SMMA: How To Make $7,000 A Month With Your Agency (Agency Incubator Student Interview)

so ladies and gentlemen imagine having an agency where you didn't charge clients at all and what I mean by that is you made all of your money through commission or percentage of Bro as well that's what we have right here we have an agency incubator student who actually and this is a self-proclaimed title is my slowest success story so you're gonna find out very shortly a little bit about Josh's story and you know he came into the process thinking that he would be my quickest success student right that was his goal funnily enough he didn't

sign a clan for 18 months and I have so much respect for him the fact that he I mean he just kept chipping away at it for a year and a half you know I don't even know you know from the point of getting my first glance in my second client I was six months I don't know if I would have been able to hold off for 18 months without even getting a client full stop and you know now he's at a point where he's making $7,000 and want to profit with his agency and you

know really it is a testament to what happens when you stick at the process and you rather than being results orientated your action and process orientated so ladies and gentleman you are in for an absolute delight today I'm gonna go ahead and roll this tune in to you now ladies and gentleman welcome back to another student interview we are joined today with potentially a member of ABC invader has one of the coolest names I know Joshua sparks a lot of cool in my name but and it's Josh first of all thank you so much for

taking the time we're a day to hop on this and share your wisdom and there are some as I said like I one thing I love about these two in interviews is first of all I love it when a student does something outside of what I usually advise and I love them digging deep into that and especially when it hits something that is quite clearly working for them but first things first obviously I mentioned off camera I love the pinups that you go on the back yeah yeah yeah straight from agency incubator I love it

yeah do you want to just and also the other thing that I want to highlight with the students use do just your sheer [ __ ] tenacity yeah respect to you genuinely and I I tell people my look because you are a perfect case of what I tell people I tell people I'm like there are certain people who come into the program who realistically considering the amount of work that they've put in and and just the amount of just yeah just amount of work they've put in quite frankly deserve to get a client with that

level of work ethic probably after a year but they get one in month one and then there's people like you who realistic considering the amount of work ethic you put in deserve to get a client at month one and you go one and one once 18 you know that should that should give you an idea that look at the end of day that's that's a good testament to life in general which is yeah look you put the work in everything that is in your control you maximize rather than they luck and timing has a lot

to do with things there's enough of me talking do you want just introduce yourself how'd you find my stuff yeah how do you initially come in contact with with myself in grade you see and yeah process joining the program and building your agency though I actually this is about two years ago I think I was working for a solar company and I got hit with a Billy gene at about one of his courses right and I actually was trying to start a clothing company at that time and I was like oh I'm gonna use this

information to market my t-shirts and so I bought that course and I started trying to advertise these t-shirts on Facebook and I was actually using print full of crayon demand service and so I was working with like an eight dollar profit margin and I knew nothing about Facebook ads and so obviously I got [ __ ] results and didn't get anything out of it but I spent like two or three hundred bucks on that course and I was like man I need to like do something with this so anyways you know started looking into just

the whole agency space and as soon as I started searching anything on it your ads just started bombarding me right so I got hit with one of your ads on YouTube I forget which one specifically but like I said this was back when you were still living at your mom's house so it's been a while since I've been following your journey and you know I took took me about I think six months before I was able to actually invest into what was back in the six-figure SMA program and yeah I mean like I was telling

you off-camera it took me a long time to get any results you know I was I made the typical entrepreneur mistake of trying to focus on too many things at once and I also made the mistake of niche hopping around for too long and I did that for about twelve months you know I actually started with solar companies which is who I work with now but after I've been getting the results with them for you know a month or two I switched over to I think dentist and then two gyms and yoga studios and like

I made the classic mistake of you know not seeing results for a few weeks or a month and then thinking that I wasn't in the right niche right or that you know there was some external thing that was keeping me from seeing success when really it was just like I just needed to buckle down stick to one thing and continue on and it took me 18 18 months to actually realize that and to get any sort of results but yeah like I said as soon as I actually stuck to one thing focused on it and

just kind of detached from the results right that's a huge sort of lesson that I've learned throughout this entrepreneurial journey like you you're always saying you know the hungry don't get fed I was hungry I was starving right like everywhere in my room my vision board post-it notes all of throughout my house the wallpaper on my phone everything had 10k per month on it right like I was focused on that number and that end result and I was completely attached to it right like my self-worth was attached to it and until I got that result

I didn't feel worthy of much really honestly like not yeah so anyways you know detaching from that and just really being okay with the journey and realizing that it's about the journey it's not about the 10k per month it's not about the penthouse it's not about the Lambo it's not about any of that stuff it's about the journey and you know when I finally kind of made those revelations in my head that's when things started to kind of happen for me mmm amazing so as you kind of briefly mentioned there you went full circle and

if she's starting off with with a solar and ending back right at it you know out of 12 months of shopping yeah first thing or there's one question I have that will come back - can you lay out the structure of your agency your your pricing your fees etc etc because I think that's a really interesting point yeah so what when it comes to structuring an agency in my opinion especially today right like you alone have thousands of students right and then there's other people out there teaching the same exact thing right the same exact

thing but the same thing so there's a lot of agency owners out there and every single day the competition grows and there's definitely there's enough businesses out there to support the amount of agency owners that there are but at the end of the day every potential client that I've ever talked to has already been pitched multiple times they've either gone forward and had an experience with an agency multiple times or they've been pitched dozens of times and so you know I just I kind of was becoming more and more aware of that and how competitive

this space is becoming because of how viable and how amazing this business is anytime there's an industry or a business model that is super it just makes a lot of sense you're gonna get a lot of competition and so I was experiencing that and when you have a lot of competition you kind of have to pivot and you have to come up with things that other people aren't doing and so number one I focus on a niche that I was passionate about solar you know I care about the environment it's all that stuff I'm from

California so I'm somewhat of a hippie and the other thing is that you know so when it comes to the way I structure my agency I work on a rev-share commission based payment structure so solar panel systems they get measured in kilowatts that's how like they measure their systems and so I get paid 10 cents a watt or $100 per kilowatt the average system is about ten kilowatt so the average Commission is about a thousand dollars on the average job so yeah so we get paid a commission every time we help a client make a

sale and yeah so we do all of their Facebook ad that's all we do is we just do lead generation on Facebook we use a platform called high level to kind of help them nurture these leads and convert the leads into appointments because like I said earlier like we really have to as agency owners find things that other agency owners aren't doing to you know increase our value and to show that to these these potential clients right and so I noticed that everybody else is providing leaves but nobody's really helping the customer make any money

right at the end of the day you can't take leads to the bank and leaves are great only if they convert but if Ali doesn't convert into actual dollars into their bank account they don't they're not gonna pay for the meaning right so I was really focused on finding a way to not only provide leaves but provide appointments in sales so that's kind of how we've yeah structured the agency mmm I love that well there's one thing I want to touch on first things first last month you clocked in $7,000 correct yeah yeah and you're

you're running everything yourself right at the moment yeah so $7,000 profit last month awesome on a commission basis is incredible first of all how many clients are you working with right now we have six I have a few more that are supposed to be coming on but you know everything that's going on right now so well actually that that Lee weighs into two questions but first things first I wholeheartedly agree with what you have said there about you can't take me to the bank and I think to be honest when you're a novice intermediate agency

owner and you've you're within that first year or so you need to have very strong expectations with clients that hey I'm bringing you the leads but then you know I can't those leads for you and you need to have that strong expectation with clans within that way I'd say within the first year from there it's like because I even realized this with my agency look at than a day at the end of a the number of the KPI that we're optimizing for is you know overall purchase conversion value like we have that pure number at

the end how much would spend how much does me both would you know with our info product clients and our e-commerce clients but in beginning of you know I kind of had the shift q4 of 2019 and it's been something that I've been thinking a lot the past six months in transitioning I realize I'm like a man you can either [ __ ] about the fact that your client has a really shitty automation and you know you could be making a lot more money and you could be making a lot more money for the client

F when they spent some time fixing that automation or you could just [ __ ] fix automation for them so I spent two days and I built out an entire sort of as built an entire automation side of activecampaign and all of our control product clients get it but actually I say that not all of our input parklands basically we've done that we also have five template emails that any client can send they can literally usually it's just half you have to plug in certain stuff like it's it's totally evergreen in the past nine six

to nine months I've created six seven documents for my clans we have a total cheat sheet on increasing landing page speeds and even just taking like images and compressing them down to a landing page speeds are quicker both for e-commerce and info parklands and we've created all these cheat sheets and all these resources because I realized amen unless you're unless the intention is you are gonna do a 2-day webinar build for this clan and charging twenty five thousand pounds you can either protect your ego and say oh no but like you know like yes we're

making them up you know a account account total we're making them a a2x return on adspend let's say it's an info product business yeah or you can go well you could get that to 3x and as I said a lot of our clients or base plus percentage of row s so it's in our best interest so it's like you can either have that ego protection that's like well no that's where my responsibility ends or you could just shut the [ __ ] up and do it for them and at the end a benefit more so

that's something that you know I think as you become a more of a chore agency owner I think you have to take on this radical responsibility for everything and it is also it's different outwardly versus inwardly you see with our clients outwardly we still say this is where our responsibility stops our movie we set that again occation but inwardly we're gonna go through if it comes to it we're gonna go to their webinar and get me webinar feedback we're gonna write some emails for them we're gonna go ahead and help them improve the landing page

feeds we're gonna go ahead and help them improve their automation because it's in our best interest even if we don't have a percentage of rise if that if we can improve that and then that client stays on extra couple months what that does for a our bottom line is crazy and that is coming from someone who as I said is always 50% of our clients our base 50% of our base are just are just retainer and 50% our base plus percentage of Oz with you where you're in a game where you're just taking percentage like

you you've got to be a hundred percent responsible for everything you know it's your best interest so that's something that I would say when initially when you're starting don't impose that on yourself because it's too much stress as an agency owner once in my opinion once you've been in the agency game for a year you could just kind of you got to mature a little and you got to start you know look at yourself in the mirror and going okay am I going to protect my ego and go well no I've got them lead and

even if you know the leads are solid or are you gonna go yeah the leads are [ __ ] solid but at the end a they're not following up with them on time and I can either complain and [ __ ] about it and you know keep a client on for three months and then once the three month minimum is done they haven't made money because you haven't educated them on how to follow up with the leads and close those leads or you can just do it and keep that clown on for 12 months but

what do you want to get so I think that's a very very very good point you made right there my next question to you is when you said that you're making 7k I was expecting you're working with like two or one clients so my question to you is is there a big disparity between the Klan that brings in the most in terms of commissions and have you ever thought about like so you know out of six clients surely there's that clan that makes 3km on thin that clan that makes to camp like surely have you

know often thought about like cutting some of your clients or absolutely so that's kind of what I've been learning and growing through for the last two to three weeks is realizing just to kind of also touch on what you were just saying that you know I know that the weeds we produce will and can convert if we in the client provide or not apply apply the right sort of follow-up and weed nurturing strategy to these the problem is is that you know not not all clans are the same right and so we've had some clients

and they're like man these leaves are amazing they're super cheap like are our numbers are amazing and then there's the clients who have been like what's going on with these leaves I can't get anybody to answer the phone and so it's just it's been a huge learning curve this whole thing is and of course it's been a huge learning curve but in the last few weeks that's really what I've been trying to kind of just dial in and figure out because one of our clients right now accounts for more than half of that 7k so

if you do that math you know the other ones essentially aren't much and has numbers or service and has everything to do with the client and yeah so that's really you know it's the whole 8020 principle obviously 20% of our clients are gonna bring in 80 percent of revenue and I'm pretty sure that that's pretty spot-on at least for our agency here so yeah absolutely really been thinking about how to you know just how to kind of look at the the right relationships that we have with the right client and how we can just multiply

that right and then get rid of the other ones that aren't as valuable so you know as you know I still consider myself still a pretty novice agency owner and you know I think that that's just part of the learning curve you know in the beginning you're eager to take on anybody and everybody and you know when I go through the discovery calls I do ask you know 15 20 questions to see where they're at as a company see if they're really somebody that I can help out at the end of the day though I

think I've been a little too lenient and I've brought on a couple people that in the back of my mind I was saying they're probably not the best fit you know for us as a solar company agency we prefer to work with clients to have like a very professional built out dedicated call centre somebody or a team of people that can really manage these leads because I think with any industry the average amount of times you have to follow up with somebody is like five to seven times right before you can get a sale or

in this case get an appointment and we've had clients in the past so we'll call the leap one time the lead won't answer because they're probably [ __ ] work and the client will text back a respond name this latest [ __ ] and it's just like no you didn't really give it a chance you know and so it's just it's a mentality it's also an expectation that you know I've gotten a lot better at setting the proper expectations especially with the onboarding funnel that I built out that's something I go into and death you

know what the client just making sure like they understand it follow-up is key you know that if you know we're not applying the right strategies to the leads the leaves are going to be what you put into them right and so but yeah they answer your question absolutely something that we've been working on recently it's just I say we I mean I can I've been working on is just really trying to figure out why it is that this one client has seen such great results and coincidentally enough they're the easiest the most adorable client to

work with so yeah trying to figure out you know like I said how to multiply that relationship and find 10 more of those because this this one client has the potential of being a whale you know we've all ready for this for the main client right now we've already produced them about 600 K in revenue and that equates to about 15 K in you know rent share for us and we've been paid out for about half of that so far so that client right there yeah we just need to find you know eight to nine

more of those and hopefully it the seven figure your mark when you say would you produce 600 K in revenue what are they actually taking home from that um their profit margins around ten fifteen percent so you know six please okay or so so sixty to ninety K yeah yeah 69 K okay so you're taking and you take so 25-ish percent of that yeah yeah understood perfect it's drops tell me what does a average day in your life as an agency owner look like so but even before finding human I've always been you know I

think I just got really lucky with the family I was born into you know I've been a vision board first my whole life I've been a reader my whole life I've been a meditator for awhile so you know as of lately with the time change I start waking up at 5:30 part of that I was waking up around 4:30 I spend probably too much time working on you know like personal development I spend the first four hours of my day like not doing anything work-related i like i said i meditate I read I journal I

studied my SBA's sheet I work out take a cold shower 50% of the time and I need a solid bribe it's really cold out here in California so those cold showers if I can rough but I try just out of curiosity just accuracy do you find the Cortland because for me this is such a strong correlation if I don't meditate or take my cold shower there's such a strong correlation between days that I don't do one of those two and the quality of my focus and productivity that day so yeah is there any correlation between

the cold shower the days you don't take a cold shower or you kind of wimp out or you're like ah you know what it's it's cold let's do a lukewarm today and and your productivity and your focus later that day absolutely man just in general ly taking like an hour to yourself a day you know not waking up and jumping on your phone and not waking up and jumping on your computer enhancing answering clinic questions taking that hour to just be with yourself whatever it is you know meditating is not for everybody reading might not

be for everybody but what regardless of what your thing is take an hour to spin that with yourself and the days that I don't do that which is pretty rare but the days that I don't do that it's like a downward spiral you know it's hard to kind of get back on track if you if I don't start my day off right right so yeah but to answer your question in all honesty I work on my agency for probably I want to say 20 hours a week like max not a lot like not a whole

lot the campaigns you know as far as the actual ads management I have that downs routine pretty just you know rinse and repeat a vote for me at this point I had a curiosity by the way by the way if you were managing let's say two clients who are producing the most amount of income rather than the six how how much would that Weekly number go to probably like seven six seven hours a day zero it is insane you know at the beginning the journey I was working another job and so the amount of time

I spent away just you can get on an outreach that I was doing it was tough right 60 hour weeks all planned but now it's it's a lot easier and as far as like how [ __ ] goes I actually have been able to really slow down on my outreach I don't a lot my main methods have always been Facebook groups and just cold messaging on Facebook that things would be the best way for this niche myself but yeah it's crazy when you start to get results how and the less hungry you get the more

opportunities seem to flood your way it's like I've had clients hit me up people that I reached out to on Facebook like months ago when I was starving right and now that like I have enough to keep me busy I have enough revenue coming in to keep me fed and all that now it's that kind of non-stop like every week or so I'll get hit up by an old leave that I reached out to or a referral from somebody and yeah so don't do much on the outreach anymore so that's probably why I don't really

spend that much time on my own my agency at the moment at least hmm okay amazing very to 20 hours a week if you brought it down to your two highest producing clients seven hours a week very agile very they're very easy to work with man I know this was obviously something to do there right like I need to uh figure that out and man it took you 18 months to sign a client what would you say to someone who's 90 days in and they're about to give up so this is what I would say

Minh and I think I've posted a couple times in the group about this because it's a super important to me and I was telling you off camera like I came in with a mission I was like I'm gonna be as quick a success story I'm gonna get a client in like 15 days I'm gonna blow this thing up 10k in 30 days no doubt like I got this [ __ ] that's just overly confident and you know I did put in the work I put in the work to like I was at my computer [

__ ] all day long when I wasn't working this is where I was and it just didn't happen for me with like it just didn't happen and I was wondering like what the [ __ ] are they doing like what are these kids doing because I'm 26 I'm older than I think your average student is and I was like what the hell are these [ __ ] 18 year olds doing but I'm not and it was blowing my mind and yeah it took me 18 months and so what I would tell somebody is that there's

so much there's so much to unpack there man I think it's very very important obviously persistence is everything right that's the what's the guy that started McDonald's sramek Ray Ray Kroc I think so yes on the beginning that movie there was a quote I don't even know who the was but it was something along the lines of like you know just intelligence there's only worth so much right there's so many people out there with with intelligence that don't amount to much right luck you know then somebody who's super lucky that also wastes those opportunities and

stuff but the one thing that is like the most valuable quality to have is perseverance right and persistence and so I really just kind of took that to heart and I realized that at the end of the day if it takes me four years to see success for this right and I'm able to build a six-figure agency I'm still way ahead of all the people who are wasting four years in college who are spending 50 200 grand on this you know on this education that may or may not even get them to a place where

they're actually content and happy and successful satisfied right and so I was like at the end of the day if it takes me before [ __ ] years to do this it's going to be worth it and I think just kind of understanding that and just being patient understanding it's about the journey it's not about the destination detaching from all the goals that I had like I was saying I don't know if this was on camera on camera but I had camera yeah a month everywhere in my house right so I was really really focused

on the goals and so detaching from that really helped and so if you are 90 days 120 days in and you haven't seen success yet you know I would I would say that it comes down to three things right the three sort of main pillars that I sort of focus on our work ethic caption and your why right you have to have those three or at least a balance of those three you don't have work ethic it doesn't matter how passionate or how strong your Y is you're not gonna get anywhere right you need to

have some work ethic but if all you have is work ethic and you don't have any passion about what you're doing or a why supporting why you're doing it that that work ethic isn't going to amount to much right so you need to have a balance of all three and really it's just about kind of you again this is why it's important to take that time in the beginning of the day to just kind of be with yourself work on yourself and best into yourself whether that's reading or meditating or journaling or studying your vision

board is to really kind of find those three things right find your why like obviously you have them very very strong why with your mom I have a very similar relationship with my mother I grew up as a only child for like the first 10 11 years of my life my dad and I don't really have a great relationship and you know so my why's is very very big in my life and yeah so I would say if you're 120 days in and you are not where you want to be I would say to really

sit with yourself obviously go through the SBA worship I think that's super helpful but also spend some time working on your wife finding that and if you have your while locked in and you're passionate about what you're working on then I would say that it's most likely your work ethic and that you need to be real with yourself and really evaluate how much time you're spending on IPAs thinking income-producing activities you know how many hours are you spending scrolling through Facebook pretending like you're working and how many hours are you actually spending on doing things

that are actually gonna catch you somewhere but at the end of the day you know like I said if it takes us four years to see success from this we're still in my opinion in a much better position than the masses out there right the majority of people who are you know I mean like they're spending 50 to 200 K on an education that may or may not get them to life or their dreams and it takes them for two you know it's just like it's it's ridiculous and yeah I see a lot of like

entitlement in this space to be honest with you people getting frustrated at that 60 to 90-day mark because they haven't seen success and it's like man like you're only 60 to 90 days in it's not like you it's not you're already 60 to 90 days and it's you're only 60 to 90 days and like for you to have a profitable business within the first year that is something that like I don't know the statistic but I would assume 90 plus percent of business owners don't experience and this is a business model where that is very

very viable and you know a year 18 months 2 years 3 years like doesn't matter mean like it is so worth it it's so worth it in my opinion hmm well I've just had an amazing time sitting back and listening to to most of this we've unpacked a lot of a lot of incredible stuff I'm just gonna ask you one more granular question and that's actually you know off-camera I'd do it nonetheless I lucky you're right I look at your right arm you got a little loot bagged yeah I can see him why'd you just

have to go for the loop rather than aura um you know it's honestly I don't I don't know man I just I got shown an advertisement for it and I just said I just kind of said [ __ ] it I'll try it I'm not a big fan of you know I actually I stopped wearing my hair pods for a while I stopped using the wood for a while as well because of the the EMF and so I'm not a huge fan of it I've been wearing this for the last couple months as just sort

of like a gauge I really wanted to see you know obviously the stats behind it I'm pretty regimented about my sleeve as far as like what time we go to sleep what time I wake up making sure that the conditions in my room are built for a good sleep environment somebody I really look up to look up to is Sean Stephenson I read the book sleep smarter a couple times and so I am really adamant about getting good sleep but I wanted to see just some more the statistics behind it I don't know specifically why

I chose this over ordering I think to be honest with you is as ugly as this thing is I've never been a ring guy and I think that's what it comes down to I've never worn a ring before in my life so that might be it I wear a lot of long sleeves out here in California so I can kind of hide this this thing and yes that's probably it but yeah I think that um that's obviously another super important factor of success is just making sure your health is on point like if you're trying

to work off of four or five hours a night of sleep you're just not gonna perform efficiently there's really not like there might be people out there that can get away with it I personally am NOT like my body needs seven and a half eight hours of sleep for me to be where I need to be work rice in performance wise and yeah this just kind of helps you see you know like I think I've posted this in the group as well because I think I was at like a ninety to sleep efficiency rate and

this really helps you see so like on the days where you know this will show you how much strain you get throughout the day if I get a lot of strain throughout the day which should technically lead to me getting better sleep at night but for whatever reason my sleep levels are still low and I'm not getting good quality sleep that means you know usually a few things that means I either ate too late maybe drink alcohol or maybe ate some sugar too late or some of the conditions in my room form right like I

got a cat that likes a party in the middle of the night so I have to stop or they lock him out of my room but anyways like just you know it kind of just helps you see the different little nuances that make a big difference amazing well yeah dude once again I can't thank you enough for taking the time I read a to share some wisdom I said I love I think I think we I think we don't eat into a lot of nuance stuff and as I did you got you got grit you

are determination 18 months is I don't even know if I would have been able to do 18 months oh yeah that's actually my cell phone now because at the beginning like I always focused on being a quicker success story now I think it's almost probably safe to say that I'm your slowest or longer are to [ __ ] put 18 months in without getting paid you know and so I guess that's my claim to fame no I'll take it I'll put there's the title great urgency slow success - and there's lots of love - appreciate

it no like wasn't thank you