Latest / Sell Well: Helping Agencies Close More Deals and Grow Revenue / Phone a Friend: Weaver Ellard on Pricing Transparency and Winning Bigger Deals

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Phone a Friend: Weaver Ellard on Pricing Transparency and Winning Bigger Deals · Sell Well: Helping Agencies Close More Deals and Grow Revenue

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Today, you're going to get to listen to a conversation between me and a good friend, Weaver Elard.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: He is CEO of Dodeca Digital, an agency that he founded.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: After being on the other side, he actually worked with a lot of different companies trying to hire agencies.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: And when he couldn't find what he was looking for, he started his own.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Since starting Dodeca, he has been able to generate an average of 10x ROI for his clients, which is absolutely crazy, and has added to his team and just grown things in such a unique and interesting way.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted him to be on the podcast because he has such a unique outlook on pricing and how to take the emotion out of pricing and charge more.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: Most startup agencies try to go cheap and scrappy in the beginning.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: And they came in as an A player right off the bat.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: And you're going to hear about some of his strategies behind that today, how you can charge more and some of the data that he looks at in order to make some of these pricing decisions and feel really good going in and positioning this with the client.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: I learned a lot in this conversation.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you will too.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get into it.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, Weaver, thanks for jumping on.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks for having me.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Excited to be here.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you run an agency that I love.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: I tell people all the time, other than Lost in House, it's my favorite agency of all time.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think what you guys are doing is super cool.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love for you to just start by telling us a little bit of the backstory because I think it's one of the craziest backstories of an agency that I've ever heard timeline-wise in your life and in Fraser's life.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Happy.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'll I'll try to give like the two-minute version, a three-minute version.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: But um, yeah, basically I spent my career mostly on the the kind of client side of marketing.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, started at like a Fortune 500 for like three or four years and got to do a lot of digital and got a lot more responsibility than I ever should have, which was awesome.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but got to spend like millions of dollars on Google Ads and Meta Ads and all that kind of stuff and build websites.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I went from there to QGenda, which is like a health tech unicorn.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um I was like the second or third marketing hire and got to help them build an inbound engine for the first time.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um I always like loved startups and wanted to kind of move more to startups.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, that felt small to me, but they were like a 500-person company.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then from there, a venturearm company that was trying to build an internal agency for their portfolio.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I went there and got to help build like an internal marketing agency for all these early stage B2B SaaS startups, um, got to help be on like their investment committee and look at other startups to invest in, and then pitch my own idea there that spun out as a software.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: So amazing experience, really enjoyed it, got to lead revenue while I was there.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, along each of those stops, I'd hired a bunch of agencies and had really bad experiences and so didn't have very high opinion of them.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um my brother Frazier and I had started to help some friends and family on the side.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: He's a designer by trait.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm more on the kind of growth marketing side of things, and he um was playing minor league baseball, so he needed some extra cash because minor league baseball is tough uh financially.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And we eventually I was at the venture firm for a while and really enjoyed advising these startups, but also started to get more of the itch to maybe go do my own thing and I think realized like it's not quite as intimidating as I thought it was.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I had a lot of mentors and advisors in my life kind of pushed me to go try and try and do my own thing.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: My wife was a really big influence in that, and and Frazier was also on board to kind of step away from baseball and go do that.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so I um turned in my notice and went to go start this agency.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: We felt like we could just build like a growth marketing agency and design agency that could be different in the space.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then two months later, Frazier got called up in the major leagues, so he didn't quit, uh, which made my journey a little uh different.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't uh he still worked a lot for us while he was like in between pitches.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Which is crazy.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so he's working like he'd go from the dugout to the computer over and over.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's like his day um for many, many months.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um so he played for two years, then he eventually retired from baseball to come back into the agency, and we've been around for coming up on three years now, like two and a half years.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, mostly kind of like a fractional marketing team that plugs in for B2B tech um companies, especially kind of in the scaling stage.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: So it's been super fun.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: We've been really blessed so far and scaled.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was the two of us at first, and now we're a team of about 16.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: So um been good, good fun growth, definitely as hard as as uh advertised, but definitely as fun as well.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: So well, I love hearing your story with that.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna jump right into kind of what I asked you to come on and talk about today, which is charging more pricing.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: I got to work with you guys for a season and it was super fun.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: But I think something I learned was you just weren't intimidated by charging more.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of people who build an agency to start, they feel this need to be like, we're just gonna come in and be the cheapest option to win some deals early on.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I just never saw you guys do that.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: You guys always kind of played up and then delivered, which I think is also what made you guys so successful is you still over-delivered.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I think you had such a good philosophy on pricing.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: You knew how to talk to people about that.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so I wanted to just have you on for my audience to talk about what that looks like to charge more.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: To kick that off, in terms of hiring agencies, you've hired agencies, you've pitched as an agency.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: What do you feel like you've seen on both sides that has worked, has not worked, has cost people deals, has closed deals kind of overall?
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a really interesting question.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the that was actually there's a couple kind of like tenants or core things when we started the business that was like, here's what I want to do differently than what I've seen from other agencies that was frustrating as a client.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's something that's become a really good differentiator for us.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: But I think on the the pricing side, it's really the lack of transparency.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think is the biggest, most frustrating thing I have had in many sales processes with agencies is we'd like, we'd they'd pitch us, we'd go through like three or four calls, we'd go through a bunch of discovery process, and then eventually we'd realize that we're in totally different ballparks on price.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like by the time we finally get the scope, it's like either they're way more expensive than we thought, or the scope's totally different than we thought.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so our way, we kind of took more of the software company mindset and like put our pricing on our site, try to simplify our packages as best we could to say, like, here's kind of the the couple different things we can do, what it generally looks like, and the general pricing.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so that helps if we lose a lot of deals because of that, I'm sure, before they ever talk with us, because they see that and we're not in the right ballpark, but I think that saves both of us a lot of time.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then for those who do see it, like then they may maybe will come and ask us to justify the cost or ask why we're priced that way.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think I also had the benefit since I hired agencies.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of knew some of the competitive pricing of like what higher tier or more agencies that we kind of wanted to be when we grow up, what they were priced at.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think we did a little bit of kind of take it till you make it of we want to be that kind of agency and we know we can deliver at that level of service, even if we are like a three-person shop right now.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so we started closer to what we like a slight discount from where maybe like a 30-person agency would price, because we do have a little bit less resourcing.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but where yeah, we just kind of price ourselves according to the market.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think those two things have have helped us a lot on that front.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: In terms of how you price things, because I see people get really bogged down with the psychology behind pricing and should it be on your site and should it not?
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: And should it be 997 or a thousand?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I just didn't see you guys get bogged down with any of that.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there was a lot of I think gimmicky stuff that you guys just didn't worry about.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: How did you price things?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: Did you use a calculator?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: How did you land on that?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds like you looked at you know the agencies you wanted to be when you grew up.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: But how did you land on here's what our cost is and here's what we think the market can bear?
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was um definitely based primarily on two things.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, one was the market, as we talked about.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: So understanding like what is kind of a competitive quote, we can't be way above that, probably.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: What is what is our customer expecting to see price-wise?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then our margins is kind of this the second most important thing we built off of.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, at our current state and at our desired future state of a team, what kind of margins do we need to make this work and to make this sustainable?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: We're bootstrapped, so that was particularly important.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, of you know, we didn't really have any runway to burn.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so we need to make sure that it was it was profitable.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: So those are two of the main um levers that we use to figure out what our price was going to be.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we did have a bit of a a kind of a calculator to to help with that, um, basically just using kind of like a PL spreadsheet almost, and then just mere kind of fleshing out a couple of different projections.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Nowadays, Claude and like ChatGPT are amazing resources to help do that.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, even if you're not really financially minded or had that background, um, they do some really, really great forecasting for that kind of thinking.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, for us it was really as simple as that.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Just kind of look at those two levers of what are what margins do we need and what does the market really like look like right now?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we we price heavily based on those two factors.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: Cool.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: When you I mean, when you think about a proposal that you sent, even doing all of these projections, you know you have people that come in and are like, I want the world, I want all of these things, and they have no idea what this costs, and they'll even tell you in the sales call, like, I don't know what this costs, but here's what we need.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: And you know the number's too big or it feels big to you, how do you confidently send that?
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: How do you kind of get over that?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you not necessarily with the client, but like in your own gut of like, oh, it's a lot of money.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a really interesting.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's definitely a bit of like an imposter syndrome, especially early on, of like, hey, they probably can't pay this much.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe I should just go ahead and cut them a deal because like I don't know if I would pay this much for us.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I think that kind of goes to uh a little bit of like one-a-perception shift of your buyer is not you.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so, like, would they you can't assume what they know or what they don't know, and even if you think they might not know what the market is, like you need to be able to justify your cost, and sometimes that's gonna mean turning away potential revenue, which is a good thing, and that's a whole other conversation.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: But I think um it's it's fine to turn away revenue if it's if it doesn't fit your model.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's why you decided on your model in the first place.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, I think for us, the the best thing that we can do, or the best thing that we do in those situations, which has won us deals in some cases, and other cases I think just won us respect for turning away clients, is we do everything we can to project an ROI for them, a realistic ROI, not like a pie in the sky, here's if everything goes perfectly.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um but it's more of, hey, if you do what we're recommending based on all the data we have at our disposal, here's what we think you would likely return, like revenue-wise.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a little bit easier for us.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: We're not like a branding agency.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: We we are more of a growth marketing agency, so what we do is very measurable.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but we can we can tell them a lot of times, like, if you spend with us, worst case scenario, you get this kind of return, best case scenario, you'll probably get around this kind of return.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: So they can see some realistic ranges of return with data behind it.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so that often makes it a lot easier of a pill to swallow for them to like, oh, this is way more expensive than I thought, but the return is pretty fair, so therefore I'll pay for it.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: In some cases, they've come back to be like, hey, this is more expensive than I thought, I can't afford it, but when I can, we'll be back because I love I love this ROI um kind of calculator.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, just being able to anchor in that and at least show them, like, hey, we're we're not gonna do this for you, or we don't recommend you do this unless we think it's gonna work.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: That really just earns a ton of trust with both prospects and future clients.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's such a better way to position it that you kind of walk them through the scenario of if you're able to take this much risk, here's what we think the reward is going to be, instead of it being like, how much do you care about this?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: Which I think is the way most agencies position it.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: They're like, you should care about your branding,$8,000.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, well, if you're not into branding, if that doesn't, if that's not on your list, it's really hard to get people to quantify how much they care about something versus kind of giving them that long-term reward.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: And most agencies don't like to talk about ROI.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: They kind of have an approach of, oh, you know, we can't, we can't be held to that and we can't have that expectation put on us.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: I know that was really important to you.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: Did you experience that when shopping for agencies?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like, did you see anybody do that well or did you run into that yourself?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think the um I no, I never saw anybody do that well.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: So that was one of the other so like pricing transparency and then like clear data and ROI um projections was kind of two of the three main pillars that we built as different.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I will say one of the best agency experiences I had as a client, they did have really good data.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: They did do a pretty good job of showing, like they didn't mention that in the upfront.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: But the reason we stuck with them for longer and the reason we really liked working with them was they did a great job of like gathering the information together to show us, like, hey, here's what we've done for, here's what you spent on us so far, here's what we're getting out of it, here's the results, here's what we expected the results to be.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so they did a a great job as an agency.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, all of the other agencies I've worked with kind of try to hide or or only show like one or two metrics that are very um tailored or you know, like very curated.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that it works for a little bit for most companies.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like they won't really scrutinize that until budgets get tight.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then as soon as that happens, they start to scrutinize and they realize, you know, that data doesn't tell the full story or they don't really know what's going on, and so they often the agency gets cut.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's also it's not only from like a personal um standpoint of me wanting to have that from like an honesty and transparency perspective, but also just from a business sense and longevity.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like we know that eventually someone's going to ask what kind of return they're getting from us.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: So if we can get ahead of that and make that super front and center throughout the relationship, then hopefully when budgets do get tight, that's a lot easier of a conversation for us to defend.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think um it's something I talk to a lot of my coaching clients about is that your lifetime value of your client can't be they stick with you until it's not death tools part.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's yeah.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of a life cycle.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody's going to question this ROI at some point.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so going into it a little less emotionally with a plan for that can set you up for better success in the long run um with your client.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I love that you guys do that.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think holds people back from charging more when they're starting out in their business?
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think this um I think it's either the market or their kind of perception of the market.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think I mentioned earlier we use the market to help us get a sense.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um that works in some cases.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think some people are in like pretty niche businesses or they're in like they're serving a very particular vertical and therefore like they're basing their prices on something that is totally irrelevant to them, or like they're worth way more value than the like I know some guys who do like four dollars or four thousand dollar websites, but their quality of website that they're producing is really similar to some agencies that charge like 50K or 100K, and they've just like never seen that price tag, or they just don't put themselves in that level.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so some of it I think is a little bit of a confidence thing and and a little bit of like can I get a somebody else's perception of my work instead of my own perception?
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um and some of it is is the confidence because maybe they sold small early, and so then they tell themselves that that's what they're worth because like that's where they have been getting paid.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think um having outside advisors, but also just like interviewing other people in the industry or interviewing other clients in the industry that you're not trying to sell is a super healthy exercise to think about pricing and to get this kind of um external perspective.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because yeah, I think I think often people are just whatever they start with is around where they see their value.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I've heard almost every agency coach I've ever listened to basically say that every agency they start working with, they recommend upping their prices because almost everyone is underpriced relative to the value they bring.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, just because that's kind of where they start and they never really reassessed it.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's interesting.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: When do you know it's time to raise your prices?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: What have you seen?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think um I think two things in my mind kind of indicate when it's time.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, one, so going back to the similar levels I mentioned earlier, but the market, like if we are going into deals, um, which often we get to see some pricing from other agencies, or we get to see some competitive deals where we know or we later get to find out where we landed, that is sometimes a great indicator to me.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like if I see that we were way underpriced or way overpriced potentially for comparable services, like that's helpful.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then the other one comes back to our margins where I'm I'm looking at our model.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: And if we are getting thinner on margins, then either we're not built well and we're not providing value relative to our margins.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: But if I believe we are, which in a lot of cases I do, then I recognize like, oh, our prices are too low relative to how we're how we're providing service right now.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like we have the people, we have all these extra services that we're providing that we're not really charging well enough for.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um so yeah, a little bit of a different answer, but I do think it ultimately comes back to like market and margins are two things that I would heavily base my timing or or my recognition or like when to raise prices on.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: I know you're not a big Instagram guy, but the girl bosses on Instagram, a lot of times, I'm gonna pick on them, will tell people you need to raise your prices because you're just worth more.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it's gut feeling.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I love that what you're talking about has to do a lot more with data.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think it gives you a lot more confidence because I might feel that way today, but I might not feel that way tomorrow, especially if I get a no.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so I think tracking that data is so much better.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: If you're looking at a super small agency, maybe they've got a small team, they're growing, they're on their way to seven figures, but they are kind of still in that really early startup phase.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: What would you recommend in terms of tracking through numbers?
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like, do you have any software that you would recommend starting out with?
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: As far as tracking like financial numbers or just tracking the number of numbers.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: I would say like what number here, maybe this is a better question.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: What numbers would you look at all the time if you were starting out in that space?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think the the main ones that that feel obvious but can definitely be easy to overlook when you get like in the weeds and get so busy running your business.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I think the main ones I would look at is revenue and expenses, obviously.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: But then I think margin and like net margin are super important.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think that it is a lot of agency owners in particular get really focused on top line revenue and people in business in general.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: But it's like, hey, I want to be in a million dollar agency, so I'm gonna do that no matter what.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna focus on my top line revenue and lose sight of margins super quickly.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, where I'd much rather have, you know, a 500k business with 50% margins than a million dollar business with 10% margins, um, because you're you're bringing a lot more.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: But I think that that's a those are numbers that just like don't get looked at often enough.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think the other one, you know, churn and understanding your churn.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are gro actively investing in your growth, then I think a super important metric that really started in the software space, but is really applicable to agencies too, is CAC to LTV.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: So how much are you paying per customer, your customer acquisition cost if you're running ads or you have a sales team or you have some sort of cost associated with bringing in customers, how much are you on average paying per customer?
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: And how much is a customer really worth to you?
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if you can get that dialed in and you find a way to continue to like make sure your your LTV is at least ideally about three times or more higher than your CAC, um then the sustainability of your growth is is so much more predictable and and also um yeah, just a lot scale more scalable.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I those are all the first four kind of normal metrics, hopefully people are paying attention to.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I think CAC to LTV is a ratio that I would highly focus on, especially if you're in kind of the scaling state or figuring out how to scale.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's uh just such a better place to operate from than how I feel today, too.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think that so many times it's easy to just go based off of gut feeling.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so really trying to focus on those numbers instead of whether or not I feel like we should charge more, um, and kind of looking at the data behind it, I think would put so many people in a better place.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: I've got one last question for you.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you were starting over today, if you were building an agency from scratch, what's something that you would do again or something you would do differently?
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: That is a great question.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think the the things that I would do again are some of the things I mentioned, just like how we separated ourselves as an agency and some of, you know, taking a stance early of here's how we plan to be different and sticking to that.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think that is really important to get any sort of traction in a business is make sure that you're different.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think the thing that I would do differently is focus a little more on the last metric I mentioned there, which TagTail TV.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think we relied really heavily and have relied heavily on word of mouth and um referrals and for growth.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something that because not no one on our team is sales people by nature, we all are more comfortable just like doing great work and bringing in growth because of that, um, which is a great way to grow.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think 90% plus of agencies in particular grow heavily through that.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's very feast or famine, and it doesn't, you know, when the market gets tight, you get less referrals.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so um I think it's a less sustainable way to grow.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so we are now putting more of a focus onto um the sales side, and that's something that you help us with as well.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, I think I would have, I should have um put more focus there earlier in our in our growth as a business and um just invest a little more in sales up front, which um yeah, it's something I would do differently today.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think you guys are doing a great job.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I so appreciate everything you've shared here.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think this will be really helpful for agency owners listening and anybody who's in the service-based business.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think that there's so much good stuff in here to pull out and start raising your prices and things to look at as you're thinking through that.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I really appreciate it.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Weaver, how can people work with you guys?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: How can they find you?
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us all about where we can follow along with Dodecca.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, to you, we Dodeka Digital.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's D-O-D-E-K-A.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it means 12 in Greek.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you're wondering where the name came from, I'm one of 12 kids, so Frazier and I did that as kind of a tribute to our family.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um that yeah, yeah, it's gonna be maybe another episode.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um but heavy brother does him.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: So so Dodeka, that's that's where the name comes from.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: So Deca Digital, we're on um LinkedIn as well.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: We both post there a good bit um and and the website.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And again, we mostly do kind of growth marketing and creative services for B2B tech companies or B2B service companies who are trying to scale, um, usually people in kind of the the two to fifty million range, trying trying to figure out how they scale their business.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: We help drive inbound leads for them.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: So um, yeah, if you want that kind of service or you just want to see what we're up to and what we're thinking on the growth marketing side, we try to stay pretty, pretty cutting edge as far as like trends and AI.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we post about that every now and then on LinkedIn.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: So if that's interesting to you, that's where you can find us.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, please follow along with them.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: They're doing awesome work.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: Weaver, I really appreciate the conversation and everything you've shared today.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and for all of you listening, thank you so much.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: We'll be back with you next week.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for listening.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Until next time, sell well.