How to spend time on your own brand? - Marc Acton - Episode #29

Founder, CEO, and Chief Strategist for Alpha/Echo Agency, is a boutique marketing firm that helps exceptional companies grow, launch, and build. Alpha/Echo Agency is a group of smartisans—an unagency, fighting the good fight against unawesome work. 

Discussion Points:

• What myth or bogus strategy do you want to bust? 1:39
• What type of work agencies don't think that they can do for themselves? 4:19
• How do you spend time on your own brand?  7:33 and 48:19
• Tell us about how you got into this business. 28:16
• What was the idea behind going after startups? How did that go? And where are you now? 30:00
• How have things changed w/COVID? 37:25
• How do you do your pricing with your customers? 41:30
• What frustrates you the most with the clients? 49:52
• What is one of the biggest mistakes that you've ever made? 54:40
• What keeps you up at night? 58: 22
  
  

Takeaways 

• There are two ways to be a product based agency; one is to create your own product and the other is to have a revenue share or partner based model.
• The problem with applying yourself to your own marketing is there's a farther distance between revenue generation.
• If your efforts aren't tied to compensation, or employee success metrics, then they're going to fail miserably.
• The success metrics are really tied to two things:
  1: Manageable, achievable goals that you're setting for yourself.
  2: The overall success of the company (in each budget).
• The system is only as good as the execution. - Marc Acton
• There's two things that make a system successful:
  1: Are people actually looking at it like that's the value of the system?
  2: If you make it punitive, you're almost assured of not having success.
• The Great work would speak for itself.- Marc Acton
• One of the tricks with clients is giving them two options, give them the one you like, and give them the one they asked for. - Jessie

Links

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fastacton/
• Company website: https://alphaechoagency.com/
• Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alpha-echo-agency/
• Largest independent RV magazine by Marc Acton: https://iheartrving.com/

Busted Myths:

• Agencies can't work for themselves.