How to Transform Your Agency into a Growth Team

In this episode of Agency Journey, Kevin Barber from Lean Labs comes on the show to talk about how he has built a growth team and his vision for his business.

You can hear Kevin’s story about building his agency in our earlier episode with him.

Here are the main takeaways from the interview:

Build the Business You Want

Kevin explains from the beginning that Lean Labs isn’t an agency but rather a growth team that businesses can hire to help them hit their numbers.

They specialize in growth and aren’t selling cookie-cutter solutions to client problems.

Kevin doesn’t see his job to make the client happy, but rather as a doctor giving treatment to his sick patients.

This is different positioning from the client’s perspective, where they see that they’re hiring a team rather than your typical agency.

With this positioning, Kevin can attract the type of businesses he wants to work with. Lean Labs can work on projects that interest them and aren’t competing with the agencies’ regular rates.

Their ideal client isn’t in a niche but rather clients who want to be taken by the hand and guided through what needs to happen for them to grow. The clients aren’t looking for someone who will fulfill a service.

However, in the past year, they decided to just HubSpot and go all-in on this platform. This will help them run more efficiently as an agency.

Lean Labs is also a remote agency with team members around the world. This gives them the flexibility to hire a top-tier team that also allows for a flexible lifestyle.

This meant deciding to let go of clients and remove old services they were offering, but the benefits of focusing on building an agency Kevin wants to run have paid off for Lean Labs.

Have a Growth Mindset

As a growth team, Lean Labs focuses on testing and ensuring that every piece of the puzzle is put together to get clients the best results.

They don’t just use growth as a buzzword. The business is designed around it with sprints and a system to iterate and test rigorously.

You don’t want to make the same mistake as the client and start many things and not finish it. You want to go in-depth with your work and adapt strategies and grow the business with proven data.

This means closing the loop and taking action based on results.

Points Based Pricing

Lean Labs uses points-based pricing to be transparent and getting the best results for clients.

Points-based pricing is based on a mix of time and value. Each project is assigned a point based on value creation and the Fibonacci sequence for determining time.

Though it can take some time to educate clients about how it works, this pricing system makes clients feel comfortable knowing exactly where their money is going.

Building Sprocket Rocket

Inspired by a Gary Vaynerchuk speech where he insisted that business owners need to be thinking about building things that will put them out of business, Lean Labs jumped into action and made a design tool for HubSpot.

The tool is called Sprocket Rocket.

With all the custom work they’ve done for clients over the years, they had design building blocks that looked good and were high-converting.

Sprocket Rocket makes it easy to build websites on the HubSpot CMS. By going through their old client work and what converted well, they put together these pieces as Lego blocks that users can use to build their own sites.

It’s more flexible than templates to map out a client’s buyer’s journey, cheaper than hiring an agency, and the design process is fast and smooth.

You can learn more about how it works on the Sprocket Rocket website.

If you want to connect with Kevin, you can reach him on the Lean Labs website or LinkedIn.