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’re talking with Bob Ruffolo of IMPACT Branding and Design who shares how establishing a strong set of values saved his agency.

To be honest, whenever I heard someone talk about their mission statement or core values, I thought of cheesy motivational posters with words like "Perseverance" and a picture of a kayaker going over a waterfall. They seem like cliches pushed by big corporation management.

But after talking with Bob, I realized that core values can have a transformative effect when they are truly embodied by an organization.

IMPACT Branding and Design is one of only 11 of Hubspot’s Diamond Certified Partners and one of the leading inbound marketing agencies in the country that consistently beats their profit goals. However, just a few years ago their growth had slowed and they started losing money.

In this episode, Bob lays everything on the table and makes the case for why cultivating a strong company culture was crucial to their turnaround and how you can do the same.

In this episode I talk with Brent Weaver of uGurus. Brent built a multi-million dollar web agency, sold it, and now works with other web professionals to help them build their own successful agencies.

He developed a system to dramatically increase your chances of success, and learned a few lessons through 12 years of trial and error. Brent covers everything he learned the hard way so that you can skip a few of those difficult years and jump-start your agency’s growth.

From the start of the interview, it’s clear how much thought Brent has put into all of the aspects of running a digital agency, and I was blown away by how he was able to distill his 12 years of learning down into simple, straightforward lessons. You don’t want to miss this one.

In this episode of Hubstaff’s Agency Advantage Podcast, we’re talking with Mandi Ellefson of HandsOffCEO.com, who shares how your agency can grow without losing your work/life balance.

Many agency owners feel like as their business expands, so do their work hours and stress. On top of all of that, expenses often grow faster than revenue, so at the end of the day the owner is making less money while working more hours. It’s not uncommon for a growing agency owner to make less per hour than some of their employees.

But just because it's common doesn’t mean it has to be that way. It’s possible for your agency to grow while working fewer hours, making more money, and dealing with less stress.

Mandi works with agency owners to help them achieve exactly that.

If you ever feel like you’re too busy running your agency to actually work on your agency, then this is the episode for you.

On this podcast, I talk to Gray MacKenzie of GuavaBox and DoInbound. Gray has expertise in one of the most important aspects of running a successful agency: developing processes. For most small agency owners, everything they do lives in their heads. This means that when you write a blog post, you do it one way, but...

In this interview, I’m talking with Galen Vinter of ClientFlow who shares how to fix the pain that is client communication.

Galen is a front-end developer by trade, but after working at a startup for a few years, he ventured out on his own as a consultant. While he was able to quickly build up a client base, he found that managing client interactions was a different problem entirely.

Support teams have help desks, sales people have CRMs, and project managers have task management systems, but there isn’t anything built for people who manage clients.

He quickly learned that delivering a great product for your client is crucial to success, but that’s only really half of what ultimately makes a project successful. The other half is managing their expectations from the start and ensuring that you stick to them, delivering a great experience.

Through a lot of trial and error, Galen has developed a system to make client communication easy, and he is here to share that system with us today.

If your clients are ever holding you up but you don’t have a great way to tell them it’s their fault that you missed the deadline, then this episode is for you.

Today for interview number 33 I’m talking with Dan Englander of Sales Schema dot com.

Dan was like many of us when he started out; he didn’t see himself as a sales person. Regardless of his feelings though, he quickly realized that needed to change if he wanted to succeed at his job as employee #2 at a video production agency.

By constantly learning, practicing, and adjusting, Dan was able to turn the agency around and grew it to $1.4 million in revenues in year 2, and never looked back.

Today he helps teach other consultants and agency owners how to grow their businesses by focusing on the most overlooked marketing asset an agency has: their current clients.

Dan does a great job of giving examples wherever he can and this turned into one of the more actionable interviews on sales that I’ve had.

James Carbary is the founder of Sweet Fish Media, an agency that helps their clients start 52 new relationships with their ideal prospects every year using a unique sales system. Instead of solely looking at podcasts as a way to build an audience, James sees them as a way to get his foot in the door with potential clients, build a relationship, and (eventually) make the sale.

This system is so powerful that james has used it to nearly $5 million dollars to his agency’s pipeline this year, and has done the same for his clients in all sorts of different industries.

This is one of my favorite interviews not only because it completely shattered my perception of the value of podcasts, but it also gives a step-by-step process that anybody can follow to do this on their own.

Whether you work with clients locally or around the world, there is a HUGE amount of untapped potential for agencies to use podcast to dramatically expand your business. If you want to build a steady stream of new prospects or just want to build a better network, this episode has everything you need to get started.

Koby Conrad is a unique guest to say the least. He sold his first company last year at the age of 21, and now has started a digital agency that did over $300k in revenues in its first year and landed one of the biggest players in the industry Koby is going after.

What’s that industry? Well, Koby calls it the 420 market, but in simple terms, it’s the marijuana industry. And Koby’s big client? Grass City, the biggest online head shop in the world.

We don’t get into the politics, but we do get into the benefits of niching down, how Koby builds and leverages relationships with influencers who have access to over 100 million followers, and what reservations Koby had positioning his agency close to such a controversial industry.

Koby has fun for sure, but you don’t build an agency that quickly or land a client that large without knowing what you’re doing and today he shares with us exactly how he did all of that.

Noah Fleming is the bestselling author of EVERGREEN: Cultivate The Enduring Customer Loyalty That Keeps Your Business Thriving, and helps companies from $2M to $2B create long-term, sustainable, highly profitable customer relationships.

Noah doesn’t bill by the hour, he doesn’t sell deliverables, and he regularly sells projects for $70k that he used to sell for $7. And no, Noah isn’t some snake oil salesmen. The best part is his clients are thrilled with the deal, because Noah is focused on something most agencies aren’t: the value the project creates for the business.

In today’s chat, we cover everything from how Noah developed these skills from the consulting master himself, Alan Weiss, to the missteps he took when applying it early on.

Kurt Elster, co-founder of the Chicago based digital agency Ethercycle, started out like many of you. He started making websites for businesses of all different kinds and slowly built that into an agency.

As his network and portfolio grew, he partnered up with larger agencies and started doing work for big clients like Verizon. Kurt was more than paying the bills, but he wasn’t making enough money to justify all the stress that came from working with all of these different (and demanding) clients.

Today, Kurt has more than 8x’ed his revenue and is working fewer hours with almost none of the headaches. We packed a ton of actionable insights into this 30-minute episode to show you how to do the same by widening your margins with a narrow focus, and simplifying your sales process through productized consulting.