The Biggest Mistakes New Agency Owners Make, and How to Avoid Them with Rebecca Howard

Danny – Enginehire (00:43)
Hi Rebecca, thanks for joining us again on the podcast. It’s great to have you here.

Rebecca Howard (00:47)
Hi, Danny. I’m so happy to be here again. I absolutely love being on these podcasts with you. Thank you so much for having me.

Danny – Enginehire (00:53)
Well, no, it’s a total pleasure of mine and ours because your wealth of knowledge will help a lot of people with agencies and you’ve just been there in a lot of different places with like the agency, other entrepreneurial ventures and stuff. So you see it in a really great angle of just business and then being able to narrow it in on the Nanny Agency world specifically. It’s amazing.

Rebecca Howard (01:15)
Yes, I mean, in addition to running my own agency for 25 years and selling it, have run, I’ve started and grown and grown organically so many different service-based businesses. And then over the last eight years, I’ve worked with hundreds of nanny agencies and hundreds of other service-based businesses. So if there’s one thing I know, it’s how to get profitable fast in any industry.

Danny – Enginehire (01:39)
Yeah, that’s amazing. speaking of that, can we dive into like, what are the biggest mistakes that people make when they’re starting their agency?

Rebecca Howard (01:49)
Part of my demographic is agencies that are just getting started, and then I’ve got the other ones who are already like in play but want to grow. And what I see in both of these demographics and in other service-based businesses are

Five core mistakes, we’ll call them, that people make that stop them from becoming profitable.

So the first thing that I see happening so much, and

This is universal, this number one, is waiting until everything is perfect. That is the…

biggest self-sabotage that you can do to yourself when starting a business is to give yourself the excuse of, my website’s not done, my logo’s not perfect. I don’t have, you know,

a million ways that we can sabotage ourselves at the beginning. And one of the biggest is waiting until everything’s perfect. So many aspiring nanny agency owners will take like

or I’ve seen people even take years, building the perfect website, tweaking their logo, figuring out the legal setup, acting like they don’t know, like, I don’t have this piece and I don’t know what to put in my contract here. And all of that is just noise that people create to keep themselves from actually doing the thing, which is to get out there, be visible.

Set yourself up as an expert in your field. Let people see that and allow people to work with you and pay you. That’s one of the biggest ones that I see.

Danny – Enginehire (03:12)
so what would be like the bare minimum? Like where is it that you can be unpolished, but like what should I then have in place?

Rebecca Howard (03:20)
anyone

were to look at my Instagram for the Nanny Agency Startup Course, the Nanny Agency Academy, and you went way back, because I never delete anything off of there, if you went way, way, way back, you would see that I was not polished when I started. I would still say I’m probably not polished. I just got out there and did it. And to answer your question,

You don’t really need much. need the idea and you need to make a decision. And then we have this beautiful thing called social media where you can just start talking about your thing. Even if you’re not ready to take clients, you could be going online and you could be giving tips to parents for finding, you know, this is how to find the best nanny. Here’s how to have your help your child sleep through the night. You could be doing things like that. And before anything’s ready, you could be building, it’s called building an audience. We have to build no like and trust. You can do that.

with literally ⁓ an iPhone and some sunlight and just, hi, my name is Rebecca. I’m launching a nanny agency. This is what I know. This is why I’m an expert. This is why you should follow me. So to answer your question in the best way that I can, you really can start with nothing, right? You can start with just the idea. Basic things that I think should be set up before you take a client, and this is speaking from, I had a client recently who,

came in on our all in package, which is a full year of consulting with me. It’s full access to our mastermind. They get a website, they get their social media posts done by my team. We were working on her website and it wasn’t done for four weeks. The website was gonna launch, I think, at week five or six. She took my course and learned how to market herself organically on social media. We had a logo for her. She ended up changing the logo down the road, but she just used the first version of the logo.

She branded her Facebook page and she just started marketing the way that I teach and she got, I think it was three clients in that first four weeks. And she was like, oh my God, Rebecca, people are signing up. So she had the contract obviously, cause she’s working with me. So I said, just use the contract other than she didn’t have any payment things set up. She took Zelle from the clients and she made $20,000 before our website was even launched. And she, nothing was ready. Nothing was ready. Her social media posts were not done. We had.

We did 60 branded posts for her, but they weren’t done. She was just showing up online and she decided not to let any of this noise tell her that she wasn’t ready. So we sort of like built the plane while she was flying it. And when she reached out to me in her second week and was like, have a client and they’re about to hire somebody and they’re paying me like $8,000. What do I do? I was like, first of all,

really good problem to have. Second of all, here’s what you need to do to make it legit, basically. So yeah, waiting until everything is perfect is a trap. It’s a trap. And guess what? I know we all love to see these beautiful social media feeds, but your potential clients are not looking at your grid. They’re flipping through. So it’s better for you to have some low…

Danny – Enginehire (05:56)
Yeah.

Rebecca Howard (06:11)
I don’t want to say low level, but poor lighting in the car, whatever thing that’s going to stop the scroll faster than any of these beautifully polished perfect posts that they’re seeing.

Danny – Enginehire (06:19)
So, you mentioned know, like and trust,

could you just explain that a little bit?

Rebecca Howard (06:23)
Yeah.

So when in any business, any business at all, I think it was Simon Sinek that I saw him do. I think it was a TED Talk by Simon Sinek where he said, people don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it. Okay. So building a business around your specific why is always going to be really powerful. Right. There’s a million people that are offering what you do.

but they don’t have your specific twist on why you do it. And that’s the magic that brings the right clients in. Now, when I say know, like and trust, what I mean is that in order to get people to give you money for your services, they have to feel like they know you. They have to feel like they like you, you’re likable, you’re knowledgeable, and they have to have some level of trust. And that used to be really hard to do, Danny. Like back, I know you had an agency too around the same years that I did.

I don’t know if yours went as back as far as mine, but I was like 1999, 2000. There was no internet like this. And so I was like out asking magazines to feature me and stuff because you want people to know who you are. You want to have credibility. So when I say know, like, and trust, it’s basically building credibility around yourself so that people trust you. And how do we do that now? Well, we don’t have to go like…

You don’t have to go knocking on the doors of women’s magazines like I did way back then and be like, hey, are you interested in my story? We can actually just for free get on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and just start talking to people and telling them who we are and why they should trust us. And that builds what, I don’t know the marketing term for it, but it just sort of builds a relationship where people sort of feel like they already know you. for example,

I don’t run any paid ads for the Nanny Agency Academy. I never have, I never will. I show up and I,

a lot of like, you can see my face, you can hear my voice, and I’m showing you proof of the fact that I know what I’m talking about in terms of starting an agency and marketing one.

So somebody could never have met me in their life, but they’ve been watching my YouTube shorts or something for the last year and they know that I can help them because I put myself out there and gave them reasons to know, like, and trust me. Now on the flip side of that, someone could be watching my stuff and be like, I can’t stand her. I don’t like the way she talks. I don’t like the way she rolls her Rs or whatever, you know, like, so it has the opposite effect of turning away people.

that you wouldn’t want to work with anyway, right? They’re not aligned.

Danny – Enginehire (08:44)
Yeah. It’s interesting what you say too about, I’ll share from my own experience, one of the things that I did to build my own like proof that I knew what I was talking about, because kind of what you were touching on, the internet was not doing what it does now with social media being so pervasive or people doing it, people were doing it for fun. People weren’t really doing it for business stuff yet. We’re not like.

Rebecca Howard (09:03)
And then.

Danny – Enginehire (09:08)
as pervasive as everybody’s like, oh, I could just start something. So I wrote a book on how to be a great nanny because I noticed that when I was being a nanny, like there wasn’t, I had some like tough questions that I was like, how do I do this? And there was like no answers anywhere. I was like, this sucks that I had to figure this out.

Rebecca Howard (09:24)
mean, what you did is exactly, you know, it’s a testament to like, we have it so easy nowadays. AI can write your lead magnet. It can write you a book. can, you know, you can showcase your, you could literally in two clicks showcase all of your expertise online in front of thousands of people. And that’s basically it.

Danny – Enginehire (09:40)
Yeah,

and if you don’t know how to show yourself off, you could probably ask, know, ChatGPT this is what I’ve done. How do I, you know, show this off to everybody and let it tell you how to just nail this?

Rebecca Howard (09:52)
Exactly.

Exactly.

Danny – Enginehire (09:54)
What’s

the next problem that you see people putting a barrier in front of being successful?

Rebecca Howard (09:59)
So this one I see specifically in the nanny industry more than any other industry, and I’ll explain why. And it is not having a clear sales process. Now, the reason I see this more in the nanny agency industry is that, as you can imagine, most people who are starting a nanny agency have probably been working as a nanny for the last five, 10, 15, 20 years. So they’re not salespeople. They’re not studying sales psychology. They’re just sharing kind of

you know, what they do and hoping the parent decides to hire them and not the other agency. And there is a whole art to having a clear sales process. And it really, really boils down to having a script that you use on every single call that keeps you in control of the conversation. Now, I was not, I’ve become a really good salesperson.

Right? Because I study sales psychology and I’ve done so many sales calls and I sort of know now, but in the earlier years, when I was just finished being a nanny, started my agency, was like just a 22 year old girl, you know, doing this. I had no idea. And I think back to how many sales calls I probably lost to another agency by just allowing the customer to take control of the conversation. Right. And

It’s not as hard as it sounds to keep control of a sales conversation, but you have to know what you’re doing. And that’s why inside of my academy, everybody gets a full sales training that is specifically targeted to nanny agencies. So it will tell you exactly what to say at every point of the call. Obviously you’re going to make that your own, you know, but,

Danny – Enginehire (11:15)
Yeah.

Rebecca Howard (11:38)
understanding how to keep yourself in control of the conversation and using language and questions and circling back with specific triggers from the conversation that really actually cause the potential client to sell themselves on your services. It is brilliant once you learn how to do this. And every nanny agency should know how to do this. And unfortunately, a lot of them don’t.

And that’s why you get people going, okay, thanks for your information. I’m gonna look at your website. I’ll get back to you if we decide to move forward. And that’s like that wah-wah at the end of a 45 minute call with a family. And so this sales process that we teach completely, almost completely eliminates that. I wouldn’t say completely, but nothing’s 100%, right?

Danny – Enginehire (12:14)
Yeah.

You’re totally right in that. That’s so, like smart to bring up like the sales script because you really do like feel like, know what you’re talking about. You might’ve proved it already, but like that’s not alone. And that control of the conversation is difficult. I, from my own experience, once again, to tell you the, the, the 50 50 on how I was successful and when I wasn’t was I had a sales script.

Rebecca Howard (12:40)
Yeah.

Danny – Enginehire (12:49)
And every time I used it, I made that sale every time when I was like, I don’t need it today. I’m just going to crush it. And I wouldn’t. Like, even if I felt like I was like, there’s just, you have to have that control. And I wrote it really well where it was just this crushes it every time. And even though I wrote it, not looking at it, that was enough for me to not make it happen. It was clear.

Rebecca Howard (13:11)
Isn’t that interesting?

Isn’t it, isn’t it crazy how that happens? And a lot of times, especially in this niche, and I’m going to speak like, I, you know, have experience with all sorts of businesses, but when I talk about the nanny agency niche in particular, nannies are empaths. We, I was a nanny. I’m a super empath. It’s really hard for me to this day to even like, feel like I’m taking control of a conversation. And so having that layout.

that you can follow where you’re not feeling pushy and you’re still allowing them to have their say. Another thing that I see is like certain parts of the sales conversation, the person that’s doing the selling needs to shut up. That is so hard for me as an empathic person. I like to fill the space of the uncomfortable void. And that is something that I find that

A lot of nannies who are transitioning to this type of work really struggle with it first. And we work on that. At this point in the call, you want to step back and let the family process. Did you notice that with your sales scripts, there are certain points where you just can’t keep going. You’ve got to pull back.

Danny – Enginehire (14:19)
Yeah, I’m thinking of that right now, after you make this, like after you’ve, you can clearly feel when you’ve sold them. And then a lot of people, at least me, do that thing of like, where you kind of just want to keep talking to them for no reason. You just, whenever like, yeah, well let me know if you have any questions and you’ve already said that. And it’s just like, ⁓ you’re like petering it all off. Like all of the work you just did, like you had them. It should have just been like, thanks so much. You already know where to get.

Rebecca Howard (14:25)
Mm-hmm.

Are you?

Yeah.

Danny – Enginehire (14:46)
more information for me, have a great rest of your day, call me if you need anything. And just like BAM! But I didn’t.

Rebecca Howard (14:49)
Yep. Yeah. Well, and I find

that where most people struggle and where I used to struggle is right after they give the price. So it’s like, you know, our finder’s fee is 15 % of the annual salary and then you just need to zip it. See what comes next. And then, and then knowing how to circle back, like if, if, if there’s an objection about price, you’re going to sit and this is what our sales script teaches. And I’m sure you were doing this too.

You’re gonna circle back to the pain point. Okay, so you’ve been up all night for three weeks, your baby’s not sleeping, you really need a newborn care specialist. We’ve already gone back and forth about what that would look like. And circling back to like, this is why we’re on this call. Taking it off of the money and back to the problem solving is really powerful.

Danny – Enginehire (15:37)
Yeah, I just want to highlight that for everyone. All of this is really important information. In fact, I know that this, and you might touch on this, but I would say one of the things that I learned myself that I just want everyone to know is you really have to heed everybody’s advice. Like you might not follow it exactly, but there’s so many things that I think people are like, that happened to me too.

Rebecca Howard (15:52)
Mm-hmm.

Danny – Enginehire (16:00)
And when I was in a group and I saw like three people go, that happened to me too, but it hadn’t happened to me yet. I told myself very specifically, like Danny, that’s going to come up. And when that comes up, you have to handle it the way that these three people just told you that they had wished they had handled it. And then it did come up and I handled it that way. And it was like, I was so grateful that I had never had to go through the bad pain of that, but it was so close. It could have happened to me. Like it could have, was right there.

Rebecca Howard (16:15)
Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah, you’re 100 % right. And these are things that someone just starting a business, they haven’t dealt with this yet. they’re stuck in the process of everything has to look perfect. And then when they finally feel like it’s perfect enough and they get their first sales call and they’re so excited, then they bomb that. And then they just think, I’m not cut out for this. This isn’t going to work for me. They get discouraged and it’s like, there’s so many things that you could have done to avoid that feeling, but it’s…

You know, if you don’t seek out mentorship or learn about sales, you’re just, you’re going to have to learn the hard way. And that could take, you know, two, three, four, five years to get good at that. If you’re not.

Danny – Enginehire (17:06)
Yeah, I’m sure you

see a lot of people like doing the parts of this that are comfortable, where they are like playing on their website. And you’re like, I’m gonna build this button right here and I’m gonna do these things. And it’s so comforting because it’s not doing any of the parts that are hard or scary. It’s easy to do that stuff. And you just gotta put yourself out there.

Rebecca Howard (17:11)
⁓ yeah. ⁓

Okay.

Yep.

You nailed it right there. Totally. Yes. Yeah. And when it comes down to doing the work to get the clients, that’s where people ended up feeling insecure. And that’s where it’s really, really beneficial to have a mentor and a mastermind, you know, of people that have been through the process that you can lean on to really collapse that learning curve.

Danny – Enginehire (17:46)
Is that just one of those things that everybody’s going to just be, at least in our industry, of being very self-conscious about all of this stuff and like build that up? Or is there a way that we can like fast track that agony?

Rebecca Howard (17:59)
We can fast track the agony for sure. mean, if, know, within what I offer within my community, when you work with me on any level, you know, whether we’re doing the whole thing for you, the website and everything, or you’re just working with me as a consultant, you’re immediately in my mastermind, which is like a rolling boxer chat with hundreds of agencies around the world that have worked with me and that are in varying stages of their, you know, their business. And so

Danny – Enginehire (18:01)
Thanks.

Rebecca Howard (18:25)
What the beauty of having that type of community is, is that you can be like, hey guys, I’m about to do like my first live stream and I’m freaking out and I’m so nervous. Can somebody just tell me that it’s gonna work? And you’ll get 15, 20 people going, yes, do it. In fact, we’ll go on and we’ll like your live while you’re on there. You have support, you have people that can be like, I’ve been there, I’ve done that. Let’s do it together, right?

Danny – Enginehire (18:49)
That’s amazing. That’s great. That’s a great thing to have right there. That solution of just that community that you’ve built up and…

Rebecca Howard (18:57)
Yeah.

wish I had that 10 years ago when I was working with my first business coach, because I really wanted to do what I’m doing now, which is to support people in various phases of their business. And I was starting with mindset work and she was like, you have to start going live. I, oh, I thought I shudder when I think about my first live stream. It was so awkward.

It was so awkward and she didn’t have a community. So was just me and her. And it was like, I had to just do it. And I wanted to die. I wanted to throw up. I didn’t know what to say. I felt like I totally bombed it. back then I even thought, whatever this turns into for me, because I knew I was on the path to supporting entrepreneurs somehow, whatever this turns into for me is going to come with a mastermind.

Danny – Enginehire (19:40)
And so, Rebecca, what’s the next thing that people are just stopping from being successful in?

Rebecca Howard (19:46)
trying to DIY everything, trying to put your own contract together or paying an attorney thousands of dollars to write the contract or just using ChatGPT, which is actually a great way to write a nanny agency contract, but not knowing what to put into it. That’s why I created the nanny agency GPT by the way. Danny, you can put this in here wherever. Like normally I charge $97 for that, but anybody who watches this podcast can get it for free. I’ll give you the link.

⁓ to give it, so I created a GPT that because I’ve been using chat GPT for years, you know, as long as it’s been around a couple of years now for business. And I, every single one of my clients, I create their own GPT when I’m helping them build their brand. chat GPT, I had it earlier this year. I said, take everything that we’ve ever worked on for every nanny agency and create one nanny agency GPT that I can give or sell that will help people start grow.

and scale a nanny agency. So I created the Nanny Agency Marketing GPT for that reason. So DIY, you don’t even have to DIY. If you’re watching this, you can get my GPT for free and you can go in and ask it to make you a contract. But DIYing everything, like trying to piece it all together. I call it like, it’s almost like you’re duct taping your brand together, right?

Like you’re in Canva, you think you have sort of a logo and you sort of think that, you know, these colors are what you like. And I kind of sort of think that this is what my contract needs to have when you could literally just work with someone that has everything you need and just have it handed to you.

Danny – Enginehire (21:16)
having just flashbacks of where I was like, I don’t know how to do that. I know that that’s gonna take a long time for me to learn. Now I’d spend money on those things and other things. I’d be like, ⁓ I can like, let me start trying to figure this out and then feel like really capable and like awesome about it. But usually those things were similar to what we talked about before, where those places where it was like, it’s like way more comfortable because like.

It’s way easier to mess this stuff up when it was dealing with governmental things. would like, you know, I I forgot what the thing was called, but like, you know, like they help you with legal Zoom. It was legal Zoom was the first thing that I did. I would never do that again, by the way. It’s way easier than people think to get an LLC in all of that stuff.

Rebecca Howard (21:44)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Do it on

the Secretary of State website. Yeah

Danny – Enginehire (22:00)
Yeah, just go there.

But yeah, it’s like all of those things of just like, we see that you’re slowing yourself down where like there are resources that you probably should just take advantage of.

Rebecca Howard (22:07)
you

Yeah, and honestly, you know, it’s what I think is really funny and I get clients like this all the time where they’ve spent like two years, they they launched their agency two years ago. They still think they’re not quite ready. They may be done like two placements and they’re just like they’ve spent and leaked out so much money trying to figure out these little things that then when I tell them the cost of working with me for six months, they’re like, really?

Like I spent three times that in the last two years trying to figure this out and I am still not making placements.

you can pay money to collapse time, do it.

Danny – Enginehire (22:42)
No!

Yeah, there’s, like highlighting that too is that, you know, if you’re working with someone like yourself, you know, you’re human that understands a lot of these things and you probably can like help people around the parts where it’s like, I don’t know, there’s just like things there and having that real human connection is probably a very significant piece of that puzzle.

Rebecca Howard (23:05)
Yeah, it’s like having the connection to me and then also having the mastermind that we have in Boxer where you don’t have to log into like a Facebook group to access the mastermind. can just, you have an app on your phone. You can literally voice clip, hey everybody, I’m trying to figure this out. Can someone help me? And not only do you have me, but you have hundreds of other women, well, agency owners that are in different stages that are gonna like, boom, you’re gonna have the answer in two seconds.

Danny – Enginehire (23:29)
Yeah. With the GPT that you had mentioned, what do you know or like what do think people are putting into it? And like, how does that work?

Rebecca Howard (23:38)
So I can’t see what people are putting into it because once they get the link, becomes like they’re, you know, it’s part of their chat GBT. But I know that it’s kind of funny because I was just on Facebook like last week in one of the Nanny Agency owners groups and I was getting ready to answer a question that someone had about ⁓ marketing. And underneath it, like I was about to type and then I saw that this girl that’s not one of my clients, she’s just someone who bought the GPT from me. She was like, ⁓

I just asked Rebecca Howard’s Nanny Agency GPT and it said this and they’re like, what’s the Nanny Agency GPT? It’s actually, a lot of people are using it. And so I don’t know exactly what they’re putting into it, but I can say that my clients are using it because they all got it for free. My clients are using it to create marketing calendars, to write stronger hooks in their content, to create more, they’re taking my sales script sometimes out of my…

out of my Academy, know, out of the course that they’re taking and they’re popping it in there and they’re having it personalized to their agency. They’re using it to train virtual assistants. ⁓ It’s a pretty, it’s a pretty hefty GPT. mean, it knows because it’s been programmed by me working within that GPT for two years. It’s helped me create and launch several businesses with several people. So it’s got, and it’s got a great personality too. It’s like I programmed it.

really encouraging. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, I’m happy to, to give that to anybody who’s watching this podcast. I’ll give you the link for it they can just download it for no charge.

Danny – Enginehire (25:00)
Amazing. You need that.

Yeah,

I think if people are listening to this, should just, they should just go, we should have them reach out to you and you could probably do that. Yeah.

Rebecca Howard (25:17)
Yeah, I can give it to them. Yeah, absolutely.

Just have them reach out to me, DM me on social media, on any of the social medias that you see me on, and I will give it to you for free.

Danny – Enginehire (25:26)
That’s amazing. I hope people really… You have to take advantage of that if you’re listening to this at all. Like, there’s no reason not to, right? That’s amazing.

Rebecca Howard (25:31)
Yeah. No, it’s

$97, but I’ll give it to you for free if you mention this podcast. either, mean, $97 is a steal as it is, but I want more people using it. Whether or not you work with me, Danny, I’m so passionate about making, I think we’ve talked about this. I’m so passionate about creating a ripple effect of empowered women and empowered business owners and not just women, but I feel like a lot of this industry is women.

⁓ But

Danny – Enginehire (26:00)
It’s true. It’s a very safe place for women.

Rebecca Howard (26:03)
I feel like, feel like the more like I don’t ever stress out about giving things away for free or I’ll coach people sometimes for free in the DMs. Like I know coaches say, don’t do that, make a pay. If they can’t afford me and they need help, I’m going to answer them and I’m going to give them help. Because my belief is like, yes, I make money doing this, but

the impact is more important. The impact is what I’m after and the money always follows, right? So I am happy to give these tools away for free to anyone who is struggling that just needs help. And then maybe eventually, you’ll turn things around and you’ll come, you’ll wanna work with me or you won’t, it’s fine. But I feel like every positive, every person I can affect in a positive way and help turn around their business, whether it’s through my GPT or through working with me or whatever,

That then creates a positive effect with their family, their friends, their community, and it just goes out and out and out and out and out. And so that is really what I’m here for at the end of the day. Obviously, I sell a program, but it’s about so much more than that. It really is.

Danny – Enginehire (27:04)
Yeah, I hope one of the things you have in there is like if somebody types in like, why should I work with Rebecca? It tells you like.

Rebecca Howard (27:10)
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It’s going to sell

you on my… If you get stuck, it’ll definitely tell you to reach out to me. Yeah. Yeah. I did program it. It’s not like it’s going to try to sell you on every… Yeah, of course. If there are certain things that if you need more clarification or if you’re looking for some branding help, it’ll say, reach out to Nanny Agency Marketing Pros and it’ll kind of refer you over to our Instagram, things like that.

Danny – Enginehire (27:15)
I would hope so.

⁓ that’s smart.

Yeah.

Rebecca Howard (27:39)
⁓ But it’s not a sales tool. really isn’t. But of course, mean, no, any entrepreneur worth their sauce is going to plug in some little sales terminology.

Danny – Enginehire (27:47)
That’s genius. again, that should just highlight to everybody the amazingness of you for thinking all of that through. tell us one of those next ones. I don’t know how many we have left of things that are

Rebecca Howard (27:54)
Yes.

There’s one more

is a big one we can end with this one because this is a big one.

Under charging because you’re new

undercharging because you’re new. I don’t care if you’ve never placed a nanny before. If you’ve been working in the nanny industry as a nanny, then you already have what it takes and more to charge top dollar, which in my opinion, and Danny, you’ve seen this too, it’s like 15 % and up. So 15, 18, 20 % of the annual salary of the person that you’re placing. And now…

I always had flexibility with that, with my agency. I would sometimes drop it to 10, 12, depending on who I was talking to and what they needed. But I cannot stand it when somebody comes to me and they’re like, yeah, we’ve been in business for six months. We’re charging 1500 per placement. Why are you doing that? Well, because we know we’re brand new. And? Do you know what I mean? You’re not…

Being brand new doesn’t matter. I can guarantee you that as a nanny, you’ve done every single thing that a nanny agency owner does and probably more hands-on. You’re probably more qualified than someone that’s been running their agency for 20 years because we get lazy at that point, right?

Danny – Enginehire (29:08)
Yeah, you know, I just want to jump into like, I’ve always thought there’s like two ways that people do this and it’s more and more common for people to do, you know, to charge the percent. But can I ask you like a deep, maybe a deep question about that? So if you’re doing it by percent, and I did it by like a flat feet, which I think actually was like probably not the way to do it. So everybody just know that. But so.

Rebecca Howard (29:19)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Danny – Enginehire (29:31)
And this is why I didn’t do that because if somebody, if one of the things that they’re going to do is be like, I only want to charge this or like pay my nanny this much per year. And like, it’s not enough. Like, how do you have that conversation?

Rebecca Howard (29:41)
Okay.

⁓ Then you can’t I mean they have to be paying fair market and I I work with people to have flat rates, too I’m just a fan of the percent because it always ends up being more and you can have a flat rate like as your minimum, know, so you like You know if it’s 20 hours a week and you know with the percentage It’s not gonna end up being that much. You can have a $3,500 minimum flat rate and then go from there But yeah, so if a family doesn’t want to pay fair market

Danny – Enginehire (29:57)
Yeah.

Rebecca Howard (30:11)
to a nanny, then I kind of wouldn’t want to work with them anyway. And that’s a bold statement that really freaks people out that they’re like, well, if I have to be affordable, no, you don’t. No, you don’t. You can be as unaffordable as you want to be and you will get probably, I I’ve seen people get more clients. Like I have an agency.

Danny – Enginehire (30:16)
Yeah.

Rebecca Howard (30:34)
I’ve had a few agencies that started with like that employer model, which by the way, I hate where you’re, where you’re employing the nannies and you have them all on payroll and you’re taking like five or $10 an hour off of it. That’s a horrible model by the way, horrible in my.

Danny – Enginehire (30:49)
Why?

I mean, can see people who agree with you, but why?

Rebecca Howard (30:50)
because it cuts down on

your profitability. And what it does is let’s say, I’m going to give a recent example. So I had an agency that was charging, I think, $35 or $40 an hour for the nannies. And then they were taking like $10 or $15 off of that and paying the nannies, I think, $25 to $30. Well, $25 to $30 is OK in most of the United States. But if you have a nanny that’s working with triplets or something or whatever, more experienced,

We all know that they’re charging more, right? So what it does is it limits the amount that you can pay the nanny. So a lot of the times these nannies are then getting paid under market. And the minute that they see an ad from an agency that’s got a $40 an hour position, they’re out the door. So not only does it cut down on your profitability and then you’re in the position of being an employer to a bunch of people, which is like a lot of liability that I don’t ever want.

instead of handing that liability over to your clients and you’re getting paid peanuts. Like it’s okay, $10 an hour for each nanny. It’s too, the model, I think the model stinks. I don’t like it. You have to do such a high volume to be profitable. And I know there’s going to be haters out there, not haters, cause I respect everyone that’s watching this. And if you have an agency that’s profiting that way, good for you. I would never want to do it that way.

And I think it’s when you go into the percentage based model, which is totally acceptable across the United States and in Europe, because I have agencies in Europe and Canada that are doing it too. One full time placement, like if you think about like one 45 hour a week placement, if you annualize that and then take 15%, like your finer’s fees are going to be six, seven, eight, nine, $10,000. Well, then how many of those do you need per month to quit your nanny job and go full time into your business? One or two, right?

Most people want to make 10 grand a month. That’s where they’re going to be comfortable quitting their job and running their agency. So if you can do one full-time placement at 15 % that nets you close to 10 grand and you’re not employing anyone, you’re not having to payroll taxes and things like that, you’re keeping 95 or more percent of that, then you only have to get one placement a month to run your agency full-time.

And then where it gets really fun is you’re like, okay, well, you’re doing like one a month now. Like, let’s try to do two. Let’s make 15 to 20K per month. Okay, you did that. Let’s try to have a $40,000 a month. You know, it’s like easier to scale. Whereas with that employer-based model or a flat rate you can scale to, you just make more when you charge a percentage. But with that employer-based model, how many people do you have to have on your payroll to make 10 grand a month?

That sounds like a nightmare to me.

Danny – Enginehire (33:27)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah, I think so. We just need to highlight that. I keep using the phrase highlight, but don’t undercharge. Doesn’t matter how new you are. Just don’t do it.

Rebecca Howard (33:37)
And I don’t care. You know, do a flat rate if you want to do a flat rate. Some areas, know, flat rates are fine. It’s not a big deal. If your flat rate’s $5,000 and you want to make two of those a month to, you know, make your 10 grand a month, that’s great. But what happens is like if you’re in a mastermind like mine and you’re charging flat rates and then you see the other girls celebrating their $12,000 placement fee, then you’re like, maybe I should do that.

Danny – Enginehire (34:00)
And sorry, no, I just wanted to say like, and I know like all the tools that I use with like AI now it’s like, it’s way easier to like, you know, I was Googling and when I started all of the, I tried my best to find all of the agencies, look at all of their pricing so I could know like what I was doing, how it compared to everybody. And so I could feel good when I told anybody a price, but now there’s like lots of, you know, you could probably just ask him and chat GBT. There’s other tools that can dive deeper.

Rebecca Howard (34:10)
Yes.

Danny – Enginehire (34:26)
Or you could use like a model that will dive deeper. But like you could just ask it like I’m in this area What should I be charging? You know based on all the other agencies and I’m proud to tell you

Rebecca Howard (34:34)
Yeah, you can use my

GPT and just say, scan the internet in Manhattan or Long Island and tell me what the nanny agencies are charging there and it’ll give you. And I can tell you it’s 18 % over there. Yeah, I mean, I’ve got a couple, I’ve got clients all over the place, but in places like Ohio, for example, like Cleveland.

Danny – Enginehire (34:51)
Here we go.

Rebecca Howard (34:59)
It’s harder to do a percentage there. you know, then you’d have maybe a flat rate for areas like that. I have, mean, this could go on forever about this, about not putting prices on your website and quoting people on the calls and being nationwide and having know, flat rates for areas that you know require flat rate or it’s going to be harder to sell. And then percentage-based rates for the areas that you can do that in. There’s a whole strategy behind that.

I thought that might be another call. Why you should not put your prices on your website by Rebecca Howard.

Danny – Enginehire (35:28)
Yeah.

This is genius. All of this, can tell people are going to learn so much from this. Rebecca, I really appreciate you giving us your time and all of your advice and your GPT. If you’re listening to this, go get the GPT. She’s just giving you.

Rebecca Howard (35:45)
Yeah, reach out to me.

Find me. You’ll link back to my social accounts, I’m sure. So, or tag me in it. Just DM me wherever you see me. ⁓ Any of the socials, I’m on TikTok, Instagram, linkedin Facebook, YouTube. Probably Instagram’s the most monitored. but you can message me on any of those. Ask for the GPT, either me or my assistant will send it to you. And all I really ask when I give that away for free is for feedback.

Positive or negative. I want to know your feedback. I want to know how it worked for you. I haven’t had really any negative feedback yet, but I’m open to it because that GPT is a work in progress and I want to make it absolutely perfect. So if you do get the free GPT, please just circle back in a week or two and leave us some kind of a message about how it’s working for you, what you like about it, what you wish was improved, that kind of a thing.

You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure.