Agency growth & transformation with Lee Jackson

Welcome to the latest episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. Now, I probably shouldn't say this, but I think this episode is my favorite one so far. I was super pleased to have Lee Jackson from Agency Transformation with me and we spent our time talking about the five stages of growth and transformation that every agency needs to go through if they want to scale their agency and they want to do it in a pain free way. What what we've both found is that agencies end up bashing their heads against a brick wall or kind of going backwards because they don't invest in this. Now, this episode is super practical and so I need you to grab a pen and paper and make sure that you can take notes so that you can work out where you are with these five stages and what you need to do next. So let's get on with today's episode.

Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added. Interview with your host agency owner and coach, Rob Da Costa.

Before we jump into today's episode, I just want to let you know that the doors have finally opened for this year's launch of the Agency Accelerator Mastermind program. Now this is a 12 week hybrid coaching program that consists of one to one coaching sessions with me, weekly group coaching calls, and access to over 35 hours of online content which you get access to for life as well as a unique roadmap to help you grow your agency. So if you are interested in learning more, head over to DACostacoaching.co.uk agency accelerator. That's DACostacoaching.co.UK agencya accelerator. Okay, on with today's show. So welcome to today's episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. I am really excited to have with me Lee Jackson. Now I've been on Lee's Agency Trail plays a podcast, so I'm really glad I can reciprocate the having him on board today as well. And we're going to be talking a little bit about agency growth and agency transformation. But before we do that, let me give you a little bit of a potted history of Lee's journey in the agency world. And Lee, please let me know if I've missed anything out because you have quite a long bio. So I'm really linked. You're younger than me. So Lee launched Angled Crown, a white label WordPress agency back in 2013. And then in 2015, Lee launched the Agency Trailblazer podcast with the mission of helping remove the stress from agency life through development and education. And Moving forward in 2016, Lee Co founded the Event Engine, which provides conference and events industry with marketing and management technology. And continuing on Lee's journey, in 2017, he launched the Agency Trailblazer community to help agency owners fall back in love with their business. Keeping going. In 2017, agency Trailblazer Live was launched, which is an event to help agency owners create real change. And this year's event's coming up in May, so we'll talk a little bit more about that later on. And if that wasn't enough, then in February of this year, Lee launched yet another podcast, the Event Martech Podcast that explores the technology and strategy to help market and deliver events and all of that. And Lee is only 21. So how do I do that? Lee Pretty still a lot younger than me. How do you. So did I miss anything out? Any other bits you wanted to add into that?

To be honest, there's. There is so much I would confirm it's Agency Transformation Live, not Trailblazer Live.

Oh, sorry.

So we don't confuse it. But yeah, we've got the podcast, we've got the new podcast and we do actually have a magazine and another podcast coming out later this year as well. And that's a magazine for agency owners that's going to be going out print, which is really freaking scary and exciting all at the same time.

So how. Well, it's amazing. So, I mean, before we jump into the kind of body of today, I'm really interested to know how you juggle all of these different priorities and manage to keep on top of everything.

It's very simple. I know exactly what I want to achieve. I have this list of the things that I want to achieve and I'm really freaking organized. I've got with me in front of me, it's called a day planner. And I have every single day planned with my to do lists, etc. And I also can fast forward several weeks so I know what I'm going to be achieving in each week of every quarter. So I can make sure that I actually get things to happen. And all of that is basically driven. We'll talk about in a second one of the stages of transformation. But for me, it's always been about the identity. I understand the identity of myself and what my mission is, but also the identity of the people I'm serving. So it makes it really easy for me to come up with a whole range of things that I want to do to help them. And then it becomes super easy as well to plan it. Also, because my team will listen to this, obviously I have A very good team as well, alone. So thank you, Nicole. Thank you, Kate.

Thank you.

The list is endless. But thank you for everyone as well who gets involved because we've got a great team around the world who collaborate.

With me and how so. I mean, there's a million things we could unpack there and there's definitely a future interview around productivity because I know that's a challenge for everybody, including me. But when you've got all these various things that you can do to serve your audience, how do you determine what you are going to do and what you're not going to do?

So a great example is that I launched the premium community of agency TrailBlazer just over two years ago, which you mentioned. And we actually closed that just a few months ago because we recognized that although there was immense value in what was being offered, et cetera, the amount of work that we were putting in, it wasn't being able to help enough people as it were. So it meant we weren't getting the amount of money that we would need to keep that going and keep it viable. We were putting tons and tons of hours into something that wasn't generating too much cash, but also the actual output that people were getting from it. A few people were getting massive value, but most people, because it was a low cost membership, kept forgetting about it and not really logging into it and not really doing anything with it. So we figured what we would do is we would diversify and we'd push more on the event and then push more on other forms of content marketing where we believe we can add more value.

Yeah, it's really good. I mean, it's a really interesting and important point that we all need to remember that it's all about serving our audience and maximizing our reach and maximizing our impact on that audience. So it's, it's like I say, a good thing for us to remember. So I would really love to have you back and talk about how you organize your day. I'm a big fan of Michael Hire and his book Free to Focus. And I use some, some concepts from that, like my morning and evening ritual, which helps me get organized and focus on the things that are going to move me forward and try and not get distracted by the things that I like doing but aren't necessarily going to move me forward.

Well, if I can throw in a book recommendation, there's Time Management Magic by Lee Cockrell. He's the former vice president of Walt Disney World. And that is essentially my time management bible that I read years ago. And it completely changed the way I organized my time. So that might be helpful for listeners or yourself as well.

Yeah, brilliant. So we'll make sure we add that link into the show notes and I'll definitely go and grab a copy of it. So, as I said in the introduction, today we are going to be discussing agency growth and agency transformation. And I know that there are a number of brick walls or hurdles that agencies hit at various stages of their growth. So I'm looking forward to digging into that topic with you in a bit more detail. I thought it'd be good to kick off discussing the typical journey that someone takes when they decide to branch out on their own and start their own agency. Do you still want to share some of your experiences of that growth, both for yourself and the people that you've worked with?

Sure. Well, the cool thing is our business focus is on helping agencies, so we've heard all of the stories possible. And also we interview agency owners on our podcasts as well. But the predominant way people get into this industry is that we're either developers or designers who have an absolute passion for it. And people have still started asking us to do websites or designs on the side. So it's kind of become our side hustle. And then we've all come to a point where we realize, oh, this is actually really cool, I can get paid to do what I love. And then we all jump in two feet into running our own business. Perhaps scared, perhaps it goes great at the beginning for a few weeks or months, but then things, you know, things start to get stressful and that's kind of where a lot of people tend to stay. They're trying to get on new clients, they don't really have much direction, etc. And there is an awful lot of work to be done. For example, myself in my early agency days, I was working 18 hour days, often working weekends, and very often going to bed at say, 4 o' clock in the evening, sorry, in the morning, and then getting up two hours later to make sure I was on standby for a site, going live, etc. So that was the story of my life and how I got into it. And it's scary. How many other businesses have exactly that. Very well, or not exactly, but very similar stories as to where they are now.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think, you know, when someone starts a business, they do it because they have a passion for the thing that they do. So it might be a web designer or graphic designer or content writer or something, and they're obviously going to be good at doing that. But they don't always realize that actually they need to be good at a number of other things if they're going to be successful at running their business. And I always kind of say that we've got to be good jugglers or good plate spinners because we've got to be able to serve the clients that we have today. That's doing the thing that we do. But we've also got to be good at strategy, which is like looking at the future of our business, making sure that we are, you know, investing in business development and marketing and sales and all that stuff. And at the same time we've also got to be good at running our business. So that's, you know, doing the admin side like getting your invoices out on time and you know, all the rest of it.

You've pretty much described there one of my favorite books on the planet, which is the E Myth Revisited as well. So we end up starting the businesses that kind of work us. So we know our work and we want to just do our work. But equally there's this entrepreneurial side of us that's trying to get in there to come up with new and exciting ideas. And equally the also the manager who wants to try and manage everything. So we're like three people in one trying to run this business, all fighting with each other. It's a great book. Another one to recommend. I read a lot of books. There'll probably be a lot of book recommendations today.

Well, that's good. I mean, it's interesting because when you find a good book, it's kind of like gold dust because for every one great book there's another 20 books that people have told you how amazing they are and how they built this multimillion pound business. But they don't necessarily give you the step by step guide of how you can do it. So. And do you feel like there are certain common milestones that people hit as they grow their agencies? Do you see any commonality in that?

Yeah, I mean we've, we've put our event around five pillars, I think of transformation. The idea being that there are certain stages you need to get to in your agency before you can then move on to the next day. So it's like 20% change if you think of the starting point. Point we'll start as an agency because we're really excited about doing development and building websites, et cetera. But our identity becomes we build websites and that's not actually the best identity. So the first kind of Hurdle to get past for most agencies is actually understanding, you know, what their superpowers are and who they, what problems they solve. Sorry. And who they solve those problems for. So that's the whole identity package. That tends to be something I think most agencies stay in for an awfully long time. So, for example, 15 years ago, when I was part of the original agency that got me into agency life, we spent years doing that. We were in that identity crisis phase. We were still growing financially, but actually we were not very profitable. We were adding staff because we were pretty much taking on any jobs that anyone would give us, which meant we were not a lean, mean operating machine. We were actually a big bloated mess and all very, very stressed. And it was only the point where we actually said, wait, we need to do something different. Someone said to me, only a fool does the same thing and expects different results. I don't know who told me that, but that was just like, oh my, we are doing the same thing over and over again and nothing's changed. And we literally stopped, we shut the office for a day and we were like, who are we and why the hell are we doing this? Or shall we just all go home? And that's where we started to work out, you know, our identity. And that's definitely the first hurdle scarily, a lot of agencies are stuck in.

Yeah, can I just pause that before you move on to the second one? Because I think that is so true and it's a conversation I have all the time with people, they're fighting this, this sort of belief that. Because, you know, I'm a big fan about niching your, your agency and I know you are as well. And in a way, when you start working out your identity and therefore you start working out who you serve, you also work out who you don't serve. And I think a lot of people in the early days believe that they've got to try and serve everybody, because if they don't try and serve everybody, they're going to be missing out on a big part of their marketplace. And the net result of that, especially if you're like a web designer or web developer, is you just look like everybody else and then it becomes very difficult to differentiate you from someone else. So how do you differentiate yourself? Well, you end up being cheaper or you end up promising ridiculous levels of service and that leads you to working till 4 o' clock in the morning. So getting to that point where you work out your identity and make a choice on where your skill is and where your passion Is and where you can do your best work, and that's where your niche is. Is. Is a huge part of. Of that phase one, I guess.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And what you just described there was pretty much my life for a very long time. The other part as well, of identity is showing up as yourself once you understand who you are in your identity. One thing I used to do is I used to show up in a suit and a tie, and I even created this funny video. It's not funny. I was being deadly serious. I was in a corporate suit trying to appeal to whoever I thought was my target audience, because I had no flipping clue. So I was showing up how I thought they wanted to see me, and I was attracting other corporates in suits who would treat me terribly, and I hated it. So I realized the minute I started showing up as myself, as Lee Jackson on the podcast, for example, that's where it all changed, you know, so identity even goes as deep as, you know, who do you want to attract to your business to work with, rather than attracting some of the nightmare clients that I'm sure we can all list on a few hands.

Yeah. And also, you know, that reaches even further because that talks about when you get clarity on who you are, it translates into your tone of voice. I've been doing some work on the launch that I've got coming up soon for my agency accelerator program, and I've been really working hard on my email sequences to try and get my tone of voice so that if you read those emails, you'd know you were talking to Rob or you'd feel like Rob was sitting opposite you. Because every best piece of content I've ever written has always been a reflection of who I am. And so I completely agree with what you said. You need to show up physically and kind of, you know, via your marketing and sales as well as the authentic version of you. Sometimes people aren't very clear about who that is. So I guess that phase one is where they have to really figure that out.

I remember so many times. I mean, we could literally do a whole podcast just on this. I know, but I remember so many times rocking up to networking meetings and like, hey, I'm Lee, and we build websites for anyone who's looking to get online or doesn't like their website. And once a new web, it's just like the worst pitch ever in network networking meetings. And we would never get anything because no one really knew what we did. I was just another web guy.

Yeah, exactly. I remember the same story, really, When I Lived down in Brighton in Sussex. And I remember when I first moved here about nine years ago, and I went to an event that was full of suited and booted blokes, basically with gray hair. And the only thing I had in common with them was that I had gray hair too. And it was one of those awful events where as a guest, you were the last to speak. And everybody went around the room and said what they did. And there's me kind of with my little spiel about being a business coach. And it went around the room and, you know, there were accountants and plumbers and there were life coaches and business consultants and energy coaches and goodness knows what. And the further around the room it got, the more in despair I was because I realized I just looked like everybody else. And I was just about to say, hey, I'm Rob and I'm a business coach. And that was a big kind of reminder to me that you've got to show up as the specialist that you are, not worry about missing out on things, not having FOMO and just committing to that nation, being congruent completely about that.

One way I'm memorable now in network meetings because I still go networking. I actually kind of still believe in it to this day, even though I do a lot of online networking as well. And even last week I went to one in Milton Keynes. And to be able to stand out, it was very easy because there are other web companies there. But I stood up and said, can everyone get your business card out, please, and have a look at it? And everyone gets their business card out. And I say, the person who designed that is probably my ideal customer. And then I explain what I do. So it's just because I know exactly who I'm talking about. And that identity piece just makes networking so freaking easy.

Of course, people remember you as well.

Exactly. So bit cheese, though. But anyway, shall we go on to the next phase?

Yeah. So that was phase one. Let's move on to phase two.

For the next hour, let's talk about phase two.

Sorry.

No, it's just how much isn't there? So the next stage is value. We so often don't value ourselves because we've lost our. Maybe we never even achieved an identity. An identity in the first place. So if we imagine all of that feast and famine, all of that stress that we've had over the years and the client's not treating us great, we actually lose our own self worth and our own value that we have in ourselves. So the next stage, from understanding our identities to start to Recognize that we are actually amazing at what we do. We are brilliant at whatever our superpowers are and that what we do has value and also that, that you know what the amount of value that has toward the client. So when we are attracting a specialist client in our specialist industry who has this specialist problem that you know how to solve because you've spent the last 30 years learning how to solve that problem, then that in itself has value as well. So we do a. Yourself. You do a lot of training as well, don't you? And conversations around helping people understand their own self worth and value, but also value led pricing. So making sure that people are not undercutting themselves. Because when you are not charging enough, you may still understand who you are. But if you're going cheap into your target market, you've still got that feast and famine then, haven't you? Because you're trading time for money and it's such a nightmare. So that was the next phase we had to work out.

Yeah. And I'm sitting here going hallelujah. I mean, you know, you know, you, you and I are so sort of singing off the same hymn sheet and you know, selling time is commodity and it doesn't show your value at all. And so again, another podcast, another conversation. But absolutely. And I guess point two really ties into point one, right? So if you understand who you are and what your niche is, then you can really understand the value that you bring to your audience and you can price based on that 100%.

So as people are listening to this, I would actually challenge you if you've heard these two steps. Which step are you at already? Because if, if you're honest with yourself, a lot of people listening may still be at that identity point. And that's probably where they need to talk with you, mate, isn't it? Over the agency accelerator program.

And can I, can I just say as well, because I know this is what some people will be thinking. They'll be thinking, oh yeah, but Robin Lee, you don't really understand my unique situation. And I can't do that. And I'm like, I just want to burst everybody's bubble and say, well, actually none of us are that unique. None of us. I've heard it all before. And people say, you don't get it. You, I can't do that in my industry. And I've had that around pricing before because people think they work in such a niche industry that, you know, they can't price higher. And I'm like, well, if you're in that Niche, you should price even higher because you're that much more of a specialist.

This is exactly what we do. So when we started EventEngine, so Event Engine was actually born out of the original agency. The product itself therefore is something like 11 or 12 years old and we've been taking that to the events industry for the last few years. And there are some huge players in that market and they charge an arm and a leg, etc. And equally there are a whole load of big companies like Eventbrite that are ridiculously super cheap and, and people can use those online software as a service platform. So we could definitely use that excuse and say, hey, we're in the events industry, it's really hard. You either have to be super expensive or ridiculously cheap. There's no way we're going to be able to compete. But instead we've just stuck our stake in the ground. We've shown up, we've been charging a high value for what we do. And it's a really successful business in that niche because we know exactly who we serve. But equally we've gone down to the niche within the niche, within the niche, as it were. So we predominantly work with conference organizers, that's professional conference organizers who do it in bulk. And we also work with them who are particularly in things like government sectors and scientific sectors because they're the ones that need extra handholding and extra security and all of that we specialize in. So now we've just raised the roof, as it were, of our value and made ourselves a really exciting proposition to that type of client.

Yeah, and you know, that's such a good advert for being as absolutely laser focused in your niche as you possibly can. Because the more we understand our target client and the pain points that they have that we can solve, the higher the fee and the more easily it is to create messages that resonate with that audience. So that's, that's really great.

Which segues perfectly to platform messages. So platform is your messaging. And if you don't understand your identity and if you don't understand the value that you have, then you ain't gonna have no message for no one. So getting those two nailed means the next stage you'll work through is understanding your messaging, how you talk, what you talk about, having conversations with people about their aspirations, having conversations about problems, etc. But it also allows you to choose your platform, which is the marketing channels you're going to go down. For example, what social media channels are you going to show up in, what events are you going to attend what networking meetings are you going to go to? You know, where are you going to show up with the message that has been formed from your identity and from your value, you. And that's essentially the next stage. I think that a lot of people again will fail in. They won't be pushing them, they'll. They'll kind of do a half hearted approach. I am guilty of this half hearted approach to social media where we might go through a flurry of a few weeks of, of putting some stuff out on Buffer and then it kind of drops off again and stuff like that. Or, you know, and we'll just put it across all social media platforms and we won't really go and check and engage with anyone on it, etc. Or we won't be investing in particular marketing campaigns because it kind of feels untouchable sometimes, doesn't it? Marketing? Because a lot of it is just things like brand awareness and all that sort of stuff. So we very often forget to show up in those places and in the right places born out of the identity and value. You mentioned that you were in a networking meeting and you were like, oh my gosh, I don't stand out. So obviously a. You don't stand out, but sometimes you might also have been in the completely wrong meeting for the target audience that you were trying to find as well.

Yeah, in that case, I absolutely was. I was surrounded by, I was a Martian on, on, you know, on Venus or something. I was just in the role. They weren't my audience, they weren't my people. But I learned, luckily I learned that lesson quickly and I moved on to other. I mean, I'm still a big fan of networking and I do some networking, but it's much more with the right audience now. So this is a really interesting point, really, because I think this is what a lot of people do. They go, okay, the latest trend is I need to do social media, so I'll do a bunch of posts on LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or whatever. Oh, it didn't work. I want instant gratification. It didn't work, so I'll stop doing that. So. And I think the challenge that we, the world that we live in now, there's so many things that we can do. So how would you suggest that that agency that's gone through those first few stages is now at this stage of working out their platform? How would you suggest they identify the right, you know, the right channels to reach their target audience?

I'll tell you how I did it. And then hopefully people can get a lesson from that. And it's. I'll tell you how I did it for both. So for my agency audience, I went and checked all the social profiles. Where are people showing up? And I found that agency owners tend to be on Facebook groups asking for help and support. So that's where I showed up. And I created a Facebook group. I've got over 3,000 people in there now who are talking and supporting each other, but I'm also a member of lots of other groups. I knew that Facebook was something that I needed to do really well because that's where my target audience show up. I recognized that LinkedIn wasn't really a place for a lot of my agency audience, at least for the people I was talking to. My type of client, that someone could be, that could be completely different for a different business. And also Twitter, not Twitter, Instagram was somewhere I needed to show up as well because that's a very visual medium and obviously I'm attracting design agencies. And that was just all through looking at what sort of engagement are people getting, what are competitors doing, where are they showing up, where do they seem to be putting their most resources into? And obviously I then also looked at industry events and even started my own industry event for, you know, for that very purpose, to help build up my own brand in that industry. And then for the events industry, it was very apparent to us that everybody was living in LinkedIn. That's where they all connect. So that's where we connect with our LinkedIn lot and Twitter, which is really handy, to be honest, because that means that I'm not like cross posting all the time. I can be an events guy in, you know, in LinkedIn and I can be an agency guy in Facebook and there's not that much crossover, which is good. And then a lot of the content that we create does have kind of impact on either we can actually cross share because there's a lot of value. Like I've just put a podcast out today on social media marketing for an event, yet the content in that would be perfectly good to go across to the agency space as well. But yeah, looking at those, looking at industry events and seeing where you can show up and you got to suck it and haven't you? You've got to try some of these things and you also have to give it time. I'm a big believer in small achievable actions lead to big change. And that means that these things will take time. A house is built, one brick at a time, and that's a lot of bricks to put down. So if you're going to engage in a social media strategy where you are going to post something on Facebook for the next six months, maybe you're going to look to, say, post one thing five times a week and then monitor it and see what's improving, look at the results and see what gets the most engagement, and post more of that stuff. And over time, you're only putting in a few minutes a day, you should start to see the benefits or the results of your hard work. Just like me with a podcast at episode 250something. You know, we have an audience now of thousands around the world because one small, achievable action every week has led to significant change.

Yeah, hallelujah. Again, there's loads of stuff that you just said that I just want to kind of drill into a bit. So the first thing you said that's really important is that we have to know our audience. This isn't about whether we like Instagram or we like. Like, we hate seeing ourselves on video or whatever. This is about what does our. Where does our audience hang out and how do they digest information and what do they want to learn about. So I think, first of all, that's a really key point. And so if you're in your sort of research phase, like you said, go hang out in other groups or other places that you know your audience is in and find out the kind of stuff that resonates with them. So that's one thing. The second thing is that, you know, it's still true that content is the center of all of this. So we produce good content. We can repurpose it for LinkedIn, for Twitter, for Facebook, for video, for blogs, for podcasts. I think that's. That's really crucial. And the last point, which I think a lot of people don't do, is that you have to be able to measure what you're doing, because if you don't measure it, how do you know whether it's being successful? So you have to have goals against the things that you're doing and then measure and tweak what you're doing based on the metrics that come out the other end.

Absolutely.

So I don't know how many stages we are through this.

There's only two more.

Okay, go. Let's go to the next one, then.

All right. We've got our identity, we've got our value, and we're rocking up to the platform, and we are giving those messages out, and that's going to attract people to us, which is awesome. Which means as we grow as a business, as we attract people, we are going to want to nail our output. We need to know that we can manage multiple projects, we can deliver that real high value, that high quality. Which means that it's self fulfilling then, isn't it? Those clients who have those amazing experience are going to become clients who will continue to spend with us and equally they're going to become clients who will introduce other people to us, etc. So the whole output section is where people really need to nail their processes and procedures. And the problem is, is that people are trying to do that before they even nail their identity. So people are spending hours, myself included. I did this a lot, which was I would get really excited about all of the and greatest project management tools and tools to create SOPs, et cetera, and all of them were good, but I was spending hours on that and actually not investing time in my platform to attract people to me with the messaging that I'd got from my identity and from my value. So once you've nailed those three, you then want to, then want to really be looking at your output. How can you deliver high quality, how can you improve your QA processes, all of that good stuff. And we do a lot of training at the event that we've got coming up. I believe you do a lot on this as well. You know, how can you improve your processes, how can you get better at project management? How can you deliver high quality but also manage your time effectively?

Yeah, I mean, so a couple of really good points there. One is that if we have our clear niche and we are very expert in that niche and we're charging the correct fee for that, we then obviously have to make sure the quality of what we deliver matches that pricing level. So I always say to people, look, you know, the reason why people like Lidl and Audi are so successful is they're really clear about their niche, their market, their price and their services all aligned. Whereas, you know, some supermarkets have kind of lost that a bit. Like, if you think about, I don't know, Sainsbury's, they're not quite sure who they are anymore. They're targeting the high end with their premium products and the low end with the value products products. And that sort of is not a good model to follow. And it's why EasyJets and Ryanairs and Audis and Lidl's are so profitable, because they're really clear about their alignment and we need to make sure that we do that. And I think the second thing is don't get, you know, seduced by Shiny New Object syndrome. We need to make sure that we are using the tools that we need to have in place for that stage of our agency's growth. And sometimes people kind of make excuses for themselves, say, well, I won't, I can't start doing that till I've got all these pieces in, all these pieces of jigsaw in alignment. And actually that's just often an excuse. You just need to get on and do it. And then you can, as you say, when you get to this stage, you can start really putting the systems and processes in place to help you grow to the next, the next stage of growth.

If you think about the identity piece, you'll have somebody who will look at their agency and they'll go, okay, what is our identity? What is our pattern? Passion. And my agency years ago was a quote unquote, full service agency until we realized that actually the best thing we did was building event websites and doing event branding. And they were the two things that we loved the most, were the most successful and had the most amazing experiences of and client interactions with. So we decided to drop everything. So if we'd have gone for output first and started going through trying to work out processes and procedures for all of the things that we did, that have been a whole load of wasted work by the time we realized that actually most of the services we were, were going to drop because we were actually just going to focus on two primary things. So there's another one to throw into the mix.

Good, good advice. You know, we should always focus on what we're good at, where we can make money and where we know there's a market for it. And we should, you know, I tell people, start niche and broaden out, rather than start broad and try and target.

Absolutely. And, and also remember, I mean, people will say, do your passion, and that is true, but equally make sure that there is, there is enough value in that, which is why you have to have that value stage working out is what I'm offering here of value to the people that I am trying to pitch it to, et cetera. And sometimes you just need to change who your target audience is to ensure that you can get the right value. The last hurdle is future. And that's something that a lot of us will struggle with as well. In fact, we're all trying to struggle with this right from the get go. We're trying to work out how we scale our business. We're trying to work out what our future plans are. Potentially we're trying to work out what our exit plan might be as well. But if we haven't nailed all of these four stages that we've just talked about, then that's never really going to happen. It's hard to make an exit plan when the business is essentially you. You own your own job and everybody relies on you. So you need to have gone through this entire process. And future or the future stage is all about learning things around scalability. So you, you've, you've got your business nailed. You know how you do things and you're, you're often encouraged, aren't you, to do things that don't scale, because then you can scale it. You know, you can evolve and scale later. At this point, you should have a business that's growing. Your platform should be attracting people to you, your output should be keeping clients loyal and building up your client base. And now you can work out, okay, how do we scale this? What else can we offer to our clients to increase revenue, etc. Etc. To add more value? Because I always tell agency owners that we have a responsibility to be there for our clients in five, six, seven, eight years. And that doesn't necessarily need to be you, the agency owner, but at least the agency entity. People are putting a lot of trust in you, aren't they? When they say, can you build me this website? Can you design me this brand and look after our brand assets and give us brand guidance for the next few years, et cetera. They need you to be around. So if we're not focused on trying to grow and develop our business so that we can be there for our clients in the future, then we're doing them and ourselves a massive disservice. And that is the five stages of transformation.

Well, that's brilliant. That's really good. I just want to say on that last point that, well, first of all, we have to make sure that we have a plan so that we can scale our business so that we don't hit a brick wall. That's really painful to get over because we don't have, you know, the foundations in place to grow to the next stage. But also, if you ever decide that you want to sell your agency, then one of the things a purchaser is going to add a lot of sway on is how scalable your business is. So if you've created a scalable agency, then that's going to make your agency worth a lot more than one that looks exactly the same at this point in Time, but is not scalable because it's going to fall over if it tries to get any bigger. So that scalability is important in so many ways. So that's really brilliant advice. And I really like those five stages is what's your sense? This is a bit of a silly question, but I'm going to ask it because I'm sure some people are thinking about this. What's your sense about how long those five stages take an agency? So if I was, you know, starting out, I'm a freelancer, I decided I want to grow to be a bigger agency. What's the sort of timescale for moving through those five stages?

I wouldn't. I would say identity is something that could take anything from two to three months. Value should be around two months. Like, if this was an ideal world, say, you know, because these were conversations, this is based on what we went through. So within the first six months, we had nailed our identity and our value. We already therefore understood our messaging. So we were then moving into the platform stage of all right, why do we need to show up with these messages? Because we now need to sell these two services we decided are the only two services that we're going to do. It then took us maybe three months before we started attracting. So this is the platform stage before we started attracting the right type of clients and the right sort of contracts so that we could then start growing the business. So months sounds like a long time, but it wasn't really a long time. If you think about it, that's not even a year. And we're already starting to grow our business because we've worked out who we are and we're now attracting those types of clients. And then obviously the natural process of that was we started to grow. And at the end of that first year, we then started looking at our output. So first of all, it was just gratefully accepting the right sort of work and then getting to a point where, oh, okay, we're actually getting a lot of work in. We need to be better at this. And that's where we then looked at our output. And that took us another couple of months to really start to put in some better processes. We were using something called Stream Time, which was great for the designers, but not great for the developers. So we had to work out what was a happy middle ground for us all to work on, or could we do some sort of integration, et cetera. So that was the point when it was right to start working on all of our processes. And that was like a two Month procedure. And then a year and a half in was where we then started getting serious about, okay, well, how can we scale this? And we actually decided that within a few years we would split the company up into two. We would get big enough so that the company could be two separate entities. One that focuses just solely on design with the design team, and one that focuses solely on development. And that's exactly what happened a few years later with, as you mentioned at the intro, where we launched EventEngine and the original business went off, carrying on being a branding agency in the events industry. And we still work together loads. So the short answer is it can take anything from a few months to a few years to go through these processes.

Yeah, and I think that's a good answer because that's why I thought it was a silly question, because it's kind of, how long is a piece of string? I guess the key thing for anybody who's at some stage of their growth is to be really mindful that there are these five stages and that you need to plan ahead heads so that you can work through them. Because I've certainly worked with agencies in the past where they've just. It's felt really stressful in their business and they've been bashing their head against a brick wall because they haven't been aware that they need to, you know, start working on the next stage of their. Their business. And they try to get to the next stage without actually focusing on this.

Absolutely.

Good. So I guess it sort of leads us on quite nicely to the discussion around what's. And this isn't a sales message for me or for you, but what sort of support do you think agency owners need to get as they go through those stages?

Well, they need to join your group.

Well, I wasn't, I wasn't trying to say that. I was just thinking sometimes we don't. We try to do it alone and it can be difficult.

Well, what I've deliberately done is I've deliberately aligned myself with people who are doing what I want to do in my community, in my industry. So I follow closely Chris Ducker, I'm a part of his masterminds, I consume his content, etc. He's a mentor of mine. And I model a lot of not everything, because I don't always agree with everything that everyone does. But what I resonate with, I try and model so that I can build up my own community in my own industry. So equally for people who are looking for help, align yourself with someone that talks your language, Rob is a great guy, I'm a nice enough guy. But, you know, know someone like Rob and the content that he's putting out there through his podcast, etc. And in his Facebook community is definitely a good place to go to start to get some accountability people to start to bounce off. We're in such a cool industry, I think right now, where I've not seen any competitiveness or snideness in any of the Facebook groups, because we're all just an open book in this industry. We're all in the same boat. We're all trying to make a living and we're all just like, oh, I just discovered this the other day, or here's a great tool to. To xyz or I've got a contract and the clients telling me I have to X, Y and Z, what should I do? If you're a part of that, that's the best place you can start to get some support through this entire process. What you might then find is at some point, you might then need to buy into some courses. So, for example, if Rob was to ever launch a course on specifically how to find your niche, and that's something you're still struggling with in the identity piece, then that would be the point where you would go, right, right. Yoink. I'm going to grab that and we're going to study this, you know, and follow it through. Because people like Rob and other leaders have been there, have done it, have had that experience, and that's kind of. It's not a shortcut necessarily, but it just means you're going to have a lot less of the mistakes that we all made along the journey.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's, I think, if we can find a way, I guess it's why you do what you do and I do what I do. I can help people not make some of the mistakes that I made when I ran my agency or I see other agency owners making then, you know, we want to help people have a much more fun, enjoyable journey. People get really fixated on the destination and they forget that they need to enjoy the journey as well. So if I can help them remember that. And it's interesting, when I first launched the agency accelerator Mastermind program, I had a few objections from people joining because they felt they would be, you know, if there was another web development agency they didn't want to join. But actually having run it now a few times, the big benefit people get is that community, that networking with each other, that hearing what other people have done and what they did to get out of that hole and how they can do it. And when I've kind of done my post sort of, you know, event wrap up with those people, they always tell me it's that, you know, as well as getting support from me and all that stuff, it's the networking and it's the learning from each other and it's supporting each other. So like you say, we're in a really exciting world, I think, and it's certainly big enough for lots of us to operate in 100%. So tell me a bit about the event that you have coming up. Agency Transformation in May of 2020.

Awesome. Yes. If you're listening in the future, it was an amazing event and I'm sorry you missed it. But it's on the 6th to the 8th of May. It is a three day event. We've got a two day ticket which is the conference aspect. And then we've got the third day where we're doing an implementation masterminds where we're actually making a plan. Essentially what I've done, we started it last year, we had Troy Dean, a whole. Chris took her there as well last year, which was awesome. And a whole lot of great speakers who were teaching on the five stages of transformation and what we do, we're doing it again this year as well. But what we did was we highlighted what these five stages of transformation were as kind of a workshop right at the beginning of the event to help people identify where they were on that journey. Everyone then filled in the worksheet, they knew where they were. And then for all of the talks that we had then over the year, next two days, we would put pills next to those talks, almost like tracks in a seminar where you would know that if identity is one of the things you're definitely struggling with, you need to pay special attention to this one. Because I think a lot of people will go to a conference, they'll listen to two days of content and just be so freaking overwhelmed they do nothing. So the whole purpose of this is to help you identify where you're at and then help you to glean the information that you need to put a plan of action in for the next stage of transformation. You just want to make one change in your business to get to the next stage rather than trying to, you know, do everything and have a Facebook campaign and learn this and do that and employ new people and all of the other stuff. So that's what we've created is that flow. And then we added it this year by demand. The the third day, which would be the implementation. So a lot of people had all of this written down and notes, but they didn't really know what to do next with it. And that's where we've then got that third day where we're going to do implementation masterminds and people get together, they're going to help each other put in a plan for the next 90 days, etc. Etc. So they've got some, some tools and some accountability to actually get some value from the event. So it's called Agency Transformation Live and you can find out all about it over on decostacoaching.co.uk atl that's Alpha Tango Lima.

Fantastic. So it sounds really good and I really like this idea of supporting people through that journey. I feel like one of the problems with online content, like online training courses is, is that they give you a lot of content but they don't hold your hand to actually work through that or keep you accountable. It's one of the reasons why I launched the Agency Accelerator Hybrid program because I had a bunch of training courses that did moderately well, but the completion rate of that is really, really low. So if there's anything we can do to hold people's hands through that journey and hold them accountable and give them a step by step guide which they can obviously get through. Attending your event is. It's a fantastic thing. So I. My last question before I let you go, because we could talk for hours and that, like I said, I need to have you back and talk about some of the other things that we talked about earlier, is the question that I ask all of my guests, which is if you could go back in time and give your younger business self some advice, what would it be?

Very, very easy. It's to. To understand my identity and stop trying to be something that I'm not. Not that guy as in me years ago who stood in front of that camera wearing a suit, trying to be something that I wasn't, which was therefore attracting the wrong type of people. I would just go right back there and say, dude, be yourself, unpack your identity. Because it all starts from identity. And everything else just naturally flows. There's pretty much no rocket science at that point. And that's the one thing I really wish I'd nailed years ago. But I've built websites for years and years and years and years for anyone. And it's only when I worked out who I was and who I wanted to attract that, you know, things really started to change.

Yeah, that's. That's such great advice. And I guess that's advice that a lot of people probably need to give themselves right now, let alone going back and giving their younger business self that advice. So.

And I still need to do it as well, mate, because so often I get excited by, you know, you said shiny object syndrome and new ideas and and suddenly I can see a gap in some random market and I'm so flipping tempted and I have to just hold myself back and say, no, stop it Lee.

Now I also think we need to listen to our intuition because that tells us quite a lot as well, doesn't it? Yeah, if you have a bad feeling about prospect, then it usually materializes into something or if they're not quite that perfect fit. So anyway, Lee, really appreciate your time today. There was a ton of sort of action packages packed, things that people need to do and so I know this is going to be a really well received episode and I look forward to having you back again on a future episode.

No worries, it was action packed because my name is Action Jackson.

I will speak to you soon.

See you mate. Cheerio. Bye bye.

So there you have it. I think you will agree that although this was a longer than normal episode, Lee had some really fantastic real world practical advice that we would all do well to start implementing into our businesses. Don't forget to check out the show notes where there'll be links to the books that Lee mentioned, as well as Agency Transformation Live, the event that Lee's company runs, and the agency accelerator program that I run too. Don't forget also to hit subscribe if you're not already subscribed so that you make sure you hear about the latest episode when we go live every Thursday. And finally, if you enjoyed this podcast, please consider leaving a review since it helps others find the podcast too. Till next Thursday. I hope you have a fantastic week and I will see you next week.