Defining your agency niche to go from a generalist to a specialist with Tyler Samani-Sprunk

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It doesn’t matter what kind of agency you run, traditional digital media buying, web dev, PRR brand, whatever your focus, you still need to run a profitable business. The Build, a Better Agency Podcast, presented by a White Label IQ will expose you to the best practices that drive growth, client and employee retention and profitability, bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Build a Better Agency. This is Drew McLellan from Agency Management Institute and I’m excited to be with you today. We’re gonna talk today about how an agency went from being a generalist to a specialist and what that entailed for them in terms of the sort of the building blocks that got them to the place where they went from having clientele that was relatively local to clients all over the US and North America, and actually beyond that. So Tyler Ani Sprunk co-owns an agency called Simple Strat and they’ve been around for about 10 years. I’m gonna let him tell you the story, but we’re literally gonna break down this story of sort of decisions made along the way, good and bad decisions and what it is that they’re doing today that has right fit clients knocking on their door.

They are not doing a lot of outbound, they are not chasing after prospects. Prospects are chasing after them. I would love for all of you to be in that position where your, your best fit prospects, your people who are gonna be with you for years and years and years. ’cause they are the right agency or you’re the right agency for them as a client. I would love for that to happen to, for you every single day. And it can, it absolutely can if this agency can do it, so can yours. So let’s welcome Tyler to the show and find out how they did it. Tyler, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. So tell everybody a little bit about who you are, what you’re up to, kind of your, your journey and then we’re gonna dissect that journey, I think on this episode.

So, so give them the ending of the story.

Yeah, so today I’m co-founder of Simple Strats and we are a, an agency, I always use that word lightly ’cause we don’t do a whole lot of creative marketing services. At least that’s not kinda the primary, like what we used to do. But we’re a HubSpot consulting agency, so we help people really get more out of the HubSpot platform. And so we’ve seen a lot of growth over the last couple years. We actually just added two people to our team that’s started of Wednesday. So I’m super excited about that and yeah, excited to to kind of go through that story today.

So how are you different? What do you, how do you look different today than you did when you started as an agency?

Yeah, I mean we are, we are a completely different company than, than when we started. So I’ve been with Simple Strat for about seven years. I think I was employee number three. So even though I’ve got the co-founder title, there was a company that was existing when I joined. They’d been around for about a year. My business partner, ally Shwanky had been doing some consulting for some local businesses and had started to kind of hire to help them really like deliver on the services that she was consulting on. And so when I joined, that’s what we were focused on. We were working on, we working with local businesses, we worked with like some franchises and a lot of B2C companies. And today we work with companies all over the country. Our team is all over the country and really focused on really our, usually start with clients with that software consulting, so helping them get more out of HubSpot.

And then some of our clients, we do still do some more of the marketing strategy and execution on top of that.

Okay, so you went from kind of a generalist and right? Oh yeah, yeah. And so where were your clients located when you were a generalist?

Yeah, so I’m based in Lincoln, Nebraska, as is Ally. And so we’re our clients. So pretty much all of our clients were, were in Lincoln or Omaha, which is neighboring town in Nebraska. I know not people, not too many people are familiar with Nebraska geography, but yeah, they were all within probably, you know, a hundred mile radius or so of us.

So what was going on in the agency that made you think that focusing a little bit or specializing made some sense?

Yeah, so I have to give credit to you. First off, so before Simples stra I had, I had started an agency with a few friends while I was in college. They had, we’d all been in a student advertising agency. They had approached me, I was, I had an ad degree but also a business degree. They were both on the creative side. One was a writer run as a designer. And since I had a business degree and had had a sales job at the time, we all kind of naively believed that I knew business. And so I was gonna be, you know, the, the secret to bringing in sales and that. So we started an agency very, very quickly found out that we had no idea what we were doing. I mean, none of us had ever actually worked in an agency, just that student agency that we, that we did in college. And so I, you know, your podcast was actually one of the places that I, that I started, you know, know I was consuming as much content as possible.

So this is a great like full circle moment, almost 10 years later of listening to this podcast and then now being on it. But you, I know have harped for as long as you’ve been a part of a MII think about the need to specialize. And so, right, actually when I joined Simple Strive, that was one of the goals. So, you know, when I closed down, the other agency closed down for a lot of reasons. We made all the mistakes in the book. And one of the things that Ally wanted was she wanted to pursue the, the HubSpot partnership and she also wanted to start growing the company so that the name Simple Strap meant something. It wasn’t just her name that meant something, right? All of the, if you asked any of our clients at the time who they worked with, they would’ve said Ali, none of them would’ve said Simple Strap. And so in that, you know, in that exploration, as soon as I started on, we, we started to try to specialize in things.

It took us a long time to find our groove though.

So talk a little bit about the process of finding the groove. Like how did you figure out how you should specialize?

Yeah, I don’t know if I’m the best person to talk about it because it did take us a long time. So when we started

We had a of clients, but, but Tyler, here’s the thing, and this is why I’m asking, is because I think everyone thinks this should be simple and fast, and for most agencies this can take years. And part of it is ’cause you have a day job and so you’re kind of doing it on the side and talking about it in some executive meetings and all of that. Part of it is ’cause it’s scary. It’s hard to say we’re not gonna, like, we have this whole roster of clients, we’re not gonna serve people like them anymore. Yeah. And, and there’s a sense of scarcity. We have to be a, a mile wide and an inch deep as opposed to recognizing that you have the same opportunity when you’re an inch wide and a mile deep.

But that’s hard for people to wrap their head around. So I think it’s actually the, you’re the perfect sort of poster child for this conversation because your journey’s not that different from a lot of other agencies. They do struggle with this idea of how do we niche down? Yeah. How do we decide how to specialize? How do we start saying no when people have a bag of money and they don’t fit the mold. So walk us through kind of what that felt like and looked like for you.

Yeah, I think, I think there was kind of three phases of it for us. So I mentioned that was one of the things we were trying to do right away, right? And so at that time, what we looked at is we looked at our current client roster Yeah. And we said, okay, what’s, you know, what are some commonalities between the clients that, that we had? And at that time, one of our largest clients was a, like a nutritional supplement franchise. And we had a couple clients that were in that space and, and Dally had some background in that. And so one of our first kind of niches that we thought we were gonna have was kind of health and wellness, fitness, mostly B2C stuff, which laughing because it’s just widely different than what we do today. So we, we started there and we, we tried to just kind of expand that we were doing a lot of, I think it wasn’t really the strategy around specializing that that hurt us.

It was about how we tried to go to market in that, in that niche. But we reached out to, you know, as many people as we could. We used those examples and, and that just, you know, we, we, we started writing content. So we’ve always been a big believer in, in thought leadership and content marketing. I’m sure we’ll talk about more today, but we started writing some blog posts about that. And what we found really quickly is, is a few things. One, we, we didn’t have a lot of success in that niche, in that niche, but especially around, around the content we were creating, we were generating a ton of traffic in health and wellness. None of it was really qualified to do business with us. And so that was kinda the first phase, just kinda experimenting with this and didn’t really, you know, we did it for a while and didn’t really get a whole lot of traction there. The second phase was when we got really, really serious.

So the first phase we didn’t really say no to anybody, and we didn’t really change our messaging. We, you know, we started

So it’s, it’s sort of I’d like to be sort of pregnant.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We, we changed our biz dev outbound efforts and a little bit of our content, but our messaging didn’t change. We didn’t say no to anybody. We were just like, we, we kind of dipped our toe in the water, right? We didn’t dive in. The second one was just before Covid we started to, we had started to have some more traction despite our lack of, of specialization. We started to have, you know, some more clients come to us that were, we were kind of starting to expand beyond local, mostly through Ally’s networking and some things like that, that she was doing. But we noticed that we would have companies ask us in the sales process a lot, okay, you do all these things, but What are you really good at? Right. And we had a hard time answering that question because we wanted to say, well, we’re good at all of these things.

Right? Of course. Yeah. And, and I think that’s, I think that’s a common trap. And so we ended up, we ended up saying, you know, what, what are we good at? We ended up actually asking ourselves that question. Well, you know, we really like writing content, creating content, not just writing right audio and video as well, but really like creating content, thought leadership content that, that tends to work really well when the, the sales cycle is, is a little bit longer, a little bit more involved. So let’s, let’s focus on, on B2B content marketing. Still not a super big niche, but it was, it was a big step for us and happened to be a really good timing step for us because it was right before covid. And as Covid ramped up, that’s what everybody wanted to do was, was figure how to do concept marketing events right up and all of that.

That was our second one. And that went pretty well. And the only reason we changed from that was really just because the opportunity was bigger elsewhere. So we started this YouTube channel called HubSpot Hacks about that same time as a 2019. And when we started it, it was really an example for our content marketing clients, the power of video content, the power of branded content. So this idea of having a, a content channel that’s branded separate from your business. And we did also have some, some HubSpot clients back then as well. And over time that YouTube channel grew drastically. And we started to have people come to us asking for, you know, Hey, can you help us get part of our HubSpot? Can you help us clean this up? Can you help us implement?

Can you help us do this? And we, while, while the content marketing specialization worked for us in outbound, we never really had a really solid inbound pipeline of people coming to us asking us for that. But with the HubSpot stuff we did almost right away once that YouTube channel took out. And so we started to kind of dabble in that. And that’s really our specialization specialization today. It’s still pretty broad, you know, it’s just companies that use HubSpot, but it really works well for us because of how much content we have in the marketplace. So that was kind of the third round of specialization for us.

So I wanna, I wanna go back and talk about the content in more detail, but where are your clients located today?

Yeah, so our clients are all over the US today. We have a couple international clients. We’re not really set up very well to, to deal with international clients, but if they’re willing to work with us in US time zones and, and somebody on their team speaks English, we’ll work with them. It’s the nature of, of content marketing today is it’s, it’s gonna reach everybody. But most of our clients are in the us our team is everywhere and we’ve been remote since Covid, so our team is everywhere and our, our clients are everywhere as well.

And what new business efforts do you do besides your own content? So how, how do you go hunting for clients? Or do you

We don’t really, we, we do think that that is, so we’re, we’re in the process right now of, so I handle all of our sales. All of our sales pretty much are, are inbound, at least in the traditional sense. I’ll, I’ll talk about that in a little bit here. But pretty much all of our clients are inbounds. I take all of those sales meetings we’re at to the point right now where I don’t have the time to take all of those meetings. And so we’re looking at, at, at building out a sales team. It’s a very small sales team to begin with and I think outbound may become a part of that as we build that out. But right now it’s all inbound. We do some networking, some intentional networking and going to events and, and things like that. But I kind of group that all into thought leadership. I don’t really consider that to be you outbound sales, but yeah.

Alright, so let’s go back. Actually, you know what, let’s take a break and then when we come back, let’s talk about your content strategy and how you, how you, how you thought about it, how you actually got it done, how you get it done today. Because I think for a lot of agencies they’re like, yes, we should do content. And then the same ebook is on their homepage for about three years. So, so let’s take a break and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk about sort of how you wrapped your head around the idea of letting content sort of drive the audience to you, the clients to you, and then how you actually get it done. So we’ll be right back and we’ll talk about that when we come back. Hey everybody, thanks for listening today.

Before I get back to the interview, I just wanna remind you that we are always offering some really amazing workshops and you can see the whole [email protected] on the navigation head to how we help scroll down and you’ll see workshops and you can see the whole list there with descriptions of each workshop. They are all in Denver and we’ve got them throughout the year for agency owners, account execs, agency leaders, CFOs. We have a little something for everybody no matter what it is that you’re struggling with, people, new business, money, all of those things we’ve got covered. So check him out and come join us. All right, let’s get back to the show.

Alright, we are back and we’re talking Tyler, about how he and his partner took their generalist agency, which had clients within, you know, a couple hour radius of their physical location and, and sort of served everybody, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, and how they decided to narrow down their focus to, in their case, just clients who use or wanted to use HubSpot as a core part of their marketing and how, and how that decision has kind of driven their business’ growth and content and all of that. So let’s go back to when you got to the point where you’re like, you know, one of the things we’re really good at is HubSpot and we should start thinking about content around that.

And I think it’s interesting tangentially, if we are recommending to clients that they use content to establish a subject matter expertise to attract right fit clients to them, maybe we should be doing it ourselves, number one and maybe two, we can be a case study to show them how it works. So take us back to kind of that moment and for example, why did you decide video? How did, how did you decide how often? Like what were, what were some of the thought processes you went through to get to that?

For sure, for sure. So I’ll back up even a little bit farther. So when I joined Simple Straw, you know, we were, like I said, I was employee number four, titles, you know, and then the four person company don’t, doesn’t mean much. So, so when I joined Ally basically was like, well, what, what, you know, what do you, what do you think for title? And I picked CMO, so my title is CMO and co-founder, not because, you know, honestly, my, my responsibilities aren’t really that related to, to A CMO, but I picked it for a very specific reason. And I had mentioned I closed an agency, you know, the, the year before. Part of that was because I didn’t think we were very good at, at drinking our own Kool-Aid about doing, you know, doing the work, being the example. And what I wanted was, I wanted a constant reminder for myself and the agency every day to do our own marketing.

So I wanted to have one of our earliest titles have, you know, internal marketing be a part of that title. So from the early on, you know, we, we really did lean into content marketing. We did, we did a lot of things wrong, right? But back then, you know, we were following all the HubSpot blogs about just write a blog about something and traffic will come. And, and so we started the blog pretty early on. We did generate traffic, a lot of that traffic was not qualified, so we tweaked it over time. But Allie has always been very, a very big believer in, in video. I’m not, I’m not sure where she got it, but for, for all the reasons that you should be a believer, a big believer in video, right? It’s very, yeah, it’s a very authentic medium. It’s a great way to connect with people. It stands out, it’s not very easy to do.

So it does stand out from people that are, that are just trying to, you know, do a bunch of other things. And so we had a YouTube channel pretty early on as well, and the YouTube channel had all kinds of different contents. So just like the agency, the YouTube, the YouTube channel was not specialized in any way, shape or form, but we had a couple videos that we had titled HubSpot Hacks that were just HubSpot tutorials. So we walked people through, you know, how to do a couple specific things in, in HubSpot. And one day we, we kind of looked and reviewed at the performance of that YouTube channel and saw that there was, you know, our, our subscribers weren’t really growing, but there were a couple videos that really stood out for, you know, retention, number of views.

And all of them were, were related to HubSpot. And so we kind of had this hypothesis of, you know, what’s, what would happen if we had a channel that was just about those videos, people knew that that’s all they were gonna get from that channel. Would they sub, would they be more likely to subscribe and return to the channel? And so that was really the impetus behind HubSpot Hacks as a YouTube channel. And then, you know, we, we kind of put a brand behind it and put a little more effort behind it because we wanted it to be that example of, you know, if we were gonna tell a client go start a YouTube channel, this is what we think they should do and, and let’s do that ourselves and, and see how well that works. And so that was really the start of, of our YouTube channel. And yeah, it’s been, it’s been huge driver of, of success for us today.

We, we do some other things. We do some webinars, we still do some blog content, but I’ll be honest with you, you’ll probably go to our website and see an ebook that’s been there for three years. We found something that works and really leaned into that. I think that’s one of the lessons we learned as a small team. We’re still only about 10 people today. You really have to lean into what works and, and you kind of have to be okay with letting some of that other stuff fall to the wayside, at least for a while.

And you can’t create everything all the time. I mean, that’s, you know, that’s, as you know, that’s a big point in the book. So with authority is the whole point is to create a few big cornerstone pieces and then use those same pieces in slice and dice options. Yeah. So that you’re really using the same piece of content in a lot of different ways, as opposed to we have to be producing this volume of content every day, which an agency of any size would have trouble with. So yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about how did, how did you form the discipline to do what you do?

Yeah, so you have to treat it like a, you have to treat it like a client. It has to be, it has to be like a client and it has to be treated like a client. It can’t just be like this thought process from leadership, like, oh, like we’re gonna treat this. Like, it has to be, HubSpot Hacks is set up as a separate client in our Dropbox. It’s set up as a separate client in our teamwork, our project management software. And our project manager is the one that’s accountable for making sure that we produce the videos, get them published on time. And essentially, you know, me and my partner are the ones that are creating the videos. We have a couple employees involved, now are the, the client, right? We’ve all had that client that like, is a little bit slow to return things to us or, or goes quiet for, for a little while and delays the project and our project managers or our account managers are really good at, at nudging them and moving them forward.

Right. And so

Just like they would for client, right?

Exactly. Exactly. That, that’s what I mean. So they, they’ve gotta, you’ve gotta give your project manager permission to treat you as an owner, like a client if you’re the one responsible for creating that content. So, I mean, I’ve been on the receiving end of mini Slack messages of like, Hey, deadline was yesterday, where is this video? I need you to block off some time tomorrow to get that recorded. So that’s been a big piece of it. Also, I will say seeing the success of it helps a lot, right? When we know that the vast majority of of our business comes from our YouTube channel or our content efforts, then it, it’s a lot easier to, to carve out the time. But it is, it is harder in the beginning when you’re kind of waiting for those results, right? And then I think the other thing, and I think this is something that a lot of people miss when they’re creating content, a lot of times they, you know, okay, you gotta create video or you gotta beat, gotta do this on LinkedIn.

Like, I think it actually matters more that you enjoy what you’re doing. And so if, especially in the beginning, if you’re not a video person, I would say don’t do video right away. Go to LinkedIn, go to podcast guesting, go to speaking, find something you actually enjoy doing. Start there. Or

I think what’s you, or, or even even that you’re comfortable doing, you know, if you’re, if you’re remember from the book, we’re like, you’re either a talker or you’re a writer, most people kind of fall into one of those. Yeah. So just figuring out where your comfort is, where you feel like you have some skills because it is uncomfortable in the beginning. And I, I mean, it does take some time to sort of feel like you’re competent and you’re offering something of value. So if you also are doing something you’re wildly uncomfortable doing, you’re just setting yourself up not to do it. So I agree with you. Yeah. Ideally it’s something you grow to love, but if you’re like, you know, some of the people listening, I’m an introvert, I don’t want, I don’t want to talk, I don’t wanna write, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t want to be the face, okay, well you need, this is an important marketing thing, agency owner more than a, a leader or someone else who can leave your organization and take all of that subject matter expertise, authority with them needs to be front and center.

So figure out at the very least what you’re the most comfortable doing. And I think what happens is you grow to like it, like as you get more comp competent and comfortable, you know, I can remember the first video I shot. I was like, I, I’m not a video guy, I’m a writer by trade. So I’m like, oh, great, I’ll write blog posts and do other things. And I was not happy about having to do video, but I knew that it was important that I did it. And now I don’t even blink at it anymore. I just do it and it’s fine. I’m comfortable, I like it, I enjoy it, but I didn’t in the beginning.

Yeah. I think starting where you’re comfortable and then getting there, there’s some satisfaction you get out of good content, helps people, and then it shows up your business too. You get that satisfaction, you see the business results and then it’s a lot easier to expand into those other things.

So for you, when did, when did you start to notice it was working? Like how long were you putting out those videos and thinking that’s great. We have three views. That’s awesome. I mean, because I do think there’s kind of that season where somebody’s committed to doing it, they do it a few times. They do a q and a and four people show up or they do some video and you know, they have three views and two of ’em are their mom. Yeah. You know, like how long did it take before you got some traction and, and acknowledging this was during Covid, so people were behaving differently than they do now. But nonetheless, about how long did it take?

Yeah, about about three months. And this was, this was 2019, so this was before covid. It really ramped up during, but we started, we started before. So we had had, you know, I mentioned we started a blog early on and we, we started writing kind of consistent blog traffic, consistent blog concept focused on traffic in that health and wellness space initially. And I remember having, you know, my ally, my partner is, is she gets marketing, she gets content marketing. But I still, I I still had the same conversation that everybody has as a business leader. When you start with the new content. We were about, at that time we were still figuring things out. So we were about six months in and she was like, you know, hey, we’re not, we’re not really seeing anything from, from this blog content. And, and back then I said, you know, give me a couple months. I think there’s a couple things we tweak and, and we did and we saw the traffic.

We did get some business from that. And so by the time we started this YouTube channel, you know, I think the whole company had seen what happened with the blog. We, we had seen what those early indicators should look like. You know, when you start to see the curve and the growth of, of viewership or readership on a blog, that’s, that’s what you’re really looking for, right? The looking for a steady line in the beginning, and then that’s the beginning of a curve. Yeah. And so we saw that about three months in for the,

Which is fast, by the way.

Yeah. And it was, I’ll say it’s a small curve.

Yeah. We, you know, we tell people it could take a year and you have to be patient. Oh yeah. And just stay at it. So

Yeah, we were definitely getting business in three months. Right. Okay.

So when did you get your first client from the effort?

Yeah, so this one’s hard because we were, at that time we used HubSpot as, you know, we’re gonna sell you a full content marketing retainer with a big strategy project Yeah. At the beginning. And if you don’t have the tech stack to support what we’re doing, we’ll implement HubSpot for you. So at that time, it was pretty difficult to get started with us, especially if you found us because you watched a HubSpot tutorial video. There’s a big difference between that and, you know, going all in on, on an inbound or content marketing Yeah. Strategy with us. And so, you know, we didn’t really see, I, I don’t, I don’t think we saw any clients from it for, for a little while. And again, it was partly an example for, for our currents, our current clients. And so we were kind of trying to sell more video services off of that, which was very difficult to do.

Covid hit. And it was like, okay, how do we do, how do we do video? So anyway, so it was probably about a year in, I think, I think I, I think we got our first client. So we started in May of 2019. I think we got our first HubSpot consulting client in the beginning of 2021. But it was a result of us saying, okay, we’ve had so many people now ask us if we could just help them with HubSpot without doing all of the wider services. And, and, and 2021 was really when we decided, okay, let’s see if there’s anything here. Let’s see if we can make money doing this. Let’s see if we can put together a product offering that, that we can sell consistently. And so that’s when we first got the client. I think if we had had those services already, though, we could have got our first client earlier.

So let’s talk about that. So how did your content strategy start to inform new products and services that you would offer?

Yeah, so, so that was the first one, right? We started people, people coming to us and asking us for, for that help. And initially, I’ll be honest, we broke all of the rules, right? So, you know, I’m pretty, pretty bullish against hourly pricing for, for agencies. I’m big on retainers for agencies, right? And we, we broke all the rules just to kind of dip our toe in and figure this out a little bit, whether we wanted to be in this space. So we started selling just blocks of hourly consulting. You could buy five hours, 10 hours, whatever. We would sell that to you, we would help you. And we would just kind of figure out what were the commonalities in this space. And so then over time, as we sold more of those and started paying attention, we do still sell some of those by the way. But as we sold more of those, we, we started paying attention to, okay, what are some of the same things that people need?

Where are some places where the value that we’re offering doesn’t really match the time we’re, we’re putting into it? And we started to package up some services. So now we have, we still do some hourly consulting, although we never lead with that anymore. Now we have some kind of more productized services around those, those hubs that HubSpot help. And today, now we’re focused on, okay, how do we turn this into larger engagements? How do we turn this into more retained engagements? And that’s kind of what what we’re focused on right now.

Okay. So what told you to make the business shifts in what you offered?

Yeah, the big one was the inbound lead stream. So, you know, we, it, it just got to the point just for us, for whatever reason, it got to the point where, and I think part of it was coming off of Covid, you know, and obviously this was happened before 2023 for us, but obviously 2023 was a rough year, just in general. It just got hard, it felt hard for us to sell our content marketing services and our HubSpot services just felt easy to sell. We had an inbound lead stream. People had already watched this on YouTube, we’d already proven our expertise. So by the time we got on the phone with them, granted the engagements were much smaller, but we were selling, we, we still do sell, sell engagements with, with one 30 minute call, right? I send you a quote, you pay via hubs and over a HubSpot payment link.

And, and we’re started when, when we were folk facing, you know, six months sales cycles on, on the content stuff. Granted, again, much larger engagements. But so, so we started to lean into that a little bit more. And as we found, we got to a point, I think it was about the middle of last year, about half of our revenue was coming from HubSpot service. We’re like, okay, we can really make a business out of this and treat our marketing services as upsell cross sell opportunities. And that’s, and that’s really where we’re focused, focused now. I mean, last year I mentioned it was kind of rough for the industry. We saw 30% growth last year, and I credit that a hundred percent, not a hundred percent. Very largely to our, to our content offers. Some of it helped that we were at small engagements and things like that. But without that content marketing, without that inbound lead stream, I, I think we would’ve had probably a, a more typical year last year that as, as what other agencies saw.

So what, what I’m hearing you say though is that a lot of the buying cycle was now happening before your initial conversation with them.

Oh yeah.

So talk a little bit about that, the kind of the before and after of that, you know, what, what were the sales conversations? What was the sales cycle like, and how much time did you invest before you narrowed your niche and before you really drove content versus what it is today?

Yeah, I mean, if we were lucky enough to get an inbound lead. So that was, you know, we got some through content back then, but a lot of it was referrals that helped. Right. It, we were at least having a warm conversation. Yeah. But then, you know, it was, it was a discovery meeting and then usually another discovery with, with larger team or a decision maker, then you’re going through putting together a big proposal and presenting that proposal and going through revisions on that proposal. And oftentimes they wanna talk to references and case that, like, it’s just, it’s just that what most agencies selling cell cycles are like. Right. And now it’s, you know, they watch us on YouTube. We, we automate a lot of it. So we, we drink our own Kool-Aid in terms of our use of the HubSpot platform as well. So they get to a landing page on our website.

They book a meeting directly on my calendar from that landing page. They get, you know, a calendar invite, reminders up until the meeting, I spent about five minutes before that meeting just doing a quick review of, you know, who they are and what they put out, what they put in that meeting booking form. I meet with them and oftentimes that’s the only meeting we have before they buy. We sell, we do sell a much smaller engagement, but then, you know, a lot of those clients return or, or and end up buying something larger after they’ve worked with us. There are still some that, you know, we need to follow up meeting or they need to bring in a decision maker, but, but not nearly as often. And, and I get a lot of comments about, you know, I feel like I already know you, some, some people joke like, I feel like I’m talking to a celebrity just because some of these people have spent hours with us on YouTube.

Yep. And the, the good thing is, you know, we got a couple examples here. So like, it helps with our, our our recruiting. You know, one of our, one of our first HubSpot specialists came to us. He had been a salesperson, his company used HubSpot, and then he had been tasked with, with kinda becoming the administrator, the unofficial administrator of HubSpot for them. And he used our YouTube channel to, to kind of learn how to do that. And so when it came time for him to, he kind of discovered that that’s what he wanted his career to be was, was really focused on the HubSpot platform and helping other people with it. We were the first people he looked at because he had been so familiar with us on YouTube and, and he had had a competitive offer from somebody else. And his comfort level with us and his history with us that we didn’t even know about because of YouTube was one of the reasons he he picked us.

Right. I think that’s, I think a lot of people think about it from the client perspective winning new business, but they don’t think about it from the recruiting talent point of view. So that’s a great point. This also helps you just like, it finds right. Fit clients, it does find Right. Fit employees.

Right. Right. And I mean, we have, you know, we, we’ve talked to people that work at HubSpot that have used our content to stay up to date with hub product updates to share our videos with, with their clients. So I mean, it’s a, it’s a good sort of referral source to too as well. Like, it’s not just, yeah, hey, go check out simple chat, they’re great, but hey, here’s a video that can help you. And then they find their, find their way back to us. So yeah, I can’t, we would definitely not be where we are today with, without what we did on YouTube. And we got lucky in some places, but, but we’re pretty proud of it.

Well, I think it’s, I think it’s about consistency and it’s about focus. Yeah. Right. So had you, I mean, yeah, sure, it, there’s a little bit of luck for everybody, but you have to be good enough and consistently present enough to earn some of that luck.

Yeah, I think that’s, I mean, that’s the biggest key, right? Where we see people get content wrong, whether it’s an agency or a client, the first one is always consistency. So either not sticking with it long enough or they, you know, they do it for a little while and then other things

Come, my, my newsletter comes out, you know, eight times a year. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And

It just doesn’t work. It just, it just does not work. You don’t learn fast enough. Your audience doesn’t get, doesn’t get, you don’t become a habit for your audience. You don’t, you, you just don’t, you don’t start to see those, those increasing exponential returns just because of the volume of content you have. You just have to stay consistent. If you, if you’re not gonna stay consistent, it’s better to start infrequent and consistent then do anything inconsistently.

Absolutely. I think

That’s, that’s the first place that we see people get wrong. The second place is you have to, you have to think about it as a conversation. You have to spend half your time listening. And it’s, you know, listening to what your competitors are doing, listening to what your audience is doing. You know, our YouTube channel would not exist. We didn’t have a YouTube channel before that had a lot of videos and we were listening to our audience that, that was telling us we want more of this HubSpot content. Yeah. And so by spinning that off, that’s, you know, that’s how we were able to get here. And, and it wouldn’t have taken off if we didn’t pay attention to, okay, what, what are people, you know, what, what video content do people have about HubSpot today? HubSpot has a great academy packed full of videos. It’s super powerful. We were going up against that.

We were going up against a couple other people that were doing YouTube videos. So we really had to say, okay, what, what do we need to do that’s a little bit different? So we had to listen to, to what the market was doing to, to identify, you know, ’cause if you just put out the same content, everybody else is, it’s, it’s not going to work. And there’s, especially with AI now, there’s so much content out there. You really have to, you really have to listen.

Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about automation. So I know a lot of this you’re creating, you know, you’re recording the videos, you’re doing the work. How and where does automation play a role in your content strategy with prospects and clients and all of that?

Yeah, I would say in terms of the content creation piece of it, we are, we’re still exploring, I think like everybody right now with like, where automation makes the most sense, right? Sure. ’cause right. I think authenticity is so, so important with this, with this content that it can, it can quickly go away. The more AI and things like that you infuse. But we do use, we do use some tools like the script and things like that for some, some sort of content repurposing and things like that. But where our automation really helped us in the sales process. So, you know, again, we use HubSpot, so, so that automation of, you know, booking a meeting, they get the updates that gets put on my calendar. You know, a deal gets created in our CRM right away. I take all of my meeting notes in HubSpot, I enroll ’em in a sequence, which is like a, it’s, it’s, it’s automated, but you personalize the emails before.

And so they get an email and then if we don’t hear back from ’em in a couple days, they get another email or a task for me to call them. So we do a lot of automation in, in the sales operations piece of it. And then, you know, constantly exploring with, especially around content repurposing what we can do with automation on the front end.

So what’s, as you look down the road, you’ve been doing this now for about four years, as you look down the road, where could it still be tweaked or better?

Yeah. And so this is where that listening piece comes in, right? So that’s actually really interesting. One of the thing that’s top of mind for us is, is, so HubSpot did not have a very good YouTube strategy. Sorry if you’re, if you’re listening to this, their YouTube strategies was, was sort of an afterthought. It was sort of a, a place where they put ads, they had like some, some marketing information on there, but they didn’t have hardly anything about their product on, on their channel that’s changing. They, they, they have, you know, we’ve seen it, they’ve also stated that publicly that they’re, they’re really leaning into YouTube, especially around product knowledge. So for us right now, we’re focused on, okay, what are they, what are they doing? They’re, we’re never gonna have the size of the audience that HubSpot has, right? They put out a video and that has like 10,000 views in a day.

Right? They put it embedded in their knowledge base articles and all of that. So how do we need to tweak our content to, to stay relevant, to stay differentiated, to stay delivering value. So that’s one piece that, that we’re focused on. And then the other piece is, you know, we’ve got YouTube, we’ve got some tweaks to make. We, we’ve pretty much got it figured out. It’s working well. So where do we expand? So, you know, this last year we started doing webinars so people could get, you know, some content that’s a little bit more real time, ask questions, things like that. We we’re, me and my partner are both big believers in LinkedIn. She does a lot better job than I do on, and I’m still kind of figuring that one out. But, but then leading into LinkedIn a lot, you know, and then also, you know, speaking, being on podcasts like this one, we’re leaning into a lot of that stuff too.

So how can we repurpose the content we already have? And then how do we slowly start, once we get one channel figured out, what’s the next channel that makes sense to us? And I think, you know, how we think about it is, is really arming Allie and I to go do that. I think the way people buy today, you know, people wanna hear from people, not brands, right? That’s been very loud and clear. I think, you know, some of the political atmospheres, some of the generational shifts have, have really driven that shift. And so people really want to hear from people, they wanna hear from authentic people. And so we, we kind of think of it as how do we arm ourselves as leaders and our employees to go out there and, and broadcast our concept?

Well, and I think too, what you said earlier, which is people get sort of used to hearing from someone to the point that they oddly, like you said, are like a little weird. I’m a little starstruck. It feels like I’m talking to a celebrity. And I will say on the receiving end of that, that feels weird. But

It does. Yeah.

But you, but you can understand it from this is somebody I’ve listened to or watched or whatever for hours and hours and hours, and I feel like I know them. Yeah. So, you know, how do you, how do you make sure you keep it, you’re giving good professional content, but how do you weave personality? And so they have a sense of you and who you are, because that’s certainly part of the buying cycle is this is a person I trust, this is someone I believe is competent, this is someone I would like to do business with, I would enjoy having interactions with. So how do you, how do you find that balance?

Yeah, so I think, I mean, in general, I think it’s definitely a personality over perfection, right? You, you have to be okay with, you know, if you are perfect, you really don’t have that, that is not a personality. So you have to be okay with having some flaws and some flare in the content you’re creating. And so for us, what that looks like, you know, I remember we had, we used, we used contractors to actually edit the videos. And I remember a while back we had swapped out our contractor, and the first time I, I sent him a video to edit, he sent it back and he had like, you know, got rid of all the ums and ahs and all that. And I was like, no. Like go back and put all of those back in. Like, unless, unless it’s, unless it’s super distracting, score

Evolved. Right? Right.

Yeah. Put all of that back in. And so, you know, there’s just some of that. And then, then with our YouTube content, you know, people are used to, like I said, lot of content and obviously we’re big believers in their company and their product, but, you know, their, their purpose is to sell their product. So they’re never gonna say anything bad about their product. Right. And in our, in our content, you know, if there’s something that we’re not a huge fan of, or we think needs, needs some, needs some work, we’re gonna say that if there’s a workaround that, you know, HubSpot wants you to upgrade, but there’s a workaround, you can, your current license, you can do this in this way, we’re gonna share that. And so it’s some of that, you know, behind the scenes Yeah. Real practitioner focused content that we share as well that I think helps us a lot specifically with our channel.

So as we, as we wrap up, as, as you look back, what was, what was the biggest mistake you made over the last four years, and what was the smartest thing you did over the last four years, just in terms of shifting the business and the content decisions you made and the channel you chose, all of that. Like where, where do you feel like, oops, we stubbed our toe there and boom, boy, did we nail that?

Yeah, I think, you know, back to where we stubbed our toe, I think was back to the beginning, right? We, we tried to specialize, we tried to get all the benefits of specializing without taking any of the risk, right? We tried to, we we’re gonna specialize. We’re just not just not gonna tell anybody we’re gonna specialize, right? That’s kind of, that’s kind of how that works. And, and that doesn’t work. And so I think, you know, there there is fear that you mentioned around specialization and there’s, there’s a reason for that fear. But if you don’t, if you don’t take that risk, you, you, you can’t enjoy the upside. So I think, you know, we had a, a major identity crisis for a long time of, of trying to do all the things for all the people. And, and that’s, it’s, it’s the oldest mistake in the book. And we’d heard it a million times and we still made it.

I think that’s the, the weird thing about it is, is it is, it is a really hard mistake not to make. In fact, there’s some ways that, that I think we still make it today, but I think the, the thing that we did best, I, I really do think it was that, that listening, I think we got really good at putting something out there, seeing how it performs, identifying a couple places that, that it’s working really well, and then putting all of our energy into those things. So, you know, the example of of having a, a YouTube channel had all kinds of videos, HubSpot videos went well and really leaning into that. And then, you know, we started having, of our inbound lead streams, a lot of ’em were, were HubSpot related. So really leaning into that and, and, and creating a whole new segment of our business that, that didn’t exist because of that demand that we didn’t really, didn’t really even knew exist before, before we had that inbound lead stream.

So I think getting really, really good about listening to the metrics to the audience and making those iterations, you’re never gonna get it right. The perf the first time. So I think, right, I think, I think your book, the, the Self Authority book does a really great job of, of i, of helping companies identify where to start and then figuring out where to iterate. I think it’s just that habit of listening and getting really good at that skill.

Yeah. Yeah. I think you’re right. I, I think you have to know going in, we’re gonna be close, but there’s gonna be tweaks and adjustments. And as you also said earlier, it’s not just that, but it’s also when, when something becomes muscle memory and, and you and the agency are just cranking out whatever that content is, then you say, okay, now that we have this, now that we have YouTube nailed, now what, what is the audience asking for next? Do they want a podcast? Do they want a q and a? Do they want webinars? Do they, whatever it is, and let’s start. So now experiment one works, and now it’s not experiment anymore.

Now it’s a, it’s a, it’s a staple in what we do now it’s time to experiment with something new. And I think, you know, for most agencies, two or three channels is plenty. You don’t need to be everywhere all the time. And obviously you’re slicing and dicing that content, whatever it is, you’re sharing it on social, so you’re spreading the word. But it doesn’t have to be, oh, we do research, we have a podcast, we have a YouTube channel, we do blog posts, we do webinars. We do, you don’t have to do all of that to be

Successful. Yeah. Especially when you’re small. Especially when you’re small, it’s too much. Right, right. The other thing I’ll say, tangentially you mentioned that, you know, once it doesn’t become an experiment, I will say that that is a really great place to help your team level up their skills. I think one of the things that we always struggle with as, as agency owners in our team is as, as business owners, we understand what it, like, at the end of the day, the things we’re doing have to affect the business in a positive way, right? Yep. Yep. And I think for employees that come up through college or maybe another agency, they don’t always, they don’t always make that connection, that connection’s not always natural to them of really really focusing on the results. And they don’t. And it’s because we, we don’t give them, it’s hard to give them something that they can truly fail on or impact.

And so I think when you have that, that content channel or, or that effort that is kind of on autopilot, that is a great place to now make one of your employees responsible for the metrics behind that and allow them to come up with the small experiments that are gonna tweak those metrics, allow them to fail a little bit. I think it’s a great way to get them really connected to the results of their work. And that’s been something that’s worked well for us as well.

Yeah. Awesome. This has been great. Thank you for sharing the story. Thanks for being willing to talk about what worked and what didn’t work. I think, I think the more people can see that a small shop, ’cause you weren’t even 10 when you started doing this.

Yeah, no, yeah. Very small.

Yeah. Can do this and it can change again, our clients, were within a 60 mile drive to our clients are all over the US and beyond. We used to do a little bit of a lot of things and now we’re really specialists, which makes us be really good at what we do. Yes, we made mistakes, but we learned from those mistakes. And the, and the critical thing is we kept at it. I think that’s the lesson, right? We just kept at it. We were, we were committed to doing this, we were committed to making it like a client where deadlines matter and we weren’t gonna miss one. That is, at the end of the day, I think the story here is that with enough commitment and diligence and consistency, an agency of any size can deploy this methodology and literally have the best fit clients knock on their door.

Yeah.

Yeah. It makes a huge difference. I mean, we, like I said, we, we saw 30% growth last year. I know a lot of our agency friends did, did not. And yeah, if we did not have the, the inbound stream that we had, that, that just wouldn’t happen. And now that we have, you know, a stronger year, like I said, we, we hired two new employees already just because capacity is showing us we, we have to. Yeah. And so that’s

A fine problem to have.

Yeah. We, we sat at that, you know, 5, 6, 7, 800 KA year for a long time, like five years. We just could not get to that million mark. And this is really figuring out thought leadership, figuring out how to make us known for a thing in the marketplace. And like you said, sticking at it really is what broke that bubble for us. And we spent a lot of time trying to break that bubble. It’s, it’s a hard one to get over.

Yeah. Yeah. Well congratulations on getting over it. You guys have done so many things well and Right. And I know we’ll continue to do that. So it’ll be fun to watch your progress. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me on. You bet. Thanks for, thanks for being on the show. Alright guys, this episode, I’m hoping it fired you up a little bit that, you know, look, if another agency that looks a lot like us and sounds a lot like us and serves clients in a geography like us can do this, so can we. And it does take courage. It does take the willingness to figure out where you can specialize. And you’ve probably heard me talk about it before, but you know, we’ve created this little Excel spreadsheet. There’s nothing sexy or fancy about it, but it really does help you evaluate potential niches and where you actually have the strongest case to say, this is where we’re gonna narrow down to.

So we’ll put that in the show notes. Again, you, a lot of you have probably already seen it from other shows or from videos or other things we’ve done, but I really highly recommended it. It down the left side, it lists what we think are important criteria to make a healthy niche. And then across the top, you just list the four or five niches you’re considering. So, you know, like Tyler said, you’re gonna look at what you’ve already done and see where you have a lot of experience and where you have great case studies and things like that. And then you’re gonna grade them against the criteria. And it’s amazing. I mean, we’ve done this with now hundreds of agencies. It’s amazing when you do the math and you sort of evaluate objectively each niche how obvious it is that one of them is the one where you should sort of lean into.

And so grab that tool and let Tyler and his partner’s story be an inspiration to you that you can do this too. You can literally change the way you get business by, by putting out great content, by being a subject matter expert. And then the right fit clients will knock on your door, which is pretty awesome. So before I let you go, huge shout out and thank you to our friends at White. Label IQ. As you know, they’re the presenting sponsor of the podcast. So they were created by an agency so they understand how to partner with an agency, they understand how to price that partnership. They understand what you need for your end client. They understand what real client service looks like.

So head over to White Label IQ. If you need white label design dev or PC White Label IQ dot com slash aami, we will get you to their landing page where they’ll talk about how they interact with AMI agencies and what they can do to help you in your shop. Alright? And guess what? I’ll be back next week. I’ve got another guest lined up that I think is gonna get you thinking a little differently about your shop. So I hope you will join me. I’ll see you soon. Thanks for listening.

Come back next week for another episode, designed to help you build a stronger, more stable and sustainable agency. Check out our workshops, coaching and consulting packages, and other professional development [email protected].