Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Here's a hack. I don't know if I've shared this before with you, Troy. But what I did was I wanted to find adjacent partners that would refer to us mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I reached out to my largest clients and I said, Hey, um, are you guys doing your it in-house or do you use a company for your it services? And, and they would say, oh, we're doing it in-house or, oh, we're using this company for our it support whatever. And I'd say, cool. Um, could you introduce me to that company? We've got some other clients that need it support and I would love to have some good resources. Could you make, I love it product. Then they would introduce me. I'd say, oh, we have a mutual client. You know, uh, I'd say, thanks for the introduction. We have a mutual client. I'd love to get coffee or lunch or whatever, cuz we've got some clients that need it support.
Speaker 0 00:00:41 We don't wanna touch their network or their email or their computer problems or whatever. I'd love to like, just connect and see how we can, you know, work together. Mm-hmm <affirmative> well, turns out one of the ones I connected with is like literally three miles down the road has been in business for he's an older, he's older than me been in business for, you know, 30 years, whatever. And his clients are all love him, but he's just, they're just like not doing websites. They just don't want to touch that. So any of their clients that come to them say, Hey, our website's getting kind of dated. Like, can you guys help us with it? Or who, who should we talk to? He just sends 'em all to us. Like literally, literally we're getting like one a month or so from him. And we they're super easy to close because they they're already trusted.
Speaker 1 00:01:24 If you have a vision for the agency you want to build, then we want to help you build it. Welcome to the agency. Our podcast brought to you by agency Mavericks. Welcome,
Speaker 2 00:01:33 Welcome.
Speaker 3 00:01:34 Just scraping through, by the skin of our teeth live here in the digital Mavericks Facebook group. For another episode of the agency hour pre-show as we were going live, I was actually cranking some tears for fears on the, uh, on the playlist. They've got a new record out called the tipping point came out last year. It is amazing if you like your pop music, definitely check out the tipping point by tears for fear. This sounds like commercial radio, doesn't it? Uh, it's not. It's an episode of the agency over we're live here in the digital Mavericks Facebook group. And I am very pleased to welcome my good friend and coach at agency Mavericks for the second week in a row. Please welcome Johnny flash Dad. He's got his own bumper. Oh
Speaker 0 00:02:19 Wow. I got my own. I got my own, uh, bumper there. Max is amazing. You know? Um,
Speaker 3 00:02:25 Do you remember Starski Hutch? Are you old enough to remember Starski Hutch? The, uh,
Speaker 0 00:02:29 Um, just, just barely. I, I wasn't into it though.
Speaker 3 00:02:33 Yeah. You were like, no, but my uncle used to watch it. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:02:36 Thanks.
Speaker 3 00:02:38 Uh Starski and Hutch was a great seventies cop show and uh, that music that, that max has got behind your bumper, there sounds like it could have come from a Starski and Hutch episode. Nice work max. Yes. How
Speaker 0 00:02:49 I'm doing. Great, man. How you doing?
Speaker 3 00:02:51 I'm very well. What is it having me
Speaker 0 00:02:53 Back? I told max I must not have failed last week. Um, or, or they're short on talent. I'm not sure which one. Right?
Speaker 3 00:03:00 Bit of column, a bit of column B. Um, what is it, uh, Amber Rushton wants to know? Is Johnny flash your real name?
Speaker 0 00:03:08 Uh, no, it is not. My real name is actually John Falk. If you're trying to stalk me on Facebook. Um, but uh, Johnny flash is my, uh, alter ego. I guess you could say I, I take the glasses off for the episode of the agency hour and, and, uh, show my, put the on yeah, put the Cape on. So excellent. Yeah, no. Was the nickname given to me back in high school? I think when I was playing football, I guess somebody thought I was fast. So I got the nickname, Johnny flash. I started, um, funny story actually. Troy, I don't know if I've ever told you this, the first website that I kind of built besides the, the crummy ones I did for myself was one for the high school basketball team. And so I registered, this was back in the nineties. I registered a domain name, Chantilly basketball.com.
Speaker 0 00:03:51 And I made our basketball team. It's very own website, which all the other sports teams were just lumped into like the school website, which wasn't very good in the late nineties. And we had our own website with like the stats and pictures from the games and all this stuff. And so after I graduated high school, then my, the coach said, Hey, um, I told him, Hey, I don't have time to do this for fun anymore. It was a fun thing. I got my website stuff, you know, figured out, but I'm going to college. And he is like, Hey, could we pay you to keep the website updated, uh, while you're at college. So that was like, wow, people will pay me. It was a website I had built like on my own. It wasn't even like he had asked me to build it or anything. It was like my own kind of hobby project. Um, and so then they started paying me to maintain it. And so I, I named my business, Johnny flash productions and it has stuck since stuck.
Speaker 3 00:04:41 Nice one. So that was like your first care plan, right?
Speaker 0 00:04:44 <laugh> yeah. Well, yeah, it was before I even had a care plan. Yeah, it was, uh, it was crazy. Love
Speaker 3 00:04:49 It, love it. Uh, ki and Kelly says won't be able to watch it all here. Looking forward to listening on Spotify tomorrow. Yes. And of course you can do that now because we are a podcast launched on the 1st of March. Thank you to max and everyone working behind the scenes to make that happen. It is a podcast available on Spotify and where you listen to your podcast, just search for the agency hour by agency Mavericks. There is another one that's a few years old by a bunch of dudes who worked at an agency called pixel something. It's not that one. This is the agency hour brought to you by agency Mavericks. Uh, so what is it Wednesday afternoon for you in you're on the east east coast of the us, right?
Speaker 0 00:05:25 Five o'clock,
Speaker 3 00:05:26 Uh, cool
Speaker 0 00:05:27 Afternoon. Yep.
Speaker 3 00:05:29 Um, now, today we are talking about a couple of things. Uh, we, this conversation came up for us in, uh, a coaching call, uh, during the week mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, and without sort of, without giving anyone's names away and breaching our clients's privacy. Do you wanna, do you remember the conversation we had that led to why we're having this conversation today?
Speaker 0 00:05:51 Yeah, I mean, I, someone in one of my squadrons, I I'm coaching two squadrons in agency Mavericks, and one of the business owners had posted basically like, Hey, I'm having trouble nailing down my sales process. Like what, you know, um, I've got some gaps I'm, I've I've been doing, you know, he had been doing all the selling and there was, we were, then we were talking about some Mavericks that were having trouble filling their sales pipeline and kind of how, you know, some things that they could do for that. And so I think the combination was just sort of like, you know, what does the sales process look like? How do we fill the sales pipeline? Um, and then I I've been talking about it with both my, uh, squadrons this week in terms of what people are doing for their sales process and stuff. So it's kind of a fresh on our minds, I guess.
Speaker 3 00:06:33 Mm. And the other, the other thing that came up was, um, you know, occasionally what will happen is you build, you are recurring. So first of all, recurring revenue is like the holy grail, right? We've figured that out. We know that and we love it. Uh, but what occasionally, what can happen is you can end up with a lot of your recurring revenue being generated by one or two big whale clients. Right. And which in a lot of cases, you know, there are, there are benefits to having some whale clients because you don't, once you land a whale client, you don't have to put in as much work to get that revenue because you've got it coming from one source, but it's quite dangerous because if that whale client falls over, you've got this big hole in your revenue. So one of the, so there's a couple things we wanna talk about.
Speaker 3 00:07:21 We wanna talk about, we wanna revisit the concept of go wide, go deep from the blueprint cause, but we wanna apply that to your sales pipeline and the types of clients that you've got, which we'll talk about in a second. And then we wanna talk about the fact that the however many, like you need way more people in your pipeline than you think, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> and this is one thing I've learned, uh, from doing a little bit of reading and as much as I'm not a big fan of grand Cardone, I do. There's one thing that I've learned from him that has really changed my thinking, which is he's got this book called the 10 X effect or something, or maybe it's just called 10 X or whatever. Um, and the basic premise is I remember I was at the gym once with my personal trainer, my personal trainers.
Speaker 3 00:08:06 Right. All right. In between these sets of lap pull downs, you're gonna do 20 pushups. And in my mind, I was like, all right. So in between these sets of lap pull downs, I have to do 200 pushups. That was what I heard. I flipped in my head. I'm like, I'm gonna do 200 pushups, which is no way I could do 200 pushups, but I got my mind around trying to do 200 pushups. And so by the time I got to 18 or 19 pushups, and I was like, oh shit, I've just done 20. And it was way easier than if I thought I'm gonna do 20 pushups. I probably would've got 11 or 12 and gone, oh, this is I'm struggling now because my mind was set at 20. Whereas if I set my mind at 200, actually physically doing 20 was a lot easier.
Speaker 3 00:08:48 And it's a really simple trick. You can play on yourself. And so the, the too long didn't read version of the grand Cardone book is whatever you think your goal is 10 exit go after the 10 X number. And you'll more than likely smash your target really easily. And so I wanna talk about how we can apply that to your sales pipeline. I wanna, I wanna unpack the go wide go deep, um, methodology and how that applies to sales pipeline. And then also I wanna talk about, oh, and I'm gonna give Johnny some time here to think about this all the different ways and channels and tactics and things that you can do to put people into your sales pipeline, right. To, to generate more leads into your sales pipeline, all the different ways, cuz there's a plethora of ways. And there is a literally a flood of traffic on the internet because of all the computers and smartphones are connected to each other, uh, by the power of Starlink satellites.
Speaker 3 00:09:46 So we wanna make sure that, you know, you are not most people, I think just don't have a healthy pipeline because they're scared to put themselves out there. They're scared to make contact and they're scared to ask people for a conversation. So we wanna unpack a little bit around that as well. Sound good? Yeah. Yeah. Sounds awesome. Cool. Uh, Jeanette Elton is here. So that, that happened to me yesterday had a big client that went bust. Yes. Right. There you go. So, um, so what, so I've been talking to one of our Mavericks in my squadron about this concept of, uh, go wide, go deep. And I learned this when I was a sales rep. Now obviously for those of you who are familiar with the blueprint course go wide, go deep is a questioning methodology. We use in a discovery call to actually uncover what a client needs.
Speaker 3 00:10:30 Right. But in this instance, in this context, what I'm talking about is the types of relationships that you have with your clients. And so what I learned when I was a sales rep is that it's, if you don't have a broad cross section of clients in your portfolio, if you just have like 50% of your revenue comes from a couple of big clients that you get big orders from every month, well, if one or two of them fall over, you're not gonna hit budget next month. So the idea is if you imagine building a, uh, a shopping center and I say this because there was a shopping center that was built around the corner, uh, recently, and one of the first things they do is they build the car park underground and then they build the shopping center on top of the car park. Right?
Speaker 3 00:11:09 Well, in order to build the car park, they put these ma and, and, and the reason that there's usually room under a shopping center to build a car park is because to hold the building up, they put these massive concrete pylons down into the ground that go deep down into the earth, right? And then on top of those pylons, they put a very wide concrete slab, which is the foundation to hold the, to evenly distribute and hold the weight of the building. So it's a combination of having deep roots into the ground and having a wide platform to build the building on top of. And that's the way I think about the types of clients that ideally you wanna have in your portfolio of recurring revenue. You want to have some deep relationships with deep clients. So Johnny signed a recently signed a ridiculous retainer was 9,000 a month or something.
Speaker 3 00:12:05 So that's a deep relationship that you've got with that client, right? You're gonna be doing a lot for that client. And it's a very deep relationship, but if you, if you had three or four of them and that was all your recurring revenue and two of them fell over, you'd be in strife. So on top of that, you've got a lot of smaller clients who, if, you know, if half a dozen of them fell over, you know, I'm sure it might sting a little bit, but it wouldn't be catastrophic. Right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> so that's the how to apply. Go wide, go deep to your sales relationships. And your active clients is to have some really good deep relationships with a handful of clients. And then have lots of wide, lots of little relationships with, with other clients to build that wider foundation so that if any one or two clients falls over or goes bust, it's not going to impact you in a way that means you, you know, you're now in strife. Does that make sense?
Speaker 0 00:12:55 Mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah,
Speaker 3 00:12:56 Totally. And, and up until, up until recently, Johnny you've, you haven't had those, a lot of those deep relationships have you from a recurring revenue point of view, you've just had lots of clients on care plans and hosting, right?
Speaker 0 00:13:07 Yeah. Yeah. We have about 115 monthly clients. And I think before this $9,000 one, our biggest one was probably between 1500 and 2000 a month. So, okay. You know, it was a, which is, it's a small, you know, small percentage of our recurring revenue was in any one client, you know,
Speaker 3 00:13:27 Which is still, I mean, even at 1500, two K a month is good, but if one of them fell over, it wouldn't be catastrophic. Like if, if then if the nine K client was 80% of your revenue and they fall over well, you're in all sorts of strife, right? Yeah. So, um, I like to not have any one client worth, probably 10% of revenue. Like that makes me feel nervous. If I've got one client who's worth more than 10% of revenue. Uh, no, I didn't go to Robinson high school. Did you go to Robinson high school? Johnny flash?
Speaker 0 00:13:59 No. No. I went to Chan high school. Well, Robinson's right around the corner. So it's
Speaker 3 00:14:03 Close. There we go. Yeah. So Thomas, Thomas Condi, I think Thomas Condi is asking, did you go to Robinson high school? I didn't. Uh, and no, neither did Johnny. Uh, so the, so that's the, the concept of go wide, go deep now to reverse engineer that and say, okay, well, how many conversations do I need to have? And, and I'll talk about the difference between your sales process and your sales pipeline in a moment. But how many conversations do we need to have in order to generate enough monthly recurring revenue clients to have those deep and those wide relationships. And so I just wanna ask everyone who's listening to this. Uh, the <laugh> thanks, Thomas. I wanna ask everyone who's listening to this. If like, tell me how many active conversations are you having right now with, with potential prospects, how many active conversations have you got on the go right now with prospects who could become clients in the next 30 days? Let me know in the chat, Johnny, have a think about it. How
Speaker 0 00:15:06 Many? Yeah, I got my, I got my, I got my list right here. I've got 20 right now that I'm talking with, right. Uh, 25, 20 5% you used,
Speaker 3 00:15:15 Oh, go ahead. What do you, what do you use to manage those conversations? How do you know that number? What are you looking at?
Speaker 0 00:15:19 I have a, I have a very technical, amazing slick software called Google sheets. <laugh>
Speaker 3 00:15:26 You were
Speaker 0 00:15:26 Gonna say that <laugh> that? Uh, no, I'm just like kind of old now. Right now. It's only me, so it's kind of simple, but I literally just have like a rating, one to four, their name or company, both the date. I last talked to 'em the date I need to talk to 'em next and the date, they originally contacted me the source that they came from in any notes. So it's literally, I just have it, like in one view, it's on a tab on my browser. I can just click to it. And about twice a week, I go to the spreadsheet and I say, who does it say that I need to contact next, based on my next contact date? And I, you know, shoot, 'em a message. Usually from one of my, I already have a bunch of different messages, so I just kind of pull one out and usually send it to them related to whatever type of project it is.
Speaker 0 00:16:09 Um, right. So, and I can see that 25% of 'em are from Google, like SEO, just contacting us from that 25% are referrals. And actually right now, 50% of them are existing clients that want us to do more work. I guess that's the one thing, once you build up a, a, a batch of monthly clients, like we have 115 of them, you know, if what would you say a new a website needs to be redone every three to four years on average? Yeah. So if you have 115 clients, if they need to do it every three to four years, we've got 25 30 websites, pretty much every year from existing clients that we could potentially be getting. So there's a lot of repeat, uh, customers in that sense,
Speaker 3 00:16:50 Love it. Uh, Jeanette says she's got 13 conversations at the moment, Facebook user, who hasn't given streamy permission to know who you are says one, Stuart, George says 15, well done. Another Facebook user says eight. Uh, Thomas says, yes, real estate, university, and tree doctors. Stuart says deeper pipeline, all rated in my CRM. Well done. So Stuart's managing it in some way. Uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna set you all a challenge whenever I, my theory is, and this is based on years of experience, uh, you need way more people in your sales pipeline than you think mm-hmm <affirmative> right? Way more people than you think, because most of them are not gonna convert. Most of 'em are gonna disappear. Not because they not, because necessarily they don't have the money to do the project that you want 'em to do, but just because they're busy and it's not a priority for them and whatever, right?
Speaker 3 00:17:41 So you need way more people in your sales pipeline than you think. Now, twenties, a pretty respectable number. Um, I would suggest, and you know, I'm not saying that in head to 10 exit, but I would suggest that whatever you, whatever your sales targets are, and that's a whole other conversation. If you don't have sales targets in your business, then you should have revenue targets or sales targets, or at least a number of new clients enrolled into a certain plan every month, you should have those numbers, uh, as targets and whatever reverse engineer, whatever your conversion rate is like, if you need to bring on four new clients this month and you've got 20 conversations, well, you know, you, I would start off by saying outta those 20 conversations, probably half of those are gonna be qualified. And then maybe a quarter of those are going to become clients.
Speaker 3 00:18:33 So out of 20 conversations, you might end up with two or three new clients, potentially. If everything goes well on the planets align. Now, if your conversion rates are above that, awesome, you're doing something well, obviously the leads coming in are, are well qualified and you've got a sales process that's converting, but I would use those numbers to begin with. So figure out how many new clients you wanna bring on reverse engineer it. And, and so the simple math for me is if I wanna bring on four new clients, I quadruple that number and go 16. So I need to have 16 people at the pointy end of the sales process to generate four new clients. And so then I need to have at least 32. So I then double that number, have at least 32 conversations this month to convert four clients there, that's the formula that I use, however, many new clients I wanna bring on quadruple that, and then double that number. And that tells me how many, how many real conversations I need to have in my sales pipeline. And a real conversation is like, I'm getting on the phone with someone having, having a conversation with 'em. I'm not just, they're not just putting up their hand and downloading a free lead magnet, then I never, never hear them again. Right, right,
Speaker 0 00:19:38 Right. Right. Yeah. And I, and I think it depends how warm the leads are. Right. I mean, with us, 50% of them have already are already paying us money. So obviously those are like hot leads. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, mm-hmm <affirmative> and, and the ones that are referred from our clients or partners, those are pretty warm leads as well. So, you know, 75% of our leads are pretty warmed up. Um, so they're a lot easier to close and make the rate go up higher. Yeah. I was looking at, I was looking at how much time I've spent on sales in the last, uh, since the month started, I've spent 13 hours, just about 13 hours on sales for the month of March. So about a hour a day
Speaker 3 00:20:17 At an hour a day. Yeah. Which is great. Um, one of the things that we teach in sales accelerator is that you, you know, if you are not tracking your time here, or you're not spending enough time doing sales activities that you should spend at least a 50 net double Pomodoro sprint, four days a week, I say Monday to Thursday, uh, I give people Fridays off. Cause I'm generous like that Monday to Thursday, uh, 50 minute Pomodoro sprint. That's like, if you're not doing any, if you're not doing enough structured sales activity, just spending like the, that almost an hour a day, which is what you are doing, Johnny, that's gonna have a profound impact because it's like, it's energy in energy out kind of thing. Right? Like it's hard to quantify, but if you just put the energy in to the sales process and the lead gen and the conversations, typically in my experience, the work comes and it's, it doesn't always necessarily come from where you put the effort into, like in terms of the channel, like you might do some answering questions in a Facebook group or posting on LinkedIn or sharing some videos or whatever, whatever it is, the, the reward may not come from the channel that you're putting effort into, but the reward comes just because you've put energy into the process.
Speaker 0 00:21:25 Yeah. Yeah. When I find there's a direct correlation, if I spent a lot of time last month on sales, the numbers are usually pretty good this month. Right. Cause I've, I've spent about 51 hours so far this year on sales, which is pretty good for, for me. And so, um, our sales plan, how
Speaker 3 00:21:42 Are you, how are you tracking that?
Speaker 0 00:21:43 I, I, we use toggle. I think you told me about it like years ago. Ah, I track my own time. It's funny. I don't really bill any clients hourly. Um, but I just track my own time just so that I can, um, you know, kind of see where I'm spending it and where I need to adjust things.
Speaker 3 00:21:57 Yeah. Wow. You are way more disciplined than I ever was or ever could be. <laugh> well
Speaker 0 00:22:02 Done there I'm like a numbers. I'm a numbers person. I, I like, I like my numbers, so yeah.
Speaker 3 00:22:07 Um, so the, the, there's a couple of questions that come up when, uh, you know, talking about. So first of all, let's just recap a couple of things you need way more people in your sales pipeline, then you think you need, I had a conversation with someone recently who said that they'd started three conversations in the last seven days with new prospects. I'm like, dude, you need to do that before breakfast on Monday. Like you, you, you, you need to be doing, if you're not reaching, I'm gonna make an assumption that if you're listening to this or watching this, that you're actually interested in growing your revenue, okay. If, if you, if your, if your revenue is good and your sales are good and that's not a problem for you and you need to hire more team or fix your processes or whatever, then that's totally cool.
Speaker 3 00:22:46 This is not for you. But if you need to grow your revenue, grow your sales, bring on more clients and increase your revenue. Then you probably are just not doing enough activity. You're not performing enough activity around lead gen marketing and sales. And you need to be doing my experience way more than you think you need start small and, and grow that commitment. But you need to be doing way more than you think, and you need more people in your sales pipeline than you think you need. And my personal preference is to have a combination of big whale clients, who we can go deep with and then lots of smaller clients that we can go wide with to build that really healthy foundation. So the, so the, the question then, uh, arises well, cuz I'm gonna also make an assumption that you, your sales process is good so that once people are in your pipeline, that you've got some process that you can take them through to convert. And if you don't, you should definitely talk to us because we have processes like that in place that we can help you with. But the question is, how do we get people into the sales pipeline, Johnny, this is like the 64 million question. How do you get people to put their hand up and express interest in having a conversation with you? Now you're in the luxurious position of having 115 active monthly clients, but you didn't start out there, right? You started out like most that
Speaker 0 00:24:03 Far out with zero. I left last week, I left my day job and I had zero recurring clients. And I was like, uh, maybe, you know, a few months into it. I and I, you and I connected. And I was like, oh man, I really need some recurring revenue cuz this mortgage wife and four kids thing, uh, is not great on project only income, you know, especially I was, I was the main, my wife was, our kids are small and my wife was, you know, spending most of her time with the kids. So yeah. Um, yeah, I mean, well I always like referrals as you know, because it's, it's warm, it's easy. It, it sells, we have, uh, a number of both referrals from our clients and we have referral partners like, um, here's a, here's a hack. I don't know if I've shared this before with you, Troy.
Speaker 0 00:24:46 But what I did was I wanted to find adjacent partners that would refer to us. And so I reached out to my largest clients and I said, Hey, um, are you guys doing your it in-house or do you use a company for your it services? And, and they would say, oh, we're doing it in house or, oh, we're using this company for our it support whatever. And I would say, cool. Um, could you introduce me to that company? We've got some other clients that need it support and I would love to have some good resources. Could you make, I love it. Then they would introduce me. I'd say, oh, we have a mutual client. You know, uh, I'd say, thanks for the introduction. We have a mutual client. I'd love to get coffee or lunch or whatever, cuz we've got some clients that need it support.
Speaker 0 00:25:25 We don't wanna touch their network or their email or their computer problems or whatever. I'd love to like just connect and see how we can, you know, work together. Well, turns out one of the ones I connected with is like literally three miles down the road has been in business for he's an older, he's older than me been in business for, you know, 30 years, whatever. And his clients are all love him, but he's just, they're just like not doing websites. They just don't want to touch that. So any of their clients that come to them and say, Hey, our website's getting kind of dated. Like, can you guys help us with it? Or who, who should we talk to? He just sends 'em all to us. Like literally, literally we're getting like one a month or so from him. And we they're super easy to close because they they're already trusted mm-hmm <affirmative> so like any kind of things like that printers it companies like any kind of adjacent business that is doing marketing or it related services for your clients.
Speaker 0 00:26:19 Those can be great partners to just, all you need is a few good ones and you can stay pretty busy. So I love that. Um, obviously there's digital ads, you know, Google ads, Facebook ads, um, we, one of our Mavericks, um, in the UK, uh, Ireland actually was running. They had like a government grant program where if you like spent money on a website or marketing or whatever, you could get money, uh, matched from the government for that. So it made it like half price for the clients mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so they ran Facebook ads targeting those customers specifically. I think the ad was like this, uh, guy with like a whole bunch of money in his hand, you know, kind of thing. Like the picture of it was, you know, all big hand of money and it was basically like, you know, targeting people for this program.
Speaker 0 00:27:03 And so they would help you get the, get the government money and then it would cut the price in half. And it had to be done on a short timeline, which that actually worked well, cuz the projects didn't drag on, it was like, Hey, you gotta get this government money. We gotta get this done. Um, and so that worked really well for them. Uh, social media, obviously just kind of putting content out there, links, links to your website. We put like a little site by Johnny flash productions at the bottom of all the sites we build mm-hmm <affirmative> so we'll get, oh, Hey, I saw that you built this site over here. Like we really liked it. You know, that kind of thing. Content, marketing, blogging videos, uh, podcasts, you know mm-hmm <affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative> so, I mean, I think there's, I think it's, it's like the, it's like the golden land of opportunity. I mean like it's never been as easy as it is right now to get clients, especially with just going through a pandemic for two years, guess what? Everybody needs a website and they need it to be really good and do things that it didn't have to do before. Yeah. So I mean, this is like, it's never been better, honestly. This is like, yeah. We're living in the golden times.
Speaker 3 00:28:04 I agree, absolutely agree. I wanna unpack a couple of things here because um, most people, I think who don't most people get stuck at a certain point doing outreach, right. Even like connecting with the it company, which I'm gonna come back to in a second because it there's so much gold in there that I wanna unpack for people. Most people get stuck and I have a theory as to why people get stuck doing outreach and they, they just don't pick up the phone or they don't send the email. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, I'd love to hear from you guys in the comments, what is the one thing getting in the way of you doing outreach to, you know, find another referral partner or do some networking or reach out to that big client that you really want, uh, you know, making contact, putting yourself out there. What's the one thing that gets in the way and I wanna come back and we'll loop into some of the comments
Speaker 0 00:28:55 I'll make a GU I'll make a guess on the two things that people will say,
Speaker 3 00:28:59 Okay.
Speaker 0 00:29:00 Time and imposter syndrome.
Speaker 3 00:29:03 Mm love it.
Speaker 0 00:29:04 I dunno. We'll see. So waiting for someone to chime in.
Speaker 3 00:29:07 So I think so here's here's my theory is that both of those things are symptoms mm-hmm <affirmative> that can be distilled down into one root cause. Cause I think time is an excuse, right? Yep.
Speaker 0 00:29:22 Yep.
Speaker 3 00:29:23 Imposter syndrome I think is real mm-hmm <affirmative> but I think time people go, well I don't have time to do it, which is a way of going, I have imposter syndrome, so I'm not gonna do it because I don't have time. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and I think it comes down to fear. I think that's really the root cause is that people are scared that they're gonna be here we go, Jane Elton just said it they're scared. They're gonna be found out that they they're scared of either rejection or they're scared of getting hired and they're not being able to fulfill on their promise. Right. Which is imposter syndrome. Um, now there's a couple of things that can help you overcome that one is if you, if you know that you've so I always look at part of what we teach in sales accelerator is getting yourself into a positive mindset.
Speaker 3 00:30:06 And one of the things that I do most mornings is look at our testimonials page or look at our wins channel in slack, or look at the ring, the bell channel in Maverick, slack mm-hmm <affirmative> and, and just go, wow, like I'm amazed. We're doing great work in the world. And these people are benefiting from it and they're getting results. They're taking what we teach them. They're embellishing it, they're tweaking it. They're making it their own. They're taking action. They're getting results. And they're coming back and letting us know that it works, which is amazing. It's very rewarding to get those, to get that positive affirmation and that gratitude from our clients. So I always, I look at that stuff every day. So I'm like that kills imposter syndrome straight away. It's like, yeah, we're not for everyone, but we, but for the right people, we actually, it works.
Speaker 3 00:30:46 Right. We get results. The second part of it, I think is with any kind of fear, like I always think about mountain climbing or rock climbing, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative>, I've, I've always been, I've never done it, but my wife and I like one of the main, main things that we wanna do is go indoor rock climbing. And what I know is when you go indoor rock climbing, they put a harness on you and they don't let you just climb the wall with no support. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so for me, yeah. I think having structure, having templates, having frameworks gives you the harness to then step out, step off the ledge into the unknown. Right? And so what I wanna talk about is how you reached out to the it company because there's a, we teach a lot of this stuff in the blueprint course. There's a whole module called the referral engine where we talk about this, uh, the referral machine.
Speaker 3 00:31:34 I think what we talk about this particularly is the, the content joint venture, or reaching out to what you call adjacent partners. Now there's a couple of things that you did here. One is you, you spoke to one of your existing clients and asked them if they had anyone that did it for them or it could have been anything. Hey, do you guys have a printer that you use? Or mm-hmm <affirmative> whatever, if you're a developer and you don't do design work, it could be like, Hey, do you guys have a graphic design? You use could be anything. You ask them. If they had an adjacent partner, they said, yes, you then asked for an introduction. So when you make contact with your it company, mm-hmm, <affirmative>, there's two things that are happening. One, you are, you are a referral. So you are, there's already trust, built into that relationship.
Speaker 3 00:32:18 Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And the second thing you did is you didn't ask them for business. You offered them business, right? So you started the conversation with a gift. You were already referred to them. So there's already trust in the relationship and you start the conversation by offering them to refer clients to them. Yeah. So it's a no-brainer for them. They can't. Why would they say no? And then the law of reciprocity says, oh, Hey Johnny, you're a nice guy. You reached out, you're referring as clients. You happen to do websites. We don't do that. But our clients are asking, it makes sense for us to refer them to you because I you've scratched my back. I wanna scratch yours. But also there's it makes sense for this to happen. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative> so I love the fact that you, uh, did <laugh>
Speaker 0 00:33:05 James,
Speaker 3 00:33:07 I'll let you read that. I'll let you read that for me.
Speaker 0 00:33:09 I've read it. It's it's up here. <laugh>
Speaker 3 00:33:12 James, for those on the podcast. Go on. Go ahead, Jen.
Speaker 0 00:33:16 Oh, for the podcast, uh, James says on Facebook, my new business pickup line. Hey girl, do you have an adjacent partner? <laugh>
Speaker 3 00:33:24 Well, it's like saying it's like saying to a, you know, a, a girl. Hey, do you have any single friends? Right? <laugh> uh, one of the things I like to do on LinkedIn, when I find someone that I think we might wanna hire is I never ask them. If they're looking for an opportunity, I ask them if they have any colleagues who are looking for a new opportunity and invariably they go, yeah, me <laugh> oh, cool. Oh, I didn't know. Maybe we should have a chat. Um, so I love this structure that you've got and this, the, and in fact, we have templates for this stuff, the email templates to send the joint venture partners or the referral partners or the adjacent partners. But I love that you've started by getting introduced and then, uh, you've started that conversation by offering them something and, and opening the opening the account with a gift of potential new business.
Speaker 3 00:34:11 Uh, so referral partners are definitely a great channel for generating leads into your pipeline. And you know, again, that the imposter syndrome thing, the way to overcome that is to, is to make sure like, find your favorite client. If you haven't got a favorite client, go get one, like do good work for a good client and, and know, Hey, we are doing good work in the world. And we are impacting people in a positive way. And then use that to overcome imposter syndrome. Most of you listening to this will have already got, will have already had that experience. You've got favorite clients where you've done good work, use that as a testimonial or social proof, uh, to prove yourself to new prospects, but also to prove yourself to yourself.
Speaker 0 00:34:52 Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:34:52 Yeah. Right. It's a daily
Speaker 0 00:34:54 Practice. I think that's why things like journaling are so important or documenting, slowing down enough to document those wins. You know, I think, uh, we have, we have a wins channel as well in, in our slack channel. And it's just great to encourage team members to like give a shout out to another team member or different things, you know, that happen, uh, so that we can kind of celebrate those
Speaker 3 00:35:16 A hundred percent. Um, so I wanna unpack some other channels that you can use to generate leads into your pipeline. For those of you who are watching this in the digital Mavericks Facebook group, leave a comment, uh, in the comments, let us know your favorite channel for generating leads. We published a, um, an ebook a while ago. I think it was called 27 ways to generate new leads for, uh, web clients. Uh, I think Tinder even got a mention in that ebook. Um, someone, one of our clients went on a date with a Tinder, someone she met on Tinder, they went on a date. It didn't work out <laugh>, but she ended up building a website for him. Uh, so there's that. Um, so, and, and then, and then what I wanna talk about is I wanna give you guys some insights into how maybe how to, uh, improve the results from any of these channels, which really comes down to content, which I'll talk about in a second, but I wanna hear from you guys in the comments, what channel are you using to generate leads? And by the way, if you're listening to this podcast and you're not in the digital Mavericks Facebook group, please come and join, go to facebook.com and just search for digital Mavericks and join the group. And then you can be a part of it and you can join in the comments and, uh, watch us livestream the podcast, cuz that's what this is. This is a recording of a livestream
Speaker 0 00:36:35 In the group. I think another, another thing I think is just letting people know what you do for your job. Like, I mean, think about how many neighbors that you have, that you don't know what they do for their job really, or acquaintances at church or other, you know, networks that you're in, that you don't know what they do for work and they probably don't know what you do for work. And so I think just like being intentional about asking people like what they've been doing or, you know, whatever, and hopefully getting the opportunity to kind of say what you do. Um, it's amazing, like those kind of people that you already kind of know a little bit, but probably have no idea like what you do, um, that they can lead to connections.
Speaker 3 00:37:13 Yeah, definitely. Christina Hawkins, coach Hawkin who's, uh, watching in here says two of my best clients came from managing the local WordPress meetup. Yes. That's a great authority play. If you're organizing a local WordPress met up, you're instantly seen as an authority in the space because you're organizing an event. Uh, um, do you go back and
Speaker 0 00:37:36 I can't remember if we talked about it last week, but the Google, my business reviews have been like huge for us, cuz we've gotten so many now that people will literally contact us saying like, Hey, we did our research and you're the best rated company in the area. And so like we automatically kind of go to the top of the pile, um, you know, which is just, which is just fantastic. It's like they wanna work with us cuz we're seen as the best, whether or not we are the best or not. That's another, that's another debate. Right. But in terms of the number of reviews, we look like that product on Amazon that has 5,004 and a half star reviews. It's like, oh I'm gonna go with the one with the most reviews. Right?
Speaker 3 00:38:13 Totally, totally. Jason Westbrook. Who's also joining in the conversation. Hey brother, how are you? Uh, Jason says restate the question please. So the question was, what is number one thing, getting in the way of you doing outreach to potential new prospects and uh, it all boils down really to fear imposter syndrome. Um, and, and what we are doing now is unpacking some structure and some frameworks to help you do outreach in other channels that you may not have, uh, used you now you've you put a lot of time and effort Johnny into getting your Google reviews, right? You gave yourself a challenge to get a hundred reviews. And
Speaker 0 00:38:50 We were trying to get 50 in three months, uh, back in 2018, we had zero <laugh>. So we, uh, did a challenge to do 50 in three months we got to 46. Um, wow. But at the time that was enough to put us ahead of the companies in the area and we've kind of kept building on that. So I think we have like 113 now. Not that I keep track of it or anything, but
Speaker 3 00:39:12 I'm, I'm looking at it right now. Hundred 13, five star Google reviews. That is amazing.
Speaker 0 00:39:17 Yeah. So we have the most in the whole kind of DC, Virginia, Maryland tri-state area here. Um, I, I keep track of them pretty closely, uh, my competitors to, to make sure that they don't get too close to me. <laugh> wow. That is, but yeah, so that that's been a good, that's been a good thing for us. And I saw someone on Facebook said neighbors, that's a big, no, for me introductions. Yes. Clients. No. Yeah. I wasn't necessarily saying the neighbors to be the clients, but I was thinking that your neighbors know people that probably need your services, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3 00:39:46 Yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. Um, they, they referrals your neighbors. You never know who your neighbors know and, and, or like friends of your, you know, like uncles or friends of the family or mm-hmm, <affirmative> uh, just letting people know. I mean, you don't wanna be that guy at the family barbecue that walks in with the new business card. So you started a business, Johnny productions, uh, but you know, what are you up to these days? Oh, well I've just started a new web agency and blah, blah, blah. Um, you know, I think we get, we get humble and we don't want to, you know, be kind of talking about ourselves too much. I don't have that problem by the way. <laugh> but some people get humble and they don't wanna be talking about themselves. And so therefore they have this great product and they put it under the mattress and no one ever knows about it because they don't talk about it.
Speaker 3 00:40:31 Um, the, uh, James Mero says I've got a few jobs by mentioning to another agency. I was a Jula dev. Oh yeah, poor bugger. And they had just landed a jur gig. There we go. I hope that horrible part of your life is now over James, that you've seen the light. Uh <laugh> of course I'm playing with you. Um, so there are a couple of other channels that are obvious, you know, digital ads, which, uh, can go very well and can also go very horribly, uh, SEO, uh, just organic traffic coming to your website. I think there's regardless of the channel, I think probably one of the biggest challenges that people have is not knowing how to have that conversation. Right. So let, let me ask you Johnny, when the it company said, well, okay, that's great, Johnny, we've got this mutual client, thanks for referring clients to me. Why, you know, why would I refer a client to you to build websites? Like, what is it that you guys do differently to everyone else? Were, could you answer that question back then?
Speaker 0 00:41:31 Yeah. I mean, what I did was I went and had lunch with him. So that, that like, it automatically kind of takes down some barriers there. You know, when you kind of learn about like he's into rock climbing and he, you know, the different things about his business and stuff. And then, um, I was able to send him a client pretty quickly that did need some it services. So they sent someone out and the, my client was super happy that their computer problems got solved. Um, and then we have like a referral program where we just pay a flat $250 for someone, if they refer us like either a website build or a monthly plan. So I was like, Hey, this it's not that much, but we'll every time you send us a client, we'll send it. So I've mailed him a lot of I've mailed him a lot of thank you cards and, and checks of $250, which it's not like a huge thing or anything, but I think it shows the appreciation and it keeps us more top of mind cuz he, every month he's opening up a, a handwritten note for me with a $250 check saying thanks for sending whatever, whoever to us, you know,
Speaker 3 00:42:28 Hmm<affirmative>, that's great. Uh, that's a nice touch. Um, Chris, Chris roak says business, Facebook groups have loads of leads. Yes they do. I'm curious though, and I'm kind of going somewhere with this. What, how do you start the conversation and not just look and sound like everyone else doing websites and SEO, right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> like I, you know, the, the thing that I've used over the years to start conversations and overcome that fear of like wanting to put myself out there, uh, is just a really helpful piece of content. Uh, and one of the things that I, uh, sort of my mindset around this and my approach is to produce a great piece of content, which I know is helpful. And then just put my Santa Claus hat on and go and play Santa Claus and give that content away as a gift to everyone, I think might benefit from it without any expectation of getting anything in return.
Speaker 3 00:43:21 Except maybe a thank you, right? If you get a thank you, it's like great, awesome. I'm glad that was helpful. And I think a, I mean that works, you pick up clients, but B if the content is good enough and helpful enough people start to share it, you just get a really good name in the, in the space for being super helpful. And then it might be three years later, someone comes back to you and says, Hey, I wanna have a conversation about blah, blah, blah. Because I mean, we've had people join our programs who have been using our proposal template for five years.
Speaker 0 00:43:49 I've still got it. I still use it.
Speaker 3 00:43:50 Right. And then now reading go, Hey, I've been using your proposal template for five years. I've never paid you guys any money, but I wanna join one of your programs now cuz I'm ready to go. Yeah. So it's a, you know, doesn't matter how long the sales cycle is. And so I think content like a really useful piece of content can be helpful to start conversations, whether it's in Facebook groups, whether it's over the phone, whether it's with referral partner, whether it's running ads, I mean, ads are as only, only as good as your offer and your content, right?
Speaker 0 00:44:20 I, the content there's just so many opportunities, right? I mean we had a client that was, um, looking to do an eCommerce website. They were trying to decide between WooCommerce and Shopify. And it was, it was down between us as the WordPress solution and another company that was pitching Shopify. It was down to those two. And so I was like, I need to write a blog post on why I think for, in his particular case that w commerce was a better fit than Shopify. And so I literally did this like WooCommerce versus Shopify article, like in a night and, um, sent it to him and I say, Hey, I just wrote this blog post for you, like the next day. And we close like a 20 K deal because I took the time. And now I have, anytime someone else is talking about Shopify versus w commerce, I've got the perfect piece, right. Or if someone, whatever the objections are or whatever, the questions that people have, like those turn into great pieces of content, cuz you can go real deep on. 'em like go wide, go deep, right on the content. And um, and, and I think it positions you really well. And then now all of our anti follow up, just refer to other things on our website, cuz we have content about what our website process is and how it's gonna help you do this and that and that whatever. Right.
Speaker 3 00:45:31 Yeah, totally. Um, and also how, like what a great experience for the prospect to go, oh my God, Johnny wrote a blog post for me. Didn't just answer the answer me via email, but actually took the time to write a blog post for me. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and that shows that you care and also for you, you've just built a marketing asset. The blog post is a marketing asset. It's an evergreen marketing asset that will generate leads for you over time. So that's a, and, and like how long did it take, I mean, you already, you've already got the thoughts in your head, right? You just gotta get them out of your head on the paper. Maybe it took you a few hours to put the blog post together and publish it and that's worth a $20,000 deal plus whatever it brings in over the coming years, someone asked here about email.
Speaker 3 00:46:10 So yeah, sure. I mean publish a great piece of content, uh, and then, you know, attach a checklist to it or attach some kind of free resource to it to help them implement faster or automate it. Uh, you know, usually people will opt in for speed and automation. They'll like, oh, I've read this great blog post. You know, one of the things that seems to be working is publish a blog post and then actually turn that blog, the exact same blog post into a PDF and give away the PDF for an email address because people wanna read the PDF on the iPad at night, rather than sit in front of the computer, reading a blog post. It's kind of weird exactly the same content. Um, but I also am just a big fan of going, like getting into Facebook groups and just linking off to a blog post and going, Hey, a lot of people asking here about recurring revenue, we published this, which seems to have helped a lot of people go check it out and it's just a blog post.
Speaker 3 00:46:58 And it's like, that's like a branding signal. It's like we here to help. We're not always asking for something in return. We are just giving value for free. Yeah. When we do ask for something, now we ask for an email address and a phone number mm-hmm <affirmative> uh, we don't give anything away now without an email address and a phone number because we wanna have a conversation with people to see if we can actually help them. Yeah. And if people aren't ready to give us their phone number and have a conversation, that's cool. We are just not ready to do business with them yet. So, um, that answers that question for the person who asked is that yeah, we give a lot of content away for free. I mean, you don't need to give us your email address to listen to this podcast. Right. You don't need to give us your email.
Speaker 0 00:47:36 We a lot of the stuff on the blog, everything correct?
Speaker 3 00:47:38 Yeah. Yeah. So in the Facebook group, it's all free and we are just here to prove that we can add value and we can help people. And then the right people will, will bubble up to the top and say, Hey, we wanna work with you. Uh, what does it mean to work with you and to deepen the relationship and to go further.
Speaker 0 00:47:52 And when you said earlier too, about the, what makes you different? I think, you know, one of the, some of the things that I say when I go into a meeting about what makes us different is that like, well, one, we really care two we're, you're gonna have a dedicated account manager. We're gonna, we're kind of like that boutique, you know, uh, business that like, uh, bats above our weight class, right? Like we're, we're, we're just someone that really cares. Um, you're gonna have a weekly call with us, like their duration of the project. So we're gonna make sure we get everything right. We have a detailed process to go from site map to wire frame, to mock up to the prototype so that we're not gonna get all the way into the project. And you, and you be like, not satisfied with where the website's going, cuz we're gonna check in with you all along the way.
Speaker 0 00:48:37 Um, we're gonna walk you through things like StoryBrand framework and other things to get your messaging, right. So it's just, we kind of have those extra touches. Um, and we deliver on time. Like we set out a project schedule at the beginning to make sure that you know what we're doing when we're doing it and what we need from you when we need it. We have these little, uh, I think I've showed you before, but we've got these like little project schedules. I think this was like a Simon Kelly hack from like years ago. Mm-hmm <affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative> but we basically like put a schedule together that says like, Hey, this is the, you know, check. This is the, the checklist, this is the site map date. This is the wire frame. Uh, this is the final content due and so forth. So like we, we, we print that out as a poster and we send it to the clients.
Speaker 0 00:49:21 Uh, well we send it to 'em PDF, but we don't tell them, we send 'em like a 18 by 24 inch poster. We ship it to them, like rolled up in a tube. And so then they'll get on like the next weekly call and they'll be like, Hey, I got the thing. And it's like, you know, like right there on their wall or whatever, love it. And so they know that like, we mean business, we're not gonna like drag this on for months for six months. Like we're gonna deliver this in the eight or the 10 or the 12 weeks, whatever we promised. Hmm. Um, and so we are just really, I think the, the clarity and the communication and them knowing that like they're with a safe pair of hands, like they just don't get that for most people. Right? Yeah. It's like, if you show up on time, do what you say you're gonna do and do it on time. You're above like 80% of the website. Totally right there. Right.
Speaker 3 00:50:03 A hundred percent.
Speaker 0 00:50:04 Absolutely. I mean, so like the fact that we deliver on time, I'm like, Hey, this is kind of odd, but this is actually like an unusual thing that we deliver on time. And I talk to people all the time and said, oh, they said it was gonna be three months. It's been six months. I haven't even seen the website yet. Blah, blah, blah. Like, can you help us? You know? And it's just, that's just how it is out there, you know? Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:50:24 We've, we all have heard so many horror stories about that. Um, and so you're right. Just like turning up on time, doing what you said you're gonna do puts you above, you know, most of the competition. Um, uh, also curious that, you know, one of the things I've learned about ads over the years in terms of generating leads, is that what I like to do is prove that something works organically. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so prove that a piece of content is gonna resonate with the market enough to get 'em, to put their hand up and express interest in having a conversation. Once I've proven that then put some money behind that content. Yeah. What I, what I generally do these days is test content with existing clients. So I'll put together a piece of content, share it with some existing clients. So I do this at, at Navon.
Speaker 3 00:51:10 We, I put together a presentation called the minimum viable effort, which seemed to be pretty popular and, uh, worked pretty well. And so now we're running that as an ad campaign to completely new people, to completely cold traffic, uh, new agency owners who have never heard of us really about how to scale your agency by, by actually working less hours, like scheduling time off in your calendar to help your agency grow, which is really counterintuitive to what everyone else is saying. Uh, we know that it works, it resonated with our current clients, which means that the people that if it resonates with a cold audience, they're likely gonna be a good client because it resonates with our current clients. Right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> so, um, content, I, I think, you know, a lot of people think that, you know, they just need one good ad campaign or one good funnel or one good whatever to, uh, you know, one good piece of copywriting or whatever to, to, you know, scale their business or one good developer or one way or client.
Speaker 3 00:52:04 I, I think, you know, really the content is just a reflection or, or a manifestation of your offer, what it is you are actually offering. And I think if you are just offering websites and SEO and care plans, it's not enough because that stuff has just been commoditized. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, I think what you are offering Johnny is like a white glove solution, like red carpet, white glove solution, which a lot of people aren't prepared to do because it it's a lot of responsibility and it takes a lot of work and you have to be really diligent to make sure that cuz once you set those expectations with the client, you've gotta then deliver you can't slip up because you've set such high expectations from the start, right?
Speaker 0 00:52:38 Yeah. But I think it is about expectation management, right? It's about saying, Hey, this is when we're gonna do this. This is when we're gonna do this. This is what we need from you. Then this is how we go about it. Like the more you set the expectations and then just exceed them. Uh it's easy. I think it's when they don't have expectations, they set their own expectations. And then, you know, you're just way off the mark because you didn't do a good job setting the expectations. A lot of it's just, you know, under promise over, deliver, you know, be clear about what you're, what you're doing. And I think you can, you can smash it.
Speaker 3 00:53:11 It's a bit like dating really isn't it <laugh> Under, you know, or the problem always the problem always starts when you haven't set the right expectations and they just expect too much from you. It's like I never said I was, I never said I was the
Speaker 0 00:53:24 Outdoor. The first date's gonna be a hundred dollars dinner. No, that's you know's suck it all down the, where are we gonna go from there? Right. <laugh>
Speaker 3 00:53:31 I never said I was good with the hammer drill. I never said I was good with power tools. Like I'm not the handyman, right? Yeah. Uh, but I, the problem is I didn't set the expectation from the start. I just let her set her own expectations and that's where it starts to derail. I'm kidding. It's all good. <laugh> um, Hey Thomas. Good, good point here. Let's not forget ourselves too. One of the things I've been doing more of is self-care, it's funny. That's my theme for this year. Self-care is my theme for this year. Um, which is why I'm only working four, half days a week at the moment, Tuesday, Friday mornings. I work, uh, Mondays. I don't work. And uh, after lunch Tuesday to Friday, I'm done I'm out. And when I say I'm not working, I mean, I'm not in front of the computer, I'm not on the keyboard. I might be sitting in the back deck, reading a book. I might play some guitar. I might go to the gym, do some exercise. Of course I'm thinking about the business while I'm doing that stuff, but I'm not actually looking at the computer and my hands and not on the keyboard. Um, and it's been revolutionary. It's been so good for my mental health, not looking at a computer five days a week. It's been, that's amazing. That's incredible. And
Speaker 0 00:54:32 Think for people that I was gonna say for people that struggle with it, I think it's, you, you have to schedule stuff so that you're forced to take the time off initially. And then once you get into the routine, it's easier to not have stuff scheduled, but like, you know, my wife and I, we usually take off Friday afternoons. We'll go to lunch in a movie while the kids are all still at school. You know, movie theaters are empty on Friday afternoon. Everyone else is working. It's like us in like senior citizens in the theater, you know? And, uh, it's just, it's really great. And then like my kids have activities and we have church stuff on the weekend and stuff. And so it's like, I don't really have the option to like work late into the night or on the weekends and stuff because I've like scheduled stuff and made other things a priority. And so if you don't have a lot of like fun activities to do or social circles or whatever, or kid activities or whatever the things are, then yeah, it's, you're gonna be working till nine or 10 at night and you're gonna be working on the weekends cuz you haven't like filled up your time with other things.
Speaker 3 00:55:25 That's right. Michael Hyat talks a lot about this. He talks about living intentionally and having so he'll have, and, and so he'll have like, you know, every weekend he has in the, in their family calendar time with the grandkids. And he's like, if I don't put in the calendar that I, that me and my wife are gonna go to the movies on a Saturday night, it could be months and we don't go to the cinema. Yeah. But if I put it in the calendar, it happens and someone asked him once about spontaneity. It's like, well, that's great, Michael, but I'm just spontaneous. I like to be more spontaneous. I don't wanna have every 60 minutes of my life planned out. And he said, I, I get totally get that. He said, most Saturday afternoons between lunch and dinner is just free time to be spontaneous.
Speaker 3 00:56:07 Mm-hmm <affirmative> like, and of course, if something happens and you, you get a vibe and you, and it's like, you don't have anything really booked in the county, you've got some free time and there's a gallery exhibition on, you've just seen an ad for on it for TV. And you wanna go to the gallery exhibition, you go like, you don't sacrifice the good things in life just because you've got a rigid structure. But the point is that if you don't be intentional about how you spend your time, you're gonna end up spending your time on everyone else's agenda and everyone else's plan, not yours. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um,
Speaker 0 00:56:35 And you gotta, and you gotta set the boundaries and expectations with your clients because we don't. I tell 'em look, you gotta have your hosting, not with us because we're just, we're working nine to five, right? We're Monday through Friday nine to five. We're not picking up the phone in the evening. I'm not answering the things on the weekend. Like I don't even look at my email or anything. Mm-hmm <affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative> and so we just set those expectations. So then we can actually, it's easier for me and my team to have boundaries.
Speaker 3 00:56:59 Yeah, definitely. Um, I said to my wife the other day, I don't know how, I don't know how people have time to work full time. Like I, you know, there's, there's so much to do in life, especially if you, you got kids, uh, I've worked, you know, very hard, long hours for the last 10 years, really growing this business. And now I'm in a fortunate and I'm just future pacing here for some people. And now I'm in a very fortunate position where I've got an amazing team who do a great job, except you know, then there's max of course who
Speaker 0 00:57:27 <laugh> she could say, then there's Johnny <laugh>.
Speaker 3 00:57:29 There's
Speaker 0 00:57:29 Still max is doing pretty good right now. I think max still call me under the bus max off camera.
Speaker 3 00:57:35 I'm just playing with you. He knows he loves it. That's why he turns up. Uh <laugh> um, and so I'm in that position now where I can take a step back and I'm still I'm transitioning. I still feel guilty sometimes. Like this week, Tuesday afternoon, I was sitting in front of the computer at two o'clock. I had lunch. I came back, sat in front of the computer. I had that moment where I'm like, dude, what are you doing? You don't need to be here. Like if you I'm just gonna break stuff. If I start work, now I'm just gonna break something. So just go get out in the backyard, clear your head, read a book. And then I didn't do any more work that day. And the business is growing things that like more stuff's happening better because I'm not, I'm not involved. Right. I'm just involved at a higher level.
Speaker 3 00:58:13 And that's because I've built the right team who are in the right seat, doing the right things at the right time. So it's taken a while to get there, but it's possible. And I will say this, I come back to my mantra, never stop selling, never stop recruiting. Right? So to look back to the conversation that we're having today is you need more people in your pipeline than you think, because revenue helps you hire people who will actually do the thing that you're promising. That's the only way to get yourself out of that business is to have other people do things, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, that you were doing. I mean, otherwise you just, otherwise you've just got a job and you are the boss and that's a horrible situation because you're not, you're not gonna give yourself a pay rise. You're not gonna give yourself annual leave. You're gonna work yourself into the ground. So having other people do things so that you free your time up. Right? That's uh, that's uh, so never stop selling. Never stop recruiting is my mantra. This is been fun.
Speaker 0 00:59:10 Yeah, man, this is, this is good. This is good. I, Emily says my husband and I have that conversation all the time. We couldn't imagine both working full time I do from home, but my husband is a full-time stay-at-home dad. And I'll, I'll just add to that. My wife and I both work in the business, you know, she's a designer and I do more on the website. And so like the boundaries and the structure you have to have are else like, we'll be, I, I can't be bringing up work stuff when we're like in family mode, right? Like that's just, you have to put on the, the work hat or the, the spouse hat or the dad hat. And it's when you start mixing them all, that's when it gets like, can be unhealthy, right? Yeah. Like if we're on our jog in the morning and I say, Hey, uh, can you get that project done today? Like that just is not gonna fly. Right.
Speaker 3 00:59:53 Not gonna fly. I, so I've worked from home for a long time. And then I was in an office for six or seven years. And then the last couple of years I've been home during COVID, I we're about to sign a lease on a new office space. We're very excited about because I've learned that I don't like to work from home. It's not good for my mental health. I like to have my, my me personally. I like to have my home environment where I just play and hang out with the kids in the family. I don't want my work kind of polluting my home environment. So I need that distance and that separation, even if it's just a 10 minute commute in the car, it's enough for me to clear my head and put that hat on. I'm really bad at switching hats quickly. I need to transition. I need some time to transition. Um, Hey, this has been great. Um, the, the, uh, Emily, by the way, is our ops manager. And what a lot of people don't know about Emily is that she's one of triplets. There are actually three, Emilys getting their job. I'm kidding. Wow.
Speaker 0 01:00:40 I didn't even
Speaker 3 01:00:40 Remember that. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Uh, the, the amount of output and productivity coming out of Emily Bryant is outstanding. And I'm convinced that she has a hidden team somewhere doing the work, because she's just so productive working from home. She's got two small kids who are basically the same age as mine. Her husband dares is a full time stay-at-home dad, which is awesome. And, uh, uh, yeah, the output from that one human being is just incredible. So big shout out to Emily Bryan, who has been a big part of me being able to step back from the business here, because she's head of operation. She's basically running the show, uh, and it's been amazing to have someone else take care of all that stuff. And I'm just in my sweet spot now. So, uh, big thank you to max
Speaker 0 01:01:19 Max and Emily just kind of pull the strings on us, you know, uh, to get everything to go.
Speaker 3 01:01:24 Yeah. A hundred percent. Hey, uh, if you are enjoying this, please leave us a rating in a review, wherever you listen to your podcast, uh, it's called the agency hour. It is now podcast. You can get it wherever you listen to your podcast and also join the digital Mavericks Facebook group here, and be a part of the conversation. Johnny flash. Thank you so much for being a part of it. Again, I really appreciate you and everything you're doing here. And, uh, I was wishing you further success and growth with Johnny flash productions. Thanks,
Speaker 0 01:01:48 Troy. Always a pleasure.
Speaker 3 01:01:49 All right. See you again next week, gang, take care. Have a great week. Bye for now.
Speaker 1 01:01:53 Thanks for listening to the agency hour podcast, subscribe at apple podcasts, Spotify pocket, audible, and wherever you like to listen, you can catch all of the agency hour episodes on our YouTube channel at youtube.com/agency Mavericks. Or you can get involved, check out our free digital Mavericks Facebook group, where we broadcast these episodes live for our community every week, along with a ton of free training. We'll see you.
