Copy This AI Agency Strategy

Hey, as somebody that started seven service businesses and failed brutally at five of them, I wanted to talk a little bit about the three key unlocks that enabled me to hit that lovely sevenf figure mark. I consult with people at the six and seven figure range all the time and I find that when they tend to figure this stuff out, their growth becomes exponential. So, just wanted to run you guys through my thoughts on them. Point one is have a

recurring service. I see so many oneandone agencies out there that just take on new projects, fulfill those projects, and then they just throw the lead away. What if I told you that 90% of the total lifetime value of that lead is not in that first project, it's in recurring. In addition, every time you do a oneanddone project, you take on a oneanddone fixed cost. You need to do things for a lot of people like scope the project, do some sort of onboarding. You have some cost internally every time you get somebody on. So, would you rather have one client pay you $30,000 or on board 10 clients that pay you $3,000 each? obviously the former because you are only going to have to incur those fixed costs once. Now, there are obviously different ways to think about this as well. You can think about it in terms of diversification and so on and so forth, but anyway, it's not either or. I guess the point that I'm making is if you don't have a recurring service, you're just saying no to like 90% of all the revenue you could realistically make. So, the optimal structure nowadays for service businesses is to have an introductory offer where you do your oneandone. You knock that out of the park. you deliver some quick return on investment for your client and you make them like you and then the second that you're done your one done and you can now justify a bigger spend. What you do is you go back to them with some sort of recurring service that usually builds on top of the one on uh one and done offer significantly more value and then allows you to recoup the sunk cost both in terms of like the acquisition, onboarding, both in terms of like the scoping and the initial asset generation and then never have to pay that again using your recurring service. In that way, you solve so many issues, it's hard for me to even begin. But you solve cash flow issues because now you're not sending invoices that are usually 50% upfront, 50% on delivery. You know, a lot of the time recurring services are prepaid. And, you know, I'd recommend that you try and make them prepaid. So, you just get all your money up front at the beginning of the month and never have to worry about them. You sort out like revenue projection because now you know how much money you're going to make next month or at least you know a much tighter error bound around the money that you're going to make next month. but allows you to get really familiar with the client business and then open inroads to selling them on some other thing crossells upsells and so on and so forth. So if you guys are operating some service business right now and you guys do not have a recurring service just know that you're shooting yourself in the foot. Recurring services are by far one of the best ways to make revenue long term. And also anecdotally they're some of the funnest I've had because when you tend to get to know somebody you tend to understand their business a lot of my recurring services clients end up becoming like lifetime

friends. Second big point is this fascination with niche hopping. A lot of people jump from niche A to niche B without giving either enough time or energy to determine whether or not they work. I think this is because of modern business Hollywood's obsession with iterating and making datadriven decisions. But if I'm honest, the truth behind niches are you tend to will them into existence. If you stick with a niche for long enough, you tend to learn the problems that your market suffers from. You tend to learn how to pitch the solutions to that market. then you tend to just get really good at lead generation for that market which enables you that perfect trio to make a ton of money with it. So in that way it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's kind of like you know you using the force and making something happened even if the numbers don't really line up. So I used to run a door to door marketing agency called Pacific Creative Group. This was back in 2019 or 2020 maybe a combination of two. And it was like one of the first businesses that I'd ever ran that I actually managed to scale. I did it with my partner. We made well over $100,000 in our first year and it felt amazing to finally have something that worked. But let me tell you, it wasn't always that way. The first 3 months of that business, we knocked on about 3,000 doors and made a grand total of $7. I want you guys to think about that. 3,000 conversations for $7. I go as far as to say that most people at the six figure agency mark don't hit that many doors or people in 3 years, let alone in 3 months. And it was only because I stuck with that niche and had 3,000 conversations with business owners that were struggling with the problems that we solved, which at our case was like Google My Business, $250 a month to put you on the map. Not exactly winning any Nobel prizes there. But it's only because we gave ourselves enough time that we were actually able to learn how to speak to the people in our niche and thus will our success into existence. There's this big fascination with niching down, which I agree with. But a lot of the time, if you're at like the six figure mark and your agency is just getting started, you've delivered some services, but you haven't really found that perfect product or service market fit to say, usually you don't really know enough about a specific niche to actually reliably niche down. So, what I recommend is instead of just picking a single niche at this point in your journey where like you're not fully educated on the problems and solutions and stuff like that, pick multiple niches. Okay? But instead of hopping from niche A to niche B to niche C, just do niche A, B, and C simultaneously and just run it for a pre-committed period of, let's say, 90 or 180 days. Give yourself that grace to fully explore a niche as opposed to jump from solution to solution wondering why nothing is working. Because if you don't do some sort of pre-commitment, then subjectively speaking on the days that are going to suck. And there are going to be many days that suck when you're running any sort of service business, you're just a lot more likely to just, you know, want to jump ship and then rationalize to yourself that it's oh, it's because of the data. The data is not checking out. If you are going to make datadriven decisions, don't make datadriven decisions too fast. A lot of people try and do iteration on like a daily cycle, but in reality, the market has built-in lag. When you talk to a customer and you pitch them, they're not going to make a decision within 30 seconds. A lot of the time it's going to take them a day or a couple days or a week or a month. Who knows? I still get people calling me back that I had conversations with 3 years ago. What I'm trying to say is if you try and make an evaluation of performance before you get to a point where uh customers have actually had the time to like justestate and sit on your solution and kind of synthesize maybe some follow-up questions or a counter offer, you're not really accurately making that datadriven decision. you are in essence jumping the gun because you've been sold this idea that you need to be constantly iterating in order to succeed. I got to be honest, the solution to hit seven figures in my humble opinion is not necessarily a sophisticated one. It's actually more of a caveman one. It's you just picking something and saying I will make this work ugabooga. And before you know it, you will have willed it into existence, assuming that you're at least halfway competent at delivering whatever service you're talking about at, you know, speaking over the phone or through video call and managing a team. Finally, with this whole niche hopping thing, one thing that you have to do every time you change a niche is you necessarily have to change your messaging to reflect that niche. So, let's say you're doing some offer to like HVAC companies and then you're like, "Oh, this isn't working. I should try doing an offer to, I don't know, B2B growth agencies instead. " Well, I mean, there's a sunk or fixed cost that you're going to have to pay in order to update all of your messaging, websites, update your business cards, do whatever. And so, every time you have to pay that sunk cost, that stuff you're never getting back. I mean, I care less about the money and more about the time. Time's that one inexhaustible resource, right? So, I mean, like most people that start in services, like they'll only shop three or four times in their first year. Those mean three or four weeks realistically that you are now spending on stuff that is not just getting better at servicing that niche that you picked initially, right? In that way, you know, you jumping from niche to niche also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where just because you haven't spent enough time or energy or learned enough about the niche or attacked it or done enough reps, the niche will necessarily not reward you and then be a niche that doesn't work

out. The third big point is inconsistent lead pipeline. I can't tell you how many people I see that will scale up some lead genen and then they will find some hole. They'll figure that service market fit out like I was talking to you about before and then they'll get a few clients and then they'll go, "I'm so busy. I'm way too busy to take on new clients, so I should stop the funnel. I should turn it off. I should stop doing lead genen. " So, what ends up happening? They like go, they do the services. A month goes by, they bank like $25,000 and everything's great. But then when their contracts are done, not everybody renews, and all of a sudden they're back at square one. They're literally at zero dollars or whatever if it's a monthly recurring solution, some small amount of money having to turn the lead on. Again, remember earlier when I talked about like market lag between inputs and outputs. I mean, this is a really good example of it. If you stop all of your outreach activities today, you're not going to see the result of you stopping that outreach activity for at least a couple of weeks. So, what that means is the position that you're in today drowning in leads or having an abundance of opportunities or whatever. It's usually not because of the work you're doing today. It's because the work you did a couple of weeks or maybe even a month ago. So if you get in the habit of like stopping and starting and stopping and starting, what you're basically forcing yourself to do is go through these periods of like dry and stormy seasons, right? Like a drought and then like a super humid wet season. You know, it's raining cats and dogs and opportunities. And this sort of thing is like impossible to scale a business with because now it's difficult for you to do things like extrapolate your revenue, meaning you don't know how much money you can invest. So if you really want to scale a business, you have to be able to project its revenue to some degree. That's why like monthly recurring SAS models became so popular because a business could officially say, "Hey, next month we're probably going to make about $100,000. Therefore, we could spend 15,000 of it on some sort of growth, right? If you guys are just selling onetime products, you can't really do that cuz one month you might make a million, but the next month you'll make zero. " That's kind of like where all this mental calculus comes in from. Likewise, if you're turning on your lead faucet and then you're turning it off, monthtomonth you change, how are you going to be able to extrapolate that and then ultimately make an investment decision, let's say in a new hire or something when every month you're just looking at the bottom of your checkbook and you're like, "Holy crap, am I going to have enough? " Instead of this, I recommend always having some form of lead generation or outreach going. As long as you are constantly doing some form of lead generation, the way that I see it is you're still pushing that snowball or boulder down the hill and still accumulating momentum even if it's a lot slower than before. So don't treat it as black or white, right? Don't be like, hey, the lead foss has to be on or off. Like it's a faucet, right? So a lot of the time it's not a button you press, but it's a thing you slowly scale up. I think it is entirely valid when a business is really busy for you to tune or turn down the faucet a little bit, reduce the flow of water. That's okay. But just don't ever stop and start cuz next time you start it, you're going to have to wait for all that dirty water to get through. You know, you're going to have to like wait a while until it runs clean, there's going to be a lot of buildup in the faucet. I'm sure there are a lot of analogies that I could use here, but suffice to say, as long as you keep some form of lead generation coming, you have that momentum building, and that momentum will reward you. Likewise, this doesn't just apply in terms of yourself. This also implies in terms of your team. Even if you have a team and you're looking to scale to, let's say, three or four million, you guys are currently at a million. you're thinking, "Well, I'm the business owner. I shouldn't be doing any form of sales or lead generation or whatever. " I disagree. I think that in order to keep your skills sharp and in order for you to be in the know in terms of what works, the messaging that your customers typically like and how to train your salespeople effectively, you should always be doing some form of lead genen. Legion is like the most important thing for businesses until you hit probably like the eight figure mark. I don't know. And even that depends like the vast majority of the time the bottleneck is the leads. Sorry to break everybody's heart. Doesn't matter how sexy your system is or how amazing your funnel is. You know, the bottleneck is just how many people are going through it and that is your big problem that you need to solve. So yeah, you know, as a business owner, if you are like constantly divorcing yourself from that, if you're constantly turning off the faucet, if you're allowing your skills to get rusty and then that faucet to flow dirty, you're doing yourself a major disservice. People that solve this tend to grow their agencies much quicker

than people that don't. Awesome. Hopefully you guys appreciated this video. If you guys are at that point, six figures trying to get to seven, maybe if you guys are a little bit lower than that or a little bit higher than that, try these out. I mean, these are the same pieces of advice that I give to six and seven figure agencies when they pay me over $1,000 an hour for consulting. So, I don't mean to say that this information is extraordinarily super crazy valuable and it should be gatekeep. I think information should be free. It's mostly about the implementation and the action of it that uh you know, if you're going to spend money on, that's what you should be spending money on. But, um, but yeah, give it a try in your business and then circle back and let me know in the comments what you guys think because uh we we've seen some awesome growth internally. We've also helped a lot of people see similar growth externally. Aside from that, thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate you guys um giving love to the channel, all the positive comments I've gotten recently. If I can help you guys out in any way or answer any sort of question or comment, just leave it down below and I'll eventually get to it. Have a lovely rest of the day and I'll see you all in the next video. Cheers.