How To ACTUALLY Grow Your Agency (5 Steps)

Have you ever wondered why some agencies in your niche skyrocket to millions of dollars per year while the rest of them barely scrape by? And if you can't answer that, you might be stuck at a certain revenue plateau. Whether that's 30k a month, 50k, 100k doesn't matter. And feeling stuck while watching your friends and your competitors land client after client and get case study after case study can be very demoralizing. So today in this video, I'm going to share five simple yet very powerful steps that could send your agency to the top 1% in your niche. And I know that these work because these five strategies helped me build my last agency to 900k per month and generate tens of millions of dollars for my current agency clients. So what is the first step? The first step is to have an intro offer and a recurring service. And these are the two types of offers that every agency pretty much has to have. And we want to have both because both of them cover each other's weaknesses. So if you've never heard these terms before, an intro offer is usually like one time service that's low price, low commitment, that they can kind of just try you out, kind of dip their toe in the water and get their foot in the door, so to speak. And then the recurring service is the service that everybody sells. It's the retainer, it's the I'm going to do X, Y and Z for you per month and you're going to pay me however much you pay me. And both of these services are very necessary because both of them cover each other's weaknesses. So the weakness of the intro offer is that it's typically only one time. And if you're not going to just get tons of recurring revenue with it, you're going to have to start over every month and get new clients and new clients. You're basically starting at zero revenue every single month. And the weakness of the recurring service is it's typically hard to sell. They're high priced, high commitment, they have to trust you, that kind of stuff. So both of these have pros too. It's not all cons. So the intro offer, the pro of it is the exact opposite of the pro of the recurring service. It's very easy to sell, it's low risk, it gets your foot in the door, and then you can upsell to the recurring service later. The recurring service has the obvious pro that it's recurring and you're building more and more revenue over time. So both of these work together to basically cover each other's weakness and act as a one, two punch to grow an agency. So what are some examples of how these work together? So at my previous agency, which was a CRO agency, I did landing pages and CRO, which is conversion rate optimization, if you don't know. So the landing page was the intro offer and I charged $2,500 per one or $5,000 for three. And those are basically an external page that they send their ad traffic to. And if that ad traffic converts better than their current page or whatever they were sending their traffic to, you know, then I have succeeded at building a landing page and they're very happy with me. Then it becomes very easy for me to upsell them to 8k per month, to 15k per month with the 6 month contract CRO conversion rate optimization services, which is basically the same thing but site wide. It's very difficult to sell them 8 to 15k per month with a 6 month commitment without selling them this landing page first, which is the intro offer. And that's the whole point of having both. I have a client who has a Facebook ad agency and his intro offer is we're going to take whatever ads are working best in your account already and we're basically going to remake them with 10 UGC influencers or creators. So basically we're going to take your winning ad and create them with a man and a woman, an old person and a young person, someone who is black, someone who is white, someone who's Asian, someone who's latino, someone who's fat, someone who's skinny and just to get a good mix because people, like it or not, are more likely to be served ads and to buy products if the people in the ads look like them. So if you just have a product that all of your ad creatives are starring someone who is a 20 year old white woman, your ads are going to be predominantly served to everyone else who is a 21 year old white woman. So if you can mix it up, it's a very good intro offer because you know it's going to work. It's already working, they know it's going to work and you're opening up an entirely new audience from them. And then the recurring service, and recurring services are usually a lot less sexy, is just ongoing ad management, making new creatives, media, buying that kind of stuff. Another client of mine has a local home service agency. This in particular is for people who remodel kitchens. So the intro offer in this case is set up the funnel and the recurring services. The typical Facebook, Google, email marketing and SEO. Very important distinction here because a lot of people will just say they do ads for home service businesses, but if they don't have the funnel, they don't have the landing page, they don't have the thank you page, they don't have the book your consultation button, whether that's calendly or something else. And they don't have the email flows in the CRM. It doesn't matter how good your ads and email marketing and SEO are because it's not going to work. Right? So those are three examples of how you might do this. So how do you go about creating these two offers for yourself? And I would say that the recurring service is likely set in stone. It's if you do Facebook ads, you do Facebook ads. That means media buying and creative. If you do email marketing, that means flows and newsletters like it's very not sexy. And it's likely set in stone. So we want to focus on the intro offer. And for the intro offer we want to make sure first at least five things are always true. The first is it either needs to make them more money or save them time. And that's really the only two reasons that someone is going to buy something in the context of agency services. It needs to be measurable or have a tangible deliverable. So if we go back to the examples before, my landing page is very measurable. You can do a split test with some different software and tools and you can see based on actual data is it better or is it not. Whereas the second example with the Facebook ads doing the ugc, there's no real way that you can just without testing it, looking at it and seeing are these better? So that would be an example of a tangible deliverable. They are just receiving 10 new UGC creatives. The next thing is we want to have it productized. And that means a very specific scope. They pay X, they get Y. There's no custom bespoke can I get you to do this? It's you have your intro offer, this is it, take it or leave it. And it's very important to do that just for your processes, your systems, your training, your hiring, all focus towards that productized offer. Because remember, we have to get a very good result for our intro offer because the results from our intro offer directly, you know, maybe solely are the sole impact of whether they upsell to our recurring service or not. And if it's productized, we can get so many more reps, so many more systems, so many more quality assurance things. And so Much more experience delivering that and that will make us get a lot better results. The next thing in our intro offer is we must be able to deliver it at $250 per hour or more. And that is not just pulled out of my ass or made up. When you scale, there's a certain level of cost that you're going to have to incur that you don't really have when you're fully just starting. So your labor costs, of course, your software costs, your customer acquisition costs are always going to rise once you get to a certain level. You're going to have managers and finance and HR who don't directly produce revenue themselves. You're going to have taxes, you're going to have your take home salary. And if you don't have $250 per hour or more, there's just not enough left after that. And you're going to have to pay a lot of those expenses in advance and then the revenue follows. So you're going to have to be reinvesting, reinvesting, reinves in your business. And if you're doing $100 per hour, for example, it's just not going to be enough margin for that to happen. And the final thing is, should be obvious, but sometimes it's not. It should naturally lead into your recurring service. And I hate that I have to bring that up. But the amount of clients that have come to me and say this is what I want to do for my intro offer, this is what I want to do for my recurring service and they're just completely unrelated is kind of shocking. So if you notice in the examples, my landing page is naturally leading into my CRO. It's kind of like a mini version or a mini one time test of CRO. The ten UGC creatives naturally lead into more UGC creatives or media buying. And then the funnel being built and fully optimized naturally leads into okay, let's drive traffic to this with ads and SEO. So after you have all of these offers, then we need to start driving traffic and booking calls. And the two best ways to do that are through YouTube and through a newsletter. So these are always going to be the two most effective ways at converting leads who already know about you into clients. And let's take a look at how I've used these over the past year. So I have a YouTube channel that you are watching right now. It has about 15k subscribers and I basically post five times per week or try to. And if you look in the video, you can pause it. If you want or you can just scroll down the link to my lead magnet. My free training is going to be in the first line of the description. And that's very important because that is where people are going to be able to click without having to see more. Because the amount of people who see that versus just click, see more and actually scroll and find it is going to be 10 to 1, 20 to 1. So it's very important. It's in the first line. Also should be linked in the pin comments. And the entire purpose of this is to collect emails and build your email list for your newsletter. So on my newsletter you can't see these statistics publicly, but I have about 6,500 active subscribers. And over the past year, just from my YouTube I've gotten 23,500 subscribers. And some of those I've either cleaned myself because they're just not active enough or they unsubscribed and all that kind of stuff. And I post five times per week a quick piece of value that I think could help an agency owner. And I have the link to my offer and the link to book a call in every single one of these emails that I send. And that's really where I drive a lot of traffic. YouTube to newsletter to sales, call to client. So how could you do something like this yourself? And I have the best plan for you coming up. So for the YouTube plan we want to follow, I think it's seven different things here. And I put seven things while I'm making this video. So the first is to find five to 10 different channels in your niche or similar niches. So I do Hermozi, Alex, Leila Hermosi, Dan Martel, Jeremy Minor, like those kind of people. And then what you want to do is scroll through their channel in the past 12 months and make a list of all of the outlier videos. So an outlier. What I'm going to consider is, is anything that's gotten over, you know, if it's a big channel, over two times as many views as normal, and if it's a small channel, five times as many views as normal. And you're going to want to make a list of these in a spreadsheet and you want to have the title there as well as the thumbnail, what you're going to do is basically take those titles. So I actually did this for proof of concept. It's how to actually grow your business was an Alex Hermosi video and now it's how to actually grow your agency. So I took his style of Title and his style of thumbnail in that video. And I'm going to apply it to this video that you're watching right now. The next step is to make a mirror board or a slide. So I'm presenting off slides right now that kind of follows the format of the video title. And then you're going to record a video like I am right now you're watching that's going through that particular asset. After you've done that, you want to optimize the audio with something called a phonic. And that is just a AI sound optimization tool. Basically upload your finish file, go through that and it will make your audio recording sound very good, even if your mic is terrible. And then you're gonna wanna post three times per week doing this. In terms of the newsletter, basically what I do is I make a make my newsletter a written version of my YouTube video and then I put it through Hemingway app, which is just an editor and it will show you like when you're doing your newsletter, what reading comprehension level you are basically doing. And I knock that down to a third grade level, replace the big words with simple words, and then I also post that three times per week. So after you start doing the system, you're going to be getting a lot of clients and you will need to manage the fulfillment of these clients. And you do so with an, basically an operations system. So let me go here. An operations system. So when you basically do this and get a bunch of clients, you're gonna have to start hiring a bunch of people. And this is typically the first point of failure for a lot of people because now they're not doing the work. A lot of the results are good. You probably started your agency as an expert doing the work and you got good results. But once you want to get past a certain revenue level, you have to hire people. And that is when the quality tends to slip. Because now it's not you the expert, now it's someone who you're probably not paying very much to be honest, doing the work, whether that's a VA or whether that's an intern or someone who's just not paid very much. And if they could do a good job, they would be getting paid a lot somewhere else. And that's just the reality of running an agency. So how do we ensure that this quality doesn't slip? So basically what I did at my agency is when I was building my 900k per month agency, this was one of my biggest problems and I had 75 plus employees and I did not have time to just answer all their questions and help them. All right? It's when you have operating at that kind of scale, and this kind of starts at 10 to 15 employees, you need some way to get them the information you need without them asking you because you're busy, you know, improving the service, generating leads, doing that YouTube and newsletter and that kind of stuff that we did before making your intro offer even better. So what you want to do is I made a spreadsheet that was basically my operations system that had all of my SOPs, all of my trainings, examples, checklists, steps, all the tasks and that kind of stuff. And that's what I really used to manage everybody. It was built in Google Sheets, not extremely sophisticated, but I honestly really liked it that it wasn't very sophisticated. And Google Sheets is so easy to learn and understand. And you can just send the link to everybody for free. You don't have to pay, you know, thousands of dollars per month to airtable or something like that, just to get basic functionality. So if you want to do this, how could you make a spreadsheet like I did? And I have a few parts here. Go into Google Sheets and make a spreadsheet. So make different columns all the way across. So you're going to have one task, name one. When does this happen? So this happens every Monday, for example, or every new landing page. You want to have the owner, which is a particular name. You want to have the role, which is going to be like landing page builder or copywriter. You want to have a reminder like, how do they become reminded to do this? Then you want to have your sop, which is your standard operating procedure. You want to have your training for the task. You want to have your examples for the tasks, what it should look like. You want to have a checklist of all the steps that go into it. You want to have what do they do when they're done? And then you want to have what do they do when they get stuck? And you want to have those all across the top of the spreadsheet. And I wish I made one to show you before this video, but I did. You're going to want to schedule one hour per day to fill this out until it's complete, and then you just share the link with your entire team. It's very, very simple. So you're going to have a spreadsheet that you can go through, that you can send everybody, that everybody knows their role. It has names, it has, you know the role, it has when to do it, it has what to do training, everything in it. And then once you have an operation System and these SOPs and these examples and your steps, you still need qualified people to work for you, don't you? So basically what you need to do when you have this is you need an employee tracking and training system. So when you're gonna go grow your agency, the labor is typically going to be your biggest constraint. So the question is, how do we ensure that we have a steady stream of qualified people? And at least at my agency, there was a three month, ish period where our client results completely crashed. They almost went to zero. And this is because I was hiring too fast, because I was getting so many clients from my funnel and my cold email system and my ads and my partnership and my content. And I didn't want to say no to anyone. So what I did after hiring a bunch of consultants and, you know, using my own brain and watching YouTube videos, is I made an automated employee training system where people could become hired or get hired, they'd go through a 14 to 30 day employee onboarding and they're going to come out fully trained on the other side. So basically, if you wanted to create something like I did, what you want to do is the first step is to sign up for Kajabi, which is what I used, or some other course platform. And we want to make a separate course or section, whatever it's called in the particular platform for every role. So what I had was copywriter, designer, landing page builder, CRO specialist, account manager, that kind of stuff. So lay out a separate course for all of these, then lay out all of the steps or the responsibilities for each of those roles. And that could be 10 different steps, let's say. And then what you want to do in those steps is 10 different lessons. So if you're doing this for a YouTube, you know, thumbnail designer, you know, collect the asset, collect the photo, you know, determine the title, you know, make the background, make the text, I don't know, whatever it could be. And then what we want to do next is record the videos and other trainings for each step, showing them exactly what to do. And that could be 10 trainings, it could be a hundred. It doesn't, depends on the rule. And then what we want to do is we want to choose three assignments that prove that they are actually learning and progressing. So at mine, for a landing page builder, and this is a good example, it was create an above the fold section that is optimized and how it should look, do what you need to do for page Speed improvements to make the site load in 2 seconds or less and then create a great offer. And those are the three assignments. And then I had basically dummy businesses that they had to go through and build a, a great thing for a supplement business, for example, and made, made that whole landing page with those three assignments for a supplement business and then a home decor business and then a fashion business. And they just went through these assignments and approved to me that they knew what they could do. And then they are basically out the other side of the system ready to go. So once you have your base of clients, your operations are dialed and you have this employee training system, the final step is to basically make your paid ad funnel. So paid ads are by far the most scalable way to grow an agency. And once you crack them, there is virtually limitless potential. But I have this step purposely on step five, because ads don't work that well until you have all of the stuff that we talked about, the intro offer and recurring service, the YouTube and the newsletter, the operations system and the employee training system. So if you don't have a good offer, because your ads are typically going to go on your intro offer, if it's not good, it's not proven your ads aren't really going to work right? If you don't have your YouTube and your newsletter because it's very common for people to see your ads, join your email list, find your YouTube somehow watch 5, 10 videos, read your newsletter, and then eventually click. If you don't have those things in place, your ads are not going to perform very well. And then if we don't have our operation system to actually do the work from all these clients and we don't have our employee training system in case we need to scale up like our ads aren't really going to be very effective, are they? So what are some examples of different ad campaigns? And basically what I say and what I tell people. In lead gen, there are three different types of ad campaigns. The first is a book, a call, the second is a lead magnet, and the third is a digital product. So you really have to choose which one of these is going to be right for yourself. And all three of them are completely valid. At my agency that scaled the 900k per month we focused on the digital product and that was 100 landing page templates for $97. So I thought it was pretty good. If they need, if they need landing pages, they might buy templates and if they buy templates, they might need a done for you landing page service. And it was Pretty much that's the amount of thought that went into it. So my goal and the goal of a digital product ad campaign or ad funnel is not to make any money, it's to break even on ad spend. So I was selling these for $97. If I was able to get a client for $97 or less, I'm basically getting a customer for free because the revenue from the sale offsets the revenue spent on ad spend. I'm getting a customer for free or a very, very high quality lead for free. And the way it worked out is I was able to upsell 2.1% of everybody who bought a landing page template pack from me to, to an actual service within six months. So you could do the math on that. I was getting about 100, 110 landing page templates packs sold per day. And if you multiply 2.1% of that, that is between two and three clients per day. Of course there's a sales process, but that's how it worked. So like that's what I did. But which type of ad funnel would you pick? And I would say that if you were just starting out with paid ads, I would always recommend a book, a call funnel. And these are the easiest to get started with because we only really need a few different things. We need an ad video which usually like a 3 minute BSL. We need a landing page with the offer and a form to collect their name, email and phone number, maybe even a little bit more. We need a thank you page with a video sales letter and somewhere to book the call and I guess proof that it works on. So when they fill out the form on the landing page, they're redirected to this page. Now that you have their email list, we need the email flows which further nurture them. We need some sort of sales process, sales presentation and sales team to actually sell these people. And when we have that, it's very easy to over time get $200 or less cost per calls, convert 20% of them and that's a thousand dollar CPA. If you have a $3,000 intro offer and it has $2,000 margin, you're going to be even profiting on your intro offer and then you can upsell them later. And it's very, very easy to do this. And a lot of you, if you have an intro offer and you're able to upsell them and your recurring service has 30,000 or even 100,000 or more LTV, you are going to be printing so much money it's going to be actually insane. So when you have all five of these steps, you have your intro offer and your recurring service, your YouTube and newsletter, your operations system and employee training system, and now your ad funnel, what happens? And the answer to that is your agency is going to grow faster than ever before. Congratulations. And that's all there is to it. So that is the end of this five step process today. If you like this video, like, comment and subscribe and I will see you in the next one.