124: Discover Your Own Passion, Knowledge and Advantage with Agency Consultant Jason Swenk

Robert Plank: Today's expert guest is Jason Swenk. Have you ever asked yourself how can I start an agency? How can I scale my agency? How can I generate more leads? How can I find time to do work on the business and not in the business, and what systems do I need in place, or even how do I position myself to sell my agency?

We're in the right place. We're talking to the right guide. We're talking to Mr. Jason Swenk. How are things today Jason?

Jason Swenk: A man. How's it going?

Robert Plank: Super fantastic. This whole agency thing, or web agency, I've got to be honest. I've heard it thrown around. I've heard this term being used at live events. I've been to events where it's like these talks offer agencies only, but I have to admit after seeing it thrown around and seeing a few different, I guess, agencies, I'm still at a loss as to what an agency is. Could you fill us in a little bit?

Jason Swenk: Yeah. It's basically a professional service firm that does marketing or technology for their clients. There's so many forms of a digital agency. The traditional agency everybody thinks of Mad Men, right? I create the Super Bowl ads, commercials, that kind of stuff, but on the digital side there's so many agencies that actually creates websites or do just social media, or mobile apps, or email marketing, or whatever it is. That's what a digital agency is.

Robert Plank: Does it have to be a team?

Jason Swenk: Yes, because if it's just one person you're a freelancer.

Robert Plank: Oh, okay. You could have a 2 person agency technically.

Jason Swenk: Exactly.

Robert Plank: Well, cool. Now that were on the same page with that could you tell us about yourself and about your agency, and what it is that you do?

Jason Swenk: Yeah. Back in 1999, back when Al Gore invented the Internet, thank you Al, I worked for a company called Arthur Anderson who was the paper shredding company of Enron, and worked for them for about 6 months. At that time I was a computer programmer and I really hated what I was doing but I didn't know what I could do next. I was just lucky my friend looked like Justin Timberlake so I created a website making fun of of NSYNC back in the day when they were popular, and it was called NSHIT. It got really popular and started designing websites for people because people were like, "Hey, can you design me a website?" I was like, "Yeah, sure." I was like, "Five hundred dollars," and they were like, "Yes." I was like, "Oh. Cool," and then the next person comes along and I was like, "a thousdand dollars," and I just kept going up until someone said no, and just started doing websites for a lot of cool people.

I struggled for a couple years just because, we were always profitable, but for the first couple years I didn't know even what an invoice was. I didn't know how to run a business or really how to get it off the ground. I didn't have that clarity of where we were going, and then when I started focusing on that that's when we started making, crossing over the 7 figure mark and crossing over that mark, and all this kind of stuff going forward.

Robert Plank: How much of this do you do yourself? Do you just manage a team or how hands-on are you personally?

Jason Swenk: I sold my agency in 2012, so I ran it for 12 years and sold it. Now what I do, and I'll explain what I did in the past. In the very beginning I was doing everything myself. I was doing project management. I was doing design. I was doing development, hosting, everything, clean the toilets, wash the sinks, feed the birds, whatever it was. When I started getting smart I started hiring people for the things I didn't want to do, or hiring for the things that I wasn't good at, and just started expanding, and grew an amazing agency from that.

Since I've sold, that's why I work with digital agencies now, it's just to show them how I started, how I grew, how I sold, and just walk them through the path that I did, and create a resource that I wish I had.

Robert Plank: Is that what you do mostly is you get these agencies to the position where they can be sold, or do you also look at these agencies and maybe refine their system and figure out where they could be doing better?

Jason Swenk: It depends on what they ultimately want. Some people, they envision, they think that in order to be successful I have to get to a point to sell my business one day. I'll tell you that is farthest from the truth because if you truly love what you're doing, why would you sell it? Even after, when I sold my agency, great. I got a great big check. I thought cool, I'll go buy an island or whatever stupid people do, but you're so unfulfilled now because you had all the significance with all your employees that you had, all the contribution that you were helping them out, helping their clients out. That all goes away after you're sold.

If you're just looking for success then that's the perfect scenario but if you're looking for more, which everybody wants more, everybody needs to feel needed. I always tell people, "Look. If you don't like doing the particular business you're doing now you can sell it if you want, but you can also create it as an incubator and build other stuff, and you put the right people into place to do the stuff that you don't want to do," which probably leads you to the next question is, why did you sell it, because I loved what I did.

I had a business partner and we did it for 12 years. I knew I wanted to do something different. I just didn't know what it was. We had a 50-50 partner split and a bunch of companies wanted to buy us and we were like let's do it. We don't know what's next. We don't know what is through that door, but it was the best thing I've ever done as well.

Robert Plank: Did you know that void would be there? Like you said, you were glad to have the big payday but did you, even at that point, did you plan on just taking a break forever or for a year? What was happening at that time?

Jason Swenk: No. I'm a creator so I always got to be building something or creating something, like my wife sees a cool furniture piece and she'll be like, "Man, that's kind of cool," I'll be like, "I can build that. I'll go do it." I have to be building something so I couldn't just sit there. I mean yes, I could've. I guess I could've just do nothing but then I think that's when people die, when you just sit around. You know?

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah.

Jason Swenk: I don't truly believe in retiring. My dad tried to retire many, many years ago, played a year of golf and was just bored, went back to work. For a couple of years I struggled because I couldn't find my purpose of what I wanted to do, what I was really good at, what I was passionate about. You take outside the money. You're like I don't care if it makes money or not, I just want to enjoy it. That's why so many people get into philanthropy and all that kind of stuff, but I just couldn't figure it out until I was lucky to fall into it like I fall into everything else.

Robert Plank: What happened? You had the agency going and then you sold it off, and then at that point then you decided that you were going to build back up just some kind of training or some kind of coaching for other agencies?

Jason Swenk: Well, no. I thought the grass was greener on the other side because I wanted to build a product. I was always in the service-based business, right? I'd sell something. I'd have to deliver something. I would look at people building these technology products and getting huge accolades. I was like, all right, and that was at a time when Instagram just sold for a billion dollars. I was like, maybe I need to create an app.

I literally created a phone app on the iPhone where it takes pictures of everything that you ate, gives you a visualization, shares it out with your friends. It was going really well but I just didn't want to take pictures of my damn food anymore. I was like if I'm not doing it I can't be the hypocrite, and I didn't enjoy it. At that time I was just lucky enough that, I think I did that for about a year, and at that time I had a couple of my old competition reach out and say, "How'd you get clients like AFLAC, and AT&T, and Lotus Cars? How'd you get the best placed to work, and how'd you do this?"

I just started helping them out for free and truly loved it. From there I was like, well, what if I create this podcast and just interview other friends of mine at the time, and just tell war stories about running a business, and an agency, and that kind of stuff, and then it just took off from there. Now I just provide a resource where I help people get to the next level of wherever they're going within their business.

Robert Plank: That's cool. Could you unpack a little bit about that? You say some of your friends asked you how you booked a lot of these clients or, I see that on your speaking topics and things like that you talk about how to generate 25 leads every day, so could you give us a little bit of a taste of the agency, I guess, wizardry that you have? Even just a couple of little things you can do maybe for even any agency to help them out.

Jason Swenk: Yeah. The biggest thing that agencies are doing wrong is they're looking at the bigger guys and they're trying to be a me too agency. The biggest thing you need to do is pick your specialization. You can't be a jack of all trades. You got to pick down to one, do that extremely well, and put out amazing content for that particular audience in order for them to build up trust, and authority, and all that kind of stuff.

By doing that you can start eliminating your competition. I tell people there's other people that help out agency owners, but I don't have any competition. My competition is procrastination and cat videos because no one can be me. No one can produce the stuff or have the style behind my style, and I can be anybody else. It's all about picking that particular market that you want to serve, understanding their biggest challenges and desires, and obsessing over it, and creating valuable information that they can go to without you. That's the most important. Stop doing damn videos about your portfolio and how cool your people are, and your culture, and all that kind of stuff. No one cares other than the people working for you. Focus on them.

The other thing I'll tell you, and this works with any kind of business and my website's a good example of this, stop focusing on yourself. Going to your website rather than saying, "Hey, I've done this and look at all my accolades," and all that kind of BS, ask a question right off the bat. If you go to my website, and it depends on when this airs, there should be a question. Always there's a question and it should say, "Hey. Do you want to know how I started, grew, had fun, and sold an agency?" Then I say, "Hey. Start here." Even on my about page that intro that you read was all questions because that focuses on the person coming to your site and changes the conversation. That's probably one of the biggest things, if you don't take away from anything on this, think about what are the right questions to ask and how do I ask questions in order to focus on them?

Robert Plank: When you focus on them how do you reconcile between making fun videos or making podcast episodes where you help them out, how do you decide between what's just something that I'm going to give away for free, like what did you say? You said to make something that's valuable that they could do without you. How do you decide between that and something that's trade secret that you probably shouldn't give away?

Jason Swenk: I basically tell people everything. The cool thing about this particular market is people are lazy. They want to know how to do it but they don't want to do it themselves, right? You want to separate yourself from everybody else so why would you give away your worst tip? Then everybody's going to think that your best tip. If you put out the typical BS e-book saying, "Do you want to know how to get more customers? Download my boring e-book." That's not going to work but if I put out a video that said, "Hey. Do you want to know how I converted 80% of my marketing proposals from AT&T, LegalZoom, and Hitachi? I'm going to walk you through the 8 steps, the 8 strategies that we use so you can do that, and you can learn the number 1 tip for closing, and not having a prospect go completely silent after you send the proposal."

That's going to be valuable. They're going to watch that video. They're going to take away a lot of stuff. They're going to go execute it. It will work and then they're going to be like, "All right. What's next?" I'm in it for the long run, right? I want to help them out in the long run, which they'll come back to me.

Robert Plank: You give them a little bit of a taste you're saying.

Jason Swenk: Yeah. The cool thing about this particular market and this strategy, you got to know what you're actually doing. There's so many people out there that they're 15 years old, or 20 years old, and they've never run a business. They took a course and they figured out how to do Facebook marketing. Now they want to do their own Facebook marketing course. People are going to see through that so when people tell me, they go, "I don't want to give away my best stuff," it's because that's the only stuff they have, so that might be the wrong business to get into.

That's why I do what I do and it makes a huge difference. I mean this business now, it's taken me, I ran the agency for 12 years so factor this in, but in 11 months I built this particular business selling information and consulting to over 7 figure business in 11 months.

Robert Plank: Nice.

Jason Swenk: By doing this strategy.

Robert Plank: That's cool. I'm looking at some of the things that you have for sale like I see one thing that's a collection of documents that agencies could have. I see you have a course on how to generate some leads. Can you tell us about those products, and how they came into being and what they do?

Jason Swenk: Yeah. I really started out consulting first and I think that's where you need to go before you actually start developing information products or that kind of stuff because you really got to get a pulse and make sure that your assumptions were right. I was just lucky enough that I was my audience, right? The materials I was creating and the lessons I was walking my one-on-one clients through, I wanted to scale that up because coaching and consulting is just not scalable. You can only take on so many people and I didn't want to work all the time. I wanted to work less than 100 powers a month at that time. I work a lot more now because of love what I do, but that was the goal. That was what I wanted to prove to everybody that you don't have to work all the time.

By doing that I was able to take what I was using for my one-on-one clients and replicate that, so I started looking at what made our agencies successful, reverse engineering it, and then breaking out into systems. The only difference between where people are at now and where they want to go is the systems that they have, and systems outperform talent all day long. I just literally started thinking, all right. What systems do I need to put in place or walk my one-on-one clients through in order to get them to understand and be able to implement how to generate more leads? That's how I created the Generate Leads Every Day program where it's basically 5 systems and walks you through all that. It's not just Facebook and that kind of stuff. Yes, that's part of it but there's a lot of other stuff in there for agencies.

What I also started doing is looking at, all right, what are all the other stuff that people are struggling with? You mentioned the agency documents. I look back at all the documents we've created over the 12 years, there's some key ones that I wish I had in the very beginning, and so I was like, okay, how do I build this service ladder, or this offering latter, and saying I don't want to maybe possibly offer the top-of-the-line product right off the bat. Maybe I need to offer the proposal template, or the agency documents, to show them that I actually did run an agency, own an agency, and I was successful at it. You go use this and then you'll come back to me for all the other programs that we have.

Over time, I think this is almost the second year, or I think maybe I crossed over just a little over 2 years now, I just keep adding on based on what people need and how the market changes, and I just keep updating stuff. That's how I created those programs. Does that help?

Robert Plank: Yeah. It does. Looking at the things you have for sale and hearing the way that you position a lot of these things, I know that you had something where you said you're positioning this as you changed up to 80% of your lead generation. and stuff like that. All the things that you were talking about and selling, and even sharing for free, they all seem to be things that they all have a real case study, kind of like you said, you use the coaching to get the pulse of these people and uncover the questions and their problems, then you figure out what kind of solutions you personally ended up applying over and over again, so there's the case study, and the steps, and the proof.

I think that, like you said, the difference between taking a Facebook course and just watching some generic videos and making your own even more genericer videos is that with you, you go back and look at, well, reverse engineer you said, you go back and look at all the things that have worked and just put it into not just a step-by-step system but also things that have actually worked. There's something to that, right? There's something to not just, well this is it been proven to work or I've used this, but you say, "Okay, I use this for Lotus cars, or I use this for LegalZoom." I say, "Okay, eill not only do I have the real stuff to find the theory but I also have the belief, I guess, that it's worked for you, so now I'm going to go at it full speed as far as implementing it."

Jason Swenk: Yeah. You just look at yourself and say what am I passionate about? What do I have knowledge in that other people may not have, and what's my competitive advantage, and then how can I help? That's really the step I follow and the formula that I follow. I had to figure out, I could go after and do consulting for any kind of business, any kind of service company business, but I wanted to drill down, and so I drilled down into a particular market that I knew. Then I wanted to say in this particular market, how do I separate myself from all the other jokers out there and be my own joker, and say, "Well, all these other jokers ran business and to the ground or never worked for an agency before." Cool. Separator.

Then I also wanted to think how can I educate them? That's the reason why I put a cat video on my homepage and I do these goofy Darth Vader videos, or whatever. I'm trying to separate myself from everybody else to break that pattern that everybody's used to in their regular educational videos, and then by doing that, and then them actually getting value from it before they even give you anything, that's the secret sauce.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. That way it's almost like they feel that they owe you.

Jason Swenk: Yeah. I literally have a Facebook ad running right now that's been running for the past 8 months. I haven't really touched it. I literally recorded it on my iPad because I wanted it to look kind of raw. I didn't want it professional and I just waving my arms. I'm like, "Hey look at me. If you're an agency owner, and you struggle with sending out the proposal, and the client goes dark, let me tell you how to stop it," and I told them how to stop it right on the video, and then I said, "Cool. If you like this video you're probably struggling with getting the budget from people. If you want to know how to get the budget click the button below. I will ask you for your email so I can spam you later, and then do that." You're having fun with them.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. None of this old stuff where one step is left out, or no click baiting, or any of that. It's here's this little problem you have. I'm going to fix your little problem. Not here's problem number 2.

Jason Swenk: Yeah. Exactly. If you're using click bait Facebook's going to destroy you, and all these other media companies are going to destroy you.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. I've seen that. They're setting all the stuff down.

Jason Swenk: Which I'm glad. Yeah.

Robert Plank: Yeah. It cleans it up for the rest of us. It's one of those little fads I guess but now it's time to actually help people. I like that you broke it down right there into, once again, steps, right? Step number 1 is the thing that you're going after with your passion, and it sounded like with your app photographing your food, that was something you were like, okay, that was cool but not really your passion, and then number 2, something where you have knowledge. You had this previous knowledge from doing all of the agency stuff. Number 3, where you can get a unique advantage, and the number 4, be helpful and educate people instead of just showing off.

Jason Swenk: Yeah. Exactly, and then the other thing too, and this is really important, especially when you start out, you're going to have one thing. If it's not right for someone don't force it. The reason why I've created so many things is because there's so many different stages people are at. If someone's stuck in their business the agency playbook's good for them. If someone's trying to generate leads, it's perfect like that. Make recommendations on what's actually right for them, not what you want to sell them. When you actually start coming at it with that, and you literally tell someone, "Hey. This program is not right for you if you're trying to get," one of my friends, Frank, is really good at this. He's like, "If you're get rich person this is not the right program for you, but if you're willing to put in the hard work this is an amazing program."

It's like try to push more people away in order to attract more.

Robert Plank: Nice. Along those lines a little bit, do you have any plans with all the products that you have for sale? Do you have any plans for a bundle, maybe with all or some, or do you think that the strategy of just making a pick and choose kind of thing, is that what you're going to continue to do?

Jason Swenk: Oh, yeah. I'm always putting stuff together. The thing is is as you create these programs you've got to create urgency. It doesn't matter what the price is. People don't make a decision on price alone. They make a decision on urgency, and let me prove that point. If I'm about to have a heart attack and I'm going into the surgery, am I going to ask how much it is to save my life? Hell no. Urgency.

It's the same thing about when you're selling your products. You have to educate them enough and show them the value, but then also create urgency so you can use this based on, hey, the price is going up, but then you're selling on price. I usually do it by having people jump on an early bird list. All my programs, when they get on my list, look like an auto launch. It's basically everybody does these Jeff Walker launches and they say, "Hey. I just revised the program. Jump on the program and you'll also get my generate leads program for free," or whatever it is.

What I have found is when you actually do that you're going to increase your conversion dramatically. You'll see the playbook advertised for a certain amount. If you get on my list and you interact with the campaign a certain way, then you may get an early bird offer which comes with everything. Everything's a test and every market is different, so you just got to test it out, and you got to figure out ... Selling my products is just a gateway for me, for them to gain my knowledge, but then come to my live events, or work with me one on one, or join the live event mastermind that we have traveling around the country. You just got to think about what's the end goal. Where do we want to position people? Where are we trying to funnel people to?

Robert Plank: You're playing the long game it sounds like.

Jason Swenk: Big time. I am so happy at what I'm doing, I don't see myself doing anything different to the day I die. I absolutely truly never had a cooler job in the world, not even close enough to this. I'm definitely in it for the long haul because I know I can outlast and outwork anybody out there.

Robert Plank: That sounds like a perfect place to be. As were starting to wind down this called do you have any, aside from all the stuff that you already have set up, do you have any cool upcoming project or idea, or something that you are currently working on?

Jason Swenk: One of the things I'll tell you, especially that can help you out, especially when you're building your campaigns, it's a framework that I've developed on the thank you page. A lot of people talked about there's no dead thank you page. I truly believe in that but what I do on the thank you page is different from everybody else, and it's called progressive profiling thank you pages.

A lot of times when people get on your list, and you're just happy someone's on your list, and you treat them the same way, eventually you'll send them an email saying, "Hey, just tell me a little bit more about yourself so I can send you more relevant stuff." It's always like everybody else. I do the typical BS stuff and I get maybe like a 5 to 10% response rate on it, so literally there was 90% of my list that I didn't know who the hell they were or what I should be sending them.

What I started doing is immediately on the thank you page I'd asked him one question, and I'd say, "Tell me. Are you an agency owner, freelancer, entrepreneur, or agency employee?" Radio button. As soon as they do that I pass them to one other page. I'd ask them to save their revenue. Are you 300,000 and below, 500 to a million, a million and above, and so on.

Then based on their answers I would show them the appropriate thank you page for the offer because I'm not going to offer a marketing professional my proposal template. They could care less about that, and then also, they're not going to go into certain campaigns that I have. If they're under 300,000 in revenue they're not going to be able to get on the phone with me, so I'm not going to offer them my blueprint session, or they're not going to be able to jump to my live events until they're over 500,000. If they're a marketing professional I'm not going to push them into an agency campaign, so now I can deliver a lot more effective content, and the cool thing, you're probably thinking would be like, well what was your response rate of people going all the way through? 94%. It blew me away.

Robert Plank: Geez.

Jason Swenk: By doing that, and I started doing that maybe 8 months ago, my revenues gone up by 75%. My open rate and engagement on email has gone up, it used to be like, the open rate was the typical BS 20%, maybe 4% will click through. Now it's close to 50% open rate and I think the click through, or the clicks, is like 20% or something like that. Something sick, because now I'm serving more relevant content to that audience, and then a lot of people actually put in the survey with the lead magnet or the opt in. That's going to hurt your conversion because you are asking more. Do it after.

No one does this other than my clients and they're just crushing it from it.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool and an easy way to get people to segment themselves a little bit, but like you said, if they opt in first they don't fill out a big long, page long survey as part of opting in, so if they don't want to fill that out they don't have to. You don't lose them but just over time you get them to slowly fill that in, that's pretty cool.

Jason Swenk: Yeah, and when I was measuring this over the month, I use confusion soft, I mean Infusionsoft, so their thank you pages were not responsive. That was 94%, and most of my opt-ins come from a mobile device, so that was 94% on a non responsive landing page. Now they're all responsive so if I measure it again it's probably almost at 98% I would think.

Robert Plank: Nice. That's pretty powerful stuff. I liked everything that you had to share with us today, not only just your story, but also the little tidbits of advice anyone can pick up and use right away. Can you tell everyone where they can find out all about you, what you do, and what you have coming out?

Jason Swenk: Yeah. Just go to JasonSwenk.com/wahoo and I have something special for you. It's links to all the shows and some cool special things for you.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I can't wait to check that link out for myself. Thanks for being on the show on everything Jason and have a good one.