Scaling to Seven Figures: Strategies for Marketing Agency Owners with Colby Wegter

Freddy D: 00:00:55

Colby Wachter is the founder of Autonomy Agency where he helps six figure marketing agency owners escape the grind of 50 plus hour work weeks and scale to seven figures, all while cutting their hours down to 30 a week. His battle tested methods are built for agency owners who want more freedom, more profit, and way less burnout. Good afternoon, Colby.

Welcome to the Business Superfans podcast. We're excited to have you here this afternoon. How are you?

Colby Wegter: 00:01:23

I'm doing well, Freddie. Thanks for having me. Honored to be on.

Freddy D: 00:01:25

So tell me a little bit about this Autonomy Agency.

Colby Wegter: 00:01:29

You know they say sell to yourself. Two years prior, I basically fell into that. I had no intention of starting Autonomy Agency.

er for nine years and then in: 2022

Super short story is networked a lot, had 200 plus conversations with other agency owners, just casual coffee chats. I didn't have an offer or anything at the time. They all sounded like I did.

In fact, I told many of them, I was like, you sound exactly like I did six months before I burnt out.

And so then the questions kind of got to the point where it's like, do you have anyone who's been where you're trying to go, helping you, coaching you, mentoring you? And the answer was always no. And so in the immediate, I didn't have any plans on doing any of it.

I was just like, oh, okay, my story's not that uncommon. Most people are experiencing it. And then it just became unignorable after a while. And so I jumped from my agency of nine years.

I was doing really, really well. To start back at zero and help. Basically the target audience is six figure marketing agency owners trying to get to seven figures.

And these are chief everything officers. And they're very, very talented people, but they've hit a cap because they can't do everything by themselves.

And they're either on their way to burnout, have burnt out, hit a revenue wall, all sorts of stuff. And so having firsthand experience and now have helped dozens of people break through that wall is just something that's super fulfilling.

Helping six figure marketing agency owners get to seven figures and then on a 30 hour work week or less is.

Freddy D: 00:02:48

The goal what got you into the marketing space in the first place?

Colby Wegter: 00:02:51

Oh, I failed as a teacher. I'm 35 now. I would say I only found my true purpose through Autonomy Agency and all that sort of stuff just in the most recent handful of months.

Right. It was just like 17 years of searching, searching as A professional. And I came from a really small town and so I only saw like teachers and farmers.

And I was like, well, I don't want to be a farmer, so I'll just go into school to teach. And then got my first teaching job in Brooklyn as an assistant teacher.

Two weeks later, half the staff quit and so now I'm a full time teacher to like a hundred students with no skills whatsoever and not entirely that passionate about it. It was just something I decided to fall into.

So I lasted four and a half months before I had to like, I was so physically broken down, working like 16 plus hour days, like not coping well. I left that with no plan as well. And then I just kind of fell into marketing.

It was a, an internship as a blog writer because I always enjoyed writing and I was like, oh, this will be my pathway to make money, to write the next great American novel or something. So then you realize, oh, that takes a lot of effort and you need to be a little bit more focused than I was.

But I was like employee 12 at this company, so I saw a ton of what they were doing every day and within a month I was like, hey, I think I can be a project manager and serve clients directly and that sort of stuff. And so it was a company full of 20 somethings and I just asked them, can I do this? And they're like, yeah, sure, whatever.

The cool news is like two years later, having done well with that, the company was at like 60 employees two years later and got on Shark Tank and all that fun stuff. That was a very interesting experience. I've basically been in startup culture ever since I failed at teaching for the most part.

Freddy D: 00:04:19

That's a great story because that complements what you're doing today.

Because that teaching that you picked up years ago, you're applying that skillset now, working with marketing agencies to help them go scale to seven figures and beyond. But since you've got that skill set plus you've got the marketing agency, the two of those really combine really well to take where you're at today.

Life sometimes takes you down the road that you need to go without you knowing that's the road you need to go down.

Colby Wegter: 00:04:47

It's kind of one of those things you see in hindsight, right, where it's like, hey, you didn't realize that this skill set was really that valuable. But one of the biggest differences from teaching to what I do now is it's one to one, right?

Versus I had a classroom of 30 students and I was a brand new teacher. As well. So I didn't really have the tools in my toolkit to do well there anyway. But even if I'd been doing it for 10 years, I.

I've always done much better at one to one interactions. So it just kind of seemed a natural marriage in that regard.

Freddy D: 00:05:12

So what are some of the things, Colby, that you see agencies that are doing that are preventing them from scaling?

I don't want you to give away your secret sauce, but there are some tips that you can give our listeners because we've gotten some people that are marketing agencies things that they could be doing differently that they think is productive, but really it's sucking up time.

Colby Wegter: 00:05:34

Yeah. Well, to keep it super streamlined and kind of choose the biggest one that I think is.

Makes me kind of a contrarian to most people you see in the market is literally just like everyone's looking outward. I find that as an incredibly stressful and poor method to do so. Right. Because it's 10 times harder to sell a new person than an existing. Right.

So I don't help agency owners go from zero to one. I help them go from one to two. Right. That's why I target six figure agency owners.

They're sitting on a gold mine of revenue in their existing clients right now.

And so I think one of the biggest issues is that they are spending 80% of their time trying to scale and looking at Legion and should I hire and should I get this new tool instead of spending 80% of their time and delighting clients.

Like just as an example, after I burnt out, we were stuck at a million and because I was like, basically rock bottom burnout, I was like, okay, well just do everything opposite. Whatever you were doing for seven years, just do the opposite of it. Right. And I was that person chasing new business.

We need to scale, we need to offer more, we need to have more services to serve a larger market. Like all that nonsense. It's not true. And so mine was a bounce back from being in a hole, basically.

But I was just like, screw it, I don't want to look for new people. That's a lot of work. Like, let's target the people who have already said yes to us, say yes to us every single month. What else do they need?

So we improved the service and then also asked like open ended questions, okay, hey, we're crushing it with your one service that you paid us for. You have other marketing problems, right? Do you care to share what those are? And they tell you because they know you, they trust you, they like you.

Freddy D: 00:06:56

You built a relationship with them.

Colby Wegter: 00:06:58

I didn't know I was doing it at the time, but I created basically what I call beta offers, where it's like active listening, essentially them telling you what their problem is and then you say, okay, well if there were a way to solve that, is it cool if I like spitball on that? Throw it into a deck or something, not even a formal proposal, and we'll just call it like a beta program and see if it feels good.

They'll say yes every time they're not on the hook for anything. And then if you present it and it's exactly what they want, they'll say yes to that too.

And now you've collected payment before you had to create anything.

And so to answer your question directly, I think the biggest thing is everyone is offering so much and looking outward, People I work with all the time, like their services tab on their website is 15 services long. It's like you can't possibly do all of those.

Well, what are you mainly providing or what gets the best result with the people you already have right now? And ask them what else you can do and they will tell you.

And that's how we went from stuck at a million and I was personally working 70 hours a week to just flipping it all on its head. I got down to 8 hours a week and we crossed the 2,5 million threshold in 12 months.

And that wasn't by doubling clients, that was by getting more value out of existing clients.

Freddy D: 00:08:00

Yeah, wrote a book on that. Creating business super fans, which is really about getting your existing customers to being your brand advocates.

But I call them business superfans because it's a cooler name and.

But if you think about it, what businesses really need to stop and think about is if they got 20%, let's get real conservative number 20% of all their stakeholders. So that's employees, because it starts there, then it goes to customers.

You've got your suppliers, you've got distributors, you got complimentary businesses. If you got 20% of all that stakeholders promoting your business, what would happen to the business? It just explodes.

Colby Wegter: 00:08:42

It explode. I say you don't have an attraction problem, you have a retention problem. If you can learn how to retain people, it's because they want to stay.

And if you can systemize that, stay into a mouthpiece to other people. Like business owners talk to other business owners all the time. They're in network, they go to events. Give them a chance to talk about you. Right.

Freddy D: 00:09:01

You know, I was in the SaaS industry when it began, so like decades ago. And I was fortunate.

I went through some high end sales training programs, and one of the things I learned about was building relationships and everything else. And so when I was selling into the manufacturing space, I never looked about presenting the product and what it did and all that stuff.

I looked where the business wanted to go. And reason I'm sharing the story is because it's exactly what you talked about. I didn't get into.

Well, I got to get 27 different businesses to buy my stuff. I went to the one existing customer and says, okay, Colby, what do you see yourself in the next two, three years? What's your strategy?

What's your challenges, and what's the biggest pain points? And then we would do a business strategy. Even though I'm selling technology, I was sitting there helping them map out some of their direction. Okay.

Of where they wanted to go and address how some of their pain points, like scrap and metal, would cost them 20,000 bucks for a chunk of metal. The software that I provide can help you save that and not screw that up in the first place. Is that beneficial? Yeah, it's a $20,000 positive.

Just like that, they became my sales force. And I was one of the top. I still got the plaques up on the wall. One of the top sales guys. I sucked at prospecting. I mean, I didn't suck. I shouldn't.

I should say I was. That was not my favorite thing to do. My favorite thing to do was visiting existing customers, having fun with them.

And they'd say, hey, you need to call so and so, just like you were saying, they all talk. Business owners talk to one another. They're looking for some new technology. And I. I'd make the call and it'd be like, oh, yeah, come on in.

Sale was done. I mean, it was like, Jack says, I need to get it. How much? How fast can you get it in? That was it.

Colby Wegter: 00:10:43

Yeah. And it's. There's an interesting other side of this, too. I'm sure you've seen this given your experiences.

Like, I talk to a lot of agency owners where it's going really well because they have word of mouth referrals and. But that's like exclusively. Their business is word of mouth. And there's nothing wrong with that because you're right.

If somebody vouches for you, that's a very easy sale. But I always challenge those people. I say, okay, this is an amazing lead source. It's an unpredictable one.

And because it's so easy, you're not learning how good your business really is. Right. The natural thing a lot of these agency owners do.

I would say a secondary answer to your previous question is when things are good, they get complacent. They're like, oh, this is working. Right? And they just stop. Right.

And so like my autonomy agency itself, first of all, it took me like four months to even get a really good offer. After I left my agency, I thought it would take me two weeks. Like, hey, I've got the skills, right?

t, my current offer went live: 2025

And like that people got it. It was good. It was the right offer, created momentum and all that sort of stuff.

But like, my biggest question after January, which is basically the best month I've ever had in my career, like in terms of take home money, was not, oh, this feels amazing. I've accomplished. My very first thought was, how do I keep this momentum? I didn't do any cold outreach in month one.

I just sent a cold outreach campaign today. I didn't do any advertising in month one. I'm doing advertising starting tomorrow. Right. It's like, I don't want all my eggs in one basket.

And I was taught that really early on in terms of clients because I always served client, like a bunch of small business clients in my marketing agency instead of big whales that were like 50% of billings. Right. But I hear those horror stories all the time. I look at my business externally the same way.

Okay, this is a really great acquisition source right here. If that's all I got, I'm absolutely suspect to a whole bunch of stuff I don't want to experience later. Right?

Freddy D: 00:12:36

Yeah. Because that goes away if it's over.

Colby Wegter: 00:12:38

And that's why building relationships is way more important. Other salespeople that you worked with were like selling features and the amazingness of the product and all that sort of stuff.

And you're over here being like, what do you need? What transformation are you looking for?

Freddy D: 00:12:51

It's a whole different conversation. Whole different. You're not even selling anymore.

Colby Wegter: 00:12:54

You're.

Freddy D: 00:12:55

It's what I wasn't selling. It was basically a conversation with the business owner of where they saw themselves going in a couple of years.

And because I would come around and says, you know what? My technology can do the job. And so the other guys, like in marketing, all agencies can get the job done, plus or minus. Right.

But what that makes you different than everybody else. And that's really the secret is standing out of the crowd, not in the crowd. And then what's your differentiator?

And more importantly the radio station, wiifm. What's in it for me is how can you help that individual achieve their goals and their business aspirations?

Colby Wegter: 00:13:38

y marketing days, I've served: 1100

But I always saw it as the salesperson's job is to get them to say yes once. It's my job to get them to say yes every month.

And so the reason I could keep clients for four or five years when competitors in the digital marketing space, at least at the time were six, seven months was typically the average, maybe 12. What were they doing differently? I wasn't any smarter, so what was my competitive advantage?

I asked them questions, I talked about them, I said, and like, I would teach this to my staff too, because we only ever hired entry level employees. And so I said, your biggest ally when speaking to a client is extending the timeline. Would do SEO or contents or whatever.

And I would say you need to subliminally drop in, okay, 12 months from now, this is what it's going to look like. 18 months from now, this is how it should feel.

Because a lot of my clients or people I've networked with in the last 12, 14 months, whatever, I will ask them. I'm like, when you speak to clients, what do you talk about? Oh, we catch up on the campaign and make sure everything's good.

And then we meet next month. It's like, meetings are for solutions, not ideas. And my time's way too valuable to catch up with you.

Like, that's what an email is, that's what a dashboard is like, teach them how to use it. And then every, like anytime you get on a call with them, by the end, how do I go from 70 hours to 8 hours a week? I quit all meetings.

And if I did hop on a meeting I was pitching, I was upselling and I'm not even good at sales. But I closed most of the time because they already knew and liked and trusted me.

They'd already been around for three or four years and I had been asking them about their business forever. And so I was just like, hey, it seems like this is still a problem.

Do you want me to Try and put together a beta program to solve this problem once and for all.

And like, because it's a beta, you know, I'm not going to lock you into a long term contract and you can just pay monthly and only pay if it works and all that sort of easy.

Freddy D: 00:15:29

Yep.

Colby Wegter: 00:15:29

But I wouldn't have been able to do that without asking them about. The clients don't care about what you do, they don't care.

Freddy D: 00:15:35

It's all about what's in it for them and how can you help them.

Going back several decades, one of the approaches that I used from a marketing strategy was when the computer technology was just coming out, especially for computer aided design and manufacturing, what's called the CAD CAM industry. I would send out letters, old school, to the president of the company, VP of Engineering, VP of Manufacturing.

I knew my sic code: 3544

That was my marketing. It was an educational come in, grab some lunch and we'll talk about technology and how it's changing the landscape of engineering and manufacturing.

And I would get the gals to follow up with a phone call to these people because it's a man's world at the time. And so I leveraged some cleverness and then we would do an educational workshop. So it was a lunch and learn, no hard sales.

We just demonstrated our technology of what it was capable of doing and how it was improving processing times and minimizing scrap and all this kind of stuff.

And these guys would be fascinated and they would say, would you mind coming into our facility and taking a look at what we're doing and see how this technology could help us with our business. That's inviting the fox into the henhouse. And so all those deals went down because I was invited in. I'm not selling.

You just invited me in to come and assess what you're doing in your company. And we'd have brainstorming sessions where you wanted to go. They already saw what the technology could do.

Now we just demonstrated for what it did for their stuff. Deal was done. And then I just maintained the relationship. And that's the other key, is I'd reach out every so often.

And my meeting would be, Colby, how's everything working? How's business? And everything else.

And we'd spend five minutes on business stuff and another five to seven minutes, BS and about life and the Mercedes or whatever it was because that was building relationship and it'd be a maximum 15 minute conversation. And that got me more business than I could ever imagine. I won said plaques of number one sales kind of stuff because I never sold.

I was solving problems.

Colby Wegter: 00:18:04

The modern landscape is trust is at an all time low. And so the more you get to know somebody, not have an agenda.

Like the whole reason I have my business is because I started coffee chatting with people, virtual or in person, with zero agenda. Hey, look cool online. Let's see if you're cool in person. That was literally the pitch. Many of those people have referred me clients already.

My business is a month old. I only have six clients just yet, but one of them is a client.

That sort of stuff is just they're getting word vomited all the time of like, hey, buy my thing this and the other. And I'm over here being like, I don't have the right to cold pitch somebody in a direct message or whatever if they don't know who I am.

t to work with. When you have: 1100

Freddy D: 00:18:54

You have to have the guts to fire some customers every now and then.

Colby Wegter: 00:18:58

100%. That's why I say to anyone who will listen to me, I'm like, you haven't lived unless you fired customers, right? Like that's all how it goes.

But I like what you said because it reminds me of kind of this mantra from someone I admire who's very successful. He calls it with or without you energy.

And that's just kind of how I put myself into the business is like, hey, just so you know, if we're hopping on a sales call, I'm qualifying you. If you think I'm desperate for your business. That's not what this is about.

I'm deciding whether you have the ability to succeed in this because I know it works. Agency owners or just any business in general.

What I find is like if you're in a hurry to get to your certain threshold and revenue or whatever, you're building a business by default, not by design.

I am getting people in like in the first month of my business, I'm in a group where they like really are into pay in fulls, hey, pay for the whole program and all that sort of stuff. That's not for me. I want monthly retainers because I want predictable revenue for months.

On end, not these big numbers for a single month and then I don't get anybody after that. So not a single one of my six clients who came in did a pay in full because I didn't want them to.

Freddy D: 00:20:03

Right.

Colby Wegter: 00:20:03

And I'm confident in my ability to get them the results they're after. They're already getting like two of them have already 5x their the total value of the program in the first month.

So I'm very confident that they will get what they need. And so what do I now have?

I have four months of predictability where it's like sweet, I can go back into my business, not worry about being so stressed out and then just do what I want to do. The big buzzword now is going to be personal brand. You were just being yourself.

I'm the same way like a lot of people interact with me because I'm very public of I'm a dad. That's kind of like the entry point, has nothing to do with business. But they're like, hey, you're running a business and you're a dad.

You must not be full of it. Like some 20 something who gets to sleep until 11am Right. It's like yeah, fair enough. Work is the easiest thing. Being a dad's the hard thing.

Freddy D: 00:20:48

Yeah, it's a different ball game. You're still dead. So totally get that. And you're right, it reminds me of I was working with a government agency that I landed a couple years ago.

Brought in about 800,000, just that one account per year. And we built a relationship to where she wasn't a lead generating source but she was a validation source.

So as I sold into other government agencies, I would use her as a reference. And so as a testament, I would say, okay, we've been working with this department of the state, you should contact them how we've been helping.

And so I used her as my sales agent. I was letting her do the selling. She's responsible for da da da da da da da. And I got several more different departments in the state and that grew.

We scaled that company just a couple of years ago, over a million dollars in a year.

Colby Wegter: 00:21:42

I'm glad you mentioned that because that's incredibly like underutilized is the kind of like the reference list.

We would use that in the agency all the time where it was like, hey, I started getting on sales calls after a while because we were retaining so well. I was like, hey, let's see if I can do this on the front end too. And so when I would Talk to them.

I would actively say to them, I'm like, are you looking at other agencies right now? And they say, well, no, you're the first. Or yeah, we're thinking about, or whatever.

And I'm like, okay, well, I would love for you to think about this and go talk to other agencies before you get back to me. Which a lot of people would say, like, close on the call.

But again, I almost wanted to create friction so that I knew I had somebody and I would tell them outright. I'm like, I don't want you to work with me because you like me. I want you to work with me because you know it's going to work.

And by the way, here, like, here's a list of 10 different of our clients who can speak to whether, you know, 100% transparently whether we do what we say we're going to do.

Freddy D: 00:22:30

I had a word as a ballsy move back in the day. I was an advanced guy. I had a cell phone in the early days and I had a daytimer.

And I would turn around and I'd have all the customers printed in all that stuff because I'm a computer geek. And I would turn around and says, okay, we've talked to the presentation. You like this stuff. I says, I'll tell you what.

And I did exactly what you just said. I'd say, here's my daytimer, pick any of the customers, here's my cell phone, call them. And I'd shut up.

Colby Wegter: 00:22:58

That is a ballsy room. I like that a lot.

Freddy D: 00:23:00

And nobody ever took me up on it, but I closed every deal.

Colby Wegter: 00:23:04

Yeah, I was on the back end. So I would not consider myself a sales wizard by any means.

But like I sold these six people the same way I sold anyone at the agency was saying, like, hey, I don't need your business. Like, you need to be a hundred percent all in for me to consider you just by kind of like pushing them away, like, go look at other agencies.

Many times you'd get an email like that same afternoon and be like, hey, I know you told us to look at other agencies, but like, we really like what you had to say. Can we start soon? Or whatever.

Freddy D: 00:23:31

So let's go back to some of the things that you help marketing agencies get themselves out of their own way.

Colby Wegter: 00:23:38

Yeah, well, I would say I help the founders specifically. It's very holistic.

But in terms of buzzwords, like I said with personal brands, another one is like kind of community and group coaching and all that sort of stuff.

The tinkering I was doing with the offer for a long time is I think I want a community and I think I want to create a model that I'm really interested in. And it failed because I don't, I know nothing about community. So I started just kind of reiterating it and realized what do I do really well?

I work one on one really well. So my offer in terms of getting people out of their own way is so focused on the model is really straightforward.

I call it the Autonomy agency model because we're after autonomy, right? Being able to say yes or no to anything without fear, that's the ultimate flex to me. You can have all the money in your bank account.

I know plenty of millionaires who hate their life right now just through networking. There's no value in money alone. And so anyways, basically we do self scale, then team scale and then client scale.

And the reason for that is everything trickles down from the founder, the owner, whoever I'm speaking to directly.

So if you're the type of owner who says, well I want my staff to have a great work life balance and you tell them that I've worked with people who are like we're a family. And then they would email them on 8pm on a Saturday expecting a response by Sunday morning, it's like that trickles down for me.

Freddy D: 00:24:46

Fail.

Colby Wegter: 00:24:47

They don't care what you say, they care who you are.

If we are going to look at this holistically for the long term, because I will not work with anyone who is in it just for the money or like I have written off anybody. No offense to you, I'm just not the person for you.

If you start your agency with the sole intention of making money and then selling it, you're not my people. I don't start anything with the intention to quit. That doesn't make any sense to me.

These are people who are attracted to me because they know I'm not just thinking of here's a tool in a system you can plug and install and then off I go. So the offer is real simple. It's like we solve your high priority problems one at a time. Everything trickles down from you.

And so if you have terrible time management and toxic behavior and all that sort of stuff, we're working on that until it's solved. Because there is no point in trying to maximize your client LTV if you can't manage your day to day.

Freddy D: 00:25:34

That whole energy goes throughout the whole company. You're absolutely correct.

Because if someone that has poor management skills, they might be Technically competent and they might be the greatest marketing person on the planet Earth, but they got a personality of a donkey. Isn't going to work.

It starts at the top because that sets the energy through the whole company which carries on to the customers and partners and everything else.

Colby Wegter: 00:25:59

People can change. So I don't want to say if you're already like struggling or you think not many of those people would identify themselves as having a big ego.

Probably, but we dissected it. They would. It's like you can change. It's really what your core values are. For me, right?

Like I'm not writing off anybody who's just kind of angry in response to having a tough go of it or whatever. Like, I was angry when I was burning out. I'm not a bad person. But my core values were I'm on earth to help the most people possible. Right?

Like if you were on earth just for you, there are other people for you.

And the reason it starts with self scale is like we're not talking about scaling in terms of revenue, we're talking scaling in terms of getting closer and closer to your potential. Because if your agency is running you, you're running it by default, not by design.

If you need to respond to every message in minutes and you don't have the self awareness and control to set boundaries and constraints in a way that you actually can enjoy and other people respect. My first client ever would respond to messages within seconds on Slack. And I simply just ask, like, why do you do that?

Well, because if I don't do it, then everyone's just doing nothing. I was like, oh, okay. So the real problem is you don't trust people to think for themselves. Is that what we're saying?

Freddy D: 00:27:08

It's exactly what's being said. Instead of empowering people, it's controlling people.

Colby Wegter: 00:27:13

Not a bad person, one of the nicest people ever, right? Just when you're in the weeds, it's the forest through the trees. You can't see the real problem. Correct.

So someone like me comes and weed whacks it all down, asks a question, you're like, oh yeah. Two months later, he doubled his revenue. Because he's an A player, he was bottlenecking everybody else.

And so when he realized, hey, if I just get out of the way a little bit, which is exactly what I did.

When, you know, the agency was transforming into a much better higher leverage one, everything all of a sudden feels like this massive momentum and positive movement. It's like, that's why we solve the self problem first.

Because you can go earn a ton, but you're not going to hit that potential in earning or just how it feels if you're answering every message within minutes.

Freddy D: 00:27:52

The only time speed is important is a prospect. I tell people, an inquiry comes in, you got 15 minutes and after that you're toast in today's world.

Colby Wegter: 00:28:01

And so that's how we want a lot of business. Just being the first person to respond.

Freddy D: 00:28:05

I've closed more sales because of that when I was working at an interpreting company, because I was the first person to respond.

And I basically set the tone as well and the bar for anybody if they were looking beyond, they had to go to this level to pass what I had put in place.

Colby Wegter: 00:28:22

And that's for any business. I gave an example of a post I wrote recently. When we moved to Milwaukee from Chicago. We looked at like 10 different apartments.

The first apartment we ever saw, concierge at the door, bottle of water, walked us straight up to the apartment, no waiting, like all that sort of stuff. What apartment do you think we went with?

Because other ones, like left us in the lobby, they were 10 minutes late, no offer of water, or like, hey, how's your day going? Or anything like. Like it was just transaction.

Freddy D: 00:28:47

Yeah, it was transaction. I always say the little things are the big things. Most people never look at that. They focus on, let me look at this big huge thing I did.

But did you actually take time to recognize the team for the reference or the individual? One of my quotes in my book is people crawl through broken glass for appreciation and recognition. Tell me I'm wrong.

Colby Wegter: 00:29:09

I love it.

Freddy D: 00:29:09

The reality is just like you're saying, the guy was in the weeds, didn't empower his people, didn't recognize him for anything like that. So it becomes a job versus this is a cool place to work. And that's what I was mentioning before.

It starts at the top, like you said, because that energy flows. And I've been in companies where I've had management that was empowering. And those are my best years on a global scale.

I was in charge of global sales and marketing. So I was given a product. Here's a product, nobody knows about it. Go to work.

And I scaled it from 0 to 60 resellers around the world and net 3 million to the company at $5,000 net chunks. But that person believed in me as the owner of the company and said, let me go. What resources do I need?

And I'd be gone three weeks in Europe because it was cost effective and everything else. And I go visit all the resellers and.

And I didn't just deal with the resellers, I dealt with the salespeople and what marketing tools that they need and what did they need for their market? Because German market is different than French market, than Italian market, than English market.

And what do we needed to do from a marketing perspective to empower them to be able to sell our product? And then more importantly, since they were independent, how do I get mind share of my product to scale what we did?

So you're absolutely correct, is that whole aspect starts with mindset.

Colby Wegter: 00:30:38

It really does, yeah. And there's. Have you experienced this, Freddie, where it's like I find myself talking with a lot of people who are looking for the big thing. Right.

And everything you and I are saying, if you look at it at surface level, it's incredibly obvious and common sense. Like it's so small and straightforward.

Freddy D: 00:30:52

The little things are the big things. Yeah.

Colby Wegter: 00:30:54

They're overcomplicating.

It's like sometimes when I am entering the market via social media content or something like that, I kind of subscribe to the giveaway, the education sell, the implementation. Right. Like I'll tell you everything.

Most of the stuff that I say you can do on your own, but you'll probably want to do it with me because you don't want to take the amount of time it takes to do it on your own.

Freddy D: 00:31:14

It's like reading a book. You can take 20 years to learn what the person put in a book that you read in four hours. Same thing. What you're doing is the same thing.

Okay, here's the stuff. Good luck. Take you 20 years. Or you can work with me and we'll collapse it into a day.

Colby Wegter: 00:31:30

Yeah.

Freddy D: 00:31:31

Exaggerating on the timeline, but you get the point.

Colby Wegter: 00:31:34

That's one of the things we're working on. Since my business is so young, we're working on a lot of time management and offers, but a lot of it's offer stuff. Right.

And these people have sold, they're smaller agency owners, so they've sold anywhere between 10,000amonth to a hundred thousand a month. Right. In terms of just retainers, whatever.

And despite the people in the a hundred thousand dollars a month range, we're still looking at their offer because a lot of the times they're so talented and they are attentive and they do a lot of little things really well.

But the problem is like the offer is either archaic, it's no longer relevant, or it doesn't actually feel that good when they get on the Delivery side, right?

And so something I heard this, like just at a kitchen table where somebody said, I was like, how the heck did I not realize that they didn't call it this. I call it this. I call it the identity pyramid. But if you picture a pyramid with four levels as you go up, it's harder to let go of.

A lot of people I talk to the bottom of the pyramid is money. But they get hung up on that, like, oh, I don't want to throw my price out there, or I think my price is too high.

Or like you're thinking low level, that's the lowest on the pyramid. It's easiest to let go with money, right? Then it comes to time. And that's like reading the book you mentioned, right?

It's just kind of to be able to distill 20 years into a four hour read or whatever. Okay, now you've saved a bunch of time and then it just comes down to implementation. But that's harder to let go of than money.

And then it, the next one is energy. Energy is just like what I attribute mental thought to.

And so a lot of the people I work with are, they're spending so much energy not having clarity on something. I always say it's like you got a big ball of yarn in your head and you just don't know which string to pull to unravel it.

And every time I say that, they're like, oh yeah, that's how it feels, that's energy. But the top is identity. And the reason I work one on one with people is because they're building their offers right now.

I want them to message me as soon as they're like, I'm stuck. And I promise to respond to them within 24 hours, often sooner, so that they're not stuck for long.

And so as an example, I have a copywriter who, you look at her website, it's just the classic like a ton of services, doesn't differentiate herself in any which way. And I said, what are you most passionate about? Like, why are you a copywriter?

Well, I just really love giving a voice to people who don't know how to access it. So you're changing the identity from the voiceless to someone who's really confident in what they have to say and will do so freely.

And it's like a light bulb went off in her head. I'm like, that's your offer. The client doesn't care about your features, they don't care about your experience, they don't care about any of that.

They are here. They're at a kind of the hell. Your offer is the bridge to heaven, simple as day. They are this person. They want to be this person. The rest will.

And you don't have to invent anything. You already have the skills to do that. What problem do you want to solve? Everything trickles down for the person.

And then the secondary is everything trickles down from the offer. If you are 100% confident in your offer, you're the person you want to be. All you have to do is get the reps in and tell people about it.

Do you want those things? Do you want to do that? And the exact no. Right.

So figure out your own identity first and then sell the transformation to the person you want to work with. Like it's actually business is not that complicated.

Freddy D: 00:34:29

So this goes back to the old saying, jack of all trades, master of none, be the master of one that can do all the other things. So that's what exactly what you're talking about is. What is the one thing that you're really known for and that's the thing you enjoy doing.

Yeah, I can happen to do all these other things, but this is where I'm a badass at. And now you have something that someone is looking for, that specific thing, you're it. Oh, and you can do all these other 12 things. Super cool.

Colby Wegter: 00:34:59

Get the first yes. Right. If you deliver exactly what you say you're going to do, they will ask you what else do you do?

Or it will be very easy for you to ask them, what other problems do you have?

Freddy D: 00:35:08

Right.

Colby Wegter: 00:35:09

And then you got it.

Freddy D: 00:35:10

So Colby, as we wrap up here, great insights, great conversation on leadership marketing strategies and you're doing some really cool stuff with helping marketing agencies get themselves out of their own way so that they can scale, which is there. They just need to get out of the weeds and see it.

Colby Wegter: 00:35:30

Life is much more fun when you're not doing it all alone. And I learned that the hard way.

Freddy D: 00:35:34

How can people find you?

Colby Wegter: 00:35:35

Well, I am the only Colby Wester on earth as far as I know. So if you want to see like my daily stuff, just Google Colby Wachter. You'll find my LinkedIn. I post to YouTube and Instagram pretty regularly.

That's all the free stuff.

I do have a free newsletter as well, which is where I'm pretty vulnerable and just share all the real stories and methods that I've used in the past, hoping that it helps somebody. And if you are a six figure marketing agency owner and it's like, yep, seven figures on a 30 hour workweek sounds great.

Then it is just autonomyagency.

Freddy D: 00:36:00

Com. Excellent. And you have anything for our audience?

Colby Wegter: 00:36:03

I'm cooking up something right now. What I will say is if you sign up for the newsletter, you'll get what I call just 100k client magnet method.

And that's literally just like I'm absolutely. I will die on the hill of your perfect fit. Clients are dying to work with you. You just don't know how to speak to them and get them.

And so that's what that serves. It's basically my exact process and framework that I've used for years and years to work with people I want to work with.

In light with a lot of the conversation we had today, I am working on something else in terms of kind of around that identity pyramid a little bit as well, but I shouldn't advertise that if it's not ready yet. So if you sign up for the newsletter.

Freddy D: 00:36:36

All right, well, we'll make sure we put that into the show notes and put all your website and contact information to our show notes so that our listeners that are interested in and more importantly, that our marketing agencies that are interested in scaling the seven figures for 30 hours worth of work. You're the guy to reach, too.

Colby Wegter: 00:36:52

Yeah. And this was a tremendous conversation, Freddie. I really enjoyed it. And fantastic questions. You really got my brain moving today.

Freddy D: 00:36:58

I like it. Well, Colby, thank you very much for being a guest and we look forward to continuing the conversation on another day.