EP 190: Positioning your agency with Drew McLellan

Figuring out which prospects align with your sweet spot and then doing the work necessary to earn their business are the difficult tasks of agency ownership. It starts with understanding what your sweet spot is. Who do you serve best? Where do you have a specialized knowledge that gives you a competitive edge?

As you have heard me say time and time again, for most agencies, being a general practitioner is neither desirable nor practical. It’s tough to compete on anything but the price when you look, sound and act the same as all of the other agencies out there. The brain surgeon is always more sought after and gets paid more than a general practitioner does.

That’s why I talk so often about positioning your agency. It’s how you find the right clients and focus on the right activities to attract and best serve those clients.

In this solocast, I spell out some of the options you could consider as you think about how to niche your agency. I walk you through the steps to take and areas on which to focus so that you can position your agency as a standout leader in whatever niches you are best suited to serve. How do you discover your sweet spot clients? How do you hone in on your point of view? How do you demonstrate subject matter expertise that will win the business? In this episode, you’ll get some answers and perhaps come away with a few questions to ask yourself and your team as you move towards that goal.

What You Will Learn in this Episode:

• The importance of defining who you serve and whom you don’t serve
• The 4 ways to think about niches
• Ways to narrow your niches
• How to position your agency by solving a particular problem
• Why POV is so important in positioning your agency
• How POV helps you stand out and focus on activities with the highest payoff
• Why you must not only claim but also demonstrate subject matter expertise
• Why walking away from a big bag of money is sometimes the right call

Drew McLellan is the CEO at Agency Management Institute. He has also owned and operated his own agency since 1995 and is still actively running the agency today. Drew’s unique vantage point as being both an agency owner and working with 250+ small- to mid-size agencies throughout the year gives him a unique perspective on running an agency today.

AMI works with agency owners by:

• Leading agency owner peer groups
• Offering workshops for owners and their leadership teams
• Offering AE Bootcamps
• Conducting individual agency owner coaching
• Doing on-site consulting
• Offering online courses in agency new business and account service

Because he works with those 250+ agencies every year — Drew has the unique opportunity to see the patterns and the habits (both good and bad) that happen over and over again. He has also written two books and been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fortune Small Business. The Wall Street Journal called his blog “One of 10 blogs every entrepreneur should read.”

Ways to contact Drew McLellan:

• Sweet Spot Client Filter: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/client-filter-var1/
• Email: drew@agencymanagementinstitute.com
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/drewmclellan