Specialize and Standardize Your Agency

What does it mean to specialize?

Can you "standardize" a service that involves creative work?

Well, to truly answer these questions we need to look at things through 2 lenses:

  1. The lens or perspective of your client
  2. The lens for you as the owner responsible for delivery

After working with 350+ agency owners, consultants and service providers the key is simply to know what to expect every single time a client hires you.

Watch today's video to apply this to your business now.

Transcript / MP3

You probably have heard people saying that you should specialize and standardize the services inside of your agency, but you probably have a little bit of resistance towards that because you say things like, well, I can't standardize my process because every client gets something custom or if I standardize, then I'm going to lose all my creativity. Well, if that's you and this video is for you,... cause I'm going to break down what that actually means to specialize in standardized when you should consider doing it and who actually should consider specializing and systemizing their agency and or creative services, let's get it going.

What's good. Everybody, Greg Hickman here with all agency at all, agency.com. And like I said, I want to break down specializing and standardizing your services inside of your agencies, whether you're a freelancer or you're a digital marketing agency or some sort of creative services firm, this is for you. Now, a lot of people think that this means that you have to like, just create a course and, or like everybody's going to get the same logo, which is clearly not the case, because that would be a really crappy and horrible service to be providing. But here's the thing. What I find often is that agency owners, service providers, they say things like I can't standardize because my clients all need different things or they say things like, there's no room for creativity. If it's not custom. Now that's obviously not the case. And we've worked with over 350 different owners at this point of all different sizes, video production, motion, graphics, lead generation, funnel, implementation.

All of these things incorporate custom elements for their clients. Many of our clients have even gone on to transition from done for you services into things like high ticket coaching and consulting and training and workshops, which in order to do so you have to specialize in standardized. So we've seen just about every single example in this scenario. Now, if you're new to this channel and you're really excited about what we're going to talk about, then I really suggest you click that subscribe button and the notification bell, because we release a new video every single Thursday. So before we talk about the who and the when and all that stuff and what it actually means a quick, we want to talk about the benefits of specializing in standardizing your services. So here's what I think of when I start to think of the benefits now, from the client's perspective as specialized solution has a compelling outcome of value proposition, and it's packaged at a set price and a scope.

This actually makes it a lot easier for your prospect to buy. They can see and feel what the result is going to look like because you've packaged it into an outcome. And there's a value proposition tied to that. And they probably will know what they're getting themselves into because they'll be able to see, Hey, this is what I'm investing. Here's, what's included. What's not. And you're able to do things like that. Once you start to specialize. Now that's from the client's perspective, from your perspective, how I want you to think about this is it's really just a service, a program or a product that runs systematically and is up to grow with, or without your direct involvement. Now, the key piece here is with, or without your direct involvement, every single person that we've worked with, they want their business to run itself. They don't want to be the bottleneck in sales and marketing and fulfillment.

Well, that means you need to have systems and a process for the business to run itself and for other people to hop into different seats inside of the organization and do the work that is required by a human, which again is probably going to be the stuff that's custom insight of your business. So now I want to talk about what does it actually mean to specialize, but before I do that in the comments below, I want you to comment, what type of business do you have and why do you think it can or cannot be specialized if that's the case? So drop a comment below. I'd love to hear what you do and what pieces of your business you feel cannot be specialized or systematized at this moment. Then let's watch this piece. So what does it mean to actually specialize well when it comes to your offer, what it means is that you need to target a specific type of client with a solution that solves a specific problem.

So gone are the days, at least in my opinion, where you should be talking to prospects and strategizing all the different things that you could do, and then concocting this magical solution that client a gets, and then doing the same thing over in client B gets something completely different, your life, your business, your revenue, your profits, all of those things. Your time, freedom will all become way more scalable and more predictable if you just specialize and systemize. And so again, from your offer perspective, it starts with the thing that you offer. The thing that you do is targeted specific type of client with a solution that solves a specific problem. Don't try to solve any problem that any type of person has now, what that means in our world at all agency for a lot of our clients is when it comes to the prospect, the ideal client that is a predefined person.

They serve blank who need help with blank, okay? Not just, oh, we'll serve this broad target of small to medium sized business. That's 85 plus percent of all businesses in the United States. So that's super broad, small to medium sized business is not specific. Local business is arguably not specific, right? So you need to have a predefined person that we are serving. Then the problem and the pain that solving is actually predefined just as is the solution as, as the scope of work and the price point. So if all of these things, client problem pain, the solution scope and price are predefined. We can go and create a repeatable process that allows us to get our clients, the results that they came to us for every single time. And because we're solving the same problem for the same type of person, we can always charge the same thing.

And we can dial that in enough times where we make sure that there's enough profit and margin for us to build a healthy and sustainable business of our own. So I talked about from your offer perspective, let's talk about from your delivery perspective, really what this means when you specialize is that you have a predictable process, a repeatable process, and every single time you get a new client, you know exactly what to expect. Imagine you had a conversation with a prospect right now, and they gave you money and you knew exactly what was going to happen. Step-by-step every single problem and pitfall they were going to go through as they started going through your process. That's how you start to get scalability and leverage inside of your business. That's how you start to create systems that will lie to remove yourself. Now, once you do this, you get to a place that I love, which is ready-made or preloaded solutions, which usually means no more proposals, because now you can go out and sell to your ideal prospect, a pre-built pre-made ready to go preloaded solution that solves their problem, which is going to make them be really excited because the likelihood is you're going to solve their problem even faster.

Now here's the thing you're probably sitting there saying, well, my thing can't be customized for insert all of the excuses that you're going to have, but here's the deal. This is where I think people get it wrong. The difference is in how the work gets done. So what I mean by that is the work can involve strategic thinking. It can involve analysis, it can involve creativity, but here's the thing. You build a process for how that creative work gets done, the production and delivery. It's a repeatable process. You have a creative process, just like your sales process, just like your analysis process. And at the end of the day, the timeframe for delivery, the tools you need and the tools that you use, the ways that you track client success, the way that you deliver for clients, the way that you handle support and approvals can all be standardized and built into your process.

The great thing is you already have this process. It's probably just in your head. And once you get to document it and share it with your team and your employees or the contractors that you work with, the ability for them to step up and know where they are a key part of the process, or they can step into being an owner of a part of your process, the faster you get to remove yourself. All right. So now let's talk about who should specialize in systematize and when you should consider doing so. So first, if you're an agency owner or freelancer that deals with chaos that comes with many projects for a wide variety of clients and needs, guess what? It's time for you to consider this. And if you have the opportunity to hone in on your best types of clients and run your business more systematically, meaning say 80% of your revenue is coming from a similar type of client with similar problem.

I recommend you double down on them and whatever those other 20% people are doing inside of your business, I'd start to slowly phase them out and really focus in on those people that you've been serving. That all look exactly the same and have similar problems. Cause that's where you're gonna be able to find the repeatability. And lastly, the people that can specialize in systemize, it's created out of a service that you've delivered before as a freelancer, an agency, or a previous job. So for us inside of our agency, we found ourselves building a lot of webinar funnels. So we created our first package around building webinar funnels. So you have to look at kind of the 80 20, what are the things that you're often doing, or the things that you're doing that are getting clients results. That's where you'd want to consider specializing in systematizing, because it's something that you can go sell over and over and over again.

And lastly, you've already seen firsthand what people are willing to pay for a solution. This equals pre-validation. So if your a branding person, and you've seen a lot of other people out there selling brand packages, brand identity packages, or brand workshops, guess what you can too, you might not need to go sell it to someone right now for yourself to validate it because tons of other people have validated it for you. I don't need you to go validate that someone needs webinar funnels or marketing automation systems. It's just how you decide to package it up. And what makes you special and unique. That's going to allow you to talk to your ideal client so you can not only look to things you've already done internally for pre-validation, but you can also look to other peers that are doing similar things to you for the fact that, Hey, is this a viable solution?

Let me go create my version of that in my own way, for my ideal client and boom, you have the opportunity to go to specialize. Now here's the big piece of this. Once you get this core service, you can actually repackage it into a done with you experience like high ticket coaching or consulting. So check out the video up here, where I talk about that. And if you would like to document your creative delivery process, your fulfillment process so that you can streamline how you serve and you start specializing and systemizing to Uplevel your marketing, simplify your sales process, and really start to become a scalable business. Then check the link out below in the description and you can schedule a 45 minute free consultation with one of the growth advisors on my team. We're going to ask you a little bit about what your business looks like right now. How do you currently deliver what services do you deliver? What price points, et cetera. We're going to look at where you want to get to. And then we're going to kind of share some insights and a plan as to how we can shorten that gap. How can you go from [inaudible] generalist service provider to specialize in systematize, really setting the foundation for your business to run without you? So if you want to have a free call with one of our growth advisors, check out the link in the description we look forward to chatting with you.

[inaudible].

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