AL EP 2: Corey Quinn – How & When to Build a Vertical in Your Agency

Show Notes

Corey has a 25-year track record of extraordinary success as an entrepreneur, sales leader, and Chief Marketing Officer for Scorpion, a $150M+ agency serving SMBs. Today, he helps agencies grow from 7 figures to 8 by doing less, not more.

You can find Corey Quinn here:
Web: https://www.coreyquinn.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyquinn/
Sign up for his newsletter here: https://www.coreyquinn.com/newsletter

Episode Transcript

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:32:22

Hey, everybody, this is Jessie Michael Moore, agency and transformation coach and founder of Mission Control. Creator of leverage for growth and I’m Lucas James, founder of Twist Attire, which scaled from 0 to $200,000 a month with my own agency. We are the host of leverage for growth, podcast agency leverage and Episodes. We know that in order to scale your agency successfully, there are multiple shifts that need to happen within the founders mindsets, skill sets, and leadership styles.

00:00:32:24 – 00:01:04:15

We are on a mission to interview marketing and PR agency owners on their journey to six, seven and eight figures and leverage the lessons from their journey to save you time, energy and money. In order for you to get your agency to the next level. If you find value in these episodes, watch the case study video to learn more about leverage growth and how we successfully scale agencies quickly at Niche in Control Decomp case study at Niche in Control Accommodation.

00:01:04:17 – 00:01:30:10

You are now listening to leverage for growth. Hey everybody, this is Jesse Gilmore, founder of Niche in Control and creator of leverage for growth. Welcome to the agency Leverage Edition. Today I am here with Corey Quinn, who helps B2B, SAS and agencies grow from seven figures to eight figures and more by doing less, not more. He’s the author of a book called Focus Vertical, which will be released later on this year.

00:01:30:12 – 00:01:53:27

Host of vertical go to market podcast and a former CMO of Scorpion, taking it from 20 million to 100 and 50,000,000 in 6 years. Welcome to our show today. Hey, Jesse. Super excited to be here. Awesome. Greg, can you tell me a little bit about, kind of your history? I know that you had, worked in Scorpion.

00:01:54:00 – 00:02:24:08

grew them, and then now, you’ve made kind of a switch. Can you talk a little bit about your history and background? Sure, sure. So the quick history is been in, pretty much a sales and marketing type role my entire career. Majority of that time has been in the agency space. As you mentioned, the last role I had was that a company called Scorpion, which if your listeners are not familiar, it is a, it’s a digital marketing agency that targets SMB, small, medium sized businesses.

00:02:24:10 – 00:02:47:07

I joined in 2015, and we were doing about $20 million in revenue at that time. By the time I left at the end of 2021, we were doing 150 million. So we literally grew the company, you know, seven times over that period. Awesome. Yeah. I bet you there has been a lot of transformation in Scorpion in order to handle that kind of growth.

00:02:47:11 – 00:03:09:02

Oh, boy. Yes. Tremendous amount of, identity shifts and changes. And in going from a small 100 person company to going to a 1000 person company. So, happy to talk about those. And I know that, based on what we discussed, before we hit record, is that a lot of the listeners here are probably, you know, smaller agencies.

00:03:09:02 – 00:03:33:01

So I think, you know, the the big the big lesson that, that I’ve learned during my time through that experience that I think is relatable to your audience is the the challenge that agency founders have. when they’re growing six figures, you know, maybe they’re in the six figure range trying to get to seven or maybe seven figures.

00:03:33:01 – 00:03:50:13

Trying to get to eight is one of these things where it’s like, you know, what got me here isn’t going to get me there type of thing. Right? Which I know is a lot of the work that you do is helping you, is helping with that. And the thing that I’ve been focusing on since I’ve left Scorpion, I’m now consulting with agencies to help them to grow.

00:03:50:13 – 00:04:13:05

The specific thing that I’m helping with is working with founders of of agencies who have, gotten into the habit of saying yes to to everything or yes to Austin. Right. And I think that as a, as a, as a growing business, you have to say yes, in the early stages, you have to grow, you have to build the revenue and build the business.

00:04:13:07 – 00:04:36:15

But at a certain point, there comes a time when you saying yes, everything actually starts to work against you and that that that’s where I can help. the founder, with specifically a marketing go to market strategy around starting to say no, and only yes to the things that make sense for the longer term future.

00:04:36:17 – 00:04:55:20

And I bet that there’s probably, either warning signs or some, some time where you’re going, hey, you’re saying yes too much now you need to focus. what are some of those warning signs? Have you seen, as being. Now you need to focus. There’s three things that I’ve noticed a pattern of and speaking with and working with agency owners.

00:04:55:23 – 00:05:20:06

Number one is the cost per acquisition to acquire new customers is too high. And that may be because PPC costs have gone up. or just the overall cost of, of, of digital marketing continues to go up. It’s always going up. number two, you know, you maybe you’ve tried third party platforms and vendors and, you know, LinkedIn lead gen and all that stuff, and it’s not really working.

00:05:20:08 – 00:05:43:28

And your competition’s just, you know, too fierce, right? So that’s causing a very, very high cost per acquisition. That’s not really doesn’t make sense for your agency. Number two is that your customer churn is too high. You’re losing customers, too quickly. And so if you’re trying to grow, let’s say I was talking to an agency owner, last week who, grew the business.

00:05:43:28 – 00:06:08:16

They, they acquired, I think, 13 new customers last year. Well, unfortunately, they also lost about ten. And so his ability to grow in the double digits, you know, very, very aggressively is very is hampered because in this case, the, the customer churn is offsetting the growth. So when customer churn gets too high, you’re probably saying yes too often.

00:06:08:22 – 00:06:29:21

And the third thing is, is if you stop innovating for your clients because you’re running around trying to serve every client of every shape and size. And so, as we know now, digital marketing is a, is a very innovative space. We have things like ChatGPT, you have a lot of different innovations around the world, and online specifically that, that are happening.

00:06:29:21 – 00:06:53:27

If you’re not able to continue to innovate for your customers, you’re probably saying yes too often. Yeah. I can see that. that even happens at the six figure level as well, where a lot of times saying yes to too many different types of clients means that you’re customizing everything for each individual, which ends up being, a complete mess because, yeah, I can see how that’s applicable.

00:06:53:27 – 00:07:12:26

It doesn’t matter if it’s six or 7 or 8 figures when it comes to Scorpion, you know, he grew the business from 20,000,250. As I said, you can’t do that by being made by approaching the business. from a, you know, customization perspective, you know, a very manual kind of. Well, we’ll, we’ll we’ll figure it out as we go.

00:07:12:28 – 00:07:51:08

We took the opposite approach, which was to take a very systematic approach. And the the foundation of that was built in the idea that, hey, we’re going to serve a specific vertical or a specific customer, and be able to become the best in the world at that. And that allowed us because we were serving the same customer type over and over and over in this case, attorneys, we were able to systematize and build a lot of processes and ultimately software that allowed us to bring on more customers, more attorneys as as clients, and at scale without it compromising the quality of the, the relationship or the quality of the output that we, that

00:07:51:08 – 00:08:29:03

we, that we created for our clients. And I know, it is a mindset shift for people to decide, okay, I’m going to not serve everybody. I’m going to now serve this very specific person. And that’s one of the challenges that I find, a lot with, with people that we work with. what would you say to somebody that kind of is, maybe like, resisting, the, the niche, the deciding to go into the niche, go all in and then be the best at it is, is psychologically like putting yourself in a, in a pretzel, like, you know, in your mind, in a pretzel.

00:08:29:03 – 00:09:00:10

It’s very difficult to do because you’re by saying no, you’re literally turning away potentially, you know, short term revenue that can help, you know, grow the business again in the short term. But long term. yeah, if you want to if you truly want to scale, it’s it’s it’s through, through saying. Yeah. So I think the biggest objection that I hear is that, well, you know, if I just say yes to if I just focus on plumbers, let’s say that, you know, we’ve got a lot of traction with plumbers, but you also work with a lot of other businesses.

00:09:00:12 – 00:09:25:06

As an agency owner, you said, well, you know, if I just focus on plumbers, it’s just one business type. And, you know, I kind of like the variety. And by the way, you know, what kind of agency is is, you know, what kind of business am I going to build if I just focus on plumbers? Well, the reality is, is if you look at if you look up the market of of plumbing businesses in the United States today, there are 150,000 plumbing businesses in the US today.

00:09:25:08 – 00:09:58:08

And if you are successful in focusing exclusively on plumbers, speak to language you solve their problems better than anyone else. And you get, let’s say, 3% of the market. You close 3% of all the plumbing businesses in the US. You will have a highly profitable, multi-million dollar, plumbing focused agency that will make you and your family very, very happy and also afford you time to go hang out with the kids and go to the soccer games and, you know, spend, spend time with, you know, the quality time and sort of the lifestyle that you want as a business owner.

00:09:58:10 – 00:10:21:11

I love it. just 3% of a market can make it so that your dreams as an entrepreneur come true. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s, that’s a good point. How do people in your experience, any tips that you have on kind of choosing that niche? so, you know, you have like a whole bunch of different types of businesses and you’re going, okay, maybe it is the plumbers.

00:10:21:11 – 00:10:40:25

Right. but what are some tips that you would give somebody, kind of deciding on the niche? First off, every single founder I’ve had this conversation with had a gut instinct on who their primary best fit customer was. They they just know because they they run the business. They’re involved in everything. But I like going beyond gut feel, right.

00:10:40:25 – 00:11:02:09

I want to be able to substantiate that a little bit. So I take them through a process where we quantify their current book of business. We look at, we basically lay out all of the vertical, verticals that they’re currently serving across, you know, class. Our client base. We look at things like, what is the average revenue per, per vertical, what is the retention rate?

00:11:02:09 – 00:11:25:22

How long are they staying with us? how quickly are they closing? Right. They’d be, you know, meaning are they we close them in the sales process if we do qualitative analysis around, you know, you know, an NPS scores, which is, net promoter score around like the satisfaction of the customer. If they score particularly high, then that’s a vote for that vertical.

00:11:25:23 – 00:11:46:14

Now you also look at this from a qualitative perspective, meaning you can have customers that, you know that work really well on paper. But there’s something inherently that you just do. You just don’t connect with them. You don’t like them. Maybe, you know, and every every vertical has different type, you know, different people in it. But there’s tends to be a sort of a personality type per vertical.

00:11:46:17 – 00:12:07:01

Right. Or, or maybe some kind of personal connection. You may have, positive, positive or negative. And so you want to really understand, you know, if I’m going to commit my business to, for the next 3 to 5 years to, to dominating this vertical, do I like working with them? Do my sales team, do they tell me that they report back to me and say, hey, yeah, we really connect with these, you know, these buyers.

00:12:07:01 – 00:12:39:19

And then the third, the third audience that you need to interview is your customer success team. You’re the people who are providing the day to day value and support to your customers. You know, who are they seeing the most success with? Who do they like working with? Who do they have the most sort of connection with and rapport with all of those, factors when you add it in plus the the quantitative piece that I mentioned a minute ago will really help to sort of bubble up a, a vertical or two that really are truly best fit customers for you.

00:12:39:22 – 00:13:00:13

And at that point, you just want to make sure that there are enough of them to go after to focus your business on. Why does it make sense to focus your entire business around a market of ten or a market of 50? You want to have somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 customers or potential customers in that space. For it to be a viable space.

00:13:00:16 – 00:13:19:24

I love your process. I’m kind of like a, geek when it goes to I’m like, that’s really good. That’s good. and so one of the things that, I know a lot of six figure agencies kind of deal with is, this kind of balance between a process, and the amount of time that it takes for them to get to a goal.

00:13:19:27 – 00:13:39:15

So we talked a little bit about kind of like short term versus long term. And yeah, on the short term, they’re trying to serve as many people as possible on a long term. They’re like, yeah, we do want to dominate a niche. but when they start this process, a lot of times there’s kind of like a dissonance between, how long it actually takes and how long they want it to take.

00:13:39:15 – 00:14:03:07

So, what are some of the things that you would tell somebody that kind of really is, wanting to decide on the niche, wanting to double down, but they’re going like, how long is this going to take for me to, to do that from a practical perspective, I would not recommend that an agency, once they’ve chosen a vertical to fire all their non vertical, you know, customers like you need to stay in business, right?

00:14:03:07 – 00:14:20:29

Yeah. Keep the the doors open and the electricity running. So from a very practical perspective it’s more about focus. It’s more about like if we’re going to go to a, conference or if we’re going to write content, like, who are we going to write for? Who’s the who’s the the avatar, the persona that we’re writing for going forward?

00:14:21:02 – 00:14:56:27

It’s a it’s a, it’s a, it’s a focusing mechanism. Right. And so from a timeline perspective, it it takes time. It takes time to build credibility in the space, takes time to understand the the buyer and the customer at a deeper level takes time to get involved with their associations like the trade associations and the conferences. And so truthfully, it’s about an 18 to 24 month transitionary period from where you, when you decide to start, really focusing on this vertical to when you start to see things like word of mouth pick up within the vertical.

00:14:57:00 – 00:15:14:13

Yeah. it’s good to put it like a time frame on it because a lot of times people are like maybe it’s the marketing messages that are out there for a six figure agency is like get rich going to happen in, you know, get rich quick. It’s like no riches are in the niches. Let’s go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:15:14:16 – 00:15:36:28

Well, this is awesome conversation. so what is what is kind of like, in the next 1 to 3 years? I know you’re writing a book. You got the podcast. What is kind of like, some things that you’re either working on or, what’s success for you in the next couple of years? Well, I’m really excited to launch this book because I think that, or at least I hope that it’s going to help a lot of agency owners, potentially listeners here.

00:15:36:28 – 00:16:00:14

But just in general, to be able to access some of the things that we’ve been talking about here, some of the wins, the that and the the approaches and the philosophies that we took it Scorpion, to help them to grow, that they’ll get direct access to that, which I’m super excited about, publishing that. And then, I’m really excited about launching a course pretty soon, about the same curriculum.

00:16:00:17 – 00:16:21:08

and so those are there’s some, some sort of business goals of mine. in the meantime, just continuing to, meet with agency owners who have this desire to go vertical, if you will, or to, to, to do less. So, right, to, to grow faster by doing less. and, and by, by applying some of these approaches.

00:16:21:11 – 00:16:40:28

Awesome. Well what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you, or do you have any offers for them that they can take advantage of? I think the best way to get in touch with me, I’m on LinkedIn, but if you like this content and if you are, you know, interested in more more story tips and ideas, I recommend you join my newsletter.

00:16:40:28 – 00:17:01:13

I have a daily newsletter five days a week, where you can sign up on my website at Corey Quinn, Dot com slash newsletter. And that’s cre y q ui n.com/newsletter. And on there you get a lot of, actionable tips five days a week. And you’ll also stay up to date on things like my book, my podcast as well.

00:17:01:15 – 00:17:16:09

cool. Well, you can, go to Corey Quinn dot coms newsletter and joining us newsletter. I’m a part of it as well. And thank you so much for, being on the show. Corey. Thank you Jesse. It’s been a blast.

00:17:16:11 – 00:17:39:26

Agency owners, if you want to transform your agency to sustain and grow without your direct involvement, where you can stop working in the business and switch to working on the business where you can regain control of your time, delegate effectively, get paid what you’re worth, and have your team run the day to day. Go to niche in controlled comp case study right now to learn more about leverage for growth.

00:17:39:28 – 00:18:07:25

You can book a free strategy session with us to look at your systems. Understand what needs to be done in order for you to scale and get a free strategic plan for the next year. To live the life of entrepreneurship that you’ve always dreamed about.

Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors.