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The Agency Hour
MavCon Recap
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Mavcon is our event, our live event. We do it three times a year, and it's for our Mavericks, people in our Mavericks club who are in our mastermind/slash coaching program. BC before COVID, we had them live and in person, and we've been to places like Santa Monica and San Diego and Melbourne. And we were supposed to go to Fiji, by the way, which I'm still upset about. And uh someday soon again, hopefully we'll be live and in person again. And those are three-day events, which are amazing. Last night was a very jam-packed seven plus hours. I think it was about seven hours, 15 minutes. And uh it's just we have we have workshops sometimes, we have speakers, we have other mavericks or coaches who demonstrate a process or a cool thing. And then we had Dr. Sherry on last night, we had Chris Lemma on last night, we had this guy, Troy Dean, do a keynote address. So yeah, it's good.
SPEAKER_01We do bring in guest speakers, and the I think the value proposition for Mavcon is not only the content, but the fact that you just take a day out of business as usual. I mean, it's easier when we run the events in person because you literally you can't work while we're there. We shut the laptops, we're just writing in workbooks, we're making notes, we're doing exercises, hanging out, doing workshops with each other. Online, it's a little trickier because people are distracted and they just flick over to Slack or emails and they check some work stuff. But the idea is that you take a day out of your business and just focus on the business so you get some distance from the business, which allows you to incubate.
SPEAKER_00If you have a vision for the agency you want to build, then we want to help you build it. Welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast, brought to you by Agency Mavericks.
SPEAKER_01Today we are going to be giving you a recap of Mavcon, which uh we wrapped up yesterday. It's our conference that we run three times a year for our Mavericks Club members. We're going to be running you through what happened and our biggest aha moments and our biggest takeaways and a recap of all the sessions and the guests. It was epic or epic, as Emily says, because she's in New Zealand. And to join me to help me recap Mavcon, she knows I love her, and uh she doesn't mind me taking the pus every now and then, is my good friend and co-host Pete Crispy Butterperry.
SPEAKER_02I can't tell you how much I love that.
SPEAKER_01That's so good. Max has uh obviously got too much spare time in his hands. So awesome. How did you pull up after Mavcon, brother? How did I work?
SPEAKER_02I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_01How did you pull up after Mavcon?
SPEAKER_02Good, good. It was you know, because you're just you know, it's a late, it's a it's a long day for her.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's yeah, and also for you seniors, it's I just wonder how you pull up after a long day.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, 55s and overs. Um it was a good day. You know you're old when they have communities just for you.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02So you know, because it's not like my day actually started when Mavcon started. I started my day at eight o'clock in the morning.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And then Mavcon goes till nine, nine o'clock, nine thirty. And then of course, you're kind of pumped up and wired, and you're wired.
SPEAKER_01You're downstairs.
SPEAKER_02My wife's watching a movie. I'm like, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh so what time did Mavcon start for you? 2 p.m. 2 p.m. Eastern, which is 11 a.m. Pacific. Which was 6 a.m. the day after here on the east coast of Australia. So I was out of bed at 4:30 on Tuesday morning to be in the office and kick off at 6 a.m. Uh, I didn't really sleep very well the night before because uh obviously I was, you know, there was something going on.
SPEAKER_02Because you're also old.
SPEAKER_01That's right. I'm old and I kind of worry about the future. That's what happens when you get old. You worry about the future because you're getting closer to death. Every day you wake up, you're one day closer to death. And so you tend to get a bit of anxiety about that as you get older. Yes. Uh so uh I was just surviving on caffeine and adrenaline yesterday, which was fun until it wasn't. And I'm just I'm just checking the live stream here because somebody said I miss Mavcon, and I'm trying to see who that is. And for some reason, here we go. Come on, where are the comments? Here we go. Watch live. I'll try, I'll attempt to do this.
SPEAKER_02I'm gonna guess who that was. I won't say it out loud, though.
SPEAKER_01Watch me break the internet.
SPEAKER_02It was Zach Stepek. Ah, I was wrong. I thought it was somebody else. Well, we miss you too, Zach.
SPEAKER_01We do. Thomas Thomas Amos is also here. We're gonna talk about his session. He gave an amazing session yesterday on SOPs. Let's just run through the agenda. We started off the first thing we do uh at Mavcon is we start off by asking, we do a bit of housekeeping and set the scene and set the context, and then we ask some of our Mavericks to share some of their journey since they've been in Mavericks Club and to share what's working for them in the agency or some successes that they've had. Um and yesterday we had two Mavericks share their uh their successes. You want to you want to run us through who they were and what they shared, Pete?
SPEAKER_02Uh yeah, just um they shared their growth, basically. So um Lily Parks is uh an agency owner over in LA. And she works with um, well, she works with a lot of different businesses, but she's a former actress, a Broadway uh stage actress. I don't know about Broadway, but stage actress.
SPEAKER_01And dancer, professional dancer.
SPEAKER_02Actually, dancer, right? And she was in Lion King, and her husband was also in Lion King. And uh so she's actually creating a website as a service for that audience, but at the same time, she's also got um an agency going, and she joined us in September. Um, we had our first flight planning call in late September. By the first week of October, she had sold three signature systems, which she had never even heard of a signature system before. And then a couple weeks later, she was up to five, and she actually put the brakes on on selling it because she didn't want to get overloaded. So now she got joined Team Accelerator with us and got a new developer, and now she's up and running again, and you know, so that's amazing growth, great revenue growth, um, and especially recurring revenue growth. And Peter Freeman was the other gentleman who joined us. I think he's a he's an Aussie, right? But he's transplanted up in Canada.
SPEAKER_01He's based in Canada, yeah. I'm pretty sure his wife's Canadian, and so he he he uh his agency's in Port Lincoln, I think, or Port Augusta, which is on the peninsula north of Adelaide. Uh it's a tourist spot. He focuses on the tourism industry, but I'm pretty sure his wife is Canadian, and so they moved to Canada a couple of years before COVID. Um, in fact, uh he came into the studio here and recorded an episode of uh actually, I don't think it was an even episode of the podcast. I think he just came in and kind of said, G'day, he's been through our courses, he's been through the blueprint, built recurring revenue through care plans, had a lot of success there, came into the studio, we met in real life, we shot a video talking about his journey, and then uh now he's based in Canada and they focus on the tourism industry, which wasn't great during a global pandemic. And he talked about that, and he talked about how he and his team essentially kind of became almost therapists for their clients during COVID because their clients were kind of freaking out because of the pandemic and and lockdowns.
SPEAKER_02Uh Jaden, Jaden here says that Lily Parks put me to shame, massive action. She puts a lot of people to shame, Jaden. She's that she's all about action.
SPEAKER_01All about action. She's awesome. Um and and Peter was Peter Freeman was talking about the um the big kind of shift for him is that he's no longer doing account management, that he's got a team member in place who's doing account management. And that the next role for him, I mean, he's got a team of I don't, I don't know. They're a significant size agency though, and and and he the next role for him is to get himself out of project management completely so that he's you know out of the kind of daily operations of the business and he can just focus on business development, partnerships, and bringing in new clients. Um, so after that, we went into my keynote, uh, which uh was called Minimum Viable Effort. And the concept, and I'm actually gonna record this, I'm gonna re-record the keynote as a standalone training video, which I'll share in the group. Uh, we're also gonna use it as a promotional tool because I just think it's such a um such an interesting concept, and there's a lot of distinctions in minimum viable effort uh that I just want to share with the wider audience. Um, the concept really that I talk about is this concept of uh of um, and now of course their name escapes me, not fermentation. What is it? Incubation. Incubation. Thank you very much. Um so this concept of incubation. So the you know, the the the the thing that a lot of people do, including myself, I've done this for years, is you say, oh look, I'll just get the business to this point and then I'll take some time off. And what I've learned in recent times is that the business can continue to grow and in fact will grow faster if you take the time off now. Right. And without going into all the details, the concept in psychological circles, in psychology circles, the concept is known as incubation. It was a concept that was introduced by a psychologist named Greg Wallace, who out of the UK, who actually was also the co-founder of the London School of Economics. He had this framework for the creative process. He he kind of proposed that there are four phases of the creative process: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. And without, or validation, I think, without uh, I think it's verification, without going through all the details. The concept of incubation, we commonly know that as uh if you're stuck on a problem and you can't crack a piece of code or you can't solve a problem, the best thing to do is step away and take a break. And we've heard that since we were kids going through school. You know, teachers and parents would say that look, just take a break, come back to it. The minute you take a break, it'll come to you. And uh I posed a question at the start of the keynote. Um, in fact, I'll pose the question here. Um, first thing that comes into your head, finish this sentence. Just let us know in the comments. First thing that comes into your head, finish this sentence. My best ideas come to me when I'm drop it in the comments now. And uh what was interesting.
SPEAKER_02A really good simple incubation example is when you're trying to remember somebody's name and you can't remember, and then you just say, Okay, I know if I stop trying to think of it, it'll come to me. And 20 seconds later it comes popping into your head. Yeah, that's how incubation works, but it can work on a bigger scale.
SPEAKER_01And that's because the subconscious actually works on uh multiple. There we go, Zach Stepek. My best ideas come to me when I'm listening to a record on my couch. Love it. Uh the subconscious works on can work on processing multiple bits of information at once. We don't really know how the subconscious works, but what we do know is the conscious mind can only focus on one thing at a time. I will admit that I have been I've hosted podcasts in the few in the past. I've hosted, you know, 250 episodes of podcasts in the future. In the future. In the past. There have been times when I've been in the middle of an interview and I've zoned out. This happens to all of us. You know, you're talking to someone at a party and all of a sudden you go, I just don't remember the last sentence you said to me. I had no fucking idea what you just said. I've just completely zoned out because I'm thinking about the groceries that I was supposed to buy. And I'm gonna wake up tomorrow morning with a hangover and there ain't no bananas in the house. And that's a shit experience for everyone. Sorry, what did you say? Your name was? Oh, I'm sorry, your husband had a heart attack. I'm terribly sorry. I wasn't listening. I zoned out, right? And that's because your conscious mind has gone somewhere else. And your conscious mind can only do one thing at a time, can only focus on one piece of information at a time. This is why in meditation, it's really common for uh the meditation exercise to give your conscious mind a thing to focus on. It can be either your breath, some music if you're listening to a guided meditation, a flame of a candle if you're doing open-eye meditation, right? Giving your conscious mind a point on the floor in front of you, giving your conscious mind one thing to focus on actually gets it out of the way and then lets your subconscious and your unconscious do the work of processing the information. That's why if you're trying to think of someone's, what is that person's name? What is that person's name? What you're doing is you're actually blocking the subconscious from doing the work that it needs to do to give you the answer because you're focusing your conscious mind on it, right? So, having said that, here we go. Sitting listening to a classical concert in the shower was the number one question. The survey says, in the shower is number one. The point is, everyone answered this question yesterday, and not one person said that their best ideas come to them while they're at work staring at the internet with their hands on the keyboard. Nobody said their best ideas come to them at work, right? So the the what I proposed yesterday in the keynote, and I'll I'll I'll re-record this at some point and get it up for you guys. What I proposed is that you will actually solve problems in your agency and come up with more creative solutions and enhance and accelerate the growth of your agency if you schedule incubation time in your calendar. And incubation time means you're not allowed to work during incubation time. And this is really challenging because what I'm suggesting and what I do now is I actually have swimming, gym, guitar practice, cooking, pickup and drop off of the kids. Those things are scheduled in my calendar, which means I'm not available to my team or clients during those times. When I'm swimming, like I was yesterday, I went for a swim at 2.30 yesterday afternoon. Now I worked mass off yesterday morning at Mavcon, got out of here after Mavcon. I was in the pool at 2.30. And I know a lot of people are going to be saying, I can't go for a swim at 2.30 in the afternoon because there's too much work to do. And this is really, this is a really tricky thing, is this we have this guilt that we or this expectation that we need to be in front of the computer between nine and five or nine and six or eight and eight, however long you work, right? If I'm not in front of the computer, I'm not working. What I'm suggesting is that you're actually doing different types of work. You're doing a different type of work, probably a more valuable type of work, if you're not sitting in front of the computer.
SPEAKER_02Well, especially, especially as a business owner, you're constantly thinking about your business or your clients or something related to your business. Almost every waking hour, right? Um, especially so a lot of our audience hasn't gotten to the point where they can do what you can do, Troy, which is you've got an amazing team, me, Max, Emily, and the team that can take over and make decisions for you and things like that. I mean, I'm being sarcastic, but it's the truth. It's the truth, you know, not everybody listening can do that yet. That's they need to evolve to get to that point. Um, so we spend as business owners, we spend an awful lot of time thinking about the business, and we need to sometimes just shut it off. You have to focus on shutting it off. Go play golf, go for a swim.
SPEAKER_01That's right. That's right. Um, and so then I gave some very practical ways of of implementing that. So, anyway, I'll reshoot that keynote and I'll share it with you guys. But I would just urge all of anyone watching this or listening to this to structure some incubation time, get that in your calendar so that you force yourself to step away from the computer and just run that experiment for a couple of weeks and see what happens. Um, then what happened after my presentation? Everyone was asleep. Everyone was asleep. We had to wake everyone up because everyone had fallen asleep during my presentation. So we had to wake everyone.
SPEAKER_02Get high level on our sponsor.
SPEAKER_01Yes, that's right. Then we did a quick sponsor highlight with Chase Buckner from High Level. Go high level is an all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Go high level and Tour Mageddon were our two sponsors, by the way, at MavCon. Very grateful for those guys uh helping us make MavCon possible. And Go High Level is an all-in-one sales and marketing platform for agencies. You've heard us talk about this, they don't sell to non-agencies. Your clients cannot go sign up for Go High Level. They only sell to agencies. When you sign up for an account with Go High Level, they have to approve your account. So if you're a dentist and you sign up for GoHigh Level, they will say, no, no, sorry, you have to go through your agency to access Go High Level. They are agency specific, all-in-one sales and marketing platform to help you run your business, but also you white label it and you resell it to your audience, right? Uh to your clients. Now, I think we do have a link, which I think is just gohilevel.com slash troydean. Slash Troy Dean, right? Yeah, that's it. Uh, and that will uh get you if you sign up through that link. Yes, we make a bit of an affiliate uh commission. Uh, more importantly, you get our snapshot loaded into your account. So you get our sales pipeline, you get all of our automations, you get our calendars, you get our email templates, you get our text message templates, you get all that stuff hot loaded into your account if you sign up with our link. It's gohilevel.com slash Troy Dean. Uh check it out.
SPEAKER_02The other advantage of using our link is that you get a 30-day trial, not 14.
SPEAKER_01That's right. So you got a full month to check it out. It's an amazing piece of software and it replaces, you know, all your email marketing automation, your page builder, like your funnel builder. It won't replace WordPress in your blog, uh, but it will replace it's perfect for building marketing and sales funnels, perfect, perfect for building those and reselling them to clients. Uh, it's also got SaaS mode, which means you can actually run it as a SaaS, sell it to your clients. Your clients, you can then mark up how much your clients pay for text messages and emails. So you can basically bill your clients for the emails and the text messages that they send. It all goes through Twilio and Mailgun. So once you plug in your details, you can resell that to your clients. You know, one of the things that Chase talks about at high level, and he mentioned it yesterday, is that the the average uh retention for an agency client is about four to five months. If you're running marketing campaigns for clients, on average, they'll hang around about four or five months and then they'll move on because there's nothing. I number of reasons. One, they don't know what to do with the leads, two, the lead gen's not working. A number of reasons that they will move on. If they're paying for software, the churn rate is less than 2%. If you are providing software that generates leads for your clients and books appointments in their calendar, they're not going to churn. It's a sticky part of their business. Uh, and it's a great form of recurring revenue for you guys as agencies. So go check out high level. And then what happened then after that?
SPEAKER_02Thomas, Thomas blew our minds.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I'll let you, I'll let you walk, I'll let you walk through what Thomas shared with us, man.
SPEAKER_02Thomas uh Amos. Um when he first joined Mavericks, he's he runs an agency in the UK, and uh their their focus is is a lot on PPC stuff. I mean, I'm I don't know for sure, but I'm sure they do some website stuff as well. Yeah. But um he when he joined, he had a he had a team, but he had no documented processes. Everybody kind of knew what they were supposed to be doing, but everything was up in everybody's heads. Um, he told us that how he did it, and I'll tell you that in a second. But he basically went from zero documented processes to approximately 170. He has 168 processes in their playbook right now, and it's all documented. And um what he did was he started out doing them himself, and he set a goal for I think it was 200 by the end of a period, whatever that was. Some I think it was the end of the year or something. And uh he did a few on his own, 20, 30, whatever, and and realized there's no way I'm gonna be able to do this by myself. So he got together and did this amazing, he he put together an amazing video, um, had a had a had a meeting with his team and just sat down and pressed play on the video. And the video was the Star Wars theme of um the the credits rolling at the beginning of Star Wars, but it was a story about their processes and where they were now and where they needed to be. And at the end of it, it was a challenge to them to help him document 200 processes. And the reward for them was they I won't say how much, but they got paid a certain amount of money for every X processes that they personally documented. So So um it was incentive, it was fun, and they very quickly ramped up to 168 processes um in their playbook. And Thomas is being generous and is going to share some of those with those of us in the uh Mavericks Club. So that's nice.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. That was a fantastic presentation. It was great. Um, they've been through a hell of a journey, they've had a lot of stuff going on in the business uh that they got burgled. Um, and fortunately, Thomas said that having their SOPs in place allowed them to get back on track and get back up to speed pretty quickly. So that was a fantastic presentation. And I just also want to thank uh all the Mavericks yesterday who came up and spoke on the stage and shared their processes, shared inside their business, shared their struggles and shared their successes with us because it helps us all remember that we're not alone, we're all in this together, and it also inspires us to, you know, do better, work smarter, uh, you know, focus on things, uh, and also reminds us that we're not the only ones with uh with challenges. Um, what happened after Thomas?
SPEAKER_02Uh the next sponsor was Termageddon. Oh, yeah. When was Jake? Was he uh after dinner?
SPEAKER_01He was later. Oh, right, okay. Um, then we had uh a sponsor highlight Termageddon, Hans Skillrod, Mr. Skillrod. Uh Hans Skillrod from Termageddon was incredible. He I don't know whether I can announce this or not, but I'm going to. Um he he didn't tell me not to. They have a so he told me something yesterday which blew my mind, right? Two weeks ago, the Austrian Data Protection Authority ruled that if you are running Google Analytics on a website, you are in breach of GDPR. Right. And the German Data Protection Authority, they ruled a couple of weeks ago that if you are using Google fonts that are served up by the Google server, you are also in breach of GDPR because Google fonts served up by the Google server actually shares the IP address with the people visiting your website with Google. Now, the very simple solution to the Google fonts situation is to serve them up locally, host them locally, host the fonts locally and serve them up locally. Uh, but Google Analytics is a whole other kettle of fish, right? So the advantage of Termageddon is uh Hans and and the team, his wife is a privacy lawyer. I mean, she she sits on the the American privacy board or something in in the States. I mean, she is the authority on international privacy law, right? And she's the one that writes the policies that you have on your website. The value proposition with the Termageddon is they give you a free license so that you have your privacy policy, your terms and conditions, your cookie consent, which they're rolling out in a couple of weeks. Not sure if I was supposed to announce that. Sorry, Hans, but I've announced it. Um, you get a free license for Termageddon on your website, and then you can resell Termageddon. And the reason they give you a free license is so you get to know their product. You're like, hey, wow, this is really easy and it's really efficient and convenient, and it auto-updates. So any changes in the privacy legislation, they just take care of the privacy policy and it automatically updates on your website. You don't need to do anything, and you can resell that to your clients, and it's an excellent form of recurring revenue, or you can just bundle it into one of your care plans, you know, increase the value of your care plans, increase the price of your care plans. So Tourmageddon is a great solution. Hans came in and spoke to us a little bit about that yesterday at Mavcon. And again, huge shout out to the guys at Tourmageddon. I think we have a link. I'm not sure. Maybe. Uh termagedon.com. I don't know. Not exactly sure if we have a partner link, but anyway, I'll let the team figure that out. Otherwise, just reach out to Hans at Termageddon and say, hey, agency Maverick sent me, and they'll look after you. Uh right, what happened then? Then came Chris. I can't remember what the schedule was. Chris. Micro segment. Chris Lemma. Chris Lemmer. Really? Was that far out? I thought Jake was earlier than that in the schedule.
SPEAKER_02Oh, Jake was after dinner.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01Well, this is I hadn't slept and I was surviving on caffeine, and it's all a bit of a blur. Chris Lemmer came in and gave an amazing presentation called Micro Segmenting.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Which this play, now he hasn't been through the Godfather method, by the way, and I didn't know what micro segmenting was all about, but I sat there and watched the presentation yesterday and went, yay, this is perfect. Uh essentially, it's the too long didn't read version is, you know, he and the example he used was Hilton Hotels, Mercedes-Benz, uh, Monday.com. If you go to Monday.com and click on what industry you're in, uh, they you go to a landing page which basically explains how Monday.com solves your specific problem. Right. Mercedes-Benz, he said that Mercedes-Benz have six SUVs in production ranging from $35,000 to $85,000. Why do we need six? He said, essentially, because there are six different types of personas that want to buy a Mercedes-Benz SUV, right? There are those who want it for function, want to drop the kids off at soccer or whatever, school. There are those that want a toy, there are those that want status, there are those that want to go fast. There's different types of buying personas. So they have six different SUVs that are just slightly different from each other. Hilton Hotel have something like 14 hotels in Chicago, right? He's like, why do they have 14 hotels in Chicago? Because they know that not everyone coming into Chicago is coming in for the same reason. Some are coming in for business, some are coming in for a holiday with a family, right? So they they cater, they have different, basically slightly different products that cater for the different buying personas. And then what he talked about was how you can craft a specific, unique offer for your customer, which basically gives them the same outcome and the same solution as this customer. They're just buying for different reasons. So the adjunct to that is if you've been through the Godfather method, there's a whole module on first of all, how to understand your customer persona and how to bring that customer persona to life and how to actually draw that out on a sheet of paper so you know what your customer persona looks like. And then how to actually craft a customized offer in real time based on what the person's told you on the call that's important to them. Now we've been doing sales call, we've been doing role play and mock sales calls on our sales accelerator clinics on Friday mornings that we run for our sales accelerator customers, right? And one of the things that we've noticed in those role play sales calls is uh that the agency owner, the person who's pretending to pitch their services, tends to talk way too much about what it is they do and confuses the prospect. It's just like this fire hose monologue of, well, we can do this and we can do this and we can do this and we can do this and we can do this and we can do this and we can do this and we can do this. There you go, Max. There's a nice meme for you. And the prospect is like, uh, I don't understand what you said, and I don't want any of that. I just want this. So the idea is that you can take what the prospect has said is important to them and use that information to craft a customized offer in real time on that sales call. And it's all there in the Godfather method, by the way. If you're interested in that, go check out the Godfather method on the website. If you're interested in becoming, if you're interested in mastering the art of sales in your agency, which by the way, I believe is one of the most important life skills you can have as a business owner, is actually understanding the theory and the method and the practical application of sales without you know, ignoring everything you've ever learned or felt or heard about sales, right? If you can understand the theory and the methodology and the process for taking someone from a stranger to a paying client and solving their problem and matching your product to their needs, if you can understand that, you'll never go hungry. It's a very, very important life skill as a business owner. If you're interested in that, just reach out to someone on the team and have a conversation about sales accelerator or drop the word sales into the comments here and I'll make sure someone on the team picks that up and reaches out to you. And we can jump on a quick call, find out if we're a good fit, if we can help you uh build out your sales process and your sales pipeline in your business. We might not be a good fit. And if we're not, that's totally cool. But if we are, we can chat about what uh working with us might look like. So Chris Lemma's presentation, micro segmenting was amazing. And we've already had some feedback on Mavcon yesterday, and his session has been voted as the favorite session by quite a few people. And you know what that means? That means we will never invite him back again because my session always has to be the favorite, right? Because of my fragile little ego. Uh, I'm kidding, of course. And he emailed me afterwards and he went, Dude, I always have so much fun hanging out with your crew. So thank you so much for having me. And I'm like, man, so generous with his time and just such a great storyteller and such a great presenter.
SPEAKER_02He's such a good storyteller.
SPEAKER_01He's such a great thinker. He's such a great thinker, too.
SPEAKER_02He gave a presentation with slides. Like, nobody, nobody wants to see a presentation with slides unless it's from Chris.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. That's right.
SPEAKER_02Then it's worse. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Um, then what happened?
SPEAKER_02Then we had a meal break, and then we and then you got to talk to Jake.
SPEAKER_01Ah, then I got to talk to Jake Goldman from 10 Up, my word. And so, you know, if you haven't been around Jake, if you're not sure who Jake Goldman is from 10 Up, go check out. There was an episode of the Agency Hour, one of the earlier episodes of the agency hour. Just search Jake Goldman in the Facebook group here, and you'll find the episode of the agency hour that I hosted with him. He started an agency, started an agency, you know, from scratch, basically, and now has over 270 people working for him.
SPEAKER_02Just makes agita mind-blowing. No, you probably don't know that term. All right. It gives me it gives me agita for those of you who know what that means.
SPEAKER_01Is that is that a is that one of those ancient prehistoric terms they talked about?
SPEAKER_02It's like that feeling when your chest is collapsing and you're, you know, that's just getting old.
SPEAKER_01I think it's an old thing. That's just getting old. That feeling in your chest is just because you're getting old. That's got nothing to do with you. Um, so anyway, he so we talked about how to how the hell do you manage a team of that size? How do you get everyone moving in the same direction? Uh, we talked about the structure of his team. He kind of they it kind of works in pods. Lance says that that word is Yiddish. There you go. Uh, they kind of work in pods. We talked about he was at uh, I think he said he was at about 40 staff when he hired someone to hire people. So you start hiring HR people when you're at about 40. He did. Uh he said the the growth from 50 to 90 to 140 was the most challenging part. Interestingly, going from 140 to 270 was pretty straightforward. Um, he talked a lot about we talked also a lot about accepting the responsibility of growing a team, right? Um, he he I asked him, like, you know, at some point you had a conversation with yourself that went, okay, Jake, we're all in here. I mean, he is the owner of the business. He doesn't have any business partners, it's his company, right? And at some point, he would have said, Yep, we're going all in and we're growing a big, great, big team, and I'm going to accept that responsibility. Uh, he he kind of talked about the the mental state of that, and he also talked about the importance of recurring revenue. He's like, recurring revenue. I could not do this without recurring revenue. Also talked about how that.
SPEAKER_02He's got some big time clients too.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they've got some amazing clients. The White House, White House, uh Learn Dash. Uh, they've got a very impressive client list, 10up.com, 10up.com. The other thing I'll say about Jake, when I first met Jake out at Pressnomics, I found myself standing outside in the cloisters. I don't know if you know what the cloisters is, but it's like a courtyard surrounded by the hotel, right? So it's like a courtyard in the middle of the hotel. I found myself standing out in in like the beautiful um cloisters there, talking with Jake, um, Carl Hancock from Gravity Forms. Um I think Corey Miller was there, a couple of other guys from larger agencies. And, you know, there are a bunch of us kind of little freelance dudes who didn't know what we were doing. And Jake was just so incredibly generous with his time. I think he just loves talking about WordPress and web in general and business growth and entrepreneurship. And he's always been super generous. With every time I reach out to him and say, Hey, do you want to come on and have a chat in the group or come to one of our events? He's he always makes time for us and he he doesn't have to do that. Like he's just super, I mean, he's a busy man, right? He I mean, I don't know what he gets out of it. He's not gonna pick up any work out of it, but he's just so generous with his time. And so I just want to give another public shout out of gratitude to Jake Goldman from 10 Up because I and also I just also selfishly feel like I get smarter every time I hang out with that dude. He's just solved problems that I'm probably never gonna have to worry about, and uh really, really appreciate him coming in and sharing with the community. It was a great presentation.
SPEAKER_02You can tell just when he was speaking, you can just tell how much he he loves talking about that stuff, like he's truly there to give back, is basically what it boils down to.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Uh all right, what happened then? The power and the glory of video testimony. Oh now, hey, also, I was absolutely blown away yesterday because Max, who's our producer, who usually hides off stage here and is very comfortable on that side of the camera, hasn't spent a lot of time on this side of the camera, and actually said that yesterday. He put together a bunch of slides, he came on and he presented. He presented the uh basically the kind of why, what, and how now of video testimonials and getting video case studies and video testimonials from your clients to add social proof to your story so that you can convert more. We know that video testimonials are a huge part of what helps people convert into our products and programs. And I was sitting there yesterday going, Well, wow, like uh I didn't realize this, but we now have another presenter on staff known as Max Jeff Cott. I sent him a text message afterwards going, dude, that was amazing. Like, I I I I mean, I kind of knew that it was gonna be good, but I was just kind of sitting there going, Well, my job's done here. I don't even need to be here. He totally nailed it. So huge shout out to Max, not only for the thinking and the work that he did putting the presentation together, but just the way that he presented, dude. I gotta tell you, man, it's like you're a natural. You were super confident, super chilled, owned the space. It was great, man. It was awesome to see.
SPEAKER_02And and it's not his comfort zone. And he stepped out of his comfort zone and stepped on the other side of the camera and nailed it.
SPEAKER_01It's absolutely nailed it. Um, and he also gave a quick kind of insight and demo into the tool that we use. And I know that you've all got the lizard brain going, what tool do you use for your testimonials? We use testimonial.to to collect video testimonials from our clients and then share them on our website. It's got this really cool feature where you basically stick a bit of JavaScript on your page where you want to display your testimonials. And then every time you update the testimonials in testimonial.to, it automatically updates your wall of love on your website. And you can have multiple spaces. So you can essentially end up with like a wall of love for web design, a wall of love for your marketing services, a wall of love for your care plan services, uh, and it's all managed in testimonial.to, which is a great platform. And then you don't have to update your website when you add testimonials because their bit of JavaScript does it automatically for you. And he walked us through that. And he also walked us through the questions to ask when you're eliciting testimonials from clients, when is the best time to ask for testimonials, all that kind of good stuff. Uh, and that was a great presentation. Um, he'll also never be invited back because some people did say that his was the favorite session as well. So that's the end of that for Max. Uh, what happened then?
SPEAKER_02Uh then we uh had Dr. Sherry. Oh. Love her. She's just so good. She's so good. She's such a good presenter. She's brilliant. And uh, she's funny. And yeah, she's just good.
SPEAKER_01Dr. Sherry Walling uh is a clinical psychologist. Uh oh, the elephant in the room, I'll just get it out of the way. She's married to Rob Walling, who started Drip and sold it to lead pages for you know squidlions of dollars, right? Uh Rob Walling's a fantastic entrepreneur. Sorry? She can dance too. She can dance. I did not know. Oh, she can. That's right. She was dancing at the start. Uh so Rob's a great entrepreneur in his own right, but so is Sherry. Sherry uh has a podcast, she has retreats, she has a thing called Zen Tribes, where and she basically focuses on helping entrepreneurs with their mental health. Her and Rob actually wrote a book called Keeping Your Shit Together, uh, or Keep Your Shit Together. She's got a new book coming out uh in July this year called Ooh. Um, this I'll get it. Sorry. It's all right. I'm on a website right now. Sherry Walling.com, S-H-E-R-R-Y, W-A-L-L-I-N-G. Uh, she's got a book coming out called Two Touching Two Worlds. Touching Two Worlds. Uh, and it's about grief. Um, and we talked about, we had a very, very in-depth conversation about what it's what how we are all coping in a post-pandemic clusterfuck, which is the world that we currently live in. How do we come out of what we've been through in the last two years? How do we come out of this and go back and sit in front of our clients and offer leadership and offer solutions when most of us have had our confidence really damaged over the last couple of years because we've been in lockdown, we've been told what we can and can't do. Um, and there's a lot of imposter syndrome, there's a lot of overwhelm, there's a lot of anxiety around the uncertain state of the world right now. And so, how do we manage that? And and Dr. Sherry Walling said yesterday, we've been through some kind of trauma, right? And we're we're grieving our freedom. We're grieving the life that we once had. So, how do we manage that and go out into the marketplace and offer our thought leadership and offer our ideas and put ourselves out there in front of people when most of the time all we want to do is curl up under the blankets and, you know, and and stay safe. So we had a great conversation about that. Uh, we talked about some of the practical stuff that you can do. We talked about getting help. We talked about the signs to look out for that something might not be quite right. Um, she is just one of my favorite humans. She's got this incredible poise about her that allows, and we talked about this, the kind of the art of sitting with someone in an uncomfortable situation and not feeling like you have to soothe them, right? Which, by the way, I think is a really important skill to learn as a as as a in in in the role as a salesperson, is to sit with someone who is making a significant investment in your services and whatever's going on for them, if they're uncomfortable or if they're feeling a bit awkward about it or they're trying to justify it themselves, it's got nothing to do with you. And our instinct, I think, is to just keep talking, to keep selling them into it. And yet if you can just sit there quietly and have poise and not move and just be with them and let them arrive at their decision on their own, uh, that's a really powerful thing to be able to do. And she's amazing at just sitting in the uncomfortable silence with someone. And I asked her some very pointed questions yesterday, and she just took a moment, and she's she's really comfortable in those silent pauses, right? Those silent moments, which is part of her job. You have to be as a clinical psychologist. So fantastic. I just love talking to Sherry Walling. I could, I mean, I just want to have her at all of our events, you know. Um, and you know, like full transparency, part of my long-term plan here is to figure out if we can partner with someone like Sherry in a way to be able to help our audience with their mental health issues, because I know that it is one of the most important things that holds us back from achieving what we want to achieve, is the noise and the stories going on in our heads. So um keep keep your eyes peeled, stand by. There'll be more and more updates as we uh move forward and as we try and work something out there.
SPEAKER_02This is where this is where we jump in and say, you're not alone. And if you need help, ask for help.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So if you're feeling if you're struggling in any way, reach out to us, reach out to somebody. People love you, people will take care of you.
SPEAKER_01Yep, totally. And you're not alone, man. You're not alone, I promise you. Like it's it's I I I get a lot of conversations. I have a lot of incoming messages from people in all size agencies and all parts of the world, like who just open up and and tell us that they're struggling mentally, they're struggling with their mental health. Uh it's Really, really common. You know, in Australia, the statistic, and I'm going to call bullshit on this statistic. The statistic is one in five Australians is experiencing a mental health issue of some sort at any given point in time. One in five, right? I reckon it's about three and a half out of five. And the other two and a half just aren't talking about it.
SPEAKER_02Right. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01I reckon it's one in five who are admitting that they have that they're having a mental health issue. It doesn't have to be. So I'm not saying that there's one in five having a meltdown. I'm saying the stat the statistic is that one in five are having some kind of mental health issue that is getting in the way of them living their full life. And I reckon it's probably three and a half to four out of five, and the others just aren't talking about it, right? So that's that's really the hidden impact of mental health because people culturally we don't want to admit that we're struggling. You know, we want to put on a brave face. Um so uh that was a really impactful conversation yesterday, and I'm super grateful for Sherry coming and sharing her time and her energy with us. Then we kind of um Brandon Hirst. Brandon Hirst. Oh, that's right, Brandon. Yeah, you well, so who was on that?
SPEAKER_02Was did Johnny host that session? Johnny was on that one. That's actually that's one that I have to re-watch because I only caught some of it. Um he spoke a lot about um how to nurture your email list. Um you know, it was it what was refreshing was a lot of it was stuff we should already know, right? But we're not necessarily executing on. And he's executing on, and he showed us the results that he's getting by executing on all that stuff, you know, just following the routine and and nurturing your list. Most of us have a list of of X hundreds or thousands of people, and it just sits there. Like nobody, nobody does anything with it.
SPEAKER_01He's also he's also got a tripwire product that he sells for $37. He said that he sold over $2,000 worth of that tripwire product in the last few months at $37 each or whatever it is, $27 or $37. And after people buy that, they get an opportunity to book in a strategy call. Those that book in a strategy call, he said he's converting about 90%. And the strategy call, I think, is $97. And he basically audits their website on that strategy call. And about 90% of those strategy calls are converting into higher paid products because and services, because he audits the website, and then he's like, well, you know, and they're like, Well, shit, we need to fix this, and you're clearly the person, and they've just spent $37 on a on a little product up front. I can I don't actually know what the product is, but they've already invested. So there's already trust there. It makes perfect sense to invest more to get the actual problem solved. And what he does is someone who who opts in for the free resource and doesn't buy the tripwire product, he then just emails them, I think four or five emails, and he says, people buy the tripwire product during those four or five emails. And as soon as someone buys the tripwire product, they're then presented again with the opportunity to get on a strategy call as like a one-time offer. So he has this segmented, he had this beautiful flowchart that he did in Whimsical, uh, that kind of which is great because I love it when people plan things out visually before you actually start using the tool. Uh, and he showed us this great flow chart of how he does all the email segmentation. So super cool. And again, yeah, you're right. It's like these are like he's just doing the fundamentals really well. He's just doing the basics really well, and he's got that dialed in. So that was super cool. Uh, and again, it was great to see a Maverick come on and share their uh share their success. So thank you, Brandon, if you're watching. Thank you very much, man. Much appreciated. And we wrapped it up. Then we did. We wrapped it up. And uh essentially, wrap-up is like encourag it, like asking all of our Mavericks to revisit their flight plan, uh, which is their one page of truth for the next 90 days, and to take anything that they'd learnt during Mavcon and see if they could fit it in and apply it to their current flight plan and um and help them uh accelerate their results based on anything they've learned. And we also said, hey, remember, we've recorded Mavcon. So if what you've learned today isn't relevant to your current flight plan, then just park it and come back to it later. Don't throw your current flight plan out the window based on stuff you've learned today. It's really I see this happen all the time. I have been guilty of it for years as well. You see something, you learn something, you go, holy shit, we've got to start a podcast. I was thinking about my buddy Dale Beaumont the other day, right? He's got a multiple seven-figure a year business and no podcast. And I don't think he's got a YouTube channel. Like you don't need to do everything, right? You don't need to do all that stuff. You just need to do the basics really well.
SPEAKER_02You don't have to do all the basics, you can just do one of the basics really well. Focus on one thing, whatever that is PPC, social media, search engine, whatever. Yeah, for you do it for yourself and do it well.
SPEAKER_01Yep. And so our advice to the Mavericks was you know, don't throw out the flight plan or change a flight plan, just stay, work the plan. And if you've learned anything today that's going to help you go faster or better or easier, then definitely apply it. But if not, then just park it and know that you can always come back to this stuff later. If your flight plan in three months' time says, hey, I need to uh, you know, uh think about micro segmenting, then come back and watch Chris Lemma's presentation in three months' time, right? Just park it, know that it's always there. As long as you're a member, you can always come back and watch the recordings. All right. Well, hey, dude, that's 56 minutes. I mean, I know we started a couple of minutes late, but that's that's the agency hour. There you go. It's the agency hour. Uh, thank you for also a big shout out to the team here. I did sweet FA with Mavcon. I just turned up and did my thing. I didn't do any of the planning. I wasn't involved in any of the organization or the planning or securing the sponsors or the speakers or any of that kind of stuff. Basically, all driven and run by you were so in the dark from the planning that you didn't know when you were going to be on stage and when you weren't. I didn't. People were just like throwing things at me and saying, Oi, you're on stage in five minutes. Oh, who am I hosting? Jake from 10 Up. Oh, cool, no worries. Where are my questions? Here, ask him these questions. Thanks, Johnny. So, Emily, Pete, Max, Johnny, Michelle, Charmaine, the whole crew did Christina Hawkins did an amazing job organizing everything. So thank you so, so much. Really appreciate it. And Lance Evans says, Thank you. This is my first time watching. Very good. Oh, thanks, Lance. Well, welcome to our ecosystem. And uh let us know what you need help with. If you want to see any guests here on the agency hour or you want us to talk about any particular topics, let us know in the comments. Uh, we take your feedback very seriously and we use that feedback to help make this show better for you guys.
SPEAKER_02And next week we're on at our regular time, which is Wednesdays.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, Wednesdays for you, Thursday morning for us in Australia. Yeah, I'm taking a couple of days off uh tomorrow and Friday, which is why we're doing agency hour a day early this week. Uh thank you, Pete Perry, again for uh helping me uh co-host here on the agency hour. And uh have a great week, guys. We'll see you next week on the agency hour. Bye for now. Take care, guys.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for listening to the Agency Hour Podcast. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocketcast, Audible, and wherever you like to listen. You can catch all of the Agency Hour episodes on our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash agency mavericks. Or you can get involved. Check out our free digital mavericks Facebook group, where we broadcast these episodes live throughout the community every week, along with a ton of free channels. We'll see you there.