8-Figure Bootstrapped Agency Blueprint

0:28All right, so we have a little treat for you. recap system does everyone use? Anyone feel free to jump in here or Adam, if you have a clarifying question for Adam here, I want to give people a chance to. You can take it any way you want, but like, you know, we're using PowerPoint just to recap things, but I know the SEO is probably automatically flowing into some system, but I just love to know maybe for your high touch client. Oh, reporting. Report, not, yeah. Yeah, like, so we do a lot of jobs where it's like a three-month engagement and it's done and we have to do recap after each month. So there's a little bit difference between reporting is like we generally give that to clients real time as much as possible.

1:11And then like the recap, like here's how your campaign went. You know, we were out there for 60 days doing X, Y, Z, but I just love to know what people are using. Like last week, I learned about PandaDoc. I'm just seeing if there's something else I should know. Adam, I guess I'm curious. So your marketing is not digital marketing. So what kind of metrics are you reporting on? That's great. So we do everything. We do a lot of similar things. So when we're out there in the real world activating, there's the general impressions that a brand gets by being, you know, So in Soho or on Venice Beach, there are the number of engagements that people we have conversations with, people who taste the product, that type of thing.

2:00And then there's a whole lot of content. We basically provide brands in real time, which is the reporting, but it's client testimonials, time lapses, all that stuff. So we kind of do all that. And then we also sometimes have people, you know, oh, you want a second sample? You have to sign up for the newsletter. So we get those type of things going on or you want to win, you know, a year's worth of cheese from Cabot Cheese, they enter the contest. So we're doing a bunch of things to get people's emails and, you know, all these different type of metrics. But I'm just curious if you guys have an automatic way to take your everything that you're doing and it, you know, populates into some kind of software recap report.

2:49I've got something. What we're kind of doing, we're in traditional digital marketing, but what we're doing is establishing a baseline with the customer at the very beginning, like what are their expectations, so that when we do that summary report at the end, we kind of use that same baseline information, KPIs, to say here's where you were, here's what we provided, So it's an immediate visible value that you're adding to the project. It sounds like the recap summaries that you're doing are where the value you're summarizing the value of your whole campaigns that you're doing with them. And so it's kind of hard to automate that.

3:36I think like Brennan talked about like how much time he puts into a proposal. we spend a lot of time on those recaps but we do have um we're feeding um the data in spreadsheets and then we're feeding that into uh chat gbt or some other ai and we are asking it to do a a roll-up summary basically with adding value like where the key areas that we performed well Where do we not perform well? Where could we do better? You know, all those things. So it actually takes a lot of data, summarizes it. And we do that with even Google Analytics now and a lot of other very technical downloaded data. And it's not always 100 % accurate.

4:23So be careful. But we're trying to really, I have a team in Pakistan that's trying to write a program where we can do that automatically kind of thing. but we're a little ways from that but that's kind of what we're doing to get it 80 of the way and then we go in there and we make it look beautiful um and it's really we're selling the next project it sounds like what you're doing so i think it's going to be a get 80 20 rule get 80 of it kind of summarized in a consistent way and then you guys tweak it and then pitch it for the next project you know here and and recommendations you know here's what we recommend to take it to the next level is we have you know hit teams that go out with uh on saturdays at this location to get signups for emails we have real we had a lot of success with getting emails we want to expand on that and target it specifically so anyways i hopefully that helps i think i was understanding thank you so much that's amazing i took a bunch of notes on that david can you just say something go ahead yeah one thing to add there is um we we also do digital like seo so a lot of our stuff we can just pull data in from google analytics and google search console i love looker studio like you can create templates and then like you just pull data from different sources and press a couple buttons and it spins up a new new dashboard based on those templates for some of the things internally that we do require some manual data entry like i imagine after doing a campaign with cabot the folks who ran that booth or something have to like tally up how many people came for seconds and all that there might be a process where you have like a templated sheet for like all right for these types of events we use this spreadsheet template for these type of events we use this spreadsheet template and then you might have a liquor studio dashboard template that connects to that type of like structured data like right now like to spin up a new reporting dashboard for a client takes like five minutes did you say liquid or liquor studio look or l-o-o-k-e-r okay yeah it's free it's from google um and i love it by the way all kinds of stuff into it scott one day one day scott you're gonna have to do a tutorial on how you have such a nice setup because i talked to someone recently and they're like oh it's gonna cost you 30 grand for that type of setup i'm like really yeah yeah so we can talk about i mean i think everybody should have that type of setup because i think brand's a big mode that you guys will have right and so you have the next 10 years to build a moat for you all, right?

6:53I think Adam has a nice background, but Scott's the most professional. My microphone, I just haven't set it up yet. Is that background actually just like a black wall, or do you have like lighting done? It's a black wall. Oh, wow. I can give you a paint number if you want. I did my research into what paint, what the colors. No, it's not hard. It's just you have to find the contrast in your two lights. Yeah. The important thing, too, is that the camera is below, because the camera right now is looking down on you, right? Someone brought that up to me. So if the camera's below, like you're, they're looking up to you, like you're a leader, right?

7:24Then, so that, I think that makes a lot of sense. So John, John had a good question here and maybe Scott, that's something you can share in the group where we can talk about it in this meeting, but John had a good question. So if you had to start your agency over again, totally from scratch, no ex-customers, no partners, what would you focus on? So personally, I would just focus on AI transformation. I literally know a guy that shut his company down. Okay. He shut his AI company down. Um, and he just focuses on AI consulting and he's charging like anywhere from 10 to 20 to 30 grand a month just for consulting.

7:56And the way he structures it is, I think you get one weekly call for an hour with him. I don't want to sell my time like that, but just FYI, um, he, and I think he's probably doing like, I don't know, a million dollars a year or something like that. Right. And that that's basically all profit. Cause it's just him working. And then I know another guy in the SEO space, I think he's pulling in like 1.5, 1.6 million in profit. He has one virtual assistant that's in Eastern Europe and mostly all he does is consult. And so I think I might've mentioned this guy before, but he helps do the dirty work for companies where like, if you're like a big software company, you know, a lot of people are afraid to hire people.

8:35It's like, oh, I'll just fire them for you. So he does like firing as a service. He like does like recruiting for them as well. He makes introductions. He helps vet their strategy. And I'm like, oh, can you help us with keyword research? He's like, no, I'm not going to do it, but I'll walk you through it on a phone call. And that's what he does. So going back to what I would be focusing on is if I were starting from scratch, I had nothing, no employees, whatever. I would just focus on the AI consulting piece for larger companies, right? Because I know they're down to pay more money for this stuff and they want to get into it.

9:05And then as I get more cash flow, if I want to build it out, then I'll start to hire people to help out and actually help with the implementation. And then I'll just build it out that way and go from there. All right, everyone, quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing six figures, seven figures, eight figures, even nine figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads, we share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions, personally, professionally.

9:37We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment. So you can just learn more by going to marketing school.io slash agency. Once again, that's marketing school.io slash agency to learn more. And we hope to see you inside. Eric, I have a two-part question related to that. So the first part is like, when you say AI consulting, what level of technical skill is required for that? I mean, Do you need to know how to set up vector databases and rack?

10:08Like. Zero. Okay. So he's giving basically marketing consulting advice on how to build AI agents, for instance, that will perform marketing tasks. I would say this guy in particular. So the first guy that's doing this right now, it's more like business consulting and the marketing angle. He doesn't know too much about marketing, but it's more around the business angle for AI in terms of just adding more efficiencies and helping cut costs and things like that. Okay. The other part of the question was, do you, I know you've said before that your agency's working on building agents and things like that.

10:44I've been trying lots of different tools and going back to the technical question, I'm bouncing back and forth between should, you know, should I hire someone to build something custom or should I be using one of these platforms like copy AI or relevance AI where you can build out these agent agentic workflows, you know, but then I'm tied into a platform, right? Like, yeah. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. I think if I were starting from scratch, if I had no, so I, I think a couple, you know, that I got really lucky with a company I invested in and there's a CTO that that's like helping me know.

11:16And so, so if you get lucky with that, absolutely jump on, jump on that. Right. But I, if I were starting from scratch, I had no developer support, I might just go Zapier. Because Zapier has a lot of these, they have like a little, there's a Chrome extension. Now there's a lot that you can do with it. And you can build workflows that way. I wouldn't tie myself into like a copy AI or a Jasper. Like, don't get me wrong. Like, you know, those companies like crushed it in the past. But those are rappers. And I don't think rappers are defensible. And I think they're going to be, unfortunately, I don't know how strong they'll be as companies in the next couple years.

11:51that makes sense thank you yep and even open ai has said themselves it's like you know if you're just gonna build and and like um you're gonna wait for the next ai thing you're gonna try to innovate on ai we're just gonna steamroll you um so so there's that i want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host agency so np digital so neil patel digital what they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global they're worldwide they have smb services as well they have mid-market to enterprise services as well they cover the entire gamut so you can just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it and now back to the episode david fox what is your opinion on of automating of auto optimizing content tools and which do you recommend david what's david kim what's your take on it as a content agency that's why i'm asking you?

12:45It risks over optimization, which we've seen, and ends up just doing what everyone else is doing. So I'd say use it, but also you should have some sort of human in there, like figuring out how to differentiate your content. This is my short answer. Happy to give a longer answer if you'd like. No, that's perfect. What's your favorite tool? cool we've bounced back and forth we started off with clear scope got extremely expensive went to surfer seo turns out it wasn't as good as clear scope jump back to clear scope we're also we've been looking at letter drop and we're partnering with those guys a bit um their product is pretty freaking awesome so i explored them as well they're a bit more expensive i think they changed their price recently to make it a bit easier to use like one part of the tool instead whole platform but right now we use clear scope for most of our work david you say what the other one was that you're testing out uh letter drop letter and letter drops better than clear scope uh we're testing it out we haven't decided whether it's better than clear scope or not it's more of a platform for like content marketing and distribution rather than just seo optimization like search optimization is one piece of what they do got it yeah i think i've heard of it before i I haven't tried it before.

14:04So Brian asked, number one SEO tactic to supercharge performance. Brian, can you, as an SEO, can you tell me where you're trying to go with this question? Sorry, that was a little bit vague. Yeah, I mean, I've been doing SEO my whole career and I think I'm doing, you know, a decent job. But I always just wonder, is there something more? Is there something like some advanced strategy? something that like really can make a difference in a short period of time or that um it's just you know more effective than other things i might be doing i was curious about that well let me tell you why i hate the seo industry um so so if you look at seo twitter all they do is complain all they do is point fingers all they do is blame other people um and i think part of it like that maybe they feel that resentment is maybe because maybe because their their tunnel vision has has has like there's a resentment that they're kind of overlooked right um and so you know when i first started doing i see a long time ago i was like no i i'm either going to become like those people because this was happening way back when right um i'm either going to become like this people these people or i'm going to expand my horizons be very open-minded and try to learn other things.

15:22And so that's even happening now. You look at that recent Google leak, you look at how things are happening. It's like, oh, wow, brands are actually important. Oh, your clickstream data is actually important. All these things matter at the end of the day. And so when you look at Eight Sleep, they haven't necessarily done much around SEO, but the fact that they're driving 15 million visitors a month just from America is because of all the omni-channel stuff that they're doing. So the F1 sponsorships, the Huberman, the Matthew Walker, right? Like these are all like health people, right? All the things that they're doing, every single podcast, eight sleep, eight sleep, eight sleep, right?

15:57And so their brand searches have just gone crazy and they are who they are now, right? And so, and they've shot past sleepfoundation.org and all these other super optimized websites. And so if I were starting from scratch today, Brian, this is a really long way of answering your question, but I wouldn't focus on SEO today. And I would just look at where there's good, strong, organic reach, such as like if my audience is on LinkedIn, Twitter, I'll just go for that all day and just keep hitting that. Um, because SEO is getting more competitive. And if you don't have that domain authority, you don't have that brand recognition.

16:31Um, it's, it's hard to play. So I would try to, if I were to think I'm thinking about this from a client standpoint too, because when I actually do get on the calls with these clients, uh, occasionally I'll, I'll be like, Hey, like, what are you doing with this, this and this? Right. Um, and some of my clients that will listen to the podcast and my people hate this, right? When they listen to my podcast, they're like, why don't we just do everything that Eric's talking about? Right. Um, but that just goes back to broaden your, your, your horizons again, because if you're just pigeonholed to SEO, um, as an agency, I think in the next five to 10 years, it's too volatile in my opinion.

17:00And, you know, we're trying to support our friends and our families. Right. So, so yeah, I'll just be careful there. And do I think, so is there a silver bullet? No, I would just say like, you have to broaden.

17:15Thank you.