Freedom - Happy 4th of July - Agency Inner Circle #8

Table of Contents

• We Celebrate “Freedom” This Week

• A Little News

• Lead Gen Insights

• New Offer

• Thanks to Our Sponsor - Clay.com

We Celebrate “Freedom” This Week

I was an accidental agency entrepreneur. It was 2002, in the deep depths of the dot com crash, and my division at ecentives was closed up right quick. In 2000, I bought a house. In 2001, I got married. ecentives closed up my business unit on January 2, 2002. By October 2002, I had a kid.

So, I had a wife, a mortgage & and a super cute kid and I had 5 solid years of digital marketing experience. And no one wanted digital marketing anymore…so there were zero jobs that I could find that were suitable. As I watched the coffers dwindle, the diaper bills explode and some stuff that needed to get fixed in the house, I was panicked. With no job prospects and growing expenses, I decided that I should do some consulting to make ends meet.

By mid 2003, I had a 6 figure agency (that was when 6 figures meant something) and another kid on the way. I tried looking for a job (you know, because health insurance is fun to have when you have kids), but since I was now a “consultant”, no one wanted to hire me. So, I doubled down again, and now we were hitting mid 6 figures…and then I realized that there was no job that would ever hire me that would pay me as much as I was making, let me work from home, and play with kid whenever I wanted.

Mind you, I had NO FREAKING CLUE what I was doing and by mid 2004, we were in the low 7 figures and we crashed really hard. (We had to call in FEMA to clean up that mess.) Looking at the smoking wreckage of my management failure, I had no choice but to get a job. There was now a 3rd kid on the way and we needed less excitement in our lives.

So I got a job. I went to work for this cool startup doing location based search for phones way before the invention of the smartphone. It was fun.

But on that first day of working at someone else’s company, I realized that my definition of freedom had changed. Of course, all of the democratic freedoms mattered, but what truly mattered to me now was the freedom to work on what I chose to work on. I demanded the freedom to wake a kid up from an afternoon nap and hang out with them while they rubbed the sleep out of their eyes. I craved the freedom to decide that I could outsource a task or change its priority. Freedom, for me, is autonomy. And I wish that this 4th of July, your agency entrepreneurial opportunity is providing you with the autonomy that makes you feel “freedom” according to your own definition.

We hope that Agency Inner Circle helps you on that journey.

A Little News

• Google’s Focused on Gobbling Up Shopping Conversions: Google is changing the way it calculates conversion from free merchant center feeds to better reflect the impact these feeds have on consumers - even if the consumer hasn’t interacted with the ad directly. Sounds a little sus to me.

• The Goog is, weirdly, pulling back on some ad automations: For app advertisers, heretofore, Google ran those campaigns in a black box…fully automated. Now they are letting you choose some audience signals to improve performance. Wow, talk about autonomy! Get out the fire crackers 🤣 

Lead Gen Insights

I’ve been thinking a lot, as you know, about lead gen (and we will have a full report out on our pretty extensive lead gen survey in the next couple of weeks). Peter Kang, the founder of the micro holdco Barrel Holdings shared their Q2 results. Their lead sources are Agencies (partner relationships), Shopify/Webflow Directories (partner relationships), tech solution partners (partner relationship) & current/former clients (partners, again…) So basically, 77% of their leads came from partner relationships & 42% of their closes came via past/current clients. Chalk up a big W for the power of relationships!

Also, look at the volume of leads - 87 for the quarter, 41 calls, 12 wins. Not incredible scale…sold and regular. Their sales team took about 1.3 sales calls a day…they were not stacked call after call after call after call. They didn’t need 40+ sales calls every week to generate a better Q2…

It is quality over quantity. Spray and pray prospecting is digital littering.

New Offer

This is an offer that I had to think long and hard about…I wanted to make sure that I could deliver value with authenticity, honesty and respect. After talking to my wife and amazing daughters, with their support, I am opening up an Agency Mastermind/Group Coaching experience explicitly for women agency leaders, women who work in agencies, etc. So, this is the semi-official launch of Agency Growth & Leadership for Women. (Snappy marketing name coming soon)

The purpose of this group is simple - to give women who work in the growth and leadership function of agencies (of any size) to have a safe space to share, wonder, explore & learn in a spot where their voice and concerns are primary. I am a coach, so when asked, I am going to teach. But my goal is to listen to the experiences of others and share my perspective from the perch of having coached over 200 agencies.

There will be 2 group sessions a month - all recorded so you can learn even if you can’t attend - and once a month I am going to bring in an accomplished woman agency leader who can share and teach around agency growth and leadership from a woman’s point of view. Check out the announcement, sign up if you are so inclined, and I am VERY excited about this opportunity.

Thanks to Our Sponsor - Clay.com