Scale or Fail: Proven Paths to SMMA Success | Free Course: Part 2 of 4

Welcome to this video. The million dollar formula. In this video we're going to talk about really the journey of scaling to millions of dollars in sales. And for those of you that don't know, my name is Dylan Vanis. I'm the founder of Mindful Agency, a digital agency that services some of the top personalities and brands in the world. And I started Agency Box. Um, I, I generated over $20 million in my company and built a team of over 75 people employees. I've overcome some major failures and I continue to reach greater levels of success. In this video I'm going to break down a bit about my journey. The things, the action items I've done, how I've scaled the business, the things I did to get there, what that looks like and how you can do the same thing. So this is going to be a really important and critical video to your guys journey here and your guys success in building your own agency. Because if you understand that a dude from middle class Canada was able to build a, a multiple eight figure multi million dollar company not once but twice and, and do it all by the age of 28, hopefully you guys can understand that. You can too. And with that I'm going to show you some examples of other people who've done it. Because I'm not just some, you know, super rare case or some kind of luck. Like this is something that's been replicated. And so here's what this looks like. This is a stripe account here that processing payments. I just show you guys this, like this is just, this is a, we have multiple stripe accounts in fact and this doesn't include wire transfers and other ways we take payments. But just wanted to show you that you know, I've been collecting money in this, my agency for quite some time and we have you know, pretty significant results. I think what I'm showing you guys on the screen right here is like roughly $10 million. And then of course there's all the other payment methods as well. You may you know, check me out on social media, seen some of the content I create on maybe Instagram or TikTok. But I'm really grateful to be in a place where I'm running a business and I love what I do and so I'm sharing this stuff with you today to show you that it's, it's possible and it's simple, it's not easy, right? You guys are going to have to put in the work, you guys are going to have to take action. But even this 24 hour program is going to help push you to being there in a short period of time. So I went from being a wantrepreneur to a full blown entrepreneur. I've been featured in some major media outlets like Fox, abc, Yahoo Inc. And I actually now have my own column for entrepreneur.com that's my office here in Henderson, Nevada. Basically Las Vegas. And I love my team. We a good portion of my team. Not everyone works out of the office here in Vegas, but that's our headquarters in home base. I was featured in a billboard on Times Square that was like one of the coolest things. I facetimed my mom and she didn't know it was happening. She's like Dylan, like what is that? I'm like it's me mom, that's me. I'm up on the billboard. And so that's pretty cool. And then yeah, this is my column here for entrepreneur.com and so building this business has granted me crazy opportunities like that where I've not only been able to build a fun life for myself where I get to do what I want to do, where I want to do it with a lot of freedom in my life, but I've also been able to employ dozens and dozens of people at my company. In fact I've actually worked with over 4,500 people to help them get into the marketing industry. People that have come through and have coached and consulted and helped build their own business. Many of which have even built six and even seven figure businesses. Here's an example here. Corey Stewart came into one of our programs and in one day close three clients. It's a pretty great wait. I think it was on a Monday. Sean Lewis got a client on a 12 month contract and scaled up using the same stuff that we're talking about in this video. Anthony Peterson closed a 4 month contract at 7k per month. 3k profit per month. 7k per month is what? $28,000 contract. That's pretty sweet. For 4 months and 3k per month net in his pocket. So he's making 12 grand off one deal. Caleb Thorp here, he closed a client and it was a $30,000 package over six months. Pretty sweet. That's not it. You know we have some pretty amazing people that have been able to come through our community and be in that same kind of same people that started here watched program like this and then they just took action. You're going to hear me talk about that a lot in this video is like this process isn't rocket science. It's just hey, let me Take some action and actually move forward. And just one thing to get a day at a time, but just do stuff, do positive actions. Matt posted this in our, in our chat in our group here and said last week, my little one person business cross $1.3 million in revenue. That's amazing. Just to kind of show you guys a few more here, Oscar, Robert, Jonathan, and Nicole. Nicole's a rock star. She's just been growing and growing and growing and nothing can stop her. $27,000 deal. 4,500 bucks for six months. Stack a couple of those up and then tell me how much freedom you have and how much excitement you have in your life. And then the other thing here is I've serviced thousands of clients in my own business. I spent millions on paid media, and I've grown a pretty sizable personal brand. Here's some of my, my friends and clients that we've been able to work with and service. And this is our, my, this is my company's Instagram account here. So what's my journey to success? Like? Did I just wake up one day and boom, I had this wildly successful company? Of course not. I literally tried everything. You name something, some crazy thing, I've done it. In fact, top left corner there you can see the date. 2014. I was selling real live flying squirrels as pets. And I traveled around doing that and it was a really great learning experience. But that wasn't the business that took off. 2015. I tried to start a, a company in the Airbnb space. You know, people talk about Airbnb. I tried to start an Airbnb company. What about 2016? There you see those inflatable couches? Yeah. I tried to sell them. And then you can see the, the E Bike company actually went to China, invested a bunch of money and tried to start an electric bike company. And while, you know, the last couple things here, I think 2016, 2017, I'd started by marketing agency. I hadn't gone full in on it, I hadn't committed. I hadn't said, hey, I'm going to really make this a reality. I was so focused on this, like, get rich from, you know, this quick thing that could just like turn on overnight, don't have to work. And these like some of the companies I tried to start. And it wasn't until I found the little one up there with it says Real Estate Growth Solutions. It's got a little house icon next to it. It's right above the zolly thing and the top middle. And it was a marketing company. I said, all right, let me just. Let me just put all this other stuff to the side. And I didn't have to, but I just made this decision, like, let me just focus for a little bit here and try this out. Let me give it a shot. Let me see this through for once in my life. How many people on this? Like, if you're listening right now, maybe you tried something before and failed, maybe you haven't tried, but you've been sitting on the sidelines watching other people succeed, and you've seen people come through and succeed, and they started at a point where you could have started, too. But for whatever reason, you said, I'm just gonna stick on whatever else I'm doing, or I'm gonna do all this other stuff or I'll do it later on. And that was me. And so I was focused. I was the guy. I was trying to do all these things at once. And I was. You know, I was. I was listening to people I shouldn't have been listening to. And then I just said, okay, this is a proven system. The opportunity is growing. The Internet's only getting bigger. It's not getting smaller. So why don't. Instead of me trying to create some new idea and reinvent the wheel, why don't I just take the system that's already working and make it a little bit better? So that's what I did. I started the marketing agency. And this is just a funny picture that I put together with my team, but what I would do is go out and get clients, and I kind of waited for results. And it wasn't long before I started to get these checks coming in. And about 10 clients here, you can see they're paying me anywhere from a few hundred bucks. I think the lowest one there is, five or seven hundred bucks, you know, all the way up to a few thousand dollars, three, four thousand dollars. And with this, I had a handful of clients in total. No, I was making maybe 20 grand a month in the business. It's pretty cool, right? When I was. When I decided to let me actually, like, pursue this. Let me actually go all in. Let me invest in this. Let me go ahead and. And actually, you know, take action on this, results started to happen. This is me holding some checks here because I was like, this is freaking awesome. Like, I'm making mailbox money. I'm literally getting a check in my bank account. That's not from me just trading hours at a job. And that led to me building up mindful agency. Now, it wasn't just this straight rocket ship up that everyone seems to hope for. There was these ups and downs and ups and downs. But you know, when you have a team around you, you kind of learn the system. You don't have to necessarily go through the pitfalls I went through. And if you follow the systems and the steps and the action steps I give you in these videos here, you're actually gonna hopefully avoid the pitfalls that I went through and be have a much smoother success track. So what I ended up doing is I ended up realizing I was like, holy crap, I'm working pretty hard here. Yeah, I made 20 grand last month, but there's gotta be a better way. I was like, what if I just had like, like one client? And that's when it hit me. What if I just charged one client 20 grand instead of having 10 clients each paying me a couple grand? So I did it. This was one of my, one of my retainers here. I think I took this screenshot maybe a couple years ago, but I signed someone up for a three month agreement at $25,000 a month. Now this wasn't the hey, I want to sign up with you for the next two and a half years type of deal, but it was like proof of concept. It was like, okay, someone is willing to pay $25,000 a month for three months. That's a $75,000 deal from one deal. And of course there's the questions of like, well, what do you sell? Who are the people that are spending this much? Like what kind of business are they? And I know I'm not working with, you know, the world's largest companies here. This isn't Fortune 500. In fact, this is, this was one a one man, one person. And it wasn't that, it wasn't that complex of a, of a campaign. What it was is I was just providing really unique services that are high value. And when I did that, it gave him, you know, there, they gave him confidence to work with me because he wants to work with, you know, a high end company. Well, if I was selling a $2,000 or $3,000 package, he wouldn't have been the client for me. In fact, you oftentimes there's people out there who are willing to buy. Even if I had a $1 million package, there's someone out there that's looking for that person. And if I went to the million dollar person, I said, hey, Mr. Business Owner, I'm a marketing agency owner, I got a $2,000 package here. He would just laugh because he'd Say no, thank you. That's not what I'm looking for. And while that 2,000 bucks would have been nothing to them, it's not the product they're looking for. So if you're able to create a higher ticket package and craft an offer that caters towards these higher ticket people, because trust me, they're out there, well, let's just create something that attracts them instead of selling something that attracts the lower end people. I'm not saying get rid of the lower end stuff, in fact, I think it's a really good way to build consistent income, especially early on. But if you can just think about how, what it would look like to sell these big packages and make 25 grand in a month from one person. Just think to yourself for a second here, like if you were to able to sell, you know, one or two deals, two deals like this a year, like how would that impact your life? Would you be able to maybe spend some more time with your family, go out with your friends a little bit, maybe take your partner, your loved ones out for a nice dinner once in a while and not have to worry about checking the prices on the, on the menu? Maybe you can take your family on a vacation. Maybe you can, heck, even quit your job and just dive into this full time. Maybe one or two of these deals would be the ticket to create that. And just to show you this isn't like a one off thing, this is a capture of my stripe account I took today earlier on when I was putting this slideshow together. And you can see some incompletes. Those are people that are invoices are out and haven't been paid yet. But you can see all the completes we got at the bottom there. 11,000, next one up at 50,000, a couple lower ones, couple thousand, 5,000, 6,000, 300, 6,500. I'm just reading off the ones that have been paid, 6,500, another 2,500 and then, you know, another 6,500 up there. And then, yeah, again, there's a whole bunch of invoices out that haven't been paid yet. But that's kind of typical with business. You got to follow up with people sometimes even after you send them the invoice. So that said, this is the structure now where we can sell packages for 5, 10, 15, 20, $50,000 in a, in a, in a period of time, in a month. And, and it becomes the norm. And again, I'm not getting rid of the lower ticket stuff. I still service my clients as needed. But the target is how can I track these higher ticket packages? And from the examples I showed you earlier, Caleb, Nicole, Anthony, those are some of the partners I've worked with, people that have gone through my programs just like this one here. And they're the ones that are following the systems step by step. So what does success in an agency look like? Well, on the left hand side here you can see that's me on the left. That's one of our clients. He actually, we were at an event, my business partner and good friend Michael there and then, and then that's our client and he signed up for one of our, I believe it was our $60,000 package. We've worked with some amazing clients. You can see some of our case studies there on the side that's just screenshots of clients we've gotten featured in some major publications like USA Today, Business Insider, you know, gq, Forbes, stuff like that, Men's Journal, Economic Journal, Grazia, Grazia. And here's the thing, it's like, do you think that a client that's a high level client would be interested in being on the COVID of a magazine like that? Maybe being inside Business Insider, GQ or Entrepreneur? So that's one of the services that I'm able to offer and that's, you know, one of the reasons why I'm able to sell high ticket packages. But that's not the only thing. You don't have to get your clients featured in these publications in order to, in order to wow them. And then bottom corner down there you can see that's actually my, my head office here. I showed you guys it a little bit earlier on, but it's, you know, really neat to be able to build something like this. And hey, if you guys are in the Las Vegas area, go ahead and give my team a heads up and I'd love to have you guys come down and check things out. We, we do events every quarter or so where we host people at our office. They're starting to get bigger and bigger. So I think pretty soon we're going to be having to move them to another location like a hotel. But for now we're still doing them in our office and it's, it's a great time to kind of show you the operation, show you guys what's going on and also spend the day together, answer some questions and stuff like that. Now that that data office is typically reserved for our top clients. But it is something that, you know, if you work with us and you are succeeding and you're getting results, wins you may be invited out to be a part of that group. Now the reality of this is it wasn't that long ago I was in maybe your shoes or I wasn't really having a breakthrough. In fact, I was just wanting and dreaming of success and I really wanted to get there, but I didn't have the vehicle to do it. That's a photo of me. I was working out of a co working space and, and I just, you know, I just followed the step by step process. I decided I'm going to, I'm going to focus on this. And then I had the vehicle. What was the vehicle? The vehicle for me was my own marketing agency. All those other things I showed you, they didn't work. But why do I know this? How do I know this? Because I tried them all. Heck, I even have a store in Amazon right now. And I can tell you, it's so much headache. I have it because I created it like six and a half, seven years ago when I was in the wantrepreneur phase. That's a tongue twister. And the thing is with that is I created it back then and it's, you know, it's still up there, but it's like headache after headache. And to be honest, I think it only makes like a couple hundred bucks a month. And so the thing is, is like I've done all these things before and for me, the vehicle was an agency. And that's why I speak on this stuff, that's why I share it, because I'm so passionate about it. I don't, you know, my agency's running, it's successful, you know, we're having wins with that. It's like for me, this is about like, how do we get other people to follow this step by step winning process and have wins and success of their own. And trust me, the Internet is so massive. There's abundance of opportunity. There's no shortage of people wanting to buy from you. And if you come in and you go sell a couple of deals, I do not see that as competition because I know that there's a ton of other deals out there. In fact, for every person that closes a deal inside, you know, that's a partner with or has been through these programs like the one you're in right now, for me, it's exciting because it means that the process is just more evidence this thing works. Of course, my stuff, I built it. I know this stuff works through my own experience and success. But for you guys listening, it's like sometimes people look at me and it's like, oh well, Dylan's Dylan, but Nicole's not Dylan, Anthony's not Dylan, Caleb's not Dylan, Oscar's not Dylan. Right. So when the community and your peers start to have wins too, it's also a showcase that, hey look, this is possible. That's my dad in the bottom right corner. My, him and I and you know, my super grateful for, for my family. He told me, dylan, in my next life, I want to be you. My dad was a dentist. His dad was a dentist. And I guess I was supposed to be a dentist, but I'm not. And when I dropped out of college, I dropped out once and my dad wasn't that happy because that kind of broke his dreams of what, what he thought was possible. Right. Things have changed a lot and, and he's seeing what I've gone through and what I've been able to build. His mind has opened up a lot. But he told me, Dylan, in my next life, I wanted, I would want to be you. He said that in jest, of course. Right. Like, you know, just, it's kind of a joke. But, but yeah, it was a very interesting moment almost where it's like he finally accepted what I did as, as real. And for people in that generation that might be listening, maybe you are my father's age or maybe you're my age or maybe you're in the middle or maybe you're younger or older. I don't know where you're at, but I know that this is a system that I've seen work. I have had an 11 year old girl that came through the program and she was getting results. I had, I've had people well into their 70s and even 80s that have come through this and be getting results and then of course everything in between that. So I say that to share with you that this isn't just a something that works for Dylan or works for Nicole or works for Caleb. Like this is something that I'm giving you the process. This is exactly how I scaled up and it's a system that can be followed. So you're here right now. You took the step to at least watch these videos. You know, 70% of people that, that jump into programs like this don't even open them. So you're in the top 30% and well, you're, you're watching through this video, you're towards the end of it, so you're even beyond that. But I have a ton of respect for people like you, people that are taking the initiative and going forward. And actually taking action to better their lives. Like, I have the utmost respect for you. So this process is simple. Scaling up this business is simple. All you have to do is follow the step by step process and put it to work. And so that's what this process is about. I'm giving you the tools, the resources to scale based on my experience and not your trial and error. Hopefully you learned from my lesson so you don't have to go through your own. So just to recap this video, we talked about how running an agency can be very successful. Again, it wasn't too long ago that I was in a similar place as many people that are here in this program. So next video, I'm going to actually show you how you can go out and get customers for this business. Where do you find them, how do you talk to them and how do you get them to pay? So again, just to remind you, action. This program is about action, right? I'm giving you the foundation. But in the next couple, next video, and especially the last video, we're going to be taking some serious action to drive this forward. This isn't a, hey, let me sit back and just have my feet up and let me go with this at my own pace. This is a, hey, let's dive in, let's get results and let's move quick. So stand up. If you have to walk around, do a lap around your house or your office or wherever you're watching this. If you're watching this in the car, take a break and pull over and take a walk, grab a cup of coffee and then come back in a couple of minutes and I'll see you in the next video.