How to Leverage Event Speaking to Grow a Thriving Agency

Does your agency's branding stand out from the competition? Is your offering and positioning unique? Does it establish your agency's authority in your niche? Today’s guest explains how he turned his speaking career into a thriving agency thanks to smart branding.

Travis Brown is the founder and CEO of Mojo Up Marketing+Media, an agency focused on building unstoppable personal and company brands. Travis has been building his brand since long before stepping into the agency world. Now, with his diverse and talented marketers, he helps others figure out and grow their brands.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

• Getting started with public speaking
• Leveraging speaking engagements to grow the agency
• What works with branding.

Sponsors and Resources

E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.

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Taking the First Steps in the Public Speaking Space

Before ever thinking about starting his agency, Travis began a successful career as a motivational speaker. One of the most valuable lessons he learned was that the hardest part wasn't the speaking itself, it was getting people to pay him to get on their stage and speak.

He hired a coach early on who taught him to invest time in figuring out his brand and unique positioning. Once he learned to do that for himself, it led to more than 2,500 paid talks over 10 years.

Travis started out speaking about leadership, management conflict, and corporate training and eventually turned to youth speaking. Later on, he got a creative position as America’s anti-bullying coach, where he could use his experience while also having a big impact. This new role was an opportunity to get to another level as he toured the country and had interviews on national TV. In hindsight, this taught Travis the power of creating unique positioning in the market where, instead of competing with anybody else, he was complimenting them.

After many years in that industry and working as VP of marketing in a bank, he decided to start his own agency to help other people build their brands.

How Can You Start a Speaking Career?

It is a powerful feeling to get up on a stage. It’s the sort of experience which changes how people see you. In fact, Travis now rejects invitations to tradeshows without a speaking engagement. He recognizes the moment you step on a stage people will look at you as an expert, which is a game-changer for elevating your brand.

Try to link speaking engagements to your area of expertise and your core beliefs so you really come off as an expert. Travis always takes the topic he’s asked to develop and links it back to his branding, which is his specialty.

How can you start? He recommends starting local. If you have a niche, look for an opportunity to do a breakout session. For example, if you specialize in marketing for dentists, reach out to the local dentist association. Once you do find an opportunity, build the presentation thinking like a marketer:

• Have video and engaging content.
• Offer valuable nuggets of info.
• Have a free offer to get them into the funnel.

Following that, focus on leveraging the first speaking engagement into another and then another. Before you know it, you’ll be on a big stage with an audience filled with your ideal customer avatar. Being on stage will put you in the position of being the expert who can help them. They’ll get in line to hire you and your agency.

Turning Speaking Career Into a Thriving Agency

Travis says he has done it both the right and the wrong way. When he started his agency, he had accumulated a lot of experience in elevating himself and his brand. However, he didn’t know how to grow an agency. He got out there and got a lot of business for the agency with his brand. He soon learned it couldn’t be all about him. It had to be about the team and the focus really needed to shift to showcase their abilities.

His first attempt to do this didn’t go as well as expected. It was done too quickly and it didn’t make sense to remove him so fast when his personal brand was driving all the revenue. He had to start over and get to a point where he transfers the knowledge and credibility over to the agency.        

A perfect example of how to do this right is Gary Vaynerchuck and Vayner Media. Gary is the brand, but clients never expect to work directly with Gary himself. Travis has started to introduce his audience to his team, instead of just making it the Gary show. This is how Travis is rethinking his model.

Building your personal brand can be the fastest way to bring in revenue for the agency. You just need to know how to do it correctly so the agency can shine as well.

What Has Worked for His Agency’s Branding

Right now Travis and his team are leaning into the “diverse and talented” core of the agency. They realized they have a very diverse team, which is not common at all. The team of 15 people includes black men and women, Asian women, and Hispanic and white women. That diversity led to opportunities with companies that are looking to:

1. Work with a diverse agency, and
2. Trying to figure out how to get a similarly diverse team.

Now they are focusing on helping clients tell a story and develop an impactful brand through the lens of diversity. This way, they can help tell diversity stories by actually being one. They recognize that the diversity within the team helps them be that much better at telling diversity stories.

A lot of agencies may say they are diverse but can’t actually back it up. Credibility is so important nowadays and people are able to tell if you’re claiming you can do something but not actually doing it yourself. For his agency, diversity has become an important part of who they are and it also works as a unique identifier, which all agencies need.

What Are Your Agency’s Unique Identifiers?

Travis believes your agency should have its own “three uniques,” which are three things that identify and differentiate your agency. Some other agencies maybe have one or even two similar differentiators, but no other company should have those exact three since they are true to your specific DNA.

These identifiers will help you create your own unique persona as an agency. Those are your core values and how you will get very different types of people in your team to all work towards one single goal.

Moreover, being clear about your brand and core values will help you find like-minded individuals to join your team. For Travis, diversity is part of the agency’s culture and what he is building. He is passionate about building a brand and telling a story to help his client make the most impact and he wants a team that is equally passionate about that.

2 Tips on Hiring and Client Success

Travis likes to make sure that whoever his hiring is really passionate about doing the thing they’re hired to do. A lot of times in an agency you’re trying to fill some roles quickly. You end up hiring someone who is good but is not necessarily passionate about their role. In hindsight, he would really slow down and make sure people convince him that they want to be in their position within his company.

He also wishes he had spent more time understanding how to create a better client experience. His agency's end product is always good, but the process was sometimes a bumpy ride for clients. Now he really wants to focus on making the entire experience exceptional from start to finish.

Improving Customer Experience

Remember that you may be celebrating every time to make a sale, but the client is probably thinking “did I make the right decision?” A good way to ease their anxiety is to immediately communicate with them after the sale. Jason likes to send quick personalized videos where he welcomes the new client and offers a few pointers. People are usually surprised to learn his videos are not automated. This is why it’s worth it to think about ways to make each client feel appreciated. That extra effort will definitely separate you from everyone else.

Travis has learned there’s a difference between having a talented team and having a successful process. A successful process leads to a great experience. You need to map out every single instance within the client journey where you can impact and connect with them.

As the lead strategist in his agency, he has also learned once clients get to a stage where they’ll be communicating directly with the team, they feel abandoned by him. He empowers his team and lets them do what they do best. However, he is working on finding a way this in a way clients still feel taken care of.

As an agency owner, you need to position yourself as a thought leader and make it clear at some point clients will be working with the team.  Build up the team and make sure they know they will get better results than if you took care of every single aspect. Also, map out the process so they’ll know who they can turn to at each stage of the process.

Should We Look for Mentors in The Agency World?

After years of building his business from scratch, Travis admits he would’ve liked having someone to turn to. Nothing like that existed when he or Jason were building their agencies, but it is the entire reason behind the mastermind. Jason's goal is to be the resource he wished he had when he was starting out.

Think about how many times you’ve given advice to your team or partners. You probably can’t seem to do that with yourself and it’s because you are too attached to your business and your way of doing things to see other possible ways to approach a solution to your problems.

If you learn to ditch the competition mindset and look at it more as a community that understands and supports your most difficult challenges, then you won’t need a mentor.

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