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Podcast Episode
Learn how you can stand out in a crowded market with Ryan Mitchell from In The Flow
Transcript
Thanks for joining us on the Mind Your Own Marketing Business Podcast. I'm Joe Barsanus from web and software development team, Fjord. And today in our show, we'll be talking with Ryan Mitchell from In The Flow. Welcome to the show, Ryan.
G'day Joe. How you doing?
I'm doing great. And if it's anything like my curiosity. People may have already noticed that, uh, have an accent for us, those of us in the Midwest.
Where are you from, Ryan?
So I, I was originally born in the States, right? But I moved to New Zealand when I was five. So I've lived on the other side of the world and the corner of the world, some would say for the past 25 years. Um, hence the accent.
Wonderful, wonderful. Um, next thing I want to know about you is what in the flow is. What is in the flow? Uh, what does it mean to you? What does it do for you? And, and, and, and what are you doing for others? Just kind of on a high level.
Yeah, for sure. So like the concept of in the flow and where I got the name is like from flow state. And it's the concept of like, when you're in the flow state, things get easier. They don't feel like they're hard or a challenge. Um, you know, A lot of sports people get into it. Musicians get into it, business people get into it.
I've gotten into it before. And it's like a state that I think a lot of people want to achieve where things flow. Um, so that, that was kind of the basis of the name and what, what I do at in the flow is help digital agencies and consultants create their own wedge so that they can, um, so that they can differentiate themselves in a market that is arguably one of the most jam packed.
In today's day and age, which is digital services and consulting.
How do you think that? That industry, this industry, um, that I happen to be in, uh, came to be that way. Was there an outside force? Is there a reason why it's jam packed with a ton of service providers?
I, so if we were to rewind maybe 10, 15 years ago, it was a relatively young market, there was still enough demand for the what, you know, so the services, the writing, the code, the pushing, the pixel, the building, the ad campaigns, because they were relatively complex things to do. We didn't have machines.
Doing it for us. It was all based on a person knowing the ins and outs of a platform or a code base and then them getting paid for it. But now there's more people that can do that because that knowledge is becoming commoditized. You know, writing code is getting easier. Designing things is getting easier.
Running ads is getting easier because. There's been a lot of training that's gone into it. So more people know it and technology have made it a lot easier. So like ad platforms, like ad accounts pretty much run themselves and Google ads, you know, you've got, um, like the co pilots that help you write code.
You've got Figma, which is like. Makes designing a lot easier so that the force of technology and just the natural progression of a market has led us to where we're like, it's a lot more mature now. And when it's mature, it's not necessarily like, what is the thing that is going to be do it be done?
Because most people can do the thing. It's like, who's helping me do the thing, which is more important.
Got it, got it. Oh, that's excellent perspective. Um, and thank you for sharing,
Oh, good.
for my own market. Uh, Now you're talking about, you know, years of experience. You're talking about how you're helping others in this industry. That must mean that you have some sort of a background.
Yes.
how did you get to where you are today?
What have you done? What have you learned along the way? Um, to, to get to this point where you're now helping others.
Yeah. So I started my first entrepreneurial journey. It has. It was, I was 19 and it was a failure. It was, I was trying to sell phone cases online. So whether I'd count that as actually me trying or I tried, right. Um, and then at the time I was in university and I dropped out because I thought I don't need to learn these things to do what I want to do.
I was like an accounting classes and information system classes, and it was just boring. So I just, I dropped out and went into the sales force. So I was selling things. I liked the concept of selling. Did that for two years. And then at age 21, 20 or 21, I decided to go out on my own and actually started as an it company.
So I was doing office three, six, five migrations back when office three, six, five was a new thing. And. Yeah, you know, and like migrating from pop three and IMF over to three, six, five. And over time, I just kind of was listening to what the demand was. And people started asking more and more for websites or for ad campaigns.
Or, and I was, I was hearing what they were saying. I didn't quite know what to, how to do it yet. Like I had built websites, but not nothing commercial. Um, and then one day I just ripped the plaster off or the bandaid off, as you'd say, on the other side of the world. And I decided to build a website commercially.
And. The first website I ever built sucked. I'm just going to be honest. It was atrocious. I only got paid pennies for it. So, you know, value exchange, but during that time, you know, and that, so that was me for the next five years, um, built that agency with my business partner. You know, we grew it to a good, good size with a good team.
And I was like kind of the lead architect behind the solutions. Got to a point where I, my vision for it was different to my business partners, so we decided to part ways. So I sold that to him. And. I started another one because I, I ensured that I didn't get a strain of trade because that was my thing. I couldn't.
Not do this. This was my, my jam. So I started another one that was called do good things. Um, during that time we were positioned as a full service agency. Uh, it was working well. I grew the team, but it was, I was still like, I didn't really want to build it. It just kind of happened in front of me. I was just like, well, I may as well, people are asking for me.
I may as well hire people to deliver. Website or an apple and service line here and I just realized that there was. Like I started searching, I was like, surely there's another way to do this. There's a better way to run an agency. That's not just like be everything to everyone. So I was one signature away from selling do good things as well.
And I didn't because of the golden handcuffs. And it just wasn't aligned to what I wanted to do. What I really wanted to do was do something different. I didn't want to be the same as everyone else. So I started searching and. I created a design and development subscription on Webflow. Um, that was like a, for a fixed monthly fee, we'll build your site and look, it worked, we scaled it to like 30, 35 K a month, give or take, um, but.
It wasn't scalable. And we, I actually further commoditized ourselves by building a premise around price and speed. And I was like, well, I've tried to change something. I did change something. I changed the offer, but it still wasn't where I want it to be. And then I kind of realized that I had all this experience and that people were asking me how they, how they could grow their agency.
And the sales tactics and marketing tactics and strategy. And it was in front of me the whole time. I just couldn't see it. And it was maybe I can help others. And then that's where in the flow was born
Wonderful. And how long has, has in the, when was in the flow born? I
and the flow was born about a, about a year ago now,
And we are just for reference, we are in October of 2024, in case those are listening, um, uh, a while down the road. So, wonderful. Oh, well, congratulations. Now, in the first year, how do you feel like you, have you learned, on how to do that type of work effectively? Compared to running an agency.
Yeah. So there's definitely two different modalities here. There's building it and doing it yourself and then teaching others how to do it. And that was a pretty big limiting belief that I had that going into running a coaching program with, with other agency founders. And it was, I can do it, but like, Can I teach it?
Is this something that I can systemize and then teach to other people? Um, and I was going to find out one way or another and the first two or three months was a grind. Um, a lot of it is generating demand because it is a Relatively new space, you know, that, that this whole thing's in where it's like, instead of doing it's teaching, not done for you, I'd done with you.
So the big challenge that I really faced was generating the demand. Number one, more demand than just the people that were already asking me. And number two, having the confidence to be like, to coach and train people and guide people, not do it for them. Cause I'm a roll the sleeves up type of guy. Like I like getting stuck into things, but.
In this scenario, this, that's not my, my job, my job is to show people how to do it. And if I do too much for them, I'm essentially enabling them to, to not do the hard work themselves. And that's not what I , that's not what I set out to do. I didn't set out to do it for them. I set out to show them the way.
So that was, that was definitely the hard, the hardest frame shift that I had going into this, this whole coaching training. Program. Yeah,
it. And are there any, are there any things that you can share with? Cause we do have a, have a fair amount of marketers and agencies that listen to this. Um, what, what things have you noticed in that industry and how to, the right word is differentiate yourselves from others, what have you been doing?
Kind of. In that process or or with agencies is what are you learning from that?
for sure. Like, and it all comes back to that, the initial combo we had at the start of this pod, which was like the context has shifted. So people who buy digital services no longer want to pay a premium for tactical. Work that they believe they can find out to it because there's things like fiber.
There's things like Upwork there's GPT that does it now. So they don't want to pay. A premium for someone to do the do per se. So that leaves a big gap for agencies who have built their whole model around tactical delivery. It's like, well, we've got a whole team built on tactical delivery, but year over year, the value of that tactical delivery is make, is, is dropping.
So the margins that you make in it are dropping. So in order to shift, it's to shift the frame away from tactics and outputs into strategy and outcomes. So instead of the. Steps that you take to get there. It's ensuring that you're pointing in the right direction in the first place, because there's a million how to guides online.
It's not necessarily the tactical steps that most people struggle with. It's like, is this guide the right guide in the first place? And a lot of agencies have sold from the same playbook in a way that. Used to work like you used to just be able to say run ads, run a, they ask you answer framework, do SEO, capture the demand, and then you can sell to them.
But now that everyone does it, everyone's competing against each other. And the only way around that is to build a wedge that you drive into the market that separates you. And all the other competition, because that distance between you and the competition is essentially the buyer perception of, Oh, you are different.
You're not just another service provider. You are a strategic partner. That's going to get me an outcome of my business.
And is that is that? am trying to tie That back to the initial the market is crowded The you know, and why it's crowded now does that happen in other industries as well? In that same is it a? A point in time where that happens do you believe or is it just unique to this that particular industry?
A lot of knowledge. It's a really good question. Um, and yeah, so it's a lot of knowledge based businesses. So if you look at accountants or lawyers or anyone who's selling conventionally sold Time for money. Is it being affected by it? You know, if you look around, if you used to be a bookkeeper, now you've got things like zero and fresh books that reconcile your books for you.
So it's like, okay, as the accountant, what are you actually getting paid for? Well, you're not going to get paid a premium to reconcile because of software, does it? You're actually, you know, you're getting paid a premium to help guide the person. The business owner into making the right decisions in the first place.
And it's just a natural market curve of as markets get more sophisticated and as technology starts to add the deflationary pressure onto the market, the tactics get cheaper, but tools and AI can't replace human thinking yet. So it's like. That's where we're at right now. Mm-Hmm.
Yeah, I mean I can see that in the I mean from what I know in the car industry from the early 1900s Henry ford was making at a premium and you know, only the wealthiest had A vehicle. And
Mm-Hmm.
think about all of the automation and the relative price of a vehicle versus what it does and how long it lasts and, and all of those things.
And so now there's, I mean, this is a market that's even way more established than anything
Mm-Hmm.
about. Um, and, and I can just see how that's, that's starting to happen in that first phase, um, Oh, that's, that's very, that's very insightful from, from that. Now, what have you seen when, when, when, when you're working with organizations in this capacity and they're buying into what you're, what you're saying and what you're recommending? What sort of Things have you seen come from them in a, in a positive outcome? Like, have you seen some great results or some encouraging, I know you're only a year into it, but, um, what have you been seeing and what are some of the success stories that you might have?
Yeah. Absolutely. So the, I mean, I guess the end ultimate positive outcome is these agencies end up making more money. Right? Like, they make more money 'cause they can sell a market effectively. That's like, that's, that's, that's the. End goal for everyone that buys my service. They want to make close more deals in a way that's easier so that they don't have to be constantly trying to sell and pitch slapping people on LinkedIn and like doing all these spammy tactics.
They want it to be as smooth as possible. So yes. They make more money and they acquire more clients. More of the emotional things that I've noticed is clarity and in the direction that they want to take. And this comes off the back of a lot of agency founders. And I felt like this, this is where I can like tap into my past self and help guide them through it as I didn't want to be just another service provider.
I was actually like, I was so sick and tired of just being clumped in with everyone else and just being another agency. Right. Cause there's thousands of them and a lot of buyers have actually had very bad experiences with, with agencies. Right. So there's a bit of a taint on the industry and there's a bad taste in people's mouth.
And I noticed that when I was, when I was positioned as the classic agency, people would just kind of have the, Oh, you're just that you're an agency. Oh, okay. All right. And then they would try to just like. Sweep me all the bad work. They'd be like, Oh, you're an agency. Okay. Well, can you just do all the bad jobs for us so we can focus on the other things?
And then like, I'll just find a way around the technical work.
Yeah.
um, it just wasn't fulfilling anymore. Like I was like, maybe I could build a position around this, but like, it just, it just wasn't where I wanted to go. Cause I want it to be something different. And I wanted to have a position that was more authoritative.
And more respected and, and, and listen to not just, uh, yeah, flip, flip, do good things that the ad campaign and that they can build or the, the landing page, cause they're just the pixel pushes, not the strategic partners.
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Now I'm going to flip the tables a little bit, Ryan. I think you can handle this. Um, if, if, I were to go to your website, which I will name in a second, What? in, I'm assuming you're applying some of the same tactics to your own What is the wedge that you are driving to gain business with digital agencies?
So that's a really good question, right? And it is the, I have to. Practice what I preach, eat my own dog food. I have to lead by example to, to, to prove that this thing works. Right. So my whole wedge is I help agencies and consultants build an offer that makes buyers want to work with them. Cause normally it's the other way around.
Normally the agency is very desperate to work with a buyer and the buyer's like playing hard to get, you know, um, but there's actually a way to build for demand. And the way I do that is by assembling my own wedge. So I have identified a problem. That agencies and consultants face, I have created an offer that solves that problem.
And I have developed a point of view on the problem that makes it all come together. And I use LinkedIn and Reddit to deploy my point of view and it works. Right. I know there's a lot of, there's, there's mixed bat feelings in the B2B community about LinkedIn. Some people love it. Some people hate it. I think it's a great platform.
If you actually have something worthwhile talking about, if you're just going to be a clone and copy and paste what everyone else is saying, then no, it's not going to work, but if you have something genuine to say, which I believe I do now, and by the way, it's taking me a while to refine all this and get confident in it.
Um, but when it all clicked. And I started to deploy it and I started to write about it and I started to talk to people about it. It was where everything came together. The wedge was assembled. It was in the market. And I had drove a wedge between like every other agency coach or consultant or sales consultant and what I do.
Got it. Okay. And no, I love it. You're, I mean, you do have to eat your own dog food and you definitely have. Um,
It tastes, it tastes great by the way. It's not the dog food that you'd get from, uh, it's not the, it's not the cheap tier dog food. This is the premium class Wagyu beef.
don't, don't we get some, like, don't we get a lot of like dairy from New Zealand and so it would be like that is, is that's like a thing down there, right?
Yes, pretty sure to be like a two dairy, uh, which is a different type of dairy, right? So that's another, so if we're talking about reclassifying old things, they created a word called a two dairy and it is essentially dairy that's slightly different and they've created a whole position around it. So it's like, it's, we're not normal dairy, we're different dairy.
And the perception in the buyer's mind is, Oh, that's New Zealand dairy. It must be good because it's a two.
Amen. All right, I've got, uh, one more leading question for you. when you're working with, uh, clients, digital agencies, and you're about six months into your engagement and they're starting to see some success, with kind of the teachings. What, what excites you about that? And, and, and what do you tell that client about what's going to happen in the next six months?
Yeah. So the excitement. So I'm always going to frame. Yes. We all want to make more money. Right. And that's a pretty generic outcome that most people talk about. Oh, I'll help you make more money. Whatever. Cool. That does happen a lot and it is a valuable thing, but I like to get more on the emotional side and, and watch people learn this way of thinking.
And then when it clicks, it's like they've had a. Like a positive existential crisis. They are got, they have gone. Wow. The old lens of how I was looking at things was so out of date, but they were so stuck that they didn't know how to move forward because of fear, because of the way things were because of just not knowing.
So when I come in and I. Teach this is, this is what really drives me to wake up every day and to help people is when it all comes together and they see it for themselves based on all the guidance I've given them. And they're just like, I see it and I can see the future. I can see the vision of where I want to take this thing.
Let's start like, and it takes some people get it straight away. Sometimes it takes. Three months, you know, it's, it's, it's a process that can't be rushed and it's all in good time, but that is like, I wouldn't like that. No amount of money could replace that feeling that like we both get when we find what their wages it's, it's a truly special thing.
Cool. Well, now I'll connect the dots, Ryan, in that, um, we're about three to four or five months into our engagement, uh, with you. And we're kind of right on that precipice of like, Oh, I see it and I can see the future. I think at this point, Uh, at least myself and some of my colleagues couldn't be more excited.
We're starting to, to bring some more of it to both internally and externally at our organization. Um, and, uh, that's why I asked you to be on the show just because I think that you have a really good thing to offer and, and some really good ways to talk about these things that are really going to help. Organizations like ourselves and and anybody really that you work with, you seem to just get it. And so, um, really appreciate you doing this and and and jumping on and talking to to me and and, uh, dealing with the questions that I had that referred to our own, uh, our own work together. So that was that was really fun. Um, is there any other advice that you wanted to get across or things that you wanted to talk about?
Yeah. Like maybe not necessarily talking points, but I'll just, I'll just leave everyone with this. It's we're at a turning point with digital services and we're seeing it happen right in front of our eyes. The context has shifted. People can do tactics. And generate outputs using Upwork, Fiverr and AI. The only way out of that, what I call the tactical trap is to shift the frame into strategic outcomes.
And, and strategy and lead the people that you're working with and point them in the right direction first, and then deliver the tactics. Not to say don't do the thing, but it's to say, lead with the strategy and lead with showing them their problems and how they can be guided through this path of uncertainty.
Cause all businesses want, all people want is a problem solved. If you can show that you understand their problem and you can show them what the future looks like without it. Use that as your wedge in, and then if they need tactical delivery, you can deliver it because you've built a position that is more authoritative in their mind because you're showing them the problems and guiding them through the way.
And then you've got more leverage to deliver the tactical, the tactical tasks on the back end.
Love it. Love it. And that's a lot about what we've been talking about. And thanks for summing it up so, so succinctly. I, uh, I really appreciate that. So, um, unfortunately, Ryan, that's all the time we have, uh, for today on Mind Your Own Marketing Business. Uh, if you are interested in finding Ryan, what I mentioned, his website, now we're going to go all look for his wedge. Um, at intheflow. nz, or nz,
Depending on where you're at in the world.
yeah, depending on what half of the world you're on, um, and or find him on LinkedIn by looking for Ryan Mitchell and in the flow. Um, And thank you to our listeners for joining us. You can download episodes of our program by going to fjords. 📍 com slash mind your own marketing business, or by subscribing to the show and iTunes, SoundCloud, and Spotify.
Thanks so much again, Ryan. Loved having you on the show.
Cheers. Thanks, Joe.