Voiceover Guy:
Hello, and thanks for coming along to …And We Have An Office Dog, the digital agency podcast, where we talk to agency owner directors, and learn more about what makes them tick. From the things that make them similar, to the things they’d rather have known sooner, where they’ve success, and where they’ve learned some hard lessons, all will be revealed with your host, Chris Simmance, the agency coach, and he’ll be talking to a different awesome agency person in each episode, asking them four questions and seeing where the conversation takes us over the next 25 minutes. Okay, so let us begin. Over to you, Chris.
Chris Simmance:
Thanks, voiceover guy. Thank you very much for that wonderful intro that definitely wasn’t recorded over a year and a half ago. Hi, Jesse, nice to have you on.
Jesse Perreault:
It’s a pleasure to be here, Chris.
Chris Simmance:
How are you doing today all the way in sunny Ottawa?
Jesse Perreault:
It is sunny. You did your research. I think the natural thing to talk about first is weather, right? And it’s sunny. It’s been quite poor for a while, but it’s sunny today.
Chris Simmance:
See, I do always research the agencies that I talk to and mostly the weather being a Brit, that’s all we need to know. So we can end this podcast. Thanks very much for coming along. We now know what the weather in Ottawa is. So Jesse, for those who don’t know you, tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about SOAP.
Jesse Perreault:
Yeah, certainly. So, um, but myself, I grew up, uh, an entrepreneurial family. My dad ran a DJ business doing weddings for about 45 years or so still does it. So I’ve been around the entrepreneurial spirit, so to speak, started my own little businesses when I was, I think the age of 15 with the rusty lawnmower pushing it around door knocking and things like that. Um, never had any big successes or anything like that. Some failures, some minor successes, ran marketing teams in the past. And I would say the last decade, I’ve been mainly in the agency space and now a part owner in Soap Media. And we’re obviously a boutique digital marketing agency. We’re a team of 13 right now and growing very quickly, but being mindful of our growth so we don’t grow too quick and it impacts clients at all in a negative way. So… Yeah, it’s a little bit about me and about us.
Chris Simmance:
So why soap? Is it, I made this joke at the beginning before we recorded and I thought it was really funny, so I’m gonna do it again. Why soap? Is it because you guys are really clean?
Jesse Perreault:
I get asked that question a lot and thankfully I know the answer. So it stands for socialize, optimize, analyze, promote. So it is an acronym. I didn’t name the company. My business partner, which is actually my father-in-law, so I’ve worked with my father-in-law for a very long time. My wife for a very long time. We’re family owned and operated, so I’m part owner. He named it. It’s a question I get asked a lot, so it’s
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Jesse Perreault:
not too, too clever of a name.
Chris Simmance:
I’m pretty sure that almost everyone on the North American continent love an acronym and it just seems like everything has one, which is fine, I love it. So I think you probably, I mean you look nice and clean as well, which is good to see.
Jesse Perreault:
Thank you.
Chris Simmance:
Listeners, you can rest assured that he has used his soap. So how long has the agency been running?
Jesse Perreault:
So the agency has been running now for a bit over a decade, but really aggressively as a, you know, hiring and scaling would honestly be the last three, four years that we’ve really taken off before that. It was, you know, my father-in-law kind of ran the agency on the side, worked for the federal government full time as well. And, you know, eventually left and pursued a full time with me about. Probably about four years ago or so now.
Chris Simmance:
Hmm. So, so what’s been one of the biggest successes that you guys have seen? So to date, I guess.
Jesse Perreault:
I mean, I hear a lot of agency owners talk about processes and such, and that is very key I think to our growth is understanding the sales process. So I’m usually the first point of contact. And we’ve really ironed out a value focused process and flow that is very streamlined. So a company comes to us, we do a discovery call. Then the next step is we give a recommendations video. It’s all the recommendations. That’s very customized, very personal, and then a proposal that having that one, two, three process on the sales side has been critical to our success. And then the other one really is we eliminated trying to be a jack of all trades. So back in the day, we did email marketing, we did, you know, we’d do SMS, whatever it really was, we would just kind of do it, right? We have the knowledge and the know-how how to do these things, but we realized we wanted to be experts at,
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Jesse Perreault:
you know, specific areas. So We decided that website development and tracking, GA4 and Google Tag Manager, all of that, that’s gonna be the core when you have that foundation piece. And then the main marketing channels that we use to drive traffic is search engine optimization and paid advertising. So whether that be meta advertising or Google ads, that’s what we do. We do those three things and we like to think we do them quite well.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah, that I nearly a decade of running at least something’s going well, which is fantastic. It’s it’s I think you’re right when you say you know, it’s a success to have decent processes and things like that, like the sales process is key. And I always say to agencies that I work with that the selling doesn’t stop once the contract signed. So the process
Jesse Perreault:
Thank you.
Chris Simmance:
that you that you have, you know, nicely dovetails into the delivery of the services and things which which means that, you know, you’re constantly selling your value or the value of the outcome. Because realistically,
Jesse Perreault:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
you’re selling something that’s invisible. Please, can you give me money right now for an outcome in the future that probably will happen because we know what we’re talking about. But I’d like the money now, please. So because because of that, you know, you’ve got to kind of keep the sales process alive in a way. It never kind of ends, does it? There’s upsells, there’s there’s all sorts of other things. But I think it’s really good to hear that you identified that jack of all trades isn’t the way to necessarily go. I think very closely aligned services are great, but loads of closely aligned services, it’s an operational nightmare. Costs time, costs money, stress, pressures, everything. It’s not fun at all.
Jesse Perreault:
Absolutely. Yes, sales never stops. I mean, last time I looked at retention statistics for marketing agencies, I’ve heard a lot of people on this podcast even mentioned how most agencies or a lot of agencies have a bad reputation and rightfully so. We’ve experienced the same thing. So, you know, we have a philosophy here, like you just mentioned, sales never stop. So
Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.
Jesse Perreault:
our average retention, I would say is well above a year with our clientele. I think here in Canada, at least it’s like six to eight months, we’re probably pushing a year and a half, maybe two depending. We have clients that have been with us for, you know, six, seven years plus. Um, we have a philosophy where we tried to have half of our agency growth every year come from existing clientele. So we’re
Chris Simmance:
Hmm.
Jesse Perreault:
always selling, getting new clients, but we try to instill the mindset into our clients that, Hey, look, we’re an investment as you invest money with, with soap media. and you see that payoff and you see the return, thankfully, you know, we’re in digital
Chris Simmance:
Hmm.
Jesse Perreault:
marketing,
Chris Simmance:
Is it Glee
Jesse Perreault:
we can show that
Chris Simmance:
Joe? Yeah.
Jesse Perreault:
invest more, you’ll get more. So we’ve had a lot of our growth actually stem from that as well.
Chris Simmance:
That’s great. And those retention figures for the wider industry in Canada is shocking.
Jesse Perreault:
Yeah, it’s scary. Yeah, it’s bad.
Chris Simmance:
It’s great for you, but just the wasted effort and energy and time, like the churn of going around the sales process. Let’s say a sales process takes between two weeks and a month, sometimes at best. That’s one month before the countdown clock for six months starts, which is just, oh. My God, that’s painful. I feel that in my soul.
Jesse Perreault:
Yes.
Chris Simmance:
So if you could go back in time to when you first joined and started running the business, what kind of piece of advice would you give yourself? You’ve zipped into your time machine, you’ve popped back and you’ve seen your younger self and you’ve thought, oh crikey, I’ve gotten a bit older. What advice would you give yourself?
Jesse Perreault:
To learn to delegate sooner. You know, a bit of a perfectionist with some things, I think, in life, work being one of them. I just took on more and more and more. And, you know, it wasn’t until this last three, four years where we really started scaling and, you know, grew substantially that I learned that you have to delegate, you have to have people that are much smarter than yourself. And the sooner you get to that point, the sooner you have some clarity and peace of mind, because there’s only so many hours in a day and you can kill yourself working
Chris Simmance:
Yeah,
Jesse Perreault:
if you think you can do it all.
Chris Simmance:
it’s it’s an art form being able to delegate it really is. And I don’t know about you, but the initial first step, the pain of doing it like properly the first time is quite significant, because not only you giving away control of something which you know intimately, but you’re also risking what you see is what good looks like not coming back to you. And the you know, the kind of process, should we say, for delegation is seemingly obvious, but it’s not that easy.
Jesse Perreault:
That’s right, I couldn’t agree more with that.
Chris Simmance:
It’s, um, I, I often found, um, and I find it a lot with agency owners. They say, Oh, it’s, it takes too long to delegate or I’ve not got the time for that. I could do it in 10 minutes. They, and you’re like, yeah, sure. If you delegate it the first time, it’s going to take you an hour. The second time you delegate half an hour. And then after that, you never have to do the job again, aside from delegating it to someone else. And then you’ll see the results come in. People will be happier. You end up keeping your staff longer. You get scut staff that are better at their jobs because you’ve. invested your your own leadership time into them. It’s crazy. But it is hard though. It really is.
Jesse Perreault:
Yeah, it’s very hard. I mean, you and I were talking about books quickly before this and how many books
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Jesse Perreault:
we don’t actually read, but
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Jesse Perreault:
there’s a couple of books that I have read and one of them was Clockwork by Michael something. It was a really good book that I read probably about a year and a half ago. And it was really on, you know, getting the right processes in place and learning sooner than later that you can’t do everything. And if you’re going to scale a company, you need to have the right people and the right roles. And… determine what’s called, you know, your Queen Bee role, right? In the hive of bees, there’s, you have to all serve the Queen. So there’s a role internally here at our agency. So media that everybody needs to serve, which is ultimately communication. So
Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.
Jesse Perreault:
client communication. I’ve seen it so many times where agencies get phenomenal results for companies, then they come to us and we’re looking at it, we’re like, why did they leave this agency? Because they were doing a great job, but they weren’t effectively communicating the results. And on the flip side of that, we found too that, you know, we’re very transparent with our clients. We don’t fluff or manipulate the data. So if there’s a bad month, we go to a client and say, hey, look, it was a bad month this month. But if we look at the last six months, you can see you’re actually up overall. Here’s some problem areas, here’s some solutions.
Chris Simmance:
Hmm.
Jesse Perreault:
So everyone serves that role, but the thing that I really struggled with was the individual roles outside of that. So to not… be into the Google Ads accounts and checking
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Jesse Perreault:
them all the time and making sure budgets are where they need to be and all that fun stuff.
Chris Simmance:
It’s the letting go that becomes harder the longer you hold on, doesn’t it?
Jesse Perreault:
Yes, oh gosh, yeah. Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
So is there anything that you like over the course of time that you’ve been in the agency? Is there anything that you like kind of really regret having done but has been a lesson that has made the agency what it is now?
Jesse Perreault:
I really regret having done, I mean, we’ve made a lot, we’ve done a lot of testing, you know, but that’s a split testing. I think I wouldn’t say I regret that. I think, I really do believe the biggest regret was, it goes just in alignment with what we’re talking
Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.
Jesse Perreault:
about was me trying to do everything, trying
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Jesse Perreault:
to manage. I believe we would be, I mean, we’ve grown substantially and we’re, you know, we’re fortunate to be the size we are today and growing, but I believe I actually biggest thing holding back the growth, trying
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Jesse Perreault:
to do it all. So that’s perfectly in alignment with what we were just talking about. That’s my biggest regret, just trying to handle everything.
Chris Simmance:
I think that it’s probably if every agency owner at a certain size was honest with themselves, I’d say that they become the blocker in their own growth in the long term. And it’s usually for no other reason than the agency was started by some people who knew what they were doing. And then As the teams grew, it became harder to let go, but letting go was also scary because you spent all that effort getting the clients in and so on and so forth. And, and, and, and sometimes like it’s that highest paid person’s opinion type thing. I already knew all this when, so I started the place. Don’t you tell me what to do. I know better than you. I pay your salary.
Jesse Perreault:
Yes, right, exactly.
Chris Simmance:
It’s, it’s really key part of leadership, I think, is that, you know, once you realize you’re hiring people who are either more smart than you or more capable than you at the thing that they’re there for, then you can really get down to the job of leadership and management and growth at the agency, you know, you start working on the business, not in the business. And there’s a big distinction that I think quite a lot of times when people have started to realize that there’s like a watershed moment and something, something happens to them as. business owners, they stop being kind of, it stops being guesswork and gut feeling and starts being let’s have a strategy, let’s work out how to implement it and let’s see how we can how we can deliver that.
Jesse Perreault:
Absolutely. And to give employees, as you scale, free reign to invent or add processes. And ego is one thing, ego is a horrible thing in so many cases. And that was something I was guilty of is they’d start doing something, it wouldn’t be done right. And what you mentioned earlier, in 10 minutes, I’d hop in, I’d just do it. But not asking myself, how does that make that employee feel?
Chris Simmance:
Yeah, yeah.
Jesse Perreault:
When you go in and do the work, does that make them feel useless? Does that… And they’re not learning, you’re not training, you’re not educating. And it’s Simon Sinek, I don’t know if I pronounced his last name right, would start with Y and he’s got a few other books.
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Jesse Perreault:
You know, I think he did a Ted talk where he’s talking about what leadership really is. And that once I started to really understand that and I saw big changes and now our team says, oh, this should be done this way, or what about this? And Just acknowledge the ideas, even if they’re a bad idea. Like I have bad ideas all the time. Just acknowledge the ideas and accept that you’re not going to know everything. That’s the big thing.
Chris Simmance:
That’s it. That’s it. The good thing is though, when you do have the chance to step back, the not knowing everything isn’t that scary because at least you know, hopefully, you’ve hired people and processes exist for identification of those things instead of, you know, they stop being scary unknown unknowns and start just being, well, we know we’re going to come up against something eventually. On the opposite side of that then, is there something that, you know, very early days you guys did that has been something like a staple of the success for the duration?
Jesse Perreault:
Yeah, hands down and you know that’s having a value focused approach. You mentioned something earlier, you know you’re selling this like possibility, right? So you know what we wanted to do and you know I think guys like Neil Patel, you know love them or hate them and you know other influencers if you will in this space, they’ve always stressed that you know just a lot of people hold their cards close and they don’t want to show what they’re doing or just give all the answers. I’ve learned most business owners, at least in our target market, which is, you know, more small, medium business owners, you know, between often 10 and 100 employees or something like that, that’s where our clientele sit. Most of the time, they’re not going to have the know-how to implement the things you recommend. So and if they do good for them, you give them value. Like I believe if we give value, people remember that people remember how you make them feel, right? So We implemented that very early on. That’s why so with the sales process of putting together a customized recommendations video, it takes a lot of our time. Like we do an audit, we put together this video, but we don’t know if they’re gonna go with us or not. I mean, we try to qualify as much as possible. In the early days, we didn’t qualify. There’s people that could only pay a couple hundred dollars a month, which our minimum retainers, a thousand plus a month. And we just gave these videos out. But then, you know, you got, we got referrals and people watching the videos and we could track who watched the videos and it was just awesome. So that’s something that I believe is a cornerstone to our success is giving value. If we cut that out and somebody just talked to us and we gave a proposal and we cut that middle step out of saying, you know, not even just a PDF report of here’s your audit, here’s your, you know, this is a video of myself or someone on our team. talking, walking through, showing visuals of what their competitors are doing. That has been very, very critical. And I think when they look at that process first, an agency that says, hey, we had a conversation, here’s a proposal. It’s a night and day difference for
Chris Simmance:
Yeah,
Jesse Perreault:
your value.
Chris Simmance:
yeah, absolutely. And I think if you if you stick to that focus in the showing value, it’s very hard to, it’s very hard to argue with. So okay, you know, results might not come one month or another month. And that’s because of external factors, or it’s because someone did something silly on a website, because that happens. But if you’ve proven time and time and again, that you can produce results and that you care and that you’re there to produce value, then the conversation isn’t an angry one. The conversation is a collegiate one where you can have a meaningful conversation that talks about what happens next. Instead of, we’re unhappy, we haven’t had results, we’re leaving. They know you care, so they’re not gonna do that.
Jesse Perreault:
So expectations management is huge. The other big thing is we turn down a lot of business, like more than I would like, like, you know, hundreds of thousands a year of business that we just turned down because, you know, part of that process is we look at, you know, the foundational elements. It might be a custom CMS or, you know, very a website that is a house of cards. If we were to touch it, the whole thing could come down. So we have our preferred platforms. I mean, you know, WordPress, we do a lot of work on WordPress, Shopify. Um, we, we look at these different criteria. We also manage with the right questions on our initial call or discovery call with a prospect. And, uh, you know, looking at those questions, they might say, I want SEO. I want search engine optimization, but I want to be at the top of Google and see this many leads in the first month or two. So immediately I jump in there and I say, no, no, no, no, like, this is not how SEO works, it’s a longer term investment. So we found too, that managing those expectations is very, very important work. Everyone says they under promise and over deliver, but we really do try to live by that philosophy.
Chris Simmance:
And, and, and like you say, lots of people do live by it, but judging by their attention figures, they don’t, they don’t actually mean it. And
Jesse Perreault:
Yeah, exactly.
Chris Simmance:
so if someone’s listening to this podcast now, and they’re thinking, right, I’m going to start an agency and I’m going to, you know, I’m going to do a really good job, but I need some advice from Jesse, what advice would you give them?
Jesse Perreault:
Yeah, I think I was listening to one of your podcasts before this and she’s like, don’t start an agency. Um,
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Jesse Perreault:
you know, it’s like any business there’s ups and downs. Uh, it’s not smooth sailing. If that’s what you’re expecting, it’s definitely, you know, don’t
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Jesse Perreault:
go into business in the first place. I think when you start an agency, figure out exactly what your agency figure out obviously like any business who your target market is, are you working
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Jesse Perreault:
for big enterprise companies and you’re going to manage I know some agency owners where they manage 15 clients and they make just as much as we do. We have about 60 plus clients. So figure out that, figure out who your market is, who you’re going to work with. Enterprise companies work very differently than small medium companies. You’re often working with teams. And then figure out what are you offering? What is your main focus? Don’t try to be a jack of all trades. If you do that, you’re going to set yourself up for failure unless you have some… super talent of doing everything.
Chris Simmance:
Well, yeah, it’s very hard to build consistent processes and consistent conversation, consistent narrative and expertise if you’re delivering small, medium and large retainers to every business that existed ever. And if you look at most agency websites, it more or less says as the headline on the homepage, “‘We do everything for everyone, please buy from us.’” If you say… I solve this problem for these people. They go, Oh, I’m this people and I have that problem. I should buy this thing. Um, and, and you can speak that same way all the way through marketing, all the way through sales, all the way through operation. And it, and everyone can kind of get behind it. It’s brilliant. Good bit of advice, Jesse. Thank
Jesse Perreault:
Thank
Chris Simmance:
you so
Jesse Perreault:
you.
Chris Simmance:
much for coming on the podcast.
Jesse Perreault:
Thanks for having me, Chris. It was a pleasure.
Chris Simmance:
Thank you. And in our next episode, we’ll be speaking with another agency leader to hear their story and the lessons they learned along the way. So thanks very much for listening.