Josh Tay's Linkedin Analytics

Agency owners are in love with these lead magnets and giveaways. The theory makes sense to "nurture" leads. But you know what else is still necessary in inbound marketing? - Paid ads - VSLs - SEO - Long form youtube - Podcasts - Live webinars and workshops - Partnerships - Intro offers - Downsell offers Inbound is organic. But lead flow is still not influenceable. Lead flow control can be controlled with outbound. You need both for a stable marketing engine, as part of your overall GTM strategy. Way too many small agency owners getting sucked in... Thinking this is the golden ticket to unlimited leads. 1. Most lead magnets still suck Even if you get people wanting your stuff, I highly doubt the quality of lead:close rate. Are you even tracking your cost per lead? Chances are, no. 2. You have no funnel <1% of people are in market right now, and if you have no funnel, you've wasted time. People are going to forget you by next week. 3. Your team is crumbling I know of 6 agency owners who posted giveaways last week. All of them are struggling with super low pricing and insane project timelines. Plus their team is overworked af. Your more immediate problem is your ops system that's eating your profit margins alive. Fix that. Get out of fire fighting. Then build a proper marketing ecosystem. There's no quick fix.

We have a service offering that's unprofitable, and we're cutting it. Initially, we thought: "Let's charge a higher retainer, for more completely customised work." This made total sense on a revenue basis. And theoretically, if we could sell in more clients with just one pod servicing, it would be profitable. But 5 months in, we did some calculations. Profitability of the pod servicing these clients went down. What we forgot to factor in was that there's a complexity curve, where at one point, cost starts increasing exponentially. And capacity also becomes a limiting factor. This was our lesson in setting boundaries.

Every founder needs to plan for an exit. Exit doesn’t mean selling your agency though. There are 5 types of exits: 1. Exiting the line Transiting from worker to manager. Whether solopreneur or freelancer, it’s essential to have help to exit the production line. As your business grows, you need to delegate. So you can focus on higher leverage activities. Such as business strategy and growth. Note: this isn’t client’s email strategy, not more sales calls) 2. Exit the staff Building a leadership team. - General Manager - Strategy lead - Specialist lead - Design lead - Copy lead At a later stage: Ops manager, sales manager This is when you become a true CEO. Not just a holder of the title. A proper operating system with documented SOPs for task execution, playbooks and scenarios… Allowing employees to keep the business running. Without you being involved in fulfilment. 3. Exit the org chart You appoint a CEO, while remaining on the board. Great for founders who still want to be involved in the business, but only when they need to. Like giving guidance to the C-suite. Or making strategic business decisions about direction. 4. Exit the board Becoming an investor, with no responsibilities. You receive dividends and distributions. With zero responsibilities, you can focus time and energy into investing in other businesses or building other ventures. 5. Exit ownership Selling your agency to someone else. For agency founders who are ready to move on to another chapter of life or retire… This is when you cash in on the hard work. The more scalable and profitable, like: - multiple revenue streams - predictability of income - clear system for every function - history of earnings - management structure - risk diversification - Etc etc Note: none of these are better exits than any others. It’s just a different choice of the entrepreneur. The reason why this is so important is because far too many founders have a non-existent org chart. And that is causing them to go round in circles. Your org chart determines how you progress. Otherwise you get new clients, new team members, but nothing really changes. If you’re an agency founder reading this, take time to decide what type of exit you want. This is your North Star. Don’t get caught in the motion without having an end goal.

We were never serious about our sales engine until this year. - 2 formats of sales decks being tested - 3 formats of VSLs being tested - 2 versions of audits being tested - new digital products for unqualified leads - downsell offer for not-there-yet prospects - automation for sales pipeline - integration with clickup, xero, pandadoc, stripe etc - multi-channel follow up sales cadence for prospects who don't close immediately - cold email funnel - inbound funnel (one/two call close depending on lead source) - SOPs for setters and closers Agency life is fun when you can work ON the agency.

We ran 400+ sales calls through AI. To overhaul our current pitch deck templates. 1. Top 5 Pain Points or Challenges Prospects Face 2. Top 3 Positive, top 3 Negative Experiences With Other Agencies 3. Most Common Goals or Outcomes They’re Looking for Help With Get that summary, run it through again for: - problem solution statements - case study formats - voice of the customer statements Upload 2-3 pitch deck formats you want to emulate. Run them through AI and get it to extract the structures/flow, repopulate it with what your prospects need. Add graphics/visuals for each slide to make it easy to understand. Within the past month alone, we already saw an increase in close rate. This is agency zero party data. (sorry not gonna share everything 😉 ) Suddenly "sales problems" are starting to solve themselves. The agency space is getting more and more competitive. Don't waste leads with a shitty sales process.

We just started implementing a new policy on brief and email approvals. Allowing us to stick to timelines a lot better. Without resourcing spilling over into next cycles… We should be able to forecast internal capacity much more accurately. Our pod leaders and strategists have gone through project management training on how to communicate this and get buy-in from clients. Let’s see if the theory succeeds in real life.

After training 10+ agencies in The Vault program, we saw an ugly pattern. 90% of agencies don't have strong client acquisition. It's mostly referrals, which is inconsistent. So they focus on RETENTION. But in a "please don't leave me, i'll change!" way. - Over-deliver, allowing scope creep - Afraid to bill for extra work - Reluctant to set reign in client requests/revisions - Agency turns into button pushers - "i do what you tell me" What started out as a lead gen issue... Inconsistent lead flow >> desperation to keep clients Revealed another fundamental problem... Poor account management >> no boundaries / policies >> team burnout >> unable to do good work Which would have led to the client churning still. But now, your team's been kicked around. Even if you had the best talent, it would have ended up exactly the same. Solution: - Productise and create clear package deliverables in a contract - Enact policies on approvals and deliverables - Hold firm because bending policies = weak positioning = no respect - Train your team not just on project management, but account management too - Create a knowledge base on how to handle these situations - Go crazy on sales and marketing so you don't dry up and be desperate again

It's perfectly ok if your agency isn't at the stage to track the dozens of operational metrics. Instead of overcomplicating life... Focus on these 4 themes of questions. Questions you need data-driven answers to: 👉 Are we performing well against industry benchmarks? - What should our targets be for performance? - What does good look like for us? 👉 When and how much work can we take on? - How do changes to projects and people affect this? - Who is best for which project? - Can we get more people or clients when needed? - What if we take on this client/if we don't? What if we lose this staff? (so we can get ahead of sales and hiring) 👉 Are we making money on clients and projects? - What types of clients, projects and services are most or least profitable? - Where should we look to increase profitability? 👉 Are we scoping things accurately? - Where do we consistently go over or under our estimates? - How can we be stricter with boundaries? - Are there any patterns/trends with clients or industries that are systemically problematic? Are there any team members who aren't keeping to the SLAs? From these, you'll realise that there are SOME data points you'll need to collect. These will be what's most important to you right now. Focus on these first. Trying to do too much when you're still heavily involved in the agency might backfire.' Play it smart.

I manage a 7-figure email agency and this is the basic principle: Always be in control of your problems. If you have a recurring issue… find the root cause identify lead measures create a way to track activity You’re doing so much yet achieving so little > Agency growth tracker sheet Want to prevent overhead bloat? > Cost and income sheet Your team is growing, yet margins remain the same > Pod structure calculator Aligning personal and agency goals > Pod P&L The team is overloaded, but you still can’t reach rev targets > Workload capacity tracker Your team can’t seem to be self-sustaining > Department KPI sheet When should you hire more people? > Project forecast model When to ramp up marketing? > Cash flow forecast The same client/delivery issues keep happening > Project incident report What gets measured gets improved. Manage your agency, or it manages you.

Growth isn’t about doing one thing well. It’s about stacking a bunch of little things and few big things to get the results you want. What we’re focused on this quarter: Marketing: - Lead gen with paid ads - Mastering multi-platform content repurposing HR: - Building and keeping an evergreen talent pool - How to pre-qualify candidates with AI assignments Delivery: - Capacity increase through efficiencies with AI - Reassessing time estimates after implementing new processes What are your major focuses?

Your agency is frustrated internally. Ops will always say we’re maxed out. Finance will say we should be able to do more. Marketing will always say we’re doing plenty of lead gen. Sales will say the leads aren’t closing. All this is due to lack of alignment. I’m not saying the departments can’t agree on what’s important. But they don’t have common KPIs. When everyone has their own agendas… Your team will hold each other back. We changed that by looking at different metrics. For example: Marketing and sales have aligned KPIs on “hands raised”. Aka people who explicitly said they want to work together with us. Not leads generated. Ops and finance have aligned KPIs on individual team members’ delivery utilisation rate. Aka how efficient they are with deliverables. Not number of hours worked. Wrong KPIs lead to wrong focuses. Wrong focuses lead to slow progress.

You're a high performer turned founder. You want to do more. More research. More in-depth reports. More cross-platform analysis. More metrics to add on outside of email. More tracking to stay on top of performance. All these are great, but at some point, it becomes bloat. And it will hold you back from scaling. It makes sense in theory but... How much impact does this bring to the client? - Are clients even reading your reports? - Which parts of the report are they actually reading? - Do clients even care about the metrics you're tracking? - If you stopped tracking them, what would happen? - How much of this research is your team using? - What would happen if you simplified it? Better performance, sure, but by how much? Can your team handle this with 7,8,9 accounts? These were some hard questions that we had to ask ourselves. Before culling everything and rebuilding from scratch. Unlocking extra capacity for the team to improve the relationship with clients instead. Sometimes we hate to admit it, but our snakes have legs. Time to bring it back to a snake.

Some agencies say their teams feel “watched” when time tracking. They say their team end up clocking hours for the sake of it. This happens because… You’re not communicating the value of time tracking your team properly. ⚙️ For the ops manager: You need it for daily workload tracking. - Time tracking gives you estimates - Estimates allow you to forecasts - Actuals then show you where to optimise Without time tracking, none of that can be done. ⚙️ For the finance manager: Time tracking shows you efficiency of team. The efficiency determines your delivery utilisation rate. This rate shows you your profitability. ⚙️ For the team member Without a workload view that shows time per task as a percentage of your day, you will easily be overassigned. No one wants to be overloaded on capacity with tight timelines. And because we have a pod system… Task volume is predictable, and total output units are fixed per month. So they don’t get piled with more work. — So tell me how your team is “surviving well” without time-tacking. Doing it once for estimates and then killing it because you "already know" estimates won't help. Because complexities creep in. Processes evolve over time. Running your agency like a cowboy town ain’t it. — This is how we align goals with our team members. Time tracking is really a win-win for everyone. Through time tracking, we realised some tasks were way too bloated and could be stripped. The team ended up saving hours per week with the same deliverable. Less work, same outcome, more profits. Moral of the story: Track Time

The agency operator's biggest mistake is to think they're a service provider. YOU MUST PRODUCTISE. No productisation, low profitability. Low profitability, no scale. Productisation does not mean there’s no customised strategy involved. There’s a misconception that productisation means you don't tailor things to the client's business. Productisation just means you have fixed parameters of what is and isn't included in your working arrangement. Anything out of scope will either be rejection or come at an additional cost. This is fairness. You wouldn't buy a latte... Then instruct the barista to design it in the shape of a crocodile. Then go on to ask them to make it 3D with foam. Then get sprinkles on top. Then argue that, technically, it's still a cup of coffee. So why let that happen to your agency?

3 years ago, NLE’s founders were stuck in the day to day. Then we managed to get their lives back. Now even I’m completely out of client delivery. Here’s how we did it: - Team leads KPI’ed on team performance - Individual team member KPIs - Pod structure - Pod rev and churn targets - Clearly defined responsibilities - Trainings for everything - SOPs for everything - Proper hiring practices - Productisation and boundaries Were planning to launch a proper group coaching program now. If you’re interested, let Michael Galvin / Geraldine Cortes or me know. We haven’t got the curriculum down yet. So we’re open to drill down deeper on stuff you need. Drop by in our DMs :)

There's nothing wrong with "templated approaches". Every agency says they offer custom solutions, no cookie cutter templates. Nonsense. Agencies that've successfully scaled, figured it out. You SHOULD have templates. - Template email blocks to mix and match - Template processes for research - Template strategy creation process - Template analysis procedures - Template implementation - Template copywriting - Template brief writing - Template AI prompts Find me one agency that doesn't have templates and I'll show you one that isn't profitable. Templates aren't the enemy. They increase operational efficiency. They ensure consistent delivery. They give teams certainty. I'd go as far to say that without templates, you will not have predictable results. Why NLE is so consistent with our performance is because we have playbooks for literally everything. - Video explainers - Written documents - Screenshots on where to go The real enemy is a weak system and a weak team who aren't trained to think. Templatise as much as possible. Systemise all the templates. Train your team on them. That's how you grow.

Agencies complain that they have lead gen problems. Yet they aren't following up properly with leads in their pipeline. Within each stage of the pipeline, there are high leverage activities that you can do to increase the effectiveness moving through each stage. You'll need a dashboard to show you that. 4/5 of agency owners struggling below $100k don't have this. They're too busy trying to post lead magnets on social media platforms. Not realising their: - pitch sucks - positioning sucks - sales cadence sucks When anyone considers your agency at any point of the B2B purchase journey, there are tons of areas that can kill all your prior efforts. As much as you have a marketing system, you need a sales system too. It's never as simple as lead>audit>presentation>close. You must have multiple touch points in between, else you risk drop off through stages. Don't waste your leads. Deliver value. Follow up like mad. Show up left right center. Downsell to unqualified prospects.

Agencies struggle to be profitable with pods because they're missing this. Client-based pods. We chanced upon this by coincidence early on before we even transitioned into the pod model. Strategist 1 - low level, build-and-ship clients Strategist 2 - mid-level, what-you-want clients Strategist 3 - high-level, we-consult-you clients What we found was that different businesses saw email in different ways. And we didn't want to try changing their minds. So we gave the market what they wanted. This wasn't categorised by client's revenue level. Some 8 figure brands want build-and-ship style emails, and that's fine! What matters most is how we ensure profitability for each client. Which is why we had strategists at different levels handling different levels of clients. You want to provide the best strategy, sure, rightly so. But if clients don't want it, it would just eat into your margin doing extra work. At the end, your agency exists to make money. Now, if clients want more, we upgrade them to a different package and move to a different strategist. You pay for what you get, and we build our margins in accordingly. Because team members at higher skill levels cost more. And the effort to service higher expectation clients is also more. That's how we create targets for our teams and ensure profitability. How do you structure your teams?

We lost $7,000+ on one client and we didn’t even know it. At that time, I was personally working on an account. 1 month went by, zero deliverables live. - Client not responding go approval requests - Then requiring revisions - MIA - Approving, then requesting another round of revisions - Changing strategy and requesting a relook at data Cycle schedule was missed by this point. We continued working on the next month’s resourcing. Month 1 was still backlogged. We got an alert from our time tracking tool that resourcing cost had exceeded target. Month 2 resourcing started seeing the same trend. Mid month finance check showed client didn’t pay 2nd month retainer. Reason: fulfilment not complete. We stopped work immediately. In fact, we should have stopped 2 weeks before. Then we had a chat with the client. Laid out our findings to show how their demands impacted our profitability & suggested adjustments to workflow, pricing and scope to ensure a win-win. They weren’t keen to compromise. So we walked away. Ad agency working with them had >3 months payment outstanding, never recovered. Lessons: > Setup auto-billing > Pause work asap if payment not made > ALWAYS TIME TRACK and report > Create strict policies on approvals and ensure client signs off before starting work > If a client becomes unprofitable, adjust contract to align with your costs > Be prepared to end the relationship to find better-fit clients

This year we've invested heavily in AI for our SOPs. Starting with brief and copy bots. Theory: - If we can increase output, we increase margins - If we can reduce headcount as we scale, we increase margins - If we can maintain consistency of deliverables, we reduce key man risk But we started facing obstacles. Copy was super subpar. Briefs were lame. More work has to be done to clean up the bot's work, than if team members used AI on their own with their own version of prompts. As much as we have solid SOPs, there's still a lot "it depends". More "it depends" means more uncertainty and efficient scale. Problem: - Services are not productised enough - SOPs are not replicable enough at the lowest level - Bottlenecks with "how to use AI" What we started doing: - More detailed SOPs on building a knowledge base - Ideal scenarios of outputs of each brand before starting work - So the bot has better context of boundaries and outcomes - Then reworking the SOPs again to allow replication across brands It's been a frustrating process. So many AI experts making it seem like everything's plug and play. Then you realise their processes are super case specific. You need an AI process that can adapt with change. WHILE reducing variability in general. That's agency systems for ya.