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Welcome you are listening to watching the Financial Survival Network. I'm your host,
Carrie lets Well, if you've got an agency and you're looking to scale it,
then you're going to want to hear from this person you've got on the
show before, Dave Valentine. Dave, great to have you back. So
give us an idea of what you do, your philosophy of business, and
how you make business work for others. Yeah. So I'm a serial entrepreneur
and business owner. I own seven different companies. We're in the process of
selling a few of them right now, which is which is fun and stressful
all the same time. And Yeah, the basic way that we look at
any sort of business is pretty simple. We believe in creating outrageous offers,
something that sounds too good to be true, but it is actually very profitable
for the company that we companies that we own, and really figuring out your
marketing and sales in ahead of time and then fulfilling on the back end,
because most companies get really concerned with I gotta get the product right. I
gotta get the product right, and it's like, well, it's never going
to be done. It's an infinite game. So you might as well start
marketing and selling right now and getting better and better at your product or service
as time goes on. Because money affords you a lot of runway, right,
So you accept imperfection and it's better to execute than it is to you
know, have paralysis by analysis. Right. Yeah, most agency owers,
most business owners that I know, they're doing less than a million dollars in
revenue. They're afraid they're free to take a risk on doing some sort of
outreach, or they don't want to come across a stammy, or they don't
want to waste a whole bunch of advertising. And so what they do instead
is they refer their way network, their way to sometimes a million dollars company.
That's what I did with my first agency, and it will kill you.
I mean it nearly killed me at the age of twenty nine. And
so what would really start to do as we put together this program called the
Dream Agency quests for marketing, advertising and web DEVID design agencies. The real
idea is simple, Hey, listen, I'm going to show you the things
that we've done to scale four of the agencies that I've owned over the past
ten years, the seven figures plus, and you can go execute on them
yourself. And so that's kind of the fun part is being able to teach
and train people on how to do what we do because we need more successful
entrepreneurs and we need more people that are providing high value to the business community
at large. Okay, so how did you wind up getting into this?
You mentioned you had your own business that was about to kill you. What
happened? Yeah, So in the first business, I knew that I was
good at my practice. I was young, I was twenty five, but
I knew that I wanted to build a company, and so I had no
idea how to do that. You know, didn't know how to get a
client, didn't know how to do the legal side. How do you actually
have w two staff versus ten ninety nine? What's the difference? And just
like most entrepreneurs, I had to figure all that stuff out, and I
worked really hard to go get a million dollar agency built up, you know,
and we had we were doing social media and social media advertising and web
devon design, and I was kind of everything to everyone. If you had
a checkbook and it would spend, we were interested in working with you.
And so that's kind of where we found ourselves. When I turned twenty nine,
my doc just said, hey, listen, you know we ranso tests,
said, hey, you're the most stressed out person we've ever tested.
If you keep going like this, you're not going to see forty. And
so I really had to change how I thought about business, and so that
that led to me going, okay, how did companies get sustainable? You
know, meetings books? Because I was having all these conversations and they were
small potatoes. I mean, it's funny. I was looking back through some
old contracts recently and one of the things that I saw gary was this agreement
for five hundred dollars a month. And I remember at the time thinking that's
small potatoes. But we needed and I haven't sold anything for five hundred bucks
in a long time, and so, you know, it's really it's really
fascinating when you move out of a deprivation or starvation mentality towards your lean generation.
All of a sudden, if you have a hundred calls this month,
you're not worried about closing this call that you're about to have, you have
ninety nine more. And so that really changes the dynamics of what's possible for
an organization, for a company, And that's what we're really teaching people is
not only how to set up their lead generation, but hey, how do
you scale? How do you operate? It's really easy when you're the one
that's doing all this stuff that's providing the results. Man, it's really really
easy for you to generate those results. But how do you go from working
in the business to working on the business and actually being a business owner instead
of just entrepreneur. And that's kind of where the sweet spot is for a
lot of these agencies is they're trying to figure out how to make that transition
from doing everything to having other people do things for them instead. Right,
all right, So scaling up obviously it's got a lot to do with delegation.
But as a solopreneur, it's really hard to let go of the reins
and trust somebody something times, isn't it. Yeah, And there's there's lots
of pitfalls, right like, So one of my favorite things to tell people
is, I'm like, all right, your administrative tasks should be the first
thing that you get off your plate, you know, because your admin tasks,
even as a solopreneur, they're still going to take you five to ten
hours a week, you know. And it's a little dinky things sometimes,
but there are things that are significant. So hire an admin assistant as your
first kind of hire, and then after that you're gonna want to try and
find someone to fit what you don't have. Right. So, I've talked
to some founders, They're like, I'm just not great at selling. I'm
like, okay, well, you're gonna have to get good. That's always
my recommendation. You're gonna have to be good enough that you can train a
salesperson. So what have you brought someone in to take some of the creative
work off your plate? Right? What have you brought someone in that could
be a designer like you, or that maybe they could run some of the
social media platforms, or maybe they could handle some of the conversations with clients
and that would free you up to do more sales so that you get more
of that experience under your belt. And then once you do that, maybe
does make sense to hire a salesperson after you've kind of figured out that sales
process, because no salesperson, no matter how good they are, are they
going to be able to figure out how to sell like new sell. They
just won't be able to do it. So it's really kind of homing to
the point in your journey where you realize, Okay, the first step I
have to do is get the admin stuff off. Then the next step is
I need to get some of the work that I do in the business off
my plate so that I can figure out how to sell, and then really
bringing in that salesperson potentially as the next hire. All right, So that
but you said people don't like selling, and you say, well, you
better get good at it. How do you get good at doing something you
don't really want to do. Yeah, I had a conversation with somebody recently
and dear friend of mine. She was talking about she owned some coffee shops,
you recently sold them. She was talking about how one day she got
a text message from someone. This was in the throes of the pandemic right,
and they had been exposed to COVID. And she opened up her phone
and looked at the schedule and saw that there was no one to cover the
shift, like, absolutely no one. And she'd owned this coffee shop for
over a decade at this point, very successful, and she had to go
in and go work a shift. And she was not happy about it,
right, like, that is just not what she wants to be doing on
a Tuesday. And she wasn't who getting that text message at six am.
But she realized she had a choice, right. The choice was I could
either be miserable about this and be upset order I can realize I hadn't done
this sort of work in five years. I'm probably not going to have to
do it again anytime soon, so I might as well just enjoy it.
I might as well enjoy talking with customers, making coffee and being in the
shop, because when else she didn't get to do it. And that's my
real encouragement to people are like I don't like to sell. I'm like,
I get it. There are things that I don't like in my business all
the time that I have to do. How could you flip it? Hey,
I only have to do this for so long, because we're going to
be so successful that I'm gonna have someone else doing this, So I might
as well just enjoy getting to know customers and clients right now and understanding who
they are and what they have going on. All right, Well, lets's
first love of business is you will when you start your own business, you
will spend the majority of your time doing the things that you least enjoy.
That's right, that's right true, oh, one hundred percent. You know,
like when my wife started her business, she didn't have anything, just
like I didn't have anything, but she did it. Just recently. She
started a business a couple of years ago, and she had these experiences that
I had forgotten, Kerry, Like you know the experience of how do I
put together a website? Where's the domain? How do I set up my
email in Gmail? Like all these things that as you grow your company,
and my companies are quite large now, you just don't think about those things.
Are taking care of the myriad of staff that we have, I don't
need to think about this. We're fine. And so it really kind of
changes the conversation when you have to go back to, oh, yeah,
I have to teach myself how to do everything. Yeah, agreed, agreed.
So three top pieces of advice you give anyone who has started an agency,
thinking about starting it, or wants to scale it up. Yeah.
First thing is focus on one service or one industry, right, So people
always talk about nicheing down and what they're usually talking about is an industry.
The other way that you can niche is into a specific service, and that's
my preferred method, honestly. Carry The reason why I say it's my preferred
method is if you're going to niche down into an industry, you're going to
need to provide a lot of services. And what that ends up looking like
is for every service that you provide, you need to have a staff member
that's full on, that's running that and providing that for your clients. So
I always tell people be very cautious about niching down into an industry until you
get larger. The second thing that I would say is prioritize your lead generation.
My favorite method for lead generation is old school. It's email and cold
direct mail follow up and it works wonders and if you have consistent meetings being
booked on your calendar every single month, you will close business just by accident
the general averages yea kick in absolutely. I mean it's it's really funny.
We figured out that even a terrible salesperson will close five percent of the deals
that come through the door just because they want to work with us, right,
So eighty percent of life is just showing up right, Yeah, yeah,
like they just did the job and they're here for it. And then
our top closers will close like thirty five percent because they're very skilled. But
even if you just mets it up. You know, you have twenty calls
in a month, which isn't that many. You're going to close one of
them by accident, is what I love to say. And then the other
ones you will close because you've gotten better at your craft, right, But
prioritise your lead generation. Getting those meetings booked on your calendar is svidal in
order to get where you want to go. And then the last thing is
enjoy the process, right, Like I love to tell my teams whenever we're
first getting started, I'm like, it's not always going to be this way.
We're not always going to be this small. We're not always going to
have this little staff. It's gonna get bigger. It's going to change.
We're have different people here, so just enjoy where we're at right now,
and that changes the conversation for people around what it looks like to engage with
work on a regular basis. Hey, that's such a great point. We
will leave it at that. Really appreciate your coming on the show again,
Dave. People want to find out more about you, connect with you on
the web. Where is the best place to find you? Yeah, they
can go to Dave Valentine dot coo and check me out there, and if
they want to reach out Dave at Dave Valentine dot ceo, they can hit
me up with an email. Thanks for having me on, Carrie, It's
fun, pleasure and link to the show note in the show notes on Financial
Survival Network will bring you right to Dave's site, and while you're there to
sign up for your free newsletter, Dave Leisure, Thanks for stopping by,
Thanks carry, thanks for listening to Carrie Let's Financial Survival Network, your solution
to today's trying times. For the latest, go to Financial Survival Network dot
com. Financial Survival Network now more than ever