In this episode, we're going to take you behind the scenes of the agency. We're going to talk about what we're building, why we're building it, where we are, where we're going, and how that might be of some value to you.

I think you'll find it interesting to see how we're starting a brand new agency from scratch, as well as all the different tools, technology, processes and procedures, and things that we're implementing to help clients. And then you'll also see what it looks like to just get a new venture off the ground in this business world - in this online business space that we talk about quite a bit here.

So that's something that I tried for awhile, and in failing a few times, it really led me to discover that there was a gap in the marketplace that maybe we could potentially fill that would be a win win situation for both myself and you know, the clients or the audience that I might serve.

That's really where I started to discover this expert business model that we've talked about a lot on the show and this gap in the market of somebody that was going to do done for you services to help people be successful in growing either their career or the business that they want to build around their expertise in other way that we've been talking about some of these challenges recently is an analogy of building a personal marketing team and technology team for the individual.

So what I mean by that is as a few have been exposed to any of the corporate leaders in the companies that you work for, a lot of them have a dedicated marketing team just to do, build and market the brand of the leader or the CEO of that company.

Mentioned in this episode:

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In this episode,

we're going to go behind the scenes of the expert business agency.

I've spent the last 20 years as a top performer in some of the largest

technology and consulting companies in the world.

Now I'm helping technical professionals like you dramatically accelerate your

career by cultivating an expert personal brand and building a business around

your expertise. The real question is this,

how can we pull forward raises and promotions or build six, seven,

or even eight figure expert businesses without spending all our money or

becoming a stranger to our families. This show is here to give you the answers.

Join me on this journey and learn how to start, build,

and scale your expert brand and business. My name is David Ziembicki.

Welcome to the Build Your Expert Business Show.

Hey everybody, Dave Ziembicki here from the Expert Business Agency.

In this episode, we're going to take you behind the scenes of the agency.

We're going to talk about what we're building, why we're building it,

where we are, where we're going, and how that might be of some value to you.

I think you'll find it interesting to see how we're starting a brand new agency

from scratch and all the different tools and technology and processes and

procedures and things that we're implementing to help clients.

And then you'll also see what it looks like to just get a new venture off the

ground in this business world - in this online business space that we talk about

quite a bit here.

So the first thing that I want to get into is what problems are we trying to

solve that led us into this particular direction.

If you've listened to some of the previous episodes,

you know that a lot of the analysis and the steps that we go through when we

look at figuring out whether we want to build some kind of online business.

Whether we want to choose courses or to be a service provider or any of the

different derivations of ways to build a business around your expertise.

You know that we talk about,

what are some of the highest value services that you

in the highest demand?

So as I started looking at those things and as I started trying to build online

businesses myself and think about teaching things that I know or are building a

business around my expertise around courses and coaching and things like that,

I went through a number of different programs from different experts that have

been successful in various business models.

And I tried a couple of different attempts at different things,

with pretty limited success, or in a lot of cases, no success.

As I went through that process,

I started realizing that there was a major gap in the marketplace,

which is somebody that wanted to build an online business that had the right

expertise, that was a leader in their industry,

really did not have a support system for how to do that. Okay.

So there's plenty of courses out that it'll tell you to do these 5,000 things

and then you'll be successful.

But those of us that are in a demanding corporate jobs and in successful

careers, we don't have 40 to 60 hours a week to go do all of these things.

The marketing and the content and the promotion.

And the technology and all those different things.

So as I had struggled with doing that myself, even well-funded,

I mean I can hire a contractors and freelancers and try

people. Um,

and really all that was kinda turned me into a project manager and then trying

to pull all the strings and all of these different people.

So that's something that I tried for awhile, and in failing a few times,

it really led me to discover that there was a gap in the marketplace that maybe

we could potentially fill that would be a win win situation for both myself and

you know, the clients or the audience that I might serve.

And that's really where I started to discover this, uh,

expert business model that we've talked about a lot on the show and um,

this gap in the market of somebody that was going to do done for you services to

help people be successful in growing either their career or the business that

they want to build around their expertise in other way that we've been talking

about some of these challenges recently is an analogy of building a personal

marketing team and technology team for the individual.

So what I mean by that is as a few have been exposed to any of the corporate

leaders in the companies that you work for,

a lot of them have a dedicated marketing team just to do,

build and market the brand of the leader or the CEO of that company.

You're really starting to see this emerge and kind of the medium business space

as well as, you know,

fortune 500 executives where when you think about a long career and moving up

into these higher levels of leadership, um,

people are starting to hire like a video crew to follow them around and create

content.

And to document the journey of that leader and everything that they're doing

inside of their company. Um,

so these are some things that are happening in the

end, but nothing like that really exists at a level that's feasible for,

you know, maybe the individual or the, the senior technology, you know,

a person like a lot of us that listen to this podcast are. Um,

so that's another way that we've been starting to describe the services and the

problem that our agency solves is it provides that technology and marketing

department to help individuals who are experts or you know,

want to position themselves as leaders, give them the team, the tools,

the technology, the marketing skills and so forth to be able to do that.

So it's not teaching somebody to have to go do all these things.

What we're talking about here with an agency model is actually doing these tasks

for the individual,

for our clients in order to really accelerate their career. Again,

without them having to learn how to do all this stuff.

It's basically like hiring and sharing a team and a platform that's able to do

all of those things for you.

So that starts to get into the question of why choose an agency model. So again,

as I just mentioned,

there's a bunch of different models that you can choose from that we've covered

in previous episodes for building your own expert business.

It can range from being a dollars per hour freelancer to building your own

courses to, you know, doing consulting or, or you know,

high end coaching programs, creating online courses all

group coaching and then into done with you and done for you services.

So there's a whole spectrum of different options for creating a business around

your expertise. There's different amounts of labor associated with each of them.

There's different, you know,

profit and margin profiles of those different businesses.

And there's also a huge difference in the actual outcome that it delivers to the

end customer. Okay.

So I've done courses before and I've obviously been in consulting and

professional services for 20 years.

So I've seen a lot of the different ends of the spectrum there,

but in particular when it came to this challenge of trying to solve, you know,

um, the expert business challenge that we all have,

the real answer that you know, came to me was again,

focusing on these done for you services.

I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on courses, taken them,

gotten some great information out of there,

even implemented a lot of those things. But again, like I was mentioning,

there's just not enough time in a day,

no matter how productive you are to do both things,

to stay in a corporate career and Excel there and to build either, you know,

this personal brand or separate business on the side,

it's almost impossible to do by yourself.

So what I wanted to do was actually really help people. Okay. Um,

it's definitely higher margin to just do a course and,

and throw that out there because yeah,

you do it once and then hopefully thousands of people

money on that. But I didn't really want to do that in this space.

I wanted to go deep, I wanted to build a team,

help people be really successful.

So that's why I decided to choose done for you services and go with this agency

model. And to be honest, it also puts things back in my comfort zone. I mean,

like I said, I've been in consulting for 20 years and you know,

solar delivered over $200 million of professional services.

So I really like helping clients and there's nothing like that one on one

interaction.

I'm going deep with them on their challenges becoming

actually get those results.

So that's one of the reasons why I chose the agency model. Another was, um,

there really was nothing else out there in this space.

There's thousands of courses about how to build an online business around your

expertise,

but there's almost zero done for you service providers

individual.

There's plenty of agencies that will help small and medium businesses and even

large corporate businesses where you're talking like $100,000 just to get in the

door to get a basic, you know, brand and website going.

So that's a whole different ballgame. Whole different spectrum.

We're trying to target that scenario again for that individual. So again,

seemed like a market opportunity, did a ton of research. I'm like,

I always tell a potential clients if there was such a solution out there as

ours, I would have been using it, right?

I would have paid 10 2030 $40,000 to do that and save a lot of trouble since

there wasn't found a business opportunity.

And that's why we decided to go into that direction.

So if you followed any of my previous content or episodes or if you've actually

gotten into what we call the expert business roadmap or the expert business

blueprint,

you'll note that some of the things I've already covered are the first couple of

steps that we talk about in there.

And that is figuring out what your mission is. So our mission is to help,

you know, the individual technical professional,

build a business around their expertise or accelerate their career in their

corporate. So we have a mission, we have a market. You know,

we basically narrowed up to technical professionals.

A lot of different reasons there. It's my background,

it's who I will resonate with more because I've got, you know,

20 plus years of experience in the technology space and it's just,

that's what I'm interested in and that's where all my experiences are.

So when you do think about starting your own business,

that's one of the key things that we always teach people in our programs is you

got to think about what is that niche?

What does that narrow market that you want to serve that you have some expertise

or some experience in that you're basically gonna immediately resonate with

people. So that's why we've tilted the focus towards that.

Can these services by used by people who aren't technical professionals?

Absolutely. You know, we have doctors who are clients now and you know,

other what I call skilled professionals. So people, you know, doctors, lawyers,

accountants, technologists and so forth.

And so it doesn't mean we won't serve those people.

It just means for our content, for our marketing,

for all the activities that we do,

we decided to narrow that up and go pretty deep into that market, um,

with that particular messaging. So again, we have our mission,

we have our market.

Now the next step is figuring out what is our business going to look like.

So what services are we going to offer? I mentioned done for you. Yeah,

it's a broad category. We could do anything in there.

So we decided to do is to zone in on two things that are key elements that an

individual needs if they want to accelerate their career or if they want to

build a business around their expertise.

And those two elements are the underlying technology platform to use to build

your brand and to build your content on.

And then also the actual content engine itself or how you're actually going to

produce and deliver value to your potential audience at scale.

So the first key element is again, that platform and that content engine.

And then the second is once the tools and the technology and the processes are

in place,

it actually takes a number of different areas of expertise to run an expert

personal brand or to build an expert business. So what I mean by that is,

you know, uh, technologists, developers, designers, copywriters,

editors,

everything that you would find in a technical marketing department you need

those expertise is inside of your brand or inside of your business if you want

to be successful. Now, where most people fail, like I mentioned,

is thinking they need to go learn all of that themselves.

The key is finding the right team to be able to do all of those things for you

where you're acting as the CEO of your own business, of your own brand,

and you have that marketing department that you can rely on,

you direct them and then they go off and do those things.

So that's the second key value that we decided to build out inside of the expert

business agency is a shared team.

So we have a shared technology platform where we've integrated a whole bunch of

different best of breed components together and we

And then I've also assembled a team of people with those different expertise as

people in partners.

So you don't have to go design your own logo or build your own website or you

know, mess around with you know,

how to set up a blog or any of the other things that are in there.

Even advanced scenarios, advertising, online automation,

all the different things that are, you know, modern marketing today.

They are what people do and use.

But you don't want to have to go out and learn those things yourself.

You want to be able to share a platform, share a team that already exists.

And again, that's why we decided to build that out inside of the agency.

We determined that those were the two biggest gaps that prevented people from

reaping all of these benefits.

They didn't understand the technology because it's different than, you know,

the tech that they, you know, design and do every day.

And they also had no idea about what type of team and different forms of

expertise were required to be able to do that. Um, so again,

it was an analysis of the market,

look for gaps that are in that market and then design some services that are

high value and will be in high demand and then tee them up, uh,

to our client base. So again,

it's the same type of process that we take our clients through to help them

figure out what market they want to serve and what services they want to use and

what type of thing and value they want to deliver to their audience or to their

potential customers. So once we decided on those two key elements, the,

the platform and the sharing of the platform and then

the team out with clients, we needed to dig one level deeper and figure out,

okay, well how do we actually want to deliver those services?

Because in a lot of these things,

there's a large amount of onetime setup collecting requirements. You know,

a typical design, let's collect requirements.

Let's see what the customer or the client needs, um,

what type of solution is going to be a fit for them.

Try and use our standard packages so that we don't have a, you know,

a custom platform for a hundred different clients and so on and so forth.

So we've saw pretty early on that there was going to be a onetime effort that

was pretty substantial to get somebody up and running in, you know,

these different things that we're talking about here.

But then also from my own experience,

I know that in trying to provide consistent value,

consistent content over the long term can be very difficult.

So just here, you know, doing this recording that I'm doing,

I mean I'm surrounded by lights and cameras and mixers and microphones and

equipment and all of this kind of stuff.

I have to create notes ahead of time to say, okay,

well what am I going to talk about, you know,

during this a 15 to 30 minute segment, how is that aligned to a larger strategy?

Okay. Once the recording is done,

I mean this is actually the easiest part is standing in front of the camera and

talk. There's editing that has to happen afterwards.

It has to get uploaded to a bunch of different places.

We cut up the content into highlights and quote images and social media posts,

right?

So to be successful today and it kind of break through a recording like this and

needs to be put into like 50 different locations and social media posts and all

kinds of different, um, you know,

social media strategies applied and even paid advertising, um,

to make sure that people are actually seeing the content that you create.

So everything that I just said, uh,

is downstream from this half hour recording and that's, you know, uh,

at least like four to eight hours of work for every episode that goes out.

Again, uh, somebody like me, very busy professional, uh, in my career,

I don't have time to do all of that stuff.

So that's why I built the team to do that.

And then that's why we share that team at any agency. So consistency is key in,

in breaking through, in the online space to positioning yourself as a leader.

You gotta be constantly creating content,

providing value out to your audience with a goal in mind,

whether it's to accelerate your career or to build your own business around your

expertise. So that was the other leg of services.

There's the one time setup and then there's,

we decided to have an ongoing monthly service where our clients can continue to

share our team to do all of that stuff that I just talked about for them.

So one of our standard offerings is a client, you know,

records 30 minutes of raw video, uh, in a week, some kind of content episode,

just like what you're seeing here.

And then they just give us that raw video and then our team does all of the rest

of the work that I was outlining for the client. So again, we do that on a,

on a monthly basis and there's a whole bunch of other things that are included

in, in that particular service. Um,

but that's what we've been designing and building.

Now from a business perspective. Um,

my profit comes from being able to do that as quickly as efficiently as

possible. So I don't want to just throw labor at it.

Can I throw automation at it? Can I use services? Can I use offshore?

That's a big part of what the agency has been doing in the last couple of months

is evaluating different service providers,

different services that are out there that, you know, the do some of the,

the tasks that we're talking about to assemble the set of people and services

that can do that in the least cost,

least costly way with the highest quality level.

And then the value that the agency is providing is coordinating all of that

stuff,

managing that end to end flow so that the client doesn't have to worry about any

of it. So we basically call those two different services,

accelerate and then operate, accelerate as the onetime set everything up,

get people's websites going, their sales funnels, if they have products, um,

their coaching or consulting appointment scheduling, you know, if,

if that's what they offer or if they're on the corporate career track,

we work with a client to figure out what is their next goal, is it a promotion,

is it a new position? And then we align all of our activities around that.

After that we built all their websites, all their social media channels.

We help them get that content engine up and running so that they can supply

that, that raw content that we're talking about.

And after that we look at whatever, you know,

promotional and advertising type of strategies make sense to ensure that their

content is going to be seen by their target audience.

And then we move them through automation and a whole bunch of other things.

We basically have a nine step program that we take customers through for that

accelerate phase. And then, uh, if they want to continue on with us,

which most of our clients do, then that's when we turn on the operate phase.

We move into that month to month mode and then they continue to share our team.

So accelerate and operator the two services that we've

the agency over the last couple months.

And then we've been starting to run the first wave of clients through all of

those services.

So in terms of behind the scenes and what's in place over the last couple of

months, um, as we started to launch this concept and start to build it out,

we've been spending a lot of time on platforms and infrastructure because we

know that as soon as we got the first round of clients,

we were going to need to be able to have in place things like project management

and collaboration tools. Um,

the ability for clients to review design work and deliverables that we were

giving them, you know, sharing of files and so on.

And already we knew that because we have such a high touch and a high amount of

done for you services that we're doing for clients,

we were going to need to start documenting our processes and implementing

automation as quickly as possible. So we've put a lot of time into that.

We've established all of that base infrastructure. We're using some tooling,

you know that's called process street,

which lets us create very detailed step by step checklist and process flows for

everything that we're doing. Again, as I mentioned over time,

what I need to do is to push all of the activities that we do to the least

costly resource that's able to hit the quality level that we need.

So the way to be able to push tasks to a lower our dollar per hour resource to

execute is to document the heck out of them so that they don't really have to

think about it.

We can just push that out and it's very step-by-step and so forth.

So basic flow that we use is we will figure out what we want the process to be

tested out a few times, document it step-by-step,

every different way that you could do that. Put that into our tooling.

And then we have people start testing that out and then we see how far down into

the cost model we can push these tasks. Some tasks can be done by, you know,

a $6 an hour resource offshore. Some need a 20 or $30 an hour, you know,

stateside resource and some need an expert, you know, somebody that's,

that's worth, you know, uh,

paying a hundred or $200 an hour really depends on the task. And then again,

part of the value that the agency provides is we source all of that talent we've

added and then we do all of that routing and management of those tasks to the

right resources that are able to do it and hit the quality level.

So a lot of base infrastructure in place. The next thing that we have is,

you know, again,

processes and procedures and then the first round of customers coming through.

So it's all well and good to talk about these things and build up some of this

stuff. But then as soon as you get, start getting customers onboarding,

that's when you see all of the holes in your process.

So in the last couple of months as we've gotten, you know,

initial wave of clients on, um,

we've really already seen a lot of things that we need to streamline things that

when you're managing a scale of anywhere more than two or three,

it's just a different way of thinking about things.

You really have to be efficient in the communications.

You really have to push on the client. Um,

fairly hard to provide all of the input to be for us to be able to stay within

that eight week commitment that we make to clients of getting their, uh,

expert brand or their expert business launched in eight weeks. Um,

while we do a lot of the work, we can't do it without the client's input. Um,

so that's something I've constantly been working on last couple months is how do

we collect that input early?

How do we go deeper with the client to make sure we're pulling out of them

everything that we need to get websites built and products built and you know,

landing pages and marketing are created and so forth.

So that's where we've spent a lot of time too,

which is kind of one of the first lessons learned,

which is really push on getting that information as early as possible in the

client onboarding process.

The other thing that we learned early on is that while my very strong desire is

to have a standard set of services that we use for all clients,

not every client is the same. They do have some varying requirements there.

And in order for them to select us,

we've had to be a little bit flexible on the services that we provide.

So in one case, um, you know, I hadn't been planning on doing, uh,

e-commerce based businesses,

but one of the first clients that we had that signed up for the service, um,

they created a daily planner. You know, a physical planner, um, you know,

with schedules and habit trackers and all this kind of stuff in there. Um,

and one of the things they wanted to do was to start bringing that into their

own website, their own online store,

get away from some of the Amazon fees and some of the challenges that they were

having there. So in addition to all the normal stuff that we do,

that was one of their key requirements.

And I had to think about that for a little bit,

cause it's technology that wasn't in our base platform, you know,

that we didn't initially have a lot of expertise with. But you know,

my thinking was, Hey,

it'll be worth investing maybe doing that client work at break even or maybe

even a little bit of a loss because it will give us another service that we can

add to our standard because we'll have learned how to do that or we're sourced

the right experts that know how to do it.

And then we can build that into our base package. So again,

just to get that initial wave of clients and start getting testimonials. And,

and some of the real world, um, lessons learned,

we decided to be flexible there and, um, yeah, and,

and basically do that and invest a little bit ourselves to, to do that learning.

And so we're continuing to do that.

Just a few other clients coming in with a few different needs,

a little bit off center from what we were planning. But again,

we're going to do that for this initial round just to build up that experience

and then broaden out the portfolio of services that we're able to deliver.

So finally, I would just want to cover a little bit about what's coming next.

Um, so lots of work going on. Um, you know,

just tonight as I was recording this, we had another client sign up for the,

for the service, the, the full package, the accelerate and operate phases.

So we're pretty happy about that right now.

For the last month we've been averaging, you know,

a client or two coming in per week and you know, this is a pretty, uh,

high ticket program. So, um, we don't expect to get 10, 20, 30,

50 customers in a week. If we get a solid one to two or three every week. Yeah.

Then we're going to hit our first year goals there. So, so far, so good on that.

Um,

so some of the things that are coming next is you're actually gonna see a second

studio. Um,

so what you see here is in my home office I've recorded out of here for the last

year or two and from, for various things. Um,

but one of the things I'm very challenged by in the home office is even though I

live on a amazing house on a Lake in the mountains, in, in, uh, you know,

the Pacific Northwest, we have absolutely horrible internet, uh, where I am.

Um,

if we're lucky we get maybe a half a megabit per second

is, is only three or four megabits per second. Recently, my son,

who we has started to do a lot of online courses and we actually cannot both be

on a video or a conference call at the same time without basically crashing the

internet connection. Because of using too much bandwidth. So, uh,

I've rented a space in the closest little town nearby.

It's in a small creative center there and they do have access to fiber and high

speed internet. Um,

so one of the things we're going to do in document a as part of this behind the

scenes series is you're going to see me turn a very echoey, uh,

wood paneled and wood hardwood floored a room in this creative center into a

professional recording studio. So we're going to go through soundproofing,

lighting, design, all kinds of different things.

I think it's interesting to this audience because one of the things that is

absolutely key to all of our strategies is providing consistent content and

value, especially in the form of video or tutorials or demonstrations.

And you know, if you want to do that in a professional way, have good audio,

good lighting, a good background, all these types of things. Um, yeah,

most people don't know how to do that.

So we're going to teach you how to do that. Yeah. Cause I do think,

and I know a growing trend in this, uh,

space today is people turning their offices,

turning their work location into a content creation studio.

So I think you'll find that really interesting.

So that's one of the things that's coming up as well. As I mentioned,

we have more customers starting to come into the pipeline.

So as we start servicing, you know, this first wave of customers,

I'll start doing a lot more demos and tutorials and we'll be mixing in a lot of,

um, you know, screen recordings and so forth, uh, inside of these episodes.

Just to give you a feel for, you know,

what does a content creation process look like?

How do you write a good blog post?

How do you create a video like this and get it in all the different locations?

One of the big advantages to the whole done-for-you service model that we have

is information can be free, right?

We're going to provide a lot of information that others

we all show you how to do it,

but we know you're probably not going to have time to do it yourself.

So we'll show you. If you have time, great. You can do it yourself.

If you see the value in it though and you want some help,

then obviously that's what we're here for. And then all that goes together with,

with just more content. So you know, this show will continue on as,

as it has and we'll come up with a, you know,

we've got a whole raft of different topics that we'll be talking about and

building out over the next months. And then we're also going to be laying in,

you know, again more behind the scenes, more demo in tutorial. Um, so again,

it's really just a, a all about providing as much value as you can. Um,

you know,

how much of a leader you are seen as is proportional to how much value and help

you're providing to others. So we're going to amp that up significantly,

especially as we're starting to build out this agency team and I've got a bigger

set of people that are able to help and again, fire up that, uh,

that content engine that we keep talking about.

So those are some of the things you're going to see.

I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes episode.

I know it was a lot about what we're building and some of these details,

but I do know, you know, from,

from comments from folks that they do want to hear what's going on,

why are we building this business,

why are we making the decisions that we're making? Um, again,

we'll sprinkle some of this behind the scenes in there [inaudible] from time to

time on these episodes. And also as I get into like Instagram stories and,

and some of these other things,

you'll just see some daily behind the scenes stuff starting to pop up as well.

So I want to thank you for joining me today.

If you're interested in what we're talking about here, if I,

if it's resonated with you,

this idea of having your own personal technology and marketing department.

If you want to accelerate your career by positioning yourself as a leader in

your industry,

head over to expert brand system.com and I've got a 15 minute training video on

there that's going to show you the nine step process that we talked about here.

It's going to go a little bit deeper on what those steps are,

how those things get set up, how you um,

can learn more about the services that we provide and even how you can hop on a

30 minute call with me and we'll talk about strategy. We'll talk about, Hey,

what do you want to accomplish in your career? Is there a,

an expert business within you that you're trying to unleash and to build around

your expertise? Um,

so we do a free strategy call with anybody that wants to go through our

application process and we'll get on the phone.

We'll talk about what makes sense,

and if at the end it looks like something we can help you with and you're

interested, we'll talk a little bit more about the services that we offer there.

So again, if you want to check that out, that free 15 minute training video,

head over to expert brand system.com and thank you and I will see you in the

next episode.

Success requires taking action and definitive steps

This is the difference between success and failure.

I challenge you to take action today on the things you learned in this episode