Agency Forward

Chris DuBois 0:00
Hey everyone. Today I'm joined by Eli ruble. Eli is the founder of profit labs and two successful agencies matter made and no boring design with over 9 million in combined net profit. He is one of the sharpest minds in the space when it comes to turning revenue into actual take home profit without over complicating your ops or gutting your entire team. I love how Eli breaks down how agency founders can stop chasing revenue for vanity sake and start building businesses that generate real wealth. In this episode, we discuss the biggest myth about agency profitability and why revenue does not necessarily equal success, a smart way to use underutilized team capacity as a lead gen engine, how to align your calendar as a founder, to pull your biggest strategic levers and more. No one was asking for another community, but I've made one anyway. So what's different? The dynamic agency community is designed around access, rather than content. Access to peers who've done it before, access to experts who have designed solutions, access to resources that have been battle tested. And right now, the price for founding members is only $97 a year. Join today, so your agency has immediate access to everything you need to grow. You can join at Dynamic agency dot community and now Eli ruble, 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. What's the biggest myth about agency profitability?

Speaker 1 1:46
Biggest myth? I like that question. You know, I think most agency owners end up getting obsessed with revenue, and they think the myth is that they think, if they just optimize for revenue and optimize for growth, that the profit will come eventually. And I think there are a lot of burned out agency owners who have chased that myth, only to find themselves in a place where they have a agency that's doing two, $3 million a year, and they're making 500 $750,000 in profit, which in my world would be like a disaster, like something's gone seriously wrong, if you have that level of top line and that level of profit going into your pocket. So I think it's the obsession with with revenue as the metric is one of the biggest profitability myths.

Chris DuBois 2:41
Yeah, I think I would agree with that. The lot of the agencies I'm working with don't have the revenue for the profit margins that really make, like, a huge difference. But one of the sticking points is that they, they, like, get stuck on, well, I just need to keep making more money. And it's good, yeah. But if you, if you're making like, a million now, and you have a 30% profit margin, right? If we can get you to 2 million, but you have a 50% profit margin, it's like the numbers change dramatically. So, like, you should actually shift more to looking at profitability when your revenue is going up. I don't know. Well, I mean, obviously you get addicted to, like, just seeing those revenue numbers, right? Like, when you're it's like, another deal. Yeah, let's go. How would you recommend they make that mental shift? Yeah?

Speaker 1 3:29
So I don't, I mean, I do look at revenue numbers, but I really don't look at revenue numbers. And by that, I mean I in all of the dashboards and all the stuff I'm looking at, all I really care about is profit, and I've just trained myself to only care about that, like, cool. It's almost like it would be my reaction to revenue is the same reaction that any of us would have if someone was like, I have 10,000 website visitors per month. Like, cool, bro, whatever. All right, sweet. And so it's like, but what like? What's actually happening in the business and what's actually tricking trickling down to the bottom line? And that's, that's the thing that I obsess over. That's the thing I put in my dashboards. That's the thing I rally my team around. I even compensate my team around profitability, so that they're thinking like owners and not like employees. So,

Chris DuBois 4:20
yeah, once a year you're launching a new business, like right now is, are you starting it with the profitability, like, focus over revenue, even if you have no current clients?

Speaker 1 4:35
Yeah. So, I mean, the new business wouldn't be a fit for, oh, you mean, if I don't have current

Chris DuBois 4:41
clients, yeah, just like how you're Oh yeah,

Speaker 1 4:44
from Ground Zero, gotcha, right. So the Yeah, the new business is called profit labs. We're actually launching it today. So exciting day to be recording a podcast with you. And yeah, our focus is 100% on helping eight. Agency owners run more profitable businesses by helping them increase their profit margin. Specifically the way that we do that. It's a three pronged approach. We believe that agency owners have enough headaches on their plate, and so we take over their back office, their financial back office. So think like bookkeeping, client, invoicing, bill payment, chasing down late payments from customers, all of the stuff that like. If it gets off the rails, it gets really off the rails, and usually you have some admin or some other firm working on that for you, so that it doesn't become a pain. So first thing is we help clean up their their back office. Then we and this is kind of the magic. We surface agency specific insights that any other financial partner of theirs is not going to be giving them, because we come from this background of having started and scaled multiple agency businesses. And so that was, that was kind of, I started this out of my own pain, right as an agency owner, I worked with a bunch of different financial providers over the years, but they always came at it through this lens of, like, you know, they had a degree in finance, a background, you know, maybe their CPA, their bookkeeper, whatever it is, and so they look at the numbers purely through the lens of the numbers and nothing more. Whereas, like, that's not super helpful. That's basically just putting things in buckets and providing a PDF doesn't help me as an agency owner, actually understand what's happening in my business fast enough or deeply, deeply enough to make more profitable decisions that are actually going to help me grow my business and increase the bottom line I put into my pocket every year. So that's what we're surfing surfacing are those agency specific insights. It's a combination of financial data and operational data. So, you know, we've built things like a predictable, predictive model for staffing. You know, one of the big pain points that agency owner, and one of the things that kills profitability faster than anything else, I think, is getting overstaffed suddenly because a client leaves or getting understaffed, it's kind of counterintuitive. Getting understaffed, your profit margins go up, but then you under service accounts, and then you end up churning accounts down the road, so it creates a future problem. So this problem space of being able to predictively understand, should I be hiring right now? Should I be firing right now? Are my staffing levels in a healthy place? We surface those insights for these agency owners, they don't have to guess anymore. They don't have to do it based on gut. Really helps them make these more profitable decisions. So that's the second piece, is surfacing these insights. And then the third piece is actually helping these, these agency owners, implement some of the strategies that, you know, I like to say it's it's taking the right action is hard as an agency owner, because everything feels like it's on fire all the time. You know, you're always chasing down these things that feel like they're the top priority. And what ends up happening a lot of the time is that you don't work on the things that require taking a step back, require slowing down a little bit those And invariably, they're the most strategic levers you could be pulling. But it's hard to get around to them, and so we help agency owners get around to those levers, things like price sensitivity, testing, load balancing, labor, helping them get out of founder led sales so that they can work on improving those profit margins.

Chris DuBois 8:25
Right? So what are the some of those, like key data sets that you're looking at to be able to kind of make these decisions?

Speaker 1 8:34
Yeah, absolutely. So we give our clients a live dashboard. In that live dashboard, they're going to see each of their clients, what's the gross margin by client? So they can keep tabs on like, you know, it's one thing to look at profitability across the whole agency or across a service line. It's another thing to see, hey, you know this big logo that, you know, it's an enterprise logo. We're charging a ton of money, but we're actually starting to lose money, or we're starting to kill our good margins because we're investing so many resources into it. And I think those are the types of stories that agency owners who have been at it for a while can like, not nod and identify with, because we've all been there, myself included. So we're surfacing what's their gross margin per client, what's the client's happiness score, right next to that. So you're kind of at a glance, able to really quickly calibrate, are the clients happy? Do we have churn risks and are they profitable? That's one big piece of data. The other piece, we ingest time tracking data across their team, and that's where we're able to, in combination with their sales CRM data, we're able to model predictively what their staffing levels look like. Are you overstaffed? Understaffed by what percentage are you overstaffed or understaffed? And are you staffed appropriately to meet the demand of what's in your sales pipeline, 30 days out, 60 days out. And we actually go a step further and base that on the close rates, their historical close rates. So it's should. Be pretty damn accurate for folks based on how their sales team, or if they're the seller, based on how they've been performing over

Chris DuBois 10:07
time, right? So you just mentioned time tracking, being able to use that data. I'm a fan, because it does give you a lot of really good data. A lot of agency owners feel like it's micromanaging all these things. How do you get them to actually track their time?

Speaker 1 10:23
Yeah, you know, I think they're, they're, they're agency owners who've been doing it for a long time, and they track time, and their agency owners who don't like the idea of tracking time. And they'll eventually start tracking time once they get to that point in their journey. That's, that's kind of how I think of it. I try to be pretty not rude, but pretty aggressive with agency owners when they hear they're not tracking time. And I'm just like, look, you're in a service based business where you charge for your employees time. So how can you charge effectively for your employees time if you're not tracking their time? Like that just doesn't make any sense to anybody. So yeah, that that. That boggles my mind. When people aren't tracking the time, and I'm now forgetting the question asked,

Chris DuBois 11:07
no, that was like, how do you even get them to shift their mindset? Because it doesn't make sense to me, right? When like, your team is what you're selling essentially, like, it sounds bad when you say it like that, but like, that's it. You're you have your skills, yet you have the expertise, and you're coming to us for a service. And so how do we actually track the output of this service? It's with time, and so 100% Yeah, I think it makes sense. One of

Speaker 1 11:31
the things I like to say to agency owners is, you know, this ties back into the obsession with revenue, but it also relates to whether or not they're able to squeeze profit out of that revenues is, you know, you can't buy a vacation home with revenue, and you can't make profit if you don't know how much it costs to service that revenue, and you can buy a vacation home with profit. So, like, it's cool if you want to be Kumbaya and not, not, you know, step on any toes and not track time and feel good about that. You just might be running a charity then. And if that's what you want to do, that's totally fine, but that's not what I

Chris DuBois 12:11
want to do, yeah. Except most agencies, if they're running like a charity, are paying way too much in taxes, exactly, restructure. So I guess what? What what are you seeing as some of the biggest, like, profit killers, I guess, within agencies? Yeah.

Speaker 1 12:25
I mean, it's kind of the inverse of of the services that we're offering to me, you know, over, over my career. So I started matter, made my first agency. That business has done a little over $8 million in net profit over the last five years. And then I started no boring design that business has done, like we're going to do a million dollars in profit this year. So across those businesses, I've seen a lot, and I've made a lot of mistakes, right as far as the killers of profitability, I think the first piece is when things behind the scenes. Behind the Scenes get messy, right? When you can't answer fundamental questions fast enough about what's happening in the business. Give you a perfect example. You know, I'll meet with my leadership team. Or back when I was I don't run the businesses anymore, but when I was running the businesses, we meet with our leadership team every Monday and every Friday, and that leadership team is asking fundamental questions around, hey, it feels like we're investing too many resources in this client account, but I know they're an important logo. I know it's a good relationship. Should we keep investing resources into that account? Or should we put our foot down, like, should we draw a line? Should we say that's out of scope, or should we just keep the relationship as lubricated as possible? And there have been many times where I didn't have the answer to that, because our data was behind and we didn't have or we didn't have clean enough data to say that account sitting at, you know, 53% gross margin. So yeah, we should start drawing some lies in the sand, because really we want to be in that 65 to 75% gross margin range. I think that in of itself, which is really two pieces, one is like having the cleanliness of the data, and then the other one is having the rigor to surface those insights, and knowing which insights to surface, and then rallying your leadership team around those insights. If any of those three pieces are missing, it's, it's a sure fire way to kill profitability. And then there's some tactical things too. It's like, I talk about price sensitivity testing a lot, because I've changed my life personally through price sensitivity testing. When I launched matter made we entered the market at a $3,500 a month retainer price point. At our peak, we were charging $45,000 a month. The service didn't change a lot from 3500 to 45,000 per month. Just the price right and. There's a little bit of hyperbole there. We maybe we added, you know, if it was a two person team satisfying the $3,500 a month price point, it was a four person team satisfying the $45,000 month point. But the point is, the price scaled and the labor didn't have to, which means a ton. I mean, that business was doing 67% we were at 6067 I think somewhere in the 60s percent net margin in our peak year. And that like, that's actually too profitable, and that's a problem. And I could go down a whole story about how I learned that lesson the hard way. You need to, you need to be careful when you go over a certain profit, net profit margin, because it's a signal that you're under investing in your team. And if you're under investing in your team, eventually it's going to become a giant problem. So anyway, price go ahead. Yeah.

Chris DuBois 15:53
What would you consider that that profit margin point being?

Speaker 1 15:57
Yeah. So the guidance I give to my GMs, the folks who run my companies, is I want us to be between 45 and 55% net margin. And if we're approaching 55 let's say we get to like 52% net margin. I want that leader to be coming to me with a plan for how they're going to reinvest some of that cash back into the business. A lot of the time when you get up that level depends on the size of the company, but, you know, it means maybe, hey, maybe it's time to invest in some middle management. Maybe we have, there's a layer of management we might be missing, and maybe now is the time, or, you know, maybe it's time to invest more in getting the team together more often, to improve that, that cohesion. You know, there are a lot of different ways you could invest that, but when we get to around 52% that's when I, like, the team leads to come to me and say, here's my plan for keeping us below 55 gotcha?

Chris DuBois 16:49
I like, yeah, it's a much nicer note. When we was running an agency, we had hit like, 45% for a profit margin, and that was where we actually started looking at, okay, what do we need actually reinvest? Because, like, we have the capital now to do something more for the team and make sure that we're, we're set up. But I wonder how much is the reframing of like, well, 45 is actually the start of where we want to be, right? It

Speaker 1 17:12
super depends, though, like you say that, and I want to, I want to caveat, right? Because if you're a it depends on the size of the agency, right? If you're a three person agency, you could be looking at like 70, 80% net margins all day long, right? Yeah. If you're a 40 person agency, yeah, you might be right in that like 40, 45% net margin. And that's a celebration, right? You know, it just depends on the size of the company and the amount of revenue that you're servicing. So

Chris DuBois 17:48
how do you look at service design in regards to profit? Because, so it sounds like you had, you didn't have to change much of that. One solution you were offering to get it from 35 to 3500 to 45k Yeah, but it so. Was the extra profit just coming from increase in the price point, or was it actually a service that was designed to be profitable regardless, and that was the benefit?

Speaker 1 18:16
Yeah. So I think of service design in my mind, service design is like it's the buyer journey within your plans that you offer. And so I'll use no boring design as example. My more recent agency, design creative agency, we design the tiers so that it's really easy to get someone in the door on our base tier, but it's fairly restrictive for the client, so it gives them enough dopamine hit to say this is a valuable service, and I like working with this team and to validate that we're the right partner for them. Get their foot in the door, but then it isn't enough for, you know, all of their needs from a volume perspective. And so then we make that jump from the first tier to the second tier an easy step to make, where it doesn't feel like, you know, we're not, we're not trying to double their spend, necessarily, but make it a small enough jump that they go. You know what? I trust these people. I've seen their work. I'm just it's an easy upgrade. Let's go to the middle tier. And usually in my world, the middle tier is where we want people. That's like, we're optimizing everything to get people to that middle tier. And so that's how I like to think about service design. Is like, how can we get them in the door easily, and then how can we make that step to the ideal tier as obvious and as a no brainer as possible, I can give you an example of with this new business profit labs. The way that we're doing this, the first tier, we solve that first piece that kills agency profitability of the three pieces, which is having a messy back office. So the first tier, we're taking over as bookkeeping. We're taking over as sending invoices. Chasing down late payments, bill payment, all the all the administrative, back office stuff, that's great, and that gives you a strong foundation, but without the insights that you're able to produce on top of that, like it's not it's not a complete service. It's not going to help them fully realize their goals. From a profit margin perspective, that next tier up is only $1,000 more, and it gives them all of the insights and the predictive modeling and the dashboards. Like, it's just like a no brainer, if you're taking your business seriously and you're, you know, growing this, it makes no sense to not spend that extra $1,000 so that's how we think about is, like, it's a small little baby step once we get them in the door to go to that ideal tier, right?

Chris DuBois 20:43
We're doing something similar with with all my clients, or not all of them, but for the ones that it makes sense, where I'm calling it velocity selling it was something we did at our agency where it's essentially you have your pricing tiers set up for like, an easy yes, so it might be like a six, nine and 12k offer as an example, but the outcome is the same for all of them. It's just how, depending on your budget means we can put in more effort to achieve that outcome faster. Love that so. So if they they go in at the 6k offer, because that's the easiest one for them to to get into, it's like, Hey, you're seeing results. If you want to get the results faster. We just shut up your budget and do these things, and now it's such an easy upsell into the next bracket, because, yeah, they're already happy they got in, in the door, same way you were talking and and then we can just elevate it through that. And obviously so profit margins don't necessarily change per iteration of that because we are actually doing more, but you can tweak it so that right there's like, economy of scale when you're doing stuff, like, if we can batch all of the blog content we're gonna write, for example, still gonna take us less time than if we were to do one post multiple times for you. And so, yeah, but I like the I like the thinking, Yeah, I

Speaker 1 22:00
love that framework, Chris, I think it's it's always a win if you can make the choice to upgrade clients decision. And it sounds like that's exactly what that strategy does, is it's like, hey, we can go however fast you want us to go. You just tell us and we'll adjust your price accordingly. Right?

Chris DuBois 22:17
Once you've seen those results, it's so easy to like, Hey, you already know this works, right? Why would you not want to go faster hit those goals? We've proven it out. I actually want to talk about a lead gen method that I've seen you use, specifically rebuilding the exit five design, because I don't know how much business you were able to drive from that engagement, but just not a lot of agencies are doing things like that where they go to someone they say, Hey, let me build this for you. You just help me promote, promote the business. Show it off, talk about us like and I don't even know if you're publicly saying any of this. So I can scrap this so I can scrap this part of the episode if we need to. But it seems like, I mean, that was the first time I heard about no boring design, and then it's like, you blew up from there, as far as I was seeing. And so I don't know if it was just because of, like, I'm tied into the exit five community and so I was seeing all these things, or if it actually did have, like, a pretty dramatic impact on your business, but it's not something common you see with agencies. And so I'm curious to hear like you're thinking around it. Yeah,

Speaker 1 23:28
absolutely, it's one of those funny things where, so first off, to answer your question, it drove a ton of pipeline for us. I can't remember the exact number of somewhere between like one and $2 million in pipeline. And of that, you know, we closed, I think our close rate is 30% ish, so we closed a meaningful amount of revenue from it, right? And especially if you think about it on a relative cost basis, compared to, like, What did it cost for us to do that engagement, versus what did it bring in and what did we close? I get a lot of put of pushback from agency folks when, when they hear that I like to do free work in exchange for for visibility. And I think that pushback usually comes from a it comes from a good place, right? They're coming a lot of times. Folks who start agencies start off as an employee. They're like a rock star. I see you know, they're maybe the best marketer on their team, or they're the best designer on the team, whatever it is. And then they go freelance, and then from freelance, they're like, Well, I don't want to do as much of the work. And then they start hiring people, and poof, they have an agency. Right? In that freelance space, doing free work is like a big no no, right? It's really talked down on and for good reason, like you shouldn't. I don't think it's wise to be giving away too much of your time, because that doesn't scale, and suddenly you're just it's not great. But when you have other people's time that you can offer for free, and you have employees that you can offer for free, there's a game that you can play where it isn't. Actually that bad for the business. In fact, it's great for the business. And that game is you're gonna have team members at certain points who aren't at 100% capacity. And so what I like to do is you have an option there, right? You can either run a really, really, really tight ship, where you remove team members if they stay under capacity for too long, or you can find ways to utilize that capacity that generates enough revenue to give them enough clients so that they get to capacity. That's that's the method that I like, and that's what you see at play when I do things like the partnership with with Dave Gerhard at exit five, when we redid their site. So it's a win, win, right? It gives our team members some stability, so that they're not worried that they're gonna get cut because they're sitting at 50% capacity. It gives us more exposure, generates a ton of pipeline. And don't get me wrong, sometimes these things are a total flop, like we've done exit five was amazing for us. RB, to be we're about to launch their new brand and site, same deal. I think that's going to be amazing for us. But then we did one. Do you know the guy I'm gonna I'm gonna space his name. Let's see

Chris DuBois 26:17
corporate. Bro, yeah. Okay, yeah, Ross,

Speaker 1 26:21
that's right. So we did Ross pomerances brand and website, thinking like, Man, this guy is super internet famous within our little niche of B to B SAS, it's going to be a home run, you know, it's going to be so funny and great to do his site. So we did a site, and it brought in exactly zero business, you know, just because, like, people aren't looking to him for, you know, who they don't care about his website in the sense of like, this is an amazing example of what a website could be, and we want to copy it, right? They don't even think like that. So I think the context is so important, and the audience is really important well,

Chris DuBois 27:02
and I don't know that I've ever gone to his website Exactly. I'm not using RB to be I still went to their website to, like, check it out, yeah. And so, right, it's like, probably one of those things. But I think the huge differentiator with this is the intentionality of what you're doing. Where, I think the the advice that most like freelancers and then agencies are given, of don't do free work is because they're not. They're just, yeah, cuz you're trying to get this lead right, this deal across the door, and maybe you have to give some some free stuff in the process. That's one thing, but to be able to say, No, I'm deliberately doing this because I have capacity on my team to do it, this is now a lead gen. So it's the same as if I was going to go spend money on ads or build a new lead magnet. It's the same thing comes out the same in the end, but we're being very intentional and deliberate about how we're thinking through this. What what level of capacity are you looking at across your team to be able to say, like, yeah, we got space to be able to run something like this. So

Speaker 1 28:03
I like Team capacity to sit somewhere in the 80 to 90% range. I think that's a healthy, healthy utilization rate where you're not burning the team out. And you know, if you get close to 90 or you, that's your signal. You're going to start the recruiting engine, right? You're going to start looking for those next roles so that they're they're ready to go, so you're still able to deliver a great client experience at that at that upper threshold. Once you get much below 80% then you're obviously just leaving a ton of cash on the table. And so getting back to, like, profitability killers, that's one of them. So for me, if we're somewhere below 80% and above 70, like 70 to 80% I think that's a sweet spot. To take that 10% across the team and allocate it to one of these projects, if you can. And it also depends on how every industry is going to be different, as far as, like, how long does a project take you to deliver? Because if you're sitting at 70% utilization, because you've got one of these projects going, and the project takes you four months, that's a lot of cash to give up, potentially, depending on the size of your team. So I think all of these factors, like, there's the there's the marketing strategy side, which is all well and good. And then there's the business financial side, where you have to model out like, what is our true cost on this engagement, of taking that unused, taking that utilization, and applying it to this over the course of four months, for a 10 person team as an example. So you have to go in, eyes wide open for it to work well,

Chris DuBois 29:39
right? So all right, you've launched two agencies that are successful. You're now launching another business for four agencies, and we so I opened this question like before, the the episode, but the you're now in business builder mode, meaning your calendar has been. Reset. You're not doing your normal workouts. You're not doing all the normal family activities. What does that look like on your calendar right now?

Speaker 1 30:09
Yeah, love that question, and it's funny, like, it sounds bad when you're like, Oh, you're stripping away all the good stuff in life and you're only grinding. But I'm, I'm, like, so energized right now by it, and I think I'm a big fan of riding the waves of energy when they come, because I'll have plenty of time when I don't feel like working, and I just want to ride my mountain bike with my kids, you know. And I'll ride that wave when that wave is here. So right now, structurally, and I'm looking at my calendar right here, so I hold two days a week where the first four hours of the day are blocked off. Nothing can get scheduled. There no sales calls, no internal calls. It's just pure strategy time. And so that's where, you know, when I talked earlier about taking the time to take a giant step back, slow down, and pull on the really big levers that are going to make an impact. That's my time to do that. And I've noticed that if I don't give myself three or four hours, I don't have enough time for my brain to kind of like slow down and settle into that headspace to work on those things. So Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have those four hour blocks, then in the afternoons, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have two or three hours each day blocked for sales calls. So that's where, you know, people can book, book a time on my calendar for this new business, and I'll take those sales calls. Mondays are Mondays, and Wednesdays are full of internal meetings. So that's like kicking off the week with a leadership team meeting, having one on ones, dealing with all of the like internal processes that we're setting up for the new business. I mean, there's a lot of setup stuff happening right now, right? A lot of hiring happening right now. So those days, the Mondays and Wednesdays are my days to make sure that everything internally that needs to be happening and getting set up is getting set up. And then Fridays, I actually still have blocked off. Those are, those are my days to go. I take my oldest skiing, although our last day of skiing was, was last week, so no more of that. Now we're gonna go be going mountain biking. But yeah, it's, it's just blocked off for family time.

Chris DuBois 32:28
Yeah, whatever you want to do. Yeah, awesome. So as we start winding down here, I got a handful of questions that I still want to get there. But what if we had to look at like the 8020 rule, or even, or just reframing it as the big domino that you can knock down for operations. What would have the most impact on someone's agency right now? Most positive impact? Yeah,

Speaker 1 32:56
getting a clear understanding and control over their team's utilization so that they can keep things in a healthy place. That's going to be the number one thing operationally, in my mind, that helps control margin.

Chris DuBois 33:14
Yeah, it's good one.

Unknown Speaker 33:17
What do you think? What would your answer be,

Chris DuBois 33:20
operationally? I would be looking for the bottlenecks that cause them the most where we can find the most leverage to increase output for time. So like, Where, where is it taking us the most time. But if we introduce just a better process, or we introduced some tech or something, we could actually get an outsized return without sacrificing the quality of this. So I feel like a lot of agencies just get stuck in there this, like this, how we've always done it. It's like, that's a dangerous let's not do that. So being able to just go back and look at like, okay, from a profit standpoint, right? Where are we actually spending a majority of our time? And we can see the biggest fix right now. And I think just doing that analysis, and kind of even just rank ordering, like having a sheet where you're just like, next time we got some some free bandwidth, like, this is what we're fixing, and you just keep lining it up. And anyone on the team can contribute to that list when they see an opportunity, and we just keep stacking it. Love that. Yeah, we probably tackle it that way. So what? As we wind down, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read? Ooh,

Speaker 1 34:34
Profit First is a great one. I think if folks haven't read that, that's a that's just a good I don't follow Profit First myself, exactly, but it's more so the mindset of profit first that I think is really, really, really valuable for folks. Another really good one is double double by Cameron Harold. That was a really formative book for me, early in my career. Lot of really quick hitting, tactical advice. It's from the guy. Who was the COO of one 800 got junk and he helped turn that business around. That's a great one.

Chris DuBois 35:10
There's so many good books

Speaker 1 35:12
loving your business. Okay, so for agency owners who have been at it for a while and are maybe feeling burnt out and over it, but they don't, but they have a good business, and they're not sure what to do about that. There's a book called Loving your business. Can't remember the author's name. That book got me through some really hard times with my agencies in the past, just mentally. And I think is just a great read in general.

Chris DuBois 35:41
Awesome. Yeah, haven't heard any of those? And actually, no. So normally I don't go back to questions, but you made me think of one. So Cameron Herold, right, founder of the COO Alliance as well and stuff. You're very operationally minded with everything you're doing. How do you balance that kind of coo mindset with also being the CEO of companies, agencies, and now this one,

Unknown Speaker 36:07
that's an interesting question, easy to stay

Chris DuBois 36:09
out of the weeds. Like, how do you

Speaker 1 36:10
Oh, yeah. Like, yeah, I understand. So I, I hate doing work. Is there, you know, I say I got into the agency space because I'm super lazy, and I wanted to make as much money as possible so I could spend time doing the things that I love with the people that I love, and do as little work as possible. And so the realization was like, Okay, what business allows me to do that? Well, it's one where you charge for other people's time. People's time, which sounds cold, but it's business and capitalism, and that's how it works. So for me, I love thinking through the operational stuff, and then I love delegating the operational stuff. And then the next layer from that, or level from that, is I like hiring people who are better that better at the operational stuff than I am, to come to me and say, here's here's how we're going to make this even better, whether that's a consultant like yourself or just a great, you know, team member that can be full time, but bringing in those folks who are even better than I am to implement those changes and design those changes in The first place. That's kind of where I'm at now, where I don't think I'm the best at any one thing, I'm a generalist. So I'm good at getting businesses off the ground, I'm good at understanding problems and coming up with solutions. But then, once they're off the ground, there are individuals across every category of business who are going to be better than me.

Chris DuBois 37:41
Right? Same, yeah. We got similar mindsets on that. It's like, may never be the smartest person in the room, but I can probably create the most value just by realigning how we're looking at this room. Awesome. Okay, so last question is, where can people find you? Yeah,

Speaker 1 37:57
find me on LinkedIn. That's where I spend a lot of time. Eli ruble, there you can find my new company, profit labs. It's profit labs.co. If you're interested in figuring out how you can make your agency more profitable. And yeah, those are the best places to

Chris DuBois 38:14
find me. Awesome. All right. Well, Eli, thanks for joining. Chris.

Unknown Speaker 38:17
Thanks for having me. This was fun.

Chris DuBois 38:19
Cheers. You. 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 sub stack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward. You.

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