John Corcoran 11:13
Yeah, yeah. It will be really interesting to see how that affects the lifetime value of those clients. You know, they stick around a lot longer. He: Yeah. I interviewed him on the podcast. He had some other great ideas, including his little Rhino pins. Yes, the donation, yes, right? They have it. They do a donation for each of the clients, and they nail them a little metal pin for the they actually, I think there’s a name of the rhino that they adopt a rhino, yeah, they adopt a rhino, and they, they continue to make donations on an annual basis to that Rhino, even after the client has left, and I think they send something in the mail to tell them about the donation, which is gotta, you gotta think these clients are like, Oh, geez, we should really go hire them again.
Oh, they’re making these donations in my name. Yeah. So that’s, you know, kind of interesting, is kind of thinking about how you can be different. Are there other ways in which you’ve seen agencies stand out and embrace this idea of, you know, not chasing something that is, you know, that is an emerging trend, but rather chasing something that’s not going to change? It always goes back to the basics, right?
Jason Swenk 12:20
The basics work, you know, like many years ago when I used to play tennis in college, and this is going back like when we had wooden rackets, I guess, kidding, graphite ones, yeah, but they were, yeah, like you.
John Corcoran 12:41
Dress like Billie Jean King on a tennis court, yeah? Grass.
Jason Swenk 12:44
My time was around Agassi, and my wife threw up my Agassi shorts many or a couple years ago. They were the most comfortable shorts I ever had. She was like, these are the ugliest shorts ever. Yeah, yeah. But when I was playing tennis, I remember, you know, I was one of the best in the nation, and I was losing to this player that, on paper, I should have dominated. And it was like, 6050, and my coach just was like, You’re overthinking it. Go back to the basics. And so I just said, I’m gonna take my racket back early. I’m gonna look at the ball and see what happens from there.
I wound up coming back and crushing and beating the kid, you know, just from going back to the basics. And the same thing goes with business. Just think of the basics. Look, your clients want a result, and they want to know you’re taking care of it. So communicate to them. So just keep it really easy. Don’t overcomplicate it. Don’t like to create this Pandora’s box that no one understands what’s in it, or the Wizard of Oz curtain, or whatever it is. Just make it very simple. Don’t overcomplicate it. Don’t, you know, come up with terminology that no one knows. Like, just keep it simple. Like, if you could explain it to your grandmother, perfect. That’s what you want.
John Corcoran 14:03
I want to ask you about the importance of finding your tribe, and I think that this extends to both finding your tribe of customers that you want to serve, but also the community that you want to be a part of. I know that’s an important one for you. You decided after selling your agency that you wanted your tribe to be other agencies, but also before that, you know, went through different machinations of the types of clients that you want to work with. So let’s start with first like, you know, drilling down and the importance of finding the right clientele that you want to serve. What? What are the sorts of, you know, advice you give to agencies that are struggling with that.
Jason Swenk 14:43
If you’re struggling with it, you just need to struggle faster, and you need to take on more clients and see what you don’t like. Because I treat it as like, finding your client tribe is like a Vegas buffet, right? Like, if you’ve been to a Vegas buffet, like. It goes on forever, yes. And you’re like, This is all part of it, like crab legs and filet and steak, right? Like, you could just imagine looking down, and you’re like, This is unbelievable. I can try everything, but it also gets overwhelming, right? It’s kind of like that Cheesecake Factory menu. You’re like, Oh my God, how many pages do you have? I don’t know what to choose, so I’ll just start at one, and just keep going down. And then you walk out of that restaurant going, oh my god, I’m never going to eat again.
And so you need to try everything. And then what you need to do is ask yourself this question, or these two questions, who? What type of criteria, and what type of client, and what type of niche could I knock it out of the park, where, if I was going to be paid on performance only, what would they look like? Right? But you have to try out a bunch first, and then you have to think about, what service would I do for them? So if it was like, Dude, I know YouTube ads. And if I could find these lawyers that are already producing videos that are over the 5 million mark, that want to grow, and you just start layering on more layers. And you’re like, and do this, this and this, and be like, I could crush it. And then you and like, and it has to be with like, you’re only going to be paid after you deliver amazing and they get amazing results.
Yeah. So now you’re perfect, picking your perfect client that you can knock it out of the park. What’s been happening is a lot of agencies have been taking on anybody and everybody. So they’re just saying yes, yes, yes, rather than No, no, no, no, no, and then Yes to the really good one. So that’s, that’s how I would find the tribe. That’s how we went through it. Like, you know, you’ve seen the mastermind morph over the years, the community morph, and we’ve figured out what makes the best members like, and we figured out what makes really crappy members to the community. Like, if you come in with an ego, or, you know, you’re not willing to share, or you think you know it all. Hey, there’s a group you can go to. It’s not ours. You go to them, you know. So you just gotta kind of weed through all this. It goes back to what I said. Make a decision fast. Yes or no. Boom, all right, I’ll live with it. Move on to the next.
John Corcoran 17:37
Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about content creation. Because, as you, I don’t know if you would call this your 2.0 business, because you had your agency phase, and now you’re in this phase for the last, I think, 10 years or so, serving, helping other agencies, but content has been a huge part of it. You do, you know, podcasts, you do videos, you do emails, you do all that kind of stuff. And yet, there are still plenty of businesses out there that don’t do that. Obviously, I’m a big fan of it as well. What are your thoughts, you know, talking to others? I’m sure you have plenty of agency owners that don’t, you know, practice their own stuff that they do for clients by creating their own content.
Jason Swenk 18:19
Well, I think they’re more scared about putting themselves out there honestly. And look, there’s a lot of faceless brands out there that we all know, like we couldn’t tell you who the leadership is, like Starbucks or Coke or Pepsi, right? But there’s also a lot of smaller businesses that you know very well, Gary Vaynerchuk. Like, okay, let’s do a test. You know who Gary Vaynerchuk is?
John Corcoran 18:47
Yep, Okay, cool. Had him on the podcast actually, many years ago.
Jason Swenk 18:50
Fantastic, yeah, shameless link. Link up there.
John Corcoran 18:53
Yeah, exactly. There you go.
Jason Swenk 18:57
What sports team does he want to buy? The chats. There you go.
John Corcoran 19:01
Exactly.
Jason Swenk 19:02
Are you great friends with him? How do you know this? Yeah, right. Yeah, he posts content, and he posts content on a regular basis, where we know like and trust him, or we know maybe don’t like, but we know him, and we’ve seen him grow throughout the years. It’s the same thing as what we’ve done, right? Like, it was funny, my team wanted me to watch some of our first videos that I put together, and they actually filmed me watching, man.
John Corcoran 19:37
You’d have to, like, strap you down, strap me down to do that.
Jason Swenk 19:42
Well, the funny thing was, as I was watching these, like, there was one, it says, there’s no bad agency client, there’s only a bad prospect or a bad process. And I could quote it to the T like, you could see me, yeah? Like, oh, I know this. Like, yeah, it didn’t change, yeah. Yeah, right, and it was pretty funny. The only thing that really changed was maybe having a little bit more confidence on video, kind of like your radio voice, like it was funny, like when you were doing the intro, I was like, Who is this? So, like the John I know before, I was like, welcome to Movie phones.
John Corcoran 20:21
I was like, Who is this? We have to explain what a movie phone is for some of the younger listeners here.
Jason Swenk 20:27
The Seinfeld episode, that’s my favorite. Or, well, that or the master of your domain.
John Corcoran 20:32
I think it is my favorite classic. Yeah, yeah. So, so, all right, so, content creation, so there’s kind of the psychological element. A big part of it is just getting over being comfortable with being comfortable with being in front of the camera, putting yourself out there, and then also sharing some of those personal elements, your personality, like, you know, passion for a particular sports team.
Jason Swenk 20:53
Or the or two, or it’s another way where they’re afraid if they put out what they know, No one will come to them because they put it out. But it does. It actually does the exact opposite. It attracts more people. So when people go on YouTube, or they listen to a podcast about doing something they want to learn, yeah, and then they hear you. They watch your video. John on how to, you know, get on the best podcast in the world, which is yours, and Jeremy’s, right? And so they watch it to learn. And then they’re like, Okay, I understand how to get on it.
John Corcoran 21:32
But then they’re like, I don’t want to f**king do it. Yeah, I want help with this.
Jason Swenk 21:36
But I, but I understand how John and Jeremy do it. So let me go to Rise25 because I understand the process. They’ve helped me. I trust them. So let me have them go do it right, like it just builds trust faster than anything. Because if you come out in a sense like I’ve always come at the sense of creating the content with the person like me a long time ago, listening to myself or even looking at it. If my sons want to create a business or yet, an agency, if they want to, they can watch dad talk about it later on, and they’ll be like, I know, like, I’ve seen him have success.
He’s showing us exactly what to do, okay, like, I already trust them. Like, that’s how I go about it in my content that I create, because at the end of the day, you have to think about your audience and what they want. And I’ve always wanted to create a resource I wish I had when I was running the first agency. And so that’s how I create the content. Or here’s the other reason they don’t create it, is they don’t know what to talk about.
John Corcoran 22:46
And one of the easiest responses to that is how to come up with ideas of what topics to come up with.
Jason Swenk 22:52
So you can do what I’m doing right here. You can literally hit records on your computer, and as you’re talking to your clients, you can take bits and pieces of you giving advice, or you can go back to your email of your client’s biggest questions. Just answer those, create those videos.
John Corcoran 23:10
Yeah, those over and over again, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s easier than ever now not to get into the Tools area, but you know, you can take that, transcribe it, you can put it into one of many tools that exists, and new ones that will pop up in the future that will say, here are some topics that come up, came up in in this discussion that you should create content around.
Jason Swenk 23:34
Or if you want to get really geeky and nerdy and futuristic, create your own influencer.
John Corcoran 23:43
Yeah, exactly, yeah, right. Or here’s another interesting one. David Miran Scott is the author of Democracy and a bunch of other books. Just spoke at this conference that was last week, and he took all the content that he had created over like 10 years or so, and put it all into a private chat bot that he had access to, and then he could ask it questions and then use that for creating new angles on things.
So, like, he would come up with kind of a topic that was a slightly different angle on something that he talked about before, maybe combined, you know, like, for example, like the Super Bowl is coming up, right, not right now, but if the Super Bowl was coming up, or the NBA finals or something like that. You could say, you know, come up with a piece of content that talks about, you know, something in Super Bowl terms, but, you know, focused on my particular area of expertise.
Jason Swenk 24:33
I’m gonna call you out, like, really, you mentioned the Super Bowl, but we are in the NBA Finals.
John Corcoran 24:38
I know I’m about six months off. But you know, when there’s something timely coming up, right? You know, it could be summer vacation or something like that, you know, yeah, because we’re recording this in June.
Jason Swenk 24:50
I had to go. I had to call you out on that.
John Corcoran 24:54
So, yeah, and actually, another book, another resource I’ll mention, is just to sell as human by. Dan Pink, and that book talked about information asymmetry versus symmetry. It used to be that there was this big disparity between the market and you, and you had all the knowledge, and they would come to you. But now people can educate themselves, and they’re going to do it, whether you want to or not. So they might as well be consuming your content that you put out there so that they can educate themselves and also build trust at the same time, so that by the time they get on a call with you or your team, they don’t have to spend all that time building that trust.
Jason Swenk 25:32
Yeah, there’s no trust building. There’s no selling. Like when anybody joins our community or engages with us, we always ask them kind of a survey, or most of the time, we ask them a survey on the thank you page and ask them two questions, what are you most excited to learn, and why did you join and out the past decade, most people have said, I’ve been listening to your content for so Many years. I was just ready now. So think about how big of a moat you can create around your business if you start creating content now, you might be thinking too, oh, well, I’ve missed the boat for creating content. The best day to plant a tree is 20 years ago or today. You just don’t want to get down 20 years into the future and be like, ah, should have started a podcast yesterday.
John Corcoran 26:26
Yeah, exactly. I agree as well. And that goes for other forms of content as well. One other thing I know my eyes on the clock here, but one other thing I wanted to ask you about was you’ve built and managed teams before and hired people before. And your proponent of hiring people that you don’t have to manage, talk a little bit about that. How do you find people that you don’t have to manage?
Jason Swenk 26:52
Well, It’s tough. Well, you just got to look for a burst like you’re not going to find people unless you know what you’re looking for. I think a lot of entrepreneurs or visionaries like us are horrible managers, right? You got to think like we’re thinking 1000 miles per hour people cannot execute as fast as we think. That’s what makes us such bad managers, and then we compare everyone else to us. And so I’ve been interviewing this marketing person for a couple weeks. It’s been horrible. We’ve gone across one that was really good, and we’ll see on the other one.
But a lot of them will say to me, Well, what does my day look like? And I was like, did you read the job description? Did you hear what I talked about? Like, I want you to be self managing, if, if you have to come to me and I tell my I’ve always told my team this when I started getting a little wiser, which was like, last year, or now is a couple years back. But I’m like, if you have to come to me to ask me what you need to do. I can find someone faster and cheaper. I want to. I’m going to tell you where the boat is going and what direction we’re going, and then you make the decision of what you think is best, because I hired you as an expert in your particular field. You have knowledge I may not have. I want to be the dumbest person in the room, which is not hard, right?
And so I just tell them, Look, you make the decision. You tell me, I work for you. That’s how I’ve always treated it is like, How can I support Darby? How can I support Stacy? How can I support Jody? How can I support all these people? Hey, just tell the monkey what to do. Like, I’ll go create this video. Okay, cool. I’ll go do it right. Or, like, what particular questions should we ask on this great, tell me. I’ll go execute it right. I’m fine with being setting the vision for the, you know, like I look at as the kind of, you know, four or five roles you’re really to, kind of go from an owner to a CEO, and one is coaching and mentor your leadership team, being the face of the organization, understanding financials, you know, being, you know, understanding the KPIs that are important.
And, you know, assisting sales if you want. So, you know, I’ve always told my team, I want you to manage yourself. Like, here’s the goal, go have at it, and when you can do that, you’ll have so much more freedom in your business. Like, that’s what we all want. We don’t want to grow our agencies. We don’t want to grow our business. We want more freedom to pick and choose, to do the things we love doing, and we want to work with really cool people.
John Corcoran 29:41
I’m curious because you mentioned coaching your leadership team, but you also said I don’t like managing people. Yeah, so talk about this distinction between those two.
Jason Swenk 29:52
So managing someone is telling them what they need to do, and they’re constantly coming to you to solve their problem. You actually hired them, right? It’s kind of like what we do in the mastermind, right? The 131 like, what’s the problem? What are the three things you’re thinking about? What do you think you need to do? If they do that enough, they’re not going to come to you anymore, right? And so if you implement little things like this, that’s coaching them also too. Like, finding out where they want to go? Like, do they want to own their own business one day?
Cool, I’ll coach you to do it. Like, let me show you everything. Or, how can I make you better or get you more time? Like, I’m constantly going to my team be like, Hey, should you really be doing that? Like, what things can you offload to other people that are really, like, $10 tasks for you. Like, and where do you want to get financially? Like, how can I coach them to get there? That’s what I talk about more with coaching and making them better leaders. So then, as you add layers to your organization, they’re doing that for the team below, and now you have all these rock stars on your team, because, you know, most people are in kind of No Man’s line up to about 100 employees, like you’re into, like, God damn. Like, I’m right, but once you get over that, they’re hardly ever coming to you.
Like things are running like you’re getting you’re bringing in clients you’ve never heard of, they’re delivering amazing results. People are actually, you know, sending you like, thank you gifts, and you’ve never met them, you’re like, yeah, what is this? Like? This is awesome.
John Corcoran 31:32
That is pretty amazing. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is all really interesting. And I love talking about these topics with you. We should do this. Definitely do this. Definitely do this a little bit more frequently than every five years or so.
Jason Swenk 31:44
I want to hear the radio voice change over the next exactly.
John Corcoran 31:48
I’ve honed that over the years. Anything else that you’re kind of focused on or excited about, or, you know, a frequent theme that’s kind of come up in the agency world.
Jason Swenk 31:59
You know, what I’m always excited about is just going back to the basics. Stop overthinking it, and just regardless of what decision you have in your way, A, B, C, D, pick one, execute fast. See if it works. You learned if it doesn’t work, you learned if it works great. And then just move on to the next decision. Stop overthinking things like you. We’re all making it too complicated. It’s very simple. And don’t focus on the things you don’t have in your agency. Focus on the things you have.
John Corcoran 32:33
Yeah, you do hear that as a repeating theme, you know, if I had a, you know, CMO from an agency. If I had a CFO for this agency, if we had more resources, we would buy this tool or software or whatever.
Jason Swenk 32:50
Yeah, and, and honestly, to be grateful, like for, you know, like everyone in the mastermind, they’ve been doing it for a long, long time. Do you know how many businesses have been like, how long have you and John been running?
John Corcoran 33:05
It has been, well, we started almost 10 years now, yeah, because we did our first he and Jeremy and I did the first thing together about nine years ago now, yeah, so.
Jason Swenk 33:16
You are such an amazing statistic. I mean, think about how many businesses like even looking at, like, um, on a podcast, like, how many episodes are you at? Too? Just curious.
John Corcoran 33:30
I think I’m officially somewhere past 500.
Jason Swenk 33:35
Incredible, right? So if you look at the stats of that, how many people just have one episode? Like out of two? I think it was, let’s just say the ratio is this. Let’s say there’s 2 million podcasts out there. 500,000 have only done one episode. 250,000 have probably not even made 10 episodes yet. So think about the statistics of that. Then you look at your business, right? You’ve been doing it for 10 years. You’ve been doing it with a business partner. I know sometimes you guys want to kill each other, which is always fun. And we should actually do a podcast about those conversations. That would be really interesting. I’ll take a little percentage of that.
John Corcoran 34:16
But yes, but like, think of like the stat.
Jason Swenk 34:19
You’re the odds are stacked against you on that. And when you start thinking about it that way, you’re like, shit, man, I made it 10 years ago. Yeah, we have a thriving, profitable business, and you start focusing on the things you have, rather than, Oh, I haven’t cracked the billion dollar mark or the 10 million mark, or whatever stupid number that people make up in our heads. You know, you start focusing on the things you have and the people that you’ve helped. Like, think about all the people you’ve helped create podcasts.
John Corcoran 34:50
And get to the next level. That’s very gratifying. Dude, right?
Jason Swenk 34:55
Like, think about it that way, and then you look at and stop watching the news.
John Corcoran 34:58
Yeah. That’s good advice. I told you all. He was very positive, Jason, this has been great where people go to learn more about you and check you out and learn about all your upcoming events.
Jason Swenk 35:10
Yeah, go to agency mastery.io, so agency mastery, like you’re gonna master things. So agency mastery.io, and you can check out all our free resources over the past decade.
John Corcoran 35:22
And you have it at an event in Colorado, I believe in October, that’s.
Jason Swenk 35:28
Where you learn about alligators, learn about alligators. And I think we’re one. I think this is where it got us, because there’s an alligator farm not too far where they have white, albino alligators. And I think I was just trying to think we were trying to, where did that story come from?
John Corcoran 35:43
And you also did an event in Austin, I believe, where Jeremy spoke up.
Jason Swenk 35:47
We did, yeah, we do two events a year. One is called the Digital Agency Experience. So if you go to digitalagencyexperience.com, you can check that out. But we ran out of 100,000 acre ranch. They have 2000 bison. If you’re lucky enough, John will come again and he’ll wear his woody outfit, which is awesome. And we all stay on the ranch. 100 year old ranch horse riders have great conversations, and it’s a lot of fun.
John Corcoran 36:17
Yeah, very cool. All right, Jason, thanks so much for your time.
Outro 36:24
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.