Are you running a digital agency like an SEO or Web Design company and having trouble scaling? Or maybe you are scaling from 6 figures to 7 figures and are not sure how to go about that.
In this article, I am going to show you how I was able to scale my digital marketing agency, Tyton Media, to 6 and 7 figures a year.
There are several key things you need to know to be able to scale your agency to a 6 and 7 figure business. Here are some key strategies to grow and scale:
Choose a Niche & Industry
It’s much easier to be a big fish in a little pond, then a little fish in a big pond.
When you focus on a niche, you are targeting a subset of a subset, which makes it a lot easier to become an authority in the field. If you’re agency currently does web design, SEO, social media marketing & PPC advertising, you should think about focusing on one service and even one industry.
For example, let’s say you want to scale a social media marketing agency. Instead of offering your service to anyone, try and only focus on one industry, like Dentists… or Personal Trainers.
This will also have an effect on your pricing strategy. Your target industry should be able to afford your services. If you are trying to do social media marketing for plumbers, you are going to have a hard time because their potential revenue is not as high as a dentist or lawyer.
Create an Assembly Line
Building good processes is one of the most important parts of scaling your agency.
This means laying out each step of your business from getting customers to delivering the final product.
When you know each step of your business, you can create an assembly line of steps to create or provide your product or service. This way you can eventually remove yourself from the business, which I will get into later in the video, so make sure you watch until the end!
Once you have each step laid out, you can start hiring hourly employees to perform these simple actions, like ‘email customer welcome email’, or ‘onboard a new client’.
When your business works as an assembly line, there is no 1 bottleneck and you can ideally scale the customers up without having a bottleneck in your process.
Automate & Delegate Tasks
When you are first starting your agency, you will have a ton of tasks to do every day.
Using Software to automate your daily repetitive tasks will help save you hours each week so you can focus on creating processes and sales for your business.
At first, yes, you will need to do a lot of this work, but when you start making some money, you can begin delegating these tasks.
This can include things like:
- Taxes
- Bookkeeping
- Appointment Scheduling
- Emailing
- Social Media
The bigger you grow, the more and more you can delegate out each department of your agency and remove yourself completely from the business.
Improve Your Product
Being able to scale to a 6 or 7 figure digital company requires having an ever-improving product.
In order to sell enough of your service or product to reach those numbers, it will need to be a good product.
Bad products can only make so much before they get eaten alive by the interweb. We live in a time where reviews are everything and with a digital agency, that is even truer.
Having a good track record is super important for getting and closing a lot of clients. So always be looking at how you can improve your product offering.
Build a Steady Flow of Leads
Let’s be honest… You can’t scale a company to 6 or 7 figures without having multiple sources of leads coming in on a regular basis.
There are plenty of sources that you can generate leads for your agency including:
- Lead Databases
- Search Engine Optimization
- Email Marketing
- Pay Per Click Advertising
- Events/Conferences
- Social Media Marketing
- Outbound Sales
Now ideally, you want at least a few of these bringing you in leads at all times.
This will ensure that your sales team has enough leads to close 5-6 figures in deals a month.
Remove Yourself From the Business
Like I have mentioned before, removing yourself from the business is very important to be able to scale your agency.
If you are a web designer and you do all of the layouts, designing, and building, you will not be able to scale.
What happens if you are sick? Or if you are out of town? Then the business does not generate any revenue. Not only that, but you can only work a certain amount of hours so you can only scale to how many hours you can work.
Start outsourcing the work and remove yourself from the day to day tasks. This will allow you to focus on the bigger picture like creating processes, business development and partnerships.