Mark Duval is the founder of The Duval Partnership, helping agencies win new business through a variety of strategic services including prospecting and lead generation, sales training, and agency auditing and diagnostics. Mark formerly headed business development efforts for Univision & CBS. He brings over 25 years of client direct sales experience to his work.
The Duval Partnership’s average client tenure easily doubles their competitors. They are the only firm in their space that offers sales training & coaching, and they are also the only firm in their space that employs strategists.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Mark’s background and how he got into the business of helping agencies
- Why you need a written new business plan
- Why you need to work on your differentiation
- Finding the right number of clients (and finding the right amount to bill them)
- The danger of sounding desperate to clients
- The importance of attitude and behavior
- Questions any agency should ask their prospects
- Why you need to serve up who you are and what you do on your website
- Understanding what your prospects consume and figuring out how to position yourself as a thought leader in those spaces
- Making introductions between prospects and the people you know that they need to know
- Why you should set up Google alerts on prospects you really want to work with
- Figuring out how to start your new business process program
- Why you need salespeople to manage sales people
Ways to Contact Mark Duval:
- Website: duvalpartnership.com
- Email: mark@duvalpartnership.com
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!
Recently named one of the Top 30 Under 30 by Marketing magazine, Bram Warshafsky is a Founder and Partner at 5Crowd: a Toronto start-up that provides on-demand marketing production to a growing list of clients like Labatt, J&J, Hershey, Twitter, Telus, and more. We operate a curated network of freelance professionals in over 150 cities through our own digital platform to help enterprise marketing teams bring their strategy to life, faster and for less.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Why Bram started his agency, and why he went with the freelancer model
- What Bram’s internal team is like and how they use freelancers to offset those positions
- Why 5Crowd focuses on production rather than strategy
- What a strong freelancer vetting process looks like
- Why 5Crowd needed to build their own software
- How being a production based agency has led to high client retention for 5Crowd
- What good marketing looks like
- Why you need to tell the story of how you save clients money
- The three questions 5Crowd asks to figure out if they will take on a project
- Why 5Crowd has freelancers set the price
- How 5Crowd picks what freelancer to use for the right project
- Why you need to fully embrace technology to succeed
- How to get started with freelancers
Ways to Contact Bram Warshafsky:
- Website: www.5crowd.com
- eBooks: www.5crowd.com/ebooks
- Twitter: @BramWarshafsky
- Twitter: @5CrowdTO
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!
Jason Blumer is the Chief Innovative Officer of his firm, Blumer & Associates, CPAs. The firm was one of the first to move from a traditional office to a virtual environment, where they serve digital, marketing, and design agencies. He focuses heavily on business coaching and consulting, while his team meets the technical and compliance needs of the customer.
Jason also founded the Thriveal CPA Network in 2010 as a way to help CPA firm owners connect. Since that time, Thriveal has helped many firms grow by providing an online community, coaching services, webinars, and live events.
Jason is the host of two podcasts, the Thrivecast for the CPA community and The Businessology Show for the creative community. He speaks and writes frequently for CPAs and design agencies, his firm's chosen niche. He has been honored as one of the 40 under 40 in the profession (CPA Practice Advisor) as well as one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting (Accounting Today). Jason loves to watch documentaries on just about anything and is working on his personal bests in Crossfit several times a week. He lives in Greenville, SC with his wife and their three daughters.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- How Jason and his team got into the agency niche
- Mistakes agencies and agency owners make regularly
- Why going virtual doesn’t automatically save your agency money
- How to legally save your agency money in taxes in ways that make sense for your agency
- Employment benefit plans which benefit agency owners
- P&L and AGI numbers to know
- Why you shouldn’t be struggling to make payroll if you have a strong value proposition
- Why being a successful creative director doesn’t mean you should open your own agency
- Why you need to be willing to sacrifice services, clients, and your team
- How to know whether the metrics that you’re tracking are worth tracking
- Things most if not all agencies should track
- Why you should outsource your accounting
- Jason’s recommended resources
Ways to Contact Jason Blumer:
- Podcast: www.businessology.biz
- Website: www.jasonblumer.com
- Website: www.blumercpas.com
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jasonblumer
- Twitter: @jasonmblumer
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!
Brent Weaver became obsessed with creating websites when he was 15 years old. He realized he could create and share information with anyone in the world with the click of a button. His first business was a web design agency turned marketing firm. That business was named in the top-five fastest growing businesses in Denver, Colorado two years running leading to a successful exit/sale to another Denver-based agency. In 2012, he formed uGurus, a business dedicated to helping other web professionals succeed at building profitable businesses without needing to go through twelve years of roller-coaster pains. uGurus has now graduated over 600 web professionals from their Bootcamp. Graduates consistently use words like "transformative" and "life changing" to describe the results they achieve from the program. When not focused on the business, Brent loves hanging out with his wife and two year old son. Other favorite activities: writing, swimming, and snowboarding.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Why agencies have a hard time making money creating websites for clients
- Why bad discovery leads to scope creep
- Why you should spread discovery over multiple meetings rather than one long meeting
- Why you need to niche down to find the quality and quantity of clients that you need
- Why you need to treat your website (and your clients’ websites) like a kid
- Working with your clients to develop a web strategy that fits their budget
- Establishing a communication pattern with your clients
- Not letting clients delay because a website isn’t perfect
- How to focus on the right platforms
- How to know whether to bring web-dev in-house or use a partnership
- What agencies need to know about the web to capitalize on the opportunities out there
Ways to Contact Brent Weaver:
- Website: uGurus.com
- Email: brent@ugurus.com (this is where to reach Brent for the terrific offer given at the end of the podcast)
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!
Drew McLellan is the Top Dog at Agency Management Institute. For the past 21 years, he has also owned and operated his own agency. Drew’s unique vantage point as being both an active agency owner and working with 250+ small- to mid-size agencies throughout the year, give him a unique perspective on running an agency today.
AMI works with agency owners by:
- Leading agency owner peer groups
- Offering workshops for owners and their leadership teams
- Offering AE bootcamps
- Conducting individual agency owner coaching
- Doing on-site consulting
- Offering online courses in agency new business and account service
Because he works with those 250+ agencies every year — he has the unique opportunity to see the patterns and the habits (both good and bad) that happen over and over again. He has also written two books and been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fortune Small Business. The Wall Street Journal called his blog “One of 10 blogs every entrepreneur should read.”
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Why you have to measure inside your agency
- The AGI/FTE ratio: why you should be aiming for this to be 150,000 (and why many agencies struggle to reach this goal)
- Measuring over/under on projects: how often are you over, how often are you under, and by how much?
- Why you need to look at profitability on a client by client basis (and how to know when to fire a client due to profitability)
- Why you need a minimum standard AGI for all your clients
- Why you absolutely need to use timesheets inside your agency (and why this doesn’t mean you should bill by the hour)
Ways to contact Drew McLellan:
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!