Sujan Patel is the co-founder of Web Profits. In this episode, we talk about selling an agency, why it’s important to get out of your comfort zone, and what happened when Sujan gave away almost $1 million worth of Free T-shirts to market his agency.

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Transcription

You’re listening to the 10X Your Agency Podcast Your Agency podcast where every Wednesday for the next 12 weeks, you’ll be learning strategies on how to scale up your agency and grow your client base from successful agency owners who’ve been there, done it and built a highly successful agency. You’ll learn how they attract clients, what their biggest causes of client churn were and what their challenges were at different stages of building their agency. My name is Marcus Taylor and I’ll be your host.

Marcus: Hey guys welcome to another episode of the 10X Your Agency Podcast. Today I’m joined by a very special guest, Sujan Patel who’s the co-founder of Web Profits. So I’m going to be talking to Sujan about the process of selling an agency, how getting out of his comfort zone and sky diving in his personal life, how that helps his professional life and also we are going to be talking about how Sujan gave away almost a million dollars worth of t-shirts and what impact that had on the agency. Sujan it’s a huge pleasure having you here on the show, how are you doing?

Sujan: It is going great, great to be on and excited to chat with you.

Marcus: So to kick things off, I was wondering if you could give us a brief overview of the past seven years from when you founded your first agency to where you are today and what you are working on right now.

Sujan: Yes so I’ve been doing digital marketing, that’s my expertise. Started off as SEO and then turned into kind of a t-shirt marketer and turned into a, whatever it takes to grow marketer, right? Had a marketing agency before, started it in ’09. It was pretty much started as an SEO agency and expanded into other channels very much focussed on top of the funnel and what not which is great. Built it up about 3 million annual revenue, 30 or so staff and couple of different locations. It was great and then essentially got burned out and sold it. I made a lot of mistakes, learned from them over the years after the sale. And I swore off consulting when I saw the business in 2014, like January 2014 and then mid 2015 I was like, I’m getting consulting deals, maybe I should take them. That led into a series of events that caused me pretty much to start a new agency called Web Profits and yes we’ve been different and we do two things really differently: one, my career I’ve been on the agency side of it, I’ve also been on the in-house side. I’ve run marketing teams and what not for companies. And I know the pain point. I know what happens really in the life of the person who is paying you the bills in the agency side. And so when you know that you can essentially solve their problem before they happen. Some cases we are a [sic] agency that is acting VP of marketing, you’re almost like an outsourced team maybe for early stage start-ups or late stage companies. I was going to say older but you can’t really be that old if you are an eight year old company. For those kind of companies we help them bring their mojo back. And I can say, the way we are different is that no longer are we only focussed on top of the funnel, not just channels, we do that but we also look at the conversion rate, CRO. We also look at the lead nurturing and also post customer marketing; meaning referral programs, delight. Like I say this all the time when I speak at conferences and people ask me, What’s your biggest success?î And I’m like the biggest thing for me is the things that I’ve done after customers arrived to help has been the most successful to bring more customers over and that’s having this attitude of like, I actually care about my customers.

Marcus: Got it, so I was doing a little bit of research before this interview Sujan, I have to ask, I read you’ve broken 17 bones, you’ve taken up skydiving as a weekend hobby and travelling around the world speaking at conferences to conquer your fear of public speaking. I was wondering how is this relentless approach to pushing your boundaries and getting out of your comfort zone, how has that approach in your personal life helped in your professional life?

Sujan: For me I think it’s one and the same. That’s the first thing that there’s no real line between the two. Everything I do professionally, personally, is towards what I want to do in life generally speaking. And so skydiving has been one of the most fun I’ve ever had. It kind of came from my need of going fast. As a kid I loved cars. I used to buildactually my first business was an e-commerce business selling after marquee car parts. Think like souping-up your Honda Civic, right? And it was fun. And I sucked at doing the business but that’s how I got into SEO. But then I moved into actually growing up. I can actually afford a nice car. So I actually started to going to race track and I never got into professional racing but I loved going to the track. I would go like 20, 30 times a year. I have hundreds of friends around that. And then I was like, You know what, cars are cool but what about a motorcycle?î And I started going to the race track in a motorcycle. And I took off two wheels. And then, I’ve been scared of heights, I went one time and I was scared Jesus out of me but I liked it. I was like, This is a really weird feeling, this is good.î And then I realised that what if I, instead of going and racing motorcycles, I just jump out the air? All in all I’m going hundred plus miles an hour, I’ve just removed the wheels and need for gas at least in my body. The plane needs the gas now.

Marcus: I know it added that extra excitement of plummeting towards the ground [laughs]?

Sujan: Yes. And I honestly I just had thisI grew up as an immigrant, came to this country, my parents didn’t speak English. I was three, I didn’t even talk much but I’ve always had an uphill battle. I was in ESL class, like English as a Second Language Class as a kid. I never really did well in school, I dropped out of college, more so flumped out of college, right? Dropped out is like a sexy version. And so to me, life has been full of challenges and things have gotten uncomfortable and I think it’s how you react when you’re uncomfortable. It’s how you react when you’re at the breaking point. It’s when you are at the edge of a cliff and they say, your back’s against the wall, what if your back’s against a cliff? And it’s the next five moves you make that, in my opinion, determine your trajectory and how muchwhether you fall off the cliff or whether you figure out a way to propel yourself forward. And so I work well under pressure but it’s because I’ve just lived that edge of the cliff for so long in my life. Skydiving and all these things have helped me. Like when driving cars and bikes, I’ve just learned to be more agile. I’ve learned to think on my feet and I’m just like,î Oh I got this.î It’s not even thought, it’s a thoughts, it’s like a half-thought but for some reason I have a clear answer.

Marcus: So you mentioned earlier that with the previous agency that you run you got into a point where you were at 30 or so staff, 3 million in revenue but you got to this point where you were tired and feeling burnt out, what was it then that made you then want to set up this second agency, Web Profits?

Sujan: Here’s the thing, at the first agency, we grew very fast and we didn’t include enough infrastructure. When I started the business I was 23 and I didn’t have an end goal. So first mistake I made was I didn’t have a goal I was going towards. I was just like, I want more, I want more, I want more. And when I started hitting millions in revenue, I was like, Oh, I could do that?î I remember when I first started it, I was like I wanted to make more money than when I was capped off at my job and I didn’t have a degree so being an executive was going to be tough and I hated politics and bullshit red tape, excuse my language. And so I was like I’m not going to be an executive in a large company. This is a horrible waste of time for me so anyways, what I learned was, have an end goal. So now we have an end goal and it’s huge and I’ll tell you about it in a second. Number two was, operations and processes and systems. We did it at Single Grain but we did it too late and things are changing and obviously what I learned is, in digital marketing, everything always changes. And so one it’s having these processes and then two it’s having like this grow team or set process outside of your process, right? And then three was just having the right partners and management and [fortunately] I started mine myself, got into about half a million in annual revenue. Brought on a partner, actually absorbed some of his revenue and gave him some of my shares of the company. And he and Ihis name is AJ Kumar. He and I quickly took the business to about triple and then we got s