The evolution of the digital agency.

what's good everybody Greg Hickman here and I hope you guys are doing well in this video I wanted to drop some some training on something I've been thinking a lot about I've been talking a lot about and will be a heavy focus for us and has been a heavy focus for us really for the last two years and what that really is is this notion of the hybrid agency and the hybrid agency to me is the best way for you as an agency owner to go from the owner/operator into an actual owner in a way that provides maximized or allows for maximize impact as well as maximize profitability and scalability and many of us know that and maybe already experienced that the it's very easy to start a business doing done-for-you but very quickly it becomes difficult to scale and what I found having come from traditional agency and having a lot of clients that come from traditional agency or are familiar with traditional agency don't want to grow an agency that way they don't want to play the game of you know for every X number of clients I need a certain amount of people or contractors whatever whether they're full-time or part-time doesn't matter the overhead kind of grows equally with revenue and oftentimes profit margin begins to shrink but along with that calm headaches and stress and a lot of other things that today we don't necessarily need to deal with and or maybe want to deal with and we want to go back to when we were paid for what we know and not just our hands to keyboard and what we've been teaching our clients and working on is developing what we call the hybrid agency and it's very much the notion of productizing your agency and I really want to talk about why this whole thing has come to be and kind of show you a little bit of a step-by-step on how you can actually get there and so I'm going to jump to the iPad here and so here's the reality is the problem with traditional agency is that you have this situation where you get hired to do something and like most agency owners you finish the job but you don't have another client in queue or a prospect in the queue and you find a way to continue to work with the existing client by at maybe adding services or they ask you if you can also do XYZ for them and you graciously say yes because to you that's more revenue but in the long term that's going to backfire and ultimately what ends up happening with a lot of agency owners that I come across and and/or service providers freelancers you know it's kind of ties to a lot of you is that you try to get them into a retainer like an ongoing relationship which seems good for cash flow in the beginning but if you think about any labor that you've ever hired over time the value of that labor goes down you as you can see here the value of the labor goes down over time and this is when you know a lot of times you're getting replaced by you know cheaper labor overseas or another productize service or they want to bring it in-house because at some point they will find a way to get it cheaper and many of us have heard as service service providers that hey it's gonna be better for us to bring it in-house and so they do or if you start raising rates like I know some people do then because you have to because you probably were charged too low in the beginning you actually position yourself where over time they realize that they could just bring in the house and it would be more affordable and so if as an agency owner the only way you convey your expertise is through labor I think you're in for a very uncomfortable and unpleasant surprise over the course of the next few years and your business probably won't last and you need to be able to start repositioning yourself if you want to have that sustainability build the business that actually serves you and not the other way around now if you are getting funding and you want to be like the Gary Vee and have like a thousand person agency by just turn off this video right now like that's not who we serve we serve like the micro boutique agency person who you know 1 2 maybe 20 employees and or trying to get to that size lean and mean team that wants to have you know profitability have a life and still be able to have a massive amount of impact and so the problem with most traditional agencies and many of you that I know are in here over time your clients start to devalue the labor because overtime value goes down and so the value of labor goes down so what that usually ends up with is the next big problem that I see is that when it comes to when it comes to opportunity and capacity you know I talk a lot about you know what would happen if I gave you five new clients right now would you or your business break and some most people will say yeah like I can't even take on you know five new clients and maybe if you could take on five what about ten what about 15 what about 20 the the reality is that there's only the way you do things right now is more manual and more customized that is difficult to actually grow and so whoops if you look at you know your your opportunity versus capacity you know you have on both sides or you know kind of in the red here and then you go to the orange and we then go to you know yellow I think that's the the correct color palette and the opportunity continues to grow right like I talked to many of you and you say Greg I have multiple prospects in the pipeline that would love to I'd love to work with and I'd love to close right now but I can't because I don't have the capacity I don't have the team I don't have the process it's the fulfillment is all on me and so you're sitting here and you're stuck with this issue where there's tons of opportunity and you can't really even maximize that opportunity because you don't have the capacity and what I've often find for most agency owners is that there's this line where like this is many times the break-even or very little profit and so you're capped out and you can't even capitalize on all this opportunity but this is where all of the profit lives right and so you're stuck at this position where if you want to add another client you work nights and weekends and that only works for so long before your family hates you and you're miserable and you're burnt out and you have health problems and your wife wants to divorce you or your spouse wants to divorce you like it leads to a lot of problems if you're working on vacations like this is probably you and so we have this issue there's an inherent problem with the way that you do things in kind of this traditional done-for-you all the projects are custom etc etc and so what ends up happening is when I look at what's called the you know labor to leverage ratio in the traditional model it's actually zero right like it's actually a zero and every time you get a new client it's you it's a unique like a unique project right it's a unique set of work if each of these is a unit of unique work every time you get a new client it's a unique unit of work and that's not really scalable and if you've been asking yourself you know why don't I have systems or you know I want that automated funnel the reason you don't have that is very much because of this and a point I'm going to share with you here in a minute and right now you have no time leverage in your fulfilment if you are doing things done for you and you're maxed out on your capacity now if you're just getting started this is probably not your case like if you you just got your first client like you'll very quickly like I'm giving you a warning this is going to happen and when you have this model where ultimately every new client is like starting from scratch you I'd argue at least I'd argue that each and every new client is like having a new business because the solution that you're providing to them is like a moving target and again that goes back to why don't I have automation why is hiring difficult why why am I always hunting manually prospecting why is that like feast or famine it's because there's no way to go to market with one unique message because you serve everybody you take everything and that's why we ultimately then lead to this problem which is you know the number four which is when you get a new client right here sales and marketing come to a stop because you go into fulfillment right it's the balancing act of okay I just got a new client I got to go fulfill got on board got to make sure they're getting the results and so my sales and marketing stop and hope the client project is done over here and now we can then say all right we got to go back and start sales and marketing and that's why we become desperate and you start taking whatever a client comes around even though it's probably not the client you want to work with it's doing things that I'd argue that maybe you're not even the best at you're just doing it because you need the money and all of that comes back because you don't know where the next client is coming from because of a lot of the things that we just talked about up here and so this is why when clients come to us we talk about this opportunity which is developing the hybrid agency and there is a progression to getting there and this is not just launch an online course and only sell online courses while that is a viable option most I think most and what I've seen and experienced is most service providers do it wrong and I won't go into all of those reasons why here but it creates something where I've seen service providers actually go to a course and become so unfulfilled that it's difficult for them to grow because they're missing a piece that they actually enjoy which is working with clients and building that relationship and if that's a key piece of what you want to do you can actually still charge a premium and work one-to-many if you adopt a hybrid model and that's where I see kind of the huge opportunities right now you have people that are selling info call it you know courses you know memberships yada yada yada and you have people over here like agency owners that you know do things done for you and it's custom and it's super super interesting because I talked to all of you and actually let me go here and you know the agency the you know course creator is kind of looking over here at the agency j'en see owner and the service provider and they see that the you know they think the grass is greener because like man you're charging premium you know I'm not only charging like $1,000 $2,000 for a course and it cost me you know $1,000 to $2,000 to acquire a client really difficult and so they see wow like the clients are getting more results you know course completion rates I don't know what the status right now but it's usually like less than 3% last time I heard and so course craters look over at agency providers and they're like man like imagine we could help them tactically do more stuff and charge more money and be more involved in like see our clients win more but we can't do that because we can't afford that in our margins but then you have the the agency owner that is kind of looking over here and saying the same thing like man wouldn't it be nice to have like the scalability and like the automation that comes from creating courses yeah and what I'm telling you is the hybrid actually exists on the bridge right here in the middle and I'm going to get to that and so if you're an agency owner and you're kind of like I don't want to continue to grow the traditional model and everything is of you know feast or famine and feels like I'm on a hamster wheel then this might be a really good option for you and it has been for us and for a lot of our clients and so when we come back and we look at the opportunity where you have the you know you know the profit we talked about is up here and we quickly just kind of give the the little the scale here and we look at again the opportunity verse capacity issue well when you add on something that's leveraged right well that can be one too many that's repeatable and predictable you could if you want you could still do you're done for you and be here but you could add on something that is more leveraged what that will allow you to say yes to those clients that are in the pipeline and and get to you know this profit zone which is right here right and this is where all the profit and scalability is going to come from and so you could do that which is I think the smart way is gonna future-proof your your business by adding something that's more leveraged that's based on your intellectual property not just your labor or you could do what you know a lot of people do is you know well if we just move this lineup of done for you usually that means adding more people like we talked about adding more you know a headache and you know overhead etc etc so the alternative is you know move this line up which comes with these things or is to focus on adding something that's more leverage which could get you into the profit zone and now this can be an add-on to your existing business but ultimately what a lot of our clients do is they added on with the intention to replace and surpass their done-for-you revenue and for us we were able to do that in the span of like eight to eight to eleven months we took our done-for-you business which was you know fully custom done for you one-on-one and we were about 65 K a month on average in revenue and in 11 months we brought that all the way down to five and with like our lat one of our last client and we were able to hit our first six-figure month selling our leverage revenue first of many and so that was really like a pivotal transition for us and I've now seen and helped other agencies do this and it is 100% freeing and I'm finding that a lot of our clients actually enjoy their business again and what that ends up doing and how you have to about this whole thing differently now is don't we go back to look at that labor to leverage ratio we have say a client comes in and especially in the early days yeah maybe we work hard once but when we work hard once every other client will now benefit so we don't take every custom every client that's custom but when we do do something custom every other client that we work with can benefit from it and that makes us a whole lot more scalable so when a client this client comes in and they're like I need help with this you're like oh well I solved that already like I solve that a while ago so let's let's I can help you now the question is oh and so when you do that when you have that optimal labor - leverage ratio there's never this marketing and sales stop because you're gonna have you're gonna always have the ability or at least way more than you have before the capacity to like one automate marketing automate lead generation nurture and systemize your sales process so that you could constantly be adding new clients and then sales and marketing don't stop so like you could spend time in the fulfillment and you don't have to sacrifice and put up a hold on your sales and marketing because your marketing engine is out there working for you so this all hopefully sounds cool and hope you're getting value from this but what does that mean and so the couple steps that we take to do this is to develop the hybrid agency is really exactly what we did and now what we teach and the first thing is called the five ones and I cannot take credit for this I just heard it and implemented it and it changed my life and I originally heard it buy from clay Collins who's the founder of leadpages and he said the fastest way for any business to get to six figures is to focus on the five once and that means the one avatar offering the ones solution focusing on one conversion method call it sales system and one traffic source and do that for one year and I mentioned earlier that we were able to make that transition in about eleven months and we I heard this in late January we started applying it in February and by December we had our first six-figure month and this was a handful of years ago now and so we followed this and what I find is that you know for us we at the time were actually you know thinking about red light green light you know we were a green light on Avatar we were very specific on who we were serving from the get-go but I find that most agency owners and most service providers they serve a - too broad of clients which instantaneously makes this you know red for them which makes doing the rest almost impossible and so once you get to you know once you apply all of this and kind of in this order avatar then you get to one solution and you're probably asking well but Gregg I offer a bunch of different services like how do I offer one thing well that's a key piece of this whole transformation is you have to go from offering a service menu which I'd argue in many times your client actually picks because you give them the menu of what you can do and then they probably don't like the price and you either a lower your price and deliver the exact same thing or you cut out things from the menu that they want or they cherry picked which if you think about it put them in control from before the time they even started working with you which is probably why sometimes you feel like a glorified freelancer in your business sucks right it's because they were in control from the beginning so you need to and what we have a process for we call the signature service is we look at your take your your service offering like what you're best at and who you serve and we kind of find the you know the few services there combination of services that you can then put into a box and you sell for a fixed price a fixed deliverable and you might start delivering it one-on-one but this is the option that can actually get you to delivering something one-to-many done with you and so this is where we see the hybrid agency thrive is this done with you solution and we need to package up these service options that actually solve our clients problem and instead of saying hey what do you need help with I need a website like well why do you need a website understanding the actual painful problem that you solve where you can now create a transformation you can sit you can say hey mr. or mrs. ideal prospect an ideal prospect not any prospect I know that you suffer with XY and Z and I can take you through my three or four or five step solution to get to the result that you want the promised land right and that's pretty much what goes in this box is these steps your packaging up these steps and you're going to deliver it now this leads me to kind of another piece that I think is really interesting for agency owners is this notion of the value ladder you've probably all heard of the value ladder the value ladder is talked a lot about by russell brunson from clickfunnels and typically it's in line with this notion of ascension but that's not what I'm talking about here I'm talking about the fact that there's different ways you can convey value just like there's different ways you can convey your expertise and right now like we've established as many service providers and agency owners they convey their expertise in labor and so we'll put that at done for you and when I say done for you this is what I mean custom this is you know one on one everything starts from scratch scope creep you know long sales cycles proposals all of that stuff now the path that we help our clients move to is to take a step down the ladder and introduce their solution that can be done with you that is not as hands-on that is one to many not one to one and that's what this these two steps are up here and so we introduced this done with you option and eventually you know if you want down the line you can have your DIY option which could a course or whatever but the focus is look the reality is you currently offer something that's done for you I'd argue that many of you charge you're done for you rates are actually that of either DIY or possibly what done with you should be charged and we start by increasing the rates of your done for you and so we need to elevate that which will create an anchor for people that want to go through your done with you and that becomes the focal point this is you know your core offer call it core solution that you're going to sell and we have our clients that over the course of you know 90 ish days are launching this to a pilot program and getting there you know first one to 10 paying clients and really starting to validate this whole thing is going to work and we have a step-by-step process that helps them do this with all the automation systems which I be happy to talk to you about now so the hybrid agency what does that mean real quick recap we go from a menu into a solution that is fixed price fixed deliverable fixed time frame that allows us to go to the marketplace with a clear message and say hey we can solve your problem we have a step-by-step process and that actually allows us to create the automation around sales marketing and you know onboarding the things that are gonna give you time back using technology not just people although people are a part of the process and it will live in a value ladder for you that is one step down from how you know how you operate now which isn't it done with you experience so if you're of the mindset of I want to go and move into one-to-many and more leveraged than this is exactly what we're doing here we're launching this together following a proven process and really there's three ingredients of the hybrid agency and the hybrid agency consists of I will call it you know I'll say done for you and again when I say done for you in this instance I mean one-on-one and help with implementation that's what I mean when I'm saying done for you then you have on the other side training and this could be you know your info this is your IP okay this is you unpacking your intellectual property your intellectual process and creating a step-by-step roadmap and system for your Klein to getting the results and then the last piece is you know everyone uses different terms but I'll say coaching consulting and or a mentorship very similar combination and you have these three ingredients and as you depend upon exactly what your service is we don't necessarily force you into a specific one box of you have to do it this way because honestly once we help you design what your signature service is we can show you exactly how you can use each of these over time to get your client to the result and if I were to say like hey where do where does yours exist if we were to put like a pin point you know you might start like kind of here but over time you know this dot is moving more to an even mix right even mix have kind of right in the middle of the sweet spot your sweet spot might be over here or over here but either way when you have these combination of ingredients to get your client this result which honestly nine times out of ten is the exact same result that you get your client doing done-for-you services so it shouldn't be too hard to then combine these ingredients to have a recipe that is going to be way more leveraged for you way more scalable allow you to have a mean lean and mean team profitability not working nights and weekends and that my friends is the hybrid agency and again I truly believe that this is the future of what agencies are going to do it's not just getting paid for labor is having a combination of ways to monetize the relationship with their clients and add value and it's getting back to getting paid for your thinking and having both you know front-end revenue streams and ongoing recurring revenue streams that are on the back end that are more based on advisory mentorship and coaching and overtime if we look at kind of the graph again over time as you continue to do what I was talking about is refining your training and refining your mentorship refining the systems that you're helping to help people get this this transformation right here you will end up in a position where over time you'll have your if will say this is time and we'll you'll have your leverage go up right and so and scalability and price so your price goes up your leverage goes up your scalability goes up over time because again each time you're solving a problem it's making it better for the next person you're refining the same systems over and over again you're solving the same problem over and over again your marketing gets better your fulfillment gets better it's not unique every single time and you just exponentially improve okay that's the hybrid agency and that's the future of what I believe service providers that want to kind of win in life and in business are going to going to you know focus on now if you want our handheld step-by-step solution to that where we walk you through a proven process I'd love to chat with you you can click on a link below this video you can schedule a call of my team we can learn a little bit more about what it is you do what your services who you're serving to see if the hybrid agency model even applies and if we can help you will share how we can do that so if you want to have a free discovery call to chat about this I'll put the link below but again this is where I see things going if you are watching this say in Facebook or even on YouTube I'd love for you to comment below and tell me what you liked the most about this notion of the hybrid agency and other than that talk to you guys soon hey are you looking for that cool place to hang on the internet with all the people just like you well I got it for you if you want to learn the best strategies tips and tools to productize and automate your business visit system oh i 4 slash community to join our free private community and continue the conversation there [Music]

Channel: Greg Hickman

Views: 770

Keywords: greg hickman, system.ly, the scalable podcast, scalable podcast, gregory hickman, productized services, how to productize

Id: pdVOLtw58qQ

Length: 28min 29sec (1709 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020