Dan Martell - August 29, 2016


How to Create Your Agency's Positioning Strategy


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

197.72253

Word count

1,800

Sentence count

96

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I share with you how to overcome the frustrations of having projects that always go over scope and you essentially make no money on, to having people on your team that don t buy into your vision, or don't even be in a situation where you don't have systems or processes to scale, or maybe you've even tried to scale and you ended up with more headaches, more overhead, more people, and you made less money.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.120 Was I singing Madonna earlier?
00:00:02.080 What was I singing?
00:00:03.080 Oh, Cotton Eye Joe.
00:00:04.400 I was singing Cotton Eye Joe,
00:00:05.400 but then I think I was singing
00:00:06.320 Like a Virgin for some reason.
00:00:16.320 The right way to build a consulting agency.
00:00:18.800 In today's video, I wanna share with you guys
00:00:20.440 how to overcome the frustrations of having projects
00:00:23.560 that always go over scope
00:00:25.020 and you essentially make no money on,
00:00:26.880 to having people on your team
00:00:28.200 that don't buy into your vision or even be in a situation
00:00:31.960 where you don't have systems or processes to scale
00:00:34.280 or maybe you've even tried to scale
00:00:36.600 and you ended up with more headaches, more overhead,
00:00:39.640 more people and you made less money.
00:00:42.140 You know, when I was starting my company Spheric,
00:00:44.580 we tried to do the same thing and really,
00:00:46.280 for the first year and a half, we grew to a dozen employees
00:00:48.960 and it was frustrating.
00:00:50.160 I felt like nobody really understood what work
00:00:52.100 they were supposed to be working on
00:00:53.560 and what the expectations of the clients were
00:00:55.660 and it always felt like I was two steps behind
00:00:57.960 And then one day I understood, somebody shared this with me
00:01:01.040 that the framework or the methodology is the product
00:01:04.740 in a consulting agency.
00:01:06.420 So if you don't have a methodology,
00:01:08.400 if you don't actually name, say,
00:01:10.020 this is the way we're different, this is what we do,
00:01:12.340 this is how we do it, and have that named,
00:01:15.320 then you don't really have a business.
00:01:17.100 You're just taking orders, you're doing custom work
00:01:19.140 all the time, and it will burn you out,
00:01:21.520 especially if you do this for 10 plus years.
00:01:23.560 So what I wanna share with you guys is how I thought
00:01:25.660 through designing this framework I called ours iCircle.
00:01:29.160 It was based on agile development methodologies
00:01:31.960 and a few other components and how we decided to focus
00:01:35.540 on enterprise portals as our core solution
00:01:38.500 and only after we nailed that and built the repeatable
00:01:40.900 scalable systems that we then thought about
00:01:44.480 identity management, which is called IDM
00:01:46.520 or business process automation.
00:01:48.520 So it was very focused and then once we nailed that,
00:01:51.980 then we added a few other lines of business
00:01:54.360 to scale out the company.
00:01:56.240 So there's a framework, I call it the agency model
00:01:58.920 and it goes like this.
00:01:59.760 The first part is your roadmapping step.
00:02:02.680 And I learned this from my buddy Brennan Dunn
00:02:05.320 and it's really defining what you do up front.
00:02:08.500 Take the sales process and actually charge for it.
00:02:11.520 Okay, so a lot of people sit down,
00:02:12.800 they talk to a customer, they spend two or three hours
00:02:15.300 on the phone and then they create a scope of work
00:02:18.040 or a statement of work.
00:02:19.320 And that effort of understanding the customer's needs,
00:02:22.480 translate that into a solution, presenting it to them,
00:02:25.540 I mean, you'll probably get one out of four customers
00:02:28.480 you present that with, which is super frustrating
00:02:30.400 because it takes a lot of time.
00:02:33.020 What my buddy Brennan says is take that effort
00:02:36.140 and create a outcome for the client that you can charge for.
00:02:40.040 So for example, if you are a design agency,
00:02:43.160 you could say, look, this is one of my clients
00:02:45.840 I've worked with, they call it the dig.
00:02:47.520 The dig extracts the brand from the company they work with
00:02:51.280 and it gives them a roadmap that they can execute against.
00:02:54.460 It talks about customer personas,
00:02:56.040 it talks about the strategy, and the whole process,
00:02:58.980 and I believe they charge around two to $3,000 for this,
00:03:01.720 the whole process gives them a document
00:03:04.160 that the customer can execute on their own.
00:03:06.200 So that's the key.
00:03:08.160 A great roadmapping process is an output
00:03:12.180 that they can actually take and execute
00:03:14.240 without your company.
00:03:15.960 Now if they do that, if you deliver on that
00:03:18.240 and you show them how much work it is
00:03:19.940 and how detailed you guys are
00:03:23.080 and that you guys actually know how to do it,
00:03:24.840 then you can convince them to do the ongoing services.
00:03:27.200 So the first part is a paid road backing service
00:03:29.880 that everybody pays for,
00:03:31.040 then it goes to an ongoing service.
00:03:32.580 This is some kind of monthly retainer,
00:03:35.000 some kind of service that you can define and create
00:03:39.080 that they pay every month to get a result.
00:03:41.340 And it could be ongoing development,
00:03:42.800 it could be ongoing design services,
00:03:44.540 it could be ongoing bookkeeping,
00:03:46.080 and I'll share with you guys a quick story
00:03:47.700 with my guy that I work, Mr. Greg Crabtree
00:03:50.700 from Simple Numbers, but same model,
00:03:52.820 same process, ongoing service.
00:03:54.560 And then here's how you think about the extra part.
00:03:57.920 It's really the third part of the framework
00:03:59.400 is if you have things that come up
00:04:01.580 that are out of scope, right?
00:04:02.900 You said, here's what we're gonna do.
00:04:04.100 We're an agency, a design agency.
00:04:05.760 We're gonna develop this brand and visual assets.
00:04:08.600 The ongoing services continue to enhance that
00:04:10.980 and maybe deploy it to different locations,
00:04:12.780 different contractors you work with, create those assets.
00:04:15.060 But then all of a sudden there's a need
00:04:16.260 for copywriting for their website.
00:04:17.920 That would be considered an enhancement.
00:04:20.200 And enhancements are strategically defined
00:04:23.300 and processed and created and almost like mini products
00:04:27.260 that you can upsell to the customer.
00:04:29.380 So ongoing service is a fixed monthly fee.
00:04:31.880 Then you have these enhancements that are very defined.
00:04:34.320 You know how to execute them.
00:04:35.580 It could be stuff that's done within your team
00:04:37.940 or you can partner with a third party company
00:04:40.960 to execute on it, but it all integrates
00:04:42.820 into your ongoing service.
00:04:44.320 It's very detailed.
00:04:45.260 account managers are usually responsible
00:04:47.260 for identifying those opportunities
00:04:49.020 and presenting them to the client.
00:04:50.760 But that way it's very clear to the customer,
00:04:53.020 to yourself, to your whole team
00:04:54.720 that this is how we do it, that's the road mapping.
00:04:57.620 Here's the ongoing service so you build
00:04:59.300 that reoccurring revenue.
00:05:00.560 And then if there's these one-off situations,
00:05:02.760 a contest, some kind of theme guide
00:05:07.940 that you need as a visual asset,
00:05:09.220 sometimes you want kind of like a branding document,
00:05:11.700 that might be an enhancement.
00:05:12.980 All of those are very clear cut and focused.
00:05:15.280 So that is the simple agency model.
00:05:18.860 A real great example is Greg Crabtree.
00:05:20.620 He has his book called Simple Numbers.
00:05:22.800 That's his marketing and I'll share with you guys
00:05:24.360 how that fits into the whole mix.
00:05:26.320 That book gets people involved, interested in his services
00:05:30.000 which goes into the financial model.
00:05:32.200 That's his road mapping service,
00:05:33.540 so the Simple Numbers financial model.
00:05:35.360 It's a fixed fee.
00:05:36.680 Clients come in, they present their books.
00:05:38.680 Greg does all that work, well his team does.
00:05:40.740 Presents it to the client.
00:05:41.900 So that's a very focused, very specific offering
00:05:44.900 presented to the client and then after that,
00:05:46.580 the ongoing service is updating the books every month
00:05:50.080 to get the new updated financial model.
00:05:51.800 Now you can, they'll teach you how to do it
00:05:54.340 amongst your own team if you have your own bookkeeper or CFO
00:05:56.820 or you can just pay a monthly fee to have them do it
00:05:59.320 and then the enhancements are tax type situations
00:06:02.220 or other financial things that a traditional
00:06:04.480 accounting firm would do.
00:06:05.960 That is an example and there's many others.
00:06:08.360 If you look into the world of agencies and consulting,
00:06:11.200 The ones that have figured out how to scale it,
00:06:12.800 they've used this process because it's very clear
00:06:15.380 and focused and you figure out your profit margins
00:06:17.580 and you understand the deliveries and the scope.
00:06:19.540 It all comes together.
00:06:20.380 Now, here's the bonus.
00:06:22.520 If you do this right, the road mapping step
00:06:27.180 has got three kind of features to it.
00:06:28.820 One, it becomes your USP, your unique selling proposition.
00:06:31.960 Most agency founders actually don't do anything unique.
00:06:35.920 Or maybe they do, but they don't have a great way
00:06:37.620 to position it or explain it.
00:06:39.320 If you have this process, and you can name it,
00:06:41.760 like ours was called iCircle,
00:06:43.560 I've heard it called the startup bootcamp process,
00:06:47.900 or the dig, or, I mean, there's just so many different names.
00:06:51.160 Once you define that, that's your USP.
00:06:53.000 That's what makes you different and unique in the market.
00:06:55.300 It also acts as your content marketing.
00:06:57.680 So I talked about the marketing step.
00:06:59.340 For Greg, it's a book.
00:07:00.680 In that book, you will learn how to create
00:07:02.340 your own financial model.
00:07:03.580 Most great blogs teach what the company does
00:07:07.620 for their clients as a paid service.
00:07:09.580 So do it yourself, here it is.
00:07:11.220 So you can essentially take the road mapping process
00:07:14.520 and what you would work through with the client
00:07:16.100 and the output and take each one of those steps
00:07:18.460 and extract it as a blog post.
00:07:19.800 So it becomes your editorial calendar
00:07:21.840 for incredibly targeted, specific, and qualified content
00:07:26.080 to get people interested in what you do
00:07:28.440 and are ready to pay because if they wanted to,
00:07:30.740 they could do it themselves.
00:07:32.040 And then the third part is it becomes a filter
00:07:33.980 for your customers because many of you,
00:07:36.180 maybe you have this experience, you have people
00:07:38.100 that really were just kicking the tire. 1.00
00:07:40.280 They were just interested in getting a proposal.
00:07:43.620 They weren't really, they didn't have the budget,
00:07:45.540 they were trying to use your proposal against somebody else,
00:07:48.340 but they're just not serious.
00:07:50.000 With changing the whole model where, you know,
00:07:53.040 you produce the content, get some interested,
00:07:55.120 they then pay for that road mapping process,
00:07:57.820 it becomes a filter for only very serious customers
00:08:00.780 that have the budget, that are ready to invest
00:08:03.740 in themselves and your services.
00:08:05.460 And it just makes the whole company a lot easier
00:08:08.340 to operate and manage.
00:08:09.760 So that is the process.
00:08:11.340 Number one, road mapping.
00:08:12.340 Number two, ongoing service.
00:08:13.960 Then you have your enhancements.
00:08:15.340 All those act as a filter for customers.
00:08:18.300 It provides your editorial content for your content.
00:08:21.580 And also gives you a USP or unique selling proposition.
00:08:25.480 That's what I wanted to share with you guys
00:08:26.740 to really help you scale your business to the next level.
00:08:29.620 As per usual, I want to challenge you
00:08:31.720 to live a bigger life and a bigger business.
00:08:34.220 and I'll see you next Monday.
00:08:35.840 If you like this video, be sure to subscribe to my channel
00:08:38.100 for other tips on how to start and grow your business
00:08:40.580 and join my newsletter where I send out invites
00:08:43.660 to exclusive events, free training content,
00:08:47.180 and community contests.
00:08:49.340 And also, if you wanna get going, you're ready to go
00:08:51.680 and now is the moment, not later,
00:08:53.720 and you want some more Dan Martell, click the videos.
00:08:56.040 I've got queued up for you to help you continue
00:08:58.480 on your journey and I will see you next week.
00:09:04.220 You