10 GENIUS Hacks For Your Agency in 2025

Are you ready to crush your 2025 goals with some genius agency hacks? Most agencies that I see, they're kind of still living in the stone age, and most of them don't even have the basic fundamentals, let alone all of the new tools and technology and AI. So having helped over 550 agencies scale their lead generation operations systems in 2024, I have narrowed down 10 pieces of actionable advice that you can implement within 24 hours. And these are going to be the genius hacks from this video. So in the video I'm going to show you these 10 hacks and then I'm going to show you how they will probably save you 300 plus hours over the course of this year. And then I'm going to give you some examples about what I do for each of them. And then if you're willing to take this even further and you are willing to join my mastermind, we will implement these 10 hacks together and we'll also install 26 specific systems to your agency, all before 2025 is over. So the first thing that every agency needs to do is content marketing. And part of the problem that a lot of people have with content marketing is coming up with ideas. So how do you come up with these ideas at the scale that is required to have a content strategy that lasts years, not just a week or two? So I teach over 550 agencies every month what I call the FAQ strategy. So what we want to do with the FAQ strategy is you want to break down our service into different categories. So for example, if you are a YouTube agency, some of these categories would be your titles, your ideas, your thumbnails, your scripts, your editing, your production equipment, speaking on camera, and that kind of stuff. The next thing we'd want to do is use ChatGPT and come up with 50 FAQs in each of these categories. So what are 50 things that people may might ask about thumbnails or what are 50 things about scripts or ideas or all that kind of stuff? I like to ask ChatGPT, but if you know, and you should know your niche, you'll have some idea from your own brain, right? And you can go to quora.com too. But I like to come up and ask ChatGPT for 50 of these because not all of them are going to be good. Like some of them will overlap too much with other categories. Some will just be too beginner, some will be just too niche or specific. So when you ask for 50, you really can narrow it down to about 20 of these things. And if you have 20 and you have 10 categories, for example, now you have 200 plus ideas, all of these FAQs. And then what we can do is we can basically just make content on Twitter, on Instagram, on LinkedIn and that kind of stuff. Answering these FAQs, it's the easiest content strategy in the world. And these are things that your target audience, who you're actually trying to attract, is already thinking. So there's a very good built in targeting for that. And as you answer these questions over and over, you build your authority, you build your credibility, your niche, and that is how you get basically clients through content marketing. So I will show you what I do here and if you can see my screen here, I just have a spreadsheet that is category one and I think I have it to 16 on here. So you're going to probably have at least six to eight of these categories, but you'll have as many or as few as you want. Then I did a example about a thousand x leads. So the basically the categories for a thousand x leads are paid ads, content outreach, partnership, lead magnets, email flows, paid products, conversion mechanisms, newsletters, appointment setting, website sales offers, that kind of stuff. So what I did is I have about 50 FAQs for each. I've used a spreadsheet and explained this to someone and I narrowed it down just like I did here. But if we go to the paid ads FAQs. So how can I measure the ROI of my paid ad campaigns? There's plenty of different content angles that you could go with for that one. What are the most effective ad platforms? Might be a little bit beginner, but might be good. So Facebook, Google, TikTok, that kind of stuff. How should I allocate my budget across different ad platforms? I'd say that was a good one. How can I target higher quality leads with my ads? Well, it's all about your messaging and warming your pixel properly. That's a good one. What metric should I focus on? Another good one. And basically I got all of these from ChatGPT with just simple prompts, like they're not even that crazy where I just have some secret prompt. Just get the prompts in there, load the FAQs, put them in here, and then go through one at a time and then just say yes or no. How often should I optimize my ad campaign's a good one. And you can see if I went through all of these, I would quickly determine which one is good and which not. Delete the Ones that aren't. And then I have 200 plus content ideas that I'm never going to run out of content. Once I answer all these questions through content, in examples, stories, you name it, I'll just start over and then we'll just, you know, kind of do that. So once you have all of your FAQs for mostly your written content strategy, the next thing to do is to find out what videos to make. And the way you want to do this is looking for outlier YouTube videos. Because YouTube is one of the most important tools for any agency. It gets traffic and makes people aware of you for the first time. It nurtures leads by kind of spending time with you even though it's not live. Everyone who already knows about you and is considering buying from you. And it also reduces churn because when someone buys from you, they don't really differentiate mentally between, you know, free versus paid in terms of the content. You just gave them more value. No one is going to watch your YouTube videos more than your current clients, believe it or not. And it's just very, very, very important for an agency. I would argue that YouTube is the most important thing for an agency in 2025 and beyond. But similar to the last hack, how do you come up with all of these ideas? So what I do is I teach my clients the outlier strategy, which I was taught many months ago when I first started. And basically you have a spreadsheet or a Google Document or something of that nature, and you're going to want to find some different clients in your niche. So basically what I have done is I just, before this video, made a few different ones in my niche. So someone like Charlie Morgan or Matt Shields or Daniel Fazio or Leila Hermozi and Alex Hermosi and I went through there. And what you want to do is you can either do this manually or you can go to a site called 1 of 10 and they also have a Chrome extension and then you can track these channels. So I tracked, let's just say Alex Hormozi here what you want to do. And you can do it with this app or manually, you're going to want to find videos that whoever you're tracking has done that gets a lot more than their average number of views, because that's what we're going to call an outlier video. So you can sort this a little bit too. So let's say we want to only have videos that got three times the average views. And then I want to do it in the last year just so it's like currently relevant. And then I apply. So now what you're gonna do is take the titles and the thumbnails, you're gonna save both, and you're going to basically see which ones are possible to apply to your niche. So for me, agencies. So if you want 2025 to be the best year of your agency, please watch this video. You know, possibly how to make so much money or how to grow your agency so fast it feels illegal. That's a possible one. How to actually get rich with an agency. There's a decent one. 13 years of no BS agency advice in 79 minutes or however many minutes it went to. That's a good one too. And what you're going to want to do is basically put these in a spreadsheet or a document or whatever, make sure you copy and paste it as a link so you can save the spread or the thumbnail like that. And then you're going to want to format your video like that. And you're also going to want to make your thumbnail similar. And this is very good because you don't have to come up with original ideas on your own. You're kind of just accelerating your progress by doing what already works and that kind of stuff. It's just very, very good. So if you want to do this yourself, you're going to find 5 to 10 channels in your niche or similar niches. You know, some niches just aren't that good or the YouTubers aren't that sophisticated. So you, you kind of got to go a little bit more broad. You're going to make a list of all their outlier videos and try to get like 25, 50, maybe even more. Apply those titles and thumbnails to your niche. Then you're gonna create either a mural board or a slides asset in whatever format you have chosen for the title and the thumbnail. So what you're seeing right now is a slides asset. And then you're just gonna record a video like I am right now talking through the asset. And I've already showed you the pattern bank. I have the example down here. And you could also go to like other channels too. Like, you know, six secrets to running a successful web design agency. You know, that's something that I could do. Top AI marketing tools for 2024. Top AI tools for marketing agencies in 2025. You could do that. It's the mistake every business makes. It's the mistake every agency makes. Like, it doesn't necessarily have to be strictly in your niche. So now that we have the ideas, how do we hold ourselves accountable to actually making time to do YouTube as well as many other things, we're going to want to have a work accountability. So by far the best productivity hack I've ever discovered is working with a timer and a form. And of all of the things that they or that I teach my clients, this is the one that they rave about the most. And it's very, very easy to set up. So what you want to do is create a Google form and create a Slack notification. Put your team in whatever channel the Slack notification is in. If you don't use Slack or you just want to do it elsewhere, you can use Zapier with an email notification and people's email in there. So set a timer for 60 minutes on your phone or if you have a real timer or something like that and train yourself to sit there and work for 60 minutes, don't check your phone, don't do anything, just sit there and work. And then you're going to fill out a form at the end. So if we go into an example here, this is the one that I do. So it's Matt's work form. That's my email there. Date and hour. So January 16th, hour three is what I'm doing as I'm recording this. What did I do? What is my focus out of 10? I'm trying to drink more water. So did you drink a water bottle during this hour? You know, little, just water bottle. And then what are your five goals? Top five goals in 2025. Just to remind yourself and benefit from that auto suggestion. It's very easy. I have my girlfriend, my mom, my dad, my business partner, some of my friends in here. So if I submit this, it's going to notify everyone. I also have a Slack channel with all my clients in there just to show that I actually practice what I preach. And then once you have a form like this, now we need to make time in our day to have those 60 minute deep work periods to actually do this. And that is where we do time blocking until noon. So time blocking until noon every day is one of the biggest things that made an impact on me in my entire 12 year career running agencies. And this concept sounds very scary to people because you know, what if there's an emergency? Their mind instantly goes to the worst. Like what if my spouse or kids or parents, like what if my elderly mother falls and breaks her hip or something. And this is completely fair. I'm not saying it's not fair, but think back of how many times that actually happened. And if you're honest with yourself, there is almost never emergencies. And if it's that big of emergency, they don't call you, they call 91 1. So if you are really on the fence about that white list or white how would you do it? Put it in the allow thing. So even if you your phone's on, do not disturb your spouse, your kids, they can all contact you or phone you just to put your mind at ease if you really want to. But the secret is, if you want to call it a secret, in the six plus years that I've been doing this, there's been precisely zero emergencies. And the amount of deep work sessions that I've gotten, it's got to be in the thousands. So how do you do this? You go to your calendar. You block every day from 7am to 12pm if you're in some unusual time zone, like you're Australian, for example, and you have to work, you know, USA clients, you might do this differently. But 7am to 12pm work in 60 minute sprints with a timer, just like I said in the last hack. And between those sprints you can go check your phone and stuff. But the point is, during this five hours, there's no sales calls, there's no client meetings, there's no fixing your team's problems, there's no chatting. You're doing deep work five hours per day from 7am to 12pm you're still going to have 12pm to 5pm for all of the other stuff. And if we look at my calendar here, I will show you that I practice what I preach. So 7am, I have calendar blocked until 12pm daily and just repeats every single day 7am to 12pm and then that's just what I do for the example. So a lot of these things so far have been about productivity and a few about Legion. But what are some other good hacks that no one really knows about or tells you? And the fifth one is what I call a reply trick for lead magnet emails. And email deliverability is one of the most important metrics in your business because email is going to play a huge role in everything from sales to nurturing to you name it. And we can't have our emails going to spam. So one of the best hacks or tricks to improve our deliverability is in every single one of our lead magnet delivery emails. So someone goes to our site, someone downloads a training or an ascent or whatever, basically what you're going to do in the email is this trick so the subject line is going to say reply required and then whatever it is, reply required. Your free training. The email should be very, very short so they can focus on the next thing. It should prompt them to say yes, which is the next thing and it should prompt them to click a link. So this is what it will look like in action. So this is for. If they download my training. So, hey there, it's Matthew Larson here. You signed up on my website, here's your free download. That is a link that they click. They're going to say, or it's going to say, please reply yes to let me know that you receive this. And if you don't, I'm going to email you again. And then up here is the reply required. So it kind of hits the triple whammy, the three biggest yes signals for building domain authority and therefore improving deliverability. Do they open your emails? Do they reply to you? Do they click links? If they open your emails, that's a very, very good start and reply required and then you're free. Whatever your lead magnet is is a great way to get them to open. Getting them to say yes is a reply. And if someone replies to you, you are whitelisted in their email forever. You're never going to their spam again. And it's also a very, very positive indicator for, you know, ISPs, for Google, for Outlook. Like, you know, this is actually a real email, they replied to it. And then finally, if you have a couple links, that's another great sign as well. So to show you what this might looks like, I have a 55.49% average open rate, you know, entire email software wide. And if we go into some of my different lead magnets here, so we have my free ad templates, which is 82% open rate and 52% click. My Miro board is 85% and 80% click. Free trainings is 79 and 47, free SOPS is 93 and 79 and operation spreadsheet is 73 and 68, which is very, very nice. This becomes extremely powerful, I would say when you have these like the link in the email and I don't do this here, so this is kind of like, sorry about that. But when you have, I have four other offers on my website that you can get for free, then they start downloading them all, opening them all, replying to them all and clicking on your links and that kind of goes a very positive flywheel. And like the opposite of a DEB spiral, it's a momentum spiral. Upwards and you're gonna find that Instead of getting 25%, 30% open rates, you're going to get 50, 60. And it is very sustainable even as you scale your email list. So now let's move on from some of the lead gen and productivity stuff and we want to get into the fulfillment hacks. And by far the number one fulfillment hack is to have an operations spreadsheet. Because once people generate enough leads, so let's just assume number one to five here we're all productivity. They did that and now they're being productive and now they're doing the work and generating leads. The next problem always becomes operations and client fulfillment. And what is the number one thing that you can do to your operations in the next 24 hours? And before I tell you, when I was running my 900k per month agency, my operations and fulfillment were a mess like, like reputation ruining for about a three month period until I developed the operation spreadsheet which is, you know, the hack here. As you grow, you don't have time to babysit people and watch, you know, them do all the work and answer people's questions all the time. Especially once you pass the whole like 10 employees, you don't have enough time to even do almost any of this. You're busy putting out the high level fires and growing the business. So what do you want to, what you want to do to create the spreadsheet is you want to put columns across the top for tasks like when they do it, who does it, the owner role, you know, who verifies that they did it, what's the reminder to do it, SOPs, trainings, examples and that kind of stuff. So we want to do is list every single task in the business, fill out all those columns for each and then it's going to look something like this. So you can see here, this is an example of an operation spreadsheet. A lot of people will have this in something like their project management tool or airtable. But if we put like I have mine sorted into lead generation, client work and employee training and that kind of stuff, those are my three sections. So here's an example. So the action or task is create Facebook ad creatives. Is this reliant another task? No. And if it is, you put the other task name. When do you do this? Thursday. How much time is required? 60 minutes. Who does this? The founder in terms of role and then who's the owner? Matt. So I like to separate role and owner. So like in term, in kind of this example, the founder is Just kind of me. But let's say you have a. Let's say you have just like an account manager, and you have five account managers. So the role is account manager. The owner is James. Let's just say James is the account manager. Then do you have this added to your calendar? And then do you have a reminder? And then who verifies this? Because, you know, like they say, it's not about, you know, who votes, it's who counts the votes. It's kind of like this. It's not about who does the work, it's who verifies that the work is done. Not a perfect analogy. Then you link your sop, your training, who to ask if they need help. This is very important. The definition of done or the definition of complete. You know, for this Facebook ads, the ads are finalized, edited, and ready to upload with no other revisions. That is when this task is complete. It's not when we've scripted them or shot the draft or anything. It's very important to have a definition of complete. And then what do you do when you're complete? You notify whoever, in this case notify Leo, that the ads are done and they're added to the Facebook ad account. That is an example of how to do this. And then once you have this operation filled out, once you have the processes, you still need a lot of qualified people to do this for you. And that's where the employee training spreadsheet comes in. A lot of people view sops, which stands for standard operating procedures like instructions, as the same thing as training, which they are not. And kind of thinking they're the same thing is going to cost you a lot of money and get you into a lot of problems as you progress. So an example of this is you could make an sop about how to post on LinkedIn. So you go into the LinkedIn account, click post, you know, write this much, you know, proofread it, click schedule there. That's a sop. Anyone could do that. But if you want to post on LinkedIn in a way that gets clients and actually has things of good content, that is a skill that needs to be trained. So view SOPs as doing view, you know, training as thinking. So if you have to think, it requires training. If you can just do it without using your brain, it's an sop. Like I said before, with the operation stuff, as you grow, you will not really any longer have the time to be doing the work, and you'll also not have the time to train people one on one. Once you get about 10 employees in your company and you need a system to plug people into and they can go start doing the system, go through it automatically, be trained and ready to go and kind of spit out on the other side within 30 days. And how do you do that? It's a very good question. So again, you are going to create a spreadsheet and you're going to lay out every single role in your business. So for Context, at my 900k per month agency CRO, some of the roles were, you know, assistant account manager, sales rep, appointment setter, landing page builder, CRO, specialist, designer, that kind of stuff. And then what we're going to want to do is for all those roles, lay out every single task that needs to be done and then we're going to make a training for every single task in there and I'm going to show you in a minute. So the most important thing in the very aha moment when I was doing this and perfecting it was you want to have assignments as well. So these assignments are kind of like tests, but tests sound scary, assignment sounds better. So for a landing page builder, for example, the, you know, he went through all the training and watched all the videos I made. And then the tests were based on the three most important parts of a landing page. So the site speed Must load in 2 seconds or less for optimal conversion rate. The above the fold design must be perfect. And I'm not going to get into that. It's just the section that you see on mobile without having to scroll, that's called the above the fold. And that design really needs to be intentional and then creating a great offer. So they had assignments, you gotta design a couple above the folds, you gotta take these pages and see what's wrong with them and you know, defer the code and remove some of the javascripts to get it to load under two seconds and then you have to come up with the offers. So if we go into the example here, like this is not a, this is necess, this is like the trainings we have inside a thousand X leads. But let's just say, you know, for a paid ad media buyer, here are all the trainings for someone doing cold email, here are the trainings for someone doing the content, here's the trainings for someone who does sales, here are the trainings and you just have a spreadsheet with every single lesson and then whether that's video or document or both, and then you have the assignments in there and then you just can send this to everybody. Let's just say someone is doing cold email. They get hired on Monday, January 1st. They spend until January 15th going through all of these and completing the assignments. And they should be in a perfect world, be completely prepared and like an expert at their job in this onboarding period. It's very, very important. So let's go back to Legion a little bit in the next one, because Legion is the root of all of this. If we don't have good leads and a lot of clients, you know, the operations and training stuff doesn't matter. And this is thumbnail templates. So because YouTube is so important, we need to put in max effort. Like, this is the one thing we need to just put all of our time and energy on, in my opinion. And thumbnails are not that important for your current subscribers and current people who view your channel because they're just going to click on you no matter what. But if your video breaks out to cold audiences like it does very well with your subscribers and YouTube pushes it. Thumbnails are very, very important for getting new viewers. And it's very important that we view the thumbnail and the title as kind of one thing. But the thumbnail is, you know, a lot harder to make than the title. So because we want to make five videos per week for maximum results, we want to have fast way to make good thumbnails, unless we're gonna just plan ahead like crazy. And we probably don't have the bandwidth or the experience to do that. You know, a lot of these thumbnail designers are gonna take like four days a week if they're any good, and they're gonna charge you a lot. And when you're first starting making your hundred videos, you know, and improving, let's say three things for every video is far more important than anything else. We need speed, we need volume. And I used to have the worst thumbnails on YouTube with my Mirror board diagrams of the a thousand x leads funnel. Then I tried other things. No thumbnail, you know, thumbnail of the screen share background thumbnail of me smiling. All of them were pretty bad. And eventually, recently I've just settled on just a picture of me with text based on what the video is about in different format and trying to just get them to like bait them into clicking clickbait. But then I'm trying to make a good enough video that it delivers. So clickbait but actually deliver on it. So what should you do? So you should go into Canva and get a template and then pick some thumbnails in your niche. So if we go back to the pattern bank, you know, like we're gonna try to. If we're gonna copy someone's video idea, we're gonna try to match the thumbnail. So if I was gonna do this, I'd probably try to make a thumbnail just like Alex Hormozi. He has the benefit of being famous in a huge brand, so people wanna click on his thumbnails more regardless. So you gotta keep that in mind. But that's generally what you wanna do. So what I would do here is I would save this thumbnail and I would rebuild it in Canva. So I get a Canva project, just a blank one, and then I would rebuild his thumbnail to the point where, you know, mine looks exactly the same as his. And then once it's identical, save that as a separate Canva project. And now you have a template additionally that you could also basically pay someone or do it yourself to rebuild certain things like this, where you can just copy and paste your thumbnail templates instead of having to make them all from scratch. That's another option. But we want to have templates because we can make thumbnails very fast that are 90% as good as any of the designers will do it. So that's basically our goal here. And YouTube gets even better if we run YouTube ads, if we run Facebook ads, because a lot of these people, even if they're not necessarily on YouTube when they found us, they will find our YouTube videos one way or another. It's very, very common for people to come to us with ads, find our YouTube videos, and become a very loyal viewer in that way. So what you want to do is the hook and the body ad strategy. So there's two parts of an ad. There's the body and there's the hook and the body. For this strategy, we're going to consider it the main part of the ad. And it's usually going to be three to 10 minutes long. For an agency, at least. The hook is the first one to five seconds of the ad, which reels the viewer in and gets them to watch. And both of these things are very important because the hook gets them to watch. And if you don't have a good hook, it doesn't matter the three to 10 minutes if it's the best three to 10 minutes in the world, because they're not watching anyways. And the body is important because that's what gets them to buy or book a call. We can hook them in with all sorts of nonsense, but if it all falls Apart from there, you know, and gets them. The hook, gets them to watch. But if the body's bad, they're not booking a call anyways. So when I do my ads, like, what do I do? And I've done over 300 million in paid ads. This is mostly for E commerce, and I don't talk about it a lot, but my very first agency was a Facebook agency for Fortune 500 companies. Back when that was kind of. Or back when Facebook 2016, 2017, 2018 area was kind of getting started in terms of ads at least. And I use this hook and body strategy for every one of them. These Fortune 500 companies had such big budgets that I was able to test a lot of different things. You had to go through an approval process, but, you know, whatever. So the hook and body strategy works like this. We're going to have two bodies. So we're going to have two videos that are three to 10 minutes each. One of them is going to be a demo of our product and the other one is going to just be loaded with proof that our product works. And I'm talking product service, whatever. What we're going to do is film five hooks that are one to five seconds, and we're going to film two different bodies in the format that I described. Then we're going to edit each hook to each body. So we have 10 unique ads. You know, we have hook one, body one, we have hook two, body one, hook three, body one, hook four, body one, hook five, body one, and then hook one, body two, hook two, body two, three, body. And then you get the point. And then we're going to edit them together and then test them like that. Because we can get 10 very different ads, you know, with this strategy, with a fraction of the work, we're going to film them separately and then edit them together after. It's a very efficient way to do your advertising. And then once we've done that, the last hack of this video has to do with the information we collect. Like when we're doing our ads, when we're doing our YouTube videos and we're booking calls on our call scheduler, and that is our calendly questions. So every or almost everyone uses Calendly or some equivalent tool, but most people greatly underutilize the questions to get an advantage during their sales calls. They don't get an advantage because they don't use the questions properly. So what do I do on my calendly? I get their name, their email, their phone number, their revenue. I tell them the price Ahead of time, just to not waste my time, ask if they're okay with the price and then where they came from. So what should you ask? Because that's what I do. But what should you. I always recommend the name, the email, the phone number of the company. And I like to do a multiple choice for revenue. And I like that because it doesn't really matter that much if you just have a bunch of multiple choice, whether it's 0 to 10k, 10 to 25, 25 to 100, 100 plus, like whatever. But I like the multiple choice here because it just sorts very nicely into your CRM in comparison to people just randomly putting it. Because some people might put zero like the word, some people might put the dollar sign, some people might not, some people might put a range. And when you're sorting in your CRM and you're assigning these to different appointment setters, it kind of really it up. So I like to do the multiple choice for revenue. I always like and recommend to give the price up front and in the sense that there's a range, like if that's the case, like some people, you know, depends on what size they are, you give them a range and then ask them if they're okay with that. And that's powerful because let's say our services are 3 to 10k per month, let's just say that's on the calendar. Are you okay with this? And they say yes. If it's 10k per month, they were prepared. If it's 3k per month, they're pleasantly surprised. It's a good price anchoring strategy. I always recommend that you do the price up front because you don't want just broke, unqualified people booking calls in your calendar. It's just they're not going to convert anyways. And then the final thing I do is I like to ask where they come from, such as YouTube ads, cold email. Because the tone of the call, someone who's watched 10 of your YouTube videos is going to be very different from the tone and format of the call of someone who just saw your ad for the first time and clicked. And it's very good to prepare and know what you're up against. So if we go into the example here, which is mine, we go into mine here. If I wanted to book a call here, let's just go up here. So name, email, phone number, website, current monthly revenue. If you click on that, it's multiple choice, you know, thousand x leads. Our program costs 9,800 for 12 months. There are payment plans available just to so they don't be like, oh my God, I can't afford 9,800, but I could afford 2,400amonth or something. Are you okay with this? What are some reasons you haven't bought already? Is a good one just for to collect data and where are you booking from today and that kind of stuff. So if we implement all 10 of these hacks into our business, like what can we expect to happen? And what we can expect to happen is we will see noticeable results in our business because all of these will be compounded in different areas of our agency. So if we improved our lead gen with these hacks by 20% and then our operations by 20% and then our employee training by 20%, that's 20% on top of 20% on top of 20%. It's very close to a double in the results of our agency. It's very, very important because these hacks stack up. In my opinion, you can implement all of these hacks within 24 hours and I recommend you do so. But that is the end of the video for today. So if you liked it, comment, subscribe and I will see you in the next one.