Is your agency an iPad or a reMarkable?

Hey everybody and welcome to today's episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast. Now, I'm interested to know if you think your agency is an iPad or a remarkable tablet. Now if that sounds intriguing, then make sure you carry on listening and learn more about what I mean by that. And I'm also going to give a bit of a bonus by talking about my experience of using a remarkable tablet. Now this episode isn't a review episode but but is an episode about niching your agency, which is a topic close to my heart and should be a topic close to your heart. So 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. So I recently purchased a remarkable tablet. Now I'll tell you a little bit more about what that is and my experience of it a bit later on, but when I was trying to decide what I should buy, I read lots of reviews comparing the remarkable tablet to the iPad. And this felt like it was comparing apples to oranges. And it also got me thinking about the comparison between the two and a niched agency. So that's what I want to talk about in this episode. Now, I sent an email out on this topic recently, so if you're on my email list, you will have got that email and it generated loads of responses. So I thought I would dig a bit deeper and record a podcast episode about the same topic. So you may well never have heard of a Remarkable and I hadn't until it was recommended to me. So let me just tell you a little bit about what it is and why I bought it. So we are really surrounded by tons of distractions and I try to have solid chunks of thinking time in my day to day work where I can really think about writing or think about that next strategy or think about the next product. And I find myself too often distracted when I'm sitting at my desktop and I've got emails pinging in and you know, notifications on the Internet and so on and so on. So I decided to buy a remarkable tablet. And this was on the recommendation of my coach, Ross. So shout out to him. And basically what a remarkable tablet does is it mimics a notepad. It's the closest electronic device that can mimic paper and give you the same sort of sense of feeling of as writing on a notepad when you're writing on this device. Now, I had three goals for purchasing this. First of all, and perhaps most importantly, I needed to get more organized. I don't know about you, but I tend to get on a call, grab a sheet of paper, write some notes, put it down, move on to something else. And then two days later I'm looking for those notes and I can't find them. So I wanted to get more organized. That's one key thing and a huge benefit for me already with that. The second thing I wanted to achieve was get rid of paper and become as paper free as possible from both an environmental perspective but also an organizational perspective. If only you could see the difference in my desk from pre having this tablet to post having this tablet where I do not have a sheet of paper at all on my desk or anywhere near my desk anymore because I'm now capturing everything in this device. And then the third thing I wanted to achieve, which is kind of the byproduct of that, is I just wanted to get more organized and more efficient in my work. So that's what led me to researching to buy a Remarkable. And as I said when I was reading various reviews on the Internet, so many of them, compare them to the iPad. Now the iPad is a brilliant device. In fact, I've got an iPad as well. You can browse the Internet, you can write your emails, you can read, and yes, you can take notes as well. But the truth of it is, is it does many things and it does them pretty well. Whereas the Remarkable is trying to do one thing and trying to be best in breed for doing it. And right now the Remarkable is achieving that. It's got a very sort of paper like feel. It's got no distractions, it doesn't pretend to be able to let you browse the Internet or even read books, even though it's got a PDF reader on there. All it's trying to do is help you take notes, enable you to translate those notes into text and have a great filing system for it. And that got me thinking about the comparison between the Remarkable and an iPad and the comparison between a generalist agency and a niched agency. And it's really interesting that actually the price of the Remarkable is pretty much the same as the price of an iPad. So you might be thinking, why on earth would you spend the same money to buy a device that does much less? In the same way that you might think why would you pay a premium to a niched agency? And of course the answer is that that niche agency just does it better than the generalist. And the niche agency understands exactly what you are trying to achieve and provides you with solutions to achieve that. The niche agency shows that they really understand their client, the market that their client's in, the pains that their client's suffering from, and provides really evident solutions backed by lots of experience. And again, the Remarkable and the iPad are really similar. Like the remarkable just does one and it does it really well. And because of that I was prepared to pay a premium, as are many other people. And it really made me think, like, are agencies remarkables or are they iPads? And I think especially for sort of SME agencies, it makes so much sense to be the specialist, to show up doing one thing and doing it really well. Now, that specialism might be the niche that you're working in, or it might be the breadth of service. So the more specialists you are, you're going to have less services and you're going to provide those services to a very specific marketplace. And the more niche you are, the easier it is for your ideal target customer to find you and pick you, the easier it is for you to find your ideal target customer and you should be charging a premium for that service. Now I know that sometimes people are running this belief and thinking, yeah, but Rob, that's all very well, but if I go niche and then I am going to preclude some areas that I'm currently marketing myself to. And I would always say to you, well, how many of those areas are you currently winning business in? And as you know, this is a conversation that I had with myself many years ago when I was trying to work out what my niche was going to be for my coaching practice and I had to have that tough conversation to say, well, actually Rob, you're worried that if you just niche to marketing agencies, you might lose all these other opportunities, but truth be told, you're not winning those opportunities. And of course, when it came down to it, when I was talking to a client and I said I only work with marketing agencies and I talked about my background of running my own agency, it became so much easier to win business and it became so much easier for the client to pick me. Now remember, when you're thinking about your niche, you can cut it four ways. And if you've grabbed a copy of my book the Self Running Agency, I dig into how to go about niching your agency in more detail. But remember that you can cut your niche one of four ways by the geography that you serve. That's the obviously like the United Kingdom or whatever, by the industry or the vertical sector. So that's working in tech or in my case, in marketing agencies, financial services, by your deliverable or Service, that's the thing that you give your clients. So for example, you might be a WordPress website developer and then by the problem you solve. So that might be, you know, we help you get on page one of Google because you're lacking awareness, or we help you generate leads, or we help create an amazing brand that will help engage with your target audience. And of course, you can cut your niche in any combination of those four ways. Now, I don't want to make this episode a big focus on how to niche because I've spoken about that many times before. And as I said, if you grab a copy of my book Self Running Agency, then I take you step by step guide on how to go about niching. But I just wanted to make that comparison between the Remarkable and the iPad. So look, we all know all about an iPad. Probably every single listener who's listening to today's podcast owns an iPad. And you probably use it for multiple tasks like watching videos and reading your emails and maybe reading a book when you're on a train or browsing the Internet, you might even use it to take notes. And it does all these things pretty well. But I just want to tell you a little bit about my experience of using the Remarkable, because I bet you're probably not as familiar with the Remarkable as you are with an iPad. Now, the Remarkable is a good success story because I think they are a Norwegian crowdfunded organization that's done really well and they're now on version two of their product. And what the Remarkable does is it gives you the ability to take electronic notes using E Ink. So this is a basically not quite an A4 pad, and I use it to take notes. Like when I'm preparing for this podcast, I've written my notes on there. It's a great device to just have at hand when I have something in my head that I want to write down, but I don't want to write it on that scrap of paper which invariably I'm going to use. Now when I take my client notes, instead of sending them to the printer, I just print them as a PDF and load them onto my Remarkable. So I have always got my client notes at hand and when I have a session now, I know exactly where to look. It also has some great capabilities. So you can scribble handwriting and then you can translate that into text and you can email it to yourself so that you can scribble down and brainstorm ideas and then turn them into text which you can add to a document. And my experience of that so far is it does it pretty well. And although I don't have the best handwriting in the world, it does seem to recognize my handwriting. So I think as long as you don't have that Dr. Scribble, you're going to be fine. You can also cut and paste text and move it between documents and you can move your documents into folders and create subfolders and so on and so on. So it's pretty easy to organize. It doesn't have the best search functionality, so sadly you can't search handwritten text, but you can search on file name. So so far so good for me. I've only been using the product for a couple of weeks, but it has really made a difference. Like I said, I do not have a scrap of paper on my desk and and I know where to go looking for things. It uses a stylus that has a nib on it that you have to change every now and again. And the stylus isn't rechargeable. It's just feels like a nice ballpoint pen. And I don't know how that works technically, but the surface of the Remarkable feels really like paper. It doesn't feel like you're writing on a glass screen. And in terms of form factor, it's super thin and it looks really nice. It looks like a really thin notepad. Now one of the reasons I got this is because I want to spend time away from my computer brainstorming. And how I work is I tend to set a 20 minute timer and work on something where all I'm doing is concentrating on that one thing. I'm not getting distracted by emails or my phone ringing. And then I set an alarm. And at the end of that 20 minutes I give myself a break. And using the Remarkable is just a fantastic way of doing that. You're just not tempted to check your emails or browse the Internet or anything like that because the functionality doesn't exist on the Remarkable. The great thing about the developers of this is that they realized that this device is aimed at people who want to focus on one thing and they're helping you do that really well. And again, that kind of brings me back to the fact that niched agencies who can do that one thing for their clients really well are the ones that always win. And I always say to people, be really careful, even if you are niched, but you're tempted to broaden your services out. You should only really do that when you've really done deep penetration of the one core product that you already have. You know, I ran my coaching business for about 10 years and the only product I had to offer my clients was one to one coaching or group coaching. And then I added in some leadership and management training because I kept being asked to to do that. And then most recently I've added in my online group coaching Mastermind program. But it's taken me nearly 15 years to have those three products and I see time and time again clients kind of being seduced by opportunities because maybe one client has asked them to do that and they think, oh yeah, okay, well that, that's the catalyst to broaden out our services. But unless you bring the skills and you put the systems and processes in place to provide those services, those new services in a scalable way, then you're not going to be growing your agency. So I always say to people, be like a Remarkable and keep really focused and do that one thing and do it really well and be the market leader in it before you start thinking about doing other things. So there you go. If you've never heard of Remarkable and you like handwriting and you want to be more organized, then I'd highly recommend looking at it. I'm not an affiliate or anything, but I will leave a link in today's show notes so that you can go and browse their website. I am going to be doing a more in depth review which I'll be posting on my YouTube channel in a couple of weeks time. So once I've had the Remarkable for a month and I can talk about how it's fitted into my life and give you the pros and cons of it, then I will be running that as a YouTube ad. But in the meantime I just wanted to record this episode because the email I sent on this topic was really popular and I posted something on LinkedIn. It got tons of engagement engagement and lots of people asked me about the product so I thought I would record a podcast episode as well. So I hope you found this useful really short episode today. Just wanted to make that comparison. I think it always helps telling stories to help bring particular points alive. And the remarkable versus iPad is a great story to help bring the niche versus generalist agency conversation alive. Hope you have a fantastic week. If you enjoyed the episode, please make sure you smash the subscribe button, share the episode and of course please consider leaving me a review on Apple Podcasts because as you know that helps me reach more people, which is a big goal for me in 2021. Other than that, I will see you next week for our next guest interview. I hope you have a fantastic Thursday and Friday and a brilliant weekend. And I will see you next time on the Agency Accelerator podcast. Sam.