Living The Red Life - Using the Just Sell Method™ to Scale Your Agency Fast

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

How do you strike the right balance between selling (and growing) your business – and handling the backend of fulfillment? Rudy reckons that Brittany and Michael of 51 Blocks might just have found the solution!Learn about the incredible Just Sell Method™ and the ‘white label agency in a box’ approach of 51 Blocks that allows you to sell – and for them to do the rest. Everything from onboarding, client management, housekeeping, and more can all be outsourced to 51 Blocks, allowing you to (you guessed it), just sell. If you are looking to scale your digital marketing agency, focus on sales, and not have to worry about managing every aspect of fulfilment, operations, and client relations, then the insight and approach of 51 Blocks will blow you away. As Rudy mentions, he wishes he’d known about them years ago!This is Living The Red Life doing what it does best: bring enormous value to its Wonderland entrepreneurs with an interview that cuts right to the heart of learning to focus on what you do best – and learning to outsource those areas that you struggle with. If you’re looking to scale your agency faster (or even if you’re an influencer looking to leverage your following), this episode is an absolute banger. Please join us. “It really is just as simple as signing up, and getting out there, and selling our products.” ~ Brittany“If you do one thing, you do it really well.” ~ MichaelThe first 1000 to click here and send the promo code from the podcast can claim one of my courses for FREE!  - https://m.me/rudymawerlife In This Episode:Unpacking the unique Just Sell MethodPlacing an emphasis on the client experienceHow does the 51 Blocks pricing work? What services do 51 Blocks offer? How to get started with 51 Blocks if you’re an influencer looking to sellAnd so much more!Connect with Michael and Brittany:51 Blocks - https://www.51blocks.com/Bionic WP - https://www.bionicwp.com/Connect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/rudymawer/Instagram - www.instagram.com/rudymawerlifeFacebook - www.facebook.com/rudymawerlifeTwitter - www.twitter.com/rudymawer

I think there's so many entrepreneurs just like me, where they like marketing, they're good at sales, they're networking, they've got a good Instagram or social presence, and for them to be able to just focus on sell, sell, sell, and then you guys, and know and trust that you guys can handle the fulfillment probably better than they can,

because you've got years of experience, a massive team, processors, and all of that jazz. It is the best of both worlds. My name is Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Living the Red Life podcast. Super excited for today's episode. I've got Michael

and Brittany here remotely. They didn't want to join me in the red office, so we're going to do it on Zoom. But if you're listening in, it won't make a difference. And we are going to dive into one of the coolest opportunities out there. I grew an agency for many years, as many of you know. And it's always a balance between selling,

making money, growing the business, and then actually running the back end of the business and fulfilling. And these guys have the solution. Okay, so I'm super excited, guys. Welcome to the show. Excited to have you here. Thanks for having us. Cool.

So let's dive straight in. The just sell method, right? We'll circle back in a minute, but I know everyone's probably anxious to hear what this method is after I just teased it up. And you basically have solved the biggest pain of agency services, marketing services, which is fulfillment, client fulfillment, right? Half the people don't mind it. Half the people that own agencies or do marketing hate it. And you guys came in and you now offer that. Tell us a bit about that and how that all started. Yeah. I mean, I would say it started back in 2009 when I first started talking about SEO and people didn't even really know what it was. And then as we grew about 2015, I realized that I kind of

suck at sales. So it became a white label solution for people, for agencies, and that was a better fit so that we could focus on fulfillment, things like that. And then in 2017, 2018, Brittany came in and kind of took the reins and ran from there. So that's kind of just a high level of what we kind of did in regards to focusing on fulfillment versus, you know, going out as a direct to retail type of, uh, more of, like you said, like what pain was I probably trying to solve was my own, right? So I stopped selling was, uh, was the idea where we would just do fulfillment for agencies or for other marketers. Right. So I'll add on top of that, we have white labeled an entire agency in a box. So simply put, you just sell, we do the rest. That's kind of our motto. We've taken over everything after cash collected, onboarding, client management, fulfillment, the whole management structure and housekeeping tabs on everything. So it really is as simple as just signing up and getting out there and selling our products. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. It's like I asked myself, where were you guys a few years ago?

Because I literally remember I had the agency. We were doing millions a year. And I loved the marketing. I loved a lot of my clients were close friends, loved working with them. But I also remember traveling the world. And I was traveling the Amalfi Coast in Italy. And I was up till 2 a every day doing calls because the time zone difference with my clients, right? I'm running 30 staff. And you know, I would escape in the

morning when it was like 5am for everyone in America, go do all my tourist stuff in the morning because the time zone difference. And then from like two o'clock till midnight or 1am, maybe even 2am, I was, you know, doing all the fulfillment, the client calls, working with the clients. And I think there's so many entrepreneurs just like me, where they like marketing, they're good at sales, they're networking, they've got a good Instagram or social presence. And for them to be able to just focus on sell, sell, sell, and then you guys, and know and trust that you guys can handle the fulfillment probably better than they can because you've got years of experience a massive team processors and all of that jazz it is the best of both worlds and what sort of results do you find the clients get

when they are able to just focus on sales and you focus on fulfillment yeah so from an agency owner standpoint we've helped um like single entrepreneurs scale seven figure agencies. Yeah, actually, we pulled one in to help coach our other agency partners now. He's been selling our products for years and had a lot of success. And so it's it's incredible what you can do when you just focus on growing the business and getting out of the weeds and leaving that up to us. That's actually where Michael and I have a lot more passion, I would say, to his point, right? We're not salespeople, but we really like to focus on a client experience. We have a really good pulse on how clients are feeling. So we put a lot of emphasis on the client experience as much as the

results for their campaigns. Our job is to be their biggest cheerleader and give your brand a great name, a great reputation, and you're leaning on us to do that. So we put a ton of things in place to really help with that. Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's the best of both worlds, really, because it's that whole law of like focus, right? Like if you can just focus on one thing versus two things you're gonna do it better there's no denying that right so it's like if i can just focus on selling like gosh knows how where my agency would be now right probably have been double or triple the size if all i had to do was travel to events build my social presence build my sales funnel and sell but actually i did very little of that because I was spending all my time

making my clients with a bunch of money, which is why eventually I got out of it and appointed a CEO so I could go back into marketing for myself. And I've done tens of millions since. I'm glad I made that decision. But really, if I had met you guys earlier, I wouldn't have had to, right?

I could have had you guys ruin the show and I could have just been the face of the brand. So I think, you know, this is an amazing opportunity for everyone on the spectrum. Like you have major influencers and marketers that have millions of followers. They could probably spin up a whole new business

and make a million dollars just selling an agency, right? And they probably don't even think of it that way or think about it. So you have the big, you know, the big brands that you can basically build an agency for as almost like business partners, really, right? And then you've obviously got agency owners, just like me, that were trying to grow a brand, trying to grow the agency. And maybe they

outsource some of it. Maybe it's all of it eventually once they see the magic working. And then they can just sell and focus on as the name is, right? And they can just sell and focus on growing the business. And then I think the other big part is everyone wants to go online these days, especially, you know, in the last couple of years, what happened, right? So people start drop shipping, but that's kind of dying and there's always problems. So there's like this whole, like, you're basically drop shipping for agencies, right? It's like, hey, you don't need to manufacture the product anymore. Well, you're doing the same. You know, maybe that should be a headline you test on Facebook ads. But you're basically doing

the same, right? So I just sell a product and then you guys fulfill it just like drop shipping. So there's like that whole new entrepreneur that loves social media and marketing and stuff that you could also help. Yeah. And I think we've taken the guesswork out of creating the product. That was, I think, one of the harder things when you start a digital marketing agency, you have to learn the best practices. You have to learn how to put everything in place. And as we continue growing, we continue expanding our product lines. We continue trying to figure out... And you change it 20 times too right it's like i'm gonna do this and then client complaints oh well i'll do it this way and then it's like it's what you know two years later you changed it 20 times

you've done all that guesswork you've gone through the bs you've gone through the 100 iterations i'm guessing and then it's like this is the sweet spot exactly yeah and every learning experience that michael and i've had over years, we put in a little section for expectations that when you're selling, you're also stating kind of here's the caveats, here's the things you should know. So we're helping to prevent future churn by allowing them to lean on our experience in those situations where we've had to make mistakes, we've had to learn and grow from them. So it's a great way to bypass all of those struggles as you're scaling. Good. Love it. Love it. And what would you say, are you kind of saving some agencies as well, where there's agencies that are closing down

or struggling or losing clients maybe, and you kind of swoop in and then fix everything, take it over, and now they're able to grow again? Or is it more people just start with you when they start a new agency and they never actually see the pain of trying to run the fulfillment side? We definitely have helped solve a lot of problems for agencies. We had an agency that were making about 50K a month and operations were just falling apart. Part of it was that I think they didn't have the people management skills to keep tabs on everything but it's also really hard to dial in systems and processes like it's a special mindset to do something like that especially in a virtual world where you're working with a lot of freelancers you're trying to make sure that

everything's happening in an online way you You're not like in an office. And so we've absolutely stepped in and we just had someone this week who is letting go half of his team and using our team in place because we have much better client facing, you know, practices. We have the ability to be very transparent about the things we're doing. So the coolest part I've always said about our agency is that one, we can help anyone at any stage because of the way we're set up. And two, we can easily kind of put who we want in the seat of who's receiving all of our work and deliverables and communication. So even in a large agency, we're still a great use of the extension of a team versus going out and hiring more people, right? For some, it's more profitable to use us because we pay for all of our tools and systems.

We pay for a lot of the hard work in the business. So, yeah, it's such a cool, like, it's just such a cool solution that we've got. I mean, my software costs were like 15 grand a month, just, you know, it's picky, right? So I'm even thinking about you're saving that. But okay, so let's talk about profits. I've got to ask and people will listen and are oh you know it sounds great but if i'm charging five grand a month for a client am i giving away four grand a month to you guys i'm only making a small bit like how does the pricing work michael yeah usually um you know most people double up double our prices right so

our prices you know wholesale and then you double them. So if you're at 5,000 a month, you would sign up for a $2,500 package, right? The big difference for us and what we always, like I'm very protective of the clients is setting the expectations properly. If those expectations are properly set and they pay five grand, okay, then everything's great. It's just like when somebody sells them a $20,000 website and they're buying a template for $1,000. Yeah. There's a middle ground, right? Yeah, exactly. But usually 100% markup is usually how most people do our pricing. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. Before we go into the rest of this episode,

I'm going to interrupt abruptly and just ask you one big favor. I hope you're getting a ton of value, a ton of knowledge. I hope you're getting some breakthroughs from myself and the guests. And I want one thing in return. What I would love is for you to subscribe and leave a review. The reviews and the subscription grows the podcast. It allows me to bring you even better guests. It allows me to invest even more time and money into this me to bring you even better guests. It allows me to invest even more time and money into this podcast to bring you the latest and greatest, the best entrepreneurs from around the world that are crushing life, crushing their business, and giving you all the tools, the mindset hacks, the knowledge, and the environment you need to be successful. So do me a favor, if you've got any amount of value from today's episode so far, or any previous episode or any of the content I've done, it would mean the world to me if you

hit a five star review, give us your feedback on the show, the episodes and subscribe and download. Plus, if you do that and send me a screenshot on Instagram at Rudy Moore Life, I will send you a bunch of my free training, marketing courses, sales courses worth $499. Yes, $500 worth of courses for a simple 30 second review. It would mean the world to me. Send me that screenshot. I would love for you to leave that review and I would appreciate it very, very much so we can keep growing this show and make it awesome. So let's get back into the episode. I appreciate you guys and let's dive back in yeah and i mean what and if you think about it just real quick if you think about it you have that internal team already

that's kind of more usually 60 is usually that margin or what your cost of goods sold is is usually around yeah my my my staff costs were like 50 and then i have like 15 20 random right and so i was like a 35 profit margin which, which, you know, I was doing three, four, five million a year. So it's still good profit. But, you know, the time was the difference. I think it's the difference too. And I'm unique that like, I'm a creative face of the brand, marketer, speak on stage, and I'm really great at operating and numbers and data. Most people aren't like me, right? Like they suck at one of the two. They're either great at like marketing, being the face of the brand videos, ads, networking, blah, blah, blah. And they have zero, you know, and it's like

they have their old best friend from high school running their business with their wife, you know? And then some people are the opposite of it where they're awesome at the operations, but they don't want to be a CEO and they don't want to travel and they don't want to deal with attorneys and all that. So for most people, especially on that first side where they're great at marketing, branding, getting clients, they love building their own funnels. They love doing sales and high ticket sales then having you guys take care of the rest just lets them get 100% focused on their superpower which every good entrepreneur knows it's like focused on what you're great at and then outsource what you're not great at right or build a team around what you're not so great at and then I guess you guys are that side and that's all you do so you're obviously going to do it

better than someone else yeah so so what are the sort of services say i wanted makes me want to go regrow my agency now because it's just like i could have just sent everything to you so say i'm looking at growing an agency or starting an agency or increasing my current what i'm currently doing as um you know people listening to this uh thinking about you know they have a big following maybe a lot of my listeners have a big following or they do marketing and they've never thought about a done for you element because of all the BS that comes with it. They might go, wait, well, wait, I got, you know, I'm selling this course. I'm selling this 2K. Maybe now I could sell a reoccurring 5K a month and used you guys. Well, what can they sell? Like what sort of services could they offer with you guys well what can they sell like what sort of services could they offer with you guys yeah

so we have pretty much everything under the digital marketing umbrella uh we do seo i would say is like our biggest service we have a lot of lines in here for seo google ads social ads organic social websites and then bionic wp is our hosting sister company um And it's the same type of experience. Michael, maybe you can talk a little bit about that. Yeah. So it's to Rudy's point where if you do one thing, you do it really well. My father-in-law talks about spinning plates at the circus, right? If you're spinning a ton of plates, you see the guy starts dropping plates, right? So what we've done is Brittany now has become the CEO of 51 Blocks and I've moved over to Bionic to grow that because since 2009 to 21, we had about 400 hosting accounts and now Bionic has about 2,700 hosting accounts,

right? So it's pretty rapid growth in regards to really looking for what agencies and marketers or people that want to be a little more hands-off, like we manage everything inside the WordPress or for the website. We even do unlimited edits for like $39 a month type of stuff. Right. So you can not have to be a WordPress expert in that space. And the reason I built that company was because to the pain, I couldn't find anybody to do what I wanted to do. They'd always say, Hey, that's a problem. Go talk to your developer. And those are like curse words at our company. You can't say that, right? So you have to find the problem, point it out or address it. So just to confirm on that side, on the other side of the business, even non-agency owners, if they're hosting a WordPress site right

now, they're probably using Gopress site right now you know they're probably using godaddy or one of these right so you're saying they could switch to you and you would run more than godaddy would run correct we do more than what they do more it's a more high touch like manage the website make sure if ever gets hacked we fix it for free there's a level security all that type of stuff i got hacked i don't know if i've ever told you i got hacked one time at grant cardona's first event okay so this was a long time ago right and not at his it wasn't actually at his event wasn't his fault i was this was back in my fitness days i remember i was in vegas working and i was visiting two friends from the

uk two of my old best friends that were out there for a wedding. And I remember spending all day sat on the strip at a Starbucks because my site had just got hacked, my fitness site. And this was back when I was spending 5, 10, 15 grand a day and it was doing well and it was great. But at the end, I didn't know as much about what I know now and I just had one developer. I wasn't very good and I had a couple other CDs.

And then I flew from Vegas to Miami for Grant's first event. And I remember it's like Tim Grover shouting on stage and I'm there trying to get these Chinese hackers off my website, the background working. And yeah, you never think about, you never think it's going to happen to you, right? It's kind of like getting in a car crash or something or being hit by lightning. And then we realized over time, not only the security side, but then I learned that, you know, if your site's slower than three, four, five seconds, it drastically lowers conversion rate. And if you're listening to this podcast now and you have a website, first thing you should

do after this is go check your speed load. Because if it's probably eight seconds, 10 seconds seconds some of you are way over the 10 seconds you're just losing thousands of sales right half your sales because people bounce so actually having good hosting and then the security that you don't have to worry about all that sort of stuff i think is awesome and obviously it blends super well with an agency because they can then get all their clients on there and white label that and then they don't have to worry about it for their clients so i love that synergy yeah it's really worked well it's helped support both because britney and i believe in the same customer service level so it really works well for both of them great so so last couple of questions i have if i'm about if i'm listening

to this and i want to start digital marketing, right? A lot of people want to get into social media. They want to get into digital marketing. They want to get online, right? Make money online. And they've maybe looked to drop shipping or start in a social media agency. How would you say they start? How do they get going with you maybe? Or figure out what packages and prices they could put together. Talk me through that. Yeah. So I think they could definitely reach out to us. We help coach people in that space too. In a casual sales call, we can sit down and kind of talk through some of those things.

So it's really a matter of identifying, you know, what are you passionate about? And that's like a free call. You'll help map out a business plan almost with them yeah yeah we hop on calls with people who aren't even active partners with us active partners meaning they have clients with us um we help coach them through a lot of that their package setup what what niches we see that are actually performing really well these days there's some guidance in there well you have all that back-end data too right we haven't even touched on that like you can kind of get these,

just like being a warehouse in China that's shipping all this stuff out. They know secretly, oh, we're selling 30,000 of those yellow rubber ducks right now, they're trending, right? You guys are the same. I'm like, hey, these eight agencies are killing it. So that's like obviously super awesome

because you've got all that data. Sorry, keep going, but I thought that's super important. No, it is an important point because we talk to agency owners every single day. We see how they set up their businesses. We see how they set up their packages. We see their pitches. So I will say everybody's a little bit different and unique. And this is where it gets to be really to your point.

Like you're at a creative space, right? You get to be the face of your brand. You get to do all of this. We help guide you based on the data that we have, the support that we have on all the sales scopes and all that kind of stuff. And we'll help you put it together so that you can get out there and confidently pitch. We also join sales calls as people are getting started. So I'm like their operations person. I can help walk someone through what the process looks like. We can do a little strategy on the call. So,

you know, a couple of times a week, I'm usually joining someone else's sales call or their agency so that I can help be a supportive member on their team. So, you know, they're like getting some support, like a COO without the hundred, you know, the six figure salary to kind of thing. Right. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, look, when you start, like I started my agency and you know i did i took some of my fitness staff over but most people are starting with a couple of freelancers on upwork right and they have no clue what to do so to get all that that's super awesome and uh yeah i think you guys are going to just keep growing because it's getting harder and harder and harder to be a marketer to be a social media you know guru right and there's a lot of

kids young people out there they don't know how to run a business really they don't have to figure out all that stuff and it's not that they won't learn right that's experience and they will learn but they don't have to maybe go through that five years of like clients getting upset they're maybe not offering the service as well as they could down the line because they can kind of almost watch what you're doing and learn that side of it, and they do what they're great at, which is just selling, right? I love the name.

I love the name. We don't have any contracts or anything like that, so at some point, I'll even build their website. So just like drop shipping, they could just test it. Hey, let's test it for a few months, a couple of months. That's all of them. Yeah. And we essentially meet with people and go, what is your ultimate goal?

Like what do you do? There's sometimes in my sales calls look more like therapy sessions because I'm actually helping to walk them through what their goals are. But if someone's goal is to just use us at the beginning to see if they really want to take it in-house, we still support that. I think at the end of the day, our job is to help support growth of a business, whether it's going to be with us for the long term or not, that will be determined. But our big job here is to help support anyone who needs help. And I bet you get some that decide to take it in-house and then a few months later they come running back

and say, whoa, my change, my mind. We haven't had that. I mean, we get the same with people, obviously the hires for the marketing and then they take it in-house and then realize that, hey, it's hard to find great people. It's a constant battle. So cool.

Well, just to wrap up, love everything. I think this is so exciting for so many people who can help so many people whether it's you know social media influencers adding an element to what they can offer whether it's agencies growing faster using you guys or whether it's startup entrepreneurs a lot of people that want to live the red life right which is all about making money on the internet controlling your life uh being able to travel and live life on your terms. And this helps do that because they can start a business, partner with you, you get all your team and your experience. So that's why I wanted to have you guys on.

I think it's super synergistic to what we do, obviously. So where do they go if they want to talk to you? They want to book that strategy call and talk about a business idea or an expansion idea or a partnership. Yeah, 51blocks.com or bionicwp.com. You can go right to our websites. Those go right to Michael and I if they fill out our contact form.

Awesome. Yeah, and we'll put the link in the show notes and everything too and when we post this and stuff. So guys, any final words or any words of success or wisdom or advice anyone starting off scaling an agency before we wrap up now i would just say listen to rudy i mean he clarified a lot of stuff for us over uh you know some stuff we worked with him on and it's it's you know it's

uh it's been an amazing journey so that's that'd be my advice so So. Cool. All right, guys, appreciate having you on everyone listening, uh, check these guys out, especially if you've ever been interested in the agency side. I've, uh, I I've for a long time, not like the whole white label idea. We tried it lots of times. It didn't work. And I finally found someone I could trust, um, which was these guys, which is why I had them on and we've, you know, been using them and working with them and it's been awesome and they're experts and professionals. So check them out and keep living the red life until next time, guys. Take care. See you soon.