How to Use Agency Partners to Grow Your Business

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, welcome back to the podcast. This week, I have the pleasure of bringing on Justin Thang from Allsoft Publishing. Justin, we'll get into your story here with the agency, but maybe the right place to start is just kind of your personal background. How did you wind up with an agency?

Yeah, well, you know what? I started off in traditional advertising, so I started in digital, in the digital space. And we were doing for Yahoo. 7 digital ads, banners. I mean, I started my own digital kind of web design company when I was 16 in Singapore and got an international client. So straight away headed into digital. But in the ad industry, they make TV look so glamorous that I was kind of just looking for the opportunity to jump over to tv. And that opportunity came. Ended up in a company called DDB and worked my way up there and became the creative director and started kind of CD ing on campaigns for McDonald's and Telstra and like, just some. Some pretty big international brands. Until I was talking to Amir, who was the. The chief creative officer at the time of DDB Global, and he said, look, the best that we can do as a big agency or even as traditional agency is keep being charming at what we already do, that is TV ads, even though we know that it needs to go digital, but we're too big to turn the ship. So I heard that and something in me just went, no, I can't. I can't do it. So I went back into digital and led a couple agencies, then went consulting. And, you know, I've worked with some great agencies and great teams and we've won a string of accolades. And I realized, you know what, I should probably be doing this for myself. And that's when it happened.

So this is this like 2000. What did it, 2009, 2010 timeframe, or my way off there? I'm trying to remember what I.

I don't know, man. No, no. Kind of been that early? No. 2012, probably. I started thinking about it. 2013, I think is when I. I started doing it on the side and then realized, this is not going to happen unless I jump both feet in. And then I think it was 20, maybe late 2013. 2014, where I just went, hell for leather on it.

That's awesome.

So.

So we're three, actually.

It would have been. Sorry, you're right. It would have been 2014 because it was around the birth of my daughter.

Okay, that's awesome. So let's, let's kind of fast forward here to today. Talk to us about where the agency is at. Kind of how the. I think the things that kind of first come to mind when I think about like, where's the agency at on the one hand, kind of the servicing model, what are the common services? Is that pretty consistent? And then obviously the other side, like operationally, how's the team set up? And we can take those one at a time. We don't need to dive into both of them at the same time. So maybe start on the servicing side. Are you largely doing inbound marketing, retainers, partnerships, or is it a wide array of projects and clients?

No, it's pretty widespread because I think because of my background, I've been able to float in and out of inbound as well as doing digital campaigns for companies. So sometimes a fast food chain would say, hey, can you do all of our EDMs for the next year or something? And that'll be a gargantuan budget. Because they don't think inbound. They're not thinking retainer packages. Just like, look, can you do this for us? And that'll typically expand out to like loyalty programs and things like that. Then there are others that are websites and B2C marketing. And then, yeah, there's your inbound side of it.

Okay, wow. So servicing all those different pieces, what does, in terms of the team and the way that you've grown the agency, what does that look like to try and service all those different things going on?

Right. So to do that in Australia, I couldn't have, as we call it here, bums on seats, because one, it's a bit of a red ocean, and if I put bums on seats, I'm now all of a sudden like every other agency in Australia. And in Australia, if you write a brief, scrunch it up into a ball and chuck it down the street, you'll hit an agency. So we couldn't do that from the start. So what I ended up doing was finding some good crossovers with languages in the Ukraine and in Israel. So I hired two project managers in Israel who speak fluent Russian, exact same time zone as the Ukraine, and opened up an office of six designers in the Ukraine.

Do you speak Russian?

I do not. So my project managers Speak fluent English.

Okay, that's awesome. The translation. I mean, working with people all over the globe, it's interesting to find. Like, when you have that and try and match up languages that, like, team members speak with someone who's got overlap, and when you get a couple languages deep, it can get a little crazy, but that's awesome.

Not just languages, but just expectations and definitions. Like, what a creative is in Eastern Europe is not the same as what a creative is in Australia.

It is just matching up and even cultural expectations about the way people work, the way that people communicate. I think that was something. One of the guys on the team here was just kind of like walking through the differences between the way that we here in the kind of east coast, kind of Midwest, we're in the in between zone here in the US the way that we communicate versus the way that someone in Eastern Europe communicates versus the different. There's some cultures that are very abrupt and to the point, and some people might take that as offensive, but really?

Oh, yeah.

That's just the way it happens.

Oh, man, it's so hard to follow. I mean, it's for anyone to kind of enter this kind of model. It's not easy. It's a very relational model. You got to spend a lot of time building relationships. It's not the same as jumping onto Fiverr and getting somebod. You really got to go through a lot of difficult conversations, crucial conversations. Work it out so that you guys understand each other, and then it gets really efficient and really effective.

How did you find those people initially, and then how, as a team has grown? How are you going about that?

Yeah, so great question. So, I mean, I've grown up internationally all my life. I've gone to international schools. I move countries every two years. So I've got friends all over the world. So sometimes it was just serendipity. Somebody would send me a message and I'd get in touch, we'd chat, and there'd be instant chemistry. You know, other times it's been friends of friends. So I've been very fortunate in that sense to have, I guess, kind of organically grown an international client base quite easily. Really?

Wow, that's awesome. So one of the things you've got going on right now, and we were just talking about kind of the branding for it, but it's like a servicing model for other agencies through the team that you have built. You want to kind of walk us through the way that's set up right now, and then we can dive into some of It I've got some questions around how that works and some of the specifics there, but how did that start and what does that look like today?

Okay, so how did it start? So it started like I said, because necessity was the mother of that invention. And as the team has grown, we've added inbound specialists, HubSpot people, and now I've got a team sitting around me. We've got an office in Sydney that has grown quite considerably. As well as riders in Melbourne, we've got riders in LA and Silicon Valley. As the need arose, we found the people we needed and then hire them full time. And so where are we at today? What we've done is we've gone well. Also can't hire more account service people and so I can't scale. This is about two years ago I decided, I realized, look, I can't scale if I hire more people. It's pointless getting more retainers and more income because I'm just hiring more account service people. So I had to think about it and decided that instead of having, let's say, let's make the number simple, Instead of having 25 end clients, I would have five agency clients. They can handle the end clients and I'll only really interface with five people. So if I have five agencies, they can have five clients each that we service. And now I have 25 clients without the need for 25 account service people. I don't know if I just made a mess of explaining that, but.

No, it makes sense. So a couple questions I have. Obviously coming out of the agency space as well and talking to other people who have what sounds like, at least at surface level, similar models, you're basically being the back office or the operations team for an agency for their client delivery.

Yeah, exactly.

So your team that you have, are there cases where is that kind of the way that the setup happens where you only interface with the agencies or your folks? Are your team members interfacing with the end client as well? Or is it all being run through and kind of white labeled through agencies?

Look, that is a great question. I recommend white labeling, but there's often times like some of my more successful clients and haven't white labeled. They've just pulled me straight into client conversations, at least key client conversations. For example, there might be one particular client that's so big and so just the requirement and the experience is so big that they need my kind of personal background to weigh in. They'll pull me straight into those conversations and I'm happy to wear any hat that I need to wear in terms of brand like, like I was saying, you asked the question about the two brands also and Inbounder. Inbounder was really set up to just service the back end for other agencies thinking that their clients if, you know, just to have a kind of one layer of separation for people and their clients, turns out they didn't care. They didn't care whether it was also for Inbounder. They, they really didn't mind and it was great to have that kind of trust which I didn't know would be there. So now we just service agencies. As lsoft Publishing Inbound is going to wrap up as a brand, but the model is the same.

Yeah. So I want to go back to something you said and dig into it a little bit more. You said you can't scale hiring more account servicing people.

Yeah.

And I'm curious about why that is. Obviously most agencies are trying to scale that way. So when you say that that's probably triggering like wait, what, what does that mean? At least to me that kind of triggers that.

Yeah. I can't speak for other regions. Right. But I know in Australia in order to service Australian clients you kind of need the local knowledge, you need the unspoken cultural expectations. And so that's very, very hard to do with an outsourced team. Very, very hard. So what ends up happening is you have two or three senior guys who end up on the ground in the same country, let's say Australia, talking with the clients all the time and then they're essentially becoming project managers, account service people and God forbid they actually know how to be hands on with design tools because then they're designers too. So that's what I mean by it's very tricky to scale because you can't outsource that really. Not that I didn't try. I tried, but yeah, it just doesn't move fast enough.

Gotcha. Cool. So in terms of kind of the way that the business is set up right now, we don't need to get into obviously dollars and cents, but in terms of revenue buckets is most of the stuff. Are you seeing more traction on the sourcing through other agencies side of things or is it more kind of some of those old legacy type of clients where you have those relationships around the alsoft, like end client, I guess, inbound retainers as well?

Yeah, it's a good question. If you had asked me this question probably six months ago, I would have said it's more from the legacy clients. Don't get me wrong. I mean we do okay. In the HubSpot space, we don't, we don't show the tier that we would show if everything was coming through our portal, of course, because we use other people's portals, but we do okay there. But this model has been really, really effective for consultants or smaller shops who can't really become HubSpot partners or for whatever reason. There's some kind of barrier, either it's their size or their revenue, but they sit in very influential spaces. For example, one of my best clients sits on the Australian Marketing Institute board. Huge number of contacts, resources, networks, but can't become a HubSpot partner. And that ended up being one of the biggest, biggest sources of revenue we've had.

That's awesome. I do think that's an expanding space and I think people are becoming more comfortable with it. For a while you've had that on the supply side. People understand I don't want to deal with everything that goes into marketing and operations and sales and everything else. I'm a specialist, I'll be a freelancer and specialize in this skill set. And I think that with more and more services like what you guys are doing, I think more and more there's more realization that people who have the skill set towards the marketing and sales side and the consultant side of things, the strategic point of view, can do that and have a back office without having to necessarily be. If they don't want to do the operational piece, they don't necessarily need to do as much of the building a team, staying up to date on skills, trying to constantly recruit and deal with turnover and promoting the team internally. So I've had more and more conversations, at least over the last year with, with people who are saying, I feel like a couple years ago I had people I would hear the frustration of. It's just so frustrating. I'm really good at selling and that's what I want to go do. And in the last year I feel like that frustration has turned into the realization and action plan of okay, I realized I was good at that and then I found somebody to help augment this. And so actually embracing that role and doing that, where they're able to pull in other agencies to partner together.

I think content would be in that instance, content would be our cash cow. Just blogs, writers, just run of the mill hygiene type stuff. So that's probably our basis to be able to do more niche, bespoke things. And I suppose if you look at it, that would be our rising star, that strategic partnership model with these consultants where we're going in closing deals that are very, very unconventional.

Mm, that makes sense. What are some of the things. And maybe we approach this from a. From the negative perspective in terms of partnering with other agencies. Maybe. Let's start with what are the things that, that go poorly or what causes that not to work? Well, because you're adding an extra layer of complexity, obviously, which if done well, makes everyone's life easier. If done poorly, makes everyone's life worse than it was before.

Look, I can rattle off a couple of things. Anything sub $3,500 a month as a retainer isn't going to work. You're just going to take too long to make it happen. That's one Number two agencies that say, I'd rather you try it out on our agency first before we give you to our clients is always a bad sign because it means they actually don't understand inbound marketing, and so they're just looking for somebody else to do the HubSpot stuff. Number three that I see going wrong is agencies actually don't understand inbound marketing. They're not. They're not really take away the tool set. They're not marketers. They. They are. Look, I don't know what you would call it, but they are trained up on the tool set. They buy in on the methodology. But that all stops when it comes to real lead nurturing and scoring and transitioning from ESS from MQL to SQL and that kind of thing. Those kind of conversations where they cap off and they start getting frustrated at somebody and everybody wants a neck to strangle. Usually it's the supplier.

That last one, I think, is really the difference between kind of the head knowledge and the heart knowledge, where it's like the head knowledge is I'm able to repeat what I've been told and rattle off, like, the basic principles that I've kind of read and heard over and over and over. And the heart knowledge is more like, okay, but now this is actually, I'm able to apply this. If you give me a complex situation, I'm able to take the skill set that I learned and not just prescribe. The only thing I know how to prescribe the same thing over and over. But I'm actually able to adjust this and temper this to exactly what I need to fit here.

Yeah, totally. And the biggest indicator of that is when you talk ebooks. Right. I don't know anybody that hasn't seen an ebook download and go and been there, done that. I want to talk to agencies where I can say, look, can we talk about this? Because I don't even know if this is going, you know, if we hate it, they hate it, you know. Right, right.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. If you can move towards, We've had some fun episodes. Jeff White from Kula Partners is one that comes to mind. And they've really taken that flag, I think, and run with it. But going away from the PDF download, which I do think it's funny to look back and say, there was a time when I wanted to download a PDF and now there was a time when I wasn't going to be connected to the Internet everywhere. And by downloading that, I could take that and go read it somewhere else I would want to print it out. And now it's like, I look at this stuff, I'm like, First of all, 80% of this is more poorly designed, even though you spent way more time designing it than a simple webpage, which I'd much rather read. Why is this in a PDF? It's just, it doesn't make any. Now, like, I'm connected to the Internet all the time. All I want is a webpage that I can go read. I don't want to have to first, I don't want to have to put in my information and then I don't want to have to download this thing and go read it in a poorly designed PDF. I want to see it in an easy to read web page and work my way through it. But anyways, that's a whole other story.

I know, man. You unraveled that.

That goes a long ways. Well, that's awesome. So I don't want to eat up too much more of your time, but I do want to ask kind of a bigger picture business direction question here for 2018, and that is, is there anything over the course of the next 12 months that you're either already planning in terms of where you see things going in the future, the way that you're adjusting the business or anything that you're just kind of at the early stages of thinking about and kind of. I feel like a lot of times for me, this is like there's an idea that's in my head and it's kind of stuck in my head. I can't get it out of my head. And it starts to marinate. It's like, I know I want to move that direction. I don't know the exact steps, but I'm excited about this. And then over time, it marinates and gets kind of worked out and then you ultimately head in that direction. Anything Stick out.

Yeah, look, I think the tools that we're using for inbound marketing can be used in other ways and in more unique ways beyond just marketing, strictly speaking. And I think that's because there's a kind of a melding between what is expected at an SAO level, like between MQLs and SQLs that hand over that lead conversion into a phone call or a touch point and some of the issues that we talked about with ebooks and landing pages. So broadly speaking, I think that merging of the two, the tool sets need to be able to be freed up from what we have called Inbound Marketing 1.0 and moved into whatever the inbound playbook will be of 2020. Some of that might be, you know, integration with inventory management for, you know, E commerce clients. Some of it might be more of a B2C market, which I'm looking at. You know, I think the tools that we use, if you remove the words inbound marketing, could really do a great service to the B2C digital marketplace. Beyond just E commerce, I'm talking about, you know, like, we've one of our biggest clients is an energy drink company. And it's just we're seeing great results in personalization. You know, for a B2B CEO to see his name on a webpage, it's like, oh, yeah, I've kind of seen that before. But for a consumer to see, you know, to go to Coca Cola's site and see his name on the Coca Cola front pages, this is like magic. And I think we underestimate the uniqueness of the tools that we use because we think in a certain box. So that's that. Lastly, the other thing is, I'm kind of trying to move away from Personas because I believe in Personas, but they need to be so granular that you might as well have 50 million Personas. Which is why I'm going hell for leather on artificial intelligence. As soon as I can get my website to be, I'm stripping down my website. As soon as I can get it to one box where you can just talk to it and tell it what you want and it'll come back to you with what you need, man, I'm there. Unfortunately, they haven't built it, and I don't know how.

That's awesome.

And then the other thing is, I'm really trying to pull AI into a lot of my client marketing. So I'm talking to like, you know, the IBM Watson marketing guys. You know, I just want to see what can be done right that makes.

A lot of sense. And this is an area you're probably familiar with. Paul Raitzer from PR2020, but pushing the AI for. For the marketing space very heavily right now as well.

Yep, yep.

So he's pounding that drum. And I'm excited to see. I'm excited to see where that goes and how that. Like, right now, I don't think I'm a. I don't think. I think I'm more of an optimist than a pessimist when it comes to most stuff in tech and with AI, I feel like I'm not as optimistic about the time frame as a lot of people are, which is probably the person to build it.

Here's the thing. So I'm talking to some of your guys that aren't in marketing. So your PwC, PricewaterhouseCoopers, your Deloitte's, you know, they're doing cool stuff. Like if you've got a. If you're on a Facebook photo and you're not in the middle of the photo in the group but somebody else is, they will detect that that person is the influencer of the group. And instead of marketing to you, they're going to market to them. That's a great use of big data and artificial intelligence. So why aren't we using it? Give it to me. I want to use it. We don't have access to that data yet.

That seems like the. And maybe I'm just overestimating how hard it is, but it just seems like there's so many obvious use cases. But I have. I just haven't seen. I guess I haven't seen it made accessible yet, so.

Correct.

It's coming at some point.

They're using it. They're already using it. The time frame is, you know, like these guys are using it.

So that's awesome. Well, this is. This is really cool. Just to kind of get an inside peek at the business and your thought process. Some lessons that you've learned. Justin, Obviously, we'll link up the website in the show notes for anyone who wants to check it out. It's just alsoft publishing.com au do you guys call it anything? I should know this already working with as many Australian agencies as we do. Do you say anything cool or different other than.comau for Australian websites?

No. We say go.

Okay.

No.

There's got to be some kind of fun lingo for this.

I know, right? But it doesn't exist now.

Okay.

I think it's just thrown away, you know, like also publishing. Right.

There we go. Okay, Other than that, what's the best way for people to. Is there anywhere else you'd want to point people to learn about you guys? Follow your journey.

Look, I think we're stripping. Like I said, we're stripping down on a whole bunch of things. But get in Touch on LinkedIn, I think is the best. Just go straight to me. Happy to have it.

There we go. That's awesome. Well, Justin, really appreciate your time, man. Thanks for sharing your story here.

Thanks so much, Gray.

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