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[EO Louisiana] The Power of Niching Down: Building a Specialized Agency With Mike Krass

Mike Krass

Mike KrassMike Krass is the Co-founder/Visionary of MKG Marketing, a digital marketing agency specializing in tailored solutions for SaaS and cybersecurity companies. With nearly 13 years of industry experience, Mike has guided MKG through multiple transformations, refining its focus to serve clients with long sales cycles and complex needs. He’s developed approaches like the “triangle assessment” to ensure strong client-agency alignment and build lasting partnerships in a highly specialized market.

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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • [03:29] Mike Krass shares MKG Marketing’s journey through its four transformative business lives
  • [05:41] The fears and rewards of niching down your business
  • [09:43] How being helpful can supercharge your business relationships
  • [14:30] Why MKG chose cybersecurity and SaaS as its focus
  • [18:40] The ideal client size and personality for working with MKG
  • [23:56] Understanding the “triangle assessment” and leveraging it for client success
  • [26:42] What to do when a client isn’t ready to collaborate
  • [30:57] The early days of MKG and the evolution of Mike’s role in the company
  • [36:46] How Mike met his Co-founder and their startup journey
  • [44:12] Best advice Mike received from his mentors

In this episode…

In a fast-moving digital landscape, finding a unique focus can be the difference between standing out and getting lost in the crowd. But how does narrowing your scope actually drive deeper connections and success for a business? And why would an agency give up potential clients to specialize?

According to Mike Krass, a seasoned digital marketing expert, niching down allows agencies to provide unparalleled expertise and build trusted industry relationships. By focusing on SaaS and cybersecurity, his agency was able to craft highly effective, tailored strategies that resonate with specific market needs. The result is a reputation for excellence that enables them to deliver impactful results, connect with key players in the industry, and add significant value to their clients’ growth. Mike emphasizes that this focus doesn’t just streamline services but also strengthens long-term partnerships that drive mutual success.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz is joined by Mike Krass, Co-founder/Visionary of MKG Marketing, to discuss the benefits of niching down to create a specialized agency. Mike shares how this strategy has allowed his team to cultivate deep connections within the cybersecurity and SaaS industries, amplify client trust, and provide niche-specific marketing solutions. He also talks about their unique “triangle assessment” that ensures client-agency fit.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Special Mentions

Related Episodes

Quotable Moments

  • “If they haven’t hired you already, they’re probably not going to randomly generate this idea that they want to hire you.”
  • “The bulk of our work is focused on ads, SEO, and different components of what goes into those two programs.”
  • “I’m a big believer in reciprocity. It goes both ways.”
  • “We just made the client whole and said, you know what? We want you to have the trust.”
  • “I treat it like running back by committee… there are certain people that I look to as mentors.”

Action Steps

  1. Embrace specialization and niche down: By focusing on a specific niche, you can become an expert in that area and build deeper relationships, which in turn can enhance your leadership credibility and influence. This approach tackles the challenge of trying to be everything to everyone and helps leaders prioritize where they can make the most impact.
  2. Prioritize relationship building: Leveraging deep relationships within a niche can lead to valuable connections and opportunities. Leaders can address opportunities by actively networking and giving more than they receive, which can ultimately lead to reciprocal support and collaboration from others.
  3. Adopt a problem-solving mindset with the “triangle assessment”: Assess whether you, your team, and the agency or solution you’re considering are aligned in solving a problem. This systematic approach addresses the challenge of misalignment in projects and ensures that everyone involved is empowered to make the necessary changes.
  4. Clarify roles and responsibilities: A clear division of labor can enhance operational efficiency. This addresses the opportunity to streamline workflows and ensure everyone is playing to their strengths, thereby improving overall team performance.
  5. Seek diverse mentorship: Leaders can benefit from varied perspectives and insights. This addresses the challenge of relying too heavily on a single source of wisdom and opens leaders up to a broader spectrum of strategies and solutions.

Sponsor for this episode…

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Co-founders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, FreshBooks, and many more.

The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.

Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.

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Rise25 Co-founders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:02
Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

Jeremy Weisz 00:12
Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Mike Krass. He is the Co-founder of MKG. You can check him out at mkgmarketinginc.com. And Mike, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out, since this is part of the top agency series. One of my favorite ones was with Todd Taskey. Todd Taskey helps pair agencies with private equity help sell agencies. He’s got the Second Bite podcast. I’ve listened to a lot of his episodes, maybe all of them, like at this point. But I love talking about the second bite because as you know this because you’ve actually helped people through a process and help build up their company, which we’ll talk about to sell. But sometimes they’ll sell the private equity, and then private equity sells again. And sometimes those founders make more in the second bite than they do on the first bite. So he talks about the agency space valuation space M&A space. So that was a really good one. Another good one is was Verne Harnish. Mike and I met through EO and part of Entrepreneurs’ Organization. Verne Harnish started Entrepreneurs Organization and it was a really good episode. He’s got a great book scaling up, and that was a very fascinating episode as well. Check out more on inspired Insider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast or an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. And we do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. So kind of like we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host and the company so they can create amazing content, create amazing relationships, but most importantly, run their business and worry about those things. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships, and I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I have found no better way over the past 15 years to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should. If you have questions, you can go to rise25.com or email us at support@rise25.com. I am super excited to introduce Mike Krass. He’s the Founder of MKG Marketing that’s an over a decade old digital marketing agency for SaaS and cybersecurity businesses. He has a special I don’t know if you call it a talent, but a special skill. He’s actually a pilot also. So Mike, I’m excited to dig in. Thanks for joining me.

Mike Krass 03:10
Yeah, excited to be here. Let’s take off.

Jeremy Weisz 03:13
Exactly. Let’s just start us off with tell people about MKG and what you do. And as you do that, there is a video piece where I’m going to poke around MKG website so people can check it out. So talk about MKG and what you do.

Mike Krass 03:29
Absolutely. So we actually just celebrated our 13th year in business this July here in July of 2024. And I always like to say that we are like a cat. And we are currently on our fourth life at the moment. The first life was what I called anything for money. If you had money, we were the marketing agency for you. Which is hilarious because marketing agencies are usually supposed to help you with positioning and messaging, and that message is about as unspecial as you can possibly get From there we became more of working with just technology businesses in general. And then the life that we’re on right now is focusing more on software and cybersecurity businesses. So cyber or software businesses, whether they’re startups, kind of mid-market or even enterprise, maybe a few publicly traded businesses and our portfolio of clients, they usually come to us looking for a couple of things. They say, hey, our paid media campaigns aren’t working. They’re not generating the right amount of awareness. We don’t know how to measure things. We’re not getting anything down funnel. Like we need to kind of fix the paid machine. Help us with that. The other thing that they come to and they ask for is on the inbound side. So from an SEO standpoint, what kind of content do we need to be producing. What is that content calendar look like. How should we be optimizing it and distributing it? Should we hire a backlink building agency, which our universal answer is always no, don’t do that. In fact, if you read the Google Webmaster Guidelines, it says that pain for any sort of backlinks which you pay an agency is technically paying for them. Is actually a violation of their policies. So we’ve got a lot of points of view and opinions there. But the bulk of our work, like I mentioned, is focused on ads, SEO and and different components of what goes into those two programs.

Jeremy Weisz 05:17
Talk about niche. For a second. I found sometimes the agency, it’s scary for them to proclaim a niche like they’ll lose out. Talk about your journey a little bit and any points that I don’t know if it was hard for you or scary at any points to actually proclaim, okay, we’re going to help SaaS and cybersecurity businesses.

Mike Krass 05:41
Well, first of all, it is scary, right? You’re saying there’s all these other clients that could be mine out there, but I’m going to tell them that I’m not for them. Right. Like, what if they you get into the what if game? What if like one of them just randomly wants to hire him? I can tell you right now, if they haven’t hired you already, they’re probably not going to randomly generate this idea that they want to hire you. We’ve not experienced that ourselves. So I’ll tell you a story. I’m going to focus on cybersecurity. And cyber is not a huge industry. If you if you look it up. There’s something like less than 7000 cybersecurity businesses, product vendors I should say, not service providers, but products on Earth. That’s a pretty niche market. Out there. And so because we have chosen to niche down, and that’s one of the areas that we’re focused on like you’re showing Jeremy right here, we’re able to actually create a lot of connections, just not even at cost, not even charging for that. But we’re in a lot of the same conversations. So for example, earlier this year, a friend of mine was looking for I was looking for new opportunities for marketing programs for their cyber business. I said, hey, last year I actually consulted with a business that runs actually a nonprofit in the cyber space focused on training. And that’s exactly who you really want to be getting in front of. In fact, because I know him, I’m going to call him right now and I’m going to prep him for your for your email that I’m going to introduce you to on. And I’ll make sure that you get a really like the best price and the best service you can possibly get. So I call that guy and I say, hey, I’ve got a client for you, right? I’m going to walk him right in the door. It’s a small world. Here’s kind of exactly what they do within the GRC space, and I think that they’d be perfect for you. I need you to be pretty aggressive with your pricing, because I know how you price things sometimes. And you sometimes, as most entrepreneurs do, you kind of play with the price every once in a while. And the the packaging, I was like, here’s exactly the price and the package that will get him to sign. So I was able to connect those two people almost like a matchmaker. I didn’t make any money off of that. In fact, the one person spent it and the other person received it. But being in cyber and being in a small world like that niching down, those types of connections are really added value. Like, he didn’t ask me to do that, and I just went out of my way to do it because frankly, it was easy because I knew these two people. And it’s the cost of sending one text message to one of them, a phone call to the other, and then an email connection to the to the two. It costs them nothing. And so by niching down, you know, I’ve got I’ve got a truckload of stories just like that where if I was working with everybody, I wouldn’t really have those connections. And in return, continuing the same story. The guy who I sent the client to is actually at no cost, asking me to attend a conference that he’s creating. He’s creating a conference that’s going to be in the spring of 2025. And he’s like, hey, tickets are you know, registration is a couple thousand bucks and sponsorships are going for tens of thousands. Like I would be happy. Like I will extend you a free sponsorship at no charge to you. I’d love to have you come up here. Like, all you got to do is pay for your flight and your hotel, and I’m going to put you in front of people that. Now, again, in a small world of cybersecurity, I’m going to put you in front of people that are really hard to get hold of, but you’re going to be in front of them face to face. I’m going to introduce you. I’m going to basically take their hand in your hand and put it like this and go, great, you two should talk. I’ll see you later. And if you’re our experience was that when we weren’t niched down or even niched down in our second life into technology, which in the age we’re in today, like every business, is sort of a technology business to some degree or technology enabled. It just wasn’t enough to make those types of connections and have those types of relationships. So it really supercharged our relationships with our clients and and partners and friends in the industry.

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