Scaling Smart: Corey Zieman’s Proven Path with Guaranteed PPC

Hi, Kyle.

How are you doing, Corey?

Fantastic. I'm glad you could come.

Oh, thanks for having me. This should be a lot of fun. Talk some agency.

Yep. Absolutely. Kyle, so to start out with in case our audience doesn't really have seen or heard of you before. I want you to go ahead and introduce yourself. You guys, this is Kyle Roof from High Voltage and Page Optimizer Pro. Kyle, why don't you go ahead and let, just tell everybody a little bit more about yourself.

Sure. I've been doing SEO for the better part of 12 years. As you mentioned, I'm the co-founder of High Voltage SEO. It's a multi national, multi language SEO agency. We have offices in Phoenix, Berlin, and Melbourne, and now in Kingston, Jamaica. We do local to national to international to everything in between. I'm also the co founder of Page Optimizer Pro, which is an on page SEO tool. Essentially we we help you figure out which words you need to put on the page. So Google will like your page more than your competitors. And I also teach SEO. I have a courses platform. In particular, I have a course on a on page SEO and a white hat SEO and also SEO testing. And I think SEO testing and on page are probably the two things that people know me most for. And I've run over 400 tests on Google's algorithm. I had to figure out what is, or is not a ranking factor and what's stronger than what you should be doing. It's a bit of my background.

Okay, great. So to ask you one of the first questions I had for you here in regards to the agency world here, of course, is what our conversations about. What did you, why did you decide to start a marketing agency to start with? And then why did you decide to just specialize in SEO?

I kind of backdoored into it. Initially, I was doing web design and development and I was general contracting. I had a really good team that had built a website for me for a business that I was running. And then I got the bright idea that I could general contract websites with that team. And through that heard about SEO. And it was an attractive idea of getting a monthly. Residual income from clients rather than just a one off on a website build. And there were some ups and downs there, but initially or essentially I figured out that getting a thousand dollar website client is just about as much work as getting a thousand dollar a month SEO client. The difference is the SEO client continues to pay you. The appeal of that was great in that, you weren't constantly fighting for kind of one off. But you could get a recurring revenue. And then also I found that SEO is more knowledge intensive, whereas like a website build is more human capital intensive. You have to have developers and programmers and designers and stuff like that, and It really felt like every project we get to 80 or 90 percent done and then it would be just about as much work to finish that last 10 percent and really cut into the margins. Whereas on the SEO side of things, it's very technique driven and knowledge driven and you don't need as many people in order to do the fulfillment as well as grow the company. And so the profit margins end up being a lot better. At least in how I was doing it. And I know there are better ways to do it. I'm sure people are much more successful in web design building. I was, but that's how I, As I progress, how I found things to go. And that's what put me into agency. And then also into SEO.

Yeah. With SEO, you're actually seems like you're paying more so for proprietary knowledge in general versus just labor. Even though technically, you're paying for a, different services or whatever. Okay. Great. So my second question that I had for you was what is the biggest thing you wish you knew back when you started that, now about growing that agency or growing an agency in general?

I'll give you two things. And one kind of ties into what we were just talking about as well, where. it's really imperative to productize your services. You want to get away from an hourly evaluation because there might be something that only takes 30 minutes to do. But the average human just doesn't have that knowledge, and then it's worth much more than the actual 30 minutes of work. And I think a lot of What a lot of people do initially is that they tie their work to their time, and you need to get away from that and tie it to the expertise, to the knowledge that it takes to do it, in addition to the time and then any resources that are needed. But if you productize, you're not selling the product. One link, or two links or five links, you're selling, the site booster 5000. And then it doesn't matter how much time that takes or the time involved in that because you're selling that particular product that has a particular result that you're looking for, not the actual labor. And so A big thing would be getting away from the idea of time for your services and into products for your services is a big step towards building and growing an agency, but taking maybe going back one step SOPs are everything you have to have extremely tight SOPs so that you're not reinventing the wheel every time you go and do something. And if you lose a staff member for whatever reason, Somebody can fill in quite quickly. They can get up to speed quite quickly because those SOPs are so tight and that's what will allow you to maintain quality standards. It will reduce costs and it will help you with your maintaining your staff and also help you with growth. Because you can plug people in immediately. You can scale almost immediately once, because you can bring people into the, you need in order once you get more clients and you're looking at a growth stage.

Just as a follow up to that, it seems like in the SEO world, the like company to company niche to niche, a lot of it, just carries over. So you really can, have You know, a formula that kind of just repeatable. Would you agree with that?

Yeah. Things with an SEO will vary keyword to keyword, niche to niche, but the framework remains the same, the evaluation of what you need to do. And then the implementation of the techniques is going to be the same. So you, you evaluate things on a, on a. Keyword by keyword basis, but once you have that framework in place, then you're good to go. And that framework is what may will maintain across all those keywords and niches.

Okay, great. My next question was like what truly is the best way would you say to get clients for an agency that you're trying to get started? Without the, the usual cop out referrals or, tapping into your existing network.

Yeah. The idea is that you've got no network. Tapping into network. I ain't got one , I ain't got no network. Yeah, I think one of the smartest things that we did was we partnered with complimentary services that weren't doing SEO. Partnering with a web design company that wanted to offer SEO, didn't have the manpower, the expertise, or the desire to have their own branch of it, and was willing to take on us as that branch. And that can be You do it under the guise of them, that, the client thinks that you're actually just part of their company, or you can do it as a preferred partner where they're giving you the referral and you're handling it from there. Obviously they, they're going to get a percentage of that much more so than you probably want to pay, but they're also doing all of the marketing and you're building off of their network. And then that allows you to do a few things. So you can build, allows you to start building a portfolio. The portfolio is case studies are extremely needed. To establish that you know what you're talking about. And if you're starting from nothing, you probably don't have anything there. And so this will allow you to build that if you're doing it as a preferred partner, then that is how you start to build your network. And that's how you do start to get those referrals. And what's nice, too, is that are clients that are at arm's length, they don't know you, they're not a friend of your uncle Bill. It's that somebody that actually came from that agency and coming in allows you to grow and extend an actual network. And so if I was starting from scratch, that's something that I would look to do immediately. Get a couple, Preferred partner type scenario set up there. They'll be able to feed you a steady stream, a pro tip on how to find somebody that needs that would be if you go to an agency website, a web design company website, and you don't really see an about us page, that there's, they might not have that big a team. And in that case, they might need your services. It'd be somebody that it's probably good to reach out to say, Hey, we can do this. We can offer this for you so you can get that monthly recurring income and we can handle everything for you so you don't have to worry about it. You can just grow your company. And that might, I think that's a really good way to go when you're starting from zero.

To follow that up. So case studies, I agree by the way, if you're trying to do SEO, the best thing you can just lead with is here's all the rankings we guide. That speaks for itself. But so are you basically saying that you find a, web design agency or PPC agency, you come to them with your, you just say, Hey, look, see all the rankings we got. Wouldn't you like your,

Yeah, I think it's great because they've done the marketing to get those clients. They the best thing you can do is get money from somebody that's already your client, and grow that. And so offering a service that you don't, that they don't have is an attractive way to do that. And so it can be very mutually beneficial. You'll get to the point though, where you don't want that anymore. You'll get mature enough more than likely where you then have your own network. You have your own channels. But when you're just starting off and you don't even have that marketing budget, don't know where to look for clients. This is a, I think a really good way to get off the ground and get off the ground. Quickly.

So just to give you a frame of reference here as well. So all the time, once somebody gets results at our agency for, doing the PPC where there's Google ads, Facebook ads, whatever we're running, once you build that trust, clients will literally just say, Hey, do you know an SEO guy? Hey, how do I fix this problem? That problem. And most of the time, it's just simple. Throw up my hands. I don't know. Since then I've been trying to build some relationships, but honestly they like once they find somebody they trust, they think you're just like amazing at everything automatically for whatever reason. And so people really need a referral partner more than you think. And from the agency owner's standpoint, it's like free extra money. You don't have to work any harder. to refer somebody that, can help that client like legitimately, that they get results. So you're actually you're able to scale your business pretty easily. Whereas if you were just to do more PPC work, that actually takes more employees and whatnot. And coming from the other side, if they can refer your business back, referrals are the easiest clients also to deal with because you don't have to explain, how the process works, so to say that they just are ready to start. It's the easiest client to sell as well. So it's good all the way around. And I think it's really good information.

From, in our agency, initially we were doing PPC as an offering that we would do SEO and PPC and something that we ran into, which was funny is that our PPC was good. It was fine. But our SEO was great, and we ended up competing against ourselves where the services that we were offering just weren't the same standard. You know that our SEO was really good, and we ended up hurting ourselves with just pretty good as PPC. We ended up divesting out of PPC and going to referral partners because it was just better for us to actually have that distance as well. So we started doing SEO and doing PPC through referral partners. And then we actually got ourselves into referral partners on the other end when we didn't want to offer those services anymore. So there are a lot of even mature agencies have different needs at different times and you can reach out to them and there can be really great opportunities and it can be a win for all the parties involved.

Myself personally, I always thought that it's like how you're never going to be amazing at one form of marketing unless you just specialize in it. It's not. 2010 anymore. Everything's so complicated. And there's going to be more and more specialists because of that all the time, even in the ad world, there's, just Facebook specialists. There's just Google ads specialists. And with that, you're bringing in. The agencies are going to be better off partnering with other specialists if they want the best overall result for their client, even though they might be able to make a little bit more doing being the jack of all trades, it's really not as ideal for the agency or the client. And so I just see that more and more agencies are going to want to refer out for this stuff to build their agency versus trying to figure out how to hire someone internally to try to build. Laterally in their business, it'll just refer out. It's a much easier way to grow the business itself. So anyway, as far as thank you, by the way, another follow up question here. Would you recommend other agency owners to divest themselves into creating a software like you did to try to scale their business? Or would you say that just through services by itself? Do you have to be, in other words, A special type of person to, get into developing a software that can help systematize and scale an agency. Or do you think anybody could do it?

It's getting easier. They're I think it's getting easier to build your own software. I would recommend solving your own problem. If you have a problem that you can solve, And there isn't a piece of software that does exactly how you want it. Or, you're using something, then you have to modify the results in a in a certain way so that you're repeating that over and over again, there's probably an opportunity to create something that makes your life easier and hopefully cheaper than perhaps what you're paying a regular tool. So as a result, you're going to get something that is tailored to what you're You need, and you're going to end up paying less for it. That's if you identify that particular problem. And once you've done that, the, you have actually made the value of your agency go up. Because now you have something proprietary. You've got some IP, you've created an internal tool. And if just for that alone, if you're ever thinking about selling your agency, you need something like that. You need something that's proprietary and you can create little mini tools that are just meant for you and your team to do your tasks in a specific way so that you can deliver the services that you do. Now you might find. Yourself when you're at a conference or you're talking to your agency buddies, they have the same problem. And if they do have the same problem, you can show them the solutions. They're like, Hey, would you like this? Is this something that you might actually would pay for because it'll also save you money. What if it was this price? And you can start to soft test this concept to see if it actually has market appeal. That's what I was able to do with our software, with our on page software. I was using a a big tool, big name tool, and they had a feature. And we were very successful with it. And they took the feature away and I was pretty upset about that. And then I was like I guess I just have to build it. I actually called him up and I was like, can I roll back the software? And is there any way I can do that? And they're like, Oh no, we found it. It's actually not effective. And I was like, actually, it's pretty good. I offered to buy it from him. I was like, can I buy that feature from you? And they're like no, we're not going to do that. And so I ended up having to go out and build my own is what I did. And we were doing it internally. Initially it was doing, we did it by hand at first actually. And it worked, but we realized that's not scalable at all. You can't do the math like this by hand every time. So then we turned it into a Google sheet and then from a Google sheet to a Python script it was the. Progression. But after I had it in that form, I showed it to some buddies and I was like, Hey, look, I can probably, is this useful? Would you like this type of data in this way? Would this be something that you think you could use? And the response was overwhelmingly positive. So then we took the time to build it out as a SAS from there. We actually gave it away for free for about seven months. And we got to the point where the server cost was a little too much. And I reached out to everybody. I was like, Hey, look, I need to charge like a dollar a report. And everybody was pretty chill about that. And the next month we made 2, 600, which means we ran 2, 600 reports. And I could not believe it. Like we ran that many and that by month three, it was paying for itself. And it's own development and has been since, and now we're coming up on, I think, close to 2 million runs of the tool. That's a long process, that that's a lot of internal testing. So that's something that we needed and at the end of the day, even if we didn't sell it, we would use it and we had IP and the agency was more valuable than going into a long process of testing it out with people for free, getting it to the point. This is actually something that's viable. We're talking a year long process. So I would say if you're willing to commit to something like that, and you have an idea that people are interested in, then yes definitely go into the market realm of it. If you're doing it just to make your life easier and you can save some money for your agency, I would totally do it for the IP. If you're not in either of those situations, if you're just trying to do it for the sake of doing it, then I would say no, because it is quite the process. It's very going to be very expensive, can be very expensive, and you can end up with nothing in the end. So if you find yourself in one of those two situations that I was talking about at the start, then I would explore it for sure. But understand it's gonna take a long time. It's gonna take a lot of commitment and investment.

I want to say that most of the marketing software that's out there probably originated the same kind of way where an agency was automating some sort of internal process that they were using for their clients that, so they first took the first step, like you said, to systematize and create SOPs for everything. Once you've done that, then you're in position to put it into a software because it's formulaic, and then that software, can be Then used by the general public. So that's the process. And, I just think that's probably people, if you will, stumbled into it, not necessarily, thinking that it was going to be a huge company and just, much agencies themselves were started. You get one client, then all of a sudden it's three and then five and nobody intended it to be that way when they started out with it. That's why the software is successful, because it was predicated on a real problem. It wasn't, as they say, a problem looking for a solution.

So Yeah. Solve your own problem. Make your life better. And there's a good chance if you make your life better, somebody else has the exact same thing. And you could potentially make their lives better.

Definitely. Okay.

Is this the part of the part of the show where I start to interview you now? Is that where we're at?

Yes. Yes, it is.

All right. We've got some toughies lined up for you here and we'll get down to the to the nitty gritty. All right. You wake up this morning and this is the day, this is the day of days. You're going to start your own agency. And I know a lot of people get to that point where they've got their main hustle and they're like, all right, I got to get this side hustle going. I've got to start this. Here we go. What are the first steps? Let's say what are the first three things you're going to do to try to get this agency off the ground.

It depends on what type of agency that you want to start. I would say start with whatever you think you're best at, obviously. But with that said, I would then try any more. If I were to start over, I would try to niche down. It's really almost don't really the best way to go about doing it. And I'd find a niche that seems to be underserved because there's a lot of niches that, like for lawyers, for instance, there's multiple companies that specialize in that where there's a reasonable amount of volume that There's, cash there to be able to get money that people can spend. And then I would start identifying, is it easy to get results? Can you get results? And then from there, I would just try to, obviously try to figure out what it is that you can do. Product tie is systematized that you're going to be able to sell to them. And then I would go and try to, do proof of concept of it. Even if I have to spend my own money to try to go out there and do it for somebody first, cause that's always the thing that kind of people make the mistake of doing is they don't actually have the case study to go to the client. It's a hundred times easier once you already have that. And when you niche down particularly and somebody, you can say, Hey, I already got these results for this crime scene cleanup company. Look, see how much it's working. It pretty much sells itself, spend the money, figure out the system, then go to sell it to the other companies in that space. And just start by marketing it for lack of other words, cheaply figure out the market and then start, sell it for what it's worth eventually. Once you figured out what the market is and all of that. So I think that would be my general route that I would go with it nowadays. If I had to do it all over again.

For that first one where you're gonna try to get the proof of concept that you know what you're doing, would you want to do that on a friend's side or a family member's site? Or would you actually try to get at arm's length and get into the crime scene cleanup? And try to find somebody there to do it for say free or for a seriously discounted price.

That's a good question. One thing I did have found out that if you're looking for a client if you reach out to a companies and you say "i'm willing to work for commission only" they will say "Yeah, absolutely", and you can actually don't have to start out not getting paid anything technically if you can generate a sale or a result for the client they will pay you for it. And they'll also respond at a high rate because not, it's not every day that somebody comes at them and say, "Hey, I'll work for 10 percent of whatever I produce". They'll actually think you're a hustler and people like hustlers. And so with that said, I wouldn't necessarily need a friend. I know just had the advantage of knowing I've done that kind of thing before to get, do a case study with somebody. But for that. You could go after more. Opposed to a friend, I could go after a bigger company so that when I use the case to be, to go after other companies, they're not thinking, Oh, this is some guy working out of his garage. It's not, it doesn't impress me. I've got somebody that's like me. Ideally when people. Want to hire somebody. They want to hire somebody and see you work with somebody above them because they aspire to be that person, not the person that's here, even though you may have been successful marketing that smaller company quite well.

Would you say your advice is to niche down quickly? Is that would you say that's your differentiating point is the niche specialty. Would that be the biggest thing to differentiate you from another PVC agency? Or is there something else that would go into that getting that unique selling point why people would go to you?

So when I started my agency, I always knew. The two things that people cared about was, do you have niche experience and do you offer any guarantees? And I actually work with an agency before I started this agency guaranteed PPC over 10 years ago. And of course you never could quote unquote, Offer a guarantee to clients and you really can't guarantee results. You can guarantee you won't charge fees if you don't get said result for the client and kind of have show you have some skin in the game. And I just went the general direction of offering a contingency offer and say, Hey if we don't at least get you this much results, then we don't have to charge you a fee. And it actually stands out because nobody else is doing that or would Be willing to do that per se. But with that said, really, everybody thinks their business is different. You could say I've gotten results for a thousand different companies in terms of PPC, but can you really get it for a crime scene cleanup company? Like it's any different. It's really not, but that's what people think. And that's what they're like more than that. And so if you want the one thing that people want to hear, it's. I know how to get results in your niche.

Yeah, that makes, yeah you're a hundred percent right. You hear that all the time. Yeah, sure. You did this over here, but my niche or my business is this. And it's yeah, we know it's okay. Everyone also thinks they've got the greatest idea of all time too. Have you noticed that they think that they've got the thing. In their particular niche let's say, all right, we're kicking things off we were picking our niche to get say that first five clients. I think that's a good benchmark of, okay, we have a portfolio of clients. What are you going to do? Is it through that outreach that you talked about to that particular niche? Is that how you're going to approach it? Or how would you get those first five clients?

Yeah. As I talked about before earlier, I would literally make a list of every single client. Company in that niche that I would want to work with and I'd get their email address. I would get their physical address. I would get both of those and their phone number and just, reach out to them in all three ways basically. And we did some, similar stuff at our agency. So I know it works. And you go out there and you, like I meant mentioned before, I would just work for commission until you get the five. And if you get the five, then it's just simply, Hey, we got the results for the five. Do you want this? Yes or no. And you should be going in with specifics, not, Hey, I've gotten results for these other companies. Assuming you can, sometimes you can't, there's proprietary this or that, or people that you're working with may not clear it or whatever. But the ideal is I got this business result. We got, 20 leads a month for this particular client. And we were paying roughly 30 a call and their calls are closing at 5 percent and they're getting an average ticket size of X. Therefore our average profit per month is this for the five. And then you're just making it, you're not making them. They may accidentally not figure out the value and what you're presenting. If you just say, I got, I can get these rankings or I can get, these calls going, you, it's simple for them. And they just, if you break it down like that for the client and you say, this is the profit you're going to get. It's really hard to say no, that's to the level you want to go at it with an ad. If you want it to be easy.

Do you find, how do you balance the managing expectations, the realistic expectations. While also trying to promote "Hey, we actually did this really good work, we could bring it to you", but you also can't obviously promise the moon. And also previous results are not an indicator of potential future results. How do you manage those expectations while still keeping that sale? "Hey, we were actually really good at this."

Yeah. It's always the conundrum, right? Because if you offer too much, then you're going to have a client who lasts two months and then quits or whatever. But if you don't offer enough, they're going to be like, Oh, what? I don't want to wait that long for the result. So what I've done in our own agency that I found worked great was we do an eight quarter projection and we would just say, okay, these are not, Guaranteed, but I perceive based upon the previous projects we work with after 90 days, you're, you should be at this spot, 180 days, you should be at this spot and that just lays it out well. So if they message you and clients are, great. They like to message you in 30 days and be like why don't I have any results? And you could be like, Hey, I told you, at this stage you'd be at this level here. And the big results. So in six months still here, and it's going to take a little bit of time. That's actually going to really save you more than anything to manage the expectations, so to say, so that you don't get a client who's going to be expecting too much, but also. For them to understand that there's value there because people, clients like anybody else don't understand the power of compounding interest and results that compound over time. So even though there's a great result in month 12, month one, it doesn't look so hot. So you got to paint that picture for them up front. So just and you can say, Hey, as long as we get a 10 percent increase a month in a year, you're going to be making a lot of money. And all we got to do is to know we're on track is just to make sure that month one, we have this and month two, we roughly have this, and it's at least improving and then they don't need the big result right away. And you, and if, so long as you have a way to track things somewhat, so you can show, okay, there's progress, they'll be patient with you and they'll understand the results coming. I think that's the best way you can do it.

A big thing on the SEO side that we did with our reporting that was extremely helpful was benchmarking where pages were when we started. And that information was always there on every subsequent report. When we came in, this page is getting, a hundred impressions and 10 clicks. Now it's getting, a thousand impressions and a hundred clicks. And if you have a flat month or a slightly down month, it doesn't look as jarring to the client. Because they can go back and say sure, this was month. We didn't really have that much growth. We maintained, but see where we came from, yeah, it's not a flat month. It's still crushing where you were thing. And they give that kind of not so gentle reminder of this is the good work that we're doing.

That's that happens all the time with seasonal businesses and most businesses are seasonal. They'll hit their peak season and then everything's great. And then they, coming off of that, then they think something's broken and that's just natural. It's going to happen. And so you're right, you need to benchmark it. And you got to be able to zoom out to really justify what you're doing. You got to really help them do that because they're not going to do that. They're going to be looking at. Short term because in their business, they got bills to pay short term.

Exactly. It's always, what have you done for me lately? And you definitely need to have that way to, like you said, to give them the broader view to, so that they understand the value of the work that you're constantly doing for them. I found when you're building the agency, especially at the start, you definitely hit certain like revenue milestones or plateaus and you'll get stuck at that plateau for a while. And once you figure out how to get clients, I think it's a quick race to 10, 10, 000. And then you really stuck at that plateau for a bit. And once you get with that one, you might get stuck at 20, 000. And then I think it's from there, it's probably raced to 70 or 80, 000, but you got to do get stuck at those plateaus for a while. Have you experienced that? And do you have any thoughts on how you're able to break through those plateaus if you have.

Exactly. It's always, what have you done for me lately? And you definitely need to have that way to, like you said, to give them the broader view to, so that they understand the value of the work that you're constantly doing for them. I found when you're building the agency, especially at the start, you definitely hit certain like revenue milestones or plateaus and you'll get stuck at that plateau for a while. And once you figure out how to get clients, I think it's a quick race to 10, 10, 000. And then you really stuck at that plateau for a bit. And once you get with that one, you might get stuck at 20, 000. And then I think it's from there, it's probably raced to 70 or 80, 000, but you got to do get stuck at those plateaus for a while. Have you experienced that? And do you have any thoughts on how you're able to break through those plateaus if you have.

Did you feel that there were times maybe as you, with these plateaus or even not that you're almost like reinventing your agency? It feels like you're, you've got this model and works and it can take you so far in it. And there, there's Sims. It seems to be some point of like reinvention to move forward.

I want to say that below 10, 000 a month, you're basically doing all the work yourself, and unless you're going to get past 10, 000 us, you got to be able to get somebody else doing the work. So you can focus on the sales and like the business strategy and that side of things. And then, once you reach a million. You got to be able to get somebody else who can do the sales for you specifically, and just, you have to be out of it at that level. So where you're really just. Working on guiding the company on an executive level. So if you will, that's how, how I see it. There's stages within that, that, micro stages where you get stuck. I really got stuck at 40, 000 a month. I just really couldn't get past that for multiple years. And the reason why I brought up the, like the quality of the leads that really, I was a big part of it in my mind, being able to figure out how to get somebody who's willing to pay more a higher fee because, we could do more for the client and it was also just easier to hire better quality people because when you charge low fees, you can't hire good quality people. And then if you hire low quality people, you're going to churn clients. And then it's just like a never ending cycle.

Yeah, for sure. What when you see people starting out. To start their agencies and maybe this could go into starting from zero or maybe hitting these plateaus, for example what's a common mistake or is there a common mistake or a common theme that you see of an error that's being made that would either prevent them from going. Kind of breaking through those plateaus or maybe even starting so the plateau of zero, but is there a common mistake that you see like new agency or agency owners make?

I don't really try to hyper lyze other agencies and I don't get too much of other agencies reaching out to me and telling me about what they're doing and specifics. Don't have the opportunity to really see everything that they're doing wrong. One thing I do know though without, trying to be too repetitive here, it seems like the main barrier where you go from small to big is when you start to get into being a thought leader and in your space, if you're going to do outbound sales, doing emailing, going back to what we were saying before, you're only going to get so far with that because you're never going to get there. The best clients want to work the best and the best, it almost, they almost all think as it seems want to, work with the thought leader in the space, whether you're speaking, you're writing books, whether you have the YouTube channel, whatever, you have to be able to do that. Otherwise you're never going to be really in that upper echelon where things really get easy and the people that. The really good clients are ultimately just coming to you. That should be your end goal. If you really want to get into the seven figure a year category.

I love that. And I would add to it that I know that some people probably their heart sank with the idea of having to go on camera or go on stage. One thing I think you need is the face of the company. You need to have the person that is the face of that company that people, cause people buy from people. And as you said, people want to buy from the best. They want to buy from people that they perceive are good at their jobs and people that are relatable or maybe someone that they want to work with. And I think you have to have that face of the company. So it might not necessarily being, if somebody's heart just went into palpitations about having to like do go on stage and speak, I think at a minimum, if you've got that face and then a point of view, that's You know, you have to have a point of view of something like why people are coming to you. We're the agency that does this. We have this, we're committed to that. And you touched a lot on that with the niching down and different aspects of that. And I think that all goes into, you do need that face, the company, you can't be a faceless company because I think that will really, inhibit the amount of growth you can have, that there has to be somebody out there that is representing the company.

I've seen a few other agencies do it without doing it. For instance there's pool builder lead rocket is one agency that I saw that where they were able to become a prevert preferred vendor for one of the three major, three part sellers that sell and distribute. Replacement parts for pools and then became a preferred vendor for one of the three. And then, naturally they have the relationship with all the other, all their customers. And so they could say, Hey, if you're going to hire a marketing company, you hire this one. And they got all 200 clients that they have, like off of the back of that. Not to say that they don't do any thought leadership whatsoever, but there is a way to be the guy behind the scenes and make it work. It's the, the old buddy club. If you can do some stuff like that, networking with the right people, it also can work. I just wanted to, kind of caveat what I said before, which there is other ways of doing it technically

Sure. That's the same thing we were talking about when I was like, having. Becoming a preferred partner, getting a through complimentary services. You can do it through something just like that, that you become the preferred partner of a vendor and that's a brilliant idea. And another way to, to get clients an excellent way to get clients. Last question that I've got And it's the generic one, but as you, you've grown, as you've become more successful, as you've, helped people along and the work that you're doing have you seen any mind shifts that you've had or any habits that you've picked up something that you would attribute, like I was thinking this way, I'm now thinking that way, or I was doing this and now I always do. That is there anything personally or professionally anything come to mind?

A couple of things. If you're starting out your journey as an agency owner you're going to question your existence a few times. Every business owner is going to want to quit many times over. And then you just got to talk yourself out of it. And we're just think about the big picture to get through it, mainly because, stuff's going to happen. Employees are going to quit. Clients are going to quit. You just have to really keep at it. And if you stick with it long enough and you just keep working at it as if your life defends on it, you'll eventually break through what you need to break through and just through, through brute force learning you'll do it. But the reason why I say that is, is that, when I started out, like a lot of agency owners, I heard other agency owners actually say this, that there were constantly like worried clients are going to leave key employees might leave and eventually you got to realize that, worrying about it, isn't going to help. And the best thing to do is just work as hard as you can. So that the other main thing is that, I got the luxury of it doing it now. And a lot of people won't wouldn't when they start out, clients That let's say abuse their position or whatever. You got to realize at some point in time, you know what, not every client's a good client either. There's clients that are going to make your business go down, not go up. And just from the standpoint of the level of service that they need, how they treat your staff, how they treat yourself and You're really hungry for every last client you can at the beginning, but then you eventually realize that, some clients it's no, for lack of a kinder way of saying it's worse than having no client at all. And you have to learn how to find the clients that are going to fit your mold and the way that you do things and actually help your agency. Whereas it seems counterproductive when you're starting out Hey, how am I going to turn down money? I need money. The runner agency or what have you, it eventually you got to cross that bridge and realize you're never going to build up a really nice company that's going to work and that you're going to be happy with unless you find a way to figure out who your client is, who your not client is not, and actively turn around, turn away clients that don't fit the way that you do things. Otherwise you're going to have this, mix of different clients that they just really don't work well together. They don't, and going back to your SOPs, like you've got to have people We'll do things your way, not they want you to use this, landing page builder tool. They want you to use this CRM and it gets to be really hard to run your company when you're doing things a different way for every client. You got to have your own system and every client has to use your system. And if they don't, you're not going to have a, a sellable agency at the very least. At the end of the day, once you build it up

For sure. I totally agree. If you're seeing any red flags before their clients, that's, they're only going to amplify. They're becoming red flag. They get worse. They don't get better.

That's a good funny that you say that because it, you get the red flag when you're in experience, it's okay maybe that, yeah, that was just like a one off thing. It usually never gets better. Once it starts, like you get a bad feeling, it never gets better after that magically.

No, it's only going to get 10 times worse. And you're going to hate yourself for sure.

It's not worth it at the end of the day. For sure.

Great stuff. Thanks for having me on your your live broadcast. And also thank you for coming onto my show as we'll be posting this over on my show at Hack to the Future as well. This has been great.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for coming on, Kyle. Hope that you come on some other times someday in the future. But with that said, if you I think we'll wrap it up.

Sounds great. Thanks so much.