It's Actually Pretty Easy To Get Ahead of 99% Of Agencies

Have you ever wondered what separates the top 1% of agencies from the rest? I currently consult with over 550 agencies doing a combined 315 million in annual revenue. So I have more real time insights into what separates the best from the rest. Perhaps more so than anyone else on earth. And I believe the agency model is still the best business model on earth, but only if you are in the top 1%. If you're in the other 99%, cash flow problem problems, low margins, terrible operations, all that kind of stuff, honestly, is pretty terrible. And I've identified 10 different things that you can do today to get ahead of 99% of the agencies on the planet and transform your agency from this is terrible to basically, I cannot believe how much money I'm making almost overnight. So in this video I'm going to show you these 10 things that absolutely kill the average agency and, and how you can avoid these things and all of the other lessons that I've learned from working with over 550 agencies every month. So the first thing that you absolutely must do is you must have a clear offer or value proposition. The average agency, if you just go onto Google and type in marketing agency and search for the few results, there's no real difference between them. They're absolutely indistinguishable from each other. There's no thing that will be there with an offer or clear value proposition. They have all the case studies look the same, the entire website looks the same, all the offers are the same. And if you're, especially if you're in a, you know, on a Twitter, you know, money Twitter type thing, if you're on certain section of YouTube, if you're just in some of these mastermind groups, you are in a bubble and you don't really know how bad or how just unadvanced or unsophisticated. The average agency and the average business is to be honest. So in one sentence you need to be able to explain how you either save people time or make them more money. Because that's the only two reasons that people do anything. You could say a third would be to help people become compliant. But that's hardly. Unless you're in the compliance business or you have an agency that deals with that, we can't really count on that. So in one sentence you need to be able to explain this. So at my previous agency that I sold, which was a landing page agency, to give you some context, my value proposition is my landing pages will increase your conversion rate and that will lower your paid Ad cost per acquisition. They're serving E Commerce stores and rising customer acquisition cost is probably their biggest problem. So it's a very clear this will make me more money and kind of. Although the purpose of it is not to save them time, it saves them time testing and doing it themselves. So if you're going to take some action steps from this video, create one sentence under ten words explaining how you either save them time or make them more money and then put it in Hemingway editor or something like that and chop it down to a third grade reading level and this will become your heads, your headline on your website, your sales presentation, anything in that kind of stuff. So once the offer is clear, then we really need to get the different services down and we must not offer every service possible. The average agency offers way too many services to try to increase revenue and too many services create a ton of different problems. So when you're doing that Google search from before, just see how many different services a lot of these agencies do. They do paid ads, they do SEO, they do website, they do email marketing, they do all of these different things. And that causes just so many problems for people. It causes bad margins because you have to hire so many different employees to do all these services because one 60k a year or one virtual assistant is not trained to do all of these themselves. You're going to get a lot worse or less consistent results because you can't build your entire trainings, process systems around one or two services. You're going to have a really high employee burnout and dissatisfaction just because you're going to have tremendous scope creep and they're going to be doing stuff that they didn't sign up for and not paid for. And it just has so many different problems that really, really torpedoed the average agency. So you can avoid these problems by just having two services and they should be related to each other. It should be a one time intro offer that basically is very low risk, low commitment and that gets them in the door. And then once you do a great job, you upsell them to a higher priced recurring service and that is where all of your money is made. So at my previous agency, which was a landing page, at CRO agency, which kind of spoils what I did, I basically had a landing page offer which is one for 2,500 and eventually I added three for 5,000. But that was way down the line, not like that at the start. So if my landing page performed better than their current product page, landing page, whatever they used to send their paid traffic to it was very easy for me to say, okay, I just did this for you and it worked. Why don't I do that to your whole site, which is my recurring CRO service. So it's very easy to measure with that kind of stuff because it's based on actual data. And my conversion rate optimization service was 8,000 to 15,000 per month depending on their traffic. And even if they kind of know like and trust you, that's very difficult to get them to just pay that. Especially because I had a six month contract for a lot of the lifetime of this agency. But I could just get them in the door with a $2,500 landing page and then it just becomes a lot more palatable because they saw it with their own eyes based on their brand, that I could help them and then I could just upsell them like that. So there are five key elements that I tell people with a great intro offer. Because we can't mess around too much with our recurring service. Our recurring service really is what it is. So it neither needs to make them more money and save them time. It either needs to be measurable in terms of data or if it can't be measured, there has to be a tangible, deliverable something they get. So to explain that a little bit with a landing page and an A B test that's very measurable, you can just have your VWO or some kind of AB testing tool and see for yourself which is better. But if it's not possible like that, like let's say it's design or something, you have to have something that gets delivered to them in exchange for the money. And that's going to make it so much easier to sell to people. The next thing that we really want to do is we want to have it to be productized and what I mean by that, and you'll see later in this video, I'm going to expand on this, but it needs to be they pay X, they get Y. There's no custom proposal, there's no custom off brand work. It's just a productized service where you really get in there. All of your hiring, all of your training, all of your systems are meant to deliver and optimize this productized service. And then you just pump it out kind of like a factory. And that's actually going to lead to better results in terms of consistency, you know, standards and that kind of stuff. The intro offer should also be able to be delivered at $250 per hour in terms of what we call an effective hourly rate. So that means let's say we go back to my example and it's $2,500 for a landing page. It needs to be able to be delivered my time, my team's time, all that kind of stuff like added together within 10 hours or less. And the reason for this is once you bring into scale, after labor, after customer acquisition cost, after software, once you really grow, you're going to have accounting and finance and HR and that kind of stuff. Once you get to that phase, if you can deliver something at $250 per hour or more, there's almost just no money left over, especially after taxes and that kind of stuff. So that's where that number comes from. And then the final key is that it must lead naturally into your recurring service. It's not really that helpful if your one time offer is a landing page and then you do email marketing, for example, or just not related. Whereas landing page into conversion rate optimization is a natural fit. So when we narrow our services, we create a good opportunity to charge a premium and what our services are really worth. And that leads me to my next point of you must charge a lot of money. So in my view, after working with 550 of these, the greatest problem that average agencies face is their margins are too low because they don't charge enough money. And you always need to make sure that we can deliver your service at $250 per hour or more for all of the reasons I said before. So my previous agency, I already kind of gave away the example, but I sold landing pages as the intro offer for 2,500. And in terms of from them paying to them having it online, it took me about 10 hours all included. So I had templates that we duplicated. I had AI prompts for copywriting, I had a QA process to kind of fix the copywriting on the AI prompts. And then we could kind of just do it from there. And then my conversion rate optimization was the same thing. We had a bank of tests that were kind of predetermined and pre made and then we had a checklist on how to implement each of them. My agency and all good agencies in my view act more as like a factory than an actual creative entity. So action steps to take away from this, we must be charging a lot of money and we need to do a time audit of our services. So if we take an example that you charge $2,500 and it takes you 15 hours, that is not a $250 effective hourly rate. So what you'd want to do in this situation is raise your price to 3,750 per month, which is that $250 per hour rate. I want to clarify, because I do get asked this quite a bit. It would be better if you had a $50,000 effective hourly rate, but that's very unlikely. $250 is the minimum. Anything better is better. So I just want to keep that in mind. So this is only possible if we eliminate custom work that just destroys our margin and eats away at our product profits. So basically we must not do tons of custom work. And the average agency does so much custom work. And when you do custom work, everything falls apart. So custom work is the same problem as not having a clear value proposition and having all of those different services. You know, you spend so much time doing stuff that doesn't produce revenue, you're really unsure of what you should be doing anyways. You have tremendous scope creep that just goes over and over and over and you never get enough reps to be good at something. If you're doing always 100 different custom projects versus one that's productized, you're going to get such a better result over time. Because in the productized one, all of your system training, learnings, improvements can be used to be almost reinvested or all focused on the single productized offer versus when you're doing custom work, you never get enough repetitions to actually get good at it. Because everything is one of one. There's nothing in common from project to another. So we want to productize everything as much as possible. The details are custom of course, but the scope and the service is productized. Like when they're doing at my agency with the landing page and CRO. I only did landing pages in CRO and all of my processes and systems and training and hires are based around this. But of course the actual landing page is custom to every single brand. It's not like you just do something that doesn't fit, right? I just want to clarify that because a lot of people don't understand that. But I only had two services. I had landing pages and CRO. That was my agency. There's absolutely nothing else that you could possibly buy from me. So what I want you to do is choose your intro offer and your recurring service. Get them to that $250 per hour or more. Build your processes and systems and hires and trainings around this and then stick to it. And when clients ask for other work, develop referral relationships and partnerships and refer them away and collect a fee. So I had relationships with E Commerce, SEO, E Commerce ad agencies, E Commerce email marketing, influencer ad agencies like E Commerce accounting because it's a bit different than normal accounting. And I just sent them all away and got a referral fee. And I was getting upwards of $75,000 a month from referral fees just because I had so much volume and a lot of those were recurring affiliate fees. So if we're not delivering the very high consistent quality results, we're not going to get anywhere either. And the average agency is delivers terrible results. And because of that they just have tons and tons of churn. They are never really confident enough to reinvest in the business because of that churn. They're very low conviction in terms of their sales calls and their sales process and they never really feel good about selling their service and nor do they get very many referrals. So we need to have the intro offer and a recurring service and we need to build the systems and process and checklists around all of them. And that is why before I said it's so important to do this, because if you have a productized offer like I did almost 2,000 landing pages in the lifetime of this agency, I had 2,000 different landing pages worth of learnings. Let's say each one was 2% better than the last, just compounds and compounds and compounds and compounds on itself. But when you have all of those different services and all those different scopes, that process never really occurs. So at my agency, about 55% of the landing pages we created were higher converting than whatever they were using before, whether that was a different landing page, a product page, whatever. And in terms of the CRO service, we had a 36% win rate. So that might not sound great if you don't know much about E Commerce, CRO and landing pages, but that's actually a very, very, very good result. And that really gave our sales team the conviction to really sell hard and use a lot of sales tactics that if you didn't believe you had a good service, which most people don't, and deep down they know that you wouldn't be able to pull off, let's say. So what I want you to do is I want you to get a spreadsheet with every single task that you do for client fulfillment. So in each spreadsheet, let's say for a landing page example, we have the above the fold section, the hero image headline, the hero image or the hero section headline, the hero image, the hero section image, you have the bullet points, the button, then you have the next section, whatever sections or whatever tasks that you need to do to deliver your service, whatever that service may be. Get a spreadsheet. In one column, put examples of winners. Next column, put sops. Next column, put employee trainings. Next column, put what to do if you get stuck. And then try to develop templates, AI prompts, all of that kind of stuff around this. So not only can you deliver it faster at a better, effectively hourly rate, but you could also get it more systemized and more likely to work. That's one of the most important things you can do. And even if you do this, this great results that you're delivering can be overlooked if we do not keep our clients in the loop. And that goes to my next point with. You must communicate with clients constantly. And the average agency is very, very embarrassing. And I have more insight to this than every, you know, probably anyone else on earth because I'm in over 300 different slacks on behalf of the agency as a consultant. And the average agency takes days to get back to clients. It's not. They will get back to you within an hour by the end of the day. Sometimes it takes two plus weeks for them to get back. And unsurprisingly, people churn from that. So you need to really make this a priority for your agency. And you need a system that, to remind yourself to do it so it never slips through the cracks, like, not even once. So at my previous agency that I sold, I talked to each one of my clients a minimum of twice per day, mostly through Slack, because that's what we use. So once in the morning and once at the end of the day, and as much as I needed in between, a minimum of two times. And I had a reminder in my calendar, my team's calendar, and that kind of stuff to remind this to happen. So what I want you to do is I want you to set a reminder in your calendar and a reminder for your team to do that. If you use slack, do slack workflows at 4pm local time and 8am local time. 8am will say something like, okay, talk to every one of your clients, if they're an account manager or something like that, tell them what you plan to do today. And at the end of the day, what I usually did was wrapped up. So I told them at the start what I plan to do. And then at the end of the day, you know, we wrapped up with something that we actually did. The next point I want to make is that you must not rely only on referrals. And this is one of the hills that I will die on in terms of consulting. With so many agencies, the average agency only gets clients through referrals. It's not that they rely heavily on referrals or anything of that. If you ask them, they only get referrals through or they only get clients through referrals on what they call word of mouth usually. And you can usually tell who's sophisticated and who's not if they say word of mouth or referrals. But moving on, referrals are very good. I'm not a referral hater. That's actually a very, very excellent sign because it means you're doing great work. But relying too much on referrals is extremely risky, as referrals are outside of your control. You can't scale referrals. You can't just say, oh, I want to get some referrals today. You're basically relying on other people to grow your business for you. You're not taking your destiny into your own hands. So you need to be able to generate your own leads, and you do so through paid ads, through content, through outreach, and through partnerships. So at my previous agency that I sold, I ran 7,000 per day in ads that usually went to landing page templates. So I had a hundred landing page templates in webflow for $97. And what I or what my strategy was, and it worked for about six months. And then eventually there was just no one else to sell them to. I would sell them these landing page templates and then I would market to them over time. And about 2.1% of people who bought this digital product, most people will call it, actually converted to a done for you landing page service, which is my intro offer. So in theory, if I was able to get a sale of these landing page templates for less than $97, which is what the cost, I, I could basically be getting clients slash leads for free because the revenue from the sale canceled out the revenue I spent on ads. So it was a very, very scalable, very profitable funnel. The second thing I did was I posted five times per day on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. So I made them all for Twitter and then I cross posted them to LinkedIn and Instagram with a tool called hypefury, which turns them into carousels automatically. At my peak, I was sending about 20,000 cold emails per day, Monday to Friday, so about 100,000 per week. It didn't last long because there's just not that many people to email after a while. I don't recommend you do that maybe 5,000 per day, Monday to Friday. And I did all forms of partnerships, but the most successful was white label partnerships. So I had 77 different white label partners at the very peak of this. And each of them were Facebook ad or Google Ad or TikTok ad agencies. And I had 77 of them paying me $5,000 per month for basically unlimited landing pages for their client, which usually was like 2 to 6. So that's 385,000amonth in revenue just from the partnerships. And then we had the paid ads, we had the content, and we had the cold emails on top of that. So it was a very big agency over time. So what I want you to do is set up all four forms of these lead generations in the next 48 hours. So I want you to set up a landing page funnel to book calls. I want you to film a three minute video ad, I want you to write 10 tweets and then cross post them to LinkedIn and Instagram. And then I want you to buy 30 cold email domains and warm them up. So this is all good. But to generate tons of leads, you really need to get yourself on the Internet because that builds trust and video is really the best way to do that. So you must create video content. And the average agency has absolutely zero video content. It's not even that it's bad, it's that it doesn't exist. It's. And video content is so important to build trust and show that you know what you're talking about on the Internet. In many cases, if you don't have it, they just nothing to separate you from everybody else. They don't really trust you. They think you're just an anonymous scammer. And you watching this video right now is kind of like you spending time with me. It's no different than, you know, we're at the bar or something talking about this stuff. I record it once and thousands of people see it. So it's very high leverage in that way. So you need to get comfortable making videos. And the best way to go about it is kind of the same way that I do it, where you just create an asset, whether that's a mural board or whether that's a slideshow like I'm doing right now. You screen share it and then pretend in your mind that you're teaching it to someone one on one. It's kind of awkward to teach the camera, to talk to the camera, and I'm not even the best at it, but I try to view the camera as A person that I'm really trying to go through it with. So at my previous agency, I had four types of videos. I had one on my homepage that goes over the three most important parts of a landing page and CRO. So that is the above, the fold, the site speed and the offer. And I really built most of my marketing, messaging and propaganda about that. I had a video on the thank you page which explained my offer, my process, my timeline and how to get started. I had unlisted YouTube videos that showed people how to make great landing pages. And. And then I had a 3 minute, I think it was 3 minute and 50 second loom in my cold emails. So my cold emails went from just being a spam cold email to can I send you a video? And that was very, very effective for me. When you make a video, we want to focus on three things. We want to focus on the hook and the intro, which are one in the same. The hook is the first sentence and the intro is first. 30 seconds. You want to do a three minute demonstration of your product. Then you want to optimize the audio using something called a phonic. So, so Google that. And if you don't have lighting like I do, just try to face a window and get natural light. It's very, very important. The next point I want to make is you must not run the entire business with VAS interns and low paid staff. The average agency relies almost solely on low paid virtual assistants, assistant interns and staff members. And these people generally cannot get results. It's nothing personal, it's just the name of the game. So you need to start mentally breaking down and separating tasks in your agency as thinking and doing tasks. And they are two really distinct things. Not all tasks require thinking and they can be done by cheaper labor. So separate. You know this X, Y and Z is thinking here. Okay? Now this is the work. So once the strategy and once the vision and the creative brief is made, now we're going to get the VAs and interns and low paid staff to do it. So at my previous agency I sold that. I almost kind of had two separate agencies or departments. So I had about 60 overseas employees, mostly in Pakistan, who did a lot of the work. And then I had 15 better paid full time employees from Canada and the United States. I charged in United States dollars. So I tried to hire as many Canadians as possible just because it's a very good exchange rate and I could get better talent for the same price in terms of that exchange rate. But I had my people in America as well. So what I want you to do here is make a spreadsheet and separate the tasks into thinking and doing. So column one, thinking, column two, doing. And it's probably going to be about four doing tasks for every one thinking task. So if you have five tasks, four doing, one thinking, and then separate it out and hire overseas interns, low paid staff VAs for the doing tasks and keep the well paid thinking tasks for people domestically. It's very, very important because delegating like this will only work when your team is fully trained and they know exactly how to deliver results. Which brings me to the final point of this video, which is you must have employee training and onboarding. So the average agency does not have any sort of employee training and they don't give anybody the tools they need to succeed. And this leads to burnout, it leads to bad results, it leads to a lack of clarity and unclear responsibilities, it leads to high turnover because people get frustrated and want to go somewhere else. And it leads to high churn with the clients. There's literally no positives to doing this. So you need to treat your employees kind of like you do your clients. You need to have a very good onboarding process that when they get hired, they get put through it, they have education, processes, standards, all of that kind of stuff. And it needs to happen automatically because as you scale your agency, you're not going to have time to train everybody one on one. That might be fine when you have two or three or five, maybe even 10 employees, but as you have 50, 100, if that's your ambition, it's never going to work like that, nor would you want to do it anyway. So at my previous agency I had a Kajabi with a full 14 to 30 day training for each role. 14 to 30 days, depending on what it was. Some of these roles were CRO specialists, landing page builder, designer, copywriter, that kind of stuff. And I had an onboarding process and period for each hire. So when they got hired their first 14 to 30 days, all they did was basically taking this internal course that I made. So what I want you to do before the end of the day is sign up for Kajabi, create a course or section for every role in your business, and then you want to create three assignments for each and then lay out and film all the videos for each step. So for example, for a landing page builder, at mine, I had my different things. Their sections are above the fold. Copywriting site Speed offers, mobile, optima, mobile optimization, that kind of stuff. So they had videos and lessons for each of those. And then I had three assignments. And the assignments were, I need you to make an above the fold that's proper for me. I need you to get this site to load in 2 seconds or less in term of a first contentful paint, which is just a metric for site speed. And then I need you to create a great offer for this. And if they can't do all those things within, you know, a few tries, if they don't get it perfect the first time, they're just fired. I don't have the time or effort to really do someone or train someone that's not going to get good results. But that is all for today. And if you do these 10 things, you will be ahead of 99% of the agencies on the planet and by default you will have a top 1% marketing agency. The standard, in my opinion, has never been lower. And that's good and bad. It's good for you because it makes it very easy to stand out and very easy to gobble up a lot of market share even if you are not the biggest agency before you start. So if you like this video, like, comment and subscribe and I will see you in the next one.