Josh Elkin is the Founder of Linkflow, a link building service backed by a holistic SEO strategy that gives clients high-quality links to drive and convert traffic into revenue. The agency uses keyword-rich anchor text to create editorial links that are relevant to its clients’ businesses.
Josh has five years of digital marketing and entrepreneurship experience. After earning his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Josh founded his first company, Inbound River, in 2015. Two years later he founded Linkflow, which he originally named Bestcoast Marketing.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Josh Elkin discusses how Linkflow found its niche
- The type of clients Linkflow is targeting
- How Linkflow grew exponentially over the last three years and what the agency looks like today
- Why Josh brought in a co-founder and how that decision revolutionized the business
- Josh explains Linkflow’s current business model
- How Linkflow operates with other agencies
- Five monumental lessons Josh has learned about creating a better agency
In this episode…
Are you having trouble consistently building backlinks for your website? Is your current strategy failing to drive traffic the way you planned?
Linkflow has a team of SEO experts ready to help. After finding its niche as an agency, Linkflow now specializes in building quality editorial links that drive and convert traffic into revenue. With a holistic SEO strategy and an updated business model, the team helps clients across the B2B SaaS and e-commerce spaces build their businesses.
In this episode of Agency Journey, Gray MacKenzie is joined by Josh Elkin, the Founder of Linkflow, to discuss his agency’s business strategies. Together, they talk about how Josh found a niche for Linkflow, the types of clients he targets, and the five monumental lessons he learned during the agency’s evolution. Stay tuned.
Sponsor for this episode…
Oribi:
This episode of Agency Journey is brought to you by Oribi, an all-in-one marketing analytics tool. Say goodbye to Google Analytics.
To start your free trial, visit oribi.io/agencyjourney. Use the coupon code agencyjourney and get 20% off any plan.
ZenPilot:
And be sure to check out ZenPilot, where we help agencies optimize their operations using our proven systems and processes.
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Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Gray MacKenzie on LinkedIn
- ZenPilot
- Oribi
- Josh Elkin on LinkedIn
- Linkflow
- ClickUp
- EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System)
- Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You by John Warrillow
- This Week in Startups Podcast
Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:03
Welcome to the Agency Journey podcast where we connect with agency leaders to uncover the hidden systems and processes that drive their success. Now let’s dive into today’s show.
Gray MacKenzie 0:17
Hey, we’re diving into today’s episode of Agency Journey. Let me tell you real quickly about our sponsor Oribi. Oribi is a super cool on one marketing analytics tool. They’ve got Google Analytics squarely in their sights right now. And I can remember setting up Google Analytics as a sophomore in college and thinking this was just the coolest platform. And as it’s matured, it’s still super powerful, but it’s become so complex to deal with. And Oribi has a value prop totally aside from this. But what I absolutely love about my experience plugging Oribi into his empire comm is I didn’t have to mess around with setting up what events I wanted to capture and tracking all my changes. And if I messed up view, then it would, it would delete all the data that I had. just plugged it in it crawled, it captured all our all of our events made it super easy to see our funnel. And it just works a living. You’ll see for example, how many people read the Definitive Guide to Clickup for agencies a blog post that I wrote, I don’t know six months ago, see where those folks come from how that influences the buying process, the funnel the way that it works out. So super excited to have Oribi as a sponsor, you check it out, go to Oribi.io slash agency journey, it’s all one word. If you spin up a free trial there, use the coupon code agency journey, same thing all one word that’ll give you 20% off any plan, which is super generous of them. Remember, they can track all of our conversions to check them out. That’s a readout I Oh, we appreciate their sponsorship. And let’s get on with the episode. Hey, welcome back to another episode of Agency Journey. This is Gray MacKenzie, here from ZenPilot. And this week, I had the pleasure of bringing on Josh Elkin, who’s the Founder of Linkflow, which is super cool, high quality white hat link building agency. And Josh and I have known each other for we’re coming up on a year, I think. So Josh, I’m excited to have you on the podcast. This is well overdue. Thanks for joining us.
Josh Elkin 2:05
Thanks, Gray. Super excited, super excited to be on here. I’ve actually been listening to this podcast for about six years since I just started out launching my own agency. So it’s it’s definitely an honor to finally be on. And it’s it’s exciting for me to finally get to talk to you guys on just listening. Right. I’m
Gray MacKenzie 2:27
excited. Man six years. That’s a so you’ve been with us almost since the podcast started. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally. Cool. So your story’s pretty cool. We’ve had a chance to work together. And to see you kind of focus in on a specific niche, and really grow very quickly here, especially over the past year, year and a half, two years. Doing a specific service is that’s the type of story that I love highlighting. So why can if we just want a real quick agency background, what was the evolution to get to this place where you guys are just doing link building?
Josh Elkin 3:11
Yeah, yeah, great question. So um, when I started out, like most people, sort of a little bit of everything. So we were doing some content marketing. I was doing some paid ads, I was doing some email marketing, and consistently kind of just realized, like, there was one problem that clients consistently kept having. And that was the ability to build backlinks repeatedly. So after a few years of kind of actually just flailing around and trying different things and trying to find something that would be sticky. I realized, hey, there’s this one consistent challenge for companies. And it seems that like something that no one really knows how to do well, and they know they need to do it. It’s important. But, you know, they may be made a sporadic attempt at it. But it’s it’s hard to do consistently. It’s hard to do in a scalable way. So I think I just read the book built to Built to Sell around that time, which emphasizes focusing on one kind of very specific service and just doing that well. And it all kind of clicked to me like, Hey, this is a service that is hard to do. So there’s value in offering it. Most companies don’t do it in house. And it’s something that, you know, if I learned to do it, well, then it’s definitely going to be valuable for a bunch of companies. So decided to shed everything else that we were doing as an agency about about two and a half years ago. And just learn the ins and outs of link building and go all in on that. Right.
Gray MacKenzie 5:03
And on top of that specialty, which is already pretty niche, then you guys, at least from a client acquisition perspective really focused in on of technology, SAS business businesses. And so getting to that piece, Is that still the primary, at least from a growth perspective, not necessarily that you wouldn’t take on a customer who came outside of those specific industries. But Is that still the main vertical that you guys are targeting?
Josh Elkin 5:33
Um, it’s still the core focus, it’s still I’d say 70% of our clients fall in that kind of b2b tech, SAS world. We’ve picked up a few clients that are also kind of online education. And so really, it’s it’s anything where there’s online, it is the bulk of their presence and how they generate business. For some reason, e commerce has not been a great niche for us. We’ve kind of left that one aside. But yeah, online education has been big for us. And then yeah, we’re still very focused on b2b tech, the SAS. They just seem to be good clients. And so we’ve we’ve stuck with them. We do have a few that are just kind of oddball clients that are not in those verticals. But for the most part, we, we try to stick to those.
Gray MacKenzie 6:30
Yeah, that makes sense. So as you guys have gone kind of brings up to the present day in terms of agency, kind of like team size, any main focuses or initiatives that you’ve got going on right now. in there, I want to jump back in time a little bit to some of the lessons that you guys have learned can grow and things out. But what does the team look like today? Can where’s the agency at?
Josh Elkin 6:56
Yeah, so today, we’re a team of 12. It’s me, I brought on a partner, Ben about a year ago. And we can talk more about that in a bit. And then we have a four person link operations team, we have client success, and we have a three person SEO team, that just helps ensure that our link building is is moving the metrics for our clients in the right direction. So we’ve definitely beefed up our kind of overall SEO strategy piece. And going back to sort of like our evolution, so when when I started this about three years ago, it was purely, hey, you want links, we can build links, tell us how many you want per month. And we’ll go out and do outreach and, and build those links. And what we kind of learned early on what I learned early on, because it was really, mostly just me at that point was clients that didn’t have a great SEO strategy, we would do the same quality link building, but the results wouldn’t be there. Because we weren’t focused on the right pages, or maybe the content was weak. So it’s sort of been in the back of my mind for a while that that’s something that we need to we’d like to get a little more involved on the strategy side as well. So to that end, we we kind of beefed up our SEO chops and and hired some SEO folks. And I think that the biggest evolution in our business kind of came during during COVID, actually. And so we were a year ago now, I think it was still I just brought on Ben and I think we had one one other person kind of doing the link outreach, and operations. And around that time, we just realized, hey, if we want to grow, we really need to improve our operational processes. Just get everything squared away in such a way that it It wasn’t us just kind of it felt a little house of cards in a way. So we really needed to just shore up the foundation. And that’s around the time we found you guys. And that that was sort of the catalysts for changing a lot of things in our business. So yeah,
Gray MacKenzie 9:36
well and you guys made a lot of a lot of shifts in terms of kind of going to market. Bringing in the team. Three working with a team was like and a huge investment that you guys made in terms of streamlining your processes. You guys moved on to ClickUp our project management perspective kind of took all that stuff. really serious. In the in the build out phase, the but you made a decision. I’m trying to think Well, no, but about a year ago, right when you I think that was the original conversation with Ben. So this is we’ve seen as a handful of times, but most of the time, it’s either solo founder or its founders who came into the business as partners. One of the one of the pieces of your story that I wanted to hit on was you brought Ben on and into the business as a partner, and I think, if I’m remembering this right, he may be started as a contractor initially, and then moved into that co-founder business partner role with you guys. So I’m really curious to hear because I hear that from some folks who are like, Man, I wish I had I know, I’m the visionary, I need somebody to do the integrator or I’m really good at the details, I need to sell someone who can come in and sell for me. What was the impetus for that? How did that relationship come about bringing Ben in?
Josh Elkin 11:00
Yeah, so I, you know, from when I started in this agency world, about five years ago, I always wanted a business partner. And I sort of done trial runs with five different people over the years doing various different agency models, and none of them worked out. And so I was sort of resigned to the fact that, okay, you know, what this business, I’m going to, I’m going to do it alone. And that’s okay. And then I think it was last, it was last year, during COVID. I was just like, I had this epiphany moment of like, you know, what, what do I really want? And, and there was three things. One of them was I wanted a dog, one of them was I wanted a better workstation from home. And one of them was I wanted a business partner. And I just focused on those three things. I think I actually got the business partner first, that was, surprisingly, the easiest of the three. I put an ad in a marketing agency owner group on Facebook, of all places, and basically said, Look, I’ve grown this agency, from zero up to I think at that point, it was like 4040 grand a month. Mr. Yeah, I’m looking to take it, you know, looking at five acts that really and kind of tired of doing it alone, it was it was more of like a you want someone to share, share the experience with for me, to me, like I’d rather have a little less equity and share, share in the experience with someone else who I like. And I just had a gut feeling that would be a good the right move. So I put that, put that post up on Facebook. And Ben was actually the first person to respond. We had a quick chat. I could immediately he was he was running his own agency at the time. But he wasn’t. He didn’t love running his own agency. And he was also kind of looking to team up. So it just it just kind of worked out well that way. So the way we structured it first was just kind of a trial, a trial basis, where for the first six months, I paid him a fixed salary. And kind of said, Well, this is like the, the dating phase before we get engaged, so to speak. So let’s let’s see how this goes. And if after six months, we still like each other and want to work together, then we’ll talk about equity and how to make that work. So we did that that dating phase for six months. To be honest, I probably under underpaid Ben during that time. And no, he was he was worried about that and sort of said, Look, as long as I as long as we kind of make this right on the back end. I’m, I’m cool with that. And yeah, it just worked out. Well. We have similar we think about things similarly. But we have very different styles. I tend to be more of kind of like the big picture idea, guy. Whereas he’s more of like the he’s more of kind of the the integrator type personality. But also, he’s just fantastic with with people and kind of managing the team, as well. So we complement each other in a few ways. And that’s been just a great, great partnership. And it just really infused a lot more energy and really joy back into my day to day. And that is kind of an inflection point for the business taking off, I think was bringing in Ben.
Gray MacKenzie 14:41
That’s a real cool story to hear. I think the piece that like that kind of joy piece or the motivation piece. But either that that’s like the priceless part of running a business. Like most agencies and agencies, not a super complicated business model, the run to Hey, what’s something that we’re good at, that people care about? That’s an issue That’s a problem to solve. And we can go by the way to acquire customers and deliver good service there. And yeah, the ones that fail. And it’s probably true for any business, but particularly for agencies just because that’s where I’ve seen it the most. It’s really a failure, because, hey, we actually couldn’t make it work, it’s usually a motivation. Issue, like someone got burned out, it does take a little while for most agencies to really get off the ground and get things dialed in. And a lot of agencies die during that period, or go through trauma, somewhere along the way, every agency goes through it, you lose key people or big clients lever, whatever happens, there’s stuff that comes up. And kind of motivation, like your desire to continue doing it disappears, or that that’s a stronger desire than the desire to keep running your own thing and building an agency. Yeah, I think that’s the piece. It’s like a piece here that you’re kind of highlighting, that’s an important pieces you recognized, it should be like, I really want to share this experience with somebody else. And that means enough to me that I’m willing to give up a chunk of this business to somebody and then went out and went through the trial period and found someone, now they’ve got the six month trial period is a good timeline. In terms of who you find, and how you find them, and how that that all gets structured. There’s a lot for every agency to figure out for themselves, kind of what what works best in that situation. But I like the way that you guys approach that that’s cool to hear the user story firsthand. Especially at this Yeah,
Josh Elkin 16:33
a year later looking back on. Yeah, and it’s it’s just yeah, it was it was just a game changer it made like I was actually unhappy about a year and a half ago, running it on my own. And I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to continue on even though he was doing 40k a month, which is decent, you know, for one person and I but I was just not happy. And you know, the people element is such a big part of it. And so, yeah, bringing Ben on. And then as soon as we brought as I brought that on, we just started making all these changes and improvements, and it kind of just took off from there. And we can get to that. Kind of Nast, I guess. Yeah. So
Gray MacKenzie 17:22
you kind of went through that you went through streamlining how you were selling. And so you guys made some shifts. One of the first things that we worked together on was shifting a little bit of how you sell to clients and away from just directly into retainers, or here’s a flat pay x per per link into a discovery project and strategy project on the front end, which allows you guys to be more influential in terms of saying, here’s what you actually should be building links towards or give more input? Yeah. Are you? Is that model stuck? How is that shift work out for you? Or have you changed anything from a PSA on the front end?
Josh Elkin 18:03
No, it’s it’s absolutely stuck. And it was, it’s funny when so we went through your foundations program and you guys were pushing us in that direction of Hey, you know, why don’t you sell kind of a an upfront strategy piece. Because at the time, I was just speaking to clients and and kind of saying, alright, let’s do attend like a month retainer. But each sales pitch was kind of very customized to their situation. And it felt like no two sales calls were exactly the same. And so I was kind of like, adjusting it on the fly each time. So when we worked with you guys, and you pushed us to create kind of a, an entry level product offering that was the strategic roadmap that we now do. I was very hesitant at first I was then was all about it. And I was skeptical. I said, Oh, are people really gonna find value in this strategy project where we’re not actually building any links for them. And, you know, it was just kind of a leap of faith there where I had to trust what you guys were telling us. And I’d say to our credit, we we implemented that quite quickly. We didn’t deliberate on long it’s kind of and Ben, Ben pushed hard on this as well as like, Alright, we’re switching this new model. Let’s just start selling it this week. And let’s just go with it. And to our To my surprise, it immediately resonated with people and it worked and it just made everything much smoother as far as the rest of the sales process. So the foot the foot in the door offer, you know, we did take some time to refine it and get it right But now we’re at a spot where clients love that piece, they find a lot of value in just that. And on top of that 90% of them go on to do a retainer with us. So it’s it’s been, that’s been a game changer for multiple reasons, no one is allowed us to price our services higher, I think because we come in with better positioning at the front end to is just an easier product to sell. So instead of me having to come in and really analyze their business, and then give them a custom proposal, why this allowed us to hire a salesperson who could then sell that roadmap because it’s, it’s just a much easier sell, it’s it’s a smaller amount of money. It’s a one time fee. It’s more bite sized, and approachable for companies to do. And the beauty of it is, then our our SEO team gets involved. And that project kind of becomes the sales proposal for the bigger engagement. So I can’t really recommend this to anyone who has an agency. The foot in the door. piece is, is huge. And yeah, you guys were the ones who pushed us in that direction. And it’s, it’s been awesome, we still do it.
Gray MacKenzie 21:28
But I think the piece out of that. There’s a couple different pieces. I think if you got in to be honest, I had you like I wanted you guys to move in that direction. But at the same time, you were because of being so niche, it’s, it’s pretty easy to do if if you do Gutter Installation, to come out and do a free estimate for somebody, right? There’s only so many variables involved. And the more complex a service gets, the more thinking and the more important the strategy on the front end to even understand what should we be doing here becomes. And so at least internally, for me, there’s a little bit more hesitancy saying, I don’t know, maybe backlinks and selling, you know, x links for X dollars. Maybe this is just is the right way to tag him to this specific service I got was like, I don’t think so. But maybe this is simple enough to trigger. But what you guys did was you jumped in, implemented it right away and iterated off of it. And I was just listening to This Week in Startups and Dez trainer, one of the cofounders of intercom was on and he had this quote, he just said fast gets good before good gets fast. And I like that, like very quick, one liner for a un and put it in and because of I feel like a lot of the success that you guys have had, has come from taking action and shipping things quickly and saying it’s definitely not gonna be right, like, we’ll definitely make mistakes, the first the first shot at it. But because you’re moving fast, you guys have gotten good. Very quickly from the from the bat. And same thing I was telling our team this week, we’ve got an awesome service for agencies right now. But that’s not the fact that we’ve got a good product or a better, you know, a better service for agencies who are trying to streamline their operations and kind of have the product management piece right at the same time. Our company, our big competitive advantage isn’t that we’re there today, our big competitive advantage is that we just get more at bats at this and we ship more work than anyone else does. And that’s our idea. We need to we need to keep pushing and constantly improving in the specific area that we’re focused on. And that’s what’s cool for you guys, now you’re you’re just getting so many at bats at link building and doing it better and doing it more efficiently that the service just gets better and better and better. And same thing happened with your with your roadmap process.
Josh Elkin 23:52
Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah, we brought in kind of a whole SEO team in q4 last year to look at our roadmap process and say, Alright, how can this be better? How can it kind of naturally feed better into the engagement? And yet, they were great at that. And, and yeah, it was it was worth doing all that investment on the front end to figure that out. Because now we’re we’re in a much better spot as a business. Yep.
Gray MacKenzie 24:24
And then one of the things that you guys did that I thought was unique and that you’re still doing is kind of the agency partnership side in what makes Linkflow. Awesome in terms of you know, there’s agencies who can partner with other agencies and play well in the sandbox the other and agencies Yeah, who struggle with that a lot more. And what you guys have that’s unique is you’re so niche in terms of we’re not doing all SEO like we’re touching one specific piece of it with the link building side and so you’ve done both agency partnerships, internal referrals coming in I think you got a standardized program for, but then also white label work for other agencies. It’s super nice because if I’m an agency who I know that link building would have benefit for my clients, but we don’t have to go in house and do it. I can bring you guys in whether it’s white label or done as a referral partner. And I don’t have to worry about, hey, they’re going to take my inbound client and take all the inbound components or, or PVC pieces. So tell me a little bit about what, how you guys are operating with agencies, and kind of growing that segment of the business here. Moving forward, how does that? What are the what are the options there in terms of white label versus referral partnerships?
Josh Elkin 25:43
Yeah, so the white label thing is something we’ve gone back and forth on a bit. We, we used to do it and then we kind of stopped because we were kind of taking our full roadmap approach and trying to shoehorn it into an agency setting when an agency, let’s say it’s an inbound agency, right, they might already have a good SEO strategy. So they don’t want the foot in the door. They don’t want that level of kind of SEO strategy that we usually provide that goes along with the link building. All they want is they want links, they know the keywords they want to focus on. They know the pages they want to go to. And so I think for us, it was a bit of a shift to figure out right, how can we provide our service in such a way that it feels their need without kind of stepping on their toes and without having too many cooks in SEO kitchen, so to speak. And we’re moving we’re in the process of moving to this kind of all ecard model whereby, say it’s an inbound agency, again, has a client where they think, okay, our SEO is good. We know, we need, you know, five links a month for this client, they can just come to us. And we’re working on building out a, an actual order portal on our website for sort of a self serve, click here, we want five links, here’s the anchor text, we want your the page we want that to go to. And then on our back end, we still do our same process of going through finding the high quality publications that are going to be a good fit, vetting the links thoroughly. So all that quality is still there, and all those checks. The differences, we just don’t, we’re not as involved on the SEO strategy side. So we’re able to offer it at a lower price point than if we’re working with a direct client that needs a little more hand holding on the SEO side. So yes, that portal is in the works. But in the meantime, we’re just doing it via a form where if there’s an agency that wants links, you know, we’ll send them a form that says, All right, what are the what who’s the client? What are the pages? We’re focused on? How many do you want? And then it’s kind of a, no contracts, no monthly commitment. We’re not even doing a monthly minimum, it’s just take as many as you want this month, if you want to stop that next month, that’s fine. And yeah, there seems to be good, pretty good demand for that. Having spoken to a bunch of agencies, so we’re gonna, we’re gonna spin that up again, on the website very soon. Yep, that makes sense. And then sorry, you asked about the referral program as well. So this is I guess, a better fit for an agency that is in a different space. So say it’s, it doesn’t touch SEO. So say it’s like a pay per click agency, a Facebook ads agency. We do offer a referral program where if someone becomes a client, that they refer to us, we just pay a flat fee back of $5,000. So it’s pretty kind of straightforward on that. Yep.
Gray MacKenzie 29:17
That’s awesome. What’s, uh, Josh, for any agencies who are listening who might be a good fit? To explore that conversation? Linkflow.ai
Josh Elkin 29:27
Is the website See? Exactly, it’s it’s Linkflow.ai. We’re rebranding this week. So by the time this airs, I think we will be live with that new website. Awesome.
Gray MacKenzie 29:38
And then Okay, so last question. I’m going to we’ll wrap up with this. I appreciate your time on the podcast. Yeah, for sure. Looking back now, especially over the journey here in the last last couple years, any major takeaways we’ve hit on, obviously a couple of things but anything else that are kind of key learnings? that you’ve had that pointing directly to here. If I knew this, yeah, 18 months ago, we will die faster.
Josh Elkin 30:06
There are so many. One is, as a founder, try to take yourself out of the day to day operations as soon as you can. No, I was kind of forced to do this, because about six months ago, I had some health issues. And I could no longer take all the sales calls myself, I could no longer be on all the team meetings myself. And so it kind of forced my hand to say, all right, how can we we’ve got to bring in someone else to close deals. Now, fortunately, we have a roadmap product at that time, which was easier to sell. And so we did bring in a sales person. And it was just much easier to train that sales person than I then I expected it would be. And they were closing deals within a few weeks. And I didn’t, I didn’t think it would be that fast. So I guess I over I over estimated how valuable I was in the sales process, which is a bit of an ego thing for sure. When in reality, you can train someone up pretty quickly, to do almost as good a job as you can. And then, you know, you can train them and guide them. But it’s just a much better spot to be. So for any agency owner that’s still doing all the sales themselves. That’s something that you can offload far quicker than you think. Especially if you have a foot in the door. products, I guess the second that kind of goes into the second thing that I wish we had done earlier, which is that foot in the door. That foot in the door offering that paves the way for just everything just makes everything much easier. Third thing, gosh, there’s so many things I’ve learned. It’s I could go on and on. One interesting thing that we do every week, that was Ben’s idea, is we do a employee feedback survey every Friday. And it’s a basic jot form. And we ask a bunch of questions like, you know, what’s one thing that you’re proud of this week? What’s one thing that frustrated you this week? What’s one, you know, one way that leadership could do better? What’s a crazy idea you have for improving the business? That might be a little out there. And we do these every week. And at first I thought this is going to be overkill. We get so many ideas from from reading those chat forums, and Ben and I go through them every Monday that it’s been invaluable for the business. So I’d highly recommend anyone who’s listening to this and has an agency. It just gives you a window into how everyone’s feeling in the in the company. What things are on people’s mind, are they happy? Are they frustrated? This week, we had someone who was frustrated because they felt their ideas weren’t fully heard in a meeting. And we wouldn’t have known about that that weren’t for the forum. So we read that and we were able to quickly address it, hop on a call with them. And kind of get to the bottom of things before it it festered. So that’s just one thing that that I would highly recommend to all agencies to just start doing.
Gray MacKenzie 33:43
That’s an awesome tip. We use a 15 five for that internally. Okay. Yeah, whether it’s a form that you’ve got set up internally or using engagement tool, ever.
Josh Elkin 33:56
Yeah, I haven’t haven’t checked that out. But that sounds cool, too. And lastly, not not just to boost you guys up, but switching over to Clickup and getting a project management system in place was an absolute game changer for us. So to the point where now when we have a new client instead of you know, there’s no back and forth over Slack, everything’s just automatically created and deployed. And everyone knows what they have to do when there’s someone monitoring to make sure Hey, if someone’s got an overdue task, are they on it? They let it slide for more than a few days. They’ll call them out on it in it’s just been it’s been awesome. So having some sort of project management tool I you know, we love ClickUp. We love the way that you guys help us implement ClickUp. That’s absolutely, like one of the things that we should have done sooner as well. The last thing I know I have a The last thing is raise your prices. I was I was so scared to do this, then pushed me on this. And just, it just makes obviously a huge impact on your margins, you can probably price higher than you think you can’t. And I kept hearing that advice and not taking it. And we raised our prices, and it didn’t seem to make any impact on whether or not people signed up. And in some ways, we’re, it’s it’s almost easier because we’re working with better clients now. So that’s the last thing I would, I’d wish we’d done sooner.
Gray MacKenzie 35:42
That’s awesome. I didn’t expect you to have all five ready to go. But those, those are all I can keep. I could I could keep going. I mean, this is like a 12 Days of Christmas coming up here from Yeah,
Josh Elkin 35:54
it’s just been a massive learning journey. I mean, this whole thing. But, but it’s been great. So also, we implemented Eos. Yeah. And I’m sure a lot of these listeners are familiar with that. And that’s been great. So just kind of giving a framework to quarterly goal setting to what a meeting looks like. It’s just, you know, the more kind of systems of frame frameworks you have in place, the easier everything gets. So we love EOS, it works well with with, with ClickUp. And, yeah, teams seem to like it. So yeah, I think I’ll stop there, because I could just keep calling going. But that’s awesome. I
Gray MacKenzie 36:45
appreciate you bringing those dams and share them. I think the hidden piece with raising prices is every time you raise prices, you’re also putting more pressure internally on yourself to deliver on that value. I think one of the fastest ways to improve customer experience or what you’re delivering to people is charging, charging more money. There’s no I’m sure there’s not a one to one alignment between that I think a lot of it also has to deal with people’s personal relationship to money and what’s expensive to one person’s not expensive to another person. So it’s Yeah, it’s always it doesn’t always directly line but 90% of time there’s a there’s a clear line, if you tell somebody, what would you do? If you had to double the prices on this? What would you do differently? Yeah, that’s kind of a good way to say, hey, what are the things that they know they ought to be doing, that they’re not doing right now? And you’re justifying it because the price tag doesn’t at least mentally allow them to?
Josh Elkin 37:44
Yeah, no, absolutely. And sometimes you can just raise the price on your current service because you’re under pricing. Without having to change much at all to
Gray MacKenzie 37:51
others. There’s almost always room to to increase what you’re what you’re currently charging people in the market will tell you pretty quickly marking
Josh Elkin 37:59
the market will tell you Yeah, that’s very true.
Gray MacKenzie 38:02
Awesome. Well, Josh, I appreciate your time coming on. folks want to follow along. Obviously, we mentioned Linkflow.ai. Reach out if you’re looking for a white label, link building partner or someone to refer to and get a generous kickback on that side. Any other places we should point you know, that’s that’s pretty much it. Yeah, that’s where to find us. Awesome, Josh, thanks for coming on. Appreciate your time in.
Josh Elkin 38:27
Thanks. Great. It’s been great to finally do this after listening for so long.
Outro 38:31
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