 What's going on guys? In today's video, I want to talk about a question that has come up pretty frequently on my YouTube comments and for my email list subscribers and also in like my Facebook group. And that is, Sean, as a new agency owner, what are some of the biggest mistakes and pitfalls to avoid? And this is a good question, especially right now, given the current situation, like the current global situation that we have. It's important that you understand these mistakes and pitfalls so that you can move quickly and you don't fall into the same mistakes and pitfalls that I made in the beginning when starting my agency. So let's just jump into it right now. There's going to be a short quick video and let's just jump into the first one right now. The first biggest mistake or pitfall to avoid is not doing enough outflow. Now, I actually heard this phrase or this concept from a guy named John Whiting, super smart guy, seven figure plus agency owner. He sold his agency and he always said outflow equals inflow. Now, what does that mean? Well, outflow is the activities that you're doing like direct outreach or posting value on social media and making posts on your social media page and putting enough out there in the market. And inflow are things like new leads and people interested in your service and new clients and new sales and new deals. And most people, they want the inflow. They want the results and the money coming in, but they don't put in the outflow, right? They're not doing the activities required to get there. So what you should really be doing is you should be focused on putting as much outflow in there or outflow out to the market as possible, right? So every day you should be reaching out to warm and cold prospects who can benefit from your service. Real quick, a warm prospect is someone who already knows, likes and trust you, maybe a friend, a family member, a colleague, someone already in your network who knows you. That's the easiest way to get a client is reaching out to your warm network first and seeing if they or someone they know can benefit from your service. And you can offer a discount or an incentive-based pricing, whatever you want to do to get them on board, to get some testimonials and social proof coming in, okay? So reach out to your warm network first. That's the easiest way to get your first few clients is to reach out to your warm network. I'm surprised at how many people don't do this, but once you've tapped that out, you're going to have to go to a cold audience, people who don't know you at all, right? And this is a lot harder to close, obviously, than a warm, a warm prospect, someone who already knows, likes and trusts you. Now, the beauty of the current landscape or the current internet world that we live in today is you can basically reach out to any decision maker you want at any company using platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and email. So what you should be doing is, at a minimum, what I suggest is 100 plus pieces of outreach daily on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and email. So this means that you're going out to 100 different people every single day, and you are sending them a message and asking them if they would like to learn more about what you have to offer and if their service can, if your service can help them, right? So this is like the biggest game changer for most new agency owners. I'll talk to a new agency owner and they say, I'm not happy with the amount of clients I have. I'm not happy with the amount of income I have. And I'll ask them, how many pieces of outreach have you done? And they'll say maybe five, 10 pieces of outreach every single day, sometimes less, sometimes I'm just waiting around for people to come to me. And I tell them 10x that, right? And that's the easiest way to get clients is increasing your outreach, knocking on enough doors. And in the beginning, the truth is, it's going to be quantity over quality first. You're going to have to get enough activity going and momentum going before you can expect to tweak things and make, you know, pretty messaging and all that stuff. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to have some screw ups, but I have a ton of free content on my YouTube channel around how to, how to do direct outreach and messaging. So watch those videos if you haven't yet and focus on hitting that 100 plus pieces of outreach daily. If you do this for 30 days straight, I have no doubt you can get, you know, a handful of clients. So if you're doing 100 pieces of outreach every day, combined on these channels, I have no doubt you can secure at least one client. Okay, if you have a good service, of course. So this is the main thing right here, 100 plus pieces of outreach every single day. The second thing is you can post social selling posts delivering value and showing people how you can help. So a social selling post is a post on your one of your social media pages, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn, that delivers value to your market while also getting people interested in how you can help them and gets interest gets people interested in what you have to offer. So let's just say you are a Facebook advertising agency, or you have a Facebook advertising service, and you don't have to create this content yourself, you can find a third party article on Facebook advertising, you might post it to your LinkedIn wall and say, hey, I am a Facebook ad specialist, I help X1Z types of industries with generating more leads and appointments and new customers using Facebook ads. I found this, this article on the seven best ways to improve conversion rates and this is off the top of my head, by the way, for a certain industry, I thought this might be useful or helpful to you guys, that's why I posted it. So you post it on your wall, and that gets people checking out your LinkedIn profile that gets people searching more about what you do. And sometimes you'll over time, this is a compounding effect, right? You're posting content consistently, social selling posts, eventually you'll help people reaching out to you saying, hey, so and so I'd like to have a chat with you to learn more about what you do and how you can help my business. So these are the two things, right? Social selling posts, and also direct outreach. If you are knocking 100 plus virtual doors every day on these channels, and you're posting maybe once or twice a week on those channels, and you're doing that, let's challenge yourself to do that for 30 days, and then come back to me and tell me that you have, if you've honestly done that, come back to me and tell me if you haven't gotten a client, I'd be surprised if you did this and don't have a client at the end of 30 days. So really, I want to make this a point, generating appointments and getting on the phone with enough people in your market should be your only focus until you hit at least 10k per month. That's all you should be focused on. I hear people all the time talking about sales funnels and setting up their website and doing all this crazy stuff, automations and you know, there's multi-step funnels before they even get to six figures. All you should be focused on, especially if you run an agency or service-based business, is generating appointments and getting on the phone with people who are a fit for your service who are interested in your service. That's all you should be focused on until you hit 10k per month, probably more than 10k per month, right? We got to 18,000 per month without a website. So you don't need to have a website or anything crazy like that to make sales and get clients. So this is all you should be focused on, generating appointments and getting on the phone with people who want to talk with you about your service, okay? So that's the mistake, number one, not enough outflow. Make sure that you are doing enough outreach to your market if you want the inflow. If you want the new clients, the new sales and the money rolling in, okay? This is the biggest one. If you focus on this, it'll be a game changer for your agency. Number two, not specializing. So what you should really be doing here is specializing in one service. I made this mistake in the beginning. I first started a local marketing agency and I offered everything under the sun. I had SEO. I had Facebook ads. I had Google ads. I had copywriting. I had web design. I had all these different services. I was a full service agency. Now, the problem with that is if you do a Google search and you type in full service agency, you're going to see pages and pages and pages of agencies that offer like 20 different services. Now, let me ask you this. How can you stand out if from the other agency, if you guys offer the same exact services to the same to any market that will take it, right? So if you offer 20 different services to any small business market out there, it's going to be very hard to stand out. So what you want to do is specialize in one service. When we made the switch from a local marketing agency offering seven, eight different services to offering one service, which is LinkedIn lead generation, we went from our first month. We had $4,000 in sales from our first month from making that switch and in five months, we bumped that up to $38,000 per month. So we almost 10xed our business in five months just by specializing in one service, one core offering, okay? So you want to avoid having a menu of different things you do. Just have one core service that you specialize in. And also, as soon as you get your first one to three clients, you want to specialize in a specific vertical niche. And I'll talk about why in just a second. But I know on my YouTube channel, I talk a lot about specializing in a vertical niche and picking an industry. But with the current situation that we have going on in the world, I recommend just talk to pick a few different niches and just do reach out to as many of them as you can. And just try to get your first one to three clients. Once you get your first one to three clients, I just want you to get some money rolling in so that you have an income. Once you get your first one to three clients, then you can pick who to specialize in, which vertical niche or market or industry to specialize in, okay? So focus on at first, you can just reach out to whatever markets you want and pick like five niches that you want to reach out to you. And once you get your first one to three clients, then focus on specializing in one of those specific vertical industries going forward. Now, the reason you want to do that is you become an expert in your service and your market. And I'll talk about why this is so important in mistake number three. But when you are an expert in a specific service and a specific market, you become top of mind for everyone in that market, right? You become the LinkedIn lead generation guy for SaaS companies, which is what we are, right? So you want to become that expert or that trusted advisor in that one service and that one vertical industry or market. And that makes it a lot easier on you to get sales and get clients. So that's mistake number two, not specializing and always specialize in just one service, especially if you are brand new to starting an agency. Mistake or pitfall number three is not sharpening your sword, okay? And one of the biggest mistakes that I made was every day after I did my outreach, every day I did my prospecting and I finished my work for the day like two or three PM. I would just go home, I play some video games, I'd watch some TV and I'd put it out of my mind until the next day. And I wish I spent at least an hour or two, especially in the beginning, learning and sharpening new skills and learning more about my market instead of playing video games and like going out with my friends and you know, just doing nothing and watching TV. Not to say that you can't do that. I'm just saying I wish I spent an extra hour or two every day sharpening my skills. So what you should be doing is every day you should be sharpening new skills and learning more about your market, whatever vertical industry or market that you pick to specialize in. Now if you don't know where to start, you want to read books and educate yourself and watch my seven high income skills video on the skills that I'm focused on. Those are specific skill sets that are ever green and will move not only you but your business forward. And you want to learn and hone evergreen skill sets that will again move you forward and move your business forward. Evergreen skill sets are things that copywriting, like sales, like persuasion and speaking, these are things, these are skill sets that you can, will apply to any business and any part of your life, right? If you know how to write well and sell well and speak well, those are skill sets that are evergreen and will never go out of style. They will always be useful to you and whatever business that you start or are a part of, okay? That's what I mean by evergreen skill sets. So learn and hone those skill sets and learn to love your market and dive deep into their language, their pain points, problems, etc. So when you can dive, when you pick a market or a vertical industry to specialize in and you dive deep into that industry and you learn about their language, the way they speak about certain things, the way they talk about their pain points and their problems and you go out to the market and you use their same language when you speak to them. It's a game changer, right? They listen, they become more excited to talk to you because you are speaking to them in the way that they speak about their specific pain points and their problems and they trust you more because you understand them. So that's a big reason why you want to specialize in that one service in that one market eventually because you can dive deep into the language and the pain points and the problems that they have and also the way that they talk about those things, the specific language that they use and that's going to be, that's going to make getting clients and getting sales and growing your income a lot easier. So what I ask myself every single day and what you want to ask yourself is how have I gotten half a percent better than I was yesterday and if not how can I get a half a percent better than I was yesterday? And I know this sounds a little fluffy and woo-woo I promise you I'm not like that mindset guru that you might see on YouTube or wherever else but I always ask myself this question. It's a powerful question because if this compounds over like just let's just say a year right or maybe just a few months if you get half a percent better every single day for a whole year you're getting like over like a hundred percent, a hundred and fifty percent plus better right so that it compounds over time you get better and better and better and better and if you ask yourself this question at the end of each day how can I get half a percent better than I was yesterday or have I gotten a half a percent better than I was yesterday if not what can I do to get half a percent better than I was yesterday? You are going to push yourself to learn those new skill sets to learn about your market and eventually you're going to be making a lot more money if you make if you have this mindset and you improve every single day improve your skill sets improve your knowledge improve the way that you can help your market if you get half a percent better every day it is phenomenal what it can do for you and your income and also your personal well-being right so these are the three things the three mistakes of pitfalls that a new agency owner especially should avoid so number one again and not enough outflow make sure that you are knocking enough doors and doing enough direct outreach to your market on platforms like facebook linked in instagram and email make sure that you are posting value social selling posts to your market getting them interested in what you have to offer mistake number two is not specializing so specialize in one service and once you get your first one to three clients specialize in a vertical niche as well or industry so that you can become an expert in that service in that market number three mistake number three is not sharpening your sword so ask yourself how you can get half a percent better than you were yesterday you want to read books and educate yourself learn some new skills evergreen skill sets that are going to move you and your business forward regardless of where you go in life and in business and also learn to love your market and dive deeper into learning more about their language their pain points their problems so that you can speak exactly how they speak and increase your your sales and your amount of clients you have in your income and if you focus on it or not focus on if you avoid these three mistakes and pitfalls you're going to be ahead of ninety percent of other agency owners because these are three things that i see most agency owners make these three mistakes and if you can avoid these three things you're going to be ahead of most of them okay so that's it for this video guys answering the question as a new agency owner what are the biggest mistakes pitfalls to avoid those are the three things that i recommend to avoid and look out for if you fix these three things i can tell you that you will see a lot more success in your agency all right so that's it for this video guys and i will see you in the next one