How to Grow Your Agency
Episode 109: How to Grow Your Agency, with Stephen Woessner
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How to grow your agency to the next level? In this episode, reach even greater heights by learning how to grow your agency.
For this episode of Sell With Authority, we’re shaking things up a bit. Instead of our usual format — I’ve got something special in store that’s related to how to grow your agency.
We’re diving into an episode I recorded with Drew McLellan for his Build a Better Agency Podcast.
Why this twist, you might wonder? There are a few reasons I’m excited to share with you.
First off — Drew and I delved deep into the topic of niche, but from a perspective that might surprise you. We explored how Predictive pivoted its niche a few years back, the reasons behind it, and, candidly, how we got a bit too comfortable in our previous niche.
Secondly — I believe the insights we share about building community and adding value will resonate with you, especially if you attended Day 1 of our March Intensive, where community was at the forefront.
And third — buckle up for some powerful takeaways from Drew’s keynote at the Build a Better Agency Summit. He discusses steering our agencies out of safe harbors, embracing the storm, and why those risks we fear might not be risks at all. Drew’s wisdom adds a brilliant layer to the conversation.
If you take and apply what we talk about in this episode on how to grow your agency — you’re going to be in a much better position to roar through 2024 by selling more of what you do.
A big dose of gratitude to our presenting sponsor for the podcast, Conduit Digital. By using their expertise in streamlining, upgrading & scaling your clients…they promise to reduce your risk so you can become the best digital agency in your market in 30-days. You can find Conduit and all their helpful insights and smarts here.
What you will learn in this episode about how to grow your agency:
- Why breaking away from the playbook and charting a new course could be the right strategic move for your agency
- How to identify the client types you excel at serving, potentially uncovering your agency’s new niche in the process
- How to grow your agency through approach and positioning
- Why your agency niche can establish you as the authority on how to become “The Authority”
- The pivotal role of cultivating a community of eager learners, facilitating more streamlined sales processes
Resources:
- Website: www.predictiveroi.com
- Continue learning about how to grow your agency by listening to this similar podcast with our guest, Shawndel Spader
- Visit our newly expanded Resource Library
- Join us in our free How to Fill Your Sales Pipeline Facebook Group
- Stephen’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/
- Order your free paperback or Kindle copy of our Book: Sell with Authority
- Build a Better Agency Summit 2024: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/babasummit/
- If you want to know how to grow your agency, then schedule a FREE 3-step action plan with us!
How to Grow Your Agency: Full Episode Transcript
Welcome to the Sell With Authority podcast presented by our friends at Conduit Digital. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI, and my team and I created this podcast specifically for you. So if you’re an agency owner looking to sell more of what you do so you can grow a thriving, profitable shop, they can weather the constant change.
This seems to be our world’s reality. Whether you’re in the right place. So today’s episode is going to be a little bit of a different twist. So I don’t have a guest joining me for an interview. And this isn’t a solocast. Instead, I’m going to share an episode with you that Drew McLellan, CEO of Agency Management Institute, and I, that Drew and I recorded as episode 354 of his Build a Better Agency podcast.
So we’re going to share that episode in its entirety here. Just a minute. So I decided on this twist for a few reasons that I would like to share with you before we dive into the episode. First, Drew and I talked about niche, but in a way that might be completely different than you expect. So he asked me a bunch of questions about how Predictive pivoted its niche several years ago and why we did it.
And candidly, he asked me to really peel back the layers and talk about how we had become complacent in our previous niche. And that was a really transparent several minutes in this episode. Let me tell you who. So second, my hope is that the lessons that both drew and I share about how best to build community and how best to add value to the community that you build.
I hope that that is helpful to you, especially if you attended day one of our March Intensive, because we really leaned into the community. I mean, it was our entire focus for that first day. So in third, you’re going to hear me point back to some of the highlights from just the keynote at the Build a Better Agency summit, a couple of years ago, where he talked about the importance of steering our agencies out of the safe harbor and the value of getting back into the storm.
The value of the challenge, that challenge that is, delivered by the choppy seas. And why taking those risks aren’t actually risks at all. I think you’re going to love this part of the interview, especially the additional context that Drew adds about what that keynote meant and what it meant, to be able to deliver that and share that with that amazing, awesome community that is the attendees who come to Build a Better Agency summit.
Okay, so I don’t want to give away the whole episode here, so you’ll have to listen. But I promise if you take it, apply what drew and I talk about in this episode, you’re going to be in a much better position to roar through 2024 and sell more of what you do. So here we go. Drew McLellan and yours truly on the Build a Better Agency podcast. Onward with gusto.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Episode Introduction
Everyone. All right. Let me tell you about this episode because I’m excited about it. So my coauthor in Sell With Authority, Stephen Woessner, owns an agency called Predictive ROI. And interestingly, he would think as the authors of this book, we have it all figured out. And, I mean, we wrote the book. We should be the authority on it.
And no doubt we are. But on the other hand, that doesn’t mean we don’t keep learning and we don’t keep making, adjustments and enhancing what we’ve learned since we wrote the book. And so Stephen’s agency has gone through this really interesting metamorphosis of shifting from one niche to another and serving a completely different audience and completely different ways.
And so I asked him to come on the show and talk, with transparency and candor, which he always does about the decisions they made, why they made them, how it’s working. Because I think a lot of you worry about picking a niche and then feeling like you can’t ever change your decision and you feel locked into something forever.
And, that just isn’t the case. And so I thought hearing the story directly from him, from one of the authors would be super helpful to you. And so, that’s what we’re going to do. So let’s get started.
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How to Grow Your Agency: The Resistance in Making a Pivot
Stephen, welcome back to the podcast. It’s been a while. It has been a while. And as always, thanks very much for the invitation.
You know, I always love being able to spend time with you and your community. So thank you very much. So, you know, when you and I were talking about you coming back on the show, one of the things we were talking about is, you know, in the book, in our book. So 30 we talk a lot about niching down and not trying to be everything to everybody and really understanding who your community and your audience is and then serving them well.
And, you know, your agency’s Predictive ROI was rocking that. I mean, we we certainly used your model as an example in the book, and we talked about how, you know, you had built a huge community around the Onward Nation podcast and that you guys were very niched and focused on in the beginning and being a podcast shop and being a podcast producer for clients and helping them create that cornerstone content that they needed to really kick off their position of authority.
But over the years, you’ve done some pivots. And so one of the things I want to talk about today in the show, because I think I get this resistance. I’m curious of you did too and people talk to you about the book and they admit what they’re afraid of doing, or that why they’re not following our advice in the book or why niching scares them, is that it’s the permanence of it for them that they feel, so obligated to make the right decision because it’s forever.
So do you get that as well? From your side? Yeah. And I think the resistance is absolutely similar. So not not only the permanency but also, because you and I have talked about this, this has happened in the workshops that you and I teach and that is the. Well, if I make this decision today, Thursday, does that mean that I need to go and meet with my team on Monday?
And by Tuesday at noon, we fire all of our clients and we start over? Yeah. The ones that aren’t in the net trade, right. Which of course is not what we’re talking about. That is a progression. And I think the way that you’ve answered that of it’s a two to a year, 2 to 3 year thing, right. Makes a lot of sense.
And the reality is the biggest pushback that that we get is yes, permanency. Yes. This needs to happen tomorrow, which of course it doesn’t. And that all of a sudden I’m going to step into scarcity instead of abundance. Right. And actually the reverse of all of those is actually the truth. Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of people think when they niche down, they have to say no to everybody.
And what it really does is it opens the door to say yes to more people who are in those narrow lanes.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Being Helpful to Clients and Earn Money
Okay. And that reminds me of something that you actually talked about at the March workshop in Chicago, because somebody asked you a question about that, like, okay, let’s say that I niche and then said, client comes along.
We can do good work for them. It’s aligned with where we can be helpful. Should we still take that back of money? You answered it. Great. So that would be helpful for this conversation if you wouldn’t mind sharing. Yeah. Well, and what they were saying is but they aren’t in my niche. Right. Like I’ve made this decision, I’ve chosen to only serve, you know, butchers.
And they’re a bank. So should I take the money? And of course, our answer is absolutely. You should take the money in the beginning. You’re if you can do great work for them and you can be of service and you’re early in the niche development, you know, just like always you would you would take clients that, you know, you can help and you can make money helping.
But there is a moment in time as you evolve into the niche and you drill down deeper where you actually say no to the bank because there are so many butchers coming to you that you don’t have to step out of the niche and what you find. The longer your niche, what you find is you’re so good at that work because you do it all the time, and you have such depth of knowledge that you actually can make more money.
And it’s so much easier to keep serving people in the niche. And it’s harder work for people who aren’t in the niche to take care of them. So, you know, they are with you. And I both often say it’s not a revolution. It’s an evolution, and you have to be patient with it. But all of that said, you know, you are well on your path to being very niche.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Deciding About Narrowing Your Niche
You know, you wrote a book about podcasting. You were serving a lot of clients in the podcast space. Your podcast was really well received, and I built quite a community around it and was doing all the things we talk about in the book in terms of having prospects be guests on the show and then getting to know them and creating a relationship which opened the door to sales opportunities.
All of those things were aligned beautifully with the book, and then you and your team decided that that wasn’t the right niche for you anymore. And so I think one of the things when people read our book or talk to us or attend our workshops, the sense that their decision is so heavy because it’s permanent, you know, it reminds me of the conversation I had with Kelsey when she was trying to decide what college to go to many moons ago, and I and and she was feeling such pressure to make the decision.
And I said, help me understand why this is creating so much anxiety for you. And she was like, well, because, you know, I’m going to be there forever and it’s going to influence my career. And I said, Kelsey, you can go your freshman year and decide it’s not for you and pick a different college. It’s not permanent. Right.
But I think sometimes which relieves a lot of the pressure because I think it’s the same, that same sense of this is this huge decision that is going to influence me for a really long time. And maybe not. And, and so when the one of the authors of the book who’s teaching all of this stuff decides, the niche that we picked isn’t the right niche, and I’m going to pivot.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Discussion About The Shift
I think that’s worthy of some conversation. So let’s talk a little bit about what led up to you shifting from being a podcast shop to doing what you’re doing now. So let’s talk about what you’re doing now. But there’s talk about the shift, right? And the path was an interesting one. And the cool thing about this conversation is that you were walking alongside us on that path, every step of the way.
And so I think it’s really valuable, incredibly valuable, because I don’t know that we would have had the courage to make that decision. And I say courage because I’ll share some numbers here in a second. But I say courage, because you were a great thinking partner, a great strategic partner for us, a confidant, somebody who we knew had our best interests at heart and also could be unbiased, even though we have this depth of relationship, obviously.
And, we’ve been in the Amish community for ten plus years. You even that you could separate yourself from any sort of, you know, personal connection and say, wait a minute, guys, and ask you and ask us some really difficult questions that were immensely valuable to the process. But as you know, we launched Onward Nation in 2015 candidly.
And I wrote about this, out of desperation, because we were looking for that next sort of business development thing. You helped us develop the Trojan Horses sales. Things were clicking along after a year or so, the podcast was on Onward Nation, and had listeners in 141 countries. To your point, we built a cool community. We had an email list of 28,000 people and on the surface, and looking at those numbers, we felt good about it.
But also, I got some personal satisfaction out of that. Of course. Right. And I’m not saying that that is a good thing, but I started feeling a little bit prideful about that. I don’t think I’m egocentric, but that maybe that was getting a little bit stroked too. And so we talked about this during our Q&A yesterday.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Focusing On Serving a Certain Group of People
Well, honestly, endorphins are released when you help other people, right? I mean, when you when you serve a community and you are helpful to clients and you’re helping them move the needle, I think one of the coolest parts about our work is that we do get to be helpful, and we do get to sort of change the trajectory for clients, which maybe feels egocentric, but really it’s just satisfaction and doing your work well and being a value to someone.
And we should feel good about that. So I don’t think you’re unique in, as you say, feeling prideful when it’s working and the business is going well and you’re serving clients well. But I also don’t think it’s really ego in a bad way. I think it’s ego in a great way.
It’s knowing that you’re doing good work for good people, which should feel good. Thank you for that. And even through that, we started noticing this clustering. Right. And we were having all these conversations in our quarterly leadership team meetings that you were leading for us. And, and we started seeing this clustering, just like the sweet spot client filter that you advise people on.
And it’s like, well, wait a minute. 30% of our clients or agencies, we’re spending a lot of time with agencies. Drew and I are now batting around this book, which is obviously designed for agencies. Right. Like, and it just made sense for and where this, where this started was actually instead of deciding, okay, we’re going to go all in with agencies, coaches, consultants, where this started was us getting really aligned with, from a service perspective with the book.
Right. You know, because we wrote the book, released the book, and then I came to you and I said, you know, even though this is our book, I don’t feel like Predictive ROI is 100% fully aligned with the book from a service delivery model. And we need to adjust that. And then through that process, you know, we had even deeper conversations about, well, what would it look like if we were fully aligned from a niche content perspective and so forth?
And then, in fact, I think you and I were walking through Epcot, one day and you said, help me understand the infamous question or the infamous introduction to the difficult question from drew. They helped me understand. And then we talked about onward. Right. And how the content was kind of aligned, but yet for as much as was aligned was also misaligned.
And then what would it look like if you had a podcast with a different name and it was more appropriately aligned and but even still is, you know, that was a two year evolution for us. Well, again, it’s working. So why rock the boat. And interestingly, you know, you’re in your original niche. We talk about a niche that doesn’t have to be an industry.
You don’t have to serve an audience. You can be an industry. It can be that you have a depth of expertise and an audience like millennial moms. It can be a service line delivery, like you’re a PPC shopper in your case, you’re a podcast shop. And so one of the I think one of the interesting parts about your pivot is that you went from the service line niche and recognized that you were attracting people who had alignment in their profession and made them move eventually over to serving a certain group of people.
But then you layered it with, I think, a twist on the service line with this whole idea of, look, we’re going to help. We’re going to help agencies, coaches and consultants Sell With Authority. And so you aligned both, as an industry and you can argue that agencies, coaches and consultants, there’s a thread that ties those together for sure.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Providing The Greatest Service as Possible
So you then shifted to an industry and then layered on top of it, sort of a methodology that you and I obviously believe in that was how you were going to serve that industry. And so you got super specific in two of the categories and said, you know, if people can check both boxes, then we can be super helpful to them.
So an interesting pivot there I think. Yeah. And I think you really hit the nail right on the head when you said super powerful, right. Because it is, you know, because we talked about this during our planning process. We’re certainly not there yet. But we are moving toward our sort of goal. And I don’t know if this goal will ever be accomplished because there’s always room for improvement.
But we want to be seen as the authority on how to become the authority. And if you’re going to do that, I think it’s even more interesting. And that takes a whole lot of helpfulness. And if you’re going to do that, that’s difficult to do when you’re spread out and your content is not as focused as it could and should be.
Right. So part of living that out and being of greatest service as possible, like you cited, the Edelman trust barometer, I think chapter one or chapter two of our book. And you talked about the two biggest things or two biggest attributes, if you will, that really develop trust and empathy with an audience.
According to Edelman and their worldwide study of surveyed 30,000 people on an annual basis, they’ve been doing it for 20 years. Is that industry expertise like you just talked about? Yeah. And second is, someone who looks like me. Not not really, of course, but someone who shares attributes, experiences, you know, those types of things.
And so when you put those two together, you know, that is pretty powerful when we think about a niche, because it gives you an opportunity to be helpful on a completely different level. Right. And earn and develop trust, empathy, rapport, all of that. And that just makes the business development process easier. But you can be of greater service, no doubt.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Taking A Risk of Making the Pivot
So talk a little bit about some of the conversations that you and Erik, your business partner, had as you were considering making this move. Because this was not a small pivot. This was a huge pivot, and it was walking away from a lot of things that were really working that had already gained you guys some notoriety and were already attracting good clients to you.
So, this wasn’t a move out of desperation. This was not what we’re doing now as a working decision. It was really, I’m ready to walk away from something that’s working, and then we can go from there. Well, and I have to give a lot of credit to Catherine Besler, who I know that you know really well because she was on our team for eight years, a member of our leadership team.
And, so this again, started several years ago, when I thought the niche was B2B professional services firms, which, of course, is not very narrow, but that’s what you would in our workshop if somebody said, hey, we’re going to be, if somebody is in B2B service, they’re our clients. You and I were both gone.
No, that is not a niche. That’s an entire world of industries, just like health care. So like health care. And so I thought that that would sort of pacify the conversations and to her credit, and just like you, you guys were dogs with a bone and not in a bad way. In a way of like.
Are you sure? Could it go a little bit? And so this is where that progression was. And again, I was resistant because I felt like, at that time, which was not the reality. But I thought at the time it was blowing up everything and starting over. Not the case. Well, in some ways it was blowing up everything and starting over.
You just were starting from a different starting point. So, that’s fair, right? You had walked all far away on the path. You had built a reputation. You guys have built a lot of systems and processes to serve people. The book had been written. So you had been on this journey, but at a certain point in time, what you decided was, rather than continuing to walk straight, I’m going to take a left here.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Stepping Into Abundance and Being Helpful in Another Level
Right. And so when. So there were just a lot of different decisions that were kind of, you know, going through those couple of years about your niche, about Erik, deservedly so, having a greater face in the content and or so how are we going to focus that content and make it better? Catherine, thinking about asking us difficult questions around B2B professional services firms, probably not that you and I were in the process of writing the book.
So all of that led to us kind of questioning, many different things with the essence of, okay, if we’re going to do that, that might be helpful to this group, but that’s going to leave out this other group. So we’re asking ourselves questions about that every Wednesday and then every quarter with you. Right. And even still, it took us a while to really kind of catch up with everybody else.
But yes, there that as you know, that led to some very, let’s call that dynamic conversations. I because I candidly, I made this more difficult than it needed to be. Why do you think that was? I think it was because at that time. So this was years ago. But at that time, I was still learning.
I still needed to do some research. I still needed to have some additional proof points. This wasn’t permanent, that this wasn’t something that the and this truly did actually give us an opportunity to step into abundance and truly be helpful on a whole nother level. And once I saw that, once I understood the data points, once I had the conversation with myself that it wasn’t like throwing this body of work out the door and now saying, well, that was meaningless, and now we’re starting over in this way.
No, actually, that body of work that you did for years and years actually helps you jump off this next door up to this next summit and the faster way. And so once I made that connection, I was like, oh, okay, this is not that big of a deal. Yeah. Well, and again, it was in a lot of ways really just, you know, talking going back to the B2B service and the podcast. In some ways, the podcast was a super narrow lane of this huge highway that you were on.
And the huge highway was anybody who’s in a B2B service industry. Right. But what you really did was you guys, you didn’t get off the road, really, but you just changed lanes. And what you did was you chose a more narrow road in terms of audience, but then you broadened the offerings. What you said was, you know what, everybody’s not a podcaster, but that doesn’t mean everybody but as our book talks about, everybody needs to have some sort of cornerstone content that begins to establish their expertise and their position of authority.
And so what you did was sort of flipped, right? You said, okay, rather than the service office offering being super narrow, we’re going to help our clients do podcasts and research and write a book and do the other, you know, video series courses, whatever that is. But rather than all B2B services now, what we’re recognizing is we’re most aligned with agencies, coaches and consultants because we’re like them and we can really connect with them.
So that’s the lane that we’re going to narrow down. Yes, 100%. And here again, what is the what is the axiom or whine of like when when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. Yeah. Right. So we had essentially told ourselves that, you know, unless you had a podcast, you could have been an authority, which of course is ridiculous.
Right. And but, you know, the hammer that we held in our hand was a platinum, gold and silver package that was all about, you know, creating a podcast for somebody. Right. And so we had dynamic conversations around that, too. Again, if we’re going to be helpful, we have to be fully aligned with the book.
And thankfully, we’ve gotten there. And then this other really interesting thing started happening certainly didn’t happen overnight.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Gaining Some Traction
But as we started getting traction and started really doubling down on how we could be helpful to this audience. So we call it the SEC. This really amazing thing happened. We started getting calls and we started having conversations with clients who wanted to sell through to that audience.
They were still aligned with the niche their audience happened to be. Our audience or their prospective audience happened to be our audience. And these and so on, we could be helpful to them. But they started saying, you know, we’re really interested in how well, you know, agencies. Yeah. And that’s who we can be of help to. Do you think that you could be helpful to us because you know that business so well?
And it was like, oh my gosh, yes, yes we can. Yeah. And that’s worked really well. Right. All right, I want to take a quick break. And when we come back I want to talk about the decisions you made. Like ending a popular and successful podcast and really, you know, beginning to shift your offering. So I want to talk about some of the decisions you made to realign with this new niche in a second.
But first, let’s take a quick break. Hey everybody, I promise I would not keep you for more than a minute, but I want to make sure you know that at AMI, one of the things that we offer our virtual peer group. So think of it as a vintage group or an EO group only everybody around the table, figuratively, in this case, is an agency owner.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Building a Huge Audience
So you have to be an agency owner to belong. The virtual peer groups meet every month for 90 minutes on zoom. This was not a Covid, creation. It was pre-COVID. You see the same people in your cohort every time. So you get to create relationships with them. And, it is facilitated by, and my staffer, Craig Barnes, who has owned his own agency for 25 or 30 years.
So plenty of great experience, both from Craig but also learning from each other. So if you have any interest in learning more about how that works, head over to the am I website and under memberships you will find the Virtual Peer Group and you can get all the information there. All right, okay. Let’s get back to the show.
All right I am back. and Stephen and I are talking about. So normally when Stephen and I are on the podcast together, we’re talking that we’re kind of co-teaching from the book or the workshop we’ve developed out of the book or things like that. But today, what we’re really talking about is the evolution of Stephen’s own agency, Predictive ROI, as he actually began to think about and sort of run his own agency’s decisions through the filters in the book and decided that they that they wanted didn’t really need to, but wanted to make a shift and narrow their audience.
And serve them in a variety of new ways. So. Okay, so you’re chugging along. You have clients that are granted, you already had 25 or 30% of your clients were already in the agency coaching consultant space, but the other 70 weren’t. Onward Nation was a huge success. You had built a huge audience.
You had, you know, hired how many episodes you had over a thousand episodes, right? 1032. Right? Yeah. So, you know, normally, you know, you and I talked to people about podcasting. We’re like, wow, you know, if you can get the first ten episodes in the can and you can still go, then odds are you’re going to go for a while.
So, you know, you had clearly done that a thousand plus episodes. That’s a lot of inventory and history and reputation to sort of step away from. So talk to us a little bit about the decisions that you and Erik made around how to shift the businesses focus and what you had to walk away from, what you had to change.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Finding A Strategic Seat at The Table
So let me let me connect this back first into, again, the word helpful, but then also retention. Yeah. And here’s what I mean by that, is, you know, we as agency owners are always talking about, gosh, I wish I had a strategic seat at the table. Yeah. Right, right, I want to advise not just sell stuff.
Right. Or worse yet, like Robert Rose and I were talking about the other day where you used to have a strategic seat and now you’re a vendor, you got kind of pushed out of that seat. Yeah, yeah. And so one of the things that we noticed, is again, the clustering, as I mentioned before the break, and following the sweet spot client filter, we saw about 30% of our clients were agencies.
And that made sense. We were hanging out with a lot of them and all of that, but also the other 70%. Candidly, we didn’t really have a strategic seat at the table. Right. The relationship kind of sounds sort of like a yucky word, but sort of transactional. Right? It was basically, you know, X amount of scope of work for X amount of dollars.
And we did that for and it was profitable work. Yes. But if we really but yet then the clients, the 30%, we actually did have a strategic seat at the table and they did ask us more things and they did invite us in for those conversations. And I was like, oh, okay. And so part of that was, okay.
Could we do more of that? Like, we really enjoyed doing that. And then we found, and then I found from a business development perspective and having a Trojan horse conversation, it just seemed like it was not seem like it was faster to develop rapport with that next agency because like the commonality and the things that you would talk about all of that, and it was just all of those things stacking together.
Finally, were data points that I could say, yeah, gosh, that that makes so much more sense. It’s just easier. It’s just, hey, there’s less friction. And I don’t mean friction in a bad way, but it’s just like everybody knows what it feels like when you walk into a session and a new business meeting or whatever. And it’s just like the chemistry hits right away.
Well, and the buyer is so much further down the buying cycle, they’ve already it’s really a chemistry check more than it is. Prove to me, you know, your stuff. Check. And you know, we talk about that in the book. We talk about that in the workshop, that the advantage of selling from a position of authority is that you eliminate a lot of the upfront sales process because of the credibility you’ve created, because of the rapport and relationship you’ve created with this audience, without you even knowing they’re out there because they’re consuming your content, that’s helpful to them. They’re learning from you.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Building a Solid Foundation
So they create an affinity, and an affection really for you and a respect that just moves things along. So it makes perfect sense that your sales meetings were sort of lubricated because people already felt like they knew you. They knew your stuff, they knew you knew your stuff. And so it’s really a matter of really a what’s it going to cost to have the money to do it.
But I’ve already decided if I’m going to do it with you. And so you just are much further down that conversation. And as you like to say, that’s a beautiful thing when that happens. Yeah. And so I think going back to your question about decisions, I do believe that Erik had already decided, the like if we were going to truly plant our flag of authority and we’re going to be aligned with the book from a service delivery model that, of course, it made sense that we’re going to also go all in and being helpful as we possibly can, or as helpful as we possibly can with that niche from an industry perspective.
And then some of the other filters that you mentioned, I believe that Catherine had already decided and we had very open conversations with you. I was the last one. Yeah. Right. To decide, because I was so wrapped up in the thousand and 32 episodes that I had recorded, and I hadn’t quite come to the realization yet of stepping further into the helpfulness around this niche, that does not diminish the work that our team has done.
That’s right. And so I know that it sounds simple. You and I laugh about this all the time, that sometimes it takes me a little bit longer to get to where everybody else is. And, so but once I had figured that out, patiently wait for you. But once that clicked for me, I’m like, okay. And then going back to the story with Kelsey that it isn’t this like permanency thing, nor does it diminish the work in the helpfulness and everything that that our team had done.
So then it was actually, in my mind, a relatively easy decision because let’s just get it up to everybody else. Right? But again, you know, you had built this amazing foundation and then built a business that sat on this really solid foundation. So, you know, it’s not like we were saying, hey, you always eat, you know, grilled cheese for lunch, right?
You changed peanut butter and jelly. It was you. You and your team had built something that was rock solid and was serving you well and was making good money. And so it is a little counterintuitive to go, you know what? I’m just going to not do that anymore. And I’m going to do something different. And again, you didn’t just launch a new podcast.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Think About How to Reposition Yourself
I want to talk about sort of what the new model looks like and the decisions you made around that. But you didn’t just launch a new podcast, which was, you know, basically starting over. I mean, you’d also develop some other ways to connect and build a community and create an audience that again, seemed like it was starting from scratch and not in some small ways.
So talk about once you once you got on board with the decision with everybody else, then you and your team very quickly went into the kind of production mode of creating a new foundation of content that was very much based on the book and really just takes elements out of the book and blows them up in terms of detail and how to and why to and talking a lot about, each aspect, an element of the book, but in ways that were very tutorial for people, it was was very much like, you had created this living course that was just going to be ongoing, you know, with the book as the foundation.
But obviously you’ve now escalated far beyond the content in the book. So talk a little bit about how you thought through how to reposition yourselves and what you could create for your cornerstone content that would be super helpful to the agency consultant and coach audience. Okay. And there were certainly a lot of decisions and progression along that.
Sure. Along that path. A couple of sort of guideposts, if you will, one, chapter ten that you wrote in the book, which is titled The New Business Blueprint. And that’s probably with the exception of chapter two, where you go through the ten truths chapter ten, in my opinion, is, oh, well, of course, it’s my favorite.
So if I say in my opinion, I guess that makes sense. But anyway, chapter ten is my favorite. And the reason being is because it truly is a blueprint, as the title says. And you walk through each of the stages macro, micro, nano existing and break all of those down and give examples. That’s where the deer analogy is.
And so literally using chapter ten as the initial blueprint as it’s intended and picking pieces out of that if we’re going to, if I’m an author of this book, then I need to make sure that when I step into a conversation with somebody, they say, well, can you show me how predictive does that?
Right. And if that makes me uncomfortable because we haven’t done that, then that needs to be fixed. Right. And so, literally we started teaching the book to our team and started having great conversations, as you know, around the book and wanted to get in total alignment so that we could be a great representation of living out the book.
And then also, we knew that if we did that, well, we’re going to be raising the bar of being helpful in a great example and all of that which, you know, certainly came to fruition. But also, I will say that the one trick pony chapter, which I think is chapter five, you and I had a lot of candid conversations around like, like back in 2018 as we’re sort of prepping for that workshop and then later it turned into a book.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Maximize The Value of Your Content
One night we had a really candid conversation about being a one trick pony. And honestly, at that point predicted was, yeah. So yeah, we had a book and yeah, we had the Onward podcast, but we weren’t maximizing the value of that content. Yeah, we were a one trick pony. And that was a tough pill for me to swallow.
And so knowing then if we’re going to get in alignment with this book, we were not going to be a one trick pony. We were going to be a true living, breathing example of doing it with excellence. Yeah. Do I think we can still make improvements? No doubt. But that has really opened our eyes to how we can be truly helpful with our audience.
And I think it really is doing that being helpful, no doubt. I mean, look at the community you’ve built. So you ended the Onward Nation podcast. You started this Sell With Authority podcast, but that was actually much further down the decision tree. You didn’t do that right away. What you really started with was creating, really teaching content, online.
I don’t want to say courses, but they were courses, but they were really video tutorials and you packaged all of that inside a vessel that people could become members of or enter into and get all kinds of content around how to sell with authority. Right. So that was really your first. That was your first step was to recognize you wanted this online library, if you will, of teaching content that people could consume at their own pace and depending on where they were at in their own journey in terms of developing content or developing a position of authority or working on a cornerstone or picking a niche, whatever it might be, you were creating content that in essence, brought all of that to life, right? Yeah.
And what was fascinating about that is the lessons we learned in doing that. So, when we built the first eight modules of that, you know, that we call the fast eight, that in and of itself was cool and then but to your point, those are video based.
Do I think the videos are helpful? Yes. But then going back to the book, it’s like, oh, wait a minute, we can take that video and we can slice and dice it in different ways. Or then all of a sudden we started doing like the Q and A’s and is like, well, wait a minute, we can take those and and slice and dice those, because I think part of part of the lessons out of soul was authority that you really championed was in every agency is doing this either consciously or
They’re out creating what could be cornerstone content. They’re delivering presentations, they’re delivering speech from stage, they’re writing a thing or whatever. But then that’s where it stops. Right? And I think that’s right. I think so through that creation process, we learned that it was like, well, it wasn’t just about the membership program that you talked about. But then it was like, well, wait a minute, we can take some snippets of content out of this and then share that publicly.
And that’s super helpful, too. And maybe at some point they might want to join, but we’ll see. But it was just another level of how we could take something, create it for the right audience, and then slice and dice it to other levels of being helpful. Well, I think and I’m curious if you think this is true too.
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How to Grow Your Agency: The Factor That Accelerated the Agency’s Growth
I think it was really the live Q & A that you started doing every week that was sort of the gasoline on the fire for you. So you had all the video content at that point. You hadn’t started the new podcast yet, so it was really driving people to video content. And then you started, you and Erik started doing a live Q & A every Wednesday, and you opened up a Facebook group for the folks who attended the Q & A and were sort of, if you will, members of the, you know, Predictive community in some way.
And I think it was really those live interactions. There was live teaching, which again, you then realize you could slice and dice and create video content and other things where you really began to create connections. And the reason I think that is what accelerated the growth of the agency.
But I also believe one of the things we have to think about when we create content is, at the end of the day, people still want to know and be able to communicate with the creator of the content. They really do want to understand who the authority is and feel like they have a connection to them and when they can actually have that connection in person, you know, even if it’s on zoom, but it’s at least live and and they know that you see them, you hear them, they can ask you a specific question.
I believe wholeheartedly in our Sell With Authority model, I absolutely do. But at a certain point in time, the thing that is the catalyst to the sale is them actually meeting and talking to the person they’ve been learning from. It’s you and I have talked about this a bunch, and I’ve seen it happen time and time again where somebody from across the country or in some instances around the world.
Yeah, fly to where you’re at, teach in a workshop and they walk in and they’re sort of on the periphery at first. And then they come up and introduce themselves to you, and they say, you’re exactly the person who I thought you would be. Yeah, but they want that reassurance, right? Right. Because every time they turned around on a dog walk or jog or the treadmill or whatever, they were being helpful in some way shape or form and some form of content.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Putting Your Efforts into Making the Community Better
Yeah. So I think you’re 100% right. I mean, we’ve seen this litmus test a bunch of times that you’re exactly the person that they thought and hoped you would be, because that isn’t always the case. Sometimes we meet somebody in person, we go to a thing or whatever, you know, like, oh, actually, they’re completely incongruent with who I thought they’re going to be.
That’s not the case with you. The other day, Erik said something to me. So big props to you. Erik said to me, I stepped out of a Q & A, and I just felt. No, we stepped out of right fit clients, back on June 22nd. And it just felt so good to be for 3.5 hours just sharing stuff and experiments.
Good bad. Otherwise it’s like this work just done. This blew up in our face. Please don’t do that. But you know do this and just, you know, just a full transparency of what works and doesn’t anyway. So it felt so good. And Erik and I, during our debrief said that felt really, really great. Yeah, it felt like the community was there and really felt like they were helpful to one another.
The chat transcript, we turned it into a word doc, turned into 27 pages of people helping one another. And it wasn’t just Erik and I answering questions. And it wasn’t just Erik, Megan, Hannah and I answering questions. They’re all answering each other’s questions. So we step out of this in the debrief, and Erik says to me, it felt like a great community.
It felt like we’re starting to do what Drew does and how Drew builds this community. And we’re just coming back from the summit, right? You know, that was three weeks before that. And he was in awe of and many of us are obviously of how you stand in front of this community, the Amish community, this packed community with amazing, awesome, wonderful, beautiful, incredibly smart agency owners.
And you talk about grace and you talk about generosity. You talk about giving. And he said, I felt some of that. And he goes, you know, there are worse people to model after, you know, Drew, and he’s like, this is like really, really feeling good. Yeah. And I think that’s what happens when you are really pouring yourself into helping a community be better.
Yeah, you do help them be better. And you then plant your flag of authority. But you don’t do that in such a way like, here I am the authority. You are doing that through being helpful. And it’s just amazing. Yeah. It’s gratifying to know that you are truly helping someone. And again, all of this is to say, and then you get rewarded with the opportunity to serve in the way that your business serves.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Making The Sales Process Easier for Everyone
Right. So it’s not all altruistic and it’s not all, you know, Kumbaya, build a community. Do you give some service? Absolutely. Do you give away some of your knowledge? Absolutely. But make no mistake about it, you’re doing it to earn the right to earn someone’s business and to make good money doing that. And so that’s the other part that honestly feels good is that it makes the sales process easier and actually pleasant because all, you know, people are just going, hey, tell me again how you can help me.
And you tell them and they go, great, I’d like to do that. I mean, that’s well, it really is often the entire sales process. Right. And I think one of the lessons that we have also started following, and again, being fully aligned with the book is something that you say all the time at the existing and nano levels of or stages of the sales funnel.
And that is you should do a thing, get everybody together, your prospects and your clients, where the only thing they have in common is you. Right. And that works even better when they’re from the same niche. Absolutely, absolutely. And right. And we’ve started seeing that where, you know, it’s like as opposed to, well, I run this type of firm and I run that type of firm like a professional services firm.
And they’re trying to find the commonality of why they’re together. Right. Instead, you set that aside, you bring the niche together and then and then truly, the thing that they have in common is you. And then when it ends up happening this really amazing community starts being formed. And you’re at the center of that. That’s a beautiful thing.
Right. And you know, I think agencies don’t think about building a community or building an audience. They think about sales as like all these 1 to 1 conversations. And I think that absolutely can work just fine. But I think you, your sales process and the connections around authority exponentially grow when you gather them together. And they can not only see how they’re learning, but they’re watching how other people learn.
And they’re not only learning from you, but they’re learning from each other. And they’re realizing because at the end of the day, I think every every business owner, regardless of what your niches at the end of the day, while they all think they are unique and you can’t understand anybody, it like you can understand them when they see that there are people who are struggling with the same things and that you can help and you’re and they’re watching you help other people, they’re going, oh, well, wait, I have that issue to my employees ask that question or this, our clients do this thing.
Oh, okay, I can learn from this too. And then they start sharing back and forth. They get something that they didn’t realize they wanted, which was a group of people who understand their world that they can commiserate with, celebrate with, communicate with, and you get the credit for bringing them together. And as you are teaching individually or as a group which every agency and every agency owner can do, everybody who’s listening to this podcast has something to teach your core audience, whoever that may be.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Killing A Lot of Birds with One Stone
Now, what you’re doing is, you are, instead of doing it one on one, which is fine. And we still do some of that too, instead of doing it one on one. You’re killing a lot of birds with one stone. You are able to serve a lot of people at once, and you get credit for the service even when they’re teaching each other.
Right. So because you brought them together, even when you’re not teaching at all, and you’re not the one being helpful when they’re being helped inside a live Q & A or at an event or whatever it may be, you and your agency get the credit, which is crazy, but lovely 100%. Yeah. And you said something from the stage at the first Build a Better Agency summit last year and it rang true.
Then it rang true this year. And, we’ve seen that in action. We’re like okay, that’s an ingredient we need to put into our recipe. And you started from the stage and said, hey everyone. Yes, I’m grateful. And all of that of everyone being here. And yes, the people on this.
And I hope that you learn from them. But here’s what I also hope is that you teach each other that you learn from one another in this really amazing, awesome community and that it was like putting gasoline on a fire. It was so combustible. And because everybody did that, everybody there was no there was no competitive harness.
There’s none of that. Everybody truly jumped in the trenches to be helpful with one another and to teach and share experiences, the good, the bad, the other and all of that. Yeah. And when we started seeing that come into our community, because we subscribe to that, we’re like, that makes total sense. That’s amazing. And when we see our community feeling that same thing then it’s not about giving somebody a capabilities presentation or Predictive ROI.
They just know we get them. And that’s a beautiful thing. Yeah, yeah, it really is. We could talk about this for another hour, I think because I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface. So, we’ll have to come back and maybe we’ll do a deeper dive into the mechanics of what you did and how you did it, because I think that would be helpful because, again, you’re an agency, and I think a lot of people are like, well, agencies don’t do Q & A’s or agencies don’t do half day teaching events, or agencies don’t create video tutorials.
And I think all of that is a misnomer. But the takeaway I think from today’s episode is it’s okay if the niche you picked isn’t the niche forever. Now, I’m not saying you should change every month or every year. What I’m saying is that when you define a niche, you don’t have to go into it with the fear that you have no ability to change.
But again, changing was painful. Changing was expensive. Changing took you time. It was all the all for the right reasons. But it wasn’t something I believe that you would do wholesale over and over again. Right? Right. And 100%, this just occurred to me, as you’re saying, this is where wrapping up and coming in for a landing.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Have The Courage to Find the Next Best Thing
I think this really ties into this. This conversation hooks into what you shared from stage at summit this last time in your keynote, and that is we’re at a time that we’re about to step into this amazing renaissance and that, yes, we did need to seek the shelter of the safe harbor because of all the things that have happened over the last several years.
But now it’s time to actually go back out into the storm. The rough water, whatever it is to find that next thing. Yeah. And so that gave a lot of courage to the people in the room and in niching down for some people does require courage. It did for me. Yeah. And that what you shared at the summit I think gave everyone in that room courage.
And that was a really powerful thing. And so as we’re thinking about this decision that is that for us it was the yeah, we had kind of a safe harbor and that we knew that if we’re going to continue this next level of growth for Predictive, we needed to get back out into the quasi rough waters.
But making different decisions and all of that and changing the business. Sometimes that’s not easy. And we did that. And now we can see that the business is on a different path and trajectory. And you for that. Right. But, that keynote that you shared, was so heartfelt and really super appropriate for this conversation. I think.
Yeah, it all does sort of connect together for sure. So it’s okay not for your niche not to be permanent. It’s okay to think about different ways to communicate and teach and be helpful. And by building a community and actually letting your prospects and your clients come together in some way, you can speed up the process of sales because they feel they feel beholden to you, that you have exposed them to these other people that they can learn from, not just you.
And I think those are some of the big takeaways from today. So, I mean, as always, it’s great to have you on the show. It’s fun to watch you evolve your model and obviously be a part of it. I know I’ve been a guest on a bunch of the Q & A’s and on the podcast and other things, so it’s fun to be a part of you and Erik and your team really doubling down on sort of this new vision of what Predictive can be for clients and how you can grow your business and all of it’s working.
I mean, it’s playing out exactly the way we would have predicted it played out. Yeah, there have been some misses and we would have predicted that there were going to be misses for sure, as none of us get it right all the time. But we get it right most of the time. And the good thing is, our audience also understands we’re human and recognizes that, you know, we’re not going to hit a home run every time.
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How to Grow Your Agency: Closing Remarks
But we’re so valuable most of the time. There’s a lot of grace around that. So, this, I think hopefully this inspired folks to think a little differently about how to apply the content of the book, and, and think about it. So thanks for thanks for being on the show again. Nobody can tell this, but we got up at the butt crack of dawn to record this.
So thank you for getting up early and doing this with me, and no less painful for you. And say, like, I know this is normal. You’re, never mind. I’m not thanking you for that. You’re up anyway. But thanks for thanks for being back on the show. And thanks for being transparent about the decisions you made and the paths you took and the paths you almost took, because I think that I think it helps people.
I think it’s a living example of, you know, here are the two guys that wrote the book and they didn’t get it all right either. Right. And so they’re still learning from their own content and their own experiences, which is a good reminder to everybody that this is all a work in progress. And we’re learning together and we get smarter together.
And fortunately we get it right most of the time, but not always. Amen to that. Thank you again for the invitation. It’s always a pleasure to be here with you. And, so thank you very much. It was great. Okay, everyone, I hope you found that helpful. And you have a bunch of new ideas that you can take and apply to move your agency onward to the next level because you’re selling more of what you do.
This episode goes live, the Build a Better Agency summit will be just around the corner. So if you’ve not yet registered, go to agencymanagementinstitute.com/babasummit. So BABA summit that slash BABA summit. And if you use the code pro I like Predictive ROI. So PROI 200 you’ll save $200 on your registration. So thanks again for being here.
We all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day, and I am grateful that you decided to share some of your time with me today. Until next week onward with gusto.
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The Sell with Authority Podcast is for agency owners, business coaches, and strategic consultants who are looking to grow a thriving, profitable business that can weather the constant change that seems to be our world’s reality.