7-Figure Content Agency Stack (Copy This)

What's up, guys? In this video, I'm going to show you the exact tool stack that I use at my $1 million a year agency. It's extremely simple. It's not difficult at all, and I'm going to walk you through every tool that I use, actually open up the tools, show you how I use it, and at the end, I'll give you some closing remarks on why I picked the tools that I did, and what I would do if I could magically turn back the clock and uh be faced with like a zero revenue again. So, without further ado, let's get into it. this little notion document that I have up here called my 2024 $1 million a year agency stack. Uh so what tools do I use at my $1 million agency? And if I could do it all over again from scratch, what would I use? So let's start at the beginning. Uh you know, I have zero customers and I'm just starting from scratch. And let's just like follow the journey from the customer starting um with my company all the way to the end, you know, getting fulfilled, getting their project delivered. The very first thing you need to do is get a customer in the door. And the way that I do it many other extremely successful agencies do it is they use cold email. Now, a lot of people think cold email is dead. I've heard some variation of that repeated every single year for the last like 6 years. And this is actually really great that happens because every time people are like, "Oh my god, cold email is dead. It'll never recover. You know, uh, email platforms are blocking and you know, we're going into spam at like ridiculous rates. " All that The reality is that significantly fewer people are using cold email. And so then if you use cold email, you there's actually like a resurgence of conversion rate. There's a resurgence of interest. It's very like uh pendulum swingy. And so instantly. ai is like the number one cold email platform. And I've been using it non-stop ever since they came out basically or maybe ever since they got popularized. And the way that it works is you can add an infinite number of email accounts assuming that you've set them up in like Google Workspace or maybe like Microsoft 365 or whatever. Um and then all you do is you pay one flat fee of like $99 a month. It's extremely affordable at scale and I think that you can send up to 15 or 20,000 contacts uh for that amount. So like contrast that with literally any other cold email platform like Lemlist or Reply. io or whatever the heck you want to use. And if I were to try and have 18 ongoing mailboxes, it would probably cost me like $2,000. So I'm capable of achieving the same volume uh for $99 that I can for $2,000 elsewhere. But that's not the only reason I really like it. I like it because in addition to the cost savings, like I don't really care about spending money if I get to make a ton of money. Um, in addition to the cost savings, it's also just way better from a user experience perspective. It's just super easy to set up extremely high performing campaigns. So, this is a an example campaign that I set up way back in the day. This is like one of the many that I set up like a year ago. Uh, and you see the reply rate for that campaign was freaking almost 10% across the board. Uh, which yielded 823 replies, about a third of which became like profitable opportunities that I've pursued. and a bunch of these people became uh our agency clients, which is really nice. The way that instantly works is they basically optimize the hell out of every aspect of your sales campaign from start to finish. So, they will automatically strip all the HTML from your emails. They'll give you like a couple of tips. They have like this whole like accelerator masterass thing on how to write these extremely high converting emails. And I basically just like dove in with, you know, both feet, learned everything that I could about cold email, copywriting, scheduling, all that stuff, and then used it to build this campaign out. If you think about it, uh that's like a onetime time cost of maybe like 15 or 20 hours. And then I've been able to use that to generate several hundred,000 over the course of the last couple years simply because of that skill set. So super simple, super easy. Uh this is an example of what my campaign looks like. I'll always start with some type of attribution. I'll always see what they're looking for. I'll always pitch and I like to pitch as a freelancer simply because I find conversion rates are a lot higher. I only know this because I added a bunch of split test variants where I ran through like 50 different ways to pitch like content marketplace, content agency, um you know, automated content solution, right? Like I've run through everything and that's the best highest ROI pitch. Uh my offer is a free trial piece for whoever currently orchestrates content, which tends to work quite well. Uh and then I don't really have like a big ask. I'm just asking if uh you know they could point me in the right direction. So, if you have any uh desire to write really high converting email campaigns, uh I can go into way more depth about what my copyrightiting process looks like and what actually works today in 2024 and beyond. Um but other than that, I'm going to move on with the next step. Assuming that you now have, you know, some people that are interested in your product and you know, potentially maybe you've talked to them, booked a call with them, whatever. Where do you go from here? Well, now you have to actually like send and receive payment, right? I mean, conversations are great, but money is why you're in business in the first place. So, uh, what do I use for my agency payments? I use exclusively Stripe. A lot of people are like anti-stripe. They think Stripe is stupid or really expensive or something like that. Um, I think that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Stripe is fantastic for a couple reasons. Number one, if you ever wanted to sell your business in the future, Stripe is the gold standard for revenue recognition. No other company is as integrated with like Flippa, buy and sell platforms, uh, like all these brokerages and stuff like that than Stripe is. Everybody knows how to use Stripe. Everybody expects to see

payment things in Stripe, whether it's an agency or like a SAS company or an e-commerce company. Well, maybe e-commerce is a one special case there, but everybody really likes to see Stripe. So, just using Stripe from the get-go makes your life so much easier if you ever want to sell. And I would never not want to sell or at least have the ability to sell in the future. That's how you get rich. That's how you, you know, multiply your revenue and double dip. You get to make money while your business operates. then at the end of that business as well and basically make two or three times more what you were able to make in cash flow. So I'm a big fan of Stripe just for that reason. But more importantly, uh Stripe is also just the most convenient payment platform on planet Earth. It's just like a breeze to do anything. If I want to send an invoice, it's like a two-b button process. The invoices are incredibly professional. They look extremely sleek, very sexy, yada yada. So like there's no reason not to use Stripe. Uh the 3% payment fee or whatever is just like come on man, you're going to make 97% of that. I understand trying to optimize margins when you're at like a $50 million a year business or whatever. A percentage point here, a percentage point there could literally like buy you an island, but the vast majority of you aren't making that much money. The vast majority of you're looking how to build like a $1 million a year agency, which is between $80 to $90,000 a month. That 3% is 100% worth it for the uh convenience and the velocity that you get as a result of using a payment platform like this. So, I really like Stripe. Um, and yeah, I'm not going to beat that with a dead horse. dead horse, but you get payments, you get invoices, you get subscriptions, whatever type of business model you have, Stripe basically covers you. Next up is, okay, great. So, now we've, you know, we've got the customer and then we've won the customer and we've received payment of some kind. And whether you want to do like agreements or anything at this stage, totally up to you. But what do we do with that customer now? Well, now we actually have to fulfill the project. Now, like, you know, move forward and give them the thing that they paid us for. And so, for that, I use ClickUp. It's my CRM and project management tool. And I freaking love ClickUp to death because it's just another example of ClickUp does what like five or six tools used to do. And basically, excuse me, by using ClickUp, you can basically eliminate like five or six other tools from your stack. Keep it as simple and as humanly possible. Uh they have had some pricing changes in the course of the last couple of uh a couple years that have made it, you know, significantly more expensive than what they used to be. They used to have this amazing free plan and that's kind of how they like acquired so much market share. But whatever, they got to make money, too. And I'm totally fine spending money on ClickUp if it means that my, you know, my business operates exactly how I want it to. Now, you can set up ClickUp however the heck you want. This is how I set it up. I have a CRM. So, I basically have like two uh spaces. I have a project management space and then I have a sales space. And so, my sales space is like my CRM. My project management space is like where all my staff members do work and stuff like that. Um, so there are many different like project management methodologies on how to set up CRM and project management systems. I'm not going to walk them through exhaustively today, but I am going to record a video on my favorite, which is a theory of constraints by Eli Goldrat. But essentially, um, you know, this is just a quick example of like a pipeline that you can set up in ClickUp that allows you to manage new entries as they come in. So, in this case, I have, you know, a column label prospect status with, you know, where are they in my pipeline? Are they interested? Uh, have I have they requested a sample? Have we delivered a sample? Are they closed? If they're closed, they become a client. Um, you know, are they unqualified, unsubscribed, lost, whatever. You can customize the heck out of this however you want. Simpler is always better. ClickUp then allows you to organize and display this information however you want. So I could do it as a top- down list or like a left to right Trello style canband board. Um I find that you know the real beauty of ClickUp is just that it allows you to represent that data however you want. And it abstracts away the data itself which is a single source of truth from the way that you view it. And people are visual learners, other people are textual learners. So this just provides like a lot of latitude there. Um, this is just an example of a CRM that I set up that works quite well. And I set CRM like this up for people quite often at LeftClick, my um, uh, my operations consultancy where you have, you know, like the lead entry. You then have a column to see when's the last time they've been updated. Then you have a lead age and that lead age is basically just a formula that shows you, hey, is this person green, orange, or red? Um, how long's it been since they've been connected or contacted? Uh, and then you have statuses. You have their source, you have the assigne, and then you have like a discovery call URL, which in my case is just a fancy uh calendar link that links specifically to that ClickUp prospect using their ID, which means that, you know, anytime I send out an email with a calendar link and somebody books, I can then do a bunch of cool stuff after that uh relevant to that prospect. I can automatically send them emails. I can automatically update stages in my CRM. I can automatically add things to my dashboard, all that sort of stuff. So, that's an example of a CRM. Uh this is an example of a project management system. And basically the way that this project management system works is it's separated into a variety of columns here, but we have like the name of the article, right? We're a content writing company. So the name of the article on the lefth hand side, we have like a project folder column, which is where we store all of the details and information about that specific project. And you know, if I click through one of these, you'll see it'll actually like show you the article itself that was written. So in this case, how to tailor financial education to diverse student populations. Um that's where the writers will actually log in and then do their work. We have like a due date column which is obviously the due date of the task. Uh

internal status which is just another status field that I created which allows us to separate things into you know when a task comes in it's a waiting assignment. It's in a queue. Then the writers acknowledge the assignment by moving it to assigned. Then when they start working they move it to writing. Then when they start editing they move it to editing. And then when they're ready they move it to ready for submission. We have a time tracking column here. Uh you know the there's a bunch of stuff here that makes the system work at the scale that it does right now. But this isn't the only way to set up a project management system. It's just the way that works for my specific business because we have a very simple staffing model and because um you know the only thing that we're providing is content writing services. There are a number of great resources that I'll link in the description. If you are uh an agency that provides more of like an endto-end one-stop shop type service um and in that case you probably wouldn't set it up in the same way that I've set it up as like an end toend pipeline. What you do is you probably set it up as like a space for clients and then different subfolders for every client that allow you to manage various services like SEO, graphic design, uh paperclick ads, yada yada. So, yeah, different flows there, but this is how my company uses it and this is how we make a million dollars a year. Um, next up is, okay, great. Now, you're actually like producing the product and you're actually working on the deliverable. Well, how do you manage your own costs, right? I mean, sure, you make money from the client, but how do you make sure that you're consistently always under that budget and operating at a profitable uh basis? I use a time tracking platform called Harvest. Harvest is the best time tracking platform that I found so far. Uh, and basically the way that it works is it allows you and anybody on your team to just click one button as a Chrome extension and then log time on a particular task. The great part about Harvest 2 is it integrates directly with ClickUp, which allows us to just do this one-click sort of back and forth integration where the time tracking will actually update inside of ClickUp. So, anybody that's doing any type of content management or me or my partner or anybody that wants to can easily just look over and see what sort of time allocation we're spending on various tasks in the business and how we can improve. The really cool part about this as well is we can then log people's time. we can see when they finish the time and then we can just query harvest once a day to get an updated like time sheet essentially of all the time people have spent on these tasks and then we can add that to a big dashboard database which allows us to see okay what are people's average margins on tasks how much money are they spending uh how much money of ours are they spending to do this um you know are certain clients more profitable than others are certain writers this allows us to make these sorts of like highle decisions that most other people just have to do off of either gut feeling intuition or they have to like ring up their finance department and spend a week trying to get information they should just have in front of them. So, that's how I do my time tracking and that's one of the most important and valuable parts of this whole business if I'm being honest. Okay. Now, at that point, uh let's just cover a couple of the other logistical aspects of most businesses. The first are legal agreements and NDAs, which I exclusively use Pandadoc for. If you're an agency that's routinely sending over proposals and, you know, doing that sort of like high legally stuff, you probably have like very high ticket items. you know, I probably would have put that over here after instantly for you. Uh because, you know, you have to send the emails, communicate with the prospect, maybe jump on a call, then send them agreement, then win it. Uh but in my case, you know, for one second copy, the content writing company, our average order value is a lot lower. A lot of the time, people don't really want an agreement. They don't really feel that they need one. It's just, hey, you know, click here to sign up on our website. Very simple and straightforward. Um, regardless, Panda is the best legal document platform that I found ever because it allows you to extremely simply template out documents and then you can automate those later on with any platform you want, whether that's Zapier, Make. com, which I'm going to get into a second, you could use code, you can do anything that you want. Um, but because of this, you basically get like this templated functionality where it's like a one-click thing on your side of things, and then the customer gets this beautiful guided experience with whatever your branding is. Um, and you know, uh, they have like integrated payments which are cool. So, you can like automatically oneclick, uh, connect with Stripe and then before they finish signing the agreement, they have to pay you. It's just really cool. This is an example of one agreement that I sent. Uh, it's not actually for once copy. This is for left click, but I don't really send proposals for one second copy. So, um, this is a quick example, right? We have like a what you're getting page as you see. It's very beautiful. It's very minimalistic. Um, they have a variety of like super simple templates that make it really, really easy to just get up and running. Um, yeah, and you know, they have like places to add your signature and stuff like that. Way better than DocYign because of just how automatable it is. Um, I routinely send these automatically using like a proposal flow that I generated, which I can link in the video description if you're interested. Uh, but Panadoc is by far the best and I think it's also one of the cheapest now. Um, I may be wrong, but I didn't have the wherewithal to look into the prices of all these before I made this video. So, yeah, check that out. Uh, regardless, this is definitely still like I would pay I think I pay something like uh $1,000 a year or like $1,200 a year for this. I would gladly pay five times that much money. That's what an impact it's made to my business. And last but not least, we have Make. com, which is just the glue that holds literally everything in my business together. make. com is the like

project manager. It's the bookkeeper. It's the um you know sales administrator. It's the virtual assistant. Make. com does everything in my business that I would probably need like four or five other people for. And it allows me to save those four or five people's salaries and then give it to the remainder of the team to bolster their productivity, their effectiveness, uh and you know their incentive to continue working at like a very high level for the growth of the business. So, I do that in the form of bonuses. a variety of different ways. But having that extra cash in the pocket means that you don't really have to worry too much about short-term debt obligations and you're willing to, you know, invest in the future and the growth of the company. And I find that right around the million-doll a year mark that starts being important. Before then, you can usually get away with just bootstrapping and that sort of But, um, yeah. Anywh who, uh this is just an example of one of the many flows that I build and this one templates out new content writing tasks as they come into the queue. We'll do things like automatically create Google Drive folders for new projects as they come in, which I showed you earlier. We will create Google Docs. Sometimes we'll use AI to help template out portions of that immediately. We'll do um automatic like project management stuff like adding links and resources and stuff like that to the ClickUp file. We'll do uh automatic time tracking and harvest where we'll create projects, link the projects to the asseneigenees, that sort of thing. We'll also add uh stuff to our dashboard data source, which is just a big Google sheet that we pull from using Google data studio, which I didn't really talk about here, but it's not super necessary. We didn't really have this until quite recently, but regardless, that lets us see at any point like how much money we made that month, um what the projections are for next month, maybe some milestones or KPIs we need to hit, that sort of thing. So, make. com is fantastic. Uh, I use it on the front end, back end. I use it basically everywhere um that, you know, we we need. Okay, and that is about it. That's a quick little wrapup of all of the software platforms that I use on a daily basis in my $1 million a year agency. Of course, there are a couple of other ones, but they're usually just like on and off. like I might uh spend uh you know buy a software or subscription to LinkedIn Sales Navigator once every three or four months and then I'll use that for one month to compile a big list of leads to pump into instantly or something like that. The vast majority of the time though these are sort of one-off expenses that you can conceptualize as just not really being integral with the day-to-day operations of the business. But certainly uh instantly Stripe, ClickUp, Harvest, Panda, and Make are. And if you're starting an agency in 2024, regardless of whatever kind of agency that you're operating, I highly recommend that you at least try all of these tools. It'll make a big difference. Okay, thanks so much for watching this video. Please like, comment, subscribe, and leave me any notes if you have any questions about how these platforms work or maybe some alternatives as well. I'd love to hear from you. Thanks so much. Have a great rest of the day. to buy.