The 7 Keys to 7 Figures

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.

Excited to have you on with us live. We have, we have a really exciting session that we're going to be doing today. Um, we've got Michael Borgelt and Brittany Fioli from 51Blocks. Um, in my mind, the, the top white label agency in the country for agencies that need help with websites, SEO, paid search. I'll let them kind of talk more about what it is that they do. But they've, they've grown a multiple 7-figure agency, have really dialed in client acquisition and client retention. And so they're going to be unpacking the 7 lessons, the 7 keys that they used to grow to 7 figures. So Michael, Brittany, thank you guys so much for being here. Really excited for today's session.

Thanks for having us, Josh.

Thanks for having us. Appreciate it. Excited to kind of talk and show people why I don't have any hair left, uh, from growing this agency and, and doing things like that and things we've learned. Just some high-level tips that, you know, I think people could take away and, you know, make their lives a little bit easier as they're starting to do it.

Excellent. Hey guys, if you're joining us live, just, you know, Unmute yourselves, turn on your webcams, give me a 1 in the comments to make sure you're here because I don't see any engagement yet. All right, Isaac is here. Excellent. Roger, Melissa. Okay, perfect. And we do like to make these interactive, so if you have questions, put it in the comments. Um, this is going to be a very action-oriented session, get a lot of great information, takeaways. Uh, Michael and Brittany, before we kick off, um, you know, you work with a lot of the 7 Figure Agency members I hear nothing but good things about the services you guys provide. Just high level, like, what is it that you guys do before we dive into the meat and potatoes here?

Sure.

Okay. White label SEO, websites, Facebook ads, organic, social, PPC. We pretty much do everything. Our biggest, I'd say, like, feature as to why people really like our agency is our client-facing side. So we actually do all services, white labeled, client-facing underneath your brand name. And so that's been a big help, I think, for agencies that are honestly small and big. One of our bigger partners has us managing his clients on the front end, just like some of our smallest. So yeah, I think that's the biggest help that we provide in addition to our services.

I love that. I couldn't agree more. A world-class delivery, right? If you don't really like to do the building of the websites, the doing of the SEO, managing that team, managing that process, and you want to know that you get a world-class solution, these guys are amazing. Um, and they take it a step beyond that because the other hard part is like defending your position and why you do things a different way. And actually having account managers on the front end— I don't think I know any other white label provider that does that, like where you actually will be that representation of the agency, um, so they can just focus on sales and business development.

Exactly. Yeah, and we have like a full management structure, so we handle client fires, pretty much everything stresses a normal agency owner out on the fulfillment side, we take ownership of and take care for them.

So good.

And, and Michael, you also run BionicWP, which is a life-saving hosting speed optimization service to really make sure that your sites— even if you don't want to white label your websites and SEO through 51Blocks, BionicWP, I think every agency should use Because site speed is mission critical. It really impacts your rankings and impacts your conversion rates. And we struggled with this for years and we finally moved to BionicWP and all of our sites are like lightning fast, green on green GT metrics. And it's not as easy as loading a plugin, right? There's daily activities that your team does to make that a reality. Can you talk a little bit about that for the group?

Yeah, that's a great tee up. I appreciate it. And obviously appreciate your business as well as always, but One of the things I think that really separates us is we monitor the speeds and we address those proactively as well. We have a whole dashboard that monitors the speed. If it falls below a certain threshold, we address it and we'll fix the scores proactively. And obviously, if we don't get to it quick enough, you guys, our clients write in and have us address immediately. And also we do a little deeper dive of fixing tickets kind of thing. I kind of like to say we bring in the hosting world support or Agency world support to the hosting world is really what we're doing, right? Because I think a lot of agency owners provide really good customer service. That's what you have to do in our world where the hosting world struggles a little bit in that space. So it's kind of bringing that over there and doing a deeper dive into problems, issues, not just saying, "Hey, go talk to your developer," but really trying to find those problems. So that, and obviously managing the core theme plugins updates, all of that is part of it as well.

Amazing. So guys, if you're listening to this now as a member and you're thinking, you know what, I need some help with my hosting, or I'm not loading fast, for us it was a challenge because there are big providers that will just run GTmetrix reports on your clients. And if you're not green on green, if you're not like, you know, performing well with site speed, it's a little hole that they can plug into. If you're thinking you'd like to learn more about their white label services, 51Blocks, I can't highly recommend them enough. Like, I mean, we refer them, members use them, members have built their whole agency fulfillment engine on what they do. So with that said, I don't want this to be just a sales pitch for 51Blocks, but I think they're amazing. Let's dive into it. Give me a 1 in the comments if you're excited to kind of see what the keys are, because you guys now approximately— I don't know if we can talk about this, but approximately how much revenue are you guys doing in the, in the agency?

Uh, currently the agency is doing a little over $2.5 million, and that doesn't include BionX revenue as well. So, so, so good.

Congratulations. And you don't get to that size without providing great service, especially if you're white label, right? Because it's not easy to fulfill white label and retain white label. Um, so you've learned a lot about sales, you've learned a lot about positioning, you've learned a lot about delivering and client retention. Um, so let's, let's dive into it. I'm going to hand it off to you guys and let you run with the 7 keys. Put a 7 in the comments here if you're excited about hearing these 7 keys to 7 figures from an agency that has done it. Um, and, and, you know, lives it.

Awesome. Cool.

Lots of 7s.

Yeah. I mean, I just hope some people can take some things. I mean, they're, they're a little, you know, some are soft items. Some of them are a little more actionable, but at the end of the day, it's all about what we've kind of seen as we reflected back, Brittany and I, over the journey to over $2.5 million. So cool, Josh, I'll take it from here. I know you got to jump out, so I'll— got it, see you later. Uh, let me share my screen here. Oh, maybe not. Uh, Brett, can you—

I'm gonna have— I'm gonna turn on share screen. It should be good now.

Every time I click it, it says host disabled participant screen sharing.

Still has that?

No, I got it.

Okay.

Awesome. All right, cool. All right, so, uh, as I kind of said, you know, pretty much what, what happened is, as we hit this number, Brittany and I, you know, we don't do a very good job of this, but reflected kind of what we had done and the things that we've gone through to get here. And, uh, we kind of came up with this idea of— at first it was 5 tips, and then we found a couple more, so we changed it to 7. So 7 tips to the multi-seven figure is kind of what what we came up with here. And I'll just kind of, you know, bounce through these and more than happy to answer any questions or anything like that at the end of it. But overall, I'm Michael. I've, you know, as Josh kind of said, founded, owned 51Blocks since— ran it since 2009. All bootstrapped, slow growth, right? Talk about the grind. That's what this was. You know, I've started BionicWP now as well. I had a stint refereeing college basketball for a while, things like that. And that was kind of where my life kind of led here to today. Brittany?

Yeah, I'm Brittany. I run 51Blocks, manage the team over there and all the processes and procedures and sales and all the things. So a lot of my experience is based solely in 51Blocks, but I do help over at Bionic with some things there too.

Cool. All right. So today's topics, my sister, I always kind of say this when I give speeches, my sister is a professor at the University of Colorado. She says, hey, tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them. And then tell them what you told them, right? Is that's kind of the approach you're supposed to give a speech with, right? So today we're going to talk about our 7 tips. If you just want to jump off right now, here they are, right? Automation, financials, mental roller coaster, reputation, team structure, leadership, and buy versus build. Now, if you want more in depth on that, you got to stay on for a little bit longer here. So overall, at the end of the day, we just hope you guys get value from this. And that's really what my goal always kind of is when we give this stuff. So The number one thing I think is automate when possible, right? But then the key is not to over-automate as well. But I think it's almost actually really hard to over-automate. I think you have to get to a point where you feel comfortable using automation wherever it's possible, right? And you think of the pros and cons of automation, and those things can be like, hey, obviously it's less personable, right? When you use automation, that, that's the biggest issue you kind of run into. Um, and then, you know, we have to identify when it's not appropriate, things like that. Brittany, why don't you dive into that a little bit?

Um, a lot of automation comes from your operations space, so, uh, looking at when it's appropriate to automate, it's usually a time when you're trying to just be more efficient, um, and also effective with what we're trying to achieve. So one of the first things we automated at this agency was actually our client communication when we completed task work. So one of the biggest reasons we moved from ClickUp to Monday years ago was because Monday has the ability to sync any email to one particular board at our agency. So obviously having lots of white label emails out there, we're able to do it by client and we can click a button and a nice looking email shoots right out to a client. And that was something at the time ClickUp couldn't perform. And so that was one of the very first times we automated something that felt so big. A lot of our account managers used to tell us, I feel like I'm spending all my day in my inbox, uh, managing client emails and things like that. And so this really helped because Michael and I wanted the expectation to be update your clients when things get done. Proactive communication is what helps us not get the email, hey, where are we at? And so this was a solution to that. It was the ability to make it really efficient with the team, not have to worry that they were going to say something or miss something or do something like that, that we felt like we couldn't see at the time. And as we got bigger and bigger, it was a lot harder for us to look at every single email, obviously. Um, so this was really helpful. Another place that we obviously automated was like the checkout system on our website. We got away from doing proposals and things of that nature because they slowed down our ability to close fast. And when we have white label partners, on our side, they've already closed the deal. They're like antsy and ready to get the fulfillment side going. And so this was a great place for us to automate where it didn't necessarily have to take away from the conversations we needed to have. We still have those, but it took away that gap of like, let me make a proposal, then let me send it. Let me wait for a signature and get it back and collect your info. It was just so much back and forth. So anytime— yeah, credit cards. Anytime you have back and forth more than like I don't know, maybe, maybe once or twice. I think it's a good time to look into how you can be more efficient through some type of an automation.

And then talk about the lessons we learned from automation. Remember, we, we've had some rogue automations previously as well.

So there is a downside, and I think Michael and I always say like, we're good at telling you the good and the bad. Um, you know, part of this is making sure you or your team understands how to use this. Uh, we've Certainly had our fair share of people who have clicked the wrong button and things have gone off the rails. And so usually our partners are really understanding and it's not something that's super extreme by any means, but it absolutely can happen. Things can break. I mean, we had an instance yesterday where Monday as a whole just kind of stopped working for a minute and it took them like 15 minutes to get their platform up and running. And that carries a lot of our automation. So we all had to like go take a coffee break and come back. So there are definitely times when there's going to be some drawback, but I think the impact is greater than any type of setback you might have.

Yeah. And I think this is the tip from this is leverage the right automations to save money and time. And let me— those are the tools that you can use is Integromat, Zapier, and Monday. But for example, right here, this is our pizza tracker for our website process. You guys can see. There is probably 40 or 50 different, you know, automations here going on doing different things, right? So that's— when you think of optimizing a process, that's what it could look like. Now that one's a little more complicated, right? This one right here that you saw is a very simple part of our onboarding process, right? So there's different areas or different automations that can happen to help, uh, you know, kind of just streamline the stuff. So it We have, you know, we use Integromat all the time. I like it. It's more flexible than Zapier. Zapier is a little more user-friendly, I would say. Integromat's not as user-friendly. Sometimes you need a little bit of programming, very little, but very— because I'm not a programmer at all, but to get some things done, it's a little more robust in that aspect. So those are the two things that we use there. The second thing, the second tip to growing 7 figures, and Josh had recently had a group of guys on that talked about the numbers and their fractional CFO. And I actually just hired them to try to see what they can provide and push us in the right direction. But knowing your numbers, right? I think every day I look at our numbers just because it's so easy to look. We have it set up in such an easy way to look at, right? We have two different systems we could use. We use Baremetrics, right? That syncs with Stripe or other processors to pull in your data. And it pulls in information like this, the lifetime value, the user churn, your revenue, your, you know, monthly revenue, your— every metric you could even think of is in this. More metrics than I think you even need to look at. But every day we can look at it, and when we hit milestones immediately, it's almost like who's— who can tell each other the quickest of which milestone we hit, because you know those numbers, right? And you know them off the top of your hand. The other thing we have is we have a bookkeeper that updates our QuickBooks nearly every other day, right? So I can look at those two numbers, look at where our expenses are, stuff like that. Knowing your numbers, I think, is one of the best things to help keep your— obviously your margins in line, but then also understand where you're going. You know, what you focus on expands, right? So that's what Josh always says. And I believe what he says that, and you know, why, you know, why we look at those things to analyze these things, right? Where we're at in our projections, our retention, P&L, things like that. You know, why we track it is, you know, we try to hold our team accountable to certain things, certain product lines. I break out my P&L to, to SEO, PPC, hosting, um, and then websites, and then all other, right? Kind of falls into those 5 categories. So I could then do that for profit and for expenses. So we can see the profitability by service. So both of those things I think are very important. Brittany, I know I kind of blew over that one, but—

All good. So I think what you should know about knowing your numbers is who to share your numbers with. As the person who runs 51Blocks, I take chunks out of each little section and I go to the team and Michael and I will discuss with, you know, the operations side, the people who are running the client-facing end, what the churn looks like, what their goals are, what we want to hit or where we should be. And then if we start to see things falling off, we know to actually ask the questions, right? Like, what do the cancels look like and why? We try and dive like a little bit deeper into the data with the right people. Same thing on the front end with sales. We're able to talk about our monthly recurring revenue and where we're at. You know, and a lot of times you're going to find like the sales side, they forget to think about the churn. They forget to think about cancellations and how that plays into the overall goals. And so giving them this visibility has been really helpful for us to have the right conversations with the right people who can really do something about it or make an impact. And of course, just at a very high level, it's good for, for Michael and I to see where the business is headed. I think this morning I had a moment, I was like, cool, it's good to know we're like on the right path. Because, you know, months and months will go by and you, you have to stop and think about where are we at with even things like increasing our lifetime value or increasing the average spend per person or whatever it is. Those are really good metrics to have a handle around so that you can know how to essentially go into each service and try and make it a little bit better. If you're having really high churn in one particular area, why is that? That's when you can go in and look at process or people and get a little better.

Yeah, and I think having that lifetime value number obviously helps you realize what you can invest in to advertising to acquire a client, stuff like that. Right. So, right. So tip number 2 for your knowing your numbers is set, map, and measure your goals weekly, quarterly, and beyond. Right. So like Brittany said, we lay this stuff out for a year and then we back it down. We say, well, hey, where do our revenues want to be? Break it down by month and then can break it down even by week of, hey, we're ahead or below. ProfitWell tells you weekly if you're above or below your goal. Every month. So it's another tool that you can use instead of Baremetrics. ProfitWell is actually free for some of the features, I believe. So, all right. So number 3, prepare for the roller coaster. And I think this is, you know, the probably— I'm not sure if somebody is watching here, but let me admit some of these people here. Or maybe not.

Oops.

Brett, sorry, I don't know if I was supposed to admit those people. I'll let you handle that. Prepare for the roller coaster, right? Is the emotional roller coaster of owning an agency at the end of the day, right? Is super— a bunch of up and down daily occurrences, whether you get a cancel or an upset client or you want a big deal or whatever, that roller coaster, if you've run an agency, wears on you, right? You got to have people that you can trust and you can talk to and, and work through those emotional roller coasters to help stabilize you as well. Brittany, do you want to kind of jump on that?

I feel like this was the hardest part when we were going from 1.5 to 2. There was a lot of stress because we hit a block, we couldn't figure out like where to go, and with that comes a lot of stress. Every cancel felt so monumental. It didn't necessarily need to, but that was our perspective at the time because we were trying so hard to break through a ceiling. And so I think having obviously each other, I'm sure a lot of you have like a second in command, so to speak, or someone that you rely on to talk through all of these things with. That is just so important. Michael has a funny way of framing it, but when I came along, he said it was like he was just trying to like hold everything up and I came behind him and put the tape up, right? So that things could finally start kind of sticking. And I think that's really important emotionally that you have somebody, you know, your, your vibe attracts your tribe kind of thing. You have a team around you that you can go to and say, let's fix this problem together. Um, and explain how you're feeling. And I think that that's the right people around you will receive it and support you. Um, and I just don't feel like it's talked about enough. Like it's such a stressful thing to run an agency. It really is. And so making sure that you've got a good support system around you is going to be key to helping you get through some of the harder hurdles.

You know, and the point that you're talking about, the cancellations, is what Isaac's kind of asking, right? When you first started your agency, what was your client retention, or what should that be? I was still carrying what I thought my retention rate should be when we were over $1 million, right? We didn't have, we didn't have cancels or things like that. Like, that's not, wasn't acceptable to me, right? There's no reason anybody should leave, but At the end of the day, there was, there always is, right? People close their businesses, they want to try somebody else, they no longer have the funds, or we've outgrown them, whatever it is, or they have outgrown us, whatever it is, right? It's always something that you can't always do what you did to get there and continue to do that, I guess, is kind of the thing. I would say your retention rate, you know, our goal is 3%, right? I think right now we're at 3.5% or 4%. I think, you know, if you're smaller, it should be smaller, right? You obviously got to try to keep those clients to then and move up and to kind of move in the right direction. But that's kind of what I would say in regards to what your retention rate should be. One thing I kind of like to talk about this is preparing for the roller coaster. Write Tom in the chat. I'll do a Joshua Nelson. Write Tom in the chat if you know who Tom Brady is, right? Tom Brady is Tom Brady, quarterback, you know, big-time star here in the States. Recently had a documentary called— yeah, the GOAT, right? Had a documentary called Man in the Arena, right? And I didn't really like Tom Brady very much, but I watched it anyways. And one of the last episodes, the producer— it's right at the beginning of the show— the producer's like, hey, you need to tell a story. And Tom's like, oh, I need to tell a story? He's like, yeah. So he tells this old fable that Tom believes in. I'm going to explain it to you guys because I think this is the roller coaster that we have. He's like— Tom says this, he's like, hey, one day You know, a farmer, his horse— he has horses and his horse runs away and his neighbors come over and they say, oh my gosh, that's so horrible. You lost your horse. That's not— you know, that's such a horrible thing to have happen. And the farmer goes, well, maybe. The next day, the horse comes back and it brings a whole bunch of other horses with it. And the neighbors come over and they're like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. You've got 4 more horses. This is incredible. And the farmer says, maybe. The next day, the kid— his son is riding one of the new horses and he bucks off and breaks his leg. And the neighbors come over, they're like, oh my gosh, it's so horrible. Your kid broke his leg. And the farmer says, maybe. And then the next day, the army comes and starts drafting kids and all the neighbors come over and say, you're so blessed. Your son didn't have to, you know, go into war because he broke his leg. And he said, maybe. Right? And Tom's point was sometimes those things that happen to you, whether you win a Super Bowl or lose a Super Bowl, sometimes it's the best thing or the worst thing, or you don't know what it is until the future.

Right.

So those lessons you learn, or that client that cancels— now we had a client, client that canceled for— that was paying us $250,000 a year. That's a lot, right? Or I think it's $350,000 actually. $350,000 a year, they canceled. And obviously in the moment you're like, oh my gosh. But at the end of the day, it was actually one of the best things that happened to us. It allowed us to disperse and not have such a client focus, uh, in our agency and our revenue, things like that. So I just think it's such a cool story to see. Um, even Tom Brady, he was talking about even when he won Super Bowls, it wasn't the best thing for him because some of the motivation was lost. Then when he lose a Super Bowl, the motivation would be there, right, to push him. And it's, it's those things that can kind of do things like that to prepare you for the roller coaster. But at the end of the day, staying fairly even is where you kind of want to be. There are ups and downs and where we go, but trying to take some of the emotion out of it helps with that is kind of, I guess, what I'm saying. So anything else on the emotional roller coaster, Brittany?

No, no. Just have good people around you. I think that's the most important thing.

Great. Yeah, so build a strong network. You know, my sister always talks about the tribe, my middle sister, not the teacher. She talks about having a tribe around you and be able to build you up, not those people that always say, hey, you shouldn't do that, you can't do that, that's too risky, all that stuff. Those are— you don't always want people to say, yeah, you should do it too. You want people that are very balanced in both areas. And that's what I really appreciate about Brittany's relationship, right? Is where she very much balances me when I'm emotional. And I think I try to do the same for her through it. Right? We talk about, we have clients that have made us, that won't want to talk to one of us. Right? She had a client that, believe it or not, actually didn't want to talk to her. I had no idea. That said, she was too bubbly or whatever. Right? And he didn't want to deal with her. So I dealt with him and then vice versa. And then at the end of the day, sometimes those clients aren't the right people for you. For you in your, in your, in your agency anyways. Tip number 4 would be reputation. Reputation matters, right? Brittany, I'll let you take this one here.

Sure. I mean, we've seen over time how one bad experience, of course, it can have a domino effect, right? One person hears one story, comes to you, and you have to justify yourself to the next person. And so making sure that you have a good reputation, I think at the root of that is making sure you have good business ethics, making sure that you're doing the right thing for everybody. Whether it's obviously the end client for you guys, for us, it's both white label partners and clients. Michael and I sleep well at night knowing that we're always doing the right thing. We've always tried to make it fair, make sure that everybody's taken care of. And so when someone's unhappy, it's really not hard for us to go back in and say, okay, here's kind of the storyline. And, and we can get into that if you want. But Essentially, making sure that you're getting the good experiences and you're using that as far as your perceived authority, right? I think that's a really important thing that we didn't do for a long time. And for us, it's hard because with white label partners, they don't necessarily want to disclose that they're using a provider. So that was a big challenge that we had to overcome. And the other thing is just, I think it's funny that we all try and go out and collect reviews, but I don't know that a lot of people necessarily love giving them. And so finding new ways to get those. For us, we actually started doing interviews with our partners, not to get ourselves talked about at all, but it ended up being that way as we were kind of going through those agency success stories. And that was one way that we were then able to kind of leverage, you know, I guess our name and show that we had a decent reputation. So, Michael, do you have anything to add?

I think that's great. I think you kind of hit it that, you know, obviously reputation matters. And we actually had some people say that, you know, you're one— I mean, Not that this isn't great, you're an agency that doesn't have a 5-star review. And that was actually what made us believe your reviews were reputable, at least, right? Not everybody's gonna love everybody, and that's okay, right? We all choose to do business with who we want. And at the end of the day, some people aren't gonna like you, and that's okay. And we just really try to document the process so that both teams have the same expectation, things like that. So build a business and team that reflects your values and ethics. That's kind of what we talk about there. Number 5, I'm sure you all have heard this from Jim Collins in Good to Great, even though that book, I think, uh, something like 70% of the companies have now failed, right? But the lessons in the, in the book are, are valid, at least for me. And I very much saw it, uh, in our agency where right people, right seats, right? So you can have the right people working in your company, but they might not be doing the right thing. They're not passionate about it. They might not love that job or they're not— their skill set's not there. When you move them to a new seat, they're great. Sometimes you have the right seats but not the right people in there, right? And that's kind of how I kind of look at it. Every time we have somebody in here and they're struggling, we always ask the question, is it people or a process or is it the seat, right? We always ask those questions around right people, right seat and what they're doing.

Ready? Yeah, this is one of my favorite things actually. We— I just wrapped a SEO meeting yesterday, and I had all of the team follow our People Analyzer. If you're part of EOS, you know that the People Analyzer takes your company's core values. You take on one side your whole team, and then you rate them against your bar, basically where everybody should inevitably be if they are the right fit for your team. And we had our whole team do it and keep it to themselves. I don't want people to have to share it. It's kind of personal when they're reflecting on this. But it was very cool to actually have them participate in this. And we went over All of this essentially is making sure that you really have passion for what you do. So as a manager, it's making sure that everybody here feels supported with their education, with where they're headed. We just opened up career paths in our agency, and so that was what we were kind of going over. And I had so many people reach out to me afterwards to say, like, I feel so motivated, like, this was what we needed. We needed a way to kind of look forward to the next thing. And so this is actually a little itty-bitty snapshot of our older structure when we were a smaller team. And this is how we're, you know, Michael and I always feel like we're kind of there to support the team. So it's like if you were to flip this upside down, but this is how EOS lays it out. And Michael and I are at the top, the visionary, you know, your implementer, making sure that we're carrying the ship right, we're headed in the right direction. And then each person below that usually has someone who's either helping them, managing them, And this helps us identify a few things as we lay this out. Usually it's where we have a seat that needs to be filled, and then where we have the right support system for each little section. So I recommend doing this in your agency, especially if you have— I think if you have VAs, this is also an important thing. You know, everybody's here in-house with us, but I think if you're managing a lot of people, This is a great way to set it up. And then sit down with your people and ask them, are you passionate about this? Do they have the capacity to do it? That was another part of the People Analyzer that's really great. Do they get it? Do they want it? Do they have the capacity? And those are really important questions that need to be answered. Sometimes you have great team members, really smart, you know, they can do the job, but they just never really hit the mark. Maybe they're just not in the right seat. We have Lisa, who a lot of you probably know if you work with us. She's bounced around from being a website manager to an SEO account manager to being our client success manager, because we knew Lisa had the right, the right personality to be in this business. She hit on our people analyzer, the core values. But did she get certain positions or did she want certain positions? Those are the things that would flip. And so we would try and find the right spot for her. And sure enough, we did. Her passion is customer service. And so she loves being on that front end. But it took a little bit of time to get her there and figure it out. But the most important thing is that you work with the right people to get there. You don't just, you know, in my opinion, you don't just throw someone away who really does embody a lot of your core values. That's hard to find, in my opinion.

Yeah. And I think one of the things that, as we went through the EOS process, that we saw was hiring for passion or putting people in their passion positions, right? Once you do that, then— I mean, I know everyone says it's not really a job anymore, but they're just, they're significantly more passionate about it, about the position, right? And, and they're more bought in and all of that, right? So, uh, Jay, what's up, man? I'd see you on here too. Uh, I appreciate the video. I like when people have videos so I can at least read some body language. Uh, he asked, do you, uh, do you do EOS and core value exercise with leadership or the entire team? When we first did it It was just Brittany and I with our EOS coach, and we laid out what we wanted our core values to be, right? And I think those needed to be defined by those people that you want, you know, to run the agency. And that's Brittany and I, right? I didn't want a contractor to, you know, for me to say no to one of their core values when it wasn't something that I believed in or whatever it may be, right? So we first did our core values of what we wanted the agency to stand for and the 4 or 5 things that we measured people across, right? So it was just her and I in a room duking it out about our core values.

I think anybody who believes in your mission could participate in this exercise. You know, with the OS, what our coach had us do was like throw just words out. Michael and I sat there and he wrote them all on the whiteboard, and then we narrowed it because there were certain words that meant the same thing, right, or they meant something similar. And so that's how we got to ours. So it's up to you. But I do think it's going to be the people who understand the mission of the company to be able to sit through and then say, okay, what does this mean in terms of our values? But it's, it's really teachable.

And there was one question we missed before was Kevin asked, do you use a scorecard?

We used to, yeah, the scorecard before we got Baremetrics, we did use a scorecard. The Baremetrics resembles a lot of that. For our sales guy, I would say that once upon a time we were using something very similar for his KPIs, like how many calls did we have, right? We made a lot of those metrics to see if we were on track with our pipeline. And I think that's very helpful to get started. I think ours has transformed over time. And as we got larger, as we really just knew our groove, we didn't necessarily need the whole spreadsheet and going through each one of those all the time. But if it's a tool that helps you, then I recommend keeping it.

And this kind of gets to the point, right? Have measurable KPIs, you know, audit performance regularly and, you know, reward often is kind of— we just took what Nate and Drew had for Tax Pro Marketers in the last mastermind that we had there where they give some days off, right? We now set up our structure to provide for that. If they hit certain KPIs and do certain things and we measure their performance, they'll get that reward, right? So that's kind of how we did take that information. It isn't a full week off, but we do have a couple of days off to start the implementation of it, to see how it affects our agency and kind of go from there. So that's, uh, tip number 5. Oh, here we go, number, number 6, right? Uh, take this one, Brittany. This is you.

Yes. Um, having great leaders in your company is, I think, what, what transformed our agency. Obviously, Michael is a fantastic CEO, um, but sometimes CEOs aren't great people.

People aren't great people. Hold on a second. You didn't need to stutter there a couple times.

Uh, I think it's a special talent to manage people. It's called adult babysitting, in my opinion, sometimes. And so every so often you're going to find that your time just does not need to be spent there. And you need somebody who really likes to train, really likes to have those conversations. I— it's funny because I'm a bit of an introvert and I'm not necessarily a people person, but I really love to lead. I think I, I have a strength there to be able to have those conversations in a thoughtful way with people who are struggling or whatever it is. But I highly recommend that you get some great leaders in your company who can take over that side of your business, because this allowed Michael to focus on what he really needed to do and not be in the weeds and in the mix of all the issues, right? If you're a CEO and you're still looking in your clients' campaigns, I would probably ask you why, because your attention should probably be focused where you need to scale and where you need to, again, drive the ship and get someone who can do that for you. That was something that I think really changed for Few and Blocks was to have me step in and handle a lot of those issues.

So, Michael, I think stepping in and then me finally stepping away, right, that took a long time, right, for me to step away and to let— to trust in that space, right? So, uh, I know it's not easy as the owner, right? Um, and nobody's gonna do it the way that exactly how you think it should be done, but that doesn't mean that that's the only way it can be done. Right? And if you have somebody that you can somewhat train, but they can put their spin on it as well, and that's Brittany, what Brittany's kind of done for the passionate leadership that we have. And then, you know, the check-ins with the team, making sure how they're feeling, things like that. We have, you know, a weekly support meeting with the Bionic team every week, checking in on things. Sometimes we talk about more serious issues. Hey, this is how we need to address tickets, do things like this. Sometimes I think the last meeting we were like, hey, if you could be any superhero, what would you be, right? Having more things like that to kind of to do that stuff. Um, so get to know your team beyond their skill set and support their passions is really— we used to have somebody that worked with us that was super passionate about music, so anytime we got a music client, he worked on them, right? And knowing those types of things helps, helps in that space. So number 7, buy versus build, right? So this one came kind of late in our— when we were building this presentation, I was on a mastermind call. Two people were leading it, one guy from MIT and a lady from Stanford. So much smarter people than me. And they were— the lady one day just very blatantly came out and said, hey, it's buy versus build. You buy the things that are not your unique proposition position, right? So whatever you're uniquely good at, that's what you need to build, right? Everything else you should buy. And that was her. And for me, it really opened my eyes to how I think it should be done, right? So like for hosting, I don't own physical hardware because I'm not a— I'm not— that's not our unique thing is this piece of, you know, a hard drive, SSD hard drive or whatever it may be. It's our customer support. And our way to address the speed on the sites. That's what we want to build, or the platform to build the hosting around Google servers or AWS servers or whatever it may be, right? I didn't go out and build the servers themselves, right? We get that question sometimes and I'm like, nope, that's not what we're great at. We're great at this, right? And I think it really helps, gives you clarity on what you should do in regards to where you should spend your time and how you should grow things and focus on things, right? So things we bought, like in the SEO world, a keyword ranking tool. I spent $80,000 one year trying to build my own keyword ranking tool. Don't know why I did it, just because I thought I could do it for cheaper and have a better solution. Didn't work out. It's actually something that's really hard to do is to build that tool, right? So we buy that. Right. Bookkeeping support. Could I do the bookkeeping? Probably. Right. But I'd rather not have my time spent there. So we buy that, right? Whether that's, you know, our project management tool, could we use Excel or different things? Yes. But is it as robust and provide as good a value to our clients? No. Right. VideoAsk, those types of things. What we built, you know, our own white label reporting dashboard, our hosting solution platform. Right. We have actually a really cool internal content ordering system that's all run on bidding for our writers to come in and bid stuff. When a piece of content gets released, it's set at a lower price and after 1 or 2 days, it increases in price and we'll pay them more if nobody wants to claim it. And you know, we produce 300, 400, 500 articles a month in our agency currently. And this is how we are able to do that by having this system that with these writers in there, things like that. But we built that because we were spending significant amount of money there. And I was like, our content is important. We want to be able to produce this and we want to be able to own it, right? And that's kind of what we did. So, um, I think, you know, define what you really want to do and learn how to do it really well. And that's kind of what our tip was on the buy versus build. Brittany, do you have anything you want to add on that?

Sure. Don't get trapped in AppSumo too long with buying. It's, you know, you gotta look at again, what do you really wanna be known for? Obviously for 51Blocks, it was fulfillment, great quality fulfillment, great customer service, our people. We, you know, that's why we have our team in-house. That's why we train them all by hand because we wanna make sure that we're producing the best experience. Possible that a client and a white label partner can get. But yeah, I think it's, it's such an important point. We've tried to even build like our own internal way to manage clients, like we called it the admin, but it was this tool that basically would house all of our important information. It was before I think we were in Monday. And I remember going through all the QA and all the things and then we inevitably just scrapped it like a year later and used, you know, what we have now, but it— you look back and you're like, wow, I spent a lot of time there, probably didn't need to. But, you know, you take your hits as you, as you pick certain things that you think you need to focus on at the time. I think this is just a great tip to try and be efficient and again, effective. Efficiency and how effective you can be are really important.

Yeah.

So like we've gone through all 7 here. You leverage the right automation, you map and measure goals, you set up a strong network of support people. You build a business and team that reflects your values, provide training and measurable KPIs, and get to know your team beyond their skill sets and define what you want to do versus, you know, what you want to learn, right? Um, one last little tip, you know, and I think everyone's kind of seeing this obviously, building authority through sharing knowledge, right? And that's what Josh is pretty amazing at. He, you know, gives so much and, you know, everybody loves him for it, but at the end of the day, we all still pay him money, right? So it's kind of funny how It all kind of works, right? But he's really good at building the authority through knowledge and position himself as, you know, obviously his agency's doing great and the same type of thing. We've kind of started to do the same thing with our Digital Marketing Playground. That's actually where this talk came from. We actually presented it there first and I think Justin or Josh saw it and asked us to present it here, right? So those are— you can join that Facebook group. Here's a bunch of other stuff we always kind of give away. Uh, things like that. And, you know, more than happy to answer any questions people want to come on, or Brett, if you got other people on Facebook Live that want to answer the questions. Isaac, I know you said that was after you built a very successful agency. What about in the beginning? I think you're talking about, uh, what your client retention rate would be. I think in the beginning, the, the reason I said kind of what I said is I think your retention rate should be very low, less than 1%, right? Because if you're losing 1 or 2 clients It takes you a month or two to get one or two clients. That's a very tough grind. So you've got to be able to keep those clients and keep them engaged, show the value, all of that. And that's why I think I really struggled once we got to, you know, you know, $500,000 to $1 million. I was still struggling with cancels because I still had the same mindset as if I was a brand new agency. So that's something to keep in mind. I do think it's under 1%. When you're smaller. But, you know, I think Alan, Alan was on this and he was still here. I don't— based on what he said, he hasn't lost clients in like 7 years. Right. So the guy has a zero cancellation rate. He's really good. So it all obviously depends based on your industry. But it's, it's kind of— I think it's much smaller when you're, when you're a smaller agency and does grow a little bit when you're bigger. And then I think that's the struggle, right? Any time we have a super low month and our retention rate drops, we see a huge bump in revenue. And obviously that makes sense, right? It's so much easier to keep a client than get a new one, right? So that's kind of that. So go back to slide 7. Sure. I don't know which one that one was, but— oh, the 7 tips.

Great.

Right there. Cool.

And I put our Facebook group in the chat. If people want to grab these slides, they're in there with the same presentation.

OK, cool. Great, great. OK, I see it. Yep, I appreciate that. Anything else from anybody? All right, if not, everyone have a great day. Thank you for all joining. We'll see you, I'm sure, in the December event in Miami or on Facebook World.

Yes, we'll be there in March.

All right.

Oh, March.

Yeah, all right. See you.