We're excited to bring AJ Doppke from Marketing Qubed onto the podcast to talk about his main acquisition method for new clients -- cold calling.AJ is a long-time listener to the podcast and owns an agency similar in size to our own. We grill him on his agency size, niche, and services, but especially his cold-calling strategy.What is it that AJ is doing differently that gets him 1 appointment out of every 8 calls to a decision-maker and a 50% close rate once he presents his solution?Learn...

**Cold Open (The agency space is getting dumber)** **Skip the Cold Open at 15:30**Most new agency owners can agree on one thing and it's that picking your niche is more difficult than it sounds. The majority of agency owners will pick niches they heard were good based on videos they've watched or what peers have said. Other agency owners will pick multiple niches to see which ones take off first.If you cast a wider net, won't you catch more fish?Not necessarily.We talk about the differences...

**Cold Open (Physical therapist that helps gamers)****Skip the Cold Open at 4:58**Staying productive is hard when there is so much to do and you can start to get analysis paralysis by looking at your daily checklist of items. It's even worse when you leave your full-time job and you no longer have someone like a boss ensuring you come to work early enough and stay focused.We go through a few things we do to keep us focused and productive while working on our agency. That includes things like...

**Cold Open (Non-compete agreements are now illegal)****Skip the Cold Open at 9:15**We keep seeing things online about how your leads should only be costing you $2-$5 on Facebook or that a cost per lead of $80 is bad. But neither of those is necessarily true.We have clients at Evergrow that are willing to pay $200/lead. If we tried to get them the cheapest leads all the time, then we would likely be delivering poor leads.Jake breaks down his formula for helping clients understand how much...

**Cold Open (Cody got a check from a class action lawsuit / Jake's old job is hiring)****Skip the Cold Open at 12:39**Jake has seen a lot of new agency owners get hung up on what their offer should be to prospective clients. People aren't sure what their guarantee should be or what sets them apart from the numerous other agencies out there.However, we have a belief that your "offer" doesn't need to be an offer to your prospective client. It can be as simple as being good at your service or...

We hit our biggest milestone in this podcast since we started... 100 episodes!Throughout the last 2 years, we've been asked numerous times why we're even doing this. What's the point? We aren't monetizing it with ads or even have anything to sell our listeners.We don't even bring on guests who have things to sell our audience.This episode answers that.----------------------------------If there's anything we've learned about owning a digital agency, it's that your online security is #1. After...

**Cold Open (Jake gets involved with Agency TikTok / People on Reddit Suck)****Skip the Cold Open at 18:00**We talk cash flow and how our agency maintains a healthy flow of liquidity and a stockpile of cash in the bank that would make Ron Swanson blush.There are a few things we do to ensure that we are a cash-positive business and that there is enough money in the business to keep things alive for 6 months with everyone having jobs even if we were to lose all of our clients tomorrow.This...

**Cold Open (Do you use the tongs at gas stations?)****Skip the Cold Open at 6:30**This is an episode regarding a question we get asked frequently. What does our onboarding process look like when we onboard a new client?We take you through the process of the initial sales call all the way to the live website. Both from our perspectives as well as each team member's perspective who handles a portion of that onboarding.----------------------------------If there's anything we've learned about...

**Cold Open (We Have a Bone to Pick with Stacked Marketer)****Skip the Cold Open at 14:38**Evergrow Marketing's structure and goals are based on a business plan put together by Cody. But what is a business plan? What makes one good?We hear about business plans all the time but never really see them or see what's inside of them. In this episode, we talk about how we wrote our business plan, what's in it, and what business plans are even for.----------------------------------If there's anything...

**Cold Open (Nickelodeon & Shohei Ohtani interpreter)****Skip the Cold Open at 13:55**All of the gurus tell you how important it is to have multiple streams of income. But what they don't tell you is that advice is not for you. It's not for people who haven't made their money yet.You need to focus on your one, primary income stream before you even consider a second income stream. It's better to build one house with bricks than to build multiple stick houses.We talk about when you should...

Cody and Jake were asked, "At which point should you take a salary at your agency?" which brings up a good point... when should you?The answer to this question has a lot of variables, especially if you're dealing with multiple owners of that agency.How much recurring profit is coming into the agency? Are you using the Profit First system? How are you forecasting?Although a salary leads to increased stability in your personal life, it often leads to inflexibility and instability in the...

**Cold Open (Cody is jealous of Jake's electric razor)****Skip the Cold Open at 7:40**On this episode, we talk about common mistakes agency owners make when they choose to flex but can't back it up.It's incredibly easy for us to tell who is and isn't a legitimate agency owner by only having a short conversation. Furthermore, it's easy for your prospective clients to tell if you're not being truthful.Be honest about who you are, how big you are, and how many clients you have. This has actually...

**Cold Open (Jake's cigars and Cody solved the Google Ads suspension issue)****Skip the Cold Open at 13:20**We often get requests to handle SEO and PPC services for other freelancers and agency owners and we've always had a firm stance against it for a few reasons.In this episode, we explain why we don't white label and why white labeling your services could be a trap that works against your business.----------------------------------If there's anything we've learned about owning a digital...

**Cold Open (Cody has to do Jake's job and hates it)****Skip the Cold Open at 3:25**We tend to get a lot of comments on the way we price our services and how we handle billing. Those questions might include things like why do we charge credit card processing fees to our clients? Why do we put our payment information in the ad account? Why do we bill forward vs execute the work and then bill back?We thought it'd be a good idea to answer all of these questions in one...

We received an inquiry from a listener asking about how he could deal with contractors who weren't completing basic tasks such as time tracking.We decided to make this episode completely on how we handle not only underperforming contractors but employees as well. Ultimately, it starts at the hiring process and we get into why and how we pick our team but we also give really useful tips on how to manage team members when they aren't performing well or doing basic tasks or repeatedly missing...

**Cold Open (The Russell Brunson thing... again)****Skip the Cold Open at 5:00**Google is picking a fight with us and suspending ad accounts over their own platform errors. Having your ad accounts get denied, disapproved, or suspended is every agency's worst nightmare and it's happening to us right now.In this episode, we go over what's going on with Google Ads and how we're fighting back. We also stress the importance of not having all of your eggs in one basket. Thankfully doing so has kept...

**Cold Open (Russell Brunson Punches a Kid?)****Skip the Cold Open at 11:06**A lot of agencies out there seem to still be charging things in a manner that isn't really conducive to a scalable model. Ultimately, what it comes down to is that the agency's owner is still stuck in a freelancer mindset.In this episode, we really dive into what it takes to get out of the freelancer mindset and start charging prices and packaging your services correctly so you're not putting too much work into the...

**Cold open (Jake takes a deep dive into agency Reddit and it sucks)****Skip the Cold Open at 10:20**Last year, we recorded from our hotel in Colombia and recapped our finances from 2022 and how much we grew.This year, we're doing the same thing and recapping 2023. We had some explosive growth and also faced some challenges along the way that caused us to not grow as much as we wanted to.We also cover things we spent more on and things we spent less on.----------------------------------If...

**Cold Open (Jake has a question for the audience)**We keep seeing gurus make the money part of owning an agency really simplified. How money is spent and finances are handled in an agency at $10k/mo and at $100k/mo look very different but no one talks about it.Cody and Jake do a deep dive in how money looks at different levels of the business.----------------------------------⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐As always, if you enjoyed this episode or this podcast in general and want to leave us a review or rating, head...

**Cold Open (Jake and Lauren sneak onto First Class train in Japan)****Skip the Cold Open at 13:18**There seems to be some confusion around the practical application of having a CRM in an agency. Jake aims to clear that up in this episode.Aside from the typical derailments, Jake talks about:* What a CRM technically is (you're probably already using one and don't even know it)* Why you should be using a free CRM at first* How Jake uses it on a daily basis* How it helps Jake close more...

**Cold Open (Jake and Cody talk about their Hubspot automation)****Skip the Cold Open at 7:08**There are many different lead generation agency models out there. On one hand, an agency can only be responsible for delivering leads. Another lead gen agency may also follow up with those leads for the client to make sure they close.We address why we don't like lead gen models in which it's the agency's responsibility to follow up with the leads.We also explain common objections to the idea of only...

**Cold Open (Cody's had his credit card hacked twice in two months)****Skip the Cold Open at 9:00**Jake and Cody answer the questions:* What is networking?* Who do you network with?* Why should you network?For starters, it depends on what you're trying to do. Are you trying to grow your business or get better at growing your business? Because they're two different things.If you're trying to grow your business, Jake has tips and explains why you shouldn't care about networking with other...

Ahrefs has been in the SEO community chatter quite a bit since the pricing model change so we thought it'd be good to bring Tim Soulo himself on the podcast to talk a little bit about the reasoning behind that.But we wanted to get more value out of the episode than that.In this episode, Tim gives us some useful keyword research tips both using paid tools as well as free tools and sheds some light on the accuracy... or lack thereof... when it comes to the metrics that SEO tools spit out...

**Cold Open (Jake's optimal morning)****Skip the Cold Open at 3:06**We hear a lot of people quitting their day jobs in order to start an agency in which they have no experience -- only "knowledge" they've gained from online resources.To be frank, this is a dumb idea.We have grown our agency to near the half-million dollar mark while Jake still has a full-time day job. Doing this has allowed safe and steady growth while keeping full-time benefits and the same standard of living.So where do we...

**Cold Open (Lissette is gone and we're sad)****Skip the Cold Open at 5:30**We keep seeing agency owners emphasize the importance of documenting processes in order to scale, but there are a few problems with this. Most people:* Don't know how to document their processes* Don't know where to put their documentation* Don't know what to do with it once it's documented* Don't treat it like a living, breathing document* Don't even know what their processes areIn this episode, we go over what...