[Top Agency Series] The Power of Niching Down: Building a Specialized Agency With Mike Krass

Mike Krass is the Co-founder/Visionary of MKG Marketing, a digital marketing agency specializing in tailored solutions for SaaS and cybersecurity companies. With nearly 13 years of industry experience, Mike has guided MKG through multiple transformations, refining its focus to serve clients with long sales cycles and complex needs. He’s developed approaches like the “triangle assessment” to ensure strong client-agency alignment and build lasting partnerships in a highly specialized market.

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

• [03:39] Mike Krass shares MKG Marketing’s journey through its four transformative business lives
• [05:51] The fears and rewards of niching down your business
• [10:53] How being helpful can supercharge your business relationships
• [14:40] Why MKG chose cybersecurity and SaaS as its focus
• [18:50] The ideal client size and personality for working with MKG
• [24:06] Understanding the “triangle assessment” and leveraging it for client success
• [27:10] What to do when a client isn’t ready to collaborate
• [31:07] The early days of MKG and the evolution of Mike’s role in the company
• [36:56] How Mike met his co-founder and their startup journey
• [44:21] The best advice Mike received from his mentors

In this episode…

In a fast-moving digital landscape, finding a unique focus can be the difference between standing out and getting lost in the crowd. But how does narrowing your scope actually drive deeper connections and success for a business? And why would an agency give up potential clients to specialize?

According to Mike Krass, a seasoned digital marketing expert, niching down allows agencies to provide unparalleled expertise and build trusted industry relationships. By focusing on SaaS and cybersecurity, his agency was able to craft highly effective, tailored strategies that resonate with specific market needs. The result is a reputation for excellence that enables them to deliver impactful results, connect with key players in the industry, and add significant value to their clients’ growth. Mike emphasizes that this focus doesn’t just streamline services, but also strengthens long-term partnerships that drive mutual success.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz is joined by Mike Krass, Co-founder/Visionary of MKG Marketing, to discuss the benefits of niching down to create a specialized agency. Mike shares how this strategy has allowed his team to cultivate deep connections within the cybersecurity and SaaS industries, amplify client trust, and provide niche-specific marketing solutions. He also talks about their unique “triangle assessment” that ensures client-agency fit.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Mike Krass on LinkedIn
• MKG Marketing

Special Mentions

• Overdeliver: Build a Business for a Lifetime Playing the Long Game in Direct Response Marketing by Brian Kurtz
• Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi
• EOS
• Gino Wickman on LinkedIn
• Kerry Guard on LinkedIn
• Mark C. Winters on LinkedIn
• Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters
• Dan Zawacki on LinkedIn
• David C. Baker on LinkedIn
• Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE by Phil Knight
• Richard Branson on LinkedIn

Related Episodes

• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “How to Craft a Compensation Plan that Attracts and Motivates the Right People For Your Company With Verne Harnish, Owner Scaling Up” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Leading with Passion with Gino Wickman Founder of EOS Worldwide” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[One Question] Closing A Promising Startup with Mark C. Winters of RocketFuelNow.com” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Chicago Business Series] What do Lobsters, Howard Stern, and Oprah Have in Common? with Dan Zawacki founder of Lobster Gram and 4 Mores [EOS]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments

• “If they haven’t hired you already, they’re probably not going to randomly generate this idea that they want to hire you.”
• “The bulk of our work is focused on ads, SEO, and different components of what goes into those two programs.”
• “I’m a big believer in reciprocity — it goes both ways.”
• “We just made the client whole and said, you know what? We want you to have the trust.”
• “I treat it like running back by committee — there are certain people that I look to as mentors.”

Action Steps

1. Embrace specialization and niche down: Avoid trying to be everything to everyone, becoming an expert in a specific niche to build deeper relationships and enhancing your credibility.
2. Prioritize relationship building: Leveraging deep relationships within a niche can lead to valuable connections and opportunities.
3. Adopt a problem-solving mindset with the “triangle assessment”: Assess whether you, your team, and the agency or solution you’re considering are aligned in solving a problem.
4. Clarify roles and responsibilities: A clear division of labor can enhance operational efficiency, streamline workflows, and ensure everyone is playing to their strengths.
5. Seek diverse mentorship: Avoid relying too heavily on a single source of wisdom, opening your mind to a broader spectrum of strategies and solutions.

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 Mike Krass. He is co-founder of MKG. You can check him out at mkgmarketinginc.com and Mike, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. Since this is part of the top agency series, one of my favorite ones was Todd Taskey. Todd Taskey helps pair agencies with private equity. Helps sell agencies. He’s got the Second Bite Podcast I’ve listened to a lot of his episodes, maybe all of them Mike at this point, but I love talking about the second bite, because, as you know this, because you’ve actually helped people through a process and helped build up their company, which we’ll talk about, to sell. But sometimes they’ll sell the private equity, and then private equity sells again, and sometimes those founders make more in the second bite than they do on the first bite. So he talks about the agency, space valuation, space M&A space so that was a really good one. Another good one was Verne Harnish.

Mike and I met through EO and part of Entrepreneurs’ Organization. Verne Harnish started Entrepreneurs’ Organization, and it was a really good episode. He’s got a great book Scaling Up, and that was a very fascinating episode as well. Check out 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. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast, or an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. And we do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. So kind of Mike, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host and the company so they can create amazing content, create amazing relationships, but most importantly, run their business and worry about those things.

For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships, and I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I have found no better way, over the past 15 years, to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So you thought about podcasting. You should, if you have questions, you can go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected]. I am super excited to introduce Mike Krass. He’s the founder of MKG Marketing. That’s an over a decade old digital marketing agency for SaaS in cyber security businesses. He has a special, I don’t know if you call it a talent, but a special skill. He’s actually a pilot also. So Mike, I’m excited to dig in. Thanks for joining me.

Mike Krass 3:20 

Yeah, excited to be here. Let’s take off.

Jeremy Weisz 3:23 

Exactly. Just start us off with um. Tell people MKG what you do, and as you do that, there’s a video piece we’re gonna I’m gonna poke around MKG website so people can check it out. So talk about MKG and what you do.

Mike Krass 3:39 

Absolutely. So we actually just celebrate our 13th year in business this July here in July of 2024, I always like to say that we are like a cat, and we are currently on our fourth life at the moment. The first life was what I called anything for money. If you had money, we were the marketing agency for you, which is hilarious, because marketing agencies are usually supposed to help you with positioning and messaging, and that message is about as UN special as you can possibly get. From there, we became more of working with just technology businesses in general, and then the life that we’re on right now is focusing more on software and cybersecurity businesses. So cyber or software businesses, whether they’re startups, kind of mid-market, or even enterprise, maybe a few publicly traded businesses in our portfolio of clients. They usually come to us looking for a couple things.

They say, hey, our paid media campaigns aren’t working. They’re not generating the right amount of awareness. We don’t know how to measure things, not getting anything down the funnel like we need to kind of fix the paid machine. Help us with that. The other thing that they come to and they ask for is on the inbound side. So from an SEO standpoint, what kind of content do we need to be producing? What does that content calendar look like? How should we be optimizing it and distributing it? Should we hire a backlink building agency, which our universal answer is always. No, don’t do that. In fact, if you read the Google Webmaster Guidelines, that says that paying for any sort of backlinks which you pay in an agency is technically paying for them is actually a violation of their policies.

So we’ve got a lot of points of view and opinions there, but the bulk of our work, like I mentioned, is focused on ads, SEO and different components of what goes into those two programs.

Jeremy Weisz 5:26 

Talk about niche for a second. I found sometimes the agency is scary for them to proclaim a niche like the lose out. Talk about your journey a little bit, and any points that I don’t know if it was hard for you or scary at any points to actually proclaim, okay, we’re going to help SaaS and cybersecurity businesses.

Mike Krass 5:51 

Well, first of all, it is scary, right? You’re saying there’s all these other clients that could be mine out there, but I’m going to tell them that I’m not for them, right? Like, what if they you get into the what if game, what if, like, one of them just randomly wants to hire I can tell you right now, if they haven’t hired you already, they’re probably not going to randomly generate this idea that they want to hire you. We’ve not experienced that ourselves. So I’ll tell you a story, and I’m going to focus on cybersecurity. And cyber is not a huge industry. If you look it up, there’s something like less than 7000 cyber security businesses, product vendors, actually, I should say, not service providers, but products on Earth. It’s a pretty niche market out there, and so because we have chosen to niche down, and that’s one of the areas that we’re focused on. Like you’re showing Jeremy right here, we’re able to actually create a lot of connections, just not even at not even charging for that, but we’re in a lot of the same conversations. So for example, earlier this year, a friend of mine was looking for new opportunities for marketing programs, for their cyber business.

I said, hey, last year, I actually consulted with a business that runs, actually a nonprofit in the cyber space, focused on training and like, that’s exactly who you really want to be getting in front of, in fact, because I know him, I’m going to call him right now, and I’m going to prep him for your email that I’m going to introduce you to on, and I’ll make sure that you get really, like, the best pricing, the best service you can possibly get. So I call that guy. I say, hey, I’ve got a client for you, right? I’m going to walk them right in the door. It’s a small world. Here’s kind of exactly what they do within the GRC space, and I think that they’d be perfect for you. I need you to be pretty aggressive with your pricing, because I know how you price things sometimes, and you sometimes, as most entrepreneurs do, you kind of play with the price everyone at the packaging. I was like, here’s exactly the price in the package that we’ll get him to sign. So I was able to connect those two people, almost like a matchmaker. I didn’t make any money off of that. In fact, the one person spent it and the other person received it.

But being in cyber and being in a small world like that, niching down those types of connections are really added value. Like he didn’t ask me to do that, and I just went out of my way to do it, because, frankly, it was easy, because I knew these two people, and it’s the cost of sending one text message to one of them, a phone call to the other, and then an email connection to the two, it costs nothing. And so by niching down, I’ve got a truckload of stories just like that, where, if I was working with everybody, I wouldn’t really have those connections. And in return, continuing the same story, the guy who I sent the client to is actually, at no cost, asking me to attend a conference that he’s creating. He’s creating a conference that’s going to be in the spring of 2025 and he’s like, hey, tickets are registrations a couple thousand. Sponsorships are going for tens of thousands. Like, I would be happy. Like, I will extend you a free sponsorship at no charge to you. I’d love to have you come up here.

Like, all you got to do is pay for your flight in your hotel, and I’m going to put you in front of people that now, again, in a small world of cyber security, I’m going to put you in front of people that are really hard to get hold of, but you’re going to be in front of them face to face. I’m going to introduce you. I’m going to introduce you. I’m going to basically take their hand in your hand and put it like this, and go, great. You two should talk. I’ll see you later. And our experience was that when we weren’t niche down, or even niche down in our second life into technology, which in the age we’re in today, like every business is sort of a technology business to some degree, or technology enabled, it just wasn’t enough to make those types of connections and have those types of relationships. So it really supercharged our relationships with our clients and partners and friends in the industry.

Jeremy Weisz 9:52 

I love that. Mike, there’s two things that kind of take out of that. One is obviously the power of a niche and this second is just being as helpful as humanly possible to people, because of that, you’re not looking to gain, but you’re just, you’re able to make those connections because you have a deep relationship to a specific niche, and then, I mean, because people do, there’s people who have deep relationships to the niche, but they’re also not necessarily looking to make those connections and being helpful to people too.

So I always think about one of my favorite books, Brian Kurtz Overdeliver, which is kind of, he’s got this like 100 zero, which is like, I just give as much as humanly possible and don’t expect anything in return. Now we both know what happens is when you give as much as humanly possible to someone the right people want to help you as well, which it sounds like happened in that particular case.

Mike Krass 10:53 

100%. Yeah, I’m a big believer in reciprocity. It goes both ways, you know, and when someone helps me, I look the ways I can help him or her in the future, and in the example again, that I gave, I’ve already received in return, right? I’m getting this no cost, sponsorship, attendance to this very tight conference in terms of the attendee, that’s not going to be a large conference. It’s going to be three, 400 people, like by design, like that, just the right three, 400 people. It also makes it so that, Gary Vee always talked about jab, jab, hook, when you do need something like and with this guy, I actually did need something. I was looking for an introduction to an investor that he had worked with in the past and raising capital from years ago. When I mentioned the name, he was like, Oh, that was like, a lifetime ago. Like, yes, I know that guy pretty well.

Why? Because I want to meet it. And if it’s not too much to ask, like, I’m going to send you an email. Can you just push the forward button, put his name in the to: line and hit send? Like, I’m not asking you to write anything. Like, just literally push forward his name, send an outlook, and you’re done, and he’s like, oh, yeah, of course, happy to do that. So I didn’t know I was going to ask him for that down the line, but we can’t predict the future, so eventually there will probably be something that that person can do for you, and at that point you can ask, I use the word appropriate, is it appropriate to ask you to do this? And if you say, no, I respect that, of course, but if you don’t have any objection, I would love if you would do whatever I’m asking you to do.

Jeremy Weisz 12:28 

Yeah, I feel like we have very similar philosophies on this mike, because if someone’s going to introduce me to someone, I like to call it the no work intro, like, I don’t want you to do any work you’re already kind of doing enough by making an intro so you sent them an exact email, literally, just copy and paste it, or, you know, I would even say, Hey, do you want me to reach out and just mention your name so you don’t have to do anything? And most of the time, people are like, no, I’m happy to send something. But you didn’t make them do any extra work, you know, because people, oftentimes, because I sometimes make five to 20 introductions a day. And if someone sends me just an email, I can copy and paste. It’s just so much easier, better, and I’m more likely to do it right away, too.

Mike Krass 13:19 

Yeah, and it’s funny, you mentioned copy and paste. That used to be my go to and I was informed by a fellow kind of center of influence type person. If you read Keith Ferrazzi, who talks about being a center of influence, Never Eat Alone, that’s a great Never Eat Alone. Yeah, that book’s right there, that my friend, who shares our same mindset. Actually, I said copy and paste is too much today. I was like, a couple clicks, and he’s like, you need to get into the forward game. Like they should literally push forward and nothing else. And this person should receive it, see the name go, oh, I know. Dr Jeremy, open. Well, it’s an empty mess. Oh, wait, no, I scroll down, okay, there’s the message, like, it should be, it should be that. I was like, Are you sure? Man, like, copy and paste in a couple clicks. And he’s like, it’s too many clicks. You got to do fewer clicks.

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