Latest / EGGS! The Podcast / Eggs 457: How to Price Your Services for Profit with Marcel Petitpas

Transcript

Eggs 457: How to Price Your Services for Profit with Marcel Petitpas · EGGS! The Podcast

• 0:12
  Hey, everybody, and welcome back to Eggs the podcast.
• 0:14
  But before we get started, I want to talk to you about our
• 0:16
  sponsor, Taylor Style. It's kind of crazy that we're
• 0:19
  already in March. The first quarter is almost
• 0:21
  over, which means that we're in the stretch where everything you
• 0:23
  said you were going to do at the beginning of the year either
• 0:25
  starts paying off or it doesn't. And for a lot of you listening,
• 0:29
  it's conference season, it's board meetings, it's investor
• 0:31
  updates, it's sales pushes, it's being in rooms that matter.
• 0:35
  And when you're operating at that level, there are only so
• 0:37
  many decisions that you can make in a day before your brain is
• 0:39
  just fried. And for me, that's one reason I
• 0:42
  love working with Taylor Style. I'm a subscriber right now and
• 0:45
  every few weeks I get a box with hand picked outfits chosen by a
• 0:48
  real stylist, refined by their AI.
• 0:50
  And the crazy part is they actually nail it most the time.
• 0:53
  Stuff I would never go by, but I end up wearing non-stop just
• 0:56
  because it works. Taylor is an AI powered human
• 0:59
  refined menswear rental subscription.
• 1:01
  It's built for busy, ambitious guys who want to look sharp but
• 1:04
  don't want to spend any time shopping, coordinating outfits,
• 1:06
  or dealing with laundry. You simply fill out their quick
• 1:09
  style profile, their AI learns your fit and your preferences,
• 1:12
  and then a real stylist refines the selections.
• 1:15
  Complete outfits show up at your door, you wear them, and when
• 1:17
  you're done, you send them back. There's no laundry, no trips to
• 1:20
  the mall, no mental energy spent staring at your closet before a
• 1:22
  meeting. It's one last thing on the list.
• 1:24
  And in March, believe me, when you're trying to finish the
• 1:26
  quarter strong, taking even one thing off your plate matters.
• 1:30
  If you want to simplify your life a little bit and still show
• 1:32
  up confident in the rooms that count, Egg Show listeners can
• 1:34
  get 25% off their first month with code eggs at Taylor dot
• 1:37
  style. That's TAELOR dot style.
• 1:41
  Use promo code EGGS and take 25% off your first month.
• 1:44
  Taylor handles the clothes so that you can handle everything
• 1:47
  else. That's TAELOR dot style.
• 1:50
  It's a smart system for people who are serious about execution.
• 1:53
  And now back to the show. Hey, everybody, welcome back to
• 1:55
  Eggs where our guest today is Marcel Pettipah.
• 1:58
  Marcel, welcome to the show. How are you, man?
• 2:00
  I'm great. Thanks for having me guys.
• 2:02
  Absolutely stoked to have you here.
• 2:03
  Thanks so much for making the time.
• 2:05
  It's a pleasure. Why don't you give us a quick
• 2:09
  rundown of who you are and what you do?
• 2:11
  Yeah. As you mentioned, my name is
• 2:12
  Marcel. I'm the CEO and founder at a
• 2:14
  company called Paraquito. And our whole thing is helping
• 2:17
  digital agencies and creative agencies measure and improve
• 2:20
  their profitability. It's a simple problem that's
• 2:23
  really hard to solve and our whole MO is making sure that
• 2:26
  they have visibility into the data that they need to make
• 2:30
  decisions everyday about people, projects and time that end up
• 2:32
  influencing how successful their business is financially.
• 2:36
  Yeah, I love this. You know, and there's no
• 2:37
  shortage of like sort of self help books for the agency owner
• 2:40
  or whatever. And people who know the show
• 2:42
  know that I work in the agency business.
• 2:43
  So they have the context of, of my, my line of questioning here
• 2:47
  or line of line of conversation. But the, you know, the, IT seems
• 2:53
  like no matter who I talk to, even at really high levels of
• 2:57
  what I would consider successful for a small boutique agency,
• 3:00
  it's funny how few of them still even even measure profit, if
• 3:03
  they do at all. Like, it's just like, I mean,
• 3:06
  the idea of being profitable, I think for a lot of them is kind
• 3:08
  of, well, you know, it'll come or we'll just build more money
• 3:11
  or we'll just do whatever. And it's not ever really done in
• 3:14
  a way where they're being thoughtful about profit, you
• 3:16
  know, maybe at a certain level, but you know, for a lot of the
• 3:18
  little boutique shops, it's it's a challenge for sure.
• 3:21
  So what drove you to get into like this line of work?
• 3:24
  Can we talk a little bit about your past?
• 3:25
  I mean, is there some agency experience there?
• 3:27
  Are you a data engineer? Like where does this come from?
• 3:30
  It's kind of funny. So my career started in sales
• 3:33
  and marketing. I was an account manager for
• 3:35
  Apple. That was kind of my first real
• 3:37
  job with like a real company. And I left that actually to
• 3:40
  start my first agency. And we were doing real estate,
• 3:44
  virtual reality services back in like 2015, 2016, before you
• 3:48
  could like do it with your iPhone.
• 3:50
  We would go into a house. With the two cameras and.
• 3:53
  Yeah, yeah, we'd have like that, we'd take like a bunch of shots
• 3:56
  with a wide angle camera. We'd have to stitch like 16
• 3:59
  images together into a 3D image. Then we had to load it into
• 4:02
  software and then build a 3D model of the house.
• 4:04
  So it was like super labor intensive.
• 4:06
  And this is also 2015 in Moncton, NB in Canada.
• 4:10
  So it's a buyer's market. Houses are sitting on the market
• 4:13
  for like 3 years. And the average price of a house
• 4:15
  where I lived at the time was like 150,000 Canadian dollars.
• 4:18
  So I'm trying to justify a price point for the 30 hours of work
• 4:23
  that it takes to do all of this work to a real estate agent
• 4:27
  who's like I might sit on this house for three years and make
• 4:31
  whatever the Commission is on $150,000 house.
• 4:34
  Not that much, right? And so very, very quickly I ran
• 4:37
  into these challenges with the unit economics of a service, not
• 4:41
  having enough margin there to scale beyond me doing the work
• 4:44
  and very quickly realized that this could be nothing more
• 4:47
  really than a lifestyle business for me and ended up walking
• 4:49
  away. So that was where I really
• 4:50
  became familiar with these challenges.
• 4:52
  From there I got interested in software as a service, try to
• 4:55
  start a couple of soft software companies.
• 4:57
  And that's How I Met my Co founder Jared, who ran a big
• 5:00
  agency in Boise doing custom software development and
• 5:03
  integrations. And I remember him calling me up
• 5:05
  one day and saying, dude, I spend like two days a week in
• 5:08
  spreadsheets just trying to answer these simple questions
• 5:11
  about are we busy? How much work can we take on,
• 5:13
  what clients are profitable? Like what do we need to do?
• 5:16
  He said there's got to be a better way to do this.
• 5:18
  And I'm sure that other agencies are struggling with this.
• 5:21
  And so that was kind of the entry point into exploring this
• 5:24
  problem and we haven't turned back since.
• 5:26
  That was almost six years ago now.
• 5:28
  Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, I know.
• 5:30
  That's super cool. Yeah.
• 5:32
  I mean, Mike's presently in Idaho and I'm from Idaho
• 5:34
  originally, so that's cool that he's a Boise guy.
• 5:37
  So yeah, yeah, that's pretty cool.
• 5:40
  It's funny that you know your story about the, the margins in,
• 5:47
  in a project like that. You're doing 3040 hours to put
• 5:50
  this one tour together and, and they can't really afford to pay
• 5:55
  you what you what it really deserves.
• 5:57
  I actually ran into the this weekend.
• 5:59
  I had a I'm a DJI do event lighting and, and stuff like
• 6:05
  that and music and sound systems, all that fun stuff.
• 6:09
  I had a quote for a holiday party and I usually take the
• 6:13
  winters off because most of my work is weddings during the
• 6:17
  summer, high, high profit weddings.
• 6:19
  And had this, it was referral from a friend who knows what I
• 6:25
  do and they reached out and I gave him like a very reasonable
• 6:29
  quote for the area that's less than my normal even just
• 6:34
  deposit, let alone the full retainer.
• 6:36
  I'm, I'm here, I might as well just take on a job.
• 6:39
  And it was I knew that the instant I sent the quote out, I
• 6:43
  knew that it wasn't going to go anywhere, but I'm not going to
• 6:45
  lower my prices to the point where I just take the job.
• 6:49
  But I gave him the quote. Sure enough, text him two days
• 6:52
  later. Hey, any word on this?
• 6:54
  How we found someone else And it's it's like you, you kind of
• 6:57
  have to almost walk that line. Where do you want the job and
• 6:59
  the work? Or is it too much to even be
• 7:03
  worthwhile? Can you maybe talk about how you
• 7:05
  kind of go about analyzing a job and the the economics behind it,
• 7:11
  if it's worthwhile? Absolutely.
• 7:13
  And you raise something that I think is a trap that so many
• 7:16
  agency owners fall into, especially as they start to
• 7:19
  build a team where they start focusing on quantity of revenue
• 7:23
  and they lose sight of the quality of the revenue.
• 7:25
  And that's the Achilles heel of our business model, right, is it
• 7:28
  doesn't, we don't have a fixed cost to deliver to a client.
• 7:32
  That is the nature of a service. The cost basis for us is
• 7:35
  contingent on the volume of time that's required to deliver the
• 7:38
  outcome to the client. So it matters what the price is
• 7:42
  because it matters what the cost is.
• 7:44
  And so if we're thinking about a job, there's these two ideas
• 7:48
  that I think we need to separate that are often conflated as
• 7:50
  being the same thing. We have the scope of the project
• 7:53
  and we have the price of the project.
• 7:55
  The price articulates what the client is willing to pay us to
• 7:58
  get this outcome or to get this deliverable.
• 8:00
  The scope articulates what it will cost us to earn that
• 8:04
  revenue and to deliver on the promise that we're making to the
• 8:06
  client. And typically when we are
• 8:09
  assessing the health of a project, it just comes down to
• 8:11
  one really simple metric, which is what is the delivery margin
• 8:14
  of that project. And delivery margin you might
• 8:17
  think of as being exactly the same as gross margin or
• 8:20
  contribution margin. We created a separate term from
• 8:22
  it because I'm really tired of arguing with accountants over
• 8:24
  semantic issues, OK? But for all intensive purposes,
• 8:27
  those are the same ideas, OK. And the way that we calculate
• 8:31
  that is we look at how much is the client paying us and we
• 8:35
  immediately want to strip out what we call pass through
• 8:37
  expenses. So that's money that doesn't
• 8:39
  belong to you, that passes through your agency on to
• 8:42
  another vendor. So in your case, Mike, where
• 8:45
  you're doing, you know, stuff with music and and DJing and
• 8:48
  stuff like that, maybe you got to go rent some equipment 4 gig,
• 8:52
  right? So that's pass through expense.
• 8:54
  That money belongs to the rental shop.
• 8:55
  It's not your money. It doesn't matter what the
• 8:57
  rental shops cost basis are, that doesn't affect your
• 9:00
  profitability. So that's pass through.
• 9:01
  If you were selling ads and you had advertising spend, that
• 9:04
  advertising spend is a pass through expense.
• 9:06
  If you were doing a print campaign for out of home media,
• 9:09
  that print budget would be a pass through.
• 9:11
  So you want to isolate the money that flows through you into
• 9:13
  external vendors and what's left over is what we call agency
• 9:17
  gross income or AGI. That is the important number
• 9:21
  because that's now the money that's leftover for you and that
• 9:24
  you now need to earn with your time.
• 9:26
  So that's the basis for the profitability of the project,
• 9:29
  your agency gross income. The next thing you want to do is
• 9:32
  understand what are your delivery costs.
• 9:34
  And that's largely going to be a function of the time that's
• 9:37
  going to be required to earn that revenue multiplied by the
• 9:40
  cost basis of that time. So let's say you have three
• 9:44
  people working on a project. 1 is a strategist, another is a
• 9:47
  copywriter, and the third one is a designer.
• 9:50
  Each of those people have a different cost basis.
• 9:52
  So you take how many hours you think it's going to take for
• 9:54
  them to do this work. You multiply it by the cost per
• 9:57
  hour of that person, and that'll total up your delivery costs.
• 10:00
  And what you're looking for is a delivery margin of 70%, roughly
• 10:05
  at least 50%. But you want to try to get up to
• 10:08
  about 70% on a project, generally speaking.
• 10:12
  And if you can do that, what that allows you to do is lose
• 10:15
  about 20% from the project to the PNL for things like
• 10:18
  utilization and gaps and work and overages.
• 10:21
  Spend another 30% on your overhead running the business,
• 10:24
  paying for your lawyers, your accountants, your office,
• 10:26
  whatever, and have about 20% leftover as profit.
• 10:30
  So that's kind of the starting point for assessing the health
• 10:32
  of a job. And that framework, I think it's
• 10:35
  really special because the way that that math works, it doesn't
• 10:39
  matter if you bill by the hour, if you bill a flat rate, if you
• 10:42
  bill on value, if it's a project, if it's an ongoing
• 10:45
  recurring thing, the math is always the same.
• 10:48
  The way we measure delivery margin is all the always the
• 10:51
  same. The way we isolate pass through
• 10:52
  expenses is always the same. So we can actually compare all
• 10:55
  of our work in a relative basis. And the way that we measure that
• 10:59
  delivery margin is important too because it's horizontally
• 11:02
  consistent. So you can look at any time
• 11:04
  period and apples to apples compare 2 projects to each other
• 11:07
  because we're not trying to factor in externalities that are
• 11:10
  fluctuating all over the place. So that would be the mistake
• 11:12
  with doing something like trying to figure out what is the net
• 11:15
  profit on a job, which is like a fundamentally flawed concept
• 11:19
  because that won't ever be the same calculation from one time
• 11:23
  period to another. So you can never compare two
• 11:24
  things to one another because it's not the same comparison.
• 11:27
  Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense.
• 11:29
  It doesn't. Tell I think about this a lot.
• 11:32
  Well, I wanted to ask you too, you you brought it up there and
• 11:34
  and given your aforementioned experience with David Baker, I
• 11:37
  wanted to talk to you about the value based version of this.
• 11:41
  As you're breaking down the math problem, we were talking about
• 11:43
  the, you know, well, you would multiply it by the cost per
• 11:45
  hour, stuff like that. Well, if everybody gets on board
• 11:47
  to this value based pricing thing and now all of a sudden
• 11:50
  you're value based seeing your contractors like for example, so
• 11:53
  in the in, in like our model, for example, we have a lot of
• 11:55
  contractors, but they have an hourly rate.
• 11:57
  So we can do that math, but if everybody's on value, so we
• 12:01
  start to figure out everybody's value, like how do we, you know,
• 12:05
  if, if basically you were given kind of a flat rate from each of
• 12:08
  your contractors, how would you, you know, solve this math
• 12:10
  problem using sort of their whatever they're considering
• 12:13
  their value based off? Yeah, it's still the same idea,
• 12:17
  right? You're that's actually a lot
• 12:18
  easier because now they've just told you exactly what they're
• 12:20
  going to cost you and you'll know what the price is from the
• 12:23
  client. The math is still exactly the
• 12:24
  same, right? So the framework doesn't change
• 12:26
  the cost basis. Now, instead of being hours
• 12:28
  multiplied by rate, it's just whatever number they gave you.
• 12:31
  Hey, it's going to be 10 grand for me to work on this.
• 12:33
  Cool. All right, so that's $10,000.
• 12:35
  What about you, Mike? Oh, you want 18 grand?
• 12:37
  Great. You're 18 grand.
• 12:39
  My costs are 28. What's my price?
• 12:41
  Is the margin there bingo bango? This is the big misconception
• 12:44
  though, with value based pricing that really, really gets under
• 12:47
  my skin is people think as soon as I start pricing on value, I
• 12:51
  no longer have to care what it costs me to earn this revenue,
• 12:55
  which conceptually makes no sense at all.
• 12:57
  But that seems to be how a lot of people actually, and I've
• 13:00
  seen this in big agencies where they start value based pricing,
• 13:03
  they stop tracking time, they stop thinking about cost, they
• 13:05
  stop thinking about timelines. They just think, oh, we're
• 13:07
  charging more money now so it doesn't matter how much it costs
• 13:10
  us. And what they start to
• 13:11
  experience is indigestion. They think they're starving,
• 13:15
  suffering from starvation. But I'm like you're making, you
• 13:18
  know, you have $6 million in top line revenue.
• 13:20
  The fact that you're not profitable is an indigestion
• 13:22
  problem, not a starvation problem.
• 13:24
  You've got more than enough revenue.
• 13:26
  It's just that the quality of that revenue is not being
• 13:27
  focused on. Yeah.
• 13:29
  No, that's a great point because yeah, I mean in my experience
• 13:32
  with other agencies and working with freelancers and stuff like
• 13:34
  that that do this value based pricing model and, and we've
• 13:37
  tried doing it ourselves to some extent.
• 13:39
  I, I can say, I mean, we do a flat rate, but that is sort of
• 13:42
  value based. But I don't know that we're
• 13:44
  totally, you know, using the exact frameworks that some of
• 13:47
  these guys espouse. But, but we're, you know,
• 13:50
  ostensibly value based. And so, but you're right.
• 13:52
  I mean, it is easy to kind of forget about all those practical
• 13:55
  matters when you're not chasing the hours.
• 13:57
  You know, because a lot of times in just in our situation, most
• 13:59
  of our contractors are hourly based.
• 14:01
  And so they give us, you know, a, a number of hours or flat
• 14:04
  rate to do the job. And then we calculate our, you
• 14:06
  know, our, our needs in terms of profit and everything kind of
• 14:08
  like you're describing here. But but it is funny, you like
• 14:14
  just even thinking of my own experience, you know, not so
• 14:16
  much under our current model, but under a prior model, we were
• 14:19
  really bad about that where it was just like, well, we're
• 14:21
  charging enough money that it should be able to catch all and
• 14:23
  like it'll be fine. So we'll just let it go.
• 14:25
  And then we get a bill for a few extra hours and we don't think
• 14:28
  about it and it starts eating into those profits and starts
• 14:30
  cutting up that bill. So, so it's really an
• 14:32
  interesting point that you bring up.
• 14:34
  So because I think that especially for a lot of young
• 14:36
  designers and agencies that are making the switch to value
• 14:38
  based, they start thinking about it as like, oh man, we're going
• 14:42
  to be making so much more money. We're billing all this extra
• 14:44
  money, we're doing all that stuff.
• 14:46
  And yeah, it's funny, you totally lose sight because we're
• 14:48
  not supposed to be tracking our time anymore.
• 14:49
  So, so it's like, but if you, if you stop paying attention to all
• 14:53
  those things, then all of a sudden your value, you know, you
• 14:55
  may be getting more money for it, but it's, it's funny how
• 14:57
  quickly it could be capitalized. And that's the thing, right, is
• 15:01
  an increase in price only benefits the agency to the
• 15:04
  extent that it separates the price from the scope.
• 15:07
  And that's the thing we got to keep remembering is it there is
• 15:09
  no value in doubling your price point.
• 15:12
  If you triple the scope of work that you're doing, that's less
• 15:14
  good for the agency from an efficiency perspective, you'd be
• 15:17
  better off being smaller. You probably end up making more
• 15:20
  money. So is there a way to accurately
• 15:23
  define scope upfront as far as like other than verbally and
• 15:28
  contractually having it out there?
• 15:30
  Like this is what I'm doing and this is what X will cover.
• 15:34
  Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't, right Mike?
• 15:36
  Exactly. Yeah.
• 15:38
  And so this. Is something like software, for
• 15:40
  example, that scope creep is huge in that like it's very easy
• 15:43
  to say, all right, I want this to do this, but you don't take
• 15:47
  into consideration all the other elements that make that work.
• 15:51
  This is where I think we've got a bit of a different perspective
• 15:55
  on pricing and dare I say that our perspective is maybe a
• 15:58
  little bit more nuanced. The last 10 years in our
• 16:01
  industry, I think we'd all agree has been hyper focused on
• 16:05
  pricing innovation as the way to combat our eroding margins.
• 16:09
  Our our margins are always under pressure, but positioning and
• 16:12
  pricing have been the two biggest topics of the last
• 16:14
  decade. I think that's a big part of the
• 16:15
  reason that David Baker has had such a successful career in the
• 16:18
  last decade, because those have been kind of his two major
• 16:21
  calling cards is positioning. And then value based pricing,
• 16:23
  especially in tandem with it with Blair ends and both
• 16:27
  incredibly important concepts. So everyone is focused now on
• 16:31
  value as the focus of a pricing conversation.
• 16:34
  But the thing that nobody's talking about is risk, right?
• 16:38
  And risk corresponds to how accurately can we predict what
• 16:43
  it's going to cost us to do this work.
• 16:44
  And there are even scenarios where it's not only that you
• 16:47
  can't predict it, it's that you shouldn't even try because that
• 16:50
  would actually be counterproductive for the
• 16:53
  methodology that you're employing to solve this problem.
• 16:55
  So if we're using the agile methodology, for example, to
• 16:58
  solve a problem, it would actually be in our, it would not
• 17:02
  be in our best interest and it wouldn't be in our clients best
• 17:03
  interest for us to try to predict how long it's going to
• 17:06
  take to do that. Because the whole point of agile
• 17:08
  is we work, we learn and we iterate and we keep doing that
• 17:11
  until we deliver business value. So to try and put that process
• 17:15
  in a box would be counter to the process itself.
• 17:18
  So in that case, it's like I shouldn't even be really trying
• 17:21
  to put rails around this and scope it up front.
• 17:23
  So how do you price something like that?
• 17:25
  And the way you price something like that is you use the pricing
• 17:29
  model that everybody says sucks and doesn't work and that you
• 17:32
  can't scale a business on. And yet for some reason, the
• 17:35
  biggest consulting companies on the planet for the last three
• 17:39
  decades all use this pricing model almost exclusively.
• 17:43
  It's called Time of Materials. It's billing by the hour.
• 17:46
  And the argument against billing by the hour is we can't scale a
• 17:49
  business on it. You can't make profit on it.
• 17:50
  But that's that's not true. We just talked about the formula
• 17:53
  for profit. It's cost relative to price.
• 17:55
  So as long as your cost basis is 30% or 40% or 50% of what you
• 18:00
  charge by the hour, you're fine. You don't have as much upside,
• 18:04
  but you're protected from downside because if the scope
• 18:07
  changes or if the scope is hard to predict, you're getting paid
• 18:10
  for your time. And so that's the thing that I
• 18:14
  think not enough people are considering when they're
• 18:15
  thinking about pricing is the singular objective is not just
• 18:19
  to charge as much as possible, it's to make as much profit as
• 18:22
  possible. And we get so obsessed with
• 18:24
  chasing this potential upside of having a flat or value based
• 18:27
  rate. And in a perfect scenario, we
• 18:30
  come in way under budget and then we make all this extra
• 18:32
  profit. But what we're not thinking
• 18:34
  enough about is, yeah, but what if it takes us three times more
• 18:37
  than what we thought it was going to get this done?
• 18:40
  And how do we protect ourselves in that scenario?
• 18:41
  And sometimes saying, you know what, let's share some risk with
• 18:44
  the client and bill hourly or bill on sprints or some
• 18:47
  abstracted version of time materials billing.
• 18:49
  That's actually the better way to do it.
• 18:51
  It's a better contract model to facilitate the solution and it
• 18:54
  protects you from all of that variability in scope.
• 18:57
  And from a margin perspective, all we're doing is instead of
• 19:01
  trying to predict what's the cost of the whole project, we're
• 19:03
  just trying to predict what is the cost of a unit of time that
• 19:06
  we're selling to the client. As long as our margin is good at
• 19:08
  that unit of time level, then we should be OK.
• 19:12
  That makes sense. Yeah, In your bio that we got,
• 19:18
  I, I think they refer to that as the pricing quadrant.
• 19:22
  Yeah. Is that what you're talking
• 19:23
  about right now is the pricing quadrant is like defining which
• 19:27
  that's exactly right you're looking for, OK.
• 19:30
  Yeah, Yeah. So the the pricing quadrant has
• 19:32
  those two axes, right? You have value, which is kind of
• 19:34
  the vertical axi and you have risk, which is the horizontal
• 19:36
  one. So the four kind of scenarios
• 19:38
  are if you have low value, low risk or sorry, low value, high
• 19:42
  risk. That's typically hourly billing,
• 19:45
  right? I bill you this much per hour,
• 19:46
  you pay me for the amount of hours it takes.
• 19:48
  If it takes 50, great. If it takes 100, great.
• 19:50
  We get paid for our hours. And again, as long as your
• 19:52
  margins good on that hour, you're fine.
• 19:54
  Then you have low value, low risk.
• 19:56
  That's typically where you use a flat rate.
• 19:59
  So you'll say, hey, I'll give you this website for five grand
• 20:02
  and you know it's not going to take you that much time and
• 20:04
  you've done it a million times. So you can increase your hourly
• 20:06
  rate by being efficient. Then you have the high risk,
• 20:09
  high value. That's typically where you're
• 20:11
  using what we call abstracted time and materials.
• 20:14
  So you might instead of selling ours, you'll sell like a cross
• 20:17
  functional team for a biweekly Sprint.
• 20:19
  So it's like, hey, this development team is $10,000 per
• 20:22
  Sprint. We think it's going to take 20
• 20:24
  to 30 sprints to complete the backlog.
• 20:26
  And then if the client says halfway through, hey, we want to
• 20:28
  change a bunch of stuff or we want to add a bunch of new
• 20:30
  features, the answer is always yes.
• 20:32
  And do you want us to do that before or after the other things
• 20:35
  that are in the backlog? Because they're paying you for
• 20:37
  sprints. So if it ends up taking 70
• 20:38
  sprints to get the work done, as long as they ask for all the
• 20:40
  work that's getting done, you're good.
• 20:42
  You're getting paid and your margin is baked into that unit
• 20:45
  of time or that unit of of people.
• 20:47
  And then the last case is high value, low risk.
• 20:51
  That's typically where you get into value based pricing, where
• 20:54
  you can arbitrage the fact that there's high value, but you
• 20:56
  still have a low enough risk that you can price the risk into
• 20:59
  that value based price. Yeah, no, I think that's great.
• 21:04
  And I think I mean, cuz obviously I mean, I've been, you
• 21:06
  know, a part of a lot of these discussions around pricing and
• 21:09
  what's the right way to do it and stuff like that.
• 21:10
  So I think that's really good cuz I think, you know, just the
• 21:13
  hourly billing model that I mean, almost everybody still
• 21:16
  uses or most familiar with either because it's easier to to
• 21:19
  quote work that way or it's more understandable by clients.
• 21:22
  So many people still fall into that process, you know, or doing
• 21:26
  it that sort of older way. And so I think it's really good
• 21:28
  to sort of talk about these other things.
• 21:30
  And this concept of the abstracted time and materials is
• 21:33
  really interesting to me too, because it's kind of, I don't
• 21:36
  know, almost best of both worlds, right?
• 21:38
  Like you do get a little bit of that sort of value based thing
• 21:40
  where it's not strictly hours tracked, but but you were still
• 21:43
  able to give people a flat rate and let really let them
• 21:45
  understand what it's going to cost.
• 21:46
  And so because I think that, you know, so much of getting a
• 21:49
  client to buy off on something is certainty, right?
• 21:52
  I mean, so the idea of just paying infinite hours, at least
• 21:54
  with our clients isn't very appealing, you know, but, but if
• 21:58
  they know it's going to cost 12,000 bucks for this thing or
• 22:00
  it's going to be $5000 for this thing or 25 hours for this
• 22:04
  thing, whatever it is, as long as it's got sort of brackets
• 22:06
  around it, then they're pretty comfortable with it for the most
• 22:08
  part. It's the uncertainty that tends
• 22:10
  to be the issue. And I think sometimes with the
• 22:12
  value based pricing, you can run into a scenario where maybe you
• 22:15
  see a value but they don't see it or maybe there isn't a metric
• 22:18
  to back it or, you know, some sort of something.
• 22:21
  And you know, maybe if you're really good at it, you'll have
• 22:23
  some of those metrics. But I mean, I think that, you
• 22:25
  know, that uncertainty, I think can sketch people out sometimes.
• 22:30
  The thing with value too is that I think people get caught up in
• 22:33
  what the value of the service is to them.
• 22:36
  Like what they think their service is worth, but in a value
• 22:39
  based price conversation, what you think it's worth doesn't
• 22:43
  matter at all. It's only what it's worth to the
• 22:45
  client. And sometimes the same service
• 22:48
  is worth very different things to different clients, right?
• 22:50
  Because it it comes down to two major factors.
• 22:52
  The 1st is your positioning and how many alternatives they they
• 22:55
  believe that they have to solve their specific problem.
• 22:57
  And the second, the probably the most important one is the
• 22:59
  relative value of solving that problem.
• 23:01
  Where it's like if I know I can improve any websites conversion
• 23:04
  rate by 10%, who's it worth more to apple.com that does like a a
• 23:10
  billion dollars 1/4 in sales through their website or you
• 23:14
  know, some small e-commerce shop that does 10 KA month in sales.
• 23:18
  That same result is worth wildly different amounts to those two
• 23:22
  companies. And so it doesn't again, it
• 23:24
  doesn't matter what it costs us to do it.
• 23:25
  The scope of work could be the same for those two outcomes, but
• 23:28
  the value is anchored to totally different things.
• 23:30
  So I think sometimes people lose sight of that, that it's like
• 23:33
  even if you figured out how to have a value based price
• 23:35
  conversation, it's not always applicable to every client.
• 23:39
  Depending on who you're talking to, that might actually not end
• 23:41
  up being a winner for you. You might end up on the wrong
• 23:43
  side of that equation. Well, there's it's sometimes the
• 23:49
  client doesn't know the value that you're bringing to the
• 23:54
  table and so on. On our end, we almost have to
• 23:57
  educate them as to why, you know, why hire me instead of
• 24:00
  your, your nephew up the street who just bought a pair of
• 24:03
  speakers from RadioShack. You know, there's, there's a
• 24:06
  difference and they just don't realize that.
• 24:08
  And sometimes I get in that like this, that gig I was just
• 24:13
  telling you about earlier that I sent a quote to when I know
• 24:17
  that, that they don't see the value.
• 24:20
  Lots of times I don't even pursue them as a client because
• 24:23
  it's just not worth my time or effort to try and educate them
• 24:27
  to as to why you would hire me in citizen.
• 24:30
  And I think unless it's, you know.
• 24:34
  Yeah, I think that goes back to, to Marcel's point earlier, you
• 24:37
  know, he didn't use the word exclusivity, but some of it is
• 24:40
  that being able to sort of choose your clients.
• 24:42
  And one of the things that he does that I think is
• 24:44
  particularly interesting is on their website, they allow you to
• 24:47
  apply for a call instead of just, you know, book a scheduled
• 24:50
  call with us or whatever. You know, you have this form to
• 24:52
  fill out that's basically, you know, an application for a phone
• 24:54
  call. And this sort of screams of that
• 24:57
  ethic of, you know, starting to need her, who your client is and
• 25:01
  make sure you're getting a good quality client.
• 25:03
  You know, I imagine, you know, plenty of people probably come
• 25:06
  to your website and say, oh, well, I want to be profitable.
• 25:08
  You know, I want to do this and you know, but maybe they're not
• 25:11
  at a spot or like their business isn't where it needs to be for
• 25:14
  you guys to be effective. For example, you know, so
• 25:16
  through the screening process and and you can elaborate on it,
• 25:19
  but through this sort of, you know, light screen, at least it
• 25:22
  probably does a fair bit of filtering out who needs a phone
• 25:25
  call and who needs the ebook. Yeah.
• 25:28
  So 100% you have the drop down in there that says budget and
• 25:32
  then you have the four different options and says you're way too
• 25:35
  low, don't even try. Yeah.
• 25:37
  We're not quite as on the nose as that, but the proxy for that
• 25:41
  is we get an understanding of the revenue and their profit in
• 25:43
  the last 12 months. And that tells us right away,
• 25:46
  can they afford what we do and will they get a return?
• 25:49
  Right. And our, our bar is if we can't
• 25:51
  get them easily a 10X return on every dollar that they give us,
• 25:56
  we're not going to have the conversation.
• 25:57
  And we're typically going to respond to them and say, hey,
• 26:00
  just so you're clear, this is what our engagements start out.
• 26:03
  We typically work with companies that are here, but based on the
• 26:06
  problems that you told us you have in the intake form, here's
• 26:09
  some free stuff that might be helpful and here's some other
• 26:11
  people that you might want to reach out to for some help on
• 26:13
  this. So we do try to be helpful, but
• 26:15
  I would say about 1/3 of the people that apply for a call for
• 26:18
  us, we don't, we don't end up getting on that call and we have
• 26:21
  to direct them somewhere else. Well, and I think that there's
• 26:23
  kind of, I don't want to call it greed.
• 26:26
  It goes back to, and I think Blair ends talks about this a
• 26:28
  lot too, that the sort of feast famine cycle.
• 26:31
  And it's this, you know, concept of, you know, I need to, I need
• 26:34
  to rake in every dollar, I need to grab every client.
• 26:37
  I've got it. Especially for young companies
• 26:38
  or or boutique shops, you know, this is an easy trap to fall
• 26:42
  into where it's just like anybody that comes along, my
• 26:44
  God, dude, we got bills to pay. We got to we got to take the
• 26:46
  job, you know, and they don't spend a lot of time, you know,
• 26:49
  or or at least don't enforce the luxury of being able to choose
• 26:52
  who they work with. Even if that is an option
• 26:54
  available to them, for whatever reason, it doesn't feel like
• 26:57
  it's something they can decide. And so I think that this
• 27:01
  screening methodology is a, is a good idea.
• 27:03
  I mean, like the way that we do it in our business is we just
• 27:05
  flat out publish our rate. And so if it's for you, cool.
• 27:09
  If it isn't, cool. Like, you know, and maybe that's
• 27:11
  not the smartest approach either, I don't know.
• 27:14
  But, you know, there's a, there's different approaches for
• 27:16
  doing this, but a big part of it is you price yourself a certain
• 27:19
  way so that you're not doing a certain kind of work.
• 27:22
  And I can just even speak to it as just a, you know, a young
• 27:24
  freelancer back in the day, you know, my first freelance rate
• 27:27
  was 25 bucks an hour. Well, there's a certain kind of
• 27:30
  client you get for 25 bucks an hour.
• 27:32
  It's, you know, in my, in my case, it, you know, wasn't the
• 27:35
  worst. I mean, I was doing business
• 27:36
  cards for strippers. I was doing, you know, all, all
• 27:40
  kinds of just nonsense work that was like, you know, not, not the
• 27:44
  kind of work that you would want to hang your hat on, right?
• 27:46
  But I was a young designer. I was trying to get started as a
• 27:49
  freelancer. These guys would give me money
• 27:50
  in exchange for business cards. Business cards are easy.
• 27:53
  So, you know, we crank it out. But of course, I was totally
• 27:56
  hourly back then, right? So it's like, OK, I got your
• 27:58
  business card done in 30 minutes.
• 27:59
  I'd like $17.00, please. And it's like, you know, and
• 28:03
  it's pretty tough to make a living at that, you know, so
• 28:06
  over time, you know, opportunities come along,
• 28:09
  clients come along, whatever it is that give you the opportunity
• 28:12
  to go, oh, OK, well, I can charge a little more for this
• 28:14
  or, you know, whatever. And the examples I always use,
• 28:16
  you know, when I'm talking to young freelancers about this
• 28:18
  stuff is like, Pepsi is not hiring a $25.00 an hour
• 28:21
  designer. You could be a great designer.
• 28:23
  You could be an amazing designer for 25 bucks.
• 28:25
  Maybe you just have horrible confidence and you have really
• 28:27
  bad self esteem and you just love $25.
• 28:30
  That's your, your goal. Like you could be the best
• 28:32
  designer on the planet and they're still not going to hire
• 28:33
  you. There's this whole perceived
• 28:35
  value thing, right where, I mean, you need to be charging me
• 28:38
  $300.00 an hour so that I know you're serious, you know,
• 28:41
  because otherwise, you know, I, I don't even want to risk it,
• 28:44
  you know, for 25 bucks an hour. And so there's so much that goes
• 28:47
  into, you know, trying to figure out your price and trying to do
• 28:50
  this sort of screening step. But I think, you know, the way
• 28:53
  you're doing it is really intelligent.
• 28:54
  And I just kind of want to, I guess, go on this diatribe just
• 28:57
  to tell people to, you know, be conscious about your, you know,
• 29:01
  the people you choose to do work with.
• 29:02
  I mean, especially as a small business owner or freelancer,
• 29:04
  like, I mean, a good client can make or break you, you know, or
• 29:08
  a bad client can make it. And, you know, and I, I know a
• 29:12
  number of people or a handful of people that, you know, ended up
• 29:15
  leaving the industry because they're jaded on the type of
• 29:17
  work they're doing or they're not happy with what they're
• 29:18
  doing and they don't see that they have control over this, you
• 29:22
  know, so, so I think it's cool what you're doing with that is
• 29:24
  a, you know, macro or micro version of, you know, this, this
• 29:28
  sort of screening or being selective about who you choose
• 29:30
  to work with. Yeah.
• 29:33
  I mean we have to practice what we preach, right and need our
• 29:35
  own dog food. And this kind of leads perfectly
• 29:39
  into a Segway here which is talking about the things that
• 29:42
  really influence in agencies profitability or any service
• 29:45
  businesses profitability. And why this these things like
• 29:49
  positioning, being selective about clients really sticking to
• 29:53
  a specific problem, the downstream impacts that that has
• 29:56
  on the metrics that actually lead to a better outcome.
• 30:00
  But before I get into that, I just have to say, like this
• 30:04
  example of doing business cards for strippers, I just had this
• 30:06
  image of my head of of like Cinnamon at the Chamber of
• 30:10
  Commerce luncheon handing out her business card to somebody.
• 30:15
  And it says like her title is something like adult
• 30:17
  entertainment performer or something like that specialist.
• 30:20
  And yeah, it's funny. And I I guess put it in your
• 30:23
  parlance as they, they would be peelers I guess.
• 30:25
  But you know, it's the same difference.
• 30:29
  So anyway, I digress. So let's let's talk a little bit
• 30:33
  about that. Like why is that stuff so
• 30:34
  important? And when you get into the nuts
• 30:36
  and bolts of it, it comes down to deliver margin, which we
• 30:39
  talked about at the pricing level.
• 30:40
  That's really kind of the Holy Grail of metrics.
• 30:43
  If there was one metric that you were going to pay attention to
• 30:45
  in your business that would tell you if it was healthy or not.
• 30:47
  If there was one metric that I was going to pay attention to in
• 30:49
  your business, if I was, let's say, trying to buy it to
• 30:52
  evaluate what the potential is, I would focus on delivery
• 30:55
  margin. And as we come back to the
• 30:57
  previous example, that's really looking at what does it cost
• 31:00
  your business to earn revenue. So for every dollar of of money
• 31:04
  that a client gives you after you take out all the pass
• 31:06
  through, what's leftover after you've promised, you've
• 31:09
  delivered on all the promises that were made.
• 31:11
  And we want to have at least half of every dollar leftover to
• 31:15
  pay for overhead and then leave a profit.
• 31:18
  And if that isn't healthy, it's really hard to get everything
• 31:22
  else in the business to be healthy.
• 31:24
  If your delivery margin isn't healthy, profit feels like it's
• 31:26
  happening to you as opposed to happening for you.
• 31:29
  But when your delivery margin is strong, then you can start to
• 31:32
  make decisions about do I want to over under invest in
• 31:34
  overhead. You can actually start to
• 31:36
  control your profit margin and whether you want it to be higher
• 31:39
  or lower. That's like a totally different
• 31:40
  experience that for a lot of people listening is foreign to
• 31:43
  them because they've never even, they have no idea what that
• 31:45
  feels like. They always just kind of feel
• 31:47
  like they're bracing themselves for that conversation with their
• 31:49
  accountant at the end of the year and they're going to go
• 31:52
  drinking regardless of what the outcome is.
• 31:54
  They'll either drink to celebrate or they'll drink to
• 31:55
  mourn, you know, the death of their their hard earned time and
• 31:58
  money. And so when you think about
• 32:01
  delivery margin, there's really three things that influence
• 32:03
  that. And the two biggest ones are
• 32:06
  what we call average billable rate and utilization.
• 32:10
  And so average billable rate measures, no matter how you
• 32:15
  bill, whether you bill on flat rates or value or abstracted
• 32:18
  time materials or hours for every hour that you or your team
• 32:21
  spends doing work for clients, on average, how much revenue
• 32:26
  does that create for the business?
• 32:28
  So again, you can measure and compare any project regardless
• 32:32
  of how it's structured against each other because the formula
• 32:35
  is really simple. You take your agency gross
• 32:37
  income, which we discussed earlier, it's your revenue minus
• 32:40
  the pass through and you divide that by the number of hours that
• 32:43
  it took to complete the thing or to deliver on the promise that
• 32:46
  was made to the client. So let's say you had a project
• 32:50
  that cost $5000 and you spent 50 hours on it.
• 32:55
  Then you had $100 per hour average billable rate.
• 32:58
  Again, it doesn't matter how you build for it.
• 33:00
  You could have just said hey, it's 5 grand and then took you
• 33:02
  100, you know, took you 50 hours.
• 33:05
  That's your average billable rate.
• 33:07
  And so it sounds kind of too simple to be true, But if you
• 33:10
  can double your average billable rate, you can double the amount
• 33:12
  of money that your team can make without changing anything else
• 33:14
  about the business. And you can do that either by
• 33:17
  increasing your price. That's the obvious one.
• 33:19
  But the other one that no one's talking about is you can do that
• 33:21
  by getting more efficient at what you do.
• 33:24
  If you can figure out how to take something that used to take
• 33:25
  100 hours and you can get it done now in 50, you can now do
• 33:28
  twice as many of those things. You can earn twice as much
• 33:30
  revenue and everything else can stay the same.
• 33:33
  That's really powerful. And this is where the
• 33:35
  positioning, being selective about your clients, right?
• 33:38
  Taking on things that aren't going to blow up your process,
• 33:41
  have you take more time and then you can work on those processes
• 33:44
  and get it more efficient. That has a huge impact.
• 33:47
  But it all starts with being selective upfront.
• 33:50
  And then the other side of that coin is utilization, which looks
• 33:54
  at, you know, if I'm, if I have a team of five people and they
• 33:58
  all work full time, I'm basically buying 2000 hours of
• 34:01
  their year on the employment contract and the agreement with
• 34:05
  an employee in a service based businesses.
• 34:06
  I'm going to buy 2000 hours of your life for this amount of
• 34:09
  money, let's call it 70 grand a year.
• 34:12
  I'm going to go try to resell a certain amount of those hours at
• 34:15
  a profit. And if I do that, everybody
• 34:17
  wins. You get certainty and a salary,
• 34:20
  I get some profit and the client gets deliverables that they want
• 34:23
  at a price that's reasonable to them.
• 34:25
  That's what we're trying to accomplish.
• 34:27
  So the important question is what percentage of those 2000
• 34:30
  hours is actually end up being sold and spent on earning the
• 34:35
  average billable rate that I talked about earlier.
• 34:37
  And of course, the higher that percentage, the more likely it
• 34:40
  is that we're going to be profitable as an agency.
• 34:42
  And for most firms as a whole business, they're trying to get
• 34:45
  that number to be around 50 to 60%, which doesn't sound very
• 34:49
  high. But once you factor in all the
• 34:52
  internal time, the holidays, the vacation and the sick time, paid
• 34:55
  time off, right? And all all the internal
• 34:58
  projects and meetings that you have to have, that's kind of
• 35:01
  where you end up. And, and then factor in the fact
• 35:03
  that there's some people in the business that don't spend any
• 35:05
  time on client work. They've got to go out and do
• 35:07
  sales or they have to take care of finances and internal stuff.
• 35:09
  So as a whole, you want to try to get it, you know, around 50
• 35:13
  to 60% of the total time that you buy from your team spent
• 35:17
  earning revenue. Those are kind of the two major
• 35:20
  levers that control delivery margin.
• 35:22
  And to give you a simple example, fight a team of 10
• 35:25
  people, they had 10,000 hours of capacity. 50% of that was
• 35:30
  utilized. That means 5000 of those hours
• 35:32
  were spent earning revenue and we earned an average of 100
• 35:36
  bucks for every hour they spent. That team does a half,
• 35:38
  $1,000,000 in revenue. If we take that same team, we
• 35:41
  get them up to 60%. They now did $600,000 in
• 35:45
  revenue. And if we take that same team
• 35:48
  and we hold the 60% utilization, but we bump our average bubble
• 35:51
  rate up to just 125, they now do $750,000 in revenue.
• 35:56
  So think about that difference. You know, we just went from 500K
• 36:00
  in revenue to 750K in revenue. What that means for their bottom
• 36:04
  line in this example, if they were, if they had a $300,000
• 36:09
  payroll and they spent 150K on overhead, their profit margin
• 36:12
  went from 50K in the first example to 150 in the second to
• 36:16
  300 in the third. So 10% to 40% EBITDA with these
• 36:20
  two little tweaks. That's the power of these two
• 36:23
  levers. So what you're describing makes
• 36:29
  sense, but getting people to actually report their actual
• 36:35
  hours and actually like you, you must have a guy that all he does
• 36:39
  is a bean counter. Like he just tracks everything
• 36:42
  and has a spreadsheet That's ridiculous just to keep all
• 36:45
  these metrics straight. How?
• 36:47
  How do you, well, how do you get your employees to get jump on
• 36:53
  board with giving you the correct hours and giving the
• 36:56
  correct metrics to actually base all this off of?
• 36:59
  Because sometimes they've got enough on their plate and
• 37:02
  keeping track of, you know, it took me 3 1/2 hours to do this
• 37:06
  job and 2 1/2 hours to do that job.
• 37:09
  And then usually they don't do it right after.
• 37:11
  They have to do it at the end of the week and they're guessing.
• 37:14
  So is there a a better way? That's a great question, Mike.
• 37:19
  An astute question and one that I get asked a lot.
• 37:23
  I'm going to step back and 1st address the the major reason
• 37:27
  that most people struggle with this and the major reason most
• 37:30
  people struggle with this is because they're not closing the
• 37:33
  loop between that time tracking activity and the impact that it
• 37:37
  has on those employees, right? So let's paint a picture.
• 37:42
  Let's imagine, Mike, that you work on my team and I'm going
• 37:46
  out and I'm selling projects, and I'm thinking it takes 50
• 37:51
  hours to do this project, but it's actually taking you like
• 37:54
  75. But I just keep selling projects
• 37:57
  and I keep resourcing. You like it takes 50 and you're
• 37:59
  working evenings, you're working weekends.
• 38:01
  You're absolutely slammed. How am I going to know that if
• 38:05
  we don't have data, how are you going to be able to identify,
• 38:09
  hey, I can't do six of these next month because they take me
• 38:12
  this much time. If we're not sitting down and
• 38:14
  having that conversation where I'm showing you, here's the data
• 38:17
  that I'm making these assumptions based off of, and we
• 38:20
  don't have a feedback loop to say, well, your assumptions are
• 38:22
  incorrect because it actually takes me 75 hours to do this
• 38:25
  thing. And that conversation, that
• 38:28
  simple exercise of sitting down with the team and just showing
• 38:31
  them here are the decisions that we make based on this
• 38:34
  information. Here are the assumptions that we
• 38:36
  make based on the data that we're getting back from you.
• 38:38
  That doesn't happen. And so to the team, there's just
• 38:41
  they get to come up with their own story as to why we're
• 38:43
  tracking time. It's often not a good story that
• 38:45
  they're coming up with in their head.
• 38:47
  It's usually something like they're trying to make sure that
• 38:49
  I'm busy enough. They're just trying to keep tabs
• 38:50
  on what I'm doing. They don't trust me.
• 38:52
  They're billing, you know, the client by the hour, and they
• 38:54
  just need time sheets for that. But the most important reason to
• 38:58
  do this is because it protects all the stakeholders in the
• 39:01
  business from being overworked, from being under resourced, from
• 39:05
  the business not being profitable enough to keep
• 39:06
  everybody's job or having to lay people off the second you lose a
• 39:09
  big client. So closing the loop is probably
• 39:11
  the most important thing. The other factor is
• 39:14
  understanding what methodology is appropriate for tracking
• 39:17
  time. And a lot of people conflate
• 39:19
  time tracking with a whole bunch of things.
• 39:21
  They conflate it with billing for time.
• 39:22
  They conflate it with having time budgets for tasks.
• 39:25
  They conflate it with time sheets.
• 39:27
  They conflate it with all kinds of different things.
• 39:30
  But the exercise of tracking time is really about creating a
• 39:33
  record of where time is going. And time sheets is one way to do
• 39:36
  it, but there's kind of two main methodologies and there's four
• 39:39
  major kind of ways to do it as a whole.
• 39:43
  The first is time sheets, right? So Mike, at the end of every day
• 39:45
  or whenever, go in and punch in this timesheet.
• 39:49
  Here's how much time I spent on each client, on each task,
• 39:51
  whatever level of detail that's at.
• 39:53
  On the other side of the spectrum, you have what's called
• 39:55
  resource plan based time tracking, where I as a project
• 39:59
  manager, say Mike is on my team. And my plan is that Mike is
• 40:03
  going to spend the morning on these clients and the afternoon
• 40:08
  on these clients for this much time.
• 40:10
  And then throughout the week through check insurance, I'm
• 40:12
  just capturing material changes to that plan where I say, Mike,
• 40:15
  how was yesterday you go? It was OK, but I had a fire with
• 40:18
  this client, so I spent all day on them.
• 40:20
  And then I update to say, OK, that's what actually happened
• 40:22
  and we're going to re resource. And then in between there are
• 40:27
  variations on that. So there's what we call assisted
• 40:30
  time sheets, which is where you're using things like device
• 40:33
  monitoring, AI tools, right, to help you track what you're doing
• 40:37
  and prefill your timesheet so you're not having to remember
• 40:40
  everything. You're getting some assistance
• 40:41
  from AI and there's some great tools out there to help with
• 40:43
  that that don't expose that information to your employer.
• 40:46
  So you're the only one that can see it, Mike.
• 40:48
  And then there's what we call resource assisted timesheets,
• 40:51
  which is where the resource plan prefills your time sheets, and
• 40:55
  then it's up to you to capture the material differences between
• 40:57
  what we expected to happen and what actually happened.
• 40:59
  So there's a spectrum to this. And filling out time sheets is
• 41:02
  not always the way that we have to create this this record of
• 41:06
  time. There's just operational
• 41:09
  considerations to figure out what's most feasible, what's
• 41:11
  actually going to work for the team.
• 41:12
  And underneath all of that, it's important to remember that
• 41:14
  precision and accuracy are not the same.
• 41:18
  And a lot of people conflate precision and time sheets with
• 41:20
  accuracy of that data. But the reality is it doesn't
• 41:23
  have to be very precise to be accurate and extremely helpful
• 41:27
  at actually solving the problems that this is meant to solve.
• 41:30
  Like figuring out that it takes way more time to do something
• 41:33
  than we thought and that we're overworking our team by not
• 41:36
  having a feedback loop on that. That was a.
• 41:39
  Rant and then no, it's, it's a good rant.
• 41:43
  You know that that 25 hour difference between 50 hours and
• 41:46
  75 hours, that cuts into your profits as well, not just the
• 41:52
  overworking part of it. If you're billing it a certain
• 41:55
  hour price per hour and you're adding $25.25 hours to it that
• 42:01
  you're not accounting for, that just cuts everything in in half,
• 42:06
  almost in maybe not half, but you know what I mean.
• 42:09
  It's really. Yeah, I mean, that happens all
• 42:12
  the time. Yeah, it's, it's crazy because
• 42:14
  I, I like, I build a flat rate for me.
• 42:16
  I don't, I don't deal with a A-Team or anything like that.
• 42:19
  So hearing all these different things that you guys have to go
• 42:22
  through that I don't just makes me happy.
• 42:25
  Well, there's a lot of. Times I mean, and I think for a
• 42:27
  lot of. From being in in bigger agencies
• 42:29
  too. I mean, at least in my last
• 42:31
  agency, there was like a silo between account management and
• 42:35
  creative, right? Each of us sort of ran our own
• 42:38
  thing. You know, we were tasked by, you
• 42:39
  know, to do stuff by our account managers, but the account
• 42:42
  managers handled the money. So they were going and they were
• 42:44
  making bids and doing estimates and creating all the stuff and
• 42:47
  never even really talking to us, you know, basing it on, you
• 42:50
  know, how long did it take us to do that thing last time or
• 42:52
  whatever? And then we'd occasionally run
• 42:54
  into these situations where it's like, oh, OK, well, you bid them
• 42:56
  100 hours, but God, I need 200 to do this.
• 42:58
  Like, we're not even close. And then those just go, oh, OK,
• 43:01
  well, we're going to lose on this one, so we have to win on
• 43:03
  the next one. And it's like, what?
• 43:04
  We could have just solved it with conversation.
• 43:06
  Like, why don't you just come talk to us first?
• 43:07
  But but at least in some agencies, the siloing is really
• 43:10
  a problem. And, and the problem with that,
• 43:13
  of course, is that the timeline is rarely the thing that's going
• 43:17
  to get moved. So where is that extra 100 hours
• 43:19
  coming from Ryan? It's it's usually coming from
• 43:21
  your evenings and your weekends. And so the employees at this
• 43:23
  agency end up subsidizing a lot of this mismanagement of the
• 43:26
  business. Unfortunately, yeah, it probably
• 43:29
  does end up affecting the leadership team and the
• 43:31
  ownership team in terms of profits.
• 43:33
  But most of that whiplash is actually going to impact the
• 43:36
  team too, because who, who gets laid off when profits aren't
• 43:39
  good? Who gets laid off when our
• 43:40
  utilization starts to dip a little bit because our
• 43:43
  utilization has to be insanely high because we're over
• 43:45
  servicing the shit out of every client.
• 43:47
  It's the employees that end up paying for this.
• 43:48
  So that's the thing that I think is really challenging for me is
• 43:52
  there's a lot of resentment in the industry about things like
• 43:55
  tracking time, about things like paying attention to these
• 43:58
  metrics, because time tracking has been used the wrong way by a
• 44:02
  lot of agencies for a long time. But all of this really is meant
• 44:05
  to protect the team and create an environment where they can,
• 44:10
  you know, be asked to work a reasonable amount of time and
• 44:13
  have some amount of buffer because the the business is
• 44:16
  financially successful to not have to fear for their job every
• 44:19
  time a client slips or they lose a big bid.
• 44:22
  Yeah, but in fact, I mean, that's what happened to me in my
• 44:24
  prior agency, you know, the last time I worked for somebody and
• 44:27
  it's a big motivator for why I don't work for somebody now is
• 44:30
  that, you know, I mean, we were working nights and weekends.
• 44:34
  We were working crazy hours to to accommodate for these kinds
• 44:36
  of issues. And the, you know, I mean, to
• 44:40
  your point, it just never got to management, right?
• 44:42
  I mean, they, they had no idea what was going on.
• 44:44
  But some, you know, person right out of college is, you know,
• 44:47
  brokering these big, you know, $50,000 a $100,000 deals, you
• 44:51
  know, or bigger even. And you know, they just, you
• 44:54
  know, they, they weren't talking to anybody, you know, so we're
• 44:56
  the ones picking up all the slack.
• 44:58
  And so as it, as, you know, working on the creative team,
• 45:00
  you know, you start to resent your account managers and you
• 45:02
  start to resent the people that are, are making you work over
• 45:05
  the weekend while they are seemingly off doing whatever
• 45:07
  they want to do, you know, and, and all that kind of stuff.
• 45:09
  So I can see, you know, and I feel like, and maybe this is
• 45:13
  just my experience, but it feels like at least in the past,
• 45:15
  agencies didn't really care that much.
• 45:17
  Like it was actually part of the culture that you would work your
• 45:19
  ass off. And, you know, so it was sort of
• 45:23
  an expectation. And I remember earlier in my
• 45:24
  career when I was much younger, because now I, I couldn't do it.
• 45:27
  But, you know, you wanted to be the guy that worked overnight
• 45:30
  because then when everybody got to work in the morning, you'd
• 45:32
  just be like, oh, yeah, no, I just killed it.
• 45:34
  You know, I just did 24 hours, no big deal.
• 45:36
  You know, I just, I rocked it, you know, for this client, you
• 45:38
  know, so there's like a little personal pride in being the the
• 45:40
  one who was just totally abused, even though you didn't think
• 45:43
  about it that way at the time. And I think in the agency
• 45:48
  industry, thankfully, that culture is changing.
• 45:50
  There's more competition for talent.
• 45:52
  Firms just frankly can't get away with that anymore.
• 45:54
  The consulting industry at large is still very much like that.
• 45:57
  Unfortunately, there's still quite a bit of a culture like
• 46:00
  when when I talk to friends that work at big consulting firms in
• 46:03
  places like New York, this is still their life and it's just a
• 46:07
  bill by the hour, mega high utilization, let the team
• 46:10
  subsidized poor management kind of situation.
• 46:12
  But in smaller firms, I think as a positive thing, we've come
• 46:16
  under a lot of pressure from both sides on margin and it's
• 46:19
  forcing agency owners to be better stewards of this stuff.
• 46:22
  And I think culturally as well, a lot of agency owners tend to
• 46:25
  be more progressive, and they have experienced that.
• 46:28
  And they don't want to subject their teams to that because
• 46:31
  they're, you know, they're fairly conscientious human
• 46:34
  beings. And so the underlying thing,
• 46:37
  though, is I think the common reaction is I'm going to reject
• 46:41
  everything that I learned at my last agency, like time tracking
• 46:44
  and timesheets and budgets, and like, I'm not going to do any of
• 46:46
  that stuff. No project management.
• 46:48
  But what they inevitably realize when they start to scale their
• 46:50
  team is actually, we need all of that stuff to accomplish the
• 46:53
  things that I want. If I want to protect my team,
• 46:55
  that's the only way to really do it because otherwise you end up
• 46:59
  with these problems. And what they find themselves
• 47:02
  hearing is they sit with their accountant who's telling them
• 47:05
  they're overstaffed, and then they go sit with their team who
• 47:07
  tells them that they're overworked and they have no idea
• 47:10
  what to do about this and who's right and who's wrong and how to
• 47:12
  even get to the bottom of what's happening and how to fix it.
• 47:15
  And that's where these operations metrics clarify it.
• 47:17
  Yeah. And, and in a lot of cases, you
• 47:19
  know, these people, you know, in my case it was a design team.
• 47:21
  But like, I mean, we're not even at the table about these
• 47:24
  problems or these issues, right? I mean, nobody's talking to us
• 47:27
  at all. So in terms of our ability to
• 47:29
  affect it positively one way or the other, it's, it wasn't even
• 47:32
  on our, you know, not even something we're capable of
• 47:34
  doing. And in fact, you know, I mean,
• 47:36
  ultimately the reason I left that agency was I was laid off.
• 47:39
  And I was laid off because they lost a client that I didn't work
• 47:42
  on. And but I was one of the more
• 47:44
  senior people on the team. And at the time it happened,
• 47:47
  like, you know, to your point about mismanagement, the money
• 47:50
  that I was generating should have been allocated or something
• 47:54
  earmarked for our team or for my, you know, for me.
• 47:56
  So I should have been generating the income that keeps me
• 47:59
  employed instead, you know, somebody somewhere else, you
• 48:02
  know, dropped the ball or they ended up losing an account and,
• 48:05
  you know, and then they just made sort of a global cut, you
• 48:07
  know, took the high payroll out. So it's sort of that, I mean,
• 48:10
  it's unfortunate and, you know, I, I mean, everybody that runs
• 48:13
  that agency is great. I'm still there.
• 48:15
  Maybe their top freelancer, like, I mean, we still do a ton
• 48:17
  of work for that agency. So I love them and, you know, no
• 48:20
  hard feelings at all. But it's just, you know, the
• 48:22
  agency experience that they offered, which was probably
• 48:26
  better than the bigger shops in the New Yorks and the LA's is
• 48:30
  still, you know, nothing like what I wanted to do in my own
• 48:33
  business. So that's why we've we've
• 48:36
  managed to stay on our own for so long.
• 48:38
  So I wanted to ask you, we're actually getting kind of late.
• 48:41
  So I don't know if I can get to both my questions.
• 48:43
  But I wanted to ask you as sort of an entrepreneur, we've talked
• 48:45
  a little bit about positioning and things like that.
• 48:48
  And you're talking, I mean, obviously from a point of
• 48:50
  expertise in this field, but like you couldn't have been at
• 48:54
  this level when you started your business.
• 48:56
  And so I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about just
• 48:58
  positioning your own business and sort of the sophistication
• 49:01
  that you've developed now, you know, versus probably where you
• 49:05
  were when you spun off your first agency.
• 49:07
  And just talk a little bit about how you positioned yourself, how
• 49:09
  you chose. I mean, because, you know, like
• 49:11
  you've mentioned even in this conversation that a lot of your,
• 49:14
  I don't want to call them tips or pointers or whatever, but a
• 49:16
  lot of the advice you're giving would apply to any service
• 49:19
  industry. So why do you only work with
• 49:21
  agencies, for example? You know, So can we talk a
• 49:23
  little bit about just your own experience as an entrepreneur in
• 49:25
  positioning? Not necessarily.
• 49:27
  I mean, of course, everybody wants, you know, here's the
• 49:29
  advice, you know, you should niche down, you should be more
• 49:31
  selected, you should be all this stuff.
• 49:33
  But I'm just curious how you actually did it in your own
• 49:36
  profession. Yeah, that's a great question.
• 49:40
  And I can go a little bit late to answer these because I think
• 49:43
  they're important. So the first, it's funny, the
• 49:47
  first tech business that I wanted to start was like the
• 49:50
  exact example of what you shouldn't do when you're
• 49:53
  starting a business and trying to position.
• 49:55
  My idea was this, let's just rebuild Google but make it
• 50:01
  social purpose. So you get to choose Ryan like a
• 50:04
  percentage of the ad spend that generate that's generated by you
• 50:08
  using the search engine gets directed at a charity of your
• 50:11
  choice. Turns out that already exists.
• 50:13
  It's called the Kosia. They're specifically like a
• 50:15
  nature fund, but I just like, you know, like a complete idiot
• 50:22
  was just like, Oh yeah, Google has like 50,000 engineers.
• 50:25
  But me, a guy with no technical expertise and no money and no
• 50:29
  resources, yeah, we could just rebuild whatever they did.
• 50:31
  That's not going to be difficult.
• 50:32
  Like, and you think about like the scope of what Google does.
• 50:36
  There's so many things. So that was like super dumb.
• 50:38
  So I didn't start to your point where where we are today.
• 50:41
  And I think this lesson is learned through realizing it's a
• 50:45
  thing that you hear a lot when you're a young entrepreneur, but
• 50:47
  you don't really appreciate until you're older that like
• 50:49
  ideas are worthless, execution is everything and execution is
• 50:52
  exponentially harder the the larger the surface area of the
• 50:55
  problem that you're trying to solve.
• 50:57
  And today I have, I think a really clear framework for how I
• 50:59
  think about this, where we talk a lot about the concept of an
• 51:03
  MVPA minimum viable product, especially in software.
• 51:06
  But I think this is a more pervasive concept in
• 51:08
  entrepreneurship today in general.
• 51:10
  And minimum viable product is this idea in kind of the lean
• 51:13
  startup ecosystem where it's like what's the smallest, most
• 51:16
  lean, most like quick to build solution that you can create to
• 51:20
  test if anybody will buy your thing, if you can deliver value,
• 51:23
  etcetera. But I actually think there's
• 51:25
  like 3 MVPS that come before the product.
• 51:28
  And the first is the minimum viable problem, right?
• 51:31
  What's the problem that needs to get solved and that has not
• 51:34
  changed in the six years that para keto existed?
• 51:36
  But we identified a problem, we went out, we figured out that a
• 51:39
  lot of agencies have that problem, and that problem has
• 51:42
  not changed. We've just deepened our
• 51:43
  understanding of it. But it's still the same problem
• 51:45
  today as it was back then. And if if anything, it's gotten
• 51:48
  even worse now for agencies, then the second P is minimum
• 51:52
  viable point of view. And this is something that gets
• 51:55
  overlooked a lot, but what is your unique point of view on why
• 51:59
  that problem exists, why it hasn't been solved yet, and what
• 52:02
  the right way to solve it is? And this is incredibly
• 52:05
  important, especially if you're creating a new category of
• 52:08
  product, because you have to be able to articulate, here's why
• 52:10
  all the other product categories don't really address this
• 52:13
  problem. And here's the new kind of set
• 52:17
  of criteria that needs to exist for something to really solve
• 52:19
  this. So we early on again developed
• 52:22
  this point of view of the existing solutions are basically
• 52:27
  finance data. And I could clearly articulate
• 52:30
  here's all the reasons why looking at finance data in the
• 52:32
  rear view mirror that tells you that you're not profitable, it
• 52:35
  doesn't tell you why it's not a solution to the problems that
• 52:37
  you face every day in your agency.
• 52:39
  Then the third one, and this is the one that we skipped over for
• 52:42
  almost three years is minimum viable process.
• 52:45
  So what are the actual steps that you need to take a client
• 52:48
  through to get a a consistent outcome in solving that problem?
• 52:52
  We skipped right to trying to build software for like the
• 52:54
  first three years that we existed.
• 52:56
  We wasted a lot of time and money trying to build software
• 52:59
  before we actually understood a process that we could automate
• 53:02
  or repeat with software. And so it was when we switched
• 53:06
  to doing more consulting leveraged with software that we
• 53:09
  really accelerated our understanding of the process
• 53:11
  that created repeatable results. And then then it makes sense to
• 53:16
  build a product because a product is just a packaged
• 53:19
  process or a system that repeats a process, right?
• 53:23
  But until you've kind of checked those first three things off, it
• 53:25
  doesn't make sense to go in and build the product.
• 53:28
  And so that framework is really useful.
• 53:30
  And I think it helps with the positioning because it's like
• 53:34
  everything, every other opportunity that's come across
• 53:36
  our plate and every other temptation that we've had to
• 53:39
  expand, we run it through that filter.
• 53:42
  And it becomes really evident really quickly that like the
• 53:45
  implications of trying to adapt this to something else are
• 53:49
  significant in terms of how it impacts the problem, the point
• 53:52
  of view, the process and eventually the product.
• 53:54
  And yes, our vision is to eventually serve all the
• 53:56
  professional services verticals, but I'm not naive to the
• 54:00
  operational drag that that would create for us.
• 54:02
  And so it's just taken. It's just about having the
• 54:03
  discipline to say we want to go slower now so we can go faster
• 54:06
  or later. Because to your point earlier,
• 54:09
  if we just started taking on all that work, we had experienced a
• 54:11
  lot of indigestion. We wouldn't be as profitable.
• 54:13
  Our marketing wouldn't be as potent and it would dilute the
• 54:16
  potency of our point of view and our process in the short term
• 54:19
  because it would be less specific to solving that that
• 54:22
  really, really pinpoint a problem for one person.
• 54:24
  Yeah. No, I, I think that's really
• 54:26
  interesting. And, and it's something that
• 54:28
  like even in our business, we still kind of struggle with, we
• 54:31
  sort of were founded on what I imagine is a trajectory for a
• 54:34
  lot of people like me, which is a, it basically an extension of
• 54:38
  my freelance business, right? We, we got to the point where my
• 54:41
  freelance business outgrew me and so I had to start bringing
• 54:45
  on additional resources to help out.
• 54:46
  And so we grew. And so the problem for us and
• 54:50
  it, and it's still a problem. I mean, I, I keep feeling like
• 54:52
  we're inching closer, but we just can never really seem to
• 54:55
  get to a threshold where I go, you know what, damn it, we made
• 54:57
  it is in this sort of positioning realm, right?
• 55:01
  Because just my life experience as a designer is really diverse.
• 55:04
  You know, I mean, I've worked across every industry I've
• 55:06
  worked across, you know, and at really high levels, you know, so
• 55:09
  it's like, OK, well, we're capable of doing anything for
• 55:11
  everybody. So, you know, if we can do that,
• 55:13
  if that's our pitch, you know, how come we don't have, you
• 55:16
  know, business coming out of our ears?
• 55:17
  I mean, we can do anything for anyone.
• 55:18
  It's perfect, you know, but, but that sort of lack of position or
• 55:22
  that, you know, position of being able to do everything
• 55:25
  really isn't a position at all. And, and so, you know, we've
• 55:29
  tried to narrow down and sort of recently we've sort of converted
• 55:34
  our business into something a little bit different, which is
• 55:36
  more of a subscription based model for right now, we're
• 55:39
  offering it to small businesses and to agencies, although I'm
• 55:43
  thinking we may just even drill down further and, and just serve
• 55:46
  agencies. But the idea is right now it's
• 55:48
  really hard to find good people. Hiring processes are long and
• 55:50
  slow and you can basically hire a whole agency, you know,
• 55:54
  experienced agency, you know, professionals hire a whole team
• 55:59
  in one shot for a monthly subscription, right?
• 56:02
  And so if you've got an agency and you just need to scale up in
• 56:04
  this month or you need to, you know, layoff and then replace
• 56:08
  with somebody or you just need freelancers, you know, we can do
• 56:11
  it all in one big shot, you know, so you just pay a flat
• 56:13
  rate thing. So we're we've started to niche
• 56:16
  into being sort of an agency for agencies and our experiences in
• 56:21
  AD agencies and design agencies, but the, you know, but really it
• 56:24
  could be applicable to just about any sort of agency type
• 56:26
  business that needs to spin up personnel quickly.
• 56:29
  And so, but like even just in being wishy washy about do we do
• 56:33
  this for agencies and small businesses?
• 56:36
  You know, like the offering is so different and the people are
• 56:38
  so different and the, you know, the, the needs of a small
• 56:41
  business are totally different than the needs of an agency that
• 56:43
  just needs to speed it spin up a team.
• 56:46
  And so, so, you know, so as we're still doing this, but I
• 56:49
  mean, I've been in business 20 years, you know what I mean?
• 56:51
  And we're still just trying to figure out how to not be an
• 56:54
  extension of my freelance business, you know?
• 56:56
  And so it's like, yeah, so this positioning thing is really
• 56:59
  challenging, but I love your your framework here because, you
• 57:02
  know, just as you were going through it and I'm trying to
• 57:04
  apply it to where we're at in sort of what we would call a
• 57:07
  positioning journey, very casual positioning journey.
• 57:12
  I can see logic for refining even further and just picking
• 57:16
  one vertical for now and maybe we do the other under another
• 57:19
  brand name one day. But right now we just do this
• 57:23
  sort of like you guys have done where you've narrowed into just
• 57:25
  doing agencies specifically. So I think that that's really
• 57:29
  good logic. I like that idea.
• 57:32
  Well, and I, what I encourage you to think about on that is
• 57:34
  like, what's the problem? Focus on the problem.
• 57:37
  And all the other, I think like tactical elements of niching
• 57:41
  that people get caught up in, which is like, what's the
• 57:42
  vertical? What's the service?
• 57:45
  Are we a Facebook ads agency or a YouTube ads agency?
• 57:47
  It's like all, none of that stuff matters.
• 57:49
  What matters is the problem. And then you work back from
• 57:52
  that. OK, well, what is the right
• 57:54
  point of view? What is the right solution?
• 57:55
  Who has that problem? Those things will fall into
• 57:58
  place. I think if you can get really
• 57:59
  clear on like what's the problem that we are really, really,
• 58:02
  really good at solving, everything else kind of flows
• 58:05
  from that. That's why the problem is kind
• 58:07
  of at the foundation. And every time that we've been
• 58:09
  missing the mark or that it hasn't been working or we
• 58:11
  haven't been finding product market fit, it always came back
• 58:14
  to that stack. Like that has been a tried and
• 58:16
  true framework for us. Well, I, I love that you look at
• 58:20
  it like that instead of just a minimal viable project or you
• 58:25
  know, the output, you look at what the problem is and then you
• 58:28
  find the easiest solution for that because there could be
• 58:33
  multiple problems. But if you start with the, the
• 58:37
  most important one or the easiest one, or however it is,
• 58:41
  just figure out what, what solution you're going to solve
• 58:44
  and then go from there. And then, OK, now I've got this
• 58:47
  functionality, let's work on that functionality and then that
• 58:50
  functionality and kind of slowly grow.
• 58:53
  At least you've got a product and something to get out there
• 58:56
  and start working on and then go from there.
• 58:59
  And I think a lot of a lot of people will get into something
• 59:02
  like a software project and it's so overwhelming because they've
• 59:05
  got a million problems they've got to solve instead of just
• 59:08
  focusing on one and then going I'm.
• 59:11
  Sorry. And that that basically, like
• 59:13
  you raise a great point, which has exactly been our experience,
• 59:16
  which is the times that we've like spent a lot of time and
• 59:18
  energy building the wrong thing, You know, spending time on
• 59:22
  things that didn't end up delivering value or the people
• 59:24
  weren't interested in buying or that didn't get the right result
• 59:27
  for the client. When we struggle with those
• 59:29
  things or, and then we struggled with deciding what to do, the
• 59:34
  sobering question was always what problem are we trying to
• 59:36
  solve? And when we would sit back as a
• 59:39
  team and be like, shit, I don't know, like we're not on the same
• 59:43
  page about that. It's like, that's it.
• 59:44
  That's the issue. How could we possibly build a
• 59:46
  great service, a great product, a great offer, a great funnel if
• 59:50
  we don't even know what problem we're solving?
• 59:52
  Yeah. It's impossible.
• 59:53
  And that's always been the kind of the thing that we, you know,
• 59:56
  it's just so easy to overlook. Yeah, no.
• 59:59
  Well, Marcel, we're kind of at that time.
• 1:00:02
  Do you want to tell people where they can reach out and a little
• 1:00:05
  bit more about para keto and? Yeah, yeah.
• 1:00:10
  Tell people how they can get in touch with you.
• 1:00:12
  Well, if anybody's listening and some of the stuff around
• 1:00:14
  profitability resonated, you run an agency or service business,
• 1:00:17
  you want to improve that, I encourage you to check out our
• 1:00:19
  Agency Profit Toolkit. It's a free set of resources
• 1:00:23
  complete with training videos and free templates and
• 1:00:26
  checklists and tools that you can access
• 1:00:28
  parakeeto.com/toolkit. So definitely go check that out
• 1:00:32
  if any of that stuff resonated. If you want to follow me, check
• 1:00:35
  me out on LinkedIn. It's probably the best place.
• 1:00:37
  And I also have a podcast called The Agency Profit Podcast.
• 1:00:40
  You'll never guess what we talk about on the show.
• 1:00:42
  And of course, parakeeto.com if you want to learn more about our
• 1:00:44
  company. Awesome.
• 1:00:46
  Well, thanks so much, Marcel. This has been awesome.
• 1:00:48
  Really good information. Yeah, I appreciate it a lot.
• 1:00:51
  Thanks man, appreciate you guys having me.
• 1:00:53
  Absolutely. Thanks so much to everybody who
• 1:00:55
  tunes into the show this week and every week.
• 1:00:57
  See you guys next time.