Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started My First Agency

Hey there everybody. In this video I'm going to be going over nine things that I wish I knew before I started my first agency 12 years ago and a few other agencies since then. So these nine things are going to be in no particular order. I hope they're helpful to you. And I'm sure that there would be more than nine things if I really took a few hours to think about it. But these are the nine most important ones that I thought. So on my screen here I have the nine points and I kind of just put a blocker over all of them so I can focus on one at a time and so can you. I'll zoom in on them and we'll just go through them one at a time here. Okay, so let's get started. The first thing that I wish I knew is that eventually every client leaves without any exception. I think that even now talking to a lot of people saying that my clients stay with me forever or you know, I don't churn clients or something like that, if you actually truly believe that and aren't just kind of being cocky or just that kind of stuff, this is going to be a really bad wake up call for you when you know your most important clients leave and you thought they never would. And it's just one of those things. I remember when I was first starting, I can't remember the overall revenue but I had one client that I thought would never leave and it was, it's like 85%, maybe 90% of the total revenue. And then one time or eventually because it was easy to do Facebook ads back then, it was an E commerce client and they were paying me a lot of money and that was all my money. And without them, you know, I would still be living in my parents house. This was when I was like 19, 20 and I ended up doing such a good job for them that they paid me back by saying thank you for doing such an amazing job. We can now afford a media buyer in house and your services are no longer required. And that was a very sad moment in my life and I ended up having to get a part time job just because 19 years old, I believe I didn't really know that much. And there wasn't as much free information out there back then as there is today. So every client's going to leave no matter what, whether they get fired, whether they shut their business down, whether they hire it in house or whatever. But never go with the assumption that any client's going to last more than 612 months. And if they do that's great, fantastic, but don't count on it. And there's a lot of unforeseen circumstances that could really screw you over if all your eggs are in a few baskets and those baskets get lit on fire. The second thing is that you can't just hire employees. Even if they should be qualified or even if they are qualified and have experience for what you're hiring for, you still have to train them in the context of how you want it done in your own company. And this probably costed me. I wouldn't say this is one of my top five mistakes I've ever made, but it's gotta be somewhere between number six and 10. And it's like a repetitive mistake that I've made too many times to be happy about and haven't learned my lesson. So you can't just hire a media buyer or an appointment setter or someone to do your cold email or a sales rep or any of that thing. Even if that's what they do, and that's all their experiences, you still have to train them to do it within the context of your offer, your company, your operations, all of that kind of stuff. And if you don't do that, don't be surprised when they don't work out. And it is going to be your fault and it has been my fault in the past for not doing that. The third thing that I wish I would do or new is every client acquisition method works together to make the other ones more effective. So in general, like the four main ways to get clients are going to be your paid ads, your content, your outreach and your partnerships. And I think that everything you could possibly do in a service based business can fall under one of those umbrella categories. And it's very important that you do all of them in my opinion and don't subscribe to just doing one. And I just subscribed to doing one of them back in the day, which was for me back in the day. And I'm thinking kind of like five to 10 years ago, timeline, I was paid ads because Facebook ads were 1/10 of the cost they are now. And it was just so easy. But in some ways it was not like 10, five to 10 times easier because it was kind of like novel concept to buy stuff off a Facebook ad or to give your phone number, email it on the Internet. Back then it was, and the algorithms were not that good as they are now. So it was easier for sure, maybe a few times easier. But I just did paid ads for a long time and just it Worked for me. So I was like, well, that's good. But if I had content, so when someone clicked on my profile when I'm running paid ads, or someone on my list could find my YouTube videos which did not exist, or they've seen my ads all over and now they get a cold email from me, or they see my ads all over and now they want to reach out to me for a partnership or something that would have been a lot better. Similar if you are in the spot where you do do this and you're just doing cold email right now, people have seen your content before and people have seen your ads before and you're partnered with a few trustworthy people and you have like a track record, they're going to be so much more likely to respond to your cold email like 2, 3, 4, 5 times in terms of a positive reply. And all of these work together. And you shouldn't do just one. You don't even have to be the best at all of them. You just have to do them. I really wish I knew that back in the day I would have been way more successful. The next point that I would say is that you want to set everything up in your business, like for ads, because what works for ads will work for content and that will work for referrals and it will work for your networking and it will work for cold email. But the opposite is not true. Your offer has to be good enough that it runs like, that it can be sold through ads. Because a lot of people, and maybe going the other way would be better here. They don't really have any lead magnets or email flows or content or newsletters or webinars or have a good offer. I think I might have said that already. They basically just exist and they do good work, which is a completely legitimate way to run a business, by the way. They do great work and they get referrals. But if they ever want to scale their business, like you can't scale through referrals, typically, like they're out of your control and you're going to need to convert cold traffic. And you could make content, you could do paid ads, you could do partnerships, you could do cold or cold outreach. And just like I said before, but ads are by far going to be the most expensive and the most difficult to crack. So if you set everything up to work with ads, it's going to work with your content, it's going to work with your cold email, it's going to work with your partnerships, and it's going to work through Anything else, but the opposite is not true. Like what works for referrals is probably not good enough to work for paid ads because there's no trust, there's no rapport, there's no anything. You need to set everything up with the mindset that this has to be good for paid ads because it'll be good for the rest if it's good for paid ads. Point number five, and this was definitely me back in the day, lots of people start their business through referrals and get unrealistic expectations about their marketing and sales ability. I see this all the time now, and it was definitely me back when I was starting out where my close rate's a hundred percent, you know, because I only talk to referrals who've been hyped up and my price is so low that, you know, it doesn't matter to them. But this is the case with even a lot of big businesses. They just do great work like I said, and get referrals and that's perfect. But having a 70% close rate on referrals and you know, when they're already basically pre sold by the person who referred them, does lead to unrealistic beliefs about how good you are at sales and how good your marketing is. It's I wish I knew this before I started because that would have saved me a lot of time and more so than that, it would have caused me to learn a lot earlier how to sell well and how to market well, because I just didn't do that for the first few years of when I was trying to build agencies. The next one is, even if you only have multiple services, only ever promote one of them publicly or in your ads, in your cold emails, in your content, on your website, and then upsell and cross sell the others. And this is a kind of a nefarious one because one might think that more services equals more revenue, but you're actually going to get way less by doing that. It becomes very hard to for someone to refer to you when you do email marketing, ads, website, SEO, as if you do Facebook ads, they're going to say, let me introduce you to my Facebook ads guy. It's going to be you. And when you're doing your marketing, a jumbled message, you're not going to be ever known as the best at one thing, and the people who are known at the best at one thing get all of the money. So having multiple services, no problem. But focus on the most important one and then upsell and cross sell the others. After point number seven and this one probably going to be one of my toughest lessons to learn, is that the further you get away from operations, the worse the quality will be. And this is where most agencies fail. Even at the agency that I exited, like, this was a big problem. When you, as the founder are doing it, it's typically pretty good. And then when you hire and train your first few employees, it's still maybe not as good as if you were doing it personally, but still pretty good. Then you hire a director of operations and they're managing it, and it just gets slightly worse. And then all of a sudden you get like a COO who manages the director of ads and then the director of content, and then. And then it just gets worse and worse from there. And this by far, in terms of if they don't fail right away or just never get big enough. For those agencies that I've seen and I work with about 300 on a monthly basis, the ones that I see is like, if they succeed, and I'll just say succeeding is getting to a million dollars or something a year. Once they get past that, this is where it's going to go wrong for them most often. And an extreme situation, but not uncommon, is you scale too fast, and then you get a bunch of unhappy customers who either ask for refunds or just tell everybody how bad you are. And then your customer acquisition cost goes up, and then eventually you don't have enough profit to pay everybody and you have to lay everybody off or you're done. Didn't happen to me quite that extreme, but I've seen this happen dozens and dozens of times. So I wish I knew that when I first started. And it makes sense, obviously. But the thing I wish I knew is that you have to account for this in your pricing, in your SOPs, your trainings, your operations, and just kind of the name of the game. Like the biggest companies out there tend to provide the worst service. It's because of this. You got to get past this to where you have, like a brand name that they just buy because it's the brand name. Like if they. You're buying accounting services from Ernst and Young or something, or you're buying consulting services from McKinsey, you probably know that that's not that best option ever. But at the very least, they have such a big brand and they're such a big company that it's not going to be terrible. That's where you have to get to. You got to break through that barrier. The next thing is that you can't just hire for everything. And you need to know how to do everything to some degree before you hire for it. So a lot of people say I need to hire a copywriter instead of practicing copywriting for a few minutes or watching I need to hire a YouTube media or a Facebook media buyer instead of watching a one hour course that you're going to know just 90% as much as the average media buyer. If you don't know how to do everything to at least to some degree, you're not going to be able to check for quality, you're not even going to know if that's what they need to be doing. And you're going to just erode your margins too early in your business when you could in fact be doing it all yourself. And you just need to be better. So that's another problem where you hire it away instead of just increasing the capacity and efficiency of yourself. And I wish I knew not to do that when I first started. The final point is start posting YouTube videos as early as possible. I wish I knew this before and I never really learned this until a thousand x leads where you can get huge top of funnel traffic. You can use the YouTube videos to nurture in the middle of the funnel and your clients watch them more than anyone else and get more bought in. If you're watching this, post YouTube videos every day. And those are the nine things that I wish I knew when I first started, when I started my first agency. I hope they were helpful to you and I hope these videos are kind of actionable. So with that being said, that's it for today and I'll see you in the next one.