Book your agency solid with Matthew Kimberley

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 with another episode of Build a Better Agency. Welcome back if you are a regular listener and thanks for coming back. Always grateful for your time. And if this is your first go around with Build a Better Agency, welcome. We try and create a super collaborative and cooperative community around agency ownership. We do that in a lot of places here on the podcast, we have a Facebook group for this podcast, which you are invited to join or you’re welcome to ask us questions about the podcast episodes or anything you have related to sort of agency life and management. And we certainly try and do that in our live events, whether those are workshops or our Build a Better Agency conference. Whatever it may be, I am a firm believer that we can learn from each other, we can support each other. And we all, no matter how long we’ve been doing this, it’s nice to know that you’re not doing it alone.

So welcome. Today’s topic is one that I know is very top of mind for a lot of you now. This whole idea of how do you sell, but how do you sell in an environment that is a little unusual and as we come out of COVID and sort of try and redefine some things for ourselves and I think my guest is going to be a great beacon for that. So one of the things I know I want to talk to him about is this idea of every client is not a great client for us. And I think if you have run your agency for a day or a decade or multiple decades, you have experienced this more than once where you got super excited about a client, maybe about the project or the budget or whatever it may be, but you had that sort of nagging little inkling in your gut that perhaps this was not a right fit.

And as we all have done, we ignore that feeling. We bring the client on and then chaos in suits. And typically those clients end up costing us at the very least money and time, but often the peace and tranquility of the agency that can cost us staff. So I’m a firm believer in you selecting clients that are right for your agency. Every client is right for some agency. It does not mean they’re right for yours. And so we have put together a tool called the client’s sweet spot filter that really helps you by going through an exercise, a series of questions, helps you identify what you love about clients, the kind of clients that are the best fit for you, random flags that suggest to you that maybe they’re not a great client and you can grab that sweet spot client filter by just going to agencymanagementinstitute.com/client-filter.

So again, it’s /client-filter. And download it as a PDF. You and your leadership team can go through it. But I think that you are going to benefit from knowing who you should date and who you should not date. And that’s just one of the things that I want to talk to our guests about. So let me tell you a little bit about him. So I have known Matthew Kimberley for probably three or four years now. And I met him because he offered that a period of time sort of an accountability tool and partnership through email. And it had the words, single malt scotch in it and I was sold. So that’s how I first met him and we’ve collaborated on some things together. And he’s a sales guy, but not in the way that we think about sales guys. He’s a very thoughtful sales person and coach around sales.

And when I realized his background and that he had come out of the Book Yourself Solid world which many of you are familiar with that book by Michael Port, which if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend reading it. But anyway, when I found out that Matthew had sort of come… Had worked with Michael and help launch the coaching business tied to Book Yourself Solid, that made a lot of sense to me because that’s the kind of business sales person he is. He really is a collaborative business sales person. So I was not at all surprised to find out that Matthew has recently taken on the role of heading up Book Yourself Solid worldwide.

And now he is waving that flag all over the world trying to help people understand that there is a way to literally Book Yourself Solid so that you can say no to all those wrong fit clients because you have enough right fit clients at the door. He’s also the author of a great book called Get an Effing Grip. He has an online course about writing delightful emails, which I thought was spectacular and he hosts his own podcast called How to Get a Grip. So without further ado, I would love for you to meet Matthew and for me to start asking him the questions that I know you would ask around sales and prospecting and how we as agency owners and leaders can better use our day to drive sales into our agency. So let’s get to it. Matthew, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Matthew Kimberley:

Thank you for having me, Drew. Great to be here.

Drew McLellan:

So we’re going to talk today about the concept behind the Book Yourself Solid. So give everybody just understanding of how you came to have this expertise, your role now in connection with the organization and the book and all of that. And then we’re going to dig into how this pertains to agency owners.

Matthew Kimberley:

Cool. So Book Yourself Solid for those who aren’t familiar with it is a business building system. It’s tagline is how to get more clients than you can handle, even if you hate marketing and selling. I came to… I was in a previous line for recruitment company owner and I used to do a lot of cold calling and face-to-face sales and training my guys and teaching them how to hit the phones and how to do account management. And I didn’t love it. There was vast swathes of the business that I really didn’t love. Also I had a relationship with my business partner that started strong and ended pretty catastrophically. So I was looking for an out and I realized that what I liked to do was train people and I liked to sell. And I thought, ooh, I could combine the two and become a sales trainer, help people sell more. Who doesn’t need that?

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Matthew Kimberley:

Really most small business owners would identify at pretty much any stage of their career that sales is a priority. It’s super important on day one because you need the revenue to have a day two. And then as your company or your agency grows, you need the revenue to support the scale that you’ve achieved and your overheads become bigger and your salary costs become greater. So sales is something that people have always wanted. Selling money at a discount, it’s basically what sales trainers do.

Drew McLellan:

It’s interesting. They just don’t want to do it, right?

Matthew Kimberley:

Who? Yeah. I mean, who does? It takes a weird person. And that’s kind of the hook with Book Yourself Solid. Even if you hate marketing and selling-

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely.

Matthew Kimberley:

… there is a way to do it. So I decided I was going to become a sales trainer/business coach having met some pretty poor business coaches in my career as a business owner. And I didn’t want to improvise, I didn’t want to make it up. So I looked for a franchise. I was looking to buy a coaching franchise and I looked at some of them, some of very good things like action coach or Sandler training, brilliant franchises. But more money than I wanted to spend and I didn’t really want to be tied. So if you’re on a franchise, you can’t sell somebody else’s products along. So you can’t sell big bags and bulk is under the same roof, right?

Drew McLellan:

Right. Right.

Matthew Kimberley:

So I’d read the book, Book Yourself Solid, which first came out in 2006 as a business owner and I was on the mailing list. And I got an email from Michael Port, the creator, the founder that said, I’m looking to license some coaches to sell Book Yourself Solid to their own clients. And I said, huh. So I explored that avenue, became a Book Yourself Solid certified coach and sucked up to the teacher to the extent that I became an employee of Book Yourself Solid and eventually a business partner in Book Yourself Solid. So I spoke that language for six, seven years. A few years ago, I took some time off. We started a new company called Heroic Public Speaking, which is I think one of the best public speaking and growing performance training companies in the world.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, many of my listeners have been out to hang out with Michael and Amy in New Jersey taking their core course. So absolutely, it’s spectacular.

Matthew Kimberley:

Brilliant.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Matthew Kimberley:

It really is. I mean, I don’t think there’s anything quite like it-

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, I agree.

Matthew Kimberley:

… outside of drama school. It’s the beautiful combination of the business of speaking and the performance of speaking which isn’t easy to find combined elsewhere. And so around the time that we launched that I realized I wanted to do a lot of speaking on my own. I was less interested in teaching speaking. Amy was a fantastic and obvious partner for Michael from a business point of view. And then I took three years off and I did sales training. I taught people how to write emails. I did a lot of keynote speaking. I ran lots of mastermind coaching style things all with the focus on selling.

But Book Yourself Solid kept calling to me. It’s world class. It’s a world class system. It’s intellectual property that’s been appreciated by millions of business owners. And there was an opportunity for me to slot back in there, which I did at the beginning of this year. And so now I’m training the trainers and licensing certifying coaches so they can go out and multiply the sales exponentially of all of their clients. It’s a system that starts from the ground up. It might be an anathema or sacrilegious to many of your agency listeners, but we believe that marketing doesn’t get you clients. All that marketing does is create awareness about who you are and what you do. And it’s what you do with that awareness that determines whether your marketing gives you money.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, I actually think that’s one of the reasons why sales are challenging for a lot of agency owners is because they’re brilliant marketers. And so the top of their funnel, if you talk about the traditional sales funnel and I know you, in Book Yourself Solid, I know you have a different philosophy about a funnel. But if you talk about the traditional sales funnel, most agency owners kill it at the top of the funnel with the marketing part-

Matthew Kimberley:

Sure.

Drew McLellan:

… the awareness part, but they struggle when they have to flip it and actually drive to sales. That’s when their discomfort gets super bright. So I think they would probably agree with you that marketing is great, gets me on the radar screen, but I got have to do something with it to actually land a new client.

Matthew Kimberley:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Matthew Kimberley:

And then good, there are plenty of people who are doing this very, very well who maybe they did it, maybe they worked it out without reading the book. But I think Michael and Book Yourself Solid was the first time that it was really all of the individual components of having a book solid business where codified. They were put into a systematic structure because the very first thing that needs to happen when somebody responds to your marketing message is they need to, wherever you’re sending them, whatever they’re doing as a result of your marketing message, they need to immediately feel that it’s relevant and a home. So I was on Instagram the other day, something really cool. I can’t remember what it was. It was… I can’t… I’m just going to say it was a Wallaby. It was something and it was a Wallaby that looked really funky. It was a really cool… It would win branding prizes. It was a cool cartoon. If I’d Wallaby I thought I liked that Wallaby, I’m going to click through. And it was for a purse and I don’t carry a purse. But the message to market much-

Drew McLellan:

Was it a purse made out of Wallaby?

Matthew Kimberley:

… No, it was just a cool brand. It’s like-

Drew McLellan:

Got it.

Matthew Kimberley:

… Tony the Tiger on your first season-

Drew McLellan:

Got it. Got it.

Matthew Kimberley:

… It was like this is the logo, the representative. I was like, oh, they just wasted a dollar. Am I click? So there’s a question about message to market match, which everybody who’s listening to this will be familiar with. But they’re going to say, is this relevant to me? Am I in the target market? And does this person or this organization or this product deliver a result that is relevant to me? And then if they say yes to that, then they’ll say, well, what about the person who’s delivering it? Who is the firm? Who is the service provider? Do I like the cut of their jib?

Do I like the way they put themselves out in the world? Do I feel anything towards them at all? Haven’t we seen a really compelling message on a website that doesn’t entice us to find out more? Sure, because it doesn’t speak to us at that level. What happens then is the sales cycle or in Book Yourself Solid terms, the trust building exercise begins. So people will make investments. You mentioned that we don’t necessarily believe in the funnel. We believe in the concept of vulnerable. We believe that a funnel has to fit into a cycle, right?

Drew McLellan:

Right. Right.

Matthew Kimberley:

People will make investments in you that are dependent upon two things. The first thing is the amount of trust that you’ve earned and the second thing is their situation. I might only buy a mortgage twice or three times in my lifetime, but it would be well advised for that mortgage broker to keep in touch with me and build trust with me over a couple of decades to make sure that they’re the obvious choice. I give keynote speeches sometimes. And normally at the end of those 45 minutes, somebody will come up and say, “You blew my mind. I want to hire you to be a private consultant or my coach.”

And I’ll say, “Well, it costs lots and lots of money.” They’re like, “It doesn’t matter.” And I took 45 minutes for them to make a five figure spending decision. It might take somebody else three years to make a $100 decision, but you won’t know unless you continue to nurture, build trust, shower them with love and scale those messages. How many agencies do you know have proper CRM discipline? How many agencies do you know regularly email their prospect database with delightful, relevant trust building emails?

Drew McLellan:

You mean instead of talking about themselves.

Matthew Kimberley:

For example or even just remembering to do it once a week, right?

Drew McLellan:

Right. Right.

Matthew Kimberley:

How many agencies do you now don’t have media assets like information products courses books, white papers that speed out trust, demonstrate credibility, sell, speed up the sales cycle for sure on behalf of them while they’re off working on client work? There’s so many areas for improvement and that’s what we do. And then we talk about marketing as… We’ve got some very distinct marketing practices as well in Book Yourself Solid, but the core is marketing. Do I get your clients? Also you don’t have to work with anybody. If you’ve worked with everyone, who’s got a checkbook and a pulse, it’s the fastest way to an early hospital-

Drew McLellan:

Right. Right.

Matthew Kimberley:

… and all of this.

Drew McLellan:

And misery, right?

Matthew Kimberley:

Right. Yeah, once we do that.

Drew McLellan:

So one of the things I heard you say about Book Yourself Solid and I don’t know if it came out of the book or if it was of your own creation was the Book Yourself Solid is a love story disguised as a business system. So tell me what you mean by that.

Matthew Kimberley:

It’s directly out of the book. There are three philosophical principles, three guiding principles in Book Yourself Solid. Marketing doesn’t get you clients, practical one. There are some people you’re meant to serve and others not so much. That’s another one. And because Book Yourself Solid is a love story disguised as a business system and what we mean by that is that nobody goes into business on their own because they say this is going to be hard work. This is going to be a drudge. I’m going to get to work with some people that I wouldn’t sit down and have a drink with all day, every day. I’m going to be at the mercy of my clients. I’m not going to sleep enough.

But that’s frequently what happens and what we say is, well, what if that wasn’t true? What if we could implement right at the very beginning of our process a red velvet rope policy that only allows into your business the kind of clients, the kind of partners, the kind of employees, the kind of people who energize you and inspire you and motivate you to do your best work? Because that’s a virtuous cycle. You start to do that. And what if that was a decision that we made from day one? Now of course, when you’re getting started, your red velvet rope policy is going to be a bit looser because you need the cash because you learn the ropes because you don’t know how to spot the warning signs. But for me, there is nothing more beautiful or luxurious than being able to look for…

When I’m talking to a prospective client, look for reasons to say no. It doesn’t feel quite right. Didn’t get a great vibe of this person. And the only way you can have the confidence to say no is if you don’t need the money and you don’t need the money, not only because hopefully you’ve exercised decent cash flow management, but also because you’ve got a system for bringing in another lead who will have a sales conversation with you tomorrow. That’s the… You hear about basically the more successful people are, the more they get to do that. So if you’re a nightclub designer or an architect, you categorically get to pick and choose your clients and your prices. Well, why don’t we… You don’t have to be a celebrity status to execute that policy to some degree. And that’s what we encourage everyone to do because it’s a long game and 90% of business problems are personal problems in disguise. So what about if we could eliminate the personal problems as much as possible by saying only going to have cool people in there.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Yeah, we’ve got a tool called the sweet spot client filter that as I was prepping for our conversation and reviewing the Book Yourself Solid for principals. They aligned perfectly because it’s not about… Some of it is, are they in the right industry? Are they the right size? Certainly, but a lot of it is things like, you know what? I don’t like working with clients who’ve never worked with an agency before or I want somebody who actually returns my call in a reasonable period of time. All of those intangible things that make us actually like our clients and be able to serve them, right?

Matthew Kimberley:

Right, I love that you’ve combined those two things because we see really frequently in marketing exercises or in teachings, people say we have to create the ideal client or the avatar. And that either looks like a very strict demographic profile. This person drives a Mercedes, they are a dentist, they earn $160,000 or more a year. And then we get into the avatar part, which is, they love fishing, they have a cabin in the woods, they value their family. But what we don’t really look at is their inherent qualities. And so I like to come up with this and what we recommend our clients do and our coaches teach their clients to do is come up with a list of non-negotiables like this person… Because we can say anything. Oh yes, I truly… I love kittens, but in the weekends you go kicking kittens. Is it your action?

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Matthew Kimberley:

Is this person able to laugh at my jokes? That’s one of mine. That’s really important because I’m a narcissist or at least I like to get kind of visual feedback when I crack a joke. Do they take responsibility for themselves? And this can be determined when I ask them questions about how’s business. And if they say things like, well, the economy or well, I lost an employee and that’s why I haven’t done any revenue in the last six years or I got a flu and it kept me out of action for three weeks, set me back nine months. Always looking to blame somebody else.

Drew McLellan:

Something, right.

Matthew Kimberley:

I think good timekeeping, that’s important for me. If someone’s late twice, that’s a respect for others issue that’s going to manifest itself much further down. So I like these non-negotiables. You can even go one step further. This person votes for this particular party or this particular candidate. You can have those conversations with people because we’re looking for their inherent values not their circumstances. Somebody who’s wealthy today might not be wealthy tomorrow, but somebody who is generous today is probably going to be generous tomorrow.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Yeah, and again, that gives to the luxury of being able to really cherry pick your clients. And I think that’s the position every agency wants to be in, every agency owner wants to be and not just because they’re going to make great money, but a lot of it is around because they’re going to treat my people well, they’re going to be fun to work with, we’re going to get to do work that we’re proud of. So all the reasons why we got into the business, sometimes we allow our clients to take that away from us.

Matthew Kimberley:

100%.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Matthew Kimberley:

And also commercially, it makes sense.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely.

Matthew Kimberley:

And actually you are an agency owner and you deliver good work to a less than ideal client. And it’s difficult to deliver your best work to someone who doesn’t inspire you. You deliver good work. They’re having a drink with their buddies in a bar afterwards say, “Wow, you have a new website, you have a new campaign, you have some new branding. How was your experience?” “Yeah. Yeah, it was fine.” Because they won. It goes two ways. Whereas if you have raving fans, they’re going to be talking about, they’re going to… Guys, you’ve got to see this. I’ve been working with this fantastic agency. And what does that mean? Referrals.

Drew McLellan:

Right, so I know one of the things that you talk about with your coaches and your coaches talk about with their clients is this idea of trust developing at different points in time for different reasons. And so let’s talk a little bit about what that looks like in a service business like an agency.

Matthew Kimberley:

Okay, so many people are doing this well. Albeit unknowingly, they don’t know that they’re doing it, but they are doing it. We believe that there are very stages of trust demonstration from clients. So a client will demonstrate trust by giving you their contact details. A client will demonstrate trust by giving you their time. A client will generate trust by giving you their undivided attention. The client will generate trust by writing you a low figure check and they’ll demonstrate their trust by writing you a high figure check. So we mentioned already that trust develops at different speeds for different people. But what that means practically is that we need to give our clients or our perspective clients, both of them, different investible opportunities.

A different investment opportunities and an investible opportunity is some way that they can give you something in return for you giving them something. And one thing that we missed the boat on, which is a technique which is I think exclusive to put yourself started, although others may have named it something else is the concept of an always have something to invite people to offer. This is a free thing that we give our prospects. It’s not an ebook, although there is time for that. It’s not the opportunity to watch videos, although that should also be part of our strategy. It is an interactive group format frequent meeting preferably face-to-face, next step video because how quickly does trust develop when you’re standing next to somebody? Very quickly. How quickly does trust develop when you’re watching somebody’s body language and talking to them? Very quickly. And here’s the purpose that it serves.

It allows people who are hovering around you wondering about whether you might be the right person to get to know you better. It allows them to do that and it allows you to get to know them better. It allows you to do it in a non-threatening non-salesy environment that also scales your attention to prospecting and marketing. So typically we’d say, hey, why don’t we jump on the phone for 20 minutes? I want to run some things by you or I’d love to pick your brains or I wonder whether you’ve got half an hour to coffee. When I was an agency and I used to run a recruitment agency, I spent half my life on the road doing getting to know you meetings. What we try to get yourself started is save your time, save your energy and give you a highly scalable, very valuable way of building trust with your right people.

And so there’s always have something to invite people to offer when somebody says, “Hey should we grab a coffee or I’d love to pick your brains.” You say, “Fantastic, why don’t you come on Wednesday at midday to my happy hour.” “Well, what’s that?” “Well, is when I open my brain for picking. You can ask me anything you want, I’ll be live for an hour.” “Ooh, that’s fun.” And then you get social proof because some of your existing clients show up and they get to meet and you become the center of a network. And these people will have you in common and you strengthen your ties and you may not make any sales offers. And it may never be about your core offering either. I’ll give you an example. We had, is my favorite example and you may have heard this before, we had a dentist who said, I want to get book solid and I can’t think what might always have something to invite people to offer should be. Who wants to come to a weekly dental hygiene seminar-

Drew McLellan:

Payer or of a group flossing.

Matthew Kimberley:

… Yeah, I like that idea. Well, actually now you said that, Drew, that might have been a great idea. But nobody apart from fetishists and weirdos is going to come to… Or people will come for information once, but they won’t come a second time or third time. We used to track this. So we hadn’t always had something to invite people to offer previously called the coaching success sessions. Anybody who enrolled in the Book Yourself Solid School of Coach Training, as it was then called, had attended at least three of those free offers because it was a five figure investment. It used to cost… I’ve changed the pricing. I don’t know.

But it used to cost about $30,000 as a one-off investment. And so people want to get to know you before they do that. And so they’d come three times on average. Some people would come for nine and never buy. Some people would never come and buy. But on average people would come three times and then they say, we trust these guys now. We know that they’re good for it. So the dentist said, I can’t think what I could possibly do. And here’s the thing. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with your core service. It just has to be for your target market. And so if your target market, in the dentist case, people who lived in the neighborhood who had teeth and possibly they didn’t have teeth, maybe teeth.

We said, “What do you like to do?” He said, “Well, every Sunday, I’d get on my bike and I go for a ride or we had a Harley-Davidson.” I said, “Well, invite some people. Stick up a flyer and say, hey, Harley owners or if you have a powerful motorbike, let’s hang out for an hour and a half on a Sunday lunchtime.” And he did. And he said, “I’ve no idea how this is going to get the clients, but I’ll do it.” And six months later we said, “How’s it going?” And he said, “Well, I think it’s going fine.” He said, “Well, I’ve got 30, 40 people showing up every week and we go for a ride.” And then we said, “Well, how many of them are clients?” And he said, “Yeah, probably more than 1/2 of them plus their families.” Right?

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Matthew Kimberley:

Because he’s the cool dentist. Molto, I live in a tiny rock in the Mediterranean that many people haven’t heard of, but it’s 10 miles by six or 20 miles by six. There are 500,000 people here and it’s deeply homogenous. We’ve got families here going back generations. So it’s quite difficult to cut into the commercial infrastructure here because there’s one family that owns the casinos, there’s one family that owns the hotels, there’s one family that owns… et cetera. So what startups here do is they socialize. Where are you going to find a client? Because everyone knows who the best agency owner is here. Well, you’re just going to hang out. You’re going to go and play five asides soccer. You’re going to go to happy hour at the bar.

And you’re going to get to know and build trust with your clients in a non-work centric environment because one day, they’re going to need a website. One day, they’re going to need some ads running and they know you and they trust you. So they always have something to invite people to offer. As well there are other elements to that. We believe in a menu of services. That’s why we don’t really like the funnel. The funnel says, everyone has to first give your email address, then get the upsell, then get another upsell. And it goes like this. Whereas if someone were to walk up to me after speaking gig and say, “Hey, I want to give you $15,000 for a consulting engagement.” I wouldn’t say, “Great, here’s what you need to do. Go and download my free ebook.” I’d say, “Thank you very much.”

Drew McLellan:

Right, right. Right, right. Yeah, everybody wants to enter where they want to enter based on their need, right?

Matthew Kimberley:

Exactly, right.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, so I want to take a quick break. And when we come back, I want to talk about the five things that every agency owners should be doing every morning to fast track clients and sales. All right, so let’s take a quick break and we’ll come back and talk about that. Hey guys, sorry to interrupt the show, but I wanted to tell you about an opportunity that we have created for you that I hope you’re going to be excited about. So as many of you may know Stephen Woessner and I just finished and published our book called Sell With Authority. It’s available at Amazon and all other good bookstores. But what we’re trying to do especially because right now we had a big book launch planned and all of that, but that feels yucky right now given that everyone is thinking about other things.

So what we’re doing is instead reaching out to our community, you guys and making this offer. If you will go to Amazon and buy a single copy of the book and then after you read the book, leave a review. And then all you have to do is forward me the Amazon receipt for the book or a picture of you holding a book I guess and the copy of the review. That would be awesome. Then what we’re going to do is we’re going to put you in a drawing for a seat for the Build a Better Agency Summit. So we’re going to give away three seats to the conference that we are having, the Build a Better Agency Summit and all you have to do is buy the book and leave us a review. Even if you think it sucks, that’s okay. It’ll make me cry a little, but it’s okay.

We’re just trying to generate more reviews on the book because as you know that affects the algorithm of the book. And since we’re kind of dark in terms of promoting it in other ways, we’re just looking for a little help from you. And most importantly, I really do believe, which is why I wrote the book, that you will find it valuable and hopefully inspirational in terms of how to position your agency and become an authority where prospects are actually seeking you out rather than the other way around. So if you’ll do that, that would be awesome. Again, buy the book, review the book, send me proof of both and we will put you in the drawing for a seat to the Build a Better Agency Summit. All right, let’s get back to the show. All right, we are back. So before the break, I had said one of the things I know you teach is this idea of five things you should be doing every single morning. So walk us through those if you will.

Matthew Kimberley:

I believe that everybody, when they come into the office or when they sit down at work, whether they’re a one person business or 30, 40, 50, 100 people business worst for the smaller companies, but important for everybody is they tend to get their priorities wrong. We prioritize client fulfillment above marketing. We prioritize client fulfillment above sales. If you have a dedicated department that takes care of marketing and sales, that’s great. But even they will prioritize admin. Like, oh, why aren’t you on the phone? Well, A, because even though I work in sales, I hate sales, oh, I haven’t got any leads because the marketing department haven’t done their job. Why haven’t the marketing pumped on their job? Because they’d been in meetings or they’d been emailing each other.

So this is like the lowest requirement or investment of time, 10 to 15 minutes, every single morning, every individual, certainly every business owner should be doing this. It’s prioritizing marketing and selling using a couple of the Book Yourself Solid marketing or self promotion strategies. The first one is networking. And for most people networking means going to events, exchanging business cards. And we say that that doesn’t need to be the case. Networking in our vocabulary is strengthening the relationships with people who are in your network. So we have a loose network, we’re going to make it stronger. We have a small network, we’re going to make it bigger.

So what I like to do, and this is real fun takeaway activity you can do right