Building Your Pay Per Lead Dream Team

First whiteboard video back in the office, for what has felt like, a very long time!

In honour of getting back together, I have decided to do today’s video on how I built my amazing pay per lead marketing team that surrounds me today.

Now, I know you think differently than me and will probably want to do your hires in a different order.

For example, you might dread doing sales so you will want to hire someone to handle the client acquisition right away, instead of doing it last like me.

You kick ass at managing account but struggle with writing copy for your ads, so your priority would be to hire a skilled copywriter.

Either way, you need to identify your strengths and hire someone to work your weaknesses to keep the business growing.

Trust me; you can not do everything yourself. Focus on what you are good at and invest in hiring for the rest.

In today’s video, I show you how I have built my marketing team, watch it, you might get some ideas on the hires you are missing in your agency.

Enjoy!

Video Transcript

Hi, everyone, it's Dan Wardrope here from Flexxable.

Back in the office for the first time since the COVID pandemic hit, so really glad to be here with my team and recording our whiteboard video for you guys.

So, one of the questions that I often get inside my Mastermind or in some of my free groups is, "Dan, how do you build a team?" a team around a Pay Per Lead agency.

So a lot of you guys listening to this might be starting out in your agency journey, or you could be you could have had some success and you're looking to grow and hire and take that next step, all right?

And I, I'm gonna run you through the way I did it.

And you know, probably made a few little mistakes here and there, but I wanted to run through what my process was and how that worked for me, and hopefully you can learn from it.

And if you've got any questions, of course, you can post below this video, and I'll definitely get back to you.

Alright, so, when it first started out with me, I quit my engineering job for like the third time and finally decided I was gonna make a real go of this.

So at that point in time, I'd had a couple of local businesses I think, you know, my best may was a plastic surgeon in Sydney, so he trusted me, I don't know why he trusted me but he did.

Because I knew nothing back then.

I also had a real estate agent and a couple other small clients and I think I was pretty much at my limit, just looking after all of that, and I was doing a lot of work.

But for me at that point in time, I was doing sales I was going to be in our meetings, I was trying to learn clients, I was building funnels myself, and I was managing the Ad accounts myself, okay?

Essentially, it was a one man band, and it worked up to a certain point.

But as you know, what happened is you get another client and then it was bigger than the client that you had previously and suddenly the previous client was getting neglected a little bit.

So I'd always be chasing the bigger clients and forgetting about the smaller ones, which was not not a really good way to run a business, okay?

So I decided it was time to get an office and hire someone, I was to work at home at that point in time.

My first hire was a university graduate I think with an arts degree and didn't have any online marketing experience but you know, because I knew my way around a bit and I'd learned from you know, my mistakes and you know.

At this stage was probably a year down the line, I had enough knowledge to be able to teach him some you know, direct response, marketing, some ads, you know how to build the funnels, how to capture leads, and all that type of stuff.

So that was my first hire and that allowed me to get away from creating the ads, all right? W

hich was, which was great. For some people, some business owners, just mad tinkerers, alright, all I wanna do is get in there and get the most out of their Ad accounts, and really, they love doing all of that.

For me, that wasn't me.

And I like working on relationships and build and sales and speaking to clients and stuff like that.

So it was kind of my last hire to get a sales team in.

So you might wanna flip that around a bit if you'd prefer to stay working in the Ad accounts.

It depends on your personality and the way that you you kind of enjoy running your business, I guess.

So after that, I hired a like a Front-end web dev.

Again, he was someone that didn't have you know, any previous skills or any thing like that, but I threw him into the Unbound account that we had.

And I said, go do the training in Unbounds and see if you can figure stuff out I didn't give him much more content apart from that, but it took him some time, but now he's very good at what he does.

So I was able to get rid of the Funnel spot with hire here and hire here. And the next thing the next hire I had was a copywriter which is really good for when you're writing like, in our agency, we write up tutorials, and we run Traffic fire, you know.

Quiz pages and stuff like that.

So it's very important that we know our customer.

We know the, you know, the customer avatar, be able to write empathy maps and understand the market that we're advertising in.

So a copywriter is really good to help with that. And the next hire after that was when we started getting a bit bigger, and word started to spread, was account manager number two, so, so, I think at this stage, we probably been doubling in a bit of Display Network, maybe some YouTube Ads, and it was getting a little bit too much to manage an account manager number two came in.

After that, at this point in time, you know, probably a couple of years to get all of this done for me.

And then at this point in time, I decided that I was gonna launch a program Flexxable, which teaches agency owners how to build a Pay Per Lead agency.

At that point in time, I started doing a little bit more video content. So I hired a videographer, and, you know, that was a really great move.

In fact, if you're running an agency and you're running Ads on YouTube, and you're doing video Ads on Facebook, it makes sense for you to hire one too.

You don't have to have a program I think it's a good move for any agency to get a videographer in house if they can afford it, okay?

After that, things were getting a bit busy and a little bit hectic for us.

So I, and I wasn't very good at staying organized and focusing on stuff, which is why I hired an assistant at that point in time.

And my assistant Sarah looks after my calendar and just keeps things running smoothly and making sure that you know, everything's cool and attend my meetings right on time and also helps with personal stuff as well which is really good.

It takes a lot of stress out of my wife, and I'd highly recommended if you can get to that point in time, in fact, I wish I did it early because it's all.

At this point in time, it was time for me to hire some sales guys, so that these guys are doing a combination of sales for my agency and inside my program, okay?

So I'm quite lucky, I've got that luxury.

If you do, and this is probably one mistake I made a long time ago is that I should have hired someone and go commission only basis or whatever, to just smash the sales up here a little bit earlier in my journey because sales makes the world go around with, you know, with the agency, model, all right, it doesn't really work in scale unless you're constantly challenging yourself and getting new clients and working towards, you know, growing the agency.

Not being over reliant on whiles and things like that.

So that was my journey.

Hopefully, you've learnt a little bit from it. A few things that I'm still outsourcing is the Web dev, the API and our hosting maintenance and things like that, because we haven't managed to get that in house yet and bookkeeping and accounts was, my bookkeeping and accounts was outside of the business as well.

This happened up until probably about three or four months ago, and I've got a finance manager in house now, okay, so that really should be kind of like this.

All right?

And finance managers are really good because they can look at cash flow projections.

They can give you consolidated accounts, and figure out what your monthly payouts are and really take control of the finances and make sure that you're putting cash in the right place and keeping tax outside of your account for VAT payments and Corporation tax and all those types of boring things that I used to ignore as well.

I mean, I had a good understanding with my paying house.

But, you know, paying tax is not one of my favorite things to do, so, Yeah, that's roughly, well, that pretty much is the way that I built my agency.

I hope you've enjoyed this, if you have any questions type below and I'll get back to you.

Thank you.