Opportunity Knocks for Opportunity Marketing

Hi Reader,

Let me tell you about Gerald Osprey and his agency, Opportunity Marketing.

Gerald started his marketing agency about six years ago after being laid off. For those early years, he tapped his network to do all kinds of work: SEO, content writing, some paid media advising. After the first two years, Gerald was booking about $100K in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

In year three, he hired a few outsourced people to help do the work. Over that year, a few more referrals rolled in and a client renewed at a higher price, and soon Opportunity Marketing passed the $500K ARR mark. One key hire was an account manager who set up his company's CRM, Hubspot...but half a year later, that account manager left and Gerald had no idea how to detangle his CRM (it never got detangled).

Now on year six, Gerald is struggling to break $1M in ARR. His outsourced talent is keeping the lights on, but winning new business is a struggle. Most of his new business is through referrals but since his CRM is a hot mess, he's not exactly sure how much and from where.

In the fall of 2024, Gerald was burned out and feeling a little hopeless. He was clocking long hours but day after day felt like Agency Problem Whack-a-Mole. Gerald was laying awake for too many nights, vividly imagining how one good catastrophe would wipe out six years of work.

As a marketer, not an entrepreneur, Gerald felt overwhelmed by the challenges of reaching his $1M ARR goal.

Gerald knew 2025 needed a different approach.

What should Gerald do? He's got some clients, some systems, some talent, and some idea of what he could be doing next. Gerald could keep hustling on everything, but by admitting some vulnerability that he's guessing his way to success, he might have a less painful and shorter journey to that $1M ARR goal.

Instead of more-of-the-same hustling, here's what could happen for Gerald:

1. Gerald took advantage of Learn to Scale's Black Friday special and purchased a Small Agency Assessment. For $750, the possibility of clarity, confirming his suspicions, and just being able to share his struggles with someone was a risk worth taking.
2. After two interviews, Gerald received the following:
   • A Small Agency Assessment Report​
   • An Audio Summary of his Assessment report​
   • A NotebookLM specifically catered to his business and the Assessment report
   • ​Three Top Challenges, four specific recommendations, and a specific timeline to achieve those recommendations
   • A $750 discount on any Learn to Scale standard training offerings in 2025 (the Black Friday Special!)
3. Throughout the Assessment process, Gerald identified upcoming pitfalls and a few that he was deep inside and wasn't aware. Simply being asked, "How do you know which clients are the best use of your time?" made Gerald realize that his Hubspot Hot Mess was a bigger point of friction than he previously realized.
4. Gerald also realized that it was ok that he didn't have every answer. The hype surrounding "being a business owner" made him feel shame that he didn't have a crystal clear vision for Opportunity Marketing. Talking through this shame made Gerald understand that he didn't have to feel shamed. In fact, it validated some of his past decisions, making him feel pride.
5. Gerald followed some of the recommendations right away: he scheduled a leadership strategy session for December, he found a Hubspot Solutions Partner to re-organize and simplify his CRM, and he decided to use Toggl for time tracking (and discovered that one of his team members was a Toggl wizard and set up all the tags and clients on a Friday afternoon).

Wow, Gerald, looks like you're going to have a MUCH better plan for 2025.

Ok, confession: Gerald isn't real. Gerald's story is a composite, based on real agency owners who transformed their businesses with Learn to Scale.

However, you might have a bit of Gerald going on:

• Overwhelmed with prioritizing which dumpster fire to address first
• A sense of shame that you don't have it figured out while the rest of the world seems to know it all
• Ready to move beyond ad-hoc growth and develop a strategic plan

Make 2025 your year. Book a free consultation to discover how next year SHOULD and COULD be better than the last one.

A TL;DR from the CRO

We take different walking routes when the days are shorter: often, we discover something delightful.

-Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer

A TL;DR From the Archive: How to Pitch the Perfect Corporate Offsite for Your Small Team

A corporate offsite might just be the catalyst your small team needs to unleash its full potential and/or get out of a rut. From building stronger relationships to fostering creativity, offsite meetings offer a wealth of advantages.

But how can you sell this idea to your company? For some small teams, they may have never heard of or conducted an offsite before. What a missed opportunity! In this short blog post, learn how to position and pitch the perfect capstone to 2024 and to gear up for a better 2025.

​As per my last TL;DR, I'm a big Black Friday fan.

This year I've been eyeing a new office chair to replace my currently molting chair. Something sleek, comfy, and worth living in for six hours a day.

I realized with chair shopping that there are two branches of nice chairs:

• ​Chairs that look boring and corporate-y​
• ​Things that look fun and gamer-y​

OBVIOUSLY I'm not going the corporate chair route. Life's short: why be bland?

But do I go whole hog and get a hobby-emblazoned chair, like the SecretLab Arcane series, or just get something gamer-y but neutral?

Open to suggestions on where to put my buns for the next five years.

​

Sitting, shopping, and salivating,

Dan from Learn to Scale​

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​PS. Train your pokemon with AI, they said. Traumatize the AI with another computer, it did.​