everybody likes talking about success but no one really likes to talk about their failures well
that's what i'm going to be doing today i'm going to talk about the main times that i've screwed up
since i've launched my digital marketing agency but before we get into it please do make sure
you're subscribed with your notification bell turned on let's get started with this video
okay so it has been three years since i launched my digital marketing agency and it
hasn't just been one straight line to success and i think it's very easy for people to show things
as a straight path to success when in reality it really isn't there have been ups and downs
there have been mistakes there have been lessons that i have learned and today i want to give you
those lessons i realized i've never really spoken about the failures that i've had within my agency
and the lessons that i've learned from them so i'm probably gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna paint a picture
of my agency from start to where we are today and kind of highlight some of the biggest mistakes
that i've made that come to mind i've got becky in the background cooking up lunch right now and so
there might be a bit of background noise today but yeah we don't care we're gonna get straight into
this so from the start one of the main times that i can remember or one of the biggest mistakes i
made to start off with was my first ever meeting i remember walking into this meeting with this
cockshaw salesman almost arrogant mentality that i could sell snow to a snowman because i worked
in sales beforehand and it kind of does that to you working in those boiler room type settings
now i walked into this meeting and i did all the wrong things right i was ramming my service down
the client's throat i was criticizing their current strategy i was giving them all these
facts and figures that they didn't really care about and it was completely impersonal and uh
at one moment in the meeting i remember we stopped to have a coffee they went away and had a coffee
and i really realized at this point it wasn't going how i wanted it to go and so i stripped
things right back and i just looked at it for what it was from a top level eagle eye view and
i realized it was just one person speaking to another person one person trying to help the other
person solve their problems equally we're just trying to help each other generate more revenue
i want a service charge they want to generate more revenue in their business and so what i did was
is i stopped talking i just asked a few very very simple questions about their business about their
goals about where they are at the moment and where they want to be in life and they just unloaded all
of these problems that they were having in their business it was like this relief just dropped from
their shoulders and i was able to provide bespoke solutions to the things that they were talking
about it was personal and i built a rapport and a relationship with that business owner instead
of trying to pressure sell them they actually managed to become my first ever client they were a restaurant
in my local city first ever client great client worked with them for months and months and months
and months got them some incredible return on investment i built a great personal relationship
with them in fact i they actually helped me go to networking events in my local city and helped me
build my agency when i first started out and that was all based off that realization
that this is not pressure sales this is just a problem-solving exercise between two human beings
the second time that i that comes to mind and it's pretty much right after this this
restaurant i realized when i first started out or i realized now when i first started out that i was
just trying to sign up anybody that would take my money okay if you're going to pay me some cash or
do advertising i'll probably say yes to you right and this is a big mistake that i see agency owners
make to this day when you're first launching a business you want the cash you want to quit
your job you want to get into a good financial position but the problem is that can mean you can
drop your standards when it comes to the kind of client that you want to sign up so my first ever
client was actually a kitchen bathroom showroom and i'm not saying kitchen buffing showmans are
bad they can be really really great clients but the fundamentals weren't there with this client
number one they didn't have a very good brand at all the brand is it was pretty piss-poor and
the website uh was was was barely functional and there was no option to buy any products online
or inquire about any products and we also didn't have a great relationship from the
off this client wasn't good at providing content for us for adverts we did social media management
for them as well which was the daily organic posting and scheduling of posts on instagram
and facebook but they didn't provide any content and the content they did provide was poor quality
uh they weren't open to offers or any kind of um campaigns that we wanted to run on facebook so
it really made our life difficult we had to rely on just pushing traffic through to the website
and we couldn't track that return on investment whatsoever and so we actually only worked with
them for the three-month contract that we had we made we moved away uh did our separate things and
we kind of agreed that we weren't the best fit for each other but in reality looking back i knew that
before i signed them up i just wanted the money and that was the crucial mistake that i made
and now today i would rather have one high quality client than five bad clients because believe me
those five clients are not worth the hassle they're a headache and it'll make you question
yourself as a marketer and really is just stress that you do not need in your life so do not
sign up people based on the financial gain make sure that you stick to your high standards even
when you're first starting your agency in fact especially when you're first starting your agency
now one of the big issues i had with that client was communication and actually as communication
became this big issue up until the point when we had around six clients uh i gave my clients
my mobile number that was a big mistake and so my clients would call me up every day they'd be
asking me questions some would what's at me would facebook me someone send me an instagram message
or an email and it just became this logistical monster and it really was not fun to manage and
i would be taking calls in the evening and then i kind of realized hang on a second i'm not a slave
to these clients right they're my clients and they need to respect my boundaries as much as i
respect theirs i wouldn't call them in the evening therefore they shouldn't be calling me and so i
took everything back i looked into communication softwares and i actually got slack so i got
slack the team management company and the team management tool and i've set up all of my clients
on slack and then from that day onwards they could only contact me within business hours using that
one tool which was slack and therefore i didn't have the stress of managing clients through my
mobile admin stuff anymore now what have we got so um communication and hiring hiring is another
issue that i had problems with i made a big mistake when i first started out again this was
financial mistakes when we start our agency or in any business we want to keep our our um overheads
low we want to keep our outgoings low and so when i needed to build the team i actually started off
with doing social media management as well as ads we only offer ads as a service now but we used to
do social media management as well and so i hired a team member to actually manage the social media
management side of the business they were going to take all of the clients content on a monthly
basis from a dropbox folder and then write all of the posts out and schedule them for the clients
now i took on someone really low for like fifty dollars per month i was paying this guy based in
bulgaria and he was doing that fifty dollars per month per client for 30 posts per month
now he was he used to write all of the posts for me scheduled them out and i didn't always check
the posts okay i didn't always hit them after a little while i kind of let him do his own thing
but the issue was when i stopped micromanaging that there were so many spelling mistakes through
to communication issues right there's a lot of people on like websites like upwork for example
say that they have really really great english written and writing skills at written talking
vocal and writing skills um when in reality they're really not that strong and so
you need to be careful when you're hiring people when you first start out that you do micromanage a
little bit to ensure that you're not putting out posts with bad grammar with bad english because
it's going to reflect poorly on you when the client sees that post that's an issue i had a
couple of times now the same thing happened when we hired our first media buyer or advertiser this
is a guy from the philippines and again we hired him on a very low rate it's around 200 per client
per month and uh in principle he had really really great case studies and testimonials he sent over
some really really great results but actually when he started working with us he didn't deliver on
what his case studies said and uh to this day i probably think those case studies were bogus uh
or probably taken from somebody else which isn't great and when we started working with this guy
we actually gave him one of our ad accounts to manage and it was a hair transplant clinic and
he set up this new campaign a messenger campaign to be getting uh leads through into the client's
inbox when he set up this targeting he didn't put any um uk specific targeting right it was
completely open to the world who forgot to do that forgot to leave forgot to add that in there and
so overnight we actually got like 500 messenger requests at a cost of around two people messenger
request to the client inbox and they were literally just the most terrible request the worst
traffic ever and it reflected so poorly on us as a business and uh yeah and we can just say that
there were a few disciplinaries there and we only actually managed work ended up working with that
guy for another month or so he was just kind of tying us over as we were so busy on ads but again
i went for finance over quality and it's the same problem that i had when i signed up those clients
early on okay you need to go for quality and there is a fine line between getting somebody
who can provide a service for you or a team member who can provide a good service for you without
charging you above the odds without ripping you off at the same time and so that's something that
we really had to learn when we were first starting out not going for the cheapest outsourcer that we
could find okay so what else have we got i think that's pretty much the the main thing
that come to mind uh when i first launched the agency the main stumbling blocks but i
definitely remember last year in in july last year around summer period we had this lull and i had to
have this big kick up the ass to myself to sign up more clients and uh we got complacent and we
pretty much autonomized the entire agency i wasn't having to do much work at all apart from signing
up new clients apart from the fact that i wasn't signing up new clients i was going on holiday like
i think went on like nine holidays last year and i was just enjoying the success that we had within
the agency rightfully so but we got to this point we'd actually lost a couple of clients and revenue
started to drop a bit and that's natural in any service based business you're gonna lose clients
every client has a lifetime right whether they go and run out of themselves and you train them
up whether they want to try it themselves whether they move on to other ventures or
something doesn't work for whatever reason clients will come and go that's the natural
cycle of any service based business and that's why it's so important you keep the pipeline full
and keep out reaching sales 101 as i said to you keep the pipeline forward i always preach about
that but i didn't do it myself right i was off gallivanting enjoying things and whatnot and so
we got to this point where we lost a bit of revenue and i really needed to kick up the ass to
start out reaching again and so we recovered very very quickly luckily we're coming up to that
christmas period which we're in now and there's a big rush for e-commerce businesses to start
advertising so we leveraged our case studies started out reaching again and we just kind of
got back to it but at that point it could have been really dangerous for the agency
if we just kept letting things decline it could have turned into nothing very very quickly and
so it's very very important that yes you should enjoy yourself but you also need to keep your
pipeline full at the same time so i think that's pretty much it i can't really think of anything
else that's happened this year which has been a big failure on the agency of course there's been
many failures in the other businesses but keeping things strictly to the agency i think that's
pretty much all the main things that come to mind if there's anything else and i'll be sure
to create a new video in the future going through that giving you the lessons from that but i really
wanted to create this video today to uh paint a more full picture of what it's like to own a
business or own a digital marketing agency because it's not plain sailing and i don't have all the
keys to success and there is going to be a roller coaster and it's not just going to be one straight
line to get to where you want to be and i think that if you watch any of our student interviews
you'll realize that this is the same thing for everybody nobody just has some straight line
to hitting six figures within their agency there are gonna be ups and downs and you need
to learn these lessons yourself sometimes you need to make your own mistakes it's like when
your parents and your kid they tell you not to do something and you go ahead and do it anyway and
realize they were actually right but you needed to do it yourself and fall on your face off your bike
over the handlebars to realize that you shouldn't be going down that hill without a helmet on
and i think it's the same in business we need to make our own mistakes we need to stumble across
things and and and and and give ourselves those lessons for them really to sink in uh if i could
finish this video on a couple of things just some of the biggest advice which has really come up
i'm talking about these problems today um is that transparency really is king when you're
launching your agency you need to be transparent with your clients you need to make sure you manage
their expectations they know exactly what they're getting into they know exactly what they need to
give to you and you also need to learn to say no say no to clients that aren't a good fit for you
say no to strategies that won't work say no to clients that are trying to micromanage say no
to those that are trying to contact you in the evening and believe me once you hold yourself to
a higher standard once you have bigger or stronger principles within your business you're going to
be a lot happier with what you do because the quality is going to be so much better as i said
i would rather have one really really good client than five crap ones because these five crack ones
will destroy your agency and really make your life miserable so i hope you have enjoyed this
um please do share with somebody else who will get value from it if you want me to create more videos
like this again in the future then i will uh even when i have more failures i hope i don't but i'm
sure i will and i will welcome them with open arms because i've taken lessons from every single
time we've made a mistake in the company so yeah that's the end of this video is lunch ready nice