Today’s Newsletter will give you unprecedented insight into Magnet Monster’s year-to-date performance and our marketing plans for 2025.

First, a disclaimer: it feels strange to write this Newsletter. I’ve been largely removed from Magnet Monster’s operations for at least 75% of this year, and I feel incredibly grateful and indebted to our team for their contributions to our success. They’re the real winners in this.

The reasons for this have been well documented at this point but for those new here: my son was born in late November last year and I’ve been focusing on getting my second business (Content Army) off the ground running, with much pain along the way.

Around a month ago, I decided to start reallocating a significant portion of my working week back to Magnet Monster, which I discussed here.

In this newsletter we’ll break down the following:

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• What went well with the business
• What could be improved
• Our strategy for next year

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Let’s dive in.

What went well this year

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• Myself and Andy do zero client work. It’s been longer than a year on this front now, but like all other agency owners, it took us way too long to get out of the day-to-day (we still need some work extracting Wiehan from things, but that’s more complicated)
• Wiehan successfully transitioned into the CEO role. Under Wiehan’s leadership, the company has achieved its highest ever year both in terms of revenue and profit. The results speak for themselves.
• We paid out bonuses (twice!) to our team. Andy wrote about how we structure our bonus schemes here for those who are interested.
• We matured as an organisation financially a lot. Freeing Andy up from the client work entirely has led to a massive improvement in our daily financial management and visibility. We weren’t exactly flying blind before, but we were definitely very reactive and not as strategic as we should have been in our decision-making. That’s completely changed now.
• Our client retention is stellar. We have a higher CLV and retention rate than at any time in our history.
• Our employee retention is stellar. Average staff tenure is up to 2.5 years (almost unheard of in the agency world!) and we’ve had several people alongside us now who have been at our company for over 4 years. It’s incredible how much this has strengthened our performance. Stability FTW.
• We successfully relaunched our flagship course (Monster Email Marketing) with rev-share with our team. Bringing this to reality really makes me incredibly happy and gives them more incentive to build their lives and careers alongside our company.
• Our processes as an organisation are so much more mature and reliable than in 2023. Wiehan’s wizardry in restructuring our systems here has improved the business tremendously in terms of client delivery.
• We are servicing enterprise accounts very well now. It’s not daunting at all to take these beasts on to our books. We have the infrastructure and skills to service these brands comfortably.
• We just finished migrating our site to a .com domain! (Check it out here)

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Overall, we did basic things extremely well and the business benefitted from its maturity in the marketplace and exceptional people delivering client work.

Despite this, we have so much we need to improve on and believe we can double our profit next year. Here’s where I think we need to improve.

What could be improved?

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• Our marketing regressed in 2024. This was due to me removing myself entirely from operations and doing a poor handover to Wiehan, who has had to play catch up to my personal brand and pre-existing leverage. This harmed our lead generation and close rates. We failed to diversify our channel mix and wasted another $7k on cold outbound. We stalled on long-term SEO improvements we needed to make. Our Newsletter ground to a halt. Our social posts lost their edge. This made me incredibly sad and put undue pressure on Wiehan when these activities have a long-term time lag to make an impact.
• Our CRM & sales processes need a major overhaul. Before, it was managed in ClickUp (our PM software). It’s evident we’ve outgrown this and need to streamline our systems more, hence our move to HubSpot. We need to stress-test all inbound routes and forms in Q1 next year when our domain migration is complete. Progress is already underway here.
• I am not happy with our approach to Partnerships. It feels scattergun and ad-hoc. We know we can be such a better partner to the SaaS in our space and likewise, hold them accountable more to what we can offer in return.
• We have zero offline presence at the moment and I’ve realised it’s a mistake to remove ourselves from these types of activities in their entirety. We'll have some degree of offline presence next year. Not a lot, but enough to keep us top of mind for key partners and maintain relationships.
• Some of our internal systems are outdated and need improvement to create a more agile workflow. This is a work in progress for any agency of course, but we’ve probably held on to a couple of key processes in our agency that we’ve long outgrown. We don't want to end up being a lumbering giant whilst newer agencies are faster to adopt AI and maintain agility. but this becomes more difficult to reverse engineer the bigger you are.
• I feel as though our positioning lost its foothold in the market a little bit. Before, Magnet Monster was known for its innovative strategy that went beyond revenue generation in the retention marketing space. Today, are we known for that or are we just another email agency? We have to restore this positioning by showcasing the amazing work our team is doing and embodying our methodology with clients.

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There is definitely a threat to our business losing its competitive edge, and a lot of our strategy next year is focused on restoring our positioning in the marketplace.

Our strategy for next year

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• Refocus on OKR planning across our core leadership team. We need diligent tracking and monitoring of marketing, operations and financial goals to ensure we’re progressing as an organisation and not resting on our laurels.
• Restore our positioning and amplifying social content. I want Magnet Monster to stay known as the leader in the retention space with exceptional content focused on strategy. Work is already underway here to bring in our wider team to dominate the narrative on social.
• Improve digital product velocity. This is an area we had major success with in 2023 but didn’t follow up nearly as effectively with this year (mainly down to me being absent). This is dependent on us restoring our positioning in the market and driving innovation like we did before.
• Be more present at offline events. I’m going to make a conscious effort to get out more and be visible in our space and strengthen relationships.
• Rebuild the media entity around Magnet Monster. I look at what an amazing job CTC has done around acquisition and paid media for eCommerce. I want us to have the same standing when it comes to retention strategy. We need the best blog content, social posts, Newsletter and media mix to truly bring this to fruition.

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2025 will be harder again

The biggest challenge and threat to our business is keeping our infrastructure agile enough to cope with all the incredible technological innovation in our space and younger agencies capitalising upon it to drive more efficient service delivery at better margins. We’re not taking this for granted or getting complacent, and our North Star is delivering the best possible service to clients (above all else) with the belief that profits will take care of themselves if we achieve these goals.

We’re ready to go again.

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