Build a Better Agency Podcast

The past three months have felt like a bad sci-fi movie. As agency leaders, most of us have navigated the economic struggles right after 9/11 and the great recession of 07-08’. But nothing has come close to the economic, health, and social impacts that we’ve experienced recently. But we need to stay smart and fight our way out of this economic slowdown. I want to share some trends that will help you do just that.

COVID continues to be a major topic of discussion throughout the world. It is still a hot button issue as many agency leaders work to stabilize their operations. However, the pandemic has had to share the spotlight with the global conversation about racism and it’s reasonable to assume these are both conversations and realities we’re going to be wrestling with for the foreseeable future.

In this episode of Build a Better Agency, as I have every summer, I want to look at the trends that are impacting our industry. A couple of them have been altered by COVID but most of these are trends I was talking about in early 2020 and they’re as relevant today as they were in January.

With everything going on right now, it is hard to dedicate the necessary time and mental space to focus on running your agency. The health of your agency is more important than ever before. We have to carve out of the time to protect our businesses and I am hoping that taking a look at these trends will help you do that.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here: https://www.whitelabeliq.com/ami/

• Why the health of our agency is so important in the big picture
• How to tee up your agency for a great 2021
• What you can to start thriving right now
• Trends that agency leaders should be watching for in 2020-2021
• Why AMI agencies have been so much more profitable than average privately held agencies
• How our clients’ needs have changed this past year
• What we can do to map out our sales funnels and increase efficiency
• How to take control of the sales cycle by being direct
• Why agency leaders have become a bottleneck for strategy
• Why we are seeing more employees buy minority stakes in their agencies

Most agency owners hope to sell their agency someday down the road. If that’s you, understanding how agencies are valuated today will help you maximize that opportunity whenever it comes. Even if you aren’t interested in selling, you can and should still be beefing up your agency’s value.

Gina Cocking joins us for this episode to provide an investment banker’s perspective on the valuation and sales process. She’ll walk us through the key items investment firms look for in your agency’s valuation and explain the technical numbers-side. She’ll also help us identify ways you can add value in advance.

Gina is managing director and partner at Colonnade Advisors, a boutique investment banking firm that specializes in mergers and acquisitions in the business services industry. Colonnade has helped many agencies buy and sell, so Gina understands what it takes to help agency owners get the most out of their purchase deals.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here: https://www.whitelabeliq.com/ami/

• A glimpse inside the process of selling your agency
• How Colonnade Advisors represents business owners selling their companies
• The importance of enterprise value, recurring revenue, and client relationships when you sell your agency
• How your key employees factor into a purchase deal
• The various elements that increase or diminish an agency’s value in the marketplace
• How to approach the numbers-side of selling your agency

• Website: www.coladv.com
• LinkedIn:
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/ginacocking/
  • https://www.linkedin.com/company/colonnade-advisors-llc_2/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Colonnade-Advisors-LLC/308550405834700

Drew McLellan is the Top Dog at Agency Management Institute. For the past 21 years, he has also owned and operated his own agency. Drew’s unique vantage point as being both an active agency owner and working with 250+ small- to mid-size agencies throughout the year, give him a unique perspective on running an agency today.

AMI works with agency owners by:

• Leading agency owner peer groups
• Offering workshops for owners and their leadership teams
• Offering AE bootcamps
• Conducting individual agency owner coaching
• Doing on-site consulting
• Offering online courses in agency new business and account service

Because he works with those 250+ agencies every year — he has the unique opportunity to see the patterns and the habits (both good and bad) that happen over and over again. He has also written two books and been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fortune Small Business. The Wall Street Journal called his blog “One of 10 blogs every entrepreneur should read.”

• Augmented reality and virtual reality: what you need to know about this technology that is coming fast
• Influencer marketing: connecting your client’s brand with their audience through social influencers who have built an audience around a specific topic
• Ratings & Reviews: How agencies can turn a profit by solving this problem for existing clients (and how to use it as a door-opener for prospects)
• Why agencies are developing relationships with more people inside companies than just CMOs
• Why you need to play nice with the other agencies that you share a client with
• If you’re not being offered exclusivity, do you need to offer it in return?
• Selling what you know and what you think instead of “stuff”
• ROI: why it’s not an optional conversation
• Why you need to be transparent on your fees
• Bragworthy benefits like a student loan repayment program

• Email: [email protected]

We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!

We’ve all been hearing it: a storm is coming. Or maybe it’s not. Depending on who you ask, we don’t know what our economic future holds. But one thing is for sure, if you stay prepared with recession planning, regardless of what the economy is doing, you can hold strong against those unexpected changes much more easily. In this solocast episode, I will share with you the best ways you can start recession planning even if your agency is financially okay right now. It’s never the wrong time to start looking at how you can operate better, earn more profit, and keep great clients and employees, no matter the economic outlook.

Instead of waiting out the economic storm and wishing you had been better prepared, start making changes today and know that you have the power to pull yourself through anything while still making a profit. You just need to be smart about it.

For 30+ years, Drew McLellan has been in the advertising industry. He started his career at Y&R, worked in boutique-sized agencies, and then started his own (which he still owns and runs) agency in 1995. Additionally, Drew owns and leads the Agency Management Institute, which advises hundreds of small to mid-sized agencies on how to grow their agency and its profitability through agency owner peer groups, consulting, coaching, workshops and more.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

• Things you should already be doing for recession planning
• Why you should be raising your hourly rates
• How to prepare yourself against a longer sales cycle
• The importance of renewing contracts and locking in good clients now
• The good and the bad of employee staffing during a recession
• Why having too much money in your agency is a bad thing
• The importance of maintaining a good attitude with your team
• Why you can still be profitable even if there’s a recession

So many of us hate selling or feeling like we are “being sold to” because it has the old reputation of being manipulative, exploitative, and too pushy. Thanks to the sales tactics of the old days, our sales prospects have walls up before a call or meeting even starts.

When we know the psychology of sales and truly understand how people want to be sold to, that’s where the magic begins. Jeremy Miner, voted in the top 50 best salespeople worldwide, has some knowledge to share with us about approaching the sales process in a way that sets you up for success from the beginning.

Not only can you ditch lengthy sales pitches and pretend to care about the weather in your prospect’s city, but you can also get to the root of their needs much more efficiently and teach them how you fit into that equation. Your prospects win because they learn about their company’s problems, you win because you know how to solve them, and you both win again because fixing those blind spots helps you both make more money. What do you have to lose?

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

• Jeremy’s first door-to-door sales job
• How to get sales prospects to pull you in rather than you pushing them to make a decision
• Getting to the bottom of your prospect’s problems and figuring out how to solve them
• The least persuasive way to sell
• Leading sales conversations with emotion instead of logic
• The NEPQ approach to sales conversations
• How Covid impacted selling to prospects
• Building a visual gap between where your sales prospects are and where they want to be
• Asking the right questions