SPEAKER_04 0:00

Everything is for the business. I think when you look through that lens, it's almost impossible to lose. I think who's this dude? He's starting this podcast. It's not gonna last. 90% of podcasts don't get to three episodes. And it was very similar to when you hear about starting a business. 90% of businesses start or fail in the first three years.

SPEAKER_02 0:15

And for me, it was kind of like, is it the business or is it the person? Four years after launching that agency, you're making 400k a month, which I think was the catalyst.

SPEAKER_04 0:24

This is why Elon Musk is more followers in Tesla, Tim Cook is more followers than Apple, and this just goes on and on and on.

SPEAKER_02 0:31

Because what is your experience prior to the agency and with building teams and like how did you apply that to building such a great team that you have today?

SPEAKER_04 0:38

I have no skills in the entire world. I can only why does it matter how good your agency service is? It doesn't matter. Under the theory of constraints, that's the only constraint you have right now. If you look at our agency, we edit videos. You can do it for $10. Why do people pay us $60,000 a year?

SPEAKER_02 0:53

What is maybe the one most important thing on getting from zero to ten? And then from ten to a hundred, how do you do that transition? Darren, welcome to Agency Giants. Appreciate you, man. Bali edition.

SPEAKER_04 1:08

I feel like after our first podcast, that uh I spend more time with you than I do with my wife.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

Well, here we are again on another marathon. So you started your agency, I believe, in like 10k's worth of debt, and now, like just about four years after launching that agency, you're making just shy of 400k a month. What do you think was the catalyst to such quick growth in the business? Fear.

SPEAKER_04 1:34

100%. So people run from pain versus running towards pleasure 101, and that was me. So I was in tech and I invested all my like life into engineering initially, and then wanting into tech, wanting to be a tech founder, I worked for Revolute, I was pretty senior in Revolute, and I hated my life, and it was so bad and it was so terrible. But I had tried businesses when I was younger, so I had like built an e-commer store, I built a tech company, I ran raves, and I had done a lot of stuff, but it kind of just fell on deaf ears. So if I was going to go and do something, it was going to be now. And I was living in Singapore, I was making good money, I was like in the middle of golden handcuffs. For my age, I definitely was, but it was fear for sure. And we can go deeper into that. But when I had left, I was really moving into a whole new space. I didn't know what the word agency was. I can tell you a funny story about that too. But it was always a continuous journey of like, oh my god, this is gonna fail, this is gonna fail, this is gonna fail. And because of what I've done on my podcast being so public, I had to make this work. You think about that? Like, I'm doing something that's extremely public, 24-7, and I just felt that this was meant to be the normal path, you know. So, or my journey was pretty fast, but it's been like a long, long 10 plus years. I'm 29 now. I started my first business when I was 17, and that's what kind of gave this forward momentum. But I can tell you some hilarious stories though about this map.

SPEAKER_02 3:03

Just paint a picture quickly. So you're you had the podcast before the agency. Yes. So how long have you been running your podcast and what had that kind of materialized into? I just want to get an idea of like the stakes that were on hold when you came to launch.

SPEAKER_04 3:14

Okay, so take a step back. So I built many businesses and I tried many different things. And I, when I was growing up, basically didn't have much money, like didn't really have any direction, didn't have any entrepreneurs in my family, and trying to make money was my way out of that. Okay. So I tried and failed many different times, and I'd ended up going back into corporate. So I'm working for like big technology consulting companies. Then I moved into tech startups, and after having built tech startups and working for startups, I was like, okay, it was time to go with a big company and try scale and grow that. And we grew that company from 2,000 people to 8,000 people. I'm not directly responsible for that, but in the pursuit of that, I was still trying to find my thing. So up until that point, I was failing and iterating over and over again. But now it was time to slow down, listen, and learn, which is why I started a podcast. Okay. So I still at the time wanted to become a tech founder, and in many different ways, I still actually do. Um, but I was still kind of in the mode of like I need to build this huge team and so on. But what I had learned was that when I was trying to interview people, a lot of the guys were younger than me, 21, 22. They had agencies, they had businesses that were service-based, they were getting clients, they were getting the 15, 20k, 30k a month, they were spending three or four thousand a month on their business, and they were crushing it. And in theory, there wasn't much different from me to them. They're smarter than me, whatever, but there wasn't much different apart from that. They they did it. Okay, they literally just did it. So what had happened was I was recording podcasts, creating content. It was terrible, awful. I always recommend just putting out the worst content in the world. You'll learn to get better. And I'd interview people like yourself, and they would say, Darren, this is great, amazing experience, really enjoyed the podcast. Could you do this for me? But I was too proud to say yes. I was like, Oh no, no, no, no, I want to go build this tech company. So I was too proud to do it. But eventually I had a lot of interest from guys that had big companies, and they said, Could you just come in and help us with the podcast? So I would come in and I would I would speak to a founder and a marketing chick named Emily, and I'd be like, Hey, like this is what we do with our podcast. And they would say, Well, could you help with this too and this and this? And I'm like, Look, this is broader marketing, but yeah, for sure. Because I guess I learned the concept of getting attention, and how can I get attention and monetize that attention or use the traffic to generate sales? Okay. So I started my podcast in 2020, and then about a year into it, people were asking me about doing this, and I actually ended up consulting and coaching a lot of these very large companies, I mean Fortune 500 companies, and teaching them basically how to use their podcast for acquisition of customers. But a very important thing happened at this point, which was I would meet with these people, I would tell them what to do, and I would leave, and I'd come back, and guess what happened? Nothing. They would do nothing, right? So I had a mini team for my own podcast, and I said, Look, guys, can I just edit the videos? Can I just do the thumbnails for you? Can I write some of the copy? And I would I would write the titles for thumbnails and I would write the titles for YouTube and I would just do this. And that became a mini agency. I didn't know what the word agency was, I literally didn't know what it was. I just thought it was like consulting with a bit of done for you component, but I didn't even know what done for you was. And they said, Yeah, absolutely. And I would say, okay, like let's package this up and it's 4k a month and 5k a month, and they would say, Yeah, okay, let's do that. And I would have one client and then another person would ask, another person would ask, another person would ask. And then what happened was Justin Welsh, who's a big influence for me, was on my podcast a few times, a huge mentor of mine, especially in the beginning. He said to me, The best way to leave your nine to five is to get 60% of the amount of salary you're making per month, and then leave because you can apply your total energy, and you can now do 100 hours a week, let's say, at that thing. So I'd done that, I got to 8k or 10k a month, and I said, Okay, now it's time to leave. And I'd gone from doing 10 hours a week on this mini agency to 80 hours a week because I had all the time in the world, and I needed to make it work, and I needed to make that work. This is a very important point. So it was it was beautiful, man, because I could just see input input equals output equals outcome, and I could see for the amount of input that I was doing I was getting some output, which was booked calls or you know, terrible closes and all this kind of stuff, and then it was leading to outcome, and it was that process over and over again, and we can go deeper into you know what I was doing really in the beginning, too.

SPEAKER_02 7:59

Yeah, that's interesting, man. That's so cool. It's the best businesses are always those that have like just came out of necessity. It's like the opportunity is just there, and you're crazy not to pursue it, and so you just lean into it and and it's far more effortless that way. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's probably very hard in the early stages of growing that business, but it's so much easier when you have an interest chain waiting for you to come. And you know what it is to you need to do.

SPEAKER_04 8:27

So let me give you an example. So obviously, I didn't know acquisition and I didn't know client acquisition costs, 100%, but I knew what I was doing for someone. So I could look at your podcast and say, okay, Jordan, we can change titles here, let's change the thumbnails here. Okay, I can do that myself. Also, when I was hiring freelancers, I knew when someone's pulling the wool over your eyes. Because when I worked in tech, that was very difficult to understand. If I had an engineer, the engineer could just pull the wool over my eyes and say, Yeah, it's gonna take four weeks to build, and it would take like a week, right? That's common in technology in tech. So I knew that going into an agency or going into a service-based business, which was I can make it, I can edit a video, man. If you know the Wi-Fi goes out in Bangladesh, I can make I can edit that video. And knowing that gave me a lot of, give me an edge, right? Because I would sit with a prospect, you know, multifamily real estate in Wisconsin, and I would still be able to say, okay, yeah, we'll we would do that in this way. And then my what I would always say, and to this day, I always say the best example is yourself. You have to, you gotta do it for yourself before you do it for anybody else. So when I get on a call with someone, I would literally show them my podcast. I'm like, yes, we're talking about real estate for you, but this is how I do it for myself, and I feel like the best case studies are when it's you, when you're that person. And this is where you know, my opinion of like, you know, picking the niche and finding your niche is that you have to do something that's aligned to you, that you know the subject matter, because one, there's a genuine interest, and two, you just know it. Like you just know it, right? This is why fitness coaches are shredded, this is why you know personal finance experts are guys that are nerds with numbers, is because they just enjoy that thing initially. So I find it very difficult to understand when people want to start like an agency in a niche that they know very little about, because you you not only have mechanism issue, which is the agency, you also have modality issue, which is the actual thing. So it's very difficult to understand. Whereas let's take another example, many years later, when we moved from the agency and we added the coaching, we simply turned our notion docs public because we had so much understanding of what a podcast was and how we could roll it out in a company. That's what the agency is, by the way. For context, is that like we literally were podcast production in the beginning, we can talk about this later, how we expanded. But but the idea was that we knew so much about topic we could teach it. We knew so much about topic we could implement it, and I think that's for me the best business to approach, right? And if you if you look at some of the biggest companies in the world, the guys that are founders, they love that thing, they love machine learning, they love sales automation, whatever that is, they love it.

SPEAKER_02 11:04

Yeah, I can't agree more with that sentiment. I mean, what is the alternative to that? It is creating things for hypothetics and hoping that they work for your client, and then your feedback loop is through the clients rather than through yourself. And it's it's it's exactly the same for us in the agency space, and we we just turned over all of our SOPs and started handing them over to other agencies because we'd proven them in the field, and so it makes it so much easier. You're not having to go the extra mile that some people are going. Um, but lots of people don't have that, you know, that initial passion for a specific niche or maybe the experience and so on. Like, what was it that that that sparked a passion for you with podcasts? Because you were you were really early to like the video podcast game. Like, I feel like the industry was still, correct me if I'm wrong, like very audio centric at that time. Like, what was it that made you think, like, I need a video podcast? And like to then still to this day be, you know, you did seven different episodes this week alone. Like, you're a beast, man. You've been doing it for a long time.

SPEAKER_04 12:02

So I'm dyslexic, really, really badly dyslexic. And when I was in school, I was told to not read or write that I'm so dyslexic. So when I wanted to get into the space, or when I wanted to do anything, it had to be visual. And I used to listen to these old podcasts from Tim Ferris back in the day, and it would be with him and the CEO of MailChimp, and I'd be like, I can't see him. And like the the cover artist Tim Ferris's face. Like, what's going on here? It's like I'm listening to the radio, and I'm like, I don't, I don't get it, I don't vibe with it, I don't, I don't find any bit of alignment. But if you compare it to like the bigger podcast like Joe Rogan, you saw him, you recognized the red background, it was very like um visceral, right? So for me, it was about creating that experience, okay? And to go deeper on this, like the whole world is super disconnected, as we know, right? We're sitting down here today, our phones are away, like my wife has gone out, she's gone off doing her own thing. This is the closest we're gonna get to like true authentic conversation if we're both comfortable and natural, which you learn to get into. So I had that pain, which was I enjoy doing this, but I'm really shit at it, right? And I really, really was shit at it, but I really wanted to get good at it, and I saw that huge upside in your in YouTube. And let's give an example as to how early we were. We were the first people putting out shorts on YouTube, dude. Really? Like completely so when YouTube Shorts launched, like we were putting out podcast clips on them. Awesome. They were doing like 40 million views. Wow. Because there was no ad sense, right? So they were trying to pull attention from TikTok and Instagram.

SPEAKER_02 13:38

I remember when that algorithm went crazy, right?

SPEAKER_04 13:40

And this is what's so funny. We were a podcast production company in the beginning, agency. We were doing video only, split the audience. I was I'm super against audio. And I say, like, we're super against audio, and we're not for audio podcast, we're not for the audio nerds, we're for video. And then we had the first videos being produced that were coming out on shorts, and we were just ramming them down to algorithm. We'd release like five clips a day, and they would just pop, pop, pop, pop. And that that worked for like 18 months. Every video would just smash. I forgot about that, man. This is actually even good to remember, and it was a huge opportunity, just huge, huge opportunity, you know? And um, I've I've identified a few of those different changes with video and content, and I think a lot of it's based on psychology, right? A lot of this actually is based on psychology, which is during COVID or during the pandemic, there was a shutdown, people hadn't seen each other, they were watching podcasts, they were literally watching them when they were eating their dinner or watching on TV, and then short form came up. I really did look at short form for YouTube being like this is a huge blue ocean, um, which is another huge opportunity, and there's those few moments of time in time, and then another, I'll give you two other examples as well. So, another one was moving into studios. So, when COVID when the pandemic was just about to finish, I was like, This is our time to get into the studios. So, all of our clients and what I was selling, what I was producing, was get into a studio for brand equity to build your awareness, to become a key person of influence, get into a studio now and start recording. And it went and it hit really well, and I think that was a big flip. And the most recent flip was the switch from studio like super like tight to relaxed. So last year, beginning in 2024, I did another tour and I met some of the OGs in the industry. I mean like Sebastian Giorgio, you know, the e-com bro, and they're all these guys are like out of podcasts, they're like, fuck that, I'm so sick of this shit. I don't want to be like, you know, cornered in a room. And one of the biggest drivers was because it's too serious. So we went, we flipped, moved back to couches, chill, relax, calm, more like human-centric, and as a result, like the industry now is slowly moving there. So it goes in waves, but it's all based on human connection, like all of it's based on psychology, dude.

SPEAKER_02 16:02

It's all based on psychology. It's interesting because I was was saying to a mutual friend last night that um your podcast is or it was and is the most conversational podcast that I've that I've been on myself, which was it which is incredibly refreshing as a guest. Like it's it relieves all pressure and it means you are actually far more open and quicker to get to the meat of what I believe the audience would want to get to, but also just what you are the most passionate about through because there's no guard, and when it's very interview-centric, let's say, and it's kind of question and answers, and it's and it's I suppose more serious as you would you would put it, it's a lot harder to break down those barriers. So you've you're you're clearly ahead of that. Where do you think? I mean, this is I'm getting ahead of myself here, um, but I would I think it's on topic. Where do you think that's going? Like, what do you think is beyond where we're in now if if we are, if we've gone from you know, wanting serious interview style podcasts, it was audio and then it's video, and now it's really conversational in a very relaxed setting.

SPEAKER_04 17:13

Where does that go? It's more pushed towards this relaxed setting, and the reason being is because um everything is a seven-minute, 13-minute, like highly curated video script from a teleprompter on short form, it's the exact same. Written, written copy too. When you see like AI added to it, everything is crystal clear. So it's a yin and a yang. There's always going to be a flip back, like the universe will literally pull you back at times. So all of your content, when we can bring it back to more natural, that will actually attract more people. Now, from the perspective of client acquisition, when it's more trust-based, relaxed, I can see your values. I can see on your face if you're enjoying it, if you're smiling, if you're enjoying it, I can tell if someone's enjoying a podcast or not. Also, your prospects, when they're checking you beforehand, they're gonna see that too. So if you type into Google Darren Lee, my YouTube will come up first. You will see me in my like natural habitat for the most part, recording, genuinely curious, at a conversation level, as we discussed, that's something that's I'm interested in too. And therefore, that trust barometer goes way up, right? You've probably seen recently there's like a trust recession. So where we're at right now is that people don't trust things, right? You send a cold email for your agency, people are like, oh, who the hell is this? When they search, they want to see this content that's this person in their natural, their natural, their natural habit, right? What is it that they enjoy doing? What do they not enjoy doing? What do they stand for? What are their values? Because people don't buy process, right? They buy the story. So your story, my story, we can go deeper even into that. Um, people buy the story, not the process, right? Because they can learn cold email from anyone, they can learn whatever. And for the most part, the delta between like you know, you and another person is not that much in terms of execution, but they're more buying into you, especially as an agency owner, right? Because they're they're in bed with you effectively, right? You're sharing, you're sharing passwords, you know, you're sharing so much together that it's less about is this person the best in the world, but more so is this person the best fit for me? Yeah. And I think that's what content and long-form content really does, right? And it almost pre-sells, it's objection handling, it's overcoming all these different elements, and it's showing your values more so than anything else. Because again, tactics, frameworks, trends, all this stuff is fantastic, but people do buy the story, and then your story is composed of your origin story, your mission, your vision, and what you want to see differently in the world. And I think that's the real, real edge. Yes, your story will will repel people, but it'll also pull the right people into your ecosystem.

SPEAKER_02 19:48

And it's really the responsibility of the podcast hosts themselves, because we see lots of people now creating podcasts who have already got an audience, already got an influence. Let's say, for example, we're talking about agency here today, although we're talking about all sorts of different things naturally. Um, but it's the podcast hosts to act on behalf of the audience and extracting the information that's relevant to why they're watching it in the first place. Like I very I'm very selfish with the questions that I asked, with the guests that I have, because I'm an agency guy myself. And so it's almost an opportunity for me to well, it is an opportunity for me to learn and extract as much value from agency as I can. And naturally, because that's my inquisitive nature surrounding that topic, it's also my audiences because that's why they're watching the pod.

SPEAKER_04 20:34

Um double tap on that as well, right? And I completely agree with you, and you're completely correct. If you look at our agency and like the numbers we're doing and all this kind of stuff, we edit videos for people, right? You can do it for ten dollars. Why do people pay us $60,000 a year? It's our story, it's our vision, it's our mission, and it's the attitude, right? Some people that might not like me, some people like my attitude towards things, it's what draws people to you. That's why people buy the iPhone. The iPhone is just a random piece of technology, they'll they buy it, what they align with their values, what it becomes that person. So if you have an agency, the best thing you can do is share your story, yeah, share who you are, share your positioning in the world. Even if you don't like anything about the nail salons that you work with, how you show up in the world, that's what you need to get across, right? Because those different values 100% will work, will work to attract people. And I I think I told you the story offline, which was we have this client and the Freddy agency, and they're an amazing client, really big real estate company. And the individual I actually met in person and we had dinner together and so on. And the individual looked at me and she said, Before I signed and sent you the money, I watched your origin story on YouTube. And she was, and then I looked at her and I said, And that's why it's there. So before she took the risk on me and the chance on me, which I'm extremely grateful for, she watched. My origin story on YouTube. So you don't need to be a YouTuber. I'm not even for content for creators, I'm for content for business owners, which is why we have the podcast and everything. And it's a great way to differentiate yourself because if your agency is like everyone else's, you can differentiate yourself in your story. And I've said this to you about yourself, right? You should have a YouTube video that's called like From X to Y in brackets, my story. And it goes through the hero's arc, it goes through three or four main inflection points in your life. It tells your vessel, tells your journey, and I guarantee you people will watch that before they buy. 100%. Yeah, we need to get that done. 100%. And we'll script it out together. I actually have a GPT prompt for you as well on that. But but it goes back to the human essence of connection, though. Right? Because think about it from a relationship perspective, right? People are good looking, we're in body. Everyone's good looking. Everyone's good looking, right? Everyone's into fitness. Some people have money, whatever. You connect with the person that's based on a deeper internal driver, right? That's what people, that's why people are compatible and clients are compatible, right? You could have a great client and a great service provider, but if they're not compatible, it's not gonna work. If you're not aligned on like whether they're ego-driven, insecure, decisive, indecisive, we need to see that chemistry. And in the agency space, chemistry is everything. You know, it's everything. And I've even seen that with some of the biggest clients in the world we work with. Because we work with many famous podcasters. If the chemistry is off, it doesn't matter how good they are.

SPEAKER_02 23:31

I want to get into this because I couldn't agree more with what you're saying. And I think what you're saying is increasingly more important with every single month that goes on in this new era of AI that we're in, where good service is baseline. You have to have an exceptional service. You have to be able to deliver results. That's baseline. Like you have to have credibility, you've got to have case studies. Story, brand, your mission, what makes you different, the box in which put you uh people put you in, or uh the way I like to think of it is like how unboxable are you? Like you don't want to be boxable because if you're boxable working with an industry that a thousand other agencies are trying to work with, which most people are, you're in quite a unique position almost. I can't imagine there's a huge amount of podcast agencies in the world in contrast to, let's say, a marketing agency for dentists doing lead gen, right? But when a business reaches out to a company like that or is running ads, like those dentists who have worked with loads of agencies before are just looking for a box to put that agency in. And so it's how can I be unboxable? How can I be new, fresh, and different? So they're looking at me thinking, hmm, who are these guys? And then you're piquing that interest. So it's kind of like what you're expressing here when you're when you're when you're talking about like uh standing out and making sure that it's very clear who you are. How do you manifest that? How does that like how does I know you've spoken about the story, but like what does that in like a tangible, real-world, actionable instance look like?

SPEAKER_04 24:56

So it's the what is the unique thing that you're gonna provide for someone and what's the thing that you value the highest for them? We don't create podcasts for the sake of creating content to be famous, we create podcasts and content to make money. I just ran a mastermind recently, and someone said in mastermind, I want to know my intentions behind this action. And I keep it very logical, which is to make money. So when we create podcasts in an age of AI, we are there to provide a service, but we also coach and consult our clients. I will look at their funnels, I look at their offers, they're for the most part usually shit. I will take my two cents on it from what I've done in my years of experience and the 200, 300 clients we work with, and the hundred plus active clients right now that we have to say, look, we change it in this way for that particular reason. So the mechanism that we help with, which is really good as it flows into how the business evolved, and I can walk you through this, which is yes, our baseline, as you said, is producing great content that's generating more attention and growing your podcast YouTube channel. But the big differentiator is what we do with that attention. So we moved along the value chain from just being output to outcome oriented, which was using that attention to generate more money in the form of booking more calls, getting more people to convert to a landing page, converting them into users, helping them with their sales team, helping them with their closing team. What else can we do that quantifies an ROI? And that happened when we spoke with a very large client with us that are going through a merger. And they said, like, look, we love you to debt, but from an investment banking perspective, we need to quantify this in new revenue, net profit, or Epitha. And I said, Yeah, no worries, dude. Let's have a look at the funnel, let's see what else we can do in the corner. So what we did was back in the day, podcast production. Then we moved into a media company, which is we handled the back end. So for podcasts, we did sponsorships, and then for people that use the podcast, we did their products, their funnels, their email marketing, things around the peripheral, bringing them into lead magnets, converting them into lead magnets, and then they had more leads, and then we showed them how to close them. So we we teach them, right? And then that was the genesis of our education business. But the whole idea was it's the consulting component, right? Because I agree with you. Well, of course I agree with you that like AI does 90% of this, but the consulting element is me putting my hand around your shoulder, shoulder and saying, Hey Jordan, done a great job this month. We let's change this in that way to get that outcome. And I know AI can do that too, but it's it's providing that support from the angle of what I value, right? So just for the concept context. In one of our programs, well, our main thesis is leads, sales, delivery. And if you're a business and you come to us for your podcast and your content, we still look at it through that lens. We will, as an agency, as an agency, do the leads part, do your content, generate the leads, pull them into the ecosystem. Then there'll be a sales component. We will advise you and teach you how we run our sales calls, why we do our sales a certain way. And then delivery, then is we can actually help you improve your offer. So if you're a coaching offer, we build a back-end offer. If you're an agency, we'll either help you uh with the operations or we'll actually add in some reps, you know, sales reps. Sorry. So we'll do one of two things, and that's how we've actually built multiple programs, is because we looked at it through that lens versus I do X for Y. You know, it's a super, super replaceable, you know. Okay, and it was born out of necessity. I'm saying this out of I'll never forget this. You'll love this. So just left my job in Revolute. I'm living in an apartment in Singapore. I sold everything. I mean everything. There's a photo on my Instagram where I'm sleeping, I'm working from the floor, and I sent out this email on instantly, a cold email campaign, saying, We will do podcast management for you. And this guy wrote back this massive message being like, Nobody wants podcast management, they want outcome, they want more views or more revenue. And I looked at it, and in my head, I was like, I hate this guy. And then I looked at it again and I said, This is this is genius. Like, this is exactly why everyone quits. This guy was trying to give out to me, but it was actually exactly what I needed to focus on, which was outcome. And that was at the beginning of my journey, like the very, very beginning. And I'm very grateful for that message. I still know who that guy was, by the way. He's a guy that's based in Singapore, and again, that was born out of necessity. Then we had a bunch of clients who grew our podcasts, and they said, All right, dude, like what are we going to do with all these views? And then I had to figure out a way, and I was like, Well, we actually monetize our podcast this way, let's add that into the agency. And then you add the value and then therefore get paid in proportion to the value that you're created, right? So I got better at running making funnels, I got better at me creating uh landing pages. How does that look? Okay, how do the VSLs look? Okay, let's learn VSLs. Oh, we can edit them too, fantastic, and then it morphs and morphs and morphs, and that's how now we call them more of a media company because yes, there's a production element component, but there's also many different things around the ecosystem that make the podcast valuable.

SPEAKER_02 30:19

So many agencies find themselves or could stay on the surface level of just offering like a A B based service. We run ads and we generate leads, we hand over leads, that's where it ends. And you've managed to create a moat, and all of the best agencies create a moat by getting so deep into an understanding of the industry. Um, but not to be confused with like early stages, it's important to keep things simple, and presumably it took it was a gradual process getting to that. There was a natural evolution. How did you how did you not get lost in the source of all of that very early and all of a sudden build this complex mess?

SPEAKER_04 30:53

Okay, so podcast product you gotta think of it this way. So you gotta think about how simple and stupid it was. Podcast production. We did it until we had to get results, which was podcast growth. So then we just started growing and just growing, okay? Great. And then I would do consulting calls, coaching calls with our clients, and I'd just be like, hey, we do this XYZ, and they would be telling me about their business and offer. I'm like, dude, like that's shit, like change that, like do this, whatever. And then we would talk about okay. Well, actually, this is very interesting. We had growth, and then we were growing the channels, and then because they were podcasts, they were getting inbound messages. You love this. We're getting inbound emails, and all these guys, you're like 50s, 60s, getting 50 emails about sponsorships, and they were either ignoring them or offering 200 an episode, and we were putting them on the shows, and I was like, What the fuck is this? Like this random company is throwing a show. And I said it to the client, I said, Hey, like, what's what's going on here? And he said, Dude, could you just manage this? I'm like, Yeah, yeah, sure. I looked at the emails and I said, Okay, $200. Maybe I'll just say a thousand. Yes. Maybe I'll say $1,500, yes. Maybe I'll say two and a half thousand dollars per episode, yes. And then I was doing all of this myself. I'd wake up, I'd have 80 emails, I'd smash through them with a shit ton of coffee and nicotine every morning because bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. We were making 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 a month all on sponsorship revenue. I was taking 20%, 30%, 40% of these clients, and then I have this huge infrastructure all of a sudden, and then we're bringing in more podcasts, and then I'd sign a podcast and be like, hey, would you want to work with this person? I can just do a kind of a request for opportunity here. And now all of a sudden we're running the back end. I didn't even know this was sales, dude. I didn't even know this was a sales component. And then I was I, dude, for full full transparency, I've done the sales side on the sponsorships on my own for a very long time because it's very hard to crack. Because B2B selling is a gentleman's game, B2C selling is a speed game, right? So there's a different language, and because I came from corporate, I know when Jenny's thinking about it. She actually is thinking about it. So there's a different way to speak to B2B. So we had all these circulating leads, and what was happening was we guys got really good at it. I had a template, I had an approach, I had a different element of psychology. I'd read a book, I'd implement it, I'd read a book, I'd implement it, and I would just have this like spider web of like what I would do. Like this would happen, do that, this would happen, do this. I would never take calls. It was all email selling. They were buying $10,000, $20,000 packages. So what I'm trying to say here is that that was an evolution that was being built. And we've, again, it's 80-20. We have some clients that make a ton of money, some clients make less so money, some clients that make mediocre money, and they're fine, whatever. So now we're we're managing and sponsoring these shows, okay? And then what was happening, which was super cool, was this is so cool to reflect on. I'm actually really glad we're doing this. I was like getting all this inbound, and then we're building out this infrastructure, so we have these media companies, and I mean like the biggest, you know, I'll be transparent like your Shopify's, your Oracle, your Net Suite, uh Babbel, uh, all these big tech companies, and they would sponsor our brands. And then I would go back to the brands and say, Who else do you want? You want to have a look at Rob Lips' podcast? Let's have a look at Rob Lips' podcast. And then we look at that, and then Rob like, yeah, let's go, and then we would just match it. So we're doing like a matchmaking, and again, there were so many SaaS platforms that did sponsorships, whatever, all BS, dude. None of it was working. We were doing the manual elbow grease. When everyone said it was going to be replaced by AI, we were doing the gentleman's game, we were getting on the calls eventually with the brands, seeing where they want to go to, finding out their goals, ambitions, and now we are tying these side by side. So now we have this again. Most podcasters and podcast companies are absolutely broke because they're thinking themselves as creators. We were just literally just making a shit ton of money, fully transparent, off of this. And the irony, this is a such such a great story. We have one client, um, nicest guy ever, and he was paying us around 60k a year, so 5k a month, and we were taking 30% of sponsorships, and we had made like 500k in a year, but he had paid us in sponsorship revenue around 150k. So he paid us 60k plus 150k, and then he came back to us. We do a yearly review at every client's, and he said, Look, dude, like why am I paying you so much money and paying you the sponsorship? You want to score 50-50? And I'm like, Yeah, let's go 50-50. So then we rolled out a spot uh uh a sales team, a sales team specifically for this client, and then just started doing some wild numbers, dude, like wild stuff. Like this guy solo podcast in a in a very niche specific area, but again, opportunity arises, right? And now he has like two account executives, one does inbound, one does outbound, probably doing just for this client alone, probably doing anywhere between 50 to 150k a month, um, just off email. You know, so again, opportunity arise, and I had done that for so long that then that became the education business, okay, which was showing people how to build, grow, and monetize their podcast. And I'm like, look, dude, here's all the sponsorship emails we ever sent, here's all the scripts we've ever sent, here's how to use instantly, here's how to grow your podcast. And then what had happened from there was a lot of those people and the other and our other clients who don't use sponsorships were had traditional online businesses. So the same mechanism of how do we get leads, how do we get into a landing page, how do we show them, showcase this, we decided to build upon so build on slowly and slowly. And I think uh that's how you fully go like end-to-end, you know. But again, that's every single devil was a new year. Does that make sense? It was like a whole new year. Um, and it's ironic because what we now kind of sell or I guess suggest is an ecosystem, which is one hero product, one main product, and then like a back-end offer. But I always say this caveat, which is like, look, guys, it took us three to four years to get the agency to be stable before we could even do the education, you know. So you don't need like a huge back-end offer yet, you just got a great front-end offer, that's enough for now.

SPEAKER_02 37:19

That's beautiful, man. I love that. It's um there's two things I can observe from that that people can take away from it. It's like jumping on coaching calls with your clients is the gateway drug to all that other opportunity. So true, man. So most people are so afraid to have those really candid conversations with the client where they're just speaking about the overall success of the business in relation to the service they're offering, and the just the ripple effect of the thing that they're doing, and just increase through in you have five conversations a month with five different clients in the same niche over the course of three months, six months, you're gonna have such a depth of understanding of all the other areas of the business, and then a relentless opportunistic mindset where you just have fluidity in the business, and because and and and and I think that's something that's really interesting, actually, is like there are many people that would argue that we have to focus on one thing and we say tunnel vision on that opportunity and we keep it going until we scale that. Um I'm reminded time and time again through observation of other people that fluidity and the ability to I know that I I weird. This must be in my subconscious, they'll see the infinite game by Simon Sinek up there. Um which is which in its entirety really is explaining that concept as well. That we must, if we're playing an infinite game in business and not a finite game, we're remaining fluid, and obviously we get the story of Canon and Kodak and how and how there was innovation there and how Canon came and overtook the camera industry. And um, you've you've you've really demonstrated that throughout all of your growth from day one. How do you battle um what is an opportunity that should be pursued and what isn't? Um how do you stay fluid enough to say welcome the right and and and also rigid enough to to welcome the no? And I'd love to then explore like maybe some of the failures because not everything could have succeeded.

SPEAKER_04 39:17

A few things on that. So there's there's so much so much to unpack there. There's so much so much to unpack there. So, firstly, okay, so answering your question specifically, what's within the ecosystem is within your realm, right? So our ecosystem is podcasts and YouTube videos, which is the same shit, right? And what's within that realm can come into it, okay? Um, so let me give you an example. So that ensures that you as a service provider become one of one, and as you said, the coaching right adds to this. Let me give an example. So I spoke to my mentor, James Kempier, and I said that the relationship between coaching clients and and agency clients is very different. Coaching clients, they like almost feel liberated by you and you give them the skills. However, agency clients they kind of almost look down on you, and he said, It makes sense, you are of service to your agency clients, and therefore, in many ways, you are a servant of them. And I always think about like the Roman times when I hear this. No matter how good the scholar was, he was a servant of the king, right? The servant of the leader. And I think about it through that lens. We have focused exceptionally hard on how to shift the responsibility from just on a service provider to a shared responsibility with the client. We'll edit your videos for you, bro. We'll do all that stuff, but you still got to show up and get better. So we do that through coaching, right? Which is we have blitz calls. So we do a blitz once a week where we come and we realign priorities. So if a new video is coming in or whatnot, then I, for the most part, only really talk about outcome. I'll generally only talk about outcome, even if there's like a video going on.

SPEAKER_02 41:02

Do you do you guarantee outcome to the clients?

SPEAKER_04 41:05

Well, it depends what the goal is, right? So if they're using it to grow their business or whatnot, like I can't be like you're gonna get 400,000 leads if they only get one right now, you know. So it depends on what that outcome is, right? For the most part, we're growing the channel, right? We're growing the channel, we're getting more leads, we're growing a business, right? That's that's the that's the goal, right? Context is important, obviously, right? So the way I'm trying to say this is that I'll come in and be like, all right, we're working on this new tracker, or there's a new way we're doing this, or here's one way we can improve, or whatever. Tom, our head of client success will come in in just a coaching capacity and be like, all right, bro, let's work on your public speaking. Like, do this in this way, let's work on this. And then Piush or CEO would come in purely on operations, be like, here's the schedule. Anything here looks out uh realigned. So let's give an example. Piush is basically our CEO is focused on input slash output. Tom is purely focused on output. Say it this way change the branding, change your position in that way. Coaching. I'm focused on outcome. Okay. And as a result of that, then it is 100% shared outcome, shared responsibility. We're doing our part, you're doing your part, we have responsible owners, great, fantastic. So I'll give an example. We have one client, real estate client, fantastic people, recording podcasts, so on. We've worked on like lead magnets from them, they're doing like free audits and all that kind of shit. 100% we've attached that to the podcast. 100% I brought the idea of like, let's use a tracking system. Some of them are gonna be attributed from the podcast, some of them are gonna be attributed from ads. Let's look at it objectively, and then we can make objective decisions. If the leads that come from the podcast are lower, that is not like anyone's like fault, it's just like a feature. It's just like, yeah, that's like the outcome. What do you want to do about it? Like, what do you want to do about it? We can make those decisions. So it removes the emotion and it also removes the subjectivity a little bit, okay.

SPEAKER_02 42:52

Um, and then back to your what was your initial question on this? Um, it was how do we stay fluid enough, but again, know what to say yes to and what to know.

SPEAKER_04 43:00

Okay, so again, if you take that example, I have to start focusing on the outcome and looking at that system, looking at how it fits in. Because if I said we don't do lead magnets or we don't touch lead magnets, then they'd be like, Well, fuck them. I'm just gonna hire a marketing manager called Emily. She'll she'll take care of that in the podcast, right? So I have to like attach to that and it stays within the ecosystem what we do. If I was to invest in like a real estate company over in Bali, that's 100% girl in the red dress, just misaligned. So it has to stay value aligned, right? And when we look at the growth of the of the agency, we got to around 120k, 150k, let's say about 120, um with a lot of complexity. Okay, so a lot of complexity without the education. And then it was like, right, we have this huge CRM of people that came in that tried to work with us. They want to work with us, but they're not financially qualified, they're not willing to pay between 40 to 60k a year. So again, that's 4k to 5k a month. So as a result of that, um it's hard for us to work with them. So we have a few things here. We have either with the agency clients, we do the retainer plus the performance, the Rev share, or we turn on the tap of the education and we add that in for everybody else. Dude, our CDRM was so big with people that were like very hot that when we launched education, we had like our first 40 customers like on launch, you know, and this is high ticket, man. This is high ticket, it's 5k program, so it's on launch because that is an opportunity in my ecosystem because I'm already coaching them. And my again, James Kemp, my mentor, said to me, He literally said to me on a podcast, you can watch it happen in real life, a first ever podcast. He said, You have to learn to unbundle and rebundle your offers. So our offer was we do podcast production, we coach you, we do the growth, we do the follows. He goes, just unbundle it, just separate the coaching, sell the coaching. It's still the same thing, just sell the coaching, unbundle it. You could also unbundle uh the coursework, just sell the coursework coursework. You can also just do a workshop that's on the coaching for 100 people, sell the co sell the workshop. And he blew my mind with that model, and it's all in the ecosystem. Whereas if he's like, Oh, do you now want to move more into TikTok coaching coaching? Yeah, that's so different over here, right? And our ecosystem model has come from James teaching me like what we sell is literally from that podcast I recorded with him. He taught me to me on a podcast, and I went off and built it. And I messaged him like a week later, being like, Oh, build, all rolled out.

SPEAKER_02 45:38

That's um, I'm smiling so much because it's uh it's such a huge lesson I took myself. That one, um, I think many people struggle with that in agency and info and anything. It's innate in good people to want to do everything they possibly can for someone as a bundle together. So an agency will very often overcommit to a thousand different things and then wonder why they have terrible profit margins and they can't scale because they're you know packaging together a multi-stack service for $2,000 a month when they're just starting out, or an info business will create a full done for you program, six months, doesn't need lifetime access, coaching, course, client acquisition, fulfillment, the whole thing. And actually, it's what I've learned over time, and that was my mentality always, was like give everyone the whole picture for for for a reasonable price and and and don't have cost sell them on to all these other things. Because I was just like, well, let me just give them everything. And what I learned the hard way over time is actually in giving people everything, you get less action and less of what you're acting the less of the the the reason you're doing it is to try and increase client results and make them happier and give them everything they need, but then they have decision paralysis because they've got too many things in front of them. Exactly. And actually, if you just separated everything out and had them pay through stages at based on where they're at right now, they will focus on the task at hand and you will get what you ultimately wanted in the first place anyway, which is increased client results, increased retention, increase happiness, and everything else.

SPEAKER_04 47:12

Give people what they want so you can give them what they need, you know. Let's touch about the failures. Okay, so oh dude. Oh where do I begin? So let's do the failures in the agency. So I guess we jumped right in. You know, when we had like the funnels and stuff, we were able to help you with the funnels. We did jump right into that then, and then when I went into that, that was kind of my focus because like we've always had well, not always, but I brought in Piusha CEO pretty early. He was in Goldman beforehand, so like he's super solid, great guy, no ego, not a kid, like really great. So it allowed me to focus on building back ends of businesses. But again, like tracking revenue attribution, like it's tough, right? It is tough, like even to this day. I even have friends that like you know they can't even track what came in from the agency, what didn't come in from the agency. So you have to be super, super clear as to like what revenue is within your scope, okay. Happened for a few people for sure, which was like we're running a coaching program. Did did the lead come from the podcast, or did it come from Instagram, or like where did that come from, right? So we can't attribute where it came from, right? So that was one minor fuck up, but I should have really recognized that before this happened. So basically, we had this client and was a good friend of mine. Um well, he was a friend of mine, whatever. He okay, full transfer. Okay, let's take a back. So this guy basically I had built his coaching for him, just as a friend. And I was like, uh, like we'll do this. And I just kinda he was in a really tough position. And I mean, for context, like this dude was like a lot older, he was in a very tough financial position because of like a fail business. So I said I'll help him. So as for as for free, I just helped him, whatever, and it was fine. This guy had scaled the shit out of it because of what we had done, and he was making a lot of money, but he was so cooked, super cooked in terms of time and everything. Okay, so I was like, look, dude, like we got it to this fair just from WhatsApp. Let's actually build an ecosystem, front-end offer, back end offer, scalable coaching, front-end content, the whole thing. Let's ram the leads in, set them, close them, put them into a few offers. But and we did it, and we owned a part of the business, so own a lot of the business, right? And we owned a lot of the business because the whole logic was I want you to have skin in the game. So because you have skin in the game, um, I carried the opex. So full transparency, I was probably losing around $10,000 to $15,000 a month on team, uh, setters, closers, uh everything, dude, just everything, right? Because the agency ran it for the client, okay. But what had happened was we were getting leads that were getting that were coming in that were getting booked, but they weren't coming to us because we were running the coaching, which was uh one of the back-end offers, but the front end, like consulting offer, it was going down that side. So the leads that we were generating were coming in that they were closing for their other offer, obviously to avoid the rev share, and this had gone on for like six months, and I was like, because because everything checked out the leads checked out, the traffic checked out, the booked calls checked out, it's just the closing wasn't checking out, and then I put in closers and I was because that individual was closing the calls, because you know, fender like closes is always gonna work more, right? So that made more sense, and then up with the put in a closer, I was training the closer, and the closer wasn't getting calls, and it's because the money was going the other way, and I had lost so much money, dude. So bear in mind, six months of losing like 10-15k a month, not making any money, and then the irony was anything that we were making, I was paying out because the revenue was coming through us, right? Do you get me? So anything that was coming out, I was giving 70-80% back to the client. So the transactions that were being made were from me to the client, and we weren't getting anything, man.

SPEAKER_02 51:27

Brutal.

SPEAKER_04 51:28

So it's an awful lesson, dude. You know, that was probably that was a real stinger.

SPEAKER_02 51:36

So what have you learned now and adopted differently when it comes to Rev share deals with clients?

SPEAKER_04 51:44

It has to be within the remit, right? So sponsorships is super simple. Addie last wants to go on your podcast, we do the deal, cash comes in, we pay out 80%, and the cash is cleared, done. Simple. But when you're running like a when you're running the biz opside, so you're basically creating opportunity for their business, you have to put very harsh uh hard rules on okay, are we getting full exposure here? So what I mean by that is is it all revenue generated from all channels at all times? Okay, is it yes or no? Uh if it's not, how the hell do we track it? Right? So someone like Ravi Avula will use like UTM links out his neck, or he'll track everything. But like my conversation with Ravi before on this was like, I still don't know is that 100% accurate because like if I clicked on your Instagram and then went to YouTube and then went to the bathroom, and then my kid vomited, and then I reopened my phone and I but and I click book a call, it didn't attribute. So attribution just like inherently is like wrong, like inherently like breaks. I know it's like whatever, it's like there's like a an effectiveness, right? So, what I mean by that is you need to have like very, very, very, very, very strong guardrails on how you attribute your leads and sales if it's going to be in there, and to be perfectly honest, I still haven't cracked like a fully effective way to be like, yes, all lead attribution in this pool, the best way that I've seen it is this product, right? Is it this product? If you ran like a straight $1,500 info product to a landing page, perfect, like sweetest way to do it. Um, or you manage a sales for the entire business overall and you do like an actual Rev share. But if there's some sort of like mixed off, there's two different offers, or they're coming from different places, I think the agency owner will get screwed, yeah, because of the fact that like the business owner is a business owner, right? He can make those, he can make the decisions whenever to pull it. And the irony, the worst part about that story, the worst, worst, worst part, is that I was already super flaky on as an I was super um cautious or like weary as to like what was happening with the revenue. Like I was like, there's something up here, and the irony was when I had raised a hand and said, like, bro, like what's up, the client was like, Oh no, no, no, like let's let's let's stop this now, and then they left with the offer we built. So remember, we built everything program, coursework, CSM strategy, front end, back end, hiring process, the VSLs, the landing pages, the color codes, the branding, the YouTube, the podcast. And they're like, Yeah, I'm just gonna head and I'll bring my product with me. And it was literally that's like the worst part in that scenario. And what am I gonna say, dude? But it's funny because I'll tell you the individual later, but as in this other example, but you might have seen this very famous salesperson recently got like a lawsuit, and it was the exact same scenario whereby her growth partner, business partner that runs the back end, uh sued because this individual who runs a big sales program threw threw their hands up and said, Oh, I'm out, but I'm bringing my business with me. And that business now is doing like 10-15 million a year coaching, and then the other partner just sued for 10 million. Wow. Because, like in theory, that person who has 70, 80% can walk out, but there's still sales coming in, right? Infrastructure's built, the brand is built, and everything that that other individual has just sold for uh has just sued for 10 million um lawsuit.

SPEAKER_02 55:41

You have to have those lessons, you've those big things have got to happen. I I I rarely meet a successful person that hasn't had something that's cost them six figures in losses at some point, and it and it hurts like hell. But you look back on it with no regret. There's always so much value to come off the back of it. Like you would never invest that money in taking the lesson, but it was forced upon you, and you needed to have it because god forbid it could have been much bigger, you know, five years down the line.

SPEAKER_04 56:12

The way that I look about it though is that in that scenario, you know. So we basically had built like a coaching program for this person, and it was dialed, like everything was dialed. The gamification, if we had a gamification, we had check-ins, we had everything, like everything was dialed in, and it was really clear, it was really good. And I had already my own education business, and I had mirrored it off that, and I had actually funnily enough, I'd spent a lot of money on coaching from people to do all these tracking sheets and stuff for that for that offer, bear in mind. And um the second it all kind of went to tits, I like had a call with my team, and I was like, What the fuck aren't we doing this for ourselves? I was like, why don't we just we already have our own coaching? And I was like, we're not taking 30% of that business, we're making 100% of that business. Let's just run it up there, and that was we just was like, okay, let's just do the exact same thing that we were gonna do. Because you were talking about running ads, and I was like, why don't we just do that ourselves? Because you want to appease someone else, right?

SPEAKER_02 57:10

It's that is true for every every business industry. Uh so I I'm really into and I'm really into gastronomy, vine dining, um, midstillin' star restaurants, but not the silver service side of things, more so just really great food, great people. There's a great restaurant in Wales called Innishir, a guy called Gareth Ward, he's now just got two stars, incredible guy, really cool restaurant. They play house music on vinyl, they had Sasha playing that really cool vibe. I went skiing with those guys and a few other those chefs, and that it was like uh and we and we went and we all stayed in a chalet and had this dining experience for four days. And uh I remember having a conversation with Gareth and said, You must eat some cool food yourself, man. You must and he's like, Nah, I just like I'll just get McDonald's on the way home, or I'll just have like beans and toast sometimes. This is like a like a you know, this is like a two-michlin star chef that has the ability to cook the best food in the world, but himself opts in for just, you know, like, ah yeah, I'll just like I'll just I'll just rustle something up, you know, like it's it's it's all the basics. And it's the same with agents teach, you know, like you you build the best funnels, you run the best ads, but then you look at your own marketing and it's like and uh it's interesting. I don't know, it's it's like um uh I'm not sure where that comes from. I don't know the origin of that, but it's true across every industry.

SPEAKER_04 58:29

Yeah, and even I have to put my hands up always, right? Like even yesterday, um one of our clients in Apex, Apex is like for like really serious people, like it's dude, some of the some of the problems are like so fucking complicated, you know, they have like a huge like book and call issue, and there's like so many different funnels running at once, and like it actually pushes me a lot, not gonna lie. And one individual, lovely woman, uh I was like, you need to fix your fucking uh pre-call flow. And then she was like, Show me yours, and I pulled it up, and it was a bunch of language that we don't use anymore, like positioning language, and I was like, Oh my fucking god, you know. I hadn't even updated my own, and I'm telling this individual she needs to update hers, you know. So um, this happens, right? That does happen from time to time as well, which is uh yeah, I think the advice so take a step back. I always say the advice that you give is the advice that you need. This is why you have a lot of personal development people who have never done the work, a lot of guys that are you know selling XYZ for personal development and they have a super messed up life, or you have broke financial advisors or fat personal trainers, right? You really gotta be careful of that, and I think that's a sometimes that can be like a wolf in a sheep's clothing, sometimes, but for the most part, we're all mostly for the most part well-intentioned, but there is sometimes you gotta be a bit careful with it too.

SPEAKER_02 59:49

We're all mirrors. Your do you think then, in light of that, that it is nothing short of negligence for an agency not to have an internal content strategy in 2025? Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:01

From day one, yeah, of course, because like you think about it, you are for the most part generating leads for people, you know. And if you learn anything from hormose and Berman Hormosy is a huge influence on me, the reason why he helps so much people with offers and leads is because of his content, right? That you have to look at the mechanism underneath as to like how it works, and then you know, we always hear this from clients being like the oral why, the oral why content is not designed for direct response, and if you come from an ads world or a direct response email world, you're so used to that, right? And you we talked earlier about people going from cold traffic to warm traffic or warm traffic to cold traffic. I would think about the logic of people thinking about oral why versus non-ORY. Brand building is forever, right? This is how I I've gone from having my agency and still running the agency at a very high level to adding the education like this because I just had all the leads and I had the brand equity, and then I went from helping people with their podcast, so our positioning is very changed now, right? Before it was helping podcasters make more money with their podcast, now it's helping business owners make more money with content. So now our TA has gone from 30,000 people, it was a 30,000 to 300 million or whatever. And I can just like dude, I get booked for masterminds to speak on like sales because the brand, right? We've just sold a lot of stuff. I have my own way to selling. I show up and I'm like, this is how I do it. I'm like, this is how I do it. Here's the receipts we have, here's the clients we have, here's the brands we work with. I sell B2B and B2C. I'll get booked for that, I'll get booked for something else because it's a brand, it's brand equity, you know? And that's how even for our programs, like the the one Apex is very interesting because it's it's mainly sales and offers, but it's 80% sales. And for the most part, like I'm not a fucking sales expert, but I have a way that we do this for online businesses that means that like, yep, we can have like a mini sales program and people want to come and work with us, perfect, whatever, you know. So you get you get to just do things, yeah, right. And you asked earlier about what's within the ecosystem or other kind of failures and what's without the ecosystem. So, for the most part, we have an agency and education, and the education is split with like a front-end offer and a back-end offer, and they're good and they're profitable, whatever. But again, part of me wants to get into software. I have been delving into software and so on and so forth, and it's been for me to just focus, like I'm failing miserably to put my focus into it. Uh, when I do want to pull the coordinate, I have an exceptional CTO that I I can basically pull in, okay, and we can work on it, whatever. But I just I just don't have the mind with right now to do it, right? But what's interesting is like if I do, I have the audience, right? And I and people listening to this podcast might not know who I am, but in my small, tiny, tiny, tiny niche, if I have a podcast tool, people are gonna buy it, bro. Like just straight up. It doesn't matter if it's $30 or if it's enterprise level, I fucking guarantee you someone's gonna buy it. Same with a book. I'm just saying about low-ticket things, right? Yes, it might not, I might not be William Brown and sell 5,000 of them, but people will buy it because I have the five years of documented video, and that's why I always say it's best to put out your worst video first. Because you see, if you click on my Instagram, you'll see my videos are very strategically put together telling my story and showing the story arc of my first YouTube videos and so on. I literally have a video on my Instagram that says, This is the first video on my channel, and that just builds so much brand equity. Is that the direct response? No. Will I ever be able to attribute that to a do attribution? Absolutely not. Like, there's no way I can ever do some sort of UTM tracking on my story. But does it work? 1000%, and you have to believe that it works. That's the thing. Is that like I can't we talk about hypnosis the other day, right? You have to believe hypnosis works for it to work. You have to believe that organic content and storytelling and brand works for it to work, and then it will work. But if you're like, I made a YouTube video and I didn't make 10k from it, I can't help you, bro. Like, it's it's a mindset thing, right? It's like a it's like a belief system. Your beliefs are we are just not congruent, and it's fine, you can do direct response, and that's great, but we just we are in very different things, and back to the infinite game. Like this podcast, in some way, will benefit you, some way and me, in the future, maybe five years from now, you know? Agree, and uh, and it's funny, dude, because like we talked about being in Bali, and like you've been in the space for much longer than me, but like I do get stuck quite frequently, and people will be like, Oh, like I listened to that podcast like three years ago, listen to this podcast and so on. And I'm like, Oh, great! Like, what do you work on? Like, oh, my dude, XYZ, great, fantastic. Hope you have a fantastic day, great exchange. It's not like, hey, I saw your email and joining your program, and you only have four spots left, and that really hit me here. You know, that's not what people cling to, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:09

And like I said to you earlier, I had someone come up to me in the gym yesterday who cried they watched a video three years ago. Was it was the catalyst of them starting an agency? This is the video when you zoom back, is in isolation, was just routine Wednesday content day. I've got something to share, let me just record this piece of content, you know. And then the magnitude of the impact of that over a three-year period that was the catalyst of someone starting an agency, and then probably went on this spiral. You probably get this all the time. Someone watches a podcast episode, they message you and they're like, I just did a binge. I've just been the whole afternoon, I've been absorbing your stuff. The indoctrination created from content is crazy. And we see that, like we were like B2C helping beginners for a very long time, like in the in the in the info, not in the agency, obviously. And we and it took, you know, it was six years until we launched a B2B offer. And we found that like we had people that had never even joined our B2C offer. But when we launched the B2B after six years, we had people that had watched some of our first ever YouTube content or were coming into this program, like, I've never bought anything from you. Your free content was really good. I never bought any of your other programs. Just so you know that I've been watching you since 2017 when you released your first content. That sales cycle, like, it's insane. But like those customers are still around because of the brand equity that you've built. And what we're really talking about here is is is founder-led content, right? We're not talking about, you know, what's your what's your what's your mindset surrounding um agency content? I think a lot of people would love to be able to hide behind faceless agency, you know, company content instead. What's your what's your mindset surrounding founder-led content versus agency content? Is it worth doing agency content? Should you sack it off? What do you think about it?

SPEAKER_04 1:06:58

The founder can talk about the agency stuff. This is why Elon Musk is more of followers in Tesla, Tim Cook is more of followers than Apple, and the list just goes on and on and on because they attract and they get attached to the individual, their weird mannerisms, their weird, unique things that they have on the side. That's what pulls people into your world, right? It's not the fact that you have the best instantly opener, right? But at the same time, because you do have good instantly openers, people will watch it. Hormosy is a great example. He's actually worked with instantly, so this is a really good example. He has uh videos on YouTube about cold email, and he's like, This is the best way to get a hold of cold email. This is like the four million dollars I've made off one cold email campaign. People will listen to that because it's Hormosy, who has a lot of experience and receipts and his story, and then he's doing thing, cold email, and they'll say, I want to learn cold email from Hormosy. So it's it works perfect. So you helping guys build an agency or teaching client acquisition or retention or whatnot, people will listen to it because it's Jordan, fantastic, amazing. Like that that's the way we want it to be. Same with the way that I go by approaching about it, is that they get interested in person and then they'll listen to you as a result. Then and I see that with a lot of our clients. We we talk about the evolution of your content. So a lot of our clients that are like really big in the fitness space, they were big in the fitness space for 10 years, and then now they've made a lot of money, and now they're going into a lot of entrepreneurship, online business bro stuff, and they do well because they're that person that you loved growing up watching, and now they're teaching you something that helps you improve your life, make more money, improve your relationships, whatever. So you can make those adjustments as a result, then you know, and that's why I just want to be in this game forever, recording podcasts and stuff that I enjoy. And we talked about um one of the comments I had earlier, which was like, Oh, like your engagement is lower than what it used to be, but but I'm like, but I'm at peak enjoyment of what I'm doing, yeah, right? And as a result, the right people find it. Okay, so that's this whole like oh, I need a thousand million views and all these vanity metrics is bullshit because it's the wrong people you're pulling into your ecosystem anyway. Yep, and it's not aligned to you longer term, you're not gonna have fun with it, you're not gonna enjoy it, and you're not gonna stick around, and you're not getting the right like leads outcome from it. So I talk, I think about it through the lens of impact, and I had this chat with a very big client, like a very big guy in the space, and yeah, he was complaining that a lot of things he's complaining that he's not getting enough views, and I was suggesting that like, look, dude, the goal was impact, right? You wanted to help people like do stuff and get into the space and become like freedom thinkers and so on and so forth. But if you have millions of people watching your stuff, that means statistically they're all gonna fall into like the bell curve mean, and it's gonna be people that are not in your ICP and also not taking action. So if we have more condensed views of people that are liking and watching your stuff, that's actually better statistically for what you want, what you say you want, which is impact. And then another effect is we want more leads, where it's like if you get more views, you're not gonna get more leads, it's gonna be the wrong people in that ecosystem. And again, you know, a lot of people in the industry. So the feedback Iman has on his videos is that their calendar was full with people from like turbo countries that couldn't afford our that couldn't afford our stuff. Nothing against that, they're just not financially qualified to be able to pay five thousand dollars for a program. So they had a problem, a genuine problem with their channel was that the channel was filled with views from the wrong people. So, what are these videos, bro? Like, what are we doing it for? Yeah, you're helping people, but you're helping people that are not taking action, they're not doing anything with it, and they're not taking the next step in your journey with you. So it's kind of like run to take to make it very practical and give it an analogy. It's like running an ad for a US product in Australia, and getting all calls booked up in Australia, and it's like, but they're all the wrong people. We don't sell to Australian people, you know? It's like you have to be very dumb with the logic sometimes.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:04

Do you know what it is? It's um simple people and non-business minds reward content creators and hold them accountable for views, and business owners, many business owners, haven't yet been able to rid themselves with wanting validation from other people, and so they will optimize for views even though they know it's not best for the business. And I see this time and time again. People have YouTube and content so wrong. The guys with like all of the views are I I'd got the so I won't name names, guy in the space, sent me a message, you know who it is. Um most of the content mindset based on YouTube kind of pivoted towards that, um, UK-based, uh getting hundreds of thousands of views on that content, used to get like 10,000 views on client acquisition content, messaged me recently, was like, How many book calls are you getting a month on YouTube? Like he's getting quite literally 10 times the amount of views on average per like video than I'm getting, I've been at that stage with those really broad videos. Um, and we're getting the same amount of book calls on a monthly basis. And the only difference is just higher quality audience versus you know optimizing for big views. The the danger of that, and so at a time I was for context for for our agencies, some of our really big client acquisition strategies were like I used to rank number one for Facebook ads, Snapchat ads, TikTok ads, things was how to run Facebook ads. I think it's got like two million views or something on that video. Everyone that I've met is like, whoa, your channel is so big. And when they refer to that, they're like, they're looking at, they're thinking of that, they're thinking about the views. That's everyone. You're how they're all thinking about that. And and and nobody who, unless they've done it themselves, truly understands. That's why if you saw my views, I saw yours, I would never judge you for lower uh engagement or views or whatever, because I know the game, I know how it works, I know that it's completely different. The thing that you're optimizing for when you're going for engagement, it's not the thing that's actually gonna drive business or drive not even away from the business and just making money, it's just like driving, uh impacting the kind of people that you actually want to impact. You know, it's like I want to have people watch this, and then you get the you I recorded a video yesterday, it was very thought-provoking. I just fancied it. I was like, I really want to talk about this thing, it's just being burning away at me. I know it's gonna get about a quarter of the views than any other video on my channel, but I can guarantee it'll get me 10 times the amount of messages privately from people saying that had such a huge impact on me because I because it's it's it's emotion-driven and it's for the right kind of person. So many creators are afraid to put content out like that because it doesn't fuel their ego, and they believe or are scared, at least I presume, of what public perception is of having lesser views on your channel, because then it's like, oh, I'm I'm lacking momentum, I'm falling off, etc. And I think it it takes a while to get over that, and I don't think many people do get over that. I think like Hormosy prints cash because Hormosia's Hormosy's got huge credibility, but the views that Hormosy gets 99% of them will be completely unqualified, you know. And he's said that, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:21

And he's even said that, you know, that's that those people like he he creates content for absolutely no reason. Yeah. Like the videos that he puts out, he gets like almost no benefit from them.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:31

And and the reason why it works for Hormosy is because somehow he's just like this perfect storm of like he's managed to get the high views because he's Hormosy, but on very specific business content. So there's still that the the the percentage of people that are qualified are awesome prospects. Correct. Because it's very specific.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:52

And it's a define technique, right? He's like very good at teaching, he's very good at like visually describing something, and he's hitting he's hitting broad titles, like how to like it's like how to make money so fast it feels illegal, and then he explains it through something that's quite con uh complicated.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:09

And they're high-level concepts, though.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:10

Exactly. That's what I mean. It'll be like lead sales delivery, and then he'll break that down, he'll make it very simple, right? And I think that's like the beauty, that's a part of him as the character, like he's got better at that. But I completely agree with you, right? It's just like I've made more money than I ever have in my entire life with less engagement. So why the fuck would I go back, right? And also, I just there's something about those videos that I just don't like, right? I look I look at some of those videos that like have crazy engagement. I'm like, I was like playing a character, and it's not me. I agree. And at the more like inner work that I do, I just show up and I just do what I do, and I'm like, put out the video, and if it does well, it does well, if it doesn't do well, like I'm not attached to the outcome. As equally as I'm not like, oh my god, I got loads of views, I'm equally not like, oh my god, I got no views, right? Does that make sense? Uh, I remember hearing a JK Molina thing years ago, and this really stuck with me, which was like if you're in the space or like you're an entrepreneur, you want to be an entrepreneur, you never want to be in a position whereby your emotions are 10 out of 10, and you're oh, I'm super happy I sent a client, and one out of 10, oh, I lost a client, they get no views. You want to sit between that four and seven mark always just emotional stability, you're chill, you're calm, you're collected, and yeah, when you win, it's great. When you lose, it's also gonna be fine. And the more you can stay in that threshold, like the better your life is just gonna be, you know. You don't want to be swinging up and swinging down 24-7, you're gonna be all over the place. And I think about that with like views, likes, leads, closes, churns, clients, customers, complaints. Just how do we manage this overall and just stay within like a decent equilibrium? Two again, play the infinite game, do this year on, year out. Yeah, the offer might change, the delivery might change, you might sell the business, might not sell the business, but it's more of like uh an attitude. And uh, I was speaking to one of our clients with this yesterday, which was having a good person in your team or having a great person in your team with the wrong attitude is dangerous. So this individual had a really good sales rep, but the guy wasn't showing up to the trainings and it wasn't tracking his metrics. Huge red flag for me. It's a behavioral thing. If you think you're better than that, you're screwed. I saw a David Dre video about this, which is like if you're if you think you're better, if you think you're the best at what you do and you're uncoachable, you're fucked. You're straight up fucked, right? And I and I and I really see that in people, which is like, are you coachable? Do you think you're better in the system? Do you have this underlying bad characteristic trait? And I and I I think it's from podcasting. I have a good bullshit radar, because I've just you I do this so often, right? That I can kind of see when someone's a smoke screen, and I can see if they have that bad characteristic trait underneath. And this isn't like abundance mindset, this is like a it's coachability, humbleness. Uh, my wife would call a god complex. Yeah, you know, you walk around Bali, like you can kind of spot someone, and I I always joke, which is like I always joke, it's like that person would never go to a mastermind. That person would never sit in a room for three days with someone hearing that person teach. A very bad characteristic trait to have. It's probably the worst, I would say. I completely agree with that. I completely agree with that. Um had a prospect, sorry, had a prospect say that to me this morning, by the way. He was uh good guy, like nice guy, whatever. We worked together on a few things, like he's he's paid, right? And I gave him an offer and I gave him an in I gave people invites, and uh I never pushed people, I gave him an invite, I let him cook, and he came back and he was like, you know, I would be just annoyed if I was doing something, and then I would be like, I could just do this myself. I'm like bad characteristic trait because we can all build a funnel, dude. But it's like you're looking for very nuanced help in very nuanced cases, and that's where you get like uh supportive coaching and consulting. And like if you think you can't learn something, like you're screwed. And dude, like if we redid a headline for someone, that could be worth how much? Millions, millions, like millions for someone if they're an entrepreneur, if they're after if they want to go really well and go really fair, that could be worth millions. So it's like if you think that you can learn something from someone, you're kind of fucked. And I also don't want you probably in my ecosystem.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:28

I think that um I think that lots of people are out of danger of that. I I I we uh we had the same thing uh only two days ago. Agency done for you funnel. We wrote copy for the funnel pre-launch of the funnel. The prospect sent back the a chat GPT screenshot critiquing the copy. We have a collective 20 plus years experience in writing copy on funnels, I've spent millions on ads for funnels, they copy and pasted it into chat GPT and asked it to critique the copy. I just said, I just wanted straight back, I said, why are you paying us if you think, hey, I can write better copy than us? Why don't you get it to write the copy? Like what what rational reason is there to look at things like that? And I think that people are I and I actually can say that as someone that I believe is was on the receiving end of that or was on was was in that mindset when I first started my business. I think when I started my business for the first two years, I didn't accept help. I remember saying explicitly, um I remember saying these exact words, I remember saying, Why would I pay someone for information when I can learn it myself? And then I went to Sam Ovens mastermind in LA when I was in a moment of need in the business, and I felt like a fool. I felt like a fool. And I sat there and I just had this rush from my head to my toes, like this that that drop, and I was like, it was sheer utter excitement for what was gonna happen, but then it was also just like uh you just wasted two years in your own head, man. And and since then I have been nothing but a sponge to information, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:08

And I um I met a very like famous guy in the space yesterday, like a very established guy for many years, and I was recording the podcast, and I was like, I am such a dumbass, and this is why I have my podcast. I was like, I am so stupid. I was like, I am such a naive 29-year-old. I'm like, I'm a dumbass, like I'm sure I'm a dumbass. And I asked the guy about his mastermind afterwards, and I was like, Can you just send me the fucking offer doc and I'll just figure out a way to pay for it? I was like, I'll just maybe towards the end of the year because I'm already in a mastermind right now. I was like, I was like, I'll just I was like, I said to him, I was like, I will join because I need to, right? And this is the yeah, it's the again what quoting Will Will Brown, like you don't know what you don't know. And when I heard that voice on today of someone being like, I already know this, it's like dude, I'm not teaching you Spanish, right? I'm not teaching you Spanish, bro. We all inherently know what like acquisition is, especially if you're making 15k a month, 30k a month, you know what that is. But do you have the support structure when you're at like 120k a month and CAC is going up? Do you know what to do then? Yeah, or do you need someone just do you need uh bounce an idea off someone, you know? Agree. And like I pay 35k for a mastermind right now, and like I might just throw in one question like once a week into like a group chat, and to be honest, I don't even do that. I don't do that, and I I can't even join the calls because I'm super late at night in Asia. So I haven't joined a call, it's 35k, so there's a week weekly call. I've never joined one because it's a time zone. I'm looking forward to joining when I go to the UK though, to be fair. But um, I might use a group chat, and to be honest, I usually use a group chat to help other people because I just like to help people. So I just somehow I'd still ask any question about content, I'll send back a seven-minute voice note.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:54

Um yeah, I think I I believe that it is nothing other than foolish to as an entrepreneur in any industry at any stage of growth to not be in some kind of a mastermind-based setting at least once a year. Like to be in just one mastermind at any one time for the rest of your life is an absolute superpower when it comes to to growing a business. I agree. It's insane to me to not be in that mindset.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:32

And again, like what's the cost? The cost is that you stay doing what you're doing. Again, like Einstein 101 was insanity, right? You're doing something that is not working, and like what not why what might not be working is like a million a month. You could be at a million a month and you can't go any further, right? Like there's always problems back to Homozy, the problem solution continuum will never ever end. So if you know that there's always going to be a problem, do you do you want to grind it out? Especially when you have a bit of money, right? Do you want to grind it out? Like, I never ever have felt the um loneliness of being an entrepreneur because of my podcast and the doors is opening me up into. And then when I had any bit of money, I was pumping it into masterminds and events and so on, so that I could just learn from other people, right? Because even if you take someone from a different example, different industry, different scenario, there's just so much you can always learn from someone. And if you're being it's again, it's it's a mindset thing, right? And this is why the best masterminds are very cautious of who they leave into their into their group. 100%.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:35

Yeah. No bad eggs. You've talking of no bad eggs, you've managed to build a really great team. You you said you got a COO from Goldman, right? Yeah. Like, how did that happen? And like, what is your what is it or your experience prior to the agency and building teams, and like how did you apply that to building such a great team that you have today?

SPEAKER_04 1:24:54

Such a good question. So uh I inherently have no skills, I have no skills in the entire world. I can only hire. So when I worked at Revolute, I ran a team of engineers. Uh, when I was in consulting, I also ran a team of engineers, and I was super young, like a very, very young at that point. When I built my first company, you know, second company in my early 20s, I always had people. So for me, it's never been what, it's always been who because I'm just inherently shit at something, right? So for me, I hate the learning of like, oh, I need to go learn like Facebook ads. I'm just always like who? Who is that person that can go do it? Okay. So knowing that, there's two components. There's a technical aspect, which is someone needs to be not a Pareto. And in an agency, a famous line that Tim Saddler told me was every role has a soul, right? Or every soul has a role, one or the other, which is that every role has one specific person doing one specific SLP, and that's it. And you don't get them to do another SLP because then they will split focus and break it up. Every person does one thing in your company, straight up. We have editors who edit. Funnily enough, we have a designer who's an amazing designer, and he works with one of our clients too on another work, and one of my clients said, Yeah, he's great at editing. And I was like, Editing? I was like, he doesn't edit for us, he's just designing. He was like, Yeah, bro, he's like motion graphics editor as well. I was like, Yeah, bro, he just does design work with us because the guy just spends all day, every day, hammering thumbnails, hammering thumbnails, hammering thumbnails all day every day. So they just do one thing, and then the biggest thing with this is they are coached by me. So every person that joins our company was once an entrepreneur, and they're all kind of like disgruntled with being an entrepreneur, and they come in and they're like, Yeah, yeah, I just want to learn, I'm like, Yeah, sure, bro. And then they all come in full-time, internal, get paid, they never want to leave. I've never ever had someone leave. I've got rid of one person. Um, and to be honest, the guy that we got rid of was making he actually was making so much money, he was on commission in Morocco, and he was killing it. But I think it was more of like a characteristic thing, more so than anything else. But the reason being is because there's a technical thing which I do, so it's in their zone of genius, it's not too much out of their uh comfort zone, they're in their growth zone, so they're learning. I teach them what it means, so outcome. So you are creating the short form video to create leads, which creates attention for that business. That business makes money, someone pays them, they pay us. Like I teach them the full cycle, the full whirlwind of it. So it's always focused on outcome, and then I'm always focused on their on their growth because I never had that when I was working in like Revolute and stuff. I had shitty managers, shitty leadership, it was awful. So it's like, where do you want to get to? What do you want to do? They start with wanting to build their own business, and then they also then they move to wanting to build within what we do. So a lot of editors will become operations guys, operations guys will become heads of departments, and then some of them will come in and start doing coaching. So a lot of our team internal team will do coaching in the incubator, so they'll teach. So then again, the best way to learn is to teach, and also people love to teach. So if you can teach someone how to teach, they actually will actually love to do it because it's what they're naturally good at. If you ask me to Talk about Spanish, I couldn't do it. We've actually talked about podcasting. I will enjoy naturally, I'll get um I'll get dopamine and dorphins from doing it. So you teach them about that, and then you compensate them, and then you put them on a journey to where they can get to. And then the biggest thing back to Mr. Simon Sinek is um two things. One, you have to do it for yourself. So every single role I've done in the business myself, every single thing, I can do anything. I said I can do everything along that spectrum. Um, and then you create a circle of safety. So inherently, everyone's an A player, and by the way, I call out A players, like I will call out an A player to them because A players are very hard to come by. So you're looking for A players, and a circle of safety means people can fuck up and they can suggest ideas because you know that they're inherently an A player. It's not like someone didn't get a video done because they're a B player, they didn't get it done because they're thinking of a different way to do it, and they can bring that up to you comfortably and safely as a result. So that's how we can like try new things and do different things, and uh we create that atmosphere. And then the last thing on this is I run the team like a sports team. So, sports team, you're all in together, you win together as a team. There's good banter, there's good culture, take the piss out of each other. Like we always joke that uh our team is like so diverse. We have like women, guys, uh guys from guys from Asia, guys from South America. Like we we joke, right? We have like good humor, a good banter, and that just creates a great atmosphere as a result. And we're actually gonna do a company uh trip soon, and we're all gonna go to a villa and just grind for a month, and just just grind like we're we said we're gonna like block out all the windows with uh with bin lining and just work for a month, and the guys love it. The guys like actually love it, and they come here and they come to the masterminds, and I teach them like about the future and like what you can do and like why people do things, and I actually teach them a lot about psychology, which is like the customer reacted like this because they're insecure about that, and they value this because of status, and therefore, when there's a spelling mistake, they get pissed off because of this, and then we teach them like broader impact, you know, and these guys are like 21, 22, it's fucking sick. I love it. Awesome, man. Yeah, I fucking love it, dude. I love culture, I love like team building, I love hiring, I love big teams, I love that shit.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:21

What's your approach to so you said that like every soul has a every every soul has a role, right? Uh what's your mindset towards that and management who naturally wear more hats, or do they not in your business?

SPEAKER_04 1:30:35

Um, for sure. That is obviously a nuanced case, and you're right. So they I call them execution roles. So you never want someone executing two different roles at once. You don't want someone running your ads and editing your short form, right? They're just gonna be so frantic and all over the place. Like every role has a soul, or yeah, whatever. But then, of course, in the leadership position, they need to be a bit more uh dispersed. But what I would say is like if it's operations and like COO for PU in particular, he can be COO across the education and the agency, right? And then like he's looking for process improvement and improvements and workflow improvements across two, right? It's still the same thing across two. We have some issues sometimes, which is like we have some guys who are doing customer success for the agency and for coaching, and they're different, so it's like changing head, changing the uh the mental model. So sometimes there can be a bit of a challenge there, so you ideally need someone else to do that because I always think about it uh through an engineer lens. So again, I hired and managed engineers for many years. The worst thing you can do for an engineer is contact switching, so you should never ever ever ever ever have an engineer contact switching. If they're working on the front end of a mobile app, they should never do the back end, just straight up. It's a simple 101 rule, and I think for execution roles, you do that. For management roles, it gets a bit blurry for sure, but you kind of need to find out what their natural best positioning is. Uh so one of my goodmates, Tom, uh, he's head of client success and head of coaching. He was a teacher and he was also head of education for um a very famous education business. And he's better at coaching than he is at management, right? And it's fine because you just put him into his best seat, you know, you put him into his best seat, and uh it's also about finding people's best seats to put him into, right? That's one-on-one uh traction, right? Um right seat, right person, right fit, or some shit like that. Is the right traction? Yeah, yeah, so it's that's that's the kind of model. Uh right person, right seat. Yeah, something like that. So is the seat do you need the seat, e.g., ahead of client success? Is the right person in there and do they want to be there? That's the biggest thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:51

Nice man. Awesome. Talk about the COO thing, because I think it's quite a unique position. Not many it's probably it's it's actually from observation of lots of agencies, I actually think it's one of the not one of the final roles, but it's a very it's a later role that comes into the business, an operations manager in general, COO, whatever. Um, what does the what what was the mindset towards bringing them in fairly early into the business? And and and what was what's a great point. What is what is the what is the role to you?

SPEAKER_04 1:33:23

Okay, so initially Push came in as an operations manager. You're right. So he was running the production, so he would sit between the editors and designers and the release. So he was making sure like the production schedule, the team roadmap, the roadmap for the clients, the trello boards, everything dialed in, the due dates, all that shit, right? All everything we got the files from the client, the production is in production, the due dates were hitting, the timelines were hitting, and so on. So that was his initial role, and like upload schedule, all that kind of shit, uh getting everything dialed in, which is like the entire business. So he sat in between everyone and the release, so between the client and so on. But then what had happened was we have multiple clients, multiple work streams, different roadmaps. He needs to sit on top of that, okay, and then we have an uh operations manager underneath him who's doing all the QA, all the checks, all the roadmaps, and then he's managing um velocity, so how much we're producing, capacity as well, and also what are the requirements that we need. He needs to foreshadow those. So if we sign two more clients this month, that's a shit ton more videos. Do we have enough editors? Do we have enough designers? And also the signal is feeding back to me, you know, like this guy's pissed off because his compensation hasn't changed and he's doing fucking 48 more videos a month. What do we need to do here? What can we do? And also process improvement because as the agency has scaled, the processes need to improve. And I don't I don't just mean like writing a notion doc. I mean like what's the most efficient way to get this result and how do we strip it back? What do we need to get rid of? And then because that ties across to education now, he has like that spectrum across there and across here, and like holistically, how does that look, right? And that can be from like a payment processing perspective too, right? How are we managing all our paid and fulls, all our split pays, all our six-way splits? What does that infrastructure look like? This is actually a conversation we're having right now. What does the payment infrastructure look like? We have three different offers, different payment structures for every different client's, whatever, not for everyone, but holistically. How does that look? How does that fit into production? What happens when triggers go wrong? How does that improve, right? So workflow management fully. And as we chatted about before, like his role is to look at AI objectively and automations objectively to see where we can improve, you know, and he needs to sit in there and and and if he can look at that, because again, this is the thing, right? If you want to use AI in your business, you need someone to do it, like you need someone to build it, right? So so you don't just fucking hire some bro on Twitter. Like the guy who's running operations who instinctively knows processes, can then learn Zapier and Make and Chat GPT to be like, right, we can add that there, that there, that there. Great. Okay, what's the next one we want to look at? This one, what does that process look like? What can we do? What can we eliminate, delegate, regulate, or whatever it's called, um, automate. So that's that's their role, right? And that never and then wrap up this point. Me and P shop in this a lot, he's always like, Well, my job is in revenue generating. I'm like, yes, it is, because one, it's based on retention, and then two, it's based on cost infrastructure. So if we can drive costs down or stable as we scale, and then drive retention up, you have a very, very pivotal position, you know. And yeah, and if I look at tech, dude, that's that's how tech companies are bound together, you know?

SPEAKER_02 1:36:53

It's a very interesting role, and um it's interesting we're having this conversation because last night I had a two-hour chat with my ops manager who's been with me for a number of years now, and he's an incredible guy, a true A player, just awesome. But the conversation was very candid. Dude, have you thought about what the future looks like for me in five years from now when AI is at its, you know, it's it's has materialized to its highest? Because the role, at least from my perception of it in our company, is the operations manager doing the exact same thing as you, but just obviously in a different model, delivering a different service, but making sure everything's running smoothly, it's optimized, it's pretty all the processes are in place, etc. But as our AI continues to get more sophisticated and more of that stuff can be automated, an operations manager will be responsible for creating that engine, or be responsible for creating that machine. 100%. Which, in theory, and just being having this really rational, refreshing conversation with my ops manager last night, it means that they will make themselves redundant eventually. Whether that's two years, three years, five years, ten years, the role will have to evolve into something else. If if if it's like an orchestrator. It is exactly like an orchestrator.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:06

You know, it's the same with a a ghostwriting agency. Like you'll be using AI, but you'll need someone to orchestrate it, right? Because if you're writing a copy of the at the start. Sorry?

SPEAKER_02 1:38:18

At the start. To facilitate it. To facilitate it at the start, but when it gets it's sophisticated enough, there'll be AI to run AI and it'll be able to run itself.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:28

Yeah, and we chat about this too on my podcast as well. You're right. You're right. Again, like that's that's exactly it. So become facilitator, orchestrator, into the next stage then.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:37

And then it's like, where do we go from there? Then it's then it's does the COO deploy those systems on your clients who are inevitably going to need them as well.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:47

Yeah. Yeah, you think about it because like it just depends, right? Shit. Like, you know, you said it's like one of the last roles to hire a firm. Yeah, I completely agree with you. But like because it's normally the founder that does that, right? But you talk about the words of my mouth, right? Which is which is there comes a point whereby the founder stops working in the business, right? So whether that's 100k a month or a million a month, like to scale it, you can't do it. So the person who sits there that thinks about deploying AI and sets up the AI agents and so on, they might be fractional or whatever, but the founder's not going to be doing that, right? Or he might be, but he's focused on acquisition, front-end marketing, you know. That's where the founder's best positioned to be. Yeah. So the teams can be a hundred times leaner, but I would say before the ops manager goes, the execution layer goes, right? Which is like you might not need someone to do creative anymore. You can use fucking Canva AI. Um you might need someone to write your copy anymore, and then the facilitator facilitates all that shit. Yeah, it's interesting.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:55

I want to zoom out for a minute. Um because I haven't said this to you yet, but when I how long ago was it that we did the when I came on your podcast for the first time?

SPEAKER_04 1:40:04

About two years ago.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:06

The contrast from my perception of you when I jumped on that and your business and where you were at to where you were at when I came on your podcast last week. I was it was I was in awe of the growth that you've had, and it was incredible to observe and and and and to reflect on over this week. Darren has absolutely killed it. You've you're you're an incredibly humble person, but you've had growth which is unlike 99% of people in business in this short period of time. Your two, three-year growth window has been what most people's five, six, seven-year growth window is like. Um, from my perception of that, I think it comes from an unwavering work ethic and just pure dedication to your craft and and an opportunistic mindset, as we've kind of unpacked here, which is amazing. Um, you've built a life for yourself out here in Bali, and many people come to places like Bali for very nomadic reasons to live the lifestyle, the laptop lifestyle, and to have all this time off. In meeting you here, it was like the ultimate juxtaposition against what I actually believed was what most people do here. Because here you are grinding seven days a week, just annihilating work, more efficient than the majority of entrepreneurs that exist in a place where most people come to live the lapse-off lifestyle. Um, what has been your mindset towards kind of travel, moving away, coming abroad? Um, and uh and have you did you start off as the nomadic, I want a lifestyle business, or is it always been no, I just want to facilitate a life that enables me to be able to work on my passion 24-7?

SPEAKER_04 1:41:55

Firstly, thank you so much for your kind words, dude. I really appreciate that. Super, super thoughtful. I think what we do is underlying. Uh I feel very little of it is extrinsic. I feel uh it's all intrinsic, and I feel like that if you're doing things just to appease people on the outside, you're destined for failure. And I feel like those intrinsic motivations is what always keeps people alive. So for me, it's about being somewhere that's beautiful, right? Being in Asia is beautiful, Indonesia is beautiful, Indonesian people are beautiful, such a kind place to be. It's a beautiful place, it's always fucking sunny, great food, great gyms, great people. Why wouldn't I be here? But as you said, if you are not that way inclined to be driven, driven, driven, you're not gonna, you're not gonna do the work, right? You're also not gonna do the work in Norwich. You're not gonna do the work in Dubai. If you're that way inclined, you're kind of screwed everywhere. But if you're truly intrinsically motivated and you actually are all in on what you want to do and you love it, it doesn't matter where you are to some degree, right? When I was in living in Singapore, I was the exact same. When I lived in Dublin, I was also the same, right? I'm just doing it in a nicer way, nicer place that I love and that I enjoy. I do think though that time alone on your own, when you're locked away and you're really focused in on getting better, the more time you have away, like the better, right? Does that make sense? Because you're more just single focused on that, and you create the lifestyle around it. So my highest like values outside the business are my marriage. I got married quite young and my health. And I think in Bali and in Asia, the biggest flex is actually your physique, right? Because it's an indicator of your life. I remember Sal Bloom, Sal Bloom's a good friend of mine. Um, he wrote a piece about the 10 lessons he learned from turning 30. And then one of the first ones was uh as I his 10-year reunion. Sorry, 10-year reunion from uh Stanford, and he said that your habits and your lifestyle appear on your face, so you can see if someone's stressed, overwhelmed, in a job they hate, in a life that they hate. And I think creating that atmosphere whereby I'm in a place that I love, I don't want to lose that. You gotta fucking grind. And two, I want to still work on what I truly enjoy, I can have both. And you said to me at dinner last week, you were like, How the hell do you like make time with me and lease? It's because like me and my wife were like in it together, you know. Like, I'm telling her of like the funnels, I'm telling her about the podcast are coming up. We're just we're living literally together, but we're working, we're almost working together, even though she has nothing to do with the business. But I think you create that atmosphere, that lifestyle, and then you invite everything else into it. Does that make sense? So for me, like the business is my most important thing, and it's something that I've worked on. Everything I do is for the business. So, absolutely everything I do. So, if I go to the gym, it's for the business. What I eat is for the business. When I go for uh a sauna, when I go to bed at 9 p.m. at night, it's all for the business. Everything is for the business. 29, I'm married, I have no kids, no debt, I just work and I enjoy it. And even when I take a break for stuff, it's for work. And even the co I have a fitness coach, and we um we just train for work. Even the food that I have, even when we're trying to put on more muscle or lose more fat, everything is for the business. And I think when you look through that lens, it's almost impossible to lose. So I have this thing where I measure everything. So in my entire life, I've measured everything. I've measured my body weight since I was about 17 years old every single day. I've measured my food every day, I measured my sleep, I measured my workouts. I know with a pretty good statistic based on previous data that I am not going to get fat tomorrow. Statistically, I try to view the business with the same lens. The inputs that I put in, what we track in the business, the sales, revenue, the clients, the success, everything. I know for the most part it's going to get better tomorrow because we track everything. I feel like that when people don't track stuff and don't manage their life effectively, that's when they get super overwhelmed and stressed because that they lack control. They lack control, you know, they don't know what's going on, especially when you grow up super, you blow up super quickly. So I think it's having that level of just like insane levels of like detail in what I'm doing allows me to like play much more of an infinite game. I'm like, oh, call volumes down, let's do this, call volumes up, let's do this. And I feel like you almost eliminate the probability of like failure, right? And of course, like things could fall to pieces tomorrow, but I feel like when you're learning skills and you truly are after skill acquisition versus like trend and hack acquisition, it's great, right? You could I could put you into any business, man, and you'd kill it. You could do any business tomorrow and kill it, you know. So I think I think through that lens, and then the way that the business is set up is that it's fun, right? Like we're coaching people, we're consulting with people, we're running masterminds, we're getting paid to do these transactions for for companies. We do no fulfillment on transactions, you know, like it's a it's a it's a good business, right? It's a really good business. I'm flying to the UK tomorrow, I'm gonna be traveling, I'm gonna be recording all week. You know, I don't wear shoes, right? Like it doesn't get much better than this, you know. For me, it doesn't anyway, right? And I feel like, yeah, of course, you can be in Dubai and so on, but like the freedom that you get in Asia is unparalleled, you know. So we, you and me together, and everyone that's an entrepreneur, you are inherently a rebel because you don't conform, and I do not conform to. Like, I am very, very, very disobedient, like very, very disobedient. Even when I was very young, part of my upbringing, I got a very bad upbringing, but because I had a very bad upbringing, I'm extremely disobedient. Like, I just don't do things that I get asked to do, um, never, and I never ever ever have. I've never ever done anything that I've been asked to do. But I will sit down and study for 12 hours a day for school, I'll build a business, I'll go to work, but if I get asked to do something, it's like a weird thing I have. I don't know what the fuck it is. But anyway, the reason I'm saying this is because like entrepreneurs are inherently rebel rebels now with your agency, with your business, you can live anywhere you want, you can do anything you want. So, why wouldn't you try to optimize or not optimize, but have the best life possible, you know? So if I wanted to move to Phuket tomorrow or move to Mexico, me and my wife hope with us a lot. Like, do you want to live in Mexico? I don't know. Can we get there? Yeah, sure, we can do that too, you know? It's very interesting. And now that I'm in I've been in Asia for quite some time, I'm not partying, I don't drink, no drugs, nothing like that. So I just try to optimize for like, yeah, what's a great life. Before we had our podcast today, brought the dogs for a walk for an hour on the beach, had a coffee on the beach, came back, was writing for an hour, got to do a bit more writing as well later afterwards, and um now we're recording a podcast on a Saturday morning.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:45

Amazing, man. You're the best, man.

SPEAKER_04 1:48:47

You're the best, man.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:48

Dude, I watched your content for so many years, and I I'm so grateful that we're friends, man. You it's very interesting. Uh like observationally listening to that. The because we've had conversations off camera, you're your teetotal, you don't drink, you don't, you don't go out, etc. etc. Contrast to a previous life where you used to like to go out and you know, used to love a rave, me too, now sober, which is which is much better, um, and have to get you on that one. Um the the old sober rave front. But uh what is very interesting about that is everything that you love and that drives you right now is almost like just killing the the the the previous the person in the past life. And that is I don't actually get the impression correctly I'm wrong, it was something that you struggle to transition out of uh because like you just have this this unwavering resilience like and and determination. Like you've just and I wanna just I wanna I wanna get the essence of that in a minute. But for many people that watch this, they're like, okay, like you're in incredible shape, you've got a very successful business, you're driven to work all the time. Most people will go to the gym, they'll look at themselves, and they'll be like, I'm too fat, it's gonna Me too long. I'm too skinny, it's gonna take me too long. I'm too broke, it's gonna take me too much to make money. And it's like most people don't realise that the period of pain of doing something that they really hate in the short term is actually only just because they resent the amount of time that it's going to take to get to where they want to get to, and the amount of time that they've already lost through not doing that thing in already. And and but but everything that they want, it's so cliche, but everything that they want is on the other side of that pain when they actually get the rewards. Like business is really shit until you start making money from it and seeing a reward. And then the things that you literally resent in the business, the things that you hate, and I'm I fucking hate these cold calls. Like I hate them so much, they're so shit until they start making your money. And then you suddenly change your neurons and you're like, let me get on those calls, let me start dialing, let me get some nose, let me get some rejections, let me get hung up on today, you know, because you're watching it, and then you're in the gym and you're like, oh, I love this pain, I love the let me get to the gym, I want to feel good, I'm starting to look good, I'm starting to get in shape, you know, I've got pecked for the first time. What is this? You know, and you're coming into this new existence. All the things that you hate and resent in that period when actually you're just resenting the time that it takes in order to get there, because everyone wants it quick, easy, fast. I think it's just so interesting. You are like a living manifestation of doing the hard shit every single day, but it's not hard to you, it's so effortless and so easy, and you love it because you've got the you're on, you're so far on the other side of that.

SPEAKER_04 1:51:36

I think there's a few things though, because like where I'm at right now is like I'm like, you know, stuck or I can't progress or we can't scale harder, or we're not getting, you know, there's always a new new level, new devil. I always just think what's the alternative? Like, are you gonna give up? Like full transparency, you're gonna you're gonna stop. Like, are you a pussy? Because like that actually is like if you don't like it, dude, it's not you stop. But like but stop means death though, because like what are you gonna do? Like, you what are you actually gonna do? Especially because you know I'm 29, going into my 30s, like I don't have options, dude. What am I gonna do? Like, literally nothing. I have this like brand that I've built. I'm not gonna I have to I have to make this work, it has to work.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:17

Thrive or die.

SPEAKER_04 1:52:18

There's no in the middle, and that's why we can go we can go deeper on this too. So my wife is American, I my audience is 80% American. Um, I'm very much, very much more driven towards like extreme capitalism uh attitude, like in terms of you know, in America, this is the reason I'm saying this is because in America there's a huge upside, right? Huge upside to your work, and there's a huge downside, the f the floor keeps falling. Whereas, speaking from Ireland, where I'm from, there is a floorboard. If you hit you hit government fucking payments, and uh there's not that much of a floorboard, uh, you can't fall too far. And it's also not that that not that too much of a climb because of the taxation and how they impact high net worth people. So the incentive to make money isn't there and the decline isn't too bad. It's like, oh, don't worry about it, the government will take care of you. Whereas, like, I've left Ireland for so many years, my wife is American, my wife's dad was actually homeless, would you believe, and grew up in a crack then? So we just get on like a house on fire because for me it's just like it has to work, it has to work, and if it hurts, great. Like I chewed glass for so many years, and like just to give a bit kind of colour on this, like I was building these businesses like 17, 18 years old, and they would fail, and they would hurt so much, and then I would go again. So at 20, you love this story. So at 21, I was into raving. I don't want to tell you the story, man. This is a really cool story. So I was into raving, I was in their print works every single weekend. I just moved to London to work in investment banking, and I fucking hated my job. And I went in, and the first day I went in, everyone was fat, bald, head down, in a grey suit, and they used to tell me that I was like a loser for bringing in lunch boxes. They also told me that I couldn't go to the gym anymore because I had to go to Thursdays, Thursdays. I told them to go fuck themselves. I said, and I never went to one for a year. I was like, fuck you, and going to the gym instead. And um, so I instead immediately, again, it's my ignorance, I was like, I'm out, I'm out of this shit. And I went home and I was still partying and I was going to print works, and I saw that everyone was wearing like really sick rave clothing, like 80s, 90s finish clothing. So I started a clothing company called Urban Kit Clothing. I got clothes from Napoli, dude. Fucking Napoli, and I would store them in my apartment. And don't tell my wife this, but I'd bring back chicks from like nightclubs, and they would see all these fucking boxes, and they're like, What are you doing? And I'm like, I'm selling clothes, dude. So I ended up selling rave clothes to rave kids, and that was like an auto reflex, just like what I need to do, and that did really well, dude. But then cash flow, and I was a kid, and I fucked it up basically. After that, I built a startup straight away, straight away, like it was a straight reflex. I was like, I'm gonna build a tech company. I went home and spent six months building a company, dude. Couldn't get funding, couldn't get anything. It was a shit show, and I think the whole logic is like if it fails, like what else is there to do? Like, I don't have another option, bro. You know, so and I think people don't have that because they think, well, Uncle Sam will fucking bail me out or some shit, you know. So in our in our program, if we ever hear like someone's like, Oh man, I'm putting all this effort and written our and it's really tough. I just say, Good, I'm glad you find this difficult because it is, and I never once said it was gonna be easy. I didn't tell you on our landing page it was gonna be easy, and like now you appreciate the value of it, and you're gonna get the result, and you got the result, and that's fantastic too, you know. But like, I'm glad you find this difficult. I completely agree. It's like personal training, right? Like, you get a coach and they they teach you, and then you gotta go and you gotta like actually do the work in a gym, right? And like then the guy leaves, he's like, I'm exhausted, and it's like good, like I'm glad you hurt.

SPEAKER_02 1:55:50

There is a difference though between personal training three times a week, working nine to five, um, doing the work to get a good lifestyle and to have a successful business, which you already have, and then you know, going as deep as you do into many of these crafts. You want to run an ultramarathon, you're you're working like most simultaneously, like cranking the business, you're already making good cash, you've got a wife, you've got dogs, you've got a beautiful house, you like everything's there. So, like, what is that gap to you? What do you think is what do you think what do you think drives you beyond just because many people work very hard, many people are in shape, many people have a successful business, but not as many people work as hard as you do.

SPEAKER_04 1:56:39

So I wanted to be a professional athlete when I grew up, and all I wanted to do was play professional rugby and play 100 meter track, and I have like a really bad upbringing, like was pushed like way too hard, like grew up in like a really fucked up household. Um, yeah, like really abusive household, really, really bad. So I always wanted to win. I've always just been, and it's only with myself. I don't really give a shit about other people, but it's always been with me. So it was like I was on the track, and it was like the time, what's the time, what's the time, as in like the track time you're running. It's you're not 100 meter sprinting, and it was like time, what's the time, better, worse? And you gotta think of true this lens. You're a young kid, right? You're running at a very high level, and you're always seen as a loser. So that's it. You're always in in a in individual sport, you're a loser until you're a winner, and you're only in a winner until you're a loser again. So that was just burned into my head over and over again. Same with team sports, but why I didn't like team sports as much was because just for the teams I was working with, they were when everyone when you won, it was everyone's winning, but when you lost, it was one person's fault. It's really weird dynamic you should look into sometimes. Um and I hated that. I used to hate that, which I love team sports because like there's one winner, that's one person. You look at you saying bold, like he is the winner, right? And that was all was just etching to my brain. And then when I went into school, so for a context, I blew out my kneecap and I had to give up everything at 17. And at that point, I basically had no school. Like I was in school, but I basically had no school. I was failing, I failed my GCSEs, I got like D's and fucking shit and everything, and then I had like two years to get into college, and I I turned green, my face turned green because I spent all day, every day in the library for two years straight. Two years straight, dude. And I mean all year, and I just got into university. I mean it scraped in. I think I got in by like 10 points, something very, very, very small. And then I went to the university and I was like, oh my god, that was so shit. I gotta make sure that doesn't happen again. And I was all day in the library, every single day. I was one of the last people to get picked for my internship. I was so bad. And I got one of the last positions, and I got there, and I was like, I'm gonna get the best, I'm I wanna make the most out of this. So it's like I have I have to become the best that I can become. I don't give a shit about other people at this. And then one of my close friends, who's actually also a client that we lived together for many years in college, um, he was a really smart kid. I wasn't smart. Uh he liked the gym. He I liked the gym, he wasn't good at the gym. We scored a gym together, and then we decided together. And then for the last year uni, we'd spent all day together. I didn't give a shit if he beat me or not. But he came first in the year, I came seventh, and there's 150 people in the year, and it was just like that relentlessness, just based on yourself, you know. Like you and I can both retire for many years right now, but I that's I just want to get better. So I just look at everything as like a game, you know, and look at like the inputs and outputs, and I have the equation as to what generates the outcome, and I think of that over and over and over again. It's just the on it's just when you meet the unmet potential, you know. I know it's very like podcast bros on a podcast, but it's just like that is the driver, right? Because that's the biggest thing for me is like I want to try this, I want to I want to be great at this because I because you can not that I can, but you anyone can. It's just how long are you willing to check last for? This is a big thing, right? Are you a winner now? So I reframe that, which is like there is no there is okay, let's go deeper on that. There is no winning in the infinite game. The whole goal of the infinite game is to keep on playing. Whereas a finite game has a limit on the actual output, which is why there's a winner and loser. If you look at a football game, the reason why everyone is anxious in the stadium is because it's a finite game. So if you're playing an infinite game with a finite mindset, you invariably can't win. So that's when I had reframed a lot of the my early days from sport, which was like there is no you can't there's no winning in the gym, bro. You just keep training, there's no winning in business, you just keep building, and there's no winning in podcasting, you just keep recording. So knowing that, if someone says to me your engagement is down, I'm like, but there's no price anyway, all right? There's no fucking price anyway. So it's like, oh, what what do I get at the at the end of it, right? Um, and that's the way I kind of like to reframe it. So when people come into the world, that's the way into the ecosystem, should I say, like that's the way we think about things too, right?

SPEAKER_02 2:01:11

So in the context of the infinite game, what is one short to midterm goal you're you're you're looking to achieve, and what is something a lot longer down that game?

SPEAKER_04 2:01:24

I really want to hit a million dollars a month. I just think about it all day, every day. I think I think I think I think about it like 150 times a day. I wake up and I just think about it immediately. It's just it's just tattooed on my brain. It's all I think about. I don't think about anything else, and I just wake up and I work on it and I think about it all the time, and I think about everything I need to do, everything I need to get get rid of, and I just think about it all the time. And I'm in the gym and I think about it, and I have a conversation in a team, and then they're like, oh, let's do this, and I'm like, but it doesn't contribute to that goal, and I just think about it forever. I've not I don't think I've not thought about it for I think it's when I had got to like 50k a month or 100k a month, like a few years a few years ago, I was like, I can do it, and I had to become that person initially. I have to think like that person to make those actions like that person to do those things, and it's just I just think about it all the time.

SPEAKER_02 2:02:18

And what does that do for you? The idea of achieving that for me.

SPEAKER_04 2:02:27

I think it's it's the it's a thing that no one can do. It's like point 0.04% of entrepreneurs ever in the world have ever done it. There's businesses that have ever done the entire world, a 10 million year business. Yeah, 0.04% of the entire world. Businesses, not people, imagine people's even less that have ever done that. It's that hard to do. It's like the most difficult thing to do in the business context. And bear in mind that's a cash flow business now. Because I'm like, again, I come from software, right? Like software, they don't make that much money, they sell for a lot of money, right? But they don't and I worked at the biggest companies in the world, they don't make that much money, dude. Like they they do make obviously, there's obviously they're obviously making a lot of revenue, some of them. But I mean, when you see someone like Gwillaine, for instance, who Gwillaine from uh Lemless, I think they got to like 40 million a year, but before that, right, like that's a very nuanced case, right? A lot of companies get to like four or five million a year, then they sell for like 50 million a year, 100 million a year, but actually to get to 10 million a year in revenue is like extremely difficult to do, and I think it's just like yeah, this is something I just think about all the time, man. Fucking all I think about it all the time.

SPEAKER_02 2:03:38

Do you think when you hit that one mil you'll take a moment to sit in it? Or do you think the next day you'll wake up and it'll be 10?

SPEAKER_04 2:03:50

Like, I'm not crazy, like I do realize that like you have to be very grateful what you are, and me and my wife will stop always and frequently and do think about that stuff, you know. Even last night at dinner, you know, just went to a beautiful restaurant, as I said to you earlier, and we always do really appreciate, especially like the mastermind before them, like before the mastermind started, we were sitting in a four million fucking villa, and I was like, How the fuck did we get here? You know, so we do appreciate in that moment. I just think that I just want to always do more things, you know. So I do think that like um I will always have more goals, but they will also be different goals. So I give you, for instance, like software is a big thing that I that I do want to really nail, and also writing. I want some dyslexic and I was told to never read or write. Bear in mind, in school I was told to never read or write, and in my last year of exams in school, the day of my exams, I was told to not take them. You fucking believe that, bro, because someone else should write them for me. Um, so I want to write a book and I want to send it to my teachers. I don't know what fuck themselves. But actually, what's ironic was I actually have a lot of the book written uh already, but I just basically want to make get better receipts and then rewrite it. Do you get me?

SPEAKER_00 2:05:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:05:06

Um so that could be that could be pretty soon, do you get me? But they're like adjacent goals to like the rec because like there's like a revenue goal, but then like they're like adjacent goals, which is the impact goals, and also to make a million dollars a month, you gotta impact a lot of people, right? You don't make a million a month selling snake oil, you have to have a huge, strong business of results, change people's lives, change people's businesses, impact people. There's a lot of things, and I thought about this very deeply. There's so much things. You should ask Will about this. I like sat in Will's kitchen the other day, like drawing this out, and I'm like, bro, this is how it works. Because there has to be so much brand equity and love for what you do from other people for that to ever happen. I think so. Anyway, um does that make sense? And that fits into the broader thing, but for me, that's the they're like my highest, they're my highest values because I'm married already, so I don't have like I don't need to get married again, you know. So this is like the only thing that I work on because I'm already done that stuff. Does that make sense? 100% ma'am. Can't wait to observe it. Yeah, and I this is the thing, I don't say it as if I'm going to get there.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:05

That's the thing, is that I there is there is there is no doubt that you that it's physically impossible that you won't get there.

SPEAKER_04 2:06:13

Yeah, it's just time, right? Like I wanted to do time. I wanted to do it before I was 30.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:17

Yeah, you know that's ambitious, but like I know, I have like eight months left.

SPEAKER_04 2:06:23

It's not impossible, yeah. And genuinely, like that's what I so we we quantified it. It was like 300 taking calls a day. Um 300 taking calls a month. Because we have so much agency clients, right? You get me? You'll have a big swing. It's not new revenue, that's the whole thing. It's it's swing revenue. That's the whole point of this. This is the reason why we created the ecosystem was that it's like 60% in reoccurring and then 40% in new, or something like that. How it worked out. Does that make sense? 100%. It's it can't be new, right? Like a fucking I'm not fucking crazy, right? It has to be like a bigger, broader organization, corporation with swing revenue that comes in monthly, you know? So I'm not fucking crazy, right? That's that's how we thought about it. Um, because full transparency, like that's where most of our money comes from, anyway. You know? From upsells and cross-sells? No, no, no, just retainers, like retainers coming in, and I'll give you, for instance, like so for Apex, Apex isn't paid all up front, it's 50% up, and then it's 50% out over six months. So like that's a lot of money that's coming in every month, right? So it it just gives it we do big depends.

SPEAKER_02 2:07:28

R1's on 50% up and 50%. They can do painful if they want to, you know. But there's a low uptake on painful?

SPEAKER_04 2:07:35

Um, no, some people do painful.

SPEAKER_02 2:07:37

Fine. But you're optimizing for the retention piece.

SPEAKER_04 2:07:40

Well, optimizing for revenue. So like if people want to pay it up front, you prefer PIF. Yes, but I mean, like, I don't want someone to not pay so they can do the split. But this is like, you know, this is tens of thousands they're sending, right? This is different because it's a seven-figure program. It's guys that are making seven figures, so it's a different uh different beast, should I say? Uh and a lot of guys that do big mentorships do that. Like I even saw one yesterday which was like 2,000 for the first month, 3,000 for the next month, and 4,800 a month for 10 months. You know, such a beautiful model. Yeah. You know, such a beautiful model. Expectations less too, by the way. Because you haven't spent spent all the money on one go.

SPEAKER_02 2:08:18

Yeah. What's the what's the uh the acquisition pace for the the guys coming into Apex who are already eight, seven things?

SPEAKER_04 2:08:25

Uh it's interesting. So people come in through the main landing page. So it's like scale your business to 30k a month is like the promise promise. 30k plus a month, and then we figure out why they are, and then it's based on approximity and speed. So it's how fast you want to go. Uh, do you want to be close to Darren and his team? Do you want to be slower? And how fast do you want to get there? And then also, do you need help with sales in terms of setters and closers? And if they do, they're better fit for there. So we have some guys that are beginners, not beginners, but yeah, beginners, like plum active beginners, they just don't want to fucking be in a group call and they want to come in there. It's still a group call, by the way, but it's a closer group, but only like a small, small group. Uh there is one-to-one access to for for sure. But then it's guys in that really want to like scale the shit up with us. So you got a few a lot of agencies in there too, and um a lot of guys that have because we build companies like us off organic, right? So the big thing we do is just sales. So again, if you're doing organic plus your own setting, well, if you just have three setters, it's like way more money. And it's very obvious, right? We have this conversation with someone, it's like we just we just 10x the amount of conversations a day. How much is that gonna make? It's gonna make a lot of money, yeah. You know, provided there's a good offer and the volume the offer's already validated in the market, you know. So a lot of guys who said this? Ah I don't know who said this, but basically it's like I think Matt Gray said this, which was like people wily underestimate how much volume they need to do, right? Like how much numbers you need to hit. If you look at your numbers properly, like how much does like a million a month look like, how much calls you need, okay, how much DMs a day do you need to send to warm prospects or whatever, how much lead flow is in there in general? Like the numbers get so scary, and that's why people don't track them. You can hide, you can hide in the grey, you know? 100%. That's why you know people that are slightly overweight don't weigh themselves every day because they know that they're like overweight by five kilos. It's not too much to lose it, but it's not enough that people notice it apart from co-workers. It's very interesting to observe in the grey area.

SPEAKER_02 2:10:26

I'm I could sit here and unpacking that for the next hour and go down another complete rabbit hole. Do it one and go down another rabbit hole, and and I'm very conscious of the of the of the listener who probably is now thinking, actually, no, please stay on this thing. But we can go down another rabbit hole for an hour, which I kind of want to do off camera because I've got a few questions I've I've got a few there that you might want to not disclose. But I just want to finish up with one question. We're talking very high-level revenue, getting to a million a month, etc. If you can bring yourself back to you know trying just to crack that first hundred thousand dollar month in the in the agency, what is maybe the one most pivotal or the most important thing on getting from zero to ten? And then from ten to a hundred, how would you see that transition?

SPEAKER_04 2:11:10

Zero to ten is volume of sales message you send a day, one hundred percent. Every single day I woke up in Singapore, I woke up at four o'clock in the morning with the biggest pain of anxiety in my chest. I would race my laptop and send out 200 and 300 messages. I would send out messages all day, all morning until the sun came up and until I physically couldn't type anymore, and then I would go to the gym. Four o'clock till 12 o'clock every single morning, 100%. Got me clients, got people on calls. I was booking up more booking up more calls on my own than I am on a sales team right now. Because I was just hammering messages instantly, lemlist, into LinkedIn, just banging, sales nav, comments, who's posting on my comments, just just it's all acquisition. Like there is no retention, so it's just acquisition. So if you have 100 energies in a day or your day's out of 100%, 100% of your day should be based on acquisition. There should be nothing else. Why does it matter how good your agency service is? It doesn't fucking matter. Under the theory of constraints, that's the only constraint you have right now is acquisition of customers. So just do that and then spend the evening because you don't have any clients reading about sales. Like if you don't have money, just read it. Just read gap selling and just re-gap selling like a thousand times, and every single day just read the same page over and over again. That's just the only book you need on sales. And then read gap selling, and then just send hundreds of messages every single day. That's all you need to do, and you will get signed clients. And then going from the 10 to 100, the biggest thing is finding the right clients. So clients that are actually not going to churn or not guys are gonna come in for 60 days and just leave, right? So identifying, do they have enough cash flow? So are they gonna be broke themselves? Like, you know, are these just inherently broke people with broke mindsets, or people that can have the cash so that you can get good results for, not like amazing results for, but good results for that they stick and it's good customer experience there. And then I think the big un unlock for us was the revenue component, right? So it was looking at ways that how can we provide additional help for these people and take a revenue share of that. So whether it's sponsorships, product sales, add attribution to sales or whatever that may be, you can get like it's your business, right? So you can do whatever the fuck you want, right? If you get on a call with someone, you're like, we have this unique way to do a commission split, and then they're like, okay, perfect, like do that. So I'll give you an example. We have one client right now, Andrew, and Andrew's a great guy, and uh we went from like 4K a month to 25k a month with him, fitness agency, with content only, and then we basically had a conversation and I was like, right, you can build an agent an education piece or you can bro scale it. He goes, Let's bro scale it, right? Perfect. He works for real estate agents in America, he was doing retainer only. Now he's doing the retainer is 6k a month. Now he's doing 2k retainer plus 10% of the closed deal, or 20%. So basically that allows him to scale up. So now he needs like 10 clients, which is perfectly fine. He's an SEO agency, and they're gonna pay him like 20k, 20 to 40k, roughly, and then he'll have that uh the tailwind kick in. So then he'll have an extra 50k to 100k kick in at the back of it. That's it.

SPEAKER_02 2:14:07

Awesome, man.