Agency Advantage - Actionable advice to help digital agency owners, consultants, and freelancers be more successful

In this episode I’m talking with Alex Berman of experiment27, an agency marketing company that helps agency owners get more high-value leads. In this episode he shares the strategies he uses to get his clients new business.

Alex is the former director of marketing at the 60-person design and development studio, Dom & Tom. In that role he developed, tested, and refined strategies that ultimately led to $2.5 million dollars in closed business. Not $2.5 million dollars of pipeline or some other vague metric, but $2.5 million dollars in the bank.

Originally I had a list of questions for Alex covering a few different areas of his business and expertise. But he went so deep on each of these 8 strategies that there wasn’t time for anything else. I’m glad it worked out this way because this episode turned into one of the most actionable ones I’ve done.

We talk about strategies ranging from cold calling to podcasting, to in-person events. And best of all, these aren’t things Alex thinks work; they’re strategies he’s tested and used to get more leads for his agencies, month after month.

This episode is not just for new agency owners. It’s for everyone. No matter how sophisticated your agency’s new business efforts are, I guarantee you will learn something today that will help you get more clients.

In this episode I’m talking with Gene Hammett of Leaders in the Trenches, a consultancy that helps entrepreneurs and team leaders achieve their goals. During our discussion he shared with me how agency owners can use speaking gigs to reliably generate new business.

Gene was referred to me by our mutual friend, Matt Inglot, and I’m so glad Matt made the introduction because Gene has a great story.

Most people think of speaking in very loose terms. They know that it will “raise their profile” or give them more exposure. It’s something that everybody knows is good to do. But it isn’t clear how it will directly lead to more clients, so it usually gets pushed aside.

Gene has personally seen that, with the right approach, speaking can directly lead to new business, and today he works with agency owners to help them do exactly that.

In this interview, Gene shares the exact framework and process he uses to help his clients land their first speaking gig and dramatically grow their business. One client of his has earned over $800k from a single speech.

In this episode of Hubstaff’s Agency Advantage Podcast, I’m talking with Samuel Thimothy of OneIMS who shares how his agency launched a successful product business.

Samuel and his brother Solomon founded the marketing agency back in 2006. Since then they have grown tremendously while generating remarkable returns for their clients. Their company has taken some clients from obscurity to authority, eventually leading to a successful acquisition.

Like many digital agencies, it took a lot of tools for OneIMS to get their job done. They tried to simplify their process as much as they could, but still found themselves using multiple disjointed tools, creating reports, and connecting all of the dots.

To scratch their own itch, they developed a platform internally to replace all of these various tools and streamline their efforts. The team knew they were onto something and spun the platform out as a stand-alone product, ClickX.

Today Samuel is here to talk about how getting rid of the third party tools transformed relationships with clients, how they managed to launch a SaaS company while growing their service business, and the challenges they faced along the way.

If you spend almost as much time piecing together reports from dozens of tools, or you want to launch a product of your own, then this is the episode for you.

In this episode of Hubstaff’s Agency Advantage Podcast, I’m talking with Mark Sneider of RSW/US who shares a proven methodology for winning agencies new business.

Mark is a 30-year veteran of the advertising and marketing service industry and today runs the 40-person agency, RSW/US where they’ve been helping marketing services firms find and win new business since 2005. Mark and his team do this by following a proven methodology that has helped not only their clients consistently grow, but that has also produced double digit growth every year for their own business.

Deep down, every agency owner out there knows that having a real plan for winning new business is crucial to success, but most are keeping their fingers crossed that they’ll be able to get by on word of mouth alone.

Mark is here today to share exactly how he has grown RSW/US and how he helps other agencies reliably land new business.

If you are tired of the feast or famine cycle, then this is the episode for you.

In this episode of Hubstaff’s Agency Advantage Podcast, I’m talking with Peter Levitan (Twitter) about how to develop skills a client can’t ignore.

Peter has owned his own two-office agency, bought and sold 3 agencies, worked for the largest agency in the world in New York and London, wrote the book Buy This Book. Win More Pitches. The list goes on, and on, and on. Peter knows his stuff.

When talking to agency owners, Peter estimates that 80% of them don’t actually have a real, written down business plan, which is an absolutely fatal mistake.

In today’s talk, Peter explains why a business plan is so important, how to develop one, and how to use that plan to develop skills that clients can’t ignore.

Referrals are great, but if that’s all you rely on for new clients and aren’t sure how to grow beyond that, then this is the episode for you.

In this episode of Hubstaff’s Agency Advantage Podcast, I’m talking with Mark Thompson of Digital Kickstart.

Like many of us, Mark wasn’t cut out for having a boss, so after getting fired from his last job, he started the SEO agency, Search Creatively. While he was able to build it up into a successful agency, he realized it wasn’t what he expected. Now instead of having 1 boss, he had dozens. And in order to grow he needed to hire more people which increased his overhead and ate into his margins.

Mark caught the product bug like many agency owners because he saw it as a way to break free of client work and stop selling his time for money.

After getting a few early wins under his belt, he quit client work altogether and went all-in on products. Since making that decision, he and his team have created over 20 products that have sold for over 20 million dollars.

Today, Mark talked about how he first got started with products while still delivering client work, what he does differently in order to get huge results, and how he and his team manage so many different products.

If you’ve ever thought about creating a product of your own, this is the episode for you.

For this 1 year anniversary episode of Hubstaff’s Agency Advantage Podcast, I’m talking with none other than Marcus Sheridan of the Sales Lion. Today Marcus is one of the biggest names in the inbound and content marketing world, but in 2008 he was the owner of a swimming pool company that was on the brink of bankruptcy.

He stumbled upon inbound marketing and went all-in with it, in the process turning his company’s website into the most trafficked swimming pool site in the world, with over 500,000 visitors a month.

Since then, he has been evangelizing the power of inbound and content marketing and now helps other agencies duplicate his own success.

This interview was a blast and Marcus dropped a ton of knowledge into it: from why your website needs to list prices, to why sales training is crucial for every agency and even how VR is shaping up to be a game changer for agencies, but the real focus of today’s talk is on the importance of getting client buy-in.

If you struggle to get clients to devote enough time to your projects or you get blamed when things don’t go as expected, then this episode is for you.

In this episode of Hubstaff’s Agency Advantage Podcast, I’m talking with Keith Perhac of DelfiNet.

DelfiNet is a technical marketing agency that at it’s peak had a team of 14 spread around the world, servicing clients in Japan and the US. But his life was a constant battle of managing client expectations, managing his team, and putting out whatever fires pop up in between. One day, the bottom fell out.

Today Keith’s agency has only 6 employees and is doing around $1 million a year in revenue, but to get to this point he had to take a step back and evaluate his priorities.

In doing so, Keith realized just how important it is to be deliberate not just about when you hire, but also whom you hire. And in this episode Keith will share his hard earned lessons about hiring the right way.

Keith doesn’t hold back at all in this interview and really dives into where things went wrong and this is one of the most honest looks into an agency that I’ve had on the show.

In this episode of Hubstaff’s Agency Advantage Podcast, I’m talking with Rich Brooks of the web design and internet marketing agency, flyte new media.

In addition to running his agency, Rich runs the annual Agents of Change conference in the great state of Maine, and also hosts the Agents of Change podcast.

Today we talk about his decision to create the conference and then the podcast, his challenges along the way, and how these side projects have helped fuel his agency and the unusual way it helped him improve his margins.

If you’ve ever thought about putting on a live event of any scale, or are curio

In this episode of Hubstaff’s Agency Advantage Podcast, I’m talking with Brian Casel (Twitter) of Audience Ops.

Audience Ops helps businesses grow their audience, email list, and customer-base with done-for-you content marketing. From creating lead magnets, to email marketing automation, to writing the blogs themselves, they do it all.

Brian was on the 3rd episode of this podcast which has the esteemed honor of being the most listened to interview of this show. He understands like no other how to systematize a business so you can remove yourself from the day-to-day and work on the business rather than in it and with what he has been working on recently, I knew I had to get him back on the show.

Brian has built his productized service business up to $50k in MRR and is preparing to to launch their first SaaS product, the Audience Ops Calendar. While we talk about the new systems he is putting in place, I didn’t waste this opportunity to rehash material he has already covered. So if you are interested in how he was able to build a web design company that only took 4 hours a month to run, then check out episode number 3.

But if you’re like many agency owners and you’ve caught the product itch and are thinking about releasing a product of your own, then this is the episode for you. And whether or not you are looking to build a product, he also shares the number one profit crushing mistake that agency owners make.