Agency Advantage
Most agency owners don't have a marketing problem. They have a delegation problem.
You started your agency for freedom, and somewhere along the way you became the bottleneck. Every deliverable runs through you. Every fire gets put out by you. Growth just means more work.
The UnF*cked Agency is the show for agency owners ready to fix that. Every week, host Brad Starnes sits down with the operators, founders, and specialists who've cracked it: people who built teams that actually deliver without the owner buried in the work. We get into the real stuff like delegation, hiring, systems, retention, and the boring infrastructure that quietly scales an agency.
It's honest, occasionally uncomfortable, and built for owners who want an agency that runs without them.
Agency Advantage
From a $14K Ceiling to $1.6M: The Power of Niching Down | Will Hanke
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
What happens when an agency owner stops serving everyone and becomes the obvious choice for one overlooked niche?
In this episode of the Agency Advantage Podcast, Brad Starnes sits down with Will Hanke, founder of Window Treatment Marketing Pros, to unpack how Will broke through a self-imposed $14K MRR ceiling, committed to an underserved niche, and built a $1.6 million agency with a global team.
Will explains why he rebranded around window-treatment dealers, spent years building omnipresence before scaling paid ads, and considers waiting too long to hire an appointment setter one of his biggest misses. He also shares how LeadBoomerang became both a client-retention tool and a sales advantage—and why trying to sell it as standalone SaaS failed twice.
In this conversation, Brad and Will discuss:
- Breaking through self-sabotage and limiting beliefs
- Finding a “blue ocean” niche from an existing client roster
- Rebranding a niche agency in days
- Growing with your business instead of outrunning operations
- Building omnipresence before investing heavily in ads
- Why cold calling was Will’s biggest missed opportunity
- Turning lead follow-up software into a competitive advantage
- Building and retaining a global team
- Using EOS and core values to create remote culture
- Respecting a winning formula without worshipping it in the AI era
Timestamps:
00:00 – Agency Advantage intro
00:29 – Meet Will Hanke
03:43 – The self-sabotage ceiling at $14K MRR
07:39 – Finding an overlooked niche
08:55 – Rebranding around window-treatment marketing
11:59 – Grow with your business
12:30 – Building omnipresence before paid ads
17:16 – The cold-calling opportunity Will missed
19:02 – LeadBoomerang as a sales and retention tool
22:01 – Will’s first offshore hires
26:16 – EOS, core values, and remote-team culture
30:08 – Mindset and nearly 400% MRR growth
33:31 – Respect the winning formula, but never worship it
34:46 – Will’s advice for growing agency owners
CONNECT WITH BRAD:
Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/BradStarnesOfficial/
Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/bradstarnesofficial/
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradstarnesofficial/
CONNECT WITH WILL:
Window Treatment Marketing Pros → https://wtmarketingpros.com
Website → https://www.willhanke.com
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/techlh
CONTACT:
TalentFuze → https://talentfuze.io
Book a call → http://bradstarnes.fyi/talentfuze/
#AgencyAdvantage #WillHanke #WindowTreatmentMarketingPros #AgencyGrowth #NicheMarketing #MarketingAgency #RemoteTeam #AgencyOwner #EOS #LeadGeneration
Are you an agency owner that is looking to scale through global talent? Connect with us at talentfuze.io or join our free Facebook group, The Agency Advantage: https://www.facebook.com/groups/youragencyadvantage/
Yo agency owners, you know how it goes. More clients, more questions, more problems to solve. You built the machines, now you're stuck in the grind. More revenue coming, but you're running out of time. Agency advantage. Rad starts breaking it down. Better people, better systems, better moves all around. Leadership, leverage, profit, and scale. Real world lessons from the wins and fails. Build it smarter, lead the team, take your freedom back. Agency advantage. Now you're on the right track.
SPEAKER_01Today on Agency Advantage, we're keeping it local. Will Hankey is a St. Louis guy who built his first website in 1996 and has been doing SEO since 2003. The reason he's on the show is that he made two bets most agency owners only talk about. First, he took a perfectly healthy, generalist agency and went all in on one unglamorous niche. Marketing for window treatment dealers, blinds, shades, awnings, you name it. That bet put window treatment marketing pros on Inc.'s Midwest fastest growing list this year with 81% growth and pushed the company past a million dollars in revenue. Second, when he got tired of watching his clients lose deals to bad processes, not bad marketing, he stopped selling campaigns and built the software himself. He did all of this with a teen spread across countries and time zones. He hosts the Marketing Pains podcast and he's written three books on marketing for his niche. Will, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. That's quite an intro.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Oh yeah. Yes, it is. You know, every episode, and people listening are probably tired of hearing this, like begins like this. You know, we take your guest form that you guys fill out, and Claude just does its thing and creates us this fantastic intro and uh and all that stuff. And it makes me look fantastic, right? So we'll welcome on those who are listening. Uh, I'm in St. Louis, Will's in St. Louis. I think we're like probably like 10, 15 minutes apart from each other. Uh, have done a few in-person masterminds uh with this seven figure agency program that we met through. Uh so I don't have like an in-person uh podcast thing, otherwise we would you and I would be recording this here in person. But uh with that, you know, Will, I had this fantastic intro from our friend Claude, but uh, why don't you kind of give us the little high-level overview of like what you guys do inside of your agency?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so we're the typical full stack, typical SEO website, paid ads, social media, all the normal stuff. We just do it for one specific niche. And that makes it really easy from a business uh standpoint of rinse and repeat. I don't have to go learn a new business or new industry every time I get a new client, which was always the struggle with my legacy agency. And it had a hard time growing because I didn't know if next week it was gonna be a mattress company or a divorce lawyer, you know?
SPEAKER_01Right. Yeah, absolutely. And those uh I've worked with one of those uh divorce attorneys. They can be they can be tough to to work with as well, whenever I had had my agency. So that's right. Let's kind of run back. You you had Red Canoe as your agency kind of since 2004. What was actually happening in the business at that time, right before you decided to niche down?
SPEAKER_02You know, the the biggest thing was I had a I had a full-time uh government job, high-paying, good quality job. And I made the mistake of reading Tim Ferris's book called The Four Hour Work Week. And that really kind of triggered something in my brain, not necessarily that I could only work four hours, but that I could do it myself, right? And not have to have a job. I hated traffic. That was the biggest thing that I hated was having to drive down there every day and being stuck on the way home, you know, all of that kind of stuff. So didn't like that. Started down the road of building out an agency, but I also would just be an honest, I would self-sabotage myself. If I got to about 12 or 14K in monthly recurring, I would do everything in my, you know, not on purpose, but consciously, I would do everything in my in my mind to if a new client came on that I would do something to try to lose one of the old ones. Like not on purpose, right? But it's just like, I don't know, 14k is a lot of money to to be making, and not sure if I can really run this thing efficiently and and yeah, you know, still get a good uh still get five star reviews at the end of it.
SPEAKER_01Right. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's it's one of those things like this was pre like pandemic, right? And so there was no like uh work from home, remote life, and everything like that. So who knows if the the job you had would have turned into this like remote life. But so you you you mentioned this aspect of self-sabotage, right? Like I'm at this like 14, 16k a month. I was there in my agency, and that was part of I actually made a post today at the time of this recording. It's been a year since I sold my book of business and my agency. And it was like, I kept hitting that point, right? Where it's like, I can't get past this uh ceiling that we're at. And so when I launched Talent Fuse, like that was my mind. I was like, I have this limiting belief that I can't get past where I was at my agency. And when I'm about to hit that mark, that's where I'm gonna sell. And so like that was about where we're at when finally was okay, like we can make this acquisition, I can move on, uh, everything like that. But even like I've found myself at times now where it's like, I can't get to that next level. I was hesitant on like, we just brought on a client success manager. Karen, who's my director of operations, has been that client success seat up until now. And it was like, I'm afraid to like put somebody else in that seat because she's always owned those relationships with my clients. And like, this is bringing somebody else in, and I didn't want to like cause the growth to like not happen and us lose clients. Well, then what began happening is because I didn't have somebody with true client success expertise in that seat. We lost a few clients because she didn't know how to handle those situations as a client success manager would, right? And so that own self-sabotage is exactly what would happen. And so that's something that a lot of people don't realize they do. And once you realize you do that to yourself, it can be a huge unlock for your personal growth and for your business growth as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it was a huge unlock for me. I I ended up doing a presentation for a local group called Giving Yourself Permission to Succeed. And it was all about that mind shift change that I was, I was limiting myself for sure. You know, and at the same time, you're it's a little scary to like start bringing people on and being responsible for feeding other kids, you know, and and that kind of stuff. So that kind of freaks you out too, right? And and some somewhat probably limits you from moving moving any further down.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. And it's like it's one thing that affects my pocket and like my my family's pocket, but then when it's affecting other people's pockets and how they live, like it's like I have to make sure that I'm operating at the highest level possible because I have not just my my mouth, my wife's mouth, and our two kids' mouths to feed, like I have how many other mouths to feed with the the team members that we have and their families and everything like that. So 100%. Let's kind of talk about your your niche that that you have, right? So you mentioned like we have this uh this cap or this ceiling in a way, you know, 14, 16k MRR. And I don't know where you were at when you decided to niche down, but what got you in deciding, like, okay, I can no longer chase these other industries. And out of all things, window treatment companies is who I'm gonna niche down on.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So as you mentioned earlier, we're in a group called Seven Figure Agency, and one of the big things they preached there is niching down, picking a niche and becoming the expert in that niche. We had two window treatment companies and an awning company on the books with Red Canoe. Okay. I had just recently read the book Um Blue Ocean Strategy and realized that this was a blue ocean. There is nobody out there marketing to these people. So that was the decision process. It wasn't anything about having a window treatment company owning one in the past or understanding it all. It was purely that it was a blue ocean. Uh, and I was the guy that kind of already knew what to do there. We were doing quite well for our clients in that niche. And I said, well, let's just do this and replicate it. And that was the decision process. That's how we went down that road.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. Now, uh I'm looking here at my notes, and you and I, this is the those who listen to power of of delegation, Will hopped on and he's like, hey, you know, my team filled out the form. So do we have to like keep on that, or can we, you know, go in a different path or whatever? But so according to kind of my notes on here, uh, is it correct that you rebranded in about two days on here?
SPEAKER_02100%. Yeah. Once I made the decision to do the niche, a little hack here, I actually built a page on my Red Canoe site because it had authority and it had traffic and it had ranking. So I actually built a page on that site specifically for window treatment marketing and used that authority to rank a lot quicker. So the first two or three clients that I got was actually it was actually kind of through Red Canoe, but it was, you know, the bill came from Window Treatment Marketing Pros.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But I used that authority. And then once that was done, I had the other website ready to roll. We just did a 301 redirect and and we were off to races.
SPEAKER_01That's that's that's awesome. I uh I mentioned in my my post I made today about like my launch of talent fees. It was kind of very similar in the sense, like I had this uh this realization that like, and it was clear to me, you know, my wife was going back to work and she wanted to be at home with the kids and I couldn't like provide that for her. And I was frustrated with my agency, and I did this exercise of like my top 10 clients, like my most recent 10 clients, like who are the ones that I'd want to work with the most. And out of my entire book of business, I kept going back to, well, these agencies that I work with that we were basically doing white label work for, like these are the ones that I love working with the most. And so I spun talent fees up out of there. I, same thing, basically got it branded and everything in about like two to five days. Uh, and what's funny is the the logo that we have now was the first one that we got. And I was like, that's terrible. We're not moving forward with that. And I was getting all these ideas and we came back to it and I was like, that's actually not bad. Like, well, let's let's go ahead and move forward with that. And so speed to execution is everything. But it sounds like for those who are listening that maybe you've thought about niching down, like kind of do what you and I do, Will, right? Like look at your clientele and think it's like, who do I love serving the most? Or in your case, who is there nobody else in this industry out there that I can come in and kind of be that one person that's gonna serve serve at this niche.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, 100%. It's the it's the best way to go. Obviously, look at your book of business and see which ones you're doing really well for is another way to go about that. You know, what are we, what if we already got dialed in that if we just worked with these types of people that uh that we could already, we already know that we would be successful.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things uh that I know about just you and your growth with with window treatment pros is it wasn't until recently, if I recall correctly from conversations you and I have had that you guys just turned on like paid ads, right? And so you grew organically through, I believe, SEO, YouTube content, webinars, everything like that. That's a slow growth, right? Like I'm going through right now where I've grown talent views up to this point off my personal brand and content and like the leads are coming in, but I'm like, man, like we have to throw more fuel onto this and just like catapult this. And so, like, we're about to launch paid ads. What did that look like for you? Like, why did you choose that as your kind of go-to-market strategy with this new company when you could have just gone and began running paid ads from the beginning?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I had a friend who owned a swimming pool company here in town. And he had made a comment to me one time about you want, you don't necessarily want to grow your business, you want to grow with your business. And at first I didn't understand it, but but really what he meant was you don't want this thing to like take off and go crazy, and then you're not able to keep up and you're starting to provide poor service, get two and three star reviews and all this stuff. If you could just, you know, methodically continue to trudge away at it. That's the approach that I took. I also took the approach of what's the most bootstrapped, cheapest way to do that. And for me, that was build content. I I had years and years of teaching, webinars, you know, live classes, speaking at events, all that kind of stuff. So I had all the knowledge and I just transferred all of that to specific to the specific niche. And I just started pounding away at content. I've got well over a thousand videos on YouTube at this point, you know, just just hammering away on what we call omnipresence. Uh, I'm on YouTube, I'm on Facebook, I'm on all the socials, I have a podcast. It's hard, it's hard to not find me if you're looking for me. And if you accidentally get stuck in my web by going to a website or something like that, you're stuck for six months on the retargeting pixels and everything else, right? So that's that was the plan. Um, we started running ads when we hit about 70k, so just short of a million dollars. We started playing with Facebook ads a little bit, but still not spending a mud, a mud, uh maybe a thousand bucks a month or something like that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And and again, the slow trudge of okay, team. Now I have a team. Okay, team, you have a thousand bucks a month. Start dialing this in. If you can dial this in, I'll give you more money, right? And now we spend a lot more than that, but we but we know if I put a dollar into the paid ads machine, ten dollars is gonna come back into my pocket, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So that's not something that happens quickly. And I think that's probably what a lot of agency owners do is they just say, Oh, I need Facebook ads. I got to get out there, I need to run these. And they're not dialed in. And a lot of them, quite honestly, see it as wow, that was a waste of money. Well, yeah, it was a waste of money because you didn't really have a good plan in place and have all the pieces and and flesh it out and prove the concept and that kind of stuff first.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. And the the aspect of retargeting people is like you think as agency owners, we think is like, oh yeah, like, duh, we should definitely do that. But oftentimes we forget that, right? And so even like the podcast form for like booking and everything like that for this, right? Like it's got a a pixel track to it. So as people are booking for my podcast. Like I am like we're gearing up for those ads. So we have everything set in place that it's tracking. You know, when we send, like, I do a lot of marketing with my personal brand. So I do like lead magnets, and I don't just send somebody a link to a Google Doc. I send them to a link that redirects the Google Doc that's got the pixel on there. Sadly, then uh when ads launch, you can track, right? And you can redirect and everything, and just simple things that people don't think about to be able to grow their agency. So it sounds like from your point of view, like in an agency owner, you know, let's go back to, you know, think of you when you were at 15, 20k a month MRR, right? Sounds like you you're recommending for those people like don't just go out and launch ads, like take the aspect of build out this omnipresence in terms of YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all of that.
SPEAKER_02I'm a huge omnipresence fan. Now, my wife had a job, so I I had the luxury of being a little lazier, maybe with the growth, right? So I had that I had that approach where yeah, 15k, we're just gonna keep hammering away at the stuff that we know how to do well. If you if you don't have that luxury and like it, like this is literally feed the kids or not kind of money, yeah. I'd probably ramp that up a little bit, but I certainly wouldn't put money into ads early on when there's so much foundational stuff that you can do, including buying a list and starting to, you know, send out monthly or weekly emails and just building your authority. I I think there's a lot of uh credence in that that maybe people don't necessarily do. They kind of try to skip it and say, let's just run ads and get clients. Yeah. You know, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And it's like it, it it doesn't quite work that way because then you got the follow-up process. And whenever you're going through like the process of trying to get people to come on board, like it's not just like, you know, you hear always think about a one-call close. I've done plenty of one-call closes, right? It happens, but oftentimes it's not, right? So then you have the the buyer's journey of someone may come through your ad now and they may not buy today, but they may buy, you know, six months from now, two years from now, that type of thing. We just closed a client that was on my old podcast, like April of last year, when I first launched Talent Fuse, and they're just now closing. It's like 18 months later, right? And it's so it's like you just have to sometimes you may not find people when they're in that buying cycle to be able to buy, right? So out of all of those, out of all those like organic channels, is there one that you're like, this has produced pre-ads, this has produced like the best ROI?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, a lot of people might not like this answer, but cold calling specifically hiring an appointment setter. I just hired an appointment setter March of this year, and we're at about 1.6 million now. And it's something that I wish I would have done at 30k. Absolutely. I I really wish I would have because just getting more at bats for me would have made my my sales process better. It would have dialed me in sooner. And then of course, I'd probably pick up a couple extra clients a little earlier in the in the journey.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So yeah, I for me, I think the the one big miss for me is having a cold caller.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Now, so the you know, the cold calling in this case is, you know, for you setting appointments, getting those set and put put on your calendar for you to take the sales calls. And I think if I recall, like when you hired this person, I think you said you were at like 1.2, 1.4. So it seems like they've been able to help you guys really grow in this sense. Uh so appointment setting and that process for your own agency is one thing. But then we have the aspect of, hey, we're gonna send all these leads and do all this marketing for our clients. In your case, the window treatment companies, and you have to depend on them, like, and it's window treatment companies, but how to know how to actually close, right? And nurture those leads and everything like that. So you then took this a step further and said, hey, rather than me losing clients because they're blaming the marketing because we're not doing the right things, you know, blah, blah, blah, we're going to build out a system and CRM for them, these processes to help them close deals better. Uh, what does that look like for you guys? Like, has it been a second business to run, or has it really helped catapult your growth?
SPEAKER_02It's really helped us catapult our growth. It's also an absolutely fantastic sales tool. Because if somebody's calling just because I need more leads, it we can change the conversation a little bit to, you know, what are you doing with the leads you're already getting? Well, I don't know. I'm writing them down on paper, I have them on my whiteboard, or you know, it's it blows me away how 1990s a lot of businesses still are. Uh-huh. And so, well, we've got all the tools to put this in place. You can access it online. You'll know where every lead is coming from. And that really changes change it changes our authority to them, right? Now they're like, wow, these guys really know what they're doing. It gives me a great sales tool, something extra that they're going to get at no additional cost. It's just part of our program. And at the same time, it also makes them a little stickier, meaning the client's a little stickier because they have that software and it it makes it a little harder for them to cancel, I think.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, because then everything's trapped into that, right? And then it's like, well, if I cancel the marketing services, do I lose this CRM and follow-up system and everything like that? And so oftentimes they're like, I'm just gonna keep keep where I'm at. Have you guys also used it as a downsell opportunity as well, where somebody may not be ready for the marketing services yet? And it's like, hey, let's put this in place and fix your follow-up and nurturing problem first, and then you know, five months from now that it may make better sense for us to work together.
SPEAKER_02We've used it as a downsell for somebody who cancels with us. Do you want to keep the lead boomerang system? Yes or no. However, we we've tried the SAS route of just selling a window treatment CRM.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And it's we've actually launched it twice now, and both times it's been a fail, which has not worked. It's just a totally separate company, it needs to be ran on its own. And we were just trying to do it as some sort of like add-on or some sort of lead magnet, like you said. Hey, here's something for 99 bucks a month. Once you get in there, play with it. We're hoping that you'll then sign up for our marketing services, but that hasn't happened. So, you know, I don't I don't know what the reasons are, but we've we've tried and failed twice at that, which is never fun as a business owner to throw a ton of money at a project that you end up just pulling the plug on.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. And then now with AI and everything, it's like half these people are like, well, I can just, you know, recreate this whole thing myself using AI. And it's like for a hundred bucks a month or 200 bucks a month, you really, really don't want to do that. Like it's not worth your time. So for sure.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01You you've mentioned several times throughout this recording uh your team, right? And so your team is spread across different cultures, time zones. How did that come together? Like going from a one person shop to hey, I'm gonna now build a team and I'm not gonna build this team here in the US. I'm gonna use talent from the Philippines, you know, wherever. It is.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Back when I was really struggling and I wanted to niche down, I realized fairly quickly on the niche side that well, I was getting clients. And I realized fairly quickly that I was not going to be able to juggle all these balls for long. And so my first hire was a web developer in the Philippines so that I could so that I didn't have to do that anymore. And then I brought on an ops manager and a paid ads person, all from the Philippines. Interestingly, that was uh eight years ago, and all three of those are still with me. Wow. Which is pretty awesome. But yeah, it was it was at the same time realizing that I was self-sabotaging myself, realizing that in order for this to scale, I can't do it myself. And I need to bring in a team of people that are smart in their little areas and you know, hire the best. And I really lucked out with with the ones that I have up till now.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, and you can find fantastic talent in the Philippines. My first introduction to it was my first company. I had a FinTech app, and we uh actually hired two developers through a company kind of like Talent Fuse, but they there was a I remember it was like January of 2022, and there was a super typhoon that had hit the Philippines, and like I couldn't get a hold of my two team members for like multiple days. And like we're about to launch the app, you know, all these different things, we're running out of money, you know, everything backs against the wall. And I remember thinking to myself, like, I'm not even worried if this product's gonna get launched. Like, I'm worried about like, are these people alive or not? Right. Like I had access to all the code, I had an IT background, I could run with it. We could always find more, more talent. And it was like three or four days later, I get a message from them that, like, the they're okay. The company that I hired them through, they had an office that they closed down for the pandemic. So they reopened the office, you know, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, we're gonna work 18 hour days for the next comedy days to make up for our lost time. And like they're they had no electric, no water. Uh, they were at this company's headquarters. And I'm like, who here in the US would get to the point where like they're like, yeah, I'm gonna work 18 hour days to make up for everything? Like, no, I here in the US, you know, you you're an Arnold, right? Here in St. Louis, there was just all the tornadoes that that, you know, just came through last year. Those people are not taking, you know, putting extra time into their job, they're taking time off, right? To be able to, to be able to do their things. And so I've just found fantastic luck with the talent in the Philippines as you know, you know, being with you for how long, very dedicated to to who they work for. Uh, and it's like once you grab find good team members, like they're going to latch for a long time.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, for sure. I think if you treat them well, uh pay them well, and give them a give them a path to growth is the biggest thing. If if you're an agency owner and you're built you want to build this thing bigger, which most all of us do, um, then as the business grows, they need to see how do I fit into this growth mode so that I'm not always stuck as you know, the grunt person doing something for a small amount of money. So I think that's a big piece of it, is giving them some sort of a path or a way forward.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and one of the things that like we coach our clients on at Talent Fuse is like to, as you kind of said, like making sure these people feel like part of your team, right? They're not just here to take the brunt work and everything. You know, we had we had one client that I had to let go because like we found out that they were like working these people like 13, 14 hour days and like they didn't have team calls, like it was just assigning tickets and they're it's all these things. And I'm like, no, like that's not how you treat these people, right? Uh and so on the concept of like mouse to feed, like not only I have to worry about my team, but it's like I gotta make sure I'm bringing on the right clients because there's mouse to feed on that end too, right? But when it comes to, you know, an agency that's coming in, maybe they're hiring remote for their first time, or they've been, you know, using remote offshore, near shore talent for a while, but they haven't really built this culture, this one team you call it, not a collection of remote contractors. Like, what did you guys have to do, or what do you have in place to make sure that there's this like solid remote culture?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, part of it is EOS. We've we've implemented EOS, which gives you a foundation of the people analyzer and how to build your culture and whether people are good fits and right person, right seat, that type of stuff uh has really helped. Also, our core values, you know, our last core value. We have five of them, our last one is fun. Make sure that you're having fun and it don't turn this into trudge, you know, and just over and over, oh my God, I gotta go to work. Nobody likes that. I didn't like that. Yeah. That's the reason I didn't want to work anymore. Right. You know, right. So I think that's a big piece of it. And then as your team builds, use the use the coaches you have. Like my ops manager is in the Philippines. So I I'll ask him, like, what do you guys do for this, or what do you guys do for that, or tell me about this holiday and that kind of stuff, and starting to learn a little bit more about their side of things. That really helped. As we've built up, I think we've got 28 people across the world now, mostly in the Philippines, but not all. But this weekend, uh starting tomorrow, uh, they're actually going on a four-day get-together. So everybody in the Philippines is flying to the center. So the people in the north, people in the south are all flying to the center. We've got a giant Airbnb, we've got all kinds of stuff uh scheduled for them. So it gets them to not see them as another slack entity, right? But a real person. And they get to they get to build the the culture of the business.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And you know, we'll we'll get them, we'll take them out to dinner. They've got a social night, all that kind of stuff. So that has really, really helped retain people, I think, and make it a little bit more appealing uh to want to work with us.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. That's that that that is awesome to hear. Like we we have several team members in the Philippines that have like self-organized, right? To be able to meet up and everything. We have one team member who his family owns a coffee shop. And so they've all met up and gone to his family's coffee shops they could try the coffee uh and all those different things. So it's always cool to see those, those different things and how kind of all that merges together. Uh, we've even done things like, you know, every Monday morning we have a win the week call. And it's like setting the mindset and the momentum for the week, right? And like one of the things I've done is like I give a shout-out to team members on the team, right? And my director of operations, she's tracking like, okay, well, who did I give a shout out to each week? So we don't have certain team members that felt like, hey, I haven't been, I haven't gotten a shout out in six weeks. Like I'm just a nobody, right? And so we're we're tracking that to make sure that one, the wins of our team members, because I'm not involved in the day-to-day of what they're doing. So I don't know everything, right? So it gives her an opportunity to share those wins with me. But then on the culture aspect, right, to make sure that everybody's kind of feeling this like, yeah, go andre, yeah, go out, you know, those types of things. Uh so it's little things like that that if you're listening and you're, you know, going into your first remote team or kind of to trying to fix or build that culture, things like that and what they're doing with the Airbnb, which I think is fantastic, uh, are great ways to be able to do that. So, you know, you mentioned kind of in your onboarding form here, we're talking about, you know, remote culture, uh, having the aspect of hiring offshore kind of gives us a little bit of leg room, I'd say, per se, in terms of profitability compared to hiring here in the US. Uh, but you were also, you've also been honest that like early on you were underpriced, you took bad fit clients, tried to make everyone happy. Uh, what was the moment that you realized like you were the bottleneck in that, in that, hey, I need to raise my prices, I need to not take on every client. Like, what went through that was like, this is my moment that I need to just make a change here.
SPEAKER_02Great question. Probably back to the seven-figure agency group. Uh, one of the things they do in that group is they celebrate wins with everybody and changing the mindset that everybody can win and that's okay. And then it's not me versus you, right? Everybody can win and and and we can still all have a great, a great life, I think is a huge piece of that. So yeah, I I think that's a big piece of that. I was sitting there, I had actually won agency of the quarter or something like that. Fastest growing agency, I think is what I had I had won. And I had gone from 14k to 47 MRR in a year. Uh, and so that was a pretty that was what would 300 growth, I get maybe almost 400 growth. Um so I had won that award, but I was still kind of sitting there steaming at the guys up there that are doing a million, million plus. Yeah, and like, you know, the the everything they're saying doesn't it doesn't go to me. I'm I'm a measly guy at 47k, which is fantastic, by the way. Yeah, but uh you know, you got you kind of get in that mindset, and it was all around changing the mindset. Uh I I listened to podcasts on it, I I studied it, you know, how can I change my mindset from what I typically do now and the way that my parents raised me to think about things, to what is a way of thinking about this where everybody can win. Uh and that it also goes back to culture that we talked about a few minutes ago, that we should celebrate everybody on the team and their wins and and realize that they're not they're not out to get you and all that stuff that uh that everybody should be able to celebrate.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, absolutely. Mindset, mindset is huge. And and you mentioned like what your your parents have taught you, right? Like my parents are fantastic human beings, right? But there's been some things that I've had to untrain my mind on. Like one of them is optics. Like I had my first company, it failed. We raised $130,000 from friends and family. And I was driving like a 2016 Audi Q5. And like it was, what are the optics of you driving this car? What are the, you know, optics, opt options, which is sort of like it's valid, right? But then like I got drilled so much in my head that then like that company closed down. I went and got a job. I would then went out on my own. I bought a truck, this and that. And it was like just constantly optics my brain. And I had to like retrain myself. Like, I want to go out, like one of the things that's on my goals, like I hit my monthly recurring revenue goal by the next intensive. I'm gonna go out and get myself a Tesla Model Y, right? And it's because part of that is like training my brain, like, no, like I'm allowed to earn that, right? Like I'm allowed to have those types of things. I've I'm allowed to grow a business to whatever it needs to be. And so oftentimes, like it's entrepreneurship is this mental game. You have to constantly be training yourself to level up and unlearn things that maybe were childhood things, maybe even things that you just learned like a year and a half ago, that you have to now teach yourself, hey, that was a year and a half ago, and that was a different level of MRR. Now it's different, right?
SPEAKER_02Things that had nothing to do with business, you know, but they're they're affecting the way that you make business decisions.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Which it just blows me away. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. So one of the last questions that I want to ask you here, you know, your your big lesson that you have is respect the winning formula, but never worship it. What does that mean like in time in terms of your company and how you guys operate?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Especially with AI. This is gonna be crazy, right? So we've got all the systems in place. We know what works. If a new client comes up to us, we have the recipe to make it successful. That's not a question. But at the same time, with AI now, for example, the recipe's changing, right? Like it's it's getting easier to replicate, it's getting easier to do some of the standard quo stuff that our competitors are doing. So keep the formula, but don't be afraid to tweak it. If we find a better way, if we find some better taste in talk chocolate chips, let's go ahead and use them, right? If we find something better, don't be afraid to experiment a little bit. Keep the formula, experiment, find different solutions, and let's keep the the end product top notch.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. Well, well, I imagine it has to do with this, but is there anything for anybody who's listening? You know, they are just getting going in their agency. Maybe they're at that mark where it's like they're at events like seven figure agency and they're at, you know, 40, 45k a month and they see the guys walking across, you know, one mil, four mil, eight mil, right? That's that's what we see at those events.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Like what would be your advice to them?
SPEAKER_02Back to mindset. Don't don't put those guys on a pedestal and think, well, they made it, they don't care. Uh, they went through the trenches too. And in a lot of cases, they'll they'll tell you how they got there or what they did to solve the problems that where you're at, and realize at the end of the day, that everybody can win and and you can get there. It may take some time, depending on your finances, depending on different things that are going on in your life, but just keep at it. Always, always move forward every day, I think is probably a great way to say that. So just make sure that at the end of the day, when you're reviewing what happened that day, that you did something to move the needle.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, well, thanks again for hopping on here today. Those who are listening, today's episode helped you, please share it with another agency owner who's trying to do it all alone and subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Until next time, this is the agency advantage.