How Past Clients Can Help You Quickly Scale Your Agency

How do you build an agency that allows you to live the dream that you have for yourself, for your family, for your community, for your team, while at the same time helping your clients knock it out of the park and doing it all profitably? These are the big questions that we tackle here on the Agency Journey podcast. I am your host, Andrew Demski. Now let's get to it.

All right, joining me on the podcast here I have Thomas Emerson from Vanguard 86 on podcast. Thomas, thanks for joining me, man. How you doing?

Oh, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

So you guys are. You know, I should have done my research ahead of time to know this, but from all of my memory, I think that you guys are the first. You're the first guest from New Zealand on the podcast. That's a huge honor. Clearly. Congratulations.

Fantastic. If we achieve nothing else this year, that's going to be the top of it.

There it is. Throw that up at the company Christmas party.

Exactly.

So is that where you grew up? I mean, you've got the accent, but are you a native New Zealander?

No, I was originally from England and moved. So he's in about four years ago. And back in the uk, I was working for kind of the bigger companies. I was working for Honda's European head office and working for Aston Martin and also works agency side for above the line advertising agency.

Okay.

As well. So that was what I was doing before. And then. Yeah. Moved to beautiful New Zealand four years ago and started a slightly different adventure.

That is awesome. So what, I mean, you're working with Aston Martin. What made the switch to Vanguard 86? What's kind of the startup story there?

Yeah, well, to be honest, the agency was accidentally formed for about the first year of Vanguard 86 existing. It was me on my own, just doing consulting and coaching work for digital marketing. New Zealand isn't necessarily because geographically we're a little bit away from everywhere. It's unlike the US in that it's not necessarily at the forefront of adopting new technology. So it was good for me, coming from the uk, where we're closely working with some leaders in that field, to then come here and take a lot of that knowledge and tell people about the importance of things like SEO and AdWords and what I thought was relatively basic stuff, but just hadn't quite transitioned over here fully yet. Yeah. So that was the first year. And then kind of towards the end of that, one of the clients turned around at the end of one of these consulting days and said, hey, look, all this stuff is great, but we just don't have the people or the need the means to actually execute this ourselves. So they said, could you put a proposal together for you to actually manage and implement this for us? So, yeah, basically came up with a very ambitious proposal which. Which they said yes to and then kind of panicked and was like, right, I need to get someone else on board and we need to start making this happen.

That is awesome. So you go from that, and that is a classic agency startup story. I mean, everyone's got a different story, but I think that almost everybody can relate to. I can definitely relate to, wow. They said yes. Now we need to figure out how exactly that's all going to happen.

Exactly, exactly.

So, looking at the agency today, tell us a little bit about the team. The type of. Are most of your clients. Are you doing inbound marketing for all the clients? For a portion of the clients. What does the services breakdown look like? Tell us about some of where things are at right now.

Yeah. So we became HubSpot's partner agency back in January, and the vast majority of our clients, like 80% of them are on inbound marketing retainers at one level or another. And then we have a small chunk that are basically just using us for AdWords and analytics kind of optimization in the digital space on our website kind of format. We do a little bit of remarketing for those people as well, but absolutely, the vast majority are definitely inbound and using the HubSpot software.

Okay, that's awesome. So as you've made that transition, is there anything that stuck out from that story or making that. Is there anything looking back that you kind of say, like, I would do this differently, or knowing what I know now, here's how I would have changed my journey of moving into the inbound marketing space and working with HubSpot and all the things that go along with that?

To be fair, I look back and I just. Every opportunity just kind of fell into my lap a little bit, and everything just cascaded one thing into another. I think I needed that year of doing consulting and coaching to build up a kind of a contact list so that then when we transitioned into the agency side of things, we could go back out to those people and say, hey, look, this is what we're now doing. We feel like we'd be a good fit based on some of the problems that I was trying to help you solve back when I was consulting. And then likewise, this last 12 months, we've been very lucky that we've had a core group of clients that have stuck with us and others have joined us as we've grown and as the reputation has kind of spread a little bit more. So we're very lucky that it's all been a perfect storm of circumstances and success we've even had because I just feel like most of it's been luck.

That's awesome. Isn't it funny how so many times it doesn't necessarily feel like it in the moment, but looking back you kind of understand how, wow, like at the time that I maybe wanted that I wasn't ready for that and then this other thing that happened like that perfectly prepared me. It's cool to see how that plays out. So is most of the client base, is it primarily New Zealand based companies?

Yes, we've had our first conversation two days ago with our first Australian based company. But at the moment we've tried to grow very as slowly as possible. Even then it's been a lot faster than we can actually handle or anticipated. But luckily the clients that we've had are kind of very good to work with. They've happily grown with us. Their expectations have been high, which has also helped us grow very, very quickly and invest in ourselves. And also having been lucky with the team that I've managed to get again, we've managed to handle the local audience quite well and just grow quite naturally just in the domestic marketplace.

Right, that makes sense. That's awesome. As far as. So obviously growth is happening. It sounds like even quicker than you would maybe ideally chart out how are, how what is. I guess if we look at like each journey that you take a client on, a client comes to you with a problem they want to grow. Are you starting them off with like a strategy or game plan type project or are you moving them right into, you know, go through a sales process and they're right into like a retainer agreement. How does. What does the client journey that you take people on typically look like?

It has been different for each client, pretty much. So obviously with the existing relationships that was very easy. It was just I was probably talking to them about HubSpot beforehand and then they were very much like, yep, that sounds like exactly what we need. At the moment, our digital marketing is fragmented. We don't do enough analysis, we don't do any optimization. We're just doing it because it's what we know we need to be doing. And so that was a very easy transition for client type A kind of. Client type B is kind of coming to us with a bit more of a challenge. Either Their market has changed quite significantly and they know they need to be doing more digital marketing, but they don't know where to start. Or, or they kind of, I suppose they've kind of been completely out of the digital space and don't really know what the problem is that they're facing. So they haven't even really identified that there's an issue. You know, they might be seeing sales drop, marketing's still doing exactly the same thing, and they just don't know what the root cause could be. They're blaming it on increased competition or price, but they've actually heard that maybe inbound marketing might be able to mean that they can sell at a high value price point without necessarily having to discount every single time.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. Are there any. This is like a. I'm totally changing gears on you here, but outside of obviously using HubSpot for, you know, for at least a good chunk of the clients that you're working with, are there any tools that you guys are using that kind of stick out as maybe like they don't have to be like virtually unknown tools, but maybe not the, maybe not just the standard like Google Analytics and Google Apps or whatever. Are there any tools. And if those are the ones, that's fine too. But any tools that pop to mind that you guys use that either you feel like save you a ton of time or give you kind of a competitive edge as you're servicing clients?

Yeah, absolutely. So we've got. So we were put onto. Again, it's difficult to know what is kind of, because most of these are probably quite well known in the US but obviously over here, not quite so. So the likes of Perfect Audience, which we use as one of our remarketing tools, which just basically means that we can give client ad budgets a little bit extra presence without necessarily having to spend a huge fortune, which is quite important for a lot of our smaller businesses who want to get the most possible, but not necessarily spend a fortune. We also use, obviously some of our clients use something like Ask Nicely for their Net promoter scoring, some of their review systems. We use hotjar for heat mapping and website kind of optimization. That's a lot of what we use actually because we don't do a lot of time tracking because we're on retainers with a lot of our clients. We basically just have a scope of work and then some months we go over some months we go under and we've got a rough idea as to those that are maybe taking a little bit more time than they probably should, but we don't do likewise. We don't use project management tools. We've tried several and they haven't necessarily worked for us. So yeah, there's lots of tools that we would like to use but just haven't yet found the right one.

Right. Make the connection. So with Ask Nicely, that's what I've seen most frequently used with software companies. Is that primarily where you're using it with software clients or is it in the E commerce space or completely different?

Yeah, we actually had again, it was a client just happened to be using it and was just like, oh, can you manage our Net Promoter Score software as well? So we're like, yeah, yeah, sure. And it had a good integration with HubSpot, so that worked quite nicely for us. But they were basically just using it as internal Net Promoter Score. They sell packaging and stuff like that. So it was actually just like a create a list of customers that have recently bought online and we just asked them to review the experience that they had. We've actually upgraded that system a little bit for some other clients and using some software called Grade Us. And we use that because it kind of goes to that next level where it gives the Net Promoter Score but also then encourages those people who have had a less than grade experience to submit feedback so the team can actually action response. And anyone who's had a good experience like four or five star, it then takes them to any number of review softwares that you want to select and take them to Facebook or Google and they could leave a positive review there to help encourage more customers in the future.

That makes a lot of sense. I think that's one area that I think that's a huge area for agencies because a lot of internal teams do just a terrible job of asking for testimonials or feedback. I actually think it's more common to see. I don't think that's probably what I would have guessed. I think it's actually more common to see companies, at least in my experience, who do at least a decent job of following up with people who are unhappy to figure out what's wrong. I still think that's way underdone and needs to be done more. But I think the opportunity to get testimony, some of your most powerful, powerful marketing materials, I think it's a huge opportunity for agencies and for anybody running a business, just hey, when your clients are happy, that's the perfect time to help them refer you and get feedback and not necessarily direct referrals, but being willing to give you A testimonial or whatever that is. I'm speaking from experience there because I know that that's something that we've historically done poorly, even here at. @ do inbound, and is definitely a point of emphasis for us moving forward. And one of the things that we've kind of gone up and down and gone in spurts with. So I think that's cool that you bring that up. And something that a lot more agencies probably should be doing is getting involved on that side of things as well.

Yeah, we're exactly the same. Obviously, we're pretty good at demarking for other businesses, but then actually, when we look at our own, we fall below the mark. I definitely think that we could do a better job, and we need to implement. We actually use ourselves as a test bed for a lot of these pieces of software. So we'll always run them on ourselves first, work out the glitches and the bugs before we ever suggest it to a client. But we then roll it out to a client, do a great job with that, see great results, and then never think to revisit doing it for themselves.

That's funny. Probably my favorite piece of invoicing Software ever was FreshBooks. And FreshBooks, a couple years back, introduced a feature where when people paid their invoices, they could also automatically leave feedback, which at first glance, I thought that's not really the ideal time to get feedback, necessarily when they're paying their bills. But we wound up experimenting with that, and it actually worked really well. And a lot of the feedback that I felt like we got was. Was actually, it was awesome feedback. And kind of we would have clients said there was a rating system, you know, 0 to or 1 to 10, how satisfied were you with the service? Or whatever. But then also the ability to leave like a testimonial if you were. If you were happy with it. And I was really shocked at the good responses that came from that. And it was cool to have people say, hey, I'm paying my bill now, and I'm happy to pay it for the service that we received. And those types of things. That was the. I feel like those testimonials are probably even better when it's like, hey, I'm the person paying the bill and I'm happy with this. Or sometimes even more powerful than, I'm the marketing manager here. I don't have anything to do with the budget spend, but these people helped me get my job done. Those are great testimonials. Some of our best written testimonials that we use quite a bit.

Yeah, absolutely. Idea.

So as far as your. You talk about growth and I think a lot of agencies, first of all, I think very few agencies, pretty much zero agencies grow according to whatever their exact predictions were. But I think that most people would trade for your problem of growing faster than, than maybe planned or than would even be ideal in your mind, what is leading to that kind of demand and growth? Is it existing clients wanting you to do more? Is it referrals? Is it through your own marketing? Where are the, I guess, where's the customers or prospects? Where are they coming from? Right now.

We'Re really lucky that all three areas are where we've seen growth in the last 12 months. We definitely have existing customers that are asking us to do more. Some of them are obviously asking us to try and do more for less money. But that's where luckily we've, yeah, we've had some good. I was very lucky to be on some HubSpot sales training with the HubSpot Asia Pacific kind of region. And that was really good as well because you kind of, you know, you need to understand the thinking behind sometimes that sort of stuff. It's, you know, it's because of a current situation, not because of where they want to go to. And they do know that they've got to spend to grow. And you've just got to try and obviously work out how you can hit those targets to help them achieve their goals. And likewise, we've been lucky that we've had people just find us through blogging, website, social media. We've had people who have had a conversation with an existing client and have gone, okay, we should probably chat to these guys. I mean, we are very, very fortunate that New Zealand is quite small. We are one of only three gold HubSpot partner agencies and there are only two platinum agencies. So there aren't a lot of agencies to choose from. And there is a huge amount of people who are kind of seeing the value in trying to get greater analytics and a deeper understanding of how marketing can play its part in growing sales. And we're just trying to raise our profile as much as possible by increasing certifications. We've got making sure that we're proving our worth through regularly showcasing the results that we get. Instead of hiding those results, just leaving them secret, we try and leverage off those results to show people that we can achieve great things for a business. And we also tried to raise our profile. We've recently entered the New Zealand National Direct Marketing Awards. We're finalists there. So we're also just trying to raise people's awareness that we even exist.

Right, right. That definitely feels. That's an ongoing process that just continues to. There's more and more opportunities out there, more and more people out there. So that makes a lot of sense. Congratulations on being a finalist as well. That's awesome.

Thank you. It was a huge prize.

That's amazing. I mean, I think anytime. I feel like anytime that you put your name in a hat, at least maybe it's just being a. Being more of a pessimist. Although I don't. I don't. I think I'm. I never like to think of myself as a pessimist, but maybe that maybe this is a sign. I always just assume nothing's going to come of this, but when it does, it's always.

And we did the same.

That's awesome.

To be honest, we were more doing it to, like, train ourselves as to how you could, like, apply to awards and things like that, because we knew we wanted to in the future. Like, one of our bigger competitors sweeps up every single year at one of these events. So we did it this year as a learning curve and accidentally, more than anything, ended up ending a lot further than we did.

That's awesome. So I'm going to kind of wrap things up here with the big question, which is as 2018 is kicking off and getting underway here, what. What Is there any. I guess, what if there was one big goal or one big shift or kind of repositioning thing that you guys are doing? Is there anything that sticks out to you as a. Maybe like a theme or decision that you're making in 2018 that you're excited about?

Yeah, we are looking at ways that we can kind of add an extra 10% to each client. And that is in terms of the value that we're adding, we want more than anything to just kind of prove that we are making a huge difference to the businesses that we work with. More so than focusing on any kind of outwards marketing to try and attract new clients, we're focusing on just if we can keep retaining the ones that we've got, then we'll see that as a huge benchmark for success. We take it quite personally if a client's not happy with the result we're doing. So the theme for 2018 is definitely just add that extra little bit of value to every client we've got and try and keep them happy and help them achieve their goals.

I really like that. I think it's kind of the principle of many small steps add up to a return and just it's not can we double what we're doing for this client or that client, but just kind of the continuous improvement mindset tends to pay great dividends in the long run, so that's awesome. Well, Thomas, I really appreciate you being willing to come on and share your story with us here. If folks want to, obviously we'll link up vanguard86.com in the show notes, but is there anywhere else that we ought to point people to follow what you guys are up to?

We're pretty active on LinkedIn, but otherwise that's kind of it. We keep ourselves focused and small.

I like it. That's a great approach. Cool. Well, we'll also point to you guys on LinkedIn as well then, and let people connect with you. Thomas, thanks so much for coming on, being willing to share with us, and giving us some of your time here today.

The pleasure was all mine. Thank you so much for having me.

Want more great episodes like this one? Hey, I'm Gray MacKenzie, a host here on Agency Journey. I don't know about you, but sometimes I get a little overwhelmed when I find a new podcast. And there are so many great episodes and great guests, it's hard to know which ones to listen to first. That's why we put together a list of the top 10 most downloaded episodes of Agency Journey. And you can get a copy of that list plus all of our notes and takeaways just by texting the word do inbound to 44222. Again, that's do inbound all one word to 44222. Standard text rights apply. You don't want to miss these great episodes. Text DO INBOUND to 44222. Now.