SPEAKER_00 0:00

Yo agency owners, you know how it goes. More plans, 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_01 0:28

Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Agency Advantage, the show where agency owners share the behind the scenes of everything they went through to grow their agency from the ground up. Today's guest is John O'Long, CEO of Leeds Near Me. Here's why I wanted him on. John spent about 20 years as a youth pastor in Metro Atlanta. He began a marketing agency on the side because a pastor's pay wasn't covering it. That side hustle turned into a national agency serving churches. He sold it and then he did the thing that most people in our world do not. Rather than beginning over again, he bought an agency. He and his partners acquired Leeds Near Me, a 10-year-old firm in the auto repair industry, and he stepped in as CEO of a team that he didn't hire serving clients he didn't sell to. John O. Welcome on. Hey, hey, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 1:21

That was great. I like that introduction.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Absolutely. You know, Claude can do fantastic things for us. So yeah. But love it. You know, uh, prior to like getting into it about like the agency and kind of your company now, you know, 20 years as a youth pastor, and now you're running a marketing agency for auto repair shops. Uh, so two completely different worlds. But, you know, I I've seen a little bit of what that uh that world is for pastors and in ministry, because we've served at our church and I've become friends with like the pastor at one of our church campuses and everything like that. And it's not an easy life. Uh so why don't you kind of just give us a little bit of a of a highlight of what that life was like? I guess now that's you know, 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_02 2:07

So yeah, man. So I I graduated high school in '98. The next week, started as a full-time intern at the church that I was at, full-time youth ministry intern with my youth pastor, stayed with him for a year, and then he went off and uh started a little band called Casting Crowns. If you listen to Kir Christian music, yeah, they they did pretty well. Then I ended up going, his dad was a pastor. I ended up going to his dad's church, and that was my first full-time youth ministry position on my own. That was in 2000 and served in a few different churches around Metro Atlanta over the course of uh yeah, from 1999 until 2020. Had five kids during that time. And back in if you let's see, if if we rewind to good grief, 2018, I guess it would have been. I had started, I had started doing social media marketing for some business owner friends back in 2012 when we adopted our son. We had four biological kids. 2012 we adopted the son from Ukraine. So now I'm I've got five kids and a wife who's homeschooling those kids, and I'm making a youth pastor salary in 2012. So you do the math is is not good. So I needed some extra money. I went around to some people who own businesses and had Facebook pages but weren't weren't posting. And I said, hey, I've noticed you haven't posted in in 90 days. Uh, if you'll give me $300 a month, I'll post for you. And and in a co over the course of two weeks, three of them said yes. And so this broke youth pastor had a $900 a month raise, which paid for my house. That was my mortgage at the time. So that was big, that was huge for me. And ended up, one of those guys ended up being pretty influential around town. And he owned several businesses. Ended up, he ended up assuming that I knew how to build a website and told me he needed me to build a website. And he was kind of a hard to say no to type guy. And so ended up figuring out how to build a website. And then a lot of people just knew him and saw that he was posting on social media. So I started getting hit up by all these people that I didn't really have to sell because if you're good enough for him, you're good enough for me. So I'll hire you, let me know how much.

SPEAKER_01 4:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:23

So fast forward to 2018, I'm making more on this side hustle than I am as a as a youth pastor. So, which, you know, wasn't a that wasn't a very tall bar. Right. But nonetheless, that's that's what it was. So 2019, I ended up going part-time at the church, and we hired an intern who I spent a year with getting ready to replace me. And then in January of 2020, me and the pastor met and decided, hey, you know what? I think he's ready. Why don't we make March 30th, 2020 my last day on staff? March 11th, 2020, that Wednesday night. That'll be a good night to announce it to the youth group, probably be a normal week. And so Wednesday night, March 11th, we announced to the youth group that I'd be stepping down at the end of the month, driving home that night. They started talking about this COVID thing and they ended up canceling March Madness that night. And I started thinking, okay, this is getting serious. And yeah, so March 11th pretty much ended up being my last night in youth industry. And so anyway, was a generalist agency at that point and just getting local clients really involved in the Chamber of Commerce. Then I joined a mastermind group called Seven Figure Agency and really pushed me in a niche down. So I niched down into wire uh fire and water damage restoration. Uh started picking up some clients there. Did that for about a year. Google ads for that niche, that industry was just near impossible.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:44

So it's tough. So around 2022 or 2023, we shifted the attention to churches and and just stayed there for a few years.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, you hit 2020 and it's like, you know, hey, this is gonna be great. And you mentioned, like, then they cancel March Madness, all that stuff. I imagine in your mind, you're like, well, I'm making more than what I was making as a pastor, right? You had gone down from part-time, and then it's like, crap, like the world's shutting down. I know, like, we just had Nick Horde on the podcast, right? And he's like, everybody canceled. Like everybody was pausing, everybody was canceling, except for like an urgent care clinic. And that's how he decided to niche down urgent cares, right? Uh so is that kind of how things played out for you guys? Did you go through that or no?

SPEAKER_02 6:36

I just had this conversation with somebody the other week because I got that same question. How was that? And man, we did not lose one single client. And I, you know, as far as silver linings and COVID, uh, we had one auto shop in our generalist agency that called me and said, Hey, I may need to pause for a month, but then his PPP came, his paycheck paycheck protection program got approved, and he said, Hey, I'm not gonna need to, I'm not gonna need to pause. So we had, you know, in that point at that point, I probably had 40 clients. So that one of the 40 said I might need to pause and did not need to pause. And then again, being local, you had all these electricians and plumbers and roofers who had been reliant on the yellow pages up until then. And those guys started realizing that they needed to do some digital marketing. And and I started getting calls from all those guys saying, Hey, I need one of them website things. You do that. And yeah, so COVID, we probably doubled in 2020. Okay. Honestly, that it I had the opposite experience, just from all those local guys moving to the internet.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Yeah, absolutely. It's one of those things like you mentioned silver lining. Like obviously the pandemic was not good, right? But there's a lot of people that it was a silver lining for them and wound up doing great things. And so it's it's sounds like through that you guys were able to grow. Um, and and then you go through this pivot of, okay, now we're gonna focus on churches and we're gonna niche down on churches. So you go from a for-profit company or restoration companies to nonprofits. You were also in the church industry as well. So you obviously had that background in terms of like how churches run and operate. You know, depending on who you talk to, some people will say churches have no money. Some people will say, hey, churches got a lot of money. You just got to find the right one and everything like that. What got you guys to decide to go in on that as your niche?

SPEAKER_02 8:31

Yeah, it it's funny. We we had a leadership team meeting and we were just real frustrated with how it was going with water damage restoration. You know, they could pay a lot and they were primed to know that they needed to do marketing, but getting results was really difficult. It was really cutthroat, just not, just didn't feel right. You know, it's just weird for us. And and I was a stranger to the industry. I didn't know fire, water damage restoration. I picked it out of a list and did some math, you know. So I sat the team down. I was like, all right, just strip everything away if you, if you, if we're not making an emotional decision here, or we we're just forget about the sunk cost of everything we've put into water damage restoration, and we were just gonna pick another niche to go all in on. What would y'all say? And oh, they were all like, churches, churches, churches, of course. So but that was completely based on my background and my experience and and my relationship with the local church. I had considered it before going with water damage restoration, yeah, but I I was one of those who were was like, I don't think churches are gonna spend money on marketing. I had a lot of experience with church budgets. I knew what that process was like, I knew what it was like to get stuff approved that the church was already primed for. So I was pretty skeptical of being able to convince churches that they needed that they needed to do marketing. But yeah, I I was wrong in some ways, and I was right in some ways. Churches, there were a lot of churches who knew they needed some help online. There's a lot of communications directors out there at decent-sized churches. They're large enough to have a communications director, but not large enough to hire that communications director any help. That really was our sweet spot was taking the load of the website and some social media and and stuff like that off of that communications director. Uh, then we also found churches qualified for the Google Ad Grant, where Google would give churches or non 501c3 nonprofits $10,000 a month in free Google Ad spent. So it was pretty easy to get, but it was not easy to manage and make effective. So there was a lot of churches that had this grant and had tried it on their own, thought it would be like boosting a Facebook post and found out quickly that it was horrible to manage. And they were frustrated because they were able to spend $10 a month and had $9,990 left over every month. So we had a lot of them coming to us saying, hey, please help us spend this money. So so those two things really became the sweet spot there. Now, the prices that churches could reasonably afford to pay for this service was not it's not what a for-profit could pay. I found for us, I was never able to crack the code of delivering a service quality enough and and and I didn't want to skimp on quality, but that just killed margins. So I was never, I never get made it as profitable as as it really was going to need to be if I ever wanted to retire or you know hire the staff needed. Because we delivered a good service and we took care of our clients. And but because of that, the margins just had to stay so thin.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and it goes in, you know, you know, the the tracking and the attribution, right? You you get somebody in from a Facebook ad or from a Google ad or from organic search, right? And then they come into the doors of the church, and then you then have this journey of like, hey, not everybody's gonna give, right? And so, like, yes, they're looking at we want people saved, we want people to give their life to Christ, right? Like that that's one metric that they're probably looking at. But then they're probably also looking at like, hey, how many of these people then turn into those who tithe and give offerings and everything like that? And so probably depending on the level of church you're working with, a lot of that was probably hard to also track as well, because some of them probably don't have the technology to be able to track all that, or was the kind of the level of churches you work you were working with, did they kind of have that in place?

SPEAKER_02 12:23

Yeah, it was it was a little bit all over the place. Um, you had some smaller churches, yeah, and we learned real quick that some churches were coming to us out of desperation, and that was just something we couldn't do. We couldn't take you from a zero to a five, but we could take you from a three to a 10, you know? And so that there's usually another problem there. If if you're not already growing a little bit on your own, we really needed to be able to come in and pour gas on a fire that was already there. We couldn't really help start the fire. Okay. So so that was so you had that slice that we were dealing with. Then you had you had other churches that were, yeah, they're really wanting to be aggressive and and and primed for growth, and and that was a good fit for us. It was hard to trace, you know, trace a click all the way to uh showing up. It was easier with meta ads, and so we ended up doing a lot of that and and really seeing Google ads more just branding and exposure and just making sure that you're there, but those were near impossible to track and and prove the return on the investment, or we we never cracked that code very well. But we did do well with with meta ads and and having people plan a visit to the church. Yeah. And and so now, not to not to be super critical of my pastor friends, and I and I have a lot of them, but I think the biggest thing that we came up against was church leadership wanting those ads to do all of the work and just expected a line out the door without having to make any phone calls or do any follow-up or do any outreach. A lot of churches just wanted that this group of new families to show up, and and that's just not the case. You know, I I the the biggest difference I see now that I'm, you know, I we work strictly with auto repair shops. And some of this is because you've got a sales guy up front, a service writer, you know, trying to get you to buy the tires or whatever, but they know that it's not just enough to answer the phone and that there's gonna have to be some follow-up. There's gonna have to be some sales, you know. So at the churches, some churches would get a team together to do some follow-ups, and but most of the time it just didn't happen. And so then they'd be like, oh, well, this is not working, and and it was working, yeah, but you're gonna it it needs some more work from the church. We could we couldn't carry that load.

SPEAKER_01 14:36

Yeah, absolutely. We we've been doing some some church shopping, I'm gonna call it on our end, right? And so it's it's clear as day the ones that do those things. Like they do the calls, they do the follow-ups, they enroll you in their automated system that when they have a family night and all those things, they're doing a voicemail drop and everything, trying to get you back into the church, right? And so it's clear as day, like who is acting on those things and and and who is it? So as we're you know, you've you've gone through, you had your your agency, you guys are niche down on churches, and then you decide to sell the agency. And I imagine some of that was probably like what we just talked about, right? Like that it wasn't as as profitable as you want it to be, different areas like that. And then you go into, okay, rather than I'm gonna start an agency from scratch, I want to go and acquire one. So you acquire one for the auto repair niche. What did that like look like for you? Because it's I've never, you know, came in and acquired a company, right? I've only built. And so it's a whole different ballgame I've heard from building to then buying and coming into a team that's already there. So prior to getting into the team and everything, like what was just that process from the buyer's side of going through and getting this agency uh acquired?

SPEAKER_02 15:52

That's kind of a wild story in that one, I wasn't really looking to sell. I I wasn't, I I was growing the agency and and yeah, I wasn't growing as fast as I would have liked it to. And and there was ultimately what pushed me over the hurdle or helped me get over the hurdle of convincing myself, like, yeah, this is this is a good move, was the fact that I I did want to grow something more aggressively. Some of that goes back to being in ministry for 20 years. I had not saved for retirement like I like I would have liked to. I had not done some things financially that I would have that I want to do and you know, just get it getting set up. So it it made sense and and had actually had a couple people around the same time approach me, which was weird because I wasn't putting out feelers. I wasn't I don't feel like I was given any signals that hey, anybody wants to buy this thing. So so that that worked out well and and that was a blessing. In May of 2025, and was you know, when you when you sell an agency or any business, I suppose this is that's the only one I've sold, but you you can you can chop that up any way you want, you know, and and uh so part of it was a lump sum, and then there's a seller's note and you know, where it kind of do a loan, personal loan there. And then another chunk of it was uh for me was an earnout. So I stayed on working at the agency, and each month I had some metrics that, you know, as long as I kept the metrics in line, I received another payment each month. And so then I and and I was that earnout was actually spread over three years, designed to be spread over three years. And then it, you know, if you walk away from it, you're walking away from it. So come June, I get a call from a mentor who says that his mentor, so my mentor's mentor, is looking for someone uh in Atlanta to partner with to purchase an agency. Uh they want wanted someone who had been who had ran an agency before, new digital marketing, and wanted someone that was kind of you know in line with his values. Uh turns out he was also a former youth pastor. So just every everything lined up and and we started talking and and decided, all right, yeah, we could work together. This would be great. Because he was in Tennessee. The whole purchase process was from July to was supposed to close in September, didn't end up closing until October 15th. And it was a pretty, it was a pretty bumpy road. It was it was pretty not fun because it's a large agency, larger agency that we ended up purchasing and and just a lot of complexity there, a lot of stuff. Yeah, but then you know, I had had the the thoughts before I met Aaron, who who ended up partnering with, before I had met Aaron, I had the idea for another agency that I was thinking about just kind of starting and testing the waters with as a as a side project. So I I was fairly excited about the idea of starting from scratch, taking everything that I had learned over the past, I don't know what however long it had been, 2013 to 2025. So like 12 years worth of mistakes that I had that I could now start from scratch and and do some things over and do them right that time. So I was pretty excited about that. And and had that happened, I don't, you know, it wouldn't have been it, it would have been fun. On the other hand, it's also really fun walking into somewhere that someone else has dealt with all the startup headaches. And I bet somebody else has already worked out a lot of the kinks, you know. So you're walking in, don't get me wrong, there there was plenty of things to fix around here, and there still are, but walking in somewhere, it's easier to fix problems when there's profit. And it's easier to fix problems when there's money. And so walking in somewhere where it is profitable, there is money, and getting to come in with that fresh set of eyes and not having the baggage and not having the emotions, just man, really be able to look at this business and do whatever you want and do whatever you need to do to fix the problems that that in our case were so fundamental. We we didn't have these big, huge, complex problems. We we had the most basic, fundamental, easy to solve problems uh that you could imagine. So it's it's it was fun. And then there's other cool things, you know, there's other cool things like having started my own agency, everybody had my cell phone. You know, you you hop over here, not being the founder, nobody has your cell phone. So it's great. It's uh it's it's cool. There's a lot of fun about it.

SPEAKER_01 20:25

Yeah, absolutely. It's one of the things like so I uh I launched Talent Fuse April 1st of 25, and like kind of the same thing. Like I had people as I launched the company were reaching out, like, hey, if you ever want to sell, like I'm like your agency, like for reach out. I'm interested, right? I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm gonna do both companies at once. And then we found out in July that my wife was pregnant with our second, we're gonna be doing two kids under two. And I was like, no way am I doing two kids under two and having two companies. Like two kids under two is already psychotic enough, right? And so I wound up, you know, uh selling the book of business and and my agency in parting ways. But one of the things I did whenever I launched Talent Fuse was I was like, I want this to be where like this company is not dependent on Brad, right? And where like my clients meet with like an account manager, like all those different things. And so like thankfully, uh, I say I'm blessed that this happened, but my son was hospitalized two days before launching Talent Fuse. And it was like, I had to be like, hey, I'm gonna be in the hospital, so you're gonna onboard with Karen, who's my director of operations, who was my executive admin and and my agency, right? And so it's a night and day difference between like anybody and everybody having your phone number and being able to reach out about the account and everything like that, versus just like, hey, here's your your point of contact, here's your who's who you're talking to. And even more so for you, right? Because all these clients came in and they have no clue who you are, right? And so it's even better and in in that sense. One of the things you you mentioned was like your biggest challenge when you came in was that there was no org chart, you know, your team was understaffed per se. Like What did that look like coming in? Like I imagine you kind of had to tread lightly of like, I can't come in and just start making all these changes, right? You don't want people like freaking out, like, hey, there's this new guy in town. But at the same time, you kind of have to get aggressive of like, hey, I'm I'm coming in and we're, you know, turning this around or we're gonna grow to X. Uh, what did all that entail?

SPEAKER_02 22:19

Yeah. Well, you know, internally in in the company, there, there was, there was a lot of stress outside of outside of being sold. There, there was the immediate fear that, okay, hey, we're all gonna get fired. But in on in my mind, there's the immediate fear that, okay, everybody's gonna quit. So we're both scared of losing each other. It turns out you had, you know, there were several team members that were looking for jobs before we bought. And I'm pretty proud to say that none of them ended up leaving. They gave us some chance. And they're extremely happy here. And that's what I mean, you know, culturally, the this, the, the, the team, there was just some culture issues and and uh and and and we've we've fixed a lot of that. So yeah, the org chart was really flat. You just had the fulfillment team, and we're all in office in Atlanta, Georgia. So you had this fulfillment team that was really lean, not enough of them, and then an operations director who was really just tasked with making sure everybody got their stuff done. And that was it. Not not looking around any corners, not able to look ahead, just really looking at today, surviving today. The other thing that we had going on, and some of these things, like you said, you don't want to come in and just rock the boat and change everything, but there were some things that were just so, in in my opinion, vital that we we had to rock the boat quick. Yeah. For example, the the biggest one is that the fulfillment team were also the account managers, and they were the ones that were on the phone all day in client meetings. So if you wanted to talk to someone about your account, you were talking to your Google Ads guy or you were talking to your SEO person. And and so what we realized was again, we're understaffed. So there was this point where, like, okay, either the SEO team can talk to clients about SEO or they can do SEO, but they can't do both. And so we started hiring account managers. We call them marketing coaches now, but inside our language, they're account managers. Their job is to start taking care of the team. And so we moved our team into pods to where a pod has about a hundred clients or so, and it has an account manager, an SEO specialist, a Google Ads specialist, and a graphic designer or slash social media person. Okay. And so, because we have a lot of clients, we have about we have over 800 actual shops that we do marketing for. That's there's right around 500 owners of those shops. A lot of them own multiple shops. So we're dealing with about 500 people, 500 specific clients, give or take. Uh so those are separated into five pods. And the the idea there was to make this, you know, pretty large agency feel small and have those because you remember the, you know, if you've been used to talking to the person pulling the levers on your Google ads, well, it's hard to go to someone. Now I've got to talk to this person who doesn't know everything there is to know about Google Ads. And, you know, at first there was a whole lot of, well, let me talk to my team about that. Well, let me get you an answer. And that frustrated people. Get it. But we're we've we've gone through that pain. Our account managers now are are amazing. In fact, we started changing their name to marketing coach because they have grown to a point where they are able to coach these owners in the marketing and and give them as some advice on, you know, doing better on the phones and and things like that. So it's absolutely it's been uh it's been an evolution, but it's it's been good. We did have to make quite a few changes and and not all of them were easy decisions, but but they were right and and it's been good. We're we're coming up on, you know, October 15th will be one year. Okay. It's been a good year.

SPEAKER_01 25:58

That's that's good, yeah. And I I recall whenever we had the sub figure agency meetup in St. Louis and you were kind of talking through some of those changes you were you were going through. And it's it's one of those things that it like probably made sense at the time for have the person who's doing ads that talks about ads and everything like that. But at the same time, it's almost like if they're talking with a client and the client's like questioning why ads are running a certain way or why the SEO is this way, right? Then it's like kind of in a way like the client's kind of like a quote unquote attacking their work, right? And then you have that issue where then the team member could get defensive about their work, right? And it's because they were the ones that was actually going and like pulling the levers and making all those those adjustments. And so having that marketing coach or account manager, I'm sure, has been a a huge change for you guys there. Um so well, one of the next questions was going to be like, what did you what did you come in and fix first? Obviously, it sounds like this was one of the big things came.

SPEAKER_02 26:51

Hmm. Man, that that's a that's an interesting question because there were so many things that, you know, they they all felt equally urgent, you know. So yeah, you're right. There was the thing where, yeah, we had to get SEO guys and and and Google Ads people, they're not known for their ability to communicate well with the general public, right? So yeah, so we had to get them off the phones. So there was that. I will say the thing that I have left unfixed, one of them, the first one that comes to mind, is there are some clients who just were never going to adapt to that. They were so used to talking to their Google Ads guy, and they had learned so much about marketing and they valued it that that it was that was never gonna change. So there are still some clients who talk to their Google Ads guy. Uh now they we charge them for it. It's a premium service, but if you want to pay some really good money and you were used to that, then then we worked it out because it wasn't it wasn't a battle that I was gonna fight with some some clients who had been really loyal to us, been with us a long time, paying us very well, you know, yeah, and and uh and were promoters of us and leads near me evangelists so that that's something that you know we just didn't really rock the boat there. The other thing is, you know, there there's there was a few services that we didn't offer, one of those being local service ads, which if you do Google ads for clients, especially in home services or auto repair, anything like that, anything local, you hear of an agency of our size not doing local service ads. Well, it we were having clients leave because we didn't we didn't offer to manage local service ads. Uh and we don't we don't do meta ads yet. Uh but one of the one of the things we we said was like we just we've got to get the other things firing on all cylinders. We've got to get some of these fundamentals, we've got to get this machine well oiled before we go starting ads, before we go add more services, because this whole thing will just implode if we do that. So yeah, we have since added local service ads just last month. Hired a full-time person, all they do is local service ads. And eventually at some point later this year or early 2027, we'll start offering meta ads. But that that those two services were things that they were reported, but they weren't, they weren't, you know, five alarm fires that we needed to deal with immediately.

SPEAKER_01 29:16

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, John, as we're as we're wrapping up here, you know, there's there's a lot we've walked through in terms of, you know, you beginning in in the church world, right? And then you kind of went down the aspect of we're gonna niche down into the world of like restoration and then go to churches and then you sell that agency, right? And now you're in the automotive repair world. And so there's a lot of different like paths you've had to go through this. Um if there's someone who's listening to this podcast and they're like, and I actually just talked with a guy today on a sales call, he's like, I chose um home builders as my niche. And I was like, why'd you choose home builders as my niche? He's like, I I I picked it off a list, right? And so you had said for you know, at one point in your leadership meeting, people were like, churches, churches, right? Uh for those who are listening and they're like thinking about niching down, and it's like, I have no clue what niche to choose, where where to go, what direction to go. Uh, what's kind of some of the advice that you would r recommend to them?

SPEAKER_02 30:15

Yeah, so you know, if I if I were doing it again, if I if you put me back in my generalist agency, what I wish I had done, and and well, and I someone gave me this advice, I just didn't take it. But what I should have done was look at the clients that I had that I had success with in my generalist agency and and and it's it's paid special attention to how I liked working with them because I did look at that, I did evaluate that. In fact, I ended up buying uh and I and I still have it. I narrowed it down to restoration, uh, law firms, and auto shops. And I even got like I still have the Instagram handle auto shop marketing pros or something like that, though several people have tried to buy from me, and I just hang on to it. Yeah. Because I we had gotten we had gotten good results for some law firms, and and my first client was a law firm, and then we had gotten some good results for auto shops, and I liked working with auto shop owners. Several of them became my friends, they were just good, you know, just generally good guys that that I clicked well with um and tended to be down to earth. Lawyers were different, but for whatever reason, I clicked well with lawyers and and we worked well together. And so I would say look at somewhere you've had success or you've had some experience, but I think liking the the general type of person who works in that who who owns a business in that niche, that's who you're gonna have to deal with a lot. And I think you should I think you should think long and hard about do you like those type of people? Because you're gonna have to deal with them. And that doesn't really excuse me. Let me start over there so you can edit that little burp out. Oh, yeah. That doesn't get talked about a whole lot. And I I think it's a bigger deal uh than we think.

SPEAKER_01 32:02

Oh yeah. Yes, it is. And uh, you know, it's it's it's crazy. That was part of what I went through. My agency, like we worked with home service companies, and I was like, I like the clients, they're cool, but like it didn't light me up. And then I was looking at my book of business and I was like, who out of all these do I like the most? And it was like I had a couple of agencies who had hired me to go find them developers so that way they could work and have offshore talent. And I was like, well, I love the agencies, like the clients, like that's who I love working with. So that was kind of like how Talent Fuse was born and a little bit out outside of my agency. But that was the conversation I had with this guy earlier today. I was like, you have to love who you serve because when things get tough, if you don't love who you serve, like it's you're you're not gonna be able to push through those those tough times because you have to enjoy who you serve and what you do and and and how you do it.

SPEAKER_02 32:52

And I would say I would almost treat picking a niche like buying a business. I I think if if you're not someone who's transitioning from a general, and and I think that's kind of the minority, transitioning from a general a generalist agency to a niche. Because I know a lot of guys who were just kind of had a day job and decided I hate it, I want to go into digital marketing, I got to pick a niche, what's the list? And and they didn't really have any experience or involvement to go off of. I would encourage those guys to, before you nail down a niche, if you've got the time and and could work it out, I one of the best things for you, I think, would be to find a business in that, to find that niche or and and go work there. Like, like, hey, can I come work for you for free on Fridays at your auto shop and just expose yourself to it? Or can I come clean up at the law firm or whatever it is? But like just go get in it somehow and make sure that you like those people, you like the work you that that you find it interesting, because if that niche totally bores you or disgusts you or it doesn't excite you just a little bit, it's not gonna work. So you got to figure that out somehow.

SPEAKER_01 34:00

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And e even if you can't get into like an auto-body shop or whatever, like do something as simple as like a podcast like this, and you don't have to brand it like this is agency advantage, right? So it's for age, but just call it like the St. Louis podcast, right? I'm in St. Louis, right? So just call it something broad like that and invite those people that you're thinking about in that niche on the show to talk about them growing their business in the St. Louis region, Atlanta region, whatever it is. And then you can kind of begin to see, like, okay, do I vibe? I've now I've now invited 10 personal injury attorneys on the show, and I've dreaded every single episode, right? Okay, then they're probably not the ones that that you should move forward with, right? So uh there are great ideas. There are creative ways that you can kind of really kind of begin to chop out that niche and uh and everything like that. So last question for you as we as we wrap up this sh this episode, John O. So, you know, people are at different phases in their agency. You got some who are just beginning, they're you know trying to get to that 10K a month MRR. I got some that are, you know, have already hit seven figs. And so everybody is like a bottleneck in a certain way on their own and in their own level, right? Like what where I'm a bottleneck in my company today is not where I was a bottleneck six months ago. Uh so if there's like one thing that like people listening to is like, what is John O the bottleneck in and his agency? What is that?

SPEAKER_02 35:20

What is the bot where where am I the bottleneck? I thought you were gonna ask a different question because I was uh I was you were making me think of people that I I get asked the question a lot, like, okay, hey, I'm I'm stuck at this level. What do I need to do to get to the next level? Let's do that. And well, in and they kind of go together. I think because my bottleneck, your bottleneck, and everybody's a bottleneck, when I get taken to those let me pick your brain coffees, people are so underwhelmed and unimpressed and actually really let down by me because they're expecting there's this brilliant idea that they just have not thought about that I figured out, or that I've got this silver bullet that I just nobody really told. There is no, there's rarely a secret sauce to this. Most people know what it is they need to do next. Typically, they're not doing it because it involves getting rid of someone and there's an emotional thing there, or it involves spending some money and they're they're used to trying to get people on a discount. A lot of times it's because all of this comes back to people. So it's it's a lot of times it's getting rid of somebody or hiring somebody and and not being cheap, but actually paying uh what it's gonna take to get someone to do that job that you need well. Uh so my bottleneck, where I'm the bottleneck, is yeah, yeah, going back to, you know, I was a pastor for 20 years, man. I'm I'm like programmed not to hurt anybody's feelings and and stuff. So it is hard for me to make those decisions to let someone go who I know would do really well somewhere else, or who I know would they don't even want to be here. They just don't want to leave, you know, that that sort of thing. So that's that's where I'm the bottleneck. That's where I've had to get out of the way. But you most guys I talk to in their agency, guys and girls I talk to that are agency owners that are struggling and and and just need that push, they know they know what they need to do. And and and I've I've been in those rooms where I've watched them, I've watched the light bulb go off, and it was never something revolutionary. I mean, it's always you either need to spend more on marketing, you need to get some help with sales because you're not good at it, or your fulfillment sucks, or you don't have good account managers and you're losing clients all the time. I mean, it's one of those four things. No matter how big you are, you're going to have to market. You got to have somebody who can sell, you gotta have a good product and keep it good and make it better, and then you gotta have people who are building relationships. There's really not much outside of that. And if you do those things well and you invest good resources, I think a lot of agency owners are just cheap and we're not we're we don't want to invest in that. I mean, 90% of agencies are spending nothing on marketing and then sitting around scratching their head why they're not growing. It's because you're not you're not doing any marketing at all. So you know what it is. Like just just be honest with yourself and do it. Fire the person, hire the person, spend the money.

SPEAKER_01 38:11

Yeah, absolutely. And so sometimes it could also be just there are you mentioned the the background being a pastor and everything. Sometimes there's also just like limiting beliefs or limiting uh, you know, things that were pre-programmed in my mind in our mind or we learned over time. You have to just like convince yourself, like if you think you're not good at sales, like no, like I am good at sales, or you think, you know, I'm I'm cheap, I've always been cheap, right? Well, maybe you just need to like invest in something to make yourself realize that okay, like prove yourself in that sense.

SPEAKER_02 38:39

And you may be bad at sales. I'm not great at sales, but there's a point where like it doesn't matter. You better get good at sales if you want to grow a business. You're just gonna have to figure it out. And and then you figure out, hey, you're not as bad as you think. And I I think the the other thing that tends to be a bottleneck, I know it was for me and my other agency, the bills got paid, my my team got paid, we had a decent profit margin, I had a good lifestyle business, you know, I was able to do some fun stuff. And so I was just kind of fat and happy. And as long as we weren't churning more clients than we were selling, I w I was cool with just kind of maintaining because I was comfortable. Yeah. And and I think that's where a lot of us get stuck too and don't and and which I that's not necessarily a bad thing if that's who you want to be. That's a lot less stressful that way. Right. But if you want to grow something big and huge, then yeah, you're gonna you're gonna have to get over that.

SPEAKER_01 39:32

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Johnno, thanks again for hopping on today. And that thank you for watching or listening to the show. Go follow Johnno, check out Leeds near me, and all the links to get in touch with John or his company are in the notes of the show. If this one helped you, you can share it with another agency owner who is still trying to do it all alone and subscribe to the show so you don't miss next week. But until next time, this is the agency advantage.