from 60 to 240k per year I'm sure most of you watching this video would be very happy to quadruple your business and I think you'd be surprised that the roadblocks that are actually holding you back are pretty easy to spot and quite simple to fix now my name is Liam and I help service-based businesses land more clients with less effort and we've helped hundreds of business owners do that in the last two years and in this video I want to show you some Snippets of a live Consulting cord that I had with Mr G Dylan who is the perfect example of a hardworking underpaid agency owner with some of the most common problems that I see our clients facing so look how can you get the most out of this video taking the time to listen to some of our conversation today is going to help you spot some of the problems that are holding your business back but the key to all of this is action in what you learn from this video now for context I've been working with G for over 4 weeks now and I'll continue to share update videos if I think that you're going to find them helpful and relevant and today we're specifically looking at what he's been doing and where he needs to go to reach his goal of 240k per year so with that said let's get into it I've had my excuse for two weeks of eating and drinking so I've got no excuse now just back to it for you I want to simplify an offer but make it way more valuable than it already is understand who we can actually go and sell that to where they'll exist online and what they're going to pay for it right so the way we do that is we spend these first couple of weeks really figuring out like who that ideal client is um and if we don't do that we end up in a position where you're in now where you're kind of looking at everyone coming to you you're saying yes to different things and you're like do doing all these things but you're a master of none of them and by the way the position you're in is like the position that 99% of agency owners are in every every person I speak to has the same problem it's like uh I'm not charging enough and I'm doing so much work I don't understand how to scale this business it doesn't make any sense like if I said to you you're gonna land 10 clients tomorrow in the same format that you're running right now you'd probably be like oh [ __ ] no really I want to know what to do where to start you be like where who do I kind of prioritize and then I've got my existing clients you think and you think it's just and it just get it's getting a bit repetitive I think some of it's it's just not exciting any I can do it some of it but then it's like yeah I'll go do some Facebook ads [ __ ] anymore that means you're not getting paid enough that's what it is oh yeah that's the other thing as well if I was getting paid three times more then I would probably would get very excited about it but nothing there at the moment so what I want to do today is obviously we have the the growth system and we use it as kind of a framework for not only our business but all of the clients that we work with um as well as you know helping you guys actually use this on your own business too so the first sort of thing I want to go through with you is just breaking down like what the last 12 months have look like or since you started the agency in terms of Revenue growth how much we're earning each month does it fluctuate a lot um average retainer size that kind of thing I'll hand it over to you and I'm going to make some notes whil talking and just bouncing ideas around but yeah like R run me for it like over a time frame where we well just did the accounts actually annual turnover for 232 for about 55k the majority of was monthly retainers I did a little bit of training Consulting for clients yeah yeah Consulting got me in like doing one day a month teaching like new business owners about the basics of digital marketing so it's like you know yeah six hours of my time I charge 500 quid so yeah but the majority of it is kind of um retainers which has fluctuated and again there's no set pricing structure my two biggest clients one of them is of course is their Electrical Company I teally of their their marketing manager director I charge them 2K a month they're my biggest client they've been with me from since day one but I literally do everything kind of like Facebook ads emails website management customer service so phones up I look if there's any orders come through and then also do a bit of B2B marketing uh on their trade side as well Google ads as well so I do everything yeah so they my first ever client they stuck with me but they are still my biggest client they've kept me going that's what I've been doing so I'm the overall package for Sor my the main big client I had for the year was a gold company they kind of buy and sell gold the deal I ranged with them was that they want me on premises so it's almost like they're buying my time it's a bit a bit annoying but at the same time I couldn't really say no so I charge them 200 quid a day so on average I go in about four to five days a month so that gives me 800 to th000 pound a month we're gon we're gonna bend them off mate okay it might have to be a lot short once I start getting some income in maybe we have to do that yeah of course of course of course of course just so you know like I want you to be selling something that's like 5K yeah if not more into a retainer so that when you land a client you've then got the cash flow that is the same as you with three months right now it means you can just throw yourself into one client or two or three clients and be making way more money and actually be a to enjoy your life and enjoy these holidays and what are the goals for you yes 10K a month I want to make that because that will leave enough money in the business to build but also I need to take some money out do you want to have a life you know I'm getting to that point you know I I want to enjoy my life a little bit I've done the corporate game I worked for all these big kind of organizations and I [ __ ] hated it that's why I kind of got out of it and tried to do something like this my own agency which I do enjoy but I don't make anything at the moment so so yeah going back to your question so another one that I did lose there was a a holiday company who was doing their media buying for I was chargeing them 800 quid a month what would you bring them just leads sales uh bookings uh of holiday conversion so of holiday Cottages uh we never really kind of cated it in terms of like me directly I can't just manage their Google ads account for them and their Facebook but we were bringing in they were spending like 40 50 Grand a month on Google ads yeah uh but they were turning over three times at a month in terms of sales uh but they just wanted someone to come in and manage it but yeah that was again start telling a bit of a counseling session again but he's one of them MDS who kept going in and changing stuff without telling you so you go change the Google you can see on the change history he's changed certain ads or he's changed the bidding and then he started doing Facebook ads and he was just like you just managing that person to say look if you want to do it do it yourself if you want me to do it yeah pointless is it it's pointless but yeah they've still got me on their ads I can still see what they're doing they haven't took me off but they want to come back to me later on this year but hopefully if this kicks off I might just turn around say no it's not worth my time this is the thing right because right now like if someone that comes to you and was like we need you to help with this would you just be like it's 800 a month would you have a setup fee in place or no I didn't have a setup fee so I was at the time I was just thought I just want the money coming in and that's where I need to kind of think about that actually think yeah I need to start a setup fee and do something like if I'm G to carry on in the interim yeah until everything else working I need to start earning a little bit more and charging a lot more it doesn't make sense right like if I'm your client and I come to you and you go oh Liam It's a grand a month and I'm just going to go and start now I'll be like all right well my Google ads account is an absolute [ __ ] show so he's going to come in he's going to fix up this Google account probably spend hours doing it because it's a complete mess and then for some reason I'm still paying you the same price on going each month so my my I'm I'm anchored to this price of you only charge a thousand a month and you do all of this work because youve just cleaned up this massive mess of an as account and now why am I still paying you the same price every month so yeah my perced value is massively dropped the way that I look at I'm like well it's not even you know maybe he's not that good you know that's what I'll be thinking because you're not charging enough so what would be better is if you could go to them and say it's 5K setup fee and there's then there's a minimum time contract which is three to six months of you working with us if you choose six months you can get a discount but the reason why we do that is because there are testing phases in these things it depends on your ad spend we can't guarantee that you're going to get results in month one this takes time we have a process and a system that we use to test these different ad accounts and test these strategies but takes time so this means that you're now only going to work with clients that have the budget to spend that they understand the value that that brings um and it also gives you the cash to say [ __ ] I can go and hire someone else to do this now or I can actually spend 20 hours on just setting this up alone because I've got the cash for it that's a fair point never never thought about it like that if you're charging the same in month three then you do in month one then then they'll probably look at the value of that as well I would I'd be like well why is it still a grand then I'd also be like if don't see results in month one if there's no long-term lock in which most people aren't going to see results in month one right so again it depends on who you're trying to work with if you're trying to if you're saying yes to everyone and you're working with these people that are happy to pay like the low price they're going to be the worst clients because they're going to freak out they're going to manage the ad account whilst you're doing it they're gonna be annoying clients and just like not worth your time so we want to eliminate those guys not actually eliminate them but you know what I mean like move away from them and then um focus on these other guys and luckily you're in a position where you you still have this running so you can still work this and tweak it um but we can do this on the side you know we're obviously talking about Ai and implementing that I feel like you've got a skill set I don't think we should just move out of what you're doing like you're obviously good at media buying you obviously know it you can speak the language you can hold yourself in the conversation when you're talking about it so I think it would be doing you a disservice to say we're gonna completely bin it off no no I completely agree my aim was almost to almost have a bit of a hybrid of the two um you know eventually if it does move into the kind of the AI field but my whole my 20 years of experience or 25 years is marketing and digital marketing so you know I've got that experience I don't want to just completely just blank it off but it's almost like refining this package and doing it right because you know like I said I'm charging 800 quid here, pound 2,000 pound here I'm doing like you know it's all it's all over the place yeah at the moment and I think it's just purely just because of desperation because like someone's come in I just want the work I want to get you want money um there hasn't been a kind of a thought process to actually and also have some value to myself ter think actually if they don't if they don't like it then yeah go I I'm sure someone else will come along and I can work with someone who genu values me like with this Electrical Company they're paying you 2K month because you're doing their Facebook ads you're doing their Google ads B2B Market I'm assuming that's like LinkedIn is it yeah L Outreach yeah you're doing the customer service for them and you're building their websites and you're running their emails it's like [ __ ] me I'd pay you 2K to do that that's insane I don't I don't know how you would do it but this is the thing it's like that there is pretty much the entirety of lead gen for businesses right that's that covers every single base so even looking at that and I'm not saying this is what the offer is going to be but just looking at that and seeing all those list of deliverables you know how valuable each element of that is for a business and what it could do in terms of their Top Line right so paying you 2K makes perfect sense to them but to you it doesn't because it's not scalable but if you said to them actually we work with X type of business and we build you complete lead generation systems so you don't need to go and work with five different agencies we Implement our systems into your business we focus on generating you leads and helping you convert more leads because we build out your landing pages and your websites um and we we focus on PPC and meta ads you know you focus on two erors or maybe it's B2B marketing it's it's PPC and Linkedin Outreach or email Outreach so you can start to package them and bundle them up in a smarter way packaging them like by giving them a name by saying it's some form of like lead gen system like give it a fancy name like the Dillan system or whatever um and then again you do a setup fee you work with a higher quality of client you do a setup fee and a bigger retainer each month um and locking contracts and like that solves the problem you're still delivering the same thing but you've just packaged up in a different way and you're serving it to someone else someone new yeah I mean the other ones in there were just smaller companies like You're gonna laugh at this but some of them are like pay charging three to 400 quid a month just for me like Google ads accounts and stuff like that yeah it's just they just come along the little scrimps again it's the the work up front I set it all up in month one yeah and then honestly sometimes I literally look at their ad account once a week and go yeah it's fine just crack on with it it's just I don't really do much with it so that was my kind of thought process is that I do the work and then the money's just kind of coming in get it it's not a lot to be fair it's definitely not a lot 400 400 pound or is pound right pound yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah 00 P isn't going to quite cut it is it and like um you have a lot of them it's like still relationships you got to keep open and manage like even if you got to jump on one call a month like 400 pound for for one hour is like we we need to like I don't know like what do you genuinely think your time's worth like an hour of your time obviously you're doing this this uh this kind of Consulting back on it in terms of the what we want to learn because again my wife's the account she went back and it's just about 200 to 250 pound an hour that's what I getting Le let's double that right like your value is £500 an hour that that's it have that engraved in your mind because then that's going to help you actually make decisions moving forward as well like when someone wants to jump on a call with you you have to really think and be like I'm 500 pound an hour is this worth 500 pound can I do this another way and like this is kind of like a mental shift that you got to have and I sound I sound like an arrogant little [ __ ] saying it but even when I was like 24 I was pissed poor but in my mind I'm like I'm worth 500 pound an hour and it helped me kind of like position myself it helped me price better it helped me understand that actually I'm not going to work for 4400 I'm not even going to do anything for £400 I'm going to charge the price that I want to make because I'm worth that amount of money and you you you are worth that money so we need to start rephrasing that and actually putting you in that position too yeah okay made of that let's whip through this then go through how you're you're generating leads at the moment keep that blank at the when I was doing it when I was kind of I I I like yourself I Tri few different routes I did the kind of went to an email marketing company yeah um paid them a couple of grand and get [ __ ] all I mean that but then like I said I only did it for like a month or two and I kind of just got cold feet I said look you guys were promising me at least a couple of good leads from it so I how much how much you pay him by the way how much did I pay him I paid him about say two grand it was just shy that about 1,00 quid or something and they only did emails yeah yeah they did email out reach yeah but it wasn't they just sent it the leads I got back were just just terrible I mean I literally got back two or three had a couple of calls with them it was just like they it wasn't the right type of people and they said oh we need a couple more months to let it work and I can understand where they're coming from but I was like as a business I'm only earning three to 4K I can't pump half of that out just to try and get these leads and I was like I'm gonna do it so what I kind of went back to is kind of um the most profitable way of doing it when I had people coming to me I actually was doing like a bit like what you're doing I actually started to really focus on organic LinkedIn started to do a few video posts video myself talking or just doing some regular posts what two to three times a week and then within a couple of months I actually got the gold company guy approached me on LinkedIn and also the Indian fin Tech guy I we've seen some of your posts on LinkedIn can we have a talk why did you stop LinkedIn I just it's just the time then I got it got to that point was at capacity because I was doing five days a week five days a month at the old company I was doing the fintech company was AED about five days of my time I then had had all these other smaller ones I was I capacity again then something was like oh I haven't got time to do this I've heard I've heard enough there mate we can change that that's something we got to change it it but at least it's proven to work because um you know when I then come to you and say this is a LinkedIn framework let's follow this you're not gonna turn around to me and say [ __ ] off I'm not trying that no know it worked I I I recommend it when I do calls I do this like Mentor thing calls I like it's called something called digital boost I I did when I first started my business because I I had loads of time on my hands but you can you small business owners can have like an hour of your time I I don't do as much now but I do like one or two calls a month yeah and what I say to them is like you need to get on to Linked In but organically and do it but do it consistently because it for me it worked when I did it I just didn't I just came off it again so and the only the only way you can make it work is by understanding the type of client you want to go after and what it is you're actually offering because then everything that you write is is about about that nothing else you know on my on my LinkedIn I don't sit there and post every single day um I've been a bit off over the last few weeks but usually I'll just sit there on like a Monday morning schedule five post takes me like 45 minutes and I'm done yeah just yeah just one day that's it just one post one post per day and I just sit there for like 45 minutes and schedule them but it's really easy to write about it because like I'm just writing about what happened last week in the agency I'm writing about what we did for a client I'm writing about what my thoughts are and what I think the best thing to do is if you are my ideal client and you're reading my post you know so just basically just having that framework is just like Fe organic so all right so Le gen referrals I'm guess yeah I did did a bit of media buying but again it's just you just get you get time wasted on some of that some some of the stuff that I did again funny the media buying stuff as well it only works when you're charging enough money because if you are booking calls which by the way standard book calls for this kind of service you'd be looking to spend about 80 quid you know 80 to 80 to like1 pound is kind of a good rate for a book call but if you're charging $300 and your close rate is 20% well you need I I can't even do the math so 80 to 100 pound a lead we could call it a lead but it's a call per call yeah a book call that's what we spend we spend about100 pound for a book call but we know that our break even points like 10K so we can afford to spend like up to 10K we never will for a closed deal but if we're doing 100 if we're doing let's say we book in 10 calls and we close two people um or we close one person we we we're profitable and we could have spent a grand two grand on the the ads does that make sense yep yep okay I know it's a bit of a funny thing a marketing expert doesn't do much marketing for himself don't worry that honestly like I know people that are selling the dream and talking about running Ecom stores and never touched an Ecom store in their life as well so don't worry about it this is a safe space in terms of Ideal client like this again we could just whip through these but the type business that you've seen the best results in and the type of business you actually enjoy working with like you know what actually gets you excited uh I probably would be kind of like the the more results based so kind of like the e-commerce based if we talk about marketing then it's kind of e-commerce based where I can actually see some tangible results but I guess this could be anything like this could be selling yeah selling digital products could be anything it doesn't have to be a physical product it's kind of just kind of like selling a certain type of product or service but you know leads is a little bit difficult more to do when it comes to Media buying as you probably know it's kind of you can't you can't get that immediate reaction to me though if you was to manage my media buying and then you was like we're generating leads for three pound I'll be like [ __ ] yeah that's my immediate results I'm very happy so I get it but there is an element of the funnel has to be right the website has to be right like everything has to be right there whereas Ecom you can kind of throw [ __ ] at a messy product page and you'll still get sales if youum off cash into it whereas like you kind of want to be tweaking and optimizing all the time um all right so ideal client like B Toc more B Toc rather than kind of just Ecom because that kind of just pigeon on we just into like physical products so yeah BC clients yeah that's kind of way I I mean like I've done B2B like you know the fintech company and stuff I know how to do it but that immediate hit of like oh great you've done you've got some many leads as you know takes longer the lead time is a lot longer for people to um you're probably going to say that I you could probably get leads like that because you've got proven framework which is great again I'd be happy to getting sort of B2B clients yeah yeah yeah b2c clients um to be discussed we'll we'll we'll dive into that I mean like we're B2B we're running ads and we see ton of value in ads and everyone that I know in the agency space or consulting or coaching space they're also pumping ads you know some of them are spending 50 100K a month and generate [ __ ] ton of leads but if you don't want to get into that world then you don't have to um all right well we'll leave that for now then CRM and P management where we at with that uh well it's pretty much non-existent because I kind of there's no leads coming in um I tried stuff like I forgotten the name of the there was a CRM platform that I was using pipe drive or something yeah I tried pipe Drive I just couldn't get my head around it uh I bought a ton of load of leads in started emailing them and tried to it was just a bit difficult for me to get my head round but maybe that's I didn't really just focus on just getting it right so because I think I watched a couple of Jordan plat videos and he recommended it on YouTube and yeah I gave that a try but it just wasn't it just wasn't working for me makes sense no systems in place currently main no zero in place mainly due to scout yeah all right cool it's gonna be a quick call for you this right it's like no no no no we're good we're good in terms of nurture sequence no nurture sequence right there's no like emails or SMS there's no confirmation because there's no system so no it's all it's all manual kind of yeah the only automization was then on my on my website you can book in a call Via cendy and cendy I set up an a an automatic uh questionnaire before you booked in a call about what's your current requirements what's your budget Etc and then it books in a call then it sends out a reminder email and that's it can you L me to can you link me to your website do you have a website yeah yeah uh put the the developers actually looking at it's a it's about five years old so don't judge who uses a developer for websites these days right show your age some I know I am actually going to think of moving away but he's like no no because I've I've thrown him a bit of work he's I'll do it for you I'll do it for you for free so I was like yeah fine if you go to contact or contact us it's right the stop there yeah yeah yeah you can book in a call there so it should should load up there you go so does a discovery call from there nice so it does the same kind of thing and then it kind of want you book something in it's got like a form there ask him some basic questions how often do you how often do you book a call in not a lot I actually get shocked if I get something coming I don't think it's a bad website I think it's pretty good it's clean it's nice does the job but we there's too much stuff going on right we just want to simplify it if you look at unorthodox one it's like a landing page book a call that's literally it a S letter tell you why you should look a call um so again it's just kind of giving you that strategy instead of being like let's just build a big website and make it really confusing and have all these different services on there which again means like I don't know what you do and I'm not going to go and work with you because you do all this other stuff so you know you can't be an expert in this if you're doing this this this and this and this like you know that's that's how it is and that's how people perceive it so I'd much rather just have one and then just say you are a paid media by an expert and everything else can pretty much fall in underneath that so the nurture side was pretty manual you know we'd have that call I then follow up with an email kind of listing the points and then we just go on to I do like a bit of go away and do bit of a takeaway and come back with some high level thoughts almost like a very bit of a presentation say this what I think you should do and then yeah that that that point they say yes or they or they say we'll come back to you and never come back to you so yeah that's m h we we know it so well as well oh I'm so interested I'll um yeah I'm just gonna go chat to the team yeah right I made the mistake when I first started out doing too much work and was giving them a fullon high level strategy and then they'll go off and I've heard that sometimes they' go back to their previous agency and go why are you not doing this like yeah [ __ ] hell you're [ __ ] idiot so I've learned the hard way with that pricing model I don't I don't think we should uh dwell on this for too long but it's pretty much like you said 400 is the cheapest up to 2,000 yeah I've now moved to 500 is my cheapest kind if anyone comes to me it's like one service you know if it's media like if it's Google ads it's 500 quid if it goes up if you want then Facebook on top of that and then it moves up to 800 quid um anything on top of that and then it goes up to 1,000 so that's again I've just plucked it out the air I just want you have mate you're charging 300 you're charging 300 pound a month for Facebook ads mate so yeah that was you know what that guy was um he's I'm actually well that developer building the website I'm making a bit of money out of that because I'm not I'm just sitting back and managing it but how youing sorry how much you making uh making a grand out of it I've CH uh I've ch chared him two grand the developer only charged me a grand I'm I've made a grand out of it I'm just doing a bit of the project management side of it two hours of work mate yeah two hours of work oh bloody hell there you go um all right then that's a fair point yeah there you go that's that's your already right uh client management how are you dealing with clients right now what's the communication Channel you have email it's purely email uh monthly calls um majority of the clients though I kind of just I used to use reporting platform but then that was yeah bit bit of Annoying It's like 40 quid a month and it wasn't very good it's quite glitchy so I kind of just uh I used to I used to do PowerPoint presentations and stuff it took took far too long I just take them online on a on a call take them I just show them in terms of like the Google ads the Facebook ads emails go through it all I don't how how long are the calls they about an hour 500 quid exactly that's destroyed your retainer um what is the onboarding process like someone signs up what do you need and how do you do it again it's email I kind I give them a list of things though you know if it's kind of um media buying you need to give me access I do send them out a form kind of like an onboarding form basically asking them about more about the company what they're trying to get out of this tell me about some USPS about your company some competition that you've got as well so I can go do a bit of research it's not as detailed as it should be it's about like one and a half pages um and then once you've got that I then go away and then put together a bit of a high level plan which they don't then present to them on another call which is again probably another 500 quid and then if they're happy with it then off I go and start doing like doing the doing the doing part of it yeah okay so you got like three hours of calls um or four hours of calls really if you're doing a two call close and then you've got a monthly call as well with every client and then you have a live um then you have the sort of presentation 1 hour four hours of like a new client in the first month of just calls yeah 2K yeah exactly mate seriously like we have to think we have to think like that because it's like before you know it you reflect back and you're like what the [ __ ] I've sat we do it we have it all the time we've got clients that are be paying us two and a half k h and this was like back when we was doing the AI stuff really and it's like we we've sat on seven calls this month you know me and Mark and it's like well we were completely at a loss here it's just a waste of time so that's why we just like five weren't paying us enough that were just causing too much heartache and headache and constantly wanting more and more and more of our time and then just like reallocating our time and focus into spending longer and you're not Landing as many clients but charging an actual good number that actually means we can work with less so goals 10K per month and let's just bul this out a little bit more obviously we want to be working with maybe BTC clients Simple Solutions or low effort client and scalability yeah I mean if if we're going to if we're going to put some kind of goals into I want it 10 to 15K I want to ear something yeah so you okay 20K perfect get a dream let's dream big yeah and and honestly mate like this this this isn't unreasonable um if you think about it right if we end up charging let's say if we manage to land on an offer where we're like okay it's 7K up front and then it is then 2K per month for a minimum of three months but then every single client to you is then worth 13 Grand if you land two of those a month just through everything you do it takes you three months to start Landing two a month yeah you're there you hit your number yeah and then when you start getting busier you just up your prices you up your prices you up your prices until you're at a point where you're like I'm doing 40 Grand a month right now and I've got all these retainers going and this is working and I'm very very happy that's where you want to get to