[Progress] Building An Advertising Agency | Personal Journal

[Rasti Miklovic]

There are so many tips on the internet about planning your day, writing down daily goals, and all that. I found out that the most effective thing for me is to wake up, start a Pomodoro timer, and just work till the cows go home.

Hi everyone! I'm Rasti and I'm here to log in on my progress, make new friends, share my knowledge, and maybe learn something new from all of you. I've been on this forum for a year, but just now felt the need to start my own little corner.

Background:

- 4 years running social media ads+PPC as a freelancer on Fiverr and Upwork
- 4 years running a small E-commerce store(inconsistent due to working with numerous clients)
- Currently working for an agency
- Studying finance at the university
- Worked with fitness influencers, 2 Silicon Valley startups, a Shark Tank business, Chinese scammers, wannabe e-com dropship millionaires, bloggers, saas companies, biggest dj store in the US, one of the biggest wedding businesses in the US, multi-mil $ e-commerce stores

Why do I want to build another marketing agency in this saturated niche?

- I've built a positive track record, with some amazing case studies, great results for many clients
- I've noticed there are too many charlatans in the marketing niche who watch a YouTube video on how to make 10k a month with SMMA, open an agency and promise insane results and never deliver. I've seen this first hand too many times.
- I've been taken advantage of too many times. Even by the agency, I work for at the moment.
- I'm tired of getting paid a pocket change on Fiverr and Upwork while delivering some great results.
- Never got paid more than $1k a month, even when I worked for some big brands, I'm too nice to be more aggressive with my service
- Another reason, the current agency I work for is founded by a 20-year old girl who watched some YT videos on how to get rich running SMMA, she knows absolutely nothing about marketing. I've found out after several months of working with her. She basically uses my case studies to get $2,5k a month clients while I get $500 per client. (I know, it's f##d up)

My strengths

- A ton of experience, a track record
- Lots of knowledge built over the last 4 years
- Exceptional focus
- High-risk tolerance
- Friendly communication

My weaknesses

- I'm too nice
- I'm too introverted and struggle with doing cold outreach
- I'm too slow at times (I get caught up with irrelevant details, like fixing image resolution on some non-priority image on my website for 2 hours)

How far am I on this journey?

1. Agency website built
2. 5 blog posts
3. Around 20 valuable social media posts on my Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter profiles
4. Cold outreach - 30 loom videos sent with a ton of value talking about the lead's website, suggestions, competitor research, with a quick CTA at the end of the video, if they liked it, they can reach back and book a quick call with me. Results - 5 positive replies(they found it very useful and one of the best cold emails they ever got), 1 discovery call, but failed to close.
5. I'm active on Facebook groups, Reddit and Quora, answering people's questions regarding PPC, FB ads,...

Current monthly revenue:

February 2021:
+900eur (working on 2 clients for the aforementioned agency)
+10,000eur revenue selling meme merch (it was that insane Bernie meme, now the meme is dead and the merch doesn't sell anymore)
-35eur DashThis ad reporting tool
-30eur Shopify
-12eur custom e-mails

Plan for March 2021:

1. Get 2 clients
2. Write a complete guide(8000-10000 words) on one specific topic
3. Get 20,000 viewers on Quora
5. Cold outreach - record 100 videos for potential clients

My agency's specialization:

- Fb+IG ads. Google ads. Multichannel advertising(most profitable for businesses in my experience)
- Businesses located in the US, CA, EU, AUS, NZ, UK or the EU
- absolutely no dropshippers
- businesses having at least $3k monthly ad budget and either $5k+monthly revenue or a significant startup
- businesses that are active on social media and comfortable with the content creation or at least they're paying skilled content creators
- no passive business without social media activity and sales that hire a PPC manager, goes on vacation and expects me to get tons of sales for them.
- I never promise insane results, the agency I work for promises everyone 10x ROAS and then I'm always under insane pressure to deliver.
- I'm trying to build my agency on honesty and a realistic approach. Not every business has margins healthy enough to run FB ads. Not every business can achieve high ROAS, not all products/brands are unique enough to scale. Not all businesses are able to create engaging content.


Extra notes:

I'm not here hoping to get clients in some sneaky way. There are enough businesses out there.
This will be my personal progress journal. I don't really expect anyone to reply. Maybe along the way, someone will find this journal useful.

 

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[ExaltedLife]

Welcome to the forum. Based on your track record and experience, you have the skills to make the business work.

If you're too nice and struggle with cold calling, there are two avenue you can take:

1. Hire somebody to do it for you, and/or
2. Learn to do it

I suggest the latter at first because it's going to make you comfortable talking to people, and this will make you more comfortable with negotiating. Maybe read some books like "The Virtue of Selfishness" by Ayn Rand or "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" by Mark Manson. Might help.

Here's a challenge you can do right now to both get a client and to level up your skills:

1. Arm yourself with wordpad and google, and make a list of 10 businesses (and their phone numbers) you could provide marketing services for. If you can find the name of the decision maker on their website, that's even better.
2. Call them and ask for the decision maker by first name. Ask questions. Sell yourself.
3. Once you hit the bottom of the list, repeat with another 10.

 

[_Seba_]

It‘s already useful, depending on the level the reader is
I like your progress so far, have fun on the upcoming stuff!

 

[Rasti Miklovic]

Welcome to the forum. Based on your track record and experience, you have the skills to make the business work.

If you're too nice and struggle with cold calling, there are two avenue you can take:

1. Hire somebody to do it for you, and/or
2. Learn to do it

I suggest the latter at first because it's going to make you comfortable talking to people, and this will make you more comfortable with negotiating. Maybe read some books like "The Virtue of Selfishness" by Ayn Rand or "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" by Mark Manson. Might help.

Here's a challenge you can do right now to both get a client and to level up your skills:

1. Arm yourself with wordpad and google, and make a list of 10 businesses (and their phone numbers) you could provide marketing services for. If you can find the name of the decision maker on their website, that's even better.
2. Call them and ask for the decision maker by first name. Ask questions. Sell yourself.
3. Once you hit the bottom of the list, repeat with another 10.

Thanks man. I've started doing an outreach again. I found out that personalized videos work the best for me. The only downside is that it's pretty time-consuming.

 

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[Rasti Miklovic]

It‘s already useful, depending on the level the reader is
I like your progress so far, have fun on the upcoming stuff!

Thanks brother. I appreciate it.

 

[Rasti Miklovic]

Here's a quick update:

1. I'm currently finishing an 8,000-word guide that will be one of the cornerstone articles on my website.

I've got 5 blog posts active. I've submitted the sitemap and optimized the whole website, under 3s load time, 2MB heavy.

2. My goal for this week: Approach 100 businesses with my personalized videos and get 1 strategy session booked.
It takes some time to shoot the videos, but I'm getting positive responses. I never got a response with my cold emails, even though I've tested multiple headlines, personalized texts, etc..

The thing is, I'll have to get better at filtering out the businesses that don't have money to invest into a dedicated marketer + extra ad budget. I'm sure that will come over time.

I'm good at weeding out the businesses that have much advertising potential. I don't want to run ads for everyone and then look like an idiot when I don't drive ROI for the client.

3. As for social media, I'm on Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook. Posting a valuable piece of content 6x a week. My goal on social media is to provide value and be seen. Avoid cliches and cringy content, especially on Linkedin, which is just one huge cringefest, everybody over there is the world heavyweight champion and everybody worked for NASA or Apple.

4. Regarding my current situation, I'm gonna quit at the current agency I work for. I wouldn't even call it an agency, it's just a 20year old girl playing to be the agency founder, one sales guy, and me. The whole agency is built on my case studies.
The sales guy used my case studies to build his own agency (without actually having any marketing skills), the girl uses my ideas as her own while knowing nothing about marketing. I get paid $500, the girl takes $1,5-2,5k per client. I'm trying not to let it settle in my mind or else I'll go nuts.

How did I get into this retarded situation? Last year, the pandemic came and I lost my job, I was so desperate that I took everything I saw.

My last paycheck next week and I'm gone. It's messed up how many charlatans without a backbone are in the marketing industry. If I ever become mainstream, I'll use that platform to expose these idiots.

5. As far as my agency is concerned, I've got the website going, logo, posting regularly on social media, writing blog posts, creating guides and infographics. The next piece will be a lead magnet so I can start building an email list.

I forgot to mention that I've got a business partner, we're 50/50 in this, but that brings me to my next point. I'm doing 90% of the work and it seems that it's not gonna change. Since we launched the first website 2 months ago, I still don't know if he's an asset or a liability. We are an advertising agency, but he doesn't know anything about running ads, doesn't do outreach, doesn't write blog posts, doesn't post on social media. His only contribution is that he knows some people in the Bay area, but it didn't bring us any clients yet.

So if we get a client, I'm gonna do at a bare minimum 90% of the job while splitting the revenue 50/50.

Should I break it off and go at it alone?

 

[Kid]

Hi Rasti,

If you want some approach to clients, be sure to read Andy Black's posts on this forum.

Regards

 

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[poseidn]

good luck - best advice is keep at it. Do LOTS of outreach. Send loom videos until you get flashbacks looking at the loom icon.

Once you've proven your offer with organic, start running paid traffic (with your skillset should be ez) to scale.

Gl!