Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] This is what the most successful agencies are doing. Not all at the same time. You can't do all this at once. It's a journey. This is a marathon, not a sprint. It's broken up into sprints. So you can bite one of these little projects off and get it done in a couple of weeks, but the whole journey is a three to five year journey to get your agency to the point where it's delivering amazing profit for you. And maybe you're only working, you know, three or four hours a day.
[00:00:24] Hey, gang. Welcome to the Agency Howl Podcast. My name's Troy Dean. I'll be your host this week and most weeks. This week we have a special episode. There's no guest, it's just me and you having a little chat about your agency. And what I wanted to do was to. I thought it was about time that I kind of went through exactly how we help agencies at Agency Mavericks. This is not a pitch, by the way. We are fine either way. It is entirely up to the agency owner whether or not they need help. But what I want to do is I just want to walk through the framework that we use to help agencies. You can probably figure this out. You'll see full transparency. And if you are listening to this episode, what I would strongly suggest you do is at some point sit down in front of your computer or your iPad and actually watch the video on YouTube. Because I am sharing my screen now, I'm going to keep this very brief. There's going to be a short episode, but this is just an update on the framework that we use for how we help agencies. And if you stay with me, I'll give you some clues also as to how you can get started for $1 to start to implement some of this in your agency. Stick around for that in a moment.
[00:01:36] Okay, so what we're looking at on the screen here now, and by the way, it's not imperative that you watch this, but it just might make a bit more sense. But I will explain it in a way that makes sense even without the visuals. What we're looking at on the screen is what we call the agency GPS model. It's a three circle Venn diagram. Gotta love a three circle Venn diagram. And GPS stands for the G stands for grow your authority. The P stands for package your ip, and the S stands for scale your impact. And they are what we call the three pillars of transformation. They're the three big chunky items that we help agencies with. The first thing we help them with is we help them grow Their authority.
[00:02:17] Because what we know is that if you are seen as an authority in your marketplace, there is essentially unlimited demand for your services. Now, an authority, by the way, doesn't mean you have to start a podcast or a YouTube channel or dance on TikTok. It just means that it needs to be super easy for people to be able to refer other people to you because they know exactly what you do, who you do it for, and the kind of results that you help your clients get. So growing your authority is the first thing that we help you with. And the way that we do that, we. In between each of these pillars of transformation, there are what I call stepping stones.
[00:02:52] By the way, we teach this framework to agencies so that you too can come up with your pillars of transformation and your stepping stones. And within the grow your authority pillar of transformation, there are three stepping stones that you need to focus on in order to get to that pillar. The first one is expanding your reach, literally just getting in front of more people. The second one is increasing your influence, that is that you're having an audience that when you tell them to take action, they do. They book in a call, they turn up to your webinar, they watch your YouTube videos, they read your blog, they do whatever.
[00:03:26] And the third stepping stone is that what we call upgrade your on ramp, which is a fancy way of saying improve your sales process. We think of the Internet as the information superhighway. I'm that old. I remember when it was called the information superhighway. And what we want to do is get traffic off the information superhighway onto your on ramp so that they can work with you. And that's called improving your sales process. So expand your reach, increase your influence, and upgrade your on ramp. And if you do all of those three things, you will grow your authority. Now, within each of those stepping stones, expand reach, increase influence, and upgrade on ramp. We have very practical projects that you can undertake in order to achieve those things. Right. I'll talk more about those in a moment.
[00:04:09] So now that you've grown your authority and there is an increased demand for your services, the next thing you want to do is package up your ip.
[00:04:18] And what that means is turning your services and your intellectual property and your knowledge and your experience and the way that you do things, turning those into products.
[00:04:26] Because if you don't package your IP into products, there's no leverage in your business model. Growing a client services business model where you're doing bespoke custom services for everyone that walks in the door is Almost an impossible business model to scale.
[00:04:41] So you need to package your IP into products that you can deliver consistently and repeatably. Repeatedly, I should say. So how do you package your ip? Well, there are two different types of products that we recommend. One is called a fire starter. Think of a fire starter as a, an audit based diagnostic kind of tool. Right. My web audit, an SEO audit, paid discovery, they're all Firestarters. They're designed to show the client that there's a fire in the building. But we don't actually put it out. We just show the client how much work needs to be done in order for them to get the results they want to get. Simon Major at Practice Edge does a great job on this. He calls this the competitor analysis or the competitor performance analysis. So he gets on a phone with, gets on the phone with the prospect, shows the prospect where the competitors are sitting in search results, and then shows the prospect how much work needs to happen for them to start to compete with those competitors. And all of a sudden he stretches the gap between where the prospect is and where they want to be and writes himself 12 months to 3 years worth of work for each client. Says, well, we can help you with all of this. What do you want to do? Very simple sales process, right? We haven't solved anything yet. We haven't done anything for the client. We've just shown them what's on fire and what needs addressing. So they're Firestarters, the next type of product we call accelerators. And all they do is they just fix one thing at a time, right? So SEO, paid ads, a conversion rate optimization lead, capture a landing page. They're all accelerators. A website is not a product. It is a suite of products. A website is a collection of accelerators that hang together to form, hopefully, a beautiful digital experience for your client. So accelerators fix one problem. They usually create more problems for a client. Your signature system is the third stepping stone within packager ip. And your signature system is the sum total of all of your firestarters and accelerators all wrapped up in a beautiful client experience. Okay. Otherwise known as a growth plan. So the three stepping stones to package your ip, ignite your fire starters, activate your accelerators and create your signature system. And now you have a productized business model that you can actually scale and you have an increased demand for what it is you do. The combination of those two things, the reality is you're just going to make more money, right? How do you scale if you don't scale? And when I say scale, I Don't care what level you get to. If 500 grand a year is scaling for you, then that's fantastic. Let's get you to 500 grand a year. If 5 million a year is scale, that's great. Let's get you to 5 million a year. There are no rules. There are. There is no comparison, there is no judgment.
[00:07:22] Scale is whatever you are comfortable with. I can tell you that once you get to $2 million a year in revenue, to get past that and to get to 4, 5, 10, you need to become a new version of yourself.
[00:07:33] So you may just get to 500 or 2 and be happy, you might get to 10 and be happy. It's entirely your journey. It's up to you. But if you don't scale at to some level, there's no freedom. If you're doing all the things, there's no freedom. In fact, if you're doing anything operational in the business, you're kind of trapped in it. And so the way to get freedom is to scale your impact through, first of all, automating your intelligence so using AI and automation tools like Zapier or Make or any other kind of workflows to automate the way that information moves around the agency and moves through the agency. So how do we get information from the client? How do we distribute that information, how do we report back to the client? Automate as much of that as you possibly can. Stepping stone number two is elevating the team.
[00:08:17] You want to make sure that your current team are making their highest possible contribution. And you want to make sure that whoever you hire in the future is an A player. And the third stepping stone to scaling your impact is to write the playbook, document all your processes so that you can literally hand over the keys to someone else and they can run the agency. And I'll give you a clue, your team are the best people to document your playbook, not you. Biggest mistake I see agency owners make is is not hiring quick enough because their processes aren't ready. Your processes will never be ready. Your team are the best people to document your processes. So stop trying to document your processes and just hand it over to your team.
[00:08:52] Now, if you package your IP and you scale your impact, you as the business owner are just going to end up with more time on your hands because your team are going to be responsible for delivering the products that you've developed, okay? To fulfill and meet the demand that your increased authority has created. Now, if you grow your authority and you scale, you have more control because you have More time, so you have more choices. And it's this combination of more money, more time, and more control that we think makes you a maverick. A lot of people in the coaching world try and sell freedom. What I know is that freedom is an expression of control, right? You can't have freedom unless you have control over your time and your choices and money and time gives you that control. And that's what makes you a maverick. Okay?
[00:09:43] So you end up with more demand for your services. You end up with more leverage because you package your services into products. And you end up with more freedom because your team and your automation and your documentation are driving the business forward. And you, as the business owner end up with more money, more time, more control. And you are a maverick. Now, this is fabulous, but how do we do this? Well, we have a checklist that we put together for our agencies.
[00:10:09] By the way, I would suggest that you think about what your three pillars of transformation are for your clients, right? And break them down into stepping stones. And then break each stepping stone down into beginner, intermediate, and advanced tactics that they can deploy.
[00:10:27] And we have come up with an 81 point checklist which I'm going to make available as a result of this episode. You can just go and download this checklist. We'll figure out how to do that. So that you can just give us your name and email address and your phone number. And I promise we're not going to, you know, spam the shit out of you. We'll just make contact and say, hey, do you want some help with this? Otherwise, grab the checklist, watch this video, watch our YouTube videos, hang out in the podcast. You can figure this out yourself. If you want to move faster and not make all the same mistakes that everyone else makes, then one on one mentoring might be right for you. If not, you can figure this out yourself. Okay, so the agency GPS checklist is the 81 checkpoints. Literally, it's a roadmap that tells you the 81 little projects that you can bite off to improve every one of these stepping stones. And it's broken down into grow your authority package your IP scale, your impact. It's three pages plus a cover page, that's a four page PDF. You literally work your way through this and tick it off. Okay, now you might be asking, well, Troy, that's fabulous, but I don't know how to do some of these things. I don't know how to develop my ideal client avatar. I don't know how to have a hundred conversations in 90 days. I'm not sure how to sell paid discovery. But that's okay because we have a solution for that as well. We recently launched a community in circle and in the community. When you join the community for $1, your first 14 days is $1 and then it's $97 a month after that. If you join the community, you also get access to what we call the agency GPS workshops. And in the community.
[00:12:04] I go live every week just before I record the podcast. I've just finished a live stream in the community, in the agency GPS workshop, and I teach one of the 81 ways that are in the checklist, right? So I'm we literally teaching one of these things every single week now. A lot of them we already have in the vault. And I'm just pulling them out and I'm polishing them up and I'm teaching them and a lot of them are brand new. We've completely updated all of our 81 checklists to make sure that we're in line with best practices and that we are giving you the best, most actionable, most practical advice so that you can get things done and move the needle and full transparency.
[00:12:43] Our expectation is that you join the community for a dollar, you hang out in here for a few months, you move the needle, you get some results, and then you put your hand up and say, hey, I think I want to come and hang out and get some one on one mentoring from you guys, because this is awesome, but I just want to move faster. And then you ascend into one of our mentoring programs. Okay, no pressure, but that's typically what happens. So I will put a link to our community, come and hang out for a dollar, start digesting some of these workshops, grab the checklist, have a look at the agency GPS model and ask yourself, how can I put together a framework? How can I put together my pillars of transformation and my stepping stones so that I can then put this in front of clients and say, hey, this is what we know the most success, our most successful clients do. So our checklist, if you look at our agency GPS checklist, know that that was developed because I talked to the most successful agencies that we've worked with over the last 10 years and said, great, these are the things that successful agencies do. And then I did research other agencies and I talked to AI. I actually built this checklist before AI existed. So 90% of it's out of my brain. I've updated it with AI recently just to make sure that we're in line with best practices and we haven't Missed anything.
[00:13:59] And this is what the most successful agencies are doing. Not all at the same time. You can't do all this at once. It's a journey. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Right? It's broken up into sprints. So you can bite one of these little projects off and get it done in a couple of weeks, but the whole journey is a three to five year journey to get your agency to the point where it's delivering amazing profit for you. And maybe you're only working, you know, three or four hours a day. I'm down to probably about 12 to 15 hours a week in this business now. And the team are doing an amazing job delivering value to the clients. It's a very profitable business.
[00:14:34] And I'm, you know, as I said, down to 12 to 15 hours a week because I'm following the same framework. I'm implementing this same framework into my business. Okay? The only difference is we're a coaching business, so we're done with you. You're an agency business, so you do agency services for clients. That's the only difference between an agency and a coaching business. So I'm following the same framework and implementing these same projects into our business.
[00:14:58] So my mission for you is this.
[00:15:01] Familiarize yourself with the agency gps. Check the agency GPS model. Right? The three circle Venn diagram. I'll put a link to the page that explains it. All right? Familiarize yourself with the checklist so that you know exactly what to do next. And then get into the community so that you can learn how to do all of these things. We also give you AI prompt packs every week to help you implement this stuff super fast so that you can just get the results that you come here for.
[00:15:26] Join the community hangout. And then at some point, if it makes sense, come and work with us one on one. If not, as I said, you can just do this yourself and implement this yourself. Either way, at least now you have a roadmap and you have a plan to grow your agency. And think about how you can develop a framework like this for your clients. Because I can tell you something. Clients will hire the agency that they think have the best plan to help them get the results that they need. Your skillset and your past results don't really matter. It's the plan to get your clients the results they want. That is what your clients will pay you for. Because they don't have a plan. If they did and it was working, they wouldn't be talking to you in the first place. All right? So ask yourself how you can develop your own framework like this so that you can help your clients get better results.
[00:16:18] All right. I told you we'd keep it short this week. I hope this has been helpful.
[00:16:23] Your call to action.
[00:16:25] Familiarize yourself with the agency GPS model, download the checklist, come and join the community. If you want to work with us one on one, have a chat with our team, and we'll see if we're a good fit. We're probably not, but if we are, we'll get you onboarded into the right program. If we're not, then you can just hang out in the community and do it yourself. All right. I hope you're having a great time, and I hope you're having as much fun as we are. I'm Troy. Dean. Let's get to work.
