Day 18: Building An Agency From Scratch — My NEW Cold Email, Something Personal + Updates

In case you are new to this meaty little series, I’m documenting everything (raw and real) out in the wide open as I attempt to build a highly focused social customer service agency, work several jobs, deal with anxiety, and fear of the unknown.

Well, it’s day 18. I have a new cold email to share and some updates. But first I want to share something personal, if you will.

I don’t have a very high emotional IQ. This means I let a lot of things affect me very easily and it’s hard to not take things personally. This is not one of the easiest traits to deal with in business because you are going to get a lot of people coming at you from many angles. And you need to be reslilient.

I am trying to get better at this but it’s very tough. I think emotional IQ comes from our parents and it stems from having self-confidence and a healthy self-esteem. For me, none of these things come easy or were engrained in my upbringing.

I’m writing this becuase it’s tough to deal with and because it’s very real. No one will tell you this stuff when you read their article about how they just made their first million dollars with their startup. But I will. I’m not ashamed of who I am one bit. Frustrated and afraid, yes. But ashamed, nope.



Anywho — the reason I bring this up is because of something that happened. When I set out to build this agency, I wasn’t focusing on becoming a consultant. I wasn’t telling the world that I’m the leading expert in “social customer service” and you should hire me (Shane).

And this is important for me and for you to know.

There is a big difference between working for yourself and building a business. Yes. There is.

Let’s look at Richard Branson. Did he know about the airline business when he bought Virgin? Uhm, no. And he didn’t plan to go sit at a reservation terminal either. Let’s look at Debbi Fields of Mrs. Field’s Cookies. She had no formal training or knowledge of cooking. The list goes on — Mary Kay Ash, Joyce Hall (Hallmark), Steve Madden, Walt Disney. Here’s an article from SmallBizTrends that digs deeper into this.

All of these folks wanted to build a business. They had the idea and the vision and then they got really good people to execute it. Nothing wrong at all with that. The really good people they got had the experience, creds, and knowledge.

On the one hand you can have a vision for somethig you want to build and execute it by getting a good team to help you carry that out.

Now I am not saying that you don’t need to have any industry knowledge and know what you are talking about. You most certainly do. You need to do your homework and entrench yourself in that area to make sure you know what’s going on.

On the other hand, you can simply just say that YOU want to be the expert with all of the experience, creds and knowledge. At this point, you can become a consultant and work for yourself.
There is nothing wrong with either situation. It’s really just a choice you need to make. For me, I have already done choice #2 and while it’s great to be the “expert” in something, it’s only satisfying for a short time. It’s harder to scale and much harder to sell something down the road when it’s just you. So I choose #1.

I have an MBA (meh), worked in tech, have a strong affinity for marketing and customer relations, helped build an entire customer success department (very successfully) for a startup, and also built my own content marketing business based solely on social customer care.

I’m very confident that I’m qualified to build this business. I don’t need 5,000 connections on LinkedIn. I don’t need thousands on Twitter. I don’t need to be on Facebook all day. What I need is to know and understand the industry at many levels and how to lead people. The connections and all of that will follow and they will be authentic.

For a year, I took a break so I didn’t build up my networks with a lot of people and connections who really don’t necessarily care about me or what I do. I take the approach of having a very small and limited network because it’s much higher quality and I get far more out of that.

Where I want to focus is on finding the right people to help me carry out this vision. There are people far smarter than me who can help make that dream come alive. They have the creds and experience. I have the vision and leadership.



All of that is to say, when I think about this, I know I need to change my approach a bit. Instead of trying to get that first paying client — I need to do some pilots so that I can create a few case studies and attract not only more clients but really good people to work with me.

Done.

So….that all leads up to a newer strategy in sales. I begin with posting this new “cold” email. It asks to do a free pilot instead. It changes some language. I have already sent the first one (see how motivated I am?).

Along with this I plan to do the following:
Meet with some great folks that can offer up advice who I met right here on Medium
Run a highly targeted LinkedIn ad campaign to drum up some free pilots

Here’s the NEW email:

New Lukewarm Email

You might wonder where my face is at the bottom of the email. It got cut off when I did the screenshot but rest assured my little mug is there.

I also made the following changes today:
Updated my Business LinkedIn page
Wrote some more blog posts for good content
Fixed a huge issue where I could not log into Facebook due to some weird security thing they have going and so I had to re-create the whole thing and I now have Messenger running on my website again
Sales prospecting on Facebook. I’m using the same method as I am on Twitter but Facebook has some really juicy drama — perfect for me.
I added a testimonial to my website and to Linkedin