Should New Agencies Accept Bad Clients for Cash Flow?

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Should you take on bad clients just to build cash flow during $0 to $1 million phase? I would say you have to stretch your ICP a little further, but not take on nightmare clients that call you all the time or text you all the time or whatever. I think there's a limit to that, right? In some cases, you have to put food on the table, so you take what you can get. But yeah, you just can't have the ones that are going to occupy too much headspace.

Right.

Does that make sense to you? Is there a follow-up there?

Yeah, so there are some clients that are so needy and they're not gonna have that much of a budget in themselves. So yeah, that— I was looking for that balance and I think that part of that is because I'm having a child.

Oh, congrats!

In a few months.

That's awesome.

That's pretty I'm pretty anxious about that as well.

Oh, and how old are you again?

I'm 24.

My God.

Yeah.

All right.

Congrats.

Yeah, that's amazing.

So, okay.

Yeah.

So let me answer you this.

Okay.

So I think what you need to do is you need to tier your clients, right? In terms of headache, right? So you can tier them in terms of how much they're paying you, but you can also tier them in terms of headache too. So, you know, tier 1 would be the biggest, or maybe tier 5 would be the biggest headache, right? And then tier 4, tier 3, tier 2, tier 1. And then you can, when you look at all of them on a spreadsheet, it's like, okay, how much are they paying? Are they worth the headache? headache at the end of the day, at least you have a, you have more of a methodical process here in terms of who you should eliminate, right? And the ones that, that are more of a pain in the ass, you put an asshole tax on them, right? So you charge 'em 25, 50%, 100% more, whatever. And you can just say, hey, hey, my prices are going up or whatever. Um, they're doubling. Oh, I can't pay. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. Well then we're gonna have to offboard in a month or so. So you have a lot more control than you think you do here.

Right, right.

Thanks.

Thanks a lot.

All right. Brian asks, Brian, is that a Miami background? That's a Miami background, right?

Brickell. Yeah.

Brickell. Yeah. You know, did I tell you I lived in Brickell? That's downtown. The 3rd to the right is downtown.

Actually, yeah, it might actually be closer to downtown. That's near like Biscayne.

Yeah, it's downtown.

Yeah. Yeah.

So Brian, Are there any upcoming digital marketing conferences worth attending that aren't expensive, crazy expensive and stateside? Well, Brian, define what expensive means.

I don't know. I mean, I see some conferences and it's like, oh, you know, it's going to be like $2,000 to go for like, you know, 2 days or 3 days. To me, that's kind of a lot.

Yeah. Well, I mean, here's the thing. So I'm looking at here. So let's do this. I'm just looking at one of the conferences that Neil and I are speaking at. Register now. So I remember, before I forget this story, SaaStr, this is back in the day. I think I paid $1,000 for a ticket or whatever. It was 2 days and it's probably more expensive now, but I was just walking around and then I remember a guy stopped me and said, oh, look, podcast guy, right? That client ended up being like 2, 3 years or so. And then another client, that was another client for like 2, 3 years as well. So they actually stayed for a while, both of these. And that was, that was so successful that the next year, so I think we got 3 clients out of it, just me walking around. And then the next year we actually ended up paying $60,000 or $70,000 for a booth and we brought a couple of our people. We got absolutely nothing from it. So that's another lesson. That's a side lesson, right? Like the booths maybe aren't so much worth it. But I think attending industry conferences. So Brendan's not here, but Brendan goes to all these travel conferences and he throws dinners and that works out really well for him. So I think it just depends on where your audience is hanging out. But I'm looking at HubSpot's thing right now. Yeah, it's $1,500. That's the event both Neil and I are speaking at in September if you guys want to come to Boston. So, but to answer your question, things that are under $2,000, I'll go like under $1,500. I guess inbound would be one of them. Brian, you sell SEO mainly, correct? So I like the industry SEO conferences, right? So people still go to MozCon. Ahrefs has that conference that's coming that for sure is not stateside, but it's going to be less money. It's like $500 or whatever. And I like the industry SEO conferences. So that's all I can speak to. But in general, I find a lot of these events are Pretty, like, I don't know, $1,500, $2,000 plus. So you just have to— my, my whole take on it is if I can at least break even from it, it's a win. If I can meet one amazing person from each event, um, each day, that's a win for me because I know that's going to come back in spades in the next couple of years.

True.

Thank you.

Yep.

All right.

We got, uh, Adam here. Adam asks, how can I get— how can I help get my agency and my clients on a practical CRM system to automate lead nurturing? Let's see, what are you using right now?

So I don't really have anything. I'm definitely a CRM bozo. I know you're talking about bozos earlier. Sadly, I'm a bozo when it comes to this. And I tried to go with GoHighLevel and I had some basic CRM-like functionality. I wouldn't call it CRM through Wix, but anyway, GoHighLevel has been hard to integrate with my site on Wix. And I'm trying to use Wix as the testbed to see like, how can I give clients like a janitorial services firm, like I'm getting them leads with Google Ads and they get a bunch of phone calls, then they never call the people back. I need to be able to store the leads, have people put in just like with Salesforce, like, oh, this is, I called them now and then we'll get, then they'll get an automated reminder like, oh, you should call them again now or send them an email, something like that to generate this top of mind, like here's how to outreach to these leads and mark them as MQLs, SQLs, all that fun stuff. I know I heard about Vbout from Kevin, but I'm just like, wow, this has been way harder than I thought to figure it out. It's like, do I just do HubSpot? But I thought GoHighLevel was going to be easy.

But so I might let a couple of members jump in here because I see people making faces. So my answer is just going to be just use HubSpot because that's what we do. But anybody feel free to jump in here. Let's use the mastermind here.

HubSpot.

We use HubSpot with all our clients.

I gotta take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association.

This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group?

She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas.

The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, and he says, The ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So Again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside. Anybody else?

What's the rage with GoHighLevel? And is it just a farce?

It's, to me, GoHighLevel, I only see internet marketers talking about it. And when that's, when that's the case, I tend to veer away from stuff like that. Um, I come from an internet marketing background. I just know that it's like they're not product people at the end of the day. I'm not saying HighLevel, excuse me, is good or bad. Um, but I just see so many internet marketers promoting it where I kind of just get an icky feeling. So it's not maybe a fair judgment. Go ahead, Kevin.

Yeah, we use Pipedrive, but I've been looking at a variety of new ones and there's one called Copper CRM that's targeted specifically at agencies. It's kind of a new CRM in the marketplace, so it's not like HubSpot, you know. But it's simpler.

It's—

I'm looking for simple because a lot— I've used Salesforce, I've used in different roles, and a lot of these CRMs are way overkill. You're going to use 10% of the, um, features in there. So I think simpler is better. I mean, Pipedrive is a decent simple kind of, um, uh, Kanban type board. And so that's, that's what, you know, I could throw out there.

Got it.

Yeah, we use, I have a couple of agencies. So for lead gen agency, we actually use GoHighLevel. The craze about GoHighLevel is primarily one affiliate fees, you get paid 40% if you sign someone else up, that creates a bit of a craze there. So that's why internet marketers are big on it. But for us, GoHighLevel is great because there is so much opportunity for customization. If you figure out how to do automation in the backend, it's way more powerful in my opinion than HubSpot. I hate HubSpot, no offense. It's great for like HubSpot is great when you have developers and they can go in. Whereas on GoHighLevel, there's so much you can do. Like we pump leads to customers all the time. Like we do actual pure lead gen on local home service businesses and we just route leads based on the city, based on the phone number and whatnot, based on who the person is assigned to and whatnot. And it works great. But yeah, there is a lot that you have to do in the backend to make it work for you.

Interesting. Is there a way to pipe back like lead quality, like MQL, SQL status from GoHighLevel like you can do in HubSpot, like back to Google Ads? Do you know if it can do that?

I think they do have automation between— yeah, they definitely have connection between Google Ads. I don't know if you can pipe it back. I don't know that because we don't care about that particular metric. We just purely do pay per lead. So I wouldn't know, but I'm pretty sure there's probably an option for it.

Yeah.

And we do everything through, at the beginning we did Zapier, but now everything is on Publy and we just run thousands of like whatever tasks every month. And so it works really well.

Publy, Zapier competitor?

Yeah, it looks like HighLevel has an integration with Zapier. So you could, you know, connect it to Zapier and then connect that to Google.

Yeah, we found Zapier to be too expensive, so we moved to Pabbly on a lifetime deal and it works great the same way. Yeah. Or make.com, the same idea.

Oh, that's funny. Adam, does that help?

It does help. I mean, it makes me want to give GoHighLevel more of a shake as well. And then there were a couple other things like Pipedrive and I'll check out this Zapier clone too. It's still tough. Like I think I want some kind of like consultant to help me out. Maybe I'll just bug you, Scott, for a little bit more advice if you're open to it.

Yeah, you can ask questions.

I'm just kidding.

I'm not a consultant on it. We do, but I've done— I spent a lot of time in it, but you can also white label it. You can create your own accounts, which I don't recommend. A lot of folks took it as a SaaS business. It's not a real SaaS business. If you don't control this, the code, you're not a SaaS business. It's not Yeah. So we don't go into that, but for funneling leads, as simple as that works great for us.

Yeah.

Okay, good deal. Great. Thanks.

The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, You can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/hire. Again, it's marketingschool.io/hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires That we can help you find.

If you guys can, by the way, if you guys can maybe carry that conversation over to the forum too, that's always helpful for everyone's benefit if you guys want, or just share the recording or whatever. I'm just trying to get more engagement in the forum. There's always engagement here, but the forum is, could be better. All right. So Elian, follow up here. I just want to know, and this is probably relevant to everybody, how do large agency owners actually make money, like taking home $10 million personally? Is it through dividends or selling the agency? So the good news with an agency is you get to do both, Elian. You can have an exit every single year. So once you get it to $5, $10, $15 million in profit, if you just keep growing it, you can take that dividend every single year, right? You can either reinvest it back in the business or you can take, you know, you know, 66% for yourself or whatever. And then you can sell the agency too if you want, right? So I think building the agency to sell is a good thing because you are buttoned up operationally. So when people look at you, it's like, okay, they actually have real profit. Oh, it's not completely reliant on the founder, right? Um, and so I think you want to build it to sell, not necessarily to sell, and then you can decide what you want to do with the money. And then if you do decide to sell it, um, private equity, they'll look at you and say, okay, you know, maybe you, you as a founder, you're taking like $1 million in seller discretionary earnings. That's what they call it. So what the private equity firms would do is they'll add that money back and then they'll, they'll count that into the profit. Um, so You know, you as the founders, this is not financial advice. Talk to your advisors. I'm just saying, you know, you can probably run a lot of your expenses through the company. You should be running a lot of them through your company. You decide to the extent how much you want to do that. Some people get a little too aggressive with that. But you know, this is all for you at the end of the day, right? So the good news is you can do both. And the fallacy that most people have is like, oh, agencies not— agencies can't sell for a lot. It's not scalable, blah, blah, blah. If you hire the right people, it's scalable. And yes, absolutely, if you get it to a high profit level, you can sell it for a lot. So screw what other people say.