The Exact Script I Use to Hire (and Fire) Agencies

0:00So, here's how I use agencies now and how you can too. Phase one is I get what I would consider a basic agency. So, long before getting on YouTube, the first step I did was I hired a $3,000 to $5,000 a month agency and they just got me to commit to doing three videos a week. They just trimmed it, which means you take out the oohs and ahs, put an intro and a thumbnail. The main objective of that first phase was just to get the basics down, forcing me to create content on a regular cadence. Once I have more context because I've spent three to six months working with them, seeing what the audience likes,

0:28>> [music] >> then I'm like, "Okay, now I would have to learn everything." So, I go from beginner of learning the basics and doing the fundamentals to how do the top creators create on this platform? No business owner should change their business for one client. And so, it makes sense for both me and the small agency or for you and a small agency to part ways at some point when your demands for what you want exceed their capacity. So, then I work with the much better, more advanced agency who works with the top creators to learn all of the more nuanced pieces of the platform.

0:58So, rather than agree to their initial terms, which is basically pay as long as humanly possible and we hope you pay until you die. This is exactly what I say. "Gather around. I want to do what you do in my business, but I don't know how. I'd like to work with you for six months so I can learn how you do it. Plus, I'll pay extra for you to break down why you make the decisions you do and the steps you take to make them. Then, after I get a good idea of how it all works, I'll start training my team on it. And once they can do it well enough, I'd like to change to a lower cost consulting agreement. This way, you can still help us if we run into problems. Are you opposed to this?" When you start that way, I like it because you're starting with very clear intentions. And you're saying, "Hey, I'm going to commit to six months. This is what I want from you."

1:36And I'm also saying I'm going to continue to pay you after the engagement's over for a much higher leverage, much more profitable consulting engagement. So, that's what a lot of agencies would ultimately want. And if I need to pay a little bit more than the agency fee up front, then I'm willing to do that. I also understand that as I start to train my team on it internally, there will be a period of time where I'm paying both them and my team. So, you're paying twice. The thing is is that when you do that, you're actually building the enterprise value of your business and you're building the asset that you own rather than being reliant on somebody else who eventually could, if you wanted to, cut you off and then you'd be dead in the water. Or, what more realistically happens is they gouge you and they continue to raise their price cuz they can see how much money you're making from the thing. With that new agency, we ran the same play. Hey, we want to learn from you. We want to understand why you're picking these things. We want to understand the decision-making process, etc. I start documenting what they're doing into our processes internally. We want to start co-creating. So, they're making stuff for us and we're making stuff for us. And eventually our stuff for us starts to be as good and eventually better than the stuff that they make for us. And it should be because I'm only one client of many to them and I'm basically renting them as fractional labor with expertise at a premium. Once your team has the same amount of expertise or more, they should be better because one, they have more time because they're going to fully allocate their time to you. And secondly, because they will always have more context on your brand than an agent will. By having more time and more context, all we have to fill is the gap of expertise. And so, once we have the expertise gap, then the in-house team should be better than the advanced team.

3:08And then at that point, you decouple and you let them go. You want to make sure that you have a clear deadline for when you want to make that transition. And this is good for a couple reasons. One is cuz it sets expectations with them. They can also see the LTV and you can talk in terms of that. Let's say it's $6,000 a month. I'm committing to $36,000. All right. So, like you're going to get that from me as long as you're not an idiot. But the real real is that your team also knows that you're like, "Hey, we're 1 month down. We got to understand the stuff in 5 months. Hey, we're 2 months down. We got to understand the stuff in 4 months." And so, it drives you towards the outcome of getting your team up to speed faster.

3:38Now, you have that deadline, but what if your team's not as good as theirs by the time the deadline comes? Well, in my opinion, you either need to change the people or they're not teaching you everything that needs to happen. Because if their low-skilled people are doing better than your team, someone who is a problem. Either them or you. Let's assume that the people are right and maybe it's a more complex platform, whatever. I keep going until our team matches theirs. Once our team matches theirs, then I drop it off. We downgrade it to a consulting agreement just for insurance. One or two months later, if we feel like we're not learning anything on the calls that we have from a consulting perspective, we cut it. And we do so amicably because we set that as the expectation. That's how I grew my YouTube. If you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift.

4:16So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so, we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so, I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can just book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.