Early Exit #33: Building an 18-person Marketing Agency
How Nigel Stevens of OGM went from solopreneur to agency owner with clients like Ramp, Twilio Segment, and Hotjar.
You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business by Nick Lafferty.
Last week: February finance update
I have no desire to start a marketing agency or hire people to help support my client roster right now. I never enjoyed people management and I want to stay as close to the work as possible.
But maybe you want to start an agency! Or you’re curious to peek behind the curtain of a successful agency.
Today’s newsletter is for you because I sat down with Nigel Stevens from Organic Growth Marketing (OGM).
OGM’s past and present client roster is a who’s who of successful SaaS brands like Ramp, Twilio Segment, Hotjar, and Intercom.
OGM now has 18 employees supporting 10+ active clients. His business model is focused on having a few people go really deep on a small number of companies, where each person helps with no more than two or three clients at a time.
Nigel gave advice for anyone who wants to start an agency today:
The importance of nailing your first hire and what he looks for when hiring right now (hint: it’s not extreme SEO experience)
Accepting uncertainty in balancing the supply & demand of your business
Finding product-market fit
Everything in quotes is Nigel’s advice from our call and the rest is my commentary 🙂
Advice for future agency owners
1. Finding your product-market fit
Charge enough so that when you learn a lesson, you learn it while getting paid well.
Every consultant I’ve talked to has eventually narrowed the focus of their business.
When you start out, you’re often trying a bunch of things to find your own product-market fit.
You might think you know what skills you want to offer your clients, but you don’t really know until you do it. Maybe some work is more fun to talk about than actually doing it.
In Nigel’s case, one of the first things he did was sign up to recruit freelance writers for a client.
He immediately found out that he hated that process and never wanted to do that again, but that hard lesson informed how he approaches this with new clients:
I signed up for something and I learned I didn't want to do it. And then when somebody else asked me, I could say confidently: here's why we're not a good fit for this, and here's how to best solve this problem.
You should be saying no to things.
I felt this pressure to say yes to everything a client asked for, because when people ask for stuff, you say, oh, I guess I'm supposed to be able to do this. But what you learn is that your job is to say no to almost everything. And if you just say it confidently, and you can explain a reason, it will generally resonate with people. And if they really want you to do that thing, it's not a fit anyway, so why try to fight it?
Your personal positioning statement, which is your filter for determining who’s a good fit for you and who isn’t.
My experience matches Nigel’s. I’ve found that the more upfront you are about your work in the beginning the better, because it prevents scope creep and confusion down the road.
Here are some things I don’t do:
SEO or content strategy (you should hire Nigel’s team at OGM instead!)
Meta/Facebook/Instagram ads
Graphic design
Takeaway: Figure out what type of work you don’t do and be upfront about it with prospective clients.
2. You don’t go from 0 to 18 employees overnight.
There's a middle ground between a solo consultant and agency.
Nigel first brought on a friend from college to help with some administrative operational work. That person wasn’t client facing for over a year
There’s no perfect order of operations here. Nigel just sat down and figured out what he needed to offload to keep scaling his business. Every time he hit a bottleneck he’d find a way to offload it.
Takeway: Understand what part of your client work is taking up a lot of your time and consider finding someone to help. It could be reporting, billing, or even organizing notes from your meetings.
3. Nail your first hire
Pick the right people, because I feel like I just got lucky. The first few people I had were very, very good. But along the way, there are some people that don't work out. And if those people that didn't work out had been towards the beginning, I think everything could have crumbled.
The first person you hire can have an outsized impact on the future of your agency.
But don’t limit yourself to only looking for someone who is a 10/10 in every area.
Understand where you need help today and then find someone who can plug the gap. Ideally this person is someone you already know and have dealt with in the past.
Hire people who don’t check every box
Most people look to hire someone who has done the exact thing before. But the best people are often only well-developed and experienced at certain aspects of what the job needs to be.
And they have the soft skills to cover everything else. They have a high degree of internal motivation to level up and prove that they can do the next thing.
When hiring for new roles at OGM, Nigel first defines two things:
Figure out what the most important aspect of the role is
Figure out what are the things you can teach
For us, the things that are hard to teach are general marketing chops and content marketing skills, EQ, and communication.
Takeaway: Most people aren’t a 10/10 across the board, so figure out what isn’t teachable and build systems to teach the rest.
4. You’re probably overrated
At first I was very hesitant to put anybody in a client-facing role because that person was representing me. But then I learned pretty early on that I'm kind of overrated across most things.
For example, I thought that I could never hand off doing content briefs. I thought I was special at it, but it turns out, no, I could just teach someone how to do it who actually has different skills than me.
You are not the only person in the world who can do things really well.
Accepting this mindset is key to finding good people to work for you and for growing your business.
I’ve also seen this described as giving away your legos.
You should give up parts of your job to people who are better equipped to do it so you can do things they can't, like finding and closing new clients.
Just be mindful of your reputation.
Your reputation is everything you have. And if you stick someone who isn't ready for prime time in front of a client, all it takes is one bad interaction for them to be able to tell somebody else. And then that's your reputation.
This is my biggest fear of hiring someone else for client-facing work.
My clients hire me. They want to work with me.
And ultimately it’s my reputation on the line. Nigel felt the same thing.
But reputation is a real thing, and my business is built on positive client referrals right now.
Takeaway: Find the right balance between giving away your legos and putting someone too junior in front of an important client. Giving away responsibility is the only way you can move onto bigger and better things.
5. Stay close to the sales process
I still haven't handed off sales because I've talked to a lot of other people about how that doesn't go well. And I just enjoy it.
Like Nigel, I also enjoy talking to potential clients, understanding their problems, and deciding if we’re a good fit to work together.
I would have a really hard time giving up this lego, because the potential risks of signing a bad client are too high for me:
They churn early, messing up your supply & demand equation early
Doing a bad job and harming the long-term reputation of the business
Adding extra stress to the team and myself
Networking is the superpower of any good business owner because it keeps you current with trends and updated on what other people are seeing in the market.
The biggest strength I have is that I hop on a lot of calls with people in the industry. I'm talking to them about what's working and I'm across a lot of projects. So I have a unique perspective to have pattern recognition across conversations I've had with clients and across the whole company. No one else has that same perspective.
Takeaway: Be cautious about straying far from the sales process early on.
6. Perfect supply and demand doesn’t exist
You also never have the right balance between supply and demand, meaning available time and bandwidth of your team and clients. So you just have to be able to live with the uncertainty.
This is something I’m struggling with right now: what is my maximum client workload?
This gets even more complicated when you bring on additional people to help support your client roster.
There is never a perfect balance, you’re always out of sync on the demand side(too many clients) or the supply side (too many people).
Takeaway: You have to be able to live with the uncertainty of supply & demand imbalances.
7. There was no master plan
Throughout my conversation with Nigel, I kept assuming he had this big plan to start an agency immediately after leaving his full time job.
That was not true.
You're already giving me way too much credit. There was no plan. It just kind of happened. If I had left my job to start an agency and I lived in San Francisco, that would have been a lot of pressure. And the whole thing is I put myself in a situation where I had no pressure.
I purposely saved this last piece of advice for last, because it parallels my early journey.
When I quit my job, I had three things that massively decreased the amount of pressure on me:
Two paying clients
Relatively low monthly expenses
A large emergency fund
When Nigel quit his job, he moved to a lower cost of living country to remove a lot of the pressure on himself.
I was living in a cheap place. I left [my job] with a small contract that paid the bills and I had some money saved up.
And crucially, he was up for the challenge.
I was hungry to hack my career.
I'd never hired people, but I was up for that challenge.
I'd never done sales. I was up for that challenge.
I'd never managed people, but I was up for that challenge.
A lot of people are not cut out to be solopreneurs or business owners.
This stuff is hard.
But if you’re in the right place in your life where you can take some risk, then building an agency is a great way to grow your income beyond the $30k/month mark into six figures and beyond.
Wrapping Up
Huge thank you to Nigel from OGM for sharing his time and insights with me.
Even though building an agency isn’t in my immediate future, I wanted to share the experience of someone who has done it before.
Did you enjoy this post? Let me know because I’d love to do more things like this in future newsletters.
Nick
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