Case Study: 2.5x ARR In 6 Months

Flax Creatives is a full service YouTube agency. Creatives works one on one with YouTubers to scale their revenue, views, and strengthen their communities. Their services include ideation, video editing, channel mgmt, revenue optimization and data reporting - really the full service.

From January 2023 to June 2023 I assumed the role of COO and scaled Flax Creatives' ARR 2.5x generating over $700K in revenue for our clients in the process. This is a team result, and wouldn't be possible without my boss and creative team.

For a service as complex as Creatives, 3 main changes that needed to be put in place to truly start growing.

From June 2022 I'd started as an editor, then graduated to Creative Director. Over the 6 months before assuming the role as COO I'd started to create templates for my projects, but I knew this needed to be noted down company wide.

I started with the highest leverage templates - scripting, editing, and communication templates.

The scripting templates followed a structure I'd heavily researched and understood well and still use to this day. This was attached to a questionnaire the creative lead could use during our scripting calls with clients and meant we could script an in-depth video in 30-45 minutes. Additionally prompts for ChatGPT to help the creative writing, format and flow. This cut down hours of writing time.

Editing templates started with folder structures, which you can read about more below. Once a client uploaded their content, editors knew exactly where it was, and this was linked directly to our Monday.com board. As we worked together each client got built out templates for thumbnails, captions, and other branding as required.

Communication with clients was the most important thing we could do to grow our relationship. I created a template our team could follow during calls and while messaging clients, making sure to highlight wins.

Everyone falls into the same trap at some point, creating or "planning" before getting to work. It gives us a small hit of dopamine and makes us feel like we've accomplished something. This is why I prefer to semi automate, especially in the startup setting.

This is a simple workflow to foster production.

Each client has a Monday board and a master Google Drive folder. Each time a video idea is created, the default folder is duplicated and titled the video title. Now, because everything is hosted on Google Drive, any team member at any time can go in and make changes live. Once something was complete, a team member takes the drive link and pastes it into Monday, changes the item status to "client review" and the client gets a notification.

While this simple process cuts down on time the team member and the client spend on the task, I could automate the process to add notifications, set up projects automatically and so much more. It's simply not high leverage. By semi automating tasks like the one mentioned above we could move faster, making clients happier.

You'd be surprised how many problems you can solve for yourself by removing bottlenecks or fixing workflows. The best example is from Alex Hormozi - if you keep forgetting to put on sunscreen, put it next to your toothbrush or your keys so it's a part of a habit you already do.

Understanding the struggles faced by different team members in on the sales and creatives teams helped me understand how we could make our service better and keep the team happy. Scripting was one of the hardest processes to create a workflow for because it impacts almost everything that happens in the future. All the research that is done to create the title, thumbnail and video in general is related to the script.

Pre-call, researching competitors, engraining ourselves into our client's niche and actively looking for concepts to build on were key drivers to making great videos.

Ironing out team workflows came with practice, but once everyone was in the swing of things only small changes were needed, resulting in lower churn and happy clients.

There was an idea that "everyone who has a YouTube channel or a business that can pay us is our customer". I completely disagreed, and writing it makes it very obvious this is not the case. Using this approach caused friction in our sales team, we wasted a lot of time and money trying to get anyone.

Understanding WHO and WHAT we could service was the first step to finding more of the right clients. While it would be awesome to say we support 2.5M+ subscriber channels, in January that simply wasn't the case. We needed to look at our current clients, understand who and why they were our ideal client, and how we could solve their problems.

By doing this we could target the YouTubers who we understood, they reacted to our outreach positively and this resulted in a ton more meetings. Not only was it beneficial to understand what their pain was AND have the solution, but sales calls are so much easier when you can point out the pains they know they have, and truly help them.

Because we worked with people who we understood, they trusted us with their business. Not only did we create awesome work and get great results, but our clients asked us to take on more of their business. Even in sales calls they'd pitch US on things we could do for them. Awesome.

Running an agency is hard work, especially a service based agency. You are basically an employee for any client you take on. This meant things don't always go to plan, so understanding what went wrong, talking to clients about issues and actively working to make sure to improve is imperative.

Your team and clients both need to review the past weeks work, ask each other how they can improve, and deeply discuss what's next. For clients this was twice a month and for the team once or twice a week.

The entire team that works on a project should be reviewing the results and brainstorming ways to improve. This is also a time to celebrate the wins and share them with clients! We review our videos and competitors videos as well as other creators. Things like retention spikes, social listening, cross platform sharing and trends are all sources of info.

Step 3: Learning

Different from review, taking time to learn more about the craft and space. How to script better, what are the industry leaders looking at, learning about clients outside of their jobs, learning about your team and becoming a better human. This might mean time off, going to the gym, or just decompressing.

Trust building - built us a website, dramatically increased booked meetings

Asking for referrals

Hiring experienced team members

Letting go of problematic clients - more time on GREAT clients