Strategies for Agency Growth With Michael Lisovetsky and Troy Osinoff

Welcome to the Agency Journey Podcast, where we connect with agency leaders to uncover the hidden systems and processes that drive their success. Now, let's dive into today's show. Hey, it's Gray. I want to let you know that today's episode of the Agency Journey Podcast is brought to you by Around. What is Around? It's a video calling tool that's lightweight, it's playful, it doesn't take up your whole screen. It has saved me so much CPU usage, and I was a super early adopter of round back in early 2020, and I'm so thrilled that they're sponsoring the show. We're still using it. It is the coolest internal communications tool that we've added in the past 18 months here at Zen Pilot. We absolutely love it. It's made our meetings a lot more enjoyable. The GIPHY integration is absurd and really fun. And, um, yeah, I think everyone's kind of gotten used to here in the post Covid environment, the fact that people are working from home, but they have some super cool tech that's baked in. Everyone talks about being AI based. They actually have AI based noise removal, camera framing, and background cropping. So basically you're not seeing a big square rectangle of what your camera would be. It's a circle that centers on your head and it cuts out a lot of the background stuff. And then if you get people screaming in the background, I've got four kids at home. It's going to cut out a lot of that noise. It's absolutely awesome. So you can try around for free. Go to Around Co agencyjourney if you sign up. If you like it, shoot me. Your favorite filter. Ask me for a link to my secret room. I love to hear from other agencies who are using it. I think this is an awesome tool for internal agency teams. All right, let's get back to the show. All right. Welcome back to another episode of Agency Journey. I am Gray MacKenzie. I'm your host. And this week I've got not one, but, but two special guests. I've got Troy Osanoff and Michael Lucifetsky, co founders. Hey, Gray at Juice. Welcome in, guys. Thanks for joining me. I'm going to start with. So we've been connected for what we're coming up on two years now. Right now in Juice, which the website's thinkjuice.com, we're going to do more of your story here as we go. But you guys have done something since really early on. You've grown much at a much faster clip than most agencies. Out there. Originally headquartered in New York City. Now you two are both in Miami. You've joined the stream of folks migrating down to Miami. But, Troy, I'm going to push this to you first, and we're going to jump right in. What have you guys done? I realized I've got the perspective of seeing a bunch of agencies, and you're just like, yeah, this is how agencies grow, but this is not how most agencies grow. What have you guys done on the sales front that's allowed you to grow so quickly?

Yeah, I mean, the issue most people face when starting an agency and growing it out is you have that first group of clients which are effectively friends within your network. And the issue that happens is once you exhaust your friend network, not being able to go past your friends and family network is where most agencies kind of die. Die off. And for us, like, we always, we of course leveraged our network to start Juice, and then we made a big, big emphasis on the quality of our work to make sure that those initial clients that we got thanked within our network can showcase what we can actually do and the results we can achieve from our team. So we leveraged the existing clients we had to start with to find those next clients and putting out public case studies and kind of building in public to show up on what we were doing and how different we were than ever their agency and how much more level of thought and care we put into our clients. And the work kind of showed, like, spoke for itself.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Mike, from, you and Troy both have pretty advanced pedigrees for folks in the age bucket that we're all in. And I put myself in there because I'm the old fart in the room. And that's unusual in these conversations. But your background, obviously, going through a couple different startups ahead of going to Juice. Were there pieces from that, or what were the most valuable pieces of experience that you had coming to Guice that helped you guys scale?

I think unfortunately, some of the most valuable pieces of experience were just working with other agencies that weren't able to deliver on their promises. So what brought Troy and I together was a really simple goal, which is, or question rather, which is why can't agencies provide, like, a high level of service or a great experience? Or why. Why do so many agencies struggle in delivering with that promise? And, I mean, we could do a better job now at answering those questions than we did from the outside. But. But no, it brought us together. It enabled us to know, like, at least the obvious things we're able to tackle and then we learned a lot of lessons along the way to just, just figure it out. But the idea is that we, we've always run like a startup, so more like a traditional Silicon Valley perspective startup. Whether it's a technology that we've used, the approach, the mindset, the principles kind of through and through, we've. That's, that's all we knew in a sense. So it was pretty straightforward to us for us to take those values and embody them.

Yeah. From a. You mentioned kind of the servicing side and seeing why there's some of the challenges that agencies run into on that front. You guys have started out. One of the things that I admire about your story is you started out relatively streamlined in terms of what those service sets were. So you kind of built the name originally from my understanding in the paid social space and then kind of layering on paid search and then added in more of the website with peachy kind of sister company to Juice that does shopify development and now you're tacking on email and that kind of stuff. Was that accidental or was that intentional? And Mike, I'll start with you. And then.

Oh, it was completely intentional. I mean it was just bolt on. It was bottom up. I mean there are a couple of things that we, we had as non negotiable from day one, such as we would never do white label work. So we, we are, I mean the decisions we've made were always growth focused and thankfully they paid off. Now it wasn't always a direct payoff and as it felt like a little bit of a boomerang effect but it's the key that they paid off. So for example, we didn't take on white label work. Troy and I reinvested most of what could be salary or take home income into salaries. We were always trying to hire and move forward. I think the biggest challenge we've had is just keeping up with headcount and talent just given the demand and thankfully the demand is scaled and everything's moved forward and we've scaled up. But the biggest challenge has been just keeping up with that demand. But really it's just keeping consistent. We first started with paid social. We wanted to make sure we were delivering there. We almost were limited by talent as well. I mean we weren't comfortable launching a new channel until we knew that we could deliver on it. There's also this element where you don't want to be known for everything because if you're known for everything, you're known for nothing. Especially As a challenger agency, as a startup agency, you can't come out of the gate trying to boil the ocean and trying to do everything for everybody because that's a quick way for people to think that you're a discount shop or just. It just wasn't the brand we were building. So thankfully what happened was we started with paid social, we were able to build a world class paid search team. Now we're building a world class email marketing team and we're doing it right. So with every kind of iteration and addition, we've just gotten better. And we are just a lot better. Thankfully, we've taken the lessons, we've taken the hits, no earnings, and now we're able to do this better, stronger, faster. So with every channel, we're able to launch it faster as well. And I'll just wrap another. The last point is you asked about Peachy. So we actually have a sister agency called Peachy and it does web development and design. So one of our partners at guice, he was taking on this web development work and we had a bunch of inbound and it just intuitively made sense to us. Again because we didn't want to dilute the juice brand and we didn't want to just be everything for everybody. We wanted to make sure that we were specializing. So Petri specializes in web development design. There's about 80% E commerce to 90% E commerce, a lot of that Shopify, big commerce and the big ones and then some other projects as well. So we just always wanted to make sure that everything made sense and it was very clear and clean from the outside world.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, Troy. We were talking a little bit about potentially looking at growth through acquisition. You guys have kind of reached a point where there's probably some faster ways to continue to scale up your capacity to handle more clients. Is a great time to grow as an agency. The challenge for everybody right now is scaling up the ability to service that and continue to provide good results for clients. What's the thought process for you guys behind looking to potentially acquire? What types of agencies would you be interested in potentially bringing on board?

Yeah, I mean, we're definitely looking at the possibilities of acquiring an agency and of course this helps us grow the agency from a revenue perspective, which is nice. But as Michael was touching on talent, acquiring talent is one of the top priorities for us and good talent. So we're looking at acquiring agencies as a means to acquire more talent. Thankfully with Guice, like we have a lot of demand for clients coming in and we turn down most of the business coming in. We only really take. That's something else we've done since the beginning that we always, Mike and I firmly believed in is that we won't take on a client unless we truly believe in them. We truly believe we can have an impact on them. So we have no shortage of clients coming in, thankfully, trying to want to work with us. But the only limitation on our side is talent to service them. And we will never take on too many clients. We can't properly service them and give them all the attention that they need to properly grow their accounts. So the meat. So the optionality of potentially acquiring a company or agency gives us the means to actually grow in talent. So it gives us. Lets us one, see a group in aggregate, see all their work and how they perform and what they're capable of. And two, just again, just acquire. Grow the company much quicker rather than hiring one offset at a time, which we've been doing of course internally. But this just gives a quicker, quicker means to an end of getting that talent.

The door that makes sense. Do you guys have any kind of benchmarks around types of. Is it more kind of exploratory, see what's out there or hey, we'd like this type of size of an agency or the specific skill set of an.

Agency for the skill set. I mean, any of our core competencies that we operate in, we're definitely interested in. Like, I know Mike was touching on that. Like, email is a big emphasis for us right now with our clients. So, like email agencies would be great. Paid social. But really any areas where we. We operate in, we're always open to because our clients, like I said, we have client demand across the board, so we're pretty open. But paid social and email are probably the top two in my opinion. But definitely open across the board.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. I think what we're looking for is folks with a certain type of mindset. The hardest thing that we've had is there's really. There's been no way to replicate the type of mindset that we were cultivating. And gray, at some point you had a first front row seat. And a lot of why we're able to deliver, what we're able to deliver is our clients, everyone, they're buying into the mindset, they're buying into the approach, they're buying into the fact that we take ownership, they're buying into the fact that the team actually cares. So that's really hard to replicate. So for us to find competent People and a talented, motivated team that wants to come in and grow. That's the most interesting thing, like for us, Troy and I, like, we, we've done businesses in a bunch of industries and now Guice is maturing and is beginning to kind of thrive without our direct involvement. And it's pretty incredible to see, but it still represents us. And for us, like we want to do everything that we do well. So anybody who wants to join that journey, who wants to just kind of be in front of a fire hose of new business and be able to leverage that new business, but ideally and more importantly, deliver like great work for that for those clients.

I think the mindset thing is the hardest. Like it's the part of culture that's the hardest thing to build and to replicate in any business. I can relate to that on a very personal level. Speaking of the operational front and kind of growing out the team, you guys have a little bit of a track record. I don't know, we haven't talked about this. I don't know if I think you guys will relate to this right away when I say it. But there's this pattern that you guys have which is you're willing to. So a couple keys, I guess, in the Juice story. One is you had pipeline, you built pipeline and you were able to close new clients, but then you didn't. Because of this drive to deliver a different experience, you went and invested. So before I was involved at all in the Juice journey, you put a good amount of money into trying to solve more of the operational challenges and building out operational infrastructure. And then you made the continued investment with Zenpilot. You guys put a lot of money into growing it, but you have this pattern of if there's an area of the business that needs to be fixed, we're going to take action and both get personally invested and then also put money into it. And then there's also this pattern of we're going to spend money from the outside and then we're going to try to bring those resources in house for a long term solution, which I think is the right way for agencies to think about it. How do I solve this with outside expertise and then figure out how to replace that in house? So in terms of bringing on talent, working with external recruiters, and then this is, and I don't know how recent this is for you guys. So Mike, maybe you could touch on this. But bringing in an internal recruiter, how has that process been? And then is that an intentional decision to say, hey, we'll buy outside Help first and outside expertise. Or someone has seen this pattern a bunch of times, but then ultimately we want to in house that and make it something native to juice.

Yeah, I mean, the priority has always been how do we get to the answer the quickest. Again, we've always been grow. Everyone has a goal and a focus and an approach. Ours has always been growth. It's if we ask ourselves one question, how do we grow faster? And the faster solution is to buy the answer to the best of our ability. Like, money is not always a solution and it doesn't always solve anything, but when we find competent vendors. And like, because the two primary levers you have as an agency owner, really any business owner, is just time and money. And then those dictate people and those dictate everything else. But you have time and money just as. Just as a human. So how do you leverage those two things to move forward? So in our case, it wasn't about how much money could we make today. It was about how do we invest in our company and our team and our people and just figure it out. And thankfully, now it's starting to pay off.

I was always looking. No, I was just gonna say Mike and I always look at long term investments rather than immediate. A lot of agencies or people immediately just, there's money on the table. Let's just take it as income. Mike and I always want to be supposed to just keep reinvesting and growing the company for the long term gains because we know it would pay off later and be helpful for the company.

When did you make the decision to hire a recruiter in house?

We had an offset. At some point we realized, like, historically our biggest bottleneck ever was talent. And we had always kind of tiptoed around this idea of committing to a full time. Well, she's a recruiter, she's an HR lead. We were very much tiptoeing around it and we realized like, hey, if we want to grow, if we want to solve our number one issue, we want to finally get ahead of it, then this is the move, I would say, two or three months ago. Okay.

And Troy, you were saying you kind of outlined some of what you wanted that person, that recruiting role to do. So obviously there's these obvious stuff at Go Source talent, but were there any guidelines that I might be surprised by that you laid out for that role?

No quirky, weird stuff like you'd expect from me, but no, I mean, just we have a series of interview questions. We asked potential hirees, making sure they're a fit for our company, someone we enjoy working with. Getting your. And it's really important we have not only like the executive team with the company, but, you know, media buyers and team people within the different parts of the organization interviewing potential hires. You get everyone's buy in the company. It's not just the executive team's decision, it's everyone's decision because they're going to be working with them day to day. So that's been important for us as well, getting the whole team buy in. Realize we're all growing this together and we're all a team in the day that we work together on all this. So it's important everyone enjoys working with each other. Right.

I think as. As we've grown as well, we've tried to actually increase the level of transparency throughout the organization. And the reason for that is just, it's been interesting to watch. Like, you know, we. We've been in this position where we've been trying to hire and over hire for like six months or even longer. And what we didn't want to do is end up in a position where the team felt like we were stringing them along or somehow not delivering. So we took a step back and we're like, at least a solution is true transparency that they knew. They saw what we saw to the most allowable extent. Sometimes you don't want to share all the ups and downs because sometimes they don't materialize or they just don't make sense. But to the best of our ability, we try to be fully transparent. We actually have, I think it's once or twice a week, specifically talent pipeline updates that go out to the entire company that the entire company's bought into the recruiting process. I mean, we have referral bonuses that we give our team if they're able to help us successfully issue a successful offer that turns into a hire. So really we're going out of our way and we're seeing like, what, what can we do to have people buy in?

That's awesome. The, the talent pipeline thing, I think having those updates going out to the team ahead of time makes a lot of sense. That's a cool iteration on the process to have that for them. So you guys were on TechCrunch today and so of course I just texted you and said, hey, can we talk here in a couple hours? And you said yes, not actually how it happened. So what's the deal with Magic Troy? I'll throw it to you. You can start with an overview of what it is.

Yeah. So Michael and I Joined on magic for Fund 2. Fund 1 was very successful and thankfully invested in a few unicorns in some great companies. And Mike and I jumped on for fund two at a much large, I think fund one was 1.5 million and fund two is they're hitting 30 million and we're leading like I'm leading up D2C and martech investing. Mike is leading up fintech, proptech, real estate, Tec and we're taking. We're all just collective of fat. Sorry, all the techs, all the techs. We're a collective of founders which is super interesting and it really made it really enticing for myself to join on. I'm sure Mike as well for the same reason. Just because the whole thesis is founders backing founders. It's one thing to be money and be a typical standard investor, just be a monetary add in but actually have strategic insight and help you can have for these portfolio companies to actually make sure from our side Mike and I know oodles about growth so we can help all of our portfolio companies on the growth side we have other people in the fund that have other skill sets as we could all help from our own perspectives, our own insights, our own experiences and be true value adds to the portfolio companies we're investing in. So super excited about it.

Mike. There's the two of you and then 10 other GPS.

Yeah, there are 12 GPS in total. So the whole premise of Magic, I mean Troy and our hearts are in building companies and from an agency perspective we're certainly like we help empower companies in the ideal case and we help build them and kind of see them thrive over time. But it's a little bit removed. I mean we're a vendor and we always wanted to get back to our roots. So what's cool about Magic is we're able to do it part time. So the whole premise of Magic is there are so many partners to enable each partner to participate part time and do so in a way where they're still operating their primary businesses and they're still founders. That's the whole idea is the premise of Magic is that founders are the best investors. So Magic was just a really great opportunity to teed us up. Now we can identify opportunities that fit this venture capital thesis that can get really big really quickly according to the thesis on that side and then also be able to participate in the upside.

That's awesome. And that's is most are most of the gps. It's not based out of Miami. Right. It's all remote.

Everyone's Remote. Yeah, we have some folks in. In la. We have some folks in Africa. We have some folks in Southeast Asia.

Yeah.

Latin America.

Definitely in America. It's pretty. Pretty global coverage.

Yeah. It's cool to see that come together and that opportunity for you guys as well. So, as we're wrapping up, I always like to see what are the types of roles agencies are hiring for in terms of what you're recruiting for right now? What are the main roles or a couple of the main roles that you guys are looking for?

It's always the same. It's just mostly folks that are executing. Like, we try to prioritize hiring within, promoting within, rather. So for us, it's like, how do we get talented people that know how to execute and then tee them up in a way where we can ideally coach them up and then promote them?

Makes sense. So you're saying media buyers, account strategists on the paid search, paid social side. Yep, exactly.

So folks that can. For us, it's. It's strategists. So folks that can manage accounts, folks that can do media buying, those are ideal. But to your point earlier, I mean, the goal is to, like, if there's an aspiring agency that's growing and maybe they're not growing at the right pace and they want to be part of something that's already slightly bigger and on track to become bigger faster, then that's a target as well.

Right. So I mentioned the URL earlier. Thinkjuice.com if anyone wants to follow you guys. Obviously, Troy, I can't have you on and not give you a hard time for being @yo on Twitter. So you're the. You're the. Actually, there's an app. You guys heard of this app called around.

Around.com they're going to say yo app, but what's. What's around.

So around is really cool. Actually. They'll probably be sponsoring the podcast. It's a fun video app. It lets you have these little rooms and you can, you know, members from the team. If someone's in any of the rooms, you can see who's in there. But it's got. So if everyone's sitting in the same room, it's got noise cancellation where it'll echo cancel out. They had this free Zoom. Now, I think Zoom has some of the same stuff and it's just these little circles of team members and different filters, basically taking some of the pressure off. But anyways, it's been really fun to use in a remote world. So anyways, around, co, slash, whatever they're thing for rooms is slash yo. I made sure I went and registered that right away just to just to troll you for down the road.

I respect it. I respect it. Power moves only.

But for folks but for folks who want to follow you guys, what are the best, what are your preferred channels? What are the best places for people to follow the journey?

Myself it's Twitter, Instagram Roy. Very easy.

How about you Mike?

I need a better Twitter handle but Mike Liso on Instagram and then underscore Liso underscore on Twitter.

That's right. Awesome. Well I appreciate you guys coming on being willing to share. It's been super cool to see the Juice journey and to be a part of it so I appreciate you guys coming on.

Thanks Grant. Great catching up.

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