10 common mistakes new agency owners make 🧵

I have coached 1k+ people to help start their first marketing agency

Today, many have scaled to $10k/mo and beyond

Each of them fell victim to the same 10 problems that held them from getting their first client and scaling

Here are 10 common mistakes new agency owners make:

I noticed a pattern...

The same 11 problems happening over and over again that hold people back from starting and scaling a marketing agency

I want to address all of them in this email here

If you understand what these mistakes are, you can overcome them early on

The outcome you get: Your chances of success will go higher

Also, the time it takes for you to reach the success will be quicker

Now, let’s get in-depth on the mistakes you need to avoid

1/ Manage your expectations

You are not going to get a winning offer right away,

You can’t find the best positioning right away,

You can’t master a skill right away

Everything takes time

You need to stay out of your own head and set realistic expectations

You also need to have uncompromising confidence in yourself

Have the confidence that no matter what you are going to have in your way,

Tens of thousands of other people are also going through that and have overcome the problems

So why can't you?

2/ You will need to juggle roles

You’re going to wear a lot of hats

What does this mean for you as an agency owner?

As an agency owner, you will need to manage a multitude of roles

You will work on:

1. Closing

2. Prospecting

3. Providing clients with results

As a beginner, these are going to be your priority tasks

In addition, you NEED to choose a skill that is in demand (the skill that other people are needing)

These are the 5 agencies that are in demand right now:

1. Community agency

2. Tiktok organic agency

3. Tiktok ads agency

4. Email marketing for SaaS

5. Social media marketing for Saas

These are the niches in my opinion that you need to target today

And from here, you can go on and construct an OFFER

3/ Creating an OFFER

To create an offer, you need to define 2 things:

1. What are you targeting

2. What value are you offering

For example, If you are doing email marketing, you're going to be providing:

1. Flows

2. Campaigns

3. Sign up forms for lead gen

You also need to provide GUARANTEEs to assure people of the value that you will provide

Here’s how you can create an offer for your agency:

4/ Get qualified leads

Getting qualified leads can be daunting at times but can be made easier and practical by following a framework

Luckily I have one for you

Simply, follow this link:

5/ Work for FREE

I get this a lot on a daily basis from newbies

The answer to it is:

As a beginner, you will need to work for FREE

No one is going to pay thousands of dollars for you to experiment

You need to polish your skills before you start making money and getting clients.

Set your pride aside, get 2 or 3 clients, and be with them for 2 to 3 months until you polish your skills

Once you spend the time, you will gain experience and you will have case studies to back up your skill

From case studies, you will get clients and from there on you can hope to expand by getting referrals

Simply put, Working for FREE → Get you case studies → More clients through referrals  → Use Case Studies for outreach + vsl 

6/ Invest in yourself

Nothing in this world is free

An investment in YOURSELF is an investment for the FUTURE

You need to prioritize yourself to stay ahead

If you are keen to spend 60 to 80$ on drinks and partying with friends

Where you can’t invest 25 to 30 bucks on yourself for learning a skill

Then, your priorities are all WRONG

Instead, you need to:

1. Be ready to invest

2. Give yourself the opportunity

3. Work on how you can learn more

4. Invest on platforms that teach you something

A prime example is https://theutopia.io

Where i have given various marketing solutions & sources to help you get from 0 to 10k/mo

7/ Be patient

Don’t underestimate the amount of time that you will take to get your first client

Be patient and keep going forward

In agency business, patience and perseverance is the key It’s a long road ahead

Realistically, mastering a skill to help you get results will take you 2 to 3 months

The time it takes you to go from 0 clients to 1 totally depends on you

How?

PROSPECTING and OUTREACH is a numbers game

The more people you reach out to through cold emails,

The more people you reach out through your social media,

The better chance you have of closing multiple clients

Of course don't compromise on the quality of the work

8/ Failure is inevitable, simple as that

Your goal here is to construct good offers

If you don’t get the bites on offers after a month or two, there can be 2 outcomes:

1. You are getting a good open rate but CTR is not good or no one wants to pay you

Solution: Your offer needs work.

You need to analyze and tweak your offer to see what sticks

2. You are not getting impressions on your offer.

In which case, your offer is not working.

Either it's not targeted good enough or it isn’t lucrative

Solution: You need to start working on a brand new offer.

Failure is a part of your journey as an agency owner,

But, as long as you don’t give up you will be okay

So keep grinding, adopt perseverance, and pivot

9/ Don’t systemize early on

You don’t need to systemize your agency early on

You don’t need to automate anything within your agency at the beginning

You need to get experience and you need to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t

The only systems that you need at the start are for:

1. Prospecting, and

2. Onboarding

3. And a little bit for the work you are doing

Your goal: Minimal systems for the actual work that you need to do

Focus on getting your feet wet and get some experience

10/ Don’t try to optimize without reporting

Having a reporting mechanism is really important to optimize and scale

So create a reporting sheet; one reporting sheet for each of your services

And then, provide monthly reporting to make you look good

Then, optimize the results.

This will allow you to retain your client

80% of your role in the future will be optimization

Optimization is done by tweaking a single variable at a time based on a hypothesis to see if it creates a better outcome

You will have to run independent variable tests to help you move the needle and get your clients better results

That’s it!

After reading this you now have 2 options:

1. Be a freeloader that takes this info for granted and does nothing

2. Take action and JOIN UTOPIA to take the first step

If you are person 2 then I salute you, success is inevitable