Marketing for Risk Takers: Working with a Marketing Agency for the First Time

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Are you committed to your business’s growth?

You might say you’re a daring person. After all, you’ve done what so many people never risk and started your own business. You’ve put your money and your reputation on the line in the belief that you can do something quicker, cheaper, or just better than anyone else. Maybe you’ve packed up and, like so many before you, headed west to hang your shingle as an independent doctor, dentist, or lawyer. Maybe you’ve mortgaged your house to finance your startup while you start looking for investors. Maybe this is your big gambit to be able to afford to put your kids through college.

Regardless, you’re a risk-taker. You’ve lain it all out and done something remarkable, going into business for yourself and setting your own destiny. You’re a pioneer in a growing field: the independent entrepreneur. So take a second, and pat yourself on the back. A little self-congratulation is in order! Because it can be scary to go into business for yourself.

Kudos, props, adulations all around.

Now, let me fill you in on a little secret: you aren’t done taking risks yet.

You’re invested in your company. You’ve emptied yourself into it, giving it longer nights than you ever gave your actual human children, carefully carving it with chisels named “Excel” and “Quickbooks.” It’s as much your work and legacy as any painting or sculpture. And that means getting daring with how you run it can be hard to do; after all, you already took the risk in establishing it to begin with, and by now, however many years later, you have employees who depend on you and hundreds of thousands of dollars wrapped into it.

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Marketing is a Risk, Too

We’ve written in the past about the practical side of working with a marketing agency: how it can enable scalable growth, what you can expect, and what that relationship means. But we haven’t talked about this side of it. Because taking on an agency relationship can sometimes feel a little frightening. You’re handing off a big part of your sales process to a room full of strangers who you’re pretty confident don’t understand your business half as well as you do. How can they communicate who you are and what you do effectively? Giving up any control, especially over something you’re this invested in, is always scary.

But fortune favors the bold.

Working with an agency is about long-term planning and results-oriented marketing by professionals. It’s about trusting someone the same way your clients trust you: to deliver what’s promised. It’s about freeing up your own time for things you and only you can do better, instead of racing around trying to do it all. The key to any business’s growth is having a scalable operation, and that can only happen when you start delegating tasks to other capable people. It started with your first hire, which is really an act of radical trust on your part that this person was worth the investment in time and money to handle this job more effectively than you can.

And the same is true for an agency. You’re looking to grow. Looking to expand. And you know you don’t have the internal resources or personal expertise to handle the marketing side of things as much as you’d like. So it’s time to make a call, make an investment, and commit to your enterprise’s growth by embracing the same bold spirit that inspired you to go into business for yourself in the first place.

Taking up with an agency saves you time and energy staffing your own team, giving you access to a veritable brigade of talented, skilled, and experienced marketers including writers, strategists, SEO experts, and analysts who do this stuff all day every day. It’s an investment, but it gives you the means to burst out of the gate instead of having to slowly and blindly feel your way through your marketing efforts. You get a team that takes your goals, makes them their priority, and dedicates time and energy to figuring out how to get you there – so that you don’t have to.

It’s always going to feel risky when you hand off such a big part of your sales process. But you’re the kind of person who goes into business for yourself.

What’s a little risk to you?

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