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The Agency Hour
Proposals vs Statements of Work
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I hated that as an agency because I want to grow intellectual capital. I want to get momentum. And in order to do that, sometimes you have to really establish what you do and what you don't.
SPEAKER_02Welcome to the Agency Our Podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. And this week we're joined by Joe Ardisur. Joe is the founder of SmartPricingTable.com and an expert at creating proposals for agencies. Wait a minute. What? Writing proposals? We've been recommending our agency clients to stop writing proposals completely, so this should be a very interesting conversation. In this episode, we discuss proposals versus statement of work, why agency life can stink sometimes and how to fix it, how successful agencies productize their services, how the market defines your roadmap, the plan for AI moving forward, and of course my midlife prices mohawk. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, please welcome to the podcast, Joe Artisur from SmartPricingtable.com. How are you, Joe? I'm doing really good, Troy.
SPEAKER_01I'm I'm a little jealous of your haircut.
SPEAKER_02Doing great. Listen. Listen, I'll be 50 in a few weeks. I know it's hard to believe. No way. No, it's a true story. And so you know, when you turn when you're 50 in Australia, you have a choice. You can buy Harley Davidson, you can get a weird haircut, or you run off with a 23-year-old. I figured the weird haircut was probably the cheapest, the easiest, and had the least tiers involved. So this is my choice for uh for now. No motorbike. So now this is going to be a very interesting conversation because here I am telling everyone to stop writing proposals, and you're from smartpricingtable.com, which is basically a proposal writing software. Right?
SPEAKER_01That's true.
SPEAKER_02That's correct. Come on then. Convince me. Convince me why I should No. We talked about this uh in the green room. Um let before we before we dive into it, let's just talk about why proposals are a thing and where they sit in the process. Like what is the function of a proposal?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I love this question, Troy. And over the years, as I've you know, understood, you know, really, really honed in on this particular topic. Um, one of the things I've realized is that when you're writing a proposal, you're essentially writing a plan. You're you're just pitching a plan to your prospect. A lot of a lot of agencies don't think that way, right? And that that's why you get these vague, one-page, no description, no clarity proposals. Not really, well, that might be a proposal in your mind, but it's not a plan. And the reason why I'm so passionate about proposals as plans is because I had a web design agency for 12 years, and I saw our proposal template become the most important piece of IP I could ever imagine. I mean, it was just it was our secret sauce. Um if if you want happy people, happy team members, happy customers, good reviews, a happy CEO, you need a good plan. Simple as that. And that's why I'm so committed to good proposals.
SPEAKER_02Now, uh what's interesting, I've never heard anyone talk about a proposal as a plan because so everyone knows, back in, I don't know, whenever it was, 2010 or something, I started giving away my proposal template. I had a proposal template from the agency that I was running, and I started giving that away as a lead magnet. Over the next 10 years, that proposal template got picked up by most of the proposal software companies and was integrated and generated the hundreds of generated millions of dollars for us in revenue and also hundreds of thousands of leads for our email list, and you know, it was a fabulous thing. And I burnt it recently in a Facebook ad campaign. I lit it on fire in the office here and I threw it into bin and I burnt it because I said proposals are dead. Uh now the reason I said that is because my belief is that a lot of the time proposals can actually be used by the prospect to the request for proposal, even if it's not an official RFP process. If they say on a call, they say, Hey, this sounds great, Joan and we love what you're talking about. Can you send us a proposal? What they're saying is we don't trust you enough to work with you yet. We want to delay this decision so that we can go away and think about it. But in the meantime, we'll make you feel better about investing your time with us by letting you send us a proposal. The mindset that I have now is we don't call them proposals, we call them a statement of work. Because the difference between, in in my mind, the difference between a proposal and a statement of work is a proposal is something that we're proposing and that we're asking the client to agree to. Whereas a statement of work is a way of formalizing something that we've already agreed to with the client during some kind of paid discovery workshop, right?
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02So so pardon me if I'm a bit of a smart ass about, you know, telling people that they shouldn't write proposals. The nuance is that I think they should pivot at the statement of work. And your software allows us to do that, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, first off, full pardon, Troy. Uh no, no uh resentment there. Um I I'm a I'm a big fan of both models, okay? I I think that you just have to pick. What are you doing? Are you is it get the deal, figure out the scope, or is it use the scope to get the deal? I I I don't have a fundamental issue with either of those uh methodologies, and and our customers use both. And what I think when I say a proposal is a plan, what I mostly have in mind is the scope of work. I think the a clear scope is just uh huge.
SPEAKER_02Now we did talk your company by the way, smartpricingtable.com. We'll put links to this stuff in the show notes. You can go check it out. I must say the design of everything I've seen, which has only been a few minutes, is exquisite. It looks beautiful. I've had a few looks at the screenshots of the software, it looks like a beautiful interface. We were talking in the green room before we hit record about um this c this concept of using the things that you do in your agency and and kind of modulizing or producttizing what it is that you do, and then literally using those modules or those Lego blocks as building blocks to build out the plan, i.e. the proposal. Can you talk to us a little bit? Because this is something that we are very big advocates for is productizing what you do. We have a whole thing called growth blueprints, which is essentially a series of frameworks uh to help your team understand how we do the thing here, so we're not reinventing the wheel every time a client comes in the door. Can you talk to us a little bit about the most successful agencies that you've seen and how they go through this process of kind of productizing what they do?
SPEAKER_01You know, at the at the core, it's really about uh discovering the patterns in your business. If you don't have patterns in your business, you can't productitize. But I have news for if you don't have patterns, you also can't get momentum. You know, that one of the worst feelings in the world is doing a one-off technology for a prospect or a one-off campaign or whatever, whatever kind of marketing setup that you're never going to do again. I hated that as an agency because I want to grow intellectual capital. I want to get momentum. And in order to do that, sometimes you have to really establish what you do and what you don't. And so the idea of productization, you know, I was sitting at my agency, you know, I grew up uh in my agency learning how to do sales, learning how to do proposals, and I really wanted to be able to just generate a proposal quickly. Uh, we found that mostly it was just the scope and the price that changed. And and it was during that time that we just we kind of stumbled onto productization. And here's the basic idea how it works. Instead of just grabbing this line item description, this service offering, this one from scratch and Frankensteining it all together, right? I know so many of your agencies listening, right? You do this, don't you? Right? You grab an old one and just hope you got all the names correct, right? Instead of doing that, stop for a moment and say, when we say we're gonna do social media management, what the heck do we mean? Right? When when we say we're going to do a blog, maybe you're doing a website quote and you have a blog line item. When we say we're selling a blog, what do we actually mean? And when you can figure that out and you can put it down on paper, all of a sudden it becomes almost like a product that you can use over and over and over, you can improve on, and that's where we get back to patterns. You need the patterns in order to improve and to run out your theories, you need those patterns. And so that's the basic idea of privatization. Comprehensive line items that are reusable.
SPEAKER_02I want to park here for a second and unpack this because our entire model now and the model that we teach and advocate is uh paid discovery upfront. We don't call it paid discovery because no one wants to pay for discovery. So we we recommend that our clients package it up into something a little sexier. I personally call them digital roadmaps. Hey, let's sit down, do a digital roadmap, work out the plan for the next 12 months, right? And at the end of that, if you want to hire me to help you implement it, happy days, we can talk about that. If you don't, if you think I'm a lunatic or you don't like my haircut, you can go and shop that strategy around to another agency or you can do it yourself, I don't care because I've been paid to help you come up with the plan, right? So that's rule number one. Rule number two is then at the end of that discovery, instead of trying to I think the old model is we get on a call, we do free discovery, we try and sell them a project for 12 grand, right? And we don't even really know what the scope of that project is. It's a website with some other bits and pieces that no one's really talked about. And then after that, three months down the track, they come back to us and we add some post-launch services like maybe some SEO, maybe some lead capture, email marketing, maybe some ad management to social media, whatever. So my model now is get paid to work out the plan and then get paid to deliver them a quick win. So we might start by saying, you know what, all we're gonna do is get you some traffic. We're gonna do some social media management, some social media marketing for the next month, get you some traffic, get it to convert, start getting some leads and sales, then we'll look at what's next. And I'll just use the example of a blog, right? If you build a blog for someone, building them a blog and allowing them to publish blog posts is the first it's the tip of the iceberg, right? It's the first step. Because usually what happens is someone publishes a blog post and a week later they're like, why is no one commenting? Why is no one why am I not getting any leads? Why is this not actually generating why is it not moving my business goals forward? And what happens is they come back to us because we've built them a blog and they start asking questions, and we we go, well, you you hired me to build a blog, and I built a blog, and I'm sorry it's not getting any traffic, and I'm sorry your business model is broken, but I can't help you. And I don't think that's a good outcome for anyone. I think the better outcome, this is where I think these line items come in. If you dial in and ask ask a client why, and I had this exact example, this client wanted to go all over on social media. I'm gonna go all in and do the omnipresent Gary V model and be all over social media. I'm like, dude, it's you and a VA, right? You you haven't got the budget all the time, you're just gonna burn out. What do you actually want? I want more calls, he's a coach, I want more calls booked in my calendar. I'm like, okay, man, well, you've got a Facebook group, you've got a great following on LinkedIn. Let's just get you a and a really highly trained appointment center to go through your organic social media audience and book calls, right? And that's working. And guess what? He hasn't had to post any new content on social media.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So I think if you look at a blog, for example, you could break that down into probably six or I could break that down into probably six or seven line items, right? So like like there's there's the blog, but then there's the content marketing strategy, and then there's the content repurposing, and then there's copywriting, and then there's lead capture, and then there's email nurture once the person opts in. So if you look at what you've got in your business, and the reason I'm kind of ranting here is because anyone listening to this, if you look at what you do for your clients, I guarantee you have four or five times the amount of line items in your business than you think you have. You just need to break them down into bite-sized chunks.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I I agree, and and Troy, I I'd say whether you write proposals or you write scope of work, that's really where once you get to the scope of work, because when I say proposal, that's really what I mean. It's outlining your services, of course, some biographical information, terms, etc. Um, but but once you get there, I I you know, as as you kind of go over that example, what I think of is, you know, I could have a blog line item and it's a fixed thing that's defined. I define what's included. In smart pricing table, one of the cool features is I can have upsells inside of the line item. Imagine like uh related blog posts that show underneath or um social media integration or whatever. And you but then you can odebump.
SPEAKER_02They just like tick the box like an older bump, or like that.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, yeah, that's totally what our software does. Completely.
SPEAKER_02That's great.
SPEAKER_01And I've seen people say they have a 25 grand max sign with me for 34. So I uh give them give them freaking options. That's another big idea. Uh but but uh finishing the thought here, I like to do at my old agency, I would have a section in the scope of work or the proposal that said additional items for consideration. And I would I would I would have something like content marketing or blog promotion strategy or something like that, so that even if they don't want it just now, um they they can educate themselves in phase two of it in their head. Now, they might want it now, okay, and so I want to explain it to them. But here's the thing. We as see a lot of a lot of agencies are 20 or under people, a lot of times the CEO is doing a lot of the work, other times it's it's really big, you know, and there's a lot of salespeople involved. But no matter what the case, you're freaking busy. And if I have to, like a lot of times I can't find 15 minutes to do this quick little task, let alone two hours for this proposal that or scope of work that really needs my attention. But here's the here's the thing though, Troy. If I am over time building out a library of line items, all of a sudden I can add two or three upsells from my library in seconds. And that, because you can do that, you actually will. And and because you actually got it on there, it's amazing how many times people want some of your services and will pay for them that you had no freaking clue.
SPEAKER_02We found that over and that's right, because if you don't if you don't make the offer, they don't even know it's there. And if you, you know, I love the related post thing, right? That's a great example. It's a great example of chunking down what you do into products. So we build you a blog. Would you like at the end of each blog post to have related posts? Because that keeps people on your site longer and increases the chance of conversion. Of course I would like that. Well, that's an extra $495, right? Yeah. And we know that internally it might take us 12 and a half minutes to configure that and set it up, but to the client, it's valuable. So if we don't line item it out, they expect us to include it. They just go, Oh, by the way, how come there's no related post-it then to the blog like I say on all these other blogs? Oh, because you never asked, because I never offered and we never had that conversation. Right. And I think a lot of agency owners undervalue what they do because they just go, We're gonna build you a blog, and they throw all the bells and whistles in, and then they realize that the project's just not profitable because they've over-delivered, because we're inherently insecure about the value we add, because I think we're dealing in ones and zeros, not tangibles, right?
SPEAKER_01Yep, yep. It's so important that your line item has guardrails, and and it it's I love the idea of patterns. It how this works is I do a blog, I sell it to a customer. Now I have a hypothesis about how this is gonna go and what things they want, and so I've got this line item, okay? I sell it to them. We make 120 an hour instead of 150 like we were hoping, okay? I'm asking the question, what went wrong? Why was I not profitable on this particular line item? And I go back and I say, you know what, we're just not charging enough for development. I up the base price a little bit. Or it was it was actually this upsell inside of the line item, and or we gave away this thing for free. Let's part that out of the base line item, add it as an upsell inside the line item, and charge an extra 300 bucks, we would have been profitable. Um when when you do that constantly, it has such a profound effect. You know, at my at my old agency, we made, we made millions and millions. Uh uh over the 12 years that I owned it. I like to share, we had $3,500 of nonpayment in in 12 years. And I think so much of so much of that was, you know, I I I like the, you know, I can't remember, I don't know if it was a Jim Collins book where he talks about a runner who's like straining his cottage cheese for some reason because there's some efficiency. Anyways, I love geeking out on that stuff like crazy, and we did that with our proposals, just like we're talking about here. But you're you're building momentum over time, you're building a system so you don't have to start over every time.
SPEAKER_02The thing I like about line items is it's then very easy to then direct the team to say, here's what we're doing. We are integrating the blog with MailChimp, we know what that looks like, that's what the client's paid for, we know how long it takes, here's the task list in ClickUp or Asana or whatever we're using. Don't reinvent the wheel, don't be too cute by half, just follow the process, get the thing done because that's what the client's paid for. Because the biggest uh challenge I have seen in the agency business over the last 150 years that I've been doing this is the discrepancy between what the client expects and what the team is delivering. Even if it's a one-man show, right? You get halfway through a project and for some reason you've forgotten the conversation you had with the client. The client's expecting the client's heard about other things from someone else, they're really excited, they see the first draft, they're like, Where's the membership area that we talked about? And you're like, We never talked about a membership area. Uh and you have that sinking feeling in your gut that their expectations are now not being set or managed or met. And I think these really detailed, broken down, individualized line items make it super easy for an account manager to go, hey, the team's delivered on exactly what we promised. Now, nice little segue here. If you're struggling with your team developing stuff on time and within budget and you have capacity issues, uh E2M Solutions are the sponsor of this podcast. They are the exclusive sponsor of the agency our podcast. They have an amazing team. I think they're up to 180 staff now that can help you with all things WordPress development, SEO, they do some copywriting. I think they also do some design. They're completely white label, so they will project manage your project, they will work in your tool, so in your ClickUp or Asana or in your Slack, wherever you want them, and they will deliver outstanding top quality work. We've got a bunch of clients working with them now, and the feedback has been amazing. Just haven't heard a bad thing about them. Manish obviously came out to our event in the Gold Coast last year, uh, sorry, earlier this year, and uh we spent some time together, and we just have such an alignment of values and what we're trying to achieve. And if you're using something like Smart Pricing Table to scope out work for clients, then you've got a very solid, clear, distinct, tight brief that you could give the team at E2M to get that stuff delivered for you, which allows you to increase your capacity, serve more clients, and grow your revenue. So little plug there, e2m solutions.com slash agency dash mavericks, go check them out. I think you get a discount on your first month.
SPEAKER_01Um I I I like to say, you know, I apply this principle to limitations on a line item, but also to your contract. But um clauses are like bats. Um uh I I like putting them in there. The idea is um I don't want to hit you, but a get away from my wife, right? Like I we never use clauses. We never execute on them, or we were never hard-lined, right? But they give me something. So, for example, it um you can use that if you want.
SPEAKER_02So I'm totally gonna steal that and I'm gonna credit you every time I say I don't want to hit you, but get away from my wife, said my friend.
SPEAKER_01As long as as long as you tell the people to schedule a demo on that smart pricing table, then you can use it. So, so like on the line item level, one thing I used to do all the time, and Troy, I never got pushback on this, hardly ever. I I would have something like a blog that we're charging $3,000, $4,000 for, and I would say something like there's a max of at after I outlined the line item, I usually use a bulleted list of what's included, and then I'd say, note, this line item is limited to a max of 30 development hours. And that was just because, just in case I forgot, you know, the other these uh five other things that you thought of and I didn't, it's limited to 30. And I cannot tell you how much that saved my butt. And going back to the bat analogy, I don't have to swing the bat at 10 hours. But what I can say is listen, Troy, here's the deal, um, or 30 hours, whatever I said. Um, we actually have a limitation of 30 hours on this. Now, I don't want to just pull the plug, I want you to be happy, but I do need to cut this off at 33 hours. So I'm giving you like a three-hour warning here. We're really gonna rein it in, and then after that we'd have to go hourly. You manage your expectation. I mean, people like expectation management and profit are so freaking connected. If you manage, I can't so many times it's like if you just manage expectations well, you can go to your high hourly rate post normal project, and all of a sudden a client that you thought was a bad one is actually a fantastic customer, and we were bad because we didn't define things.
SPEAKER_02You know what I'm realizing? Just looking at some of the sample proposals here on your website, right? Uh if you go to smartpricingtable.com and then click on the sample proposals in the menu. Item, there's the first one here is a website and SEO proposal for Rogers landscaping. What I really like is the the first of all, it might, you know, you could just change the word proposal to scope of work. Because the there's the cover page and then the second page is scope of work, right? So I mean I just d don't like the word proposal, so I would just change that. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. What I like about this though is I and what I'm gonna say to everyone listening to this, even if you don't use this platform to send a proposal to a client, I think you should use this platform to build a proposal because what it will do is it will force you to understand how much does it cost me for my team to build a home page, an about page, a service page. A blog and integrate it into Active Campaign. That's what it costs me. Here's my margin. So this is the pricing on these line items. Yeah. Right?
SPEAKER_01Now you're stealing my talking points, Troy.
SPEAKER_02Oh, sorry. Sorry. I do that. I can't help myself. I'm caffeinated. I'm almost 50. I don't care anymore. I'm excited. I'm enthusiastic. I'm Australian. Come on, hit me.
SPEAKER_01It's it's so it's so true though. I I love the saying if there's a if there's a mist in the pulpit, there's a fog in the congregation, right? If you don't know what you're selling, if you haven't slowed down to say what is this freaking offering, your your customer has no clue, right? I I have a a recent, not to plug my software too too much, but um I have a customer who recently put on our G2 reviews, he said, it's it's almost like a game. Using the software helped me understand my offering so much better than I did, right? Yeah. When you when you start saying, I'm gonna think of my um my offerings more like products with descriptions and and handles to grab onto so they can't go crazy, and have upsells, right? You get so much clarity. You can start shutting things down that don't work for you. New line items that work for you, like like a competitive analysis. Maybe don't do that. And all of a sudden you're like, oh my goodness, what would that take? This customer wanted it. I could define this. I'm gonna define it in smart pricing table, fill everything out, and you're like, oh my goodness, competitive analysis is our most profitable line item. What were we doing?
SPEAKER_02Or or paid discovery is a great example as well. Like let's let's sell paid discovery for whatever the price is, work out what it costs you, work out what your margin is, and then you re first of all you realize that people that pay for discovery actually have a much higher chance of converting to an ongoing client, but it's a whole other conversation. But then you might realize that hey, I could just do like I have a client who just does paid discovery. It's all he does. He actually doesn't do it, he hands off the client to another agency if they want to implement, but he just does paid discovery. That's crazy. Because that's his sweet spot. This is super interesting. Um, so now most of your clients are you were saying like 90% of your clients are marketing agencies, is that right?
SPEAKER_01Right. Yeah. I kind of I I like taking a really small idea and just going nuts with that. I I like niche. I like specialization.
SPEAKER_02So do I. So do I. I'm surprised that other service providers haven't discovered you and because I know like some of the other I know some of the other owners of some of the other proposal platforms, and like that they might have started out with agencies, but now they're like agencies might be 15% of their client base, and it's really like financial planners or accountants or uh, you know, uh even even local business, like even like home remodelers and rent like kitchen remodelers that are using the platform. Is is it that you don't want those clients, or is it just because of the world that you've grown up in and that you come from an agency that you've attracted other agencies?
SPEAKER_01I I love agency life. You know, when I sold my agency, I had five hours of required work per week. And it was all finance that I didn't want to outsource. We I I had I talked to agency owners that hated their life all the time. I I freaking love my agency. We were we were uh top three web design agencies on clutch.co for three years. Um I was I actually held the top spot for a couple months and then someone bought me out. But we were there without the promotion. We were you just rated us by pure rating, we're top three. So part of it's a personal passion. I just know what agencies go through and the pain of proposal writing. But I also I just love, you know, my company's not as big as Panda Doc. Maybe that's a surprise to some of your listeners, right? Um I can't compete with Panda Doc, but I can compete like crazy with Panda Doc in a freaking vertical. Um, and I like I like the idea in marketing that to most people you're noise, but to the select 1%, you're the freaking hero, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_01We have other industries, but my commitment, at least in the short run for the next few years, is is likely gonna be marketing agencies. Your your your market defines your roadmap. And I don't want to I don't want kind of a so-so roadmap for my customers, I want a killer, right? Like we have a surcharge feature. Let's say I have a $30,000 project. There's a setting to where I can add 20% across the entire proposal, all behind the scenes, equally applied to every single line item. Some industries don't care about that. Uh there's actually an acronym. I I I say um in my demo, I say three reasons for this are um high maintenance customer, um, high risk project, or high demand agency. That's why you'd want to increase it by say 20% behind the scenes. Well, I have a feature for doing that specifically.
SPEAKER_02And so in Australia, we call that the dickhead tax. That's what we call it. There's a lot of different call it. You should just say apply dickhead tax in the background and it just adds 20% to everything.
SPEAKER_01In America, we're we have a it's called like PETA. Uh yeah, that's what it is. And we just don't say that we don't say mean words, but the acronym's mean.
SPEAKER_02So Yes, yes, yes. We live on mean words here in Australia. That's all we talk about, because we're a nation of convicts and we're quarrymen and we're very good at digging up the planet and selling it off to other parts of the world. Um now, uh I the other question I had for you is uh I want to talk about the roadmap and what's coming up, and I specifically want to talk about, and I didn't brief you on this, I want to talk about AI. Yeah. I've been using AI a lot over the last few months, and I have to say, man, it is bonkers good. Like it is the use cases are everywhere. What's the plan? I've got to ask. What's the plan? Is there a plan to use AI to help in the kind of because a lot of people might be good at the thing, but they might not be good at explaining the benefits of the thing. And I imagine there's a use case for something like a chat GPT integration at some point to go, hey, I can take this and I can make it sound like an Australian car salesman.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, well, we we use the tiny editor for our text editor. I have a few thoughts on this. We use we use the tiny editor, the former uh WordPress editor for our text editing, and they actually have an AI plugin that we're exploring, so we could have something very, very soon. Um long term, I think we'll make something even better that's more comprehensive. Um, but the thing about it is if you look at some of my sample proposals, especially the branding and print uh sample proposal on our website, it's all freaking Chat GPT. Um I have a logo design line item, go check it out. It's all written by ChatGPT. I just had to copy and paste it. Okay, so there's a small little little gap there, but you know, I I would just say something like, hey, hey, chatty chat, or whatever your nickname is for ChatGPT. Um I I want to I want to uh pitch someone on a logo design. Um I I I would like to give them three concepts, but I'd also maybe like to have some upsell opportunities. So could you give me a three upsell opportunities on this? Um I'm gonna give them these three formats. I'd like them to be able to respond in two weeks. Or sorry, the whole thing has to be done in a month and they need to get back within two days. So please give me, start the line item with a summary sentence that's no longer than two sentences. Give me a bulleted list of what's included, and then tell me maybe some limitations I could consider, and then and then give me three ideas for upsells. And I mean, look look at the look at the logo uh design um line item on our website, and literally I did exactly that. It it built it out crazy, wicked, uh quick. And then and then I just love like this is oh, this is nuts. If you want to do a new service, like your customer says, Can you do competitive analysis? And some of your agencies are like, Well, I do web design, I don't really know what you mean by that. It turns out when you actually figure out what it is, it's like this is super easy. Like, like, I just like what it could you just define the scope of it. It could be massively complicated, it could be really simple, right? What what are the people, what are their backlinks, all that kind of stuff. Well, you can go to Chat GPT and you can say, tell me more about this, tell me some of the pitfalls that could happen, and then tell me what should be included. And you're you've got a massive head start on that offering. Um, and a lot of the lessons you normally have to learn yourself you've already have baked in because of chat.
SPEAKER_02Totally. Big takeaway for me there is I didn't know you could nickname ChatGPT. You can give it like a pet name, can you?
SPEAKER_01I just call it I just say when I'm talking to my friends, I'm gonna put that into the chatty chat. I don't I don't know, I don't actually call it chatty chat. I I actually try not to be too personal. Like I don't I don't even say thank you. Like I feel bad, but it's like I'm pretty sure you don't have feelings yet, and this is gonna be fine.
SPEAKER_02It's funny, I even though because I'm an Australian and I'm quite opinionated, I am super polite with Chat TPT. I always say please and thank you, and and it's it's I just feel weird if I don't do it otherwise. It's uh yeah, it's an interesting, uh interesting time. It's a great time to be alive. I mean, it you know, AI, we we're exploring AI for doing things like, you know, I I saw a video the other day of a two-camera setup podcast that was edited in 47 seconds. It was a 45-minute long video edited in 47 seconds with a plug-in for Premiere called Autopod, and it basically just switched between cameras based on who was talking. I'm like, man, that's like an hour and a half editing work just gone, right? I mean, you know, audio podcasts, you can th just chuck it into the browser now and it will be edited within a couple of seconds. Like, I mean, Max, who's in the green room listening here now, who's our video editor, he would argue, and rightly so, that it's not going to be able to edit the YouTube videos that we publish because there's a lot of thought that goes into the B-roll, the titles, the edit. There's a lot of we try and do things for humorous effect. So it's not going to replace that, but just for rudimentary like content repurposing and stuff. I mean, it's just it's uh making everything so efficient. Yeah, fantastic.
SPEAKER_01Writer's block, ideation. Like I just read a LinkedIn post that said said, you know, chat, don't don't fear of losing your job. Just figure out how to use AI, right? Figure out how to use it and get really good at prompts. Like, like you're gonna write a blog post, okay. Well, it's not gonna do all of it for you. You you it you can tell generally, and it's getting better and better. Um, but but you you know, when I'm doing something with chat, I'll I'll say um, you know, I might do like five different like responses after an initial draft. And I think that's the power of it um to to really uh streamline that.
SPEAKER_02So one thing I learned recently was the use of variables with Chat GPT, which I didn't know you could use. So you put something in, you say like data and then colon, and then you write like a whole bunch of context, and then the prompt is using square bracket data from above, please summarize this into a blah blah blah. And it just looks at the variable above, which has kind of blown my mind because you can have all sorts of different you can just like throw variables in at the start and then at the bottom have a prompt with the variables in where you want them, and it kind of builds out a whole framework for you. So, anyway, it's super exciting, super interesting. Apart from nuding out over AI, what's on the roadmap for smart pricing table over the next six to twelve months? Where are you taking this thing?
SPEAKER_01Well, the the goal is to be true to the name. So, my first uh allegiance as far as product roadmap is to add additional features. So uh things like um volume discounts for quantities are things that we have that we have that on our radar, the uh quick quicker building on the back end, so um some bulk editing features that can help build things quicker. Um to be candid, we we've really we've gotten to where the vision that I had. So I built this for my agency six, seven years ago, and I took it, I started taking it to the market two years ago. We've recently just gotten to the point where the vision is basically complete. And so I'm gonna be looking to my agencies to really understand where to go where to go next. Um, we've got a lot of kind of smaller features, we're we're beefing up our integrations. I certainly see see AI in there, um, but I'm excited that the the model is really working. It's so well, Troy. I I wanted to answer this question a while back. Uh if I excluded all of my non-agency customers, what's our close rate across all agencies where the proposal or SOW is actually sent? And it blew my mind. Um, 42% close one for sent proposals on the system.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_01All almost one out of every two. Yeah. I had a lot of customers that wanted to use it back at my when I owned my agency. Our customers are like, what the heck is this? I want to use this. And I had competitors other other friend agencies that wanted to use it, and and we had this philosophy, but I didn't know how it would serve the market, the bigger market, other agencies if we were to open it up. And uh so uh pleased that it's done so well. Um in our in our vision, other other folks can take advantage of.
SPEAKER_02Um I'll I'll augment 42%'s good, and it's funny because I'll put together a presentation recently that globally the conversion rate of proposals is between 25 and 40 percent. So 42% is above the average, which is good. I will say this to anyone listening if you sell paid discovery first before you put in a scope of work for a bigger project, you'll convert it 75 to 80%. It's it's just it's such a no-brainer. And you could use something like Smarter Pricing Table to pitch them paid discovery, or if you're like me, you just tell them on the phone and they give you their credit card, and then you use something like this to pitch them the final scope of work, your conversion rate's gonna be you know 80% plus. So and in terms of the where you know, where do you like what's the what's the how big is the team at the moment? Are you like are you developing this thing yourself? Are you writing the code?
SPEAKER_01We're we're a startup, we're we're super stable. I mean, at this point we've got lots of agencies using it. I'm I'm not the developer, I have a I have uh other folks involved in the company, but it it's we've gotten past the point where the app is very, very uncommon that we find a bug um and it runs super, super smooth.
SPEAKER_02So, what's the vision not only for the product itself, but for the team over the next sort of 12 to 24 months? What are you excited about?
SPEAKER_01You know, I really love um putting a box around what you do and what your passions are. Um I like cutting things out. When when you define what you do, and I I don't I'm probably just stealing this from Jim Collins, good to great, or something like that, but when you define what you do and what you don't do, it's so powerful. I want I want to absolutely slaughter this concept of productization inside of agencies, and I want to create the best uh proposal software or SOW software I can for the agency vertical. I want to keep the roadmap going, keep it going strong, adding more and more value, but I'm gonna know who my customer is. I'm not interested in serving every industry. There's a bigger banner, it would simply be professional services. But right now, I just love agencies.
SPEAKER_02They are a very unique um business model, and I think without productization, I've taught I've, you know, I mean I've been coaching agencies for a long time. I've lost count of the amount of times I've been on a Zoom call with an agency owner who's in tears because they want to burn the whole thing to the ground because they're overwhelmed and they can't see a way out, and they've built this they've built this uh Frankenstein of a business that is now eating them alive. And it's because they don't have any productisation. Because every time a client walks in the door, they're reinventing the process, they're building custom bespoke solutions, and that business model was never meant to scale. And so I totally hear you. I think it's one of the things that we talk about a lot is productising, and we we have a methodology called growth blueprints that we help our agencies do that with. And as I said before, and I'll say it again, I think even if you don't use smart pricing table to send your clients anything, I think you should use it to map out what it is you're doing and so that you understand your costs to deliver this thing and you can work out your margins, and then you know how much you should sell it for. And then if you want to use smart pricing table to send out to your client, that's a bonus. But I think just as an internal tool to actually figure out how much shit costs and am I profitable on this thing, and then removing the 80% of the stuff that you're doing in the agency that's just not profitable, that you just do because you feel like you should do it because c some one client asked once, right? So you talk about doing less and reducing and that whole idea of like reductionism to actually figure out it's the Jim Collins like this is the hedgehog effect. This is what we do that we are the best in our world at it. We're super passionate about it, the market will pay for it. Let's just get really freaking good at doing that. And let's not run ads for clients because we don't like it, we're not good at it, so let's not do it.
SPEAKER_01I like I I tell my kids, I've got eight-year-old twins and a five-year-old. I don't tell my five-year-old as much, but when you're stressed out, I want you to take uh uh I want you to pause for a second and I want you to ask what's actually stressing me out? What's contributing to this? Because it's probably something, it's probably not ethereal, right? Why do why does agency life stink sometimes? Well, you know, it's a lot of times it's because projects are going over like crazy. Or as a s as the owner, you feel totally strapped. Listen, one of the most amazing things I've ever done is I hired a salesperson and I got out of sales. For the last four years of my agency, I was involved in two sales deals, period. Where the customer actually knew who I was or was talking to me, right? But here's the thing as an agency owner, you don't want to let go of sales because you don't want to screw up the pricing. You don't want to screw up the deal, the expectation management. But when you productetize, when you have a catalog, all of a sudden a non-technical salesperson who's just good at being at selling can start assembling a proposal and selling and focusing on selling all day long because you can't. I would guess that for a lot of your listeners, that is one of the biggest pain points is I don't have any freaking time. I feel like I'm drowning in sales, and the worst feeling in the world is I'm losing that deal because so-and-so needed to talk to me for 15 minutes and I couldn't get anything out the door, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Where's the stress coming from? I think that's a huge, huge piece.
SPEAKER_02We have cli I'm coaching clients right now who are hiring salespeople, and the big fear they've got is like this this salesperson will not know how to scope this out. They won't know how to put a proposal together, they won't know how to sell them because all the intellectual properties in my head. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Get it out of there.
SPEAKER_02Get it out of there. Here's an AI power tip for you. So I'm using uh we uh currently have started and are currently continuing to build out our knowledge base in Notion for various reasons, and there are a whole bunch of chatbots uh softwares that you can plug into Notion. You can basically train your own Chat GPT style chatbot that uses the OpenAI uh API, and you can train it on your Notion database exclusively, so it just is trained on your Notion documentation, right? So our sales team, the plan is that we'll roll this out. Uh some of these chatbots have a direct Slack integration. So imagine you're in Slack, you're on a sales call with someone, and you don't know how to answer the question, and you just ask a chatbot directly in Slack for an answer, and you get an answer from the company, you get a chat GPT style answer, but specifically from the company documentation in Notion, right? Well, every time you put a line item in your proposal, add it to Notion as a line item with a name, a description, and a price, and then when you're on a call, just ask ChatGPT or ask your chatbot to build a proposal for you based on your own internal knowledge base. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's I mean, now we're talking about now we're talking and this is the thing about AI, is that I think it's finally the technology's here that we can scale a service-based business that is based on, even though we're productizing, we're still providing a service, but it's based on intellectual property. It's been very hard up until this point to scale an intellectual intellectual property-based business, right? Because how do you get the knowledge out of your head and communicate it? Chat GPT is amazing at communicating if you give it the right information and you train it on the right data.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, that that's great. And and I I always like to say too, you know, that there's that facet. And then just because someone makes a proposal doesn't mean they get to send it. Like I would I would have my sales guy create the proposal and then I'd approve it. But here's the magic after you productitize enough, and every every time you eat concrete, every time you bump your head on a project, you're you're going back and you're fixing things. What can happen? And this happened for me, after like six months, I just said, look, we're good. Because I knew he's not gonna mess up the trunk. I made the trunk. My team made the trunk. We we made most of the tree. He's just maybe tweaking the line items, he's he's adjusting a branch or a leaf. And unless he does something big and he'd tell me, I don't really care. And so I've unleashed him to close more deals without me. He's got a product catalog. If he doesn't understand something, you could ask my developer or someone else, right? But he can he can go on his own. And man, the feeling of the company closing deals is not getting bottled neck on me on me, but someone who thinks about that all day long.
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_01None like it. None like it.
SPEAKER_02Yep, totally. I agree. Hey, uh, this has been a super, I'm conscious of everyone's time, including yours. This has been a super interesting conversation. I'm glad, I'm glad I got out of my own way and was open to this conversation. I'm still gonna say people shouldn't send proposals, they should send statements of work and they should sell paid discovery first. But I love everything that you're talking about here in terms of productization. And again, I'm gonna say people should go and check out smartpricingtable.com, sign up, take it for a spin, and at least use it to build your own products in there and work out your margins and make sure you're bloody profitable. And then you can brief your team and say, this is exactly what I've promised the client, so this is what we're gonna build. It really helps you tighten up that scope and manage those expectations. SmartPricingtable.com, is that the best place for people to get in touch with you, Joe, or do you have another way people can reach out?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's that's the best way. Go to smartpricingtable.com. A few a few options on there. I do have a free guide, the profitable proposal blueprint. Um, uh, it's five principles that have just killed it for for uh for me and for my agencies. I or my customers uh use these as well. I also have a free demo uh along with our free trial. And the demo is quite really cool because I can personalize it. Um you'll actually be meeting with me, and I can personalize it for your specific uh agency. And I also provide some consulting on the free trial side. So even if you're tired kicking, you're not sure, schedule a demo and I'd love to chat with you personally.
SPEAKER_02Love it. Awesome. Thank you for joining us on the agency hour. Appreciate your time and uh looking forward to keeping the conversation going.
SPEAKER_01A blast, Troy. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02Thanks for listening to the Agency Hour podcast and a massive thanks to Joe Ardisur. Super interesting stuff. Really looking forward to seeing how our agency clients use smartpricingtable.com. Be sure to check out smartpricingtable.com if you want to build your own products, map out the scope of projects, and ensure your agency is profitable. We'll leave a link somewhere near the show notes to go and check that out. And a huge shout out to E2M Solutions for sponsoring the agency hour podcast. Visit e2m at e2msolutions.com. That's E, the number two msolutions.com slash agency dash mavericks. If you need to expand your capacity and bandwidth in order to serve more customers and generate more of that sweet, sweet recurring revenue. We'll provide a link under the podcast if it's the con. We'll also leave a link to chat with our team. If you want to work with us to grow your agency, I can guarantee you are sitting on your agency's most valuable asset and you're just not getting paid for it. Also, tickets to Mavcon are selling fast. We're gonna be in Fairfax, Virginia this October. This is your chance to surround yourself with Mavericks and work on your agency in person. We are gonna be talking a lot about how to scale your agency with AI. Our community has been described as phenomenal for good reason, so book your seat today and come and hang out with us in Fairfax, Virginia before they sell out. Okay, folks, don't forget to subscribe. Please share this with anyone who you think may need to hear it. I'm Troy Dean, grow a mohawk. Don't buy a motorbike.