Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] The thing that they enjoyed the most was looking over someone else's shoulder during one of the networking sessions and during one of the breaks is looking over someone's shoulder and seeing how other agencies do the thing. How do you manage Notion? How do you manage ClickUp? How do you fire staff? How do you use AI? Show me what you're doing with N8N. Show me what you're doing with NPCs and Claude, show me what you're doing here. That was the thing that they enjoyed the most.
[00:00:26] G' Day folks. Welcome to another episode of the Agency Hour podcast where we help digital digital agencies create abundance for themselves. Their teams, their communities, their families, their clients. It's why we get out of bed every single day. And we have been doing so for about 15 years now. And it's why we went to Bali a couple of weeks ago and ran mavcon, our in person live event for a bunch of our VIP clients. It was a fantastic event, a fantastic location. Seven swimming pools across the resort, right on the beach in Nusa Dua. The weather was spectacular. Sunshine, blue skies, palm trees, just the way we like it, amazing food. The Balinese people would have to be the nicest people on the planet. And so what I thought I'd do in today's episode was just give you a recap of the event, a bit of a rundown, so that you could kind of have a bit of a virtual experience of what it's like to come to mavcon in a beautiful, luxurious, exotic, tropical location like Bali.
[00:01:30] So first of all, I need to give a big shout out to our partners who help make these events possible. They are very expensive events to run and we could not do them without our partners, predominantly E2M who are E2M solutions, who are a white label WordPress, design and development, local SEO content, paid ads, high level, whatever you need in your agency, whatever you need help with. They have over 300 staff now spread across India and San Diego, and they're an incredible resource for helping you get some work done for your clients so that you can concentrate on growing the business and thinking strategically about what you want to do next. Of course, the new CEO of E2M Solutions is Brent Weaver, who for a while was a very friendly competitor of mine. Of course he started and ran you gurus. He sold that to Cloudways.
[00:02:22] Cloudways then got bought out by DigitalOcean, who eventually shut you gurus down, which was very unfortunate.
[00:02:28] Brent has now accepted the position as CEO at E2M and it's great to be back in contact with him and be talking about how we can work together to help digital agencies grow and become more successful. So huge shout out to the guys at E2M and I'll talk a little bit in a moment about the presentation that Vishal gave at @mavcon all about the future of SEO in the world of AI. Now the other partners, of course, WP Remote were there and Pritham gave a great presentation about recruiting in the world of AI and how to make sure that you are accepting and finding good candidates who are not cheating.
[00:03:06] And again, huge shout out to WP remote. If you're managing multiple WordPress websites, they just allow you to do it very easily and very elegantly in one dashboard. Their suite of plugins include WP Remote Wire, which is a competitor to manage wp, but way better.
[00:03:24] Blog Vault, of course, the backup solution, Malcare, which is their security plugin, and Airlift, which is their performance plugin, which will just make your WordPress website faster. So check out WP Remote. By the way, if you use WP Remote, you get all those plugins in the one system. So check out WP Remote. And our other partner of course was Convicio. If you have a WordPress website that you host and it keeps you awake at night because it's mission critical, maybe it's E commerce, maybe it's a large membership website, maybe it's in a, a funky market like, you know, legalized cannabis or some other market where some other hosts get a little bit funky about it. Go and chat with Tom and the team at Convicio and they will just take that headache off you.
[00:04:09] Now the event was MAVCON Bali 2025. It was the 21st MAVCON event that we ran. We started running these in June 2018 in San Diego. Mission Bay was the first one that we ran. Myself and Simon Kelly with the first cohort of mavericks. And so this was the 21st MAVCON event. Now some of those have been virtual online, obviously during COVID but this was the 21st Mavcon that we ran. It was at the Laguna, which is a luxury collection resort and spa in Nusa Dua in Bali owned by Marriott. It is unbelievable. It's so good. It's such an incredible resort. It's five star, it's world class service. The staff are just incredibly helpful. They just could not do enough to help.
[00:04:57] As I said, seven swimming pools spread out across the resort, right on the beach. The food was spectacular. It's expensive, very expensive. They're charging $80 for half a dozen oysters. 80 Australian dollars for half a dozen oysters. Very expensive. Over a hundred bucks for a wagyu beef steak. Right. I was not used to paying those sort of prices in Bali, but you're paying for the location, you're paying for the service. The food is unbelievable.
[00:05:21] The statistic now is that on average, one in two Australians that travel to Bali will get what's known as Bali Belly, where you basically ingest some of the local bacteria and you get very, very, very bloody sick.
[00:05:36] Well, I'm pleased to say that out of everyone who came to Bali, which was myself, Jane and Max here on the team, Jane's husband, Ty Janna from the Philippines came with us as well.
[00:05:48] She met us there. That was great for Jana and Jane to meet each other. They've been working together on and off for the last three years and they'd never met in real life. So that was nice. No one got sick. And I think out of the 31 or two clients and partners and sponsors that came, I don't think anyone got Bali belly. So that was. That was a win.
[00:06:08] So we had welcome drinks on the Sunday afternoon, which was cool. Just to kind of. It was always a bit awkward when you have welcome drinks because you're meeting people for the first time and you're a bit nervous. You know, everyone likes to be liked, everyone wants to be loved and everyone wants to fit in. And so you kind of navigating your way around, it's like, who are you? And, oh, yeah, I've seen you on Zoom and, oh, you've got legs too, and you're taller in real life, especially if your name's Elliot Dean. That guy's 6 foot 8. He's a giant lovely bloke, and he was there with his family and his wife and kids. So you're kind of getting to know everyone and it's all a bit awkward, but you have a couple of drinks and everyone kind of tends to settle in, settle in. And then we were in the room Monday morning. It's a very nervous time for me. The five minutes before we go live and open the doors is a very nervous time. We're setting up the room, making sure all the AV works and all the, you know, the screens work and the slides and the headsets and the speakers and the music and all that kind of stuff.
[00:07:01] So then the doors opened on the Monday, and the first thing we did, we kicked off 9 o' clock with a welcome. And I typically do some wins during that first sort of half an hour session. I kind of throw the microphone around the room and find out who's had some wins just to get everyone into a positive state of mind and also just to take an opportunity to have some gratitude for how far we've come and the progress we've made, rather than just beating ourselves up for how, how far we think we should have come.
[00:07:29] And so that was nice. And then a little bit of a chat about mindset and kind of how to approach the event, how to approach the conference.
[00:07:37] And then I went through the agenda and sort of laid out everything that was going to happen.
[00:07:41] And then I dived into my keynote presentation which was called the Ultimate Agency Asset. The ultimate asset for your agency. And what it is, is, is an automation experience, an automated experience set up in your agency.
[00:07:56] So, and I call it from click to close. What it essentially is, is all the automations and content and case studies and videos and emails and text messages and all the triggers and workflows that you need to implement Google's 7114 strategy into your agency. Now I'm not going to go on too much about this, but essentially you can research this and look it up yourself. Google published some research a few years ago. Now, I don't know when it was, but it was quite a while ago. And they coined this phrase called the zero moment of truth. And essentially what happens is when you are researching to buy something high ticket, when I say high ticket, I mean it requires you to have a phone conversation with someone or to go and meet someone in person to have a conversation. I'm not talking about E commerce. I'm not talking about buying an iPhone cover or a keep cup or, or even a $400 pair of shoes. I mean, you just do that on E Commerce. You just put your credit card details in. The thing gets delivered to your house, right? That's not what we're talking about, a high ticket purchase. So it could be B2C, right? Business to consumer. My examples are I had laser eye surgery almost two years ago and that cost me $6,000. And I also spent about $25,000 on solar panels on the roof of our house and a battery on the side of the house. They are high ticket B2C purchases, right? Business to consumer. If you buy a car that's a high ticket B2C. You buy a house that's a very high ticket B2C purchase. B2B would be if you hire an agency or you hire a consultant or you hire us to help you grow your agency or you hire A book publisher to help you write a book and publish a book and promote it. Right. Or you hire an accountant or a lawyer. They are B2B hook high ticket transactions. So if you're buying something high ticket that requires you to have a conversation with someone, then typically what Google have determined is that the consumer needs on average seven hours of engagement across 11 touch points and four different locations to build enough trust to get the consumer to make a decision to buy.
[00:10:08] Now, 711 4, let's just break this down. Seven hours of engagement, you're listening to this podcast now. Probably go for 20 minutes or half an hour or whatever. That's engagement in our process, in our brand.
[00:10:19] If you've listened to three or four episodes of our podcast, then you're up to three or four hours of engagement. Okay, the platform, maybe you listen to this on Spotify, that's one location. Maybe you listen to it. Maybe you then go to our website and you opt in for one of our free resources. That's a second location. Maybe then we send you an email. That's a third location. If you come to a live event, that's a fourth location. If you go to a clinic to have your eyes tested for suitability for laser eye surgery, that's another location.
[00:10:47] If the solar installers come out to your house and have a look and see if you qualify for their solar system, that's another location. So if you're online, locations could be YouTube, website, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, email, SMS, phone call. They're all different locations, right? So Google have said seven hours of engagement across 11 touch points and four different locations to take someone from the zero moment of truth, which is when they start researching the thing to the moment they buy. And we actually have a 7114 snapshot pre built in high level that we give all of our clients and we train them and teach them how to set that up and the assets and the content that they need to get that 7114 dialed in. So from the moment someone clicks on a link on an ad on social media, on, you know, Google search Results or a LinkedIn post or whatever, from the moment they click to the moment they close, everything else is automated. And that's why I call it the ultimate agency asset. So I did a deep dive around that in my, in my keynote. Then we had a break, had some coffee, tea, some amazing food. Then Max Jeffcott did a presentation on lights, camera, clients. He talked about some frameworks and helped people understand how to essentially get over themselves and just start producing video content. Because what we know is that the fastest way to get better clients is to produce video content and publish it on the Internet. Right?
[00:12:14] And I think for me, if you've never done this before and you're selling B2B, if you're selling marketing services to other businesses, what I would do is I would make a video about something. You know, typically you would do like a before and after. Hey, here's a client we're working with. Here was the problem they had. Here's what we did to fix it. Do a deep dive, do a screen share. Here's how we used Gravity Forms to fix this problem and just publish it on LinkedIn. That's what I would do. If I had to choose two platforms, I'd choose LinkedIn and YouTube. If I'm B2B. If I'm B2C, I'd choose Facebook, slash, Instagram and YouTube. Right? That's what I would do. And I would do that every week. This is what we do. We do this every week. We publish this on YouTube and Spotify. We're not doing much on LinkedIn at the moment. We're doing a lot on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube.
[00:13:05] So Max did a presentation there to give everyone the frameworks they need to get unstuck and keep moving. Then Vishal from E2M did a presentation called how to Rank in Large Language Models, AI Overviews and Chatbots.
[00:13:18] So how to Rank in Large Language Models, AI Overviews and Chatbots. This is the new SEO playbook.
[00:13:25] And what we're noticing now is that in fact, one of the attendees at mavcon, Sid from Fiji, is not a client, but he found us because he was already going to Bali and he typed into ChatGPT, Hey, I'm going to Bali on these dates. Is there a conference happening in Bali to help digital agency owners? And ChatGPT recommended Mavcon. And so he bought a ticket and came to Mavcon. He's not a client, but he came. He bought a ticket and came to mavcon. So now we haven't even. We haven't even optimized our pages or website for large language models. Right? There is a. There is an LLMs txt file that you can put on your website to basically tell large language models how to navigate your website. Similar to the robots TXT file that you put on your website for search engines, there's an LLMs TXT file which is becoming the standard. I don't even think we've done that. We have a landing page built in, high level and it came up in the chat GPT results and it delivered us a client to Avcom which was amazing. So, and we're seeing this more and more when we deal with clients that in their Google Analytics, their referrers, that ChatGPT is coming up more and more and other AI large language models are coming up more and more in their referral results.
[00:14:41] Then we had lunch. Then I did a presentation called how to Talk to Other Humans, where I basically taught the content framework, the why what how now content framework. And we did a bit of a content calendar workshop. So we basically helped people plan the content that they're going to use in their 7, 11, 4 sequence. So it all kind of started to fit together. Then we had a content workshop where they all worked together to plan some of that content and actually get some stuff done. Then we had afternoon tea. And then Thomas Amos from the uk, who had a very eventful journey to get from London to Bali, he was going via Dubai and on his way from London to Dubai, he's half asleep in his seat and the plane did a dramatic left hand turn and he kind of woke up and looked at the map in the seat in front of him and had a look at the screen and the plane's doing circles and going everywhere. And then the pilot comes on the intercom and says, excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, sorry for the disruption here, but we're trying to find an airport to land at. We need to make an emergency landing in an airport because there are missiles being delivered from Israel to Iran and it's in our flight path, so we need to get out of the bloody way so a missile doesn't go through the plane. And they landed in Istanbul, Spent seven hours in the plane on the tarmac at Istanbul airport. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, seven hours on a plane, on the tarmac at Istanbul airport. Eventually got on another plane, flew to Dubai and then eventually landed in Bali. And the poor guy had been awake for about 42 hours.
[00:16:12] He rang me on WhatsApp when he arrived and he could barely speak.
[00:16:16] And fortunately we were just wrapping up dinner, he came down, had a drink with us and took him a while to decompress. I think it was a pretty hairy journey. So he got up and did a presentation about growth plans and he shared his incredibly detailed notion client portal template that he's built to manage.
[00:16:34] I think he said, I, I think I'm right. I think he said they have about 150 clients on growth plans and he's managing it all in these Notion Dashboards, these custom notion dashboards that he's sharing with our clients. So just to give you a bit of a sneak peek, if you're a client of ours, these are the kinds of things that we give you for your agency. Notion Dashboards, ClickUp workflows, click up Kanban boards, high level snapshots, all the assets, all the digital assets you need to take your agency to the next level. Then at 4 o' clock we did a bit of question time, closing session. Then we, we broke up and had some free time. Monday night, I think I stayed in my room and got some room service decompressed, kind of stayed away from everyone. Tuesday we had a welcome. I just kind of recapped what happened day one and we did some highlights. I did a little bit of an agenda for day two and then there was some other stuff here I was supposed to do, which I did not do. I don't know why that's there, but anyway, I didn't do that. Then I introduced, I was supposed to talk about our direct to offer and retargeting campaigns, our omnipresent director offer and retargeting campaigns on Facebook. I did not talk about that at all. I think we just shared big aha moments and insights from day one. So this is what happens. The agenda is the agenda, but you gotta be flexible because things happen on the day that you just need to adapt.
[00:18:02] So then the first actual presentation on Tuesday was from Tim Kelsey, our coach, who's based in Thailand, manages an agency of about a hundred staff called Pronto Marketing. And he did a presentation called the Beginning and Ending of the Employee Life Cycle. We had a big conversation about how to fire staff and he gave a great insight. He said if you're going to meet with someone to fire them, whether it's on Zoom or in person, when they come into the meeting in the office or on Zoom, don't build rapport with them at all. Just get it out of the way straight away and say, hey, thanks for joining. Look, sorry, bad news, but today's your last day at Pronto Marketing. And then you can throw up or do whatever you need to do with the emotional shit that's going on in your body. They might have a cry, in which case you just say, hey, look, why don't we just turn our cameras off for a few minutes and I'll be back in 10 minutes and then we can continue the conversation. And the big lesson here was if you fire someone and they have an emotional response to it, it has got nothing to do with you. It is not your fault and it is not your responsibility to fix it. They are having an emotional response because they are. They have been triggered and rightly so. They have been triggered. But really what is happening is they trying to deal with some. And I'm sorry to get woo woo here on you, but they are trying to deal with some unprocessed trauma in their body from shit that's happened to them in their life. And you firing them has just triggered that emotion in them.
[00:19:27] And it's not your fault and it's not your responsibility to fix it. And you don't need to feel guilty about it. Okay, then we had a break. We had coffee, tea, networking. And then Pratham from WP Remote gave a presentation about hiring in the age of AI and talked about how to get applicants to send resumes. And we've been doing this for a while. Is that you put some kind of Easter egg in the instructions that AI, that they don't feed AI. Right. And so what we do is we have a detailed form that people need to fill in on our. We have a website called careers.agencymavericks.com I think, and you have to fill in a form on that website to apply.
[00:20:05] And in the form it says, or in the, sorry, in the job ad it says in the field that says additional information, put the words Top Gun.
[00:20:17] And we, the last time we advertised for a role, I think we had, I don't know, 50 or 60 applicants. And I think five of them put Top Gun in that field. So the rest of them are just eliminated completely because they don't follow instructions.
[00:20:32] And so we talked a lot about that and we also talked about how to ask questions that AI won't be able to answer and also how to answer how to ask questions in an interview situation that AI won't be able to answer because we know that everyone's using AI to pimp out their applications and write resumes. Then we had another presentation from Tim called Selling Smart, Buying Strong, Navigating Agency Acquisitions. And we had a deep dive conversation about how you can grow your agency by acquiring other smaller agencies that are currently being run by people who are cooked and burnt out and want out and want to get out of the agency space, but don't know what to do with the 20, 40, 50, 70, 100 clients that they've got on hosting or small care plans. Right.
[00:21:13] By the way, if that's you, if you have an agency and you have some recurring revenue through hosting or care plans, and you just are done. And you want to go and do something else, and you want to get rid of it, but you're not sure what to do with your clients.
[00:21:26] Let's have a conversation, because I have two agencies now that are in the acquisition space. Adam Silverman at Muletown and Tim Kelsey at Pronto Marketing. So shoot me an email.
[00:21:37] I'm not going to give you my actual email address. Well, it's not that hard to figure out. It's Troy agencymavericks.com but probably shoot an email to support agencymavericks.com and it won't get lost. So email supportagencymavericks.com and let us know that you've got an agency that you want to sell, and I'll get you connected with either Tim or Adam.
[00:21:56] All right. Then we had lunch. Then we did a brains trust session where everybody works together on their tables to help them solve the biggest problem they had. So there were five people, I think, or six people per. No, there were five people per table.
[00:22:12] Six tables. So we had 30 attendees. 30.
[00:22:16] What's the word I'm looking for? 30 participants in the brains trust. And everyone had 10 minutes each on the table. And so you had. This is the way brains trust works. You have two minutes to describe the biggest challenge you're having at the moment. Then everyone else on the table has. And you put a timer on. On the. On the iPhone. You go, timer, bang. Two minutes, right? What's the problem you got? And they go, well, here's the problem. And they tell you their life story. Timer goes off after two minutes, and you go, great. Now everyone else has got two minutes to ask clarifying questions. What about this? Have you tried this? Have we already done that? What's going on with him? Is he really that bad? Blah, blah, blah. What's legally happening? Blah, blah, Right? Who's your accountant? Then you've got two minutes to head down, write down as many ideas as you can, quantity over quality. Then you got two minutes to share those ideas with the person in the hot seat. Then you've got two minutes to vote on what you think is the best idea. And everyone gets a time in the hot seat. 10 minutes in the hot seat. So 50 minutes, everyone gets an opportunity, and then everyone leaves with a bunch of ideas on what they should do. It's a great format. Then we did some awards. We gave out some awards to our fastest moving, fastest growing, most resilient mavericks. You're gonna ask me who won them. Braden Davy won an Award. Mara Malani from Marameo Design won an award for Mindset. Elliot Dean won an award.
[00:23:38] And it was one other person. Oh. Josh Moore from New Zealand won an award. So they were the four award winners. I can't believe I remember them. And they got physical trophies. On the day, we took some photos. It was fantastic. Then we had afternoon tea and then we came back into the room and we were all completely cooked. And we were supposed to do a flight planning session, which we cut very short. I gave people some final thoughts. We had a group photo taken. Then we went for an amazing VIP dinner on the lawn. Where this was the Tuesday night. On the Sunday night, there was a wedding on the lawn. And what the staff at the Laguna Resort said to us, hey, would you like us to set that up like we did for the wedding, for your VIP dinner on the Tuesday night, if the weather is good. And we said, yes, please. And the weather was amazing, by the way. So we had this beautiful outdoor VIP dinner on the lawn near the beach. It was just incredible.
[00:24:31] And mentally, I think I'm still there.
[00:24:35] And then that was it. And then Wednesday, we just kind of hung out by the pool and people did their own thing and, you know, we worked and chipped away at stuff. It was amazing. So that's what it looks like again. I just. I mean, I cannot tell you how amazing Bali is in June. Every single day I woke up and I got in the pool and went for a swim.
[00:24:56] It was 24, 24, 25, 26 degrees every day. Blue skies, palm trees, sunshine, beautiful pool, beautiful people everywhere, beautiful food, amazing staff.
[00:25:08] Absolute heaven on earth.
[00:25:11] So we are going to put tickets on sale very soon for Mavcon Bali next year, 2026. It will sell out. And so if you want a ticket, please keep your eyes on your inbox and keep your eyes on our socials and on our website. I think it's go.agencymavericks.com Mavcon is the landing page. When tickets go on sale. Make sure you buy one and come and hang out this next year. All right? I hope this has been helpful now. So the biggest takeaway, by the way, the biggest takeaway from everyone there was, the thing that they enjoyed the most, was looking over someone else's shoulder during one of the networking sessions and during one of the breaks is looking over someone's shoulder and seeing how other agencies do the thing. How do you manage notion? How do you manage ClickUp? How do you fire staff? How do you use AI? Show me what you're doing with N8N. Show me what you're doing with, you know, NPCs and Claude. Show me what you're doing here. That was the thing that they enjoyed the most. As much as I would like to say, hey, the thing they enjoyed the most was me getting up on stage and presenting how much of a clever pants I am. No, turns out nobody really cares what they. Well, I mean, they did like that, but what they enjoyed the most was hanging out with each other, looking over each other's shoulders and sharing what was working and what wasn't.
[00:26:30] So I hope this has been helpful for you. I hope it inspires you to get out and meet other agency owners and go to an event, whether it's mavcon or another event.
[00:26:39] Do that. Get out of the building and go and hang out with other agency owners and get inspired. And I look forward to seeing you again next week on the Agency Hour. Until then, I'm Troy Dean. Let's get to work.
