How To Scale A Digital Marketing Agency - Case Study

Right now it's at least five to six times more than what we used to make then because we have systems. And I can't tell you the feeling, David, because when you see the money coming in without your involvement, when you see clients posting testimonials, clients posting their results that hey, we got this result and this result because somebody else delivered and you didn't. It's so beautiful.

Hello, it's David Jennings from Systemology. I'm here with JN Kumar Patty from Pixeltrack.net and we're shining a light on different businesses that are building up systems culture, applying Systemology in their business. And JN's done some amazing things that I'd love to dive into. So maybe just to start off, Jayan, if you could introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your business and what you do, who you serve, a little bit about your team and how long you've been doing it for.

Absolutely, David. So, hey guys, my name is Jayanth. As David said, I have been running this digital marketing company with my partner. So we specialize in three things. One is getting more leads through for B2B businesses through cold outbound. And this we do on LinkedIn and email. We do it very personally. So our clients get a lot of results and this happens along with this. We do a lot of personal branding for the founders because a lot of the time we reach out from their accounts. So in combination we are basically a lead generation agency that specializes in B2B outbound. I know I've been doing this since 2016. Actually towards the end of 2016 we started. But yeah, Systemology has been a game changer for our business. So thanks a lot for that, David.

Yeah. And tell us a little bit about your team. How many do you have that work in at Pixel Track?

So right now we have 11 team members.

Yes.

So we had a lot but we had to let them go. When Covid hit. Then we literally restarted. You can say like Pixel Track was reborn in 2022 and then we used Systemology to hire team members ourselves. So right now we have 11 team members. Yeah.

Yeah. And do you see yourself as a systems person or were you resistant to the idea of systems like for you personally as the founder is. Yeah. I'm always interested to know if it, if you see yourself as a systems person.

Oh, I was the first time founder back then. Right. So can you imagine for the first three years I didn't know there was something called as systems and process because I mean we just started out of hustle pure hustle. We just kept doing stuff. And I didn't know that there are something called standard operating procedures. There are some documents, there are checklists. I'm like, I was completely new to this fact. So it was basically, you don't know what you don't know. It was that for me. So when I knew, I just could not ignore that from my business. So what used to happen was earlier, the pre Covid pixel track or pre Covid, my business was like, I would hire an expert and I'd be like, you know what? This client has this demand, please do it. I don't know how you'll do it. Please do it. And because of that, sometimes what would happen was my expectations of the outcome would vary very differently from the expectations of the outcome of the employee that we would have. And that would be a very clear, you know, I would say communication gap and clients would not be happy. They would leave us very literally. The churn was so high that a client would come and they would go within like six months. It was horrible back then during COVID when we had nothing to do because all the clients left to really honest. I was reading the book around somewhere in 2021 and I was like, oh, this I missed this. That used to happen. And then I kind of adopted this to myself. Like, okay, you know what? This is something that needs to be done. It was not like, whether I'm the system guy or not, but I need to deploy this.

So.

So I'll do my best. I read your book twice, thrice, to like really get into it and start building the critical client flows and pick when am I getting the stuck the most? Like, I love the concept that you mentioned. Pick the 80, 20 of the systems. Right. I used to be the one who would do outreach for my business. I would be closing the deals and I would be onboarding them and fulfilling them. And I was like, these are four different rules. I didn't know that. And then I started hiring a sales team. And I want to tell you, David, because of you, for the first time in my life, you know, clients started coming into our business without my face at all. And was such a great feeling. Yeah, I love that.

How did you come across systemology? Like you mentioned, sort of in that downtime with COVID Was it a referral or did you find it on Amazon, like, or something on YouTube? What caught your eye?

I was Amazon entrepreneurs. I was deep diving into businesses because I felt like when the clients left, it was kind of a rock bottom business. And we had to let go of our employees hurt me really bad. Then I felt like, oh, am I a bad entrepreneur? If I am bad, let's fix that. Let's read a lot of books. So I started reading books and.

Email.

Three visited came out like it was one of the top recommendations I read. That blew my mind. Then I read the Checklist Manifesto, though it was a little bit complicated then Checklist Manifesto was one that was like, you know, oh, it introduced myself to Checklist and I knew that I had to make checklists. But then I was thinking when I actually started listing down the number of checklists, I had to make it become some hundred and fifty, twenty five checklists that I have to make for my business. I'm like, I don't have any business. I don't have patience to create like 125 checklists. Then I came across Systemology. So Amazon recommendation. Right. And that was like the best recommendation Amazon ever did. So that was my journey.

Yep. And what was it about Systemology? Because, I mean, you already had some exposure to systems. And I love the E myth because it builds a great case for why. And oftentimes a lot of business owners get stuck on the how to. That was a big part of why I wrote Systemology because I kind of felt like I wrote the book I wish I had, which was more of an instruction manual on what to do. But I'm curious what it was for you that stood out, especially since you've read some other things and yeah, what connected the dots with system?

So I'm not sure which chapter it was, but you mentioned, like, there are two things that stood out. One was you don't have to build all the systems. You have to pick the things that hurt in the company and you have to systemize that. So first thing that I did was like, build a system for my sales team because I don't want to be in there and be in the trenches getting the clients in. So I first created a sales process for myself and then hired a sales team. So once that was fixed, my time was free. And then I was like, oh, this works so I don't have to build systems for everything. The next one was onboarding. So I built systems for onboarding. So the concept where you mentioned that you don't have to build system for everything in the business, and I remember you mentioned a story somewhere in the book where one of your friend has this wall with all the different checklists and checklists are checklists and all the employees would get confused. You saved me from that. State. Because I was all in, like, creating. I was thinking to create 125 checklists, brother. Like, I would die if I do that. So that's one second one I remember. I'm not sure which essence. Middle of the book, somebody mentioned that you don't have to build the systems yourself. So right now, what is happening is I'm at that phase that I'm not building any systems. So now I see the first sales guy that I hired, he became even better than me in sales. So I asked him, like, bro, you updated this. Then we hired an account manager who would take care of the delivery of our services. Now, whatever I created back then, now this guy is doing a much better job than me. So I just simply, like, you know what? Record yourself while doing it. You know, write the systems based on that, update the sop. So these two things really stuck out that I don't have to build all the systems. Second, I don't have to do them myself. And probably these are the concepts that a lot of people don't talk about.

Yes.

Yeah.

As you've gotten into it, because you're quite far down the journey now, and you're building the systems culture and you've rehired a lot of the team and you're starting to grow again. There's always challenges as you're growing your business. I would love it if you could share. Are there any challenges that come to mind that you've had trying to get the team to follow the process or to build a systems culture? I think one of the things that you've done is it just happened fortuitously was the team shrunk and then you had to rehire, which means you were very lucky that a lot of the systems and processes for the rehire were in place because it's always hardest with the existing team. But have there been any challenges that you're aware of?

Yeah, I mean, right now there are some challenges. So I told you about sales and fulfillment, but operations wise, we are still facing challenge because we have team members. When they came, there was no systems. And right now we are building systems. So there's a little bit of friction going on, but the way we are tackling that is I kind of set the tone straight that, hey, we need to systemize this thing. So the next two quarters, I give them two quarters because if I build this, then they would have ramped up in, like, the quarter itself in the next two quarters. Our mission is to systemize finance. Let's say, for example, like, every payment that comes in, everything that goes out should be recorded, automated reports, pie charts, whatever. We need to systemize this. So we need to work together on this. And I want to like, I also gave them like, if. So the way in our company we work is we don't work beyond six hours in any day. So I told them, you work four hours a day, but dedicate two hours of your every single day in building whatever systems that you want to build for finance. So that little bit of freedom when I gave to my employees and set the context that it is going to be hard, my employees are like taking it fairly better. But still sometimes we come up with challenges. People hate documenting things. As you know, we are creative people. But one of my friends actually told me and I also interviewed Alex, everybody had the same message, that big businesses are boring and boring things are difficult, but they make a lot of money so might as well suck it up and do the boring thing. They're doing the boring thing right now. Yes.

Yeah, I love that. Are there any other either habits or tips or things that you've put in place that have helped this. Because you mentioned that idea of, right, for the next two quarters we're going to focus on this and I love that. It's like a real sprint, as in you know what needs to get done in a set period of time and, and you're obviously showing the team that this is important. You're allowing them to have up to two hours per day to work on that. Are there any other things that you feel you've done that have helped to foster this systems culture you're developing?

There's one more thing that I've done. So the two hour thing, the way it works is what I've done is whatever you have done throughout the day, just start journaling. If it takes them 30 minutes, they can leave home early. That's the bonus that they get. So people are happy doing that. But one more thing that we have started doing is like we started focusing less on checklists but more on the. I don't know how to find this. I don't know if that is a term, but I'll give you an example. So this client comes in and they had a specific demand that we don't really fulfill. But I know that if I take this client and put a little bit of effort, we can like he can be really good client. I don't know if I'd share this, but let's give you a different example. Let's say you go to McDonald's for breakfast and McDonald's closes at 11am and you reach enter the restaurant at 11:15 and ask for breakfast. They say, no, we're not giving. But let's say right next to McDonald's there is another restaurant. It's called Mom's Cheese Pizza. I don't know, whatever. You go in and it's 11:15. But they also have the same policy that after 11 we don't serve breakfast, but a little bit late. But mom Auntie really understands and they still make you a great breakfast. So you love auntie, like because she's really personal to you. So I gave my people freedom to go beyond checklists. Sometimes if you know that this is good for company, please do it. We also incentivize them for that action may not be always monitoring, but like for example, one of our finance guys, there was this issue going on with one of the clients. He didn't even come to me, he just did it all by himself. He himself went to the bank, fixed the thing, came back, gave the reports. So that was lonely. So we appreciate that. We just clap in the town hall. So that's really fun doing. So these are the cultures that we are developing.

I love that one in particular because a lot of people, they'll get stuck and rigid to a process. And sometimes by having a policy versus a process or a system, like a system can be step by step, exactly what needs to be done. Whereas a policy might be a more broad rule. So the policy might be we always go above and beyond for our clients and we deliver excellence. And what that does is it enables the, the team to see beyond just the process, which I think that's the human element that a lot of people miss around process, where they. If you get too fanatical to follow the process, you miss the human bit. And the human bit is actually where you can make your business really great. I love the way that you articulated that as an example. As you start to apply this to your business and in the tail end of the call, like what sort of impacts have you seen? I mean, you have got the benefit now to have built the business pre systems, as in when you first got it started and now you can see post systems because you kind of shrunk and then you've grown it up again. So I'd love to know, yeah, if you've got any other wins or insights that might motivate someone to go, you know what, it's actually worth the effort to put systems in place.

So I'll give her an analogy. So one of my Mentors. He mentioned that. So he did not mention systems as per se, but he mentioned that anybody can hit their first $100,000 in business with just hustle sales process and having a good sales process and a marketing process, it'll be there. But the difference between $100,000 a year company and a million dollars a year company is. Or a $5 million a year company is building systems in between. And it happened very recently, to be honest. This advice came to me. That's why I shared this. But if I were to share our stuff before pre systems, obviously I told you about the chaos that we had in the company and we were actually making about this like 100 grand a year. So that was about 10 to 12 grand a month that we will be hitting. But, but that would be our cap. We would never go beyond that number. And it would bother me that, you know, my business is stuck. Why the hell am I doing this, right? So right now it's at least five to six times more than what we used to make then because we have systems. And I can't tell you the feeling, David, because when you see the money coming in without your involvement, when you see clients posting testimonials, clients posting their results that hey, we got this result and this result because somebody else delivered and you didn't, it's so beautiful. Like you are the most replaceable person in the company. And I think, you know, emotionally that is my biggest takeaway financially. The 5x growth that we had in the business, that's something that we have seen.

It's funny what you articulated there, and it's actually seeing it that then creates the belief there's something magical when that happens. Because most business owners, they start the business, they do the thing, they're familiar with, building the business where they're delivering the product or service. And that's the picture in their head. And because that's the picture in their head, that's what they build the business like, the picture in their head. And when you can change the picture in your head, when you can get the critical client flow firing without key person dependency and the business can make money without worrying on the founder or any other team member, because you've got the process in place, it then something happens where you can then go, I can see how this is going to work. I can see how this can be scaled. I can see how these same ideas can be transferred into other departments. And I think what you're talking about is now being able to see it. And when you see it, you can't unsee it. I think that's why when people get hooked with systems, you can almost become quite fanatical about them because you see a different path.

Yeah, I'm a marketer at heart. I started as a marketer and you know, marketers are a little bit crazy. You cannot teach discipline to a marketer or a sales guy. And that's what we have this term here. And I used to have this wrong belief earlier that if you just do good marketing, good sales, everything will be sorted. But now I didn't care about delivery back then. I didn't care about client success back then, but now I care a lot. And the only way you deliver great results at scale is by building great systems. And I think that one belief, if somebody breaks in their own head, I mean, they're good to go. Yeah.

Yeah, I love it. Well, if, if people want to see more jant about what you guys are doing, we'll send them to pixeltrack.net so if they want a, a systems driven marketing agency that can deliver a stream of clients, if you're in coaching or consulting business in particular, then Jayant is your man. Just want to say a huge thank you as well, J and for being a great example for other business owners.

Thank you. D thank you very much for that.