#288: Escaping the Legal Billable Hour Hampsterwheel to Start and Sell a Digital Agency with Andy Cabasso

In this episode Andy Cabasso shares his story of leaving the grind of the legal industry to start, grow, and exit JurisPage (a Marketing Agency focusing on law firms). Even though Andy’s new company was a professional services firm, he explains how he created a hyper valuable marketing agency by focusing on their niche, implementing productization based processes, and never going outside their skill sets and scope of services - even when clients begged him to do a unique project. Andy gives examples on how he scaled his agency using streamline procedures, independent contractors, and focusing NOT on paid ads but content and affiliate marketing to get leads. Whether you’re a professional services firm looking for ways to scale the business and make it more valuable so it can give you exit options, or a business owner looking for an inside scoop as to what makes a great marketing partner, this episode is for you!

What You Will Learn

The challenges - and solutions - to scaling a professional services firm
Productization in a service versus standardization in a service and what the difference is between the two
Why specialization in a services firm helps you increase client satisfaction, profit margins, effectiveness of your marketing, and the ability to scale
Why - and when - a fixed scope / flat fee pricing structure works in a services firm
Why Andy shifted his payment plan for clients to a percentage-by-project (at the start of the contract) and why that approach got his projects through the pipeline a lot faster
Why it’s so important to partner with a niche specific agency as a business owner seeking marketing help
How Andy leveraged partnerships and affiliates for scaling his agency rather than paid search
How Andy reacted to his out-of-the blue offer from a competing agency
Why coaching and mentorship was particularly helpful to Andy’s exit
Why Andy didn’t want his offer to be based off EBITDA
Why you must be able to hand off most of the day to day in order to get a good offer

// USE YOUR FINANCIALS TO CLARIFY A PATH TOWARDS A MORE VALUABLE BUSINESS: Intentional Growth Financial Assessment

Bio:

Andy Cabasso is the co-founder of Postaga, a new all-in-one platform for link building and email outreach. He is also co-founder of Offsprout, which helps web design agencies more easily build websites for their clients by using white-label website building tools.

Prior to Postaga and Offsprout, Andy capitalized on his life as a lawyer and co-founded JurisPage, an Internet marketing agency focusing on helping law firms create a professional Internet presence and get better visibility online. Andy’s mission is to help make businesses on the Internet more successful. JurisPage was acquired by Uptime Legal in 2016.

Quotes:

07:56 - “No matter how productive or efficient you can be, I can bring in ways to automate things and streamline things.” - Andy Cabasso

08:45 - “Your revenue is tied to hour and a billable rate, not at all tied to productivity.” - Andy Cabasso

13:17 - “There were two aspects of business that we would turn away regularly. We would turn away one-off projects and we would turn away customers that weren’t in our niche.” - Andy Cabasso

19:04 - “The idea of a productized service is that, we’re creating a very thick scope projects so that nothing is a surprise, so that you can adequately price for it knowing (generally) the range of time it’s going to take you.” - Andy Cabasso

22:04 - “To be clear, we didn’t get it right on day one.” - Andy Cabasso

30:03 - “That was part of our marketing. It was, ‘We are in this niche. We are law firm marketing.’ So, just doing websites for law firms.” - Andy Cabasso

31:06 - “You can’t market a law firm the same as you market a restaurant in Minneapolis.” - Andy Cabasso

40:01 - “Making sure that I’m making it as easy as possible for the people who are going to be 46to send customers my way, is very important.” - Andy Cabasso

46:15 - “Here is where we’re at. Here is our trajectory. Here are our numbers. If you have this asset, and this is where it is, what would you tell someone else to do?” - Andy Cabasso