Hey everybody it's Jeff. If you're on early, just let me know you can hear me. I am starting early just in case we had technical difficulties. Hopefully it's all working great.
Alright, I see a few of you are in there now. Let me know if you can hear me in the chat. I am just putting finishing touches on a few things we're going to display on our screen today.
Hey Paul, hey Gaorii, nice to see you all. Hopefully a few more people will join us. Seems like people are jumping in. I am glad the audio is working. We are using the same system as far as you are concerned for the webinar, but we are using a different back end after our fiasco from last week. It seems like it's working better. I actually like it better myself.
I know most people aren't used to these things starting on time, but I am going to do it. So we are going to start with our survey results. I might do our hot seat today with a few people who are on the call.
So here is our survey results. And as you probably know by this point we do these surveys every week just to understand some more about you. I am going to refresh this and see if there is any new answers that have come in.
Okay, so describe your agency size. We went through this last time but the reason why we ask this time again is just to help understand why you responded the way you respond. So many of you are just freelancers, partnerships or small agencies.
Does your agency have a formal org chart? The majority of you are saying no. Which makes sense if you are just you or you and a partner. One of you says yes. So we'll get some elaboration on the one that does say yes.
Have you defined your core service offering? Majority of you are saying yes, which is great to hear. I think core service offerings are super important to say what you do. Just a little anecdote there. I was interviewing somebody for my podcast about an hour ago and they are the president of Hanapin Marketing. They run the PPC Hero blog and the Hero conf. PPC conference. It's the largest PPC blog in the world and the largest PPC conference in the world.
They are pretty good people and Jeff Allen is the president over there and he has become of friend of mine over the years, out of mutual respect. And he listens to the podcast and he had said, I like the podcast. So I asked him if he wanted to be on and he was on.
Anyway, long story short. Long introduction short, he tells me that he spends a thirteen yeasr career--his first thirteen years of his career, eleven years whatever it is working for a company and this company spends all their time and effort chasing after the new big thing. So they started off as an email marketing company and that email marketing company--he said that his second week on the job as an intern at this company, the power went out, the internet went out and he had to talk to all the customers and didn't have the internet and all kinds of crazy stuff and everybody in the company had left.
So that's a crazy story in itself this company. Anyway, he goes from an intern in this company all the way to the equity partner over the course of eleven years. But during those eleven years they do email, suddenly they actually are doing qualifications of phone calls from lead generation. He said that they actually passed a cell phone around between them answering phone calls they generated from their client's websites. That turned into lead generation and that turned into PPC and that turned into developing a software platform which for those of you who just watched the lesson 36, I saw a lot of you have watched it and commented on it.
They did everything wrong. So eleven years into his career he is an equity ownership in this agency. This look good on paper because they are doing all kinds of services. They are listening to their customers they are doing all these things that sound really good on paper. And he gets a call from Hanapin Marketing, which is the PPC Hero people. And they say, would you like to become account director? And becoming an account director is like three steps down for this guy. From an equity partner in an agency that he is at from eleven years, to being an account director at another agency. No equity, nothing. And he takes it.
He packs up, moves his family from Utah to Indianapolis. Churns two years in this job as an account director at Hanapin and they invited him to become the president of the company. And now he is running a very successful, Inc magazine 'best places to work', company. A lot of the same things that I talked about in my agency, he is doing right now as the president of Hanapin. And it's a really fascinating story though.
And the reason why I am talking about this at core service offering, is one I am letting people join the call and the then two, I asked him, I said what's the difference between working at a company that takes on all the business that it can find and does everything versus a focused one? He goes, man I wouldn't trade being at a focused agency for the world. We turn down business left and right. Anytime somebody wants them to do a website, they turn it down. Anytime somebody wants them to do SEO, they turn it down. Everything that's not PPC, they turn down. That's all they do.
And that agency, when he joined their 15 people--they are a 15 person agency and they basically had two founders, a husband and a wife. Now they are 60 people. They are growing like crazy. They have all kinds of really cool awards they've won. But they're both, a good place to work and a growing employer. So he basically determined that it was a better option for himself to get out of an agency that he had a part of, because they weren't focused, and go after something that was completely out of his realm. And it led to all the difference in his entire career.
He was really basically validating a lot of what we've talked about in the course. And that is that, you should have a core service offering. You should do planning, you should take these steps, you should really be methodical about your business. You should work on your business, not in your business. Everything we’ve talked about in this course, he basically validated, that's the right way to do things, that's the right way to grow.
And he is bullish on his company and he is the president of his company. He wasn't the founder of the agency by any means. But he also has a lot of responsibility in there. So long way of saying and actually you should listen to podcast when it goes live. It is going to be a couple of weeks still before it goes live. But it's a long way of saying that if you don't have a core service offering, then none of this really matters. You actually need to be able to turn down business that doesn't match your core service offer. Sort of crazy that I talked to this guy who runs a very successful agency an hour before this call. It's all fresh in my mind. But they turn down business that doesn't match their offering. A lot of you are doing that as well. That's great. You need to do that.
And also they are very proud of their relationship grades. So I think looking at where you guys are many of you say A's and B's. Few A's and B's a few D's and F's. Those do happen from time to time. A all the way. So there is one person who has 'A' clients. That's great to see. I think you want to definitely be A's to A's and B's right. And then if you have D's and F's that's when you got to get the confidence to fire them.
Do you solicit feedback from your clients? Half of you say yes, half of you say no. I'll be curious anybody who does that. Like how it's working for them and what they are getting from their clients.
Many of you don't have a formal budgeting process. This is a question I've seen in the forums from a lot of you and that’s around budgeting. It's difficult to do a budget, especially when you are not sure how much money you're going to make, especially when you're a freelancer or just you or just you and your partner.
But I think that it really does help to have a budget in mind. It doesn't have to be a formality is something that you can grow toward. You don't have to have a perfect budget. I think that's the biggest barrier for any of us. Is that we think that budget needs to be perfect and we thing that it needs to be something that is set in stone document. You really don't need that at first. You just need to know when your expenses are coming and when your revenue is coming. So you can say, are we going to be able to have cash flow? Can we hire people? That type of stuff.
There are templates that can do it. I was looking on Fiverr.com. If you sent just an overall amount of money you think you're going to make this year and how much you're going to spend, you could actually get somebody to do a budget for you for $5 for your business. I am not saying that, that's a right move but maybe if it's that easy to get somebody to do it, then that will get you going on it, because a lot of you haven't done a budget.
That's the key thing here. None of these things in there own are super hard, but it's hard to bring ourselves around to doing it. Because we don't want to be wrong and that's really what it comes down to. We don't want to be wrong with how we did our budget or we don't want to be wrong because we don't know what we’re doing or we don’t have an accounting degree or haven't taken the classes. That type of stuff.
I'll tell you as an entrepreneur there is tons of people with accounting degrees who would love work, who would love to be able to provide services for you and they don't cost a lot because there a lot of them available. There are a lot of people available that are looking for work. And so you can use that to your advantage at your agency. So I'd like to see those no's get to a 100% yes, you should have a budget for your business.
Planning intervals. What intervals have you run? So a lot of you do monthly planning, some quarterly, annual, weekly. Let's see more about those.
And we have a few people that are interested in joining our live coaching call as well. And I think if they are on, I'm going to ask them to join.
First let's go into the free form answers. Now let me see, so several of you have joined. Hopefully you're listening along. Feel free to put something in the chat, just to let know that you're alive and you're here. And I'm going to switch over to the free form answers.
First one is, describe your agency. Alright Ryan is there, Rosemary is there, great. Rosemary I noticed that you're volunteering for the hot seat, so I think it will be great to have you on a little bit later. So I'm going to give you a warning, just in case you're still up for it, we'll get you on to the screen in a little while.
Describe your agency accountability structure. So I'm going to go with the ones that have the longest answers. It's a short process. There is one client success manager who is accountable for on-boarding new clients, communicating, performance and managing the relationship. She does consultative sales directed by me. She is also producing email, newsletters for a couple of clients. I manage biz dev, finance, optimization, marketing and analytics consulting. Currently hiring PPC optimizer.
So it looks like this is the beginnings of building out structure. Which is great. Basically you know what people are responsible for and you say what they are responsible/accountable for doing and having them available. And no worries, Rosemary, if you need to pass that's totally cool.
And this one just the person and the contractor. So obviously accountability is more difficult if you have more than one person. This one is saying accountability is pretty simple. We empower each manager/producer on each individual project and allow them full decision making as to how the project moves forward.
As the EP on the project I makes sure not to only follow up the client but during as well. Mixed positive experiences. Okay great. So this is basically saying this is model where you oversee your executive producer and then each of the people who produces has a lot of autonomy within that. But you have checks and balances along the way. I think this is the good way to go. Especially as you're growing your business, you want to give people the ability to do things but you don't want to give too much power or too much control over to your small business to somebody who--you want to give away too much of your flexibility in your small business to individuals.
Actually I am not saying that right. What I mean is you don't to have somebody who can derail your company by taking and making the wrong decisions or they tell you they are doing a good job with your clients but they are not and your clients are unhappy. You really want to be careful with that type of person. So I think this is good to put them on it, give them autonomy but then also check in on them along the way.
The next one. Describe your core service offering. First one is paid search and social. Any website development or graphic design is contracted out. I think that's a good way to go. Just basically paid media only. As I was telling you in the intro, that's what Hanapin Marketing decided to do and it's been pretty successful for them. They are 60 person agency. 60 people and all they do is PPC. Now that includes paid search, that includes paid social, that includes a few other areas. So if you are all out there wondering how big can you get, and can you be happy and can you have happy employees as you grow? That's a good example of company that does it.
Now let's just talk about that for a second. They own the biggest blog that they have had for almost ten years. And that has been really important for them. So they have a ten years old blog that's well read by a hundreds of thousands of people a month. That gets them pretty far, that lets them pick and choose their clients. They also have really happy employees with a lot of autonomy that helps them as well. I am just basically saying, that's good to have that as a core service offering. Because we have an example of one that did that and did it really well.
Next one, PPC management, which includes AdWords, search display, shopping, remarketing, YouTube and AdRoll remarketing, avoiding Bing and Facebook due to complexity. I'll be curious about complexity of just the amount of time you put into it versus the reward. I'm guessing that's the complexity you're talking about. It's for actually Bing, so is it worth it to do two more things if you can't find ways to make money off of it. That might be an expansion opportunity. Is to have somebody who specializes in that area, who is focused on it and see if that works. Or you just don't do it if it doesn't bring margins and it doesn't bring happiness to you company.
Then this one, you are also doing analytics and GTM deployments for your clients who are you're doing advertising for. Analytics consulting, email marketing. Basically doing a one monthly news letter and drip campaign development. So as you can see there is a lot of service offerings that are here. They seem a little bit different from each other and different sides of the brain.
Going back to structure it sounds like it's basically you and another person. And so I wonder if you are just going after where the business is coming in from or if there is more to it. As I look at this I wonder just in general, are these the right areas of focus to be on. If you are on the call and this is your answer, it will be fun to talk some more about this but when I look at this I say, it almost seems like you're under optimized on PPC. You can do more in that area.
Then you're doing some stuff that's very custom for people. It's probably high revenue and probably pretty lucrative, the consulting type stuff and pays the bills and everything. But they are different than doing paid management and then email part time service that's completely different from these things. It seems like you have multiple service offerings but that they're completely different from each other. And I am wondering if that is causing problems with focus and allowing you to focus on growing the business.
Yeah Daren is saying both sides of the brain--okay this must be your answer Darren. There is nothing wrong with it by any means. Especially if you want to be a consultant and you want to do fun work or satisfying work, you can do that. To me it just seems like for one person to be able to do all these things and concentrate on business development, it's almost spreading yourself too thin. That's the concern I have in reading it.
Darren is saying email is new, completely different. It fits the approach, direct response to digital marketing. A lot of what you're talking about Darren reminds me exactly of what my agency tried to do. Basically it was that, we did PPC, then we actually opened up a call center in order to answer the phone calls that PPC generated and then we started trying to do email marketing and everything to be basically a one stop shop for that lead. And I would say some of the things we did, we did extremely well and some of the things we did, we just couldn't do it at scale. And it was mostly because we weren't that good at it. Usually when you are not good at something, it's because you don't have a partner or somebody in place to do it or you don't have the team in place. So we had a team problem. Anyways, so we chased after doing everything and it was a mistake on our end, just speaking from experience.
This one core service. PPC management, analytics, email marketing management. It sounds similar to above, so same comments there. Web design and digital marketing, too broad a little vague. Need to narrow it down more. Yes, I would agree with it. That could be something that would narrow it down. These are freelancer items right? We want to provide value around skills that we have. And so if we can do website design, we can do marketing, we just offer that. I think the part of the way to expand is to really get focused on saying we're just going to do this one thing and getting narrowed down.
This one, core service offering is offline editorial and finish for broadcast commercials and internet content. We've also began offering production services to our core clients in an effort to help us grow and complement our editorial services. Great, I am not that familiar with this area but it seems like it's dialed in as to what you do and you're offering more services to help grow and complement, and yeah it makes sense to do that, especially if you can get and achieve margins and goals and everything.
Where is the most profit? This one is saying paid search. But it will change over time as more and more people warm up to paid social. Yeah I think that actually going back to the conversation I had with the guy at Hanapin Marketing earlier today. He said that their agency goal is to deliver solutions for clients where they deliver ten times return on the expense. So whatever it is they want their clients to get ten times return on what they spend with them. And I assume that includes media spend plus agency fee or maybe it's ten times on agency fee. I am not actually sure how they said it. But I thought that was a good way to phrase it. I've never heard that phrase before as far as being able for agency to define the value they create.
So if you can create a profitable business and you can generate this type of profit opportunity, it's a really focused area to go on. Still understanding profit opportunity based on the course ,PPC management. I wouldn't read too closely into what I write in the examples. The examples are based off of experience but there is so much more that goes into profitability than just, this service is more profitable than that one. There are people who can make services that I have not been able to make profitable. They can make them super profitable. So it depends on your team, your hires, your management, depends on so many people that are involved whether it's profitable or not. So yes, my agency made PPC super-duper profitable. And we didn't make other things as profitable. But there are agencies that do SEO that are super profitable. So I wouldn't read into that too much.
Websites because you don't have recurring revenue working on rolling out some monthly plans. Okay that makes sense. Editorial and finish still offer the most profit opportunity, but once production is a bit more consistent, then the scales will switch. Yeah. This one down here is a classic area that basically you're re-investing in your business. So you found some things that are profitable and work well for you right now and you're trying to go after the next opportunity and so you're re-investing in the business--both re-investing and doing research and development for the future. So it seems like you're saying okay these things are profitable but the future what we think is going to happen is going to be doing more production and so you focus on that. I really like that line of thinking and that's definitely on board with what we have been talking about in the course.
It's okay to do things that don't make you any money today. But it has to be as a means to an ends. It has to be as a way you believe this is the future. Like you might decide that mobile content or you're talking about internet broadcasting, you're talking about editorial--you might decide there is another way that it's going to be delivered in the future and you just want to get ahead of the game and so you decide to invest in that. Totally cool and actually the right way to go. Definitely recommend doing it that way.
Describe your budgeting process. No process yet. We talked about that. How, when you're an individual it's difficult to have it. This one says, too focused on the revenue side. Tend to plan just the number of clients I have without looking at profitability. Time tracking is poor, contributes to lack of understanding. Time tracking is important for all the reasons you say here. That you don't understand what's profitable and it's hard to focus your efforts. And I'm not the biggest fan of time tracking either. But knowing what you put your time into at least having some kind of mental, at the very least or some kind of document or note where you say you're spending your time, I think is really a good way to figure out how to become profitable, and to know where you invest your time into.
I think it's alright to be focused on revenue side. I would be lying if I said that revenue side isn't the most important piece of any business. At least getting started. Unless you can get revenue you don't have a viable business. Like enough revenue to prove that you're a viable business. So first thing is to make sure you're a viable business. That's the first and foremost thing to do, is to make sure you have a viable business, it's coming in.
Then you can get into the point where you want to establish profit. It might not happen in the same cycle to be able to prove to yourself that your business is viable and to focus on profit. But they need to come at some point. It can't be two years, it can't be four years. Basically once you get that first hurdle out of the way, that you know people are going to pay you for your business idea, then the next thing is how do you make profit.
No budget, no budget. Our industry has an AICE estimate template that most agencies and clients are familiar with. We've altered it to align a bit more with our process and our pricing.
I missed this bottom one so I'll come back to that. Sorry about that, I missed the bottom one. Once the script has been dissected and we know exactly what is needed in what timeline, then it becomes more about filling in the spaces. So this one is basically saying that they have built in profit into the industry standard. Which is pretty cool, as long as that profit's reasonable. Is that you know how it's going to work based on pricing. You know based on the industry template that you're going to hit a certain amount of profit. Which I think is nice but it can get squeezed out in that area as well.
So I'm going to go back to these--describe your accountability structure. President handles new business, day to day running of business is the visionary leadership team, support teams, writers, designers, okay. See this is a very solid org chart. Basically you have the president on top. Leadership team the next level and the teams below them on that one. Great.
Core service offering, brand development. Help clients attain success by ensuring they are authentic and relevant in an ever changing landscape. In other words, we make sure they don't leave money on the table. I am just curious about this definition. Is this your service or is this your vision statement. Because it's hard to--what is the service that you do in this one here? So you're a brand development firm based on inclusion, you help the clients attain success. So I am not sure what the service offering is in this area. It sounds like a lot of things we do--I am not clear on what the service is.
Where are you seeing most profit opportunity? Evenly split between strategic and creative offerings. Because margins we find on developing websites of a certain size has been very profitable too. That's good so if you can offer strategy and provide creative and develop the site and make them all profitable, that's good. And then you can make this profitable especially if it's all around the same thing so you do a strategy first that leads to creative and then you develop the website. Makes sense to be able to offer those things. That's an example of expanding a reach in a few areas. And then still maintaining profit.
And back to the budget question where we were. It's a quasi formal process. They have forecast based on annual goals and desires such as new team members and operational wants. In the process of making this process more formal and are working to make time entry mandatory. Plan to get much smarter about true versus perceived costs. Great, so basically is saying it's getting there. It's how I read this. It's getting to the point where it's becoming a formal budgeting process. And you want to get to that point and get better at it. Great so hopefully some of the things you've learned in class will get you to this point.
I see, so Rosemary is saying that your service offering is, you do research and then you use that research to tell people how they should go forward with their business. Like a strategy for their brand. So basically brand strategy is what your core service would be. That's how I would describe that. We do brand strategy and implementation. That's how I probably summarize the--as a lay person you already give me an elevator pitch and say what you do. That's sort of how I would hear it and how I would say it. So we do brand strategy and implementation. And then people say what does that mean? Then you say we research about your brand and about your competitive market. We learn a lot about your business and the market place out there and we come up with the process that lets you strategically attack your market. Something like that.
Okay, so this is the last one. Describe how you will operate your business differently based on what you've learned in the business operational module? First one, more methodical process oriented. Write out on paper what every process will look like, and document outcomes to see where improvements can be make. Excellent. That's a good way to go.
Even since we've been doing this course I've been trying myself to get better at processes and nailing things down. And what I've realized is that, a process is so important to everything we do. To map out each step and be so much more focused on what's going on and holding accountable. Asana has been really good for doing that on my end. Just getting stuff done. There are certain times where it's easy for us to know what we need to do with our business. Like we know that we need to create something or deliver something. But then there is other areas where it just comes down to focusing and it just comes down to documenting all the steps that are there so you can get it done. So excellent.
I want to time tracking consistently to get good at profitability, create a better avatar but that's becoming more clear with a marketing profile, I require leads to compete. I want to get disciplined partnership agreements and start to explore my relationships. On-boarding employees/contractors needs to improve. Yes, so sounds like there is some good processes that you recognize need improvement and I think it's just implementing them. I would say try to tackle them one by one is definitely a good way to go. I think trying to fix all your processes at once can get really difficult. But just deciding, we need to hire somebody documenting the on-boarding process, maybe a good starting point.
Workflows are critical. Meetings are critical. Business needs more process and structure. Modules are pretty eye opening. That's really good to hear. I am glad that they were eye opening for you.
I would implement more consistent process, which is something we've always lacked. I think in the editing business, since it's so client driven it's got to be difficult to be consistent with your process. That's the hard thing with all this, is that if we are providing high value services that are really unique and can charge high margins, how do we have a process that's consistent when the value we provide is in the uniqueness. And that's hard. It's not an easy solution to get to, but the key is to break it down into manageable pieces that you can work with. How do you break it down into something that you always have to do on your project versus some things that you don't have to always do. How do you at least document that you need to have time dedicated to doing these things.
So for example you might always need to kick off a call with client, you might always need to have a client give you a brief or give you materials those types of things. And then in the middle part somebody just needs to make a decision and get things done. So maybe you build the process around the beginning. You let somebody have full autonomy in the middle and then you build the process around delivery at the end, billing all other aspects that go into your business. And now you have a pretty consistent process. But you still have the creativity that you need in between. I think that's actually a good way to compromise in high value thought-based areas that we are providing.
Make sure everybody is accountable for reporting their time. Have better time tracking. Revising our estimating based on this course. Increased fees course has justified that decision. I have also started demanding consultancy fee for my time and appearances. I am often pulled to provide input on inclusion topics for free. A speaking gig here and there provides exposure. I think it's good. You're valuing your time more and you're trying to either get a return on it. Or be more selective with how you use it. I think that's great. It's perfect.
You are in the process of updating your website before the course, put on hold we're going to go back to drawing board to make sure it appeals to our sweet spot clients, midsized companies. This benefits driven site with allowances to develop thought leadership via a blog, white papers, reports and perhaps a blog. He has a lot to do. I look forward to being more focused on and more decisive about the type of clients to take on. Great. I think that's awesome so focus, being decisive and just knowing what keeps you going, right. What keeps you on the right track? So I think that waiting to redo your website can be a really good idea.
I don't know if anybody noticed but I redid the Jeffaytics website recently. I did it over the holiday break. After we had recorded those lessons and we were talking about good versus bad websites. I realized that our website was pretty bad and now I just have one call of action and that's all I'm asking people to do on the homepage above the fold, it's just one thing. Here is what I want you to do. And it's starting to get some traction and some people filling it out. But also as I look at it, remember the website is your opportunity to tell people what you want them to do and see and also how you present yourself. I am not sure it's perfect yet but it's at least getting closer to where I want it to be and there are still bunch of other things we're working on with the website to keep on making it better as well.
Okay so sort of quiet in the chat today. I know people are busy or weren't able to make the call. That's it for our survey results and so I'm going to answer your questions. So let me know if you have any questions. And let me know if you want to get on to the webinar as well and you want to be on camera. The cool box is back. I know everybody loves that box, seeing it in the background. I have awesome wall artwork. We only have one more of these calls so this is your second last chance to ask questions. Yeah Ryan it really does tie the room together.
Jason is talking about building a brand and how to describe a little more about how I did that for my company. Actually you have some cool resources on this call as well. Rosemary specialty is strategic brand consulting. So she might have some insights on this as well. But to me, what a brand is to me is basically when somebody thinks about a provider of the services that you provide, they think of you or you're in the conversation.
So let me give you an example of that. When I say a brand, it first started out in the Twin Cities there where I am from, where my agency is located. I just wanted to be--when somebody thought of the search marketing or whatever it was, basically search that’s really what I was focused on, I wanted them to think of our agency. So that meant going out and speaking at things, joining associations that had to do a search. I even am the co-founder of one of the premier search organization in the Twin Cities, one of the biggest ones in the United States.
Basically to me a brand ends up being, that you're in that conversation and when people think of digital marketing agency or when they think of providers around specific areas, they think of you. So that was my board memberships like I said, that was going to a ton of events. I went to four or five events a week sometimes, which is too much. That is not a recommendation to you. But if you are really hungry that might be something you do. It was participating on social media, getting our name out there. It was going to galas and events, participating in trying to win awards for our agency, for anything out there. There are so many agency awards out there that it's hard to even keep track of them all. They are basically all rewarding the same agencies and those are the ones who apply. It's blogging, it's getting out there, it's experimenting with new things and trying to do them. That's really what the biggest thing for me was always being out there and try to be part of that conversation.
It's the same thing with Jeffalytics. Just putting myself out there. Going to conferences, speaking, creating relationships as much as I can. For example, I wrote the foreword of a program for this conference that's coming up in Hungry in a couple of days. I always think that the person who writes the intro to a conference it seems like a pretty big deal. It's just because I had a good conversation with the guy who runs the conference back in India a couple of weeks ago. And he was like hey, I want you to write the foreword. So all these little things again are being top of mind and just putting yourself out there. So that's the thing for me. Hopefully that helps Jason around being a brand.
I am just going to read Rosemary's comment then I'll get back to the questions in order. Make sure you're differentiated, compelling, consistent. Service may not be unique, your delivery should be. Elevate what you stand for, why your organization exists. I like that one, why does your organization exist? Any anchor to your service, I like that a lot. See Rosemary is the expert here.
George wants to know, how do you approach value pricing for services like AdWords monthly management when most of the time the client would like to know the time that you spent on her account. Okay. Let me just get my head into that. So we are describing somebody who—we’re managing AdWords for them and this person, let's say they are spending a $1000 a month and they are making $10,000, just throwing numbers out there. And they want to know, for that $1000 they are spending with Google and however much you're asking them before they say, how much time did it take you to manage that in order to get me this return on my investment? And that happens all the time.
People want to know, they think they can pay Google money and they don't have to pay somebody else to make Google there. It's really weird. People are totally cool with paying money to Google which we call working dollars by the way. So they are totally cool with paying working dollars to Google but they don't want to pay non-working dollars to people to provide the services, which doesn't make any sense when you think about it. Because Google is a huge company and their advertising is not accountable at all if you ask me. It's not very accountable and yet they don't want to pay the individual who makes it accountable. Meaning that they don't want to pay you to make the return on Google.
So what I would tell them is that the average person who runs ads on Google, they spend a dollar they make two dollars, that's it. And you're spending a dollar and making a ten. So it's not about how much hours I put into it, it's the value that you get. Your dollar or whatever your currency is, your Euro is ten times more productive because I am there then it would be if you would have gone to Google by itself. The way I work on value pricing is more putting into the context of what the cost would be if they didn't use me or if they didn't use my services.
Specifically speaking, my agency when we provided PPC services we were about two to three times better than an average agency and about 10 to 20 times better than the person managing directly with Google. And we had charts, we had all kinds of different things to show that, because consistently we were able to deliver it. Because the truth is that most people are terrible at managing advertising efficiently and the reason why they are terrible is they trust Google, the $66 billion corporation, they trust them to do what's right for them versus actually just doing what's right for them.
So basically I would phrase it as in doesn't matter how many hours it takes me to do it, I am providing you outsize value and I'm taking a piece of that value. Now you don't need to be that blunt about it, but that's how you got to look at it. Is basically I am making you more money by being involved then you can do it yourself and not have good results and you could keep on getting the good results with me.
Now this is depending on you, delivering good results. If you can't deliver good results or if you are not confident enough to do that then you can't charge value price, you really are going to be stuck in the hourly trap. So basically ashamed something that makes me weeper little bit is somebody who is super talented, who does deliver results being in the hourly trap. But somebody who is just an average worker bee who doesn't add any value to what they are doing, they are just punching clocks and putting numbers in there then you're probably going to be in the hourly trap, because you're not providing them with the outsize value. I am not speaking for you by any means but I am just saying in general that's what it comes down to.
How would you bring partners to be more on the same page on various topics? Nicola, I am trying to understand. Do you mean business partners or do you mean--when you say same page, are you saying how do you get your partners to be on the same page with you or you’re saying how do you bring on partners to get you more business. I am not positive on what that means. I'll come back to that one if you can just clarify a little bit, that'll be great.
Alvaro wants to know, top three reasons--Nicola is that yes to the first one or to the second one? Okay so Alvaro wants to know top three reasons to change your company name. Interesting. I think what Rosemary is saying, is that if you don't have any equity, it's been compromised something like that infringement. So the reason why I would change a name is because the name you have right now doesn't match the direction you are going to use moving forward and the name is appeared to be hindrance on your way of doing business. So I would change my name if the name itself either has a negative connotation, neutral or just got in the way. And that's both, with your clients and with your employees.
I think once you establish a brand, your name doesn't matter as much to the fact that you've established a brand. But they become one in the same. So I would say, at some point I'm going to change Jeffalytics to be something else. I don't know when it's going to happen but the biggest reason why I'm changing it is because as I grow my business to be less reliance on one person, I don't want it to be one person's name. And so that's the main reason why I would eventually be doing that because it's not about me. It's about growing a team and building up a real business versus just a freelancer named Jeff and you put his name in it. So that's one reason why.
But it's a big consideration, it's a big undertaking it shouldn't be taken lightly and I would say for sure talk to somebody like Rosemary had some good ideas in there as well. But you might talk to somebody who is an expert in branding and naming to see what they think. See how they can help you. I don't know if I have three reasons. I think I might have said three there but.
So how do you get your business partners to be in alignment with your company strategies? Business partners are hard because it's a marriage. Ultimately the key to a successful business partnership is like the key to successful marriage. I think a lot of it is compromise, empathy and understanding the other person and seeing things and then trying to create a logical case for why you should do things some way. So basically, coming up with some kind of happy medium or some kind of understanding. It's really all about understanding.
Why is that person thinking this way? Do they just not have enough information that you have? Do you have information that is vital that you're not telling them? They have information they are not telling you? Do they have experiences that are telling them that what you're thinking is not the right way to go? Are they just indifferent that they not understand enough? Have you not established accountability and who get to decide things? Is it one of those 50/50 partnerships that people get into thinking that's a good idea. Only to learn that 50/50 partnerships are terrible idea. Is that person carrying their weight? Or is their lack of decision just how they are everywhere? So is it always a problem or is it just on this one thing? Are you getting your way most of the time or none of the time?
Those are all the things that I would sort through to figure out why is this person thinking this way. And why is it different then the way that I am thinking. And usually it comes down to inexperience that they have, that they are not sharing with you. Or it comes down to they don't have the same information that you do. And talking it out almost always solves the problem.
But like in marriages, it's often that people are afraid to even talk about it or they don't talk about it and it causes tension and problems. And the other person might not even know it. And trust me that's how it works in business partnerships. I can say for a fact, that's how it works. Is that all this time you spend with these people working, but then when it comes to working on the business, it's hard to find time and you don't want to rock the boat, things are going okay and so that's a lot of times what ends up happening.
Great, Gaorii shared something about changing business name, awesome. Okay so that's all the questions that I have right now any other questions that you guys see coming through?
Alright, I am going to stick around, I am just going to have a sip of water and stick around for a little bit, just in case you have any questions. Yes Rosemary, we have another call next week, it's going to be same time, same channel. That will be our final coaching call.
Ryan says talk about process. Love to hear some things you guys were doing. Can you be more specific Ryan. When you say some of the things you guys were doing. Do you mean agency process? Do you mean things that I'm doing right now? Just want to be clear so I can answer that. Agency.
My agency developed a lot of processes and they are in various forms of completion and utility. But I'll give you one about email delivery. We sent 500 million emails a year on behalf of our clients and in order to do that you need to check a lot of stuff to make sure you deliver email properly. Everybody who is on this call probably thinks email marketing as, you write something and then it gets delivered. You write something, you select a list and they click on them and they go to your website. That can be as easy as that but that can be your entire email process.
But our email process was basically, creative agency would create a psd file and a copy deck for the email. Our team would take that, we would cut up all the images to be just jpeg images and then we would put the html around the email in order to make it render then we would send a test email to these different tools like Pivotal VeracityI, I think it was called. And that basically would render it in about 45 different email clients and tell you if it was broken or not. We would fix the email, we would then do the campaign piece where we would make sure it's going to the right people. We would triple check that. We would have a whole bunch of--you do a count of how many people should be on this list versus how many are actually in your email list. We would send a test to a small group of people, maybe 1% of the file just to make sure it's not broken. Then you do a subject line test. Where you send out 10% subject line to 50/50 to two different groups and then you take the one the subject line that one and you do that to the rest of your list. Then you would do a report on how the email performed. Provide that to your client and do all kinds of downstream analysis as well.
Now that's what the process would be like. Basically the process is documenting all those steps saying when they need to happen, what's our service level agreement from when we get a psd file all the way to when we send the email out. How much lead time to we need? What's the schedule for our team? Is there too much work for them to do that at one point in time? Can we delay things? If there is too much work can we triage client requests. All kinds of different things we would do in order to make sure that a single email was sent out to the right people and the right message and everything worked.
So that's almost like a quality control process when you think about it. Anybody can send an email but it's what you don't do and what you don't document that could cause issues. As you probably know, sending an email is nerve wrecking because it's permanent. Once you send that you can't pull it back. You can pull back almost any type of marketing if it's not working because it's not physically living in somebody's inbox. You can take down a website or you can take down your ads, but you can't do that with an email, you can’t take it back. So you have to be pretty perfect about it.
So that's just an example of a process that really--every email is different but basically it was all the same. You need to follow the same steps the same checks in order to make it work. So that process is what you need in order to use it. It’s like a three person team delivering 500 million emails a year. That's pretty insane when you think about it.
How that process works is we had coders, who code the emails, people who run the campaign system, sometimes the same person, sometimes it's a different person. A project coordinator which in agency term, a coordinator is usually a little bit lower than a project manager. A coordinator is somebody who is taking a defined process that already exists and they are just running the process. They are not actually creating the process. If you want somebody to create the process, that's usually a manager, a director who would do that, that type of level. And basically you just run through this in order to make sure you don't miss any steps.
Now I can't tell you enough how important it is to not miss steps. And to make sure that you do things consistently and that you deliver them the same way, because that's really the down side especially in the marketing world. If you get the message wrong or if you miss steps, bad things are going to happen. So sometimes process is just like don't screw these things up. That's actually where a lot of this comes from is the necessity of let's just do this consistently so we don't screw it up. Then you just build it from there. It doesn't have to be a lot of steps. It just has to be don't forget these steps.
And actually if you do it enough, sometimes you don't need the process, you don't even need to look at the steps, you know what they are. But you have that sanity check there to make sure you don't screw up. And that's really what it comes down to, in my opinion. You just want to deliver things consistently. Especially if you are delivering the stuff for a client and you want to keep them happy. You can't screw up your job, the job that you're getting paid to do.
Hard part is to do a process around something that changes every time, something that's very inconsistent or if you don't get paid enough to have margins to create a process or you're just not focused on it. That's where you get into trouble. And our agency had plenty of those too. Plenty of rogue projects, one-offs things that we did. Just because we did it, it was easy or was a quick profit opportunity.
But those things always hurt the most when you go after the profit opportunity just because somebody is paying you money it ends up--maybe it works once, maybe it works twice but eventually it caves in, because you have no process to speak of it. You just have the efforts of an individual. That's like they call it in sports, that's like hero ball. You're going out there trying to be a hero. The reason why we talk so much about building a team is because this isn't about hero, this is about building up a quality team. A team that can get these things done and they can rely on each other.
Okay, any other questions? That light on my face is me checking the questions room.
Okay so I am going to end this call then, since I don't see any more questions coming in. So next week we have our final coaching call and then you are a graduate of the Agency Jumpstart Course. So thanks everybody. Have a good one.
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