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

In this episode of Hubstaff’s Agency Advantage Podcast, we talk with Dan Golden (Twitter), founder and President of the 45+ person digital marketing agency, Be Found Online.

Be Found Online was recently awarded a spot on the Inc 500 list of the fastest growing private companies in America, and if that alone isn’t impressive enough, this was the 5th straight year they’ve had that honor, so they know a thing or two about growth.

Today Dan shares how they accelerated that growth with agency partnerships, but the real focus of our talk is how he and his team use open-book management to build a high performing team that made this growth possible.

If you could use fully engaged and driven employees, then don’t go anywhere because Dan lays out exactly how to get, and keep, them.

Casey Cobb is the founder of the 25-person design and development shop, Project Ricochet, but he is also an inventor, angel investor, writer, speaker, and has co-founded 2 other companies.

In this interview, Casey shares with us a concept that describes why working with a team can be so miserable sometimes. That concept is called accidental evil, and if you have spent any time working in a group, then you’ve been a victim of it.

I’ll be honest, the deck is stacked against you, but luckily there is a way out, and Casey is here to explain what you need to do to avoid accidental evil and make work fun, profitable, and more impactful.

This isn’t some pie in the sky motivational talk built on cliches that you can’t act on. No, this is an actionable lesson to increase your productivity, decrease your stress, and build a better agency, and a better life for that matter.

The dream of many agency owners is to one day be able to sell their agency and, frankly, get a nice payday after putting in years of hard work. A few agency owners are able to pull it off, but for most it doesn’t pan out, for one reason or another.

Henry Corona of FinanceSur specializes in, among other things, handling mergers and acquisitions of agencies, and in his career he has seen it all.

Today Henry shares the common mistakes agency owners make that prevent them from being able to sell when they retire, and also what you need to be careful of during the actual sale process.

If you hope to sell your agency someday, you need to tune into this episode to make sure you’re on the right track.

Responding to RFPs can suck the life out of any agency. You’re the expert, but the potential client is telling you what needs to be done and for how much, before you’ve even had a chance to really understand the scope.

And because you aren’t getting paid for this work, you have to try to limit the amount of time you invest in the proposal, but you also want to protect yourself so you end up padding the quote, and in the end nobody wins.

When was the last time an RFP project actually finished on time and on budget, anyways? I can’t think of a time either.

Luckily, there is a better way: Paid Discovery

Sara Bacon, founder of the e-commerce development and optimization shop, Command C, has spent years optimizing her own process for not just doing the discovery, but selling it as well, and today she shares everything she has learned.

If you’re tired of responding to yet another RFP, then this episode is for you

I was introduced to Jake Finkelstein of Method Savvy by another guest of the podcast, Karl Sakas, who told me that he considers Jake one of the top 1% of decision makers out there. After this podcast, I understand why.

But what sets Jake apart isn’t that he always makes the right decision, it’s that he is able to quickly learn when he is wrong, both in the problems he focuses on and the solutions he applies to try to solve them.

Today, not only does Jake share how he does that and why it’s so important, but he also shares the decision making process that lead to him turn away a $600,000 client.

If you ever second guess yourself or feel like you aren’t making the progress you should be, this is the episode for you.

I’ve talked to a lot of really interesting people as host of this show, but Bill is right up there near the top, and you’re all in for a treat.

Bill has started 23 businesses, yup, 23, including a limousine company he built up to $8.8 million a year before selling, and a national mini golf franchise with 78 locations nationwide. Oh, he was also a professional golfer.

While this would be a great episode if all Bill did was tell stories, it’s an amazing episode because he does more than that. Bill took that vast experience and used it to build a multi-million dollar agency, nearly overnight. But he isn’t here to brag, and instead he shares how that fast growth nearly destroyed the company and what he had to do to fix it.

I was going to say, “If you’re obsessed with growth but haven’t planned for the new problems that arise when you actually achieve that growth, this episode is for you.” But honestly, Bill’s experience is so deep, that I am convinced everybody can get something out of this episode.

In this episode of Hubstaff’s Agency Advantage Podcast, we’re talking with Justin Christianson of Conversion Fanatics.

Justin is a longtime entrepreneur and after selling his previous business, he began consulting and eventually launched Conversion Fanatics, an agency that specializes in data driven conversion optimization strategies.

They have been growing like crazy recently (150% last year), and today Justin pulls back the curtain to share the old school tactic that is driving that growth: direct mail.

Even if you never plan on sending a single piece of direct mail, this episode is packed with advice that can help you better market your agency, because not only does Justin talk about how they’ve developed a sophisticated outbound sales system, but he talks about the mindset that is required to make any sales system work.

If you’ve struggled with sales and want to improve, or just want to hear other success stories, this is the episode for you.

In this episode of Hubstaff’s Agency Advantage Podcast, we’re talking with Drew McLellan of the Agency Management Institute and the McLellan Marketing Group.

Drew has more than 25 years in the agency world, including 5 years at Mega-Agency Y&R, running his own agency for 21 years and counting, and working with hundreds of agencies at the Agency Management Institute.

In this interview we focus on one of the most important aspects of building a successful agency; drumming up new business. Drew covers the 5 mistakes agencies owners consistently make in this effort.

But this interview is about much more than that, it goes over everything from when you should stop being involved in client work, to why marketing agencies have no excuse to suck at marketing themselves. This episode is jam packed with advice and lessons from Drew’s 25 year career.

In this episode of Hubstaff’s Agency Advantage Podcast, we’re talking with Paul Roetzer of PR 20/20, who shares the importance of developing your own unique intellectual property.

In the year that I’ve been hosting this podcast, I’ve noticed a major difference in how big agencies market themselves compared to smaller agencies.

Whether it is a trademarked process or model they follow to produce consistent results, or books they’ve published laying out their methodology, the larger agencies almost always have developed unique intellectual property to help differentiate themselves from the competition. Smaller agencies tend to focus exclusively on the generic service itself.

Paul gives dozens of talks a year around the country, has published two books, and his agency has developed proprietary Marketing Score software (now they are even getting into AI). Today we dive into why it's so important to develop intellectual property, how the managed to build this portfolio of IP, and the results it has driven for his agency.

If you’re struggling to stand out from the crowd, this is the episode for you.

In this episode of Hubstaff’s Agency Advantage Podcast, we’re talking with Eric Baum of BluLeadz, who shares how he overcame the evolving problems he faced as his agency grew.

One of the struggles of hosting this podcast is that I know listeners are at different places in the lifecycle of their agency. Some just made their first hire, others have a growing team, and others are as big as they want to get.

This makes picking topics to cover difficult because as agencies grow, their problems change.

In today’s podcast, Eric shares how those problems evolved over the growth of BluLeadz from a solo practice all the way up to their current team of 17 (they are one of only 11 Hubspot Diamond Certified Partners), and what he is preparing for as they continue to grow in the future.

If you’re looking for a refreshing view on how to overcome the evolving problems as your agency grows, then this is the episode for you.