What Agency owners need to know in 2025, compilation episode DS
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[00:00:00] Rita Richa: Welcome to the deep specialization podcast. My name is Rita, the producer of the show behind the scenes. I worked together with Corey and the deep specialization podcast team to bring the show and the content to life. We thought for the new year, it would be a great idea to bring you a recap episode, highlighting the top three all time episodes from the deep specialization podcast.
[00:00:23] Rita Richa: This special compilation episode is curated with the theme of what agency owners like you need to know in 2025. We've selected standout moments from Jonathan Stark, Jamie Adams of Scorpion, and Ryan Golgoski of 180 Sites. Each of these thought leaders share invaluable lessons on specialization. Scaling and building your business to create lasting client relationships.
[00:00:48] Rita Richa: Let's dive in to our first one with Jonathan Stark.
[00:00:52] Jonathan Stark: I am a former software developer who is now on a mission to rid the world of hourly billing. You want to be the one and only either, you know, if it's just you or if it's a small firm, if you're in any kind of service business, you want to be the one and only, you don't want to be just one of many.
[00:01:07] Jonathan Stark: Standing out is, it's for some reason it's very scary and a lot of people don't want to do it. They want to kind of copy things that are air quotes proven. It's like I am a discipline who helps target market with expensive problem and unlike my competitors, unique difference. But the unique difference, they're always stumped.
[00:01:26] Jonathan Stark: And the reason they're always stumped is because they don't even know who their competitors are. So how could they possibly say how they're different? Would you rather be in the ocean or would you rather be standing next to a barrel full of fish? You know, the ocean has something like 3. 5 trillion fish in it, but good luck finding them in your little dinghy.
[00:01:43] Jonathan Stark: Why are you fishing in this vast space when you could just pick a place where there's demand already, you can dial yourself into some white space and become meaningfully different to those people. So then you could, in theory, charge more premium rates. You could race to the top instead of racing to the bottom with your fees.
[00:02:00] Jonathan Stark: There's a difference between. An expensive problem and a big problem.
[00:02:05] Corey Quinn: Okay.
[00:02:05] Jonathan Stark: So, like, global warming is a very big problem. But it's too diffuse. There's not one person who's losing sleep over it, or could write you a big fat check to solve it. By picking a particular vertical, You can start to find out how they talk about the symptoms of the problem that you solve and how painful they are.
[00:02:26] Jonathan Stark: If you get that specific, you can start to read their minds. Because you talk to a few of them, you have conversations with them, and it's like, How do they articulate, how do they articulate the symptoms, the painful symptoms that they're experiencing? Their expensive problem is not really that they, they want more money.
[00:02:42] Jonathan Stark: I mean, yeah, that would be nice. But the real problem they have is that they're working weekends every week. And what they really want is their time back without losing money. Don't resist it. I talked to someone recently who does websites for power washers and is this novel business model where he doesn't charge them upfront at all.
[00:03:04] Jonathan Stark: It's like immediately a subscription. It's, he's probably not even the only person making websites for power washers, but I'll bet you, he is the only one. The charge is 180 a month.
[00:03:13] Corey Quinn: I recently saw a study from HubSpot that says that those companies that study their competitors have a 2. 5 times higher ROI in their marketing compared to businesses who don't study their competitors.
[00:03:26] Jonathan Stark: Uh, I believe that. But I also would caution people from paying too much attention to their competitors. I think it's more important to pay attention to your customers, but the overlap there, I think, is paying attention to what your customers think of your competitors. An expensive problem is, it's a situation where someone will write you a big fat check.
[00:03:45] Jonathan Stark: To make their life better. If you're a designer, you're solving problems. Designer is super creative, has to be super creative and has to, but, but the point is you're getting paid to solve problems. If you're attracting the kind of clients who have expensive problems, you can go through a series of questions to uncover their real motivation for even talking to you or someone like you in the first place.
[00:04:08] Jonathan Stark: Why not not do this? This sounds like a really big deal. It's going to be disruptive to your whole organization. It's going to cost you a fortune. Why not not do it? Why would you hire someone expensive like me to do it when you could get interns or use AI or get your cousin Vinnie or outsource this to emerging economies?
[00:04:24] Jonathan Stark: Why not just do it cheaper?
[00:04:25] Corey Quinn: Get really clear on who you're focusing on and what you're doing for them. Do it for them for a while. Begin to recognize patterns in the work that you're doing. Build a business that everyone wants to buy, but that you don't want to sell.
[00:04:37] Jonathan Stark: My business strategy is like help people you like get what they want.
[00:04:40] Jonathan Stark: And if you can do that. Over and over, you're gonna be fine. The biggest deal is that no one was considering anyone else. Like, they might be aware that there are other people out there, but they're not even considering them.
[00:04:52] Rita Richa: That was Jonathan Stark emphasizing the power of deep specialization. As he said, knowing your niche and solving expensive problems can set you apart from the crowd and position you as indispensable.
[00:05:05] Rita Richa: Next we'll shift gears to Jamie Adams. Chief Growth Officer at Scorpion. In this compilation, Jamie focuses on sharing how to build a winning sales culture and why customer success is at the heart of sustainable growth. Here's Jamie.
[00:05:21] Jamie Adams: I'm the Chief Growth Officer at a great company called Scorpion. We bring digital marketing solutions and software to local service based businesses.
[00:05:30] Jamie Adams: We were going to have to make some dramatic shifts in how we operated as a sales organization to reach the, the growth that I knew inherently he wanted to reach. As we expanded verticals, we committed to going all in on that vertical from a sales resource perspective. I've met very few people who are successful in outbound sales that when you ask them, Hey, are you pumped up about making a cold call today?
[00:05:53] Jamie Adams: They immediately answer. Yes. Bring it on. Like, I can't wait to get told no or hung up on like 15 times today. We have to create a culture of getting our sales teams comfortable with calling them, emailing them, things of that nature. What does it mean for the company? What does it mean for them? What does it mean for the customer?
[00:06:10] Jamie Adams: Help them build the motion and the habit. So you make your first sale from a cold call or even you book your first appointment. You're excited about it. People around you hear it. You celebrate the wins, right? Part of your job description is you're expected to come in and, and, and hunt. And what you would see is you would see like this up into the right line of revenue, but then you would see three to six months later, it just crater, right?
[00:06:34] Jamie Adams: Cause their churn was so bad. If you don't have great product market fit, you're going to have churn. You're going to have upset customers. And that's going to impact your ability to leverage referrals. If you are more customer focused and you're, and you're trying to solve their problems, that's really your North Star.
[00:06:49] Jamie Adams: You can make up for it if you have like an intense focus on your, on your client success.
[00:06:53] Corey Quinn: I would say that that's one of Scorpion's core competencies is just that true genuine care for any business that's looking to scale. One of the areas that I've seen businesses get into trouble is in the variability that is, that can occur in delivering value for the customer.
[00:07:10] Corey Quinn: You want the, the leads coming in super warm from a client who's been blown away by the value they've been getting.
[00:07:15] Jamie Adams: When my team misses a target. My immediate inclination is not to go point the finger at somebody on the team. It's to point the finger back at myself. Like what did I do or not do that prevented my team from being successful?
[00:07:29] Corey Quinn: One of the results of bringing in more of an outbound focus to the sales team, which you were very successful in doing, it immediately doubled the business size far as size, because we were no longer just relying on inbounds. We were actually going. And having these proactive conversations that led to a tremendous amount of growth.
[00:07:45] Corey Quinn: You share with me personally, over the years that you played a lot of tennis growing up, any thoughts around how playing tennis helped you to become the leader that you are now, the man that you are, the success in business.
[00:07:56] Jamie Adams: The other thing about tennis specifically that I really value that actually served me more than the tennis itself was I grew up in a really small town in Louisiana, but my town was was was 40 miles south of Shreveport, about 1000, maybe 1500 people total.
[00:08:12] Jamie Adams: So it's a very like, you know, walled off. You know, area, I mean, like relative to the rest of the world and what tennis afforded me to, the ability to do was go out and play tournaments all across the country. We would fly to a place, meet up, stay at a hotel together, and we would just kind of be in charge of figuring out how to get around.
[00:08:31] Jamie Adams: And that forced me to get outside of my comfort zone, learn to have conversations with strangers, learn to be adaptable in any environment that kind of got dropped into. I didn't love getting my ass chewed out because I missed a forehand, but man, I mean, like. In hindsight, you know, it just got me locked in.
[00:08:48] Jamie Adams: And I think that that helped me like from a sales and business development perspective. I find it pretty easy to kind of jump right into a conversation with a complete stranger, take ownership of the wins and take ownership of the losses. You can get really dialed in on, does my product solve this very specific customer segment problem?
[00:09:09] Jamie Adams: And if it does, great, you should be really successful selling it and retaining it. You can get really tight on product market fit and TAM. You can get really tight on your, on your marketing content. And then I think you can get really tight on how you service those customers. You get to know elements of their business.
[00:09:25] Jamie Adams: You can give them advice beyond maybe even the things that you're selling them. That would be beneficial, right? That's going to strengthen the relationship.
[00:09:31] Corey Quinn: When done really well over a long enough period of time, you build up a great reputation in the industry, which, which results in word of mouth. Amen.
[00:09:40] Corey Quinn: And that's the sort of the Holy grail.
[00:09:42] Rita Richa: Jamie reminds us that scaling isn't just about numbers. It's about relationships, ownership, and delivering consistent value to clients. Before we move on to our final compilation segment with Ryan, here's a word from Corey about our trusted sponsor, E2M Solutions.
[00:10:01] Corey Quinn: Hey, it's Corey. I wanted to take a quick break from the show to say that if you're an agency owner looking for a strategic and reliable white label partner, You should check out E2M. They offer website design, WordPress development, e commerce solutions. SEO, PPC, and content writing. And they are trusted by over 300 agencies.
[00:10:23] Corey Quinn: You can check out E2M's transparent and flexible pricing model at e2msolutions. com slash the deep specialization podcast. For limited time, E2M is offering a special 20 percent discount for the deep specialization podcast listeners on your first month. Go check them out. Now, back to the show
[00:10:47] Rita Richa: and here we are at our final segment with Ryan Golgoski, founder of 180 sites. This compilation highlights his creative strategies for turning customers into raving fans and brings to light how a personal touch can help fuel referrals and longterm success for your business. Time to hear from Ryan himself on how he's used these strategies to scale his agency.
[00:11:14] Ryan Golgosky: I'm the founder of 180 Sites that is a productized web design service. We take web design and package it up into predefined scopes with predefined prices and sell it as is. And our goal is to provide high quality agency level work, but not the super high price tag. So targeting like lower end to middle of the market for those guys that would like a really high quality site, but can't afford that.
[00:11:38] Ryan Golgosky: 20, 30, 000 price tag, our messaging and our product is geared toward the home service industry as a whole. And within the home service industry, we do work with tons of different industries, but mostly exterior cleaning. So pressure washing, window cleaners, and lighting companies. I came from that industry so I can kind of speak the lingo with, with customers and build rapport there.
[00:12:03] Ryan Golgosky: As it started to snowball, it just exponentially became more and more attraction in that niche. Even if you're not like, say I was targeting lawyers or I was targeting dentists, I would just try to engulf myself as much as possible into that niche, learn about what they do, like become an expert in that space.
[00:12:24] Ryan Golgosky: Whether you have any history in it or not, how can I facilitate my customers to be raving fans for me and get me tons of referrals? And so from the very beginning, that's, I was really obsessive about my customers sending them gifts for no reason at all, like going on their Facebook page, seeing what they're interested in and getting them a hundred dollar gift that's related to their hobby or something in their life.
[00:12:48] Ryan Golgosky: Every single customer gets a gift. They get, when they sign up, they get a box full of treats and that's all automated periodically throughout the year. They might get handwritten cards or other sorts of things, just. Really making them feel loved and valued. If you're going to take the time to send them something that they're going to use every day, put their logo on it, and they're always going to be thinking about you.
[00:13:08] Ryan Golgosky: Even though they're seeing their logo. They know who gave it to them.
[00:13:11] Corey Quinn: In the early days of a startup, you want to do things that don't scale. I do a little bit of everything and figure it out based on the feedback that you get from the market.
[00:13:19] Ryan Golgosky: You're on a sales call with somebody and they're asking, you know, what can you do for me?
[00:13:23] Ryan Golgosky: You're like, not only do I specifically work for your industry, but I've done exactly what you need. I've solved your problem for 500 other people, just like you. The perceived value of you solving that problem is infinitely higher than. The other guy who may be better than you, but he's just not telling people that he solves that problem for those people.
[00:13:44] Ryan Golgosky: From the beginning, it has been the core methodology of customer acquisition for us. Most of the time we'll try to, if we have the time. To make a custom little two, three minute video for every new lead. I think for an agency similar to ours, but they maybe they do SEO, Facebook ads, Google ads, if you're offering a lot of different services, I think you need to go even further narrow in your niche.
[00:14:09] Ryan Golgosky: Because you're dealing with now many different problems, you're dealing with problems in different channels of marketing and web design starting out. If you don't have capital, that's a really hard model to work with in the beginning because you're going to service all these, these customers and you're not getting much money at all in the beginning.
[00:14:28] Ryan Golgosky: And so by focusing on just a smaller area in the market, you can solve those problems better. The barrier to entry is really low to start that, that type of company. You don't have to have specialized knowledge. You don't have to have certifications. You do need some equipment, but you can get started pretty minimally with that.
[00:14:47] Ryan Golgosky: And so for us, because. The way our services are priced, we are targeting kind of the low to the middle of the market. And so pressure watching is a great industry for us because referrals do make up the majority of our leads. Really customer referral and agency referral. So our customers do refer us a whole lot.
[00:15:07] Ryan Golgosky: I'm very, very grateful for that. We're really lucky and blessed. You could just send an email to me, introduce me to your customer or to this prospect, and I could pay you for sending me an email, at least in an agency perspective, once you hit the hundred client threshold, I think that's where it starts to really take off.
[00:15:27] Ryan Golgosky: It is amazing as a small business owner to just have that peace of mind knowing no matter what, at the end of the day, I've got this guaranteed amount of income. Everything just becomes easier with a productized model. For somebody who is still figuring things out in terms of where in the market, should I focus my efforts?
[00:15:47] Ryan Golgosky: I would say, just keep shooting your shotgun and, you know, spreading your seeds everywhere and see what grows. I don't think you as the owner need to have any sort of background or your team, just be focused on educating yourself and engrossing yourself in your customer's world. Whatever you do, whatever your hand finds itself to do, be the best at it and do it with excellence.
[00:16:08] Rita Richa: That wraps it up for our top three deep specialization episodes of all time. We've learned from Jonathan Stark about the power of specialization, from Jamie Adams. about building a customer centric sales culture and from Ryan Golgoski about creating loyal clients through productized services and better understanding your vertical.
[00:16:30] Rita Richa: As you navigate 2025 this year, remember that deep specialization and customer focus are one of your strongest assets and standing out. Scaling and succeeding within your agency. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoy any part of this highlight episode, make sure to check out the full interviews and the show notes below.
[00:16:50] Rita Richa: Now, we'll let Corey close it out for us. Take it away. Corey.
[00:16:55] Corey Quinn: Thanks for tuning in to the Deep Specialization Podcast. If you haven't checked out my bestselling book, anyone, not everyone, you can download the audio book for free right now by going to anyone, not everyone. com. That's anyone, not everyone. com.
[00:17:12] Corey Quinn: And finally, a special thank you to our sponsor E2M. We'll see you in the next episode.
