How to set the right kind of goals in your Digital Marketing Agency

For me, it all starts with your goals. I talked about this a little bit. Uh, I am a big fan of Brian Tracy. He's got a great program called the Ultimate Goals Program. I've been through it a number of times over the years, and one of my favorite parts of that whole training is a quote that success is goals, all else is commentary. So when you think about, you know, you're in a business, right? You're trying to get clients, you're trying to figure out how to fulfill for those clients, you're trying to figure out how to market to get leads, trying to learn the latest techniques on LinkedIn prospecting and Facebook advertising, and all that is activity, right? If you haven't taken the time to get clear on where you're trying to go in your business how many clients do you need, how much recurring revenue do you want, then you're focused on commentary, right? You're just chasing the next shiny object. You're not really clear on what you're gonna do. So the other thing is you wanna make sure that you're setting the right kind of goals because there's nothing more frustrating than spending a lot of time and energy doing something. Let's say you're gonna climb a tree, right? And it's a 20-foot tree out in the a sequoia out in the middle of the forest, and you say, "Okay," you set your ladder up on that tree and you do one step at a time, it takes you a bunch of time and energy to get to the top, and you get up there and you're kinda like, "Okay, I'm at the top of the tree," and you look down and the guy that sent you up says, "Hey, that's the wrong tree, right? The right tree is over here." And that's kinda what a lot of you guys are doing with your goals. If you're setting project goals, somebody put in the comments box, is that retainer business or is that project business. If you're setting goals on, I wanna sell 6 projects or 6 mobile sites or whatever, you're setting goals, you're climbing the wrong tree. And so it's really important that you have the right business model fundamentals. And I say this because I was the guy that climbed the wrong tree. I would build websites for small businesses, auto shops, mechanics, hair salons, restaurants, I would go in and I would charge them $800 to build a website, and I might sell 5 or 6 websites in a month, but it didn't amount to a hill of beans. I would charge them $50 a month to host potentially, but it was like every month I had to go get new projects and I had to continually hustle without even being able to pay myself or cover my expenses. So as I learned the business model I'm gonna share with you right now, which is all about getting recurring revenue, that's when you start to get some momentum. That's when you get accelerated growth within your business. And so, first of all, recurring revenue truly is the only way to do this business. And, you know, I, I mean, I can't see a lot of examples where I'm wrong on this. So I'm gonna encourage you to just focus your energy on where the momentum is, and that's on the monthly recurring revenue. So no one-off projects, no check payments, please no check payments. The other thing is, okay, I'm gonna get retainer clients, but I'm gonna have them mail me a check once a month. I've tried that, it never works. You get the check once, maybe twice, maybe 3 times, but that 4th month comes around, or that 9th month comes around, and where's the check? Hey, Mr. Jones, where's the check? Oh, I mailed it. Oh, you know, why don't you come by my office, we can get together and talk about it. I've never had an experience where check works. It's just a recipe for disaster. So credit cards, debit cards, e-check is okay, and no partial payment deposits. If you're in a business model that requires you to get a deposit, finish the work, get the remainder of your payment, wait for checks to come in, you're gonna constantly be chasing your tail. There won't be any momentum. In your business. So I'm just gonna check in here on chat, see if anybody has any comments on this. Um, let's see, any comments? Any of you guys have experienced this in your agencies, maybe selling project work, maybe dealing with the frustrations of tracking down checks? Go ahead and put it in the comments box and I'll keep going because we do have a lot to cover. The other thing is you wanna make sure that there's a large enough monthly recurring fee that it makes sense. And I've always— our business model started at $1,000 per month and it went to $1,250 per month. That was kind of our sweet spot. Now we charge about $2,500 per month. We're at a higher threshold, but I don't really think it's going to be efficient for you to charge less than $750 per month. So make sure that your minimum monthly is $750. I really like to see more like the $1,500 range. 'Cause for every $750 client, you have to sell 2 to get 1 that's at $1,500. So you just have to sell a lot more clients. But it's not lost on me that not every vertical lends itself to a $1,500 or $3,000 a month program. So just, just kinda set yourself up where you're getting paid monthly recurring revenue and that your monthly is in that like $1,000 to $2,000 a month range. I find that's a sweet spot. When you're adding new clients every month at that price point, you really start to see some momentum and you start to see some build and you get to the place where, hey, I've got enough money coming in month over month that even if I didn't sell anybody new, I'd have enough revenue to cover my expenses, to pay myself enough money to pay my bills and leave a— live a pretty decent lifestyle. And when we moved to this model, our entire life changed. And so that's what I'm gonna encourage Make sure that you got the business model fundamentals in place. So with that said, we can talk about our goals, really where we wanna go. And this is where our worksheet's gonna come into play. I really want you guys to think about this and put it in the chat if you could. How much monthly recurring revenue do you want? So if you could just project yourself to the end of December 2018, so we're at the end of the year, and everything went according to plan, right? As Brian Tracy says, if you could wave a magic wand and be there, how much recurring revenue would you have? And it's different for everybody, you know, it's gonna be different if you're just getting started or if you've already got $30,000 to $40,000 a month, but where would that number be? So think about that, and then you really have to break that down to what you're gonna charge on a monthly basis. right? So are you gonna charge $1,000, are you gonna charge $2,000, are you gonna charge $750? Because armed with those two data points, you can figure out how many clients you need to get there, right? So if you're gonna charge— I've got an example. If you're gonna get to $35,000 per month, which would be a great number, right? That's a pretty great monthly recurring number. And you charge $1,000 per month, that would mean you need 35 clients. So that's pretty simple math, and I'm not asking you to figure out, is it really feasible for me to sell 35 clients? Is it really feasible for me to sell $1,000 a month to each client? But just, you know, in the perfect world, where would you be? And so put in the comments box for me where you're gonna be. James, thanks for joining us, man. Awesome to have you here. It's a true honor. Um, $260,000 per month. Awesome. That's awesome. Who else? Okay, CU bonus, $25,000 per month, great target. You know, that's great. David's gonna get to $20,000 per month, fantastic. And what I want you to do is actually put this on your worksheet, or write it down in your document, so you're really clear. You're like, okay, this is how many clients I'm gonna get, this is how much I need to bill in monthly recurring. Matt, what's up man, thanks for joining us. $120K, would love to see you get there, that'll be your 7-figure a year plus, so fantastic. Heather's gonna get to 50, Todd's gonna get to 30, beautiful. And if you could, how many clients is it gonna take to get there? 'Cause what I find is when there's a disconnect between that monthly number and the reality of how many clients that requires, It has an impact. So Jimmy needs 148 additional clients. Just out of curiosity, can you guys see the comments people are typing, or are you just seeing what you wrote? Somebody tell me that, because I'd love it if you guys could see it, but I don't know if I have it set up like that. Okay, good. So you guys are thinking, right? You're getting clear on where you want to go. Now what I want you to do is We can see it. Okay, awesome, good. So you guys are seeing each other, you're kind of seeing where you're at, you can see who the true players are. Jimmy and Matt, these guys are legit, I can tell you. I know them both, they're rock stars, and what they're writing there isn't like pie in the sky. It's gonna happen for them, I'm sure. Awesome, okay. So the next thing we wanna do is we wanna break this down quarterly and monthly. Because, alright, so you gotta get an extra 30 clients per, uh, 30 clients in a year, divide that by 12, how many new clients is that to get there? And what I found in my experience is your mind really can only think in about a 90-day chunk, which is 3 months. I found it really effective to put together a quarterly sprint where you take your year, you set a big target, then you break it down by quarters. And so what I want you guys to do is, you know, take the number, divide it by 4, and that tells you how many clients you need to sell each quarter in order to accomplish your goal. Now, it starts to get a little bit complicated because some of you guys, like Jimmy and Matt, you've got clients and there's gonna be some churn, right? I wish that clients never left, right? But no matter how good you are, no matter how well you execute, there's gonna be some churn. So you wanna make sure that you're factoring into your planning some level of churn, maybe somewhere between 3 and 5% of your client base. And some of you might be doing way better than that, maybe you've got a newer client base, but as you start to get into the 50 to 100 clients, there's gonna be a little bit of churn. So I did put together a document for you guys, if you downloaded the worksheet, it's called the— what I call is the Sales and Retention Tracking Sheet. This is something I custom developed for our agency, it's been a complete game changer, and you can download it, I'm actually gonna give it to you guys for free. It's a Google Sheet, just click that link, 7figureagency.com/tracking. Let's see if I can type it in here. Alright, so you go there, you'll get this sheet, and it breaks, breaks your year out, and it will help you get clarity on how many sales you're gonna get, if you have some potential churn, how many clients you think you might lose, and then where you'll end up at the end of the year. And what this does is it gives you a powerful mechanism to see your targets. The, the best, most successful sales organizations in the world, if you've ever been experienced working in B2B, I worked at companies like ADP and Data Impact and Lason, big sales organizations. Every single salesperson had a very specific target, and ReachLocal as well. They had a very specific target. So they started their, their month, they knew, I have to have this many sales, it has to be this much recurring revenue, and if I don't, I'm probably gonna get fired, right? If I don't one month, I might get away with it, but the next month I'll probably be fired. And what I find with most small agencies is either they didn't have that experience, so they didn't know to put this in place, or they just, they don't put targets for themselves. And without a target, you're never gonna accomplish your goal. It's almost like if you were gonna go on a family trip and you just got in the car and you started driving, and you drove for a couple hours and you get wherever you're gonna wind up, and a couple days into the trip, your wife looks over at you and says, "Hey, where are we? Where are we going? Are we there yet?" And you're like, "Well, I don't know, we're here." Well, you certainly didn't get to Disneyland and you didn't get to your brother-in-law's home, You're in the middle of nowhere, and that's where you're at as an agency if you don't have clear targets and goals on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. And that's what a tool like this can do for you. So Scott wrote in the comments, "Those who fail to plan, plan to fail." Absolutely right. And so I'm giving you this as a free tool. We don't have time to go in and update all the cells on today's session, but I want you to do it, and I promise you to invest the energy to set this up and to hold yourself accountable and maybe have a third party look at it with you, your probability of accomplishing those goals that you just set out are significantly greater. And I just want to share an example of this and get back into my presentation mode here. So Brian Kaskavalshian is the owner of G4 Marketing Group. They're here in Coral Gables, and Brian runs a really successful agency targeting the, the roofing and remodeling industry. And over the years he built it to a pretty successful place, but he, he kind of lulled out at about $70,000 per month. They built it there, it was enough money for him to be satisfied, and a couple years passed and he was just at that same level and he was struggling. And I guess it was around 2015, he and I got together, we put together this sales and retention tracking sheet for his business. And he started to put these kinds of targets in place where he and his team knew, here's where we're going for the end of the year, here's the amount of sales we have to get this month, next month, and this quarter in order to get there. And I can tell you, since then his business has just accelerated because with clarity of goals and with clear targets, you start to get into action. You've got things that you need to get done and, and you start to accomplish your goals. And so I met with Brian just last week, and at the end of 2017, his business did over $2 million in the agency space. And a big driver of it was having this type of clarity in place. So invest the time, invest the energy, it will have a huge impact on your long-term success.