[Progress Thread] Marketing Agency

[B-qiri]

I'm not sure yet how consistent I'm going to keep this thread. I am doing this to give back for the valuable advice I got up until now, hopefully somebody can get value through my process.

The plan:​

1. Build Marketing Agency​

- Perfect Marketing-Skills
- Get to know many industries and businesses
- Get to know interesting people
- Have a stable income
- Have proof that I can repeat my success in marketing in many different industries and I can build and optimize my own company (for potential investors in the future)
- Collect business ideas
- Save as much money as possible

Build it to a point so that my brother and I can comfortably live off of it (meaning we can save a lot when living moderately) in 1-2 years. About 20-60 clients. At that point optimize it to be as efficient and automated as possible for about 1 year. Then start step 2.

2. Work on the Fastlane​

- Use knowledge and network to weed out ideas
- Test ideas
- Select winning idea
- Implement idea
- Scale

 

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[B-qiri]

Here are the tasks I got from the inputs from Andy Black and Black_Dragon43.

I will work on them top-down.

Andy Black​

(This week)

Tasks:​

- Reach out to people who have a business of sort, get coffee, chit-chat, naturally help
- become member of local business groups
- attend local business classes
- Maybe (depends on results of the points above and if it sounds too salesy or not) reach out with having free capacity or maybe "I'm looking for new niches and people willing to talk to me in exchange for me giving advice"

Mindset/habits:​

- Habitually talk about what you do in a natural way (do that alone in a room a couple of times and track if you did after every interaction)
- Write down and practice to tell success-stories
- Write down and contemplate on how you're an equal in networking (track after interaction)
- Talk about process, not result / practice and track

Black_Dragon43​

(Next week)

Tasks:​

- Work through the webinar-documents
- Work through his Thread:
- Choose Niche
- Get dream outcome
- Know what are the problems to get that dream outcome
- How you can eliminate problems to reach dream outcome

What I have done today:​

- Reached out to 11 people invovled in their own business I knew, will meet at least two of them personally in 2 weeks
- Had and am having conversations with 9 of them (2 waiting for response)
- 1 of them works for a big online "phone-book" listing. They do websites, google listings and digital marketing. He grew his client-base from 700k to 1.2 Mio in 2 years by "just looking at websites of local business of ANY kind, finding errors, calling them to tell them about that error and naturally get asked by them to help them.
I got great conversations from the others too!

Next immediate steps:​

- Scim through LinkedIn who I could contact, wrote down 15 people already
- Scim through our Instagram account and chat with our followers
- Go on with the task-list

 

[B-qiri]

• Had a chat with a lot of people and integrated "connecting" into my calendar so that I regularly connect to people.

• Changed how I introduce myself and already got a potential person I can help:

Usually I said "I just started a marketing agency with my brother" which earned a swift and bored change of subject.
Changed it to "I do Google and Facebook Ads" and immediately stirred up a conversation about their effectivness, technology etc. etc. until one person overheard us and took my number to give her some tipps.

With my previous introduction I was lazy and let the listeners figure out themselves what exactly I do, which of course they weren't going to do. I can still do better but with the new introduction people actually have something concrete to work with. It's like writing: Show, don't tell.

• Got invited to hold a talk in front of some businesses about digital marketing.

• Worked on a marketing strategy for a friend of mine who's a freaking good videographer.

And today I started implementing Black_Dragon43s NPOT methodology.

The only niche I really know well I cannot do (gravestones) as discussed in my other thread so I need to find a whole new niche, get to know it and its problems so that I can find a solution.

The challenge: I need to research a lot.
The advantage: I can choose from more or less 0 which niche so I can orient myself towards big and growing markets.

I researched the WHOLE day, feels like a waist, but I have to do it.

Got down to the following niches which I'll research further by talking to people (up until now I used AI, Google and LinkedIn)

- Solar systems
- B2B ecommerce in construction and medicine

At the moment I'm exploring Ecom construction materials.

While researching I found a lot of other opportunities (for example there is a need for lumber and other materials which I could import from the balkans) but I need to stay focused.

There is another opportunity which is showing in the horizon but until I know more about that I'll keep on finding problems to solve with my skills.

 

[B-qiri]

What happened

"found" a niche but the problemsolving was so complex, I could have taken it as my fastlane-idea which would defeat the purpose of my plan.

Researched some more to see if I could find any other niche that didn't require me to create a completely new product, unsucessfully.

Did a lot of networking, got only some fruitless leads. Mostly the connections were companies way too big or way too small, mostly too big.

Decided to stop the agency, just take a job and work on the fastlane idea on the side, but first had a to go to military service (obligatory, once a year for 4 weeks).

Decided to learn some sculpting and setting gravestones to earn some money on the side. Did so up until End of january which is when I chose my fastlane idea too (gym bag specific to a certain sport and building a community around that). Building a community around ecommerce brands was the niche problem I "found" as stated above btw.

Realized that Im going to have a lot of waiting time for my fastlane idea until I get the proof of concept, so needed to either get a full time job or do something else.

Decided to give the agency another chance. Got an offer of buying an agency, declined. Got back to cold calling.

At this point my brother drops out of the partnership, didn't want to do it anymore.

Now I'm juggling with:
- keeping the gravestone business afloat with marketing, creating and sending offers and keeping an eye on finance and the processes and earn a small living of of that.
- working on the bag
- cold calling

Dont have a lot of time for cold calling because of that, made some with less sleep and longer hours.

Finally closed one client im doing ads for since octobre.

Currently I have a feeling that I'm not going to find more clients anyway this and that but if I'm being honest that's just excuses because I don't like cold calling. Although it does feel like a waste of time, which it maybe is in some sense. Did 130 calls up until now, was able to send out only 2 offers. On the flip side if I just close 10 clients I'll have double the income I would have had in a normal job so I'll get that lost time back I hope. And its a great exercise to overcome Resistance and to get used to failing and get humble.

Ill know if the bag is going to be a thing by june and Ill probably have news on the agency by june as well.

Im 26, trying since im about 17, not reached anything significant (did get the gravestone business from about 250k to 900k a year and back to 650k a year but with more profit but thats not really where I aimed at), but I tried very hard. I think I will reach some milestones in the next few months. Im not going to be rich in the next few months but I'll see things rolling in the right direction.

Pretty doubtful a lot of times though. Other times not at all.

Either way, I'm pretty sure that I will never stop trying

 

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