Agency Forward

Chris DuBois (00:00.13)
What's the biggest mistake you see agency owners make when starting out?

Selim Maalouf (00:22.176)
Sounds good.

Selim Maalouf (00:27.604)
Honestly, they think knowing how to do the work is the same as knowing how to run a business. It's not. Just because you're a great marketer or a great designer or great developer doesn't mean you're ready to build a scalable agency. The real job isn't delivering client work. It's building the machine that delivers client work efficiently. And that's not something that you learn as a individual contributor. And honestly, the thing that

kind of killed us was timing. Like timing matters. You can't just start an agency because you got laid off, for example, and need income. But that's what we did. It was a brutal lesson. Unless you've proven tangible demand for the services that you're offering and you have a book of business ready to kickstart your pipeline, you're going to deplete your life savings very, very quickly.

think of it like jumping out of a plane. You better have a parachute, like existing demand, a client base, a strong cash reserve. Otherwise, you're free falling and hoping you'll grow wings before you hit the ground. But spoilers, you won't.

Chris DuBois (01:38.118)
Right. Yeah, the there's like a couple pieces of timing on that too, right? So timing the market timing to know when you're going to be able to move from you're like actually start like building up leads in some way actually filling a pipeline just rather than having to do like doing the brain play. So I guess a lot of a lot of agencies will come in and say, Oh, if I just keep marketing, eventually I'll get people but they're not bringing in anyone to keep the lights on. And so

But then there's also the, like there is a time when you're an independent contributor where you can be really good at doing the work and that's all that matters. And so you're more of a freelancer and you're not running an agency. But like the timing for that, like that's another layer, right? guess when does that shift happen?

Selim Maalouf (02:14.377)
Yes.

Selim Maalouf (02:24.19)
Yes, exactly.

Selim Maalouf (02:28.448)
Yeah, like I think people have heard it a million times, but I'll say it again. The most successful agency founders I've seen personally are subject matter experts who built their brands as a side gig first. They leveraged their audience for market research. They figured out a value proposition that the audience is willing to pay money for. Then they tested that hypothesis with freelance work. And then once that freelance work

grew enough, then they turned it into an agency. honestly, that is kind of been like my MO always, but like there were weird circumstances where like an entire team got laid off and we were crunching like we need we need something right now. And we looked at each other and and told ourselves, hey, why not an agency and 11 months down the line, I learned why not an agency.

Chris DuBois (03:28.302)
Yeah, so I mean there's value in like, in doing it on the side, mainly because someone else is also paying you to build these skills, right, and develop expertise so you can hit the ground running. Like, I'm curious now, like what were those challenges though, even though you had that set up, what were some of the things that became like blockers for you in making that happen?

Selim Maalouf (03:53.696)
So like every early stage agency, we kind of butted heads around like, do we do the quick play or do we do the long play of like brand building versus we need to generate pipeline quickly? And both of us were marketers and we were championing inside the manufacturing space the idea of like, you do need the long play and we're experts at the long

And honestly, we didn't have the reps in to do demand generation for short term, like all of the typical, you know, we were bootstrapped so we couldn't do ads. We didn't do enough relationship building while we were employed to take those relationships and leverage them in a new agency. We didn't do

You know, all of the things that make successful founders that have a vision successful. And we were just like, we're working under the premise of like, we'll build it and they'll come, but they never did. So we did a lot of brand building, a lot of content. I was doing both marketing and the services. So I created a lot of shows. had funnily enough, two podcasts and a live event.

We did a bunch of content and that was very resource intensive but none of that resulted in pipeline because we didn't create it in a way that would generate pipeline because we're creating it using the long brand play and Once we felt the squeeze of okay. We need revenue now we started doing you know, the the prospecting plays and

reaching out to our contacts and all of that. And by the time we had any nibbles, like it was time for me to say, okay, I've done this experiment enough. I'm running out of runway myself and I owe it to myself to hit the eject button and go back to the agency side and be an individual contributor on an agency. so far I feel like that has been the right decision for me.

Chris DuBois (06:06.903)
Mm-hmm.

Chris DuBois (06:22.318)
So you said you were doing the marketing and the delivery. So co-founder doing sales for that. How did you find the handoff between each phase?

Selim Maalouf (06:25.31)
Yes. Yeah.

Selim Maalouf (06:32.83)
Yeah, it was interesting. Like I mentioned, we're both marketers, so we didn't have the experience in doing sales and knowing a lot of it. And it's a little bit frustrating because we work in the CRM space and we kind of help other organizations, you know, figure out their processes around that. So it was frustrating to go through these growing pains and not be able to solve it for ourselves. And a lot of those, a lot of what it ended up

being is a game of broken telephone. Like sales says one thing and services crumbles to figure out like, figure out what it was and the client wonders, like, what did I just sign up for? And I had to relisten to sales calls just to understand what was sold. And, you know, that is inefficient. Like I'm, I'm spending a lot of time not doing the work and just trying to, redocument what should have been documented already.

And it doesn't have to be that tedious now with more AI tools that have matured and like, you know, AI note takers, we use Fathom on the daily. Fathom has been an amazing transformational, you know, tool for further work that I do during my day job. Like, yes, AI note takers have been here for like a year and a half, two years, but the quality has changed significantly. and another thing that

would be helpful is the services team to have that checklist, to have that playbook that, all right, I need these data points. I need to know this, this, this, and that, work with the sales team, train on asking those questions early and often, and make sure that we're not scrambling at the last second once we close a deal to figure out, what are the requirements actually? And what software platforms are we integrating and what's the...

size of the data, et cetera, all of that. So a lot of it has come from us not having done it in the past and trying to figure it out on the job. And in a startup situation, that's not usually ideal.

Chris DuBois (08:46.414)
Yeah, yeah, that baton handoff, right? From marketing to sales to delivery is way more important than I think a lot of agencies give credit to. Where it's like that is, I mean, the marketing to sales is like the first taste of your business and someone actually meeting someone from your company and talking to them. And then as soon as they go from sales to delivery, it's like that's their onboarding has started. This is like the real experience. And if you can't nail that, it's like that entire engagement is going to fall apart.

Selim Maalouf (09:10.91)
Yes, exactly.

Selim Maalouf (09:16.628)
Yeah. And another thing that, given that we work in the CRM space and work with a lot of clients that have processes that are bigger than, you know, a two man shop. We fell into the trap of trying to design a process that is kind of at the same scope. Like we're two guys dealing with a small pipeline and we're designing processes that were kind of designed for like a 10 person team with a giant pipeline and

all these, you know, customer client portal and they can async see everything they need and all that. That kind of was a distraction and a resource hog and also a point of clash around vision. we kind of also at that point clashed around vision of like, we're just a small outfit. We just need to get stuff out the door, get paid, have people be happy and repeat that. And instead of trying to build for a future state of the agency that

may or may not happen if we don't nail what we're trying to do right now. So like those were tough conversations as well.

Chris DuBois (10:23.118)
Yeah, and there's probably a balancer where it's like you have to build for the company you have, but you're also trying to build for the company you want. And so how do you even attack that?

Selim Maalouf (10:30.528)
Correct.

Selim Maalouf (10:34.472)
That's, that's, I, I believe I don't think I have the answer for that because we're, we're, we did not succeed in that. We, I was focused on trying to get stuff out the door and building processes that make getting stuff out the door quicker. he was thinking of three steps ahead where, okay, how do we give the best customer experience that they could ever have, which is kind of aligned with.

Chris DuBois (10:38.19)
Yep, the unanswered question.

Selim Maalouf (11:04.18)
you know, if you've bought anything from Amazon, like all of it's self-serve, can sign into your profile, look at all of your orders, can track if anything's like ready to ship. like, given that a part of our services was building stuff like that, we wanted to build a portal that you don't have to talk to me to get a progress update. I can push notifications to you. You can approve, you know, documentation and sign off on work on your own time.

and not have our communications lost in the emails, which is a great idea to sell to a client, but as a two person outfit, was too big, like too big for us. And it kind of generated a lot of the vision discussions and yeah. So long story short, I don't have an answer to that. I would love to learn from someone who's been successful at it.

Chris DuBois (11:58.19)
You

Chris DuBois (12:02.818)
Yeah, me too. But I think the like even to that vision, right, being able to let your clients work asynchronously would actually be super positive for especially a small team to be able to because you could take on more clients knowing that I don't need to sacrifice needing like time in order to make sure they have their delivery and they answer all their questions. Like we can just use this platform to keep things moving along. They have the actual like deployment of

Right? like there's reason and change management and everything happens within businesses. But you both have to match up. That's a lot of extra work to set that up while doing the work.

Selim Maalouf (12:30.09)
Correct. Yes. Yeah.

Selim Maalouf (12:38.622)
Yes, like the way I could summarize it is I was super focused on step one. He was focused on step 10 and maybe we should have been building step two while we were on step one. That makes sense.

Chris DuBois (12:52.942)
Yeah. So maybe this will resonate. The people can easily be bucketed into like zero to one thinkers or one to 10 thinkers. Right. And like the team that sets up your local Walgreens is not the team that stays there to continuously manage and run it. And so I found that identifying those individuals within your organization and how they think becomes super helpful because then you move people into roles where they're actually set up for success with how they're already thinking.

Selim Maalouf (13:09.982)
Yes.

Chris DuBois (13:22.83)
with a two man shop if you're both thinking differently. It does become a bit of a challenge.

Selim Maalouf (13:25.374)
Yes, it does. I, most of my career after I switched from engineering into marketing, I've always landed in organizations where marketing is kind of like an afterthought. And I've always been like a one man person, one man shop with almost no budget and forced to do marketing ops and marketing, like by bootstrapping everything. So I was used to the environment of,

you know, not having enough budget and trying to make stuff work. But there was always this cushion of my salary at the end of the day is getting paid. If I regardless if if I succeed with no budget or not, and I got put into a position where I have the same parameters, but if I don't succeed, I'm done. And I guess now next time if I do it, I have better

I am better prepared to what needs to be done than I was when I attempted.

Chris DuBois (14:30.542)
So how did you guys go about aligning on vision then with knowing that you are structured a little differently like in your thinking? With only two directions, right? It's like, what'd do?

Selim Maalouf (14:44.8)
Yeah. Yeah. So, to be fair, we were aligned on our why, like the reason why the agency exists. We were aligned on it. We had recognized a lot of pain points in the customer experience for industrial manufacturing companies, and we were kind of specialized in that space. And we wanted to make

customer experiences that are modern and working for clients. So we're aligned on the big vision. But what we were not aligned on is how we get there. And there was a lot of points where we decided, OK, we're spending too much time trying to hash out the details of those processes. Why don't we just divvy it up and

each one of us focuses on a section. And as long as like the general direction we agree on, I will not go into the details of what you're doing and you won't go into the details of what I'm doing. So what ended up being is the sales was like, as long as you're bringing in closed deals, I don't care how you do it. And the marketing and the brand building, I'm gonna take control of that, the details, the production.

you know, all those, I'll deal with that and the services, I will try to make sure that everything goes smoothly and you'll have to trust me on that. The breakdown that happened was on the services when I did pushback on the handoff being bad, then he started suggesting, okay, let me change the way we do services. And at that point, I felt like

but we agreed that I'm leading this effort and you're leading the other one. The other case was, suddenly I started learning about plans for a product, like an app that I didn't know about. And apparently he had been planning for a while. And then the resources that should be spent on getting deals in a pipeline have been...

Selim Maalouf (17:07.392)
spent on product managing an app that I didn't know is going to exist. And then suddenly I get invited into meetings talking with developers on how we're going to bring an app to market. I'm like, sorry, what are we doing? What is this app that I didn't know existed? Which to be fair, the app serves the general vision. And maybe a couple of years down the line would have been a great business play of diversifying from just services to apps.

stuff like that. But the breakdown happened when suddenly we started interfering with each other's areas of accountability and just straight up, I would call it miscommunication, but we weren't telling each other what's happened.

Chris DuBois (17:58.117)
Yeah, I think that's pretty normal for lot of agencies. I mean, I'm working with more agencies that are greater than just a two-man shop. But the founder often gets into an area that someone else has been delegated responsibility for, or authority, can't really delegate responsibility. But someone else has the authority to create this system and do everything that they need to. And then someone else has an idea and says, well, why aren't we doing this? And they just insert it and it's like, yeah, but

you don't have all the context that went into the thinking for how this is being designed. I started using the Growth Canvas, which is a document that I have where we can map out. It's almost like an agreement between individuals to say, this is everything that your position is responsible for. And just getting that little bit of clarity goes a long way.

Excuse me. Recovering. I got pneumonia. And so I didn't realize. I thought I was just being weak. We'll clip this part out of the episode. So yeah, so if your budget was going to building an application rather than, like you said earlier, you weren't able to run ads. You weren't able to do some of the other things to be able to just keep the lights on, like do the lead gen activities.

Selim Maalouf (18:53.354)
Bless you. Now we're good.

Selim Maalouf (18:57.82)
I'm so sorry.

Chris DuBois (19:21.026)
But so if you did have budget, but it was actually getting deployed elsewhere, it's like now you're only potentially hurting yourself more. Yeah.

Selim Maalouf (19:27.082)
Yeah. And a part of that app development, if we didn't mention, we work in the HubSpot space. So building an app on top of HubSpot requires some access to specific products. Those are enterprise-level products. And you can imagine, as a two-man shop, we have no business owning those enterprise-level projects.

products and but if you need to test that stuff you need access to those products. And the way our demo portal works is there are specific things that we cannot do. The demo is for demo purposes. It cannot communicate with outside systems and the app we're building needs to communicate with outside systems. So we were strapping, you know, some really hefty subscriptions which meant we're adding overhead

to ourselves, which means our target pipelines need to grow. it just, it cascaded to a point where, that project required us to have some insane, you know, software costs that we technically did not need to run our services. And that also was another point of contention.

Chris DuBois (20:47.246)
And now you have another cost center until it becomes a profit center.

Selim Maalouf (20:50.546)
And a a huge cost center. If you're familiar with HubSpot's pricing structure, like enterprise software is, is even too expensive for like 20, 20 person shops. Like if you're not bringing in, you know, seven figures already, you have no business getting enterprise.

Chris DuBois (21:08.514)
I mean, think there are enterprises who don't want to afford enterprise level help spots. So yeah, I'll stick with my starter plan. So I guess what you, okay, so you were running an agency, you've got a lot of insights on like what not to do. Also, mean, I don't want to discount. You also learned a bunch of things, like positive things, right? Like what you should do. But I guess 80-20.

Selim Maalouf (21:12.424)
Yes. Yeah.

Selim Maalouf (21:18.994)
you

Selim Maalouf (21:28.479)
Yeah.

Selim Maalouf (21:34.03)
yeah, of course, of course, yeah.

Chris DuBois (21:38.274)
Right, what are those few things that you would say, don't do that, like, I would have done this differently, you should just do these things right now so that you don't make the same mistakes.

Selim Maalouf (21:49.62)
Yeah, honestly, hone in on your MVP. Figure out how to do it efficiently, quickly, make its value very clear, and make sure you're setting time aside to do the long brand building play. Sometimes you might feel like, don't have time for marketing. I'm gonna focus on delivering those services. If you're very successful,

at messaging that MVP, you might have a lot of demand and feel like, okay, I don't need to do any marketing. But I have been in organizations that were focused on, you know, founder led sales and leveraging their relationships and contact lists. at some point you grow and you feel that's not enough. And you turn around to marketing and say, hey, I need you to start bringing me leads. But that buildup

If that didn't happen, marketing is gonna fall flat on its face. So you need to talk to your loved ones, your family, because the only resource you have at the start is time, not money. So you gotta invest that time, and that time might be in your evenings, and it might take over your downtime or your family time. And as long as they're okay with it, set time at a regular pace.

to do your brand building outside of your working hours because that needs time to cook, that needs time to ramp up, that needs time to start gaining attention and be ready when you need it to get you leads when you're a small MVP that kind of sells itself, runs out of steam and you need to start getting either bigger products or, you know, bigger pipeline. And at that point, marketing is essential. So,

Don't lose sight of the long play, but make sure you're nailing the short play first. So 80 on delivering a concise and clear MVP, 20 on marketing, and then that ratio can start shifting the more you give time for your brand to develop and gain traction.

Chris DuBois (24:07.02)
I'm glad you mentioned that. I just wrote down that question as a follow up. What percentage would you have and what milestones might you hit before starting to shift those? Yeah, I agree. I think that's probably the good way doing the brand versus the man. We got to keep the lights on right now, but it doesn't mean we neglect everything else.

Selim Maalouf (24:25.439)
Yes.

Yeah. And that's kind of why a lot of people do the side gig thing. Like it's removing risk. It's, it's giving you time to ramp up that, that brand play that you will need at specific sizes. like nobody decides, Hey, I'm going to risk my life savings on, on a agency, know, a services agency. Sometimes it's an inventor that's getting a product to market, but you rarely, at least I rarely hear

someone saying, I'm going to bet the house on running a marketing consultancy. Nobody does that.

Chris DuBois (25:06.04)
Yep. Yeah, no, it's definitely, I mean, I started my coaching as a semi-signing gig. Like I had a decent contract for like 20 hours a week that was kind of paying my bills and then started building this up. But even last year, like I had some low months that I was like, man, what are we doing here? Then things clicked because of the consistency and I don't have to.

Selim Maalouf (25:28.223)
There.

Chris DuBois (25:34.318)
worry about my kids starving. So that's good.

Selim Maalouf (25:36.222)
Yeah, and honestly, you're doing a great job at the brand play. the only reason why we're here having this conversation is because I'm a fan of the content you put out on LinkedIn and the efforts you're doing to build community around a shared pain are definitely the things that I always tell people to try to do. And those are the things that people don't set time aside for. And they say, we're too busy doing the work and

You notice there's a there's an interesting tangent that I would love to get your take on but like there's a lot of subject matter experts that say like hey, I don't have time to To do content and do marketing on LinkedIn. I'm too busy doing the work, you know rolling up my sleeves But then you end up seeing a lot of people who might not be the the the top experts in their fields There might be like middle-of-the-road experts, but they're more successful because they've been putting themselves out there

They've been consistent, people see them and they don't see the others and assume, right, these are the experts that I need to follow. then, know, a pipeline follows quickly and they become more successful entrepreneurs than, you know, the quote unquote true experts that are behind the scenes grinding away.

Chris DuBois (26:53.452)
Yeah, I would like in my own experience, completely anecdotal, but I think the content creation process has actually been what's made me more of an expert where I'll see a problem with a client, I'll work through and we'll work through it together. But then it's in my like afterwards writing about it and thinking about it and try to figure out is this the best way? Could we have done this better? And just creating some system or framework. So the next time this problem comes up.

It's like, have a solution, but it also means other people get to read this and say, I have that problem. And then I just gave them a solution, hopefully, and they can go deploy it. And so I think the content side is actually where you actually develop a lot more of your expertise by just thinking about the doing of the work.

Selim Maalouf (27:38.366)
Yeah, I would argue and that's something that I've jokingly discussed with a lot of people in my space that and if you're doing consulting, then that is 100 % true. But if your services are less around consulting and have more of a, I wouldn't call it tangible, but like a real product, that might be a harder pill to swallow for some. Like I joke saying like making content,

for marketers about marketing is easy mode. Like because marketers like skip steps and like get to the end before you can push them to the end. And they're like, yeah, of course. The thing you're saying, yeah, yeah, I get it. 100 % like share whatever. like when in other industries, some subject matter experts start trying to put themselves out there, it's either crickets or a lot of other experts come out.

to tear them down and they're spending most of their time trying to defend their credibility because interestingly enough, like in the manufacturing space, for example, everybody's super vicious and they don't care that they're being vicious online on LinkedIn. they'll come out and you'll see an argument between two experts and you don't understand a thing because that's not your industry. You don't know what they're talking about, but they're being very aggressive at each other and trying to tear each other down versus like places like HubSpot or

You know consulting and marketing stuff like that. Everybody's like, yeah, I get it because I agree with you and then content just performs on its own and you know, but just a funny aside. Yeah

Chris DuBois (29:18.348)
Yeah, no, that is, I think even in, I mean, even in my space, like I've had some posts where someone will come in and just try challenging every, everything. It's just, I don't know, it makes you wonder like, are they here for the debate or are they here to actually help the community try to be better? Yeah, I almost tried to put that lens on, which is another reason why we have the dynamic agency community where it's like, let me just bring people who only want to help together and create a resource.

Selim Maalouf (29:37.247)
Yeah.

Selim Maalouf (29:45.726)
Yeah. In fact, recently I've had an instance where, you know, I was critical of misuse of AI and I caught the eye of specific people and they started brigading my, my comment section. I had a choice to make. either back down or remove the post or I just be very bold and just fight back. And I did. And I got a couple of people that back down and, and, and agree with like, yeah, I'm not, you know,

I'm not telling people don't use AI, I'm telling people use it properly instead. yeah, that ended up being a net positive, but yeah, I've experienced it firsthand.

Chris DuBois (30:27.022)
I think when it comes down to those social media debates, the mark of a true marketer is when you can actually change someone's belief tactfully. Because I've seen plenty of marketers just going guns blazing. As soon as you tell someone no, they shut down. And that's common marketing. You're not going to go tell your buyer, hey, you're wrong, you're stupid, you need to come do this. They're never going to want to buy from you. And so if you're trying to change someone's mind on

Selim Maalouf (30:46.089)
Yeah.

Chris DuBois (30:57.346)
on a tactic like that, like this, how are you using AI? It's like just coming in, like in combat mode is not gonna convince anyone you're right. It's just gonna take people like polarize things more. And so.

Selim Maalouf (31:09.62)
Yeah. In fact, you see a lot with cold email. Everybody comes out says cold email is dead. And then the comment section is filled with people who have some affiliation with some tool that makes cold email easier. And they're like fighting for their lives in the comments saying like, no, you don't know what you're talking about. We've had this amount of success doing this, this and that. you know, on LinkedIn, can say you have receipts, but who's spending the time to go dig deep and confirm that you are

Chris DuBois (31:34.158)
I'm delicious.

Selim Maalouf (31:38.974)
you're saying what you're really, like you are true to what you're saying and you just get all these, you know, shouting matches of like SEO is dead, cold email is dead, cold calling is dead and it just becomes a joke at that point.

Chris DuBois (31:54.04)
Well, everything is probably dead on some level. And so we'll see how that pans out. I got two more questions for you. The first being, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read?

Selim Maalouf (32:08.544)
This one might be not very typical, but.

They ask you answer, and I know a lot of people are familiar with it, might not teach you how to properly, you definitely have it somewhere. It doesn't necessarily teach you how to build an agency, but it can give you the right mindset of knowing that people need to be educated on the problem, need to be educated on the solution, and they...

Chris DuBois (32:26.22)
I got a signed one somewhere over there from Marcus.

Selim Maalouf (32:44.186)
should feel like they have all the information they need to make a decision without having to pull you into a conversation. And if you do that successfully, if you give everybody the information they need to make a decision, you'll find more likely that they'll either come to you already deciding to buy, or if they talk to you, that conversation is so well lubricated and so easy.

that you might close them within 15 minutes of a conversation. So I think the ask-you-answer is a definite must for anyone who's trying to start an agency but hasn't worked in a function somewhere in an organization. Yeah.

Chris DuBois (33:27.17)
Yeah, I agree with that. Last question, where can people find you?

Selim Maalouf (33:32.224)
Easiest place on LinkedIn, Saleem Maloof. You can find a link anywhere. I create a lot of content there. I am very active there. I'm very responsive. Shoot me a message, send a connection request, and I can easily get into a conversation.

Chris DuBois (33:52.138)
Awesome. Salim, thanks for joining.

Selim Maalouf (33:54.673)
Thank you for having me.