How to Start an Agency Business with Joe Troyer

Joe Troyer 0:28

I want to take you guys through this formula that I've been working on, and that I use when I really think about an agency. Alright, so here we go. So first and foremost, is your core offer. Okay, so your core offer guys is, this is the main thing that you sell, this is the thing that makes you 95% of your revenues. So in terms of a core offer, your core offer should always be a monthly residual, if you don't have a monthly residual in this business, I think that you're absolutely, I'm just gonna be frank, I think that You're shitting the bed, I think that you're missing the boat. And ultimately, you're going to kick yourself in the ass three months, six months, 12 months down the road from now, when you have a bad month and can barely survive, right, I was just speaking with a really good friend of mine.

He's my videographer, great, really talented dude. And I'm speaking with them. And he's like telling me that that he was kicking himself in the butt, like his business model obviously is not recurring, anyone from crushing it every month superseding for like the last year, last year and a half, and just getting bigger and bigger and bigger to that abrupt fall off of quite literally no deals happening the entire month. And if you haven't felt that yet, you're going to feel it, you're going to have this experience. So let me save you some trouble, let me say save you some angst, and definitely build a core offering. And for me, guys, I wouldn't do anything less than 1000 bucks a month. Okay, 1000 bucks a month, that should really be like the starting price point for you.

Okay, and ultimately, over time as you get clients and as you retain clients, you're getting them awesome results that monthly recurring needs to go up. So you need to go from 1000 to 1500 to 2000, or 1000 to 1000, from 2000 to 3000. And your pricing as you get bigger, and as you get bigger, and as you need less and less customers, your pricing should go up. Okay, so this is just the monthly minimum to start, okay, so your core offer should have a minimum of 1000 bucks a month, right?

At the end of the day. Again, you need $1,000 A month minimum for your core offer. And frankly, if I was going to jump into a new niche, or new vertical, I would really challenge this number, okay, and I would be looking at potentially even starting at 2000 plus a month, and your profit margin on these numbers is almost as important as that $1,000 A month mark or that minimum recurring revenue mark. And I would say that at the end of the day, you should be looking at 75% Plus margins on this. Okay, and if your margins are the opposite, right? If you got 75%, and cost of goods sold, trust me when I say you got a big frickin problem, right, and you're not doing yourself any justice.

And the fact of the matter is probably in six months, like you're going to be done with the client, because you're not making any money, you're going to be sick of it, you're going to be doing a crappy job. How many of you guys have at least a 75% margin right now, when you look at your current customer base and your current revenue, so I was talking with, with with a friend of mine, well, friend of a friend, and this guy recently, you know, took took some coaching from me. And literally in the course of 30 days, we took his profit margin from a 25% profit margin to a 75% profit margin.

And the dude right now is at between 3038 and $40,000 a month recurring. Think about what just happened for him in his life in his family. Like that is frickin crazy. That is bananas. Huge difference, right? So make sure that you got that profit margin. And I know some of you guys are already thinking like Joe, how's that possible? Right? Like how do I get that profit margin? By all means you guys can add on things like Pay Per Click advertising that have a smaller profit margin, right? But say that they're gonna actually put up the spend, right?

And then if you wanted to, you could roll in the management into your service. Okay, but keep out all the things that cost a lot of money. Keep those out of your core packages, okay? You guys should be at 75% Plus margins. Alright. The other thing in terms of a core offer is we want to make sure

Joe Troyer 4:51

that it's proven to keep customers for at least six months, or that you believe you can keep customers for six months because at the end of the De, if it just turns people out, and it burns people and they're sick of your program in six months, and they're gone, I think you probably could find a much better core offer. Okay, so if I'm going to build a quote unquote, traditional SEO agency, okay. And by traditional SEO agency, I'll kind of walk you guys through what I would put in my core offer.

All right, so first off, I would put SEO, obviously, and that would consist of on page and off page. Most likely, I'm going to go after local as well. So that's going to include me building out like city based landing pages, so I can rank for all of the different variations and all the different cities and towns and service offerings and those combinations together. On Google Maps is obviously a big, big part of locals, most of your call volume is going to come from Google Maps, okay.

But SEO on page and off page, I believe full heartedly is actually going to help you rank and rank higher, actually, inside of Google Maps. So they are inside. Yeah, on page and off page SEO, traditional SEO is going to help you actually rank higher in Google Maps. So I think they belong together, I think they're one in the same, at least when you're selling to local. Alright, so for me, Google Maps would definitely be inside of this package, as well in here is going to be called tracking.

Okay, and not just for SEO, and whatever I'm doing, I'm going to want to try to be consultative, I'm going to try to help as many of them as possible, as many traffic sources as possible, so that I can help the business owner understand what's happening, right and call tracking super freakin cheap, right? A couple bucks, a phone number and a couple of pennies a minute. Okay, and by all means, if you see that creeping into your margin, you got a client that that is getting a shitload of phone calls, that by all means have them start paying, but maybe you just include, you know, hey, we'll include five phone numbers for you every month.

And we'll include the first X amount of minutes for free. And if it becomes a problem, then deal with it. Okay, so after call tracking, I would also implement reviews, okay, and at the end of the day ranking in Google Maps is great, but really where you're going to get the most call volume, what your clients want, right? Like they want results, which means phone calls, which means the leads, you need to have a good reputation in Google, you need the most amount of reviews that are in the three pack and you need the best aggregate score. Right?

So you want a four and a half or better, and you want to make sure that you Trump everybody else and the total quantity of reviews. Okay, so you might be thinking, yeah, Joe, that's reputation management. Yeah, but at the end of the day, if that can swing my, my calls, 30 or 40%, up or down in terms of call volume, you better best believe, right, that I'm gonna be talking about reputation and using reputation inside of my local SEO package. Alright, guys, so for me,

I'm going to take my own advice, I would be starting out at $2,000 a month, minimum, and hear at the end of the day, if that is not acceptable in a niche and my ideal prospects, which we're going to talk about next, we're gonna run the other way, right, we're gonna go find another vertical that can afford to pay it. Okay. So next up, and Guy 75% margin in that package is amazing. Let's talk about fulfillment real quick in that package. On page is going to be labor intensive guy, but there's no other cost of goods sold. And that's a one time per account thing.

No problem, right? City based landing pages is a bit of content. And no problem. You don't have to do 100 In a month, just drip them out and ensure that you can hit that 75% profitability. Next up is Google Maps. We're going to do one full audit, fix the items that are wrong, optimize the GMB then you're going to order your citations and you're going to be golden. Right? Like that's about all that you can do in terms of maps.

Now, every month moving forward, we can do some map embeds, right, and we can do some other strategies. We can power up the citations with more backlinks. But at the end of the day, that's about all that we can really do.Joe Troyer 9:36 Okay, call tracking. Obviously, once we set up, it's kind of set and forget. And then reviews as well. We're gonna run some type of review boost campaign.

And what I mean by that is like, we're going to have something that's going to get reviews fast. All right. And so we're going to want to implement a campaign that very quickly puts us ahead of the competition in terms of total reviews and also aggregate score, right? So we're gonna go on and up again, four and a half reviews or better or four and a half stars or better and also be beating them in terms of the total number of reviews that we have. And then what we'd want to do is implement some type of review monitoring program that is automated, right?

So as soon as they get done dealing with a customer, they put them inside a CRM or it connects with the CRM and it automatically as a requesting a review, okay, and that folks, if you think about it is very front end loaded, right? First 90 days is critical. Okay, first 90 days is critical if you can keep your cost of goods apps at 25% and your profit margin at 75% in the first 90 days. absolutely crush it after that.