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Agency Forward explores the future of agencies as tech and AI drive down the cost of tactical deliverables. Topics include building competent teams, developing strategic offers, systemizing your business, and more.
New episodes delivered every Tuesday.
Unknown Speaker 0:00
Hey everyone. Today I'm joined by Jakub greitzer. Kuba is the Content Marketing Manager at zenpilot, and I wanted to bring him onto the show to shed some light on marketing for agencies. You have probably heard me mention the stat that only 14% of agency clients come from direct marketing, and it's for that reason you should be spending more time marketing your own brand. Kuba hosts the agency Journey podcast. He writes Zen pilots newsletter, and he produces just loads of content for social media, so there is a lot you can learn from him, and he over delivers in this conversation. In this episode, we discuss how marketing an agency is different than other businesses, how Podcasts can benefit your brand, why agencies should start a newsletter and more. Today's episode is brought to you by Zen pilot. There are lots of tools out there for agencies to manage projects, but any project issues aren't usually caused by the tool. They're from your own processes. Zen pilot helps agencies implement their project management tools while streamlining operations so your team can move from chaos to clarity. You can see for yourself at Zen pilot.com/forward,
Unknown Speaker 1:08
and now. Jakub greitzer,
Unknown Speaker 1:11
it's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward.
Unknown Speaker 1:30
Al is marketing an agency different than another business. Okay, so my experience, previous to working at Zen pilot, I was working at not exactly an agency. Was a software development consultancy, and was, you know, Polish based, so a little bit of a different world there. That company got to, like, three, 400 I think, headcount by the time I was leaving there one difference that I see is more of a quirk, really. But what I noticed, and this is a point to the extent of I think this industry is a little bit further marketing wise than some others, but I'm noticing that there's a lot of thinking about having intellectual property when marketing an agency, it seems like every agency passed a certain point of maturity has a framework that they're or a model that they're communicating about to the market. That's one thing that I've noticed here, where it seems like, you know, despite the fact that a lot of these boil down to marketing agencies, digital agencies, there still is a need to, like, lay claim to something that they can call their own. I think this is a really smart move. And actually, I've been taking it back, you know, talking with, when I talk with marketers in other industries, I say you should have a look at having some sort of model, something you can name, something you can claim, and then that intellectual property takes on a life of its own. I feel like that's one of the things that I've noticed. Yeah, so I'm taking a course right now, and it's reminding me of a bunch of different frameworks and models and stuff that, like, I've just been neglecting, because there's so many out there, right? How can you keep keep in touch with everything? But one of them is the market sophistication model and so, and I think this is actually playing into what you're saying, Where, if nobody at this point is going to a marketing agency, agency saying, like, what problem do you solve? Right? They all know, like, you're generally solving, like, you're going to help me get in front of more people so that I can get more customers and do this. So people are asking, like, Well, why are you better? But now every agency is going to make these massive, bold claims, right? Like, when you look back in the 90s and everybody's making these big, like, fitness claims, like, well, we can help you lose 10 pounds in 10 minutes. Like, it was like, okay, really? And so it over saturates, and then it becomes like, Okay, well, what makes you different than everybody else? And that's where you start building these, these other frameworks, and then what makes you best? And now it's like, okay, well, this framework works, like, we have, you know, 1000 clients that we've ran through this, and it's gotten everything. I don't think we're yet at the the final stage of, like, what makes you iconic, where it's, like, Apple, right? And like, all these, these things are going to completely revolutionize I don't know marketing agencies will ever get there, but I think that's where all those, those framers come and see. I think you're spot on with, like, the intellectual property being something that's necessary in order to stand out within this space. Yeah, and that's interesting, because what I'm also noticing, like you mentioned, you know, the problem that you solve that I think is known to a large extent. I mean, you go to a marketing agency, maybe with superficial problems, and the Agency helps you understand kind of the deeper rooted issues. But you've probably heard about those things coming in as well, if you're, like, a well versed CMO or something, something like that, hiring an agency. But I've also noticed, and this is something, one of my key learnings from actually hosting the agency Journey podcast.
Unknown Speaker 4:49
I've had, you know, a couple dozen, or maybe, yeah, a little bit more than that, of these interviews already as hosts, since taking over from from gray. One thing that stands out and.
Unknown Speaker 5:00
The watershed moment for agencies, a lot of the time, is we picked our niche, not only what we do, although narrowing it down can be very important as well, but also who we do it for, and I feel like that's a big part of the marketing where we're just for. We had Chris Dreyer on agency breakthrough, our sister podcast, and I think his niche, as I recall, is like personal injury lawyers, just just, yeah. Oh, right, yeah.
Unknown Speaker 5:28
So you know, that is where this, this industry is also, in my eyes, where it's like, super specific and super narrow, and whoever hits that niche, identifies it and takes the plunge, they seem to benefit in a big way. Yeah. What was interesting about Chris's story too was that they he set out to just do, like, personal injury, hence, and then private injury, whatever. I don't know. I'm not a lawyer, but set out to do that. And then they started, like, acquiring more things as they went on. And then when they went back and looked at it, they were like, well, our most profitable is what we initially set out to do. We got to get back to doing that. And it was like, hey, even, like, so even if you do said this right, you got to go back and, like, look at it every so often to make it happen. But, yeah, that's a awesome insight that, uh, like, why don't more agencies realize that right? Like, you're, you're marketing an agency. How do you make sure that you guys are targeting the right people, and that you're you're promoting the the problem to those people, so that you can actually make headway. I
Unknown Speaker 6:29
feel like I'm a little bit spoiled in that regard. When I arrived here at Zen pilot. I feel like a lot of that thinking, a lot of a lot of that work, uh, was already done. I mean, not to understand myself here. But for example, the 135, formula, the three keys that we solve and the one goal that we that we try to lead clients towards. And the three keys being tools, projects, tools, processes and habits. For for those who don't know, as an pilot, we hope with project management for these three keys that was already in place and the niche was already picked agencies. However, there's still more. I mean, when you look at content, there's still even, you know, you can go even narrower. And every piece of content is really a question of positioning. Is how I see it, and sometimes the positioning is, you know, a strong lens could be the type of company you're trying to reach. Just recently, I recorded an episode with with gray, just talking about the specific challenges of a company, an agency, that's got that's around the 10 FTE mark. What are the specific challenges there? What can you anticipate happening past that mark, and how to prepare, and how to how to handle these challenges, both operationally and in terms of what's going on in your mind as an owner. So that's like super niche. You're talking to one particular role at one particular type of company at a particular size, and I think this is where it's going to to go in the future, like these days, a lot of the content ideas that we're throwing around are specifically geared towards helping sales conversations. I had a conversation with a company in this type of situation, this type of niche, this type of size, okay, we don't have something that specifically targets them. If conversations of that sort happen frequently enough, we just try to record a conversation specifically around that. And with podcasting, it's quite easy, right? You know, I often compare podcasting too. Like I'm a musician too. So you know how there's you know when you're doing music, you can the way songs come to be is often through jamming, right? So you might jam out for 30 minutes, and the song that comes out of it, after much kind of refining, can be three minutes. So podcast episodes, even the conversation we're having here, I compare these to like having a jam. You know, you never know what's gonna what's gonna come up, what's gonna send out the most. And I think a lot of content operations right now are seeing that, that it's worth having these kind of loose conversations to see, to see what comes up. And when they're highly targeted, you come up with with interesting stuff.
Unknown Speaker 9:01
I really like that metaphor podcasts or jam sessions, because it doesn't make sense, right? You're going to find uncover like that one idea just through conversation, and then it's like, you can go now explore that, and it becomes blog posts and clips and everything else. Let me tell you, it's really familiar looking at what's happening, you know, during these conversations and what comes out the other side. You know, the clips, the summaries, the blog posts, like coming from the music world. It's really similar. Yeah. So I guess, how else are you using the podcast to kind of just market, I guess your business.
Unknown Speaker 9:38
I've been following the thinking in this world for a while, like my first real connection with this world was back in 2020. The pandemic started, lockdown started, and at my previous company we were thinking of,
Unknown Speaker 9:52
we were basically looking at live streams. A lot of events moved online for obvious reasons, and we started a live stream.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
Series of our own. At the time, I happened upon James carbery from Swedish media at the pleasure of interviewing him last year, also for agency breakthrough. So at the time, he was promoting his book called content based networking, and that was my that was my initial idea around podcasting, where it's a way of making connections. It's a way of getting a yes where usually you would get a no in terms of, you know, having a conversation. I mean, how else would you have landed a conversation with me, if not just kidding, just kidding. We go way back.
Unknown Speaker 10:33
But that that, and that was the playbook, right? Uh,
Unknown Speaker 10:36
come up with maybe an ABM list. Find the stakeholders at those companies send them a request, get them on the podcast, and then follow up on that, you know, send, have some follow up conversations, and you might have some business. So that was, I see that as like the previous chapter of using a podcast now, though, and even James himself is now, has now changed his tune where it's more in the direction of
Unknown Speaker 11:02
co hosted commentary, is what he calls it. But there's a more specific like there's the podcasts have a couple main characters. Sometimes there's an initial guess, sometimes there's a there's a bit of a switcheroo, but it's more of a recurring voice commenting on various aspects of the industry. This is a change that we've also been making with agency. Journey I took over from gray as host, but what we've actually introduced is I do guest episodes now interwoven with those, and we're looking for a 5050, split in the future, kind of that kind of balance for now, I also interview gray a lot. And what this allows us to do is to highlight Ray's expertise a lot more our expertise, a lot more our view on the world, or a lot more. And this is more effective for building trust, because, and I feel like you know, depending on your needs, you might want to these are tools in a toolbox, right? You might want to go more in one direction or the other. If you need to make better connections, if you want to fill your list of contacts, maybe an interview based show makes more sense initially. But if you want to be building more trust, kind of you've got, you know, a good contacts list. You've got a good base of listeners, and now you want them to kind of warm up to you and try to, for example, go down a sales pipeline. If you like having more of these in house episodes, that's going to be that's going to be more beneficial. And again, it's a great engine for content too. I mean, from these jams, some songs, so to speak. Yeah, it's something
Unknown Speaker 12:34
I've started exploring too. Just I had some time off because I was working with the army, and so I fell behind in podcast recording, but I still doesn't stop the ideas from coming, right? So I just recorded a handful of solocasts and got those up, and those ones are almost more downloaded than some of my top episodes. And so it's like, okay, well, these are ideas that maybe people want to explore more. Maybe we should have more of those. But, yeah, that's always been one of my thoughts with like B to B podcasts, right? Like, if you're just interviewing guests and getting these people on, like, it's one thing if you're only interviewing your customers, because then you can get all these case studies, success stories, right? All of these things that helps your business, yeah, otherwise, if you're just interviewing experts, it's like, where are you getting to insert some of your ideas that people want to go back to you to hear what you have to say. So
Unknown Speaker 13:23
it's like, yeah, finding that balance right to be able to do it
Unknown Speaker 13:29
on the podcast, you are probably the only,
Unknown Speaker 13:33
I wouldn't say, non agency found, like most, most podcasts with agencies, it's like, founders started it and stuff like, they roll in the podcast and then they just hang on to it, whereas gray actually hand in the rain to you, which is a pretty big shift to take, like a host for a podcast and move it. How has that transition been, and how have you been kind of fitting into that role? I mean, it's been awesome, to be honest. Like,
Unknown Speaker 13:58
I'll admit back when I was joining Zen pilots. I mean, that was first of all, you know, if anybody's curious, if anybody's running a podcast right now, let me tell you, there might be people considering joining your organization now that are going to join three years from now, and they're already listening to your podcast. Because that was my story. I was listening to agency journey already in 2021 I think after my very first call with gray, back when we met through our mutual connection via clickup. So, you know, I was listening to it, and when I was joining Zen pilot, I already had it in the back of my mind, but that's just because I love to host stuff. I had it in the back of my mind. A conversation might come one day to take over the podcast. And it's been a great fit, to be honest, but there needs to be willingness on both sides. Right Gray said, you know that he saw benefit, of course, to making these connections himself, but then having some somebody that he can delegate that to, that's been it. I feel like there's, there's value.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
You there, and you mentioned, you know, myself not being an agency owner. Myself, again,
Unknown Speaker 15:06
that's actually been interesting for me, because I see, you know, content creators. I see two types. Probably there's more, but right now, I see two types of content creators, and there's teachers, and there's reporters, and I see myself very much as the second type, you know, to be a teacher, you know, a bona fide teacher you would need to have, in my view, hands on, experience, done something, lived through something, built something. And you know, that might be in the cars for me sometime in the future. But right now, I'm definitely not an agency owner. What I do have, though, is and then kind of that Library's been building and building is I report on what I see in the industry. I ask questions that some people find smart and just listen, just very intently. Listen. This is how insights come, like the one about niching that I just mentioned, some some recurring themes. You know, when you talk with people of that, that sort in that kind of role, in that kind of situation, long enough and often enough, then you can see kind of the trends and being a little bit of an outsider, partially at, you know, not being in that role. It's some things pop up that that other that are missed by the by the agency owners themselves. So I feel like that's been really, really useful to be able to ask, sometimes I ask, you know, naive questions, but also asking those questions, kind of the simple questions, the blunt ones that can uncover some of the most interesting insights. And with each conversation it gets, it gets better and better, in my opinion, right? You're not taking anything for granted when you go into these conversations and you get to have exactly the beginner mindset to, like, really pull everything in. Because, yeah, and realistically, right? Like, just because you're, like, talking to an agency owner, one owner does not know all the same things as others. I mean, I have worked with a bunch of them at this point where it's like, I'll say something, and they're like, What do you mean? It's like, Whoa, hang on. We gotta go back couple steps. Like, you're not, you're not tracking these numbers in your business. Okay, that's like, 101, right? So let's, let's take a step here. But so, like, we can't really assume that every agency owner has it. And so by, yeah, you being able to go in and do do that the way you do, I think, is definitely valuable for for the audience.
Unknown Speaker 17:15
Yeah, that happens in our conversations too. You know, we talk about, we help with, you know, issues like profitability, utilization, through the work that we do at Zen pilot. And sometimes we, you know, we have an agency owner on the call we mentioned utilization, utilization, and they stop us basically asking anyway. And might be even like a 10 ft agency, right? And they stop us asking, Could you Sorry? Could you explain that one to me? You know, you never know. It's like there's a whole pie of knowledge to acquire as an agency owner, and some people have certain slices of that pie, and other slices need to be still filled in. I don't know why I went in the direction of a pie metaphor, okay, but bear with me. It takes a while until you eat the whole pie and you have everything in your head.
Unknown Speaker 18:00
Yeah, so I guess you mentioned themes that you get from, uh, from guests. What are some of those, those themes that you've been hearing lately, things that people should be paying attention
Unknown Speaker 18:11
to? Let's see. So I already mentioned niching down as one of the watershed moments, and definitely kind of, I call it picking your lane, which doesn't always have it sometimes have a pejorative meaning, but for me, it's like the clearest, clearest visual in my mind. Another one. I had some conversations around.
Unknown Speaker 18:30
Some conversations were around what to do in a recession or when the market is a little bit tougher, and I had various responses to that, but one that stuck with me is to lean closer into your existing relationships. Basically, the relationships that survive in the recession and keep bringing in value are the ones that are kind of closer and stronger. So you know, in times of abundance, you might have more kind of looser connections. When the going gets tough, you have a more limited number of partners. Maybe you go back to your clients to try and sell them on additional work, because they they've and, again, being blunt, they've opened their wallet once you know momentum. I mean, they already trust you. They know that you can bring value, but they're not always aware of of what more you can you can do for them. Here and shout out to some of this I'm pulling I can remember from the episode with Kurt Schmidt. That's a good listen. That one was partially about networking, but he also mentioned this, this whole and he did it step by step, this whole frame of reaching out to your previous clients and and getting more business out of them. So that was another trend that basically, and I suppose it's another kind of flavor of niching as well, focusing on less but better. So you know, if you were to really generalize it, that was another trend that I saw for larger agencies. Whenever I spoke with somebody who leads a larger agency, like 150 people, 250 people, I had some conversations like that as well. A lot of the focus was on leadership that you should be really.
Unknown Speaker 20:00
Like your main focus should be on building your leaders, because they trickle the culture and the standards and the accountability down into the rest of the organization. So if you're in that sort of position, that's where the
Unknown Speaker 20:13
focus should be. And these are just some examples, right? Yeah, again, these threads pop and the connections kind of come through various conversations, and it's really interesting to see which points get mentioned often and what this whole landscape is like. Yeah, I think what I've noticed about the like recession proofing conversations, they more frequently come from people who are very well tied into the finances, not the people who are doing the other other pieces of agency life. So I always find that interest, like, maybe we should listen to the money, guess, right? Because if they're worried, like there's something,
Unknown Speaker 20:53
but yeah, the leadership piece hits. Because
Unknown Speaker 20:56
so I just had Dr William Attaway on the show, and he's super smart guy. We go back now over a year of just like, bouncing on episodes together for like, different shows and events, and he's a leadership coach. But, like, we're just talking about, like, people kind of neglect just leadership skills, because there's always something else that's more pressing, right? It's like, oh, I should go fix my, I don't know my sales funnel, I should go do work on this marketing asset. And it's like, at some point you stop being an individual contributor, and you have to actually work through people. So like, maybe start working on that skill now,
Unknown Speaker 21:34
yeah, and so yeah, I can definitely see how that that is like as agencies grow, like it's going to become more of a problem to not have those leadership skills, and I have an idea as to why. Actually, I think this comes down to immediate gratification. If you increase conversion in a sales funnel or, you know, fix issues on your website, you know, you can kind of see the effect immediately with leadership skills, it's a lot more fuzzy. It's a lot more slow. You might say something in the one on one today, positive or negative, that has an effect three months down the line. And of course, there's ways. And back when I was hosting their previous show, I was interviewing C level executives a lot, one of the key insights from them was to build feedback loops, right? So particularly in a leadership position, you need to be sure that you're asking the question of, you know, how this particular conversation went, what your takeaway is, or like, rate me as a leader. You know, these 360 evaluations, for example, some some organizations do that. So there's ways to surface that feedback faster and to make it more clear, but you need to do it deliberately. It doesn't just come to you as it might come through, you know, statistics in your Google Analytics or your HubSpot or whatever, right? So I think that's what puts some people off. But the work is definitely worth doing. And that was kind of the course from my previous show. It was mostly like CTOs VPs of engineering. They kept saying, focus on your people and build feedback loops. That was the that was the main thing there. Yeah, yeah, that's a good I'd heard the concept of hidden metrics before, where it's like, you have the stuff that's visible, right? Those are the things that we're kind of gravitating towards, because it's like, I can track it, right? I can actually measure this and do it. But then there's the hidden metrics. Like, people will always take a job if there's more money, versus, like, thinking through a lot of those other details of like, well, let's go through my family, and I'll have more time for like this and that, right? They just like, because you can't quantify that really exactly. And like leadership is definitely one of those things. So I think those feedback loops are great way to add like, a quantification strategy to it so that you can do that. I think it's super smart. I
Unknown Speaker 23:37
want to shift direction, though, so clarity, and the goal of seeking clarity, and all you do, it's kind of, it's like woven through everything that Zen violet does, which I think makes sense, right? It's very fitting. But how so like, it's within the kind of, like the actions that your your brand is taking, and like how you guys interact with your clients and at what you're teaching, how are you also weaving that through everything you're doing on the marketing side? It's
Unknown Speaker 24:07
an interesting question. So I think one part of it is definitely that we are, I mean, that that is a big part of the messaging itself, right? And again, this is the benefit of having a clear framework that's that you're sticking to, and it's set in stone that we always talk about the 135 formula. We always talk about the three keys. We always talk about clarity. It's kind of a guiding principle, in the sense of it creates an ideal that we also try to imprint, so to speak, in the audience's mind. And this is kind of the top of the mountain that we want to lead them to. So basically, it's like, you know, the goal, or the promised land, so to speak, that you want to lead them to. In that sense, it really helps the marketing because, and we have a defined this didn't happen overnight, right? But I think a lot of agencies could do that as well. Is to think about like, what is the end state that you want to lead your client?
Unknown Speaker 25:00
In towards and to be able to really visualize that, really have, you know, some enticing language to describe that. A tactic we've been using recently is we have, we have this Miro board that contains just a bunch of our intellectual property on there, and a section of that Miro board is all about clarity, and we divide it by five roles. It's individual contributors, project managers, account managers, leaderships and leadership and clients. And then for each of those roles, we actually show what clarity looks like. And in our case, it's rather easy, because what it boils down to is views within clickups. Or for the individual contributor, here's the My Tasks view, finally, clarity on what you need to do on a given day within your allotted eight hours, or however many of time. For account managers, you've got the client health view, etc, etc, not to go through all of them in detail, but, and we show that on almost all of our streams and webinars, just to show what is possible. That is what clarity does for us. And you know, in a sense, it's meta, because this also kind of creates clarity around the end state, if you know what I mean, right? When you make it so concrete, when you really show, don't tell, so to speak, that principle that we try to adhere that prompts some really good questions from the audience and some good reactions. Some of the of the questions that we love to get, of course, from a business standpoint, is I love this view. How can I get this view? Well, here's the product page for that. And you know, we can talk about how to make that happen, but it's a much easier conversation when you can just really tangibly show it right? This might be a better fit for some agencies versus others, but I think all of the agencies listening to this might benefit from thinking more about this, this end state. And of course, contrary to that, we talk about leading agencies from chaos to clarity. I probably won't be the first person, nor the last on this show to talk about having a strong brand villain, but that can really get people going where you talk about also, because you know you've got this brand villain, but you also need to think about like the symptoms that this villain is actually ruining your life. So on a recent webinar, what I did, for example, as the very first slide. That was a tactic that worked nicely. On the first slide, I showed like, 12 particular things that might be happening at your agency. So, for example, individual contributors don't know what what they should be doing on a given day, or leadership doesn't know capacity. Or, you know, you don't know your client, health. It was numbered one to 12, and the first question I asked before, before everybody even joined the webinar, instead of the usual, you know, warm up, type of question of like, what's your favorite type of sandwich? I've done it. It's fun. But this time I asked, you know, since you're first, you're here early, you can steer the conversation and steer the content. Which of those 12 Do you feel the most right now, you know you can pick a few, and that really helped us, you know, find the right language and to to identify. And it also makes follow up conversations easier, right? Because if they identify, I don't know the workload of my team. Here's a dedicated video of that, of that, you know, the email, the follow up emails, right themselves, so to speak, right? So, yeah, I hope that answers the question, because I went to a few places there. No that, just that one. That's a super smart tactic too, because they
Unknown Speaker 28:10
very infrequently. Do, Do your customers know what, what the problem actually is, what that core problem is, but they definitely know the symptoms, because they show up every day, and they feel those so being able to hit them right from the start there, my immediate thought is, like, this person gets me right, like they're literally they have a he has a list of 12 things that I'm feeling right now in front of us. He obviously has a solution. Let me stick around and listen.
Unknown Speaker 28:34
So, yeah, super powerful concept there, yeah, the mindset there is linear content can be used to diagnose the prospect, so to speak. And once you've got a more clear diagnosis, then you can prescribe, you know, better solutions. This can also help you filter people out who have a problem that you don't solve, right? But this, and I learned this from that episode, is not out yet, but it might be by the time this is out. I recently had the pressure pleasure of interviewing Jen Allen Knuth, she's running her her own thing called demand. Jen J E n right now. Super awesome conversation. And what she taught me was this whole concept of a problem hypothesis. You know, for every new contact, every new prospect you've got, you know, initially, you don't necessarily know what their problem is? Maybe they signed up for a webinar on a particular topic, but you don't know their exact symptoms. And I think one of the key roles of content that's being neglected right now is not just to get attention and to retain that attention, get people kind of involved with your brand, but also try to gradually identify, find out more and more about the people that are coming to your webinars, reading your content, give them something to click on, give them, you know, three, three options to choose from. So you can have, you know, richer data, and that makes outreach and a follow up after the content. If you're doing any outbound or like farming your list, so to speak, it makes it much easier to make these conversations much more relevant. Yeah, yeah. It's a good, uh, a lot.
Unknown Speaker 30:00
Of times you think about content as a way to like qualify disqualify, but I think I like the the idea of diagnosing within that content as well, so that really directs like their route.
Unknown Speaker 30:13
So speaking of other content, though, what are your thoughts around agencies having newsletters?
Unknown Speaker 30:20
I think having an email list continues to be a smart play. I don't know what would have to happen to not for that not to be a smart play right now, email still works differently to almost all the other platforms. You get your email still sequentially. You get all of your emails in your inbox. I mean, it depends on how you have it set up. Gmail, for example, by default, does some filtering. But if you send somebody an email, there's a good chance they'll see it. This is very much not guaranteed. When you're posting organically on social, notifications might fire off, might not fire off, even for people who are following you, they might hit the bell. And you know, theoretically, they should always get the notification when they hit the bell on your profile, but it's a very specific action. So I think kind of being able to have more certainty around the fact that your audience is going to get your content, that is a very strong reason to have a newsletter. And I don't see like if I were spinning up a new marketing operation. Now, I don't see how, okay, maybe, I mean, it depends heavily on the context, right, but especially for B to B, especially for longer sales cycles, you want to keep them in, you want to keep them close, and email is a great way to do that. I wouldn't say kind of ubiquitously every agency should have a newsletter, but I think every agency should consider one, and that's often going to be a yes, I
Unknown Speaker 31:46
think we should have had one when I was running an agency. We very rare, like, we had, you know, certain email sequences that would go out during certain events and stuff. Like, if you took an action, here's, here's a week's worth of emails around whatever topic, but then we'd really only hit people if we had something coming up that we wanted them to attend or purchase or do something. And so it was like we didn't have that constant like being in your inbox, letting you see us. I think a newsletter really could have shifted that. And let me just say, you know, there's different various ways to approach it, but if you're really pressed for time, I think it's okay to start off with, you know, a lot of maybe solopreneurs. You know, solo founders right now are committed to posting on LinkedIn, for example, four times per week or something like that. So you know whether you want to do a weekly newsletter or more frequently than that, just that post if it stands on its own, and it's not heavily dependent on like interaction or something that can be your newsletter, you know, or you've got a new podcast episode that can be your your newsletter too, just something that gets you in that inbox. This is, this is a lesson that was also difficult for me to learn, is that nobody pays as much attention to my channels as as I do, and people need to be reminded. And if they see the same content on my LinkedIn and in my email, the worst thing that's going to happen is they're they're going to think, Okay, I already saw this. I'm just going to read the next email. But the upside, you know, on the flip side of that, so to speak, is if the algorithm, for whatever reason, abandons them and they don't get my latest post, they will get it via email. If they get to the LinkedIn version of that, they'll get kind of reengaged with my account, and there's a good chance that they'll, they'll start getting organically these LinkedIn posts again. So this is another big advantage to having that, right? Yeah, and it's definitely, I mean, my my newsletter, I'm averaging like, probably 50 to 65% open rates, which, like, I cannot say the same for LinkedIn post, right? Some posts, it gives me a ton of impressions. Other times, like, it's not putting in front of anyone, and I don't know the rhyme or reason,
Unknown Speaker 33:57
but I can see, like, okay, are people like, I get responses back, right? People will reply and say, hey, great topic. Love this email. It's like, okay, I know that's something I need to explore further. Like, I'm getting very direct feedback from a place where you're not necessarily going to get feedback, but even the clicking of links, it's like, okay, they're clicking on this thing. How did I set it up? Like, what is it about this that's exciting them? Let me go try that on LinkedIn now and see what it does. And, yeah, I think newsletters probably under appreciated. And it takes, I mean, I wrote one, one that goes out tomorrow. I wrote it in 15 minutes last night, just like I had a thought I knew what I wanted to put down. And so I just started typing away. And it was like, boom, like, I got something right. Like, hopefully, it's, hopefully it's a good something, I guess the audience will let me know. But
Unknown Speaker 34:43
what's interesting is, like, you don't even when people start reading them and they realize who you are, and like, when you pop up in their inbox, I don't have, like, some crazy subject line for like, Hey, pay attention to me. It's just, it's literally dynamic agency OS newsletter, like, issue 10.
Unknown Speaker 35:00
You know, 20 whatever, and like, that's all they see for the subject line, and they're still clicking into it. And so it's like they know that they like, I know they want the content, which is, from an ego's perspective, awesome, or
Unknown Speaker 35:12
at least 50% of them want it. The other 50% I'm watching you, but, uh,
Unknown Speaker 35:17
but, yeah, that's, that's positive.
Unknown Speaker 35:21
So as we wind down here, I've got a
Unknown Speaker 35:27
couple questions for you. Well, first, where can, where can people hear about the both of your podcasts? More?
Unknown Speaker 35:36
Okay, so the situation with the podcast is we ran I reference agency breakthrough a couple times in this conversation that was like a limited run series,
Unknown Speaker 35:46
but you'll find both this and agency journey, our main podcast, which I now host, and that has a lot more episodes. You'll find that currently on the Zen pilot YouTube channel. And you can also look up agency journey on your favorite podcast platforms, just not on Google podcasts because that went away. I was a heavy user.
Unknown Speaker 36:06
I'm still I'm still sore about it. I had all my pods on there, but I heard that YouTube music is gonna handle that now.
Unknown Speaker 36:14
Yeah, yeah. I ask because I follow agency journey. I listen to most of your episodes, but I hadn't heard of agency breakthrough. So should I know about this one? But if it was a limited series, then I'm okay. Yeah, that one is now concluded. Although it did have some of my favorite conversations, I have to say we had Marcus Sherrod and we had James Carberry, Tiffany Sauder. That was when I ran solo, because the idea behind that was, like, gray and me were co hosts. But yeah, right now the focus is very much on agency journey as the as the main show, and we'll see how it goes. I want to experiment with different formats, etc, over there as well, so we'll see how it proceeds from there, which I was on agency journey, I think,
Unknown Speaker 36:55
two years ago, when I when I shifted, we did the handoff of Kevin barber and myself becoming CEO of the agency. And so we did an episode on on that with gray, and it was a, I mean, I'm personally fond of it, but
Unknown Speaker 37:09
seering is, yeah, it's been a while since you've been on the agency journey, huh? Oh yeah, you're, yeah, yeah, it has been a while. Maybe, maybe we should connect, talk about that
Unknown Speaker 37:20
enough for any agency owners who are looking at handing over kind of the CEO role to someone else, you know, there might be some insights you can pull from our conversation there.
Unknown Speaker 37:32
Okay, next, next one. What book you recommend every agency owner should read?
Unknown Speaker 37:38
Ah, I mean, there's a book that that I have personal experience with that I would recommend, and then there's also, and again, I guess, I guess that's the kind of main threadline of the conversation. The two books that I hear that reference to the most often within agency journey conversations are built to sell. And I think the second one is good to great. So those are classics, and I will admit, from my perspective, haven't read either of those yet. But if you haven't, then those come highly recommended, and there's like crowd wisdom behind them. Now, from my point of view, there's a few that I love. We were talking about leadership for leadership. There's this one, and I think if you haven't heard about this one, then then it's one that that you might love. It's called turn the ship around.
Unknown Speaker 38:21
I am not great at author names, but basically, the author was commander of a submarine, and I can't remember his name either. Exactly, exactly. I assume we'll put it in the show. Maybe not the Navy. So, okay, exactly. So I loved that one. It had, you know, a storytelling element to it. It it had a particular character, so it was much more immersive. Pun intended,
Unknown Speaker 38:47
submarine immersive. Anyway,
Unknown Speaker 38:50
one framework that I took from that book was the leader, leader framework, and the phrase I intend to that one really stuck with me, both as a manager and as an individual contributor, which I'm basically now am and Zen pilot. So the leader leader frameworks, basically you see your team members as leaders in their own area of expertise. And as leaders, they come to you not with questions or requests, but they come with plans, fully fledged plans, and that's what you should be calling them to do. So they should begin your their conversations with you. And not everyone right, but the main mode of thinking should be, I intend to do X about this problem. And what you do as a leader is you comment on the idea, you kind of critique their thinking. And in some cases, you'll just say that is not the direction that I want. I would prefer a different direction. But the kind of the default is the team member has the plan, not you as the leader, but the team member has the brand for their particular area of responsibility. That was very powerful, and that stuck with me. So that's turned the ship around and within the area of marketing. And I mean, that's that one is a classic, but I really like building a story brand. I referenced that knowledge.
Unknown Speaker 40:00
Various ways. I mean, we talked about brand villains even today, right? So if you haven't read that one, then that's a great framework to have. It's a really good, good way to have just, just one sheet that summarizes all of your your marketing. And I just like storytelling as a discipline in general. So that one really resonated with me. Awesome.
Unknown Speaker 40:19
Last question, Where can people learn? More of you,
Unknown Speaker 40:23
more of me? I'm on LinkedIn primarily so Jakub greitzar on LinkedIn, I am working on niching down myself in terms of my personal brand, but you find various types of advice on my profile. Some of it is going to be about agency operations, being a better agency owner. Through my work with Zen pilot, I share a lot about our content when I'm writing more, you know, within the vein of my own personal brand, and I share tips on marketing, tips on podcasting. I'm really and public speaking. I'm really passionate about that. Just today, I posted some tips on just how to run a good podcast interview. You know, the stuff that I've learned over the years, I also like to talk about productivity in general, and mindset. I like to know, I love to know what goes through people's heads as they achieve great, great things, how they keep themselves motivated, keep themselves going, keep themselves disciplined. So, you know, whenever I learn about something like that, I try to share it on my profile too, so you can find me there on LinkedIn. No email list yet, but if I have one, it'll definitely be plastered all over my LinkedIn profile. Too. Awesome. All right. Cuba, Thanks for Thanks for joining. Yeah, thanks, Chris. This is a great conversation.
Unknown Speaker 41:39
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