Business Lessons: 15 Hard Lessons Learned From Building Two 7 Figure Companies

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yeah I spit all over myself today I want to share with you 15 lessons I’ve learned from building to multi-million dollar digital marketing agencies wow that’s a mouthful but I’ve done it twice now my first one was single-grained we grew it to about three million in revenue and about thirty employees when I was 23 when I first started it so I knew nothing about business or at least when I look back I look back at how many dumb things I did but probably a couple things right since it grew that to that size now I’m running web profits a an agency that grew to seven figures really really quickly under a year and we’re growing pretty rapidly but essentially with what profits we did things right we built the processes properly and essentially didn’t make the same mistakes we did the first time around the first time around I was kind of learning on the fly a second time around it’s funny because I know exactly what to do I have very little stress levels and essentially it’s my restart of doing things right and from our growth so far it’s working it’s working quite well so let’s jump into it the first lesson I learned was to do save ratio this means is how many things you do versus how much things you say wonder one is ideal two-to-one even better but essentially most people talk a lot it but they don’t actually do just as a the founder as an entrepreneur as a marketer this is something to make it to keep an eye on up it is something you have to be honest with yourself you don’t have to share it I won’t share my number it’s definitely not one-to-one but essentially this is to make sure you’re actually as good as you say you are and oftentimes is easy to kind of get away and get carried away so just make make it make sure you you keep an eye on this and to keep your ratios in check number two is to build an audience and build it early there’s nothing bad that can happen if you build an audio people actually listen if you bility early people will actually listen to you you can start you have might not have anything to monetize with or you might not have anything of note that’s okay providing value and helping people and growing your audience your email list your fan base whatever it may be can always be helpful I wish I could go back ten years and build an audience it would definitely be a lot larger one of the things I learn with web profits is I jumped in we got clients immediately all I had to do is say hey guys I’m post on LinkedIn change my status and actually just tweet a couple things all social media and say hey I’m doing consulting again here’s my new agency let me know if you need help I got a few clients right out the gate just using that we got two seven figures really really quickly because our deal flows our lead flow is really really good we’re about 175 leads we don’t do any real advertising all we do is remarketing we create a lot of content and I’ve talked a lot about my 2017 and 16 marketing calendar which you can see in the show notes and in the video notes below but essentially build an audience early it could only help you do getting started focus on that now to think about getting started do it now – all right the next thing is to help people even if they can’t help you or afford to pay for your services I make it a point to try to help as many people as I can whether the individual marketers who knows it may be a potential client they may be a great employee or a higher in the future or there may be a lifelong friend I’ve had all three of those experiences just by helping people or starting the conversation by helping people even when it comes to potential clients try to provide value in our sales process we don’t really sell we try to understand what the heck the client is doing right now what they want and then if we can help them we provide help or we let them know this is what we can help we’re being super honest that way we have the right clients bit minimizes churn and all of that things that happens when you oversell but essentially even if we don’t help plans we try to walk or recommend them through to a couple things they could do themselves maybe a few people they can hire individually a lot of times people just don’t have enough of a budget to hire us or they shouldn’t be doing marketing yet or maybe they need an in-house person either way we give them that recommendation we even point them through a few places they can find those people and then go from there all right number four is focus on Co marketing if you just start enough or you or have been around for a while but you want to boost your brand is the best way to do is using Co marketing what I mean by this is essentially partnering up with other other marketers or other brands and doing something together I’ve done a lot of work with the hub set that’s not by accident while HubSpot because they sell to my my ideal customer I’ve done a lot of work in the referral marketing space why does that make sense because if you have enough money to spend to devote to referral marketing even pay for the software alone you probably have enough budget to hire marketing agency so another Avenue essentially to expand your audience and when you co market somebody you can anchor based off what their brand is like or how big their branded as well as two entities promoting one piece of content or one thing together just has more horsepower gets you further along alright number five is transparency I find myself to be very very transparent these days because I have nothing to hide to a client to an to our employees to myself to my viewers my fans my audience whatever I’m an open book I try to be that way I’ve done different things in the past differently but I found that just being open and honest is generally the best approach it minimizes the amount of friction points bad conversations bad clients and whatnot speaking of which my next point the next lesson I learned was don’t take on bad client if it feels wrong early on even in this company even in this email conversation it’s likely going to get really bad or could get really bad or even horrible throughout the process or months and years working with them thing by this way you’re getting in an order of an early email or early call you’re likely getting get very frustrated early on and this is a team effort right remember like if you do marketing right at the right time you get done there’s still a chance it works right you still in every opportunity everything to go well and hostility or bad clients can can lead you to do a lot of bad things first of all if you lead to high churn bad debt meaning people don’t pay their bills people having a bad experience with you and that pate that hurts you in the long run and lastly you never want to not love what you’re doing because frankly life’s too short and you need to make sure your team yourself or having a lot of fun doing so the next thing is process invest into building and creating a process what I do at web profits and I’ve done well at my last agency is actually build have the person I trained to do something so I do things myself I poke I prod I’m always the one trying to figure out new ways to do things sometimes I bring in my team but oftentimes I bring in the team as soon as I figured it out I explained it to them and the first thing I have them do is do it once and then create a process if it works having creative process based off what they did this way they can teach the next person and this also helps them get smarter at what they’re doing it forces them to write something down so they did it once that could be locked but if they write it down and they actually can write it down to be coherent enough for someone else to learn it or figure out what they’re talking about that means they know it well enough to do it again and so it’s a two-way street it helps you streamline your business because there’s a lot of redundant beings there’s a lot of stuff work in marketing and that’s not going to change as an agency you need to scale as a business owner in your scale and you need to keep your cost down and process process process helps you do that all right remember eight it sacrifice the first couple years of your business your profit to build a great team a great team and your first three to five hires is the most important thing for some people that may be your whole team some agencies actually most agencies don’t ever grow that big so three to five people that’s all you end up getting to and that’s okay just make sure they’re great people do you want to be around three to five people that you don’t love like you don’t like you want to be able to hang out with them like I always try to look for traits in my team or my staff or people I’m working with or hiring that are positive things I look up to them and if you hire people that are always bringing in one little thing that’s better than what you have currently you’re making your team smarter not worse and lastly when you hire a great team you’re able to create a process you’re able to do the things I mentioned above much much easier and there’s a lot less friction okay because like I said building a business marketing businesses is already hard enough you need the things to work and that’s where the next thing is important I learned early on culture is so important I used to think like culture you don’t really need that but I learned through a few bad hires and people who have had to unfortunately let go that if they don’t fit the culture if they have the wrong attitude generally things don’t work out and it’s not that they can’t do their job it’s frankly that they don’t help lift up they don’t help grow they don’t have that same mentality you do and you end up fighting on things that just don’t make quite sense all right the next thing is everything dies in marketing at some point so never stop learning and growing I personally made this mistake in 2012 and 13 when single-grained got through pretty large-sized I was frankly in over my head trying to do the best job I can with our growing lead to the time we have a thousand leads coming in a month that’s a lot to handle my business partner was doing that I was helping him on that front taking on new clients hiring growing I was serving you know as a CEO but I was also the operator and so the strategist and so when I got dull the agency got dull and so it was a really tough thing so getting back onto that it took a while fast-forward four years I’m sharper than ever I’m always doing new things testing poking pushing my own limits whether it’s professionally or even personally to never stop growing and learning things at the end of the day everything dies at scale all right number 11 build a network of smart people one of the things I’ve done in the last three years right is actually connect with really smart people in my quote unquote slowly backs of people and I know just a lot of people a lot of smart people that can help me solve problems people that elevate my level of thinking the way I the way I function that make me a better person I hang out with them a lot on slack I also try to connect with them when I’m traveling at conferences and whatnot one of the biggest things value I get from speaking at conferences is actually connecting with other speakers they teach me something new I’ve made a lot of fun awesome people who have pushed help me push my limits they gave me feedback on my top it helped me kind of unlock doors I could previously not get into and so these network of smart people very very awesome I’m writing a blog post about it stay tuned for that on how to build your network using dinners that’s right pretty much did when I traveled around for conferences and work-related things even personal events I pretty much made it a point to connect with locals in that area and had dinner with them even bought them dinner just to build rapport and connections did that a few dozen times and connect with hundreds of people worked really really well and and I couldn’t I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for all the people I’ve been able to work with alright the next thing is to get out of your comfort zone look life is full of comfort and discomfort as a kid I hated leaving my veggies I still hate veggies but I still try to get out of my comfort zone a few years ago public speaking was something I was scared of datas about a year and a half ago these you recording YouTube videos and videos like this took me hours to create just one this is my first take and this will probably be my last getting at your comfort zone just means it’s something you’re scared to death of or not comfortable with that you can master imagine every few years you just master something you suck at how smart how good are going to be at that next thing and if it wasn’t for that one thing I wouldn’t be here where I am today all right the next thing is spend a day or two with your client not every day not every week but once a month once a quarter get inside your clients head to know what it’s really like or what actually happens when you give you recommendations on a fancy spreadsheet or on a Google Doc or dot PDF PowerPoint whatever you do what happens next do they implement it what do they think what are the hurdles what happens on their side of the table it’s hard I’ve been on both sides as on in one part of my career I’ve been a you know head of marketing and how to add software companies and and whatnot on the other half I’ve been an agency side so I have a good understanding of what happens and given that I have my own businesses on the software side now I know a lot of real life circumstances that just can’t happen when someone says oh can you install this Facebook pixel here or can you do this and continue this or we should try this yeah sure but by trying this it’s going to take you away from this and that and the other so I feel like as an agency owner you often get really really separated from that as time goes on because you’re not talking to clients so make sure you live inside their shoes at least for a bit all right the next thing is to build relationship with your clients and your employees this is really really critical because things take a while to work cause like content marketing marketing it takes time you’ll start to see results and you might start to see positive momentum early on but it takes six nine twelve months to actually start seeing really good or a lot and work during that time you want to you want to have a client that’s confident in you you want your team to know exactly what’s going on either side it’s great to work with people you like and people that trust you if you’re invested building relationship with your clients it’s going to cause less questions less frustration things getting done faster and frankly it’s fun joking around and people you know I forgot who said this but people you’ll fire your friends that easily think twice if you build a relationship it actually reduces churn in case you’re looking for a financial benefit to actually building relationships speaking of financial let me leave you with one last lesson hire accountant a CFO an outsourced CFO and a bookkeeper do this early on get this off your plate because this is something you need to know is taken care of it’s critical to your business that you get paid on time that people follow up you file your taxes on time that you file the right then you write off the right things you can write off a lot more than you think all the stuff you shouldn’t as a agency owner entrepreneur you don’t need a master you need to hire people who are really good at this you can hire an outsourced CFO really really easily just make sure they’re certified public accountant a CPA again this all could be the same person I’ve learned this from both the second the second time when we when we want to do my agency web profits we did this early on and build got paid earlier than on time we never had any cash flow issues and we knew exactly the financial planning for the year and the year or two ahead of what’s happening so we can budget accordingly we’re just flying by the seat of our pants or whatever that phrase is alright guys hopefully these lessons that help you if you have any questions leave a comment below and good luck building your agencies [Music]