Scaling Smart: Melissa Morris on Data-Driven Pricing and Operational Mastery

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If I've got to cut down three trees, I'm not going to, you know, every day go hit this tree once and then go and hit this tree once and then go and hit, right? If you're like hacking away, it's going to take a long time to get even one tree down. But let's get one down and then let's move on to the next step.

Into the world of success with your brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. I am thrilled to have Melissa Morris on the show. Melissa, your company name says it all. Agency authority. One of the things that so many people get wrong in business is we don't start with the fundamentals, operations, processes. How can we streamline things? And that's where we do see a loss of productivity, of management, of knowing who's doing what and being effective. What processes are being effective and it's then where we lose money. So I'm really excited to dive in to your story, your journey and how that propelled you to create agency authority. So thank you for being here.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. I'm really looking forward to sharing this conversation with you.

Yeah. So let's talk about it. What was the genesis of your business experience that brought us here today?

I actually worked in ad agencies for several years. After I graduated college, I got my degree in advertising. So I worked in ad agencies and like many, I was looking for more work life Balance. I was looking for more flexibility. And about seven, eight years ago, I went out on my own. And what's interesting is at first, given my background in advertising, I had a lot of marketing and advertising experience. Sales experience. I was going to help local businesses with their marketing and advertising and support them in that way. And I got a good book of clients. And what I uncovered is, as I was working with these business owners is they were lacking some basic foundations that would allow them to scale effectively. So I am asking them questions like, what's your most profitable offer? Let's make sure we're talking about that. And they're thinking, oh, we don't know, or okay, well you haven't sold this X, Y and Z service offer. Maybe we should promote that. Yeah, we're really at capacity for that right now. Okay, well when are you going to have more capacity open? We have no idea. And so I was thinking, okay, well we need to take a look at these things. And so I started shifting my focus to supporting them with that and then through my agency experience, working, you know, actually in marketing, working with vendors, working with the media, what I found was it was really easy for me to plug in to other agencies. And sometimes people ask me what I mean by the word agency and I mean any group of people who are done for you, service providers. So. Right. I think this audience probably knows that term. But just for clarity there, I just realized because of how much I know about marketing and advertising and branding and websites and all that good stuff, it was really easy for me to plug in and truly already understand the operational gaps and the inefficiencies within their business because I understood it so well. And so that's what I do now is I help really multi six figure agency owners scale and start getting to the next level and reaching that million dollar mark where they're actually earning a good paycheck, they're not burning out and they're not living in constant overwhelm.

So many good points there. As a former, I mean, I guess I do have an agency now focused on podcasting, but when I had my PR firm, we were a multi six figure business, but I didn't pay myself very well and we did have SOPs. But I also, and I've said this on the podcast before, I probably staffed up a little more quickly than I should have. I wasn't putting my best foot forward in terms of what my offer was and charging enough for it. And I think that's another place where a lot of us fall down is we don't see our value. And we're not. Like you said, you speak to agencies who are saying, well we're at capacity, we don't know when we'll have more. If you're at capacity, that probably means that a lot of people want what you're offering and maybe you should charge more.

Yes, well, and I think this is exactly the trap that so many agency owners fall into though is they don't know, right. Like their approach to pricing is what do I think my audience can afford? Maybe they are looking at competitors, but they're thinking, well that competitor actually does things a little bit different and we have a much more premium service offering and they're really trying to go off of their gut. And what you should be basing your pricing off of is data. And there is a way to capture this data. And it starts by understanding how much it is going to cost you to fulfill the client deliverables that you have promised. Okay, so what does that mean exactly? If I create a scope of work and I promise to create X number of posts and a landing page and a lead gen and a funnel, how much time is it actually going to take me thinking of your business, right? Like it may be a variety of team members, but thinking how much time is it actually going to take to pull all of that off? Okay, well now we know what my expense is. Once I know after I pay my contractors, my employees pay myself, this is the one we always forget about expenses, the tools or softwares. Right? Now I know how much is actually going to cost. Well now I need to build in the profit margin, right? Like, and when we're not looking at it in this way and we are just using more of a gut instinct or what we think people will pay and we don't have anything to work off of. And look, I do understand that sometimes we do this math and we end up at a number and go, oh, that's $15,000 a month. There's zero percent chance anybody is going to pay for this scope of work at $15,000 a month. Okay, that's a sign though. And a lot of people at this point, this is where a lot of agency owners go, well I guess we'll just have to charge 7 because that's what people will pay and we'll just kind of of figure it out. No, no, no, right, like what can we do then? Are you talking to the right audience? Perhaps it's time to shift who you are serving. If this is truly you can't do it faster or less Expensive than that, then you're looking at the wrong buyer. You need to look at a new buyer. Is your team costing you too much? Sometimes you have a very heavy salary, contractor fees, and maybe you're overpaying your team. Maybe you need to tighten the scope. Maybe you are just offering way more. And we need to start healing out some of the things that are included in this behemoth package so that it is getting in a better alignment with what your audience can actually pay. And then of course, are we looking at efficiencies? Like, where are we getting really inefficient? Where do we have profit leaks? Where are we just letting money slip away? And that's actually eating away at the profit margins? So. So I feel I've been saying this a lot with my clients and stuff, like it's just a problem we have to solve and we can use data and industry standards to help us solve that problem.

An interesting note there, even using data, because I have an offer that I'm about to release and I've looked at the market and competitors and figured out what I think is a great. A good price that's fair, reasonable, will, allow accessibility. And then I met with some people who are helping me out and they were like, no, we're increasing this by a lot because at that price point they're like, that's even too inexpensive for what you're offering. And I was like, oh. Because even when we think we're doing the right thing and we've priced things out, it often takes somebody like yourself to be able to give us a wider lens and pull us into reality versus what we see as reality.

Yeah, that's a really great point because sometimes once you have done the math, you're still coming in lower than you could be. Right. And I think this is an important moment too. This isn't where we start thinking about being greedy or asking for too much. Right. Or anything like that. Like, that's not what this is about. Because at the end of the day, if you're going to run a scalable and sustainable business, it has to be profitable, period. Right. Like it just has to be. And so that is where you do have to lean into some mindset work there about, no, I need to make a profit so I can can help more people and not get caught up on that. So I just wanted to speak to that for a minute. But yes, it can be then useful to consult with other people. Right. That is something that I'm able to do. I work with tons of agencies and so sometimes I do have an agency saying, hey, this is the package we're rolling out. I was going to price it at this. What are other people doing? Is this right? Is this on mark? Is this on par? Is it too much? Is it not enough? You know, and I can offer a lot of guidance around that. And also with, you know, what you're paying your contractors, they may say, hey, I'm looking for a new copywriter. These are some of the rates that I'm getting. Does that feel fair? Does that feel appropriate? So absolutely. It can be helpful then to tap into other people in your industry and see if you can get a feel for what the going rate is.

Yeah, well, I'm taking a look at your own business because you left thinking you were going to do one thing and then the market showed you that there was another purpose, right? Yes. So you also had to go through this process. And when you were figuring out how to price your services, did you have to just kind of do what a lot of us do, do some market research, but then change your pricing based on what you were actually receiving? Did you have a team of people that you could go to to ask questions the same way that you are now providing that service?

Yeah, those are a lot of great questions. And you know, there are a lot of different pricing strategies. You can learn about some in business schools or marketing programs and they will teach you that. And there is a point where if it truly is a new offer and you're like, I don't exactly know how much it's going to cost me to deliver this, I'm not exactly sure how much people are willing to pay. This is where you hear some of that, like entry based pricing. Right. I know this is probably kind of a low ball price point, but I've got to get my feet wet. I need some people to just say, yes, and I need to experiment with this. So you give that easy, yes, price point and people go, oh yeah, like, you know, $2,000, I'll go for that. What's the worst that could happen, Right? Like, I'll get at least $2,000 worth of value out of this and then you can deliver on it. And then you do that two or three times and then you start to say, okay, where am I falling now?

Let me.

But maybe it's not $2,000 or maybe it's $2,500. Same thing. Like, let's get some iterations, let's start to collect data. But there is a point where you just have to go off of Your experience working with similar projects, something you see competitors doing, maybe some market research, maybe, you know, pulling your audience if it's a new offer, sharing what you're thinking about, what you're interested in, seeing if you get any bites there. So even if we don't have solid data like I was speaking to before, I know it takes this long, I know it has a, you know, this much expense. Let's see what we can get and then put together that entry. Easy. Yes. Price point. Yeah.

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Exactly, exactly. Because you have to be profitable if you're gonna make it.

We hear a lot about streamlined offers and we all know that it's better if we stick. You know, the riches are in the niches. What do you share with owners who have a lot of different ideas and maybe have had multiple businesses and this is just the next idea that they have that they know is the right offer right now, but then they're all already thinking down the road of other things that they want to do?

You know, I think a lot of entrepreneurs can feel that way, right? Like they have lots of good idea and they have good ideas. Right? That's why they're entrepreneurs. They can have a knack for seeing these in the market and having the energy and the quick startedness to get something together and that fearlessness to go ahead and put it out there. But you do have to be careful that you don't start propping up so many things that now you're not getting any of them across the finish line. Right. Like I heard this once, I think it was John C. Maxwell equated it to like, if I've got to cut down three trees, I'm not going to, you know, every day go hit this tree once and then go and hit this tree once and then go and hit. Right. If you're like hacking away, it's going to take a long time to get even one tree down. But let's get one down and then let's move on to the next. So that is always my recommendation is what business, let's get it up it, let's get it set, sustainable and scalable, work you out of it and then you can start the new one.

That's great advice and I think it is hard sometimes for entrepreneurs to hear that. But if we have people reminding us, then it's a lot easier. And when we start seeing the results of sticking to one main area.

Yeah. And I think they can overestimate how long it can take to really get a scalable business in place because it's not maybe where they're experienced, maybe it's not stuff they enjoy. Right. Workflows and automations and tracking KPIs. If that's not something that you enjoy, you feel fine on or you have a lot of experience and it's going to feel overwhelming, it's going to be daunting. But that's where people like me and my business can come into play and we can take that off of your plate and we can get you skilled scaling very quickly and get the systems in place. Because we know what we're looking for, we know what levers to pull. Right. Like, we already have a lot of our own frameworks and systems that support agencies and can really jumpstart things. So I think that's something to keep in mind too, is, you know, you could think like, oh, but I'm gonna need years to get this right where. And I don't want to spend years working 60 or 70 hours a week. I don't want you to either. Like, that is not the goal.

Well, and speaking of 60 to 70 hours a week, one of the reasons why you left the agency world working for other people was because you wanted a better balance or just more time to do other things besides just grind out work for other people. How was that shift? How was that transition when you were starting your company, did you find that you were still in that zone or have you been able to carve out that life that you wanted?

I've definitely been able to carve out the life that I wanted. And even when I was in that energy of, you know, the agencies, of, oh, we've got to get this last minute ad placed and oh no, the website's down, we've got to call it, right. Like all this, I learned early on I had a couple of really good mentors. And I remember this one woman, she used to always tell me, she'd say, Melissa, there are no advertising emergencies. There just aren't. And I thought she's right. Like there is no advertising emergency. Right. And the other thing she used to always tell me is you can't care more than the client. And I see this too where some of my agency owners there, but they didn't approve it yet and it's supposed to go up. They didn't approve it yet and their website supposed to launch, they have this big thing, there are events happening and they haven't approved. You can't care more than them. Have you followed up? Have you honored your commitments to them? Have you given them what you said you were going to do? Then the rest is on them. Right. Like another email follow up isn't right, isn't not going to move the needle. So all that to say, I think in general I was good about keeping a level head about those things because I had some good mentors to begin with and I did apply that to my business. I would say what was tough is my growth was slower because of it. Because a lot of business owners will start their new business and work 60 or 70 hours a week and say, I'm going to get it up. I'm going to go, I'm going to get there. And right away I was like, okay, Melissa, we're going to take the tortoise approach, not the hare. And we're just going to slow and steady, build and build and build. So while it took longer for me to get to a point I knew I could always get to, it was worth it. Right. And that was probably just the hardest part, is just reminding myself, no, I'm holding back on like quote, unquote holding back. Right. I'm slow and steady on purpose. It's okay if this happens in six months and not in six days. Yeah.

And that is so hard because I think I've also learned I want to work within my limits and give myself space and time for other things. That are going to be there when work isn't anymore. Right. But then it's. Yeah, you have to go slow to go fast sometimes. Right. But I think we, we can get impatient and we can say, but if we just do this and this and if I just spend all weekend working on this one piece and, and honestly I've done that and it doesn't work. It doesn't make it go faster.

No. Well, and then what happens is, is you have all this. You work 60 hours a week. Maybe you do that for a year or two. And now you do have this six, $700,000 business. You've got five and six team members. They're all looking at you saying, what's next? But you. And you're still working 60 and 70 hours a week and you're thinking, what just happened? But it's not going to just turn like that. If you are pouring into it at that level, you're going to have to slowly back yourself out. You don't go from six working 60 hours a week to working 15 at the, you know, like, congratulations, you made it to $750,000 a year. Now you only have to work 15 hours a week. Tomorrow it starts. Right, right. That's not, that's just not how it works. Yeah.

And you talked about teams and building teams and making sure you're not over staffing, overpaying. What has been your personal approach to growth for your agency? And what are some other things? This is a separate question that you see as other places where people are leaking money.

Yeah. So for myself, I did make a couple of hire mistakes early on. Like one of my first hires, I was overpaying and I realized pretty quickly that I was getting the hourly rate that I was paying was not in alignment with the needs that I was requesting. Right. And so I had to separate ways because it's, it was just financially not making any sense. And so that was a good lesson learned there. Does the wage match the like what I need from them? Does that feel in alignment? And then I've also waited too long to hire in the past where I felt like I was up to my eyeballs in work and thought, oh no, I need to hire. But then I found myself in the trap of interviewing was a hot mess. Right. Trying to find somebody because I had no time. Training was non existent. Right. And then of course that lasted. You know, somebody came on, I think they made it like three months. And that was a total train wreck. So it was like, okay, redo. So I've definitely made Some of those hiring mistakes as well, and, you know, lessons learned there. So I take a much more careful approach, much more strategic about when and how I hire. But, you know, it's common mistakes that a lot of agency owners make. And then regarding your other question about where we often see a lot of other profit leaks, one of the biggest is absolutely through poorly scoped offers. So what do I mean by that? I mean, we are not being very clear about what it is we're going to deliver to the client. So I may see things like strategy is included in your offer. Well, then what happens is this agency's client, every time an idea flitters in their head, they're like, well, send it over to Melissa and her team. They do our strategy. And then you're fielding these emails and these questions. We're having a brainstorming. Why don't you join it? Because you're our strategy girl and you're like, oh, my gosh, like, and then you're sitting it, right? So this is just an example. I'm sure everybody listening can insert their particular situation, but we've all been there where we're like, why did I say that? And so that's what I try and teach my agency owners is, no, we don't offer them just strategy as a blanket statement. They get one strategy call a month or two strategy calls a month, right? Like, how can we really put a container around that? And then when they are sending you emails or inviting you to random calls, say, hey, these are some great ideas. I'm going to add them to the agenda for our strategy call that we're going to have next week. And now you're not on speed dial for every idea that comes their way. And then the second part that I see in terms of poorly scoped offers is there's always a lacking of attention to how much time it takes just to run and manage a project. The checking, the email, the checking asana or ClickUp, the conversation during the team meeting, right? Like all these little things in a moment, it may only be 10 or 15 minutes, but when you do 10 minutes every day for the, you know, entire six months of your contract, it's starting to add up. And maybe you do it for 10 minutes a day, and then your designer is doing that for 10 minutes a day, and. And then your copywriter's doing that for ten minutes a day. And then the agency owner is thinking, what happened to my profit margin? And I'm like, well, it got emailed and asana notification away is what happened. To it.

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And then other things that I think in terms of overall operational inefficiencies. One thing I've seen for myself is for instance, just got charged for a couple of subscriptions and I'm like wait a minute, I haven't even used those things. I didn't even know I was subscribing. But they're just auto renewing or why am I paying this much for a hosting company, for a whole bunch of websites for clients and myself? I can find something better that's a better deal that does will give me also better customer service. But it takes again, like you said, time to to go through each of those and decide and decipher exactly which ones are right for your business. So I imagine that's something that you can also help your clients work through when you're looking at their overall organization.

Yes, absolutely. We're always looking at their tool stack because sometimes too I'll see redundancies. We have Asana and ClickUp. These are both project management tools. There really shouldn't be any reason that a business needs both. So when I see someone and they're paying for both, that's when I'm digging deeper and saying what's going on over here that isn't going on here and how do we fix this and get everything really working in one system? Because also the more systems you have, the more opportunity there is for tasks to get lost, the more of that project management time that really erodes your profit margin starts to happen. Because I'm checking over here and I'm checking over here and then we're talking about it over slack on which system I'm supposed to put it in. So I always encourage agency owners to review their tool stack at least once a year. And then inside of that too is what tier are you on? Because so many times, particularly like as we're recording this, we've just come off of Black Friday. So a lot of these tools sign up for our Black Friday and it's this next up tier is going to be 67% off. And you think, oh, why not? That's not. That's basically what I pay now. And I get what. We'll see. We'll see which of these features we use. Maybe we can introduce some new features. And then you sign up and then you forget. And then like you said, you're on this auto renewal and suddenly, I mean, you could easily be paying four or five hundred dollars for a tool annually on a tier. And you're thinking, I could be in the free tier based on like how we're actually using this tool and I'm just paying them $500 a year for nothing. Right.

Talk to us about strategic upsells because you help people hone in on their offers. And I think some people love upselling and some people also are like, are people going to value that? Should we do that? When's the right time to do that?

Yes. I am actually a big fan of. I don't even know that I refer to it as an upsell, although. Absolutely. That's ultimately what it is too. I'll often use the term add on. So when I'm working with an agency owner, I'm always trying to guide them and seeing how close we can get to them to what is called a productized service offering. And this is really an offer that is very repeatable. It has the same scope, it has the same deliverables. And when you can get that in place, it becomes very, very easy to scale it. Training your team gets really fast. You know when your capacity is going to come up, you know how much it costs to get the work done, you know what your profit margins are. The clarity that that can give you is just tremendous. Now as we're looking at that though, we often know, okay, we have package A and package B, but sometimes people need this, you know, letter C and this letter D also. But do we put them in the package? Do we not put them in the packet? If I put it in and only 50% of people need it now, my pricing is really high. Cool, let's make those add ons. So I really try to work agency Owners is let's find, you know, a few of your core service offerings. And then when we have this, well, sometimes people need X, Y or Z. Great, that's an upsell, that's, that's an add on. And then we package and scope that differently because we know 80% of people are going to fit in this package. And for the 20% of people who need a little judging, well, they can select from the add ons you have available. Nice.

And what about. Because I imagine that also helps keep clients longer and retain clients because we all know it's no matter what your business is, it's a lot easier to keep the people you have than to have to go out and find new ones and spend the marketing dollars or the advertising budget or go to that extra networking event or whatever it is.

Yes, you are speaking my language. I say all the time it is easier to keep the clients you have than go find new ones that I, I feel like should be stamped on my forehead. So I so feel you on that. And it is true. And the thing is, is when you have an offer like this that's really clear, it's really scalable, you're delivering it well, you're delivering it efficiently, your client feels like they understand what's going on, they're getting great results, they're going to stay like they're going to stay. And then this is where we do. If we have add ons we know we can pull to, if we have a really smart marketing and offer suite, then it's really easy then to take a client to and move them up in a tier, move them down to the tier, give them an add on, take an add on that they previously needed, take that off and you can really start to think about your offers being almost modular. Right. Like I need a love seat. Nope. Now I need a sectional. Nope. Back to a love seat. And you can start to I guess, like Ikea your way to success.

Yeah, I love that strategy. And I never thought about the offers or the add ons as a modular set or unit. That's a really great reframing. I'm going to have to keep that with me.

Yeah, for sure. And then it's easy too because you start to think of those units moving together. Right. So now they're also moving together in your scope of work. And I know what's included in this piece. That's a KPI. I can track. How many of these did I sell? How do I set this up in my project management tool? What team member do I need to execute this, like it just starts to answer so many questions when you have everything just in buckets, so to speak.

Do you have a specific avatar that you like to work with? You did, you mentioned that mid six figure, getting them to seven figure. But are specific types of agencies that you love to work with or that you found are your sweet spot?

Yeah, as I was alluding to a little bit before, it is definitely marketing advertising. I've worked a lot with like web development branding agencies. I just, I know that space really well that it's super easy for me to plug into. I actually worked with a PR firm for a number of years as well, so I know you mentioned that. So I've definitely worked with other industries, but anything in the digital marketing space is really easy for me to. To plug into. Yeah. Fantastic.

What's one piece of advice that you'd give to somebody who is looking at their business going, I'm not paying myself very well. I'm not sleeping, I'm not spending time with my family. I need to make one major change or shift.

This is going to be one that you would probably never expect me to say, but this is, I think one of the smartest things any agency owner can do if they're finding themselves in this situation is to time track. They should be tracking their own time and their team members time. Because as I was saying, the first thing we need is data. And even if you hire somebody like me, the first thing we're going to implement is we're going to start talking about time tracking. Right. We can obviously do other things and work on other things while we're starting to collect some of that data, but it's often very, very enlightening. And if you're thinking, Melissa, I'm already time tracking. My second question is, how often are you actually looking at the data? Because I do know a lot of agency owners, they, their time tracking, their team's time tracking. Like, oh no, we're all. We're so good about time tracking. Great. And how often are you reviewing the data and what are you doing with the information the data is giving you? And that's when I start getting that look on her face. It's like, oops, you caught me.

That's so valid. I know because I'm balancing being a professor with running my own podcast, with helping other people on their podcasts, with meetings with people in my industry, outside of my industry to talk about partnerships or different things. And so I scheduled things out and time blocked really well starting in January because I know Mondays I'll be on campus all day. I'm not going to take meetings. I'll need a little time in the morning Tuesday so I can't have meetings until this time and some things like that. But I haven't really taken a look at all of those little 30 minute intro meetings that I have on my calendar and did things actually come out of them besides having a great new relationship, which is also fabulous. But it's not necessarily leading to revenue and it won't necessarily lead to revenue.

So yeah, yes, that's important too. And that's when we can see when you start paying attention to your time tracking or doing some time blocking like you're doing as well is okay. How many income generating activities am I doing or how much am I putting out? Quite a client fires and team fires and fixing things that came back wrong or that my team didn't get to the point I wanted them to be. When you start looking at that, that gets very eye openening. Yeah, yeah.

We're going to of course have the link to your agencyauthority.com in the show notes. I wanted to ask a couple of other questions as we wrap up. One is we didn't really talk about AI and I know that's something that is now really there's a lot of things people can operationalize with using AI tools and I'm sure that's shifted since you started agency authority as well.

Oh, for sure.

So are there specific. Are you and your team using a certain tech stack? Are you investigating? Are you kind of leaving it up to each agency and helping make recommendations for how they can have even more efficiency with those tech stacks?

Yeah, I would say within agency authority. ChatGPT has actually been my best friend for most of this year. At this point. I'm using it in a number of ways in the agency in terms of how we're guiding other agencies to use it in their own. That is definitely a very customized approach. Right. Like we have to take several things into account when we're looking at utilizing something like that. Does it fit within their own tool? Is there extra fees? How is it going to best support them? And I would say just like with so many other things, I just have to caution. Can I go into ChatGPT and say write an SOP? Sure. It'll write. It'll write a client onboarding SOP, but then when it finishes writing that client onboarding SOP, it's going to say do you want me to make it a slide deck? Do you want me to Put it in a branded PDF. Do you want me to add more bullet points? Just let me know what you need. What it's not going to do is say, does your client still have questions after this onboarding process? It's not going to say, I notice you're saving a contract in Google Drive and then adding it to ClickUp and then sending it to, you know, so and so on your team. Why are you putting it in three places? It's not going to say, how does the client feel about the onboarding experience? Does your team member still have questions? And that handoff is feeling really clunky because I can tell you any broken workflow, you can write it down in calligraphy and it is not going to help. It can be written down on a beautiful canvas with colors and branded and it's not going to matter. It's not going to help your team. It has to be an efficient and optimized workflow for first. So how we're using it is. I'm having conversations with my agency owners and those are the questions I'm asking. Well, how does this feel? How's the team feel? What's retention rate like? You know what I mean? Are your clients staying on board? Okay, let's figure all of this out. Okay. Now we actually have a quality and efficient workflow. Now do I need to go type that and format it? No. Then it goes in chat GPT and it spits it out. I do a little judging and we're good. But it was all that pre work before that allowed me to get something out. Good. So the same old thing, right? If I just put broken garbage in, I'm going to get broken garbage out. It's just going to be written down really fast and in a branded PDF.

Yeah, too true. So that's a great note. I mean, because I think we can also get excited about adding new tech. As you said, the Black Friday sales, like we need to add this and this and this and then you still have to learn how to use them. So that's time. You have to decide if they're really appropriate. You have to, like you said earlier, is this doing something that another tool that you already have and love is doing? So there's still a lot of. There's some really great use cases, obviously, and I'm a big fan of using AI appropriately. But we also have to make sure that we're not getting overly excited and that we are making sure that it works for our teams, it works for our clients and that we're fulfilling what we need for our agencies.

Exactly. And I think that's what I would challenge a lot of agency owners with too. I think sometimes we are getting swept up and thinking we need to understand AI, we need to be using it in our business, we need to be making it more efficient. Team, go figure out how to use AI in the business. That is like a fool's errand. What are we trying to solve? Right? Like, is there a problem in the business? So, okay, let's look. Where are we being really inefficient? Like, where do we already know It's a time suck. Like, oh, every time we have to do this, it takes three or four hours and it's painful. Okay, now we've got some things here, we've got some opportunities. Now let's go look and see how can AI turn what feels like. That's kind of how it was for us, like we would do. And the fun part for me is the conversation and the figuring out the workflow and what's broken and how do we fix it and then it would get, okay, we've got it all done. Oh, now I just have to literally go and type and format and like play with the bullet points on a three page written sop. That was the time consuming and tedious part. All the stuff before that was the fun strategic work. Okay, that was the problem. Oh, how do we get rid of this time consuming, tedious. Just typing the thing out, right, Cool. We're just going to throw it in chat GPT and it's going to zip it out in 60 seconds. So do that in your own agency. What is time consuming? What is the pain in the butt word? The stuff that just feels really painful to complete. How do we get AI to fix that and do that incrementally, right? Like continue to address different departments and tasks and before you know it, it will also start to shut a light and open doors on other ways you could use it in your business. Yeah, fantastic.

What is a piece of advice or a quote, a mantra, words that you live by that you could share and impart with others right now?

Yes, run your own race. You are only in competition with yourself. And as I spoke to earlier in this podcast that I really had to tell myself that when I was taking a much slower approach to growth and where my kids are 9 and 11 now, but you know, this was when they were, you know, 1, 2 and 3 years old and it was really important to me that I had the time and energy to focus on them and spend time with them and I knew that would mean growing the business slower and I would see other people who a few months earlier were right where I was at and now they're having a big win and then, you know, six months later somebody else is having a big win. And I had to just keep focusing. Thing let's say you're running your own race. This, that is not their journey and they're doing what's right for them. Right. And if your approach is I'm going to work 60 or 70 hours a week and go and crush it and do that until I can anymore, that is your choice too. Like, I'm not here to cast judgment on that. But that is not what was going to work for me. And so I had to say no, Melissa, run your own race. And so that is always my advice. You're only in competition with yourself. Are you better than you were yesterday?

Then you're doing good, amazing and so important. So I love when we're recording this episode because we are recording it towards the end of the year and it is a time when people really do need to reflect even deeper on how are we going to move into the next year, what are we going to get rid of and what are we going to keep and what are we going to make better? And I think what you do speaks to all of those questions in terms of our businesses and making sure that we are only competing with ourselves, but that we're also making sure we pay ourselves, that we take time and that we're intentional, that we're niching down, that we are looking at all aspects of our operations to make sure that we're being the best we can be for ourselves, our clients, our customers, our team members and the world. So, Melissa, thank you for being here.

So thank you so much for having me.

I absolutely thank you to everybody who is watching this episode, listening to it on your favorite platform. Leave us a rating review, hit that subscribe button and let us know what you think of the episode. I'll be back again with another amazing guest to share some tips and tricks for you very shortly. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of youf Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out@yourbrandamplified.com.