00;00;00;00 – 00;00;27;09
Hey, everybody, this is Jesse Gilmore, agency transformation coach and founder of Niche and Control, author of the Agency Owners Guide to Freedom and the creator of leverage for growth. I’m the host of the leverage for growth podcast, and I know that in order for you to scale your agency successfully, there are multiple shifts that need to happen within your mindset, skill set, and leadership style.
00;00;27;11 – 00;00;51;21
I am 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 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 at niche and control economy assets.
00;00;51;23 – 00;01;17;03
That is niche in control. Dot com slash KSAT. You’re now listening to leverage for growth. Paper money is a Jesse Gilmore, founder of Niche and Control and creator of leverage for growth. Welcome to the agency Leverage Edition. Today I’m here with Tudor Dimitrescu, founder of Tanda Digital, a business development agency for B2B agencies looking for sustainable growth through outbound systems on LinkedIn and cold email.
00;01;17;06 – 00;01;38;09
Thanks for coming to our show today, Tudor. Jesse, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. Yeah, absolutely. Can you tell us a little bit about the history and background of your agency? For sure. So, I mean, I’ve been in this space for the past 13 years. Really? I got my phone start for the first time, basically as a direct response copywriter.
00;01;38;11 – 00;02;03;16
And from there, I started my first agency, which was basically building sales funnels in, mostly with direct response clients in the finance industry. Also health and wellness stuff like supplements and so on. So that was my first agency. And while growing that I grew really good at actually using outbound to get clients and to connect with clients and to build relationships with them.
00;02;03;19 – 00;02;24;29
And what happened is that I noticed ad basically founders, other agency founders I was networking with didn’t really have the same sort of skill set, and they were really good when it came to getting clients from referrals and from their network, but they didn’t really know how to actually be able to expand beyond that. So many of them were stuck.
00;02;25;02 – 00;02;43;21
And that’s really when I first got the idea that it would be really useful to take the skill set that I’ve developed in terms of scaling my own agency to other people. And that’s sort of how the digital was born. And ever since then, we’ve worked with 150 plus agencies to date. We’ve helped a few scaled to seven figures.
00;02;43;23 – 00;03;10;03
We’ve done really well. And I mean, with agencies across the spectrum in web design, graphic design, branding, marketing, advertising, PR so basically the whole spectrum of digital services that are being sold online. So yeah, hopefully that gives you a bit of background about myself and the company as well. It’s very cool.
00;03;10;05 – 00;03;33;18
So you started an agency, got into it through copywriter, led towards, understanding, a certain skill that other people didn’t have then that led towards a second agency. So that’s really, really cool. How long a standard digital. Been in existence so far. So under this model, initially, when I first started on the digital, it was under a consulting model.
00;03;33;24 – 00;03;58;00
So much like you work, for example, with clients nowadays under a consulting model, that’s sort of what we did as well initially. So that started in like 2022 and in 2023. At the start, we switched from a consulting model to a done for use service model. And that’s really when we exploded in terms of growth, because with the consulting model, it was sort of hard to scale because it cost a lot.
00;03;58;00 – 00;04;32;20
And I used to work one on one with founders, so it also consumed a lot of time. So when we switched to a service model, we could lower the prices in terms of what people would be paying per month. And that’s really when we had a huge explosion in terms of the clients that we were acquiring and we started to acquire, I think the first month we launched it in February of 2023, we acquired eight new clients, and it kept growing up until we got to 24 new clients acquired in a single month, which for most agencies is a crazy, crazy result.
00;04;32;22 – 00;04;59;00
Almost. Unbelievable. That was in June of 2023. And from there, really, the expansion continued. And for most of 2024, we’ve spent the time refining our team structure, implementing SOPs and processes and systems to actually be able to handle that volume of clients and still deliver terrific results. Initially we were doing outbound just through LinkedIn.
00;04;59;01 – 00;05;23;15
We’ve expanded since then. In 2024 to cold email as well. I mean, we were doing it for ourselves, right? But we didn’t have the team capacity before to do it for clients. So we’ve, nailed all those things together now. And basically our journey has in 2024, focused on the team structure and actually growing it so that we can have the foundation ready for further growth.
00;05;23;17 – 00;05;44;21
Now we have that in place. So we’ve unleashed, so to speak, the next wave of growth. Awesome, man. Yeah. It’s cool. The natural progression of, focusing on, more clients and then all of a sudden you’re like, oh, crap, I gotta make sure processes are good. And then from there, then it’s like, okay, team training and structure and, the set up.
00;05;44;24 – 00;06;10;12
And I know that, there’s a decent amount of people, agency owners that are listening to this where they can either relate based around like the influx of clients and kind of trying to figure out the systems piece. Is there any, like, advice you’d have for them that maybe, maybe they have tapped into growth outside of referrals and they’re starting to get more or referrals come in all of a sudden and they’re realizing they need some systems.
00;06;10;14 – 00;06;30;26
Yeah. Do you have any advice for people regarding systems? I would say that the first thing is that you have to prepare the growth engines that are required to be able to sustain your growth, because that’s the biggest thing. Most agencies don’t have that and they’re stuck between feast and famine cycles. They get a lot of work at one point.
00;06;30;26 – 00;06;51;12
And they’re like you know, how do I now build a systems to handle this? But then even if they succeed, then they find that they have little work and then they’re doing nothing with the system. Right. So it sort of rusts. They don’t get used to properly running it properly training people and actually operating the system. And it sort of fizzles out, fizzles out from there.
00;06;51;14 – 00;07;18;10
And I’ve seen this happen with a lot of agencies, over time, even people that grew very big, you know, quick period of time, because of, you know, whatever their circumstances were, if they didn’t have the systems to sustain that growth, they ended up having a fall at some point. So I think that’s the first thing you have to get really good at perfecting a system that’s both predictable and can get you continue as growth even when you are fully booked.
00;07;18;10 – 00;07;49;04
Your marketing should basically never stop. Outbound is fortunately very good at that because you get to decide who are your best clients, those that you most want to work with. You can go directly after them. You can penetrate you market, you have control over you, right? And nobody can actually, control it or you’re not waiting basically passively, as you would view with inbound or your network in terms of deals coming to you, you can go out there and you can actually get the deals that, you need to actually continue your growth.
00;07;49;06 – 00;08;13;06
So that’s the first thing. Once that’s in place, then you have to actually work in terms of figuring out what’s the process of actually delivering the work that you do for your clients. The better you can codify that, the easier it’s going to be to actually train other people to be able to replicate that process and obviously take you out of it so that you can be focused on the bigger aspect of actually scaling and growing the agency.
00;08;13;09 – 00;08;43;00
So both the sales part and the fulfillment part are important, and you actually need to have systems for both of them. Obviously, if you are to work with a provider like us, we provide the systems when it comes to the outbound and the growth, but you would still need to focus on the systems that are internal to your agency because those are going to be key in terms of obviously accommodating the growth and being able to sustain it over the long, a longer timeframe.
00;08;43;02 – 00;09;15;28
And I know, for some outbound like a little bit like people are nervous about it because the majority of people will say no. Yeah. And that you reach out to you and most likely people that are listening have tried outbound before and for some reason it didn’t work right. What are some of those things that like either people do outbound wrong and are kind of like, yeah, I mean, like in the market, there’s a bunch of people saying like, outbound is the way to go, but their methods or the way that people approach it might be off.
00;09;16;01 – 00;09;37;24
Have you seen any of those. So, so for sure Jesse. So I would say that first of all it’s not true that you get a lot of rejection on outbound. I mean that can happen, but it’s not necessarily the case. So I’ll give you an example. My latest post on LinkedIn, which I just posted today, in fact, is a campaign that we ran for ourselves, 85 lead in the campaign.
00;09;37;26 – 00;10;00;20
Out of those 85, we already booked five meetings, from just 85 people contacted and we had a positive reply rate of 78%. Right. So those are very good numbers. You would not say that the majority there for sure were negative. And even those who are negative were just like not interested. They didn’t get aggressive in any way, shape or form.
00;10;00;23 – 00;10;23;11
Now, the reason why a lot of outbound gets a bad name is because in order to be able to do it in such a way that you’re not going to get that massive rejection, it’s going to take a lot of manual work, right? And you need a multi-disciplinary team to actually do it for you. So that’s what we provide for clients, because when they work with us, they basically get five people in their business.
00;10;23;11 – 00;10;43;12
So they get a copywriter that’s going to be working on their sequences and their outreach. They get a lead researcher and list builder who’s manually going to be actually putting their lists together. They get an account manager who’s going to be responsible with reporting and identifying where where there’s problems in their funnel. They get myself a sales consultant.
00;10;43;12 – 00;11;08;22
I can work with them in terms of both their sales process and actually looking at the overall angles that are being used. And then they also get if they want an SDR, that we can train to actually handle the conversations and make sure the meetings are booked in their team, on their team. So because there’s so much expertise that’s required, when you ask yourself the question, you know, how can we do outbound for a lot of people?
00;11;08;29 – 00;11;27;06
The answer becomes, you know, we have to drop down the price. And how do we drop down the price? We use automation as much as possible. We scrape existing lists as much as possible and so on. And when you’re going to do that and you’re going to have basically generic outreach, going to sort of just a big niche, you know, not an endpoint.
00;11;27;06 – 00;11;45;00
You can talk about that differentiated sort of interest, you and your audience. When you have that, what basically is going to happen is that people are going to perceive it as spam, right? Because it’s not really going to be relevant for a lot of them. They’re going to know that you didn’t really take your time to look into them.
00;11;45;02 – 00;12;12;09
And for that reason, they’re not going to bother very much to actually pay attention to it. So you’re going to get very low response rates. So for example, on this, this last example that I gave you of our campaign that I posted today on LinkedIn, the screenshot of it, we got a 10.5 something percent, in terms of the response rate, whereas most cold email campaigns that people run get like a 1% response.
00;12;12;09 – 00;12;31;29
And that’s considered good, right? You know, you get 1%, it’s considered good. So, and the reason why those numbers are considered good is it’s just a question of economics, right? If you want to do outbound and you want to do it cheaply, that’s the only way you’re going to do it. So yes, you’re going to get a lot of rejection, a lot of no’s.
00;12;32;01 – 00;12;50;01
Obviously there’s still going to be some yeses there. There’s still some ways that you can do that better, you know, than other ways, where your response rate is going to be, let’s say 1.5 instead of 1%. But the big differences are going to come if you’re actually able to invest properly into it. Right. That’s what’s going to make a big difference.
00;12;50;01 – 00;13;14;16
And many agencies just can’t do that. So then the alternative becomes, you know, either do nothing or do out in a way that’s more automated part and obviously lower in terms of response rates. More people, more rejection involved in the process, but it’s still going to enable you to get an influx of clients and grow the business, obviously not as effectively as if you had more budget to actually do it.
00;13;14;18 – 00;13;52;17
Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. And what actually, this reminds me of, I interviewed, Joey Gilkey on the podcast twice, and he does outbound as well. And, and, he kept on saying the list is everything losses, everything losses, everything. Is that over time and, that it was actually the strategy. And when you’re looking at that 85 as opposed to like the larger Tam and being able to have more of a manual kind of process and actual conversation with them, it produces a lot better results, even though there’s a little bit more, you know, personalization or, closeness to it as opposed to completely automated.
00;13;52;20 – 00;14;23;00
And I think, for anybody that’s trying to get into outbound, I think one of the main things is figuring out what is the audience that you’re actually reaching out to. And if you are, focused on, a larger audience, you could increase the Tam and kind of do it more automated. But if you are worried about, either repetition or in doing it to automated, to where people are not connecting as much, it seems like that personalized approach that you’re talking about, seems to have a better response.
00;14;23;03 – 00;14;46;06
I mean, the personalized approach is pretty much always going to have a better response. It’s just about if you can actually do it at volume. That’s what we’re really good at actually doing for people because we can do that at volume for them. Whereas because obviously we insert the talent that they need inside the agency, whereas most people can’t do it by themselves because they lack the expertise, number one.
00;14;46;12 – 00;15;14;22
And even if they had the expertise, they just don’t have the time in the systems required to actually be implement to be able to implement such an approach at scale. So when it comes to that, that’s sort of why it becomes much more advantageous to actually work with a third party provider like us who can become a partner, and take care of basically that SDR level work that you need done for, your agency in terms of leveraging outbound.
00;15;14;25 – 00;15;51;18
Awesome. And you’ve been on quite a journey last few agencies and you got a lot of growth and, and the team development. What are you excited for in the next 1 to 3 years with your agents. I mean I’m really excited about the next wave of growth really. Because as I was telling you, we laid down the foundation pretty much until the, until Q4 right now, in the you know, September, that’s sort of when we really, really we started our own marketing because until then we were mostly relying on existing clients to perfect our processes and obviously also referrals from the, and so on.
00;15;51;21 – 00;16;22;08
So that’s really when we started, we started our own growth engines and we’re on track to hit our marks for this year for sure. And that’s really exciting. I’m really passionate about expanding our team and making sure that we can help a lot more agency owners. We have a mission to help 25,000 agency owners. And, you know, we’re sort of just 150, closer to 160 now, but still very small compared to the impact if we’re looking to have.
00;16;22;08 – 00;16;44;22
So we’re still very much at the start of the journey. And you know, where when you’re still in the early phases, there’s, there’s so much to see ahead of yourself. And I love that. Right? I’m excited and I’m passionate about what’s coming next. Awesome. For anybody that’s listening, what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you or learn more about what you do.
00;16;44;24 – 00;17;13;10
Yeah. So the best way is to go to our website which is standard dot digital. If they go to standard or digital, they, they’re going to be able to find a section there with resources that you can go to. Resources. We have a lot of different resources that can help people. We have, for example, a bootcamp that I’ve done one on one with basically three other agency owners to implement a specific called outreach strategy for their business.
00;17;13;12 – 00;17;35;23
Actually, the exact same strategy that I’ve implemented for myself. I sort of did the workshop with them, and then I was like, okay, I will do the same strategy for myself. So that’s an example. We have two workshops that walk people through our methodologies for growing agencies. There’s a LinkedIn playbook there, how you can leverage LinkedIn to grow in an outbound way.
00;17;35;25 – 00;18;00;22
We have basically over 15 plus different resources there that people can look into about growing their agencies. So that’s probably the first step. Looking at one of those resources in terms of actually working with us, we have basically two ways that people can, initiate contact and work with us. One way is that we give them the knowhow through a video learning platform and through group coaching, so that they can implement themselves.
00;18;00;25 – 00;18;23;08
And we call that the agency ascendancy Group or the ascendancy program. They can find the link in the menu on our website for that. It’s basically a group coaching program with the video training modules that give them everything they need, and they’re going to be implementing themselves. It comes at a relatively affordable monthly cost, just $249 per month.
00;18;23;08 – 00;18;40;19
So pretty much any agency owner out there is going to be able to afford it. It’s a 12 month program, and takes them through the entire process and they can apply it themselves. The other option is obviously we do it for them, and when we do it for them, we have different service options depending on where they’re at.
00;18;40;19 – 00;19;00;25
As an agency, do they want us completely as an external partner? Do they want us to work with an SDR that’s already in their agency? We can do obviously both. And we have service options to accommodate whatever their needs actually are. So usually the way it works is we have a short initial chat, 15 minutes to check if it’s actually a good fit for them, and it makes sense.
00;19;01;02 – 00;19;33;28
So anybody who’s doing, you know, $200,000 or more in yearly revenue and they want to scale to seven figures, or they’re doing low seven figures and they want to start scaling towards mid seven figures or eight figures. The best thing would be to obviously book a chart with us. And I can take them through. I can ask them a couple of questions, learn about their business, see if what we do would actually be a fit for them, and if it is, then we can actually book in a time for, a longer session where we can take them through the details and the service options that we have.
00;19;34;00 – 00;19;54;22
In terms of connecting directly with me, probably the best way is LinkedIn. So the username on LinkedIn is two door. If the, you can probably share a link to that. I don’t know how it works. Exactly. But you can probably share a link to that. And I’m happy to connect with anyone and have a chat on LinkedIn as well.
00;19;54;24 – 00;20;22;09
Sweet. So for anybody that’s, listening, all the links that, Twitter is talking about, I’ll put it into the show. Notes and tutors want to thank you very much for being on the show today. It’s my pleasure. Jesse. 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 start working on the business where you can free up your time, delegate work more effectively, price and position your services to finally get paid for what you’re worth, and have the team run the day to day.
00;20;22;10 – 00;20;40;16
Go to niche and control.com/case study now to learn more about leverage for growth, and also to book a free strategy session with us. We’ll look at your systems, determine exactly what you need to do in order for you to scale this year, and to create a strategic plan so that you can live the life of entrepreneurship you’ve always dreamed about.
00;20;40;19 – 00;21;13;25
Go to niche and control.com/case study. Now.
(Transcripts are auto-generated and may not be 100% accurate)
