Mark DeVito is the President and Partner at Beyond Definition, formerly Bates Creative, a boutique brand experience agency on a mission to positively impact the world. Having led brand-centric campaigns and developed creative content strategies for over 20 years, he is known as a sharp-meets-savvy strategist.
Mark guides teams to translate relevant data into memorable experiences by applying his comprehensive expertise, strategic thinking, and creative cohesion.
In this podcast, Mark Devito talks about how he pivoted Beyond Definition from a boutique creative firm focused merely on creative output to becoming a strategic partner of their clients, increasing not only their client value but their revenue as well. He also discusses why he chose hourly pricing over value-based pricing, and why most agency owners get this type of pricing wrong. Lastly, Joey and Mark talk about challenges in outsourcing and sales and how to resolve these issues in your digital agency.
This Cast Covers:
- The massive cultural shift Mark went through from working at a larger agency to leading a boutique marketing firm (02:52)
- Mark’s strategic reasoning for choosing to price on an hourly basis rather than based on value (04:47)
- How Beyond Definition made their move from being a creative digital agency focused on delivery to focusing more on strategic work (09:18)
- The big difference between being the driver or the captain in a partner-client relationship and simply being an order taker (12:05)
- How does Beyond Definition think about growth? 17:54)
- Why Joey advises against requests for proposal or RFPs (20:16)
- The vertical and horizontal niche Beyond Definition chooses to operate in (21:12)
- Current areas Mark and Beyond Definition would like to improve on and how are they addressing them (23:54)
- Why strategic partnerships are the best to have if you want to scale, lower costs, and increase profit margins (27:07)
- The perks of outsourcing and how that looks like at Beyond Definition (30:23)
- Beyond Definition’s focus in the next 12 months for the agency (31:24)
- Why most agencies should stop thinking on a binary scale and understand that they can get incrementally better at sales (35:00)
- How you can leverage so much more from outbound sales rather than rely on marketing to increase your margins (36:59)