[00:00:00] There are many people who we have had come through our program that have been through Ugurus and vice versa. And I know that he has impacted lots and lots and lots of agencies around the world. So I can only imagine that it's a sad day for him to see all of the work that he put into yougurus just being shut down and not sold off and not continued.
[00:00:21] Welcome to the Agency Hour podcast where we help digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, themselves, their teams and their communities. Now, in this episode, we're going to do things a little bit different. I want to talk directly to those of you who might be affected and feeling a little bit lost after DigitalOcean have recently decided to shut down. You gurus, if you don't know, you Gurus started out a long time ago, not long after I started WP Elevation to help WordPress consultants elevate.
[00:00:56] Brent Weaver started a thing called BC Gurus, which stood for Business Catalyst Gurus. Business Catalyst was a technology platform that was made here in Australia. Actually it was a content management system and e commerce engine. Fun fact. One of the first projects that I did in the agency that really put us on the map was the digital strategy for a 16 year old girl called Jessica Watson who sailed around the world in a pink yacht on her own, unassisted, uninterrupted, and I believe she might have broken a world record or anyway, it was a massive achievement and we managed her digital strategy while she was at sea, which included her website, which was built on Business Catalyst. It was a very clunky program, but years ahead of its time. It was, you know, think WordPress and a very basic version of Shopify all built into one. And Brent was in the Business Catalyst world. He had an agency based out of Colorado that was building Business Catalyst websites for clients. And at the round about the same time we didn't know each other, but around about the same time we discovered that we had a passion for helping other agencies. And so I started WP Elevation. He started BC Gurus which became Ugurus. Adobe bought the Business Catalyst platform and then, you know, wrote it into the ground and it doesn't exist anymore. And Brent pivoted and became you gurus. And for a long time you gurus and us were seen as competitors. In fact, there are quite a few Facebook groups where you will find posts where someone says, hey, can someone give me a comparison between you gurus and agency mavericks? Of course, we used to be called WP Elevation and we changed our name to agency Mavericks in 2021. So the first thing I want to do here is acknowledge that Brent has done an enormous amount of work helping freelancers and agencies grow. The other person that I would put in that bucket is Brennan Dunn from W Freelancing. When I first started out, I had many, many Skype calls and zoom calls with Brent and Brennan because we were all doing a very similar thing, but in slightly different target audiences. So Brent sold you gurus to DigitalOcean in, I think, 2021, maybe 2022, perhaps around about that time.
[00:03:17] I don't know for how much it's not disclosed. He was then working at Digital Ocean and or Cloudways at the time. Then it got bought by Digital Ocean and so he sold you goos to Cloudways. DigitalOcean acquired Cloudways. Cloudways. And he was working at DigitalOcean still kind of mentoring and, you know, helping out at Eucurus. And he did an enormous amount of work. He wrote a book called Get Rich in the Deep End, I think it is. And there are many people who we have had come through our program that have been through you gurus and vice versa. And I know that he has impacted lots and lots and lots of agencies around the world. So I can only imagine that it's a sad day for him to see all of the work that he put into you gurus just being shut down and not sold off and not continued. And so it is. I mean, I can't imagine how that would feel for me. And I've reached out to Brent and offered my condolences. And I think he's moved on and he's doing other things now, and I don't really know where his head's at or how this has impacted him. But hey, Brent, if you're listening to this, I'll say it again publicly. You've been a big inspiration and a healthy competitor over the years, and I wish you all the best in whatever you do next because you've done some amazing work in this space and in fact, you know, helped us really open some doors. I think we helped open some doors for him as well. So the fact that both of us were here validated the idea that an agency coaching program was a thing. Right. If it was just one person doing this, and you got to remember, we started this back in, you know, 2013 really was the birth of WP elevation, and it was a long time ago. Now, of course, there are agency coaching programs on every street corner, and with all due respect, I'm probably old enough to be most of their dad and Brent is too. Brent and I've been around a long time. We really were the pioneers in this space. And so I want to thank Brent for all the work he's done over the years. And also I want to acknowledge that this is a very difficult transition for everyone who worked at Ugurus and for all the agencies who were being served by you gurus in some way, shape or form. I think this is a terrible, terrible decision by DigitalOcean. I think it's been handled very poorly. They've given everyone a month to kind of log in and take all their stuff and download it all. I think it's appalling. I think it's a horrible way to treat their agencies. And, you know, I can't imagine what it must be like for those agencies to now be feeling lost and feeling completely abandoned by digital ocean and cloudways. So my heart goes out to them. However, I would be doing you a disservice if I didn't take this opportunity to let you know that there is a home that you can come to. Of course, and it's here at Agency Mavericks. So if you're feeling a little bit lost. Before I dive in into how we can help and what we do exactly, I just want to quickly share a little bit about who we are. As I said, we've been around for, I don't know, since. Well, I mean, I started this really in 2010. The current format of the business was I started in 2010 with a WordPress plugin and a proposal template. That's what we were doing back then, helping WordPress freelancers and agencies grow. We then started an online course business in 2013. We then pivoted to one on one coaching in 2018, or actually group coaching in 2018, and then one on one coaching in about 2020. During COVID we've helped over 4,500 agencies grow their revenue grow their teams grow their profit. And we are 100% independently owned by me. I'm the 100% shareholder and owner of this company, which means we are here for the long haul. Now, I just want to talk a little bit about why we've transitioned over the years from different business models. And I've seen Brent do similar things at Ugurus. We started out, as I said, as a WordPress plugin called Video User Manuals. We had a web design proposal template that we were giving away that was very successful that things been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. In fact, if you sign up for any of the proposal template or the proposal software on the market, better proposals proposify any of those platforms. They have our proposal template baked in because I did deals with them all and licensed it to them and in some cases just gave it to them as part of a joint venture. So the proposal template did wonders for our business. Then in about 2013, I was just getting asked lots of questions by small agency owners about, you know, how to price, how to manage client relationships, how to manage their team, how to manage their money, all sorts of questions, how to handle change requests, how to grow recurring revenue, how to roll out care plans. And so I started, I built a course called the Blueprint, which was done very quickly in a very short space of time. I literally was just answering questions over email and I thought I should just shoot videos to answer these questions and turn into a course. This is back in 2013. There weren't many online courses available back then, right? It was, it was a fairly new industry and I learned from people like Ryan Dice and Amy Porterfield and Pat Flynn and John Lee Dumas, and I was following all those guys and listening and consuming these podcasts and these, this content. And what I was doing was synthesizing what I was learning into my business model and then also leveraging the Internet so that I could teach hundreds and thousands of WordPress agencies at the same time rather than answering questions one on one. I had my first child in 2017. I came back to the business from parental leave and I didn't like what I saw.
[00:08:51] We had a very highly automated business that we had no relationship with our customers. Our customers were buying a course, they were dropping into a $97 a month membership program. And then we never spoke to them. We would leave comments in a Facebook group, we would answer them, we would go live every couple of weeks, but we never actually spoke to our customers. And I was bored at that point and I wanted to talk to customers. So I started picking up the phone and calling our long term most successful customers that had been in the program. And they all said, dude, we just want more. Like, and at $97 a month or whatever it was, you can't give us more. So we're probably going to go and get more elsewhere. And so I started a coaching program called mavericks club in 2018, predominantly with Simon Kelly, who really helped me get that thing off the ground. And we then in 2020, when the world went into lockdown during COVID we realized that the right thing to do was actually to roll out one on one coaching. And that's where we are now. So Where I think we are different from a lot of other business coaching programs on the market is we only work with digital agency owners, similarly to you gurus, who unfortunately now no longer exist. We're not trying to be everything to everyone. We focus on only serving digital agency owners and that allows us to develop deep expertise and create specific frameworks that work for digital agencies. The most successful, one of the most successful frameworks that we have created created is our paid discovery method program that I created a long time ago and just never packaged up and made it public. I was just teaching our, our private clients that's been available for sale for years on our website and we have enough social proof to sink the Titanic of agencies that have adopted paid discovery. And the reason that we're able to create frameworks like this is because we're not helping dentists, we're not helping physios, we're not helping chiropractors and therapists and you know, spiritual life coaches and you know, and all due respect to people who are helping those audience, we're not. We just help digital agency owners which allows us to go deep and really understand the problems that digital agency owners have and help them fix those problems.
[00:10:57] So speaking of frameworks, I want to just give you a high level overview of what we do and how we can help so that if you find yourself in a situation where you are feeling a bit lost and or you know, an agency that is feeling a bit abandoned because you gurus has disappeared off the face of the planet, then you can recommend them to us and at least you know what we do and how we help. So we have a model called the Agency GPS model. And the reason it's called GPS is two reasons. One, I love an acronym, right? GPS stands for grow, Package, scale. And also I've always said, I've been saying this for a long time, that growing a business is a little bit like flying a plane. There's no accident that a lot of our terminology is aviation has an aviation slant on it, right? We're called Mavericks Club, we talk a lot about aviation. We have different levels within our program. Cadet pilot, top gun. And that's because I think growing a business is like flying a plane. If you know what the buttons do, it's lots of fun. But if you don't know what those buttons do, it is freaking terrifying, right? So we, I designed this agency GPS model which is a three circle venn diagram. Got to have a three circle venn diagram. And it is designed to help keep you on track and let you know what you should do next. It's built on three core pillars of transformation. I'm just going to give you a high level overview of each of them. The G is grow your authority. And so the first pillar is all about knowing, is all about putting your, your flag in the sand and saying this is what we do and this is who we do it for. So let's just be real for a second. Referrals are great until they dry up. And I have worked with, as I said, Over 4,500 agencies everywhere from agencies who are agency owners who are still driving for Uber, trying to start their side hustle, right up to multiple seven figure a year agencies. And in every case I have seen referrals either non existent or dry up at some point. And an agency owner goes into panic because they have no control over their deal flow, they have no idea where their leads come from and you cannot generate referrals at will. So with Grow youw Authority we help you do three things. One is expand your reach by literally getting in front of more people, building a consistent audience, putting some very basic things in place in your agency that continue to bring in leads every single day. Just think strategic content that is designed to help your target audience and you know, an occasional free resource to get them to opt in. That's really what it is in a nutshell. The second thing we do is help you increase your influence so that you're seen as the go to expert. You don't want to just be seen as another digital agency, web design agency, SEO agency, media buyer, ad manager. Because you're a commodity and it's a race to the bottom, you'll be competing on price. If you are seen as the person that helps X achieve Y using Z, which is, you know, I'll talk about in a moment, which is your like proprietary unique mechanism, then you are instantly the go to expert. And it becomes easier actually for people to refer to you because they know what you do. We have an agency here in Melbourne who essentially does email marketing for E Commerce stores, right? They use Klaviyo on Shopify and they do flow marketing for E Commerce store owners. If I have a dentist come to me says oh, I need a lead gen agency or a conversion rate optimization agency. I don't refer them to Simon at Flowstate because he doesn't do that. He does email marketing for E Com, right? We have another agency in South Australia who does large Shopify builds and he calls him an online store manager. He puts one of his staff in the shopify store to manage the Shopify store. Right. Well, again, if I have a client that comes to me and says I need a brochure website built on WordPress to capture leads for my physio practice, I'm not going to refer them over to Sean. I'm going to refer E Comm stores to Sean because I know what they do. They're not a generic agency. Okay. Increasing your influence, by the way, is very simple. It's just keeping in touch with your existing audience and creating very specific content to help them. The third thing we do with your authority piece is help you upgrade your sales process so that your reach and your influence translates into paying clients in a systematic, predictable way that doesn't rely on you, the agency owner being the one, you know, doing the razzle dazzle or your charisma or your personal network making it rain. This is the hardest thing, by the way, to do in the business is to remove yourself as the agency owner from the sales function.
[00:15:17] So that's grow your authority. That's the G of gps. The P stands for package your ip. And this second pillar focuses on packaging your intellectual property. And this is crucial because without it, you're stuck in the custom services trap. Now I'll talk a little bit about the.
[00:15:33] A client services business is the hardest type of business to scale because you end up just needing more people to do more bespoke services for more clients. And I can tell you now, I've mentored agencies that have larger teams and they feel like a kindergarten teacher or a daycare center. You're just managing lots of people with lots of needs because you have no leverage in your service delivery. It's all custom. So what you want to do is package that up into products that any team member can deliver. By the way. I'll just go back to grow your authority for a moment. You don't have to do. You don't have to do any of this, by the way, right? You could be listening to this going well, this all sounds like a bunch of horseshit. And I don't want to do any of this. And you don't have to. I'm just going to highlight some of the risks if you don't. If you don't grow your authority in an intentional way. As I said, eventually the referrals will dry up and the demand for what it is you do will decrease and then you'll be in a state of panic. And finding clients in a state of panic is always the worst time to try and do it because you'll take on the wrong clients, you discount, you'll negotiate on process and you'll end up hating your life. So just wanted to kind of put an underline around that. Okay, let's come back to package your IP for a second. The three things we teach you how to do here are create what we call fire starters. And fire starters are diagnostic products. Think of a web audit, an SEO audit, even paid discovery itself is a diagnostic product because what it does is it highlights to the client what's broken and what needs fixing and the work that needs to be done. But it doesn't actually fix anything. Okay. It's literally just saying, hey, there's a fire in the corner, someone needs to do something about that. That's what we call them Firestarters. The second thing we do is, is help you turn your services into what we call accelerators. And they are individual products. Think of them as Lego blocks that you can pull out of the bucket and install in your client's business when they need it. The obvious one is if you're working with a client who's got a website and they're not doing any lead capture, the obvious one is installing a lead capture blueprint into their into their business, which is a dedicated landing page, a great offer, a free resource, a pop up form, a connection to their CRM, some follow up emails, and a call to action. Right? That's a lead capture blueprint. You could install a webinar blueprint, you could install a recruitment blueprint. If you're working with professional service companies who are always trying to find better staff, you could install whatever type of product or blueprint you have into that client's business. And once you've done it, once you've then got the documentation and the tech stack and the know how to do it for any client in the future. Again, this is why it pays to focus on a niche and not be a general workshop.
[00:18:08] The third thing we help you do, once you've got your Firestarters dialled in and you've got your services packaged up into accelerators or products, the third thing we do is we help you develop that into a unique signature system.
[00:18:19] And your signature system is the sum total of everything you do wrapped up in your client experience. The most practical example of this is a growth plan. So instead of, you know, the old model is you have a free call with a client, they pick your brain, you give them some ideas for free, you then write a proposal, you play follow up for three years, they eventually become a client, you convert it maybe 30% because you're trying to sell them a project worth 15 grand. And then after that you're trying to put them on a $200 a month care plan and maybe a thousand dollar a month SEO plan. Right? It's a terrible model, doesn't work, takes too long because you're asking for too much upfront. The new model is paid Discovery. Very low ticket, might be twelve hundred dollars, might be three grand, might be five grand depending on the client and depending on how much work you're doing. Then you sell them a growth plan. And a growth plan is a recurring revenue product. And during that growth plan, you might rebuild their website, you might do an SEO audit, you might repackage their brand, you might help them with a recruitment funnel. You do whatever you need to to help them achieve their goals. And I'll give you just some hard numbers here. Agencies we work with that sell paid discovery are then converting paid discovery clients into growth plans at a conversion rate, an average conversion rate of 85%. I guarantee if you're listening to this episode, you're not converting your proposals at 85%. So we just to recap, packaging your IP, we help you create your Firestarter products, which are diagnostic audit based products. We help turn your usual services into accelerators and we help develop that whole thing into a unique signature system. And again, you don't have to do any of this, but if you don't, you'll be stuck in the client services business which is not scalable and eventually you'll burn out. The third thing we do is help you scale your impact and your revenue and your client base and your profit. And the way we do that is three steps here really. One is automation. So how much can you automate in the business without sacrificing quality? And we have systems and processes to help you identify what needs to be automated and then how to go about doing that. The second part, and this is probably one of the most valuable things that we work with agencies on, is how to elevate your team. The biggest mistake I see agency owners make is not hiring quick enough because they think their processes aren't ready. I can't hire yet because my processes aren't ready. I hear this on the day, on a daily basis. The reality is your processes will never be ready to hire someone. If your processes were ready, you would have already hired someone. You are not the best person to write your processes. Your team members are the best person, are the best people to write your processes because they're the ones doing the job every day. So hire people who know what they're doing. Don't hire beginners and train them. We're not a community college here. We're a business. We are a for profit business. Right? We are here to make profit because profit allows us to reinvest back into the business and our team and create better products and services for our clients. So don't be ashamed about making profit. There's, you know, if you've got hangups with that, go and see a mindset money mindset therapist and get over that. There's no nothing wrong with making profit. In fact, you owe it to yourself and your clients and your family and your team and everyone around you to run a profitable business. Because if you run out of profit and you run out of money, you're no good to anyone. Okay? So let's just, you know, park that and put an underline and accept that as the truth, because it is. So elevate your team. Hire good people who know what they're doing and then get them to write the processes for you. And the third part of scaling your impact is to create the playbooks that allow you to step away from the agency and have your team deliver value to your clients without you. And that will come from your team writing those processes and doing that work on the playbook for you. Again, you don't have to do any of this, but if you don't, you will be stuck on the treadmill doing everything for everyone, all of the time, being the chief everything officer, and you will burn out. Or like many agency owners I know you just will never be able to take a holiday because you only get paid when you're smashing the keyboard and that's not a fun place to be. Now I know this might sound overwhelming, but here's the beauty I think of what we do is you don't have to do this all at once, right? We start with a very simple scorecard assessment that you can
[email protected] and this gives you a personalized roadmap showing you exactly what to focus on next. Our job here is to play concierge, help you avoid distraction and provide one on one mentoring so that you know exactly what to do next, so that you can move the needle and get closer to your goals every single week. One thing I know that many you gurus members valued was the amazing community that they had. And I want you to know that we have an incredibly active and supportive community of digital agency owners. There are no dog trainers here. There are no dentists or physios. They are agency owners. These are people who are in the trenches, just like you, sharing what's working and what isn't. And our commitment to you as a digital agency owner is that we provide one on one mentoring. We give you access to over a decade worth of proven playbooks. We have regular calls with your client success manager and your coaches and other agency owners, a very supportive community of peers to make sure that you basically can't fail. The only way that you fail with us is if you give us money and then disappear. That's the only way you can fail. We also guarantee your investment with us, so anything you invest with us is guaranteed. If you are ready to take the next step, here's what I want you to do. Go to gameplan.agencymavericks.com and take the scorecard assessment. Book a call with our team to discuss the results of that scorecard so that we can tell you exactly what to do next. And we'll help determine if we're the right fit for your agency. And I can tell you now, most of the time we're not. So it's not a hard sales call. Most of the time, like the majority of people we talk to are not right for us. We will happily and politely turn you away and point you in the right direction if we're not a good fit. Now, I know transitions can be tough, but they can also be opportunities. We've helped thousands of agency owners grow their business and we'd be honoured to help you too. So remember, you don't have to figure this one out alone. We've got the frameworks, we've got the community and the support to help you take your agency to the next level. If you're ready to explore what's next for your agency, head over to gameplan.agencymavericks.com or click the link in the show notes to book a call with our team.
[00:24:30] All right, that's it for this week's episode. Thanks for listening. I look forward to potentially working with you inside Agency Mavericks. I'm Troy Dean and remember, the riches are in the niches.
