The Innovative Agency 183. Monetizing Your Expertise with David Riggs
Intro
This episode covers a few ways an agency can branch out, capitalizing on techniques they’ve perfected through conducting business, after the point at which they achieve self-sufficiency. David Riggs joins us to discuss how he led a web development and SEO agency to success and wrote his company’s playbooks. He also speaks about how he now monetizes those core concepts to help other agencies reach the point of self-sufficiency, all while growing his own agency.
What you will learn in this episode:
- How to document your agency’s processes and operations.
- How to invest in newer companies and teach them how to succeed – and how to pick the right ones.
- The concept of trading playbooks – not money – for minority shares in a company.
- The 80/20 rule: finding the 20% that gets things moving for a new company; the other 80% will come with time.
- How problem-solving skills can be valuable for someone trying to break into this business model.
Bio
David Riggs, founder of Pneuma, a full-service web and SEO company, has been running businesses since he was seven years old. Where most kids dip their toes in lemonade sales, David did things a bit differently. He caught the “leadership bug” early on and never quit.
He structured his first “venture debt deal” when he asked his grandmother to loan him ten dollars for ten percent of his earnings. A few years later, while living next to a golf course, David gathered all of the errant balls that landed in his backyard and sold them at a yard sale. He then started flipping sneakers (think Jordans and other in-demand brands) for profit.
David graduated at the height of the pandemic in May 2020 and took a remote job that allowed him to continue working on Pneuma. David says, “I hired a co-founder to help run things while I closed deals on lunch breaks.” Many mornings, he would appear on podcasts before starting his day job. He spent a lot of his time “focusing on how to get the momentum rolling.” Eventually, he switched to Pneuma full-time and was joined by a CMO and CTO
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