Agency Forward

Unknown Speaker 0:00
Hey everyone. Today we've got a special episode for you. I am joined by Chris story, and we're gonna recap the excitement from this month's all in agency Summit. We had 14 presenters covering a range of topics, so we wanted to capture some highlights to share with listeners. If you want to be notified of the next summit. Visit the all in agency summit LinkedIn page, give it a follow. You can also keep following me here on substack or anywhere else, because I will be sharing the next event everywhere. But all right, let's get to our recap of the all in agency Summit.

Unknown Speaker 0:37
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 agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward.

Unknown Speaker 0:55
So story. Welcome to the show where we get to spend a little bit of time talking about the all in agency summit now that we've officially wrapped it up,

Unknown Speaker 1:09
looking forward to, yeah, let's just dive into, kind of some of the lessons learned. What, uh, some of the reasons give people reasons to to show up for the next one. Well, I think you kind of buried the lead a little bit, like you were like, oh, that's the agency, son. But like, that was the most fun that I've had in a long time. I mean, it was an awesome, awesome event. We had a bunch of people there, a ton of great presenters, a lot of great stuff was covered. And so, like, Don't undersell it. It was, it was a blast. And thank you for putting it on and for allowing me to be a part of it. It was, it was awesome. Can't wait for the next one. Yeah, it definitely was. This was probably, this is the third summit that I've ran, and this was by far the biggest as far as attendance, as far as the number of presenters, but then also the feedback that we've gotten from from people has been crazy with, like, people have been hitting me up in LinkedIn just like thanking me for the event

Unknown Speaker 2:08
email. I mean, I've actually had quite a few people email me to say, Hey, is it too late to get access? I'm like, Yeah, we're a week after. Like, yeah, sorry, it's too late. But if you want to join, you know this LinkedIn page and this company page for the all in agency Summit, you can catch the next one,

Unknown Speaker 2:25
which was also something interesting. We had 40 people join during the event just from other people telling them to go, like, Hey, this is where they go sign up. And so another 40 people joined. And I realized we didn't even have an all in agency summit like LinkedIn tag like a way to announce what's going on. And so people were literally like texting and doing this manually to just be like, share in the news. And so we do have a company page now. So if you look up the all in agency summit on LinkedIn, it'll pop up, which is super useful and will make it much easier to notify everybody when the next round comes about. Yeah, but yeah, yeah. I think one of the cool things about this one is we had just so many great presenters that we actually ran side by side, like simultaneous stages.

Unknown Speaker 3:17
And so we actually had a lineup of like, 16. Was a 16 total, 14, 1414, I can't do math. Just really amazing presenters, and they're running on side by side stages. So if you're like, all right, I'm stage one. I want to hear this talk, and then I want to hear this talk afterwards, and you can kind of bounce around. Plus, if you signed up, you got access to the recording, so any of the ones that you missed, you could go back and and listen to but it was a lot of fun.

Unknown Speaker 3:44
We're on stage two, the one that I was running,

Unknown Speaker 3:47
and it was, I don't think you would have ever needed to leave stage two, but I'm biased, because that's the one that

Unknown Speaker 3:55
was a I took

Unknown Speaker 3:57
a different approach on stage one, and said, Pick the pick the stage. It'll help you the most in your business right now, stay here,

Unknown Speaker 4:05
but I think you're stage one out anyway, but I think that's because you stack the deck in your favor. So only because I was on that stage, but my presentation didn't even actually work, since my computer decided to crash like 20% of the way through. But So for all of the people that stayed with me through that, thank you. If you are watching the recording of that, if you're one of the people who actually attended the show and you registered and have access to the recordings, just once, my computer crashes and just jump ahead, just skip there's a part two in there, and you can just jump ahead and just start from there, and it'll, it'll all work out.

Unknown Speaker 4:44
But, yeah, I do think having the two stages was awesome. I think there was a lot of inner Strife for people about which stage do I attend? And someone, someone in the chat, had two stages going at once, like they just, they brought their laptop and their desktop, and they're just like, watching.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Both of them like that, my brain would probably explode. But yeah, for those who are thinking about attending, you do get a recording if you actually sign up. If you don't sign up, you don't get the recording. But if you sign up and you want the recording like you don't have to, you have to choose in the moment, but you can always go back and watch the ones that you missed. So Right? So if you, I guess my thinking was, if you know you're gonna have, you're gonna want questions, like, to talk directly to the presenter, go to that one, yeah, and, but, yeah. But they also something else. I'm gonna make it a little more clear, I think, for the next one, like, get your teams to to sign up. Like, join even if they don't attend, it just means everyone has access to the recordings, right? So, like, if you find something later that you're like, Oh, I wish my team could see this, you don't now have to go share your username, login, right? Like, all that information, or or huddle the team around your screen in the office, if you're a actual, like, physical office location, which I don't know a lot of people that aren't anymore,

Unknown Speaker 6:02
but yeah, just signing up. It's free. We also did a raffle for this one, and so lots of cool little prizes. We'll probably do that again, yeah? Access to some books and from all the presenters and shirts and fun stuff. Yeah? Well, speaking of the presenters again, I think we married the lead. Let's talk about what some of your favorite moments were on snowball the whole thing, but stage one particularly, yeah, so I think I pulled something from almost every presentation. I have all my notes here still, because I have to go through and, like, document everything. But I was literally writing things down. I had three notepads in front of me. Was like, one was the all the notes that I wanted to pull from from this to make sure I captured them. There's another one for like things I should probably be doing in my business, right? And like, writing all those down, and then another one for like things I should be telling my clients to go do. And so

Unknown Speaker 6:59
I was filling those pretty fast, but we kicked off our side with William Attaway, who runs catalytic leadership. So you get check out his podcast. He's been on the show before. I don't remember what episode number, but you can go check him out there, where we get a lot more into, like, mindset stuff, but he is great at just figuring like helping agency owners through leadership, but also with just the mindset that they actually need to be successful, right? Like being an agency owner is stressful. There's depending on how you set up your company. It's probably pretty lonely for you, too. And so when you have to be the one who, like, bears the burden of all of these challenges and everything else, and like your team is just showing up, doing the work. And like they don't necessarily know all of the things that you have to go through. His presentation is very good for, like, understanding all of this, but he got into like, caring and just why the different areas that you need to kind of care about, caring for your clients, caring for your your team, yourself, and just by doing this, you're able to produce better results. But I wrote down one quote, and I got, like, a ton of notes here. I'm not going to dive into every little thing, but the best leaders are not reservoirs. They're conduits. I was like, Oh, that's a good one. And I think he's, I don't know who to attribute it to. I think he's the one who said it. Maybe it's someone else. So I'll Google it later. But it was, it was just good for, you know, getting, getting some of the thinking juices flowing for the first presentation of the day.

Unknown Speaker 8:37
It's awesome. Yeah, what do you let's, jump to stage two now for for one of years. So yeah, so stage two started off strong with Sam balter from he's the head of content at Wistia. He had some really, really amazing things to say about video. They went through some of the data that they collected in the Wistia state of video

Unknown Speaker 8:57
report that they put together, which, by the way, if you haven't checked it out. Go check it out. You can find it in the Wii website on the link right in front of me. But go check out their state of video report. They actually did this really interesting thing where they did

Unknown Speaker 9:11
the report in a couple of different formats. They did a live section and a polished section. He talked about the difference between kind of like the polished video versus the live, sort of more raw type of video. He

Unknown Speaker 9:27
had a lot of really great insights there on how a lot of people in the market today actually trust the less polished type of video more than they do the more polished kind of traditional style marketing videos, and so there's really no reason why anybody shouldn't be using the barrier's so low now there's really no reason why anyone shouldn't be using video in their reports. And he also had some really interesting things to say about like repurposing. So one of the things that they did with the state of video report is they recorded it and then.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Obviously they made the recording available, and then they did a blog post, and on the blog post, they put the full state of video, video

Unknown Speaker 10:08
on actual blog post. And it took, maybe I forget, I think it was three months before there were more video or more views on the blog post than there were an actual live event. So like making sure that you harness the power of the live event that you put so much effort into, and making sure that you make that available so that, because ultimately, once you make it, it's passive income, so to speak, passive eyeballs. So that was a really cool insight. He had a lot of other really good pieces of data around video and why and how you should start using it. Yep.

Unknown Speaker 10:49
Yeah, that's a good I need to still go back through and watch that one.

Unknown Speaker 10:53
Wistia is also one of the sponsors for for this summit, so I want to give them a special shout out. Check it. There really is, like, the barrier is gone, right? Because you can get a free account on Wistia and go create some videos, whether you're doing outreach to clients, whether you're doing, you know, marketing videos, just throwing things up on your website, like it's you can, you can create an entire, like, client onboarding process and have it, have it as video, so you just send out at different times. You can automate everything like it's, yeah, super easy tool. Uh, thank you again with the for the support. Oh, one other thing I want to mention that Sam talked about too. And we talk about video a lot in terms of marketing, in terms of content creation and stuff like that. But one of the things that Sam pulled into the report. Well, that Wistia pulled into the report, and Sam talked about was using it in in sales, as a sales tool as well, and so market. So video doesn't just have to be, hey, we're going to make this. We're going to post it on LinkedIn. We're going to make it and we're going to post it on video, on YouTube, wherever. It's also a really valuable tool. They said 1/3

Unknown Speaker 12:05
1/3 of professionals who use video in their sales outreach experience a shorter sales cycle and 60% increased a experienced an increased response rate when they when they included custom video in their outreach. So marketing is not just about or, excuse me, video is not just about marketing. You can also use it for sales. And I thought that was a really valuable tip as well. Yeah, that's a good one.

Unknown Speaker 12:32
Even using it within your offers as like a bonus, like, content can be a bonus. It's a passive addition to to your offers. And so that's something that we're grabbing a lot. I have some clients who have a ton of content, and it's like, we can package this and now it becomes a resource, right as like a bonus. And so Exactly, yeah, tons you can do with video.

Unknown Speaker 12:52
Let's move in. I think next presenter on stage one was Marcel in French, pizzipar pedipas, if you're just gonna read it in the English name. But he told me, I said it right using my the French that I grew up understanding, and so I figured I should bring the back in. But yeah, we talked about three levers to improve, like delivery margin, which is one of those big numbers. And so I don't if anyone has seen one of Marcel's presentations, right? He is just very good with numbers. He runs parakeeto. Parakeeto also a sponsor. Thank you for for the support the and dynamic agency. OS is actually a parakeet partner as well.

Unknown Speaker 13:33
If anyone is curious but the Yeah, Marcel has one. He has a tablet that he brings with them, and can write everything out, like, live like He can walk you through the numbers and throw examples up, and so it's very cool, like, it's awesome to be able to see it live right. You can tell me what your AGI is, and all these delivery margins, all these other things, but when you get to actually see the numbers playing out in front of you, you can see how easy it is to influence certain things. And so we talked the average cost per hour being one of those levers, your ABR average billable rate, and then your utilization rate. And they went in some great examples of how, like, minor influencing of like, each of those numbers can actually increase how much money you're actually keeping in your pocket at the end of the day. And I think a lot of agencies really get tied into, how do I just bring in more revenue? Right? It's like, I don't have enough leads, I don't want to flee, but it's like, well, you can actually do more with what you have. Is that's become one of the like, first questions I ask my clients, like, we can go land more, or we can expand what we currently have. And so we look and make sure we're optimized through those accounts and and a lot of it is stuff that I've learned from Marcel. Let's make sure we're going through all these numbers. There's no you know, we have everything that we need in order to really maximize these accounts. Then let's go look at acquiring some more.

Unknown Speaker 14:56
Yeah, this was a that was a good one. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
I've seen Marcel present, and he is,

Unknown Speaker 15:03
he was amazing. He blew me away. Last was it the last agency summit that he presented? Or has he presented all of them?

Unknown Speaker 15:10
Uh, past two for this one? Yeah, I saw his presentation at the last one, and I was like, I had to reach out to him, just tell him, because he just blew it out of the water. It was great. So good. So if you, if, well, I guess you can't go back and watch, but he'll do it the next one. So definitely,

Unknown Speaker 15:28
yeah, and something else, a lot of the a lot of the presenters, so like, they have access to their recording so they can do what they want. And they've all posted. A lot of them have posted, them live on, on their own websites, and, you know, within their whatever resource centers they have for their companies. And so you can, there's a chance you can go seek out some of these presenters to see if they have, they have those recordings up for you, yeah, and if you don't see it, ask them for it. That'll make us feel good, because it means that you want the stuff that we put we helped to kind of facilitate. So go ask them. Go ask them for it.

Unknown Speaker 16:06
Cool. So yeah, so stage two, the our next presenter was Jakob greitzar, more commonly known, I actually just messed that up. It's great, sad, sorry, sorry. Kuba,

Unknown Speaker 16:19
affectionately known as Kuba. He was formerly with zenpily, and that's actually he did an amazing presentation about People First Project Management. One of the things that stuck out was he had a quote that he said, if you're doing poor project management, you're blocking your teams from delivering their best results, and you're harming their future. So as a leader, if you are not investing in the process

Unknown Speaker 16:49
and making sure that you are removing blockers and holding your teams accountable to productivity and to the process of actually getting things done, you're actually hurting yourself, but you're also hurting them, and you're holding yourself back from from achieving kind of the results that you wanted to see.

Unknown Speaker 17:08
Kuba is great guy. He's presented in almost all of these too, right?

Unknown Speaker 17:12
He did, yeah, past two, yeah. So he's been in the past too, as well. He just launched a new newsletter. It's called silk and spider. You can go find him on LinkedIn and and sign up for his newsletter. I believe he's taken a little bit of a broader stance on kind of everything people and marketing related. But he's also got a really interesting take on the way that he sees things. He if this gives you any idea of Cuba as a person, he's also in a I said it wrong last time I think it's doom metal. I said death metal last time I think it's actually, I think it's doom metal. He plays bass in a doom metal band. So if you want a really unique perspective on marketing, goes on up for his newsletter. He just started. It's called silken spider.

Unknown Speaker 18:02
Yeah, great guy.

Unknown Speaker 18:04
Yeah. I was just looking it up, and that newsletter is actually growing really fast. I was one of the I think I was his first subscriber. It's weird. I convinced him to just start a sub stack and but I've been watching it just like blow up, so a lot of people checking it out. It's awesome.

Unknown Speaker 18:21
Let's see. I had Corey Quinn on my stage next. This was so this one was awesome. We were talking gift based outbound, and

Unknown Speaker 18:32
this was one. So my wife was listening in to some of these, just because out and about during the day and stuff, and she just wanted to support me. So she's checking in on these. She was listening to his and I think one of her quotes was, if

Unknown Speaker 18:46
this sounds basically like too good to be true, like, why don't, why don't we go just start giving more gifts, right? Like,

Unknown Speaker 18:55
there are some like, okay, so I'm gonna get in some numbers here.

Unknown Speaker 19:01
One point. Corey had a $6 million marketing budget and spent 3 million on gifts to get results, and they were able to grow their agency up to 150 million, from like 50 right, like that was one of their approaches

Unknown Speaker 19:15
that was great. They had they with a different client. They sent wine and stuff like very they deliberately selected wines and sent it out. They had a 941

Unknown Speaker 19:25
to one ROI,

Unknown Speaker 19:28
like, three digits, right? 94121,

Unknown Speaker 19:31
right. So crazy. Uh,

Unknown Speaker 19:34
benefit there, but some of the Yeah, so it's just a lot of proof that this works, right? And he's done it with a lot of clients. The gifts should be unique, striking and leave an impression. And so I think right now, everybody's sending, like, crumble cookies, right? Like everyone is sending crumble cooking, like, it's fine, they're a great gift. I would Deleuze some of those cookies. Yeah, good. But I.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
When everyone else does it now it's less unique. And so, like, you're not actually standing out. And so being able to find certain gifts, one of the things that I really like, though, he they were working with a it's like an HVAC company or, you know, a company like that, and they the agency or the H, man, mixing everything up. Now, there's a lot of information I went on this day, so bear with me. The they reached it, they found this flashlight that, like, H back repair guys really wanted, liked, you know, it was just awesome, but it was pretty expensive. It was, you know, a couple 100 bucks to do this. So they bought like, 40 of them, and then they sent them out to a bunch of, like, targeted accounts, and they got a ton of response back from all this, and it was super successful. But then they realized a very large percentage of those actually didn't have the money to be able to even afford services from them, and so, so it was like, okay, when you're creating your, like, dream 100 and you're targeted outbound, and you're looking at these accounts like you actually have to be deliberate and like, do some work ahead of time to not just, like, blanket send these gifts out like you actually want to, you know, be very deliberate on Who am I reaching out to? Because if they can't actually work with me, then I'm like, I'm literally just sending them a gift to, like, there you go. Thanks. See you. Which you probably don't want to spend your marketing budget just doing those, unless it's for charity, right?

Unknown Speaker 21:27
But yeah, those things were,

Unknown Speaker 21:31
yeah, man, I got

Unknown Speaker 21:33
so many. I think, well, I guess one of the big ones too, he, he said, Only send gifts to, like, your, essentially your top 20% right? So like, doing the Pareto principle, and like, be very Again, be very specific on who you're sending them to.

Unknown Speaker 21:46
But, oh, and then follow up, follow up, follow up. That was so many people do gift based outbound, and then they don't follow up. And so it's like, you just sent a gift, right? You're in their heads. Go read Chet Holmes book, The Ultimate Sales Machine, right? He talks about how he did this. Was able to double sales, like, year after year for like, three, four years, I think,

Unknown Speaker 22:07
just crazy growth. And it was essentially through the like these targeted approaches, sending gifts, getting in front of them, and so that when they do have that problem that you talk about, they know to go to you. And anyways,

Unknown Speaker 22:19
I could go on like, this was an awesome like for me, I literally wrote down my list of people I need to start sending gifts to. So if you start getting gifts from me, it was because Corey told me I needed to send some gifts out. I'll be on the lookout for mine. Yeah. But again, if you could pay me some money, then, yeah, I would happily,

Unknown Speaker 22:39
by the way, guys, this is so effective that it's actually illegal in a bunch of industries, like, for example, medicine, like the Sunshine Act, if you work for certain healthcare companies, like, you cannot provide healthcare professionals with gifts, because it is so effective in influencing behavior. So Right? But if you want, you want to go lobby Congress. Then, like, Well, okay, well, we're not going to get political about this, unless you want to, do you want to turn this into, you know, probably

Unknown Speaker 23:10
safer that we, we just stick to the summit. Uh, yeah, probably we might get unhinged. Um,

Unknown Speaker 23:19
anyway, I lost my train of thought, yeah, it works. I'm definitely going to go back and and watch that one for sure.

Unknown Speaker 23:27
So, but I just want to say that, like, if you need proof that it works, it's actually illegal in certain places because it works so well, yeah, that's good point. So there you go. Go check it out. Go try it out. Just don't do it, don't, don't give anything to doctors and get in trouble.

Unknown Speaker 23:45
So we go,

Unknown Speaker 23:47
who do you have on stage, uh, stage two. During that time, we had Leslie Bennett's, um, the founder of sales led GTM, um,

Unknown Speaker 23:56
she talked about objections and objection handling, which I think there's really, in my experience, there's two types of agency owners. There's the there's the ones who are amazing at sales and who just could sell eyes to an Eskimo. Is that? Can you say that anymore? Is that offensive? No, they're Eskimos, and they know a lot about ice. It's a culture thing. Okay? It's legit. I lived on Alaska. I met a bunch. That's fine. Okay, cool with it. Get it,

Unknown Speaker 24:28
and we're unglued. But,

Unknown Speaker 24:31
and then there's the other type who is more of the creative type, who gets into marketing so that they don't have to sell, but you still have to sell either way, whether you think you do or you're or you don't you do. And so this one was, I think, great for really both types, but particularly for the types who get into marketing. They're and they're like, I don't want to sell. I don't like to sell. I feel sleazy when I sell. And she gave a really good.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
A

Unknown Speaker 25:01
sort of primer on how to handle objections without being, you know, like used car salesman, without one lying to just kind of bulldozing. She gave it her 3c approach. And one of the quotes that she had was, before you can respond to an objection, you need to get curious about why you're hearing the objection. And so I thought that was interesting, because I think we almost, I mean even the word objection, like I object,

Unknown Speaker 25:30
it makes it all of a sudden, you kind of bow up, and you get ready defensive mode, exactly. You get defensive, and then when you get defensive, it's you against them, and it's no longer like, how do we come to the best solution for you? And so she talked about being curious, having a conversation around it, and then, and then, when you, once you've kind of had that conversation, and get gotten to an understanding of why they're even asking you this in the first place, then you can talk to talk about bringing it to a conclusion, and maybe that, maybe that means they're working with you and you overcame the objection. Maybe that means you're sending them on their way. One of the other things that she talked about in her

Unknown Speaker 26:11
presentation was she actually had a really, really big client who she ended up telling she was like, look for what you're looking for. I am not going to be your best fit. And she told that she turned down a big paycheck in order to, you know, to maintain her integrity, because she knew that she wasn't the right solution for what this company was looking for. And it actually played out to her advantage, because there was another big company that she was also talking to, and the two companies were talking to each other, and so the one company that she turned down gave her a good review, and then the other company ended up actually hiring her. But we talked a little bit about how integrity in the sales process is just such a powerful tool, like trust is something that you can't fake, you can't hack, like you can watch a bazillion sales videos on all these tricks and body language and like, questions and all that stuff. But like, if you don't have integrity, I think people have sort of a sense, and they can feel that. And so that it was really interesting to hear her kind of talk through, talk through that. So she's the hashtag queen of outbound. So if you want to search hashtag queen of outbound and find Leslie vanettes,

Unknown Speaker 27:28
she puts out a lot of stuff on LinkedIn too. You want to go follow her. She has some great stuff on how to sell.

Unknown Speaker 27:36
Yeah, couple things I want to just add on to that. So, yeah, trust huge, right? But

Unknown Speaker 27:44
a good framing that I've found for it's helped a lot of people, or I assume it's helped a lot of people I don't know trust is, trust is essentially built on predictability, right? The more likely you are to get a certain outcome with something, more likely you are to trust that it's going to get that right? You put $1 into a vending machine, you get whatever you want out. If you put your dollar in and eats it all the time, you're never going to trust it. But so when that required with people, it's a little less easy, but the more frequently you can keep doing that thing to show them. This is how I react in this situation, right? That consistency builds predictability, and then they trust you more. But the Okay, so you brought up the point about like, sales and marketing. They're like, some, some founders come in with, like, a strong sales background, and they're like, they're comfortable with with handling objections and all this. And I've probably worked with more on the marketing side that are not comfortable. But something super interesting is one of the first things I do, what I do is with all my clients, and something we touch every meeting is we look at the sales velocity, and we pick a number within the sales velocity that we know we can influence right now in order to get some wins. So we have, like, a kind of a short term fix while we're working on everything else for the long term goals. And I've noticed, if the

Unknown Speaker 29:02
individual who I'm coaching has a strong sales background, they will always gravitate towards trying to increase the average deal size or increase their win rate. And if someone has a strong marketing background, they're like, Okay, well, let's figure out how to get more leads in here. We need more opportunities and and a lot of times like, if they don't actually look at the sales velocity, and see all the numbers, then they continuously go to what they know, right? Like they won't actually try influencing something where, if you're a strong marketing background, you have a ton of leads, but you have a crappy close rate. It's like you can just do a 10% lift on that close rate, and that's a lot of money that's coming in every day now. And so, yeah, interesting to see that. But for anyone going back into the replay or, or just following Leslie's content and getting more of this, the

Unknown Speaker 29:48
following objections and going at it this way, right? Like, if there is an objection, if there's a question, there's a reason that someone is asking that and, and so when you do like, Leslie says, right, get curious and fake.

Unknown Speaker 30:00
It out, right? You can kind of uncover and you can get better results. Objections don't just happen in the sales conversation. Every meeting you have with a client is a sales conversation. And so when you're presenting an asset to deliver, and they ask a question and it's or they start objecting about certain things, right? They start giving you all this extra feedback for the designs, right? Get curious, ask those deeper questions to figure out why it's a certain way, so that the next time you have to present to them or or even for this, to handle this certain situation, you can kind of work around that and find a better solution so they feel good and you get whatever delivery asset, like, push through,

Unknown Speaker 30:37
yeah, it takes a lot of time, like reps of just okay, why are they asking this and not just giving the face value answer? But when you can Yeah, figure this piece out like I you your business will blow up because you will start being crazy successful as things. But then you got to figure out how to teach your team. That's a whole other thing.

Unknown Speaker 30:59
All right, let's keep this rolling. I had Lashay Lewis on my stage. If you are, I think the way I introduce her, I still stand by if you are on LinkedIn and you don't know Lashay, or you haven't seen her content, you're probably not using LinkedIn to actually learn and improve your

Unknown Speaker 31:19
you know your skills as a agency leader.

Unknown Speaker 31:23
She has a ton of content around, like, bottom of the funnel, content creation and stuff like, how do we actually get people to take action now that they're at the point of, you know, they're problem aware, they understand what's going on, and they're looking for options. How do we stand out as a business?

Unknown Speaker 31:38
But in this presentation, she talked about productizing your service and stuff and just going through

Unknown Speaker 31:45
like, actually documenting what you're doing so that you can continuously get this those same results and make your entire life easier. A couple key pieces that I just want to pull from this one, the when you can productize like, not only is it easier for you to sell it, to present it, understand it, but your team becomes way more efficient, right? There are so many agency owners I know that keep they'll, like, set a process in place and they'll go work on the next thing, their team has never actually learned that process. And then we're already trying to change it to something else, because the agency leader comes back in and says, Oh, that's not working, and so and so, like, it's just continuous change, and it's driving CHAOS The when your team knows the process and can get really good at delivering that process, everything becomes efficient. So you as the leader actually get to spend less time working in the business, and you get to go work on the business, and that can do. I mean, that's awesome, right? For on so many levels,

Unknown Speaker 32:47
it's also credence to, like, what I keep telling agencies, you need one service, focus on one service. And if you can focus on one service and one problem that lets you create a focused system, and when you can have that focused system. It means your team gets really efficient at solving one thing, and you can get really well known for that.

Unknown Speaker 33:07
So we talked that, and then the other piece that the audience loved and was thinking through was like, when you do only do one thing, right, when you are very focused on like you have a niche offer that solves one problem for one audience via one service makes it very easy to refer other people and to get referrals in. And so she almost has this network now where, if a business is coming in, they know who to hire to like do step one, right? Who am I creating my landing pages with? Okay, well, whoever, whoever I'm doing this with, is going to now refer me to the next step of like their journey, which is going to this person who does this, and then that person refers to the next. And they have, like, this pipeline. And if at any point someone comes in and says, Hey, this is, this is what I need, they can say, Oh, you actually or need this. And they can send them to wherever they need to be within this like funnel of of referrals. I guess I don't know another way to put that right, but if you just know the right people, and you build these actual strategic partnerships like it goes way further than than just saying I can do everything and trying to figure that out. So yeah, lots of great stuff from that presentation.

Unknown Speaker 34:18
Yeah, I think one of the things you said was interesting. There is, you know, there's, there was this big kind of movement, and I think, I don't know, people are kind of pushing back on it now on like, category creation, you have to create a new category so that you're a category of one. And it's like, this is the way to become a category of one, right? You don't have to create something new, necessarily, you just have to hyper focus on something that you are very good at delivering for a very specific type of audience, and you will become a category of one. You don't have to build it. You have to create a demand that doesn't exist. You just capture a demand that's already there, and you just do it better than everybody else by being super hyper.

Unknown Speaker 35:00
Focused. Yeah, that's spot on the all of the I mean, I just commented, actually, like yesterday, someone tearing apart category design, and it's like, well, no, we're not trying to just create a category. We're trying to get really specific about the problem. Because if we're the like, if we're the only ones who take this perspective on this problem, like, we have our own category, because we're going to come up with a different solution than everybody else, right? And, yeah, I think when you get into that, it's

Unknown Speaker 35:28
your business gets a little leverage. Yeah, for sure, that's awesome. On stage two, kind of during this time, we had

Unknown Speaker 35:39
an invasion of Norseman,

Unknown Speaker 35:42
we had, and that's actually not an exaggeration. That's not a metaphor. We had Ben Catley Richardson, who is the productivity Viking, founder of get shit done and have more fun. He came and He gave a talk on how to

Unknown Speaker 36:01
proactively pitch to your current clients. And he kind of started his all the way back at some of the evolutionary

Unknown Speaker 36:10
processes in our brain that prevent us from doing this sort of stuff. He talked about how

Unknown Speaker 36:18
we're wired for community, and if you

Unknown Speaker 36:22
because of the way that we're wired for community, way, way, way back, if you didn't have a community, you were going to die, right? Because you didn't have people around you to support you. And so because of of those sort of deeply ingrained evolutionary

Unknown Speaker 36:37
aspects of our brain, we have a hard time sometime doing things that we think are going to like, rock the boat or be against some of the social norms. And so he talked through kind of what some of those blockers are, and how we can overcome them, and then how we can move into asking our current clients to

Unknown Speaker 36:58
become, to upsell, to go to a different level,

Unknown Speaker 37:03
and he also provided a bunch of different resources for people to check out that have helped him out. I know he's helped a bunch of agency owners

Unknown Speaker 37:12
to build stronger agencies as well, and he's a freaking Viking, right? So go look him up for sure. Ben Kelly Richardson. He is the productivity Viking and founder of get you done and have more fun. It was a really enlightening conversation. And he was a VI did I mentioned that he was a Viking? I had to come up. I've used his branding quite a few times in our marketing. I think

Unknown Speaker 37:37
used to be accountability Viking. Accountability Viking. Oh my gosh, I'm sorry. Ben, okay, I'm sorry, so sorry. He probably accept both terms. He probably would either

Unknown Speaker 37:48
accountability the Viking. And so he can kind of take whichever adjective he wants, because he is the Viking, right? Which he was also on agency forward. So you can go back and listen to Ben's episode, which is another most of these guests have been on agency forward somewhere within the past, and if they haven't, we already have their interviews lined up and stuff, so they're coming. So if you needed a reason to subscribe and make sure that you're getting some

Unknown Speaker 38:18
amazing There you go.

Unknown Speaker 38:21
Who did you have next on the stage? I had Ryan Watson, uh, which another one interviewed on agency? Forward. Yes. So okay, so I expected, when Ryan started his talk, I expected some like finance tips, like how to you know how to grow, how to do, like certain finance, specific things. Ryan gave an absolute masterclass on scaling an agency. It was, it was unbelievable. He started from literally the unit economics of when should you hire in house versus contractor, and he worked all the way up to to scaling an agency to the highest level. I it was the the hierarchy of, what is it, financial needs? Hi, hierarchy of financial needs is what you talk through. And that's one of Upsource

Unknown Speaker 39:17
big things we go check, check out some of their content. But it was, it was unbelievable. You have to, well, I guess you can't, sorry, go to the next one. Maybe he'll do it again. The hierarchy of financial needs on our podcast episode. And then I think we got into the lifecycle a little bit. But yeah, this presentation was probably way more in depth, because there's also visual aspects to it. So, my gosh, man, it was, it was incredible.

Unknown Speaker 39:45
Sad for you guys who missed it. Maybe it'll be at the next one so you can't be used, so you're not square. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 39:53
yeah. I don't know what else to say about that one. He did an amazing job. He took it all the way up like I was super.

Unknown Speaker 40:00
Press go check out some of the stuff they're putting out at Upsource. Brian Watson

Unknown Speaker 40:06
is awesome.

Unknown Speaker 40:09
All right, yeah. Also Upsource, great sponsor.

Unknown Speaker 40:14
Loved working with them and just getting the word out about the summit so that more people would attend.

Unknown Speaker 40:21
Let's see I had Logan Lyles next, so first. Okay, so I love Logan. He's a friend. He's like, just very well versed in all things agency. Because not only did he work in an agency, but then running the agency life podcast, he's interviewed a lot of experts and pulled in a lot of insights. And I will put in the show notes my episode of agency life, because Logan confirmed at the start of his presentation for this one that I do have one of the highest downloaded episodes of agency life. So if that's a reason to check it out. Go check that one too. He was also on agency forward, and so check out his interview there. But what was fun about this was Logan, as a podcast host, said, I don't know how to do slides very well, and so instead of just going to do slides, he leaned into what he was good at, and just and talked, and he kept everybody's attention for the full 45 minutes, just talking to us about content creation like it was two tips to or two tactics to be able to drive more leads everything within your business.

Unknown Speaker 41:35
But some of the good, a lot of the highlights were around, like, how are we creating content and stuff in order to drive those leads and be able to pull them in. But so like a lot of podcasting tips, which is super helpful, just content creation with your audience, right? Doing things like that, doing benchmark reports, like a lot of stuff data box is doing.

Unknown Speaker 41:56
I have,

Unknown Speaker 41:58
yeah, there's all of my notes are around, like, just how to create better content. Logan is now working with business builders, and they have created, like, an kind of offset called agency builders, where, right now it's going to be a free community, probably eventually paid. I don't know. I don't work for them, so don't take anything. I'm saying it's hard, but yeah, they're gonna go do that. I would recommend doing it, getting access to their resources and all that, because I needed to continue hearing some of Logan's insights. And, yeah, super valuable presentation.

Unknown Speaker 42:34
What do, uh, who do you have while Logan was going? I had Max trailer. Oh, Mr. Opinions himself, who had the least dramatic presentation title, sell consulting services or die. You know, very direct. He's not he's not hyperbolic at all. Max trailer. You don't know him. He is the consultants consultant. He also does beers with Max, which is a you've been on that one, right? Yeah, that was a fun episode of just talking about all the things wrong with the industry.

Unknown Speaker 43:19
He

Unknown Speaker 43:21
is a lot of fun. If you've not heard of Max. He also wrote the agency's Survival Guide. He is a big proponent of in a world where AI is going to be taking over a lot of the sort of technical aspects of marketing. He's a big proponent of selling at a strategic level, and so that was what his talk was all about, so consulting services or die. His premise is basically like, you don't need to be seen as the person who does marketing. You need to be seen as the person who knows how to put together a marketing strategy and then have other people execute it.

Unknown Speaker 43:56
And so we gave some tips for how to talk to like, at what level you should be having conversations in your engagement. Should you be talking to the manager? Should be talking to the director? Ideally you want to be talking higher than that, because you want to be seen not as somebody who's going to go, do you want to be seen as somebody who they can call and they say, Hey, look, we need to achieve this objective.

Unknown Speaker 44:16
How? How can we do that? And then that's where you can come in and provide, provide the results. And he also gave some some really practical tips on avoiding, sort of eroding your position once you get to that level,

Unknown Speaker 44:32
making sure that we're not engaging in, sort of like day to day, keeping it separate from the different types of meetings. How to structure some of those meetings. And it was a wildly entertaining and very valuable presentation. And Max just go check his stuff out. He's great, yeah,

Unknown Speaker 44:52
Max has a lot of good count then, yeah, he's very direct on everything. So lots of lots of opinions, but they're well founded.

Unknown Speaker 45:00
Because he's having opinions. It's because he loves you, that's why he tells you the way it is. But no, they're not opinions for the sake of having opinions. They're very well grounded and lessons learned, and his experiences running an agency and then working with others and so yeah, awesome.

Unknown Speaker 45:21
Last presentation from our side was mine, which we'll hear about. It had the technical issue,

Unknown Speaker 45:28
but we've kind of dove in. What was

Unknown Speaker 45:33
fun for me was that nearly every presentation that I was part of, at least on stage one, was echoing things that I was prepared to, like, talk about in my presentation, like I actually had slides already for these, and so it's just, like, further evidence, like, this is the way, right? Like,

Unknown Speaker 45:51
but really it was just about, how can we

Unknown Speaker 45:55
move away from services and get into just focusing on offers? I believe there's something that I'm calling service saturation where. So if I say, Hey, I do SEO Services, right? Someone can go get on Google right now and look up SEO services, and they're going to find 1000s of agencies. It doesn't give you a chance to differentiate yourself, because now you're inviting comparison, and everyone is just like looking at the price, right? How many blog posts can I get for that price point, or whatever it is, you know that you're offering, versus leading in with a transformation, right? Having an offer that's bound by like, Hey, you're at point A, we're going to get you to point B, and really leaning into that and creating something that's tied to their dream outcome, right? Something they really want, and now they stop caring about those individual deliverables. So they don't, it doesn't matter if it's gonna be four blog posts for eight blog posts, what matters is that they get you get them on the front page of Google, so they're actually attracting leads and filling their pipeline. And so it's like, no, we're gonna do inbound marketing for you that actually fills your pipeline. It's like that's a dream outcome. And a lot of agencies, even though that's what they want to be doing, they're still not positioning it that way and saying that's what they do, right? And so we talked about all of that, and then we got into kind of four quick steps that you can be taking in order to create an offer,

Unknown Speaker 47:19
rather than going into them. Here just go agency forward blog like, I've got multiple articles up about how to do this stuff. I think we got podcast episodes, random nations forward about how to do this. And you just follow me on LinkedIn, and it's kind of what I talk about a lot. And so you can just pull it all in there.

Unknown Speaker 47:38
Yeah, yeah. That kind of ties in with one of the earlier presentations we talked we were talking about creating a category of one right, like, if you can structure an offer that nobody else is is doing right, and that's super clear on the problem that you solve, then people hear you talking about the problem one. They assume you have the solution because you know the problem so well. But then you usually do have the solution that stands out from everyone else, because you're focused on the problem. And so yeah, there's

Unknown Speaker 48:09
I also want to take this because I know that you are not going to do it for yourself. But I also want to take this opportunity to recognize that these these strategies that you talked about during this presentation. You've actually had a recent client win a couple of, like, back to back six figure deals using these principles, right? Yeah, there's been a lot of dudes following this stuff and, like, setting your offers up this way works. Like I can, yeah? I know you're not going to talk about it, so I have to, I have to throw you props, because I know you're not going to take them for yourself, yeah, but this stuff works.

Unknown Speaker 48:44
Chris is great, by the way. If you haven't worked with Chris or consumed his content, he's probably like the best person that I know. He is one of the few people I know you're not going to talk about talk this way about yourself. So I have to take the opportunity to do it. He's one of the few people that I've ever worked with or for who actually, genuinely cares about the success of the people that he works with. So please go check out his content.

Unknown Speaker 49:10
If you are interested in learning how to build better offers and streamline your agency operations, please go check him out dynamic agency OS,

Unknown Speaker 49:21
I have to. I had to have that plug because I appreciate that. I'm gonna do it. He wasn't gonna do it for himself. He's too He's too nice. So yeah,

Unknown Speaker 49:32
before it gets weird, yeah, let's move into, let's go to the last, last presenter. So the last presenter we had on stage two is Tony Wilson. He is the founder of equip, and he talked about weathering the storm and building financial resilience during a recession. And so we as a sort of an industry, marketing industry, has experienced some some headwinds in the past couple of years, especially.

Unknown Speaker 50:00
AI has been coming in and kind of disrupting a lot of a lot of things, and so he,

Unknown Speaker 50:06
as the founder of equip, talked through some of the sort of financial steps that you can take to kind of keep yourself from

Unknown Speaker 50:19
feeling these too much right, like there's nothing that we can do that to completely, to

Unknown Speaker 50:25
completely avoid this stuff, but some of the some of the ways that you can kind of protect yourself as much as possible. And one of the interesting things that he talked about was

Unknown Speaker 50:36
it was actually from like the hiring and sort of evaluating continued employment perspective.

Unknown Speaker 50:43
You know, layoffs are not a pleasant thing to have to think about. But when you do have to think about it, having a plan and having a way to think through

Unknown Speaker 50:53
how to how to do them, how to figure out, like, Okay, who? Who do I need to let go

Unknown Speaker 51:03
was actually really, really valuable. So he talked about one of the frameworks that he advises companies to use when they're when they're in these kinds of positions, is think about like your rebound team, like who is on your rebound team,

Unknown Speaker 51:20
and once you get through this, who's going to take you back to where you are now, and using that to kind of evaluate, okay, who do I keep? Who can I kind of let pursue other opportunities? And he talked about a bunch of other stuff as well. He gave his stance on debt,

Unknown Speaker 51:40
which was helpful, uh, basically, his stance on debt is, and this seems like common sense, but like a lot of agencies, are not following this, do not use debt to fund an unprofitable business. You can use debt to cover cash flow. Do not use it to fund an unprofitable business. And I think it's better

Unknown Speaker 52:02
it was, yeah, he's a great guy, really. He puts out a lot of really good content too. I think he has a podcast, the dev launch podcast, yep, been on that one too, and he was online, yep, and he was on yours.

Unknown Speaker 52:15
But yeah, those are, those are really great conversation. Really great way for us to close it out.

Unknown Speaker 52:20
Awesome. So, yeah, this entire so, I mean, we just went for almost an hour talking about all the awesome things that happen within this, and I'm sure scratch the surface, guys, yeah, there's so much more, not even scratch the surface,

Unknown Speaker 52:35
but if you want to, you know, be able to catch on. We're going to be doing another one of these, probably in the spring. You spring. If you want to attend that, I would recommend following the all in agency summit LinkedIn page so that you can get access to that. I'll put the link within the show notes as well. If you have presenters that you would like to see, if you have questions like topics you would like covered, send it to us because, like, we're the the presenters aren't static. Like, we're going to be changing people out every time, not because we don't think they're doing awesome, but like, we want to hit whatever the topics are that we think are the, you know, the most valuable to the audience right now. And so I will, I will personally hunt down the right people to you know, present on whatever topic we think is the most valuable. So if you got one of those, please

Unknown Speaker 53:27
let us know, so that we can, we can make it happen. But sorry real quick. Before you close us out, do you just want to riff? I feel like we again buried the lead to literally the very end, you want to riff on what the all agency, all in agency Summit is, and what it's for, like, what the purpose of it is, because we never really talked about that, yeah, I fear, yeah, because I've been so attached to it, and I just assume everybody knows at this point. But I created the all in agency summit the first round, as a way to help help people. So it's a completely free event. So I know, like, we've been talking like you got to register, you got to do it like it's free 100% it will remain free forever, unless something crazy happens. But the goal, there might be some bonus additions later that you can pay for. But like, the actual event, being able to access all of these presenters. It's free, but I wanted to create an environment where we could bring agency leaders and agency experts together in this environment where we can all just get tons of learning done, and it's virtual, so that you can access from everywhere, right?

Unknown Speaker 54:40
And, yeah, it was just the way, like there was I, my belief specifically within the reason I created a dynamic agency, os right dynamic is that I don't have all of the answers, and there is not one perfect way to do anything. And if, if you're looking at a coach and they say, No, this is the way it always has to happen.

Unknown Speaker 55:00
I'm like, probably wrong, right? We had three people at this summit that talked finances, three different people talking different topics, and they all probably have, like, a little bit different perspective. And I don't think any of them are wrong, or any of them are perfectly right. They just have that perspective to know how to look at the problem, get after it.

Unknown Speaker 55:18
But so by having this summit, I'm able to bring in all of the presenters that, like, you know, other coaches, other experts, to get their perspectives on these problems. So that you now, as an agency leader, have multiple resources you can go to, and you're learning from multiple people to be able to, you know, get these results. You if you're listening to this podcast, you've heard me say it on multiple other episodes, that Solomon's paradox is real and it is very hard for you to solve your own problems because you just don't know right? The same reason I didn't even think about explaining what the all in agency Summit is right now, because I'm too close to it. You're probably too close to your problems, to be able to see it. And so being able to get this input from all of these coaches and experts is super valuable to your business. And something that I feel like, if I can do it for free, get all these people in,

Unknown Speaker 56:13
goes a long way. And so that is what the summit was, plus it's an awesome, awesome networking opportunity for you to meet other people in the industry, other people who are doing what you do, or similar things. Like minded focused on growth, like I met a lot of a ton of awesome people

Unknown Speaker 56:35
helping to host the event. So it's a it's definitely worth the day that you'll spend.

Unknown Speaker 56:44
I don't know how to put in any any other way than that, like it was an amazing event. Don't miss and it's free. Don't miss the next one. So, but yeah, so we will be coming at you with another summit, probably in the spring. Join or follow the all in agency summit company page on LinkedIn for any updates and and, yeah, we will have it there. So thanks for listening, and sorry. Thanks for Thanks for joining to chat about all these wins. Couldn't have, couldn't have ran the both stages at once by myself. And so I'm glad you were able to come in and help facilitate all this, because it made a huge difference. It was a blast, so I'm super grateful to have been a part of it.

Unknown Speaker 57:29
Awesome. All right, man, speak soon.

Unknown Speaker 57:35
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. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai