Stuck in fulfillment with your agency clients?I just put together a training on the 6 mistakes digital and creative agencies make that have them stuck in fulfillment unable to grow profitably……
and the 6 steps to fix it.
Here’s what I’d like you to do
Step 1: Watch the training
Step 2: Use the link below the video or this one to schedule a call with our team if you find yourself nodding your head to any of what I said in that video.
We’d like to help you get unstuck. And quickly.
So, talking to a real human about how that might work for YOUR agency would be a very good use of your time. #realtalk
Sound good?
Transcript / MP3
If you’re working 40 plus hours a week, and you’re primarily only working on your client’s business and you’re spending no time marketing yourself, your own company or selling for getting more clients into your business, then you’re probably stuck in fulfillment. So in today’s video, I want to break down the top mistakes that have you stuck in fulfillment and what to do about it. … What’s going on guys. Welcome back Greg here from all agency@allagency.com. Uh, and like I said, I want to talk about being stuck in fulfillment and maybe some things that have caused you to be stuck in fulfillment that kind of snowball up and make growth really, really difficult. And then a few things that I believe you should, uh, put into place or start doing to start removing yourself from this challenge that is going to prevent you from growing. So without further ado, let’s jump right in. But before I do, actually you should go ahead and hit that subscribe button and that notification bell, because we drop videos like this each and every week. All right, let’s go, uh, just jump into the presentation. So, like I said, top mistakes that have you stuck in fulfillment and what to do about it. Mistake number one is that you serve too many markets or avatars time and time again, I find that, uh, people we speak with and we speak with hundreds of agency owners, both digital and creative each and every month. And the number of people that I speak with that have, you know, we serve the dentists. We serve the small business, any type of small business. We serve chiropractors. We serve, you know, real estate agents and really there’s no rhyme or reason to who they serve. It’s really just anybody with a pulse that can make it really difficult to bring clients to you. And so one of the mistakes that I see, you know, especially early stage agency owners make, but also the ones that are actually stuck. One of the core fundamental reasons above and beyond everything else. The thing that the root of the problem is that you just are serving too many different types of people, which means you don’t have an ideal client. And if you don’t have an ideal client, as you’ve all heard, trying to market to anyone really is marketing to no one. So if you’re constantly chasing people, hunting manually prospecting and people aren’t just like knocking on your door saying, Hey, I heard that you could help me solve my problem. Very good chance that your audience is too broad. So that leads us into mistake. Number two, which is that you’ll then take on any client that you can get. So I don’t know I’ve been there, uh, in early days, but sometimes we let this problem persist way too long. If you’re going to take on any client, that likely means that what you’re delivering is going to be unique. And if your solution is unique, every single time, I’d argue that each of those clients that each get a unique solution could be its own business. So if you’re doing less than a million, $10 a year in revenue, which likely you are, if you’re watching, because only 7% of businesses in the United States are actually making a million dollars and you have multiple businesses and let alone less than half a million. One of the core reasons is that you’re just spread too thin and you have no focus. So that leads us into mistake. Number three, which is you don’t have a minimum engagement level. And what I mean by this is that there’s really no threshold for like how much money you’ll take to take on a client. And as you can start to see some of these really build up, if you don’t know who you serve and you take any type of client, and then you take any client at any engagement level, um, say a thousand bucks a month, 2000 bucks a month, as you start taking some of those clients and you’ll take it any rate, you’ll cater your services to any budget you’re going to be spread thin, even faster. So I highly recommend that you set a minimum engagement level, really a, Hey, we can’t work with you unless we start at this number. Now that number can be different for different types of digital agencies and creative agencies, but a going engagement like that is paying me less than $3,000 to get started is going to be really difficult to fulfill on. Now. Um, if it’s $3,000 a month, depending upon what you’re delivering, that might, that might work. But one of my like bare bare minimum, like baseline is the LTV via the client. Lifetime value of the client needs to be at least $10,000, um, within 12 months. So kind of sorry, annual value of a client needs to be at least $10,000. And we need to be collecting a good portion of that upfront so that we can get paid for the work because usually most of the work is upfront. So if they’re going to pay you $10,000 spread out over a year, but you incur, you know, $4,000 of costs to do the work in the first 30 days, you’re going to have a difficult time growing, which leads to the next mistake that you have no lead generation system. So when I say you have no Legion or lead generation system, usually that stems from the fact that you serve everybody. And that usually means that not enough people know you exist. And so if not enough, people know you exist, that’s probably why you’re manually hunting and prospecting, relying on referrals and all of that stuff. And as I’ve alluded to a little bit earlier, like it’s tough to market this concept of we can help anyone. We can help anyone with anything. And that’s why, like I said, you are manually hunting and prospecting because even your referrals wouldn’t know how to explain to someone else that you can help them, because what you gave them is likely unique to them. And everyone that they speak with doesn’t always have the exact same problem yet. You’re still relying on referrals, which is no bueno. And that actually creates an increased pressure to take any client. As you can start to see these things, starting to snowball, you don’t have a minimum level engagement. You’ll serve just about anyone with a pulse and or that will give you any sort of money. And like, because you don’t know where the next client is coming from, you’re more likely to feel pressured to take the next part [inaudible] person that you might just slow, even if it’s a tiny bit and be able be able to help and worse. If you have existing clients and all of that, it is true. You don’t want to lose any, right? So you’re relying on referrals. There’s increased pressure to, uh, you know, work with the next client, but you also have increased pressure to not lose any of your existing clients as well, which leads us to mistake number five, that you actually let your services expand. So you’re working with a client, right? Uh, maybe they came in for a website or something like that. And you don’t know where the next client is because you have no pipeline because nobody knows you exist because you serve everybody. And that’s how you, that’s how you show up in the world. You don’t want to lose that client. So when that first project is coming to an end and they say, Hey, uh, can you also do insert whatever they ask you to do social media run our Facebook ads. And you say, yes, your service offering becomes you saying yes, which leads into now, you’re expanding your service menu based on things that your current client is asking you to do, which is really slowly turning you into an employee of their business, right? You’re becoming a full service agency that has one client, which really is going to make you super dependent on that person. So you’re going to be spending more time with that one client leaving you less time to go get more of the right clients, just because you’re afraid. So you let your services expand out side of your expertise, which usually means you need to hire right. More help and hire that help on stuff that you don’t really know much about. So they’re like, Hey, can you help me with social media? You bought my website. And then you’re like, yeah, sure. And then you go talk to your friend. Who’s a freelancer who does social media, and now you have to pay them to figure it out. And there’s really not much money left over because to hire someone that does stuff that you don’t know how to do usually is expensive. So you’re hiring expensive help, which leaves a little leftover for you. So I don’t know if that’s you, um, or if that’s a situation that resonates with you, but it leaves a little left over for you. And you just start to, over-deliver creating unrealistic expectations from your client, right? Especially if you didn’t ask to, uh, raise the rate of what they were paying you. So maybe you had a retainer and now things keep getting woven into that retainer, AK scope Crete. And you’re basically delivering the world for next to nothing, have nothing to show for it, but they start to take up more and more of your capacity, which leads to mistake. Number six, you’re selling your labor and or your time for money, which is really difficult to grow. So, as you can see, you might have really resonated with one of these things, but they really start to build off of each other. That’s why I call it the snowball to struggle town, the snowball struggle town. So the question is, well, what can you do about it, right? If this is you and you’re stuck in fulfillment, now you’re like, Oh my God, this is why things are broken. I want to share what you need to do. And really it’s quite simple, but you have to build this thing by design, not by default, by taking what you can get by serving everybody. You’re really, you have no intention. You have no vision except to just collect the next dollar so that you can try to move forward. But if you start to move forward with intentionality, then you’re going to be able to join me. My friends hop, hop, hop along because we’re going to hop onto the elevator to expansion. And that’s what I want to take you through. So how do we start to grow our business and remove ourselves from fulfillment? So first step, step number one is to decrease the time we’re spending in fulfillment. Now that sounds kind of obvious, but most people don’t know how to do this. And really what I mean by that is you need to reorganize how you show up each and every week. Because if you wake up Monday through Friday and you’re just waiting for a client to tell you what to do, your whole business is reactionary. So you need to start saying, Hey, during this window of time, on these days of the week, I am in fulfillment. But on these other days, I am actually going to work on sales and marketing and making people know more about me. I’m going to market myself so that I have new clients coming to me. We take our clients through an exercise called the perfect workweek, where they through growth of their business. They start to restructure their, their days and their weeks so that they can spend less time on fulfillment without sacrificing client results, but really dedicating more time to working on growing their business. And we’ve seen just by applying this perfect week, um, you know, framework that our clients are getting five to 15 hours a week back just by restructuring, how they, you know, how they utilize their time and being more intentional and designing their week for growth, not just to be reactionary to the clients that they currently have, which leads us to step number two, which is specializing, who you serve. Obviously I mentioned earlier that if you serve everybody, you serve nobody. So we need to narrow down who we’re working with, the types of clients, the problems that we’re solving, right? Which leads us into the next step, which is then simplify and streamline the offering. If you go from serving everybody down into, uh, serving a few specific people, or even ideally one specific type of person that has one specific type of problem, what you actually offer and the services that are in your menu can kind of come together to have a unique solution for that problem, which makes marketing and delivery, hiring all of those things way easier. And we can actually start to find profit and leverage and efficiencies in doing the work for our clients and getting them results, because we’re going to be getting them the same results as the last client. And so we’re going to go through the motions and we’re going to be able to essentially know our exact step-by-step process, getting a client, a result, any given result that we’re helping them get, and it’ll be repeatable, right? And that’s going to make you more desirable by the client, the next prospect that has this problem, because you’re gonna say, look, we’ve taken other people just like you through this process. And they’ve gotten this result if that’s what you want, that’s what you’re going to get with us. Okay. So the streamlining, the offer looks a little bit like this from a process perspective, we’re going to take all of your services and distill them down into a core service. We call that your signature service, and then you’re going to go get a handful of clients and you’re going to deliver that service, um, and refine it. So yes, that means you’re going to go package up this new thing, probably removing some things that you do right now that are inefficient, that you’re not really great at go get a few clients to go through this new refined offering. And you’re going to learn from that process and you’re going to tweak and refine and improve. Okay. Then from there, then we get to go install our minimum viable lead generation system. Because now we have a core service that solves a specific problem, which is going to allow us to go to the market with a specific message, attracting people that want that solution as well. All right. So now we’re gonna start having people coming to us, minimum viable, nothing, super crazy, um, minimum, if any ads at all, just a marketing process, a marketing engine to start bringing people to you that are aware of this new offering that you have. Then once we’ve gotten comfortable doing the delivery of this, for some people, this will be a matter of just taking three or so clients through it. Sometimes this will be, Hey, this could be a three to six month process. All depending upon your existing level of expertise before we got started. So a handful of clients go through this process a little bit of time passes, and then we expand your offering, right? This is step number five, to get it out of fulfillment. We expand our offering so that we get paid for our thinking, not just for our labor. So what this looks like is we jumped back to that core service that we’ve been working on. And like I said, we’ve installed that lead gen system. Now we want to add a done with you revenue stream. So we’re going to raise the price of our core service and deliver and refine this new offering. Now this new offering in almost 80 plus percent of the time is going to be exactly like your core service, but delivered differently delivered as coaching or consulting or a training for your client. So it’s going to be way more done with you and likely one to many versus one-on-one if that’s making sense. And so that step a step five. Now step six is to really start to grow and scale the operations around this new model, because now you’re making money two ways, your core service, and then your leveraged offering, which will be more done with you. That is going to be, um, allow you to serve more clients without necessarily, and or linearly increasing the number of hours that you work. One of the biggest mistakes I see agency owners is that they only have one revenue stream. And so what we believe is as an agency, you need to get paid for your, your core service, your a signature service, a done with you version of that. And then in the future, if even needed, expand into more DIY solutions like products and courses, and maybe selling templates or the byproducts of your solutions, and really what this means is you’re building what we call an alt agency. And so that’s what we help our clients do. And when you build an all agency, what you’re going to find is that you’re going to be more profitable. Your business is going to be more predictable when it comes to lead generation to sales and income and profits and clients getting results. And you’re gonna be able to do all of that with working less hours, making your business more scalable and honestly more enjoyable. One of the things that I find that our clients, uh, share in working with us is that they really fall in love with what they, what they do and how they serve people, because they got back to mastering their craft. So if this sounds uh, useful to you and you want to move through those six steps with us, and we’ll hold your hand through a proven process that over 300 agency owners have now gone through, I’m going to drop a link in the comment section below for you to schedule a call with our team. We’re going to ask you a bunch of questions. You can tell them that you watched this video here on our YouTube channel. Um, I highly encourage you to check out some of the other videos. If this is the first one you’re watching and we’ll kind of explore what your business and agency looks like now and why you’re stuck in fulfillment and how to actually start making some of these, these taking some of these six steps to transition out of being stuck in fulfillment and have a more, uh, a, an agency designed by or built by design, not by default. So I hope this found found you well, let me know what your biggest takeaway is in the comment section below. And again, if you would like to chat with someone on our team about how this can apply to you, go ahead and jump in the comments section, grab that link, pick a time that works for you. Answer a couple questions and we’ll have a human to human conversation about how this might work for you. Otherwise, again, I hope you enjoyed see you next time. Peace.
Read more
