Let's Close 2023 Strong

I'm on with a quick reminder, a quick check-in. It is November 1st, and this year is just zooming by. And I really think it's important that I take the time to show up on these videos at the beginning of each month to kind of prompt you, you know, as you grow and as you scale your digital marketing agency, you should always have goals on the horizon. You should always have an action plan that you're implementing, but you also need to make sure that you consciously check yourself, you consciously pause, you either at the end of the month or the very beginning of the new month to see how you're doing, to see how you're tracking against those goals, and to make sure that you course correct as you go. So I'd love to know in the comments, just kind of let me know, how was October for you? How's this year playing out for you? Let me know. Is it good? Is it bad? Are you crushing it? Like, just in one comment or less, or throw an emoji with kind of how your emotional state is so far this year. And, you know, I want to remind you, and I really think it's important that you do 4 things at the beginning of each new period. And obviously you go deeper at the beginning of a year and at the end of a year. You go deeper at the beginning of a quarter, at the end of the quarter. But at the end of each month, you still want to consciously review. We had a sales goal, a sales target, and daily we put that on the sales retention tracking sheet. Review, are we on track or off track? Do we have as much recurring revenue as we were hoping by this time? Did we land as many clients as we were expecting? Was there higher churn than we expected? Did the ideas and strategies we put in place for, for landing clients work? Did the strategies we put in place to deliver for our clients and improve retention work? Like, just spend a couple of minutes to review and then also take a couple minutes to celebrate. Regardless of where you're at in your agency, regardless of how well things are going or how badly, things are going, there's always something to celebrate. So maybe something that you accomplished, something that you implemented, somebody new that you brought on to the team, some new client that you landed, some new strategy that you were able to get off the ground. Figure out what there was that you did accomplish that you can celebrate. It's really important that as you review, you kind of check in with the team and you let them know, hey, the goal was to get to $72,000 a month in recurring revenue. We only got to 65, but here's some things that happened well. Here's some, you know, things that are happening good within the business. Bring the team along in that review and celebration progress. You get more of what you celebrate, so consciously recognize that. And then I really think it's important now at the first of the month to consciously reset and say, okay, it's a new month. It's November. We've got 2 months left in this year. What are we gonna do between now and January 1st? What are we gonna do? And there's some downtime for Thanksgiving, there's some downtime for Christmas. What are we gonna do to make sure we end the year better off than we were last year? To end the year super duper strong. And I really believe now, regardless of how good the year's gone, regardless of how good or bad last quarter was, or last month was, just to consciously decide, look, in November this is what I'm gonna get to. This is how many clients I'm going to land. This is how much recurring revenue we're going to build. This is where we're going to be. And set whatever that new goal, whatever that new target is, make it present, right? Don't put it on a spreadsheet somewhere. Print it out and have it physically in front of you. Print it out and put it in your closet or put it on your mirror that we have to see it every single day. If you've got a whiteboard somewhere in your office, I've got a nice whiteboard over here, put it up in big bold letters. I'm going to land 7 clients. We're going to add, you $23,000 a month of recurring revenue. And track against that. Really reset and refocus yourself for what you're going to accomplish. So, give me a yes in the comments if you'll do that. You'll spend a little bit of time reviewing, celebrating, resetting and really just getting yourself refocused, re-energized because that's what you need in order to end the year strong. In terms of me looking back over the last month and the last quarter, one thing I'm really excited about that I'm absolutely celebrating is that we now have 100 agencies as part of the 7 Figure Agency Community that we've been able to help go to 7 figures and beyond. And that's when we started 7 Figure Agency, you know, almost 10 years ago, that was the goal. And here we are today, we've got our 100th agency at 7 figures. Now we're tracking forward to, to 500. And yes, we're going to keep pressing forward, but we're also taking a minute to recognize that and to celebrate that because we get more of what we celebrate. And looking ahead, we have our member intensive. Members, super excited to see you guys, 14th and 15th. Mastermind members on the 16th. We also have our Roadmap Live. So, if you happen to be watching this, you're not a member of 7 Figure Agency yet, we'll be getting together on the 13th in Miami, Florida. If you're serious about closing the year strong, you're serious about going into the next year with a really strong plan, I would really encourage you to come plug in, right? Come spend that time, get the latest ideas, the latest strategy, plug into the energy of other highly successful people. Really believe you come an average of the 12 people that you hang around most. So as you think back on this last quarter, as you think back on what you want to accomplish throughout the rest of the year, are you around people that are making things happen? Are you around people that are facing some of the obstacles and playing at a super high level If not, that's a super important thing for you to be conscious of going into November, going into December. And if you're coming live, members that are going to be there live, type live in the comments. I'm super excited to see you guys at the new venue. It's going to be great. If you're plugging in virtually as members, you can type virtual in the comments. Just let me know. I know we've got a pretty even mix of live and virtual. It's going to be amazing either way. So monthly review, very tactically, very specifically. Couple things I want you to do between now and the end of the day, just to make sure you wrap up last month and you've got yourself ready to rock and roll this month. And I really want to make sure you take action on this and that you do something with this right, right away. Number 1, update your sales and retention tracking sheet, right? What you measure gets done. What you track always improves. If you're not tracking how many clients are we shooting for this month and then logging that activity, How many clients are we expecting to churn and logging that activity, you're missing out on a major opportunity. So what I want you to do is go back through October. How many clients did you land? How many clients did you lose? What was the target? And I want you to set a new target for November, December and track it, right? If you know there's a tracking mechanism and you're holding yourself accountable, you're more likely to get the outcomes that you're after. And pretty much all the members that have gone to 7 figures that we've been able to slap high fives with and we've been able to celebrate, that we've been able to have on the, the Agency Success Podcast, they track their numbers. They know how many clients they're shooting for. They know how many clients they got. They know how many clients they lost. So the sales retention tracking sheet, if you don't have that set up, type track in the comments. I can get you all the details on how to track that and get that in place. And as you update it, just recognize on track or off track. Did we hit the sales target or did we miss the sales target? Sometimes you hit the sales target, but you churned more than you were expecting. You just had a bad retention month. Being aware of that and passing that information back to the team so that you can course correct is really important. So share that feedback with the team. I think right now would be a great time to open up a Slack and send a quick thanks, right? There's always things to correct, but we typically don't share appreciation. So send a quick Slack message to somebody on the team. Hey, thanks for going the extra mile for that client. Hey, thanks for taking the trip out to that event and, you know, coming and standing in our place. Thanks for whatever it is the team's doing. Throw some cold bricks and recognize what your team is accomplishing. The other thing to look back on a monthly basis is the number of strategy sessions. Oftentimes, if we don't hit our growth metrics, like if the goal was to land 7 clients this month and you only sold 3, or maybe the goal is to sell 3 and you only sold 1, usually it's the number of strategy sessions that you needed to have that didn't happen. The number of sales appointments with prospects within your niche. And so if you're not tracking that, put the tracking dashboard in place so you know how many actual strategy sessions and meetings am I having, or is my sales team having, and is that number where it needs to be in order to hit those targets? Really important to check that. Work the Growth System, right? We're gonna talk about some of the key things you should be doing daily, monthly, quarterly to really keep your pipeline full to kind of deliver for your clients. Make sure you're working the growth system. I've got an image of it on the next screen, but key number 1 is a monthly webinar. What's the monthly webinar you're going to run in November? If you don't have it picked right now, if you don't have it on the calendar right now, now's your time. Pick the topic. November's a great time, towards the end of November, early December, to run the 2023 or 2024 marketing planning session. Set that up. Your clients, your prospects right now are making buying decisions. And if you're the one that helped them build the plan, allocate the budget, like really figure out how to spend their dollars to hit the growth targets they've set for themselves, you have a good opportunity of retaining the business and/or being the person that they shift to going into 2024. So, uh, we've got a workshop, uh, members that you guys all have access to, and we should all be running in November, in December, even in January. And that's your 2024 marketing plan for your niche, right? And you just run it like a workshop. You have them set their goals, you have them figure out how many leads they're gonna need to generate. You help them figure out what their budget should be. You help them figure out how much of that should go to digital, how much of it should go to offline and online. You help them figure out what, like, what their online marketing focus should be. SEO, content, paid search, local service ads, right? Run this webinar, and members will be doing a workshop on this in the very near future and helping you guys run this. But if you're not going to do that, pick a session that you can run, right? We know running the monthly webinar gives us a reason to email the database. It gives us a reason to, you know, to upload new content to the internet. It gives us attention. And it gives us appointments. And so right now is your prompt, right? It's the first of the month. Decide which webinar you're going to run, put it in the calendar now, set up the promo and just do it, right? Make it happen every single month. For your podcast, who are you going to feature on your podcast? We know part of the growth system is every month we run a webinar and every month we do an interview either with one of our clients or we do an interview with an influencer. We do an interview with somebody doing great things. In our niche. And so who will you interview this month, right? Who can you bring on and ask, like, what are you doing? How did you do in this year? What strategies did you use to get your phone ringing? Um, you know, what are you doing with online reviews? Like, ask those questions, create that content. And so what I want you to think right now is, who will you interview this month? And, and make the connection. Reach out. Hey, would you be up for being on the podcast? What's a good day and time? Get that scheduled in now, right? And if you haven't run the, the interview approach podcasting for growth process, do that now. Like, there's workshops for both of these for those of you that are members to swipe and deploy, but make sure you do this, at least one, in November. Number 3, industry events and conferences. There's not as much going on typically in November and December, but What events are there? Are there any events that you can exhibit at, that you can speak at? And start looking at next year too. Start look at just January, February, March. There are absolutely events coming up. What are those events? Can you get yourself on the speaking docket potentially? If you don't start doing those outreaches today, they're not gonna happen, right? So start looking at this month, next month, and the first quarter where you can plug into those events and conferences. Also super important is to make sure you spend a little bit of time reviewing the profit and loss sheet, right? Yes, we wanna grow our agency. Yes, we wanna serve more clients. But the reality is we run these businesses to create more money, more freedom, and a bigger impact. And if you are not managing your financials, if you don't know exactly how much money you spent, where the money went, what the profit is, and really make sure you're carving out a solid 20 to 30% net profit after all expenses, you're gonna wind up chasing your tail. Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and so it's your fiduciary responsibility in your business to know the numbers, right? Whether you've got QuickBooks Online or whether you've got Xero or some other online accounting system, you need to have all of your expenses flowing in. You should have a bookkeeper that's coding everything for you, And this is the time of the month to see how much money do we actually generate and what's the actual profitability. And go through line by line. If the profit isn't where it needs to be, you need to look at all of those ancillary expenses, all of the things that you're spending on that you haven't paid attention to, and course correct, right? If you don't manage your profit, you will have no profit. And so now's your time, like spend some time between now and the end of the day to do these things. You'll make more money. You'll have a better plan going forward. You really position yourself to close the year strong. So if you could type P&L in the comments, if you'll commit to go review the P&L, right? Just having numbers flowing into QuickBooks and getting like a little thing that you look at once in a blue moon isn't going to do you any good. Every month you need to look at the P&L. You need to look at the numbers and know where those numbers are and make the necessary adjustments. And really kind of like map the plan for the growth system. Really, if you're going to hit whatever the target is for November and you've got that target front and center, right? You've got it printed out, you've got it in big bold letters and you're tracking against it on sales retention tracking sheet. Like what do we need to do more of in order to hit that target? In order to really get the outcomes that we're after. And I would encourage you to go back through the growth system and find the gaps. But definitely at a minimum, Do your monthly webinar, do your monthly podcast, look for those events, look for those clients that you can feature, right? That you can create case studies out of, and get your 15 strategy sessions that should lead to 3 to 5 clients per month, and then knock it out of the park for those clients that you serve. So hopefully that's clear. I, you know, I gave you the Cliff Notes version. In the comments here, you've got the breakdown of the key things you want to do for your monthly recap. Spend the time, right? You've got, you know, between now and the end of the day, at least 2 or 3 hours. Spend the time to do your review, to build your new plan, to send those golden bricks, and to really build your plan to crush it in November and December. Again, only 2 months left in this year. Let's close the year strong. I'm excited to see a bunch of you guys next month in Miami. Um, cannot wait to celebrate your progress. Cannot wait to hear about your wins. And, uh, that's it for now. Hopefully it was an amazing October and really excited for an even better November and December. Thanks everybody. I'll talk to you soon.