How to Get More Money Per Client Without Doing More Work with Raul Hernandez Ochoa

Hello, hello, hello, everyone, and welcome back to Agency Journey. I'm your host, Kuba Gretzar, and with me on the call today is Raul Hernandez Ochoa, growth strategist and founder of Do Good Work. Raul, how are you doing today?

I'm doing fantastic. I want to mirror your energy, but I'm doing fantastic.

You're not the first one to say that, but, yeah, we try to keep it high energy from the first, from the first moment here. We've got a very exciting topic to dig into here today. Our guiding principle is going to be how to get more money per client without doing more work. So, you know, no biggie, but I hope we can deliver on that promise. And I plan to ask you some questions about that here today. But first, for the audience to know you a little bit better. And before we get into all of that agency stuff, let me hit you with this question. What is the most fun thing you've done, personal or professional this year thus far?

The most fun thing? Oh, my gosh. Oh, yeah, dude. I live a very simple life. Okay. Fun triathlon. I did a triathlon, I think, in April, and I'm training for an Ironman for next April and might do two more this year. So that's. That's my definition of fun.

Okay.

What did I tell you?

So what is the most fun thing about the triathlon? Is it crossing the finish line? Is there anything else that's kind of along the way, way that, that people enjoy, that people maybe don't normally know about or talk about?

I absolutely love the training. Sounds weird, but me, some headphones, a good audiobook, cycling for an hour, two hours, running for an hour, or swimming, I don't know. I just really, I really. It recharges me.

Right. You can get lost in the process. Right? That's how it feels.

You have to. I mean, it's, it's. If you're training for. For swimming longer than I've ever swam in my life, you have to get immersed in the process. If not, it becomes very long.

Yeah, I can feel that. And falling in love with the process. I mean, that. That advice often gets shared in a business context, but it's useful for anything. Like this year, like looking back 12 months from today is when working out in general finally clicked for me. And it was literally falling in love with the process, plus having a little bit of a support network, like people that I can talk with. Myself and a few other friends started working out a similar time and just trading messages about gains and the changes in our bodies. So to speak. That is. That is so huge. One last question about that. What kind of audiobooks do you listen to when you train?

I listen to anything from personal development, mindset, just anything that can give me a new idea.

Okay, so for the audience of agency owners that we've got here, any recommendations, anything particularly good that you listened to recently or not so recently?

I like to listen to the classics. A good one. A good classic to listen to would be the Thing. It's the magic or the power of thinking Big. That was a pretty good one. So that back in the. In the. In the audio. Audio audiobook, it talks about down payments for homes of a thousand dollars. So you can see that this is a very. A little bit of an older book, but the principles, I think apply to this day.

Yeah, that one is one that I kind of nibbled. I only just started the first few pages, but maybe I should get back to it. And we'll put that one in the show. Not. And that's the first thing we'll put in the show notes from this episode and we'll see where we go next from here. Okay, so, Raul, where I would like to go next is I'm going to give you a moment to talk about yourself and your business in a moment here. But before that, I like to kind of lead with value from the very beginning. So I'll ask you the traditional agency journey question. Are you ready for it?

Sure, let's shoot.

Okay, so what is your number one tip for agency operators?

Patience. Patience with yourself, with the process and with others. Because, you know, we create systems and processes because we want to automate and have less human error. But the beauty of life is human. But also that can be frustrating, and that's. You have to deal with other humans, you have to work with other humans. And if you're a leader, you're coaching other humans. So we can dive into all that. But I think the number one thing is patience with yourself. Patience with achieving the goal in the process, because it's not going to come as soon as you think it will, but with persistence, it will. And patience with others.

Okay, I love that. I'm very big into kind of the art of self talk, you know, like in the moment, what you tell yourself to push through difficult situations to keep yourself on track. So on the subject of patience, what do you like, literally tell yourself in your head to be more patient to kind of. To implement that in the way you run your life?

It's going to sound a little weird. And I had an agency Owner kind of be taken aback when I, when I did this is, I just chuckle at problems now because at this point it's like, yeah, because I've seen. You've seen. I mean, I haven't seen everything in the world, but I've seen quite a bit. And when you just see the problems, you're like, okay, well what do we have to do? We can either complain about it, we can mope about it, or we can figure something out. And my natural instinct at this point is now to just chuckle about like, all right, this is good, let's just try to solve this problem. Because that's all it is. And it's essentially the same thing with life. Uh, it's, that's why I love triathlon training or training for endurance because it's, you're gonna face a door, you're gonna face an obstacle, you're gonna face like some hidden thing that you have to open the door. And they just figure things out. And that's one of the best characteristics of high performing agency founders, business owners, just humans in general, is the ability to solve problems as they happen and not be put down by those problems or the weight of those problems. So my natural instinct is to chuckle about it and just say, okay, cool, new opportunity.

That's awesome. I love that. I just wanted to let that kind of resonate a little bit because I really feel that the moments when I struggle the most are the moments when I lose perspective, lose a healthy distance towards my problems. And that's when I tend to have, you know, and I think a lot of people can relate. I tend to have like, strong negative emotions, feelings of paralysis and overwhelm.

That's the, that's the negative side of remote work. That's the negative side of working on your own by yourself and or through this digital realm where it's just bits like the problems that we face are always processed up here. I'm pointing to my, our heads because we're literally touching these bits, these, these computer things that we can't even grasp. Right? And I've even found myself too in those same situations. You just have to be aware that you're in that situation and know that this is not the right place to be and either change your environment or just like stop completely, just stop. Go outside, change the. For me, it's changing the environment or doing something that I'm naturally resisting.

Yeah, I really recommend that. I had a conversation recently about pacing. Pacing when you're writing, pacing when you're creating content. And like this has Been a big unlock for me, like doing like a standing desk type of situation, just moving my body as I work. Because like you mentioned in the remote context, that can get really, you know, lost where, you know, all of a sudden you notice that your body has been pretty much immobile for 90 minutes and you're surprised that you can't focus.

Like, you know, or nine hours sitting in front of the screen.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I feel that, I feel that very strongly. This has been so awesome already. And we're only into the first few minutes of the conversation. Alrighty. As promised, now let's take a step back and before we get into kind of the main topic for today, can you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, your business, what you do, how you got here, you know, a little bit of the context behind what we'll be talking about.

Yeah. So Raul Hernandez here in San Diego, California, father of two at this recording. I run a growth consultancy and it's like an agency kind of consultancy. I've built agencies in the past. My first agency, I was actually trying to start a software company in 2015. And when you interview the market, you're like, hey, what's your biggest problem? Sales and marketing. I'm like, okay, cool, we can figure this out. Partner with a buddy from Brooklyn. I was in San Diego, he was in Brooklyn. We never met in person. Remote work started the company. Brooklyn company boom. To this day, if I check the spreadsheet, I think we had like 19 clients. It was great, but it was also something like, hey, maybe this is not what we want. Just a working relationship. Good friend to this date, he was actually at the wedding. So we paused that and I decided to work and help other agencies grow online. And honestly it's just like good timing, blessings and being able to help agency founders who were either mergers or acquisitions, pretty much. Long story short, three months in leadership position. From there helping lead guide set up the entire infrastructure for an agency. Then just a lot of like tornado swirls. I was just like in my 20s, I'm like, okay, where's the work at? So let me go and execute. I got a chance to work under and lead a well known agency founders agency. And I got from there exposure to coach, consult, advise very prominent well known online businesses in the Internet marketing space. And then from there that agency got bought out. And then I helped Aaron Parkinson In 2019 we was it 18 or 19? I forgot which year it was. But we almost tripled his agency from 7 people to 24 people and doing significant profits and revenue top line in less than a year. And that's where a lot of the material that I use to this day to help other agencies scale up has come from. So my journey is not, it's not a straight line. Could be a little bit like up, down, upside down, twirly backwards, crazy stuff. And had the opportunity to build teams in house to helping a revenue team scale up to 50 million in revenue in a year. Also doing things with an agency and just doing this on my own as a solo consultant with assistance and looking to start supporting. Supporting by building my own team and continuing to grow. So that's where we're at in this phase.

Okay, so that's how Do Good Work started. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, the business, the scale of it, et cetera? Yeah.

So Do Good Work started when I went solo to consult and help other agency owners. And that was through, I think a mentor told me, hey, you should just start this and just go. So I did.

Okay. Okay. So summarizing that journey up until now and you know, right after this, we'll get into the main topic for today, what I like to ask about. And I know it's maybe a blunt and oversimplified question, but along this way, thinking of where you started and how you got here, what was the single best business decision?

To bet on oneself. To bet on you. Like me. Like, I think as you're listening to this, continue to reinvest in that bet in yourself.

Okay, okay. I love that. I love that. And I think, you know, a lot of the people listening, you know, given that a lot of the audience is agency owners, they, you know, have made that bet on themselves.

At least at some point you got to keep reinvesting. It's not a one time decision.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think, you know, and I want to make this episode another moment like that, you know, I took the time to listen to a podcast. Maybe you've, you've been a long time listener to Agency Journey or maybe you just decided, you know, on a whim to, you know, to listen to another episode. Well, in today's episode, we want to tell you a little bit more about, I mean, I mean, we. I'm going to ask you, Rahul, in just a second about, you know, the topic that we selected is making more money per client without doing more work. So can you talk a little bit, kind of introduce the topic in terms of like, I mean, does this need building up as something that agency owners would like to do? I mean, I Think this is something that all of the agency owners would like to do more of. More revenue per client. So what's stopping them from actually getting it?

A lot of it is actually in the mind. So let's, let's set up the frame here. More revenue and profit per client. Let's just imagine there's three phases. I'm not sure if you can see the video or if this is just audio. Um, but there is a new version. So I don't know if less people are listening to audio or only on the car.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's going to be like a phase or part one is before part two, or like the center phase is like this is more revenue per client and profit per client. And then part three is the after you sell. So it's before the sale, the sale after the sale. Like that's, that's the whole, that's the framework here. So why more revenue and profit? Why does it begin in the mind? So I'll tell you real stories for that, but really it's the value of your own work and the value of how you perceive your work. And you're pricing your work based on your perception as well as market perception. There is, I will put the antithesis that there is delusional pricing. All right? This is not to say that you're going to balloon your prices to this delusional thing that no one will pay for. I know there's a lot of proponents and arguments about that in the marketplace, but right now I'm talking about practical high value pricing of your work and not selling your services. I don't want you to sell your services because if you just sell your services. If I go on LinkedIn right now and I search every single agency and I come up with 200, 300, 2000 different agencies and I go to their websites. I kid you not, I've done this almost every single one. 50 in a row, 70 a row, 100 in a row. Have the same thing. We'll help you with this, we'll help you with that. We'll do this. We'll wash your kitchen, we'll clean your cat, we'll do all these things for you and we'll post your content. It's like the same thing over and over and over again. It's like, okay, well, where's the value here? If I can just buy a commodity, why should I pay you to do this? I had an agency for one of the teams that I've been a CMO for. I mean, they were fired, but the whole thing is when they started pitching us and showing us more of their services, they literally gave me a Chinese menu. Do you want five emails? What's going to be this much money per email? And I'm questioning why is it this much money per email? What am I getting? Like what am I getting for this email or what am I getting for this? Like this? Click. So I don't want you to sell your services and a lot this is a really hard to ingrain. One of my recent clients, we started repositioning their offer and repositioning the way that they approach their business. We just went through this process and they wrote the sales page recently and they still are working to sell the service. I don't want you to sell the service. I want you to sell the outcome of the thing that you do and that you produce and the value of that outcome. And that's the number one thing that matters. Because clients don't buy your fancy education degrees, your awards. And I know that might offend some people, but they buy. What are you going to get for me? What's the solution you're going to provide to me? Sounds simple, but it's actually a little bit more complex to execute this. This goes beyond just positioning and positioning statements. This goes beyond and dives into what are you actually solving for? What is the measurement of that solution and is the person you're talking to either one, see the value of that or two, are you hitting surface level value? Because at the end of the day people are like, well, my clients just want to make more money. Sure, great. But what else? What's deeper for that? One of our agencies or one of my clients. This was a little tricky because the clients that she works with have donation money to spend and they're not looking just to make more money. They're looking to create an impact. But they're not just looking to say oh, I want to do all these key things. It's like, oh, we're going to save you. You're going to do this. Like the position around there is to prudently deploy those donor funds to create measurable impact and we help you measuring and execute on upon that versus just hey, let me save you timely, make you more money. Those are the surface level. You got to go deeper and understanding the psychographics of who you're talking to. What do they care about? Because some people care about looking important, feeling important. Other people care about making the right decision, being over analytical. Other people they care about, is it feel good, is it in alignment with what we're going to do with a mission, et cetera. Others are like, is this like the best support for someone else who I'm responsible to? And they care more about the person they're responsible to than themselves. You got to know who you're talking to, what do they care about? And then how are you positioning your solution to what they care about? Because they don't care what you do, they don't care how you solve it. They're not going to see your 27 checklist SOP with 15 subtasks and 5 documentations and 3 workflows and 4 zaps. They're not going to see that. Okay, right, yeah. So you have, you had. That's the pre work and this is a lot of mental. And I'm emphasizing this a lot. But this is the number one hurdle because the process is simple. We're going to walk through the process. It's actually really easy. Well, it's not easy, it's just simple. It's not, it's not complicated is what I'm trying to say here.

Yeah, yeah.

But the biggest lift is the thinking. How do you view your services? How does your ideal client view what you do? How do you present that as a solution that they care for in the language that they can receive it? And then how do you value, price it in a way that is in alignment, that's going to reach their goals, is profitable for you? Day one. That's not going to do scope creep and you get more revenue per client without doing more work, just delivering on the stuff that you know how to do.

Yeah, yeah. So I would love to tap you here for an example. And like initially my mind went, let's talk about a content agency. But no, let's talk about a business like Zenpilot, because I would love to get your take on this. Okay, we've done a lot of, you know, thinking and doing in terms of, okay, what is the surface level pain that we solve and then what is underneath that? You know, the kind of, the deeper level outcomes, et cetera that we hit on. So I have an answer to that, a version of it. But how about. I'll tell you, and you have some context here, you know, kind of surface level what we do. But for the listeners, et cetera, what we do could be boiled down to training around the proper use of ClickUp done for you, done with you, depending on the context, ClickUp setup, setting up processes, workflows, kind of accountability habits for agencies, you know, 10 plus FTEs, kind of up to 100, 200 we've serviced. Right. So kind of surface level, this is what we kind of help with. A lot of the time they come to us saying, you know, we want to do better with ClickUp. We can see the potential, but we're not using the potential. But it's all about the tool primarily. Sometimes it's a matter of I would love to build like a full dashboard of how many hours have I got, you know, to invest, can I take on new projects, et cetera. That sometimes comes up. But primarily it's about, you know, do better at ClickUp. And that's the surface level. And then how would you kind of take a company like ours from. Just because I'm very curious about like how, how you, your thought process would go here, kind of from the surface level to something that's more outcome based, value based, and, and you know, a deeper level. What would you say?

So there's a few things with that. You already have the three part of the sales process to give options to work with you. So you already have like done with you training or done for you, et cetera, so that we can save for the next phase here. In particular, when you're talking about, oh, I just want more of the tool, I think you need to dive into who does this solve the largest problem for? Because I've worked with founders and they tell me specifically, some can't sleep well, like legitimately. Like, they're actually worried about, like, hey, I don't know if I can actually take home more money this month or I actually don't know how my team is doing. How do I know how they're actually executing? The frustration of the team equals the culture. Like, you gotta pinpoint ClickUp, what it's, it's a fantastic tool, but what does it allow and enable the person who's buying from you? Is it the CEO that's buying for you? Is it the vp, is it director, Is it CEO directly? Like, who's actually buying from you? And then anchoring, what are the things that they actually want? They want to be more efficient so that they can earn more money, hire new people, bring on new clients, or just streamline and not have to stress every single moment when they're on vacation with their family. Like, we need to anchor towards what that looks like and then the value, the transformation of what you actually help them do. Does that make sense? So we got to dive into that specifically. It's a deeper dive than a simple conversation. Yeah. But to keep it high level and simplistic not, not oversimplified. I would lean into the solution that you, that you, that you deliver who is the most valuable for. Because if it's, you mentioned an FTS of 10 or more, that means they're doing a certain number of revenue. That means that when you come in and implement, you have, have them save a certain number of hours or time or sorry time or money. But out of those which industry or vertical, what solution do they have to be selling? Because if you save someone who sells like a $200 an hour project, that's great. But if you help someone who solves a 1500 or a thousand dollar an hour project, that's more significant for them. The value is greater for them. So it's anchoring not just what you do, but who you do it for and their perception of value.

Okay, I see. So it's about identifying who this is most important for within the organization. Hopefully it's somebody high up because that unlocks budget, being blunt about it, but also what kind of stands out from what you're saying is like make it personal. What is if they're not sleeping well at night, if it's affecting their personal life. You know, I've had conversations, we've had conversations on agency journey of like how, how being an agency owner and over indexing on the business side can affect your, you know, your family life, your, your personal life. You're doing this to have some, some amount of freedom at the end of the day and you don't because you're working 80 hours per week on your agency. I do feel that, and I'm curious about like where this goes from here. One curious thing that you mentioned is, you know, you would think that one, one goal that they've got in mind is to kind of use for example, something like the Zen pilot system to be more efficient, build up processes to scale to bring on more people, get from 10 FTs to 20 to 40, et cetera. But what we've also heard though is I've got 10 FTs or 20 FTES, I don't want to add more people. I just want to have more efficiency. So with the same team, I can bring on more clients. And interestingly enough, with the right workflows, efficiency and kind of clarity and visibility in place, you can do that. You can increase profits without having to increase your scale, which is also very valuable because more scale means more potential chaos, more potential problems. Right. So I just wanted to add that in as something that I've learned during my stint here at Zenpilot about this context. And now I would love to dive kind of further into your framework. You mentioned, you know, we're at like the first stage. How about we proceed from here?

Yeah. So the first stage is understanding yourself, the service, who you're serving for. We'll tie that into the second stage. But before we leave the first stage, it's also valuing this, your service. I can't tell you how many times that we were working with proposal. When I work with founders and doing proposals and working with them on sales pitches, they're scared of the offer we're making. I literally been told, I feel like I'm gonna get laughed out of the room. Like, no, you're not. So that's the number one thing too. Like, do you actually believe in the value you're delivering? Because if you don't, no one else will. And I know that's like, okay, well, we'll get over it. Like, let's go to the next phase. This is more prevalent than not. This is why I'm over emphasizing on this point. But now if you've, you've taken care of those things, then it's all about the sales process, the discovery and then the presentation. And in the discovery, Like, I'm not going to go through the entire discovery sales process, but you're literally figuring out, why are they talking to you? What do they actually want? Like, what's their current situation, their future situation, what's stopping them from reaching that? But then also, like, what's the cost of not reaching that? What are some of the things that they've spoken about that they're currently facing? What are the things that they're doing and they're not doing. So just taking notes of that specifically, because when you present your offer, you're not going to send them this Chinese menu, this pitch deck, you're not going to send them this scope thing where they can choose. And I've seen these softwares that are fantastic, but like, oh, I'm going to choose to like this thing and only get five emails and only do like. Like, no, no. Like, unless you want to be a commodity. And that's your thing, you're selling a SaaS, great. But if you're selling a bespoke service to solve a particular problem for a particular person, we need to be more concierge than that. So the first thing is obviously understanding, you know, where they're at, where they want to be, what's stopping them, what's mentally stopping them. Because not only are you sometimes mentally stopped from Achieving your goals. They're also mentally soft. What are their beliefs that are stopping them and weighing them down? And why are they actually talking to you? Is the pain great enough for them to make an action and invest in it? They say they will, but until people see a price, you know, you never know. So then once you get that on the background, you're going to be matching your services and your areas of transformation, of the things you actually do, because you sell this service. But there's multiple areas of transformation. Team efficiency, team efficiencies, click up. Organization, being able to take on more people, higher profit margins, potentially being able to lower the stress of the founder. How do you measure that? Like those are different areas of transformation. And then you create a scope of work with different options. And the different options, you just laid it out. Do you just want training? Do you just want us to do it with you, or do you want just us to do it for you? In a different tier of that, Again, this is simple, but you want to give them options because I call this the bullseye offer. You want to price anchor your highest on the left hand side, your middle tier is like your, your average pricing and then your bottom tier is your lowest pricing. But on the flip side of that, and we, this is probably further than the scope of this podcast is I work with founders to review what is your ideal profit number. Because some people are like, I have, I have no idea if we're profitable, I have no idea how to price ourselves, I have no idea like what, et cetera, et cetera. So we dive to an exercise of identifying what is the ideal number in terms of number of clients that you need, type of staff paying for that staff, the salary that they have and the revenue you should have per client to hit your profit number. And all we do is the lowest price offer for every offer that we make is a guaranteed number on their profit number. So no matter what happens, they're always going to be profitable. Day one, clients are going to get value because you've concierged this service to them. And number three, they are going to feel seen and heard because you've just, you didn't just create this. It's going to feel like a custom scope for you. It's actually going to be a productized service or something that you just bundled together that looks like a custom scope. But for them, it's going to feel like this is a unique solution for me because it's going to solve this problem. And during the presentation, all you do, before you ever show this pitch deck. Or you show a PDF or a price or a number, you just literally say, let's go through what I heard. Let's go through what you told me in our first couple calls. Did I hear this correctly? You're doing X, Y and Z. Is this correct? You're feeling this. This is what you're going through. And when you do this, I kid you not, when I personally do this, I had founders who literally, like, they heard because the pain that they hurt, not because I'm. I'm just mirroring what they told me. I'm not, I'm not using any psychology or some manipulation tool. I'm just mirroring what they told me. And they literally say, that's right. And they gasp and they look down and their shoulders go down because they know the mockery they're going through. And you've pinned pointed to the point where you understand I know what you're going through. So in order to reach your goal, and this is literally the language I use in order to reach this goal that you told me within this time frame, here's what needs to be true. And there's no arguing to that. And this is quote, unquote, your scope of work, like at the top tier scope of work. Here's what needs to happen. If you want to run, for example, this is like a simple example because it might be easier for this analogous example if you want to run an ironman or a half iron, here's what needs to be true. It's like, oh, okay, I can get behind that. This person's clearly done it before. Okay, they've shown me that they've done it before. They understand where I'm coming from. They understand that I gas out of this model, whatever. Here's what needs to be true. And then they ask the question is, how do you want to get there? And then you present. Yeah, you. How do you want to get there? They tell you, you don't tell anything. The beauty of this process is that they self select and close themselves. You don't sell. You just offer to help. You're not trying to lean over and do hard, pushy sales. You're doing the true service of selling, which is just help someone else. And they tell you, okay, well, I want to do this tier because this is what the things that I need. And it opens the room for negotiation. And that's the whole goal. And then from there, you make sure that they feel heard and comfortable. You make sure that you can fulfill them. That and ideally, the way that you Package. This is all of your service already productized. Either you're working with Zenpilot or you already, like documented everything. They're all productized and ready to go. And you, when you Lego block these things together, they look bespoke. But for your team to execute, it's pretty simple. So you're not over promising on sales and they select you, onboard them and.

You go, okay, so I would love for you to make this, if you can, just a little bit more concrete. Because what I heard is that like, for example, there's a pain that feels so true and real to them that they have like literally an emotional, like a gas moment. And also there's a list of things that need to be true.

Not all of them are gonna gas, but I've had that, I've had that experience where they.

Okay, so let's start there. What is it actually? What pain is it actually that makes them have such a strong reaction? Like, do you have like specific examples?

I mean, it's just I mirrored what they told me, the initial call. So whatever they're facing right now, the language that they use, I literally mirror that language. Specific examples would be, is right now you have no way of duplicating your success because you don't know what's working, what is working. And that's frustrating you because you know you can add on two or three clients. Is that correct? It's like, yeah, that's actually very true. And right now the team, you don't know if they're executing properly, you don't know how they're executing, what they're doing. And that kind of makes you feel like you're running, like kind of running blind. So it's just simply, this is not fancy language. I'm not trying to overcomplicate the process. I'm not writing a book about this whole thing. It's just, you hear what they're saying, understand what they're coming from, see what their internal motive is. Is it for self, is it for other people? And then from there just mirror that language in the conversation and then attach your products in a way or your services in a way that looks like a product, like a custom packaged solution, and you sell the outcome.

Okay, so I would like to draw attention to one thing here. As you were giving the example, I have a feeling your voice changed a little bit. I feel like that has an impact in itself. And I mean, everything matters on a call like this, right? You know, it's kind of slow and kind of deeper and it feels soft. It's almost like a therapist kind of voice, you know, it's like this. This voice of like, deep understanding, like, I'm here with you, you know, it like, makes you feel like your hand is on my shoulder here or something, you know, like, we're looking at this.

That could be part of it. I really don't train around teaching people how to use voice inflection because even just having the saying the right words in a way that. Because I assume and when I work with clients like, that you're human and that you're actually here to sell. Like the sell to serve the other person, not to self serve. And that's a. That's a whole personal internal client selection thing. But usually when they do that, like, you can't fake it. You can't fake being real. Some people do. And you can totally tell, like within three seconds. So here, like, if I have to say, like, be real in your calls, that's it.

Okay. Yeah. And serve the other kind of your counterpart. I feel that. I feel that. And so I'm glad I zoomed in on this part. And I would like to also zoom in on kind of the very next step you mentioned. Like, here's what needs to be true. And there's like a list, you know, and I'm trying to imagine I stepped away from the Zen pilot context for a moment. You were mentioning, like, this, this Chinese menu. You were mentioning, you know, like, buying five emails. You don't want people thinking about buying five emails, but there's still, you know, some list of things that need to be true. And I don't know if this is like, for a content agency, for a business like yours, I don't particularly care, but I would love to just kind of get from you, like, what that list might look like. So what are these kinds of. What's on the list, so to speak, if it's not a Chinese menu of like, buy 5, 10, 15 emails or whatever?

You're pretty good at this podcast interview thing. You're really good at picking up these questions.

Thank you.

So what needs to be true there is your methodology. So you're. Again, so this, this is a really good point to double down on. I don't want you to sell, hey, I'm going to do this audit for you, then I'm going to do this strategy for you, and then you can kind of bullet list that out. But you're selling the process instead. You're selling the unique mechanism. And if you're a marketer like me, like, this is not new news for you. Like this is like very simple, proven, principle based stuff. You sell the mechanism that gets a unique outcome and you just educate how you're going to do the process of that mechanism. You're not going to tell them we're going to spend 40 hours auditing your social media and your paid advertising and exporting that to this Excel sheet. And then we're going to have our data wizards do this whole like analysis on it. You're not going to say that. You could say like part of step one or the process one is to do an internal deep dive where we look at X, Y and Z. Then from there we pull those things into our proprietary AI prompting or whatever you use. Again I, we've sold websites, we've sold done for you call outbound, paid advertising, content marketing. It's this, it's for me it's the same process again. I look at a framework, I'm a frameworks kind of person in thinking. Yeah, I look at the framework. So you're selling the mechanism and you're just teaching them how you're going to walk through the process. You're not educating them how to do it, you're just teaching them how you're going to execute them step by step. Because they. When you work with a digital agency and when I hire agencies or I work in agencies or I help agencies, the only things you can experience are the discovery, the phone calls that you have with them, the work quality and the ongoing like communication. There's nothing else to experience in this, in this flat screen world of selling digital pixies. Right?

Yeah.

So all of it does matter how you show up, how you talk, the clothes you wear, the background you have and then also the process, how you educate them and do they know and do they trust you, do they believe in you and do you believe in yourself and your process going back to phase one up here in the head.

Yeah, I feel that. Okay, so now I'm tempted to think again about the Zenpilot context in the sense of, I think I'm understanding now what you're talking about in terms of what needs to be true. So for example, our conversations typically go, you know, like if you want to achieve this outcome of increased profitability, get more work done with the same team. What needs to happen is like all of your work needs to be within one system. There is no work outside of the system. That system is ClickUp. All of the work is kept there. Not only that, but there's time estimates and time tracking for everything. Otherwise you don't know where your investment and your team members, you know, salaries, et cetera, where it's, where it's going. And not only that, but on top of that you have a way to not only see utilization and profitability data, but you're also able to slice it up. You know, what's the utilization and profitability per client, per service line, per account manager. When all of that is true, it becomes possible and even easy to make better business decisions, pivot towards different service lines where you have like double profit, which has happened in terms of our clients, but like you help them see this kind of different world in that sense. But these things need to be true and you need a way to get there. How do we get there? That goes to kind of the next part, which is, you know, they self select from the options, right? Am I getting all of that correctly?

That is correct. The only thing is when you talk about your process or the way that you deliver value, you use a language that the other person can absorb and see themselves in. That's the number one key thing. So what you have is really good for us to use at any given moment. But depending on who you're talking to, you change the language in a way that they can absorb it. So like a simple example like you mentioned. Oh, you see these graphs you can data analyze as opposed to like Raul, you'll know exactly within two clicks, while you're sitting by the beach with a drink in hand, exactly what your team is doing, how much revenue you made yesterday and utilization for next month. How does that feel?

It's a bit of a difference there. Indeed, indeed.

So, so it's, it's again mirroring who you're talking to. And this is again not fancy persuas. All you're doing is communicating, communicating well the value that you deliver and knowing exactly that value because. And going back to, to the original point, if you're selling this to agencies or maybe services, maybe in healthcare, how much more valuable is that to them? Maybe you do need to use more technical jargon for them, but for them, you're helping them save hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. And for you to charge, if I don't know, all your pricing models, but if you were to only charge $15,000 for that, when you're going to help them save $150,000 a month or potentially in an entire two or three month period, it is a disservice to value it that low. So then you got to look at your pricing and say, what is the Right approach here. And this goes to the different battles of do we have productized pricing or do we have bespoke value based pricing? That's a whole different discussion. But the whole idea is who is this the most important solution for and how are you communicating that and giving them options so that they feel like they're in control based on the speedway or like the railways that you've put together.

Okay, okay, I see that. So I want to leave enough space for us here to kind of go through the whole framework. I'll leave my kind of other curiosities aside, kind of points of curiosity aside. You mentioned kind of the first big stage of the process was all about the mindset around outcomes and value, not selling services. Now the second part was all about discovery and presentation. So what comes next after that? How do we fill out the rest of the framework?

So the rest of the framework is now on fulfillment and the behind the scenes. I alluded to it earlier. When you're doing the math, like the simple third grade math of identifying your profit number at the same time you're identifying the areas of transformation that you deliver in phase one and then just having things operationalized for that. Like if you're only solving, let's say you have five different areas of transformation that you deliver and from those you have like pretty much productized ways of like, hey, if we're doing 1, 2 and 3, we know who's going to do it, how it's going to be done, what tools to use, what automations, or maybe it's already 70% done for you. Because you've probably heard this on the podcast and plenty of other podcasts that the best agencies are like stamps. They sell the same thing over and over and over and over again. It's just a stamp, new client stamp. The thing that I'm going further here is that I don't want you to position yourself as just a stamp. I want you to have your services in your backend delivery which no one sees but you. And maybe Zenpilot the backend delivery to be the stamp. But when you collect and you put these together to bundle them or create a bespoke solution, it's just bundling 1, 3 and 4 and then maybe number two on month three if they want it because that's the price that they chose. So your fulfillment team knows exactly how to do it. Because I've also had this problem like talking to the CEO and like Raul, we needed some sales, so we over promised on the sales. Now we have to make it up on the back end. And we know we're not going to be profitable. We're actually going to be running maybe 15% negative on these current projects. But we promised it, so we have to fulfill on it that that is more of a reality than we like it to be. So the back end has to be fulfilled. And when you're selling, you're just connecting the dots. You're just puzzling this LEGO pieces together, giving them options and whatever they choose, it's profitable because we've guaranteed it to be profitable based on your, on your numbers. And number two, your team can fulfill on it day one because it's just the same things that you've been doing all along. You're not doing any extra work. The maybe quote, unquote, extra work is the way that you talk to people. That's it.

Okay, so I'm understanding that in terms of like, what I want to achieve here in this third step is like, should be, you know, process driven. You know, there should be, I imagine, like, SOPs for it, you know, like a standardized, standardized way of doing this. But can we dig deeper into like, how to actually get there from an operations perspective? Like, how, how do you actually, I don't know if I'm right on the metaphor, like, create the stamp or like, how do you make sure that this fulfillment piece becomes easy on the, you know, after the sale?

Well, so that you can, you and I can do a masterclass on that with Zenpilot. But that entire process, I'm, I'm assuming, I mean that that's essentially, I mean, I'm hopeful that's the outcomes that you deliver too, is how do we create repeatable success. That's the language I exactly use with clients because some of them want to scale and like, you're having trouble repeating success and you're like, I'm not going to curse here, but you're like, yeah, crap, you're right. Like, how do you repeat success? I think that legwork or that foundation work needs to happen again. The analogous of, let's say, your weightlifting. I've, I've powerlift in the past as well. First six months, your squats are gonna suck. Like, you're gonna have terrible form. But once you get that form, then you can really stack on the weight. 200, 300, 400 pounds. You can really do that. But that foundation, this, that foundation piece of what you mentioned, productization, it's all inputs and outputs. What are the outputs that you're going to produce? What are the inputs that you need from your team, from your clients, and then from there delegating. Who is it? Who's going to do it? You, Another human or a machine? If machine had to automate that, what is the best tool in going through that process? So I have an entire, I mean, I wrote a simple book around that particular process. But the whole idea is that foundation piece needs to be here before you can do this, because if not, you're going to be over promising overselling, and then you're going to be stressed as crap because you have this huge invoice that's going to be due because they are paying you a substantial amount of money. And you're like, I feel overwhelmed. I don't know if I'm delivering value. And that hurts your belief around your product because you actually don't have something that's going to be fully delivering on the goods that you've promised. So don't be in that situation.

All of the elements kind of feed into each other, right? If you can nail the fulfillment that gives you so much more confidence, you know, within your mindset for, you know, any future conversations, I can see how this is all connected. And you're right. I mean, this does definitely connect to what we do here at zenpilot in terms of, like, I've seen what it looks like just by sheer nature of being part of the ZenPilot ClickUp workspace of like, what it looks like to have that machine in place. I'm looking at the process library that we have or even our internal processes. And, you know, I think a lot of the listeners would be surprised to see, like, how much detail the processes go into in terms of, like, it's not just a list of steps. Let's talk about client onboarding, for example, and I'll put it in the show notes. You can Download our free ClickUp template for client onboarding from the ZenPilot site. It's just one example, but it has not just steps, but, you know, for each step in the process, you know, for each stage of the onboarding, there's a separate checklist of did you check that? Did you recheck that? There's like multiple checks of the same thing. You know, a particular, you know, whether the invoice is paid or whether a document is properly sent and signed on multiple occasions just to make sure it's totally watertight and even to the extent of, you know, the welcome email to the client. Here's a template. You know, some customization is expected, but generally speaking, you're 90% done from the moment they sign the contract with like a lot of the work. And yeah, having that. And this is created, you know, over time. This does not just pop up, you know, during the course of one day. It has a lot of lessons learned kind of baked in. But that's your intellectual property there. And once you have that, you should be able to plug in somebody fairly junior to be able to run this process at a senior plus level, just because it guides you step by step and there's little room for error if it's detailed enough. So I just wanted to add that in as an additional part of the vision here. So we covered the three main steps of the process. I was wondering if there's more to share here or if you want to tie a bow on it in terms of, I don't know, is there a particular point that agency owners get wrong more often than not that bears emphasizing here or is there, is there anything else to fill in here?

I think, I think I beat it over the head. Is that the biggest hurdle that I personally, my clients right now is valuing the value of the work that you, that you offer, believing in the offer and to tie a bow on it, to be honest with you. Just buy these ideas. What I'm. What I'm. What I'm quote, unquote, serving and selling here on this call is the idea. Buy it, apply it, try it, go for those home runs. You'll again going back, bet on yourself, you'll be surprised that you can actually hit a couple of home runs out of the park. The second thing is as you apply these ideas, these are based on proven principles that my clients to this date are winning deals that they never won before, large deal sums. And this is all, isn't all about just how to make more revenue. Whatever you're looking to attach this to, how do you serve at a higher level? Because everyone churns. Everyone has an artificial churn and a natural churn. If your agency is having artificial churn, that means that you must be thinking of higher levels of service. How can you help them go further, faster or better with what you are doing? And hopefully aligning that to the natural churn. Because no one's going to stay with an agency forever. That's just the nature of things, right?

So that's the natural churn point, where in a natural way, the time has come where they got all of the value. There's not much more to talk about. But the artificial churn is that something happened along the process that made them quit before they got Maximum value. Am I understanding that correctly?

100%. And those things are usually controlled. Those are things that you have control over.

Okay, so one last question. So in terms of valuing your service, My mind thinks in simplistic ways. You know, it's like service, sorry, outcomes transformations, I should say. Right. My mind works in simplistic ways. And I'm thinking, okay, so tell me there's more to this or like, how is there more to this than just slapping a higher price on things?

Just try.

Yeah.

I mean, that's the simplicity of it. If I wanted this podcast to last three minutes, it would be, increase your prices by 1.5x and see what happens and follow this process. Increase Your prices by 1.7x 2.3x 3x. Why those numbers? That's what we've done. That's what I've personally done sometimes to the point where I felt like, oh, my gosh, this was a balloon pricing to the tune of $2,000 an hour over 120 days. Because I've anchored a service that I deliver to the client and what they were needing, and it was a situation where they really needed it.

I love that. I love that.

That's. That's the key thing. That's the key thing. That's a simple summary. I don't want to get too much into the theory of value pricing, because the whole idea is like, I'm holding coffee right now. I won't tell you where I got the beans, but sometimes I overpay a significant amount of money for beans because I care about the quality of life and my quality of coffee. But that's value to me in particular. And I don't want to get too much in the theory of value based pricing, because it's all this. You can get into this tunnel. I'm a practical, feet on the grass kind of person. Here's like, what works, here's what you can apply. Give it a shot. Let me know how it goes.

Beautiful. Beautiful. You had coffee? I'm almost finished with my tea. And we're almost finished with this episode. Thank you so much for the conversation. That was lovely. Yeah, I know. I tied a bone on it. I know. So now for the last part. Can you please tell the listeners and watchers where to find you, where to connect with your you and get more from me?

Yeah, absolutely. Everything is on the website dogoodwork IO. That's dogoodwork IO. IO is input and output, Input excellence and then output. You know, a good life, do good work.

Okay. And that is as simple as it gets. Are you also on LinkedIn? Do people, do you want people to reach out to you there or just go to the site?

LinkedIn also. I can put that in on the. It's on the website. But yeah, LinkedIn is also.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. I'll add that to the show notes as well. Okay, well, that ties a bow then, which is definitely the phrase of this episode. There's always one that you kind of end up over repeating that ties a bow on this episode of AJC Journey. Raoul, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was a bomb of an episode bombshell. It was great is what I'm trying to say. And for you watchers and listeners who may be joining us for the first time, don't forget to subscribe to follow to rate. We're on YouTube Zenpilot. We've got not just episodes of Agency Journey, but a lot of ClickUp and Agency Ops tutorials there so you can learn so so much more, particularly about this fulfillment piece, but also increased profitability, utilization, all that good stuff. And don't forget to follow well me, your humble Agency Journey host, Jakub Greitzer on LinkedIn. Follow us on Pilot on LinkedIn. We've got events, we've got content, we've got newsletters coming your way so you can enjoy all of that. And that's it for this episode at all. Any final thought to share with the audience as we close out? I'm about to hit the button.

Yeah, I think the key thing is enjoy the journey because your journey determines your destination, not the other way around.

Enjoy the journey, the Agency Journey. And we'll see you next time. Thank you everyone. Bye bye.