Meet Milkshake Media
Milkshake Media is an email agency that helps e-commerce businesses grow. Founded in 2017 by Tarunbir Brar in Australia, Milkshake Media has consistently led the way in the field of email marketing, achieving a remarkable milestone of generating over $20 million in email revenue for its clients.
Throughout their journey, they’ve forged partnerships with numerous brands globally, enabling them to reach 7 and 8-figure growth milestones. Milkshake Media’s expertise lies in constructing robust backend retention systems and leveraging data-driven insights to drive success for their clients.
The Problem
Milkshake Media reached out to 8 Figure Agency in March 2023 because they were facing the following issues:
- They had plateaued.
- They couldn’t take on new clients.
- The founders were 100% embedded in the operations.
The Solution
Here’s how we solved these constraints to enable big growth.
1. Systematized Service Delivery
Systematized service delivery allowed Milkshake Media to consistently onboard new employees.
However, one of the major issues with Milkshake was that there wasn’t a clear definition and ownership to operating the major sections of the business. They needed to streamline operations, but onboarding team members took an entire month. To rectify this, we started with their process workflow to define how they ran their business.
We defined:
- every step of their process
- the owner of each step
- software implications
- SOPs & trainings
We were then able to curate a training library consisting of every documentation and system. This allowed them to have a definitive business operations ordinance.
2. Onboarding
Once we could define their business, we had to address their issue with onboarding talent immediately. Onboarding talent should be highly specific. Therefore, we created an onboarding roadmap that plotted each step a new hire (per role) needed to accomplish in their first two weeks. At that point, we specified what new employees’ initial 30-60-90 days would look like.
Please note that this was a huge step for Milkshake Media. We took them from manually training to intentionally training new hires successfully by the end of 8 months. By doing this, they could cut their training time significantly, resulting in a 2-week onboarding and training process for new roles. This allowed for a more timely skill gap analysis when relevant. This process helps to establish the skills each role needs to be successful.
3. End of day reporting
With the problem of being able to onboard and manage new talent under control, the next step for Milkshake Media was to create operations transparency.
In a short time, they scaled to over 25 employees. Then, we introduced the end-of-day report. This process made sure every employee submitted an end-of-day report, end-of-week report, and end-of-month report. These reports highlighted their performance and project management for all tasks and all clients.
In my podcast with their founder Tarun, he mentioned that as a direct result of introducing this one process, “In a glance, we could analyze 25 employees”
4. Account Management
With the foundation set, we needed to get the founders out of the day-to-day and give them the flexibility to begin working ON the business. Tarun mentioned they “were very scared about handing over control at first. We are very passionate about our clients and worried about delegating.”
To build trust in our partnership and ensure they felt confident, we created:
- clear escalation points on how to ask questions.
- clear training processes to fix issues when they arise.
- clear audits to ensure everything was being done correctly.
Milkshake Media was quickly taken from 1 to 3 account managers. This massive step removed the founders from the previously overwhelming day-to-day operations.
5. Building Personal Brand & Continuous Improvement
Now that the founders could focus on the business operations, we moved them into their respective roles. Tarun moved into the CEO seat and elevated his capacity to be the face of the brand. He could then invest time into building his brand on YouTube and Twitter, allowing Milkshake Media to get inbound leads and begin nurturing prospects over the long term.
Huss, the COO, was able to focus on continuous improvement and refining operations and systems. Because anything is susceptible to breaking in an agency, having someone who can provide improvements at every step, raise standards, and upgrade processes can turn a mediocre agency into an elite one. With each co-founder sitting in their zone of genius, they are on track to increase their revenue by 100-400% in 2024.
Results
Since the owners of Milkshake Media were able to GET OUT of the operation, Milkshake Media went from 40k MRR to 100k MRR. They can build their dream business as they now have:
- definitive business operations ordinances
- a 2-week onboarding and training process for new roles
- end-of-day reports, end-of-week reports, and end-of-month reports to track operations
- account management is not bogged down with day-to-day operations
- a clear path to building the brand, acquiring and maintaining leads, and increasing monthly revenue
Ready To Set Our Strategies In Action?
This may seem easy just reading it here, but it requires hard work and it takes time. The best part, however, is you just have to get started.
If you’re ready to make this year the best year to date, book a call with us and get out of your day-to-day operation so you too can scale up your agency.
We helped Tarun Brar add 60k MRR in 8 months, imagine what we can do for your agency!