37:2 Own your market (and how to find it)

Lee:
Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer podcast. This is your host, Lee, and on today’s show we have the one, the only, it’s Mr. Brent Weaver from uGurus. Brent, how are you today mate?

Brent:
I’m doing really well, thanks.

Lee:
That’s awesome. We just spoke yesterday.

Brent:
I know.

Lee:
It feels like we’re becoming really good friends all of a sudden, I like this.

Brent:
Yes, this is a good time, man, I like making contact with you and it’s been fun.

Lee:
So, what time tomorrow then mate?

Brent:
We’re going to just put that Google Calendar event on repeat, right?

Lee:
Let’s do it.

Lee:
Folks, if you don’t know who Brent is, then head on over to episode number 74. Yeah, head on over all those years back in May 12th 2017, Brent was on the show with a slightly higher pitched voice than he has now, I’m joking, and he shared his journey and talked about building an agency that you want. One of the things that really stuck with me from that episode and still has to this day is the idea of building an agency that works for you, rather than building an agency that you think you have to have because of the stereotype or because of what other people project. That’s a real powerful episode, that’s episode number 74. You’ll get to learn about him, you’ll get some inspiration, and of course you’ll get to learn more about uGurus.

Lee:
Now, back then mate you had a free course that they could email you on, brent@ugurus.com. Do you know if that still exists?

Brent:
They can definitely get that free course. Yeah, so if you want that and we’ve got some other goodies that we try to give away for free too, so happy to share that. Same course and some new stuff.

Lee:
Nice. So guys, been a few years, he’s got extra stuff for you. Head on over to episode 74, we will put that in the show notes.

Lee:
Brent also is the author of a brand new book called Get Rich in the Deep End. You can check that out on ownyourmarket.com, of which we also put in the show notes. And Brent, I mentioned we were chatting just yesterday. You have become a fellow CloudWays maverick. We would love to thank CloudWays firstly for sponsoring this show, and also for bringing Brent into the maverick’s family because we’re having a great time together, buddy.

Brent:
It’s awesome. I love what CloudWays is doing as a platform, and I think the community they’ve built of industry leaders is absolutely world class.

Lee:
Thanks, man.

Lee:
So, Brent before we go too much further I’d love to know a little bit more about your book. It’s quite an intriguing title, Get Rich in the Deep End. And here in the UK, or at least for me, I’m thinking the deep end is when you’re in deep bleep. So, is that what it’s about?

Brent:
Yeah, it could be. It could be, right? You know, I found early on when I was running my agency, and now my business is so niched within the industry and I own my market in terms of it is … the people that I serve is how I define myself in my business. It’s a huge part of my identity. I am way far into the deep end within my industry. And let’s say for instance if I was out talking with an entrepreneur who was a doctor and he said, “Hey Brent, can you help me grow my business?” I’d be like, “No, I work with digital agency owners.” There’s no real conflict for me, and that’s to me where I think people make the most success and impact on their market and also on their business is when they’re in the deep end. They’re very proud of who they serve and they’re not apologetic about it and they’re able to make a really great business off of that.

Lee:
I hate the phrase there’s riches in the niches, or niches as we say here in the UK, but I think what you’re saying here is if you can go all in on something, on some particular market, some particular area, that is where you can thrive as to opposed to, I’ve got the words here, floundering I guess in the shallow end where you’re trying to be all things to all people, which is where we were at least 15 years ago, struggling to get anywhere because we were trying to serve so many markets with so many different products.

Brent:
I think the idea of an inch deep, mile wide. That’s how I felt running my agency for probably the first almost two thirds of us running that business. We had no specialisation, we really had no market. Our clients loved us, so they gave us referrals. But it’s really hard, as I found, to grow a business predictably on the backside of referrals, because sometimes people aren’t talking about you for whatever reason. They’re not out there marketing themselves, so they’re not having a lot of new conversations. And so referrals, being dependent on that is something that can be a scary place if you’re running a services business and you have a large payroll.

Brent:
For us, running our agency every couple of weeks, it was like that $20,000 auto draught was going to be taken out of our account, or a $30,000, right? And if we didn’t have that business lined up it was just like … I remember staying up at night staring at the ceiling in cold sweats wondering where my next client was going to come from.

Lee:
Yeah man, I remember that in our agency with regards to the big payroll and the stress that would come from that.

Lee:
Now, there is a lot of excitement about the current climate. And that sounds weird, I know, but a lot of people are being super positive. They’re super hyped, things are going really well for them. They’ve got new, unexpected business. COVID, lockdown, all those sorts of things have been great for their business. And yet it’s very clear that there is still a large amount of people that are actually really struggling. They are feeling very fearful right now. Maybe they’re managing to coast through and just survive, or maybe they’re seeing a significant drop. And this has led a lot of people to realise and recognise that they really need to do something about their business. Perhaps they’ve been able to survive an inch deep like you said earlier up until now, but given the massive shift in the global climate, the way things have changed, they realised they really do have to do something significant.

Lee:
I remember our entire business model changed when somebody said to me the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Now, people may be listening to you saying, “Yeah, I want to get deep into a market. I want to own something. But I don’t know how to get there.” What would you say to those people?

Brent:
I just want to address, Lee, I think that there is kind of this success lottery that COVID created. There are people that, now we’re six, seven, eight months into it, depending on what part of the world you’re in, and I think there are some people that have taken some extraordinary action to pivot their business. And I don’t want to discount that at all, because there are people that have worked really, really hard to ride this wave. I mean I’ve got a friend that runs … his business was purely built on putting speakers on stages. And when this all happened, Pete Vargas, [inaudible 00:07:25] business, and everybody thought, I was looking at his business like, “Oh man, you’re done for.”

Brent:
And him and his team put in an extraordinary amount of work to pivot. And they’ve actually had one of their biggest years, and they have not had to lay anybody off. But they did an extraordinary amount of work, I mean massive work. And I want to give props to people that have done that.

Brent:
Now, I do think though that there are a lot of people that kind of won the niche lottery, where they just happened to be positioned in a market, whether it was retail, ecommerce, or they were in something to do with food delivery. Not food delivery like restaurants, but like the subscription services like Freshly and thinks like that where it’s delivered to your door or whatever. There’s certain niches that were just poised to take advantage of this situation.

Brent:
And the opposite is true as well, right? I mean I had clients where 80, 90% of their revenue was cancelled within 72 hours. And I’ve never personally experienced that, and I don’t know what that feels like, but I imagine it’s not super great. And it’s been hard to come up from that, they’ve had to lay off a lot of staff and things like that.

Brent:
But I do think there is an opportunity if you have been on the sidelines and you have not yet found your niche and found your market. And the main reason is because I think that what COVID did was it created kind of this great reset. It created this opportunity where people that were set in their ways, maybe it was a publisher that hasn’t been taking any new influencers or authors, they haven’t accepted any new content on their platform outside of their regular trunch of content producers. All of a sudden they might say yes to people. People that had in person events, conferences with speakers booked, months out all of a sudden are having to start over to some degree. They’re having to reschedule their events, or having to find speakers that are willing to do virtual events, or having to … maybe they can’t do two hour long workshops with one speaker any more because people can’t hold that attention online and they’re having to do lots of 30 minute events.

Brent:
Or some of these virtual events are not running live, they’re running these week long summits, and there is no limit really on speakers. They could have 50 speakers, they could have 100 speakers, or whatever, because each presenter pre-records their content. So there’s all this new opportunity I think for creating authority in the market.

Brent:
One of my clients that was in the travel industry in the Caribbean, he started running webinars for hotels to help them create more direct bookings because the travel sites were decimated and they could make more money on future direct bookings, way out in the future, discounting people and stuff like that. And so he was out there producing these webinars and he had never done a webinar for his market ever before. His first webinar I think was March 19th. Stock market had crashed and he starts doing these webinars. And the local travel association’s couldn’t get enough of it. They kept promoting his webinars and in three months he went from never doing a webinar in his niche, never promoting himself in that way, over the three or four months following COVID he generated more leads and really more authority in his niche than he ever had.

Brent:
And this niche is hard hit. He’s not blasting off in terms of revenue but he is getting tonnes of leads, tonnes of exposure and stuff like that. And so I think there’s still an opportunity if people have been sitting on the sidelines to say, “Look, you know what, maybe now is a great time to get known for something.” Because there’s a lot of people that have that head trash right now that they’re like, “Oh, I haven’t done it up until now, and now would be a terrible time to go up there. I don’t know enough.”

Brent:
And I can say if you can help one client, I think it’s your duty to try to go out there and share your message, share how you can help people. And I think there’s a big opportunity for people.

Lee:
I think what’s interesting out of that example there is that yes, he was already in some form of niche or market, but the one thing he wasn’t doing was stepping up and being that authority, becoming known as an authority, becoming known as somebody that he can learn from, as somebody who is a person of value. And I imagine there are a lot of people listening right now, you may already have some form of market or niche, and perhaps you don’t even recognise it.

Lee:
Just taking a look at the clients that you have and the type of service you’re offering, maybe the type of problem you’re solving, the type of client avatar and even the specific industries that you’re touching, perhaps you already do have some form of market. But what you’ve not been doing is actually stepping up and saying, “Hey, during these times we understand you have the following problems, let’s create a webinar or some free content,” or something that will help those people that you are serving with the real problems that they have right now.

Lee:
And that example of the guy within the travel sector, which is I believe one of the hardest hit industries of all time right now, because none of us are flying, and yet he’s still able to really dramatically raise his profile and start to own his market.

Brent:
And he wrote me a message the other day and said that COVID has been the best thing that’s happened to his business, which is a really phenomenal thing to say. He’s still not up on revenue. Year over year, he’s still down, but because of … and this is I think good for people to hear because sometimes I see people out there and they think, “Oh man, people are making so much money that are successful.” And I think he’s defined success as reach as well it’s not just about trying to make money right now, but also reach and helping people.

Brent:
And so over the last six or so months, while he has stabilised his business, he’s been able to protect the core. He’s been able to create for him a lot of awareness, relationships, things that might take many, many more months or even years to fully realise. But his list has grown a lot, and he’s been able to create a lot of that market authority.

Brent:
And I think a lot of people in this market are going to remember him going out there and putting in the extra time to help those hotels that maybe were struggling. How that plays out for him financially we’ll see, but he has been able to grow back some of his business that he lost, but not all of it.

Lee:
I think as well you mentioned where people would say this would be the worst time, or even people may say, “I can’t do this, I don’t have the ability to do it.” What I’ll do, folks, is I’m going to share a video that I watched just a few days ago that talks about the limiting beliefs that we put on ourselves and the language that we use with ourselves which literally stops us in our tracks from doing those very things that in this time would significantly help us. I do a lot of content, I show up all the time, and yet I still have those limiting beliefs and have to keep watching content to help me push forward.

Lee:
I think mental health wise as well, being stuck at home and all the negativity that’s on the news, et cetera, can really affect people. It certainly affects me, and I can start to listen to that inner-voice and hold myself back, and there not do that webinar, or not write that piece of content, or not call that client because of those limiting beliefs. Have you seen that as well, buddy, with the people that you’re interacting with?

Brent:
I mean I’ll start with myself and then talk about other people. Here’s what I tell people, because my clients, people that I’m talking to in this market will come up to me about this all the time. And they’ll say, “Yeah, that sounds nice going out there and publishing a blog post, or running a webinar, or trying to get myself on a podcast, but I’m not an expert enough yet.”

Brent:
And what happens I think is people see other people that have been doing this for many, many years, and they just assume that that’s how they started. And one of my favourite to follow in this vein is Gary Vaynerchuck. I think he does a great job and posting content that he was doing many, many years ago. And almost in a way holding himself accountable. But what you can see with him publicly is an immense amount of growth. I mean go back and look at some of those original Wine Library episodes and you’ll see a very different Gary Vaynerchuck in front of you.

Brent:
And I tell people, “Look, if you already have one person that has paid you money for the skills that you do to help them with their business, or their organisation, or their project. If they’ve paid you even $1, in my mind you have already passed the expert test.” One person thinks you’re an expert enough that they have literally given you currency to help them solve a problem.

Brent:
And so look at the work that you’ve already done and just talk to people about … look at your projects. And this is one of the things that I’ll do, people will come into our webinars and stuff and they’ll say, “I’m not an expert, I can’t teach anybody anything.” And I’ll just be like, “Hey, tell me about your last project.” They’ll be like, “Well, we did this design project for this type of organisation,” or whatever. I’m like, “Cool, what were the problems that you were solving?” “Well, we just did design.” “No, no, no, tell me about the real problems.”

Brent:
And we dig, we peel back the layers of the onion and it’s that process of unpacking for somebody. And of a sudden you see these lights go on where they go, “Yeah, I guess I did help somebody.” I’m like, “Would any other business benefit from knowing about this thing?” And they’re like, “Well yeah, I guess they could, right?” Cool, go out there and talk about that. You’re already an expert, somebody’s certified you with that dollar, so you now have permission with that dollar that you made, or $100 or $1,000 or $10,000, you now have my permission and hopefully your own permission to go out there and help that next person.

Brent:
And I think content, I think finding yourself your, “Stage,” whether it’s a podcast or a blog or an Instagram feed to share that knowledge with other people.

Lee:
In our discussion we’ve talked about having a look and defining our market. We’ve talked about establishing ourselves as the authority in that market. We can do things like raise our prices. We can win more clients that way. You cover a lot of that in your book. But also you talk about creating a market infrastructure. Could you talk a little bit about that? What is the market infrastructure? What can people put in place in their defined market to start to attract leads to grow their business?

Brent:
I love this idea of market infrastructure. So, first of all, and this is just a little nuance and I love how you said it because you said, “Create market infrastructure.” And really what we do is we actually just find market infrastructure. So, one of the fastest ways for you to become an authority in your market is by actually going and finding existing infrastructure that is already in place. There’s this famous quote of, “We can see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Brent:
And I’ll give you my own personal example. When we first came into the web pro-market, now I was very active in a very sub-niche within web pro, a product that Adobe had made many, many years ago and is now end of life. But we were in this space but we weren’t really in the general web pro market. So when we decided to pivot or expand to the web pro market, I think the normal thing that a lot of people do is they launch a website and then they start to create content on their own channels. And they hope that Google and Facebook and organic reach will eventually get ourselves out there, which people do that, and it does work, it just takes a really, really, really, really, really long time to build any authority and build any traffic.

Brent:
The faster way to do it is to go out there and find people that have already done that. And it’s almost kind of in a way kind of cheating. And so what we did is we found a bunch of websites that had already been publishing information to web designers for a decade. I built a list of, I don’t know, 26 or so of these websites. And we pitched our content to them.

Brent:
Some of these websites had tens of thousands of visitors a month. Some of them have 100,000 visitors a month. Some of them were in the millions of visitors per month to their website. And we built this list of 26 of them and we started to pitch our content to them. And most of them, when I say most of them I mean 25 of them, said no multiple times in multiple ways. And they were very, very nice about it but we kept on asking, and one of them said yes, we will publish your article.

Brent:
So we did a lot of this outreach, got one person to say yes, we will publish your article. Got that article published and then went back to all of those other 25 and re-pitched ourselves and also expanded that list and kept re-pitching. And we went from one person saying yes to then two people saying yes, then over about three or four months we got about a dozen guest articles published in our market. So, three to four months for a dozen articles.

Brent:
Now, these dozen articles helped us build our email list to over 10,000 people in less than six months. So, from there now we had the start of an audience. And all of a sudden, and this is just kind of by happenstance, but one of the articles did go viral. It was number one article on Hacker News, and I started getting all of this momentum effort. People were now throwing opportunities at me. Podcast interviews, additional guest posting. Got some affiliate agreements, stages at events, things like that.

Brent:
So got some momentum built and then it was kind of like almost an avalanche breaking, right? The snow builds up and builds up and builds up and then all of a sudden enough energy builds up then some other cool things happen. But we kept doing the same thing, finding other podcast hosts and continuing to build our list.

Brent:
So, that market infrastructure, going from not known in a market to literally within by the time the article went viral I mean people were emailing me like, “Oh, you’re Brent Weaver.” It doesn’t matter, I’m not saying I became micro-famous, but I sort of did. The point is, is six months prior nobody in my market knew who I was. And it wasn’t because I sat there and blogged on my own website and published Facebook post after Facebook post after Facebook post on my own stuff. It’s like I went out there and I faced that rejection in the market. I took advantage of leveraged, existing market infrastructure.

Brent:
So that’s probably one of the, if not the secret to probably the success that we’ve had in our business is building our own audience through other people’s great audiences and the great work that they’ve done.

Lee:
I would definitely mirror that. And in our industry that we were in with Event Engine, for many, many years we grew only because of staff turnover. So, people would be out of business, we would be their supplier. One of their employees would leave and go to another company and take us with them. So, that was a nice way to grow, but nobody had ever heard of us. And it’s only really been in the last two or three years where we’ve taken a leaf out of my own book and actually started to show up. Yes, we’ve created our own content but equally we have gone to events, we’ve been interviewed on people’s podcasts, et cetera, so that we can become known in the events industry as the go to guys for digital events and for online marketing within our very specific niche.

Lee:
So, for years and years and years we still grew, and that was great, but everything changed the minute we started to show up. And like you said, finding the existing market infrastructure. Also to mirror what you said, for me to build up an audience, which I have been doing now for over five years with Agency Trailblazer, has been a phenomenally long and slow slog. And I feel like I’m still just at the beginning of it, if that makes sense? We have thousands of listeners around the world and yet we still have so far to go. So, to slog and slog and slog, it happens, and it is happening and it’s getting faster and faster, which is phenomenal, but it definitely takes time. And now people are asking to be invited on our show so that they can get access to the wider audience, et cetera.

Lee:
I would definitely say don’t go straight for creating all of your own content. Your own content is great, but do have a look at who else is out there because that is a significantly faster way of growing, and maybe something I should have done – although if I didn’t, maybe I wouldn’t have launched the podcast, mate.

Brent:
Well Lee, dude, I appreciate the five years that you’ve put in to create this platform. And I had to wake up a little early today to get on the programme, but the amount of work that I have to do to put my message in front of your audience is a tiny fraction of the work that you’ve had to do.

Brent:
Now, I have my own show and I have built up some of my own platforms. Another example here is events. So, we run an event at uGurus. And I’ll tell you a little bit about the behind the scenes stuff here. We spend I would say a good solid … It takes a year to really plan and run the event. Probably in terms of man hours, it’s probably about three months solid of my team’s attention spread out over six to nine months. And we drop on our last event, the price tag for us to run the event was $150,000. And that is an insane amount of work.

Brent:
One of my big early breaks within our market, I was invited out to speak on stage at a web pro event, similar size. I’m sure it was similar cost to put the event on. It cost me, I was running pretty lean at the time, and I think I spent $79 on a Spirit Airlines airline ticket to go speak at this event. I used points for the hotel for three months. I think they even reimbursed me a [inaudible 00:25:43] for that, so I think I actually maybe made money on my travel expenses. And it took three days for me to go and hang out with people at this event.

Brent:
We signed 15 clients from that event. The initial value of each of those members in our business was about $3,500. Lifetime value was probably closer to $10,000. So I made $150,000 give or take with a $79 Spirit Airlines Flight.

Brent:
So, there is huge reasons why somebody should build their own audience, but I think if you’re getting started in a market I tell people when you’re getting started I would probably put 80-100% of your efforts on existing market infrastructure, and maybe 0-20% on your own owned media in terms of your own blog, your own social media, et cetera. And then when you’ve done that for maybe a year, start to think of it like a DJ slider. You have those sound controllers, it’s like a slider, you can go from left to right or whatever. So as you get more established in your market, start to slide that over to maybe 50:50, and then maybe on day you’re spending 60 or 70% on your own audience in the market place versus continuing to having to constantly go out there and pitch yourself to other people’s audiences.

Brent:
Because it is a lot easier to email my list of 60,000 subscribers at uGurus than it is to go out there and pitch myself constantly to other people. It’s a lot easier. I don’t have to go through editorial control, I don’t have to face rejection. I can just send my email and be done with it. When it’s my stage, I can decide who’s on there. I can decide what we’re talking about. Whether we’re pitching or selling anything, et cetera. So there are a lot of benefits to having your own platform, but man, existing market infrastructure, that’s the jet fuel to get you really airborne within your market.

Lee:
I think as well, to add to that, is there are so many online summits in many niches right now that you could go present yourself as a potential speaker. Within Event Engine I’m the person that goes out and talks for Event Engine on very specific subjects, such as a keynote on outcome driven events, and all sorts of different subjects. We send those out to particular event organisers and then we end up on stage. So I’m speaking even next week at the event tech show here in London. It’s virtual now fully because of the law, but I’m still there on stage. And just like last year, that’s where we generated a whole load of brand new leads.

Lee:
Flip that with Agency Transformation Live, we did the physical event a couple of years ago. We had to go virtual this year. But like you were saying, Brent, that cost us an awful lot of money and we didn’t necessarily generate the sorts of clients we would generate had we have shown up at something that already existed, the larger event. For us we’re not doing it for those reasons, but it’s at least a good example of you can build your own, it will take a long time. But use the existing infrastructure that’s out there.

Lee:
We’re coming into land now mate, so what I would really love is just a little bit of information about your book. Folks, you can check it out over on ownyourmarket.com. Could you give us a little top and tail of what to expect from your book and the sort of outcomes that people could be striving for once they’ve read it and they’re inspired?

Brent:
Yeah. So, in the book I cover the five A’s to owning your market and getting rich in the deep end. And those A’s we walk through finding your audience, finding those awareness channels, that market infrastructure. How to attract these people to you by talking about stuff that they actually care about, not just stuff that you care about. How to build that authority, how to not just build the authority through hard work, but how do you kind of crack the code on authority code in a market? And then how do you create a path to conversations through acquiring leads and opportunities?

Brent:
So we cover the five A’s. I did something a little bit different in the book, which I think people, hopefully your listeners will enjoy, and we kind of follow a character. Her name is Heather Carlisle. And she’s kind of an amalgamation of a lot of my own personal story as well as many, many of my client’s stories. And we follow her journey through a lot of what this actually looks like implementing in the real world. A lot of times you read a business book and it’s just like, “Oh hey, go do this and it’s all going to be great,” right? And so Heather’s story I think to your point earlier about limiting beliefs and about rejection and failure, we get to kind of see that through Heather’s story in the book of what actually happens when you go out there in your market, what owning your market happens for a real agency. And we got to take some creative freedoms I think with Heather’s story to make it a little bit fun and engaging for the readers.

Brent:
And so I think that you’re going to learn a lot but you’re also going to get to watch this agency story play out, which I think will be kind of fun for folks.

Lee:
That’s a real neat way of doing it as well. I think you’re right, a lot of business books will tell you what to do and try and inspire you and tell you why you should do it. And that’s all great, but being able to learn from an example, I.e. it’s almost like a parable in the Bible where they teach in parables to help you understand the concept better. I like the way you’re going with that where you’re telling a story and we get invested in the character and we can also understand and learn with the character as you go through it. So I’m looking forward to reading that.

Lee:
Folks, you can get that over on ownyourmarket.com, and you can get your copy today. Is it just digital or have you got a physical version as well?

Brent:
Yeah, so you can check it out at ownyourmarket.com, or if you’re on Amazon you can buy the print book or Kindle version. Just do a search on Amazon for Get Rich in the Deep End, and you’ll find that on there. And then our website just points over to that, as well as some other free bonuses and things like that.

Lee:
Sweet. So, I’ll make sure I get those Amazon links in the show notes as well folks, you can check all that out over on trailblazer.fm, and you will see the latest episode. Brent, this has been phenomenal. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for sharing value. Thank you for helping us understand how we can own our own market and even find the market if we don’t know where it is. You’ve been an officer and a gentleman, and all that’s left for me to say is thank you and goodbye.