Breaking agencies out of ruts early in 2025

TL;DR

• Our subconscious is fantastic at working things out if we give it space.
• Asking a few questions can help leadership teams reframe and break out of ruts.
• What kind of value would you need to deliver to charge twice as much?
• What do you do that’s valuable, and why do clients hire you?
• What should you focus on?
• Stepping away for a bit can work wonders for our businesses. What we trade-off in productivity, we tend to gain in better directionality.
• I’m refactoring our Revgen Review Service and offering a discount for feedback. Reply to this email if you’re interested in participating.

​

Happy New Year!

I was lucky enough to take the entire two weeks off over the holidays for the first time in… well, ever, maybe?

It was incredibly rejuvenating.

This picture is from a hike we took with friends featuring Nettle, the half-husky. They were up from North Carolina, and it was her first time seeing that much snow. That didn’t deter her, though. She crushed the full five miles like a champ and could have done another five if her humans weren’t frozen.

Throughout the time off, I forced myself to stay away from work.

This was aided by a small notebook I kept nearby to jot down work thoughts. I followed the mindfulness approach: I let thoughts come, wrote them down, and let them pass.

When I reviewed my notebook earlier this week, there were a ton of “duh, just do this” moments.

I love how I can park challenges in my subconscious, and they come out solved. The only real rule is that I need to stay away from work and destress a bit.

Hiking does that for me.

That whole process is helped immensely by seeding it with the right prompts. What follows are some of my favorite prompts applied to digital shops that should help break teams out of a rut.

Let them marinate though, it’s amazing what the subconscious can figure out for us.

​

Double Your Pricing

This is almost a cliché at this point, but improving pricing power can transform an agency.

When I used to offer benchmarking services, I’d come across agencies that were a notch or two below average for their service mix.

They obviously asked me what it’d take to bump them up to average.

Nine times out of ten, it wasn’t anything external, the answer was a mindset shift.

They didn’t believe they were worth that increased price per hour, so it made it impossible for them to confidently sell it.

A great way to crack through this is to ask what you’d need to do to charge twice as much.

What kind of value would you need to deliver to your client where the ROI calculation is still soundly in your favor?

I love this question because it forces the team to think about pricing and value from the client’s perspective.

What will they pay for to solve their challenge or achieve their goal?

To answer that, you need to put a value on their challenge or goal. This is where the ah-ha moments happen. This is when agency leaders really see the ROI their teams can deliver, or they realize the actual barriers that exist.

When it’s mental, 2x-ing pricing is irrelevant. The goal is to shift the team’s mindset around value and close any blatant gaps. This could result in raising rates a few notches or 5x-ing pricing and shifting to value-based.

Most shops I’ve worked with shift their positioning and dramatically raise prices after this.

​

What’s Valuable?

Highly-related to the first question, what do you do that’s valuable?

Why do clients hire you?

I guarantee it’s not because you can deliver “top-tier SEO services.” Everyone says that.

This gets deep into pain-point research, but knowing what drives your clients goes a LONG way to making better decisions about where to take the agency.

This is easily the weakest point when I review ICPs and buyer personas.

There’s a second step after figuring this out.

It’s critical that this information is disseminated to your team and linked to their role in delivering it.

It’s shocking how rare it is to find an agency where team members can successfully articulate the value their firm delivers and their role in it. This is the root of misprioritization and its effects create friction throughout the organization.

If you’re deep enough in the business, this is typically something you can suss out yourself. If not, client interviews are fantastic. Have your team run through this too. You’ll be surprised at what they come up with, and this is the perfect chance to guide them.

​

Focus & Discipline

Shiny objects are incredibly alluring.

We get to live in this space of imagining them where everything just works out, and they’re integrated into our businesses, and suddenly, everything’s better.

Even if you shifted all your resources to go after a singular shiny object, nothing works out perfectly.

The issue with jumping from one thing to another at the first sign of friction (some people call this “pivoting” to ease the pain) is it prevents your team from developing any kind of grit.

Focus and discipline force your team to address a challenge head-on.

It naturally builds expertise in an area and allows you to actually do something better than another agency.

​I wrote about valuing options and, thus, evaluating shiny objects in a past newsletter. ​

Letting your subconscious handle this one can be fantastic since it can sort of filter out a lot of the noise you get from client demands, new tactics you saw that other agency doing, and unhelpful “10 steps to scaling your agency” drivel from LinkedIn.

I’m convinced most of us know what we need to focus on, but we lie to ourselves to get out of doing the challenging work.

​

Seeking Balance

Hopefully, you were able to step away from the grind over the holidays. If not, try to seek some more balance this year.

What we trade-off in productivity, we tend to gain in better directionality.

See you again in a few weeks,

-Nick

​

P.S. I’m Refactoring the Revgen Review Service

One of the main things I’ve been working on lately was refactoring my Revgen Review Service.

The main problem with it was just how much time it took to deliver. If I calculate it on a dollar-per-hour basis, it’s my lowest priced engagement, by a lot.

The reasoning is because the first step is a thorough doc review. Here’s a list of the docs we request:

Reviewing all of those can take a LONG time, but I find gold buried in them more than half the time.

They also help me dig deeper during the one-on-one interviews that make up the second part.

I need to keep this portion, but some docs have been more valuable than others. Therefore, I’m experimenting with a refactored Revgen Review Service, where I cut that list to about a third.

In exchange for feedback on the refactored service, I’d like to offer it at 25% off for a limited time.

I have capacity for 2 of these starting the week of the 20th. The standard Revgen Review Service has been described as:

and

If you’re interested in trying this out, reply to this email and let me know. It’s $3,500, with results delivered within two weeks.

​