Josh Tay's Linkedin Analytics

We started using diagrams in our decks. It changed the game. Most agencies conduct an audit to find areas of opportunity. But tbh, most prospects who aren't email marketing savvy get lost. Their eyes glaze over. In our sales calls, we found that most brands struggle with automation. There's too many, it's too technical, the customer journey is too complicated. So we came up with a way to simplify things. Show prospects what they care about. Where you are (current setup) Vs Where you need to be (ideal setup) With this diagram, we can circle everything that's missing. Moral of the story: Show, don't tell. You don't need to be a great talker to close. You just need to know how to think like your customer. You also don't need the best salesman to get out of founders ales. You just need great sales enablement tools.

Sneak peak into how I budget for pods. Hint: Profit first - How much can you afford for a team member? Which role? - When is it time to hire a new person or open a new pod? - How many revenue must each pod generate to turn a profit? - How many hours must you cap a contractor based on their rate? These questions are solved with our pod calculator. This sheet is informed by our cash flow statement. The sheet has multiple tabs. 1) Agency overheads Shown in the image below 2) Pod overheads Only for direct salaries and costs of team members in respective pods 3) Pod resourcing and profitability Shows the amount each pod needs to earn to breakeven with said profit margin. Shows the number of accounts each pod needs to manage based on average contract value. A change in agency or pod overhead affects the numbers here. This lets us know exactly how much we can spend on who. You run an agency. You are a business owner. Act like it, stop winging everything. And if you can't manage it, ask for help.

It's been 2 months since I started submitting hourly work forms. Most people use it from an accountability "i need to stay focused" standpoint. We're using it for a completely different reason. To audit the TYPE of work we're doing. What $10 and $100 tasks are we stuck with? These are the things we should be delegating. It's hard though. Admin. The rest of the team can't do it. Really? Why not? Can you train your VA to do it? Building sales and marketing systems. It's not the team's duty, we can't delegate. Should we be outsourcing then? Every single hour, myself and the founders submit hourly forms. That get pulled into a common sheet. And every submission zaps and email to each other, so we all know what we're doing all the time. Sometimes even the leadership team needs micromanagement. For good reason. Because of this, we're a lot more conscious of the tasks we engage in. So we can work on actual important stuff.

Early warning signs of client churn: - Client asking for updates - Client spots something before you - Calls are project/status updates rather than strategy discussions - Client says "this is what we need to do", instead of asking for opinions Clients need to feel taken of all the time. And they won't tell you they need more support until it's too late. By the time they sound it out, you have a low chance of recovery. Proactivity is the key. So internally we have communication acknowledgement protocols. No message goes more than 4h without a response. There are start of day, mid day, end of day tasks. We have a VA dedicated to responding out of office hours, and a bot to remind us if messages aren't responded to. Reports follow a strict structure of recommendations. Every week we send wins. Every month there are health checks. Other pod team members help flag if anything's amiss too. Every week we have internal client status updates. All calls are run through AI for recommendations on improvements based on our best-practice doc. Clients don't just want an agency to execute. They want partnership, guidance, direction and assurance. This is what differentiates you from every tom dick or harry agency with a cool name.

Enable your team to think on their own. That's probably the #1 tip to working less. You can't have people asking you questions everyday. You can't be constantly jumping back in to salvage accounts. You can't afford to be the safety net for everyone when things fail. The solution to this is simple. Build a knowledge base. This is your playbook for how to do everything. Every software, every repetitive task, every common problem. As long as there's a "how to do" something, there can be a document for it. - Video recording - Written instructions - Images with arrows pointing This becomes your brain that the team can turn to. Founders, you must offload. When you get questions, you direct them to the knowledge base. And they naturally start to learn to solve problems on their own.

Getting out of sales is one of the biggest challenges of founder-led agencies. You're the face of the company. People expect to see you on the call right? Founder sales closes at a higher rate, you should be on it right? Sales reps are good at sales, such at technical. Your team is good technical, suck at sales. But you're good at both, so no choice right? That's where a sales system becomes important. Starting from your deck. Here's what we learned after going through the wringer for 2 years. If you hit pain points right, you technically don't need to be that great at sales. You just need to be good at proving authority. If you have the right credibility and case studies in your deck, you technically don't have to have too much domain knowledge either. Then next comes training and shadowing. What's your posture on calls? When do you pause? When do you intentionally skip slides? When do you engage the prospect in conversation? What questions do you ask? These are all process-driven. You don't need to be a super duper salesman + subject matter expert to do it. 1. Refine your sales decks 2. Start documenting your process 3. Find someone to shadow and eventually replace you We used to keep looking for a unicorn. But that person was unlikely to come, so we changed our approach. Made it stupid simple. Looks like it's working now. Founders, who's managed to completely get themselves out of sales? How did you do it?

NLE opening a new service line? Profit is down, revenue is stagnant, now what? This was us last year. We considered offering a new service. Horizontal expansion could mean… Landing pages? Paid media? CRO? Or expanding our niche could mean… Managing new ESPs? Working with non-ecom brands? But we slapped ourselves when we realised the biggest problem. Profit was down because we weren’t productised enough. And it was eating even more into margins because scope creep was too high. So we got down into: - Streamlining processes - Clearly defining packages and being strict - Creating new policies to protect ourselves - Doubling down on efficiency tracking - Aligning team KPIs with agency KPIs, based on new packages Ever since then, profitability went up 20%+. Not a fluke. Will we ever expand into a new service line? Maybe next time. But what I know, from creating new service lines for my previous agency is that it is not effing easy. It takes years to build up. Don’t fall for bright shiny object syndrome. Stick to your core competency first and work on what you can control. There’s probably way more for you to clean up and systems to build, than you realise.

Recently I audited an email agency's production process. He was complaining that client revisions/slow approvals + his team being too slow, caused a backlog. I made him do an inventory check. - All existing client resourcing - All pipeline resourcing - Existing team capacity This included emails, sms, popups, across both campaigns and flows. We charted that daily and monthly. Turns out the founder had oversold. It was impossible for the team to deliver, much less catch up on the backlog now. They'd need to hire contractors to clear the load. This happens a lot more often than we think. Very commonly with agencies that don't track capacity. Here's what you need to track: - Production capacity (emails per designer/writer) - Implementation capacity (tasks per specialist) - Management capacity (accounts per strategist) Time tracking's very important here. So is stress-testing each team member's limits. As well as streamlining of processes to unlock "extra capacity". These will give you the three capacity metrics. Once you have these, you'll know when you should hold back on sales. If you oversell, it could very well cost you more to service the backlog than it generated for that new client.

The reason most retention agencies are stuck with small clients that can't pay: Their team is half-baked. I hear excuses like this all the time. "Talent quality is poor" "Brands don't value retention" "Freelancers are undercutting me" You know who doesn't have this problem? Agencies with good marketing and employer branding. We used to have a client and team acquisition problem too. Until one day, we sat down and did a root cause analysis. And realised all problems start because we don't have enough money. Resulting in a team problem and a client problem. Weak team >> Founders stuck doing work >> No time to build marketing engine Weak marketing >> Weak client acquisition >> No money No money >> Cannot pay good talent >> weak team There are only 2 ways to solve this. Invest in team training to relieve yourself so you can focus on marketing Bite the bullet and invest in marketing, and sacrifice clients now

In a recent test, we found that email copy doesn't matter as much we thought. Our initial tests: - Sale banners 3/4 way through email - Different angles of body copy - Long vs short copy All of them had the same hero image, headline and CTA. Result? Not much difference. Next batch of tests: - Different hero images - Different headline copy - Offer vs no offer Result? A lot of variation in revenue and engagement. This is a clear signal of 80/20 rule in play. If the hero makes the most impact, what if we cut majority of our emails into 2-3 sections? Result? Same performance. So instead of making strategists spend time writing complex briefs, copywriters writing long copy and designers spending extra time... Focus to improving the areas that matter most – the hero. If performance stays the same with lower cost, as an agency, you win. Play smart.

Last week I spoke with a $50k/mo email agency owner who hasn't taken a vacation in 2.5 years. Firstly, yup after 2.5 years, still stuck at $50k/mo. Many new founders overestimate how easy it is to grow an agency. His problem? He's the bottleneck for every client strategy. "My team still isn't good enough to handle on their own" "Clients expect me to do it and be on calls" "I don't have time to work on SOPs if I'm always doing this" You know what these are? Signs of poor management. People gonna roll their eyes and say they're pretty good. But it's the truth. He says he "cares too much" about clients. The truth is that he just doesn't trust his team. Which comes back to himself. Either: 1) He doesn't know how to train properly 2) He doesn't know how to hire properly 3) He doesn't how how to delegate properly Here's a 3-step framework I gave him to extract himself in 4 months. It's the same framework I used to get myself out of the day-to-day, as a second level leader, after the founders. 1. Document your strategic thinking process - Not just what you do, but HOW you think about email strategy - Create a training curriculum to teach your team this - Record this and get an AI to make this into a knowledge based document 2. Create a decision tree for common scenarios - This turns your expertise into a system anyone can follow - Too many variables? Rant to an AI and let it help you come up with more problems and solutions and create the decision tree for you 3. Implement progressive delegation Week 1-2: You do, they watch Week 3-4: Do it together Week 5-6: They try, you help Week 7-12: They do, you review Week 12 onwards: They lead, you observe This is also the same plan I use for every single new team member we onboard. So it works. The secret isn't working harder. It's building systems ANYONE can follow. So that the agency can operate without you. The moment you insist you're the most important person in the company, is the moment you promise yourself to stay stuck forever.

As a strategist working personally with over 100+ DTC brands... And managing teams handling 100+ more... Then training other agencies managing another 100+... I realised one thing. Marketers are too in love with impressing other marketers instead of their clients. This is a huge trap for many agencies as well. Trying to implement super complicated strategies. Or do crazy levels of tracking to make themselves feel like they're on top of everything. But we fail to ask ourselves. How much of an incremental difference are we making? Are we getting outsized returns for the work we put in? If the answer is no, kill it. RFM segmentation for a brand <$1.5M/mo revenue? Heck no Zero party data splits for a brand with <100k site visits/mo? No Scaling an agency comes from efficiency. Relook at your processes. What activities give you 80% of revenue? Operational bloat kills profitability from within. You can't afford that. It's a dangerous drug that rots you and you happily keep doing it so you can boast about it on linkedin and think that you're better than other agencies. No one gives a damn. The ones who make the most money are the happiest. Work smart.