Jeremy Weisz 15:22
So you would say, to set this campaign up? I’m just going to charge you hourly, here’s my hourly rate in the run the campaign, would you just charge them hourly?
Bo Royal 15:31
Yeah, I would tell them like, this is going to be the bucket of hours, I need to do this work. And if it’s a little less, I’m not going to charge you that if it’s a little more, I’m going to need to charge you that. But just to give you a ballpark. And that’s how I would get my foot in the door. And, you know, it worked well, for the first you know, like I said, like eight clients. And the problem is, there’s only so many hours in the day. And people also, you know, we’re paying for me to do the work, right. And so I really had to start separating the actual execution from myself, right, like, you’re not paying for me, per se you’re paying for, you know, the thought leadership, the systems, the best practices that that our agency abides by. And, you know, that doesn’t mean I’m going into your account and like, creating ads for you or anything like that. But my team does that. Right. So that took, honestly about two years to pull myself out of that.
Jeremy Weisz 16:38
Talk about hiring. Right. So obviously, you start off, you’re like, Oh, God, I just took a lot of clients. I’m doing all this work. The 80 hour weeks, I thought I wasn’t gonna have, you may have more hours, sometimes. What were some of the key hires you made?
Bo Royal 17:00
I would say the best initial hires that we made were the actual doers of the work, right. So like, the setting up the campaigns, making the optimizations and doing all of the minutiae of account management. And then that freed us up to spend more time on like strategy, client facing type of activities. And then we quickly started hiring people to actually run the calls and interact with the clients for us. And I should note, the first two and a half years, all of our help was contractors, we did not hire full time until I think we were founded in February 2019. We didn’t make our first hire until September 2021. So we were able to grow the business with part time help.
And, you know, most of it was found on Upwork, Fiverr, we had like this whole like, screening process where we make candidates go through a Google Form questionnaire. And then if they did a good job on the questionnaire, we’d make them go through a project, which we pay them for. And it was just our way of sorting through the hundreds of applications that we would get, and, you know, proved to be a good way to bring on what I would call flexible help. It was, you know, if we were to lose a client, we wouldn’t have to fire anyone, we would just say, hey, you know, we lost this client. We’re going to drop your hours next month. But oh, hey, here’s another client now your hours are coming back up. Right. So it really, it gave us the flexibility we needed to maintain profit during that initial two, two and a half year period that we were founded.
Jeremy Weisz 18:58
We are talking about and you mentioned you have some scar tissue from hiring. What did you mean by that?
Bo Royal 19:09
I think we did not when it came to hiring. I think we were very quick to make decisions on people. And I think there probably could have been more time spent during the interview process to understand you know what their strengths and weaknesses were. We could have done a better job to clarify what the role was and what the expectations were. And I you know, I want to be clear like whenever we hire a Workout. We recognize that to be powerful, right, as the business owners. And so I think, you know, we’ve made a lot of hires over the years, some of which just didn’t work out. And every time we’ve done that, it’s really forced us to look in the mirror.
And so what did we miss? You know, how do we avoid this next time? Right. And so, a lot, a lot has been done, you know, in terms of the interview process, there’s a lot more questions, there’s a lot more upfront things that we’re sharing about what the role needs to be and what our expectations are. The project that we have is, I think, pretty challenging. I don’t think most people in the field could do it, which is why, you know, we, if you can do it, it’s pretty good indication that you can work with us and that you are going to work up to our standard. But, yeah, it’s honestly been one of the hardest parts of the job is finding great talent. And then, you know, unfortunately, if it doesn’t work out having to part company with people, it’s never fun having to fire someone.
Jeremy Weisz 21:10
So you found the biggest thing was really being clear, having clarity of the role, and then also having very clear expectations of what you want from them.
Bo Royal 21:23
Yes, I, the other thing I’ll say is, we’ve kind of realized that our sweet spot candidate is someone that has been at a big agency, and has become kind of disillusioned with the way it’s being run. They really know their stuff, you know, but they’re trying to join a company where they can make an impact, where things are fair, and they’re compensated for their contributions. So something I’m really proud of is we have a revenue share compensation model at our agency, where all of the account team gets to share in the growth of the client account. So the client account grows, that trickles down to the agency, and then that trickles down to, to the team. That’s managing the account. And I’m very clear about that, when I’m on sales calls with prospective clients, where I say, like, look, there’s not a lot of agencies out there where your team is going to be incentivized to grow your account, like it’s if your success is their success.
And so I think that that incentive structure keeps everyone kind of aligned on what the goals are, and keeps my team hungry. And it keeps it fair, right. Like, when I was in the big agency world, I got pulled into all these pitches, all of these projects, all these things that were distracting me from what the root of my job was, which was to serve my clients, grow their businesses, and so on and so forth. And I’m very aware of how quickly a team can get distracted when you know, sales wants to have someone weigh in on something, or, Oh, we want to build this content piece or that or that, like, it’s not to say that you shouldn’t, you know, ask your team to occasionally do things outside their, their, their job description, if they want to learn something new, like recording a video or doing a pitch or something. But at the end of the day, the account team is there to serve the client. Right. And so I think that is something else that we have added over the years that has made, you know, the agency. It’s made it stickier with our clients and and and our employees. So I’m very proud of that model that we put in place.
Jeremy Weisz 23:43
Yeah, it’s really interesting, because there’s definitely a pull between operations and sales, right, like sales selling, like, Oh, they’re great. And then it creates all this work for the team. So it makes sense. They’re incentivized to be excited about as opposed to dreading it. How do you decide and you have to share specific numbers, I’m sure they ebb and flow but how do you decide on the incentive structure and balance between? Okay, we need to when we’re growing, you need money to hire people, you need money for, you know, overhead and everything as you grow clients, but in the same sense, you want to reward the staff?
Bo Royal 24:26
Yeah, I’d say first off, we keep two months of operating expenses in the bank at all times. That’s our, you know, emergency fund. Right? That’s something we’ve learned the importance of over the last five years is having cash on hand for whatever happens, right. Jake, my Co-founder would probably be able to answer this better than me but you know, we just we run a p&l forecasts based on current clients current operating costs, And we’re basically able to determine or we did determine a figure that gave, give the team enough skin in the game and still left enough on the table for us so that we could, you know, post a profit every month, quarter year, right? So I’ll be transparent about it or so if our directors make a 2% rev share, on account revenue. And then the junior like account analysts that are working on each client, they make 1% revenue share. So that’s, that’s, that’s basically it’s a very simple model. If you’re a director level, you make 2%. If you’re a manager level and or analysts or below, you make 1% rev share.
Jeremy Weisz 25:48
How do you end up distributing that? Like, what’s the frequency of distribution?
Bo Royal 25:56
Quarterly? Yep. So we don’t like Big Year End bonuses anymore? We’re just paying out quarterly once all, you know, once we have received all the invoices paid?
Jeremy Weisz 26:11
No, it’s really interesting. I appreciate you sharing. I’m sure people will be interested in that. And how do they incentivize their staff? Not just, you know, from a culture perspective, but from a monetary perspective. I love how you said, you know, people have an ideal client profile, right? And they’re thinking about, but you kind of have an ideal staff profile, which helps you to attract probably in market to those staff, you know, if they’ve been in a big agency, and you kind of know who’s a fit for your team culture skill set. So that’s really interesting as well. What did you learn, Bo at it working at a big agency that you bring to Preto Legal?
Bo Royal 26:59
I think the importance of perception, and the importance of presentation, I think those things and like more enterprise and fortune 500 businesses matters so much. And, you know, I’m kind of talking about, like, you know, how you how you build a strategy and present that to a room of people, I got a ton of that experience at a very early age, I was like, like, I was in my first like, boardroom meeting when I was like, 23, or something. And just seeing how executives would speak with each other and how decisions were made, and what the things they really cared about, and the stuff they didn’t care about, that rubbed off on me. And, you know, when my team sends me a strategy or sends me a deck for review, or we’re doing a pitch, I’m still kind of thinking about that boardroom I was in when I was 23 years old. And I’m thinking about that CEO in the room. And it’s kind of like, so what, like, why are we presenting this? What are we trying to get across? Right?
That type of laser focus is like, what is the end goal is pretty much prevalent in all the work we do now. And the other thing I will say is, over-servicing clients, when done in a controlled way can be a very, very positive thing. That’s not to say you should be going out and you know, giving all these freebies away or something like that, but sometimes it’s doing a little bit beyond what’s expected of you. It can really keep your clients happy and engaged, it can help with your churn. You really want to position yourself as a partner, not a vendor, right? And I think if you’re always saying, Oh, hey, this is out of scope, like I’m gonna need to send you an invoice for this or like, oh, yeah, I’m gonna need to charge you for this time, like blah, blah. That that’s, that’s, that’s a recipe for a higher than desirable churn, in my opinion. Right. So I think just sometimes just getting the work done, going a little bit above and beyond can go a long way.
Again, though, that needs to be done in a measured and controlled fashion. I think I was so successful earlier on in my career, because I was willing to go the extra mile for my clients, whereas everyone else was, you know, leaving at five o’clock, you know, they were just doing what was expected. I was staying until eight o’clock, I was responding to emails on the weekends I was doing, you know, going above and beyond and, you know, I’m not as much of a hustle and grind type of thing. Carson these days, I’ll be honest about that, I think I got that out of my system at the right time and age. But, you know, that’s it’s in the world today, if you want to be noticed, you have to be willing to go the extra mile relative to others. So, you know, take that for what it’s worth.
Jeremy Weisz 30:19
Talk about the sales process for a little bit, we’ll get into it, I want to talk through what you do. And I know one of the companies works with Schneider Law, but I’m sure your sales process has developed over the years. And when you go to the website now, you know, obviously, all of you walk through a little bit, how is it? How do people start to work with you and take me through that?
Bo Royal 30:51
Sales has been an area that we’ve made so much improvement in, in the last 12 months, I will be totally honest, and telling you at the beginning of last year, we didn’t really have a great sales process. The biggest change is, we will only start working with a client, if they agree to do a project. And the project can be one of two things, it could be an assessment of their existing advertising channels. Or it’s us coming in and building a strategy that they can implement. So that’s really our qualifying criteria, if you will, you know, a year, a year and a half ago, two years ago, I’d get on a call with a prospect and be like, what’s your budget, when you want to start? And if the questions were so ridiculously surface level, I’m kind of embarrassed by it, thinking about thinking back to it. But I just didn’t do a good enough job of discovery, you know, a year and a half ago, and now. It’s kind of like we’re interviewing to hire someone almost right?
Like, we’re, we’re looking at every potential client with such a higher level of scrutiny. And really what we’re trying to get to the root of is, can we help this? Can we help this business? And if we can’t, then we have no, we have no business working with them? Right. So that’s where the assessment came in, to start and then the strategy that we do, that’s more for clients that aren’t running advertising currently, right. So we have a project for each different type of business. And the other thing I’ll note is both of those projects are paid. And we have lost, you know, out on potential deals because the prospect said, Well, I’m getting this for free from this agency, or I’m getting this for free from someone else. We go, you know, that’s, that’s totally fine. You know, get that free assessment, get that free strategy. And if you’re impressed by it, work with that partner, but, you know, for us, it’s just, it’s not worth extending time.
Jeremy Weisz 33:13
You know, it takes time and energy, if you’re really truly digging into someone’s company and giving them insights, to do those things.
Bo Royal 33:23
Exactly. I also recommend the books, how to win without pitching a manifesto. Like I listened to that, like on a three hour drive down to Fort Lauderdale a couple of years ago. And that’s when it kind of became clear to me that I need to stop. I need to stop going and like joining these sales calls and trying to try to sell myself in 30 minutes. That’s not the purpose of the call. The purpose of the call is to understand is this the right fit? And ask those qualifying questions. And don’t give away free strategy or recommendations. Like if I’m leading the conversation with that, in the prospects mind, I’ve already kind of lost like there’s no value to what I’m doing if I’m just giving this stuff away for free. So that’s been a big, big area of improvement for me personally, over the last 12 months because I’m still the one doing most of the sales.
Jeremy Weisz 34:27
Is that Bo? Is that the one with Blair Enns? Is that the person The Win Without Pitching Manifesto, right?
Bo Royal 34:35
Yeah, yeah it’s The Red Book. Yeah. Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 34:39
Okay, cool. We’ll check it out.
Bo Royal 34:41
But yeah, to answer your question, I know you had brought up Schneider on the screen. That was one of the first ones that we did an assessment for. And, man, that was such a good success story for so many reasons. Because when we did our assessment when We identify that 40% of their advertising budget was being spent outside of their target market of Baltimore. So to be able to early on in their relationship, look under the hood, and point out 40% of your budget is being misspent, like that, that created such a urgency, and then they’re like, oh, my gosh, we need to fix this. And it just enabled us to build a proposal that immediately addressed that problem. And it really helped us, it really helped us sell the value of the service at that point, because not only are we going to save you 40-40% of your budget per month, we’re going to reallocate that. And then we’re going to help you generate more leads, more cases with that, that wasted budget, right, or what’s currently your wasted budget.
So that was one of the first clients that, again, we did the assessment for, and we basically realized this, this is our process going forward, you know, we are not going to work with a client or prospective client until they either let us look under the hood of what they’re currently doing. Or they pay us to build a strategy so that we can present to them the direction we want to move with thanks. Because there had just been too many former clients where we didn’t know what we were setting ourselves up for. Or we didn’t, you know, on the sales calls, they were kind of on the same page with what we wanted to do. But then once they put pen to paper, and we really started working, they were like, whoa, whoa, wait, I don’t want to do this. We don’t have a budget this big, right. So both of those foot in the door offers, if you will, forced us to qualify, not only the client but qualified the direction that we wanted to go with that client, right.
Jeremy Weisz 36:57
It’s interesting, Bo, admittedly, I know some of the stuff for ourselves, and sometimes I will skip over that process. Most of the time, it bites me, but it bites us. Occasionally it doesn’t. But, you know, you get this. But so yeah, we just want, you know, we’re really interested in working, we just want a proposal. Right. And when we’ve skipped over that strat, you know, just well, we’ll do this strategy as we go along, you know, because obviously, the strategy is key. It’s been us more than it hasn’t, so I totally, I totally get it. So you mentioned Schneider Law, any other points of some of the things that how you thought about that and what you did with the Schneider
Bo Royal 37:55
Can you be more specific, sorry?
Jeremy Weisz 38:03
Yeah. Is there anything else that you didn’t mention before that was interesting about the Schneider Law Group when you worked with them?
Bo Royal 38:14
Yeah, yeah. And there’s still a client, I’d say the assessment in identifying how their budget was being misspent was one thing. The other area was, you know, we started asking more questions about their overall marketing budget. And this firm had historically spent the lion’s share of their budget on traditional advertising. And so we were really their first digital advertising partner. So more like billboard, Radio TV bill, yeah, the really those big three. And once they start within a matter of like two months of advertising on Google, I think their budget went from like 8020 80%, traditional to 20 80%, traditional 20% Digital to like, almost flipped. It was like we flipped it from like 70-30 or something like that. 70 Digital 30% traditional, and that’s still kind of how their budget is structured to this day. And that’s, that’s honestly a common problem we’ll see with law firms if they’re there they’re, they’re not prioritizing their budget on the right tactics. You know, they’re buying the billboard, because ABC law firm has a billboard so I need to do that too. Or they’re running a TV ad because def law firm is doing that, right. It’s kind of this like shiny object syndrome. And the reality —
Jeremy Weisz 39:41
It’s like a FOMO almost like well there. I just drove on the highway. I see my competitor has like seven buildings. We don’t know if it’s working or not.
Bo Royal 39:51
I mean, it could be one of my agency friends. He has a law firm client that apparently buys billboards in his past. Have to the office just to see himself as he tries to the office. Right. So talk about an ego trip. But yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s honestly part of the reason why I think firms get the shiny object syndrome. But in reality they they need to start with a very, very targeted digital campaigns and they need to have very specific positioning very clear landing pages that are fast loading that have clear calls to action that enable click to call functionality like all these these technical requirements that they end up missing, because they end up getting distracted by the shiny object, right. So that’s something that we’re commonly helping firms with and in the example of Schneider Law, that was something that they needed help with.
Jeremy Weisz 40:48
Um, Bo I have one last question before I ask it. I just want to thank you for sharing your lessons. Story expertise has been really valuable. And people can check out Pareto Legal at Legal.ParetoPPC.com. It’s Legal.ParetoPPC.com. I love to hear about some of your favorite resources. It can be books, it could be, you know, actual mentors of yours. You mentioned the wind without pitching a manifesto there any other resources that you’ve utilized. It could be even, you know, tech tools, too, as well, throughout your career
Bo Royal 41:33
In terms of podcasts. I’m a big fan of Build a Better Agency Podcast. I listen to that frequently on walks around my neighborhood. Books already mentioned how to Win Without Pitching Manifesto. I also read the book Clockwork. I forget the name of the author. It’s the same guy that did
Jeremy Weisz 41:52
Mike Michalowicz.
Bo Royal 41:53
Yep, yep, I read that back in 2020. Right before we started hiring contractors to help us and that really clarified that, you know, until you bring on people to do the work for you. If you’re a business owner, you’ve just basically created a job for yourself, right? So the point of owning a business is to truly own it and bring people into kind of run the show. Right. And that was a great book. And then the other one, I’ll give a shout out to 8020 Sales and Marketing.
Jeremy Weisz 42:25
Perry Marshall.
Bo Royal 42:26
Yep, yep, yep. That’s how I got the name Pareto into our name. I’m a huge proponent of the 8020 principle, I talked about it all the time with prospects with clients with my team. So that is definitely a framework of thinking that we deploy with all of our, all of our work, right? So those are three great books. And then I love YouTube, or YouTube. I spent so much time on YouTube, from like, trying to learn a specific technical thing to just following, you know, thought leaders in the space, I’ll follow my competitors, just to kind of hear about what they’re doing. I got a YouTube premium account. So I can just kind of save it if I’m on a plane and listen to it and route to somewhere but you’d like I can’t even tell you a specific one because like a YouTube person that I’m following, because I’m just following so many right now.
Jeremy Weisz 43:24
Any software and tools that you like, and by the way, I echo that Mike Michalowicz has some great books. He actually did an episode on the podcast with him, people can check it out. It was more on his book fix this next is a bunch of ones. And also, I did two interviews with Perry Marshall, one of them on his 8020 sales and marketing. So I totally agree with you Bo, fantastic book. He’s actually here in Chicago. So I know him a little more deeply than the others. So but great, great stuff. Software tech tools that you use for the company or yourself.
Bo Royal 44:02
For myself, Freedom. The Freedom App. I am, like, very diligent about cutting out distractions these days. And for me being able to create a fixed schedule where I am not reachable via slack email. Like I’m not able to go to distracting websites, I’m not even allowed to like, go look at my email. Right. So I’m very, basically during the mornings typically, I don’t make myself available to anyone. That’s when I’m doing my deep work. Right. So Freedom has been a lifesaver for me. I’m trying to think of any other tools I use. Loom I love Loom. If I’m doing a task that I want to ultimately delegate, I’ll just record myself doing it, send the video and then it’s kind of you know, off my plate forever. And then for kind of like the operations and the Project Management we historically have used Asana but we made the decision last quarter to move on to ClickUp which basically is Asana plus notion plus like time tracking all in one. I haven’t used it yet. We’re getting it set up right now but from what I hear, it’s awesome.
Jeremy Weisz 45:18
We did the same switch actually a number of years ago to Asana. We are heavy, heavy Asana users and then moved to ClickUp.
Bo Royal 45:26
And you’re still on ClickUp?
Jeremy Weisz 45:26
Oh, yeah, we love it. Yep. Yeah, so if you need some tips, happy to share what we’ve learned. Awesome. Yeah, I love it. Um, CRM wise, do you use a CRM?
Bo Royal 45:38
HubSpot.
Jeremy Weisz 45:39
HubSpot? Okay, cool. Well, thank you, thanks for sharing everything. Everyone check out their website at Legal.ParetoPPC.com or episodes of the podcast and we’ll see everyone next time, Bo. Thanks so much.
