Logan Lyles (00:02.948)
building a profitable agency is hard enough. Why and how would someone try to launch five individual agencies in two years? Well, that's exactly what today's guest is doing. And it's not without experience. My name is Logan Lyles. Welcome back to the Agency Builders podcast. Today, I'm joined by John Giorso, who founded and exited Orca Pacific. He's our guest today and we'll be discussing what he learned from his exit that he's applying to these five new agencies he's launching.

what processes he found to be scalable across different agency types, and maybe some common advice for building your agency that you can possibly disregard. John, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.

John (00:43.863)
Yeah, thanks, Logan. Thanks for having me on.

Logan Lyles (00:47.053)
Awesome. Well, the first question I've got to ask, I alluded to in the intro there is why the heck would you try to launch five agencies in two years? It's got a ring to it. But other than that, once you kind of get over that, sounds cool. It's like, my gosh, what are you getting yourself into here?

John (01:02.743)
Yeah, I ask myself that sometimes. you know...

Logan Lyles (01:05.124)
you

John (01:08.111)
The sort of the philosophical answer, there's a philosophical and there's a practical answer. The philosophical answer is I already launched and was, you know, by most accounts successful with an agency, right? So I've done that, like, and it was great. And I did it for actually a little over a decade, right? And that was a really good chapter in my life. And I'm looking for a novel challenge. So that's like the philosophical, like, what do want your life to be about? What do you want to accomplish? That kind of thing, right?

And then the more practical answer is, there's a bunch of stuff I'm interested in.

And I really strongly believe that agencies, especially when they're small, should be hyper niche focused. So what I didn't want to do is start a, you know, functionally a 10 or 15 person agency that claims to be world class at 12 different things. Right. Because I actually don't think that works. It doesn't resonate in the market. It's confusing to the market. It's confusing to customers. That being said, I'm, I'm really interested in several different domains.

and I believe I have a good operating model for you know 0 to 1 and then 1 to 10 and

And I think I can apply it multiple times. I'm also very interested in the, in the idea of kind of force multiplying my experience and skillset through the agency of others. Of course, any business is doing that. But I think when you actually try and launch multiple businesses, you're sort of taking that to an extreme. And I just find that to be a super interesting concept. You know, ask me in a year if it's worked or if it's working, right? But because we're early days, but signals are good so far.

Logan Lyles (02:42.246)
Mm-hmm.

John (02:53.609)
So yeah, we're gonna see if we can make this work.

Logan Lyles (02:57.032)
Cool. Yeah, we'll have to do a follow up episode in about 12 months from now and see how things are going getting into the holidays of 2025. For now, though, you know, we alluded to it. There is definitely in your background building orca Pacific and exiting that give us a little bit of context so people know kind of what was your journey there as it impacted now this new leg of the journey. And then we'll dig into kind of the operating models.

John (03:01.347)
Yeah.

Logan Lyles (03:25.276)
you know, as we alluded to at the open, what are you finding is applicable across different agency types and what are you kind of disregarding? But I think that backstory is important as well.

John (03:34.379)
Yeah, so I'll keep this one pretty brief, but you know, I was basically an accidental agency owner when I was in my early 20s, kind of that typical story. I got into a service that was pretty straightforward. It was basically helping brands set up their account on vendor central, which is one of the Amazon portals, which at the time was actually kind of like weird and hard and tricky. And then setting up their items for them. And like that was the service. That's what I did. And it was me.

Doing it and then kind of you know, long story short realized Once the items are set up you can start doing some marketing and you can actually like grow the sales proactively You know fast forward over a decade You know built out content and paid and strategy and kind of turned what I was doing into a genuine full-service Amazon focused agency Again back to that kind of niche that served us very well in terms of saying, you

We want to be the best in the world at Amazon. That was kind of our thing. We were in Seattle. were, you know, we had an office on their campus. You know, bootstrapped it over about a decade up to a, you know, healthy kind of eight figure mark and then sold it in 2020 to a global marketing services company called MediaMonks. Stayed on for I think about three years, did the earn out and integration and became the VP of Commerce and kind of that whole thing.

left to retire. I mean, very, you know, earnestly was like, okay, I'm done. I'm like done working. Got bored, started dabbling, and then one thing led to another. And you know, now I'm, I'm, I'm kind of back in it. So

Logan Lyles (05:20.832)
Back in a very big way, launching, as we said, five agencies in two years. So talk to us a little bit about, you know, a full decade of launching and building a bootstrapped agency, obviously a successful exit. There were things that you tried, things that you found worked, things that you threw away. All of that. What kind of rose to the top for you that, you know,

as you start to build out this plan with the novel challenge, as you mentioned earlier, that you're like, I'm pulling this forward. I'm leaving this behind. What are some of the nuts and bolts of the operating model that you are bringing forward from that experience now?

John (06:02.773)
Yeah, so I'm a big believer in creating systems and operationalizing the two most important components of an agency delivery and growth. I think most agencies are forced into operationalizing delivery because you get to a certain size and you realize, man, just having a room full of people doing stuff for clients kind of all their own way. And it just, it just breaks at some point. And usually it breaks like in the mid seven figures, three, four, five million.

a year, you you're up to maybe 15 people and all of a sudden it's like, uh-oh, it starts to become quite chaotic. you know, in my journey, kind of I went through that first, right? Operationalized delivery. But I'm also a big believer in operationalizing growth. If you show me any agency that's stuck in seven figures, and when I say stuck, that's not like a bad thing if you're an $8 million revenue company, right? But...

Logan Lyles (06:58.219)
Right, right, sure.

John (07:00.811)
If they're like, they don't want to be an eight million dollar company. They want to be a 20 or 30 or 50 million dollar company.

it's because they have an effectively operationalized growth. So for me, those were kind of the two biggest takeaways. And I know this because I didn't do it for a long time in my company. And then when I did, that's when things really started to change. I mean, like a lot of agencies for years, we were just a group of people doing stuff for clients and just really focusing on keeping those clients happy. And I took some sales calls personally because

because we did good work and we got referrals. And it wasn't that we were opposed to growing, it's just that it was like me, basically. Even up to, I think we were probably four or five million in revenue and our growth team was basically me. And then we reached a point where we said, we really wanna hit kind of the gas on this thing and see how big we can make it.

And then we built out kind of a full stack growth team and went from there. yeah, big, big, big believer in both those concepts.

Logan Lyles (08:10.914)
I mean, a couple of things come to mind just from my own experience. recently, in addition to being director of growth here at agency builders and leading content and community at this, in this growing community, I'm director of growth within business builders, our agency that was founded by Jay Owen, who's one of the co-founders here at agency builders and

You know, we're in that transition where growth had prior to me coming on had kind of been split between Jay and Chris, the president, and they had someone in an account executive role. And so that transition and investing in growth beyond the founder had kind of started, but then kind of trying to, and hoping to, if things go well, again, we can kind of check in with me on that front in six months to a year as well of kind of this, this hopefully tipping point of investing further in growth. The second thing that came to mind is we recently pulled all of the

community members here at agency builders that are going to our retreat in March down in St. Augustine. And we asked them, you know, we've been talking about these four cornerstones of building an agency. You've got people, product, process and promotion. So you've got your people, you've got, you know, your culture, it's the lifeblood of any service business, like an agency, your product, how do you package up what you, what you service and what you deliver? And then there's process and promotion. And we asked folks,

Hey, which areas are you most challenged with or looking for more help with? And it was process and promotion, which align exactly with delivery and growth as you're talking about here. And so I think that those are our two areas. I would agree that most agencies I talked to, you kind of get forced into operationalizing delivery. So let's talk about that. And then we can talk about operationalizing growth.

John (09:31.788)
Hmm. Yep. Yep.

Logan Lyles (09:49.762)
looking back, what are some of the things that maybe you're doing differently in these new agencies as far as operationalizing delivery? I one, you're doing it with intention instead of being forced into it. But beyond that, what else would you say when it comes to operationalizing delivery or streamlining your processes early on?

John (10:09.773)
You know, I'm sure I'll make new mistakes this time around.

Right. But I'm trying not to make the mistakes I already made in the last company. So I'm trying to at least do the stuff that took me 10 years of messing around to find kind of the right combination. I think the biggest difference this time is I'm doing that stuff much earlier. So basically putting it in place like day one or, you know, month six versus like month 36, you know, trying to get out ahead of the problems that will be caused if you don't, you know, properly sort of operationalized things. But then also, and these companies

Logan Lyles (10:13.025)
Of course.

Yeah.

John (10:43.477)
as well, but at least to start, they're going to be, I would say straightforward in terms of the pitch and the concept, but hopefully like they add a lot of value, functionally they're productized services, right? So you can and should operationalize them, you know.

pretty deliberately from day one. That being said, I think this can be overdone. you can, if you're, if you're not careful, you can actually overly operationalize delivery and you kind of lose the magic of it because you become too rigid. You start saying, no, we can't do that or we don't do that. Or that's outside of the lanes of what we do. And if you do that, you're actually optimizing like to zero that that's a huge problem. So it's this interesting kind of balance of you need to build proper

Logan Lyles (11:17.553)
Yeah. Yeah.

Logan Lyles (11:30.287)
Yeah, yeah.

John (11:34.963)
walls kind of around delivery, but then...

still need to be able to kind of create magic inside of those walls. And so to give you a couple like very specific things. So one, I'm a believer in, you can call it different things, but we always call it a prescription model. Basically this idea that, you know, your outcome and kind of value focus for clients, you're not like billing by the hour, but then internally you have, you know, an understanding of how many resources each person is putting into each client.

It basically is just the kind of overarching kind of, you know, lanes around kind of work product. So you don't, so you stay profitable basically, right?

Logan Lyles (12:18.279)
Yeah. Meaning kind of generally if we're delivering for this sort of client ongoing, it should take this project manager this many hours per month to service that client. Like those sorts of guide rails. Okay.

John (12:26.137)
Correct. Correct.

Exactly. And it doesn't mean that they're like, well, I did my, you know, eight hours this week, so I'm not going to answer their email. Like, obviously not, right? It's a guide, but it kind of like appropriately helps staff balance their workload. And then the just in no particular order. I'm a big believer in quantifying as much as you can. And that includes delivery and in particular with client satisfaction. So I think regularly quantifying and then also getting the quality

of information that comes with it, client satisfaction and doing that as regularly and granularly as you can without annoying the client. That's basically the line, right? Is when you're like, yeah, there is. And I've tried different things. So here's where I landed. You have...

Logan Lyles (13:08.157)
Yeah. How have you found to do that effectively? Because there is a line there.

John (13:19.883)
I would say leadership, but it's not necessarily leadership. It's probably like if there's a manager, it's just probably not the frontline people working on the client account. But you have a manager or someone in a specific role or if company is small, CEO, right? Talk to clients on a regular, not annoying cadence. Maybe that's monthly, maybe it's every other month, maybe it's once a quarter. And you have a pretty simple conversation with them. You say, hey, how's it going? How's check-in? How's the family, whatever.

And then you go, listen, you I know that, and you can even be a little self-deprecating. I know this is kind of a pain, but like, just, want to get your scores again, right? And then you ask them on a one to 10 scale, how are we doing overall? How each individual team member is doing? And if there's anything specific you want to drill down or like different service lines, how we're doing on paid media, how are we doing in strategy? How are we doing, right? And you get a one to 10 rating. That within four minutes gets you quantitative data on their satisfaction, right?

It also gives you an opportunity to get the qualitative. If they're like, you're a seven. really? Seven. That's interesting. Why aren't we a nine or 10? you know, it's fine. Like, okay, but what would make us a nine or 10? Because clients are nice, right? Like, mostly clients are nice. They don't want to they're not going to call you and be, you know, be angry or annoyed. They like the people they work with. But if they're underwhelmed, they'll leave just a matter of time. If they're underwhelmed, they will leave.

Logan Lyles (14:45.043)
Yeah. And is that part of the reason that you suggest a management or leadership level person do this rather than the account manager who's dealing with the client day to day?

John (14:49.698)
Yes.

John (14:54.199)
Yep, exactly. Cause you get more candid feedback. You know, you can pull things out of them. You're not trying to get them to talk badly about your staff. That's not the goal here. The goal is just to get candid feedback, right? Okay. Interesting. I'll look into that. I'll get back to you. So if there's anything less than nine or 10, you get the qualitative feedback and then you flag it. It's a yellow flag goes up to leadership. You work with the team. You, you know, you're, you are transparent internally around scores, et cetera. So you can deal with specific client issues that, you can nip them in the butt, on a, you know,

one-on-one basis, but then you also have this aggregated view of the business, right? Because you have, okay, this is how all of our clients rank us on strategy. This is how all of our clients rank this specific, know, frontline person. This is how all of our clients rank us overall. And then you have a trend line. And that at scale, you know, even if you're talking about 20, 30 clients is incredibly valuable because prevention is the key.

know, churn is always right around the corner. I don't care who you are, what agency you are. You're always one step away from churn accelerating. And you know, it's hard once churn happens, it's too late, right? It's a,

It's far too late. The amount of stuff that's happened usually to lead up to a client leaving is actually pretty significant. It may not be anything dramatic, but it's like death by a thousand cuts. And if you can find the first cut when it happens, you can just prevent it and deal with it and move on. So.

Logan Lyles (16:26.54)
Yeah, I love all of that. The quantitative plus the qualitative giving an outside person outside of the direct relationship between the client and the account manager, right? Because as much as clients can be demanding and all those sorts of things at the same time, at least in our culture in the U S most people are a little bit more hesitant to give critical feedback directly to the person. So just give them that out.

And I like what you said there for anybody taking notes that 1 to 10 scale should be overall how you're doing as an agency, 1 to 10 on the team member who's managing that account, and then possibly on various service lines or different services you're delivering so that you can build those trend lines. Have you found any tools that worked well to enable this? Is it just simple Google Sheets? Anything there? I know I'm kind of getting into the weeds and getting a little nerdy here, but.

John (17:18.699)
No, it's okay. It's no. The only reason I'm shaking my head is I've tried and I've also tried by the way, if people are thinking this, I've tried doing this asynchronously. I've tried doing it via surveys, via, you know, email and my experience, not saying it can't work, but my experience is that people just don't respond. They don't fill it out. And if there is negative feedback, people, it makes people even more uncomfortable to put that in writing. Right. So it's, it's, it's much, much better if you can do it over the phone. You should probably be doing some sort of top to

Logan Lyles (17:28.858)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John (17:48.545)
top check in any way with all your clients on a regular basis, you know, this is just a way to kind of insert into that conversation. And yeah, in terms of tools, yeah, Google, like Google Sheet, right? I mean, I suppose if you had like 1000 clients, maybe you need something more advanced, but Google Sheet, you know, do conditional formatting highlight anything under a nine and you know, the executive team reviews it on a weekly basis as part of their usual cadence. And it's just this constant sort of

Logan Lyles (18:00.845)
Yeah.

John (18:18.468)
map, color map of where all your clients are. And if there's anything that's not green, you address it until it is.

Logan Lyles (18:24.367)
Yep, I love that. Especially I know that a lot of our community members here at Agency Builders run on EOS and so they're regularly reviewing that weekly scorecard in their level 10 meeting. This could be, you know, one of those scorecard items that you're regularly looking at and we know if it's yellow or if it's red, you drop it down.

to the issues list, those sorts of things. And now, like, even if you're not, you know, that skilled in kind of turning this into visual data with even Google Sheets, just track it in Google Sheets and drop it into chat GPT, you know, or another tool and have it visualize the data for you. It's becoming much and much easier. One of the other things you were talking about, John, that I really related to was when I was part of a previous agency, they're still around. But when I was with Sweetfish Media, we kind of swung

the pendulum, as you said, kind of too far in operationalizing delivery where I started to hear clients say, geez, it kind of feels like the DMV around here. Because we went from saying yes to way too much to saying no, you know, way too frequently. And they, you know, course corrected and I'm not, you know, throwing the team there under the bus is all stuff that we talked about. But you mentioned a little bit kind of tracking capacity, how much time should be spent per client, anything.

there that we could drill into to give folks either some of the tools or some of the benchmarks that you looked at as we look at, you know, kind of that balance between, hey, we're operationalized, but we don't want to feel like the DMV.

John (19:54.778)
Yeah.

It's so first of all, this is a very difficult balance and I actually think getting it right is like one of the single biggest unlocks for delivery in an agency, but it's hard to do I don't even know if I've done it perfectly ever right like But a couple things that I would suggest one is all of your staff all of your client facing staff should track their time And I think you have to be really clear to them About a couple things one is they have to do it. It's part of the job. They don't do it They're not doing their job to you are not using

to check if they're working full time. That is not the purpose of this. You're not trying to be a babysitter. That makes people very uncomfortable, which I understand. The goal is to have the data around their individual workload and where the balance is so you can help them be more effective and balance, et cetera. And the goal is to have the aggregated view. know, hey, we're, especially if you have like multiple people fractionalized on a team, right, to deliver multiple.

specialist to deliver a service, it's really hard to know what's going on if you don't have data. So one, do time tracking. It takes people five minutes a day. It's annoying. I get it. But like, you just kind of have to force it. Two, you know, I think that then that has to properly align with the prescription model that's ultimately based around like maintaining a delivery margin, right? And like a lot of agencies, they're just, they just don't

Logan Lyles (21:19.506)
Mm-hmm.

John (21:24.873)
make enough money on delivery.

Like, you know, small agency, in my opinion, should have 60 % plus gross margin or delivery margin. An agency at scale where they have management in delivery, maybe 50, right? Cause they, that eats away at margin. you're anything less than that, you've got to figure out a way to be either be more efficient or raise your pricing. so it gives you a good view into kind of that as well, but this all needs to be based on like economics, right? It's not just like, right. We think it would take this much time, this much time. It doesn't matter. It's like, what can you afford?

Logan Lyles (21:37.532)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Logan Lyles (21:43.742)
Mm-hmm.

Logan Lyles (21:50.536)
Mm-hmm.

John (21:56.694)
And then you within that try to provide the most value humanly possible within this economic constraint.

Logan Lyles (22:06.959)
What you were saying there about the delivery margin, I imagine some of our listeners are like, man, I'm feeling it because I'm not hitting those margins because I've seen industry reports have talked to a lot of agencies, especially the smaller agencies that aren't hitting that 50 % mark.

What do you think are some of the things that are often eating into that or maybe some of the low hanging fruit they could think about if they hear, Hey, I'm a smaller agency, John, and I'm not hitting that delivery margin. you know, what should I do? What are maybe two or three things I could think about at this stage? If you kind of run the time machine back in your, in your own head a little bit, right.

John (22:41.348)
Yeah.

So one, think the most important thing, and this is also the hardest, you have to make sure that the service you're offering is not fundamentally commoditized. Because if it is, you'll never be able to get out of this trap because the market is in perfect equilibrium. And, you know, just because there's a lot of like Mexican food restaurants doesn't mean that the Mexican food restaurant industry is a good idea. Right? Like you see this all the time with like entrepreneurs and like small businesses where they're like, there's like 10 Mexican restaurants on this street. It must be a great business. It's like, no, it's in

Perfect equilibrium, right and no one's making any money if you're you know, if you're effectively like I'll give you another dumb analogy an oil change place like if you're just doing a thing that anyone can do themselves But and the reason they're having you do it is because they just don't want to do the work themselves, but there's nothing fundamentally differentiated like

Logan Lyles (23:33.248)
Thank

John (23:34.573)
That's a terrible business to be in and you'll never be able to get out of this trap. So you have to find what is the thing that really makes you unique and valuable and that allows you to set pricing in a way that actually justifies a better margin. So again, very hard, But that's, I think, critical. And then from there...

Logan Lyles (23:50.324)
Yeah, I hear you.

John (23:57.187)
You know, think scope creep is a big one. Especially what I what I've seen happening with smaller agencies frequently and we fell into this trap as well as the worst clients get the most effort because they're always the ones complaining and about to fire you and they're never happy. And so you just over deliver and over deliver and over deliver and they're never happy and they they leave anyway. And then you create this weird imbalance in the business where they're unprofitable and they're high-term.

Logan Lyles (23:59.382)
Mm-hmm.

John (24:27.173)
clients and then you functionally underserve other clients because there's literally only so much time in the day right and then those clients eventually leave but they leave kind of quietly they're just like we're going a different direction it's not you it's me kind of thing yeah yeah yeah

Logan Lyles (24:31.692)
Yes.

Logan Lyles (24:39.234)
Yeah, yeah, that silent churn as we were kind of talking about earlier. And I've seen data on this when I was at teammark.com, we did some annual reports and we looked at, think it was last year, 45 % or so of agencies that responded to the survey for that report said that they were either frequently or often over servicing clients. And just at

John (25:00.194)
Yeah, yeah.

Logan Lyles (25:02.808)
practical advice for anyone listening to this that's either in a client facing role or you have those people in your client in client facing roles on your team that report up to you. One thing that I got from Eric Sue who's you know successful agency owner coaches other agencies as well. He talked about the zero dollar change order and essentially it is you know John you asked for me ask something of me that's out of scope.

Okay, John, can do that, but that is out of scope. I'm going to write up this change order to kind of document it, right? Okay, second time, we're going to go through that same process. Third time, okay, we're going to do this. It's going to be an extra, you know, $500 for whatever this is or a thousand dollars or whatever. And maybe you introduce that the third one's going to be charged, you know, in number one, kind of depends on the situation, but that's a way that you can kind of go beyond and not feel like the DMV, but not...

John (25:35.406)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Logan Lyles (25:58.691)
I've been in situations where if you don't kind of call out that it's out of scope, then the scope creep literally is the client thinking these things are in scope because you haven't told them. Right. And I think that's what we don't talk about a lot with scope creep.

John (26:09.977)
I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah.

I agree with that. think most scope creep is not a client being malicious, right? A client's just trying to get stuff done and they're like, we like you guys. Can you do this? And can you do this? It comes from good intentions, but it's not their fault. It's your fault. Like any agency, you know, they have to own this. It's not the client's fault. In fact, I would say nothing is the client's fault. It's always your fault. Right? I think that's a big, this is a bit of a tangent, but I think there's a mindset thing here too, where it's like, it's always your

Logan Lyles (26:17.303)
Mm-hmm.

John (26:42.8)
your fault, right? Like you can't be like, this client was unrealistic or this client was too needy or they, you know, they were political. It's like, yeah, yeah, it is welcome to an agency, right? Like welcome to the business.

Logan Lyles (26:55.844)
It's kind of like the old saying of I'd, you know, I would just love running my agency so much more if it weren't for the people and the clients. People are people, right?

John (27:02.976)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's part of the deal, right? And then it's on you. Well, you didn't explain this well enough. You didn't set boundaries. It's always back on the agency leadership to figure this out.

Logan Lyles (27:16.442)
Yeah. And if it's an outlier and something malicious is happening, that is on the agency leadership to kind of step in and go to bat for their team. But oftentimes, as you said, they're kind of stepping here, just trying to get stuff done and they know that you'll, you'll help them. You can still help them, but just call a timeout and say, look, John, I'm going to do this, but technically this is outside of scope and just doing that. It will change the change the game. Cause I've seen clients being over-serviced and the account manager is stressed out and worn out.

And the client is frustrated because then when you come back to them and say, Hey, this thing we've been doing for six months, we can't keep doing anymore. And they're like, why didn't you tell me that? You know, from the get-go. So you're doing yourself a disservice and the client a disservice. If you don't call it out sooner.

John (28:01.139)
I will give you one more sort of oddball way of addressing this and it won't work for every business, but it's, it's maybe kind of mind expanding for some founders. And I use this to very good effect of my old agency. The other way you can handle this is to build in performance based pricing. So performance based upside so that your clients naturally, like without adjusting the scope, without adjusting the contract, without signing a new SOW, they just naturally pay you more.

As which which creates this incentive where you're kind of like actually want to do more because you now have the bandwidth like you can afford and you just kind of keep doing more and more and more and they keep paying you more and if you do that it's tricky if you do it the right way though it actually can create a win-win very sticky situation where you don't have to do it change order right you can just go yeah we'll do that we'll do that and actually is there anything else you need us to do because you're looking at it going like we're good in fact we're sort of like

Logan Lyles (28:58.545)
Yeah, if we do this, yeah. Or it, the, thing I like about that, we did a previous episode on the show about success based billing and in talking to other community members, think most are shying away from that, you know, as a whole way to, price for clients. I like the upside success based billing, maybe more because it puts you in this strategic authority position of you asking me to do something like you were just saying. And I'm like, John, yep, yep, yep.

John (29:16.29)
Yeah. Yeah.

Logan Lyles (29:27.635)
What was that third thing? That's not going to get you the results. No. And you know that I'm going to tell you that if I'm being incentivized based on driving greater results, right?

John (29:30.744)
Yeah. Yeah.

John (29:37.164)
Yeah. And just one more thing, if you want to get really specific about it, what I would recommend is people do a base fee that basically covers their overhead, maybe plus a little bit. Right. So you're, you're in a position where you're not actually going to lose money. And then you basically make money on the upside. And that's kind of a win-win, right? Like you come in at a pretty aggressive rate, but then if you do well, your client's happy, you're happy. You make a good margin. Like it can work really well.

Logan Lyles (30:06.026)
Cool. Really good stuff. And I appreciate you drilling down into some of the details here as we talked about, you know, operationalizing delivery kind of in that process area of one of the cornerstones we were talking about the flip side of the conversation that you were talking about earlier is operationalizing growth. The promotion cornerstone that we talk about a lot here. And I think one thing that could help us continue to have a good conversation on this is

I was looking at your LinkedIn post, I think from today at the time of this recording and you were talking about how you were operationalizing growth across these five agencies that you're launching in two years again, kind of bringing it back there. You talked about a LinkedIn full court press outbound email and social DMS, a partnership program, podcast tour, and then testing and tripling down. We don't have to go into all of those in detail, but I thought there's definitely some nuggets here and talking about operationalizing growth.

that have probably come from lessons learned and then what you're rolling forward, similar to how we were talking about delivery earlier.

John (31:07.937)
Yeah, for sure. So let me start with the last one first, which is basically the idea that you're going to test a bunch of stuff, but specifically to figure out what you want to double down and triple down on. I, I

Logan Lyles (31:11.261)
Okay.

Logan Lyles (31:20.179)
Mm-hmm.

John (31:21.335)
I actually would really shy away from and this is for any B2B company in general, especially a bootstrap company. I'd shy away from kind of peanut buttering across your efforts on growth long-term. I think that, you know, most companies that are like seven figures and quickly hit eight figures or eight figures and still growing pretty quickly year over year are doing it based on like one or two or three growth channels. You know, it doesn't mean that they don't kind of have a presence elsewhere, but usually they're like crushed.

Logan Lyles (31:31.476)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John (31:51.348)
it with SEO and they're crushing it with like, you know, events or like there's a couple things they picked and gone all in on. So my general kind of advice is test a bunch of stuff, but don't just keep it all running at, you know, 10 different things at 10 % of your effort and budget. Like figure out what's working, kill seven of the programs and then double down on three and go from there. but to get more specific in terms of the things that I think are working really well, and I'm, I'm kind of eating my own cooking here because two of these are the first two

agencies that that we're doing. One is already up and running and was started by my co founder. So it's been around for two years. And it is basically it's LinkedIn personal brand, right? I think it works incredibly well. I know it works incredibly well, because one, we have an agency doing it too, it was a huge part of my strategy at Orca. And it worked very well then it still works. Basically, the idea is you're giving away as much free stuff as you can to your ICP via LinkedIn.

the platform does a very good job at matching a niche audience to kind of a niche concept or thought leader and You know just pumping out high quality content on a daily basis If you can also then pair that with ads it can work very very well So that's kind of number one I'll pause there if you want to go into it because I have a few others that I highly recommend as well, but

Logan Lyles (33:15.65)
Yeah, I definitely want to get to those. This is definitely an area of interest for me. I've grown significantly on LinkedIn and whenever I have folks, you know, want to talk about LinkedIn and or podcasting or the combination thereof, I'm always, you know, good to jam on that. And so I'm curious, do you think that for agencies specifically, there's a unique advantage versus maybe SAS companies or others that are doing the LinkedIn personal brand game or

anything they should do differently or tweak in their approach versus other sorts of businesses when it comes to building that founder brand on LinkedIn.

John (33:52.92)
So I do think agencies are uniquely advantaged in this channel. One, because marketing in general is the conversation is happening on LinkedIn. Like that is where the marketing conversation is happening. Yeah, it happens a bit on X, but not nearly at the same scale. So it's kind of is just home base. Like, yeah, yeah.

Logan Lyles (34:15.147)
I'd agree, yeah, that's been my experience in the last six years or so on the platform.

John (34:19.863)
Yeah, for sure. And I think it's even gotten more that way, right? Like LinkedIn's doing very well as a company. So, you know, they're increasing engagement. They have more members than they've ever had. Two, you are...

Logan Lyles (34:23.309)
Mm-hmm.

John (34:33.462)
an expert as a founder or someone in a leadership position at an agency. You are by definition an expert in some specific kind of domain, right? Because that's what you're selling. Like if you're not an expert in the thing you do, like why are you in this business? How is that even possible? Right? So it lends itself incredibly well to this format because all you have to do is talk about the stuff that you talk about all day long anyway with clients, right? You're probably, if you're an SEO agency, you're probably an expert in SEO and you're probably even kind of like,

A nerd an seo nerd. It's just like what you love and you think about it and talk about it all the time Like so you you don't have to fake anything or make anything up, right? You just have to find a way to take these ideas and perspectives and experiences that you've already had or are having and then amplify them via this communication channel So it's just such a straightforward unlock. It takes a lot of time which is you know, frankly kind of the concept with this first agency, right is like

Logan Lyles (35:07.025)
you

Logan Lyles (35:22.839)
Mm-hmm. All right.

Logan Lyles (35:26.946)
Yeah.

John (35:33.613)
we fractionalize all the effort that has to go into it, but like, build an internal team, hire people, hire an agency to do it, but I think it's well worth the effort.

Logan Lyles (35:44.973)
Yeah, yeah. And that's Influence Social that's doing that, correct? Yeah, yeah. Very cool. I love what you guys are doing there.

John (35:47.938)
Correct. Yeah, correct. Yeah, yeah, thanks. And then, you know, the second one on that list is outbound email and DMs. This is an interesting channel because it's been around for 25 years, right, since the advent of email. I know. Yeah, I know. So I actually, I think this is a fascinating dynamic. Here's what I would say briefly.

Logan Lyles (35:58.061)
Mm-hmm.

Logan Lyles (36:05.133)
Yeah, outbound's dead though, John. Cold is dead right now.

Logan Lyles (36:13.124)
Mm-hmm.

John (36:17.593)
doing outbound kind of moderately well is a complete waste of time. It is dead. If you do, if you just throw stuff against the wall, it will be worth nothing. Like you will, it's a total waste of time. In fact, I would say there's a big downside risk, reputational risk, you're spamming your, your tam, right? It's just, yeah.

Logan Lyles (36:36.783)
Yeah, I'd agree.

Yeah, you're burning future bridges, all that stuff. Yeah.

John (36:42.476)
Yeah, it's a total, total stupid waste of time. That being said, outbound done in kind of a world class way is...

In my experience doing this for agencies actively today is maybe the single highest roi channel that they have access to so the quality It's not the channel like the channel is just a channel, right? like It's like a podcast right you can there's tons of podcasts that have three listeners a month and there's podcasts that have millions and you know, it's the channel's not the the concept here it's what you do with it and

Logan Lyles (37:08.4)
Mm-hmm.

John (37:23.216)
There's more opportunity in outbound messaging than there ever has been because of a lot of the new technology that's come online over the last two years.

Logan Lyles (37:31.592)
Yeah. I mean, I saw you mentioned clay as a, you know, part of the tech stack there. It's the second time I've heard someone recommend clay to me in just this past week. and I've got a buddy who's actually out in my neck of the woods here in Colorado, Obed, who's, recently gone on staff there. talk to me a little bit, maybe one or two things that you see the differentiation between doing outbound moderately well and doing it excellently that actually leads to results.

John (38:00.854)
So here's the trend that I think is happening right now and I think it's going to accelerate over the next year plus. We're getting very close to being able to directly replicate asynchronous human communication via marketing and technology.

So that's a kind of jargony way of saying this, but what I mean is if you have an SDR and that SDR job is to sit there and do research and find out all they can about the prospect and then sit there and write an email and say, you know, hi, Jim, CTO of this company. We noticed that this is happening and we saw this on your website. We, were on a podcast that I listened to and they gather all this information and then they craft this very well written, highly contextual, highly value additive email. They even do some work for free and say,

Hey, like we'd love to send you this, you know, no strings attached like just review it And if you want to jump on the phone like a good SDR, right is gonna do that stuff We can do that with technology now. It's not evenly distributed, but it is possible that was science fiction two years ago and Not to AI wash everything and make everything about AI, right? I know it's a it's a bit of a buzzword but genuinely in this case like AI has been one of the big difference makers that the upstream

Logan Lyles (39:05.382)
Yeah.

Logan Lyles (39:16.029)
AI is great at research, at summarizing, at providing context, those sorts of things. Generating stuff new, new thoughts, new points of view, not so much, right? But that doesn't mean it's not, it's kind of the same thing you were talking about with podcasts as a channel or outbound as a channel. Look at AI in everything here, right? There are bad applications of AI that are probably only going to get better for what it's worth though. But then there are, these are the things that are tailor-made for AI to be the application to do that.

John (39:18.222)
Correct. Correct.

Yep. Yep.

John (39:44.64)
Exactly, and that's why there needs to be a service layer.

Still right and again, whether that's like someone internally or an internal team or an agency or whatever when you're doing outbound email You need a best-in-class tech stack, but then you need really great people You need great writers great strategist really deeply understand psychology and marketing and icp and those kind of bigger picture concepts And then you need a technical expert as well to deploy all this stuff but if you do that the right way, yeah, that's exactly right. You're taking human-led strategy

Logan Lyles (39:47.176)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Logan Lyles (40:09.556)
Mm-hmm.

John (40:16.716)
but you're force multiplying it through technology.

Logan Lyles (40:20.338)
Yeah, we were talking about the other day and I would I would tend to agree with this. It was actually Jay, one of the founders here in the community. He said, you know, AI, we were talking about things on a webinar about AI, things to fear, things to cheer. One of the things to fear is his job loss. If I'm getting it right from the conversation the other day, he was saying he actually thinks that there's going to be more job loss, not from AI taking your job, but from people who learn to leverage AI.

taking your job because they're going to be able to produce more from this, you know, out of one person's input than folks who aren't learning to, you know, drive the robots. I say, let's learn to operate and drive the robots before they kill us. that's my take anyway.

John (41:04.916)
Yeah, so I've had a lot of conversations with people that are far smarter than me on this and and much more connected, especially in the big agency world where I was for a while. And AI is going to be incredibly disruptive. But it's also you know, it's creative destruction, right? So it's going to disrupt a ton of jobs, it just will, but it will create probably more jobs on the other side of that, that are things that just are much harder to kind of

Logan Lyles (41:10.58)
Mm-hmm.

Logan Lyles (41:13.984)
Yeah. Yeah.

John (41:34.838)
Understand right now. It's easy to think about the thing that goes away It's much harder to think about the thing that gets invented and created But yeah as like if you're an individual I would absolutely be thinking about how do you? Dramatically force multiply your own effort via AI because yeah, that is the threat is people that don't know how to do that

Logan Lyles (41:40.606)
Right? Right?

Logan Lyles (41:54.006)
Absolutely. All right, John. Well, before we let you go, we got to hit you with a rapid fire round of questions if you're good to do that. So let's do it as we always do here on the agency builders podcast. Number one on our list, John, is what's one book that you often recommend to other agency founders and leaders?

John (41:59.074)
Yeah.

John (42:12.039)
I'll give you two and you're probably a fan of the first one traction. It's the EOS kind of Bible I'm a big EOS fan. I think it lends itself super well to agencies Number two is a book called who and it's a fantastic book on Jeff smart is the author It's a fantastic book on hiring recruiting and hiring. It's really good

Logan Lyles (42:25.878)
Mm-hmm.

Logan Lyles (42:30.135)
Awesome. All right. Number two, what's the next challenge you and your team are focused on tackling this quarter? think it's, you know, launching, launching five agencies in two years. It kind of answers itself for today, right?

John (42:37.846)
launching a business. Yeah, well, what Yeah, I mean, the the the immediate one is we're launching this outbound email service, hopefully in January. So yeah.

Logan Lyles (42:47.032)
Okay, very cool. All right, number three, this could be a Chrome extension, an app, or part of that best in class tech stack you were talking about earlier. John, what's a tool you've been recommending to your friends and especially agency peers lately?

John (43:02.379)
Okay, so the first one is clay because I just think it's such an impressive tool and it it kind of unleashes creativity in this in this scaled way

Logan Lyles (43:10.56)
Yeah. And context for people who aren't familiar, kind of the 30 second rundown on clay.

John (43:15.444)
Yeah, so clay basically automates a lot of the upstream research validation list building and then provides a way to mass customize communication in sort of a non if you use it the right way, like a non gimmicky mad libs kind of way, right, like in a way that actually feels much more kind of like a human wrote it authentic, etc. And so it's like the, I would say the first half because there's some

stuff you need to use other tools for. But it's a lot of the first kind of component of, again, automating the stuff that would be done on a one-to-one basis previously.

Logan Lyles (43:55.865)
Okay, cool. And then number two on your list, because you were going to give us two tools like the two books.

John (43:58.687)
Yeah, I'll give you another one. I love the chat GPT voice, like the new voice mode. It is, if anyone hasn't used this, it's brilliant. I think it's like the top five most impressive pieces of consumer technology I've ever used. I know everyone's sick of AI hype, but it's really genuinely brilliant and it's super useful in my opinion. So.

Logan Lyles (44:05.828)
Mm-hmm.

Logan Lyles (44:20.535)
Yeah. And if you're not using the new canvas mode in chat GPT for content writing, that it's just so phenomenal and how it changes the game. It's basically like gives you a kind of a Google doc experience. And instead of commenting back and forth between Logan and John, you're commenting back and forth on sections and giving feedback to chat GPT within the document or the content that you're writing. Yeah.

John (44:25.111)
it's also great. Yeah. Yeah.

John (44:42.86)
Yeah, that's also super, super useful.

Logan Lyles (44:45.882)
Awesome, man. You will not, we're not sick of the AI hype over here at agency builders, at least not yet. If you are, and you're listening to this, shoot me a DM. Let me know. Always looking for feedback on the show. All right. Number four, John, if you could ask one question of every one of your peers, other agency founders and owners in the community, we could kind of aggregate that data, get it analyzed back for you. What would you use that one question on to the community?

John (45:11.573)
I would say in your own growth efforts, what is the, the, the single biggest channel that you've had a hard time leveraging?

So this is a selfish question, right? What I'm asking is what's a good idea for an agency that could help work with other agencies and B2B companies, right? Because we have five, we have ideas. I think we have them, but there's always room for another idea, right? So does that make sense? Did I phrase that in a way that makes sense? Yeah, exactly. Like what's the thing where you're like, man, I wish I could hire someone that could just like do this for us, because I know there's opportunity, but we don't have internal capability. It's weird and complicated. So yeah, yeah.

Logan Lyles (45:39.636)
Yeah, yeah, what's number six on the the list? What's number seven? Maybe

Logan Lyles (45:49.456)
Yeah. Yeah.

Or clients are asking for this and we're not going to go there. That's that sort of thing. it's one of the things I love about our community just earlier today, one of our members posted like, Hey, we had this inbound, prospective client. They're not a fit for us. Who else, you know, would be a better fit for, for serving them. Here's the situation. there's so much in that. And that's why the tagline of this community is, collaboration over competition. You wouldn't think those sorts of conversations would be happening with a bunch of potential competitors, but they are. And it's part of what I.

John (45:54.668)
Yep. Yep.

John (46:15.789)
Yeah.

Logan Lyles (46:21.736)
love about this community. So shout out there if you are a agency owner, founder or working in an agency and you're not a member of our agency builders community, but you're here in the sound of my voice or you're watching us on YouTube, hit me up on LinkedIn, send me a DM. It is completely free or community, but invite only. So hit me up there. All right. Number five, back to it, John. Who's one person you'd like to thank or mention that's helped you in your own journey as an agency founder.

John (46:49.639)
you know, had a really good boss at MediaMonks and I never had a boss before like like literally ever and and so, his name was Chris Martin. He was a coo of MediaMonks. He's since moved on, but he was great. He was also a founder and it was just like, it was just a great working relationship. So yeah.

Logan Lyles (46:52.86)
Cool.

Logan Lyles (47:08.146)
I love it, man. All right. Well, if anybody listening to this is new to you, they haven't gotten to know you, but they got a ton of value as I did from today's conversation. John, what's the best way for them to reach out or stay connected with you?

John (47:20.298)
Yeah, LinkedIn is my home base. I'm always there if you want to chat or you're interested in figuring out what we're doing. Hit me up there. We're launching a partner program as well. So that was actually one of the things on my list we didn't get to. But if anyone's interested in that, seriously, shoot me a DM. There's tons of opportunity here, I think. And then, yeah, just stay tuned. I'll let you know the website addresses when we get those launched. So yeah.

Logan Lyles (47:45.946)
Yes, to be to be determined. yes, anybody listening to this, I recently was introduced to John from another agency owner and we've had some great conversations. Glad we got to record this one today. So John, thank you for that. Look him up on LinkedIn. His last name is spelled G H I O R S O. So look up John Giorso. Connect with him. And again, John, thank you for being our guest today. Really appreciate it,

John (48:09.004)
Yeah, thanks Logan.