Jeremy Ellens
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My first post is inspired by @Sean Marshall's great article on how he built his agency.
In 2015, I lost three clients worth 35% of our monthly revenue and was had two of them threaten to sue me.
Since then, we went on to close 189 clients in just two years and grew our revenue to $720,000/year.
It all began in 2012 when I started a web development agency with my business partner Dornubari in college.
We made a lot of mistakes and we learned what we DIDN'T want our business model to be...
Step 1: Choosing Your Niche
When we first started our agency we relied on referrals for the majority of our business, which meant we would take almost any type of work we could get.
This resulted in varied results for our clients, difficulty in setting up training etc.
We niched our agency services down to helping people build their email list by using a quiz.
Additionally, we niched our industry down to the health vertical.
This allowed us to get predictable and repeatable results for hundreds of clients.
Action Step: Niche down your services and your industry.
Step 2: Generating Leads
I mentioned we were reliant on referrals and networking for a long time, which resulted in being unable to get the types of clients we wanted and unpredictability in our business.
So what we did next was create a unique offer for our clients.
We told them we were looking to build case studies for our agency and help them build their email list by 100k people in a year with a quiz. We would charge a reduced fee in exchange for the case study.
Here are the ways we went out to generate leads and promote our offer that led to closing 189 clients in two years:
Step 3: Dial and Email Your Leads
Once we started getting leads from Facebook and our website, we called and emailed every single person that gave us their info.
A mentor told us to do this even though we were afraid of asking for a phone number. It helped a lot!
Action Step: Follow up with every lead as soon as possible.
Step 4: The Sales Script to Close Your Leads
Once we started getting people responding to our offer, they would schedule a call with us to discuss it.
I used Jordan Belfort's Straight Line Seling program to develop a sales script that we could tweak and optimize to close leads consistently.
Action Step: Learn how to sell by taking courses and reading books online. A sales script is a MUST for scaling your agency.
Step 5: Measuring and Managing Your Salespeople
Once you get things working and you can scale your leads through cold outreach, Facebook ads, etc. you will need to hire sales people to clone yourself.
I was afraid to hire this at first but it's not really that big of a deal.
Action Step: Learn how to sell first yourself. Then hire salespeople to scale what you created.
Step 6: Kickoff the Client
Once you close your new client, you need to have a sytematized onboarding process.
We used a Basecamp template to kickoff clients. We also asked for them to fill out some sheets to prepare for their first call.
On their phone call we would create a quiz for them. We would write half of it on the call and send the rest to be approved within a couple days.
Once approved we would set up the Facebook ads and turn on their campaign.
Action Step: Think through and systematize your kickoff process.
Step 7: Ongoing Ad Management
Once their campaign was live, we would provide weekly reporting on their lead costs and communicate whether we should scale up ad campaigns or not and make adjustments based on feedback.
Action Step: Communicate weekly with your clients on their results.
Step 10: Scaling Your Agency by Hiring Ads Managers and Account Managers
Once you get the process down, hire ad managers and account managers to manage more and more clients at once.
We were able to grow to about 60 managed clients at one time.
Action Step: Document your process and create KPIs so you can scale your operations.
If you're interested in reading more of our story, here's the full 17k word marketing agency training guide if you would like all the details (outreach copy, sales scripts, etc.)
We ended up closing our agency down to focus full time on our software LeadQuizzes. That means we gave away literally all of our secrets to support other agencies!
Please respond with questions here so I can answer or give me feedback on what you would have done differently
In 2015, I lost three clients worth 35% of our monthly revenue and was had two of them threaten to sue me.
Since then, we went on to close 189 clients in just two years and grew our revenue to $720,000/year.
It all began in 2012 when I started a web development agency with my business partner Dornubari in college.
We made a lot of mistakes and we learned what we DIDN'T want our business model to be...
- Reliant on referrals and networking for lead generation.
- Reliant on project-based work where we had huge peaks and valley in our revenue that led to unpredictability in cash flow and therefor the inability to hire and create a great team.
- Reliant on a few major customers for revenue, meaning if we lost one or more, it had a major impact on our business.
- Built around custom work, meaning it was difficult to train and scale our team or establish proper KPI's.
Step 1: Choosing Your Niche
When we first started our agency we relied on referrals for the majority of our business, which meant we would take almost any type of work we could get.
This resulted in varied results for our clients, difficulty in setting up training etc.
We niched our agency services down to helping people build their email list by using a quiz.
Additionally, we niched our industry down to the health vertical.
This allowed us to get predictable and repeatable results for hundreds of clients.
Action Step: Niche down your services and your industry.
Step 2: Generating Leads
I mentioned we were reliant on referrals and networking for a long time, which resulted in being unable to get the types of clients we wanted and unpredictability in our business.
So what we did next was create a unique offer for our clients.
We told them we were looking to build case studies for our agency and help them build their email list by 100k people in a year with a quiz. We would charge a reduced fee in exchange for the case study.
Here are the ways we went out to generate leads and promote our offer that led to closing 189 clients in two years:
- Mailed our email list
- Ask for referrals
- Cold outreach
- Facebook advertising
- Website leads
Step 3: Dial and Email Your Leads
Once we started getting leads from Facebook and our website, we called and emailed every single person that gave us their info.
A mentor told us to do this even though we were afraid of asking for a phone number. It helped a lot!
Action Step: Follow up with every lead as soon as possible.
Step 4: The Sales Script to Close Your Leads
Once we started getting people responding to our offer, they would schedule a call with us to discuss it.
I used Jordan Belfort's Straight Line Seling program to develop a sales script that we could tweak and optimize to close leads consistently.
Action Step: Learn how to sell by taking courses and reading books online. A sales script is a MUST for scaling your agency.
Step 5: Measuring and Managing Your Salespeople
Once you get things working and you can scale your leads through cold outreach, Facebook ads, etc. you will need to hire sales people to clone yourself.
I was afraid to hire this at first but it's not really that big of a deal.
Action Step: Learn how to sell first yourself. Then hire salespeople to scale what you created.
Step 6: Kickoff the Client
Once you close your new client, you need to have a sytematized onboarding process.
We used a Basecamp template to kickoff clients. We also asked for them to fill out some sheets to prepare for their first call.
On their phone call we would create a quiz for them. We would write half of it on the call and send the rest to be approved within a couple days.
Once approved we would set up the Facebook ads and turn on their campaign.
Action Step: Think through and systematize your kickoff process.
Step 7: Ongoing Ad Management
Once their campaign was live, we would provide weekly reporting on their lead costs and communicate whether we should scale up ad campaigns or not and make adjustments based on feedback.
Action Step: Communicate weekly with your clients on their results.
Step 10: Scaling Your Agency by Hiring Ads Managers and Account Managers
Once you get the process down, hire ad managers and account managers to manage more and more clients at once.
We were able to grow to about 60 managed clients at one time.
Action Step: Document your process and create KPIs so you can scale your operations.
If you're interested in reading more of our story, here's the full 17k word marketing agency training guide if you would like all the details (outreach copy, sales scripts, etc.)
We ended up closing our agency down to focus full time on our software LeadQuizzes. That means we gave away literally all of our secrets to support other agencies!
Please respond with questions here so I can answer or give me feedback on what you would have done differently
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