AL EP 30: Chris Marrano – Streamline Your Processes

Show Notes

Chris is a seasoned digital marketer with 15 years of experience. He began his career at Mullen in Boston, working on accounts such as Match.com and Nat Geo. Later, he worked at EMC and Harvard Business School. He then became an agency partner and CMO at Blue Water Marketing before transitioning to CEO, overseeing client relationships, digital marketing strategies, data analysis, and business development.

Connect with Chris Marrano & Blue Water Marketing here –
Web: http://bluewatermarketing.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bluewatermkting/
Instagram: https://instagram.com/bluewatermkting
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/chrismarrano

Episode Transcript

00;00;04;02 – 00;00;32;14

Everybody is adjusting to your agency and transformation coach and founder of Mission Control, Greater of Leverage for Growth. And I’m Lucas James, founder of Twist, which scaled from 0 to $200000 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;23 – 00;01;00;19

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 for growth and how we successfully scale agencies quickly at Niche in control Icon slash Key Study at Niche in Control Icon slash Kingdom.

00;01;01;20 – 00;01;25;04

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 Chris Morano, the founder of Blue Water Marketing, a creative data driven digital marketing agency that drives results for B2C brands by delivering solutions, The results in growth.

00;01;25;09 – 00;01;54;17

Thanks for coming to our show today. Chris Awesome. Jesse Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. Excellent. And can you tell us a little bit about the history and background of your agency? Sure. So for me, I went to school in Boston for for advertising and, you know, really was just kind of an interest of mine and the psychology of everything and worked at agencies up there, worked on the client side up there and eventually got sick of the winter.

00;01;54;17 – 00;02;18;25

And so I moved to South Florida, where really I saw an opportunity for at least a local agency at that time. So I kind of started that freelancing journey and which has led me now six and a half years later to owning an agency, a formal agency with employees and a location. But yeah, that was it. Really just have a passion for marketing.

00;02;18;29 – 00;02;40;19

I spoke with someone today, you know, and there were asking about plan B’s in Y marketing. And, you know, it’s really the only thing I’m very good at. And so taking that and learning how to become a business owner, kind of the history of how I got to where I am now and hopefully going to where we’re going for the future.

00;02;41;07 – 00;02;59;20

Mm hmm. Awesome. So you started off as a freelancer, and then you got to a point where you’re ready to bring on people a lot of times, freelancers kind of get stuck in that role where they don’t know to make that jump. Can you talk a little bit about maybe some of those earlier moves that you made to make sure that you can grow?

00;03;00;21 – 00;03;23;15

So actually, it’s interesting. That move was a terrible mistake, right? So for your listeners who are in that spot where, you know, they have X amount of clients and work is kind of becoming a burden, we’ve definitely all been there. So the mistake that I made was I didn’t have the process in place for lead generation. Some most of my work at that time was coming through for referrals.

00;03;24;11 – 00;03;55;23

Now, years later, we know referrals are great. They should be the cherry on top but not be what your business is built around. And so I hired quickly, we got a location. I quickly I think at that time three team members some contractors that would come in but still pretty formal hiring. And unfortunately because I didn’t have that system built out of that process to generate leads on a consistent basis to determine, you know, lifetime value and my profitability.

00;03;56;16 – 00;04;22;10

Very quickly, I saw a problem in that I went from being able to support myself in my family to I’m now paying everybody else and not making anything. So at that time, so that was 2017, probably 2018, 19. Quickly, that castle that I thought I had was crumbling. And unfortunately, those people obviously had to go. I had to really take a step back.

00;04;22;10 – 00;04;46;17

It was back to being myself and determining what to do next. Mm hmm. Yeah. There’s. There’s times in the entrepreneurial journey where you scale up to scale down and then scale back up. And it’s kind of like this ebb and flow. It was definitely a lesson learned in understanding the business side of marketing agency opposed to the marketing side.

00;04;47;09 – 00;05;12;01

Mm hmm. And since since kind of scaling down, what did you end up doing to kind of grow again? Did you focus on leads right away once everything was back to you or talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So after that, did bring in someone else who was kind of had a background in business and sales and from there.

00;05;12;01 – 00;05;37;10

So that was two and a half, three years ago they came on board and we quickly identified a number of problems. I had determined the Legion problem. Now we’re back to a team of six and growing quickly, looking to hire probably in the next 60 days, again, upgrading our office space, what we did over the last three and a half years was really create peace.

00;05;37;24 – 00;06;03;26

I mean, we have a Google Drive folder that is dedicated to every single email that we sent, post follow up sales calls, Our sales processes outline perfectly, our proposals, our strategy documents. Everything is now template based so that we can duplicate the same experience for each client over and over again. You know, and then now my role has once again shifted from the marketer to business owner sales.

00;06;03;26 – 00;06;40;11

And now I’m able to focus on maintaining that growth for the business because the team now are rock stars and they’re able to follow these processes that we put in place. MM As hobbies are such an important part of business growth and now you talked about like a role change and there’s probably been multiple roles where you were the freelancer to the solopreneur, to now a team lead and a CEO for somebody that’s maybe listening and either resisting a role change or trying to figure out exactly what that means, because a lot of times there’s a shift.

00;06;40;24 – 00;07;03;01

Mm hmm. What would you say to somebody that might know they need to shift and they need to make some type of shift, but maybe they’re resistant to it. The resistance, in my experience, has always been the I. The term in the office is I’ll just handle it. That can’t be the term right at the end of the day, depending on what the vision is of your agency.

00;07;03;01 – 00;07;22;21

I have a big vision of what we’re looking to create here so that I’ll just do it can’t be that I need to be doing the things to make sure that my employees are getting paychecks. We’re growing all of these vital parts of the business now, building the relationships. It really comes down to what it is that you want to do.

00;07;22;22 – 00;07;46;19

Right. So my passion is shifted from marketing, which still is, of course, but to growing the business and client retention. So that’s now my passion. Before it was trying to analyze Facebook ads Manager to determine the Click to Regions KPIs of different campaigns. Now I have this bigger for growth in the business to see what can we create with this.

00;07;47;20 – 00;08;06;15

You know, and that’s that hard pill to swallow sometimes. Maybe that it’s not a pivot and you just focus on Google ads and you build up some shops and then you hire Google ads assistant and you can do it that way. I think it would really just become like, what is your idea of what you want your business to come to or grow into?

00;08;07;01 – 00;08;33;23

Mm hmm. And so far on the conversation, you have given a lot of different kind of like nuggets of wisdom. Now, if you were to go back to maybe either your future or past self and you’re to say like, hey, turn left, or like, whatever kind of advice that you’d give to either shortcut time, energy or money. What would you say to somebody that might be one or two steps before you?

00;08;34;11 – 00;09;02;16

It’s like the cliche. Everyone says niche down. I kind of do. There was I would say, niche down and potentially a service, right? So in the beginning of Bluewater Marketing, it was like logo design websites, Google ads. I was doing it all. I could do it. But quickly, once the team came in, realizing that like I didn’t have those processes in place.

00;09;02;16 – 00;09;34;21

So trying to duplicate how I do things was extremely challenging. And then now from the growth side, like we actually are launching a new agency or we already have very, very specific to a certain home service niche. The leads are qualified, they’re coming in fast, The process is duplicate. We were able to duplicate very easily. But it’s for me as like the crazy marketing business owner, entrepreneur.

00;09;34;21 – 00;10;09;24

It’s not that fun. I enjoy ecommerce brands, consumer goods, direct to consumer, that type. So we were breaking the business into two divisions. One will be that repeatable, very dedicated. These are the two services, this is who we work with. And then the Bluewater brand will continue to be that direct to consumer e-commerce. But again, like Native, if you’re looking for more efficient, effective growth, niching down like I just described would be the answer.

00;10;09;27 – 00;10;28;27

If you were like me, that sounds like the most painful thing ever and I don’t want to work with that one specific industry over and over again. So that’s where I go back to like, what is the vision that you guys, as the listeners have for your agency? And then how can you make that vision as streamlined as possible?

00;10;29;09 – 00;10;57;00

You know, and that’s where I said going back to those shops were just like really priority. And now when we start new things like we did this year began really going heavier into influencer marketing for our clients. We’re writing it down as we’re doing it. So now that process is even a process in creating the S0 piece. And so that’s what I found too, just and we just brought on a project manager who’s going to follow those as opposed and integrating project management tools.

00;10;57;10 – 00;11;23;04

And so really it’s the streamlining. Once you have that team. Mm hmm. That’s awesome. So what is success for you over the next 1 to 3 years? What are you excited about? What are you working on right now? I know you just talked about launching a new agency, but you know what? What are you excited about? Yeah. So right now, my excitement is my team rock stars growing that team of rock stars, Right?

00;11;23;04 – 00;11;52;15

So like the hiring process, we all know it can be extremely challenging. The so that’s the one side of it. We’re working with some amazing e-comm brands right now that are fun, exciting the content we’re putting out is just awesome. So those two things, we’re looking for new office space to continue to grow. Three years, man. Really looking to, you know, quadruple in size.

00;11;52;21 – 00;12;11;22

Hopefully in the next three years, one year a little bit slower because those are shops and we want to make sure people are following those. So we’re not looking for that. Like kind of Silicon Valley push of growth. We’re looking for, you know, quality, consistent growth right now. But yeah, three year plan, which we have some big, big things in motion.

00;12;12;08 – 00;12;29;08

Mm hmm. Awesome. And so what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you or do you have any offers for them that they could take advantage of? Yeah. So I do some coaching consulting on the side, not frequent, but you guys can find me on YouTube. I think the link will be in the show notes or the description.

00;12;29;17 – 00;12;53;27

It’s just search my name Chris Morano to check out the website Blue Water Marketing dot com. Instagram. Same thing you can follow me on Instagram at official underscore Chris underscore Murano. Definitely reach out if you have questions you know I’m always part of the YouTube channel is that like this is complicated business owners small business owners don’t always understand this.

00;12;53;28 – 00;13;19;17

There’s a lot of scammy marketing companies. So my YouTube channel is a way that I can give back to people and understand, Just teach. I teach everything we do. You don’t have access to our shops, but I teach the whole process and how we manage ads, Google ads, SEO the content. So make sure to check that out. If you guys are in that infancy level where you’re trying to figure out how to do Google or Facebook, go next.

00;13;20;03 – 00;13;51;05

For everybody that’s listening right now, it will be in the show notes and you can connect with Chris on all the different platforms. And Chris, thank you very much for being on our show today. Yeah. Jesse Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. 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.

00;13;51;12 – 00;14;09;01

Go to niche in controlled dot com slash case study right now. To learn more about leverage for growth, 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.

00;14;09;17 – 00;14;30;04

Go to niche in control dot com slash case study that is niche in control dot com slash case we now.