ESYB2 015 - Starting an Agency Business
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[00:00:00] Students have asked me to add practical examples to this course. So this is one of those practical examples of how to start a business. And I want to start with an example of a business that can be started and created in many, many different ways. And that is an agency business. So, it's actually pretty confusing, because an agency business, first of all, what is that?

If you're not familiar, it's a little bit vague, and people sometimes call it an agency, or freelancing, or consulting, those are the most common names for it. Basically, what it is, it's doing some service. Usually for small business owners, but the idea is that as you grow, you'll serve as bigger and bigger companies, and obviously ask for bigger and bigger rates.

But obviously, there are few big companies, and there are many, many, many small businesses, so these kinds of companies, like agencies, freelancing, mostly focus on helping small businesses in some [00:01:00] way. And the common ways they help are SEO services, social media marketing, doing programming, doing design, doing some sort of web creation or writing content, things like that.

Those are the common services. So far so good, right? The confusion starts to happen when well, how do you start this business? What's the plan? There are so many different approaches to starting this business. The simplest one is just freelancing. You can sign up on freelancing sites like Fiverr and Upwork and usually you start at low prices, work hard and as you gain experience you would work up in price.

and getting more and more clients. This is actually what I did. I appreciate this method. It's a hard method because when you start out, you're working for very little money. For relatively demanding clients still, and you have to do amazing work because your work gets reviewed. And that's why a lot of people, service providers, don't want to [00:02:00] do this.

Because who wants to work many hours and get paid little? People want the exact opposite. They want to work few hours and get paid a lot. But I will tell you that hard work like this to gain experience is a sure way to succeed long term. It's not the only way to succeed as you'll see in this video, but it's actually what I did and it's what gave me a lot of experience helping so many businesses that then I started to be able to teach and having so many perspectives helped me coach better and it was a tremendous foundation for everything else I did.

But I started the hard way. Freelancing is essentially the hard way. You don't have to do the hard way. You can do the smart way, which we'll talk about later. But the hard way is also a fantastic path. Now, a different way to do freelancing is to call it an agency. It's kind of still freelancing, but with a fancier name, certainly.

And maybe you hire a [00:03:00] little team. And as you grow, your team expands. And when you're an agency, well, you can still get clients from freelancing sites, but there's more emphasis on getting your own clients. Clients would come from Google search, ads, YouTube, your own sales outreach, etc. But these are clients you own.

Whereas on the freelancing sites, really the freelancing site owns the client and so agencies can typically charge higher prices and sometimes much, much higher prices. Like, let's say I wanted to make a website, I can get one made on Fiverr or Upwork for like 200, but agencies sometimes sell websites for 3, 000 or 4, 000, same really relatively basic websites.

And you would think, well, who's going to pay 4, 000 for a small website? Apparently, a lot of people do, because they're just not savvy enough that there are cheaper services available or they get sold the idea that they'll [00:04:00] get a better website, where in reality, even if it is better, it's only marginally better.

But the promise of the agency is that the agency owner doesn't do a lot of the mundane day to day work. They just make the sales, and then the team does the work. So once the agency owner figures out how to get a lot of sales quickly, the idea is that they will spend very little time actually working and will be able to outsource all the work to their team.

The challenge of course is that a solid team is really difficult to build, but the promise of this idea that, Oh, as an agency owner, I'll just get sales and have my team do it, so I'll be left with a lot of free time. That's a great promise. It attracts a lot of people and it's certainly one of the ways to try to Strategize this business, but it's harder than it seems to make it work.

Now. There's another way to do the [00:05:00] same business And this is to call it Consulting it's basically the same idea largely but Branded much better. Oh consulting. What is that? It is a confusing term and there's a lot of like MBA consultants that consult with Fortune 500 companies. This is not that consulting.

This consulting is basically the same services more or less just more professionally packaged. And of course much more expensively sold. It's all about how you present what you do. So instead of saying hey I'm a hard working freelancer I'm gonna work for you for five or ten dollars an hour to gain experience You can find the way to present yourself like a million bucks and say I'm amazing.

Trust me I'll do a great job for you. And of course, there's many trusting clients who go for that Who just want everything done for them. They believe that if they pay the consultant the consultant will do the work Everything will turn out great. So you see [00:06:00] the consulting is really A polar opposite to the freelancing, it might be a very similar service, but almost every way in which you run this business is different.

Now there's another way to do this kind of a business, another approach, and that is to have your service that you provide as a secondary revenue stream. I used to do this. So for example, when people would buy my courses. And let's say they would struggle, let's say, with SEO or something. Then they would ask me, hey, can you do the SEO for me?

And I would help them with SEO. This is a long time ago, I actually don't have time to do this now, so I actually never do this anymore. But you can build free content or products that is educational, perhaps, and when people struggle and they really cannot do it themselves, they try but they really can't, then they might come to you and say, hey, can you help me with this?

And of course, You can apply all the [00:07:00] previous approaches to this. You can do the freelancing on your own or you can outsource the freelancing. So you see in this video we went over the same business but in four different ways that you can approach it. All of them are viable and okay for different situations and different entrepreneurship styles.

