My Agency Grew 650% When I Focused On These Four Things

My agency grew by over 650% in a few short months when I only focused on four very specific things. So if you don't know who I am, my name is Matthew Larson. I currently work with about 550 agency owners every month. And what you're seeing on screen is a funnel that I designed that is perfect for agency owners who don't want to rely on referrals or networking or hope and prayer marketing and, and they want to generate and convert cold traffic at scale. So in this video I'm going to talk about four very specific things that I think every agency owner should do when they have finally gotten out of operations and they've finally gotten out of sales and their calendar is empty and they can just focus on growing the business. So I'm going to go through them one at a time. They're in no particular order, but a lot of them do relate to each other and a lot of them have to do with just promoting and driving traffic to the business. So the first thing that I think everybody should do is content. And content is very important because if you look at the funnel on the screen, content shows up in a few different places. It shows up at the top to drive traffic, it shows up in the middle and bottom to convert leads. And it also shows up kind of after you can't see it on the screen, but after they become a client. Because people watch your client, people don't mentally differentiate between stuff that you're giving out paid and for free and they become more bought and they become more likely to do what you say and trust you and less likely to give you attitude and churn. So it shows up at literally every step of the funnel, in every step of the business. So the first thing I do with a content strategy is I want to get super dialed in on a very specific target audience. And a lot of people will just make content about whatever they feel like that day. I don't really think that's a good idea. And there's at least three reasons why I think you need to get dialed in. The first is obviously that is going to be who your client is. So there's really no point in making a bunch of content for how to get your first 10k per month with E Commerce. If you're an E commerce agency that only serves eight and nine figure brands, you're much better off just making content that appeals to the actual content or the actual target market and size of business that you're trying to close. The second reason is that it sets expectations. If someone comes to your YouTube channel, for example, and they watch a video of yours and they like it and subscribe, they basically are going to be blindsided the next time when it's a completely different topic and they're going to lose interest and that's not going to look very good for your algorithm. One of the things that will make you grow the fastest on the platforms is people basically binge consuming your content. So on YouTube, they come in with a video, maybe like the one you're watching, and you go to my channel and you see it's all about agencies and you're going to watch their other stuff. That is really one of the most positive indicators for YouTube, for TikTok, for Instagram, for Facebook, for LinkedIn that you can possibly get. And when you don't do this, when the opposite is true, the algorithm doesn't really push your content as much as you would like it to, because it doesn't know what you're really going for. If I post 20 videos in a row that I'll have agency in the title that talks specifically about agencies and their problems. With the 50k to 500k per month range on my 21st video, the algorithm's probably going to be pretty sure that I'm going to do that again. So it's going to push it to people that it thinks is in that target audience. So it's the very first step of all content is doing something like that. And then once you have this audience dialed in, what you really want to do is spend 30 minutes per day, preferably without music, preferably not being distracted by anything. And what you want to do is you want to think of problems that this laser specific audience has. So for me, I go on a walk for 30 to 60 minutes per day with my phone, no headphones, just Apple notes open. And I think to myself, what do agency owners between 5 or 50k and 500k per month, what problems do they have? And this video is one of the results of that. You know, they need to. Where should I be spending my time for high leverage stuff? There we go. When you're on your walk or when you're in this brainstorming period, as you think of these ideas, create a list of bullet points on how to solve each and every one of these problems. I have some of them on screen, you can't really see it, but I'm reading off of those. I don't necessarily have a script, but this is a very easy way to make very effective YouTube videos. We take that list of bullet points. And then we're going to turn it into a YouTube video. YouTube video like this one. And what we really want to do is we want to maybe do this brainstorming period daily, if we can, or at least every second day. And then we'll batch film four YouTube videos twice per week. So that's going to make eight YouTube videos. This is currently the second video I'm making in my batch session. Sorry to disappoint everybody if they thought that I'm making these every single day. But I do that because it's easy. Usually takes me about one to two hours, depending on the length of the videos. And then I have them scheduled out. I can upload them with the title, get my thumbnail person to do it, which is me. And I don't make good thumbnails anyway. And what I'll do is when those videos are finished, I'll put them into Claude or Poppy AI and I will transcribe them and get a nice, good transcription that's nice and clean. And then I'll send them to my list as a newsletter. And then my assistant will see those newsletters and they'll be able to basically turn each video into one newsletter, and then that one newsletter into five to ten tweets, and then one to two long form posts. And then they're going to use hypefury and they're going to schedule them across all the platforms. So this is a system that you can work on with you and maybe one assistant. And your thing in this system, and this part is making your YouTube videos at least Monday, Wednesday, Friday, three times, really focusing on the packaging, which is the title, the thumbnail and the idea, and maybe the intro as well, and then getting better and better and better every single time. The goal here is to basically knock out 100 videos that are laser specific to your target audience. And you want to become known for that. If someone thinks of agency or someone has a problem that has to do with agencies, I want a whole, you know, market of agency ownership instantly. Think Matthew Larson's YouTube and go to it. That's what you're trying to be known for. Then when you have this system, you can go on to the next one. The second thing that you should be spending your time is creating systems making your business better every single day instead of slaving away in the client work. So when you're out of operations and you're out of sales, you'll have time to actually make a lot of these systems. And the two main things That I think everybody should do are their operations system and their sales system. So inside the operation system there's a few things you want to have checklists for every deliverable. So if I'm trying to make a YouTube video, for example, I'll have a checklist and then I will basically go through that checklist on a call. When training someone to help me and basically do the entire YouTube video with just that checklist in front of them, then I'll take, take that, send that checklist to them and if they can do it back in front of me without any other help, I've successfully transferred the skill to them and they're trained. The next thing you want to do is about nine examples for every checklist and deliverable. This is what it should look like. Whether you're designing an email campaign or you're designing a landing page above the fold, or you're writing an ad script. These are stuff to compare it to. The next is your list of SOPs. And these are basically to do lists for everything that is not necessarily a deliverable with a checklist like we said before, but are just recurring tasks that you have to do all the time. We need a step by step SOP that has the purpose, has a video, you know, training or video demonstration, step by step, any resources they need, any trainings they need, and you just have all of those in a spreadsheet or airtable or some kind of base. The next is a project management system. You want to have one for your client work and one for your internal agency growth. You need to plan out your employees tasks, pass every day or every week, or train their managers to if you're kind of at a further along stage. And then we want to have reminders. So every SOP that has a recurring task, every project management tool that has a recurring task, we want to have reminders, either using Zapier, Slack workflows, you name it, we need to have that stuff. Because people forget and having reminders is one of the best ways to ensure that your systems actually get used to. Because a lot of systems are created, very few actually get used. The next is going to be a hiring system. So the hiring system that I usually go for would be a video on its own. But I'll usually do something like they need to send a two minute video so I can see their face, hear their voice, do that kind of stuff. Then I'll hire or I'll interview about 10 different people. And when you interview 10 people, you'll quickly learn who knows what they're talking about and who doesn't. And the filter that you want to use is did they teach you something that you didn't know on the sales call? Preferably if you're hiring someone to do something, they're better at it than you. It's kind of very concerning if you're the best one that you hire for every single task. So if they basically taught you something or not is a great filter. The next thing you want to do in your operation system is the training aspect of it. So you should have a training for every employee that's similar to an onboarding process for a client. So someone gets hired, they are immediately put through a 14 to 30 day basically Kajabi course. They have daily one on ones with their supervisor or you. And they basically have three different assignments that they have to do when like to prove that they're progressing. So at my landing page agency, those three assignments where they need to design and optimize above the fold, they need to get the first contentful paint the page to load at 2 seconds or less and they need to design a great offer. And if they're basically doing that things and they're doing this successfully, I know they are progressing. And if they don't like basically 30 days is their probation period, they're gone. You're not paying someone to not progress. The final thing in the operations system is the employee management system. And basically what you want to do here is you want to use your project management board effectively. You want to tell them what to do, how to do it. So in every project management thing there should be basically a link to training or a step by step of what they have to do. And then you need to give them a deadline. Because there's four main reasons that people don't do it. You know, they didn't know what to do, how to do it, when they needed to do it. And if you have all those things and they still don't, it's probably a motivation problem or the give a shit problem and then you can deal with that separately. Those are the things that really make a full and complete operations system for an agency in my opinion. You could have other ones that are specific to certain kind of agencies, but those are specific to or those are broad, so to speak. And then in your sales system I like to have a few things. I want to have a pre call research bot that my sales reps can use so they can put in a website, it'll scrape it, it'll put it into Claude sonnet or whatever and make a Google Doc with a summary. Your sales reps typically don't do this manually, even though they really should, and this speeds up the process. The next thing in the sales system is when someone submits an application or books a call or both. I like to have an SMS in Zapier that text it to me or text it to the sales reps and that makes it easy to, you know, just click on the phone number, click send message and make a video introducing yourself as soon as you get it. That's going to increase show rates and when they come on the call, they're going to have much more rapport in comparison to if they didn't talk to you ever in your application, in your form, you definitely want to filter out unqualified leads because you don't want to be on calls of people who have no chance of buying. Usually this filtering is revenue related or cost related and there's literally no benefit to getting on the call with these people. And by filtering them out you can also ensure that they don't get included as a conversion event in your Facebook pixel, which is just a added bonus. And then your pixel will become a lot better and better over time. In your calendly, make sure you restrict everything to 72 hours in the future or less. No show rates just skyrocket after that and there's no real reason to have it like 14 days in the future. If they basically are booking a call 14 days in the future, they're not really that interested. They're not dying to get on a call with you and those aren't the type of people we want. Anyone who really wants to get on a call is going to do so 72 hours or less from your calendly. You'll also set up the email and SMS reminders 24 hours before, four hours before and one hour before. So three reminders total. And that will help reduce your no show rate even further. When between the time that they book that call and the time they get on the call, you want to send them a pre call flow that basically shows some case studies, answers some frequently asked questions, overcomes some objections and gives them all the information that they would need so they come to the call closed or at least very aware as opposed to you have to spend half the call explaining what you even do. Then for the call you want to have a sales presentation, you want to have an overall sales call strategy, and then you want to have post call follow up templates in your CRM. I say that you really want to Build these systems as the founder, spending your time, because it's going to make it a lot easier on your sales reps. And instead of basically spending all this time and effort saying to increase the effectiveness of your sales rep by 50% each, that takes a lot of time and effort, you can build this sales system that makes it 50% easier to sell and it will impact and affect and in a positive way all your sales reps. So after you're done building those systems, and there's a lot more that I'm not going to mention this video. Those are the two most important ones. We want to spend a lot of time forming partnerships. So there's three types of partnerships that we really want to do. And if we go back to the funnel over here, they are the cold or they're the white label partnerships, the referral partnerships, and the media partnerships. Those are the partnerships that are going to be kind of universal and the highest leverage. So what we want to do is a lot of us are cold emailing and cold dming and doing kind of prospecting and outreach to clients. We want to do the same thing to partners. Usually I like to do three to one ratio. So if I'm sending 3,000 emails per day to clients, I'll send a thousand to potential partners. So media partnerships is someone like you go on their YouTube channel, or you're in their newsletter, or you're in their podcast, or you're speaking at their event or something of this nature. Basically, the partnership is they get content, you get exposure to their audience. It's mutually beneficial. The other two are white label and referral. So white label is basically some other agency or something like that pays you to do work for their client, pretends that they're the ones doing it, or referral is basically they're referring to you and usually click your referral. And the white label partnerships are basically the same type of thing. It's just a matter of what they prefer to do. You do. You'd approach them both the exact same way. You do outreach to the same people. And it's just a matter of if they want to white label you or refer to you. In every type of partnership, there's three things that you really need to focus on. The first is what is in it for them besides a referral fee. So, for example, when I had my landing page agency, I had 77 white label partners that were Facebook ad agencies. So in addition to the referral fee that I gave them, which was medium, it wasn't super generous, but it was Good enough. The main benefit for them is our landing pages are going to convert higher, their ads are going to perform better, they're going to get a lower cpa, and their chance that their clients are going to churn is less like that's an example of what's in it for them. The second thing you want to focus on is how do they know that you won't fuck them over? How do they know that you won't disappear or you'll screw their clients over or just cease to do your business and they'll be stuck with it? It's a very, very important question. You typically will do this or overcome this with building case studies, building proof, building a reputation, but giving your manual assurances too, like I'm here for the long haul. This is their exact process. They said the exact stuff that your referral or white label partner will go through and all that kind of stuff can really alleviate their concerns quite a bit. And then the final thing that I like to focus on is how can you completely take the risk away with a special offer for their audience or their clients. So I did basically, if you want to introduce me for a landing page, I will do a 100% free mock up within 24 hours for them and then they can basically decide for themselves whether or not that they want to go ahead. Kind of takes all of the risk away from the person doing the white label or the referrals and puts it onto you. And then that way if you do fuck them over, they're not mad at the original refer. That's kind of the really most important part. Another thing I did is if people referred me for CRO, I would do their CRO test for a free for a month, so four tests. And if they continued, then they continued. And it's their choice, not the refers. So when you form these partnerships, you really got to focus on those four or those three things. And those will get you more partnerships than you can possibly imagine. The next thing we want to do here is paid ads. So we want to have a nice little funnel that goes from our paid ads up here all the way through, captures, applications, you know, a little appointment setting action, a little newsletter action, maybe the VSL and goes all the way to eventually booking a sales call. So the things that you want to do and places you want to spend your time, the first thing you want to do is create your funnel. So that always goes for a landing page with a VSL and proof first. If they click the call to action button on that, you want to Go to an application that filters out people based on qualifications. If they complete that application, you're going to go to a call booked page where they can book a call. And if they do that call booked page, they'll go to the thank you page. And that's where your pixel tracks people who hit the thank you page. You always want to use the schedule event if you're trying to go book the call. And it's very, very good process. So you need to have the funnel there first, obviously before you are able to run any ads. So that's very important. Once you have the funnel in place, what you really want to do is create three versions of a video ad, all with kind of similar but different messaging. And what I mean by that is your offer is your offer, right? There's only so many ways you can describe it, but oftentimes the way you describe your offer can really, you know, get 500%, 1,000%, even 2,500% better results. When it's essentially the exact same thing that has happened to me with my mastermind offer here. I changed the name from scale your agency and tagged about and it's about building cold email or cold traffic funnels and running them with AI instead of I have this mastermind which I'll help you build these systems. And it's the exact same offer, but I've gotten over 1500% more clients kind of on a monthly pace since I changed it. It's the same thing on an ad level. So the main, the main reason or the main way to write an ad, to keep it simple, what you do, why they need it, and then just put as much proof as possible. That could be case studies, client testimonials, scrolling through wins, scrolling through reviews, whatever you want, and then a call to action. Those video ads should be one to three minutes and just gonna put them on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, that kind of stuff. Once you have those three ads, and we're gonna call those the body of the ads, you want to create five different hooks that are three to seven seconds long that really get attention and call out your target audience. So are you an agency owner? Over 50k per month, you need to build this cold traffic funnel that converts or are you an agency owner over 50k per month. This cold traffic helped this 19 year old grow his business from 61k to 371k per month or something like that. What you want to do is have those five different hooks and those three different bodies and edit them all together so you get 15 unique ads and you'll quickly be able to sort in your campaign basically which body's working the best and then which hooks are working the best. Because you'll be able to set up your campaign, three ad sets, one per body, and then one to five ads in each or the five ads in each sorted by hook. And then you can really easily sort or see it at the ad set level which ad is working the best in terms of body. And then at the ad level you can sort by name and see which hooks are performing the best, edit them together, then turn on the ad campaigns like that. Next thing is you want to have your pre call system which will kind of be the same as it was for the sales system that I described earlier. So you can kind of get two in one here, but you basically send your ads to that landing page you built first in the funnel. And then every time someone books a call, you want to have a zapier SMS that will text you or your sales team immediately. And what they'll do is they'll click on it, the phone number will be in that SMS and they'll just be able to text them right away, introduce yourself, maybe even send them a video. Then you have that pre call flow that nurtures them and then you have that sales presentation on the call. I like to aim for 15 to 20% close rate with ads and get under a $1,000 customer acquisition cost. You really obviously want to get it as low as possible, but you can really scale once you get like 10 to 1 lifetime value to Keck. So if I wanted to, basically if I had a $1,000 customer acquisition cost CAC, I would want to have at least $10,000 gross profit per client over the course of a 6 month relationship is what I like to do. So if you're going to do that, you need basically $1666 per month. That's just an example and that's really what you need to scale. Anything over 10 to 1 is good to start scaling. 30 to 1 is really, really good scaling. And then 100 to 1 or more is like hyperscale. So my average customer acquisition or customer lifetime value is 30k. If I'm able to get that to basically $300 or less in terms of my ad spend. So basically that would be like getting, you know, $60 per call, closing one in five very possible. Then that is when I'm getting to hyperscale territory and I would just want to spend as much as I could. So what you want to do, as long as you're hitting these metrics that is acceptable. You want to scale your budget 20% per week. I'm not really a advocate of just, you know, taking your budget from 500 per day to like 3,000 just because you can never really works out like that in my experience. And it's better to just do 20% per week. Gives you time to see things breaking. It's still very, very aggressive. You're going to double your ad spend every month. And if you did that for 12 months, it's going to be astronomical increase. But when you're stop, when you stop hitting your metrics, you're not getting an acceptable customer acquisition cost. You're not getting an acceptable lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio. That's a sign that you need to fix something. So the five things that you're really going to have to fix or could be any of them. Your ads, your landing page, your form, your sales system, or your pricing. If you notice that your ads cost per click is pretty good. Your landing page has a good application rate, your sales metrics are good. It's usually a situation where you need to raise your price. So what I usually do is anytime I'm getting over 30%, 30% close rate, I increase the price by 20% until I'm basically in that 15 to 25% range. When you're kind of increasing your price, you can't really do so without case studies, without proof, without content, without a reputation. So just keep that in mind. But this is what I was doing when my agency grew by 650% in just a few months.