[Top Agency Series] Scaling an Agency With a Hands-Off Approach With Mandi Ellefson of Hands-Off CEO

Mandi Ellefson is the Founder and CEO of Hands-Off CEO, which helps seven-figure consulting agencies scale. As the creator of the Scale to Freedom Scalable Service Growth framework, she has consulted with hundreds of agency owners and CEOs, helping them free 20-50% of their week to focus on accelerating profits. Mandi is also the author of The Hands-Off CEO and the host of the Hands-Off CEO Podcast.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:57] Mandi Ellefson discusses what Hands-Off CEO offers service-based companies
• [07:44] Common CEO traps and how to identify the root problems that hinder growth
• [12:02] What causes the stagnation that hits many businesses at seven figures?
• [19:21] Mandi tells the secrets of creating an irresistible offer that multiplies your fees
• [23:33] How refining your offer can decrease your operational workload
• [25:31] How a Hands-Off growth roadmap can reinvigorate your stagnating business
• [30:00] How building the right leadership team begins with an exceptional vision
• [34:29] Typical growth methods for scaling

In this episode…

Many business owners work tirelessly and barely move the needle, while others make strategic moves that lead to exponential growth. Could there be a method to break free from the cycle that entraps so many entrepreneurs, allowing them to scale their businesses without being hands-on all the time?

Mandi Ellefson of Hands-Off CEO tackled these very challenges and emerged victorious. Suffering from burnout after managing her business single-handedly, she applied her firsthand experience and problem-solving skills to develop systems that free CEOs from the daily grind and enable their businesses to scale with increased profitability. With a focus on creating irresistible offers that command premium fees, Mandi’s approach revolutionizes the concept of growth in the consulting agency realm.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Mandi Ellefson, Founder and CEO of Hands-Off CEO, about revolutionizing consulting agencies. Mandi talks about the Hands-Off CEO and the evolution of its services, the CEO entrapment cycle, the secrets of creating an irresistible offer that multiplies your fees, and the Hands-Off growth roadmap to reinvigorate your stagnating business.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Mandi Ellefson on LinkedIn
• Hands-Off CEO
• The Hands-Off CEO: Triple Your Fees and Profitably Scale an Exceptional Consulting Agency that Grows Without You by Mandi Ellefson
• Hands-Off CEO Podcast

Special Mention(s):

• You 2: A High Velocity Formula for Multiplying Your Personal Effectiveness in Quantum Leaps by Price Pritchett
• The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by Gay Hendricks
• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Maximizing Agency Profitability With Greg Hickman of AltAgency” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights with Jason Swenk Host of The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Giver Series] The Power of Video Storytelling to Transform Your Business with Ian Garlic of StoryCrews” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “How to Set and Achieve Goals With Ian Garlic, Founder of Video Case Story” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Scaling takes time — it takes changing the way you are operating within your team.”
• “If you want an exceptional team, you better have an exceptional vision.”
• “The irresistible offer is about selling what your customers actually want to buy.”
• “We need to shift from the entrapment cycle to scalable growth.”
• “Breaking the seven-figure slump starts with getting really clear on the problems you’re solving.”

Action Steps:

1. Refine your company’s vision to align with the impact you aim to make in the market: A clear vision attracts higher-quality leadership and team members who are inspired to contribute beyond just earning a paycheck.
2. Narrow down your ideal client type and focus on solving million-dollar problems for them: Targeting can increase the effectiveness of your service and allows for premium pricing.
3. Develop an irresistible offer centered around the outcome your clients crave: This approach transforms the perceived value of your service, prompting clients to invest more for desired results.
4. Establish a scalable business model with built-in profitability to facilitate growth: It ensures the availability of resources to hire skilled team members and supports sustainable expansion.
5. Implement an accountability structure within your organization to empower team leadership: This creates room for the CEO to focus on strategic growth efforts rather than day-to-day operations.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Mandi Ellefson of Hands-Off CEO. You can check it out at handsoffceo.com Mandi, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast. Greg Hickman, he’s been on your podcast, actually, yes. Great episode with Greg. He shared his interesting journey in the service-based business world and from big agency to his own agency to just helping agencies. So that was a good one.

Also, Jason Swank talked about how he built his agency to over eight figures and sold it, and then how he has been buying agencies. Also Ian Garlic, who I know you know, also, he talked about his videocasestory.com. Helps people create video case stories. And he talked about growing up in an entrepreneur household. And I love this, one of my favorite stories from it. There’s so many. It gets the creative juices flowing. He talked about how his dad at a restaurant with live dolphins in it. Okay. Now he lives in Orlando, as you know, that would be kind of strange. But this restaurant was in Wisconsin, and live dolphins, which is even stranger. So just some unique things, and Mandi, you talk a lot about this. How do you make yourself unique? So you stand out from everyone else that stood out. Check those out. Many more on inspiredinsider.com, this episode is brought to you by rise25.

At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. So Mandi, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background to make it look easy for the host so they can create amazing content, create amazing relationships, and, most importantly, run their business, hopefully in a Hands-Off CEO way. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way, over the past decade to profile the people in companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you thought about podcasting, you should just like Mandi does, if you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected].

And I’m excited to introduce Mandi Ellefson. We’ve known each other for a while. She went from $175,000 in debt to multi-million dollar status by revolutionizing consulting agencies. So through Hands-Off CEO, she rescues agency owners from a daily grind and helps transform them to million-dollar agencies into self-sustaining enterprises. And so with her expertise, she’s boosted hundreds of agencies to millions in revenue, attracting premium clients who are willing to pay 50 to 600% more from their fees. And she also wrote the book. Check it out. The Hands-Off CEO: Triple Your Fees and Profitability Scale an Exceptional Consulting Agency That Grows Without You. Mandi, thanks for joining me.

Mandi Ellefson 3:35 

Thank you so much for having me, Jeremy, it’s such a pleasure.

Jeremy Weisz 3:38 

We’ll talk about your origin story, because what’s interesting about you from my research, I’m like, so how’d you go from majoring in geological sciences to what she does now? But just take a second and talk about Hands-Off CEO and what you do.

Mandi Ellefson 3:57 

Yeah, great. So Hands-Off CEO. We help service-based companies B2B, service-based companies be able to free up the time to work on the business and be able to scale in a way where quality increases or profitability increases, and where the company can actually run and grow without you. So that’s in a nutshell what we do, and we work with companies that want to scale from 1 million to 10 million and beyond. And that’s in a nutshell what we do.

Jeremy Weisz 4:38 

If you’re watching or listening right now, there is a video, and we are on her website. You can see Hands-Off CEO here that you could poke around. I’m curious about the evolution of the niche for you, like right now, you’re very specific on who you work with, who you help, how you help them. Talk about the evolution of that. Was it always that way from the beginning? Or did you kind of figure that over time?

Mandi Ellefson 5:02 

I think it’s a little bit of both, we chose this market because I had an agency before, so I understand them. I understood the challenges in the market, and I actually had this problem. How I started this company was that I started this consulting company by accident, actually, because I had this problem. And really what I was doing was I was looking at doing testing and research and interviewing people to understand what the problem was, and I knew that if I understood the problem better and I could help other people solve the problem, I’d be able to solve a problem for myself. So just because it’s one of my skill sets is problem solving.

So I knew if I could solve their problem, I’d be able to figure it out. But before I knew it, people started saying, hey, can you help us do this? And I had a company that came off the back of that, so that’s pretty much like the back end of how that got started and how we chose this market. And I can talk a little bit more about what led to that next after if that would be interesting. But the biggest thing is, is that we chose this market because it’s who we could do our best work with. And I started this from the perspective of not coming with us. I didn’t come with a skill and saying, hey, who wants the skill? I came from it, which is what a lot of agencies do when they start their company, a lot of services. I have a skill. Who wants the skill? I came at it from already solving the problems. So I only wanted to work with companies that I knew I could solve this problem for. I mean, at the time, it was just me that we have a whole company now, and I also had, this was 11, 12, years ago. And I had a nice, large helping of imposter syndrome, which was, I think, a really good healthy thing to have when you want to really stand by results with and within a company.

So how I offered services is like 100% happiness guarantee. I guaranteed results, and if you didn’t like it, you can have your money back. That’s how I started my other company as well. And I find that it’s a pretty effective way to be able to break into a market. It’s not the best way you want to be doing the business long-term forever. You have to be pretty careful with how you do guarantees and all that, but what I found was that it’s who we could deliver results for consistently, and I knew every single time we could get them results. So that’s how I chose the market. And we’ve just gotten more and more fine-tuned in who we can deliver the biggest results for what problems that we’re solving? So to answer your question.

Jeremy Weisz 5:02 

You said, explored it, interviewed people, talked about it, what did you find was the problem? Because I’m sure it got shaped over time as you talked and helped more people.

Mandi Ellefson 7:44 

Yeah, well, I found out that I was not the only person who was having this problem. And what I found out was that, and what I continue to find, is that CEOs get stuck in the day-to-day, for a number of reasons, but the most common one you’ll hear is, is that I just can’t find good people. That’s oftentimes what they’ll say, but it’s actually the deeper-rooted issue is something a lot bigger than that. Because the reason why they can’t find good people, and this isn’t always the case. I mean, you might have really great people, but it’s a matter of like they’re good doers, but they’re not good strategists. They’re not, they’re not thinking at a higher level, like they’re not helping me grow the company. So we get to a certain point where you can’t grow the company without having more leadership in place, and one of the reasons why that happens is that the business model is not set up in a way where you actually are scaling something that actually can be, that can be scaled.

And let me share a little bit more what I mean by that, if that would be useful. But it doesn’t scale because there’s not enough profit in the model. There’s not enough cash flow to be able to pay good-quality people. So what ends up happening is that there’s this entrapment cycle that we see happen in. And if you’re on the homepage, you could scroll away the bottom and it shows a little bit of an image of this, actually, that’s the entrapment cycle right there, where you start with sales growth that happens and your team gets overwhelmed, the CEO gets pulled into it, and you’re looking at, you’re going through, yeah, that’s just a freeze frame, but you’re looking at going and hiring, then you have to choose between hiring and choosing profit or quality, and you have to your company has to be profitable, so you end up having to hire the level of people that you can afford within your budget. And then you end up having to do or redo some of the work yourself.

You’re pulled into it. And then, meanwhile, as you’ve been working in the business, your cash flow drops. You go back to working on the business. You wait for the cash flow cycle to catch up, and then sales happens, and then the whole cycle happens all over again. So this entrapment cycle is pretty hot and heavy in service-based companies.

Jeremy Weisz 11:09 

Is this what you experienced?

Mandi Ellefson 11:12 

Oh, yeah, totally experienced this. Yeah, and I just early on what you can, you can experience this at different stages in the company too. Because what happens is, you can stabilize the whole company, and then it goes, you take it to the next level, and now it destabilizes that you’ve got to build all new systems, and everything that worked before does not work at the next stage. So you can find yourself in this cycle at different stages, pretty much when, when growth plot goes this is oftentimes the cycle that you’re seeing yourself in.

Jeremy Weisz 11:43 

We are talking before we hit record. And you talked about this slump. People hit right, the seven-figure slump, and people come to you, they’ve been stagnant, maybe for like, 2, 3, 4, years. What are some of the causes of that?

Mandi Ellefson 12:02 

Well, to put it simply there, it’s the cliché, they’re working too much in the business and not enough on the business. They’re all aware of that. They know that. I know everybody knows they need to work more on their business instead of in their business. But how do you actually do that? And with the service-based business, what we found is that you have to be able to break this entrapment cycle and the way you break this entrapment cycle is you change the problems that you’re solving. You get really clear on what problems you’re solving and for what client type, not just for the industry. Most people, they niche down on an industry. We’re going to go do SEO for chiropractors. That’s great, because I know you’re a chiropractor too, right Jeremy.

Jeremy Weisz 12:59 

I’m intimately familiar with that.

Mandi Ellefson 13:01 

Okay, so here’s the thing.

Jeremy Weisz 13:03 

I recommend someone not do SEO for chiropractors, but yes, keep going,

Mandi Ellefson 13:08 

Right? I don’t know that that would be the best niche or not, but…

Jeremy Weisz 13:12 

No, I’m feeling, I’m hearing you, yeah.

Mandi Ellefson 13:16 

But that’s useful in a way that you’re niching down, and you’re going after one type of market, and doing SEO services for what that gives you some economy of scale. It makes a little more scalable, right? And you can position yourself a little bit more because you specialize in one market, but you’re still just peddling what you want to sell, not what they want to buy, because what they want to buy, what chiropractors want is they want more patients in the door. They ultimately want more growth with their company. So when we look at creating an irresistible offer for the right type of client that profits we spot client that’s where you can look at it and say, how do we be able to scale our company in a way where we can deliver the very best results, where we could be working with the type of clients that are the easiest to generate results for, that we have a track record of generating results for or maybe something similar, like there’s a lot of variables within the company that you could say, well, you know, we’re better at B2C, we’re better at B2B, we’re better at high ticket.

We’re better at lower ticket. So there’s all these variables that you can look at when you have a service-based company, and understanding who gets the best kind of results and under what conditions that that helps you uncover what that profit sweet spot client, is that power of ones, the one the one problem, one painful problem, million dollar problems, like million dollar problems to solve. A one profit sweet spot client and one outcome again. It’s an outcome. It’s not like, we’re going to drive more traffic. We’re going to drive more organic SEO traffic. It’s like, because here’s the thing is, is like, well, what if it’s all this traffic from India, you’re driving traffic, but is that going to do that anything? No, actually, it could make the business worse off because you’ve gone and spent all this money on something that doesn’t work. So it’s looking at selling what your customers actually want to buy.

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