What is the number one thing that stops agency owners from specializing in a niche? Fear. It's the fear that they will get fewer clients. I work with and meet niche agency owners and I'll live in examples of how specializing is the best thing they've done for their agency. In today's episode, Amanda Lee Smith shares the transformer of process the letter to a niche and the defining moments that made her go all in. Her agency has worked with brands like Adidas, Arterics, Lou Lemmon and Albirds because of the specialty in outdoor sports and activities.
What's her agency apart is their deep industry knowledge and their ability to partner with clients as true experts. Specializing has made working with Dream Clients not just possible but a reality. Of course, the decision to specialize isn't always straightforward. It requires introspection, experimentation and a willingness to adapt. Amanda shares key actions that helped her claim and stand out in her niche, including how they shaped their brand and positioning for the niche, innovative ways they attract and work with Dream Clients and knowing what to say yes and what to do.
So, I want to decline opportunities outside the niche. Stay tuned to gain actionable insights into claiming and driving in your own niche. Welcome to the small but mighty agency podcast. If you want to grow an agency to seven figures and beyond without working more hours than your business, you're in the right place. I'm your host Audrey Joy Kwan.
I know what it takes to build an agency, including supporting an agency owner in selling and exiting. I also have a master's degree in communications, specializing in organizational development. My team and I have worked behind the scenes of multiple seven figure agencies and have coaching consultant with over 150 agency owners. All this to say, when you join us on the small but mighty agency podcast, you get real world experience and practical tips that help you work less, earn more and lead with integrity. So let's go.
Hey friends, welcome back to the small but mighty agency podcast. If you've been with us for a while, you know that one of my favorite things to do is to explore what is working in agencies and what isn't. We do it to the eyes of our guest who are agency owners and agency experts. When I first connect with Amanda, we hit it off and I knew I had to have her on the podcast to share how she has used positioning to help her agency stand out and get clients.
Amanda Leesmith is the CEO and co-founder of Monday Creative, a brand day and creative agency building brands enhance human potential and seduce people into the outdoors. Their clients include Adidas, Arterix, Lou Lemmon and all birds. Who they serve is connected to men as deep passion for the outdoors. We're going to jump right into the no fluff good stuff, but the path to finding her positioning, how the niche has changed the agency for the better and what creative things they have been able to do in the niche to engage with clients.
Amanda, thank you for being here. You have a very clear niche. You serve brands that are about the outdoors and you've positioned the agency to have a strong reputation in that industry. Of course, it's taking time to get here. How did you initially identify the outdoor industry as the niche for your agency?
Amanda Leesmith It took us about a year to really get there. I'm not going to lie. We started out as I was just running a silver proprietorship and I was kind of saying yes to whatever projects came my way and then there was too many projects for me to take on. I brought in two partners and suddenly we had an agency.
For the first year of running Monday, we carried on down that path and it meant we were doing projects in education, in SaaS, in some brands that feel more aligned with what we do now, but really it ran the full gamut. Whoever came to us, we said yes.
At the end of the first year, we did a really meaningful exercise where we audited everyone that we'd worked with and we assessed the quality of the engagement, how proud we were of the work, how much we enjoyed working with that particular client, and an interesting, clear theme emerged with the projects we had, the most enjoyment out of and the most success with.
All were more brands that existed in the outdoor and active space. So it was actually a combination of three things. It was that assessment of where we were seeing the most success.
It was reflection on where we liked spending our time. I am avid trail runner, backcountry camper, my co-founders are both really into the outdoors as well, their anglers and campers and hikers, and we just love that space and we knew that people in that space tend to have the same environmental passion that we have and just commitment to health and movement.
So it was a mix of this is the work that we find satisfying. These are the people that we want to work with. This is the thing we like doing and this is actually our background. We all met working at a brand called kit and ace, which was clothing company actually still is a company started by the founders of Lula lemon and the whole kind of thesis behind kit and ace is clothing that kind of moves with you the way your yoga clothes do but you can wear them to the office.
It's not really good at telling the story of performance apparel and we realized that was a special niche that we could offer our clients. So this all came together and it was like so in our face and apparent we were shocked we hadn't seen it sooner. What's interesting is the pivot that you took into claiming that niche. Now I know that anytime an agency owner goes to find their niche, it's not an immediate kind of stake in the ground claim that niche.
So the marketing typically still is pretty generic and at some point in time they turn on that switch so to speak and then claim that niche. Now was there a particular moment or experience for you where you kind of flip the switch and decided yes we're going all in to claim this niche.
Yeah, there was a moment when we decided kind of energetically that we were going all in on the niche, but the actual flip was a bit more gradual. We started by going through our content that we were putting out into the world. So mainly our Instagram content, but also our blog and just removing anything that didn't feel aligned and also our case studies we started creating case studies by that point and we thought you know what.
Yeah, it's scary to have less work out in the world, but we really want to make it clear that this is who we serve and this is what we do. And so we just it was an exercise of editing we edited down everything and really only left the work that was representative of the work that we wanted to do.
And then we started work on what I call Monday 2.0 we're kind of on Monday 3.4 now the Monday 2.0 was a rebrand and a relaunch of our website where we sort of modeled our brand after the types of retail brands we wanted to work with. So it looks more like a performance brand if you're on our website or logo looks more like it could be a clothing company or content looks more that way and when we relaunched the website with that new brand that was when our messaging went all in on.
So using people into the outdoors and building brands that enhance human potential. It took a little while before I figured out my business dev strategy around that and it actually all coalesced right around a couple months before the pandemic when I realized like why am I shooting and aiming really broadly in BIS dev. If I want to be working with outdoor and active industry, I'm just going to focus all of my energy on these types of trade shows and events.
And that is where everything really coalesced and made us start to be a known figure in the industry. I like what you're pointing out there. I think you're really talking about hey, how do you become a niche agency that stands out in the industry and for you, that's the outdoor industry. And you've kind of covered the brand changing IE, the websites, the assets and all the case studies. Was there anything else that you were currently doing to get your footprint out there?
Yeah, I mean, it really started actually with our own messaging. So we do messaging for our clients. It wasn't just our look and feel it. We had to re look at our pillars. So we re-jigged our pillars so that they spoke specifically to our expertise in performance. And then yeah, we started doing really deliberate outreach within those markets. So going to the trade shows, as I mentioned, also just like refocusing who I followed on LinkedIn.
So really starting to follow people who are CMOs and CEOs in that space. And we do specific events to engage these people. We had started initially doing something that we call table talks where we invite CMOs and CEOs maybe in a certain city or region for a really nice dinner. 12 person dinner, we get everyone around the table. Everyone has a question on their plate at the beginning of dinner.
And if facilitates a discussion around what's working for them in marketing, what's not, what are their biggest challenges. We give them lots of food and alcohol and by the end of the event, they feel like they're all best friends and like they've all been in a CMO marketers support group. We re-jigged that once we re-thought this audience and now we do something called tailgate talks.
So we take this table talks format and we take it into the outdoors. We invite all the same people, but specifically people that are working at outdoor brands. And we take them on a hosted hike. So do a hike up in the North Shore Mountains. And then instead of doing the dinner at a restaurant, we do it in the parking lot of the trail. In camp chairs, we bring in dinner, we bring in drinks, and we ask all those same tough questions. But we do it in a much more brand aligned environment.
What it sounds like to me is how focused you've become in your marketing by having the clear niche and by having clear messaging. It's very easy for you to approach the people that are the buyers for your agency. You're not randomly showing up places and hoping that the right buyer is going to be there because you are so niche, because you have the right messaging, you can show up at the exact place where they're looking for you or they're looking for information.
And support them down their buyers journey by giving value and creative value. I might say because the whole idea of a tailgate party is so creative for your niche. Because guess what? You're speaking to people who are outdoorsy people. And now you have a tailgate party, which is very outdoorsy, because it speaks to their passion and you're meeting them where they're at.
I just, I love the creativity behind your marketing because it isn't just meeting people where they're at. It literally is understanding what their desires are, what they think is valuable, putting that value in a fun environment and then delivering it. And I think that is so special.
And that speaks to the benefit and the impact of having a niche and being able to focus your marketing your biz dev in that niche. Now, I'm curious, there must have been challenges that you faced in the early stages of position your agency. Can you share a few of those challenges and how did you overcome them?
Yeah, two of them come to mind. So the first one is I think every agency as they start to grow regardless of their positioning faces this challenge, which is how do you start to weed out those clients that you realize aren't a good fit.
Anymore, we took a few approaches to this one being so unapologetic with our messaging, just like blatantly stating, this is who we're for. That said, I'll talk about this probably at some point, but just because you are maybe not aiming for a certain target doesn't mean other people won't be drawn to that message that you put out there.
But there were definitely clients that we knew weren't a fit for us and we wanted to kind of get them off of our books and we did that a few different ways. Sometimes we waited for things to naturally wrap up. Sometimes we raised our prices and kind of made it a little bit untenable for those clients. Sometimes we just let them kind of ride out a little bit longer if they were good people.
And then a couple of them we just broke up with in the most generous way possible. So that was one challenge is you realize suddenly that people aren't a fit and it makes it easier to wrap up those relationships and it makes it more clear who isn't fit.
And the second thing which I think is a perceived challenge, but isn't a real challenge, but I got this from our team. They had a real fear and I hear this from clients as well. They had a real fear that by going that niche, we were excluding ourselves from opportunities and like just narrowing down the field that we can work with. And it has totally been the opposite of that I would say if anything the more niche we got the more opportunities we had and I think I've shared this with you.
You mentioned some of the clients we work with Adidas is a perfect example. Adidas would never have worked with us if we were just a typical small boutique agency based in Vancouver. They worked with us because we had a very specific expertise that we've gone really public with and they knew that that was what they were looking for. So that that approached to being so unapologetic has really served us in working with really dream clients.
And it's brought other people to us, you know, we still do work in education, we still do work in property development and often the people that are coming to us, I'll say I'm like, you know, this isn't our area of expertise and they'll say, no, we know that. And we really want your retail expertise and your brand and specifically your performance and active where brand expertise and we want you to apply that to our industry.
I really appreciate you pointing out the fear of me, she often comes down to the fear of less clients or fewer clients and you pointing out that it was quite the opposite for you. And I got to say working with agency owners have niches, it is the same across the board for niche agency owners where I think initially there's that fear.
Oh my gosh, we're going to limit the amount of clients that we get because we're now niche, but really what happens is there's this like flywheel that we stress to take place when your name is out there inside that niche.
That people just, they start talking about you and you start to build that flywheel and you get more clients and the beauty of having a niche, a clear niche is that you're actually able to truly partner with your clients because you actually understand their buyers journey a lot better than if you were doing 10 different types of industries.
And I think that's the huge value that we're speaking about and why companies like Adidas and Lulemon or all birds come to you because they understand that hey, they're just they're not just working with a marketing agency, they're working with someone who actually can come alongside them, understands their buyers journey clearly.
I think that's huge value and on the other side of that it's very interesting for you to say look like we still attract people who don't fit inside this niche despite the fact that our messaging is geared towards outdoor industry and to that have a question, how rigid or flexible do you think agency should be in staying within their chosen niche.
Yeah, I think about that often and my team asks me that it's actually for two at this time, just this morning, I was listening to one of my favorite other agency related podcasts, which I honestly think should be in every agency owners repertoire, which is Blair ends and David C. Baker's podcast two Bob's and in today's episode, I mean, I listen to them the minute they come out today's episode.
They were talking about how the target and the market are two different things, so you might think of the target as the and I'm revealing how little I know about golf, but the like the whole that you're aiming for in golf is their name for that. I don't know, I'm not a golf person, I got to admit by understanding what you're going with it.
The target is the green, the target is the actual hole that you're shooting for and you always are going to aim for that hole, but sometimes you're going to hit the green and the green can be really, really broad. We have personally, we have a set of values that our clients need to fit in. They have to, you know, it can't be about excess consumption, so we don't work with luxury brands. We don't work with anything that's harmful to the environment.
We had vehicle, a car company approached us a couple of years ago, and it seemed like a really cool opportunity because in my head, it was an electric vehicle. It turns out it wasn't at all, and the company was actually owned by one of the greatest advocates of fracking in the UK. And as I was doing my research, I just realized no matter how good of an opportunity this was, there was no way I could in good conscience take on this work.
We also had a client that is really focused on the online gambling space, and my team just couldn't, couldn't do it. So I had an organization, you know, I come from a religious background, and so I tend to be plugged into a lot of Christian organizations from my upbringing, but one particular organization had a really public stance against gay students. And as a team that has a queer people, we didn't feel like we could in good conscience take on that scope of work.
There are things we say no to, and we have our kind of guiding positioning, which is we build brands that enhance human potential as our filter. So if I can honestly say, yeah, this brand builds human potential, it enables us to live more fully. It's making life easier and better for humans without being detrimental to the environment.
Then, you know, we'll say yes, we also have kind of an filter, we don't work with drugs. So that's the other way that we try to weed things out is we were like, are these good people, are they doing things that are enhancing human potential? I love how the mission to enhance human potential aligns well with outdoor brands, because if you think about outdoor brands, what are they doing? They're getting people outside, they're asking people to expand and stretch themselves.
And then taking that mission and using it as a lenser filter for brands or companies that may not fit the outdoor industry, but align with that mission makes a lot of sense, because now you have a threat, a threat that combines or goes through each of your clients.
And I think that's what's important is defining what is the threat that if you were going to go out of your niche, what is the threat that binds it all together? And I feel like you guys have done a really good job identifying what that really is. We've been really lucky in terms of clients like we do this exercise every Monday morning, where in our Monday, Huddl, everyone shares their rose thorn and their bud from the previous week.
The rose is the high, the thorn is the low, and the bud is what they're looking forward to this week. And if I hear about one client to consistently in people's thorns, then I know we have a problem client. And I can honestly say, since we really nailed our focus, I don't hear that many complaints about our clients. It may be like one project that goes awry.
That's been fine. We have refined our positioning over the years. So within our positioning, we have our purpose statement, which is we want to seduce people into the outdoors. And kind of our how is that we build brands that enhance human potential. Those took a little bit of time, you know, my business partner and I, my former business partner and I were both writers.
And so once we kind of figured out what it was that we wanted to do and who we wanted to focus on, I think it took us maybe two or three months to really get to the right words. However, our pillars have evolved and they become more relevant as we grow. We started really, really niche.
You know, one of our pillars is endemic expertise, which is the, you know, our knowledge of the outdoor and active industry. And the way that we express that for a long time was technical apparel is in our DNA because we came up through most of us came up through Louis Lemon or kit and a's or Arctarex.
But technical apparel is so niche. And I think that was important at the beginning because it was an opening to tell the story of being trained by Chip Wilson on how to talk about the benefit to the end user, all the design decisions that are made. We are going to telling the story of how it actually serves you and make makes your life better.
But we've recently refined that to performance is in our DNA and suddenly that the word performance as opposed to technical apparel that opens up a whole new set of opportunities because we also work in hard goods that have to perform. We also work in wellness products that make your body perform and we're also a really high performing team.
One of our kind of big rock goals with three big rock goals, we update them every five years. But one of them is to create a hub of talent here in Vancouver that you wouldn't expect to find here. You might only expect to find this level of talent in New York or San Francisco. And to that end, we've made a point of only hiring the best. You know, we don't just hire someone because they happen to be available.
We have an opening. We'll wait for someone that really has specific expertise in that niche. And we know that they're better than anyone else in the city. And so performance extends to how we show up as well. So it's evolving from learning and being flexible, not changing the course, but knowing that sometimes you just got to tighten the cogs a little bit.
I want to go back to the rose thorn and bud exercise that you do with your team. We all do daily and weekly huddles differently, but I've never heard it frame for the garden analogy before. I love it because it's so out there related and matches your brand. I also want to point out when agency leaders really listen to how the internal team experiences the client.
It helps agencies have a better relationship with the client and it leads to better attainment among other things. And key for me is hearing you say, look, we really listen to people get their feedback and take action emphasis on taking action because organizations can do a lot of listening without action taking.
And the other point I want to bring out is how much that one word performance has impacted everything you do. It goes to show that it doesn't take long statements or complicated explanations to define the agency. So I like to switch gears here and talk about trends to exonanish you have to keep up with industry trends. How do you do that in your agency? What trends do you see in the outdoor space that are shaping the way you approach branding and creative work?
So there's some fun trends. Maybe I'll just focus on one that comes to mind right away and it's close to my heart. And so I'm paying a lot of attention to it. But the thing that I'm most excited about is the overlay of fashion and the outdoors.
Historically, the outdoors was all about function. You know, you would go to MEC if you're in Canada or REI if you're in the US and you would figure out what is going to keep me the driest, what's going to keep me the warmest, what's going to move with my body. And if you're a woman, this is a conversation that comes up a lot in our industry. You know, it was pink or teal or purple. And it was like, this is what you're stuck with.
And there's been a big shift towards incorporating fashion and specifically that's happening in the running space. So run is kind of my lane. That's where I get most excited. I'm a trail runner. I'm a road runner. I race.
And there's so many amazing brands that are taking all of these really fun principles of fashion, marketing and fashion and applying it to run. And so a couple that come to my mind off the top of my head in the run space are a brand called Bandit running out of New York and satisfy.
They are actually both mostly target towards men bandit has a women's line as well, but I would say they really excel in the men space. But they're doing almost these like high fashion photo shoots. And the designs are so much more interesting than they used to be in the hiking space, which is my other passion.
There's a brand like hiker kind, which is literally to New York, you know, fashionistas that also happen to love through hiking and they've brought principles of fashion design into backcountry gear. So like these really nice button downs that also happen to perform exactly the way you need them to if you're on like a 20 day through hike.
And that overlay of fashion and outdoor is very exciting to me. And how do you take that trend back to your clients? How do you approach it in the branding creative work that you do as marketers? That's what we do. We go out there, find trends, find things are interesting. We want to look ahead for clients and implement some of these things so that we can help our clients to head of the curve. How do you bring that back to your clients and how do you share these trends?
We always do it through the voice of the customer. So there are so many niches nowadays like the internet, you know, this TikTok means trends move like daily. There's a new trend every day. It's so hard to keep up with what the latest kind of core trend is. Whether it's cottage core or core core or you know, whatever movements, strawberry, what is it like the summer girl I'm too old to be talking about this. But anyway, you know what I mean.
There are too many trends and every brand is speaking to a different niche within that, you know, speaking of niching brands have, you know, they can find their own little corner of it. And so it's about hearing from their customer, what are they into right now? What's speaking to them? What's going to resonate with them in what's happening in their life right now?
We try to not take guesses. My team is deep in desk research all the time. We pay a lot of attention to email marketing. That tends to be a great reference point for what's happening visually with language with product. We're all all the social channels. I will not go on TikTok, but my team is on the top paying attention to what's happening there. We have magazines subscriptions. We have tears that we put on the walls.
But no matter how plugged in we are to what's happening in this site case, nothing compares to talking to our audience. So, you know, you mentioned our work with Adidas.
Adidas, the biggest project that we did with them was a research project where we were talking to Gen Z and Gen Alpha. So like 10 and 12 year olds finding out how they think about the themselves in relation to sport and really thinking about how the brand can be marketing to them in three or four years time when they're becoming the consumers.
You know, I'm a 44 year old woman almost there's no way that I could speak on behalf of a 14 year old or 12 year old. We really need to go to them. And so we not only capture the quotes and the trends that come out of those. We also catch capture imagery so you can really see who it is that speaking and kind of put it into context.
We pull their words verbatim and kind of find the nuggets within that that we bring back. And then you, you know, especially when you're working with a big brand, there has to be also a narrative that you're bringing back to their team. Here's what's happening in the world. And here's the brief to your brand. Here's how you bring it to life in your product, in your marketing, in, you know, the events and activations that you do.
It has to be really actionable as well as truly immediately relevant. Thank you for sharing that no matter what niche you're in trends on social media move so fast. And your point about focusing on the ideal client and what they want to see and what they care about. It supports deleting the unnecessary noise. Now speaking of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, I have one niece who's Gen Z and three Gen Alpha nieces.
And between those two generations never mind my generation. Their purchase behavior is so different. I grew up with commercials. They grew up with social media influencers and now my Gen Alpha nieces will be growing up with AI. Anyhow, Amanda, before we wrap up here, one last question. No agency owners journey is the same. Tell us about yours.
Mine was not, I think, the typical journey. When I look at my peers, most of them are either designers who started maybe freelance designing and then that blew up and they turned it into an agency. Or maybe they came up through big agency as a more copy driven creative director and then branched out on their own. I didn't take either of those paths. I actually thought I was going to be in magazine publishing. So I started out as a writer.
I was really passionate about reading and creating publications and did my masters in publishing and really thought that the path for me was to be the editor of some national or international magazine. But as I was doing this was right around the time that the 2008 recession happened and every major magazine, at least in Canada, seemed to be closing their doors or downsizing in the US. And it became clear that telling stories for magazines wasn't really going to be lucrative.
And if you really want to do it, you kind of have to have a wealthy family and do internships at New York magazines right out of university. And I was already in my 30s and you know that wasn't the path that I was taking.
And I had been a freelance writer on and off for years. I moved around a ton in my 20s and in my early 30s and freelancing was always what I did kind of in between while I was looking for other jobs. And so I was used to working for myself. And I was kind of that exact situation. I had left kit nace. I was consulting on my own. I was doing some consulting for another strategy agency. I was doing some of my own writing.
And it just kept growing and growing and growing. And you know, I'm one of these people who would just say yes to everything, which means I've learned about a lot of different things. I was doing work in financial tech, in insurance tech.
I was writing for all different departments at different colleges and universities. Your knowledge becomes so vast. But because I was saying yes to everything, I was subcontracting a lot of work. And suddenly I found myself as this project manager with seven subcontractors. I was doing the actual work that I love to do. And I had this revelation. One that I didn't want to be a project manager. I wanted to be able to stay in the high level strategic work and actually interact with clients.
But that I had the foundation of an agency. And so I reached out to my two most trusted writers that I'd ever worked with, both of whom reported to me at kit nace and had gone on to other amazing brands. Co founders Lindsey has she had gone on to sage the natural wellness company and our other co founder Rachel had gone on to be a senior copywriter at a ritz. Yeah. And so I just hit them up one day. And I said,
would you want to start something with me? And speaking to the power or not power of me. And I was really, really excited to be able to do a presentation. We originally launched Monday as a content agency thinking specifically we were going to be doing content strategy, copywriting. But thank God we didn't get to niche in terms of our actual service because within months, people we were working with, we're asking if we could also do much bigger strategies.
And then we could do a designer who could then bring the work we're doing to life. So we, we very quickly grew it from the three of us just writing copy and doing content strategy to having a full time designer to having a full time project manager. And then really grew it into this business where we have three different streams of insights and research strategy and creative execution.
And so I think that's the key to the agency owners that I meet do start their agency by being a specialist in something. And as a specialist, the really good at it, which means that, hey, hello, you're getting a whole bunch of clients. And before you know it, you're managing a whole bunch of people. And the next logical step is to form the agency. I'm glad that thank you so much for being here and sharing your experience with me.
And I hope off where can people find you? Yeah, the best place is if you want to follow Monday, we are Monday Vancouver on Instagram. I think we're Monday creative ink on LinkedIn. I personally am really active on LinkedIn. So Amanda Lee Smith, and that's LEEE the Lee, that's probably where you can engage with me the best is through my LinkedIn. I am sharing things all the time. I'm sharing job posts, I'm sharing things I'm thinking.
I'm commenting on other people's things. I just love LinkedIn as a platform and it's been such an amazing tool for connecting with folks. So that's your best bet for me. Thank you, Amanda. We'll get all that into the show notes and thank you again for being here. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Hey, thanks for hanging out with me at the Small BitMighty agency podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world to me, if you hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app and share it with your friends. I'll see you on the next one.