The 2 Biggest Mistakes Digital Agencies Make That Prevent Growth
These 2 things are guaranteed to keep you either broke, stuck or struggling…
I know, cuz I’ve ignored these 2 things in the past myself so I’ve seen it firsthand.
Believe me, it’s lethal.
About a month ago I got to spend 3 days on a houseboat with some awesome entrepreneurs and we each had time on the “hotseat”.
For 60-90 minutes we each got insight, advice, and ideas from the group on our biggest and most pressing issues.
It’s events like these where you don’t hear people talking about funnels, Facebook ads, chatbots etc…
We talk about hiring, systems, financials, training your team, process, etc.
As each entrepreneur had their turn, I was reminded of 2 critical things that separate the successful from the struggling.
1. Hitting Targets
2. Doing the boring work
In today's’ episode, I’ll break down these 2 things in more detail and how you should avoid them...unless you want to stay stuck...then just skip this video.
Transcript / MP3
What's good everybody. In this episode, I want to talk about the two biggest mistakes that I see agency owners making when trying to add on a more leveraged revenue stream like training or workshops or coaching and consulting.... 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 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 Scalable.
Welcome back guys and before we jump into this topic, I wanted to quickly just say thank you for uh, the reviews that you guys have been leaving on iTunes. I know we're a new show, uh, and you probably have other podcasts that you also listened to, but the ratings and the reviews in iTunes go so far. If you don't follow the whole podcasting algorithm, every time we get a rating and review, it just really helps propel us and puts us into the eyes of or in front of the eyes of more people like yourself. So thank you to those that have reviewed, we're probably going to get started doing some sort of a shout out to to those that have left awesome reviews. But if you haven't left a review yet, what we would really appreciate you doing is the payback for this content because obviously we're not charging you for, it would be to just go over to iTunes and leave an honest rating and review.
If you love the show and you love how we, you know, talk about building and scaling and growing your agency and some of the things that we're sharing that you enjoy, we'd love you to share that in the reviews within iTunes. Again, it just helps us get in front of more eyeballs when it comes to us growing, growing that audience. So like I said in this episode, I wanted to talk about, um, two, two mistakes that I see agency owners making really often when they are trying to add a new revenue stream to their business, like coaching, consulting or training. Now if you're new to the show and you're unfamiliar with what what we do here at systemly, we work with agency owners that have kind of capped out their potential in, done for you and are interested in scaling that up even more. Now, in some cases they enjoy, they enjoy their agency and they want to keep a few clients around, but they want something that's more leveraged and more scalable, more predictable, something that will allow them to create a repeatable sales and marketing machine, a predictable, you know, income each and every month.
Um, something that they can remove themselves from when it comes to the sales process, the, you know, the fulfillment process. So then they're, they're not the ones doing all of the hands to the keyboard. So when they come in, oftentimes, you know, we're suggesting some radical changes in how they do things, right? The most common one being, you know, they're serving too many different types of clients and they have to simplify who they are serving to create that predictable process that they can package up and sell like a product, right? Because productizing your services is all about packaging up a service and selling and delivering it like a product, right? So we need to package something up that can be sold over and over and over again, but at the same time you need to be able to deliver the same result over and over again, right?
That repeatable client success result is something that is going to help make your marketing a whole lot better. So if you serve 50 different types of clients and you give them 50 different types of things, it's going to be hard to make that repeatable. So that's essentially what we're helping a lot of our agency clients do is add this new revenue stream to their business, some of which it's going to become their front end revenue stream. Kind of make up 80% of their revenue. In other cases it is going to be added on to um, you know, added onto their agency, uh, in the backend after they do a core service. And in some cases we have clients that come in and they're, they're new leverage revenue stream starts to do so much better and it's so much more profitable and enjoyable that they start to transition out of doing done for you agency work.
And they kind of evolve into more of a training and consulting agency. So as they're doing this right, they have to make a lot of difficult decisions on simplifying, eliminating things, delegating to other people so that they can focus on growing their business. And Yeah, you know, there's obviously situations where clients run into obstacles and um, you know, if you come in and you have a thriving agency and it's just something that you don't want to continue to grow and you want to add this thing on, you're going to have to make some tough decisions. You're going to have to say no to some clients that are coming in as you start to package, you know, this, this new thing and get it off the ground. And so again, many of our clients are, are coming in to add this new piece. How do they take what they're doing done for you and add it into something that can be delivered with more leverage.
And so in doing so, I see two mistakes being made. Pretty much like the most common mistakes we see. I narrowed this down from a list of about seven or eight, maybe I'll share those at another time. But the two that I see that I, that I actually see holding a lot of other entrepreneurs and agency owners up in and kind of achieving something that they're striving to, whether that's a radical shift in how they deliver their service, um, or who they're serving. The first mistake that I see people make is to constantly change their target like every three months, right? So well in our business we set quarterly goals and they're specific and they're measurable and we identify specific milestones that we're trying to achieve in the process of delivering that, right? And what I often see is, you know, we, a client comes in and they set their eyes on how they want to package this new service.
They've defined the goal, how many clients they want in a specific time frame, which is great. It's measurable, it's time bound and they go off to the races and they hit the first bump in the road and they completely change their goal, right? Sometimes so drastically that it's like a completely different goal. Not just like, Hey, my goal was 10 and I'm going to reduce it down to two. It's like, Hey, I was trying to to generate, you know, 50 k in sales in the next 90 days or next 30 days and now I'm gonna launch this whole other new thing. Right? And I think this is really common right now in the entrepreneurial landscape because there's just an abundance of information if you're one of those people that is caught consuming, consuming and consuming. And not creating, you're going to constantly be seeing things that other people are doing and you are like, I want that.
But in the reality is you want to want that and you haven't really looked at what their trajectory was, the work that they put in to get there and you just really neglect the original goal that you had. So the number one mistake that people are making is just, they're just changing their goal, right? Like if you want to hit a goal, you have to commit to it, right? Give yourself a reasonable amount of time. Know, not like, you know, a whole year to achieve something that can be done in 30 days, but like give yourself a goal that can be knocked out in 30 60 or 90 days and do whatever it takes to hit that goal. And the way in which you go to approach that goal might have to change like your strategic approach, right? You might be trying to do x, Y, Z and you realize, you know, 30 days in that it's not moving as fast.
And so you want to introduce ABC, right? It's a new strategy, but you're still aiming towards the same goal versus completely obliterating that original goal and changing altogether. It's kind of like I see agents, owners come in and they're like, well, I really want to launch this thing. I'm tired of doing my agency. I want to launch this new program where we do done with you instead of done for you and I want to launch it in the next 90 days and we're like, sweet. We have a step by step process to get you there. If you just follow the step by step process and while they're doing that, a unique opportunity comes their way. That is basically their old model, right? So they're trying to launch this new thing because it's what they want. It's what they, they know is true. It's what they believe they need to pursue in order to have the lifestyle and the business that they want.
Yet, opportunities are going to keep coming for that done for you agency that you have been running all along and the ability to say yeah, it's just as easy to say yes to those people as it is to say no. And which is why a lot of these agency owners are saying yes and so they take on that one more client. I'll take on that one more client and then that client turns into, you know, 80% of their bandwidth and they're like, you know what, I'm going to hold off on doing this thing because now I'm so busy, you know, working with this client. Right. And there's a tradeoff, right? And this is why a lot of these agents, owners that come and work with us have to make some sort of radical shift because they've come to us saying, I don't want to do the old way, I want the new way.
And then the first opportunity that presents itself that is still the old way that might seem attractive takes them out of their goal. Right? So if you feel like your trying to go a new direction, but you keep accepting opportunities that bring you back to the old way of doing things, you're likely going to keep changing your goal, right? And if you keep changing your goal, how are you supposed to hit a moving target? Right? You know, the whole point of a goal is to like aim for something and go after it and you can see how close or how far off you are from it. Just like if you were going to go to a, you know, an archery range and shoot an Arrow at a target, right? You're not going to know how close you are to the target until you shoot that first Arrow, right?
And so you gotta, you gotta take steps towards the new thing and start saying no to the old thing. So number one mistake I see most agency owners making and trying to transition into something more leveraged is changing their goal because a, an old style opportunity presents itself and they're desperate for the cashflow and they're acting, uh, more out of desperation then making decisions based on who they want to become and what they want their business to become. And it just turns into a cycle. So at some point you just need to stop changing your goal and go all in on the goal that you set for yourself and give it ample time and an ample effort to get there. The second mistake that I see a lot of agency owners making is experimenting with the tried and true fundamentals, right? You cannot go scrolling through Facebook right now without seeing someone talking about like the latest, greatest marketing technology or chat bot funnel or whatever.
And it's really easy to think that you're not moving forward because you don't have the latest and greatest thing. I get it, I like shiny objects. But what I've found in both the success of our own agency as well as the the mentors and the coaches that I've hired and really anyone successful that I've looked up to that's doing far greater things than myself. And you'll see this too, if you look at people that you admire and that you're trying to emulate, they never stopped doing the fundamentals. Like they never stopped doing the basics. And it's so easy to think that, oh well, you know, webinars don't work or you know, this t this style of sales funnel doesn't work, so I'm going to go try this new thing. And the reality is it just hasn't worked for you yet. Right. There is hundreds and hundreds of businesses, probably thousands of businesses that are just like you that got the result only focusing on the fundamentals.
And it's really just comes down to like the, the accessibility of the new shiny thing and you thinking that by me doing this, I'm actually moving forward. But if you're doing that and you're neglecting the fundamentals, like going out there and creating content, going out there and having sales conversations, you know, sticking to selling one product or service offering instead of offering 10 different things, like not waking up early, not taking care of yourself, not controlling your schedule. All of these little basic things are why you see certain people blow up really quickly is because they never stopped doing them. And even once they've blown up, they keep doing them. Right. And so I challenge you like, do you ask yourself like, are you doing the fundamentals? Are you waking up early? Are you creating the content that you know you need to produce? Are you trying to have as many sales conversations that you can be?
Have you simplified your business? Have you optimize your calendar so you're only working on the things that you should be working on? Are you eating right? Are you, are you being healthy? Like literally the basics, you know, are you journaling? You know, like there's so many little fundamentals and basic things that the successful people never stop doing. And then we look at their success and we're like, oh, it must be this funnel. Right? And what it really comes down to is they just stuck to their stuff, to their basics, and they didn't change their goal and they kept moving forward, right? They fell in love with the process. So in this, you know, to kind of conclude this, like the two biggest mistakes, changing your target every 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, not giving yourself a chance to hit it, right? You're never going to hit a moving target.
So you're not going to get there if you keep changing it and to like experimenting too much and avoiding and, or stopping the fundamentals that it's going to be that are required of you to, to reach success. So I'd look at what you're doing right and see like, am I doing the basics? Am I doing the well, if you're like, you know, subpar at some of the basics and the fundamentals, like one sales, one sales conversion system, selling one solution to one person, waking up early to do the most important thing in your business, right? Um, documenting what you're doing. Like if you're skipping some of those fundamental things that the latest chat Bot or the Messenger strategy or the Facebook ad strategy is not going to help you because you're not going to have the, the sustainable foundation to support that explosive growth that you're hoping to have. Right. So in my studies, the most successful people, they never stopped doing the fundamentals and they don't try to hit moving targets.
If I gave 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 doubled profits without adding more hours. If you want to work directly with me and my team to transform your agency, visit myscalablebusiness.com to learn more.
