This is a follow up story for Counterweight Creative. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 5 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

My name is Jeremy Enns and I’m the founder of Counterweight Creative, a podcast production, and marketing agency specializing in helping health and wellness experts become the go-to authorities in their field.

Our flagship offering is our integrated podcast production and marketing services where we build out a content plan alongside our clients, and then handle the audio post-production and content repurposing to help grow the podcast, and with it, their business.

We’re also branching out into the world of online education and just launched our first program, Podcast Marketing Academy, where we teach business owners and podcasters how to put out agency’s podcast marketing system to work for them and their shows.

We’re currently averaging $20-25k/mo in revenue and are planning to triple that over the course of the next 18 months.

how-increasing-customer-value-doubled-our-monthly-revenue

Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?

Over the course of the past year, we’ve scaled down the number of clients we work with but focused on increasing average customer value, resulting in a doubling of our monthly revenue.

If you don’t have someone filling that accountability role for you right now, it’s definitely worth looking into getting someone reliable in your corner to keep you in line and push you forward.

Our main focus over the past year has been on streamlining our back-end systems, building out our team, and refining our client targeting and messaging to hone in on health and wellness experts.

While we were previously working with a lot of businesses in the wellness space and had grown our network through referrals, we’re wanting to be more intentional about serving that niche specifically as we have a great reputation for a solid network.

The main addition to our team has been an operations manager who has been incredibly helpful in working to improve the back end of the business allowing me to focus on marketing, sales, and the creation of new offers.

One of the challenges we’ve faced is that as we’ve looked to target higher-level businesses looking for more full-featured solutions, our existing referral network has lost a lot of its value as the referrals we get from past clients often can’t afford our new offerings.

As a result, we’re working to build out our network of strategic partners, consisting of service providers also operating in the health and wellness space.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

The biggest lesson I’ve learned has to be around setting aside the ego involved with certain metrics.

I used to be proud of how big and how quickly our team was growing, but as time has passed I’ve realized that I prefer a smaller, more committed core team than a looser, larger one.

As a result, we’re currently grandfathering out our network of contractors and moving towards a smaller in-house team of employees.

The other big win for me personally (but which has also benefitted the business) has been starting a daily writing habit at the start of this year. I’ve published well over 100 blog posts now in 2020 so far, and while I haven’t built up a huge audience around them, that was never really the goal.

The massive benefit has been the improvement in my clarity of thought and the number of new ideas I find myself generating on a daily basis. What started out as an experiment has quickly become my favorite part of the day and one of the most beneficial practices in my life.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

Over the next year, we’re planning on rolling out three new online programs aimed at businesses who use podcasting as a marketing channel, while continuing to raise the average customer value of our agency clients.

We’re launching a new podcast in the next few months aimed at helping health and wellness experts run more profitable online businesses, and looking to expand our content marketing efforts to start getting our name out there.

Our longer-term plan is to keep building the agency with a focus on serving a small number of high-level clients while offering high ticket online programs to a larger number of people.

Have you read any good books in the last year?

When it comes to content consumption, I’ve actually been on a content diet for the past year after building up an impossibly long to-do list. The past year has been focussed entirely on doing rather than learning, although I can feel that starting to change going forward.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

When it comes to growing your business I think it’s essential to keep looking for new ways you can serve your existing audience and customers. Talk to them and understand where they’re looking to go and what you could potentially offer them to help them get there.

You just need to make sure that you’re not overextending yourself so far that your existing business starts to break down under the strain.

I started working with a great coach this year who’s really helped me get clarity on the next steps for the business and provided much-needed accountability in executing.

If you don’t have someone filling that accountability role for you right now, it’s definitely worth looking into getting someone reliable in your corner to keep you in line and push you forward.