Getting Paid for Your Thinking: A Discussion with Greg Hickman, CEO of AltAgency

Thanks for having me, man. I really appreciate it.

New Jersey.

Most people don’t know when they meet me, just because I’ve been in Colorado for so long. They’re surprised that I’m from New Jersey. But yeah, born and raised in New Jersey, man.

Immediate family—just me and my sister, my parents. We had cousins and aunts and uncles all local for the most part. My mom’s whole side of the family was around us, and my dad’s side was scattered. So, really close with my cousins, but just one other sibling—older sister.

Interesting fact, though—my grandma, my dad’s mom, was one of 16 children. I’ve yet to find anyone who has that many, and I don’t think anyone’s even trying to go down that path nowadays.

My wife’s an OB-GYN!

A budget! I mean, dude, they are expensive as heck.

Yeah, in July. She’s about six months old.

Well, this might not seem that interesting, but it comes up sometimes, and some people find it entertaining. I grew up with Anne Hathaway—elementary school, middle school, high school. When she went off to do The Devil Wears Prada, she got pretty famous, but yeah, we were friends growing up.

August of ’08, and I’ve been here ever since. My now wife moved here in 2010, we got married in 2014, and yeah, don’t plan on leaving anytime soon.

I was working with a startup company that a friend of a friend started. It began in Connecticut, where we were all based, and the CTO was here. I was done with the East Coast, so I asked the owner if it’d be cool for me to work remotely with the CTO in Denver. He said yes, and then shortly after, the whole team decided to move here. We got an office, and we grew the company to about 13 people. I actually left eight months later, but that’s what brought me here. I wanted to be here for the biking and the outdoors.

Upstate New York, at a small liberal arts school called Skidmore College.

Business management.

I was a project manager at an agency called TracyLocke. They were part of Omnicom. We represented in-store promotional marketing for Pepsi, Unilever, and a company called InDev. Not sure if they’re still around, but they had a bunch of beer brands we got to support—basically, in-store shopper marketing.

Yeah, the initial thought goes all the way back to seventh grade. I started mountain biking really early, and I always hung out at the local bike shop. I thought owning a bike shop would be the coolest thing ever. The owners were super nice, so at an early age, I thought it’d be cool to own a bike shop. But once I learned more about business, I realized it was the worst idea, since most bike shops aren’t profitable.

I went through a handful of agencies, then ended up on the client side, but I focused on mobile marketing. This was pre-iPhone days, and I was there when the iPhone came out. Text message marketing, apps—everything started exploding. I started following people like Pat Flynn and Amy Porterfield, who were building businesses online. I thought, no one’s doing this around mobile. There’s no one teaching about it, no podcasts, no blogs. So, I started a podcast and blog all about mobile, interviewing heads of mobile from cool brands. I didn’t know where it would go, but the goal was to become an online entrepreneur around the mobile space.

That’s how I transitioned out of corporate. In 2014, I worked for myself for the first time. I started on the side like many people do. I took what I had been doing for other people and started doing it for myself, going after my own clients. That’s where it all began.

Yeah, so, at the time, I had built a small agency where we were supporting clients by building sales funnels and doing marketing automation for a lot of online influencers—people like John Lee Dumas, Chris Ducker, and Jay Baer. We were basically behind the scenes, helping them build out their sales funnels and automate their marketing, email nurture, all that stuff. We grew pretty quickly, mainly through referrals, which is how most agencies grow.

We kept getting pulled into more and more of our clients’ teams, and it started to feel like I had a lot of different bosses. We hit a critical point where, if we wanted to keep growing, I needed to make more hires. For every new client, we needed new team members. I started to see all my past agency experience and realized I didn’t want to go down that road again. I didn’t want to build something bigger than I wanted in terms of team size and structure.

We got hired because we knew a lot of stuff, and we bundled the knowledge with the labor. But over time, we started to just become the labor. Or at least, I felt like that’s how we were being valued. So, we decided to take our core service and package it into something more scalable. Now, people are calling it a high-ticket consulting offer, but it’s a hybrid model—part training, part coaching, and a little bit of done-for-you. Mostly, it’s a “done-with-you” experience. We started delivering this to small cohorts, and clients were getting amazing results. It was way less work, way easier to sell, and way more profitable. It felt like a win-win.

So, we had clients on a retainer, but with the new model, we could add 5, 10, or even 15 new clients at a time without increasing our hours at all. That’s when I realized the opportunity. Once you get asked enough times how you do something, it’s a trigger. That’s when I knew we could deliver the same value by showing people how to do it instead of doing it for them. And that’s how AltAgency came to be.

Yeah. For most service providers, they’re paid by selling their time for money, doing services. What we help them do is add another revenue stream that complements their service or can eventually replace it. This is done through a group coaching program, consulting offers, or workshops and training. With this model, they can make money two ways. It allows them to sell things and make money without raising their expenses and overhead at the same time.

Absolutely. And also, one thing that gets overlooked is that if you’re really good at what you do and you charge what you’re worth, there will be a lot of people you can help but who can’t afford you. So, this new offering allows you to serve a different tier of clients who would never have been able to afford you. They still get great results, but they’re putting in more of their own effort. That’s a win.

The other piece is that depending on who your ideal client is, say you have a marketing offering, and you go to a company where they already have people in-house. I’ve personally bought courses and training for my team to help them improve. So, you can offer a service where, “Hey, we don’t need to do everything for you because you’ve got people in-house, but we can show them what to do.” They’re going to get smarter and better along the way.

If your agency is successful enough, at some point you’ll hear, “We’re going to bring this in-house because it’s more affordable.” But usually, when they bring people in-house, they bring in the execution team. That doesn’t mean you can’t sell them something purely advisory and strategic. A lot of our clients have done this, and now they get paid for their thinking. They advise the execution team that happens to be internal, and the execution will probably be better because it’s in-house. It’s a win-win. We’ve seen clients extend their relationships with companies that were planning to go in-house, which has added another 12 months of business.

I’d say the biggest lesson is that whatever kind of technician you are, whether it’s building websites or doing marketing, you were hired for your expertise. We just packaged that expertise as labor. The learning is that there are other ways to package your expertise. Just because you know something doesn’t mean you need to be the one doing it. You can show others how to do it. For example, if you build websites, rephrase that to, “I know how to build websites,” and suddenly you can sell other things and have different offers. You don’t have to always package your experience as a service or labor.