Ever feel like you’re only moving forward because of brute force?Do all of your leads and sales come from word of mouth or referrals?Are you the key bottleneck in the business?If you’re nodding yes, then you’ve likely never escaped the first stage of growth.First, know that it’s ok.Even veteran agency owners are often stuck in this phase.Second, not escaping the first phase is the very reason why you’re so dependent on word of mouth and referrals to get new clients.This is what creates that constant hamster wheel feeling.In today’s video, I’m going to break down the 4 phases your business goes through as you grow.1. Product/Service Delivery (most are stuck here when they think they’re far passed it. Watch and understand why.2. The Client Journey3. Vision + Growth4. Scaling UpYou’ll finally understand what you need to do to create a more predictable and sustainable business.
Transcript / MP3
What’s good, everybody. In this episode, I want to break down the four phases that I see agencies go through as they’re looking to launch their first successful group consulting or group coaching program where they’re really starting to make that transition from one-on-one done for you to one-on-one done with you. Let’s get it going. 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 and 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 scaleHey guys, welcome back and before I jump into those four phases that you’re going to go through to launch your group coaching or consulting program within your agency, I wanted to make a special invitation. If you are a digital agency owner and you want the help accountability and a step-by-step proven system to launch that group coaching or group consulting program that compliments your existing agency services, then we would love to help. You’d be going through our foundations program and we’re only looking to bring on a handful of clients to go through this process because it’s very intimate. We work very closely through this process and the goal is to have five to 10 clients into this program by the end of the 90 day, 90 days that we’re going to be working together. So if that sounds like something that you want help with and you want to move faster, you want to step by step proven system, the proven templates, the automations, the scripts, all of that stuff to get those first five to 10 clients in this new offering, that’s more leveraged, more one to many.Then visit system dot L Y forward slash foundations. You’ll learn a little bit more about the program and you’ll be able to click the button to apply for a strategy session where you’re going to answer a couple of questions to tell us a little bit more about your agency and your business. And then we’re going to hop on the phone call. It’s going to be either myself or someone on the team. We’re going to learn a little bit more about what your, what your goals are with your agency and this new offering that you want to create. And if it’s a good fit, we’ll share how we can help. And if it’s not, we’ll point you in the best direction possible. So visit system dot L Y forward slash foundations to get that call booked today. All right guys. So like I said, there are four phases that I see essentially all agency owners going through as they’re looking to add on bolt-on or really replace their existing revenue with a done with you model.That might look a little bit more like group coaching or group consulting, we call it the hybrid where you add the best of online courses, training, coaching with all of the benefits of doing done for you services, like getting your clients results, moving them quickly, being able to charge premium, all of that. So the four phases are as follows. Phase one is really product service discovery, so we’re looking right over here at phase one. Phase one is product service discovery. This is the phase where you’re really starting to narrow down your niche potentially. If you’re an agency owner and you have a wide variety of clients, you’re going to have to narrow down the types of clients that you’re going to serve with this new leveraged offering. In addition to, you’re going to have to simplify those deliverables and that means maybe removing some of the services that you currently offer or combining a handful of them in a unique way that will help your client get to a specific result.So that’s the product service discovery. So you’re going to be going out there having conversations, getting feedback from the market and trying to sell this new service. And the, the reality is if people aren’t giving you money, then the likelihood is that it’s not really validated and you need to go back to the drawing board and and revamp what that is and what the, the outcome is that you’re actually selling because people don’t want it. And really the important piece here is don’t offer this for free, especially if you’re going to be charging for it. Because if some, if you say you’re going to charge 10,000 for something and someone takes it for free, that may validate that the topic is of interest, but it doesn’t validate the price. Again, if you’re also going to be selling it for 10,000 eventually and you sell it for 5,000 that still might be too far of a gap.Four will someone actually buy this at 10,000 so just because you’re selling the first version of this, we have our clients create a pilot program where they get five to 10 clients going through this version one experience. We still don’t recommend giving 50% off just because it’s a pilot. They’re actually going to get more access to you. So it could arguably be more valuable. So it could be seven thousand eight thousand something a little bit closer to what you’re really going to sell it for at the end of the day. Now, phase two is really around the client journey. This is how are you going to attract prospects for this new thing that you’ve now validated and how are you going to automate your lead generation, automate your lead nurture, systemize your sales process, systemize your new client onboarding and fulfillment systems around delivering this one thing, right? The reason right now that you, you might have trouble leveraging automation or using systems or creating systems in your business is because there’s too much variability.There’s too many unique things going on because each project starts from scratch, but once you’ve narrowed down and you’ve simplified your deliverables, you’re going to have something that is selling an outcome, right? We’ve talked about this all all the time in previous episodes. The, the, the, the nature of product [inaudible], right? So the client journey is the systems to sell, market and deliver that thing effectively. Now, the reality is that most business owners, especially agencies, because you’re always doing custom projects, you’re really always staying in this phase one. Many of you that are probably watching, if you’re a digital agency owner, don’t have a completely automated and systemized system to go attract clients and nurture clients and sell them and onboard them and deliver the results. You just don’t have that because everything’s been manual referrals, word of mouth, et cetera, because you don’t do the same thing really more than once.There’s always those variations. So many of you are actually living in phase one. All the time and you’ve never actually advanced into building the client journey. Now when you go to launch your group coaching or group group consulting program, you are going to validate your offering and you’re going to be taking that to market. You’re going to deliver it as a pilot program once, twice, maybe even three times, enough times where you know that, Hey, you can get people the results, be people want the problem and see people are paying you for it. Right? At that point you can then advance into starting to build out your client journey and start automating things and do all the things that you probably want in your business right now but haven’t been able to do because you really haven’t had the product market fit. So what I find is that, like I said, most agency owners live in this phase one, but oftentimes they’ll go and they’ll get into phase two and start building on their client journey and they’ll realize that they have problems with getting enough leads or closing people and it often requires them to go back into product discovery.Okay. So you’re kind of looping around phases one and two until you kind of get things right and you can automate lead generation for that offering. You can start to systemize sales and things start to become a little bit more predictable. Now you might be noticing the little line here that is right down the middle, this dotted line right here. And the thing about this line is really interesting. You see on the right side, phases three and four, oops, go back and change the color. There are phases three and four, our vision, growth and scaling, right? So what’s this line all about? Well, at this position, if you’re still in phase one and two, either product service discovery or the client journey, the likelihood is that, or the reality is at this point, you don’t have a business yet. Yeah, I’m going to say that again.You don’t have a business yet. You have something that’s working well and you’re like, Oh man, this is working. But that’s pretty much all it is. You haven’t been able to remove yourself from anything. The business is still mostly around you. And again, many cases you’re looping back around phases one and two. So once we jump into vision and growth in phase three, that’s where we’re going to really start to look at where do we want to take this thing? What do our numbers need to look like? Is this a [inaudible] a half a million dollar dollar, dollar a year business? Are we trying to get to 10 million? What are the sacrifices that we’re going to have to make in order to get there? What is my purpose? What is my, what am I core values? These are the things that are going to help you bring in team members that align with that vision and start to remove yourself as the bottleneck from certain pieces of those five core functions.If you haven’t checked out the video and the five core functions, uh, click the link here and go check that out. But we really want to start removing ourselves systematically from lead generation, lead nurture, sales fulfillment, and you know, retention, resell, upsell, and then look at operations and all those things. Like all of that starts happening when you actually have a vision for where this business is going to go. Just because you have sold something a couple of times and you’re starting to get some leads and you’ve sold it here and there through your client journey. You don’t really have a business yet. You have something that’s currently working and we want to take that to the next level, which is why we start diving deeper into the vision. What do you want? How big do you want your team to be? What do you want the client experience to look like and starting to make the investments in those areas to start growing around the vision, right?That’s why vision is really important. Typically you see a lot of agency owners that hit this wall, this yellow line, and it’s because they don’t have a vision and they just keep doing the same thing as why they keep going back and forth between phases one and two the, they’re always reinventing themselves because the next client is demanding that they have a new product or service so that they can say yes and make money. So they constantly keep going through this loop, never breaking through the barrier of actually creating the vision for their business that will give them the focus and the clarity to target and move forward through all of the, the adversity of the resistance, that resistance that you’re going to face in building and growing a scalable business. Which brings us to stage four which is scaling, right? You hear a lot of people talking about scale, this scale that obviously our podcast is called scale a bull emphasis on the ballpark and scaling is the really, I look at this as the process of adding multiple layers of leadership.Um, scaling up to, you know, beyond 1 million, 5 million, 10, you know, that level of growth, right? If you’re around 20 K a month, you haven’t scaled, you’re not scaling. That’s growing, right? And the, this is the fourth stage here is scaling. So as you can see, there are four phases as you go to launch your new group consulting or coaching offering within your agency that you need to move through. First we need to launch it. We need to get five to 10 clients validate that people want to pay for it and pay the price that we want them to pay for it. Once we’ve done that a few times, we want to build the systems around lead generation, lead nurture, sales and fulfillment to start systematizing it. Making that more predictable, start generating, you know, three, five clients a month or whatever the number of clients a month that you need to be generating in order to hit your goals.Then we start looking at, okay, what’s the next level of this? Let’s start looking at the vision. What do we want our team to look like? What do we want our culture to look like? What do we want the client experience to look like as we grow and increase our numbers? All of these things start to become important because it’s going to create your North star that will allow you to rally yourself and your team too. Continue expanding on what you’ve already done in phases one and two and build that momentum and then you want to start looking into or evolve into the scaling phase where it’s really just about adding those multiple layers of leadership, adding those secondary maybe tertiary product offerings and building a business that is not just a self managing but also self correcting. If something goes wrong, those multiple layers of leadership can come in and make the appropriate adjustments without you the business owner.So I hope this was helpful. I just wanted to kind of break down these four phases that I see a lot of agency owners going through as they’re trying to really add something in their business that is more scalable, more profitable, more leveraged that they have the intention to replace and surpass their existing done for you revenue with. So if that’s what you’re looking to do, like I said in the beginning of the video, we’re looking to take on a handful of clients to move them through our step-by-step proven process. We’ve worked with over 150 agencies at this point. Taking them through this process. We will be there right with you every step of the way. Just visit system dot L Y forward slash foundations. Uh, I’ll put a link below this video. We hope to chat with you soon and we’ll see you in the next episode. Okay. Are you looking for that cool place to hang on the internet with all the people just like you? Well, I got it for you. If you want to learn the best strategies, tips, and tools to productize and automate your business, visit system dot L Y for slash community to join our free private community and continue the conversation. We’ll see you there.
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