I took my first day off from work in two months.

I spent the day reflecting on our agency and came to three big decisions.

These decisions are simple, but they’ll affect our strategy in a big way.

1.) We’re not offering marketing anymore.

Recently, I pitched someone our signature offer:

YouTube plus marketing.

I finish the pitch, expecting him to love it like everyone else.

But he pauses, smiles, and says, “That sounds great, but we don’t need marketing. We only need YouTube.”

This alone isn’t a big deal.

Plenty of businesses need YouTube services, and others need both YouTube and marketing. Heck, I was talking to the CMO after all.

But what surprised me is how much he was willing to pay for just YouTube. I heard of brands who pay a lot for YouTube, but this was the first time we talked directly to one of those brands.

This was important for a couple of reasons.

First, focusing on only YouTube makes our agency easier to run.

We can streamline our systems and delegate more easily. Sure, adding marketing makes it a more attractive offer, but it adds a lot more complexity. Complexity is what caused me to burn out and shut down my first agency. I don’t need to learn that lesson again.

Second, focusing on only YouTube allows us to double down on one service.

Doing one service allows us to be the best at it. Stronger retention, better client results, more referrals, higher LTV. It’s a product-first approach to building an agency, which follows my favorite quote, ‘the best marketing is the work on your desk.’

Direct response marketing is a completely different animal. It’s hard to do, hard to teach, and hard to delegate. So although YouTube and marketing is a strong hybrid offer, it’s essentially two different services.

We’re realizing it’s best to provide just one service for now.

Third, it’s more profitable for less work.

Generating a view is easier than generating a dollar. Which means YouTube will be an easier service for us to deliver than marketing. Plus we can actually charge as much as I used to for marketing, and possibly even more, if we find the right prospects.

Now, it doesn’t mean we won’t generate revenue for our clients. Our YouTube strategies will still be ROI-focused. But we’re just a traffic driver now. We’ll be a step removed from the point of conversion, like frontend offers, backend offers, and funnels.

Does this mean we’re giving up on marketing?

Not at all. In fact, it’s quite the opposite…

We have marketing partners right now, and we plan to stick with them for the long term. We may offer extra marketing to the absolute best prospects.

We’re just getting picky with who we offer that too.

But more on that in the third point…

Let’s move onto the second…

2.) We’re changing the problem we solve.

Our positioning is not like most content agencies.

Most content agencies help you get views and leads.

We help you do something much more specific:

Get stability from your paid advertising channels.

I chose this because it’s the #1 problem for the businesses I’ve worked with over the last decade. A YouTube channel is just one solution that can help.

It turns out, the businesses we’ve talked to up until this point all agree.

However, we found one big issue…

You see, six weeks ago, I wrote about how we were on the verge of closing a new client.

But just recently, we got an email from their team saying they couldn’t move forward.

They said their revenue was too unstable. It was unstable because their ads were unstable. The very problem we’re solving is exactly what stopped them from working with us.

That’s when it hit me:

If a company’s ads are unpredictable, so is their revenue. And if their revenue is unpredictable, the last thing they’ll want to do is invest into an entirely new marketing channel like YouTube content.

On the other hand, the prospect I mentioned in point one had the opposite problem.

Their ads weren’t volatile, their ads were just stagnant. Their revenue wasn’t dropping, but it also wasn’t growing. They were stuck at the same level month after month, and they needed a way to break through that ceiling.

They decided YouTube would be the best next step. Their guru was great on camera and he was already producing short videos on IG. Plus they looked at YouTube as a long-term solution, rather than needing a quick fix in the moment.

We realized this is the type of business we want to work with. The business that’s doing well with paid ads, but is struggling to scale further. They want to take a branded approach, they’re thinking long-term, and they’re willing to invest a lot in YouTube.

There’s fewer of these businesses, but it allows us to build a more niche agency for a small but wealthy segment of the market. Paired with point number one above, we can focus on one highly valuable service that retains people for a long time.

So by now, we already doubled down on one element of our service, and we’re also going more upstream with the type of client we want to work with…

But there’s still one more point…

3.) We’re launching our own offers and YouTube channels.

One of our main goals was to build an agency that generates cash flow, then use that cash flow to launch our own offers.

This was always the plan from the start.

I believe launching your own offers is the ultimate form of demonstration. Plus, you can earn a lot more money without needing to play the client game if you manage to do it properly. This would allow us to focus on an even smaller segment of clients while supplementing our income with our own offers.

And if you’re a marketer selling services to clients but you don’t do that service for yourself? That’s a big positioning flaw in my eyes.

I believe whatever you or your agency sells, you should be spending your own money to do it for yourself too.

For us, that’s building YouTube channels that sell courses and coaching programs.

So we’re just going to start spending our own money on these sooner. I already did it with my channel in the Latin American market, which I’m reactivating soon here. But it’s time to double down and do this even more for ourselves.

We’re going into other markets that don’t have my or my partner’s face on it. They could be faceless where we own it all, or they could have someone else’s face on it where we share in the profits. Either way, we want to put our money where our mouth is.

We made all three of these decisions over a single weekend.

One of the top questions you should be asking in your business is…

Is my strategy bringing me closer to my goals or further?

Strategy is all about closing the gap between where you are now and where you want to be.

This means there are no right or wrong answers. That’s what makes strategy hard to master. It’s really just mastering the awareness around what you truly want in life then taking the correct steps to achieve it. People drastically overcomplicate this, just like we almost did until we caught ourselves.

All I want to do is publish ideas, share stories, and build brands on YouTube. Everything I do needs to bring me closer to these things.

I recommend spending at least one day a month revisiting your strategy. Only pivot your strategy based on data. We’re making these decisions because we got data in the form of talking to prospects.

It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes…

The journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step, but what if you’re going in the wrong direction?

You don’t want to climb to the top of the mountain to realize you climbed the wrong mountain.

This, in my opinion, is the essence of strategy.

This is Week 9 of building my business in public.