Ladies and gentlemen bigger is not better. And in 2020, you really want to be building a boutique agency. And this has really been my obsession.
And I think the thing that I've mastered over the past few years and at my education company GrowYourAgency I've got seven figure agency owners, that's revenue though, who run more full-scale agencies coming to me, wanting to go from making seven figures revenue to making seven figures profit. And when you were in an agency profit to honest is the only thing that really matters. And at this point I actually have a few seven figure students profit, as I said, and the way that they've gone to that point is by building a boutique agency.
And I think it's been very interesting to actually get my agency to the point it is. And it's always been very interesting for me to hear stories from Ciaran Now, as when you guys know Ciaran is the product manager for GrowYourAgency, but he also spends 30% of his time in copywriting for all of our clients here at IAG media. And Ciaran used to actually be a part of a full service agency.
In fact, he was the head honcho. He was the boss. He was managing 400,000 pounds a month in retainers.
And if you want a real funniest story, technically Ciaran was my boss for a day. I interned at that agency because I thought, Hey, maybe I should get some experience of what it's like at a proper agency. And I remember I went for one day and never came back.
And that was I think three and a half years ago. At that point I only had one client and, um, I thought that I would spend every day that we've worked on my own agency. And then one day of the week, I would end up going to Ciaran's agency, just as I said, get some, uh, experience of what it's like at a, at a bigger agency, alas, that was not the route that I was going to go down.
I was going to have to go down the route of having a boutique agency. And in this video, I want to really break down the three keys to having a boutique agency in 2020. And the three things you really need to focus on because to me, having a boutique agency is the only way to having a successful agency.
And more importantly, to have an actual profitable agency here in 2020. Now the first thing you need to do is you need to only offer one service and look before you click away, because you've probably heard this before. Listen, this is by far, the biggest quantum shift that I had in 2018 was going from offering multiple services.
You know, in 2017, I used to shoot the photos and videos. I used to edit them. I used to distribute them.
I used to do the captions. I used to do a whole host of things and it was so sporadic and over the place. And in 2018, I shifted to just doing Facebook ads for my clients.
Now, for me, it doesn't matter. I think, you know, I could have built my agency to where it was safe, still having creative agency. The point was not what service I did.
It was the fact that I just picked one thing. And even to the state, I'm very, very tempted because I know for a fact that if I start an email marketing, a branch of the agency, or we're doing clients, email marketing for 2,500 pounds a month, I know for a fact, by the end of this year, I could get that to 30 K a month business and I'm not gonna lie. It's all something that's played on my mind.
Another thing is IP protection internally. I have someone full time for intellectual property protection. Like there's quite a few people at that company that you guys aren't familiar with.
You've never seen their faces. So Nikolai is hired full time. His entire job is well.
He has a, he has a few different, interesting, uh, interesting rules of the company. But the main thing is around IP protection, uh, cybersecurity as well as law. He's a very scary guy.
I'll tell you that. But anyways, I digress. Something like that.
We, at this point have become the experts in the world when it comes to intellectual property protection. I know because I had four service providers. I was paying for every single month in order to deal with IP protection.
I brought it in house full time and we built some ridiculous systems to manage IP protection and you can never fully manage it. But, uh, I don't know anyone who does it better than us. So when that knowledge, IP protection is such a pain in the ass to all infoproduct businesses out there.
So my point is that is a big, big issue. And I know that if we charge clients 2,500 a month, we would have 15, 20 clients lined up. I know because there's a service provider I used to use who charged me two K a month, who I sent probably 10 of my clients too.
And I mean, he was great, but we do the job literally 10 times better. So even just a business like that, you know, even at my point, I always have to remind myself, I'm like, okay, yes, you could start offering these things to your existing clients, but now it's like, you've started another business. And that's truly what having another service is.
It's like having an entirely new business. And for me, it's especially dumb because I know I can get to 250 K a month profit with IAG Media, just offering one service. In fact, I can get to 500 K a month profit.
I know that for a fact. So it would be so dumb to start this new branch of the agency, because when you offer one service, you can literally just copy paste, procedures and protocols, especially if you're running ads for local businesses. I mean, honestly, guys, you can pretty much duplicate the ads.
All you have to do is change the creatives. You can duplicate the landing pages. You can duplicate the offer.
I mean, it's, it really is copy paste with eCommerce and info-product clients. You can't actually duplicate the service delivery aspect of it, but all the procedures and protocols are the same. So that is number one.
Number two is only work with one niche. That was once again, another big quantum shift I had in 2018, you know, from 2017 kind of just taking any client that I could get to end of 2017, early 2018 niching down on one specific niche. I was working with gyms at the time and I had a couple of different straight clients here and there.
And going from that to later on in the year are really selling down on my niche, which was InfoProduct clients. And, you know, 20% of the time we still work with eCommerce brands, but for us to going from info park, which is by far the hardest niche to operate in, to working with eCommerce clients, it's kind of like a, it's such a walk in the park for us. As I said, for me, really getting focused in on my niche was when I went from doing 15, 20,000 months sporadically here and there to then hitting a hundred, came on profit with my agency and consistently doing 60, 70, $80,000 a month for me, I found my niche and I became an expert in it.
When you have one niche, when you have one service and you have your agency every year, it compounds you become more and more of an expert in your niche. You get more and more referrals. Like I still get people coming to me from a client that we worked with two years ago and they're like, Oh yeah, they told me that you guys are the people that go to and imagine, you know, as your clan roster grows in over several years, you start working with dozens, maybe even hundreds of clients think about how many referrals and how many times they're chatting to other people at business networks and business meetups.
And they're like, Oh, this is the agency that did well for me. You know, it really compounds when you work with one niche and you work with one service and you need to remember that having multiple niches is true, like having multiple different businesses. The other thing that I implore you to do in 2020 is get creative guys.
Everyone is like, Oh, I'm going to work with eCommerce businesses or I'm going to not to be able to work with infoproduct businesses because hopefully people understand just like local businesses, the level of difficulty needed to run local business ads is here. E-commerce is like here. And then InfoPath is like way up there because it's not only what happens in the ad dashboard.
You have to look at every single breaking point in the funnel, every single contingency, when there's a problem on the ad side, there's so many different reasons it could be broken. Whereas from an eCommerce perspective, if a KPI is out of whack, then you can just kind of look at the other KPIs within the dashboard. And you'll kind of find a solution with infoproduct businesses.
Now you're delving into the funnel level. Anyways, my point is, everyone's like, Oh, you know, like I'm just gonna run ads for eCommerce or real estate agents or gyms. And that's awesome.
That's cool. But then if you can find a unique niche, like for example, a greasy, we have someone killing it with pet hotels, like really high end pet hotels. We've got people killing it in construction.
We've got people killing it with chiropractors who got people, killing it with med spas, dentists. We've got people killing it with specifically furniture companies. I mean, there's so many that are alluding my mind.
We've got people who specifically focus on meal delivery companies only. So my point is, there's so many different niches and we've got people who are killing them with SAS companies, advertising for SAS companies. Once again, there's so many different niches that you can work in and operate in.
I really just urge you get a little more creative and the last thing needed in order to have a boutique agency. And this isn't so much a tangible tip. It's more of a overarching theme and that's resourcefulness.
This is a principle that you need to live by you, your agency, everything it does internally and externally, you need to achieve more with less resources. You need to be lean, okay. You need to be frugal.
You need to do less things, but eat out more efficiency from it. For example, outreach, find the outreach method that works best for you and equal out more efficiency out of it. Once you've actually identified, which outreach method works the best, either eat out more efficiency from the process or find a way to scale your output by potentially bringing on an appointment setter rather than doing 12 different forms of outreach.
Would your website be resourceful? If you're an agency incubator, I give you a template that you can just use it. I write out the box, it's ready to go.
Okay. So you can use that as a website template, or you can also just create a Wix or a Sqaurespace. Like, you know, it doesn't matter.
My point is be resourceful. I got my first client, August of 2016 and it was only may of 2017, which by the way, I was already making $10,000 a month with my agency at that point that I even had an agency name and developed a really shitty website that I think is still the no, is it knows a different website to what I have right now. Well, actually that's at the time recording this.
Anyway, my point is I had a really janky website. I had that for a year and then basically my website got hacked because I never bothered to upgrade the WordPress. And basically my site was down for like four or five months.
Cause I just found it amusing that in 2018, my biggest period of growth was when I had no website. And I eventually developed another shitty janky website. I've ran with that for the last 18 months.
And now finally, finally, I'm at a point where I'm like, okay, I've been an agency owner for four years. I should probably have a good website. That's a good representation of our brand.
But once again, that brings us back to a point of resourcefulness. I was just resourceful. I didn't care the next way in which you need to be resourceful is with your team.
For me, I expect my team to do as much as four different people. For example, Danny, my CMO, he does sales in the sense that he does the first demo call with clients. Now we've moved to, to call closed strategy.
I don't recommend it for everyone. And just in my instance, that allows us to have a high volume of calls, but I don't have to take the first call. So Danny is doing sales, he's done hiring.
He's the one who did out of 150 applicants for our new performance marketer role. He did the initial 45 interviews. He does things at the funnel level.
He does things automation wise for our clients, as well as the, as like you need a team that is resourceful. And if you're starting to develop a team, hiring a team that won't have to make excuses to say, I can't do this and that instead we'll learn how to do it. And that really hits home.
The point of unique to be resourceful and your team needs to be resourceful, no matter what, I even see this with, uh, you know, mid-level agency owners where they have a performance marketer, but then they also have a copywriter. And then they also have someone who does the, like for me. .
. The performance marketer should do the copywriting And in their free time, they should be learning about funnels and automations and stuff like that. Like, yes, I have a full time copywriter at IAG media here, but that's because 70% of his time is spent on green seed.
com. 30% is spent on IAG Media. And that was just a unicorn situation.
Like I couldn't have predicted that if Ciaran wasn't around, Danny would still be writing all of the ad copy for all of our clients like he used to do in the past. So ladies and gentlemen, I hope all of that makes sense. Look, from every perspective, from a client delivery perspective, you know, actually delivering great results for your clients in terms of just being happy as an agency owner and having joy as an agency owner, because you're actually building machine, not a blood sucking leech, as well as from an actual profitability perspective.
In every sense, having a boutique agency is the way to go. Now, if you would like our help in order to build your own six figure and multi six figure a year boutique agency, and you can just have some final questions about Agency Incubator, then I'd love for you to book in a call with our student success manager, Caden it's a free 30 minute call. He'll just ask you some questions about your current situation and on the call, you can ask them any last minute questions about Agency Incubator, that thousands of agency owners in our community, the success stories that we've gone and kind of the process we use to get there.
So as I said, go ahead and booking a call with him. Or if you're someone who's eager and just wants to jump straight into the program, there's also a link to the enrollment page, ladies and gentlemen, hope you guys enjoyed this video and I'll see the next one.
