Good to see you, Jack. Joseph, Snay, good to see you. Pumped to have everyone here today. We’re gonna be jamming on some recurring revenue tactics. Uh we got quite a few folks registered today, so I’m thinking probably give it another minute or so to let some folks join our Zoom. Uh but good to see you guys each here. If you want to throw where you’re connecting from in chat, uh that would be amazing. I’m broadcasting today from Castle Rock uh in the sunny blue sky, Colorado, which is a nice change from yesterday, which was uh quite a bit overcast and uh a little bit uh snowy uh here in Colorado. So, uh yeah, got India, very cool snor, Michigan, Ontario, Canada, where it’s currently thunderstorming. Stay dry, Jack. U so excited to have you uh joining us today and uh yeah, let’s um jump in here in a minute. So, good to see you, Casey and Peter hanging out with us today. So, we’ll get started here in just a couple of minutes, folks.
Uh would love to know what kind of agency you’re running right now. So, you running a web design agency, digital marketing business, uh branding? Let us know what kind of business uh you’re focused on and uh yeah, we’d love to uh help you all generate more recurring revenue today
marketing. Very cool, Peter. Just general uh broad marketing, digital marketing, ads, everything that the client needs, web development agency, digital. Got it. Very cool. Awesome. Uh 360°ree digital marketing at creative impact.ca. Very cool. We’ll give another 30 seconds or so before kicking off our content uh today.
Casey and uh let’s see here who have not heard from yet. So we got Snay, Peter, Jack, Joseph. Uh you connected with us here. What kind of agency you running, Joseph?
welcome to uh Enoton as well. So, all right, we’re going to go ahead and jump in. We’re three minutes past the hour, so looks like some other folks are coming in here. Welcome, Vince. Good to have you with us today. Uh also work full-time for an agency and do web dev, SEO, anything else clients want. Uh very cool. Well, welcome. Good to have you here, Joseph, Jack, Peter. Uh today we’re going to focus on how to earn more recurring revenue and multiply your income. Uh this is one of my favorite topics because as an agency you will find without recurring revenue your income might become very lumpy. If you’re very dependent on projects, project revenue where you have, you know, one big project that might go on for one or two or three months, you get paid a bunch up front and you get paid a bunch at the end. uh and that creates kind of that lumpy revenue within your business. So, one of the ways that we fight that is by generating more recurring revenue uh in our business. And so, if you haven’t started that journey, hopefully today will be a little bit of a kickstart. Um if you are already offering recurring revenue as or or packages or retainers or subscriptions to your clients, hopefully you will learn some tactics, some methodologies today to generate more recurring revenue. Ideally, with any agency, if you’re not able to achieve 100% recurring revenue, if you’re able to even generate 30 or 40% of your revenue from recurring sources, that can be uh gamechanging for yourself and for your business. So, uh looks like we got a few more folks coming in today. Welcome. Good to see you here. Uh Fernando, good to see you, Fernando. Uh if you haven’t yet introduced yourself on chat, please do that. Let us know where you’re connecting from today and what kind of digital agency you run. Good to see you, Eigor and Dennis. Uh, let us know, introduce yourself, let us know where you’re from, what kind of agency you run. Today is all about recurring uh, revenue for your digital agency. Uh, you’re from Dundee. Very cool. Uh, so I’d love to hear uh, from each of you uh, what’s the hardest part about growing and scaling your agency? So, let us know in chat. Um, you know, one one sentence. What’s been the biggest challenge for you in growing and scaling uh, your digital agency? love to kind of know where we’re starting from in terms of what’s going on for each of you in your business right now.
From Peru, UK web design. Very cool. Getting new clients. Very cool. Thanks, Snay. Appreciate that.
What else?
Finding high ticket clients on a recurring subscription basis. All right.
What else? Couple people getting new clients. Price setting, getting clients fast without much sales effort. All right. Very cool. Yeah, this is good stuff. So, what we’ll find with uh so getting higher ticket clients, getting the clients to actually subscribe uh when I do find them. Very cool. Yep. So, we’ll hit these topics, I think, um, a little bit head-on today. Some of them will be a little bit more indirect because today we’re going to be focusing on recurring revenue. Uh, one of the challenges a lot of agency owners face is they don’t have time to market their business. They don’t have time to work on their business because they’re so busy with project revenue that’s very inconsistent. And so it’s like, you know, you’re head down working on a project and then all of a sudden you’re finished that project and you’re trying to like scramble to get the next client. And that’s one of the things that recurring revenue is going to help you overcome. Uh my name is Brent Weaver. For those that have not met me yet, uh see a lot of first- timers here today. That’s cool. We work with digital agency owners that are struggling to attract and win highv value, high-paying clients. Uh before running you gurus, my first agency ran that for 12 years. had over 300 clients in our active management on retainers. We had um I pitched over a thousand website and digital marketing projects. Um you know, done a lot of things right, but I also did a lot of things that could use some improvement. I don’t know if you guys feel like sometimes running your agency is a little bit like riding a roller coaster. Uh but uh for me, that first like few years of of running my agency was like this crazy journey of highs and uh unfortunately some lows. Uh, for me, I think this one moment comes to mind where I went into a Starbucks and I literally had $3 in my bank account and instead of ordering my usual venty Starbucks, I had to switch my order to a grande because I I literally didn’t have enough money to afford a larger size of coffee, right? And one of the reasons that happened was we only had 3% of our revenue came from recurring. So 97% of our agency’s revenue with 14 people had to be found every single month. It felt like I was on this hamster wheel where I just I constantly was hunting for new business. And new business is the hardest type of business to win. Existing customers are always easier than going out and finding new customers. And so one of the things that we implemented in our agency was was some awesome recurring revenue strategies. And that allowed us, that was one of many things allowed us to achieve more freedom in our business and life. And that’s my mission now is to help you and 10,000 uh agencies achieve freedom in business and life. Uh we’re going to be moving pretty fast through today’s content. Uh if you have questions, please throw them in chat. Uh we’ll give you slides and recording after today’s session, so don’t feel like you got to take a ton of notes. Um today is also not like a a buy now webinar. Um you know, we we we’ve got no nothing for you to buy at the end of today’s free training. Um, if you are interested, we do offer free agency growth sessions. Those are 1-hour calls where we spend time learning about your agency, getting helping you get clarity on what’s going on, figure out where you want to get to in that business. And so, if you enjoy today’s content and you want to learn more about you gurus, later in today’s session, I’ll give you an opportunity to book that call. Does that sound good? So, if we’re all like getting tons of value today, we’re going to book an agency growth session and do some virtual high fives. Does that sound good? Yep. Cool. Sn’s on board. Awesome. Seeing some thumbs up emojis. Big fan of emojis. Exclamation points. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Uh, so this is our model. This is a good like thing to like screenshot when you’re just thinking about like what do I need to grow a successful digital agencies. Uh you need four systems. You need an attract system, a win system, a delight system, and a scale system. It’s important for you to understand where in your business needs the most help right now. You need to isolate that area. You need to get focused on that area, and you need to engage in 90-day sprints to move that area of your business forward. Uh if you don’t have any leads right now, then you need a system to funnel leads. If you have leads, but they’re coming in, they don’t respect you, they’re not willing to pay your prices, then we need to build more authority with our market and with our list. Um, now once you have that authority, you have that list, and you have leads coming in, we need to start creating leverage in your marketing systems and get you out of the day-to-day marketing for your business. Same goes for your win system. Do you have a system to convert clients? Do you have a great offer? Do you have that recurring revenue? Now, we’re going to be focusing today on recurring revenue. We’re going to go deep on this recurring element, but if you don’t have recurring revenue, wowing your clients, having a playbook, having a great team is very difficult because you’re having to go out there and earn all this project business over and over and over again. It’s time consuming. Uh it’s very uh difficult to scale an agency without that recurring revenue. Uh so, real quick, like we’re talking about recurring revenue today. What’s been the most difficult thing for you? Maybe you haven’t done anything with recurring revenue. Uh maybe you’re having a hard time getting clients to sign on for recurring revenue. Um what’s been the biggest challenge for you around recurring revenue in your business?
Just starting to try and sell it, managing support hours, selling the idea to clients, increasing the ticket. So maybe getting, you know, higher prices on these things. Yep. Yeah, good stuff. Anything else with tracking and communicating hours to clients, getting the clients to pay on time, Vince, man, I feel you. Feel you, man. That’s that’s that can be difficult, right? U depending on who your clients are, right? So, so part of that could be, you know, coming back to our model, like if your clients aren’t paying on time and you’re delivering great value, then we need to come back to your attract model and look at, you know, what kind of clients are you attracting into your business, right? Uh, and so, you know, there’s there’s all those things kind of connect with one another. Um, you know, and you have to look at that whole system. Uh, I’m going to be talking to you about some specific tactics and strategies today. Um, I’ll also mention a couple of clients that we’ve worked with. Talk about their stories. You know, Scott and Craig, I love these guys, man. When they came to us, like they were a fish out of water, man. They’ve been running their agency for um, you know, years and they had plateaued and then they had a bad couple of months. They didn’t have any recurring revenue. Uh, and and those bad couple of months like put them into a very very bad place. So we we taught them the methodologies that we’re going to introduce to you today in principle and they now are now booked out six months over half the revenue comes from recurring half a million dollar year agency run by two gentlemen no employees whatsoever right um this is what I want for each of you to like start planting the seed of you can have more freedom in your business by implementing the right tactics and systems and you don’t have to run your business on trial and error uh when it comes to recurring revenue and thinking about the problems that it solves in your business. You know, the biggest challenge is is just lacking peace of mind. When all of your revenue is project to project, it’s very difficult to create uh a successful business because, you know, you’re having to reinvent your revenue every month. You can’t make investments with confidence. You can’t work on growing your business with confidence. It’s it’s a mess. Um, and when revenue is not consistent, right, we can’t uh even just paying, you know, salary or payroll, like when when 97% of our revenue was was project based, like we would literally like miss payroll, which sounds terrifying. Um, you know, imagine going to an employee, right? The the worst day ever is having to go to your team and say, “Hey guys, uh, you’re not going to get paid on Friday, uh, but we’ll get you we’ll get you caught up as soon as possible.” Right? Like being in that type of state is like a very bad place to run a business. And so by having consistent recurring revenue, it’s not only going to help you make more money, but it’s going to make you have a more secure business. Uh, and I heard this in chat a little bit, like just not being able to sell, you know, recurring kind of deals, like not knowing how to do the pitch, not knowing how to structure your packages. Um, and then not, you know, not not thinking that clients will pay for your services on a monthly basis. And here’s the reality. Some of some services are great for recurring and other services are not so great for recurring. And you need to know the difference. Um, if you’re not confident on like your packages or your offer or your sales methodology, that’s a big problem. If you don’t even have packages to to to start with, right? If you don’t actually have a recurring service to sell, then we need to solve that problem pronto. Uh, or if you’re making this just too complicated. I was talking to somebody the other day, like like literally yesterday, Monday, and she said to me, you know, uh, you know, she’s like, “I’m really excited. I’ve got these packages that I’m going to be ready to sell in October. And I’m like, what? Like, why don’t we just create some packages? Like, she’s like, I’m having all these conversations with these clients in my niche, and I’m going to be ready to sell something to them in October. And I’m like, October? Like, that’s fall. We’re in spring. We have like a whole season between now and then. Like, what’s taking so long? She’s like, well, I got to build everything out. I’m like, you’re running an agency. Literally, we can sketch out packages on a napkin and we can go sell them that afternoon because that’s one of the great things about running an agency is you can be profitable on day one. Your clients will pay you and then you go deliver the work, right? We don’t have to go build stuff ahead of time and then hope that people will pay us, right? We can get paid and then we can do the work, right? So, don’t make this too complex. Also, you might have packages that you don’t feel like will sell, right? Which is is not good. So the opportunity achieve peace of mind is first and foremost recurring revenue when we went from 3% of our revenue as an agency to 30 or 40 or 50% of our revenue was recurring like we could breathe again. Now my agency that I run today uh we’ve got almost 100 people on the team and we are 100% recurring revenue. 100% recurring revenue. Over $100,000 a month recurring revenue. We have incredible peace of mind around the business. We can think strategically. We can think about our longer term vision. We’re not just like constantly like having to like put out fires and and and run around with our head cut off. Right now, are there problems in that business? Yes, there’s problems in every business, but we at least have the peace of mind to think about stuff clearly. Uh we get those monthly auto deposits, right? So, you know, in terms of getting paid on time, right? Like great, like you should get paid and then you deliver the service. It’s that simple. So, if you’re on marketing retainers, you’re getting paid at the first of the month. You deliver marketing services that month. If you don’t get paid by a client, right, you’re taking them off the roster. You should be able to close those deals with ease. Uh somebody told me if if I had like a a photo of me when I was like seven years old that this would this would be the photo. I don’t know how true that is, but I want you to win recurring revenue deals uh with these. I want you to have clients that are excited to sign for your services. you know, selling hours or like maintenance. Like just it feels like going to the car dealer or the, you know, the oil change place. It just doesn’t seem like an exciting offer. So, we need to level up your offers and be able to help you choose stuff that’s going to be uh more valuable to your business. Uh good to see you, Natalie G. Just saw you jumped in. Uh clear client outcomes. Uh we want your clients to know like what’s the result? What’s the exciting problem in their business that you’re going to help them solve? We want you to have awesome packages. We want to make sales easy, exciting, and we want you to have high value wins. That doesn’t mean that you’re going out there and selling, you know, a hosting package for $50 a month. Like $50 a month, like agencies are low volume, high value businesses. If you don’t understand that, it’s going to be a very painful journey for you. Low volume, high value. The amount of time and energy it takes to build a relationship with a business that’s going to pay you money is extraordinarily high. Now, there are ways to run this type of services businesses at volume. The amount of people that are savvy enough to do that, it’s just it’s a very difficult business model to make uh as a volume business. Right? So, I want you to take if you just take one idea from today, low volume, high value. So that means that every client you have needs to be worth at least 10 or $20,000 per year that you’re working with them. 10 or 20,000 because the average agency best case is signing 10 to 20 clients a year. So if you’re going to run a business that’s going to be generating half a million dollars, you should probably, you know, be making at least 20K off of each client and you’re you’re you’re signing on, you know, one or two clients a month. that’s gonna get you a half a million dollars, right? High value. You shouldn’t be, you know, if you’re pricing your packages out and they’re, you know, $25, $50, $75, $299, right? Like there’s just not enough there for you to be successful. So, we need to work backwards from high value and then and build a business around that. So, quick pulse check. We had some new folks join us. Uh, you know, good to see you, Dre and Denise and Natalie and uh and Sirad and and Cortrice and Tiffany. We’d love to hear hear from some of you new folks as well. Uh, how would it help you if you had more recurring revenue? Don’t think about this in in broad terms, but very very specific terms. Okay? How is it going to help you to have more recurring revenue for your business?
I I jumped on a little late. This is Shirad. And um I mean what what has helped me is uh is shifting to thinking an hourly rate or even if I don’t bill hourly to build that way and think about the full year like what is the full year going to cost me as far as how much how many hour and I think weekly too. So I said all right well how much time am I going to contribute to this particular client per week. What is the hourly and then build it out for the year. Then I really then I started to develop a rhythm of like what it should look like. And I don’t have 20 clients yet, but you know, I’m getting there. It helped. It helped a lot. Yep. Yep. Cool. Uh and and Denise, I’m gonna have to turn off uh notation for you here in a second. I keep seeing you drawing stuff on the screen. We do appreciate that though. It shows you’re engaged. Uh yeah. So sir, did awesome. Yeah, somebody else jumped on here. Oh yes, I didn’t realize I took myself off of you prematurely. But uh my name is Tiffany and I am actually positioning my business to offer reoccurring revenue. Um I added on uh coaching and consulting and that is where a lot of my clients have been I’ve been transitioning into recurring revenue. So, I have about 10 clients now um that I’ve had for the last year. And I want to get to a point where the recurring revenue is built out um like Siraj said, for the year and my my months are planned out based off of the packages that I offer. So, I’m I tested it last year and I’m fine-tuning it this year, which is why I’m on the call. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Well, good to have you here and sir, awesome have you here and see in chat right it aids in growing your business. Uh Natalie right says with recurring I will be able to commit to a set number of hours for staffing and then be able to scale. Yeah 100%. Um, you know, say, uh, one of our clients, like she was doing these lowv value content packages and, you know, she was we were able to help her reposition her packages into highv value subscriptions for her clients. And we got her to that result, you know, in at least twice as fast as she would have done that on her own. And and that’s a huge part of how you need to start thinking about your business is what’s the opportunity cost of either inaction or what’s the opportunity cost of actions that are not getting you a result that’s helping you achieve your goals. Um you know if you can get there faster, if you can get to bigger goals, um it can truly change uh what your agency does for you in your in your business and life. Okay. If I could do like I’m I’m going to I’m going to walk through some really tactical stuff. And you’ll kind of notice I’m I’m spending a lot of time today on, you know, mindset and just how you think about your business and talking about the big picture. Like why do you want to do this stuff? Because at the end of the day, like all the tactics, like this stuff is out there. What you have to understand is like you have to flip a switch in your head that says, I want to commit to more recurring revenue in my business because it’s not going to be a linear path. It’s going to take you some iterations. You’re going to have some pitfalls. you’re going to have some things that don’t work out exactly as the road map says. Uh, and that’s like any journey. And so, for you to just leave today’s session with this commitment of like, I’m I’m committed to growing the recurring revenue I have in my business. I’m committed to making this work uh, no matter how long it takes, and I want to get there as fast as possible. All right. Um, we’re going to run through nine hot principles. So, these are tactics that you can use uh, in your digital agency to help you generate more recurring revenue. The number one thing, and this might sound self-evident, is start offering recurring revenue today, not tomorrow, not next month, but commit to something today to offer your customer base, your network, a recurring service. If you have never sold your packages in a recurring method, start trying that on today. Have a call with a a client today. Have a call with a past client today. see if you can get them to engage in a recurring uh monthly subscription. Uh and don’t go out and build a website for it. Don’t go build an order form. Like call up a customer and say, “Hey, um you know, here’s what we’re doing for our clients. We’d love to get you on one of our new subscriptions.” And be able to offer them that today. Uh the sooner you do this, the more successful you’re going to be, right? Think of it like planting a tree. The best time is 20 years ago. The second best time is now. and and I’m going to run you through the numbers, but if you wait three months to try to quote unquote get this right, those three months that you’re giving up is it can create an incredible amount of of lag time in how successful you’re going to be with this. Uh I’m going to introduce you to a concept here and and Fernando I’m going to give you some very specific package examples uh later in today’s session. But the rule of 78 basically says you know how much money you’re going to make this year from a recurring offer or in the next 12 months. You take the price point times the number of new clients you would sign up at that price point per month and then you multiply that by 78 and that gives you how much revenue you’re going to make in the next 12 months. And so this is just a rule of thumb. So if you want to say, look, I want to make, you know, $100,000 this year from recurring revenue, then what you need to do is do $100,000 divided by 78, and that’s going to give you the price point or at least the monthly net gain of revenue uh for your business. So I’m going to give you a zero churn example. This means that we’re not churning any customers. We’re going to sign them up for a $1,000 a month service. Now, this could be two clients a month at 500. This could be one client a month at a,000, right? And what you’ll see here is, you know, one year gets us to $78,000. So, if we signed up a client in, and let’s just imagine we’re doing this on the calendar year. So, let’s say we had one client sign up in January, we had our second client sign up in February, our third client sign up in March, our fourth client in April, and so on. By the end of the year, we’re going to make $78,000 for that year. Now, the fun part is when this starts to compound and it doesn’t add 78,000 a year because what happens is all of your clients from year 1 are going to get build January of the next year and and so and then they’re going to get build in February and March and so on. So, the first year is 78, but then the year two is 144 for those original customers. And so, you can see this jump from 78,000 to 222,000. And and so, just think about this. So, if you have a recurring revenue marketing service, you know, the first year you might make $78,000 in recurring revenue, but the second year there’s this huge jump. Now, when we sold our first agency, we had implemented successful recurring revenue strategy um over about a 5year span. And so, our agency went from 3% less than the 78,000, right? Our agency went from 3% of our revenue was recurring to over half of our agency’s revenue was recurring. and that helped us create a much higher valuation for our business. And so you can see how this starts to compound. Now, this is a zero churn example, which either means that if you’re going to churn some of these customers along the way, you’ll make less money um over time. However, if you simply retain or I’m sorry, if you sign more customers, basically sign the customers that you lost and continue to have a net uh gain of customers, then this model is still true. So, so sirrod, it kind what matters here is a net gain of $1,000 uh dollars per month. Okay. So, what I’m going to do is I can I can sketch this out for you real quick just so you can see how this works. Um, because sometimes, you know, you see the numbers, you’re like, “Okay, I kind of get it, but maybe I don’t fully understand how we get to that like 78.” Okay, so let’s imagine, right, in January, uh, I’m just going to do a few months out here, right? January, February, March, April, you know, May, June, right? So, let’s imagine, right? Here’s our our half of our year of our our calendar. And we’ll do uh split these up into hopefully enough columns here. And so let’s say in January you sign one client at $1,000, right? That’s your your your first your first customer, right? Now in February, you’re going to bill them $1,000. March $1,000. April, $1,000. June, $1,000. Right? So, so your total revenue for January, because you only signed one client in January, is $1,000. Right? Now, in February, we’re going to sign our second client for $1,000. $1,000, right? Because this is recurring. So, every month, you’re going to So, so now in February, the revenue we got is actually $2,000, right? Now, in March, doing another 1K, right? And then the revenue for March is $3,000 that month. Okay? And then we’re going to get our fourth client, right? And that fourth client here is billing in April. So April’s revenue is $4,000, right? So if we continue doing this, 78 is the number of these boxes that we have in the first year. So, an easy way for us to do is say, “Look, if I have a service, and that service is $1,000 per month, and I sign one new client per month, and I lose zero clients, in year one, I will make $78,000. In year two, I will make an additional, if I continue signing one new client a month, I will make an additional $78,000. Plus, I will have all the clients from year 1. So, I’d have 12 clients from year 1. And so, I would I would get another 144,000 from my year 1 clients. And I’d get another 78,000 from my year two clients. Okay? So, let’s say for instance, you want to make $78,000 this year, but you price your services Okay, let’s say you’re like, “Oh, I want to make a bunch of money with recurring,” but you don’t set a goal and you mistakenly price your services at $250 a month and you’re only signing on average maybe one to two clients per month. That means that some months you’ll be adding a net gain of $250 a month. Some months you might add $500 a month. And let’s say your average over the course of the year is you add about, you know, $350 a month. Well, in this example, right, I’m not going to make $78,000 that first year. I’m going to make a lot less, right? I’m going to make 350 * 78. I’m going to make, you know, 27300 that first year. And in that second year, it’s going to be, you know, 144 * 350, which is 50K plus the 27K, right? Which will equal about 77K in year two, which depending on what your goal is, that might be enough, it might not be enough. Okay? And so when you come into your recurring revenue offering, your pricing strategy needs to be combined with what your marketing strategy is in terms of the number of clients that you want to sign up. And I see this all the time with web agencies. They’re like, “Oh yeah, I went to this webinar. I’m going to do recurring revenue now.” And then they go and they price their services at like a $100 a month for like web hosting and maintenance or whatever. And so then they end up like, you know, it’s like and they’re signing like one or two clients a month and they’re adding Yes. Yes, they are adding recurring revenue, but they’re doing it at such a slow pace that it’s going to take them like a decade to generate enough recurring revenue to sustain their business. And so now you might say, well, but Brent, I don’t know what to offer in order to charge more. Well, first we need to understand what is our target and then let’s work backwards with what kind of services and what our model needs to be in order to actually deliver that recurring revenue. There’s lots of different like levers and dials when it comes to recurring revenue. Maybe some of you are building websites. Those are great projects or great great engagements to build on a project basis. It’s not a great offer to sub have somebody subscribe to a website that they don’t own for the next, you know, five years, right? A lot of people have tried the like website as a subscription. It’s just not a great deal. Website, great to have as a project based engagement. Uh ongoing maintenance, management, marketing, growth, optimization, etc. Great for recurring. Okay. So now, if you’re currently allin on project revenue, we just need to start building some strategy to diversify you to recurring. And my recommendation for any business is to be at least at a 50/50. Half your revenue from recurring, half of it from projects. If you’re running a branding agency, again, you’re you’re probably never going to be 100% recurring. Don’t try to innovate a model. continue to do your big rebrand projects as big lump sums, but start to build some creative services subscriptions. Like once clients have that new brand, they’ve got to implement it. They’ve got to get ongoing design services. They’ve got to get ongoing copywriting services. Those are great things for recurring. If you’re a digital marketing business, you have an opportunity to be over here because digital marketing, Facebook ads, social media, SEO, inbound, all that stuff is is a chronic and recurring problem. So, you can actually structure your services into a recurring retainer from day one. Okay. Now, it just depends on like what kind of business you have, what your services offering is. But what we want to do is we want to unpack our strategy, right? Are we month-to-month with clients or do we require some type of commitment? Is it self-s served DIY or is it a fully managed done for you service or is it somewhere in between where you have some expectations of what your client does? Are you trying to do low price stuff? Only do low price if you have a proven track record of being able to attract clients at scale. If you do not have a proven track record, and I’m not saying that you don’t have great ideas to market your business, but if you’ve come from a business where you’ve earned dozens of customers per month and you’ve got a proven track record of building those systems, then you can probably um, you know, kind of experiment with some commoditized service offerings uh, and some lower price stuff. If your track record is earning about one or two or three clients a month, then I want you to go more on this side of the price scale, right? higher price because you just don’t have very many at bats. You need to get better at selling a lower volume amount of services, get better at valuebased pricing, get better at discovery, get better at strategy that’s going to have the highest impact on your income in the shortest amount of time. So, we want to make sure we have a good recurring revenue strategy. Uh the other thing that we want to do is we need to have play the calculator game a little bit. Okay? So when when people create their recurring revenue strategies, one of the things they miss is they don’t actually think about what their business’s operating expenses are, they don’t actually think about what their monthly salary is, and they have no idea how many clients they get per month. If you get like, let’s say, you know, two clients per month in your business and you want to generate, you know, 10K a month in recurring revenue, you can’t price your services at, you know, 200 bucks a month, right? Like the amount of time it’s going to take you. You’re going to be years before you have 10K a month in recurring revenue. Uh we we can’t do that, right? And so this is a little bit of a of a of a set of equations for just like figuring it out from like cover your base cost like your salary, your team salary, your monthly expenses, and take that salary plus the operating expenses, multiply it by 12, and that should give you your total month recurring revenue goal. So let’s say your your monthly salary was 10K a month and your operating expenses was 10K, then your your monthly revenue that you need to make is, you know, 20K a month. um you know times times that 12 months, right? And so that’s going to be about 240 uh K per year. Okay. So now we take that 240 and we can divide that uh so 240K uh divided by 78 gets us to 240,000 divided by 78 gets us to about three uh $3,000, right? And some change. Okay, that means that you need a net gain of 3K a month in order to cover all of your salary and operating expenses in the calendar year you start doing recurring revenue. Now, if you’re if you’re signing two clients a month, guess what? Your package pricing, your average revenue for recurring needs to be 1,500 bucks a month. 1,500. Okay? If you’re coming up with prices for your packages that are less than 1500 or your clients are going to choose the smaller ones on average, you’re not going to hit your recurring revenue goals for the first year. You’re going to come up short. Now, maybe in year two or year three, you’ll eventually kind of catch up. But if the game for you is, I want to cover my salary and my monthly operating expenses this year, then you’ve got to set that bar a little bit higher. And you’re probably going to have some client churn. And so we want to set the goal uh in a way that we’re actually going to achieve uh that end result. Okay. Now, when it comes to recurring revenue, I mentioned like I want you to take an action today. I’d love that action to be, you know, booking an agency growth session with you gurus, but at the end of the day, like set a plan. Where do you want to be three years from now in terms of recurring revenue? Generating recurring revenue for your business is like investing in the stock market, right? like we’ve got to invest today and we got to have diamond hands, right? We got to make sure that we’re investing, we’re committing to this today and every month we’re going to make a little bit of progress, a little bit of progress. But it starts with every day having some kind of action that’s going to generate more recurring revenue for you. And you need to make sure that that action lines up with where you want to be in, you know, in 90 days, in a year, in three years. We need to have a plan for that. Okay, so this is just a basic goal and planning exercise. What are you going to do in the next 24 hours? the next three days, the next month to maintain and grow your current revenue. Uh the second thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to build passive momentum. This is the make money while you sleep. I’m very torn on talking about making money while you sleep because all the money you make in your business is the result of some activity, some action, some investment that you make. um you know so so passive income usually just means that it’s it’s like a delayed payment for something that you put time in you know three months ago six months ago etc right uh you do something today and then maybe in the in the future you make some some money right so a lot of you have a core service offering you maybe you’re web designers maybe you’re digital marketers and there’s other stuff that your clients need these other services you can make money off of them by not delivering them by referring them out to other people, tools, or agencies, and they can give you a commission on that. Whether it’s set up as a referral agreement, an affiliate agreement, a commission, you want to start setting these things up. What are the services that your clients use? Are they using web hosting? Are you managing that for them? Are you referring them to somebody else? I meet countless agencies who are like, “Oh, yeah. I just refer my clients over to XYZ host, you know, I don’t really want to make any money off of it.” And I’m like, hold on. What are you talking about? Why don’t you want to make money? Oh, it’s too much trouble here. Like, I have affiliate agreements with hosting companies, with platforms where literally I have made tens of thousands of dollars where I log in and I see total earnings 50 or 60 or $70,000. Like, that’s a down payment on a house or at least contributing to one. Uh, these days with housing prices, right, maybe it’s half of a down payment on a house, right? like you can make some serious money on this stuff over time, but it does take some setup. And some people say things like, “Oh, I don’t want my clients to think that I’m trying to make money off of every, you know, thing that I do.” Like, tell your client, like, “Hey, I recommend this hosting company. The reason I recommend them is because of this. Oh, by the way, it’d be awesome if you use this link if you do decide to use them. Um, I do make a small amount of money off of that link if you use it. uh you know, it’s just a way to help support our company so we can provide better services and we can do amazing things for you as a business owner, right? Like tell your clients that you got an affiliate agreement. Tell them that you get a commission off this stuff. Don’t be like weird and you know and and opaque about it. Um if you’ve got clients who need SEO services, pay-per-click services, find agencies that you could that can become referral partners for you and every time you send them a business, they might send you 10% or 5% of that revenue. It might not happen super often, but if you’re referring people out, take the time, set up refer referral agreements and affiliate agreements. If you’re doing a lot of marketing, you might have a lot of people that are coming to your business that aren’t a good fit for you. Monetize this. Refer them to somebody else. Maybe they’re not yet ready for you. Maybe they’re too far advanced. Maybe they’re uh you’re getting the vibe that they’re a pain in the butt customer and maybe somebody else would give a swing at it and they needed the work. Right? I I’ve definitely been in the situation before where I’d gladly take on a pain in the ass client uh because we needed to, you know, fill some gaps and and and and you know, fill the pipeline, right? Uh but maybe, you know, some months you’re like, I don’t want that client. I want to refer it out to somebody else. Okay, so most tools out there have affiliate programs. Just go to the footer of the website, click on them. you know, my web audit. These guys send us a PayPal like every month and um you know, they uh you know, send us, you know, we send them some business and every month I get like a PayPal for a few hundred bucks, right? Uh at Unlimited WP, the agency I I co-founded, um we we give 7% of recurring revenue for the life of the account. That means if you send us an agency that signs up, like we’re going to send you, if they sign up for a $1,000 a month package, we’re going to send you 70 bucks a month on that account for life. that could add up to some serious money. You send 10 clients, you know, that’s thousands of dollars per year uh that you can drive in just passive recurring revenue for your business. Um, you know, hosting companies are, you know, famous for their great affiliate programs. Uh, Cloudways, one of our sister companies, you know, we they pay out tons of money to agencies for the businesses they’ve referred. Um, you know, in this example, right, an agency could be making, you know, $4500 per month by just referring in two customers a month and end up using AWS on their platform. So, get up those set up those passive recurring revenue systems in your business because, you know, you got to set them up early. It’s going to feel like you’re not making a whole lot of action at first, but over time, it’s going to start to snowball. Now when it comes to your packages, your services, we want to set up uh we want to find and solve chronic issues in your client’s business. Websites as a build, brands as a build are not chronic issues. Those are investments that businesses make every 3 to 5 years. website maintenance, website growth, paid ads, SEO, content, creative services, design work, graphic design, no social media management. These are chronic problems. Like it’s like cleaning your house. Like you can’t just pay a house cleaner to come to your house like one time and clean your house. Every week that dust comes back. Every week we must continue to sweep and clean our house. So, what you want to do is go in and figure out what do your clients need all the time, right? Helping them find more leads and customers. That is a forever job of every business. You know, there’s it’s there’s rarely a time where we just say, “Oh, yep. That’s it. We we we found all the customers we’re ever going to need, right? Like businesses always need more customers. They always need more leads. Those are chronic problems. It’s like drinking coffee or shaving, you know, every every week the the hair comes back, right? every morning. Got to have that coffee, right? So, so those are chronic issues uh that your clients might have. When you’re thinking about this, um you know, look at your service offering. Unpack like what services, skills, products, and value could you offer your clients ongoing? What problems, frustrations, and outcomes do your clients want ongoing? And what we got to do is we got to match the services with the outcomes. So, what are those things, you know, and go and if you don’t know the answer to this or if you’re making assumptions or you’re making stuff up, go talk to your clients. Talk to them about what are the chronic problems. What are the things that just seem to be recurring issues that where they they solve them a little bit, but they just come back later. We had an agency we’re working with where their client’s website was getting hacked all the time, right? That’s a chronic problem. Like hacking, website security, WordPress security, these things are recurring issues. So, in order for clients to be protected, um, they’ve got to be able to, uh, have some kind of subscription to support that. When it comes to creating your packages, we want to ascend and anchor our packages. So, price anchoring is one concept. It means that you’re if if you when your client comes to you, if the highest package that you sell is $500 and your second to lowest package is $200 and your cheapest package is $50, like $500 seems extraordinarily expensive to $50. And in this case, $500 is your price anchor. And so people are going to choose a couple hundred a month thing and they’re probably going to complain about it. Uh, you know, when when you’re anchoring, we want to anchor to high value. That means that we’re not choosing, you know, $500 anchors. We’re choosing anchors in the thousands. What is a VIP package look like with your business? You know, a lot of agencies for some reason think that like a $1,000 a month retainer or $2,000 or $3,000 a month retainer is a ton of money. The reality is like the alternative to hiring your agency is hiring an employee. Employees cost thousands a month, potentially tens of thousands of dollars per month. uh and they can get that through your business. So when we when we ascend, we want to start with packages that clients, you know, your earliest type of business can afford and then we’re going to move them up to additional service levels depending on what kind of results that we’re getting for them. So we need to understand who our customer is. We need to understand what the outcome that that customer needs and we need to understand how are we framing that value. you know, having a business in a box, you know, have being able to break through a plateau, being able to hit some desired growth goals. Um, so we want to ascend those plans from small to medium to large, and then we want to anchor them into highv value packages. We also want to make sure our packages are value priced and irresistible, valuep packed. If you’re selling broccoli, people are going to hem and haw, right? Like if you’re going into your clients and being like, “Oh, you need a security maintenance package. It’s like insurance. Who the hell wants to buy insurance? I don’t know about you guys, but I hate having to shop for insurance. It’s the worst, you know? So, if you’re selling your your clients on a on a service that feels like you’re selling insurance, I want you to to recognize that you’re probably selling your client some broccoli. Yes, they need broccoli. They should eat healthier. But the reality is is everybody wants chocolate sundae with a cherry on top. Everybody wants the burger from In-N-Out or McDonald’s or whatever. Everybody wants the greasy, nasty food that we all know is bad for us, but like we love it. It’s so tasty. It’s so good. And so you need to you need to approach your clients in the same fashion. Give them some juicy stuff that they can sink their teeth into that’s exciting, that’s got some sizzle behind it. You know, sell them those chocolate covered strawberries. And then through your service offering, make sure you’re giving them also what they need as well. Make sure you’re getting them, you know, a little appetizer of vegetables. Make sure they’ve got some stuff that’s really, you know, tasty, that’s going to be healthy for them, but give them the stuff that they ultimately want. If your clients tell you over and over, we need more leads and customers, how is our website going to help us get more leads and customers? How’s our brand going to help us get more leads and customers? If that’s what you’re hearing on a regular basis, you’ve got to address that concern with your clients. You got to you got to satisfy that need with them. So when we look at our value stack, right, a lot of you are probably selling a commodity or a timebased recurring revenue plan. That’s better than not selling anything at all. So if you’re selling a basket of hours, if you’re selling, you know, you know, five blog posts a month, like it’s fine. You you’re starting at the lowest two tiers of service offering. Um the reason I think that selling you know at least selling uh time is a little bit better than commodity because we can actually set an hourly rate that is based on a value of your agency. So if you’re selling time you can you know let’s say a commodity hourly is like whatever 50 bucks an hour. Um you could actually sell your time at a higher rate $125 an hour $150 an hour. Now, you’re going to have to get results for that that how much you’re charging, but you could charge them a little bit more value through your hourly pricing. Whereas, if you’re just charging for like five blog post, at the end of the day, they can get those five blog posts from any content writer, any inbound marketer um out there in the marketplace. Right now, over time, you can move into selling your services. What does that mean? Hey, we’re going to manage all of your Facebook ads for $5,000 a month. Right? So, now we’re not managing time. And we’re not selling a number of posts or whatever. We’re managing like a channel or a platform for a client. We can start charging a lot more per hour because you might have a client where you’re getting them phenomenal results on Facebook ads and you’re working only a few hours a month because of your proven frameworks. When your proven frameworks get really good, you can start to sell results. And this is where you’re going to start to really drive into valuebased selling. And ultimately, if you can get to this fifth level where you can guarantee your clients results, you’re going to make the most money per month from those recurring services. So, if you feel like you’re not ready to do a guarantee right now and to have a guaranteed service offering, that’s fine. Like, you know, sell to results or sell services or sell time or sell commodities. I don’t care what you’re going to sell. We’re going to sell something and realize this is a journey. If you’re starting at level one, great. Let’s get some clients paying you on a monthly basis and then just realize you got to start to increase the value of those services over time. Now, we make this shift, right? Like clients go from low value to high value. That means we’re selling into clients that are going to be worth 30, 40, 50, or even $100,000 or more per year to your business through your upfront project and your ongoing recurring revenue. So when we work with agencies like this is the type of shift that we make we see right low value services into those highv value services over time. Now I’ve got I think four more key principles. We’ve kind of gone through uh four or five or five or six of our key principles today. We’ve got four more uh key principles to drive into today’s session. Uh I’m looking at time. We’re just about at the hour. I want to make sure that you guys have an opportunity uh to book an agency growth session. So, if you want to be like Gretch and Trina, like Scott, like say, uh, that first step with us is to jump on that agency growth session. I’m going to put that link in chat here uh for you guys. If you click on that, I’ll walk through that form here in a second. Um, we’re going to go through uh key principle 6, 7, 8, and nine here in a second. Um, but if you’re hearing today’s content, you’re like, man, I wish I had more of this in my business. I wish I had accountability. I wish I had somebody to coach me through this process. That’s what these agency growth sessions are for. We’re going to spend an hour with you, help you get clarity on what’s going on in your business right now, build that vision for where you want to be, and identify some of those obstacles and roadblocks, and discuss if and how you gurus might help. So, if you want to know more about our programs, what U Academy Pro is, how we work with clients, how we get them these types of results, um then you want to go ahead and book into that session. So, if you pull up this screen here, if you guys click that link in chat, it’s going to take you to this page. Um go ahead and put your your name in here. this. It’s a couple step form, so it’s not going to submit right away. So, if you go ahead and fill out your your contact information, fill out your your website address. If you don’t yet have a website, that’s okay. You can put NA in there. Or, you know, if your website’s in, you know, being renovated, still put the URL. We’d love to take a look at it. Um, let us know what kind of agency you’re running. Are you running a web design, digital marketing? you know, when it comes to recurring revenue, uh, what type of agency you run, it’s going to change kind of our strategies and tactics for you, uh, in your business, whether your business is full-time income, um, what you would like your target revenue, or I’m sorry, your current monthly revenue is. So, this just helps us to kind of pinpoint, you know, what level is your agency at right now. Um, if you can be, you know, pretty honest and transparent with us on this stuff, it’s going to help you grow your business faster. Uh, let us know, you know, what your monthly revenue target is in the next 6 months. one or two uh sentences about your biggest challenges and this will just help our team to triage uh your issues and and bring you the best strategies. And this is going to be a call. So, if you can let us know, you know, what the best number is. It will be on Zoom, but it’s always nice for us to have a backup number there. Um let us know where uh you’re based. Not sure why my There we go. Uh so, if you’re in the US, if you’re in Canada or wherever, uh let us know what country you’re from. And so once you get to this, you’ll see the button changes to schedule your free call. Click on that and then it’s going to open up uh that live training uh strategy session. So it’ll give you the opportunity to book in with our team here. Um and then from here uh you’ll be able to schedule that time. If if if it gives you auler that’s for 15 minutes, um it just means that we might need a couple of more pieces of information from you uh from your application. So, uh, we’ll verify that information and then we’ll get you booked on that 1hour agency growth session. Um, so quick quick show of hands. Anybody have any questions on booking in for their agency growth session? Um, feel free to throw those in chat if you if you need help or assistance on getting that call booked. Um, I did see one person jump out of the room and pop back in. So, I’m going to put that link uh back into chat there. So, um, looks like we got a couple of folks who have already taken action from today’s session. So Gerald, excited to be talking to you. Say, uh, excited to be talking to you as well. And Snay, very cool to be talking to you, uh, helping you grow your agency. So if you have not yet booked that agency growth session, uh, make sure you do that now and we’d love to, uh, help you out. So, Joseph, yeah, wish I would had this a few weeks ago before I started offering cheap services. Uh, Joseph, definitely submit that app. Um, talk to our team. Like dude, you know, sometimes you’re going to be building the plane while you’re flying it. Uh what I can say, man, is it’s it’s never too late to make some pivots and changes and tax to these services. Um you know, entrepreneurship is a marathon, uh not a sprint. Now, it’s a series of sprints early on, but at the end of the day, like we need to set you up for success over the long run, and that means you’re probably going to make some mistakes here and there. That’s okay. It’s just part of the process, right? is learning from these lessons uh and not allowing them to stop you in your tracks. Okay, so excited to be uh doing that agency growth session with you. If you guys are on this call today and you have any questions about our agency growth sessions, um what those look like, how to get uh booked in for one of them, uh just let us know in chat here. So, key principle number six. Um yeah, awesome, Natalie. Very cool. Excited to have you here as well. So aim for three. So your packages when it comes to you know structuring your service offering and presenting offers to clients like having more than three packages um is is too many. Okay. Uh when it comes to your recurring offer having two or three pack packages is ideal. Three is really the sweet spot because it allows your client to choose which package do I want versus them saying yes or no to your offer. Some people um might not have the budget you think they have, right? They might tell you, “Oh yeah, I got this big budget. I can’t wait to get started.” And then when it actually gets down to it, um they don’t actually have a budget, right? And so for those people, um we want something that can get them started, uh but it’s not going to burn you out. So, your starter plan, you know, should be like, you know, 40% of the of the work of your of your tier 2 um at at maybe 80% of the price, right? So, we’re not going to we’re not going to charge them a lot less, but we’re going to charge them a little bit less and we’re going to we’re going to, you know, remove features from this plan um so that you can get people started for their budget, but we don’t want to promise them the farm at the starter plan. um your your second tier package. Really, this is what you want to be your most popular. This is the thing that you want your client to select. And then your top level package, think of this as like your VIP. If if money were no object, what would you pitch to your client? Uh it’s it’s the Ferrari, right? Like like you got your Honda, you got your Mercedes, and then you got your Ferrari. So, what does your Ferrari look like? And you know, are you creative enough to come up with like a compelling Ferrari? So, having these three packages going to help your client to make a decision and people will surprise you. We have people all the time that like choose the Ferrari, right? They’re ready to go. They’re they’re looking at stuff and they’re um you know, they surprise you. They come in and they buy your growth plan or your VIP plan uh and you’re like, “Wow, I didn’t expect that to happen.” Uh which brings me to pricing. You want to price your avatars. If your service offering is like $100 and $300 and $500 a month, like let’s be real, that’s the same customer. I mean, if you’re selling something that’s at scale and you have a lot of competition, like you’re a project management tool, like yes, those are very different levels of of of engagement uh for those types of tools. But for highv value services, like clients that can afford $200 a month, they can afford $500 a month. Like, we’re not talking about a different type of business. Uh, and so if if you have plans that are that close in price, merge those into one plan and then think about who’s that next tier of customer that you want to sell to and then have a plan for them. So when we think about pricing our avatars, you know, what could that look like? Well, you know, $1,000 a month to get started, 2,000 and 5,000. Like not every business that has $1,000 a month can have 5,000 a month, right? Um, oops, didn’t mean to go to that slide. So, like for example, you know, if you’re doing inbound marketing services and you’re you’re selling to some early stage businesses, they might be able to afford $1,000 a month, but they can’t afford 5K a month. That’s a good thing because you want them to go with your starter plan. You don’t want to have a $1,000 plan, a $1,500 plan, and a $2,000 plan because those are basically the same plans, right? I mean, maybe some businesses that that can afford a,000 can’t afford 2,000, but you want to have enough spread in your pricing to where you’re actually excluding some people uh from your different plans. All right. Now, um I’ve showed a bunch of these little worksheets and stuff today. Uh if this is something that you all want, I’ve got this recurring revenue handbook. I’m going to put AB’s uh Facebook Messenger into chat here. If you guys want that handbook with a bunch of these tools on it that I shared today, um just shoot AB a message and just say, “Hey, AB, I want the handbook. I want the recurring revenue handbook.” And he’ll hook you up with that uh over over Messenger today. All right. Uh and and there’s a bunch of cool tools um in that uh in that kit, right? the calculator, um the strategy mix, uh the the the the uh goals and game plan doc, the value ladder, um some of the service uh unpack sheets. Um there’s a bunch of different tools in there. Uh so yeah, shoot AB a message on that. Um for those of you that uh are ready to hit the ground running with recurring, our eighth principle is we’re going to activate these relationships. So this means building a list and attacking that list with high value engagement. Uh you know recurring revenue doesn’t just appear. You know you’re not going to be like sitting here in in six months right going oh man I have all this recurring revenue and I didn’t really do anything right like you need to build your list of past clients of current clients and you need to go talk to them about your services. If they ain’t buying, then you need to change your pitch and change your services. So, when we go and make a campaign against our list, I mean, we go after, you know, we we list out all of our clients. We we put them on like a master sales spreadsheet and we go after our our our current or past clients. We call them, we text them. Hey, we’ve got something new. We’ve got some exciting. You know, you have a few minutes to chat. You know, we deliver a ton of value in those conversations. A lot of them lead to nowhere. They just lead to us helping, you know, sending clients referrals, doing some coaching, some consulting. Like, we put a lot of time into value generation, but we have that list of opportunities. And so, don’t just look at your next pitch as the only opportunity you have to sell recurring. And I see agencies psych themselves out on this step all the time. I say, “Hey, how many past clients do you have?” And they say, “Oh, you know, 50 past clients.” Oh, cool. How often do you talk to them? like once a year and they start saying things like, “Yeah, my clients wouldn’t buy this sort of thing.” How do you know? Have you offered it to them? No, but I just I just know that it’s just it’s just not for them. Like the amount of times that I think to myself that somebody isn’t qualified or isn’t going to buy something and then they surprise me is incredible. Tons of people surprise me all the time. What you want to do is just make sure, hey, are these people marketing qualified leads? You know, do you have contact with them? Can you have a conversation with them? Spend 15, 20 minutes with them. Sus it out. Do a little discovery. Chat, you know, build some rapport. Maybe they know somebody. Maybe they actually, you know, maybe their business or life has changed in some way since you last spoke. Don’t make any assumptions. Build your list. Reach out. Connect with them. Get on the phone. start talking to them about what’s going on in their business and see if you can add value. At the very least, do some customer development. Figure out like what are their pains, what are their problems, what kind of services would they would they pay for um on a monthly basis. So, we’re going to activate those relationships. We’re not going to just sit around and hope people are going to sign up. We’re not going to send one email to our list and ask them to go buy your stuff over a web page. You’re going to schedule people on your calendar. That’s where agency sales happen. So, don’t try to build like a funnel or all that kind of stuff. Just reach out to people. Get them to book a call with you. Start talking to them about their business. Do some discovery. Tell them what you’re up to. See if they’re willing to look at your plans and packages and start actually overcoming real world objection objections. All right. Our last key principle here is that we’re going to make our offer compelling like the godfather, right? Like I’m going to make you an offer that you can’t refuse, right? like what’s the offer that your clients can’t refuse? If they’re not buying your stuff, how can you add more value into that offer? Are there any bonuses that you can offer them? Are there any results that you could promise them? Asking a client like, “Hey, what would it take to make this the easiest decision that you make this year? What would it take for you to say yes today?” And you know, and just, hey, totally like be creative, right? And sometimes clients will tell you like interesting stuff. They might say, “Uh, what if you did this for free for the first month?” And you could be like, “Okay, like I’m willing to do that.” Maybe you’re not willing to do that. Maybe they say that and you say, “Well, what if I did it for half off the first month?” And then they say, “Yeah, I can live with that.” Right? So, what what can you do to make your offer compelling? First, you’re going to ask your client, you know, what would get you to say yes for this service today? And if they are not able to tell you anything, then it means we probably have a service market mismatch. It means that your clients have no interest in what you’re offering. They don’t see a future where your service is going to provide them some type of of of result. Um, if you’re able to offer your client a risk reversal, so offering them a guarantee can be a way to do that. You can also offer your client uh even a payback where you pay them money if they don’t get results. a friend of mine runs Facebook ads workshops and he says, “Hey, if you’re not happy by the end of day one, it’s a two-day workshop. Um, I will not only give you your money back, but I will pay you $500 to reimburse you for your flight and your hotel to the to the uh off-site.” Right? That’s a very compelling offer because not only is he taking the, you know, he’s giving you money back for the investment, he’s actually paying you to, you know, take take the chance, right? Which is which is pretty cool. So, how can you make your offers more compelling? Make them more exciting for the clients that you serve. Now, we’ve covered a bunch of tactics today. Start offering recurring, building passive momentum, finding and solving the chronic and and many more. Which of these is going to help you most and why? Uh let us know in chat here. And big shout out to Elmer and Roland and Victoria and Paulo for taking action on today’s session. Andreas for taking action on today’s session. Uh looking forward to having calls with each and every one of you. Uh, which of these is going to help you most and why?
Paulo says one. Yeah, start offering it today. uh for aim for three cuz I don’t have anything really set up as a package and mostly do oneoff projects. Sn says three. Anaton says two. Uh Paula. Okay, got it. Thank you. Uh thank you Paula. Uh we have a a not currently on the team but co-orker that was on the team which was Paulo. So apologies on that one but Paula excited to be uh chatting with you. Yeah. So it looks like we got some good value from today. I mean, hopefully you take value from all of these things today, but I realize one of these things is probably the thing that you need next, right? That’s the thing that is holding you back and you want to be able to implement in your business um as soon as possible. And that’s the thing that I want to make sure every one of you does today is take some type of action from today’s session to implement this into your business. Now, uh you know, when we started off this session, right, like I’ve talked a lot about how we’ve gotten customers results with with this methodology. I mean, when Drew Herel came to our business, you know, he was doing, I think, less than half a million a year. He now runs a business doing over seven figures a year. He’s got killer recurring revenue plans. Over half of his business comes from, uh, recurring. And that’s, you know, all the stuff that you learned today is the stuff that Drew implemented into his business. Uh, it’s the same stuff that I implemented into my agency that I helped me go from 3% recurring to 50% recurring to now today my agency UnlimitedWed WP has a 100% of its revenue coming from recurring. And the more recurring revenue you can generate, the more you can get off that roller coaster. And I hope each of you like you might have a rock bottom moment at some point in your business, but like I hope it’s not as challenging as the thing that I had to go through with three bucks in my bank account. You don’t want to be in that position. You want to follow a road map to gaining the freedom you want in your business. You don’t want to be inventing the stuff uh through trial and error, right? You don’t want to reinvent the wheel. You want to use a proven system and a proven process. Um when we started implementing that in our business, we became one of the fastest growing companies in Colorado. We were featured as a top Denver uh design and development firm. In 2012, we were able to uh have our agency get acquired and we were able to create a very successful exit for myself and for my business partner. And whether exits in your future or just running a profitable lifestyle business is in your future, recurring revenue is going to be how you get there. And so, I want to leave you with this question today of what it would look like for your business if you had 5x or 10x more recurring revenue in your business. Or heck, for some of you that don’t have any yet, just to have recurring revenue in your business might be a big leap forward. You know, would you feel like you’re kind of spinning uh your wheels in the mud? Or would you finally feel like, wow, I’ve got a business. I’ve got um, you know, clients. I’ve got regular predictable income coming through my business each and every month. You know, I’d hope you’d go from, you know, that kind of spinning your wheels to having something to celebrate. Today, we talked through our agency freedom model. I introduced some concepts. Today, this is the thing that you need to master in your business um in order to to to get the results that you want. Today, we went deep on multiplying the recurring revenue in your business. We unpacked nine key principles that you need to have in order to win with recurring revenue. Uh but I want you to commit today. Draw a line in the sand. Take one action, at least one action from today’s session. Uh now, that could be, you know, going and calling all of your clients. It could be making that list. It could be, you know, structuring out your uh recurring plans for the first time. It could be uh one of many things. Now, I hope one of those things is going to be to schedule uh an hour with our team. Uh and yeah, Joseph, if if you got the 15-minute call, it just means that one of our team members, Dakota or uh AB, probably Dakota, um we’ll just jump on a quick 15-minute call with you and collect some just additional info, ask a couple questions, and then Yeah. Yeah. So, Dakota, he’s he’s awesome, dude. Dakota is uh is an amazing resource and and so, you know, it might be more than 15 minutes, but it’ll just be a quick intro call, get to know kind of where you’re at in the business, and then we’ll set up that one hour uh agency growth session from there, right? So, you’ll you know, it’s almost like you’ll do a mini growth session with Dakota um before we put you with one of our senior strategists. Okay. Uh so, yeah, if you haven’t yet done that, book into those calls and I’m looking forward to chatting with you, Joseph. I did just see that app come through. I’ll give my team a heads up. Uh Andress, excited to be talking to you as well. So, um yeah, one of the great things about these calls is that we’re going to put an hour aside with you to work on your business versus you just being in your business all the time. And if you’re somebody who’s working at home, you’ve got maybe a small team, uh you don’t have somebody to bounce these ideas off of because it’s hard to go to your employees and your team and talk about, you know, your biggest business issues. it might be difficult to go to a spouse or somebody that doesn’t understand how to grow this type of business to get real objective feedback on what it’s going to take to get your business to the next level. And that’s where you can leverage this hour. You know, one of our core values at UGurus is to help first. So, we want to help you through these free trainings. We want to help you through our agency growth sessions and looking forward to chatting with uh each and every one of you. If you have questions about lead genen, about recurring revenue, about sales, uh happy to stick around here for a few minutes and answer any specific questions that might be uh percolating for you in your business. Um let me know in chat or use the raise your hand feature. Happy to jump on with one or two people here before we close out today. Um is there an area around recurring revenue, around lead acquisition that you need some help on? Uh now is the time to ask that question and get some assistance.
Give another minute or so to answer any questions here if I’m seeing those come through chat. Couple of DMs. Uh we will be sharing a recording of today’s session. So, if you do want to rewatch um this session, uh keep a lookout on your email. Uh Jeff, uh great question there. Too much to process. Paula, uh if I know how much the customer makes from all sales, but I don’t know their costs, what’s a good way to set up recurring pricing on critical services uh for their business? Okay. Hey, Jeff, you mind coming on microphone for a couple of seconds? Sure. Yeah. So like can you so like you know you know much how much revenue the business does. Is that is that what I’m getting exactly? I know all of that uh mainly because our system tracks that. So Okay. So you you kind of already have like a window into into what the business is doing. And then what’s your core service offering? Uh we do like business logistics. So we kind of manage all of their uh operations. Okay. And what’s the company make? They do uh shuttle services. They do shuttle services like like airport shuttles. Okay. Not like shuttles like to the moon and stuff. Um no, that’d be great, too. I’d love to get a client like that. But like ballpark, what’s the revenue? You know, I don’t even know that. So, okay. I could go do the math, but I don’t know. Okay. Well, let’s just say like if we want to use client revenue as a basis for developing like let’s say for instance a business is doing a million a year, right? I mean, I think probably a business doing shuttle services probably is doing more than that. If I had to guess for an airport or whatever, you know, they probably have a lot of hardware and equipment and lots of, you know, employees and working around the clock, right? But like typically businesses spend, you know, 7% of revenue on marketing plus ads. Now you’re doing business logistics. So like there’s some, you know, I I know this I know this stat because it’s, you know, most website developers, digital marketers are are doing stuff through uh through ads. Um and uh and let me just check there. Sorry, Casey in chat. Um looks like there aren’t availability on that calendar. Um, so I will have uh somebody from my team reach out to you and figure out what’s going on with that scheduler. Um, I do know we’ve got one strategist out this week. Um, and so it might be pushing into next week, but we can get you uh a message to uh to book that time. So anybody that gets that screen that doesn’t show times available, um, we will get you hooked up with u with somebody’s schedule there. Um, so like with business logistics and ops, right? Let’s say we’ve got uh this million 7%. Let’s say we’re doing like ongoing website management type stuff, right? This client has ballpark, you know, 70,000 a year to spend on all their marketing and ads type services. That means like, you know, potentially employee salaries, agencies, ad spend, right? All in. Uh and so if I went to this client and I charged them, you know, 5K a month, right? That’s $60,000 a year. That’s basically their entire budget for marketing ads. Um now if I am their essentially like their marketing team and my agency is basically like you know serving their entire marketing system then that could work right so you just kind of want to look at like overall what kind of revenue they’re doing help you price the avatar a little bit but you also have to look at what kind of value you’re providing and how much your customer uh values that service right okay so like you know this is I’m not giving you a very clear answer but this would be like one way to work backwards from revenue to give to get an idea of um you know what your client might be able to afford. Perfect. Thank you. Okay. Um and then this question came in uh any organic lead acquisition strategies that you can recommend. Uh so we do run a lead genen webinar Nelvin. Uh I think the next one is maybe next Wednesday. Um our general lead genen uh frameworks are around attract strategies and we like to do one to many uh channels and so that means uh blogs, podcasts, um you know associations, webinars, anywhere in your target market that has a one to many audience. We want you to go in there, be the expert, deliver highv value content like we’re doing today, right? Like think about this webinar. We had, you know, 30 or 40 people here live today and we got a whole bunch of people that are are scheduling calls with us because we come in, we talk about the problems that you’re facing. We deliver value, specific strategies and tactics on how to overcome those things. We offer a next step and we’re able to generate some opportunity there. Maybe some people that we talk to will just help and send them on their way. Maybe some people will become clients. Um, that’s just kind of the abundant mindset we have with that. So what you want to do is find what what channels Nelvin then are available in your market. So if you don’t yet know who your target customer is, that’s the first step to to solve, right? So when it comes to attract, we have five A’s, right? Uh the first A is audience. So if I can spell today audience. Uh the second A is awareness. So that’s think of this as you know who’s my customer. Awareness is where can I find them? Where do they hang out? Uh the second the third A is attract and that is what I’m going to say to them. Okay. Uh the fourth A is authority. Um that’s how I’m going to say it to them. And then acquire is how they’re going to schedule, right? When are they going to schedule my calendar? Okay. So, if you don’t yet know who your ideal customer is, then that’s your homework. If you know who your customer is, but you don’t know where they hang out, then that’s your homework. If you know who your customer is, you know where they hang out, you don’t know what to say to them, then that’s your homework. If what you’re signing to them is not getting them to take action, then you need to look at either the content and and work on that or you need to position yourself as uh a higher authority through thirdparty endorsements, through uh credibility, through proof points, through case studies. Um if you’re doing all of that and nobody is booking on your calendar, then you need to look at that funnel, right? If you’re out there in your market, you’re talking to people, you’re giving keynotes, you’re you’re on podcasts, you’re writing guest blog posts, you’re, you know, getting influencers to promote you, and nobody’s scheduling with you, then the funnel is probably the problem, right? And so, we’re going to we’re going to look at these things in that order. This being the number one and this being the number five thing. Okay? So, that’s a little crash course on uh targeted marketing. uh for that. In terms of scripts for Legion, uh Paula, can you come on microphone here for a quick sec? Yep. Yeah. So, who’s who’s your customer? I think that’s probably what’s changed in the last um few years. So, I think that’s where my homework lies. But yeah. Yeah. So, like, you know, how do we write a script for somebody that we don’t know who it is, right? Right. Yeah. So, you know, and then the context matters, right? Like where where are you actually communicating to them? what does that look like? Um, you know, but I I think once you know who that customer is and you know where they hang out and you can get a list of them or somehow they’re contacting you, right? Like writing a script is is pretty easy. Um, if you don’t know who the customer is, then that gets that that’s really hard. Right. Right. Yeah. No, that I understand. I I do do a lot of networking, so I do meet a lot of people that are who I think is my target audience. Mhm. I haven’t spent a lot of time defining, but just business owners that, you know, have fair fairly well established businesses. Um, but I don’t have I I feel like it’s my like what I say. I’m too laidback about it. I I don’t have like the I guess that that part where I would push them and like not push but you know like lead them to like hey book a call with me so I can talk to you about what we can offer. That thing I don’t have. Yep. So you go to like networking events? Yes. Yeah. Um or what kind of events are those? So I belong to business network uh internationals. Uh oh. So like that’s a weekly thing. And then I belong to BX which is a new country. Uh yeah uh business exponential which is one from Australia. Um and a few other ones. And and what’s your core service offering? uh our where our most most of our core is web design but we also do social media management and SEO. Um social media management we do have you recurring revenue obviously from that but it’s it’s getting it’s making that plan like you said to acquire so many per month or whatever. We we haven’t put that into place. It’s kind of just my business is only four years old. Um so but we are re our revenue is about 30,000 a month right now. So it’s it started with just me. So it’s grown too big too fast, I guess. So a lot of our services came from just me having to fill the need that they that my clients needed and less time was spent really thinking about, you know, what the prices of those should be. Yeah. And the pricing structure. So So like opener for you, like again, if this is somebody you’re like at a networking event, it’s like, you know, hey, tell me about your business, right? like what do you guys do in terms of online? Like how does online work for you with your business, right? Is it is it is it working? Is it not working? Are you not sure? Right? I mean, those are I’m just going to like those are the types of openers that I would be interested in knowing if those are my services, you know? And so, you know, if I’m talking to somebody and they’re like, you know, and I might even be like, “Hey, can I just like ask you kind of a like a personal question, right? I might like frame it in like a way that gets them to go like, “Oh, what’s what’s Paula gonna ask me?” Right? And it’s like, you know, is your is your like website and your online business like is it working for you guys or is there like you guys have some challenges, right? Which I I literally just did not ask you a personal question. I just asked you about, you know, your business, right? But like find some way to get somebody to open up about what’s going on with their online business. And you know and then from there you know it’s just like hey you know something that we do for uh people that we meet is um you know we kind of pop the hood like look at things look at their analytics look at what’s going on you know would you be open to just a quick little like kind of audit call where we you know between now and then I’ll I’ll look at your site I’ll run some analysis with some of the tools we have. I’ll take a look at your social, you know, and I’ll just give you like my honest feedback of like why I think maybe you’re you’re not getting the results that you want and, you know, maybe that’s something that’s helpful for you and you guys can go implement or maybe it’s something that we could help you with in a more meaningful way, right? So, so that would be an example for you of what that script might look like in an in-person setting. And then, you know, over email or over messenger, right? It’s going to be pretty similar. We’re just going to have, you know, have to learn how to do that through through like a text message, right? Like Like let’s say you and I met at an event, you know, and we chatted about business stuff. Um I might send you a message that says, you know, hey Paula, you know, really great meeting you. Uh you know, curious. Do you have a couple minutes to chat real quick? I had a thought about some of the stuff that you were talking to me at the event, right? And so now I’m just getting you to be curious like, oh, what is what did Brent think about? Right? It’s like, oh, what were you thinking about? I was like, “Oh, well, you know, I was just I had a chance to look at your site and I had a couple of things that I thought maybe um you know, you might want to look at, right? And if you have five minutes, that’d be great. If not, like I totally get it, right?” So, we’re just trying to create some curiosity, um some intrigue from those interactions that you’re having and getting folks to engage with you on a next call. Um, if you were going to be up in front of an audience and you were going to speak to the entire BNI chapter, then um, you know, I would probably try to craft that into like a high value audit that’s really tied to whatever your presentations on. So, if you’re giving a presentation on SEO, then saying, “Hey, if you guys want me to do like a deep dive analysis on your current SEO rankings, I can run some reports. It’s going to take me a little bit of energy, some time, but you’re all BNI members. I love BNI and I want to help you grow your business. So, just shoot me an email, right? Like Paulaggency.com and I’ll run all the analysis for you. I’ll jump on a call 15 20 minutes. We can review that with you and and give you some pointers on how to help your your business grow. Okay. So, so now we’re giving an offer to a room, casual, but also clear. Here are the next steps. Answer the question. what’s in it for them? What’s the value that they’re going to get from that interaction? Like we know what’s going to be in it for you. We want to we want to make sure that they know what’s going to be in it for them and then get them to engage in that next step.
Yeah. I mean, I do get a lot of leads from from that. It’s my main source of leads really like is networking. Yep. Um but yeah, so I just would like to leverage it a bit better if I’m going to be spending the time. Yeah. Right. I mean it and and I think too it’s um you know I mean look networking is is onetoone networking like I don’t know where you want to go long term but like for me personally like it’s it’s just hard work because you got to like get in a car you got to drive someplace you got to like put the name tag on it’s like sometimes it’s hit and miss it’s like I don’t know right it’s like it’s a lonely drive home when you go to the networking event and like you don’t get any leads or whatever like you you met 10 real estate agents that are all trying to sell you a house, right? Um, so, so like one to many channels would be the thing that I, you know, if we’re going to plant a seed for you is getting like more clear on your who and figuring out more of like where those people hang out and start to transition into like highv value content where like people are going to just start banging down your door from that presentation, from that piece of content and you don’t have to drive anywhere. Perfect. Thank you. Cool. Thanks for being here, Paula. Uh, I’m not seeing any other questions from chat and uh, we’re coming up here right on time. So, I’m going to throw our link to those agency growth sessions. If you have not yet taken that action today, just one friendly reminder, if you want this type of coaching, this type of help in your business, but on a one-on-one level, and really want to take that agency to the next level, then that’s going to be that next step for you. Uh, click on that link. couple uh you know couple page application there and our team will help out and if for whatever reason you get that scheduler that doesn’t show availability uh Joe or myself will personally reach out to you um after today’s event and uh make sure that we get you on a good time there. So apologies for anybody that did not get that um scheduled opportunity. So um thanks again for being here. Good to see you Katherine Marlene. Good to see you here today. Didn’t see you jump in. George and Leo and Angel and and Paula, great questions. Hong, great to see you. Peter, Casey, Anaton, Flo, awesome folks here today. Thanks for being a part of our Yugurus’s journey to help 10,000 agencies achieve freedom and business life. That is our program for today and we’ll see you uh next week on another free webinar around lead genen. Thanks again for being here. Until next time, I’m Brent Weaver. See you Hong. Thank you.