How This Agency Owner Scaled to Their Most Successful Year Yet

Speaker A: From May onward have been our best months ever. We now have more business than we had people that do it. At the moment any of our clients are listening to this. Don't worry, I'm sure we've hired people, but now we're working hard to hire to keep up. Because not only is it, uh, new clients and a lot of growing, like the digital health clients that we're getting are also growing three and six months after we land them. M the business grows because it's going well. There's just all these positive effects.

Speaker B: Today I'm joined by Chris Madden. He is the co founder of Match Node. Welcome Chris.

Speaker A: Thank you so much, Corey. I'm so happy to be here. Uh, really excited to talk.

Speaker B: So we connected back in late 2023 and I think that you at the time joined a Focus Finder workshop that I was hosting. And the focus, the purpose of that workshop is to help agency owners to identify a vertical market to specialize in. And I'm curious Chris, what was going on at matchnow time, uh, as you were showing up to that workshop?

Speaker A: You know, a lot of what felt like spinning our reels of getting beholden to a sales pipeline that was not in our control because it was overly reliant on referrals. Because of that, we weren't able to build any sense of momentum or be super clear about who we were for and what we did best. And the what we did best was always pretty clear, was always digital ads leading with paid social. But over time that stopped being enough. And there were sales deals that we wanted and we thought we'd get that we lost to specialists. There were clients that we were excited to have that ended up not being huge business wins over a long period of time. So there was just a lot of issues that looked kind of different from one another, but all had similar roots, which is that we were not clear enough on um, who, what particular business segment should work with us and why.

Speaker B: I remember back at that time you, you sharing with me that you had a focus on digital ads, on creative, on strategy, but you were kind of across finance and banks, healthcare insurance, pro sports teams, which you had, uh, some really great clients there, as well as restaurant groups. So you kind of had a mishmash of a lot of different types of clients.

Speaker A: Yeah. And that was hard it for my co founder and I, it matched what we were interested in. We liked moving, we like business a lot and we like moving from industry to industry. From phone call to phone call kept things interesting in the early days, but of Course, once we got to a certain point, it's really hard to go from a pro sports team to a restaurant group to a bank, to a digital health company to a cryptocurrency company, like all in the same couple days. And so it started to, uh, become clear to us. And it was really hard to find people that we could hire, uh, especially people early in her career who were looking to grow. It's really hard to find people to hire who could, who could talk to leadership at each of those kinds of businesses.

Speaker B: And you mentioned that you were losing deals to specialists. What kind of specialists were those? Were those companies?

Speaker A: You know, it's funny because looking back, like, there was even deals that now I'm glad we didn't get. But at the time, at the time, it felt like a loss. There was one that was a very particular kind of like, high highlight. It was like a jewelry insurance and, and we lost to an insurance focused agency. We. Yeah, there were too many. And sports was really exciting to us. It matched what some of us on the team, including myself, were excited about, personally, what we spent some of our free time on. And so getting a lot of the cool Chicago sports teams was a dream come true. M. In many ways, like sincerely, getting the Chicago Bulls was a kind uh, of a threshold sort of moment for me, getting my upbringing as a Bulls fan. And my dad had a similar business with similar clients. So getting all those was really cool. But then we realized that, uh, it was, I think in the Focus Finder workshop. I think the sports niche might have been the first one we tested because we were excited about it. Yet we knew deep down it wasn't working and wasn't going to work long term because we had already attempted the most obvious tactics there over the past or over the course of the past couple years. And there were some shortcomings.

Speaker B: So what, what was some of the challenges in targeting a vertical like sports arenas and sports groups?

Speaker A: Well, I remember so clearly, and I referred to it regularly still, which is you have a scoring system where you lay out each of the different traits or attributes that you would want for, uh, for a particular specialization. And as we did that exercise for sports, some of the things that were challenging was just the sizing of that space. We of course went Beyond. We have NBA at the time we had NBA, NHL teams. Now we have an MLS team or two as well. But still, that's only 90 teams we could get. There's a lot of reasons why we, MLB and NFL weren't good fits. We looked at, uh, Expanding that to different college sports as well as arenas to try to take a bigger look. And it still was just wasn't big enough. We're talking about having a hundred or two hundred potential targets instead of, you know, the thousands that I now know we would have needed.

Speaker B: So through the process of working together, you eventually ended up with Digital Health. What about Digital Health for you and your agency with your co founder, Brian? Like, what. What about Digital Health made a lot of sense for you guys to focus on?

Speaker A: We had a coup, a couple of Digital Health clients who were real leaders in the industry. And they really opened our eyes to the momentum that some of these businesses were having and into the direct impact we could have on them. And so that was like a clear piece of evidence. It was the reason why it was the second or third niche we went through your process with once we saw a bunch of reasons why sports wasn't right. And so there was a real feeling of momentum. You know, like that was just a feeling because we put numbers to these things. But having wind at your back instead of wind in your face was really clear with Digital Health also from the beginning, as a agency that focused on advertising, we were really clear in our purpose that we wanted to drive conversions for businesses that made the customer's life a little bit better in some way and never worse. And so that was helpful in the early years to start to, like, state a claim and build some culture around our core values, which I'm now thankful we've put a lot of investment in and definitely guide us in important ways. But it was the, the impacts that we are having for the people on the other side of our ads. In a good case for these clients was the thing that really hit us. So we have a client called Bicycle Health, which helps people kick opioid abuse disorder using digital health tools and, you know, remote prescriptions and things like that. And as we started to see the impact that our good work was having with them, they're like potentially every person the other side of this ad is getting or that converts because of these ads that we've showed them. Who makes an appointment and shows up to, you know, get this care, to get this specialty care from. Bicycle Health is getting help kicking opioid abuse. So that was a really. Aside from the numbers and the business strategy, it really made our, like, very. Going back to the beginning of our business purpose start to click in. In a way that I thought it started to become obvious to me that this was going to be the, the conclusion and, you know, how Are we going to get buy in from everyone else? But that that answers that question is just like the morale for everybody to have that positive impact behind the work that we're doing was uh, one of the biggest things and remains remains.

Speaker B: So how did you go about sharing this change, this change in focus or maybe this narrowing of focus to digital health? How did you communicate that internally? How did you rally the troops? What was that process like?

Speaker A: Carefully and over time, certainly with your help, we worked together over months. So towards the end of that process we were like, okay, we've made this decision, so now what does this mean and what are the steps we take now? What are the steps we're going to need to take in three months? How will this look in a year? And having, you know m, my co founder and I are both strategic but we're also very data driven. And so having the scoring system of the different. I remember very clearly again the scoring system we had sports next to finance, which we also have had lots of great clients in and still do over the years next to digital health. And the difference in the score was not close and the reasons behind the difference of the score made a lot of sense. You know, we had a lot of sports clients when the pandemic hit and a lot of restaurant clients in the pandemic hit. That was not a good position to be in. Healthcare is particularly recession proof as well as pandemic proof. Sports had this continuous issue of we got all the Chicago clients because we were a Chicago agency. But it was really hard to go get Portland Trailblazers or the Los Angeles Lakers or the New York Knicks when there are incredible agencies in those cities that uh, it will those teams would prefer to hire. So we had hit our heads against the wall for long enough that my co founder and I knew that we were changing something. It was just like we wanted to have the right strategy before we started jumping into the tactics because we'd made those mistakes. Those are our first idea of specializing and we talk about and tried to specialize. There were tactical driven efforts years before this. And so it wasn't that hard to get him on board because he was feeling the pain potentially even more than I, than I was because my job is to run the agency and his job is to lead our service delivery team which is 80% of our headcount and the effort that our team puts in. So he was the one where it was like he was getting stretched in because all uh, the, both our sales and our service delivery was too founder reliance and he Was the founder on that side of the business, so it wasn't hard to get his buy in. And he was also saw the business profit and revenue numbers coming from these two clients was a totally different thing than we were getting from sports teams. And so then it was a question of how do we get our team on board. And similarly, we did it very slowly and over months and quarters of communication. And it was very much a crawl, walk, run sort of feeling.

Speaker B: And from a positioning perspective, how did you roll out this new focus? Did you slowly roll it out or did you change the whole website? I know the answer to this, but here's to hear how you, you would approach this or respond to this like, how did you change the positioning? Was, uh, it gradual? Was it more sudden? How did you do that?

Speaker A: We slowly rolled it out and we're iterative people and so everything ends up being iterative to some degree. But there is of course important milestones and important thresholds. We had our backup, we had our legacy homepage that have been probably unchanged for years. And then behind the scenes we're building our Digital Health homepage and we put a lot of time and effort into the positioning and work with you doing white space exercises, talking to our Digital Health clients, doing a lot of competitive research, very carefully, writing all of the language on that, and then having our great design team design that page. So, you know, it took weeks and weeks at least. And the decision to flip from the legacy page to the digital Health page that we no longer would call our Digital Health page, this is our homepage, was the big one. And it definitely came in a moment of clarity of like, this is going to take longer than we expect, so we should, so we should flip it sooner than later. I remember, you know, we had almost from the start we had positive leading indicators, but the sales cycle is longer than our previous sales cycle. So it took quite a bit before these positive marketing leading indicators turned into closed sales deals. So it was, I think it was in some of that wandering through the forests at that point where I remember my co founder said is we just need to put the website right now. So we did. And that was a big deal. And of course that didn't even make that much of an impact as far as like getting business. But it was just an important psychological moment. Yeah, our commitment increased over time as the results dictated and thankfully the results continued to push us in this direction. And so we didn't fire all of our legacy clients. Of course not. Uh, but at the same time we were getting a Lot better at running the agency. And so we had better data on who was a good client for us and who wasn't. And we had conversations with a lot more confidence in the future our business independent of how a particular piece of revenue might work out for next year or next month. So that's been a big change.

Speaker B: And once you flip the website to the Digital Health Focus and you had the internal buy in, you're building momentum internally. How did you build momentum as far as gaining awareness, credibility and really sales opportunities in digital health?

Speaker A: It wasn't easy. And it came also the old fashioned way. We started of course, because our website showed what it did. It became our commitment was clearer. One of the concepts in your program that I learned is the idea of the maven. And we found a maven through a couple of Digital Health clients that we had and he put a couple of really interesting new deals in front of us. Now we didn't get either of those deals and that was a frustrating and painful and discouraging setback. It was too much too soon too looking back on it, it was like almost too good to be true. But we've remained close with that maven and he continues to feed us a lot of business. It also, not just through him, but through. I remember you saying you're in your book. It says something about how you know it's a good niche when it feels small quickly. Like even just this is only my second year going to Health, which is a big conference in Vegas that everyone goes to. And I feel like we know so many more people than we did a year ago. And that's just because it is a small world. So a couple of what it always comes from pori is like someone who worked, uh, was our client at one business, leaves that, uh, business for whatever reason, go somewhere else and then hires us there. It's like all those traditional things were continuing to happen, but those nodes that we were building off of were expanding because we had a really good major and he's not the only one. So then we had other partners. So it took some time and to continue with the commitment theme because we were just because we were getting enough of like the sales lift and the pipeline lift that we were getting enough encouragement to keep going. And it wasn't like wildly obvious that it was working. Now we're talking like six months after changing the website. It's still like, okay, this is fairly, it's working. But we had to convince ourselves a little bit the sales pipeline wasn't. There weren't deals Coming out the end of the sales pipeline through it. So the big commitment, the big change that really has helped was planning for 2025, planning for this first full calendar year of uh, being a digital health agency. It made our sales and marketing plan so much easier and that was a really good feeling. And we only did a few things for marketing this year and it was a big podcast project and following closely your playbook and that's leading into a printed uh, book which is going to be out in maybe four or five months. It's going to be. I'm very excited for the book. The book is going to be so good. I'm really excited for the book. And while those things are like, the podcast is 24 episodes and we've only released six or seven, so we're still early on in the public facing part of those content projects, the putting together. And uh, interviewed over 30 digital health marketing leaders for the podcast, which is how we've organized all the content to be able to write a book about how these digital health companies grow that has created a bunch of relationships. And I'm going to conferences and different like very small, intimate group style things with these leaders and decision makers. So feeling the smallness of that, where we can already see like people that are moving from one company going to another. People who used to work at this, you know, there's a handful of like tent pole digital health companies that create this like mafia of, you know, alumni that go on as start other businesses. So all of that we start to get in the middle of those networks and that's what's been working.

Speaker B: Tell us about 2025, what's working in addition to this sort of inner circle that you've been able to penetrate, which is awesome. How's the beer? How's the year shaping up? It's October 3rd as we record this.

Speaker A: Yeah. So my experience as an agency owner has been, thankfully it's not this way anymore. Spurts of growth where it feels exciting and it feels like things are working. And then you hit a, then we've hit plateaus and this has happened now a couple times. And as you get to that uh, plateau for the first time, you don't know you're on a plateau at first and then after a while, maybe a year or two passes where we're not growing as quickly as we wanted to and that causes us enough pain where we decide it's time to change and that's what happens here. And so after a couple years in a row of projecting 20 and 25% growth and then not hitting it, it was getting kind of frustrating. And so we continued. We came into 2025 again with another 25% growth projection, with a better pipe, with a better marketing plan and a better pipeline for sure. And we're blowing it out of the water. And so it wasn't the first four months of the year kind of. Even though things were starting to close some deals, the numbers didn't change yet. From May onward have been our best months ever. We now have more business than we had people to do it at the moment. If any of our clients are listening to this, don't worry, I'm sure we've hired people, but now we're working hard to hire to keep up. Because not only is it new clients and a lot of growing, like the digital health clients that we're getting are also growing three and six months after we land them. Um, the business grows because it's going well. There's just all these positive effects. And one thing I've definitely noticed is whether on the sales side or just our team, where we start with a new client, or when we're having just our ongoing regular strategic discussions with clients, because we're so specialized, we know so much about this stuff now and there's a lot to know. We picked a good niche where HIPAA compliance, state by state regulations, the technical aspects of how all the data flows so that ads can work is extremely specific. It's extremely high stakes. It's extremely important to get right because up to now there's been a lot of digital health companies. It hasn't been that long, just a few years, but just say like, we're not going to do ads because it's too dangerous or we might get sued. And so there's now good solutions to that and our team is expert in helping implement those. And on the other side, there's these creative realities of how you can message with empathy to people in a, uh, health, you know, context. And so whether it is our existing clients, I mean, we're always learning from every client we'd have, but we were bringing a lot of knowledge to each discussion that people are valuing just on its face. So, so that's been really exciting. And whether we're talking about retaining business and growing business that we have that was digital health or getting new clients, that's been a really exciting dynamic.

Speaker B: What's been maybe the biggest surprise along the way the last 18 to 24 months as you've been going through this transformation?

Speaker A: There's one thing I would Go back and tell myself at the beginning of the process when we made this decision, it's just like to remember the rule of life, which is big, important things are always going to take longer than you want them to and to stick with it. We did stick with it, but you know, there are some of the moments of doubt which are just inevitable on a program this long, with ups and downs, just entrepreneurship. Any entrepreneur or business owner who says they never have a moment of doubt is probably not being honest. But so like in those moments, just that it was going to be worth it. And you know what's hard though too is we had tried so many things previously, it wasn't the first time we tried something and thought it might work. There are so many things that we tried in the past and thought they might work, but in those moments we would remember why this one is different. And the reason why it was different is because we started with a strategic decision first and we made a hundred percent certain that we were all confident with the strategic decision because this is where we were going. And once we got there, then all the little course corrections and decisions on how to allocate budget time, those things are really important, but no one's going to get them 100% right. But because where the ball is just rolling in the right direction and gaining momentum, um, those things all became easy. But it did, it did take longer that like if you ask for the 18 to 24 month journey, like months six through nine were pretty hard. And so I would tell myself that it was worth it. But that was probably the most surprising thing, is the thing that shouldn't be surprising, which is it's never going to be as easy or quick as you think.

Speaker B: What advice? Great, great point. Um, Chris, what advice would you have for an agency owner or a co founder such as yourself? The 24 month ago version of you in addition to it takes longer. But maybe that version of you who was trying to grow, struggling as a generalist, what advice would you have for that person?

Speaker A: I think that first the specialization and the literal knowledge, uh, and expertise that you and your team will gain makes people come to you, makes opportunities come to you. Instead of you having to go out and chase every opportunity or chase opportunities that are referrals to you, that aren't even good fits because you want to land the revenue. The specialization is worth it, I think, just for that reason. And then the second thing I would most recommend, and this I'm so happy about, and it was strategic for us, but there's also luck Involved, which is pick something that has tailwinds and not headwinds. Like, I got really. Even having just a digital agency that wasn't specialized, it felt like there were headwinds coming at us all the time. And it was hard to feel like we were gaining momentum. And of course, that translates down to our teammates. And we'll lose a teammate we don't want to lose, or we can't hire someone that we want because we can't afford them. There's just like all these death by a thousand cuts sort of feelings when you have headwinds, but when you have tailwinds. And so we picked Digital Health. And part of the reason why we picked it was because we thought it would be a good pick for a decade or two. Like, we weren't trying to think of, like, what's going to work for the next six months, but it was early 2024. And so I feel like even in those 18 months or so that we made that decision, there's been a zeitgeist and kind of a cultural shift in the United States towards, I think, proactive and personalized health, where people are taking more interest and taking more seriously all the ways that we can be healthier and all the technology that's now available. And so that, like, picking something that's growing and picking something that is going to have a big place in the future would be one of my biggest, like, things I think we got right that I would recommend other people take very seriously. Especially now. It's really hard when it feels like AI is eating everything. It's like, well, what part of the economy can I go build something and thrive in that isn't going to be at risk of some existential threat that's out of my control or just a market size that's shrinking by 1 or 2% every year is really difficult to grow in.

Speaker B: It's amazing how your timing was impeccable. Right. Just as it was really picking up. You're absolutely right. When you're in a, in a vertical market or an industry that's expanding rapidly, a lot of investments coming in, a lot of just organic growth, it's a great time to be a specialist, A, uh, well known and respected specialist in that space. So I think what you guys did was just fantastic.

Speaker A: We had some good help. We needed it.

Speaker B: Yeah. Cool. Well, I appreciate you coming on, sharing your story with folks. I know it's going to be helpful for, for people who maybe are trying to struggle or are struggling with this idea. Vertical specialization, choosing the right vertical. So thanks again for coming on.

Speaker A: Uh, very happy to be here. Corey. Thank you again for asking. If anybody wants to talk to me further about this experience that you're considering working with you or considering specializing in general, uh, overall, I'd be happy to talk with anybody about it.

Speaker B: Thanks, Chris.

Speaker A: You're welcome. Thank you.

Speaker B: If you're looking to go deeper on how to scale your business with high ticket clients, click the video that's on screen right now.