Ep 13: How To Build a Business with Agencies with John Crestani

How do you manage employees? If you’re like John Crestani, you don’t want to have to manage employees.

John is the founder of the Super Affiliate System, a blueprint that helps you start your home-based affiliate marketing business. John has made a promise to himself, that he is determined not to hire any employees while continuing to double his business. But how does he do it?

John has joined the How We Solve podcast today to tell us all how he has successfully run his business without any employees to manage.

What is the Super Affiliate System?

John is the founder of the Super Affiliate System, which is a marketing strategy in which you are the affiliate and you are actively promoting and connecting customers to various business products and services. 

The Super Affiliate System was the answer to John’s question of, “How can I play to my strengths (marketing) and love what I do every day?” 

Problem: I’m bad at management? How do I run a business that has no employees?

John learned early in his entrepreneurial career, that he is not fond of managing employees. Between the years of 2012 and 2017, he hired and fired dozens of employees. In order to neutralize the weak points within his business, John decided to stop hiring new employees.

After a somewhat tumultuous fiscal year in 2017, he boiled down all of his strategies in order to focus on the basics. He played to his strengths and took away from his weaknesses. When he took a good hard look at what his weaknesses were, the steps he needed to take were obvious to him: 

• Don’t hire employees.
• Don’t have an office-based operation.
• Run the company virtually

For some companies, this may be more difficult than not. John’s business has always straddled between technology. 

“We kind of straddle the tech space and in the tech space (because we use the internet and technology) we just have a business model that opens itself up to very high margins.” – John Crestani

What steps did John take to starting and maintaining this business?

After realizing what he needed to do in order to run a successful business for himself, he looked for the tools needed to do so. While he wasn’t hiring employees, that didn’t mean that he wasn’t hiring at all. His next option was to ponder over contractors but this led to another epiphany: contractor agencies 

“I can really rely on hiring agencies.” – John Crestani

When it comes to hiring agencies, John treats the process the same, as if he was to hire an employee. He has specific criteria for which he addresses during his numerous interviews. As for the criteria he formulated, they were multiple-fold. For each role he is looking to fill (software, support, sales, everything), he uses these criteria:

• He only looks for agencies that have experience in his niche (marketing).
• The agency must have (currently or in the past) worked with a competitor who is at, least, twice as big as his business.
• They must also be able to host his landing pages for his company and be able to modify or work with those landing pages because of the amount of importance he places on funnels.
• Another criterion is that the agency’s fees must be $5000 a month or lower, with no longer than a three-month commitment to start.

Are there tools, sites, or referrals that John has for burgeoning or curious entrepreneurs?

John’s first suggestion is to network with your competitors or other people in your market. He also suggests you look for connections and agencies at conferences. His last suggestion is to look in mastermind groups. Of those three, he prefers the mastermind groups the most.

“When I’m in a mastermind setting, I can really interrogate and interview [agencies]. I found that it’s a very good fluid business environment with a lot of marketing masterminds.” – John Crestani 

Remember that you run your own business and you can play to your strengths as well. If there is a part of your business that you consider is your weakness or that you don’t want to do, you can find an agency to fill that role.

“You should desire to make an impact in any thought that you have, any positive you have to help somebody.” – John Crestani 

John believes that everything, no matter how small or trivial, can be the seed of a much bigger idea. He encourages everyone to think about the grand vision of their tiny seed idea. What can it lead to? What are your biggest aspirations for this small thing?