Ep 111 – Corey Quinn – Deep Specialization
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Featuring: Corey Quinn
In episode 111 of Agency Bytes, I sit down with Corey Quinn—agency growth expert, author of Anyone, Not Everyone, and the guy who helped scale Scorpion from $20M to $150M. We unpack what it really means to specialize as an agency and why empathy might just be your most overlooked growth lever.
Corey shares how moving from generalist to deep specialization can unlock operational efficiency, stronger positioning, and a hell of a lot more revenue. We also dig into outbound sales strategies (including the power of gifting!), how to expand into multiple verticals without becoming a generalist again, and what the future of agency specialization looks like in an AI-driven world.
If you’ve ever worried about niching down “too far,” this conversation will flip that fear on its head.
Key Bytes
• Corey Quinn emphasizes the importance of deep specialization for agency growth.
• Empathy is crucial for understanding clients' specific problems.
• Transitioning from inbound to outbound sales requires a strategic approach.
• The generalist trap can lead to operational inefficiencies and client loss.
• Building trust through industry engagement is key to agency success.
• Agencies should consider adjacent verticals for expansion.
• Creative teams may need variety to stay engaged in specialized markets.
• The tools used in marketing may change, but the outcomes remain constant.
• Agencies should focus on solving real-world business problems for clients.
• Founders can explore new verticals once they achieve a certain market share.Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Agency Growth and Specialization
01:11 Corey's Journey in the Agency World
03:02 Scaling Scorpion: From 20M to 150M
07:15 The Shift to Outbound Sales Strategies
11:44 Deep Specialization: Breaking the Generalist Trap
12:10 Empathy in Agency Specialization
19:10 Building Trust Through Industry Engagement
21:10 Expanding into New Verticals
25:17 Addressing Fears of Niching Down
27:42 Future Trends in Agency Specialization
Corey Quinn has over 18 years in the agency space, including as Scorpion's CMO, where he helped grow revenue from $20M to $150M in 6 years. His bestselling book: "Anyone, Not Everyone: a Proven System for Agencies to Escape Founder-Led Sales" has been endorsed by Aaron Ross, John Ruhlin, Dr. Benjamin Hardy, Marcel Petitpas, and many others.
Today, his company helps digital agencies become the go-to choice within a vertical market with his Deep Specialization Methodology.
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Steve / Agency Outsight (00:00.238)
Welcome to Agency Bites, a podcast dedicated to helping creative entrepreneurs thrive. I'm Steve Guberman from Agency Outsite, where I coach agency owners to build the business of their dreams. Today, I am thrilled to chat with Corey Quinn, agency growth expert and bestselling author of Anyone, Not Everyone. Corey spent nearly two decades in the agency world, including his time as CMO at Scorpion, where he helped scale revenue from 20 million to 150 million in just six years. Now through his deep specialization methodology,
Cori helps digital agencies become the clear go-to choice in their market. It is awesome to have you here. Appreciate you spending some time with me today. Hold that book up again because it's beautiful.
Corey Quinn (00:37.53)
Steve. Yeah. Yeah, Steve. I'm excited to be on here and it's, I've, this is selling. Yeah. And I've gotten to know you a little bit through, I recently had you on my pod and then we've had a couple of discussions and gosh, you're such a great guy and really looking forward to our conversation today.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:42.7)
Best selling author, anyone not everyone.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:58.158)
Yeah, we're going to dig into it. I appreciate the kind words. The pod swap is the way to go. I love it. So quick backstory, your time at Scorpion and now getting into deep specialization and what you're doing now, kind of walk through so listeners get to know who you are.
Corey Quinn (01:02.842)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (01:11.299)
Yeah. So I graduated business school here in Los Angeles at USC a long time ago now. And while all of my classmates were all going into commercial real estate, because that was the kind of the big thing back then, I decided to go back into the internet. I had a dot com business that I started a long time ago. I was wrapping up business school and I decided, hey, I want to get back into the internet. was 2000 and let's call it
2007, 2008. And my first job out of business school was as a business development rep for a digital marketing agency called the Search Agency. And they were selling premium SEO and PPC to large retail brands. And I personally sold deals into Lululemon, Remax, the Men's Warehouse, Hyundai, all of these really big...
Steve / Agency Outsight (02:00.865)
Wow.
Corey Quinn (02:05.006)
brands that had big budgets. We were selling six and sometimes seven figure deals like SEO and PPC deals was pretty, pretty awesome. And during that time, I really fell in love with the sales process. I loved selling. I love the consultative sale and the that that whole process. And I was pretty good in that I was able to be the top producer for, believe, like 15 consecutive quarters on the sales team. I was always number one, always the best producer, really, really productive.
That led to sales management roles. It typically does when you're the top seller, you go into management. And then eventually I was recruited to go work for an agency called Scorpion. And at Scorpion, I was transitioning into the marketing aspect of selling, let's call it, which is selling one to many, if you will. And my role there was chief marketing officer. And the business I walked into was a relatively successful agency. doing 20 million dollars.
Steve / Agency Outsight (02:36.576)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Corey Quinn (03:02.764)
And revenue, a big concentration on personal injury attorneys. And the reason why I was sort of invested in by the founder of Scorpion was that while he had a very good business, $20 million business, it was all driven based on kind of word of mouth and inbounds, which is great. However,
He wanted to grow as a very ambitious guy, right? And ambitious meaning he wants to help a lot of people. He really wanted to make, make a positive impact in the world and growing through inbounds and referrals only was just not good enough. We had to, we had to accelerate the growth. so much opportunity. Right. And so my challenge. Yeah. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:44.143)
But hold on a sec, 20 million without like a rev gen strategy with doing referrals, word of mouth, like that's insane at those numbers. But I am curious, while you're tracking this trajectory, can you also track EBITDA or profit or something that you track along with gross sales?
Corey Quinn (03:56.153)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (03:59.972)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (04:04.418)
It was so some some inside some inside ball. So this is back in the day when Google, we were a premier partner and they would also do they would also give you bonuses based on spend.
And so our job was to try and grow the business fast enough so that we can get this really great bonus, which is basically a percentage of the ad spend that we brought onto our platform. So we effectively were co-funded by Google, know, informally as a result of that. Right. So we were really incentivized to really grow that because it was very, very profitable for us. At the same time, we had a brilliant founder.
who was much more of a build versus buy guy. What I mean by that is we had tried a couple of different ad optimization platforms before I came there. I think it was called that. What do they call it? There was a bunch of them back in the day, but it was basically a third party software that would optimize your pay pay pay per click ads. Ended up ripping all that stuff out and building his own software for the company.
Steve / Agency Outsight (05:06.958)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Quinn (05:11.064)
that extended not only into the PPC campaigns, every new Scorpion client got a brand new website and we built it on our proprietary CMS. And it turns out that that was something that allowed us over time and going forward to scale quickly because we were able to leverage custom software to help us to do things like eventually close 600 deals per quarter. Right.
Steve / Agency Outsight (05:38.007)
Wow.
Corey Quinn (05:38.86)
on board 600 clients per quarter, like a tremendous, tremendous amount of volume. But we were able to do that because we had average software. So we could talk about that that more. But the the thing that drove those inbounds of 20 million dollar business, it was literally a six person sales team that were extremely well paid, didn't have to work that hard. Right. Because.
The phone would ring. They pick up the phone and they close a deal, right? And they do a one call close and they had this big metallic gong on the sales floor. They would, they would strike every time it's this big, fun sort of sales environment. And a lot of, a lot of those, those calls came in from attorneys who it turns out how they shopped was. The trades would shop for an agency is that they would, they're very competitive and they would look at their competitors and go to Google and type in like personal injury attorney, Santa Monica.
and they'd see who'd rank, they'd go on their competitors website and inevitably it'd be a Scorpion client because we were early and it was our own website. At the bottom of their Scorpion website would be a logo that says, know, Scorpion website built by Scorpion. Click here to learn more. I would bring them to our website, which would turn into a sales call, which would turn into a closed deal. And that's what drove the business.
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:54.954)
Easy, easy close. Yeah.
Corey Quinn (06:56.728)
Right, easy close, already built authority and established credibility and great case studies and everything. They just wanted more cases from the internet. And we were one of the few at the time, in early days, one of the few true vertical specialists in the marketplace so we could tell a really compelling and unique story.
Steve / Agency Outsight (07:15.854)
Interesting, crazy. So getting up to 150 million in six years, you added to that process, layering it on top of it, niching outbound, yeah, more of the, I don't wanna say traditional, but more of the strategic growth methods, yeah.
Corey Quinn (07:20.794)
Yeah. Yeah.
Corey Quinn (07:29.37)
Correct. Yeah. Yeah, so there's a couple. Yeah.
Yeah.
Sure. I mean, basically, I came in, the CEO was like, this, we want you to grow, help us grow faster. And so was like, we got a lot of inbound, we're doing good. Like, no, no, we need to grow faster. Of course, I knew that coming in, I was I was on board with that. And so what we did is probably similar to what other any other agency founder would do has ambitions to really grow, but in bounds and referrals are just not cutting it or it's not providing enough fuel for the fire is we had to go outbound. And
Steve / Agency Outsight (07:45.218)
Yeah. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (08:06.102)
Yeah. Go ahead.
Corey Quinn (08:07.984)
Go ahead. So outbound is very different from a sales perspective or a salesperson perspective. Different than just picking up the phone and making money, making a commission, right? It's actually kind of the opposite where.
you have to go out and hunt for your business. And you can imagine what this six person sales team, this driving great cars, living the life, you know, pick up the phone, making money, like really, really great lifestyle. had to go into that sales floor and break the news to them to say, we love you. Thank you for being an amazing team. However, we need you to start picking up the phone and start cold calling.
And that didn't go over very well because they were, of course, they were they were not used to doing that. They were used to being rejected. Who wants to be rejected 50 times a day calling strangers who don't want to hear from you? Right. It's very difficult to sell that internally. So we did a number of things to kind of.
figure it out. We brought in a sales trainer, sales coach who helped us to bring in more of an outbound methodology and a sales process, which we adopted. But it was still a really struggle for a lot of days, weeks, months into this. We still weren't getting much out of it, but we were committed to figuring it out. And it wasn't until we actually started sending gifts ahead of a cold call that changed everything.
Steve / Agency Outsight (09:36.184)
So you're building awareness beforehand, you're rewarding them before they've even done anything worth rewarding, but you're letting them know, you can expect a call from Joe at Scorpion any day now. And when he picked up the phone...
Corey Quinn (09:48.42)
We tried not to be super like, yeah, right. It was, it was, was not intended to come off as really quid pro quo. Like, Hey, we sent you something. Where's, yeah, we need the phone call. Right.
Steve / Agency Outsight (09:57.644)
Yeah, obviously. But there is the methodology a lot of people will say like, yeah, in a gifting strategy, don't reward bad behavior. And so if they're not gonna hire you, don't waste the effort and the money. But in your case, you're doing the cart before the horse to seed the company name, to see the value to, again, not that now you should feel guilty to hire us, but we're letting you know who we are.
Corey Quinn (10:12.73)
Correct.
Corey Quinn (10:20.855)
Right. Yeah. So the interesting thing that we learned over time is that, and this is backed by studies that only 3 % of any addressable market is coming inbound. Majority of the market is not actively looking for a new agency, but about 80 % of the total market is in what I call the zone of indifference. And the zone of indifference is kind of like my wife with her iPhone 11, which is
out of date, no storage battery kind of sucks, but she still doesn't actually fix the iPhone. She doesn't get the new iPhone. It's OK. Right. It's good enough. Just like a majority of the audience for anyone listening is your target audience, they're just kind of the current agency is kind of like, it's OK. It's just not the top of my list of things to fix today. And so we kind of figured that out by doing a lot of these this gifting eventually at scale.
But what we found was that, or what the practice was, we would develop a list of attorneys and eventually we did go to new markets, new verticals, and I'll talk about that. But effectively we would develop a list of high value prospects that we would invest sending a $50 gift to, typically it was cookies. And as a result of that, we got past the gatekeeper. We typically got the phone call, which led to sales conversations that otherwise were impossible for us to get.
Steve / Agency Outsight (11:44.313)
Yeah, I love it. So let's get into deep specialization. Let's get into how you're breaking into new verticals and what you're doing now. You're coaching agencies on kind of pushing them into deep specialization, getting them out of being all things to all people. I have found in 25 plus years of being in the agency space, it's the thing that we fight the most. And the rewards are ridiculous on the other side of it. And even through the process of
Corey Quinn (11:51.941)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (12:10.19)
Yeah. It's something I call the generalist trap, which is that many, many founders, agency founders, not in every case, but the majority I would say is falls into this trap where you say yes to everybody. You get into business, maybe you are an SEO and you're really passionate about starting a business and an agency. And so you just kind of go out and market. I want to be a business and it works, right? You attract clients.
Steve / Agency Outsight (12:12.83)
and
Corey Quinn (12:36.912)
through your network, through the local chamber of commerce, whatever that is. And there's reward in that. There's intrinsic reward because now you're in business. You have employees, you have revenue. Maybe you can eke out a little bit of profit, right? You're paying yourself. Maybe you're able to eke out a living, but eventually that saying yes begins to work against you. And what it looks like is, and you you're nodding your head because you know exactly what this is, right? It is saying yes to everybody leads to
Steve / Agency Outsight (13:01.558)
That was my story, dude. Yeah.
Corey Quinn (13:06.85)
massive context switching, right? Which means one day you're building a website for a dentist. The next day, maybe you're doing an SEO strategy for a lawyer. And maybe the next day you're doing a social media campaign for a manufacturing company. Every new client has a different industry, has different learning curve in your team, by the way, over time. They get a little frustrated because every new client you bring in, they have to learn a new industry, right? So it's
It creates ultimately as a result of that, it leads to operational inefficiencies. It's difficult to really be able to build a process or system driven business like we did at Scorpion eventually through because your, your every client is different enough. And so that kind of blocks you from being able to, to, to, to really scale. then it also puts a lot of dependence on the founder.
Okay, the founder becomes the core sort of center figure in the agency because they're the only ones that know all the clients and all what was sold. Everyone's kind of not fully on board. That leads to becoming more of a commodity, right? Because you begin to look and sound like everyone else. And as we know, commodities are sold based on price and people will start leaving you because they feel like they can get the same thing or better for cheaper somewhere else.
Steve / Agency Outsight (14:20.375)
Yep.
Corey Quinn (14:25.302)
or maybe they're going to a specialist agency. Maybe they feel understand their problems better. And of course, when you lose clients, you begin to chase revenue because you need to make up for that revenue, which leads to going back to saying yes to everybody. So it's this vicious cycle that goes on and on and on. That's your point is very hard to get out of, think, intrinsically, because, as I said, we're rewarded for by saying yes. And then secondarily, I don't.
What I've found is that a lot of agency founders, don't have a clear path out of this trap. They don't know where to go. And so that's where I come in.
Steve / Agency Outsight (15:03.59)
And you come in and do what? No, we're gonna, so I do wanna like dig into your methodology. One of the things in your methodology, I'm looking at my screen because I have some kind of notes put up there. One of the things that you talk about is deep specialization is different from like a general niching strategy. And I'm curious about the differentiation there.
Corey Quinn (15:23.728)
Correct.
Yeah. So there's there's two ways to specialize in general. You can specialize in who you serve or what you do. In other words, you could be an SEO agency that works with any businesses. Ecommerce lead, Jen doesn't matter. Or you could be an agency that focuses just on attorneys. And that's all that's who we serve. And we provide a suite of services typically to specifically help them as relates to digital marketing. The
Steve / Agency Outsight (15:31.566)
Mm-hmm. Right.
Corey Quinn (15:53.456)
So when I talk about specialization, I talk about specializing in a vertical market. It's becoming an expert in solving a specific problem for a specific industry, let's call it, or people within an industry. And the selection process, what I call deep specialization, is different than just throwing up a landing page on your website and saying, yeah, we serve doctors or we serve attorneys or whatever that is. There's a there's a
a requirement today for success where, where the thing, the ingredient that's often, that's often missing in these types of strategies is really empathy is giving a damn. Right.
Steve / Agency Outsight (16:34.99)
So empathy, I think, is one of the most valuable and often overlooked qualities of a great leader. And whether that leader is the owner, founder, or somebody within the leadership team, and when I was kind of doing some digging and researching and some of the things you talk about in your book, you talk about how empathy is as crucial when you're specializing in vertical market. So from your standpoint, how does that influence the agency's success in what vertical that they do choose?
Corey Quinn (17:03.428)
Such a good question, Steve. how it influences is, first off, buyers care that you understand their specific problem, not a generic version of their problem. They want to understand. They want to work with someone who can demonstrate that they've solved that specific problem for someone who looks exactly like them. That's number one. So it helps you with your positioning and your ability to build trust and authority in the mind of the buyer. But I think over time, people
The agencies that are truly successful taking this approach of the specialization approach are I think on an identity level, they really move out of the the belief that they are there in the agency industry and they actually believe that they transition into the industry of the buyer that they're working with. So I'll give you an example. There is a
Steve / Agency Outsight (17:53.826)
Hmm.
Corey Quinn (17:57.504)
An agency founder, I him on my podcast. His name is Luke Eggabrodden. He has a an agency called Phaser. They target the construction industry and the construction industry may be familiar. It has a what Mike Rowe, the old TV producer actor, calls that five to two problem for every five people who are aging out of the construction industry. Only two people are coming in. Big problem.
yet there's a continuing demand for construction. Like people want to continue to build. And so they have this talent gap in the industry. It's very real. And so what Luke has done because he is not just an agency, but now he's a member of the construction industry. Like that's part that those are his people, their problems or his problems. He started a scholarship that raises money.
to fund kids who are going from high school, not going to college, but going directly into the trades. So he uses this scholarship to raise awareness, raise, to support kids who are going into the trades as a way to not just lip service, say, yeah, we're a member, we're part of the industry. They're actually doing things. They're behaving in ways that
Steve / Agency Outsight (18:55.086)
you
Corey Quinn (19:10.896)
create evidence from the buyer that, these people really are one of us. They understand us and they're credible. They're visible in the market and they're worth taking a bet on.
Steve / Agency Outsight (19:22.412)
That's such a powerful example of like really embedding yourself in the industry that you serve, whatever came first, his allegiance to the industry or seeing that this is a viable industry for us to own as a vertical, how do we embed ourselves and leading with your heart and putting your like literal money where your mouth is on how am going to improve this industry? That's beautiful. What a great example. Yeah.
Corey Quinn (19:43.15)
Right. Right. Exactly. And so part of the selection process in this in this journey from being this generalist who wants to really break through whatever ceiling they're struggling with is really asking, getting serious about do I actually care about this vertical market or what are the conditions where I could care about this vertical market? In some respects, you see agency founders who grew up in a house that was they're raised by plumbers.
Steve / Agency Outsight (19:46.766)
Thank
Corey Quinn (20:10.69)
Empathy is already given, but there's other situations where that just doesn't exist. And then you have to go through a process to really think about like, gosh, if I'm going to target this vertical market and spend the next, bless you, the next.
know, five to 10 years or whatever time span spending time with these folks, going to their conferences, speaking on their stages, creating really great impactful content. Like, where do I see myself really aligning with and really excited about that industry? Because that's truly the empathy that's required.
Steve / Agency Outsight (20:42.978)
Yeah, that's a really good point. You're going to spend the next five, 10, 15 years living, eating, breathing in that space, rubbing elbows with people and getting to know them and their families and what makes them tick. so choose wisely, I guess is the point there. so scorpion was like heavy and legal and then brought on a second vertical. Do you believe. Okay. So talk about that because when I talk to owners about niching, they're like,
Corey Quinn (20:52.846)
Yeah. Yes. Yes.
Yes. Second, third, and fourth, yes.
Yes.
Steve / Agency Outsight (21:10.506)
I don't want to just do healthcare forever. We're going to get bored or we're going to this is an amazing like wives tale where we're to call it. We're going to run out of leads in this industry, which come on, you're not, you know, it's not that small of an industry. No industry could be that small. But to your point, one, two, three, four, like how many do you think an agency can own at scale?
Corey Quinn (21:20.45)
Right. Yes. Yeah.
Corey Quinn (21:25.86)
Yes.
Corey Quinn (21:34.032)
Sure. So that's a great question. And at Scorpion, the way we did it was a little bit maybe a little unique, but I really believe it was the right way to do things. And so we started off illegal and we're making a ton of money getting funded by Google indirectly. And and the.
We wanted to expand into another vertical market because we felt like we had good momentum there. We had systems and processes and dedicated resources. We wanted to go into another vertical. So what we looked at was what other verticals are like attorneys, i.e. local service businesses that have a radius around which their business that they want to service, that they rely on leads from Google. We did a lot of research and the next best vertical market was home services.
right, the plumbers, the electrician. It's an adjacent market, right? It's very logical. They need websites, they need LSAs and PPC and SEO and all the things that we'd already established. What we learned, interestingly, was that they are very different than attorneys in many, many ways, what they care about and how they behave as clients and so on and so forth.
Steve / Agency Outsight (22:25.486)
So just adjacent.
Corey Quinn (22:46.916)
But effectively, the way that was different was we didn't just put a landing page on the website. It says now we also serve home service businesses. We actually carved out separate resources. We hired a separate sales team. Eventually, we hired separate account managers to help support that business because what we learned in the legal business was that the reason why we had a fantastic client retention rate was because we were truly specialists in the legal market.
the account manager understood personal injury attorneys at a deep level and could empathize and be able to anticipate things in the law firm that even the law firm owner wouldn't even know to think about. That value, we had to recreate that in home services by dedicating resources there as well. So effectively.
It was a separate business unit, separate sort of leader of that unit, different, different, different teams across all of the aspects of servicing a client. And that really helped us to establish a really strong home service vertical, which today is really, really powerful for Scorpion. We decided to go into another vertical market, which was franchise multi-location businesses. Now it turns out that the
the vertical within franchise. So franchise is different because it is not really a vertical market. It's more of a business model, but it's effectively multi-location businesses. In any event, that vertical market had a different rhythm, had a different buyers, different approach. That was a separate whole business unit for us. A major difference is an attorney will do a one-call close of an established franchise brand.
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:09.496)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Quinn (24:26.682)
They want to go through an RFP process. They want you to fly out. The whole thing was different, whole different world. Right. And so we built out that vertical market and then we dry it. We do it into medical. And that's the one that we backed away from eventually because it was too different from our core. And there's reasons why, but that was eventually a vertical market that we'd never really fully developed like the other three.
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:43.521)
Interesting.
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:49.484)
Yeah, I think it's one of the things to really think about when agencies are digging into how do I niche down and stop being a generalist? Because the fear is, and maybe you have some insight on the fears related to specializing, so many agencies are, you know, we're going to get bored in one or two industries. What if that industry dries up? Like we saw during COVID, you saw in-person events dry up. You saw travel and tourism dry up, things like that.
So my belief is always like, pick four. And I use the analogy of like the four legged stool. If one of those industry goes away, your three legged stool is still gonna be pretty stable. You're gonna be okay. Balancing on two might be a little tough, you know, so yeah, I'm curious what your experience with the fears surrounding niching down.
Corey Quinn (25:26.842)
Solid. Right. Yeah.
Corey Quinn (25:36.494)
Yeah, yeah, a lot of the fears you mentioned are definitely valid from my experience. Like people will say, well, our creative teams are going get bored just doing dental websites all day. Like that's not going to work for us. And that is a that is a real reality. And at the same time.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:47.138)
Right. Yeah.
Corey Quinn (25:55.448)
The purpose for taking a vertical specialist approach is because you want to you have a vision for your agency. You want to build certainly wealth for yourself and your family, but also for your employees. You want to build. You want to have a greater impact on your clients. So there are trade offs in that respect. The reality is, though, if you have a really great team, a very talented creative team. From a practical perspective, you're going to have to let them do some creative projects that are.
Off the reservation, right? You're to have to say yes to some clients that aren't perfect for perfect fit just to keep them engaged and challenge the other the other aspect that I talk about. I mentioned in the book is that you want to drive focus into a vertical market and really become build your expertise your positioning, but at a certain point as a founder, you can lift your head up and actually look for what's the next vertical market. You don't want to do that too soon.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:27.534)
.
Corey Quinn (26:52.698)
But at about three, what I call 3 % of the market share, which if you have a market that you're targeting that has 10,000 businesses that are your ICP or target audience, once you hit 300, at that point, it probably means you have enough momentum internally. You've got systems and processes and you've got a lot of, you have a really great asset there. As a founder, you can go, okay, what's the next adjacent vertical that we can concurrently start to build to add some more depth and variety to the business.
Steve / Agency Outsight (27:08.312)
systems.
Steve / Agency Outsight (27:19.758)
Yeah, love it. And then my last question, because I don't want to run too far over time. Sometimes I don't care about the time. Sometimes I just want to be respectful. Because I do promise try to keep it to about 25. But what are your thoughts on kind of future trends of agency specialization and kind of as AI is coming in and digital landscape is evolving? How do you foresee the role of specialization changing in the next, I don't know, two, three, five years?
Corey Quinn (27:23.62)
Yeah. Yeah.
Corey Quinn (27:35.3)
Yeah.
Corey Quinn (27:42.212)
Well, I think if you look at the world through this binary lens where it's either you're specializing in a platform or a service like SEO or you're specializing in a vertical market, it's more advantageous today to specialize in a vertical market because if you specialize in SEO or TikTok is a classic example right now, the world that we live in is
Steve / Agency Outsight (28:06.638)
Yep.
Corey Quinn (28:10.116)
The level of innovation and change is only going to increase. And what I've found, what my clients have found is that when they specialize in a vertical market, ultimately they're helping to solve a real world business problem, such as getting new cases for attorneys could be an example. The attorneys really don't care at the end of the day, what tools you use in order to drive that outcome. They just need help because that's expertise that's outside of their sphere of comfort or experience.
Steve / Agency Outsight (28:31.895)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Quinn (28:39.694)
And so when you focus on a vertical market, the tools may change, but the outcomes will remain the same largely. And that's certainly true in AI. As an attorney, you probably don't care whether or not the e-book that was launched was written mostly by AI or human. What they care about is are they meeting their business goals? So that's the benefit of taking a vertical specialization approach in my mind.
Steve / Agency Outsight (29:06.454)
Love it, beautiful. So much insight. Make sure you check out Cory's podcast, The Specialization. Get the book, probably on a shelf in your nearest bookstore. It can be delivered to your house tomorrow. Anyone, not everyone. Brilliant minds. I'm gonna wrap it up with three random rapid fire questions from my robot that I worked very closely with. So the first is, if you had to rename your agency based on your last meal, what would it be?
Corey Quinn (29:09.379)
you
Corey Quinn (29:20.324)
Thank you.
Corey Quinn (29:26.234)
Ooh.
Corey Quinn (29:32.528)
blueberry smoothie.
Steve / Agency Outsight (29:35.854)
Perfect. What's one thing that we might all be surprised to learn about you?
Corey Quinn (29:43.086)
I was a childhood actor. I started the world's first ever recorded chicken McNuggets commercial when I was six years old.
Steve / Agency Outsight (29:50.626)
Get out of town, that's fun. All right. You still get royalties from that or not? And then finally, if you had to market your agency using only three emojis, what would they be?
Corey Quinn (29:52.238)
Yeah. I wish. That's long gone.
Corey Quinn (30:05.776)
a target symbol, a fire and then a rocket ship.
Steve / Agency Outsight (30:11.266)
Love it. I feel like I've seen you post those. Yeah, that works. Love it. Corey, my friend, thank you very much for joining us, for sharing your expertise and your wisdom and experience with everybody. I really appreciate you being here.
Corey Quinn (30:13.584)
That's my go-to.
Thank you,
Corey Quinn (30:24.44)
I quite says great conversation. Thanks, Steve.
Steve / Agency Outsight (30:26.658)
Thank you.