Live Q&A - Scaling Your Agency
In this 90‑minute live Q&A, host Eric Deeran, co‑host Ethan, and contributor Sarah Peacock discuss practical strategies for scaling video and creative agencies. They begin by celebrating recent client wins—multiple high‑ticket 3‑, 6‑, and 12‑month contracts ranging from $7K to $120K, often secured with sizable upfront deposits. The conversation then shifts to pricing and packaging: they advocate a single core offering offered in 3‑, 6‑, and 12‑month terms, avoiding overly complex tiered menus, and encouraging full‑price upfront or large deposits to improve cash flow. They stress simplifying the sales pitch to focus on outcomes (time‑saving, revenue‑generating results) rather than detailed deliverables, and recommend walking prospects through customized proposals rather than sending static documents. Advertising tactics are covered, with a focus on “sketchbook ads” (long‑form, trust‑building video ads) and the importance of aligning ad creative with the prospect’s existing desire for leads and revenue. The hosts answer audience questions about time commitments, inbound vs. outbound lead generation, and how to handle objections about workload. A case study from Ryan Maloney illustrates how packaging deals into three price points anchors negotiations and drives higher average contract values. Throughout, the tone remains conversational, enthusiastic, and supportive, aiming to give agency owners actionable steps for sales, pricing, marketing, and operations.
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What is going on, guys? We are back for another live. We are live on Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, not TikTok, um, but those are the ones we're live on. We're excited to be with you guys today, and, uh, we're going to be going over how to scale your video agency, how to get more clients, how to get more leads, all the good stuff. If my camera glitches out on me here, bear with me, uh, but, uh, we are here, we're ready to rock and roll. Ethan, what's What's going on?
How are you? Good, good. What's going on?
Not too much, man. Crazy week so far. We got some people joining on Instagram. If you guys are just joining live, let us know where you're calling in from and what questions you have around scaling. And we're gonna start jumping in here. Let's see. Let's go over some wins from the week so far. Let's see. I'm gonna pull these up. I'm gonna take our time, man, because the first couple minutes of these lives are always, uh, slow as people start to trickle in. So I'm gonna take our time because we always get answers— like, we always get questions and answers at like, um, whatchamacallit, uh, like 15 minutes in, which is hilarious. So I'm like, yeah, we shouldn't rush here. Let me see, let me pull up some of the wins that we have rocking and rolling here, guys. And if you're just joining us, let us know where you're calling in from. And, uh, what kind of video agency you are currently running. Let's go over some wins in the Slack channel. Let me pull it up here. Boom, here we go. I don't know how well you guys could see this on Instagram, but, uh, Jason Kindig closed a 3-month, uh, sprint for $14K. Huge. Onboarding call tomorrow. Stacking. Uh, Sarah uploaded one of her sales calls, which is huge. Will got his first call booked with a personal injury lawyer from his ads, which is awesome. What else do we have? We got Sarah Peacock closed a $65K deal, got a $1K deposit, and it's set to close, uh, next week. What else? See, Jason Kindig, another one, $31K for 6 months, got $15K down on that deal, which is great. Let's see, got Gage with a 3-month $12K deal that he closed. Dave Scott, yeah buddy, closed a 12-month $44K deal, which is great. What else, what else? Gage closed a 12-month $60K package, closed $15K upfront. Love to see it. Ryan Maloney got 4 leads yesterday. What else, what else, what else am I missing? Sarah closed a $60K deal. Ashton got 6 new leads and closed a $6K deal. What else do we have? Sarah Peacock with another $40K deal, $20,000 deposit on that one, which I love to see. Sarah's racking in the deposits, man. She's killing it with those, um, and the, the high-ticket deals with medical companies, which is great.
I love it.
Um, yeah, she's closed $120K. Get this, guys, she's closed $120K deals in deals, video deals, off of $2,000 in ad spend. Which is insane. Um, she's crushing. She's a single mom of two, killing.
Those deposits are why you pitch the full price up front.
Yeah, why do you pitch the full price up front, Ethan? I thought I should just go monthly.
Why would I do that? Just like Sarah, you can collect a lot more up front if you can get 50% up front. You know, there's no reason to stretch out.
I think so many people are like, they think there's a rule, they think they have to pitch monthly when they don't.
Like right here, that's the lowest option.
It's the lowest option. That's how you can step down to that if you need to. But if you guys are closing deals, pitch the full amount upfront. I get so many people who are like, oh, but isn't that going to scare them off? It's like you're trying to get that like gasp out of them because then they're like, oh shit, that's a lot of money. So then when you're like, oh, we could put, you know, half down or, you know, a third down, they're like, okay, great. That sounds great. Like, that's so much. That's so much easier for me. And it feels like it's a lot cheaper, you know what I mean?
Um, it's like when you buy a car, right? You put a, you know, $10,000 deposit down, right? You don't put the first $400 monthly payment down. You put $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 down first before you start the monthly payments.
That's exactly right. Yeah, exactly. Um, Evan with a 3-month $60K deal got $10K down. Let's see what else we got. And then we're going to get into questions, guys. We're doing a live Q&A. If you're just joining us, let us know, uh, where you're calling in from and what questions you have. Let's see what else, what else, what else. Brandon Link got a, uh, just pitched his first business that has raised prices, which I love to see. It's awesome. Um, let's see here, what else? Uh, one second, I gotta respond to this.
Cool.
What else? We got Julian with a $7K, $7.5K, 3-month package, and then the wins go on and on and on. But guys, I'm curious, where are you at in your video agency? I'd love to answer any questions you guys have around scaling, getting more clients, getting more leads, whatever it may be. Let's see what other questions we have. Ethan, what are some of the things that are coming up for you this week?
Uh, today I was talking to actually, uh, Parks, who's on the Wins Channel. He's got that call with the lawyer actually going on right now, or within 30 minutes. Um, just going through, you know, what the discovery call looks like of— we were talking about, you know, you're not selling the flight there, you're selling the vacation, right? So just identifying, you know, where are you at, where do you want to be, and how can I help you get there, right? Yeah. For sure. Like the tactical step-by-step of we're going to use this camera and, you know, all of that. It's, you know, hey, what kind of results?
And I think, yeah, I think too many people just get too deep into the, into the deliverables when they're trying to sell these deals, right? Um, I think it's way too much on like they're, they're, they're over— you guys are over-explaining a lot of times when the client really only cares about how am I going to use this to make more money. Or, you know, I always say it's, it's like How can you make your offer as simple as possible? So it's like they pay you and then they can make money as quickly as possible. And I think so many times people overcomplicate it to where it becomes like they're overexplaining, they're making the offer really complex, and then the client gets confused, overwhelmed, and then they're like, oh, you know, I wanna think about it. And it's like, because you added way too much to the offer. So I think a lot of times you just have to dumb things down. And the simpler you can make things in these sales calls, the better time you're going to have and the easier it's going to be to close people as well. Um, yeah, Zeshan says, hey guys, is it better to keep one core package and adjust price by contract length or offer different tiers with different deliverables and higher pricing? Ethan, you want to take that one?
So typically we— yes, we do one core package. But yeah, like, like you said, different contract length. So typically we'll do a, a 3, 6, and 12-month package length. Yeah, obviously those are different prices for longer time, um, and the, the deliverables are typically pretty much the same. There's a, you know, little variation in terms of the volume that you get on a 3-month versus a 12-month, um, but I try not to have too many options where, you know, if we have 3, 6, and 12 months and then a you know, a bronze, silver, and gold, then we have, you know, 9 or 10 different offer variations. It's just too much for them to pick from.
Well, I think it goes back to what you're saying too, what we were saying about like, you just want to make sure the offer is not overly complex either. The offer needs to be simple. It needs to be like, these business owners are paying you because they want to save time and make more money, or save time, save money, make more money. Like that. Those are the outcomes they want. And if your stuff is too centered around like needing things from them, or there's too much involvement, any kind of rich business owner is not going to care to buy something like that because they want to protect their time. And that's the biggest thing for them. So it's like, make your offer around how can I make it as easy as possible for them? And they have to do as little work as possible. And they are willing to pay for that, right? Perfect examples like medical companies like, um, Sarah's closing a $70K or $65K for, for 12-month deal. And like, she one-call closed it because the, the medical company was like, hey, I just want to, like, I just want to pay you to get this. I don't want to deal with it. I'm going to pay you, you come in, you handle it, and that's it, we're done, right? So it's like, don't over-explain. The business owners don't want to understand how it works. They just want to know that it works and then that you can do it for them. And like you're selling them speed, time, implementation. Like those are the true things that you're selling them at the end of the day. Um, so yeah, Zeeshan, let me know if that makes sense. Um, it is better to keep one core package, like Ethan said, and then have like a 3, 6, 12 of that. And then maybe there's like an incentive on your 6-month and your 12-month, uh, like an extra deliverable or some sort, um, to get them to go for those longer-term packages. But you always wanna pitch the full package length. Um, so it's like, hey, it's gonna be a 12-month at $60K, uh, a 6-month at $30K, or a 3-month at $15K. Which one are you leaning towards? And like, that's how you pitch it. And then if they're like, oh, is it monthly? Then you would say, well, no. Well, most of our clients pay upfront, but did you need me to split it up for you? And then you can go back and forth on that. So hopefully that makes sense.
Yep.
Good question. What other questions, guys? I see some people on Instagram here. What do we got? What do we got? What do we got? Let's see. Otherwise, we're going to yap about stuff that you guys don't care about, which is not going to be beneficial to you. Let's see, what other questions do we have? Let me pull some questions from Slack and see what we got. Yeah, something that's working really well for our clients right now too is like sketchbook ads. So like having longer form ads that really build trust with the prospect before they click on your ad. So if you've ever run ads in the past and they haven't necessarily worked for you, it's usually because the ads suck, number one. Um, and number two, they're just not building enough trust. They look like everybody else. There's so many AI ads and photo ads and basic-ass image ads that just like your market is so tired of seeing that you have to do something that's different and actually builds trust with them. At the end of the day. And I, that's why I see a lot of people struggle with ads is because their ads are not good enough, or they just don't understand the pain points of their market well enough to the point where like they can communicate those pain points to them, right? It's like you need to understand what your market wants. And then just advertising is literally as simple as just putting the offer they want in front of them. That's it. Like you're not creating— we always like to say like you're not creating desire. You're not creating this desire. You're just putting your offer in front of an existing desire because you can't make people want something. You just have to simply put your offer in front of them based off of an existing desire they already want. And most business owners, they want more leads. They want more clients. They wanna make more money. And if you can put your offer in front of them, then and position it in a way where it makes sense, they will buy.
That's it.
Um, that's why inbound is much better than outbound, right?
Because they're reaching out to you. They're saying, hey, I'm interested in talking with you. I want to learn more about this. Not the other way around. Not you reaching out to them. Uh, Ethan, you want to take this one?
Let's see. Should I include how much time they need to input in each tier? Also, what I mean, the higher the price, lower their input time. So I usually will schedule— like, most people schedule, you know, one shoot day per month is pretty typical. Obviously it'll vary based on the amount of deliverables that you have in the package, um, also depending on the amount of time the client needs to actually, you know, accomplish the content in the package. So typically most people will list out, you know, hey, we've budgeted for you know, one shoot day per month, two shoot days per month. Um, but that's also not something we can necessarily negotiate to get lower, to decrease the price, because yeah, we need that time to actually film this content. So less time would mean you get less content because we just can't film at all. Yeah.
And I wouldn't put the time needed from them on the, um, on the sheet. I would just communicate to them. I would communicate the time to them in the, uh, in the sales call. Like, hey, this is what we're doing, um, this is what we're gonna need from you. And then if you ever get that objection on a sales call where they're like, well, how much time am I gonna need to put into this? It's usually a trick question. You don't want to just outright answer that because you could shoot yourself in the foot. You want to say something like, um, well, it really just depends, you know, how much time would you have on a weekly basis to dedicate towards something like this? So you see how I didn't answer the question? I just asked them what time they would be able to dedicate, and then I can see if I can fit what we do into that, because then I can't lose, right? If they're like, oh, well, I really have like 5 hours a week, I'd be like, oh great, we probably only need like 3 to 4 hours a week to do something like this. So that actually works out great. We probably won't even need the full 5 hours a week, right? Whereas if I just came out and said, you know, we're gonna need 5 to 10 hours a week, uh, then they would be like, oh, well, I only have 3, so like this probably won't be a good fit. Let's go ahead and cancel the call. I'm not really interested, right? So it's like you never want to answer the question outright. You want to understand excuse me, what the intention is behind the question and then say, okay, great. Like we could probably fit that within whatever answer you gave me.
Right.
So then you can't really lose. People just shoot themselves in the foot by just outright answering questions a lot of time, a lot of times, and they just need to, they need to make it more like what is behind that so I can understand it a little bit more, especially on the time side. So it's huge.
Just gotta clarify.
Yeah, for sure. What other questions, guys? I see you guys on this live. Better be asking questions, otherwise we're gonna wrap this up early. People are just starting to trickle in here 15 minutes into our live here. Let's see, what other questions? What other questions? Let's see. If you're just joining us, we're going over how to scale your agency, how to get more leads, how to get more clients, how to scale your, your fulfillment, how to hire the right team members. We're going over all of it. We've worked with over 800 plus, almost, I think it's almost 900 now. Uh, let me look at our sheet. Video agency owners we have worked with, 852, 852, uh, video and creative agency owners, which is a lot. We've been doing this for a minute, man. I forget how long we've been doing this. Uh, we got Southend Productions. What's going on? How are you? See you on the live here. We're going over any sort of, uh, questions you guys have around how to get more leads, how to set up an inbound system, how to go through sales calls. We are answering all of it. Let's see if there's any other questions we got here. And then, yeah, Zeeshan, if you have any other questions on this too, I just would not be including anything around time. I would just have it around how quickly can we get you that result is really what we're looking to do here. So let's see what other questions here. Let's see, go over a couple more of these wins. Oh, I wanted to highlight, I just did a case study with Ryan Maloney. Right before this. I want to go over part of his win too because he comes from like the, the larger quote and bid type, uh, clients. Let me find this. I'm finding in our Slack channel here. Where is it? Here it is. Here we go. Yeah, so he works a lot with corporate clients, right? That's where he came from. Um, but one of the things he said, he locked in a 6-month deal at $59K with a beauty brand and then a, uh, 12-month deal at $90K, uh, with an airline company. I don't know which one it is specifically, I have to ask him. Um, but one of his big takeaways, which I think is interesting, is he's never used package pricing before with corporate clients. Um, he says it's a complete game changer, which I have that case study coming out later today. I'll upload it on my YouTube channel for you guys as well so you can check it out. Um, but one of the benefits of doing the, the 12, 6, and 3-month packages is What he was saying is like originally when he would quote them, he would quote them one price and then they would try to just take things out of that price to get them lower and lower and lower. Whereas when he does the packaging, he has like a super high price that anchors them, right? And then he has a middle price and then a lower price and they all have different amounts of deliverables obviously. But when he does that, what he noticed is, is that they would naturally go towards the middle obviously based on human psychology, but they wouldn't negotiate anymore because they would just fall into one of the packages he had for them, which I think is really interesting, you know, like, as opposed to just giving them one price, he gave them 3 options and he actually made more money than he would have previously pitched, which I think is cool.
So, yeah, well, that's also why selling the outcome is so important because if, you know, when they come to you, they just say, well, hey, we need video, right? Yeah. Or, hey, I come in with a solution. Here's what you need based on what we've talked about.
Yeah.
Getting you from point A to point B. So you're more of the expert and less of just the, you know, order taker.
Well, I think what's interesting too is he talked about his proposal. Like, he used to— he would lose tons of deals by just simply sending proposals to people and not actually walking them through how that is going to— how it's going to work for them. And Sarah Peacock, um, the, the client we were talking about earlier, she, um, she's closed like $100K. I think it's up to like almost $200K in deals now. One of the major takeaways she had was like, you just gotta do a little bit of work on the sales call. Like, it's not that hard. Just don't be lazy. Like, take— if you're asking someone to pay you $60,000, take some time to walk them through how it's gonna work for them and customize it, for God's sake, a little bit. I think so many people are just a little bit lazy where they're like, I'm gonna send this proposal, or I'm not gonna follow up on this, or like, they're gonna buy if they want to. And all of that keeps you stuck. Because if you just put in a little bit of work with these clients, they would pay you that amount of money and like you would stand out from every other person. And Sarah was like, I feel like I'm like, um, I'll find that. Maybe I can find the clip real quick. But she was like, I feel like I'm, um, like I'm cheating because it's so easy because all I'm doing is putting in a little bit of work with these, with these clients.
Right.
Um, yep.
Yeah.
So, uh, Zeeshan says after the sales presentation, if they ask us to send us a document, should we, should we not? Ethan, you wanna take that while I find this?
Yep.
So yeah, so I would clarify, you know, yes, I can send you something, but you know, what, you know, piece of information are you looking for? Yeah, in particular, you know, are you looking for, you know, deliverables? Are you looking to present this, you know, to somebody else potentially? And just clarify the reason behind, you know, asking for, you know, a one-sheeter, you know, proposal, you know, just whatever, whatever, whatever they're looking for. And more importantly, why they're looking for it as well.
Yeah, for sure. Let me see if I can find this snippet of what Sarah was— she was dropping some gems on our coaching call. Let me see if I can find some of it here. Let me see if I can find— let me see. Give me 2 seconds here. Mm. Yeah, let's see.
Here we go.
Let me see if I can find it.
Here we go.
Let me know if you can hear this too.
I was obsessed with stories, you know. I put this idea together, totally workshop it if you want, you know, trash it if it's, you know, doesn't resonate. But, um, just wanted to pass this along. And they were both just like, oh my God, you know, you'd be amazing. I mean, people just are like, I know, do a little bit of work and they just like freak out, you know.
For sure. Cool. I want to keep it moving too, Sarah. I appreciate you. Yeah, I mean, that was one of the main takeaways too. Let me see if I can get back further in the conversation, but that was one of the main things is like you just have to do a little bit of work and a lot of these doctors will, they'll be like, great, like you customized a proposal to me, you walked me through it. It's not that crazy. Like she was walking through some of her proposals.
I think we said $250, but some bleed, some bleeds in her, in her ecosystem that, you know, I realized she wasn't monetizing properly. She doesn't have a central hub as a website for her. Dr. Kate White, OBDYN. I made some suggestions here to get rid of the noise and consolidate into two clean lanes. Just kind of a rebrand overhaul. I recommended retiring her Recalibrate Health MD. Separate, just made a couple recommendations here. And then I came in, I did a mockup of what a website for her could look like, of what we could potentially do, and to just show her where everything lives. And again, like, I have, I have some preferred partners that I'll use, like, to fulfill this. I'm not going to build her website, but, you know, I've got partners and contractors that will do it and will do a great job, and I'll just pay them and make a commission off of that. And then here is— so I— part of it is, you know, developing for her, developing some keynotes. Again, like, it's really nothing— like, it's— I'm acting like I'm creating, like, a strategy for her, which I am, but, like, in the end, it's really just, like, me— and my editor is on salary— me going to film like a really polished, you know, reel and having my editor do it and just making it up on her website. Like, it's really not a huge fulfillment for me, but it sounds like a huge, a huge leap for her, you know what I mean? So it sounds like solving a huge problem for her, which I'm creating. Like, I feel like that creates more of a value thing or a sense of, you know, oh my God. And then, you know, how to monetize her speaking engagements. You know, she can, she can make them, you know, partnerships with CME, continuing education for medical people, speaker fees, blah, blah, blah. Come in here. I show her how, you know, one month, one day of filming becomes like months worth of content. And then I also I also told her that, oh yeah, she's launching, she's launching this new health practice, which is a membership-based. It's $4,000 a year. So I showed her what the ROI could look like. And then here, her podcast, she's not monetizing it currently. She's spending $34,000 a year, not getting a whole lot. This is where I show her how she can monetize her podcast. I'm not going to be her agent to do that. I'm just going to make it easy for her to do things that she's going to do by, you know, having my— by taking over the workflow, by empowering her to, you know, do her podcast at home instead of paying $34,000 a year for a studio. And, you know, I can load up an Amazon card, set it up for her when I go to film her videos, you know, her brand film. That's no problem at all. Come in here. Okay, so I'm estimating cost per lead possibly if we run ads against her speaking pipeline and her new practice pipeline. These are just guesses. Okay. I wanted to have a decent guess. Now, her patient acquisition ROI is going to be even greater because I think I did this math based on like a $1,000 a year membership. It's $4K a year. So we're actually going to be quite a bit more than that. 2 to 3x ROI for that. And then I broke down the math for her. I mean, oh my God, if I'm making her $1.6 million a year, she'd be a fucking idiot not to hire me. And then, and then here, and then this is just a little bit of what I deliver. Her start date, talking about what her brand stack is going to look like. Again, you know, I've got some reliable preferred partners that can install GoHighLevel and run and create those funnels so I don't have to be the one fulfilling it. Again, I'm just charging a flat rate and then it's going to cost me minimal to fulfill that for the client. So yes, the next slide here and then boom, here's the offer sheet. And she— yeah, towards the end of the call, they had to go really quickly. I said, how about we do a deposit now? Because, you know, I've got a lot of hormone doctors on my list and creating that sense of urgency, you know, and I don't want to— I don't want to sign too many of you guys. And, you know, if you want to— even if it takes you a couple of weeks to figure out exactly what you want to do here and ramp down the current podcast production company, tell them, you know, give them like 2 take notice or something like that. That's fine. You know, and she's like, okay, yeah, done. And her husband was there. They did a podcast together, of course.
And so it was like a good example of just like she takes the time to walk them through it on the call. She's not just like sending them this proposal and then hoping that they'll understand how it works, right? So it's like, I think a lot of times I think we take some good notes from that of how do we actually walk the client through on the sales process, how we go about it, the ROI, like doing some of that work instead of expecting, expecting the client to do the work for you when you're the one asking them to pay you at the end of the day, you know what I mean? So hopefully that's helpful. Hopefully it gives you guys some insight. We're gonna wrap it up, get some more questions here, give you guys a last call for questions, Q&A, and then we're gonna wrap it up and we gotta jump to client work here. What other questions do you guys have? Going once. Let's give them a second here. I know there's a bit of a delay. Let's see. Going twice. All right. All right, guys. We'll be back next week for another Q&A. Let us know if you have any questions for us. We will talk to you in a bit and, uh, have a good rest of your week, guys.
See ya.
Peace.
