Agency owners are entrepreneurs, and more often than not start their marketing agency because they see an area where they can improve and do better sometimes that’s from within a different agency. Sometimes that’s from within a brand that was using agencies, but going from being an agency client to owning and growing an agency of your own is challenging.
Where do you start? What are some of the unique challenges and how can you overcome them?
Agorapulse’s Chief Storyteller Mike Allton sits down to talk with David Mink about the CEO of Avalanche Media, a full-service marketing agency. David leads a team of talented and passionate professionals and fractional CMOs who help clients achieve their online marketing goals with over 11 years of experience in this role and over 14 years in the industry, he’s developed a deep understanding of the ever-changing digital landscape and the best strategies to optimize performance and results.
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E-Commerce Brand to Agency
Mike Allton: Now, before you launched your agency, you were contracting other agencies as part of an e-commerce brand.
Tell us about that experience.
David Mink: Yeah, no, it’s a fun story.
In my undergraduate days, I worked at a business that offered business consulting for internet marketing entrepreneurs. And I had landed a job on a hotline where I was getting questions from people who were trying to find a supplier, build out a website, market a website that they had recently come, [and] built all of those things. And so this was a great incubator for me. I just got baptized [into] internet marketing and entrepreneurialism at a pretty young age, which for me was all brand new. My dad was military, so I never really thought about the prospect of owning a business.
But as I was working this hotline, I was talking to people every day who were in the process of doing that and kind of caught fire by it. Just really enjoyed the whole process as part of that decision: “Hey, I should throw my hat in this ring.”
And so me and a couple of college buddies started a custom mattress company. We called it Rocky Mountain Mattress, being here from the Salt Lake City area. And so that company allowed us to work with agencies. Shortly after starting Rocky Mountain Mattress, I began law school. The first year of law school, the business was sleepy. Frankly, we’d only really get business if somebody referred somebody our way or something like that. But starting my second year of law school, we started to rank on the first page of Google for a custom mattress, memory foam mattress, RV mattress, all these different terms.
I quickly had a legitimate business. And so [in] my second and third year of law school, I probably spent more time in empty classrooms fielding mattress calls than maybe anything else. So through that process, we just had an opportunity to work with a lot of different consultants and agencies. I’d say that we were probably heavier on the consultant side than a true agency, a lot of one-man bands or one-woman bands, but we had an independent contractor that did a lot of the design and development work on our website. We had several different kinds of SEO either consultants or small agencies that might help us with things like link building or something along those lines.
So, that opportunity was my early introduction to working with others to do things that either I didn’t want to do or couldn’t do myself.
Mike Allton: Got it. Got it. So you’d done e-commerce, you’d done retail, you’d worked with all kinds of different agencies and consultants. So you had that familiarity with marketing agencies.
Why was it a challenge for you to start and build an agency of your own?
David Mink: Yeah, it’s a good question. Honestly, Mike, I’d say that—not that there weren’t challenges and there were certainly a lot of challenges and we can get into those—but I looked at it more as an opportunity than anything else because we had had a variety of experiences.
I felt like, to a degree, we had a fingerprint on what was a good experience and not such a good experience. And I may tell you that the catalyst for starting our own agency was we had started that custom mattress company in the mid two thousands. When 2008 rolled around, obviously it affected that company pretty, pretty severely, just because people were buying mattresses for toys. It was for cabins, boats, RVs, things like that. And so with the economic downturn, there weren’t nearly as many people spending money on those kinds of recreational vehicles and whatnot. We were looking for additional income and we thought, “Man, we sure have learned a lot about internet marketing and e-commerce. Maybe we’ll do some consulting.”
The thought process was: We know exactly what to offer because this is what we’ve been doing for the last several years on the other side of the table.
First of all, I’d say it was a great opportunity because we had so many experiences that I think paved the way in terms of challenges.
Some of the things to figure out were most of the people we had worked with really had one lane. They just knew SEO or just new web design and development or maybe just advertising.
We had a vision that was painful from our perspective because we had to constantly have these broken-record conversations. You’d get off a meeting with somebody on Monday explaining what you were up against, what you were trying to achieve. You’d have another meeting on Wednesday and you have to go right back around and have that same conversation. As part of what my partners and I wanted to build, we wanted to build a full-service agency that could give people like ourselves an opportunity to work with one group that understood your brand, your story understood me as an individual, what my love language when it comes to communication and relationships and all of that and not have to have such a game of telephone all the time.
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The biggest challenge was effectively building out a full-service agency where you could simultaneously offer a very high level of service. But also do enough of the core pillars of marketing that you effectively could offer that, that one-stop shop. And that certainly is all about talented people. It’s about being able to bring the right people your way.
A lot of challenges in the early days of “When do we have enough money to hire the next key person?” and “How are we going to balance that supply and demand game and talent game?”
Going From Client to Agency
Mike Allton: I imagine then that meant that you focused, like you said, on some very, very core and specific solutions or directions.
Could you articulate how you started that? What specific services were you offering initially? And how did you grow or expand as you went?
David Mink: Yeah, no, it’s a great question.
I’d say that the marketing pillar that we at our core understood the best and could, and could deliver on a personal basis was SEO. That’s where we won with our custom mattress company. And so that was the first pillar of marketing that we hung our hat out there of, Hey, we do this kind of work. Let us know if you’d like some help with your SEO. We had an understanding that the very first additional service offering that we’d like to bring on would be paid because there’s such a powerful relationship between paid advertising and SEO. A lot of times your best keyword research can be what’s happening on the paid side, some of your best audience research, etc.
That was our number two. Frankly, the way that that happened is we worked with another agency. They ended up dissolving down the road. We had an opportunity to pick up one of the folks that we had worked with previously. So we had had personal experience, and they understood us great. Because at one point we had been their client, and now they worked at our agency.
Mike Allton: I like that overarching approach because you make a really strong argument that it’s just so much easier to work with one agency that can handle virtually everything that I might need as a business versus having to work with four or five different consultants.
I think a lot of folks who might be listening are very focused on a specific niche right now, but may be thinking about entertaining that idea of growing and expanding. That’s a very great approach that you’ve taken and had that core competency and then expanded from there and do some acquire or whatever you need to do to bring in the right folks.
Examples of Client to Agency Success
At what point did you feel like this was working, this is successful? Could you share some of the examples of those early successes that you had with clients?
David Mink: I’ll piggyback off your last question too.
The next core group of people that we started hiring was creatives, and it wasn’t to offer creative services because people were looking for new branding or something like that. We found that one of the most effective SEO tactics that we were using back at this time was creating great data visualizations. And so we’d found a fantastic designer, a really fast, fantastic kind of researcher/writer who was on that cusp of things that are pop culture, very interesting, or proprietary, etc. So we developed this little niche for being able to create content that had the potential to quote-unquote, “go viral,” right? Or at least pick up some attention from other websites for link-building opportunities or get a little bit of social attention.
Bridging onto your question of like, “When did we feel like we had made it?” We started being hired not necessarily just by individual business owners but by big agencies.
Some of the bigger agencies in the digital marketing sphere at that time—I don’t know if any of these names are familiar to you, but like SEO.com or OrangeSoda.com, Internet Marketing, Inc., back in those days—these were some of the bigger shops around, and they started hiring us to white label work with their enterprise clients. A lot of what we were doing was building out these data visualization strategies and infographics. We got into PowerPoint presentations early before there were a lot of tools like Canva and things like that. And so when did we feel like we made it? We felt like we made it once we realized, “Hey, we’re the agency behind the work for these big agencies enterprise clients.”
That led us to decide to get serious about what we were doing, but we decided to flip the script instead of having the mattress company as our 80 percent and doing a little bit of consulting on the side. We flipped that around and so we ended up selling the mattress company and then going all in on a marketing agency.
In 2012, we came up with the name Avalanche Media and opened our first office here in Salt Lake versus working from our homes and basements brought in our first couple of full-time employees to work at the office and all of that. I think that’s when we felt like we’re there, we’re legit. The best agencies in the world are using us to work with their top-tier clients.
Advice for Past Self
Mike Allton: So, Dave, if you could go back to 2012, when you went all in on Avalanche or maybe even earlier than that, and talk to that younger David Mink, what advice would you give him? What would you think that he needed to do maybe differently to launch the agency and propel you even further?
David Mink: Something I’ve learned over the years is just how important your network is not just with business owners and people who are CMOs and directors of marketing to other companies but also with your competition, right? Like, your friendly competitors.
One of the things that I wish we would have learned earlier is to think of other agencies, like fewer people you’re at odds with, and more good friends of yours that you like competing on the field with. To look for those opportunities to teach each other and push each other to make the entire industry better. To share leads when there’s something that comes across your desk that isn’t the right fit, but you know another group might do better with it, or you’ve got a conflict of interest there, or something like that.
And so that’s one of the things that I feel like you learn as your career moves on and the earlier you can learn that probably the better.
What Clients Shouldn’t Do
In your opinion, what shouldn’t clients do? What might get them fired? And can you share an example?
David Mink: It’s such a fine line. I mean, honestly, I will tell you our approach as an agency is very much old school with the client is always right to a degree. And so I will say that we lead with “You’re the boss,” right? And we want to be known for excellent customer service and all of that.
However, over the years, again, one of the things that you get better at is pushing back on people being a challenger when you need to.
One of the first things I would say is that I’ve found—probably the key skill—the best agency people have is the ability to be extremely likable. For the client to feel like this is a friend, someone who has my back, but also just like your favorite friends, someone who calls me on my BS and will challenge me when that needs to happen.
If you’re a client, a few of the things that maybe we can categorize in that BS category are some clients will try to steal your employees. Come after people. Don’t put up with that if you’re an agency and something like that happens. I mean, that’s a deal breaker. So many business people in general just look at contracts as one-way deals that are only there to protect them, but they don’t mind breaking them. And so, over the years have found that people who think seriously about what they’re signing and then assign themselves to live by it as a big deal.
Again, I think that’s one of those areas you can call people on and challenge them if they’re going outside of the contract. You’ve got to be a good communicator. It doesn’t matter if you’re the client and the other groups, the agency, you can’t expect good service and you can’t expect to win. If you’re ghosting people, failing to respond to things with adequate thought, etc. Then the last thing that I would say is that sometimes there’s just the wrong person in a seat. I think it’s your job as an agency person to point that out.
Some common examples are oftentimes you’ll find that a business might let marketing roll up to like a head of business development or maybe a chief operations officer.
But frankly, that individual just doesn’t understand marketing. Any time you just sit there quietly when you know somebody’s ordering off a menu, they don’t understand. Maybe ordering a meal that isn’t what they’re expecting to receive. You’ve got to raise your hand and make sure that you’re helping somebody inside the organization, though, in a tactful way they probably should rethink how marketing is rolling up inside their organization.
Tell me how your fractional CMO services play into that kind of situation.
David Mink: What we found now is one of our key questions early in conversations with a new potential customer is I just asked them, “Tell me how, tell me about your organizational chart. How does marketing sit inside your company? Who’s responsible for it? Who do they have underneath them? What is their background, etc?”
You always want to try and talk to the highest person on that marketing totem pole that you can. And this goes back to that challenger mindset. If we determine that marketing is rolling up to somebody who probably is going to struggle with an agency relationship, then we’re just very verbal about it. “Hey, we’ve been doing this for decades. I’ve seen this movie a few times. Here’s what I would advise you not to do.”
- Don’t just hire an agency thinking that they can solve all the gaps that you have in your organization.
- You need to make sure that you’ve got an executive, somebody with an executive seat even if that’s on a fractional basis. And so the way that our company positions itself in the marketplace when that’s the case when we have a company who we can tell they don’t have strong executive marketing leadership, as we suggest to them versus a standard marketing agency relationship.
- We would propose that you look at a fractional-led agency-backed relationship. And so it’s the best of both worlds. You’re getting a qualified fractional chief marketing officer who can come in, and help you establish all your baselines. Help you hire the internal team you might need but create a marketing plan that the executive team buys off on and then manage to that executive plan.
The reality is most fractional CMOs out there in the marketplace are one-man bands or women, like it’s just a one-person show. They have to then go get help from independent contractors, etc, to get a lot done. And that’s what we help companies understand we have the best of both worlds.
We have a room of fractional CMOs, but they have 50 colleagues behind them who are agency people so they can get their hands dirty as a group and implement an SEO strategy if that needs to be done, etc.
That’s the way we approach that.
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