How to Build a 7-Figure Agency with Zero Employees Using Psychology, Not Ads with Adam Erhart

0:01John Lee Dumas:Light that spark fire nation, JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today we'll be breaking down how to build a seven-figure agency with zero employees using psychology, not ads. And to drop these vibe bombs, I brought Adam Erhart and the EO Fire Studios. Adam helps entrepreneurs build one-person marketing agencies that generate six or seven figures with zero employees. His psychology-based approach has attracted millions online and clients at Google, Amazon, and Meta. Today we'll be chatting about the solo scale myth, demand over chasing, lessons from giants, and oh, so much more.

0:35John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Adam and our sponsors. CAPE is a privacy-first mobile carrier built from the ground up with security as the priority. If you care about protecting your digital life without giving up your smartphone, CAPE makes that possible. Visit cape.co forward slash fire and use code fire for 33 % off CAPE for six months today. Stop duct taping your business together. High Level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place. And when you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you get a 30-day free trial plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more.

1:12John Lee Dumas:Visit highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Adam, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. All right. Well, JLD and what's up to Fire Nation? Something I believe that others would disagree with. I think success is, I think it's a boring process. I think, yeah, I know. Hot take, hot take. But I think it is a proven and predictable recipe of boring, dry, often painful steps that you can just follow. And we've got the map in front of us. All we have to do is look at those that have achieved the things we want to before and the writing's on the wall.

1:59They've shown us what to do. We just have to kind of go up there and follow in their footsteps.

2:03John Lee Dumas:Well, Fire Nation, you better be excited about the conversation with Adam today. We're going to be talking about building a seven-figure agency with literally zero employees because we're using psychology, not ads. And I want to talk about the solo scale myth. I mean, honestly, Adam, how realistic is it to build a seven-figure agency without a team? And what does that actually require behind the scenes? Great question. And I think there's a difference between realistic and for most people and like the kind of audience and the kind of people that are listening to us right now, right? So I think for the average person, it seems insane and unrealistic.

2:40And if you're not willing to put in the work and learn the stuff and, you know, all the usual business stuff, then it's not going to happen. But if you know the map, if you've got the keys sort of, and you know what to do, I mean, It's realistic. And we can say this confidently because we've done it. We've looked at other people that have done it. The sort of the process has been proven over time. Is it easy? No, but it's, yeah, it's doable.

3:03John Lee Dumas:And Fire Nation, we like things that are doable. So that's why I want to kind of move into demand over chasing because you figured out the psychology behind positioning yourself. So clients pursue you, Adam, instead of you having to constantly hunt for deals. Talk about that. How the heck did you accomplish such a feat? Yeah, I think it goes mostly, I think like all things that we do as entrepreneurs, right? It's like we're solving our own problems first and then we share that. So, I mean, like anybody that's ever started a business knows that we're probably gonna have to do a bit of outreach and a bit of networking and some cold calling maybe thrown in there.

3:38And very quickly, at least for most of the people I've ever spoken to, we realize it's uncomfortable. So we start looking for other ways. And I think that's really what drew me into marketing in the first place was realizing that, hey, with just a little bit of work ahead of time and a little bit of understanding of like what clients are looking for and what are their pains and problems and fears and frustrations, maybe I could create a bit of content. Maybe I could publish a few blog posts or make a video or do something that would sort of bring them into my world and establish me as the expert and as the thought leader so that they start coming to you.

4:11So I think it's really both sides. Like in the beginning, you've got to do outreach because you've got to go out there and try to make as many connections as you can and have those conversations. But sooner than later, you realize that, hey, wait, there's an equal and possibly greater other angle that we can take here, which is this inbound marketing angle, which I know you're familiar with. So.

4:29John Lee Dumas:Big time. What would you say is like one of your favorite examples of that? Like what's something that you did or maybe even currently do on a day-to-day basis that just continues to create this flywheel? It's funny because the thing that I do now and the thing that I've done for over 10 years now is YouTube videos. It's long form content. We've tried other things. We've done everything under the sun essentially to try to drum up demand. But there's this absolutely incredible thing with the YouTube video where it's this organic evergreen asset that you create it and then it just lives there on your channel and it continues to bring in views and clients and applications and it does this day after day week after week month after month and unlike all of the other platforms out there where you're making something and it's this incredibly short lived uh short-lived lifespan on the on the algorithm youtube has this amazing way of like you can show up in search you can show up in discovery you can show up suggested and browse and in all of these different places and if the video is good enough like it's gonna do okay and every time that you create one, you're building that content library.

5:37So by far, that's been the most powerful. I think for anybody just getting started, there's easy ways to sort of get into it rather than having to dive full into long form YouTube videos. You can make shorts, you can try simple formats. There's a lot of different ways to it. But yeah, by and large, that has been the most powerful thing. And it's the one we still do today.

5:55John Lee Dumas:Well, let's talk about lessons from the giants. I mean, we are all standing upon the shoulders of giants. And after working with Google and Amazon and Meta, what did you learn about marketing that most entrepreneurs completely misunderstand? Yeah, I think the biggest lesson and probably the most painful one to learn is when you sort of get to look behind the curtain and you see the Wizard of Oz, they're not doing anything magical. Like there's no secret playbook. There's no fancy thing that they have access to that us regular people don't. They're using the same ad platforms. I mean, they own the ad platforms, but they're still using them.

6:34But it's just the fundamentals. They just do them a little bit better and they do them more consistently. So they've got a deeper customer understanding. They've got a better testing system. They tend to prioritize data over feelings. They've got systems over one-off campaigns. But like the best campaigns we worked on were just shockingly simple, like just one clear message, one clear action. And then we just repeated it time and time again. And I think the problem is most entrepreneurs just overcomplicate things because they think that for some reason, complexity equals this sophistication, but the opposite is completely true.

7:06John Lee Dumas:Give us like a specific example. Like what was like a great idea or a video campaign that you created that like, you're like, I don't really know how this is going to react. I don't know how this is going to do, but then it actually worked well. Like, what was that? Yeah, it was probably, it's funny. Like anytime I create a campaign, I've always got these, um, these biases and beliefs like this one's going to do well. And this one's not going to do well. And I remember one we had where it was just like, oh man, it was, I thought it was so boring. Uh, it was just like, they, they cut out all of my fancy talk and all of my cool copywriting sayings.

7:38And they're like, no, no, no, we can't do that. And I had a, I had a video for a skit that was a little bit on the edge and they cut that out and they just like slashed everything back. And so by the time we were done with this thing, there was, there was a little bit of me in it, but most of it was just like, all right, customer avatar language and things like that. And it crushed it. This absolutely, what I viewed as a terrible campaign that was boring and dry, and certainly not the playbook that I want to advise anybody use, but like it was dialed in. It was exactly what their avatar wanted.

8:07It was exactly what the audience needed to hear. It was in direct relation to a problem that they currently had. It provided a solution. I mean, it just checked all of the marketing boxes with none of the clever creative stuff that I thought was going to be required. And, uh, and it made me really rethink everything I was doing. And it sort of led me to develop this, like, all right, be clear, not clever. I never try to force the creativity when it just doesn't fit with the message.

8:28John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, simple cells, fancy fails, simple cells, fancy fails. And the problem with fancy too, by the way, you just stop shipping, you know, because it's like, it's too hard to like be so creative and it gets so fancy and do all these things. It's just like, I had to finally just tell my trainer, I'm like, listen, you just need to give me three exercises. I'm going to do every single day. I'm going to do three reps of three exercises. It's going to be upper body, then lower body, then upper body, then lower body every other day of the week. And I'm going to do that six days. And I'm going to do it 100 % of the time because it's just simple.

9:02John Lee Dumas:I'm getting in there. I'm doing three, three, three sets and three reps each. And let's just in and I'm out. And so then I'm like a hundred percent now, instead of like, Oh my God, I have to be like in the gym for 45 minutes. I'm just going to skip today because of this is happening and I'm busy here and my son's crying and this. Nope. It's like, there's no excuse now because I'm in, I'm out and I just get it done now. So simple sales and fancy fails. And I know the title Adam of this is using psychology, not ads. Do you use ads for any videos that you do or is it strictly organic? Yeah, it's strictly organic now.

9:36Where I really love ads is if I'm testing a new angle. So often, and we won't do this on YouTube typically because I find short form platforms like Instagram, like Facebook, they work a little bit better, but like that's where I'll put out, I don't know, half a dozen, a dozen different hooks or taglines or title ideas. And then I can run some ads in order to figure out, all right, what in general is a really good way to say things. And then once I've got kind of a basic idea, yeah, I'll just, we'll go straight organic. And I mean, we can update the title if we need to, we'll adjust the thumbnail.

10:08Fortunately now YouTube, you can look at, look through the search history of someone, you can see everybody and all their titles they've changed and all of that. And yeah, we'll continue to refine it. The other side of it is we'll launch a video with a specific title and thumbnail knowing full well, we're probably going to change it in three days or seven days. Once we've sort of gone all in with our current subscriber list and the people that are going to watch the video, because then we're going to able to, to broaden it out a little bit more and sort of hit a different demographic.

10:34John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, I want to talk about the 10x premium effect starting from zero systems over stress and more when we get back from thinking our sponsors. There's no better time to review your systems than the new year. And one of the most important systems you can streamline right now is your communications. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the smarter way to run your business communications with more than 90 ,000 businesses from solo operators to growing teams, relying on Quo to stay connected, professional, and consistently reachable every single day. It's no wonder Quo is the number one rated phone system on G2 with over 3 ,000 reviews.

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13:35John Lee Dumas:Stop piecing tools together. Start building momentum. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Adam, we're back, and I want to talk about the 10x premium effect. What makes someone willing to pay 10 times more for essentially the same outcome? And how can agencies ethically earn that premium? All we have to do is just look at why people buy premium anything. And often it's for status, it's for sort of the symbol, sort of for the image that we're trying to project. But things get a little bit different when we're talking about, say, B2B, business to business marketing, and like, why would someone actually pay 10 times more for an agency or a coach or a consultant or anything like that?

14:17And I think what people have to understand is it's never about the deliverable. It's always about the experience, the certainty, probably most so, and the identity of someone that does this. So what someone's buying when they're spending this amount of money is they're buying confidence that's going to work and they're buying the confidence of the status increase they're going to get or the feeling of being taken care of. But essentially, there's three things that create this premium perception. If you want, we can dive into them.

14:42John Lee Dumas:Yeah, go ahead. All right. So the first one is specificity. So if you want to charge premium prices, you've got to move from, say, I help businesses, which is worth 50 bucks, to I help service businesses, which might be worth 500 bucks, to something even more specific. Like I help home service companies in competitive markets at 30K MRR through automated lead capture, something like that. That's worth 5K. Now, all we've really done is we've taken the same skill, but we've positioned it differently. The second thing is selectivity. So what you've got to do here is you've got to start being selective about the people that you're going to work with.

15:12And when you do this, a couple of things happen. And first of all, you're able to only work with people that you know you're going to get good results for. So therefore, if you get better results and you can charge more, but people also assume that you're good because you do have a selection process. You're not willing to take anyone. And of course, third one is certainty. So what premium buyers are buying is rarely the most fun or exciting thing. They really want the safest bet and they're not willing to sort of forego that just to save a few bucks. So you want to remove any risk you can. This is through case studies and confidence and testimonials and things like that.

15:42John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, the 10x premium effect. I also want to talk about starting from zero. I mean, if you had to start over today, Adam, with no audience, no case studies, no leverage, what we just talked about, I mean, you had none of that. What would your first move be? We do this once in a while, just for fun. We wipe my name off things. We hide my face. We'll launch a little bit of an agency. And the process is always the same. It's essentially very similar to what we talked about. Starts with specialize. So we've got to pick one problem and one audience. So again, we're not offering like business help or marketing help or consulting.

16:15We need something like I help chiropractors stop losing patients to no shows using automated reminders and reactivation sequences, which bit of a bit of a nerd talk, but the chiropractors will get it. So that's our specialized. Then we have talk. So we've got to reach out to 10 people. We've got to ask questions, not pitch. So this is going to be your warm network, primarily friends, family, anybody in your phone or your email. You're not trying to sell them, but you're just trying to let them know about what you're doing and seeing if they know anybody. After that, this is where people sort of get a little bit of a, get their backup a bit, but I don't mind if people work for free for a little bit.

16:47So solve a problem, help them out. Because after all, if you've got no case studies and no proof and no testimonial, like you as a, you as a human, you're valuable, but you to the market, you got some proven to do. So I want to work for free and I need a case study. I need a testimonial. I need a referral. Then I'm going to record. So we're going to document everything. I want screenshots. I need videos. I need results. I need proof that I know what I'm doing. And then finally, I'm going to teach, which is I'm going to build content that answers questions along the way so that I can replicate this and then go out for someone else.

17:18And again, if you talk to enough people, my strong belief, and you might echo this as well, is like your income can be measured in direct proportion to the conversations you have with potential clients. So it's like, you want more clients, you want more money, you got to have more conversations. And a lot of people spend a lot of time redesigning a website or fixing a logo or doing anything, anything they can to avoid going out there and actually talking to someone. And the faster you can get over that hurdle, the more money you're going to make.

17:43John Lee Dumas:I want to move on to systems over stress. I mean, how do you systemize delivery, sales, and growth so that this business can run cleanly without burning out the founder? I mean, Adam, you have four kids, you have a lot going on, and you still have plenty of time to do what you want to do. Talk to us about systems over stress. Oh, if I could go back of all the lessons that I've learned, this one is one of the most important. And what I should have done in the early days and what I absolutely do now is anything that happens more than once needs some kind of a system. So any kind of delivery, we've got to standardize our onboarding flow.

18:20We want to send the same welcome sequence. We want to have the same kind of intake forms and first week experiences for every client. We want all of that templated, automated so that it's consistent. Same thing with sales. We need content that pre-educates prospects. So this is our YouTube channel where, again, everything's systemized so I can come in and record a video, script it when I can and get it out. This way, by call time, clients have already decided and the call is really more of a confirmation that we're a good fit for working together rather than trying to convince anyone. But yeah, systems have made all the difference.

18:50They enabled me to go from working 16 hours a day to a couple hours randomly if and when I feel like. And again, it's because everything else is fully automated and fully systemized.

19:01John Lee Dumas:Adam, let's take this home. For agency owners who want to scale without chaos, what is the single principle that changes everything once they truly commit to this? I think there's two. Can I have two? You can have two, Adam. You're too good. I think it's like principle number one, we have to understand our IC, our ideal client avatar, and we really have to try to know them better than they know themselves. So it's like their pains and their problems, what they're going through. And then we have to figure out how our solution, our offer is the best solution for what they're going through. And then our job is to communicate that.

19:34And the second thing is once we've got that dialed in, we have to try to systemize and automate as much as possible. And it's not because we're lazy. It's because the more that we're able to eliminate this mental workload of these repetitive and redundant and boring kind of tasks, the more it frees us up to do the real strategic creative thinking that's actually going to get people results. And not to mentioned, that's going to help you build the life and the kind of career that you want to have.

20:00John Lee Dumas:Adam, if Fire Nation's loving your content, loving these value bombs that you're dropping, what would be your call to action for our listeners today? How can they connect with you? How can they learn more? What say you? Well, I think the best place is probably, it's funny, we've talked about it. I wasn't even planning on mentioning our YouTube videos, but that's probably the best place to go is just head over to YouTube, type in Adam Earhart or Adam and marketing or, and you'll find me there. There's over a thousand videos on the channel, been doing it for over 10 years now. Leave a comment. We try to get to as many as we possibly can.

20:31So yeah, it's probably the best way to stop by and say hi.