We lost focus... Here is how we got it back
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Anthony Simonetta
- 5 minute read
Where we dropped the ball
Losing focus, dropping the ball? Before we get to that, the first thing you should know is that we’ve started a podcast on YouTube. We’ve called it ‘The Venture Beyond Podcast’. In the podcast we talk through the day-to-day experiences running Hustle Agency and the new companies we’ve launched under our start-up venture wing of the business. Sounds like something you might be interested in? Well here’s a taste into what Anthony and James discuss in the first episode.
Like any other business, our primary objective with Hustle Agency is to operate a profitable organisation, so that the people who come together to build this business are fairly compensated for their actions. That by any opinion is a non-negotiable. It’s following the law! But what that objective shouldn’t do, is strip an agency of its focus, demand all of its creativity, or ask that it not multitask.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened to us. We became so focused on generating revenue for both ourselves, clients and external parties through our digital marketing avenue of the business. Consequently, our founding purpose of developing products became a lost part of the agency. The, “we’ll get back to doing that soon” part. We soon received the reality check, that this path wasn’t providing value for the level of effort and passion we collectively as a team put day in, day out. Not just value as in completing a job equals payment, but long-term value. The act of ensuring that year-on-year the brand you’re building is forming a stronger identity, respect in the industry, and also more importantly a greater freedom in how the business operates.
Changing our mindset
So when reality struck, what did we do? Simple, we revisited our purpose. The first thing to come from that was excitement. Excitement that we had the opportunity to create products again. So we took all of the learnings from the last 10 years of operating an agency, across amazing to less ideal experiences, and set out on establishing scalable businesses. That ticks the primary objective mentioned above, to be profitable, yet it also opens doors to secondary objectives that lean on creative ambition.
A big goal for us is making such a splash across different industries with our products, that there’s a noticeable and measurable change in their course. This will be the ultimate determiner of whether our agency can sustainably and successfully output ventures long-term. That ties neatly into the name of this new podcast, and too the motto we’re now bound to. ‘Venture Beyond’. You may have first read this and perhaps thought we’re joining Elon Musk on the race to Mars. We haven’t ruled that out just yet, anything’s possible right? Rather though, it’s an updated mindset. Underpinned by passion for the work as we’ve always done, it’s being accountable to the question of ‘what can we do better?’. Are we leading a healthy lifestyle, are we meeting the needs of one another in the agency, whether that be on a personal or professional level, in our systems or through our tools? Only when these questions are frequently asked and delivered upon, can we guarantee that we’re at the top of our game and as such can provide better outcomes for the people we work with, as well the businesses we put into the world.
We’ve already started making businesses!
With our focus clear, we were eager to release a product out in the world. So we created ‘Website 2 App‘. Formerly known as ‘WPNativeApps’, it’s a magic tool that converts websites into mobile applications on the Apple and Google app stores. “Simply put, it turns a website into an app within a matter of minutes to a few hours without breaking the bank”. Cost-efficiency, that is what’s key about this idea. In the past when we’ve created apps for clients, it’s been a procedure that’s cost tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Whereas now if a business already has a WordPress site, the cost is laughably tiny in comparison. In the podcast, we unpack Website 2 App’s usability more in-depth, through demoing how we’ve converted content to a fully functioning mobile app for one of our clients, ‘The Sector’.
In the second episode of The Venture Beyond Podcast, we continue the momentum by showing our next product, ‘SiteWatcher’. Be sure to catch both episodes which are live on YouTube and subscribe to our channel, turning on notifications so you know when we post next.
Watch below episodes we mentioned in this post.