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

Jason Swenk is a digital agency expert. He built his first agency, Solar Velocity, up to a $13 million/year business before selling it.

It wasn’t always a smooth ride. There were bumps along the way, but in the end Jason had built a successful agency that didn’t consume his entire life.

Today, Jason helps other digital agency owners learn from his mistakes and build successful 7 and 8 figure agencies. He is knowledgeable and shares his insights in a clear, down-to-Earth way, without over-complicating the message.

To Jason, the difference between an agency struggling to grow past the $500k plateau and one that is bringing in millions of dollars a year all comes down to the systems they have in place. In today’s episode, Jason covers what those systems are, how you can implement them, and how to avoid the common mistakes along the way.

Even if you’re already a million dollar agency, Jason goes deep into everything you need to consider before selling. No matter where you’re at with your agency, this episode has something for you.

Nate McGuire is the co-founder of Code My Views, an on demand development team to help you convert designs into code. 6 months after launching, Code My Views has already built a team of 25 developers and isn’t slowing down.

This isn’t his first time in this space, as he and his partner Connor Hood actually had a similar service called The Site Slinger which they sold a few years ago. Instead of following the playbook from their first attempt, Nate and Connor knew from their experience that they wanted to start moving upmarket. With the rapid growth they’ve experienced, that strategy is clearly paying off.

In today’s chat, Nate covers the reasons why so many agencies are stuck at the $500-$5000 project level, how he was able break out of that and move upmarket, and the steps you need to take to do the same.

Jay Baer is a New York Times best-selling author, the most retweeted person in the world by digital marketers, founder of Convince and Convert, and an expert in customer service.

Jay has built and sold several digital agencies in his career and today operates Convince and Convert, a strategic consultancy that helps companies create more customers and keep the ones they’ve already earned.

In the research for Jay’s new book, Hug Your Haters, discovered that since social media turned customer support into a spectator sport, it is increasingly important that companies step up their game.

Where this gets interesting for digital marketers is that when companies handle customer support exceptionally well, it is another form of marketing. And if they don’t do anything? They are going to see their market share erode as competitors pick up their slack.

If you offer marketing services to your clients, then you need to get in front of this change and help your clients improve their customer support.

This episode will help you better understand why this is so important, how companies can improve, and how your agency can help them get there.

Andy Crestodina and his partner Barrett started Orbit Media, a Chicago based web design and development agency, back in 2001 and while today he is an authority on content marketing, he didn’t launch the Orbit Media blog until 2007.

Until that point the agency was built primarily on referrals, but Andy knew that wasn’t enough if they wanted to really grow, so he started studying content marketing. He kept it simple, using his content to build a bigger audience, keep in touch with leads during the long sales cycle, and stay front of mind with clients in between projects.

This strategy has paid off in spades, and today Orbit Media is a $5 million dollar a year business with a team of 35.

Andy speaks about content marketing at events around the world and today I’m lucky enough to have him on the show to pick his brain about how other agencies can use content marketing to dramatically grow their business, even if they’ve never written a blog post before.

When building his agency to a team of over 20 people, Marcus was like most people; he didn’t have a real plan. When he had more work than his current team could handle, he hired more help and thought that as long as he hired “go-getters” then he wouldn’t need to learn management skills. He also thought that if he wanted to make more money he would have to expand his team.

He was wrong on both counts, and today Marcus has taken everything he learned from that experience and helps other agency owners avoid those same mistakes, especially those around hiring and managing developers.

The common theme across all of his lessons is that you need to be deliberate with everything you do. You can’t expect your agency to grow on its own, and you can’t expect your team to become highly effective without some effort on your part. Things will never be easy by accident.

In today’s podcast, Marcus lays out exactly what is needed to achieve those things so that you can create a plan of action that works:

Today Jake Jorgovan helps agency owners get the attention of potential clients using creative direct mail at Outbound Creative, but he started out as an agency owner himself. Jake’s video production agency created graphics for stage production events like you would see at big conferences but he wanted to stop depending on luck and referrals for sales.

To fix that, Jake started by building a list of the top 30 conference planners in the country where a deal with them would mean access to Fortune 500 companies with the budgets he wanted. But he also knew that these people are getting pitched all the time, so he’d need to do something to stand out.

This realization is what got Jake to first start experimenting with creative outreach (a more personalized approach to direct mail), and the resulting process is what he offers to agency owners through Outbound Creative today. Oh, and that original campaign he did to 30 conference planners? It directly lead to $500,000 in deals for his video agency.

These unique pieces now regularly drive 75%+ response rates from high profile prospects, and today Jake lays out the exact process he follows so you can do this yourself.

Robert’s dream job coming out of art school was to join an agency, but once there he realized he didn’t have the freedom he had hoped for and went out on his own. Freelancing gave him that freedom, but it took him years of trial and error to reliably find clients.

After overcoming those struggles he realized that he could help other freelancers and agency owners with this, so he started his lead gen service, Workshop.

In today’s talk Robert lays out not just how you could recreate his service and find a steady stream of leads, but also how you can write emails that actually get read AND get your agency hired.

When Kai Davis first went out on his own he considered himself an SEO specialist. The trouble with that title, he quickly found out, is that many business owners already have a lot of preconceived notions about SEO works, and they usually aren’t good.

Today, Kai bills himself as an outreach consultant and instead of promising to use the latest trick of the week to jump you to the top of Google, he uses proven (and lasting) methods to help consultants and experts grow their audience and increase their traffic.

Kai recently published a book called The Traffic Manual which lays out the step-by-step system he follows to get results for his clients using podcasts. And today he joins me to share how you can follow the same methods to build an audience for your agency and keep your pipeline full.

This is another episode where the show notes just couldn’t capture all of the great advice Kai gave. His responses throughout the show are not only succinct, but also contain some of the most actionable advice we’ve had so far on the show.

Bart Bartlett has more than 10 years of experience in sales, and after a career of working at more than 9 startups (including 2 exits, one of which was to Apple), he wanted to do something a bit different. A little over a year ago he partnered up with Amanda Moore and DemandZEN was born. DemandZEN is...

Today's guest is Brennan Dunn of DoubleYourFreelancing.com

Brennan started his first agency in 2008, built that to a million dollar a year business, and then exited it when he realized it wasn’t what he was looking for. Since then, he has launched Planscope, a SaaS product that helps you gain total control of your agency, taught over 30,000 freelancers how to charge what they’re worth, and recently launched a new agency which he plans to continue growing while maintaining his ideal work/life balance.

Here are the main takeaways for this episode:

Fill your pipeline with prospects by finding ways to speak in front of groups who you can help and sharing with them enough information so they know how to can start helping themselves.

Then continue to build a relationship with those prospects through email, so that when they are ready to buy they’ll turn to you.

Use socratic questioning when talking to a prospect in order to determine the real reason they are coming to you, and no, it’s not just because they want a new logo.

When it comes time to ask for the sale, always focus on the benefits your clients will get when talking about your services. They don’t care that you use test driven development, they care that they won’t have to spend as much money maintaining your software down the road.

And finally, be a professional. For everything you do make it clear that you have a process in place that you built through experience, and don’t deviate from that to appease a needy client. You’re the expert.