How to Go from Consulting to Agency (2019 Guide to Consulting)

Fun fact, I actually got a client paying $30,000 a month off of a Quora answer that I wrote. They stayed around for 3 months, so $90,000. Not bad. This is kind of how you get going, how you cut your teeth with consulting. So in this video, we're actually going to talk about how to go from consulting to agency. So my name is Eric Siu. This is Sujan Patel over here. We both have— we both went from consulting to agency. And look, if you like videos like this, don't forget to leave a comment. Let us know what you plan to do in terms of growing into an agency, and also don't forget to subscribe. And without further ado, let's get started. So in terms of going from consulting to agency, I mean, how did you go about getting started, and then what did you do? Why'd you decide that you had to become an agency?

Yeah, so I think it's all about scaling, right? I got a couple clients, I'm like, I can't do this all myself. And you know, I asked myself, like, what can I do in my business that can bring in the value, right? And it wasn't doing the work, it was really the strategy, right? So I started off with Single Grain Days as an SEO. We did lots and lots of SEO work, and to do SEO you need content, you need links, pretty much those 2 things, and maybe a technical SEO audit. So a lot of upfront work and then a lot of ongoing work. A lot of that stuff isn't sexy, it's like a lot of just hard work. And so I needed people, right? And so I needed revenue to support those people. And so if you're doing consulting, you hire people, your profit goes down, so you need more clients, and it's just this consistent like back and forth. Whereas when you build an agency, you have a team and you have a fixed, maybe a fixed cost, but you have clients that can come into that and then over time it kind of scales. So I realized really early on that I'm limited at revenue potentials of maybe $300,000 to $500,000 because I can only take on 3 to 5 clients. Let's say each client's $10,000 a month.

Yeah.

That's, that's, I'm stuck at $500K. What do I do after that? So really it was building out the team to kind of scale.

And maybe we should give people a little context too. So like, you know, everybody, when you start as a consulting consultancy, you might be working from like your parents' basement or working from a cafe or whatever. That's totally fine. Maybe just to give you a little context as to why we're talking about this right now, you can talk about the types of clients that you work with. I can give a little background too. We can kind of continue just to show that we're not bragging, but to give you an idea of the possibilities if you're able to kind of follow the frameworks and follow the experiences and the mistakes that we've made. So, Sujan, what are some of the clients that you work with right now at Web Profits?

Yeah, I mean, we've worked with all types of clients from large liquor brands like Absolut Vodka, Mint, Cabbage, large brands that you would think would have a built-out team, and they do, but they still need agencies and consultants to scale. And these brands came from So if you watched the past video, lots of referrals, lots of outbound and building case studies, and then just building the personal brand. What about you?

Great. Yeah, so on our side, like clients that we have, Lyft, Amazon, Nordstrom, and to Sujan's point, actually when we did the math, a lot of it comes through referrals or the content or the brand that we've built. So that's kind of the starting point. Like in the last video, you saw how to start consulting. That's the first part, but like, what are some key lessons you learned in terms of going from consulting to agency? You talked about building a team. What are some, like, I guess, other lessons people can kind of take from that?

So I think the biggest thing is when everyone starts a consulting business, you get a couple clients, you're like, oh my God, I'm gonna be rich, 'cause I can just infinitely scale this. No. Now you've turned from a consultant, a freelancer essentially, to building a business, right? And building a business takes a marketing plan, there's cost to it, There's scalability, like process and, okay, how the team works together is retention of employees, retention of clients and things like that. But let's talk about the marketing part. I think a lot of people fail building a consulting agency because they can't get enough clients. They can't get enough business. And I think I've talked to so many people like, hey, I'm stuck. What do I do? Well, have you actually done marketing for your business?

Like, what are you doing?

I know, and you do a really good job with this at Single Grain.

Yeah.

You have a marketing budget, you have marketing, you have a marketing team for the business. And I think it's a big part of it because you have to think about this agency as a business.

And I think it's totally fine too, like if you want to be a freelancer, you can totally do that, right? And I think from Siu, I guess maybe this is a good question to ask too, like why have we gone from, and there's, you know, 5 partners, 3 went back into consulting or have a consulting thing or agency going on right now. Why even bother trying to build an agency when we have other stuff going on?

Yeah, I mean, I think the big thing about an agency and why I love it is that I love— it's really fun working on different projects at the same time. And so I kind of strive when I'm working and I have my creative juices like flowing on like one client, and then like the team kind of is— there's a lot more pieces to it when the execution, then moving on and moving on. So I love working on multiple projects. I also like the money that comes along with it, right? You've got a pretty great revenue stream. So when you build a personal brand, I think you can monetize it with paid speaking engagements, ads on your website, and let's face it, like, you want to get paid on AdSense or one big whale client? And I can tell you that one or two clients from building hundreds of thousands of visitors to your blog, or tens of thousands, or even hundreds of visitors, is way better than any other form of monetization. So I think it's monetization, it's my preferred monetization method.

Yeah, actually, there's— you brought up something, or something just came to my mind. It's like you hear about all the people that go from agency to like shutting down the agency and building software businesses. The irony is that Neil, you, and myself, we have helped subscription businesses, we have like our software too, and we still have the agency. So I think my opinion, and I'm curious to get your thoughts too, is When people say they're shutting down the agency to focus on something, it's just like, dude, why don't you just hire someone that, you know, can continue to grow the agency while you're working on the other stuff? I don't know how you see it.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point because I think that's where people fail, is that management part, right? So like, when you go from consultant to an agency, you've got the team, you've got the process, you need to do marketing for yourself, and then there's management of the agency. And you do a really good job at this where you hire senior people, manager level, director level, even executives to run the operations of the business. Because, you know, I'm a marketer, right? So I can market. When I realized, and what I did wrong at Single Grain when I first started it, was that I tried to be the CEO when I'm really a good, you know, director of marketing. I'm a good CMO. I should have hired a CEO or COO to run the operations, the management, the HR, all that stuff.

Mm-hmm.

But I think That's where people fail, where it's like, oh, I'm gonna go focus on this. It's like, it's not like the business fails. I think you just hit another wall when you go from consultant to agency. And that, I'm talking, so consultant, you can get to $300K to $500K. Now I'm talking about agency at $500K, maybe to a few million.

Yeah.

And then that $1, $2, $3, $4 million mark, depending on how much you charge, you end up hitting another wall, which is operations, management, You now have to put on your big boy pants and actually do the right thing.

That's what we got for this one. Let us know in the comments what you think and how you plan on doing it. In the next video, we're actually gonna talk about 6 pitfalls to avoid, or 6 mistakes to avoid when growing an agency. So we'll see you in the next video, and goodbye.