In this you’ll learn about the 6 steps to productize your agency.
Productization has so many benefits which I’ll pretty much just let Lee talk about as he’s the expert here, but I remember reading the Built to Sell book which really sold me on productization.
The story follows a fictitious graphic design company that was struggling with all the custom work coming in, and they eventually end up only doing logos. They have packages you can buy and each one has a very specific process.
It makes everything easier from getting clients, doing the work and even hiring. The best part is that it makes the business saleable, which many agencies aren’t because if you take out the owner, the business would fall over.
Lee’s 6 Systems Required to Productize Your Agency:
- System 1: Everything on a rope – Begin with the end in mind – messaging aligned
- System 2: Legos – pricing in pieces. What to do when people ask for something outside
- Foot in the door offers
- System 3: Service framework – Delivery of all your legos. Systemisation
- System 4: Value based pricing – cruise ship analogy (gold!)
- System 5: Bespoke = be broke
- System 6: Existing clients – transitioning to products from legacy clients
Resources mentioned in the episode
Other Resources
Connection Info
Bio
Since founding GetUWired in 2003 in Lee’s upstairs bedroom, GetUWired has helped thousands of business owners around the world break through the glass ceiling and live the lives they deserve — making more money with less work and having more time for all the things they love. Lee is living proof that his formula works.
At GetUWired Lee and his leadership team won the following Awards: 2012 Technology Partner of the Year, 2013 Infusionsoft Innovator of the Year, Top Company Culture – Entrepreneur Magazine in 2015, and Infusionsoft Elite Business of the Year Finalist in 2015. Some of GetUWired’s top clients also were the Ultimate Marketer of the Year Winners in 2012 and a finalist in 2014.
In 2013, using Jim Collins and the Infusionsofts leadership team as his inspiration he began handing off leadership responsibilities, eventually leading to his retirement from that company in May 2015. In May 2016 he sold out his remaining shares to his long time partners to pursue his lifelong passion of mentoring small businesses. His motto is “Success using vision, leadership and shared knowledge”. He shares everything he learned while building GetUWired. His new venture is leegoff.com and is in business to help small businesses grow faster and more profitable than they could have ever imagined.
Transcript
James Rose: Welcome back to another episode of Agency Highway. Today we're speaking with Lee Goff, who is pretty much a legend in the agency space. Thank you for joining me, Lee.
Lee Goff: You're very welcome. Thank you so much for having me on here.
James Rose: I'm going to go ahead and start introducing you and butchering it like I do. And then I'll hand it over to you, but look. Actually no, I'm not doing an intro. I just want to talk about this awesome guy.
Lee Goff: It's right after a big break, you know what I mean? We'll just wing it man, and it's going to be a good content.
James Rose: Oh yeah. I liked the ones that are just like chill and someone actually reached out to me the other day and said they love the podcast and I was like, just out of curiosity so I can keep doing whatever it is that you like. What is it that you like? And they were like, I just like that you have these like really chill, laid back conversations with people who are killing it. And I was like, oh cool, I can do that. That's really easy.
Lee Goff: Authenticity, if they like authenticity they're gonna get a couple today. That's what I do, man. Authenticity is not my problem.
James Rose: We were just talking about offline. I haven't recorded an episode in probably a month or something now I'm, so I'm going to be a little bit rusty, but maybe that's a good thing
Lee Goff: I know my stuff and I mean we're going to be all over it. So absolutely. I'm excited about the topic today. We've been working with this for awhile.
James Rose: On that note we are talking about productization of agencies and i love this topic, right? Because I just realized I say that literally every time, but I mean that's just means getting the right people on I guess. Especially since I read the built to sell book, which is, you know, starting to become pretty like god like status in the business world which will pick up in the show notes, but it follows a fictitious graphic design company who they are struggling with all the custom work and stuff coming in and they eventually sort of change all their processes and they ended up doing logos. I think it is
Lee Goff: A really kick ass product.
James Rose: So yeah. And then they like have different packages around different sort of logos you can get and what comes with it and they turn everything into a process and it makes everything easier from getting clients doing the work. Even through the hiring. So
Lee Goff: Messaging your messaging is what's one was called on the rope. We're going to get into this here in a second. Being on a rope is one of the six things you got to have to be productized. And, to your point, built the sale was actually one of the books that I used along with over 15 years experience with building agencies and I actually used, it's kind of a kind of an obscure story I'll explain here in a second, but, history was called the Toyota, the agile, a real time inventory. Okay, I'll pick some pieces of that. I took some pieces of built for sale and of course with my vast experience in this whole thing. And we asked what we came up with is the, is the productization model and how to productize your agency or digital agency through that hard part is that digital agency part? Right? Totally. Exactly. And so we've cracked the code, me and my students, I've been working on this and we we're super excited about.
James Rose: Yeah. And many owners of digital agencies are just so ingrained in their business that they, without them, it would kind of fall over, which is another part of the whole productization thing is it makes the business saleable because once you're out of the business, you can sell that as an asset. Right? And that's why I know you have sold an agency, which is
Lee Goff: I have and I tell you what I didn't do as good a job about this as I had. If I had gotten another excellent multiplier. You know what I mean? So I'm not complaining, I'm not complaining at all, you know, but, this lesson, you know, as you go through things like that, you just learn what could have made it a little better, a little whatever, you know, whatever I said, that's exactly right.
James Rose: Let's talk about it. How did you get to the process of selling an agency and what you do different, you know?
Lee Goff: Yeah. So, you know, I started my first agency in 2003. Literally from the bedroom. I know, right? And at the time it wasn't even digital marketing it was web marketing. I don't know, I don't know how long you've been in the space, but it went from web marketing to internet marketing to digital marketing. And so now it's kind of settled on digital marketing and I think it's perfect for where the industry needs to be. But it started in 2003 literally in my upstairs bedroom, me and my wife at the time, we're divorced now. But we started it and then it grew into where I got one suite, you know, in the historical district that has historic district in the town. We had one suite, then went to two suites and then three suites and then move out of that into a big like, you know, 5,000 square foot log cabin that I owned and purchased and all that fun stuff and eventually got to the point to where I retired from my agency at the age of 40 and then I sold it at the age of 43 to pursue what I'm doing now.
Lee Goff: Because as a result of when your agency gets big, well you're not dealing with clients as much. You're dealing with leadership teams and project managers and attorneys and CPAS and bankers and you know, you're dealing with all that stuff. And I missed that. And so I pulled back from that and went back into working specifically with small business owners. And I love it. Absolutely love it. So.
James Rose: Nice. And now you help agency owners do all kinds of stuff. I assume productization is one of them?
Lee Goff: That is one of them. I have 12 different, I have a lot of different things I coach on. But The 12 primary things that I coach on, you know, I'm not going to list all of them, but it's, but it's an entire roadmap for lack of better term on, on how to build an agency, whether it be from pricing to your service framework, how to get more leads, sales and marketing automation, all that fun stuff. Right? And so, and the reality is that all of that stuff gets 10 times. I mean, so much easier whenever you have your products in alignment with your messaging and, and it's how you build your products is the secret sauce. It's not the fact that you can't dream up a big package is how you build it.
Lee Goff: Really. I'm looking forward to getting into that today. But, uh, it's really neat. It's a really neat process. And whenever you hear about it, you're like, oh, that makes sense. Why didn't I think about that sooner? And I'm going to explain that as well. There's actually a history based reason on why the industry had not evolved into this, where it's going right now over time. So it's really neat.
James Rose: Well, let's dive into it. So, so we decided on the topic of what six systems required to productize your agency. So shall we start at system one or is there like a preamble?
Lee Goff: Well let me kinda give you, a little bit of a preamble. Let me kind of give you know a little bit. Okay. Whenever you go to productize your agency, there are a lot of factors that come into play.
Lee Goff: You always hear about certain terms, right? Value based pricing. Begin with the end in mind, you know, have everything on a rope, you know, like standardized. And all the stuff like that. But nobody ever tells you like physically how to go about doing that is, it's so conceptual. They never actually physically tell you physically how to go about doing it. And so what I want to make sure that, where we focus on today is, is that there are six different systems that actually have to be in place to be effectively productize your agency. So I'm going to get it at a very high level, what those systems are. Obviously in each one of those systems, there's a lot of devils in the details, right? So of course, right? And so, but it all boils down to to solving some very basic human needs.
Lee Goff: And so I'm going to give an example. I want to give that his, the, the history example of why the industry, where it is and is where it is and why productization is all of a sudden a big damn deal. Everybody's talking about it. Wow. All of a sudden out of the blue is, is everybody's talking about productization, right? Well let me explain that. Okay. And again, I'm starting to kind of lay the foundation here before we get into the six systems. You know, in 1920 or in the early twenties like that, you can buy any color model T you wanted as long as it was black. Okay. That was it. You didn't have options. You could get four wheels and. But that was it. That was all you can do because, you know, Henry Ford was trying to figure out how to build the actual mass production of similar.
Lee Goff: It had never been done before in the automobile industry. And so he's literally figuring out what does this mean? What is this, you know, do I need a conveyor belt here? Do I need a, a welding machine here? He literally figuring out where to put the different pieces. And so at that moment in time, it's not logical to even entertain options and more product add-ons to that. All you have is one simple product. That's the model t. that's it. You get it in black, that's it. Game over. Because if you attempt to productize, if you attempt to add options at that point, then you spread yourself so thin, but you can't perfect the core of what your product line is, which is ultimately the model t now jump ahead 20, 25 years until post World War Two, you can get forward wheel drive, you can get convertibles and get hot rods, you could get motorcycles, you could get jeep.
Lee Goff: You can get about any damn good thing and then jump ahead another 30 years and now you're going to be getting into a, you know, electric cars and all kinds. I mean it's, it's self driving car. It's freaking awesome. Point being is that it took the industry quite about 20 to 30 years to develop all of the systems and tools required to effectively mass produce a product. Okay. It's not rocket science. What I'm saying is that makes sense. Well, think about our industry. I mean hell, it was just literally dreamed up by Al Gore what? Twenty six, five or six years ago, right? I mean, you know what I mean? Literally, and so if you think about it in the timeline with that, we're right on track.
Lee Goff: So if you're old enough to remember all this stuff, you know, aol was the dominant email and search engine for a long, for a long time. I mean years, five, six, seven, eight years. Then it went into firefox and msn. First it was msn and IE right. Then it went to firefox and now it's google and chrome is kicking everybody's ass and that it's not going to be changing anytime soon, but Google has has the dust, has settled. Google owns that space. Facebook didn't even exist. Now that space is there. Search as an optimization, Google ad words, all of these things, these platforms had to evolve and develop and there were changing so fast that anytime you attempted to build a product around a platform that was changing that fast, you're the idiot in the room because it's going to change. We can't really do anything with it.
Lee Goff: Now the industry is kind of, the dust has settled. You know, we know what tools we are going to be us. I mean nobody's arguing. Look, WordPress, Google, Facebook, some kind of CRM. Thare can be a lot of different CRM, but I promise you the core tools is probably gonna be 90 percent the same across the board, like landing pages. Look, nobody even knew the hell a landing page was 15 years ago. It was a freaking ad in a magazine. Nobody even knew what the hell, It didn't exist. Okay, so now we're in a situation where all this stuff is standardized. We know what a landing page is. We know what we know what a DSL is. We know how to set-up Facebook ads. We know to drive them to landing page we know what UTM parameters. We know what all this stuff mean.
Lee Goff: We don't know if that's something that even exist. UTM parameters that term it wasn't even part of the English language probably 12 to 15 years ago. It just sort of came back.
James Rose: I wonder if there's someone like frantically googling what a UTM parameter is right now after hearing this. I imagine there'll be a couple.
Lee Goff: Probably so, if you are like a design shop, you probably don't know what that is. But anybody who has ever paid for any media buying at all, trust me, you know what UTM parameters are so. Okay.So that leads us to the six systems. Okay? There were six of them, and so let me go through these six systems. First. It's got to have everything on a rope. What's called a rope? So I wrote being on a rope is actually one of the systems. That means you begin with the end in mind.
Lee Goff: That means that all of your lead magnets in your proposals and everything, the messaging is congruent in perfect alignment from point of contact to referral. Because here's what happens, okay? In today's shiny object kind of society. People are honestly more and more sensitive to bullshit than ever, ever, ever. In the history of mankind.
James Rose: Thank God, I'm very happy about that.
Lee Goff: Me too, because good people are starting to rise to the top and bullshit starting to float to the bottom. I mean, you know, I hope it keeps going that direction. You know a lot of times they're not even sure why they don't like a certain person or a certain vendor or whatever it is. It just doesn't feel right. You know what I mean? But, if it's not in alignment with what they're searching for, they're probably not going to return your calls and your emails or texts, whatever it is, because its out of that alignment.
Lee Goff: So you know, it's out of alignment. I'm, yeah, I read this in the lead magnet when I talk with a sales rep, he said this or she said this, and then I got the proposal and the proposal said this, contradicted that end. And I'm just like, I don't know man. You know, and that happens a lot, especially when you're getting into custom work, bespoke work. Because of your lead magnets, you can't begin with the end in mind or custom work. It's not possible. You dream in that ship every time. And it's not possible to have a lead magnet that sets the expectation levels for a product and a proposal whenever you're dreaming the products and the proposals up on the fly, that is obviously that can't happen there. So everything on a rope that's the first system you got to do. You got to understand that you develop your products in an object oriented fashion or do you get your products developed and at that point your lead magnets, your proposals, your scope documents, your technical checklist, everything is in perfect alignment around the value proposition and the USP's for that product.
James Rose: And you should be doing this on one product to start with i assume to get started?
Lee Goff: It's going to be a pain in the butt and get to get that first one done is a pain in the butt. Okay? Okay, first off, I'm sorry. You develop all your products. I'm sorry. And the reason you develop all your product first is because they have to be in alignment. Okay? The congruency part. So this product is something to this product in front of me.
James Rose: What are some examples of products just to clear it up for people.
Lee Goff: Sure. It's very difficult to do a product and in a jack of all trades kind of scenario. So it's easier to give an example.
Lee Goff: He's already niched out. So let me give you an example. One of my coaching students have niched out into the craft brewery space. Okay. And that's, that's her niche. And it's awesome. I'll tell I would get on with her a lot. Oh, I totally agree with that. I'm going to take advantage of this niche because I love it. And so, you know, one of the products is basically in the past she could put together, everything was custom, right? So she had a dream it up. And so with craft breweries, the big this was called untapped. There's an app out there and it's like the 800 pound gorilla. It's like, it's like Facebook and social media. If you're not integrated with it and then you ain't doing nothing. And so her website is like, instead of being based on how many pages it's based upon the functionale. So you need to contact us form you gotta, get the on tap, Api integration, the menu integration and all these different things. And that's a predefined product at $4,000 for the website, you get five pages, that's it. That's a simple website. Okay? So you productize and that 90 percent of that products identical across the board for all industries is that other 10 percent that allows you to productize. That productization is where you're solving specific pain points for a specific industry with a specific target audience.
Lee Goff: Let me give you another example. So for Craft Breweries, they serve typically a 50 mile radius, right? Once you do a Google Adwords account for somebody in Raleigh, North Carolina, and you crush it and you get it dialed in, you got all the keywords, the negative keywords, the ads, the extensions, everything dialed perfectly dialed in. Then you go to somebody in Charlotte, North Carolina saying, Hey, I am perfectly dialed in this google ad words campaign.
Lee Goff: It works like a boss. I'm crushing in Raleigh right now.
James Rose: Yeah, this is good. I just realized I was nodding and people listening can't see that now.
Lee Goff: Now you just take that and you tar ball or you bundle it all up, but a master file so you go to the person in Charlotte and all he does is upload the master file. So you just doubled your damn prices for the person who, Charlotte because you can guarantee results. Okay. And that's Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, all of them. It's how you package your stuff. Not that you have to change anything that you're doing. You can still do custom work with productization.
James Rose: Do you recommend sort of focusing on just one or two products to start with though? Like I'm just trying to work out, like if I was going to do this and be like, oh my God, I have so much stuff now after trying to do this Adwords thing and this website thing and social campaigns.
Lee Goff: I wish I could share my screen. I'll show you an example of it. It's best to set your products up in what's called a client path alignment, so because think about that for a second. People come in, you need a foot in the door product offering any your base model like your like your model t or your 1500 truck or you're a tesla, whatever. Like the base model, right? And then you have add ons to the base model. So the base model is a base website or a base Google Ads.
Lee Goff: Google ads, now we can add retargeting and we can add this, we can add that, just bolts on. So you need to think that because you don't want to get somebody who just comes in and does a website and then goes and does everything else with somebody else because if they do that then eventually they're going to cut you out.
James Rose: Yeah. So what just to start, what's a foot in the door kind of example? Would that be like an audit? Is that a foot in the door kind of thing.
Lee Goff: One example, one of my coaching students is niching out into video marketing for property management companies, and so one of their foot in the door offerings is, it's either $49 or 99, I can't remember. Ridiculously cheap, and they write out a script and they plug it into this little xml thing and it pulls the data into the videos of precomputed video.
Lee Goff: But it's nice, it's professional, you know. It puts it in their copy and some of their photos and it's, I mean, it didn't take them. I think it takes them 30 minutes or something or something maybe delivered. So they don't really make any money.
James Rose: It's all right. But that's a really good example
Lee Goff: box or something, you know, because there's two foot in the doors. Let me give you an example. In their space, the property manager is going to be like, dude, I don't know anything about video. Okay. Tell you what, man, I'll get you a video for 50 bucks and you liked the video. Then you will get at least get me out on the rest of it. Okay, that's cool. Right now. The other ones were like, oh yeah man, I've heard about video marketing.
Lee Goff: You know, truth is I can never find an agency to do what I want to do. I know I want to do it. I just don't know exactly what I want to do. Okay, great. We have a discovery phase, where we come in and it's a thousand dollars and we do the entire figurative mapping, planning content, everything, and at that point, if you move forward with us on the recommendations, we'll give you a thousand dollar credit towards whatever we recommend. If not, then you have a full pledged reports. Go on and do whatever you want to do it. Right. So what you do is you isolate the pain points and the buy cycle for your current audience and you create foot in the door offerings that make it almost like you'd be an idiot not to do it kind of scenario. And it's a cool.
James Rose: Like I didn't realize we'd kind of done that with our customer development stuff because that's the part of the agency we still have left is l sort of custom development as in like a Ruby On Rails and Angle very much web apps some mobile apps and whatever. And we've had situations where we can't quote because they just don't know in alphabet what they want or whatever and they don't want to do like an hourly agile type thing. So we end up doing a a ux design phase where it's just wire frames or something maybe we have like pretty as well or whatever. And we say once this is done, you can take this to any developer.
Lee Goff: That's actually the key. If they ever get the hint that you're trying to block them in, like of wrap them into where they got to use you. You have go to deliver overwhelming value in that report, the discovery phase, and it's got to stand on its own two feet. They have to see that you're above the line and you're doing the right thing. That's so important because now they're going to see that and you can charge another 20 percent for the contract that you would have like 30 days, 1500 for it today. Going to charge two grand for it because of value in the process of delivering the discovery phase. All right, so that's number one is the first system number two. Okay. What's called Lego. Alright, I'm got to give you some legos. Legos example Legos is actually the product decision model. The name of it's actually called the Lego's pricing model and the reason it's called the Lego's pricing model is because what you do is you have your core offerings and then you have bolt on add ons.
Lee Goff: Okay. And if you might got kids out there, you know, you can buy Lego sets and as that little base, little plates and you put things on there. Then the rest you may need to put whatever you want to do and literally give the same 25 Legos to 10 different kids and you all legit get 10 completely different things and they won't even look. It will be completely like, you're like, what the hell? Right. Meanwhile still all the same exact 45 Lego's. They were all made in the same manufacturer. There was no interruption to process. The owner didn't have to get involved and to paint those Lego's or nothing like that. It's just they sold some of the, one of the $50 million Legos I printed out the last hundred years or whatever. Right.
James Rose: So, How to say this can work in say a website projects. But what's an example of a single piece of Lego?
Lee Goff: A single piece of Lego is all website packages. You have like, let's say you have a base website, a core offering. Okay. And you have to have two cores. One of them is like a basic website is five pages a contact us form and the Google Maps integration and an untapped integration. $4,000. Okay. The next one is also five pages. Okay. But it comes with the API integration. Instead of the contact us form, it actually comes with a CRM web form integration and to follow up, you know, in other words, the functionality behind it is different and it is, it's different for every single one. So those are your two core deals. Now the add ons, if a lot of people need more than five pages, so you still packs a three, three pages for $2,000 if it's custom, $1,000 if it's templated.
James Rose: And that's, Sorry. Yeah, the Lego is the pricing model for some reason I was thinking it was the actual delivery.
Lee Goff: They may want to bolt on a shopify store that's $5,000 or are they want to bolt on or they want to bolt on. A good example is like a document, a little login area to swap documents back and forth. I mean it's a document system. You can actually get dropbox now embedded on the website, a little private log in there it is and it is beautiful. It looks like it's your fucking website is awesome. Like it's like magic to them, you know. And you can charge five or 600 bucks for it. You gotta brand it out and make it look sharp in it. But then again, I mean, you know, a good example is The website package without the API untapped integration and add on to and that is 500 bucks. Me, I would choose to include it because that's part of your value prop. Anytime anyone is negotiating against you, they have to spend 10, 12, 15 hours figuring it out. You can upload a zip file and you're done. So you can beat them on price and make more profit. Okay? So it's how you put your Lego's together. They all have to stand on their own two feet. They're typically unimpressive by themselves, but they can build literally anything.
James Rose: I like that. And so you have to be pretty selective in your Lego's.
Lee Goff: You can only sell your Lego's if they want anything that falls outside of a Lego, they must pay for the strategic planning in discovery phase because there's no way for you to know you can't read their mind.
James Rose: That is awesome. That's a massive AHA for me I think like, yeah, so you've got and anything outside of your Lego, you force them into like a discovery phase. And that makes total sense.
Lee Goff: Oh you have to, i mean come on. They'd been building this business five, 10, 15 years. Do you really think you're smart enough to figure out what the fuck they want in 30 minutes. It drives me insane when I hear agency owners do that and sales reps do that. They just start throwing shit at 'em. I'm like man, you probably don't even know their fucking last name. You mean you don't know anything about these people and you're throwing out solutions that are going to be very expensive and impact their lives without having any idea of what the hell they need? Man, it's just like, come on man, I mean, come on, I have one more.
Lee Goff: I'm telling you I've won more deals by holding firm on this. I won't get on the phone with a prospect on the phone for you, for the people and they will say I need to get a proposal. I'm like, I can't give you a proposal. Why not everybody else is, and I'm like, well, because they're rookies at this. They don't know what the hell they're doing, but the reality is you're about to spend a lot of money somewhere. Okay, and I am not going to take your money unless I know I can deliver on what the hell you want, period.
James Rose: And if they come back and say things then start kicking and screaming and demanding the proposal, that's a pretty big red flag. You probably shouldn't work with them anyway. That's a good.
Lee Goff: Actually in that case, you price them out. So you take what you would normally charge for it, you double it, you give them a proposal, they bite off on it, then there'll be worth it. If not, then piss off. I mean, they're going to be a whole client so you better make it worth your time period. They're going to, they're going to be the biggest pain in the ass client ever. And them right there. They're going to continue to get them to you make no mistake about it.
James Rose: Yeah, absolutely. And that's why like, you know, we've, we've done that whole double thing before and they've gone for it and we've gone crap. Like we wish they didn't.
Lee Goff: You can go get some Chuck Taylor's Yo what I'm saying or something. You know what I'm saying? You can get a pepsi or something, you know what I mean? So, that's two of them. The third one is after you get everything on a rope and you've got your products, your Legos, okay. Well then obviously you have to have the service framework behind that to back it up. Okay. So let me explain what that means. Okay. So whenever you have your Legos, you can actually now have a folder that includes everything it takes to deliver that lego. Because you're beginning with the end in mind, okay. So a checklist that literally check, check, check, check, check. Now even a monkey can do that shit in Tijuana I dont care. Because whenever you got this dialed in, the skillset, the qualification of the people doing it, required to do it, goes way down.
Lee Goff: Meaning the amount you have to pay, the goes way down as well. And you're not beholding to anyone. You're beholden to your processes and your checklist, but you're not beholden to a (inaudible). That's huge. Okay, so you get your proposal in alignment, you get your project scope documents, your technical checklist, your sign off, your face sign off your legals and everything is already done in a folder waiting for someone to sell that product. per Lego. So now sales guys can go out there and say, Google Adwords, Product number one, Website product number four, and CRM product number eight, or whatever the hell it is. To the sales rep, that's like the magnetic package. To service that's Lego one, four and eight. When they go double click on the folder for Lego number, Bam, there's a scope document and copy paste file and replace game over. Like literally on-boarding a client takes you to complete all the documentation and everything takes 30 minutes.
Lee Goff: Then you got to schedule it and it takes about 30 to 45 minutes to deliver it and it's boom, done. It's awesome. It's awesome. The unbelievable success we've got out of that. Yeah. So in after that, okay. Then you get into the value based pricing. Okay. And this is actually one of the. This is a big deal. Okay. So everybody is always bitching about I'm not getting paid what I'm worth and all different things and you're right, you're probably not. I agree with you 1 million percent, unless you're an idiot and then I don't. You know who you are and If you ain't never done nothing to help me do something and you're probably that guy. But anyway. So with that being said, value based pricing comes by default whenever you get your product pricing in place because in value based pricing is obviously the definition of value based pricing is you target based on the value that it delivers to the client, not the level of effort in delivering two fundamentally different things. Okay. So if I have a google ad words account that I have sold five or six times to, you know, a cracker in Raleigh and Charlotte wherever. Well I know that they work the value to the client goes through the roof, the amount of time it takes for me to roll that back out and goes through the basement of the client is happy, happy, happy. The client does not care that it took me five hours to set-up that damn thing and I charged him $3,000. They don't care.
James Rose: As you can see people having objections to this because I see it all the time in our Facebook group where, they people feel like because they're not doing the work, they don't feel like they should be charging for it. But it's like, I dont remember the analogy, but it's like the technician that comes around and looks at something and can tell you what's wrong with it.
Lee Goff: I might even give you this, the cruise ship analogy did i tell you this? No, here it is. There is a billion dollar crew ship bought by somebody out of Fort Lauderdale, you know, and I think the stories made up, but it's a great example. But this mega, mega cruise ship city on the water, kind of a huge, you know, Disney, whatever. Big, big money cruise ship. And they got like 3000 people, all of them paid $5000 they get on this thing and so they're like, holy crap and It can't get started. The damn engine and everything else is running, the electricity. So let's get going. But the engine itself wont get power. Back and forth, it wont start.
Lee Goff: So they call Fort Lauderdale Cruise, cruise ship capital of the world. So there's a big cruise ship mechanics and engineering firms. So they spend all this money, call all these people, rush work, get them out there and nobody can figure out what the hell to do. Jump ahead one day, they have stalled with all the people on the boat as long as they can. People are starting to get pissed people are getting ready to leave. It's starting to get ugly. And one of the guys on the boats like, hey man, you know, there's this old guy that lives down the street from me. I swear he had been a buddy of mine forever and he's been working on cruise ships forever. And you know what I mean, I don't see what we got to lose. I mean, might as well give the guy a call.
Lee Goff: Please call him and they call him. The guy comes out there, in his own little Chevrolet or whatever the hell it is. Comes out there with his little toolbox and walks out there. He sits down. He says try to turn it over. It does what it does like that. And he's like, hmm, gets up, moves down a little bit and you sits down. Okay, try it again and turn it over. It doesn't start over like that. He then sits there and they do this for about an hour. I mean it goes on about an hour and next thing you know, out of the blue, he goes Ahh. He grabs a little back scratcher, in this case is a Ball Ping Hammer. He actually grabs his hammer. So he grabs the hammer, and goes to the engine (THUMP) and puts his hammer back in his case and says okay, try it now.
Lee Goff: And it Fired right up. I don't even care what you did. Get off the boat. We got to move. Go. Just send me an invoice. And the guys says, Ok Great. So he goes home and he sends an invoice that's $10,000. And the company responds back and says, Hey, you were out there for an hour. What the hell is this? What the hell was $10,000? And the guy's like, the agent, that was going to pay it says, can you give me an itemized receipt because I need to know what I'm paying for. The guy goes okay, sure, no problem. One hour of diagnosing or whatever a 100 bucks or whatever. Knowing where to tap, $9,900. Exactly until the experience and everything. That's 30 years. Agency owners underestimate how much time they spend learning this stuff because they love it. They're passionate about it. So when they're reading blogs till midnight or they're watching a video, they're doing that kind of stuff. They don't really understand that that's not normal.
James Rose: That's what clients are paying for, right?
Lee Goff: So if you figure out a way to roll out a Google Adwords campaign that gets twice the results of anybody else and can charge twice as much, but it takes you a 10th of the time to roll out. Your prospects do not care. They don't care. All they care about is getting their phone to ring, that's all they care about. And if you can do that because you have a better, you know, better mousetrap, then sell the effin' mouse trap. I mean that's, that's the whole point, right? So value based pricing, sale based upon the value deliver not the actual level of effort. And again, be careful if you don't have products on this and you do this with like custom work, you're going to lose your ass on that. There's a time and place for everything.
Lee Goff: That's why, by the way, that's why I'm a coach, is such a big deal. It helps out tremendously. Okay, so the fourth system is what's called bespoke equals be broke.
James Rose: Oh yeah. I've heard that before.
Lee Goff: One of my favorite little things. And so it's not really a system, it's more of a mindset. You need to get into understanding that anytime you do custom work, the odds are you're losing a lot of money because whenever you start to sell products and you see the value and the happiness that your clients get out of it and the value and the happiness you get out of it. Not Having to work your fingers to the bone, you're not going to want to sell anymore custom shit.
James Rose: It's funny because we've done like the opposite, right? We've got rid of all our products ended up doing custom stuff, but that's because that's like intentional and we don't actually do a lot of custom work and when we do it's all out like hourly based and we don't do the work anyway. Right? So our team handle it and it's pretty much just because we have that development team so we can. Like Content Snare.
Lee Goff: Okay. So. And then the next one is what's called an existing clients. I highly recommend kind of a slow bleed out on this. What you're gonna find out is that the majority of your clients, when they see you roll out your products are gonna be like, wait a second, that looks pretty cool. It's going to be almost always very positively received. Okay? You will have a couple of those legacy clients that are accustomed to calling you on your cell phone at 9:00 at night. You know, and by definition productization is going to help win those people out there, so that's a good thing. It might be painful at first, but it's a really good thing. So what's going to happen is you're not going to interrupt how your existing clients are getting serviced at all. You're going to continue to service them just like that. Until your product run overcomes that work in revenue and then you slow bleed it out.
Lee Goff: You slowly bleed it out. You kind of introduce it to your existing base via a newsletter, website. Hey, we just launched a new website and some exciting new products. Go check it out and you do this slowly over six, nine, 12 months and eventually you'll get to the point where there's only one or two left and they're the biggest pain in the ass clients ever. And your product are showing. It's a glorious day when you walk-in and fire them. So, let's see here. I think I skipped one. I covered them all. I think that was number six. Oh yeah, I got number five. Let's see. Highlighting needles. Central's. Okay. So yeah, no, just got um,
James Rose: I got everything on a rope I had as number one. And then number two, I've got a Lego's pricing and pieces. Number three, service delivery of said Legos. Four is value based pricing at Five is transitioning from your legacy clients.
Lee Goff: Five was bespoke equals broke. So I'm like, wait a second. I know existing clients is number six and so it's either my math's off or I'm still bad.
New Speaker: We went through that one real fast.
New Speaker: My brain is still on the holiday break area, but I knew that was number six. Actually the reason why, I'm writing my book about all this, I got a book that's coming out pretty soon here. It's called Agency Success Roadmap. Literally walks you through the productization model, Have a niche out. There's 12 chapters, and each chapter is intended to put one system in place a month within your agency. And I'm super excited about it.
James Rose: So when is this due out?
Lee Goff: This is coming out in about 45 days. Thirty to 45 days depending on how fast we move on from here.
James Rose: I think this interview will be out before then. So is there somewhere we can send people early, like if you've got somewhere they can sign up now.
Lee Goff: Yeah, marketing? No, there's nowhere to go that you can sign up right now. But trust me, if you're on my list, you will hear a lot about it. Okay. So marketingagencycoach.com, just go there and get some of the freebies everything is there. And if you're on the list and you'll get notified about it. Same thing with my Facebook Group, Marketing Agency Success Group is the name of the group
James Rose: And I will be dropping links to both of these in the show notes at agencyhighway.com.
Lee Goff: Okay, perfect. And actually in the agencysuccessroadmap.com, will be the url that the landing page. Will be given away free plus shipping.
James Rose: agencysuccessroadmap.com. You know that by the time this interview comes out you might even have time to get that along.
Lee Goff: I'm hoping I'll have that. If not, then I'll tell you what, I will at least have forwarding where it bounces to the right slot. So. Awesome. Definitely. Well i think James, I think that about wraps it up. So. And you are in Australia, right?
James Rose: I am. And I'm just about to go into a meeting with this bespoke client, but you know what? We're gonna try and sell them on a on a product. We've got this big idea of what they want and we're like, there's a pretty good product idea in this, like another SAS product. So how about, we build that and you pay us for it.
Lee Goff: By the way, that actually is kind of a, That's kind of the evolution of how productization really evolves. Is because now in your case it's bespoke to product, but whenever you actually have some products and you get out there in the market, they will say, oh great. And if this company can do products and the people who want to approach you to do products that they can sell for you, that's fucking awesome. I'm going to right now because again, once you get it dialed in, then it's like chain. I'm telling you that it snowballs. It's wonderful. This productization model that we have perfected. To my knowledge, no one else out there has it. I'm sure that they will, as soon as people see what I got, but you know, but this productization model we have rolled out over the past year and stress testing it with dozens and dozens of my one on one coaching students. And it's fucking unbelievable. It's unbelievable.
James Rose: So cool when you can say that kind of thing with confidence about your own service, right? Like, yeah, such a good feeling. Like when we got to the point where our team would just absolutely killing it with custom development. And before that it's kind of like, yeah, no, we can build custom stuff and now I'm like, nope. I know we build better stuff than the old, the high end agencies in our city pretty much, that I know of and we do it at like half the price, right? Because we have a, like, we don't have a big office, we don't have all the bullshit and we're just, you know. And now I can confidently say that it's such a freaking good feeling,
Lee Goff: I used to tell my prospects, it's not, if you want to hire me, it's if you can afford me, boom. Its that simple and I was saying, don't say that unless you got the kind of proof that we have, right? Meaning that you know, ultimate marketer of the year winners and the runner up and an entrepreneur magazine awards and elite finalist, all these awards and all this stuff. You have a map and so by the time they heard about us, they probably heard about us through one of the lots and lots of awards that we won and then they did their homework. They say, Oh crap, they won all these awards. Then they go look at the competition and none of the competition at any of those awards. And so by the time they got on the phone with me, it wasn't. If they wanted to work with me, they already knew that I was more expensive. They already knew. They knew before they got on the phone with me. That's going to be a lot more expensive and a lot better now.
James Rose: What an awesome filter. So that's another topic to go PR in awards
Lee Goff: Well that's, yeah, that social proof is called brand positioning and I have an entire course on this and its in my book too, so it's nice all, all of that's in there. So. And I also have. Guess what else I have? I have a 10 year old little girl. That's sitting here doing her homework quietly. I'm getting a little worried about because it's too quiet. I'm going to go check on her to make sure my house is burned down. James, thank you so much for having me on. You know, I just thank you so much.
James Rose: No worries, And thanks for joining me. This like a lot of a lot of value in this episode. I think I'm going to use your value based pricing to charge nothing for it. As usual. You guys are all getting this for free, so thank you so much for sharing all this awesome things Lee.
Lee Goff: You're very welcome and I hope they'll have me back in one day and again, the book is coming out in about 45 days. That's going to be Agency Success Roadmap.
James Rose: You do it because I was just about to re-share that. Remember. agencysuccessroadmap.com and marketingagencycoach.com to check out Lee.
Lee Goff: That's it, the book is going to be out and there's a group coaching program that comes along with it. So there's a lot of options if you guys are looking to grow so, or scale your agency. I'm your boyfriend. ,
James Rose: Love it. Thanks Lee. Uh, yeah. that's it. Let's wrap it up there. If you've enjoyed this episode, please head over to itunes and leave us a review. To help me sort of stroke my ego and get through the day and yeah share it with anyone you think would get something out of it. So thank you very much for listening and I will see you in the next episode.