158 - Loser Agency Owner or Winner Agency Owner: Which are you?

Welcome in to episode number 158 of Agency Journey. This week you've got Gray on the line with Andrew. What's up, buddy?

How you doing, my man? Excited to be here?

Hey, I'm doing well. Sipping on some hot peppermint tea right now.

I'm getting old. Like, here's some peppermint tea.

Listen, thank you very much. The kids absolutely love peppermint tea. The smell of it.

Love it.

Not so much the temperature of it. So if I ever would let it get to get back to room temperature, then we'd be in business.

Yeah, they love a little sweet. Little sweet peppermint tea. Maybe in the fridge.

Oh, I'm sure. Without a doubt.

Like, it always blew my mind growing up how there could be things that smell sweet, but when you taste them, they are not sweet. Or things that look sweet but when you taste them are not. Like baker's chocolate.

That's a good point. I'm trying to think of what smells sweet and doesn't taste sweet.

Cinnamon. Mint. You take a whiff of mint tea, you're like, oh, that smells delicious.

Okay.

Not if you're looking for something different.

So I'm working with.

These are the things that young Andrew had to deal with.

Speaking of mental mistakes, I wanted to talk about here today was the mindset of being an owner. And obviously we'll talk about it primarily in the context of owning an agency, but I don't think that what we're going to talk about exclusively applies. In fact, I know it doesn't exclusively apply to agencies. So what prompted this was I was proofreading an email that you wrote. Is that for our nurturing sequence or is that going out to. Is that going out as a content piece? I proofed it, so I should know.

Yes, repurposing.

Okay. Like I said, that email. You talking about the owner's mindset, though, and the difference between, like, the winning owner's mindset and the losing owners? I think you said loser owner. Oh, man, that sounds harsh, but probably accurate. What prompted you writing about the owner's mindset?

Well, it's been, like, in the back of my head for a while of, like, how do you protect your mindset? Because it's like, if you're owning a business and you're trying to build something up, like, after what we've gone through the last few months, like, I've been very conscious of where is my mind at right now? Like, what am I telling myself? Where am I? What's my environment looking like? And all of Those sorts of things. And I was on the phone with one of our clients the other day, one of our agency accelerator clients. And this. This lady's awesome. She's like. She is a sales rock star. Her problem is she's selling too much. And now when she sells and she bring things, she kills something and drags it back to the cave, so to speak. Delivery's flopping. So the delivery team is all over the place. They've got talented people, They've got clients that see results, but, like, everyone's hair is on fire, and they feel like something's going to fall through the cracks. And they've been going through the agency accelerator for a couple months now, and they're just not seeing the traction that they wanted. And the issue is, like, they're. They're tuning in and they're turning. Tuning out. Like, you can come on a call, you can get fired up, you can learn stuff, and then you can go home and not do anything. Like, it's the key in anything that you do is to learn and implement and learn and implement and do it in small pieces. So they're not doing that. They're struggling with it. And so we're on the call, we're talking through this. And I lay that out to her pretty clearly. This is why nothing's happening. And she, in that moment, could have pointed fingers at the team. She could have pointed fingers that she was dealing with clients, that she's been traveling all over the world. But she laid it out. She's like, andrew, the whole process is right there. All we need to do is implement it. And that was a great snapshot right there of what is a winning owner's mindset. Because a loser owner, they're the ones that are pointing fingers. And there's always an excuse. But the winning owner owns themselves and says that, yeah, my team was meant to do stuff that they didn't do. But the end of the day, the buck stops with me, and I own that. And until you get to that state where you're owning your stuff, like, you're not going to grow because you got to realize, like, there's always these stair steps. There's always different plateaus you hit as you're growing a business. Like, you're going to shed clients, you're going to shed team members, you're going to shed, like, your own vision of what you're able to do and these different layers. And if you can't own where you are and see clearly, what's the problem, dude? How do you Go anywhere, right?

Yeah, we looked through that personally. But also, I mean, so like everything, it's so much easier to identify in other people, the agency owners, where you get on the call. And it's just like you start asking. Because everything I feel like most of the time, like with anything the least confident people often put up or some subset of people with low confidence. I have one personal example from our experience here and then two kind of side tangents. And as a third tangent, one thing that I learned here recently was you never want to set yourself up that way the way that I just did. You never want to say, I have three reasons why this, or I have X number of whatever, because instantly your brain is trying to like as you go along, you've already put that, you've already boxed yourself into pressure of what you're going to come up with. So you don't want to set yourself up to now have to try and scramble. And now I've got to try and think as I'm trying to explain my first personal experience, I have to make sure that I hold in the back of my head the two tangents that I promised were coming. So there's a mistake that I made owning it gray.

Look at that, guys.

Speaking of a personal experience, though, the software space has changed dramatically in the last five years from when we started what was due inbound until now. So we talked a couple weeks ago, the big transition that we've made and the easy thing for us to do, making the decision about where we're gonna pivot the business, how we were gonna change the channel that we took to deliver the results and deliver on the mission that we'd set out with. The easy thing to do is just look at the software space and say, it's crazy. Things have just changed so quickly in the environment and ecosystem around us, and we don't want to raise money, but that's what you have to do if you want to keep scaling this. And until we got comfortable with the fact that it has changed and that's not an environment problem, the world doesn't revolve around us. That's our problem to deal with, is how are we going to react and respond to that. That finally, I think, freed us up to make more of a decision of, okay, this is our future, this is our business, this is the decision that we need to make around what we're going to do and make the hard decision and take action on it. And obviously, this place now feels much better and much different than stuck in the limbo. Of there's no answer for it. Yeah. Just the way that things have shifted. So the two tangents that I was going to go on. One was, I love the point that you just brought up around how the roles change so quickly from an early stage to a little bit more mature agency.

Yeah.

Even just in head count. But there's a lot of different ways that that changes and how so frequently we use the cliche or like the, you know, the same people who got you there won't get. Or get you here, won't get you there.

Yeah.

That's the easiest thing to say, but I feel like that kind of is pointing outwards towards, like, the people. They were good early on, but they're not good now, and blaming people instead of, you know, we don't understand how much our business has changed so quickly and how the whole environment and ecosystem, like, really, from an employee perspective, like, what got them here won't get them there. So we got them here. Now we're a completely different place than where we were. And we didn't understand they're going on a journey and so not. Not point the fingers and be upset when. When people leave that. How can there be no loyalty in this world anymore if the journey wasn't. You know, if you're going to use that cliche to point fingers or to pass the buck at all, then don't anticipate that the other side won't do the same thing.

Yeah. So I guess it's like that kind of prompts before you go on your next tangent.

Yep.

That kind of prompts the point of, like, how do we as owners put ourselves in a position where we're constantly gaining perspective on ourselves? Because if all we do is live on the wheel doing whatever our routine is as owners, we don't take time to step back and evaluate how do we notice that those changes happen? Because it's like growing up with a kid. Like, my daughter June, she's gonna be two here in October, and she looks the exact same because every day I'm with her. So every day, like, I don't see those dramatic changes. But when we get together, like, months can go by before we see each other's kids. So when we see that, it's like, oh, dude, they grew so much. Like, what the heck? It's like, if you're not taking regular time out of the business to look at it and look at yourself too, like, you're not gonna see how those things are changing, and you're not gonna be able to proactively put plans and processes in place to deal with those changes. You're instead reactively dealing with client fires, team fires, midlife crisis, like burnout, like all of the crap that, honestly, most people listening right now are in the middle of. So perspective there in the midst of agency life, being crazy is perhaps the greatest gift that you can start giving yourself today. Budget doesn't count. Like, you just carve time out in the calendar. You have as much time as Elon Musk, who's very busy today. So go make it happen.

Oh, man. Well, I 100% agree with that. And having the third, like, the third party, I think can't be ignored either. The fact that you do have a responsibility to be in your business, you're being your business more than anybody else is. So have those friends who can come look at your kids and tell you how much they've grown and how encouraging it is, the steps that they made or discouraging the way that they're behaving, you know, whatever it is. But who. Someone else who can give you some of those insights as well, and encouragement or direction from the outside, I think is a big principle. The other tangent I was gonna say was, until you own things, I think it's very easy to overlook what you're doing to cause that problem. Like I said, a lot of those problems are not 100% externally caused. So I was doing a strategy session with an agency owner the other day. They're trying to sell retainers as much as possible. They lead with a lot of projects. An average project is a couple thousand dollars, and an average retainer right now is right around $1,000. But they've got people on retainer as low as $400, and I think the highest one's like 3,500 or something. And so this. He was just telling me about how his main role, what he mostly wants to do, is sales and that he's such a good salesperson. Like, that part is not a problem at all. He closes most of the deals that he walks into, but then they wind up getting stuck with these really low budget retainers, and the delivery team just can't keep up with it, and they're stuck. And so it was kind of a classic example of, like, my team is just not, like, they're not able to keep up with me and do this. And I said first I asked, I said, can I have your permission to offend you? I'm not sure whether this is right or wrong, but what I'm going to probably say, like, what I'm going to say might offend you. And he said, yeah, that's fine. Which I appreciate it. I try and ask in some cases before I say something that's offensive. But then I asked a couple questions about what was going into the retainers and stuff. And I said like, there's a good chance that the reason that you're so good at sales right now is because what you're selling is a no brainer for people. I don't know why I wouldn't like, if you'll sell me what you just said went into that $800 retainer, I'll become your customer right now. Do you want to sell that to me? And do you want to put that on your delivery team again? And I really would have paid for it because it was crazy, all the stuff that they were doing. They're basically an outsourced marketing department. Now obviously I would have been, I would have known that the long term of this, like this will fail because there's no way to do this. But, but basically an outsourced marketing department for like whatever a client needs that's included in unlimited support on top of the social posting and content creation and all this and website maintenance and everything else. And so that led to a conversation. But as long as you go around thinking like I'm owning the sales side and that's groovy and my delivery team can't keep up, I can't keep up because you don't have the budget to hire the right people or to have enough of the right people. Like this is a problem that even though it's on the delivery side, it's created by sales because your need for validation and your need for approval and your need for being able to close deals, you're not comfortable with a close rate that drops down to 40% or 30% or sub 70% where you're closing right now, that's your first tell that you're pricing way too low and delivering too much is if everybody wants it, why are you leaving it on the table? And even just to break down and say, if you doubled your retainer price right now, but you cut your, like, would you be willing to sacrifice half your close rate for that? And that didn't click right away. Like I said that now, but there's probably some people even listening where it doesn't click right away. If you do that, you will make exactly the same amount of money and do half the work that you're doing currently. That is a bargain. That's a good deal. That's what you're trying to figure out. I realize a lot of us have dysfunctional relationships with money and with our need for approval, and I'm first among those. But we have to be comfortable and look for opportunities to create value, then to capitalize on that value as well, so that we can build a sustainable business and better serve our clients in the long run. I love what Jonathan Dain from ClientBoost, when he was on the podcast, talked about. Charge enough so I don't have to charge more to his clients. And at that point, maybe an average retainer was around ten grand, but it was something where they could have delivered the services. I probably need to be careful about what I say for a specific now that I've said who it was. But something where you could deliver the services much cheaper, but by charging more, you're able to exceed that and exceed the expectation. Clients not disappointed. They're getting way more than that in value. Yeah. So as long as you're delivering it, charge for it.

Yeah. Again, dude, like, looking at yourself through an honest lens, and if you have a hard time doing that by yourself, that's when, like, a mentor or a coach or, like, some third party needs to come in and just. You need to be open and coachable to that person to. To bring them in and allow them to speak. It's okay to be offended. Like, if you're not being offended as an owner, like, if you can't offend yourself, then you should allow people to offend you from the outside. And I think, like, subconsciously, most of us are. Most business owners kind of have an imposter syndrome. Like, even as you grow, you've never been where you are before because every day is new. But, like, you think about, like, everyone. That's true of everyone. That's true of the Fortune 100 CEOs. Like, they've never been where they are before today. Because we're all living today for the first time. So it's easy to break ourselves down into kind of when we have a bad day, a slump day, weigh it on, like, how crappy I am and I don't deserve it, or whatever the lies are that we tell ourselves. I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about negativity. I'm talking about actually doing constructive criticism on yourself. Say, okay, where am I weak? What are the gaps right now? What I'm not seeing? Can I look at myself through a different lens? Even for, like, you and I as co founders, this was my theme for the talk up at HubSpot's Partner Day this year. How does understanding your roles and your personalities as visionary and integrator change the way you communicate, change the way you think about, like, stuff Gray says to me, stuff I say to Gray, like, those perspective shifts are key to ownership and key to grasping a situation and maximizing where you are. Because if you flounder here, that's when you start rolling backwards.

Yeah. I think probably the healthy perspective comes from when you really own it, where, if you really own it, you understand, I can't stay like I own this problem. And staying down in the dumps isn't gonna. That doesn't accomplish anything or help anything. I just need to be honest about this realistically. We all have strengths and weaknesses. That's okay. Get comfortable with it. Okay, here's a weakness I have. What's the action plan? How do we improve that? Who do I need to bring in to help? What are the things I can do? What are the habits and rhythms and routines I can build and put in place here, have accountability on or talk about with my team to support this and get through this? So, yeah, and there's a lot there. We could go on for a long time, but I think just breaking it, trying to break down what you mean by owner's mindset is helpful and encouragement to you listening of take that responsibility. Make sure that you are constantly evaluating what's happening in your world with the business with you personally, and gaining insights from the outside as well. All those things are helpful. So anything else that you'd add in there before we wrap it up?

Yeah, just one thought. Like, when you're approaching it, doing it with a thankful heart from a place of gratitude that as a business owner, you have the independence to make these decisions. Because there's people who are stuck in the middle of bureaucracy at jobs or in corporations or whatever that, like, sure, they can look at themselves, but they can't change anything around them. Like, we are in the best spot because we can pivot like that. And so the only thing holding us back is our ability to, like, assess the situation, identify the bottlenecks, and put a plan to overcome those.

Good stuff. All right, we'll wrap it up there here for episode 158, and we'll talk to you again next week in episode 159. Have a good one.

See you guys.