Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Once you solve a problem once for a client and get them a quick win, you've got a new product in your product suite. You've got what we call an accelerator or a fire starter that you just add to your standard operating procedures, then next time it's push button, roll it out, delegate it to a team member, and you're done.
Speaker 1 00:00:12 If you have a vision for the agency you want to build, then we want to help you build it. Welcome to the Agency Hour podcast, brought to you by Agency Metrics.
Speaker 0 00:00:22 Hey, ladies and gentlemen. Woo. Welcome to another episode of The Agency Hour. We're live here, by the way, on whatever platform you are joining us on. It could be our Facebook page, it could be YouTube. I don't know, I think we're even trying to stuff these on TikTok these days. I have no idea. Anyway, uh, if you're watching live, welcome, welcome, welcome. If you are listening to the recording of this podcast, and thank you for joining us for another episode of The Agency Hour where we help you grow your revenue, your team, and your profits, so you can live more life, because that's what it's all about. At the end of the day, we have a couple of very special guests joining us here on the show today. Uh, but before we get there, do us a favor, and wherever you're watching us, like us subscribe, hit the bell, do a happy dance, dress up in a panda suit, all that kind of stuff. Share it with your friends so that we can get this content in front of more agency owners and also so that we know that this content is resonating with you, and we can make more of it. That's the idea. All right. Hey, my first guest today, or my co-host actually today, which I only found out about 20 minutes ago, and I'm super excited to have him here, is one of our brand new coaches here at Agency Mavericks. Please welcome to the stage the one and only Adam Silverman. Hey, dude.
Speaker 2 00:01:33 Howdy. How's it going, man? I'm
Speaker 0 00:01:34 Good, man. How are you
Speaker 2 00:01:35 Doing? Good. Yeah, doing good. Awesome.
Speaker 0 00:01:37 How are the horses on the farm?
Speaker 2 00:01:40 They're good. They're all doing good. We've got two little babies of a boy and a girl that are about four weeks old now, and, uh, yeah, man, they're, they're a lot of fun. It's
Speaker 0 00:01:50 Awesome. I saw a photo the other day of your son, and, and what you said, I think was a, like a 1500 pound horse or something.
Speaker 2 00:01:57 <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. We have a big old, his horse is an Oldenburg. He's like 1800 pound massive horse, and he just loves my kids. He follows 'em around and <laugh>. Oh
Speaker 0 00:02:07 My
Speaker 2 00:02:08 Gosh. He just, it's like, yeah, they control these massive animals, and they're just like, No, you walk this way, and they're like, Okay. Like, it's, it's really cute. Oh,
Speaker 0 00:02:17 Man. That's beautiful. It must be great to watch. I, I'm terrified of horses, by the way, so I'm looking forward to coming out to your farm one day and your kids can break me in.
Speaker 2 00:02:24 That's right.
Speaker 0 00:02:25 Now. Hey, what are you, what's, uh, what are you most excited about before we bring on our very special guests? What are you most excited about over the next 30 days in your agency in Milltown Digital?
Speaker 2 00:02:37 I, uh, you know, I guess like we've started, uh, rolling out go high level, um, which I've never done anything like that before. Uh, and so, you know, my CRMs in the past have been like, these attachments of like 10 different softwares, <laugh>, and so it's been a, it's been a process rebuilding it, but I'm really excited to roll that out out, and I'm excited for just, we have like, I think nine or 12 websites going out the door before the holiday, so, uh, I'm really excited to see all of that kind of get out, get, get, you know, get out and, and get the next stuff in. So, yeah, it's all, it's, it's, that's, it's good stuff.
Speaker 0 00:03:16 And, and what do you, what's your role in the agency these days? You, you've kind of built yourself out of most of the key seats, so what do you spend most of your time doing on a day-to-day basis?
Speaker 2 00:03:27 Yeah, you know, most of the time right now, uh, I kind of, I'm sort of like the product guy, so it's like, you know, pro probably not too far off for what you do at Maverick's. You know, I kind of figure out, okay, we wanna start doing more marketing. Um, let's, uh, you know, let's look at a high level. Let's figure out how it works, Let's figure out how we can use it. And then I sort of build the products around that. And then, um, I hand that off to our marketing person and our sales person, and then they go market it and sell it, and then they implement for our clients. And then I kind of act more in a support role, really. I just, I feel like I'm kind of customer support for our employees, you know, whatever they're stuck with, I sort of try to be available to help. So yeah, totally different think space than, you know, starting out the agencies turning four here in a, in about a week, I think. And so, yeah, it's, it's been a, been a cool journey.
Speaker 0 00:04:21 It's been a great journey, and it's been awesome to be a part of it. And I, it's funny you mentioned that, like customer support for your team. That's kind of how I feel as well, and I really, I'm really enjoying that role. I'm, I mean, I still do a little bit of coaching with a handful of mavericks, but I'm really enjoying, you know, I spend most of my time doing product and partnerships and, and supporting our team, and now I'm really en enjoying that. I feel like I have less people that I'm responsible for, but greater impact because if I support the team and the team support our clients, then my impact is still there. I still feel like I'm, I'm having an impact, but I'm actually managing fewer conversations, which is really nice.
Speaker 2 00:04:55 Yeah, that's, that's exactly how I feel. It's, it's like you're helping the clients through the people that actually have the tools to, to help the clients. You know, it's like my bandwidth is so, uh, you know, so thin that I can't be the guy anymore that they call, They have to call Theresa or Haberly or Chris or somebody else on our team. And yeah, they all do an amazing job of running all that. So, yeah, you know, I've, I think I've, I've tried to follow what, what you've done as best I can in my own way, and it, it, it works, you know, it really does.
Speaker 0 00:05:27 And when you get bored, you figure out my
Speaker 3 00:05:29 DNS in Cloud Flare for me, which is awesome too. So there's always that
Speaker 0 00:05:35 Happens, happens. Keyboard, keyboard. Um, so hey, we have a very special guest on today. Just a little bit of backstory. Um, we're gonna talk about, uh, essentially today's topic is about how you can very quickly and almost automatically close more clients and generate more revenue super fast and in a very strategic way. But I just wanna talk about our guest before I introduce him, because I've known this gentleman for a, a long time now. Back in the early WP Elevation days, we've hung out at several word camps. Uh, he was a sponsor at our recent Mav Con in San Diego, very generous. And he, he was the broadcast sponsor actually, so he made it possible for us to actually film the, uh, event and put it together for our members. He's also just one of the sharpest dudes I've met in this space. He's like super, super smart and also just really generous and just a really bloody nice guy to hang out with. So I'm really stoked to have him joining us here on the show and to talk about his product and he's tool and how it can help us. And so, ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for the wonderful Clifford Almeda from my web order. Come on down, brother. How are you?
Speaker 4 00:06:46 Hey Troy. Um, I'm doing great. Thanks. Pleasure to be here, Adam. Good to see you brother. You too, man. Always.
Speaker 0 00:06:52 And it's so good. It was so good to hang out in San Diego a few weeks ago. That feels like so long ago now, doesn't it? Right. I
Speaker 4 00:06:58 It was, it was such a great time. I was telling my wife, um, just to be back in person and hanging out, then hanging out with other agency owners, right. And just talking shop and family and life. Uh, it was, it was awesome. Highlight of the,
Speaker 0 00:07:10 So good. Um, hey, just give people a little bit of backstory before we dive into the, the, the software and my way bought it and, and why it's important and what it can do for your business. Give us a little bit of a backstory where before my, we bought it, you had an agency, right? What was your, what was your entrance into the agency world?
Speaker 4 00:07:27 Shoot. Um, alright, long story short of Cliff Notes version, um, I built my first website in 98. Troy, I lived north of you in Papa Newin north of Australia. So when I moved here to the us like it was hard to make calls. So I built my first website so I could connect with friends. Uh, 2000 I got paid $400 for my first website and then I kept doing that as a side hustle in about two. At around 2008, I decided to jump full time in to the agency world because I was making more money on my side hustle than my job at, at a government office. Wow. And, um, I think I ran into what you had at that time, which was WP Elevation around 2015. Um, around that time I had created a six figure solar printer and some contractor side hustle, moved into somewhat of an agency and then just joining WP Elevation and getting like a business in the box and some mindset shift changes, I was able to build a real agency in between 2015 and now 2022, um, I more than quadrupled our, um, revenue, build a full scale agency and then started a sas, which is what we'll be talking about a little bit here.
Speaker 4 00:08:40 But I still run the agency as well.
Speaker 0 00:08:43 Wow. Um, also, I did a little bit of stalking on you recently and I found that at one point, Oh, there we go. My camera's auto focus has gone funky. Uh, I found at one point you were designing, I found something that you, you designed on Smashing Magazine.
Speaker 4 00:08:57 Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:08:58 What was that? I can't remember what it was, but what was that like? Were you like designing things and selling little digital assets at some point?
Speaker 4 00:09:04 Actually it was part of a side hustle to get authority back links earlier on. So I'd have our offshore team design some wallpapers and put it out there and some other quick resources that people could use and get relevant back links back to our agency.
Speaker 0 00:09:19 That's right. It was the wallpaper, cuz I don't know why I was searching for wallpaper and your name come up and I'm like, What? And it was like 2000 and it was early days and it was like something on Smashing Magazine. I'm like, well there you go. Uh, we've all got those stories in our closet, haven't we? Fantastic. Now, um, at some point in the agency you realize that, uh, Adam now owes everyone a slab of wine. I believe <laugh> cause his phone just went off during a call, really expensive wine too, Adam. Um, at some point you realized that there was a, there was a gap or a need or an opportunity to start using website audits as a tool to start a conversation with a prospect. Walk us through how you got to that decision in the first place where you said, Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go and solve this problem.
Speaker 4 00:10:07 Yeah, Yeah. So one of the biggest things we needed to do in, in our sales process, cause we weren't this big agency and we needed to find a way to add value, build trust, and establish authority. So what we did earlier on, like around 2013, 1415, is, uh, we'd use hf, Sam Rush, we rank a few different tools out there and Coble information as part of Sales Fresh. So we would do is try to go in there and show them all of this information and um, ultimately tried to win that deal. This is before leveraging discovery and all of that now processes. We'd give that all out for free. And what I realized is that was taking us three to four hours to do, and ultimately we more deals than not, but it was just a lot of time and, you know, we would, it wasn't something we could build for. And so that was a huge problem we faced. And I think honestly when we jumped into, um, at that point that WP Elevation and some other groups, we realized that this was not a problem that we were only facing. And
Speaker 0 00:11:06 So we
Speaker 4 00:11:06 Decided to build an mvp, validate it. And um, I think our first, um, in essence like sales call was a webinar with WP Elevation. We converted three qu um, two thirds of all the people who jumped on were like, okay, we have something here. And now, I mean, we're about 20,000 hours in <laugh>
Speaker 0 00:11:26 Wow.
Speaker 4 00:11:27 For years building this out. I
Speaker 0 00:11:29 Didn't realize that webinar was like the MVP validation. That's excellent. That's awesome. Um, I'll take that. Uh, how did you, you we, so hang on cuz let's just park you for a second, right? Yeah. Building software is really freaking hard, takes a long time, costs a lot of money and a lot of resources, and it's a massive risk because 98% of the software that gets built on the planet is never gonna see the light of day, right? How you, you obviously had a dev team and you had resources, but you still had to make a decision to allocate some of those resources to build something in the hope that it would fly, right? How do you, most people just won't take that risk. Cliff, walk us through the mindset there of
Speaker 4 00:12:10 Yeah, so as I said, we were spending several hours in sales prep and, you know, we're trying to close three to five deals. So about 15, 20 hours were being spent of my time for the most part and, and another team member on this. And so, um, we did have about 30% capacity for our dev team. We actually are a dev shop, not just web design. And so we were doing large, um, 30 to 50 to $150,000 projects at that point. So we took some of that time and slowly built this up over a year, slowly validating it, getting a few people to run it for free. And then after that webinar, that's when we knew we had to like, dedicate it. At that point, we just had some sort of MVP of a web audit and why did, um, we make that investment? For me it was that dream, um, Troy of leverage, right? Build it once and sell it hundreds or thousands of times. And that concept of freedom that I had not experienced in the agency at that point, um, my dream of, of a SaaS and being able to do that as what in essence inspired me to do it. I had revenue, we've been very profitable and we had resources. And so we made that, we, we made that gamble, I guess.
Speaker 0 00:13:19 Wow. Well done. And it paid off. Um, where, where if someone, someone listening to this who is a freelancer or an agency owner and they're struggling with, uh, you know, getting a con you know, starting conversations and getting those conversations to the point where there's enough trust where someone says, Okay, I'm gonna engage you to fix these problems. Where does an, like, what, where does an audit fit into that process and when should someone be using an audit and, you know, should they be going after complete cold traffic? Should they be using it to audit their existing clients to get repeat business? Where where does it fit into the kind of agency ecosystem?
Speaker 4 00:13:56 Yeah, okay. So one of the things about mawa audit, the application we built is we build it from the ground up for web and SEO agencies, digital marketing agencies. So I think there's a place to use it in several different areas. Cro um, think about it this way as the audit should solve a value gap, okay? And, and a vision gap. What do I mean by that? I e most business owners, um, they say things like, I need a website or I need seo. But truth be told, once you ask them several times why you realize, oh, I need a website because our sales team is not generating X revenue or we need SEO because we need to generate 30% more leads, right? So that's the vision gap. So our goal is to identify specifically what the problem is and then tell them, Hey, here's a gap.
Speaker 4 00:14:44 This is where you are and this is where you want to get to that gap. And then we in essence, instead of telling them about our services, we show them some opportunities. So that could be leveraged in the sales process. That's where we use the audit the most. All right. So let's just say you jump on a call with me, Troy, I'm asking you some questions to qualify if you are, you know, an eligible prospect for us to work with. Once I know that my goal on that call is to spend 60 seconds telling you about me and the rest of the time telling you about the opportunities or challenges we've identified, if leveraged can get them from point A to Z or whatever that really looks like. So we're focused on outcomes and not so much our services. The audit, in essence just quickly shows them that, one, we've done the homework, two, we know what we're talking about, and three, because we identified their problem and ultimately the end result, we can then truly deliver value. Otherwise, it's really hard in 30 minutes to be able to get an aha moment from a prospect where they're like, Okay, and that's how we use it in the sales process.
Speaker 0 00:15:51 And, and do you, do you use it prospecting wise? Do you use it, have you or do you, or have you seen it work successfully? And Adam, feel free to chime in here anytime, brother, because my mouth just never stops moving unless someone tells me to stop it moving. Uh, do you use it for cold prospecting or is this for people who, where there's already some trust because they've responded to some of your marketing or some of your content?
Speaker 4 00:16:10 Yeah, great question. So a couple of ways that you could use it. I tell people, if you want a successful lead generation campaign, you need to know your audience. You need to, there need to know the expensive pain point or you know, big goal, desired outcome. And then you need to be able to have some social proof. If you have that, then leverage audits a couple of ways you could do it, like the, the easiest ones would be one, leveraging it as a dynamic lead magnet on your website, putting it in your footer on your LinkedIn profile as a value add. That's an easy, easy way to generate leads. The next one, um, most people are gonna kind of cringe at this, but I'm gonna tell you this is an easy way to generate leads is if you already are on webinars a part of a BNI group, um, you do podcasting, you know, you could say something like, here's five ways to improve your GMB or GBP or five ways to get more leads from your website.
Speaker 4 00:17:01 And then the tail end offer would be, well, if you have no clue how your website is performing often here, and then send them to a landing page. Then lastly, you have like the cold email cold calling, which I did, or like two, 2016, 2017. Luckily we don't have to do that in our agency because we would build frameworks to generate leads inbound, but if they were to do that, then it would be an approach like this, something like, Hey, you know, my name's Cliff. I was doing some industry research for home remodelers. I found out that you are missing three common things that home remodel companies need to generate leads from their websites or from their GMB profile. For example, home remodel companies they care about calls less about like, you know, website leads. And so I would say like, this is what you're missing. Hit reply if you'd like to, you know, learn a little bit more about some of the, the common things that we've seen on your website or on your GMB profile and how we've helped X company generate X result that's gonna get something versus like, Hey, we're a web agency and we can help you with your local optimization.
Speaker 0 00:18:02 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And the social proof element there I love as well. Um, uh, I just wanted to unpack something that you said there. There's two things again, Adam, feel free, punch me in the face and tell me to shut up. You said the dynamic lead magnet. Am I understanding that you can put some kind of form on, on my website to say, Hey, put your URL in here and we'll generate some kind of audit and then that comes into my web audit funnel for my leads, and then I can contact those people and follow them up?
Speaker 4 00:18:33 Yeah, most definitely.
Speaker 0 00:18:35 Wow.
Speaker 4 00:18:35 And, and if you have a minute, I believe in showing versus telling. If we have a minute, can I just share my screen and show you
Speaker 0 00:18:41 Examples? Yes. Ladies and gentlemen. Oh, we need a, you know, Max, we need a bumper for this show. That's like, it's screen sharing time. Uh, that would be good that I'll send Mac and Rabbit hopeful the next few days.
Speaker 4 00:18:54 <laugh>,
Speaker 0 00:18:55 Let's share our,
Speaker 4 00:18:57 All right, so let's look at this.
Speaker 0 00:18:58 All right, so for those of you who are, who are listening to this as a podcast, this is excellent audio right now because, uh, uh, Cliff has brought up my web board on the screen and he's gonna show some of this.
Speaker 4 00:19:09 So this is a simulation of potentially what they would see if they put in their website on, on your, their info on your website. So it would pull up something like this. It'll dynamically pass over their information. It'll tell the, we've identified some EO issues, we've identified some page performance stuff. But if you really wanna understand like the, the things that really matter, Hey, look, give us a call and we have these call to actions, right? And wow, this what ly and we have examples of this for a GMB a or a Google business profile audit, a website, seo, you name it, we've got lead widgets for all of them.
Speaker 0 00:19:48 Wow. So they, they put in the url or they put in their, like they put in their Google My Business listing, or they put in their like, and, and, and so it kinda shows SEO traffic and opportunities as well.
Speaker 4 00:19:59 That's right. So this would be an example of what this would look like for just a common lead magnet. I am pulling up, uh, gimme just a second here, let me pull this up. This is what a GMB audit would look like if you gave this to them in an automa automated manner. Now, one of the things we do is we've taken time to really build these reports so they don't look like they're automated. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, if you wanted to show an automated GMB audit just like this, you easily could mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and this is like, you know, all of this, or you could slim this down. The cool part about our reports is that you can customize it to your liking and to your services. And each one of our reports have these great presentation views. So you can load them up like a presentation and cover what you need.
Speaker 4 00:20:43 And this could be a lead magnet or it could be a full audit. Um, since we're in here just for a minute, what I wanted to do was show you guys this new report. So let's just say a company came to me and, or let's just say this is an existing company, so we're at the end of q4 or start of q4 and we're planning for 2023. I can run the report just like this in less than 15 minutes that shows my competent, like my primary client possibly, and two of their competitors across their website, their gmb, all of these elements in 15 minutes. And I can take this now and present it to them to say, This is where you are. These are the opportunities across all of these different elements. And it's presented beautifully and easy and easy to understand manner, where they look at it and say, Ah, okay, now we see that we're not ranking here.
Speaker 4 00:21:32 And if we don't rank in, you know, for example, in position one, we're losing 70% of all clicks. Um, you know, we look at their GMB profile and all of these different things are different reports, but my point view is we can create these in a matter of minutes. So imagine, you know, taking some of these things, getting these insights quickly versus like scouring the web and doing all the research in 10 to 15 minutes so that you can bring this onto a sales call or a discovery call or a meeting and they'd be like, Oh, wow, this is what's going on. The biggest thing that, oh, and I'll just close with this. At the end of the day, the biggest thing that you have to answer is, is your service worth the investment? And one of the things we've built in here into our reports is the simple ROI analysis.
Speaker 4 00:22:18 And what's cool is you could bu you could use this as a lead widget as well. They put in some basic information and then it literally says, Look, if you, in this case, if you were to just get a 1% conversion rate with a, a redesign, you'd add $4,000 to bottom line. If you could get 30% more traffic, whether that's paid seo, content marketing or whatever, this is your bottom line. And this would be your annual bottom line. So selling 30, $50,000 of services, whether that's a reoccurring retainer or you know, this long 12 month program mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you're now offering in essence a three to 10 X ROI on your services. And this is how we sell.
Speaker 0 00:22:57 One of the things that I'm a big advocate of is laying out a 12 month roadmap for a client on a CanBan board. Right. I kind of usually load it up in click up or a san or whatever you use, show them what we're gonna do over the next 12 months and kind of plan it out in order, right? That's part of the sales process is, Hey, over the next 12 months we're gonna work on this. And I, I have a list of all the stuff that we do in like a, like a hopper column, and then I just build it out month at a time. And so the first month we're gonna do this, the next month we're gonna do this. The next month we're gonna do this. The thing I love about this audit is it actually takes all the guesswork outta that because you can look at the audit and say, Well, here's the burning fire we need to put out right now. So we're gonna do that in month one. Here's the next thing we can do that month two, this thing can wait a couple of months. We're gonna start this now, cuz it's gonna take a while for that to kick in. And so this gives you the data to help build out that 12 month roadmap. And it's no longer based on opinion, it's based on the data that's out there.
Speaker 2 00:23:46 That's, that's right. And like you can see here, like section, I don't know if you can see my screen, and it prioritizes all the insights that we've identified by impact.
Speaker 0 00:23:58 Mm. Do you normally sell, do you normally sell these audits or are they normally given away for free and then you use it to sell the client the thing?
Speaker 2 00:24:07 Yeah, that's, that's a great question. So, um, it just depends on who it is. So if I know that the prospect is, you know, just looking for a quick solution, then I'll tell 'em, Hey, look, this is a paid consultation.
Speaker 0 00:24:20 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>,
Speaker 2 00:24:22 Can y'all hear me?
Speaker 0 00:24:22 Yep. Yep, we got you. Okay.
Speaker 2 00:24:24 Yep. Okay, cool. So if it's a paid, if, if we find out that there may not be an ideal, uh, customer, then I'll look at bringing them in a foot in their door strategy and then it becomes a paid audit. We generally work with, with seven and eight figure businesses cro. So our goal there is to add value up front, and that's why we generally don't charge for it. But the one audit we do charge $2,500 for is the e-commerce audit. It still takes us about 30 minutes to run, but it gives about 50 pages from homepage to checkout all the insights from cro, conversion rate optimization to user experience and all of that stuff. And we give them four hours of consultation and the report for 2,500, and then we're generally trying to upsell them into 30 to 50 k, you know, redesign project.
Speaker 0 00:25:14 Mm. Adam, well, we've got Cliff here. Do you have any questions?
Speaker 2 00:25:20 Man, the, I just think there's so much value in this system. We, we use it for so many different things. We use it for the Google business profile, um, for bringing people onto care plans. Um, just, there's just so many ways. I have not actually, uh, used the competitive analysis yet, but is that live Cliff? Is that ready to go? Yeah, so we just launched it last week, Adam. Sweet. It's good. Yeah, it's very cool. What's really, what's really funny is, is my first experience with, with my web audit in Cliff was actually not in, uh, w P e. It was that a, uh, client actually reached out to me that had not been a client, and they gave me this audit, which happened to be Cliff's, my web audit audit, and said, Hey, like, you know, we, we have this horrible website, it has all these things in it, like, can you guys give me a hand?
Speaker 2 00:26:14 And I just died laughing because I looked at it and went, I've never seen this before. And a few months later, somebody brought up my web audit and I looked and went, Oh, that's what that thing was <laugh>. So like, it basically just sold me, it got me a client and sold me on, you know, using your software <laugh>. So say that's the one thing about cold outreach that could kind of burn you. If, if they have a, you know, if they have a contact already, you're kind of giving them some legwork. But I love what you were saying about, you know, using it to generate, you know, to create value because especially when you're cold with a client, if they don't know, or they're not sure if you know what you're doing, to me, this is like a way of being like, we absolutely know what we're doing and we know, like Troy was saying, which thing we're gonna need to do, where the impact is gonna be. So I just feel like it's a great, it's a great leader into them seeing you as an expert. You know,
Speaker 0 00:27:08 It's like the, the 21 point safety check when you take your car into the mechanic and they go through and they, they're on the clipboard or the iPad, and they come back to you and they go, Well, you know, your brake pads need replacing and this back tire needs fixing and blah, blah, blah. This is all good, this is all good, but these things need fixing. And I don't really know what they're talking about. I mean, they, I mean, they could be lying to me. I mean, I have no idea, but it looks like they know what they're talking about, so therefore I trust them. Right? Uh, and, and I think this is, this is a, a similar trust building, authority building play. How do you, if I'm just starting out, Cliff and I kind of go, well, I wanna, I wanna work with, um, you know, I wanna work with, I mean, does it work for non-local business? Like I wanna work with course creators or coaches? How do I, how do I generate the leads and get them to use? Like, how, how do I start the conversation if I'm just starting out? And I, you said you've built some processes for inbound. I'd be curious to explore that. Like how do we use this to start conversations with strangers?
Speaker 4 00:28:05 Yeah, so I'll, I'll share a couple of, um, I'll share a couple of examples. Now. These are for, so getting started, you know, I always tell people, figure out what your strengths are. So if you enjoy public speaking, then you know, again, like I said, try to build authority by speaking in front of local groups or online webinars where your target audience is, right? Um, one of the easiest, um, I'm creating a playbook. I've created these playbooks that can be leveraged. An example of a playbook that we're putting together right now is generating leads from social media. All right? So that's LinkedIn. And LinkedIn and Facebook groups are, step one is, um, identifying who you like to work with or who you wanna work with, and then looking for them. So you could look for, you know, Facebook groups for attorneys or face or LinkedIn groups for attorneys, um, whatever that might be.
Speaker 4 00:28:52 And then you could join them. And we always say, you know, lead with value, right? That's like the motto we, we, we live by. And so the idea would be join those groups. Don't try to mind them for leads. We've seen what that happens in my group and your group, right? So the idea is deliver value. That means, you know, engage the post, see what the admins need, see how you can help answer questions. And then once you do that, right, and you build some rapport after a few weeks or a month or so, you know, instead of saying things like, Hey, I run a web agency, like drop your email here and, you know, I can do an audit or dme, which sometimes can be a little sleazy, you know, you could do things like, Hey, you know, um, I've helped this type of business so that people, I've helped accountants just like you, these are five common things on the website or their Google business profile.
Speaker 4 00:29:38 And look, I'm doing a tear down. And you literally could do a tear down and then show them the report and say, drop your link below, right? And then we'll do it. Now you'll, when we did this, we've realized that people don't want their stuff to be like broadcasted or analyzed in front of a whole group, right? Cause no one wants their stuff torn down like that. And so then they'll DM you, they'll email you and you can put that at the end and that becomes a great way. Or you could reach out to the admin and say, Hey, could I jump on live and kind of just add value. And then the tail end is because your community is great, like we give you this audit, right? Or we'll offer this audit for 30 people. I've done this and generated dozens of leads. Peter Butler, who is affiliated with you guys at one time, did that, um, and generated thousands of dollars.
Speaker 4 00:30:23 Now if you were doing outbound again, um, the big thing there, I stress is an audience identifying an offer that's compelling and then ultimately some social proof. And most companies starting out don't have that Troy, right? And so, like, I don't wanna say like, do do cold email and then it's gonna work. Um, generally people don't even know how to do cold email. And I think you've got some great training around generating leads. I think adding this becomes that value stack. And that's where I'd point people to honestly, because just going out there and trying to figure out a strategy, um, without, you know, effectively knowing how to execute it is not gonna work. I
Speaker 0 00:31:05 Mean, so social proof. Here's the thing about social proof. What I, I learned, uh, when I was starting out, I had no social proof, right? And so what I did is I, I like full transparency. I built a couple of websites pro bono. And when I said pro bono, what I, what I meant, what I said to the client was, I'm gonna do this at cost. Whatever it cost me, it's not free, It's whatever it costs me, I'm gonna charge you. So I'm not making any money outta this whatsoever, which I'll come back to in a second. And at the end of this, we are going to write an article on a press release about, And so I did this with a, a local charity here in Melbourne, and we wrote a press release and we got the local charity, a lot of press, and we were attached to that story because we were a digital agency that helped them launch.
Speaker 0 00:31:42 Now, so that's a great, it gives you free press, it gives them free press, it gives them a website at cost, which is a lot cheaper than they would normally pay. And, uh, when I say at cost, you are, you still get paid for your time. You just don't make any profit. And so maybe you just take a hit on what you would normally get paid for your, for your time to put it together. Uh, you wear a few of the costs. So you, you kind of break even. I'm not saying you need to lose your shirt and go broke and, and live on two minute noodles while you're doing this, but if you do that, the, the great targets for me are local nonprofits, local charities and local schools, because they're tied on budget. Uh, they're usually open to this kind of thing. And the condition is, uh, if we do this and it, and it works, just give us a testimonial and allow us to use your logo with social proof.
Speaker 0 00:32:23 The other thing, if you're starting out, as I learned this, if you're starting out as speaking and you wanna get into the, into the speaking space, target, the local schools or the local colleges, uh, even if you run an online webinar for them, add value for free, and all you wanna do is then be able to put their logo on your website and, and say, Hey, you know, I've spoken at, you know, University of Southern California, or I've spoken at whatever, um, and that it builds ins, you're kind of borrowing their credibility to boost your own authority, right? Hmm. Um, the, the, and the other thing I will say is this, is that I think people with, with someone like cold email, right? People's expectations are that they're gonna like grab a list of audience people, you know, names and email addresses. They're gonna write one email that is the best email they've ever written.
Speaker 0 00:33:05 They're gonna stick it into a tool like my limb list or one of those other tools. They're gonna hit publish, and then money's gonna fall outta the sky and they're gonna drive Lamborghinis for the rest of their life, right? The reality is that you need to touch someone at least seven times before you can say, Okay, they're dead to me. They're not gonna respond, right? If you've emailed someone two or three times and haven't responded, then you have it, You, you're not even halfway there. Like at least seven touch points. Now, that could be LinkedIn reach out, it could be a LinkedIn message, it could be liking something they've done on LinkedIn email, uh, it could be a text message. Um, you know, at least seven touchpoints before you say, Okay, they're not gonna respond. And the other thing I will say is I would not lead the conversation with the word audit.
Speaker 0 00:33:48 I would lead with the opportunity that we've uncovered that we wanna show you. And then when you get them on a call, you use the audit to show them the opportunity. Like you, we've got some red lights here that we need to turn green. And by the way, if we turn these red lights green, this could mean another a hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue to you guys, right? Paying me 15 grand or 18 grand or 20 grand a year to figure this out is not, not a big problem because you're gonna get a massive roi, and my web bought will help you put all that data together. So I would just caution people, if you're gonna do a whole bunch of cold email outreach and email a thousand people once and offer them a web audit and you get no response, that's not the right strategy, right? So, um, just manage your expectations around that. And it, and as Cliff said, it all comes down to the offer. The audit is the tool that helps them, that show them the gap, right? But you've gotta have that offer to show them that you can actually help them bridge that gap.
Speaker 4 00:34:41 So, Troy, I'm gonna share my screen again. I'm gonna show a hack for people that aren't trying to get scrappy and how I would actually do this if I needed to generate sales in the next seven days and start it out with really nothing. This is probably what I would do. All right,
Speaker 0 00:34:55 Love it.
Speaker 4 00:34:56 All right, let's take a look at this. Let me show my screen.
Speaker 0 00:35:00 By the way, if you're listening to this as a podcast, you should really get on over to our Facebook page, uh, facebook.com/agency MAs, I think it is. And, uh, and also maybe on YouTube, we, we, and I'm not sure what we're doing with these videos, but, uh, come and check out the Facebook page so you can see what Cliff is sharing on his screen here.
Speaker 4 00:35:18 Cool. Yes. What this is how I would approach it. So one of the audits we have is, is it gives you a local presence. So let's say I was working, again, let's stick with the home remodelers. So I might search for something like, um, home remodeling, and then I see the, the list of companies I would quickly look and see which about good domain authority and grid reviews, but aren't ranking well. That just means that the company's cared about maybe some of their growth over the years, but haven't optimized effectively. And then I would reach out to them strategically and say, Hey, look, if you over the NetB optimizing in the keywords, I can get them some quick wins. Make that a case study and close, you know, close that deal and keep building. That would be one way. Another thing we did build out is this thing called Better Leads.
Speaker 4 00:36:04 This is a playbook here. And with this playbook, really what it says is look, build this foundation. It gives you some examples, and then you quickly search for, um, you can search for businesses in your area, i e with, with better leads. You could search for plumbers, you could look for dentists, whatever group you serve, and it tells you what problems they have, whether it's responsive, paid speed, et cetera. So you have some quick talking points, or if you use a tool like Mail Shake or Lu List and you do know how to use Target to outreach this streamlines that and generates hundreds of leads in a matter of minutes that you can connect with. So just I gave that disclaimer of if you don't know what you're doing, then you know, it's just kinda like throwing a dart and hoping you hit something. But if you sort of know what you're doing, then we do have some tools that help you layer, um, the insights and quickly find people who need your services so that you can get in front of them.
Speaker 0 00:36:56 Love it. We talk a lot about lead gen tools over the last couple of weeks here in Sales Accelerator. One of our programs, and I was referencing, you know, D seven Lead Finder and those other tools. The problem with a lot of those tools is they just generate a name and email and a phone number, right? They don't actually tell you any information about the potential problems that that website owner has or the opportunities that you can help them explore. And the thing I like about Better Leads is that obviously it taps into to some of that, um, demographic data, but it also shows you the intel around their online marketing and their online presence so that you've now got a way to start a conversation because with the other tools, if you've just got a name email and a phone number, it's like, you know, I saw this meme the other day on Facebook that says, this is what LinkedIn outreach looks like. Hey, you breathe and I breathe, we should connect <laugh>.
Speaker 4 00:37:43 It's
Speaker 0 00:37:44 Completely irrelevant. Like, you, you know nothing about me. And that's the problem with just gen gen, generic lead gentles, like, Hey, you're a dentist in Arizona, We're a dental marketing company, we should talk, No, we shouldn't, you should go away and leave me alone. But if you can put an opportunity in front of them and say, you know, we've helped a lot of dentists achieve X by just tweaking this one thing and we can see that this is a problem for you, would you like us to show you how to do this? That's way more likely that to elicit someone putting their hand up and saying, Okay, I'm happy to jump on a call for 10 minutes, don't waste my time. Right?
Speaker 4 00:38:14 Exactly. And, and, and I, I'm, I'm a big believer in, uh, just finding common threads and, and being able to, to continue to leverage that. So if, if one of the things we do is, let's say you have two or three, you have two or three customers asking for referrals suck, right? We all know that. Well, what would it look like if you told the customer like, Hey, I got these results for you. Or here's, you know, I call 'em growth assessment. So we've shown you growth assessment and we've got you some results. Are there two or three business owners in your network that you'd like me to offer this for? Again, look, if they want to take it and apply it themselves or have someone that works with them, do it. Great. What we've realized pro is that by adding value again and being proactive, this is a great way to you, you know, leverage the, the network and, and the type of people we already work with and leverage their audience or their connections.
Speaker 0 00:39:11 Yeah. And it's the law of reciprocity, isn't it? Like if you add enough value, people just want to pay you back because of, of reciprocity. Hey, what is the, before we go any further, what is the link where people can get started with my web order? I think we've got a link somewhere that people can go to, to, there we go. My web audit.com/mavs, my web.com/mavs mvs. What happens when people go there? Cliff? Oh, we've, you, you are on mute, Cliff. Sorry.
Speaker 4 00:39:38 Cool. Yeah, so there's the link. Um, ultimately if you go to that link, you should, you should see a special offer for the Mavericks community or a link to a free trial. Ultimately, you could go through there with any of our paid offers. We offer a 30 day ROI guarantee, not just a trial. And, or you don't, like, literally we're saying if you don't generate three to five x roi, let's just say off the monthly plan, then we've done something wrong. Just because we've given you the, we'll give you the frameworks, we'll give you the resources, the tools, the reports, the emails, whatever you need to generate that. And, um, you don't even need to tell us no roi. You could just say, Look, this didn't work for me, but we believe in our products so much that we put ROI guarantee around it. And I will actually be jumping on one on group calls once a week or twice a week, depending on where in the world you are. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, um, to help get you to success as fast as possible. So, um, just drop a note and say, you know, I'm part of the Mavs group, I'm taking this offer on, and we'll get you the details.
Speaker 0 00:40:39 Great. Love it. Not very often that a, uh, owner of a SaaS jumps on a group call once or twice a week and helps people out. Dub uh, my web board at.com/mavs m a s is the link to, to get started. Uh, if someone is, how do you use this with existing clients? Cuz here's one of the things that I'm thinking, right? If I'm a web agency and a client comes to me and says, All right, well you, we've been working with you for 12 months, and I go back to 'em and I say, Hey, here's this audit shows you the opportunities that we can still explore, and there's still some gap here. Would did a client look at me and go, Well, dude, you should have fixed this already. This is like, how come this isn't like, you know, why, why am I paying you? Right? How do we, I'm being, you know, trying to be funny him? How do we use this with existing clients to either retain them for the second year or to add more value and to increase their spend with us?
Speaker 4 00:41:33 Okay, great question, Troy. We get this a lot. In fact, I created this playbook and another playbook there. It's accessible to everyone, whether or not you're a customer, the link will be shared. Um, simply put, um, we tell them, and we've got this right, we'd run an agency. So we hear that, say this and I'll say something like, Hey Troy, look, um, I appreciate your concern. I just wanted to let you know that the retainer you were on focused on your website or maybe your local presence. Look, what we've done is give you a complete growth assessment. We've analyzed your website now, we've taken a look at your on page SEO and your GBP and some of the citations. At the end of the day, what we've covered for the few hours that you've paid or for that retainer each month is this. What we're looking here is to be proactive as a trusted partner to show you these other opportunities to help you gain a competitive advantage.
Speaker 4 00:42:24 So look, you could either increase your retainer and we'll cover this over the, the span of the next six to 12 months, or, you know, if you have a lump sum that you'd like to invest, because for example, here in the us we're at the year end, so looking to gain a, for example, a tax benefit and so they can invest that now and that we can deal with that over the next one to three months and get it done faster. And that's where the, we always focus on, um, high impact work. And so we'll really tell them like, this is high impact work for the next one to three months, and maybe this is other stuff that we could leverage over the next six to nine months, for example. But the idea is to tell them, Look, you're paying for x and what we're doing is we're proactively showcasing other opportunities that we're not addressed here. And that's the benefit of actually working with us. We don't want you to lose out to the competition. So we proactively analyzed this and all the verbiage, the templates, how to present it, those all templates put into the playbook that I shared, um, that you can kind of see streaming right
Speaker 0 00:43:26 Below. Love it. My web board.com/playbooks/annual client meeting with annual dash client dash meeting, or I'm sure you could probably just search my web board at playbooks annual client meeting and you'll find it. And then of course, my web board.com/mavs m a vs to sign up for the free trial for the my web order software. And I've gotta say, uh, Cliff, you're doing an amazing job staying focused while that dog of yours in the background is, uh, having a, a complete meltdown.
Speaker 4 00:43:51 <laugh>, I'm sorry, my wife came and, and just caused trouble here. I hope it's not, you might see a sweat beat coming down. I like, Oh no <laugh>, it's totally fine.
Speaker 0 00:44:02 For those of you listening, yes, that is Cliff's very excitable dog in the background, uh, welcoming a family member home. I love it. I love it. What sort of dog is it, by the way?
Speaker 4 00:44:11 Um, so we have two dogs. This is a maloo and she's two months old and so not
Speaker 0 00:44:16 Really great. Yes, there you go. Love it. Love it, love it. Um, what, uh, what in your agency, what does your team look like in your agency these days?
Speaker 4 00:44:27 Yeah, so, um, it, it, it's me as the business owner. I still handle some of the sales, actually I would say a lot of the sales. I have a chief technology officer, six developers. We have a designer on staff, um, and then a front end designer that does not just HTML css but like Angular js, some of that type of stuff. And then we have a customer success manager that helps with both like customer support on my web audit as well as like project management tasks, help desk stuff as well. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 0 00:45:00 <affirmative> and the, and the, my web audit software dev is completely separate. Is that a separate team?
Speaker 4 00:45:04 Uh, we, we have four dedicated towards that. And then, and depending on what we got in our roadmap, they'll share about 50% of that in the agency depending on where we're at. We try to keep at 80% capacity in the agency so that we have some space for my web audit. And when we don't, um, need them, we just kind of move back and forth. But we have four dedicated devs generally investing about 600 hours in development, either research API integrations, or just ongoing work for my robotic month to month.
Speaker 0 00:45:37 Mm. Uh, that was one of my questions actually. What, what does my web board integrate with? What's some of the other tools that it, that can integrate with to allow, I know we were at Ma Con actually someone was asking, does my web board integrate with Go high level? Cuz there's an obvious play there. Does it, what does it in, does it have like an api? How does it integrate with other tools?
Speaker 4 00:45:54 Yeah, great question. So right now we, we just have a direct integration with Zapier. We're building in building out an API for not, you know, for people to do their own integrations directly with us, but Zapier is the number one way to do that. And with that you can tie into Active Campaign and everything else. And we're working with, well, we're in the beginning conversations with go high level about direct integration with them as
Speaker 0 00:46:17 Well. Mm. Sweet. That'll be good. That'll be good. Um, Adam, when your team are using this, the, are they using it in a, are you selling these as like a fire starter or are you using them to sell paid discovery? How does it fit into your kind of marketing and sales process?
Speaker 2 00:46:34 Yeah, so we c we do a little bit of both. So sometimes we give it away, um, we'll do we call it like a website performance evaluation? Um, sometimes we'll sell it. Uh, it just depends on the client and the circumstance. We always offer the local Google business profile evaluation for free. Um, just because in our local community, like where my business is, technology and digital marketing is just not, um, something that people are used to yet. It's a very, uh, agricultural area. And so a lot of people have to really, they don't understand any of this, right? Like, half of them don't even know what a Google business profile is or why they would want to use it. And so it's a really good education piece. Um, and it's one of the things that I actually still do in the business because I really enjoy running these evaluations and looking and seeing the gaps and the problems and being able to tell them like, Yes, we can definitely help you, and let me connect you in with Teresa so she can have a conversation.
Speaker 2 00:47:36 So it helps my sales team like it, It honestly is just a, it's a really powerful tool in the tool belt to kind of use however it makes sense for your, you know, for your business. And, and I think like, also one thing Cliff said, I think agency owners, we always forget that we have leads available to us at any time. Like most of us have past clients, most of our past clients have not gotten where they want to get to <laugh>. And so it's like, you know, they're, they're, we forget about them and we worry about the new person, the new thing, the new, you know, this the shiny object. But you know, what he's showing here with the ability to go back to them and say, Look at where you were. Look at where you are. Look where you could be if we continue or we do more. I mean, that's just, you could constantly be adding revenue to your, to your business, you know?
Speaker 0 00:48:29 Totally. Yeah. It's, it's like, it, it, you're right. No one, I've never had a client, either an agency client or a, or a maverick or a, a mentee or a student, and I've never had anyone come to me and say, Hey, Troy, it's done. I tick off a life on my to-do list and thank you so much. The business finished and I'm out. Like, yeah, I've had people exit, but the new owner just has a whole bunch of problems they need to solve, right? So it's never done. The conversation's never over. And I think our job as consultants, which is really what we are, our job is to, uh, help the client figure out what they should do next in order to get to where they want to go. And my web order is a great, it's a great way of, you know, Jeff Bezos has got this great saying, right?
Speaker 0 00:49:14 He's like, If you have data that proves me wrong, bring it on and show me the data. But if this conversation is gonna come down to opinion, then my opinion wins because I own the company and I've been doing this a long time, and my opinion got us to where we are now. But if you've got data, show me the data. I will happily be wrong by the data and my web board. It is that data. Here we go, Dude, this is not a matter of opinion. This is what we need to fix right now because this is gonna give us the fastest return on investment. And I, I've always said, if you can show someone a quick win and get them a fast return on investment, they will think you're a magician. And then they will basically do whatever you suggest because you've already proven yourself.
Speaker 0 00:49:57 And this lays that out. Uh, my web board.com/m A V s is the link to go and sign up for the free trial, my web board.com/m a v s, Full transparency, that is an affiliate link. So if you, uh, end up signing up to my, we board it through that, I will make a little bit of commission to buy my very expensive coffee beans that I enjoy drinking and probably buy another microphone just for fun. Um, Cliff, what are you most excited about over the next 90 days in my we board what features are on the roadmap? What can we expect?
Speaker 4 00:50:27 Yeah. Um, I think we're working on a couple of playbooks. Again, our goal is how do we get quick wins for the agencies and what are we using in our agency? So everything we do, we take and slowly productize into these playbooks that other people can take as far as features and functionality go as we look to move, um, higher up market, I would just say in this, in the digital marketing space, two things that we're working on over this quarter is going to be leveraging Facebook audits and, um, Google AdWord audits as well. Again, it's a quick way, right, to show people where they're losing money and, and get some quick wins. And the cool part with Facebook and, and like paid ads pretty much, is that if you can identify these opportunities and tweak 'em, usually in a matter of weeks, you're able to, in essence, quantify the ROI in your services. And so those are two big things that are coming up, uh, over the next qu three to four months ish.
Speaker 0 00:51:23 Um, imagine that's not a, a light undertaking either. I imagine that's probably a big pain in the ass of a problem to figure out.
Speaker 4 00:51:31 <laugh>, it, it, it really is. And, and Facebook keeps changing its APIs, which is worse. Like we, we went through four iterations already since we started the initial integration with them. But, um, again, our goal is to say what are we doing? What reports work? We do a lot of research and analysis, and then we actually work with a lot of agencies that are doing this. So we say, Hey guys, look at this. What's missing? Like, what would work well? And then again, our goal is to even like with a Facebook audit, usually it might take you hours unless you do, you know, some automated thing and then that doesn't give you great insights. So our goal is to analyze the audits out there, work with people, see what they're doing. And the cool part with our audit system is that we are, we, every single audit of ours allows for you to put in your own notes and custom points.
Speaker 4 00:52:14 So for example, if you are, you know, let's just say with Facebook ads, you might be able to analyze, click through rates or, um, conversion rates to automated matters, but you can actually analyze the ad copy well, So with our system, you'll be able to have the audit points and just add your notes in minutes. And so it does take a lot of time and effort, but, but being trusted and pride and proven in the industry is our goal for everything we release out there, because we want people like ROI should really happen in a couple of days no matter what service you're using.
Speaker 0 00:52:46 Yeah, a hundred percent. And, and, and, and as agency owners, that's what, that's how we should be approaching our clients is if you can get, like, you know, when I started out, it was the, it was that typical model, which, which most people still follow because they, it's not their fault. They just know one shown 'em an alternative reality, right? But the model is that someone puts their hand up and says, Oh, I'm interested in a website. You get on, you kind of build rapport. You, you, you try and convince them that you know what you're doing. The whole thing feels like a job interview. And in fact, the success criteria for that first call with a client is that they ask you for a proposal. If they ask you for a pro proposal after about 45 minutes of shenanigans, you're like, Yes, I'm in with a chance, right?
Speaker 0 00:53:27 You go back, if you're really smart, you're using our proposal template that we gave away for 10 years, which we don't recommend you do proposals anymore. But anyway, if you're really smart using our proposal template, you send the proposal off, then they go dark, you put 'em into some kind of weird anti follow up sequence, you might even send them the magic email that's been floating around the internet to try and get them to respond. And the problem is, you're asking 'em to spend 8, 12, 15, whatever it is on a new relationship. They don't know how they're gonna get a return on that. And so what I've done over the years is gone, I've bro basically broken that whole process down into products. How can I get you a return on investment within 14 days so that, so you are like, Oh, hang on a second.
Speaker 0 00:54:04 All the other noise in my life needs to go away for a second because this person has added massive value and got me a return on investment in a couple of weeks. I'm now gonna do whatever they say and they're saying, we should do this. All these other clowns are telling me to do this stuff. But this guy's proven his value. And I think something like my web order, not to label the point too much, but I think something like my web order allows you to identify the quick win and chunk it down into a little product. Once you do this once, by the way, once you solve a problem once for a client and get them a quick win, you've got a new product in your product suite, you've got what we call an accelerator or a fire starter that you just add to your standard operating procedures, the next time it's push button, roll it out, delegate it to a team member, and you're done.
Speaker 0 00:54:47 Right? Systemize it. It's not that difficult. So I actually think I'm gonna dig more into my web audit because it's been a while since I've seen the features here. I'm gonna dig more into this and, um, figure out how we can help leverage what you are doing and what we are doing and actually lay out some really solid playbooks here and some click up templates for our clients to go, Hey, if the, if the audit says this, prescribe this. If the audit says this, do this. Right? In fact, we might just make it part of our standard operating consulting procedures. They need to use my web audit. Uh, this has been super insightful, dude. I'm glad we did this cuz as I said, it's developed a lot since I saw it last, and it's, it's, uh, really insightful. Adam, you got any parting questions or thoughts for Cliff?
Speaker 2 00:55:25 No, man, I just love, love what you're doing, Cliff and love, love your heart for you know, your clients and for all of us and, and, uh, honestly, just appreciate, appreciate the work because it, it helps us all get through some of the barriers that we run into with clients and this, you're tearing a huge wall down, um, and giving some people a chance to get, you know, projects that I, I think they would struggle to get without, um, without using this. So man, just yeah, love what you're doing and glad you're doing it,
Speaker 4 00:55:56 Dude. Thank you. I appreciate it. And Troy, I mean, I say this every time I speak to you, like your coaching program has changed our, my life, right? Like in 2015, um, just across here, my wife was like, Look, Cliff, like, we're making good money, but like, time with our kids and our marriage, it just wasn't working. And, um, having like, I I I call agency Mavericks, whatever version it an issue started at that, um, was like a business in the box for me, Those templates, those assets, that was one step that just gave me a leap forward. Then the next step was connecting with Croda and Christina and these other people within that agency world. I got referral work and that's easily 8,000 thousand dollars of the last four or five years, but the biggest one is time. Like, you know, I'm in a place now where I'm continuing to buy back time by leveraging others, and that was not something I could have ever have imagined before.
Speaker 4 00:56:50 And now to say that I work less than I did in 2015, running two very successful businesses and getting by with under 40 hours, you know, is, is because of learning from people like you, you who've blad that path ahead. And so for people that are in here, and I know there's a lot, obviously there's thousands of people in this group or on the YouTube videos, like if you are in a place to invest, like that's the best investment you can make. And if you aren't able to make that investment right away, like consume the content blog, the videos, the Facebook group has amazing insights, invest in yourself and get a leap, you know, leap ahead in 2023. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 0 00:57:28 <affirmative>, it's one of the most rewarding things. And I never realized this when I started w television back in, you know, 150 years ago whenever it started. One of the most rewarding things is meeting people in real life. And they tell you these stories like, yeah, you know, when, when I, I've met you in real life and one of the, you know, first things was like, thank you for everything you do because you've changed my life. And like, I I, it's weird when I, when someone tells me and I'm like, Holy shit man, like, oh, don't wanna be responsible for changing your life, but I've learned to accept that over the years is that this is the impact that we have on, on people. And uh, it's, it's very humbling. So I appreciate the fi the kind words. Uh, Pete Perry will tell you, he and I, our, our love language is words of affirmation. So when people tell us, you know, my wife can like show me she loves me until she's blue in the face. I'm like, I need you to say the words, right? If you tell me you love me, like shit, I'm happy. Right?
Speaker 4 00:58:19 Love, Like that's what family looks like in the agency space. Like Adam's a friend Pete, Johnny, like Christina, like those aren't, initially they were coaches, then they became friends, they became peers, and like now they're either customers or just great friends. And so, you know, Christina moved out, Christina Romero this time moved to Arizona and we went and hang, hung out and had lunch and Pete and Johnny, like we, Adam, we broke bread and hung out and spoke outside of these events. And that's what, you know, masterminds become. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 0 00:58:54 Not
Speaker 4 00:58:55 Just people
Speaker 0 00:58:56 You work with. It's a tribe. I love it. Awesome. Thank you so much for being here on the agency. Our cliff for Almeda from my web board at my way board at.com/m avs is the link. And thank you Adam Silverman for joining us Co-host here on this episode of the agency. I appreciate you both. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that is another episode of the agency how, uh, uh, you can like, subscribe, click the bell, do all the fancy stuff, put on a panda suit, do a happy dance, let us know that you love us, give us some feedback so we know to create more content like this, this, and please share it with your friends. If you are listening to, this is a podcast, come and check us out on the socials and join the Digital Maverick Facebook group, which is where we put a lot of content out, tips and tricks and tutorials and, uh, how to establish yourself and grow yourself as a digital marketer and an agency. Uh, so joining the conversation there, I look forward to speaking with you again next week on the Agency Hour. Until then, have a great week. Bye for now.
Speaker 1 00:59:43 Thanks for listening to the Agency Hour podcast. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify Pocket cast, Audible, and wherever you like to listen, you can catch all of the Agency Hour episodes on our YouTube channel at youtube.com/agency Mavericks. Or you can get involved. Check out our free Digital Mavericks Facebook group where we broadcast these episodes live for our community every week along with a ton of free training. We'll see you there.
