How Client Caps and Community Made this Agency a Category of One with Oli Luke | Ep #800

How Client Caps and Community Made this Agency a Category of One with Oli Luke | Ep #800 Speaker 2: Hey Oli, welcome to the show. Speaker 1: I am very excited to be here, but a long term listener. So being part of the show is now exciting. Speaker 2: Oh, cool. I'm happy to have you on now and tell us who you are and what you do. Speaker 1: Sure. So my name is Oli Luke. I've been in the marketing space for, I can go back to the story of starting my first little marketing business at 15, but it was questionably illegal, definitely morally illegal in terms of what I was selling and the reasons I was using marketing. Speaker 2: What were you selling? I want to know that. Speaker 1: I think we may need a beer before we get into that conversation. I may tell you in a moment. But yeah, I've been in a number of marketing businesses, but I suppose most prominently in 2017 started a marketing agency in hearing healthcare. In a quite a tight niche and and that's been a big focus over the past seven years as we've grown that build a leadership team in that and and almost built a category of one positioning piece in that marketplace. Speaker 2: That's awesome. Now, how long did it take you to figure out? You know, to kind of build that category of one. Speaker 1: It helps being in a niche. For many years, I was, I had marketing agencies, which was like, we do this and we'll help anyone with it. The decision to be very, very niched down and very, very specific about we help these types of businesses that fit this very specific industry. And that really helps because it's not a big industry. Like if we really laid it out, there's probably about 2000 businesses in the world that fit a potential client fit. So we're not looking for quantity, we look for quality. So when you're playing in that space, you're not playing against a hundred competitors. You're playing against two or three and you find your sweet spot and you can become very, very good at that sweet spot in my experience. Speaker 2: I love that too. And you know, one of the things we were talking about kind of the pre-show is you've really I grew your agency off the backbone of creating a community. Is that correct? Speaker 1: Yeah, so it was a very accidental situation that occurred. So when we started in 2017, traditional agency model, like we had one-to-one relationships with clients, we did the work for them, and they didn't know who else we work with. They weren't particularly interested. But the joy of COVID, when you're in one industry, where nobody competes with each other, but they've got a lot of similarities, is during COVID, we decided to go, okay, we're going to have a weekly campfire chat, and all clients are going to come together and We're going to hustle through this period, and we almost pivoted from being a marketing company to being a communications company, because as healthcare providers with patients who still needed support and care, we helped them to grow reputation and brand within their community for helping when others didn't, and we just had to pivot to help them during those moments. And that formed a community and a bond between people who were together during some of their hardest times as business owners, And then from there that's grown into annual events, into monthly member only calls, to print monthly newsletters, to a whole bunch of resources and assets now where it's more community focused and members helping members. And I think that was the moment we no longer had clients, we had members. And then the community almost feeds the community. And it becomes an elite place for people to hang out who are of a certain calibre. Speaker 2: And I know a lot of people are wanting or curious to know like the percentage breakdown for your membership revenue versus the agency revenue. How does that matter? Speaker 1: So I suppose we may be slightly unique as we bill in a flat monthly rate. So we have three packages essentially, but it's a flat monthly rate, which is inclusive of everything that the business needs. Now that is, of course, we help them understand what the recipe is. They delegate the responsibility and the strategic nows to us. And we have a certain methodology that we found that works really well and we help them to strategically implement it. But yeah, for the flat monthly rate, it's like being part of the community and then the execution is there. Speaker 2: So you don't have any clients that are just members. You have clients that are their client and members. Speaker 1: Agreed. If you're on board. Yeah. I suppose that the term client and members kind of mean the same thing, but members just feels nicer. Speaker 2: Okay. One of the things I've always been telling our mastermind community is you need to do the same thing of what you're doing for your clients because they want to be around other people in their niche. But also too, the one thing you may want to think about adding, and this is what I tell our mastermind members is, Have an ability for members outside of your one-on-one clients. I'm just going to refer to them as clients. I know you refer to them as members, but let someone from the outside that's not working with your agency come in as a member. And then they're able to talk to all these other members that are clients. And they're going to be like, Oh, I did this. Who'd you use? Oh, I used Oli's agency. And it, it's very incestual. Is that right? Or. Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that. It's, it's a funny one. Like we we've, we've really debated that and then steered like, Oh, it's a great idea. Oh no, we don't like it. And I think that's probably where, where there's a good chance we'll end up. And even the way we structured it is the promise and the situation within is we have said we're going to cap out at 100 clients. We don't want more. We want depth of relationship with everyone we work with. We like the intimacy. So when we get to that point, we're at 74 right now. And I've kind of slowly and purposefully adding the right clients. That's probably when we're going to reach a point where we need to look at alternative model and alternative areas for growth. And I think that will be it. Speaker 2: When I interviewed Seth Godin, I asked him about an agency that he really respected. And the one that he was talking, I don't remember the name of the agency. I don't even think he said it, but he said they capped off the amount of clients that they wanted because they felt like they were at a great size for the number of people on their team. But their clients always knew that they only wanted to work with 25 clients at a time. And so then it was like, clients didn't want to get fired. There was true urgency, right? Like if an opening comes up, not this fake urgency that all these dumb ass marketers create, which I always hate. Speaker 1: Yeah, agreed. It's such a trust-based economy. It's not a good start, right, if your marketing company instantly burns trust by trying to manipulate you on day one. Speaker 2: And I'm the type of person where you have to kind of earn my trust versus other people are kind of, you have to lose my trust. Speaker 1: We're going to see that more and more, right? And I think speaking about this to our team today is even on a world of AI, like if trust isn't already really low from a consumer's perspective, like we're not far from not being able to believe anything you see on the internet, videos, images. I question everything now and give it a few years, dare I say, it's going to be very, very difficult to earn trust. Everybody's going to be highly skeptical over anything they see, hear, read. It's interesting. Speaker 2: There was a survey that I read a while ago and it had like the most non-trustworthy positions or something or companies or types of companies. The top one was like car salesmen. The next was lawyers. The next was agencies. Speaker 1: Great. Speaker 2: Because of that, but that's why I always tell people like when you can build a community and you should be building your brand, you're building your content, right? That's why we've been podcast for 11 years. Oli, how many times do you get hit up on LinkedIn from like some Joe Schmo trying to coach you for an agency or join this group or sell you some kind of service, right? Like there's millions When I started 11 years ago, there was like three. But like, we've done it for 11 years, same thing with like Carl Sackis or Drew McClellan, right? They've been doing it forever, right? And they do great job, very opposite than us, right? They're very corporate and they have their own little niche versus like, they're kind of the problem child or wild, creative people. So, but like, it fits, but the ones kind of coming up, like you don't trust them because they're just selling kind of snake oil. It's the same thing in the agency space. Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's Marketing Foundation, so I don't know, LinkedIn. They need to fix it. Speaker 2: I like LinkedIn. Speaker 1: Get that bit fixed because nobody enjoys it. Just getting bombarded with people pitching you on something you didn't want and then asking to hop on your schedule for 60 minutes. Is this working? There must be some numbers, some percentage of people that say yes. Speaker 2: I don't know. I always get the emails every day of going, I have this great idea for you. I've created this video for you. Can I send it? I was like, well, you're already starting off lying to me because you would already send it if you actually created it. And then like, if I do reply, then they do send me this generic email with like my website in the background. I'm like, good God, you're marketing like it was five years ago. Speaker 1: I don't know. There seems to be an expectation that the people you're marketing to are idiots. Speaker 2: Let's talk more about building this community and what you found works. Hopefully you do test it out, but I also do like, like if your clients ever leave you, they have to leave the community too. So it's almost kind of this agreed black box as well, which I like, or you could just charge the people test coming in more than your clients. Speaker 1: Certainly, something that's happened, we've got a lot of grandfathered rates for people who've been here a period of time. And if they leave and return, it's going to be significantly more expensive. And there's a lot about our community that I want to improve. There's areas that certainly aren't where I want them to be. But on the whole, it really helped that COVID was the catalyst for it. Getting people together during their darkest times and seeing them work together and collaborate It builds certain character in that group. So that group's been great. That's helped. The challenge we've had since then is how do we now embed newer people into the community that were part of the bunch of veterans that have been to war together? Speaker 2: Do you have a cluster of groups? Speaker 1: Yeah, unfortunately. We're trying to close that cluster as much as possible, but it's certainly there. There's nothing that we found that does a better job than in-person events. Once again, I do think Face-to-face communications and some of the old school things are probably going to rear their head again more and more during this AI world where human emotion and human touch is probably going to become slightly more important. And this sounds ridiculous to say, but there's nothing that adds more value to a community than getting people together and getting them drunk. When people are going out and having food and actually socializing, that's where weight of relationship can become huge. So I'd say that's one of the biggest ones, getting people together and creating space that it's not at a hotel next to an airport, but take people, give them an experience. We've got 50 of our US clients coming to London in June. So many of them are coming to Europe for the first time. We're doing an Austin Powers-themed event. So we've got the UK's number one Austin Powers impersonator who's going to be there. It's going to be a very 60s themed and two days is going to be a lot of fun, but giving them a real experience that is going to build relationship and depth in that community as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what we found with our community is, you know, we do two events a year. One Elevate is kind of open to the public after we screen them. And it's amazing where You get the right people together as long as you curate it. That's the biggest thing, right? You can't have the people with different agendas in there. And you curate it and the campfires, like when we're sitting around the campfires or doing the games or chatting, like that's the most fun. And then like, then we, you know, once a year we always do a member event only, which we would rent out this huge ranch. This year it's in the fall in Aspen, Colorado. We go horseback riding, we go fly fishing. Like it's not the typical boring conference. It's all orchestrated to get people to have those conversations, to build those connections, so then they're not alone. And I've hired a lot of agencies. I wish they did what you did, right, with the community, because I'd love to get around other people like me that they're helping. They don't, like it's crazy. Speaker 1: You know how much like as an agency, right? And I say this to all our clients when they first come on board, when I'm encouraging them to maximize their community is like no matter what challenge you're facing right now or puzzle, there's probably someone in the community that's dealt with it, solved it, has a story to tell that will save you time, money, energy, resource, give you extra sleep at night. It's like that is a value add that we can give as a company. It costs us nothing to do. We just put people together. Speaker 2: And it saves you time. Speaker 1: Huge value. Speaker 2: Because they're not hitting you up for all those answers. Speaker 1: And we don't have many of the answers, right? I have never run the business that we're marketing towards and who we serve. And yeah, you put people together and a lot of challenges get solved and it adds a huge amount of value without you even being part of it. Speaker 2: Hi there, agency owners. Let me ask you, are you ready to scale your agency without increasing your overhead costs? If yes, then you need to know about E2M Solutions. Now, E2M is the number one most reliable white label partner for agencies. They specialize in web design, WordPress development, e-commerce, SEO, and content writing. They basically do all the heavy lifting, which frees you up to focus on growing your agency. Now, here's the best part. E2M is just not another vendor. With over 10 years of experience, their team of over 300 experts has a track record of delivering for more than 300 agencies. They're your strategic partner. They deliver on time every time, so you can focus on what you do best. Now, E2M's mission is simple, to help 500 agencies increase their revenue and profit margins with white label services that actually work. And to help you get started, they're offering a special deal, 10% off for the first three months, but act fast because it's only a limited time offer. So head over to e2msolutions.com slash smart agency to check out their transparent and their flexible pricing. Trust me, if you're ready to grow without burning out, e2m is the partner you've been looking for. That's e2msolutions.com slash smart agency. Go check them out and tell them Jason Swenk sent you. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing about, you know, our community that we build. The only thing lacking for my business to capitalize on that is what you're capitalizing on, right? So we'll tell people, Hey, here's where you need to go. Here's who you need to connect with. Here's this best strategy and you know, actually what to do, but they have to go do it. What I like about your model, you'd be like, oh yeah, here's the email marketing campaign that you need to do. We can do it for you if you want. And then you just go do it. It just enhances it even more. And that's why I'm like, everyone listening, you have an agency, you don't build a community of just your clients together. It's crazy. Like, why not? Speaker 1: It's so true. And of course you end up with things like competition. You've got to manage all these things, right? You get people who don't want to be in the same room as their competitor. So there's some limitations about if you're introducing your clients together, like you've got to ensure a few things add up and mainly the values of the people that you work with are aligned. Speaker 2: That's the biggest key. Speaker 1: Agreed. We've all been at a state of an agency that you'll just take any old client, even if you don't particularly like them, just because you need the client. And the thought of introducing the one who's a pain in the backside to the one who's bouncing off the walls of energy filled you with fear, you need solid values. And that takes a little bit of time to understand what those are. Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I think too, it's just like hiring someone. So our agency experience used to be at my house. And so when Darby would qualify people, I'd always say, they're going to be at the house. So anybody you want to invite at your house for dinner, they can't come. Speaker 1: Yeah. It's a great way. Speaker 2: They have to believe in what we believe in, right? Like, you know, a lot of times we'll jump on a call with an agency and we'll start asking them, Hey, what's the revenue? And if they're not transparent with that and they're like, Oh, I don't want to tell you that's off to send you an NDA. Like, well, you're not going to work in the community. Right. Because where are you gonna make everybody sign an NDA? Like I get like some stuff is very private, but. Top Line Revenue isn't going to hurt anybody. Speaker 1: So yeah, it's true. I think even from a marketing perspective, we don't have a sales team. We don't really have a marketing team. We deliver some signature pieces of content, typically through webinars and through a weekly newsletter to prospects. And then we've got everything dialed in. So the people that reach out, it's just a very easy qualification call and scheduling an onboarding date, which has been nice. Speaker 2: How did you choose your niche? Speaker 1: It was such an accident. So the backstory was I had a small marketing company in the UK and I had a client at the time who was just about to launch a book. He was a speaker, a guy called Phil M. Jones, and he was doing some work in the hearing care industry in the US as a speaker, going around doing some consulting with some of their big clients. And then he invited me out to Houston, Texas, because he was hosting a small event there for a few clinics. I was very reluctant to go for a couple of reasons. The first one was I'd only been to the US once prior to that. And it was to Cleveland, Ohio for a Dan Kennedy event. And my view was the U.S. was very overrated based on what I had experienced. So, I decided to give it another chance and realize that... Speaker 2: We're Cleveland. We love Cleveland though. Speaker 1: Not all like Cleveland, Ohio, unfortunately. So, no, I went to that event and shared some ideas. It just felt very obvious to an industry outsider. And from there, a few of the people in the room just asked if we can help them to implement some of the ideas we discussed. And before we knew it, it's one of those where you go to the bar, you get a beer, you look at each other and go, well, okay, let's work this out. And then we started, yeah, started from there, had our first client the week after. So, yeah, one of those kind of accidental agencies where there wasn't too much intent, We found that people needed help. We knew we could help them. And before we knew it, we were saying yes and making stuff happen. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's exciting, right? Like, I always tell everybody, you have to pick a niche, but it takes some time to figure that out. And a lot of times you just got to experiment and kind of fall on your face a lot of different times. I'm so glad you created the community, right? Like so many people freaked out. And I think that's, that will help a lot of people going through this right now, because obviously the markets is so like no one, like we got, we have a crazy person in the world that the helm, regardless if you love them or like them, you know, I won't say either, but like, it's disrupting the market in a way where a lot of people are kind of scared or freaking out. And I think They're all having kind of this knee-jerk reaction. And we had that same thing during 08 and 99, the dot-bomb, even with, you know, COVID, right? Like everyone had this knee-jerk reaction. But when you look at those downtimes, those are amazing opportunities that created this community for your clients that changed the whole trajectory of your agency. You know, I was at dinner, I was telling the mastermind group a little while ago, I was at dinner this week with a friend. He's a stockbroker. He was telling me the story of this doctor client that called him. And he was like, hey, should I not invest when the market's down in my 401k anymore? And my buddy Joe was like, yeah, if you want to buy it when it's at an all-time high, like let's not invest right now. And that's kind of how I look at this time right now with agencies. Like you have huge opportunities, like a massive, and it's going to take all your competition out. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's so true. And we're doubling down in this period and trying to get as effective as possible and attract more and more clients. But yes, there's a lot of confusion out there and people who can bring clarity to confusion typically get attention. So I think a little bit of thought leadership and even going back to the AI discussion before, if we jump a few years into the future, What are agencies, right? Because traditionally we were built on human capital, scaled and sold. And when that changes, I think the role of being in a niche and being significantly more value than just the doing, you can strategically lead them through all the significant change that's occurring. Give business owners some leadership because no matter how brave we all pretend to be as business owners, we lack a little bit of leadership of somebody to say it's going to be okay and follow me in this direction. So I think if you can combine a little bit of thought leadership, a little bit of strategic care and love for the people that you want to serve with the implementation and execution, then it's going to put you in the best place as we approach some very interesting years for our kind of industry. Speaker 2: Incredible, right? Like I was, you know, the, the new thing that I've been researching for a while now or for the past month is creating AI agents. And it's not going to replace agency. Like if you think about. At the end of the day, an agency is the middle person. Okay. Between someone that has a problem to someone, you know, figuring out a solution. And so. There's always going to be that person. Now that agency may not need 50 people or a hundred people that it used to. When I had my agency, we were over a hundred people. I could create the same thing last year. Let's say before AI, but all this digital media and all these tools and all this kind of stuff, I could create the same agency with probably around 30 people. So now with AI, if you think about that, now I can probably get that down, especially as AI gets better and better. I could probably create it with 10. Have an eight-figure agency with 10 people. Speaker 1: Crazy, right? I think that's it. And it depends, like, what's the value going to be on in the past? Because I think there's going to be a squeeze in one direction because, I don't know, I look at how many people pay agencies for the work they do. And people know what's going on with AI. So the question is like, do I get more for my money or do I pay you less? Speaker 2: We were just talking in the mastermind. I just got so we have a bunch of different groups and sometimes we'll get like performance agencies in a group and we'll get creative agencies in a group and we'll just have discussions. And one of the discussions today was around this and they were all talking about The bigger brands are coming to them and saying, Hey, I want to reduce budget with less people in using AI and putting out like RFIs in order to do this, right? That's how they're thinking. And they're just like, we just want to leverage AI. So the agencies that understand AI and can communicate that and have that expertise, they're going to have a leg up. That's what the clients are looking for because they hear it in the news like, oh my gosh, all creative agencies are going to go away because you can go to ChatGPT and create the ad. But you still have to have someone figuring out what to produce. And communicate that, but another day I was messing around. I created like this super AI agent. You just go to ChatGPT and you go to ExploreGPT and then you upload a bunch of cool things to it. Like we uploaded all our case stories and success stories. We uploaded like our client's biggest challenges, all the data that we have from our CRM. We uploaded our brand voice and then like it knows our tone or it knows our voice. And then I can share out that link with my team. And they're like, write me a blog post on this. Write me a LinkedIn post on this. And it's like, I did it in two seconds. And it's probably better than what I would thought because it's combining all that data together. Speaker 1: Interesting. Right. And yeah, I feel like we're, we're almost on iPhone too. It's like, what's, what's iPhone 15. iPhone's probably, iPhone's probably not the best example because like. Speaker 2: Well, they haven't changed it forever. And their crap AI that they've put in their phones right now is so bad. I'm like, why did you even call it Apple Intelligence? Speaker 1: It's not, I don't know. It feels like Google and Apple are in a very funky phase right now, where the power struggle that they've had for a long time is being challenged. Yeah, interesting times across the board for marketers like us. Speaker 2: Well, it's fun. I just look at it as a huge opportunity. At first, when things start turning around and you start watching the news, I had a knee-jerk reaction. I'm like, well, glad I made my money. Then I'm like, well, hell, I can make more because there's a huge opportunity. And then you just change your perspective versus like, yeah, AI is going to replace everything. It's not like that's ridiculous. Speaker 1: It's so true. It's so true. Speaker 2: Awesome. Well, Oli, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the listeners listening in? Speaker 1: I'd say the only one and I'll take a leaf out of your book on this one is starting a weekly podcast was the best thing we ever did as a business. And we didn't really touch on it, but I've been listening to your podcast for a scary number of years. And I love the format of just regular production of good quality, helpful content towards the type of people you want to serve. Yeah, I'd say that's probably been the biggest catalyst to Not just our retention of clients, how we've attracted clients, how we've educated clients, how we've grown reputation and brand within our market. Once again, using AI, this has never been easier to do. And, um, I think as, as marketing agencies, we don't really have an excuse not to create good content like this. Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's really fantastic. You know, like this whole podcast, it was all generated by AI. No, I'm just kidding. But in one day you will not know. And my team will have duplicated me and then we will just interview random people that no one's ever heard of. Like that's kind of the future that could be coming. So, but well, Oli, thanks so much for, for coming on the show. And if all of you. I hope you enjoyed this type of content and you want to be a part of a community and really see how a community works so you can actually implement it in your agency. We'd love you to check out Agency Mastery. You go to agencymastery.io and we put the most amazing agency owners in there that are sharing and caring and growing and just really cool people. So go check that out and until next time. Have a Swenk day!