Should New Agencies Accept Bad Clients for Cash Flow? Pros & Cons Explained

0:28All right, so we have a little treat for you. flow during zero to 1 million phase. I would say you have to stretch your ICP a little further, but not take on like a nightmare clients that call you all the time or text you all the time or whatever. I think there's a limit to that. Right. And some cases you have to put food on the table. So you take what you can get. But yeah, you just can't have the ones that are going to occupy too much headspace. Right. Does that make sense to you? Is there a follow-up there? Yeah, so there are some clients that are so needy and they're not going to have that much of a budget in themselves.

1:11So yeah, I was looking for that balance. And I think that part of that is because I'm having a child in a few months. That's awesome. I'm pretty anxious about that as well. Alain, how old are you again? I'm 24. my god all right congrats yeah that's amazing so okay yeah let me let me answer you this okay so i think what you need to do is you need to tier your clients right in terms of headache right so you can tier them in terms of how much they're they're paying you but you can also tier them in terms of headache too so you know tier one would be the biggest or maybe maybe tier five would be the biggest headache right and then tier four tier three tier two tier one and then you can when you look at all them on a spreadsheet it's like okay how much are they paying are they worth the headache at the end of the day at least you have a you have more of a methodical process here in terms of who you should eliminate, right?

2:02And the ones that are more of a pain in the ass, you put an asshole tax on them, right? So you charge them 25, 50%, 100 % more, whatever. And you just say, hey, my prices are going up or whatever. They're doubling. Oh, I can't pay. Oh, okay, I'm sorry. Well, then we're going to have to off-board in a month or so. So you have a lot more control than you think you do here. Right, right. Thanks. Thanks a lot. All right. Brian asks, Brian, is that a Miami background? That's a Miami background, right? Brickle, yeah. Brickle, yeah. You know, did I tell you I lived in Brickle? That's downtown. The third to the right is downtown.

2:39Actually, yeah, it might actually be closer to downtown. That's near like Biscayne. Yeah, it's downtown. Yeah. So, Brian, are there any upcoming digital marketing conferences worth attending that aren't expensive, crazy expensive and stateside? Well, Brian, define what expensive means. I don't know. I mean, I see some conferences and it's like, oh, you know, it's going to be like two grand to go for like, you know, two days or three days. To me, that's kind of a lot. Yeah. Well, I mean, here's the thing. So I'm looking at here. So let's do this. I'm just looking at one of the conferences that Neil and I are speaking at.

3:19Register now. So I remember before I forget this story, SASTR, this is back in the day. I think I paid$1 ,000 for a ticket or whatever. It was two days and it's probably more expensive now. But I was just walking around. And then I remember a guy stopped me and said, oh, look, podcast guy, right? That client ended up being like two, three years or so. And then another client, that was another client for like two, three years as well. So they actually stayed for a while, both of these. And that was so successful that the next year, so I think we got three clients out of it, just me walking around.

3:54And then the next year, we actually ended up paying 60 or 70 grand for a booth and we brought a couple of our people. We got absolutely nothing from it. So that's another lesson. That's a side lesson, right? Like the booths maybe aren't so much worth it. But I think attending industry conferences. So Brendan's not here, but Brendan goes to all these travel conferences and he throws dinners and that works out really well for him. So I think it just depends on where your audience is hanging out. But I'm looking at HubSpot's thing right now. Yeah, it's$1 ,500. That's the event both Neil and I are speaking at in September if you guys want to come to Boston.

4:29But to answer your question, things that are under$2 ,000, I'll go under$1 ,500. I guess inbound would be one of them. Brian, you sell SEO mainly, correct? So I like the industry SEO conferences, right? So people still go to MozCon. um ahrefs has that conference that's coming that for sure is not stateside but it's going to be less money um it's like 500 bucks or whatever and um i like the industry seo conferences so that's all i can speak to but in general i find a lot of these events are pretty like i don't know 1500 2000 plus so you just have to my whole take on it is if i can at least break even from it it's a win if i can meet one amazing person from each event um each day that's a win for me because i know that's going to come back in spades in the next couple of years.

5:23True. Thank you. Yep. All right. We got Adam here. Adam asked, how can I get, how can I help get my agency and my clients on a practical CRM system to automate lead nurturing? Let's see. What, what, what are you using right now? So I, I don't really have anything. I'm definitely a CRM bozo. I know you're talking about bozos earlier. Sadly, I'm a bozo when it comes to this. And I tried to go with go high level and I had some basic CRM like functionality. I wouldn't call it CRM through Wix. But anyway, go high level has been hard to integrate with my site on Wix. And I'm trying to use Wix as the test bed to see like, how can I give clients like a janitorial services firm?

6:08Like I'm getting them leads with Google Ads and they get a bunch of phone calls. Then they never call the people back. I need to be able to store the leads, have people put in just like with Salesforce, like, oh, this is I called them now and then we'll get then they'll get an automated reminder like, oh, you should call them again now or send them an email, something something like that to generate this top of mind, like here's how to outreach to these leads and mark them as MQLs, SQLs, all that fun stuff. I know I heard about VBout from Kevin, but I'm just like, wow, this has been way harder than I thought to figure it out.

6:44It's like, do I just do HubSpot? But I thought go high level was going to be easy. But so I might let a couple of members jump in here because I see people making faces. So my answer is just going to be just use HubSpot because that's what we do. But anybody feel free to jump in here. Let's use the mastermind here. HubSpot. We use HubSpot with all our clients. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. and I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her, what do you like most about the group?

7:18She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas, the leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds, great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you wanna grow your agency faster and you wanna peer group to do so, just go to marketing school.io slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future.

7:51So again, marketing school.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. What's the rage with go high level? Then is it just a farce? To me, go high level. I only see internet marketers talking about it. And when that's, when that's the case, I tend to veer away from stuff like that. I come from an internet marketing background. I just know that it's like, they're not product people at the end of the day. I'm not saying high level, excuse me, is good or bad. But I just see so many internet marketers promoting it where I kind of just get an icky feeling. So it's not maybe a fair judgment. Go ahead, Kevin.

8:24Yeah. We use PipeDrive, but I've been looking at a variety of new ones. And there's one called Copper CRM that's targeted at specifically at agencies. it's kind of a new a new crm in the marketplace so it's not like uh hubspot you know but it's simpler it's i'm looking for simple because a lot i've used salesforce i've used in different roles and a lot of these crms are way overkill you're going to use 10 of the um features in there so i think simpler is better i mean pipe drive is a decent simple kind of um uh kanban type board and so that's that's what you know i could throw out there got yeah we use uh i have a couple of agencies so for a lead gen agency we actually use go high level uh the craze about go high level is uh primarily uh one affiliate fees you get paid 40 if you sign someone else up that creates a bit of a craze there so that's why internal markers are big on it but for us go high level is great because there is so much opportunity for customization if you figure out how to do automation in the back end it's way more powerful in my opinions and hubspot i hate hubs no offense um it's great for like hubspot is great when you have developers and they can go in uh whereas on go high level there's so much you can do like we pump leads to customers all the time like we do actual pure lead gen on local home service businesses and we just route leads based on the city based on the phone number and whatnot based on who the person is assigned to and whatnot.

10:07And it works great. But yeah, there is a lot that you have to do in a backend to make it work for you. The Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested. Traffic surges, inventory moves fast, and every second counts. You need a platform built for the moment. That's Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and 10 % of all US e-commerce. With Shopify, you can launch fast with thousands of templates and tools that make your site not just beautiful, but conversion ready. Shopify is packed with helpful tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography to increase your reach during the busiest time of the year.

10:43You can also stress less knowing that Shopify's award-winning customer support team is on standby 24-7 to help with any issues that arise, allowing you to get back to business as fast as possible. This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash marketing school. That's shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this Black Friday one to remember. Interesting. Is there a way to pipe back like lead quality, like MQL, SQL status from go high level, like you can do in HubSpot, like back to Google ads?

11:21Do you know if it can do that? I think they do have automation between. Yeah, they definitely have connection between Google ads. I don't know if it can pipe it back. I don't know that because we don't care about that particular metric. We just purely do pay per lead. So I wouldn't know. But I'm pretty sure there's probably an option for it. And we do everything through. At the beginning, we did Zapier, but now everything is on Publi. And we just run thousands of whatever tasks every month. And so it works really well. Publi is a Zapier competitor? Yeah, it looks like HighLevel has an integration with Zapier.

11:59So you could connect it to Zapier and then connect that to Google. Yeah, we found Zapier to be too expensive. So we moved to Pavley on a lifetime deal and it works great the same way. Or make.com, the same idea. Oh, that's funny. Adam, does that help? It does help. I mean, it makes me want to give GoHighLevel more of a shake as well. And then there were a couple other things like Pipedrive. And I'll check out this Zapier clone too. It's still tough. I think I want some kind of consultant to help me out. Maybe I'll just bug you, Scott, for a little bit more advice if you're open. Yeah, you can ask questions.

12:37I'm just kidding. I'm not a consultant on it. We do. But I spend a lot of time in it. But you can also white label it. You can create your own accounts, which I don't recommend. A lot of folks took it as a SaaS business. It's not a real SaaS business. If you don't control the code, you're not a SaaS business. And it's not, yeah, so we don't go into that. But for funneling leads, as simple as that, it works great for us, yeah. Okay, good deal. Great. The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer?

13:14And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketing school dot IO slash hire. Again, it's marketing school dot IO slash hire to learn more.

13:44You can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. If you guys can, by the way, if you guys can maybe carry that conversation over to the forum too, that's always helpful for everyone's benefit if you guys want. Or just share the recording or whatever. I'm just trying to get more engagement in the forum. There's always engagement here, but the forum could be better. All right. So Allianne, follow up here. I just want to know, and this is probably relevant to everybody. How do large agency owners actually make money? Like taking home$10 million personally.

14:16Is it through dividends or selling the agency? So the good news with an agency is you get to do both, Elian. You can have an exit every single year. So once you get it to 5, 10, 15 million in profit, if you just keep growing it, you can take that dividend every single year, right? You can either reinvest it back in the business or you can take 66 % for yourself or whatever. And then you can sell the agency too if you want, right? So I think building the agency to sell is a good thing because you are buttoned up operationally. So when people look at you, it's like, okay, they actually have real profit.

14:47It's not completely reliant on the founder, right? And so I think you want to build it to sell, not necessarily to sell. And then you can decide what you want to do with the money. And if you do decide to sell it, private equity, they'll look at you and say, okay, maybe you as a founder, you're taking like a million dollars in seller discretionary earnings. That's what they call it. So what the private equity firms would do is they'll add that money back and then they'll count that into the profit. So you as the founders, this is not financial advice. Talk to your advisors. I'm just saying, you know, you can probably run a lot of your expenses through the company.

15:18You should be running a lot of them through your company. You decide to the extent how much you want to do that. Some people get a little too aggressive with that. But, you know, this is all for you at the end of the day, right? So the good news is you can do both. And the fallacy that most people have is like, oh, agencies can't sell for a lot. It's not scalable, blah, blah, blah. If you hire the right people, it's scalable. And yes, absolutely. If you get it to a high profit level, you can sell it for a lot. So screw what other people say. Thank you.