- Speaker #0
So here's what most people will get wrong building their agencies is that it's founder dependent up into a certain point. And what most founders really suck at is the leadership side.
- Speaker #1
You're watching Marketing Mystics with Norm Farrar and Kevin Kane. Mr. Norm Farrar, how are you doing? Long time no see.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, it's got to have been about 24 hours.
- Speaker #1
Not even that long. Yeah. But I had to run away from you because you gave me a kiss.
- Speaker #2
Hold it. That was in New York only.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, you gave me a kiss in Times Square. Yeah. So I had to run away. I had to get away from you. Before I got out of the cab,
- Speaker #2
right?
- Speaker #1
I'm going to be crying at the end of this thing.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, so I'll have to share that photo with your expression when I just kind of mauled you in the middle of Times Square. That was fun.
- Speaker #1
Hey. So Norm and I had a billboard just to explain the audience. We had a billboard in Times Square promoting this podcast, Marketing Misfits. You can probably see it at some point. I don't know when this is coming out, but on marketingmisfits.co on our website. But we shot, we put on our little monkey suits or our little cigar smoking jackets and went down to Times Square and our billboard showed up on Times Square and we took some video and photos of the billboard in the background with us on it for some marketing. We'll talk about that on another show another time. But at the very end of it, after taking a bunch of pictures, Norm leans over and just kisses me on the cheek. And they caught a dog shamron. It's Norm is like laughing his ass off. So yeah, that's, that's what we're talking about there.
- Speaker #2
Yeah. And you know, that might've been a funny part, but the best part was the cigars we were holding in our hands when we were looking up at the billboard, they were the David off year of the dragons. Like I think there were what? 150 bucks a pop. So we were, yeah, we went out with a bang with that one.
- Speaker #1
That's right. We did. That was, that was cool though. That was, that was good, but we've got some good stuff today too on the show.
- Speaker #2
Yeah. And, and, Today, this is why I love events. You love events. You get to meet really cool and interesting people. And today we met, or recently we met a guy at DealCon. And I don't know. It's just, you get to meet these people, people you've never expect to meet. And all of a sudden you kind of hit it off and you can bring them onto a show like this. So I'm like, today I'm talking about Josh Johnson and he's got an incredible agency. We'll be talking about. And. Today's episode, we're going to be talking about building, growing, scaling your agency and how he did it and how he did successfully. So why don't we just bring him on?
- Speaker #1
Let's do it. Let's do it.
- Speaker #2
Okay. Let's see. Where is the button? I got one job. Here we go. Hey, Josh.
- Speaker #0
What's going on? That was one of the most epic. One of the most epic introductions ever. I just hope I get to the point of success. I get a kiss from Norm one day. That's the goal right there.
- Speaker #2
Well, if you get an orange smoking jacket, take off your hat. That just might be coming. All right. Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about yourself?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. I run a consulting firm called Hydra. I'm a past agency owner. I was in the direct consumer e-commerce space for a really long time. uh worked with a lot of big brands in that uh did a lot of content creation that was primarily what we were known for in our agency a lot of uh direct response paid ads so anything that you saw on meta uh during you know 2018 to 2021 uh a lot of our creatives were were the ones uh on meta so uh your snow teeth whitenings uh the way i know tom shipley karenny care care we developed a lot of the uh ad creatives for brands just like that and that that's kind of what we got our launch in We ended up exiting that agency back in 2020. And then I stepped into a consulting role. I was just doing some freelance consulting and started noticing I was having a little bit more demand than I could handle. So I started developing a consulting team around me and teaching them a lot of my methodologies on growing agencies. And yeah, today we're working with about 45 digital marketing agencies internationally and here in the United States. Yeah, and now we grow. agencies through operational consulting, whether that's lead gen sales, fulfillment, HR, or finance. Those are the main tenants of what we consult on.
- Speaker #1
But speaking of starting things, Josh, on the agency side of things, Norm and I are big in the Amazon space. We were talking about this a little bit before. And in that space, there's about, at last count, there's probably even more of it last that we can know about 3,600 agencies in that space that help people. Manage their advertising, help them manage their accounts, help them do various things related to Amazon. It could be getting VAs, a lot of different stuff. But what I find... and tell and you you know this better and you're not in the amazon space you're across a lot of stuff a lot of people that start agencies that i find this is not always the case but a lot of them are failed entrepreneur failed sellers they tried to in the amazon case specifically that people who tried they saw somebody do a youtube video or some webinar on how to sell on amazon they went out invested some money try to do it realize hey this is actually kind of hard It takes a lot of cash flow to do inventory and to manage this. I'd rather just sell digital air. I kind of figured a little bit of this out. Maybe I really like the PPC side of things. I really like the internet or whatever. I'm just going to do that and sell digital air and sell my expertise. And some of them are very good, and they're very great at what they do. But the vast majority are garbage. Yeah. So what do you see from your perspective? Who starts an agency? Yeah.
- Speaker #0
Well, I think it's spot on, Kevin, on that side of like running a brand is a lot harder than running an agency. There's a lot more logistics involved in running a brand than there is in running an agency. I think an agency is one of the best first businesses that an entrepreneur can run because it's very simple. Really, you have no overhead outside of just labor. You're selling skilled labor as a service. And there's really no... overhead, right? We live in a very digital world nowadays. So you have the ability to work remotely. You don't have to have an office. So there's no cost of having an office or an in-person team. You can get people from anywhere. You can get them from here in the United States. You can get them overseas and you could build a pretty profitable business doing very minimum amounts of revenue. You can have an agency that's doing 50, 60K a month and you can bring 50% of that to the bottom line. every single month. And for someone that is just kind of getting started in their entrepreneur journey, it is a really good starting place to start an agency. And I think what you're referring to, Kevin, is kind of like we had this probably in like 2020, 2021, like a really big surge of people that tried like this dropshipping type service, where it was like, we're going to dropship specific products, and we're going to try and figure out what works. And then they're going to try to build a brand based off of a product that works well. A lot of those brands ended up failing because they didn't actually build a brand. They built a dropshipping business, right? And so a lot of those people were like, hey, I know kind of like the digital marketing side and I've seen some success with this. And so some of those dropshippers turned into agency owners, but there was a whole other side of agencies coming into the ecosystem that were like very young entrepreneurs. You're talking like anywhere from, I've met entrepreneurs that are 15, 16 years old, upwards to, you know. 30, 40 year olds that are starting agencies. Why? Because it's a relatively simple business to start. You can start collecting two, $3,000 per month retainers from clients if you have a good offer set up and you're decent at the fulfillment side. So 100%, I think it's like any business, what, 90% of businesses fail in the first few years alone. So it's like, yeah, you're going to have your agencies that are going to struggle and not get much traction. But I mean, I think that's really any business.
- Speaker #1
right what's when an agency and a consultant you have these guys that get out of a mckinsey that get out of a harvard or somewhere with the mba yep they go straight to work for mckinsey which is a big consulting firm and basically they're an agent and in fact they're an agency and but and they have no experience all they've done is do some classwork and look at some case studies and maybe worked an intern job somewhere and here they are advising fortune 500 companies you have the same thing in the agency space where you have all these agencies advising people in some cases that have a lot of money or putting their trust in them when they really don't have the experience they might have a great website maybe a talk of talk and good sales people but they don't have the experience so how do you what what's your opinion on that and how how do you vet that yeah actually trying to work with an agency
- Speaker #0
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when it comes to vetting agencies, I think track record is huge. Like anytime that we start building agencies, especially at the beginning, it's always a race to like the first case studies, the first results that you can pump through your agency client roster, right? And so a lot of times, like you're looking for case studies, you're looking for, you know, hey, is there a similar product that they've worked with? that they've had success with. That's like typically like the number one indicator of if you're in with a good agency or not. Um, it doesn't mean that they're always going to win for you. Um, there are, you know, there's tons of agencies out there and I would say a majority of agencies that people work with, um, it takes two, three, four different agencies before you find the one that is actually masterful at what you do. So a few things that I would be looking at if I was a brand owner looking to get in with an agency is one. Do they have case studies in a similar niche to me? Have they been able to prove out this model specifically in my niche? And this is something that we teach inside of our consulting programs is like, yeah, like you should be niche down, which is one of the, I guess, like cliche consulting tactics is like, yeah, like niche down super, super far. But it's very true. Like you need in the agency space, a very repeatable process and system that you can train your team up on. in order to deliver those consistent results time and time again. And the broader you go, the more skilled labor you're going to need, which means you need better marketers, you need better copywriters, you need better funnel builders, right? You need all of these people that have a broader expertise, which in my opinion, doesn't exist fully unless you have someone that is very experienced in marketing, right? And those are very high ticket people to have on your team. You're talking six figure salaries and for someone that's getting started. it's really hard to afford a six-figure salary on your team, right? And so that's why I say like you got to really refine and niche into something very specific, prove out those results for that specific vertical. And then you can kind of start doing some vertical hopping, right? Go to adjacent niches that are somewhat similar. That way you're not having to like, essentially like any client that you bring in is like, all right, well, hopefully we can win for these guys. And if we don't win, you know, you burn that client relationship.
- Speaker #2
When I've gone to events or we've gone to events, we see this all the time. An Amazon seller probably failing and they get started as an agency because they have their best friend or they have somebody come up to them at the event and, oh, you're an Amazon seller, can you help me out? And that's their first and probably only client that they'll have because they'll fail for the most part. But then what happens is at these events that we go to, They talk about that. They'll have somebody on stage saying, hey, look, if you're having some problems right now, we've got the solution for you. Here's a course. And so they take the course. And what ends up happening? And you know when the course is released. Because all of a sudden, this happened to me. I was dealing with this lady in Australia. And I had my deck there. And these are my prices. And she says, Norm, you're a lot more expensive. than these other guys. But I have a problem. These three consultants have the same spelling mistakes in the same contract. And it's just a template that they were following. So the other part to this is, yes, I was more expensive. But the problem for the agency business that we see is that all of a sudden there's product or service cannibalization. And people think that they're getting... the same service as if you were dealing with Kevin or me in the Amazon space. Yeah. You know, and that's not the case. So it's hard to market around that. So what would you, what would you do to market yourself and tell people like, Hey, look at, I'm three times more than this guy, but you get what you pay for.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. A hundred percent. And that comes with your guys'experience, right? Like you guys have been in this. for such a long time now like kevin i think you've been in it since amazon really allowed people to to to push on amazon right so it's like you guys are are are decorated in in that specific niche and you guys can definitely justify a higher price point right than anybody else in the market but it's where you know if someone was new getting into amazon um well you're hunting some of those smaller brands right the brands that kevin and norm like they can't work with you because they can't afford that type of price point. So they tend to find another agency a little bit smaller, right? And has a little bit less experience than you guys, less results, less proven track record. But at the end of the day, I think it's good for those people to have a place to go. And they don't, brands follow a very similar trajectory to an agency of like, when you first get started, you can't just bring on a six figure salary to run your marketing, right? To bring on someone like Kevin onto the team, you're going to pay multiple six figures. to bring that type of person on to their team, like hands down. More,
- Speaker #1
more, more for me. Yeah,
- Speaker #0
seven figure salary, seven figure salary.
- Speaker #2
I'm a dollar more. So whatever Kevin says, I'm one dollar more.
- Speaker #0
Exactly. So it's like stages of business, right? your beginning stages of businesses, whether it's on the agency side or the e-comm side, there's certain companies like if a Kevin, if a brand came to you today and they said, Hey, we're generating 30 K a month with our brand right now. Uh, and we need some Amazon, you know, marketing, like would that person be qualified to work with you guys?
- Speaker #1
That'd be pretty low.
- Speaker #0
It'd be pretty low. Right. So yeah, there has to be a place for those people to go to cause they, they do need some help, but maybe they can afford a $2,000 per month retainer to help get them launched on. on Amazon. Right. And that's where some of these smaller agencies tend to fit in. And yeah, like it's kind of a crapshoot. Sometimes they're, they're good and they're scrappy and they can like figure it out along the way. And, you know, sometimes they're, they're not so great. Right. And our goal with our consultancy is one, can we help them create a systemized offer that is very repeatable inside of their business? So the success rate drives upward with each client that they bring on, and then they'd start to develop these brands, say they're doing 30 K a month. Well, they move them to 100k a month, 200k per month, right? Through their service. Well, now they have this awesome case study of how they've grown a brand from 30k a month to 200k per month. And then they could start to pull down some of those larger deals. And that's how we tend to expand those agency services and those agency retainers. It's like, yeah, at the beginning, you got to be scrappy. When I first started my agency, I did more free work than I could ever imagine shooting free video content. uh, running free paid advertisement. It's like, Hey, you just pay for your ad spend. We'll run the paid media so we can build our case study and be able to say, Hey, this is what we did for this brand under our guidance and under our agency. And then that allowed us to start taking this to bigger brands and saying, Hey, this is what we're able to do. This is what we did for this brand. And we can do the same thing for you. And we feel very confident in that. And so that's why I tell a lot of people when they're first starting their agencies, like it is a race to get your first five to 10 case studies published. and ready to go. That way people feel confident in your ability to deliver. And the higher that ability is to be able to deliver, the higher retainers you're going to be able to charge further down the road. Now, some people get stuck in that hamster wheel of never raising their prices as they are able to deliver a better and better service. So that's where it's like the shift has to happen. You have to become a little bit more enterprise as you continue to deliver those great results for people.
- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #2
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- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #2
I just want to expand on that for a second. Yeah. Because we tell people when we're looking at their listings, we did this on the weekend, Kevin. We looked at a listing and we said, you know, the perception's not there. You can do regardless if you have the better title, better bullet points, better descriptions, all that, if the perception's not there, if you don't have the quality, the quality in your packaging, the quality in the overall product, the quality in your product shots or even in your videos, you're not going to get the dollars you're looking for for that product. And that, if you're marketing an agency is exactly the same. If you don't have a quality website, if you don't have quality social or... You have no authority out there. So write a bloody press release or something. Get something out there.
- Speaker #1
Wait, Norm, but wait. You have had an agency for a while. We're managing accounts with no website.
- Speaker #2
Well, see, that was a marketing hook.
- Speaker #1
That was a marketing hook. That's one of your proud things is like you just, I had all these clients doing six figures a year, bottom line for my-Eight figures a year. Six figures a month. Sorry, I misspoke. Six figures a month, bottom line for my services, and I had no website.
- Speaker #2
See, and I got that marketing technique off of, I think it's Fox Travel out of New York. You can't find them anywhere. You have to be invited in for the travel to use their services, luxury travel. And I thought, okay, well, while I got this going, when I was at my first Amazon event and I got my first client, and then I got my second and my third, well, it was all word of mouth. And then I got the... ability to speak at on stage at one of the larger events and that just filled up my calendar and so I never had to do it and I was always on a on a sales call if people most of the people 80 90 percent of the people who called hadn't had have either heard or known me from the Amazon world but the ones that didn't know me at all and somehow they got my name and like I've never had to sell the person they always would like almost want me to take on their service. So when I had to sell my service, it was really weird for me to do. But again, yeah, no website. You're right, Kevin. And that was kind of cool. But Dragonfish Communications, Inc. will have a website.
- Speaker #1
So, Josh, I mean, back to that point, as a market of an agency, if you're first starting, like, and you don't have a reputation, you're not seen as an expert in the space, you're probably going to need more case studies and more flashy websites. But if you're known, like Norm is, or I am in our space, our reputation, we just put the word out, or we go on stage at an event, and that right there is the lead gen.
- Speaker #0
Yeah.
- Speaker #2
That's marketing.
- Speaker #1
That's the marketing of it. So is that something that people who are not out there need to be working on? Is that what you see? When you consult with your clients, is that one of your big things? Like, look, you need to get out there and get on stages.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I mean, stages is one thing. Luckily, we also live in a world, like a digital world nowadays, where it's not necessarily 100% needed to get on stages. It does help, and it does help catapult your authority in the space. And we call this, on our side, we call it market leader positioning, right? The ability to be seen as a leader in the space. something very specific, whatever the agency is delivering. And so if you look at all the top agency owners today, they all have this market leader positioning, whether it's through their website, but typically it's going to be some sort of top of funnel attraction. So you're talking events, you're talking social content. It doesn't necessarily have to be built just through speaking on stages. I know plenty of people. One of my very good friends, Chase Diamond, is one that I know. always refer to. I don't know if you guys know Chase very well, but Chase's email marketing agency does a lot of retention marketing for e-com brands. And that's his thing. That's his bread and butter. And that's all he talks about. And he built a massive following on LinkedIn. And that's where he pulls a majority of his clients from now is through his LinkedIn content. So it's like, there are these avenues. It doesn't necessarily have to be speaking. I think speaking is one of the best ways to get attention. solidify yourself as a market leader. But even as Norm mentioned, it's like, you don't need to have, like, you don't even need to have a website to become a market leader, right? It's, you know, can you do the thing that you say you can do? And then can you talk about it, you know, where other people are going to start seeing it and recognizing that your ideas are maybe slightly different, or, you know, you're kind of leading the charge in these new marketing tactics that, that people need to have for their brands.
- Speaker #1
So how do people differentiate as an agency? I mean, if If I'm comparing, if I'm trying to stand out, maybe it's your reputation. People are like, I'm going to go with Norm because I just know Norm. I've seen him in a lot of events or heard him on stage over this other guy. But in cases where that's not, a lot of times that's not the case, how do you actually stand out? And not everybody's going to go study all the case studies. They're not all going to go. They're just going to, they go on price. To your example earlier where you start with a $30,000 guy and you grow him to $200,000. When he gets to 200,000, a lot of times those guys are like, I got this now. I don't need you anymore. I've been paying you money. You're making a percent of my ad spend or whatever it is. I'm not going to keep paying you this kind of crazy money. I can just hire my own people to do it. And maybe they can, or they go bounce around to another agency and it goes disastrously and they come crying back.
- Speaker #2
I've had that.
- Speaker #0
Yeah.
- Speaker #1
So how do you deal with those kinds of things?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. I think it's having the expectation that all clients churn eventually. You do what you can as an agency owner, but there's this wonderful thing in physics called entropy. I don't know if you guys are familiar at all, but everything degrades over time. Every business will fail over time. Even the greatest businesses, even Amazon, will fail at some point in time. And that's something that you have to... be Recognized as an agency owner no matter how good you are your whole client roster will turn at some point in time It's just law physics at that point So one you have to be very accepted that clients turn right now Of course, we try to mitigate that as much as possible We try our goal is to have all of our our client rosters below a 10% return rate What whatever we're working with them that's kind of like our gold standard is be below 10% because chances are we can replace those clients through good acquisition models but As far as how do you mitigate it, you can't remove it entirely. Clients are always going to churn. It just happens. You can't win for everybody, in my opinion, because one, it could be a saturated market. The products couldn't be the right fit. It could be the wrong time for the product as well. There's a lot of nuances and a lot of things that you have to recognize that make something successful. And that's true for the agency space as well. So there's definitely things you can do to lower. the churn percentage and be able to keep clients around longer and increase that LTV with them. But to say like, hey, how do we remove it entirely? Well, you can't, unfortunately.
- Speaker #1
What can you do? What are some of those things you can do to actually reduce that churn?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. So from our side, client experience, the first 30 to 60 days are the most important for any agency. From our side, what we see typically is that if the first 30 to 60 days are really rocky, they will churn within the first 90 days, 100%. like almost guaranteed that they will turn within the first 90 days if the first 30 to 60 days are not really dialed in. So a lot of times when we're working with clients, we focus on one, the initial engagement and like how, like the onboarding processes that we put in place for people. Um, we want to start celebrating wins as early as possible. Now people always think of wins as like, Oh, like revenue in, uh, not necessarily. Uh, what we'll do is we'll put, uh, other tactics in place, like celebrating like, Hey, campaigns launched today. new creatives launched today. We got our first lead coming in through the pipeline. Our funnel had its first sale. We have these little milestones to go across that client journey. So it feels like they're winning very early on, even though it's not always a monetary gain. Sometimes, yeah, it takes a little bit of time to prove results and to get these campaigns launched. But at first 30 to 60 days, I'd be trying to find any little win. that we could stack in the win column with that client as possible. And when you start stacking those wins, the perception and the feeling of success is much higher. And those clients tend to stay with you past past that 90 day mark. So those are like the small things that we kind of look for is like, what does our onboarding process look like? What does our client gifting strategy look like? How can we make the best impression possible? So it feels like we're on the same team, and we're all rowing the same direction versus, you know, someone comes on, they get a a half-ass onboarding process. They don't necessarily feel like they're in the best spot for their marketing strategy with that agency. We want them to feel as if we're an extension of the team and their best bet is working with us over anybody else. So those are some things that we look at to help mitigate that early churn. And typically, if we can get past the first 90 days and the client relationship is thumbs up, good to go, we'll retain them for anywhere between nine and 18 months.
- Speaker #2
You know, one of the things we found is that managing expectations from your onboarding call, that is a key. If it's not done, and then if it's not done regularly, people will change, or they'll just get fed up with the... Even if you're doing a great job, they could leave. And the other thing is attracting clients. You might see that your brand's just getting old. And, you know, the people that were attracting a lot of leads because maybe the color combination or the logo, it changes. And I'll give you an example. In Ontario, where I live, there is a national frozen meat store called M&M's. And frozen meat, when they first came out with it, was very popular. Like they were the company to go to. Their logo was orange, like a deep orange and a... brown. That was it. The colors of food. Okay. Uh, and then, uh, about, I don't know, 10 years ago. So sales were declining. They wanted to attract new franchisee. They spent a ton of money on this new branding and now it's deep blues, oranges, more modern and their sales went up. So they were about to do the bell curve. They were about to.
- Speaker #0
just dump by changing because people were out there and they were listening they were able to change it around and become very successful even to this day so they changed what people were looking for they changed everything uh they did they did the research put it that way and you have to do that as an agency too if you're sticking with older techniques if you're not getting into ai for example and being able to really expand or find out what people want today it was different Kevin, two years ago, what did people look for? How did people find an agency for Amazon? What did they expect from that agency? Completely different nowadays. And that's an answer. Kev, I don't know if you agree with that or not.
- Speaker #1
You know, it has evolved. It definitely has evolved, and I've seen a lot of changes, and I see a lot, you know, you get people teaching people how to be an agency. You get people like in... in the Amazon space, like Stephen Pope, who actually teaches Pakistani BAs how to start their own agency. And you see them on these WhatsApp groups where they're just begging for clients. I just opened a new agency. We help people do this, this, and this. I wouldn't touch most of them with a 10-foot pole. But most people, they don't know how to vet them. They don't know. Who's that guy that sent us the website? There's a guy that had a really fancy website, and he sent us all that.
- Speaker #0
I forget.
- Speaker #1
It's almost like the old days of Flash, this fancy HTML5 website that spaceships going through the air and all kinds of crazy stuff for his agency. He's like, what are you doing? That's actually not going to sell me. So the agency business, I think more and more people are going into it because of what Josh said, is you don't have that overhead. and it is easier to get in, you can build it up. You can start small and then try to roll it up. So when people come to you, Josh, are they already have an agency? And they're like, hey, we just need some help scaling and building out the team? Or are there people that are like, hey, I've been working for this email marketing company for years, and I think I'm ready to go out on my own. I'm tired of working for the man. I'm going to start. agency slash consultancy, what do I do? What do you do?
- Speaker #2
Yeah. So a majority of who we work with are already established agency owners. Typically, they're anywhere between just north of 500 a year as far as annual revenue goes. That's typically where we start with agencies. We need some proof of concept, right? I'm not here to teach people how to be marketers and how to launch their first paid ads on Meta or how to stand up an Amazon store. That's not what we teach. There has to be some skill set that they have worked through and they have some traction with the business already. We're not in the business of starting brand new agencies and shipping people out there, landing your first clients. You have a client roster, you have proven results, and you just need a little fuel to the fire that you already have. So majority of the agencies we work with are all going to be north of at least half a million in ARR. And then on the... top side uh you know we work with agencies that are doing eight figures a year so so what's a what's a big agency like who who what level do you need to be at to be in like the top one percent uh well the top one percent would be you know a million dollar agency a majority of agencies will never will never cross a million dollar run rate yeah yeah so um i would say like that would be your one percent would be the ones that cross the most agencies never cross a million dollars in billable and
- Speaker #1
what they're billing.
- Speaker #2
Correct.
- Speaker #1
So they may be marking themselves as if we do $20 million a year in business, but that's what their clients do.
- Speaker #2
That's what their clients do. Yeah. Yeah. So not what they do.
- Speaker #1
So what they're actually billing out and invoicing is if they hit that million dollar mark and invoicing, that's a big, that's a top 1%.
- Speaker #2
Yeah. It's a big deal for an agency to hit a million dollar run rate for sure. A majority of agencies will never cross that point. Um, and, and that's, you know, that doesn't include, you know, what they're what their clients are also doing in revenue. Like that doesn't count towards-I'm just doing the math right there.
- Speaker #1
The point, if I'm just, even on the small end, I mean, I'm working right now with one of my, I have an agency that does something for my newsletter. It's a newsletter agency. Their specialty, like you said, niching down is the guy that owns it. He's not really involved in the day-to-day. He was on the onboarding call and the initial sales calls and all that. But now he's pretty much out of the loop, but he's got his team. and they're mostly international people from Pakistan and Philippines and stuff, but they're running all my Facebook ads. But this guy built his expertise, his claim to fame. The reason I went with him is he built the morning brew. 10,000 subscribers to 2.5 million. So he knows what he's doing. He knows how to guide the people what he's doing. And so I went with him, but he's at $4,000 a month is what I pay. Yep. Plus my ad spend. So it's four grand straight fee. So to hit a million bucks, and that's 48 grand a year, he needs 20 clients to hit that, basically roughly doing roughly a little bit, 22 clients to hit that. So most agencies aren't going to hit. 22 clients?
- Speaker #2
No, because they tend to run into like, so here's what most people will get wrong building their agencies is that it's founder dependent up until a certain point. And what most founders really suck at is the leadership side and building good systems to teach that repeatable process to a downstream of team, right? And so as soon as they start onboarding teammates, well, all of a sudden their churn rate starts to peak, right? And what happens is they get into this acquisition hamster wheel, as I like to call it, of one client in, one client out. And so a lot of times people will get stuck at roughly that half a million dollar run rate. That's typically where we see the biggest congestion when it comes to revenue growth is right at that half a million dollar run rate, because that's right where people tend to start bringing on more team and start to try to delegate. And what happens is they just ineffectively delegate and train their team appropriately to deliver the exact same results that you were able to deliver as the founder. And so that's where we come in and we help systemize and process a lot of those types of fulfillment processes of like, hey, let's download what the founder has inside of their head. We build playbooks, we build SOPs, put it in a training portal and a Wikipedia that the team can then access during their onboarding and say, hey, this is exactly how we run these types of client accounts. Here's the exact buttons we press. Here's exactly how we onboard, fulfill and offboard clients on a regular basis. So. Those are the types of things that keep agencies from growing is that they'll start to bring on team and all of a sudden they'll start to get into this hamster wheel of like, hey, we signed a client, but we also lost a client this month.
- Speaker #1
I just know that in an evolving space, some agencies, what they do, it's pretty much cut and dry. Others, like on Amazon, like PPC, for example, on Amazon, pay-per-click advertising, it's constantly changing and evolving. So your SOPs this year could be no good next year.
- Speaker #2
yeah or they need to be completely revamped and updated you have to quantify them each you have to have a reporting system yeah absolutely as soon as something changes those things need to get updated that's why it's you know it is important at some point to have you know someone more on the back end of like the operations that understands how things work and watches the trends and being able to adjust and be able to work with the team it's consistent training this is what why most agencies don't ever cross the half million dollar mark is that It is a constant training, right? Like even in meta, you know, like you said, with PPC, everything changes. It can change overnight. And if you're not constantly updating those things and updating the team and training them appropriately, yeah, like you fall by the wayside and your results for your clients dip dramatically. So yeah, it's a constant evolution. You can't stop doing it.
- Speaker #0
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- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #0
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- Speaker #1
I get a lot of people that ask me like, Kevin, who's a good agency for this or X or this or that? I don't recommend anybody unless I personally use them. But it's almost unfair because usually when I personally use them, I get the founder, even if he's not involved anymore. He's on the call because it's Kevin. We can't screw this up because he's got a lot of influence and clout out there. What I find from listening to other people is it's usually one agency, someone will say this agency is great. Oh, so-and-so X, Y, Z agency is great. And the next person will say, no, that agency sucks. And I find that it's usually like, oh, you just got the luck of the draw of who you got assigned to on your account. Yeah. And so how do you how does an agency fix that? How is it? Is that in the training? Is that in the SOPs? Is that in the systems? Does that mean that that company that one person thinks is great and the next person thinks sucks? There's a flaw somewhere in the in the backside?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, there definitely can be. Typically, we have like a kind of like a reporting system like Norm had mentioned for our agencies when clients typically go into like certain ranges. Right. So if you see results dip past a certain point. Then what we'd say like a senior representative of the company would come into that account and be like, cool, show me what's going on. Okay, why can't we get past a certain point? And what are the changes that we can make from someone that has a little bit more experience in those accounts? So typically that's what we see as far as like the agency model goes. And unfortunately, a majority of agencies don't have that type of accountability system where a junior representative is running the account, but they never upgrade. a status of a client to like, we call it like green, yellow, red, right? Green meaning, hey, they're within KPI and they're really good at communicating with us. Yellow would be like, hey, they're not within KPI or they're not great at communicating with us. Like that's typically where we'll see like a yellow status with a client. And then red would be a combination of both or like they've been out of result for some time. Like we're not delivering what we promised. And like a simple system like that actually fixes a lot of headaches because you can get ahead of it and you can say, hey, this week, this client was not within KPI. we can go into that account see what levers need to be pulled from someone a little bit more senior on the team and be able to say hey this is how we get this back in account we need to make one two and three changes new creatives here new copy here these are just nuanced examples of course but that's what we need to do to get this this account back into a green status and then we go deploy those changes and then the hope is that they get back into the results that we promised so we see uh we have sops that change all the time we have
- Speaker #0
No, we don't have SOPs. We have policies and procedures. The SOP is part of it. But at the end of the day, you might have two or three layers down. And if you don't tell or if you don't mention in that SOP who is reporting, who is responsible, then it's just going to fall apart. And it's going to happen just like Kevin said. It'll be outdated. And then all of a sudden, you got somebody poor that hasn't been trained properly. Because when you go... back to the foundation. It's that founder rollercoaster that happens. Does really great, hires people, sales go down. Gets rid of the person, hires another, gets really great again, new sales, and then they don't train properly, sales go down. Founder's rollercoaster. By spending the time and putting the prerequisites, the definitions, the buy-in, the SOP, the... quantification, how many times, what's the structure? Like if it's a junior VA that's doing the SOP, most of the time the project manager or the senior project manager is never going to see that. Who's in the weeds is the VA or the project manager underneath them. So they should be reported. If there's a difference in that system, they've got to change it or report it. And there's so many. Just for example, we've got about 270-ish SOPs, policies and procedures, just for launching and ranking. Yeah, for launch and rank. 270 tasks and subtasks for that structure. How do you keep track of it? So our graphic artists, if they're doing something, if they have to upload something, if they have to report who they're reporting to, and the same thing. things start to fall apart or if amazon has a new structure then it's got to be changed and who's going to change it and again it comes down to quantification if you're not checking it you know every it could be a month it could be a quarter it could be annual then you're just going to lose out at some point because it's going to just fall through the system and when that second or third tier person with that ppc agency that uh you were talking about kev then guess what? Your sales are going to drop. You're going to say they suck.
- Speaker #1
So what do you see? What do you see in Josh with AI right now? There's a lot of people saying that AI is going to replace a lot of people with agencies and agencies. 20 people can go down to four where the AI can do a lot of what the junior people were doing. And you got people that are there was a guy at DealCon that was talking to Norm and I that's doing some AI stuff. And there's a lot of people who don't understand AI or they might just have a they have a with basic understanding, but they don't really get it. Norm and I are pretty advanced on that when it comes to that. So we're on the cutting edge. So this guy was talking to us as if we didn't know much, and he was telling us he charges $5,000 a month to do this service. For monitoring. It's crunching it and this and that and the other and how valuable it is. Norm and I are looking at each other like, this is like 20 minutes of work a month using AI, what he's doing. And we saw right through it. But a lot of people will pay those crazy money because they're like, holy cow. I had seven people doing that before. What are you seeing the influence of AI have? And how long are people going to be able to be raping people? And how long before they start getting hung to dry?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, well, I mean, it's great for the business owner, one. So I would say if you're like a junior staff and you're listening to this, I would be working very hard to not be a junior staff. anymore because I think that's what we're going to start seeing is like, it's not necessarily like, I think there's always going to have to be someone behind the scenes, you know, helping press the buttons. Yeah. You need a babysitter, right? Exactly. And so with that being said, like, I don't think it's going to completely replace us as agency owners. I think it's going to make us more effective, more efficient. I think, you know, in my opinion, we'll see agency margins increase dramatically over the next 10 years. I would love to see agencies be able to pump. 70 to 80% margins with a lower overhead of staff because they're utilizing AI the most effective way possible. Now, how that pans out, I don't know exactly. I wouldn't say we're the most up-to-date on our AI strategies. We use it a lot, a lot of copywriting, a lot of making us more effective and efficient in the way that we're responding to clients and being able to push out our social media content, things like that. But- Overall, I would say if you're a junior staff, I would be worried. If you are an agency owner, I would be super giddy and excited, and I'd be leaning in extremely hard because it's only going to make your staff more effective and allow you to hire less people and get more work done. So your senior team is going to make more, and then you're going to make more as the business owner. So I wouldn't be afraid of it. I'd be leaning in extremely hard, like you guys mentioned, to make your team as effective as possible.
- Speaker #1
What about, though, like you said, that a lot of people are using AI now to help them write their copy or to help them slice and dice their videos for social media. And those are all great, great examples. But you have the robotic side where you can actually link GPTs together that can actually do these full freaking automations. Taking it to that level and the analytical level and the mining data level. And I think that's where a lot of. the agency owners and a lot of people in general are way behind the wheel. They don't understand the depth and what you can actually do. They understand, yeah, I can help it. It helps me write my emails. It helps me do this, like I said, but it helps me find keywords. But if you really get into it, the advantages that you have, if you can get to stay on the cutting edge, I think are tremendous. And you might be able to get those margins to 95%.
- Speaker #2
Oh, 100%. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think the biggest thing is the time investment into learning those things. You do have to put some time into it. And this is the trap that a lot of agency owners get themselves into is they just don't make the time to learn these things because they're constantly tied to the client work or they're constantly trying to support the team. There has to be time set aside to learn how to utilize AI, like you mentioned, on a deeper level, whether that's pulling reporting. uh being able to give you know significant feedback on what needs to change inside of campaigns i think all of that is is spot on and needs to happen it's just you know once again finding that that time for that entrepreneur to go and and actually develop those systems and we've seen a lot of great software come out of the ai side as well um like opus is one of my favorites right now that like chops up the content for you um but it's like a lot of people are creating those on the back end so If anything, I think we're probably going to see most agencies not develop that stuff internally. You're going to see a lot of SaaS type AI come through the woodwork where you're just going to pay a fee for it to do the thing that you want it to do. And I think there's a big opportunity on the SaaS side as well for SaaS companies to blow up and use the agencies as the marketplace for finding those types of solutions. So if you're not super in depth on AI, I don't think you necessarily have to be. I think there's other people that are really giddy about it and are releasing really great services or softwares as a service. And you're going to be able to tap into those when they do launch them.
- Speaker #0
It's pretty important nowadays to go and find, probably spend a little bit of money on a consultant. You know, if you don't know. how AI can work or streamline your systems or just anything in your workplace, you're missing out. And unfortunately, there's going to be a lot of guys like we met that are going to charge an arm and a leg and then a crazy monitoring fee. But just to find a consultant that can come out, look at your business, even over the, just on a video call, virtual call, explain what you're trying to do, then...
- Speaker #1
uh you know you can help and and get to understand it but if you're not doing it you're going to be so far behind for sure yeah it goes both ways though i mean there's the guy that we were just talking about that we norman i looked at you this guy's charging ridiculous amounts of money for something they shouldn't be charging that kind of money for no way we're going to pay that then on the flip side we just met with somebody uh recently that told us a price for what that what they're offering right that's way too low uh i mean i'll take it i'll be i'll gladly pay you this this is a hundred bucks a month. But you should be charging a lot more because it's worth a hell of a lot more than that. So you got, you got both sides. So there's people that a lot of people in the agency space or in the SAS space, they don't know how to do their pricing. And they, it happens. I have my newsletter that I send out is my voice. And I read the newsletter and it's my voice reading the newsletter. It's all done by AI. And I have a guy in England that does that. And he wanted to charge me a hundred bucks a month to do 10 newsletters. And he's tweaking it right now. He's spending time going in and kind of a couple hours with his team. I'm like, I'm not paying. No, I'm not going to screw you. So I'm paying him $300 a month because I just felt that was the right thing to do. Yeah. Love that. And he was grateful. He's like grateful. Now he's going bending over backwards. I mean, it's paying off. He's bending over backwards doing all kinds of stuff. But that's where I think a lot of people don't know. So how do you price an agency? Is it are people that you're consulting, is it like based on the level of client you're going after? Is it based on your experience or your proven track record? Is it based on, is it based on, are you taking a, you recommend a flat monthly fee and a cut of whatever, some sort of KPI? Um, what do you, what, what's, what's, how do you price, how, how, how do you price an agency work?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, it's a, it's a very loaded question, uh, because there's a lot of different agency services out there. Um, I think if you're running some, like really basic stuff, like if you're just running some meta ads, or if like you're just like a one ticket type service, typically, it's going to be a flat retainer. But for someone that's doing a little bit more in depth work, so say you're in the e combination, you're doing the retention, you're doing the paid ad strategy, you're doing, you know, a lot of the creative as well. Yeah, there's definitely room and personally, my favorite is like, get some skin in the game. So some sort of flat retainer to help cover the cost of delivery. So all your labor costs, and then some sort of upside. with that brand. So typically a percentage of either ad spend or percentage of growth, percentage of revenue, something like that, that gives you that upside. And then typically what we recommend is like put a cap on it at some point, because as soon as you start billing out, you know, 20K a month, they're going to start looking at this and saying, well, why don't I just build this internally? Like I'm spending 20K a month in just agency fees. Like why wouldn't I just build an internal team that manages for me at this point? You know?
- Speaker #1
What about like with Norm though? What about equity? Like with Norm, he had, he had some big clients, uh, and he helped them grow tremendously, you know, from, from, uh, you know, 50 grand to millions of millions of dollars. They ended up selling, uh, several of them ended up selling. He lost a tremendous amount of revenue, uh, uh, just almost overnight. And he got nothing on the, on the opposite side. So on the backside for helping them grow. So do you think that there's a case where you should be? sometimes as an agency saying, if we hit this certain KPI at a certain level, you need to kick off a little bit of shares or have some sort of, you don't want the equity because there's liabilities and stuff there, but maybe upon exit, we get a Scooby snack.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, for sure. Scooby snack. I love that. That's incredible. In most cases, I would say equity is a very difficult thing to navigate, especially with most agency owners are pretty young. uh, and, uh, don't have a ton of business experience quite yet. So playing with that equity side, uh, like you mentioned, Kevin, like there's, there's some nuances tucked in there. Like there's a lot of protecting you have to do for yourself. Uh, and then also you have to be willing to play a much longer game, uh, and kind of have that, uh, uh, like, you know, kick the can down the road until I, I get my, my Scooby snack is as you put it, Kevin. Um, so I think for most cases, no, like I wouldn't recommend equity, especially if you're someone that is like, Hey, I'm trying to get money in today. Equity is not going to be your play. If you're someone that is a little bit more established, you have good revenue streams and you find a brand that you're like, yeah, I vibe with this brand. And like, I could see this, you know, potentially exiting for a nine figure exit at some point. Then yeah, like there you do. kind of give yourself those opportunities to take a stake in the company. So I think in most cases, no, I wouldn't recommend taking equity in a company because there's a lot of nuances in there. But outside of that, yeah, it is an option. I've seen very few pan out in a place where it's like, yeah, everybody won from this equity deal that we've done, just from my small experience that I do have.
- Speaker #0
It's also how you word it in a contract. So when that experience happened back in the past, all of a sudden you grow these companies and these aggregators when it was a big aggregator boom, they ate up all the really great brands very quickly. Now it's a little bit different. But what I learned from that is I had to go back and remodel my contracts. What I found is when, and this is just split testing, really, when you send out a contract and it looks more legalese and you're talking equity, then there's a problem. Like almost 100% of the people are going to stop and say, I'm not giving you equity or I'm not giving you a, I don't care if you're building my company. But if you put in, and that's not good for me, I don't want the liability side of things, you know, but as a joint venture. and you get a percentage and you're going to grow and it's going to be performance based it sounds like now it's sexy you know we're going to grow you and the key here is that as we grow you or as we bring in these subscribers you're going to get a higher multiple so if you can show that even on a graph if they you know if you're on the phone with them or on a call with them you can pull this up you know most of i've never had to do a graph or anything but most of the time They're just going, oh, yeah, now I get it. Now I get it. And you're not going to bother me. You don't have to have shares in our company. It's just a straight deal. And the other thing you were talking about a little bit further about, I forget what it was. It was just a few minutes ago. I'm old. I forget these things. But to build this out is vertical integration. If you want your company to grow and get better, offer more than your competitors. You got to have that leverage or that USP. And that's through the group you that's through for an agency that could be multiple, multiple touch points. Like for us, for example, we might do an Amazon thing, a retail thing, a Walmart thing. And now we're growing out, we're getting different people involved. We can expand out our service. Yep. You know, and a lot of agencies. don't do that. They focus in on one thing. Well, that's great. They're, you know, focus in on one thing and you might be happy with the outcome, but work with something that's an added value or something that you can grow into. And now you're going to have a much bigger, more solid agency.
- Speaker #2
Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, this is what we did with our consulting business. We saw a pretty big gap in the marketplace for bookkeeping for agencies. Like there weren't a lot of people out there that were specialized in doing bookkeeping for agencies. Uh, it's very simple to do. Uh, so we stood up a bookkeeping service specifically for agencies and we went further into our vertical, uh, and, and now it's a, an additional service that we offer. And for us, like as consultants, if we do our job, right. Someone shouldn't need us for 36, 48 months. Right. Like we do our job, right. Like they should be able to say, cool. We got what we got. We got what we needed from Josh and his team. And we're able to move on and continue to grow. And for us, we're like, yeah, that's awesome. We do a good job. But then we start to lose revenue, right? And so for us, well, what if we keep them around in just the bookkeeping side and we can retain them for an additional 36 months just through a bookkeeping service, right? And so for us, you do have to find, Norm was spot on, you have to find these little integrations that you can do vertically to keep people around. Because if we go back to the beginning of our conversation of the law of entropy. is a very real thing. If you're running a service business, you're going to lose clients. That is going to happen. Your best clients today, one of my really good friends has a really successful e-com agency. He grew this brand from literally the start. They were doing maybe 40, 50K per month and grew them to a seven figure per month brand. And they worked with them for five years.
- Speaker #0
And, uh, three months ago, uh, they ended up churning out as a client of theirs. And it was like, awesome, really good track record. Five years of service, like the LTV on that type of client is incredible, but it's a perfect example that you can't expect clients to stay around forever. And so it was like, what, uh, what are those little vertical integrations that you can do to continue to capture revenue long-term with them?
- Speaker #1
Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player, or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of the Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?
- Speaker #2
Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time? It's just me on here. You're not going to know what I say.
- Speaker #2
I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. And we'll just, you can go back and forth with one another. But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of the Marketing Misfits.
- Speaker #1
Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm. What do you see? You're at DealCon. That's where we met you. Yep. And one of the big premises of DealCon. Oh, no.
- Speaker #0
Here we go.
- Speaker #1
What you were talking about was doing roll-ups.
- Speaker #0
Yeah.
- Speaker #1
So what's your opinion? The agency business from the point of view of I'm an agency owner listening to this. I just want to get out of this and just sell. What's the multiple there? And then from the other side, I want to roll up. Maybe I'm not well-known expert in the space. And I just want to roll up and weed out the shitty employees and keep the good ones and bring on clients and grow that way. What's your opinions on that?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. I've seen a few work for roll-ups. I've seen a lot not work for roll-ups. You know, you're basically getting in bed with new partners and, you know, typically people's due diligence process are just very underbaked and they get into something that they're not ready for. Whether that's on the acquisition side of someone acquiring a business or someone being ready to actually be acquired. So for me, like this like roll up culture that we're kind of seeing right now in the agency space is like. let's roll up and let's roll up fast. I would say a good roll up should take you about 12 months, in my opinion. Do a proper due diligence and make sure that you know exactly what comes with joining another company or you purchasing an asset or purchasing an agency that you're going to roll up. People think it's like this big shiny object and it's going to work out great every single time. I would say majority of these roll ups do not work out. I can share a lot of horror stories with you on agencies that I've seen get acquired that ends up not panning out and ends up leaving people high and dry. So I would say just if you're going to wander down the roll up route, I would say take it slow. Make sure you do your due diligence and check it twice and make sure that you know exactly what you're getting into. It can be an effective strategy if it's the right partnership. but it has to be the right partnership. That's the only way that I've seen these roll-ups actually work or these acquisitions actually land in a good spot is when they are done diligently and when they're done extremely slow.
- Speaker #2
Hey, I just noticed the time and I know you have a cutoff time, Josh. So maybe what we can do is any last insights, anything you could tell us about marketing.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, absolutely. I'm a huge top of funnel guy. I love... that more entrepreneurs are doing podcasts, they're writing more newsletters, they're putting out social content. I think if you are a business and your sole focus is conversion and bottom of funnel, I think you're leaving a lot of money on the table. And with that being said, your top of funnel strategy, it's going to take some time to build. And this is what happens is people get really impatient with their top of funnel strategies and then they just stop doing them. Try to... pick a top of funnel strategy that you can do consistently for a year. Uh, and I'm I can't promise this. There's no guarantee tied to this, but there's a very high likelihood that it will work out for you if you continue to push into something top of funnel for a extended period of time because you just continue to get better and better at it. So I want to encourage more people to do top of funnel, focus less on conversion. I think we're in a very big mistrust period in our industry and digital marketing as a whole of everyone has something to sell. And so if you're providing more value and if you're giving... the secret sauce away and like helping people be successful, you will get clients, you will, you will make more money. Um, but it's going to take a little bit of time to build out that strategy. So, uh, I don't know your guys'thoughts on top of funnel, but, uh, I want to see more people do top of funnel.
- Speaker #2
That's a whole other podcast.
- Speaker #1
That's a whole other podcast. We agree. We agree. Yeah. Yeah. Well, how do people reach out to you if they want to find out more about your agency or about you or follow you? What's the best way? Yeah.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. I'm, I'm, very active on LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn as a platform right now. I think it's one of the most underutilized platforms, um, when it comes to finding decision makers. Um, so I'm on LinkedIn, uh, uh, pretty, pretty consistently. Uh, you can find me Joshua Johnston over there. Um, and then as far as, uh, the consulting firm goes, I've got, uh, two plugs on that side, workwithhydra.com, uh, or workwithcleanbooks.com. Uh, that's our bookkeeping company, uh, that runs in tandem with our consulting firm. So those are the two.
- Speaker #2
Please don't forget the big event.
- Speaker #0
Yes, of course. And we got Hydra Council, which is our event. We just hosted one in London in October. So just a few weeks ago, it was an awesome event. We had so much fun. And then we'll be hosting another one here in Nashville in April. So looking forward to those.
- Speaker #2
All right, Josh. Well, thanks for having or thanks for having us on. Thanks for coming on.
- Speaker #0
You're so welcome. You're so welcome. I'll have you guys back soon.
- Speaker #2
Okay. Now I'm going to remove you for a second. I'm going to be, I'll remove you for a second. Kevin and I are going to talk and then we'll come right back to you.
- Speaker #0
Thanks guys.
- Speaker #1
That was good stuff, Norm. Interesting. You know, we always mixing it up here on the Marketing Misfits, talking about from psychology to agencies to you name it, but agencies are a big thing when it comes to marketing.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, absolutely. And we would never have met Josh if we never went. to the deal con, deals con.
- Speaker #0
Yeah.
- Speaker #2
Nashville. So, yeah, that was a blast. And like you said, you know, we're bringing a very diverse cross-section of people on here all about marketing. Today, it's about marketing your agency, not necessarily your product.
- Speaker #1
Getting into the agency business, if that's something that you might be looking, maybe this gave you a little bit of insight on. some things to think about if you're that's something that you've been thinking about doing maybe we'll do that yeah maybe maybe yeah we should talk about that yeah we should have a meeting or two about about that and see if there might be some opportunity there more bloody meetings that's that's
- Speaker #2
more cigars though more meetings means okay i'm there how many meetings you want to have
- Speaker #1
But speaking of meetings, we're going to meet everybody again here next week, aren't we, on the Marketing Misfits? Everybody that's listening right now, aren't we going to meet them again here next week?
- Speaker #2
Every Tuesday, we'll be seeing you right here. So stay tuned.
- Speaker #1
That's right. And if you want to follow us, follow us on Apple, Spotify, your favorite podcast platform. Or you can go to marketingmisfits.net. No, no,.com,.co.
- Speaker #2
Here we go again.
- Speaker #1
What is it, Norm? Yes. it's it's around uh christmas time right so i can go co-co-co it's marketingmisfits.co uh and you can also find us on youtube uh so hit us up and get us a subscribe if you like this episode you know someone that's thinking about doing an agency or maybe you know someone that's in the agency business please uh share this with them and also don't be afraid to give us a little review uh if you're listening to this on apple or spotify or even YouTube, put a little comment down. Hey, great episode. I loved it. You guys suck. I'm never listening again. Whatever your opinion is, we'd love to hear it. Right, Norm?
- Speaker #2
We always like to hear opinions, but if you have anything bad to say about me, I don't like that. I can't take it. All right, guys, we will see you next week.
- Speaker #1
Ciao.
- Speaker #2
And
