Surviving & thriving in these challenging times

Welcome to another episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast. It's Rob DeCosta here and today we have a special COVID 19 episode focusing on surviving and thriving in these challenging times. Now, in this episode, I'm going to cover five really key areas for you. That's mindset, serving your audience, pivoting where necessary, discussions around sales and marketing, and the importance of having a strategy for your agency. Now, this episode is super practical. I didn't want to create an episode that's just full of a load of kind of cliche comments around how to survive. 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. Hey all, it's Rob. Rob here. And welcome to another episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast. Now, this is a bit of a special episode because I wanted to theme it around surviving and thriving in these challenges time in these challenging times. So it's my COVID 19 episode. Now, I didn't want this to be a load more sort of naff, cliched advice that's sort of obvious around how to be productive at home or whatever, but I want to provide you with some practical tips that you can actually start using. The one interesting thing is about this point in time is that we all know what everybody's thinking and we're all in the same boat. In other words, we're all working from home in some form or another. And if you're working from home running your agency, then I want to provide you with five areas that will support you to navigate your way through the crisis for however long it's going to go on for. I think it's really important to stay that people still are spending money, and if we believe that they're not, then actually that's our own limiting belief. And it's certainly going to impact the way that you show up. And so we need to focus on our mindset. And that's actually the first of the five areas that I want to talk about today. So let's move on with that one. So, first of all, we just need to make sure at the moment we've got the right mindset. And I think that first approach to that is to be a bit kinder to ourselves. I think that we've got all sorts of feelings going on and we need to recognize that all of the feelings that we have at the moment are really valid. But there's a danger that we let all those thoughts and often those are negative Thoughts paralyze ourselves into inaction. And actually, my first piece of advice is to get into action because it's not a good place to be stuck or distracted by that inner voice that's saying, oh, you shouldn't be marketing and it's really inappropriate and everything's going to go wrong and I'm going to lose all my clients. If I. If we really engage with that inner voice and we give it lots of energy and power, then of course the voice will get much louder. Actually, what we need to do is have a different, supportive, coaching voice on the other side that tones down the inner voice. And the way I think we should do that is by jumping into action. And if we can get into action, then we can quiet down this voice. And the simplest thing I can say about this, which is what I've been doing and what I've been sharing with my clients is, is to identify every week what your priorities are for the week. So what I recommend you do is that you have the top three actions that you want to get done this week that will move your agency forward. And then every day, you start your day by having the top three actions for the day that will move you forward. I'm going to share a template that you can grab in the show notes that's attached to this podcast episode that will support you into that. It's a really simple one page template that you can use every week or even every day just to capture what your priorities are, to create an action plan based on those priorities and to put some metrics by them so that you know that you are delivering them. And if you focus on the three things that will move you forward. Now, the thing about that is that there is lots of things that can get us distracted at the moment. There's so many things that, you know, so much noise and things that we could be doing, but we need to be driven by the three things that are going to move our agency forward. So get a copy of the template associated with this lesson and then fill it in for the week. That's your top priorities for the week. And then breaking that down into some steps and even do that every single day. I feel like when you get a plan, you get a sense of control. And let's face it, perhaps more than ever, there's so much stuff going on around us that we have absolutely no control over that if we want to get stressed, we just need to think about that. But if you want to feel in control and empowered, then you need to focus on what you can Control. And that is why you need a weekly plan and a daily plan. So the other thing about that is it encourages you to start and finish your day in a consistent way. And anybody who's listened to this podcast for a while knows that. I'm a big fan of morning and evening rituals, and I've done episodes before on productivity that you can go back and listen to. That becomes especially important when we're working from home, because suddenly the boundaries get really blurred between when you're working and when you're not working. And so having this concept of consistent way of starting your day and ending your day is super important. And your morning and evening rituals, or your wake up and wind down sessions, whatever you want to call them, probably look quite different today than they did when we were in our normal world, whatever that was and whatever it will be in the future. But since we're working at home, we definitely need those boundaries in place. So we need a sense of coming to work. We need a sense of closing the office door at the end of the day and going home from work. And one of the ways you can do that is by having a morning ritual and an evening ritual. So let me just explain quite simply what they are. So these are the three, four or five things that you're going to do every morning and every evening consistently to start your day. So your day might start off by saying, make a cup of coffee. Then it might be to go through your emails and clean them out and action any of them that you need to. Then it might be to review your three priorities for the day and break that down and schedule them for the day. And obviously including that, schedule any email actions that you need to take place or any client work that you have. So that might be your morning ritual and it might take you half an hour to make your coffee, go through your emails and plan your day. Then you can get on and deliver your day. And then when you get to the end of the day, you need to kind of do the reverse of that. So you need to reflect on what you did during the day, keep a journal if you do that, but certainly tick off your list. What did you achieve those three priorities, and you should have done them, because if you didn't, then you're getting distracted by the wrong things. And then reflect on your weekly, plan your three big priorities for the week and work out what you're going to do tomorrow. And at the end of the day, I always find it really useful to schedule my next day and then the next morning I can Just check back with that schedule again and I kind of know what I'm doing. I really like this idea of having a clear desk policy, but also like a clear mind policy as well, because it just makes me feel really kind of calm and in control when I start my day. So ending my day by planning tomorrow is a really great way of me feeling like I'm in control and feeling like I'm moving forward. I feel like when we're working at home, there's a real danger that we just are being busy fools and we're not actually moving our agency forward. So by having your big three priorities for the week and for the day, and those priorities are absolutely driving your agency forward, then you will feel like you're in control and you'll feel like you're actually making some progress. I think in terms of mindset as well, it's really worth remembering that we will get back to normal at some point. And yes, it might not be for a few months yet, it might not be till summer or even the end of the summer, but there will be some kind of new normal. And so we need to have a mindset that's all about surviving now, but also about thinking about the future, which is why I called it surviving and thriving in this challenging time. Because those agencies that are planning for the future as well as planning to survive now are going to be the ones that are going to do really well when we come out the other side of this. If all you're doing right now is in survival mode, then I think it's going to be really tough when you come out the other side. So don't, don't make it harder for yourselves when we do. And I appreciate, you know, for those people who are losing a lot of clients right now, and I'm going to come on to that, then. It's easy for me to say this, but it's hard to do it. But if you have your plan, then stick to your plan and that will serve you well. So that's my first point I wanted to talk about, which is all about having the right mindset, turning down that negative voice that's kind of causing stress for you, and focusing on more of a kind of supportive voice that is saying, right, get an action plan. I don't know about you, but whenever I get stressed or feel overwhelmed, the very first thing I do is get a sheet of paper and write a plan. Because then I feel like I've got some control again. And that is really important at the moment. Like I said, we're surrounded by craziness at the moment. This crisis is causing a lot of things that we have no control over. So more than ever, we need to focus on those things that we can control. Okay, so my second point that I wanted to talk about today, my second way of navigating through this crisis is, is to think about keep serving your audience. And this is really important. Lots of people have said to me, should I be selling? Should I be marketing? I'm going to come on to that as one of my points. But the answer is, yes, you should. And you should keep serving your audience. So how are you currently serving your audience? It's going to be different to how you were before, because you obviously can't meet them face to face. You might have to be pivoting some of what you do. And that's my next point. But you need to think about how you are constantly communicating with your audience. What's your messaging at the moment? Are you taking this time to be educational or motivational? What is the key messages that you're saying to your audience? And we almost need like some crisis messaging at the moment. And how does that messaging look different to how it would in normal times? And what that might mean is that we're really focusing on benefits when we're communicating with our audience. We might be providing some kind of micro services rather than the macro service levels that we provided before, because clients just don't want that from us at the moment. But I think the two key points about serving our audience is, first of all, you have to believe that what you do and the service you offer is actually helping your clients and providing value to them. And therefore, you believe in what you're doing. And that means you need to show up and not hide away. Like I said, I've had this question a lot from people that they feel awkward about continuing to do marketing and sales. But people need your services. You just have to make sure that you are delivering those services with a sensitive and empathetic ear and not just ignoring what's going on. But that doesn't mean writing more content about how to survive coronavirus because we're all bored of that. This is the only piece of content that I'm producing that is addressing this. That's not because I'm ignoring it. It's just because I think there's a lot of stuff out there already. So my second point is all about continuing to serve your audience. So that probably means that you're going to be communicating regularly. One of the things I think everybody needs to be doing better. Although of course we should always be doing this is in order to serve your audience, you really need to be listening to your audience. So if you're not listening to your audience, then you can't amend how you serve them. So make sure that you are listening to them. You're asking them questions around what they need and how you can service that need. And that's what your messaging should be based on. The third area I wanted to talk about is connected to the second one, which is pivoting where necessary. So we may well need to be pivoting or tweaking our offer at the moment that might be forced upon you because you might, for example, be a video production company, but you can't go out to your client sites and video them at the moment. So you've got to be offering them something different. But there's two kinds of businesses at the moment, and we're all hearing some great stories around this. There's the business that had a service that's just focusing on trying to push that service still. And then there's. Or they're just retracting because they can't deliver that service, but they're not thinking about alternatives. And then there's the business that's being super creative and amending their service based on what people need. I'm sure you've got your own examples of this, but you know, I've been getting a meat box from a wholesale butcher. So this butcher would normally provide meats to restaurants and hotels and so on. Well, obviously they can't do that at the moment. So quite quickly they pivoted and started providing food boxes for, you know, for the residential space. So that's an example of pivoting. My favorite Indian restaurant obviously can't be serving you, so they doing takeaways like a lot of other people and. But they're also doing a home delivery service. So they are providing all the ingredients that you can cook it yourself. So that's another example of pivoting. I have a client that is a PPC company. They focus on delivering services to the mortgage broker sector. Well, obviously that's fallen off the edge of a cliff because people are not buying new mortgages, interest rates are low, Lenders are more nervous about lending at the moment. But what people do still need to do is they still need to remortgage and they, they have mortgages that are up for renewal and they have to be renewed. So he's helping his clients pivot to continue marketing, but to focus on those remortgages because it would be pointless telling his clients you need to keep promoting new mortgages because you know they're going to waste a lot of money in their PPC and so on. So that's another example of pivoting where necessary. So you need to think about what pivoting means for you. And you can pivot in three ways. So first of all, as I've been talking about, you can pivot in your offering and actually change your offering. And I'll talk a little bit about how I've done that in a moment. You can pivot by the message that you deliver and you can pivot by pricing. So let's just work through those. Let's start with the message that you deliver. So first of all, you need to think about how do you need to change your message to reflect that, the times that we're in, to be sensitive and empathetic to that. And I give you an example. So I have an annual group coaching program called the Agency Accelerator, which many of you all know about, that opened its doors in March. And I've been planning to open the doors on the 24th of March for six months. Before, I'd been doing all of my planning internally, putting the assets together, building the email sequences, updating the content. And then this all came along. So I thought to myself, well, what do I do? Do I cancel, postpone the launch? And then I thought, no, actually, people need the services that I'm offering. People are going to be at home, they're going to feel isolated, they're going to want a sense of group and community that my program offers. So I'm going to still launch it. But I changed all the email content to be more reflective about this, to identify some of the challenges that people have. The need to still grow their agency, the isolation, the des to be part of community, the wanting to interact as humanly as we possibly can. And I thought, no. So I'm going to alter my messaging to service that. And I went ahead and I did the launch and it's been a success. So I think you just need to think about how the messaging of whatever you deliver needs to change. Don't just think about postponing any kind of marketing or launch or product or campaign, but just think about how the messaging needs to alter and think about how you can be more personal. I think at the moment, because we're all isolated, the more personal we can be with our clients, the better. So, for example, I'm making a real effort to shoot videos when I'm responding to emails for my customers. And I use Loom, which is a great product, so that's L o o M, not Z o o m. And Loom enables you to shoot short videos. So for example, I'm responding to an email, I can have the email on the screen and it records the screen, plus a little circle with me in it giving feedback to the clients. I can just be a little bit more personal. I've been shooting regular videos that I've been sending out to my whole client base, just talking about one or two aspects just to stay connected with them. And so I think if you can be a little bit more personal, perhaps pick up the phone where you would have written an email or consciously arranged to talk to all your clients on the phone or via webinar or whatever, then you should be doing that. I think the more you do that, the more they appreciate you, the more you stay front of mind for them and the more they're going to put trust in you and your agency and your services. So that's all about messaging, changing your messaging, but don't cut back on your messaging. And then the next area is about pivoting your offer. And there's a number of things that you can do here because you either forced to pivot your offer because you can't go and shoot video or deliver the food, open your restaurant or whatever. That's one of the extreme examples. But also it's just about pivoting the offer to make it more appropriate for now. So that might be creating a smaller version of your offer that might be looking at how you can add additional value or how you can assist your clients in different ways. So it might be like a, like I say, a micro service rather than a macro service. So it might be more one to one calls or something might need to be changed in park. So one of the things that I'm doing because I recognize that people are in a very different situation is I'm taking my 12 week agency accelerator program and I'm creating like a membership version of it. So it will deliver the same content but it will be a much lower monthly subscription price. So it creates a much lower point of entry for my clients, I can still serve them and hopefully I can reach a wider audience. So that's an example of me pivoting my offer in order to be empathetic. Because I had a lot of people who didn't join the program this time around who were interested in it, but just obviously worried about money. So they didn't want to make the investment at several thousand pounds to join the program, but they probably will make an investment of 50 pound 60amonth to join my membership program. So think about how you can pivot your offer to still serve your audience, but in a different way that's sensitive and empathetic to them. And then the third way is pivoting your pricing. Now this is really important here. I do not think you should be giving stuff away for free. I acknowledge that some of us have had clients, me included, who have said, I can't work with you at the moment. And I think we should still find a way to serve those people so that they remember us, that we're front of mind and then when they're ready to start working with us again, they'll, you know, remember you and they'll come back to you. So I think that's important. But that's not about giving away your service for free. That's just about providing some value to them that is less than the service they paid for. So don't give your stuff away for free. Bear in mind that if we all gave everything away for free, we're hurting the economy and of course we're hurting ourselves as well. But you might need to think about how you price and you might want to discount things a little bit and you might want to think about adding additional value in for the same price. What I did for the agency accelerator is I offered a 15% discount and I offered an additional payment plan. So normally people join the accelerator, they either pay one payment or three monthly payments. But I also introduced a six monthly payment as well. That made the price lower and I gave people who joined a discount When I register people through a webinar, so if they came to the webinar they got a 15% discount when they joined. So think about how you might need to change your pricing. It might be more flexible payments, it might be longer term payments, it might be creating a micro version of your offering and just offering that. It might be doing stuff online because you can't meet face to face. And can you do that a more cost effective way? So that is my third point, which is all about pivoting where necessary and pivoting around your message, your offer and your price where necessary. The fourth area I wanted to talk to you about is the question that lots of people have said to me, rob, should I be marketing my services at the moment? Isn't it bad taste for me to doing to do that? And I'm like, guys, no, it's the absolute opposite. People have got more time, people are reading more content, people are looking at social media more. One really interesting non scientific statistic is that I mail out my list usually once a week, although during my launch it was every day. And the open rates and click through rates on my emails were a lot higher than they have been on average. And I think it's because people have obviously got a bit more time and they are less distracted so they are actually reading emails. On the other hand, it's a way, way busier world at the moment. A lot more people on social media and a lot more people emailing, no doubt. But you should still be getting your message out there. And remember this, that if you are serving your audience, why on earth would you be embarrassed about getting your sales and marketing messages out there? That is the key point. Serve your audience. If you've been talking to them and listening to them, then you amend your message accordingly. You're empathetic with your audience, but you still get content out there because they need you. So provide value. And remember the old adage, when we're communicating with our audience, we want to focus 80% on giving value, 20% on selling. So if you've got an email sequence that might look like, you know, an email sequence of 8 emails where email 5 and 8 are selling but the others are actually giving some true useful value away, which means people look forward to receiving your emails and stay on your email list. And talking of email list, I can't emphasize this enough. I've said this so many times. If you're not building your list than you should be and this is a great time to get onto it. So you need to look at your email service provider such as Mailchimp or Active Campaign or ConvertKit, which is a tool I use. And you need to create your email list and start building it because it's one of your most valuable assets. And if you're at a point where you need more clients, then if you have a list of a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, then you can reach out to those people in a consistent value added way and some of those will come popping out and become your customers. That is something that's put me in really good stead over the last few years and you should be building your mailing list and that obviously gives you a great channel for your marketing. So we need to keep marketing and this is a message that I give to you and it's a message that you need to give to your clients because obviously you want them to be Buying marketing services in some form or another from you. So I would encourage you to share these messages with your clients. Their clients still need them. They just have to think about how they serve them in a slightly different way. And just bear in mind that if you're worried about your business disappearing and going under, and because of that mindset, it's stopping you getting out there and marketing yourself because you feel slightly embarrassed, then you're just creating your own self fulfilling prophecy. So you need to keep marketing and you shouldn't be embarrassed about it. You just need to make sure you're doing it sensitively and you're listening to your audience and you are truly adding value. So that answers that number. The fourth point, which is should I be marketing right now? And it's a resounding yes to that answer. The fifth strategy I want to talk about is the importance that you have a strategy for your agency. Now I've talked many times before about the concepts of having a vision, which might be a 12 month roadmap for your business, which talks about the destination, having a strategy which is your quarterly plans for your agency of how you're going to reach that 12 month plan, and then having a monthly to do list for your business, which is a breakdown of the quarterly strategy into which bits of that am I doing this month? And that still remains absolutely true and you should still be doing that. But if this situation teaches us anything or reminds us of anything, and that is that our plans need to not ever be cast in stone, which they should never be anyway. But of course right now is more important than ever that they're not. But instead they need to be nimble, dynamic documents that we're changing on a monthly basis based on all of the things that are happening that we didn't know when we wrote the plan. And the coronavirus situation is such an emphasis of, well, if you wrote your plan in January or December last year, how on earth could you have predicted this? Well, of course you couldn't, but you need to be mending your plans. So the only additional thing I would say about that concept of vision, strategy and action plan is that the plans that we have at the moment need to be a lot more short term, still have your vision because that focuses on the destination that you want your agency to get to by the end of your year. And that's still very important. And there's still a reasonable chance that you'll get there, although you might need to be amending that as well. But you need more short term plans as I talked about at the beginning. So you need your weekly plans, your daily plans, but your monthly plans. And, and they may be just taking the same concept of what are my three priorities for the month? And so I can't emphasize how important that is. So allocate some of the time that you've got now just to thinking at least a month ahead so that you can have a plan for what you're going to achieve this month. You will have. You will have had to craft some crisis messaging that you will have got out to your audience as part of the previous points that I've made. And you need to brainstorm that internally in your. In your agency or with yourself. And the key thing about that messaging and why we shouldn't be embarrassed about marketing is because we want to be really authentic and truthful about what we say. And if we are like that, then, you know, we will feel fine about doing it. And as I said, we want to plan to talk to our clients regularly, listening to the hem and keep serving them. Keep selling. As I said, you don't need. You won't feel bad if you're selling something that is truly valuable. And keep marketing because, you know, at the moment, this is a great opportunity for us to get a lot of our ducks in a row. So if you have time, if you have more time than normal because you've been freed up from client work, then it is the perfect time to build a strategy for your sales and marketing. So that might look like building assets, like revamping your website. It might look like defining your sales funnel. It might like, look like reaching out to more customers and talking to them. It might look like doing some research. It might look like creating a new product or service. But you need a strategy for this because I've just reeled off a bunch of things off the top of my head that we could all be doing that would kind of weigh us down by so many opportunities. That's why you need a plan, guys. So at least have a monthly plan. I appreciate it's probably hard to focus too far beyond that, but the concept of vision, strategy and plan is still really relevant. So at least once a month, sit down and work out, what are our priorities for this month? What do we need to do to move our agency forward? What do we need to do to win more clients? If you're in a situation where you've lost business and you need to pick new business up, it's really interesting in a space of sort of real honesty, I've lost probably 50% of my regular clients. But because I've been really putting into practice a lot of what I've talked about actually won a bunch of new clients and they look really different. First of all, they're all online. Second of all, I'm talking to them more regularly than I normally would. Third of all, they're probably shorter term engagements. They may be initial three month engagements. But because I am putting into practice what I've talked about, I've replacing lost revenue with these clients and I'm also doing a number of other things. I've obviously got the agency accelerator program running and I've also been developing my membership program which I mentioned right at the beginning, which will be launching next month to enable people to join and work with me at a cheaper level. So I am really pivoting. I'm putting marketing plans in place, I'm putting a strategy to deliver all this stuff so it doesn't feel overwhelming and you need to do exactly the same. So that's my fifth point which is about having a clear strategy for your agency hanging on to that one year plan, but if necessary, just working out a month by one plan. So there you go guys. That's my five key points for surviving and thriving in these challenges challenging times. My COVID 19 episode. So the five things again I talked about it's importance of having a really positive mindset, having an action plan so that you can calm this sort of negative voice that's getting in your way. The second point is all about serving your audience and listening to them to make sure that you are being empathetic and sensitive, but getting out there and talking to your audience, serving them. The third point was around pivoting necessary and we can pivot on our message, our offer or our price. And the fourth area I talked about was the importance of continuing to do marketing and sales. And the last point, perhaps most important point, is to have a strategy. If you can put all of those things into place, you're going to be able to survive and get through this time. And remember, we will come out the other side and it's those companies that have done this and still have a bigger picture plan that are the ones that will survive. Now as I said, connected to this episode is a free download which will help you with that daily, weekly and monthly planning. So make sure you go to the show notes associated with this. So go to dacostacoaching.co.uk podcasts and then look for the show, the latest show on this and grab a copy of that. Okay, that's me done on this episode. We'll be back to sort of normal broadcasting from next week. Luckily, most of my podcast content is still really useful and valuable and relevant, so I haven't felt the need to pull anything. But I did want to do this episode where I addressed my thoughts on your five best survival tactics during this challenging time. I hope your agency is doing okay, and please do drop me an email if you have any questions about anything we've talked about today. I want to serve and help my audience as much as I possibly can, just like you do with yours. Sa.