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Building an Agency is Hard but Easy -- Dave Valentine #5806 · Financial Survival Network

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  You're listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network, where you get valuable information you
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  Welcome you are listening to watching the Financial Survival Network. I'm your host,
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  Carrie lets Well, if you've got an agency and you're looking to scale it,
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  then you're going to want to hear from this person you've got on the
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  show before, Dave Valentine. Dave, great to have you back. So
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  give us an idea of what you do, your philosophy of business, and
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  how you make business work for others. Yeah. So I'm a serial entrepreneur
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  and business owner. I own seven different companies. We're in the process of
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  selling a few of them right now, which is which is fun and stressful
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  all the same time. And Yeah, the basic way that we look at
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  any sort of business is pretty simple. We believe in creating outrageous offers,
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  something that sounds too good to be true, but it is actually very profitable
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  for the company that we companies that we own, and really figuring out your
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  marketing and sales in ahead of time and then fulfilling on the back end,
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  because most companies get really concerned with I gotta get the product right. I
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  gotta get the product right, and it's like, well, it's never going
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  to be done. It's an infinite game. So you might as well start
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  marketing and selling right now and getting better and better at your product or service
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  as time goes on. Because money affords you a lot of runway, right,
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  So you accept imperfection and it's better to execute than it is to you
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  know, have paralysis by analysis. Right. Yeah, most agency owers,
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  most business owners that I know, they're doing less than a million dollars in
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  revenue. They're afraid they're free to take a risk on doing some sort of
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  outreach, or they don't want to come across a stammy, or they don't
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  want to waste a whole bunch of advertising. And so what they do instead
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  is they refer their way network, their way to sometimes a million dollars company.
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  That's what I did with my first agency, and it will kill you.
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  I mean it nearly killed me at the age of twenty nine. And
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  so what would really start to do as we put together this program called the
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  Dream Agency quests for marketing, advertising and web DEVID design agencies. The real
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  idea is simple, Hey, listen, I'm going to show you the things
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  that we've done to scale four of the agencies that I've owned over the past
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  ten years, the seven figures plus, and you can go execute on them
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  yourself. And so that's kind of the fun part is being able to teach
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  and train people on how to do what we do because we need more successful
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  entrepreneurs and we need more people that are providing high value to the business community
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  at large. Okay, so how did you wind up getting into this?
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  You mentioned you had your own business that was about to kill you. What
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  happened? Yeah, So in the first business, I knew that I was
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  good at my practice. I was young, I was twenty five, but
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  I knew that I wanted to build a company, and so I had no
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  idea how to do that. You know, didn't know how to get a
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  client, didn't know how to do the legal side. How do you actually
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  have w two staff versus ten ninety nine? What's the difference? And just
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  like most entrepreneurs, I had to figure all that stuff out, and I
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  worked really hard to go get a million dollar agency built up, you know,
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  and we had we were doing social media and social media advertising and web
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  devon design, and I was kind of everything to everyone. If you had
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  a checkbook and it would spend, we were interested in working with you.
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  And so that's kind of where we found ourselves. When I turned twenty nine,
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  my doc just said, hey, listen, you know we ranso tests,
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  said, hey, you're the most stressed out person we've ever tested.
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  If you keep going like this, you're not going to see forty. And
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  so I really had to change how I thought about business, and so that
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  that led to me going, okay, how did companies get sustainable? You
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  know, meetings books? Because I was having all these conversations and they were
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  small potatoes. I mean, it's funny. I was looking back through some
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  old contracts recently and one of the things that I saw gary was this agreement
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  for five hundred dollars a month. And I remember at the time thinking that's
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  small potatoes. But we needed and I haven't sold anything for five hundred bucks
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  in a long time, and so, you know, it's really it's really
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  fascinating when you move out of a deprivation or starvation mentality towards your lean generation.
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  All of a sudden, if you have a hundred calls this month,
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  you're not worried about closing this call that you're about to have, you have
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  ninety nine more. And so that really changes the dynamics of what's possible for
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  an organization, for a company, And that's what we're really teaching people is
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  not only how to set up their lead generation, but hey, how do
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  you scale? How do you operate? It's really easy when you're the one
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  that's doing all this stuff that's providing the results. Man, it's really really
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  easy for you to generate those results. But how do you go from working
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  in the business to working on the business and actually being a business owner instead
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  of just entrepreneur. And that's kind of where the sweet spot is for a
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  lot of these agencies is they're trying to figure out how to make that transition
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  from doing everything to having other people do things for them instead. Right,
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  all right, So scaling up obviously it's got a lot to do with delegation.
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  But as a solopreneur, it's really hard to let go of the reins
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  and trust somebody something times, isn't it. Yeah, And there's there's lots
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  of pitfalls, right like, So one of my favorite things to tell people
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  is, I'm like, all right, your administrative tasks should be the first
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  thing that you get off your plate, you know, because your admin tasks,
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  even as a solopreneur, they're still going to take you five to ten
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  hours a week, you know. And it's a little dinky things sometimes,
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  but there are things that are significant. So hire an admin assistant as your
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  first kind of hire, and then after that you're gonna want to try and
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  find someone to fit what you don't have. Right. So, I've talked
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  to some founders, They're like, I'm just not great at selling. I'm
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  like, okay, well, you're gonna have to get good. That's always
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  my recommendation. You're gonna have to be good enough that you can train a
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  salesperson. So what have you brought someone in to take some of the creative
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  work off your plate? Right? What have you brought someone in that could
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  be a designer like you, or that maybe they could run some of the
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  social media platforms, or maybe they could handle some of the conversations with clients
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  and that would free you up to do more sales so that you get more
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  of that experience under your belt. And then once you do that, maybe
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  does make sense to hire a salesperson after you've kind of figured out that sales
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  process, because no salesperson, no matter how good they are, are they
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  going to be able to figure out how to sell like new sell. They
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  just won't be able to do it. So it's really kind of homing to
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  the point in your journey where you realize, Okay, the first step I
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  have to do is get the admin stuff off. Then the next step is
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  I need to get some of the work that I do in the business off
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  my plate so that I can figure out how to sell, and then really
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  bringing in that salesperson potentially as the next hire. All right, So that
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  but you said people don't like selling, and you say, well, you
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  better get good at it. How do you get good at doing something you
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  don't really want to do. Yeah, I had a conversation with somebody recently
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  and dear friend of mine. She was talking about she owned some coffee shops,
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  you recently sold them. She was talking about how one day she got
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  a text message from someone. This was in the throes of the pandemic right,
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  and they had been exposed to COVID. And she opened up her phone
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  and looked at the schedule and saw that there was no one to cover the
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  shift, like, absolutely no one. And she'd owned this coffee shop for
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  over a decade at this point, very successful, and she had to go
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  in and go work a shift. And she was not happy about it,
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  right, like, that is just not what she wants to be doing on
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  a Tuesday. And she wasn't who getting that text message at six am.
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  But she realized she had a choice, right. The choice was I could
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  either be miserable about this and be upset order I can realize I hadn't done
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  this sort of work in five years. I'm probably not going to have to
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  do it again anytime soon, so I might as well just enjoy it.
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  I might as well enjoy talking with customers, making coffee and being in the
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  shop, because when else she didn't get to do it. And that's my
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  real encouragement to people are like I don't like to sell. I'm like,
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  I get it. There are things that I don't like in my business all
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  the time that I have to do. How could you flip it? Hey,
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  I only have to do this for so long, because we're going to
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  be so successful that I'm gonna have someone else doing this, So I might
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  as well just enjoy getting to know customers and clients right now and understanding who
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  they are and what they have going on. All right, Well, lets's
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  first love of business is you will when you start your own business, you
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  will spend the majority of your time doing the things that you least enjoy.
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  That's right, that's right true, oh, one hundred percent. You know,
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  like when my wife started her business, she didn't have anything, just
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  like I didn't have anything, but she did it. Just recently. She
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  started a business a couple of years ago, and she had these experiences that
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  I had forgotten, Kerry, Like you know the experience of how do I
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  put together a website? Where's the domain? How do I set up my
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  email in Gmail? Like all these things that as you grow your company,
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  and my companies are quite large now, you just don't think about those things.
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  Are taking care of the myriad of staff that we have, I don't
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  need to think about this. We're fine. And so it really kind of
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  changes the conversation when you have to go back to, oh, yeah,
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  I have to teach myself how to do everything. Yeah, agreed, agreed.
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  So three top pieces of advice you give anyone who has started an agency,
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  thinking about starting it, or wants to scale it up. Yeah.
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  First thing is focus on one service or one industry, right, So people
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  always talk about nicheing down and what they're usually talking about is an industry.
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  The other way that you can niche is into a specific service, and that's
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  my preferred method, honestly. Carry The reason why I say it's my preferred
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  method is if you're going to niche down into an industry, you're going to
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  need to provide a lot of services. And what that ends up looking like
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  is for every service that you provide, you need to have a staff member
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  that's full on, that's running that and providing that for your clients. So
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  I always tell people be very cautious about niching down into an industry until you
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  get larger. The second thing that I would say is prioritize your lead generation.
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  My favorite method for lead generation is old school. It's email and cold
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  direct mail follow up and it works wonders and if you have consistent meetings being
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  booked on your calendar every single month, you will close business just by accident
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  the general averages yea kick in absolutely. I mean it's it's really funny.
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  We figured out that even a terrible salesperson will close five percent of the deals
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  that come through the door just because they want to work with us, right,
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  So eighty percent of life is just showing up right, Yeah, yeah,
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  like they just did the job and they're here for it. And then
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  our top closers will close like thirty five percent because they're very skilled. But
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  even if you just mets it up. You know, you have twenty calls
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  in a month, which isn't that many. You're going to close one of
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  them by accident, is what I love to say. And then the other
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  ones you will close because you've gotten better at your craft, right, But
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  prioritise your lead generation. Getting those meetings booked on your calendar is svidal in
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  order to get where you want to go. And then the last thing is
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  enjoy the process, right, Like I love to tell my teams whenever we're
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  first getting started, I'm like, it's not always going to be this way.
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  We're not always going to be this small. We're not always going to
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  have this little staff. It's gonna get bigger. It's going to change.
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  We're have different people here, so just enjoy where we're at right now,
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  and that changes the conversation for people around what it looks like to engage with
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  work on a regular basis. Hey, that's such a great point. We
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  will leave it at that. Really appreciate your coming on the show again,
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  Dave. People want to find out more about you, connect with you on
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  the web. Where is the best place to find you? Yeah, they
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  can go to Dave Valentine dot coo and check me out there, and if
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  they want to reach out Dave at Dave Valentine dot ceo, they can hit
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  me up with an email. Thanks for having me on, Carrie, It's
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  fun, pleasure and link to the show note in the show notes on Financial
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  Survival Network will bring you right to Dave's site, and while you're there to
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  sign up for your free newsletter, Dave Leisure, Thanks for stopping by,
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  Thanks carry, thanks for listening to Carrie Let's Financial Survival Network, your solution
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  to today's trying times. For the latest, go to Financial Survival Network dot
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  com. Financial Survival Network now more than ever