You're so busy executing your project and client deliveries that there's not enough time that goes into marketing or branding. If you're focusing on the delivery, you didn't get the enough needs or enough sales. Once the delivery ends, you have these ups and downs cycles, right? I think getting out of those cycles, that's where we see a lot of agency stuck at.

Welcome to the IgenCale podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. This week we're joined by Ronic Patel, WordPress and White Label Development Specialist. And in this episode, we explore the acquisition of unlimited WP by E2M using White Label Partners to deliver your WordPress websites and care plans and how Ronic and his team are using AI for digital agencies and a whole lot more. If you're growing your agency, looking to scale, or you have the intention of selling your agency, you will want to hear this episode. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the Agency Our Podcast, Ronic Patel from Unlimited WD. Hey Ronic, how are you? I'm doing good, Troy. How are you? Thank you so much for being here, man. I'm I'm very good. I just want to let people know it's 5 a.m. where you are right now in India, and you've been doing this all night. You've been podcasting right throughout the night. And so I just want to appreciate you for being up at this crazy time so that you can uh come on the podcast here and share your story with our audience. I really appreciate you doing this. Thank you. No worries. Now, um the big news is that Unlimited WP was recently acquired by E2M. Dude, congratulations. How did that come about? Thank you. I think you you you know E2M gays for quite some days. Very well. They've been a they've been a big supporter of ours. They were the exclusive sponsor of the podcast last year. They are sponsoring MavCon again in October in San Diego. Got a great relationship with Manish. He came out to Australia last year to our event. Have a great relationship with with Manish and the guys at E2M, big fans of theirs. And uh saw the news come through that they acquired Unlimited WP. Curious how that came about and and what was the motivation for E2M to acquire unlimited WP?

I think that that's kind of a big uh subject, right? Usually this acquisitions aren't that uh straightforward. There's a lot of history uh that comes before this, and certainly in our case, you know, that that was the case. Uh it started years ago. Uh my philosophy has always been that you build a business to sell, right? Uh, regardless, one day you may decide not to sell it. Uh, but the day-to-day, your operations, your systems, processes, how just basically how you're building your agency, uh, it is for sale. So that was something always uh been uh back of my mind. Uh now, when to do it, the timing of it, how much, in what conditions and what terms, all of those are dependable, right? If those all things just happen to match uh at some point, then it's all gays. And for us, uh it happened uh a couple months ago.

It seems to me like it's a strategic acquisition by uh E2M. Just to break this down for some people, those three types of buyers usually that you can look for is an owner-operator, someone who's going to come and buy your business and then operate it themselves, someone, uh a private equity group. So, in other words, someone who's got a lot of money and they just want to invest that money into a business that's profitable. And in that case, you as the founder or owner need to kind of hang around and continue to manage it. Um, and an acquis and a strategic acquisition, which is uh another company that has potentially massive upside from buying your company. So it feels to me like it could it could be part strategic, part aqua higher. You've got a large team that are doing uh WordPress support for agencies. Was it that it's just quicker to buy you guys and bring you into E2M than it was for E2M to continue to bring their own team? Or because I see Unlimited WP still trading as its own brand, right? So can you just kind of walk us through that?

Yes. Uh from that angle, just like how there are different ways to exit, there are different ways to scale as well, right? You could do it organically, you can pour money into ads and other marketing mediums, or you can just uh acquire somebody who has a strategic better feed. Now, in our case, uh with our team of almost 90 people and 100 plus recurring agency clients, uh, given what the A2M already uh was at, it it almost doubles them overnight, right? So it is a more strategic play in that sense, is where you're scaling it. Now, when you're scaling it by other mediums, organic, it takes time, or paid ads, it could be hit or miss. Uh, right. So acquisitions, there's some uh I don't want to use the word guarantee, but it's almost uh sorted out for you, right? That uh overnight you're adding hundred clients and all these team members. So it's not about uh when you're going organically, when you're adding clients, but you're also then adding team members, and not all the team members are going to work out for you, not all the clients are going to work out for you. So it's just that journey of maybe depending on the size, that journey of a year or two years, you're cutting down to this two or three months that it takes to roll up uh another uh strategic competitors of yours.

How long had Unlimited WP been trading uh prior to the acquisition? A little over four years. Okay. And um so you can't tell us how much that was acquired for. Will Unlimited WP continue to trade as its own brand? And what's your do you have like an earnout or are you contracted to stay on for a period of time?

Um so we some parts of it, it's more like a merger. So I will be uh part of the E2M now on. Uh, not an active day-to-day role, uh, but a growth advisor sort of a role to keep uh helping Manish uh take E2M to another level. Uh in terms of uh uh earnout, uh that it was that type of deal. So and Manish being a friend now for a long time, uh, it was an easier deal for uh us to make than if it was uh with some unknown person that you met online over, right? Uh I to give you some context, I and Manish met back in 2016 uh at one of the conferences from UGurus in Denver. Uh the first year uh we didn't talk to each other. We I mean we looked at each other, we were like, oh damn, he's my competitor. We both had that mindset. Uh next year at the same event, we met again. Uh, and both of us were a different person then. Uh, abundance mindset, and you know, there's no such thing as competitors that share things. And we ended up becoming a close friend. And a couple of years ago, I moved back to India, and then we had this cadence of meeting monthly for lunch, uh, which would last for like four hours, five hours, and we are openly sharing our secrets. Hey, this is this channel works for me, this channel doesn't work for me, and just more of that sharing build a lot a lot of trust uh between us. Uh and at one point, Manish even jokingly mentioned that you know I'm gonna acquire Unlimited WP one day. Uh so I'm like, ha, yeah, I got a buyer.

Who's who's running Unlimited WP now? Is Unlimited WP still being operated as a separate entity or?

Yes, I didn't answer that question, sorry. Yeah, uh so right now, uh, since all the clients are uh majority of them are still on the plans at Unlimited WP. A lot of a lot of them actually have chose to migrate to the A2M plans. There are nuances, we even though we both offer the same exact thing. There are nuances in just how the service is delivered. Uh so actually quite a lot of them have already migrated to the A2M plant. Now, others we don't know uh how uh long they would stay on it, what operationally makes sense to how long, because they are in a way operationally two different models, even though uh it's it's funny, right? We it's they're building WordPress websites and we were building WordPress websites, but still, like operationally, both of us are big believers in systems and processes, and there are differences there. Uh, and for those reasons, we're keeping it separate for now uh until we decide what the long-term strategy would be.

Um, and so unlimited WP, uh similarly to E2M, I'm just looking at the website now, has uh developers, website care, uh SEO, and uh an optimized plan. So it's white label WordPress development, so building you know websites for clients and also managing those WordPress websites, so care plans, which is the opportunity for and the pricing I think is kind of similar, right? Your unlimited WP and H2Ms in a similar price bracket. Am I right?

They're very close. They're not exactly like Apple to Apple comparison. Like our models were slightly different, so it's it's hard to do that comparison. Uh, but our offices are two miles apart. Uh so you know, in that terms, the local talent, the pricing uh on our end is it's near about uh near about similar. Now uh when we launched Unlimited WP, we were one of the first ones to have productized a WordPress development service, like a design pickle they did with the design, right? Nobody at the time was doing it with the WordPress. And I'm like, yeah, why not? I had already niched down into the digital agency space uh at my old agency that I was running it for like, you know, at that moment for about four years, uh I wasn't getting any traction at it. I mean, after niching it down, it was better, but still it wasn't the breakthroughs that uh I had you know heard stories about uh people who were niching down early on. This is back in 2018-19 time. Uh so then I decided I, you know, I read about this product I services, and I got really intrigued. Uh, and that's when we launched Unlimited WP, where it's all 100% re-occurring plans. And uh, if you look at the pricing, uh how many agency sites do you go to? And on a homepage you find the pricing plans, right? So really trying to uh package the product and also in the operational uh side of things, it was pretty much all the processes, like you know, there's systems in place, custom project management system in place. Uh, so it was uh the idea for me was to actually run it like it if it it if it was a product product as service. And uh to be honest, I wasn't sure if it would work or not. I'm like, you know, uh, if this doesn't work, I I don't know what would I do with the agency. And uh we launched about a couple months before COVID. Uh and then COVID happens, and you know, if it was the model or I don't know what it was or SEO, but we really took off uh in a short time span. It didn't take us that long to reach to 100,000 USD in monthly recurring, right? Uh so that was a quick journey, and we're like, whoa, this this model is amazing. And then I immediately started preaching that model uh out to others. And uh Manish being a friend, uh I'm telling you about this model, and he's already making his systems more recurring and he loves our model. So I think he had an eye set uh since then that you know, let this guy grow and then you know I'm gonna acquire them as my growth strategy down the line when the timings uh are right for everyone. Right.

Um and and so, you know, if you look at some, I mean, I've I've been talking about this for a long time, like 10 years. I was talking about care plans back in 2013. You know, your care plan is $49 per website per month, right? So I'm paying you guys $49. I'd easily charge $150 or $200 a month to a client to have that all taken care of. So there's good margin, it's kind of hands-off. So it makes sense. I see this as a fast way to get to market as an agency, a fast way to scale where the agency just focuses on doing good business development, good problem solving, good strategy for clients and have like unlimited WP to do the execution. That's the model, it's been that model for a long time, and it, you know, I like it, it makes a lot of sense. One thing I'm curious about, I want to talk about WordPress kind of a larger conversation in a moment, but talk about your tech stack because the the problem I see with a lot of agencies is they kind of reinvent their process every time a new client comes in the door. I was guilty of that when I started out. I'm like, oh, I'm gonna try this new plugin, I'll try this new theme builder. How do you manage that when you've obviously got a lot of agencies coming to you with different tech stacks, different page builders, different plug-in requirements? How do you manage that? And what's your advice to other agencies to help them kind of productize what they're doing?

Yeah, uh definitely you've got to pick your stacks, right? And it that that's not always going to be the best. Maybe the ones that you uh have picked, those plugins have stopped being uh uh updated as often as you wished, or they, you know, their uh roadmap is is not per your liking, right? But you gotta pick some stack. And and you yes, you you can make changes here and there. Uh, but the point is to have a consistency uh across, for example, for forms, if you're using WP forms or gravity forms or whatever, use that across all of your client sites, right? So if there is a known bug that pops up of the gravity, uh you know that you how many number of websites you have to update, what's exactly the issue, who's impacted by it, who probably won't be impacted by it, right? If you're using all sorts of plugins, first of all, there is no way to keep tabs on uh what happens on WordPress sites, right? They're-I mean, let's accept it. They're big, they're messy. Uh, plugins are built by developers who necessarily don't have the right incentives, right? A lot of people are just building it, they put it on up on the repo, and who knows when it was last updated, and then how many vulnerabilities are reported. So, for tons and tons of reasons, you definitely want to have your stacks uh fixed. Now, your second point about we working with agency, I would say in our experience, about half the agencies did have their stack figured out, and other half is somewhere in between that they they do want to get to that point, but they usually what we see is they say, Well, I already have 40 websites and it's using 10 different builders, and I don't know which one to go anymore. And that's usually because you know, in the past, if they use those paid themes and it came with different builders, right? And you're sort of stuck with it. Uh, but that I think, you know, just the whole popularity around Elementor in the last uh three, four years, right? Uh, majority of the builders uh for us, it's Elementor. I would say 70%, you know. So that's sort of all it sorted out. Now, across the other plugins, for example, forms, that's actually very straightforward. You could pick any of the leading five ones and you'll be alright with it. Uh, but it's after, let's say, you come down to ACF, you're still uh with everyone. Yeah, majority of you are using ACF. But then now it comes to some assistant plugins for ACF. That's when you start seeing that everyone has their favorite. Even with the elemental, which add-ons do you use? There are 50 out there. Uh, somebody like says, I like happy add-ons and some, you know. So that consistency, it's it's hard to develop. Uh, for us, what we did uh is across the across the board we had templates. Uh we had uh agency uh profile in built into our project management system. So when a task is assigned to a developer, uh he or she can see right there what are the preferences for this agency that they always use Elementor. So if you see a visual builder in there, you know, do drop and comment and say, hey, this is not something you use it in your normal stack. Uh so that all of that was possible for us because we only worked with agencies and you know, within a first year we figured out that if you don't do this, there's no way we can scale this service.

If I was gonna start another agency now, I would come to you and I would say, I don't care what you use, I just use the best practice give me the fastest sites that are the easiest to update in the back end. I've used Elementor and WP forms in the past and they seem to do a good job, but I just I don't care. Like you just use whatever I would take your recommendation or your team's recommendation, right? And I think uh that would be my advice actually to anyone listening to this is like I mean, how many, how many you guys have built over 500 websites, right? I would say more to like more 5,000. 5,000. Okay. So uh sorry, I was I must have misread that on your on your website. So so I have built right, like who knows this better? Me or you, right? Your team clearly know how to do this better than I do. So I would just come to you and say, hey, you guys do what you do, let me do what I do, which is design the strategy for the client, map out the user experience, work out how we're gonna help the client achieve their goals from a tech point of view. You guys just do it, tell me what you've done and follow best practices and and I trust you. And I think a lot of agency owners just struggle to scale because they they kind of get stuck in the trenches and they want to keep their hands dirty and they want to stay on the tools because they enjoy it. But they, you know, at the end of the day, you have to make a decision about your role in in the agency, and you have to either become an agency owner, business development, sales strategy, or you stay in the development world. It's very difficult to ride both horses as your agency grows. Now, if I did say that, hey, just you use the best tech stack. I'm guessing you're probably going to choose Elementor and WP forms or gravity forms as as the main kind of statues, right?

Yeah, like Astra as a theme or Gendit Press or Cadence, or you know, one of those themes. Simple things we would ask you is like, do you are you ready for Gutenberg, right? Because we are sort of in between. Uh, some if you have a strong preference, then we'll go for it. Otherwise, Elementor uh across the page builder is it's something. And also it's another thing, like how many licenses are you going to get? Uh, if you already have an elementor license, then let's just go with it. Uh the that that's the license cost is also another factor, right? Uh that's uh a reason for you to stick to uh one or the other system. How long have you been around the WordPress ecosystem before starting unlimited WP? Three years. I would say 2016, I've been going to like Boston WordPress meetups. Yeah.

So I was I was actually I was at Boston WordCamp in 2016. I was there too, at the Boston University. In fact, in fact, my wife and I both spoke at Boston Word Camp in 2016. So we were probably hanging out, having lunch, and didn't even know it. What's your observation? I I've been in the WordPress space since about 2007, 2008, right? And I saw this boom happen, I saw this wave happen from 2007 through sort of 2013. What's your observation about what's happening in WordPress now? And uh because I I'm just seeing different platforms being adopted and and I'm curious about the future of WordPress. I'm I'm you're obviously talking to a lot more WordPress agencies than I am, so I'm curious as to what your observation is and what you think the future of WordPress is.

I think I think I'm going to be a little biased here, right? Uh as just being a WordPress specific agency. Uh there, you know what you just mentioned, there have been a lot of talks about that in the past couple of years. Uh I don't think though the needle is moving fast enough uh towards any other platform. Uh year or two years ago, there was a big uh uh talks for Webflow, right? That oh there is a lot of people are moving to that. Well, uh clearly, but it's more becoming a niche platform for a lot of startups, uh websites, uh uh type of businesses are going for it. But majority or uh day-to-day trade businesses like plumbers and electricians, right? Though those type of sites are still on WordPress. Of course, the publisher blogs that's not going anywhere from the WordPress. Uh, so that uh the the bar isn't moving much, right? I think it's around 42% of the web or or somewhere around that. And yes, it's not gaining a faster traction that it has gained uh in the previous years. Now I don't know if that's a play-to-that it has hit, uh, that there's enough number that's you know, probably this is the limit. Uh that's kind of hard to say. The whole Gutenberg uh experience, I'm sure it hasn't gone as easy as they would have predicted, right? Uh think in talking since 2018 or something. So it's been six years now, and it's still not here, right? That it's coming in the phases. And I think uh as an agency, you'd lose patience, right? That hey, this is just a tool, my client isn't looking for a tool. He's looking for leads and he wants to, you know, generate some tangible results. So why am I stuck in this when the Gutenberg will be ready? So I think those uh things definitely have an impact. I think the WooCommerce has lost its uh steam. Uh, you know, even amongst the agency, we we see that for any uh like a decent e-commerce site, uh, let's just build it on Shopify, right? So so e-commerce has definitely taken a hit on its reputation for being uh, I mean, now recently from the past year, they have they have been updating it because they've got a lot of complaints around speed. Even in our experiences, like imports of let's say thousand products, you're gonna get the error. You won't be able to upload a thousand product or a thousand orders from a sheet, right? So I think that becomes a very necessity if you are you know claiming to have the the most uh number of e-commerce websites on your platform. But if the basics uploads uh have problems with it, people are going to fork to uh different platforms out there. So, you know, e-commerce, yes, probably, and some from the core WordPress base as well. But overall, it it's to me it seems as strong as ever.

Very diplomatic uh of you. Um uh Ronic, uh my observation is that there's just a ri and there has been for some time. I'm and I'm still I'm not, you know, I'm still an advocate for WordPress. I still think if you're building websites for clients, that WordPress is probably the best platform to use. Uh y I meant I publicly said this and will say it again, I've made a big transition to high level, not for building websites for clients, but building funnels and marketing funnels and marketing pages and online courses and all that kind of stuff. Um I think my observation and my frustration with WordPress is the lack of direction from the top, the lack of leadership. You know, Gutenberg's a great example of the open source community has its benefits. The plug-in repository, for example. I mean, the plug-in repository is just it's it's like heaven on a stick to a WordPress developer. It's like all this amazing functionality that you can access. However, that open source um philosophy means also the community is very fractured and there's not a lot of direction from the top. There's there's no leadership in terms of the direction of where WordPress is going, and it is very frustrating because um, you know, you you end up with these platforms that aren't being updated. Gutenberg taking six years, and it's still really just a minimum viable product, as far as I'm concerned. I can't even use it myself. I know a lot of people swear by it. Um, so it's it's it's interesting to me that WordPress has grown so much so quickly and has got such market share. I'm just curious what's going to disrupt it and and what's going to come along and uh and take that market share. It's going to be interesting to see what happens. And also I think AI is, you know, I'd love to know what you guys are doing with AI in-house and how AI is helping your workflow because I see Elementor, I see Divi, I see all these platforms now coming up with with AI built in. How is it, how has it improved your workflow, or are you guys still just kind of tinkering with it?

Well, we're tinkering with it. Uh, one of the reasons why I'm exiting from unlimited WP is I'm going full-time into AI. We're building a tool for digital agencies in the AI space. Uh, hopefully Alpha version would be out later this month. Um wow. Uh I I've been very curious about it. In terms of building the websites, the tools that are out there, uh, it is a beginning phase. Uh they're not production ready. Uh, but there's some school stuff is happening, like Figma to WordPress, and it does kind of get you halfway there, which is, you know, if that's a 50% productivity gain, that's amazing, right? Uh so in that sense it's helping. Uh, a lot of the code boards that we have internally uh built uh to do certain things, they work for most part. Uh no complaints there. Uh, but all the plugins that have came out that, you know, claiming uh to do within a WordPress dashboard, you can put in command in edit, creates a custom plugin for you. I think it's a good initiative. I mean, it it's it it wouldn't be able to create anything serious, but that's you know, that means uh people have eyes on it, they've started working on it. So it's just a matter of time uh that the breakthroughs will uh come through in that space.

What's the can you tell us about the IR uh software that you're working on?

Um It would be So last year we were uh I wanted like entire team to have a chat GPT, right? And build these boards that are shared among different teams. Uh your custom boards, because not everyone has that uh understanding on how to create those boats and how to actually use them. And was looking for a tool where I can actually onboard the entire team. Imagine like a workspace where there are teams and all the chats are shared between those teams, and the team has their own prompt library and then their own boards that they have trained over the time, and uh there wasn't anything. And we were like, let's build one. Uh so we're building this like a team adaptation uh platform for digital agency specifically. Uh so the library of prompt and boats that we are building, uh, they're all for digital agency space. Uh the phase two, three, the idea is to take a foundation model and train it on you know, the gazillion amount of data that's out there uh for agency, uh, how the pricing works, the proposals and project discoveries, and you know, all the things Troy you talk about. Uh imagine taking all that data and actually training a foundation model uh to give answers that doesn't feel like generic. It feels like, you know, this is Troy Dane's answer, right? Um so we're we're looking into that direction. We got some machine learning developers. Uh the task seems like dauntingly difficult for a lot of reasons. Uh so we're getting that interface built right now. Uh, and then the in the next phases, it would be uh having those customized models. So ultimately getting you answers even better than what ChatGPT can uh get you, even though behind the scenes it is using ChatGPT.

Oh, I've got it. Well, I'll happily license my intellectual property uh to you when you're ready to have that conversation. So that's a uh that's a scoop right here on the ATR podcast. Um and and so what um just kind of circling back to uh agencies for a moment. You obviously deal with a lot of agencies, you see uh it must be frustrating. I mean, I coach agencies for a living and my whole team here, mentor agencies, and we see sometimes that the brief from the agency to a provider like E2M or unlimited WP is just not, I mean, it's just there's just not enough information. How how do you, if you're uh listening to this and you're an agency owner and you are wanting to scale and you need someone like E2M or unlimited WP to help you, what can they do to set that relationship up for success from the get-go? And I will say this, you know, this doesn't just apply to using a white label provider like you guys. This applies to if you're hiring your own team, like if you've got your own team developer. So how can they be thinking about this? And what can they, what are some of the tactical things they can do right from the start to make this a successful relationship?

Yeah, I think uh at Unlimited Wheat, the custom project management system we had, uh, if the agency, when agencies log in, right on the dashboard, there was a project brief. That that's like the first the first link they see it there. Uh, and there's a nice two-page uh uh template uh which lists down the all the bare essentials that we need to get started on any project, right? Once we get started, we would have some days on the background to to get and collect more information, but it's the getting uh started part. Um that's you know what we had. Now, uh in general, to to answer your question, I think it's the expectations, uh references uh of what you're looking for, and uh just you know, paint me a picture of what the end result would look like, right? If we if we have uh that clarity, uh then some of the smaller decisions uh that requires like 15 back and forth and losting 10 business days just to get some clarity, right? I I think that's so some of those uh smaller decisions, the team, uh any developer or your team members, they can make it independently if they know what that end vision they're looking after. Uh not just saying build me a lending page for this, right? Uh if there was some reference point, uh and you know, any other reference uh that's out there, I think just basically the when you're passing down a task, it's how clearly it is defined. Uh now that's easier said than done, right? If I'm passing down uh down a task to someone, I don't have all the time to paint you a picture and to give you uh all that clarity, right? So it isn't a difficult uh thing. But as you said, if you want to be successful uh at working with other people, be it a white label provider or anybody else, you have to figure out and master that trick uh about quickly painting that picture uh down to the other person. We agencies that work with us, tons and tons of videos uh would come to us every day because that's what we told them. You know, if something's too complicated, just do a Loom video and explain it over the video. And they loved that fact, right? Rather than just typing something for 15, 20 minutes and drafting it. Uh so videos have helped enormously uh in the last few years, right? But that videos thing isn't new. That's I've been you know, agency has been using it for you know five five, seven years now. Uh hasn't been anything new since the video. It's it's still we're kind of stuck on the video, haven't seen any any new updates since then. But uh this is a huge point uh for any service, right? Even if you're working with a client, uh if imagine if the clients were able to give you those instructions how much uh scope grip uh can be avoided. Totally.

You guys um you guys design as well as develop, right? Can you walk me through the what you know what what does that mean? What do you guys actually design? Will you like design a website from scratch or a landing page from scratch?

Uh so we at Unlimited WP, we didn't do a lot of design, uh, but at E2M we do do a lot of design. Uh and that is developing a page from scratch, uh taking just concept, idea, reference, uh, clients uh profile, uh taking those information and then putting something together, uh showing it to the agency, uh, getting their approval and just moving in that step-by-step process. Got it.

Um, what what are some of the other things that you see across like what is it that makes some agencies successful and and that other agencies are really struggling? What do you think some of those key ingredients are? Well, the marketing would be one, right?

Uh you're so busy uh executing your project and uh client deliveries that there's not enough time that goes into marketing or branding. Uh it's just, you know, if you talk about the smaller agency, they're maybe stuck uh uh in that phase, right? Uh if if you're focusing on the delivery, you didn't get the enough leads or enough sales. Uh once the delivery ends, you have this ups and downs cycles, right? Uh, I think getting out of those cycles, uh, that's where we see a lot of agencies stuck at. Uh, the ones that have been doing it for the long enough now have enough uh client-based build that they could ride that very comfortably. That doesn't mean they would grow it, but at least they're not, you know, going through their upper or up or down phases. So uh there's a different way to look at it. But like I would say marketing being as just that it's not being focused uh as much, and it's it is a competitive space, but that's like any other space, right? All the spaces are competitive nowadays. Uh, you still need to stand out, you still need to put, I mean, look at you, you're doing this video production, it isn't that easy, right? You there's a time commitment uh for that. Uh, and you see a lot of agency they complain about not getting leads, but then you know, if you're saying what exact activities that you put, what marketing engines you built in the last quarter, or or at least which ones did you improve? And that's usually like, no, I was busy. And you know, they're genuinely they were busy, they worked 12 hours a day, but they were busy doing the wrong things in the agency.

That's right. We I did a live stream about this, I think it was last week, uh, literally called How to Get Unlimited Leads. And the the what I talk about is leads are a lagging indicator, right? Leads are a byproduct of sales and marketing activities that you choose to undertake or you choose to neglect. And so when an agency says to me, it's that's the exact conversation, when they say I need more leads, which is by the way, the number one question that I get from agencies, you know, how do I get more leads? My question is, well, what have you done over the last 90 days to generate leads? And 90% of the time the answer is nothing. Well, you haven't done anything. You haven't produced any content, you haven't published any content, you haven't been to any networking events, you haven't even reached out to your existing clients asking for referrals, uh, you haven't done any advertising, you haven't produced a YouTube video showcasing your knowledge and your expertise. You've done absolutely nothing. You've put no energy into attracting new people into your world, and now you're here asking me why there are no new people coming into your world. It's like saying that you want to meet a life partner, but you've done nothing over the last 30 days to get on a dating app or go out and meet people. Well, they're not just gonna knock on your front door and walk into your life. You have to put some effort into this, right? Um Yeah, and I and and I think I think the reason that a lot of people don't is because it's scary, right? Doing marketing, because a lot of the time you do, I mean, you would know this, right? You you do marketing and a lot of the time nothing happens. You go, well, that didn't work, we're gonna try something else. We we went on this podcast and nobody reached out, or we ran these ads and the leads are too expensive, or we went to this WordCamp and we didn't pick up any new clients. You don't you don't quit on those things, you just improve, you get better, you think about how can I do it better next time. And I think being able to continue doing the marketing and sales activities, knowing that you're going to get rejected and you're not going to get the results that you want, but you've got to keep doing it anyway. I think it's that level of grit and determination that a lot of people unfortunately just don't have. And while they're getting referrals in word of mouth, it's very easy to say, oh, well, you know, we're getting good referrals, but as we know, referrals eventually dry up and then you've got nothing in the pipeline.

Oh yeah. Uh I mean, uh, I'm a big believer that you have to do a quarterly plan. And it's okay if the things didn't work out as you planned, but make sure the next as soon as the quarter uh ends, you plan for the next quarter, right? And we have like you, we have done so like at the last WordCamp in Washington, DC, we sponsored, we had a booth. Uh I've been in India for two years, but especially I flew, you know, I took that uh 20-hour flight to go there. And, you know, I kind of, I mean, I enjoyed the thing. We got a zero leads. I mean, we got tons of leads, uh, but uh nothing really worked out from that whole four years experience and putting probably $15,000, $20,000 on the whole trip and the sponsorship, right? And if nothing turned out, that just doesn't that doesn't mean that I don't do that anymore, right? Like I'll still try out at other events and you have to keep trying it because if you don't, uh ultimately, right? The uh that that's how the results would show up. And I'm also a big believer in building marketing engines. Uh so because marketing can get overwhelming. Uh, and so I'm big believers in building those engines and uh thinking of a concept and then thinking just like an engine in the stages uh and thinking, you know, I'm gonna try it out. I'm gonna try to get at least one client of the strategy. If I get it, you'll have more confidence to then think about how you can scale it, right? And once uh you don't need to spread yourself too thin. If you know, usually if you're the only person running the agency, uh just work on one engine at a time, right? And if the one engine is working, then you can think about building a second engine. Uh and you know, not all your engines are going to work at all the times, and that's why you do want to have a handful of engines, but not too many where you can't manage them. Uh so if if one of them, for example, uh we see organic traffic uh drops uh in January, right? Of course. Uh in summer as well, when people are, you know, around this time, when people are taking vacations right before the school starts. Uh this is uh bad timing for the traffic. So uh I, you know, now that after four years, I know we wouldn't be expecting a lot of the leads to come through the SEO work. So we'll uh ramp up our ad spending at this time if we still expect to to have that signed up, right? So you can then pull different levers across your different engines uh if you have that. But you know, as you said, building that takes a lot of time, uh, and you you don't need to be fearful, just just keep trying uh and keep building. And leads sometimes a most unexpected thing you did. Uh it it turns out, you know, but that's only if if you try it. I mean, you know, there's stuff we have done it, and I never expected that to actually result into something. And I'm like, huh, that you you heard about us there. I mean, we just did that because we thought it was easy to do it. And I'm like, hey, it's that easy to get new leads, eh? And then you trying to double down on that strategy.

We I I think of them as assets, right? I uh when I have downtime in the business, which is uh, I mean, a fair bit these days. I'm probably you know, Thursday's my content day, Tuesdays and Wednesdays I do a bit of coaching in the morning. I've probably got two and a half days of contact hours in the business where I'm required to be somewhere and do something. The rest of the week uh is pretty flexible time for me to think about things and I think about building assets. I think what what can I build today that is going to be an asset that is going to help the company while I'm sleeping? And that could be a YouTube video. We're getting an incredible amount of leads from YouTube. It's it's amazing, actually. I mean, I I'm obsessed with YouTube views, but really it's the wrong metric for us because people that watch our YouTube videos opt in for our our templates that we give away on those YouTube videos. Every day I see leads coming into our Slack channel, people that have opted in from YouTube, which I never expected. There's a whole community over at YouTube, which is very different to the Facebook community. I never expected that. And so for me, I think if I if I build a YouTube video, if I make a YouTube video, publish it, in a year's time, that YouTube video could have thousands of views that just happens while I'm sleeping. So I build something once, and then that's an asset that serves the business. So, you know, I build playbooks for our coaches on how to coach clients. I build playbooks on how our client success managers run one-on-one meetings with our agencies that we mentor. And I I spend the time to build that stuff once and then give it to the team, and then I can go to sleep knowing that those assets are being used. So it's a similar way, thinking about the engine that's running without you.

I I got a funny story there. So four years ago, I was big on SOPs and across the company, we were building SOPs. And uh I'm like, oh, great marketing idea. Why don't we build an SOP guide? Uh, and we use it as a lead magnet, and we'll do Facebook ads on it. And while we are preparing the SOP, and it was almost the guide, and it was almost done. And then I got a Slack message in our marketing channel that hey, the guys at the agency Mavericks, uh, Troy has just done his SOP guide. I'm like, huh. So, you know, and and for us, we took that as a validation. It was like, hey, we were thinking that agencies, I don't know if you noticed that too, but like four or five years ago, the SOP were big things. Uh and we were like, let's do it. We and then a couple other people we saw, they were also building the SOP guides, right? And it's still to date that guide that we built back then, and it's uh to be honest, it's not even that good. I think now if I look at it, and I'll we could do a lot better than that. Uh and it it's still like yesterday I checked and uh it was like a six or seven downloads. So daily it's getting me seven downloads, and those people are being added into newsletters now, and you know, they're getting touch points, and you know, it takes uh God knows how many touch points, but uh it it starts somewhere there, and yeah, I like that just building those assets and uh you don't know that it could pay off uh 100x over the time.

Right. What do you use for your internal marketing automation and stuff? Do you use the active campaign or mail chimp or something off the shelf like that? Yes, yes, uh mailer light. Got it. Oh, I love mailer light. And also the uh project management system that you built, the it's asked me, is that something you guys built from the ground up or is that something you've adopted from off the shelf?

Uh we adopted off the shelf back in 2015 when I had a normal agency. So we've been using that day one uh internally. And then about three years ago, we built it ground up in React uh and uh yeah, Node.js in React, and it took about six, eight months to do that. But it's super customized to work with our exact product as service flow. And you know, what I was what you were questioning earlier, like what we if this acquisition had not happened, the sort of the roadmap we had for around this time of the year was we were going to introduce AI into it. So it would read an agency comment, and if it, you know, it would pass those comments to uh chat GPT API, get the response when the developer, and which we will uh still do it at E2M, is by the time developer look opens the task, it has that same task response from the ChatGPT uh as well, there, right? So it saves so much time from that doing Google search or RD and how exactly to do it. We did a pilot of that, and about 60% of the time it was amazing. Other times it was just you know the requests and things are so customized in nature that you know chat GPT isn't going to help you. Uh, but it was some crazy uh, I mean, there's some research that I looked at. It was a task where it said, oh, we need a chat bubble, uh, and you know, this height and this color, and it should have this uh three fields. And if the user fills it out, it should have WhatsApp icon and this and that. And took it literally, gave just that code. And I I got so intrigued. So I went myself in there and I put that code in there, and there I had that problem. It probably needed some CSS uh modification, but in like five minutes that task was done, that would have taken uh two, three hours to do it, right? Just to get it and test it. So uh that time saving is coming, and I think uh uh agencies, uh some are worried, but they shouldn't be worried. I mean, if anything, they are going to get all that time back.

That's right, and they're not gonna know what to do with it. You know, marketing. What you do with it is you build marketing engines with the time that you've got back. That's what you do. Uh it's a fan, it's a very interesting and exciting and weird time to be alive. I think AI is going to disrupt the world more than the internet has, and I don't even think we've seen the start of it yet, and it's very exciting indeed. Veronic Patel, thank you so much for joining us on the Agency L. Congratulations on the acquisition uh to E2M. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you guys do over the coming years and looking forward to hanging out with some of the team at MavCon in San Diego in October, which is our flagship event for agencies. Looking forward to that. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. Thank you, Trey. Thanks for listening to the Agency L podcast and a massive thanks to Ronic for staying up so late to join us today. Mavcon, our next live event is happening in San Diego in October, and you don't have to already be in Maverick Club or be one of our clients to attend. At the time of this recording, we only have 10 seats left, so it will sell out. If you'd like to get a taste of Maverick Club and what it's like to work with us to help you grow your identity and tap into our amazing community of identity owners and mentors, check out the link in the description and book your ticket to Medcon today. Okay, folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone you think may need to hear it. I'm Troy Denning. And remember, Hope John Paul II was an honorary Harlem global.