Are you a solopreneur looking to grow your agency into a more sustainable business but aren’t sure of the best path to take?

Do you run a marketing agency that is billing primarily via the hourly model and would instead like to generate more retainer income?

Would you like to hear from an agency CEO that has built a 7 figure agency that generates 90% of its revenue from retainers?

In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, I’m joined by Paul Roetzer, founder of PR2020, Marketing Agency Insider and The Marketing Score and during Paul and I’s conversation, you are going to hear us talk about:

• his book, The Marketing Agency Blueprint
• the major shift that he sees taking place and how to position your firm to be ahead of the competition
• the activities you should be focused on that generate more leads (and how most people screw this up)
• how to generate more income from retainers
• the services pricing model that Paul is using very successfully to differentiate his firm
• how he’s recently closed a round of investment to fund expansion
• how to know which activities to focus on to improve your firm’s profitability
• retention programs and how to structure them
• the software tools he uses to run his business
• his new software app, The Marketing Score
• and so much more.

If you run an agency, this is an interview that you can’t afford to miss.

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Watch Now

Transcript

Trent: Hey there Bright Idea Hunters, welcome to the Bright Ideas

Podcast. I am your host, Trent Dysrmid, and this is the podcast for

business owners and marketers who want to better learn on-line marketing

and sales automation tactics to massively boost their business. And the way

that we do that, is we bring experts onto the show to share their

experience, their ideas and their thoughts with you, and today we are going

to be doing that again. My guest is Paul, and I should have asked you how

to pronounce your last name, but I’m going to take a stab at it. Roetzer?Paul: No worries, yes, that’s close enough. It’s Roetzer, but Roetzer is

the most common pronunciation I hear, so we’ll go with it.Trent: All right, so Paul is the founder of a firm called PR 20/20 and

he is also the founder of something called The Marketing Agency Blueprint.

So, if you run a marketing agency, this is an interview that you absolutely

want to stay glued to. So Paul, thank you very much for coming on the show

with me. It’s a pleasure, I’m really looking forward to our conversation.Paul: I appreciate you having me, I’m looking forward to it as well.Trent: So for the folks in the audience who don’t necessarily know who

you are just yet, maybe you could just take a few minutes and talk a little

bit about who you are and your agency, and then we are going to dive really

kind of deeply into this Blueprint thing that I referred to earlier.

Paul: Sure. I started PR 20/20 in 2005. It was started as a PR marketing

agency, but I came from a traditional PR agency background. So what had

happened, in my five plus, almost six years at that agency, I started to

really critically assess the traditional agency model, and I asked a lot of

‘why’ questions and there weren’t always very good answers. So, why do we

use Bill Blowers? Why do we offer these services and not those? Why don’t

we track what we are doing in different ways? There was never really good

responses, and in essence, what was happening is our agency at that time

was being run like many traditional agencies, on models that had been

around for decades in some cases.

So, in 2004, I started just really questioning it, and I had this

idea, I actually typed a paper called PR 20/20, and it was going to be a

new vision for the PR industry, kind of a new direction to go for agencies.

I typed up what some people called a Jerry McGuire moment, that little one

page manifesto of things have to change. I didn’t have answers yet, but I

just felt things needed to change. And about a year and a half later, I

basically just spent nights and weekends playing around with it, and at

some point in October, 2004, we started a business for my wife as a fine

artist, and I realized that even though I was in the industry, I had no

idea how to get a web site made for her, how to get a brochure made for

her, affordably. She couldn’t afford our agency that I was at, and there

really weren’t services designed to help people like her. Then, my parents

own cookie franchises, Cookies by Design franchises. And same thing, I was

thinking, ‘Man, I’ve been in this industry for four or five years, and I

can’t help my parents’.

So, I tried to start building an agency model that could be more

efficient and affordable for the mass market of small business and that led

me to move towards a model of standardized services and set pricing, very

much a la carte, kind of a retail mix, where you could almost like buy it

off the shelf. You could see exactly what each thing cost, and that’s the

model I designed and in July 2005, I finished a business plan for it and

presented it to my boss at the time and he was interested in it, but our

timing and our goals were just different. So, that fall in November of ’05,

I got $25,000 in debt financing and I left, and I started the agency. I

decided on a Wednesday that I was leaving, and that Sunday I got the

$25,000, put it in the bank, and the next Wednesday I handed in my

resignation and walked.

So that was the start of PR 20/20. I had the idea, I had a general

service guide in place that had 105 services in 19 categories, but I didn’t

have a website, I didn’t have anything. So, we started it from there and

then just kind of started building. So we’ve always done things

differently, I guess, and looked at things more as what’s possible versus

what’s been done and never really got too caught up in what everyone else

did, and tried to kind of find our own way. It was more pulling from best

practices of other industries versus. the marketing industry, which as a

whole had not been very innovative up to that point.

Trent: I love it. Bravo man! That’s not entirely dissimilar to my

story either, which probably my audience has heard many times, so I won’t

go into it again.

Paul: Yes, that’s cool.

Trent: Before we get into the Marketing Agency Blueprint, I want to

ask you about that first month. You’ve got $25,000 in debt financing and

then Monday comes. What did you do on Monday? How did you get your first

client?

Paul: It was the greatest feeling in life, was to walk away and have that

freedom. So, I’ve never looked back. To me, as soon as I started it, it was

just full steam ahead. I was living and breathing it. Staying up late,

waking up early, you’re just driven by everything you are doing. So for me,

I couldn’t work out of home. My wife was an artist and stayed at home, well

she was working as a manager at a pottery studio at that time, but she was

home quite a bit, and I couldn’t work in a home office. So, I spent a lot

of time at Panera. Free wi-fi, free coffee refills, it was like all I

needed in those days. So, I just went to Panera, and I just sat there and

the first two months was really finding a web partner to build the site and

finishing the service and pricing guide that was going to be the foundation

of the brand. That’s really what I did. The $25,000 was meant to give me

the flexibility to go probably six months without having income, so I could

still pay my healthcare benefits and pay myself to cover my bills, but I

was 27, my wife and I didn’t have many expenses. We didn’t have kids, so I

had a lot of freedom in terms of I didn’t need much money to get by.

The first client ended up being a barter deal. It was with a local

organization, Northern Isle PJ was actually the first client. We bartered

golf outings for services to get started, and then a couple of my past

clients, that I was not targeting. I didn’t have a non-compete, but I

didn’t want to take any clients with me, just because I felt it was better

to do it that way. A couple of people came calling by January, like two

months in, and what actually happened was word got out that I had started

it and that it was a very different alternative. So people that had

traditional agencies actually started calling me and saying, ‘Can you tell

me about how your model works? I think we’d maybe like to get rid of our

traditional agency and work with you.’ So, people just found us through

kind of my existing network and it ended up evolving pretty quickly away

from the small business model, because larger enterprises were the ones

that came calling.

Trent: Did the pricing model that you have, which I love by the way,

and that was one of the things that I did with my tech firm, I killed the

hourly thing and put it all a la carte and put the pricing on the website,

and I think it was a huge differentiator. Did you do that right from the

beginning, or was that something that came later?

Paul: Yeah, right from the beginning. It was actually more transparent than

it is today. Because today, so much of what we do is bundled into monthly

service packages, and at that time there was a lot of a la carte, a lot

more project work being done. Now we don’t do as much project based work.

But, the original one was literally a service and pricing, kind of like a

menu, and you could go through and look at brand marketing, public

relations, mail market, whatever it was, and you could click through and

look at exact services, and then there were three tiers of pricing for

every service. In total, there was like 105 services, so what, 315

different services and pricing. It was absurd. I spent like 600 hours

building that spread sheet and then turning it into something on-line. It

was called ‘the 20/20 standard’ was the original service guide. Today,

there are still pieces, like remnants of that within the site, but for the

most part we have moved more towards kind of a software as a service type

of model. Like what you would see where there are there are three pricing

levels, and you get different features based on that.

Trent: So, for the folks who are listening to this, if you are already

chomping at the bit to go look at this, its PR2020.com, right?

Paul: Yeah. And that pricing model is actually about to be completely

revolutionized, that’s probably a heavy word, it’s going to be dramatically

changed in the near future to completely eliminate word count and hours,

which I’ve always wanted to get rid of but I hadn’t figured out way yet,

and I think we’ve finally figured out a way.

Trent: I want to talk a bit about that, because I think this is an

important point. Because I know that when I was in the tech space, everyone

was really, really concerned about billable hours and they were very

frightened of going to a fixed fee retainer per month, because they were

worried, ‘Well what happens if I’m only charging them $2,000 a month and

then we use more than say, for easy math, 20 hours, then I’m not getting as

much.’ Do you look at your portfolio of clients that are paying you a

retainer fee kind of like a portfolio of stocks, in that some of them are

very profitable in a given month because you didn’t end up having to do

much, and then others, maybe not quite as profitable because in that

particular month you end up having to do more, but on balance, it ends up

being a very attractive yield, for lack of a better term, on your

portfolio. That’s the way I looked at it and I’m just curious if you see it

any different way than that.

Paul: Yeah, no, I agree 100%. Even when we were all primarily project

based, we still look at things as loss leaders, so we had projects within

the portfolio that we looked at as, like a strategic marketing plan, let’s

say. We may charge $5,000 but end up spending 125 hours on it, so in a

billable hour model, you are eating a ton of time. In our model, it was a

fixed price. They were paying for an output that they valued at $5,000, but

that plan was designed to get them in the door. So, when we look at our

portfolio today and our client base, you are definitely looking at – we

monitor efficiency rate – so how efficiently we turn one hour of service

into X dollars of revenue, but the client doesn’t pay that hourly fee. We

are just trying to hit that revenue target number, and so you have some

clients that are going to naturally be more efficient, and some that won’t

be as efficient and therefore as profitable. An example would be like a

client that just comes on in a highly technical B2B space. So, let’s say we

are learning about machines or computer automation or whatever it is. It’s

a very technical industry that require talking to engineers and learning

scientific details about what they do, you are going to invest more time up

front learning that account.

Then, the idea becomes the longer you retain it, the more economies

of scale you develop, and in theory, accounts should become more profitable

the longer they stay. Which is why so much of what we do is around

retention, growth of our existing accounts versus spending all of our time

trying to find new accounts. Because the ones that stick around longer

should be more profitable. So, we do look at the portfolio and kind of

grade out our clients based on a number of factors, profitability being one

of them.

Trent: That’s a very similar methodology to what a past guest of mine

by the name of Mike Michalowicz, and I swear I must plug this guy’s book in

every interview I do, so Mike, if you are listening, I hope you are

laughing. But, his book is called The Pumpkin Plan, and if you haven’t read

it, it’s a really, really good read, and it’s really about focusing on the

best and most profitable clients and figuring out how to replicate those

clients, and getting rid of all the other ones that are actually taking

away from your profit margin. All right, so I want to talk about your

Marketing Agency Blueprint. Before I do that, just for folks who don’t know

you, how big is your agency now? How many employes and how much revenue are

you doing?

Paul: We have twelve, and we’ll probably do between $1 million and $2

million this year in revenue.

Trent: You are obviously more familiar with the marketing agency space

than I am, is that average size? Bigger than average? Smaller than average?

Paul: People have differing opinions. It’s probably a small to mid-sized

firm, depending on who you talk to, which publication you look at. I’m a

big one on-, growth for growth’s sake doesn’t interest me, and I think a

lot of people get caught up in that. We’ve spent most of our time trying to

scale growth back. So, we’ve actually purposely stayed to the size we are

1. doubling growth. There was a five year stretch where we grew like 500

and some percent, it was like a four or five year stretch, and we were

literally growing at 100% rate and it wasn’t manageable, because we didn’t

have the infrastructure. And that’s so much what The Marketing Industry

Blueprint book is about.

It’s not necessarily about how do you dramatically accelerate growth

and keep the pedal to the metal, it’s more about building a solid

infrastructure for a company that can sustain growth and become more

profitable than the average firm. So, I’m far more interested in building a

model that has higher profit margins and has greater efficiency, then I am

size of employee count and revenue count. I don’t really set goals on those

two areas, I guess.

Trent: Well, at the end of the day, it’s your private company, you

don’t have anyone to report to, profit is more important than revenue. If

you’re making $10 million in revenue and no profit, you just have stress in

your life and a lot of moving parts to manage, whereas if you could do $1

million in revenue with $500,000 in profit, life would be pretty good.

Paul: That’s okay.

Trent: So, let’s shift and talk, and I want to use your firm as much

as an example as you can, but feel free to use other examples to illustrate

the points that we are going to talk about in The Marketing Agency

Blueprint. So, I think I know why you created it. Well, it doesn’t matter

my opinion. Why did you create it?

Paul: The back story to the book is in 2007, so when we were about two

years old, I came across a company called HubSpot, which makes inbound

marketing software, all inbound marking software, so people, if they aren’t

familiar with HubSpot, they have $100 million in venture capital funding.

It started in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, and they’ve grown

to about 400 or 450 employees now, and they just expanded into Europe and

are going to hire another couple hundred this year. So, it’s a very fast

growing software company.

In 2007, we connected with them and we actually signed up for their

software as a customer of theirs. So, we were going to start implementing

their software which enables like blogging and search engine optimization

and content management, and now today e-mail marketing and complete sales

funnel, lead nurturing, loyalty building, and everything you need to do. We

started using it mainly, actually, to train our staff because they had

awesome methodology and great eduction. So, we were using it to adapt our

personnel and teach them how to become evolved professionals, what we term

in the book ‘hybrid professionals’.

Then, in early 2008, we actually started seeing this market

opportunity to bundle our services, because we already had the pricing

model to do it, with their software. So, in the early going of their

growth, when they were just a few hundred customers, there weren’t agencies

they were working with that helped their clients get more value out of the

software. So we were the first to do that. So, they actually started

referring opportunities to us of customers that wanted their software, but

didn’t want to do the work themselves, or couldn’t do the work themselves.

So that’s when our growth really started accelerating, you know the 100%

plus growth per year. Then, about a year and a half later, they actually

put a strategy behind building of our program, and they have since created

a program kind of around that original model we developed with them.

They’ve built it to about 800 or 900 certified firms worldwide, and a large

portion of their revenue and growth now comes from agencies.

So, what happened is, was as we were growing, we had agencies all

around the world copying our model. Literally, scraping content from our

website, leaving links back to our product pages on their sites. It was

absurd. So, here we were, like the first few years of the agency I tried to

stay under the radar and I didn’t really want people knowing what we were

doing and didn’t want people kind of judging or copying, I just wanted to

create it and see where it went. So, we spent a couple of years with people

just copying everything. It was kind of a weird time. HubSpot kept pushing,

like ‘Why don’t you get out front and talk and educate other people’, and I

thought, ‘All I’m going to do is teach competitors how to do what we are

doing. Why would I do that?’

Then fast forward to December, 2010, and I got a message from someone

on Twitter, a direct message, that said she was building her countries

inbound marketing agency because of this, and this was someone in Romania.

So I woke up to that. That was a message on my phone when I rolled out of

bed at like 6:00 AM, and I thought, that’s really interesting. So, on the

ride in that day, I actually decided, screw it. We’re going to share

everything we’ve learned in hopes of advancing the industry and agency

ecosystem, and if we do that enough and create enough value, there will be

benefits for us down the road, but my basic premise was there are tens of

thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people wanting to build

agencies or that have agencies already, maybe solo shops, maybe a few

people, but those people had no aspirations of what we intend to do.

The type of firm we want to build, the scope we want to build it to,

these are people that want to make a living, probably stay one to five

people, maybe ten, and they just want to do good things and help business

grow. So, I felt we had been through enough that we could accelerate their

ability to do that. We could share what we had learned, the pains we had

gone through, the lessons we found out along the way, and hopefully fast

forward their growth or their development as an agency a year or two maybe

in the process. So, that’s what I decided. I got to the office that day, it

was like December 10, 2010. I e-mailed my friend at HubSpot who ran the VAR

program and said, ‘Here’s what I am ready to do, would you guys be behind

this? Will you help us spread this?’ He said, ‘Absolutely’.

So, that was December and then that March of 2011, I was at South by

Southwest and David Meerman Scott, who is a friend of mine, had me come to

the Wiley party with them, and introduced me to his editor that night, and

from there, about a month later, 30 days later, the editor from Wiley and I

created The Marketing Agency Blueprint title and I signed the deal, and

three months later the book was done. I had 90 days to write it, and so I

wrote it and it came out in December, 2011. That was really it. It wasn’t

something I set out to do, I never had set this career goal of I’ve got to

have a book by the age of 34, it just sort of happened. And it’s been

wonderful. It’s gratifying to hear the stories from people who have

realized what we set out to do, which was help them develop their

businesses, and the book was very much about not who we were, but what we

thought was possible for agencies. There are definitely lessons learned,

and we do tell the inside story behind the growth of PR 20/20, but it’s not

a book about PR 20/20.

Trent: So has The Marketing Agency Blueprint now become a revenue

generating entity for you? Or is this…

Paul: Well, we launched Marketingagencyinsider.com to coincide with the

book, because we don’t offer consulting and services to other agencies, so

like mentoring and coaching, we get a lot of requests for that. We don’t

offer that, but we do have webinars, paid webinars, and we’ve done two

series. We did The Blueprint series in February of last year which was like

a $500 per person thing. We have had 80 or 90 agencies take that. Then, in

October of 2012, we did a Client Services series, which we created a

hypothetical B2B company, and then did a seven part webinar series on a

year-in-the-life of that company and ran the whole hypotheticals of how

would you build the campaigns, how would you create the score cards? So,

we’ve had probably 50 or 60 agencies go through that, and that’s like $695

is the rate for that. So, we leverage the book to do on-line education,

which has been a very profitable piece of the business the last year.

Trent: And do those courses still sell kind of on a passive basis?

People are just showing up every now and again and buying them, or does it

require active promotion on your part?

Paul: They are available on demand. They are promoted through the Marketing

Agency Insider site, which we do invest a lot of resources and continue to

build that community. So, people do naturally find it through there. We

passively promote it through other agency properties, and mainly through

like social networks and e-mail marketing with our other properties. When I

say other properties, I mean PR 20/20 and then we just launched a software

called Marketing Score in December of last year, so it’s connected through

that, so it’s passively promoted through those. Then, we are in talks right

now to launch a full blown agency academy.

The Client Services series was a test. It was a test that validated

an idea of how to do on-line learning differently, so now we are in the

process of figuring out how heavily we want to invest in that. Again, going

back to the revenue question, we’ve spent the last 18 months building

foundations to take a leap forward. A leap forward for us, and hopefully a

leap forward for the industry, and some things are publicly known, many

things aren’t, and so rather than me spending my time trying to grow,

incrementally, the service side of our business, I’ve been building things

behind the scenes to take those leaps, I guess.

Trent: Terrific. In one of the promo videos I watched in my research-,

I want to shift gears now and talk about some tactics that the agency

owners, there’s people listening to this who are that one-man solo

agency…

Paul: Yes. Lots of them.

Trent: …or maybe they are a three person agency. There are lots and

lots of those people, and they all struggle with ‘How do I get more

customers, how do I get more leads?’ I know HubSpot did a survey, #1 pain

point for agencies was unpredictable revenue, so they are wondering how can

I get more retainer clients, and these are all areas where you have

demonstrated expertise. So, I want to talk about them. You mentioned

something about ten rules in a video that I watched. Can you talk a little

bit about what those ten rules are? Kind of describe what they are as

opposed to going through all ten of them, because people can go and find

those rules and listen to them.

Paul: The premise behind the book was ten rules for building a modern

marketing agency, like a tech-savvy hybrid agency. So, each chapter is one

of the rules. When it comes to what you are talking about, bringing in that

new business, even at the early stages of a single person, because that is

one of the most common questions we get is, how do you get that first

client? How do you get that first retainer account? How do you build that

stability and how do I know when it is time to hire the first employee?

There are far more people out there trying to answer those questions then

there are trying to figure out how to go from 25 to 50 employees. They have

different problems.

Most people are in that smaller size and trying to figure out how to

take those next steps. I think one of the big take aways from the book,

which is kind of universal through all ten rules, is to differentiate by

doing. There is really no way to bring in the new business without proving

you have the ability to do it for yourself first. It’s a backwards way of

thinking, because historically agencies have dealt with themselves last.

The agency web site is never, according to them, up to their brand

standards, or what the quality they do for clients. They don’t do anything

besides send out press releases or file the win awards for their work. It’s

really pretty pathetic how the industry has marketed itself historically.

The change that has happened, and the way inbound marketing works, is level

the playing field. It doesn’t take massive amounts of budget or time to be

exceptional at marketing yourself.

Our feeling has always been, because our growth, we’ve never gone

looking for new business. We don’t do sales. We don’t have any outbound

sales. Our sales people are consultants. Everything we’ve grown through is

organic. People have come to us through referral or through our website.

We’ve grown by publishing e-books, doing webinars, having a blog, building

strong personal brands for our employees who are active on social networks,

being out in the community, being out through organizations. We’ve just

done the stuff we teach our clients how to do.

So if it ever comes to a question of, well can you guys do this, and

especially in those early days when you don’t have the client roster to

refer to, then you can say, ‘Well look at what we’ve done with our agency’.

Our site went from 500 visitors a month to 1,400 to 5,000, and we built our

blog from three subscribers to 300 in the last year. You can prove you have

the ability to do it by doing it for yourself. To me, it’s just hard work

and it’s not a quick fix, and everybody wants a quick fix, but that’s the

answer. You just have to do it. So many people just don’t want to, or just

can’t. They can’t commit the energy needed to make it happen.

Trent: I couldn’t agree more. So many people are looking for that

quick fix. I don’t know if you heard the interview, but I had a fellow on

recently, Marcus Sheridan.

Paul: Marcus is awesome. He’s a friend of mine.

Trent: Yes, he is awesome, I’m sure you know him. The sales lion. His

pool business. There was nothing complicated about what he did. He just

said, ‘I’m getting killed here because of the economy’s down turn, I lead

more leads. So, what’s every question that someone could ever ask before

they would want to buy a pool, and I’m going to create answers to all of

those questions on my blog.’ And he shared with me some of the results that

he got. Phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal.

Paul: It’s a brilliantly simple approach that anybody can do. The space has

gotten noisy since he did that, in terms of there are a lot of people

following that approach now, and he’s going all around the world speaking

about the approach, so it’s also a quality play now. So not only do you

have to have the strategy, but you have to actually be committed to doing

it in a very quality way, and that’s what Marcus has always done. Again, he

differentiates by doing. He is out there working his ass off, and he is

still blogging and he’s still out there doing the speaking circuit, and he

just worked harder than everybody else. You’ve got to love it.

Trent: Funny how that works, huh? Okay, so your advice then, to the

one person…I talked to a guy, maybe a month ago now, he was doing about

$150,000 a year in revenue, doing it all himself. Everything. Killing

himself doing it, had no time whatsoever. How does that guy make the

transition from being the one-man show to a real entrepreneur, when he’s

got some staff working for him. Because there are lots of levers he could

pull, right? Like he could pull the hiring lever, he could pull the ‘I want

to get more customers because I think I need more revenue before I hire’

lever, or I could spend all my time blogging and stop going to all

these…what does he do? What advice would you give?

Paul: To me, it’s a unique answer in each situation. And it’s mainly

because, like chapter ten of the book is titled Pursue Purpose. I think

that’s what it is, I have to double check. But, the whole idea is, the

question you need to ask is what is the goal of building this? Like why am

I building a firm? For me early on, I had every intention from day one of

building a firm of lasting significance. I wanted to build something I was

going to spend my career in, and that was going to create opportunities for

other people. I wanted to develop talent, I wanted to hire and retain them,

and I wanted to build something that had an impact.

When you ask these questions, they have to be within the context of

why are you doing it. So, if someone at that one person phase just wants to

make $150,000 a year and not have to report to anybody, your growth path is

going to be very different than if you want to build a 50 or 100 person

firm that lasts for 50 years. So for me, I’ve been doing this seven years

now, every day I make a conscious decision to forego personal wealth in

favor of building the firm. Because personal wealth isn’t what is driving

me right now. I’m certainly building equity in what we are doing, but I

could care less how much I am making right now. I pay my bills and I put

some money away. But my employees are developing and they are building

their wealth, and to me, that’s more important right now.

I think once you answer that question, why am I doing it? Then you

need to figure out, well what steps make the most steps to take then. So,

if you’re okay with making $50,000 a year, whatever you can afford to pay

yourself and you can sacrifice the other money you’d like to be making, you

can use that to hire that first employee who can work in the business and

you can now go to work on the vision and the growth and the business

development and putting infrastructure in place and building career paths

for the employees.

It just depends on what that next step is. For me, I’ve always put

funding in place to enable me to not make rash decisions or irrational

decisions. I think desperation is the worst thing that can happen to a

business owner or a business executive, so I’ve always made every effort to

have a funding runway there so I was never making those desperate

decisions. That has enabled me to hire sometimes at need, sometimes before

need, when the right person is there, you make that hire, because you know

that person is instrumental to get you where you want to go. If you know

where you are trying to get to, then should I hire a sales person? Should I

hire an account executive? Should I hire whomever that next person is? It

becomes easier to make that decision in the context of why you are growing

the company.

Trent: So, let’s say, we’ll give a mock answer, that the person we are

talking about wants to get to, say, the size a firm that you built

currently. They may not have aspirations to go beyond that, but they want

to get to like, you know, ten people, couple million dollars a year in

revenue, they are at one person now. Should they hire someone so they can

get some of that creative off their plate? So they can spend more time

producing blog content to drive more leads, or…what?

Paul: From an agency perspective, that’s probably the most important

question. Because what I have seen historically is a lot of people start

marketing agencies because they are very good marketers. They can excel at

doing the work, that’s naturally what they want to be doing. The reality

is, if you are going to start hiring people and build a business, you have

to be a better business person than you do a marketer. Unless you have a

partner who is going to run the business. The best advice I can give is,

get out of the way as quickly as possible on the service side of your

business, because someone needs to set the vision, grow the company,

recruit and retain the talent, and that someone needs to be the leader of

the company. In most cases, that is going to be the entrepreneur who

started it.

You are doing the company and clients a disservice if you are

spending 140 hours a month of your time doing client work. When that 140

hours could be going towards building the vision and the culture behind the

company. The hard part for people to accept is that there are a lot of

people who can replace you on the service side. It’s a very hard thing to

replace vision of a CEO or a founder, and so you have to understand where

your value lies and be willing to get out of the way on the other stuff.

Trent: In people that you talk to, do you think that’s one of the

biggest struggles they have, making that mental shift that they need to

stop working in the business and spend more of their time working on it?

Paul: Yes. I don’t think it’s always for the same reason, though. I think

there are a lot of people who would gladly get out of the way and start

working on the business itself, but they don’t know how or they don’t have

the money in place to hire that first person. They don’t know who to hire.

It goes back to many of us, many people who start agencies aren’t trained

to be business owners. You don’t go to school for it. So I don’t know that

it’s always that they’re not willing to get out of the way, they don’t know

how, I guess would be it.

Trent: Let’s say that they are thinking, yeah, the money. I don’t have

the money. I can’t afford this. You got a $25,000, I’m assuming it was an

SBA loan, or something like that?

Paul: Friends and family.

Trent: Friends and family, okay.

Paul: That was the first loan. Then there were many other ones.

Trent: Many other ones, I know exactly what that is like. I was

$400,000 in debt at one point. $400,000, and if it all failed, I had no

assets to sell to pay off. I was done. But that’s a whole…

Paul: Good for you, man.

Trent: Yeah.

Paul: It’s the dirty truth behind building a business. People don’t want to

tell you. It wasn’t a long time ago I was close to pushing the button and

liquidating all my retirement assets to fund the growth of the company

myself. I was probably 12 hours away from pushing the button, but you’re

willing to. I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. I didn’t want to do it,

but you do. And that’s if you believe in what you are building, you are

willing to do it.

Trent: And that’s exactly what happened to me. I completely and

totally ran out of money. Here’s a phrase that maybe you will want to use,

when I gave talks and people used to ask me, what do you need to do to be

successful? I used to say, ‘Well, you need to embrace economic pressure,

which is another fancy way of saying bury yourself so far in debt that you

have no option but to continue moving forward.’ It can be pretty scary, and

at the time I did not have a wife or children to look after, so it was only

my rear end that was on the line. If I had the other responsibilities, I

probably would have taken a different approach. Now I’ve side-lined us.

Where was I? Yes, getting the money. Do you think that it’s a legitimate

excuse to stay at one, ‘Oh, I don’t know where to find the money’, or do

you think it’s just an excuse and that people can figure it out if they are

really motivated to.

Paul: That’s a tough one. I don’t want to assume that everyone has access

to capital. I think in today’s market it is easier to access than people

think because there is a lot of money on the sidelines right now. So, if

you think about just the friends and family network, before you even get to

the angel investor network and other options, there are a lot of wealthy

individuals who have significant amounts of money sitting there gaining

less than a percent of interest a year. If you can offer convertible note

options, there are a lot of different financial vehicles you can look at to

get access to money that can give individual investors a far greater return

than what they are getting in the market, or not in the market. I would

say, if you believe in what you are doing and you believe you can create

tremendous value through it, I wouldn’t be shy about talking with people,

because they are looking for opportunities.

Now banks are a different story. Banks serve a very important role in

our economy. Funding small business growth in my opinion is not one of them

at this stage in the economy. You need money to get money is pretty much

what it comes down to. So, there are certainly wonderful programs, probably

through the SBA and I think Goldman-Sachs probably does some. There are

people trying to do programs to fund small business growth, but I would say

you are fooling yourself if you think you can fund your growth strictly

through borrowing from banks. It’s a very tricky thing to go through right

now.

We’ve tried everything. We’ve had equity lines on homes, we’ve taken

out term loans, we’ve borrowed from friends and family, and we recently,

actually private equity funding and raised a significant round of funding

for our growth, but that’s not the way to go for many companies, but for us

it was finally a good time to do it.

Trent: Yeah, it’s not even an option for very many companies, as a

matter of fact.

Paul: No.

Trent: Paul, there is a noise outside my office. Somebody is making

too much noise. Can I ask you hold on one second? I’m going to be right

back.

Paul: Yeah, go for it.

Trent: So, raising private equity is not something that’s an option

for a whole lot of people, especially running a service business, where you

don’t necessarily have intellectual properties, but I do want to find out

how you manage to get some institutional money.

Paul: The general rule, if you look at the simplest way of evaluating a

company and every expert you read has wildly different ways of determining

valuations, but a simple one would be a multiple of revenue. So, let’s just

say that traditionally a marketing agency, a service company, may be able

to get one, up to three times revenue, if it’s a really great company. So,

if you are a $1 million company, you may be able to get $1-3 million in

terms of valuation of your company.

Then, when you start playing into the software world, it expands.

I’ve looked at a number of software service companies, and the publicly

traded companies would be roughly in the 5-6 time multiple of revenue, and

then you have some that are dramatically higher than that. So in essence,

to raise the valuation, you have to have much higher potential, or you have

to have some crazy model that brings in dramatically high net profit

margins. So, if you are making 20%, 25%, 30% margins, then you can probably

raise some pretty decent money, but you probably also don’t need the money

if you are making 20% or 30% net margins.

So for us, the agency evolved. When I wrote the book, a lot of what

we talked about in there was theoretical. It was where we thought the

agency world could go, and what appeared to be possible, and since then,

we’ve kind of brought some of that to life. We’ve moved into the on-line

education world, which obviously has significantly higher profit margins

than services.

Trent: Sorry Paul, the internet slowed down for a minute there. You

said you moved into the on-line something world. We missed that word.

Paul: The on-line education. Like, the marketing agency insider stuff we

were talking about, where you can make money while you are sleeping. People

can buy on demand licenses to stuff that you create once, and then you can

monetize almost infinitely. We first moved in that direction and we added

that layer to the business, which has some pretty sizable potential. Then

in May of last year we started building software for the first time and we

released Marketing Score in December of 2012. It’s a free assessment tool

right now, but there is absolutely a product road-map behind it, that has

significant revenue potential, so when you start looking at, we have the

service business which does well, could be more profitable, but again so

much of this is by design because I’m more focused on building long term

than short term returns.

So, you have a service module, you have an education module, you have

a software model, and then there are a few other revenue streams as well

and now all of a sudden you can build a company that has a far greater

valuation because it has far greater potential for returns, so once we had

that story to tell, we luckily have a network of individuals that have the

ability to make investments, and we had some people that for a couple of

years had expressed interest in investing and I was never comfortable

giving up the equity that would have been necessary because our valuation

would have been too low, and once we had a different story, we had the

ability to reach a different valuation that I was far more comfortable

with. So, we could raise the amount of money we needed without having to

give up a great amount of equity in the company. Again, it’s kind of that

option like you had said, you go $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 in debt, or

at some point, if you can raise the money through investment rather than

through debt, you can balance your books a lot better and life looks a

little rosier.

We took money, I didn’t take anything off the table, and I don’t

think I’ve every publicly shared that we took money, so this is kind of the

first time I’m even talking about it, but we did put all of it into the

business. It’s all going to fuel growth that most of which people aren’t

seeing the fruits of yet. It’s stuff we are working on behind the scenes.

Trent: How much did you raise?

Paul: I won’t get into that.

Trent: Okay.

Paul: It was a significant amount for a company of our size, and it was

from an angel investor, I can say that.

Trent: Last question on this fundraising. The angel investor, did they

bring, I call it smart money. When they bring more than the check, did they

bring contacts, or some other asset, intellectual asset to the table?

Paul: Yes. For me, that was essential. We had a list of like 10-12 people

that we were going to approach, and the first person on the list is the one

who invested.

Trent: Well, that’s nice.

Paul: Yeah, it took an hour. So, it was a good use of an hour. A couple of

hours to build the deck, but an hour to land the investment. I think

anybody who is looking at that, whether it’s business partners or silent

partners through investments, whatever it may be, even an advisory board,

they always have to add something. Money, again I don’t want to sound trite

or trivializing this for people who don’t necessarily know where to go for

money. Raising the money is the easy part. There is money out there if you

know the right people and if you have the right story. You need the right

money from the right person. Otherwise, it’s kind of like growth for

growth’s sake. Just building revenue means nothing if you’re not doing it

for the right reasons and if you don’t have an end goal in mind. I feel

that raising money is very much the same way. It needs to come from the

right people.

Trent: So to put that in perspective for the listeners, Uncle Dave,

who knows nothing about your business, is willing to invest a chunk at a

higher valuation, which would be more favorable for you, and then Super

Smart Phil, who has connections and expertise and other intellectual assets

is also willing to invest the same amount of money, but he’s going to do it

at maybe half the valuation of Uncle Dave, which money are you going to

take?

Paul: If you’ve ever watched Shark Tank, in essence, it’s what

entrepreneurs on that show have to balance. It’s, okay, if I’m getting an

offer of $1 million from each of these three people, and they are all

asking for around basically the same percentage of the company, whose money

is worth more to me because they are adding either expertise or retail

distribution, network, whatever it may be. You can’t look at just the

dollars as the way to value an investment.

Trent: Yeah, absolutely not. Because there is so much that a shrewd,

connected investor can bring to the table, because now they are your

partner. They want to do everything in their power to help you succeed,

because it’s a self interest for them. That’s how they are going to get the

biggest bang for their buck.

All right. I got a little down a rabbit hole there. We are going to

go back. We talked a little bit about lead generation. I don’t know if

we’ve covered that in enough detail yet. I want, if we can get some bullet

points on what you think that solo printer, who wants to get to three or

five or ten people, just rattle off the activities. What do you think are

the top five activities that they should be doing on a day-to-day or week-

to-week basis?

Paul: It starts with, figure out the best way to package and present your

expertise. If that can come across, I think the obvious ones and the most

affordable ones are, things like podcasts, blogging, webinars, white

papers, e-books. It almost always comes back to content. What content can

you create that demonstrates a unique expertise and shows your personality?

Because so many people, professionals in the marketing area in particular,

are starting to sound the same, and they are starting to offer very similar

services.

So, you want to be able to establish a connection. There is a great

study that Google did for the zero moment of truth program, and they have a

website for it and everything, and they showed that in 2010, the average

consumer would look at 5.7 and I can never get the decimal point right, say

it’s 5.7 sources of information before making a buying decision. The next

year, 12 months later, it was like 10.8. So, in essence over a 12 month

period, the amount of information that people would look at before making a

buying decision, and this applies in the business world as well, doubled.

In other words, they are consuming far more information.

Well, that information is being found in blog posts, e-books, white

papers, webinars, case studies, and podcasts, so you need to be considering

the fact that your buyers or your prospective buyers, these leads you want

to bring in, are looking for information. Like Marcus Sheridan said in his

talk, ‘What questions are they asking?’ Answer questions. And the more

value you can create, the more questions you can answer through your

content, the greater chance you have of getting them into your marketing

funnel at the lead stage, and from there it is all about nurturing and the

sales process.

Trent: For anyone who is listening, who maybe hasn’t gone down this

content creation road, and you’re thinking, well what would I create? All

you’ve got to do is think about the questions.

Paul: Yup.

Trent: As soon as you have 50 questions that your potential customer

can ask, you have 50 topics that you can write about, that you can

interview other people about, that you can create e-books and webinars

about, you will have more ideas than you have time to create the content, I

promise you that.

Paul: And I know you’ve interviewed Joe Polizzi as well. Joe is with the

Content Marketing Institute, and so if you’re new to the content game and

you kind of want to learn what is going on, go to Content Marketing

Institute’s website, attend Content Marketing World, there are a lot of

professionals who have succeeded at doing this who are very open about

telling you how they have done it. I would say use those resources.

Trent: I don’t think it’s rocket science, it just takes work. That’s

it.

Paul: Yup.

Trent: Okay. Let’s talk about generating retainer revenue. Because if

you are going to build your firm, as I’m sure you are well aware, and I

definitely was, retainers are where it’s at, because it’s less stressful,

the revenue is more predictable, so that’s great. But your company is also

worth a lot more money, so that when you want to raise money or sell it or

take a partner or whatever, you are in a much, much better position of

negotiation because you’ve got that predictable revenue.

How do you think, the one man shop that we keep talking about,

probably doing a lot of web design, maybe some press releases, maybe some

social stuff. What should they be doing in terms of services to generate

recurring revenue, and then how do they get that shift happening in their

head and how do they communicate it to clients, so they can get the client

to say, ‘Yes, I will take a retainer.’

Paul: The main premise behind the book is teaching people how to be a

hybrid agency, because I think that’s really what you have to be to make it

work. For us, the most important metric, and I would argue for any service

firm, as you are saying, is the recurring revenue number. What is the

number we know we are going to hit, every month, month over month, and we

want that number always growing, and we want it to be as large a percentage

of our total revenue as possible, because it’s predictable. So, you have to

know how you are going to get there. Often times, if you are just doing web

work or graphic design work, or just writing content, it’s very hard to

build service packages around siloed projects or siloed services.

So, the premise in the book is you have to look at becoming an

integrated firm. You have to consider the fact that CMOs are looking for

integrated services. There have been studies showing that the importance of

integrated services is dramatically increasing, and yet studies show that

71% of CMOs have no idea where to turn for integrated services from firms.

They don’t know what firm is going to provide those. So, CMOs are trying to

simplify the matrix of agencies they work with. You know, an e-book needs

to have a landing page on a website. Ideally, you want to AB test that

landing page, so you are going to have a graphic design component, you are

going to have a copywriting component, you’re going to have a web

component, just to publish the e-book. Then, you want to spread it through

social media channels, you want to have a e-mail lead nurturing campaign

that is automated for people that download it, you want to automatically

segment the people that download it by company size, by industry, by

whether they are a marketer or agency, whatever it may be. All of these

things go into running a campaign. Then, on the back end you need to

monitor the analytics and look at download rates and look at the click-

through rates on the follow-up e-mail nurturing campaigns. That’s what

marketing is today. You can’t create an e-book and then hand it off to

someone else and hope they build a social strategy, and then hope the ad

team does something with it. It doesn’t work.

So, the first step is really to understand where the marketing

industry is going and has gone, and then figure out how you can actually

take your services, fit them into that model, it may require that you build

some partnerships or some expertise you don’t have, and then from there you

actually need to model your plans and pricing in that style. In our case,

when someone comes to our website, it is pretty obvious that we have

service packages, and those service packages are a monthly, recurring

program. Well, that’s the first step. Because now the expectation when

someone reaches out to us, is that we primarily run ongoing programs,

retainers if you want to call them those. So, it’s in part of structuring

of your business model and a part of positioning, which requires really

thinking critically about your plans and pricing.

Trent: In your service business, what percentage of total revenue

comes from retainer?

Paul: Ours is probably about 90% at this point.

Trent: 90. That’s nice.

Paul: It’s almost exclusively that now.

Trent: For the folks that aren’t there yet, I can promise you this,

and I know that Paul will nod in agreement, when you come in on the first

day of every month and you’re not back at 0, and you’re going, ‘Oh man, how

am I going to crack my nut this month?’ instead, in my case, it was about

$78,500 hit my bank account on the first day of every month. And that was

pretty much my overhead for the month.

Paul: It’s beautiful.

Trent: Yeah. It allows you to sit back and be a bit more strategic.

You talked about creating a runway for yourself so you didn’t have to make

decisions under duress. There is no way I ever could have sold my business

for what I did if I didn’t have that recurring revenue, so I’m a huge

evangelist, and that’s why every opportunity I get, when I have someone

like you, Paul, who has demonstrated that this can be done. That I really

want to jump all over it for a bit. Because it’s the game changer. It is.

Paul: And one of the thing we preach a lot about, and I’ve done a number of

talks on, you can’t get so caught up in getting to that number, so let’s

say your break even is $78,000, for us, for a couple of years, that was our

goal, was to get the recurring revenue to the break even point. Everything

else over that was gravy. But once you get there, things happen, clients

leave for all kinds of reasons that are completely out of your control.

Mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcies, you name it, we’ve had clients

leave for it. We fired our biggest client last year, and then two days

later a Fortune 500 company closed the division that we were working for

and doing phenomenal things for.

So overnight, our two largest accounts are basically gone. As an

agency, you have to prepare for those contingencies, and that’s why I say

it’s so much more important as an agency to have retention programs in

place, to know that once you get them through the sales funnel and they are

now a customer, the real work begins then. Getting them through that point

takes a science and an art, but keeping them is where the money is really

made and the profits are made.

Trent: Can you talk a bit more about retention programs then?

Paul: There’s obvious things like customer service that come into play.

But, for us, everything comes down to performance. So we’ve again, lost

clients for everything you could possibly imagine, and what my directive

internally has been is that I don’t do the client service work. I spend

probably less than five hours a month on client services. My feeling was,

if I get a call from a client out of the blue, and they say, ‘Hey, we’re

thinking of leaving, what value are you guys bringing right now for the

$10,000 a month we pay you?’ or whatever it is. I could log into their

scorecard, we build custom scorecards for clients, and in three seconds, I

could spit out, well, in the last three months your lead conversion rate if

up 3%, lead volume is up 34% over the previous three month average, your

customer conversion rate is this, and we’ve helped reduce your return rate

by 2%.

Trent: End of phone call.

Paul: Yeah, ‘If you want to leave, I understand. If there is anything else

I can do for you, let me know.’ I will accept that there are ways that you

lose clients that are out of your control, but I want to control as many

variables as possible, and the best one I know how is to actually deliver

valuable performance to them, and to be very transparent in showing them.

Trent: Are you using HubSpot’s tools to produce the numbers that you

just rattled off, or is that something that you have built that plugs into

HubSpot. How does that work?

Paul: We use a blend of HubSpot and Google Analytics for pretty much every

client, and then our custom scorecards are actually built in Google Drive.

Trent: So, using their form builder, something like that?

Paul: We actually just built spreadsheets and then we can run pivot tables

on those if we want. I guess we probably haven’t shared it publicly. We

shared the template as part of the Client Services Series we did, so we

made all our templates for everything we do. We do monthly scorecards and

monthly game plans, and then we actually provide a deck each month that we

build in Keynote that highlights the active campaigns, how those campaigns

are performing, what’s coming up next month, how the analytics from the

previous month have actually affected the strategy moving forward, so we

try to run kind of agile, real-time programs based on performance. And if

something didn’t work, we are the first ones to tell the client, ‘This

didn’t work and here’s why. We even AB tested it and it didn’t work in

either case, so this is what we are going to do next month.’ The more

transparent we are, I think the more credibility and trust you have with a

client.

Trent: Yes, absolutely. So, you say you are building a deck each month

for them to basically convey, ‘Here’s what we’ve done for you lately?’

Paul: Right. Knowing that many of our client contacts forward things on to

the C-Sweep if we are not working with the C-Sweep themselves, like a

marketing manager, marketing director, so we have spreadsheets and we have

beautiful Google Analytics reports and all those things, but most clients

don’t want to spend time on that. So, we try to condense it to like 8-10

slides that they could easily forward on to their bosses. Again, hopefully

everyone understands the value we are bringing and the other stages, the

effort you are putting in, that you know those are designed to contribute

to some measurable outcome.

Trent: How big is your average client?

Paul: Probably like $6,000-7,000 a month right now, I would say.

Trent: Okay, that’s not the answer I was looking for, but that’s a

good one.

Paul: You mean the size?

Trent: Yeah.

Paul: It’s all over the place. Some of our larger accounts are actually

small businesses, so people like doing $10 million or less that are

spending $7,000-8,000 a month probably. Then, you have Fortune 500

companies where we may work with a division of a multibillion dollar

company, but we’re not like agency of record for Fortune 500s with million

dollar budgets. You could average it, but the average would mean nothing.

It’s kind of all across the board. I actually just had this conversation

last week, trying to define the prototype customer, and it’s a hard thing

to come up with.

Trent: They have pre-signed checks they keep in the right hand drawer

of their desk and they hand them to you when you walk in the door.

Paul: Those are good ones.

Trent: All right. We have been an hour. I could go all day. I want to

show you the software interface when we get off-line. So, last three

questions. These ones are quick and easy. What are you most excited about

for 2013?

Paul: Marketing Score. We’re building software, and it’s

themarketingscore.com if anyone is curious, but it’s only the beginning.

There are some really cool things that we are working on that we have

alluded to, like we talked about origins of a marketing intelligence

engine, I wrote a blog post for that, and it’s basically what we think is

possible and we are moving in that direction rather than waiting for the

industry to get there. We’re just kind of going in that direction

ourselves. I’m very excited about the potential of what we can build.

Trent: Nice looking landing page, by the way. Very 2013.

What book are you reading right now, or books, that you are enjoying.

Paul: Well, I’m reading Mastery by Robert Green right now. Robert Green is

actually one of my favorite authors. His writing style takes a little

getting used to because it’s a little long winded at times with his.

Trent: You think?

Paul: Yeah. His examples.

Trent: My God.

Paul: But you can learn to actually read past those, so I actually skip…

Trent: Thank you.

Paul: …the story in each chapter and I get to…

Trent: Thank you. I read his book, Mastery, and I’m going, okay sample

#17 of the same point, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip. It got to the

point where I would just kind of skim to the end of the chapter where he

would give more or less summary.

Paul: Yup. That’s the way I read it. He wrote one with 50 Cent called The

50th Law, and they would start each chapter with a story about 50 Cent’s

life. You can skip it. You don’t need the 50 Cent part. Just skip to what

the application is. Every book he’s done is like that. I’m reading that. I

just finished ‘Automate This’, which is phenomenal. And if you walk about

what I was alluding to earlier, about where we are going as an agency and

where I think the industry is going, that gives a great prelude to it. So,

if you look at what happened on the stock market on Wall Street and what’s

happening in the healthcare world and you sit back and ponder about how

that could affect marketing, that’s kind of the direction we are going.

Trent: Okay. And…my last question, oh yeah, how can people get hold

of you?

Paul: Well, they can visit the website, obviously, pr2020.com. The

Marketing Score site is themarketingscore.com, and they can e-mail me,

Paul@PR2020.com if they would like.

Trent: Paul, really enjoyed this interview.

Paul: Thanks so much.

Trent: I feel like we have so much in common, so many similar beliefs

about how to run a business. I wish when I was running mine, I would have

known about information marketing and I would have had the epiphany to

think, you know, ‘Hey, maybe there’s a lot of people who would like to know

what I am doing, and I could have created a whole other business.’

Paul: There’s still time.

Trent: Wasn’t even on my radar screen. Well, that’s kind of what

Bright Ideas is all about.

Paul: Yeah, you’re doing it now.

Trent: Yeah, yeah, I pretty much am. All right, my friend, well thank

you so much for making the time to be on the show. You can come back any

time you want. I probably will bring you back in the not too distant

future. Because I’ve got another sort of series of discussions that are not

so much about building a firm, but they’re actually about the creative and

the tactics. So, you’ll probably be on my list of people for that.

Paul: I’ll show you something we are working on then.

Trent: Cool! All right, thanks for being on the show.

Paul: Thank you, Trent.

Trent: If you’d like to get access to the show notes for this episode,

go to brightideas.co/#35 and if you run a marketing agency and you’d like

to find out what your peers are up to and what’s working in the industry,

get access to the Bright Ideas 2013 marketing agency industry report by

going to brightideas.co/2013report. As well, if you are looking for traffic

generation strategies for you or your client’s websites, go to

brightideas.co/massivetraffic and enter your e-mail address, and when you

do, you will be given free access to the Massive Traffic tool kit, which is

a compilation of all the best traffic generation ideas that have been

shared with me by many of the guests here on Bright Ideas.

That’s it for this episode. I am your host, Trent Dyrsmid, and if you

enjoyed this episode, please do me a favor and head on over to iTunes.

There is a link at the bottom of the post that will take you there, and

leave the show a 5-star rating along with some comments in the form of

feedback. Every time you do, it helps the show get more exposure on iTunes

and therefore we can help get more entrepreneurs exposed to more bright

ideas to help them massively boost their business. Thank you so much for

turning in to this episode. We will see you again in another one soon. Take

care.

Recording: Thanks very much for listening to the Bright Ideas Podcast.

Check us out on the web at brightideas.co.

About Paul Roetzer

Paul Roetzer is founder and CEO of PR 20/20. He started the agency in November 2005 after seven years at a traditional PR firm, with a vision to evolve the PR industry. He is the author of The Marketing Agency Blueprint, and is a graduate of Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.

Paul also frequently speaks at local and national venues on the topics of inbound marketing, content marketing, public relations, social media and marketing agency management.

Links Mentioned

• The Marketing Score
• Automate This (book)