Agency Trends, Capitalism vs Socialism, and Gary Vee’s Blueprint for the Next Generation

0:01Let's talk about what we're seeing in the agency world because you hinted on a little bit and I did as well. you're slowly starting to see things pick up, right? It's been picking up, which is why when you, the signal for my end is when I tell you my main focus right now is on recruiting a lot of my time, that means things are, it's a good problem to have. But yeah, the leads are flowing pretty well right now. And plus Outbound is working for us. How about revenue-wise? Revenue-wise, it's picking up. So we can't hire quickly enough right now because the bar is getting higher and higher. and so yeah you're looking at numbers right now Neil's looking at numbers on his phone so if I look at last year August versus this year August I don't have the last few days in but if I look at the numbers of what they sent me in a screenshot of sales of last year's August versus this year it's up 170-ish percent it should be more than that sales are up 100 % 170 % wow okay I think for us it's of signed contracts.

1:04Yeah. That wasn't the last day of August. That's a few days before the last day. Yeah. I think we're pacing to maybe double, potentially triple. So. Of last year. Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. So, which is good, but. For the whole year or just the month? The whole year. Yeah. So you'll double last year. Yeah. Yeah. We will not double last year. Well, you guys are much bigger revenue wise. Yeah. So it's different. Different story. I would love a double. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But the point is, we've sat through this because we did see a light at the end of the tunnel. But this just, again, this reminds me again that you need to have people on your team that can call these celebrations and we can make it a celebration where people feel like they're winning.

1:43People need mini wins. But you can't, again, if you're listening and you're an entrepreneur, you're a leader, you probably don't celebrate as much as you should. But that does burn people out. But where are you getting the, you're doubling, okay? Let's say this year you're projected to double. Is it from Q1 to Q2? where you're really seeing the growth or you started seeing the growth really in Q3? Q3. Well, we had a major difference. Let's just say that we had a... Nick does well for you, right? Yeah. Let's just say we started doing a lot better on the sales side. Yeah, I know who you're talking about.

2:16Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, but when did that kick in? Q3. So your Q1 numbers were similar to last year? Yeah. Q2 were similar to last year? So your Q3 and Q4 will be way more than double last year. You know, maybe 3X, I'm making up a number, to get you to double for the whole year. Yeah, so we got a lot better at driving even more leads. We've always done decently on lead flow, same for you. But then now we're doing a lot better on the inbound and outbound sales closing side. But I'm assuming outbound is not for single grade. Outbound is for single grade. It is. It's working. Oh, okay. Good for you guys.

2:56This is the experiment I was telling you about. What was the experiment? It was, we're basically, we tested like 14 different emails. And the one that's working right now. Oh, with the gift card. Yeah. The gift card's working. So it's like a 17 to 20 % response rate or something. Okay. Yeah. And then, yeah, it's booking legit meetings. Yeah. You should do it. We found that we haven't done outbound well for enterprise. Yeah. For services. That's interesting. interesting do you do mainly for smbs no we're doing no we're doing it for b2b sass only that's all we're targeting okay some some we flip for carrot it's just carrot demo um with no no it's naked no gift card i don't know why i call it naked but anyway the second one is just gift card for single brain so we will do outbound but we don't call this outbound yeah we're me my co-founder CEO and a lot of the executive team will continually hit up people that we're connected to our companies even if we vaguely know them and pitch them taking a call but without saying it like let's say if you're a moving company or that's a bad example let's say you're a CRM company yeah okay and you're Salesforce okay I'm making this up by the way this is all fictitious but the concept is where it's at and we crushed it for you for internal reasons your budgets got cut and you're no longer doing seo paid advertising crm etc what we would do is and let's say i know someone at adobe who's in a similar department i would message them and assuming my salesforce data was all public and i was allowed to release and we have a case study i would email someone at Adobe that I know, let's say their name is John and they're in the CRM division.

4:45I'm like, hey, John, hope all is well. You know, not sure if you knew this, but we crushed it for Salesforce in the CRM division. We got them X more traffic, X more conversions. We had amazing team on them. We don't work with them anymore because of budget cuts. But if you're open to talking, we would love to schedule a call. And it was very brief, very brief message. That works out really well for us. I can see that working well. We all do that. So all the executives, I don't know if you would consider that outbound or not, because we're going after LinkedIn connections, people we kind of know, but not fully know.

5:19I think that's still outbound. Yeah, and that is how we're getting included into more potential deals that aren't RFP related. The problem with RSpace, and you know this better than anyone else because you're in it, is on the enterprise end, although actually you may not face it too much because you don't get a lot of enterprise, right? We don't do RFPs right now. Do you get a lot of RFPs? We get a couple a month, like one or two max. The RFPs, the marketing world is very different in which most of the big engagements are RFP driven. Yeah. And you guys are global. So RFPs, you can win those. We know we can't win the RFPs because we're not global.

6:00So different type of story. And it's not worth the time suck for us. It is for you guys. It's very expensive. Yeah. Because when you lose them, a lot of times we'll spend hundreds and thousands of dollars. That money's gone. And lose RFP. Yeah. It sucks on that end too. Yeah. But you've done the math on it. It's just like, okay, well, I'm going to spend a couple hundred grand, but my conversion rate's this. It's conversion rate's this. LTV's this. It's worth it. Yeah. But no, that's interesting with your outbound. We've tried outbound on the S &B side. We can't get the numbers to work out for us on the profitability end.

6:30We can get it to work out where closing deals is just not profitable. Yeah. And the cost per close is pretty decent, but just the margins are so low. Your lower, your S &B, it's like a couple thousand dollars a month, right? So it's hard to make the numbers work out. It's really hard to make. Yeah, because let's say, let's call it, someone could start off at two grand, three grand a month. They might only stay for like three months. No, you want them on a year contract. But the problem with that is like sometimes you're only doing like 15 % margins, 10 % margins when they're paying you really small amounts.

7:01So there's not that much profit. And when you're doing outbending and you're spending all this money, you also run into cash flow crunches. So we look at the business in two separate ways. We look at it from is something profitable, but also how long before we recuperate that payback. Because with the S &B, you're doing work. The margins are low. You may get paid 60 days later. Yeah. So now you spent all this cash to get a customer. You're telling me it takes you, let's call it like eight, nine months to start breaking even. So there's a few months worth of profit left, but your cash flow is so bad.

7:39Like, is it even worth it? So then we just shy away. That makes sense. I do think though, if you go kind of, let's say mid-market enterprise level for these outbounds, it does work because the people that are responding now, they are significant companies and they are saying, hey, this is hitting us at the right time because the gift card one also includes the whole AISO angle. And so everyone's like, oh, this is hitting us at such an opportune time right now because everyone's losing their minds over it. But we're seeing something interesting with AI SEO in which companies are all about it right now, but the budgets are not there.

8:12No. They talk about it because they're scared, but you know why the budgets aren't there? Because they don't even know what they're looking for. No, and they don't know what the ROI is, and most of them don't track, even though they say they do track because they have data in an analytics division, so they don't want to say they don't know the data. If you're an executive at a big company right now, you need a CYA, cover your ass, right? And the way you cover your assets, hey, do we have the AISCO cover? Oh, yeah, we're working with SingleGrain or MPDigital over here. Okay, if SingleGrain and MPDigital aren't doing good, great, you just fire them.

8:38You just blame it on the agency. Yeah. That's the game. But what we found for the AISCO, it's a great way to get into the door with large enterprises because they typically have agency of records, but AISCO is not covered under there. So it gets our foot in the door. But then we got to work with them for a lot smaller of a budget than we would like. for a year until they do a new RFP or two years. And then, you know, you try to expand. Yep. I have a funny one here. Not funny, but it's interesting. So this goes broader around business in general. But you know Patrick Bet-David? I saw the video where you even paid for her to fly to any communist country she wants.

9:20Yeah. So you saw a clip. Okay. So Patrick Bet-David did this video on Jubilee. And Jubilee, they do this whole like, you know, one billionaire versus 20 anti-billionaires order. But this video was called One Capitalist Versus 20 Anti-Capitalists. And so the way this works is that he sits in the middle of the room and then he picks a topic. And then, you know, people can go up and debate him. And people raise the red flags or whatever. Once a bunch of red flags go up, that person has to get kicked off the stage. So anyway, I think this is interesting because what Patrick Bet David, very successful entrepreneur.

9:50He came from nothing. You know, I think his family immigrated from Iran. Insurance company, right? Insurance company guy, yeah. Sold it for a couple hundred, I think,$400 million or something. Part of the Yankees. Part of the Yankees. Very successful podcast and just good entrepreneur all around. And so a lot of the way his talking points are always like because his argument is like, oh, yeah, capitalism is the best form of, you know, best ways to kind of drive the best outcomes for the economy. Or he has another one where it's like incentives matter. And then everyone's arguing with him. His sticking point is always to the point that you saw.

10:22It's like, hey, okay, so if you're so into socialism, so into communism, why don't I pay for you a one-way first-class ticket to live in one of these countries? And then he's arguing with one of these students, young women. And then she was like, so she's like, name some communist countries. She's like, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea. She's like, those are not communist countries. And then she's just there. Whenever he puts a point in front, they're not willing to argue it. and it's interesting to me all you need to do in situations like this is just say hey if you love it so much why don't you just move away from America if you love it so much just move and they'll just like they can't argue anymore they can't argue but people still do argue because I have some friends and Eric and I aren't political you know we tend to be in the middle so we are political but just in the middle yeah but we don't really lean left or right I would say we really are in the middle So just to clarify this, I think socially we're more liberal.

11:20I think fiscally we're a lot more conservative. So I had a friend, you know him. When Trump got elected, he was really pissed. Trump announced the new tax plan. He was really pissed. And he's like, I pay more in taxes because of Trump. And I'm not saying I like Trump or hate Trump, but I was just like, where the heck are you getting this from? so then I end up showing him the tax brackets over the last you know few administrations and I calculated based on his income because he told me his income I was like this is how much you actually save yeah I went through it and I'm like here's how much you save and he's just like I don't believe it I need to verify all this information I believe I'm paying more money and that the tax breaks only benefit the wealthy yeah and I'm not saying the tax breaks don't benefit the wealthy.

12:13They definitely do. And it may benefit the wealthy more than the lower class. I haven't looked at the data on this, but you can even try to make that argument. I would have to double check that. But I was telling him, I was like, dude, the data shows that you are actually saving money. And they wouldn't just accept the data. And then, you know, we were talking about marketing and how hard it is to get a job right now in this ecosystem. And they're saying, what could I be how could I be better as a marketer to get a job and I said you could be more objective and look at data yeah and I was like what do you mean I'm like I presented you with data and you can't take your opinions out data is data yeah you know this is pretty black and white data yeah and I was just like and then we started going over marketing examples yeah and with some of the marketing examples they had their opinions in place with certain types of marketing campaigns because of what they politically believed it was like dude people are paying you to get them a result yeah you got to stop talking about your opinion and what you think if the data shows it's great and you're doing something that's ethical and you're not breaking the law that's what the client's paying you for you may not like it but this is the reality and the companies don't care because they're bored and they're investors and shareholders just want to ROI.

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15:21No issues with versions or miscommunication. Whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter. Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's framer.com, promo code MS. Framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. So these people in this video really hated the whole idea that incentives drive the world.

15:54And they're like, no, like profit is the wrong incentive or whatever. Right. And then Patrick, but Dave is like, you look at North Korea, I think it's a one 17 billion or something like that. Is there GDP? Maybe a little higher than that. But, but you look at South Korea, it's like 1.7 trillion or something like that is our GDP. Right. And so, and then to your point, when you bring up data, they're unwilling to accept it. So the final thing I want to say around this, this is interesting too, is there's a guy who applied on that thing. He applied for 477 jobs. He couldn't get one job. And then Patrick McDavid offered him a job.

16:27He said, hey, I'm going to move you to Florida. I'm going to give you a job. You work for 90 days, okay? I'm going to want you to work hard. And the other guy was like, the moment he got a job, he's like, I'm going to have to look into it, right? So it's like, dude, you just got offered a job right there. And he applied to 477? Yeah, couldn't get something. And then Patrick McDavid said, why do you think that is? Why are you guys, oh, this and that, this and that. It's just excuses the whole time. And then another girl came up and she was like, it's like, yeah, so she has mental health issues.

16:53She's just saying whatever. Like, she's like, okay, great. He was actually concerned. He's like, did you go to a psychologist? Whatever. He's like, okay, I want to do this. I will pay for you to go to a doctor. Okay. Cause nobody, she's like, I can't get any support. He's like, I will pay for that support. But would you be okay if I also helped you find a psychologist as well? I'm paid for that. She's like, oh, you're going to find me a psychologist? No, I'm not going to accept that. Screw that. Right. And then a bunch of red flags got off and then she got kicked out. But one other thing I want to call out too is – And I'm going to say, no, I look at this as more entertaining content than political content.

17:23Oh, it's entertaining to me. Yeah. Because I think in your 20s, you do think more like this, right? More socialist, communist in those senses. And because you're broke at that time, of course, right? In your 30s, you're a little more capitalist when I was in my 20s. Yeah, but you already knew how to make money starting at age 15. Okay, fair. Yeah, so same for me. But I still felt like I would like to be rich. But anyway, did you know that 1%, the top 1 % end up paying 48 % of taxes and the bottom 50 % end up paying what? 2 % of taxes. Wait, the top 1 % pay 48 %? Yeah. And the bottom 50 % pay 2%.

18:032%, yeah. That makes sense. And another number. So guess this. So did you know that the, so we bring in what, like call it 4.5, 4.9 trillion a year in revenue as the United States. Okay. So guess the percentage that goes into welfare programs of that 4.9 trillion. Let's call it 30%. 68%. Oh, wow. Yep. So like, and then he's like, dude, how much more do you need? Would you like a hundred percent? Like 68 % is a ton. No one will ever do this, but I think one way to really stimulate the economy and create a boom for at least the marketing industry and most industries, I wish someone will do this.

18:45Because I've seen stats that the top 1 % pay the majority of the taxes. And I know the bottom, call it people who make less than$100 ,000 barely pay any of the taxes, percentage-wise, right, of what the U.S. collects. I'm not saying the people making under$100 ,000 are doing anything wrong. but I just wish federally they charge no federal tax for anyone making$100 ,000. If you're married, $200 ,000 in exemptions, pay zero. I'm not saying you or I need a break, charge us the same and this for me is not a left or a right thing. This is a pure capitalistic thing because if someone's making under$100 ,000 which is the majority of America and you charge them no federal taxes, what do you think they're going to do with that money?

19:28Pocket it. spend it yeah right when i say pocket it sorry the government likes to spend so no but if the government doesn't collect that money from you yeah and even if they charge you and i into the top one percent a little bit more in taxes i think we would actually make more money if they didn't charge anyone under 100 grand uh in federal taxes yeah look they would spend more money on rent, cars, all consumer goods, our clients sell goods and services, we would make more money. Yeah. Look, I think at the end of the day, just to wrap a bow around this one, the capitalism versus socialism thing, we've tried socialism in many different, the world, we being human beings, right?

20:10We've tried it in North Korea. We've tried it in Cuba. We've tried in Venezuela. Why is it that everyone tries to escape to the United States? Why is it that we have the border? We had the border issue before, right? Which has since been cut down a little bit, but why is it that everyone wants to come here? Because they are escaping socialism, socialist countries, right? Capitalism is not perfect by any means, but it does allow for more greater, I think, outcomes, better outcomes for society. It's not, again, it's not perfect. There's always going to be inequalities, I think. But if you want equality is what's going to happen.

20:40You and I are not going to be incentivized to work. No, we don't watch TV. For all the same people, then there's no point in working hard. Like, well, let's just be the same people, right there's no you know if you get equality you don't get freedom the the problem with the younger generation and gary v has a video that he published recently on this is parents will celebrate like eight place trophies with their kids yeah participation trophies uh-huh yeah and thank you you lost yeah i i do not give my children eight place trophies no you know they won in the box car, you know, box car derby. What's that?

21:17In Beverly Hills where like you race cars. Yeah. Who won? Some kid got number one. Older kid. They call it maybe like 11, 12 years old and he built his out of scratch. I was like, good for him. They also provide you kits. We use the kits. My daughter's six, son's four. My daughter came in second place. My son came in third place oh nice and they won and we're like congrats yeah and then we broke down we we said you guys did a really good job on your cars and there were people coming into the room using chat gpt to build their cars we didn't do any of this stuff we used common sense yeah uh and then people would come into the room because you would build the cars in front of uh the community or you could take it home but a lot of them were building for the community people would walk and be like i was the winner last year and they had all this ego and i was like just chill i'm like we're just kids building a car yeah my kids did not rub it in any other kids face they gave some of their balloons to some of the kids who lost yeah uh to show good sportsmanship and then our kids were happy that they won trophies but we also broke down why they did not win number one and what they could have done better to beat number one potentially in the future did they get second and third place trophies yes okay so those you held on to we held on to them gold bronze silver yes but we still wanted them to understand what they could have done better yeah and how did they respond uh they liked it they were just like so next year i can get first pies i'm like potentially yeah can't guarantee it but other it's going to be more competitive next year yeah because every year gets bigger yeah but the yes you should celebrate wins but you should also give feedback and teach people how they can improve so that way they know that they could do better and not just be like oh i want like my son races me down the hall yeah i'll beat him yeah sometimes i let him win and he tries really hard and i'm not going to just let him be like oh cool i'm fast when i'm not fast no work at being faster and get better yeah by the way um so what you just brought up with gary v i mean that that is a content format right when you look at the patrick but david episode for example It's one capitalist versus 20 anti-capitalist, right?

23:31These are formats that work. I actually watched a video this morning. It was five WNBA players versus middle school prodigies, right? Guess what? They almost lost. So these WNBA players last time, they played high schoolers. They lost, right? But they played up to, they lost the three-point game. They lost. There's like a couple other like one-on-ones. They lost, like the women lost. WNBA players, by the way. Professional women. Yeah. Yeah. Then they end up playing five on five. So the women won 21 to 18. It was really close at the end, right? But this is interesting because formats get repeated quite a bit.

24:07Like Mr. Beach just had a video where it's like$1 bunker versus like a million dollar bunker or something like that, or like survive in a bunker. So when a format works, you want to repeat it over and over. And that's what Jubilee has done really well, which is why they have so many viewers. People like extreme content. another example that I saw this recently I think one of Mr. Beast's friends went on this date with something bear Madison beer Madison beer or bear beer beer I think it's beer is she an influencer or a celebrity she's like a singer influencer type like everyone is like big on her okay I did google her just to see how many Instagram followers she had tens of millions right it's something like that I thought it was more than 20 or 30 or something large but it's funny how I use google to find out how many instagram followers oh that's interesting instead of going to instagram yeah yeah yeah but um you know and the date was a failure and it was posted all over the internet she was dating someone i think she's dating someone already so that was like yeah either way i watched it because it was pure entertainment yeah but people like extreme content like that like uh if you and i talk about um uh why your content's gonna get crushed by google unless you adapt with - You do this, fear, fear driven.

25:23Yes, that also works extremely well in today's world of content marketing, whether you want to use it or not. And that is it for today. We'll see you tomorrow.