● XYZ model-- I help X (niche) achieve Y (leads) via Z (PPC, video, etc.)
○ Your WHY
○ How to get clients when you don't have any yet (the catch-22 of starting out)
○ Choosing your specialty (and delegating out the rest to your partners/white-labels) • Setting goals-- income, freedom, impact
● Build your foundation-- website, LinkedIn, Facebook page, Facebook profile, Twitter, etc...
○ Critical personal branding assets (to place on your properties)
○ Key assets to get clients-- strategy assessment, Power Hour, set-up package, monthly retainer
○ Outsourcing execution of your personal and company branding (marketplace, Fiverr, FancyHands, onlinejobs.ph)
● Digital marketing crash course-- all an agency owner needs to know (to be knowledgeable enough to get clients and keep them)
○ How Google really works
○ The Facebook algorithm
○ Local auditing-- snapshot reports
○ Video and reviews-- the engine of sustained growth
● Getting your first client
○ [Integrate George's modules]
○ How much to charge: your price sheet
○ Driving inbound leads via your Content Machine
○ One minute video audits
○ Writing blog posts that rank for your niche
● Closing deals
○ Prospecting for clients-- 3 minute audit checklist
○ During the client call-- Quick Audit template
○ After the meeting-- follow-up techniques
Master Agency Management | page 5
Grow your Digital Marketing Agency (To $10k/month)
● Build your LIGHTHOUSE (key client to get 10 more of the same)
○ Documenting successful execution
○ Producing marketing content based on success
○ Boosting posts
● Operations-- keeping track of clients and money
○ Using the Vendasta platform
○ Staying organized, free basecamp project management, email management
○ Financial planning-- how to assemble your monthly P&L and analyze
● Personal branding (getting more clients with ease)
○ 3 components of authority (people, place, proof)
○ Build your Topic Wheel-- choose 6 topics and fill out content
○ Podcasts, interviews, webinars-- collect authority and be a public speaker
Scale Your Digital Marketing Agency (To 7 Figures)
● PPP: People, Process, Platform (systems to scale)
○ 9 Triangles framework
● People-- finding workers, managers, and leaders
○ A hiring process you can use for freelance and for internal
○ Compensation and performance-- how much to pay hourly, per project, or revshare.
● Process (the Operations Manual)
○ LDT (learn, do, teach): if it's not in a checklist, we don't do it.
○ CCS (content, checklist, software): anything we do well, we record how we do it.
○ Document library:
■ All your key documents, skinned for your agency
Master Agency Management | page 6
■ Master Presentation: be ready to give a presentation, proposal, or training on any topic-- already skinned for your agency.
■ Building case studies from a LIGHTHOUSE
● Platform (delegation, software, and automation to eliminate headaches and repetitive stuff)
○ Parter outsourcing/white-labeling at scale
○ Our favorite tools to manage our agency
○ Training systems for staff
Master Agency Management | page 7
Agency Management Course One-Pager
Master Agency Management | page 8
How to go from a one man show to an agency
You're good at what you do.
Clients wouldn't hire you if you weren't.
But you're afraid that by hiring more people, you'll lose the personal touch and the quality of your services will go down.
At the same time, your business is growing and you're not going to be able sustain this current effort level.
So something has to give: scale up (what you'd like to do), decline business (not smart in the long run), or work harder (impossible).
Clients come to you because of your expertise and relationships.
When you're small, you are the face of your business so your personal brand and company brand are synonymous.
To survive you have to find ways to start working ON your business instead of IN your business, in E-Myth style.
First, start documenting how to do the simple things.
Billing clients, weekly performance reporting, and simple stuff should be driven by checklists.
You can have junior folks do these things so you can focus on the 10% of stuff that is truly high impact.
Do you know what items have the highest impact?
Probably those that are strategic in nature, leaving tactical stuff to be competently handled by the rest of your team.
Your documentation should be step-by-step checklists, assisted with video training snippets.
Master Agency Management | page 9
Use this same training to qualify your prospective staff, as a real-life litmus test of what to expect.
You've also solved the burden of having to interview and qualify people one at a time-- a real time sucks.
Tools like Infusionsoft and ClassMarker let you run people through self-serve training and quizzes.
Boil down your offering to just the essentials.
Make a package that you can reliably execute.
Then you know that your training and agency offering are in alignment.
Clients don't want custom, as much as you think-- they want results.
Before you argue that this sounds cookie-cutter or eliminates thinking, would you say that a Tesla is low quality?
Even movie studios have a process for how they create films-- a framework that enables creativity versus no structure leading to chaos.
If you seek to do things differently for the sake of doing it differently, be prepared to fail a lot.
You want to use proven techniques, especially if you're doing something that can have standards, such as advertising, website building, or anything in digital.
Get out of the day-to-day
Hire a project manager if you need to.
Ironically, if you truly want to help your clients, you'll focus more on troubleshooting than on administrative details you can delegate.
This requires that you trust the people you've been developing.
Master Agency Management | page 10
We look at three criteria for success:
People: Good character, since that can't be trained.
Process: Do they know what to do?
Training: Have you trained them on how to do it?
If you have these three, then you can attend every other meeting instead of all meetings (alternating tactical versus strategic).
Pro tip-- to initially wean clients off you personally, say that you'll show up mid-way through the meeting.
They'll later find that you didn't have to be there the whole time, giving your people a chance to shine.
If you're really that good at what you do, clients would expect that you are delegating to handle the workload.
And you can review the work instead of doing it all yourself.
If your process is solid (checklists with training videos), you should have consistent delivery.
Follow the Content>Checklist>Software process to scale up You can share your training publicly.
Don't be afraid of your "competitors" stealing your know-how or clients deciding they don't need you.
If that were to happen, then you don't know enough or have enough depth to deserve serving clients.
What happens in most cases is that prospective clients appreciate your sophistication and this INCREASES your new client growth.
So engage in content marketing with no fear.
And fire the bottom third or more of your clients.
Master Agency Management | page 11
The ones that are a big headache or make your staff unhappy-- you know the ones.
The clients that treat you best are usually the ones that pay the most and demand the least.
You should keep the ones that you want more of the same-- handing the rest to "competitors".
Then you have consistency across what you offer and can double down on process bits instead of trying to do everything.
In fact, you should make it super clear what you DON'T do.
We like to say we don't be creative, don't do SEO, don't do community management, and don't do strategy.
What we do is implementation-- to drive traffic and conversions on existing converting assets.
The marketplace will believe you when you demonstrate you're world class at doing one thing over and over well.
A good way to tell if this is truly a great client is to raise prices-- gasp, I said it.
If you're truly delivering value, they'll have no problem paying more.
Even I often struggle with mustering the courage to do this.
But if you're proving your value, then making the case should be easy.
You don't want to be the cheapest and you do want a few clients to balk at your price.
If nobody ever balks at your price, you're undercharging for most deals.
And those who are paying less will often think you're not as good, since your prices are low- a double whammy.
Master Agency Management | page 12
