1735 – Scaling your Agency with Solomon Thimothy of Clickx

Josh (00:00:05) - Hey there, thoughtful listener. Would you like consistent and predictable sales activity with no spam and no ads? I'll teach you step by step how to do this, particularly if you're an agency owner, consultant, coach, or B2B service provider. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create more than $10 million in revenue. Just head to up my influence and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to up my influence and click on podcast. We'd love to have you. With us right now. Solomon. Timothy. Solomon. You are the co-founder of clicks. Clicks is found on the web at clique x dot I o Solomon, thank you so much for joining us.

Solomon (00:01:11) - Thank you so much, Josh, for having me.

Josh (00:01:13) - Yeah. Give us an overview of what clique X is and what you do.

Solomon (00:01:18) - Yeah. So I've been in the marketing space since 2006, right out of college, started a marketing agency. We scaled it very well, very happy with the success and the team and everything we built. And I started to help other marketing agencies start and scale their own business. So we took a lot of our technology, our software, our tools, our resources, and we built a basically a community around agencies to help them scale. So we do a lot of fulfillment work, lead generation and so much more for agencies. That's what clique exists.

Josh (00:01:51) - So primarily you have and I'm kind of looking at your website right now. So you have like a kind of a start my agency and then a scale my agency. And then essentially what they get to do is white label and I don't know, and I'll ask you about this is if they offer only your services or they basically offer what you're doing in the background as part of their suite of services. Would that be accurate?

Solomon (00:02:14) - That is absolutely right.

Solomon (00:02:15) - So our goal isn't to just sell our services. Our goal is to help them scale, right? So whatever that is. And for them, it might be completely doing all the services in-house, but they need help for marketing and lead narration. Or it could be a hybrid where they need help in lead generation and closing deals, but also require fulfillment, if that makes sense. So our first way into this market was opening up our own team so that other agencies didn't have to hire and bring on consultants to scale their sales. And then we realized that, like, well, that's a good start, but they need more help. You know, there's only so many resources we can bring on. So we began to start really transforming how they look at business. And just so I can kind of explain, when you're in the professional services business, you only have so much capacity, right. So your income is capped no matter how good you are. There's only 24 hours in a day. So we have to really think about, well, how do you go from 3 million to 10 million? How do you go from 10 million to 15 million, whatever that goal might be, it doesn't have to be 10 or 15 or whatever millions.

Solomon (00:03:20) - It's how do you double or ten or whatever that goal is, and you've got to either hire, you got to automate, you got to bring on a partner. That's where we are, if that makes sense.

Josh (00:03:31) - Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, million dollar question. What is working well in Legion and what is no longer working. Maybe because marketers all ruined it.

Solomon (00:03:45) - Absolutely. So we teach hybrid again for our lead generation. So we don't want our agency partners to rely on one source. Now when I say agencies, I'm also referring to the clients that we're serving as well, because at the end of the day, we want all of us to do what works and what doesn't work, right. So this is a general principle for any business owner at this moment. Again, when you do outbound, people are familiar with outbound. People are familiar with Cold Prospect, they're familiar with LinkedIn outreach. They're familiar with email prospecting. Find database of companies and you send them an email. But the challenge that you run into is no matter how qualified that company you're emailing, you're trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Solomon (00:04:24) - That's what it is, because we know that only about 3% of businesses are in market for what it is that you do right now, like right now, if you email them, they might book a call with you, but then 97% of all the effort that you're putting into, it's not actually going to return anything. Right. So but so we don't say, hey, don't ever prospect, don't connect people on LinkedIn or don't post content. The idea is, what can you do right now to have the best pipeline possible? And we refer to that as inbound. And what that really means is we need a system, an engine that runs 24 hours, seven days a week without you having to figure out what company do email, what should the messaging be? Should I email the president? Should I email a VP? And they say stop, unsubscribe, removing from the list like all these other things? That's aggravating. I say do that about 20% of the time because there's a lot of companies out there.

Solomon (00:05:17) - They may not be actively looking for what you do, but you can certainly help them. Does that make sense? So when your product and service is so good and you know that you can absolutely crush it for them, you have a moral obligation to help them. That's what Jay Abraham once said. So what I do is like, let's not do that for 80% of the time. Let's do 80% of the time inbound. And what that means is you have a really good master class or you have a really good webinar, a free training. I just wrote a book and I put it on Amazon for $0.99. Why? That's a great lead generation, a beginning tool for somebody to reach out and say, hey, I'm looking for help and let that be the engine. It kind of drips every day. You know, we have a free signup on our website. So it means that we used to charge several hundred dollars a month for access to our platform. We just took a small portion of that and said, we're going to make that available for free.

Solomon (00:06:11) - So right out of the gate when they come to our website, I don't ask them to download an e-book. I don't ask them to watch a webinar. I'm like, start for free. So what does that do? It gives us like the highest conversion rate in the history, because no one's going to say no to starting the whole thing for free. I mean, HubSpot does this, Canva does this, right. Any platform that you go to, they're always trying to give you a free version, because if you put 999, how many people are actually going to sign up Josh versus free?

Josh (00:06:40) - Right, right. Well, that was going to be my next question is, you know, I think that if we look at, you know, maybe what a lot of the messaging historically from the funnel marketing world would say is start with a tripwire and, you know, get people to buy into something low cost. And then you know that they're buyers, not just freebie tire kickers, but what you're suggesting is, no, no, no, no, no, make it easy for them to spend time with you.

Josh (00:07:07) - Can you address that debate real quick?

Solomon (00:07:10) - Yeah. So tripwire is kind of like digital marketer Ryan dies and all those guys, they kind of came up with that concept of get a $47 product out there, $27 product. It also has the concept of self liquidating offer. So it just whatever your ad cost is, you're going to get rid of that from this $47 cost. So technically one day upsell or whatever that product is, you're going to get all of that profit. It's a great concept. The problem is the cost of running ads is way more than $47 to get somebody to do things because, you know, you really have to hone in on who is that ideal customer. So the way that we're trying to do it is or we teach it is use inbound as a method. And that means that it doesn't really matter if it's organic, if it's paid, if it's your YouTube channel, it's your TikTok, it's any platforms. It could be LinkedIn, you name it. But you want 80% of the people reaching out to you that are warm.

Solomon (00:08:02) - They're all the needles and none of the haystack. Right now, your job is to convert them into a customer. But you know, if you have a software like a HubSpot or something like that, and you don't flood that with a bunch of contacts of potential companies, but you only have a list of 2000, 3000, 5000, whatever many people it is, or people that actually requested more information registered to your webinar because of an ad on Facebook. Look how warm that list is. Now you can invest your time in nurturing them and closing those deals into whatever your lifetime value is. It's so much easier. And because we got a positive response from an outreach, we don't necessarily add them to our CRM list until they've actually said, yeah, I'm actually interested. This is good timing. Thanks for contacting me. Just so happened to be that we're also interested in doing something. Then those people should be added so that you can nurture them to kind of the same way. Does that make sense? So it.

Josh (00:09:00) - Does.

Solomon (00:09:01) - We don't need to have all of our ads liquidate in a $47, as long as it's driving quality contacts into our system. Once they try our product or do something, watch our training, then I feel like they're a much better candidate for long term nurturing. And maybe in that process, some of them may fall off because their needs change. The timing isn't right. The budget didn't work, but I don't have to have contacts with people. They're just contacts, right? Like that doesn't do anything. You never take context of the bank. How's that?

Josh (00:09:34) - I love it, by the way, congratulations on the launch of your book. I just bought my copy on Amazon right now while we were talking. It's the 0 to 10 K scale playbook, the unconventional playbook for scaling your agency to $10,000 a month. And beyond that, what is the transformation that would take place in the reader when they read and apply what they learn in your new book?

Solomon (00:09:56) - Absolutely. So the thing about this book is my vision is to kind of grow that content over time.

Solomon (00:10:03) - So my publisher said, look, Sam, you got to get something out there because there's a thing called perfectionism that all of us entrepreneurs are trapped into, and there's never a good time. We're never happy with the products that we hold off on launching. Does that make sense? So what I've decided to do is there's a lot of folks that come to me that are just looking to start, and what they want to do is they want to fire their boss, right? Like they don't want to do the thing that they do anymore or something's happening. They got laid off. Whatever it is, they kind of want to get that income from another source. And because agency business is one of those very few businesses where you don't need an office location, you don't need to get certifications, you know, you don't need to have compliance, you don't need registration with the Finra and anything else. You can actually do this from anywhere. You can do it from your home. It could be, you know, I don't like to say on the beach, but some agency owners seem to like that.

Solomon (00:10:52) - Like, do you know what I mean? I don't want to paint the wrong picture, but you don't physically need to rent space. You don't need anything. In this case, a lot of people ask me, can you just give me a few tips on what do I need to do? And obviously there's a lot more than just a few tips. So what I went deep into is making it affordable. So anybody who might be looking to switch careers to. Jobs start something. This playbook will just give them what they need to do and nothing more, nothing less, right? And it's specifically kept really small. However, once you reach that stage of ten K, the next goal might be like build, you know, a $360,000 business or $500,000 business. So we plan on going back and giving them email templates of what work or ad templates that worked to scale once they get to a certain stage, but they don't need that, right. The second, if that's the goal, right. The transformation is to create six figure income for yourself, whether profit or top line, right out of the gate.

Solomon (00:11:48) - Very simple, very fast and efficient.

Josh (00:11:51) - Yeah. Can I ask you so we have a webinar on up my influence. And thankfully we don't have to rely on that. Like we have amazing things that we've done over the past years that put us in a place of where I'm extremely grateful. However, we do have a webinar and I'm not convinced it's doing what it should be doing. Is there any high level tips that you'd recommend that maybe we're most people screw up on a webinar versus kind of what you would recommend best practice for webinars today?

Solomon (00:12:21) - Absolutely. So just so I know, because this is kind of the same thing a lot of people do as well. They make a webinar and they wonder why they can't attract the people or convert the people to to customers. So the first question is, what do you want people to do after they come to the webinar? Do you want them to book a call with you, or are you asking them to buy something?

Josh (00:12:40) - You know, I've gone back and forth on that.

Josh (00:12:42) - And, you know, now especially like after having our conversation here, I think I want to make sure just given that I'd much rather just have them chat with me.

Solomon (00:12:51) - Okay. Because the challenge is sometimes if you want them to buy something, and we didn't make the content compelling enough to take action in buying something, they're not going to buy anything because they just we've been yeah, we've been spewing information at them and saying, here's an offer. Does that make sense? But the other would part would be if you want them to book a call with you, we have to make it very clear upfront. Hey, by the end of this call, we give you an opportunity to schedule a call with us. So they know it's kind of pre framing. You know that, hey they're not going to sell me anything. This is just going to be leading up to a call. But first let me learn why I might even want to talk to them. Your job is to show them what they're doing wrong or what they could be doing better.

Solomon (00:13:30) - 2 or 3 steps or three topics that might be and say, hey, if you fall into any of these categories, we're happy to chat with you to find out if this is a good fit for you. But if this is not what you want, like do not book a call because we don't want to waste your time that way. They're like only the qualified people. Then get on a call with you. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Josh (00:13:51) - So yeah. You want to talk with everybody I know.

Solomon (00:13:54) - And this is a challenge because we do this. I mean obviously we've been doing for as an agency for businesses when we're doing B2B sales, when we're doing high tech manufacturing company, whatever it is, you know, they're selling $100,000 equipment and we run a webinar and then a whole bunch of people book them, but they don't have the budget. They don't have the problem, they don't have the need. So then it's a wasting everybody's time, right? So we want to only drive qualified people.

Solomon (00:14:17) - So the way that we measure a campaign, just so you know, and I think every agency should do this, is if we did not build some revenue that they're supposed to get in because these are longer sales cycles, they're not going to be buying overnight. No, we don't track how much opportunity was created as a result of our effort. I'd love to get them to close, but it could take 18 months. It could take six months. It could be nine months. I don't know, right. But we want to drive quality contacts. That took a sales call that had the problem that we fix. And they are in sort of in the timeline of buying it. And they were actually putting a dollar amount to the opportunity and a potential close date in the next 90 days or more. That's what we want to measure. So if we use that as the actual measuring tool, what we say in the webinar really matters. Do you agree? Yeah.

Josh (00:15:10) - Yeah. Absolutely agree. Yeah.

Solomon (00:15:12) - We're not just going to post things about the industry what's changing, what's trending.

Solomon (00:15:17) - Because that's really irrelevant. What matters is do you have this problem? And if yes, here's how we fix it. Here are some examples of how we've done it in the past. And if this is something you want to fix for yourself and you are kind of fit these box, maybe we should have a conversation. It's so, so direct so people wouldn't waste their time talking to your valuable salespeople, to your B2B company or a coach consultant. They're only going to talk to you if they fit the box. Sometimes we even go to the extent of putting the price of what it cost to get started. Say it costs $50,000 on average. It costs $100,000 for us to start a program. And if that doesn't seem like that's something you have budget for, perhaps we should wait until that becomes so. This isn't even to disqualify the people rather than to qualify.

Josh (00:16:09) - Yeah, yeah yeah.

Josh (00:16:10) - Love it. Okay. So, Solomon Timothy, again, you're the co-founder of clique X and you're the author of the book 0 to 10 Scale Playbook The Unconventional Playbook for Scaling Your Agency to ten K a month and beyond, just picked it up myself.

Josh (00:16:24) - Your website is click x I o who should be reaching out and what do they do next?

Solomon (00:16:30) - So the folks that are that we talk to and train and coach every single day are individuals, business owners, maybe they're in real estate. They want to diversify their income. They might have other businesses, or you might be working a job right now. You're saying, hey, you know what? I'd like to create a side hustle, which I think is a legitimate kind of a strategy for a lot of people out there, because they may have the time or they might want to invest in themselves. I really believe that if you can figure out how to run a business, that is the greatest personal development that you could ever have. So if you're interested in developing yourself, there's not a better business out there than go into entrepreneurship. Go start something. So this is fortunately a lightweight, low cost, low overhead, almost zero entry cost. Right. Like there's not you don't need a big equipment or anything.

Solomon (00:17:14) - So the folks that are looking to do that and want to invest in themselves, want somebody who's done it before or an entire team to support them from start to finish. Those are the folks that I'm happy to talk to, or our team for that matter.

Josh (00:17:28) - I love it. Solomon Timothy. Click x.io. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a great conversation.

Solomon (00:17:35) - My pleasure. Josh, thanks for having me again.

Josh (00:17:43) - Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up my influence slash guest. If you're a listener, I'd love to shout out your business to our whole audience for free. You can do that by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or join our listener Facebook group. Just search for the Thoughtful Entrepreneur and Facebook. I'd love, even if you just stopped by to say hi. I'd love to meet you. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world.

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