Biggest mistakes lead generation agency owners make: Not Making Money? Here's Why

I started my lead generation agency in October 2022. And in the past 16 months I've scaled my agency from zero to $50,000 per month. And in the first 12 months of me starting, I collected over $300,000 cash in my business. But it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. I failed more times than I could count, made more mistakes than I could actually explain in this video and in this video I want to explain all of the mistakes that I made and the most common ones that I see that people take or people make when they're starting their own lead generation agency. So, number one, not getting enough attention. So this is by far the lowest hanging fruit. And it's pretty simple to understand. If no one knows who you are, if you're not getting a lot of eyeballs on your business, on you, your personal brand and your business, then obviously you're not going to make any money. So if you're able to master this one skill with which is generating attention for yourself, then you will make it rain. Right? It's the lowest hanging fruit. And if you're just able to just get enough attention on yourself, then getting to 10k per month is extremely easy. And that's personally my experience. I know when I first started my business I went a really long time. I went literally months, I think even like a year without making money at all. And looking back at that, the reason why I struggled to make money was because no one knew who I was. I was sending 20, 25, I think 30 emails a day, meaning every single week. I was literally only reaching out to 200 people. And if only 200 people are seeing what I do and seeing what I sell, then obviously it's gonna be very hard to make a lot of money. So this is by far the easiest thing you can do, is figure out how you could generate a lot of attention for yourself and for your business. Grant Cardone has the saying it's not the best product that makes a lot of money. It's the best known product that makes a lot of money. And this is 100% true. So if you are looking at your stripe balance, you're looking at your bank account and your digits are not increasing on a weekly basis, they're not increasing on a monthly basis. You're going weeks, if not months between payments on your stripe. Now what it most likely means is you're just not getting enough attention, not enough eyeballs are seeing who you are and what you sell. And if you're able to figure this out, then you're just going to make a lot of money in a very short period of time. So number two, focusing on the cost savings in terms of your business. So unlike some of the most common businesses online, you see dropshipping Amazon fba running a lead generation agency, specifically selling a cold email service is not going to cost you thousands of dollars a month in terms of inventory costs and ad costs, but it still requires money. You're not going to be able to run this business for free. And quite frankly, there's no single business model online that will allow you to get started and make thousands of dollars without you needing to invest some sort of upfront money at all. The good news is with a lead generation agency, this is a business model where you'll be able to just incur a few hundred bucks in terms of business costs. I know here in Canada, so my currency is cad Canadian currency. It's a little bit different from US Dollars or whichever country you're from. But I know inside my own lead generation agency I spend between 500 and 700 bucks a month on my business. And the vast majority of that cost, I'd say roughly 80% of that cost comes from my Microsoft Outlook business basic accounts, which where I'm paying around I think 8 to $10 a month for each email account. And that's where 85% of my costs are. And the largest mistake I see, and I get hit up from a ton of people on my Instagram DMs every single day as well, is people asking about different email providers, most of which are a lot cheaper than Outlook and Gmail. And the largest mistake I made was around a year ago. I actually got baited into using some of these tools because I was getting billed every single month for a few hundred bucks on Google Workspace accounts. This was before I moved onto Outlook I and it was pretty expensive, right? And I looked at these different tools and I saw that the way they were being marketed was they will help you buy your domains and they will help you set up all of your email accounts, meaning the dmarc, the dkim, the spf, all of that stuff in the backend. Plus the major advantage was you only pay once or you pay a very small amount of money on a month to month basis. And the way they work, I'm not going to call out those tools, but the way it works is they are custom domain providers, meaning they're not using Google infrastructure or they're not using Outlook infrastructure in order to send emails. And those tools, they cost a lot less and they work in the short term, meaning when you set them up, you'll be able to send emails and they'll land in the inbox for the first few days, first few weeks. But what I have always found with 100% certainty is after a while, after a few weeks, all of your emails will start going to spam. And for a lot of those tools, they started happening within weeks. So within three, four, five, six weeks they would just stop working really efficiently and working well. And at the end of the day, what ended up happening was I'd be paying for these tools to get started, to test them out and, but they'll just stop working, meaning after that I would always have to go back to Google or always go back to Outlook, meaning I was actually paying more money. And on top of that it wasted a bunch of my time because now I was wasting my time doing all these things. And opportunity cost is a really real thing. So for example, if you are being baited, if you, you know, the thought crosses your mind of maybe using tools outside of Outlook and gmail, I would 100% not suggest it. So there's a reason why Google and Outlook are the largest tools in this space. And there's a saying, right, stick to the basics and this is a business, so if you are cheaping out on some of these tools, kind of the essentials to actually run your business in terms of actually sending emails, then you're just taking a massive shortcut in your business and you're making a very massive mistake. And this also applies to a bunch of different tools in your business. So for example, the email sending platforms, there's a reason why smartly and instantly AI are the largest tools. It's because they 100% work. Now, obviously there's a lot of different tools you can try, some of which are a lot cheaper, but those tools are not a guarantee that it will work. Again, there's a reason why Instantly and Smart Lead are the largest tools. Same thing applies for your list scraping tools. There's a reason why Apollo and LinkedIn are the two most common tools in the space. Now, obviously there's a bunch of other tools and, and a lot of them are marketed as being much cheaper than Apollo and LinkedIn. But again, once again, there's a reason why these tools are the largest in the space. And the reason why is because most people are able to make it work with these tools and they will 100% still be working three months from now, six months from now, even a year from now. And if you try different tools, you're gonna run into the risk of spending more money, all things considered. And on top of that, just wasting your time. So that's kind of one of the largest mistakes that I made, and one of the largest mistakes I see people making is kind of cheaping out on the tools required to actually run the business and in order to actually see results that allow you to make money. And number three, which is overthinking and taking too long to take action in your business. So last week I was actually on a Zoom call with someone who's been building their lead generation agency for the last six months. I asked him, so over the last six months, how much money have you made and how many clients have you signed? And for those two questions, he basically said, hey, Jimmy, I spent six months, I have not made a single dollar and I have not signed a single client. And it wasn't too surprising to me because we've all been there. When I first started, I didn't have any clients. When everyone starts, they don't have a single client either, meaning they're not making money. It's very normal and it's a part of the journey. But what was most surprising to me was he went six months doing this every single day, and he still haven't made a single dollar. So now the question becomes, why did it take him six months and he still didn't make a single dollar? While other people such as Sadiq, Tom's and Mark have been able to sign their first client and made their first thousands dollars inside the business within a few weeks of starting the business, what is the main difference that allowed someone, these people, to make money within weeks versus this person I was talking on Zoom, who spent six months without making money at all. Now the answer is because this person that I was talking to on Zoom, let's just call him John. The reason why John went six months without making money was because he was overthinking and trying on perfecting every little thing inside his business. I took a look at his website and he designed a very beautiful website, five pages long, completely on webflow. And quite frankly, it was even better than my own website. And it's not wrong to focus and make sure that the things that you're doing are done really, really well. But a lot of people, this actually handicaps them because they go actually spend two weeks building out a website, when in the grand scheme of things, a website is not even that important, especially when it comes to signing your first clients. And that's exactly what I mean. The largest mistake I see people make is they're focusing their time, they're wasting their time on the wrong things. They think they have to do very specific things. Building a website, building, doing this, doing that. But in the grand scheme of things, it barely moves the needle forward. So for myself, when I started my business in October 2022, I actually got to $10,000 a month by December. So around 60ish days later. And the largest thing that I did was focusing on actual revenue generating activities. Meaning every single day I was waking up, I was thinking about how I could generate the most attention for myself and what I can do to actually make money. And let me tell you something, let me let you in on a secret. Building a website will not help you get more attention. Building a website will not help you make more money, not at least in the beginning. And that's exactly the largest thing I have learned is inside this business. If you want to make money quickly and you want to do it within a reasonable timeframe, you have to sit there and think about what you need to do every single day that actually moves the business forward. And I'm giving you the answer right now, and that's learning how to get the most attention possible for business. Meaning focus on figuring out how you can start sending emails as soon as possible. Figure out how you can send as much emails as possible, and focusing on nurturing your leads. Right when you're reaching out to people, people don't know you, they don't trust you. What can you do to actually get them to trust you? And that's the biggest thing that I've learned, is people who struggle, people who are going months, if you are spending months, you've been building this business for a very long time and you just haven't seen results. Most likely it's because you're just not focusing on the right things every single day. So that's pretty much the video, that's what I wanted to talk about, which is the three biggest lessons that I've learned inside of my business and the three biggest things, the three biggest mistakes that I see other people make when starting the lead generation agency. So if you're watching this video and you've been building your business for the last few months, maybe you spent three months, four months, six months, maybe a year plus, and you just haven't gotten the results that you're looking for and you're interested in just changing. I included a link down below to my calendar where I work with pretty much complete beginners, helping them start their business and get to $10,000 a month in the next 90 days. If that's something you sound that sounds interesting to you, then book a link in my calendar below and we'll just chat to see if I can actually help you. But hope you enjoyed this video. If you have, please subscribe like this video and I'll see you in the next one. Thank you. Bye bye.