433: Success, Self-awareness, and Stress Management with Dave Valentine
02/09/24 • 34 min
Elzie hosts Dave Valentine, Founder of DreamQuest Agency, for a deep dive into agency growth. Dave shares insights from his agency journey, emphasizing the pivotal role of reliable lead generation and operational efficiency. A focus on Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and effective task delegation emerges as a key theme, with Dave highlighting the long-term benefits of documenting processes for scalability.
The conversation explores the significance of focus, clarity, and intention in business strategy. Dave advocates for niche specialization, comparing the efficiency of specialists to the challenges faced by generalists. Introducing the Dream Agency Quest program, Dave outlines its two versions, offering yearly growth support and a three-year commitment for agencies contemplating a potential sale.
Dave encourages entrepreneurs to embrace self-awareness, believe in their services, and resist the allure of every opportunity. The Dream Agency Quest emerges as a valuable tool for agency owners seeking to scale, grow, and potentially sell their businesses. The episode concludes with gratitude from Elzie and an invitation from Dave for entrepreneurs to reflect on the impact of focus and intention on their businesses.
Highlights:
07:00: If you don't have SOPs, standard operating procedures, for your team to follow, it doesn't matter if you're a really great practitioner. I was and am a very good digital advertising person. I knew how to target the right copy and put it to the creative. And this was before they had a lot of automated targeting that's pretty savvy now. So I could do it, but I could never train someone else to do it. And so I always found myself going behind the people that I hired to do that work and doing it for them.
15:28: After I sold my first agency, I had a lot of people say, dude, how did you do that? You know? I mean, because that's what people want to do. And in 2020, I started consulting with agency owners, and I started to see they would see immediate success. So they would go from making $10,000 a month to $25,000 a month in 45 days just because I was like, "hey, here's how you do lead generation. Here's how you set up the systems. Here's how you take sales calls." And it's so rewarding to see other people be successful when they're using your playbook.
31:27: So one of the ways that we do this is that no one person at any company that I own ever makes more than 5 times as much as the lowest-paid person. So if I want to take a raise, that's cool.That's great. I have to get the bottom person up so that I can have that race. And what that does is create this community amongst our employees where they go. Dave has a job that I don't want. I'm glad that he makes more than me exponentially, because I don't want to do what he does. But I also know that I'm not getting fleeced, that I'm still making a lot of money, and that I'm being taken care of. And so it's just being thoughtful, conscious, and aware of the actions that we take that affect other people and the planet.
Master Your Journey
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Sponsor
This podcast is brought to you by Podcast Town: Professional Podcast Solutions for B2B Leaders Focused on Growth and Authority.
Contact Dave Valentine
Elzie hosts Dave Valentine, Founder of DreamQuest Agency, for a deep dive into agency growth. Dave shares insights from his agency journey, emphasizing the pivotal role of reliable lead generation and operational efficiency. A focus on Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and effective task delegation emerges as a key theme, with Dave highlighting the long-term benefits of documenting processes for scalability.
The conversation explores the significance of focus, clarity, and intention in business strategy. Dave advocates for niche specialization, comparing the efficiency of specialists to the challenges faced by generalists. Introducing the Dream Agency Quest program, Dave outlines its two versions, offering yearly growth support and a three-year commitment for agencies contemplating a potential sale.
Dave encourages entrepreneurs to embrace self-awareness, believe in their services, and resist the allure of every opportunity. The Dream Agency Quest emerges as a valuable tool for agency owners seeking to scale, grow, and potentially sell their businesses. The episode concludes with gratitude from Elzie and an invitation from Dave for entrepreneurs to reflect on the impact of focus and intention on their businesses.
Highlights:
07:00: If you don't have SOPs, standard operating procedures, for your team to follow, it doesn't matter if you're a really great practitioner. I was and am a very good digital advertising person. I knew how to target the right copy and put it to the creative. And this was before they had a lot of automated targeting that's pretty savvy now. So I could do it, but I could never train someone else to do it. And so I always found myself going behind the people that I hired to do that work and doing it for them.
15:28: After I sold my first agency, I had a lot of people say, dude, how did you do that? You know? I mean, because that's what people want to do. And in 2020, I started consulting with agency owners, and I started to see they would see immediate success. So they would go from making $10,000 a month to $25,000 a month in 45 days just because I was like, "hey, here's how you do lead generation. Here's how you set up the systems. Here's how you take sales calls." And it's so rewarding to see other people be successful when they're using your playbook.
31:27: So one of the ways that we do this is that no one person at any company that I own ever makes more than 5 times as much as the lowest-paid person. So if I want to take a raise, that's cool.That's great. I have to get the bottom person up so that I can have that race. And what that does is create this community amongst our employees where they go. Dave has a job that I don't want. I'm glad that he makes more than me exponentially, because I don't want to do what he does. But I also know that I'm not getting fleeced, that I'm still making a lot of money, and that I'm being taken care of. And so it's just being thoughtful, conscious, and aware of the actions that we take that affect other people and the planet.
Master Your Journey
💬 Want more than just another post in your feed?
Join The Journey Feed — a private stream where I share exclusive insights, behind-the-scenes reflections, spiritual discovery and real-time updates you won’t find on social media.
🎧 It’s also the best way to go deeper with the Journey to Mastery podcast and get early access to what I’m learning, building, and navigating — all through the lens of faith and purpose-driven entrepreneurship.
👣 This is your space to stay connected and aligned as you grow. No noise. No fluff. Just clarity, intention, and inspiration for the road ahead.
Support me as a creator
If the Journey to Mastery podcast has encouraged or equipped you on your entrepreneurial journey, I’d be honored if you’d consider supporting the show so we can keep empowering purpose-driven entrepreneurs like you!
Sponsor
This podcast is brought to you by Podcast Town: Professional Podcast Solutions for B2B Leaders Focused on Growth and Authority.
Contact Dave Valentine
Previous Episode
432: Disrupting The Freelancing Industry with Karl Swanepoel
In this lively conversation, Elzie and Revolancer founder Karl Swanepoel explore the dynamic world of freelancing. Revolancer, born out of personal frustration with existing solutions, stands out with over 20,000 users in just two years, aiming to revolutionize freelancing by eliminating commission fees. Karl, with a background in AI and robotics, sheds light on the strategic shift to a Software as a Service (SaaS) model and the importance of first-principle thinking in overcoming industry challenges.
The episode emphasizes key insights for entrepreneurs and freelancers, touching on self-confidence, networking, and standing out in a crowded market. Karl shares tactics to combat the race-to-the-bottom pricing dilemma, offering valuable advice to businesses and freelancers.
The conversation dives into broader business lessons, with Karl emphasizing perseverance, learning from failure, and adopting a customer-centric approach.
Highlights:
09:40: I think it's really important to work with clients who kind of develop a good relationship with clients. I can tell you that from my freelancing experience, I actually noticed a really strange kind of trend, which is that for my 2 clients, I have 2 clients who paid me a lot more than every other client I had. And those two clients were by far the best to work with. They were the most understanding, the most reasonable, and just a real pleasure to work with. I felt like I was really contributing something, and the clients who were constantly trying to push the price down and had tiny budgets were often horrible to deal with.
19:32: I don't think it's likely that some AI is going to start launching nukes or go terminate, or whatever. But I think it's more so in automating jobs that there's now suddenly a large portion of humans who cannot do anything better, more efficiently than a machine can. And at that point what do they do? I think there are a lot of big questions around that, but there aren't really good answers, and people aren't moving fast enough to find good answers there.
23:21 People think that when you start a business, you have a cool idea. You go out there and build the idea and put it out there, advertise to people, and they buy from you, essentially. But, really, what I found is that the best way to start a business or any kind of project is to identify your target audience and then sort of like understand what their problems are and then build a solution for a very big problem for a very specific group of people. That way, your chances of success and your chances of guessing the right idea are just so much higher.
25:59: That's why you start with finding a target audience that you want to help or kind of a certain, just broader, industry that you want to be involved in. But as for what your business very specifically does, I think it needs to be driven by what the audience wants. So, for example, I could say that I used to be a freelancer. I face all kinds of issues. I want to make the industry better for freelancers. I don't know. I want to build a platform that's going to help freelancers.
Master Your Journey
💬 Want more than just another post in your feed?
Join The Journey Feed — a private stream where I share exclusive insights, behind-the-scenes reflections, spiritual discovery and real-time updates you won’t find on social media.
🎧 It’s also the best way to go deeper with the Journey to Mastery podcast and get early access to what I’m learning, building, and navigating — all through the lens of faith and purpose-driven entrepreneurship.
👣 This is your space to stay connected and aligned as you grow. No noise. No fluff. Just clarity, intention, and inspiration for the road ahead.
Support me as a creator
If the Journey to Mastery podcast has encouraged or equipped you on your entrepreneurial journey, I’d be honored if you’d consider supporting the show so we can keep empowering purpose-driven entrepreneurs like you!
Sponsor
This podcast is brought to you by Podcast Town: Professional Podcast Solutions for B2B Leaders Focused on Growth and Authority.
Contact Karl Swanepoel
Next Episode
434: Mastering the Art of Deals With Corey Kupfer
Elzie Flenard engages in an insightful conversation with Corey Kupfer, a seasoned entrepreneur and expert in law, negotiation, and podcasting. Corey shares his journey from being a Brooklyn kid to establishing a successful law firm and speaking, training, and consulting company. As a deal maker, Corey delves into the strategies he employed to build, grow, and scale his service-based business in the highly competitive field of law.
Corey and Elzie explore various types of deals, such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, online affiliate deals, sponsorship deals, and more. Corey also sheds light on his foray into podcasting and how it became a cornerstone of his authority marketing approach. The DealQuest podcast, now rated in the top 1% globally, has become a platform for deal makers to share their experiences and insights, inspiring entrepreneurs to explore different avenues for business growth.
Listen now gain valuable insights into Corey's approach to negotiation, deal-making, and the significance of a clear mindset in achieving success in the world of entrepreneurship.
Highlights:
11:09- So what happens in the authority marketing model is that some people think you have to do everything—you know, you have to be on Instagram, you have to be on LinkedIn, you have to be blogging, you have to be doing a podcast, you have to write a book, you have to write. And first of all, it's impossible and second of all, I think the most successful people find the platform of platforms that they're on. That's why they're comfortable with that; they're drawn to it. They're going to do it consistently, right? Because one of the biggest things on authority marketing is that you have to do things consistently.
18:50- So there's a deal-maker mentality. One of the reasons I really started the podcast is because I found that every company's trying to grow organically. Everybody's trying to get more customers, more clients, increase sales and marketing, and provide great products and services, right? And you should do that. If you can't get a customer, a client, get another one, and get another one organically, you probably don't have a viable business. Having said that, though, I also would run into people all the time who would be frustrated they weren't growing or they were not growing as fast as they'd like and they were trying to, let's say, access a new market or hire a new talent or get into a new vertical, geography, whatever it was, and they were trying to do it organically. And there are many, many ways that you can do deals to help accelerate that. And if you study the most successful companies, they do both. They have a good, or excellent, organic growth engine. And they also do deals.
33:30-The other huge thing that's been important to me in my life for many, many years now is being of service. And that's how I approach my clients and my law firm, but it's also, my wife and I are involved in many things outside of businesses, and I have a very specific goal in terms of what we want to do in terms of increasing our philanthropic work and specifically it's funny, we've given out a lot over the years, and we have given a decent amount of money.
Master Your Journey
💬 Want more than just another post in your feed?
Join The Journey Feed — a private stream where I share exclusive insights, behind-the-scenes reflections, spiritual discovery and real-time updates you won’t find on social media.
🎧 It’s also the best way to go deeper with the Journey to Mastery podcast and get early access to what I’m learning, building, and navigating — all through the lens of faith and purpose-driven entrepreneurship.
👣 This is your space to stay connected and aligned as you grow. No noise. No fluff. Just clarity, intention, and inspiration for the road ahead.
Support me as a creator
If the Journey to Mastery podcast has encouraged or equipped you on your entrepreneurial journey, I’d be honored if you’d consider supporting the show so we can keep empowering purpose-driven entrepreneurs like you!
Sponsor
This podcast is brought to you by Podcast Town: Professional Podcast Solutions for B2B Leaders Focused on Growth and Authority.
Contact Corey Kupfer
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