How to Accelerate the Growth of Your Digital Marketing Agency

This is the 7 Figure Agency Podcast. Discover the strategies and techniques to grow a highly successful and profitable digital marketing agency with your host, Joshua Nelson. All right. Hello and welcome. So excited to see everybody. So excited for today's session. We have an amazing session. We're gonna be unpacking really, really around how to accelerate the growth of your digital marketing agency. Really how to take things to the next level as quickly as possible. Justin Little, if you haven't already, please hit the live button to share this into the Facebook group. Guys, if you're just logging in, I see a lot of you guys have just logged in. Give me an all-cap GROWTH in the comments here if you're excited to unpack some strategies that will help to accelerate the growth of your digital marketing agency to the next level. And you guys know I love interaction. So Please type in the comments. Okay, I've seen lots of growth coming in. Fantastic. You're in the right place. So if you run digital marketing agency, whether that is doing websites, SEO, pay-per-click, social media, web development, or full-service solution, whether you're running a generalist agency or a niche agency and you're serious about taking things to the next level, you're in the right place. This is gonna be a great session. I'm gonna make this quick. I'm gonna make it efficient. Most importantly, I wanna make it practical so that you walk away with key insights that you can implement to take things to the next level. So first thing I'd love you to do, because this is a live session and I want to be able to interact with you in a two-way conversation, if you could rename yourself in the chat. Some of you guys have already done this and I appreciate it, but if you could, whatever your name is right now, it's usually, it's going to say like Justin Little, if that's your name, or it's going to say Joshua Nelson, if that's your name. If you could put, just go edit name, and call it your first name, your last name, and then your company name. That gives me and the rest of the participants some context as to your agency, what you do, what your company name is. And that's up in the participant panel. You'll see all of your names. You can just rename yourself if you know how to do it. If not, no sweat. I've got enough information to kind of be able to drive forward. So here's my promise to you. During the course of this session, I'm gonna share a plan that if followed can really help to propel your agency to 7 figures or beyond, over $1 million per year in the next 12 to 24 months. And if you're already on this session, you're already at 7 figures, I will show you how to add an additional 7 figures, an additional $1 million in revenue over the next 12 months. And I really have found this model to be proven. I found it to work very consistently, and it's just a function of doing these activities. And so if that sounds good to you, I want you to put a dollar sign in the comments. Just the dollar sign in the comments if you can walk away with a clear plan to add another million dollars or get to a million dollars in annualized revenue over the next 12 to 24 months. Fantastic. Okay, cool. Thanks for engaging with me. And what I'm gonna share with you isn't based on theory. I personally have grown my agency, Set Plumbing and HVAC SEO, to multiple 7 figures. We actually do about $470,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Serving hundreds of plumbing and HVAC companies across the country. We made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in the United States 4 years in a row. But beyond that, the same information that I'm gonna be sharing with you has been implemented by hundreds of agencies across the country. Jim Mallean, Austin Hauser, Chris Rodriguez, in various niches. And what I'd like to ask, is it okay with you if I share some examples and case studies as we go. So I'm gonna tee up some information, but then I'll share a story of an actual agency that took it and what they did with it and how they've, how they've gotten results. Just type case studies. I see some of you guys are case studies. If you're okay, if we share some case studies throughout to anchor the learning and to kind of give you that context, because there's, let's face it, at this point, there's lots and lots of people saying, hey, they've got the golden ticket to grow your agency. They've got the secret sauce to help you take things to the next level. But at the end of the day, you really want to find someone that can show you validated proof. And when you know that it's true, when you know that it's worked for others, then you can feel confident to implement it in your, in your own way. Alright, a lot of you guys saying sure, absolutely. Fantastic. And so this session is being brought to you by 7 Figure Agency, our coaching and mentorship community. Wanna share some stats because a lot of you guys, maybe you're on my email list. Maybe you read my book, The 7-Figure Agency Roadmap, or you're in the group, the Digital Marketing Success Facebook group. May or may not realize 7 Figure Agency is a coaching and mentorship program where we help, you know, really closely work with agencies to scale their businesses. And just some community stats. We now have 237 active members in the program. 93 of the members in 7 Figure Agency have built 7 figures and beyond in their business. And so it's not like a small percentage, a large percentage of our member population are agencies that are truly running 7-figure agencies in their niche and have accomplished great things. 33 of the members are running multiple 7-figure agencies, which means they're doing more than $1 million, more than $2 million per year in revenue. And the average revenue in the group is $71,000 per month cumulatively. 7 Figure Agency produces over $213 million per year, the cumulative revenue of all the members. And so I share that because regardless of where you sit in your agency right now, whether you're at the getting started phase or you're at the scale phase or you're already at 7 figures and you're looking to go to 8 figures, this is one of the most powerful mindshare communities that you can plug into. And so what I'm gonna be sharing with you is, is based on what's working with other agencies in the real world. It's not based on theory. It's not based on hypothetical. And 7 Figure Agency as an organization is one of the fastest growing companies in the United States. Last year we ranked 275 on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies. This year we came in at 1008. What was really cool was 7 of the members in the community also made the Inc. 5000 list, which is super, super exciting. So you're in good company. You know, you're, you're learning from some of the best of the best in this particular trade. And kudos to you for taking the time, for taking the energy to be in this place and to spend your time and your energy learning information, getting insights, and ideally going out and practically implementing it in the real world. So I find agencies go through these, these 4 or 5 stages of growth, and I've added 5 because as we've grown, the, the, the kind of the, the growth chart has grown, but you kind of go from Startup to Stability to Scale to Significance. And at startup is when you're just getting started in the agency world. You've decided, I wanna run an agency, I wanna build some recurring revenue. It's a very exciting time in the business because it's like new, it's exciting. You got a lot of potential, you got a lot of energy and enthusiasm for what you're gonna do. It's also very stressful because when you're in startup, there's no revenue. You're usually doing less than $10,000. In my mind, in recurring revenue. So that's the startup phase. My goal would be that all of you guys that might be in startup get through startup as quickly as possible, get over $10,000 per month, and get to stage 2, which is stability. Stability would be kind of when things start to stabilize. You've got $10,000 to $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue, which means you've got enough money to pay yourself a little something and pay the bills and kind of keep things going. But you're also just trying to get stability because you've got new clients that have just started. You're figuring things out in terms of your systems and your procedures. Maybe you're just hitting the stability place or you've been at stability for quite some time. Unfortunately, a lot of agencies get stuck at stability. And that's pretty much as far as they go in their business journey because they get to, let's say, $25,000 or $30,000 a month recurring. And either they just get too busy serving the clients. That they can't continue to grow, or they get complacent. You know, I'm making $25,000 per month. I've got things pretty well taken care of, and they lose the drive to continue to take things forward. And I find to get through that stability, you have to find your why to go to the next level. You have to really start to build some team in order to free yourself up so you can continue to grow. And that's why the next stage up is scale, and that's kind of between $40,000 and $70,000 per month in recurring revenue. At scale, you've learned that you can't do it all yourself. You need to put some people in place. You need to start to build your systems and your procedures. And this is a fun place to be in the business because you're growing, you're hiring, you're probably making a lot of mistakes in terms of hiring the wrong people or paying too much or paying too little with maybe some untalented people offshore, potentially. And a lot of people either blast through scale and they go to the next level, or they get stuck at scale and drop down to stability. We're like, you know what, this was too annoying to try and manage a team. It was too many, too much drama. And so I just went back down a little bit and kept it all myself. And so really to get through this scale phase, you have to get good at managing your team and you have to be really good at continuing to build your growth engine where you've got new clients coming on a consistent basis. You really start to position yourself. As the go-to expert. And then of course, step 4, like stage 4, is significance. And in my mind, we call it significance because it's— you're at 7 figures per year, over $83,000 in monthly recurring revenue. What I don't call it significance just because you're making more money, but usually once you get to 7 figures, you've got a good enough client acquisition machine going, you've got a good enough delivery mechanism that the clients are sticking with you long term. And you've, you've become talented enough to kind of keep a team in place, keep them excited, keep them engaged. So the company's in pretty consistent growth. And when I say that we've added another tier is that over the years, we've got a lot of members now, like I said, 93 that are at 7 figures. So the next stage of above this, we call this Titan status. And that's when you're at multiple 7 figures and you're going to 8 figures and beyond. So these are the stages. And what I find is all of you guys on today's call are at one of these stages in the growth within your business. And what I also find is, is the thinking that gets you to one stage is different than the thinking that gets you to the next stage. There's new skills, there's new talents, there's new abilities, there's new learnings that have to be unlocked at each stage. In order to go to the next level, in order to create that higher level of impact. So what I'd love to do now is I'm just gonna pull up a poll here. Justin, I'm not sure if you've got this handy. Give me a thumbs up if you do. And I'd love to like just quickly poll you guys. What stage are you at in your business right now? Are you right now kind of in the startup phase? Are you in the stability phase? Are you in the scale phase? Are you in the significance phase? You can either type into the chat or Answer the poll, right? I see a lot of answers coming out of the poll. We will share these momentarily. I want to make sure everybody gets a chance to submit. It gives us great context. It's also going to help me make sure I weave this presentation to make it as relevant to as many of you guys as possible. All right, we've got about— we've got about 80 of you that have responded. There's 135 in the call, so I'm going to give you another second. To kind of fill this in. It should have popped up on your screen. It's asking you to submit the poll. Can you share the poll, Justin, just so everyone can see the results? All right. So what we've got is about 61% of you in startup, kind of down here, like, how do I get my first $10K in monthly recurring revenue? We've got about 20% of you in the struggle phase, which means You're kind of between $10,000 and $30,000. We've got another 16% of you at scale, and we've got about 3% of you at significance. Amazing. Thanks for answering. It gives me a lot of context. And a lot of like good understanding where you guys are at, make sure I can kind of gear this to as many of you as possible. For those of you at significance, you're gonna get great value from the session. But you're probably gonna want to talk with us about our mastermind program and kind of how we can get you around a peer group. Being that you're in the top 3% in this particular session. But I do want you to know, you are our ideal prospect. Like, when it comes to people we want in the community, we really thrive on helping people go from scale and significance to 8 figures and beyond. So, perfect. That gives us good context with who we've got on here. What I want to know next in the comments, if you could, in the next 12 months, like right now you are where you are, either you're kind of Somewhere on this hierarchy, what's your commitment? Where will you be? By next year, what are we, at the end of August 2024, where will you be? I want you to type this in the comments. Are you committed to be a 7-figure agency? Are you just driving to be a, you know, kind of a stable agency at $10,000 to $30,000? Type it in the comments. I just want to know kind of like how driven are we? What are we trying to accomplish? All right. So I see a bunch of you guys saying, well, be significant. That's the purpose of us getting together, right? Is to give you the roadmap to get to 7 figures and beyond. Others of you are like, you know what? If I can get to scale stability, my life would be pretty good. Super committed, significance. Okay. Good. All of us are different, right? All of us have different ambitions. So it's just important that you recognize, because awareness precedes change, where you sit on this hierarchy right now and kind of where you're trying to go. What's your objective? And I'm gonna give you the tools, I'm gonna give you the roadmap, I'm gonna give you the information to accelerate your transition through these stages as quickly as possible. But it's really gonna come down to your commitment and to your action and to what you execute on the other side. So to me, it really starts with the model. Like where you go in your business, how quickly you grow, how quickly you scale, It's very contingent on the business model that you choose, the growth model that you choose to implement. And really what we want in our digital marketing agencies, and really what I wanna show you guys how to do, is create a business that provides 3 things. Provides more money, so it provides the money that you need to pay the bills, to live your desired lifestyle, to afford the luxuries that you want. And there's nothing wrong with wanting the nice car, the nice house. right? Maybe the money that you want in order to donate back to charitable organizations or to donate back to the church, whatever it is that's, you know, on your heart with what you want to do with that money. But we want it— we want obviously to produce the money, but it also— we want to make sure we have a business that provides freedom, right? I think most of us, when we think about why we started the business, some of it was like, hey, I want to make a lot of money, or I want to have lots of financial capability, but we also typically, when we think about it, actually started because we wanted freedom, the flexibility to set our own schedule, the flexibility to work when we want to work, the flexibility to spend the time with the friends or spend the time with the kids if that's what we're after. Let me know, you know, if you think about what you wanted more when you started your business. Freedom if it was freedom, dollar sign if it was, if it was money. Just, I like, just want to check in for some feedback on that. So Freedom, right? Some of us say freedom. The money's important too. Don't go— don't get me lost on that. Someone said money buys freedom. 100%. But we want both, right? We want money. We want freedom. And then also, we don't want to forget is we want a business that provides impact. Right? Because if you make a ton of money and you've got total freedom to do whatever you want, you whatever want to do, but you're not impacting your clients. You're not impacting your team, you're not having an impact in what you do, you will soon burn out, right? You will soon become very frustrated. And so really what we want is— business provides money, freedom, and impact so we can feel good about what we're doing because we know we're making a difference in the world around us. We know we're making a difference for our clients. We know we're making a difference for our team. And so to do that, we have to do 3 things, right? If we want money, freedom, and impact, we got to do 3 things. Number 1 is we've got to land clients. We got to create a system to get new clients coming into our world month in and month out. Like we've got to have that growth engine purring. Second to that, we've got to deliver results and we got to deliver world-class results where when a client gives us the money, you know, the $1,000, $2,000, $5,000 per month to do what we do, that we knock it out of the park for them. We get them amazing tangible results. And we really deliver on our promises. And from there, we've got to retain long term, right? If we're on an agency model, I'll talk a little bit about some of the basics. The fact is, if we can't retain the clients that we get at a pretty reasonably high level, this becomes a frustrating business where you feel like you're taking one step forward, one step back. You're getting clients, but then they're churning out because they weren't happy with the results or because they had a false expectation of what was possible with what we could do. For them. And ultimately, we've got to scale. So the scale piece is important because we can't just do this all ourselves. Right? Eventually, we've got to develop business systems. We gotta develop business processes and we've gotta develop a team so that every aspect in the growth within the business is taken care of so that we as the owner, as the entrepreneur, can focus on what we wanna do best. So that we can have the freedom to take the travels and to spend the time with the family. And so would love to know, like, kind of as you think about your business and just in the thought process around landing clients, delivering results, retention, and scale, what's the area you need most help with right now? Just type into the comments. Is the focus landing clients? For those of you in startup, it's probably that. Is it delivering results? You know, maybe you just gotta get better at, like, confidently saying, I I know when I get the client, I'm gonna get them ranked. I'm gonna get them more leads. I'm gonna get them more return on investment. Or is it, is it maybe on the retention side? Like, I need to figure out how to, you know, move my retention rate up. Alright, lots of landing clients. Lots of landing clients, which is the first problem, right? Once we solve for landing clients, then we gotta solve for delivery. Once we solve for delivery, we've gotta solve for retention. Excellent. The good thing is this isn't hard to solve for, right? If you've got the right outreach strategy, you've got the right marketing strategy, you can solve for landing clients, and that's going to generate the financial resources that you're after. So for me, like, this is where I got stuck in my first business, and I'm gonna do very short of this so we get right to it. But my story is I started my first agency back in 2004. It was a web design and hosting company called Developcom. Worked 40, 60 hours per week selling websites at $1,000 to $1,500 one time. I would charge a hosting fee of like $10 to $15 per month. And I would, I would sell clients, but there was no revenue. And so that business after 3 and a half years of beating my head against the wall, sitting in BNI meetings, making cold calls, driving door to door from, you know, one business to the next was shut down. Like it literally didn't produce enough money to pay the bills. And I needed to actually make some money. And so fortunately, I was always a student of the game. I was reading the books, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, E-Myth Revisited, all of the, the great books on success and creating wealth. And one thing stood out to me was that if I wanna be successful and I wanna create abundance in my life, I need to be running my own business. I need to not have a job. And I need to figure out like what the right model is, like what is working in this digital marketing space because whatever I was doing wasn't right. You know, I tried hard. I had some results, but the outcomes weren't what I needed them to be. And so I got a job and I wound up working at ReachLocal. Type ReachLocal if you've ever heard of this company. They're a big pay-per-click management company. Back 10 years ago, they were one of the top agencies doing over $250, $300 million per year. They went public. And so I got a job there because they were growing. They were obviously doing something right. They were on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies. Like, I wanna learn what it is that they're doing. And I spent a couple years there, learned how to sell, learned what the model was. And armed with that information, I was like, okay, I'm gonna go start my own agency again. I know what I need to know. And I started my own agency. Fast forward, grew to 7 figures in the first 2 years. Again, currently at over $425,000 a month in monthly recurring. Made the Inc. 5000 list 4 years in a row. And I say that because what I think the difference was, was the model. I had all of the energy. I had all of the drive. I knew how to sell, but I was selling the wrong thing in the wrong way, and I didn't have the right mechanism to attract clients. And so what I wanna share with you guys is the model that made all the difference. And the model that helps me go from broke to, you know, multiple 7-figure agency. So type model if you're excited to kind of unpack this model, make sure you've got a good foundation so that you can apply the same energy and get completely different outcomes. Let's unpack it. Love it. Thank you guys for the engagement. So Cliff Notes, I used to spend 45 minutes on this piece, but I really think We want to talk about other things, but the basics of the model that I implemented that had a huge impact for me, and it's had a huge impact for the other agencies that have come through this program. Number 1 is, is one targeted niche. And I know at the beginning I asked, are you a niche agency or are you a generalist agency? And there was a mix. A lot of you guys serving a niche already, a lot of you not. But I can tell you, working in one niche Changes the game because instead of trying to serve everybody in a localized market, I was able to say, hey, I'm gonna become the very best of the best in plumbing. And we decided we're gonna go after plumbing companies. We put together a program for the plumbing industry. We started putting together marketing, which made us magnetically attractive to that particular space. And not only were we able to grow faster in terms of how quickly we landed clients, but we were able to systematize the offering. Because we were working with plumbers, it was the same thing. Okay, this is how we set up the website. This is the keywords that we target. This is the content strategy. This is what we do with our landing pages and our, and our website design. And that process led to better marketing, making us more magnetically attractive. It also led to more systematized delivery so we could get results for the clients more consistently and retain. So niche. Number 2 was monthly recurring revenue. I had to part ways with the idea that I could charge a one-time web design fee of like $1,000 to $5,000. And just say regardless, I'm gonna sell a monthly retainer-based fee. They're gonna pay me a certain amount every single month, whether it's $1,000, $5,000, whatever it is. Every month when we land new clients, the retainer-based or the monthly recurring revenue grows in this way versus project work where you might charge, even if it was a $25,000 project, what happens is you get paid once, maybe as a deposit, you get paid once the project's done. And then just like, like phantom money, it just disappears, right? Goes by the wayside. So I want to encourage you guys, monthly recurring revenue, No project work. No check-based payments, all credit card or ACH automatic billing. No partial payment deposits. And the other thing, you know, we decided that really was important was a monthly recurring fee greater than $1,000 per month. And these were all mindset blocks that I had going into my agency and kind of my first agency. I thought, man, no one's gonna pay a recurring fee for this stuff, right? They're only gonna want to pay once. I also thought Man, no, no, like no local business, plumber, auto repair shop, dentist is gonna pay more than, you know, $500 in a monthly recurring fee if they did. And so once I worked at ReachLocal, I saw the average plumber, the average company happily paying greater than $1,000 per month. All on monthly retainers, just kind of took all the project work off the, off the opportunity board. This worked, right? It worked really well for me. As you guys saw, we went to multiple 7 figures. And we've taken the same model and shared it with our 7-figure agency members. And now 93 of them in very specific niches charging greater than $1,000 per month. No, no project work are now like doing over 7 figures per year. And so, like, as you think about this, and again, If you did charge a monthly retainer fee, and I'm gonna suggest it be more than $1,000, like that's the minimum. Today we charge $2,500 per month as our lowest program for our plumbing and HVAC clients. You could do between $1,500 and $5,000 per month. There are thousands of businesses in every single niche willing to pay that if you've got the right program packaging and the package makes sense for the, you know, for the industry. And bottom line, if you can land 5 clients a month that pay you greater than $1,350 per month, 5 clients per month times $1,350 per month times 12, by the end of 12 months, you'll have a 7-figure agency because you'll be doing over $83,000 in monthly recurring revenue. And so with that said, maybe, maybe as you're listening today, you do this, right? You already got the niche, you've got the recurring, you've got all that stuff dialed in. Or maybe you don't. And what I want you to do is in the comments, what would you need to change in your model right now? Is it the niche thing? Is it the monthly recurring thing? Is it the amount that you're charging? Type that in the comments. And if you have any questions on this, I, I'm gonna be happy to answer like 1 or 2 questions on this as we continue to press forward. A lot of you guys are saying up the amount. Some of you are saying choose a niche. Someone said, Garrett said, automating. John says charge more. Simple model, right? And, you know, if you guys read the book, the 7-Figure Agency Roadmap, it's a simple model. A lot of people struggle with it. A lot of people want to resist it, but I promise you it works well. A great example of this is Allan Hillsberg. Allan Hillsberg, when he started down this journey, was really good with websites, really good with SEO, really good with content. He grew to about $10,000 any given month. So he's kind of out of the startup phase, but kind of in the struggle phase within his business. And I am doing this live. This is live. And he was stuck because he wasn't in a niche. He didn't have a recurring package that he sold. And so he was oscillating back and forth. When he went full speed with, I'm gonna choose one niche. He decided to work with funeral home service companies. And he was gonna charge at least $1,000 per month and think he, he He started right at the $1,250 a month mark, and he's kind of grown that over the years. Fast forward, he's doing over $1.5 million per year serving the funeral home space. And for the sake of time, I'm not gonna play the video. If you wanna watch it, I'll be glad to send you the link. There's a video of Alan telling his whole experience, his whole story, and he's thriving. He's actually now created a whole nother line of business as his agency. Continues to grow and continues to scale. So we talked about the model. Hopefully that's clear. I want to talk about the accelerated growth model here and the 3 things you need to do in each of these different areas to accelerate your growth. So when it comes to landing clients, right, I said the number 1 thing we need in order to produce the money is we've got to land clients. We have to have a process for getting new clients coming into our world on a consistent basis, there's 3 things we have to do. Number 1, we've gotta fill the funnel, right? We've gotta have a funnel in place where prospects can raise their hand, they can express interest, they can, you know, kind of come into our world within the niche. Number 2, and this is where most agencies fumble, say, okay, I'm gonna go after the niche model. I'm gonna do lots of marketing. Maybe I'll do cold emails. Maybe I'll do, you know, Facebook ads, but they never build authority. You've gotta position yourself as the go-to expert within whatever niche you're in. Like in Alan's example, he positioned himself as the go-to expert in the funeral home space. And so when you position yourself as the authority, people come to you prepositioned to buy. They're like, hey, I saw your webinar. Hey, I read your book. Hey, I saw that case study that you rolled out. Obviously you understand how to generate results in this industry. How do I hire you? So we gotta fill the funnel, we gotta build authority, and we need to have sales process mastery. Like, we gotta have a great process for taking an interested prospect in the niche from, hey, I'm interested in what you do, to, hey, let me sign up. Like, let's— here's my credit card, let's go. Here's the $2,500 a month, go do your thing and let's make it rain, right? So to land clients, fill funnel, build authority, have a great sales process where you convert 30% or more of your meetings into sales, that's gonna produce the money. Right? So I'm just curious here, kinda, and I wanna make this an assessment process as we go. That's why I've got the red, yellow, green system here. If you had to rate yourself on, on each of these when it comes to landing clients, are you red, yellow, or green? Like, do you have an amazing sales process where you're converting at 30% or higher? Maybe that's red. I mean, maybe that's green. You're like, bam, rock and roll. Maybe authority-wise, you're like, you know what, nobody knows me. If somebody was looking for me or someone that could help them in this particular niche, am I the go-to expert or am I anonymous? If I'm the go-to expert, I'm green. If I'm anonymous, nobody knows me, then I'm red. And then we gotta fill the funnel. You know, are we getting 15 to 25 strategy sessions with prospects in our niche every single month, month in and month out? If that's the case, then that's probably green. If we're only getting like 1 or 2 per month or 0, then it's absolutely red. Right? Red, red, red. We got some red, red, reds. I mean, I guess the good thing about green, red, red, red means lots of opportunity. You solve for these things, you start to fill the funnel, you build your authority, you have a great sales process, you're gonna be off to the races. You know exactly what you need to work on and what you need to focus on. I'm gonna give you the specifics on what you need to do in each of these to, to get them moved to green. But it starts here, right? This is what we have to do. Fact is, when you do these 3 things, the money will take care of itself. There's more than enough money. There's gonna be more than enough, you know, revenue coming in to, to take care of the bills and to kind of do the things you wanna do with your finances. Now, after that, we've got to deliver results. And when we talked about how we deliver results, the second thing we wanted was freedom. So we gotta make sure we deliver results in a very specific way. And so 3 things we wanna do on deliver results. Number 1 is we've gotta choose the model. Right? We can, in the digital marketing agency business, there's an infinite number of ways we could sell these services. Right? It could be we're gonna sell a one-time fee. It could be we're gonna do funnels. Or it could be like we're gonna be in a very specific niche. We're gonna charge a monthly recurring fee and we're gonna package the entire service offering, right? We're gonna do website, SEO, pay-per-click, paid ads with retargeting and automation, which is what I recommend you guys do for your niche. That way you can charge a higher fee and you can also be more relevant. You can be more consistent with the results that you generate. But the fact is you've gotta choose the model. And That's the model I just talked about a couple minutes ago. Right? So hopefully we're all green. If we can all commit that this is the model we're gonna focus on, we're gonna be able to run, not walk, in the right direction. Number 2 is we've gotta systematize.

Right?

And that's the beauty of being in the niche pre-programmed package model is we can systematize it because we're not reinventing the wheel for every client that we get. Right? The problem with the generalized business is one day we're working with a dentist, the next day we're working with a roofer, the next day we're working with an e-commerce company, the next day we're setting up Facebook ads. We're reinventing the wheel. And so as the entrepreneur, we've gotta re— set it up, right? We gotta figure out, we gotta be chasing our tails to get it right. When we sell a pre-thought-through program to a very specific niche that we know is gonna generate a result, we can systematize it. We can put it into playbooks. We can put it into project management systems. And ultimately, we can hand it off, right? Which is the goal. We can say, hey, we're gonna sell a client. I don't have to personally do anything. Here's the package. Team, go implement that. Get the result. Check all of the boxes. Give me one if that makes sense. Like, it's really important the way you deliver for your clients isn't just like we wanna knock it out of the park. That's obvious. But the other thing we wanna do is we wanna do it in a way that can be systematized so we don't have to do it as the entrepreneur. Which is what's gonna give us the freedom that we're after. Good. I'm seeing lots of ones. And then number 3, we gotta build a team. Right? After we've chosen the model, we've systematized the offering, we've gotta build the team. Who's gonna do the websites? Who's gonna do the SEO? Who's gonna do the pay-per-click? Who's gonna do the client account management? Who's going to sell the clients? Who's gonna do the marketing for the agency? Really, if the goal is to build an agency that's growing, an agency that provides freedom, we need to build a team. And so we've got to get good at hiring, we've got to get good at team onboarding, we've got to get good at creating team culture so that our team's excited to work for us and they're engaged and they stay with us long term. And when we deliver results in this way, that creates the freedom because we've got a business ideally that can run without you having to do everything. Now, as the owner, you probably still want to be involved, but maybe in the marketing of the business and the positioning of the business and kind of being at the key events within the industry. But you don't have to do everything. You do what it is that you do best so that you can carve out the freedom to do the things you really want to do. So on this red, yellow, green here, how do you sit? And I loved— I think somebody— I'm gonna roll up in this chat here. Somebody just did red, red, red, and then Justin did Green, red, red. I want you to do the same. How are you on the model? Green? You got the model? Or at least all of us could be green right now. Hey, I know exactly what to do. I'm gonna choose one niche. I'm gonna sell a package, $1,000 or more. Systematized. Do you have everything systematized? Can you hand it off? Is that green or is that yellow or is that red? And then how are you at building a team? Do you have a team? Are you good at hiring and recruiting and kind of growing that operation? Ryan Hurst says green, green, red. So he's got the model, he's got the systems, but he needs to build the team. He needs to put that in place. I want you guys all to do this thought work because awareness precedes change. Amazing. Perfect. And so that's, that's what we want to do on the delivery side of the equation. From there, we have to retain, right? I think a lot of agency training is really good at like, hey, so I'm gonna land the clients. Here's the ads we're gonna run. And here's like the, the social media strategy we're gonna do to get the clients on a consistent basis. But the reality is you can have the best offer in the world. You can have the best sales process in the world. You can have, you know, the best growth engine in the world. But if you can't retain the clients, you're always going backwards. Are you taking one step forward and one step back? And so you have to, if you're really serious about building a 7-figure, multiple 7-figure agency that continues to grow, you have to be able to retain the clients that you get. And so there's 3 key things we need to do on the retention side to make sure we retain the clients. Number 1 is you have to have world-class onboarding, which is when the client comes in, there's a great crafted experience where they, you know, their usernames and passwords are collected. They get a welcome box in the mail. There's a choreographed onboarding call. And they're really excited about what they've just done. They know the outcomes. They know that you're gonna deliver on your promises and they feel confident that your team has it under control. If your onboarding is good, really what happens in the first week, within the first month, will dictate whether they're with you for a year or 2 years down the road. So world-class onboarding, mission critical. Number 2 is your communication rhythm, right? Even if you're delivering amazing results, if you don't have a communication rhythm built into your company where you're monthly, you're meeting with a client, you're showing the reports, You're sitting with kind of the vision of where things are going within the business. Eventually they're gonna cancel, right? A lot of us as agencies, we think our job is to make it rain. Okay, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna build the website, I'm gonna get it ranked, I'm gonna run the paid ads. And as long as they're getting leads and as long as those leads are converting, they're not gonna leave. And I'll tell you just from experience, that's not the case. You have to deliver the results, but you also have to be communicating. They have to perceive the value that you're bringing to the table. Yeah, Ryan says perceived indifference is gonna be the number one reason that they leave. And then number 3 is you have to have client success management in place, which, you know, as you grow and as you scale and you go from 10 clients to 30 clients to 70 clients to 150 clients, whatever the number is, you're gonna need to be able to place account managers, client success team in place, and you're gonna need to be able to track the KPIs. Like, what are they doing? How often are they meeting with the clients? What's the communication rhythm that's happening, not for you personally, but for the team that you have in place? And so, you know, we want to have world-class onboarding, a great communication rhythm, which is like the reporting that we use. And then we gotta have great client success management. And when you, when you actually do these things really, really well, you will be able to retain the clients. And that's where the impact comes from. And when I say retain clients, there's never 100% retention. Right? Even the best agencies in the world don't have 100% retention because things change in the business. Unfortunately, balls get dropped no matter how good you are. But really what we're shooting here is, is like a 97% monthly retention, at least, or no more than a 3% churn. If you can get to that benchmark, you can feel really good about the results that you're delivering to your client base. And so that's, that's what we want to do. And really, when we do that right, We're making an impact, right? Because if we're landing clients, delivering great results, and we're retaining the clients that we have, our clients are winning. Like, they're getting return on investment. Otherwise, they wouldn't stay with us. We're growing a team, which means we're creating opportunities for other people to, you know, to pay the bills and to take care of their families. And we're really having an impact across our industry. So when you think about on the retain long-term side, how are you? Like, on green? Are you creating a world-class experience? Are you dropping a welcome box? Is the client starting with you like, man, this is the best agency I've ever dealt with? Or is there opportunity for improvement there? On the communication rhythm, are you meeting with the clients monthly? Are you showing them meaningful data that get them excited? Are you seeing the vision for where things are headed next? Are those meetings happening not like via email behind a hidden box, but actually live on Zoom with like real interaction? And then do you have a process in place when you get to that 17th client or that 35th client? That you can onboard account manager, make sure that they're trained up, and make sure that they provide as good or better service than you do as the owner in the business. Real quick, I want you guys to assess on this particular front. All right, I'm seeing some yellow, yellow, red, some yellow, green, green. Awareness precedes change. It's some reds. Awesome. So when you've got all this dialed in, you can really start to scale the business, right? Because you're landing clients on a consistent basis, you're willing great results. The clients are staying with you long term. You've got the systems and the procedures and you've got the team. And really what we're all after is we try to create more freedom and abundance in our lives is to have the sales process, which means we've got the marketing for the business, the sales process that goes in to get an agency client signed up, done by a team member or, or a group that can handle that. When we deliver results, we're not involved in that, but it's still being done at a world-class level, and the clients are getting amazing results. And then on the retention side, there's a team that retains the clients and retains those clients long term. And this is really where we can truly have unlimited scale. And our digital marketing agencies. So out of all of that, like, what's the biggest thing for you? Landing clients, living with ultra retention, scale. I think it needs to be all of it, but we're all in different places. And so for some of us, we need to prioritize this delivery right now. For some of us, we need to prioritize the retention right now. For others of us, we just need to prioritize landing some clients, right? Getting to those 15 or 20 strategy sessions per month. And I promise you, this seems basic, but the fact is when you implement this, you can and will get the results. Excellent. So I wanna shift gears into the growth system. So you've got the model now and the things you need to focus on. This is the growth system that we share with our members that we really help to focus on in a consistent basis to get accelerated growth. And this is the Agency Growth Model. And so there's things that we wanna do to fill the funnel, things that we wanna do daily, that we want to do monthly, things that we want to be doing on a quarterly basis. And so at the beginning, like as we're trying to build our positioning, we're trying to build our lead flow, really what we're after is 15+ strategy sessions per month. This is the KPI when it comes to landing clients. 15 strategy sessions, that means booked appointments with our ideal prospect in the niche that's already interested in what we can do. They're interested. They're like, hey, How much is it going to cost for me to have you guys take care of this for me? We want $15,000 or more, because if we're closing at 30%, that $15,000 should materialize into at least 3 to 5 clients per month, right? It should be at least 3 clients per month, and that's going to put you on a consistent growth path. Any agency I deal with that I feel like, man, you know what, you're stuck, you're not growing, you're not landing clients, What we have to look back to is this number 1 KPI, which is how many appointments are you having? How many strategy sessions are you happening? And usually the answer is like, oh, like I had like 2 or 3 last month, or I had 3 to 5 last month. You have to get that number up. So I want you to put the number 15 here in the comments. If you recognize at a minimum, you need at least 15 appointments. I don't care if you get that through cold calling. I don't care if you get that through BNI. I don't care if you get that through Facebook ads. If you're not having at least 15 strategy sessions from you or somebody on your team, that's the thing you need to focus on right now because that's gonna keep you bottlenecked. It's gonna keep you stuck. So we'll put 10 anyways. That's fine. Okay, so what do we do to get to 15 strategy sessions per month? Number 1, we should be doing cold outreach, right? And cold outreach is cold calling, it's sending emails, it's shaking the bushes to get prospects to know who we are and to kind of express our value. What I recommend doing here is join the national association within your niche. That way you can get the list of members. So in my case, we joined the Plumbing National Plumbing Association, became an affiliate member. We stroked a check to become part of that organization. As part of that, they give me the names and contact details of the members, several thousand plumbing HVAC companies across the country. Whatever the association is for you, that's usually a pretty quality place to start. Because they're actually in business, they're in doing continuing education, and you can draft on some level of affinity. Like when you email them, it's not, hey, I scraped your email off Google. It's, hey, I'm a part of the National Plumbing Association or the National Roofing Association or the National Chiropractic Association and wanted to reach out and offer value, right? So we want to get a list that we can introduce ourselves to. So I joined the association. You want more data than that typically. There's a great service I recommend called Coldlytics. Coldlytics gives you the ability to say what niche you're in, choose a city, and they will provide you manually researched contact details. Like the reason I don't recommend for cold outreach D7 Lead Finder or some of these other tools is usually you don't get the name and the direct email address of the owner. And it's important that you have that data. And so from a cold outreach perspective, we're gonna join the association. We're gonna do a coldlytics list. We're gonna buy good quality data. And then we're gonna, we're gonna reach out and whether using Mailshake or Lamlist or HighLevel, we're gonna send messages to, you know, kind of express some level of interest. And there's, there's really 3 cold outreach plays that we find works best. The first would be, can you handle an additional X, which would be, hey, can you handle additional 3 to 5 plumbing jobs for 3 to 5 additional repiping jobs. And you're just looking for a reply from those people. Awesome. I've got a great strategy to help you get those leads. Can we jump on a quick call to talk? Right? If that's all you did, you'd start to get some responses. You start to get some opportunities in play. The second one that I actually prefer more and kind of what we do typically today is a case study. So we would say, hey, this one plumber generated 372 leads last month with the strategy we uncovered. Would you like us to show you how we can do the same for you?

Right?

So it's a very simple, punchy, cold message like that. And then the third would be some type of value-added content. Hey, I just created a new book on our new ebook on the, you know, 17 most important keywords every plumber needs to know about. Can I share it with you? Right? We're trying to send a message via cold outreach to get prospects to raise their hand by responding. And then we can call them up. Hey, you requested my ebook. I just wanted to kind of make sure I got the right contact details. Also, I'd love to kind of jump on a quick call to show you how we can do that for you, how we can get that outcome for you. I could go for an hour and a half or more on just the cold outreach stuff, but that's the basic Cliff Notes version of what you should be doing every single day. Sending messages that are short, personal, expecting response, getting responses, and then jumping on the phone, converting those opportunities into appointments, right? Because we want to get appointments. Give me one of the comments if that makes sense, kind of what we're trying to do with cold outreach. Fantastic. Again, I'm gonna give you guys some opportunities to get more training on this stuff and get more details on it, but that's the Cliff Notes version of what we do here. From there, really, and I want this point to hammer home, I don't believe you can build your whole business on cold outreach. And I think most agencies, that's what they try and do. They think, oh, I'm gonna get my emails going, I'm gonna get all these appointments happening, and, you know, I'm just gonna— my calendar is gonna be full. That's not, that's not gonna work great. Really, we wanna move from cold outreach where we've got names and email addresses and cell phone numbers and maybe contacts on social media that start to develop a relationship with us, right? That start to know, like, trust us, start to understand our value in advance so that we can shift from chasing prospects to having prospects come to us prepositioned to buy. And the way that you do that is by adding value content to that list, right? Because if all you did was every week send the same message, hey, do you want more jobs? Hey, I'm only looking to work with one roofer in the Dallas area. Hey, I just created this new ebook. Eventually they're gonna get bored and they're gonna disengage and they're gonna be really frustrated. So what we wanna do is have value-added content that we're dripping on our database over time. And so there's 2 strategies I recommend that you do every single month. And that's the monthly webinar method. And the monthly podcast. And what's beautiful about this strategy is you're starting to develop content to position yourself and create inbound marketing. You're gonna be able to create content, let's say through the monthly webinar that you put up on YouTube, that you put on iTunes, that gets split up into like smaller clips that gets found by people within your niche because you're creating information that they find interesting and they're gonna come into your funnel, right? And they're gonna schedule in a time to learn more about what you can do and how you can help. But it's also nurturing your database. So if up here we join the association, we bought a list, doing a monthly webinar gives us a reason to email them. Hey, I've got this webinar coming up on Tuesday at 3. I'm gonna be sharing how to get your plumbing or HVAC company ranked for the most important keywords in your area. Right? Once per month. Right? One webinar per month. And I found this to be applicable across our entire population of 7 Figure Agency members. If you do one webinar per month, You will soon become prolific within the industry, and you'll be positioned as the go-to expert within your space. I want you to type webinar in the comments if you can do one webinar per month. And then of course you're gonna promote it, right, with emails and social posts and social ads. And then you're also going to— you're also gonna syndicate it afterwards, which means you're gonna not just do the webinar, but you're gonna record it and you're gonna get the most bang for your buck out of it. The other thing you're gonna do monthly is a podcast. And what we found works best is an expert interview podcast. And what all we're doing here is finding somebody in the niche that's doing cool things or that is being successful, and we're going to get them on Zoom or we're going to get them on Restream, and we're going to ask them a series of questions. Hey, tell me about your plumbing company. Hey, what are you doing to market? How many trucks do you guys have today? What's working best in order to get more leads? What are you doing to drive online reviews? You're interviewing successful people within your niche. You're making a live experience and then you're loading it up on iTunes. You're loading it up on YouTube and you're syndicating it out to this list. So this list is hearing from you. Your cold outreach list is hearing from you every month with more and more value-added content. So, and this is simple, right? If you've got the right format for it, it should only take you an hour per month to do the webinar, but an hour per month to create the content. Give me a yes in the comments if you're following what I'm saying here. These are the things we're gonna do daily. We're gonna constantly be reaching out to new prospects. These are things we're gonna do monthly, a webinar and a podcast. And we'll be prolific and it has a compounding effect, which means every month that you do it, you're becoming more and more well-known in the industry. You're developing more and more know, like, trust with your list, which is gonna make you better positioned. Okay. So then things we wanna do quarterly. After we do these things monthly, 3 things we wanna do quarterly. Number 1 is we wanna be looking for live industry events. One of the most powerful things you can do to position yourself to get clients to come to your preposition to buy is to be at their events. Don't just be on digital. Don't just be, you know, on Facebook. Be live where your customers and your prospects are hanging out. Whatever niche you're in, plumbing, roofing, dentists, e-commerce, is somewhere in the country that niche is gathering, and they're gathering to do continuing education, to brainstorm with each other, to share best practices. And so you want to be at those events. Ideally, you want to have a booth. Ideally, you want to be looking for opportunities to speak and share, because when you speak and share, you're gonna get more trust. You're gonna get more people coming to you prepositioned to buy. But at a minimum, we're looking for like one of these events that we can exhibit at per month? Just give me a like, events in comments if you like. I know this is a little harder, right? He's like, I gotta get out of my— gotta get out of my office and I gotta go somewhere. Money is made live and in person. Stage time, when you get the opportunity to speak, is money time. People will absolutely hire your services and your growth will be exponentially grown. So we're gonna do that and then we're gonna do industry case studies our client case studies at least once per quarter. The goal would be every client that you get, you knock it out of the park for them. You deliver a great return on investment. And so what we wanna be doing is featuring those client wins. And you could do this by creating your own client, like, hey, here's the client, here's what we did on their website. Here's like the results that they're getting through our tracking. Or you can get them on a Zoom call just like you would with one of your podcasts and you interview them. Hey, why did you choose our company? What were some of the problems you were looking to solve? What's the result been? What would you say to somebody else thinking about hiring our services? How many of you think if you start to build this list, you put out good content on a consistent basis, and then every couple of months you've got a client win, it's like, hey, here's the client, just like you, here's the result that they got, and here's how their life is different and better now that they're using our services. How many of you think you'd be more positioned to have 15 or more strategy sessions per month coming in month in and month out? I just want a capital yes in the comments. Heck yes. Yes. Okay. Absolutely. So there's an infinite number of things you can do. What we found is these things on daily, weekly, and quarterly will absolutely fill the calendar, will absolutely get you to 15+ strategy sessions per month, will get you out of that startup phase if that's where you happen to be right now in your business. And will absolutely accelerate your growth to the next level. Really what we're looking for is 15 strategy sessions per month, and then we want to set 2 things up on the land client side of the equation so that we can convert our clients at the highest level possible. Number 1 is we want an appointment funnel. We want a way for them to be able to schedule in and to not just schedule in but actually show up to the meeting warmed up, excited about hiring our services. And we do that through what I call the, the appointment funnel. I've got lots of training on this, but ultimately they schedule in. There's a reminder sequence that happens, but there's homework that happens in advance. There's case studies that they watch. So they're indoctrinated, they're pre-positioned not just to show up, but to show up excited knowing that you have something that you're gonna bring to the table that's gonna have a huge impact on their growth. And then we've gotta have a great sales process, right? We don't wanna just show up and wing it. We don't wanna just show up and say, Hey, here's my pitch deck and hit it, right? We want to have a sales process. We're able to show them. We want to meet with them where they're at. Where are they today? What are their goals? What have they tried in the past? Then we want to be able to pivot to like, hey, let me show you what we found and how I think we can align with the goals that you have in place. And then we want to show them examples. Here's a couple of clients we work with. Here's the results that we've gotten. And then we want to ask for the business. Hey, here's what I think we need to do. Website, SEO, pay-per-click, social media, paid ads. Here's how much it costs. And we want to ask for the business. And when you do this well, and we've got what I call a hot lead follow-up that happens after the sales call, you're gonna wind up with at least a 30% close ratio. I find that the industry average right now in digital marketing services is about 12%. Right? The reason you can get it to 30% or higher is because you're going after a specific niche, doing marketing that gets clients to come to you prepositioned to buy. You're warming them up prior to the meeting and you take them through a thoughtful and intelligent consultative sales process that shows them the outcomes. It shows them exactly what you're going to do. And then really to be in perpetual growth, we have to retain the clients. The KPI over here is we want to retain at 97%, which means we want to churn less than 3% every single month. And we do that through world-class onboarding. Right? So when the client signs up, they get a personal note in the mail. They get a package that welcomes them on board. There's a thoughtful onboarding process that kind of sets expectations, gathers the usernames and passwords, gets them excited about where they're headed next. We've got a great communication rhythm where we're showing the client, hey, here's what we did. Here's what we're seeing on our tracking results. We're not overreporting what we're showing. Here's how much you spent. Here's how many leads you generated. Here's your return on investment. Seeding the vision. Like, here's what we're gonna do next. And you've got an account management growth process where you don't become the bottleneck, right? Where you can start to separate yourself from that within the business. So a lot of you guys said right here was the meat and potatoes that you need to focus on landing clients. And so I went a little bit heavier here, but the fact is like this is the accelerated growth model. And so I'd love to know like, do you have any specific questions on this or any of the elements on this that I can kind of fill in some gaps on for you? We get the slide deck. Sure. Can we get that in PDF? Absolutely. Okay. So those are, those are the questions. I wanna share an example of this, like in the real world, because I said I was gonna share some examples. Austin Hauser runs a digital marketing agency working with painting contractors. So he chose the niche. People get to put together a program package over $24,000— I mean, over $2,400 per month, um, and has grown to over $92,000 in monthly recurring revenue. I'm not sure if you guys are going to be able to hear this. Let me play this. You tell me if you can hear it or not.

My name is Austin Hauser, and I run Base Coat Marketing. Before 7 Figure Agency, I was negative $3,000 a month in MRR. So before the 7 Figure Agency, we had no vision, no direction. We had a goal, but no idea how to get to that goal. So the 7 Figure Agency has really provided us with the means, the drive, and the motivation to reach our goals effectively and quick. Today we are at $92,000 a month in MRR, and we achieved that over the last more or less 11 months. Today life is very different for myself and our agency. We have a clear direction. We know exactly where we are today, where we're gonna be a year from now, 3 years, 5 years from now. I cannot stress enough how vital the 7 Figure Agency has been to our success. A few things that we have implemented since joining the 7 Figure Agency has been EOS. It's helped us have a clear vision, accountability with every team member. We now have daily goals, weekly goals, quarterly goals. We also know exactly where we want to be financially, not only myself, but every team member. And not only that, but we can measure our client results. So we have 100% client retention. I need to knock on wood somewhere after I say that. Uh, but we really focus on delivering results for our clients. Everything that the 7 Figure Agency preaches. If you're considering joining the 7 Figure Agency, I cannot stress this enough. Do it. Invest in yourself. It is my number one point of feedback with anybody that I'm speaking with. 7 Figure Agency helps you grow not only your company, but you as a person. I consider a lot of these people in this room behind me family members. I mean, they are people that I talk to daily, weekly. The 7 Figure Agency has helped get us to where we are today, hands down, period, end stop.

So a good example here, like choosing the niche, having the right model, getting the resources and help that you need in order to grow and scale. 2 things I wanna do. I, I, I see some questions here I haven't gotten to, so I wanna get to those. Second thing I wanna do is for those of you that are interested in learning about the 7 Figure Agency and how we can help actually implement the growth system for you. And help you get these results, just give me one if that's you, if you'd like to learn more about kind of how we can work together and help you generate the growth that you're after within your business. Because there's only so much we can cover in a, in a, in a session like this. Like, even on the full 2-day workshops that we do, we can only cover so much. Awesome. So lots of you guys interested in learning. I am going to get into that with you. And I don't usually make offers on these webinars, but I definitely want to get in and kind of show you guys how we can help. Um, if you had a question I didn't answer that's like a burning question for you, type a capital Q in the comments here. Um, and I want to answer a couple of questions just to make sure nobody feels like they didn't get their question answered. Okay, John, go ahead and unmute. John, uh, well, let me go back. John Tedesco, do you want to unmute for a minute?

Yeah, that's me.

What's up, man?

Yeah, thanks for, uh, thanks for calling me up. I've been reading your book many times and Following you guys for several months now. My biggest issue is that my agency, my legacy agency, is— I think it's keeping me too busy to drive in, you know, drive in the niche. So we have it pulled apart, we've got it assembled, we have the website, we've got— we even have a couple clients running it, but right now it's a very revenue opportunity and we haven't exactly had a chance to wrap our hands around it. So this is one of the struggles we're having. And the other issue is that these are blue-collar workers that we're dealing with, and they don't have time for a meeting, meeting, meeting before we even get to, you know, what the cost, what the price is. And some of them are just like, just go, whatever it costs, just go. But we need to get there, you know? And so, you know, what's the short and quick process for those guys? And how do I let go?

So I think you gotta decide what you want, right? So if you're in a generalist agency and that's sucking all your time, You can only do one of two things. You can continue to spend your energy chasing your tail in the generalist agency and just, you know, keeping treading water. Or you can say, hey, where do I wanna focus my energy? And I'm not saying cancel any of your existing clients. What I am saying is, where are you gonna cast your focus as far as your growth? Right? So yeah, eventually that will start to sunset. But if you're on, like, whatever your niche is and you put your attention towards that and you're aggressively looking to grow that, You've just got to decide, I'm going to let go of this vine and I'm going to climb this ladder instead because it's a more efficient model. I think that was the first question. The second question in terms of these contractors just want results and they don't want a dozen meetings. I don't, I don't personally do like 6 calls with the contractor. Our team doesn't. When the prospect schedules in, we vet to see if they're qualified. If they are, we're jumping straight into the sales process. And in one call, we're figuring out where they are, what they've tried, kind of what, what their goals are. We've already done our analysis on the front end in terms of where they rank and where they don't, what's going on with their website, what's going on with their paid search, and we're making the offer on that first call. So don't feel like it has to be 6 or 7 calls to get to the offer. Either they're interested in a good fit and they're going to say yes, or they're not. So don't like overcomplicate it. You do have to engineer quick wins into your onboarding. So once you get them on board, in your onboarding here, You gotta engineer some quick wins. That could be starting the pay-per-click campaign in the first couple of days for a very specific set of keywords. So they start to get some lead flow. Could be doing a database reactivation where you get a list of their past prospects and you send an offer to get back in the door. Those are some things we do right out of the gates to get quick wins while the website content is being written, while some of the other long-tail strategies that are gonna win the day really build up. Does that answer those questions for you?

Yeah, absolutely does. Thank you very much.

Appreciate it.

Absolutely. Thanks for being on here, man. Good question. Let's see, David Masinga, did you have a question? You want to unmute real quick? Yes. Wow.

Thanks for calling me out, Josh. Really privileged that you did. Listen, two questions, quick ones. I hope you can hear me.

Yep, I hear you loud and clear. Glad to have you on here.

Awesome. Awesome. Can the 7-Figure Agency be effectively implemented by countries outside the US? I'm asking this because I am from Africa. I'm in Zambia to be specific, which is in Southern Africa. And number 2 is also you say no one-off projects. So the question for me is, aren't one-off projects a conduit to getting the recurring revenue? Those are my questions.

I'm gonna answer both those questions as quickly as possible so we can kind of get to the next thing. So, um, the answer is it can be implemented in other countries. It's harder, right? Obviously, if you're in the United States, you get a competitive advantage, or if you're in North America to go after the North American market. There are people that I know outside that are able to implement that, right? It's just a function of choose a niche, do your cold outreach, do your appointments in, you know, in, in All actuality can be done from anywhere, right? Because you're on the phone and you're on Zoom sessions and things like that. It's harder, right? Because you've got an accent because there's other moving parts. But if you build up the social proof and you build up like the validation of what you can do, it absolutely can be done. I'm trying to remember what the second part of your question was.

That was about the one-off projects.

One-off projects. Are they a conduit? The answer in my mind Could they be a conduit? Yes. My experience running my first agency, my— if my goal was to sell them a small project thinking they were gonna upsell into a monthly recurring service, it never happened. Right? And a lot of the agencies I've worked with over the years, they sell the project and of course the client wanted to do that project, but they're very ineffective at converting the one-time project into monthly recurring fee. And so what we did was we just went straight monthly recurring fee. And it's Works extremely well. So if you spend all your time selling the projects, your energy is going to be diverted versus focusing on, I want to sell this $1,500 a month thing or this $997 a month thing. And when you do, you're going to get more and more of those. So do you have to have project work in order to get recurring? Absolutely not. You know, I've proven it and several hundred agencies in the program have as well. So good question. Thanks for being on here. I do see a lot of questions. I'd love to answer all these. I might have to take these into the Facebook group after. But let's go with Jose Gomez. You got a question? Jose Gomez, going once, going twice.

Yeah, there we go. There we go. All right. Hey, how are you today?

Fantastic. And yourself? Good, good.

I just wanted to ask a quick question. You know, over the last, you know, 10, 15 years of doing business, you know, we've seen is it used to be a lot easier to get prospects on the phone. And less and less people are answering their phone. It's dramatically affected our business model because we sell mostly on the phone. Any, any strategies for improving that situation from what you've seen in the market?

I think it depends upon niche. There are certain niches that are much harder to get on the phone than others. I— that's why I am a big fan of leveraging email, leveraging social messenger, and then creating content for inbound. You know, we do not rely on outbound to fill our schedule. It's mostly inbound. So we're following up with people that requested our guide or downloaded our case study or sat on our last webinar. And that's a much easier person to get on the phone than just cold calling the, the company, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, that— well, actually, these are— what I'm talking about is inbound. We know we do mostly inbound and people who've either requested our services or downloaded something that we've created. But, um, even then, we're still get— having that trouble where we'll get the inquiry inquiry, but then getting a hold of them after that initial inquiry is so tough.

Yeah, I think, I mean, that's par for the course. I would say speed to lead makes a difference. So the quicker you and your team are to call that lead once it's requested is gonna improve the connection rate. And then don't die on the vine with the phone call. You can start the conversation via two-way text. You can start the conversation on LinkedIn, you know, Messenger. You can start the conversation on Facebook Messenger. And we find we get a lot more people that will respond to a text message or to a two-way, like, social message than they will to a phone call, at least for the initial contact.

Okay, thank you so much.

Good question. Guys, give me a yes in the comments if you get value from the questions that are being asked. I think this is great. I appreciate you guys asking. Let's see. Darko's saying, should we have a separate staff for account management versus project management, or should they do both? I say separate, right? There's a different mindset and a different skill set that goes into client account management, which is talking to the client, showing the value, going through the reports, asking their questions, building the rapport, than there is for somebody that's project management strictly, like managing stuff in Teamwork or managing stuff in Trello and marking tasks off and keeping the entire project on task. So that would be my answer there. I feel like we don't have enough staff to strictly account manager busy enough. Over time, you're going to want to move to a dedicated account manager and a project leader. But yeah, you have to be agile if you've only got 1 or 2 clients. Over time, that would be the model I would suggest building up to. Let's see, any— that— I mean, there's lots of questions here. I think I can take like 1 or 2 more. Is there someone that's got like a burning question? Eric B, I see you've got your hand raised. What's your question?

Hey, Josh, how are you today?

Fantastic. And yourself?

Awesome. Thank you so much. Great books, by the way. I read both your books and took your course. Awesome. Question is, I'm not sure if I missed it on the course or missed it on in the book, but, um, and a couple people were nice enough to answer in the chat and I appreciate that, but I wanted to get it from you, um, in particular. Um, if you don't have any clients at first, right, and you don't have any case studies, if someone kind of backs you into the corner on a call, what would you normally say?

Be completely honest. Be completely transparent, right? I think, I think the way you land your first client's a little bit different than the way you land your second, third, fourth, fifth client. But I would say, you know, I'm just getting started in the plumbing space, and I really believe I can generate great results because XYZ. I'd love to make you my case study client. You know, if I can knock it out of the park for you, would you be willing to be a testimonial and be my case study? Ask them to come with you on the journey, and they'll be excited about that. Never compromise your integrity. Never try and lie like, oh yeah, I've got experience here if you don't. Better to come in and just say, hey, look, I'm trying to break into the dental space right now. I see some deficiency in what you're doing today. Here's what I think we could do together. Does that sound like a good fit? Right? And kind of be honest and transparent from the, from the get-go.

Real quick though, on that same question though, would you normally— some gurus have said to, to try to do something for free in the beginning to get a few people in that niche and then bring them along, you know, get their testimonials and all that. Is that, does that sound right or no?

You could. I mean, I mean, if you had to, I would do it for free. I mean, just to get the first couple. I find that if you've got strong enough positioning because you've done digital marketing in the past and you kinda, you know what you're doing, you can get them to pay. Like, my first client in plumbing paid us. Right? He actually funded the entire business because he paid us the $1,500 per month to build his website and do his stuff. He knew he was our first client. He knew he was coming in as a case study. So You can absolutely get those people to pay to be part of that journey. Um, but would it be worth it to do it for free just to cut your teeth and get some experience? I think so.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Fantastic. Great questions. Great engagement. Guys, give me some feedback on a scale from 1 to 10, uh, 1 being this has been a total waste of time, then this has been good value. Like you got some good insights, you got some clarity, um, you got some ideas on how to take your agency to the next level. I'm seeing some 10s coming in, so that's encouraging. I got a 100 there. Fantastic. Love to see it. Love to hear it. A couple 9.9s. Fair enough. I want to give you guys the opportunity to learn about the 7 Figure Agency Coaching and Mentorship Program. For those of you that are interested, if you came to the session and you just wanted to kind of learn the model and kind of hear some insights, and that's good for you, you can, you can feel free to hop off now. But if you're interested in learning about either our coaching or our training programs and you're willing to stick around for a few minutes where I can explain it to you, please, by all means, let's, let's have a conversation. I'll walk you through what it is, who it's for, who it's not for. First thing I want to say is we talked about these stages of agency growth, right? From startup to stability to scale to significance. Our coaching and mentorship program starts at the stability level, right? So it would be if you're at $10,000 plus, right? If you're just getting started, you're just trying to get your first couple of clients, we have a training course called OnRamp. And OnRamp is a training that walks you through kind of how to choose the niche, how to do your cold outreach, how to do your sales process, how to develop your program package. And so if that's you and you're kind of below stability, you're kind of still in the startup phase, I've opened up a breakout room that you guys can hop into. Justin just confirmed that that breakout room is open. And I'm gonna have you meet with Henry on our team. Henry will explain exactly what it is. We've got a special incentive for you guys to buy today if that's something you want and you want to just kind of get the, the blueprint. So open up that— so that's you. You can just open the breakout room down below and then jump into— did you name it? Start. Okay, so at the bottom it says Startup Less Than $10K. So if that's you, join that group. If it's not you, stay in here. I'll walk you through the coaching and mentorship program. Assuming you're kind of at the $10,000+ level in your, in your agency.

Cool.

I think, I think you guys are all heading over there. I'm going to stop the recording because I don't want to