Agency Forward

On today's episode, I'm joined by Peter Caputa.

Pete has a wealth of knowledge in the agency space. He’s a former agency owner, former VP of Sales at HubSpot, where he also kicked off the partner program as it is today. Pete’s currently the CEO of Databox and is consistently co-marketing with agencies.

He’s a great mentor and I’d strongly encourage everyone to follow his prolific publishing on LinkedIn.

On this episode we discuss:
  • Strategic Advantages for Specialized Agencies
  • Collaborative Growth via Partner Programs
  • Leveraging Benchmark Data in Agency Strategies
  • and more...


Today’s episode is brought to you by ZenPilot.

Join the AI in Agency Operations Roundtable, Thursday, April 25 by signing up at ZenPilot.com/Roundtable.



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What is Agency Forward?

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.

Chris DuBois 0:00
Hey everyone. Today I am joined by Mr. Peter Caputa. Pete has a wealth of knowledge in the agency space. He's a former agency owner, former VP of sales at HubSpot, where he also kicked off the partner program as it is today. Pete is currently the CEO of data box and is consistently co marketing with agencies. He's a great mentor and I would strongly encourage everyone to follow his prolific publishing on LinkedIn. On this episode, we discussed strategic advantages for specialized agencies, collaborative growth via partner programs, leveraging benchmark data in agency strategies, and more. Today's episode is brought to you by Zen pilot. Check it out. The AI agency paradox is real. You need AI to stay competitive, but over reliance makes you replaceable. Do you want to see the strategies that agencies are using to stay ahead of the challenge? Well, Zen pilot is hosting an AI in agency operations roundtable this Thursday, April 25, you get to hear use cases and practical advice from multiple presenters. Because let's face it, the game's changing. What worked yesterday might not work tomorrow. So join the free event at Zen pilot.com/roundtable. All right. Now let's get into the episode with Mr. Pete kupuna. 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.

So you blew up HubSpot like partner program from the start. And what I think is the most interesting about that is there was pushback from other people. So it seemed I wasn't part of this decision process. But it would seem there was some pushback that, hey, maybe this isn't the direction to go. But I feel like you saw something there to the future with agencies and this partnership and collaborative growth and all this. You saw this then. And obviously it panned out. What are you seeing right now that other people still aren't seeing? Wow, I

Peter Caputa 2:13
didn't expect the question to go that way. So what am I loading now that other people aren't seeing like other software companies are related to agencies? Or partner programs? Sure. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, just to be clear, I didn't blow it up. I started it. And I built it up to a little over 100 million in annual revenue for HubSpot, and then close to a billion dollars in services revenue for 1000s of agencies. So very proud of that blow it up in a good way. Yeah, very proud of that right time. Certainly right place. You got lucky to join HubSpot early on and I had the right background to spot the opportunity and the right skills and to get it going and permission to go and do it. Yeah, very grateful for that opportunity. What am I seeing now that others aren't seeing, I think having the benefit of 20 plus years of being in the marketing technology, marketing services, space, and seeing evolutions occur, what I the lens that I look at it through is I think a lot longer than most, there's a lot of agencies that get shut down and get started every year. So go back 20 years, and guess there's a lot that went out of business. And there's many that have formed most probably most small agencies formed since then. And I think agency owners tend to jump on a trend or a bandwagon. And if they do that at the right time, it works out just fine. Right, the partners at HubSpot, they got involved in 2009 when ruffler started building out the program and stuck with that they did well I know many of them are retired at this point with lots of money in the bank, they've built in many of them, Bill 510 20. I know some that are 30 $50 million agencies that started in started in in their kitchens, or dining rooms or wherever. So if you hit so if you hit it at the right time and jump on it, and you're not run a business and you're smart about it, you can hit it, but there's many people that jump on too late and don't have all the right things figured out and struggle. I also know a lot of agencies that have been doing it for 15 years and their business is a million or 2 million bucks a year and in revenue. So like they're making a living, but it's been a job for a decade, they probably could have done better going and getting a job working for someone else with a bigger better vision. So that's what I see. I see that happening now with Reb ops, and I get a big bold and saying that will happen there because everybody that's doing Reb ops right now is loving it and doing great, but there's people getting into it too late. They're not going to be as good and they're just not going to drive it. It's happening. Now, with people jumping in and saying, I'm going to help companies with their LinkedIn publishing, that's a service, that's not that hard. And there's going to be 1000s of people doing that. And so that's what I see. And so therefore, I see that agencies making the same mistake over and over relying on the market or other people to define who they help, what they help them with, and, and and how they're different from other agencies. And they really need to flip it the agencies that are most successful over that 20 years period of me observing and knowing many of them and intimate levels, is, are the ones that start with how can I be different? How can I do something different? And how can I do that for a different group of companies that other people aren't serving as well, or as in such a focused way. And so that would be the thing that I see over and over again, it almost pains me to the point where like, I'm so frustrated by it, like I have, sometimes, I have conversation with somebody about this, and they want to fight me on it. And I'm like, I just am not interested in the fight anymore. But it is the biggest problem I see. So

Chris DuBois 6:18
as we're looking at companies jumping on trends, and stuff, too. And yeah, you are seeing it like with, especially with LinkedIn, right now, a lot of social media agencies just popping up what happens when that trend is now completely disrupted by technology. And so when you're providing this tactical level work, because it's something that really isn't that hard, if you just put some time into it,

Speaker 1 6:41
yeah, I'm a big where LinkedIn, I drive a funnel to our business through LinkedIn. It works, it absolutely works. And you can maybe get started doing that. And now would be the time to start doing that. But I just, it's not defensible. If that's who you are. If you're like I help executives, do thought leadership on LinkedIn, there's gonna be a million people that can do that. And it's not that much different than any other content marketing channel. There's differences to it. But it's not that hard to figure out.

Chris DuBois 7:06
Right, which is probably the same for a lot of things that agencies are just doing in general, right now, where they're focused a lot on tactical deliverables, instead of the strategic and oversight the things that you can provide by being, like seeing these problems over and over where a brand might only see it once. But that agency now gets to see it five times within that month. I guess, how are you? What do you recommend agencies do to spot those? Those strategic, like footholds? I guess, if

Speaker 1 7:35
you're gonna do something, get in early, be the first 100 to do it. Like if you could spot that spot for it, go for it, you got to go on. So I it's not that I say don't go on trends, what I think are don't pay attention to trends, like you got, you have to pay attention to the way the world is moving and adapt your plan and your service offerings. Yeah, it's marketing. I think the mistake is that they're focused on doing those things. For too many people. The right way to think about it is to really narrow down who your market is David Baker, ABC Baker has written about this more than I have in he been preaching this longer than I have. And I forget the exact numbers, but I think he says something like, have two to 200 competitors in a market of two to 10,000 prospects. So imagine you have two, three competitors. But there's 3000 companies you could help. There's no way that the typical marketing agency, especially small ones, under 10 2050, people are going to be able to serve 1000 companies. And so you will never have a problem getting clients. On the flip side, you will shrink your competition to three people to other people. Instead of now, most agencies, their competition is like 50,000 other agencies, because they try to do everything for everybody. So the first thing is pick somebody you're going to focus on. Most agencies really resist this advice, because they get most of their business through referrals and word of mouth. And so the last thing they want to happen is somebody that did not refer them, because they changed their homepage to serve another industry, right? And so the only way to get over that is to have a method or a proactive way of marketing and selling your services to a specific market. And I'm not saying to agencies go I don't say because I tried this many times, and it's never, they'll never do it. I don't say Go change your homepage. Eliminate things that aren't limited case studies outside your mark and I don't say strip away what I say is launch a page for that industry. Start writing some content, do some research on that content, publish that research and that will help you to start building that audience proactively building that list of prospects engaging that list of prospects, while you continue to take those referrals and word of mouth that's happening maybe from your broader client base or your more diverse client base.

Chris DuBois 10:14
Right? Yeah, it's definitely a reservation, even one of the agencies I worked with, or them currently working with, we're talking this couple of weeks ago, where it's you. I asked them who could you best serve. And they gave me an industry that was like, I'd never heard of it. And it was, I don't want to put it out there now. But, but it was like, unheard of. There's a decent nice, Tam, but nobody else is specializing in this. And they literally have people on their team who can do it. And I'm like, we don't need to change the homepage, right. Now. Let's get a landing page up that can smoke test this and see if these get in front of these people. See if it works. And now you can slowly start to get the proof. Yeah, I think there you do have a lot of these, these companies that just want to be everything to everyone. And they ended up watering everything down in the process. Exactly.

Speaker 1 10:57
It's just it's, there's a handful, I run a SaaS business as a software business, there are a handful of people who agency owners or agencies that focus exclusively on SAS, I can tell you their names. I know that I don't know them personally. But I follow them, I follow what they say, if I'm going to hire an agency, I'm going to one of them. I'm not going to hire an agency, that's general, I don't believe in this bullshit that like, oh, you learn something, you did something for your manufacturing client. And that can be applied to my business as a software subscription business. Like, that's bullshit, excuse my language. I want my business intimately because I got a spreadsheet that models my business, and I need them to know that before I show it to him, because otherwise they can't tell me where I should invest my marketing dollars, they can't tell me what things will actually get me the most growth next. And if you don't, if you're not focused on SAS, you're not going to understand all of the revenue flows, all this unit economics, and all that to be able to help me advise me on my strategy.

Chris DuBois 12:01
No, and that's a great exam. So even with my own, like framing, like I have a specific problem that I work towards, but now I'm adding the lens of maybe I should only do this for b2b SaaS agencies, like they're helping us because that's where my background, so I know where my results come in, specifically for that, and I can now get someone to win much faster. And so yes, I can go help you if you're in healthcare, like you're marketing for healthcare companies, or whoever else, real estate, whatever. But it's not going to be as quick of a win. And I'm not pulling out industry knowledge and connecting you with the right people. Right, because that expertise does matter, man, let's shift gears a bit. And because I want to talk just collaborative growth. So something I know you're very passionate about

Speaker 1 12:43
my forthcoming book that have paused right now, but yes, I got it half right.

Chris DuBois 12:49
And you've had How long have you had the your Kobo group? Oh, yeah, I've

Speaker 1 12:54
been I've had a group for 15 years called collaborative growth. Yeah, co grow. I call it for sure. It's, it's a group of marketing agency owners we meet almost every Friday. Lately, it's not been every Friday because there's just been too busy with other stuff. But I either have a guest speaker come in or are all speak or when our members will speak. But the concept for collaborative growth is that any company can grow faster and more profitably, by building a partner program. Whether you're a software company, whether you're a training and education company, whether you're a manufacturing company, like you can go to market faster if you have built a methodology and you're training your partners to be able to go and execute on that. And so that's what I did at HubSpot, that's what we're doing data box. I've advised a bunch of other software companies to do the same. I think there's a lot of other methodology companies out there that either help companies with how to run their business or how to do certain types of marketing or how to sell better and so those the concept of collaborative growth is like helping companies build those partner programs and then engage people that come in and learn their methodology and go out and evangelize market sell service clients around them. Yeah, one

Chris DuBois 14:17
of the quotes that I'm very much a fan of is that the more people who want you to be successful the more successful you can be yes. And I was really leaned into that with my I was doing it in the army unknowingly

Unknown Speaker 14:32
necessary part of

Chris DuBois 14:33
please watch my back Yeah, exactly. But then even coming into the business world and stuff realizing how much faster you can do everything when you have the right people just aligned with you because they want to see you successful you want to see them successful. Yeah, it's good. I

Speaker 1 14:48
got a call this morning. A message actually from two of like my closest, like people I respect immensely, who I've worked with in the past but never together. Like I'd be the advice I use them or I've referred them or whatever. And, and they basically said, Hey, we want to do this thing together. And I get on a call, I'm like, a little skeptical. And they're like, and I asked for questions. I'm like, wow, you've thought of absolutely everything. And you've already aligned this with exactly what I'm doing, that I don't even think I would even talk about, because that person knows everything so well about what we're doing. And they are able to come up with together without me, like this proposal, and I had a five minute call. And now we're off and running. And we're going to be basically doing some amazing things together now build each other's business. And so the more that people have this mindset of, you're saying that if I can help other be successful people be successful, I know I will be successful, then the easier this becomes because I've been have had that mindset that givers gain mentality for most of my career. And the more you do it with people, the more they want to be working with you. And one of the people, for example, that's in that little those group of two that came up with his idea. I've collaborated with him, and he's with him in four different companies, like he's been in four different companies. So for better part of 12 years, I think, at this point, and it's just the more you do that, the more you have mutual wins, the more people just want to keep working with you. So, so much easier than cold calling for your new business or sitting there trying to get your search engine traffic up. If you just keep building these mutually beneficial relationships. They will want to keep working with you.

Chris DuBois 16:37
One Yeah, actually, let's take that back to what we were talking earlier. So for I think WordStream study for last year said that agency clients are currently at 60% are coming in from referrals. Right? It's 14% coming in from marketing efforts. That's a pretty substantial difference. Yeah, right. Knowing that, like one, your biggest kind of attractor of prospects is from a source you really don't have actual control over right? Unless you make a really good impression on someone and even then they might not have someone to send you. Yeah, you're just hoping for it right. And

Speaker 1 17:09
most likely, a good portion of what they think is marketing is actually word of mouth. Just that somebody randomly goes to Google and searches for that, or finally looks them up on social and connects with them. They're like, so yeah, like, yeah, oh, this is really based on word of mouth. Everything else is just a little tactic that kind of reminds people, you exist, and they should move into.

Chris DuBois 17:36
But so going back, if you're a super generalized agency, the ability for someone to refer you because you're probably not top of mind. But when someone comes in and says, Hey, I need to find a company that solves this very specific problem. Do you know anyone? Right? Yeah, that person is immediately going to think of you and send you that referral. Because you that's what you do. It's like you're in that nice little tightly packaged box. Just crazy. There's I

Speaker 1 18:03
can only store in my so I know lots of agency owners. I'm sure you do too. But I can't store more information in my head about what makes them unique. Beyond a few things, right. But if I'm talking to a lawyer, and they're like, hey, we need to improve our marketing. I'm going to introduce guy Alvarez from good to be social, because I've started my head that he works with law firms, right? I happen to be walking talking to somebody that owns a mental health and behavioral health clinic. I'm gonna refer them to Jennifer Christian for beacon media marketing. And I have a list of people like that, that are focused in on markets. Now somebody says to me, Hey, could you tell me a HubSpot partner that I should work with? Do you know what I do? I have, like 15 questions. Now I know hundreds of them, I probably know 40 or 50 of them pretty well. But still, the first thing I ask is what's your industry and then some of those HubSpot partners, at least have 30% of their customers in a in an industry in which case I'll refer them assuming there's a one that isn't completely focused in on that industry. So like, you got to make it easy for people to refer you. And the way to do that is to have a smaller market, believe it or not.

Chris DuBois 19:19
Yeah, that's a partner enablement is huge, because like my reaction to what he just said was, I'm just gonna give you a link to the HubSpot directory. What

Speaker 1 19:26
I often do if I can't, or I'll give him a list of five seems like the right thing to do. But that sucks for that agency. Now they're in a bake off with three other agencies. And they're they're compete on price, but exactly,

Chris DuBois 19:38
they could have been completely resolved earlier. And I think the you have your ICP, right, every company has their ICP. Do you have your ideal partner profile as well for Who should I be syncing up with to be able to work some of these referrals and stuff like that and I think if you can nail that down, and you coupled with them, knowing your ICP this, you can blow up your referral base really cool. Rick? Yes,

Speaker 1 20:01
yeah, no I, so I interviewed the woman, a woman I mentioned a minute ago, Jennifer Christian, she's a co founder of, of bigger media marketing. And they only work with behavioral and mental health clinics, not only but 80% of their client base. And they there's a conference, believe it or not for Mark, for marketing, and mental and behavioral health clinics. So the owners of these clinics fly in and go to this conference and talk about marketing for few days. Clearly, it's a perfect place for them to work. So they, no other agency would make this make sense to go and try to cozy up with them, at least not at the level that beacon to Beacon basically said, hey, we'll sponsor you the event, and will help promote your event. Right? And of course, the event organizers like That's amazing. Yeah, let's do it. So a year later, they're like, Hey, would you like to speak? Oh, yeah, we have this data about mental and how mental and health, mental health and behavioral health clinics should mark it online. We did this survey. And we have this benchmark data to show them what the typical performance is on Facebook and Google ads. Maybe that would make a good keynote presentation for presentation. Oh, yeah, let's put you a keynote day one. And so by focusing that allow them to then gather that data that no one else has made it easy for them to to cozy up to this event organizer. And all of a sudden, they are the experts at a conference in front of hundreds of Perfect Fit customers and clients for them.

Chris DuBois 21:28
So yeah, that's a good segue to get into a benchmark groups. All right, let's do it. Because I'm curious about two things. One, how are you working with these agencies and stuff to be able and just businesses in general like to be able to leverage the benchmark data? But then I'm also curious, like you've gotten, you've done some benchmark groups with a lot of agencies. That's like the primary kind of thing. And I'm sure you're seeing some data there. That's pretty insightful, just for what's coming in the future.

Speaker 1 21:57
For sure. Yes. Just maybe explain. Explain the idea a little there. Yeah. A benchmark is a way of helping somebody determine how they compare to a population in an anonymous way. And so a population of companies or people like them, right, and what we've done is we've built software that plugs into hundreds of other tools like Google Analytics, and Google ads, and Facebook and HubSpot, and et cetera, et cetera, and pulls the performance data out automatically. And then allows that company to then compare themselves to companies like them. So it could be companies of certain size companies in a certain industry companies of a certain type, like SAS software company versus an E commerce company. And then they can see that for whatever tools they connect, so if they connect their Google Analytics, or Google ads, or Facebook ads, or Tik Tok, ads, their HubSpot, or whatever, then they can see how they compare against a group of companies. And honestly, performance wise, we also have built integration with surveys so that not only can companies compare how their businesses performing, but also how their business processes and practices and outlooks are comparing, again, anonymously, they can see how their answers compared to the group anonymously. So what it does is it allows companies to answer that question like, how are we doing? How are we doing compared to other people like us? It's a foreign concept to a lot of people. So what we did is, and the more specific that comparison is, the more helpful it is. And so we did is we went to agencies and said, Hey, partner with us, on building this benchmark community, you'll be able to create a group or a study within the bigger hole of the bigger piece of of the study, and study just your market. So for example, the beacon media marketing, who focuses in on behavioral and mental health clinics for good to be social, who focuses in only working with larger law firms. They basically built this group, they can add their clients to it or invite their clients to it. And now they have a benchmark group that they validated, includes only companies in their market. So became literally has 100, mental health behavioral health clinics in their benchmark group. And so they can go to any one of those 100 Mental Health behavioral health clinics, and say, Here's how your Facebook ads and your Google ads are performing against this group of other 99 companies. And so they can see things like your cost per clicks a little too high. Your cost per lead is a little too too high of your budget is lower than everybody else's, things like that. And so they use this to spot issues and opportunities to help their each client improve. But they can then also go and share some of that data publicly, or offer access to that data to a prospect and pull people into them to continue to work with them because they're the literally the only ones in the world with that. data access to that data like I would not be able to get if I spent the next year on it 100 behavioral and mental health clinics into a benchmark. They don't know who I am. But I don't work with any of them. Who are they to trust me, but they already have that bill. And so it's a massive asset for them to use in their client service delivery, their marketing and their sales.

Chris DuBois 25:21
Definitely a great conversation starter. Yes. Like yes. Would

Speaker 1 25:24
you like to know how to market advertising expenses, and results are compared to companies exactly like yours?

Chris DuBois 25:37
Right. But So in regards to what you're seeing from some of these agency benchmark groups?

What are some of those more fascinating finds that are,

Speaker 1 25:51
I don't look at their data necessarily. I do have my own group that I run that's exclusively just HubSpot partners. And I'm tracking everything from like website traffic down to deals closed one. I haven't looked at it a month or two, you're honest. But I over time, it will pick up different insights. For example, I see that the agencies that are still in the offering Mr. Marketing Services are not doing as well as the companies that are offering DevOps CRM implementation, like we talked about, it's trendy right now, I can see that companies that have done a lot of content marketing have relatively low engagement of their content, versus companies that are doing more of the CRM implantation, I can see that the companies that are doing both are doing really well. They're closing a higher volume of deals and also bigger and bigger deals. So I can start to make these conclusions around the strategy. We're also running a survey of just social partners. It has 40 questions, we actually co design the survey with like 20, other household partner 20, HubSpot partners that wanted to know the answers from their peers. And so I can see things that I can see the habits of the top performing companies in there such as they're spending time building relationships with those sales team, they are offering a certain set of services over others. They have specific accreditations from HubSpot that HubSpot offers. So all things that maybe they would have thought were true. But now there's data to say, here's what the top performing companies are doing.

Chris DuBois 27:19
Validate everything. Yeah. Right. All right. Shift gears to essentially the last topic for today. I want to get into how you're looking at performance management, and recommending that to agencies as another service offering. Yeah,

Speaker 1 27:35
I came up with this term the other day called the tacticians trap. I think most marketing agencies fall into this tactician trap, they actually like almost design their business to be so that they fall into it. Where they're, they're picking that trend, right. They're picking rev ops to beginning inbound marketing years ago, they're picking SEO, they're picking, paid ad management, whatever. They're letting someone else to find that market, that phrase, so that they can be findable. So I get why they do it. But what happens is, they just end up becoming the Facebook ads experts, they just end up becoming the implementation people, they become known as the blogging people, right, like doing inbound marketing and landing pages. So they get relegated very quickly to doing one thing. And there's a whole new whole different world of people like me, sea level clients of theirs, that are not wrestling with how do I do paid ads? Or how do I do? blogging? I don't have to know that. But I know that I can hire someone to do that. And I check that off the box. But what I have struggled with is who should I sell to? What should I sell them? How do I differentiate my product? And then once I have that figured out is am I getting the most out of my investments or not. And that's where I think marketing agencies, especially the ones that are a little more analytical, a little more technical, or even rubs off DevOps agencies that are always tactical, can come in and offer a higher level of strategic service where they're helping with that initial strategy. Of course, they're still going to do the blogging and the Facebook as management and CRM implementation. But the more important thing that they're doing, is having ongoing conversations and driving strategic performance management in their company. So they're sitting down at least once a year, and say, Hey, what are your targets for the year? What are you doing to get there? Here are our suggestions based on what we're seeing based on benchmarks that we have, maybe they're sitting down, or they're building out a model that helps them and helps the client understand that they invested here. This is what they should expect. And this is how that should flow through into revenue so they can because they're helping their clients understanding the leading activities and leading indicators that ultimately result in lagging or lagging outcomes, which is what people most people want, which is prep. New growth and profitability improvements. As they're having that conversation, then they're setting up an infrastructure to measure that, whether that's the work they're doing, like the blogging and paid ads, or it's work that the client might be doing, such as their sales team doing their service team doing, or maybe they have some in house marketers are doing some things. But they're setting up the entire management tracking, so that you're able to track the work that's being done and the impact of that work, and reviewing that on a regular basis to make sure that they're actually hitting the goals. Review that on a regular basis to see are they trending or forecasting in the right direction? Monitor all that performance to see oh, did something not happen this week that was supposed to happen? Did for some reason we blow our ad budget out because the CPC spiked, or for some reason, do we generate a lot of leads, but the sales team is too busy to call them and therefore we just wasted all that ad budget. So they're monitoring for those things and reporting that out on an ongoing real time basis. And that on a monthly basis, they're sitting down and saying, Hey, we missed here, we overperformed here. Here's what here's what we're training for next month, this is what we should maybe tweak, maybe move a little resources over here to here. And then on a quarterly basis, they're sitting down with all that and saying, here's what we did for the quarter we missed here. We didn't, we did well, here. We're not doing this yet. And we think this can have an impact, and making those strategic decisions on the things that they should be executing in the following quarter, in order to get closer to those annual targets. And of course, that three and five year vision that they might have, I think there's a massive opportunity for professional services firms to jump in and do that work. Because companies I can see from our own vantage point of lot 1000s and 1000s of companies using our product that most companies really struggle with that, frankly, we've struggled with it, I've been running this business for seven years, I still don't think I haven't perfected and we're good at it, we're way better than the rest, but then the majority, but it takes its hard work. But it gets those professional services firms in the driver's seat to the point where no one's ever going to come along and say, I think we should change on our Facebook ads people or I think we need a new CRM, Reb ops, company, whatever, right there. If you're in there driving the strategy and ensuring that the strategy gets executed to the outcome desired. You're not going anywhere. So I think that's the opportunity really, for agencies, golf.

Chris DuBois 32:18
I think what's most interesting is that, yeah, it gets them out of that tactical piece. But it also shifts them from being just a vendor, to being a partner, where if an ally, I'm relying on you for helping me actually make those decisions within my business, for the direction that we need to go, like you are a much more critical part of this team. Right. And so the odds of me keeping you around are gonna go up, assuming you're not leading us to that decisions. Absolutely. That's awesome. A lot of a lot of great conversation here. I want to hit you with two final questions. One being, what is a book that you would recommend to every agency owner,

Speaker 1 32:53
a book that I would recommend every agency on? Oh, that's easy. David C. Baker's book. I have one right here. I don't know if you'll show this on video. But secret tradecraft of elite advisors. And if you've ever read it,

Chris DuBois 33:10
yep. And because of actually, I think you recommended it to Becca might not have been directly to me, but I'm gonna assume you

Speaker 1 33:16
did somehow. Yeah, he's written two books, I highly recommend this one is the easiest one to start with. And it's the most actionable. The other one's a little thicker. It's called the business of expertise. The one the reason I love this is you could read one, three pages and get something out of it. And then it's a really easy read.

Chris DuBois 33:32
Right? Awesome. All right. Last question, where people want to hear more from you, where can they find you? If

Speaker 1 33:37
they follow me on LinkedIn, they might hear too much from me. But that's where I'm spending all my time is posting on LinkedIn. I, despite me saying that I don't think you should start an agency just around that, or at least, if you're gonna do it soon. Don't do it two years from now. It is I think it's the best b2b marketing channel. By far as the CEO of a company, I post regularly. So clearly, my time is valuable. There's a lot of things I could be doing. But posting there, literally once a day, at least, helps us do so many things helps me fill the top of our funnel, recruit partners helps me stay engaged with our customers and partners, helps me nurture prospects and educate customers like it literally does a full lifecycle of marketing on there, just by posting regularly and engaging with people. They're

Chris DuBois 34:26
awesome. All right, Pete, thanks for Thanks for joining.

Unknown Speaker 34:31
Yeah, thanks, Chris. It's always fun to catch up.

Chris DuBois 34:38
That's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review or you can do something that benefits you. Click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on substantive, you'll get weekly content, resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai