Ecommerce Influence Podcast 245: How To Build A Successful Agency (Without Burning Yourself Out)
by Austin Brawner and Andrew Foxwell
Every Business Has Its Unique Set Of Growth Challenges.
Zach Stuck spent several years working for a digital agency before deciding to go out and start an agency of his own, Homestead Studio.
Now he’s in the process of building his agency business. He’s on the front lines of trying to help clients grow their ecommerce brands.
Today we’re covering a range of topics with Zach. We dive into some specific paid social tactics and what’s working right now for Zach’s clients, and we talk about the onboarding process Zach uses for his clients to ensure both his clients, and his agency, can be successful.
Enjoy!
Episode Highlights
5:58 How Zach went from working at an agency to starting his own.
8:07 Changes in Zach’s role from agency employee to agency owner.
9:52 Resources Zach used to help a client grow from zero to a million in their first year.
11:26 Common paid social misconceptions Zach hears from his clients.
14:33 What’s working in paid social right now and how to successfully approach dynamic creative testing.
17:33 Value-based lookalike audiences and how to easily start using them.
19:07 The state of social proof in 2020 – does it really matter?
23:37 If you don’t have a large customer audience to run social proofing to, what can you do?
24:31 A little known fact about 1% lookalike audiences.
27:07 Crucial steps for successfully onboarding new clients and building a strong ongoing relationship.
32:00 What’s keeping Zach up at night.
34:20 You can’t outsource your growth.
37:16 The challenges with growing an agency and how finding clients who are the right fit is key to success.
43:20 How Zach’s avoiding the churn and burn that happens so often to agencies.
44:57 What Zach’s eating, is he working out, and what his daily life looks like.
Transcript
Andrew Foxwell: I think one of the reasons that we wanted to bring you on, and we'll have you kind of introduce yourself and what your agency is up to now, but is, there are agencies and business owners that listen to this podcast and I think having more agencies on is a good thing to give people an idea of where we're at in terms of the expectations and the alignment and the things we're thinking about to serve our clients better. That's really kind of one of the main ways and your agency's grown really quickly.
Can you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, the types of things that you guys do and what's happened in the last let's say two years?
Zach Stuck: Sure. Yeah, my name is Zach Stuck. I run a small boutique agency called Homestead Studio. We're based in Appleton, Wisconsin. We work with only e-commerce, direct to consumer brands. The main key services that we offer are Facebook advertising, SEM, email automation, and kind of what led me to starting Homestead was just having some great conversations with people in the industry.
I actually came from another agency based in Wisconsin called Optimal Digital Marketing and had the opportunity to work with some really great businesses there. My mentor, who's the owner, Brandon, really gave me the opportunity to just learn as much as I wanted and work with any client that came in the door.
Over the course of three years working there, I just put myself deep into the work and really put it on my back to say, "Hey, like all these clients want to come to us and grow and what can I do to make that happen?" And a lot of what that came down to is just doing continuous learning through courses, through following people on Twitter, through reaching out to people in the industry and just asking as much as I could to gather as much information as I could.
Through that kind of got to the point where I was ready to do my own thing and had some really good people around me that were encouraging me to give it a shot and started Homestead about seven months ago back in July of 2019 and we've been growing really fast ever since so it's been great.
Austin Brawner: One of the things I've known you from being a member of the Coalition and from Twitter for the last year and a half, something like that and one of the things that I've noticed is that you are an excellent executer. That you take in some training and you're like, "Okay, I can put it to use for the clients right away and get really, really good results." As you've transitioned from being in that role where you are working at an agency to now owning your own agency, growing, building and continuing to kind of like expand in that, how has your role changed over the last six, eight months as you've been able to get this thing rolling?
Zach Stuck: Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to taking lessons that I've learned over the last few years and building just really solid processes from that. A lot of the clients that come to work with us at Homestead are primarily looking for paid social advertising as a service and one of the other key services that we've been able to do at Homestead is email automation using Klaviyo and through the Brand Growth Experts Membership I was able to learn from Austin, take his courses on there and kind of like what you're saying, just taking the courses and just implementing them straight up to the first e-commerce client that I was really working on and just giving that a shot, see how that went. Right.
Just by being able to do that as a test and just see the amount of revenue that that drove and just the amount of results that came out of that, it just really opened my mind up to saying, "Okay, what other courses, what other opportunities are out there that I can at least just go learn from, implement and see just how it works."
Andrew Foxwell: You landed in the right place first. I mean in terms of advice.
Zach Stuck: Yeah.
Andrew Foxwell: Right. Coming into the Brand Growth Experts community. It's rare because that's I think world-class in terms of the training that you get. A lot of people wander their way through other courses or things and so got the right advice right out of the gate, which is good.
Zach Stuck: Yeah so that was a lot of fun and at the previous agency we actually brought on a client that came to us and said, "Hey, we want to go from zero to a million in our first year." It was a pretty big feat. We've never been able to do that and never had that experience prior and that's what I was just like, okay, it's time to get after it. What do I need to do? Found Brand Growth Experts, the podcast here, and just kind of used either every episode, tactics that you guys would share to even just some of the courses, even Jon Loomer's courses that I know Andrew you've worked on in the past and would just implement it and just try to see what I could learn from it, and just by doing that over and over and over again over the course of two years, we've really started to figure out really solid processes and things that work.
When clients come to us at Homestead and say, "Hey, we want help growing." We already have a pretty good track record of what's worked in the past across multiple verticals from CPG to every type of e-commerce business that we... We have a really solid system in place that we can just implement right out of the gate and we know that we're going to help companies grow their revenue just from that. A lot of that comes down to email automation and just set up of the way that we structure paid advertising on social and on SEM.
A lot of my day to day really now comes down to working with new businesses, auditing what's going on in their current systems, what they're currently working on and taking that and trying to implement our new systems and see what we can do to help them grow.
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