Everything Is Down - Here's How Our Businesses Are Being Impacted And What We Are Doing.. Why We Network With Our Competitors

0:04Alright guys, we are live from Miami and we're recording on my DJI Osmo so Neil is actually my hotel room right now guys. If you don't see the video right now, this is why you guys should subscribe to us on YouTube. We're on YouTube right now and we're at the Global Marketing Summit. And I think we're going to riff a lot today for the podcast episode and share the things we've been doing, the conversations we've been having at this event. And I think it's going to be a great time. I'm obviously in the middle of hosting this damn thing. So there's a lot of running around that I have to do. So Neil, why don't you start first?

0:37Because then that takes a load off of me. Yeah, sure. Dude, one of the most interesting things that I put on a spreadsheet based on a conversation that happened today. One of the main benefits of going to big events where people generate a lot of revenue, many of them have multiple businesses and some of their businesses are in the same industry that yours is in, but they're not its primary focus. So for example, there was a gentleman that Eric and I know, he has a business that's a few years old and I think it's like on track for like 70 million or something like that. Then he has another business that is probably closer to 10 years old, not doing as well, but still doing decent revenue.

1:17I think maybe like 15 to 20 million. And Eric and I were sitting down with him as well as with a few other people. And Eric mentioned right away, cause I started asking him questions about his business. I'm like, what are you doing in revenue and all this kind of stuff? And Eric's like, Oh, are you looking to buy it? And Eric knows we're going more upstream to enterprise. I was like, no, but it could be a good fit for you. And I'm like, you guys should talk. And Eric and I are sitting here. And right before we started recording, he's just like, huh, we're actually going to talk. It could be a good fit for both of us.

1:49Deals happen in person and they happen at some of the most random times when you don't meet and mingle with people in your space. You're just not going to get as many opportunities. and it's not as effective to just send cold emails being like, hey, should we just merge? A lot of things are spontaneous. You know, it's fascinating. So we're actually in line and then there was a multi nine-figure business person that came up to me and I just happened to introduce that person to one of our other mutual friends. And then all of a sudden, that person who runs a multi nine-figure business, she was like, hey, I've been trying to like work with you guys on this stuff.

2:26And it was a total chance introduction. I just happened to mention, hey, this is so-and-so at this company and she knew the company. and then my friend pulled me aside afterwards. He's like, that's going to be a seven-figure plus deal. And that is how these things happen, by hanging out with like-minded people. That's why I love doing events, even though they're a lot of work. At the end of the day, I know I'm going to get everything back 10 or 100-fold back and just not on my timeline. It's never on your timeline. I was going a few days ago with our Brazil team. They shared a spreadsheet of all their RFPs and they break them down from inbound, like someone coming to the website, maybe ebook or search traffic, whatever it may be, it's just considered inbound.

3:06Then they break down events as a category. They break down referrals like directors or employees or other clients sending a referral. And then the fourth category is outbound. So a good chunk of the 36 were from events. And I can actually pull up the real number in real time here, but out of the 36, um, RFPs, if you had a guess from the events that ended up happening, how many of those events do you think were same year events that were generating RFP? And the event count was nine, as you can see here, 36 total, 16 inbound, six sales outbound, nine events, five referrals. And when I look at the events of nine and we started going through them and seeing what the close rate was in brazil we're closing around 40 percent of the nine event ones no joke seven out of the nine were from ones uh from the previous year the year before that yeah it takes time to do a lot of these deals they don't happen tomorrow and we all want it tomorrow but it just doesn't work like that it never does yeah you know you know it's interesting too um so you're i didn't know i i thought you had quit YPO already, but you're still in YPO, right?

4:22I don't know. I paid for something. I think it's an online version or global or something like that. So get this, there's a global business summit that's happening and it's actually going to be in LA in November or something like that. And someone told me that they, so they did this event in Dubai and they have like, I don't know, call it like 1200 YPOs in there. Right. And again, everyone, YPO is a leadership group worldwide. You know, a lot of business operators are in it. And this is an event where you can actually pitch each other because in yp you're not supposed to hard sell like even for your so neil's doing i just talk right after this i was like hey neil we had to remove one of your slides because it's a bit too hard selly right um and neil's cool with that but point is at this event you can hard sell you can hard pitch and someone said they had an agency business that they got a hundred customers from it a hundred that's crazy yeah and that's gonna be in la in our backyard so it's a good thing that you're still in it right now so and then you apply to speak or pitch yeah so i'm i actually applied for both of us already to go do a session but then also you can do your own session to and i'm going to try to do my own session so you just go up online apply and you apply to pitch yeah so my point is like guys i've been talking about these groups for a long time neil's still a little skeptical right now but i think he'll come around in the next five to ten years because he he needs to find a certain you know there's a type that he that he likes that i'll just put it that way yeah no if i can go and pitch to a thousand two hundred people and they all generate a minimum of 10 million in revenue some generate hundreds of millions some even billions Yeah, it's great.

5:43I love it. See, there you go. See, this is the type of event that Neil likes. Yeah. So the event that I'm doing right now, so we're in beautiful Miami. We're right, we can see the ocean right now. This is why I miss Miami. But this event, you can't pitch. And then this event's like 185 people or so. So it's very intimate. And, you know, yesterday you missed the dine around. Sorry, not the dine around. But the opening dinner, we had a Cuban Adele sing. So she has a really like crazy voice. Adele? Yeah, she was like a Cuban Adele. She's like, she was like a finalist on America's Got Talent. But not Adele.

6:12Not Adele. Yeah. But still, it was worth it. And then we had a Cuban band and we had a DJ who was playing very vibey music. And the food was great. And it was just like everyone's chilling outside right by the water. My point of saying all this is that the event that I put together here, and I co-championed this with one of my friends, Jesse, we are very focused on the learning. So I tried to bring in good speakers. And the second piece is just the networking. And so, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, Eric, can you can you do like this, you know, crazy experience where you take someone to like, you know, the heat arena or whatever.

6:48I'm just not interested in that. I'm just like, I'm just going to load it with learning and good networking. And that's it. And you guys can go home. Dude, I'm with you. On a side note, how's your business doing in this environment? I think so. We were both talking about this at lunch. Neil and I were sitting with a with a few friends and business for me, it's similar to yours. I would say it's it's really I would say it's slow because I feel like everyone's everyone's hesitant right now because of all the things that are going on. And I want to hear your thoughts in a second. But the other thing I would say, too, is that for me, lead flow has actually slowed down.

7:20It's not like our traffic has gone down, but lead flow has actually slowed down. And your lead flow is still the same, right? No, lead flow. Are you talking about total lead flow or enterprise lead flow? Both. Enterprise lead flow is up, shockingly. Total lead flow is down. but I think enterprise and I look at them as two different animals right enterprise organization that's looking for a big contract for a company to help them in multiple regions it goes back to the old saying for these type of companies you never get firefrying IBM I'm not saying my companies like IBM we don't have that kind of trust we haven't been around for 50 or 100 years I don't know how old IBM is I don't think they're 100 but they're probably quite old.

8:02But what we found is the longer we've been in market, the more RFPs we get, assuming we go to the right events like this or other ones where it's like true enterprise. And when I say true enterprise, I would say YPO for us is more mid-market. True enterprise would be like CMOs, VP of marketings, where it's all company. Most of them are publicly traded. And when I look at like, I was just looking at my Brazil numbers, even though my ad agency is around seven years old, brazil's uh at least one year older so it's eight they started the brazil agency before we even started in the united states they had 36 rfps last year our website traffic is down in brazil i would say around 6x roughly i'm rounding here from its peak but a lot of our website traffic wasn't driving rfps it was driving the wrong type of customer so we shift our marketing strategy from focusing on website traffic to focusing on things like interviewing the cmo of mcdonald's on a podcast.

9:00Do you still do that? We still do that. We do a lot of that and we do it globally. Do you like doing it? No. I do it. But the leaders within the different countries do quite a bit of it. And then what we'll do is we'll speak at events like this. We'll do partnerships with others. We still do create web traffic like SEO, but it's more targeted towards keywords that would be more applicable to enterprise. But again, 36 last year to this year, we're already at 18 in April, and this is just in Brazil. So it's on track to well exceeding last year's. And in the United States, last year, we averaged 25 RFPs in 2024, so around two a month in the United States.

9:46so call it an april of last year in the united states we are around eight or nine i'm guessing because we ended up at 25 but averages two a month i do know for a fact in the u.s we actually have matched our brazil number in which we're exactly at 18 rfps in the united states but we are seeing longer times to make decisions people more hesitant and the way i look at the whole space is, dude, even if marketing as an industry is getting hit and people are spending less because of tariffs and all this economic crap that's happening, if there was 10 ,000 RFPs that are going out in a given year and making up a number, but it's something massive like that, and it's shrunken down to like 9 ,000 in this bad economy or 8 ,000, well, dude, maybe last year, I don't know my total global numbers, but let's call it sub 200.

10:42We were such a small percentage that you can still grow when things are getting bad, at least when you're small like us. And maybe we should give our thoughts on the tariff situation right now. So let me give you my thoughts first, because I know you kind of gave yours during lunch. My thoughts overall is Trump has been very consistent for the last 40 years. So he's always complained about this trade deficit. And he's always, you know, he wrote this book called The Art of the Deal. And his thing has always been, you go in hard with a lot of fanfare and whatever it is you're doing, and then you settle out something reasonable, right?

11:14I think the problem right now is the Chinese know that he's doing that. And, you know, in Chinese, I think I used a phrase with you before, but the phrase again is they talk about eat bitterness, right? But the phrase how you say is suku, right? And so I think the Chinese are trying to make a point saying, hey, like, you want to play this game with us? We'll play it longer than you need. What do you mean by eat bitterness? Eat bitterness means they know how to take pain. That's what it really means, right? So they're saying, oh, okay, you want to play this Art of the Deal thing. Okay, we'll play it out, and we'll play it out even longer than you guys, and we can take pain for a long time.

11:43And then the problem for them, the problem for us, actually, for the United States, is they dictate from the top down. So whatever they dictate from the top down, the people have to listen, right? In our country, it's not really like that. And so I think what's happening right now is they're playing a game of chicken. I still hold out hope that a deal will be done, and most things will go back to normal. I think everything's gonna come down to, for most countries where US is charging a 10 % tariff on everything, that's where I think we land on everything. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast.

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13:58If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school. Yeah. Yeah, and the US, even though the president is top down, he still has to deal with all the people underneath. I don't know how it is in China. Yeah, you know, it's mostly just you're going to do, as we say, and hopefully you trust me type of thing. And I'll be honest with you. I mean, if we go back in time, you think about World War II real quick.

14:38It was Roosevelt, right? He was president, I think, for 12 or 16 years. And that's why the two-term limit came in. And he was a really good president, I think, for the most part. and basically what happened, the logic here is that because he was president for so long, he started to build like a, it almost appeared like a monarchy, right? And so that's why the government started becoming bigger and bigger. And that's why our government is so bloated today. That's one of the reasons, right? My point of saying this is that if you have a really good leader, people would prefer that leader stay in power for a long time.

15:09And I think right now, I don't know enough about China, but it seems like people are okay with it being dictated top down. And I'm assuming they don't have the problems that, I wouldn't say problems, but in the United States, a lot of states, I think it was like 12, are trying to sue them over tariffs. I'm assuming they don't have those things in China. So in our country, yeah, the short answer is they don't have that problem because it's like, no, you're going to listen to us. But here, everyone's fighting each other. And that's not productive. Like, imagine if you're running a company, everyone's fighting each other.

15:37How can you get anything done? Well, I know a lot of people who donated to both political parties on the business end in the United States, both Harris and Trump. And a lot of these corporations and individuals are really wealthy, like quite a few of them are on the Forbes list. No, I don't know Soros. I don't know anyone even close to him. No, I mean, Soros donated. Yeah, he did. No, but I'm saying I personally know quite a few people who are wealthy on the Forbes list who donated on both sides. And the problem that people have, whether it's good or bad, rich people don't like their businesses.

16:14And most of them are invested in business directly from what they created or their money is in businesses through the stock market. they don't like when things start going bad whether it's good for the long run or it's bad for the long run they don't care and my team and i we were curious to see what people are concerned about the most recently so instead of running a survey which a lot of people do saying like this is you know if people ran a survey on trump i don't know if you saw they said he has the worst ratings on the economy than he ever did on first term or currently yeah right now we just looked at all the news sites and if you look at the news sites they mainly talk about the economy terrorists recession jobs people spending less uh people gambling less in las vegas airlines re-forecasting you don't really see them talking as much about ukraine you don't really see them talking much about israel they're focused on the economy is bad is this going to be recession are people going to be in trouble the media that's what they're talking about more than anything else right now from what when we when we started scraping all the news sites to just quickly see what they're discussing yeah and that's what's top of mind right now so to your point most we're not wired to care about the long term but if you can think long term if you can wire yourself to care about the long term like warren buffett and charlie munger then you're going to be more successful than most people but we're just not wired we're not wired to think like that you have to reframe your mind um i do believe though like let's take trump out of the equation for a second when scott beston says maybe maybe we do need to take some medicine and to kind of you know solve this can that we've been kicking down the road for a while.

17:47I do believe it needs to happen as bad as it sounds. Like I do think it's better for the long term, but that's just my two cents. Yeah, the business is suffering right now and people are suffering. The question is, what are they going to do? What is the right solution? People don't really, when you think about long term, majority of the people barely have any money in their bank account. Yeah. I mean, I think most people have less than a month saved. Like most people can't even take out like a thousand or two thousand dollars if they need to correct so when you look at it from that perspective they don't care yeah they don't care because they won't be able to survive and i'm not saying we shouldn't think about long term the tricky balances for people in power how do you solve long-term problems while not creating much short-term pain and that's beyond our pay grade but that is a deep question right it's like how do you solve that while not putting people not putting the economy into a recession which i actually believe in a recession right now me too And you saw how they reported that.

18:42Was it Besant and Musk? He did battles at the White House? Or was it Musk and someone else? Navarro. Musk and Navarro. Peter Navarro. No, no, no, no. Recently, it was someone else. Besant and Elon? I think it may have been Besant and Elon. Supposedly, they were reporting on CNBC yesterday how they're having heated battles. Oh, I didn't know that. I'm pretty sure it wasn't Navarro. It was Elon and someone else. They were just disagreeing with certain policies. Yeah. I mean, if you're Elon, you definitely don't want tariffs at all. Yeah, it doesn't help. Yeah. I mean, it just puts insane pressure on.

19:10But anyway, going back to the event real quick. So did you get the goodie bag? No, I didn't even register. Okay, so you should get the goodie bag. The goodie bag, it's a very nice bag, okay? But inside this goodie bag, I have a point to all this. I'm going to show you on camera right now. So we have a 30-pack of AG1, okay? So AG1. And then we were just having lunch with Nick Shackelford from Brez, right? This can does$44 million a year. And this year they're going to do... 70-something, I think? I don't know that's public, but the 44 is public. That's all I know. I don't know about the projection, so that's your fault.

19:43But anyway, my bad, Nick. But either way, you're growing great. So that can be a bad thing to have out there. You remember Ian Blair? Laundry sauce. Yeah. Laundry sauce. OK, these are premium laundry detergents. And so why am I bringing this up right now? I am bringing up the gifts for my goodie bag, our goodie bag, the YPO Global Marketing Summit, because the team told me basically a month or maybe six weeks ago that we're lacking in the goodie bag. so I quickly reached out to Nick I was like hey can you hook up a bunch of cans and then I was like hey Ian I saw him in Vegas I was like dude can you hook up like you know these these laundry sauce things these pods and then Kat I was like hey last minute can you hook these up she's like no problem she's gonna send us like a big ass one that had like you know a little like um I don't know a container as well um and my point of saying this is that even the relationship I have with Neil we've known each other for what 14 years 15 years all this stuff takes years to manifest I've known Ian for nine years, Nick, I've known for like five years or something like that.

20:37Kat, maybe three, four years or something like that. You can't call these in last minute. These are all, and these are actual friendships and all of the people speaking, they're all my friends, right? And that's my point. Like it's, you can build your network however you want to build it. So Neil's built it in a certain way. I built it a certain way, but what's core is that you have to build your network no matter if you're introverted or extroverted. So speaking of this event, how many of the 180 people percentage wise, how many of them do you think are direct competitors to you and I? Um, 30%.

21:07I have the number. Okay. So 30%. Yeah. Do you like networking with your competition? I do. Why? Because it's at least when you're in person, you're not trying to kill each other. Um, you do, you start talking about other things and you start to figure out other angles to help each other. Um, even in, without going too much into your detail, but you, you have an angle in mind, um, for something that you do. And, you know, I would just argue that maybe they're like a pseudo competitor, right? Um, but there's always different ways to do business. It's not just like, Oh, he's a complete competitor.

21:39I hate this person unless they're an ass, right? There's only one competitor that I don't like everyone else. I like the only competitor I don't like it's cause they're an ass. I bet you that competitors based out of Los Angeles. There's a lot of companies, competitors of yours in Los Angeles, but yeah. Um, I'm with you. I, I enjoy meeting up competitors. And Tim Solo from Ahrefs and I were chilling for a bit and we were talking and he's like, do you remember that time where you said you were going to crush our company? And I'm like, yep, didn't crush it. We grew, but definitely didn't crush yours.

22:12And he was just like, yeah, we're growing as well. And we were just laughing about it. And Tim and I are friends. And when we were talking about competition, whether it was on the software side or meeting other people in the agency world. The good thing is, is you get to learn a lot by being around your competitors. So for example, when I was talking to Tim, we were talking about our own growth rates and we're sharing them publicly because if he knows my growth rates and I know his growth rates, what are you really doing with that information that's causing you to grow faster? It really doesn't.

22:44I can't necessarily just go and copy his marketing strategies and tactics. In theory, I can, but it doesn't really yield the same results. A lot of times because someone was earlier to market or they've been doing it longer, their brand has a different type of pull. So you don't always get the same results when you copy, but it gives you an understanding of what's happening to the market when you get more data points. Plus you can wheel and deal and you can get deals done. Like I've talked to some competitors and some of the competitors like, well, if you're not interested in these assets that you have, do you want to sell it to us?

23:15And I'm like, oh, okay, what can I do with that money? I can redeploy it. And I'm not saying they would do a deal or not. It just strikes up conversation. So talking to your competitors, what I've seen over time produces better results than going against your competitors and trying to create that rivalry. I do think it's different on the level of like a Google or Microsoft or Apple, but none of us at the event are anywhere near there. So it's different. And plus the other thing is if you're in the agency business or even just any business in general, there's so many customers to go around where you don't need to just focus on killing them.

23:49I think if you're probably in your early twenties listening to this, yeah, you might have the motivation to just want to kill your competitors, but we're a little older now and that's not our motivation anymore. You know, it's funny. Neil was working with a company before and then he met another company that was a big player in the space and he told them the same thing. I was like, we're going to crush you. We're going to crush you. And this was in Miami too, a couple of years ago. Remember? Yeah. Yeah. And that one didn't happen either. That company is very much the big company You know, yeah, the only company left standing.

24:16One of the few. That's right. And that company, the one I said, we were going to crush you. It was a company we were doing marketing for. And we were blowing up extremely fast, doing really well. But the founder of that company, they were a client of ours. It's public. I'm not going to mention the name. But they did some funky, illegal stuff that no one knew about. And they went to jail. Nothing related to marketing. They just did some financial embezzlement and fraud that no one could have ever guessed. yeah and so what do they say they say um pigs get greedy hot hogs get slaughtered that's from mark no uh warren buffett or did you say that it's warren buffett pigs get fat hogs get slaughtered yes yes yes that's that's the phrase that's very good yeah um but look and you just got in yesterday so tell me okay you you came to this thing why did you come to this thing what do you see the benefit of coming to these things honestly yeah because you told me to come to it that's about it guys i didn't look it up or anything but the cool thing is you get to hang out with the person that you've been talking to that's an in-person connection i think that you deepen that connection i think that's still worth something um you getting to hang out with tim you know that's that's cool was the other person that you introduced me to here he's here was he already here he was here yesterday yeah he's speaking oh today yeah i don't know if he'll be here today he should come today i should tell you guys to hang out but you should make that right that but that connection you would argue that it helps sure i think the connections are good i don't think it It hurts to continue to have more and more connections and get to know more people.

25:43Yeah. All right, guys. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. Let us know what you think about this episode where we recorded with the DJI Osmo. I set this up myself. We've got another camera over there. So that being said, we'll see you tomorrow.