As an agency owner you’re probably used to getting help. You’ve got a handful of contractors ready to call and or maybe you keep a handful of them busy each and every month…But…You pay them more than you pay yourselfManaging them is complicated Scope of work is always changing so you’re always hunting for the right helpThe list can go on…The reality is that most agency owners and service providers I know have far too many contractors or team members for how much revenue they are pulling in. And, as the owner, they are still hardly making any money. All that headache and for what?The fastest way to optimize your team is to optimize what you offer. We’ve focused on the 5 ones mentality for a while. One avatarOne solutionOne conversion vehicleOne traffic sourceOne yearIf you do follow that plan you’ll catapult your business forward. But what’s better, is by focusing on the “one solution” – you get really clear on WHO you actually need on your team to remove yourself from the day-to-dayWHAT systems need to be installed to make them rockstars and handle more of the load. Whether you’re productizing your service or adding a coaching/consulting model to your agency, you can really generate a lot of revenue with a lean and mean team. I know many high 6 and 7 figure business owners with a small but mighty team. I’m talking 3-5 core people.In this video I break down the key roles you need to run a successful and profitable online coaching/consulting business.
Transcript / MP3
If you run a coaching or consulting business and or you’re adding that to your digital agency like we teach our clients, you might at some point host an in person workshop as a part of our 12 month coaching program. We have our clients come into town three to four times a year for a two day intensive and we actually have our clients at the time of recording this coming in in just less than a month. … And I want to talk through high level how I plan and architect those two days that we’re going to spend together in person. So let’s dive in a little behind the scenes thinking through how we’re going to plan this event.three years, my agency built funnels and automation systems for the biggest names in marketing today since then have transformed that agency into a hyper profitable training and consulting business. While everyone is out there talking about scale, like it’s some sort of destination, we’ll be asking the real question, how do you transform your business into a more scalable model using the knowledge, skills and expertise that you already have? This podcast is here to give you the answer, join me and follow along as I learn, apply and share the strategies I’m using to build my multimillion dollar business. My name is Greg Hickman and welcome to scale upWelcome back guys. If you’re new to this podcast or channel, my name is Greg Hickmanand we basically help digital agencies add on coaching and consulting arms to their business so they can increase their profitability, increased their freedom, and really start to streamline and systemize their business. Now as a part of all of that, we have clients that eventually start bringing their own clients into town. Maybe it’s, maybe it’s on a retreat, maybe it’s actually in their own city where their headquarters is, but they end up hosting events just like we do. And so we have our clients come into town a couple of times a year, actually three to four for two days of workshopping. And I want to kind of take you through a high level of how I plan and map out what happens during those two days. And I’ll want to give a quick shout out to one of my former coaches talkie Moore from million dollar coach.He kinda taught me this architecture. It will probably make tons of sense to you as well. But let’s, let’s jump in. I’m going to kind of draw on the iPad here. So if you’re, if you are just listening, I’ll kind of talk through, but let’s, uh, let’s jump through onto the iPad. So here we go. For us it’s a two day intensive. So what I typically like to start off with is I quickly sketch out a box and all make two columns. So I have two columns. Obviously the left column is day one, the right column is day two. Then I’ll basically slashed that whole box right in half because that’s our lunch break. Then I’ll slash the morning into two boxes as well and the afternoon into two boxes as well because we’ll want to take a break. Now as you start delivering your own workshop over and over and over again, you’ll probably make some subtle tweaks to how you do your agenda.But this is a simple framework for how to get started doing an event. Because when you go to create your first event, you might be really overwhelmed or scared because you’re going to think that there’s so much content that needs to be taught. And in reality there is not, there’s not a ton of time to [inaudible] to teach tons of stuff, especially if you want to have your workshop primarily focused around some sort of implementation. So we’re breaking it down into mini chunks so that you kind of understand how you need to structure each day. So like I said, I’m going to quickly kind of grab a gray marker here and you know we have our gray lunch break right here. We have our morning break right here, an afternoon break. So I’ll just kind of [inaudible] break that down. Let me just quickly write out. And now typically I don’t remember the exact times we do it, but depending upon when you start in the morning will dictate when you take your first break. But a real simple kind of timing game plan for planning these events is consider each block 90 minutes.So if we look at each of these blocks as 90 minutes, we have eight 90 minute blocks and that means we need to fill eight 90 minute sessions with some sort of content exercises, et cetera. And what typically we’ll do is reverse engineer. So in the beginning, you know, we have a welcome session because depending upon what you’re doing, you’re probably going to have some sort of, or at least I recommend having some sort of theme when you get started for the premise of the event. Now what I’ve learned was day one is more teaching. Day two is more implementing, but depending upon your clients that might evolve for you over time. So you could always kind of theme one as kind of teach. And then the second day is do that’s totally fine. But in your first 90 minutes, you’re obviously going to welcome people.We want to cover things, um, like wins and lessons learned. And we want to kind of set up the next two days. We want to kind of lead them into here’s what we’re going to be covering over the course of next two days. And if there’s some sort of overarching content or framework or principles that they need to know that are going to apply to the next two days, this is where we teach that. Okay. Now again, reverse engineering, we know that we’re going to have to say goodbye on the last day. And what we do is in our last session, we always plan the next 90 days. We do, we operate in 90 day sprints. So we have a process that we take our clients through, um, that we’ve learned from our coaches and then evolved and adapted to our own business and our clients. And we basically work with them to customize their own 90 day game plan so that when they leave our event, they have clear action items.They know what milestones they’re aiming for, they have a specific, you know, um, revenue goals. They have specific, you know, freedom goals, all of that sort of stuff. And they have it boiled down into typically three to five projects or initiatives and they’re laid out by, by week. So they know each and every week of the 12 weeks of the next 90 days. Here’s sort of what the mini milestone is to make sure that I’m going to hit my bigger goals for the end of the 90 days. So at the end of the last session, the last 90 minute session, you’re probably going to do some sort of planning, um, have them identify what their action items are for when they go home because everyone leaves events on a super high and most events that I’ve personally been to, you go home and you know, if it’s done on a Friday, we typically do ours on Thursdays and Fridays you end up having this situation where, um, people won’t kind of digest what just happened and then they go into the following week and they never really documented what they’re supposed to do now from this event.So we want to make sure they do that before they leave. And that’s why we do it in the last session. So that being said, now we only have six 90 minute sessions to plan, right? So we’ve planned, we’ve essentially documented and aligned two of our 90 minute sessions and now we only have six 90 minute sessions. Now a couple of things that we do is, uh, at least in one of these sessions, we do a fire sale. We call it a fireside chat. These are our lessons learned over the last 90 days sprint things that we’ve seen in our business and, or our client’s business that we wanted to share to point out to our high level clients to make sure that they’re either doing more of it or doing less of it. And usually this comes from tests and experiments that we’re either running on ourselves and or with other clients before we go and share that to the public.So this is a cool session where it’s, Hey, here are 10 things that we learned in the last 90 days that are going to be applicable to you. Um, again, depending upon how you structure yours, there might be a section for hot seats. Uh, you might do two of those. But what the great thing is, is you actually plan out each and every piece of content by the 90 minute block. Now, if you’re one of our clients, you’ll be, you’ll have developed what we call the signature service. This is your methodology and when you have that plug in plane, your methodology into any one of these blocks becomes literally that plug and play. So you’ll look at your clients and say, Hey, where do my clients need help the most right now? What area of my signature service do I need to dive deeper into?And that might be a training and or an implementation, an implementation session that you focus on during that 90 minute block. So for example, let’s say our clients were coming into town and we had just taught them about our sales process. Well we might have them come in and during an implementation session actually implement the sales system in their business where there may be recording some videos or they’re actually writing some email copy, installing it into their automation. It could be like a workshop session or we could take them through our sales methodology or we can teach them our content creation process and show them how they, how to do it, and then have them go create some of that content. We typically look at each one of these blocks of found. Each one of these blocks you break into smaller chunks, so if it’s 90 minutes you could break it into three 30 minute chunks where you can teach something.Then you have them do it and then you recap and have the group share their takeaways and now that fills up. So now really you only have like 30 minutes of teaching and you just got to create some exercises for people. I’ve always found that the more doing you can do during these workshops, the better. So that actually means less teaching, which helps you in planning because you don’t have to plan as much, but you want to make sure the exercises are jam packed. And so again, depending upon what your signature service is, and this is something that we help our clients break down is what is your, your proprietary methodology, which gives you a roadmap as to what to talk about. You would go look at that and say, where are my clients needing help the most within my methodology right now? And you’d plug that into one of these blocks.And again, typically if you’re getting started with this, having a theme of some sort. So maybe day one might be all about sales or marketing or fulfillment. And then day two could be a little bit of a mix. Now as you evolve, you might want to do more round tables and hot seats and um, you know, coaching sessions, which is a little bit more free form. You could totally do that in the beginning as well. But a key piece of having that is again, that signature service. But I just kind of wanted to break down how we think about this. One thing we’ve been doing recently is brain and a guest speaker. Sometimes it’s an existing client that’s been having a lot of success. Sometimes it’s one of our, uh, one of our coaches that comes in and does a talk last intensive. We had a coach, one of our coaches come in and talk on Facebook ads this time around.We’re going to have someone talk around, um, content creation and providing a new framework and how to easily create content. And so he has a whole 90 minute presentation filled with exercises that they’re going to go through. And that’s typically how we designed the two day event. And for us, we’ll do some fun stuff. Um, the evening of we’ll do a dinner, we’ll do a dinner together and then typically we’ll do some sort of mixer or happy hour at the end of our day Friday. And clients are typically heading back home either that evening, Friday and or Saturday. Again, we do ours on Thursdays and Fridays, but with this framework you really only have to plan six 90 minute sessions. Of those six, you’re probably only teaching about 30 minutes before you’re creating exercises and things that you have to work on. When you start adding sessions like hot seats or workshop implementation style things, again, that’s less you have to teach in more doing and customization.And when you frame up the entire event, you’re going to need to obviously have sort of an introduction, which is our first section right here that we talked about in this highlighted red. And you also need to have a farewell session where you help them distill down what are the things they’re going to do when they leave and go home. And that’s pretty much how we structure our two day intensives that we do with our clients and to determine what we need to talk about. We obviously have a sense on our finger, on the pulse with our client community, and we look at our methodology that we’ve created and had been developing over the last three years and start plugging and playing different exercises and trainings related to what our clients need the most. And again, then we structure it in a way where we’re teaching some principles, we have some exercises and then we’re going to have them share their lessons learned from those exercises and you really create a dynamic interactive two day workshop.Again, shout out to my former coach talkie more taught me kind of this whole framework, really just breaking everything down into 90 days and this framework goes into doing a one day it goes into doing a one day sales event. If you’ve got to do a 90 minute workshop or presentation for some sort of an association, you’re a part of this framework applies the key piece, which obviously is a little bit of a dangle here is your signature service because that’s going to have chunks that you’re going to extract and fill into these different areas over time. So if you found this helpful and you are an agency owner and you want to start packaging up your intellectual property to start designing and delivering workshops and group coaching programs or consulting programs, programs that are done with you instead of one on one and customized every time there’s a link below.To a 26 minute case study, taking you through our step by step process on how we did this in our business and how three of our clients have done this as well among many more. We’ve now worked with over 150 agencies doing this. So if that’s something that you want to do going into the new year in your business, check out that case study below in the link and we will chat with you guys in the next episode. If I give you five to 10 new clients, would you or your agency break if so, your current agency model is broken? I struggle with this too, until I found a better way. By adding online programs, training, and coaching to our agency, we doubled profits without adding more hours. If you want to work directly with me and my team to transform your agency, visit myscalablebusiness.com
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