Does Being Transparent Really Help In Your Marketing?, First Principles Of Generational Businesses, What We Learned From A Private Conference Ratings, Why Our YouTube Channels Are Starting To Finally Grow… Again

0:03Does being transparent really help in marketing? Okay, where did that come from? I was at an event called Seller Summit in Fort Lauderdale. E-commerce event. Was that done by Steve Chu? Oh, that's so funny. Yeah. I did the very first one. Oh, cool. It was a long time ago, yeah. So Steve's here this weekend, by the way. Oh, is he? Yeah. Great guy. Yeah. So I met someone there. He stopped me before I went on stage to speak. And he said, Neil, I'm really disappointed with your agency. And I'm like, who are you working with? What team? What department? man because we got like a thousand plus client a thousand plus people or he was a past client right so i was just like all right and we typically do enterprise work he was in this new program called level up i don't know how much it was call it a thousand bucks a month where we just help out startups just get things off the ground and i was very transparent with him i'm like there's only so much we can do for a thousand dollars uh and he's just like i get he got it and i was like if I gave you the people I put on an enterprise account you know a big global 1000 company I'm like I would lose my shirt really I would be just losing my shirt so I was like what was your problem so he tells me some of his problems I was like cool so I introduced him to someone on my team the president of that division I said make sure you refund his last month's worth of money and then on stage right before I went on stage I said when are you free next week for a call He's like, with who?

1:30I'm like, me. He's just like, what are we going to do? I'm like, you're going to give me your website URL. I'm going to get on the phone with you for 30 minutes an hour. I'm going to break down everything I would change to grow your revenue. So then I was on stage and people were talking about marketing and stuff. And I was giving an example because they were mainly entrepreneurs. No, I was just speaking. But I was giving an example during my speech in marketing that not everything goes the way you want. And in business, because most of these people are entrepreneurs, you got to adapt and you got to take your licks.

1:59and you got to improve based on data. Because on one of my slides, I was talking about reviews. And this was an example of like a real life review. Now, everyone in the, no one in the audience knew that he gave me this feedback other than Steve. Steve may have felt bad. I didn't care. I was, I was happy that he brought this to my attention. And I use them as examples on stage. I'm like, look, reviews are important. I'm like, you know, I was talking to this guy named Charles. Charles is the one who gave me the complaint. I'm getting on the phone with him for an hour next week. I'm like, how much did you pay Charles?

2:28I'm like around a thousand bucks. And he's like, yeah. And I was like, guys, do you think it's worth my time to go on the phone with Charles for an hour to break down everything he needs to do to grow his business? He wasn't happy with my company. And I'm like, we have some amazing people who are extremely satisfied. You're never going to have 100 % satisfaction rate at scale. It's just impossible. And what he ended up telling me, he was happy at the end that I'm doing this. People are like, no, it's not worth my time. And I said, it is worth my time. The reason it's worth my time is one, One, Charles is now much more likely evangelize my company.

3:01Two, I'm writing a wrong. Three, I'm learning what we did wrong in his opinion. So I can go back to my team and work on fixing it to create a better experience in the future, which will cause less churn and grow my overall revenue faster in the long run. Assuming my team takes that feedback, which they're really good at, especially Sarah, who runs that division. But the point I'm getting at is I was just really transparent in front of an audience and at the end of being transparent i had a lot of people come up to me who wanted to hire my agency for marketing even though i was transparent on stage that charles was not happy he didn't get results and i was working on fixing it and just people didn't care people like stories too it's it's a like us talking about this now might lead to more leads as well right yeah but the problem is there might be an expectation now where if they aren't happy they get a one hour call with you i would do that anyone who's not happy ever hit me up i'm always willing to get on the phone with them would you do it with a hundred people yeah would you do it with a thousand people yes 10 000 people if time permitted yes yeah um i think but i think it's a really important part i think you have to do this especially when there's if it keeps popping up you have to get on all of them because then you're the one that can drive the pace at the end of the day you have to but i hate to say this one it wouldn't ever happen with a thousand people you just look at client count um two a lot of people would have been fired if it happened with a thousand people way before then i'm not trying to be rude but it's just reality because they're tarnishing our company's name and three i look at every experience as a way to improve revenue and reduce churn which grows revenue and profitability faster if the team wouldn't take action on that if i'm giving them solid data that's actionable not fluff not just someone saying I didn't like this creative.

4:52This is why I'm not happy. And if my team actually showed positive results and they don't like creative, there's not much I can do on that. And other than to try to make them happier with the creative. Um, but this guy wasn't happy with the results, the actual revenue increase on his end. Cause I was like, all right, sounds good. He, I don't think he was in the program long and at a thousand bucks, there's only so much we can do from a consulting standpoint because it's just, it's hard. The costs are high. But for me, the way I look at it as every interaction helps you make my product better, which is how you build a big company.

5:28Yeah. And you can't build a product or a service in a vacuum. At the end of the day, this is interesting because I talked to someone on my team. He likes to build products in a vacuum, right? Sometimes he's not used to talking to customers as much. The same thing with his last started just not used to talking to customers that much i'm like we have to talk to customers a lot more and we have to not only that we have to be using our products and services ourselves um and not only that um it's it's not it's talking to customers but it's also talking to prospects too and understanding what their problems are because that's what business is at the end of the day it's just solving problems so let me reframe a reframe the question would you rather talk to a upset customer or a happy customer i don't learn anything from happy customers bingo and i knew you were gonna say that and he's spot on if you talk to happy customers and i still think someone on your team should i don't think it's a good use of your time but someone on your team should because if they can figure out what are the commonalities and they can push that messaging forward with your marketing maybe you'll get more conversions on the front end but the bigger thing is by talking to all the upset customers you now know what to fix and improve by talking to the happy customers it doesn't tell you what you should change in the business have you seen that show on netflix called american factory no okay so this is where a china a chinese company buys an american factory in the midwest and there's a there's a breaking point where the chinese people are basically on one side and then there's you know the the american people right and the chinese hr was talking to the chinese people was like go back i'm confused when you say chinese on one side american other are you talking about in the u.s factory or in the china factory i think they're in the u.s factory collaborating now so this is a story that was told me right so basically the chinese hr talking to chinese people just you have to watch when you work with americans they really need compliments right now if you're chinese and like i'm taiwanese right so whatever right it's you're we're wired to take criticism you're wired like if you're asian you're you're wired to take a lot of heat you're just never quite good enough when you're growing up right and so my point of saying this is i learned a lot more from criticism and my coach my coach haha told me this he's like yeah you've done something sick with your mind you disregard compliments and you take criticism as compliments right and so i think if you i'm not saying you should be like me guys but i'm saying if you can learn to seek out more criticism you're gonna grow because even even uh bill gates himself love him or hate him has said that success is a lousy teacher and it is i don't learn much from from successes yeah i don't either yeah and And when I read like a biography, for example, I want to know the tough things that they went through, the tough experiences.

8:01So then I can know maybe how I might want to adjust when that happens to me. One of the best lessons I learned from Elon years and years ago, not in person, but he just talked about this in an interview or somewhere online, was he reads a lot of biographies. And when he was asked by the interviewer why, he said, I like reading biographies of some of these successful people because I can learn from all their failures and mistakes and avoid making those same mistakes and, uh, for himself. Right. And because if you look at technology, it's changed over time, but business strategy and concepts and principles, they've actually stayed very similar.

8:36Psychology doesn't really change. Yes. Yeah. So learning over time from like the Rockefellers and people like that, it can help you figure out what mistakes to avoid going forward in the future. Have you listened to the founders podcast? No, that's the one that's worth listening to because all he does is he he he reads biographies and he deconstructs it into like a 30 to 40 minute podcast and and he's done like a 1300 of these so far and he'll deconstruct like sony uh microsoft uh walmart um the freaking um raisin canes which is like multi-billion dollar company yeah you like who does it it's david sender this guy lives in miami and he's like it's it's great because you can get it really quickly he did he did a michael dell podcast but But the thing that's common with all of these people is they were maniacally focused and they did it for a very long time.

9:23And that actually brings me to my next topic over here. I think we should kind of go back and forth here. These are the first principles of building a generational business or the building blocks. People like to say first principles. That gets a little confusing to me. I just like to say the building blocks, right? So let me start off first and we can go back and forth here. So if we're talking about building a multi-billion dollar company like a Walmart or something like that for the long term or like Hermes or something. The very first thing that I think needs to happen is you have to build an exceptional team.

9:51And that gets said so much. But when you look at the teams like Renaissance Technologies, for example, their team, everybody was, everyone's like expert mathematician, right? This was like a, this was like an investment firm. He passed away, right? I'm not sure if he passed away or not. What's his name? I think you're right. I think you're right. He did pass away. But point is that's one of the first principles of building a generational business. Jim Simmons. Yeah. He passed away. It was sad. All right, you go. All right. Um, I would say the next one is if you want generational business, you got to go after a big Tam.

10:23There's only so much money to be made from things like best man speeches. Reason that comes top of mind. Cause someone tried selling me a best man speech business a long time ago, and now it would exist today with AI, but, um, you, you got to pick a big Tam. You use Walmart as an example, Walmart sells food. They sell clothing. They sell stuff that you need. AI may disrupt the food industry, but AI is not going to disrupt the fact that you as a human still need food in your body and you need to get it from somewhere. So you need to go after a big TAM. If you don't go after a big TAM, I think you're just not going to do well.

10:57And actually the third one related to that, you can either sell something cheap to a lot of people, or you can sell something really expensive to fewer people. When we talk about TAM, we are talking about more of it from a revenue standpoint. Yeah. The fourth one would be you have to have a culture of willing to kill your own baby, not real baby, but your business. If you're not willing to kill the business by innovating, you're eventually going to get disrupted by someone else and they're going to crush you. Just like Facebook crushed MySpace and MySpace should have been where Facebook is today, but that's not the case.

11:30You need to really be willing to kill off your business. If you kill off your business by doing something that's more innovative, you'll keep surviving in the long haul. Now, this is the next. The next one is when I look at all these biographies or all these founders that I've studied, they are all extremely frugal when it comes to their business. They watch their costs like a hawk. Neil's a great example of this. He's pulling up his Amex statements all the time. He's looking at every little thing. You have to do that in your business because nobody's going to care as much because at the end of the day, the cost structure is the thing.

12:04Yeah. The other thing, if you want to build a generational business, you got to think slow and steady. Too many entrepreneurs want everything right now. The Bill Gates quote, right? Everyone underestimates or people underestimate what they can do in a year. I mean, people overestimate what they can do in a year, but they underestimate what they can do in five or 10 years. But you need to go slow and steady. A great example of this is we've been doing acquisitions at NP Digital. I want to make sure the business is solid in a bad economy. I'm not going to go buy five companies this year, even though financially I could, because then I may struggle next year when things go bad and I don't have enough dry powder.

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15:00That's framer.com promo code MS, framer.com promo code MS rules and restrictions may apply. By the way, you, you actually shared this story. Remember you, you talked to this billionaire heiress, right? But when we talk about building, we're talking about something generation, we're talking like 30 plus years. That's what we're really talking about. The last thing I'll say from my side is you have, and I learned this the hard way you, you learned this the hard way too, but you have to be maniacally focused. When you look at raising and canes all they do is chicken fingers right when you look at when you look at hermes it's it's it's luxury goods right or the lvmh luxury goods that's all they do you look at costco what is it at the end of the day it's just buying buying in bulk at discounts right so they're all known for one thing it's really hard to do one thing really well for a very long time that's why most people don't do it yeah they don't have the they're not willing to just keep going they're not i would say a lot of people don't do it long enough because they're also not passionate.

15:54But if I had to go with the last one, when it comes to building a generational business is you got to figure out how to retain customers. Too many businesses focus on continually getting new customers. Big businesses are built from the same customers spending over and over again. They're not built by focusing purely on retaining or going after new customers. It is much more expensive. I had the stat in one of my presentations was like seven times more expensive to get a new customer than is to get an existing customer to keep spending more so focus on getting your existing customers to keep spending money it not only grows your revenue faster but it helps you generate way more profit yep one more thing here we were kind of texting a day or two ago and there's a lot of stuff that's happening in the business world right for for just in the business world but also for us right um and i was just thinking about it and i'm like you know sure it's a pain in the butt right now to have to go through all this stuff in a shaky economy but i'm grateful for the pain because it is the journey that's fun at the end of the day i don't want to be at the end of it right like it's like we're in the middle of it right now so i i'm grateful for it and i think um if you're in the middle of it and you're dealing with it and you're not running away i i think you're on the right track totally agree yeah um can i let me just talk before we started recording here i got the conference ratings back from the global marketing summit that I helped with.

17:16And it's really fascinating to me. And so the good thing is we scored the highest of all business network events that have more than 150 people. So that's nice. Right. But when I was looking at the scores, first of all, when you're I would say the audience is mostly affluent. Right. We're talking average revenue, 41 million, something like that. Right. The thing is, you can never please everyone. And And so we did the event at the St. Regis Bell Harbor and people were complaining. It was right on the beach. People were complaining about free ice cream, free ice cream, the gelato. Amazing. You have the gelato Noah.

17:50Oh my God. You did not. Oh my God. That's a screw up. See what? Oh my God. Oh, you would have got it if it's free, right? You knew I got it three times. So we picked the hotel that had free gelato. It was amazing place. The amazing, beautiful spot. Right. That wasn't good enough. The food wasn't good enough. Right. Right. You know, so and so one person really loved this speaker. OK, let's just talk about me. One person really loved my talk and say Eric's speech, blah, blah, blah. You know, great. Right. And then one person was like, oh, Eric sold too much. Right. And then one person's like, there's nothing new from this.

18:21My point of saying all this is that. So someone said there's nothing new from this. Yeah. I bet you didn't use all the AI tools. For sure they did. And frameworks that you were giving. For sure they did it. And so but I'll give a couple of key learnings from this doing this event. So one, when you do an event, it's a labor of love. Um, and two, I would say that I've used a couple of teams in the past. I would say that I was grateful for the team that helped me this time, but there's also consistency things. So like Noah came and helped, right? No one knows how I work, how I think about this. Also working with Deanna from a war room in the past.

18:53Oh, she helped with that. She didn't, but had she helped, I'm just saying that a lot of the things, a lot of the issues that we had wouldn't have been issues. And so for example, we had some AV issues, right? We had some issues with, for example, I never walked through and looked at the screen. Like I think we should have had a bigger screen showing the speaker and showing that, like, you know what I mean? These are a lot of things that you expect to just be done. So this comes back to, if you're going to do anything, not even just the event, you want to have consistency. And when you don't have consistency, it makes it hard to get anything done.

19:23But also you can't please everybody. And also if you're going to do an event, forget about the ratings, do what works for you at the end of the day. Because had I done this for ratings, I think I would have tried to please everybody. Um, I, but I'm deeper in my career now and I've done a couple of these where I'm just like, yeah, I'm going to do it my way, um, and do what's right. And I will say one more thing too. If you're going to help volunteer where you don't get paid for something like this, it actually compounds because now I'm going to be helping with the global business summit. So I'm grateful for this event.

19:50And now it's like the global business summit is going to be 1500 people. Right. Um, so those are a couple of learnings that, that I had. Cool. Um, here, this will be fun. This will be fun. Why are YouTube channels are finally starting to grow dot, dot, dot again? Well, one of the main reasons is YouTube changed the way they count views on shorts. So they're all inflated. Huh? You didn't know that? How are they counting the views on shorts now? Your views are double on shorts. Yeah, I noticed that we're getting more views on our shorts for both levels. Yeah, that has nothing to do with our content.

20:18It has everything to do with the way YouTube is tracking data. How are they counting it now? They're counting it to be more generous and inflated. Well, I'm more so talking about the long form, though. uh my long form is going up in in traffic and views because i'm creating long form i wasn't ever publishing long form for like over a year yep same for me too i would say the thing that's helping for both of us right now is you and i are both spending more time on the outline so i copied what you did so um maya from my team will come up with six ideas that she's done research on and i'll highlight the ones that i like and she's she'll show the thumbnails she'll show like wide tam or low tam i'll pick two that i like and then what i'll do from there is each one i'll make like a 10 to 15 minute loom saying what i want to talk about then she'll make that into an outline and then we record at the same spot in century city uh visible audible studios visible audible studios or something great spot um record there it takes me an hour to get the long form two long forms done i'm assuming you're probably the same how long is your long form usually i'll take 20 to 30 minutes to record each one but then it gets cut to like eight to ten minutes uh so if mine gets cut to eight to 10 minutes it takes me for eight minutes probably 12 minutes max yeah not like 10 that's what they said about you usually you're you're pretty good like we both take multiple takes but usually you're pretty good at getting it done no i just do one take there's there's some there's some parts well reread but um i if it's an eight minute video i'm usually recording 10 minutes worth of content 12 max what i'll say about my videos i don't know about yours But when I do record in studio now, I'm just looking at it because a couple of months ago, I was only averaging like a thousand long forms views per video, which is not much right now.

21:57The average is going up to like, you know, 5000. And then some of these I'll hit like, you know, I have one here that I hit 97K views about a month ago. So it's it's going up because point is we're putting more effort into it. Do you use a teleprompter? Yeah. OK. Yeah. But I never use a teleprompter before. Yeah, no, I'm trying to figure out how to get yours lower. Like if it's an eight minute video, how to get it where it only takes you 12 minutes to film it. I think it's because I start to, as I start to record, I start to think about other ideas. I'll be like, oh, let's go back. Let's go back.

22:30And so I start to add more and more to it. But yeah, that's basically anything else you want to add. Because you've been doing this experiment for, call it four months now, three, four months? We've been doing it for three, four months. Now, long form videos are starting to do decent on some of the other platforms as well. We like it because it just makes the quality is high. I don't like the topics my team's coming up with. So I had to record audio notes and screen share video notes for eight more videos today. So I'll do that either today or tomorrow whenever I get time. But when I look at that, quality is important.

23:07but um this stuff just doesn't drive the revenue as like me going and speaking at a conference with 200 people in the audience that are my ideal customer or like dude i was just texting amazon today dude what is this you have all this millionaire and billionaire stuff that's what i'm saying but that's going to change there's only one script yeah uh or one batch and i told him dude never again yeah and i remember in that studio session you know they would have me record shorts as well and i was so pissed off that i refused to record the shorts on millionaire topics i just went home i went home and then uh the next round i think only two videos were about money related stuff but six were not this next round none of them are they're all marketing related but going back to what i was getting at dude i just generally hire roi speaking in a room with like 200 potential customers or i was emailing or texting uh it was actually made a little bit of both someone who works at Amazon and partnerships and someone who works at Google.

24:05Um, and I don't know which one it was, it was either Amazon or Google. And we were talking about doing a event together. I'm like, dude, it's just so much easier to do event at one of their offices or venues and invite a ton of people. They'll invite a ton of people. I'll speak. We'll bring in a few other speakers and just try to close revenue. You know what? I think the benefit, well, my hypothesis, I, because we have gotten a couple of customers from LinkedIn that just view like a short or like a mid-form video because we'll already post it um i think that might work with thought leader ads and things like that the other thing i'll say before we get out of here um you're publishing the long forms also to instagram reels too aren't you yeah i don't care how's that going they tell me i shouldn't be doing it but i don't care because i have audience there and some of them do well yeah anyway that's it for today guys we'll see you tomorrow

24:59Thank you.