How to Use Agency Partners to Grow Your Business

Andrew Dymski hosts this episode of Agency Journey. His guest is Justin Theng, founder of ALSOF Publishing, an Australian agency. Justin started a web design company at 16, became a creative director at DDB, then came back to digital and went out on his own in 2014. The conversation covers how he built a team in Israel and Ukraine instead of hiring locally, the math behind serving five agencies instead of 25 end clients, and what makes an agency partnership go wrong.

Local hires would have made him every other agency in Australia

Justin’s work ranges from inbound retainers to email campaigns and loyalty programs for a fast food chain. Andrew asks how the team is set up to deliver all of that, and Justin starts with what he refused to do.

If I put bums on seats, I’m now all of a sudden like every other agency in Australia. And in Australia, if you write a brief, scrunch it up into a ball and chuck it down the street, you’ll hit an agency… So what I ended up doing was finding some good crossovers with languages in the Ukraine and in Israel. So I hired two project managers in Israel who speak fluent Russian, exact same time zone as the Ukraine, and open up an office of six designers in the Ukraine.

(Listen at 04:50)

He doesn’t speak Russian; the project managers speak fluent English and bridge the gap. Even the word “creative” means something different in Eastern Europe than in Australia, and Justin calls the whole thing a relational model: a lot of difficult conversations up front, and only then does it get efficient. He found the overseas team through his own network, then added inbound specialists, an office in Sydney, and writers in Melbourne, LA and Silicon Valley.

Five agency clients instead of 25 end clients

The partner model came out of a ceiling Justin hit about two years before this interview. More retainers meant more account service people, and that wasn’t getting him anywhere.

Let’s make the number simple. Instead of having 25 end clients, I would have five agency clients. They can handle the end clients. And I’ll only really interface with five people. So if I have five agencies, they can have five clients each that we service. And now I have 25 clients without the need for 25 account service people.

(Listen at 09:00)

Andrew summarizes it back: ALSOF becomes the back office for another agency’s client delivery. Then he asks why Justin couldn’t just hire account managers like everyone else.

In Australia, in order to service Australian clients, you kind of need the local knowledge. You need the unspoken cultural expectations. And so that’s very, very hard to do with an outsource team.

(Listen at 12:08)

The result, he says, is two or three senior people on the ground becoming the project managers for every client, and that’s the part that doesn’t scale. On white-labeling, Justin recommends it but says his most successful partners skip it and pull him straight into key client conversations. A second brand he’d set up to give partners a layer of separation was being folded back into ALSOF Publishing, because their clients didn’t care which name was on the work.

The best partners are consultants who can’t become HubSpot partners

Andrew asks where the revenue is coming from: the newer agency partnerships or the legacy end clients. Six months earlier, Justin says, the answer would have been legacy. Now one kind of partner is pulling ahead.

This model has been really, really effective for consultants or smaller shops who can’t really become HubSpot partners… But they sit in very influential spaces. For example, one of my best clients sits on the Australian Marketing Institute board. Huge number of contacts, resources, networks, but can’t become a HubSpot partner. And that ended up being one of the biggest sources of revenue we’ve had.

(Listen at 13:48)

Content (blogs and writers, what Justin calls “run of the mill hygiene type stuff”) is the cash cow that funds the more bespoke work. The partnership model with consultants is the rising star, closing deals he describes as very unconventional.

Three ways an agency partnership goes wrong

Andrew asks about the failure modes, since a partner adds a layer that makes everyone’s life easier when it works and worse when it doesn’t. Justin has a list ready.

Anything sub $3,500 a month as a retainer isn’t going to work. You’re just going to take too long to make it happen. That’s one. Number two, agencies that say, I’d rather you try it out on our agency first before we give you to our clients, is always a bad sign, because it means they actually don’t understand inbound marketing. And so they’re just looking for somebody else to do the HubSpot stuff.

(Listen at 16:47)

The third one is the same problem showing up later in the engagement.

Number three that I see going wrong is agencies actually don’t understand inbound marketing. Take away the toolset, they’re not marketers… That all stops when it comes to real lead nurturing and scoring and transitioning from MQL to SQLs and that kind of thing. Those kind of conversations where they cap off and they start getting frustrated at somebody, and everybody wants a neck to strangle, usually it’s the supplier.

(Listen at 17:23)

Andrew calls that the gap between head knowledge (repeating the principles) and heart knowledge (adjusting them to a messy situation). Justin’s tell is the ebook: everyone has downloaded one and thought “been there, done that.”

Where he wants to take the tools next

Andrew closes with a direction question for 2018. Justin wants inbound tooling freed from “inbound marketing 1.0” and pointed at ecommerce inventory, B2C, and personalization.

One of our biggest clients is an energy drink company, and we’re seeing great results in personalization. For a B2B CEO to see his name on a web page, it’s like, oh yeah, I’ve kind of seen that before. But for a consumer to go to Coca-Cola site and see his name on the Coca-Cola front pages, this is like magic. I think we underestimate the uniqueness of the tools that we use because we think in a certain box.

(Listen at 22:22)

He’s also moving away from personas (too granular to be useful, in his view) and toward AI. Justin points listeners to the agency’s website and says the best way to reach him is directly on LinkedIn.