The Just Sell Method

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're going to be doing something really, really special today. We're going to be talking about what we call the Just Sell Method, which is proprietary method by 51Blocks. One of the best white label agencies that I know in terms of really just helping you deliver world-class service to your clients without having to feel like you have to do it all yourselves. And, you know, at the beginning I asked, you know, what's, what's the breakdown in the room? And I'd love it if you guys could just engage with me in the comments here and let me know. Um, one, if you're in-house right now, like you do everything in-house. Two, if you've got a little bit of a combination, maybe you do some white label, maybe you do some Outsourcing. And 3, if you're all white label, like it's all white labeled out and you can just focus on selling, even down to maybe the client fulfillment and customer service management. All right, well, too many comments for me to read them all out, but we got Ken is 1, Lucas is 1, Richard is 2, Bob is 2. Excellent. So we got a good mix here. We got some people in-house, some people subcontracted, some people a combination of both. Fantastic. And then in the comments, just so, just so Michael and Brittany know, what do you do? Like, do you— what kind of agency do you consider yourself? Do you consider yourself a pay-per-click agency, an SEO agency, a full-service agency? For those of you that were on early, I apologize for the redundancy of the question, but it does, it helps to kind of fill in some of the gaps. All right, mostly full-service. And then, you know, I'm a big advocate for being a full-service agency, right? Because if you get your hands in their website and their SEO and their pay-per-click, you're going to be stickier. You're also going to be able to generate better results, right, by blending it across the board. So, all right, last question, and then I'm gonna— I'm gonna introduce Michael and Brindley. We're gonna get into the content. Um, like, are you a niche agency or are you a generalist agency? Put that in the comments. Niche, like you work with chiropractors or you work with roofers Or are you a generalist? Okay, generalist for now, says John. Alex says niche. Okay, mostly niche, but a little bit of generalist. You know, you know, here at 7 Figure Agency, I'm a big fan of being niche-focused, right? Having a very specific offering for a very specific niche, positioning yourself as the go-to expert. But good, that gives us a good sense of what we've got and who's here. So as you look to grow and scale your agency, right, we have to solve for a couple things. We gotta land clients. We've got to deliver the results. We've got to retain those clients and create a great experience. And then we've got to scale the team, right? If we want to really have a business that provides money, freedom, and impact, we've got to do all 4 of those things. And oftentimes, if you're trying to be great at delivery, you're trying to be great at sales, you're trying to be great at client retention, something starts to give, right? And there's, there's really a thought that you should always be thinking, and that's Sometimes it's better to ask who than how, right? So asking the question how is like, okay, so how do I do better SEO? How do I do better pay-per-click? How do I do better Facebook ads? And you want to learn it, and then you want to test it, and then you want to do it. And sometimes that's like writing a blank check, right? How many of you guys— just give me a yes in the comments— if you've ever spent hours in training, hours in learning to try and figure out how to do something only to realize you're nowhere near being a master at that skill. You're nowhere near being able to do it well. Lots of it, right? And so that's who. It's like writing a blank check. Sometimes it's better to ask— sometimes that's how. Sometimes it's better to ask who. Like, there are people that have mastered these skills. There are people that already do this at a very world-class level. And sometimes— I'm not saying this is for all of us or for everybody on the call— But sometimes it's better to say, let me focus on selling, proving my business model, proving that I can, you know, actually get clients to pay for these services and let someone else do the delivery, right? And like, who would be best to do that? And so I just wanted to start us off with that thought. And so with that said, I wanna welcome Michael and Brittany from 51Blocks. Thank you guys so much for being on with us today.

Thanks, Josh, for having us.

Yep, thank you, sir. Appreciate it.

Amazing. I'm gonna try and spotlight you guys and, um, let me hand it—

let me hand it off.

Like, this is something you guys have been doing white label for years. You've really kind of moved to this Just Sell Method. So I want to let you guys explain this to the group, unpack it, and I'm really excited to have you guys run with this.

Awesome, cool, let's do it, Brittany.

All right, I'm gonna—

we're just seeing your face now after seeing all those faces.

You're used to my face. All right, let's go ahead. Can everybody see this okay?

Yep. Cool.

Awesome. Well, Michael, I think you can introduce everyone and then I'll take it over.

Yeah, yeah. So, um, you know, we're from 51Blocks. We're a white label digital marketing agency, uh, you know, started in 2009 and, uh, in 2015 switched to complete— to be a completely white label solution. Um, Recently, as of 6 to 7 months ago, we kind of changed our positioning to this just sell method. And that's— it's really become much clearer to everybody we talk to and kind of what we do and how it's approached. And, and yeah, that's kind of what we're here to talk about is, is this— Brittany, did you want anything?

Yeah. So I think if you've heard of us in the past, we used to be a little bit more of the traditional model. Michael and I opened our ears and listened to all the feedback we were getting, right? Where were the major pain points from our partners? What support did they need? And then as a white label provider, one of the hardest things that we have, I think any white label provider feels this, is not being able to help with things like, uh, churn, right? Not having our hands on operations, not being able to really be a part of a full agency model, but we're just like one component inserted into someone else's business. And so part of this and what we— why we developed this was because we wanted to make sure that we gave complete support top to bottom and our partners could focus on selling. So yeah, that's where we kind of developed this from. There's been a lot of changes at our own agency that have helped support this. Everything from our content creation all the way to our client-facing services has evolved because of this. So Yeah, we're excited to share with you guys kind of what this is, how it helps. The other thing for us is that we're able to help anybody. People who want a side hustle all the way to the established agency owner can leverage this service now, which has made it a very exciting thing for us to expand our market in addition to helping people. So we'll go ahead and dive in. Michael?

Yeah, just quick high level of who we are. You know, like I said, a computer science background. I helped coach some agencies here in the 7 Figure Agencies for a while. Very passionate about site speed. Actually launched a WordPress hosting solution, BionicWP, just to focus on site speed. And we kind of say at Bionic that if you say the words, "Go talk to your developer," that's like saying a curse word, right? So we really try to fix those problems that you run into with hosting, things like that. I'd say I authored 4 books, but Brittany really helped do that. Most, my mom is more, excited that I actually wrote a book than anything I've ever done in my life. And I don't have the heart to tell her that Brittany wrote most of it, but my name's on it. But yeah, that's kind of who I am. And Brittany, go ahead.

Yeah, I, so I primarily run the show at 51Blocks. Now, you can see that we have a lot of businesses. Michael and I also have a Facebook group that we run. We have another agency called white-label-seo.io. And of course, he just spoke to Bionic. But I help kind of manage everything here at 51Blocks. So if you've met me through the sales process, or I'm the one who's helping with the team, that's usually where you're going to find me these days. Um, we actually had an exciting moment. I will say, if Josh tells you to write a book, write a book, because we had a moment last week where someone held our book up on a sales call and just gave me shivers. Like it was the most exciting thing. So definitely write your books because it's, it's very cool. All right. Uh, so we can talk a little bit about the major pain points. So if you look at this little model, we've essentially taken the thoughts that tend to pop into your head at some point. Um, and I think for us, you know, looking at the way Josh always models this, as your agency grows, at some point it typically is going to break and you have to decide on which way you're going to go with it. Whether you hire more team members, whether you look at your processes and your systems, uh, whether you just decide none of this is for me and I'd like to just sell. A lot of the times when we run into people, this is something that they're typically thinking. Michael, do you have anything to expand on that?

Oh yeah, I think it's all these pain points that you run into as you run your agency that as you kind of grow, you're like, Jesus, you know, I, you know, before Brittany came in, I would spend a lot of my vacations not on vacation, right? Doing fixing issues within the agency as they come in or like, like I kind of make jokes all the time about my hairline, right? That comes from managing clients, right? So if you don't want a hairline like this, you get somebody else. To help manage it and help you, uh, help you do that. Or if, you know, you wish you could, you know, just focus on sales, that's like— I mean, Sean Denon is a perfect example of this. He's come in and just leveraged us to do everything else, and all he does is go and sell, right? And he's like the perfect model of this, growing your agency that way, uh, through this solution. So, but these are the type of pain points that people come into. We're going to jump into each pain point and talk about you know, how to address those with a white label partner, and then kind of how we address them. So good.

So right before we get into that, this is a little bit more about what we're going to be covering kind of in this session, showing you guys how we operate in terms of supporting all of these areas. Everything that we do in our agency, what we try and figure out is how do we take care of this so that our partners can completely sell. And then in addition, I know we just mentioned Sean Dennon. We actually brought him in to start doing sales coaching at our agency as well. So it really is, you can see it kind of encompasses every area of your business. So let's talk about the first pain point right here. Michael, why don't you get started and then I'll follow up with some.

Yeah, so it's like the pain point is I don't understand how to, I don't understand how to, you know, do reseller pricing or services. To even sell to my clients, right? And these are the tips for success here, right? You research your white label. And usually when I first started off, I would say, hey, 2x is too much, right? Because that value gap. But now because of the value gap that we can create or that we can overcome, you can 2x the pricing, right? So now you immediately have 50% margins is really how that comes into. And in the agency world, I think anywhere we talk about 20 to 50% is pretty good. Obviously you're gonna have some costs with your sales and things like that. So maybe you end up around 40, you know, that's obviously a very, really good for a business, right? We always kind of say, hey, follow the 7FA model with their 3 pricing packages. That's how we help support in this space. Don't overcomplicate it or over-customize. You just be careful with too little value or single price options is really what we say. Like, when somebody tries to mark it up 4 or 5 times, that's where we've seen issues that clients are like, hey, what am I paying for? I see this work, but They feel like there should be more, right? And understanding the level of support you're gonna have to give from your sales provider. So yeah, just those are the tips for success when you don't understand how to work with a reseller, right? Is make sure you have those options, follow the 7 Figure Agency, the training in the modules, and don't overcomplicate things. I think overcomplicating the things is very common for all of us. I think as entrepreneurs, we'd like to do that. And then we're like, what did we build here? And then you come back and kind of fix it and simplify it. Ready? Go ahead.

Yeah. Yeah. So this is a, it's a really common one I get from people who are just starting out and they're like overwhelmed by the amount of information. So every provider typically looks a little different. If you're doing this in-house, you're figuring out not only how to create the product, but also make sure that you have profitability there. So these kind of go hand in hand when you're looking at creating your packages. I think Josh has done it in the smartest way, which is why we also modeled kind of our own pricing after it. But simplification, as we've seen, is scalable. It's when you try and customize everything for everybody does it become really overcomplicated in your model. So some—

just real quick, even selling right there, right? It's so hard to sell multiple, all these different things. If you just go sell, like, look at In-N-Out, right? In-N-Out is like the perfect example. They give you like 3 choices of cheeseburgers, right? And that place is super successful because that's all you can go there to get, right? And that's that there's a reason for that. Right.

So, yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, and then also understanding kind of what you're buying. So I, I've seen this done in a number of ways where depending on who you go to, they might have like a very cookie cutter package you're buying. They might have like à la carte options for every single thing and you have to put it together, which is when you're gonna need that strategic eye in order to do that. Um, or you can have providers who are very fluid and customizable based on the client's goals, which is kind of how we try and approach everything. So understanding how much need of your effort needs to go into creating the product is really important here because you're gonna have to be the one that pitches it. So you're gonna have to make sure you understand like every aspect of it. So these are some tips on going to any provider. And throughout this, you're gonna see that we're kind of just giving general ideas on how to make this work. Doesn't have to be, of course, with us, but we can talk a little bit about how we support in this space. A big, big thing we get is, do you have case studies? How do I market this? Can you help me close deals? These are all areas that we have identified as points in getting started that can be really, really hard and challenging. And so we've offered our support to our partners in this way, understanding that because we created the product, we can speak to it really, really confidently and well. Same with the workflow, right? How do we get started? What's the onboarding like? These are all motions that are going to take you some understanding. So we've decided in our model that, you know what, we'll put ourselves in that seat and help explain this to any of the prospects that our partners have if they need any of that support. Michael, maybe you could talk a little bit about HighLevel and how we use that.

Yeah, I'll talk a little bit first about like, I suck at sales, right? That's why we're a white label company. And then as I built that and as we were kind of building this out, I was like, okay, how can we provide more sales material to people, right? And one of them was getting the best trainer, I think, in 7 Figure Agency about sales, Sean Dennon, right? And now he will get on a private, pretty much a private call because the groups are very small and address, you know, any questions and issues on how to sell this. And I think that's the biggest thing to overcome. And then I was like, okay, if we have that and we have the ability, how do we track these leads? How do we do all that? We give you guys access to our, to a GoHighLevel account that you can have inside of your agency under our brand. So you don't have to spend that money right away until you get up and running further along. Or if you're a bigger agency and you don't have a CRM yet, you can leverage that as well. And that's kind of where we've thrown— like, I've tried to— we've tried to think about— I say I because I'm the furthest thing from a salesperson. So I'm like, how do I solve this problem? Right? So the CRM solution is, you know, we were using HighLevel. We give support on closing deals. Like, I'm much more confident in a sales call when Brittany's on with me. In it, right? And that's what she'll jump in and help you, help you do that on some of these deals where if it's a bigger deal and you don't know how to talk to something, having another person in the room just builds trust in that space as well. And then having it all branded underneath your email is how we kind of do it. So we're communicating if you need us to help communicate. But go ahead, Brittany.

Yeah, no, that's perfect. I usually tell people you can call me whenever you like, right? I'm joining the call as the operations person, as the SEO expert, as the other salesperson. But the goal here is that It's a win-win, right? If we help support our partners in closing deals, it's a win-win for everybody. So that's why we like to offer our time and support to be able to do that.

And if you see the column here under your job, it's the most you're going to have to do, and is under the sales part. Everything else you're going to see, it's just going to say just sell, right? And that's on purpose, right? So that's a little teaser to the information later, but go ahead. You gotta take this one.

All right. So the next pain point is usually about onboarding existing clients to a new agency. This is super common. You know, you've had 5 clients, you've managed them the whole time. Like, oh my gosh, what are— how are we gonna ever like pass the trust basically or get them on board? So something that's really important to do when you're looking at either outsourcing this or to be honest, just hiring a new person and trying to create that trust is to make sure that you understand what the process is gonna look like to introduce them. So if you go to another vendor, understand what their onboarding process looks like. Are they involved in some way to make sure that the client is nice and smooth? One example that we do is we'll sit down with our partners and do these like pre-planning sessions now, where we can actually go through and say, okay, what have you done? And where would you like us to pick up? And then we go through like our task board on the call and try and identify areas that we can swap out or things that we can do. Our goal is to make it very seamless. So in a lot of cases, what you want to make sure that you're doing is understanding how the vendor or person is going to be getting access points, what understanding they need from you to be able to kind of close that gap and make sure that your clients feel well taken care of. In our world, for us, we always say it's as simple as saying you've hired on a new team member, you've introduced a new software to the agency that's going to give them ultimate transparency. So our ability to get a legacy client into our agency is actually pretty easy. It's more so just understanding that there's going to take a little bit of effort, maybe join a couple of calls with your new team or with your partners and see how that goes. Michael?

I just think the onboarding process is so key, and I think we all talk about it. If that goes smoothly, the trust is built. I think if nothing else, you know, reach out to us and steal our onboarding process. We've been doing it a long time, right? Take all the data that we're collecting. And build it as your own, right? That's, if nothing else, that's something we're welcome to give that and provide that through the process. I just think the smoother onboarding is, the better the relationship goes from day one. Just think of any time you interact with a service company and the first communications are very difficult. It's already set in your mind that this whole thing is going to be difficult, right? Where if it's very smooth, it just goes well.

So yeah, and we taught that in a ninja hack. I don't know, Josh, if you remember, we did the video, ask It has worked so well at our agency. It's scalable.

Yeah, it's really cool.

It's super cool. And I mean, the best part about it is that our partners have a preview of it so they can actually see exactly what their clients are going to walk through before they decide whether or not they want their clients to use it. So it's—

and using the video ask, you can do it in 3 different ways, collecting information. If you're somebody like me that shouldn't be on camera that much, you can just type and And talk is speech, right? If you like to be on camera, there's a video option as well. So there's so many different options that you can use through VideoAsk in the onboarding that makes the collection of information so much easier.

Yeah, for sure. All right. So this is what we do in our world for onboarding. So we welcome clients. We have dedicated client success managers that will reach out. One of the things we changed in our agency recently that has really helped is that We've asked clients what they prefer in their communication. Do they prefer monthly calls? Do they prefer Loom videos? We have a ton of home services at our agency. A lot of those guys are out in the field and they are not interested in always hopping on a Zoom call. So we ask their preference, and this has allowed us to really tailor the experience by client instead of trying to fit everybody into our workflows. We're able to really make sure that we're addressing the client first and what they prefer, and then we kind of go from there. Making sure we follow up on access points, assisting with literally anything. In fact, after this speech, I'm hopping on a Zoom call to help a client get through just sharing access points because it's just that much easier to quickly do it on a Zoom. And then making sure that we follow up as much as possible in that first 30 days. They're going to get lots of communication from our side of things. This is something that I think is key in any agency, and I know Josh teaches this, but Making sure that first 30 days you get everybody, just make sure everything's running smoothly. That's really important for overall retention.

Yeah, I think one other thing we— there's two things that we've kind of done that I would recommend anybody doing. We call it a pizza tracker, right? And that's constantly updating people on where they're at all the time in the process so they never have to ask. We used to get multiple emails, hey, what's going on? What's next in my campaign? Can we get this going? But with the pizza tracker, it lays it all out. Tells them each step of the way, these 7 steps. This one takes 1 to 2 days. This one takes 3 to 4 days, whatever. So they're always in the know of it. And the other thing we just recently launched was a 30-day or a 21-day update of just our onboarding process of what's going on. So that more communication I find is better early on.

So yeah, for our partners, it's the 20 days of onboarding. It gets an email every day and some form of education or tip. We've created. So, and that's all from like our learning moments, just working with people, which is really, really good. Alright, cool. Next pain point.

Go ahead.

Alright, this is probably the most common, right, is that you've gone through a white label provider, one you didn't like. Now there are different reasons for everybody as to why they don't like it. But the most common one we do see is that they didn't feel like they delivered on what they said they would I think for every provider out there, they would say expectations are key, making sure you understand their delivery times, how they're going to communicate, and what the product actually is, is super, super important before you ever sign on with them. So that's something that I would say and recommend to anybody who's using an outsourced provider, especially if you're managing the clients and they're just doing backend fulfillment, making sure that you understand these things are going to be key in retaining your clients or keeping their expectations in line, making sure that you understand And what level of transparency they're gonna give you is also super important. Now at our agency, we're 100% transparent and we're month to month. So our goal has always been to make sure that the team is held accountable and our partners can see anything that we're doing at any time. Same with their clients. But not all agencies are built like this, right? There's some that just kind of get the work done and they do it behind the scenes. There's some that might give you a little monthly update, but knowing what you're gonna get from them is gonna be really important because when you get that client who gives you a call on a Friday afternoon and asks asks about some update and you don't have it in front of you, you're going to want to make sure that you have the ability to get that information quickly. Making sure that you discover their goals, your client's goals in the sales process. So this is just a tip, I think, from what we typically see is that understanding the goals before the client signs on is really going to be important for us to execute or your provider to execute against those goals. And that way they don't feel like they signed on and didn't get what they were supposed to get. So when we talk about not feeling like providers deliver or something of that nature, sometimes it's because the goals or the understanding of the goals aren't in line. So this is a really great thing to get just carved out in the sales process and then making sure that whatever is being executed is against those goals throughout the entire campaign.

Yeah, I think you could say it 1,000 times and I don't think we say it enough times is expectations. If you set the expectations upfront properly, your lifetime value of that customer is gonna be significantly longer than if you come out and try to close the deal with a 3 or 4-month SEO campaign, right? Like, set the expectation that it's gonna take 6 to 9 months to see this X result, or in a year you should see this. This is not pay-per-click, right? SEO is this, right? And setting those expectations make a huge difference. I always talk about It's no different than when you're in your relationship with my wife. If I say, hey, like I don't tell her what I want to do this weekend and she has other expectations, the weekend doesn't go as smooth as had we both communicated it. Right? And it's the same in business, in my opinion, is if we set the expectation and say, hey, this is what we're going to do, this is how it's going to work. And you're within, you know, you're steering the ship the right way. We're going to make adjustments as we go. But the expectation is this, that relationship is so much smoother.

Awesome. So operations, the biggest space in our business, right? Because we're on the fulfillment side. Because of that pain point, I feel like we mend a lot of broken hearts around here. And you are going to— obviously, we interact with people who might just not like the way we do things. So what we've really tried to do, especially I would say in the last 90 days, is I've kind of taken a deep dive into everything, is that we've tried to customize our workflow support. Because I think we want to make sure that it fits a partner as much as it fits a client in terms of the way things are going. We do a lot of operation support in the form of just keeping people organized. We have lots of partners here that now have their own kind of custom views of things to make sure that whatever feels most important to them, we're keeping our eyes on. And we customize that for them every month or as often as they need. We do everything from like the fire management, if any clients are unhappy, to the standard check-ins. We have tons of measurements of client happiness, KPIs, proactive emails going out to clients before reporting periods to make sure that they understand we're still on top of their goals. We have lots of education around here too. That's the benefit of kind of being— Michael and I being a little bit more in like the nerdy space is that we actually develop a ton of material just to educate on everything. So we allow our partners to leverage that for any needs. And then of course, we take care of all the team management, hiring, recruiting, all that good stuff.

Yeah, I mean, like I said, I shouldn't talk about, you know, the sales part, but with the way that we do, I think it works for my personality, at least in regards to just education. And then it's like, hey, if you want to take us up on it, great. If not, not a big deal, right? Where you should probably take more lessons from Sean than me on how to sell. But that's just how we position it, kind of what we do. And how we try to approach. It's almost kind of like what Josh talks about, the abundance, right? You give and you give back is kind of how it is. And to be honest, at the end of the day, like I think somebody mentioned, you give them expectations, set expectations without guarantees. For sure. That's great. I think if somebody is unhappy at the end of the day, I'd obviously work with them to come to a resolution that would make sense and doing business the right way through operations kind of. Go ahead.

Right. This is a big one. Mostly I see this for smaller agencies, but I would rather manage my own clients because they know and trust me. So I can't tell you how many times I've seen the agency owner become their biggest roadblock in scalability, in making sure that things are moving forward. There's something called death by fulfillment, and that's taking on too much yourself so that you, you aren't able to sell, you aren't able to focus on those things. A lot of people come to us and this is the spot they're currently in. They have a handful of clients, they do it all themselves, and they are unable to focus on growing because they're too busy focusing on fulfillment. So, um, this is something that I would say be careful of because like I said, you will become your biggest roadblock if you don't find the solution on how you're going to end up expanding that. And again, it could be hiring someone, finding a vendor that fits your needs. Um, but this is a big one, understanding how The provider will give you enough support and communication is also, again, key. We talked about that here in the operations space, but making sure that you feel supported, it's different than just making sure that they're fulfilling. This is really ensuring that you have a team on your side who's going to be there whenever you need them. There are definitely times where we're just answering small questions, or there's times when I'm hopping on sales calls, doing full quotes, like We dazzle and do the whole show for them. And whatever that is, you want to make sure that your provider is open to things. So this is a really big one for us too. And then making sure that, of course, clients understand what they're buying. So when we— back 6 years ago, when I came here, we had our account managers client-facing, and people, clients would get so married to their faces that they would almost get upset when you had to move things around or people left, whatever it was. If you have account managers, you've probably been through this before. So something that we did that was actually pretty smart is we developed the client success manager role, which was 100% a concierge. It's a dedicated person to communication. So we tell clients all the time that they're like a liaison, right? They're gonna go from, you know, whatever is taken from that call to the account manager and get it taken care of. This is still something that I think is super important is that your clients understand what they're paying for. They're not paying for a person, they're, they're paying for results. And as long as you drive home every month, the value and the results, and you become their biggest cheerleader, your team is, that's where I think this really becomes something that you can then step away from and you don't have to get stuck in. Because I see it a lot of the times where the owner, they're the face, right? They're the person that the client knows and trusts, but it is possible for them to know and trust other people too.

I think that's a huge point because it happens in all agencies. It happened in mine. It happens, I think, throughout the processes. You have to kind of shift the way that you sell. You're not buying the person, you're buying, like Brittany said, the result, or at least the process and procedures that they have put in place. And that's a little bit different in the sales process as you go through it when you're smaller, growing, and as you kind of move it through that, you know, passing that trust to that person that's going to be taking over the campaign and then even when that person leaves or moves to a different position. Because it all happens in all agencies. People want different jobs or they move on to different things. It's something that's super important. And then to go back to your other point, how many people feel like, just an answer in the chat, that you've been an own— just say yes if you've been your own roadblock in your agency. I know Brittany could probably write yes for me. A thousand times, right? Because there's times where I've put yes, like I've definitely, you know, put roadblocks and she made me work through them, right? Or I moved them out of the way or just said, Michael, this isn't your space. You do something else here, right? And that like, there was a time where she's like, this isn't your job, right? And that was like, whoa, I'm the owner. But I'm like, it doesn't matter that I'm the owner. She's right. That's not my job. Right? And I was the roadblock and had to remove it. And that's all my job is, is helping her remove roadblocks. But then I was putting roadblocks into place. So it's just something I think we need to, as an entrepreneur or as anybody, as a business owner, it's something you got to think about is the roadblocks that you put in place either just by, usually by accident. I don't think anybody does it on purpose. But then when you sit back and look at it, it's that. And then I really like the quote, death by fulfillment because it's true, right? You gotta avoid that. And that's, that's so good.

Yeah, no, all good. And I think, you know, for all of you who own these businesses, these are your babies. So from a person who is an employee of the business, I will say it, it's very understandable, uh, to see that you're very attached to everything.

But at the end of the day, get the A players into place that Josh talks about, into those— like, he even has a special mastermind just for those people to talk, talk to each other. That's so important. That if you find those people— like Brittany started here as an account manager and within 3 weeks she was very easily elevated because luckily I didn't see a roadblock in my own way and was like, she is a rock star and she needs to— like putting people around you that your weakness. I'm really bad at managing people. I shouldn't be doing that. Right. And understanding that and then finding somebody that's really great at it. And that's how we're able to really work well together.

Yeah, so we can talk about that, people management. If you've done it in the past, sometimes it feels like babysitting until you have the right people in place. So our, you know, our job at our agency has been to constantly recruit. We're always recruiting, partly because we, you know, need to be scalable, but the other side of it is that you should never stop leveling up your talent. And so when it comes to people management, you're training a person to be the face of the agency, to make sure that they're a big cheerleader. We joke about like our tone with clients on email, but you never really know what the person on the other end is going through if they're having a bad day. So we try and be the team that could maybe turn that around for them or be really positive for them. So on our fulfillment side, of course, we do like the day-to-day client management, which can be tough, especially if you have tough clients. We try and roll with them, whatever level of service a client needs, we go with that. Making sure that of course we're fulfilling in the standard sense and then doing a lot of check-ins with people. I think it's tough, like you shouldn't assume that someone's happy just because they're quiet. So we try and make sure that we are at least touching a client every so often and seeing how it's going, especially if they're quiet and ensuring that they see the value. One big question actually Michael taught us to ask on our check-ins is like, what's important to you? What's going on in your life right now? And sometimes you'll find that those client check-ins turn out to be like a therapy session for them. Sometimes we're actually just there for 10 minutes and we're covering very high-level information. But the important thing is that they feel like you, you showed up today and you were there to support them. And that's what we try and train our team to do.

Yeah, I think that's it. And if you've seen every column so far, you just sell, right? That's, that's, that's the focus.

You don't have to do any of that. Right, exactly. It's tough, to be honest. People management as a people manager, it's one of the most draining things when you don't have the right team in place. And so if you feel like it's a, it's a point of stress for you right now, I would highly consider, like Michael did, whether or not you're the right person to even manage the team, or if you even just have the right team in place. If your team is stressing you out, that's a problem. They're either not trained or they don't understand what the expectation is. So those are just areas to address.

I would also say this real quick. If you need to learn how to— when you fire somebody and have them say thank you, you should talk to Brittany. That's what she does. It's amazing how people— how she's able to have people see the same things that we're seeing, but in a way that people appreciate her approach and the way that she addresses it. It's amazing. If you need, I'm going to offer it up because I think it's honestly this magical thing that happens and the way that she approaches it. It's very, very unique and very cool to see. So if anybody ever is in a situation or has a situation like that, that needs to get rid of somebody, I've refereed. I used to referee. I refereed in front of 19,000 people before. I had to fire my first person. I've never been more nervous. I was more nervous to fire that one person. So like I said, Brittany really brings a light to that, that if anybody needs help with that, please reach out. That's— we're here as a resource for that too.

Oh yeah, for sure. I'll give you my, my tips. Breaking up with boys helped in high school. So, all right, um, let's talk about case studies. So this is a big one if you're starting out. This is the hardest thing to get, and this is of course what you show as your authority. Um, we recommend of course just like asking a provider if they have anything. We give this away, um, at our agency. We actually still develop it. I have people who haven't even signed on yet have come to me for case studies, and we've been working on developing those for them. So I think You know, kind of how Josh is, like, we have that same motto, you just share it with anyone who needs it. And it's full circle, right? Usually comes back around. Making sure that you also can leverage your own authority in other, in other ways too. Like, this is interesting. I get a lot of people, people who are on-ramp, people who are just starting, and they have these careers in digital marketing. And I always say just leverage past clients that you've had before as well, like be able to show that through new case studies. They don't always have to be niche-focused, so that's what we provide. This is something that I feel like a lot of people miss an opportunity to showcase, and it's still, to me, it still counts, right? You're able to work in that space. And then also we talk a lot about perceived authority. You know, learn your niche and become the expert. I always like to fake it till you make it. I think this is a really great tip that we've provided to a lot of people too. If you don't have the confidence yet, Just pretend you do. And then eventually, you know, you start to really stack up those clients. You'll, you'll have everything you need. Michael?

Yeah, I mean, it's funny you say, you know, that— I mean, I don't know, I don't know if anybody's ever old enough or knows the movie Boiler Room. They talk about act as if, act as if like you've been there before, right? If you act that way and you can talk that way and you understand the lingo even though you've never done it, you can be that perceived authority in that space, right? And that's it. Like we used to talk in refereeing all the time, and I'm sure people would agree when you see officials, but you fake it until you make it, right? Like you're out there trying to do the best you can until you start to build that confidence that you can, you can do it. And it's the same with running an agency or anything like that. So for sure.

So this is where a lot of our partners get value from us as they get started. Our whole partner center is just full of information, swipeable assets, all that fun stuff. This is the hard stuff, I think, to create as you get started. And so we've gone ahead and just provided anything we absolutely can. It's super cool now having Sean Dennin at our agency helping with sales coaching because he'll come to me and say, we should create this. So of course, this is ever expanding at our agency now, but this is something super cool that we've been able to provide to all of our partners.

Yeah, and there's lots of valuable stuff there for people.

So yes, speaking of which, um, if you want to book a demo with us, we are going to be giving that entire resource center away to anyone, um, if, as long as we meet and say hello. Um, and then we're also going to waive our partner minimum. Normally we have it at $1K. It's a couple of clients, but, um, we're happy to waive that for life for anyone who just books a call, uh, just to kind of get more information. You'll be meeting with me. So you can definitely bring any questions that you have.

And like I said, even if it's outside of things like this, I'm not somebody that wants to try to be here pitching something, but here to help grow agencies and really behind Josh's, um, uh, message of, you know, making all of these agencies over 7 figures and now even 8 figures, right? As people get there and how we can help support. And if that's, you know, as much as, you know, you're having a bad day and your agency just lost a client, Jeez, Brittany's the best person to talk to about that. Like, she'll help you understand that it's not the end of the world and those things happen and they turn around. Or, hey, I just landed this big client. How would you approach this? We're literally here for anything and everything to help support this community as part of Josh's group. And, you know, somebody that really appreciates Josh and what he's done, that's kind of what we want to try to do is just be here for people with any questions running an agency. We can do that.

So yeah, for sure, this is for everybody to just have, whether or not you decide to go with us. That's a totally different story. But I think this is something that really felt big for us to be able to provide to a lot of people who normally wouldn't get their hands on things that are going to give them just such a push forward with selling and everything that you need to get lined up. Well, and here's a little bit more about how we do business. If you decide to ever sign on with us, no contracts. Complete transparency, reliability, and we're big on communication. We can talk more about these things if we sit together. And then last one, Michael, maybe you could tell people about white label SEO.

Yeah, so kind of the opposite of 51Blocks— so not the opposite, but it's still in the both in the white world, white label space. 51Blocks is very much client-facing, very much hands-on. We'll do all this stuff completely transparent, does a lot of these things. The white label SEO is I would say, I don't wanna say a level down, but it's a level to the side where he doesn't do the client management for you. It's just a fulfillment-only service and it's much less than the, not much, it's 20% less, let's say, or something like that than the white label solution, right? Or the JustSell solution where you're like, hey, I can't get to JustSell yet because I have to be in front of my clients and I can't, trust me, I know what that feels like, right? And if you just want somebody to help with the fulfillment, that's the white-labelseo.io. That's that website. And it's pretty cost affordable.

So yeah, we built this out of, I think, somewhat necessity. If you've ever been with the HOTH or one of those type of bigger, more machine-like white label solutions, you usually go there for a need, right? You have a team in place, you're just looking to expand bandwidth, you just want something to get done in the background. That's why we created this solution. It's been pretty popular with our lead gen agencies. So let's say you're already doing Facebook or some other type of lead gen and you just want to have a little bit of SEO taking place. This is a really great solution. We're also taking on partners who might have their own SOPs. So let's say you like your keyword research done in a certain way, you can come over to whitelabelseo.io and discuss that with us so that we can use our time and energy there to help support you. All right. All done.

A couple, a couple people asking for the link, the QR code. It's hard if you're on a, on like a mobile phone. So if you guys could grab that link, I think that would be, that'd be awesome.

I think so, Michael, you have my calendar link.

Oh my gosh, that's the one Brittany told me I was supposed to drop in here and I'm an idiot and I didn't. I got to, I was like, such a dummy. Okay, here it is. Sorry, it was this one I was supposed to. But when she said, when I say this, do this, that's how good I follow directions. So apologize.

Okay, awesome.

So Dave's asking a question. I think I'll kind of address it. Dave says, Josh pushes niche, niche, niche, become the expert, advantage you gain. Doesn't outsourcing the white label diminish that? Not necessarily. So the idea is to position yourself to understand the industry— plumbing, roofing, whatever it is— and to really go deep in that industry, understand what the keywords are, understand what the hot buttons are, and kind of craft your offering in a way that makes sense. No reason you can't have a white label provider provide that on the, on the back end. They've mentioned a couple times Sean Dannon as an example, so I'll just use that as the example. He works in the, in the veterinary space. He's positioned himself as one of the go-to experts in that space relatively quickly, and he white labels it through 51Blocks. So instead of trying to position yourself as the expert, do the webinars, be at the trade shows in advance, get your cold outreach machine purring, doing podcasts and interviews, and trying to figure out how to fulfill and trying to, you know, serve the clients simultaneously, he's able to focus on selling the Just Sell Method and know that 51Blocks is going to be able to deliver the service for that niche on his behalf, show up and act as the client liaison on his behalf. So he's able to have a sales operation and know that the fulfillment is done and still provide a Google class service to his, to his client base.

Yeah. And one thing with like Sean, he first came to us years ago with his legal niche. And I think the coolest part about having a white label is actually the fact that they have bigger sets of those clients. Like that's in our case, that's how it was for us. Like we have huge verticals of all sorts of clients. And they're all from different agencies, which has allowed us to really work with tons of different levels, which I think actually expands our, our growth, expands our knowledge, because we have the experience to take on 30 of those types of clients, right, rather than just having 2. So yeah, I think it actually could enhance depending on your niche, depending on how you're positioning your own agency, it could actually enhance what you're providing.

Garen was asking, hey everybody, I joined a little bit late, but if I've got it correct, you take care of fulfillment and client management, so all I need to do is sell. That is like a perfect synopsis of what was just covered. It's a sell, right? And 51Blocks will deliver the, the service and client management on your behalf, right?

Yeah. Just to address kind of again why we created this, it was— we wanted to help address churn as much as we do fulfillment. And part of that is making sure that you have a great team on the front end, that you're not bogged down. I mean, we, we had partners who really wanted to hold that seat at their agency, but they were struggling to give their client the level of service I think that they were hoping to. So we created this solution as a way for anybody to just like take it all off their plate. Now it is, you know, still at our agency, fairly customizable. We definitely have partners who still want to hold it and we do everything else. Maybe they only leverage like, you know, the client-facing side as needed. That's fine with us. Like we're not stuck again, we're not stuck in any little box, but we like to expand ourselves to anybody who really does like to just sell and grow a 7-figure agency.

Great stuff, um, guys. I'd love to know if you have questions because, you know, you've got, you've got them here. If you've got any questions on their services or kind of, you know, the, the benefits of white label versus trying to do it in-house, now would be a great time. We can definitely answer those. Uh, let's see.

Ah, thank you, Casey.

Randall says— Josh says one core offer package with one variation. Can you offer that to us? Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, over the years, at one of our first Roadmap Lives, as the Roadmap book was created, Michael and Brittany were there, and I was saying, hey, look, you choose one niche, you're going to put together one package. It should be all-inclusive. It does the website, the SEO, the pay-per-click. And they created packages that marry in with that very nicely so that you can sell your program at, you know, $2,000 a month, have them do the entire fulfillment, and still have a healthy margin. I don't know if you guys can add to that at all.

Yeah, we have this, um, if you go to our Partner Center, so partners.51blocks.com, we'll put it in the chat, uh, we have a little Q&A on this as well, like developing your package. So the way we're structured, we're all a cart and we're month-to-month. So what it just means is that you can take Josh's model and you can literally plug and play everything that we have and build out your own package. We also have the 3 kind of low, medium, and high. So it allows you to just kind of seamlessly build that out. So yeah, we'll work with you on that too. Like based on our experience with certain niches, we'll kind of give you what that should be. Like for example, the lawyer in New York is going to look different than the dentist in Ohio. So we can help kind of change that up for you and give you the best pricing options. All of our pricing is on our website. It's self-checkout. We're maybe like, we're not salespeople, we're not billing people either. So you get to manage all of that too. And it's sign on at any time.

Awesome, great answer to that question. Good link to know about partners.51blocks.com. Michael dropped it. Um, Casey posted in the comments, I use 51Blocks at my agency and they're great. Communication is incredible, total transparency, and Brittany's amazing, always willing to jump on a call and help out via email. I was able to email an entire web team— I was able to add an entire web team with them overnight. They're crushing it for us. On multiple clients. Can't recommend them enough. Amazing. That's it. That's a comment from Casey Richardson. Casey, thanks for posting that. That's amazing.

Appreciate that.

Let's see.

What solutions do you guys offer, or is it just SEO? That's from Steve.

Yeah, we do SEO, Google Ads, organic, social. We build websites. We of course have Bionic, which is our hosting company. We do pretty much everything. And there's a possibility we'll be launching Facebook Facebook ads in the future here.

Fantastic. Let's see, Armin, can you please show the slide that includes the pricing that was included? Did you guys have a slide with the pricing?

Uh, we had one for White Label SEO, but we can send you here. You can get all of our pricing here or here. So there's both agencies just so you can see. We have a cool little chart on these sites too that shows you the differences between 51Blocks and White Label SEO. To I/O and like the major core differences that you're going to experience there.

Awesome.

With this—

Oscar, did you have a question that you want to unmute and ask? Or I see you posted question in the comments here.

Oh yeah, I think I posted it underneath. But it's basically two things. First of all, I see that in the SEO side, or at least like the local SEO, most white label agencies have a, like, a fee that's associated with how competitive the area is. So how do you guys handle that?

A fee in terms of like the niche, like a fee that's specific to—

No, I think it's based on where you are, like if you're in—

Oh, like Los Angeles versus— Oh, yeah. Right.

So for SEO, that's like our low, medium, and high, right? So we did a really easy thing. We thought rule of thumb, you have rural, you have suburban, you have metropolitan. That's how our pricing is set up so that when you get a prospect in and you understand where they are trying to target, it's as simple as looking at one of those. And then we have national as like our last one. Um, so essentially what we've done is we've tried to create a structure that allows us to understand based on more competitors, you're going to need to be a bit more aggressive or have a higher volume. So if we're going to target 3 cities in 1 month, that's going to be metropolitan. If we're looking at maybe a bigger city or a couple of towns, there's your suburbs, and then little rural out in the country, maybe 5 or less competitors, that's your low. So we try to make it super like easy to just understand based on a location.

I'll say this, previously it was this huge matrix. It's actually even on the site still that had every single industry laid out completely. And it just became too confusing even for me, right? And I built it and it's just simpler this way when it really comes down to like Oscar said, or anybody said like Los Angeles is different than Bismarck, North Dakota, right? So it's, it's as simple as that now, just 3 plans.

And then, um, just one quick question then. When, when you guys— how does it work when you build a website? I also noticed that you have, uh, some type of flat fee, which is I think $795, and then you have another one that's like an, uh, it says SEO optimized, and there's a monthly fee. Involved with that? How does that work?

So WebDev is, it's one of the spaces that I think Michael and I were like, we gotta get out of the custom side. It was like 6 months to like create a whole site. So we have a template offering that is like super easy. It's like 10 pages. You get a theme in a box and we put it all together. It's just development only. And then we have a monthly fee. This product was created pre-COVID. It actually ended up being probably one of our most popular products in 2020. And it's a website created almost like a cell phone model. So if you take your iPhone and you have a service at Verizon, you pay $30 a month towards your $1,000 iPhone. You have a service fee for the actual service. This is how our website plans were modeled so that a small business owner didn't have to pay $5,000 to $10,000 to get a new site. I think that's why Michael would say we did it out of the the desire to provide something to them that didn't have to be an arm and a leg. The other thing is we wanted to give our partners something that was fairly sticky. So the cool thing about this is because it's a subscription model, it's like a lease-to-own model, your clients will still be with you even if they shut off SEO or they shut off PPC, right? You can still retain them and nurture them as their hosting provider. All the hosting is done at Bionic, which has incredible service as well. And then We also give a free, what we call an upgrade. So every 2 years they could get a whole new site, keep paying the same fee. We would just reset those little payments, just like when you upgrade your iPhone. So it's a very cool product. There is a buyout, like there's a lot of different ways you can customize it now, but it is built to be a fantastic conversion funnel to support digital marketing activities. So it's a WordPress site that we typically are gonna use a page builder. Of your choosing to be able to build it out.

Thank you. Yes, it does.

Thank you. Good questions, Oscar. Josh is asking if you guys have any experience within the estate planning niche.

You do? Yes, we do.

There's the answer to that. Any experience in the UK? Li3 Logistics says, do you have any experience in the UK?

We do.

Yeah. UK and Australia. We do have clients there. I would say the only struggle tends to be the client-facing services. So our UK and Australian providers do have account managers who manage that side, but we absolutely do the fulfillment on that end.

Amazing. Marketing Hippo says great work, great group to work with, highly recommend them. That's always good to see. Richard, billing options are great to get them to sign up for the web design. Okay, kind of have those options to break it down. Agricultural equipment. Well, I'm not sure what you mean there. Laura's asking if you have any experience with agricultural equipment. What do you like?

Uh, like tractors. We surprisingly do have a client that is kind of like a John Deere rental place, so maybe like heavy, heavy equipment sales and stuff potentially.

Let us know if that's what you're talking about, Laura. Yeah, that's what it is. Perfect. So they have some experience. Let's see. Okay, so Clint's got a question here. Does the PPC monthly admin fee increase based on ad spend budget?

Right. So we developed 3 tiers. We used to have this, it was like a sliding scale and it's a billing nightmare. So the answer is it depends on what bracket you're gonna fit into. We tried to make the brackets big enough that really shouldn't flex too much. We have a basic and advanced and a pro. And then if you're up higher than that, we can always do something custom. But the goal here is that we don't want you to feel like you have to charge your client like more than what you sold them on. So we work with our partners for sure, but we like to make it nice and clean and simple.

Excellent, excellent, excellent. Any other questions? Diego is asking if you have any experience with e-commerce, SEO, Google Shopping services.

Yeah. Lots of that.

Excellent. Fantastic. Well, Michael, Brittany, thank you for being on. Thank you for sharing. I think lots of good insights, whether you decide to just sell or build your own operation and do it yourself. Um, my hope in kind of running today's session and getting you guys on here is to give you another option, right? A lot of us think we're going to run an agency, I'm going to have to build a team, I don't have to manage a team, and that's not the best play for all of us. Some of us, you know, have a good operations partner that can help execute that. Some of us have a great operational mind and we really enjoy, you know, getting our hands dirty and dealing with the client relationship stuff. Others of us, we just want to— we want to grow a business, we want to provide great services and not have to deal with it. And I think this is a great option where, you know, you've got a provider that can do the delivery, manage a relationship, and you can just focus on maybe what you do best and what you like best. Which is going out and selling the service, know exactly what your cost is going to be, know exactly what your margin is going to be, and have a very scalable model in that way.

Yeah. Well, thanks for having us on, Josh.

Thanks so much, Josh. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Good stuff. So last, last time, if they want to connect with you guys and learn more about the two services, where should they, where should they go? Was it partners.51blocks.com?

Yeah, partners.51blocks.com is a huge resource center, lots of free stuff in there. And then if you want to reach out to us and just ask more questions or get some advice on any stage of your agency, you can reach out to us through our website, just our contact form, or the link that we gave you here in the chat.

Fantastic. Good stuff. Lots of comments coming in saying thanks. If you have follow-up questions, go to 51blocks.com, connect with these guys. Michael O'Brierley, thanks so much for taking the time, and we'll talk to you guys again real soon.

Sí.

Thanks everybody.