Are you struggling to get a handle on your agency’s growth? Have you established the right strategies for formalizing growth beyond referrals? Today’s guest grew organically for a long time but eventually saw the need to clearly define his agency’s direction and business goals. His team lacked a clear understanding of the overall direction, resulting in the constant need for guidance. He talks about the moment he knew it was time to hire an operator and how having clear processes and systems benefitted his team. He also shares how starting a podcast revived his agency, fueled their social media, and helped him become a better leader.

Paris Childress is the founder and CEO of Hop Online, a performance marketing agency for SaaS companies. Having run his agency for 14 years, he’s seen many ups and downs and come out stronger. Today he shares how to identify and navigate the hard times of entrepreneurship and advice on how to overcome challenges and make informed decisions. Tune in for an inspiring conversation with a seasoned agency owner.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

Becoming a manager of systems, not people.
Formalizing growth with a three-fold marketing strategy.
Establishing a brand and leadership through podcasting.

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Sponsors and Resources

E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design, and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.

Learning to Manage Systems Instead of People to Grow Beyond Referrals

Paris is an accidental agency owner who rushed to create a company once he realized invoices were an important part of getting paid. At the time, he didn’t fully understand what he was creating but luckily organic growth soon followed.

As time went by, Paris realized the agency was not set up to see real growth past initial referrals. The challenge now was to get the systems and the structure in place to grow his small team. It was time to move from managing people to managing systems.

Basically, managing the agency was getting harder because he had to manage more and more people who didn’t always know what to do. They needed systems to fall back on. He needed to clearly define their services, implement SOPs, and figure out what they were good at. Step one was hiring an operator. As the agency’s visionary, he recognized it was time to get someone to focus on processes and execution.

His agency greatly benefitted from that clarity and setting up the systems for real growth. More recently, the pandemic presented new growth opportunities as SaaS businesses were red hot during COVID-19. Now, Paris is getting ready to tackle new challenges as SaaS businesses are seeing their valuations go down. It’s definitely a tougher environment with marketing budget cuts so they’re focusing on developing their brand.

Formalizing Growth with a Dedicated Team and a Partner for Outbound

One of the first steps to have a more serious focus on their marketing was formalizing a growth team working on generating more leads for the agency. It includes two full-time marketers, one salesperson, and himself.

With a decrease of new business coming their way, Paris made the conscious decision to dedicate agency resources to the problem. This helped them avoid downsizing. With the margins being way too low for way too long, he had been pondering that option. However, he realized it was not a marketing problem but rather a sales problem.

In terms of strategy, Paris was clear he needed to develop the 3 marketing channels: inbound, outbound, and partnerships. To tackle their lack of inbound strategy, he launched a podcast, which has become his favorite part of his week. It’s still very small but it’s starting to attract the right audience. A podcast can make a huge difference in your brand even with 50 to 100 downloads per week. It’s not about building a huge audience, but rather building a relevant audience.

As to the outbound piece, Paris is surprised at how well it’s worked. They’d previously tried in the past with internal teams but this year they found a qualified partner to help them on this front. The result has been a steady pipeline with pretty good leads for them. Of course, it is a longer sales cycle than inbound or referrals. Discovery calls should be approached with a much more consultative approach and guide the conversation to get them talking about their business so they can start to realize they do need help in some areas.

Establishing Thought Leadership Through Podcasting

Starting a podcast has helped revitalize his agency in many ways. For instance, they now get to repurpose that content. It’s fueling their social media and creating assets for salespeople.

Additionally, and perhaps most importantly for Paris, it brought a lot of clarity for him as an agency owner. Since having the podcast, he has had new exciting ideas and gets to have interesting conversations with influential entrepreneurs. It has made him more focused and a better leader for his team.

Paris strives to find guests he knows his audience will enjoy and benefit from. It can also be a strategy to invite people he’d like to be clients but this aspect is not a primary concern for him. He focuses on generating great conversations. In his opinion, if that person is ready to work with him they’ll come back based on that first exchange they had during the podcast.

As a strategy, a podcast will take time to bear fruit. Building your brand and establishing your agency as a leader in your niche takes a lot of effort. In the end, you will have a machine that creates predictability, freedom, and wealth but it all starts with creating content that helps and using that to build the business over time.

Real Growth Also Relies on Client Retention

One key aspect of building a successful agency is client retention. Once you have the strategies to maintain a full pipeline, you’ll also need to work on having sound processes. Separate yourself on your processes and you’ll see the positive impact on your client churn rate. It’s not always about constantly getting new clients, maintaining those clients also requires a lot of work and will help you experience real growth.

The frustration of constantly having to replace lost clients is not conducive to the growth and success of an agency. If you’re experiencing this, it may be time to think about what you can do differently in terms of service delivery and marketing. After all, bringing on two clients and losing one is better than a 1:1 win/loss ratio.

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