You’re never going to rich renting out your time.”Real wealth doesn’t come through hours. It comes through starting a company or investing” – Naval Ravikant.The problem most agency owners have is that they got the “starting a company” part right but their company is based on hours.Aka Selling their hands.In today’s video, I want to break down Naval’s 3 classes of leverage that can help you become a wealthy agency owner.
Transcript / MP3
In this video, I’m going to break down how you can actually rethink, reimagine, redesign your agencies so that you’re actually a wealthy agency owner. Now, before we jump in, uh, I put together, if you stay till the end of this video, a free resource, I put together a little book it’s called the 10 useful frameworks. We use to make agencies more profitable and predictable. And these are all frameworks that we’ve been using in our business over the last couple of years. Uh, and now have helped over 300 agencies apply these to their agency to become more profitable and more predictable, stay till the end, and I’ll show you how to get it, but let’s talk about how to be a wealthy agency. … Welcome back guys. Uh, Greg Hickman here with all agency@allagency.com. And like I said, we’re going to talk about how to become a wealthy agency owner. But if you’re new here, we obviously talk about how to build a more profitable and predictable agency. And again, if you stay till the end, I’m going to show you how to get access to this new ebook that we put together on how to make your agency more systematize. And the 10 frameworks that we utilize to do that. So if you’re new here and you haven’t yet subscribed to go ahead and click that subscribe button and that notification bell, because we release a new video every Thursday, why am I talking about wealthy agency owner? Why are we talking about this? Well, I just started reading this book by [inaudible] called the Almanac of [inaudible] now full. Now. You’re probably sitting there saying, well, who the heck is Nepal?Uh, well Neval is a famous entrepreneur. I would say a very well known entrepreneur. Um, he has invested in a lot of different companies. Like Uber has a lot of popular exits and also started a company called angel list where he kind of connects investors and startups. But where I kind of started following him was on Twitter where he has, uh, at least at the time of the screenshot, a million followers, and goes on this, on these crazy, uh, Twitter posting sessions. And you’ll see you see here that he’s following nobody, but has over a million followers. And one of these segments that he did, which was called how to get rich without getting lucky, basically inspired some folks to go and create this book and you can go follow him at Naval on Twitter. Um, but he shares a lot of his thoughts that he’s learned from investing in companies, building successful businesses, having these exits, uh, and he also goes into a lot of philosophy and things like that.And in this book, he talked about, uh, wealth and leverage. And I started thinking about how the things he’s talking about in this book apply to what we teach at all agency and how to help agencies grow. And looking back on my experiences when I was working in agencies and on the client side and all the struggles and things that came along with that and why we’re all sitting here now as entrepreneurs trying to build our own agency. Now, as we dive into some of these topics, I want you to know where I started with this. When I jumped into this book, as I started reading it, he asked a lot of questions that really got me thinking, and I had to ask myself like, well, what is the goal with my agency? What was the goal? So in the comment section below, I want you to share what your goal is with your agency, because it’s going to be different for all of us.And it probably changes. Maybe it’s freedom, maybe it’s impact. Maybe it’s a certain amount of income and money creating wealth. Maybe it’s something else. So comment below with why you built your agency. What is the goal of your agency? Now, some of us started our agency because we got let go from a company or we just chose to leave because we wanted to be our own boss. Those are all good reasons. But now that you’ve gotten past the necessity of needing to make money, right? What’s the goal. Now for me, I think about, you know, obviously the ability to not only pay myself, but my team and serve our clients and have a greater impact in the community. That’s why we do all of these videos and give away a lot of free content. But you know, when push comes to shove, like I’m trying to build a successful business, that’s profitable that can pay me and allow me to support my lifestyle and my family and my team.Now, the, some of the things that kind of are brought up in this book, I highly recommend you read, by the way, we’ll start to challenge how maybe you got to where you’re at now, if you’re running an agency and a lot of the things reminded me of an Alan Weiss, who, if you’re not familiar with Alan Weiss, he wrote the million dollar consultant. And in his book, the million dollar consultant, he said that real wealth is not money. It’s discretionary time. And he said, think about it. You build a business, you go into work for yourself because you want to have the ability to go leave, work early and go check out your kid’s soccer game, or, you know, go on vacation and not have to worry about money coming to you or being a specific place. You want to work on what you want to work on.When you want to work on it, you want to have the financial freedom, but really it comes down to the ability to do whatever you want with your time. Alan Weiss goes on to say that, you know, I can always make another dollar. You can’t make another minute, which obviously plays into this whole notion that most agency owners, when you get started and myself included, we’re essentially selling our time or selling our labor, which has a ceiling. And I’m going to do another video on this topic of the capacity ceiling, uh, in a few weeks. But you have to understand that most of us got started literally just selling hours or days, and maybe you’ve packaged up some things and you sell blocks of hours or sprints. And ultimately it’s just kind of the same as if you were employed by the agency that you used to work at.If you used to work at one. So just like many of you probably, and again, when I got started, we were stuck being labor. So most agencies are stuck being labor. And I know that because we speak to a lot of them. We have thousands of people that subscribe to this channel and tell us weekend and week out that they’re really just selling their time for money. And as Navarro mentions in this book, he says, you’re never going to get rich renting out your time. Now, I don’t know how you define rich. I’m not going into that today, but I think we all want to make money and we want to keep more money so that we can live the lifestyle that we want. The interesting thing about what he said was, well, you’re never going to get rich renting out your time, but if you look at the real wealthy people, it doesn’t come through hours.It comes through starting a company or investing. Wait a minute. So I left my full-time job at an agency to start my own business, to have the ability to earn as much money as possible. So I did what Nevada said to start a company. The problem is I didn’t read the part about, you know, selling hours because you’re not going to get rich selling just your hours. So you need to do something different with that type of company. And he goes on to say that really what you need to do to achieve wealth is to find a position of leverage, to achieve wealth. We need to find a position of leverage. Now he goes on to explain three classes of leverage that I want to share with you today because you can apply each and every one of these to your agency, you might even be applying some of them right now.So three classes of leverage. These are things that you can do right now in your agency to be more profitable and predictable. You can look at labor. That’s a way to create leverage. You can utilize money to create leverage. And also you can think about products. So let’s talk about each and every one of these first, let’s talk about labor. Now in the book, novel talks about labor being the oldest form of leverage. Probably the one that you’re most familiar with when you were an employee, or if you were an employee, you were leveraged to someone else, the owner. So right now we have a team in place at all agency. And those team members give me the owner, leverage. I can be on vacation and our sales team can be generating us revenue. I can be on vacation and our client success team could be helping our clients get results.The, the outcome that we sell doesn’t require me, Greg, the person, the owner, to be there, to sell it and or to deliver it. So I’m utilizing labor team members, employees, staff, to help free up my time to focus on growing the business and, you know, have the ability to take vacation. Now, um, as Nevada mentions, he says, it’s the oldest form, but it’s also commonly one of the weakest forms of leverage. And he goes on to say that, uh, another form of leverage is money. Now, when he talks about money, he thinks about, or at least I think he’s talking about how, how you can grow and scale your business. There was a time in my agency or in my, my training business now where we wanted to grow, but I didn’t have the know-how or the skills or some of the knowledge or experience.So I had to go pay someone who had that experience to help teach me. So I hired a coach. I didn’t have the money to hire that coach. So I borrowed money from American express put on a credit card because I bet on myself and yeah, I used American Express’s money to acquire the skills, to go pay American express back. Think about your city or your town, wherever you live in, maybe your house, you probably didn’t pay for your house in full. You probably put down a down payment and you’re paying a mortgage. You’re leveraging someone else’s money too, afford your home. Most successful business owners are leveraging other people’s money to grow their business. We use an app Amex card to put money on Facebook ads, or just spend money on Facebook ads. We make more from what we spend on ads. So we’re able to pay off the balance and have a profit.So, um, utilizing someone else’s money to go get customers and I’m generating enough revenue to pay off that card. I’m leveraging someone else’s money to grow and scale my audience, our influence, and the number of leads and clients that we have every month. There’s a lot of examples about how you can use money, think about investors and startup companies that take funding to go hire a lot of people. You can use money from others, okay? Other people’s money to fuel your own growth. That’s another form of leverage versus creating it yourself. Now, the third form is actually products. Now, products of all goes on to say is probably the best form of leverage and inside of products. He actually includes media, um, like technology. So like automation tools, you know, any sort of SAS software that you might be using. So products is kind of a big bucket here, but this is, I think the biggest opportunity for you as an agency owner, you can take your expertise and turn it into a product.And I’m gonna talk about that here in just a minute. You can go and record yourself just like I am right now on video and put your media outsides, uh, out into a marketplace like YouTube or, um, run ads to it, et cetera, and attract people to you that is leverage. I don’t have to be there creating that video live for it, to work for my business each and every day, each and every day, our subscriber count goes up each and every day. The number of viewers that watch our videos, it goes up. So I show up once to create this video and thousands and thousands of people over time will continue to consume it, which lead people to me, into our sales funnel, into our business and to sales calls, et cetera. So if you start a podcast, if you build a YouTube channel, if you build an email list, those are all also forms of leverage, just like using active campaign to streamline your email automation or any sort of software that you might use.But one thing that I want to talk about that you can do when it comes to products is to sell your know-how. Now I’ve talked about this in the past, in the beginning, you got hired because you knew what to do, not just that you would do it. So I want to talk quickly about how we can start to think about selling your know-how in your agency. So I’m going to jump to the iPad real fast. And what I want to talk about is selling your new house. So right now you, I talk about this a lot of different ways that draws a lot of different ways, but you’ve probably heard of the product ladder or the value ladder. And right now at the top of this ladder is your done for you work. This is maybe your, your one-on-one. This is the custom bespoke work.What we recommend is that you raise the price of that. So it’s the most expensive option and you package up your know-how into a product or a program that can be delivered done with you. Now, the goal here, yeah. You’re going to take a step down the value ladder, and you’re going to now have an offer that is available to a wider net of people, people that might historically not been able to afford you. And you’re going to get more selective in the people that you do done for you work for. So you’ll get to raise your rates, work with more of the right clients at the done for you level, but you’re going to then sell your know-how by creating a done with you experience. This could be a productized service.This could be a workshop. This could be coaching, it could be consulting. And eventually as Alan Weiss talks about like, you’re not going to get rich selling your time. Eventually you’re going to be able to create DIY products. And this is where you can create a course or a training that you can sell, where people can consume the content, which is leverage. And you can make money more than one way. In fact, if you have all three of these, you’ll be making money three ways. And that’s how we start to get our clients into the path of selling their know-how is unpacking their process and rolling out that second revenue stream, which is a done with you, experience something that’s prioritized something that’s, uh, capitalizing on creating, uh, opportunities to leverage by packaging up that expertise, the byproducts of the things that they utilize to do the done for you work, which I’ve talked about in other videos, but all of this to say, if you’re trying to build a business or you built your agency because you want to create wealth for yourself.And the only thing you’re doing right now is selling your time, your hours. We need to start making that transition to selling your know-how. And that’s going to come by adding a revenue stream like I was just talking about. So if you want to learn more about kind of how we believe you should be structuring your agency for growth in the link below, there is, uh, the ability for you to download that workbook or the sorry, the ebook on how to apply these 10 useful frameworks to your agency. So you can become more profitable and predictable. And if all of that sounds great, there’ll be the ability for you to schedule a call with our team. And we’ll chat with you about how we can help you get this done with you revenue stream off the ground with paying clients in the next 30, 60, 90 days. So hope you found this video helpful. Uh, just wanted to share how I took novels, information on building successful businesses that create wealth with how we’ve been really thinking about, you know, transforming agencies and bring them to you. So hope you hope you found this useful. And again, subscribe if you haven’t subscribed yet, and we’ll see you in the next video.
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