
How to Attract High Ticket Clients – w/ Ryan Stewart
SUMMARY
How do you attract high ticket clients? This is an important question: the more your clients are willing to pay, the less work you have to do in order to make that money. This means you have time to focus on each client, and you have the resources needed to do the very best work possible.
Ryan Stewart explains it all. The owner of the award-winning marketing agency From the Future, Ryan has built several successful ecommerce business, and he’s worked as an advisor for high ticket brands.
In this video, he shares his secrets with you.
TRANSCRIPT
What’s up everybody? What’s going on, everybody? Hey, how are we doing man?
Give me one second. We’ll just get this speaker. Okay. All right. Awesome. Can you guys hear us drop a one on one in the chat if you guys can hear us. Ryan, can you hear me ma’am? Yeah, can you hear me? Awesome brother. Yep, got you on. We’re gonna let some people pile in. What’s up everybody? How we doing today? We got Ryan and Stewart in the house. I was about to drop some flier on you guys. Yep. No, we’re just gonna let it up. People pilot. And by the way, Ryan, just so you know, and just so everybody who’s watching, just so you know, I’m not not looking at you. I got our DSLR right up here. And then I got into rim right here on the sides. We’re live on Instagram. And then I’m actually gonna push this live. We’re going to broadcast to Facebook. Who’s going to be right here on my side screen? Yup. That’ll just give us enough time. We’ll let people pile in. Cool. And I’m also going to apologize ahead of time. I just said my girlfriend just got a puppy, so he’s, he’s he’s playing around crying. Yeah. I’m not killing somebody in the background. It’s just, no worries man. All right, go here. What’s up man? You were just out of town, right?
Philly? I was in a, the keys for wedding last week with some of my buddies. I took a couple of days off and then I was in Philadelphia or agency’s headquarters up in Philadelphia. So I just got back last night. I was up there for most of the week.
Oh, we love it, dude. Nice man. Well, we should have a pretty good amount of people in here. I’m just gonna roll this over to live really quick in the group and let me just push this. Go live. Awesome. So we are alive. They’re going live in the Facebook group. What’s going on everybody? Can you guys do me a quick favor? Can you do me a quick favor and just let us know where in the world are you from? Just go ahead and drop in the chat. Go drop in the chat. Where are you guys from? We’ve got people from all over the world.
All over the world. All right. So let me get this bad boy up live on Facebook. Let me open that up so I can see everybody’s comments. [inaudible] Oh, so you got something special for us today. Huh? I said you got some [inaudible] you’re talking to me. Are you talking to me? I am.
It’s funny, I just saw the comments and like three people were like, Yo, I thought this was a hardcore closer like [inaudible] my name is Ryan Stewart. If you do a very similar last names and I am talking about sales but I’m not the same dude.
Yeah, it’s funny cause one of our moderators in our group actually asked me for all the info and he’s like, Oh Ryan students come coming back. Cause Ryan Stewman came on a couple of weeks ago. I’m good friends. And he was on a couple of weeks ago and no, this is not Ryan Stewman all of you guys ranked stewards. I can see why that’s confusing. Yes. Like little slight little name change. Everybody said what up. So we’ve got George in the house, Ottawa, Auckland, New Zealand, Wrightsville, Fremont, Indiana or Richmond, Virginia, Bulgaria, Houston, Waco, Texas, Toronto, Canada. We’ve got countries from all over angels at Dashcams headquarters. We got angel on what’s going on, Angel. Yeah, we’ve got people from all over. All right. Awesome. Awesome. So we’re live here. We’re also live on Facebook. We’re live on my Instagram and probably got a couple hundred people watching us run all these different platforms. So Ryan, what I’ll do is I’ll let you kind of introduce yourself, tell the people who you are, what you do, and then we can just get right into it.
Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Ryan Stewart with a r t at the end. I’m out here in Miami, Florida. Yeah, absolutely. I currently have an agency. It’s called from the future, which was the parent company of the my agency, which I sold to it, which we’ll talk a little bit more. I’ve also built and sold a couple of ECOMMERCE businesses. I’m getting ready to launch a really awesome piece of software, two pieces of software in the next two months actually. Do a lot of consultants got my start working for some very big brands. And I’ll be talking a lot about all those things. I tend to infuse a lot of stories into my presentation so you guys don’t fall asleep on us. So we’ll, we’ll deep dive in more about myself as well. And as I said too, I’ve got a puppy on my lap here, cause if I don’t, then he’s gonna start crying. So there he goes. His name’s frank. Yeah, buddy. So if you see my hands moving around, I’m not touching myself. I’m just playing with them. I want to repeat that cause people are gonna be coming on. And I, it’s funny, I just did a Webinar. I just did a Facebook live from my, from my personal I have a train platform myself and there was like 40 people in there and my hands were constantly moving around and they were like, are you all right over there? I’m like, yeah, I’m going to,
Yes, no, everybody’s on the same page. If you’re watching this live right now, Ryan is not playing with himself under the desk. If you’re watching the replay, you still not playing with himself under the desk. There’s a dog in his lap making sure you’re all on the same page. Awesome. All right, cool man. So Ryan, you’ve been in the game. You know, it’s funny cause I remember when I spoke to you I actually spoke to you, I think it was like two or three, maybe two years ago and I spoke to you about like you have, you had a backlink course. I’m talking about like back reaching and for a retail agents who want to like come up with like different strategies and stuff like that. So you probably don’t remember, but I spoke to you like two years ago and then I started seeing some of your Facebook ads and I was like, dude, we’re getting all these influencers on the space in the agency space coming on. Ryan’s right here as a south Florida native. Let’s get them to jump on. Probably share some shit terminology with all these guys. So just so you know, everybody watching this live right now and everybody’s going to be watching the replay. They are all agency owners from across the world. So everybody in here is an agency owner. There’s no retail guys in here. It’s all people with like likeminded doing the same thing with the same goals
Are can I ask it just to specify, is it mostly SEO Marketing, advertising design, yes.
Good guys. What are you guys selling the most of? Go ahead and drop in the chat for us real quick. What is you, what are you pushing the most? SEO, Facebook ads and click funnels. All the above web design. Okay. SEO Leads, web, Facebook, SEO. So it’s inside somebody 10 all the above. Well, yes, it’s, it’s pretty everything. Yeah. It’s pretty much everything, which is great.
Cool. Cool. Yes, I mean, so my first agency, Weber’s that I ended up selling to the company that I’m now partnering from. The future was, it was pretty much strictly SEO. We did some design, but it was mostly like referrals out. And just tick to kind of [inaudible] we’re now end to end digital doing some really cool stuff. So I’ll try and keep that in mind when I’m going through this presentation, but cool. Sure. Yeah. And there’s, yeah, people are sitting on, so SEO, there’s a bunch of us young guy, just so you guys know, like for us, and I’m talking about our agency too, so our retail agency, we started selling SEO. That’s, that’s pretty much how we got our start, right? That was our recurring remedy. That was our model that we built where we’re like, dude, let’s just sell a shit ton of SEO. Everybody needs it. Everybody wants it. Especially back in the days I gave you reverse like 10 years. Really? How we were like, oh, let’s just drop 400 keywords on this page. Let’s hit them. That’s it. The number one spot, right? So obviously, unfortunately SEO is not like that anymore. We can all agree. It’s more on tactics, strategies and Ryan will probably go through a bunch of that too. But yeah, SEO is probably what got us to the point where we are today, where we have probably upwards of almost 30 employees in house ourself for an office. Allowed us to build all the software. So like selling SEO, especially for like high ticket, which I know somebody that we’re going to speak about today too, right? Getting people to pay you thousand, 2000, three, $5,000 a month. Maybe even more than that to do SEO campaigns depending on how detailed oriented campaigns or that’s the way to go. And just billing monthly and having like a longterm strategy and approach.
Yeah. Yeah. I see. It was awesome. I’m hoping to get through this deck. I tried to build it. I had some, some thoughts that I just wanted to get down. But I would love to get some to some Q and a because I feel like we can definitely go out to answer some specific
Probably is. So we can have two options. One, if you want. And we do this with a bunch of different, a bunch of the speakers that come on. We can do Q and a. Like they can just fire off questions as we’re going and we can just pause and answer them or if you want we can hold all the questions till the end. We’ll just do a Q and A session.
P people can ask them. And if, if I feel like it’s relevant, I’ll stop for sure, but otherwise we can double back and get them. I just want to get through this shouldn’t say more than 15, 20 minutes to go through it and it’s, if you guys do have questions, please fire away so you don’t forget. And again, if it’s relevant to what I’m talking about that time I’ll do, I’ll definitely jump in to cover it. But beautiful man. I, I’ll let you get started. You can share your screen if you want to know. You got a slide deck. Yeah, let me get in here.
All right. So I was asked to come on here today and talk about high ticket sales. So when we say high ticket sales, first of all, this is all relative, right? It depends on where you are, what point high ticket as you just said, Chad, it could be two thousand five thousand. When I think high ticket, I think the for just SEO really 10,000 up. But when I’m thinking end to end, I’m thinking $25,000 retainers and up. And we’ll get more into that as well. Just get my face out of here so I can see.
So when I broke this down into like three main buckets here, I wanna talk about attracting larger clients. So how to get the attention of these larger companies, how to get on the radar how to get them into your ecosystem. Number two is how to close them. So how to nurture them how to convince them that you’re worthy of managing these, these large retainers. And then three, to me, this is actually probably the most important, which is always overlooked, ironically, is how you can actually deliver this. Because it’s a different type of service when we’re talking about taking on a 25 k a month retainer versus a $500 a month retainer, even though they’re very similar. In a lot of the work is overlap, but we’ll talk about that. So let me just go to the next slide.
So real quick just a little bit about myself. My name is Ryan Stewart. These, my social handles, please drop me a followup you to chance. I’ve been in this game for over 10 years. I got my start working in big consulting. I was actually working for a company called Deloitte and Accenture eventually went on to go work for safety and nitrile, which is a massive agency. So I got taught marketing. Ooh, the scope had big brands. So this was all I knew at first. I knew how to do big million dollar contract campaigns on like target.com end to end digital type stuff. But with a heavy focus on, on analytics and SEO. I eventually after that just realized I couldn’t really work for people and decided to call it branch off, start consulting, started a blog, picked up steam, Lottie guys know the story. And then I ended up opening an agency Web which I then sold last year about a year and a half ago now to another agency to call from the future. We got to about 1000001.2 in revenue in about 12 months. We’d be really fast. Using a lot of these tactics that I’m going to talk about in this Webinar. I’m in really getting off of those $500 month retainers and pushing more into the 5,000, $10,000 a month. Because if you want a scale fast and scale large and get up to 50 million in revenue you can’t be doing on, on $500 a month or 10 years, it’s just not gonna happen. There’s nothing wrong with them. That’s where we all start. But eventually you have to have the strategic plan in place to move up and push out to those. And we’re gonna talk about that. So I’ve also sold to other companies. I had an ecommerce website and I had a couple of blogs and a couple of websites that I’ve sold as packages. So I’ve got a lot of experience in this. In pretty much all of them run off of a passive, it’s not passive, but it’s still a lot of work. But that passive, a source of organic search. But I pushed heavily now into advertising as Chad alluded to, I just launched a new business called the blueprint training.
It’s essentially the agency in a box for SEO agencies. And I’m marketing that with basically what I think is the best type of marketing now, which is content advertising, content advertising which we can talk about more in, in the questions that you guys want to. So I already alluded this. I built this. So my agency I now serve as partner at from the future that was just up in Philadelphia. We just hit 30, I think it’s like 38 employees. Like we’re just growing like crazy. I’m going to close probably eight figures in revenue this year, which is exciting. I’m working with some really exciting clients and again, these are some of the things that I’ve extracted nut from building my own agency and then serving as a partner in the CMO at from the future to attract these higher clients.
So the first thing is, is is to ask yourself if you really want these to be your clients, like we kind of alluded to it about these $500 a month retainers. Like there’s absolutely nothing wrong if that’s the type of business that you want to run. Don’t listen to me. Stop this right now. There’s nothing wrong with building a lifestyle agency. When I built websites, and really the reason why I sold it was because I didn’t want to manage a hundred person agency. I didn’t want to get to $50 million in revenue. I wanted to run an agency that was high margin. Small. agile allowed me to make decisions and not be dictated decisions based on clients, based on circumstances, all that type of stuff. My goal was really to get to a million in revenue at 60% margin so I could take that 600 k profit and rolled into other investments.
Right? I wanted to use my agency as essentially a purse to further fund other projects, to get into software to get into things where I didn’t have to talk to people. Because even though I’m good on Webinars, I’m not really good with dealing with clients. It’s not my thing. So it’s important to ask yourself that like, what do you want out of your business? Where do you want to go? What makes you happy? It’s really sexy to sound like to get bigger clients and stuff like that. But like, it’s, it’s, it’s a whole nother level of commitment. And that was one of the big reasons why I wanted some, my agents too, because we grew fast and 12 months to get to that 1.2 in revenue. But we hit a ceiling and I knew that in order to get past that ceiling, I had to make operational changes, staff changes.
And it wasn’t for me. So I had an offer on the business and I sold it. And now I’m able to be an equity partner in a much larger agency, but take a more passive role and focus on other projects and just marketing the agency and not have to deal with the day to day operations, which has been a godsend. So just real quick I’m a little bit old school. Like I said, I came from a consulting, I’m big on pros and cons. It helps you to think through things. So I did some of that for you. So on the left hand side we’ve got basically large and small clients and the benefits and drawbacks. So the benefits of working with big businesses, and again, this is kind of built with the scope of SEO was just a fall to SEO, but you can replace SEO with anything you want.
It really, the concepts apply to everything here. But one of the good things about working with large benefit businesses is that the SEO is an end to end. It’s only partial. So you can really find a niche, whether that’s link-building whether that’s content creation, whether that’s UX, UI design, whatever that may be. These big companies are looking for specific problems that you can solve. You don’t have to solve them all so you can really get in the door with one service that you do really well, that you could, can specialize in and really blow it out and crush a 10, $20,000 contract from just doing one thing. So the other large the other benefit is obviously that it’s high retainer value. You’re getting paid more for kind of the same amount of work. Obviously there’s more things that go into it, but you yourself are pretty much doing the same thing.
Just getting paid a lot more for it. But the drawbacks are, is that you’ve got to have local people. You can’t go and pitch a large enter, I call them enterprise clients without having a local staff. That’s highly trained that knows what they’re doing that can communicate, but also think strategically. I was, I’m very still very big on offshoring a lot of my work, but those things are generally sub tasks, right? I’m not asking my offshore team to go and build an SEO strategy or to design a website. I’m asking them to if it comes to design, I’ve got an offshore designer that I use who’s awesome but I give him the framework, I give him the brand guidelines, I give him the wire frames and I basically say, this is paint by numbers. Just go do that.
So it takes a lot of the time. Then I’m able to scale my team’s time and my time by not having to do the tedious things. But you can’t really do that when you want to work with big clients. You’ve really got to have local people that can talk. There’s a different level of understanding communication that you have to have when you sign these big contracts. And there’s a lot of communication. And again, that was something that I didn’t like. I’m somebody who wants to go deep on something. I want to be on my computer at home like I am now and not be bothered and just get stuff done. But you can’t do that when you’re working with big clients. You can with small clients cause it’s a little bit more of an understanding. It’s like you’re only paying me 500 bucks.
You don’t get to bother me nonstop. But that wasn’t for me, but it is if you want to get paid more. So another benefit. So now moving down to the smaller contracts, again, like there’s nothing wrong with working on small contracts, especially if that’s, if that’s what you want to do. The benefits are, it’s much easier to get results because you can move the needle a lot faster. The markets are a lot smaller as generally a lot less competition. There’s way more leads. So, as I said, I alluded to the fact that if you want to get to 50 million, you have to sign less clients, but you can still get a 50 million on $500 clients because the market is so much bigger. There’s so many more of them. And if you’ve got a really good outbound sales process, I know you know some of my buddies that have agencies that’s only work with $500,000 a month clients that are doing 10 million revenue cause they’ve just got people calling nonstop and chasing them down.
So just another kind of tip and side note, like always hedge on what you do best. If you are by nature a salesperson, you can go to the sales team like you don’t need marketing. You know what I’m saying? You can just go and build that sale outbound sales engine and crush it no matter what, which we’ll talk a little bit more about. There’s also much shorter sales cycles with small businesses. You can one call close, which is an amazing feeling. There’s really nothing like it when it comes to working with bigger contracts. We’re talking about three, six, nine, 12 month business development cycles to land these big contracts. So it’s a much different process. Some of the drawbacks are for small businesses is that you can’t really do the work, especially when it comes to SEO for not that much money as much as software has done for us.
Marketing is still a very manual process until AI really takes over. It’s going to be so for the next five to 10 years which means you need people or you need yourself and if you want to grow your business, you can’t be doing the work. So you need a team and it’s difficult to build the right team when you’re only getting $500 a month, cause then that person economically has to manage 20 clients and it’s just, it’s not a fun environment for them. So it’s really difficult to do top work when you’re trying to squeeze everything on a shoestring budget. And there’s a lot of the, I call this scope creek. This is an agency term. Scope creep is when there’s things that you’re not getting paid for that are getting, getting done. Right. So communications is one of those things like when a client’s constantly emailing you.
I can’t see the comments by the way, Chad, if somebody a questions, if somebody asks a question you want me to answer. But communications is one of those things where we charge at our agency now we charge for project management, we charge for account management, we charge for meetings, we charge for everything and the clients are happy to pay for it because they understand the value of that communication where a small client at 500 a month is never going to pay you an hourly rate to sit in the meeting with them. They’re going to expect that in scope creep is basically the concept that you’re doing work that’s not getting paid for, it’s not getting billed. And you’re hurting your business and you’re losing money. A lot of times agencies, especially when you’re first getting started, you look at just top line revenue versus top line expenses.
Meaning, I’m getting $500 a month off 10 clients, that’s five k a month. You know, and I’m paying my staff $3,000 a month, so my margin is 2000. That’s not it. Because there’s all those things in between where they’re wasting their time. You’re capping the amount of work that they can do because you’re hamstringing them by all these things that you’re not getting compensated for. That to me is like the biggest downfall of working with small clients cause they will never pay you for those in between things. It’s just really hard to commit and you can’t really blame them. Right. So I’m gonna move on to the next slide. Does that something popping up for me here? Yup. We got a question. Yeah. Far Away Jordan. Jordan’s asking, how do you consistently go out and find small to medium sized businesses?
They see the value in SEO and want to grow. SEO is a hard sell because everyone is bombarded with SEOs. Yeah, we’re going to talk about that. The same concepts I’m talking about here do apply for small businesses. You know, it’s just, it’s easier to find smaller leads either through outbound PR sales. I mean, like again, I always say hedge on what you’re good at. If you’re a beast of a network, like I, you put me in a room full of people and I sit there and like drink five beers in the corner and can’t talk to anyone. It’s not who I am. By nature, I’m not a good networker. My skill set is around content, building content like this and promoting it properly. That’s how I attract people. I’m also ranking websites, inbound leads like that. But if you’re going to networking, if you’re going to talk to people, go to meetups, there’s plenty of businesses there that need help and if you just go there and provide one inkling of value or starting meet up, I have a meet up and man, I can’t tell you how many leads I get from people I can’t work with.
Probably like 10 every time. That’s not an exaggeration of people that are willing to pay $500 a month, but I don’t work with them anymore. So I’m in person is still a great way to do that. Outbound sales, which we’ll talk about a little bit more is a great way to do that. Any sort of inbound marketing is a great way to do that. The market is just a lot bigger and you can target a lot more, which again, we’ll talk about more as we get through this. So after going through that, to me, the big question is why even bother? And I should have staggered these with a little bit of animations here, but this is a scale. And this to me is everything I’ve learned the hard way about scaling. And it’s really, really like I’m all about putting myself in my team in the best position to succeed every day.
In working with smaller clients does not do that for you. It’s very, very difficult to scale. Just because you’re not getting compensated what you should before. Again, when we’re all getting started, we have to take what we can get. I just did a consulting call with one of my blueprint training members where he talked about how he’s going out and he’s doing SEO for free for some of his friends to get started. And I’m like, Kudos to you man. Like that’s how you have to start. You know what I’m saying? You have to earn the right to charge more. But you also have to be concise all consistently taking that next step to charge more and understanding how to charge more, attract those people in charging more is different than attracting higher value clients, which I have a actually have a really good youtube video that I just posted last week about how to price your services.
I strongly suggest you check it out where I talk about basically how to increase the value of what you’re selling over time. So part one of this, as I said, there’s three parts I’m gonna talk about how to get their attention, how to attract them to you. So a big companies are just not doing Google searches for your services. Again, this is defaulting to SEO, but anything like I said, like we’re down here in Miami, the big brands down here that I would like to attract will be like a carnival Bacardi. Like they’re not out there searching for like I need an SEO agency. They’re just not doing that. Right? So they’re also really not being attracted by like the traditional inbound things like content ads. They help as a part of the support journey. But when we’re talking about attracting people at the top of the funnel, it’s very difficult to get their attention and doing that.
So we’ve got to take a different approach in something that’s really, really important to understand is the different business development cycles. So what that means is that again, if we’re working with small businesses, they’re just there as needed. They’re like, I need SEO. I just found out about SEO. I’ve got a website and I realized that if I rank for Miami Coffee Shop, I’m going to get more customers and they’re going to go, they’re going to search, they’re going to find, they’re going to interview and they’re going to hire probably within a week to a month. Right? Very short bizdev cycle, very different convincing process. Whereas with big companies they’re not doing that. They off RFPs for those of you not familiar, that’s what’s called a request for proposal. So they’re basically working on cycles, right. Where they, they’ll sign a contract for a year and they might be listening to other pitches.
They might be listening to other agencies out there, but they are hiring based on when their cycle is up. Right. So that’s what I said. There’s longer sales cycles. You’ve gotta be patient. You got to understand how that works. And there’s a lot that means there’s a lot more work up front. Like before you’re even ready to get an RFP, which is sent to you via email, which means you have to be invited to propose to them. You’ve got to do work upfront, which is called Spec work, which we’ll talk a little bit more about. So it also, a lot of this comes down to, again, and this is what I said, this is not a strong point of mine, but these people are not going to the internet as a source, as the initial source. They want to work with a company that has been referred to them by another person who’s high up in a company who trusts them, who’s worked with them.
So it’s almost kind of like a chicken and the egg. Like how do you get within those cycles? How do you get referred? How do you do the work for companies and prove yourself if you’re not getting the opportunity at first, you’ve got to go out and network conferences. I believe it or not, again, like I was always a very shy person. I was never good at speaking, but I had to develop that skill set because while I can’t go to a conference or a meet up and network with people and hand out business cards, I haven’t had business cards for four years. I know myself. I, I don’t, I won’t even get business cards cause the waste of money because I’ll never hand them out. I agree. God, it’s not who I am. I’ve wasted probably like a thousand dollars over my life on business cards and I have every single one of them still.
You know what I’m saying? But if you could put me on stage, if I can better, better phrase that, if I can put myself on stage, I’m walking out of there with clients. And that was a skill that as a business owner, you have to understand how to develop. Again, like I’m all about hedging on what you do best, but a lot of times you also have to put yourself in uncomfortable situations to make yourself better. And for me, one of those was learning how to speak. And I started by doing stuff like this behind the camera webinars, which was hard and eventually graduated to doing meetups getting myself on camera, getting material and then starting to pitch those to conferences and events. And over time, this is a six, seven year process. I still get turned down all the time.
Even though I’ve got companies worth, you know, 20 plus million in revenue, I still get turned down. So it’s a continuously ongoing process for me to do that, but it’s a very effective way for me personally to get out in network. So like I said, most leads are going to come through an introduction or a relationship. If you can hire a sales person to go out there and help you out with that, somebody who can go and talk to a brick wall, I strongly suggest that. Because all you need is someone to make that warm handed introduction to you and then the balls on you to pitch them. Right. another big thing is industry recognition. Obviously awards are kind of bullshit. We all know that. But document your work man. Like show your case studies anytime you have success, create a lot of content around that which we’re gonna talk about more. It was their question, Chad, that you want me to take. There’s a time in aspect besides working for free, how much would a total total newbie starting out their own agency charged for SEO Keyword research and link building. So basically what he’s asking is if you’re a Newbie, what’s like a good price point?
The charge? Yeah, I mean so, so I can’t answer that for you because I don’t know where you are. I don’t know what your expenses are like. Again, like I, I hate to push you off, but like I have a really, really, really amazing video that walks you through exactly how to price your services. I personally choose to use hourly pricing to build that into retainers or then deliverable based. So for example, if, if you, if you want to do keyword research, tech class, Yo, whatever content creation, you basically have to factor in all your expenses. You have to factor in all your employees expenses, all your staff expenses, all your overhead, your tax rate. And then tack on your desired margin on top of that. And then you just gotta do a little bit of math to figure out what it is that you should be charging it out at an hourly rate.
A lot of people don’t want to charge per hour, especially when they’re getting started. Cause I saw some video online that told them not to charge for their time hours. You don’t have to charge for your time per se, but you do want to charge for your employee’s time because otherwise you’re not going to be paid for stuff. And you don’t have to necessarily be like, I work 10 hours, I’m sending you a bill for 10 hours. But when you’re pricing your services and when you’re trying to figure out the value of what it is that you’re selling, it should be based on hours. And then that also, again, I talk about this a lot in another video, but when it comes to managing your agency and managing your staff, your profitability, understanding utilization rates, how much people are working, how much availability they have, when you should hire, if you’re not tracking and managing hours, you’re making it a lot harder for yourself.
Again, like you can’t look at top line as the final say, oh, you have to go all the way down to the bottom and price it from the bottom up. Figure out what it is that you should be charging for the hour at a minimum and then start to build out how many hours it’s going to take you to do keyword research for them. And then you can fall flat price that. So for example, if you come up with an hourly rate of $100 and you think it’s going to take you 10 hours and you charge $1,000 for keyword research, you don’t have to tell them that how you got to it, but like hours are justification and you need to have that figured out.
Yeah. Just to kind of piggyback off that and just help you out team. And if you can also log into your dash it’s account and inside of the store, under all of the SEO packages that we sell you can actually see a suggested retail rate right next to it. And that’s kind of industry standard or we put it, it’s not too competitive or it’s not like overly like you’re overcharging and you’re not undercharging. It’s kind of right there where the market’s at. I mean we’ve, we’ve been doing SEO for like 10 years, so I think that if, especially if you’re just starting out, you’re not really sure like what the price and where to go and what to do dash tricks is definitely a perfect solution for you. Just log into the platform. You know, you’ll see the wholesale rates to retail rates, you’ll know exactly what your margins need to be and then you can go that route. So that’ll definitely help you out there too.
Yeah, that works too. So is there another question, Chad, that you want me to tell you want to push on now? You can go ahead. Well, there’s a couple coming in, but I don’t want to stop because I know you’re, you’re, you’re going, you’re doing your thing right now. We can always get back to them. We’ll do, we’ll do Q and a at the end for everybody. Okay. So this is another very important thing that it’s difficult for people to grasp at first, but you’ve got to know who you’re selling to. If you want to sell to a larger company, you’re not selling to business owners. You’re selling to, again, just defaulting to SEO professionals here, but you’re selling to marketing professionals, people who do this for a living, people who are getting paid 60, 70, 80, $150,000 a year to do this job for a company, right? You have to speak their language, which means you have to find out what their problems are. This is a big fundamental thing that you know, when you’re first getting started, you’re assuming that you’re, cause when you’re selling to a small business, you’re talking to the business owner, which just sucks in itself because that person’s not educated.
They don’t understand. The value of what you’re doing. And all they care about is the, the result, which is a terrible way to enter an agreement. Like you have to shift. Another big reason why you want to work with big companies because our clients at the agency now care about the value of our work. They understand the value of keyword research as a part of the bigger scope and process not going. Like if you, when you’re doing SEO for a small business, you send them keyword research that you spent a lot of hard time on and they’re like, great. Or these are keyword rankings or like what are these? Right? So you have to fundamentally understand that if you want to sell the small businesses, you should be speaking like the rankings results game. It sucks, but that’s what you have to do. But when you’re shifting to talk about bigger companies, you have to understand that they are talking about a hundred million dollars in revenue there.
They’re not really focused on one keyword ranking. They’re thinking about problems that they don’t have the time to fix themselves or the knowledge or the budget in house and they need some outside help to come in as a consultant, as agency, whatever and take that off their plate. So you have to understand what issues are solving and you’ve got to understand how you can recommend the proper fixes and you don’t want to sell it to them. You just want to help them out. That’s like the best way to break this relationship. So that question before kind of alluded to how can I even like start to build these relationships? You can go out and network, you can start to meet people like that, connect with them on linkedin. And then again, like you don’t have to know specifically what Scott Laughlin, the SEO manager at Walmart’s problems are specifically.
But you have to understand what that position within a company like that issues would be. And again, mostly it’s, I don’t have the bandwidth to get these things done. Like, he knows tech, you know, you don’t need to sell them the technical SEO audit, but maybe there’s things on there that he can’t implement because he doesn’t have time or maybe there’s things that a, a missing resource within his team that he doesn’t have. So one of the things that I really love to do for cold, for cold prospecting, and I’ll talk to you about another strategy in a minute, but we built a lot of tools. This was something that I started investing in heavily. So when I told you I was running a small agency with all that extra cash I wasn’t out buying Lamborghinis. I don’t even have a car. You know what I’m saying?
I live in a nice apartment, but this is eight years in, you know what I’m saying? I was taking that cash and I was spending it on building tools that I could use to sell more services. And one of those things was a proprietary audit that we use and we would just have an offshore VA run it. I would give him a list of people that we cross detected for off linkedin. Just like these guys, sto managers, that companies and we would run it for them for free and we would send it to them and just be like, Hey, look at I’m not here to sell you anything. Like, we just built this tool. It’s really cool. Nobody else is doing anything like it. I ran it for you, here’s the PDF report, take it or leave it and then just continuously follow up over the next six months. You know what I’m saying? Ask them if there’s anything else that they need help with, things along that line. So that was something that worked really well for me. So I’m gonna push on to the next slide. I Apologize Cause one quick question. Trevor said, what are the best high ticket industries to target?
I guess I don’t look at it like industry. I look at it more like function, which would be like ecommerce, B2B software. They’re all good man. I mean like it, I tend to skew more towards web-based businesses because they understood. So, for example, like an attorney office we have an attorney that does my God I think like half a billion a year in revenue, like something crazy. They’re one of our clients. But 60% of their spend still goes to at home, billboards, TV, radio, right? There’s still plenty of a budget for us to do SEO and some design work, but we want the whole pie, right? So I tend to skew more towards like an ECOM shot, like E-com. And when I say niche, you can niche down within that right to like, and I always suggest that especially when you’re first getting started, like find a niche within a niche, right?
If you want to go e-comm because you’ve got a good feel for it and not something that you enjoy doing, you got, you’ve gotten good results in the past, niched down into like, I don’t know, like fitness or like supplements. Find a niche within a niche that you can build a brand around and then expand upwards from there. But I, again, I tend to go with companies who are web based, e-commerce software companies. They understand that the power of the Internet, they’re an online company. They don’t care about anything offline and they’re going to put 100% of their budgets into online. So I don’t think about it as niche. I think about it more as function. But any of those, it, it’s, it’s, you’re good with those. That was actually perfect. And guys I know we’re going through a bunch of slides.
People are coming in and out. Which is cool. If you guys are awake, can you just do us a quick favor? Drop an 876 in the chat right now. Let’s fire up this chat. Eight 76. Beautiful. All you guys are awake. There we go. It’s a beautiful day here out in south Florida. So another big thing to consider is, is, is unique value and how you position yourself in the market. So you can look at someone like a Gary v who’s just built like a very powerful, like why would somebody, the way I look at this unique value is why would somebody want to pay you $50,000 a month? Right? But what is the unique value that you have as opposed to all the other competition? So you have to define what that is and how you can build that and scale it out.
Again, like a Gary v he’s an easy example to grasp, but he’s probably a terrible example at the same time because you’re just never going to get to his level. But it’s the same thing with me. I decided that I’m building, I hate to call it a personal brand, but using myself to market my company was a really good way to do that. And then people were willing to pay a premium to come and work and work with my company because they trusted me. Right? personal brands are really, really powerful. Agency branding to it takes a little bit longer. But a good example of this is on the right. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with Boston consulting group, it’s probably one of the biggest consulting groups in the, in the, in the world. They charge like $2,000 an hour for their time, something ridiculous.
And this matrix is something that they delivered, they call it the BCG maker Matrix. It’s really simple as you can see. But they were able to take this in brand. This another really good example actually is someone like Brian Dean who developed something called the skyscraper method for link building. Which now people like look at that as an industry standard type deal, right? So if you can develop something like that, people will absolutely be willing to come to you and pay a premium for that. So that’s what I have down here for proprietary deliverables. This BCG Matrix, it looks stupid, but it’s a proven platform for them to market and then stand on and deliberate, right? It works really well for them and they’ve made billions of dollars off of it. That little matrix right there in how software’s another really good one. Again, our agency now is developed something we call it the website quality audit where it’s a proprietary selling point for us.
It’s something that we can go out and pitch saying that like if you work with us, we build something that only we can run and you can only get that through us. So we’re almost like kind of a managed software that helps us get in the door with a big client either for like a trip wire, like just smaller agreements just to run that and then show them what we can do a and then up sell them longer work. But that works really well. And the final one is always proven results. Like if you just, if you’re just going out there and crushing it for everyone you work with people will pay for that. You know, at the end of the day, I said small businesses led results with big, big businesses too. They see the value in the process but ultimately they still want results and they want it in a bigger way too because they’re paying a lot more for it.
So this is a just a few ways that you can help yourself to do this. So put in the time I said this before to document your work, I’ve literally made a career out of this. I build side projects because I enjoy it, but I also do it because it’s the best way to mark in my agency because I know that when I take on a client, there’s certain things that I can and can’t talk about, right? A lot of the times clients want the results for themselves to look at, like to just make it look like they have an awesome business. So they’re not overly ecstatic about you going out there and talking about it. But something that we have on our agency now that we put a lot of time into is building out dedicated case studies on our website are our agents.
When I say our agency now, it’s ftf.agency that’s the URL. You guys can check it out if you want. But we have like 12 case studies up there now and we have a internal commitment to document to every month and add them to the website. These are a huge selling point for us and a huge selling point for any agency. Right? once you have that introduction, once you’ve pitched what you have, people want to see what you’ve done. So spend the time to document your case studies. It’s incredibly important. Powerful. another one is spending the time to build a reputation. These are some of the reviews that I have online. They don’t just show up there. I’ve actively gone out and solicited to people to go out and leave us reviews on Google. My business, again, Weber’s was the name of my old agency, just FYI.
It’s the, the name is stuck because we do so much traffic, but Facebook Google my business and then of course if you can, I’ve gone out and really solicited hard for video testimonials. They’re more for like my personal consulting and for my training course. But like, you know, there’s nothing that sells more than someone who’s willing to get on camera and talk about how awesome you are. I know it’s hard to do. It’s hard to get, but that’s why I say like you have to spend time to build these things. Your reputation is not just given to you. It’s built. It’s developed in more than anything it’s created. So it’s really important that you take the time to do that. This is something again that I built a career off is spending the time to build knowledge. Content is I again, I know people like Gary B are out there saying content, content, content, but it’s always taken out of context.
Content is something that, it’s not just blogging, it’s not just going on Instagram live. It’s taking the time to understand your customer’s journey and how you want to nurture them throughout the process. Content is the best way to reach people at the top of the funnel. It’s also the best way to push them through your funnel and make them want to give you that RFP. So I’ve gone out and done thing like get guests, put guest posting on the biggest blogs in the world. And if you can’t, right, pay someone $1,000 to do it cause they will do it for you. Another thing I found you on your probably one of your, I think when your videos on Youtube, the youtube, youtube has been another huge thing for me. We just hit like over a million views on youtube which is awesome.
And again, it gives me a scalable place to, to publish my thoughts, create content, document all these things, and they all just flow together. Right. Again, like understanding that, that path to getting that RFP is not going to be like, oh, I saw your video, I want to work with you. No, it’s, oh, I’ll go to a conference. They’re like, oh, I saw your video. That’s right. Let’s talk. You know what I’m saying? So like, understanding how content is not, it’s a nurturing process. It’s, it’s a long ongoing thing. And it’s incredibly important, especially when we’re talking about promoting it as well. So, which feeds into this, which is just a theory of mind of being everywhere at all times. I used to think that I was knowing people and now I just don’t give a shit. You know what I mean?
I, you can’t work with me if you don’t know who I am. It’s a fact. So create content in promoted hard. I know it takes budget. I know it takes time. If you don’t have the budget to advertise it, get active on core, get active on Reddit, get active in Facebook groups, start from the ground up, build traffic, build awareness, build reach. Incredibly undervalued things in a time where digital tracking everything has become return on ad spend, return on investment. A critically important, don’t get me wrong. But those are the same people who focus on that and they don’t understand the value of attention, reach awareness critically undervalued. And again, like you can’t get a return on ad spend for people who don’t know who you are. It’s just a fact. So as I said, content is just, it’s a critical part.
I call it my hypothesis. I have like a hypothesis about how I market, how I as the clients I use content to promote to, to build, communicate and promote my hypothesis on how I will help your business in its 100% of the reasons why I’m sitting here right now. There’s some questions coming in. Chad, do, what are they worth talking about? Do you want to keep pushing through? Can I steal your Emoji blog post idea? My Emoji blog post idea. The creative. I guess so, yeah. If you want, I mean creative’s incredibly important. Yeah. If you want to. Here’s [inaudible] came through says I’m Trevor asks on Facebook, he says, I know that a high ticket clients are often protected by gatekeepers are their great workarounds or great work arounds is often to find them on linkedin or Facebook and direct message and what’s a great lead message that we can send them to spark interest that that won’t get ignored.
I’m glad you asked that because that brings me into the slot. So number one, they’re actually not protected by gatekeepers. To me, it gatekeepers like a secretary and you’re thinking about trying again, trying to get in touch with the CEO. You’re not trying to do that. You’re trying to get in touch with the people who are actually really easy to get in touch with. You just have to know how to get in touch with them. And while I do believe in Linkedin as a prospecting tool, as a content creation tool, I don’t believe in it as a direct messaging tool. Because if you go to my linkedin Inbox, I have 8,000 messages from people who are just selling me stuff. And even when they’re like not selling me stuff, I know they’re trying to sell me stuff. It can work, don’t get me wrong, but like I, to me, it can work better at when, and we’re talking about doing this for mass.
Like if you have a piece of software for bloggers you can spread that net wide and get the little bit that will come in and that’s fine. You’ll get customers from it, you’ll be profitable. But if we’re talking about trying to get high ticket clients, the market again is so much smaller. We’re talking about a fraction of the market. You don’t really want to just be spamming out, blasting them. You’ll just not only not get their attention, but if you do get their attention, they’ll never, didn’t let their never hear from you again in the future. So and this is a little bit of a juxtaposition juxtaposition cause it says that foot first bullet point here says you need to aggressively pursue your target clients. But let me explain that for a second. So basically what that means is that inbound marketing is not enough.
Creating content is not enough. You need to go out and pursue them. And this is something that our agency is doing now. We’ve relied so heavily on inbound leads because of the content that I create. My business partner and the CEO, he’s really well known in the space as well. People just come to us because they want to work with us. But that’s taken us to, you know, six, 7 million in revenue, but we want to get to 50 to get to 50. We’re in the process of building like a very aggressive sales team. When I say aggressive, that doesn’t mean we’re picking up the phone and, and Wolf of Wall Street calling people. It means that we’re building a sales process. We’re building the right way to get into, to prospect and find the people that we want. So again, going out and manually finding a list of a thousand marketing managers at the companies that we think we can help, and then figuring out the best way that we can get in touch with them and get their attention.
So I’m gonna give you an example right now. Demandware is, so when I talked about when you asked about niche, and I study commerce. Demandware is a CMS just like wordpress, but it’s only free commerce and it’s really, really expensive and really advanced. We’re talking about like, you know, 100,000 products that up. So I know that anyone who uses demandware has a lot of money. They make a lot of money and they need a really good marketing agency. Without a doubt. You’re not doing that in house at that point. So we built a little crawler. There’s, so there’s a, there’s a platform called built with which allows you to see, see whatever website you’re on. It tells you a ton of stuff about like IP address, but it will also tell you the websites built. So if it’s on wordpress, it’s on wix.
If it’s on demandware they have an API and API allows you to extract that out and put in something else. So we basically we had built a crawler, a webcrawler in Hadoop before. We basically cannot combine that technology with that API and we’re just constantly crawling, looking for websites, running on demandware. Right. so now we have a list of websites that run on demand where that are 100% our target audience, no questions asked. And this can be the same thing for like I wouldn’t go wordpress cause it’s too broad. But there’s other seeing messages that do this too. You know, I don’t know. Like, I don’t know, maybe like big commerce or something like that. That’s probably a bad example. But same thing, right? So we crawled these websites, we got all these emails we’ve got, we then cross check that against Linkedin to like make sure that we have the right person that is like a marketing manager and not just you know, the CEO or a secretary.
We want to get the marketing manager. So now I’ve got a huge list of the marketing managers contacts at these companies, right? I put together a really, really informative and in depth blog posts. This is why I don’t mind telling you the strategy cause I know that none of you are going, no offense, then you’re going to write a blog post that’s as good. So basically what it is, it’s, it’s a blog post that talks about really in depth demand where SEO issues. So I know because we’ve worked with the men where we have clients that run on demand where that it’s a really difficult platform for SEO. There’s issues with like canonical tags pagination fascinating, like all sorts of technical issues with it. So I wrote a really in depth blog posts. You guys can again, check it out on our website.
If you just Google demand where SEO it ranks first. Thank you. And you can check it out to see what I’m talking about. Just while we’re going through this, but then I just put that together, wrote it up, publish it. Obviously it’s not that simple. It took me like two months to gather that information and then I sent them this email. So I’m just going to read it to you guys so you can see it. It says, Hey Stephanie, this is the name of the person at that company. The marketing manager says we’ve never met before. So apologies for the random outreach. My name is Ryan Stewart. I’m a partner at from the future. We’re a technical SEO and UX agency with offices in Philly and Miami. So basically right there, what I’m telling those, I’m asserting a little bit of authority. I’m telling them what we do, that we have two officers, blah, blah, blah, so then I just get right into it.
Demandware is a great platform for a company like yours, but as you may or may not know, there’s a lot of funky issues when it comes to SEO. Through the work with clients who run demand, where we’ve seen and fixed it all, I can pile them into this short blog posts. You can link to it here, check it out. That’s it. No call to action. Just wanted to offer up to see if it would help in any way. Have a great day. That’s the outbound page, right? That’s the way that I’m finding those people connecting with them in a very, very kind of like, Hey, I’m not trying to sell you anything way. Here’s a blog post. Now, the beauty of this too, now if you’re not sure if you’re a true marketer like myself, what we did is we then set up a pixel on that page, a URL specific, a rule within Facebook that anytime someone goes to that page, we then have a remarketing ad.
That remark gets them a little bit more of a sales offer. A video of our agency shows all the people really dope video that says the title is where demand, where experts. So after anyone goes to that page, and it’s not just through this outreach now to, if you Google it again, it ranks for demand where SEO, so anyone coming to that page, now that search is highly qualified. That page is a sales page in itself. They just don’t know it because anytime after that they’re getting remarketed. That ad that tells them we’re demand, we’re experts in, it has a link to a form to contact us. That aside, this email we then follow up with a week later that just says if they click this link, we know that they saw it, they were somewhat interested in it. It says if they click that link, send them a followup email that asks them if they wanna if they have any questions, if they want to, you know, just like have their team pick our team’s brain free of three of costs.
So I’m like gradually, gradually, gradually, again, we’re talking about a long sales process here. Even after that call. Again, like at that point, if they accept that call, which is low, probably like a 2% success rate. They know, they know that we have to offer, right. So again, this is kind of answering that question from before about how do you do this the right way to me, this is how you do it the right way. I’m not just blasting you on Lincoln’s linkedin like everyone else saying, hey, we’re demand, we’re SEO experts. Like, no you’re not. You know?
I think one piece just to add something also, because I see it a lot with new users and baskets and stuff, so everybody’s all about like doing things in like such volume and they’re just trying to blast out and do like kind of like a shotgun approach versus what I like to do. And, and, and any good marketer would know that is to do with kind of like what you’re doing here is a sniper approach, right? Where you know you’re, you know, exactly you’re trying to market, you’re taking the time to craft like the blog posts that you said it took you two months, you’re taking the time to find the information, scrape the information, segmented, organize it, set up the follow ups, like going through and actually doing all of that versus just buying the list and just emailing a million people saying, hey, you want to get some SEO?
I do SEO just like every other person and every other like Indian person that tends to be 50 emails to my email every single day talking about how they’re going to change my website. I mean, I get emails, it’s talking about, hey, we can help improve your SEO and we’re freaking SEO company, right? So it’s like, it’s like they, obviously we, we’ve done it in the past. We know how it works. We know, you know, we all know how to send email bosses and stuff like that. Right? We’ve automated things where a software company to write, but like that shit, that shit doesn’t work. This doesn’t, right. It doesn’t, it’s a busy time as what it is. Yeah. Just put some strategy behind it, man. And and that’s, that’s like, that’s what a Ryan shown you here, man. Just, you guys need to put a little bit of strategy. Can you guys, do you guys agree with me? Can you drop a 48 in the chat if you guys think that putting strategy behind it and kind of using the sniper approach is better than using a shotgun approach. Just drop a four 88 in the chat so we can hear and guys, don’t make me go into the panel thing and call you out. You’ve got to engage with us. Y’all before 88 in the chat.
Do you want me to go into panelists? All right, let’s pull up the panelists. There we go. 48 48. Alright, cool. We got to make sure that you guys are awake. Four 88 the chassis chatted blown up. All right, cool. All right, let’s keep rolling.
So that’s part one. That’s how to attract him. Now we’re going to talk about how to close them. So this is something again that I see a lot of is people don’t spend enough time on the proposal. Again, that’s fine for small businesses. When you have highly volume, you’re sending out 20 proposals a week, use a template, change some things, that’s fine, you’ll have a standard success rate. But again, just as Chad said when we’re talking about something much bigger where the market is much smaller, you’ve got to really take your time with these things. Something that I always is I have it here as a console call, but really it’s a discovery call. I make them fill out a discovery form and I will literally spend like 30 to an hour of my time digging into their business and just giving them like the best piece of like I want to sell them on me first.
I want them to understand that I know as much as they do and I care about their business and I care about solving their problems. So I do that, I take my time with that. Then me and my team get on a whiteboard and we will start to map out, I call them the top 10. What I like to do is build a list of top 10 opportunities for that business and for that website. It’s mainly SEO, but a lot of it’s UX to, you know, improving conversions. Just basically how we can come in and solve their problems for them right away. So we’ll list out the issues and then how we can fix them. Right. And then just quoting them based off that. It’s pretty simple. But it does take a lot of work. It’s almost like doing the free strategy.
It’s called Spec work in the advertising world. Like I said, I used to work in a big advertising agency and I remember I was like 22 years old. I was working on a pitch for universal studios and it was, we built them basically a full functioning app, just a pitch that work cause the contract was like 6 million bucks. We lost the work too in like amount of time and effort that went into it. That was like, it was like heartbreaking. You know what I mean? But if you want to play it, that’s the price of admission, you know? It’s in a bigger gets the more these companies expect they are going to because they swing such big budget, they command that and they want to, you know, if you’re paying 6 million bucks to, you want to see exactly where you gonna get as well.
So you’ve got to do it and it sucks. And our team always complains about it, but that’s just, again, that’s the, the, the price of admission here. So something that I like to also suggest is initially you go deep and not wide. So what I mean by that is focus on hyper focus on specific issues that you’re super, super good at. These big companies, they’re not sole sourcing your contract to one agency. I would imagine that target probably has like a hundred different agencies that they’re managing an anxiety. So you have to understand that they’re not looking for someone to come in and solve all of their problems. They’re looking for someone to come in and solve specific problems. Once you get in the door. Again, I keep using the word trip wire. If you guys aren’t familiar with the triple our products, it’s like an old school Ryan dice Internet marketing tactic where it’s like he wants to sell you $1,000 product, but he’s going to get you to pay for a $5 product first.
Because once you open that wallet, you see like when you pay for something, you’re actually going to consume it. So he knows that if you pay five bucks, you’re gonna read what he wants and he’s going to sell you in that part. Right? It’s the same thing with selling services. You don’t have to get in and get $100,000 contract upfront. You can get in for $1,000, do something that you do very, very well and then up sell the rest of it on that. You know what I’m saying? Let’s go up the value ladder. Yeah, there you go. Call called all sorts of different things, but it’s tried and true and it works. So again, these people are looking for experts that can help them solve specific problems. And you can outpitch your competitors by offering really high value items that just fold really well into what you’re doing.
So like an example is if you do link building think outside the box, you know, to pitch influencer marketing as well. You know what I’m saying, not just the same thing that you know, everyone else pitching something that you know, you can go very deep on and help them solve a lot of these problems. So that was a quick one and I just want to get into, again, I’m going to wrap this up cause I do want to get into Q and a, but how to deliver the work, this to me is something that’s always undervalued. By agencies. A lot of people want to sell and not, you know, focused on their operations. But at the end of the day, your service is your product. That’s the most important thing. Marketing is not hard. Everyone here probably knows marketing just as well as I do. But I’d be willing to bet what I know better. And the reason why me and chatter sitting here is cause we figured out how to scale it. Right? we understand that it’s not just about, you know, ranking for a keyword. It’s about how you manage the entire business. And so much of that is process. So it’s really key. Demo slides.
Just let it load. If not, I’ll just freestyle. So basically what the slide is going to talk about once it loads is the importance of process in your business and specifically with your agency. So there’s different levels of process, right? When I say process, I mean your keyword research that the person alluded to should have a process. We use standard written slps. Now I hate to put in a plug in a sales pitch here your, but if anyone out there does do SEO, the blueprint training is we give you all of our slps step by step training videos. It’s literally an agency in Boston said to get it out there. But everything is documented. And that was my job to do that. When I first started, I knew that like, you know, I, my time could only go so far and if I was going to get to the next level, my people had to take over for me.
And the only way that I could do that, the only way to, to fix that knowledge gap was to take what I had in my head and give it to them. And that’s not being able to, you know, each one of us as individuals has something that’s specially each of us, right? I can’t take over. I can’t give them my gifts, just like they can’t give me their gift. But what I can give them is a process to approach it and solve it there with, right. So process means giving them a documented approach, giving them the right template and then letting them think creatively and strategically to figure it out and improve on it, on their own. Part of that is hiring, but most of that is training and giving your employees the best way to succeed. So the other part of that too is it’s not just about your deliverables, it’s also about the in between things.
So when I say the image between things you know, I do a lot of agency consults and one of the first things that I ask people is I say, run me through your whole process from the time that you find the client that you want to work with to the, till your selling process to your contract process, your onboarding process. And a lot of people are like, well, we don’t, we send them an email. Like onboarding is one of those things that needs a process. Everything needs to be defined from start to finish to even to when a client is leaving, right? When a client leaves, that doesn’t mean they’re leaving. It means the contract is up and they will come back if you treat that the right way. So everything from onboarding to affording project management, account management, how do you structure your meetings?
Like, if you go into a client call with a huge fortune 100 enterprise client and you don’t have a meeting set up ahead of time, you’re as good aspired. Right? So everything from how you approach your meetings to your internal communications, everything needs to be documented. It’s unfortunate that these things aren’t loading cause there were a couple of other things in there, but oh, let me see if I can do it. This one. Okay, perfect. Yeah. Yep. So as I mentioned, there’s a level of communication that larger contracts require and so much of that is offset with prostitues onboarding, meeting schedules, project planning, all that stuff will make or break the relationship. And the last thing is just quality too. I said this is kind of like a chicken and an egg process here where how can you do quality work if you don’t have the big clients?
Well, once you have one of those clients, even if they’re a small client, even it’s a free client, do that work to the best of your ability. Your reputation is determined by the quality of your work. And your referrals that will come in that will eventually get you to the way to the clients that we’re talking about will be directly correlated to the quality of your work. There is nothing more important than the work you produce initially. And even more importantly, as you grow in scale, that means there’s nothing more important than the people that you hire in how you treat your people, the culture that you create. It’s so funny because when I first started again, like it was all about scaling you know, doing the good SEO work, getting results. And now as I go up to Philly once or twice a month my job is to drive demand Gen for the company, but it’s also to make sure that my employees are as happy as they can possibly be because I know that if one of those people leave somebody that we’ve invested two years of training in, they know everything, they’re comfortable, they’re happy all that stuff, then it’s a huge detriment to the business.
Like we’re letting a piece of our product walk out the door every time we lose an employee. So you have to invest in that employee happiness, all these things, your deliverables. It takes time. It takes attention and it takes care. It’s not something that’s given. And that’s it. As I said, one final plug here. Everything, if you have an age SMU agency, you can go to the website and just determine it for yourself. It’s worth it for you. But it’s the blueprint.training. That’s my plug and a shout if you want, if you’ve got any questions now, I’d love it.
Yeah, let’s, let’s run through some Q and a guys and definitely guys now would be the time to drop it all your questions. We’ll go through them one by one. So angel said, where is the border for you between low ticket client and high ticket client? I guess broadly speaking, like money-wise.
So again that’s, that’s all relative. It would be. That would be for you to determine, but for me personally low, like I’ll be, we won’t entertain anyone that doesn’t come to us with they have to commit to 8,000 a month over 12. We’ll do some contract work, but it’s usually around like 15 minimum over like three months type deal. Cool. That’s our threshold.
Awesome. We’ve got some more questions. So Andrew said when starting out as a brand new agency, should I go in house outsource white label to grow as quickly as possible? So I mean, my obviously my 2 cents on that I’ll just drop in here is we have dashboard side Z, which is a completely white labeled fulfillment center. And that’s, we can pretty much do any work from SEO to Facebook ads. Oh, we’re full screen now. I forgot about them. Sorry. Now I just really, where are we for a second? But yeah. So everybody has, everybody has different opinions on it. I’ve spoken about it. Tons. I’ve gotten into debates in our Facebook group of over people about it. Which is why I wanted to jump in and share my 2 cents and then Ryan out so you can share your story.
But it’s, it depends on the size of your business, right. And I’ll tell you why. We have very small businesses that are startups that you might not know how to do SEO, you might not, not to do Facebook ads, Google ads, you might not be web designer. Your bad ass sales person, right? Dan shoots is perfect for you because you can go out and do your sales thing, drop them into dashboards, and then just focus really mainly on project management, right? However, even if you look at it from a larger company, because we do, we do a lot of work for really large agencies. And I’m talking about agencies that have a hundred plus employees where they want to go and they don’t want to deal with opening a Facebook ads department, right? They specialize in web design and SEO or Google ads and that sort of thing.
They don’t want to do Facebook ads, right? So they’ll trust us to be their Facebook ads outsourced department. Right? So it’s whether you’re a small company, whether you’re a big company, you can outsource, but it also depends on tons of different variables. Right? like Ryan was speaking at earlier, speaking on earlier, do you want to be the two? You want to be the company that’s got 50 employees, is that what you want? Right? You might not want that. You might want to, you might want to be in Hawaii chilling on your laptop, living a laptop lifestyle and being able to manage 40 or 50 clients and not have to do any of the work and not have to worry about getting office space and hiring and HR and payroll. And there’s a lot with running a company like our size, the size of the companies that me and Ryan run.
There’s a lot, think about doing payroll for 30 people and we’re not talking about 30 people in the Philippines and we’re talking about 30 people here in the United States, in our office that are highly qualified marketing experts and they get paid a shit ton, right? So imagine what that payroll check looks like and then equate that to the amount of clients that you need to intake on an ongoing basis to be able to level that out to still become profitable. Right? So there’s a lot of equations that go into this and also talking about like processes and protocols. Like you can go out and you can create all that stuff on your own or you could just go to dash list and really just focused on front end sales and let us do everything else for you to be your fulfillment center, your software hub, your platform for your clients log into like literally everything all rolled up in one.
So that’s just my 2 cents on it. Plus also processes like stuff like, like I know you said something about like onboardings how crucial onboardings are, right? We know that because we’ve been doing onboardings for 10 years to the point where we build in dash clicks an entire onboarding center that automates the entire process for you. It asks the exact questions that we need per service that you’re actually selling. And we have injected smart form technology where some things are required, some things will actually read and check if somethings a valuable source. There’s tons of stuff that happens and it automates the whole process, sends it to your client. Sometimes you’ll send onboarding docs to your client and it might take two weeks for them to fill out. We have an automation process that emails them daily, every day at 9:00 AM est their time. That lets them know, hey, your onboarding docs or your onboarding doc should do.
Right? Because we went through the whole process and we understand that if nobody’s reminding them to fill out the onboarding docs, the project gets pushed back. We waste our employees time calling them every day trying to get the onboarding docs for that. Like we, we’ve already went through all of those processes and automated everything so you don’t have to worry about stuff like that. Right. So Phillip said, dcs. Great. Thanks man. But yeah, there’s, there’s, there’s tons of different approaches that you can take. Ryan, I’ll let you jump into and we’ll give you a two sentence.
Yeah, no, I mean, I agree with that. I actually made them like, I think that there’s, there’s a lot to be said for like, I’m all about speed. I’m all about getting things done, but there’s something to be said about patients and in growing responsibly. And I think part of that is, especially if it’s your first time as an entrepreneur, like not knowing how to balance finances, HR operations, service delivery, sales, marketing, like it’s a lot. And when you start adding in different services, you’re talking about basically starting a new business within your business. I made the mistake early on of hiring a Facebook ads expert. Luckily she was amazing and she converted very well to SEO. But you know, I realized when I did that that I was slowing down my overall business growth by trying to go wide instead of deep. So I’m a big fan, especially getting started of, of going deep.
And then as Chad said, either building strategic relationships or passing it to someone else and taking a cut. Like there, there, there’s a million things you can do that without kind of like putting your business in jeopardy. So like I would say most of the, most of the time, especially until you’re ready to get to that point, like for example, we’re six, $7 million agency now and we’re just getting ready to start introducing paperclick and it’s like a big thing, you know, it’s not easy. You know, we’ve been outsourcing it for the longest time. And not white labeling it too. I mean, I think the difference between outsourcing and white labeling is is up to you. But either way, I think you focus on what you do best until you’re super good at it and you’ve got enough margin for you to invest in getting the right people in place to, to help you out because there’s just too much going on to just start a new business within your business. You can tank the other line of business as well. Yeah, sure.
And I know that for a fact because we have multiple departments, just like Ryan said, it’s like multiple businesses inside of the business, right? We have multiple people running Facebook ads, multiple people running, Google ads, website developers, designers, content writers, people who just post on social media. And these guys, that’s all they do, right? Facebook ads department, they just come in and they run Facebook ads all day. We even have our Facebook ads apartment broken up into specific strategies. We have the strategy person that does strategy, right? We have the, the, the the Bilbao person who does all the build out for like the funnels that we’re running and build out to the campaign. We have a maintenance department that does all the maintenance of actually like optimizing the campaign efforts. So there’s like a whole process and a whole science to this stuff.
Right. So let’s go cause we’ve got a bunch of other questions coming in. So let’s say I have not asked if a client only sign for short term contract of three months. Do you approach a meeting at the three months, three month mark, like a new closing meeting, bring them all the results you’ve gotten for them to try and close on a longer contract? So yeah. So basically saying, if I got a three month contract and it’s up do I go back to them and try to sign them up for another three month contracts? Should I hit him for 12 months? What should I do there?
So for me specifically when working with larger clients no you don’t want to wait till they don’t want to wait that long. To me what you should be doing is like, again, you sign a three month contract as a trip wire. You should be, this is why, again, why it does, it doesn’t have to be hours, but some sort of management system. So you don’t go out of scope. Like you’re going to find additional problems whenever you’re working on a business. Instead of fixing them for free, being like, Hey, we found, you know, you really need content, let’s, we’ll just do that. You should be continuously bringing that to their attention and almost kind of like nagging them about it being like, you know, there’s massive opportunities for you to create content on your website. We can handle that for you. But like, we’re going to have to rescope so you should be continuously upselling lot along the line.
We actually just went through a deep training for our account managers who are on all the client calls to start documenting upsell opportunities and starting to have that conversation with them to then pass it back to our, to our sales team. It’s a big mistake to wait until the contract is up because if you don’t do a good job along the line too, because the scope wasn’t big enough for you to have an impact it’s too late. And not to mention too, they’re not gonna sign a contract on the day the contract is done. It’s gonna take another couple of months. You’re going to lose revenue. So it’s something that you should be considered continuously looking for problems in ways that you can fix them. And just continuously upselling. Another reason why I like ours, because if you’re on the hours models and these things, it’d be like, it’s an extra 20 hours a month for us to, you know, handle your content.
Well, we got another question from David Davidson. What is what has been the most effective lead generation for enterprise clients for you? A referrals. That’s kind of shitty answer, but it’s, it’s, it’s actually on point because the same for us, like the big clients that we have, they were referred to us. Yeah. And referrals are the best. Those are like the, the highest close rate. Like anything that you can get because they’re coming from somebody who’s speaking great about you, who, who has used you, who can vouch for you. Right. And that’s what people are looking for in this world. Just like anything, right? Think about like Amazon and Google, like reviews. Like why did, why do people leave reviews? Why is, why is there a whole review system? Right? So that’s like the referrals is like bypassing all of that shit and it’s just like, this guy’s perfect.
He does. Our SEO is amazing. We’ve worked with them for two years. Here’s his number. You have a really high, high chance of closing that person, right? Yeah. So referrals are awesome. All right. So question, in your experience, how big does your client need to be in order to be paying for the strategy upfront or consulting? So basically we get this question pretty frequently in dashboards. Should I be charging for that upfront strategy or should I be doing it for free? Strategies sometimes takes a shit long time, right? You want to go scan, go and do your, like I know you said sometimes just spend like a half hour to an hour going through that, right. And building up your top 10 list. So that’s definitely I’ll ask that question. That’s definitely something that maybe you can do if you want to devote an hour of your time, I’ll just do that. But I personally, my opinion, I wouldn’t do like a, I wouldn’t waste more, I don’t think more than it depends also on the size of the contract. Right. And that’s another thing, right? If you’re talking about like a $500 client who wants you to do like a whole strategy and create like a 50 page pdf, it’s not gonna happen.
Yeah, no, I agree with that. I like the bigger, that just general rule of thumb, the bigger the client, the more work you’re gonna have to do up front because if you don’t like that’s what everyone else is doing, you know? But like we co we actually do have like a kind of a standard proposal pitch template. For like we, I lied. We will take on a client at like five k a month for SEO. If it’s like a standard SEO retainer like that we can follow like kind of a standard process throughout. We’re getting away from them just because again, like those don’t upsell well. Like those people just want that and that’s it. We’re looking more for people who we can like, again, like up sell from 10 K to 500 k over time. Right. but you know, it depends on your age. It just depends on a lot. Like I, I like, I would say like against small clients, no, you shouldn’t you like, definitely don’t charge them.
That’s great for them up front. Just send them a credit card authorization form. Exactly. That’s, that’s the to just send them a little love note with a credit card authorization form and said, hey, we ran the website speed test and your website’s not fast enough when did this? Now I’m just kidding. All right. Any other questions guys? Before we wrap this up? Just go ahead and drop them in the chat right now. Angel said, where do you see Facebook in three to five years from now? Like a platform for advertising changes in general. So where do you feel like the Facebook advertising thing in three to five years? I Dunno, man, that question for me, I just can’t answer that. I see that daily and I see it because of our Facebook ads department. Maybe not daily, but gradually Facebook ads are beginning to increase in price, right?
Like kind of like a reverse, like 10 years back, you’re running Google paper click ads for 50 cents, 20 cents a click, where now it’s like $50 a click, right? Don’t run a Google pay per click ad for an attorney, for personal injury attorney. It’s like $50 a click. Right? We’re back in the day, it used to be like 20 cents, a dollar a click, right? So as more and more people use it, kind of like the supply and demand method, more and more people are gonna start using it. And it’s crazy to, it’s crazy to think, but so many people are using Facebook and so many people are advertising on Facebook, but still not enough people, I don’t think. I think that like in three to five years, like you said, it’s going to be like oversaturated, like Google ads. So if you’re running ads right now you better run as run them as fast as you can because I know like over the months that we’re going, we see kind of like a medium between all the ad accounts that we have.
The prices are going up slowly and gradually. It’s not like tomorrow we’re going to wake up and your dollar click is now $10 a click. That might happen in like a year or two years from now. Right. So that’s just my opinion on Facebook ads and where they’re going. Now I’m saying how do you find an approach? SAS Companies? Same thing I just did right? Just watch a replay now. Maybe you came in a little late and that’s cool. There’ll be a replay up. It’s on our marketer’s mindset Facebook group and it’ll also be up on our youtube channel. Al Said I just had a four hour workshop and included sessions on training. I’ve got a client out of out of it and wanted to pay for strategy. Example. I wanted to take the time to figure out where his opportunities are before jump just jumping in.
So I think what he’s saying is he spent four hours doing like a whole kind of consultation and audit. That’s what I’m understanding. Kind of like a workshop for them and then trying to upsell them from there. If that’s it, I don’t really understand the question, but that’s cool too. I don’t see a question mark. Yeah. Well, Tim said what is your hiring process to find the best people to do SEO for you? Oh man, that’s like a whole business in itself. HR. I’m going to be honest with you, man. Hiring like I actually watched like a really good Gary v video where he talked about like how anyone who claims to be like a hiring expert is full of shit. Because like first of all, especially local people, like you don’t know what you’re going to get from a resume. You just don’t, I lied on all my resumes resumes, to be honest with you.
I actually take people, I sit them in front of my computer. I’m like, let’s, let’s that account really quick. Yeah, that’s, that’s really smart. I mean, I don’t hire, I again, like I know what I do well, I tend to focus on marketing and sales and growing in big business strategic decisions. That’s why I have partners out to handle this type of stuff. Not a skill set of mind. Yeah, HR is tricky. I think one thing with dashboards is we’re kind of turning into like this like monster of an HR company. Because of the scale and the growth we need to hire as fast as, right. So we’re always hiring and going through like we have a whole HR room. Just all we’re doing is just interviews, interviews, interviews, all day. And just going through that cycle of interviewing a hundred people and finding that one diamond in the rough, right, sure.
That they’re a good fit for you and vice versa. Right. So hiring is pretty hard and that’s also, and I’m just going to be straight up, I’m not trying to sell ourselves, but I think that’s the value of Dash. It’s not having to even deal with that. You can literally wake up tomorrow morning, sell Facebook ads campaign, not have to worry about anything. Just drop it straight into dash list and just go on with your day. That’s it. So I’ll say, okay, so you said, sorry for the confusion. It was a followup to the first question just to say, just to say that there’s a market for strategy. The workshop was open to a lot of small businesses. Absolutely. Absolutely. I have workshops once a year just cause it’s 50 grand cash in my pocket.
Like events, local events, workshops, shit that you can throw, like absolutely. Yeah. Can you scale a das quiz? I’m gonna say 100% because we have companies that are in the escalates that are scaling right now. Like literally as we speak today, they’re scaling. Like yesterday there was scans. Yes. And the reason why, and it’s not just me saying yes, the reason why behind it is just kind of what I spoke about a second ago, right? You don’t really need to worry about HR. You don’t need to worry about getting an office space, buying more equipment, computers. Like you don’t need to think about any of the things that are regular business would have to deal with as you open up this new business and a business, right. And a new department or as what happens right now. And I like to use this example a lot.
Sometimes you don’t just sell SEO, right? What happens right now if you speak to somebody, they’re like, hey, we need SEO, we need Facebook ads, we need to do glides and we need a new website where we are just, we just fired our last company. They were doing all that for us. We need somebody to do everything. What if you’re just a web designer, right? When you can not just be a web designer, right? And you can build their website and then you can use dashboards for all the other stuff and just manage your project, right? So as long as you’re a good salesperson and somewhat of a decent project manager, that suits is a perfect fit for you. And you can use this to scale out as fast as you want, right? It’s up to you. Just more sales. You get Jamie said. Absolutely. Thank you Jamie.
And he saw your business, but Kevin asked, I think a lot of concern is relying on an entire business on outsourcing the dash licks. How do you sell your business based on this so I’m a s I’m assuming the question is can I scale or should I have to worry about outsourcing?
Yeah. So people are firing off a shit ton of messages. Yeah. If you want to maybe ask that again and sorry, just, I didn’t really understand the question too much or we can answer that for you. And Natalie said, what’s a realistic goal of scaling with Dash rates? Assuming you’re using $500 a month into site strategy? A cold email phone console. Yeah, so insights. I’m Brian if you’re not familiar with that, it’s Society’s our web tool that we built. It’s a platform that we use for prospecting. You can go in there and we have tons of templates that are industry specific. You can just fill out a form, literally press submit and our system will actually go out and build you an entire website in five seconds and also automatically send the client an SMS and an email notification. So you guys are watching right now. It’s called insights. It’s actually available in dashboards and you can go get it right now.
Natalie, what I would do is we did like a whole two and a half hour webinar on like the strategies that we take. Also, we have our dash accelerator course that we’re dropping on Monday, which is a $2,200 course that we did lie those 12 day bootcamp, 13 day boot camp that we did lied that we have the recordings. Those recordings are going to be out on Monday. And you can get them on Monday just if that’s something that you want, just open up your dashes account, open a live chat and just say add me to the list and we’ll get you on the waiting list for that. And on Monday we’ll blast it out to everybody there.
All right, so Kevin’s back. Kevin said can you build a profitable business and then potentially sell it, assuming your staff is outsourced via dash clicks in my opinion, I would also say yes to that because it’s based on the accounts that you have. It doesn’t necessarily, especially like, and maybe even Ryan, you can touch on this a little bit too, cause you Kinda just did that, right? I think Ryan, you sold to another agency, right? If I’m not gonna say yes, even if even if you didn’t have, let’s say the 10 employees that we’re going to go with you to the other agency. I don’t know if they did or did it. It’s the reason they’re buying you is mainly for the accounts for the most part, right. Actually no. So like, yeah, we had, we had, so like the reason why they wanted to buy us was our process actually. Oh, there you go. Okay, cool. There’s a couple of, I have another really good blog posts on my personal blog about selling an agency if you’re interested.
I kind of detailed the different reasons why. Another, like if you’re going to sell, you’re going to sell to an agency or you’re going to sell to a big company who like you do something, your company does something very, very well, like really, really good e-comm marketing and they want to bring your team in house. Aside from that though, you’re going to sell it to another agency. It’s either going to be because your book of business, your process or your staff or the software that you, you know, ain’t just about some high level information today for little fish like me. Very nice. Thanks guys. Cool man. We’re glad to. I’m glad to share some info with you. All right. I think we’re pretty much done for the most part. Wait, hold on one second. Charles said in response to having the right to charge a high ticket price when would you say you’ve earned the right to charge high ticket? Like AK Month?
Yeah, I can answer that. I think it’s a combination of things. I think you just kind of know because you’re continuously, like you don’t just go from two K to eight K or eight K to 20 k. You’re continuously improving the quality of an output of your work. Also your expenses go up because you have more employees, so you kind of have to charge more. And you’re charging more because those people are doing better work. The results, your reputation. There’s, there’s a lot of things. And again, it’s not something that happens overnight. We’re talking about years of work to, to, to continuously move up. You know, I wanted to do this. I knew that most of you guys were younger agencies. I wanted to do this because I think it’s important for you to have a roadmap for where you want to go. And even for us, like we’re not a big eight, like we’re still like small fish in a really large pond in terms of being agencies. So we have a roadmap to get to 100 million that we’re looking at it webinars just like this on how to get to $100 billion. Cause it’s a whole nother strategy to do that. But it’s really, really important that you’re thinking you’re planning about these things before it’s too late really because it’s really hard to make changes in your business the later it is so awesome. Well, I think quite possibly the best a lot of you have done today to appreciate all the value. Awesome. Thanks John. I was ever going to ask just before known links, videos, walk me through the process and the funnel. Yeah, I’m Alan or glossier. Your question on Dasha it’s about like how to use everything. I guess the best thing to do with just log in your dashes account and open up a live chat and just scheduled, call it somebody from our dash connecting. They’ll walk you through the entire process. I’ll demo the popcorn for you to do everything with you. So that’s pretty much it. I know time is pretty much a up here at the end of time. Ryan, I want to thank you so much for joining us today, brother. I really appreciate it man. I know you’re down in south Florida.
I love to get to get together with you sometime after. But thank you so much. You just came in, drop some bombs on everybody. We can we get like a 500 in the chat for Ryan real quick. 500 in the chat. Thank you. I had to get, he’s across the board from all over the world, man. But yeah, we appreciate it. And Ryan I guess if they want to just reach out to you, where’s, what’s the best way I, you had some of your social media handles up earlier. Yeah, Instagram’s probably the best one. That’s where I’m like kind of making my focal point. It’s Ryan was here. Youtube is also good. You can just Google my name, Ryan Stewart and you’ll find my all my shit. So I’m definitely connect men for sure. I’m active on all those places, so awesome man. Well thank you once again guys. Thank you guys for joining us on another awesome episode. And once again, if you’re watching this live in the, you’re on social media, Hashtag lied you’re watching the replay. Hashtag replay if you’re watching on youtube, hit the subscribe button so you can get more videos like this and grow that brain ears and like video comment, like the video comment on the video. Share the video with your friends. We’d love you guys. We’ll see you guys next time. Thanks Ryan. Have a great one man. Alright. Alright, bye guys.