Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:16
Don’t introduce me to your toxic clients. Those two. I’m not toxic. I’m kidding, I’m kidding.
Steve Guberman: 17:21
Wrong. Vertical. They’re not just the right fit for us. Do you know what I mean? So?
So a freedom comes along with the ability to own some vertical markets. And you talked about like horizontal versus vertical and two bobs David Baker and Barron’s have a great podcast on that specific topic about like how do I decide whether I’m going to choose and or a service or and or a vertical. And again, I think that there needs to be that sweet spot in that axes of this is the service that we provide, and this is who we do it for. And I can just do niching in my in my service line, we do vertical, you know, we do video or you know, we do animation storytelling for anybody. All right.
That can work. But when we lean into it and we say I do animation storytelling for, you know, healthcare and adjacent health, you know, vertical adjacent healthcare, I’m mixing those words up industries then that’s that much more. I get to lean into it and be a perceived expert and look at the breadth of work that I have in this industry. But then, you know, similarly, I can’t say, well, we do. We’re a full service everything shop for the healthcare.
We’ll do your CRM, we’ll do your marketing, we’ll do your website, we’ll do your SEO and your PPC. And like I don’t, it’s just too much, right? So there’s got to be that that right fit in in that axis of horizontal and vertical.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:58
So let’s assume you know Steve. Yeah. Like you fought it inside your head when you had the agency. But then you kind of came you saw the light. Right.
And you niched. So let’s assume you’re working with someone like, yeah, I get it. I see the benefits. How do you work through with them? How to find their niche. Because at this point they’re like we’re spread out across 15 different industries. We have seven different services. What’s your thought process behind that?
Steve Guberman: 19:32
That’s the best position to be in because you kind of have the choice. And that’s where we were in my shop. We sat down and we went through regular exercises of who is our ideal client? Who do we want to work with based on, you know, the most profitable clients we had, the clients that allowed us to do our work the best, as opposed to the ones that kind of looked over our shoulders watching us move colors around in illustrator, you know? And so we found there was a handful of industries that we had some pretty deep experience in that we had enough work we could show in our portfolio that we had enough experience.
We could do thought leadership content around. And so I’ll take owners through the exercise of as we’re trying to figure out verticals, look through the book of work and look through the past year or two of clients that you’ve worked with, who are the best clients and why? Who are the worst clients and why? Let’s also identify them and kind of group them together. You know, there might be an architecture client.
That was the absolute worst client. But you’ve got enough work in that industry and you know that that industry is wide enough, but not too wide to have enough of a concentration and also not too much competition in the service you provide in that industry. And so you can say, all right, we’ll do, we’ll do architecture. But what’s adjacent to that engineering construction, interior design. So we can lean into that entire industry with a number of adjacent, you know, industries as well.
Same thing with service. Let’s look at all the things you’ve delivered in the past two years. What is your team enjoying the most, which is often overlooked for the actual like numbers and profitability, which we’ll dig into also. But what does your team enjoy the most? What’s the most profitable, what’s currently?
And in the, you know, near term future, the most in demand in the industries you want to play in? And then how do we kind of productize those services to be the most profitable? And how do we optimize their delivery process internally to be the most profitable? And that’s not really tied to niching. That’s just tied to operations.
But I will say a lot of owners who are starting the process to build into their niches will overlook the idea of what does my team love the most? And there’s and there’s good sense to that. Your team will come and go, and the processes that you build around, the things that we want to do, our services and our delivery, those will stay. And so people are replaceable and you’ll plug them into the process that you’ve built. But the team that you have and the loyalty you want to build with the team that’s in place, ties to the work that they’re doing.
So if they’re miserable building websites, why are we selling websites? Right. They’re often not the most profitable service anyway. So. Yeah.
So those are the two exercises that we’ll dig into. And it’s a process because it can’t just be a one and done. We’re going to flip the curtain and come up with this brand new rebrand. And now we are experts in these three industries. Great.
But you’ve got to refine that over time. You know, it’s not I don’t think it’s just a one and done thing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:40
You mentioned operations Steve a few times obviously, because it’s so important. What are some of the mistakes you see agency owners or maybe you made on the operations side?
Steve Guberman: 22:53
Oh man. Again, it’s like, oh yeah, we’ll say yes to everything. And so again, if we’re a well-oiled web shop and suddenly somebody wants to do, you know, a branding campaign or go do a trade show booth and we haven’t done it. Like, sure, there’s there is good reason why shops should kind of break into and try something new, so long as they go into it wide open, no eyes wide open, knowing that’s most likely going to be a huge loss of profitability, you know. And so staying in the lane of what I’ve committed to doing and what I’ve committed to delivering in our lines of service is the best way to maintain that profitability.
You know, if we’re strictly a WordPress shop and suddenly, hey, let’s take a crack at Webflow, those first few Webflow projects are going to just tank profitably. So, you know, those kinds of things are, you know, things to watch out for. It’s the, you know, kind of the attractive shiny thing in the corner disciplined.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:54
Yeah. I find those are sometimes the biggest opportunities for growth from a partnership perspective. You know, like if someone’s coming to us and asking like, hey, let’s — we either have a partner, let’s find a partner because we want to stick to what, stick to our lane on it, you know, and then we can refer over to them and hopefully they can refer back.
Steve Guberman: 24:17
Yeah. Listen. So the shop that bought mine was a PR firm, and before they bought mine they were strictly PR and at that time PR was starting to morph into marketing communications. You know, it has always been the internal comms side of things, but they were starting to do some of the marketing. But anytime they had a creative project, a web project, a branding project, they were reaching out to a creative partner like mine.
That’s the way to do it. And whether it’s white label or doing it up front, as this is so and so, they’re our partner. Like that way you stay in your lane and don’t veer from that because it can be very detrimental.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:54
I want to hear some other mistakes in operations. But let’s stick on the partnership topic for one second. You know, there’s a couple incentives for the company. And maybe we could talk about the PR. You know, obviously they serve their client the best.
Right. Have you I’m curious if you’ve seen what kind of partnership programs you’ve seen that are our successful maybe not white label, but just like referring over, are there certain guidelines people should think about? Okay, we’re going to give a percentage. We’re going to give a one-time thank you or whatever it is from like a monetary perspective. I mean, I’m just making coming under the assumption, you know, they want to serve their client first and foremost, and that’s why they’re recommending.
But from a wanting to think that other company and from a monetary perspective, what have you seen works or mistakes on that end?
Steve Guberman: 25:50
I think when it is a partnership in both shops or serving the client, there’s less of a need of a referral or a kickback or anything like that. And so some agencies, if there’s a white label instance, the front line agency will call them, they will often mark up the service being provided by the white label. But when it is a fully transparent partnership and both agencies are at the table. Agency A and agency B. And they’re doing their own invoicing.
There’s less of a need or a confusion or muddying of the waters of hey, you owe me 20% or anything like that because they’re both at the table to serve the client and for the best interest of the client and to grow their businesses individually. And so whoever brought the other agency in did justice to the client by saying, I’m going to bring this, this brand marketer forward, and they’re going to handle that, and we’re going to handle what we do best. And there’s a level of integrity. There’s a level of trust that, you know, they’re going to take care of you. They’re not going to steal you away from me.
You know, we own the web part of this client relationship, and you own the brand marketing part of this relationship. And you know, the two shall not interfere. And you’re going to respect my business, and I’m going to respect yours. And that’s, I think, the best way to do it. There are certainly plenty of other instances, you know, I don’t do any delivery anymore, you know, as a coach.
And I get people reaching out to me all the time. Hey, do you know whatever? Yeah. I’ll introduce you to 2 or 3 people from my referral network, and I’ll take a cut of that. And that’s just a part of my revenue stream.
It’s my referral network. It’s pretty lucrative. It’s great for everybody because the web shop does great work. The web shop gets the revenue, the client gets a great web shop, and I get a small piece of the pie. So in that instance, like it works perfectly.
But I think when there’s two, two or more agencies going after and working together that I think is, you know, you got to keep that as simple as possible. I am seeing more and more collectives forming, and I think that that’s a really beautiful yet potentially complicated if it’s done right. It’s not too complicated, but I think it’s a really beautiful way for, let’s say it’s a dev shop to build out a library of partners that when they’re going hunting, if it’s not strictly dev work, they can bring in all these different partners of the collective, and they’re kind of all hunting together and considering one another together. And it’s a very like organic process. And so I think that that’s really cool.
I’ve seen more and more of that in the past, I don’t know, five or so years than I ever had before.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:30
I’ve seen that to actually do the collective. I don’t know if you, you know, but do the collectives typically then contribute a percentage to the overall pot or something for the. No they don’t. Okay.
Steve Guberman: 28:42
Not the ones I’ve seen. They, you know, kind of eat what they kill kind of thing. I see, you know, they’re.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:47
Just.
Steve Guberman: 28:47
Kind of.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:48
A referral network. I mean, I guess the way I define collective, you correct me if this is kind of the same as you, but, you know, it’s just a group of agencies that really specialize in something. So they may have a web one. They go out and get a paid, paid search one and they kind of vet, you know, their, their network of people and really they’re referring business into this collective group. And each of them have a really specific, probably service, you know, that they provide in that collective.
Would you say.
Steve Guberman: 29:18
That? So I’ve seen it both ways. I’ve seen it that way more popularly. I’ve seen it that way. I do have a client who runs a collective actually here in New Jersey, and they do all the hunting.
They form the teams based on who’s in the collective, and they take a cut of the revenue for each of the partners in every engagement. And I think that that’s.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:39
All good at lead gen, like they’re really lead gen ING, which is really valuable. Right? I mean, that’s, that’s money that the company doesn’t have to fork out because they’re getting, you know, clients and referrals from that source.
Steve Guberman: 29:53
Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:54
So in the operations piece you said not being disciplined is a big mistake. Any other big ones that stick out that mistakes people make on the operations front.
Steve Guberman: 30:05
Not systematizing things. You know, I’m working with an agency now where they’re working on their delivery of organic social. And so we go through, we follow a project beginning to end. And it’s like this one graphic that’s going to hit somebody. You know, Instagram for a minute was touched like 19 times or something insane like that between the client and the agency, you know.
So spend time and understand that everything can be optimized. Even when it’s optimized, it can be optimized again. So not having those kinds of procedures in things, I’m a big fan of tracking time, not necessarily for the not necessarily for the need to be strict about it and not necessarily for the need to use it for pricing, but to understand profitability and understand account and project level profitability, I think, is vital. So that’s something I often see missed not having a budget. Listen, there are, I know, multi-million dollar shops that don’t have an operations budget.
And so, you know, again, it’s not having the ability to have clarity in where it’s like, I don’t know where all my time for my team is going. I don’t know where all my money is going. And no wonder your profitability is in like single digits or, you know, something so, so simple as that. You know, it just escapes owners and leadership teams.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:31
So the next thing you had mentioned from operations niche profitability. Right. What are some I know there’s a lot out there, but I’m curious. Any of your favorites from a tracking time perspective? I know, you know, we use Hubstaff.
We like it. What are the ones you have you heard are good or that you like out there?
Steve Guberman: 31:53
I haven’t heard of Hubstaff. I’ll have to check that out. So? So I’m a loyalist to Harvest. I’ve been using harvest for 15 years, maybe even longer.
At this point, I probably just need to figure out how long I’ve been using it, but since the early 2000 for sure. I also am a big fan of systems where it’s all integrated, and I’m not referring to QuickBooks and how they integrated timely. I think that that’s a trash integration. I don’t think it works very well, but bonsai, for instance, has all the operations built in with time tracking and proposals and project management. ClickUp is a popular one.
ClickUp is another popular one.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:33
ClickUp we use ClickUp. And yeah, there’s a direct integration, I believe, with Harvest and ClickUp.
Steve Guberman: 32:40
Yeah. Also Asana, I think within the past couple of years has integrated time tracking natively. So. So I’m a big fan of that. When it works smoothly for the ops team is when it’s best, because when it’s a barrier, then nobody wants to do it.
Nobody’s going to pull the data. Nobody’s going to turn that data into something operational. And it’s just going to be a headache. So it’s got to be easy. It’s got to be smooth.
I have a client here in New Jersey. They have a homegrown PM system made on FileMaker Pro that’s been part of the agency for like 25 years, and it is such a headache for the team to use. It is a headache for the project managers to use. And so we’ve been working to revitalize it. And how do we simplify that?
Because nobody wants to track time. But operationally it’s so, so important to know. And again, whether it’s a flat fee project or client, whether it’s a retainer client, knowing where people’s time goes is super important.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:46
Yeah. And I find it not just from obviously all those reasons, but also from like a hiring perspective to see, okay, these people. Well, one well, let’s just assume they’re being efficient with their time. Right. For a second.
But we don’t want our team to be overwhelmed. Right. And so when we see they’re bumping up against, you know, that like many hours a week, we want to be like, hey, do we need to get someone to help out so they don’t get burnt out also? Yeah. You know.
Steve Guberman: 34:20
Yeah. Resourcing is vital. You’ve got to have the data to say we need a freelancer. We need to bring in a part timer or hey, we’re ready to, you know, by Q2, we’re going to be ready to hire another person without having that visibility. Spreadsheets can do it, but there are plenty of tools that will help do it more effectively.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:36
So on the profitability, profitability side, Steve, we talked about maybe people aren’t tracking time at all, right. What are other things you see people making mistakes on the profitability side?
Steve Guberman: 34:52
I mean, I think it starts with they’re not charging enough, right? So not knowing what to charge. And that goes back to like don’t do one off things that you don’t have efficiencies built in place for. Not charging enough. Not sticking to scope.
They’re, you know, a really solid account management team that knows how to be assertive and push back on scope, creep out of scope work client. You know, pain in the ass is essential to maintaining profitability. You know, I mentioned the client with their organic content procedure where too many chefs in the kitchen, like you don’t need a senior account person to, you know, write tweets like think about what that person is costing versus what you’re charging for this service. How can we get it done more effectively? More and more people are moving to offshore teams.
You know, that’s been a thing for 100 years, but maybe not 100, but for a very long time. And it’s more and more popular. And so if I’m paying somebody a fraction of what a US salary costs, my profitability should be through the roof on what I’m getting out of that person in their delivery. Marcel Petitpas talks a lot about, you know, profitability and leverage that you can pull. I can’t recall if you’ve had him on here, but I’ve had him on my podcast and he did a mastermind for me.
And the levers that you can pull on your effective hourly rates and the efficiency on in which you’re doing things. Once you know your numbers, you know he’s got a software called Periquito, but you can do it in a spreadsheet. And yeah, there it is. And so once you know your numbers based on how many hours you’re billing out for what you’re charging for that time, whether that’s project based or hourly or routine or whatever, then you can, you know, adjust your effective hourly rate and increase your profitability without working more hours. And so, you know, knowing your numbers is just so vital.
And again, there’s so many owners and senior leadership teams that just don’t know their numbers. They don’t know what they’re charging or what they should be charging. And it’s kind of I don’t know, they’re just they’re mired down in the day to day. And so they’re not able to step back and say, hey, let’s spend, you know, half a day this week and go through our numbers and understand how do we become more profitable. A lot of times, you know, increasing profitability is not moving mountains.
You know, a lot of times there are very, very small tweaks that can be made enough times to realize real big differences in, in both gross and net profit.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:36
Let’s talk about pricing for a second. How do you go about thinking and helping each of these? Figure out the pricing piece? And I’ll just point out before you answer that, we are if you are listening to the audio, there’s a video part and we’re an agency outside.com/resources. We’re going to go through a bunch of these categories because I find you know Steve and team spent time curating these and you could see under the resource and finance and forecasting the periquito with Marcel.
I have had him on it and it was a great episode. He’s a smart dude. And there’s some other ones here with harvest forecast parallax and metric AI. So pricing wise, how do you go about helping someone figure out the best optimized price?
Steve Guberman: 38:23
There’s a lot to it. And it depends, you know, certainly it depends on the size of the company. If it’s a solopreneur, if it’s a five, 10-20 person shop. But yeah, there’s a download for an hourly rate calculator. And what that does is it walks you through knowing your operational budget.
How much does it cost me to turn on the lights and deliver the services that I’m selling? And, and that’s really targeting larger shops maybe like 7 to 10 people and up because there’s a chief component that talks that outlines in that spreadsheet what my what my human costs are. And so whether it’s salary, benefits, paid time off, you know, how many hours in a year they’re actually working. And then it calculates from that. It helps calculate what my average hourly rate for the shop should be.
And that’s not what I’m billing, but that’s what it costs me. And then add to that my profitability. So I guess I say it’s a lot really. What it comes down to is the variance of the formula, of what it costs to do the work, the profit that I want to make. And by the way, owners need to be included in what it costs to do the work and not as an afterthought.
Owners pay is not net profit. That’s just a nice bonus to have. And then it’s also what’s the perceived value of what it is that I’m selling. So let’s say it cost me 100 bucks an hour, which is on the high end to build a website, and it’s going to be 400 hours. I think that comes out to 40 grand.
Can I charge a client 40 grand for this scope of work that we’ve outlined? Do they see the same value in the scope of work that I’m selling them, that they say, yeah, 40 grand is a really nice price. It’s within our budget. It’s what our investment, you know, is. And it’s within the threshold of the investment we want to make in this project.
Or am I selling that to a mom and pop? And they’re like, listen, I’ve got five grand. I can’t do that for 40 grand. What are you talking about? So pricing is a mindset thing, but it’s also the mindset of both who’s presenting it and who am I presenting it to.
Early, early creative professionals are underselling themselves. They’re not charging enough. Seasoned professionals are often also not, you know, presenting their prices properly. And they’re kind of going on a hope and a dream versus presenting confidently. I think also there’s the miss of not having upfront financial conversations with clients to understand, are we aligned here?
Because I’m going to charge 40 grand for something. Do you have that in the realm of your radar, or are you looking for somebody that’s only going to charge five grand?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:25
See, we’re going to go through these resources a little bit. Thanks for putting this list. But I do want to hear about when you sold. What do you wish you knew at the time. When you sold that you now know.
And obviously when I heard the story before it, obviously you stayed on for years after the sale also. So obviously there was a very good relationship there. But what are some things you wish you would have known when you sold?
Steve Guberman: 41:56
So I’ll preface it with saying that I sold my agency. Not necessarily out of desperation, but I was done like I had surrendered. And I was just kind of I was fried. I had just finalized my divorce, and I had also just lost our biggest agency of record account, and it was a seven figure account, and I had to lay a few people off, and it was the first time I ever had to do that. So those that series of events kind of took the wind out of my sail.
From a confidence in selling standpoint. And we were a small shop. We were 12 people. And so I was responsible for all bizdev. I was so in hindsight, I wish we were not owner led sales.
That wasn’t even on my radar. I had brought in somebody to help with sales and they weren’t effective. And they lasted about 90 days. And we joked that the one deal they did brought in was like the bane of our existence. It was the client that wouldn’t go away.
But so. So I do wish prior to that, I had been more hands off with the agency because it would have increased the valuation. We were probably about 60% retained revenue when we were acquired. So from that standpoint, we were really good. We also had a productized recurring revenue.
We were selling white label email marketing, which was a recurring revenue stream for us. So I’m grateful that we had that in place. I do wish we had better systems that were documented. We didn’t have the strongest documentation. And so when it was time to transition some of our services to a newly built team, We spent a lot of time recreating the wheel documentation and, and, you know, SOPs, things like that, whether it’s outlined in a wiki or in a notion doc or, you know, however it’s outlined, like it’s super, super important for the value of the company.
But what I did was I literally pitched my agency to complementary service providers. We were branding and web. And so I pitched package design, I pitched digital marketing, I pitched PR shops, people that didn’t do what we did. And we focused on this is our book of business. This is our trend of the past three years of top line revenue and profitability.
These are the sectors that we serve. And so I ended up getting three offers through the series of pitches that I made and ended up moving forward with the merger with the PR agency. We had a great relationship. We had worked with clients together before. I aligned with their values and they with mine.
And it was initially a two year buyout and a two year earnout rather and stick around for two years. And that turned into five years. So it was. Yeah, it was a great relationship. I think we did some great work.
One of the things that we had hoped for and worked a lot towards that didn’t come to fruition, was the cross-selling of services. So all of the PR clients benefited from the creative services that we did web branding, digital marketing, email marketing, etc.. I don’t think we were able to sell PR into any of the creative clients, maybe like 1 or 2, but not nearly on the level that we had hoped. And PR is far more profitable than creative services delivery. So that was the goal was we can really make a difference in revenue streams if we sell PR to creative services.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:40
So yeah, thanks for breaking that down. Before we get to the resources piece, there was you talked when you know some of the goals people have, obviously there’s revenue goals. There’s balance goals. Some of the things you did, you had someone who was kind of working 80 hours a week. Talk about that.
And some of the things you did there.
Steve Guberman: 46:05
Yeah. I had a client come to me through a referral, a Boston based agency, and they were working, you know, six days a week, 12 to 18 hours a day, burning themselves out. And a few of the biggest challenges were the work that they were doing was stuff that they loved doing. But then on top of that, there was a million other things that they didn’t love doing, you know? So a lot of creative professionals, I’m going to launch a business because I love doing this thing.
Come to find out, I don’t get to do that thing. So I taught them how to delegate. I taught them how to, you know, brought them through the exercises of the things that you’re doing that are on your plate are far more profitable if you have somebody else do it. Things that you want to keep, even if it’s not the most profitable, it’s why you’re in business. And so I help them go through the exercise of how do I delegate, what do I delegate, and to whom do I delegate?
And so we built a team. We brought in a project manager for them. So they’re not running projects any longer. Huge relief for them. You know we put systems in place, put procedures in place.
We also help convert almost 65% of their top line revenue to retainer based clients, as opposed to on demand project clients. And no discounts built into those retainers. There’s a misnomer that if people are pre-booking my time, I should give them a discount. There’s no discount. I don’t believe in that.
And so now they work a very comfy and healthy 40 to 50 hours a week. Most of the work that they do is the activities that they love doing. They get to, you know, go to the gym during the day or have lunch with their husband or have, you know, have dinner with their husband. Like, imagine a world where you’re working so much you don’t get to have dinner with your spouse. Like that’s just disgusting.
So huge, huge wins there all around. Their profitability is up. Their team has, I guess about doubled in that time. Top line revenue continues to increase and their life is far more manageable. So it’s just a great success story. I’m super proud of them.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:10
No thanks for sharing that. It’s instructive to kind of hear the process. I’m going to bring up the screen here for a second. I want to poke through some of the resources here because you have some valuable stuff and here we go. So I just like to hear how you’ve categorized it.
First of all, you have automation so people can check this out at agency outside.com/resources. We have automation. We have like Chris I don’t know your personal favorite or two. We’ll just go through the category and you’ll let me know. You have Chris Phantom Buster scribe how Zapier create, create, copy and feed bucket and he what’s your what’s your favorite in this category?
Steve Guberman: 49:01
So I use crisp for all of my recordings. You know, you jump on a zoom call and you see everybody’s robots in their fathom that AI and all that crisp records, all of my calls without taking up a square in the Zoom call. It’s a super powerful tool and it gives really good synopsis back for me. So I love crisp.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 49:22
It’s interesting. They started as a canceling noise, canceling only when I, when I, when I used it. And so they must have pivoted and did noise canceling. Now they do transcription meeting notes and recording. We, I think use fathom and read I for that.
Yep. That’s cool. I didn’t realize they.
Steve Guberman: 49:43
Did that video. I guess within the past couple of months they integrated video. I haven’t played with that yet. So yeah, so I use that and I use Zapier on that list. I’ve kicked the tires on the others, but I think they probably came as referrals through other podcast guests or clients.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 49:59
Yeah, we use Zapier and make, as far as that goes, bookkeeping. We have bench, Bonzai, FreshBooks, QuickBooks, Xero. You mentioned Bonzai. What’s a favorite of yours here?
Steve Guberman: 50:12
So I unfortunately I’m a slave to QuickBooks, but I’m a big fan of Bonzai again. I love their all in one system. I do think FreshBooks has some really good merit to it. So yeah, I think they’re all strong.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 50:26
Okay. Books, Atomic Habits we have Getting Things DoneSeven Habits of Highly Effective People. Smarter. Faster. Better. Traction.
What about in this category? What’s the favorite?
Steve Guberman: 50:39
First of all, I’m embarrassed that Built to Sell isn’t on there. But yeah, I mean, traction was a game changer for me when I first read it, probably about six years ago now, seven years ago. So I’m a huge fan of that. Getting things done. I probably read his book, I don’t know, 2 or 3 times.
And same thing with Atomic Habits. Just, you know, every time you go through it, put it on an audiobook when you’re walking the dog and every time you go through it, you’re going to take something away from it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 51:04
Yep, yep. People can check out. I did a interview with David Allen of Getting Things Done and Gino Wickman of Traction on the podcast, so people can check those out. Those are all great books on there. We have coaches talk about this category.
Steve Guberman: 51:21
So I’m a big fan of community over competition. I don’t really believe in competition necessarily. Not that like, oh, I’m so amazing that I don’t believe in competition. It’s quite the opposite. Like I’m humbled to have relationships with all of these people and there’s plenty more.
I mean, there’s so many coaches these days. People that I’ve been able to, you know, build friendships and relationships with. Guys like yourself and Marcel and Greg Hickman and Dan Englander and just names that I can’t even, you know, often remember. But these are people that I’ve been able to build friendships with. Chip Griffin is awesome.
I’ve known Elise Bannon for probably 30 years now. Justine Clay, she’s a Jersey gal and, you know, by way of England. So she’s awesome. Kelly Campbell inspired my ability to become a coach. And so I forever grateful to them.
And Mary Mario Lanzarotti is just he’s just game changing and mindset. So huge fan of his as well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 52:16
CRM we have Bonzai Dubsado HubSpot streak. We use Activecampaign actually for that. But what’s your favorite? Do you have a favorite CRM?
Steve Guberman: 52:29
I use the free HubSpot to be honest, I’ve been using that for about five years. I like it. I actually didn’t realize that Activecampaign was doing CRM. I know that they —
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 52:39
They have a deal section, so since we have a large email list that we like to use. So we were using Pipedrive. It was just more than we needed. We were using like 1% of what they have an amazing platform. But we already had activecampaign they have a deal section.
So like we might as well just use it for that too. So yeah. Yep. H I know we have another minute or so. We have HR team and resources.
Caliper. Enneagram. Gender decoder. Gusto. Job boards.
Lead generation is always a popular topic. Apollo cleverly zipify Rev boss. Any favorites there?
Steve Guberman: 53:19
I mean I love drip. I used it on and off for probably two or so years. And kick around different ideas and campaigns and outreach things. So I love that Apollo. I’ve seen great effectiveness.
And then cleverly, I had used it in my last role. So I enjoyed that. And Rev Boss, I’ve got clients that have gotten some really good results from that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 53:44
So last one Steve, before we go podcasts. Right. Obviously what’s not on this list is the Agency Bytes Podcast, so people can check that out. We got to put that on there. Right.
Obviously. And you have build a better agency smart agency masterclass as Jason Swenk and the two bobs I know you got to run, but maybe a favorite episode or two on agency bites that people should check out.
Steve Guberman: 54:12
So I don’t know when this is dropping, but my 100th episode is coming out this week, the week of February 25th. And quite, quite honestly, I’m like just blown away at the guests that I have. I’m not going to reveal who they are, but in my mind, they have made the most impact in our industry out of just about anybody I’ve ever heard of or known. And the fact that they spent almost an hour with me in their insanely busy life. I was just blown away by — amazing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 54:45
So open the loop. You’ll have to check out agencyoutsight.com and the podcast page to find out who this mystery 100th mystery guest is. But first of all, Steve, thank you. I know you got to hop on a call. This was fantastic.
Everyone check out agencyoutsight.com or episodes of the podcast.
Steve Guberman: 55:04
Jeremy, thanks for having me. I appreciate you and your audience as well.
