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Welcome to Funnel Vision, Hosted by Mikael Dia, Founder & CEO of Funnelytics - a revolutionary marketing analytics software that allows marketers and business owners to map and track their sales and marketing campaigns visually.
We feature Marketing Agency Owners and Performance Marketers to highlight the tactics, tools and strategies they use to grow their own business and their clients.
Funnel Vision brings you 3 episodes every single week that aim to highlight the strategies used by successful agency owners and performance marketers in a 20 minute format.
Aside from their unique topic of the day, our guests always answer one big question:
What is your best growth tactic?
For more content, check out our YouTube page, newsletter or connect with Mikael Dia on LinkedIn!
[00:00:00] Mikael: What's up? What's up? What's up everybody? It's Mikel here. Back with an other episode of the Funnel Vision Show. This time I've got somebody who's been at this for a really long time. He's one of the OGs in the game when it comes to, uh, growing and scaling agencies. Coaching agencies. Uh, he's got the number one podcast in the agency space.
[00:00:27] Mikael: I'm super excited because. I've been secretly following Jason for, for a long time. Uh, he doesn't know that, but, uh, now he does. Uh, Jason Twank, thank you for joining me. Thank you for being here.
[00:00:39] Jason: Thanks for calling me old. I said, OG, OG, right? Well, I've been, I've been doing it for a long time cause I'm old.
[00:00:47] Mikael: Um, but man, uh, it's, it's, it's really exciting to have you because, um, You know, this game and, and, uh, growing kind of agencies, you're really one of the first people that I [00:01:00] know who started coaching agencies. Like now there's a lot of coaches who coach agencies. There's a lot of people who've built kind of, let me train how to grow an agency.
[00:01:11] Mikael: Uh, but you've really been doing it for, for since the beginning. So, uh, for those who don't know, let's start with your humble brag, uh, tell people. What you've been able to do for your clients, what you've been able to do for yourself. In other words, why should people listen in for the next 15, 20 minutes?
[00:01:30] Jason: Well, I started an agency by accident in 99. So I'm an accidental agency owner. Um, starting with 500 websites, all the way up to a million dollar websites for clients like LegalZoom, Hitachi, AT& T. And we sold that agency. Uh, we got over the eight figure mark and then, uh, about a decade ago, got into this business by accident because.
[00:01:54] Jason: The old competitors were like, how'd you kick our butt? How'd you do this? How'd you do that? How'd you sell? [00:02:00] I was like, well, let me show you. I started doing that for free and created a podcast 10 years ago called the smart agency masterclass and just wanted to create a resource. I wish I had when I was doing the first agency and.
[00:02:13] Jason: Have helped over 20, 000 agency owners, um, tons be able to exit the things that they don't want to do anymore and tons to exit their agency and go on to the next venture that they wanted. And then the past three years, we started another agency up where we've bought 10 agencies, um, and we're a little over 30 million in revenue.
[00:02:35] Mikael: Incredible, man. That's a. What a journey selling 500 websites to then selling a million dollar websites. First of all, how do you sell a million dollar website? Like, let's just unpack that super quick. How do you go from 500 to then a million?
[00:02:51] Jason: Well, you know, five, everyone starts off with 500 with, you know, I, a lot of times on my show, I ask him like, what'd you charge your first client?
[00:02:59] Jason: [00:03:00] And the average is always like 500 bucks. I'm like, how'd you come up with 500? I don't know. It sounded good. Um, and that, that's kind of what it was to me.
[00:03:08] Mikael: Mine was 2000. That was my, and he gave me, he gave me a physical check. Like, uh, he, he mailed it to me.
[00:03:15] Jason: My first, of course. I mean, We didn't have electronic checks when I started.
[00:03:19] Jason: So my first client asked for an invoice. I didn't know what an invoice was and I didn't have Google who you don't like very much right now. Um, you know, like. You know, I didn't have Google to ask. I had to ask my dad and my dad's like, you sure you want to do this business? Like, you don't even know what an invoice is.
[00:03:36] Jason: I'll figure it out. Um, but how did we get a million dollar sites? I mean, Bill, one step at a time. It's kind of like, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Uh, PETA don't have it for me. That's just a figure of speech.
[00:03:51] Mikael: Yeah, exactly. Jason does not endorse eating elephants. No. So you just slowly graduate to that, but [00:04:00] a lot of agencies though, um, kind of stay in that, you know, small business.
[00:04:08] Mikael: So there's obviously a completely different sales cycle, um, um, psychology, uh, process to go from selling a 500 website to, you know, the, the store down next door to a million dollar website for legal zoom, right? So what does that look like?
[00:04:29] Jason: Yeah, there's a number of different things. I mean, that's a great question.
[00:04:32] Jason: So the first thing is, is in the very beginning, I can't go from a 500 website to a million. I just don't have the skills yet. Right. So it takes years to get there because you need to make sure that, you know, and I wish more people knew this, you need to make sure that you're worth it and you need to know what are the results you can actually deliver and then make sure that.
[00:04:59] Jason: [00:05:00] Those results you deliver is less or more than what you cost because you never want to be a burden on someone, right? I always look at it as if you give me a dollar, I want you to get out at least a hundred dollars. I want you to, or I'm sorry, um, I want you to get 10 back. I want you to get a 10 X result.
[00:05:20] Jason: I just can't do math. You're not paying me for math, math problem. Um, and so you, that, that's the first part. And then over time, as you start to gain amazing results for your clients, you need to ask yourself, man, like this person just landed a million dollar deal off a 10, 000 website, I got them. I'm not charging enough.
[00:05:50] Jason: And what is my time actually worth? And then not even, and that's probably a bad question of like, what's my time worth, because. What's my [00:06:00] experience worth? Like I have a shirt that says, don't pay me for my time. Pay me for my experience, right? Because I can, I can do things faster, but I don't want to lose money because I've, you know, accumulated all this experience.
[00:06:16] Jason: So it really takes those two things. And then it just takes, you know, constant pressure, right? You know, constant pressure on anything's going to break and you're going to constantly break things down. And knowing where you want to go, you know, I remember we got to about 2 million in revenue and I wanted to shut down the agency.
[00:06:38] Jason: I wanted to literally quit. I was so miserable. I hated what I did. I felt like every decision was going through me and it felt like I felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest. That same elephant I told you to eat. He was sitting on my chest.
[00:06:51] Mikael: You weren't eating them fast enough.
[00:06:53] Jason: Yeah. And I needed to get out.
[00:06:55] Jason: And I remember my wife telling me one day, he's like, why don't you just quit? Why don't you go get a job? If you're [00:07:00] under so much pressure, you're so miserable to be around, go get a job. And so I interviewed with NASCAR and they asked me two questions and I used to be a race car driver, so I was like, hold on, let me go work for NASCAR.
[00:07:12] Jason: Right. Um, and, uh, they asked me two questions that changed everything. I didn't know how to answer them in the interview, but they said, what do you love doing every day that you want to continue doing? And what do you hate doing that you never want to ever do again? And so I went home. I thought about it cause I just botched the interview, which is really good.
[00:07:31] Jason: It turned out, um, because I don't know if I had a good interview. I'm kind of just quit, but I went back. And I sat down, I just started writing on a sheet of paper, all the things I never wanted to do again, I spent maybe like an hour and I was like, okay, project management, dealing with clients, you know, I was like, all right, well, what, what do I love doing?
[00:07:55] Jason: Like what gives me energy? And I started writing that down. So one of the exercises I tell everybody, and you guys can go [00:08:00] do this. Get a sheet of paper, put your fist on it, draw a circle around your fist, spend about an hour outside the circle writing all the shit you don't want to do. And then after that, spend what's all the stuff you want to do.
[00:08:12] Jason: So from that, I go, man, I love coaching my team. Like I love building, you know, my, my team up. I love being the face of the organization. I love, um, building, you know, relationships. Uh, I love setting the vision of the agency because I'm an idea guy and then communicating that to the team. So that became the role that I needed to fill and that gave me energy.
[00:08:36] Jason: And then that's how we started building ourself to working with the biggest clients in the world.
[00:08:42] Mikael: Interesting. And, and, and that transition meant that you had to, uh, the right people next to you who could fill the other pieces, right?
[00:08:53] Jason: Exactly. Right. I was trying to do everything. And, and also too, here's the deal.
[00:08:58] Jason: I didn't tell the team where we're [00:09:00] going. So every decision had to go through me. It's kind of like, we're on a boat from New York to London and I have my whole team on it and I drive it for about 10 hours. And after about 10 hours, I'm like, dude, you got to take over. Like you drive, but if the boat changes course, come get me.
[00:09:17] Jason: Well, right. Do you ever been on a boat? It changes course every two seconds. Right. Right? But if I just told him, Hey, steer to the heading, you know, 270, we're going to London. Well, anytime the boat changes course, I can sleep the whole way.
[00:09:33] Mikael: Yeah. And you're going to Paris, right, for sailing. You sure you don't want to
[00:09:36] Jason: watch that sailing, uh, race there?
[00:09:39] Jason: Every time I've been on a sailboat, I've sunk it, crashed it, or almost drowned. So, uh, so there's, there's the reason. Uh,
[00:09:47] Mikael: okay. So then tell me what was the, what was the tipping point then? Cause obviously you, you had this interview, you went and you decided, okay. I, I'm going to list what I love, what I don't love.
[00:09:59] Mikael: [00:10:00] And now that gave you a little bit of clarity, uh, but there's a big difference between clarity and, and kind of execution, right? So now, now you have to go and make some decisions. Who do you bring on? What do you do? Um, you know, are you making enough money right now at this stage in order to bring on the right person?
[00:10:19] Mikael: Uh, you know, what did that look like from a more kind of tactical execution standpoint?
[00:10:24] Jason: Well, it was about where do I want to take it? And then the two, who's, who do I need to bring on to help me? And who do I need to become? Because you got to think what part of the agency, I was a 22 year old punk kid that knew nothing.
[00:10:39] Jason: I didn't know what an invoice was. So you have to grow and the agency will only grow up to the level of the leadership. And so if the leadership is not constantly elevating and growing and going up, you know, the agency's not going to go up. And so those are what I needed to figure out. So I needed to figure out [00:11:00] where do I want to go?
[00:11:01] Jason: I didn't want to figure out the how that wasn't my job. That with the who, and then who do I need to become in order to become the leader and really kind of transform from the owner to the CEO. And those roles, I told you, those are kind of a CEO role, but when you're actually able to achieve this, and I see this in our agency mastermind all the time, they're able to achieve these roles.
[00:11:30] Jason: And they go to me like, Oh, I'd love not to do project management. I love not to do sales. I'd love not to do delivery, all this stuff. I'm like, okay. And, um, and I don't want them to either because then it gives them options in order to sell or create other businesses and that kind of thing. But when you're transformed from an owner to CEO, congratulations, you're going to be depressed and depressed, right?
[00:11:54] Jason: Because now that the agency in your eyes, in the past eyes, right. The [00:12:00] old you. Doesn't need you for all the old shit you used to do, but it needs you for the new things. So when you start realizing it needs me for the new things, cause I would go into a creative meeting. Oh, Jason, I don't need you. I go into sales meeting.
[00:12:13] Jason: Don't need you. I go into all these meetings and I'm like, shit, man, no one needs me. What do I do? Yeah. And, and your listeners listening to me like, man, that'd be awesome. Well, it is awesome. Once you realize now you have a new role. But you will just remember, you'll be depressed for however long, and then you'll be like, Oh shit, this is nice.
[00:12:36] Mikael: You know, you know what? Um, it's funny. We did, we did the same thing with, uh, when I grew, you know, I got to a stage with Finalytics, I grew the team and, um, it was a weird transition cause I, I did something very similar. Somebody told me and gave me this, this very interesting kind of graphic, uh, to represent like how to think about as a CEO, especially when you raise money and [00:13:00] we raised, uh, VC funds.
[00:13:02] Mikael: And he kind of gave me this, he kind of is like a, uh, you know, whatever act back this y axis and, and on the y axis is experienced. And then on the x axis, the bottom axis is, is time. And he kind of explained to me and said, look, here's what happened, right? If in a traditional bank, what will happen is kind of this linear growth.
[00:13:22] Mikael: So your experience moves with time and it's kind of linear. So I'm going to start with an, as a, like an account person or like a teller. When you have zero experience and you're going to do that for about five years. And then you're going to go to like junior manager, and then you're going to do that for five years.
[00:13:37] Mikael: And then you're going to level up to, you know, senior manager, regional manager, VP, et cetera. And it takes about like 35 years to kind of go from beginning all the way to like C suite, right. To like a high level, um, because it takes about that amount of time for you to learn these particular skill sets.
[00:13:57] Mikael: But when you are growing and you're [00:14:00] growing quickly, uh, especially kind of You have to realize that what's happening is you're compressing that time. So you've got to accelerate your experience levels in a much, much shorter amount of time than the five year time span. So he kind of said to me, he's like, look, you need to understand what CEO does and you need to level up your mindset towards just what does a CEO do?
[00:14:24] Mikael: And it, it, a CEO is there to make sure you don't run out of money, make sure that you understand the vision and build the right people for the job. To send them towards that vision, right? Build who you have to become and, and basically where are we going? Like you said, right? But there's this transition that you go through because you're so used to hustling, so used to doing things, so used to getting your hands dirty where you're lost because you're like, I don't know what the hell to do with my time.
[00:14:51] Mikael: What am I like? I don't know how to be just the vision person or, you know, so it's, it's fascinating to hear, um, to [00:15:00] hear how you, you kind of go through that. Yeah.
[00:15:02] Jason: You feel bad because you don't have to work as hard.
[00:15:06] Mikael: Exactly.
[00:15:07] Jason: Right. And when you go, man, I can leave early. Like I work 10 hours a week.
[00:15:12] Mikael: Yeah.
[00:15:14] Jason: That's it. Like, uh, I don't do meetings on Monday. I have epic Fridays and I'm on my, with my family on Saturdays and Sundays, Tuesdays through Thursdays from nine to about two, I have my meetings or interviews and that kind of stuff. So, you know, it's, But like when that first happening and I started designing that, I felt guilty, but then I'm like, Oh, my team actually likes it when I'm out
[00:15:42] Mikael: to be honest, especially if you're, uh, you're a visionary, uh, founder like you and like me too, where ideas come to us all the time, we actually end up creating chaos, right?
[00:15:55] Mikael: Like we end up like our team hates it because. You're always coming up with new ideas [00:16:00] when they're supposed to stay the course and execute. Um, and that was one of the hardest things I had to learn. Like I used to self sabotage the company in their early days because always constantly coming up with new ideas.
[00:16:14] Mikael: Yeah. What
[00:16:14] Jason: about this? What about this?
[00:16:16] Mikael: Yeah, exactly. Guys, what do you think? We can do this, right? And they're like, but you just told us yesterday on Friday, it's Monday on Friday, you told us that we're going to do this and it's like, yeah, but I spent the last 48 hours thinking about these new things, you know, um, happened.
[00:16:34] Jason: My team now, um, calls it the, the Jason rule. Any idea I have, I have to think about it for 24 hours.
[00:16:42] Mikael: Nice. That's good. It means that, that they need to sit back and all right, this Jason. So did you, um, who was that person? Like, do you still have that person, um, on your team when you kind of made that decision, uh, that you needed to kind of find the who, [00:17:00] um, in, in terms of not who you have to become, but the who, in terms of the people, um, did you go and say, I need to find a COO or an operational person?
[00:17:11] Mikael: Cause clearly I'm not good at that. How did you kind of go about that?
[00:17:15] Jason: Yeah. Whoa. It's about self assess, or it's about assessing yourself, um, figuring out what am I good at, what I don't want to do, right, and bringing that person in. I needed, um, the person that really helped us was our VP of operations, um, at the agency, because I would come up with all the ideas.
[00:17:37] Jason: I'm like, Hey, dude, we need to put all the projects in your hands. You're the traffic controller. You're, you're going to control everything. Everything has to go through you. You're going to be the bottleneck. But you have the bandwidth because you don't have to worry about the other stuff. And then I started thinking about on sales.
[00:17:54] Jason: Well, um, I need to get out of sales. Okay. Then I need to [00:18:00] start thinking about marketing. I need to get out of marketing, right? So you need to start replacing yourself. You don't do it all at once and you don't want to do it. You don't want to pay up. One of the biggest mistakes I made was this, I mean, a thousand of them.
[00:18:19] Jason: I thought in order to grow my agency faster and get bigger, I needed to hire the people that were bigger than me for my competition. Okay. And so I remember this, this one come, I still think they're around, Definition 6, they're a great agency. But at the time, many, many, many years ago, they were always kind of the gorilla in Atlanta and we wanted to be them.
[00:18:42] Jason: And I remember hiring their salesperson, amazing, that salesperson suck because he was so used to having so many resources, right. But we were still scrappy. You know, our culture was being [00:19:00] resourceful and scrappy. Those, that was the Goliath at the time. You know, they were really big. They had tons of resources.
[00:19:08] Jason: They had the account manager, biz dev support. All these things, so this salesperson was, was not going to work. So you, who, you don't necessarily have to hire a COO. You can hire a director of operations was you or a salesperson, and then maybe they'll become a sales manager, or maybe they'll just be amazing at sales.
[00:19:35] Jason: They build up your revenue and then you can afford a sales manager. I always liked hiring people here was my goal. I never wanted to hire someone I had to manage. If you came to me for direction on what you need to do every single day, I could find someone better, cheaper, and faster. And you were fired, but I could always give you direction [00:20:00] of like, here's the direction where we're going.
[00:20:02] Jason: I can hear your, um, ideas. And then I would always do this one, three, one method. You know, so if you came to me with a problem, be like, all right, what's the problem? So that's the one. What are three things you're thinking about doing, right? That's three. What do you think we need to do? So they do, you do that enough.
[00:20:20] Jason: They'll never come back to you.
[00:20:22] Mikael: Yeah, I learned that method as well. Um, and, and we've been using it. It's actually fascinating how people come to you with problems. And then all of a sudden it's like flip it, turn the onus on them. It's like, well, what do you think we should do? What are three possible options?
[00:20:37] Mikael: And then they're like, Oh, let me think about this. And then they give you those three options. Like, which one do you think is the best? And like, most of the time, the one that they think is best is actually the right one. So it's like, all right, go ahead and do it. You know, like it allows them to think and not put you in the bottleneck.
[00:20:53] Mikael: So very quickly then, um, tell me a little bit. So you kind of mentioned, you know, you, you decided, okay, [00:21:00] well, your competitors and, and people as you were growing your agency, Um, people came to you and were like, how did you do this? How do you solve that and stuff? So now, now you coach, you still have your agency and it seems like it's a, um, Well, I sold one of them.
[00:21:15] Mikael: I created a new one about three years ago. Right. You created a new agency about three years ago, but you've helped kind of 20, 000 agencies out there and, um, grow. And I'm sure you've helped significantly more when you think about just the resources and the content and all of that stuff that you've put out, uh, over the years, of course, Um, what's the number one kind of growth tactic that you speak to agencies about?
[00:21:40] Mikael: Like it, what's your philosophy in a sense about growing agencies?
[00:21:46] Jason: You gotta, and there's, there's a ton. I mean, there's, you have to have the right systems in place. So let me go over really quick, kind of the eight systems I think that can really guide someone. The first three [00:22:00] systems are foundational, right?
[00:22:02] Jason: The first system is you have to have clarity. Where the hell are you going? Who are you going to help out? Uh, what service are you actually going to do? You have to have that. Most, most of us are accidental agency owners like me, and we struggle for years until we figure that out. Like. You can hit 2 million easy with not knowing this, but then you're going to hit a ceiling and you're going to be like, man, I don't, I don't know what to do.
[00:22:28] Jason: And so that's really where we, we start going, well, where are you going and answering these questions? The next is how do you position the agency in the right way where you don't look like everybody else? You're not a me too agency. Third is what you're offering. Right? In the right order, too many of us, agency owners, including me in the long time ago, we'd pitch a retainer off the bat, you're pitching marriage, you're not making it an easy decision, how can you create an offering ladder or what I call this foot in the door [00:23:00] offer that helps someone very fast, it's an easy decision, you do it with them, and then once they pay you, they're 20 times more likely to pay you again.
[00:23:10] Jason: So that's the foundation. Then after you have the foundation, now we can start prospecting. You should have an inbound, outbound and a strategic partnership channel. Then once you have the prospecting, now you can go to sales. What's your sales system? How do you train your salespeople? How do you get the budget every single time?
[00:23:28] Jason: What are the, what are the questions you need to ask in order to position yourself where you're not like everybody else? And then, and this is where a lot of people mess up because there's a lot of great marketers out there that could not do the delivery part, right? You have to deliver results. Like how do you onboard client, you know, how do you get them result?
[00:23:51] Jason: Right. Because there's a lot of people that are really good at marketing and sales, but they suck at delivery. Right. And then it's all about building your team, your operations, and [00:24:00] then how do you become the leader you need and then build leaders and make the leaders better. Those are the eight systems.
[00:24:08] Jason: When people start doing that, that's when they start having, you know, exponential growth and, and people wanting to buy them for real money. Uh, not just like, you want to roll up, I'll give you a start. I'll give
[00:24:22] Mikael: you a stock out of the rollup. Um, no, I, yeah. And, and honestly, like, uh, I, I tell, uh, uh, the audience all the time.
[00:24:32] Mikael: Um, you know, you have to be result driven and you have to be able to sell something that drives results because the reality is. Marketing is a commodity these days. I can go on Upwork and find somebody who does Facebook ads for five bucks an hour, all the way up to 500 an hour. I can go on Udemy and learn how to start a Facebook ad, like learn how to do Facebook ads for free.
[00:24:56] Mikael: So it's like, okay, that means the next person you speak to, or this business speaks [00:25:00] to could easily have a zero experience, right. And, and it's easy to sell time, but, uh, if you can't deliver results, you don't retain people.
[00:25:08] Jason: That's why I like. Great companies, great marketing. Like, um, we have this agency experience every year where the members come in.
[00:25:18] Jason: And we were talking like, we are not going to use the word fine, good, okay. Anymore. If we use that, those are. That means we need to delete that work or we're not doing, we're only going to put out great work. We're only going to do work with great client. If they're okay or fine or any of that, no. And that's, that's really how people need to look, because I agree with you.
[00:25:44] Jason: There's, there's too many people out there that can do marketing and it's a commodity, but not great marketing.
[00:25:50] Mikael: Yeah, that's very true. And not marketing that gets true results. That's, that's actually, um, very difficult. Jason, uh, this has been awesome [00:26:00] and very, very insightful. And I love, uh, the journey and everything you've gone through.
[00:26:05] Mikael: Where, where can people learn more about you?
[00:26:07] Jason: Yeah. Uh, just go to agency mastery. io. Um, and, uh, check out all their resources. We put out a ton of free resources or check out our podcast, the smart agency masterclass been around for 10 years, over 700 episodes. Wow. Which is crazy to me. Um, but yeah,
[00:26:27] Mikael: it is.
[00:26:28] Mikael: That's impressive. It's impressive. Uh, and. Thank you for all the, uh, knowledge that you're putting out there, all of the content, the resources, and really just genuinely, uh, wanting to help people. So, um, thank you for being on and I hope and I believe everyone will have a lot of value from this. So, thanks again.