How to Monetize Agency Knowledge for Scalable Growth With Max Traylor

a business coach , a thinking partner and a product creator . He helps agencies productize their consulting services and do some other things better too .

He's the author of the Agency Survival Guide and the Consultant Survival Guide and the host of Beers with Max , a podcast where authors , speakers , consultants and agency owners share how they've turned their expertise into a digital , scalable and residual money-making machine . Max , I'm so glad you're here . Thanks for being on the show .

So I had this incredible childhood , uh , and exposure to this mindset of you can , you can put your personal life first and you can build a business around your personal life . Uh , he , you know , play tennis all day , go to Disney world , whatever . And so I , I , when I got into adult land , I didn't see that anywhere .

It was like , yeah , you can do what you want , like maybe on the weekends , and if you want to be an entrepreneur ,

you can kiss that goodbye . Um , so I , I was sort of like stuck between what I grew up with and then what society was telling me was , like , you have to work , you know , you sacrifice , sacrifice , so that one day you can return , uh , you can retire from sacrifice .

And as I was running this marketing agency , which is quite possibly , uh , the the like worst sacrificial business model you could think of professional services , linear growth , highly highly competitive and commoditized in a lot of ways , low margin , extremely difficult on the personal life .

Every year I'd hit my goals and revenue and headcount which apparently is how they measure worth that . You know their big conferences when they're shaking their pom poms . Every time I felt like I was supposed to be celebrating my . My personal life was getting worse darker circles , uh , under my eyes .

But I discovered that , uh , there was a part of the business that didn't play by the same rules . Strategy , thinking , planning , advisory , consulting all these , all these different words that amount to helping companies make decisions , not not the doing of things , which everyone can do .

At the time , it was the gig networks that were coming online , um , and there was , there was this proliferation of training content , so no shortage of people that could do the things , and now has has sort of taken things that it can take and it will continue to do that .

So you're left with with this business model of charging for thinking , charging for , for knowledge . That's what we did . I mean , I started charging for knowledge . People were treating people were treating me like a big boy .

I was 23 , running this company , I was invited to the decision maker table , and so we started to shift our business model towards strategy and thinking , and then I had the opportunity to license that process that we'd created to other agencies all around the world .

That's when the light bulb went off , because a I realized that professional services , businesses uh , business are sitting on the solution but they're not charging for it and they can't see it very clearly , and that is their knowledge .

That professional services , businesses uh , business are sitting on the solution , but they're not charging for it and they can't see it very clearly . And that is their knowledge . How do they monetize their knowledge ? That's number one , and then second is you can monetize it in different ways .

You can diversify your business model by offering it high ticket , low volume , uh to leadership teams . You can run uh . You can facilitate cohorts or groups of your ideal clients

to run through the same process . You can license that intellectual property to hundreds of companies at a time , but it requires that you rally around a single definition of your body of knowledge and then dedicate yourself to conversations and relationships with the people that will pay the most for that .

That's where I've been the last 10 years and I've been lucky enough to maintain my focus on designing these consulting services and the other packaging of how to monetize it , and it's been a fun journey and , like you said , I've drank a lot of beer with really , really smart people along the way , and so now I'm basically just regurgitating smart things that other

people have said . But you know , aren't we all ?

And I went to that and it was all these business owners , you know , and have a couple of beers and talk about business actually talk about business , like the real challenges , like they're you know , lamenting about the employees that they can't stand , and I was like this is a really fun business conversation . So I said that's what I want .

I want that's what I want to like organize , but I don't want to leave my house . And so the original beers with Max was like an online get together of uh people in the agency space and we'd have a beer and just and just share what we were thinking . Uh , I accidentally recorded it . One day . Somebody said , hey , this sounds like a podcast .

You should , you should make it a podcast so that you know . Then it was a podcast for a few years . Uh , and now you know there's a lot more podcast material and I , I like using video .

So right now my format is just to interview people , um , and use very short video clips on LinkedIn so that one of my interviews can become , you know , months of content that both they and I can , uh can share and uh talk about some specific things and uh and and grow our network that way .

And then maybe five years ago , I started looking at the most popular clips and I turned that into my first book agency survival guide and that's sort of been the yearly .

Mo is to take the topics and the people that have been most popular with my audience and stick it between two covers and you know and sound really smart because I have these books , you know , but you open the books . There's just a bunch of other smart people in there and what they've said Don't tell anybody .

But yeah , it's a dedication to learning from the people that you want to add value to . That's all . This is whether it's Beers with Max or the books or the studies that I've done . I don't know how else to get good at something .

happen . You don't just happen to have these conversation and then happen to have a book pop out or happen to have a podcast . Like you've been intentional with this , I'm curious what are some things that you have learned that have been things that you've applied in your own business , in your own practice ?

They're like , really like that that you're making millions of dollars on that , and so it gives you the perspective of like , why do we spend so much time trying to get the offer Perfect when , like , we're going to live and die by the relationships that we create ? That's all , that's all business is .

So if you're not out there creating the right relationships , listening to the right people , stumbling on those one or two people that could , that could make , uh , you know , they could turn everything around for you . Um , so , yeah , it , it , uh , it's all .

A game is what I learned and , um , it's how you play it that matters , not the uh , not not how , not how smart you are or the . You know the brilliant idea . We're not inventing the cure for cancer . I mean , we're in like marketing , like you could do anything you want and people would buy it . It doesn't , it's all . You know , it's whatever .

Um , some of us actually are able to add value , but the majority are just , you know , I don't know . I don't know what they're doing , and neither do the people that buy the services . It's just like on the budget , there's just we should buy this stuff . Sure Great . I started picking up little one-liners like 90% of the value , and focusing is focus itself .

Only 10% is choosing the right thing . So I think it's given me the freedom to experiment with things . I try to pass that along to the people I'm working with a certain indifference to success , like you just have to choose something and go . That's good , and most of your ideas sorry are going to be trash . Yeah , maybe we stumble upon one that works .

They were like I look , there's too many ads , I don't trust your ads , I don't want to talk to your salespeople . Before that I think it was like direct mail or something I don't know . I wasn't , I wasn't around , but so people were , were done with ads and you had , you know , search content and people wanted to do their own research .

And so there's this influx of people doing this one thing content and of course it gets abused , and then the content becomes trash , and then people don't trust the content and of course it gets abused and then the content becomes trash and then people don't trust the content .

Now people aren't doing their uh , their own research , and so this trend is almost it's almost predictable . Anything that everyone jumps on , and you can tell they're going to jump on it because the people with that are putting money into education in this space , the software companies are telling you to do it .

As soon as a software company tells you to do something as a professional service organization , you should get away from that . So you saw it with inbound , and then there's , you know . Then then the software companies were like , well , we need more features so we can sell more stuff to our existing clients . Then you had all these rev op agency .

Like what , what is that ? What is what is even that term ? Oh , it means we can't make a decision of if we're going to help marketing , sales or customer success or any of these other departments , so we're just going to wrap a buzzword around it . That's software companies saying they want to sell more features and they need an army to do it .

Anyway , I get I get a little triggered on that stuff . The major trend is that people trusted content yesterday . People only trust the people they trust today . Uh , and you know I'm a fan of the buzzwords not really , but you know I'm a fan of the buzzwords .

You hear in things like , uh , ecosystem led growth , uh , near bound , uh , partner led , uh , marketing , all of this stuff , to say that if you're not creating

content with the people that already have the trust of your buyers , aka their peers , the people that already have trust with them somehow , then you're doing it wrong . They're not going to trust your content . They're not going to trust Mary , the marketer that's in your dark back room writing your blogs or doing your videos , or whatever .

Your blogs or doing your videos or whatever figure out a way to be next to work with . Be introduced by uh . Collaborate on projects with the people that already have the trust of your buyers . That's uh , that's , that's the trend , and , um , I mean , geez , the AI thing .

Look this over the course of one year , you saw every agency jump on this , leverage AI to hobbity , and now it's table stakes . Now , everything has AI , and people are already saying , like , get AI out of your positioning . It says nothing , yeah , so you know , I think there's , there will always be a trend . I think it is set by technology .

Then there's a wave of professional services behind it , and these things go up and down . What I keep saying , though , is that there will always be disruption , and the rate of disruption is only increasing . During any time of disruption , the value of being able to make better business decisions goes up .

If the answer is clear , you don't need help making a decision Like AI . You should use AI . Great thanks , max . What an opinion . Let's pay you for your consulting . You told us to use AI , very good . No , the value of decisions go up when there's crazy amount of disruption and companies don't know what to spend money on .

And so I think we're in that space right now where there's crazy amount of disruption and companies don't know what to spend money on . And so I think we're in we're in that space right now where there's a million things going on . People know there's disruption in the economy , there's an election coming up , there's the AI is a disruptor .

There's changing buyer behaviors and companies are sitting there going , hey , everything that we invested in isn't working . We need somebody with an outside perspective to help us make decisions . That's consulting , that's advisory , that's a true business partnership , and that requires some skills and facilitation business acumen , empathy , listening .

So marketers have this problem of living in the microcosm of the marketing budget . They don't see churn coming because they don't realize that sales operations hr any weird finance . They could all take budget from you .

There's only so much money to go around , and so they're , they're , they think they've got a handle on things because they talk to the cmo , then the cmo leaves or gets fired which , by way , they don't have a very long tenure and you've gotten , you're left with no understanding or relationship with the other decision makers .

So a big problem is that you don't have access to the people that make decisions about budget . You need to get access to those people and you will last about 0.5 seconds in a conversation with a head of sales about marketing . They don't want to talk about marketing , they don't care about marketing .

So , even though that's your passion , that's your expertise , you need to figure out a way to hold a conversation with someone that does not care . And it's really easy . All you got to do is listen . You got to ask questions like what's important to you ?

You know you got to be able to listen and you know you gotta , you gotta , you gotta be able to listen , uh , and you know that's , that's empathy , that's um , uh , you know psychology and these sorts of things , and that's what consulting is is just you're helping people identify what's most important to make decisions about that thing . That's it .

The best thing that could happen is that you discover some new initiative and you're able to upsell or cross sell your services . So point them out and I guarantee every agency that looks at their accounts will not have access to every member of the leadership team . They will not know their current initiatives that they are committed to in Q4 .

I don't know when this episode is going to come out , but it's September and we're just about to get into the most important planning time for any organization for the most part . What is your plan for getting all of them in a room telling you what they are going to spend money on ? That is the correct question to ask . The answer can be quite creative .

There's a lot of different ways to do it , but the correct question is how am I going to get the decision makers that decide on budget not just mine into a room talking about what is most important to them ?

. We're awesome people . We . We are uh , we're approachable . We like hanging out with one another , we like helping one another um , but we survive on self-manufactured confidence . Agency owners are like if you talk to an agency owner% of them will be supremely confident that they are the best in the world at doing what they do .

And they have to be , because if they don't project that confidence to their clients , who again understand nothing about what they do , what are you buying based off of ? You're buying off of the confidence of those leaders .

So you go into an agency owner and you say , hey , good try , you could actually be , you could actually be delivering a better service or doing it a better way . Yeah , it's . It's not met generally with open arms . It's very different than saying , wow , you have such a great service . You're like more people should know about this .

That's why you have all these people helping agencies with demand generation or branding , because there's so much pride in what they have and yet they're not getting the recognition that they need . That's poking on pride . I don't think that's the biggest opportunity .

I think the biggest opportunity lies with the existing clients and the idea that they're going to admit to themselves that they've been doing themselves a disservice , that they've never hired somebody for help in that area . It's a very it takes a certain type of someone to invest in performing a service better . They hold on to it for dear life .

The minute you begin to calcify and this becomes set in concrete and this is how we do it here , and we're not coming here and tell me how to do it , we lose the teachable spirit that makes , I think , what marketers do so valuable . They're always looking , always learning , always growing , always pivoting and adapting right .

They've gotten outside help with their marketing , with sales and these sorts of things . The way they help their clients , that's like the foundation , that's like their core skill of of of what they do . So it's . It's just there's a lot of , there's a lot of resistance there .

Basically , every limiting belief that comes from not actually having real conversations with the other decision makers . They believe there's limited budget because they've never talked to any of the other people that have budget and learn what asinine nonsense they're spending money on .

If you can only have a marketing conversation and you're not invited to the decision maker table , if you can only have a marketing conversation , you're invited to the vendor table .

You're wasting your time .

Is there anything that we would that we could do that would make your planning sessions more insightful , that we could add value ? You know what they're going to say Wait , you can tell us about what our competitors are doing . And then you're going to go , ooh , that's a good idea .

And then you're going to call up someone like Pete Caputa that has benchmark surveys and you're like shit , can we get some industry information really quickly ? Yeah , you do a benchmark survey . Look they unanimously , regardless of their role , every person on the leadership team will want to know things about their competitors and their buyers .

There's not a seat at that table that doesn't care about their buyers and their competitors . Go out there and interview them . Go out there and survey them . Use AI or some data thing , but not to like , cannibalize your communication and make it non-human nonsense .

Go and collect information that's usable by the leadership team , but it starts with going and asking them what is most valuable , and that's what people aren't doing . You got to pick up the phone , solid , I was interviewing Pete . Pete Patty , no , steve Patty and you know he talks about this outside-in service design .

We're both service designers and you got to start with the fact that I have no idea what your buyers want . I kind of do , because I talk to a lot of them , but why don't you go talk to them and ask them what are they spending money on ? What are the budget line items for 2025 that you're focused on and why ?

or email campaign , like that might not be a part of the conversation because no one cares .

If an agency is able to go in there and run a workshop with their leadership team and help them inform decisions , nobody makes money . But you convince them that they need 10,000 email campaigns and , and you know , 40,000 marketing contacts someone's making some money Solid point .

How do you level up with new skills that you're going to need as a leader ?

I'll listen to an interview that I did with somebody , but not not because , like I'm saying smart stuff , yeah , but because the stuff that they talk about . Like , for years I went to people that were the head , the pinnacle of their time in business , and I would just listen to them tell their stories .

I was the only person under 90 that was sitting at those tables every single week , single week . So I just listen to people and the wisdom that you can pick up just from uh , just from listening to people leading , oh man , leading , leading honestly , is a lot of work . I'm not , I'm not sure I am a good leader , because I am , uh .

I I only have one approach to leading and that is uh doing . You can follow me if you want , uh , but I'm going this way and I try to educate people and and be as open as I can about why I'm doing things . Where I learned that , where they can learn that , um , but I try to set an example of like I still don't know what I'm talking about .

Most of the things I do are wrong , but I do them so quickly and and I and I make decisions that occasionally I stumble across something that works , and I guess that's my style of leadership is like stop thinking so much , pull some triggers and if you're , if you're , scared of that , then just follow my lead . How ?

I never have to worry about her Like you've . You've seen some things you know what ? I mean so at this point , like I think you're either born with it and you have that knack for learning , or or you don't , and I'm , I don't . I don't need to invest in those people .

It's enough of an investment for me to align myself with them , myself with them , and and spend time together , like , like we are here , I know it'll be a well , uh , well worth investment , but , like I don't have to develop you will , we don't have to work on you together , um , and I think there's enough people out there .

If you're having those conversations and if you're expanding your network , um , you know , I'm , I , uh , I try to find people that don't need to be led but will be additive , you know , to your life . And it's the sharing of that expertise and the sharing of motivation , being able to pick each other up when one of them , you know , falls down .

Uh , maybe it's an approach of collective leadership .

So I really try to to uh measure my progress based on , like , how I feel , like if I can wake up in the morning and okay , I have a couple of calls , but uh , I want to , I want to go to the zoo , I want to take my kids to the zoo .

Now I can make that decision , but am I going to be , am I going to be , like , actually there , or am I going to be on the phone and paranoid and stressed , you know , about all these things ? And so I it comes back to me having a very clear planning cycle , an annual plan . I really don't go past annual plans . I'm still young .

I got a six year old and a three year old . I got no three year plans except to survive . You know I got , I got time . I'm still young . I got a six-year-old and a three-year-old . I got no three-year plans except to survive . You know I got , I got time . I'm young , um , but in any given year , you know we might like .

A few years ago we decided we were going to take every third month off , and so that has a trickle down effect to the business model , um , the the ideal client that we're going after , the types of services that we can provide , how we organize those services , um .

So I try to start with something that's very personal balance , uh focused , like exercising more or eating right .

Um , those two things have never been a part of the equation , but I I do hope that someday I choose those , uh more , like playing a lot of golf or , like you know , being around for the first year of of my daughter being alive and um , yeah , those are , those are the things that that I'm prioritizing and trying to measure , uh , measure progress on .

But you know , even when you make those decisions and you're not able to be present and and just emotionally uh strong , uh , it's not , it's not worth it . And so you know it takes , it takes a while to figure out what gives you energy , what takes your energy , what you can and can't do , how to set up barriers around those things .

I'm not trying to speak from like this altruistic , like I've got it all figured out , but like in in retrospect , like it's fine .

Um , so that was like a long time ago . I forgot who wrote it , but we can Google it Right . Um , but other than that , in the agency space , I've always been a huge fan of David Baker and so I'd go business of expertise , the red book for the win , Absolutely .

Um , yeah , I mean there's , there's been some others , but I think well to your point about agency trends or trends in marketing business development .

Jared Fuller recently put out this near bound away from using content as a way to do their own research because they don't trust it , because it's probably ai or some marketer in a back room somewhere that's writing that stuff .

And all about leveraging partnerships uh to um for any go-to-market motion , whether it's marketing , sales , customer success , like really integrating a partnership first mindset .

That's what I'm thinking of when you're talking about the Nearbound book . I mean , it's still you do business with people that you know like and trust .

Shoot me a DM . All those things .

Second , if you don't have a copy of my newest book , catalytic Leadership , I'd love to put a copy in your hands . If you go to catalyticleadershipbookcom , you can get a copy for free . Just pay the shipping so I can get it to you and we'll get one right out . My goal is to put this into the hands of as many leaders as possible .

This book captures principles that I've learned in 20 plus years of coaching leaders in the entrepreneurial space , in business , government , nonprofits , education and the local church business , government , nonprofits , education and the local church . You can also connect with me on LinkedIn to keep up with what I'm currently learning and thinking about .

And if you're ready to take a next step with a coach to help you intentionally grow and thrive as a leader , I'd be honored to help you . Just go to catalyticleadershipnet to book a call with me . Catalyticleadershipnet to book a call with me Stay tuned for our next episode next week . Until then , as always , leaders choose to be catalytic .