Embracing Autonomy & Personal Branding with Nicholas Kusmich | Ep #665

Do you have a hard time letting go of agency operations and overall control? Have you embraced your role as the visionary and taken a step back from minor tasks? If you haven’t, why not? Today’s guest realized at one point that autonomy was his personal core value and that his agency would fail unless he prioritized it. This realization led to a new point of view, where he imagines how he would run his agency if he knew nothing about the business. This exercise has greatly helped him detach himself from agency operations and trust the agency can run without him. Tune in for an interesting discussion about autonomy in business, having employees vs. hiring contractors, and the benefits of building a personal brand.  

Nicholas Kusmich is a digital marketing expert who helps businesses rapidly scale revenue using Facebook Advertising. He’s behind the highest campaign ROI's in the world thanks to his “Contextual Congruence”– a proprietary process based on the marriage between direct response marketing and understanding social behavior.

He’s also the founder of H2H Media Group, a paid media agency that has been helping brands be heard since the onset of Facebook. Nicholas shares his journey of starting his agency in 2008 and how he transitioned from being a one-man show to building a team of autonomous contractors.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

• Strategies vs. tactics to build businesses.

• The power of personal brand.

• Putting autonomy first.

• An exercise to help take yourself out of the equation.

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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.

Long-term Strategies vs. Tactics as a way to Build Business

Back in 2008, Nicholas was told having his own business would require selling an ebook and a course. In order to sell said ebook, he started running ads on Facebook. Once he became good enough, people were contacting him to do these ads for them. Suddenly, he had an agency. Since then, his agency has had the fortune of working with big brands and helping businesses that needed to be heard become brand names.

In the beginning, Nicholas admits he was charging way less than he should have, with an initial fee of $500 a month. However, compared with today’s landscape where you can get offers from people promising to work for free, it seems far more tamed. As an alternative, to get the attention of your first clients, he suggests being clear on what the fees are from the beginning but offering to only charge them after they see results. It’ll allow you to build leverage, get those new clients and not ruin your reputation.

Furthermore, you’ll get much better results by building your reputation using long-term strategies. Instead of emailing a prospect offering to send them a video, create 10 custom videos that offer value and send them over a certain period. You’ll be much more likely to get their attention and start a conversation. For Nicholas, “strategies build business and tactics make sales.” Yet everyone in the business seems to be using tactics.

Too many marketers are constantly chasing the latest trends in an attempt to capture attention and make quick sales. To some extent, of course it makes sense to always be aware of new developments and using new technologies. However, the consistency and focus on long-term strategies is what will allow you to build a successful business.

Recognizing the Power of Building Your Personal Brand

Nick, unintentionally, built the agency’s brand around himself and his knowledge. Now he’s spent the last few years pushing off the notion that working with his agency means working directly with him. In the beginning, he was very much the button pusher, running the ads himself and taking sales calls. However, he realized he wasn’t living the entrepreneurial dream he’d wanted and was burned out and stressed. Learning about Dan Sulllivan’s unique ability principal, he realized real growth and development would only come by surrounding himself with people with their own unique abilities. These people would then take over every other tasks outside his specific expertise.

Next, it was time to build his brand, but was it better to build his own or the agency brand first? It seems no one can agree on whether it’s best to develop your personal brand or agency brand first. But we can all agree on this: personal brands are very powerful. Logan Paul and KSI took out heavy hitters like Coca-Cola not because Prime is the best energy drink in history but because they had really strong personal brands.

No one wants to engage with a brand, they want to engage with a human being. Nicholas recognized the value of his personal brand in attracting clients. His unique point of view on acquisition and advertising strategies is what sets his agency apart from others. In essence, your personal brand is something that will stay with you for years to come. Will you also need to build a separate agency brand? Yes, because that’s maybe something you’ll sell or license down the line while you keep the personal brand you’ve worked hard to build.

Establishing Autonomy as a Core Value in His Agency

Nick strongly believes in upholding autonomy as his number one value in all aspects. Going against this, he says, would only bring frustrations. This is why he set out to create a business where he would either not have employees or strictly hire autonomous individuals who don’t need to be micromanaged and know how to take initiative.

Taking this step felt simultaneously liberating and like he was going against industry standards. He felt like team culture was very important for owners but something that went against his sanity overall. In the beginning, he admits to going too far with this approach, diving so much into autonomy that he ended up being a bad leader. It was one thing to give people space to operate and a very different one to feel disconnected from his team. He had to go back and bridge that gap.

In the past, having employees had been a source of pressure. Therefore, he set out to look for specific team members who value autonomy and initiative just as much as he does. This approach has worked out well for him. Of course, working with contractors has its down side but it’s what is right for him.

It’s a vision that a friend of his called “netting up”, which means maintaining his net revenue while working less and having fewer employees. Importantly, Nick always had a vision of building the agency as a lifestyle business. Diving deep into building an agency where he could maintain his autonomy was his way to continue to scale the business on his terms.

An Exercise to See the Benefits of Taking Yourself Out of the Equation

For Nicholas, many agency owners find it hard to give up full control of their agency’s operations and sales because they started the business as a skilled person working by themselves. If you have the skill and do the work, when it comes time to hand that work off chances are you’ll think “I can do it better!”

An interesting exercise for these cases is to imagine how things would be if you started a business you knew nothing about. In this hypothetical case, you wouldn’t build the business around yourself but rather hire great people to execute the business while you come up with strategies in your visionary role. It’s an exercise that helps agency owners detach themselves from their business allow them to reach new heights by taking themselves out of the equation.

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