1999 – How to Turn Your Agency into a Client Retention Powerhouse with Colby Wegter

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:05With us right now, Colby Wecker. Colby, you are the founder of the Delivery Mastery Community. You're found on the web at colbywecker.com. Let me spell that for you. And again, to our friend that's listening in your podcast app, just click on the cover art or show notes or the information icon. You'll find a direct link. But it's, Colby, your website, C-O-L-B-Y-W-E-G-T-E-R.com. Colby, thank you so much for joining us. Honored to be here, Josh. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. All right. Well, I'll let you kind of share what the Delivery Mastery community is and the work that you do in the world.

1:41Yeah, I'll be brief. I've been in the digital marketing agency world for 12 years now. I ate as an owner, and I had crazy burnouts in 2022, two of them in the same year, to the point where I was near hospitalization, just doing too much work, saying yes, too much. And so then I crawled out of that in 2023, and that was through networking with other people and found a whole bunch of interesting people basically trying to do the same thing I was, except they might have been a couple steps behind, not at burnout stage yet. And so that's where Delivery Mastery was formed is the more I talked to these people, the more I realized how under supported they were, that they were trying to do all the things and didn't have anyone to talk to who would understand.

2:24And that was exactly my experience when I had those burnouts. So the goal of Delivery Mastery is really simple. It's surround people with like minds who are eating glass, same as them, and then giving them any techniques, codes, tips, systems, frameworks that I have used to go from, as my description says, online from multiple burnouts to multiple seven figures. So we're a global top 1 % agency is my full-time gig and Delivery Mastery is going to be brand new as a pilot community later this year. Yeah. Well, listen, I'd love your take on, you know, kind of agency growth today. Or, you know, if someone, let's say someone were to start an agency today, what advice would you give them?

3:07Especially if we think of maybe outdated advice that may still be out there that you might say, yeah, you might still be seeing this a lot. I wouldn't recommend that today. Here's what I, you know, say you're a champion of or what you're a fan of. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the one thing I think is grossly mismanaged is just like actually caring about the client because the agency model is really attractive to a lot of people, right? You can charge high margins, you can have someone fulfill the work for you, all that sort of stuff. But you're going to have a ton of client turnover. You're going to have unhappy employees.

3:41And over time, unless you're a complete crazy person, I haven't met anyone like this, you're going to hate it too. So there's really no point in going into something that you either don't have an exit strategy to sell or like to put in the proper hands, or if you're not going to take care of the clients. And then of course, with the way the world's trending, actually using AI to help you, but also making sure that you stand out. Because if you're doing it exclusively with AI, congratulations, you're part of white noise. And if you are actually ignoring it, then you're going to be too slow. So you basically need it to speed up process.

4:16But I find the biggest advantage that people are missing is actually leveraging the personalities of the people at the company, right? Like every employee should be active on LinkedIn. Every, every employee should be giving educational content out there because that's really what a client wants at the end of the day is to know they're in good hands. Cause anybody, I say to our clients all the time, this strategy is not that different from a lot of our competitors. It's how we teach you the way in which it works. That is different. Yeah. So it's really down to the client. Yeah, absolutely indeed.

4:51And so when we think about retention, which is one of the main formats, if we think about where revenue comes from, obviously visibility or impressions are important, conversion is critical. But then retention, you know, there's the old saying, right, it's just it's so much easier to keep a client than it is to get a new one. So I think that there's likely opportunity for most of us, you know, whether again, no matter what it is that you're doing, you know, we could be talking about agencies. But I think a lot of these principles are applicable no matter what your business is, you know, is, you know, how can you work with and who, you know, with who you already have these relationships with?

5:37I find that most people, or at least I find that it's a, there's the temptation to not realize the gold that we have. We don't spend – we potentially should be spending more time with fewer people. We might just be out there just trying to swipe right on more and more and more people when you're kind of like, wait a minute. You already have a pretty good roster of people here. I don't know. Just some thoughts. I've been going on too long. Colby, you're okay. Well, can I jump on that? Because haven't you noticed, Josh, and I'm sure everyone who's online notices, is like all of these leads agencies popping up.

6:17all of these people promising 50 leads a week. I got an email yesterday, Josh, I don't kid you, 500 leads in a month was their promise. And it's just the idea of that is at least the people I talk to, because I survey my audience all the time. That would be another just quick recommendation. Survey prospects, survey existing clients, survey your staff. Always know, don't assume. Assume is the worst word in the English language, 100%. So actually know what they need. But among surveying these agency owners, they were all saying they had a leads problem as their primary issue, but they already had existing clients, right?

6:51So just as you mentioned, it's 10 times harder to go get somebody. And you got all of these crazy promises by people who don't have the agency owner's best interest at heart, promising 50 leads a week. Even if they delivered, they wouldn't be able to serve them and they never deliver anyway. So the problem is not an attraction or a lead gen problem. It's a retention problem because all of these people I spoke to, they have clients already and then they couldn't keep them for over a year. But if you could keep a client for two years, three years, four years, you don't need as many leads. And if you can keep a client for two years, three years, four years, those clients will sell for you.

7:27They'll open their mouth, word of mouth referrals. And now you're an attractive agency. You're a magnet to people who you already like working with because you worked with them for so long. And so everyone's chasing the next shiny thing or the huge pipeline influx. And it's all backwards to me. I think it's completely, I think there's way too much money going outward and not enough money invested. I think you should spend 80 % of your time on improving your service, not creating a new one or not trying to find a new customer. Wow. Wow. Colby, do you share just a bit about how, like, what does it look like when, when, when you work with a client?

8:05Like, what are you doing together? Yeah, great question. I mean, there's nothing sexy about it. There's nothing amazing about anything I say, yet so many people don't do what I do. I keep clients six, seven years because my number one goal is that they never have to guess what I'm doing, which means they never have to guess what the value is. and you can do that without having to message them every single day. My relationships with clients are built on trust because I tell them exactly what the expectation is. I always try and put it on a long timeline. I want them to know that we're going to work with each other for a long time.

8:40So for instance, I'm in digital marketing. The average digital marketing contract is around six to seven months. Well, if I tell a client by this time next year, you should be seeing X subliminally in their head, they know they're working with me next year. And if I can start backing that up and keep delivering and making sure that the communication is clear, they'll be there. Because then once you deliver, they're like, why would I go anywhere else? And I like working with this agency, right? And so I think I say to all the clients in our very first call, one is I encourage them to look elsewhere because I don't want anyone to sign up with us if they just like how we sound.

9:21I want them to know we're the right choice. and two, when they officially do sign, I say communication is the number one key to success. I can't do my work without your help. And so it just kind of sets more of a partnership dynamic than a vendor to client dynamic. Oh, yeah. Get any, Colby, any maybe former clients or someone that you've worked with, any stories come to mind about, well, listen, we started improving this or started making this change or started really kind of doubling down or providing more resources around this and maybe kind of more of a kind of a before and after? Yeah, what I will say is I think the clients, our agency attracts and keep in mind, a lot of our clients come from other agencies, right?

10:03They just weren't taken care of very well. So we're typically a breath of fresh air just in how we operate, right? And I'm learning that if all the strategies aren't that different, I mean, everything that we do, Google actually tells you exactly what to do. It's more of like a time investment and energy thing that our clients simply don't have. They have businesses to run. But in terms of like a before and after, what I will say is so many clients are focused on them. They're actually not focused on their customer. And we say their website and digital marketing should be their number one salesperson.

10:33Most of the time, all their website is doing is talking about them instead of the problem they solve for the customer. So the moment we flipped that, we don't even have to have a massive influx of traffic. Like what we specialize in is search engine optimization. That's not the quickest, but it's the most cost effective if you do it for over a year. But what happens in those first six months if the traffic isn't exploding? It's those little fixes that are like, your website is a salesperson who shows up late with an untucked shirt and bad breath. Let's fix that. And so those little tiny things that other agencies just quite frankly don't care enough about their customers to recommend.

11:09end right so uh individual before and afters i mean we we've had plenty of clients um i i hope it's i don't know if it's unkosher can i talk about the cbd space on this podcast otherwise i we good yeah we we worked with a client who basically you know started with a couple thousand people uh a month and now organically they're well over five figures in organic traffic a month like those sorts of things now that's also aided by the space the cbd space is growing right it's a bubble that will burst at some point. But we've done so with moving companies. We've done so with local brick and mortars.

11:44The only thing I would say is we don't do a ton of e-commerce. We're much more like service provider B2B style. Yeah. Your website is colbywechter.com. And again, that's W-E-G-T-E-R.com. Colby, I know you've got some resources. By the way, you're a great follow on LinkedIn. Do you mind maybe sharing to our friend that's been listening to us, what do you recommend they do from here? Yeah, and depending on when you listen to this, all of this will look new and refreshed because Delivery Mastery is coming later in 2024. LinkedIn is going to be the best, right? But what I can say, Josh, is I enjoy creating content so much.

12:25I am just laying the groundwork to be in other places as well, exploring long form and that sort of stuff. The one place I would highly recommend people follow me is on colbywechter.com and then just sign up for my newsletter. It's totally free. If you don't vibe with it, unsubscribe. It's right there. But the whole point is to just be the voice that isn't saying, hey, here's how I made my millions. It's more of like, here are all the things that were terrible along the way to multi seven figures for the agency and what I would do differently because my path is not one I would recommend to someone who's just starting out.

12:59I'm very thankful for the lessons, but I would love to help them avoid it. And that's the purpose of the newsletter. Yes, please. to baby brand new entrepreneurs or agency owners to all you can to learn from those who have already got their nose bloodied. And you don't want to go through that if you can avoid it. So, Colby, I appreciate all the work that you do for the kind of the agency world. Again, your website, Colby Wechter dot com. You also have a passion project, your podcast, What You Want with Colby Wechter. And again, to our friend that's listening, you can do a search there and you can find your episodes of your podcast there.

13:37Colby, great conversation. Thank you so much. It's been, I've really appreciated our time together. Yeah, thanks, Josh. We got to get you on mine as well. Appreciate it.

13:51Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program. Please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders, asking them where their best business comes from.

14:32I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required, where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed.

15:14I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.