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

Today I’m talking with Jeremy Reeves who helps businesses grow their revenue with more automation, more stability, and more consistency using sales funnels.

In this episode, Jeremy explains what most copywriters get wrong, and details how he built his own audience from scratch using podcasts and guest posts, what he does to capture prospects’ attention, and how he converts those prospects into clients.

This system worked so well for Jeremy, that he directly attributes over $120,000 to a single guest post.

If you’re looking for a way to build authority and get clients coming to you instead of the other way around, then you’re in the right place.

Karl Sakas has been working in the digital marketing industry since he was 15 years old and today he draws on that experience to help fast growing agencies scale profitably by avoiding the common growing pains.

Through his Raleigh, North Carolina based consultancy, Sakas and Company, Karl has worked with clients in 19 different countries and 6 continents (still waiting for that Antarctica dev shop, though), and has seen it all. In today’s chat, he pulls back the curtain to show us the strategies he implements to help agency owners take back control of their agency and scale profitably.

If you’re already stressed out with your current projects and are scared about things spiraling out of control as you grow, then get out your pen and paper because Karl lays out everything you need to take back control of your agency.

In the early days of his custom dev shop, Quipro, John Parker suffered from what he calls “freelance syndrome.” He thought that having an agency was as simple as getting a bunch of freelancers to work together. But John soon found that he had completely overlooked the management side of the equation, as managing his team and handling the back and forth with clients was taking 80% of his time.

Through trial and error, John learned from his early mistakes and grow the agency, but recently he has taken that growth to another level. Since he started listening to the Agency Advantage Podcast and applying the lessons from the show, his growth has gone through the roof. This year John has already beaten his previous annual revenue goals, and it’s only May.

John isn’t here to brag, though. Instead he shares the most important lessons he’s learned and the challenges he faced trying to act on the advice. If you’ve struggled to act on advice to improve your agency, or even find the time to, then this is the episode for you.

The feast or famine cycle of business is something almost every agency goes through. You’re constantly hustling to find new clients, then delivering their projects, and repeating the process all over again. That makes it pretty hard to get ahead, doesn’t it?

Matt Inglot has been there. He started his agency, Tilted Pixel, 10 years ago while in university and it slowly took on a life of its own. After a few years, he realized he was miserable; he was working 80 hours a week and constantly was on the hunt for new clients.

He thought he could solve his problems by bringing on other employees, but he still was working just as many hours and now he was responsible for the livelihood of several other people.

After taking a long hard look at his business, Matt realized something had to change. There were a handful of clients that were responsible for the lionshare of his profits, so he rebuilt his agency from the ground up around those clients and with the goal of finding more.

By focusing on building longer and more profitable relationships with the clients he could help the most, Matt transformed his agency into a 6-figure business that doesn’t consume his life and today he shares with you exactly how he did it.

If you’re tired of the constant hunt for new clients, this episode is for you.

Johnathan Dane has only been in the PPC world for 5 years, but in that time he has built 2 different multi-million dollar agencies. In fact, his current agency, Klient Boost, hit $100k in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) in their first year of doing business. Not only that, but they have so much demand for their services that they had to institute a waiting list for prospective clients.

While that growth is impressive, the story alone won’t help your agency grow. You need something actionable.

Luckily for you, in this episode of the Agency Advantage Podcast, Johnathan breaks down the steps he took to build a brand that get 5 new leads a day, the process he uses to hire and train his employees to ensure great results for his clients, and how he cultivates a relationship with his clients to keep them for the long haul.

If you’re struggling to find clients in what seems like a saturated market, then Johnathan’s lessons are going to help you stand out from the crowd.

Luke’s point is simple: The process most agencies follow for web design is broken.

You meet with the client a few times over a couple of weeks and then go back into your office for a few months, you battle the inevitable scope creep, blow past deadlines, and then when it’s finally done you don’t hear from the client agian for 2 or 3 years until they are ready for a redesign.

The agile method has been all the rage in software for the past few years, so why are we clinging to something that nobody is happy with when it comes to websites?

Today Luke shares with us a methodology calls Growth Driven Design that helps avoid all of these problems, get your clients a better result, and make you more money.

This isn’t some high level talk covering lofty ideas with no clear way to implement them. This is a solid framework for changing the way you sell and service your clients. Luke covers a ton of stuff today so if you are listening along I would strongly recommend heading over to the show notes over on at blog dot hubstaff dot com so you can follow along.

Bram Warshafsky used to be a brand manager at Johnson & Johnson so he has first hand experience with what makes huge corporations tick. After the recession in 2008, he felt increased pressure for marketing and sales departments to do more for less.

Bram co-founded 5Crowd to help solve this problem for other sales and marketing managers in Fortune 500 companies. Once a business has the blueprints from their creative agency partner, 5Crowd executes it for them affordably and without surprises, using their worldwide network of freelancers.

Today Bram explains what this market shift in the agency world means for you, but he also r gets into the nuts and bolts of how he is able to manage a hyper efficient team by focusing exclusively on execution.

If you’re stretched thin by trying to offer every service under the sun in your agency, then this is the episode for you.

Mat Newton hosted the Web Agency Podcast with his brother Ben and together they interviewed 100 digital agency owners and helped give me the inspiration to start the Agency Advantage Podcast. Mat’s focus today is on his agency, Tourism Tiger, and his new job board, JobRack.eu.

In this episode, he shares the method he came up with to balance getting advice from so many different experts and gurus, how he is able to get over 150 email opt-ins a week from LinkedIn (without spending a dime), and how he prevents outsourcing headaches.

If you ever feel overwhelmed with advice and don’t know where to begin, Mat’s advice today will help set you straight.

Practically every agency owner has been there before: you spend hours upon hours creating the perfect proposal and know that once the prospect sees it they’ll be begging to hand over their money. But when you hit send, you get radio silence. Maybe you hear back that it wasn’t what they were looking for, or maybe you just don’t even hear back at all. All of those hours gone to waste.

Ben Lee of Neon Roots flipped the old model on its head by selling paid roadmapping to his clients. Roadmapping is essentially the proposal on steroids. Instead of loose estimates and approximations, roadmapping is a full discovery process that gets to the root of what the client wants to achieve and lays out how they can get there.

Today Ben shares how he went from pitching for free to selling $30,000 roadmaps and teaches you how to take the first step.

Ryan Waggoner doesn’t run a big agency, instead he intentionally stays solo, but that doesn’t stop him from earning a salary that most agency owners would be envious of. For each of the past 4 years, Ryan has had annual profits of over $250,000. Impressive, huh?

Instead of focusing on even more tactics and hacks to apply to your agency, Ryan and I take a step back to look at the mindset it takes to grow a successful agency and whether or building an agency is actually the best path for you.

Today he shares the mindset that helps him earn over a quarter of a million dollars a year, the routines he builds into his day to ensure productivity, and the questions every agency owner needs to ask themselves before they make their next hire.

If running an agency didn’t lead you to skyrocketing earnings like you expected, then this episode is sure to set you straight.