Agency

“So I think one of the really magical things is this is a technology that really amplifies our identity, our agency. It kind of unbundles skill from desire, for example. If you want to make music, you can make music now. You don't have to know how to play the p…”

“No, I mean, and then I think it's crazy to what degree, like, suddenly agency and taste, like, off the charts important now.”

“I don't think that it means that we're going to get rid of people. I think it means that people need to still supply the agency.”

“Just carefully look at how everything around you is made up by people that are no smarter than you, and realize that probably in the span of six to nine months, you can, for most things around you, figure out how to make it from scratch. And therefore you have…”

“To back all this effort, we've actually created an open source project called Agency. And this, you know, became a Linux Foundation project with the backing of a few large formative members. Google, Oracle Red Hat were with us and Dell as well.”

“An agent with no agency is useless. An agent with you know, too much agency can be dangerous and especially if it goes out of control.”

“Even if you have an agency or whatever, or you want to hire an agency, you should start by doing this because you're gonna dial it in yourself. You're gonna really understand yourself by doing this.”

“You have to imagine that even if you want to use a more traditional process and go through the traditional Hollywood pipeline, showing up to a pitch meeting at an agency With a pretty much polished AI version of your film is going to resonate in a way that a s…”

“When they try to control your reaction to them, it is like inherently off-putting. I think we generally respect people who are, we generally respect people who respect our agency, right? So if I come in here and I just start saying all the things you want to h…”

“What's interesting to me about agency being popular in my view, among a certain like circle of tech people is that. Agency is a different way of saying this idea of like, oh, you should consider yourself like radically responsible for your life experience and …”

“If I come in and say, I can install the sales process, that's going to Met you guys another 500 K to a million dollars a year. That's huge value. And so they're going to easily pay me a hundred K to do that, even if it's going to take me two months. You know w…”

“Ownership is seeing that you can run, but I think agency assumes that you control, you're more of a thermostat than a thermometer. And that means that, hey, the thermometer is always measuring the temperature of the room, while a thermostat will change the tem…”

“The thing with building a SaaS out of an agency is every agency wants to do it. Some agencies try and almost none succeed. It's very, very hard.”

“When you work with like an agency or something like that, that can take a long time. They have to get access to your code base or whatever. And now there's this beautiful sort of like power that someone has who can build the website and go and fix all this stu…”

“The philosophical definition I would say is like means ends effectiveness. What I mean by that is for a given set for a given end. So for a given goal and means goal, right? Can you select the means to achieve that goal?... So it's like a narrow instrumental c…”

“Right now at agency, I have no meetings with anybody, right? We're like 15 people. We have one meeting for the whole company, for the whole team. Show me what you did yesterday, show me what you're gonna do today. That's all we do in that meeting.”

“CEOs are making a big mistake right now. They're like, I talk to them and they're like, yes, this is what I want. I'm down. Elias, let's get agency in here right now. And then they pass me down to the next person and to the next person.”

“What I realized was, luck is actually poison, because it strips people of agency. So if you constantly rely on luck, if you constantly fall back on good luck, bad luck, what you're saying is that you have no agency.”

“The beauty about being a creative for hire or anything for hire, doing an agency even, is the cash flow is really good. You can make like a good income just by helping other people achieve what they want.”

“And by the way, on all these functions, like support, CSM, whatever, we're using his product inside of HubSpot. And we're using it in the group where it's like very, what ECF has a thousand accounts.”

“At agency, there's only going to be one email address. It's aliasatagency.inc. Everyone will email. I will always like take care of all the customers, right?”

“No one joins agency until they have work for me as a contractor. I'm going to put you to work and I am going to be real exactly how I am with everybody in the company today. And if you don't deliver at a level that is World-class in that one or two week timefr…”

“To trust the output of an LLM to send an email to a million dollar customer. It's like, you know, when you present that to a CSM, they're like looking at it and they're like, they're questioning every word. You have no idea. They're questioning every word in t…”

“I would say max, like if you create a huge agency out of it, like eight figures, like ten million.”

“We really tailored our services, our approach and everything for a client, which is Not the most scalable way to grow your agency, because the more time you invest, you have a less time to allocate for other clients, et cetera. So either you should increase th…”

“Start there, get it to a good place, create that milestone of, hey, when we're spending 50 K a month, I need to hire somebody full time to take this over and just have that conversation with your agency and your consultant.”

“And every agency deteriorates when the principals don't do the work, but also how do you scale if the principals don't want to do the work, right?”

“I think the higher agency person is more focused on like process metrics versus outcome metrics. Right? Like, from pottery, like, one thing I learned was, if you want to be good at pottery, you shouldn't count, like, the number of cups or bowls you make. You s…”

“You don't have to be as popular as that to have good materials so that when you Are doing your sales calls in your ways. You have an edge over the next agency who just says, I do strategy. Here's three customers who are happy. You can call them. Yes. We all ha…”

“Pre twenty-twenty-two, you're at five million EBITDA, you can sell for 15 to 20, if, like, your agency's really good 15 to 20 X. And so, that's like a hundred million dollar business, if you wanted to sell.”

“If your agency's doing, you know, five, 10, twenty million dollars in profit a year, that's an exit for you every single year.”

“So paying somebody to dub, you need an agency, it's a hundred dollars per minute.”

“Software is great at long-term enterprise value and terrible for a short-term cashflow. And so the agency kind of bridges that gap.”

“No amount of like onboarding and help tutorials will ever turn someone into the perfect user. But when you're like, all right, fine, I'll like pay me and I will just set it all up for you. It turns out that works pretty well.”

“If you're joining a company and the CEO does the role that is your functional area of expertise, it's probably the area where you'll learn the most because they're hopefully world-class at it, but also when will you, you'll be the most frustrated at times beca…”

“Everyone wants to take the business in house at some point. I mean, that's just the natural way of things. And it's just a matter of when, not if that's another people lie to themselves about. It's like at some point they want to take it in house.”

“I think the biggest killer or roadblock trying to have an agency launch products is they never get the focus that you need. You always get distracted running your agency because that's what pays the bills.”

“The problem that I see with many startup founders is that they want to outsource everything that they can before they make it predictable. And it will just not work out. Like if you find an agency that like will do certain things For you, they will not probabl…”

“And we obviously didn't you know, didn't raise any money or et cetera, because we had, you know, we had the agency that can finance that.”

“This is like by far the number one theme from successful SaaS founders is starting as an agency.”

“The money you make as an agency is indifferent from the results you drive for clients. And they're usually not correlated because the quickest way to make money in the agency is you just kill your people. Essentially, you just increase your capacity, but that …”

“My advice, if you're just starting to dabble in PR at the company is try not to do it, building an in-house team from the get go. And the reason is, is that it takes a minimum number of people. It takes certain network reach for PR to be effective.”

“So if paid acquisitions kind of working for you, that's often a really good use case for going with an agency or somebody who does it all the time because it changes so fast and so much, you know, right.”

“There's two types of nurture. There's chance and there's chosen, right? Chance is like what country I'm born into, what my parents do for a living, what my you know, what my situation is, what my environment is like, what circumstances that my zip code, right?…”

“A big mistake that a lot of people make, which is hiring freelancers. Freelancers are okay at some points, but for the management, the, like, especially if you're creating a website and you're doing it right for the first time ever, you want to put that in the…”

“First thing is you spend all this time making yourself indispensable. Then if you want to do this, you need to make yourself dispensable. You have to do the opposite.”

“From what I've seen, at least a glaring pattern is a successful agency spins out successful tech because they've got a built-in base.”

“The largest SaaS companies today, they usually start as some form of agency and they slowly morph into a more predictable software oriented solution.”

“If you're getting, you know, five to 10 a month, you're probably at a point where you may need an agency to help you manage through that.”

“I like to say that DC is a fact for Free zone. And relying on a congressional office or an agency to figure out how your business works by, you know, jumping onto the internet and, you know, doing a news search isn't enough.”

“There's a lot of research showing agency affects it positively. So people who have a sense of agency, of control, they're less likely to be depressed. They're more likely to be healthy as well because the two are very much correlated. Our mental state affects,…”

“Even after taking that into account, people still would rather make their own decisions Rather than give it to an expert whose success rate is higher. And the reason that we concluded what's driving that is the extra benefit of control. So just having, making …”

“So if we don't have our own agency, we don't know the pain. So we'll have to suffering all that to make the sense really perfect for our own agency to use.”

“Something that I actually would recommend is just bringing a new agency in house every, every year or two.”

“I think it's a danger of an agency when you have a charismatic leaders, you can only be in so many places at once.”

“Agency is an incredible place. I, when I talk to young entrepreneurs that are, you know, they feel like I want to do a business. I don't know what it is. You know, I often will tell them, you know, go do services work for a while. Somebody is going to bring yo…”

“Many times, SaaS businesses that go and become very big, their infancy is from an agency, which is the cash cow. The agency gets to see into clients' problems, and they realize every client has the same problem.”