How Agencies Should Hack The Value Ladder

What’s good, everybody. Greg Hickman here with the scalable podcast and in this episode we’re going to talk about how agencies and service providers should hack the value ladder. Let’s get it going.

three years, my agency built funnels and automation systems for the biggest names in marketing today since then have transformed that agency into a hyper profitable training and consulting business. While everyone is out there talking about scale, like it’s some sort of destination, we’ll be asking the real question, how do you transform your business into a more scalable model using the knowledge, skills and expertise that you already have? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me in a follow along as I learn, apply and share the strategies I’m using to build my multimillion dollar business. My name is Greg Hickman and welcome to scale up.

All right guys, welcome back. And so here’s the deal. We’re going to talk about the value back, which

in many cases, maybe a new concept for you. Um, but this is kind of the ascension, so to speak, of clients and prospects working with you at higher and higher levels. Um, increasing your value, increasing the speed to results, increasing access and mmm, getting them to kind of up this ladder and how much they’re paying you, et cetera. But there is something that I see happening in the marketplace right now that, um, what’s being taught kind of leads, service providers specifically a little bit of stray and oversteps a huge opportunity that I see in the marketplace right now if you’re an agency or a service provider. So let me really quick talk about the opportunity at hand here. Right? So, um, we are in a place right now where, um, you have kind of the knowledge economy, right? This is, you know, people selling information.

MMM. You know, so on the left side of the spectrum, we have people selling info, you know, courses, uh, quote unquote, you know, passive income. You know, we won’t go down that rabbit hole right now, but passive income, right? And then on the other side, we have, you know, the people that you know, do done for you work, right? Uh, this is, you know, services, you know, on the right side of the spectrum of services. Uh, you know, this is, you know, where you see a lot of the implementation happening. No build the doing, you know, you do this stuff for your clients. And look, if you’re on the, if we look at this as sort of like a, you know, a chasm, right? Uh, where if you’re sitting here on the top of the hill on the done for you side and you’re looking out across the chasm of the opportunity of man, it’d be really nice to be able to sell a product or a service and let it run on autopilot and, you know, make all this money and not have to do the work and be hands to keyboard like Amazon, my clients.

Um, it seems really appealing, right? Uh, to go to go make that leap, right? Uh, and a lot of people are out there teaching how to create and sell courses on, you know, on autopilot, etc. Now, guess what, on the flip side, there are people who are on the knowledge side that are selling courses and membership sites and things like that that are, you know, maybe a thousand dollars or less. Even though they’re, they’re getting some traction and they’re selling them, they’re actually looking over here at the people that are able to do the work and an add that layer of implementation. And they’re looking for ways to kind of say, hey, how can I up level what I’m doing over here with my, my knowledge and selling information to adding that layer of implementation. Right? And so you kind of have both sides of the party. The people that are used to selling low ticket info products, they want to be able to sell something more high ticket that involves more transformation and implementation.

And then you have the service providers that are like, man, it must be really nice to be able to sell a hundred of those courses at 1000 bucks and not have to be involved in fulfillment. Right. And what I see as the opportunity is there’s actually, if you imagine these two sides of the mountain, right on one side is knowledge and then one side is the courses. You have this big chasm, right? And so here we have, you know, the chasm, you know, or the gap and what I see as a huge opportunity, and I’m going to draw this in a blue, no, we already have a blue, I’ll draw this in orange. Like what, where’s the bridge? Right? Like if we, if we could put a bridge and create a destination that is right in the middle, right? Like what does, what does this destination look like?

You know, what’s, what’s the happy mix between knowledge and doing the work for them? And I really think there’s a huge opportunity right now in the marketplace for, um, application of knowledge, right? Like, yes, people want information, but there’s a lot of information readily available, obviously on youtube and stuff and organizing that is super valuable and that’s really what the core stuff is. But as a service provider, as an agency owner, a freelancer, whatever that may be, you have the opportunity to package up that expertise and share the knowledge, but also provide resources and support in order to get them to apply it into their business, right? The implementation economy, right? That’s the economy that we’re in, the implementation economy. So who better to help people implement then the people that know how to implement, which is you the service provider. So that’s what I want to talk about, right?

Is, um, where do we fall on this ladder? Because what traditionally, you know, the value ladder looks like this traditionally, if you look at like a set of stairs, right? And we’ll say there’s three steps. Typically how, um, you know, the traditional value ladder that a lot of info marketers talk about is, hey, you will actually add one more layer. There’ll be, there’ll be four layers. Um, and I’m actually gonna make this a little bit smaller so I can show you some differences. The, if you look at the value ladder, uh, at the bottom, you know, you have your free stuff, right? Your blog, your podcast content like this, and then you move them up the ladder with something that costs a little bit of money than a little bit more money. And then a lot like your highest value services at the top of the ladder, right?

And many marketers and all that stuff, we’ll be like, hey, you have to design your funnel to move people up this ladder. Right? And it, it makes, it makes a lot of sense in some cases, but I don’t think it makes sense for service providers. And here’s why. A lot of this, this, uh, information is geared towards people that are just getting started and they’re going out there and they’re focused on, um, you know, giving away this free stuff. We’re giving away this free stuff because they’re building an audience and they’re trying to figure out what the client needs. But as a service provider, oftentimes you already know what they need, right? Because you’ve been delivering it. So if we look at the value ladder, um, and how I suggest you look at it is, um, look as a service provider right now, you’re probably at the top of the spectrum.

You’re delivering your services. Now many of you probably aren’t charging what you should be charging at this level, right? But you’re already theoretically like the amount of access speed that people get from you doing the work is at the top of the ladder, right? And so you have these options that uh, move down the ladder again. So like the highest, most expensive down to the free, like your already position from what you do at the top of the ladder. So the most logical step is to take one step down the ladder somewhere between these two stages and focus on your done with you option. Right? So back to the, the analogy of on one side there is knowledge at one site application. If you try to make the leap over that chasm, right, the entire chasm to go all the way down to, you know, like your free content and focus down there.

Likely what I find service providers doing is they give away way too much. Right? And that’s even at actually even at this level, I didn’t mean to draw that that far. Like we want to move down to the mid tier, right? That mid tier level of how do we provide people with the right support, um, in this, this highlighted area right here. So as a service provider moving into this done with you layer is the most common or the most ideal logical step for you to start adding leverage to your business without sacrificing revenue. Because what happens is when people try to make the jump down to here too soon, they actually jumped down here and they charge little rates, but the time and bandwidth and support that’s needed to deliver, they’re, um, they’re actually losing money, right? Because their, uh, their costs to fulfill and support people at that level, uh, hasn’t been fine tuned to the point where they can actually serve them in more of, like, I would say, this is a DIY capacity, right?

So this is a DIY, this is done with you and this is done for you, right? Another way to look at these tiers as we move up this, um, access, uh, up up the ladder is we have to look at increasing speed access and status. Look, that’s really why people will give you more money and move up the ladder for done for you. They want it done faster. Well, if you’re doing it for them, technically it should be done faster. They want access to you while if you’re doing done for you and it’s, or giving them one on one access at the top of a ladder. Sweet. Like now they have access. And guess what, when you’re at the top of the ladder, people now use that as a status. Like thinking about people that are in masterminds and they’re like, oh, I’m in so and so’s mastermind status, right?

Those are like as you’re building up the ladder is not just about how much you’re charging and the investment, but it’s about the speed, access and status, right? And so for service providers, if you want to really start to, or an agency owners really starts to become more leveraged, don’t make the leap all the way down to the DIY course just yet. If you haven’t done the done with you because the work that you do in here is going to a prime you for what should ever become down to the done that do it yourself level, uh, in the first place. And you might never realize you never even want to go down there at all because you can actually achieve everything you want. Having a, you know, a mid to high ticket done with you program, that is a great front end to your done for you and, or could completely, um, in the long run, you know, take away your done for you services and you don’t offer that at all or only to select people for really, really high rates, right?

Like, we’ll still work with people for one-on-one, uh, intensives if they come into us or if they want to bring us to them for a one or two day experience. But it’s, you know, it’s a, it’s a big investment because we bring a lot of value to coming to you for two days. Are you coming to us for two days designing all of your systems and all that stuff, right? So you can design that. So the point of the story is, you know, if you’re a service provider and you already have a done for you service, which most service providers are doing the work, uh, beware of kind of the info product ladder, where you jump all the way down to the bottom, start doing all this work for free, and then moving up to a DIY type course or offer because you’re going to overdeliver on that and it’s actually not going to be profitable for you.

And a lot of the intelligence, the experience and the work that needs to be done to effectively design that level of a program at a lower ticket scale, say less than, you know, 1000 bucks is going to come from you doing the work in the mid tier done with you. So if you’re at the top, take one step down the ladder and let’s start working on that leveraged one to many delivery of your service, which again we can help you with. And if you’re looking for a little bit more on this and kind of some of the steps, uh, check out the links below. You can visit, uh, either hop on a call with our team@system.ly forward slash application or sorry, apply system.ally or slash apply. Uh, and or if you want to kind of a more in depth training, um, you know, check out our website, system dot l y n and at

the top you can register for an on demand training that kind of walks you through some of the key mistakes that agency owners are making in kind of designing a more productized leverage business. So that’s all we got for today. If you’re enjoying these episodes, be sure to click that subscribe button if you’re on youtube and or leave us a rating and review in iTunes, Google, play all the places we love and appreciate your support and we’ll catch you in the next episode.