Do you think that growing and scaling your agency means always going for more in every aspect? Will Russell is the founder and CEO of Russell Marketing, an agency focused on product launch marketing, crowdfunding, e-commerce, and Amazon. Through his experience with his agency, he created a five-step launch process meant to enable anyone to validate and pursue an idea in an affordable manner without taking a massive amount of risk. In this episode, he'll talk about how to prepare for the launch, why you should never ask family and friends what they think about your idea, and how he approaches the idea of scaling his agency while staying lean. 3 Golden Nuggets Pursuing an idea. There are no guarantees when it comes to ideas. If there were, major brands like Apple wouldn’t launch products that fail. This is why Will’s process is all about swiftly and, and affordably pursuing an idea. Lots of people have big ideas, but not everyone has the right feedback. Preferably don’t lose time asking your family and friends if your idea is good. You won’t know for sure until you start selling. Sometimes the market will tell you that the idea is not good, Will’s system is all about preparing as much as you can and anticipate some of the possible hurdles. The five-step process. The mistakes made when pursuing a bad idea or pursuing an idea in the wrong way can be very costly. This five-step system was created to avoid those mistakes. 1. Validation, which is understanding how a product resonates in the market. 2. Build an audience, 3. Engage your audience, a key here will be resolving sales objections by trying to understand as many of those objections as possible and getting them resolved in advance of the launch, 4. Focus on audience conversion, 5. Scale and optimize. Not more but better. Something that really describes Will’s philosophy and the direction he wanted to take with his agency is “the goal should not be more, the goal should be better” and how he wanted to continue to scale his business while staying lean. This applies to pretty much everything. From the number of clients you have, the number of employees you need, and the number of hours you’re working to get your agency to the next level. The answer doesn’t always have to be more, more, more. Sometimes we should ask ourselves how we could work better or smarter. Gusto: Today's episode is sponsored by Gusto, an all-in-one people platform for payroll, benefits, HR where you can unify your data. Gusto automatically applies your payroll taxes and directly deposits your team's paychecks, freeing you up to work on your business. Head over to gusto.com/agency to enjoy an exclusive offer for podcast listeners. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Continue to Scale Your Agency While Staying Lean With this 5-Step Process for a Successful Launch Jason: [00:00:00] What’s up, agency owners? I'm excited to have another amazing guest in the masterclass. We're going to talk about the five-step launch system that you can follow for yourself or for your clients. We're going to talk about how Will's actually grown and scaled his agency while staying lean. And having a lifestyle that he's always wanted, where you have the freedom to pick and choose to do the things that you love doing rather than being forced to do everything. So let's go ahead and get into the episode. Hey, Will! Welcome to the show. Will: [00:00:39] Hey, Jason. Thank you for having me, pleasure. Jason: [00:00:42] Well, um, thanks for coming on. Uh, tell us who you are and what do you do? Will: [00:00:48] Absolutely. My name's Will Russell. I'm the founder of a launch marketing agency, Russell Marketing. We specialize in product launches, idea launches, uh, such as crowdfunding, Amazon, e-commerce, and so on. Essentially we have a five-step system that we, we bring to our clients and help them successfully launch their, their big ideas. Jason: [00:01:12] Awesome. Well