Many agency owners start out thinking that clients care about the work.
All the pretty dashboards, the sophisticated tests, and the endless optimization.
They all soon find out this is wrong.
In this episode with Alex Manning, we got into one of the biggest mindset shifts agency owners have to make if they actually want to grow:
Clients don’t care how hard you worked. They care if it improved revenue.
That sounds obvious but I think most agencies still get this backwards!
Alex went from running paid social campaigns to building a TikTok Shop agency helping 7 and 8 figure CPG brands scale.
He knew he was on to something when he took a makeup brand doing ~$50k/month on Shopify to doing $50k/day on TikTok Shop.
Every day for a week.
It wasn’t the “viral growth” story that I found interesting, it was what happened after.
Alex explains why most agencies fail when they move into TikTok Shop
Why brands churn even when results are decent
And why being “good at delivery” is no longer enough.
A few moments worth paying attention to:
The real reason brands hesitate to invest in TikTok Shop
Why agencies accidentally create more work for clients
The hidden danger of becoming too romantic about your process
How lean 2 person teams are outperforming bloated agencies
The positioning question every founder eventually gets asked:
“Why are you different from everyone else?”
There’s also a section near the end where Alex talks about finding your lane fast enough before the market catches up.
Listen to the full episode here:
Catch the full episode on The Agency Uplift Podcast
Get the Client Call Analyzer and 4 more powerful tools for free at:
THE AGENCY LEVERAGE BLUEPRINT
- Sean
P.S. One of my favorite lines from the episode:
“You don’t have to prove your work has value if the value is already showing up in their bottom line.”
That sentence alone is worth the listen.