Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You're so busy executing your project and client deliveries that there's not enough time that goes into marketing or branding. If you're focusing on the delivery, you didn't get enough leads or enough sales. Once the delivery ends, you have this ups and down cycles, right? I think getting out of those cycles, that's where we see a lot of agencies stuck at.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Welcome to the agency hour podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities.
By Ronick Patel, WordPress and white label development specialist and in this episode, we explore the acquisition of unlimited WP by e two m using white label partners to deliver your WordPress websites and care plans and how Ronick and his team are using AI for digital agencies and a whole lot more. If you're growing your agency, looking to scale, or you have the intention of selling your agency, you will want to hear this episode. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the agency our podcast, Ronick Patel from Unlimited WP. Hi, Ronick. How are you?
[00:01:09] Speaker A: I'm doing good, Trey. How are you?
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Thank you so much for being here, man. I'm very good. I just want to let people know, it's 05:00 a.m. where you are right now in India. And you've been doing this all night. You've been podcasting, right? Throughout the night. And so I just want to appreciate you for being up at this crazy time so that you can come on the podcast here and share your story with our audience. I really appreciate you doing this.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Thank you. No worries.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Now, the big news is that unlimited WP was recently acquired by e two m. Dude, congratulations. How did that come about?
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Thank you. I think you know e two m guys for quite some time now.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: Very well. They've been a. They've been a big supporter of ours. They were the exclusive sponsor of the podcast last year. They are sponsoring mavcon again in October in San Diego. Got a great relationship with minish. He came out to Australia last year to our event. Have a great relationship with minish. And the guys at e two m, big fans of theirs. And all the news come through that they acquired unlimited WP. Curious how that came about. And what was the motivation for e two m to acquire unlimited WP?
[00:02:17] Speaker A: I think that's kind of a big subject, right? Usually these acquisitions aren't that straightforward. There's a lot of history that comes before this, and certainly in our case, you know, that was the case. It started years ago.
My philosophy has always been that you build a business to sell, right. Regardless, one day you may decide not to sell it, but the day to day, your operations, your systems, processes, how just basically how you're building your agency, uh, it is for sale. So that was something always been, uh, back of my mind, uh, now when to do it, the timing of it, how much, in what conditions and what terms. All of those are dependable, right. If those all things just happen to match, uh, at some point, then it's all gays. And for us, uh, it happened, uh, a couple of months ago.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: It seems to me like it's a strategic acquisition by, uh, e two m just to break this down. For some people, there's three types of buyers. Usually that you can look for is an owner operator, someone whos going to come and buy your business and then operate it themselves, someone a private equity group. So in other words, someone whos got a lot of money and they just want to invest that money into a business thats profitable. And in that case, you as the founder or owner need to kind of hang around and continue to manage it.
And a strategic acquisition which is another company that has potentially massive upside from buying your company. So it feels to me like it could be part strategic, part acqui hire. Youve got a large team that are doing WordPress support for agencies. Was it that its just quicker to buy you guys and bring you into e two m than it was for e two m to continue to bring their own team? Because I see unlimited Wp still trading as its own brand. So can you just walk us through that?
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Yes. From that angle? Just like how there are different ways to exit, there are different ways to scale as well, right. You could do it organically, you can pour money into ads and other marketing mediums, or you can just acquire somebody who has a strategic better fit. Now, in our case, with our team of almost 90 people and 100 plus recurring agency clients, given what the a two m already was at it, it almost doubles them overnight. Right. So it is a more strategic play in that sense is where you're scaling it. Now, when you're scaling it by other mediums, organic, it takes time or paid ads, it could be hit or miss. Right. So acquisitions, there's some, I don't want to use the word guarantee, but it's almost sorted out for you, right, that overnight you're adding 100 clients and all these team members. So it's not about when you're growing organically, when you are adding clients, but you're also then adding team members and not all the team members are going to work out for you. Not all the clients are going to work out for you. So it's just that journey of maybe depending on the size, that journey of a year or two year, you're cutting down to this two or three months that it takes to roll up another strategic competitors of yours.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: How long had unlimited WP been trading prior to the acquisition?
[00:05:30] Speaker A: Over four years.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: Okay, and so you can't tell us how much that was acquired for will unlimited WP continue to trade as its own brand? And what's your. Do you have like an earn out, or are you contracted to stay on for a period of time?
[00:05:45] Speaker A: So we. Some parts of it, it's more like a merger. So I will be part of the e two m now on not an active day to day role, but a growth advisor sort of a role to keep helping Manish take e two m to another level in terms of earn out. It was that type of deal. So. And Manish being a friend now for a long time, it was an easier deal for us to make than if it was with some unknown person that you met online over. To give you some context, I and Manish met back in 2016 at one of the conferences from Ugurus in Denver. Uh, the first year, uh, we didn't talk to each other. We. I mean, we looked at each other, we were like, oh, damn, he's my competitor. We both had that mindset. Uh, next year at the same event, we met again. Uh, and both of us were a different person then. Uh, abundance mindset. And, you know, there's no such thing as competitors that share things. And we ended up becoming a close friend. And a couple of years ago, I moved back to India, and then we had this cadence of meeting monthly for lunche, which would last for like 4 hours, 5 hours, and we are openly sharing your secrets. Hey, this channel works for me. This channel doesn't work for me. And just more of that sharing build a lot of trust between us. And at one point, Manish even jokingly mentioned that, you know, I'm going to acquire unlimited Wp one day. So I'm like, huh, damn.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: I got a buyer who's running unlimited WP now. Is unlimited WP still being operated as a separate entity or.
[00:07:20] Speaker A: Yes. I didn't answer that question. Sorry. So right now, since all the clients are, majority of them are still on the plans at unlimited WP, a lot of them actually have chose to migrate to the e two m plans. There are nuances. Even though we both offered the same exact thing. There are nuances in just how the service is delivered. So actually quite a lot of them have already migrated to the a two m plan. Now others, we don't know how long they would stay on. It would operationally make sense to how long because they are in a way operationally two different models. Even though it's funny, right? They're building WordPress websites and we were building WordPress website, but still, like operationally, both of us are a big believer in systems and processes and there are differences there. And for those reasons we are keeping it separate for now until we decide what the long term strategy would be.
[00:08:15] Speaker B: And so unlimited Wp, similarly to e two m, I'm just looking at the website now has developers, website care SEO and an optimized plan. So it's white label WordPress development. So building websites for clients and also managing those WordPress websites so care plans, which is the opportunity for. And the pricing I think is kind of similar, right? Your unlimited WP and E, two ms in a similar price bracket, am I right?
[00:08:49] Speaker A: They're very close. They're not exact like Apple to Apple comparison. Like our models were slightly different so it's hard to do that comparison. But our offices are 2 miles apart. So in that terms, the local talent, the pricing on our end, it's near about near about similar. Now when we launched Unlimited WP, we were one of the first one to have productized a WordPress development service. Like a design pickle they did with the design. Nobody at the time was doing it with the WordPress. And I'm like how I not, I already niched down into the digital agency space at my old agency that I was running it for like, you know, at that moment for about four years, I wasn't getting any traction at it. I mean after niching it down it was better, but still it wasn't the breakthroughs that I had, you know, heard stories about people who were niching down early on. This is back in 2018 to 19 time. So then I decided I, you know, I read about this product day services and I got really intrigued. And that's when we launched unlimited WP where it's all 100% reoccurring plans. And if you look at the pricing, how many agency sites do you go to? And on our homepage you find the pricing plans, right. So really trying to package the product and also in the operational side of things, it was pretty much all the processes. Like you know, there are systems in place, custom project management system in place. So it was the idea for me was to actually run it like it if it was a productized service. And to be honest, I wasn't sure if it will work or not. I'm like, you know, if this doesn't work, I don't know what would I do with the agency? And we launched about a couple of months before COVID uh, and then Covid happens and, you know, if it was the model or I don't know what it was or SEO, but we really took off, uh, in a short time span. It didn't take us that long to reach to 100,100 thousand USD in monthly reoccurring. Right. Uh, so that was a quick journey. And we were like, whoa, this, this model is amazing. And then I immediately started preaching that model, uh, out to others. And Manish, being a friend, I'm telling you about this model, and he's already making his systems more reoccurring and he loves our model. So I think he had, I said since then that, you know, let this guys grow and then, you know, I'm going to acquire them as my growth strategy down the line when the timings are right for everyone. Right.
[00:11:23] Speaker B: And so, you know, if you look at, I mean, I've been talking about this for a long time, like ten years. I was talking about care plans back in 2013.
Your care plan is $49 per website per month, right. So I'm paying you guys $49. I'd easily charge 150 or $200 a month to a client to have that all taken care of. So there's good margin. It's kind of hands off. So it makes sense. I see this as a fast way to get to market as an agency, a fast way to scale with the agency. Just focuses on good business development, good problem solving, good strategy for clients. Have like unlimited WP to do the execution. That's the model. It's been that model for a long time and I like it. It makes a lot of sense. One thing I'm curious about, I want to talk about WordPress, kind of a larger conversation in a moment, but talk about your tech stack, because the problem I see with a lot of agencies is they kind of reinvent their process every time a new client comes in the door. I was guilty of that when I started out. I'm like, I'm going to try this new plugin, this new theme builder. How do you manage that when youve obviously got a lot of agencies coming to you with different tech stacks, different page builders, different plugin requirements, how do you manage that? And whats your advice to other agencies to help them productize what theyre doing.
[00:12:43] Speaker A: Yeah definitely youve got to pick your stacks and thats not always going to be the best. Maybe the ones that you have picked. Those plugins have stopped being updated as often as you wished. Orlando Roadmap is not per your liking. Right. But you gotta pick some stack and yes you can make changes here and there, but the point is to have a consistency across. For example for forms, if you're using WP forms or gravity forms or whatever, use that across all of your client sites. So if there is a known bug that pops up or the gravity, you know that, how many number of websites you have to update, what exactly is the issue? Who's impacted by who probably won't be impacted by if you're using all sorts of plugin? First of all, there is no way to keep tabs on what happens on WordPress sites. I mean, let's accept it. They're big, they're messy. Plugins are built by developers who necessarily don't have the right incentives. A lot of people are just building it. They put it up on the repo and who knows when it was last updated and then how many vulnerabilities are reported. So for tons and tons of reasons, you definitely want to have your stacks fixed. Now your second point about we working with agency, I would say in our experience about half the agencies did have their stack figured out and other half is somewhere in between that they do want to get to that point, but they usually what we see is they say, well, I already have 40 websites and it's using ten different builders and I don't know which one to go anymore. And that's usually because, you know, in the past if they use those paid themes and it came with different builders. Right. And you're sort of stuck with it. Uh, but that I think, you know, just the whole popularity around elementor in last uh, three, four years. Right. Uh, majority of the builders, for us it's elementor, I would say 70%, you know, so, so that's sort of a lid sorted out. Now across the other plugins, for example, forms, that's actually very straightforward. You could pick any of the leading five ones and you'll be all right with it. But it's after, let's say you come down to ACF, you're still with everyone. Yeah, majority of you are using ACF, but then now it comes to some assistant plugins for ACF. That's when you start seeing that everyone has that favorite, even with the elementor, which add ons do you use? There are 50 out there. Somebody like, says, I like happy add ons and some, you know, so that consistency, it's hard to develop for us. What we did is across the board. We had templates, we had agency profile in built into our project management system. So when a task is assigned to a developer, he or she can see right there, what are the preferences for this agency that they always use? Elementor. So if you see visual builder in there, do drop and comment and say, hey, this is not something you use it in your normal stack.
That all of that was possible for us because we only worked with agencies and, you know, within our first year, we figured out that if you don't do this, there's no way we can scale this service.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: But if I was going to start another agency now, I would come to you and I would say, I don't care what you use.
Use the best practice me, the fastest sites that are the easiest to update in the backend.
I've used elementor and WP forms in the past and they seem to do a good job, but I just, I don't care, like, you just use whatever. I would take your recommendation or your team's recommendation, right. I think that would be my advice. Actually, to anyone listening to this is like, I mean, how many, how many you guys have built over 500 websites, right?
[00:16:27] Speaker A: I say more like more. Upwards of 5000.
[00:16:31] Speaker B: 5000. Okay, so I must have misread that on you, on your website. So. So I have built 30. Right. Like, who knows this better, me or you? Right? Your team clearly know how to do this better than I do. So I would just come to you and say, hey, you guys do what you do, let me do what I do, which is design the strategy for the client, map out the user experience, work out how we're going to help the client achieve their goals. From a tech point of view, you guys just do it. Tell me what you've done and follow best practices, and I trust you. And I think a lot of agency owners struggle to scale because they, they kind of get stuck in the trenches and they want to keep their hands dirty and they want to stay on the tools because they enjoy it. But they, you know, at the end of the day, you have to make a decision about your role in the agency and you have to either become an agency owner, business development, sales strategy, or you stay in the development world. It's very difficult to ride both horses as your agency grows. Now, if I did say that, hey, just, you use the best tech stack I'm guessing you're probably going to choose elementor and wpforms or gravity forms as the main kind of statues, right? Yeah.
[00:17:39] Speaker A: Like Astra is a theme or generate press or cadence. You know, one of those themes, simple things we would ask you is like, do, are you ready for Gutenberg?
[00:17:48] Speaker B: Right.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: Because we are sort of in between, uh, some, if you have a strong preference, then we'll go for it. Otherwise, elementor, uh, across the page builder is, it's something, and also it's another thing like how many licenses are you going to get? Uh, if you already have an elementor license, then, then let's just go with it. Uh, that's the license course is also another factor. Right. Uh, that's a reason for you to stick to, uh, one or the other system.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: How long have you been around the WordPress ecosystem before starting unlimited WP?
[00:18:18] Speaker A: Three years, I would say 2016. I've been going to like Boston WordPress meetups.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: So I was, I was actually, I was at Boston Word camp in 2016.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: I was there too at the Boston University.
[00:18:33] Speaker B: In fact, my wife and I both spoke at Boston Word in 2016.
So we were probably hanging out, having lunch and didn't even know it. What's your observation?
I've been in the WordPress space since about 2007, 2008, right. And I saw this boom happen. I saw this wave happen from 2007 through sort of 2013.
What's your observation about what's happening WordPress now? And.
Cause I'm just seeing different platforms being adopted and curious about the future of WordPress.
You obviously talking to a lot more WordPress agencies than I am. So I'm curious as to what your observation is and what you think the future of WordPress is.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: I think I'm going to be a little biased here as just being a word for a specific agency.
What you just mentioned, there have been a lot of talks about that in the past couple of years. I don't think though the needle is moving fast enough towards any other platform. Year or two years ago there was a big talks for webflow, right. That there's a lot of people are moving to that. Well, clearly, but it's more becoming a niche platform for a lot of startups, websites, type of businesses that are going for it. But majority or day to day trade businesses like plumbers and electricians, those type of sites are still on WordPress. Of course, the publisher blogs, that's not going anywhere from the WordPress so that the bar isn't moving much. Right. I think it's around 42% of the web or somewhere around that. And yes, it's not gaining a fastest traction that it has gained in the previous years. Now I don't know if that's a plato that it has hit that there's enough number. That's probably, this is the limit. That's kind of hard to say. The whole Gutenberg experience, I'm sure it hasn't gone as easy as they would have predicted. Right. Uh, thing, been talking since 2018 or something. So it's been six years now and it's still not here, right. That it's coming in the phases and I think as an agency you'd lose patience, right. That hey, this is just a tool. My client isn't looking for tool, he's looking for leads and he wants to, you know, generate some tangible results. So why am I stuck in this when the Gutenberg will be ready? So I think those things definitely have impact. I think the woocommerce has lost its steam. Uh, you know, even amongst the agency we, we see that for any uh, like a decent e commerce site, uh, let's just build it on Shopify. Right? So, so e commerce has definitely taken a hit on its reputation for being, I mean now recently from the past year they have, they've been updating it because they've got a lot of complaints around speed. Even in our experiences, like imports of let's say, thousand products, you're gonna get the error. You won't be able to upload a, that thousand product or 1000 orders from a sheet. Right. So I think that becomes a very necessity if you are, you know, claiming to have the most number of ecommerce websites on your platform. But if the basics uploads have problems with it, people are going to fork to different platforms out there. So, you know, e commerce, yes, probably, and some from the core WordPress base as well. But overall it's, to me it seems as strong as ever.
[00:21:53] Speaker B: Very diplomatic of you, Ronick. My observation is that there's just a, and there has been for some time and I'm still, I'm not, you know, I'm still an advocate for WordPress. I still think if you're building websites for clients that WordPress is probably the best platform to use.
I mean, I publicly said this and we'll say it again, I've made a big transition to high level, not for building websites for clients, but building funnels and marketing funnels and marketing pages and online courses and all that kind of stuff.
I think my observation and my frustration with WordPress is the lack of direction from the top, the lack of leadership. Gutenberg's a great example of the open source community has its benefits. The plugin repository for example. The plugin repository is just, it's like heaven on a stick to a WordPress developer. It's like all this amazing functionality that you can access. However that open source philosophy means. Also the community is very fractured and there's not a lot of direction from the top. There's no leadership in terms of the direction of where WordPress is going and it is very frustrating because you end up with these platforms that aren't being updated. Gutenberg taking six years and it's still really just a minimum viable product as far as I'm concerned. I can't even use it myself, I know a lot of people swear by it. So its interesting to me that WordPress has grown so much so quickly and has got such market share. Im just curious whats going to disrupt it and whats going to come along and take that market share. Its going to be interesting to see what happens. And also I think AI is, id love to know what you guys are doing with AI in house and how AI is helping your workflow because I see elementor, I see Divi, I see all these platforms now coming up with AI built in.
How has it improved your workflow or are you guys still just tinkering with it?
[00:23:48] Speaker A: Well we are tinkering with it. One of the reasons why I'm exiting from unlimited WP is I'm going full time into AI. We are building a tool for digital agencies in the AI space. Hopefully alpha version would be out later this month. Oh wow. I've been very curious about it in terms of building the websites, the tools that are out there. It is a beginning phase. They're not production ready but there's some school stuff is happening like Figma to WordPress and it does kind of get you halfway there which is, you know, that's a 50% productivity gain. That's amazing right. So in that sense it's helping a lot of the code boards that we have internally built to do certain things. They work for most part, uh, no complaints there. But all the plugins that have came out there you know claiming uh, to do within a WordPress dashboard you can put in command in and it creates a custom plugin for you. I think it's a good initiative. I mean it's, it wouldn't be able to create anything serious but that's, you know, that means uh, people have eyes on it, they've started working on it so it's just a matter of time, uh, that the breakthroughs will come through in that space.
[00:25:00] Speaker B: What's the. Can you tell us about the AI software that you're working on?
[00:25:05] Speaker A: It would be so last year we were, I wanted like entire team to have a chat GPT, right, and build these boards that are shared among different teams. You have custom boards because not everyone has that understanding on how to create those boards and how to actually use them. And was looking for a tool where I can actually onboard the entire team. Imagine like a workspace wherever I, there are teams and all the chats are shared between those teams. And the team has their own prompt library and then their own boards that they have trained over the time. And there wasn't anything. And we were like, let's build one. So we're building this like a team adaptation platform for digital agency specifically. So the library of prompt and boards that we are building, they're all for digital agency space. The phase two, three, the idea is to take a foundation model and train it on the gazillion amount of data that's out there for agency. How the pricing works, the proposals and project discoveries and all the things. Troy, you talk about. Imagine taking all that data and actually training a foundation model to give answers. That doesn't feel like generic. It feels like this is Troy Dane's answer.
We're looking into that direction. We got some machine learning developers. The task seems like dauntingly difficult for a lot of reasons. So we are getting that interface build right now, and then in the next phases, it would be having those customized models. So ultimately getting you answers even better than what jet GPT can get you, even though behind the scenes it is using JGPt.
[00:26:43] Speaker B: Oh, got it. Well, I'll happily license my intellectual property to you when you're ready to have that conversation.
That's a scoop right here on the AVntr podcast.
And so what? Just kind of circling back to agencies for a moment. Obviously deal with a lot of agencies. You see, it must be frustrating. I mean, I coach agencies for a living in my whole team here, mentor agencies. And we see sometimes that the brief from the agency to a provider like e two m or unlimited WP is just not, I mean, it's just, there's just not enough information.
How do you, if you're listening to this and you're an agency owner and you are wanting to scale and you need someone like e two m or unlimitedwp to help you, what can they do to set that relationship up for success from the get go. And I will say this, you know, this doesn't just apply to using a white label provider like you guys. This applies to if you're hiring your own team, like if you've got your own team developer. So how can they be thinking about this? And what are some of the tactical things they can do right from the start to make this a successful relationship?
[00:27:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I think at Unlimited WP, the custom project management system we had, when agencies log in right on the dashboard, there was a project brief that's like the first link, they see it there, and there's a nice two page template which lists down all the bare essentials that we need to get started on any project. Once we get started, we would have some days on the background to get and collect more information. But it's getting started part.
That's what we had. Now, in general, to answer your question, I think is the expectations, references of what you're looking for, and just paint me a picture of what the end result will look like. If we have that clarity, then some of the smaller decisions, that requires like 15 back and forth and lasting ten business days just to get some clarity, right? I think that's some of those smaller decisions. The team, any developer or your team members, they can make it independently if they know what that end vision they're looking after. Not just saying, build me a landing page for this. Right? If there was some reference point and any other reference that's out there, I think just basically the, when you're passing down a task, it's how clearly it is defined. Now that's easier said than done, right? If I'm passing down, down a task to someone, I don't have all the time to paint you a picture and to give you all that clarity, right? So it isn't difficult thing. But as you said, if you want to be successful at working with other people, be it a white label provider or anybody else, you have to figure out and master that trick about quickly painting that picture down to the other person. We, agencies that work with us, tons and tons of videos would come to us every day because that's what we told them, you know, if something's too complicated, just do a loom video and explain it over the video. And they loved that fact, right? Rather than just typing something for 1520 minutes and drafting it. So videos have helped enormously in last few years, right? But that videos thing isn't new. That's, I've been, you know, agency has been using it for, you know, five, seven years now, hasn't been anything new since the video. It's, it's still, we're kind of stuck on the video. I haven't seen any, any new updates since then. But this is a huge point for any service, right? Even if you're working with a client, if, imagine if the clients were able to give you those instruction, how much scope creep can be avoided?
[00:30:25] Speaker B: Totally. You guys, you guys design as well as develop, right? Can you walk me through the, you know, what, what does that mean? What, what do you guys actually design? Will you like, design a website from scratch or landing page from scratch?
[00:30:39] Speaker A: So we, at unlimited WP, we didn't do a lot of design, but at e two m, we do do a lot of design and that is developing a page from scratch, taking just concept, idea reference, clients profile, taking those information and then putting something together, showing it to the agency, getting their approval and just moving in that step by step process.
[00:31:02] Speaker B: Got it.
What are some of the other things that you see across? Like what is it that makes some agency successful and that other agencies are really struggling? What do you think some of those key ingredients are?
[00:31:15] Speaker A: Well, the marketing would be one. You're so busy executing your project and client deliveries that there's not enough time that goes into marketing or branding.
You know, if you talk about the smaller agency, there may be stuck in that phase, right. If, if you're focusing on the delivery, you didn't get the enough leads or enough sales once the delivery ends, you have this ups and down cycles, right? I think getting out of those cycles, that's where we see a lot of agencies stuck at. The ones that have been doing it for the long enough now have enough client base build that, they could ride that very comfortably. That doesn't mean they would grow it, but at least they're not, you know, going through that upper up or down phases. So, uh, there's different way to look at it. But like I would say marketing being as just that, it's not being focused, uh, as much. And it's, it is a competitive space. But that's like any other space, right? All the spaces are competitive nowadays. Uh, you still need to stand out. You still need to, I mean, look at you, you're doing this video production. It isn't that easy, right. If there's a time commitment, uh, for that, I, and you see a lot of agency, they complain about not getting leads. But then, you know, if you're saying what exact activities that you put, what marketing engines you build in the last quarter, or at least which ones did you improve. And that's usually like, no, I was busy and you know that genuinely, they were busy. They worked 12 hours a day, but they were busy doing the wrong things in the agency.
[00:32:44] Speaker B: That's right. I did a live stream about this, I think it was last week, literally called how to get unlimited leads. And what I talk about is leads are a lagging indicator. Leads are a byproduct of sales and marketing activities that you choose to undertake or you choose to neglect. And so when an agency says to me, that's the exact conversation. When they say, I need more leads, which is, by the way, the number one question that I get from agencies, how do I get more leads? My question is, what have you done over the last 90 days to generate leads? And 90% of the time the answer is, nothing. We haven't done anything. You haven't produced any content. You haven't published any content. You haven't been to any networking events. You haven't even reached out to your existing clients asking for referrals. You haven't done any advertising. You haven't produced a YouTube video showcasing your knowledge and your expertise. You've done absolutely nothing. You've put no energy into attracting new people into your world. And now you're here asking me why there are no new people coming into your world.
It's like saying that you want to meet a life partner, but you've done nothing over the last 30 days to get on a dating app or go out and meet people. Well, they're not just going to knock on your front door and walk into your life. You have to put some effort into this, right? Um, yeah. And, and I think. I think the reason that a lot of people don't is because it's scary, right? Doing marketing, because a lot of the time you do. I mean, you would know this, right? You do marketing and a lot of the time nothing happens. You go, well, that didn't work. We're going to try something else. We went on this podcast and nobody reached out, or we ran these ads and the leads are too expensive, or we went to this word camp and we didn't pick up any new clients.
You don't quit on those things. You just improve. You get better. You think about, how can I do it better next time? And I think being able to continue doing the marketing and sales activities knowing that you're going to get rejected and you're not going to get the results that you want, but you've got to keep doing it anyway. I think it's that level of grit and determination that a lot of people unfortunately just don't have. And while they're getting referrals and word of mouth, it's very easy to say, oh, well, you know, we're getting good referrals, but as we know, referrals eventually dry up and then you've got nothing in the pipeline.
[00:35:03] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm a big believer that you have to do a quarterly plan, and it's okay if the things didn't work out as you plan, but make sure as soon as the quarter ends, you plan for the next quarter. Right. And we have, like you, we have done so, like at the last word camp in Washington, DC, we sponsored. We had a booth. I've been in India for two years, but especially, I feel, you know, I took that 20 hours flight to go there. And, you know, I kind of, I mean, I enjoyed the thing. We got a zero leads. I mean, we got tons of leads, but nothing really worked out from that whole four years experience and putting probably 15, $20,000 on the whole trip and the sponsorship. Right. And if nothing turned out, that just doesn't, that doesn't mean that I don't do that anymore. Right. Like, I'll still try out at other events. And you have to keep trying it because if you don't, ultimately that's how the results would show up. And I'm also a big believer in building marketing engines. So because marketing can get overwhelming and some big believers in building those engines and thinking of an concept and then thinking just like an engine in the stages and thinking, you know, I'm gonna try it out. I'm gonna try to get at least one client of this strategy. If I get it, you have more confidence too, then think about how you can scale it, right? And once, you don't need to spread yourself too thin. If, you know, usually if you are the only person running the agency, just work on one engine at a time, right. And if the one engine is working, then you can think about building a second engine. And, you know, not all your engines are going to work at all the times. And that's why you want to have handful of engines but not too many where you can manage them. So if one of them, for example, we see organic traffic drops in January, of course, in summer as well, when people are around this time when people are taking vacations right before school starts, this is bad timing for the traffic. So now that after four years, I know we wouldn't be expecting a lot of the leads to come through the SEO work so we'll have ramp up over ad spending at this time if you still expect to have that signed up, right. So you can then pull different levers across your different engines if you have that. But you know, as you said, building that takes a lot of time and you don't need to be fearful. Just keep trying and keep building and leads sometimes. Most unexpected thing you did, it turns out, but that's only if you try it. I mean, you know, there's stuff we have done it and I never expected that to actually result into something. And I was like, huh, you heard about us there. I mean we just did that because we thought it was easy to do it and I was like hey its that easy to get new leads and then you try to double down on that strategy.
[00:37:44] Speaker B: I think of them as assets. Right. When I have downtime in the business, which is, I mean fair bit these days im probably Thursdays my content day, Tuesdays and Wednesdays a do a bit of coaching in the morning. Ive probably got two and a half days of contact hours in the business where I'm required to be somewhere and do something. The rest of the week is pretty flexible. Time for me to think about things and I think about building assets. I think what can I build today that is going to be an asset that is going to help the company while I'm sleeping and that could be a YouTube video. We're getting an incredible amount of leads from YouTube. It's amazing actually. I mean, I'm obsessed with YouTube views, but really it's the wrong metric for us because people that watch our YouTube videos opt in for our templates that we give away on those YouTube videos. Every day I see leads coming into our slack channel, people that have opted in from YouTube, which I never expected. There's a whole community over at YouTube which is very different to the Facebook community and I never expected that. And so for me, I think if I, if I build a YouTube video, if I make a YouTube video, publish it in a year's time, that YouTube video could have thousands of views. That just happens while I'm sleeping. So I build something once and then that's an asset that serves the business. So I build playbooks for our coaches on how to coach clients. I build playbooks on how our client success managers run one on one meetings with our agencies that we mentor. And I spend the time to build that stuff once and then give it to the team and then I can go to sleep knowing that those assets are being used so a similar way, thinking about the engine that's running without you.
[00:39:20] Speaker A: I got a funny story there. So four years ago, I was big on sops, and across the company, we were building sops. And I'm like, how? Great marketing idea. Why don't we build an SOP guide and we use it as a lead magnet and we'll do Facebook ads on it. And while we are preparing the SOP, and it was almost the guide and it was almost done. And then I got a slack message in our marketing channel that, hey, the guys at the agency, Mavericks, Troy, has just done his SOP guide. I'm like, huh? So, you know, and for us, we took that as a validation. Like, hey, we were thinking that agencies, I don't know if you noticed that, too, but like, four or five years ago, the SOP were big things.
[00:39:58] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:39:59] Speaker A: And we were like, let's do it. And then a couple other people we saw, they were also building the SoP guides, right. And it's still to date that guide that we build back then. And it's, to be honest, it's not even that good. I mean, now if I look at it and I have do a lot better than that of, uh, and it's still like yesterday I checked and it was like a six or seven downloads. So daily it's getting me seven downloads. And those people are being added into newsletters now and, you know, they're getting touch points and, you know, it takes God knows how many touch points, but, uh, it starts somewhere there and, yeah, I like that, just building those assets and you don't know that it could pay off 100 x over the time.
[00:40:39] Speaker B: Right. What do you use for your internal marketing automation and stuff? Do you use activecampaign or mailchimp or something off the shelf like that?
[00:40:46] Speaker A: Yes, yes. Merely late.
[00:40:48] Speaker B: Got it. I love mate a lot. And also the project management system that you built, the task, me, is that something you guys built from the ground up or is that something you've adopted from off the shelf?
[00:40:58] Speaker A: We adopted off the shelf back in 2015, where I had a normal agency. So we've been using that day one internally, and then about three years ago, we build it ground up in reactival and, yeah, no js and react. And it took about six, eight months react. But it's super customized to work with our exact product as service flow. And you know what I was, what you were questioning earlier, like, what if this acquisition had not happened? The sort of the roadmap we had for around this time of the year was we were going to introduce AI into it. So it would read an agency comment and if it, you know, it would pass those comments to check JPT API, get the response when the developer and which we will still load at e two m is by the time developer opens the task. It has that same task response from the chat GPT as well. So it saves so much time from that doing Google Search or R and D and how exactly to do it. We did a pilot of that and about 60% of the time it was amazing. Other times it was just the requests and things are so customized in nature that chat GPD isn't going to help you. But it was some crazy, I mean, there's some results that I looked at. It was a task where it said, or we need a chat bubble and you know, this height and this color and it should have this three fields and if user fills it out it should have WhatsApp icon and this and that and took it literally gave just that code. And I got so intrigued. So I went myself in there and I put that code in there and there I had that problem. It probably needed some CSS modification, but in like five minutes that task was done. That would have taken two, 3 hours to do it right, just to get it and test it. So that time saving is coming and I think agencies, some are worried, but they shouldn't be worried. I mean, if anything, they are going to get all that time back.
[00:42:45] Speaker B: That's right. And they're not going to know what to do with it.
What you do with it is you build marketing engines with the time that you've got back. That's what you do.
It's a very interesting and exciting and weird time to be alive. I think AI is going to disrupt the world more than the Internet has. And I don't even think we've seen the start of it yet. And it's very exciting indeed. Ronnie Patel, thank you so much for joining, joining us on the agency. Our congratulations on the acquisition to e two m. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you guys do over the coming years and looking forward to hanging out with some of the team at Mavcon in San Diego in October, which is our flagship event for agencies. Looking forward to that. Thanks for joining us on the podcast.
[00:43:22] Speaker A: Thank you, Drake.
[00:43:24] Speaker B: Thanks for listening to the agency, our podcast, and a massive thanks to Ronick for staying up so late to join us today. Mavcon. Our next live event is happening in Sandhya, Diego in October. And you don't have to already be in Mavericks Club or be one of our clients to attend. At the time of this recording, we only have ten seats left, so it will sell out. If you'd like to get a taste of Mavericks club and what it's like to work with us to help you grow your agency and tap into our amazing community of agency owners and mentors, check out the link in the description and book your ticket to Mavcon today. Okay, folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone you think may need to hear it. I'm Troy Dean, and remember hope, John Paul II was an honorary Harlem Globetrotter.
