How To Bootstrap Your Agency To 8-Figures

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so. And you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you wanna learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy the episode. Okay, I'm gonna go with Adam. What campaign recap system does everyone use? Anyone feel free to jump in here or Adam, if you have a clarifying question for Adam here, I want to give people a chance to.

You can take it any way you want, but like, you know, we're using PowerPoint just to recap things, but I know SEO is probably automatically flowing into some system, but I'd just love to know maybe for your high-touch client reporting.

Report?

Not yet. Yeah, like, so we do a lot of jobs where it's like a 3-month engagement and it's done, or, and we have to do recap after each month. So there's a little bit difference between reporting is like, we generally give that to clients real time as much as possible. And then like the recap, like, here's how your campaign went. You know, we were out there for 60 days doing XYZ, but Just, I'd just love to know what people are using. Like last week I learned about PandaDoc. I'm just seeing if there's something else I should know.

Adam, I guess I'm curious from your perspective. So your marketing is not digital marketing. So what kind of metrics are you reporting on?

That's great. So we do everything. So we do a lot of similar things. So there's, when we're out there in the real world activating, there's the general impressions that a brand gets by being, you know, in SoHo or on Venice Beach. There are the number of engagements that people we have conversations with, people taste the product, that type of thing. And then there's a whole lot of content we basically provide brands in real time, which is the reporting, but it's client testimonials, time lapses, all that stuff. So we kind of do all that and then We also sometimes have people, you know, oh, you want a second sample, you have to sign up for the newsletter. So we get those type of things going on, or you want to win, you know, a year's worth of cheese from Cabot Cheese, they enter the contest. So we're doing a bunch of things to get people's emails and, you know, all these different type of metrics. But I'm just curious if you guys have an automated way to take your everything that you're doing and it, you know, populates into some kind of software recap report.

I've got something. What we're kind of doing, we're not, we're in traditional digital marketing, but what we're doing is more establishing a baseline with the customer at the very beginning, like what are their expectations so that when we do that summary report at the end, we kind of use that same baseline information, KPIs, to say, here's where you were, here's what we provided. So it's an immediate visible value that you're adding to the project. It sounds like those recap summaries that you're doing are where the value— you're summarizing the value of your whole campaigns that you're doing with them. And so it's kind of hard to automate that. I think like Brennan talked about, like how much time he puts into a proposal. We spend a lot of time on those recaps, but we do have— we're feeding the data in spreadsheets and then we're feeding that into ChatGPT or some other AI and we are asking it to do a roll-up summary basically with adding value like where are the key areas that we performed well, where do we not perform well, where could we do better, you know, all those things. So it actually takes a lot of data, summarizes it, and we do that with even Google Analytics now and a lot of other very technical downloaded data. And it's not always 100% accurate, so be careful. But we're trying to really— I have a team in Pakistan that's trying to write a program where we can do that automatically. Kind of thing, but we're a little ways from that. But that's kind of what we're doing to get it 80% of the way, and then we go in there and we make it look beautiful. And it's really we're selling the next project. It sounds like what you're doing. So I think it's going to be get 80/20 rule, get 80% of it kind of summarized in a consistent way, and then you guys tweak it and then pitch it for the next project. You know, here and recommendations. You know, here's what. We recommend to take it to the next level is we have, you know, hit teams that go out with, uh, on Saturdays at this location to get signups for emails. We have real— we had a lot of success with getting emails. We want to expand on that and target it specifically. So anyways, I hopefully that helps. I think I was—

Kevin, thank you so much. That's amazing. I took a bunch of notes on that.

David, Kim, you wanna say something? Go ahead.

Yeah, one thing to add there is we also do digital SEO. So a lot of our stuff, we can just pull data in from Google Analytics and Google Search Console. I love Looker Studio. Like, you can create templates and then like you just pull data from different sources and press a couple buttons and it spins up a new dashboard based on those templates. For some of the things internally that we do require some manual data entry, like I imagine after doing a campaign with Cabot, the folks who ran that booth or something have to like tally up how many people came for seconds and all that. There might be a process where You have like a templated sheet for like, all right, for these types of events, we use this spreadsheet template. For these types of events, we use this spreadsheet template. And then you might have a Looker Studio dashboard template that connects to that type of like structured data. Like right now, like to spin up a new reporting dashboard for a client takes like 5 minutes.

Did you say Looker or Liquor Studio?

Looker. L-O-O-K-E-R.

Okay, cool. Yeah, it's free. It's from Google. And I love it.

By the way, plug all kinds of stuff into it.

Scott, one day, one day, Scott, you're gonna have to do a tutorial on how you have such a nice setup. 'Cause I talked to someone recently and they're like, oh, it's gonna cost you 30 grand for that type of setup. I'm like, really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we, we can talk about, I mean, I think everybody should have that type of setup 'cause I think brand's a big moat that you guys will have, right? And so you have the next 10 years to build a moat for, for you all, right? I think Adam has a nice background, but Scott's the most professional.

My microphone, I just haven't set it up yet.

Is that background actually just like a black wall or do you have Oh wow. I can give you a paint number if you want. I did my research into what paint, what the colors.

No, it's not hard.

It's just you have to find the contrast. You need 2 lights and a camera.

Yeah. The important thing too is that the camera's below, 'cause the camera right now is looking down on you, right? Someone brought that up to me. So if the camera's below, like you're, they're looking up to you like you're a leader, right? Then, so that, I think it makes a lot of sense. So John, John had a good question here, and maybe Scott, that's something you can share in the group, or we can talk about it in, in this meeting. But John had a good question. So if you had to start your agency over again, totally from scratch, no ex-customers, no partners, what would you focus on? So personally, I would just focus on AI transformation. I literally know a guy that shut his company down.

Okay?

He shut his AI company down and he just focuses on AI consulting and he's charging like Anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 to $30,000 a month just for consulting. And the way he structures it is I think you get one weekly call for an hour with him. I don't want to sell my time like that, but just FYI, he, and I think he's probably doing like, I don't know, $1 million a year or something like that. Right. And that's basically all profit because it's just him working. And then I know another guy in the SEO space. I think he's pulling in like $1.5, $1.6 million in profit. He has One virtual assistant that's in Eastern Europe, and mostly all he does is consult. And so I think I might've mentioned this guy before, but he helps do the dirty work for companies where like, if you're like a big software company, you know, a lot of people are afraid to hire people. He's like, oh, I'll just fire them for you. So he does like firing as a service. He like does like recruiting for them as well. He makes introductions. He helps vet their strategy. And I'm like, oh, can you help us with keyword research? He's like, no, I'm not going to do it, but I'll walk you through it on a phone call. And that's what he does. So going back to what I would be focusing on is if I were starting from scratch, I had nothing, no employees, whatever. I would just focus on the AI consulting piece for larger companies, right? Because I know they're down to pay more money for this stuff and they want to get into it. And then as I get more cash flow, if I want to build it out, then I'll start to hire people to help out and actually help with the implementation. And then I'll just build it out that way and, and go from there. All right, everyone, quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures, even 9 figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads, we share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions personally, professionally. We'll share templates, resources, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment, so you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more, and we hope to see you inside.

Eric, I have a 2-part question related to that. Is, are we, are you, so the first part is like, when you say AI consulting, what level of technical skill is required for that? I mean, do you need to know how to set up vector databases and RAG?

Zero.

Like zero. Okay. So he's giving basically marketing consulting advice on how to build AI agents, for instance, that will perform marketing tasks.

I would say this guy in particular, so the first guy that, that's doing this right now, it's more like business consulting and the marketing angle. He doesn't know too much about marketing, but it's more around the, the business angle for AI in terms of just adding more efficiencies and helping cut costs and things like that.

Okay. The other part of the question was, do you— I know you've said before that your agency's working on building agents and things like that. I've been trying lots of different tools and going back to the technical question, I'm bouncing back and forth between, should, you know, should I hire someone to build something custom or should I be using one of these platforms like CopyAI or RelevanceAI where you can build out these agent workflows, you know, But then I'm tied into a platform, right?

Like, yeah.

And I'm curious what your thoughts are on that.

I think if I were starting from scratch, if I had no— so I think a couple of you know that I got really lucky with a company I invested in and there's a CTO that's like helping me now. And so if you get lucky with that, absolutely jump on that, right? But if I were starting from scratch, I had no developer support, I might just go Zapier because Zapier has a lot of these, they have like a little, there's like a Chrome extension now. There's a lot that you can do with it and you can build workflows that way. I wouldn't tie myself into like a CopyAI or a Jasper. Like, don't get me wrong, like, you know, those companies like crushed it in the past, but those are wrappers and I don't think wrappers are defensible. And I think they're going to be, unfortunately, I don't know how strong they'll be as companies in the next couple years.

That makes sense. Thank you.

Yep. And even OpenAI has said themselves, it's like, you know, if you're just going to build and like You're going to wait for the next AI thing. You're going to try to innovate on AI. We're just going to steamroll you. So there's that. I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host's agency. So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. David Fox, what is your opinion on automating, of auto-optimizing content tools and which do you recommend? David, what's— David Kim, what's your take on it? As a content agency, that's why I'm asking you.

It risks over-optimization, which we've seen and ends up just doing what everyone else is doing. So I'd say use it, but also you, you should have some sort of human in there, like figuring out how to differentiate your content. This is my short answer. Happy to give a longer answer if you'd like.

No, that's perfect. What, what's your favorite tool?

We've bounced back and forth. We started off with Clearscope, got extremely expensive, went to Surfer SEO. Turns out it wasn't as good as Clearscope. Jumped back to Clearscope. We're also We've been looking at Letterdrop and we're partnering with those guys a bit. Their product is pretty freaking awesome. So I'd explore them as well. They're a bit more expensive. I think they changed their pricing recently to make it a bit easier to use like one part of the tool instead of the whole platform. But right now we use Clearscope for most of our work.

And who'd you say, David, who'd you say the other one was that you're testing out?

Letterdrop.

Letterdrop's better than Clearscope?

Uh, we're testing it out. We haven't decided whether it's better than Clearscope or not. It, it's more of a platform for like content marketing and distribution rather than just SEO optimization. Like search optimization is one piece of what they do.

Got it. Yeah, I think I've heard of it before. I haven't tried it before. Um, so Brian asked, number one SEO tactic to supercharge performance. Brian, can you, uh, as an SEO, can you, uh, tell me where you're trying to go with this question?

Sorry if that was a little bit vague. Yeah, I mean, I've been doing SEO my whole career and I think I'm doing, you know, a decent job. And, but I always just wonder, is there something more? Is there something like some advanced strategy, something that like really can make a difference in a short period of time or that it's just, you know, more effective than other things I might be doing? I'm just curious about that.

Well, let me tell you why I hate the SEO industry. So if you look at SEO Twitter, all they do is complain. All they do is point fingers. All they do is blame other people. And I think part of it, like that, maybe they feel that resentment is maybe because their tunnel vision has like, there's a resentment that they're kind of overlooked, right? And so, you know, when I first started doing SEO a long time ago, I was like, no, I'm either going to become like those people because this was happening way back when, right? I'm either going to become like these people or I'm going to expand my horizons, be very open-minded and try to learn other things. And so like, even that's even happening now. You look at that recent Google leak, you look at how things are happening. It's like, oh wow, brands are actually important. Oh, your clickstream data is actually important. Like all these things. Matter at the end of the day. And so when you look at Eight Sleep, they haven't necessarily done much around SEO, but the fact that they're driving 15 million visitors a month just from America is because of all the omnichannel stuff that they're doing. So the F1 sponsorships, the Huberman, the Matthew Walker, right? Like these are all like health people, right? All the things that they're doing, every single podcast, Eight Sleep, Eight Sleep, Eight Sleep, right? And so their brand searches have just gone crazy and they are who they are now, right? And so, and they've shot past sleepfoundation.org. and all these other super optimized websites. And so if I were starting from scratch today, Brian, this is a really long way of answering your question, but I wouldn't focus on SEO today. And I would just look at where there's good, strong organic reach, such as like if my audience is on LinkedIn, Twitter, I would just go for that all day and just keep hitting that because SEO is getting more competitive. And if you don't have that domain authority, you don't have that brand recognition, it's hard to play. So I would try to, if I were to think, I'm thinking about this from a client standpoint too, because When I actually do get on the calls with these clients occasionally, I'll be like, hey, like, what are you doing with this, this, and this? Right? And some of my clients that will listen to the podcast and my people hate this, right? When they listen to my podcast, they're like, why don't we just do everything that Eric's talking about? Right? But that just goes back to broadening your horizons again, because if you're just pigeonholed to SEO as an agency, I think in the next 5 to 10 years, it's too volatile in my opinion. And, you know, we're trying to support our friends and our families, right? So, So yeah, I'll just be careful there. And do I think— so is there a silver bullet? No, I'll just say like you have to broaden.