How to Scale Your Agency to 7 Figures (and beyond) with Dave Schneider

0:01John Lee Dumas:Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level. It's time to take your agency to the next level. Today we'll be breaking down how to scale your agency to seven figures and beyond. To drop these value bombs, I brought Dave Schneider into EO Fire Studios. Dave is the co-founder of Shortlist.io, an inbound marketing agency that grew seven figures in revenue. He is a world traveler having visited over 60 countries. And today for our nation, we'll talk about living in a crowded marketplace and how to stand out. We'll also talk about hiring, the major do's and don'ts for running an agency and client churn, what a killer it is, and oh, so much more.

0:39John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Dave and our sponsors. 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 highlevellfire.com, you get a 30-day free trial, plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more. Visit highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, 50 days will fly right on by. The only question is, will you have something to show for it? I created a free YouTube series called 50 Days to Something, a step-by-step path to build a real product, service, or offer in just 50 focused days.

1:21John Lee Dumas:Start today for free at eofire.com slash YouTube. Dave, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, Fire Nation? Dave here. Something that I believe is important in becoming successful that many people disagree with is luck. I think it's important. Do you know the right people? Do you meet the right people at the right time, make the right partnership, come across the right tool or resource? We forget how fundamental these are to kind of impacting the journey. It's not to say that hard work and skills aren't also an important part of getting there, but I think believing that luck is still a part of the equation helps keeps us a little bit humble when we get there.

2:08John Lee Dumas:And Fire Nation, I'm personally a believer that luck is where effort meets opportunity. So if you're putting the efforts, opportunities just might come your way. And today we'll be chatting about scaling your agency to seven figures and beyond. And Dave, we live in a crowded marketplace. How the heck can we stand out when it is so crowded? Yeah, it's hard, John. It's getting harder every day. I run an SEO agency right now. Before this, I ran an influencer marketing tool, both very crowded spaces, right? These are kind of, I hate to say a dime a dozen, but they kind of are. you've got to find that that angle that makes yours just just a little bit different than the others and so you know with with shortlist with an seo agency you know we came up with quality standards that the way we approach link building and seo that no one else in the industry was doing and that allowed us to to put that front and center and say hey this is why you should consider us and people that value that uh you know it appealed to them um back when i ran an inch uh you know, influencer marketing tool, we were the first tool to really combine prospecting and outreach in a single tool.

3:15Now there's many of those, but at the time they really weren't. So that's how you can kind of break into a crowded space. You got to find that, that unique value proposition that allows you to stand out.

3:25John Lee Dumas:Now hiring is such a struggle for so many people. I mean, it's the whole finding an individual, actually putting them through a process, like actually having a hiring process and then training them. I mean, and then, you know, sometimes you lose them, but I mean, it's just like the struggle for many. So can you talk about who we should hire and when, like what does it look like in your experience? Sure. So, I mean, this is going to depend obviously on the type of business you're trying to build, but I imagine a lot of people in the audience dream or are looking to run a business where they don't have to be involved in every single thing, you know, 24-7.

4:03And so as a general rule of thumb, I always start with replace yourself, right? The first people that I hired for my agency were off of, you know, Upwork and they were people that were executing the service that I was doing for clients. And once I felt, you know, satisfied that they were doing as good a job as I was doing, I could kind of hand over the reins. I started to take on sales. And when we grew enough, then the next people that I hired were biz dev people that I could do the sales. They could do the calls, but they get the presentations, follow up with clients, close deals. And so now, you know, I've graduated and my role is more on the business as opposed to in the business.

4:39And so, you know, there may always be some sort of tangential need for, you know, a hire here for other reasons. But as a general rule of thumb, I like replacing yourself as a good way to go.

4:49John Lee Dumas:So can you give us an example of a time that you actually did a good hire and how it worked out? And then conversely, like, tell us a story of a time that maybe you didn't follow your own advice or you just made a bad mistake and you made a hire that didn't work out. Yeah, I mean, the very first hire that I had, you know, at shortlist my agency, it was like I mentioned, someone from Upwork and they happened to be from Macedonia. A lot of, you know, people, not everyone is always, you know, worked with what I'll call offshore talent from an American perspective. and I think that you know there's some hesitations it's concerns where it's gonna be language barriers there's gonna be you know time differences things like that but I believed in the person the attitude the skill set that they brought to the table and that individual Victor is still working with us today seven years later and we've built a whole team around him he now goes into an office where there's there's a bunch of other people that work with him and so that was a great example of, you know, being comfortable with being uncomfortable and trying something a little different and going from there.

5:52On the flip side, you know, bad, bad hires, you know, we've had people I've had, you know, developers where I felt like, hey, I really just need an additional person to we're behind so much on products we're working on, I just need to kind of get somebody and I'll look the other way on maybe like a cultural fit. I'll say maybe an individual. It looks like they have the technical skills, but maybe the communication is lacking and things like that. And I'm hoping that they'll learn as they go along. What I find out is often people kind of present themselves very much who they are. And a couple of months later, you realize that, you know, those things that were yellow flags at the beginning, they were actually yellow flags and people kind of struggle.

6:35They kind of, they're not going to really make a lot of changes. And so if that is something that is going to be a deal breaker for you in the long run, you know, you got to kind of address that right away by really not bringing that person on. So I've made that mistake, you know, once or twice bringing someone on that wasn't really a good culture fit. And then, you know, unfortunately, usually having to let them go.

6:52John Lee Dumas:Now, I know that you're running an agency and I know that you said there's some struggles, some challenges, of course, of running any business. Let's go over some major do's and major don'ts for running an agency. Why don't you start with the do's and then let's move over to the don'ts. Sure. I mean, one of the do's is definitely about being transparent. I mean, I know that this is a word that gets kind of thrown around a lot. You know, it's almost become like cliche. I mean, who isn't for transparency, right? But you got to think about what that means in your industry and how can you go above and beyond.

7:22So in the agency space, you'll often come across agencies that they don't say they're pricing up front. They don't really share their contract terms, things like that. And, you know, why they're I'm not saying everything here is malicious. But I think that's some of the reason why agencies and businesses in general don't do this is because they want to be able to, you know, assess the client, maybe assess the budget, and maybe, you know, make an adjustment based on what they're seeing. You know, this person probably has more capability to pay or willingness to pay. Or they just, you know, they don't, they don't want to scare someone off from scheduling a call because they're going to feel like the prices are too high.

8:02So they want to kind of get them on a call first before they unleash, you know, the full, the full amount. What we've done differently with shortlist is trying to be as upfront as possible about, you know, what to expect, right? So you go on our website, you look at any service, you'll see prices, which, you know, you'll see the process, the contract terms, all these different things that normally in the agency space, you wouldn't really see. And so that's one way that, you know, we have gone and been able to really own transparency. That's one of my do's. I think that matters. As for the don'ts, let's say overlooking the need to provide results.

8:43I think that often we get caught up with the idea of just we're delivering a service. It's focused on the deliverable in the SEO space that might be backlinks or technical audit or a piece of content or something like that. That is the means through which clients get results, but it is not the actual results themselves and is not actually what clients want. Clients want growth. They want sales to a lesser degree. They may be interested in things like traffic and authority as well. But, you know, but really they're looking to kind of impact the P &L. That's why they hire you. So if you overlook, you know, actually needing to provide results, you're not going to be thinking from the perspective of the client and you're going to get surprised one day when they cancel because you're going to say, well, why?

9:30I've been, we've been delivering these great, you know, the services. We've been delivering great content. Why don't they see what we see? And it's really about that, that frame of mind. You have to really kind of be thinking results focused.

9:41John Lee Dumas:I think that's such an important point that I do want to reiterate, Fire Nation, is you cannot overlook the need to provide results. I mean, we live in a results oriented world. Every business has to be results oriented. Otherwise they're not going to thrive in the way that they want to. So great, great content there. And we have a lot more to talk about Fire Nation, client churn, cash flow, and a lot more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. If you've ever tried getting a traditional bank loan for your business, then you already know that it's not exactly fast or easy. Between rising costs, tighter lending standards, and all the hoops you have to jump through, it can feel like you're stuck waiting when your business needs capital now.

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10:58John Lee Dumas:Give your business the flexibility to handle whatever comes next. Apply now at revenued.com slash fire. That's revenued with a D dot com slash fire. Apply today and be ready for whatever comes next. Fire Nation, ideas are exciting, but systems will allow you to create freedom. That is where High Level comes in. High Level allows you to build and run your entire business from one platform. website builder and hosting funnel and landing pages email marketing automation and workflows calendar booking payments and subscriptions even course and membership hosting everything works together seamlessly plus award-winning 24 7 support so you are never stuck and when you go through my link at high level fire.com you unlock my full bonus stack a 30-day free trial of high level with full access a private 15-minute coaching call with me weekly live office hours with me a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something Execution Roadmap, and more.

11:58John Lee Dumas:Stop piecing tools together. Start building momentum. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Dave, we're back and client churn is the silent killer for so many businesses. Let's discuss the best ways to reduce client churn. Yeah, it's a massive thing for all businesses, really. We're always obsessed with acquisition, getting a new client on board. It's fun to acquire new clients, but then we forget about how big of an impact it is when we lose a client, especially if they're a large one. So we start doing things. We play with our contract terms to make them more strict, longer, harder to get out of, push annual plans, things like that.

12:42And those can work to a degree, but they don't necessarily address the core problem. The core issue is you need to understand the decision maker flow. You need to know who is involved, when those decisions will be made, and what they are based on. And you need to position yourself to address all of those needs. So that means you may be talking with one point of contact, but there may be three other individuals that are also part of the conversation. One of them might be this person's boss. they may have a meeting coming up in three weeks where they're going to review everything and you want to make sure that you control the story that you know if what you've been you know handing them is maybe some monthly reports or spreadsheets or things like that that you've taken the time to actually condense it into a story or presentation a format that people actually you know can can understand get insights from because the higher people are up on the food chain in my experience the less likely, the less patience they have for looking at, you know, spreadsheets and data and stats.

13:42They want messages, things like that. So you need to be able to kind of show the results that, you know, not just that you think matter, but as a reference in a previous thing, that actually the client thinks matter and make sure you're hitting all the timing with all the right people.

13:55John Lee Dumas:Now, Dave, cashflow is the lifeblood of business. I mean, without cashflow, I mean, what do you actually have? So what are your thoughts on cashflow? And, you know, how can our listeners really focus on that and hopefully improve? Yeah, this took me years to figure out for the agency. I mean, I always knew in theory, cashflow is important, but I was very much obsessed with the top line revenue, just trying to get it as high as possible and assuming that profit would kind of come along or being satisfied with the profit that we had, even though maybe the margins weren't really as strong as they should have been for the amount of revenue we were doing.

14:34And at the end of the day, I was just thought, you know, trying to be predictive and forecasting cash flow would just be like too difficult. But one day, you know, frankly, after a couple months of just having a really rough time in business, things not really going that well, lost some key customers, we had, you know, the team was too large, we were just overspending. Why don't we give it a shot? We can't just keep operating in the dark anymore. And just not really knowing, you know, what things are going to look like three, six, 12 months from now. So we, you know, we went kind of down to the spreadsheet and we started to kind of forecast all the clients we had and when they were committed to, and then what it would cost to service them and not just kind of like, you know, the hourly work and the employee salaries, things like that.

15:15But if there were certain deliverables that had to be paid for, you know, as part of, as part of it. And it's changed everything. Honestly, I've been, you know, it's been this year, like I've been in business like seven years, and this is the year that we've finally done it. It's allowed me to really better manage the resources of the team to know what to expect, you know, months ahead and how to prioritize clients and be more focused on reducing churn.

15:37John Lee Dumas:So we love talking about the future. Like we love knowing what's maybe coming up ahead from people that have been there, done that and, you know, could at least estimate what they are seeing, what they are forecasting, what they expect. So what do you believe the future of digital marketing and marketing services is? What are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, obviously, AI is a huge topic. I know it's been discussed on this show and it will continue to be so. And a lot of, you know, AI's early features, as we're seeing as entrepreneurs, are replacing, you know, some of the marketing services that we've known.

16:12You know, content writing is a big one that's been cannibalized. Design is coming up. You see a lot of graphic designs that can be made. You know, whether or not you can kind of put together a full scale, you know, landing page or website, I think isn't maybe quite there yet, but it will be eventually. And so it is making inroads in a lot of digital marketing services, which could, you know, scare people away from the industry. But I do believe that people, you know, will still need people to plan, strategize and execute on their vision, you know, either due to a lack of time or a lack of skills.

16:44And, you know, AI still has to be operated. It still needs prompts. It still needs, you know, back and forth communication, editing. There are still additional plugins and extensions that people are using to kind of power it up beyond your basic kind of chat GPT. So learning those tools is going to allow you to deliver faster, cheaper and quicker. And that's always been the name of the game. The individual that can do that, their business is going to grow relatively to the competition. So that's how you get it done.

17:15John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, that is how you get it done. from, again, somebody who's been doing this for seven years now and has really started to click these last couple of years on how to actually run a cashflow business that's rocking. So Dave, of everything that we've talked about here today, what would you say is the one thing, the one key takeaway that you would want our listeners to get from our conversation? Yeah. I mean, a lot of the different things, they do kind of depend on where you're at in the business, right? Like if you're just starting, you might not be super concerned about cashflow or reducing client churn, you know, but I think at any point you really need to kind of be results focused.

17:50I don't, I don't think that there is a time in the, in an agency's life or really any business really, you know, beginning, middle, end, where if you are not, you know, results focused and thinking from the client perspective and understanding how they are going to judge your performance that that will serve, you know, that that won't serve you well. So really, it, you know, take a step back and try to remove the bias of what you believe the value is you're providing and just try to think about the client and why they come to you in the first place and who they have to answer to and make sure you are aligning with that.

18:26And if you do that, then, you know, the business often kind of sells itself, you know, churn reduces itself, acquisition becomes a lot easier, how you market yourself, your positioning, everything just kind of clicks. So really trying to kind of understand, you know, the results that is being desired.

18:42John Lee Dumas:So Dave, if Fire Nation is connecting with what you're saying, they're really appreciating the content. What would be your call to action for our listeners today? I would love for everybody, if you're running, you know, if you're actively, you know, running a startup, getting that going, take a look at your website right now. Well, actually, let's put it this way. First, go through the exercise of the results focused, you know, that we just kind of spoke about. So if you were to start with a blank page, you know, what are the results that your product delivers? And what are the results that your client expects?

19:16Are they aligned? And then go through your homepage, go through your website and see, are you speaking in the same way that you wrote about on that paper? Are you using the same verbiage? Are you prioritizing the same, you know, the same benefits? You'll likely see disconnects. I see it all the time, you go on people's homepage and they're talking about one thing when they should be talking about something else. So I think that's an easy, you know, fix, important fix that somebody could make today.

19:42John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with DS and JLD today, so keep up the heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Dave in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And Dave, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you, John. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Dave for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, are you an entrepreneur on fire who's looking to share your amazing message with the world?

20:13John Lee Dumas:If yes, we are now accepting applications for entrepreneurs on fire. To learn more about becoming a guest, visit eofire.com slash guest. And I'll catch you there or on the flip side. 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. Visit highlevelfire.com. Highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, 50 days will fly right on by. The only question is, will you have something to show for it?

20:53John Lee Dumas:I created a free YouTube series called 50 Days to Something, a step-by-step path to build a real product, service, or offer in just 50 focused days. Start today for free at eofire.com slash YouTube.