The Agency Owner’s Q4 Survival Guide

And welcome back to another episode of the diamond download chase. I didn't realize we were the same height in person. Yeah, I think I was slightly taller. I was a little bit taller. Maybe a little bit. Yeah. Everybody, me and chase after four and a half years of work, we finally met for the first time in person. Isn't that no one could believe that when I told them, they were like, you haven't met chase. I was like, yeah, we just never like we're able to get it together. Yeah, dude. I'm pumped. That was awesome. I appreciate you driving down. That was a really, really great time. So we got to do more of those. That was super dope, man. I, we talked a lot about like the, you know, California versus Florida stuff. Um, it, I understand the California hype. Cause like up until then, I'd never really left Beverly Hills. Like I kind of just like mobbed around there and had fun there. It is great. I love it. But like, I didn't know what else California had to offer. And dude, OC is unreal. Yeah. OC is really cool. And we'll, we'll find some other spots next time, but that was great. That was, that was a lot of fun. I'm excited to do this podcast. It feels like it's been a minute. Yeah, dude. Yeah. Cause we, I mean, we skipped last week so that we can hang out, but I think it was worth it. Um, all right. So first topic we got is something I've been thinking about. I I'm pretty sure we've talked about this in some version before. Um, but it's the idea of dumb it down. And so this came to me recently. It was actually today. Cause I was talking to one of my sales guys. And, um, so we have a sales guy on the team who I believe to be overqualified. Like most of our sales guys are 19 to 21 years old gunslingers, like just fresh out of high school, basically just like, you know, hitting phones and like a couple of them are closers. And this guy is a, he's a closer as well. And he has a PhD in primatology. Um, you know, monkeys. I think I actually was telling you. Yeah, I was going to say at first I didn't know what that was, but when we were talking about it, that was really interesting. Okay. I know you're talking about. And, um, he, uh, super smart guy. He's in his mid to late forties. He's been around for a while. He like knows how you've been selling before, but never anything kind of like this. And so we're training him out to be like a full-time closer because our volume is about to get a little bit crazy. And our main sales manager is one of those young kids who's like, you know, he barely has a degree, 19 years old, like a little bit brain fried. Call me though. And when he was like reviewing this other closers calls, he was saying like, yo, everything sounds really scripted. Like everything sounds like you're kind of just reading off something. He's like, I'm literally not reading anything. It's just the way that I talk. And the sales manager was like, yeah, add more like ums and ahs and like take your time and like, look like you're thinking more and like maybe look a little bit less polished and he was like, but this is how I'm like trained to talk. Like, this is, you know, how I just talk. This is how I've been talking since I was, you know, in my, in grad school. And he was telling me this and it reminded me a lot of like the number one copywriting tip that I feel like everyone hears, which is, uh, right at a third grade reading level. And I think people kind of don't really understand why that is, but a lot of your listeners chase, I'm assuming most of them are pretty smart people, people that follow you on LinkedIn, people that watch this podcast, so they might not be able to understand that like most people, 95% of America is kind of dumb. You know what I mean? And when you are selling anything, whether it's face-to-face kind of like this or whether you're writing copy or whatever, it's super important to remember where the average person is. And this is not like a bad thing. Like it's not, it maybe sounds derogatory where it's like, oh, they're dumb. It's just true. And if you are trying to sell anything, the number one thing you should sort of look for is like, am I relatable to the average person who has a 98 IQ and like might not relate as much to the polished salesperson speaker that sounds like they're reading out of a script because it's so polished or someone who has a background in academic writing and then switches to copywriting and then they start, you know, writing sales pages and it just doesn't hit. Um, I think the tip that I guess I have for the day is anytime you write something or anytime you like have a sales call or something like that, go back over it and see like, what can I, what can I add here to literally make it sound dumber? What do you think of that so far? Yeah, no, I agree. And I don't know if you were in conversation, but I was talking to your, uh, your videographer over the time that we hung out and I was just telling him about like, why I think some personal brands are so big and it's because they've taken really smart topics and be able to make it like bite-sized mass market kind of dumbed down versions, right? Like Oxfam O2, for example, is taking a really complex topics and making it so dead simple that like anyone could follow it. Right. And I think the same principles apply to what you're saying. Like this guy, because he's only older, he's overqualified and almost seems like he's probably talking down to people versus like being at their level and speaking to them, not at them. Dude, another great example. I think probably the perfect example, Andrew Huberman, Huberman. I'm a, I'm a fan. I'm not like, I don't listen to all this stuff or read all this stuff, but whenever he's like a guest on a podcast that I like, I always watch because I learned something new is I'm not a genius. She's like, I'm not that smart. I, I like hate to admit it to myself, but let's just be real. I, whenever I like read anything scientific, like any of the stuff that, um, uh, Huberman will talk about is way over my head, but because it's him saying it, it makes it sound so much more attainable. And then I, like the thing that people I think value the most is that like you can take that stuff and then it's dumb enough where you can like tell it to somebody else. So like, I've talked about like different stuff that humans talk about before. And I feel smart because it's dumb. He said it dumb enough so that I can remember it and then tell somebody else. And like, I don't really know anyone else in like the science based community who's doing as well as him because he's able to explain concepts that are like super high level that people have written like peer review papers on. And he didn't like tell, you know, the average Joe Rogan listener kind of how something works. And I think that's super valuable. Like most people really don't have that skill. It really is a skill. And it's a skill combined with patience, right? Because, you know, sure. He'd probably rather be geeking out and nerding out with other scientists that are at his level talking about, you know, X, Y, and Z, but to have like the patience and the understanding to be able to break it down, like that's mastery, right? He actually understands it so well that he can speak it and break it down in normal language. And he's not trying to sound smart. Certain people that are smart try to sound smart to let you know that they're smart, which like it's really hard to have a conversation in a relationship that way. So, yeah, it's very strategic. It's really cool. Yeah. And also on the personal branding thing, like the building an audience part, I think that's super true too, where it's like you see the people that have the biggest audiences and like, there's obviously smart because they have to be, but they're saying super basic stuff. Like, even if you just like look at it on a smaller scale, like Twitter, the people that tend to do really well on Twitter are the people that take platitudes and make them relatable to people. Like people that take, you know, little business bits that have been around forever that like Warren Buffett probably wrote about in the eighties and telling it to us, you know, the simpletons and like, we're like, Oh, this is awesome. Follow. And then you have like hundreds of thousands of people in your audience that are like, this guy's a genius, even though all you're doing are taking things that people have already said and just making it simpler so that people can understand it more or remember it better. Love it. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. Um, next one, dude. So I want you to carry this one. So Q4, um, I, I know you don't really talk about agency stuff very often, but I, I really want to hear this from you because like not many people know about this more than you do. Um, Q4 is a tough time for like brands and agencies. And we talked a couple of weeks ago about like good clients and bad clients and stuff like that. I want to know if there's anything that you want to tell agency owners specifically, anything that they should know about what's going to happen is Q4. Maybe you have like new agency owners that like have never had a Q4 before, or like they're just scaling up and starting to get serious for someone who's like between like 10 and maybe $50,000 a month with their agency. Like, what can you sort of tell them to prepare for like in your experience, like dealing with clients, specifically DTC clients, like around like the biggest buying season of the year? Yeah. I think like the biggest one or two things I have are related. I think number one is like, you know, at this point in mid October, I probably would slow down taking clients or maybe not even take any new clients, right? If you have enough clients to kind of get through, pay the bills, you're in a good spot, I would potentially close the door. And I think that does a few things. I think one, it signals that you have enough clients that you're busy, that you have demand. Two, it probably creates some hype and some excitement around maybe working with you in a Q1 because someone couldn't have you now, right? People want what they can't have. But really kind of the goal of that is so you can be extremely focused on over-delivering for your current clients, right? In kind of the Superbowl of e-com, right? Q4, BFCM. If you could really be there and be like omnipresent for all your clients and really be accessible and really over-deliver in Q4, that sets up, I think, a beautiful Q1, Q2 where you've just earned a lot of trust, you've made your clients a lot of revenue and money, you built yourself a great case study. So I think for me, quite simply, the biggest thing would be slow down the onboarding of new clients and have all hands on deck and communicate and over-communicate with your existing clients, letting them know that you're there for you, right? If they only have you on Slack, give them your cell phone number. And if they need to call or text you during an emergency, they can. Carve out time from your personal life, if you can, for that one or seven to 10 days where things are crazy and just let people know around you that it's going to be insane and that you're going to be kind of always on. And then after, right? After Black Friday, Saturday, Monday, you deserve to kind of chill, take some time off, take a few days off. Your clients are going to appreciate you and understand you. But that's kind of my quickest kind of best advice is just be the best partner for brands that you possibly can. And that's going to set up a lot of goodwill going into Q1. Okay. That's solid. Have you had any, like, do you remember any crazy curve balls that you got as an agency owner where it's like something that like you'd never saw coming, but like your brand just threw it at you? I mean, yes and no. I think it's like our first time versus our most recent time. I think the first couple of times it was just like anything that can and will go wrong, does go wrong, right? Inventory issues or, you know, for whatever reason, you know, the email didn't send, God forbid, right? You scheduled an email for whatever reason it didn't send. Someone went in, clicked something, it broke. Automations weren't firing. So I think like just keeping tabs and kind of having a checklist of the things that you need to make sure are working, making sure that your automations are firing for your email, making sure that your campaigns are going out. Clients are going to probably in the spur of the moment be like, oh man, this didn't perform well enough. We've got to send another one. Or, oh, oh my gosh. This performed way too well. We got to go pause everything, right? We got to switch the messaging. We got to, instead of, hey, the sales going on, we got to say, hey, oh my God, we're so embarrassed. We sold out of all the inventory. So I think like just a lot of things happen on the fly where like you have one plan of just pressing the gas pedal to the metal and then you have to like pull back and kind of undo all the work that you already did, which is kind of a bummer or the opposite, right? Like maybe the client didn't want to go super aggressive. You recommended going aggressive. They pushed back. So you said, okay, you guys are right. And then now they are last minute wanting you to speed up. It's like the day of we're not sending an email. Why are we sending an email? It's like, well, we told you we wanted to send an email. Let's send an email. Actually, you know what? Let's send three emails. They say, I just think that like clients are going to be very anxious and kind of on the edge of their seats and they're going to want things in real time and wonder why they're not done, even though they asked for it 20 seconds ago. Do you think it's a good idea to have like fail saves? Like in case someone does run out of inventory, should you make an email ahead of time or two to like it just in case, so you can set it up right away? Yeah, that's a good question. I think one is like, you need to have conversations with your clients around like inventory. Like, do they have limited quantity or do they literally have like a surplus and endless amount? Um, but I think that's always a great job to over prepare, right? So I, I think that actually is an interesting idea is maybe to have like one or two versions of a fail safe that like, um, aren't specific to a single client, cause you don't know necessarily what client is going to need it. But having like one or two versions that like you could alter to one of 10 clients, if you have 10 clients or one or 20 clients, making it generic enough that you have the base and the template. And then in the future, making it specific of a specific skew for a specific client goes out, it would be pretty easy. So I think that's actually a pretty good idea. Okay. Good to know. Um, just cause I've, I've had, you know, agency Q4s before and it's a stressful time, like Q4 should be fun. Like if you're a brand owner, it should be like, yeah, like we're going to make but as an agency, you're just like, Oh my God, like you're just getting battered. It's not fun. It's exhausting. Unless you have, do you recommend like setting up like performance bonuses for that period of time? Just so you can go as hard as possible and like be on the brand side instead of like feeling like, okay, I'm just stretching this 5K month retainer as far. Yeah, for sure. Not every client is going to do that. I think if you're a smaller agency working with kind of smaller clients, there's probably a little bit more flexibility and it's like, Hey, let's both win together type of a thing. I think that makes sense. I think if you're big, we're going with big corporate clients, like for them to get that approved and them to set off on something like that probably isn't going to happen. Um, but I think like you should always go for it if you think the client's chill and up for it and have that conversation in advance. Like I would probably start thinking about having that conversation in Q2 or Q3. Don't put it on the client on the start of Q4 saying, Hey, why don't we do some performance this month or this quarter? I think it would be wonderful. Don't you? And the client's like, what, like where did this come from? I think the, the sooner and the quicker you can have those conversations, the better, and you might as well ask for it. Worst cases, they say no. And you're like, all right, we're still going to crush it as is. And maybe the fall in Q4, we'll have something we can work on together like this. Okay. So we should have the conversation in July. Is what you're saying? We should have done this episode a little earlier. Yeah, exactly. I'm thinking of it too. Like, I think it is in the brand's interest to have more bandwidth on with their agencies so they can get more done. Like if you go to them and say like, Hey, listen, we've been doing, you know, five K a month for 12 emails a month since February. And that's good. You know, when you're not in peak season, but right now I know for a fact, you guys are going to have like way more deliverables and we want to give them to you. Like we want to make sure that we can send two emails a day if you want. It doesn't make sense to do like to sell them like a bigger package. It's like, okay, I know we've been doing five K a month, but let's go to 12 K a month if you want for basically unlimited ----. Like, can you sell something like that? Do you think? Yeah. And I think that kind of goes hand in hand. Actually what I, what I started with of like slowing down the onboarding and focusing on the retention and kind of the servicing existing clients. I think like you can have that as like the lead, like, Hey Mason, you know, I know we've been working together since February with five K. I'm super happy with that. Don't want this to seem like we're not wanting to let you know that we're actually closing down the shop to new business for two, four, so we can really over deliver and make sure that you have all hands on deck. You know, we're at 12 for emails for five K. We think we're going to need at least 20 to 30 emails, you know, in most of the months, you know, can we do 10 K, right? Can we double the budget? So that way we can over deliver. You're going to more than make it up based off of what we've seen. Does that work for you? You know, we wanted to obviously have this conversation versus just hitting that stripe invoice, double X, you know, two X and charging you. Right. I think having that conversation about like the, why you're having that conversation and really it is in the client's best interest and for you, you're not taking on clients. So if you can make a little bit more money from existing clients in a win-win, I think that's wonderful. 100%. That's awesome. Do you ever get any cool gifts from clients after a good Q4? I used to get a lot of cool stuff. Um, I haven't got much lately since I'm not as much in kind of the day to day of the clients, but yeah, tons of clients used to send me like any products or leftover stuff that they didn't sell, um, that I'd wanted, or they'd give like a discount, like a couple hundred dollars to their store and go buy something in Q1. But yeah, I would get a lot of, probably thousands of dollars worth of product or merch or, or gift cards to buy stuff, but it's been a few years. So if any clients are listening to this and they want to send something my way, I won't say no. You heard him everybody. Go send gifts. Okay. You ready to move on? Yeah, yeah. Let's wrap it. Let's last one. Okay. Last one. So, um, you launched something on Instagram, I think like what? 20 minutes before this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you obviously knew about this. I think you were like one of three people that knew. I think it was like you and my two brothers about this. But, um, back in July of this year, I filmed the course with Iman and his company, um, Iman Godzi, I say pronounce his last name, um, with Iman Godzi and his team, they're fantastic, by the way, you know, world-class, best in class. I think we talked kind of anonymously about the course and the filming and kind of some of the things, so that just went public. The trailer just went public on their account like 20 minutes ago. So, um, it was really cool, dude. Like they did a little teaser thing. I think a week ago they dropped the trailer this week. And then I think officially we got to like, start pumping and promoting the course. I think they already have about 500 people in the course, which is really cool, not just in the past 20 minutes. Like they were kind of selling it. I think over the past couple of weeks type of a thing, it's like a part of the, they have like my course and a couple of other people in this thing called the agency accelerator pro. They like the agency accelerator. This is the pro version. So basically did a LinkedIn course with them and spent like multiple days and multiple nights in LA filming it. And I don't know, I don't, I haven't actually even seen the final course, but I think it's like six or seven hours across tons of modules. It was sick. It was, it was a really fun experience and stoked to see it come to life. They did a great job on the trailer. Dude. Yeah, it was great. Was that like, did they give you a script? Like, did they write that? Yeah. They wrote some of it and I changed a few things, but like they wrote probably 80% of that script, that trailer. They, they, they modeled all out with like, we're going to do this shot. We're going to go here. We're going to do this. So they, yeah, they, they choreographed majority of that. And I changed a few things. Okay. Awesome. Yeah. I think that was super cool. So like, so it's, you have like basically just a course inside of a larger course for Iman. Yeah. Um, and so is he doing like a hard launch coming soon? Like how's he going to distribute it? Yeah, I don't know. But yes, I don't know how many courses are in there. I think there might be like three or four others. So when you buy the course thing, I don't know what it's like thousand or $1,500 or whatever it is, you get access to my course plus like four or five other courses type of a thing. I don't know what's in it. I don't know what not, but from what I understand, he has like an evergreen funnel, always promoting agency accelerated, which is like his core primary course. And then this is the upsell. So basically it's like they sell the course, this is the upsell. And I think they're getting no 10, 20, 30% of people taking the upsell. Now that this is done, they just added it to the upsell. So that's how they were able to get like 500 people over the past like few weeks. And they just had a lot of volume on the main course and then they're upselling it. And I'm doing like a webinar tomorrow with them for it, like within their community. So I'm excited to meet some of the students and people and just see, yeah, who's going through it. 100%. So the webinar is, is it to actually, so you're selling the pro to the people that are in the base one? So I think it's a bit of both. I think they're selling it to, um, yeah, I think it's, I think it's open to the agency accelerator and the agency accelerator pro people. So certain people in the course are going to come and just kind of learn about me, connect with me, ask some questions from stuff they've already learned. And I think it's also a chance for me to kind of just flex knowledge of LinkedIn to be able to convince people from like the, the main program to upsell or kind of ascend into this higher tier. Gotcha. Okay. Dude, that's awesome. That's so exciting. Where do you think it's going to go? Like, what do you think, you know, if you do become sort of like the, the LinkedIn guy, well, I guess you are. Um, like what, what are you expecting that that goes to or that leads to? Yeah, I think the reasons I did, it was a couple of things. Like one, you know, Iman's great. He's awesome. His team's awesome. It just felt like a cool way to build that relationship. Um, number two, like it just seemed like a great way to get some awesome content. Like they're pros. It was a cool experience. And then three, um, they're kind of like distributing me within like their couple of groups now. They have this like gents croquet club or something, GCC, like I'm now kind of in that inner circle. Um, I'm becoming like they're, I'm like their go-to LinkedIn guy. So, you know, they're kind of pushing people my way for my LinkedIn service, um, for the course itself within the course, Iman let me promote my LinkedIn service, so I've already had a couple of people reach out asking about pricing and whatnot. So I'm just hoping that I blow it up. They blow it up. And I got a bunch of MRR on the LinkedIn agency side. That's really the end goal. Awesome, man. Yeah. And which I think you will. Um, because like as an agency owner, it makes a ton of sense to like get, even my like copy MBA students are, are killing it off LinkedIn, like both inbound and outbound, like they're doing a lot of outbound on LinkedIn. They're finding a lot of luck there. And also they're just like posting, you know, whatever posts, like just easy stuff to post. Um, they're getting people coming in, not to them. So, so cool. Yeah. And so if you're an agency owner, cause like a lot of my copywriters, they're kind of, it's like a part-time thing for them. But if you're an agency owner, you're trying to like build this thing, like a hundred K a month, two hundred K a month, get on LinkedIn. Yes. Like it makes so much sense. Like you don't say any numbers, but you've driven like probably hundreds of clients from LinkedIn to the agency, right? Yeah. I don't know the exact number of clients, but over the past, like two years since I've been going hard on LinkedIn, um, I've done a couple of million dollars in revenue between like the agency and kind of some of my personal stuff and some of the people I've promoted, I'll be done in the ballpark of like three to $5 million in revenue off of LinkedIn for kind of businesses I'm a part of. Wow. But just to the agency, like, uh, just to the agency, I mean, so I get about 50 to 60 leads a month on LinkedIn. Not all of them are great fits for agency. About a third of them are a good fit for agency. So I'm getting what's that? 15 to 18 kind of good leads a month from LinkedIn and we're closing. I don't know, half a dozen, potentially a dozen clients at five, 10, 15 K a month, um, each. So it just depends. It kind of all varies. Some months we'll close just projects. Some months we'll close more. Some months we'll close less, but we're getting a lot of deal flow for sure. Yeah. I've probably been over the past two years, probably in the ballpark of like, I don't know, 60 to a hundred clients potentially. Yeah. And to be honest, it doesn't even look like you promote it very much. Like I never, yeah, I never promote it. So like, if you're an agency owner and you're, you know, you go through chase stuff and also you're a client for the product or service you have, and you're like actively posting about the agency and results and stuff like that and posting content around that, like, there's no reason why you can't, you know, in the next 12 months, add 40 to decay a month in revenue. Heck yeah. Dude, this was fun. This was a great episode. All right. Very good. I lost my mic again, dude. I I'm actually in those. All right, everybody. Thank you for tuning in to the diamond download. Hope you enjoyed this one. We're going to see you next week. All right. Appreciate it, man. Cheers.