Lessons Learned In My Business In 2022

How has your year been in 2022? I hope it's been a good one despite all the craziness going on in the world now in today's podcast I'm going to share with you the good, the bad and the ugly of my own personal year and I'm going to talk about the things that worked well for me and activities that didn't work so well. I'll share some of the changes that I made in my business and also some of the wider trends I'm seeing in the agency world now. I hope you find this not only interesting but also insightful when it comes to planning your year. So so let's begin and get going and talk about 2022. I'm Rob Da Costa and this is the Agency Accelerator Podcast. As someone who has stood in your shoes, having started, grown and sold my own agency, I know just how it feels in the ups and downs of agency life. So this podcast aims to ease your journey just a little by sharing mine and my guests experiences and advice as you navigate your way to growing a profitable, sustainable and enjoyable business. This is a bit of a self indulgent episode because I want to share with you the highs and lows of my year in 2022, including what worked for me and what didn't work so well, in the hope that my experience will inspire you in terms of your planning as we move forward into 2023. So I'm going to break this down into four or five areas. So first of all I want to give you a high level overview of my year. Then I want to talk to you about how I evolve my offering and how that might inspire you. Then I want to talk about my marketing and what worked and what didn't work. And then I want to wrap this up by sharing with you some trends that I'm seeing in the agency sector in the past year, both with clients that I've worked with and more broadly in the agency market as a whole. So let's jump in by starting off with a high level overview of my year. So first of all, my revenues have been pretty consistent over the past three to five years, which I'm pleased about, especially since I now work a four day week. So basically I've managed to condense what I used to do in five days, Monday to Friday, into working four days, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. And then on a Friday I focus on a personal project. Now this has only worked because I know exactly what I'm going to do with that fifth day. I've tried this before. And I've recorded an episode on this before which I'll put into the show notes. But I've tried working a four day week before where I'm thinking, okay, on a Friday I'll do my chores, I'll go to the gym and all that kind of stuff. And of course invariably work encroaches on it and clients say, can we book a call on Friday? And of course because you don't really have anything planned, you say yes. So then suddenly your fifth day that you plan to keep free has been eaten up with client work. So the way my four day week works is that Monday to Thursday I focus on the cost of coaching and serving my clients and my marketing and building new content. And then on a Friday I focus on a personal project which is my YouTube channel, which isn't connected to coaching at all. It's much more to do with my travels and my experiences. And I spend a day editing videos and uploading them to YouTub and creating all the social posts ready to go live on a Sunday. And as I said, the only way I've made this work is by making sure that I know exactly what I'm going to do with that fifth day. And it's interesting really, because that's a bit about the same advice that I would give to someone who was selling their agency. I would always say to them, know what you're going to do next. So in a way, working a four day week has the same kind of approach and mentality that you need to know what you're going to do on the day that you're not working. So that's sort of an overview of my year. My revenues have been consistent to been a pretty good year for me. I've really enjoyed working with the clients I've worked with. The way I'm spending my time has changed, which I'll tell you about in a moment. But I am managing to still earn the same revenue by working a four day week. Now, I'm not saying that at all because I want to brag. I'm just saying to you that it is entirely possible. And of course in part what makes that happen is by being super organized and super efficient with the four days that you are working. And when I talk about my marketing in a moment, I'll tell you a bit more about how I'm becoming really efficient with that. So next, let's move on to talk about my offering. Now, I think when times get tough, a lot of people think the right thing to do is to diversify and mitigate their risk and have lots of offerings so that they can capture more of the market. Well, usually the opposite is true because as you know, I'm a big fan of niching and the more niched you are, the easier it becomes to attract clients. And in the same way, the more specialist you are with your services, the easier it becomes for you to be known as the expertise for that Service. So in 2022 I really consolidated down my offering and I went from having four, five products. In fact, at one time I had seven online courses as well as my private coaching. Now I have my one to one private coaching. I have my main online program which is the self running agency implementation group. And I also have one standalone course called Build, Nurture, Convert which is an email marketing course. And in the future I may well consolidate that even further down to just my private coaching self running agency. Now talking of the self running agency, my group coaching program, I switched the revenue model from people paying a one off fee or three payments of that fee to a monthly reoccurring lower payment membership. And I think that makes the point of entry much easier for people. And I'm finding fortunately that the retention rate is really high because I'm making sure I'm delivering great value all the time. So this year we hit 50 members in the self running agency implementation group. And the goal next year is to grow that too. 100 members. And the thing that I really love about the group, besides people getting to interact with other people, realizing that they're not on their own, that there's other people who are to support them, is the fact that I can impact more agency owners than I ever possibly could if I was only doing one to one coaching. So a big remit, a big why for me a big driver is to make an impact on the world. And my group coaching program is a way to impact more people. So I'm really excited about growing that in the next year. And on the private client side, it remained pretty consistent with about sort of 10 to 14 private clients at any one time. And I plan to keep it at this level moving into 2023 as well. It just gives me a really good balance of paid client work focusing on content for my programs, plus obviously doing my sales and marketing activities and having a decent work life balance as well. So remember how we split our pots of time between serving our clients and the admin to run our agency and then the strategy which is the future of your agency. So this is business development and marketing and networking and so on and we always want to make sure we've got the balance of those three pots right. And I feel like in 2022, I have that balance pretty well. Okay, so let's move on to that marketing part, the strategy piece, the business development I said earlier about getting super efficient. And one thing that I have really focused on this year is batching as much content as I possibly can. So, for example, a PODC like this. Well, I'm actually recording three podcasts in one afternoon. And I've spent some time sort of scripting them out and working out the structures in advance, but actually having my head in the game of spending an afternoon recording three podcasts. And similarly, with my emails, I'll try to write three to four emails in one go because my head is in that writing. Email zone really makes things more efficient. And I know it can be really difficult to allocate that sort of time, but I really want to encourage you to take an approach to batching your content, because it just means you can get so much more efficient with your time. Now, in 2022, I really doubled down on my email marketing with a focus on providing really good quality content, but also building my email list as well. And hopefully you're on my list. And if not, why not? And I do what I tell everyone else to do here. I'm a big believer in practicing what I teach, so I'm really focused on providing value. 80% of the time my emails are about value. 20% of the time they're selling. I'm always focused on getting that balance right and really doubling down on the quality of my emails and that they are serving you and tackling some of the issues that I know you have, rather than me just wanting to write about things that I want to write about. So really double down on email marketing. I send one email every Tuesday. Then once a month, I send a sort of a consolidation of the four or five podcasts for that month. And occasionally, if we're doing an enrollment for the program, I'll send more emails than that. But I think weekly is good. It's a bit like getting your favorite Netflix show every week. Well, I kind of want me to be your favorite email that you look forward to receiving every week as well. Now, I think 2022 was a year of simplification and consolidation, both with my offerings in terms of my services, but also with my marketing, because fundamentally, I only really do two things. I write an email every Tuesday, and I release a podcast every Thursday. Now, in terms of promoting that content or reusing yes, I'll turn the podcast into a YouTube video and post it on YouTube. I'll also have my VA team create some social media posts to promote the podcast as well. So I'm thinking about how I can get as many ears to the podcast as possible or eyes on the YouTube channel. But basically I'm only focused on two things. And my advice to you, which is the same advice I take, is do a few things and do them really well. Don't be seduced by shiny new objects and the latest trendy marketing strategy that's going to come and go. Because it's the old ones that the best ones. Email marketing is still by far the best way of building your own audience. Of course, on social media, it's someone else's audience, but also it's a way of getting people to read your content. Because what's the first thing everybody does every morning is they open their email and they check their emails. So if you've got a good subject line, your email is likely to be read. So I've simplified my marketing. I've stopped being distracted by shiny new objects and I'm just really focused on those two things. And that's what I will continue to do next year. And I have some bigger goals next year to really grow my email list, which is something that I really think you should be doing as well. Even if you haven't started your email list today, then I would really encourage you to focus on it next year because the money is in your email list. People much smarter than me have told me that, and it's a strategy that I follow that really works for me. It's worth saying actually that from a business development perspective, I really don't rely on referrals and I don't want to rely on referrals because we have no control control over the quality of those referrals or when they are going to come in. And I'll give you a really good example of this quickly, is that I recently had a referral from an old client of someone that was looking for some help that was not in my sector, in the agency sector, but I kind of felt obliged to have that call with their person because I didn't want to upset the old customer. So I had the call. Yes, I felt I could help them, but they really weren't in my core sector. So it's kind of like I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. So that's why I don't rely on referrals, but instead said I'm putting good content out there to get inbound inquiries coming to me. And those people have kind of self qualified because they understand what I can do and how I can help them. And that is a strategy that I think you should follow. And I think it becomes even more pertinent when we are in a recession and times are a bit tougher because people are much less likely to make those referrals when we are in a tough economy. So making sure that you are not just solely relying on word of mouth and referrals, but you have a proactive business development strategy is going to be super important and your email list should be at the center of that. So I want to share with you a few things that didn't work so well. And a big one was that I worked with a consultant to support me in the September enrollment of the self running agency. Now the consultant was really good and I haven't got much of a bad word to say about him. We just massively missed the targets that we were aiming for. We had fairly high targets in terms of new enrolments and we only hit about half of that number. So I think my learning from that is that we over complicated a lot of the process in terms of getting people to a webinar, over complicating the webinar and then the follow up process. So in a way it was an interesting experiment that cost me quite a lot of money. I learned quite a few things. We did put some good things in place. But I've learned that the next enrollment I do next March will just be much simpler. And actually if you're nurturing your email list between enrollments then it becomes much easier just to say to people hey, this is what we're doing. Do you want to come and join me? So that is definitely one thing that didn't work so well. And I also have to say that part of that was doing some Facebook and Google Ads. And I have been spectacularly unsuccessful using Facebook ads and Google Ads in the past. And sadly this was to be the case again even though we spent a good few thousand pounds on it. So I'm not sure. I'm not trying to say that that doesn't work, I just haven't it work yet. And one thing I know and a lot of Facebook ads and Google Ads experts will tell you this is that you need quite a lot of money to be in the research phase to find your message and your creative and your audience. And then you also need to go through a next phase of warming up an audience before you Start trying to make your offer. So if you're ever going to do any advertising, then you really need to know that. Now obviously some of the listeners to this podcast will be Facebook ads, Google Ads, PPC experts, and so on. So they'll already know this. But if you've ever thought about running ads yourself, just know that you need a sizable budget and you also need this phase of testing and research, of then building and warming up an audience before you start making your offer. Even if that offer is download a free book or come to a free webinar or whatever it is, you still need to go through that phase. Otherwise you will just be throwing lots of money. So the Facebook advertising component of the campaign that I did for my enrollment didn't work either. So I won't be doing that again. That doesn't mean I'm not going to be doing some advertising. I just need to take a more considered, longer term approach to it rather than a sort of short, sharp bursts. So those are two things that didn't work so well. And you know what, at the end of the day, we always just need to do the things that we do if they don't work. Make sure we take some key learnings and some key takeaways from those situations so that we do things differently in the future. And that's definitely the case for me in this launch. Okay, the last part of the podcast, I want to talk about some of the trends that I have seen with my audience and more generally in the agency world. And for some of the guests I've had on my podcast in 2022, one of the things I've seen is that there is more willingness and desire for a lot of agencies to move away from selling on price to taking a more value pricing approach and really digging in to understand what the client's trying to achieve and then building a program, a scope of work and a fee that is based much more on that outcome and then assessing it as the project goes along. So I definitely think more people are coming around to the idea of value pricing, which is a gets a big thumbs up from me. I think just need to get out of their comfort zone regarding selling time and realize that there are other, other ways of doing it as well. Now, obviously a lot of agencies are worried about recession and they're worried about high inflation, but my message has always been to keep promoting the value of what you do and be seen as the expert consultant from the very first conversation you have so that you are totally indispensable to your clients. When they might be worried about costs and they're looking at cutting budgets. So my advice to you is to keep investing in your marketing. Don't be afraid of putting yourselves out there because if you cut back because you think your customers have less money to spend, then of course you create yourself fulfilling prophecy of losing business. And please don't cut your prices at the moment. That is not the way to retain clients. The way to retain clients is make sure that you are delivering consistent value to them. Now, on a similar note, I think more agencies are coming around to the idea of niching and they are working out their niche. They understand that if they want to be seen as the expert and not the generalist, then they need to have a clear niche. And that means that it becomes easier for them to attract the right clients, to charge fair fees and to do great work. I've also learned this year that people really value being part of a community, even if it's just so that they can take comfort in knowing that others are facing the same challenges that they face and that they don't feel like they are alone. And of course that's the beauty of my group, the self running Agency Implementation Group. But of course there are many other programs out there and networks where you can be part of it. So I think more people are recognizing that and they are finding their own community to get support and help and advice from. I think more people realizing that they need to focus on margin, that's the smart number to focus on. And they're being more mindful about measuring their margins. So they're hitting sort of 20 to 40% margins and they're not being busy, falls over servicing clients clients and making sort of 10% or less margins on the work that they deliver for their clients. And the last trend that I've seen that kind of touches upon the point I made earlier, is that more agencies are recognizing the danger of just relying on one source for their new business. So they are diversifying that. So so many times people tell me that they get all of their business through referrals and word of mouth. And I've already told you why that's a bad idea. So people I think now are doubling down more on their marketing. They're practicing what they do for their clients, for themselves, although there's still a long way to go with that. But they are recognizing that if they can do outbound marketing, they're going to generate inbound inquiries. And that is the best kind of lead that you're ever going to have. It's been an interesting year in terms of resourcing. Post pandemic, people have learned that we don't always have to have the people in the office. They don't have to be full time employees. They can be based all over the place, they can be part timers. I can have a mix of freelancers and in house staff. I think another thing that people are coming around to is understanding that when they work with freelancers they need to treat them as much as possible like an employee and do reviews and give feedback and all of that stuff so that the freelancer really feels part of the team. So hope you can relate to some of those trends and if there's any learnings in there or things that you want to implement, then please do. And I hope this whole episode has been food for thought for you and getting you thinking a little bit as we head into 2023 about where your focus needs to be and tackling some of the challenges that will be coming our way head on and taking the right action to cope with those challenges. So hope you found today's episode useful as ever. If you did enjoy the episode, please do consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. There's a little video I've posted in the show notes showing you how to do that because it's not always that simple. And of course share the this episode with your colleagues. And I will be back with you in the new year for Season four of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. There won't be a podcast for the next couple of weeks. I want us all, including me, to enjoy our Christmas break. I really hope that you are able to step away from your business and relax with your friends and family and come back in 2023 with renewed energy and enthusiasm and focus for us all having an amazing year. So I hope you have a fantastic Christmas and New Year and I will see you in 2023.