#AgencyVision: Get Paid for What You Know, Not Simply What You Can Do

Hello, welcome, Agency Journey insiders. What's going on? If you were listening on the podcast, welcome into another Agency Vision show here on the Agency Journey stream. I'm Gray and I am joined by. Let me see if I can switch cameras here. Joined by Andrew, my lovely co host.

What's up, gang?

How you doing, dimmer dude?

I'm doing very well today, thank you for asking, Grey. Very kind of you.

Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure. Welcome to Chick Fil? A. What can I get for you? Hey. This is the sixth episode in our Agency Freedom Manifesto series. And yesterday, or in our last episode, depending on when you're listening to this, we talked through what it looks like to sell the solution, not services. There's a whole rundown. Go to zenpilot.com manifesto, see the full manifesto. But today we get to focus on the sixth point in the manifesto, getting paid. And it's all around getting paid for what you know, not just what you can deliver. And to me, this is the one that comes up all the time. Talking with agency owners who are struggling right now. Like the common pain point or this is one of the pain points that comes up non stop is like, I feel like we know so much, but we only get to deliver so much or we don't get paid for all the past experience that we have and leads to a ton of frustration and burnout in the agency world. So you wrote up a bunch of notes for today around this topic and kind of centered it around three main benefits. So maybe where we start is how do you actually get paid for what you know and then dive into the benefits of that.

So this is kind of a. This flows after the sell the solution, not the services for a reason. Because when we sell the solution, like, we're really taking all of the collective expertise that we as owners and that our team has accomplished over the years and we package that together into the ideal offer, like the irresistible offer for the audience. Like, we've done the hard work, we've made that hard decision to figure out who are we trying to serve. We know them now. We know what their costly pain is. Now we're going to position the whole agency around solving that pain. And so today we're going to talk about the benefits of doing that. We're actually talking about getting paid for what you know rather than what you do. It's a huge shift for agencies because we're. A lot of people are used to being like the digital order takers, the digital yes men, where the client asks us to do something, we go do it for them. And we talk a lot about how the traditional agency business model is broken here. Like, you got into this space because you wanted an element of control, you wanted some freedom in your life. But this model, it's like building a set of handcuffs. Because the more clients you bring on, the more complex it is to keep the ship afloat and to maintain sanity. Because you'll see as even big agencies, as their number of clients grow, their team grows with it. And as your team grows, you're just increasing the variables for something to fall through the cracks. What we want to unpack here is how getting paid for what you know as a team and the expertise that you've accumulated as a team allows you to charge more per client. It allows your clients to get a greater value out of your services as an agency. It allows your team to operate in a healthier place and allows you as the owner to achieve much greater impact both in your clients lives, in your team's lives, and more fulfillment in your life and with your family, in your community. So it's kind of the overview of what we're going to dig in here. Yeah, today, buddy.

That's great. So one of them, in our early kind of foray into digital courses and training, we packaged up one of the most successful courses that we had was a packaging of our system for how we kind of initiated relationships. To get paid for what you know, first of all, I think we need to point out if you want to get paid for what you know, like the expectations, the relationship, it's all got to start in the sales process, in your first touch points with the client, the way that things are positioned. If you get hired to execute tactics for somebody, it's really hard to break the mold of what you've been hired to do. If you get hired to sell the solution, if you get hired to achieve the result that they're looking for, it's much easier to position yourself this way. So maybe talk first about what does it look like to initiate getting paid for what you know and then what is the ongoing in a normal agency relationship? Like what does this look like in practice?

Yeah, so we want to go back to the beginning and all expectations start in marketing. So the agency that says, I don't do marketing for myself, like I operate 100% on referrals, that's you're gonna have to change your game. Because when you operate 100% of referrals like your, it's expectation transferred from one referral to another. And that can be a good model to get your agency up and running. But you can't scale it because it's not predictable. And if you don't know the cost to acquire a new customer, the chances of you scaling your business, taking it to the next level where it operates without you, go way down. So what we want to do here is figure out what are the beliefs that we need to instill in our ideal fit prospects early in our marketing that set the table so that when they start working with us, they are ready to listen to the experts. Because nothing's going to break the agency freedom model faster than a client coming to you and telling you what to do. So the way the agency freedom model is set up and the agency freedom model is how you put these manifesto points into action. And if you haven't checked it out yet, you can go to zenpilot.com model to check out the agency freedom model in action. It puts all of these pieces, all these principles to work within a business model that can allow you to build the agency that gives you the freedom you're looking for. But that all starts in marketing. You instill those early beliefs in marketing. In the sales process, you're filtering for who is that ideal fit client? Do they fit the matrix that we've built? And that's another kind of escape hatch, I call it. So in your sales process, you've got an escape hatch to push out those bad fit clients. You're basically weeding out, trying to figure out of 100 leads, who are the ones that we want to be working with. And you're always filtering for bad fit clients and then you bring them through your discovery process and there you're guiding them through a process and you're getting paid for what you know there. You're getting paid to build a strategy for them and facilitate a conversation that happens around the table. It's another escape hatch where if you get the end of that process and it's not an ideal fit client, you can pull the escape hatch and say, hey, here's your strategy. It was great working with you. We're not the best fit for you guys long term, but here's the plan. You can go implement yourself. After your discovery project, you've got your build out project, which it's going to vary depending on what you do as an agency. But basically, what are the core things that you need to implement for your client so that you've got the foundation laid? Do you need a website? Do you need to redesign their branding assets? Do you need to set up funnels for them? Do you need to create a baseline set of content the sales team can go and use during sales calls? What are the basic foundational elements that you need after that project's done, you've got another escape hatch you can pull if it's not ideal for the client. So you've got these things baked in the whole time, leading the experience so that you're walking the client through a journey. And that journey is your knowledge, your expertise distilled. Let me say that again. The journey that you walk your client through is the ideal journey that you would take this ideal fit client through. So you've taken the time to step back from the chaos and you said, if I had a client sign up tomorrow, here's what we would do first, here's what we would do second, here's what we would do third. That is the outline of your proven system. And once you've got that outline in place, you run it over and over and over again. So it is your knowledge leveraged into a system. And within that system, you're helping the client achieve the transformation that they're looking for along the way. But that only works when you instill those expectations. Early marketing, sales, initial onboarding and delivery, the build out project, the ongoing retainer work. Like all of those elements require leadership from you if you expect the client to behave properly through the process.

Yeah, well, I think that's a really helpful overview of how this all flows out of the way that the relationship is initiated. We go off on a whole other tangent about agencies living off of referrals, pros and cons of that, or why we wear that as a badge of honor when it is rarely a badge of honor. But let's talk about the benefits that come out. So if I implement all of this, I'm serving ideal fit clients, I'm walking them through the ideal journey that I've put together. What are the benefits that come out of getting paid for what you know and not just what you can do, or reframing the client journey this way?

Yeah. Let's start with the client. What does the client benefit from? Because a piece of pushback or a question we'll hear from a lot of agency owners like is, if I package my services together and I only focus on doing a small set of things and we systematize that, doesn't that create a bad client experience or doesn't that cheapen the client experience? The answer is 100% the opposite, 180 degree difference. Because it all starts with getting clarity on who is that ideal fit client, and what's the costly problem that they're stuck with is what a lot of agencies have backed themselves into the corner of doing is solving cheap problems. Building simple websites, configuring simple funnels, like setting up and managing Facebook ads. These are all services that are commoditized.

That is so true. That is like the curse of agency life is that it's not that you're not providing some value. It's not that you're not working hard to solve problems. It's just they're the wrong problems to be solving.

Yeah, they're cheap problems. And now it's not to say that you can't operate in that space because those things need to be done, but they need to be done within the scope of a larger conversation, a larger system. And so we need to elevate our positioning as agencies. And again, that starts in marketing. It's strengthened in sales, and it's reinforced during the onboarding process. And that collection, that compound of leadership, is going to allow the client to receive so much more value. Because you're not just operating in this scope of, yes, I'll build this website for you. Yes, I'll design this brochure for you. Yes, I can create this trade show booth by Friday. That is the yes man job, doing those things at the will and whim of the client. What the client needs is the expert to take them from where they're stuck at the bottom of the mountain to where they need to be at the top of the mountain. And the only way that you can unlock that value for your clients is if you make that hard decision once. And if you do the work to build the solution and not just focus on the menu of services that you provide. When you do that hard work, you create an asset that delivers amazing value to the client. And you become the place where they're like, where has this been my whole career? I've been looking for you guys forever. That light bulb moment of, oh, my gosh, I need this. Oh, my gosh, these are the guys. Like, this is the team that is going to help me get where I'm trying to go. Because you deliver that value. You give them that aha. Because you spend enough time with them, you walk a mile in their shoes. You show up at the conferences where they're hanging out, you read the blogs, you listen to the podcast, you immerse yourself in that world, and you create this unique intersection of expertise and experience where you know that Persona, the questions, problem goals and challenges that they're stuck in, not just at a service level. And this is where it gets kind of crazy when people say, can I target five or six different Personas? You cannot immerse yourself and be this relevant for that many people. It's not possible. It's not fun. And once you do it, you would realize, I don't want to do that. I want to serve one group of people and know them really well and be the person who knows the marketing and the industry. Bringing those two things together is a powerful place to be. When you do that, you can prioritize what are the most impactful things that we can do along this journey to get them from where they are to where they're trying to go. And this is a huge shift. I really want to drive this point home here. Gray is that the value is unlocked by walking the same path multiple times. Like, if I'm trying to get from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to St. Louis, Missouri, I'm going to travel a highway. I'm not going to bushwhack a trail. The fastest way is to get on the highway and go from one town to the next. But what so many agencies do is they walk into a client and say, where do you want to go? And then they get out the machete and the axe and the chainsaw, and they just start blazing a trail that they've never walked before. I've never been there, but, hey, I can go out and do the work. And this machete worked for the last client. I'm sure it'll work for you, too. You can't be blazing new trails for every client. Client. Value is unlocked when you put them in the car and you drive them on a highway and get them to where they're trying to go. Or you put them in a plane and you fly to the next destination. Like Zen pilot. Get it? You are taking them on a trip. So you unlock. You put together the best recipe that gets them to where they're trying to go. And when you can do that, the clients are going to receive the most value. And when the clients receive the most value, you put yourself in the seat. Instead of spending all your time blazing that trail and dealing with clients that are frustrated because they're lost. You're now honing this system. You're now improving this road that all of your clients are traveling, and that is shortening the client's path to value. And when we can obsess about shortening the client's path to value, we've made ourselves irreplaceable as a team. And as an agency, and that's the first point on this, is the clients get more value when you invest here and you help them get to where they're trying to go faster. When you lead them, you can get them to value faster than when they lead you.

For sure, all that is true, I think, really well said in terms of the way that this works. The common objections are like, what if I'm picking the wrong town? I don't know if this is the right problem to solve. I don't. You know, there's so much fear and unknowns and uncertainty, but you've got to pick somewhere. There's got to be some destination, or else it's perpetual bushwhacking.

Yeah, perpetual bushwhacking. You got to start somewhere.

So all this client value created. I think the supremely undervalued side of that, you know, people will understand the theory in that, in that piece. The supremely undervalued side is how this impacts your own internal team. And we've got all these agency owners who we talk to on a daily basis. Sure, there's a lot of people I'd prefer not to be disassociated, not to be associated with in the agency world. But by and large, we've got a great group of people who really want to do good and serve other people. That's why they're running a services business in the first place. It's not the most profitable place to be in the world. This doesn't attract the, the greediest people. They're certainly a subsect of that. But it's people who want to build a team, who want to lead a team well, who want to have the freedom to do what they want to do with their life. Yeah, well, serving other people. So when we do this, the underrated benefit is the impact that it has on the team. Maybe describe the benefit that this has to your own internal team.

Yeah, so the key word here is leverage. When if we compare the agency freedom model to the traditional agency model, like the bushwhacking model, your team is tasked with the job of walking into a brand new situation of working with a client in an industry that they may have never worked in before, or if they have worked in it before, like the scope of this project is going to be different than the project in the past. And so what they're tasked to do is blaze that new trailer and to go in there with a different set of deliverables, stuff that they may have never done before. They've got to go learn how to do it now, they've got to figure out how we're going to do this thing. We have to put together a hypothesis, we have to go out and learn the skills to implement it. We have to implement it, keep all of those plates spinning for all of these different clients. So your team might have 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 different clients that they have to manage and keep all of these custom operations running. They're setting up systems and running systems for each client that are not transferable from one to the other. That creates a state of chaos. It creates a state that is ripe for conflict. Because you've sold these expectations in the sales process, now you're relying on this team that is likely over capacity and under compensated to walk into this place and solve these problems. And that is just a very stressful place to be. That's why the agency life is not necessarily like the most positive conversations. It's not the healthiest, happiest place to be. You may have a ping pong table, you may have a keg on tap, but that is not the reality of life in the typical agency. It's typically a very stressful place to be where you're dealing with upset clients. A lot of the time. When we flip the script and we implement the agency freedom model and we craft that one journey that we're going to walk clients on, we now have unlocked the ability to leverage our expertise. And that leverage can be expressed in a lot of different ways. One way is it could be instead of personally going on site and teaching clients how to implement a CRM, for example, you create a training course or a certification program that all of your clients go through, that they have their sales teams go through. And now you've taken the knowledge that's in your heads, you've put it into a training program that can now run without you. That delivers more value to the client as well. Because instead of them needing to be there in person, when you're in person there, they can consume that training on their own time and they now have more flexibility. You've unlocked more value for them and you freed up the team just a little bit because they're not going and doing that type of custom work anymore. If you walk the same type of clients through the same discovery process, you can template out your meeting agendas, you can template out your information gathering forms, you can template out the emails that you send out, the calendar invitations. Everything gets more systematized when you've standardized the journey. When you systematize things, you're just removing the to do from your team's plate. When you've standardized your client meeting schedule so you're meeting with them on a regular basis, following a regular agenda, smoking out those client fires before they even start, you're empowering your team to lead the relationship. And that just creates a happier, healthier place to work. When you're charging a premium for your services, you can work with less clients and make more money so that you've got less on the plate of your team. When you do that, you put your team in a place where they actually have capacity now to improve the system, to create templates as they're going to invest back into the system and not just try to stay alive and try to keep all those plates spinning, keep all those clients happy. So it's going to be different for every agency on how that leverage is expressed. But when you standardize the type of client you work with now, you can standardize how you solve that problem and you can bring a lot of leverage to that process to where you can service a lot more clients than you are right now with the same size team. That means you can pay your team more. That means you can give your team time off because they're interchangeable. If one team member walks away for a week, they're not coming back to a mountain because they're the only person on the team that can solve those problems. You've diversified the roles on the team. So that's the second point here, is that your team gets a happier, healthier place to work because there's more opportunities for leverage not pulling you in because you've been able to take your expertise and put it in the system. So they're now empowered to solve problems, have conversations on their own. That's going to make them feel better because they don't like interrupting you, they don't like going to you with questions and problems because it makes them look weak. And they know it frustrates you and interrupts you during your day. So you give them the tools that they need to really be successful. And because you've narrowed the scope of the services, you can really define the roles, the expectations really well in the team. So they know where the goal posts are, they know what defines a win, and they're really in a happier, healthier place.

Hey, it turns out people like to be good at stuff and they have more fun when they're good at stuff.

Shock.

And you just get gooder faster est when you seriously. I mean, the more that we allow them to focus in and understand, like apply what you're really good at to solving this specific set of problems. Instead of I'm gonna throw this one at you, then I'm gonna ask you if you can do this. I'm gonna ask you if you can do this totally opposite thing of what you just did. Because the client asked us to do it. You know, on one client site, we're doing stuff this way. They asked us for something else, so we're gonna do it the exact opposite way because that's what they asked. Like, this point is so critical. And sure, you have the ability to do all these things, but like, what you know puts you back in control of, here's what we know is best. And it's going to keep getting better the longer that we do it. So let's keep doing that. So between client results and leverage for your internal team and a happier, more impactful, more competent team to deliver the results that we're looking for. Going back to selling a solution, not just services. There's a lot of benefits to this, but it all starts back at the beginning. Are there any other benefits you wanted to highlight?

The last one is just the impact it allows you as the owner to have. Because I think a lot of agency owners, like you were saying earlier, like, really good heart, really good. Like a vision for creating deep impact for their clients and a happy, healthy place for their team to work, really. But we go back to the beginning of this agency model is fundamentally broken and flawed. It needs to change. That's why the agency freedom model is here, so that you can, as the owner, have the impact that you want with the freedom that you need. Like, you started this thing to have impact and to have control, but you're not having impact that you want. Like, client fires keep coming up as you scale. Things fall through the cracks. Clients are not in a happy, healthy place. You're not helping them grow to the level that you want to. As a result of those upset clients, your team is in a state of chaos. They're not in a place where they feel like they're in control, that they have a clear view of the expectations that are on their plate. That's creating a lot of employee turnover, which for you as the owner is a stressful, anxiety ridden place because you're getting sucked back in to help this team that you're paying. That should give you your time and capacity back. But they're not in a happy, healthy place because they're coming to you for help. Because every situation is unique. Your clients are upset at you because you're not delivering the expectations that you thought or there's anger errors coming through the process because nothing is systematized. And so you're left in this spot of overwhelm and chaos. But when you implement the agency freedom model and you get paid for what you know, not what you can do, you actually have that impact that you wanted to on the client because you can deliver more value there. And you actually create that atmosphere for your team that you always wanted because you've got opportunities for them to be leveraged and for them to have very clear roles and for them to actually get good at what they're doing and deliver value over time and get stronger at that role. It puts you in this spot where you can actually have the fulfillment that you always wanted to as the owner because you've made that hard decision. You've put this new model into work here. That's the last point, is just the place it puts you in. You get paid better because you've positioned at a premium. You can keep your staff where it is because you've extracted more leverage out of each person. And, and that's not just like trying to squeeze more juice out of the orange. It is putting them in a healthier place where they might actually be logging less hours, but the client's getting more value because it's more potent. The time that they're spending there is better spent. The last value point, Gray, is that the owner actually gets what they want out of the whole situation.

That's a nice cherry on top.

There you go. That's not a bad thing.

Go back to why you started this thing in the beginning. That's awesome. Well, we've rambled on here for about 25 minutes. And so for all of you who are paying us by the hour, thanks for paying us for inputs. We'll keep talking here for five more minutes. Make sure we hit the half hour mark and send your, send your checks directly to my place. Just kidding. We'll focus on the results like we're talking about and we kind of, we jumped the gun a little bit here today. Get paid for what you know, not simply what you can do. Point number seven, you who are paying us by the hour. Thanks for paying us for inputs. We'll keep talking here for five more minutes. Make sure we hit that half hour mark and you can send your checks directly to my place. Just kidding. We'll focus on the results like we're talking about and we kind of, we jumped the gun a little bit here today. Get paid for what you know, not simply what you can do. Point number seven is all around training better clients with your sales process. So again, this goes back to the principle of, like, all of these manifesto points. This is just the agency freedom model distilled. Like, this is the best way to build a healthy, happy, profitable agency. And so what we'll be talking about next time is what does it look like in your sales process, kind of in more detail to train your clients? Like, how do you. How do you flip the script to go from putting on a show and pitching hard to try and win their business to clients training prospects who want to work with you and where you are the expert from the beginning and then all the way through the servicing and delivery side of things. So I'm excited to dig into that one. There's a lot here to cover and there's a ton to work out in practicality, what this looks like to get paid for what you know, not simply what you can do. Any questions that you have, shoot our way. Drop in the insiders group or hit us up via email. Put it on social. Put it somewhere we'll see it. Preferably if you put it on Snapchat. Well, Andrew's not gonna see it. He's not that cool. Awesome. Cool. All right, for the recap of this and the rest of the episodes in the series, go to zenpilot.com manifesto. We appreciate you spending some time with us. If you are live here in Insiders and you are an American in the U.S. happy Independence Day, a day early 2019. As we're recording this there, I just put our timestamp on it now. It's not an eternal episode anymore.

Good job, dude.

Nice. All right, well, take care. Enjoy the rest of your day. Hit us up with any questions. We'll talk to you next time.