good but by the end of the day, are you increasing sales? She makes sure to ask clients if her agency is getting them more business. And if not, it's time to find out what they are doing wrong. Having a lifestyle business. We usually talk about the mindset of growing an agency to then sell it and enjoy the lifestyle you want. Anna says she would be bored out of her mind without something to do and preferred to build a lifestyle business. In Jason's experience, we should all strive to design our business around us rather than having a business that controls us. There are a lot of negative ideas about having a lifestyle business but you could also sell a lifestyle business if you choose to. After all, any business is about setting up the right system and the business operating without you. Sponsors and Resources E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Building a Successful Lifestyle Business That You Could Sell in The Future {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 got another amazing episode for you. We're going to talk about growing and scaling your agency and really creating an agency that's a lifestyle business. I know a lot of times we talk about growing an agency building up real big and selling it, but what about if you just want to do a lifestyle business? On today's episode we're going to talk exactly about that, so let's go ahead and get into the show. Hey, Anna. Welcome to the show. Anna: [00:00:31] Thank you, Jason. It's great to be here. Jason: [00:00:34] Yeah. So I'm happy to have you here. Tell us who you are and what do you do? Anna: [00:00:38] Sure. I'm Anna Mannerfelt. I'm the co-founder of an agency called Wired Mustang and we're based out of Denver, Colorado. Jason: [00:00:46] Awesome. And, uh, tell us, how did you start the agency and why did you do it? Anna: [00:00:50] Oh, my goodness, Jason. So I've been in marketing for 30 years, started way back when in Sweden and advertising. And then when I came to Colorado a few years ago now to start over, I saw there was a need for businesses to be represented correctly online with actual professional digital marketers. And having hired and fired a lot of agencies throughout the years, I saw there was a gap for this and a need for it, and also, uh, an opportunity for us to set up a business that we feel very, very strongly about, but also more of a lifestyle business that coincides with our personal interests with horses. So, there you go. Jason: [00:01:31] That's awesome. And what were some of the things that when you were working with agencies and in your past, you said, I fired a lot of them. What did they do to get fired? Let's start it there. Anna: [00:01:43] The over-promise. They said, we can do this or we've done this a gazillion times. They over-promised and they come in and do, it's like dating, you know, you go in and you work for the agency. They, they, they're singing and they're dancing and they show their pretty graphs and analytics and all that goody stuff. But most of it was just show. It was all bullshit. I don't know if I'm allowed to curse. I'm sorry if I do. Jason: [00:02:03] No, you'

Is your leadership style genuine and sincere? Do you have empathy where your team is concerned? Do your clients display empathy for their end-users? When Lonn Shulkin first started working at Bam Strategy, they had just lost their biggest client and were in the process of pivoting and taking the opportunity to shift their focus to find their ideal customer. Eleven years later, Lonn is now the CEO at Bam Strategy and is dedicated to motivating consumer behavior through strategy, media, platforms, and creative initiatives. He sat down with Jason to discuss how they went from losing their biggest client to getting to eight figures, how they started building their sales team, and how empathy has helped them increase client and employee retention. 3 Golden Nuggets Building their sales team. Losing a client that represented 70% of their business meant the agency had to find a way to pivot and use that experience with a global client to diversify. After realizing what they were great at, they got specific on who their perfect audience was and then focused on the business development side to build the sales team around that. Investing in leadership. This agency has been able to improve its employee retention by understanding that each individual employee needed the time and attention and the effort from them to understand their role in the company. They worked to create an honest relationship where an employee could go to them if they had other job offers and give them a chance to discuss why they should stay. They also started doing more social activities as a group to create bonds and created leadership programs to start building up their leadership practice. Putting in that work results in a culture fit that permeates to all employees. Teaching their clients empathy. Just like they built employee retention and loyalty by implementing empathy into their company culture, Lonn says they now try to extend that concept to clients to teach them how to care about their customers in the same way. It's been a big driver of growth and success caring about the end-user in the same way because that's what creates brand loyalty today. Sponsors and Resources Verblio: 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. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Grow Your Agency & Increase Employee Retention Through Empathy {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 guest who has grown an eight-figure agency, very, very profitable. Done it through amazing team, amazing systems and done it with empathy. And so let's go ahead and get into the show. Hey, Lonn. Welcome to the show. Lonn: [00:00:28] How's it going? Great to be here. Thank you for having me. Jason: [00:00:31] Yeah, man. Uh, so tell us who you are and what do you do? Lonn: [00:00:34] Uh, so Lonn Shulkin. I am CEO at Bam Strategy. Been with the agency for 11 or so years, and just very passionate about growing teams and certainly what we do, which is working as an agency with pretty large customers bring brands that you would know that really focuses on digital experience. So not necessarily the UX stuff, but how we can actually engage customers and communicate with them on a one-to-one basis. Jason: [00:01:05] Awesome. Tell us kind of the progression or the different cycles that Bam has actually gone through in the past… I guess two decades. Lonn: [00:01:14] Yeah, it's quite the ride. I'm sure it's a common ride as a, as I've heard from other guests on your show. But, um, when I joined 11 or so years ago, we had that, that one really big flagship client was taken up 60 or 70% of the business and… yeah it was pretty scary times. And I think at the moment they had actually told us they were, they were a global brand and they had told us that they were going to consolidate all of their marketing in the US and we're based in Montreal in Canada. So that was a moment where I had just joined the company and we had to figure out how we were going to, um… Luckily, we had a bit of a runway from the client, so they gave us a couple of years notice there, but usually you don't get that in my experience. Um, but we had to figure out, you know, how we were going to pivot and shift and how we're going to use a lot of our experience with this big global brand to diversify. And so that was probably phase one coming in… the agency is actually 25 years old so coming in as sort of the new guy, there was a lot of work to do as far as aligning teams. And, and for me as a new leader, just sort of figuring out who are my people who share my vision and who buys into that and who can help me craft the company that

Are you having a hard time hiring the right talent to build your agency team? Manish Dudhareija first started his journey as an entrepreneur nine years ago when he noticed there was a huge demand for skilled developers trained in the latest technologies and there was a gap in hiring, training that fit his expertise. He created E2M Solutions, a full-service agency that offers website design & development, SEO, copywriting, and content marketing. In this interview, Manish shares how agency owners can address the common struggle of finding and hiring new talent. He also talks about how advertising your culture can help attract the right people, and the creative ways you can make your agency stand out to top talent. Advertising your culture. We've talked about how many agency owners need to do more to market themselves to potential clients. Manish adds another layer to this: marketing aimed at attracting the best people to your team. You're really missing out if you're not marketing your culture to attract the right elements. He likes to use LinkedIn to showcase his agency's values and says he is as interested in candidates' personality traits as he is in their skills. In this regard, he is looking to identify do they have the right kind of attitude? Do they have the willingness to learn? Are they curious? Are they accountable? The answers to these questions will be just as important in the process of selecting a new team member. Be creative in your search. When searching for your ideal team, Manish recommends creating ads that contain some sort of challenge, like code in the case of developers. This will help your agency stand out from the many messages just stating "we're hiring" and is a way to spark the interest of the type of dynamic and curious individuals he wants to attract. On training his team. Manish has a team of senior developers whose main task is to be constantly researching and testing new technologies. Once the agency gets a new project, the team identifies the latest technology that they could work with and try to implement it. Later, when the opportunity arises, they propose that technology to their existing clients to let them know that they are always on the lookout for new developments in their area. This is also a good way to always have someone on the team that can train the rest of the developers and are creating the processes to do so. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Getting Creative in Your Search for New Talent For Your Agency & Advertising Your Culture {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 have another amazing episode and we're going to talk about, because look, I've been chatting with so many agency owners over the past months, and one of the big things is hiring the right people and just finding the right talent. On today's episode, we're going to talk about some ways where you can find the best talent, should you hire seasoned pros or train them up? How do you train them up? And it really cool solution at the very end. So make sure you listen to the whole episode. So let's go ahead and jump into it. Hey, Manish. Welcome to the show. Manish: [00:00:38] Hey, Jason. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Jason: [00:00:41] Yeah. I'm excited to have you on. So tell us a little bit about your business. You know, you've been doing this for a while and you have over 110 people, but tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Manish: [00:00:52] Sure. Yeah. So I'm kind of an entrepreneur. I started this journey nine years back, uh, in 2012. So I founded E2M nine years back. And one of the reasons I founded this company is to solve a specific problem. That was kind of seeing, like, there is a huge demand of skilled and trained, you know, people, resources in terms of technology. And there was a gap, you know, I thought we can really feel where my expertise is, uh, strategy, uh, hiring, training people and, you know, injecting the traits like personality traits and how to have the force ready, where someone is looking for, like, you know, Uh, someone is not looking to hire people and they are looking for people who are trained to work with. So that's how I founded E2M. So it started like nine years back and we are kind of a white label, uh, you know, outsourcing company. Uh, we build websites, we do a lot of web development. With WordPress and Shopify and big commerce. And we work with digital agencies, regardless of the size, across the US and the other parts of the world. And yeah, you know, we help them scale their agency business with our white label services. Jason: [00:02:13] Awesome. Well, let's get into it and let's talk about, you know, a lot of agency owners struggle right now because there's a lot of demand for what we're doing, right? But it's really challenging to find the right team members. So what has worked for

Are you using your resources wisely in order to scale content creation? Are you leveraging partnerships that will help you grow your agency? Content creation is following a classic marketing channel trend and continually evolving every year. If your agency is not keeping up with the increased demand, you're missing out. In this episode of the podcast, Jason talks with Laura Smous and Steve Pockross from Verblio about how agencies are helping their clients do more with content, as well as some common mistakes agencies make when it comes to content creation. They'll also share the biggest investments your agency needs to make in 2022 and how your content efforts can work with AI. Laura Smous is the VP of Product Marketing at Verblio and Steve Pockross is the CEO at Verblio, and a three-time guest of the Smart Agency Masterclass. He believes content is still king, especially in a struggling economy. 3 Golden Nuggets Top trends in content creation entering 2022. Keeping up with content demands has become increasingly more challenging for agencies. Clients need original content, but that doesn't necessarily mean reinventing the wheel. Verblio's survey of agencies has shown the current trends include refreshing old content and repurposing content in new ways (like turning videos into blogs). Mistakes agencies are making in content creation. Verblio has identified 2 key mistakes they're seeing agencies make when it comes to content. First, an over-reliance on technology to create content results in sameness. AI has a place in content creation, but using it to create all content is a mistake. Secondly, it's important to have a content lead who sees and touches content as the core function of their job. If your agency is having people wear too many hats it becomes evident in the content output. Use AI for things humans are bad at. As Laura observed, "humans are bad at getting started." While she is not a fan of using AI to write content, she says there is a place for it in helping humans get started with content. Some great uses for AI is sales scripts, outlines, and other repeatable functions. The Changes Your Agency Should Make in Order to Scale Content Creation in 2022 Jason: [00:00:00] Welcome back, agency owners. I'm excited, I have another amazing two guests coming on. It's been a long time since I've done a three-way on the podcast and we're going to talk about the three biggest investments you can do next year. We're going to talk about Verblio's survey that they did to all these agency owners that you need to be aware of. So let's go ahead and get into the show. Hey, Laura and Steve. Welcome to the show. Laura: [00:00:32] Hi! Happy to be here. Steve: [00:00:33] Hey, Jason. Good to be back. Jason: [00:00:35] Awesome. Well, Steve, welcome back. Laura, welcome to the show. So I'm going to start with ladies first. Tell us who you are and what do you do? And then we'll go to we'll. Maybe get to Steve later. Laura: [00:00:48] Sure. Well, I'm Laura Smous. I'm the VP of product marketing at Verblio. We're a content creation marketplace and platform. And I've been doing some sort of messing around at the intersection of marketing and technology for over a couple decades now, with the last number of years really focused on product marketing for high growth startups. So really happy to join. Jason: [00:01:09] Awesome. Well, welcome to the show. And, Steve, I don't know how we'd let you back on, but tell us who you are and what you do? Steve: [00:01:20] It's good to be back. I'm Steve Pockross. I'm the CEO of Verblio. I've been here for five years. I have been working in startups, nonprofits, and Fortune 500's for the last 20 something years, always in high-growth industries. And Verblio is the intersection of my, two of my favorite places, the future of marketing and the future of work. Jason: [00:01:35] I love it. I love it. Well, let's go ahead and get into why everyone's listening, which is every year you guys do an amazing survey and you always find out really cool stuff. So what have you found out in the survey? What are kind of the three big investments that we need to be thinking about for 2022? Laura: [00:01:55] Well, I think the first piece is just that the demand for content has only increased. So, uh, that's a really good thing for all of us, but it is a, perhaps a really frustrating thing for a lot of the agencies that we've been polling because they're having a lot of the, the second piece of that would be they're having a lot of trouble meeting that demand. So, uh, whether it's hiring, whether it's figuring out how to um, assemble a team of freelancers or whether it's leveraging technology or platforms like ours, they're having a lot of trouble making it work to meet that demand. So they know there's this huge growth opportunity, but rising to the challenge is tough. And I think along with that, there's all of the change that you deal with at any time. Um, but it's just accelerated. So, um, new content t

Is it time to sell your digital agency? Considering a merger or acquisition in the near future? John Burns worked in mergers and acquisitions for 15 years when he realized a gap in the market, specifically for agency owners. So 7 years ago, he started Clare Advisors, a company that provides mergers, acquisitions, and financial advisory services to privately-held digital agencies and companies in the marketing, media, and business services industries. In this interview, John discusses what owners should consider preparing to sell their agencies, the common misconceptions of when to sell, and why now is a good time if you're considering selling in the next three to five years. What you need to start preparing. There's a number of factors a buyer would potentially look at in evaluating whether or not they should buy your agency. One of them is profit margin, whether you're consistently making profit and whether your profit is expanding. Also, revenue growth and scalability, since obviously buyers want to buy agencies that are growing and have a lot of momentum. John says the important thing is considering whether you have the infrastructure in place and the right team to grow, over any earn-out or follow-up period. A common misconception. One of the most common questions John gets is around the target revenue for selling. Whether an agency should be at $10 or $5 million and then sell. "This is a common misconception from owners," he says because people think the right time to sell is when you've topped out at a particular number. Many commonly look to sell a business when their lease is up, and John agrees it could be a factor, so have in mind it may come up. But actually, the right time to sell is when you have the most momentum behind the business and the most wind behind your back. If you're not in this situation and still want to sell, remember that Jason always advises the right time to sell is when you need the money or you hate the business. Thinking about selling soon? We have a very active market right now with a lot of owners who are thinking of potentially selling. There are really low-interest rates, so cash is easy to come by, and a lot of companies have excess working capital on their balance sheets because of either PPP loans or some of the fiscal stimulus. Also, capital gains tax rates are potentially going to increase at some point in the near future. It is a very dynamic climate and John advises taking some of those factors into consideration. Don't necessarily sell sooner than you want, but it is a good time if it's been something you're considering the next 3-5 years. Common Misconceptions About Selling & Tips to Selling Your Agency in The Current Active Market {These transcripts have been auto-generated. While largely accurate, they may contain some errors.} Jason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Today I have an amazing guest. We're going to talk about valuations and preparing your agency for selling and why you would sell or why you would not sell. So let's go ahead and jump into the show. Hey, John. Welcome to the show. John: [00:00:21] Hey, Jason. Great to be here. Jason: [00:00:22] So tell us who you are and what do you do? John: [00:00:25] Uh, I am the founder and managing director of Claire Advisors. Claire Advisers is a boutique mergers and acquisition and financial advisory firm that specializes exclusively in working with agencies and marketing services companies. Jason: [00:00:38] Cool. And so why did you get into this business? John: [00:00:41] I've been doing mergers and acquisitions for about the last 15 years. Uh, started initially working in New York for a couple of different investment banks. And about seven years ago found there was a real gap in the market in terms of, uh, resources for agency owners specifically related to mergers and acquisitions. So I decided to found Clare Advisors in order to specifically work with boutique agency owners ann the mergers and acquisitions field. Jason: [00:01:12] I wish you just said that, uh, I got into it to pick up women. Because I keep thinking of there's a movie going, like, what do you do? I've been mergers and acquisitions. I've always wanted to say that. And now I'm kind of am and that's the kind of… John: [00:01:25] I was going to say. I think you technically can. Jason: [00:01:28] Well, but I'm married. So I can't. Let's talk about what are some of the things, if someone's listening and they go one day I want to sell. Jason, I want to sell, like you did in your agency or, or like someone else, what do they need to start preparing? John: [00:01:49] So there's a number of factors that a buyer would potentially look at in evaluating whether or not they should buy your firm. They should be looking at profit margin specifically. So whether you're kind of making, whether you're consistently making profit and whether your profit is expanding. Revenue growth, obviously buyers want to buy agencies that are growing as opposed to s

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 Focusing on what you do best. Like most agencies, Mary Ann's started being a full-service integrated media agency. It worked for a while, but she says she was constantly banging her head against the wall feeling frustrated. She felt like they could never land a big brand or were not able to make it. That all changed once she started asking herself how she would build the agency into what it needed to be. She figured out what they're the best at and what's a business model they could build. Niching down was a scary step, but after getting the first client in their niche, Mosaic Media saw significant growth in a 12-month period. Focus on your own marketing. Too many people think they need to hire a sales hunter right off the bat but don't give them a clear call to action. Mary Ann works with many agencies and something she says is an unpopular, but necessary tip is there is no magic salesperson to grow your business. You need to be building your own brand and build your own funnels. It's your job as the agency owner. As you're scaling and as you're growing, 50% of your day should be spent on business development. Stay in your lane. Agency owners can sometimes get caught in growth mode. They keep going and pushing. But when your team doesn't need you for the little things anymore, it's a great moment. That is when you know you have transitioned from agency owner to agency CEO. You may feel your team no longer needs you but actually, there's a lot for you to do. Like figuring out what new offerings should you be researching and how can you take this to the next level and continue to grow. Grow your team and nurture your team to the point that you can trust their judgment. "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," Mary Ann assures. 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. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Growing To a Multimillion-Dollar Agency By Focusing on What You Do Best and Staying on Your Lane Jason: [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 a

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 Shaping culture to grow your agency. If you're an agency owner looking to create a brand and culture that can help grow your business, remember your leadership, the decisions that you make, the ways in which you operate all become more critical than technical expertise or unique ability. Your role as a leader determines how the culture works or if it becomes toxic. Ted explains one of the biggest gaps he's seen in company culture is leaders who fail to understand the reality of their power and do not build bridges over to the people they lead so that they can actually be given feedback on how to reshape their HR systems or their values. The six layers of marquee culture. In their book, Ted and his partner identify six layers of marquee culture. Your marquee culture is at your forefront. It is the thing that galvanizes and draws attention to your agency, attracts great people, and keeps great people. Each of these layers translates into behavior-shaping principles for the people who are a part of our organizations. These 6 are: principles, architecture, rituals, lore, vocabulary, and artifacts. The single most important layer is the first one. Ted and his team have found many times the values or ideas that hold an organization together are too vague or abstract. He talks about the way to transform them into behavior-shaping principles for the people who are a part of your team How the 6 layers interact. A lot of agencies might already have some of these layers in places but not in a way that actually transforms them into core values. This is because they haven't actually integrated them into their decision-making. For example, in the case of architecture, Ted believes HR systems and structures should not simply be healthy or unhealthy. They really need to be built in a way that furthers aspects of your brand value. For rituals, it needs to be organic experiences that energize your people, not just staff meetings. Remember these layers are permeable, they're not just independent ideas that operate independently from the others. Your principles should inform your vocabulary and rituals and so on. 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. Subscribe Apple | 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 contr

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 Learning to implement layers. They were a very linear organization for a long time and that worked well for them, but growing their business beyond the 2 million mark required a leadership team, as Josy realized, she calls this "putting layers in place". Josy and her partner needed to get out of the business to run the business, and their leadership team was pivotal for that. So, when they first started the business, for example, they used to have an analytics lead. Now they have someone that minds the data, an analytic storyteller, and someone that does all the business intelligence and dashboarding. It is more expensive this way, but it definitely improves the level of the service they are able to provide. More clients or bigger clients? Once they were ready for growth, Josy knew it was important to have a growth strategy. You want to grow, but how are you going to attract bigger clients? Bigger clients 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," she says. Some agency owners focus on having more clients at that point. That's valid, but you may end up adding a ton of people and having less profit. And when it came to getting those bigger clients, Josy had some names in mind, but also industries. Her agency has grown while remaining wide, with half of their clients being B2B and the other half B2C, and that has allowed them to ride through difficult times while exploring new industries. The pillars of building your pipeline. First of all, put your money where your mouth is. Do all the lead generation run, retargeting campaigns, LinkedIn, etc. Run on all the lead gen sites that are out there so that when people search for an agency they can find you. The second pillar, something that people don't talk about enough, 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. And finally, 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. 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. Subscribe Apple | 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 Taj

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 Bootstrap from success to success. The internet has been a passion for Rich from day one and led him to start his first business, a newsletter. He quickly grew his following and started advertising on it. He did this with a very small investment, some hardware and the internet connection he already had. So he turned a couple hundred dollars into thousands in earnings. "That's how I've always done it," he explains. "You just kind of take one success and roll it into the next." When he gets a new idea, he tests the waters small to see if there's approvability. Then he runs a bigger test and, if that works, he just keeps growing that and scaling that as fast as you can with budget you have. Learn as much as you can. If you're planning to bootstrap a company, you should try to minimize costs wherever you can. Of course, at some point it may be better to look for investors, but at the very beginning, when you're first figuring out your business model, margins, and everything else, you have to be a sponge and be willing to learn. For his first company, Rich took a week off from work to learn everything he could about HTML and web design and started making websites for his clients. "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," he insists. Profit vs. profit margins. Something he always makes sure his team and clients understand is the difference between profit and profit margin. A lot of times people get hung up with trying to make 70 or 80% margin on a campaign that at margin level there will be not enough room to scale it. In the end, you may have a killer margin but are making $2 on a campaign. It's important to try to maintain a balance between the profit and the profit margin. Although it's hard to talk in general terms when there are so many business models and variables, Rich recommends proving something that works and find the scaling point and always keep in mind that you pay the bills with the profit, not with the profit margin. 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. Subscribe Apple | 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 li

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 Being a virtual voice. Before she started her own business, Julia worked at a company that didn't quite know how to label what she did. They settled on "the voice" to describe that she was basically the company's mouthpiece with everything she did. She represented them on stage and before the press and was their voice in sales and throughout all their business. She later took that concept with her when she decided to create her own PR agency and continued to represent her clients, organize events, networking events, speaking slots, etc for years after that. Every year brought different changes, but 2020 brought a real shift in the way her agency was doing things. The transition to agency experience. For Julia, the last 18 months especially have brought a lot of change and evolution that has had a huge positive impact on them and their clients. "It made us stop. It made us think a little bit more about how we can use every platform possible," she explains. The agency went from relying on networking events, standing on stage, and getting their clients speaking slots to investing in a platform to now offer speaking events with live voting polls and 3D networking floors. How to use that on social media? You can use that same content of the speaking event and can take snippets of that to social media and do polls, write a news story based on that, do a thought leadership piece, do Q&A's and a podcast. This is what they now bring to their clients. The impostor syndrome. One thing that Julia wishes she had known when she first started her agency is that, more than vanity metrics like whether or not you have a huge reach, it's all about who are you? Are they you for the message? What are you trying to say and who do you say it to? Now it is all about taking that and make it count and make it measure and show that the value is there. She used to let those vanity metrics get to her and have impostor syndrome but now she feels confident having a wide range of clients and loves working with startups. She has also accompanied some of her clients on their journey from being a small tech company to taking the step of going public. 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 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

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 Getting your agency off the ground. For Scott, the biggest challenge to getting over the million-dollar mark was gaining the experience he needed to project the confidence that would actually lead him to land jobs. "You almost have to earn confidence in this business," he explains, "because people are smart and they smell your bullshit." He advises people who want to make as an entrepreneur to give themselves a long runway until that plane finally gets off the ground. It's very difficult, as he acknowledges, it will take time and you will need to become an expert on your client's business before you can confidently say that you know exactly how to do a great job for them. Stop wasting time on bad pitches. After working hard to getting his agency off the ground and past the million-dollar mark, what would Scott do differently? For starters, he wishes he had been more strategic about growth. He is sure he wasted too much money on bad pitches and that he should have considered that the agency didn't have the capabilities for that yet. "I should have only pitched what we had business pitching or key relationships that I had," he says looking back. Another regret was holding on to unprofitable accounts. We're all guilty of this, low-dollar pain in the ass clients that you didn't let go quick enough. "If I had done both of those things. I would probably be at 50 million in fees right now," he adds. Hope for the future. With client dissatisfaction rates in the industry at 80%, Scott believes this is something we should all take seriously and try to work on. The good thing is, this industry tends to thrive during difficult times. There's real opportunity to see eye to eye now that clients increasingly have more in common with agencies and can learn from each other. So there's reason to be optimistic, he says, at a time when bad practitioners are getting weeded out of the industry and people who are doing things the right way have a ton of opportunity. "Especially for independent agency owners," he insists. It is a good time for small agencies that want to do the work and build their reputation. Stop Wasting Time on Bad Pitches & Earn the Confidence to Get Your Agency Off The Ground Jason: [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 wro

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 Creating meaningful interactions. Most companies are focused on trying to sell you something all the time and are missing 90% of the chances to create opportunities for meaningful interactions. In this sense, Ben has never really liked the type of marketing that focuses exclusively on selling a product. Instead, when he transitioned from working in journalism to working in the marketing industry, he knew he wanted to bring his approach to storytelling to his agency and always ask "how can I make someone care?" This is what he tries to do for his clients. Making stuff and putting it out into the world with the goal of making it valuable. What's driving their growth. When it comes to creating something that people will care about, you don't want everyone to care. You're trying to find your audience, find the people who care, and then focus on them and show them understanding, authority, and a plan. If you try to create something for everyone you'll end up creating something for no one. This is what Ben has been working on to effectively communicate with people in the key non-sales moments and it is what has been driving his company's growth. "You care about people that you're trying to reach, and those people are somewhat narrow," he says. Growing smart. Despite seeing some pretty big successes in just three years, Ben regrets starting with the idea that running a digital agency would be really easy. This drove him to make mistakes like going on a huge hiring spree as soon as the company started to grow. "We convinced ourselves that we had the business model of a high growth startup," he recalls. This meant that, as much as they were growing, they were not growing smart or strategically. They were not investing through time and ewsearch strategy and trying to make their service better and that created what Ben calls weak growth. Now he tries to look at growth as an indicator that what they're doing is what people want. 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. Subscribe Apple | 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 meanin

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 Honest rapport with clients. Trust in agencies has hit all-time lows, according to Bob. That's not a place any of us would want to be. So how to gain back client trust in agencies? Especially in a time when more and more clients are moving to in-house many services. Bob believes the key to building trust starts with the initial conversation. He makes it a point to treat it as a conversation, not a pitch, and makes it about them. "I feel like squaring the meeting centrally right on their business and what they need is the place to be," he assured. Also, he's seen the positive effect of knowing who you are as a business and how you can help their business, instead of trying to do everything, which comes across as just wanting more money. Building leadership. As we always say, you can get to the million-dollar mark almost by accident. But to be a multi-million-dollar agency you'll need to start building a structure, starting with your leadership team. Bob didn't always get that right, in some cases because the people weren't quite right. But also because they weren't quite ready as new owners to really understand what that meant. They really had to look themselves in the mirror when the company hit a cap at $3.8 million and start to get serious about leadership. They needed more structure, so they selected a group and shared everything about the business with them. "If these guys are going to lead, they need all the information to become leaders too," he acknowledges. Try to not be a fixer. How can you help your leadership team grow? Prepare them to solve issues and trust them. Bob and his partners started organizing weekly meetings with their leadership team to discuss new business leads and prospects, financial forecasts, what they call remarkable creative briefs and opportunities, they also talk about employees or client issues and possible solutions. This way, they started to prepare the leadership team and shared the information and metrics they may need to do their jobs. Ultimately, it is always about trusting that they are capable to face any issues that may come up. Agency owners normally get to where they are because they are very good at solving problems, but at some point it should be your team's responsibility to do so. 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. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Creating an Honest Rapport With Your Clients to Address Low Trust Levels in Agencies Jason: [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 everyo

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 Should you niche? Dmitriy loved to lead his business by looking for new challenges that sound interesting, fun or like a difficult problem. However, he was made aware of a rule in business that you should pick a market, pick a service, and focus on that. "It sounds very easy," he comments, "but in a way, it's more difficult". He can see the benefits and downsides of both. On one side, you're forced to do things that are not necessarily repeatable and are not scalable by not picking a market. But on the other, you're able to learn so much in those ventures, like is his case in e-commerce. He has been able to explore that space and is happy with the things he has learned by not niching down. It takes time to figure out a direction for your business. On creating an assembly line. Sometimes agency owners believe that they can teach other people to be the unicorns that they are. "It's like Superman trying to teach people how to fly," Dmitriy says. People may not have the experience to comprehend what you're expecting. When you have a lot of talents and a lot of experience and can solve any problem better than most people, it may be difficult when you start to create a team and they can't keep up. Dmitriy realized that it's about creating an assembly line, a process that could be followed from start to finish without many tangents in an expected way with everything to set it up. The only way to do that is to niche down. Figure out your 'why.' What is your reason for growing an agency? Do you know what it is? Are you after a specific lifestyle or want to accumulate a certain wealth that you can pass on to your grandchildren? Why are you pushing through? It may sound corny, but not everyone has figured out their motivation. Dmitriy believes this is the core of everything. "Once you figure out your why, revisit it," he says. "Figure it out. Make sure it's aligned. Talk with your partner about it with your team, your leadership, just so they're all aligned." If the trophy is worth it, maybe you'll do something that's not as exciting but drives revenue. 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 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 pat

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 Measure what's happening in your funnel. Many agencies don't have a really good lead generation source and are leaning on word of mouth to get new clients. You really have to find that source to keep growing. Where do most businesses fail? Kara says most companies she works with fail at truly measuring what's happening inside their funnel. At the top of her lead generation strategies are "share good news, track who's interested, and then follow up." Another successful strategy is getting as niche as possible. "When your niche is small, you can be hyper-targeted in your approach," she says. This will save you a lot of time with clients that don't meet your criteria. Measuring volume, velocity, and value. Kara is not running a creative agency, but she is all about making her business as profitable and valuable as possible. When it comes to how valuable her consultancy or her agency is, she thinks in terms of measuring volume, value, and velocity. 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 pipelines? This is all about close ratios and trying not to spend too much time on deals that won't close. And value is all about what is this potential customer truly going to be worth to you? For this, try to be really honest and don't overvalue customers. Lead with pricing to save time. When you are speaking with potential customers, do you lead with the budget? Doing so could really help your closing ratio and save you a lot of time on deals that aren't going to close. Kara prefers to be really straightforward with her approach and start the conversation by stating what her company does for customers and say "this is our minimum monthly rate" to find out whether it is on that potential customer's budget or not. If they're not, then she offers to use the rest of the call to give free advice. She assures this is helpful and saves her a lot of time. 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. Subscribe Apple | 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

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 Getting inside people's heads. How can we really understand what goes on inside someone's head? Anne explains that what really gives us away is how we write, instead of what we write. The tones, the structure, the number of emojis, and the type of words we use are giveaways that offer a glimpse into things like our emotional state, personality style, social styles of interaction, and conflict management. Her company uses this data to build algorithms that help them put people in categories of psychological profiles or cognitive styles. "After we applied it to sales and marketing, we've seen a significant lift in our customer ROI," she says. How the industry will change. Will AI replace what agencies are doing for clients? This technology is becoming quickly democratized. A few years ago artificial intelligence was all about building training models and putting in huge massive slices of data. Today it costs $16 and 39 cents to run a learning model. It can be really quick and easy to train a model with a high level of accuracy. Is the technology strong enough to completely replace a human? "I think not at this point," Anne told us. There is still a long way to go before that, but it is the future. For now, it's all about not wasting money on inefficient positioning. "Data-driven algorithms are not the enemy," she adds. Advantages for agencies. We should always use new technologies and innovations to our benefit, and to benefit our clients. We all know that agency owners struggle with their own marketing and have a hard time treating themselves like their own clients. Anne believes this struggle comes from not really knowing where your sweet spot is and that using these technologies could help you experiment. Using algorithms can help you determine the accuracy of your targeting. For example, if you would like to go after medium-sized businesses with revenues between 10 to 50 million, you can test your response rates. Algorithms are great ways to experiment. It's cheap, it's fast, and you're not wasting time. 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. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Stop Wasting Resources and Use Data-Driven Algorithms to Find Your Sweet Spot in The Market Jason: [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 informa

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 Relationship equity. Michael considers himself to be a connector. He loves creating connections between people and really believes in the concept of relationship equity. To him, relationships are like a bank account, you have to make sure to make a deposit and you have enough money before making a withdrawal or a purchase. "There are folks that are very quick to make massive withdrawals and they haven't substantiated," he explains. People will sometimes try to get something from a person without first establishing a true connection with them and building trust. How can you do that? By taking that relationship and multiplying it by time and by value. That is what truly builds relationship equity. How can agency owners use it? Relationship equity is all about connections and being bridge builders. Agency owners can really benefit from this approach when they focus on really understanding 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. Understand it so well that they think, this person really gets me and my business. But this is something that you can also take to your relationship with peers. "It's amazing what doors can be opened when you try to approach the world from a place of abundance," Michael assures. Be in a category of one. Having that connection and understanding of your client's business and needs will happen especially when you find a niche you're really passionate about. When there's a connection that allows you the opportunity to start building and cultivating that relationship and building that bridge, this is the start of establishing yourself as a category of one in your industry. This way, you can empathize with and what they're going through and ask how can I help? Who can I connect you to? 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. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Investing in Relationship Equity and Establishing Yourself as a Category of One Jason: [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

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 Test to find the right formula. When discussing how to find the right formula to grow your business, Ellen recalls that, more than anything, what helped her find the right fit for her agency was finding what didn't work for them. "Testing and experimentation was a much quicker route to finding what was going to work," she assures. The agency relied a lot on word of mouth at one point and at one point they started to try different approaches, from outbound sales to putting on workshops and events. Finally, they focused on an SEO strategy that now brings 75 leads per month to their door. The foundation to grow your most valuable asset. In an unusual move, for her second hire, Ellen searched for an HR person. "If you're serious about building a remote team and a small team," she assures, "you have to put a lot of foundation in place." So, she worked with this person to set a career framework and think about the hiring processes. They decided on details like how to set up benefits and compensation and how to create an inclusive hiring process. It took a lot of time, but your agency team is your most valuable asset, after all. By the time she figured out what direction she wanted for the agency and the type of roles she needed to hire, there was already a solid hiring process in place. A predictable pipeline is everything. One of the things that became very clear for Ellen when she thought about what she could do to continue to grow her agency was that she would need to figure out how to create a more repeatable formula for generating new business. A more predictable look at revenue and growth would allow making strategic hiring decisions early, versus hiring someone when the pressure is up due to so much work. The only way to get ahead of that is to predict what the next six months are going to look like. 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 Finding the Right Formula For Quick Agency Growth and Generating New Business Jason: [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

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 Taking a step back is a process. After many years in the business and finally being able to take a step back to being his agency's CEO, David admits that he made many mistakes along the way. The first time, he recalls, he hired someone from the outside and did not have a solid onboarding process for that person. That fell apart quickly and they even ended up losing clients. Later, he had a leadership team implement EOS, which he highly recommends, but he chose not to be the innovator and integrator. It fell apart and he had to step in to fix the situation. Finally, he brought somebody up through the ranks, worked on a transition plan, clearly defined authority, and is holding that person accountable. "It's a process," he says, "and you will have your failures in it." Allow leaders to learn from mistakes. David has figured out a leadership team system that works for his agency. There were mistakes along the way, however. One of them was tying the head of the team's financial bonus to their financial income. He later changed that and now their bonuses are tied to the overall performance of the agency, not of an individual. Also, what business owners need to do is let go as they bring on those senior people. You don't hire senior people and micromanage. They don't want to be told what to do. With that, you also have to accept that there will be failures and things that don't work. If you want to grow your team, you need to let them make mistakes. On mergers and acquisitions. With 24 years in the business, our guest has seen his fair share of acquisitions. So, what does he look for in a potential purchase? In their case, as a full-service agency, they look for businesses that can complement their services. So they've purchased agencies that allow them to gain a deeper focus on some aspect of the business. On the financial side, they are definitely looking at the EBITDA. He's also made some mistakes on this front, and his advice is that, when it comes to people who will help you evaluate a potential acquisitions organization, they need to understand the industry. The person selling won't mind if you're uneducated, but you will surely overpay. 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. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Building Your Leadership Team & Letting Go of Day-to-Day Operations is a Marathon, Not a Sprint Jason: [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

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 On adapting to changes. Nancy actually credits the hard times of the 2008 recession for preparing her for the pandemic. "When the economy takes a downturn, you're sort of stuck throwing all of this stuff overboard," she recalls. When it came time for everyone to welcome the new digital and minimalistic model, she had already adapted to it years ago. "I've been co-working and managing a virtual team for the last decade, so I was good." In her opinion, the pivoters were the ones surviving and thriving. It was a time to do market research, to find out how customers were behaving, but many went into a state of inertia. Lessons learned over the years. After 18 years in the business, lesson number one for Nancy has been to always trust her gut. She doesn't have a lot of regrets, but she always regrets moving forward with projects where she felt like something didn't seem quite right. Another important lesson is to always watch your P&L. Hope is great but money in the bank is better. Always make sure to have that cushion because you never know when things can go south. Also, remember that a good profit margin for your business should be an average of 30%. And finally, invest in things that will bring you long-term value. Don't underestimate experience. Nancy is very passionate about calling out ageism in business. "I now bring to the table wisdom that I didn't have even 18 years ago," she says. She calls for people not to assume that an older person cannot understand technology. She even challenges anyone a social media strategy contest, since she's been in the social media and digital media realm since the late nineties and feels that, at 65, she can offer a unique perspective. 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. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Lessons Learned After 18 Years in the Business & Why We Shouldn't Underestimate Experience Jason: [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

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 Levers you can pull to scale faster. One of the biggest challenges for agency owners is when they need to hire new employees and must raise their prices to be able to afford that. Will their clients pay that? Well, that depends. Do they know how much value they are delivering to their clients? Sharpspring focuses on ROI and being able to report specifically on this piece of revenue. With the consolidation of tools and bringing data into one place, you'll have a centralized data repository that drives your automation engine and behavioral tracking, making your message more relevant. This is what gets you extra conversion rates and will help you grow your revenue. Why are agencies bad at their own marketing? You probably recognize this. The cobbler's shoes. Agencies spend a lot of time and effort working with their customers and they don't do a great job of marketing for themselves. Agencies spend all their time trying to blow their clients away to get more clients through word of mouth. That's great, of course. It's the first requisite to start scaling. However, you can't raise your prices when you're built on referrals. About this, Jason asks, what if you hire a hunter? That way, con can stop self-sabotaging, you'll continue to scale, and you can finally raise your prices. What works for showing ROI. For Greg, it's all about showing value at the end of the funnel. Agencies bought into the lead marketing approach, he says. But with new customers these days there are multiple interactions before they actually make a purchasing decision. So the idea is being able to track all the different interactions across the entire funnel. Having all that data in one place and being able to map it to a singular campaign and then show when this deal actually does close enables agencies to tell what contributed to a sale and report on it in a way with confidence. YOUTUBE AUDIO LINK Levers You Can Pull To Scale Your Agency Faster and Why Agencies Are Bad at Their Own Marketing Jason: [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 poi