Interview with Brent Weaver from uGurus

Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. Today I'm interviewing Brent Weaver from Ugurus and this is another action packed episode. He is very similar to me in that he's run his own agency, he has sold his agency, he's written books, and he now helps people like you to grow their agencies. And we chew the fat a bunch about a bunch of things from the pandemic and how that's impacting agencies to common challenges that they face, how they need to get the right infrastructure in place to grow, and some of the trends that we can look forward to in 2021. So without further ado, let's get on with today's episode.

Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host, agency owner and coach, Rob DaCosta.

Today's episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast is sponsored by Cloudways. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that simplifies the web hosting experience for agencies. The platform offers complete peace of mind and allows agencies to focus on their growth with 24. 7 support and easy to use features. Now Cloudways is launching its Agency Partnership program that's designed to help agencies grow to new Heights. So visit cloudways.com enagency and join the program to get access to extended technical support, discounts and co marketing opportunities with Cloudways. Okay, on with today's show. So welcome to the latest episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast. I am really excited to have Brent Weaver with me today and Brent is the CEO of YouGurus who help digital agencies get more leads, higher value clients and scale their agencies whilst having a life which is music to my ears because it's a kind of a message that I give to a lot of my clients all the time. Now Brent is also an author of the book Get Rich in the Deep End and host of the Digital Agency Show. So Brent, welcome. I'm sure you can do a better introduction than my coupled one, but do you want to just fill in fill any more details than I just shared with the audience?

Totally. And Rob, thanks for having me on. Really appreciate an opportunity to share my story with your audience. I started out in 99 with building websites in high school and I decided that I had to pay for some servers to support a gaming website that I was running at the time and it was the most atrocious looking website you could ever imagine if we looked at it in today's standards. But I had to pay for these servers and my minimum wage job wasn't cutting it. So somebody introduced Me to a client. I got paid 500 bucks to build a one page website. Took me about two days and I was like, wow, this is interesting. I can make money doing this. And, you know, we're hanging out here 22 years later and it's been a. It's been a crazy journey. I had an agency for 13 years, successfully exited that, and have been running ugurus since 2012. So we've had the great fortune of helping thousands of digital agencies around marketing and sales and scaling. And it's been a really cool journey.

Yeah, so we were just chatting before we came on air and I think yours and my journeys are so similar, albeit I'm a bit grayer and a little bit older than you.

But I don't know, man, we could compete on the gray. We could. I think we could go toe to toe. May, you've got a little bit of an edge, but I'm going to catch up.

Dude, you definitely got more hair than me. Yeah, so, I mean, you know, I started, grew, sold my agency, retrained to become a coach and I've been doing something similar. Now, Brent particularly focuses on digital agencies. Mine is a bit more bricks and mortar as well as digital agencies. But I'm really interested to get a sense from you about, you know, the last couple of crazy years that we've been through. And you know, I know I've seen some agencies really thrive and some agencies really struggle. And I just love to get a sense from you of like, what have you seen and what are the common themes that you've seen of those agencies that have actually done really well in the last couple of years.

If I could, I mean, a couple of words that come to mind, Rob. Adaptability is one that's been huge. Another is specialization and another is authority. So being able to make quick changes in your business and being willing to pivot and break some things that I think a lot of people hold on to. Business models that maybe in good times aren't really working that well for them, but they just kind of always done it a certain way. I think that the pandemic kind of shook the table quite a bit and, you know, and you had to kind of be willing to be flexible and then specialization. I think that the people that are a part of our community and out in the marketplace that have been, you know, highly niched and not just in who they focus on, but also in terms of building their offering around getting that group of people a very specific result I think have done better because of what's happened the last year. And initially there was a lot of, oh my gosh, you know, if you're in restaurant or if you're in a touch based business or gyms or this or that. Right. You're screwed. And the reality was, is, yeah, there was probably a couple of crazy months, but the clients that I have that are focused on hotels or travel or, or restaurants, in a weird way, they've had, they've had to be very adult, adaptable to the market. They've had to get out there and talk to their customers and pivot and all that kind of stuff. And it was messy and it was bad. I was in the trenches with some of those clients, but they've actually come out with healthier, more profitable, and in some cases even larger revenues and teams than they had going in. Because those markets had a lot at stake to pivot, and they relied on digital agencies and agencies of all types to help them make that journey. And Rob, the last thing I'll say is that authority piece, which is the people that had lists and audiences and some kind of influence over their market because of the things that were changing. So many people were looking for leadership ideas and strategies. And those people that had those audiences were able to capture and grow their market share of whether it was growing their client base at first, like, that wasn't happening, but they grew their lists. Uh, some of my clients that had like that were in travel, for instance, got more leads. Like people that signed up for their email list because they were running webinars and trainings about how to pivot with the pandemic. And their email list like, grew by like 500% in like three months. Like, they got more emails in three months than they had in two and a half years of authority building because so many people were looking for leadership. And so I think that was a really unexpected gift that people couldn't have ever predicted. Right. When this first broke, they probably thought, I'm, you know, this is gonna be horrible for my business. And then now hindsight, it's like, well, actually that was a crazy opportunity if you, if you knew how to take advantage of it.

Yeah, it's, it. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things there to unpick. First of all, I think it's a good lesson in listening to our audience and perhaps that's something that we don't do enough. And of course, this pandemic has taught us that we have to listen to our audience because we have to serve them and we have to sell them things that they need not things that we want to sell them. And I think that perhaps differentiated, you know, some people from another. And of course something that you just said that I'm always going on about to all of my, my listeners and my group as well, which is build your mailing list, focus on building that audience, focus on providing value to that audience, focus on nurturing them so that when they're in enough pain and they're ready to buy from you, they reach out to you. And you know, that is that sort of foundational thing that has been around forever and is still, you know, one of the best marketing strategies that you can possibly, you know, possibly adopt. What do you say to your clients? So, so I'm, I'm a big fan of niching as well. And I always have this kind of contradiction almost with some clients who recognize that they should be niching, but they're very nervous about it because they believe they might lose opportunities. That when they're trying to be this generalist that they're actually not winning in any case. So what do you say to people who have that sort of fear about going really niche?

Yeah. Well, I think if you've ever been, I have a lot to say here. I probably could go, we could, you know, we could have an extended long, five hour interview on this. But I think at the, at the core, I like to give an example and this is probably something that if you are an agency that's a generalist and you haven't come up against this kind of competition before, you will undoubtedly at some point in time, right? Or maybe you've lost deals to this type of a situation and you just don't know it. You know, the client chose a different direction and it's always interesting to ask your clients why they chose a different direction. But let's imagine a scenario, right? Let's imagine you've got a client and let's just say I'm going to choose a generic kind of business. They're a restaurant, right? Obviously a hard hit niche with everything that's going on right now. And you're a generalist and you're competing for the business and your value proposition is, you know, we help businesses with public relations, right. Or whatever your value prop is we help businesses with websites, right? It's just very generic. Like you're very broad and you're going and competing against this business, right. The person that's also competing against the business is specialized and their value proposition is, you know, we help independently owned restaurants doing over a million dollars a year, get 500%, the PR hits in three months so that we can guarantee your restaurant's going to get a lift of at least 2x in curbside orders and takeout business and delivery business in the next 90 days or whatever. And I'm kind of doing this live, right? But the point is, that's the value prop you're competing against. So put yourself in the shoes of the client, right? On one hand, they've got this agency that they dress well, they present well, they have all the trappings of like a quote unquote good agency. But they're having to constantly put their work, their case studies, through the lens of, well, how would this apply to my business? Right? The client's going, okay, I see that you did this really cool pharmaceutical thing, like, oh, that's interesting, right? Wow, that's great. You got them in Forbes, right? And they're having to translate the work that you're doing and make it relevant for them. And maybe you have one or two clients that even hit that niche and that you could show them. On the other hand, you have a business who's worked with 350 restaurants. They actually have intellectual property, you know, patented or trademarked frameworks about how they approach this market. They have a network already of hundreds or thousands of PR contacts in the, in the market, right? I mean, the list could go on, right? If you're at the table, like, you're gonna get smoked, right? You're gonna get totally obliterated by that company, right? I mean, maybe if you have some kind of personal relationship, like, maybe they'll choose your agency for now. But the reality is once their competitors start going with that specialized agency, once that their competitors start, you know, using that trademark system to crush them, right? They're gonna go, man, maybe we made a bad mistake, right? They're not gonna stay clients for life. And if they do, in a weird way, it can sometimes be the worst thing for an agency because they're constantly have to reinvent the wheel for their business, right? They're. If they're a generalist PR agency, they're constantly having to ask the question of, well, heck, how do we keep up with all this stuff going on in restaurants? And it's only going to benefit that one client, right? Or maybe there are two clients, right? Like the amount of effort that they have to put in to stay cutting edge in that niche, and it's going to be almost like their worst enemy, right? They're going to have to put so much R and D time and it's going to crush them. Right. So I play out that scenario and whether it's happening to you as an agency right now, do you. Are you going to, quote, unquote, lose opportunity? I think that agencies that are generals are losing opportunity hand over fist right now. And so this idea that you're going to niche and have to, quote, unquote, give up, like what we see in practice and in reality is that opportunity multiplies with specialization.

Yeah. And of course, it's a bit of a race to the bottom for the generalist, because the only way they can differentiate themselves is by being cheaper or promising to over service and provide ridiculous levels of service. And that leads to stress and unprofitability in the agencies. So I always think that if you are a generalist competing with a niche agency, then the only way you're going to win that business is by being cheaper or by promising ridiculous levels of service. And that is not sustain. And, you know, you. You get the client to focus on the wrong thing, which is the money, rather than the thing that you're going to deliver for them. So, you know, anybody listening to this who's kind of in that quandary of trying to decide how niche they should be and, you know, whether they should be niche or not, you know, you just ask yourself, how many of these clients are you actually winning at the moment? And the answer is probably not very many. So I always think you, you know, the best advice I give people is go as niche as you dare and broaden out over time if you need to, but don't try to be all things to all people because you, you will never win against the niche player. I think you and I are on the same page about a lot of this stuff, and we're probably, you know, constantly pushing this message to our marketplace and, you know, hoping that they listen and, you know, having lots of examples of agencies that have gone really niche and have been really successful. Talk to me a little bit about some of the roadblocks for growth. So if I'm an agency that's, you know, turning over about half a million and I want to go to that next stage, what are some of the common roadblocks that you see getting in their way to growing and what some of those infrastructure things that they perhaps need to get in place in order to grow?

Yeah, this is a great question, and actually something I didn't mention on one of the projects I'm working on right now is with the team over at Cloudways as one of their mavericks and this is something that I talk about at length with people and it's actually why I chose to kind of go that path and create a partnership there is because I see that one of the challenges with growth is on really getting clear around what your core business is. Like. A lot of people think growth happens like scale happens when we make things more complicated and we get more services in our tool belt. Like, oh man, if I was, if we were doing a million dollars, if we were doing $2 million, we could have like an ad department or we could have a graphics department, we could have a copy department and we could have a, you know, a server team and a web team, right? Like there's this image that, you know, scale happens with more complexity and more moving parts. And, and I've been in the entrepreneur game now, Rob, for, for over 20 years. And what I've now understood, having been able to scale, you know, multiple seven figure plus businesses, is that it is, it's kind of like niching, right? It's like the exact opposite is really the truth in that, you know, simple scales, complexity doesn't. And at some layer you have to have a lowest common denominator, something that is like your core or your truth within your business. And then we're going to scale that truth, right? And that, you know, yes, we can have, you know, we can, we can create complicated solutions to scale that truth, but the truth itself, like can't be complicated. So one of the challenges that we had, especially that kind of like mid six figure zone, was that we were, you know, we started having a lot of clients and we were focused primarily as a web agency. And a big part of web is hosting. And it's like this, you know, it's like this great like recurring gravity dream. Like I'm gonna offer my clients Hosting, right, for 25 bucks a month or whatever. And after I get a thousand clients, I'll have 25,000amonth in recurring revenue, right? And first of all, it takes a long time to actually build up a thousand clients, right? So if that's your business model at 25 bucks a pop, we probably should have a conversation. But that was what we had initially had dreamed was like, oh, we're going to get all these websites that we're going to host for 25 bucks. And one of the challenges was, is that as our customer base grew, our, the complexity around our hosting solutions grew dramatically. But we weren't a hosting company, but we wanted to make money on it and we were in a position to make money on it. And so we had like, a guy in our office and his name was Eric and he was a developer, and he was also like our hosting dude. And so as we started to scale, like, more and more risk got kind of bottled up into the seat of Eric. Until one moment, you know, it was little things at first that would just be these unexpected fires, right? Some kind of software update would get pushed out to a content management system we were hosting. Maybe one of our servers was under a lot of load and we needed to increase resources. And back in the day, we had a server, like in some co loc location, like in a basement. And we're like, oh, we need to grow the ram, right? So somebody had to shut the server down, like, walk down there with, like a chunk of RAM in their hand, like, open up a cage, like open up the server and they like, stick the RAM in, right? And this has all been. This is different now, right? But the. But what was happening for us was there was a part of our business that we were making money on that we were responsible for. And what are. What we should have done and what we ultimately did that we started helping us to scale was abstract that out of our core business, abstract the actual function of that. It was okay to make money on it, but instead of having, like a server in a basement with a dude on our team that managed that stuff, we started to abstract that. And the really, the turning point for us was one of our servers crashed. And it was. It was awful. We had 50, 50 clients, their websites and email. We had their website and an Exchange server. I don't know how your audience knows about technology, but at the time we had 50 websites and an Exchange server all running on one server, which is just, like, ridiculous. It fails. And it was like the worst 48 hours of my life. We got another server up and running. I'd say we got about 80% of people's stuff back. Some of it was just like, never going to come back. And we had to rebuild it. And the news server was up for about 24 hours and it had a RAM failure. It went down, and we literally had to start the entire dog and pony show over. I remember literally being at home, I had just literally, like, hit the pillow and it was like, oh, my gosh, that was the worst two days of my life. And then, like, my phone, you know, started blowing up again, and we were like, right back to it. And the problem, I mean, we probably lost somewhere in the ballpark of $50,000 of lost opportunity over that week, right? Because that the carry on effects, the client disruptions, the cancellations, the team members that were pulled off of projects, the delays, I mean just the whole nine yards, right? And we were like, wow, like we're making money on something and it's something that we're actually serving. Like we're doing the service internally but it's not what I'd say core to our business. Now our business depends on it, but it truly isn't core. Like we didn't wake up in the morning thinking to ourselves like we want to be the best hosting company in the world. We wanted to be the best web agency in the world. Right? We want to be the best digital marketing agency in the world. We wanted to get our clients amazing results in terms of, you know, business growth and lead opt ins and E commerce and you know, conversions and transactions. But we weren't like waking up thinking about like hosting stuff, right? But we were responsible for it, which is really, really bad. And I see agencies do this all the time where they, you know, their core business is web and then they like start dabbling in a little bit of content and then they hire like a content person and they're like web and then they, a little bit of content web, a little bit of social. And then as they start scaling like they start to have these challenges where they're, you know, there's their core business and then there's these little like extra little like amoebas that have like they're like along for the ride. And my advice to agencies is get rid of that stuff. Like get really clear on what your core business model is and work on staying focused on that and growing that and getting obsessive about the results that you provide and then abstract everything else. And it doesn't mean you can't make money on it, but just make sure that it's not somebody's, you know, it's not like one of your, it's not a salary that you pay for, if that makes sense.

Yeah, it's such good advice. I think it's so easy to be seduced by shiny new objects and you know, get rich quick things and things that look like I can make money really easily like you say with hosting. But you know, as soon as you start focusing on a service that isn't part of what you, your core of your DNA, then you are in trouble because it's so much harder to. It's like taking on a client that's not in your core niche. They might look like a great client, they might be worth a Lot of money to you, but they're really hard to service and you have to work so much harder to keep them happy and they don't really understand you. And I think the same is true with, you know, with taking on services as well outside of your core, of your core specialty. What other challenges do you see agencies facing as they grow?

Well, I mean that, that what you just said, I think is key and a question I ask my clients to ask themselves because there's always this like, clients come to you with problems. And I think there's a mentality of, you know, well, can we do it? And a lot of times, because founders are, have been kind of through the trenches with maybe a handful of different services or maybe they have a technical background or a design background or a background doing the in the trenches PR or whatever, they have this idea of can we do it? And if the answer to that is yes, they just say yes. There's kind of this yes mentality. We had a speaker come to our community recently and he said we kept adding services to our agency to the point where we were literally in a meeting and a client mentioned that they were moving and they needed help, like moving their fridge and they said yes to it. Right. It got to that point where they were like, literally like, if you want us to move your fridge, we'll do that too. Right? We're going to bill you for it, but we're going to do that too. So this idea of can we do it? Is just like the only question that people ask is can we do it? Yes. Okay, cool, let's do it. And I think there's a follow up question is, you know, should we do it? Should we actually offer this service and what are the follow on effects of that thing? And here's a good filter as you start to scale your business is start thinking about your business as a system outside of your delivery and fulfillment team. And thinking about your business as a system versus a service or a product is a really important lens. So like one of my clients who I serve a handful of private clients and they're really talented dudes, they're really good. And what happens is they get in these meetings where their clients are bringing this really crazy stuff to the table and they say yes and then they go and they solve this really complicated problem. But the problem is there's no repeatability because they don't have a marketing system that actually attracts more people like that to their business. They don't have a sales system that actually is able to replicate that Sale. So that this one project that they did that they had to put an incredible amount of work into from an R and D perspective and a consulting perspective, and they had to come up with this really great idea, right? The problem is they only made money on it once. And even in their, like finance and admin systems, they're having to go and create like a whole new business model of how they're going to invoice their client for this, like one thing, right? And so they say yes to it because at a service level they can do it. But at a system level, they really have no intent of growing and scaling their business around this additional service that they're offering. And so I have to go to them and say, guys, then what's the point, right? If we're not going to take this idea and turn it into another seven figure product for you or another seven figure business units, like, what are we doing here, right? Because like, you know, if we just, if we just want to make an extra ten grand or an extra thirty grand or extra fifty grand, like if that's the game we're playing, then this is going to get really tiring really fast. I'd prefer to play the game of, hey, this one client, we're a web agency, this one client's asking for content, you know, to step back and say, okay, is content something that we want to build a business unit around? Do we want, like, do we see a seven figure opportunity in content? Because if we say yes to this client, then the only logical next step would be for us to go build a marketing system and a sales system and a fulfillment team around content. And if that's what we're going to do, then let's say yes to this and let's make this the first, you know, the first pillar in going and doing that thing. But realize that adding that service unit is going to be like, yeah, this client's going to pay us 10 grand, but we're going to go have to spend 30 or 40 or 50 to build to build a system around attracting, winning and delivering around this service, right? So put yourself through that lens. You know, if somebody's asking for a random service that's not part of your core business, you know, and you're not willing to build a system around it, my best advice to you is find a partner agency, find somebody else you can refer. They're not going to steal your clients, they're not going to steal your business. You know, they're going to, you guys are going to work together and collaborate Whether that's through a partnership or whether that's through a direct referral. When we started to get in that practice of referring people out and just sticking to our core, like, and it was hard at first, it felt scary, but then it was like, oh, wow, we're like referring business to this company. And then like, they'd refer business back to us. And then like, our client would be like, hey, thanks for referring us to like the best content agency in the world. Like, they did. Amazing. We think that you guys are so great. And oh, by the way, here's another web client, right? Like, it always worked out better when we took that approach to it. Now in some cases our clients were asking us for, we kept hearing the same thing over and over again. And it was like, okay, maybe we do need to look at this other area, whether it was SEO or social, right? Maybe it's time that we've heard this in like 30 pitches, that if we added this service and we started positioning ourselves with this thing on the front end of our marketing system, like, maybe there is an opportunity here to build an extra revenue stream for our business. Right? But it was, it was more of that systems thinking versus service thinking.

Yeah. Such good advice. I think I always talk to my clients about, you have your P1 product, your core product, and you have to think really carefully before you start having a secondary product. And like you say, you have to have the systems, which are the delivery systems, the back end system, the sales and marketing system to support all of that stuff. And if you don't have it in place, it's just random pieces of work coming your way and that isn't going to be scalable. And it's really interesting because I think, I'm sure you see this as well, Brent, that you have these amazing entrepreneurial people who start their agency and in the end they have to get out of their own way in order for their agency to grow. Because they are the reason why their agency grew that far. But they also become the reason why their agency can't grow any further. Because everything's sitting on their shoulders, all the knowledge is in their head. They're not particularly good at delegating. They perhaps aren't building the team beneath them that they need to build in order to scale. And yet they're really frustrated that they're not growing.

The quote, Rob, that comes to mind is what got us here won't get us there. And that's, that's a really common occurrence of, you know, the types of things that you did Right. The hustle, the work till midnight or 2am you know, the working on Saturdays, right. I mean, there's only so much of that that is going to, that is going to help, right? I mean, when we were doing a couple of million dollars a year, it was like, it was like, okay, like if I work, you know, if I'm normally working 40 hours a week and I up it to 50 hours a week, right? Like I put an extra 50 hours in. Like we have a team of 14 people. My extra 10 hours a week is like, it's like this little minuscule thing, right? If I burn myself out, obviously the costs are huge to our business. And so you have to start thinking more of in leveraged terms. You know, one of the things I'll talk about with my clients is really look for 2x levers inside of your business, right? And this doesn't mean that you can pull a lever and you double your business. But if you pull enough 2x levers in your business, like if you're looking at your, you know, your advertising spend, right, don't increase it by 10%. Like, let's double the ad spend and see what kind of impact that has, right? If you have one salesperson, let's go to two salespeople, right? If you have, you know, one developer, let's go to two developers, right? Let's, let's, let's find these two X levers and if we pull enough of them, it's going to have an impact. And when you start to grow, when you start to hit that 500k a year, 700amillion to a million and a half, 2 million, right. You have to start thinking in more leverage terms. You can't just. The solution can't be, I'll do it, you know, like, oh, this client's asking for something that is really unique. None of our team can do it, but I can do it. The owner, right? So I'll go in there and I'll do, you know, I'll do 300 billable hours over the next year. And you know, this is going to grow our agency because it's not right. I mean, that's going to get you another, whatever, 30 grand, but it's not going to be, it's a drop in the bucket when you look at like a million dollar agency, right? That's not going to get you from 1 to 2 million.

How do you get agency owners like this to let go? Because there's this, I always think there's this contradiction between them wanting to grow them Wanting flexibility and freedom, yet they still want to control everything. They still want to know about everything. They still want to have their finger in all these pies. So what do you do to help these owners let go a bit more?

I think one of the easiest tricks is to find team members, partners, consultants that are smarter than you, better than you at what you do. One of the first team members that I hired ever at an as a. At our agency was a designer. And I could do some design. I was okay, but it was like emotionally frustrating for me because I just wasn't like a born and bred designer. I didn't grow up wanting to do this. I just did it because it was part of how we made money. But I had a designer, this guy Stephen that worked for us and he was my very first employee that I ever hired, first W2. And I was training him on kind of how we did certain design assets for a handful of clients. And you know, it took me about three weeks to kind of show him all my tricks, you know, of different things that we would do to kind of create stuff or, you know, how we set up templates and files and all that kind of stuff. And it basically, at three weeks I was still kind of dabbling a little bit, like I was still getting in there. And he came in my office one day and in dead seriousness, he said, brent, I'd really appreciate it if you, you know, stopped using Photoshop. And I was like, he's like, he's like, you're actually causing me more problems than I think it's saving me and it's worth. And I think we're going to have a better end product if you just actually get out of doing this design stuff because you're actually causing a lot of frustration for me. And I was like, wow, cool. I was like, okay, right? It was after I got over, like the ego hit, it was like, okay, I see how we're going, right? But it was an important lesson for me. And, and you know, we hired a developer and it took a year or so to get kind of out of that. But what, what I ended up realizing was there are, while, while I kind of might be this jack of all trades and I might be kind of okay at a lot of things. When you bring a players into your business, when you bring specialists into your business, when you bring people that are truly talented, what you, you should feel obsolete really fast. And there's a certain type of agency owner that is really scared to hire a players that they're actually scared to hire. People that are smarter than them, right? They. And they'll say, oh, it costs too much or whatever is the excuse. But I think it's deeper than that, Rob. I think it's because they don't want to feel obsolete that they enjoy being the smartest person in the room. And so I think the easiest way to let go is when other people kind of force it upon you, you know, where they literally kind of make you. They. They make it so clear that you're not the best for your client. And when you start to work with people that are truly talented, it becomes a lot easier to delegate because you're like, you know, you're able to. You're not. You're not handing down, right? You're not like, passing down work, which I think a lot of people have this idea of, like, they're going to delegate down to somebody who's cheaper or whatever. When you start to really hand up work and you start to, you know, and this is one of the other questions I hear from people all the time is like, how do I empower my team to work directly with my clients? And I'm like, well, when you're. When your team is. When you're not just telling your client that they're smarter, right? You're like, oh, because. And I've seen people do that. Like, they'll be like, oh, please meet your project coordinator. They're going to handle all of your stuff, right? And your client here is coordinator. And they're like, could I talk to the manager, please? Right? So, you know, when you actually hand your client to the team member, and within five or ten minutes of them being on the phone with a client, you see the client go, oh, like this, you know, and you. You'll see it happen. And then you realize, wow, like, your team actually is better at this stuff than you. And then I think what happens is, is you just start to let go by default.

It's.

It's really hard to hold onto stuff when you know that it's going to be. It's gonna be bad, right? Like, when I get in there and design in Photoshop, like, I'm not helping anybody.

Good advice. I mean, you know, everyone should be hiring at the absolute top of what they can afford, and they should be hiring the best people, and they shouldn't necessarily be hiring people in their own, like, and, you know, people that won't challenge them. They need. They need all of those things in an agency. Let's. I'm conscious of time, Brent, but I'm just Interested to hear any thoughts from you about trends in 2021, what you think we will see happening kind of as we come out of the pandemic and what the agency world will look like in the future.

I think that, I think that what we've experienced in the last year has been really hard. And I think that while, you know, a lot of people are expecting things to, quote, unquote, get back to normal, I think there's a handful of things that we all knew were maybe better for people in certain ways that are going to be here to stay. I mean, I think that there's been a big shift to kind of like abstracting in your business certain things out of your, out of your business that are not core. I think there's a lot of people that are engaging in, you know, services, whether it's Uber eats, whether it's grocery delivery, whether it's, you know, not having to work in an office and being able to work wherever they want. In terms of remote relying a lot more on E commerce than main streets, I mean, these are unfortunate trends for certain types of businesses. I mean, this is not necessarily good. And I'm sure there'll be a little bit of a return to, oh gosh, we can go back to the coffee shops and things like that. But I also think that there are certain things that are here to stay and I think that the digital ecosystem is here to stay at a big level. I think a lot of laggard companies were forced to get online over the last year and I don't think we're ever going to be in a meeting where somebody doesn't is a non believer in the web and digital and remote work and jumping on a zoom. I mean, I remember I had clients who like refused to get on a go to meeting because they were, you know, they were convinced that there was no way that I needed to drive three hours to see them. Right. That there was some value in that. And it was frustrating because you're like, well, I want to win this business, but like, do I really need to go drive three hours for every meeting that I have with this company? And so I think there was a, there was a bunch of people that were resisting that kind of stuff for no good reason other than they don't like change and they were forced to. And I think that that kind of stuff coming out of this world at a certain level, I think 80 or 90% of it is going to be here to stay. I don't think people are going to go back to, you Know, they're not going to go back to offices in droves. They're not going to go back to shopping on Main street in droves because pulling out your phone and clicking a couple of buttons is just straight up easier. Right. It's easier to find companies on social media on these types of things, you know, from the comfort of your own home. And, and so I think that that's going to be a lot of, you know, the focus is taking these things that we helped companies build in the pandemic, delivery, you know, curbside, etc. And you know, direct meal ordering, you know, in the food space. Every industry has its own version of that. You know, gyms have online trainers, more, you know, personal video coaching in between sessions. Right. I mean all that kind of stuff I think is going to be, is going to still be leveraged in kind of the post Covid world. And I think that's a great thing for people that are digital agencies. Right. I mean, I think that business has probably been good the last year and I think it's only going to get even better.

Yeah, I think that, you know, I think out of the awful situation there's some really good habits that we've been forced to adopt. And I personally really hope that I don't ping back to my old way. Like I'm. I used to spend my life driving, taking the train to London, driving all over the country to visit clients and I'm so determined that actually, as you say, we can be so much more efficient. Yeah, there's a time and a place for sitting with a client, but it's probably once a quarter or once every six months is not every month. So I'm so determined personally and I know a lot of my clients feel that way as well. So we just have to make sure we hang on to the good lessons we've learned. Now one question I ask all of my guests on the podcast, Brent, is if you could go back in time and give your younger, less gray haired self a piece of advice when you were just starting out in business, what would that be?

Besides buying bitcoin? No, I'm just kidding.

Buy Tesla shares.

Cheap answer, right, Rob? I think it would probably be this quote I read in a book called Essentialism. I still am not doing a great job at living this value. But the idea of less but better, that there's so much opportunity in getting really good at fewer things and then it's okay to say no to things. And if anything, it's not just okay, but it's the path to success is turning down opportunities and taking the opportunities you do have that you do commit to and going all in on that idea sooner. I think that was one of the biggest limiters to us scaling that. I just didn't have that discipline to say no. And when I finally said no to, like, a really big shiny object and I started saying no more often, like, we saw the business grow, and. And that's something that I think if I would have learned that lesson sooner, I think it could have accelerated some things a little faster.

Yeah. Such great advice that's so pertinent today. Right. As well as many years ago. It's really interesting when I ask this question because I always expect to hear the same answers, and I almost never get the same answer from people. So, like, I've never. We've never had that response before, so it's really great. And, you know, I'm gonna do an episode where I gather all of these answers together into one episode, because I think there's a ton of stuff we can all learn from all of those. So, listen, I really appreciate your time on the podcast today. If people want to find out more about you and you guys, what's. What's the best way for them to contact you?

Yeah. So, I mean, obviously you can check out our stuff@ugurus.com if you guys are an agency and you're looking for some help, we've got a ton of free resources. The work that I do with Cloudways, if you guys are looking for any kind of cloud solution, on that hosting side, we've got a really awesome agency partner program, and that's just cloudways.com agency. So if you are interested in that kind of stuff, if you need that infrastructure in your business, there's a ton of resources about how we help agency owners. I spend a good chunk of my time right now helping out Cloudways and coaching some of their agency owners. So that's cloudways.com agency.

Fantastic. I'll put both of those links into the show notes so people can access that really easily. And I just want to say a big thank you for giving up your time today and sharing your wisdom with our listeners.

Awesome. Thanks, Rob.

So I hope you found today's episode really useful. There is so much that we can learn from the words of wisdom that Brent shared with us, and I hope you can go away and apply some of what he's talked about. And also it gets you thinking a little bit differently about your agency. So as ever, please make sure you've hit subscribe if you found today's episode useful and provided some value, then please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. But other than that, have a brilliant weekend and I will see you next week for the next episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. Sa.