I Built My Digital Marketing Agency to $10k a Month | Here Are 7 Important Things I Learned

what's up everyone matt lawson here back again with another video if you're someone brand new to the channel first off welcome i document a lot of what i'm doing in my everyday life in terms of my business and my hobbies if you're someone's been around the channel any period of time first off i want to say thank you for the support over the years but also you'll notice that it has been about seven or eight months since i've uploaded a video here on youtube not specifically because of the fact that i've been focusing solely on growing my digital marketing agency to hit the recurring revenue goals that i have set for this year however as you can tell by the title of this video these are going to be a few things that i've learned to reach the 10 000 per month goal that pretty much every single guru out there seems to put as the the flagship number and i want to shed some light on the realities of reaching that goal and some of the things that i've learned over the past seven or eight months now of really focusing on solely just my agency not doing anything else because it is a lot of work and there's a lot of things that have just come up and there have been so many moments where i've said to myself man if i only knew this back then or if i only knew this now or you know all the saying how that goes so that's what i want to cover in this video is a few different things that i have discovered on this journey of the past seven months of really just focusing on one thing and that is just getting clients getting them great results and making sure that they stay on board to continue paying for my digital marketing agency services because that's the true lifeblood of a business not the crappy project work which i do not want to have any part of anymore because it just sucks so let's just get right into it all right first things first before we get into all the main headlines of this video i want to be 100 transparent with you guys and share the sales data because so many people make the big bold claim in the headline with the the ever elusive 10 grand a month because i guess some people see that as just being rich i don't i don't know i mean i've seen this money come through multiple months now and it's still it's not as much as you think especially the way that it's portrayed on youtube with the guru garbage that's out there it's you should really be aiming a hell of a lot higher than 10 grand and that's what i'm doing because like i said i haven't even come close to my goal that i've set for the end of the year so anyways refresh the page today about two grand had come in now again this isn't every single day because if that was the case the headline would say 60 grand a month agency something along the lines of that the background would look a whole lot different and my videos would be completely different i can guarantee you that if i get to that level the content that's on my channel is going to be completely different than what you see here but if we take a look at june which i haven't finalized july's numbers but we come down here to june june 30th here in stripe so 7973 right here and come down here to the stat that i really like the most this is what i pay attention to which is monthly recurring revenue how much money how much revenue is coming in every single month and so for june and what it's currently at still right now is 78.25 and i obviously want to grow that to a whole lot higher but now we come back over here to paypal we'll go back into june create the report right here two thousand bucks so two thousand seven dollars and some change plus 79.73 that puts us at 99.80 okay so 20 bucks off ten rand that also does not include youtube ad revenue which would be another i don't know three or four hundred or something like that bucks per month so my my agency's youtube channel brings in a little bit and then this channel still brings in a good amount as well so as a whole 10 grand a month now is that all recurring revenue no there was some project work here as you can see recurring revenue 7825 is still currently at that level right now i do have clients in the pipeline we're trying to grow that as much as i can but those are the numbers right there that's what i'm doing currently and while i'm not alex becker doing 20 million bucks a year and while it took multiple years for me to get to this point what i know now hadn't known back in late 2015 i probably would have been able to do this my very first year easily easily once you figure out some of these things so again i want to share that with you guys to be transparent that's what i'm about here on the channel just to share with you guys what it's actually like to build this type of business because there's a lot of things that go into it anyways let's get into the main topics at hand so the first thing is how to actually get your first client and one of the things that people always get hung up on is figuring out what to do first to at least get the business going they go set up the facebook page they share that facebook post with their friends they get the nice dopamine rushes if they accomplish something but you still have no sales coming in so what you need to focus on is getting the first client so what i would suggest doing probably the simplest way to go about it is pick a niche is the really the best way to at least get the an agency built with a good foundation is to be in one industry in one industry only and if you have some experience in some industry whatever it is if you work for a moving company or you still work for moon company or a deck contractor or whatever i just like home services because i know and understand the industry very well if you're someone who works with chiropractor or whatever then go that route so what i did is i use my industry knowledge because i have a decade and a half of landscape industry knowledge working for lawn and landscape companies working for municipalities doing landscaping going to school for horticulture starting my own landscaping company scaling that to multiple six figures and just way too much time in the industry frankly at this point but i know it very very very very well and it's very very key and that helps me close more sales because i can understand 100 with these business owners and they're able to resonate with me because we have similarities it just makes the sales a lot easier to obtain when you're at least trying to get the thing off the ground when you get bigger and you have maybe sales staff it doesn't matter that much because you have the results you have 50 of these of these testimonial videos your results speak for themselves just pick something pick the niche then find somebody in that niche whatever that is for me what i did was i utilized my network of friends that i had in the industry specifically the very first one this was dating back to mid 2018 again started 27 august 2017 right around this date is when i registered landscape marketing pros which is crazy and i'm actually embarrassed that we're only doing 10 grand a month i would love to be at 10x that i should be at 10x that at this point if not even more than that because i've seen others do it in less time to be at more than 10x what i'm doing in less time [Music] lesson there stay focused on one thing one thing only don't jump around from oh i'm gonna do ecom today i'm gonna do info tomorrow i'm gonna do agency wednesday or whatever don't do that just do this it's just simpler it will work it sucks in the beginning because what i did here with alwaysgreener you can see their website here didn't look like this initially i built a crappy thrive architect website looked like but i built the website i paid for the hosting and all this sort of stuff initially and then i obviously they're paying for the hosting now but i did the seo myself out of pocket with a very very limited budget i'll add working a job where i did not make very much money i'd put it that way i mean from today's sales that was damn near a month of income coming in so so it's possible to make it happen and this website works great for them they're able to produce a lot of leads he's been very very happy and you some of you watching like i don't want to spend my own money i really hardly have any for what i live here's the deal if you're not willing to put in your own money then this ain't going to work for you bottom line but so me putting in all that time way too much time to that was really like one of the first websites that i built back in 2018 was his it took a ton of time to figure all this stuff out and then i got into these guys working with these guys in 2019 that was with elementor that was a just that took so much time and just oh man it's just a lot of time to put in learn how to build the websites with those builders but again some of you might be wondering why is it worth it to work for free right here this look at this review right here testimonial from him photo it's from him directly i mean it this helps tremendously to get these initial clients right here among others that i was able to bring on in 2019 and then in 2020 had another one that actually was signed on board for the full service program that i wanted to have my very first client that had that but he was a startup company his cash flow really went down towards the end of 2020 so that one fizz it up but then in 2021 the work i put in over the past couple years with my agency's youtube channel started to produce actual paid clients and now we're at where we're at so the past couple months have been a little bit slow in terms of new clients because it's middle of the season a lot of these guys aren't really thinking about it they're focused on the current workload they have make sure it gets managed now august into september is when things start picking up and i foresee hopefully pulling in a whole lot more sales as we close out the year so anyway a little bit of a rant there don't be afraid to take someone on for free spending your own money to rank their sites because you'd be shocked as to what it can turn into if i can 10x my business or more all stemming from that one decision that i made to build always greener site for my crappy apartment back in 2018 then made it all worth it without a doubt 100 without a doubt because because a business doing 100 something thousand dollars per month that can post a very nice profit for you the owner plus an owner's salary is definitely worth spending a couple hundred bucks over the course of a couple months to get your first clients website to have some success so the next thing that i learned was that you have to set parameters like i mentioned just a little bit ago with the client from 2020 that had finally signed on board for the service program i was so pumped because it was a very nice amount coming in every single month but it was a startup company so i worked out a deal with one of my legion sites and that thing just produced a ton of leads for them i mean he turned it into six figures it was almost multiple six figures in sales last year but again his cash flow slowed down he didn't have anything for for wintertime with snow because he was local in minnesota and then that client went out the window so what i would suggest doing once you get first couple clients coming in or at least get that first testimonial first couple results testimony videos whatever you got to do set some parameters for what your system that you are selling will work for so for my company that is 150 at the lowest some clients were like 120 and they were willing to spend the money they were absolutely 100 on board to spend a grand a month on seo on a website because it's the results they can produce and this year they've the one client who was around 120 who signed up in january he'll probably be close to doubling if not tripling his sales compared to 2020 and the only change was website and seo from my company so bottom line very base minimum no less than 150 000 maybe even 200 000 depending on the industry upwards to 1.5 2 million and this is what works with system that i have set in place sometimes you get to the higher levels the 5 10 million dollar companies and while it sounds cool hey we work with a 10 million dollar company and in most instances a lot of the things that my company does with that my service programs have great success with they already have that in place they want to do other things they want to do email marketing or social media that sort of stuff and right now this very point in time that's not what i have interested in doing i have a great system right now that just does what it does and it works very very well there's a lot of huge huge market for those services so if you're someone who wants to do the email marketing for a 10 million dollar company you can increase their sales by two percent or whatever then that justifies the purchasing of your services then by all means go do it which your services do not have to be a website and seo by the way there's a whole long list of things that you could do so know that going into it i've spoke with multiple business owners that they're doing upper seven even eight figures in sales and sometimes this just doesn't work and that's okay not everyone's gonna fit within these parameters but if there are companies that are doing multiple millions of dollars a year and they don't have a website and like believe me i've encountered that or they're not ranking for anything and they want to grow their business then there's opportunity there again that's just what the system that you have set for your company will it work for them great then they can then we can work together if not then they just go on find someone else there's there's a lot of different options out there it's a big world just don't get so hung up on it this is something that i struggle with sometimes too i get so hung up and landing the sale that i forget about the abundance there's just there's so much out there there's a ton set parameters once you get those initial clients and in certain industries it may even have to be certain services that they offer so for example do i want to work with a company that does 2 million bucks a year but they only service like retail stores and commercial office complexes and their focus is outbound sales to property managers and that's how it kind of works in the commercial side of things for law and landscaping a lot of times it's not always that but that's just what i've experienced is our system going to work the best for them and it'll it'll help produce but i get much better results for our clients that are doing residential design build or working with local property owners let's say someone owns a local restaurant loans a local strip mall whatever and they do the snow removal there that sort of stuff to get those contracts is usually someone going to google typing in landscaper near me or whatever so again set some parameters understand the industry and you can set those parameters very easily for your system that you have in place so number three and yes i did just sit down my camera battery died i'm feeling with my iphone let me know which quality is better but guru garbage let's talk about it because there's a lot of it out there you go to instagram you're going to see a lot of it but you will see a lot of it on youtube as well and what i would suggest doing is you're trying to find somebody to learn from they learn from me that's cool my channel isn't going to be 100 all about learning all the time because i get really bored doing those videos i like talking candidly like this versus me in front of my screen sharing you here's how you build a website here's how you do the backlink whatever but so what you want to be doing is determining who's actually doing the business that you're doing if you're trying to do e-commerce i would look to people that own big e-commerce stores or e-commerce companies gym shark for example i think that guy has a youtube channel i don't know what he shares on it i've just seen it show up on my recommended feed on youtube for example with me when i try to figure out some of the things because i want to build a big digital marketing agency that does multiple five and hopefully even get this multiple six figures per month in recurring revenue i was trying to figure out answers to okay when do i hire somebody what's their position going to be are they going to be like a va is it going to be an actual employee what do i do so that's what i was trying to figure out so i bought some of these crappy guru courses and they're fine for their target market which is someone making 30 40 grand a year seize 10 grand a month they see that as life-changing money it's really not with with a just marketing agency it's good but there's a lot more to be achieved when you get to that level and so all those training courses are basically built for someone to create a side hustle with or maybe eventually they'll turn to something full-time but it's all super generic stuff it's basically what i've been covering in this video and and just low-level things i was trying to figure out those things about hiring and that sort of stuff with delegating so that's why i came across josh nelson who owns a plumbing and hvac digital marketing agency that does around four and a half million dollars a year recurring revenue i think a staff of around 30 employees that is who i wanted to learn from because i want to build a big digital marketing agency so that's who i learned from so just be able to google their name and find their company that's probably the biggest way you google my name you're going to find my company and that's that pretty much if it's someone who is just a full-on guru education is their business that's fine they probably get great results but just know most of the time their stuff is going to be super generic low-level stuff if you're trying to build a big business knowing the super intricate things management and systems and that sort of stuff you're not going to get it there i can almost guarantee it they're probably what they're doing now i think some of the ads as you probably see on this video right here drop servicing so they're basically just they're selling the servers they're white labeling it it's it's kind of that but and so that is my take on the guru side of things now the next one is to never reveal price unless you're in a strategy session and always do strategy sessions i cannot stress that enough how important that is to be doing one-to-one video calls make sure they're on video too because if they're just on not showing their face on a video i've noticed most of the times that i've not closed somebody they don't have their face on video analogy i like to use is it's basically like you're playing texas hold'em with them and i have multiple occasions of this happening this year with one person i actually knew locally who owns the landscape company that i knew 10 years ago and he had reached out to my company's facebook page and i shared this in my facebook group it just the link to the group is down below it's 100 free there's no pitch to join or whatever i wrote up a long post about it and things that i learned from doing this because what happened was he was interested in services and he said what do you charge and i said well most are a thousand fifteen hundred boom gone ghosted nothing red and that was it and then i realized damn i should not do that because and what i've realized is that okay if i wait until they have some type of verbal commitment that these guys are all in that's when we can kind of talk pricing a little bit this situation is essentially like me having pocket aces betting in i'm going all in i'm putting 100 grand down on this hand showing my cards this guy's sitting here right here and he might have two kings and he got to see everything that i shared but he didn't have to call that bet of that hundred grand because he didn't have to commit to anything he'd have to commit that he's in all in on marketing that's one of the strategies that i use in my in my sales calls is that we're trying to take them on a little bit of a mental journey and what you've been doing does not work here's your competition they're taking the traffic that you should be getting come pay us and we help you get that traffic from your competitors and that's just one of many examples so never reveal price without being able to demonstrate value too of course we're not just full on sales we're demonstrating value we're showing them hey here's where your competitors like i just said they're getting the traffic here's where you could be you could be getting this you are buried on page five so let's see what we can do here so do not reveal your price don't reveal your hand until you've got some kind of commitment during that strategy session so that's one of the lessons that i learned i probably lost out on i don't know a few grand a month in recurring revenue because of that so don't reveal your hand too soon now the fifth one is to get the accounting and business structure all that sort of stuff get it set up initially just do it right away now again this is not financial advice i'm not a lawyer not accounting any stuff talk to an accountant get that stuff but just get the structure set up start using something for your bookkeeping i use wave it's free to use and then also if you are doing a corporation make sure you start doing payroll because that's one thing you will need again i'm not an accountant talk to one for how your stuff works in your location that you're in you might be a different country than the u.s where things are completely different get that stuff set up so that way it's out of the way i know so many out there say oh just get sales coming in get get to 10 20 grand a month then worry about it i would way rather just take half a day to get all that stuff set up get the company registered get the ein get the estate tax id do the payroll if you are setting up an s corp and you could probably even do that with an llc i believe as well it's just it's just a good way to have that but actually you'd definitely want to have some type of income coming in at that point if you're doing salary because when you are paying yourself with payroll you do need to actually pay i think at least once a month is what most states require sometimes you too but hey again talk to an accountant that knows those sorts of things this is just my experience with my business and what i've done but get those things set up so it's out of the way you don't have to think about it and then just understand kind of how the taxes and that sort of stuff work to a degree you don't have to be a full-on expert and cpa to know how to manage the numbers of your business what you want to be able to do is know how all these things work so that way when you either hire someone in-house or you hire a cpa you know things are doing and are being run how they're supposed to be run get those things out of the way and then you can focus on sales and growing the business and the sixth one is to get some type of business credit card for the expenses that you're going to be doing within your business whether you're paying white label service providers or you're buying software web hosting all that sort of stuff and anything and everything to use with that card ideally one that's got probably no limit that would be the best to have or one with somewhat decent of a limits just you don't have to spend as much time making sure that you're not hitting the account limit every single day and having to make payments and transfer all it's just a lot of time when you want to just be focusing on getting more clients and making sure your current ones are able to get the results that they are paying for so the one that i use currently is with wells fargo that one works pretty well for the time being one in particular amex one that i really like that is amazing for businesses specifically digital businesses because the fact that certain categories of spend have like four extra points the current card that i have now so i was actually able to redeem some points for airline tickets which i'm looking forward to that we'll probably do some videos here on the channel on that trip so be sure to go down below and subscribe if you're not already to stay up to date on the newest content that comes out the the coolest thing about that is one you don't have to constantly be worrying about your cash flow and if sometimes a customer's card gets shut down for fraud you have to wait two more days for the payment to come in because they got to get a new card that's happened to me before and it's it sucks but what are you going to do about it there's nothing you can really it's just something that occurs so having a business credit card allows you to float those expenses obviously making sure we're keeping everything paid i've made mistakes on that before but then also you're getting a kickback from every dollar that you spend on these cards you're getting it for example the the gold business amex i think it's 4x return points up to 150 000 if you spend it on google or facebook ads and a couple other categories as well so you spend 150 grand on business expenses and you times that by four that's about 600 000 points that's a lot of airline miles that you could fly somewhere for free or hotels or even use the statement credits to apply as payments but there's all different sorts of options out there that's something that i've learned that i think is one of the best things to have in terms of just on the financial side because i can manage the cash flow easier with a credit card and then you get the kickback of free first class seats to wherever or free hotel stays whatever you want to do with it so it's just a cool thing that i think is an added bonus to having a business card anyways those are the six things that i've learned over the past several months with building my digital marketing agency and getting it to hit 10k a month so if you like this type of content be sure to go down below drop a like i'd appreciate that and the last thing i want to say though is that don't overthink i know there's just so many different things that so many people trying to figure out all at one time i'll do a video on this in the future leave a comment below if you want to see a video on this of how to get started i know there are a lot of other videos out there that say how to start this marketing agency and whatever and a lot of things that they don't really cover and i think that i can explain it very very well with a super detailed video so let me know on that in the comments below otherwise if you like this drop a like down below and make sure to go down below hit the subscribe click the bell for notifications so you know when all the newest content comes live and be sure to comment if you made it this far to the end of the video i appreciate that fully and with that said my name is matt wasak thank you so much for checking out my channel there's gonna be a whole lot more content so be sure to stay tuned and i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Matt Wacek

Views: 617

Keywords: Matt Wacek, 10k month digital marketing agency, make 10k a month, 10k a month online marketing, digital marketing agency 2021, how to start a digital marketing agency, How to get digital marketing agency clients, How to build a niche digital marketing agency, seo agency 2021, ppc agency 2021, web design agency 2021, web design business, how to start seo agency, how to start seo agency 2021, how to get seo clients 2021, how to get seo clients, how to get web design clients, seo

Id: hs3uaDIDUD4

Length: 22min 35sec (1355 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021