Top 5 Business Growth Tips on How to Scale Your Agency

Are you struggling on scaling your agency and just can’t find the best business growth tips that fit your business model?

In this episode, we’ll cover:

• Top 5 business growth tips to grow and scale your digital agency.
• How to juggle and manage multiple businesses.

If you’re looking for a 7 or 8 figure entrepreneur to model, this guy might be it…

Syed Balkhi is the owner of several multi-million dollar online business and he’s crushing it. Syed’s trifecta of online startups includes:  WPBeginner (the largest free WordPress resource), OptinMonster (lead generation software, and List25 (entertainment site) — all of which are hitting 7+ figures and combined, serve over 400 million visitors! He’s also a former agency owner and a stakeholder in several other businesses.

In this episode, Syed shares his best advice for getting your business to the next level. He’s got a ton of great tips for growing and scaling.

Top 5 ways to grow and scale

#5 – Answer everybody’s questions. Syed says he spent very little on marketing his startups. Instead he would run hashtag searches on Twitter and respond to every tweet that had anything to do with a particular topic (in his case, WordPress). Don’t reply with a hardsell. Reply with a helpful tip or solution.

#4 – Identify and solve one problem at a time. We’re entrepreneurs. It’s easy to get distracted by all those fantastic ideas that pop into our heads. Syed says a key factor in his success was concentrating on one idea at a time.

#3 – Use a lead magnet. You’ll have far better success with an opt-in that offers a payoff in the form of a useful checklist or tool. People are always hesitant to opt-in for fear of spammy junk mail. Bribery works so much better 🙂

#2 – Follow-up is paramount. Once you capture contact info use it to establish trust and gain authority. Don’t just send your monthly e-newsletter, which is all you. Provide goodwill content by offering resources and valuable information that helps them.

#1 – The BEST advice to grow and scale:  Find the right combination of content marketing and marketing automation. Build a system that establishes the “know-like-trust” factor with content and useful tools. Test and tweak often. 

How to succeed at multiple businesses

The key is F.O.C.U.S. – Finish One Commitment Until Success. Syed says your agency should  have to be focused on the strengths of your business.  Identify a problem your prospects experience and then solve that problem differently and better than anyone else.

Sometimes agency owners see a common problem their clients’ experience and want to develop a product solution. Resist the urge. FOCUS. If you do decide to venture into developing a product, make sure it is a separate entity with a dedicated team. Don’t overlap your resources between your service business and your product business. You can’t excel at both simultaneously, so one will always suffer. In the end, neither business will flourish.

In terms of juggling it all… Syed says he doesn’t. He is in regular communication with team leaders that manage each of his businesses. He and his teams use tools like Slack and Basecamp to stay looped in. Syed’s role now is mainly marketing, support and coaching his team. In fact, he’s so far removed from daily operations, he doesn’t even have coding access anymore (and he’s OK with it!) 🙂

If you want to grow and scale your agency, check out my Agency Playbook. It includes the 12 systems I used to start, scale, enjoy, and sell my agency. Check out this video on you can use my Playbook to take your business to the next level.

Building Your Business

Using these business growth tips, I hope you begin to see a real difference for your agency.

If business growth tips aren’t the only piece of advice you need, what other challenges are you facing?

I have probably experienced all the different struggles for an agency owner through my own experience and I can help you from what I learned. From what to do with your sales processes, ways to increase your profit margins or how you can build authority for your agency.

I can tell you the best ways to stop losing money on projects, why performance based pricing can be the best pricing strategy for your agency as well as why including remote working or freelancers in your team can be beneficial in the long run.

You can learn more about my career and different experiences as well as tips, tricks and insights by checking out my blogs that cover a wide variety of topics.

Find more from my Ask Swenk series and more of my videos on my Youtube channel. There you will find advice from myself and other agency experts.