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Jonathan Dane, founder and CEO of KlientBoost, a digital performance marketing agency, explains how they doubled their revenue from $10 to $20 million during Covid, and are on track to hit $100 million ARR by perfecting their operations, crunching the numbers and working scientifically. He explains that KlientBoost's focus on encouraging customer reviews has driven mental availability, and a focus on training up their staff means they can operate far more efficiently than other agencies.
Hear how successful B2B SaaS companies and agencies compete - and win - in highly saturated categories. No fluff. No filler. Just strategies and tactics from founders, executives, and marketers. Learn about building moats, growing audiences, scaling businesses, and differentiating from the competition. New guests every week. Hosted by Peep Laja, founder at Wynter, Speero, CXL.
How concentrating on the details helped Jonathan Dane double KlientBoost's revenue
Johnathan Dane (00:02):
We did the math. We created this Google Sheet calculator that basically would show like if these different teams within KlientBoost like marketing, sales and operations for example. Were achieving minimums consistently. How long would it take for us to get to a hundred million annual recurring revenue run rate? It would at the longest time, if they then say consistently take us 10 months from that point to reach a hundred million ARR.
Peep Laja (00:24):
I'm Peep Laja, I don't do fluff. I don't do filler. I don't do emojis. What I do, is study winners in B2B, because I want to know how much is strategy? How much is luck? And how do they win? This week Johnathan Dane founder at KlientBoost. KlientBoost is a digital performance marketing agency, which advertises itself as having more published wins, reviews and testimonials than any other agency on the planet. Founded in 2015, the company now has 20 million in revenue with over 120 staff.
Peep Laja (00:58):
This episode, we talk about being scientific and systematic to your outreach and marketing to maximize your opportunities. We hear about deliberately filtering out poor quality leads, targeting specific MQLs to get the best customers. And we hear about crunching the numbers to develop a clear growth strategy with ambitious and goals. Let's get into it. Johnathan, when you started KlientBoost, you were just a PPC agency or was there more to it in the beginning,
Johnathan Dane (01:29):
I briefly scanned the landscape and I was like, if there's already successful agencies out there, I know we can do it too. But differentiation was a key focus. So our first two hires were designers and we decided to do the PPC and CRO combo, like just focusing on landing pages to begin with. But that was a very uncommon decision I think, because we cared a lot about the way that we looked ourselves, the branding and the design too, but that was the beginning of it. Yeah.
Peep Laja (01:56):
And when did you decide that's not enough or you want to be more things?
Johnathan Dane (02:01):
So early on it's funny, I left a previous agency that I co-founded in Utah and came back to Southern California and I was like, I'm kind of burned out by the client stuff. I don't want to do that anymore. I'm going to focus on building software. I don't want to use some of the revenue from the agency to then funnel over to that. But then within the first six months of us being in existence, I think we were achieving 60,000 MRR, 60,000 US dollars. And I was like, it's silly to not focus on this and keep striking while the iron is hot.
Johnathan Dane (02:33):
At that point, I was managing everything of that MRR doing the account management, doing the marketing, doing the sales for us, the design QC process and all that kind of stuff. And I could have been happy. I could have been very profitable, but as human nature can sometimes be, I was a little bit greedy and wanted more and so wanted to keep growing from that point on.
Peep Laja (02:52):
And so how did you decide how to get bigger?
Johnathan Dane (02:56):
I was telling my first hire a designer. I was like, "Look, we have six months of runway of payroll that I can basically pay you. If we get no clients, I don't care. I want to focus on design and I want to focus on content. I want to scratch as many backs as I possibly can with our blog posts at that time, for example." And we just kept publishing and we learned a ton too, a lot of it regurgitation, but then after we saw the snowball effect start happening and the organic traffic growing and more leads coming in, it was like, let's keep adding more fire to the oven, so to speak. And that's what we've been doing ever since.
Peep Laja (03:32):
There's so many PPC landing page design, CRO agencies, all of them, well almost all of them have a blog. They do conference talking and they're on social media. They do all those things. And so if we go by survivorship bias, I mean, they also should be really big and successful, but mostly small. So what did you guys specifically do differently or more boldly or whatever than most other companies out there.
Johnathan Dane (04:00):
It's a great question. Obviously, I don't have the inside scoop on a lot of other agencies, let's say acquisition channels. I know from a lot of talking and having conversations with them that most of them still rely on referrals or their network. And that gets exhausted relatively quickly. So even if they do, the content marketing doesn't mean that they're good at the content marketing. It doesn't mean that they're ranking. It doesn't mean that they're getting that organic traffic and turning into leads obviously.
Johnathan Dane (04:25):
So we've been always focusing on doing that and seeing what we can do to squeeze more out of what we're already doing too. And it's leading us to systematize everything within KB, specifically the marketing. So like our intros, we have a certain system for the popups, all those kind of things we keep testing. And I think a lot of agencies suffer from they're so busy with their clients, so they can't be consistent with their own marketing.
Johnathan Dane (04:49):
So you take that as one thing, creating more content, increasing the quality. But then we also have things like our design, our cartoon style is very unique and a lot of people will glance over that and be annoyed with it. But then the feedback that we get of the clients that we actually do have are, "That was a breath of fresh air. That was interesting. Because you guys don't look like the cookie cutter agency out there too."
Johnathan Dane (05:10):
So little things like that from a first impression perspective, I think are really important. And on top of that, we also went very aggressive on the social proof, meaning Clutch, G2, HubSpot, all that kind of stuff. Because we knew we could be number one in that as well. And it was actually funny because we're going head to head with my previous agency. That was like number one on Clutch as well too. So all of those things just for me, help us build our moat from a first impression perspective. And those things were very important. Same thing with our case studies, we have like over 300 of those. So yeah.
Peep Laja (05:43):
When people are choosing a vendor, be it an agency or a SaaS tool they're like, "How do I choose? All these websites look the same. Say the same things." That's right. Sameness is everywhere. Everyone has stellar G2 reviews. So folks mostly end up choosing based on word of mouth. Word of mouth traffic has the highest conversion rate. But what is the best link building and word of mouth strategy. It's being the example for something. So for instance, anytime somebody talks about narratives or category creation, talk about Gong, Quora, Drift, they get all the back links and mind share.
Peep Laja (06:16):
So focus really hard on what you do well and deliver it to the absolute perfection. Don't sell something you can't deliver. Bad word of mouth is one of the worst things that can happen right now. Don't hurt your reputation by offering something you can't back up. Gaining market share is the best thing a brand can do for itself. The more known you are, the more word of mouth you will get, and the more consideration sets you will enter. The more popular you are, the more popular you will get. So are you saying that most of your leads still come through organic search?
Johnathan Dane (06:54):
Yeah. So three out of the top five customer journeys that we have are organic influenced.
Peep Laja (07:01):
How much block traffic are you getting to feed your 20 million revenue?
Johnathan Dane (07:05):
It's actually not that high. From organic, we might be hitting like 30 to 40,000 organic visitors per month. And then obviously there's like the referral and direct. We have abnormally high amount of reoccurring traffic that comes back and visits from a B2B perspective. That's not common. So I don't know why that is, but that's about where we are organically right now.
Peep Laja (07:24):
Yeah. So that's not crazy amounts. It's very attainable for most people out there. So how you just converting those leads better, is your content more bottom of the funnel? So these are more-
Johnathan Dane (07:35):
It's funny you ask, I literally don't have a strategy for it. I just try to do everything. We aren't in a specific niche either. We have a variety of case studies that fit all types of companies, which counterintuitively a lot of people would recommend not doing. But we have a standard 0.75% conversion rate. But then we have like a lot of direct conversions. We have a lot of the people that like, "Hey, I heard you on that podcast or Redger guest post three years ago and knew, and now I got another job. One example of that funny enough with you and me was a person who signed up for your CXL course, saw the Google ads portion that I was coaching, got a job at Bloomberg and then Bloomberg became our client and like the biggest client that we've ever had.
Peep Laja (08:18):
Boom.
Johnathan Dane (08:18):
And what kind of attribution is that, right? Wild. So those things happen a lot where we just can't track it. So I'm going to exhaust everything that I can track. And then as soon as I'm done with that, I'm going to spend a lot more time in brand. I'm going to spend a lot more time in experiences and doing that instead too. And I think that that keeps extending our lead and mix things unfair for us.
Peep Laja (08:37):
Based on these numbers I'm making an assumption that the in incoming a lead volume is not like ridiculous numbers. Then that means that you must be doing other things on the flip side. So once you convert them, how long do you retain them? What's your typical ACV and what are you doing to increase your net revenue retention there?
Johnathan Dane (08:55):
We initially started allowing everything to come through, but since then we have stopped allowing Gmail, personal emails come through. We only track a few certain things. So we have nearly 200 MQLS per month that we get coming through. Our goal on the sales team is to convert half of those into opportunity calls and then close half of those as well too. So out of the 200, initially we want to close about 50 of them as clients, for example. So that's still a decent amount per month. We're not there obviously, but we're getting there and making progress towards it.
Peep Laja (09:26):
Totally. These are the ones who fill out your, get my marketing plan at CPN on your site.
Johnathan Dane (09:32):
Correct. Correct. Yes.
Peep Laja (09:39):
Motivation is way more powerful than friction. If people want something they're ready to deal with considerable friction, that's why working on your offers and your value proposition is going to deliver 10 times more results than reducing friction. Aim to increase using motivation first. If I would sell you a Tesla Model X for $20,000, but you'd have to fill out 100 form fields. I guarantee 99% of people would do it. And of course that's not going to happen, but the point of offers is to seem like what you're offering is a really good value for money. The right offer on your home page, landing page or out on sales email can have a dramatic impact on the results. So how do you craft a good offer? One, know the people you're selling to. Their pains, design gains, challenges and priorities. What is the offer I need to design to meet their needs and address their pain?
Peep Laja (10:33):
Two, know how to write good copy. Three tests that offers before you put them out there. It's impossible to know in advance what will work, but you can absolutely eliminate dirt's from the get go and get directional data on which variants might work great. You do this through preference testing. Create whatever number of offers and put them in front of 15 to 30 people in your exact target audience. And ask them something like, which of these is most clear? Which of these would give you the most value? Don't ask whether they would buy or sign up. People are horrible at predicting their own behavior. Somebody signing up is the effect. So focus on the cause. Is this offer compelling? And so tell me more of about the ACV and retention.
Johnathan Dane (11:20):
Our tenure is honestly not the greatest we have, I think on average, eight months that we keep a client, we sometimes have months where we lose 10% of our clientele. There's a lot of things where everything has been getting better and better in the marketing and sales side. But ops has been like the bigger beast of more moving parts and harder to optimize and get better. But it's a big focus that we have right now. You see this part of our vivid vision that we put together too. What are we actually doing?
Johnathan Dane (11:48):
So we talked about this in the past too. We are systematizing everything and we are tracking everything and we're coming out with this thing called God view internally that is very similar to how professional athletes watch game film, and helping our team be better at the retention, but also just asking our clients like what could be better for them?
Peep Laja (12:05):
Tell me more about that God view that you have. And also, can you quantify the impact improvements in operations had on your business? Are you now able to serve more clients or what happened?
Johnathan Dane (12:19):
Yeah. So yes, to both. So one thing that happens a lot in service based businesses is that very simple example, you'll have two people in the same role, but they do things completely differently. And it's kind of like the same thing of giving somebody a recipe to bake a cake. One person takes an hour to do it. The other person takes 15 minutes to do it, right? What are we're doing internally to help everybody learn how to do things in 15 minutes.
Johnathan Dane (12:42):
Not to overburden them or stress them out or give them more work, but just like to relieve stress because if there's certain output that we expect and we had that expectation for both those people, but one person just chronically takes longer to do them, that person's going to be stressed out. So what we've been working on has been creating this internal academy and creating all these systems and every, we call them diamond standard systems, which just sounds better than gold standard.
Johnathan Dane (13:07):
But the other reason why is because we had this rapid feedback process where we actually incentivize people internally to give feedback on how to make things better. And we treat that as almost like a polish to the diamond to make it brighter and brighter. But in that system, in that diamond, we basically have the fastest and most effective way of doing that one thing. And then once we established and gotten consensus that that is the best way to do it, we then create the training around it. We require the retention proof to be shown somebody can't just read it or watch a video and be like, "That's cool. I know how to do this."
Johnathan Dane (13:37):
They actually need to show us that they can do that within that timeframe. And then starts the game film process like we track things then, and make sure everybody stays consistently doing it. And if somebody has a feedback that they want to do differently, as long as it improves things, by making it faster, more effective or simpler for that matter, we take that internally almost like a software update without being software, obviously, and then roll out that training to all our people to go through and then start the process again.
Peep Laja (14:04):
The fast eat to slow, speed is a competitive advantage. A fast organization has more people deciding and taking action and fewer people briefing each other, reporting, seeking approvals, sitting in a myriad of unproductive meetings. Information sharing should happen asynchronously, make information accessible. Anyone should have access to any info and stats in real time, clear data on inputs, outputs, and outcomes. Any question that needs to be answered to make a decision, anyone should be able to just look it up, dashboards, we use knowledge management, et cetera.
Peep Laja (14:36):
And stop making your top people bottlenecks. Top leader should focus in fewer more mission critical decisions or a lot decisions can be delegated. That means tolerating mistakes that don't put the business at risk. A slow decision can often be worse than an imperfect one. Also drive closed loop accountability. Everyone on a team must be clear about what needs to get done by whom, by when and why.
Peep Laja (15:00):
And this requires a proactive attitude. No one should wait to be told what to do. Discipline follow up is needed to review actions and results. A lot of speed improvements can come from empowering and unblocking teams. Leadership needs to communicate a clearer vision of the future and then empower others to realize the vision, coach the players, but let them make their decisions and execute. Harder to start, easier later. Empowering your staff to become experts in their field and make decisions is something leaders like Guillaume Moubeche of Lemlist to embrace as he explained in episode 15 of How to Win.
Guillaume Moubeche (15:35):
The truth is the more you help people shine. The more grateful they are, the idea is to always like double or triple or quadruple the expert that you have. So for example, in our sales team right now, we have at least four people who are seen as experts on the sales topic. For marketing it's the same. Everyone has their own way of communicating as their own touch. And for us it is always like a good and very beneficial. I would say, like image to reflect on the company.
Peep Laja (16:05):
What others things behind the scenes have you been cooking up to contribute your fast growth?
Johnathan Dane (16:10):
It might sound weird but we have a... And I might sound bias coming from me obviously, but we have a deep sense of caring about the values that we have as a company. And we act on them a lot. I think a lot of companies fall short when they have a vision statement or mission statement and values. They're like, "Hey, nobody really access." So we track happiness for example, internally. And one of the number one goal I have at KlientBoost is 100% happiness. And we track this via anonymous surveys in Gusto, which is our salary platform right now.
Johnathan Dane (16:38):
It's a very lofty, aggressive goal to have, because I guess all over the board, happiness is very low for all jobs, especially now too, but we're hovering around like 90 to 95% every single month. And I'm like, "Can we talk to that person who's obviously anonymous? Can we get them to tell us like what we can do better?" And what we found is that some people might not align with the values. They're not going to be here that long, but the people who do, there's no reason why they couldn't be 100% happiness. Most of the time, people are very, very simple in what they need. Especially people that are working at a company, they want to know what their growth tracks are. They want to know what their KPIs are.
Johnathan Dane (17:13):
So everything is black and white, they want honesty. They want training, they want to get better. They want to have more skills. You give them that and they will be thriving. They'll be really happy. So one of the things that I think will differentiate us, that we've loosely not had a focus on, but it still helped us has been like that focus on our people. And really like literally everybody says the people are the biggest asset, but how do they actually do that? Through the things I just listed. That's going to be the mark for how we get to the next level for us.
Peep Laja (17:40):
So a lot of agencies or small businesses, and they have a hard time competing with the tech companies that are loaded with money can offer insane salaries. So how are you thinking about attracting top talent as a small business? And I've also seen you throw out things like hiring in one day, in a single day. So tell me more about those things.
Johnathan Dane (18:00):
Yeah. One thing is literally creating an environment where as long as your motivational factors and your personality are good. We can train anybody with no experience and be great. Our best people are the ones that have no prior experience joining KB. So I think mindset wise, we're a bit different. We're not worried about going out and finding the best talent like we still do. And I feel like it's easier for us. And it's kind of like the bigger fish eating the smaller fish, because even bigger companies are recruiting our people all day long. They get hit up five times a week all the time.
Johnathan Dane (18:32):
And I've seen some of the recruiting efforts and people share that with me. I think one great way to combat that is again, having that transparency with your team, having their growth tracks already laid out, talking about the next steps. So they always know what's next, because there's not a guarantee that the place that they want to go to or thinking about going to has those things. It's like, yeah, you might bump now. But then what about the next one? Can they tell you that? Can they show you that? So those are things that we focus on a lot too. But the bigger thing is, we're creating a training and an environment where we can just level people up a lot faster and not really worry about getting unicorns all day long.
Peep Laja (19:08):
You don't get far with a mediocre team. Talent selection is hard and the consequences of the wrong hire are severe. Hiring junior people is cheap, because they cost less. But hiring junior people is expensive because you need to guide them, hold their hand, cue their work, show them how to do it. Coach them. If you are going to hire junior folks, you also need to build the support systems.
Peep Laja (19:30):
Hiring people with deep expertise is typically worth the money, better decisions at a much faster pace. A senior person with a ton of expertise of course costs more, but allows you to move much faster and focus better. So choose your heart. I'm obviously not alone in the hire the best people you can afford camp. The book Good to Great by Jim Collins was about longitudinal study of what made companies great. One of the key pillars was hiring the right people. Here's Jim.
Jim Collins (19:57):
When Dick Cooley became chief executive of Wells Fargo in the late 1970s, he knew he would be facing the storm of deregulation. He knew that the entire banking industry would be appended when deregulation swept through. The board, understandably concerned asked Cooley, "What is your vision? What is your strategy? Where will you lead us? How will you get us through the storm of deregulation."
Jim Collins (20:20):
And Cooley had a wonderful answer. "I don't know. Not only that, it's the wrong question. See, I am not going to first figure out where to drive this bus and then get people on the bus. No. I'm going to do it completely opposite. I am not going to figure out where to drive the bus until I've got the right people on the bus. And only once I've got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus and the right people on the key seats then and only then, will I turn my attention to the question of where we will drive this bus." Always think first about who and then about what. Put who of the head of strategy, who a head of tactics. Who a head of technology. Who a head of business ideas, who a head of everything. First, who, then what.
Peep Laja (21:17):
You said you reach 10 million dollars around peak COVID.
Johnathan Dane (21:21):
It was a little bit before COVID. Took us like four and a half years to get there, yeah.
Peep Laja (21:26):
And now recently you said on LinkedIn that you guys hit 20 million ARR. So you doubled in size, in relatively short amount of time. So if you think back to that rapid growth, did you do anything different during that time period or just made the existing machine better or what happened?
Johnathan Dane (21:45):
Yeah. It's the boring answer, it's a leverage conversation. Average client value has grown. Our tenure has grown. Our retention rate has grown. All the other metrics that are important to us have gotten better and better. And so that has just afforded us that like when COVID hit, we lost like $200,000 in MRR, just like any other agency it seems like there was that big cut to begin with.
Johnathan Dane (22:05):
But then after that we just took off and I don't know whose because of our positioning, all of our social proof of our reviews, because yeah, we did more than double in size during this pandemic, but it was more of the same thing to be honest. It was more of doubling down on what worked coming out with new more blog posts, updating existing ones as well too. And just looking at the data that was very much right in front of us of what we can do. So that was like what we did to get to the hundred million. That's a whole different story. I think we got to do some different things for sure.
Peep Laja (22:32):
To play the devil's advocate. You said Clutch reviews and G2 reviews but like everybody has great reviews and G2 and Clutch. I mean, nobody who hates you or is mediocre about you will not go through the G2 review process. It's a pain in the butt.
Johnathan Dane (22:49):
Yeah.
Peep Laja (22:49):
So you only invite your happiest customers and you incentivize them. So how can you be sure that actually doing anything?
Johnathan Dane (22:56):
I look at it through the lens of differentiation and I look at well, okay. If other agencies are also doing this, then we have to have the most reviews, right? That's the next step. We planted a flag pretty aggressively saying that we have the most published wins of any agency in the world. And we looked at all the published case studies. We looked at all the reviews, all the video testimonials as well too. And we put them all together with like up to 500 different agencies that we looked at in a spreadsheet that's actually on our website. And we made that claim and we backed it up too.
Johnathan Dane (23:25):
And so it puts some pressure on us to want to keep extending that lead. But when we talk to people that are leads for example, they're saying, that is the thing that got them over the step to choose to at least reach out. Now they may also reach out to five other agencies that happens quite often too. So it's more like once you get them in the door, how do you then convert them later on. But to get them in the door, all those things that might seem like vanity metrics, actually aren't very helpful as well.
Peep Laja (23:53):
Right. Because agencies are notoriously hard to differentiate and you do PPC, well, so does everybody else, right? So was going for that an intentional, "We want to be objectively better than others out there." Was that the line of thinking there or?
Johnathan Dane (24:08):
It was because like you said, if you were to ask, let's say a focus group of potential companies that want to hire an agency and you ask, "Well, how do you choose? How do you decide which one to reach out to?" They're all going to be like, "Hey, I value the design." Maybe it's like, "Oh, I look at the reviews," or maybe, "I just saw the ad and I converted." So then if that's the case and you have these not so great answers, then your best bet as an agency, say well, then be number one in all those categories and focus on that. If that's all that they actually use to choose who they reached out to.
Johnathan Dane (24:38):
I joke with my team, "Hey, if we decide to do something, we're not going to go half ass on anything. We're going to go full ass." And we went so aggressive, if you look at Clutch reviews for example, you can see the date stamps of when they actually happened. There were some that were like, "There's a lot back to back," a lot coming in because we had such a insane focus on doing that and wanted to plan that flag of being number one.
Peep Laja (24:59):
Do you have a dedicated person going after these case studies and?
Johnathan Dane (25:03):
Yeah, we actually have. So we have a system internally where we do QPRs with our clients and in those slides, we ask them to like, if they're open to review, because things are going great. And then that gets passed onto this person. Once they do the review, then we ask them do the case study. Once they do the case study, then we ask them for the referral. So there's like the step ladder approach that we take to increase the ask over time. But we start with the lowest ask first.
Peep Laja (25:28):
Positive reviews help close deals, everyone knows. G2, Capterra and others like that are great for showing trustworthy reviews. But they're also increasingly unhelpful when it comes to comparing tools, because most everyone has fantastic reviews, because obviously they're solicited from happy customers. If you have a below 4.0 rating on G2, you must be objectively terrible. That's it. A bad review makes all outer five star reviews more believable. An admission of possible shortcomings in your sales pitch makes the rest of the pitch more credible.
Peep Laja (26:01):
Brands become more human when they're not perfect. They're more likable when they own their flaws or even flaunt them. This was first augmented by Psychologist Elliot Hansen in 1966. Hansen termed the fact that we prefer people who exhibit a weakness, the breath fall effect, here's Elliot giving a great example of how being open about your shortcomings can bring its own benefits.
Elliot Hansen (26:23):
John F. Kennedy, when he was president of the United States, he had just come into office in 1960 and immediately did one of the great blunders up until that time that our country made the Bay of Pigs invasion when they invaded Cuba, when he sponsored an invasion of Cuba which was an absolute disaster. And afterwards he took full responsibility for it. And the Gallup poll his ratings of popularity increased immediately afterwards. It's a stunning example of showing failability and owning up to having made a mistake is a very, very good thing, even politically. But I don't think people believe it. And even though it's the truth and therefore they dodge around and they try to duck away from owning up to having made a mistake.
Peep Laja (27:17):
In terms of marketing. So you guys do what everybody else is doing, blog. It's working great for you. You're a visible founder. I see all your team is on LinkedIn and being active, following all these somewhat obvious best practices. And you have the case studies technically any other PPC landing page agency could also do the very same things and probably many are doing it. So thinking ahead, 2025, 2030 and beyond, what other moats are you building or betting on that to keep your growth, your momentum going?
Johnathan Dane (27:52):
One, consistency is really important. Just keep doing it. But then also having everything done through the lens of what we call continuous improvement. It's like we use shield analytics for all of our LinkedIn posting, right? We can see the engagement rates and the overall engagement volume. If things aren't growing that way, we figure out, look, let's stop doing it this way and let's change it.
Johnathan Dane (28:11):
So that's one key thing where some agencies barely have time to be consistent. And then the second part is then can you then also continuously improve from there? That's the other part to it. The third part in my mind, like you said, with a 2025, looking into the future, is building other acquisition channels. And for us, it's like we are doing a decent amount on paid advertising ourselves too right now, working with a lot of other, let's say SaaS partnerships that we want to be in with. Because a lot of SaaS partnerships and especially in the martech world, they have the software, but they don't have the implementation. They don't have the ongoing maintenance of that too.
Johnathan Dane (28:45):
So partners like Clearbit are really going to be important to us in the future too. But then we also look at other types of content. I want to dominate YouTube on every single thing that we dominate on from a blog perspective. I want to dominate, which is much harder, but podcasting and some of these just as well too, have a lot of positive ripple effects for recruiting and for hiring too. So those all stars, those unicorns, they come through. We had a person that was at a bigger agency where the VP of that agency actually left and started another agency and wanted to recruit that person that's talking to us and has a relationship already established, but because they heard some BoostSauce podcast in the past, because we stopped that when COVID happened, they really like that, and that struck a chord with them.
Johnathan Dane (29:28):
So I'm like, "Oh shit," those little things who could fucking track that. So you have this like, hate to use the word synergies, but one thing influences the other. And so for us, it's doing more content. We have a marketing goal of eventually having like a Netflix series, kind of like Headspace does with meditation and showing people how everything in life is marketing. The way you dress, the way you talk, the way you write, all of those things are presenting you in a better light. That's kind of like a north star for us.
Johnathan Dane (29:53):
We want to get to that level where we have mainstream B2C marketing, like media empire kind of stuff. And I think that, well, we dream that big and we keep raising the bar the way that we have been doing and what you're seeing today, isn't even anywhere near close to where we want to be. That's going to make it much easier for us to get to where we want to go, because we feel like the bar is very low compared to other agencies too.
Peep Laja (30:20):
A few years ago, I came to a realization that I've been self-limiting my ambition. This was driven by exposure to people who've gone to grab a bigger slice of the pie. And I learned that most are no smarter than I am. They're just thinking bigger. Something I think about often, am I playing too small? What if my ambition was 10X bigger? What would that look like? And when I look back 10 years ago, I see that I set my sights too low. And so my advice for my younger self would be to have bigger goals. But I could 10X my current goals too.
Peep Laja (30:54):
The easiest thing in the world is to settle. When you set a goal, there's tension based on where you are and where you want to be. And there's a massive temptation to collapse the tension by reducing or dropping the goal. "Ah, it's okay. I never wanted it anyway." The gravity towards mediocrity is strong, but don't give in. Ambition and focus can work wonders. Just got to prioritize ruthlessly. You guys recently did this vivid vision exercise, setting goals for 2025 and also working out like a rough plan, how to get there. Can you tell me about that?
Johnathan Dane (31:31):
Yeah, so we basically did the math. We created this Google Sheet calculator that basically would show like if these different teams within KlientBoost, like marketing, sales and operations for example, were achieving these minimums consistently. How long would it take for us to get to a hundred million annual recurring revenue run rate? And so what we did was we figured out that it would take us 300 MQLs. On the marketing side, it would take like that 50-50 conversion rate on the sales side, meaning 50% of the MQLs turned into SQLs and then 50% of the SQLs were closed. And then ops has a 97% retention rate average client value of $10,000. And there was one other metric I forgot.
Johnathan Dane (32:10):
But anyways, if those three teams achieve those things, it would at the longest time, if they then say consistently take us 10 months from that point to reach a hundred million ARR. Because the growth rate month over a month would just take care of itself at that point. So it was a very helpful for us to not just have a vision statement, but then to say like, "Well, how are we going to achieve that? How are we going to get that?" And obviously our vision statement is, well, once we achieve that, we're going to set a new one and it's going to keep helping us propel to that point.
Johnathan Dane (32:39):
But it was very helpful to just do the math and say, "What are we aiming towards and how are we helping each other achieve those things". And one key thing we did was, we decided to raise the bar on qualification from a sales perspective, to not just have anybody come through that was a solopreneur or things that we'd done in the past that just weren't good fits. So we had new quality filters put in, which then helps ops achieve their goal with retention because economics wise, those things need to matter and things like that too.
Peep Laja (33:06):
So you studied with the end in mind, like a hundred million goal that worked backwards. What does the conversion numbers here? What are the funnel metrics need to look like? And then also you can calculate how many people you'll need to service all these clients. So you know how many people you're going to need to onboard train and hire over the next three to four years.
Johnathan Dane (33:26):
Exactly. We have 500 people from the 120 or so that we are now. And that was really important for the people on the team to see, because it shows them the open seats that are in the future as well too. What are part of their growth tracks as well. So it was all tied together. We also put in our social impact work that we care a lot about, our BLM focus. We have this internal community that will eventually be external called BoostBabes, which is literally helping marketing female marketing leaders break glass ceilings too, and be getting those promotions and things like that as well. So there's like a little bit of everyone to get excited and different people are more excited about different things. So it was good to capture everything in that PDF.
Peep Laja (34:05):
Boom, thanks so much.
Johnathan Dane (34:07):
You're welcome.
Peep Laja (34:12):
So how is KlientBoost winning? One, they're in a market with a lot of preexisting demand. This also brings a lot of competition, so they double down on differentiation and built a systematic approach to their marketing.
Johnathan Dane (34:25):
We planted a flag pretty aggressively saying, that we have the most published wins of any agency in the world. And we looked at all the published case studies. We looked at all the reviews, all the video testimonials as well too. And we put them all together with up to 500 different agencies that we looked at in a spreadsheet that's actually on our website. And we made that claim. We backed it up too.
Peep Laja (34:44):
Two. They focus on the back of the house. They invest in ops, better internal data, staff training. They basically went from 10 million to 20 million dollars in revenue by focusing on operations.
Johnathan Dane (34:56):
It's the leverage conversation. Average client value has grown. Our tenure has grown, our retention rate has grown. All the other metrics that are important to us have gotten better and better.
Peep Laja (35:05):
Three. They've strategically planned their next steps, working backwards from the goal. What are the inputs needed to hit their odyssey targets?
Johnathan Dane (35:13):
If those three teams achieve those things, it would at the longest time, if they then say consistently take us 10 months from that point to reach a hundred million ARR.
Peep Laja (35:24):
A final takeaway from Johnathan.
Johnathan Dane (35:25):
We want to get to that level where we have like mainstream media empire kind of stuff. We have a marketing goal of eventually having like a Netflix series, kind of like Headspace does with meditation and showing people how everything in life is marketing. That's kind of like a north star for us.
Peep Laja (35:40):
And that's how it went. I'm Peep Laja, for more tips, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.