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We share our thoughts and ideas on how to grow a business.
We got an email from a pretty
well connected person in kind of
the startup world who introduced
us to a startup founder.
And they said, Hey, like we heard
really good things about you.
The founder did, but he
wanted something he wants.
This is an active thing.
Have you even hit reply?
We were working on it.
I just replied to the email, but why
don't you explain what he wants and
why we were kind of hesitant about
it the founder responded that they
were looking for someone to really
help them grow LinkedIn content.
It just led to this debate on whether this
is a service that we even want to offer,
and whether it's worth our time coming off
of our focus of just growing the agency.
With our core service and
testing out a service like this.
Okay.
So today we're going to talk about
this thing that a lot of service
businesses, agencies, and freelancers
go through, which is when to
reject business in order to focus.
And I want you to tell the story of what.
We're dealing with right now with
respect to that, we got an email from,
would you say, a semi, like a pretty
well connected person in kind of the
startup world who introduced us to a
startup founder and they said, hey we
heard really good things about you.
The founder did.
But he wanted something he wants.
This is an active thing.
We have you even hit reply?
We were working on it.
I just replied to the email, but
why don't you explain what he wants
and why we were hesitant about it?
Yeah the reply actually gave us the
whole idea for the video because.
Right before we hopped on this.
Yeah, I got an email back.
So basically when we get a lead,
we always qualify the person and
ask them a number of questions.
Just how many customers they have.
What are some of the
other questions we ask?
What are the, what's the main marketing
channel and then what's their goal.
And.
To the goal question the founder responded
that they were looking for someone to
really help them grow LinkedIn content
because they know that LinkedIn is
one of the main channels where they're
going to find growth for their company.
And so that just led to a debate.
Between Davis and I on
whether we can do this.
We have some experience doing LinkedIn.
So we produce content on people's
blogs and companies have repurposed
that content for LinkedIn, or
we've advertised blog posts on
LinkedIn to help with distribution.
But from the answer in the
email, it sounded like.
He wanted more of the ghost writing that
a lot of people are doing on LinkedIn.
So someone else coming up with ideas
or going through past posts or videos.
And I think his rating, I think
his language was telling is he
said something like we're looking
for someone to crack LinkedIn.
Like we want to crack LinkedIn
meaning that's what they want to do.
And he even said, we know you do a lot
of SEO, but we want to crack LinkedIn.
Yeah.
So it just led to a debate on if this
was a client that we wanted to do.
We just, we've been thinking a lot
about doing more stuff on LinkedIn.
We had someone that we hired as a
test contractor just to help us grow
our own personal brands on LinkedIn.
last month.
And it worked decently well,
but it just wasn't someone that
we ended up continuing with.
And it just led to this debate
on whether this is a service
that we even want to offer.
And it's whether it's worth our time
coming off of our focus of just growing
the agency with our core service
and testing out a service like this.
Hang on.
When you position it that way, it sounds
if I was listening, I'd be like, okay,
the way you positioned it, it's obviously,
no, it just sounds like a good direction.
Okay, fair.
So let me make the pitches or the
reasons why we would maybe want to
some, to do some, something with them.
And I think this is one of many problems
that this whole series is meant to
solve, which is these are the business
problems that like you run into when
you're trying to scale the business.
Like on the one hand so first things
first, here are the multiple reasons.
Number one, it's potential business.
And the whole goal of this is
to scale the business in two
years, double the business.
Every dollar helps, right?
Like that's like an argument.
And, but then there's
some more subtle ones.
I think it's important that this isn't
just a random lead in that it is.
Referred to us by someone who
we know is like well connected.
It's like somewhat of a personality
and like the startup circle.
So we certainly want more referrals.
The whole point of video number
one of this series was, or podcast
number one of this series, either
way you're listening, hit subscribe.
Just kidding.
I'm actually not kidding, but I am.
This is a.
Is that we want it to scale.
And and we want it to do this YouTube
slash podcast, like self case study thing
specifically as a top of funnel channel
to compliment our existing channels.
Another great compliment to
our existing channels would be.
People referring us nonstop.
And so there is that kind of motivation.
And then the last thing is content
brand, which we should update people on.
You can, if you're really curious, you
can, either pause or after listening
or watching this, you can Google like
content brand growing, convert and read
our posts, but maybe you can describe.
Yeah, it's a post we wrote what, like
maybe two months ago now that was meant to
compliment just our existing SEO services,
just forward thinking a little bit.
So there had been a lot of people,
I would say in the last couple
Six months that have been shitting
on SEO for lack of a better term.
They think that SEO is going away.
You need to produce other content if
you want to succeed in the future.
And so it was just a post.
To help, become part of that conversation
or just to have companies think
of us outside of just SEO content.
Because this is something that we do is
in the very beginning of an engagement,
we typically do something that we'd
like to call a disruption story.
I guess I don't need to share this.
Yeah.
Basically like we're damn good at it.
Like a lot of our service in order
to do the SEO pieces is that we
do extensive interviews with the
sales team, the founders, whoever.
is in charge of explaining and positioning
the product and the company in the market.
And we, what, how would you say it?
Distill their essence of their value prop,
what features and benefits are important.
They're differentiators,
they're competitive advantages.
And then we put that into our SEO pieces
and we use that to inform what keywords
we're going after our core service.
In addition, Benji saying
we do this disruption story,
which is a non SEO piece.
We don't do it for every account or
every client, but where it's appropriate.
We will often do it at the beginning and
use it to promote on social with, paid,
organic, whatever, in order to, I don't
know why do we do disruption stories?
Yeah.
Having tested out a
bunch of different ads.
In the past, so Twitter and LinkedIn,
what we noticed is when we were doing,
when we were promoting just the SEO
pieces that went off their keywords,
they didn't perform as well, but when we
promoted these disruption stories that
explain what the company is disrupting
in their industry or what they're
doing differently with a compelling
headline, those are really what
performed well on LinkedIn and Twitter.
And so what we were doing,
because SEO takes a while to start
getting rankings and results.
We were producing these as one of
the first pieces and then promoting
them both paid and organically on
some social channels to help drive
leads earlier on an engagement.
Yeah, so we figured people hire
content agencies or written
content agencies for more than SEO.
We're really good at it.
And people pay a lot for this kind
of ha, like consulting on value
prop messaging that kind of stuff.
And so we thought, like
we can play in that space.
We released that post.
I think there's a link to a
landing page that says there's.
Some, somewhat expensive
price one time or whatever.
And I'll let you tell the audience how
many leads we've gotten for that service.
We've gotten zero so far.
You've exactly, it, it doesn't mean that
the service isn't wanted or valuable,
but it was just something that we tested.
So I think this is what
you're talking about.
Yeah.
So there's, we even say,
how can you work with us on.
This there's two ways.
First is just our core service.
Again, we do this for a lot of
the clients that we work with.
And then the second was we're just
offering a one time standalone project
where we help figure out the core
messaging and core positioning of the
business and give you multiple pieces,
I believe, I don't even remember
what the, so let me bring us back.
So three reasons why there could be a
reason to find some way to work with this.
Referred lead, number
one, business is business.
You're trying to double the agency.
That's the goal.
Number two, you want to maintain a
good relationship with the person
who referred, cause they potentially
likely have a bunch more companies
that they could refer to you.
And a key detail is they likely
have a bunch more startups.
They can refer to you,
or maybe that's not true.
And then number three is we have a
service that's related to what someone
would need if they wanted to quote
unquote crack LinkedIn or do LinkedIn,
which is we have this service that
distills, the company's positioning
and in, in a long form written format.
And so you can see something that
could be transferred to LinkedIn posts.
So those are, and the
last thing would just be.
If it works, maybe it creates
some new revenue stream of a bunch
of people that want LinkedIn.
And again, in terms of like future
proofing the business, I don't know.
Now we have another service that's outside
of just that, the SEO service that we
offer could be the argument for doing it.
Okay.
So with that said, we
ultimately decided to say no.
And you can explain your reasoning.
I think you were, I was like
maybe, and you were like, I
don't want to deal with this.
Why didn't you want it?
Yeah.
Because we already have an existing
service that has demand for it,
and we know exactly what we need
operationally to fulfill that service.
And this is just a little bit outside the
scope, so we would need to hire someone.
I think on the writing side, we probably
have the resources that we need to do
that, but it's more than around posting
this, building an audience on LinkedIn.
There's just all these things
that we would need to figure
out what the deliverables are.
If we were to offer a LinkedIn service.
Hang on.
We were devil's advocate.
Why not have a growing convert content
strategist do the content brand
disruption story interviews, right?
Grow and convert level pieces and hire
some LinkedIn promotion consultant expert
on Upwork to do what you're saying.
We just tried to do that for
ourselves and it didn't work.
So I don't really want to do
it for a client on top of that.
Yeah, I think.
If we had a successful arrangement with
a contractor already where we were doing
this for ourself and we saw it working and
we could apply our learnings to a client,
I would be more willing to do this.
But having just gone through the whole
process of trying to hire someone to
do this, and I wouldn't say it failed.
I think we got more impressions and views
from our LinkedIn posts than we were
getting on our own posting on LinkedIn.
But I think what didn't work was just
all the back and forth and the editing
that we had to do on the post To get
them into I guess the right formatting
and just the quality standard that we
have yeah, like a LinkedIn post if you're
hiring someone to ghostwrite your LinkedIn
post as a founder that's what we did.
You have standards because it's
literally everyone in your network is
seeing it as your voice And so there's
a huge incentive to edit it to be
as close to your voice as possible.
So we were spending too much time editing.
So I think we just don't want to
do something like that because
it takes our focus away on
just growing our core service.
Again, we know exactly what we need
to do to deliver our core service.
And this is now going and firing or
going and hiring some new contractor,
figuring out the deliverables.
It's just, it takes too
much mindshare away from.
Another double tactic though, we hired
someone to take content we've already had,
like what we did when we tried LinkedIn
was we hired someone to say, look, we have
all of this content on our site already.
Can you turn that into like
cool, compelling LinkedIn posts?
And it took too much
editing of us for that.
And what we're saying here is that
we could have one of our existing
strategists that perhaps I could argue
would, be able to get it closer to
right on the first attempt on a LinkedIn
post because their job so far, like
what we filtered, people for, to our
awesome team that we have now is these
strategists are really good at taking.
A value prop or whatever, and
turning it into a full article.
So they could certainly do
like a summary on LinkedIn.
That would be another devil's advocate.
I have my comebacks to that.
Yeah.
But I think the core thing is
just, we haven't done it for
ourselves and proven it out.
And if we were going to do this, I
think we would need to do that first.
Again, pain point SEO, when we created
it, we had data that proved this worked
and we already had a process around it.
A lot of the other frameworks
that we released, same thing.
We've tested stuff either on ourselves
or clients and found out that it worked.
And then we created
something around it here.
It's just too much of
a risk at this stage.
Again, we've done some minor tests.
I believe in LinkedIn as a
channel, a hundred percent.
It's just not our strength and our
skill set really at this point.
Yeah, things that I could see going
wrong, even if we use one of our like
best strategists on it, is one the level
of editing that a founder is going to
want to do on his own LinkedIn posts, in
this case it's a he versus an SEO post
ranking for best blah blah blah software.
It's just like next level, right?
And this particular business is
something where there's probably
like a lot of opinionated takes that
have to be said, really carefully.
And there's a lot of nuanced
statements or whatever.
So it's going to be, we can
already tell it's going to be
a massive editing bottleneck.
It's not as easy to
just be like, okay yeah.
The agency does it.
Like when we have client, like our
best clients that really trust us,
editing goes really smoothly after
a while, because at that point.
They know these things are working,
like just let these people do their job.
That's going to be
harder to do on LinkedIn.
And then the other thing we haven't talked
about that I want you to talk about is,
or we, before we hit the record button, we
talked about the whole like churn issue.
And how we don't think this fits at all.
Yeah I think this is a a couple of things.
So one, they're at an earlier
stage than most of the clients
that we would take now.
So that's a risk.
But then the other thing is someone
in this mindset, just trying to test
something out is definitely more
likely to churn than someone who's
already bought into content who's
looking to do this for the long term.
And so just the language
in the email and you.
Someone trying to grow their audience
and just the way that a startup person
is thinking about this at this stage
is just probably not a good fit for us.
Because even if we were to find the
resources to do this, chances are they
could turn in three to four months
anyways, if it wasn't getting the results
that they wanted, or I don't know.
Yeah.
I just don't think it's worth it.
You got to watch our churn
episode if you haven't already.
And, but in short we discovered
in that episode to make the
numbers work and be able to double
the business in two years, i.
e.
ideally add something
like 10 clients this year.
If we don't fix our churn, which is
the average client lifespan being
12 months, if we don't up that, we
have to basically add 30 new clients.
To make this work, right?
That's insane.
Whereas if the average one was like
24 months, I forget the numbers, but
it's dramatically less so 24 months.
That's hard as it is on our SEO
service, which we know works.
And we have multiple clients
at 36 months at 60 months.
We have one at 60 months.
I think we have another
40 something across that.
So three years, four years, five years.
Ain't no one hiring a LinkedIn
ghostwriter for two years.
Are you kidding me?
Have you heard of anyone ever doing that?
That's just not a thing.
And so we learned in that episode that
all revenue is not created equally.
And just some revenue that lasts for
even six months if we work with them
and you, and someone kept a, and
we're not going to be cheap, right?
So someone kept a high paid.
LinkedIn ghostwriting agency
for eight or 10 months.
I think that would be successful
from the LinkedIn agency standpoint.
And that would literally be less
than it would be pulling our
average client lifespan down when
we want to basically double it.
So that's just, it doesn't make any sense.
To do that in that respect that when we
talked through that's what convinced me.
I was like, Oh, yeah this is what
we're learning from that churn episode.
We have a bit.
We are at that stage where
we have a very specific goal.
And I tell there's a lot of people
in our course and community or just
like that email us or that we're
in social media comments with.
That ask about, these
kinds of business problems.
As per why we made this whole series,
and they're often at an earlier stage,
they're at probably a pretty early
stage and they're like, I have this
client and someone's asking this, my
opinion, when you're first starting
out freelancer, getting clients,
going off on your own, starting an
agency, you should probably be very
careful about not saying no to revenue.
I know some people disagree, but like you
need the cashflow coming through the door.
You need the clients.
Because you just want to
make sure you have money.
This definitely feels, to me,
that we are not at that stage.
We have graduated from that stage.
We're not.
We haven't defined service.
Yeah, at that stage, you're
just trying to figure out what
service offering will work.
And what you're good at.
And you're still modifying
your service offering.
And I just don't think we're
at that stage right now.
We're at the point where we have
a really good service offering.
That we want to get out the word to more
people and just keep focusing on that.
We don't need to keep
adding new revenue streams.
And if listening, you're
like so what's the cutoff?
How do I know when I've graduated to that?
Look like I don't have a scientific
answer, my gut instinct or my answers
are, we have a seven figure business
revenue wise, and then we have multiple
clients that have stuck with us for years.
So we know that there is that product
market fit in terms of multiple clients
at two, three, four, and five years.
So we know our, and then we've done
the math and been like, Oh God, we
need to get more of those clients.
So that's that needs to be
our focus at this point.
We know we can, and we can
also, we also know we can take
on Rando McRando startups.
On our normal SEO service that
can last three months or something
like that and then move on.
And we don't even want to do that.
So we definitely don't want to do
the equivalent of that on LinkedIn.
That's going to take
a lot more time to do.
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