“Change it in one place – change it everywhere.”
Melanie the marketer was at a critical juncture in her career as an agency owner.
Her goal as an entrepreneur was what seemed the goal of everyone else in the digital space – hit 7 figures in ARR, or annual recurring revenue.
Try as she might, however, Melanie was unable to reach this milestone, and the more her contemporaries surpassed her on their million-dollar journeys, the more frustrated she became.
This was how Melanie was feeling when, while scrolling through the latest posts in her favorite Facebook Agency Success group, she came across the headline:
“Change it one place – change it everywhere.”
The Journey to 7 Figures
The sentence stirred something in Melanie, and all her struggles and trials of the last few years surfaced with renewed force.
She had built a quality business; she had groomed a quality team; and, more often than not, delivered quality work as a result.
But Melanie’s business had plateaued. Her team was spread thin. The prospect of scalability seemed remote. Still, she could not pinpoint precisely the reason for her company’s bottleneck.
The Facebook post continued:
“Imagine, fellow agency owners, how much easier our lives would be if onboarding clients only took – MAXIMUM – an hour of our time? How much faster we could deliver results to our clients – how much happier our clients would be, how much longer they would stay with us – if we could bring them to market, with all the tools and bells and whistles they need and expect, in LESS than 60 minutes?”
“Yeah, right,” thought Melanie, “wishful thinking that.” She locked her phone and went to sleep.
The Bottleneck
In the morning, she met with Aaron, a client she had lately signed, and the 11th dentist on her company roster.
She went through the usual checklist – “Alright, Aaron, based on our experience in this industry, and on behalf of your objectives, we recommend the following…”
Active Campaign for email marketing…ClickFunnels for funnel building…WordPress for website hosting…Calendly for booking appointments…
“We’ll also need…”
A call tracking system…A pipeline and CRM to oversee contact stages…A reputation management software to collect and track reviews…an analytics engine for reporting…
Oh…and, of course, a form and survey builder.
“Does that sound good to you, Aaron?”
“Okay, whatever you say – and you’ll set all that up for us?”
“Yes,” confirmed Melanie, “absolutely.”
“How long will it take,” asked Aaron, “before we get started?”
“It’ll take about a week to get the tech sorted, and another week to get our campaigns going – so roughly two weeks, Aaron.”
“Oh, okay…”
The call concluded, Melanie pinged her fulfillment lead with the account details and requirements, and they got to work.
That’s when, suddenly, it hit her.
The bottleneck.
“Change it in one place – change it everywhere.”
Every time Melanie signed a new client, even though her experience in the dental industry was extensive, it took weeks to replicate the systems for new clients that Melanie already had in place for existing clients.
Despite her extensive experience, she and her team were always starting over.
And, what’s worse, whenever a client would leave her agency, they would take her systems – the infrastructure refined over long hours and late nights – with them, and she would have to build them, again, and again, and again, from scratch, for every new client, she enlisted.
“A nightmarish, devilish, laborious waste of time and money!”
A Better Way:
That night, Melanie did something she had never done before, and DM’d the author of the post she had read the night prior.
Hey, Amy, hope you don’t mind me reaching out to you like this, but your post from last night really resonated with me, and I’d love to know if what you said about onboarding clients in less than an hour is really possible…
Within minutes, Melanie and Amy were chatting back and forth as if they were the best of friends.
A: It is possible, Melanie, and super easy! Thanks for reaching out – I’m a bit of a SaaS nerd, so love talking about it whenever possible, haha!
M: Awesome, I’d love to hear more about what you’ve got going on in the back end!
Amy proceeded to reveal to Melanie that six months ago, she, Amy, was in the exact same position as Melanie…
Building tech stack after tech stack; increasing cost while decreasing operational efficiency; and renting out the technologies that made funnel marketing possible.
A: That’s when I discovered HighLevel, an all-in-one agency platform that combines all the technologies we use for our clients, but which licenses us as the agency to resell the technology as if it were our own. This means that when a client decides to leave, they can’t take our software with them – unless they keep paying us!
M: Seriously? What…
A: That’s not even the best part, Melanie. Because all of our technologies and all of our clients are housed within one dashboard and ‘master’ account, the work we do for one client can be LITERALLY transferred from one client to another. Which means that we never have to start from scratch – if you’ve set up a beautiful funnel for one client, with the whole nine, you can just save it as a snapshot – that’s what it’s called – and duplicate it from one account to the next, without having to rebuild it!
M: That’s awesome – but wouldn’t you still have to do a lot of manual work, like change the brand colors, change the names, locations, links, across every LP and email and everything in between…?
A: You’d think so, but not when you use the custom variable feature. Once you’ve duplicated the snapshot into whatever account or accounts you want, you just have to go into settings and under custom variables, substitute your new client’s information in the custom value fields where applicable. The changes will automatically populate wherever those variables are in use – hence, change it one place, change it everywhere, haha!
The next morning, Melanie and Amy, discovering that they lived within a few miles of each other, met up for coffee.
Amy officially introduced Melanie to HighLevel, showed her HighLevel’s snapshot functionality in person, and demonstrated how Melanie could resell the software to her clients under her own company brand, retain ownership and transferability of her systems, and empower her team to do more with their abilities, no longer bogged down in the cycle of starting over.
The bottleneck thus resolved, it wasn’t long until Melanie and her team mastered scalability through systems and at last arrived at their destination – 7 figures in annual recurring revenue.
Summary:
To scale to 7 figures ARR, agencies, once they’ve mastered their services, should look to turn their services into systems and processes that are replicable and automatic. Traditional tech stacks, consisting of one third-party software app after another, make it harder than it needs to be for agency owners to get out of their own way and stop trading their time for money. Through HighLevel’s all-in-one marketing platform, agencies can consolidate their work into a ‘snapshot’, which they can then duplicate across as many client accounts as they like, and resell to new clients as an out-of-the-box solution. Clients get results faster, stick around longer, and agencies have more time to focus where it counts – strategy and growth.
