Fortis Agency

Like any good success story, ours also starts with an epic fail. We had grown from 2 employees to 15 in a very short time. Every problem we had, we tried to solve by scaling.

Not enough revenue? Let’s scale the client list! Not enough capacity? Let’s scale the team!

We were making the typical mistake of assuming that “more is better.”

We did scale, but we scaled too fast. We didn’t have the right systems in place to support our growth.

To take the load off, I tried to delegate customer support to my employees. Some systems were implemented, but they weren’t great.

Since the clients were used to working with me, just a few months into my absence, they started leaving in droves. In fact, half of our clients canceled within a single week.

A lot of other problems came our way at the same time. For example, it was that same week that my father was diagnosed with cancer.

When it rains, it pours, they say.

It was a tough period, but all this hardship made me reexamine our processes, principles, and goals. I read many business and finance books, trying to find some hope that things will get better.

We ended up having to cut costs, and this created a toxic culture. Many people left the company. Luckily, having fewer employees forced us to start building systems that would improve our effectiveness.

We had to hire new people, but we now wanted people who would enjoy the work more and share our passion. So we upgraded our hiring system as well.

We followed the principles from the New York Times bestseller “WHO: The A Method for Hiring” and adapted their system. This helped us hire outstanding employees we enjoy working with every day. We hired for character, but also tested their role fit. It was an absolute success—our team is incredible!

We rebuilt our link building and outreach promotion department from scratch.

We took over many Henry Ford, Toyota, and manufacturing principles, adapted them, and implemented them when recreating our system.

I know what you’re thinking: who wants to be an assembly worker?

We didn’t want to stifle creativity. Our goal was to implement systems to make things easier and more transparent and make our team more efficient. The system proved effective, the staff loved it, and productivity is now through the roof.

Through our systems, we detected that the most essential, yet the most difficult part of doing blogger outreach was personalization.

So we put all our efforts into streamlining and optimizing that part.

For example, we came up with our own RIA framework to teach our employees how to personalize outreach emails. It was a game-changer.

Templates are too limiting while rewriting the whole email takes too much time. Our framework provides the perfect balance between structure and customization.

Now, our outreachers can write completely customized emails fast, because we used the framework to teach them how to do it.

For years we were just an SEO company, and we regarded content as a means to an end—to rank.

But content is so much more than that.

Content is the centerpiece of digital marketing.

If you have great content, you can get backlinks, you can rank, and rank high, but you can also repurpose it. You can use parts of the article in a newsletter, share and cite it on social media, etc.

But content is also a conversion tool. It helps your customer get to know you and tells a story about you and your company.

I’m sure you have told your company’s story to investors, partners, and friends before. But if you write it down and turn it into content, you tell it to everyone—every single visitor to your website and potential customer.

So from our point of view, where search engines are a sorted index of (content!) pages, where social media are content posts people share to their network, and newsletters are emails that either provide content or invite you to check it out—the world of modern digital marketing is a content-centric world!

This mindset shift transformed us from an SEO company into a content marketing agency that uses SEO as one of the best means to promote the content.

With the importance of content in mind and the experience of rebuilding and systemizing the outreach department already behind us, we set out on the challenging path of codifying our content department.

And we did it!

Here’s what we have done. 

Broken the writing process down into smaller parts by segmenting content creation into multiple stages, and further dividing those stages into smaller substages. For each substage, we created initial (MVP) procedures

Used Lean & Agile approach to improve our content-writing processes and procedures.

Implemented the 80/20 principle that helps us detect areas in which improvements in content quality will be the most far-reaching and require the least amount of effort. 

For example, writers often wander off-topic, so we’ve created an amazing system for creating outlines. If the content is well researched, the article improves exponentially, so we fully streamlined and optimized this process.

Adapted the TEEL structure to content writing. Data-driven content (essential for B2B articles) shares many similarities with academic writing. So we borrowed the concept of the TEEL paragraph and turned it into an easy-to-understand framework for writing data-driven content that includes stats, examples, quotes, etc. This framework strengthens the points in an article and makes it a lot more engaging.

Systematized the process of hiring writers, of course. Yes, Neil Patel, Brian Dean, and Eric Siu are all great data-driven SEO writers. But our goal is to implement a system that repeatedly makes great writers. We take promising talents and use our system to turn them into proper 10X writers.

So this is it. We’ve been through hell and back, and this experience made us learn from our mistakes and become fully committed to finding solutions.

We are now an extremely process-oriented content marketing agency.

Just like sales automation tools remove the mundane data-entry aspects of salespeople jobs, our systems enable writers to focus on what’s important: creating fantastic content!

Our strategy is to zero in on the best keywords, find topics that matter, and create well-researched, engaging long-form content that can perform well. Then, we use outreach-based, white-hat link building, and top-tier collaborations to promote it.

We hacked the system – by using the systems! We created the process of forming great writers and producing amazing content.

Fortis Agency is now a well-oiled machine that consistently develops great writers, produces world-class content that ranks, and promotes it effortlessly.