Kasim: 00:00:11

So talk to me about that stair step of growth for agency

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owners that are listening here.

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, I think a lot of them are sort

of stuck at individual levels.

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Like it's always, I don't know who

said it, but it's every time you three

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X, you basically everything breaks

if not in and around that point.

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So zero to a hundred thousand to 300, 000

to a million it just goes on from there.

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One of the things that.

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I think a lot of agency owners really

struggle with is that CX component is

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that customer satisfaction component?

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And where do you double down on

that in that evolution of growth?

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Which is a challenge because

this is a service based business.

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And, going back to Customs original

premise, which is obviously not

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accurate based upon your success and

the success of the Baines of the world.

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And the McKinsey's of the world is that

service businesses can't scale because

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you always have that CX component.

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So talk to me about each individual

step, like where your challenges

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were, if you can remember that far

back, it was CX always a component.

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Of it, or did you wait it more in

one stage of growth versus another?

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And how did you navigate through that?

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I would say we you always need

to do good work people ask,

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like, why is Hawkins so successful?

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It's because frankly, 99 percent of

marketers have no idea what they're doing,

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and so it's not hard to, compete with a

bunch of charlatans, when people come in

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and work with us, they're like, Oh, wow.

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You actually deliver what you say you're

going to the fact that's a novel idea is

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crazy, when I talk to a lot of the new

agency owners, a lot of times they don't

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actually know anything about marketing.

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There's no barrier to

entry to start an agency.

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They see a Tai Lopez video and

they go, Oh, I can start one too.

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And then they see, we talked about

this before getting on, but like

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someone driving a Lamborghini

and talking about their agency.

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And it's Oh, that could be me.

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I was like Whoa, Whoa.

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You forgot the key ingredient here.

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You need to actually know what

you're doing in marketing.

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That's important.

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I know that there's no barrier.

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It's crazy to me that need a license

to cut hair or actually deliver

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milk in the U S but you don't need

a license to manage half a billion

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dollars in marketing budgets.

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It's absurd to me, but here we are.

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That has been one of

the biggest challenges.

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And that's where I see a

lot of agencies struggle.

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That's number one.

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It's like you're churning through

clients because you're not doing good

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work and you can only keep up so fast.

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At some point you hit.

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You can only bring in so much business

and you're losing it all the back door

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and you hit this, equilibrium where

you can't grow the business your

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sales can't keep up with your churn

and that is a rough business to run.

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And that's why you see a lot

of burnout and agency owners.

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You see a lot of plateaus like that's

number one, if you're not able to keep

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your business now, that being said, we

deal with churn too, because we also work

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with small and medium businesses that

they, by nature are all over the place.

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And so regardless of how well

we're doing a lot of times,

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small and medium businesses.

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Are shifting.

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So if that's, let's assume you're doing

good work and that's, table stakes, the

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next piece is having that sales funnel to

replace that business and to keep growing.

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And I'd say that's an important piece

that I know we've really nailed in terms

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of we've been able to grow a lot because

we're able to, drink our own punch.

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Turns out we know how to do marketing.

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So we market ourselves and it works.

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And then the last piece of that I

think people miss is the margins.

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lot of people don't understand the

importance of having decent margins on

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your agency so that you can reinvest

in marketing sales so that you can

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invest in the future so that you can

invest in growth and hire people and

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have some bandwidth because a lot of

people don't think about that ahead

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of time and they end up a slave to

their own business because they're

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paying their people way too much.

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Like we saw it in the

Rick great resignation.

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We refused to pay these rates that we

were getting competitors paying because

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we knew it didn't pencil for the business.

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We're like, Hey, if I get it, if you're

going to make three times as much money

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in another company, go hope it cope.

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It lasts six months and you've

got a year and a half of pay.

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Like I get it, leave, but

we're not going to match that.

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we have our MNA side.

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We look at hundreds of agencies books

throughout the year, if not thousands.

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And there are a lot that ended up

giving these raises and promotions

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and paying people too much.

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Now they can't run a profitable

agency because there's no way that

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they can charge clients enough

to then build that person out

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enough to actually make any money.

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And so margins, marketing, and client

retention, I'd say, are the three.

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Now, client retention, again, servicing

them well and communicating with

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them well are the two biggest things.

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Communication, I think, actually

trumps actually doing good marketing.

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If you're good at communicating

and aligning and talking to your

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clients, you'll keep them longer.

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We've seen this in the data constantly.

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If we're good at communicating and talking

to our clients, they're going to stay

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a lot longer regardless of performance.

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And so that's key there.

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And then if you go over those three

things, I think you're actually

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going to be doing all right.

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Y'all, this is maybe the most

important thing that's ever

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been said on perpetual traffic.

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Hey, so if you're listening to this

and you're an agency owner, honestly,

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if you're a business owner, stop

the car, pull over, write this down.

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Communication is more

important than good marketing.

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communication is more important than

deliverable, and I've seen this too.

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My biggest fail point in early stage

at Google Ads, we were phenomenal.

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We crushed life.

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But we spent so much time,

we're deep, dark, cave dwelling,

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nocturnal, over caffeinated

engineers that like to work at night.

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And so we're sitting there really

doing the work, but not telling the

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client we were doing the work, and

the client was always pissy with us.

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And then we got really good

at communication, and they

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preferred that to the good work.

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I can do C minus work and good

communication and rather have that than

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A plus work and B minus communication.

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It's so critical.

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Build that into the fabric

and ethos of your business.

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It's important to understand as human

nature, we use logic to justify emotions.

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If I feel good about you, I'm

going to find a reason why I

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want to keep working with you.

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If I don't feel good about you,

I'm going to find a reason why

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I shouldn't be working with you.

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And so making sure you like the

communication side plays to that emotion.

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Why are people hiring you?

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Because they don't want to manage this.

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It's a bandwidth or expertise thing.

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They either need bandwidth because

they don't have enough time to manage

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all their marketing, even if they're

an expert, or they need expertise

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because they're not an expert.

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So one way or another, you need to satiate

that desire to be like, I need help.

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And so they need to feel like

you're that one, that you're

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better at doing this than they are.

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You have taken this off their plate.

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And you are the expert and you

are helping them save time.

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And if you don't fulfill that,

you're out and they're going

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to find a reason to be out.

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Dude.

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That's another writer downer.

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Agencies are banned with your expertise.

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That's it.

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Or actually we always talk about

bandwidth expertise or a punching bag.

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Some people just want to

hire someone to yell at.

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that's a little bit of expertise though.

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I need you to know how to take a punch.

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Yeah.

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Touche.

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That's fine.

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That it's even if you're not getting

the success, it's having the enthusiasm.

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And the idea is to say, all right we tried

this didn't work, but here's what we're

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going to do next because we actually care.

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And it's like the thing that ends

up being the real linchpin for

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retention is that these guys just

give a shit, like they actually care

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about what it is that I'm doing.

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Here.

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you can infuse that in your smaller

agency, that's one of the keys

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to successes is what I'm hearing.

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How do you do that, Eric?

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What specific systems do you have in

place to process size communications?

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There's something like that at

Hawk, or is it just I hire smart

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people that know how to do this?

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No, we have a ton of process to it.

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And we have a whole AI system

that monitors our client

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communications and flags.

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When we flag correlations between

when we lose clients and what the

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communication was like, and so that

we can actually say for example, we

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thought apologies would be a bad sign.

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If we're saying, I'm sorry, and our

communication will ship, we screwed up.

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And so we monitored all these apologies

that were going out and then we monitored

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how the clients retained and we found

actually apologizing did the opposite.

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When we take ownership and

apologize, clients were like, Oh,

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you actually took ownership and we

can trust you because you actually.

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Owned it that actually had a positive

effect on the relationship, even though

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we were apologizing because we made

a mistake or something happened, the

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fact that we just apologized actually

retained clients better, even though we

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thought it'd have the opposite effect,

which meant, so we're apologizing.

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We did something wrong.

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We're going to lose a client.

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It was the opposite.

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So it's things like that we actually

monitor using AI now that allows

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us to actually See what is causing

us to lose clients and your tech,

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or is that something we can go by?

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I don't know if it's public yet.

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I can't share it yet, but it's a

friend of my co founders that we

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installed and it's pretty cool tech.

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It's not being used much in

the agency world, but if I

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can, I'll follow up with that.

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Dude.

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We'll pimp it out all to death cause

I'd be the very first public customer.

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That sounds amazing.

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. It's not even sentiment analysis because

not giving us a dashboard of here's

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all the sentiment of your clients.

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It's literally like these things

were said heads up or when

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we set up all the triggers.

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So like we haven't responded to

a client in 24 hours is a trigger

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which we know is kryptonite.

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We're not responsive game over.

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And so now we have a trigger to let us

know if an email is et cetera that then

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pings the person goes, Hey, heads up.

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Yeah.

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This person hasn't been responding

to you need to get on top of