Agency Forward

Unknown Speaker 0:00
Hey everyone, today we have a solocast coming at you, where I wanted to walk through a question that I had been asked of, what would you do if you had to start an agency from scratch? So today's episode is my step by step plan for how I would approach that, and I hope you enjoy. Today's episode is brought to you by Zen pilot. There are lots of tools out there for agencies to manage projects, but any project issues aren't usually caused by the tool. They're from your own processes. Zen pilot helps agencies implement their project management tools while streamlining operations so your team can move from chaos to clarity. You can see for yourself at Zen pilot.com/forward,

Unknown Speaker 0:45
all right, let's get to the question of what would you do if you had to start an agency from scratch?

Unknown Speaker 0:52
It's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward.

Unknown Speaker 1:11
Okay, I'm gonna break all of these down into steps to try making them easier to follow, but I would actually recommend you go through these steps and then add or remove anything that you think is necessary if you're using this for your own process. I never believe that things never makes this funny.

Unknown Speaker 1:30
I don't like believing that things are black and white. I think almost everything in life is a shade of gray. And to be able to say this is how you do this specifically, right? There is no one perfect way to run an agency, to start an agency. It's why I created dynamic agency OS so that we can pull whatever the best practices are that we want for our agency to make things work right. Then we can take in all these different variables. We can actually look at like, what do we have going on, or what do we want from our agency, and then we build, you know, the business around that. So let's get into these steps with that in mind. First, I would set my audience. Okay, you need a clear idea of who you're going to work with, because without it, like nothing else matters, if you don't know who you're targeting, then it doesn't matter what service you offer. It doesn't matter you know what problem you're trying to solve. Nothing matters if you don't know who you're doing this for. So two things. First, you should look at niching into a specific area, right? So either vertically or horizontally, or both vertically, you're looking at a specific industry, horizontally, you're looking at specific job functions. If you can find a good intersection for both of those, that's awesome. An example I like using is like HR departments, right? So we could be very good at solving a problem for HR departments, but an HR department in manufacturing looks very different than one in SAS, and so they're going to talk about the problem differently. But if we know who we're targeting and how we're targeting them, then we're able to actually tailor our messaging to those individuals, right? So once we have the problem that we're trying to solve, we can now insert this lens that says, This is how we talk about the problem. Okay, so that's what we want to look for there. We also want to make sure it's a an audience that has a good Tam. Is the space growing? Is it shrinking? Is it large enough to support the goals that we have for our business? Because if we can't actually make enough money serving these people, then we should probably find something else to do.

Unknown Speaker 3:38
Speaking of money, right? We also want to make sure that they actually have money.

Unknown Speaker 3:43
If the audience that we're targeting is broke, right, or they just don't have the funds to be able to pay for the level of service that we're trying to offer, then we need to find someone else to go to

Unknown Speaker 3:56
within that right? Are they also? Are they fun to work with? Because if I'm looking at starting a business from scratch, I wanted something that's actually going to have some longevity here, and that requires me actually enjoying showing up and working with the people that I said I want to work with at some point in this you will go do conferences, you will be interviewed, you will conduct interviews. You're going to be working in meetings right working with these people every single day, and if you hate seeing them, it's going to make your life miserable. So we want to make sure that there are people who are fun to work with next. We want to make sure that they are easy to work with, if, if we have to chase them down for every single invoice, if they give us feedback on deliverables, you know, a week later, and it's all stuff that should have been caught two weeks even before that,

Unknown Speaker 4:47
we're just going to be miserable with everything that we're doing. So we don't want to target people who are not easy to work with, because it's it's going to make our life a living hell, right? So that is step one. We want to.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Really identify the audience that we need a target. Once we have that, then we can go into the problem, right? We know who these people are, but let's start looking at the actual problem that we want to solve. And I have a massive article that I've written that I'll link in the show notes to the prism model. It is something I came up with to help find deserving problems. Really, it's to vet it out. It's not even to find the problem. It's to know if the problem that we are trying to solve is actually worth solving. 35% of businesses fail because there is no market need. That is a huge number for something that we could actually do a quick check on right to actually find if people want this. And so just a quick snapshot. The prism model stands for painful, recurring, impactful, solvable, marketable. You can go check out that article to kind of do a deeper dive in all of that. I won't take up all of your time with the podcast. Now, one of the reasons this is also important to identify the problem is because I see a lot of agencies have a solutions page, and that solutions page is actually just a list of services.

Unknown Speaker 6:11
You to have a solution, you need to have a problem, right? There's something that we're actually trying to solve for. Hence the word solution. And so in having just services now, we're inviting comparison to all of those services on the page. But if we have a problem that we've identified, and we start talking about this problem, and we talk about it in a way that resonates deeply with the audience that we've selected, they are going to want to see our solution. But what's even more probably impressive with like this model is that they're going to believe you have the solution before they even get to it right, because you're talking about the problem in such a way that it shows you have the expertise. So I would pick one problem, identify what that is, and then tackle it that way. So first we come up with the audience, then we figure out the problem. Then step three, we figure out, what is our specialty? What is that one like service that we want to offer? And now I think there's an important distinction here. I would not pick a service because it sounds sexy or because you think it's what people want, right? Saying I offer rev ops, I offer this like we don't want to anchor it like that. We want a service that is going to be attached to the dream outcome that we'll get to in a

Unknown Speaker 7:28
bit, but really, the service is just the vehicle to help our client achieve more. So we're not selling the service, we're selling the offer the transformation. But the service is something that we enjoy doing, that we're already that we can be an expert in and so the things that I would do when looking at what service to choose is first make sure it's profitable, right? If I can't make money with this service, then I shouldn't bother doing it.

Unknown Speaker 7:51
We want something where we can make a lot of money, and it's pretty easy, even before we start honing our efficiency around it, it should be something that's pretty easy to maintain a decent profit margin. Next we look at whether it's impactful, right? We want to do something that actually delivers value.

Unknown Speaker 8:10
No offense to some agencies, but like creating a brand's logo, it might feel super important, and you can do that as a delivery, but it's not the most important thing, until you're an iconic brand and it's popping up everywhere. That logo doesn't matter as much as the the expert delivery you're able to do on your services. Right?

Unknown Speaker 8:30
Next, is it proven? Okay? Have you been able to do this before? Right? A lot of agencies take on work just because the client says, Hey, we need someone to do this. Do you think you could do it? And they don't want to turn away the revenue, so they figure it out, right? It's awesome if you can figure it out, but you're not going to get an amazing result from that. And you're actually watering down everything else you're doing, right? You're diluting your services, because you're starting to take on more things your team is required to learn more, to do more, rather than being very focused on delivering great results for this one thing, and last, is it enjoyable? Just like with working we want to work with good people. We also want to do something that is enjoyable for us, something that doesn't make us miserable every day, otherwise we're going to hate doing it. Right? Most people start an agency because they love doing some sort of work, and then they realize work, and then they realize along the way, like, oh, doing this for everyone, like turning this into a job, is actually miserable. So we want to find the thing that is enjoyable that we can enjoy doing it for someone else. And if we need to, we can bring in team members to help us with, you know, packaging this up in a way that we can still enjoy are part of it. So, okay, one audience, one problem, one service, and then we're going to create an offer. I believe there are five types of offers that every agency needs. You need a lead, magnet, core offer, bridge, offer, no.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Next offer, self liquidating offer. I have content about this that I will also drop in the show notes as well as I was interviewed on agency life, where I did a huge like deep dive in this, explaining how all of these offers work and some of those variables. You can also sign up for the email course that we have for around agency offers. Um, you can find that at Dynamic agency, os.com

Unknown Speaker 10:28
and if you sign up, it'll show you how each of these offers can benefit certain problems within your agency to help you get out of those issues. Okay, but kind of the big thing that I would like you to take away from creating an offer. I would not just be creating this suite of offers where everything is in competition with each other, right? I want to make it as easy as possible for the person coming to my site, coming to a conversation with me, finding me. I want an offer for their dependent on their stage of the buyer's journey, right? So if they're brand new, they're super problem unaware. It's like, I want a problem that's going to help them or a solution to help them address some of the symptoms that they're facing that leads them into the next thing. So I'll give them a lead magnet that leads them to a core offer, right? And then, like, and it just keeps working that

Unknown Speaker 11:17
way. So focus on multiple offers dependent on the stage of the buyer's journey, not when you're just looking across the spectrum of all the different problems you could solve for so remember, we want to pick one problem, right?

Unknown Speaker 11:34
Okay, so one audience, one service,

Unknown Speaker 11:39
one problem, and then we are creating an offer next. I have two more steps, and I've kind of renamed these. Some people will call this partner led growth. I'm calling it partner assisted growth because we want to actually approach multiple ways of doing these things within the marketing

Unknown Speaker 11:57
having strong partnerships is a great way to one get in front of more people, but to also help your clients more. Okay, one of the a lot of agencies are not great at doing the partnership thing, because they want to keep taking on all of this extra work, because they're trying to be this full service agency. They don't want to turn down revenue. But if you're focused on one service, right, and one problem with one audience, then you kind of need partners to be able to come in and help with some of these other issues that are surfacing, right? Like you don't need to be an expert at everything. And so finding those partnerships, whether it's technical, strategic or a channel partnership, right, having those kind of in your back pocket, so you can help other businesses that will likely return when those businesses need someone who does exactly what you do. And so we want to lean into the partner assisted growth, but we want to make sure that while we're choosing these partners, that we're being very selective. You do not want a lot of partners. You want a smaller number of quality partners who can deliver and you can build these great relationships. I see some agency websites that list their partnerships, and there's like 30 different businesses on there, and some of those are in competition to each other. And so now I can't send all of my leads, you know, like, scatter them out like that, to kind of show that I'm supporting all of these partners, right? Because now they're only they're going to get, like, one deal a year that's kind of attributed through me, versus one partner who might get all 30 and so, so you want to be able to build stronger relationships that way, because that also lets you kind of work more closely with a single partner and really get a feel for how do we work together? Right? When you build that relationship, you're actually able to bring better results to your clients. And so that's something that we want to target. And then after partner assisted growth, we do event assisted growth. Hey, one of the smartest things that I did for my consultancy was to create the all in agency Summit. It actually goes live tomorrow for our third iteration of the summit. So if you haven't signed up yet, all in agency summit.com, and you can just check back, you know, semi frequently to see whatever the next one's going to be. But this event is 100% free. Okay? For my first one, I brought in eight other industry experts who are just providing advice to marketing agencies, and none of us were in competition. We're all like in adjacent services, so no one had to feel weird about providing, like sharing the stage with all these people, right? It was like, we all do something different, so let's all just provide as much value as we can to the audience. Everyone helped to market the event and then, and that was like, the benefit of presenting, was that the all these presenters also get the access to the list

Unknown Speaker 14:48
right. So it's like a one for one. Now, any agency can run this play within any space, and I would strongly recommend that you find adjacent service providers like that you can bring in if they're already.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Partners, that's even better, right? But bring them in for a single day, just virtual event and and just execute this, right? Make it super easy for for the presenters to like, share and get involved in doing all this and and then just hit it that way. But this event was how I went from having no people on my email list to like, a couple 100, you know, very fast, like, within a month, and I didn't have to create anything except this event, and now I had people who are directly within my my reach for marketing. So those are the steps that I would do.

Unknown Speaker 15:37
We start with making sure we have a good audience set when we actually want to work with we've identified a core problem that they have. Our specialty for how we're going to deliver on that we'll create an offer around it, and then we'll use partner assisted growth and event assisted growth to help get our message out more separate from just regular marketing, right? Like I kind of left out the standard marketing channels and play because you can choose whatever is best for you. If you're an ad agency, run some ads right? Show people proof that what you're doing can work. If you're going to be doing websites and stuff like have a great looking website with a great landing page, and get as many people there somehow, right? But the last kind of step here is to refine, focus on refining every step of this throughout the process. The more data that you get right, the better you can make everything. When you real, you might realize, hey, this person isn't actually enjoyable to work with. I thought they would be, but they're kind of a pain. And so now you can keep tweaking that right and refining everything. Hey, this service isn't actually as profitable as we thought we were. That it would be right, so maybe it's we actually have to shift to something else. And when you start doing these things and tweaking it, you start creating a better agency every day. And so be super analytical, be super critical of everything you're doing right what worked yesterday will not work tomorrow. And so you need to be constantly thinking about what you can be doing to improve everything going on in your business. But all right, that is it. Those are seven steps, I guess,

Unknown Speaker 17:07
that you can use to create a great agency. If you already have an agency, which I'm guessing you do, if you're listening to this,

Unknown Speaker 17:14
that is how I would actually look at my current agency to see what do I need to be working on and refining internally to make sure that we're making all of the right moves. Hope you got something from this again, all in agency. Summit is tomorrow. So if you're listening to this on october 1, that's what you have that to look forward to the next day.

Unknown Speaker 17:34
And as always, just get after it.

Unknown Speaker 17:41
That's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on substack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward.

Unknown Speaker 18:02
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