How To Grow Your Agency So Fast It Feels Illegal

Have you ever felt envious of other business models that just seem to scale from 0 to 100 overnight? A lot of people on the Internet and Twitter and YouTube will tell you that agencies don't scale. And it does feel that way sometimes because there's low margins you have to manage a lot of people. There's high customer acquisition cost, and these services are getting more and more commoditized. But what if I told you that there was one major thing that you could do today to turn your agency into one of those businesses that scales and scales and scales and scales? I've seen some of my clients leap from under six figures to over a million dollars per month by just by implementing this one thing. And you can too. So let's get right into it. The thing we got to understand in order to understand this concept is that there are four main problems that every agency of all sizes face. The first is no one knows who they are. The second is they don't capture enough leads. The third is all or way too high of a percentage of their clients come from referrals. And the fourth is they have nothing to offer unqualified leads. And 99% of leads are always unqualified. There is nothing anyone can do to change that. Not me, not you, not anyone. It's kind of like gravity, if you will. It's like you're not going to get mad at gravity. You're going to just live with it and try to find other ways around it, just like we invented the airplane, for example. So every single agency suffers from one or more of these problems, and those are to varying degrees. For example, a $10 million agency would definitely suffer from all of these problems less than a 50k per year agency. But everybody always sol struggles from these problems. And if you're not growing and you've plateau, but it's because one of these problems needs to be solved, and then when you do that, you'll experience the next leg of growth. So inside a thousand x leads, which is one of my programs, I have 550 people paying me every single month to help them solve these exact problems. So what do I teach them? The first thing I teach them is you solve problem number one, which is no one knows who you are, by doing paid ads, by doing content, by doing outreach and doing partnerships. And you do all of these, and you don't just master one, you do all of them. Because then you have more channels, of course, but a lot of these work together to make the other ones a lot more effective as well. So for example, if someone has seen your ads everywhere and they follow you on YouTube and Twitter and they consume your content, it'd be much more likely to respond to your outreach than if those things weren't true. If someone sees your ads and they click on your profile and there's a bunch of helpful content there versus just a empty dead profile, they're much more likely to take whatever action you want them to take, whether that's a click or fill out a form or whatever. You solve problem number two by having proper lead magnets, proper applications, proper book a call things, proper landing pages, forms, email flows, all of that kind of stuff. Because then you're capturing and nurturing leads properly. If you solve problem number one and problem number two, you now people know who you are and you're capturing leads, then just problem number three is solved as a byproduct. You're no longer only getting clients from referrals, it just is no longer true. So that's nice. And then you solve problem number four by having different offers to target different levels of the market. And this entire video here is going to be dedicated to solving the problem that I believe holds the most people back, because it plays a big role in all of the other problems too. And that is the fourth problem. You have nothing to offer unqualified leads. So nearly every agency just has their main offers, which is always just high priced recurring services. Sometimes they have a contract and commitment makes it even worse. So the fourth problem here is the most important one to solve, because when you solve it, you give yourself a lot more wiggle room and margin for error to solve the others. And what is an example of that? Like, that proves that that's true. So if we consider the fact that 99% of leads are unqualified and we're running paid ads, for example, that basically implies that 99 cents out of every dollar you spend on advertising is essentially lit on fire. And that's not very conducive to running a successful, profitable ad campaign. So what do we do about this? We solve this problem by creating seven different offers so that we basically have something to offer everyone. And now we can monetize every level of the target market instead of just the people who can afford and are willing to pay for our high priced recurring service. So what are these offers that we have to create? There's seven different ones and they're the intro offer, the recurring service, the course, the mastermind, the Referral partnerships, the SaaS affiliate, and the digital products. So what are some examples of this, there's many different ways you can do this, but this is what I did at my agency. My intro Prof. Offer was landing pages. My recurring service was conversion rate optimization. CRO I had a course that was for landing pages. I had a mastermind that was for landing pages and Croft. I had referral partnerships with ad agencies, email agencies, influencers, SEO design, you name it. I was a major webflow affiliate because that's what the landing pages are built on amongst other things. And then for a digital product I sold a hundred pre made landing page templates built in Webflow, hence the affiliate stuff. So what you want to do is think of some offers that you could do for yourself. All of them should be targeting the exact same target market but should just be for different income levels. You got to think of these as you're solving the problem completely to the best of your ability. But just a more fractionalized and non personal version is that it's kind of how I think of it. So what are the benefits of having all of these different offers? There are a ton and some of them aren't super obvious. So to name a few, you're going to have a bigger advertising return on ad spend because now you have multiple conversion paths for people to take. When you have these seven offers versus just having the two or the one main one, you're very much can two times your revenue. And I've seen this about a half a dozen times in the last three months. Just by having these things you're going to double your revenue because your target market goes from about 1% to about 20% and they're just other people buying stuff because these offers are so high margin. Like think about it, referral partnerships, affiliates, mastermind, course those are all 90 plus percent margin. Maybe a little bit of labor, maybe some payment processing fees, but that's about it. When you're doubling your revenue that's kind of like three to five times in your profit because these are high margin services typically aren't and you can get a lot more profit and that will lead to either just more money in your bank account, which that would be good or you're going to get a much higher multiple and have much greater exit potential if one day you wanted to sell your agency. Another thing that's going to happen is because you're getting a bigger roas, you're going to have more customers, you are going to be able to scale your ad spend and your cold email campaigns and your sales team much further than you would without of these. Another thing you might do is if you're really a big dog and you let's say you start getting 50k a month from webflow as an affiliate or even more, you can actually start getting referrals back from your affiliate partners because you know they see how much money you're making them. If someone goes to them depending on the software and wants your service, they'll refer it to you back and you can get a lot of clients this way. Another thing is that assign a client or customers ascend up the funnel over time. So I had a ton of people who would buy the landing page templates and then within the sick next following six months, 2.1% of them upgraded to a done for you landing page. So a lot of time the lower ticket products are great just to test the waters and get people to be comfortable with you, become your customer and then buy something from you later. Customers, even if they're not qualified for your main service, they bought your landing page templates, they bought your course, they might refer a lot of people who are more qualified and who do have a bigger budget. And then finally a lot of customers. And if you're in this for the long haul especially they may work. Let's say they're a media buyer at X Y and Z E commerce company. Two years goes by now they are the director of marketing at a different one and they've worked with you, they bought from you in the past. If you're, they're thinking CRO and they're thinking landing pages. In my example, you're the first person that they're coming to. So the point is, and I'm gonna keep repeating this, you should be taking this very, very seriously. Brainstorm what you could do for each offer, make a list, narrow it down and just really take this seriously. So the next thing we wanna do is talk about a very important concept that has to relate to this. And this is how solving number four solves number in terms of our four problems. So although these are separate problems, they do impact each other because at the end of the day, your agency is just one big cohesive thing. It's not, you know, individual things. And there are some clear examples of how these things interact. So if you have all of these offers, you have much more conversion potential and you can scale your ads more and get more traffic. Which solves problem number two. More traffic tends to lead to more leads as well, which is problem number two. If you have different offers, more people will find about out about you for different reasons as well, which is Problem number one, more people know about you. And if you have different offers, more people will convert and sign up to leads just because they feel like you're not too big for them. There's something that you can do for them which is more leads in problem number two. And then if you have all these offers, you're going to be converting customers, you're going to rely less and less on referrals, which is problem number three. So again, it's very, very important that we take this seriously. And I'm going to just keep repeating that. So again, we want to brainstorm what we would do for each, come up with let's say five ideas for each, narrow it down to two, maybe a B test, who knows? So let's get into the details and the criteria for each of these things and we'll start with the intro offer. And there's two offers that every agency must have in addition to like these are the main offers and they're the intro offers, they're the recurring service. So what are some examples of those? For my CRO agency I did landing pages and then I upsold them into CRO. For a Facebook ad agency, one of my clients remakes their best performing ads with different UGC influencers of different races, different genders, ages, that kind of stuff, just to open up the market for them. Then they upsell them to media buying, more creatives, that kind of stuff. I also have a client who is a local home service agency. He primarily does roofers, but he does not discriminate. Basically a lot of those businesses are very unsophisticated and they don't even have a funnel to begin with. So his intro offer is to install the funnel for them. He has a bunch of templates, he duplicates it, puts their logo on it, changes the city and just kind of builds it very fast and for cheap. And it's very effective because he's tested it so many times. Then he upsells them to the Facebook ad, Google Ad, email marketing, SEO, the things you would expect a local agency to do. But the point of that is his ads, his SEO, they're not going to work or do anything if he doesn't have a proper funnel for his clients. So in a lot of cases the intro offer is required to sell them the recurring service or you're just going to churn. Like that's basically it. So how should we go about creating these two offers? The recurring service is kind of almost always set in stone. Like if you do email marketing, you're just doing the same thing that every other agency does for email marketing. You're managing their campaigns, their flows, you're cleaning their list deliverability. So there's not that much you can do in terms of recurring service. So I usually focus on the intro offer. And the intro offer should be at least five criteria. It should make them more money or save them time, which is the only reason someone buys something in terms of like agency services, it should be measurable or have a tangible deliverable. So for example, my landing page intro offer, like very easy to just ab test that in a. You can use vwo convert.com used to be able to use Google Optimize, but now you can still do it with other tools. But for something like he builds their funnel, that's not really measurable. Right? They probably didn't have anything before. You know, what do you even measure? So in that case, the tangible deliverable is the landing page, the thank you page, the vsl, the email flows and that kind of stuff. You want it to be productized because custom work is the death of all agencies, especially the death of intro offers. You need to have a productized offer for a few reasons. The first is you're going to get a lot of reps in and that's going to lead to more knowledge, experience, learnings, that kind of stuff. All of your training, hires, employees, systems automations can be based on this intro offer. It's a lot easier to explain in your marketing messaging. And because of everything I just listed, it's going to be a lot more margin where you can just focus on it and that will cover the cost of your ad spend and stuff like that. The final thing is when we have a productized intro offer, like, our ads can be very, very focused. Our cold emails can be very, very focused on, okay, how do I keep selling this as opposed to how do I keep promoting my agency or doing all of this crap. The fourth thing is I believe that you need to be able to deliver this intro offer and your recurring service. But we're talking about intro offers here at an effective hourly rate of $250 per hour or more. So by effective hourly rate I mean like if you were, most people charge a retainer or a flat fee. If you are doing landing pages for 2,500, for example, and you wanted a $250 effective hourly rate, you would have to do this for 10 hours or less for it to be true. And the reason why this is so important is once you scale, you're going to have to pay for Customer acquisition, for labor, for software, for non revenue producing roles like HR and finance and account managers and stuff, you're going to still have to pay your taxes. You're going to have to front all of this money to reinvest. You can't just take it out. And, and if you don't charge at least 250 per hour or more like there's just not that much money left because let's say by all is said and done, 30% is going that to taxes. So that's 75 bucks. Let's say if it's taking 10 hours and you're going to probably pay 20 to $40 per hour, that's another, you know, 40 bucks. If you're paying your HR and your finance and your account managers, that's probably another 60 bucks an hour, like relatively speaking. And then you just know much. There's just no money left over if you don't have it like that. And the final thing is it should naturally lead into the recurring service. That would be pretty strange and pretty goofy if it didn't, right? So next let's talk about that recurring service that this will naturally lead into. This should be very high priced service that saves them time. And I have money producing here. This should have the potential to make them more money and it should have an LTV of $30,000 or higher. So for my CRO service I charge $8,000 per month to 15,000, but we're going to use 8,000 here. The average client lasted 11 months before they churned. And that's average. Some people would last two years, some people would last one month. They really just hated it, you know, and anywhere in between. So if you do the Math, I have 88,000 total LTV in term of revenue. And then I had a 40% ish margin on this, so just about $38,000 in margin. The only two real variables to do here when you're making this for yourself is either have to charge a higher price or you have to churn less. And the answer to both of those is you need to get better at your recurring service. If you're better, you can charge a premium. If you're better, you're going to churn less. And there's no real thing you can do besides get better to solve these problems. Very, very, very important. So what if they can't afford you or you actually find out they need a different service and that would be better for them? We develop referral partnerships and referral partnerships are very huge and a very underutilized revenue stream. So the key here is to find people who sell the same service or sell to the same customers rather, but do not sell the same service or services as us. So what does that look like in reality? For my CRO agency, I had partnerships with Facebook agencies, Google, TikTok, YouTube, email, influencer, SEO design, like packaging agencies, sourcing agencies, that kind of stuff. So if you're going to do something like this for yourself, the steps are to make a list of 10 potential niches or types of partnerships. So you have see some of mine on the screen, you want 10 of those. And then we want to Brainstorm and list 20 potential like actual people we may be able to partner with in each. And hopefully these are from our network, from communities, from groups, from social media, from mutuals, you name it. And we're going to develop a very good network by doing this. So that is the referral partnership. And then next thing I want to get into is what about people who just don't want any done for you services? They want to learn to do it themselves. And that is the course. There's always going to be a percentage of the market in any service in any niche that wants to learn to do it themselves. And this usually makes up about 15 to 20% of the total market. Oftentimes I am in this percentage myself. So what do you do when you're creating a course? What is a typical subject or what's the word? Syllabus? Maybe we'll just go table of contents. What does that look like? So for example, my course was top eight things you need to make your landing page convert at 4% plus from cold traffic. I had videos, documents, templates, examples and support in there. And because my agency was pretty big, I would say I only got about 1% of my total revenue from this course. I sold maybe 10 of them a month and it was 9.97. So that's. Just keep that in mind. So what should you do if you want to make a course and I always recommend you do, don't skip this part because Most of these 15 to 20% of people that don't want done for you services just won't buy them under almost any circumstances. And 10 or 15 to 20% of the markets, a large part of the market and you're going to miss out on this. So what I recommend, the easiest way to make a course is to basically take your internal employee training, what you use to train your employees on all these tasks, maybe make it look a little better, more professional and repackage it and then sell it as a course. By far the easiest and most effective way to do it. I've never heard of something that was easier and more effective than that. But what about the people who are kind of in between the course and the service? So usually there you're going to have a mess mastermind and that's usually a done with you program that promises a specific result. And these kind of things are appealing to all levels of the market because there are often other benefits to these, like community live calls, you name it. So I didn't do that much for my mastermind at my agency, but I had like a little one with about 30 people in it and I charged way too little. And the only thing I did was I reviewed their landing pages, their CRO tests, that kind of stuff. When I did this, I was very surprised to find out that most of these customers were big e commerce brands who either already had an agency or they had an internal team. But they kind of wanted a second set of eyes for someone to see if like what they're doing is actually right. I anticipated or made my mastermind for the exact opposite. I made it for either agencies or for like people who can't afford the done for you CRO service. But almost none of those were actually in this mastermind. So if you want to create your own mastermind, you want to create a community, that's the number one thing you want to promise a very specific result that they're going to get by joining. And this should be very, very specific. So they're going to make more money or save them time. I would always charge a lot of money, 30k plus for, let's say a year for your mastermind and really nothing else. It's just not going to be worth it for you in terms of, you know, the economics and the time you need to do it. And the number one thing you can do to make a great mastermind is actually get them the result that you promised, whether that's measurable results or the tangible deliverable. And then if you grow up big enough, hold in real life events four times per year. So I'm going to wrap this up with the final two offers that we need. And these are offers for people who are super, super unqualified. Because our intro offer, they have to have some money recurring service, they have to have a lot of money. Same with the course, same with the referral partnerships they're buying from someone. And especially the same with the mastermind. But what about the people who are unqualified to the point where they just can't afford any of this. The first is SaaS affiliates. So SaaS is software as a service. Just say software, any app that people use in your niche. So being an affiliate for different SaaS products can really lead to a lot of revenue if you scale. So, and a lot of your customers and leads will buy three to five tools that you recommend that they need anyway. And you'll get a Commission usually for 12 months or more from the actual platform if you sign up and you get approved. So for me, what does that look like? So because of my paid ad funnel that I'm going to talk about on the next slide of the video, I ran my affiliate commissions up to over 115k per month, mostly through Webflow affiliate through ClickFunnels affiliate through Jasper AI, which was an AI copywriting tool that was long before ChatGPT and then closed. Er, so they should say convert.com, which is an AB testing tool, not close.com, my mistake. So I got to about 115k per month with this, mostly with Webflow, to be honest. But the other ones were in there. And if you want to do something like this, you want to choose five different relevant tools to your niche and they should be obvious, they're probably going to be the same tools that you're using. So I have found that if you promote or offer more tools, it's actually less effective than being more effective. You might think it would be more effective because there's more chances to click. But I have found, and I've found with my clients that promoting 20 for example, is actually worse performing in terms of like true dollar value of your commissions overall than promoting just 5. So just choose them carefully, you don't need to promote every single thing and just choose one per function. Like if you were to promote CRMs, you don't need HubSpot, Go High Level, Close.com, pipedrive, you know, you don't need all of them. And after we do this SaaS affiliate, that leads us to the final of our seven offers and that is our digital product. So digital product is a pre made product, go figure. Usually templates or some sort of asset that you can sell to pretty much anyone in the market. And that's exactly what I did at my agency. Mine was 100 webflow templates for $97. These were all landing pages that they could go in duplicate, you know, put their logo, put their pictures, put their copy in, hit publish. So I had 50 sales pages. I had 30 listicle templates and then I had 20ish advertorial. Those aren't exact numbers, but you get the idea. And I think if you're going to do it yourself, these are the things that I've learned over the years. You want it to be $100 or less for impulse buys. That kind of like a psychological threshold. I've tested this extensively when I even went from 97 to 107 with my webflow templates. Because I actually started at 27 and kept raising the price. The conversion rate fell off a cliff. Like I'm talking 50% less for, you know, $10 more. And this was not like piece of shit ad spend. I was spending up to $7,000 per day. You get a lot of data and a lot of consistency. It's not like I was spending $50 per day and there was just variance. The next thing is 100% automated, no fulfillment. So a lot of people will say that will come and say, like I'm going to do a custom ad creative for them for 97. That is a service. That is not a product. It's a standard prepackaged product. 100% automated. You are not involved in this in any way. A very, very interesting hack or thing to consider here is the best digital products are interesting to all levels of the market. So my landing page templates be interesting to agencies, to freelancers, to people just starting to beginners, to medium like level E commerce stores and even to the biggest ecommerce stores. The CEO or some director of marketing sees an ad for it and says why not downloads it, sends it to their team and then what I really like to do is have some bonuses that solve the natural next problem. So in my landing pages, basically, how would I say this? When I have the landing page, what do I need next? I need copywriting. So there I hit him with the Jasper AI I need to a B test. Okay, I hit him with an AB testing list of what you can do to have a good landing page. You need a good offer, offer swipe file and that kind of stuff. So that is really what I would consider if you were trying to do it yourself. And we've gone through all seven of these offers. So the question becomes, what happens when we have all of these and we're driving traffic and capturing leads? Our agency is going to grow so fast that it'll actually feel illegal and like something is wrong or that it's just too good to be true. And that's what we want it's very, very good. So that's the end of this video. And if you liked it, comment, subscribe, and I will see you in the next one.