It's Not Supposed Be Easy - Agency Inner Circle #9

Table of Contents

• It’s Pretty Much All Fake

• Shameless Plug For My Wife (and maybe a life-chang …

• Everything You Need To Know About Prospecting You …

• From The Agency Inner Circle Slack

• Thanks To Our Sponsor - The Number 57

It’s Pretty Much All Fake

I was taking to a client this week, and he was talking about how “behind” he feels. He’s just clicked over into his mid/late twenties and he sees all of “these kids who are killing it”, and he is struggling to hit $500K in revenue a year.

I laughed right out loud at the “kids” quote. I started working in digital marketing the year this guy was born…

He referenced all of these ads - I’m sure you’ve seen them on your FB/IG feeds, too - the ones that say “I burned my $66K agency down & now I make $83 billion dollars using the secret growth partner formula…” or "We used to struggled getting clients until we uncovered this AI tool that books us hundreds of qualified sales calls every month…and we’ve scaled our agency 6x in the last 4 months!”.

My client isn’t a “bro-marketer”, but the get rich quick schemes seem real enough because all of the people in the ads look just like him. He even knows a few, I suspect. And he can’t figure out how they got so successful so fast…

We talked a while and we walked through what these people were selling. They were selling a single tactic or a single hunk of software and representing that it performed magic and was singly responsible for amazing results without any effort or stress. But if you really look closely, what they are selling is a promise of ease and automaticity. They are selling alchemy - “turn your agency made out of lead into gold magically.”

What they aren’t doing is creating a business that creates value for their clients, their employees & their communities. They want to sell you an easy to deliver, low value thing at high prices. The high price is evidence that it is value.

I told him it was the worst sort of advertising - selling low value items to people who are desperate for money & usually desperate to avoid work, too.

Building a business that truly serves its clients over months and years & building an employee culture that values autonomy, respect, inclusion and growth is brutally hard. The truly lasting gains that businesses make and the truly meaningful values they deliver to their clients and team are hard won and take real time and effort. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.

Shameless Plug For My Wife (and maybe a life-changing opportunity for you?)

My wife is a freaking rockstar. She is an incredible parent to 5 amazing kids. She founded a non-profit learning center that teaches neurodiverse kids in the ways they are best able to learn.

But after working with children for years, she has started to work with some neurodiverse adults. That led her to get a certification in Executive Function. After watching my ADHD brain lead me astray during our 2+ decades together, she has learned a thing or two about entrepreneurs, executive function and the importance of radical acceptance.

She’s wrapped all of this together in a 1 on 1 coaching program called “Discover Your Personal Operating System”. It helps neurodiverse and executive function challenged adults make the changes they want to make without changing who they are.

I’d encourage you to take a gander if you think that learning how to move through the world on your own terms is worthwhile. Learn more.

Everything You Need To Know About Prospecting You Can Learn From TikTok

Finally, TikTok is useful for something other than mindless scrolling & and sending all of our precious data about how many times we look at that amazing Scrub Daddy value pack to China.

From The Agency Inner Circle Slack

Kevin is hiring for a media buyer.

Shawn is wondering what everyone is doing to get AI to write stuff that doesn’t suck.

Are you in the Slack group? If not, join the fun.

Thanks To Our Sponsor - The Number 57