An agency operator who's sold three companies and works with 450+ agencies lays out six priorities: long-form YouTube and newsletters five times weekly, a repeatable offer plus recurring service, detailed operations docs, all four traffic methods, and a 200-300 page lead magnet with email flows. He calls these the 80/20 for scaling to $1M-$10M.
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If you only had to choose six things to do for your entire agency, these are the six that I would recommend. And I work with over 450 agencies on a monthly basis that do over 315 million in combined revenue. And I've sold three agencies myself. So here are what I would recommend. The first one is five times per week YouTube videos, just kind of like the ones I do, or sharing a screen with a mural board, or sharing a screen with some slides. YouTube is so effective because it kind of comes up at every stage of the funnel. It's at the top to drive traffic, it's at the middle to nurture leads because they can see your face, hear your voice, all that kind of stuff. It's at the bottom to convert leads because a lot of times people will be on the fence. You know, you might have had a sales call with them and then eventually they just convert. And that's because they've watched so many of your YouTube videos. And then even after the sale, it helps because your current clients are going to be watching your YouTube videos more than anyone else. And that might sound weird or backwards, but it's absolutely the case. And it becomes a situation where they trust you more, they become less likely to give you attitude, less likely to churn. So the YouTube videos, long form, not short form, are, in my opinion, if you only had to choose one thing, it would be this, it would be YouTube videos. The second thing you should do is a five times per week newsletter. Email, Instagram and YouTube are the three best platforms in my opinion. And the newsletter is kind of like the written version of the YouTube videos. It's a very intimate stream of consciousness from your mind directly into theirs. Email is great because it's the only platform that you own and you're not going to get screwed over by bands or an algorithm change or anything like that. And it's also the only audience that you could reach 100% in its entirety at any given time. Where you post a YouTube video or an Instagram post or whatever, and it only shows to 1% or 5% of the audience or whatever, this will show to 100% of the audience. And even if they don't read it, they're going to see it in their inbox and they're going to see your name. And that's kind of like a follow up or a touch point in and of itself. So an easy way to do it if you want, is just send the transcript of your YouTube video as your newsletter and kind of just format it properly. But make sure you do the five times per week, YouTube and the newsletter. It's just so important. The third thing is a repeatable intro offer and recurring service. So what do I mean by that one mistake that I had that I still was very successful anyway with my previous three agencies that I sold, but they would have been five to 10 times bigger if I had a repeatable intro offer and a recurring service. So what do I mean by that? So all of my agencies were, well, Facebook ads for E Commerce, then Amazon FBA services, mostly ads, and then landing page and CRO for E Commerce. So I've been in the E commerce niche. But the problem is that E commerce is not really a niche. Every store is different. You could be selling fashion or supplements or baby goods or home goods, or you name it, could be anything. So in many cases the only thing that is in common with E commerce stores or that they have in common with each other are that they just use Shopify. Other than that, there's almost nothing in common. So the problem with that is it's hard to get consistent results for every single client, no matter what. Because a lot of the cases, your learnings and your successes for one client really translate to the others. If you contrasted this with something like an agency for commercial cleaning companies, once you find the winning cold email script, the ad creatives, the email flows, the newsletter, the website, all of that kind of stuff, you basically just copy and paste it. One client in every city, change the name of the city and change their logo and it's guaranteed to work. If you have cold emails, you have ads, you have lead magnets, you have sales scripts, you have a website, you have all that stuff that works in New York, for example, it's guaranteed to work in Las Vegas, you know, Minneapolis, Austin, Texas, Sacramento, New Mexico, like wherever. And when you do that, you're one, you can get away with hiring a lot dumber people because it's just copy and paste. Two, because everything is all around that one thing. You can build AI tools and systems that you just wouldn't be able to justify building otherwise. Three, all of your hiring and training and all that kind of stuff is just on how to do that stuff. So you get more with less. And then obviously because you know it works, you're gonna have a 95% success rate and you're gonna get tons of word of mouth and business and happy clients and low churn, which is just not possible when you have an E commerce agency or agency for startups or an agency for even agencies. Because every Agency is different too. So repeatable, intro offer and recurring service. So important. The fourth thing is an operations spreadsheet. So just use Google sheets or Airtable or Notion or whatever. And basically what you want to do is you want to have categories like acquisition, client work, you know, whatever, employees, and you want to list out every single task that is, you know, necessary that it's repeated. So every week, every month, every day, whatever. And then for all of them, you want to assign it to someone, you want to have an sop, you want to have a training, usually documents for both. You want to have an example, usually a picture of what it's supposed to look like, or a link. And then you have a step by step checklist and what they do when they're done. And then eventually, if you just build one of these tasks out per day in its entirety, and you do that for six months, you're going to have a fully operational automatic operations spreadsheet that you can just send to someone, they can click through it and know exactly what to do. And that is really the key to getting out of operations, which is what every agency owner dreams of. Instead of you having to show people them having questions, they just look in the spreadsheet. That's how in depth it should be. I like the Google spreadsheet for this because you can just share it in one click and it's, you know, free. I guess a lot of the using notion or using some of those other ones, if you have tons of employees and they all have a seat, they get pretty pricey. And this operation spreadsheet is just the key to scale, if you will. The fifth thing that you want to have is all four main traffic methods. And that's kind of cheating because there's four of them. But I count them as the same thing because they all work together. So the four are paid ads, content, outreach and partnerships. And it's very important to have all four because each of them make the other ones more effective. So for example, if someone sees your paid ads all the time, they follow you and consume your content, they'd be way more likely to respond to outreach in the form of cold emails or DMS or prospecting or whatever. Another situation, if someone is senior paid ad and there's a bunch of content on your Instagram account, for example, they're going to be a lot more likely to click on the link, you're going to get a lower cpm, they're going to follow you more often, and they're much more effective ad funnel than if There was no content on your profile. So having all four of these automated to some degree, whether you have a team doing your paid ads, you have a team ghost writing for you, team managing your cold email and all that kind of stuff, or you just have great systems for it that is so important to have. And then the final six thing is one good lead magnet that's basically like 200, 300 pages and just makes you look like the absolute man or woman. And email flows. So you have a page where your YouTube and your newsletter and your paid ads and content and outreach and partnerships, you drive traffic to they download your lead magnet, they get added to the email flows which nurture them alongside the YouTube and newsletter to your repeatable intro offers and recurring service. And this setup of these six things, kind of the 8020 rule for an agency. You can build a 1 million, 2 million, 5 million, 10 million a year agency just if you perfect these six things, you really don't need anything else. And that is why they're so important. So I hope this video was helpful and I'll see you in the next one.
