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In this episode of the SEO Insider, Seth Price is joined by Josh Nelson, author of the Seven Figure Agency Roadmap, to provide you with key tactics for growing your firm.
Tune in as these two experts discuss all you need to know for digital marketing success and company growth. Together, they provide invaluable insights on how to structure your company (whether remote or in person!) to create and grow a winning firm.
Welcome to the SEO insider with your host, Seth Price, founder of BluShark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.
We are thrilled to have Josh Nelson here from the seven-figure agency. Welcome, Josh.
Thank you. Glad to be here, excited.
Josh, I have been a big fan of what you’ve done from afar, you know, not only, sort of, I love the fact that you did something with an agency built into the seven figures and like, Hey, I got a roadmap, let me share that with others. Because I was the accidental agency, you know, we sort of stumbled upon this, having pulled ourselves out of a brick and mortar. And so, the idea that you’re sort of taking best practices, so I studied this area, and I’ve seen the people have written books and the Guru’s and the coaches. And like, when I first saw your book, I was like, this is the roadmap. I wish I had this when I had started. So, tell me a little bit about how, you know, again, I see the inspiration, but your story and how this came to be?
Yeah, so I started my digital marketing agency plumbing and HVAC SEO, while going on like 11, 12 years ago now. Grew that relatively quickly, in the first two years to about a seven-figure business. And I was a big student of the game, so I was always going to the digital marketer conferences, Traffic Conversion summit, I was always learning. And so as our agency grew, other agencies that weren’t quite getting the same level of growth started asking like, what did you do different? Like, what’s your model? And so I created the seven-figure agency roadmap training, which was just that, it was like, here’s what we did, like we chose a niche, we positioned ourselves as the expert, we put together this program, we made a recurring package and this is how we get clients. And that kind of blossomed from there, of course, into an actual coaching and mentorship program, and now a great group, mastermind of digital marketing agencies from across the country.
They typically, at this point, they’re like a mid to high six figure digital marketing agency, so they’ve got clients, they’ve got recurring revenue and they’re looking to go, you know, to seven figures and multiple seven figures. And so, that’s kind of our sweet spot, you know, six and seven figure agencies that are looking to go to A and just deliver world class results to their clients, retain their clients at a higher level and scale their team, right? So they can create more freedom and more impact.
They typically, at this point, they’re like a mid to high six figure digital marketing agency, so they’ve got clients, they’ve got recurring revenue and they’re looking to go, you know, to seven figures and multiple seven figures. And so, that’s kind of our sweet spot, you know, six and seven figure agencies that are looking to go to A and just deliver world class results to their clients, retain their clients at a higher level and scale their team, right? So they can create more freedom and more impact.
I mean, to a certain extent, are most of your clients’ sole proprietors versus partnerships? I’m curious to know whether, very often, I know that as I’ve built their time that I have an amazing copilot who’s been with me from day one, who does a lot of the day-to-day nuts and bolts, but it gets very lonely at the top. And probably part of the value of this is getting outside of your own echo chamber to sort of say, hey, you know, what’s worked for other people, because it’s great to try stuff, but if you could at least cut that learning curve down and not make the mistakes that everybody knows are not going to work. I assume that goes a long way.
Yeah, I guess, you know, if, I don’t have the exact numbers, but I’d say probably 70% are sole proprietors, like they are the owner in the business and they’ve got a team and stuff, but it’s them. And there’s probably another 30% or 40% that are partnerships, usually just two partners, you know, one’s the marketing sales director type of person, the other’s the operations behind the scenes, manage the team person. And I find that those partnerships tend to go fastest, right? When one person could just focus on business development and the other can just focus on operations, we’ve got success, you know, case studies and…
Understood. And I, believe me, I get it and I feel very blessed because I can be in front of the house and somebody else can be back in the house, that’s awesome, but when you don’t have that, you know, it’s almost like you need a partner, and it’s a lot cheaper than giving up half your, your equity. The idea that there’s a copilot for you in that, in that group, not just on the social piece, right? So that you have compatriots but like the stuff that we’ve learned, the mistakes we made early on as far as hiring and culture and all those things. You know, curious to know, what do you think are the top three biggest mistakes you see agency owners making when they first come into your world?
Okay, a couple of things. First, I would say trying to be general instead of specialist, right? And this was a mistake I made in my first agency, we can do digital marketing for anybody, right? So, you know, it could be the, the local dentist, it could be the lawyer, it could be the roofer, and while that gives you lots of opportunity, it really doesn’t make you very interesting to anybody. So, kind of being generalist instead of specialist, and you and I are great examples of this, right? You just work with law firms; we just work with plumbing and HVAC companies. And most of the people in our program, choose a niche, right? And that’s really one of the catalysts for accelerated growth. I think the second thing is taking a lot of project work versus recurring revenue work. So, they set themselves up to sell a $5,000 or $10,000 website, and then just a low monthly hosting fee, and that is just constantly chasing your tail, right? You get the project work and you’re chasing the next piece of revenue. When you move to a retainer-based service, where you’re going to add more value, right? You’re actually going to do things to get the client ranked and make their phone ring and really move the needle for the client, you can charge more, and you can have a recruiting base. And so, deciding to just sell retainer-based services I think is another thing that really makes a big difference in terms of where I see people fail in their agency. And I think if I had to, say a third, it’s probably not marketing themselves, right? A lot of us are marketing agencies and we really know how to do this stuff, but we never eat our own dog food, right? We know we should be running ads and we should be putting out content, and we should be creating, you know, search engine rankings, but we do it for our clients, but we never do it for ourselves. And if you’re gonna grow and scale as an agency, you have to do that for yourself as well.
Now, it’s so funny you say that, like, you know, we’re over eight figures, but we’re like now, you know, we should probably have a marketing director in-house because cobbler shoes often. You know, we won some sort of an award, it was like an awful graphic, and I’m like, you know, what’s going on? Like, we do great stuff for our clients, why wouldn’t we do that in-house? You know, one of the things that’s been tumultuous, both the legal world and the marketing world, pre COVID, we had a townhouse in Dupont Circle that 95% of our employees came to every day to do their work, and they went home at night. You know, March 2020, the whole world jumped on its head. Some people had started agencies as virtual agencies, but want to get your thoughts on, you know, again, some states, you’re in Florida where COVID never existed. I went there during COVID and hung out for four months, and like, you know, people were still masking playing soccer in DC, and that down there they weren’t masked if they were nose to nose. So, I want to get your thoughts on how the new normal as far as, you know, virtual being, you know, the new normal, well, how that you’ve seen affect your entire tribe?
You know, I think you’re right. It really has shifted from some of us running virtual agencies to most of us running virtual teams like, for me, personally, I had a large office in Doral, we had 35 and full-time employees, we all went every day, we worked all day, and at that place, in our business it really helps, right? Because you don’t want, I, both know there’s something different that happens when you’re live and in person, you’re seeing people every day, and we’ve tried to be like get like VA’s and things like that over the years and never been successful. We didn’t really develop that skill. When COVID hit, fortunately, we had implemented EOS, and I’m a big believer in the entrepreneur operating system as a leadership team, having your meeting rhythms, having everybody with a scorecard, and because we had that in place, before we had to go virtual, we were able to say, hey, look, we could do this same similar thing virtually. And what we found was, while it was annoying at first, and it actually became super productive, because now we’re not driving 45 minutes back and forth every single day to go to an office, we can jump on Zoom, there’s, there’s less like water cooler, wasted time that happens throughout the day and we’re able to acquire talent, anywhere like we were limited to just around Florida because nobody wanted to drive much further than 45 minutes to come in. And well, there’s good talent there, the price for that talent is pretty high. There’s not really a lot of people great with Google Ads and Facebook Ads and things, and so going virtual now we’ve got this talent pool, that’s a lot of people in the US and a lot international that we can get the best of the best out and actually pay less. And so, for us, we made the decision after two years of COVID to say this works for us now, we’re a completely virtual operation. We’ve got like virtual, you know, those little virtual offices where we can go in and meet from time to time, but I think that’s the new norm for most agencies today. It just you can get such better talent, it can be so much more efficient than being in a, in a centralized location.
Agreed. We weren’t, we sort of were, still clinging in the sense that we went fully virtual during COVID because where we were people shut down. They weren’t they wouldn’t go ice skating like it was a different time. It was just right. Literally people without leaving the house. So we went to a clubhouse where it’s a place, we pay rent. It can’t hold everybody at once, unless you’re doing an all hands on meeting people come in for their team meetings once a week. I’m trying my best because like corporate America signaling, hey, they want people back for the reason you talked about right? You love the collaboration, what’s going on. But look, DC is not inexpensive as well. And it’s limited. In my world. If somebody knows the word SEO…
They want hundreds of 1000s of dollars.
They can be hired by AARP, know nothing and have $120,000 with a title. And they can’t help me with what I’m doing, which means the bar just got so high. So yes, national and international reach. But what what’s your thought a lot of the major law firms and investment banks are pushing people back in the office, I don’t think the genie is going back in the bottle in our world. But have we lost something because right now I’m almost seeing the opposite, which is the people that come to the office almost use it as a flex fun day, they come in late, they’re there, they’re not really getting much done. Whereas really great employees that are, you know, isolated home. Yeah, they might take a two hour lunch, they may cut out early, but you’re getting six, seven hours of unbelievable focus that you weren’t getting before.
Yeah, I think there’s there’s a potential give and take, right, the benefits of somebody that is focused, and that can stick with the home based work environment, I think those people are just going to be more productive than someone that has to drive in and, you know, wants to take an hour long lunch, and you do like a lot of these things that you used to do in an office that were just norms don’t really exist anymore.
Right. And there’s, there’s negatives that we don’t feel in touch. But at the same time, I mean, again, our saying was, if you agree with this, when COVID broke our A player’s became A plus at home, and our B minus players slipped to C plus, C. So the key is, can you just keep raising that bar by not having to be limited right before you’re like, hey, you’re you’re in West Palm Beach, you’re never gonna make it to my office on a daily basis, like you ended up losing people, somebody moved, got married, they went to the West Coast now, that’s not a limiting factor. So I assume that over time, and there are moments, I would say the other thing that if you’ve seen this is our retention, we have not lost a person we haven’t wanted to lose at the agency in quite a while, years. And so that I believe that at some level, you’re making the bar to leave that much harder. And that’s part of the reason we also kept the clubhouse was that we had people that wanted it and we were going to lose if we didn’t have an office. I don’t know if you see that. The other way, where there are people that wants the socialization at some level may not be your A players, but there are people that definitely want that.
Yeah, I think I definitely agree with that saying right, the A players became A plus the Bs like, you know, they started to slide because they aren’t productive. They need someone looking over their shoulder, they need someone to see that they’re not being, you know, on task today. And I do agree like I think being flexible enough to be able to say you can work from home, you’re not going to be micromanaged, makes it a very compelling place to work. There is the dynamic now in the agency space as you train people up, and we tend to train people, you know, right out of college and train them up to learn the skills. Once they learn those skills, they’re very much in demand as a virtual employee for the bigger companies, agencies and not and so you know, you have to make the choice, do we raise our compensation to try and at least be competitive for those people? Or do we just go back to the well and build somebody else from the ground up? There is some of that going on in the marketplace for sure.
So I got a question. I was curious. Because you have you have this great organization. You can see people read the book, they’re like, I gotta get here now two books, they come they sit in your in your Florida seminar. Can you tell when somebody walks in the door within reason, whether this person who has a modest agency is going to zoom? How much of that is the genius of Josh able to sort of like get that? Or are you still surprised when somebody pulls it together with everything going on?
I wish I could say I’ve got this brilliant sense that I can look at somebody like they’re just going to crush it. But I’m always surprised at some level like, it’s all actually like mindset based. It’s what’s going on between the head that sometimes you can’t see. Sometimes someone will come in, they say all the right things, they’re very polished, they seem very professional, but then like their follow through on getting things done they just kind of they flounder they don’t get exponential growth. And then somebody else that you wouldn’t think like this is a rock star right here will just blow up to multiple seven figures in a very short span of time. So I wish I was better at predicting, but I’m always surprised.
How much of it is the marketing? I mean, obviously it answers both but marketing versus creating team and culture. Like where do you see, to me that’s been one of the most biggest challenges we haven’t outsourced, we’re not Whitley, nobody, we’re not just taking stuff out, all the sausage making is done in house. So the question is, I’ve seen that as incredibly difficult. We’ve learned so many lessons, you know about who to hire, how to manage, you know, what works within your environment. You know, we’ve been at this for a number of years, a few less than your your base agency, you know, some of those things are, is that something that you have? Would you think with with your organization help people cut down on that learning curve because it is so difficult to manage people well?
I think the first million is about salesmanship, hustle, like going out. And doing the effort to get appointments, the multiple seven figures comes down to your ability to be organized, manage a team lead well, and you know, those are some of the critical skills, we’re really trying to help agencies to understand like, no longer are you the, you know, the SEO guy, the PPC guy, the marketer of your agency, you’re now the CEO of your agency, and you’ve got to shift to those CEO skills in order to really go to the next level.
As far as like inbound versus outbound, agencies that sort of find a way when you’re niche and you become the expert in the area, hopefully, you get known for that, and you’re getting the inbound, you know, what are the outbound seems like it’s one of the most challenging things to do well, and particularly to scale, you see private equity coming to a lot of these places. I’m sure they’ve taken out some of your clients over time. And their playbook is bringing outbound sales. What you know, talk to me a little bit about your perspective on outbound sales, what you’ve seen working and where people stumble.
I think it’s a combination, I do find some people, they just like, they don’t have that skill, and they’re not going to develop that skill. And so if they realize that they just kind of lean into inbound strategies like joining the association, putting out content, publishing a book, being consistently like a voice of reason and a voice of value in the marketplace, they can usually generate enough leads and sales to grow to seven figures and multiple, seven figures, I do think to go into to go to, you know, to eight figures, in a lot of cases, you do need to start to build a little bit more sales, infrastructure, and develop that that skill.
Interesting. What excites you, like we’re gonna have so many things are going on, right, we’ve got virtual, we have international opportunities we never had before, what you know, as somebody who’s watching all these amazing agencies build and grow what excites you these days?
I mean, for me, personally, when I started seven figure agency, the goal was to help 100 agencies go to seven figures over the next five years. And now we’ve got 76, at seven figures in the program and multiple, seven figures, we’re collecting the data for our annual awards, because we get everyone together and once a year, we do these annual awards. Cumulatively, the organization like all of the agencies, revenue combined, does $153 million in annualized revenue. So it’s $100 million, digital marketing, mastermind. And for me, the most exciting thing is just seeing the lives that are changed, like agencies now having more financial freedom, having more personal freedom to spend time with their family, and do the things they really want to do, and really doing it in the right way. Because we really don’t want agencies that are just out for the cash grab, like, we want them to deliver world class results for their clients. So their clients are winning, they’re winning, their team is winning, their family is winning. And that’s just a really exciting thing to be a part of.
Great. Look, that’s the that’s the part I get that gets you up a bit, because you’re helping, but as far as the things that the agencies should be doing, or adding into that, that you’re talking about the masterminds like, you know, what are the trends and things that you see people doing that you think next chapter like, what should people if you’re an agency owners watching this? What should they be doing to sort of push themselves to the next level?
I think the big thing is the mindset shift from just being good at whatever the thing is just being good at SEO and generating ranking, or just being good at lead generation with Facebook ads, to shift to, all agencies need to be actually generating leads sales and revenue growth, right? And so yes, you want to be good at the services, but you should also be thinking about not just generating the lead, but also how do we convert more of those leads into revenue? I think, you know, the agency of three, four years ago was like, hey, it’s my responsibility to get you the lead what you do with it from there, you know, that’s your problem, right? And then they start to cry, the clients are canceling, they’re not getting the results. And so if you can step up to the next level, and say, Hey, we’re gonna help you figure out why these leads aren’t converting, we’re gonna put some marketing automation in place to follow up on those leads, maybe we’ll even put a call center on the back end to act as the person that touched those leads and schedule them in. I think you can really position yourself at the top end of the market and actually generate a tangible result, which is what we should all be doing as agencies.
So funny, you say the legal space, that’s the bane of our existence, right? Like you get the phone to ring but like, it’s not one of those things you can outsource overseas, it’s domestic, generally, high powered labor that you need. It’s a very tough thing to manage. There’s a hole in that bucket doesn’t matter. So it is both, selfishly you need that but it’s also the right thing to do, because then it becomes that symbiotic piece. This is awesome, Josh, in general, I got into your world just reading your book. What if somebody wants to learn more about seven figure agency and Josh Nelson, what’s the best way to sort of learn about that.
Probably go go to seven-figure agency.com. I have two books, I have the seven figure agency roadmap and the client retention handbook. So if you’re at the place, you’re like, I want to figure out my roadmap to grow to seven figures, start there, get that book. If you’re thinking, you know, I’ve got a great business, but I’m struggling with retention, the client retention handbook is really, really good at some of our best strategies, just to create a world class client experience. And, you know, get out of the constant churn cycle that a lot of agencies find themselves in.
And I’ll say, I don’t care where you’re at. The first book is not a bad place to start, just because it is fundamentals. And if the fundamentals are not sound, when you tweak, and look you have to retain the clients don’t get me wrong, and that’s where I’m at with my business. But for most agencies I thought that first book, not the second book isn’t great but that first book gives such a clear, and it’s without the noise. It’s like, this is real, actual stuff that if you follow it, you will make more money. Very good. Well, Josh, look forward to seeing you soon. And thank you so much for your time.
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Thank you for tuning in to the SEO Insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand’s online presence. Episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital’s website.
