1898 – Digital Marketing Coaching with AJ Rivera & Mike Schmidt

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0:58with us right now we've got aj rivera who is the ceo and co-founder of agency coach and we've got mike schmidt who's the cmo and co-founder of agency coach uh gentlemen your website is agencycoach.com it's so great to have you hey josh thanks so much for having us yeah super excited yeah so tell us what agency coach is cool well uh you know we got our start in the web design digital marketing space 2003. Started way back in the land before Google was the top of things and before Facebook and YouTube and all those things, a web design company. So we've owned that web design company and digital marketing company since 2003.

1:36It's got a team of 20 folks that work for it today. But in 2016, 2017, AJ and I decided and kind of realized we had slayed a lot of the dragons in that business and we're looking to do something differently. And so what we did is we launched Agency Coach, which is all about helping digital marketing agencies create more time and financial freedom because we believe that when you own your agency, you own your life. So too many digital marketing and agency owners are trapped by the very businesses that they've created. They have a job, not a business. They have all the downsides of owning a business, all the risk, all the things that come along with that.

2:16And they have all the downsides of the job in terms of limited upward mobility. And so it's like, why do we go and create these businesses? Why do we put ourselves out there and stick our necks out there? It's because we were trying to create a different and better life for ourselves. And it's really about understanding that, you know, business is a game that we get to play. But when we're the owner, we get to design it as well. And so we help agency owners create high ticket, monthly recurring revenue that's greater than their expenses. So that way they have financial freedom, be able to do the things that they want and buy back their time.

2:47Yeah. In defining what an agency is versus, I think, other ways that you can serve, particularly, you know, we work with a lot of folks in the B2B world. You know, certainly you can go out and you can provide education, you can coach, you can be a consultant. How would you define what an agency is? You know, particularly if you say, well, it's just me and my assistant. Are we an agency? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think a lot of times some of the agency owners call themselves freelancer, right? So like really, really, it's like, what's the difference between a freelancer and an agency?

3:20And in our community, we say like freelancing is an F word, actually. Why don't you want to say you're a freelancer? I wouldn't want to say that, but I got my own reasons. I'd love your take on that. Yeah. I mean, no disrespect to freelancers who might be listening here. But, you know, the thing is that I think that when you adopt the identity of an agency, you are looking at your business in a long-term fashion, right? Right. I think that you're, you know, freelancers trade their time for money, whereas agencies get paid based off of value and not the time that it takes. Right. Agency owners, you know, one day, whether you're a freelancer or agency owner, you will not be working in your business.

4:00Like, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but like we're all going to die. We're all going to, you know, hopefully live a long, long, long life and at some point not do the thing that you're doing right now. and if you have a freelance business, that's an awfully hard thing to sell or to give to somebody else, right? When you have an agency, it's a business that has value and can be sold. It can be, you know, you can get out of something like that. And so I think thinking with the end in mind, giving yourself the identity of the agency owner today is so important because it's going to help you make the decisions that are in alignment with your long-term success.

4:39And even if you don't feel like you're an agency today? Because we talked to a lot of people. I'd be like, oh, do you own an agency? They're like, oh, no. They're like, it's just me. I'm like, okay. All right. Well, here's lesson number one. You're an agency owner. Just put CEO on your business card. It's okay. Sure. AJ and I would get laughs or chuckles sometimes from people when we were first starting. They're like, they look at the card and they're like, CEO, really? I'm like, yeah. It's like, yeah, but that's the way I want to think, the way I want to act. And that's what I put. So that's really key differences.

5:11Let's provide some guidance for the agency owner that's listening to your conversation right now that might be stuck in a, well, all I did was just created a job for myself. And I'll be frank with you, not a very high paying job. And to add insult to injury, I'm now working 60 plus hours a week. What's going on? What am I doing wrong? Yeah, there's a couple of key things that we see happen time and time again with agency owners. The one thing is that we believe that they're like some of the most resourceful people on the planet, right? Because there wasn't really a school, at least when we started this, to learn this stuff, right?

5:47You couldn't get a degree in web design at that time. You had to just learn how to do it and you had to figure out how to do it. And I think sometimes agency owners fall in the trap of realizing that they can be super resourceful and then saying yes to anything anybody wants, right? And being the one that's on the hook for doing that. We call those snowflake projects, right? It's just like somebody has money in hand. They want to give you that money. And you're like, well, I've never really done Facebook ads, but I can figure it out. I can do that. And so they say yes to it. And guess what? Now they have to spend a ton of time learning how to do it.

6:19They probably underbid what they needed to do and underscoped it. And they're the ones stuck doing the work. It makes it impossible to delegate anything because no project is the same as another. They've got all these different projects that are a little bit different. and they're the ones at the end of the day that are on the hook for delivering all this stuff. And so we always say like, imagine if a realtor had to build every house that they sold, they're not going to sell many houses, right? And that's what we do time and time again as agency owners is we go out and sell something and then we spend a bunch of time actually doing the work.

6:50And so just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should, right? And you have to get better at saying no to projects that aren't in alignment with where you want to be as an agency. Now, the second piece of that and the way that makes it really easy to say no is when you have recurring revenue, right? For a long, long time, we played this game where we're out there trying to hunt for big website projects, right? There's these whales and we wanted to get bigger and bigger sites, you know, 10 grand, 20 grand, 50 grand, 100 grand. And the truth is that at the beginning of the next month, we start at zero again.

7:22I got to go find another one of those and another one of those. And so Mike and I realized that we needed to stop chasing that. And we were tired of starting at zero at the beginning of each month. We shifted all of our focus to high ticket recurring revenue services, like digital marketing. And once we did that, we started to see our lives change, right? Because we got to a point where at the beginning of the month, the very first day of the month, all of our expenses were paid, payroll, our office, anything else. And we didn't have to make another sale that month in order for us to be able to pay ourselves and pay all our bills.

7:55And when you're in that type of position, then you can say no to that weird project that's coming through because it doesn't quite fit. Right. You don't want to be the one that's doing it. You know, say the biggest flex a agency owner can can can execute on is saying the word no. No, you're not a great client to work with. No, it doesn't pay enough. No, I don't want to work on this. Right. No, no. Right. As opposed to many agency owners get themselves into this trap of trading their time for money, get themselves into this job they call a business by saying yes to too many things. Yeah. So let's say that there's someone listening to us and they're like, that sounds great.

8:33I want to say no more often, but right now they might be facing, they just don't have the volume of bodies coming through the door to engage in those conversations with. Are there any practices that you find that are really great for it? And again, I know each agency might be a slightly different, but any tried and true principle that you would recommend for getting to that place where you've got some momentum and maybe some sort of predictability on at least new potential client conversations? Yeah. You know, one of the most common things folks come into our world with is exactly that. They're like, hey, Mike, AJ, I need more leads.

9:09and can you help me figure out where they are and have those conversations? And the thing is that most businesses in general don't know what to do with a lead. Like leads come in, let me just tell you this, there's so many leads out there, like everyone, especially if you're a digital marketing agency. This is one of the most in-demand needed services that exists, especially in a rough economy, right? Because what's happening in a rough economy is people, business owners need someone that they can trust to help them with the stuff that they're worried about, which is their business and their customer activity, right?

9:43So the agencies that win are the ones that know how to not only attract that attention, but also warm up their own leads. Because every lead goes from cold to warm to hot, right? Every single one. But most businesses run on hot leads, right? The word of mouth, the referrals that come in just naturally. Yeah. And we love those, right? But if we understand that every lead goes from cold to warm to hot, Well, then we can start to realize that we can actually warm up our own leads. Now, the referral, the word of mouth lead that comes to you that came in really hot, like that also started cold. And the question is, how did it get hot?

10:21Right. Well, it got hot because the person that referred it to you warmed it up for you. Like it showed up on your doorstep, Josh, maybe. Right. And they're like, hey, I really want to work with you. And the person who referred it was like, hey, you got to work with Josh. He's amazing. He's awesome. And boom, this cold lead went from cold to hot instantly. but you just didn't realize that. And so our approach really is recognizing that most businesses in general, especially agencies, they're not doing anything to nurture or build a relationship with the leads that are in their world. Even right now, what we're doing in this space here is that there's people who are listening, who are listening to AJ and I, and are being warmed up for our services because they're getting to know us a little bit more.

11:01And so we really feel that you know, warming up those leads, like email marketing is oftentimes one of those services that is just neglected and people don't talk to their list or, you know, what are you posting on social media? Could somebody look at your social profile and understand what it is you do in the specific problem that you solve and really being clear about that. But, you know, with that all in mind, one of the key services that we open up the door to a lot of the contracts that we work with is actually reviewing reputation management. There's a lot of businesses out there that are getting pitched hard all the time.

11:35I can build your website or I can run Facebook ads for you. I can do X, Y, and Z. And the really pivotal moment in our agency is when we recognize that we could simply open up the door with virtually any business by saying these exact words. Hey, Josh, would you be interested in getting more five-star reviews from your actual clients and customers? So that way you appear as the obvious choice among your competitors. And you'd be surprised. So many people hear that and say, what do you mean? Yeah, I do need more reviews. And so we've built a really strong business just around opening up the door around reviews and having conversations with businesses.

12:12Because a beautiful thing for an agency about reviews is we can help a business get more reviews in about 30 days. And when you provide a result for a client, when somebody gives you money and then you provide an immediate result, suddenly there's a huge amount of trust built. What do we as agency owners typically hear from clients? Oh, the last guys suck. They were terrible. They promised the world and delivered nothing. Right. And the reason why is because they have never established that trust and coming in and opening up the door with reviews has been, been huge. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk specifically about how agency coach works and how you engage with your agency owners.

12:55And what, what does that process look like where you're kind of helping them up level their work and outcomes? Yeah, so we've got a number of different programs. We've got some kind of do it yourself course material, do it yourself implementation of like lead funnels and things like that, that they could purchase just as a first step. But then we have higher end coaching programs where we can work more directly in a group setting with some of our students. Really, everybody's kind of like at a different point in their agency that when they come to us, right? And so we're able to identify kind of what your next step is and really provide you the shortcuts that we never had.

13:30You know, Mike and I talked a lot about like how we wish something like Agency Coach existed back 20 years ago when we were starting the agency, but didn't, right? And that's why it took us so long to kind of figure some of these things out. You know, we provide not just theoretical like strategies, we provide stuff that they can just rubber stamp and implement in their business today. Yeah. And what would be some examples of maybe someone that's joined? What did they experience? What were the outcomes that they helped create? Yeah. So one story that comes to mind is a student of ours, Jason Burroughs.

14:04And so Jason came in. I love his story because he was a rock star, like quite literally touring drummer for a band and bands that people listening probably would recognize if I said it. And he was tired of traveling, right? Young kids. He was actually on a plane listening to one of our trainings. And then the light bulb just went off for him. In fact, they made him shut down his laptop. This is shut down his laptop and they cut the cell service right at the good part. And he couldn't wait to land to listen to the rest of it. Well, that was the catalyst to help him launch his agency from zero. And just about two years into it, he crossed the million dollar mark of revenue.

14:42And what really is fascinating about that is that's with a pretty small team, right? It was him and a full-time employee. And then he had connections to what we call leveraged service partners to help him deliver the work. So he's really done some amazing things, right? But I think some of the stories that are most, that's an amazing story. But one of the ones that really just excite me the most is students who come in with an idea of how much they need to make monthly recurring revenue wise. And we help them set that goal. So that way it exceeds their expenses, right? And that's really the focus of everything we're doing.

15:16You know, it's how to create more monthly recurring revenue such that it's more than what your expenses to have your team or your personal, what you're paying yourself. Because when you're in that space, that's a space where you can say no to projects that don't fit. And you can create and build a business that's fun and easy and less stressful. Building a business is hard enough, right? But if we can cover the financial aspect of it, business gets a lot more fun. As well as life should be for every agency owner. If I had my magic wand. So your website is agencycoach.com. To our friend that's listening, what would you recommend their next steps be?

15:53Yeah, if you actually head over to agencycoach.com slash Josh, what we'll do is we'll put a link to training that I think would be really relevant for agency owners. If you're looking to create more recurring revenue, if you're looking to get more leads, if you're looking to get your foot in the door with more folks, we'll link to that training there so you guys can take a look at that. But agency ownership and business ownership in general can be a lonely thing, right? And there are folks out there that have done it. And I think the general attitude of a lot of agency owners tend to feel like they have to figure it all out themselves.

16:26But I'll tell you, come on over, join in with all of us who are talking about this day in, day out, trading secrets, trading ideas, pointing out where each other can improve and celebrating each other's wins. And let's build recurring revenue together. And that's one of the coolest things we get to do. Mike Schmidt, CMO and co-founder, AJ Rivera, CEO, co-founder of Agency Coach. Your website, agencycoach.com. Go to agencycoach.com slash Josh. And there is that special training for you. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. Great conversation. Awesome. Thanks so much, Josh. Thank you, Josh.

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