How we plan to build a $100M+ Agency in an unorthodox way

When I talk to people, it's like, yeah, like if you're really as good as you say you are, then you're gonna do it. You're gonna do pay for performance. This is why we hire smart people in here. You know, part of that is saying, okay, we go to a SaaS company or whatever. We say, okay, you guys pay us $500 per sale or per lead or whatever. And then, you know, we start helping them drive leads. We start helping them drive sales and they will pay us. We'll make money on the margin there, right? When I look at one of my friend's companies, I think I told you guys, $26 million a year. 10 employees. Like, that's a tight-knit family and I want to keep it— I want to keep it small ideally. I'm not opposed to growing more, but I don't think we need hundreds of employees. I want to keep quality high, the culture good, because if you add more people, culture is going to deteriorate a little bit. So I want to maintain that because that's the number one thing for me.

How do we do a great level 10?

Agenda.

Yes.

And what do we do when we get to IDS?

We put it to-dos.

Yep, prioritize. Get stuff back on track, go back into your work.

Shall we begin? Let's start with good news from last week, starting with Hannah.

My roommate had a friend's dog over for 2 days, and I've never met the dog, but the dog instinctively kept coming in my room and sleeping with me. His name was Dash, and I'm in love. So that was a good surprise.

That's awesome. I had a birthday/Super Bowl party that was a lot of fun, and people brought a lot of food, and I think I'm still full.

How many pizzas did you have?

How many pizzas, you said?

Yes.

I had approximately one half, a half pizza.

Okay, that's good.

So a quarter.

Yeah.

Mine was finishing my manuscript finally, so that took about 7 hours over the weekend. Obviously the Super Bowl is good too, and just a lot of reading too. How did that new topic do? Did it okay?

Interestingly enough, like, we had— it was number 1 on views and watch time. For some reason, we got -4 subscribers, which is weird.

I don't know why. That's fine.

What was the topic?

It was a nifty marketing idea.

Next one, customer, employee, vendor headlines. Who's got something?

JJ's starting.

Yeah, JJ's starting.

Eric and I will be in Miami next week until Wednesday, FYI.

A lot of us are doing jobs right now. Let's say if I got sick or let's say Noah got sick, then we're just kind of screwed on the video side. Or if Ben got sick, we're kind of screwed on the client side, sales side. There's a lot of that going on, right?

Yeah.

So we want to figure out how we can prevent these single points of failure. And one of the things we wanted to do was to— because we all do a lot of different things, we want to identify maybe a top 3 all the way up to 10 things to— that are critical to our job and then potentially start to document them. So I put together this memo. I shared it with Selena, Zach, and Zach and Brynn. You can go through it, you can comment on it. So go through the document, take 5 to 10 minutes or so, and then just leave comments in there. And then everyone else here has a physical copy. So I'll stare at the clock for about 5 minutes and I'll check in. And then yeah, those of you that are here, just write down your questions and then we'll go through the questions. So this is one of the— There's white powder over there, what's that?

That was from me back in December, we partied really hard.

It's there if you need it. These are staple for Asian people. They're shin cups. It's really unhealthy now that you look at it. 1,300 milligrams of sodium, but who cares? It's only 360 calories, so it's healthy. Single Grain is number one, the number one customer at this restaurant. It's Hashiaki Tori by Daniel Sham Tom, and we're gonna see if they have the ramen today. If they don't, I'm gonna smash your camera in. Hey, how's it going? Doing good, and you? Good. Do you guys have the ramen back or no? Unfortunately, we don't.

All right, let's go ahead and start. If you're getting emails from me from a mysterious email address that's asking if you have spare time, please don't respond to them. It's probably gonna go to your spam anyway, but this happened to Eric, I think, last year?

Yeah, we'll be beefing up our security probably sometime in the next year.

The next part of it is he'll ask if you have time, and then if you respond, it will say Please go buy $100 worth of gift cards.

Almost fell for it.

No, no, no, he was leaving to go buy the gift cards that Eric told him to buy.

Oh wow, okay, we're gonna need to beef up security faster.

The BHAG is obviously 10 years out, so we ended up reading a book called The 3-HAG Way, and the 3-HAG is a 3-year highly achievable goal. So we wanted to put one in place because 3 years is kind of where the long-term meets the short-term goals, and it's something that we can achieve and we can build out a plan. It's kind of hard to We're trying to build out a full plan. How do we get to a 10-year goal? But you can build out for 3 years. Some people have been here for 3 years, so it makes sense.

So in terms of identifying where we're gonna focus, obviously we don't wanna do every single thing. We wanna know what we're good at. Our target market is really gonna be that SaaS that Eric was talking about, and, you know, kind of fleshing out what that hunting looks like. E-commerce, we've had some success with the e-commerce brands we've been working with. And also EDU, just because of the foundation of the company and what the focus is. Seeing success there is also gonna bolster our own efforts of trying to be greater educators in the space for marketing.

But we were speaking to a coaching group last week that's looking at helping us. And he said he originally didn't want to take the call because he heard agency. And he's like, dude, most agencies, I don't even want to talk to them because they don't add value. But as you started talking more and more about kind of all the stuff that Ben's talking about right now, it's like, yeah, I'd love to work with you guys because you guys are actually focused on driving value. Like, but I don't want to work with any other agency.

We want to specialize for a couple of reasons. Number one, we know we can be good at this. This is where we put our efforts in. This is where we learn. But also because a lot of agencies do try to be a jack of all trades in every single thing. And that's something that we've never done. always want to be really honest with clients about what we can and can't do. And that's something we want to continue forward with. And that does include where our specialties lie. So when clients come to us, like, if we can help them, we will, but we know exactly what our strengths are.

So Zach, I mean, he wanted to congratulate Noah and Hannah for hitting output numbers. It's not an easy thing to do. I've actually been harping on it quite a bit. So we're right now publishing about 35-ish pieces a day, and we're trying to ramp that up even more. It's really aggressive with the amount of people that we have, and I know that. So congratulations.

Um, the compliments are addressed.

All right, can you explain what is this belt about?

The belt is given to the person who exhibits our values the most that week. Whoever has the belt that week gives it to someone that they see personifies as many values as we have during that week. So it's not like no one else deserved it, but that person really did deserve it. Am I talking too much?

Personal best, Super Bowl party this weekend.

Professional, I had a really good call with Zach today. He just closed a ClickFlow client. We're just figuring out how to do a really easy pass-off from ClickFlow to Single Grain, which is exciting.

ClickFlow is a software that Eric's been building for the last couple years that works with your website to find some automatic suggestions to improve your content overall. So the term they use is content intelligence, and what it basically does is it looks at your site and it says, hey, You're not optimizing this content. If you change the title and you upgrade it to this, you'll get a better click-through rate. You can get more traffic this way. Or this, this really amazing article has been performing really well in the past, but maybe now it's not performing as well. If you made this tweak, you'd see some improvement. And that software has really enabled us to have a lot of different conversations with different companies who may not be suited for agency services, but They can really use this software. Wanted to give you a little context about what ClickFlow is. Now we can go back to the vlog and carry on our story.

I cleaned my apartment this weekend, which is like a big thing. When you finally—

I didn't— no, no, no, no, no.

I didn't clean out. I didn't like throw stuff away. I literally cleaned like, like, you know.

That's a pleasure.

Yeah, like Cinderella style, you know?

You hid everything.

I just shoved everything under my bed and it was fine.

What? Y'all being dramatic.

I just have sniffles.

So don't touch.

Here, here's my hand.

Like, everyone just—

I don't have coronavirus.

Are you sure?

I don't have the flu. Y'all dramatic. I have the sniffles.

It's over.

That's how it starts.

All right, all right, uh, Sabina.

Slow close.

Let's go with a personal best.

Personal best, I took a break yesterday to go watch Bad Boys for Life, and now I have a new crush.

Who?

The villain.

Who is it?

I'm not gonna say.

Bad boy.

I'm not gonna say.

Bad boy.

But really, his real name is Jacob. We're hitting— the content team is hitting all of our output goals and some. We're like surpassing them, so that's impressive.

I sat through the entire John Cena Playing with Fire movie. My little sisters, and enjoyed it. Keegan-Michael Key does his thing and made me laugh, so I was like, I can't be mad at this movie, can I? I did see Noah's Carousel today, and we don't necessarily get to see all the stuff that's a little bit more innovative, a little bit, uh, more cutting edge in a sense. So normally I would do a sort of co-champion, but Because Noah brought it up, I'm gonna give it to him this week. Also, there's a chance he may not infect me.

He also deserves it, maybe.

He also may not infect me with infectious diseases as well.

Really?

So not that I get sick, but probabilities are in his favor as well. So I'm gonna go with Noah.

Aww, a warm, compelling speech.