How To Start SMMA With $0 in 2024

ladies and gents welcome to this week's video now by the end of today's video not only are you going to be able to start your agency but you're going to be able to do it without spending a single euro pound dollar frank dinar or real so just some quick housekeeping i always try to leave chapters in my videos so if you check the description below you'll actually be able to see table of contents replicated with timestamps so you guys can scroll through also i strongly recommend you go ahead and save this video to your watch later so that way you could come back to it reference the different time stamps and actually go ahead again and use this video as a reference point when you get started so in today's video we'll be covering four things what you need to start your agency what you need to reach out to clients what you need to get paid and what you need in order to deliver your services first let's talk about starting your agency because this is such a massive sticking point for so many people and you know most people count themselves out of the race before it even gets started because you know in their mind in order to start an agency you need to you have to register with a government or a professional body and spend you know thousands and thousands and thousands on fees now obviously laws change country by country and i cannot stress this enough i'm not a lawyer i'm not accountant so you should never rely on me for that information but what i can go ahead and do is i can share my story and i can also affirm that this is really the case for most people you know in my unique experience of not only having my agency ig media also being the owner of the largest education company on earth for agency owners i've spoken to and coached thousands and thousands of agency owners and i can tell you most kind of go through this process so let's get into it that's me little fetus eman and because i started working in the uk i could do so as a sole trader that means that i could charge businesses for my service and give my business a name and at first there's nothing really that i needed to do to become a sole trader you just go on the government website it just takes a couple minutes you just register as a sole trader let the government know that hey i'm doing some self-employed work so in the next tax season i might be paying some money now eventually you have to pay tax but that's it and you don't have to register your business legally with anybody you can just choose a name so in terms of my agency i ran my agency from august of 2016 all the way up to uh april 5th of 2018 all as a sole trader in fact i'd created my company a few months prior to that actually in fact i created two companies and later realized that as an absolute nightmare to file tax returns for two companies if you don't have to you know have two credit cards have two uber accounts et cetera et cetera so that's just another piece of advice to you if you can try to bundle some companies up together but anyways i digress my point is from august of 2016 all the way to april 5th of 2018 i waited until a new tax season in the uk rolled around to start using my limited company and i'm sure you guys remembered i managed to get my agency up to 20 30k a month within that period and as i said i was a sole trader i would invoice my clients i would just um you know keep track of any receipts or invoices that i paid for as an expense and that was actually in a deduction it was just super simple i think you know as i said a lot of people really freak themselves out guys the government wants you to pay taxes so they're not going to make it hard on you you know really all you have to do is just register as a sole trader at the beginning until your agency and you know this depends country by country gets to around 10 000 a month that's usually where it's kind of worth uh starting a company and operating it through the company and then apart from that every month just do the calculation how much did i make uh what were my expenses whatever's left the profit you just have to pay a percentage of that in tax and you can just look up an online calculator and it'll tell you that and then just in your bank account just make sure you've got sort of like a reserve account and that's just your tax fund it really is as simple as that remember the government is happy that you're paying them taxes and you're declaring taxes so you know they're not going to make it hard on you so on the topic of starting an agency and picking a name i'm going to show you an example of an imaginary agency that you could start now it's an agency that provides leads to home insulating companies i just saw this name in my head and then i went to canva. com made this logo and downloaded it free of cost once again ladies and gentlemen you don't need to spend you know 500 bucks a thousand dollars 2 000 on an extensive brand pack when you first start my agency ig media that was the updated logo the first logo i ever did i literally just did in camp actually i don't even think i had a logo i think it was literally just like i just typed it out in times new roman so look all this stuff does not really matter when you first start i've said it time and time again once you're first starting and looking at your first few clients the only thing that matters is outreach later down the line like i did if you know you want to go ahead and create some newer logos just you know redesign the website etc you can do that but with these initial steps of starting your agency just get it done and get it done in the most cost effective manner possible next i'm gonna go to wix. com now wix is an idiot proof website builder and this is probably a great time to announce that today's sponsor is we still don't have any uh kieran can we get that sorted please no anyways as i was saying wix is an idiot-proof website builder that actually lets you sign up for free browse its templates of websites and create one for free as well it's super easy to design and you literally drag and drop your logo in place and change the text now one thing to note specifically with wix's free websites is that they do use a dot wix site in the url and also display a banner add advertising wix at the top of the website but if you're looking for your own website with a custom domain you can use a professional site from only six pounds a month and we'll get on to that in just a second so ladies and gents now you have a legitimate agency and it should really never take you more than 60 minutes to pick a name get registered as a sole trader if you aren't already and just make a janky logo in canva obviously the website you know may take you an hour or two just fiddling around adding all the text that you want but you know really within the space of half a day it should never take you more than that to actually get off the ground with your agency but now it's time to start finding clients but to do that you're gonna need a way of outreach here's where gmail comes in handy now i know you're gonna be cynical and say that you can't email off a personal email address but when i first started out i didn't even have a website let alone a professional email address now ladies and gentlemen this is really just to tell you that you have no excuses you know when i first started my agency in fact for the first basic from august of 2016 all the way to april of 2017 so that was like the first eight months or whatever i had no agency name i was just operating as me and obviously because i had no agency website or domain i didn't have a personal business address so my point is you really have no excuses now one thing i will say is that of everything you can kind of spend money on when you're first starting i think the highest roi is a business domain because it's ten pounds a year and then a business email that comes with that which is you know five pounds six pounds a month please prioritize that over using a software like pipe drive or slack or you know just like if you need to bootstrap this thing which i did when i first started there are some really powerful tools that you can just add later if you really don't have 15 pounds to start in your first month and get a business email and domain that is still absolutely fine as i said i managed to scale my agency up to at that point 15 grand a month in fact you guys can even go back on my youtube to 2017 you can see me signing clients in the office with my clients et cetera et cetera at that point i send some really awesome clients like furo systems athlete zebra fuel and as i said all of that was without any technical business name or business email but i will say this uh definitely has a great great roi so if you can afford the 15 pounds a month in fact it's not even 15 a month it's 10 a year for the domain and then 5 a month for the g suite i strongly i strongly strongly recommend it as i said if you do want to have a personalized email address i'm going to show you how cheap and easy it is to do first go to google domains then type in the name of the domain you're gonna buy as you can see ncleads.

com has already been taken but you can still get a high authority domain like a docco. 2k for just 10 pounds a year and when you check out you'll be given the option to buy a custom email through google workspace that means you get a personalized domain and email address instantly for 10 pounds and then with a monthly cost of 4 pound 60 you get the entire g suite ecosystem next consider setting up an instagram remember this is completely free and you can use canva to create high quality graphics for things like testimonials now i will say do not spend hours and hours and hours you know maybe once a month to just batch you know five or six pieces of content on your agency's social media and now at this point with my agency i don't think i've touched the instagram for a year two years you know like honestly i have no idea what's going on that thing and once you get to a certain point with your agency the testimonials that you have the clients that you work with that you know most clients i don't really think look at instagram but when you first start if client is looking you up looking up your website uh etc etc it is nice to have just something there on instagram and also don't just make a boring boring uh graphics like informational graphics you know have a photo of you add a bit of personality to it when people are working with agencies i think the thing that uh you know a lot of uh agency owners forget is that you know we're still in a service based business and you know we're you know it's business owner or business owner so i don't know i think when you're working with a service provider you want to see their face you want to know what they look like you want to you know get a feel for them in that sense so that's just a good little piece of advice now that we've gone ahead and gotten all of that set up it is time to set up a way to get paid right because then they when you start reaching out to clients when you start setting some meetings you know on the meetings whether it's a one meeting close or a three meeting close you know really the culmination of all of this is signing them and getting paid and i've been saying this for years and years and years you know i've been running my agency like this ever since 2018 so everything that's gone on in the world over the space of the last year this is you know the new normal has been normal to me ever since uh you know mid-2018 exclusively zoom meetings with clients even potential clients and you know charging all of our clients online using a payment processor rather than bank transfer now the two i'm going to show you here yes you're going to pay anywhere from a one and a half to three percent fee but trust me having a client card on file and being able to auto build them every month and all of that will be stipulated in sort of your standard agreement with the client that is so so powerful and to me is worth paying the one and a half to three percent because you know because anyone who's running agency and you know for the first two years almost um you know we did everything bankwire you know how much friction it can cause with a client even if you're delivering incredible results if you know they're late on payment et cetera et cetera it's you just don't want to deal with it you want to focus on being an amazing agency and an amazing service provider and not having to faff around with uh you know collecting payments etc etc now it's time to get paid if you've ever watched any of my videos before you know i'm a massive fan of stripe the reason is you can get paid via debit or credit card setup auto billing and it generally reduces any friction between you and your client now you can actually set up a stripe account as an individual or sole trader okay so it's not necessary to have a registered business address in order to set up with stripe however the big problem with striper paypal is that they take a small percentage of each one of your transactions as i previously said and really at the end they only charge you a small percentage and you only need to worry about that if you get paid which means you're in a great position but it's still possible to get paid by direct bank transfer if you prefer not to lose anything of your service fee next it's time to deliver your service now what service you're actually delivering obviously depends on what niche you're in you know what sort of agency you want to have you know at gradiency.