Kill The Old To Welcome The New

When it comes to your agency, at some point you're going to have to kill the old in order to welcome the new, let's get it going.For three years, my agency built funnels and automation systems for the biggest names in marketing today. Since then, I've 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 in to follow along as I learned, apply and share the strategies I'm using to build my multimillion-dollar business. My name is Greg Hickman and welcome to Scalable. ... What's good everybody.

Greg Hickman here and welcome back to another episode. Like I said already in this episode, we're going to talk about how there are situations in your agency where at some point you're going to have to kill the old in order to welcome the new. And what I mean by that is, you know, when I look at our clients that come to us, they come to us because they are stuck inside of their business. They are their business in many ways. They're doing things manually and they have a difficulty growing right and in a sustainable way. And so what we often recommend is, and not often always is making a radical change to their business, a radical change in really their business model. Um, by adding on more profitable revenue streams that are more productized, more leveraged, that are repeatable instead of custom, uh, which requires them to conduct new ways of marketing instead of just relying on referrals to go out there and build marketing and sales systems that can capture leads and nurture those leads, create sales conversations as well as kind of redesign how they fulfill and deliver the client experience, which often requires them to go get some help.

To remove themselves as the bottleneck in fulfillment. And depending upon what model they really shift to and how they're going to remodel and reimagine their fulfillment really requires what type of people they're actually going to need. So when an agency comes to us and they're kind of stuck in their ways of doing things, this kind of radical shift can be a little bit scary. And what I want to talk about really is like the spirit of your business. Because if you, if I, if I look at a lot of the, the people that come to us, um, you know, maybe they grew in year one and possibly even in year two, but they've hit this point where there they flatline, they've plateaued. And the challenge with that is, and the problem really lies within the fact that they've hit this plateau where their work weeks are pretty much full that any new client added requires them to work more hours and or into the weekends, which we all know will bleed into your personal life and your health and have a, you know, a vicious, uh, you know, tear through the rest of your life, but their week is already full.

They're not making the amount of, the amount of money that they want to be making with the clients that they already have. And so something has to change, right? Like if they're not making the amount of money that they want to be making, thus they're not paying themselves enough and taking home enough to support the lifestyle and the family that they are either wanting to build or create, then there they're in this position where they're maxed out in capacity from a client perspective. They're maxed out on bandwidth and they're still not reaping any of the rewards of having their business in the first place. So in that regard, you have to think about your business like a vehicle. The vehicle that you've been in is broken, right? It the last couple of years you've felt this resistance and this friction and you know, it's just chugging along and it's not getting you to the final destination.

So you need to get into a new vehicle. Right? And I want to talk about kind of overcoming that, that change because it's, it's a lot more up here than it is, you know, tactical, right? Obviously there's tactical things that I mentioned, right? We're having our clients dramatically change their, their business model and add more profitable revenue streams so that they can kind of take home what they want. But I want to kind of share a story from, from our past when we were kind of in this position where we had a handful of clients that we were working with and we were maxed out on capacity. It was myself and two, two or three other people on the team. And we hit that point where in order to take on one new client, we either all needed to start working more hours or we needed to bring on the next person, but we didn't have enough money to bring on the next person because when we dove deep, we were actually losing money on a handful of the clients that we were operating with, right?

So we started digging into our own numbers and here that, well, our own numbers. And the reality was that 80% of our bandwidth was, was being utilized by about six or seven clients that when we looked at each of them individually, we were losing money on all of them, right? And so that was on us, right? The way in which we charged, the way in which we fulfilled, uh, all of those things, like we didn't know enough when we started to charge the right amount. And once we got more and more clients, it really caught up with us. So maybe you're in this situation where you really had no reason for how much you were charging at the time, and you now have a handful of clients charging you that amount and you're kind of maxed out and you're stuck. Well, the reality here is that trying to get those clients to make this change into the new model, they're probably not going to go for it, right?

And so you're gonna have to kill the old in order to welcome the new, because if you add some new profitable revenue streams, right? Whether that's coaching or training or workshops or some sort of productized service like I've talked about in previous episodes, you're going to have something that is priced right, is priced so that you, you know, you can pay yourself what you need to be making. You know that there's a fulfillment and delivery model that is structured in a way that is scalable and sustainable, unlike the vehicle that you're in now. Right? So this new thing has all of the indicators that it's the path that you need to go, but we want to try to keep these old clients that we've had, but we're in a vehicle that's not taken us where we want to go. Right? And so here's where I want to kind of break down just a reality that you're going to have to understand to make this transition right.

If you're not happy right now, right. And you know the vehicle that you're in is not going to get you there. Clearly we need to get into a new vehicle. We can agree on the new vehicle being required. But the, I guess the, um, the false reality that many people create is if your right here that you were going to be suggested changes and a lot of different ways and you might see a little bit of an increase and you're going to probably hit some sort of Plateau again, right? Just just sort of like, you know, maybe this was your, your year one and you know, the last two, three, four years you've sort of hit this plateau where you're maxed out on capacity, maxed out on bandwidth and you're not even making the money that you want, right? So if that feels familiar to you, despite wanting to do this again and keep kind of going up this ladder, you see that it keeps plateauing, right?

And so the reality is when we go to make this transition into kind of a new model, like this radical shift that we help our clients make, the reality is that you're going to have to take a few steps back before you can accelerate and keep growing. Right now, the quick obvious visual of this graph that I'm drawing is that the hockey stick growth will happen because the new model allows for you to grow in a more sustainable and a more scalable way. But because we need to kill the old, we need to be comfortable with this gap and this period where we're below the break-even line, right? And sometimes you need to do a little bit of acceleration in your current model and kind of flex that bandwidth to capitalize on some revenue to sustain this. Or we just need to kill the old, right?

And there is a fine line and everybody's business is different. This is why we worked so closely with our clients on this transition is how do you actually make this transition possible without breaking your business, right? Even though you're losing money, you have some clients that are probably covering expenses and things like that, but you know, this vehicle isn't going to get you to the longterm destination. So we need to switch vehicles, right? We've, we've, we've decided that we need to switch vehicles in order to hit this future goal and if we wanna hit this future goal, we know that new vehicles required. So let's start thinking and acting like we have this new vehicle and start getting the new vehicle and start building out the new, the new revenue streams that are more profitable, more sustainable, more scalable, bring in some clients in that regard and start transitioning out old, old legacy clients, right?

The clients that we're bleeding this, this is exactly what we did step-by-step. We've got one or two new clients in the new model. We'd, we'd go have a conversation with old clients and we would transition them out because there was really no way that they were going to want to stay around for the new model because they already had the world, right? They had everything and now it's going to feel like we're taking it out from underneath them. Now maybe your situation isn't as extreme as ours or many of our clients, but the reality is the way you served your old clients, like they're going to fight tooth and nail to keep that because they've been, they've been able to take advantage of that for so long, but we've already determined that that vehicle is not going to get us to where we want to go.

So you need to understand that once we start to make this shift and do this responsibly and with the right math to understand how long this, this gap or this trough my friend calls it, the trough of sorrow, how long and how deep this trough will be, right? We want to make sure that we can accelerate quickly, profitably scale in a scalable way and start paying ourselves what we, what we deserve as the owner of the business, right? But the point of the matter is in order to make this shift and get to where we really want to go, where our business is running without us, where we're not the bottleneck in sales, marketing, fulfillment, and we're able to take a vacate a vacation because the business runs like a machine, most likely you are going to have to take a couple of steps back in order to take two, three, four, 10 20 steps forward, right?

You've heard that saying before, but making this change, this, this radical transformation to how you structure and deliver your services and market your services as an agency owner has to change. If you want to reach the new goals that you're looking to. So get comfortable with this gap. And what, what are here to help you do is if we look at this, this trough, again, let me reverse back on some of my changes here. If we look at this trough of sorrow here and I'm going to go in, um, uh, I'm going to pull in an orange color here, right? So we see how deep this, this gap is. What our job here is to help you do is to bring this bar line up and bring this line closer, right? So we want to shorten the gap for you to make this transition and make it as least painful, uh, as possible.

But like I said, you have to kill the old, you have to let go of something. So there is going to be some discomfort, right? And you do as you do this. So our goal is to, is to do something more like that where we shorten that gap and make this transition more seamless, uh, help you see around corners so that we can really start to train a transform the model that you currently have to serve you right? And not the other way around. Because the way that your business is running right now is the reason why you've been stuck at this plateau, which is why you can't really add any, any more new clients yet. You're still not making the money that you want to be making.

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've doubled profits without adding more hours. If you want to work directly with me and my team to transform your agency, visit myscalable business.com to learn more.