The Top 5 Things That Helped Me Build a 900k Per Month Agency

Hey everybody, it's Matt here. And I thought it would be an interesting video idea to make the top five things that helped me grow my previous agency to $900,000 per month in recurring revenue. Because there's a lot of different things you can do. And I tried pretty much everything you could think of. But these are the five things that I would say are kind of the 8020 rule where these are the 20% of things that I was doing that yielded 80% of the results. So I thought I'd share that with you to see if it could help you focus, if even a little. So let's get started. So let's get started here. I tried everything that you could think of. So this is what worked for me and this is what was the case for my business. I think it's pretty across the board that this is going to be the case for any agency or B2B business or anybody who deals with services really. But mine was an ecommerce CRO agency, which stands for conversion rate optimization. If you don't know what that is, the simple version is an E commerce store sells products online. Let's take their homepage for example. You make a new version of their homepage, you split the traffic 50% to the original and 50% to the new one or whatever traffic split you want. And the intention is you want to make pages that convert a higher percentage of traffic, making more money basically. So the first thing that I did was an intro offer that really helped me tremendously. So I'm also going to be going back and forth with this Miro board in this video. And the intro offer is the one time service circle down here. So I was charging 8 to 15k a month for conversion rate optimization services. And that's like kind of difficult to do especially if someone doesn't know you and hasn't worked for you, worked with you before. Even if you came from a referral or they're pretty sure it's still like a hard sell, right? Especially if there's a commitment. And I had a six month minimum commitment at first but didn't after a while I changed that halfway through. So my intro offer was essentially a landing page for $2,500 or three for 5,000. I started at 2,500 and then, you know, figured out I could charge three for five or 5,000 for three. You know, halfway through my, the life of my agency was way better, but I didn't know that at the beginning. So the purpose of a landing page is typically you're Going to send their Facebook ad or Google Ad or whatever ad traffic they're using to a specific landing page. And that's helpful because they can track it better. They can zero in on a specific offer, it's loads faster. Typically if you do it right, just everything can typically be done by better with a landing page. In E commerce advertising there's a few exceptions to that like jewelry and clothing. Typically it's just better if you send it to the site just because there's so many different options and it's so visual. Someone that I heard or I heard someone put it, you know, if they buy it for how it looks, send them to the website. If they buy it for what it does, send them to a landing page. I think that'd be a pretty good way to think about that. So the point is, or the thing is, I did all my marketing and did all my stuff around landing pages and hopefully I did a good job. Not every time, you know, doesn't work. Sometimes it's just think of these as tests. Not every test is better, but for a large percentage of them it was better. And then I basically proven myself to them and got some money. Of course already making some money whether they upsell or not, but it's a lot easier once you've proven yourself with their own eyes. They've seen it work for them to try and sell them a much higher price recurring service than it is straight away. And that just makes sense. But a lot of people don't have an intro offer and if they do, it's not very good. So that was mine, landing pages into e commerce CRO and I had about 90 clients total over the lifespan that I was running this and only one of them came in through directly to CRO without doing a landing page first. And you can decide for yourself why that is. But for me I had a lot of competitors that were more established at the time and probably, you know, just as good, if not better. So I had to find a way to, you know, capture this percentage of the market because if I was just a CRO agency, I'm fairly certain they would just go to my competitors. And I'm okay with that to admit that it's fine. But I did have an intro offer. So I, I was able to do it and do it very well. I wrote a five times per week newsletter about landing pages and conversion rate optimization. It's circled in green here or red here. This is super important because I was getting, I was running paid ads, I was doing a little content, I was doing tons and tons of cold email. I was building my email list pretty substantially at the very peak. I believe the number 397,000 subscribers sticks in my mind. I don't have access to that anymore. I'm not going to verify that, but I'm pretty sure that was at the very peak. And sending a newsletter to these people five times per week, even if, you know, 0.1% convert every month, that's tons and tons of people, right? And we were doing about 200 landing pages per month. And a big percentage of them came from the newsletter. It's not. I don't want people to get the wrong idea if you're watching this because you know your newsletter is useless unless you're building it with ads and content and outreach and all that kind of stuff. But if you are doing it becomes pretty much the one of the two best ways to get clients along with number three here. And number three is five times per week YouTube videos up here. So I don't know if this is a good idea or not, but I had these as like private videos that were exclusive to the newsletter, not private, unlisted on YouTube. So I had my public videos, of course, but I would post maybe once per week publicly and then I would post four times per week and just have this as okay, you're not gonna get this unless you're staying subscribed to the newsletter. I'm not sure if that was a good idea or not, but it worked for me. And I'm saying I'm not sure if that's a good idea in comparison to just having them all public. But I had a very low unsubscribe rate. These YouTube videos got a lot of. You probably could have got more clients maybe if we had them public. But it is what it is. And that's what I was thinking at the time. And it worked out for me. I'm not sure if that would be the best idea. But five times per week YouTube videos and five times per week newsletter are the two things that are going to convert and make people take the leap of faith, so to speak. And if you don't have these two things, you're just going to miss out on tons and tons of potential clients. The next is white label partnerships. So you can get clients, right? And of course we have to get clients, but you could also get partners. And what I did was I thought to myself, based on a comment somebody made at a conference called Leads Affiliate Summit. Sorry, not Leads Con, but I went to LeadScon too, in 2023, January 2023. They said something that was not related to agencies, but they were an affiliate because it's obviously affiliate summit. And they said that they changed all of their outbound to getting partners because they did. It was like financial advisor affiliate or something like that. So they were obviously doing outbound paid ads and stuff to try to get people so that they could sell the lead to financial advisors. But then they, they said it changed a lot when they started cold emailing people who had like audiences and stuff and companies and blogs to try to get their traffic to, you know, send their way and then they could sell it and they just got way more money. So it's funny that you go to these conferences and you just talk to people and you hear just random stuff that you know you didn't pay them for. It's not even like a big thing in a conversation, but it can completely change the business. So I made an offer because who needs landing pages that is not the brand itself. The Facebook ad agencies that serve the brand, because if the landing page sucks, it doesn't matter how good their ad is, they're going to get fired, right? So I made an offer that didn't put really much or any thought into it. $5,000 per month for unlimited landing pages, which is like the 8020 rule for sure. Some people got zero, some people got as many, like six, eight. But it was definitely the 8020 rule. So I changed a large percentage of my cold emails to try to get white label partnerships instead. And at 5k a month, they add up pretty quick. I had 77 Facebook ad agencies at 5k a month, which is 385k a month in recurring revenue. And they didn't really churn that much. Churn was under 5%. You can decide if that's a high or low churn rate yourself. But it's just a great addition to any business in my opinion, to just get white label or referral partners that it's a bit more formalized, you're going to do referral than just your friend referring you business. Very, very important thing to my agency. And I was very, I was struggling to get my agency past 300k a month, which, you know, probably no one's going to feel sorry for me listening to that, but I was stagnant for months until I did this. And this is the stuff that really put me to the next level because this is very profitable. You don't have to hire any sales reps or, you know, account managers and stuff because you're just like your partner's paying you to do work and basically pretending that you're, that they're doing it. That's what, that's essentially what a white label partnership is. So you don't have to spend any money on ads, account managers, anything like that. So I took a lot of this money, this 385k that was like 70% margin and I put it into paid ads. And that's what essentially exploded my business even more. I was running paid ads before, but it was like 30k a month, which is substantial I guess for a lot of agencies. 1k per day. But after that it was more like 200k a month. And then I was just filling up my funnel, my newsletter, my YouTube channel even more. And then it was just kind of exploded from there. Number five is the digital product ad funnel. So I was running ads to lead magnets and that kind of stuff. You know what everybody does book a call funnels. But eventually I started running ads to paid product. In my case the paid product was a hundred webflow landing page templates for $97. I started out at like five templates for like 17. And then I said okay, this works pretty well I guess, you know, might as well do that, right? And what I did was I had my team find landing pages that were presumably high converting on the market and just pay people on fiverr to duplicate them. And then I changed some stuff, you know, took out the logos and just sold them basically. And these are some examples of that where it's just all of these here, I still have them. And this was good because essentially I'd be getting like sixty, seventy dollar cost per acquisition to sell something that's $97 and that's not a lot of profit. And the profit from that one is not really going to change any lives there. But a percentage of these people, oops, I drew that improperly, were qualified and would book a call and would just buy a custom landing page for me eventually. And because the revenue from the paid products basically cover the cost of ads, like you're generating qualified leads for free basically at scale. And because you're generating revenue, it's kind of more like selling an E Commerce product versus a traditional lead gen product where that cash flow is instant, you can just ramp up the ad spend without much or any risk. So I went from spending that thousand dollars per day on lead magnet ads and kind of hoping and praying it would work eventually. And I, you know, would spend 5, 6, 7k. Not forever because nothing lasts forever. And if anyone tells you it does, you know they're L to you. But I was spending 5, 6, 7k per day at the height on these landing page templates and just getting that cash flow instantaneously, you know, every day. It was awesome. The last one is a bonus one and I wanted to make this a top five video and this was number six. So it doesn't really belong in the top five. But having a free group and I circled it in green, but I started writing in green here. Having a free community where you can actually like interact with people or your appointment setters can interact with people acts as a very nice bridge from like when they sign up for a lead magnet to, you know, when they're qualified or not. And this is very helpful because you can have membership questions. So I was using a Facebook group originally and then I switched but you know, questions like what is your website? What is your revenue? You know, what is your email address? They put that in to join the group and then you're basically qualified them, assuming they're telling the truth, which surprisingly 95% of people answer those membership questions genuinely because they want to get in the group, they don't want to lie. And it's just, I would say the sixth most important thing that would be on here if this was top six things that helped me do it. So I hope this video was helpful and I'll see you in the next one.