Should your agency niche down and specialize? with Drew McLellan

Speaker 1:

It doesn’t matter what kind of an agency you run, traditional, digital, media buying, web dev, PR, whatever your focus, you still need to run a profitable business. The Build A Better Agency Podcast presented by White Label IQ will show you how to make more money and keep more of what you make. Let us help you build an agency that is sustainable, scalable and, if you want down the road, sellable. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. Welcome back to another episode of Build A Better Agency. Super glad you are here, grateful that you are carving out the time to be here. I know that you are very busy as the fourth quarter marches on, if you’re listening to this in real time. I am grateful that you’re giving me a little bit of your time today. Today is one of my solo casts, so no guests, just you and me chatting about something that, in many cases, is something I’ve been having a lot of conversations with agencies. I am in the midst of all of the AMI live peer group meetings and so been hanging out with agency owners, big groups of agency owners, 20, 25 people since August.

What I want to talk to you about today is a topic that comes up in every single meeting and this, by the way, is not a new topic, this is a topic I’ve talked to agency owners about for a long time. I have a lot of, for me, clarity and a strong position about this topic, which I am happy, of course, to tell you about and then leave it up to you to decide if it makes sense for your agency or not. But before we get into today’s topic, I want to put a couple things on your radar screen. As you know, one of the things that AMI does a lot of is we do a lot of live workshops throughout the year. If you’re listening to this in real time, this is early November of 2020. Because of COVID, we have had to cancel a lot of those events, which has been unfortunate because that meant a lot of people didn’t get the education they wanted.

We were able to do some of them virtually and others we couldn’t, but I’m excited to tell you that we are getting back on track for live events. We have two events coming up, one in December and one in January that I want to tell you a little bit about. Money Matters, two days where all we do is talk about every aspect of money that comes to an agency. Money metrics, what I call agency math, the five or six things you need to be able to look at. Within five minutes of checking a couple numbers, you will know whether or not your agency is financially healthy or not and if you’re heading towards any sort of trouble; to pricing and proposals, tax strategies, bus dev, we cover it all in two days.

It is probably, of all of the workshops that I teach, it is probably the one that gets the most… We get rave reviews for a lot of our workshops, but this is one where people will literally walk up to me and say, “I am so angry that I didn’t go to this thing 10 years ago or five years ago or two years ago. I could have saved and made so much more money.” I love teaching this workshop because literally you go back to the office, you implement some of the things you learned and before the end of the year or so, within a month, you are putting more money to the bottom line and more money in your pocket, so that’s gratifying to me.

That workshop is December 3rd and 4th in Orlando, Florida. It is on Disney property and I will tell you that I was just down there for a week doing a site check to make sure that everything felt super safe and they have not had one case of COVID originate from Disney since they opened in July. I have been in their meeting facilities. I have been in their food and beverage areas. I have been in their restaurants. I, of course, went into the parks to check that out and they’re doing an amazing job of keeping everybody safe, so I feel really confident and comfortable inviting you to join me on December 3rd and 4th for Money Matters.

The second workshop that we’ve got going on, which is also going to be held on Disney property, is called Build and Nurture Your Sales Funnel. This is a workshop we unveiled for the very first time last January. This January, January of 2021, it’s January 21st and 22nd, we got such great comments and I’m telling you, I am watching the agencies that attended in January just kicking COVID’s rear end because they put into play what they learned in that workshop in January and they have scooted through COVID because they were so prepared, their sales funnel was so strong, their pipeline was full, so we decided to offer that workshop again this January.

What’s different about this workshop is while we certainly teach you a lot of things, this is a very hands on workshop. We literally carve time out of the workshop for you to actually build out the sales plan. You’re going to leave the workshop with a full sales plan of knowing exactly what you’re going to do, when you’re going to do it, who’s doing it on your team, how you’re going to get it done and you’re ready to implement the very next week. That was really important to me because this is a workshop that’s got some heavy lifting in it, some meaty topics, some big decisions and I didn’t want agency owners to have all of that in their head and then go back to their normal work week and then trying to implement it once they got back to work. I wanted to make sure the workshop was constructed in a way that you would actually leave with a sales plan.

So again, super safe. I am absolutely confident inviting you there. I wouldn’t be there and I certainly wouldn’t ask you to be there if you weren’t going to be safe. I know that right now for many of you, travel is a very individualist decision. Some of you are back on planes or trains or cars, some of you are staying in hotels and others really still aren’t going anywhere but the grocery store yet. If you’re not ready to travel, I totally understand. And hopefully, you can catch us in a year or two when we offer these workshops again. But if you’re game to travel, here’s an added incentive that I want to put in to the mix.

I know that these are going to be smaller events, I know we’re not going to draw the normal sized crowd that we would draw pre COVID to our live workshops. I totally know that. But I also have a room block and I’ve a financial obligation that, quite honestly, I can’t afford to take another hit on the chin. I want to add incentive for those of you who are willing to travel to consider coming to these workshops. Everybody who attends the December 3rd and 4th or the January 21st and 22nd workshop, their name will go into a hat and we’re going to pull a name out of that hat and that person is going to win a year of coaching directly with me. That’s 12 sessions. You can use them all in one fell swoop, we can spend 12 hours together in one day, you could do it once a month for a year, but you’re going to get 12 hours of one-on-one coaching time with me as a thank you for attending the event.

If you want to get in the drawing for that and you want to attend one of these great workshops and you want to get out of the cold if you’re in upper half of the US in December or January, I hope you will consider joining us; December 3rd and 4th for Money Matters or January 21st and 22nd for Build and Nurture Your Sales Funnel. You can head over to agencymanagementinstitute.com. Under the How We Help navigation button, you’ll see the workshops and you can register right there online. All right. So let’s now talk a little bit about what I want to talk to you about in this solo cast.

If you have paid attention on the podcast or you are on our email list or you happen to have picked up a copy of the book that Stephen Woessner and I just wrote and it came out last January called Sell With Authority, you know that I believe very strongly that agencies should specialize. I’ll tell you, I believe this because we work with 250 plus agencies a year, I talk to a lot of other agency owners outside of that number, and without exception, the agencies that specialize in some way are the agencies that are crushing it. They’re able to charge a premium price. They’re able to much better target their prospects. So for a lot of reasons, this makes sense.

We’ve got this model at AMI that I call the Agency Profit and Growth Journey. Basically, it recognizes that there are four critical components or quadrants and that an agency has to be excellent in all four of these quadrants for the agency to really be stable, profitable, scalable and, if you want to down the road, sellable. Those four elements are, number one, leadership. Is the agency run well? Is there a strong leadership team in place? All of that. The second one is bus dev, which is what we’re going to talk about today. The third one is process and systems. Are we getting it done? Are we getting it done efficiently and effectively?

The last one, of course, is money. How are we managing the money that comes in the door? How are we making sure we maximize our opportunity to make money? And as an agency owner, how are you making sure that you get to keep more of the money you make? Those are the four quadrants and there’s all kinds of detail in each of them, which I’m not going to go into today. But the quadrant I want to talk about today is the bus dev quadrant. And here’s the deal. For most agencies, imagine the quadrant is a target and your proficiency in each area grows as you move out of the center of the quadrant into one of the outer rings. So in the bus dev quadrant, the inner most ring is that you get most of your business through walk-ins and referrals.

There’s nothing wrong with that. A lot of agencies start that way, absolutely. For many agencies though, this is where they stay, that they never exceed taking most of their clients through walk-ins and referrals. What they’ll say is, “Well, we tried this and we tried that, but honestly our best bet is when we get a referral.” Well, of course, that’s everybody’s best bet because you’re already half way to the sale. Somebody that knows you and knows the prospect has endorsed you and odds are you’re very close to the end of the sale by the time you say hello to each other. The problem is you have no control over those referrals.

Imagine you casting a net and whatever you catch in the net is what you have to eat for dinner that night. It could be a boot, it could be a bottom sucker. It could be a salmon. It could be something fantastic. But whatever it is, you have to eat it. Your body has to consume whatever is served to it, as opposed to having a spear gun and swimming out into the ocean and looking for the kind of fish that is best for your body, that has the best nutrients for your body and being able to catch that specific fish. That’s the downside of referrals is that sometimes you end up eating a boot and it’s not very profitable and it’s not really in alignment with the kind of work you do, but you’re grateful to have it because you’ve got mouths to feed and so you take the referral business. Not the ideal way to grow your business and certainly not the ideal way to grow your business if you want to sell it someday.

The next ring out in this quadrant is that you perform bus dev on a feast or famine basis. What that really means is that every once in a while you get an inkling that one of your clients is going to go away, one of your big clients is going to go away, or they do fire you and all of a sudden you go into full on panic mode. You care chasing after business as fast and furious as you can because you’ve got to replace what you’ve either lost or you think you’re going to lose. The problem is that that frenzied activity can not be sustainable longterm, so you do it for as long as you have to to land a client or two and then with a huge sigh of relief, you stop the bus dev effort and you start onboarding the clients. You have this constant feast and famine. The pipeline is never very full because you’ve neglected for a while and then you’re all about it and then you go back to neglecting it again.

The third ring in this quadrant is that agencies are doing some level of bus dev, every week they’re doing something. They’re putting some things out on social, maybe they have an e-newsletter, maybe they have some case studies on their website, but the results are spotty at best. Ultimately, the ultimate goal for bus dev is that you are so well known and you are so highly respected and I believe you are thought of as an authority, so you have established yourself as a thought leader or an expert or an authority, as Stephen and I call it in the book. And now because you are well known inside that little world, and I’m not talking about your… You’re not George Clooney famous, but you are infamous in your little part of the world, you’re known and you’re respected, that now the right fit clients actually seek you out. You are now being sought after rather than you having to go out and hunt down clients.

That’s one of the big things that’s changed in bus dev for agencies. When I started in the business a long time ago, the way we got clients is we went and found them. Why? There was no real internet back then, which I know makes me sound ancient, but it really wasn’t a big deal back then and certainly agencies didn’t have websites and people didn’t know how to search the internet to find websites to tell them about places that they might go or hire. It just didn’t happen back then. So really, you were either locally known… Again, you were at the Chamber meetings and the Rotary meetings and you were networking and you got referrals or you were known for a niche. You were an Ag agency, so you were at all the NOMA meetings or you were in whatever industry you were in, so you were at those shows, either locally, regionally or nationally, and you were known in that circle.

If you weren’t known in the circle, either locally or in your niche, you didn’t get hired because no one knew about you. What your job was at the agency was to go and find clients and try and create a relationship with them so that they would hire you. We were the hunters back then, but the internet changed everything. I’m going to show you some statistics in a minute about how things have changed on the bus dev front, but now we are not the hunter anymore. One of the ways that agencies grow is they grow in sophistication in terms of how they find clients. Initially when we all started out, we all basically started our agency servicing family, friends, former clients, anybody we personally knew. And by the way, about 20% of all agencies never get past that stage.

Then for the agencies that do move on beyond that stage, they move to the point where now they’re starting to get some referrals. Now their family and friends are introducing them to strangers who also might hire them. That agency eventually typically gets a gorilla account, an account that’s 25% or more of their AGI and about 20-30% of agencies get stuck there. So they’ve a gorilla, this 30% or more, 25% or more of their AGI and a bunch of little accounts and they spend the whole rest of their time with their agency trying, with oftentimes little luck, trying to land another gorilla to balance out the gorilla, but a subset of those do bust out of that area of growth and they do now have two or three good sized clients that are 20, 25, 30% of their AGI each. So between the three of them, they consume a lot of the AGI and then there’s a bunch of little clients, again, that balance them.

These are the agencies now that move into that feast or famine bus dev model where, again, they’re so busy servicing their two or three gorillas that they don’t have a lot of time every day, every week to be going out and looking for clients. They don’t carve that time out. They do that feast or famine bus dev where when they got a Spidey sense that a client’s about to leave, they scramble around, they find a new client and then they let it rest for a while. Now, 85% of all agencies live in one of those three spaces, so either I serve family and friends, I have one gorilla and I live by referrals, I have a few gorillas and I live by feast or family. 85% of all agencies never bust out beyond that.

The reason they don’t bust out is not because they’re not super smart, not because they’re not talented, not because they live in a big city or a small city or a tiny town, none of that matters. The reason they don’t bust out is because they never get more sophisticated with their business development. They stay stuck in the referral and feast and famine model. They don’t move into having a consistent business development program or the Holy Grail, which is they don’t become a known expert or thought leader or authority. The agencies that actually achieve that, that are known experts, they’re sought after because of their expertise. That is a small subset of all agencies.

We have several of them in the AMI ecosystem and I watched them year over year, day over day, month over month, I’ve watched them really crush their numbers because they are so sought after for their subject matter expertise. So at some point in time, you have to decide as an agency owner or an agency leader, where do I want the agency to land? I think some of this is about future planning for your agency. Do I want to get out the feast or famine? We have some gorillas, but we’re stuck. Do I want to have a systemized, programmatic, bus dev program and do I want niche down in some way? Do I want to specialize or do I want to reach even further and do I want to be a known expert? Do I want to be where 85% of the agencies aren’t?

I’ll tell you, here’s my rationale, I absolutely believe that every single one of you listening should be reaching for being a niched or specialist agency or that subject matter expert, that authority. Here’s why. The reality is businesses, our clients, they can’t afford to hire a generalist, certainly they can’t afford to do it right now. Many of our clients are scrambling because of COVID. Many of them are trying to make up for the sales that they lost during the shutdown. And even during the best of times, CMO tenure is a tenuous thing. They know that if they hire the wrong agency, odds are they’re going to have to fire the agency, but even more likely, they’re going to get fired.

For a CMO or anybody who is not the business owner, the risk for them is huge. The risk for them is their job. Now if they are the business owner, the risk for them is equally huge, they can go out of business. So in essence, they lose their job too. Understand that part of the buying decision when you’re hiring an agency is that if you get it wrong, you might lose your job. Do you really want to hedge your bet by hiring a generalist? Wouldn’t you rather hire somebody who has a depth of expertise in your industry or with the audience you’re trying to reach or in a methodology that aligns with your business or solves a problem that you need solve. There are four ways that an agency can specialize. The one we always think of is the niche, that we are able to have a subject matter expertise around an industry.

My agency is an expert is pharma products for women over 50, for example. That’s one way. Another way is an audience. We know millennial moms better than anybody else and we can reach them faster and with more influence than anybody else. That’s an audience methodology. The third one is a methodology, which is one of the AMI agencies, they have actually trademarked the term challenger brand marketing. What their methodology is, is they say to their clients or their prospects, “Look, if you’re not the market leader, so you don’t have the money the market leader does and you don’t have the market share, we’re the agency for you. We help the underdog, the challenger brand, take on the market leader and eat up their market share in a budget that you can afford, so we have that expertise.” You could have a specialty or a methodology that allows you to deliver results for clients in a certain industry or in a certain position like the challenger brand.

The fourth one is that you are an expert in a deliverable. So right now, a lot of agencies are scrambling to get really good at creating Amazon Marketplaces for their clients and to really help their clients be able to capture everything that’s happening in the Amazon ecosystem. The problem with that as a niche is you are only going to be unique in that for a period of time and then all the other generalist agencies are going to catch up to you. Now, all of a sudden, it becomes table steaks. So of the four, the first three, industry niche, audience or methodology, those three are pretty evergreen. You can ride that for decades. The, we know how to do something, we know how to deliver something that is unique, PPC, like I said, Amazon, things like that, you’re going to be unique in that for a while, but then sooner or later you’re going to lose your edge. But my point is that our clients want to hire somebody with some area of specialty, they don’t want to hire a generalist.

So in our 2019 study… So as you know, Agency Management Institute partners with Audience Audit every year and we do a piece of primary research and we bundle all of those. We call that the Agency Edge Research Series. We’ve been doing it since 2014. Our 2019 study, we looked at how and why agencies got hired. From one of the questions that we probed with over 1,000 respondents, all who had actively hired agencies, so they were all currently working with agencies and they had hired agencies currently and in the past, so over 1,000 of them… We said to them, “So when you need an agency, did the agency find you or did you go find your agency?” This goes back to what I was talking about before, about the good old days of how we used to find clients versus now.

We broke out their responses by budget. The clients who had a marketing budget of under a quarter of a million dollars, 53% of them went and found their agency. For clients that had a budget between a quarter of a million and a million dollars, 76% of them found their agency. For clients that had a marketing budget of $1 million to $10 million, 82% found their agency. And for clients that had a marketing budget of over $10 million, 85% found their own agency. So in other words, they went hunting for what they wanted. They didn’t wait for some agency to send them something or to show up on their doorstep or to meet them at a networking meeting, they went and looked for their agency.

We said to them after that, we said, “Okay, you went and found your agency. How important was geography to you? How important was it that they were within a driving distance to you?” They told us how far away their agency was from them. Of agencies with a quarter of a million dollar or less budget, 23% worked with an agency that was more than 200 miles away. In the budget category of a quarter of a million to a million, 50% of them worked with an agency that was more than 200 miles away. Between the one and $10 million budget range, 63% worked with an agency more than 200 miles away. In the $10 million and plus budgets, 64% of them had an agency that lived more than 200 miles away from them. So again, it’s not about being local, it’s not a barrier to them to work with somebody whose far away if it’s worth it to them.

So we said, “Okay, you went and found your agency. Your agency is more than 200 miles away. Why? What was it about them that made them so special that you had to go find them and you’re willing to let there be a 200 mile or more distance between you, which means you have to fly to actually physically be in the same place together?” What they said was, “Because they had something that we wanted that was worth it.” 66% said that they had an expertise in a particular geography. And by the way, they could answer more than one of these. As you hear me talk about the numbers, you’re going to hear that they add up to more than 100%. 66% of them said they had an expertise in a particular geography like, “We wanted to break into the upper northwest and they have an expertise in that.” 43% said they were experts in either an industry or a consumer. 32% said that the agency had expertise in a consumer that used a different language than English. So in other words, so you can add that 32% to the 43% and know that consumer was a huge driver, that they wanted to talk to a specific audience and this agency had expertise in that audience.

18% had expertise in a type of marketing. So again, PPC or Amazon or whatever that may be. Do you know what got the lowest score? More affordable than agencies nearby. That was only 16%. This is not about money, this is about expertise. Again, hear what I’m saying to you. Clients are saying they are out shopping for a specific kind of agency, they are willing to work with agencies that 100 miles away. Why? Because they have an expertise in something that makes them so valuable to the client that they’re willing to tolerate that. So again, remember your choice is do you niche down or do you become a subject matter expert or an authority or a thought leader? I believe it’s worth the stretch to move past the niche. Yes you need a niche, but to actually become an authority.

I believe this so strongly that I literally, with Stephen Woessner, wrote a book all about it, specifically to agencies, here’s how you build a position of authority and why it is absolutely the position of strength that you can sell from. Absolutely believe it. I see it happen every day. I also see the data in other places. One of my favorite pieces of research is the Edelman Trust Barometer. They do it every year. In January of 2020, they released the 2019 data. They were talking about the power of influencers and how we as consumers are really being guided by and we put a lot of faith and trust into people like me. So when somebody like me leaves a rating or a review, I take that into account. Whether it’s I’m picking a hotel or I’m trying to decide which movie to go see or I am checking out which restaurant I want to go to in a city I don’t know, how other people like me rate them and talk about them has great influence, but there was a line in this study that… And by the way, we’ll put this in the show notes, but there was a line in the study that said, “The one attribute that ranked higher than the trust we have in people like me is the trust that we have in highly educated experts; company, industry and academic experts.”

The only people we trust more than people that look and sound just like ourselves are experts, are authorities, are thought leaders. As part of the study, they quoted Richard Edelman and he said, pay attention here, “It’s not purchased influence, it’s earned influence.” I wish I could put this in type in the podcast and you could see me underline it’s earned influence. This is the era of being an authority. This is the opportunity for agencies to step into their expertise and to really claim that position of being that subject matter expert. Today in bus dev it’s not about us finding someone and it’s not even about us being findable because there are a lot of agencies that are findable, it’s actually about us being sought after. People seek out and trust authorities and that, my friend, can be you. That absolutely can be every agency on this planet can carve out a position of authority and then sell from that position of authority.

There are three elements that you need to have. Remember, we talked about niching. There are three elements that you need to be an authority. The first one is you need to have a niche. Again, that’s going to be an industry, it might be an audience, it might be a problem that you solve over and over again, so I want to sell more stuff on Amazon, I want more leads or it may be a methodology, like the challenger brand. That’s element number one. The second element is you need to overlay that niche, whatever that area of specialty, with a strong point-of-view. That’s how you view that world, how you understand that world differently, how you see that they’re doing something backwards or wrong or harder than they have to and you have a better solution for them or that you know there is a truth about that audience or that niche that makes them need something that you can help them with. So you’ve got a strong point-of-view that you apply to the niche.

The third element, and this is the most important element of being an authority, is that you teach, that you generously and frequently teach without a sales pitch. You just stand on a podium, literally or figuratively, and you share what you know. That’s what it takes to be an authority. You have an area of specialty, you have a strong point-of-view about that area of specialty and you share and teach what you know. I can hear you all now. I can hear you saying, “I don’t know Drew, I am so glad I’m a generalist. If we had been a specialist… Let’s say I had been in the travel industry during COVID, I’d be out of business.” No, you wouldn’t. There a lot of AMI agencies that specialize in travel and you know what? They took it hard in the spring, but they are back on their feet and their clients are coming back. Why? Because of all of the industries, the industries that were hit hardest by COVID, they have the most to lose. So why are they looking for? Specialists. Who’s there to help them? The agencies that have declared that they’re a specialist.

The other problem that people say is, “You know what? I don’t want to risk that and that’s scary to me.” Understand that you can niche down in a way that is recession proof, that protects you from the ebbs and flows of finance, to a certain extent, but here’s the reality. Take away the recession, every agency has a pattern. And for most agencies, you make great money and you grow three or four or five years in a row and then you dip down for a year or two. You grow again for three, four or five and then you dip down for two. That’s whether you’re a specialist or a generalist. Every agency goes through that ebb and flow. I would far more, I would much rather go through that ebb and flow as a specialist and really be able to make bank in the years one through nine or my five years where I can charge a premium price because I’m a specialist. I am sought after, my acquisition costs are much lower, my sales cycle is much shorter, all because these people already know who I am.

They already like me, they already trust me because they have been consuming my content because I’m out there teaching. I’m helping them. Long before they hire me, I am helping them be better at their job. Sooner or later, when they’re ready to hire an agency, I’m already three fourths of the way there. They already know who I am, they already know I understand whatever it is they want me to understand. My niche, so I understand their industry, their audience, their special problem, whatever it is, I already have that. I’ve dialed that in and I’ve shown them how I can be helpful to them. I’ve already helped them, so they know me, they like me, they trust me. Now all they have to do is actually meet me, have a conversation and pretty soon, I’m at least in the running for that work. And in many cases, I’m the only agency they talk to.

So I’m telling you, you absolutely can be a generalist. And by the way, you can take an authority position as a generalist, it’s just a lot harder because you still have to carve out some subset of audience for you to focus on. Otherwise, your content is all over the place. But it’s your decision, it’s your agency. I absolutely believe that you have the right and the privilege to choose how you want to run your agency. Do you want to just work with family and friends? That’s okay. Do you want to have one gorilla and get most of your clients through a referral? Whatever comes in the net, that’s what you’re going to eat tonight. Do you want to have a couple of gorillas and then a bunch of little clients and do that feast or famine thing where you have this frenetic bus dev activity until you land a client or two and then you’re so busy onboarding those new clients that your bus dev effort dies down and there’s never every much in the pipeline? Any time you need a client, you sort of have to start over.

Or do you want to have a consistent business development program built around some variation of specialization or niching down? Or do you want to be in that very small group of agencies that is committed to being a thought leader, an expert and authority to the point that your clients come knocking on your door to hire you and they are all right fit clients? Up to you. I hope I’ve made my case that you should at least think about niching down or thinking about becoming a subject matter expert or an authority, but totally get that it is your call. So with that, I want to wind down the podcast with a couple things. Number one, if you are struggling with this question, if you are struggling with a specialization, this is something we’ll delve into in the January workshop. We will help you think through how you could niche down your agency, to consider all of the possibilities and for you to think about what makes the most sense.

We actually have a process that will walk you through, that will help you explore the possibilities and actually score the possibilities so you can see where your greatest opportunity may be. If this something that has been bumping around in your brain for a while and you want some help, one of the places you can get that help is the January workshop, January 21st and 22nd, the Build and Nurture Your Sales Funnel. But again, many of you already know the answer to this question, you just don’t have the courage. At a certain point in time, yes there is data, but at a certain point in time, there is a leap of faith and the leap of faith is, “I am a big fish in this little bowl. I am going to jump out of this safe, warm water and for a minute I am going to mid air as I fly into a bigger bowl.” That’s scary and I get it.

And really to be a specialist and niche down, you do have to have the bravery of defining that on your website, putting it in your LinkedIn profile, thinking about how you create content that demonstrates that you have that expertise, so it does take a bit of courage. It does take a leap of faith. Think about what I said, spend some time thinking about your agency and where you want to go. Again, this isn’t about today, this is about adown the road. This is about do you want to be stable, do you want to scalable, do you want to be profitable on a more consistent basis and do you ever want to sell your agency? Because if so, this may be one of the steps on the path to getting to all of those things. Think about it. All right, that wraps up this episode of Build A Better Agency, but don’t go away yet. I want to talk to you about a couple quick things.

First of all, as you know, when someone leaves a rating or review for the podcast, if you leave that rating or review, take a screenshot of it and then send me an email with that attachment. Why? Because I don’t know that Broadway Girl is. I don’t know who that is. I don’t know that that’s… I know that’s your name, I don’t know what your agency is. So whatever your user ID is or whatever, it doesn’t tell me who you are, but a screenshot of it with your email address does tell me who you are. What we do is we put all of those into a hat, proverbial hat if you will, and every month when I do my solo cast, I draw a name out of that proverbial hat and that person wins a seat at one of our live workshops or one of our on demand workshops. This solo cast winner, so this month’s winner is Angela [Conner 00:41:24]. So Angela, congratulations. I will shoot you an email so that we can correspond about which course or workshop you’d like to take and we’ll get you squared away.

All of you are eligible to do that. And if you’ve already done it, you don’t have to do it again. I mean, I guess you could, but your name stays in the hat until you win. So sooner or later, it will be your lucky day. Speaking of lucky days, the last thing I want to talk to you about is, as you know, I brilliantly decided that 2020 was going to be the year that I launched a conference for small to mid sized agencies. There really is nothing, there is no conference for small to mid sized agencies where speakers come in that are very narrowly focused on an agency under 100 people. There’s just not that out there. I decided AMI should do that and I brilliantly decided to launch that for the very first time in 2021.

Well, as you the know, the Build A Better Agency Summit was supposed to happen in May of 2020. We then had to move it to November of 2020 because of COVID and then we found out that the hotel wasn’t even going to be open in November and so we weren’t going to be able to hold the event, so we had to move it again. I’m hoping the third time is the charm. We had to move it to August 10th and 11th of 2021. A lot of people asked me to do it virtually. And honestly, I just couldn’t see how the conference could be what I wanted it to be if we weren’t all together. I know that virtual conferences are great, we’ve all been attending a lot of them, but I also think we’re all getting a little bit of fatigue around them. I think by August of 2021, we are going to be very hungry to be together.

I want my conference to be a conference of connections, connections where you actually get to sit down and talk to the speakers and really get to know the sponsors and get to know the other attendees and have a drink with people and talk to people who are literally walking in your shoes. They have eight employees, you have nine. They have 22 employees, you have 30. These are people who live your life and who know and understand what you’re going through. I think being together and creating those connections is going to be awesome. I couldn’t figure out a way to replicate it online. I’m hedging my bets that we’re all going to come together on August 10th and 11th of 2021 in Chicago for the best two days of your professional development that you can even imagine.

We’re going to combine all kinds of crazy things. We have amazing speakers. We heave speakers Joe Polizzi and Jay Baer and Robert Rose and Robin Boehler from Mercer Island Group and all kinds of amazing people that you have probably seen before, but they’re all going to talk about something that they have never talked about at any conference. Every one of them is bringing a unique presentation just for you guys, just for small to mid sized agencies. We also have folks who are going to talk about imposter syndrome, have a diversity expert coming to talk about how do we have some of these conversations inside our agency that we know we need to have, but they’re awkward and hard and we’re afraid and it’s scary and it feels dangerous and maybe we’re going to get sued? How do we have those things? How do we respond to our employees who don’t think we’re doing enough around racial injustice or whatever it may be? Those kind of speakers.

I’ve got a M&A specialist coming to talk about how to get your agency ready to sell or what to look for when you’re buying an agency. We’ve got a real estate expert who’s going to show you ways to invest your money, to get your money out of the agency and invest it and build your wealth outside of the agency. I have tried to think of everything that I could think of that would be of value for you and as many of those people that I can pack into two days, I have packed them in. We are about half sold out, so we’ve got about another 125 or so, 150 tickets left to sell and I would love it if you would join us. I would love it if you would get excited about it, if you would love the idea of traveling to Chicago next summer and hanging out with other agency owners and leader, I would love it if you would buy a ticket now and show some support for this event because honestly, I am really hedging my bets on this and I’m counting on all of you to be there and to find so much value in it that we can do it year after year after year.

Those tickets are on sale right now at the Agency Management Institute website. The very first navigation is the BABA, Build A Better Agency Summit. Click on it, you can read about the speakers. You can register for the workshop. I would love to have you there. That’s what I have for you today. Hopefully this has been helpful. In the meantime, you know how to get ahold of me. I’m [email protected]. You can track me down on most social channels. I am always available to chit chat with you about work or your business or come to one of our Q&A calls. If you want to sit and talk about what’s happening in your agency, what you should be doing about PPE loans, whatever it may be, we here at AMI are ready to those conversations with you.

I will be back next week with another guest to get you thinking differently about your business. In the meantime, please pay a lot of attention to this fourth quarter. My last solo cast before this one was all about what you needed to do to really finish up strong and get ready to just take 2021 by storm. So if you didn’t listen to that one, go back and listen to that one. Or at the very least, go find the snow notes because we included a checklist where I just listed out for you all the stuff I want you to focus on in the fourth quarter to make sure that you are ready for 2021, with guns a blazing. Please go and do that. A huge thank you to our friends at White Label. Without their sponsorship, this podcast would be very difficult to do, so I am grateful to them for bringing this podcast to you and creating the opportunity for us to spend time together.

If you are looking for a partner that does amazing work on PPC, web dev and/or design, White Label IQ could be your best friend. Whitelabeliq.com/AMI to get you to a special deal that they have just for podcast listeners. That wraps us up folks. Have a great rest of the week, stay safe, stay warm if you’re in the upper half of the US. We already have snow here in the Midwest, so stay warm and kick the fourth quarter. All right. I’ll talk to you soon.

Thanks for spending some time with us. Visit our website to learn about our workshops, owner peer groups and download our salary and benefits survey. Be sure you also sign up for our free podcast giveaways at agencymanagementinstitute.com/podcastgiveaway.