How To Make Your First $100K With Your SMMA Agency

Maybe you got a few clients or maybe you don't have any at the moment, but you want to earn your first six figures as quickly as possible. And if so, you're in the right place. Because my name is Dylan Vanit and I run an agency that has eight figures per year and it took me a while to get to the six figure mark, but it's possible I did it and I believe you can do too. So in this video I'm going to break down the strategies that can actually help you achieve the six figure milestone in your agency and grow the business into a successful company of your own. But first, let's talk about setting realistic goals. Earning your first hundred thousand dollars with your social media marketing agency is not an easy thing for most people to do. Not because it's not realistic, it's because the mental belief system, in order to get there, a lot of people that are running and starting to grow an smma, digital marketing agency, whatever you want to call it, they don't have the belief that they can actually do that. First off, a lot of you never even made 100 grand in a year. So like, we got to overcome that objective. And a lot of you haven't been able to convince clients or, you know, wonder, who in the world would pay you? Me, I'm just, you know, I'm just a regular person. Like, why would they pay me five, ten grand a month to do marketing for them? And so if you guys are able to believe, you know, I'll show you my results and show you what I've been able to achieve. Hopefully that gets you a little bit further, further in the belief system that hey, yeah, it's possible. And then I want you guys to set a target of like, hey, this is my target date. And then it's simple. We're just going to break down the math and reverse engineer the entire system on how you can get there. It's not going to be hard. Right? I'm going to help show you in this video the numbers on if we want to be making 100k in your agency, here's how much outreach you have to do. Here's the target you have to get, here's the close rate you have to get, and then it's just going to be up to you to actually do the action. So, so first off, let's set the target. It's like, hey, we want to be at $10,000. We want to get our. I want to get my first $10,000 in sales in the next 60 days. That's about 5k per month. Realistically, it'll probably end up working out to be, you know, you'll make your first couple thousand this month and then you know you'll get the bulk of it next month. But if you set that goal, it's going to really help you roll into actually achieving it. Also, don't focus on making $100,000. Instead, direct all of your focus towards activities that will get you there. For example, instead of thinking that you need to make 280 bucks every day in order to hit the goal, focus on hitting, let's say 100 outreaches every day. And we'll talk about how you can actually reverse engineer and use the number your goal target amount is to actually reverse engineer how much outreach you have to do later in this video. But it's important for you not to get fixated on the revenue number and instead make sure you're putting in the systems in place and taking action that leads to getting to that mark. For example, if you're just focused on the money, you're going to be focused time and time again. And let's say you have a bad week, you'll be disappointed that you haven't been able to achieve the goal. But when you focus on the process, not the outcome and it becomes just every day doing the action day in, day out, that will get you there. And eventually if you do it enough, you will. But yeah, let's get straight into this video. So you want to make sure you're building strong customer relations. Whether you like it or not, the client comes first. And whether it's Amazon, Google, you know these companies, if you request a refund from Amazon, doesn't matter what happened, they're going to send it to you in most cases. And that's because they know that if they make you happy now, they, you're going to buy from them time and time again. So even if they lose a little bit of money today and over a long period of time, it's going to benefit them. And so these companies that understand the customer is first really have a long term success plan. And when you're running your agency, you got to maintain good relationships with the client. It's even more critical than if you know a large company. Because think of it, if one client's paying you three, four grand a month and they stay with you for a year, you know you just made 12x in just one month. So a lot of times people think like, oh, I just got a $3000 deal. No, you didn't get a $3000 deal, you got a $36000 deal if you can get that $3000 client to stick with you for a year. And it's just simple math at that point. You just keep adding more clients and they stick with you for a year or longer. And so client retention, it's much easier to keep client than to get a new one. So really, really want to focus on, on the things you can do to keep your clients happy. Additionally, if you provide good work and have a good relationship with your clients, they're going to refer you to their friends, making it even more worth it for you. That's why maintaining good customer support and focusing on retention not only maintains that client, but also is going to help you win long term clients and other relationships and referrals. As the clients go through the process and go through the ladder of spreading your business through word of mouth to make it a no brainer for your clients to refer you to other business owners. They know you need to have a good referral system in place and don't overcomplicate it. There's some agency owners out there that I know that have like, well, for this product you get this percent. For this one you get this. And once you refer, like, it's just too complicated. Have something simple. What I do at my agency is we offer a 10% referral commission in perpetuity. So you, if, if you're a client, you send a referral to me, I'm going to give you a 10% kickback every single month. That client pays forever. If that client comes and buys more stuff down the road, you might not even know about it. I'm just going to give you that referral anyways. And so that's what I do in my agency. I believe 10% is good enough to actually have people send you a lot of referrals. You know, an average business makes 15, 20% profit. So this person is going to make 10% to just send it to you and not worry about it. Or if they built an entire business to fulfill the work, maybe make an extra 5%. It's not worth it. So that's kind of the way I look at it. And you'll be able to have people come back to you time and time again. Oh, and one more point on referral systems. If you're giving your clients, let's say, a 10% referral in cash for whatever they sent to your business, you might actually be better off to be able to give them a kickback in services instead. Because think about it. If you. If the deal is 10 grand and you're going to give them $1,000 referral in cash, that costs you 1,000 bucks. But if you were to give them $1,000 credit to your services, it'll cost you less. You know, whatever your hard costs are, but you'll be saving a fair amount of money. And so just consider like, hey, is this a client of mine that I can just, like, give them a bonus amount of services? Obviously, offer both, but don't just, like, straight up offer the cash. Say, hey, you got $1,000 referral credit. Let me know if you want to roll that into services or you just want to pay out. One of the ways you can keep your clients happy is understand that your client isn't worth their monthly amount to you. They're actually worth 10 to 15 times that. And the way I think about it is if a client's paying me 10 grand a month, that's not a $10,000 client, that's $150,000 client. Because I'll be able to keep this client on for, let's say, roughly 18, you know, 12 to 18 months. Let's say 15 months. 15 times 10,000 is $150,000. So if I treat that client like they're $150,000 client, they'll turn into $150,000 client. But if I treat them like a $10,000 client, that's all they'll ever be. So make sure you're treating your clients with the expectation that they're a much bigger client than what they actually are. Now, that brings me to my next point, which, even though client relationships are incredibly important, important, you can't just rely on your current clients to bring in new clients. You need to have a system in place that's going to fill your calendar and get you sales goals and get your pipeline filled up. Because there's the idea that I talk about called the growth fulfillment paradox, where a lot of people just focus on serving their clients for so much and trying to make their clients happy that they stop filling their pipeline with new clients. And that was something that happened to me where when I had my first couple big clients, my one of those two just sent me an email one day saying, hey, thanks so much, Dylan. Appreciate the services, but we're going to put a pause on it. Obviously, a pause means, hey, we're canceling. But in reality, you know, they were stopping services, and there went half my revenue, right? My revenue got cut in half. So because I was focused on making them Happy, which I obviously did. I stopped trying to focus on a system to actually keep my pipeline full. So in order to get to that level, you want to get to and you target, you need to focus on some kind of outreach method in order to get there. Now, a link below this video in the description has my e book, which has my 12 ways to get clients. So go ahead and download that e book, it's free for you guys. And you can actually pick one of those 12 methods that you think works for you on doing outreach and just stick with it. Don't try to do all 12. Choose one that you think, get the proof of concept, get confident in that actually working for you, and just double down and, and do that. Increase the volume. It's very important to track your numbers and know exactly how many messages it takes to get a positive reply. How many positive replies turns into a demo, how many demo turns into an actual paying client. And so just drop it in a spreadsheet. You know, we can actually have KPI trackers is simple. You just take a spreadsheet, you just put like messages sent positive responses. You just build a simple spreadsheet on Google sheets and just dump the info there. And over time, you're going to start to know your numbers and actually be able to reverse engineer the path to making six figures. If you want to make $10,000 in one month and every client's worth 2,000 bucks a month, what do you need? You just need five new clients. But how much outreach does it actually take to get there? That's the question. Okay, cool. So let's say you need to send 100 messages to land a meeting and your closing rate is, you know, let's say 25%. Now, you know, you got to send 400 messages in order to land a client. And so obviously your numbers might vary depending on your offer. You know, how good you are closing deals, stuff like that. For me, I knew that about every 100 people I reach out to lands about one one client. And so when I was getting started early on, you know, my price point was about three to five grand a month. A client would stay on for about six to 12 months. So if I sent 100 messages, I knew I was going to get about $3,000 back. Now keep in mind, like I was doing targeted outreach through LinkedIn, you know, high quality, direct stuff. I wasn't just sending 100 mass emails out. So depending on the outreach method you're using, it's going to be different, obviously, but that was my numbers. And so if you run the math, it's like, okay, cool, so my client stays on for six months at $3,000 a month. You know, that's 18k in contract value. And so 100 messages just made me 18 grand. So when you know your numbers, you actually have the ability to predictably scale your agency. Also, don't let knowing your numbers stop you from actually improving them. If it takes you 400 messages to land a client, think about ways you can actually improve it. To get it to 300 or 200, maybe you need to improve open rates, maybe you need to get better at your sales skills, maybe you need a better offer. Whatever it is, you want to start looking at ways to improve it. But it starts from knowing the overall 30,000 foot view on the actual numbers. And then you can go from there and you can look at every step in the process like, hey, you know what should this be? How can I make it better? And then go from there. All right, number three, you got to be more efficient. Having more clients isn't the only thing you should focus on. If you're going to scale your agency to six figures. You need to have some good internal SOPs, policies, processes, in order to be efficient. You got to trim the fat. You got to cut extra costs. And efficiency is not just like, hey, let's just have the workflow be streamlined. But it's also like, hey, let me be mindful where we're spending money. If you have extra users on your Google account, you're paying 12 bucks on every user. And these are people that don't even work for you. Fire them. You don't need an info, an admin support, like, just have your email, that's all you need. You're not going to fill a bucket that has holes in it and the same thing in your business. So you want to make sure you try to close as many of the holes in your business before you start to run into problems and have clients leaving. And so if you have services that you owe to clients, make sure you're delivering on it. Make sure you're selling stuff that you actually can deliver on and run smoothly. The goal of having the right systems and processes in place is to help you scale the operations without taking too much of your time and without sacrificing the quality of your services. So if you have one client right now, and then in two months from now you've got 10 clients, most people, their service quality will decrease. But if you have really good systems in place, you're going to be an agency that Actually, the quality continues to stay the same because you have good processes, good SOPs, you have a good framework, you have a good onboarding system, and the client ultimately is happy with the work they're doing. So don't spend weeks onboarding your client. Get them done quickly. Don't spend weeks training employees. Build the process while you're doing it yourself, and then you can train them quickly. That's what efficiency is all about. That's why you have to have good systems and processes in place and have a really streamlined onboarding process and reporting process. When it comes to onboarding, you want to try to automate as much as possible. Here's the ideal thing. A client says, hey, yeah, I'm ready to work with you. And you have one form that you send to them, or you can trigger something inside your CRM. It sends them the form, they fill it out, and everything else from that process on is automated. Monthly recurring is automated. Automated. Anything other information you need is automated. We even have it set up where we get automated. Access to their Facebook accounts, business pages, Instagram pages. Like, that's pretty awesome. And it reduces the amount of time. These are things that can significantly hamper your business. If it takes two or three or four days for a client to be onboarded when it should take one, that's four or five days that you lost money. The ability to charge because you can't onboard someone and then charge them like 30 days after you first started the onboarding process. Really it should be the service itself. So you need to be, you need to have really good onboarding processes. And then when it comes to reporting, you need a system to do that in a streamlined way. For me, it was like my most dreaded reporting, dreaded day of the month. Because what I would do is I would sit for an hour at a time for every single client to build these reports. With 20, 30 clients, I'm working like a whole week just to provide reports. So then I discovered a software called what a graph. And it just automatically pulls in the info from Google and Facebook ads. Now you can use Google Data Studio to actually prepare reports. And it makes it streamlined so you don't actually have to do the work of, of building these reports. Again, it's automated. And when it comes to systems, it's important that you're thinking about three things. What can I eliminate, automate and delegate. It's going to be impossible for you to get to six figures without this. You're a business owner. Your goal is to work on the business, not in the business. And so look at things that, ways that help you elevate to working on the business and those three things, eliminate, automate and delegate are critical to you. Scaling. All right, and finally, let's talk about pricing. Now pricing your services is one of the biggest keys. Scaling to the six figure mark in your agency and you need to make sure you're charging enough for your services. One way for you to determine your pricing model is actually go out there and research what your competitors are charging. If other agencies are charging $3,000 for a particular service, maybe you should charge 3,000 or even undercut them and do 2750. And a simple way for you to do this is just search social media marketing agency or marketing agency and do it in your, in your local area or in your industry. If you're doing, you know, if you're doing, if you're not in like the right area to do it, not in a big city, if you're in a small town or, you know, foreign country, just search by industry and find a couple companies that are doing it in your industry and just spy on them. Get a, get on a call, ask them what their services are and just see what they're actually charging. But that doesn't mean you can't charge more. It's going to be hard for you to scale to six figures if you're only charging 500 bucks a month, right? Think about the ways that you can actually step up and improve your offer so you can charge more. What value can you add in? And primarily things that are high profit like consulting or other services. But here's the thing. If you're trying to get to six figures a month at 500 bucks a client, you're going to need between 15 and 20 clients to get there. And if you're charging only 2,000, you only need a small handful of clients, four or five clients to do that. And so as you raise your prices, you need less clients to get there. And I'm not saying you only have one or two clients paying you, you know, 5 or 10k. Obviously we want to diversify, but if you have 10 or 20 clients paying you 5 or 10k, you can see how the numbers get pretty cool, pretty quick. And charging more makes it easier for you to scale because you're going to spend more on acquiring clients and hiring team members when your profit margins are healthy. If you have low profit margins, you don't have the ability to bring on new team members. You don't have the ability to run ads or affiliate promos. There's a saying that the person who can pay the most for a client is always going to win. And it's important for you to understand that as you're scaling, the better your profit margins means you can pay more in ads, in commissions, in joint venture deals, to the person that's actually bringing you the deal. As you can see, scaling your agency isn't about getting clients or hiring people. If you want to make $100,000 in your business in the next 12 months, you need to focus on every single aspect about your business and your agency and always think about how you can improve the different parts of the business. If success was easy, every single person would be successful. The process is simple. It's a step by step process that's been proven time and time again. But the hard part is actually getting up and doing the work. And so make sure you're focusing on little things because that's what success is about. It's the small 5%, little small things that most people overlook. All right, so to wrap up this video, earning your first six figures in your agency can seem challenging at first, but once you understand, yes, it's possible, you set the realistic goals. You pick your niche, your industry, on what you're going to actually target, and then you build the strong client relations, the processes, the outreach, the SOPs, price your services, right? And, and then just put your foot on the gas. You're going to be able to grow your agency successfully and profitably. So good luck. I would love for you to actually come back here in six months, 12 months. Hey, Dylan, saw your video. I loved it. I'm actually just crossed the six figure mark. Shoot me a message. I would love to hear from you. And if you got any value from this video, you're like, hey, look, Dylan, this was valuable. I learned something new. I was inspired. I got some new information. Go ahead and leave a comment below. Subscribe. And like, the only way I know that you're actually watching this, even you're still here at the end of the video, is if you do those things. Hey, Dylan, I'm watching the end of the video and you subscribe and you hit the like button. So go ahead and do that right now and I'll see you guys in the next video.