Fostering Digital Agency Growth
[0:33] Intro – How we met Jason.
[3:40] When Jason realized he need systematized, scalable sales to survive & thrive.
[5:34] When to focus and learn new skills and tools.
[13:19] Account Based Sales.
[14:24] When using outbound: catching prospects at the right moment.
[20:20] Hot Stocks in Digital Marketing.
[21:49] Niches — How To // Pros and Cons.
[23:57] Jason on the spot: quick look at Matchnode’s challenges.
CHRIS: We have Jason Swenk here for Matchcast our digital marketing podcast. Today we’re going to talk a little bit more about issues that in agency phases we’ll let Jason introduce himself, but just to share with our audience how we met Jason, Jason was speaking at the traffic and convergence summit in san Diego that digital market puts on.
Jason was talking about how he grew his agency and how he sold his agency, so we were very excited to go and listen to his tips. This was back in February, we’ve been watching Jason’s videos and reading his blog posts ever since.
What really resonated with me and with us was he talked about as an agency owner when you start to hit the moment where your referrals and word of mouth and personal networks as great as that can be and has been for us, you have to go beyond that to scale. So that really resonated with us. We recently spoke at the unbound call to action conference in Vancouver and after we spoke some agency owners were coming up to us asking how we got certain clients and what should they do about this problem or that problem.
We said two things, 1) charge more money, because they told us what they were charging and you have to charge way more than that. 2) We said, check out Jason Swenk so that got us thinking that maybe Jason would be willing to join us on the pod and thankfully here he is.
So Jason, thanks for joining us.
JASON: Yeah man, thanks for having me.
CHRIS: Jason if you don’t mind giving us a couple minutes of maybe your intro about, when we first heard you speak you gave us a rundown of your background and your experience, how you briefly grew the agency and how you got to now.
JASON: Thanks again for having me, so in 1999, yes, when Al Gore invented the internet. I designed my first website. Actually I designed my first website in 1998, and it literally was making fun of one of my friends who looked like Justin Timberlake.
CHRIS: Way ahead of the curve in multiple respects.
JASON: Oh yeah, definitely, so it was making fun of n’sync so I called it “n’shit” and it got really popular and a lot of people went to it, and then people started asking me to design websites. I was like are you kidding me? Alright, $500.
So that’s kind of how I got my start. So I had humble beginnings, I didn’t even know what we were doing. My first client asked me for an invoice and I was like, what’s that?
You know, I couldn’t Google it, Google wasn’t around, so after that I started transitioning and started building the right systems and building out the agency and hiring more people working with a lot more people and grew it to a really big agency and then eventually 12 years later we sold it. And now I help digital agency owners. It took me a little while to figure out what I needed to do next, but it’s the coolest job ever.
CHRIS: That’s awesome. Well, as an agency owner I certainly appreciate all the helpful content you put out there and your willingness to help. You talk about starting the agency and charging $500 that totally resonates with us, I think a lot of agencies, ours included, start with similar stories, and you don’t even send the invoice, you just send an email, send us a check for that amount and then a couple clients later they ask for an invoice and so you realize you need an invoicing system and you slowly add those things on.
I like also the “12 years later” of your story because it sounds like such a straight line and I’m sure it was not some winding road with a lot of peaks and valleys so we’d love to dig into a couple of those if you don’t mind.
JASON: Yeah, I mean there were lots of times where we were about to throw in the towel. I remember one time we were probably eight years in and we had a pretty good staff at the time, maybe around 15-20. I remember coming in to our Monday morning meeting that we always had and we would look at the bank account. That’s kind of how we would look at cash flow projections.
We’d look at our pipeline and think this isn’t good, if this keeps going we aren’t going to be able to make payroll in two weeks. And literally we were two weeks away and I remember coming back and I was so depressed and so my wife was like “why don’t you go get a job somewhere? It seems like you’re just miserable” and she was like you know NASCAR is hiring for a CMO.
I was like, well ok, I’ve helped build brands like Legal Zoom and Aflac, and all of those. So I started applying and filling out their first application part. It asked what do you want to do, what don’t you want to do and that kind of stuff. And it just kind of hit me in the back of the head or unconsciously, and I said, well, you know, if they’re asking this I can create this agency to do whatever I want. So let me get rid of all the stuff I don’t like. Let’s take care of stuff we need to do to build the pipeline so we don’t go through these areas.
And we did. And then it just kind of started skyrocketing and we kept having growth but you know, we also had a way where bad things would happen and we were like, “how can we learn from this?”
And we weren’t afraid of taking action which I think a lot of people are regardless of what kind of business you’re at, they’re always kind of getting ready to get ready. Which always frustrates the crap out of me. I’m like, come on, dude, just take some massive action, and who cares if you fail, if you fail, no problem now you don’t do it again.
CHRIS: On to the next failure.
JASON: Yeah.
CHRIS: When you talked about eliminating the things you didn’t like doing and the ability to kind of step outside the agency when you flirted with getting a quote unquote job. What were some of the things you eliminated that you started saying no to that maybe you delegated that allowed you to focus on really growing the agency.
JASON: Well one of the first things was project management. I was actually managing some projects at the time. And we were about a million and a half to two million. So we could definitely afford that. If I could go back in time, the project manager would’ve been the first person. Because what happens is you get a lot of projects and then you take your eye off the ball for building the pipeline in sales and then as your projects turn down so do your sales. And then you start going in this uh-oh period.
The other part was I wanted to get laser focused on where we wanted to take the agency. What do we want to create and get that clarity? What did we want to specialize in and be known for? Because at that time we built the business up on referrals and AdWords. So people were searching for us or on our personal network. So it was kind of eat what you killed vs kind of being known for something.
So those were the things we really, really, concentrated on. So my role changed from there where as a CEO, and if you guys are not agency owners it still applies to you. So as a CEO my job, my role, was to set the vision and direction of the business and then share that with the team, because my employees were my best assets, not my clients. So I f I could take care of them, if I cared about them, if I helped them be successful and be significant in their lives then the company could prosper and the clients could prosper and all that.
And the other thing I would do is coach and mentor just one level deep. And so I would coach the VP of operations, I would coach the VP of sales and they would do the same thing for their team, instead of everybody reporting to me which they used to do because you’re just overwhelmed.
The other thing is I started coming up with a process where I would assist sales and not do all of sales.
CHRIS: Just to clarify, at this point you’re doing a million and a half to two million in sales, and you’ve got how many employees 15-20?
JASON: Yup, and then what I started realizing too is that I needed to be the front person of the company. I was always kind of hiding in the background even though I speak now and if you go to my website you see my ugly mug everywhere. I’m a big introvert. I can stay in my house for a year and be content. My wife and kids, the opposite, they need to get out. So I was fine with that, but I realized I needed to start building that particular brand and start getting it out there.
And then obviously understand the financials and really get a good grasp on what our profit needed to be what was our total expenses what was the floor we needed to charge and then just delegate everything else. And that’s what we did and that’s how we were able to climb out of the hole and stay out of the hole.
CHRIS: And what was the thing you identified you wanted the agency to be known for? Was it AdWords?
JASON: No, that was what we used to get clients in. But our thing was we were really incredible with design. But a lot of people said that, right? So we were like, content management is getting really popular, so let’s start leveraging that for this new amazing technology coming out that at the time was Sitefinity, a lot of the bigger brands were using it as well as SharePoint. So we picked those two and we could just do anything, customize the crap out of that, do amazing designs for it so Microsoft and Telerik which owns Sitefinity started sending us a ton of business. So if you wanted to know Sitefinity or SharePoint people were coming to us for the amazing user experience
CHRIS: This is something that we’re challenged with at the moment is, once you decide what you’re going to specialize in and be known for, that doesn’t mean you’re closing off other areas of business if they’re inbound, correct?
JASON: Exactly, you’re only marketing to them. For now, I tell people, my website, this is for digital agency owners. But I work with all kinds of people. So it doesn’t matter it’s just your marketing to them. I always give an example like Facebook. If you’re trying to compete with Facebook, you’re not going to start off going after everybody, you’ve got to start going after that small niche and then start building on it. Like Facebook, rather than competing with Myspace right out of the gate, they said we are just for Harvard students and then Ivy League students and then universities, and then boyfriends and girlfriends stalking each other right? And then grandparents and all of that kind of stuff.
You have to build your one specialty and then you can grow different practice areas. So we started with Sitefinity and then grew it to SharePoint. And then we grew it to BI and then we grew it to socialCRM
So we kept building these practice areas so we would have one leader and that leader would lead that team.
CHRIS: And then because you have that chosen area of focus that you want to be known for, from what I’m understanding one of the keys to that is that it helps you identify who you should be selling to.
JASON: Oh yeah
CHRIS: Was that a big breakthrough when you mentioned this reset you went through, you clarified your role and things kind of took off, all this was kind of happening all at the same time I take it.
JASON: Yeah, big time. It eliminates your competition. I don’t have any competition, my only competition are cat videos and procrastination. That’s why if you go to my website you’ll see a cat video.
It just starts eliminating them. What we saw when we were just doing user experience and web design is we could only win business locally, because our competitive advantage, our unique selling proposition, because we didn’t help anybody, we didn’t have that unique helping proposition. Our unique selling proposition was our location, so they could come to our office and strangle us or shoot us if they wanted.
CHRIS: Right so this was Atlanta? You currently live in Atlanta right?
JASON: Yeah Atlanta.
CHRIS: So then you’re looking at certain types of business that you think could benefit from these tools you’re specializing in and are in Atlanta.
JASON: Exactly, but then what we started saying was, not screw Atlanta, but let’s go broader, let’s see how we could go to the entire US. So when we started doing that we could identify what their biggest problem, what does this audience look like? And then we could actually start helping them solve that.
And at the time, there weren’t many people, I’m dating myself, there weren’t many people doing podcasts, I didn’t even know what a podcast was. I mean some people had YouTube shows, but they were doing wine shows right?
CHRIS: Gary Vaynerchuk was doing one.
JASON: Yeah, that was a long time ago. So we were just writing blog posts and starting to do that towards the end. The market has changed so much of what you can do now, but it’s pretty cool.
CHRIS: Yeah absolutely, a lot you can do, but so much more noise now and maybe a little harder to break through with some of those tactics.
I don’t know, this is in my opinion, not a very new thing. But there seems like there is a new name for it which I’ve been reading about a lot which is Account Based Sales. So rather than a spray and pay approach where you’re trying to let everybody know who you are and hope they come to you. You’re doing a lot of research on the front end of a particular business or particular account.
In this case, this is something we’re working through at the moment, but in your case you’re able to specialize so you’re able to identify very specific business and then individuals at those business who are the people who could make the decision to at some point bring you on board and hire you as an agency. Related to that, we’re finding all these interesting tools for prospecting. Certainly, LinkedIn and LinkedIn sales navigator is in the middle of a lot of these tools but then there’s people building tech on top of it where they’re calling it the sales tech stack. We’ll put a link a good link in the show notes that gives a pretty exhaustive list of companies in the space.
So once you have identified an account and an individual that’s a fit for your specialty and you start to approach them and hopefully help at first. How do you solve the problem of timing? There are so many businesses that might be a fit for what you did or what we do or what agency owners out there do. The challenge that I find is that maybe they already work with an agency or maybe they hired somebody six months ago, or maybe it’s a year and a half form now that they’re going to hire someone.
How do you mange that, the timing is so important when you’re doing outbound?
JASON: Well the thing is, we have a requirement for them to work with us, they had to work with an agency before, because you don’t want to train someone. I could use a bunch of other analogies, which I won’t, but you don’t want someone for the first time working with an agency.
So most of the time when we would do cold calling and be successful at it, it’s like an audit. You say, hey I know you’re working with an agency right now, but what we’ve found is that you’re spending over then thousand a month in AdWords, and there’s a lot of gaps and things that you may be missing out and over spending. We can offer a service to audit that.
And then it’s all about positions to help them first. Or saying something like, I interviewed somebody on my podcast, if you go to Jasonswenk.com/4 it’s a really good interview it was like the fourth one and it’s still one of my favorites.
I interviewed the CMO of IHG International Hotel Group. And I said how can a smaller agency get into a bigger brand? Like cold calling. And he said that he gets calls all the time saying, they want to take me out to lunch or golf or send you stupid stuff and he just ignored them. But if someone calls him and says “hey Dell, we work a lot in the hospitality industry and we see this power editor just really breaking through and doing amazing things for your particular industry, I’d love 10 minutes just to show it to you. And just to tell you about it. Then you can go do it yourself.”
He would take that call all the time. What they had at the time, I think it’s more of a budget now and Dell doesn’t work there anymore, so don’t call Dell. But they had 50-60,000 in play money so they would test out different things that they would try out new. And they would start that relationship.
It’s all about when you’re calling in to these people, you’re not pitching marriage. That’s the biggest thing, people are very impatient in everything. So you just help them out and invite them to a lunch or whatever it is. And then you start putting them through your campaigns or you start building that relationship like you’d like a relationship built with you.
Like if anybody gets on my list, you’re going to get a lot of emails from me. Based on how you engage with me, but you’re going to get a lot of videos, so some people are on my list for a year and a half before they pull the trigger. But when they come to me, I don’t have to do any selling. They are like, “I’m ready, where do I sign?”
CHRIS: Makes sense, and one thing that’s really maybe accessible that Dell gave where come with something that not everybody else is doing is that stuff is so doable if you’re a small agency and it’s so doable in our example in digital marketing because there are things that are constantly changing and there’s always something new.
You can go to the Facebook developers blog and as soon as they launch something new figure out how to use it and start bringing it to people. Certainly we like to think of ourselves as early adopters in that way. We are now just constantly building audiences off of Facebook video, and maybe this a discussion to have offline with you Jason, but there’s really interesting ways to apply what you just said and take the new thing and show someone else this tool that you’re really excited about.
JASON: Oh yeah, and you have to be different, I’m so tired of people being a “me too” agency or business. Everybody is doing the same thing because it’s hot. It’s kind of like a stock, everybody buys a stock and then what happens? It goes down. You just need to find your own thing that you love. Like we love doing creative and design and then bolting it on to custom development, like no one was doing it back in the day. Now everybody says they do it and some do it, but that’s how we were unique. And as the market changes, you need to change.
The problem I see with a lot of businesses, they know how to do something and someone offers them money. Kind of like the N’shit deal. And I could’ve kept doing websites, well if I kept doing websites I would’ve been out of business quick because people wanted more than a website. They get too busy with their clients and they don’t set up a way to innovate and always constantly look at being ahead of the curve and what’s coming down next and being willing to try it so you can keep building on where people actually look at you as an advisor versus as a hands-on person actually doing the work.
CHRIS: Yeah, you have to be able to do both I think., you have to be able to offer high level strategy and guidance and position yourself with the clients so they’ll pay attention and listen to you and not just be in our opinion a consulting firm where you’re just telling them what to do but you can also put your money where your mouth is and actually execute the work and show results.
JASON: Yeah you said it right, so if you think of both spectrums. Most agencies are kind of the roll up my sleeves go do it, right? That’s on one spectrum. The other spectrum is consulting where people go to for advice. Consulting is starting to breach into the agencies space, because they are starting to do the work, so you’ve got to be both, you’ve got to be the advisor and the doer.
CHRIS: Absolutely, I want to jump back briefly to something you mentioned earlier, which is the hot stock that then is on the way down. What would you think if you look back over six months or a year and then also think that maybe you don’t do this work as much as you used to and you’re in a different business but just based on your perception of say digital marketing or digital agencies generally, what are the hot stocks that you would not buy at the moment that you would sell.
JASON: Well I bought a lot of stock in Facebook, literally. But I feel that there are too many agencies jumping on to that bandwagon so that’s going to be the new content. Like a couple years ago it was the content marketing like inbound. Like I’m an inbound agency. I’m like well, if you didn’t jump off that bandwagon you need to be a lot more than inbound. So I would just be careful on that front. One of the ones I think that’s pretty intriguing that I’m starting to mess with is the YouTube ads. And what you can do there.
I love AdWords but people have to be searching for you and that’s a very small of the market. That’s the biggest thing. But as more and more of us marketers get on Facebook and screw it up, people are going to abandon that. I love Snapchat, that’s really pretty cool. Just be different. Just pick something that you really know and that you can come up with this amazing strategy for and then ride that as long as you can with always looking for that next innovation.
CHRIS: Cool when talking about niching again. Do you advise niching based on a service offering? It sounds like you found a tool that you were excited about that you thought could help a lot of companies and started there. We’ve gone back and forth in our minds where are we niching based on something that we want to offer clients and offer the world, or are we niching based on this is a certain kind of business or we’re going to go after universities or we’re going to go after fitness businesses or whatever.
Do you see those differences and what do you recommend there?
JASON: Yeah so we did both. We had what I call the verticals which are the industries, so we went after healthcare and higher education and automotive and that kind of stuff. And then we also had the horizontal which was the product offering or the services. I think we kind of fell into it, but if I had to do it over again I would pick a vertical, an industry because then you can define that person a little bit more and then you can start adding. It’s like you’re trying to get at the crosshairs right? You’re trying to meet the horizontal and the vertical together. That’s the best and then you can be ultra-specific.
And you know you’re there when you’re pushing away a lot of people. That’s what your job is. And then the people that you’re actually going, if you’re not actually a digital agency owner, you’re not over this amount of revenue, if you’re not struggling with this, get the hell off my site.
And then people are like, I’m struggling, I’m a digital agency owner! You’re attracting more than you’re actually pushing away, but for right now it works, in a couple years? Don’t know, everybody will probably be doing it.
CHRIS: And then as a side note it’s kind of interesting when you tell somebody no, how badly then they want it like you said. You say, I’m sorry this is not right, this is not a right fit, and then very often they’re like, well why not? It should be, I want it.
JASON: Oh big time. If you look at my site, you can only buy my proposal template and my agency documents right off my site. Everything else you have to qualify for or go through. I have so many different things that we offer but you have to go through the basis in order to get to them.
CHRIS: Well Jason we hope this is the start of a long relationship but for a second here we are going to put you on the spot. You’re really, really, great at giving away helpful content for agencies. But just to sort of throw you through the ringer here. A lot of things you’ve been talking about, Matchnode our agency we start with strategy first, and we just love doing that first. We just love talking business with business people especially with small, medium sized business owners. So we almost couldn’t stop ourselves from doing that if we wanted to.
And then the way that we’re approaching the ever-changing landscape where you’re talking about AdWords being limited because the demand has to exist, it’s really just demand fulfillment it’s like order taking. And on the other end there’s tools like Facebook which can generate a little bit of demand that wasn’t already there, and then we’ve got conversion optimization and we do strategy traffic and conversion. It’s worked for us to a degree. We’re working on niching and we do a decent job closing when we get interested parties deep in a conversation, so we’re really trying to systemize prospecting.
And just based on your sense, briefly where do you see a hole in the approach where you’d put a finger first and start pay attention to?
JASON: For your approach of who you’re targeting or what you guys are offering?
CHRIS: Either, which one would you pay attention to first?
JASON: Your audience, who are you going after? You have to get laser specific. I could’ve said I’m going to help out B2B where most people start off, or small business. I’m like, small business is not a target market, you have to drill down several levels. So after I said B2B, I said, ok, agencies, and then I could’ve said well there’s a lot of agencies right? There’s traditional and digital, so I said digital agencies.
And then I said, digital agencies that are struggling with X. So you have to get laser specific. That’s where I would focus. And then you have to figure out too why do you exist? What’s your “why”?
My why on this go-round. I want to create something I wish I had. And I’m just telling stories of what worked for me, and what I wish I had and let the rest go through it.
CHRIS: And then it sounds like your “why” on the previous go round had more to do with the employees or developing people.
JASON: Yeah, or wanting to make money, I mean to be honest.
CHRIS: And there’s a lot of reasons why, to make money on a personal level, to grow a family or build comfort or have a certain lifestyle. Or make money on a more agency practical level to make payroll to be able to invest, and to be able to do things that are nice for your employees to develop them and add support.
JASON: The thing is, you can’t make decisions based on money. I always laugh when I tell people this, because I remember people telling me that and I was like, yeah “you’re full of shit you’ve got money now so it’s easy for you to say that”.
But you figure that out after, it’s not about the money. It took us 6 years to hit the million mark at our agency. And in 11 months I did that here. But I also had a lot of lessons. But on this go-round I didn’t focus on the money, I wanted to create something I wish I had. It was my “why”. So I think that’s one of the most important things.
I wish I saw the video. There’s a great ted speech, probably all of you guys, hopefully all of you guys have seen it or you can link it. It’s Simon Sinek. It’s a TEDX speech. And he talks about the power of why. It’s not about what you do, it’s why you do it. He gives an example of Apple where they say they don’t build computers they give people the opportunity to build amazing things using their boxes. That’s their why.
So when you start communicating that, people start getting behind what you believe in that why. And it’s pretty powerful.
CHRIS: And when you’re talking to a would be client or prospect you can tell when your “why” resonates with them. And that creates a connection that can flow through your entire engagement and hopefully a long term period of doing work together and you really feel a fit and then you have retention and then on the other hand it also will filter out people who don’t connect to it.
So we joke about money as being the practical why, or the results but it seems like we are getting around the idea that it needs to be something external and more profound and maybe intrinsic. Especially because the work we do is about other people. It’s never about us, it’s always about the clients or the clients’ customers.
Alright, well Jason we really appreciate it, you’ve given us a lot to think about. Like I said I hope this is the beginning of a long ongoing conversation because we are certainly intrigued by the help you have to offer, we will definitely check out that Simon Sinek Ted Talk and link it in the podcast. Anything you’d like to add in closing Jason?
JASON: No, if you guys want to know more, if you go to Jasonswenk.com/wahoo I’m doing a test, I want to see how many people actually remember it. So Wahoo, I grew up on a street called Wahoo like the fish. But I have some cool stuff there so make sure you go there and you’ll have a little laugh.
CHRIS: We’ll link that up and our listeners should please check that out, it sounds like it might be funny. Jason puts out a lot of great content, a lot of great video content like he said. One thing I appreciate about it Jason is how you chunk it up into small bits that are more digestible so there’s a lot of two to three minute videos with very specific questions with agency owners or business owners as well can find a lot of good advice from a guy who has been through it.
JASON: Cool, well thanks for having me.
CHRIS: Thank you Jason, take care, thanks very much.
Resources:
—Ways to generate more prospects
–intro and outro music from our friends at Sabers: https://sabersmusic.bandcamp.com/releases