SPEAKER_01 0:00

Like everyone wants to get straight into the problem solving, but you have to think, why are you stuck below 100k? I love school and I love learning and like that curiosity, and I think that's what like separates some entrepreneurs from others.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

You scale to 500k in eight months launching your agency. What's the secret to getting that quick growth?

SPEAKER_01 0:17

The secret was probably that even when we very first started, we were very big on a f. Even in our first 18 months, we closed three billion dollar brands.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

As far as client acquisition for the agency, getting high value clients, are you seeing them coming in on YouTube?

SPEAKER_01 0:31

I already know this. Most other agencies, my competition, are focusing on that. What we do is we just when we create marketing, we're not trying to do a big knockout punt. We want to do little micro yes. This is the most important part, I think. It is the multi-step qualification and making sure that you're only taking on serious people. Because when you there's about 60,000 digital marketing agencies in the USA alone, how are you going to stand out?

SPEAKER_00 0:54

What do you think is the biggest mistake that people make, like below 100k? Like what's the thing that stops them getting to that point? Alicia, you scale to 500k in eight months of launching your agency. What's the secret to getting that quick growth when you're bootstrapped as well?

SPEAKER_01 1:14

When you're getting started, it's just totally sacrificing your sanity and your health, you know? For us, the secret was probably that even when we very first started, we were very big on authority building and building our personal brand. So even in our first 18 months, we closed three billion dollar brands LinkTree, Wayfly, or Kogan, before we had a sexy website or anything like that. But we'd always gone very hardcore on brand and authority. And I think that's what helped us to hit to hit that initially, but also being good at sales.

SPEAKER_00 1:46

Did that authority come from previous experience that you had? And what was that?

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Yes, so definitely leveraging like where I had come from. So I worked at King Kong for about three years and built out their sales funnel and CRO team from scratch. So I was one of their first team members, you know, blah, blah, blah. Did like 400 websites, funnels, landing pages in like 120 niches. And then after that, I went to a company called Founder. So Founder magazine, if you know them, same thing. Went in to go and help them build out their CRO and sales funnel team and launching seven and eight-figure courses. So that definitely helps to use to use that. But also when we first started, and I was in Founder and I was side hustling, we would be just taking on anything to try and build case studies. So even from the very early days, now I like my team are incentivized for case studies. Like that's like our North Star metric. But even when we first started, we knew that that was social proof. So every single client we would bring on board, and I used to sell $400 CRO audits when I was side hustling, right? Like I think people hear all these big numbers, like, oh yeah, my agency does 1.5 million, whatever. Like we make this on product sales, but they forget there's no such thing as overnight success. Like we started working for free and then we increased our um amounts. And I remember the first time when we were side hustling and I closed a client for like 11k, like a funnel, and I was like, oh my god, like it just totally broke my brain in my own self-belief. I was like, oh my god, $11,000. Now I wouldn't even like, I wouldn't even give a shit. I'd just be like, what, whatever. But that's the thing, and I think um along the journey as well, it's so important to celebrate these little little milestones.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

So you started off with the authority piece, which is I think the piece that people like one, two, three years into the agency, like, oh, maybe I should start a brand now, maybe I'll start putting out content. Like I think that's changing at the moment in the industry, but you've obviously done that from the start. Um, where did you begin as far as like building your authority was concerned? Or we're talking about putting out content on Instagram, like what are we what are we looking at from a tangible perspective?

SPEAKER_01 3:50

Yeah, so in year one, where we focused was um going on other people's podcasts, kind of thinking like little parasite, right? Going onto their podcast, didn't even bother starting my own, so a lot of podcasts. Um and additionally, then it was also LinkedIn. LinkedIn was huge for us in the first like year, two years. We still use it, but for me now, that because my following has got quite big, it's a bit diluted. Whereas my business partner, he we can see from the UTMs, he's still bringing in leads, but now mine has more gone broad with a bunch of marketers on LinkedIn. Also, LinkedIn's a bit of a like circle jerk, so we don't go on it as much, it's not our main platform. And then two years ago, we added in YouTube, and that's what we've gone hardcore on, which you're obviously a master of. I'm still learning, but happy to share what we do there. So to answer your question, when we first started, it was going on other people's podcasts and it was our LinkedIn and becoming that thought leader, right? I was telling you before we got started, there's about 60,000 digital marketing agencies in the USA alone, 10% up from last year. How are you going to stand out from them? And so we got started with this early because we have always been obsessed with assets for leverage, and these things take time to compound, right? And we know because we study a lot of Dan Kennedy, that it doesn't matter what you do, it matters who you are. So it's like that authority really gives you that pricing power and even what we call this thing called the confidence tax, right? And as we started to build more of this, we were able to move from charging like $400 for those CRO audits to $40,000 for a funnel project before I learnt MRR is what you need in your agency.

SPEAKER_00 5:28

Nice. So what we're really talking about here is you you just spearheaded your brand by building authority from day one. So almost the market's like, who is this? Like, who is this person? Like, and how do I how do I work with them? You uh started off with LinkedIn. I resonate with LinkedIn being a tough platform. I recently came back to LinkedIn. I used to use LinkedIn a lot. Funny enough, I reached out to the and spoke to the guys at founder in a very early stages. I was in digital publishing way back when on LinkedIn. And recently we started posting again, and I'm like, What this is just a completely different game from YouTube. What is the strat as far as YouTube is concerned when it comes to client acquisition? Because I'm interested in your perspective. In the early days of my agency, we would post a lot of content on how to run Facebook ads and so on, and we found that the lead quality that we get was quite low quality and didn't sustain us long term in the business. So I'm interested in your perspective now as far as client acquisition for the agency, getting high value clients. Are you seeing them coming in on YouTube? And then how are you how are you thinking about attracting those people?

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Yes, and and keeping in mind we do a lot of DQ from our YouTube, like disqualifying people. So we do get a lot of leads where they never even make it into the calendar because they get DQ'd. And then the other thing with YouTube is we want to make sure that we're monetizing that attention, right? So for the longest time we had up, it was like a $17 offer, a $147 upsell, a $17 order bump, and I'm such a naughty marketer. Like I didn't even, it was like once it was up, the product was awesome. That was another thing for asset for leverage. We knew we wanted to build a list of customers, and now we have like 2,000 customers or whatever, and it was generating maybe like 7k to 15k a month USD, which is good, right? To like when you're like a small agency, that's a that's a happy little bit of money. But with YouTube, because when I've analyzed the the clients and how they come in, it's important to remember that this exists in context, right? And YouTube's just the world's second largest search engine. So for us, there's three types of leads that we bring in. 80% of the leads are founders because they're usually doing like, let's say, one million to like eight million dollars. They're still in the marketing, but they're like actively searching funnels, landing pages, etc. And that's how they find me. So when we first started the YouTube channel, and I spent thousands of dollars on like Homrosy team, Mr. Beast team, Gary V team, random consultants and stuff, and I was still really slow to figure this out. But what we do is we just wanted to step into a circle and own it. So we focused on landing pages and funnels. That's it. Because I already know this, most other agencies, my competition are focusing on ads. That's it. And then at some point you can't scale, right? Like you can't scale traffic that doesn't convert. So at some point in their journey, these founders go, bloody hell, like nothing's working. Or like the stories that we've heard where someone's like, yeah, I messaged like my freelancer was annoying the shit out of me. Like I just went on YouTube and I found you straight away and I knew I had to book a call. So I mean, do I sometimes get bored of landing page content?

SPEAKER_02 8:26

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

And you can kind of see in my trajectory where I've got shiny object syndrome, I get a little bit bored of talking about that. But so that's the main way that we see people coming in. So we make the content for that. And then for YouTube, you just have to make sure you don't optimize for the ego, right? Because I can very easily make a video about um, you know, how I made 500k from this as an agency owner. And the number one thing agency owners love is seeing how other agency owners are doing stuff. Like I could very easily do that, but it wouldn't help me to hit my goal, which is to bring in those types of clients. So after this whole journey with YouTube, what I've found is there's three things that if you nail them, and this is not revolutionary, but if you nail them, then you make it of money, right? Number one is the idea. The ideation, and that's where most people get stuck. So when we're doing ideation, we use do use a tool called one of ten to see to find outliers. You're welcome. Free of charge. You can have it.

SPEAKER_03 9:24

I'll keep that.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

You can have that one. So it's called one of ten, and it shows you the outliers of all of the videos, right? So we just go through, we do um niche, we do outside of niche, we do ideation, um, and then there's sales calls. So what questions are coming in on the sales calls? As an example, on our sales calls, we might be getting very commonly we made a video into this, which was, yeah, it's really frustrating because my agency uses me to add leads forms, all of the leads are shit, blah, blah, blah. Cool. I just make a video on that. Now, does it get 20 million views? No, but I'm not Mr. Beast. Like, I don't care. You know, like my ad revenue ever is like $4,000. Like, I don't care. Like, I can make, like, I'm not a creator, I can make money otherwise. So there's the ideation, like how to come up with good ideas, and then it's the packaging. So the title and the thumbnail. But ever since I watched, I don't know if you know who Adley, I think it's Adley Kings Kinsman.

SPEAKER_02 10:15

I heard.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Yeah. She did a presentation um at a mastermind I was in, and she spoke about like the hook and the visual hook. So now in our videos, we won't even move something to scripting, which is step three, until we have the hook and the hook visuals. Now the problem is, and this all goes back to what we were talking about before, right? There's levels to the game. There's levels to the game. And you don't start out out the gate being awesome. So, like my first videos, I look like I'm in a hostage proof of life video. Um, the we the webcam was so shit that it couldn't even go full screen, so we had to put a border around the videos. It looks like my partner Matt's off screen, like, talk about funnels, like be happy, and I got like no makeup on. I look awful. However, our first one of our first videos brought in two clients, high-ticket clients. So that was enough because it took me, it took me 563 days to hit my first 1,000 subscribers. But I made money from the first couple. And then over time, I've just been a bit dumb sometimes, but just keep dialing it in. I don't even know what question you asked me, but that's what I know about YouTube.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

It's the perfect answer. It's perfect. And and you're absolutely right. That the people optimise for views and optimise for clout on YouTube. And don't realise that those small I say this all the time to the team. I will argue with my content manager all the time, and I'll say, I've got this video, I'm I need to put this video out because I know this video is going to resonate with the audience. Yes. I know it's going to get the right kind of people. And it will absolutely flop as far as views are concerned. But I get more DMs, more calls booked, more everything by that video than these videos that will get 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100,000 views. And I think that's a really key lesson that people need to take from this, is like the hyper focused, the hyper niche videos, the really specific stuff that isn't gonna get you the cloud is gonna get you clients.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

Yes. And the goal is to go like niche viral, right? And so for me, if I have a really good video and it might do like even when I first started, my videos were getting like 50 views, and I was like, ah, 50 people? Like now it's like, no, if it's not like over 2k, and you're probably more like 20k, 200k, where you're like, why did I do this? Like, what was the point? And that's the thing, there are levels to the game, and so these really good, valuable niche pieces of content, even from me as a buyer, the amount of times I've gone to YouTube to solve something, I've hired copywriters, I've hired different agencies and stuff from going to YouTube, watching a few of their videos and going, Yep, you know what you're talking about, hopefully, and then like I've booked in with them. And that's the exact same thing that happens for us. So it's like, yeah, not worrying about whether you're going to get heaps of views, but whether you're gonna get the right eyeballs. And kind of to your point, making sure you as the founder stay obsessed. Because when we've done like with the who, the target market, because when we're brought on some of these consultants, they're like, you gotta go broader, way broader, go broader. I'm like, babe, that's not like I'm not trying to be the next homozy right now. Like, I'm just trying to bring in clients for my agency. I don't think that I need to go broader. And you can if you go and look at my YouTube, you can see it. There's a video on there. It's called something like 10 ways to make money in your sleep, or some bullshit like that. And that was from working with a consultant. And one, it flopped, but two, it felt icky. Like, I it's like I didn't really have like the authority to be talking about that at the time. And so for us, good YouTube content that brings in clients is to show what's uniquely yours. Because now with AI, anyone can go and scrape all of my stuff and probably say something that sounds like mean is good, but the thing that they can't steal is these like power of demonstration and storytelling. So every time we do something, all we make sure is that we're showing case studies, which is what my team, that's like their whole North Star metric, is feeding these case studies, and then the wins that go into our wins channel as well. So, for example, a win went in the other day. A client got a 91% show-up rate for a 25 to 75k product, like like coaching product, right? Because we're very good at what we do. And then I just make a video on that and break it down, but no one can steal that story. It's unique to me. So whenever somebody's getting stuck, it's like that's that for us has been the winner, like these unique stories, and then you never run out of ideas as well.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

I resonate with that so much because it's the exact same strategy that we use, and actually, only really the last three months have shifted on to case study, how it worked, and then the implementation of that. And it works so well. Uh I had a I have a friend in the YouTube space who who's changed their videos to go very broad by the advice of someone, a big YouTube consultant who I won't name, started hitting millions of views, messaged me only a couple of months ago saying, How many calls are you getting on YouTube per month? They were getting the same amount of views with 10 uh same amount of calls with the 10 times the amount of views that we were getting, and now they just shifted the content right back down to just being being really niche, which is actually not the easiest thing to do because you've created this new audience and now I'm happy with you, and you start getting dislike, and so so you've got to stay tunnel vision on that. Can you give us a picture of what like the whole funnel looks like? So is YouTube the true top of funnel for you? And and if not, what is? And then and then what are you bringing people into? Is it still on audit, and then is there is a a couple of different packages? What are we looking at?

SPEAKER_01 15:15

Yep, so our top of funnel is really YouTube. We've run some ads as well, like because we're scaling, so it made sense to start running ads for that predictability. Oh my god, the Facebook ads leads compared to YouTube leads, like just totally different. Our YouTube leads, the lead to sales time, close rate, etc. Like our referrals are obviously very good. YouTube's even better. Because like they already know what they want, like they've already decided, right? So, anyway, so topper funnel, we'll have LinkedIn, we'll have YouTube, we'll have podcasts. I talk at a lot of events, I mean as many as I can fly to. Uh, that's really like our main top of funnel channels and referrals. That all then moves into there's like a landing page with a video on it. It's like pretty standard, similar to like what a like a Charlie Morgan or like a Ravi would have on on like where they're pushing all of their YouTube. And then this is the most important part, I think. It is the multi-step qualification and making sure that you're only taking on serious people because when you're doing content, you're gonna bring in a broad range of people, right? So you need to make sure that you're DQing disqualifying people. That's like the most important part. Then it's a calendar booking page, they book in X percent people don't book in. Let's just say, um, typically, even with us and our clients, it's like 40 to 80 percent of people will book in, and then our setters or whoever will like make sure that they actually show up. Then we have the call. Then on the back end, like what do we sell and what's next? Then on that, all we do is funnels and ads. We have absolutely like dialed it in. A lot of people be like, hey, you should add email marketing. You should add, do you do TikTok? No. I do Google Ads and I do meta ads, and I'm very, very good at them. And I don't work with any e-comm, I don't work with like any info for that agency service. All we do is we bring in high-ticket like high-ticket um products, services, whatever, and then we book high qualified leads on a call. That's it. If you have that problem, then we're then we are for you. And that niching, although we're still dialing it in, helps a lot, right? Because people want to work with someone who gets what they do, and then they come on board and we run the ads. Does that answer the funnel question?

SPEAKER_00 17:24

It it absolutely answers the question. It's interesting. So you the ads is more like a back-end high ticket, like a like an upsell to the the funnels, or is it given that people?

SPEAKER_01 17:32

You come in for both. So because of the way that we position the content, I don't ideally, I don't really want to work with people who are new to paid ads necessarily, unless it's like a slam dunk for us, which would be something in the investment space, the finance space, because we've done it a bajillion times. Because to have to figure out that messaging and that offer and the funnel, etc., it's hard. Like I think we all know as agency owners, most businesses have, unless you may be in the e-com space where they actually like understand marketing, but I work in Legion, not local, high like high ticket, usually national, multinational. And they often confume marketing as an expense, not as an investment. So I need them to have gone through some sort of pain until they actually value what we do. And then it's very easy because I know where they've come from. They've gone, damn, like this isn't converting. Why does why doesn't my agency test more ads? Why don't they run a funnel? And then I can easily break down the economics in one of our sheets and go, yeah, so your landing page is at 2%, your show-up rates at 40%, and your qualified like that you're talking to is at 20%. Now let me show you what we're doing for other clients. And like then I can go, cool. So if we could make you get not even that good, here's where your ROI would go. So in terms of the sale, like in terms of the sales process, we don't even necessarily do an audit unless it's like I'm really unsure. Because I can literally tell straight away, yeah, babe, here's why it's not scaling. They've got two ads running for 100K a month and they're not testing anything, and your landing page is a heap of shit. Like, and so to remove the friction though, what we do is no locking contracts. No locking contracts. It's just like uh we vet them, we make sure that you're a good fit before you come on board, and then if I'm making you money, why would you leave? And that's what we do. So we don't offer guarantees, but we offer that no lock-in contract, which clients are usually very happy to have, unless when we're working with bigger clients where they start to ascend into more of that like percentage of ad spend, and then they want to know how much is it gonna be, and then we'll do like a three-month agreement based on ad spend projections.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

So on a no-lock-in, presuming like 30 roll 30-day rolling.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

What does that mean for you know the time that it takes to build the funnel? Like how long do you usually have to allow for that? Because presumably the given is people will just stay for multiple months anyway, because it the first month's gonna be a build-up.

SPEAKER_01 19:49

And this is the thing, right? There's that investment from getting that first thing. But we like we don't set unrealistic expectations. And I've been working in agencies for like 10 years, which means I've been on the fulfillment side of the whole like sell it and like don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness. And it's a shit show for the fulfillment team. So my goal is, well, how do we just not have that happen? So we say to them, hey, don't expect to make profits in the first 90 days. Like, we'll like we'll like be like very like, hey, like you in and if they're brand new, hey, don't come on board unless you're like willing to for this to not work. Because marketing is not a sure surefire thing, and that doesn't seem to impact the close rate at all, but it does impact the retention rate of the client because they have very different expectations coming in when they get started with us.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Do you set like a roadmap of exactly through a time period?

SPEAKER_01 20:39

So the way that it works behind the scenes is that when a client comes on board and we get started during that funnel stage, and we do not take on any clients unless we build their funnels like at all. Like I'm not sending it to your website, I'm not sending it to some shit landing page a freelancer did.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

From the ground up, or will you rebuild one of the existing buildings?

SPEAKER_01 20:54

From the ground up. Because is it useful if I tell people what we do behind the scenes? 100%. Okay, let me tell you, let me tell you, here's something I prepared earlier. When a client comes on board, um, our funnel and all like the build the build phase, we go through a couple of phases. But the first and the most important that we do with them is the research phase, right? So pretty much no marketing agency ever, no internal marketing team ever has ever like surveyed their clients. So we do that. We get all of their sales call strength transcripts and then we put them through AI. Blah, blah, blah. And then a bunch of like additional third-party research. This stuff used to take me 40 to 100 hours. Now I was like, I was doing it on AI and like re-prompting the end of the day, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is crazy what we can do. But that's because we have we know the questions to ask and we have the data and we know how to use it, right? So it's like not gonna replace us, but it helps us to speed up making that like initial recipe. So we do a lot of research to understand that. Our goal is to understand their target market better than any of their competitors can. Like crawl into their brains and understand how do they describe their problems, their dream outcomes, etc. Because I know that marketing. Just inputs and outputs. Garbage in, garbage out. So most of the time when it doesn't work, people are feeding the machine garbage or feeding it nothing. They don't actually understand how the target market articulates their problems, their desires, etc., which means that when they write their copy, it falls flat. It doesn't connect with anybody. So that's the first stage is this research. Once we've done the research, then we can do the strategy. So when a client comes to us, typically they can't scale cold for whatever reason, or if they haven't started cold, that's because they haven't got a message to market fit on cold. They've usually maybe scaled through word of mouth, referrals, whatever, right? But that same thing, like it's like that's not going to translate onto a cold. It's very different when you're working on cold. So we work out their messaging, their offer, their differentiation, all of this stuff, right? In saying that though, when we bring on a client, they have to have certain ingredients. Like if it's like target market, clear target market, messaging, like I can make them an authority, social proof, and the offer is the ingredient that we can come up with. So that's that's the strategy, and then we execute. But what most people do is they'll just start executing, writing copy, doing design, doing the build. That's like the easy part. It's it's that stuff beforehand. So when a client comes on board to answer that initial question, that's what we do to get that up and running. At the same time, we're getting the ads ready. What we do is we're very like what we've been going very bullish on is those AI avatar ads. And not being like, hey, like it's a fake person. Hey, this I brought this, I bought this product, blah, blah, blah. Nothing like that, nothing unethical. But because we've collected all of these stories and language in that research phase, we can now not get stuck by because the CEO doesn't want to go on camera, or we can't get UGC. So it's like, um, hey, like I work at this company and we do this, blah, blah, blah, and we help these people, and we can do this for them. So then we have a bunch of ads, and then as you know, it's just about testing and scaling and trying to find winners very quickly. In that back end, we are doing a lot of CRO. So how this looks is in this first part, we're setting a 90-day game plan. Okay, it's very easy, right? The whole point of marketing is to hit a business's goals. Where are you now? Where do you want to be in 90 days? And sometimes, like, we know clients don't even know that, which means that we are not on the same page for what is success, right? I'm trying to get them onto what is, and it's like, no, 30 days ago you told me this was success. This is not success now. We already decided. So it's like, okay, in 90 days, this is success, but it also means why does somebody leave an agency? Because it's nothing new, exciting going on. We have to have like goals, gamification, things that we're unlocking. So we have that 90-day game plan, we do all their economics, etc. Then every month we have a monthly marketing and sales sync. So it's like, heck, that's like it's like a cool brainstorming thing. And the way that I train my team is have fun on the calls. Like, I want people excited to attend this with you. Marketing should be the highlight of their day. So make like we do a lot of training and whatever to make these calls really fun. And then weekly, I guess maybe that's what all agencies do, but a loom video, what we did last week, what we're doing this week, any blockers, and then we have other little touch points throughout the week. So that's in a nutshell what we do. End monologue, talking stick to you.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

I love it, and that's so valuable for people to hear. It's amazing. The AI Avatar thing is very interesting. You're using HeyGen to create those. Yeah. And you're getting so you're just to affirm that you're using a tool like HeyGen to create founder-driven creators, face-to-cam creators.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

So you can use the founder, but like none of them, like if they don't have a brand, it doesn't even matter, right? So I did a video on this on my YouTube recently. We use HeyGen. But the thing is, when it comes to marketing, there's an equation that makes things work, right? It's psychology plus economics times technology. Technology is an accelerator. 1000 times zero is still zero, right? Like if you have a shiny sports car and you can't drive it, it's useless. It's the same as all of this AI stuff. And so with these AI avatars, sure, the AI avatar thing is cool and it unlocks us, but it's an accelerator. If we understand the psychology and if we got the sir from the surveys and the AI transcripts, the calls from the sales calls, if we can make good scripts and good stories and good what Dan Kennedy would call dog whistle language, where someone's like, that's for me. Like they hear it and that's for me. So, yes, that was my disclaimer on AI Avatar adds good if you have the right inputs for the scripting.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

It's it's it's it's exactly the same as the YouTube conversation, like the in the sense that like if the messaging is bad, then it's not going to perform, and the messaging is everything. But so many people put so much emphasis on their editing or their look and just like everything. And let me just make sure I've got something unique about me, like the whole mosey nose thing. And it's like that stuff doesn't matter. I think they want this. Yeah. If your script is sh or if your message is shit. And so the script is the most important. We've had terrible, I mean, you've seen the same terrible before uh terrible terrible visual ads in the sense that we just we haven't got access to a good camera, had nothing there's nothing high production, just a little selfie video, but the script is so much better than this high production thing that we spent weeks preparing for, we've got all this emotion attached to, and this little shitty selfie just outperformed it because the script and the message was better. So yeah. You you are transcribing cool, just I don't want to miss that bit. You're transcribing cool recordings, sales cool recordings as well, and tying that into the whole messaging picture.

SPEAKER_01 27:26

And finding patterns in there. Love that.

SPEAKER_00 27:27

That is that's a hack.

SPEAKER_01 27:29

That's also how we come up with good YouTube videos as well.

SPEAKER_00 27:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:32

Like just put it through the right prompting um and it will tell you out of these last 10, 20, 100 sales calls, this was the common thing, and then you just package it up properly and you make a video on it, and then that's the the feedback loop, the machine to keep bringing in more of that person, right?

SPEAKER_00 27:49

Yeah, I love that. So you're working with massive multimillion dollar companies like Wayflyer. Um, but you're also working with startups as well.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

Yeah. Startups are like they have to have money.

SPEAKER_00 28:03

Fine.

SPEAKER_01 28:03

Because like so they have to be over a million in revenue.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

Fine.

SPEAKER_01 28:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

Okay, fine. Well, that kind of answers my question, which was going to be how do you differentiate pricing between those two? It's the same. It's the same. Interesting. And then there's a performance model attached as well.

SPEAKER_01 28:16

Yeah, so we do a retainer, and then um, and this is something that I'm like not a hundred percent sold on, and there might be a better way, but we do a retainer or 15% of ad spend, whichever is higher. The thing that's annoying is once you scale somebody, they don't want to go from paying the retainers. That's why we've bumped up our retainers. So it's like it's less of a jump, right? It's like it starts to scale. What I see other agencies do, and I'd be interested to hear your opinion, is to do a flat retainer plus 10% of ad spend, no matter what. And I think that that's gonna be what I need to do.

SPEAKER_00 28:52

That's yeah, that's what we've done for a long time. It's standard for sure. Um, yeah, because the conversation, you know, no matter how much you can prep in the sales core, we always we used to say, Oh, and what you're gonna just so you know, what you're gonna be paying us now is gonna be dwarfed what you're gonna be paying us in three months' time. And no matter how much time you set that expectation, when it comes, they still think you're being greedy and all of a sudden you're getting something that you didn't agree to. But yeah, we do the percentage of ad spend from day one in always.

SPEAKER_01 29:13

Yeah, and I think that's what we need to do, but that's also like that comes down to like client selection and leverage and stuff. What we're kind of talking about pre-call is like, okay, how do you bring in the right clients and build those right partnerships? Because what I see a lot of agencies get wrong is that they want to just bring in heaps of clients, right? And that's a model, but you have to know whether you're a boutique or a mill. Like which one are you? And I heard Eddie Malouf talking about this um on one of his YouTube videos, and Matt and I realized who's my business partner and partner, that we were straddling mill mill and boutique. We were giving this boutique service with mill pricing, and so over time, what I've learned being a business owner is there's more to than sales and marketing, right? Like, you have to know finances. Have you heard of that before? Yeah. So I had to learn that, and that's been for me the biggest thing to unlock because making money and managing money are two different things, and I know that personally because I'm very into like my personal finances and investing, but really getting granular and and like psychopathic with your expenses has been probably one of the the best things that I've done, and I'm still learning. Like that's like the thing that I'm trying to get much better at.

SPEAKER_00 30:19

It's because it's just not the enjoyable part though.

SPEAKER_01 30:21

No, it's freaking boring. I wanna I wanna like make marketing.

SPEAKER_00 30:24

Yeah, I get it. Yeah, I saw you you say recently that you increased your pitch rate or your your win rate from 50% to 80% by making a change in the sales process. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 30:35

For us, for our clients, we do that a lot. Like, for example, we'll have clients like our close rate's very high. We're very like selective, and people get so hardcore DQ'd that the close rate's very high. But a lot of our clients they don't measure all of this, right? So they might be measuring CPL. Worst metric to measure, like who cares? Measure the ROI, and I can go into that. But for example, with our clients, when we finesse the messaging, the offer, the landing page, which is your digital appointment setup, etc., we can see sales like lead to sales times go down from 30 days to two days. Like these sort of metrics and the ROI increase. But often with clients, if they're coming to us, that particular client, they were running um meta-add lead forms, right? And it's like, yeah, like, but our CPL is so cheap. I'm like, how many do you close? Like, let's actually run the economics. No, like we when we run the actual economics, we can actually afford to spend this much on a seat like for CPL, and the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer will win. Like the goal is not seat, like like low CPLs, because what happens in it is in Legion, then you're feeding that data back into Facebook and telling it what's good, right? It's like, oh yeah, I'm happy with these shitty leads because I want a CPL, but you need to be tracking all the way down to depends on how long the sales process is, but ideally what closes, and then feeding that back in, and then looking at what ad got that closed call, and then feeding that back in and keep tweaking the machine like that over time.

SPEAKER_00 32:00

Let's get a little nerdy for a second. What are the main metrics that you're tracking a funnel on? Is it uh is it is it CAC or are you tracking like revenue per booked call? What are the main what are the core metrics that you're measuring the success of a funnel one?

SPEAKER_01 32:11

Yes, so there's what the client cares about internally, and as they get bigger, they get more sophisticated. So some of our clients are like um cost per cook booked call that shows up. That's like that's how they've built the business. Cool, we can measure that with you. Some of them they really care about CPL because they're huge and they've got this big sales team, and that's like what they care about, whatever. What we're often tracking is CAC, like so that what did it cost to acquire the customer? The thing in lead generation, it requires on the sales team doing their job. And so we have to be like, okay, it's more like a monthly thing where it's the CAC, it's the ROI. That's like that's like the main thing, right? Your business like your marketing should be making you money. What's the ROI? We'll still track rowers, or we'll still track um the landing page conversion rate, but then you've got to be careful not to over-optimize the landing page conversion rate because that's not the end outcome. Like whenever you whenever you are optimizing a funnel, you should always focus on the North Star metric, right? Even when I was at founder, the amount like you do dumb things. It's like, okay, I'm gonna get this up opt-in page up and I'm gonna get it from 10% to 20%. But if you're not tracking the North Star metric, you can like really like absolutely badly impact a funnel. So, okay, in summary, what sort of metrics do you track in your campaigns? Let me tell you, all of the media buyer stuff, I don't do any of the media buying. So, like all of your normal stuff like that, but then it's landing page conversion rate, then it would be, which means how many people fill in the form. Then we're looking at, okay, how many who fill in the form are qualified and disqualified. And then we want to improve that as well because we don't want to be paying for that lead and then they can't make it through. Then because they go to a calendar page because these are book of call funnels, then it's cool. How what percentage of people are booking a call? We ideally want that like 70, 80, um, like 70, 80%, it can't, it might be 40, 80%, and then how many show up, and then how many close. Those are like the main the main core numbers.

SPEAKER_00 34:06

Are we talking uh like an automated system or are we spreadsheeting? Like how are you attributing all that?

SPEAKER_01 34:12

That's something that we have been in process of building Looker Studio dashboards. It's been that is Yes, my balls are aching. Thank you for telling me. It's been it's been a thing, but that's something that we're bringing in. So beforehand it was like manual spreadsheets, blah, blah, blah. Now it's bringing in um like it's we've got like this other spreadsheet where like uh order pulls in all of this stuff. But because when we're working with our clients, there's all different CRMs, there's all different um data infrastructure that we are pulling from, it's yeah, a ballake.

SPEAKER_00 34:48

What are you what's your mindset surrounding A-B testing? Like let's say the headline. How often are you testing a headline, comparing that data? Is it like a two-week testing period? Is it longer? Is it based on number of track amount of traffic? What does that look like?

SPEAKER_01 35:02

Okay. Um tell me if I monologue too long on this topic.

SPEAKER_00 35:07

I want I want the longest monologue possible.

SPEAKER_01 35:09

Okay, like 72 hours later. So when it comes to CRO and split testing, right? CRO, conversion rate optimization. We are optimizing something that already is working. This is why when a client comes in, we're building these foundations, and then we can do CRO split tests. Then when it comes to the types of testing, you can do A-B split testing, which probably most of us and our clients can be doing, or you can be doing multivariate, which might be, which means like you're testing multiple things. That's like an Amazon type thing, which are huge. And then you can do sequential testing. So with sequential testing, that usually means that you might not have a big enough traffic source where it's going to be statistically significant. So you have to do it a little bit more like down and dirty, and you might just like test a headline and then test another headline in like a time frame or whatever. Now, when it comes to actually coming up with good split test ideas, this is where most people fail because we have to have a good hypothesis. But also, just like what I was saying before, it's inputs and outputs. How do you come up with those ideas? So there's qualitative and there's quantitative, quantitative being your numbers. So you have to actually figure out, cool, which part of my funnel should I be focusing on? Right? Should I actually be tweaking shit on the thank you page? Like, is that gonna be my highest impact? No. So you can use this thing called a pie framework, which helps you to like figure out um what you should do. I can link that to people. And then you want to come up with the hypothesis. So there's quantitative and then there's qualitative. That's where the surveys and the ongoing research and social listening and the ongoing sales calls and like understanding the sales calls comes in. So to your point, A-B split testing headlines, yes, often that's like the highest leverage you can have is split testing something above the fold, because most people are pretty basic. So you would split test the headline, and we've had a guy in one of our programs, I'm not gonna remember the data now, but it was something like the landing page went from like 6% to 17%, the CPL went down from, I don't know, whatever, $50 to $25. Like as David Ogilvy would say, that's like 80 cents of your dollar, right? That's in the headline. But again, it's not split testing the headline, it's knowing what to put into the headline to split test. And you only know that if you are totally obsessed with the target market. And as an agency, that can be very hard to do at scale because you have to get obsessed with 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, whatever target markets. So, how do you do that at scale for your team? The answer is AI at the moment. It was very hard for us to do how we used to do it. Now it's it's a lot easier. Plugging into the sales calls again or sales calls, um, deep research through Chat GPT, other like research tools that we have. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:49

Nice. That's cool. That sales call analysis thing is such a hack. We do that on every other part of the business apart from to adjust front end, which is ridiculous, really. It's ridiculous.

SPEAKER_01 38:00

And they're in the trenches, right? And this is another beef of mine. Thanks for opening up on my trauma today. Um, but marketing teams and sales teams are so disjointed, right? But they're one system. And so as marketers, we often forget, and maybe because my background is in sales, before I was in marketing, like they're in the trenches. So they're getting all of the information. The problem is sales team members don't know how to translate that into something that's useful for marketing. So unless you know how to ask the right questions, or you can put it through AI, then you don't get the data that you need.

SPEAKER_00 38:32

How are you dealing talking of sales teams with the issue of teams that have been used to warm or inbound traffic, they now all of a sudden have to close cold traffic because businesses cranking spend. Um, do you have to get involved in sales conversations and and coaching the back ends? Like, what does that look like for you?

SPEAKER_01 38:49

Yeah, and this is where I tried to screen for that in the sales process, right? Because my leads will be useless unless you can close. So if somebody comes in and they have a really low close rate on warm traffic, I'm like, babe, you're not gonna hack it. Facebook ads is not for you. I literally had someone big, big business, and I can't remember what the close rate was, but it was something like let's call it 5% on warm traffic. And I just said, you do not have a lead flow problem, you have a sales problem, come back when you fix that. Because I've done this like a thousand times. That's not an exaggeration, about a thousand times. Like it's like I'm an oracle, like I know all this will end up. Like you will be dissatisfied, you will not close these leads if you cannot even close your warm leads. So, to answer your question, we try to identify that in the sales process. If you retain clients, you have a successful agency. It's a lot easier than bringing on new clients. And so, because I'm like old and traumatized now and not as young and youthful as these like 20-year-old people getting out making agencies. I'm like, you're either a good business person or you're not. But this also comes from like the authority building, right? When you get started, you don't get as much like leeway to be like, nah, I don't want you're not, I'm not working with you. Yeah, that comes from over time and seeing the red flags, but also like having that authority where you don't have that scarcity in your pipeline. I didn't always have that, right? Like, but now I don't have any scarcity. I'm just like, nah. I'm talking to another 10 of you like this week. I'm co I'm good. Not not a good fit.

SPEAKER_00 40:15

We spoke off camera about you now taking it seriously and and really and really building the team out, building the client base out, etc. You've spent the last three years or so traveling. Yeah. Talk me through that. Why why why get up and leave and and sell your stuff and and and travel around? What was your mindset?

SPEAKER_01 40:35

So, in lockdown, and not to brag, but Melbourne was one of, if not the most locked down cities in the world. Like two years for a lot of that time, the mandate was you couldn't walk for more than an hour outside a day. Just dumb shit, let's not talk about it. It happened. And so my partner and I were really big into life design, and we would go away and we'll do those like quarterly life designs. We're both in jobs, and we called it operation freedom. What, like, what did we want? And that has been honestly the hardest question I've ever asked myself is what do I want? It was never a question just from childhood circumstances that had ever come up, right? And so even now it's like it's so weird and alien to me where it's like, oh, you can literally build the life that you want. The hardest thing for me was knowing what it was. Like I knew that, but I could never like figure it out. And it just takes time, right? So we would go away, we would do these life designs, and then eventually our side hustles overtook our main income, and then we shook hands over breakfast. We're like, fuck it, let's rage quit today. Not rage quit, we both loved our jobs, but um, and we had also saved up six months of expenses. We didn't pay ourselves for four months in the agency. We just wanted to build a war chest, but we could do that because we we saved up six months each of like life expenses, and back then our lifestyle was a lot more manageable. I mean, we haven't exploded it, but we get to do a lot more fun stuff now, and so we started the business, and I mean, if you could call it a business, it was like two freelancers sticky taped together, let's be honest. We were doing only half a million, and and then a few contractors plugged in, and we kind of came out of lockdown a few months afterwards, and we were fat and pale and sad and burnt out. We went to America and Mexico, and we knew the business would stop without us. We were like, whatever, YOLO, we'll figure it out when we come back. Back then we were a project-only agency, so it was like it was fine, no clients were left unattended to, but we were like, we're not gonna have any pipeline, whatever, let's go. So we went there. I I don't know if this is a part of it, but I also did ayahuasca, and then I came back and just sold all of our shit. And I was like, we're doing this, we're gonna pack our lives into a suitcase. We've read enough biographies and autobiographies, and we've got enough people in our network who regretted never building the lifestyle first. So, like, fuck it. If the business isn't gonna serve us, we don't want it. So that was maybe like eight months in. We went, we came back, um, we sold everything, we packed our lives into a suitcase, we got a one-way ticket to Bali, and we were like, if we can't figure it out, we don't want it. And then we figured it out. And we're still figuring it out, but that's the journey, right? And that's the fun of it.

SPEAKER_00 43:09

I love that. What have you taken from that experience that you're now carrying forward in your next chapter?

SPEAKER_01 43:16

I think the biggest part for me with that was letting like letting go of control of things. That was the biggest thing. Um, even before we went away, I had to like know everything down to the minute, what were we always doing? And just letting a bit more trust in the universe, knowing that what is meant for me will come to me, and that I can't always control the outcome, but I can control the inputs. And so what I do now is I don't focus so much on like even like I think about like the goals that I have for myself. I can't even think big enough half the time. And so when I let go of that control, what comes to me is like even better than I could have ever like would have ever come to me that I thought of, right? So it's more like just like getting wriggly. Getting really serious about becoming the best version of myself. Like that's it. And it's like, who do I need to be? Who do I need to become to unlock that? Because you're always, you're always the container for your business or for your life, right? So it's just okay, what are the inputs and what are the things I just need to keep doing? So yeah, like what have I taken from that? That's probably the biggest thing is to not be a micromanaging psycho of the universe and just like let it come. But what else have I taken from that? That's a good question. I do a lot of journaling and a lot of self-reflecting. I think the other big thing, and this is like another big epiphany I've had, is like to have fun. Or like, why am I doing it? And anytime on our journey where, and it doesn't happen as much, but it's like I start to lose the fun. Why am I doing this? Like, and obviously not every part of your business is fun, like spreadsheets, but it's all part of like my growth journey, and it's like it's moving towards a bigger why, a bigger vision. And so, yeah, I think that's that those are it is and that's the last one is like getting really clear on like why you're doing something and not getting obsessed with the end outcome. Yeah, that's it. That's like like why do you do this?

SPEAKER_00 45:09

Yeah, yeah. Do you think you got yourself to a place where you spend the majority of your time, your working time, on the things you enjoy inside of the company? And if so, what are those things? What do you love working on and and and what part do you not enjoy?

SPEAKER_01 45:22

Yes, that's a great question. Thank you for asking. Um so there's a great book um by Dan Martel. What's that one? Buy back your time? Have you read that?

SPEAKER_03 45:31

No.

SPEAKER_01 45:31

It's really good. And in that he has this thing called like a drip matrix where it's like uh basically you're figuring out what energizes you. And so even if none of you guys listening, where's the camera? How do I stare at everyone? If you don't have an EA, an executive assistant, or just a VA to start with, that is like the number one high that I've had to bring in to help to get that sort of stuff off my plate, but still do really important stuff. So I'm just just sharing. This is how I kind of work it out. And every quarter and every month and every weekend, I'm thinking, am I still working on the right things? Am I working on the high impact stuff for the company? Am I working on the high impact stuff for me? Because there's a lot of things that I'm very good at, but don't energize me. And so when I'm in that zone in the agency and I do a lot of that, I burn out. The agency will like make a lot of money, but I'll hate everything that I'm doing. So this drip matrix and this buyback your time, the whole thing is to try and figure out okay, well, where are you highest leveraged in your company and what makes the money? Like, where is that intersection? So for me, I don't know if you can tell, but I really like talking and having conversations. Um, that's one of the things that I'm like, that's like my highest leverage activity that energizes me. Going on podcasts, making YouTube videos, coaching the team, um, even like hiring, I think that's the most important activity we're gonna do as agency owners and all of these things. So yeah, making sure that whatever is like the main crossover, like what I'm the best at and what is valuable to the agency that I'm focusing in that. For me, I'm like 98% extroverted. This is not for everybody, right? I think you're like frowning a bit, this might not be for you. You're like, bitch, this does not sound good.

SPEAKER_00 47:06

How dare how dare you love recording content.

SPEAKER_01 47:09

But I had to turn it into a game because I got into like a funk where I was like, fuck this, like this is annoying. Like, I've got all these other things to do. Like, mmm, and then like, you know, like that's an awful place to be in your brain. So now I'm like, okay, my why is I'm really good at teaching people things. I'm like, that is what I'm good at. I'm really good at taking like complex things, and I'm really good at teaching people. I love coaching people. I've been doing that for since I was like a kid. Like I've always gravitated towards that. So now it's like, cool, well, why am I making this video? Yeah, it's gonna make me money, but I'm gonna find people because 99.9999% of people who watch this, they're not gonna pay the agency any money. But I get enough DMs and I'm sure you get a bajillion, like you were telling me that that chick at the gym the other day. Like those people are out there and you're making an impact in the world. So that's where it comes to knowing your why. Because if you don't have that, or if you're not serving something higher than yourself when you're doing this, it makes it really hard to keep going.

SPEAKER_00 48:04

It does 100%. And you're I mean, that's what a great position to be in when the thing that you love the most in the business is the thing that's arguably the highest leverage, there's no doubt. In the agency space now, or just online business in general, that authority piece. If you enjoy that as the as the thing that you enjoy the most, that's that's a that's a great place to be. But you've now started building out the team in in the agency, and I say now as if only recently, but of course for a while we've been building a team out. Um I've seen you mention before in another podcast that you don't hire juniors, you don't hire people that are entry level, is that correct? You're only hiring people from a senior perspective, and if so, what's your mentality around that?

SPEAKER_01 48:42

So the main thing is have I done that before? Yes, but really what I want is just proven that they've done it. And why? Because when you hire an A player and it might be a couple more grand a month, but and I think we've all seen it, the output of someone like that is exponential. Now, when I first got started, I didn't have them budgets, right? Like that's the thing. So there's when you get started, you bring on those people that are more for like potential, but they need to have the fire in their belly. Like they need to have that fire in their belly, and you need to get rid of them quick if they're not a good fit. Because I I do believe that like as an agency, we're just like a like a HR company, basically, right? Like that's it. We're just people, we're in the business of people, and that talent is the make or break of your agency. And and I've made all of the dumb decisions. Now I have an awesome team that are truly unlocked. But even once you get that team, you need to keep coaching them and training them. That's another thing that people forget. So one one day we had this epiphany where we were like, huh, I I tried to bring in a sales team and I didn't do a good job anyway. So I'm back on sales. But I realized with this sales team, I was like, okay, I'm giving these guys coaching every day on how to talk to people. I'm not doing any client experience training with my team, like, not formally. So we just started doing a weekly client experience training where it was like, bring your hardships, bring your beefs, and I will help and coach you on how to deal with these things. And that was tremendous. But I was like, yeah, it's weird. Like we focus on these sales teams, but not on the back end and how to deal with people. So, yeah, to answer your question, do we hire juniors? No, not really ever. I'm not trying to scale like a huge agency, so I don't need them. Um I think there's a place for them in agencies, probably when you're a lot bigger. And where the caveat to that is for me in our pod structure, where we have um like a senior campaign strategist, we have a funnel strategist and media buyer ad creative, and then we have this pod technician. They might be a little bit more junior, and the idea is that we are farming our own people, right? So the funnel, the funnel strategist and media buyer can become a senior strategist, that pod technician can become a media buyer and funnel strategist, so that we've always got peep people in our farm. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 50:56

Yeah. What is the meet the training rhythm like? Like how often are you doing training? Is it as hot ad hoc as and went, oh shit, we haven't done that in a while, or is it like a regular situation?

SPEAKER_01 51:05

So one thing is, and this is probably the most important, it's the onboarding. So that's the first thing, and that's where the standards get set. So everything is in there, not just about how to do their job, but also like how we think and how we act and the culture at the agency as well. In terms of training, then, um, what do we do? So there's different types of training. There's ad hoc when I see issues, like, okay, why are we doing this? We're all going into a boot camp together and we're gonna learn this thing, or if we're rolling out new systems or whatever, those are probably the ad hoc ones. Our more general rhythms is that we have this thing called like a fortnightly, which means every two weeks, for any Americans watching because they don't know what fortnightly is, every two weeks, like a mad men session. So it's like um being able to hear how some of the more senior people think, that's kind of like a training. But then um we're training our leaders on how to be coaches as well, right? So, similar to with our clients, how we understand what is the 90-day um game plan, blah, blah, blah. For our team members, what we want to understand is, okay, well, what are your goals? What's your personal goal and your professional goal? And all of this I'm asking in the hiring, because even if they're the best media buyer on the planet, right, and they have the skills, but if I can't help them to get to where they want to go, it doesn't matter. Like they're gonna churn, and it's the same thing for my clients. I don't want people to churn, I wanted them to stay on for as long as humanly possible. So oftentimes, because we think of it like coaching, it's a bit more bespoke. It's just like, cool, what do you want to learn in? Does it align with the business's goals? And then we're doing like upskilling plans. You can do things called like career ladders as well in the agency.

SPEAKER_00 52:39

Nice. I love that. It's um it's one of those things that I think, especially with the management piece, many agency owners and just business owners in general, will just chuck resources at their department and just expect them to learn it, except expect them to absorb it, and then when problems arise, expect management to deal with them. But so often I'm reminded that it really has to come from the top. And whilst you don't want to, you're very often going to be the person that's gonna be creating new training because you're the one that's thinking about it on this wider on this wider spectrum until you have you know director level management into the company, which is obviously two, three, four steps down the line when you're scaling out, it's so important to have those regular trainings, and it's been such so impactful for us as well in doing that on a regular basis.

SPEAKER_01 53:24

Yeah, or even just like buying, if like the team finds a course and it's not a dumb amount, it's like great, I don't have to deal with them in it. Especially like the media buying stuff, or um, we've had team members who are like when we like were first growing and we had like this one team member who had done Google Ads before, and we're like, hey man, we're gonna start running ads. You've done ads before, right? He's like, Yeah, but like not, and I was like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, you'll figure it out. But we just hired him a coach. I was like, every week you're gonna meet with this guy and he's gonna train you on this. I want you to tell me at the end of those coaching sessions what you learnt and what you're implementing, blah, blah, blah. Like, you've got to invest in your people, right? And so I never think of a team member as a cost, they're an investment. You can make bad investments. Cut bad investments as soon as you know they're a bad investment, because we're not a charity, right? And some people can think, oh, that's a bit cutthroat. Like, no, they have a contract with me, and as part of that contract, there is a job, and as part of that job, there is work, and as part of that work, there is an outcome. Now, if there's ever an issue with a person or like an outcome, it's either people or it's process. Okay, this is how I think of everything. If it's people, then either they are not the right person for the job, or you have not trained them correctly. Or it's process. The process is cooked and it either doesn't exist or they don't know what to do, or it needs to be updated, whatever, right? And each three of those, if you hired the wrong person, then go and put it back. Like, you need to make sure that prevention's better than QR. Learn something from that and go and put it back into your hiring process so you don't have to do it again. If my team is making the same mistakes, on me. Did I hire the wrong people? No, my team are awesome and they all care about the clients. There's something in the system that's broken. Like, these are not like if you shouldn't think your team are idiots. And some people do, right? Like, no, my team are freaking smart. If something's not going right, it's on me. I'm the leader. I haven't set them up for success in some way, and now my job is to work with them to understand why. And as a quick side note, making sure that you create an environment where people will bring you problems, right? Because the last thing you want is people hiding problems from you. And so, one of the things I'm very proud about the culture in our team, and I think that comes from our values, is that when someone makes a mistake, they own up to it very quickly. They say why it happened, they say how they're gonna fix it, and then that's it. And it's like, that's a beautiful way to live instead of people hiding their mistakes from you.

SPEAKER_00 55:37

Yeah, that's the worst, and then you have to deal with the fallout of that. And you're like, this has happened for three months. Like, do you know how much more of a task this is for me to fix that? Yes. Yeah, I feel that. I've been there. Uh, you've described other agencies as yes agencies. Yeah. What does that mean?

SPEAKER_01 55:53

So when a client comes to us, I say, you're not hiring a waitress, right? You're hiring a strategist. And a lot of agencies are so scared, it's this scarcity mindset of losing a client, that they don't want to say no. Yep, we can do that. What does this create? It creates unrealistic expectations. You're not training your client on how to work with you. You often have scope creep, so you're losing a bunch of money, and they'll say yes. They'll take on any client, they'll say yes, they'll do anything for any client, they'll say yes. And as we were talking about before this, most agencies don't make it into what their second year are. I think this is a big reason why. And so it's it's understanding the frame. And even though when you make that first sale, that's the easiest sale, then you have to keep reselling the client and their confidence in you, etc. So the reason why most of them are yes agencies is basically because they just say yes to anything, but the ramifications of that in your agency are dire.

SPEAKER_00 56:47

Yeah. Yeah. Terrible profit margins, stress, etc. You're saying no to a lot, which as you should, but are you then finding if there's external solutions that you need? Are you have you got lots of partners, strategic partnership relationships with other agencies? Like, what does that look like?

SPEAKER_01 57:03

Yes, because we knock back some stuff. So we we used to, but to be honest, finding agencies that you like truly trust and then you can connect them with is not always there. There's not many agencies as well that do what we do, and that's how we've unique uniquely positioned ourselves. So there's not many agencies, like I know you guys exist out there, but there's not that many compared to like an e-commerce agency, right? Or a local Legion agency where I'm very confident to refer them and put my name behind. So for strategic partners, not so much, and that's like the next that's like the next thing. That's like a good problem to have, right? Okay, well, I've got these wastage on these leads, what can I do? Because in a perfect world, I would refer them on and get a cut of the referral or whatever, but you've also got to play the long game with your brand, not like the short game of trying to make money now. It's like that'll impact me negatively. So and and then on that, just quick quickly, you can't then sell them to a done do-it-yourself thing because they don't want that. They want like that's just insulting, right? So it the answer I think a lot of people think, oh, it's fine, I'm gonna make a course. Like, no, they're not gonna get the result, they don't want to do it, they've already indicated that they don't want to do it. Like, the answer is not a course. The answer would be what some of my other mates in agencies do, they'll acquire a smaller offshore agency, like an MA, and then it's like, hey, you're not quite at the level for this agency, but what you can do is you can work with this agency, it's half the price, you know, it's like it's still a really good team, but it's not our A team, and we can still look after you. So that's probably a s a solution that I'm considering. I don't think I'll do it.

SPEAKER_00 58:41

Too much to do right now. Yeah. Yeah. What is what how what is the the the I suppose the midterm and the long-term plan at the moment in the agency?

SPEAKER_01 58:49

Yeah. That is something that I'm working out in my brain, like literally at the moment. That's what I've been working out over the last one week. And so, as I said to you, okay, we've been traveling, the business is doing fine, but nobody wins when you play small. And so it's not that we're playing small, it's just you can either travel to countries and do Italy for eight weeks, or you can scale to eight figures. And I've realized I can have like anything, but not everything all at once. So for our chapters of life, we've done that now, and now it's like, cool. What what's the impact? Like what like what is our thing? Where do we want to like spend our life and where do we want to work? Because we work really hard. We're still working like 12, 14 hour days, not every day, but a lot, like just like any other agency owner, right? But it's like, okay, cool. Where do we actually want to spend our time? Because we both love working. Like what I when I was telling you when Matt and I first started dating, I'd go to his house, we would watch infomercials, we would break down the offer, drink red wine, like call them up, go through the sales funnel, like that sort of shit. Like, I like doing funnels and marketing, right? So, what's gonna be our next step? I'm going to be getting very bullish on my personal brand. Very, very bullish. And I think that that is the only way coming out of this attention economy and into this trust economy that businesses are going to survive is having this like connection, this trust with people. Um, I don't think ads are going to be enough. I think it's going to be this sphere of influence that you create that we've been building over time and producing really, really good things that help a lot of people. That's kind of, and there's obviously a bajillion ways to do your business for us because of my strengths, probably. That's where we will focus. And so we will build out a lot more of the done with you and the product stuff. Obviously, information's going to become more and more commoditized over time, like obviously, but what won't become commoditized and where I foresee society going, because as a business owner, yes, I have an agency right now, but I have to think about as a brand and as a business, where am I taking this ship, right? And so while I don't think agencies are going to go extinct, I think that's stupid. Like I think Sam Altman was like, oh, 95% of what agencies do. No, a lot of my clients can't open a CRM. I am not getting replaced by AI. As long as you have the best systems, the best tech, the best people, the best thinkers, the best results, etc. But that all has to be experienced. So how do you bring people in? That all has to be experienced. How do you bring them in? It's through personal brand. And so for us, when we started Persuasion Experience, and we call it PX for short, we always thought of it as a modality. Like there's user experience, UX, persuasion experience, UX. And we've always thought of it as this brand. And we've always wanted to do more of like media, like media and education company. That's where we want to go. So like our high ticket will be the done for you. Like that'll be super high ticket, probably like equity play, like what every agency owner wants. Like, oh yeah, I only want clients that give me like equity or profit share. It's like, yeah, everyone wants that. But not everyone earns it, right? And that's what we're trying to do over time. So um that will be that, and then we'll be building out a lot more of that done with you. I think that done with you market is going to grow substantially. I don't think agencies are all going to die, but I think a lot of businesses might die. Because I think what will happen is the best businesses and agencies that gap. There's I think there's going to be a wealth divide in society, and I think there's going to be a business divide in business where the businesses that adopt AI are just going to have so much better economics that these other businesses are just going to not be able to compete. So they'll I actually think there'll be less businesses to serve. And then that will be the result of agencies dying. Do you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:27

I really want to I really want to go there. I want to explore that place. Just before we do, um, I'm intrigued by going more bullish on personal brand, what that how that materialises for you. Is that increasing output? Is that doing certain strategic things? Like, how does that materialise?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:41

Yeah, good question. So I still believe like because I don't have a huge media team like the Hormosis. Oh I don't know, what's your media team?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:48

Uh non-existent. We have a content team that that help produce content and plan content, but as far as media is concerned, like what's your content team? Uh we have a content manager, video editor, yeah, uh thumbnail designers, yeah. Uh and that's it, copywriter.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:03

Yeah. Similar to us, but maybe like more of our contractors instead of plugged in. And then I've just recently hired a full-time, like, I guess, content manager that I hope can move into like a creative director kind of role.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:16

I I think I think the piece that we're probably missing and and the piece that you're probably looking at or maybe already have is the the direct management of speaking positions, podcast features, etc. Like actually being more proactive with that piece.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:27

I think is like getting those extent to the other.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:29

Getting those more so because like you get a lot of inbound for that, but then managing it and then going there's you could definitely if you pushed it more proactively, I think it's do you have an EA?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:38

I'm probably gonna get my EA to do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:40

Yes, I and I was I was thinking that.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:42

Yeah, because she's awesome, but I also think like she's probably like besides me, the other big and and my co-founder, like the other big cheerleader of the company who can like get in. I tried a podcast booking agency, it didn't work. Anyway, what were we talking about? Bullish personal brand. Okay, cool. So just why? It's like it's just the number one asset you can make. And now obviously the argument is like, well, there's heaps of billionaires who never built a big personal brand. It's like, yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:10

Years ago.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:11

Sure. True. But even like, let's look at um like Kylie Jenner or Logan Paul, right? They get paid more, or any TikTok star, they get paid more than the TikTok CEO, right? And like when you have this authority, this like brand you can leverage, one, you get more opportunities. You probably see this. Like, do you not like it?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:32

I mean, it's it's I will never ever be broke, ever. Right. No, ever again. Never. My personal brand was is is infinite security forever. It's a it's an opportunity magnet.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:42

Yes, exactly. And it's and that's the same for me. Like, um, for example, last year, January 2024, keynote speaker at Traffic and Conversion Summit, two years into business. Damon John, Ryan Dice, Richard Branson, Alicia Collin Heard. I have no I have no business. My first stage talk, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:02

How did you get that?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:04

Um, so one, I was in Ryan Dice's mastermind.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:06

Nice.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:07

But two, because he had seen my YouTube um personal brand that I'd been building. Like, if you tell people long enough that you're the best at funnels and landing pages, they usually Then you become but I also am like I have an interesting background where it's like I did it like a lot, and and I am, and then I went out on my own. Um, so yeah, like that, but that's the reason. Like it's like it's an it's an asset that no one can take. I think Warren Buffett says something like, you know, your personal brand takes 20 years to build and five minutes to destroy. So that's what you have to be really careful about, right? Is like being very ethical still and and knowing what your values are and knowing what you stand for and and not promoting something or doing something that doesn't align with that. And so for me, the thing that I've always done with my personal brand, again, we were talking about this, like you still get the haters in the comments. I I I believe in dead internet theory where like half the shit. That I get comments is probably like not real people, it's just bots, right? But people like the bigger you get, the more people want to bring you down. Whatever. So you have to know within yourself, otherwise, you'll go insane. You will have anxiety all of the time. And this is what stops people from doing it. Like, why don't people put themselves out there? Because they're scared. And it's fair enough because it's scary. Like, and even like I don't I don't even always get awful comments, but I'll get weird and creepy men comments. Like one time a guy was like, I'm gonna clone you and have 600 babies with the clones. It's a bit weird. Have you ever had that comment?

unknown 1:06:32

No.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:32

Well, there you go. Maybe he'll come and find you. Maybe he will. And so it's scary because you've got to put yourself out there, right? But for me, the test is okay, so that I don't have anxiety and I'm not worried about what the billions of people on planet Earth think. For me, and this is part of this like self-growth that I've been going on, it's like, what do I want and who am I? And what do I value? It's just okay, what's the look yourself in the mirror test? Can I look, like, can I make this decision and still look myself in the mirror? And if it's yes and you can live with yourself, awesome. Because that's like who do you spend the most time with? It's yourself. It's not your mom or your spouse. Like, it is yourself. Can you stand yourself after making that decision? And once you get bigger and more money starts coming in, you've probably seen this as well. Like when people start to see big numbers of money, people go weird, and you have to know what you stand for. Like you have to know what you'll stand for, and you have to know that like what does money mean to you, and what will you do for money, etc. Right? And so I mean, I'm trying to instill those values in myself and know who I am because of the bigger I get, it's gonna be very easy to lose yourself in that personal brand.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:40

I resonate with that so much. It's something I've preached about so often over the years, actually to my own detriment in the sense that I have a it's only really the past couple of years that I've opened myself up to collaborating a lot more with other brands because I've seen you you because being on the side of it yourself and understanding that as a personal brand, you are in very many ways in control of perception, in control of of of reality, and and when you're when you have an audience and you have a platform, and so many don't uphold their ethics for money, and and that's always the danger. And I that I love that. Um what did you call that? Yourself in the mirror. Looking yourself in the mirror.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:15

Look yourself in the mirror.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:16

I love that.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:17

Even some personal brands that I meet, and I'm just a small fish, right? Like, for now, just follow along, everyone, but you'll meet them and who they are is not who they are, and I'm like, oh gross, what like an awful way that must be.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:31

And then you get to hear the motives behind the thing. So like, oh, you did that thing, and that was really cool. And they're like, Yeah, but then this, and it's kind of like that you hear the motive behind the reason they did the thing, and you're like, ah, I didn't I'm misaligned with you right now. I'm not you're you're here and I'm here, and I'm looking at this from a different lens, and they're like, Yeah, sure, impact, bro. Like, and you're like, Oh, yeah, man. Sure. Yeah. And it's just yeah, I I resonate with that a lot, and I think that's so and I think most lot so many people are at a massive danger coming into this, like this world where so many are now promoting personal brands, it's now trendy to be like, oh, we can help you start a personal brand, blah blah blah. There's so much of that. Um, and uh, and we're very conscious of the fact that brand is in a world of AI is gonna matter so incre such a huge amount, but because of that, and because everyone wants everything quick and fast and and easy, they're gonna cut corners and they're gonna try and hack um human understanding in order to get themselves to the top or their perception of the top quicker. So people lie about how much money they make, they lie about all the things that they've done, and they like falsely and there's going to be at some point some kind of law that comes in or some kind of act in which people reverse engineer all of the old stuff that happened. I don't know why people don't think they're invincible from the things that happened online. You can go back like years and they'll re look at these people and be like, hang on, this person, this person, this person, there'll be some massive lawsuit, and all these people will get like washed out. I don't know why people don't think of that.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:54

Yeah. Once your personal brand is damaged, it's hard.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:59

You're done.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:00

That's it, right? It's like the most valuable asset that you will build. And yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:04

And you're actually on the negative at that point. You're like, you're below you're below someone that doesn't have a YouTube channel.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:10

Exactly, right? It's like that is yeah, negative. One thing, like with all of this AI coming in, and I don't have an answer to this, but for an example on your YouTube, would you ever not record it yourself and outsource it to like the AI?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:24

No, I couldn't. Me neither. I couldn't do it.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:25

But I like I think it's a good thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:28

People like, oh this you look like AI today. I'm like, fuck you. Like, I would like no sweat on my forehead. Like I'm shouting at the camera, getting so irate about like something like sales, like, no, this is not AI.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:43

I think I think it loot like what my biggest concern with with marketing is like losing the soul and the magic. Like this, this connection, right? Like, I don't know. I don't know, because you never know what the future holds and whatever. And if my audience found it value because I could pump out 10x content. Like, I don't know, but at the moment, I don't think so.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:02

I've seen Annex Singao's doing that now.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:05

Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:06

All of his short form content is completely AI. I'm like, I just wouldn't do it. It's all AI, like completely.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:11

And this is the thing, right? Like, when everyone else zigs, I got a zag. So it's like because I I don't I don't know, I studied like the history doesn't repeat human behavior, does, right? So what's like what's gonna happen here? We're all got monkey brains, whatever. So where are we heading? Loneliness, connection, community. Like, what do I think is like that is gonna be the future? And so, as we're talking about before, like, yeah, the agency will exist, that done for you will always exist because there's always gonna be people that don't want to figure it out. Can you do it for me, please? Sure. Like, I'm one of those customers. I'm like, nope, I've watched three of your YouTube videos. I think you get it, like, go and do it for me now. But what's gonna be missing in society is gonna be this like connection to people, and I'm and I am worried about as a society where we're going. I've got it not AI Doomsday, I've got to be positive, but I get very Doomsday.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:01

People have been calling me AI AI Apocalypse Skyrim. The last two videos I've put out on YouTube have been like AI Apocalypse, but more so just like what being hyper-aware of the situation and then knowing what to change like in that situation. I want to I want to get into that. Um, but but you say like connection is the most important thing. Like, quite interestingly, like I mean, I think that uh in-person masterminds and those kind of gatherings are gonna be more important than ever. Um we're actually hosting an event in our agency, so not even an info, there's no info attached to it. In the agency in July, we're getting a whole bunch of clients together, getting them into the into the office. We we opened up, we are hybrid, we're we're virtual, but we very recently in the last 12 months opened up a big content warehouse in the UK. Getting everyone there, getting loads of clients together and loads of friends. Um, those kind of things I think are going to become more and more important. Like the more the in-person pieces.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:51

The experiences, right? The thing that AI can't do. And um, have you read Unreasonable Hospitality?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:58

Uh yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:58

Yeah, it was like I get obsessed with a few books a year. That and E Myth and a couple of others last year. I don't know why it took me so long to read E Myth. Have you read it?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:06

No.

unknown 1:13:06

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:07

Good. EMyth?

SPEAKER_01 1:13:08

Yes, so because it you hear it and you're like, oh, internet marketing. No, it's such a good book. Um, they're such good books. But this um this unreasonable hospitality, and that's like being like the the seed or the nugget, right? Is like this experience. So even in the agency, I already did this, but I took it a bit more next level. It's like each touch point, how do I like um anticipate people's needs and desires before they even happen and all this stuff? And then going into experiences being the next thing. Um, some people I talk to are like, yeah, buy a heap of land because that's the thing that's gonna like go, like there'll be no land, and then host like um experiences where people can go into nature again because all of the cities keep getting built more and more and more up, up and up, up. So, like, make these like experiences anyway. TBC, whether I'll buy all the land.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:52

Yeah, I mean it's not great. I mean, like I'm more for an experience where I can spend a lot of time in nature. That is my whole existence outside of business. So where are we going as far as the the this industry is concerned, do you think? What what does the next two years look for us?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:06

This is the thing, no one knows. And anyone that professes to know, they don't know like where we are right. It's fun to speculate. Yeah, it's fun to speculate, but like, and and this is the thing, it's like because of my direct response background and and marketing to me is just psychology and understanding human behavior. So, you know, like I've the guy that created propaganda, there's literally a book called Propaganda. There's like all of this stuff you can study to understand how humans behave, and and that is like a predictor of what will happen. And so, where will this industry go? I don't know. But if I had to sort of guess, kind of what I what I said earlier, right? I don't think the agencies will die. I think the shit ones will die like all other businesses. Um, I'm surprised that like 10% more have been added since last year. There's also this there's been this huge freelancer revolution that's been happening over the last like since COVID where nobody wants a nine to five anymore. So I think in America it's like give or take 74 million freelancers. The second most of those are in the marketing space, so they're in different industries, right? But we forget that as agency owners, we exist in context. So what is the context? This is the soup that we exist in. And then there's all of this AI, and then there's gonna be all of this disruption that I don't think most businesses know how to do, and that's because I've worked with probably over a thousand businesses, whether it's coaching or done for you, and I've seen that most of them don't have their shit together. We already know that because most of them fail. So where are we heading? I don't know, but what I do know is like what can I control? And what do I think is going to be important in the future? And I think it's going to be personal brand, and I think it's going to be community, and I think it's going to be connections with other human beings, and that is where I'm taking the business. Tell me about your AI Doomsday.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:52

Well, I I think the same. I think that I think that well, I the my main AI Doomsday Day has been around the fact that if people use AI so heavily, then eventually are going to lose the ability to learn themselves, and so they we're actually just going to become vegetables over a period of time. New entrepreneurs, at least, anyway. People like you and I who have got a depth of experience will be advantaged because we can use it. We're the real winners in this place because we can utilize AI to be more efficient than ever. It's just, you know, we can have lower team costs, etc. etc. We're the real winners. But the people getting started in this space, people starting agencies with AI picking offers, you know, niches, delivering services, doing all of that stuff, they don't really have that depth. And so everybody can go ahead and do that. And so if everyone can go and do that, then all these agencies are going to stay on the surface level, which will then ultimately bring light to the guys that actually do have that depth, that do have the brand, that do have the trust. And so, like, whilst these guys will make money in the short term, eventually people like you and I will just still um still win. And so I think I think more so people are in a massive danger of or the thing they can do to prevent that is learning the thing that they are getting AI to do for them.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:59

Exactly. But that's always been the thing, right? Like, it's that equation psychology plus economics times technology. Um, so in LA the other day, we actually had our senior leadership, and this is one of the things that came out where it's like, cool, what's gonna differentiate us coming in? It's because we understand these principles. Like we've got like a two-terabyte crazy swipe file, we've got heaps of them of all of the best ever ads, like the things that have worked because human brains don't change over time, whatever, right? But exactly what you're saying, people are obsessed with this technology part, but it ain't the secret source, it's the accelerator. So it's it's a very first-order thinking, it's not a very fourth order thinking. Um, and yeah, I think the whole not being able to think for yourselves, that sort of thing, is very scary. When I was doing some brain rot aka research the other day on Instagram, um, I saw this like little skit thing where they they they just had this newborn baby and someone's like, oh, like what are you gonna call it? And they're like, Chat GPT, I just had a new daughter, like what should I, you know, if she's blonde hair, blue eyes, what should I call her? And it's like they couldn't even answer questions, and I see that becoming a thing already where people are like can't think for themselves. And that's even before I use Chat GPT, I do try and exercise my monkey brain. Like, try and like because you're connecting these synapses when you do this, right? And and trying to learn from a very broad range of things. So don't just study marketing, I'm studying lots of things, like religions, I'm studying um marketing, I'm studying business, I'm studying science, like all of these things, because AI, at least not right now, can't draw from all of these different things. And so, to your point, I'm going somewhere with this. How can people like combat this? It is from like learning from all of these things and having these really diverse ways of thinking and creativity that at least right in this moment and and not for the super foreseeable future, AI can't replace these like diverse things, ways of thinking.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:48

So having that access having access to the data as well is just a huge leverage point. If you've got you know thousands of headlines that have converted well and you and you over time can load that into a database, that's your unique IP. And um, and uh yesterday I spent six hours working on this behemoth library of stories for my brand. Because I'm like, what there's this disconnect between myself and the and the content team of like they know the knowledge and they've got they understand the ICP, but they haven't got the depth of me. And so I just reverse engineered like my whole life through about 20 different podcasts I uploaded into GPT and all this, and I just ended up pulling all of these stories. But because I understand good story frameworking, because I know what is actually going to sell and what is important and what's gonna resonate and so on, I can pull out great output. Someone, if you just took even just the podcasts, you took the output from ChatGPT and you just had that list, it wouldn't be anywhere near as valuable as what I was able to extract because I've got that understanding of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:39

But that's also because you've been building your personal brand. It's the same for me. I have all of these assets that I've been building over time, so it's very easy for me now to make this like second brain almost. Yeah, but that's but you couldn't do that unless you did all of those podcasts and built your personal brand.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:53

100%. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. It's it's it's key. Yeah, AI is a AI is a is a strange one. It's it's a it's an accelerator for sure, but also is a is a big risk for people coming up, there's no doubt.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:04

Yeah, I'm just trying to be excited about it and think about it. What how do you how to leverage it properly and how to use it to help people?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:11

You mentioned Ryan Dice. Have you did you see he hosted a web class very recently, like within the last two weeks, sharing the new plan for digital marketer?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:20

I haven't watched that, but I saw his announcement. What was the announcement?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:24

So it was it was just an interesting. I'll send you the link, I've got a recording. Uh it was very interesting just the path that they're now taking in there in Digital Marketer, which for context for anyone else who's just hasn't heard of that, it's just one of the probably one of the biggest digital marketing training programs in the world. Um they are now moving from or at least what what they are doing now and where they're going to continue to move from, is from education-based like video format to now it's all each of the training areas are custom GPTs essentially. So they're creating their own custom GPTs fed with all of the information. Yes. So they're becoming enablers of AI, um, and then then going to be moving to creating agents that do all of that. So, what's the real world context for you? I suppose it's an agency who's let's say building landing page funnels and so on. The the actual um headline, the copy, and everything is then written through a GPT that's been programmed with all of your depth and experience, and eventually it ends up becoming an agent that does it for you and so on. Which I think is an interesting move because for for Ryan, at least, being one of the industry leaders, it's a it's a risk because I don't know if people have caught up with that yet. So they I think there's a perception of AI being low value in a in a in a do you think that still exists though? I think if it's GPT, yes, unless it's re-wrapped, it's re-skinned, so it increases the perception of it a little bit. Um and but but uh what I thought the reason why I still think that exists is because obviously it was a two-hour workshop. One about an hour and a half or an hour of that was spent just selling the idea that the GPT, that a custom AI agent is the right move, and then presenting an offer which was AI agent. So the whole hour pre-sale that it was just right for me was confirmation that at least they believe that people need to understand that this is actually valuable and isn't just as easy as uploading a little context document on the back of a custom GPT. It's an interesting one.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:23

Yeah, I think as well when you're in marketing and you hang out with other business owners and marketers, you're not thinking like the mass population, right? And so then I have to think like, what would my mum think about this? What would like business owner X think about this who aren't talking like we're like using AI, like agency owners are on the forefront of AI and figuring this out, right? Like for the most part, and then there's some big companies. So it's very normalized to us, but it's a good point for like the mass market isn't normalized yet.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:56

I don't think it's normalized at all.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:58

Yeah, and how and how quickly until it is.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:00

Yeah. I don't I think we agencies will end up being enablers of AI in some way, shape, or maybe. I just don't see that how it will go any other way. Um and then maybe we'll roll up into SaaS or something, who knows?

SPEAKER_01 1:23:11

You won't be able to compete even for us, like what you were saying. That's that's our next step. One of our next steps, like we're looking at our paths, would be to build out these things that can spit out landing pages infinitely quicker than we ever could. But then your clients still have a time bias, right? So it's like you still have to like coordinate when you give them stuff because if you give them something too quickly, they're like, Wow, you didn't take very long. Is this any good? It's like, babe, this is way better than like any human could do, trust me. So yeah, it's gonna be interesting to balance that and how we position it. But I do think that clients will start when we when like chat when AI first came out, which is not even that long ago when it was like more mainstream, then clients were like, Oh, is this just gonna be all AI garbage? I think very soon they'll be they'll be assessing agencies on, okay, but how do you use AI? And if you can't demonstrate how you use it to speed them up to speed you up, they're gonna be like, you're a dumbass. Like, what what are you talking about? Like, am I just paying for like human overhead? What's going on?

SPEAKER_00 1:24:08

I agree. There's gonna be a lot of mistakes made in the meantime, it's gonna get weird in the interim as well. We we very recently launched a done for you funnel build actually for for agencies. Um, and uh one part of that project is obviously doing that. We do the offer consulting and then we write the copy and put it this on a Figma design on the funnel itself, sent over this Figma design, sent it with the copy and everything. The client sent it back, and or sent back a just a document, Google Doc, which was just copy and pasted feedback from ChatGPT. And I was like, hey, I went to ChatGPT and just got some feedback. I was like, how fucking dare you? I just responded. I was like, I was like, why don't you just get ChatGPT to do it for you? Like I'm they didn't even like give any feedback themselves. It was just like copy paste, is this good copyright?

SPEAKER_01 1:24:48

No critical thinking, right? I and I see it with marketers where if you can't discern what's good and bad, and you and we've already seen this, right? Like this is like the most common thing, then you're just copying and pasting, and so there's gonna be so much more noise out there and so much less critical thinking, I think that will create a very big wealth divide in society in general, and something, something personal brand.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:11

That answer. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:13

Yeah. I was gonna so I was gonna ask you what if you were starting an agency from scratch now, what would be your free core focuses in order to make sure you were successful? Yeah. I suppose personal brand will be one of those things.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:23

Oh, spoiler alert, yeah. I think so. Because hopefully we've made the argument for it that it needs to be. But if I was starting an agency again, which I don't know if I would do, um, because like we were saying before the call, you have to be a bit of a psychopath. I've been doing it for 10 years. But it's more like what agency model would I try? And so what you have to be careful of is like not building the business that you know, but the business that you want. And so for the longest time, I was building the business that I know how to build, right? Not the business that I want or not the business, and that just comes from learning. Like, no one's born a business owner. I'm a really good leader, I can talk at people for several hours, shit like that. But there's so many other facets that go into running a business and actually being successful. So personal brand, and then I would say, like understanding like the economics of like my offer and like really like dialing in on who's the best target market to go for, not trying to be too broad, choose a niche that you can go and dominate in. Like it doesn't have to go and be roofers or something. Obviously, mine's like high-ticket lead gen, and that's where I want to be known for like getting qualified leads, but that, and then invest in yourself, like hardcore, hardcore invest in yourself. And there was probably times where we when we were a bit earlier in business where I was a bit of a tight ass, not going into masterminds soon enough, not getting coaches soon enough, or I tried to get a coach and he was a bit of a dud, you know, and then that just put me off and shit. But like you should just be putting all of your money into investing in yourself. That's like what I believe, and I and I do it a lot now. I wish I did it a lot more when I first got started.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:58

Yeah, it resonated with that a lot. It was a good couple or good few years that was until I started investing in it. Yeah, went to the first mastermind. I was like, wow, I'm an idiot. Like, what am I doing? Yeah. What an idiot.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:09

It's the best when you go into a room and you're like, oh, I'm the dumbest here, sick. Like, okay, I'm gonna learn from all these people. And then you realise I should have been paying to get entry into rooms a long time ago.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:20

You've got that opportunity cost, you're like, what where would I have been if I did that from day one?

SPEAKER_01 1:27:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:25

How do you measure whether or not someone is worth learning from or not? Say you've you've got a problem, you're like, I need to identify and find something. Where are you going to find the right people and how are you vetting that?

SPEAKER_01 1:27:36

This is the thing, right? Because most content on the internet has been alive less than 24 hours. That's not good shit. Like, that's not good stuff. And then what I find is from like the OGs in like direct response or whatever, everybody else is just a photocopy of a photocopy, of a photocopy, of a photocopy teaching more watered down stuff. So, as an example, I'm not saying this is Alex Homosi because he's incredibly intelligent, but a lot of the Stuff he says, if you just go and read the source material, but because no one's ever heard it, it's very profound. It's like, whoa, and I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty sure it's like a Zigziglar thing, or that's and that's and I'm not saying Alex Tomrose is stealing that because he is a very learned man and he takes all this stuff and then he puts it out into that. But the danger is when you're not educated yourself, you put these people up on a pedestal, right? And it's like, no, like study, study the people that came before us. Um, and so yeah, like new new age people, new age people. Um, I think like Alan Soltanich is probably one of the best marketers that I will study. Um, Alex Tomosi's obviously great. I've studied a lot of like maybe the source material, but he brings it into like real-world applications now. Because, for example, I would study Dan Kennedy a lot, but that starts to get dated in Alex Homosi. It's a lot of that. So, yeah, to answer your question, like, who should you do? Uh depends what the purpose is for, right? If it's for me in business, I try not to get too obsessed with people that are a million steps ahead of me. Because, like, you know, you can get like all into Jeff Bezos or whatever, and like his way of thinking, but it's like for where I am and the life that I'm building, it's not exactly the same. So I'm often trying to find people that are a couple of steps ahead of me with the life that I want. Because yeah, like Elon Musk is sleeping on the ground of a warehouse every day and has like 14 kids and shit like that. It's like go him, he's obviously a genius, but is he building the life that I want? Can I still learn from how he thinks? Yes, but who's like ahead of me that can show me the path to my next step and then my next step and then my next step?

SPEAKER_00 1:29:32

Do you allocate a specific budget every year to it? Do you have a mindset of okay, I want to be in one mastermind at any one time? Like, do you have a framework surrounding it, or is it just like free ball, as and when I need it, I'm gonna buy it?

SPEAKER_01 1:29:42

No, I try to be more deliberate with it, but it depends because there's different levels, right? So the masterminds, I can't just go and sink 30k into every mastermind that I think might be fun. So I have to like be very deliberate with that. I've done broader-based masterminds, um, but what I find is being in agency-specific masterminds, because they get it, it's a very unique business model. Um, and there's obviously benefits to being in those others, you see what other businesses do, whatever, but being surrounded by other agency owners is just very beneficial. So that's what I personally do for masterminds. Then if I watch somebody and they is smart, I pays them money to go on phone call. Like it's like, hey, how much she costs for an hour? I just want to talk to you. How like how much is it? So that's so like okay, let's try and think of this as a system. Masterminds, I mean like one or two max, because it's a a lot, but it's also a time commitment. That's the other thing. Like, I gotta make sure I put the time in to get the the value out and be a good participant. The next is like more like um consultants. So if I see someone who is smart, I'll just say, hey, can we get on a call? I wanna like it has to be specific. Then the next level down from that is probably like your peer group and how much time you might might be doing with other things. And then the next step down from that is like courses, books. Whatever I want in that, I will buy. But it like I'm usually I'm usually solving for something. So in my in my upskilling, I probably upskill maybe like two hours a day, give or take, minimum. That's what I'm trying to do, and that can be a podcast. So my favorite podcast at the moment is Founders. Have you listened to that? Oh, this is your plane ride podcast, you're gonna love it. So it's a guy that um distills down the best autobiographies and biographies and like talks about the key takeaways. It's really good, and like that's what I want to fill my head with. Um, and then I study a lot of like around like spirituality or like understanding like how my brain works and that sort of thing. So, amongst other things, and then I usually have pre-planned the books that I want to read, so I'm not like what should I read next? It's just I just got a list, and then I know what I'm trying to learn. Like, for example, when I'm learning money, I'll read like that profit first book, and I'll read like other books about finances and try and not make it boring. Making money is sexy, sweet, tell yourself, and and making your money grow is sexy. So I'll usually have those books that I'll hear from out all that other learning, and I'll have them categorized by like the topic, and then when I'm trying to upskill on a topic, I'll just go and like get into that. And then as you read books, they'll reference other books, and then I will put those books onto my list that sound like the right thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:11

Two hours a day?

SPEAKER_01 1:32:13

Yeah, easy. Because like I'll do a walk a day and listen to a podcast, and then I'll do like more um then I'll do like more specific. I try to make sure I actually read a book every day to make like make sure my focus works, or I'll be doing a course or something that I'm trying to learn. So do I hit two hours every day? Probably, and it would even out to at least two hours because on a Sunday that's like all I do. I I just really like learning. I'm like one of the you know how like most entrepreneurs are like, yeah, I was really shit at school, like I was flipping candy. No, I was really good at school. The best. Like that was like my escape from whatever, like home life, right? It's like I love school and I love learning and like that curiosity, and I think that's what like separates some entrepreneurs from others, like having that curiosity, and like once I target a threat, I like I want to know more about it, and I think that has served me very well.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:02

It's such a it's such a key piece, and I fell victim to it myself over the years. You go through periods of like such deep growth where you're just on the business and you're getting nitty, and it's just like whoa, I'm working like 12, 13, 14 hour days, not learning at all. And then it goes, you go to a six-month period of like not absorbing any new content, and then all of a sudden you're like, I'm running out of juice here. Like I'm I'm running into the maximum of my existing knowledge band. So like I need to learn more stuff, and so it's just it's so crucial. Like doing more work in the business is not gonna get you to the place you want to get to. You need to be dedicating time to be thinking and having your thoughts challenged and having conversations like this where I've pulled out so many nuggets from this conversation, so many things that I'm gonna chuck into ChatGPT and I'm like, pull that out, pull this out, pull this and implement. These conversations are the thing that helps you grow company, not sitting behind Slack trying to just talk to the team and moan at them for not doing their job probably.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:54

And it doesn't feel like that, but I've had the same as you where like and and I used to be like, oh, there's there's seasons to this, and I can't always be like completely on. But one, um, it energizes me. Learning energizes me, so when I'm not doing it, I can feel it. It does it doesn't it doesn't happen over straight away, but over time my energy and my life force is depleted. And then two, I'm not thinking better, right? And so like I create a lot of content and I create more than I consume, blah blah blah. But I want to I want to like consume the best thinkers. I I want to, I like my number one thing is I'm trying to think better. The better I can think, the more valuable I am, the more valuable the business is. The the bigger my container, the bigger I can grow myself, the bigger I can grow the business. And so it's always just like these things compound just over time. And even if I can sneak like 30 minutes in, right? It's and it feels like a pain in the ass. It's like having to go to the gym. It's like, no, I don't want to. And then you do it and you're like, am I better than everyone else? Like, I did it. Like, that's what you just need to do, and and it needs to become habitual. I mean, I'm obviously not the best at it, neither are you, but if you can nail it eight times out of ten or seven times out of ten or whatever it is, that just compounds over time. So that's what I try to do and try and build it into my routine.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:07

The one-hour consulting calls with expert is such a hack, by the way. Like the when you know what you want, when you go into that call with an intention of like, I want to solve this, the amount of information you can pull from someone in a one-hour conversation is like sometimes you can pull more in a one-hour conversation than you will a three-day mastermind that you attend, which fills you with a lot of noise of all this other stuff that's going on as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:30

Because it's bespoke to you. Like, I know I like mentioned courses, but the m the more disposable money I have to invest in that, the less I do courses because they're so broad, they're made for everyone. I have very specific problems that I'm trying to solve. And so if anybody wants two good places to go, you can obviously just DM people, but Clarity FM, have you heard of that before? Yeah. And Mentor Pass, those are two places where people are like, I you can pay me money to talk to me for an hour, and you can screen through their accomplishments or whatever and and find those people.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:01

Nice. Finishing us up. What is the uh one piece of advice you would give to an agency that is stuck behind uh sorry below 100k a month at the moment?

SPEAKER_01 1:36:12

That is stuck below 100k a month at the moment. Well, we have to think why. Why are they stuck? That that's the thing, right? No one ever like everyone wants to get straight into the problem solving, but you have to think why are you stuck below 100k? And really at that point, it's probably lead gen or sales. Do you agree? Yes. It's probably like that's the thing that you don't have nailed, is you either don't have enough leads or your close rate sucks, or both. And so then if you have to get more leads, okay, we just have to think about what is the best platform for you. There's platforms where we can plant seeds for later or we can harvest for now. How what percentage of your time do you put into that? And then have you nailed a channel? Because if you're at 100, if you're at under 100k and you're stuck at that, you probably have a lead flow problem. I can say something else like know what you want and scale for, but it's like, no, babe, you've got a lead flow problem. Like figure it, figure it out if you're at under 100k. Or a retention problem, maybe you can't retain your clients. That's that's that's the other thing. You might just not be retaining clients.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:09

Yeah, yeah. I I think the majority of the cases is definitely a lead flow problem. I mean, you yourself haven't done you've never done outbound, have you?

SPEAKER_01 1:37:17

We did run cold email for a little bit when we were like an um we did like a campaign. It's on my YouTube.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:22

You sent 10 emails.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:24

Well, I mean, if you want to go for a couple more hours, I can talk about cold email and and how like non-personalized most people do it. So we did it like hyper-personalized, like it actually made money, right? Now, like I don't want to be like cold email's dead. I think it's becoming more and more dead. Deader. You just need larger harder.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:42

You need to just realistically, people just underestimate how much you need to do. You need to send a thousand emails a day. Yeah, it's a lot. That's what you need to do. And to do that, you need a lot of infrastructure. You can send 30 emails a day per email address, maybe three emails per domain. So you're talking about a lot of domains, you've got to have some backups. Like, it's not the easiest thing to manage, it's time consuming, but it is still affected at scale.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:02

Yes, and this depends on your goals, right? And this and this is why it's so important to understand your numbers. So we have this great calculator we take clients through, it's like, well, how many clients do you actually need? Because nobody's ever actually reverse engineered how many leads they need, right? So I'll show a client, well, right now you're getting a 30% show up rate. So you need like 500 leads this month to hit that goal. But what if we make that show up rate 80%? And so it's like knowing these numbers in your cycle is the thing that will unlock it.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:26

That's such a big one. So many people are like, oh, we need X amount of client per month. And it's like, okay, but that no, that means we need X amount of calls. And it's like, well, have you pulled it right down to because like you can reverse engineer from the amount of clients you need to sign all the way through to the amount of money you need to spend, and that's where you need to be focused on. And not just like the money and spending, but like how many creatives do I need to put in the ad account to be able to sustain that level of spend, etc. How many emails do I need to send to acquire a customer? Not like how many emails do I send to get a meeting book? Like, who cares about that? Like, what's the yeah, what is the the the the input at the highest level that relates to the most important output? Like it's the relationship between between those two things, which is so obvious, but nobody does it.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:07

Is that economics part of the equation? Psychology, economics, technology. Nail it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:13

Um what do you think is the biggest mistake that people make, like below 100k? Like, what's the thing that stops them getting to that point outside of Lee Gen?

SPEAKER_01 1:39:21

The biggest mistake, and I did have a coaching program as part of my shiny object like origin story, and we were helping agency owners who hadn't got past 100k. So let me just look at the roller decks of data of what they were doing so I can give a a good answer and not off the not shooting off the hip. I think it's a lack of focus. I think it's a lack of focus. I think I had it as well. I think that the thing that stops a lot of us is not necessarily greed, it's envy. I've been looking at this a lot. It's like envy, and we see what other people have, and then we think we want that, instead of just knowing your why, having that long term vision, knowing what you're marching towards, and then and we did exactly the same thing, flip flopped what we did and who we served, and got distracted because of a lack of focus and probably too much envy of what others had.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:10

Couldn't agree more. It's a great place for us to end. Okay. It's been a pleasure, Alicia.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:15

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:15

Thank you.