Meet the “Don Draper” of modern-day advertising, Chris Evans. Author of The Intelligent Advertiser, Evans is an entrepreneur, a real estate investor, the CEO of Wealth Cap Holdings™, and co-founder of three international companies. How – as a father of four – does he find the time to make all these impressive agency maneuvers?! Let us count the ways…
About Chris:
Chris Evans is co-founder of Traffic and Funnels, which helps high-level consultants, coaches, and experts develop lead generation machines to scale their businesses to seven figures a year. He’s also co-founder of Wealth Cap Holdings and Sales Mentor. He’s scaled his companies to over eight figures in less than five years, alongside his partner, Taylor, on just a few hours per week. When he’s not running his businesses, you can find him hanging out with his wife and four kids in North Carolina
Points of Interest…
Ponder point alert!
- The catalyst for Traffic and Funnels‘ figure growth 1:29
- Reinvesting Agency Profits 4:35
- Scaling a Fast Growth Agency With Minimal Involvement 8:04
- Leveraging Your Agency 10:35
- Multiple Agency Mindset 13:08
Catalyst Behind Traffic And Funnel‘s Growth
Listen, possibly the main reason for you coming to this blog is twofold; not only do you get to sample my dulcet tones, you also learn how to build a business that runs without you having to hover over it constantly. Hence, my first question for Chris involves delving into what he felt was the reason why Traffic and Funnel skyrocketed at such breakneck speed.
In Chris and partner Taylor’s case, their “aggressive personalities”, and ability to apply tunnel vision where appropriate, were responsible for its growth. However, as with most companies finding their feet, their laser focus wasn’t utilized from the offset. Indeed, dear reader, it was a familiar tale…
“We were doing kind of everything – run webinars, ran ads, built funnels for people. But then when we started locking into consulting, which was way more leverageable for us. So we had one offer that fit one person, and we just went as fast into that as possible. I’d say that was the biggest part of our growth curve – our aggressiveness and our ability to take risk.”
As for the systems Chris had to have in place in order to make the consultancy scale to the degree that it did? It revolved around the core part of Chris and Taylor’s business model – “the philosophy of backing out.” In other words, you need to identify the pillars you can put in place – whether it be a person or a process – that will result in the gift of time so you can deliver on your commitment to your clients.
Reinvesting Agency Profits
Let’s discuss landscapes. What does Traffic and Funnel’s landscape look like today – what level is it operating at? Well, Chris considers it to be their platform company, complete with an impressive team infrastructure comprising of sales, marketing, and operations. As for its profitability standards? It’s very high. And this is a problem. Why? Because it can lull many company owners into a false sense of security.
“We don’t want to make the same mistake that a lot of people have made in the past; not being smart with the money that you’re making today to invest into long-term passive wealth building. You still have a lot of these guys and gals who’ve been in the industry for a long time, and they’re still having to hustle harder than they used to.”
Not favoring this future, Chris co-founded real estate investment company Wealth Cap last year, as well as starting Sales Mentor – a sales education company that trains people to do sales the right way. After an initially rocky start, Chris rebuilt the team at the start of this year, and now he’s about to turn over $600k a month. This is what a belief in your vision and the ability/drive to take risks can deliver for you.
While diversifying to this degree may seem unfathomable for many, especially when trying to build your first company, long-term it will give you the freedom of “optionality.”
Scaling a Fast Growth Agency With Minimal Involvement
OK, at this point, you probably want to break down what needs to be true for you to run a fast-scaling business in just a few hours a week. What do you have to have in place? What are the keys?!
Having a set destination helps. In other words, you need to define what you want from your day-to-day, your week, and your month. Set goals are important. If you can’t clearly envisage where you’re going, then an apathy can creep in, an aimlessness that’s not productive for growth. With that, here are the keys that helped Chris get to where he is today…
- Have a set goal for what you want your business – and your life – to look like
- To scale fast, you need the right people in place
- Now, get out of their way and let them do what they were hired to do
- Apply proper constraints to your scalability – without having the proper constraints and tolerations in your business you could be at risk of growing out of control and thus running off the tracks
Side note: our Agency Profit Toolkit is a one stop shop for you to be able to outline some of these crucial profitability numbers to a potential buyer. Spreadsheets, templates and training videos, you name it, it’s all in the toolkit. Grab yours free at the link below:
Leveraging Your Agency
In Chris’s experience, in order for the aforementioned to work, you need to create what he calls a “cap space” for yourself, i.e. you need to budget a certain amount of time to get things done. For that to happen, it’s imperative you remove yourself from all the things you should not be doing in your business.
This is an instrumental component to becoming a CEO of a company that does seven figures a month for only five hours a week. But that’s just words… how do you actually make it happen? Simply put, you need to have leverage points and the ability to put them in place.
“For us, that was identifying these pillars I talked about before – having those leaders, putting them in place, having the goals very clear for them. It being 100% their job, their duty, their responsibility to accomplish those goals – and I’m just an advisor, an investor to help and guide them.”
More often than not, there’s guilt, a sense of responsibility, a sense that ‘I’m the leader. I’m the owner, I need to be here the latest, I need to be here the earliest’. The fact of the matter is, that’s just not true. You can’t fill other people’s cups up with an empty cup. Equally, as an agency owner, you need to make time to replenish the well.
Multiple Agency Mindset
I get it, letting go is hard, especially as entrepreneurs. You have to hone your tolerance to let the people you put in place to figure things out for themselves. After all, it’s the job you hired them to do, therefore they need to accomplish whatever goal it might be for their area of the business. You need to flip the mindset from micromanager to support in order for you to have that “cap space” to invest your profits in new ventures.
“And so, once that clicked it, then those people had the freedom even to make mistakes. We have the right constraints, the right have guardrails – so no one will run the business into the ground – and it took us to the next level.”
Another mindset that helps get Chris consistently to the next level is entertaining the impossible. Asking ridiculous, high-level questions can be game-changing as an entrepreneur.
“How do I manage or grow a business million dollars a month on five hours a week at work? Well, it starts by asking the question. Then your brain starts to work out the process to get there… It’s actually fun to be able to answer these questions. And so now, like the questions I’m asking are just another level of ridiculous.”
Key Takeaway…
Get your pillars in place to leverage your agency. Then, start embracing the ridiculousness, people! Not being afraid of asking or answering those high-level questions is the gift of being an entrepreneur, and you’ll never know where it may take you.
#EmbraceYourRidiculousness (coming to a targeted Facebook ad for t-shirts near you very soon…)
Want to see more from Chris? You can do that via…
Did you learn anything new from this episode? Let us know in the comments below – feedback is king! Our next installment of #APP, on December 9th, will see us chat with Drew McLellan. While our previous blog with David C. Baker is over hither…
Agency Profitability Tool Kit
If you’re looking for more resources to help you improve your agency’s profitability, then check out the Agency Profitability Tool Kit – it’s full of the same templates and checklists we’ve used with consulting clients to help them improve their profitability by over 100% in under 60 days.
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