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Agency leaders, would you build a house made of straw? Not if you want it to last. No one knows this better than Brock Murray, co-founder and COO of seoplus. I'm Dawid, and we're digging into the five building blocks that made Brock's agency such a success and how you can apply it to your own agency's growth. Let's start at the beginning. Before Brock launched seoplus in February 2012, he was a budding entrepreneur focused on Ottawa only. For me, kind of the journey into web happened even before I founded seoplus back in 2012. I was really in my kind of teen years when I fell in love with HTML and web design. So that's kind of where I got my start. And started developing my skills. And these skills would serve them well. During the 12 plus years of growing his company. Brock faced many ups and downs as he navigated through entrepreneur shit. Big questions popped up, like how they take on new clients while hiring smart. How would they create a strong culture and how they keep providing quality service while balancing everything by building smart? Brock was able to grow a staff of two to over 50 people. Today, they have over 200 active clients across Canada, the US and Europe. But constructing a business wasn't always straightforward, like assembling Ikea furniture. It required a lot of learning, reassessing, and patience. Let's break down the five steps that made it a whole lot easier. By the time he launched his business, he was confident in web design, but not so much the business side of things. The solution? His business partner, Eddie Abernathy. What Brock lacked in business acumen, any more than made up for one thing that Eddie kind of taught us initially was to focus on monthly recurring revenue. To have a strong business, to make sure that you know you're going to have money coming in and you can pay your team and pay for your software and all these kinds of things. It wasn't an overnight success for Brock and Eddie either. In fact, it wasn't until about three years end that they really started to see their business take off. First, they had to build out the company's portfolio. They started with web and graphic design. They also worked long hours, even skipping paychecks. I was 24 years old, quite young. There was not a lot of risk for me to start a business, right? I could go like the first first three months of SEO. Plus, I didn't take a paycheck. It was like the company owed me that money. Brock was happy to take the risk, and it wasn't all bad news. He even met his wife around that time and used his savings to buy her an engagement ring. They're still married 12 years later, so it seems like Brock was following the right instincts. Those instincts only continued to get sharper. Six months. Then they rebranded to seoplus and started offering SEO and content marketing services, which worked for the business. But they failed to notice another area was suffering. That's when the deeper growing pains began to emerge. I remember there was one month. It was I remember was in July, and it was probably five years in business, and all of a sudden we had 3 or 4 people quit in one month. And it was shocking, right? For me, it was kind of like, whoa. Like it was kind of taking a step back, like, why? Why would anyone want to quit? Why wouldn't they want to work here? Brock and his leadership team had to sit down and hash out what they were missing, so that they wouldn't risk losing more good talent. What we ended up discovering was that we didn't have, like, our culture. There was an issue with the culture. We didn't have solidified a business mission for the company. They enlisted a business coach to help craft their company's vision and get everyone aligned. There is a gentleman by the name of Rob Dale. He's out of Ottawa. He works with Rob City Strategies again, amazing at helping us kind of work through what that, you know, those values are and that vision on that mission. And then working with our management team on training. And it worked. But now they had another challenge finding their niche. At first, Brock and his team would take on different types of businesses to grow their portfolio. But after several years, it was time to get focused. We have one strong area of focus that we've kind of narrowed in over the years, so that's working with multi-location businesses. So let's say a business that has 20 locations, there's like 20 different priorities, and sometimes they're franchised where the franchisees are incentivized for their location only. So you want to make sure that each of those locations is getting a good amount of traffic. So that's where our expertise has come in. Once they had their niche, there was just one step left to keep that ball rolling. Brock and his team kept building on that momentum. After all, 12 years in business didn't happen by accident. They show up every day. They care about their clients and want to do a good job. I'm a big believer in the power of momentum, and I find when you're able to kind of stack those consistent wins on top of each other, that's where you truly gain momentum. Momentum is a really powerful thing, and that's where you'll notice it's like a snowball, right? Where it just becomes bigger and bigger. And that's kind of where we're at right now. And like it just becomes a lot easier to celebrate success. So I would say definitely consistency, momentum and love for what you do. So there you have it. Success doesn't always come overnight and the challenge never ceases. But if your heart is in the right place, you'll have what it takes to keep building. Want to explore other agency success stories? Head to our blog. Find the link attached with the post! Until next time, keep making your agency dreams come true.