James Blackwell explains that creating wealth as an agency owner is less about hard work and more about understanding and applying the right strategy: building systems (virtual teams, automation, SOPs), creating a repeatable client-acquisition and conversion machine, and valuing/leverage of time. He contrasts leveraged (wealthy) vs unleveraged agency models, describes moving away from "bums on seats" cold-calling approaches, and gives a personal example of valuing his time at £5,000/hour to motivate high-leverage decisions. The video closes with a subscription CTA.
Hello, everybody. James Blackwell here from Sunny to buy. And in today's video, I wanted to share one crucial mistake most agency owners are making when creating wealth. So how wealth is created, it's not really about working hard, because if it was about working hard, restaurant waiters, owners, cleaners, those type of people would be the most highly paid in the world. But they're not, because getting rich is about, like, what, learning what to do, who to do it with and when to do it. Now it's much more about understanding than purely hard work. And what I mean by that, it's actually understanding what are the key elements that you need to be doing every single day, your agency, that are going to create the most rewards. So, yes, hard work matters. And don't get me wrong, for the first two or three years of my agency, I worked very hard, not necessarily just in the business hustling away winning clients, but also working on the business by developing and learning systems that I could integrate in my business. So it wasn't relying on me. So one of the first principles I did when I set up the agency was I did not want to make placements myself. I knew I loved and I was very good at sales and I could speak to clients and win clients and get jobs on. And I also loved business, but I didn't enjoy the candidate delivery part. So from day one and from a first principles understanding, I made sure that I had a delivery mechanism that could deliver the candidate side for me and then it allowed me to really grow the agency quite quickly, then also develop a client acquisition machine that was constantly generating me clients and a conversion methodology in terms of a highly leveraged signature service and pitch deck in order to win exclusive and retained business consistently. Now, when you work on hot, it needs to be directed in the right way. So most agency owners, when they're starting, are trying to scale up after they've made a few placements. They are, they're doing things wrong because they don't have the right type of strategy, they don't know what they don't know. So you may have heard that saying before, like, if you can bolt onto someone that's actually figured out a way and a methodology, then you can focus your energy and efforts going in the right direction. You should not have to grind out lots of hard work whilst figuring out what you should be working on. So that leads me on to say, like, if you're paid, like just for renting out your time, then you'll only have so much time in the day and as probably you've probably figured out already if you've got no systems, you have no leverage. And what I mean by systems, that might be your virtual team to help with running the agency. Automation and certain systems and standard operating procedures are how you get clients and how you get candidates and then how you actually manage and scale out that agency that they're all in systems because systems really set you free. And that's gave me the independence to I said temporarily move to Dubai and work from here. And that's one of the things that you need to work on is making sure have you got the right type of blueprint and strategy in place in order to successfully grow your agency in the right way. So I talk around the old way of running an agency which is bums on seats, cold calling. And there's no disrespect to those type of agencies, but that does not give you freedom in terms of your time, money and leverage doing things in you either way, which is having a solid client acquisition system. I talk around the four forces in terms of your traction, your conversion, your sales and marketing, and how you automate and look after the operations as well. Most successful people that are highly wealthy have managed to master that. So to talk about rich versus poor, I see it as leveraged versus unleveraged. Now you need to value your time at an hourly rate. So I value my time at £5,000 per hour. Now I remember when I used to write that down like maybe three, four years ago and when I first read I think was Tim Ferriss four hour work week and I think I valued my time at around about like 100 to 200 pounds an hour. And even then I thought that's quite good. And then over time as your business evolves and you keep growing and you generate a lot more revenue and if you're generating six figures per month and you're working in that business maybe say 30, 40 hours a week, then your time and your amount per hour that you can charge and leverage out is a lot higher. And you need to set a very high standard, like a high personal standard of your time. Because time is the most highest value currency. And I've learned this a lot as I've grown my business. Time is really key because the only way you can free more time up is by using systems and be able to use your money and your wealth you created in order to buy more time back in terms of outsourcing or delegating certain tasks for you to create wealth. So I hope you found this video useful as always. If you'd like to subscribe to my channel and check out more recruitment content, please like and subscribe. And if you do have any questions, feel free to drop it in the comments and I'll catch you soon.
