Helping Agency Owners Get Unstuck and Grow Revenue with Tim Kilroy

Tim Kilroy 10:50

no plan, like, I just knew I couldn’t do it another day. And you know, and I was so desperate for help, that I worked with these guys out of desperate, out of need and desperation, but and so I actually ended up making it bad deal with them. And so their compensation was outsized to the value that they were bringing in. So So I took myself out of the frying pan and put myself into the fire. Except, and so I, so I eventually just shut it down. Well, just couldn’t do it anymore. And I must say, the drives in this was the back back in the days when people actually met in person and stuff. Mm hm. And so I remember we met at this at this hotel lobby in Burlington, Massachusetts. And the 15 minute drive home from there was one of the happiest I’ve ever had, because he just felt a sense of relief. Yeah, even though like there was nothing to be relieved about because they had all these, you know, these depths de andolan, I had to take care of letting employees go. And I had to take care of winding down customers and all that sort of stuff. But like the it, it was finally done. Yeah. And I could take a breath. And then and then I realized, when I got a job a few weeks later, as it turns out, I’m just a terrible employee. Like my, my entrepreneurial stint, fundamentally ruined me, as an employee,

John Corcoran 12:39

how long did it take you to realize that? And did you have like a realization like, Oh, crap, what am I going to do? Now? I’m in a job, and I need to quit it, or what was that? Like?

Tim Kilroy 12:52

Well, it took a couple of weeks. I mean, I was already carrying, like, the sense of failure, because this business that I built that was reasonably successful, like, I had to shut it down because I was broken. You know, I just could not handle anymore. And, and so even just applying for jobs, I felt like, I felt like a failure. And then when I took a job, I was like, Okay, awesome. At this point, we, we had a kid. And I was just thinking, like, Okay, this is what responsible people do, like, you know, you go get a job, and you do it, and you go home, and it’s all good and good. Doesn’t matter if you like it or not, you just bring home the paycheck, because that’s what your wife and baby need. And, and so that’s what I did for a while. And then I realized, you know, as you know, people talk about the Sunday scaries. Now, you know, like on Sundays, they don’t want to go back to work. Oh, yeah. Well, I had Skerries on Sunday, and Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday.

John Corcoran 13:58

Law does while you’re an employee. Yeah. Yeah. So you just knew just for miserable

Tim Kilroy 14:03

Montana. Yeah. And so then, so then I thought, well, this, like, that’s not the right, like, and so I thought it was the job. And then I got another job. And the same thing happened. And so I had two jobs in a very short period of time. Both were terrible. And then all of a sudden was like, Well, screw it. Now. I’m just a consultant. You know, I don’t need to, I don’t need to scale. I don’t need to get really big. But, you know, I’ve got really good skills, and I’m just happier doing it on my own.

John Corcoran 14:31

When you went to that, did you still have this feeling of like, failure or an inadequacy because you shut down one business, then gotten one job, then a second job, three kind of, you know, things in a row that didn’t go so well. And then you start consulting sometimes that would go to people’s head.

Tim Kilroy 14:50

Well, at that same time, I also was diagnosed with ADHD. So here I am in my 30s Figuring out that there’s a reason why I suck at all the stuff that yeah, there are people that I think are smart are really good at. And there’s a reason why Mrs. Moniece, my fifth grade teacher would, you know, would say that my desk was disgusting. And she would pick it up and dump it out all over the floor in front of the entire classroom, like so. So like, suddenly, my, my life made sense. And I just thought, like, okay, so this is, this is who I am, there’s, you know, so this is why I’ve never really been happy working in a job. So being a consultant makes sense. And I was, you know, I was able to learn or to remember enough of the bad lessons from, from my first agency, the Kilroy group to realize like, Oh, hey, cool. So, like, I need to charge what I’m worth, I need to make sure that the bills get paid. You know, I need to say no to things. You know, I need to focus on the things that I know I can do, rather than the things that I think I can do. Because I think I can do everything. You know, like, you know, give me YouTube, a butter knife and an appendix. I’m, you know, I’m sure I could figure it out.

John Corcoran 16:28

Goodbye. ruptured spleen.

Tim Kilroy 16:32

Yeah. Like, it’s planes. Like, I don’t think you need those. So it’s not a big deal. Yeah, exactly. Right. butterknife will take care. But yeah, so there’s stuff that I think that I can do, you know, I can, like, I’m smart enough to be able to imagine it. But you know, what, the, the, it’s all about the execution. And so, this happened a lot in my first agency, I could see how to connect things, like I could see, like, you know, I could see how if you took our little, or, you know, our little window painting, exercise, and you connected it with a, with a mailer? And, you know, and then, you know, you did the same thing at Christmas time, you know, with lights on it, that you’d get sort of thing happening, right? Like, right, you know, I could see that stuff. But I didn’t have all the requisite skills to be able to organize all that stuff execute on it. So and also, part of part of, for me anyway, as part of ADHD, is the ideas in my head are so crystal clear and beautiful. And they’re pristine and electric. And, but it’s really hard for me to express some of those. Because those ideas are inextricably tied to my own experience. So in my head, like, Oh, we’re going to do something which is exactly like that thing that I did when I was 12. And I remember how that worked out. And I can see how those two things connect. And then I take that thing, and it connects to something over here that I heard about one time. And then there was this book, I read, like three weeks ago, that was really good. And so all those things come together and make this and all of that stuff is happening in real time in my head at incredible velocity. And I can’t explain, I couldn’t explain all of that stuff to other people.

John Corcoran 18:37

Which makes it hard to manage people implementing Yeah,

Tim Kilroy 18:40

and so and so I was I was so and this is this is something that I I warn my my agency owners about all the time, the five words that will kill your business faster than any other. Nevermind, I’ll do it. Yeah, and I was the king of nevermind, I’ll do it because I didn’t have the skill set to be able to explain myself to other people. It’s, it’s a challenge.

John Corcoran 19:15

So all this leads me to the next logical question, which is how the heck did you end up founding another agency? Not that much longer later. So four years later, spin shark,

Tim Kilroy 19:27

you know, glutton for punishment. Oh, no. So, a, a client, somebody that I met through one of my consulting engagements to, like, terrific guy really, really, really liked him. And he was selling he had his business. He had a family business and his and his family was selling it. And so he said, like, Hey, listen Awesome, like, we’re gonna sell our business in about six weeks. And as soon as the dust settled, like, like, we should do something together. Okay. And so I was like, All right. All right, that that sounds okay. Like, I really liked this guy. He had been, you know, he and his family had been very successful. And he said, So, and he’s got this idea where he was going to make a like a WOOT killer. Do you remember Woot, which is now owned by Amazon? So it was a website, right? Like, and they used to sell. And they were a product distributor. And they sold like the leftovers. Yeah, flash sale type of thing. Yeah. Like, my favorite thing of theirs was the WOOT bag of crap. So it’d be like seven bucks, and they just, like throw stuff in a bag, and you’d get what you get. Yeah. But my partner had tons and tons of experience buying products from China. And so we were going to, you know, we were going to build this this route killer. And so so because he was gonna do all the source and do all the marketing, it was gonna be beautiful. And then, and then, honestly, he his, he and his wife, were getting a divorce. And so that messed up him funding things. And so we thought, well, we’ve got this thing that’s, you know, that’s happened, that’s working, and it’s happening. And so we bought, we get funded some way. So I knew a lot about search engine marketing and search engine optimization. So we went out and sold an SEO thing. Got it.

John Corcoran 21:33

And you must have impeccable timing, because the first one was after 911 and the.com. Meltdown. And the second one was around 2008. Right after the real estate meltdown. Yes. Yeah. What What are your some of your thoughts on especially, we’re recording this at the end of 2022. And the last six months, the the NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange, all the markets have been down. People are talking about this being a recession, what are your thoughts on building a business in a downturn?

Tim Kilroy 22:06

I would say that it’s, it’s actually it’s, it is the hardest time to build a business. But it will help you make a business that’s hard to kill. Because if you if there’s consistent uncertainty, you have to temper your vision with pragmatism. And so not that you’re not going to take big bets, because just the act of starting a company or deciding to grow a company, those are really big bets. You just have to do it. With the understanding that there, there isn’t a soft landing. So you really do have to you have to step incrementally towards your plan. And unlike, unlike so many businesses that that I worked with, you know, sort of in the just, you know, the, the pre pandemic years and the pandemic years when, when agencies were growing like crazy. If you’re grow if you start during a downtime, you don’t have any expectations that you’re gonna go from zero to, you know, exiting your business in a year, you know, like, you’re the none of this, like zero to seven figures in 90 days, like that stuff was. I mean, it’s never been true. But it’s especially not true during hard times. So you build things more robustly? Because you have to because there is there isn’t there is no there’s no rising tide to lift you up.

John Corcoran 24:03

Yeah, yeah. Now that that company has been shark you ended up selling it only about a year and a half into it. What are your reflections on selling that early?

Tim Kilroy 24:17

So, you know, in retrospect, I wouldn’t have done that. You know, if I were able to think about it from the outside at that point, but you know, we we did it because it was it was what was best for the business. You know, my business partner needed to get out. And we were also a really great strategic fit for a for a business called pm digital at the time, which is now assembly general or something. You know, and we were just a terrific strategic fit there. And I did not and I didn’t really reflect on my on my thinking that, you know that I was a terrible employee, because I was assuming I was going to be able to be really entrepreneurial inside of that, inside of that business. And I was to an extent. But the, what I didn’t understand at the time, is when you are, when you’re sort of the like, the last piece of the puzzle, you know, when you complete the picture, when you complete somebody else’s picture, like you are now servicing their vision, sure. Yeah. Right. Like, it’s not your thing anymore. You know, it is hard to sort of, to go from the the visionary in your business to the to an integrator for your own business. And I think I certainly could have, I sort of certainly could have managed that better. That’s a common

John Corcoran 26:01

thing, though, right? People sell their business, and then they’re challenged by having to work within the business that acquired absolutely hear that all the time. Right. Yeah.

Tim Kilroy 26:09

And I think I wished I had just been, again, you know, more vocal about it. Because again, I thought this was like something people just knew how

John Corcoran 26:20

to do. Yeah. Now, before that, while you’re growing it spin shark in the year and a half before it became acquired, how did you approach that difference being differently compared to the previous time being mindful that the first time you stretched yourself that you needed to shut it down?

Tim Kilroy 26:42

I hired people not to help me. But rather to do stuff they were great at. And, and also, I, I learned very, you know, it’s something that I realized, as I was thinking about thinking about starting the second thing was, it wasn’t my job, to create happy customers. Because that’s really what I was, like, I was involved in every opportunity at the Kilroy group, because I thought I have to make these people happy. Like, you know, but then I realized that the best way for me to make the clients happy, was to bring really good people to the task at hand. Because as I reflected and understood my, the my ADHD, like, I knew that I couldn’t handle all the stuff that we were going to sell, I just didn’t have, I didn’t have the internal resources to deliver the clients what they needed, or what they deserved. And so I thought, well, I better hire people who know how to do this. And I can tell them the way that I think about it, and give them my little, you know, my little sort of intuitive take on these things. But I should let them do it, because they’re better at that part of it, than I am. And what I’m really good at, is understanding opportunity, and then connecting stuff that maybe my team doesn’t, you know, they don’t see the connections between these things. Like, like, you know, showing that, you know, the results you’re getting are tied back to the very first thing the client told you that they wanted to solve, like, that has always made sense to me. But, you know, certainly in digital marketing, people are often like, they’re focused on numbers that are easy for them to understand, or for them to measure, rather than doing the work to connect it to a significant business initiative.

John Corcoran 28:55

So it also sounds like having that awareness that you had ADHD the second time around was a bit of a game changer. Absolutely.

Tim Kilroy 29:05

Yeah. And taking you know, taking ADHD medications really mad it changed a lot of things.

John Corcoran 29:13

Yeah. What other treatments have you if any, are counseling or training counseling

Tim Kilroy 29:19

pm digital hire, right so later to nudity hired a coach, someone who has specialized in specialized in ADHD. And, and I realized, quite honestly, what, you know, the, the thing, the thing that I’ve learned is that whatever system I create for something, I’m gonna have to change it, because it’s going to work for good work for a month. For a year, and at some point, whatever strategy I put in place will stop working. And so I get to test, I get to treat my, my productivity, my output, and, you know, as a, as a laboratory, because like I like, I know that everything that I try is only temporary. And so, and I’ve actually been able to take that thing that I learned about working with my brain, and I’ve been able to help my clients understand that there are very, very, very few decisions that they have to make that are like, permanent, you know, and so every, almost every decision you make, as, as a leader in a in a service business has written, you know, after it in invisible ink coma for now. Because you can change it. And so, so many business owners, owners get paralyzed, because they’re afraid to make a mistake, they’re afraid to make the wrong decision. But something that I have learned is, those decisions are temporary. And if there’s new information, or a new circumstance, you can make a different decision about the same thing. So you know, for instance, you might think we need to go all in on ads to grow our agency. And then CPMs get too high. And instead of like, investing tons of resources, trying to optimize your ads, like it’s okay to rethink that and say, You know what, maybe right now, agency partnerships, is the right way to go. And if agency partnerships sort of peters out, maybe it’s time to really make systematic referrals work. And then maybe again, it’s time to try ads, but maybe in a different way. And so, so the understanding that there is no right decision, there are only decisions that get you closer or further away from your goals. If you make a decision that brings you move that pulls you away from your goal, well, awesome, you just have to make a decision to reverse that. And, and I really do think that understanding that, that any structure that I put in place to help keep myself on task, it’s going to be temporary, because something about my brain is going to change or something, you know, there’s something that I didn’t account for in the structure that I made it so it’s gonna have to be adapted, and there’s nothing static any time. That has allowed me to help my clients, make this make better decisions more quickly. And then also have the flexibility to know that changing a decision or changing your mind isn’t a sign that you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s a sign that you’re actually hyper aware of your circumstances.

John Corcoran 33:22

Now, I want to ask you, I know you spend about 75% of your time coaching other agency owners 25% of your time actually doing the same type of work. So you actually own an agency now. But how did you get into, you know, actually coaching other agency owners because hearing your background, the stories about the for at least the first agency that you had, that didn’t have the makings of someone who’s like, I want to go and help others do this thing?

Tim Kilroy 33:49

Yeah. So So later after, after I left pm digital, and had to go client side for a while, and I made another agency and then we we ended up at two nudity. And I knew at Genuity like this wasn’t like I wasn’t going to stay there for a long time, because I just knew that about myself. So after I left to annuity, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, to be honest. And I was doing a bunch of consulting for some SAS companies and for for some e commerce companies, and that was really fun. But it wasn’t terribly satisfying. Because, you know, I was working with these companies were Yeah, I could make them I could help them make a big bunch more money. But they were already big companies in the first place. And like it wasn’t, yeah, it was just wasn’t very satisfying. And a friend of mine, whom I’d known from way back from my spin shark days, said, You know, we were talking and she said that she was you know, her revenue had been stuck for quite a while. Five years, in fact, you know, she was at like, almost a million bucks. And then five years later, she was still almost at a million bucks. And she was really frustrated. And I said, Well, you know what? Let’s, why don’t we just, you know, we’ll just, we’ll just try this out. Like, I’m just I’ll coach you, I’m not going to charge anything. coach you and we’ll see what, see what happens. And as soon as I started coaching her, like, the sun came out, and there were rainbows and the bunnies came out to play and bird. And I thought, like, holy over her book. Yeah, for me, I was like, wow, this is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing

John Corcoran 35:39

more meaningful than helping an already wealthy company make more.

Tim Kilroy 35:44

Because obviously, like, I was able to share my experience and think about her problems, and provide some solutions. And she was able to implement them. And it made a difference. And she’s very coachable. I imagined to Yeah, and I just felt like, wow, that is awesome. And, and, you know, if I were in a position to be able to coach for free, I would. But I’ll tell you, the thing that brings me the like, the most satisfaction in my coaching business is, is just switching around to words. Switching around, can we do this, too, we can do this. And when I see my clients make that switch, like that’s, that’s the thing that I know. And that’s what I need out of this relationship is when I can help someone suddenly, like step into their own shoes, so to speak.

John Corcoran 36:49

Yeah. We’re almost out of time. And and I love asking this question. So I’m going to ask, Who are you grateful to? And when I asked that, sometimes people mentioned their family, or they mentioned their team. And that’s not really who I’m getting at. Usually, what I’m looking for is more like, who are the mentors? Who are the peers? Who are the contemporaries, who are the business partners, who are the people that you would just shout out publicly thank them for being there for you along the way.

Tim Kilroy 37:20

So, so there have been friends and family obviously, the fact that my wife has stayed married to me for this long, outrageous must be something wrong with that woman. But, you know, my, my first, my first one on one coaching client was really remarkable guy called Bostjan Belingar. He runs a company called Hustler Marketing. They’re a great retention marketing agency. He was just so receptive and coachable that when I started helping him, they made leaps and bounds like huge, huge leaps in a very short period of time. And he was just so helpful in making referrals and giving feedback. That and and allowing the consulting to go beyond tactical and beyond strategic to personal. Which, you know, is just so rewarding for me. And the fact that he was just he was just a referral machine. You know, I don’t know that I could have gotten my business off the ground without his without his proselytizing as well. He’s just an extraordinary guy. He’s the the only person I’ve ever met. That has a has a therapist for his business as a therapist for his business. Yeah. Interesting.

John Corcoran 39:11

Tim, this has been great. The Kilroy Report is the podcast. And where else can people go to connect with you and learn more about you?

Tim Kilroy 39:18

Timkilroy.com is the best place and also on LinkedIn and Facebook and all that sort of stuff.

John Corcoran 39:26

Great, Tim. Thanks so much. Thank you.

Chad Franzen 39:31

Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.