What it takes to Scale a Company 8X from $20M to $150M in Revenue

Speaker 1: 0:58

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Corey Quinn. Corey is going to talk to us today about scaling businesses. Corey helped grow a business from 20 million to over 150 million in revenue 8x and he's going to talk to us a little bit about today how he did that. Welcome to the show, corey.

Speaker 2: 1:19

Eric, I am super excited for our conversation.

Speaker 1: 1:25

Really appreciate it. It sounds like you had some great experience and showed some magic and driving that kind of growth. Talk to us a little bit about how you did that. For Scorpion and I took six years, so it wasn't quite overnight success, but tell us about how you did that right. It's fantastic.

Speaker 2: 1:44

Sure, thank you for that. I think a big part of it was the company that I stepped into as the chief marketing officer was really this company that had a lightning in the bottle. It was an amazing company, it had a lot of potential and I was very fortunate to step into that situation. I was able to make some improvements and changes and as a result of those, we just had massive growth.

Speaker 1: 2:06

Yeah, I think company is just to put a fine point on it going from 20 million to 150 million. You know the odds of a company doing that are about one in 100,000.

Speaker 2: 2:16

It's pretty nimble, and this was not my first rodeo. I didn't not every company I touched had this massive growth. I think some of the key elements that really was special about this place is first off, it's a digital agency. I joined in 2015. At the time, as you mentioned, they had about $20 million in revenue and the thing that really hurt me up in the interview process I'll be honest with you, Eric I wasn't so sure I wanted to even take a job at an agency. Like I had just finished business school and I was doing I had my eyes set on some big things. But the thing that made me lean forward in the job interview before I accepted the role there was the fact that they had a 93% client retention rate, and what that means is that, out of every 100 clients, 93% of them or 93 of them would stay throughout an entire year, which, by any definition, is fantastic customer or client retention. But when you consider that the focus of Scorpion at the time was primarily on law firms and small local businesses, it was really fantastic, and I learned after accepting the role there that things that made Scorpion unique in that regard to have that kind of result really began with true care and empathy and client intimacy. Really they really cared about the client and we could talk more about that. But that was the genesis for it that, plus a true specialization in serving a specific market, which was, in this case, attorneys.

Speaker 1: 3:47

Okay, so you picked a clear vertical, and what was the gist of the service that you were offering? Just so people have a sense of it.

Speaker 2: 3:56

So we were working with attorneys, specifically personal injury attorneys, who wanted to generate more leads from the internet, and the way we would do that is we would create a website and then do local SEO. We would do PPC soon. We would do things like LSAs, which is local search ads. We would do reputation management all the sort of blocking and tackling aspects of local marketing for a service based business, but specifically for attorneys. Yeah, that's effectively the service we provided.

Speaker 1: 4:28

And so you weren't trying to be everything to everybody. You picked a very specific vertical and you were doing a very specific thing for them, and it sounds like the reason that your customers were saying with you 93% of them were saying was because you were driving success for them right. That's the reason people say yeah.

Speaker 2: 4:47

I would say yes, and I would qualify that a little bit because, as it relates to the specialization, you're right, we had a specialization in a vertical market, but what that specialization allowed us to do was, in many cases, we became very educated on the business of running a law firm. We understood what it meant to have a website to drive leads and, very importantly, what to do when the phone rings, like they call it intake. So what does the attorney or the receptionist front desk do when the phone rings? And we would extend the sort of the aperture of our focus in our partnership with our clients beyond just SEO, keywords and leads. We would talk about the entire business. We effectively became a business advisor because we had this great experience the blending of digital marketing and running a law firm. We would, in many cases, help them to learn more about how to run the business and how to be successful with regard to growing the firm.

Speaker 1: 5:46

So it was a consultative sell and you became their marketing advisor. Do I have that right?

Speaker 2: 5:52

Yeah, I would say extend, I would open up the aperture even further to say we were a business advisor, so when they would get on a call with us we would talk about their business. We wouldn't talk about necessarily the keywords or the PPC performance. That was part of the conversation, but it was within a larger context that we were trying to help them to expand their overall success outside of just limited to digital marketing.

Speaker 1: 6:17

That's great. I think a lot of lawyers are very good at law, but they're not in great of sales and marketing, and so I think that they are open to embracing business advisors who can help them with growing their business and marketing in particular. What was the main channel or way that you convinced firms to sign up? Was there particular channels and tactics that worked really well to drive that 8x growth?

Speaker 2: 6:48

Yeah, I would say a couple of qualifiers here. The 8x growth did not come from attorneys exclusively. We did some other things, but I'll answer your question as it relates to attorneys specifically and then we can talk about the others. The thing that we did to drive attorneys, drive sales when it comes to attorneys is it turns out that attorneys, the way that attorneys shop is they go to Google. So let's say you're a personal injury attorney and you're in Atlanta, just to name a city, and you're not getting enough leads from the internet. What they will typically do is they go to Google and they search up in Google personal injury attorney in Atlanta and they look to see what other law firms come up. And because we were early in the space, we started in 2001, the inevitably a scorpion client website would come up, like a personal injury attorney who was working with scorpion. At the bottom of that client website would be a link to scorpion the website and then that would end up in a sales call. So we had a lot of credibility and a lot of evidence of success, which made it very easy for attorneys to say yes. That said, one of the reasons why I think I was hired there was because the founder of the agency wanted to accelerate sales beyond just waiting for the phone to ring. Inbound are really a great way to grow any business. However, when you can combine inbound with outbound, we were able to create a predictable pipeline of leads and sales through outbound efforts, you can really do some interesting things. For instance, we grew the business from 20 million to 40 million just by bringing an outbound sales and marketing focus in addition to the inbound. The thing that really made the difference with outbound was not doing cold calling necessarily. It was doing gift based outbound.

Speaker 1: 8:38

Okay, incentives work right.

Speaker 2: 8:42

Yes, and the way it's effectively the way to break the ice and to take a cold call into a warm call is to send them a thoughtful, interesting, unique and striking gift ahead of the first outreach.

Speaker 1: 8:55

What were some of the gifts that you sent that were Sure.

Speaker 2: 8:58

So we would send the same leads a gift every quarter. So it wasn't just a one-off campaign where we'd send them a gift and you'd help you get a sale. We would build a list, what I call it today. I call it the 20% list, which is like the Dream 100 or the really best leads that you want to go out and target, and you would commit to sending them a gift once a quarter for up to three years, and so it was a different gift every quarter. And the purpose of that was, if you sent the right gift, you communicate the right message that hey, we genuinely want to connect with you and build a relationship with you. You end up getting those sales calls. But to answer your question, the typically the default thing we would send is gourmet cookies. We would send a tin of beautiful, gourmet, like amazing, delicious, ooey, gooey cookies to the elite attorney in a FedEx box that would, when you send a FedEx to at least back in the day, when you send a FedEx to someone in an office and you address it to the, let's say, the lead decision maker, typically that FedEx box skips the mailroom because it's an urgent package and goes right to the decision maker's desk. They'd open that, up that box, they'd get the cookies and then the cookies would end up in the break room and then eventually everyone in the law firm standing around in the break rooms asking who brought these amazing cookies and of course the name this regard was Scorpion was buzzing all around the office. Who's Scorpion? And of course the tactic is you send the gift and you immediately follow up six times to try and get that conversation with the lead and inevitably we'd get on a call with them and they would be. The energy would be very different than a traditional cold call, which was very resistant to a very warm cold call or a warm call. Let's call it to hey, you guys the ones that sent the cookies. Hold on, let me put you through a type of thing right, you just change the whole dynamic as a result of sending something like that.

Speaker 1: 10:56

That's a brilliant strategy and I've seen this work for companies across verticals. I've personally done a lot of campaigns using incentives ranging from free lunches to buying Offices like that in espresso machines was a really crazy one. That was great for me, but I love the process of committing to sending it for a couple quarters and having the right follow-up. And it's not that these incentives. What I found is it's not that these incentives, it's not that they become a client because you sent the cookies, it just prioritizes them. Spending some time with you to understand just getting that initial prioritize time is a Simple thing, but it makes all the difference in the world when there's so many vendors and suppliers that people can talk to. It's like that's right, just getting your, your app bad is really what it's all about. So yeah that's great is that's one of the things they took it that helped the up-bound function take it from 20 to 20. That's great.

Speaker 2: 11:53

Yeah, and I think it's the antithesis of traditional outbound, which is very much net fishing start with a huge list, send a bunch of emails and see what comes back and then deal with it. Then this approach is you do all the lead List building at the front end and then you send them a very bespoke, high quality experience over a period of time.

Speaker 1: 12:15

So many offers that I get is a Target buyer have no offer at all. They're just like you. Give me 20 minutes, your time and that's the only offer they have. So Real cookies not yes, yeah, cookies, but real cookies are offer of some sort and how much people can have spent on incentives up to them. But, yeah, that's really interesting, and so I love the concept of inbound plus outbound. You can't be single-threaded. I like that and I like the idea. Incentives Any other major drivers that, yeah, are helpful.

Speaker 2: 12:47

Yeah, I would say, because we were focused on the attorneys in this regard. We spent a lot of time at Conferences and associations, not just having a booth, but one of the things that we would try and do is, when you go to an industry conference let's say, personal injury attorneys are going to Vegas, and you have the people that you're trying to sell to all in the same room. That's a great opportunity to create an experience, right, and there's a great book called the experience economy which talks about this idea. That it's it's quote, which is that it's not an economically viable Experience if it wasn't, if you didn't create a memory. Okay, so the the approach that we took was we have the people we want to build a relationship with. Let's go do something together that creates a unique memory that they can carry back with them to the office and they can Refer to over time. And so what we would do is we would take Advantage of being in person by doing things like taking clients to a Britney Spears concert. We buy out the whole front row in Vegas, right, we? Or we went to this hot, hot air balloon experience, or we would do something more simple and just have a intimate dinner, or maybe bring in an author to have a sort of a meet and greet type of experience, things where we can really be distinctive and stand out, versus just show up at a conference and be on the exhibit floor and kind of Get lost in all the sea of of noise there.

Speaker 1: 14:09

Yeah, delivering experiences. That's amazing. That's really what buyers want is. They want some sort of experience. It's not just about giving an incentive, but a lot of people value and Experiences more than they value getting, like a physical gift, because you know what stuff people want. It can vary greatly. So I love that idea of giving experiences. And then, more broadly, I think that most businesses Get 30 40% of their business from going to events, but the motion of what you do with those events is really makes all the difference in the world if you're successful or not.

Speaker 2: 14:46

A thousand percent. I think the thing that is the thing not to do is to Get a booth at a conference and travel out there and stand on the conference floor and hope for your ideal prospect to wander up your Booth magically. Right, that's just a recipe for disaster, if you ask me. The way to do it, in my opinion, is you plan these experiences ahead of time and you also you set your meetings up before you even get to the conference so that you can maximize your time there. The time on the floor is just bonus time. It's really just trying to get meetings with the people who are there in person.

Speaker 1: 15:18

That's right. Hope is not a strategy, and I think that 90% of people who I see exhibiting in shows aren't very successful and they're like I'm not coming back to this show next year because they don't do any of the things you just mentioned. And then they were just hoping that it was praying that things would, people would come find them and that just doesn't happen. So awesome, awesome strategies. My other question is you today help people who run agencies? Coach them.

Speaker 2: 15:50

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 15:51

And one of the things I saw that you coached them about is how to move away from founder led sales. Can you talk about that for a minute?

Speaker 2: 16:00

Absolutely. I, since left Scorpion, have been in the agency space for 17 years and I really wanted to transform my career into really becoming an expert in helping agencies who are stuck in that founder led motion. And there's three things that really cause that. In my experience, there's three things that cause the founder to really struggle with escaping founder led sales. Number one is a lack of focus. If you are a jack of all trades, master of none, if you sell a variety of services to a variety of clients, you typically struggle with separating yourself from sales because it's so nuanced. That's number one. Number two is you typically as a generalist, you have watered down positioning, the market doesn't see your unique value and you end up selling based on price. Your buyers are have a hard time differentiating you and that leads to them leaving you, clients leaving you because you're so replaceable. That again pulls founders back into sales. And then the third one is just a slow and inconsistent sales because you don't have a really strong position or expertise or reputation in the market, again being due to being a generalist. And look when suffer, when sales suffer, this is the founders. The first person gets pulled back in. And so when you lack focus, when you have watered down positioning and you are just don't have a real good system for generating sales. Those are all things that tie the founder to sales and what I help my clients to do is to reverse all three of those. Number one find focus, do positioning and then build up a strategy to acquire very specific clients within a vertical market.

Speaker 1: 17:36

That's awesome and I think this is also related to. You have a book coming out in about a month. Tell us about the thesis for this book, what it's going to be about.

Speaker 2: 17:48

Sure. So it is a very hardworking guide to agency owners who want to escape founder-led sales, and it is effectively the five step process that I take my high-end clients through. It's five steps since and it is the book will take you all the way through that. There's also online worksheets and videos and checklists and SOPs whatnot to help you make this transformation, just by using the book alone. You don't need to hire me Now. You can go through this transformation of being a generalist to being a vertical market specialist, escaping founder-led sales as a result. Yeah, so that's coming out in, like you said, about a month. And, eric, I would love to offer your audience a free version of the audiobook of the book. It's called Anyone Not Everyone and they can get that at AnyoneNotEveryonecom. Go to that website and they can access the. When the book launches, they can access a free audiobook, and that will also provide you links to the online worksheets and videos and SOPs, checklists and so on and so forth. So that would be some I'd love to offer to your audience.

Speaker 1: 18:51

Amazing. Thank you so much for that offer. I will definitely do that because I prefer to listen to audiobooks myself. So that's great, thank you, and I think people will. People should want to know more after the great story that you shared with us today. So thank you very much for sharing this story, spending the time with us today. I encourage everyone listening to share this episode with your friends. They deserve to hear this story and great review and subscribe the podcast for us so we can continue to have great guests on. Thanks so much for being with us today.