With more than 30 years of experience working with commercial businesses, it’s safe to say Rob Da Costa knows his way around the marketing game. In 1991, he set up his own marketing, PR and design agency, which he grew into an award-winning business before selling it to become a coach and mentor in 2007.
Since then, he’s been helping business owners grow and achieve organizational success. And he’s also authored The Self-Running Agency for agency owners looking to balance profitability with sustainable growth and some personal free time.
We’re thrilled to have Rob with us today as he shares his journey with us, talks through what it means to sell customers what they want, and more.
Cloudways: Thanks for joining us, Rob! Can you start by telling us a bit about your journey to become an agency coach?
Rob: Back in 1992, I decided to leave my marketing job and start my own tech PR agency (I had naïve youth on my side!).
Over the next 11 years, I grew the agency into a full service marketing agency with 25 staff, turning over about £1.5 million.
I then got approached by a large US firm to buy the agency so sold up and after a two-year earn-out left to retrain to become a coach.
I started out trying to be a generalist coach working, in theory with large corporates or small start-ups but found it very difficult to be successful. So, I decided to niche my business to focus on supporting SME marketing agencies and over the past 14 years have worked with over 250 agency owners to help them grow in a profitable, sustainable and enjoyable way.
Today I do private coaching as well as running an agency group coaching programme.
Source: dacostacoaching
Cloudways: You’ve talked about the difference between selling customers what they want versus what they need. What do agency owners need to understand about this distinction?
Rob: This is a great question!
We often think we know what our clients want so get busy producing a product or service that fulfils this belief and then we launch and it falls flat on its face!
Now this could be because we got it entirely wrong, or because we got the positioning and marketing of the product/service wrong.
This is a question of whether you’re selling ‘vitamin pills’ or ‘painkillers’ to your clients.
A vitamin pill is something that we know would be useful for our client and a painkiller is a product or service that will get rid of one of our client’s current pains. (Imagine if you had a really bad headache, and I try to sell you a vitamin pill that might stop you from getting headaches in the future. Meanwhile someone else is selling you a painkiller. Which of those two are you going to buy?)
We need to make sure we are selling painkillers because whilst the vitamin pill might be useful, our client is focused on solving their top 3 ‘pains’ in their business. That’s where their attention is and that’s when they’re most likely to notice your product or service (if it solves one of their pains).
So many agencies get this wrong – so it’s really important to carry out some customer research to not only make sure that you are developing the right products or services but you’re also getting the marketing and positioning of them correct – so they really hit home with your ideal target customer.
Cloudways: You help agency owners find the balance between delivering exceptional work, finding ideal new clients, and ensuring smooth operations. In a nutshell, what is the secret sauce behind this combo?
Rob: Well first of all if you want to grow a sustainable agency then you have to get the balance between these crucial areas right so there are several things you need to do:
Firstly, make sure you have a balance of time between delivering great client work and focusing on the future of your agency whilst making sure the agency is running smoothly today. That means blocking out time in your diary to work on ‘strategy’, ‘revenue’ and ‘admin’, and not just being stuck on the ‘client service hamster wheel of doom’ with no time to do anything else because that will lead you to lurch from feast to famine.
Secondly, make sure you have a documented roadmap for your agency, so you are in control of where it’s headed. That means having a 12-month vision, broken down into 90-day plans and then monthly plans (I like to call these to-do lists for your agency).
Thirdly, you need to make sure you are delegating as much work as you possibly can, freeing up your time to focus on what you do best. That means in your plan you must articulate exactly who and when you are going to hire.
Cloudways: Your book, The Self-Running Agency, as well as your group of the same name, helps agencies “grow sustainably and profitability whilst not being 100% dependent on you all the time.” A key element of this is growing “a team of responsible ‘adults’ who are accountable and take responsibility.” What would you say agencies have to think differently about in their hiring process to be capable of this?
Rob: Another really important question.
As I previously mentioned you need to have a documented plan so that you know exactly when to hire and who to hire. As you grow you want to make sure you are increasing your capacity to deliver great client work as well as investing in the infrastructure in your agency (so eventually you will want to hire an internal operations person).
Make sure you are hiring the absolute best people you can afford and that means often hiring people that are better than you! Also, you shouldn’t always hire ‘in your like’ because you want to make sure you have a full rounded agency with a full rounded skill set.
Your goal in building your own self-running agency is to make you as redundant as possible which as I said it means hiring people that can do things you can’t do or can do things better than you.
To ensure your team takes responsibility and are accountable you need to have clearly defined roles and responsibilities and set time-bound objectives. This way each of your team members knows what ‘good’ looks like in their role and knows where they need to be focusing their time and energy.
Source: dacostacoaching
Cloudways: Which key areas an agency owner should focus on in order to run (and most importantly grow) an agency that is not 100% dependent on the owner?
Rob: There are three areas that any agency owner needs to focus on if they want to build an agency that gives them flexibility and freedom without losing control:
Planning
Document a clear vision – I recommend 5-years, 1-year, 90-days and 30-days. Dedicate time every month to deliver that vision and delegate actions in the 30- and 90-day plan to other team members.
This gives you and your team a clear roadmap of where you’re headed and makes sure everyone is aligned and focused in the same direction.
Business development
If you don’t have a consistent pipeline of ideal new target customers coming into your agency then you are going to lurch from feast to famine and that is very stressful and a massive roadblock to growth.
So no matter how busy you get delivering client work, you always need to allocate time every week to work on your marketing, sales and client retention & growth.
Team
You can’t be superman or superwoman when running your agency so the only way to make it less dependent on you is to build a robust team and delegate down as much work as possible. If you have a clear plan then you will know exactly what the metrics need to look like to trigger that next hire.
Cloudways: As much as agencies focus on growing their operations, there are times when they need to downsize instead. What are the factors agencies need to consider before making such a decision, and what advice do you have for any trying to “strategically downsize”?
Rob: Well first of all without sounding like a scratched record, you need to have a plan and you need to make that plan dynamic so that it reflects what you know today that you didn’t know yesterday when you created it.
You need to make sure that your agency isn’t bloated and doesn’t retain inefficient team members or unprofitable clients.
I’ve seen times where an agency has got really clear on its niche and that has warranted them downsizing – getting rid of clients that don’t fit in their niche to grow faster and more profitably.
Also make sure that you don’t tolerate ineffectual team members for too long. Think about your agency as having a number of ‘seats’ in the office and each team member needs to earn the right to sit in a seat.
Remember that there is no right or wrong way about your agency’s evolution. The key is to decide whether you want to grow your agency (in terms of team members and revenues) or whether you want to build a lifestyle agency and focus on maximising profits and margins.
It’s important that you understand WHY you exist and WHAT you want to achieve rather than what you think you should do or comparing yourself to the competition!
Cloudways: Too many agency owners rely almost entirely on referrals instead of actively prospecting. What kinds of processes and systems should agencies develop for sustainable stable cash flow?
Rob: Yes this is so true, and perhaps the number one reason why clients approach me to help them.
If an agency gets busy or complacent because they get most of their new business via referrals then they are never going to have any kind of controlled or sustainable growth. Instead, you need to put a proactive marketing strategy in place to build a pipeline of leads that you can convert into prospects and clients.
Perhaps the number one activity every agency should be investing in is building and nurturing their email list because you need to make sure you have a way of staying front of mind for your target customer, so when they have a need for your product or service they will always think of you. One of the best and most cost effective ways of achieving this is by nurturing them in your email list.
My recommendation is to implement a few marketing strategies that you can do consistently because most robust strategies will deliver in the medium to long-term not in the short term. You don’t need to make sure you have a good CRM system that captures your customer information, and you are following up prospects in a timely manner.
I also believe that the agency owner is best placed to do a lot of the business development. I’ve heard so many horror stories of agencies outsourcing their business development to expensive consultants or specialist biz dev agencies and it very rarely delivers.
Also, so you don’t waste lots of time having prospect meetings with badly qualified leads, you need to have a really strong filtering process in place to ensure that you are investing your most valuable asset, your time, with hot prospects rather than fact-finding time wasters!
Cloudways: You’re a vocal advocate of video marketing. In your experience, are clients sometimes hesitant to get into video production? What tips do you have for brands or agencies to kickstart their video marketing campaigns?
Rob: A picture speaks 1000 words and that’s a good reason to jump on video.
If you think you need to build “know-like and trust” with an ideal target customer before they buy from you then one of the ways you can expedite that is by ‘building a relationship’ with them through your videos.
Video marketing is a great way for them to get to know you and learn with you/you provide value before they start 1-2-1 engagement.
All you really need to start producing videos is a phone camera, a decent mic and some decent and some good lighting.
Don’t let the tech get in your way and stop you.
Also don’t let your vanity or ego get in the way!! You may not like the way you look on camera but that is irrelevant because it’s how your client perceives you that’s important.
And then consider what you’re trying to achieve through your videos and that will dictate the format of them and the topics you are trying you’re going to cover. Remember that these videos should be about providing value to your ideal target customer rather than selling your services. Use video testimonials to do the selling for you. As with all your content, focus on 80% providing value and 20% selling. And as I’ve mentioned previously if you’re going to use video then do it consistently and consider all the different channels you can distribute the video i.e. YouTube, your website, via email, social media and so on.
Thank you for your time and insights, Rob!
You can connect with Rob on his LinkedIn and Twitter, or find him on his website.
