[BEST OF] How to Start a Marketing Agency (a Practical, No-Bull Guide)

Why Marketing Agencies Are Terrible at Marketing Themselves

David Baker: Well, they are really, really bad. I wonder if they’re worse at doing what they do for a living than other. Like, you know, when you look at somebody who shines shoes, are their shoes a mess? I think they probably are worse. I would say the first reason is because they hate to be pigeonholed. They, they hate, like when you’re, when you’re putting a statement out about yourself, you have to say something. And, and they’re afraid that when they say something about themselves from a positioning standpoint, they’re going to limit their opportunity and, and they won’t have a chance to go out and do this cool thing because they’ve said, I don’t do that. I think that’s the primary reason they’re so bad at it. There’s lots of reasons though.

Louis: So let’s go into this one. I had an agency, I mean a consulting business, but I didn’t like to call myself an agency, maybe for these reasons. But what happened was at the very start we were focusing on everything, conversion optimization. So every type of business, we would help them to convert their traffic. So from leads to sales to registration to whatever. Right. And then after a while, we discovered that there are certain type of businesses we were working better with. And then we started to go about like narrowing down our audience. But every single time we were doing this exercise, we were really worried. Right. What if we miss out on opportunities? What if we go too small? So how would you answer those objections?

The Problem with Generalist Positioning and Fear of Specialization

David Baker: Well, it’s, you know, if you’re really good at what you do, it’s hard to imagine limiting opportunities so much that you starve in this world because after the world’s been Googleized, however, 20 years ago, the world is really your oyster. I mean, you’re not just looking at opportunity locally. If you were, it’d be another question. You can work all around the world. So it’s like I picture myself sometimes asking this question. I get to a later point in my life and I’m looking back and I say, darn, I wish I’d been more effective in my life. Now. Will that occur to me because I didn’t have enough opportunity or because I didn’t focus? And always is because I didn’t focus. Like, if you get to the end of your life and you look back on it and say you didn’t have enough opportunity, you were either just starting out or you were just flat incompetent. And so I just don’t understand this concept about limiting opportunity. Besides, it’s like if you look at every one of the other areas of professional services, every one of them chooses something. We’re the only segment of professional services that is hell bent on doing anything for everybody. If we were a plastic surgeon, we’d hang up a sign that says, I’m a plastic surgeon. But if somebody comes in here and wants a heart transplant, listen, I’m willing to do that because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. It’s crazy. Good thing I’m not a doctor, right?

Louis: That’s a very good analogy. I like it. Yeah. You wouldn’t ask your plastic surgeon to get into your brain, literally, or to operate on your heart, Right? So why is it you think that marketing agencies would prevent themselves from doing so, would prevent themselves from specializing? Beside the reason we gave already, partly,

David Baker: I think, genetically they are. You know, we could summarize what we’ve just said by they’re genetically predisposed to not limit opportunity. Another thing is that if they make the courageous decision to specialize and to be focused, then they’re faced with, how do I do it? And here they enter this arena that I think everybody suffers from, and that’s they’re inside their own jar and they can’t read the label on the outside of it. And so they like, they. They do positioning for a living, right? So that’s what’s so crazy to think about. They know how to do positioning because that’s what they do for their clients day in and day out. But they struggle to do it for themselves. Even if they agree they’re going to do it, they struggle to do it for themselves because they just can’t see themselves very well. And so they just. They don’t know what to do. That’s why they. Sometimes they have to. I often think agencies ought to hire each other to do positioning for themselves because they just can’t do it for themselves.

Louis: I feel that what’s happening in people’s head at this stage is that, okay, I have an agency, I have a few employees, I have a few clients. I definitely don’t want to piss anybody off. I definitely don’t want to make my team feel like they’re going to do less. But more importantly, the reason why I’m not taking a strong positioning and I’m not taking any risk is because, yeah, it feels weird to take risk on my own stuff while it’s very easy for me to tell my clients, hey, you need to take this risk and position yourself this way. Right?

David Baker: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a very true point. And it’s really disingenuous on our part to say, listen, this advice is fine for you, but it’s not fine for me. Plus, I think you’ve highlighted an issue too, in that most of these firms that we’re talking about start with a very generous position. So they’re not starting from scratch and saying, what should my positioning be right out of the gate? No, they already have all of these clients that fit an unpositioned firm. What are they going to do with them? Right. And so sometimes they have to create this sister agency along side because they don’t know how they’re going to switch from a generalist firm to a specialized firm, and they don’t know how they’re going to find enough clients quickly enough.

Louis: So they don’t want to take the risk. They are inside their own jar and can’t read the label, and they don’t know what to say to genuinely distinguish themselves in the marketplace. So I want you to say it first. But basically, they start spinning bullshit. Exactly right. So it’s not because they believe in the bullshit, but because they don’t know what else to say. Right? Is that.

David Baker: That’s right. I mean, if you really, if you get them slightly drunk and you ask them a question, I think they will admit that it’s bullshit. And they’re not bad people. They’re not mean people. I mean, I’ve met a few of them, but it’s very rare. They’re good people that are trying to do good work, but they just don’t. They lack the courage, they lack the knowledge. And really, I mean, marketing is bullshit, isn’t it? I mean, I. I owned an agency like you did. Although I called it an agency. You refused to call it an agency. I owned an agency for six years, and I’ve been doing this for 23 years, so 29 years in marketing. And I often think. And I’ve thought this more frequently now than way back then. It’s like, why in the world did I even get into marketing? Because I’m more of a scientist than anything, and there’s so little science in marketing that I’m a little disgusted by. By the. Not a little. I’m very disgusted with the field. And I probably go overboard in trying to be a lot more honest with clients than I. Than my peers probably would be. It’s probably hurt me a little bit.

Louis: What do you mean?

David Baker: Well, I’m not out there saying I’m the best consultant, because I don’t believe that’s necessarily true. I think I may be the best in some certain cases, but I think my competition does really, really good work. So I’m not making some of these claims. I mean, maybe it endears me to some folks, but I would say I come across as a little bit too academic in some circles.

Louis: Yeah, I see what you mean. On my side, what happened was really. We took the risk on being really honest with our clients. What happened a year or two ago was that we actually published our revenue figures.

David Baker: I saw that on your website. Yeah, absolutely.

Louis: It hasn’t been updated for a while, obviously, because I’m not running the company anymore. But although it created trust for a lot of people, so we had a few inbound inquiries from customers saying, I love what you’re doing. I love your openness. I want to work with you. We also had a few clients trying to. Potential clients trying to mess with us by saying, hey, I know how much you made last year. Why are you literally asking for that much money? If you only made $80k last year, why are you asking for 30k? Because that’s almost half of the revenue last year. Being really honest. I mean, that’s really super transparency. You don’t have to be as transparent. But I feel that marketing agencies could really do with more transparency in the way they do things, in the way they sell clients, in the way they explain themselves, in their pricing. I think there’s a lot of lack of transparency in this industry.

David Baker: What motivated you to do that? At the beginning, there had to have been some huge event, some. Some desert island event for you. What motivated you to jump that far?

Louis: Because I think I’m a contrarian by nature, so I like to take the opposite of what’s going on. So I saw the beginning of what they call the transparency movement in Startup, in the SaaS. Startup, in the tech startup industry, where a few companies are starting to share their revenue online, but they were mostly tech and mostly in SaaS and mostly having recurring revenue. Right. So but they were sharing it once they had enough kind of revenue to share it. And I was like, you know what? I’ve never seen an agency or consulting company sharing that. Let’s do it, let’s see what happens. That’s basically it, right? And I took the risk and honestly, I don’t regret it. It definitely closed a few doors for us, but it opened a few more. And I feel at the end of the day now that I can kind of do a retrospective on this experience. I didn’t sell my soul to the devil. Right. I never felt like I did something I didn’t want to do anymore or I felt like I worked with a client I didn’t want to work with. We only work with clients we wanted to and that felt good.

David Baker: Yeah. Okay. Well, one of the things that’s really bothered me so I’m not in the agency world anymore, I work with agencies, so I’m in the consulting world is the fact that it’s like I. How do we know that some. Why should I listen to a consultant if they haven’t been successful following the same advice? That’s bothered me quite a bit. And I also wonder about agencies. You know, agencies will joke and they’ll say like, oh, the cobbler’s son doesn’t have any shoes. Like, we’ve been so busy doing great work for clients that we don’t have a website for ourselves, that we don’t follow this advice, that we don’t constantly spend money on marketing, but you, Mr. Client, should always spend money on marketing. That’s always bothered me a little bit, I don’t think. But I’m in such the minority that I’m not sure I’m really going to change anything there. Frankly, it’s more. It’s like my dad used to say it, you get a good feeling and it’s like wetting your pants in a dark suit. You get a warm feeling, but nobody notices. That’s sort of what this little.

Louis: Oh, I never heard this one. That’s good. That’s good. I guess I’m going to come back to my own experience. It seems like a little bit of a psychology session here or something on the slime therapy session. But the reason why we didn’t really work on our website too much, even though we try to every quarter, is because we just simply didn’t have the time. The only thing we had was time for our clients. And that’s actually one of the issue is that in the model that most agencies use, which is being paid by hour or per day with tight deadlines, there is literally no time to do anything but that. Right, right.

David Baker: Which is not in the client’s best interest because if you’re not charging enough, then you’re always having to work every minute and you don’t have time to put your feet up and think and just learn from the world around you, which in turn is going to inform your work for clients. So this transparency that you’re talking about to me doesn’t mean that you charge clients a little bit. It doesn’t have any impact on what you charge. It has impact more on just the trusted relationship that emerges from the transparency. I still think you should be charging enough money to learn constantly from other sources rather than having to bill every minute of your time.

Louis: Yeah, right. So I think we framed the problem quite well now. I think listeners are eager to listen to your step by step methodology, your way of actually your view on the right agency, the right agency model and the right way to approach it. So I had a few questions lined up, but I think I’m going to twist it a little bit and take it from another angle. A lot of people email me with the fact that they are freelancers or consultants and looking to get started or almost getting started. So there seem to be a lot of people in this kind of area, in this no man’s land of they want to do something they really don’t know how. So I like to help them to get started by challenging you to come up with an agency model, a marketing agency model that you would start tomorrow but you very much like in the set go in episode, you cannot use your name because you are quite a big deal, aren’t you? So you can’t use your name. You have to go at it, build your profile. So how would you go about building an agency, a marketing agency that you feel would match with your values and what we discussed already?

The Radical Transparency Approach - Saying What’s True vs. All That’s True

Getting Paid for Thinking, Not Doing - The Consulting Model

David Baker: Ah, okay, well that’s interesting. So I’m going to stumble around just a little bit because I haven’t thought about that question exactly the way you framed it. So in full transparency, I’ll stumble around a little bit answering that. I would say that the first approach would be to, like, everything I say has to be true, but everything that’s true doesn’t have to be said. So there’s a distinction there. Right. So every statement I make about myself, I want to be true, but I’m not going to tell everybody everything. So there’s some. There’s some level of transparency that, that could be comfortable for me. Next, I’m going to think about, all right, what is it that I’m in the business of doing? And however I answer that question, I want it to be. I want it possible. I want it to be possible that I make a good living even if I’m colorblind and I don’t have arms and legs. Now, that’s a really strange thought, right? But I don’t want to be paid for doing. I want to be paid for thinking. And if there are some things that I end up doing for clients, I want to make sure that those follow the thinking that it’s only an implementation of what I have consulted them with. And I think there’s very little difference between an agency and a consulting firm. I really wish agencies would think of themselves as consulting firms.

Louis: So let me stop you right here, because I’ll give you the opportunity to think a bit more in the next few steps, because I know it’s a challenging question, but this is a very interesting thought. So you’re saying you want to get paid for thinking, not doing, and if you are paid for doing, you want to be paid for doing what you’ve been thinking about, in a sense. So applying your framework, applying your strategy, but first and foremost thinking about the strategy and maybe telling them this is a strategy you should use. But I’m not here to execute it every day. I’m here to check every month. Let’s say that you’re doing the job that I thought you should be doing. Is that correct?

David Baker: Yeah.

Louis: Right. So that’s a good framework. And I think you touched on something before. The very first thing you said about the truth. Everything you’re going to say is true, but not everything that is true. You’re going to say. So what are the kind of. The distinction here? What are the examples of things you will never say to a client even if they are true?

David Baker: Right. Okay. So if I’m having a fight with a client, and so it’s true that I’m having a fight with a client, and I haven’t really sorted it out yet, I Don’t know what part I own, what part they own. I don’t think that dirty laundry needs to be aired. So that would be an example of something that’s true that I wouldn’t have to share with a client if I were starting over. I would probably share my financials like you have, though. That’s an example of something that’s true that I think I should be transparent about. I am a believer in open book management to a degree. I don’t think it’s useful for people to know what other people make from a salary standpoint, but I think everything else is fair game.

Louis: Okay, and how would you deal with the example I gave you where we shared our revenue. Right. And some potential clients were using it against us?

David Baker: Then I would say then those clients are not clients I probably want to work with.

Louis: Okay.

David Baker: And I would be fine with that. I, I, the older I get, and I’m a lot older than you are, I’m. You look like you’re in your upper 30s. How old are you?

Louis: Oh, that’s bad. I’m 28.

David Baker: Oh, really? Okay, well, see that? I just blew that. I Like if you were.

Louis: Let’s do it again. Let’s do it again. No.

David Baker: Let’s do it again. No. Yeah. So I’m 57, and the older I get, I feel like, you know, I don’t know. I don’t want to think too much about consequences anymore. I just want to do what’s right. And even if sometimes it’s not necessarily the smartest thing to do, I just want to do what’s right. I see too many principles of agencies thinking too carefully about the consequences of the decisions that they really should make, like how it’s going to hurt somebody’s feelings, how it’s going to piss off a client, whatever it is. So anyway, that would be part of all of this too. I would just do what’s right, not worry too much about the consequences.

Louis: And I guess that’s a good lesson in life in general. Right? It’s clear. It’s easy to say from our point of view, but from my experience, I can say that the things you usually worry about never, never happen. And that it’s a very liberating feeling to do what you feel is right instead of doing what you feel other people think you should do. Like what we are doing right now, this podcast started by me thinking, fucking hell, I need to do something about it. I firmly believe in the fact that most marketing is bullshit and we need to fight against it and we need to show the way to most people to do it the right way. And if I had listened to people telling me, yeah, I would have never started it.

David Baker: Right.

Louis: So it’s really about trusting your guts at the end of the day, and it’s tough to do. So you need to start small, go step by step. But at the end, it’s such a liberating feeling, isn’t it?

David Baker: Right, it is. And it doesn’t have to emerge from anger. I think anger can really pollute that. So, you know, you’re being honest is it’s better if it doesn’t come from anger, if it’s just really driven by a desire for honesty. Here’s a statement to answer your question further. I came across this the other day. I was researching something and I came across this agency’s website and it said. And it was a big box too. So it wasn’t a statement that was hidden. It was a big rectangular box across the statement. It said, we’ve never met a problem we couldn’t solve. That is bullshit. I would never say something like that. And my reaction to it, to myself when I read that, it’s like, oh, my God, you have not met many serious problems or you don’t understand what solving them means. So I would be a lot more honest about what I’m good at solving for clients, and what I’m not good at, solving for clients. And in the process, I would have no hesitation to send people to my competitors if I thought they were a good fit. I’ve done that all my career and it’s been really good for me. It’s not bit me at all.

Louis: So you would say, let’s take an example here. Let’s take your example, your profile. I mean, you are lucky because you do have experience in the field and you do have, you know, your skills. But let’s say people who are starting in the game, they’ve had a few corporate jobs and now they want to go on their own. So they don’t necessarily know themselves that well. Would you say that one of the steps is actually to go through this introspection of saying, okay, what am I good at? What do I like to do? And what am I bad at and what I don’t like to do?

Honest Self-Assessment - What You’re Good At vs. What You’re Not

David Baker: Yes, for sure. And at whatever age, if you’re in maybe your late teens and older, the people around you know you much better than you know yourself. There’s an exercise called the Unique Ability Exercise that Strategic Coach does where you send out an email request to about 20 or 30 of your friends, colleagues, bosses and so on. Ask them, without conferring with each other, what your unique ability is. And the most surprising thing about that exercise is how uniform the answers are. They come back to you. I did that early on at somebody else’s suggestion and it’s been very helpful to me. Like, I know there are certain clients I am not going to do a good job with. For instance, I am a terrible coach. I don’t have the patience, I don’t have the kindness. I am better. I’m a better liberating force, not an occupying force. So when I have a client who needs that sort of thing, I used to try and twist myself into a pretzel to serve their needs, and it didn’t do me any good. And it definitely didn’t do them any good. That’s an example of how we could be more honest with you other.

Louis: So you had to twist yourself into a pretzel, Is that what you said?

David Baker: Yeah. Right.

Louis: Okay. Where is that coming from? This saying? Is it from Tennessee or. I’ve never heard that before as well.

David Baker: We need to learn from each other’s phrases. I don’t know yet. Teach me some stuff from France or Ireland. Right?

Louis: You listen when I can’t force it. I don’t know if I can find anything on the spot right now. But anyway, let’s go back to the step by step because you’re really saying some very, very interesting things here. So you would choose what true things you would say. You would choose what true things you won’t say. But you also, one of the step is really to decide, okay, I’m going to say openly what I’m not good at as well as what I’m good at. Would you actually put that on your website?

David Baker: Absolutely. Absolutely, I would do that. In fact, my website is uniquely dangerous. I would say, like my website says, no, I’m not going to give you references. Here’s why. Give you four reasons why I’m not going to give you references. I’m going to list all of my competitors on my website. Here are their names. You should talk with them. I take a lot of risks on the website and one of them is definitely telling people what I’m not good at.

Louis: So why would you mention your competitor’s name on the website?

David Baker: Because I am so interested in finding a good fit for my clients is partly because I want what’s best for them. But a lot of it is driven just selfishly in that I hate disappointing people. I have a very thin skin and when I disappoint people. I just kind of cower and I hate it. And I try to avoid that. Disappointing people so much that I want them to come to me only if I’m going to be able to solve their need.

Louis: Well, but this is where I’m going to challenge you. I don’t think you are mentioning your competitors, or at least not your direct competitors. Right. You are probably. You’re mentioning competitors who are doing things better than you do. And when clients get in touch with you to do something you know you are probably the best at, you definitely not mention competitors in this instance, right?

David Baker: No, I do mention my competitors. If I feel like I’ll say, who else are you talking with? And they’ll tell me. Most of the time they’re only talking with me. And if I sense any hesitation on their part about working together, I say, oh, listen, you really ought to talk with. Tim Williams is a great competitor of mine who’s better at some things than me. Blair End is another one. So you really ought to talk with them because I feel like if they talk with them and they still come back to me, that’s going to set me up as the best choice to solve their need.

Louis: That’s a fantastic tip. I love it. I’ve never heard that before. And that’s actually fantastic because, yes, if they don’t come back, then, you know, if I had them as a client, they wouldn’t have been happy. Right. They would have left early. But if they do come back, it means that they compare me with the competition and they figured out on their own, they compare me and they figured out that I was probably the best person to help them.

David Baker: Right. We shouldn’t be afraid of the truth. And if we’re not afraid of the truth, that’s part A. Part B is let’s find the truth as soon as possible so we don’t waste time.

Louis: I love it. It’s a brilliant tip, I have to say. Right. So now we know what we are good at. We ask our friends using the service you mentioned, which is pretty good. Ask your friends or colleagues. We are openly saying that on our website. And we are also listing maybe making a list of competitors that we can refer to should clients or potential clients reach out to us. What is the next step then? What would you say? What would you do next to set that up, to set up this agency?

Setting End Dates - Why You Should Plan Your Exit Before You Start

David Baker: I would set a plan that isn’t forever. More and more, I feel like we ought to start things only with an end date in mind. So never start something unless you have an end in mind as well. So you don’t just start an agency and don’t think about how it’s going to end. You say, no, I’m going to start an agency. I’m going to run it for three years or 10 years or whatever that date is. You can always extend it if you get to that point. But we aren’t. We’re so much better at starting things than we are ending things. And we have this stigma of failure somehow. Like when we change our minds and go somewhere else, it’s failure. And I’m seeing some really healthy things happen in the marketplace. There’s. So I would pick a number of years that I’m going to do this, I would throw myself into it, and then I would seriously consider doing something else. That would be the next step.

Louis: That’s interesting. So why would you do that? What’s the benefit of doing that?

David Baker: Because otherwise we’re just doing something because we don’t have the courage or the discipline to think of something else. We’re just letting momentum carry in us. It’s like we’re on a bus and we don’t. Like you don’t get on a bus without knowing where you’re going to get off. Only crazy people just stay on the bus all day.

Louis: You’re blowing my mind.

David Baker: That’s good.

Louis: Yeah. Yeah. I like those simple ideas that really challenge the way you think. And that’s. You said one five minutes ago. You’re saying, another one. I can’t wait to hear you for another while. So you decide on an end date because you want to challenge yourself to potentially think of something else. You don’t want to be on the bus and not knowing. Staying there all day. That’s really good. Right? So let’s say we have a pretty good positioning. We actually know we haven’t touched on that. So we said, this is what I’m good at, this is what I’m bad at. But it doesn’t mean much more than your own strengths. So how do you pick a market then? Because the world is big. Do you target tech companies? Do you target tech companies in Tennessee? How would you go about it?

Choosing a Viable Target Market - The 10-200 Competitors Rule

David Baker: So usually most people don’t just start from scratch. If they did, then they would just do an honest assessment of the marketplace to see where the demand is. But usually that doesn’t occur to them until a little bit later. So they’ve already got some successes under their belt. So most positioning, in almost every case, positioning emerges from something you’ve already done. So you look at the work you’ve done and you say, which of these projects have I been effective on behalf of the client and have I actually made money? And hopefully have I really enjoyed the process? Pick three or four of those. You only need three, even two sometimes, and say, okay, now let’s test it with some other truths around positioning. Does this give me enough opportunity? Does it give me too much opportunity? And there are some really specific things about how we can frame that. Like you want to have some competitors. You don’t want to have more than a couple hundred competitors. You want to have a focus where you can buy a list. It doesn’t matter if you buy a list. It just means can you buy a list? Because if you can buy a list, then the common needs that these people are facing are addressable by your positioning and so on. So you come up with a positioning and you know, there’s lots of little ins and outs around that, but it usually revolves around that. Make sure there are competitors, but not too many and so on.

Louis: All right, so I like your answer on, because I think this is where people are really eager to learn more. You said a few things that are already really helpful. So first of all, you said between 100 and 200 competitors. Does it mean, let’s say for the sake of the argument, that we are starting an agency in Tennessee. Are you talking about 100 to 200 competitors within the Tennessee area? Are we talking about the world? What are we talking about here?

David Baker: I’m talking about, in my case, it would be the English speaking world because there simply are not sufficient qualified clients in Tennessee. And besides, people don’t respect agencies who only do local work. So we really. And because the world has been Googleized, we can work anywhere. So no, I’m talking. So I would just to tighten that range up a little bit, I would be looking for between 10 and 200 competitors around the world for the work that I’m going to be doing. And then overlaying that, you would look for at least 2,000 to 10,000 prospective clients around the world that need what it is that I’m describing. So those two things work together and that points to your positioning typically.

Louis: So if there are too many of them, let’s say you find 250,000 potential customer, you would say it’s your positioning is too wide.

David Baker: That’s right, it’s too wide. Because that means that these prospective clients are going to have too many choices and you won’t be able to use your positioning to generate a pricing premium because your work is Too interchangeable with other agencies.

Louis: I love it. So you have those people and you said buying a list. So even though you won’t necessarily buy the list, but you seem to be using that as a way to know pretty fast whether your market is big enough or too small. So you’d go and try to buy a list of. For the sake of the example paper company that prints only those handmade kind of paper envelopes and stuff like this. So you’d only focus on paper companies. I don’t know how many there are left in the world. But you would try to buy a list of them and see if there are like 200 or actually 500,000, right?

David Baker: Yeah, exactly. So there’d have to be between 2,000 and 10,000 of those prospective clients. We don’t even need to look that one up. We know there’s not enough. That means there’s not enough opportunity. So then we move on to the next option because there just isn’t enough opportunity for us to explore. We would starve, essentially.

Louis: Right, so let’s say, for the sake of the argument, I let you pick a target market right now that we can just agree on for the next few minutes. Just something.

David Baker: Dennis. Dennis.

Louis: All right. So, Dennis, how do you find them? Now? That’s probably the first question, right? So those consultants, those freelancers, those people wanting to start an agency or even having an agency, they probably struggle with that. How do they find a scalable way to get new clients in?

David Baker: Right? And the world has really turned more to an inbound sort of world. Right? So we’re not picking up the phone and dialing these people like we used to in the past, beating the bushes, trying to stir up opportunity. We’re going to generate insight that will draw them to us, usually organically mixed with maybe spending some money in an outbound way, back to this notion of why the list must exist. So we’re targeting our agency to some people, some prospects who share some common pain. This pain is keeping them up at night. If that pain is significant enough, then somebody has already figured out how to make money off of that pain. And so they’ve created a list. So they’re going to have a conference that all these dentists are going to go to. There’s going to be a blog that somebody’s going to write. There’s going to be a book that somebody’s going to direct to these people. And if no list exists to gather these people who are sharing this common pain, then it’s not a viable positioning. That’s why we focus on the list, even if you never buy the list.

Louis: And this is another tip we got from Philip Morgan, who’s an expert in positioning. I mentioned that many times in many episodes. If there is a conference for it, an event organized for this particular audience, then there is an audience for it. It’s probably big enough.

David Baker: Yes, for sure.

Louis: There is this example of this handmade soap maker conference that is actually going on next year. I don’t remember where in the US but there are more than 700 to 800 people attending it. That’s normally a proof that there is a good target. There’s a good market for you to

David Baker: go after if you don’t mind working with weird people. 700 to 800 people making soap, handmade. Okay, yeah, but that’s big enough. But I don’t know if that’s my market. But yes, but that’s part of it.

Louis: Right. So you need to use the list and the number, but also to use what we said before, what you like doing, what you don’t like doing. Right. So you don’t have to choose this because the number says so. Right. It’s also based on the affinity with, with the market.

David Baker: Right? Right, exactly.

Louis: Yeah. So how do we find those people like in, in an actionable manner? What’s the next step that you would use?

Finding Clients Through Association Webinars and Content Marketing

David Baker: Well, Google is our best friend, right. I mean, I started this agency, this, this consulting firm before Google even existed, two years before. But now that Google exists, it’s beautiful because I can put insight on my website or I can do a webinar with you and people are going to find me and it’s going to draw people in. That’s the slowest but surest and least threatening way to do it. If we need to speed up the process, then we might actually have to buy that list that we’re talking about. Here’s one of the best, quickest ways to find those prospective clients, and that’s to offer to do a webinar that’s sponsored by the association that gathers all these prospects together. These associations are typically hungry for content and you host it, but they do all the marketing for it. And you’re doing a webinar to 300 or 500 people, you’re getting all the email addresses, and then without abusing them, you can send them information that’s very helpful to them, and then one or two of them will hire you. So there’s no magic, but it’s. It really. Business development is, is easier now than it ever has been in history.

Louis: And so you would say it sounds like a long process, right. We all know it’s the right one because inbound inquiries are usually the best. They’ve heard from you in the past. They thought about it for a while and then they started contacting you. It’s much easier than cold calling somebody who’s never heard from your brand or you ever before. However, I’m picturing those people who are starting out. They would say, well, it’s all well and good, but how do I find clients next week? Right? I kind of know the answer to what you’re going to say, but what if they are in this situation?

David Baker: Well, finding work as a freelancer is easier because you can work for intermediaries, you can work for other agencies, and you are going to have this fairly vast assortment of contact from your previous jobs from people you know. I would go to LinkedIn for sure. You can even buy ads on LinkedIn that have much better specificity than Google AdWords and they cost virtually nothing. And it’s a quick, very inexpensive way to do it. But if you’re a freelancer starting out like that, it’s not that difficult. If we’re talking about starting an agency from scratch now, we’re talking about having to find clients that are going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that’s a much more difficult proposition.

Louis: So that means it’s. You possibly need to start before you start, meaning that in your current job, in your current position, or in your current project, you kind of have to start that on the side to build up your brand, right?

Building Your Agency While Keeping Your Day Job

David Baker: Oh, yeah. And I. Oh goodness, I wish I’d thought of that earlier because I so believe in that. I believe in, like if you’re. Are you serious enough about your business that you are going to spend the evenings while you still have your day job, you’re going to spend the evenings preparing all your marketing materials, building your website so you can flip a switch and it’s live that certain day. Or are you going to wait until you quit your job? Are you going to put money aside so that you’ll have some cushion? Because the enemy of pure great clients is the panic you feel. And that’s what forces you to take on client work that is not a good fit for you. So running your business well with enough cash cushion is your best friend.

Louis: And this is one of the biggest mistakes I’ve done in my life is that when I left my job to start my own consulting company, I had no clients, no reputation, no trust, no credibility in the market. The only thing I had was around 20 grand in savings. Right. And it was a struggle. And if I had to do it again, I would not do it. I would wait patiently for a few years, build up my list of network of contacts, build up my skills, and then, as you said, get prepared and launch when I felt that I already had clients to work with.

David Baker: Yeah, absolutely. And there are some things you could have done that would not have been a threat to your current employer. Like you could have done this podcast back then. You could be writing a blog. Right. So that you’re not starting from scratch, you’re hitting the ground running.

Louis: Exactly. So you don’t have to start a competitive business. You can build content. You can create content around what you’re learning day to day. And I think if you feel, if you’re taking it easy, if you think that it’s going to take you a while and you don’t really know when, but it’s going to happen, I feel that you’re less under pressure to deliver results and you do it for the pleasure of it, not for the pressure of getting clients. Right. So you write blog posts every week or every month and you’re looking forward to it and you’re fine with that. You have your day job, you’re being paid, and you don’t have to rush into it. Five.

David Baker: Yes, exactly.

Louis: Right. So before we end up this step by step, apart from getting clients, how would you keep them? Because it’s always difficult to keep them on a retainer, for example. So how do you keep delivering value over time?

Why Retainers Are Overrated and Client Relationships Should Have Expiration Dates

David Baker: I would not focus on a retainer, so I’m definitely going to be in the minority there. I think this big emphasis on retainers is a selfish movement that’s really driven by our own desire to have predictable cash flow. Clients do not prefer retainers. And when a relationship goes bad, it goes bad so much more quickly when there’s a retainer involved. It’s a lightning rod for client dissatisfaction. I would start client relationships without trying to make them last forever because I do believe that as the. As time passes, your value to the client drops, it doesn’t get higher. And so I would aim for client relationships that last anywhere from a year and a half to four years, something like that. And I would have some built in, some planned obsolescence along the way, which means that I’m going to have to work at finding new clients constantly. But I think I’ll be refreshing my client base with clients that love me because I’m starting from scratch and we’re not this occupying Force that I talked about earlier.

Louis: That’s an interesting take. I wasn’t expecting you to mention this. I like that. And I think, especially when you work with smaller businesses, the likelihood that they will churn, the likelihood that they will close down or that switch to another competitor that’s cheaper is quite high. If you compare that to the higher end of the market, the Fortune 500 and the likes.

David Baker: Right, right. Exactly. Yeah.

Louis: Right. David, you’ve been amazing on this, step by step. Now I’d like to get to know you a little bit better. There’s something that really picked up my curiosity in what you do.

David Baker: Did you see some pictures of me somewhere?

Louis: No, not this time. So, just to summarize what you do, you help entrepreneurial experts to build stronger creative businesses. You’ve worked with more than 750 firms, which is kind of crazy, and more than 100,000 others that have been through your webinars or the speaking engagement you’ve done. So it’s quite amazing. On your LinkedIn profile, though, it says that you speak English, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish. So the question is, are you full of shit?

David Baker: I am full of shit, but not about that. My graduate work was in language. Well, I grew up overseas speaking English, Spanish, and Canhobal, which is a Mayan language. And then the rest of the languages I learned in graduate school.

Louis: Pretty good. So that’s the good link with. The next thing that I actually wanted to know is that you lived in Guatemala with a tribe of Mayan Indians until you were 18, after which you moved to the United States. I’ve never heard anybody going through this experience. So would you have if you had to pick one story that summarizes your experience there, what would it be?

David Baker: Maybe. Well, the one that comes to mind is my experience. When I came to the US there’s so much I didn’t know. I remember flying into New Orleans airport. That was the gateway to Latin America at the time. Now it’s Miami. But back then, I go into the men’s restroom and I. I’m looking at the urinals, and it’s like, wow, this is amazing. This is big, long, stainless steel trough. This is amazing urinal. It’s so cool. So I’m standing there peeing in this thing, and then I look around and I see these guys walk up next to me washing their hands in the urinal. And I realized I had not been peeing in the urinal. I’d been peeing in the sink. So I had a lot of those experiences. My parents were Medical missionaries. So that’s why we lived overseas. And then I came to the US when I was 18.

Louis: Wow. That’s the type of story I was expecting you to come up with. So we talked in this episode to consultant freelancers or agency owners or people who want to get their agency to the next level. What do you think they should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years, 20 years or 50 years even?

David Baker: I think be honest about what they’re good at and what they’re not good at and don’t be afraid of that honesty. That would be the primary message for me and then probably closely allied with that is just to really be good at something. To spend the time to really know what you’re talking about and don’t worry about all the things you don’t know about as long as you’re honest about it. But be really good at something and make that your specialization.

Louis: What are the top three resources you would recommend to agencies?

David Baker: In particular, I would say they should consider sales positioning and sales [email protected] that would be a big recommendation. He’s a competitor of mine, Blair Enns. Another would be to get all of the free stuff on my website without paying me a dime. And then I would say read everything that Tim Williams writes as well. I think his ignition consulting, I think his work is really good. Those will be the three great sources.

Louis: What’s the name of your website? What’s the address?

David Baker: Recourses.com R E C O U R S E S But in the next few months it’s going to be davidcbaker.com

Louis: and how can listeners connect with you, ask you questions?

David Baker: Probably my email address which is davidcourses.com r e c o u r s

Louis: e-s.com well David, you’ve been amazing. Thank you so much for your time.

David Baker: Once again, thank you very much for having me.

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