Market valuation in India, and Marketing lessons from the human that ran the entire continent of Africa

0:00Have you seen what's happening in India? No. Did I talk to you about the marketing valuations in India? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a mutual friend that I met at one of your events. I'm not going to mention her name. She's Indian, so you can guess who it is. You know who I'm talking about? Lives in San Francisco. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She's an amazing person. Yeah. So she introduced me to some companies that help take you public in India. Her family, they took one of their companies public in India, manufacturing business. Dude, the thing's worth 70 times PE multiple, like price to earnings.

0:3670 times is a ridiculous multiple for a manufacturer. I'm not saying she did a bad job. I'm saying she's done an amazing job, good growth. I hope her stock triples or quadruples. She's an amazing person. So is her family. But Indy just has crazy valuations. How do you have mosquitoes in here? I don't know, dude. India has crazy valuations. Devin was talking to me about data center companies. he's able to buy them here in the United States for three times profit. And he's like, dude, some of these data center companies are public in India at 160 times multiple of earnings. But there's a big caveat to all this.

1:17What's a big caveat? Are you going to take the money out? You can take the money out. There's ways to take it out legally. You just have to pay your taxes right when you sell the shares. And then you can repatriate the money. but the the bigger issue isn't that it was funny because I talked to some of the guys who take companies public in India and I was like wait you're telling me I can get like a 3-4x valuation more than what I would get in the United States I don't ever care to be a publicly traded company that's a real issue and you know had conversations with them and all that kind of good stuff and the biggest problem though is you know whether i don't want to do it or not and i was already hesitant from day one but i was like oh let me just take the call i could always learn more funny enough the private equity shops have been onto it for years and they've been already running this arbitrage like they were talking to me about like yeah general lanchick is doing this deal and werber pinkus is doing this deal i'm like oh these are all american private equity funds like yeah they're here trying to buy things at cheaper multiples and just take them public or sell them at much higher multiples.

2:19PE will always find the arbitrage and milk the crap out of it. I mean, that's their job, right? Our job is to be good at marketing. That's what we do. And that goes back to what we talked about last week. Remember people are like, oh yeah, private equity sucks at marketing. Well, if you can buy something here for 10 times profit and you can go public there for 40 times profit and you can get liquidity there, you don't have to be good at marketing. You don't need to be good at marketing. It's a relationship-based sales type of situation. I was like, I'd rather do that business than actually trying to grind it out doing marketing.

2:52Would you really do? I mean, at this point, it's like, you know, you've done marketing for how many years? 24, 25 years? No, no. I'm saying if I had a company, I was buying a company and someone said, hey, you can try all this marketing stuff. You can create 20, 30, 40 % more efficiencies and grow the company by 30, 40 more percent. Or you can just sell the company here. And in 12 months, you'll make 4x your money. I'm a financial guy. I would take the 4X. Now, for me, the reason I don't do a lot of this kind of stuff is NP Digital isn't, I never built the agency to make money. It's a love project.

3:30And for some reason, I just want to build a big company and win. It has nothing to do with valuation. It has everything to do with, can I just be the holding company? Also, because it's fun. It's also some sort of identity. like every time people like hey we should you should sell to us or whatever i have this like not butterflies in my stomach but this weird feeling where i'm just like well if i don't have this what do i do now i can go buy more things and grow more companies i've been a serial entrepreneur but this company has my name tied into it so i feel like i'm tied to it like a child of mine and I just can't give up my child.

4:11It's like someone telling me, would you take a billion dollars for your kid? I would love a billion dollars, but I would never give up my kid for a billion dollars. I love him too much. So what do you say to the people where it's like, your business is not your identity? When your business is not your identity, I would tell them, go take the cash, especially if it's life-changing and go do something else. And I'm not saying I'm well off, but I've done decent enough where as long as I don't buy Ferraris or waste my money on crazy things, I'm kind of okay. Well, what I was saying was the people that say your business, your identity should not be tied to your business.

4:45What do you say to those people? I agree with them. But you're tying it to your identity. Yeah, but the business isn't generating much revenue at all because of my name. It's more so I feel the identity of myself is in the business. Not that the business needs me. I'm saying I need the business. It's like a child of mine and my kid saying, I'm ready to leave college. No, I don't want you to leave college. I want you to stay with dad. Dude, I have a video clip on my phone of my daughter, me asking her, Emma, so where are you going to live when you grow up? And she's like, daddy, I'll always live with you.

5:22I was like, oh, thank you, honey. And now you're going to repeat that video to her. Yeah. And I do. I repeated her like a few times a week. And then the other day she had me recorded in another video. She's like, Daddy, I want to talk to you about leaving you. And her new one was, you know, Daddy, I decided that I may not live with you forever, but I'll live right next door to you in Beverly Hills. And I was like, okay, honey. I'm like, that works too. That's a good daughter. And William says nothing to you? No, he just says, give me milk.

5:54All right, real quick. I need to tell you about the group that Neil and I created called the Agency Owners Association. And this is a group that's similar to entrepreneurial organizations such as YPO or EO. By the way, Neil and I are both in YPO, but we thought it'd be really cool if we're able to create a group that's dedicated to agency owners to helping them scale. So you can be at six figures, seven figures, eight figures. We have different groups for different levels. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Again, that's marketingschool.io slash agency. And you can go there to apply.

6:25And I will tell you right Right now, what we're doing is there's an online community. We do calls every now and then. There's stuff that we share in there that we don't share publicly. And you can, at least the online community, you can cancel at any time. So you can go there to learn more about it. And that being said, back to the podcast. Have you seen this guy that ran the entire continent of Africa? No. Wait, ran the whole continent of Africa. First human to ever do it. So this guy's name is Russ Cook. Dude, I've seen on Instagram, you're talking about running. I thought you meant like ran the whole content.

6:58I'm like, each country has their own leader. I thought you meant like political stuff. No, no, no, sorry, sorry. Like physically ran. Yeah, the guy with like a beard and everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Russ Cook, his handle is hardestgeezer. Mission complete. So this video, so when he completed it, 16 million views. And this guy's just been running. I think he's got 350K followers. But I'm looking at all the impressions here. 3 million impressions, 500K impressions, 16 million impressions, 1.1 million impressions. And you know what's funny? It's not even funny. The company that was really smart about this was Huel.

7:29You know Huel? No. Huel is like the meal replacement drink. It's got banana flavor, chocolate, and all that. Stephen Bartlett shares it on his Diver CEO podcast. And so Huel was smart enough to sponsor him. I think there's another company that sponsored him throughout the whole way. It's like Huel was there all the time. The brand kept appearing with this guy. And this guy was the experience. This guy was the story. This is as if Nike sponsored him. That's smart. Have you ever tried Huel? once. Is it good? It's not bad, but it's not like it doesn't have organic ingredients. Not that this boba has organic ingredients, but you get what I mean.

8:05It's pretty, it's decent. The kick I'm on, I saw it on Instagram was salad power. Have you seen those videos on Instagram? No, what's that? Salad power is one drink that you take a day. It has spinach, kale, broccoli, carrots, a little bit of apple, a little bit of lemon. I could be missing ingredient. Tastes like V8. Tastes really nasty. I think it's not bad. I think it has organic. I think it's organic. Don't quote me on that. I hate the taste, but I try to drink one pouch a day because I was like, you get double the dose of your daily required vegetables. Oh, interesting. Well, I'll have to try it out.

8:42But look, I'm just looking at this guy's sweets over here so when he's got 10 hours remaining to run 6.3 million impressions and then 1 million over here it's just a lot and if you're Huel who knows how many impressions you got from this probably was worth it I would be crying after I finished it yeah I mean I don't know how what do you call that the it's not even the the edges of it it's not the diameter well a whole entire like continent if you're running the whole way oh he ran on the on the outskirts. He didn't just run through the middle to get... No, no, no. The whole thing. How long did it take him?

9:17It was many months, right? Yeah. Dude, that's ridiculous. Anyway, we don't know our geometry, so it is what it is. Yeah, it was a perimeter. He ran the perimeter. Did I say the perimeter or diameter? Diameter. The perimeter. You're right. The only other person who I know who can do this who's great with marketing is David Goggins. He's not a marketer, but the reason his content does well and he does well from a marketing standpoint is really polarizing. Like who would go and run the perimeter of Africa? Very few people to no one. It's so crazy and out there that you're just going to naturally attract a lot of eyeballs.

9:55It's like the same thing. There's another guy who was running across the United States. I don't know if you saw that on Instagram as well. No, not Forrest Gump. I don't know the dude's name. But the same goes with David Goggins. Like he'll be traveling On crutches And not care and he's like oh it's all excuses Oh it's a dude I used to live with him In the same community in Las Vegas No joke it would be like 110 degrees outside Fahrenheit and the dude is running Not running like a mile or two He'll run like 20 miles Who wants to run in 110 degree Weather it's like my wife She took me to a hot Pilates class In Vegas years and years ago When I used to live there And I was like, honey, you're telling me we're paying to go inside a class that's just as hot as is outside to do yoga.

10:46And I just sat in the back of the room. Hot yoga or hot Pilates? Pilates, yoga. Hot Pilates? I don't think you can do hot Pilates. Hot yoga or hot Pilates? I don't know the difference. It was one or the other. But I just know I sat in the back of the room on a mat and I just laid there like a snowflake. And I'm just like, screw this. This is too hot to do any type of exercise. Well, the point of all this is this type of marketing, to stand out, you have to be remarkable. Like no regular human being is going to run 20 miles in 110 degrees. No regular human being is going to run the perimeter of Africa.

11:20Plus, let's not forget how dangerous that is. So if you want to stand out, go do something that's remarkable. How many miles is the perimeter of Africa? I can just ask Google. uh africa's the continent measures from north to south about 4 600 miles it's not actually telling me about the perimeter when i first started my business the overwhelm was real i didn't have the tools to help me scale if only i had shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like mattel and gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started the best part about it?

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13:44That's framer.com, promo code MS, framer.com, promo code ms rules and restrictions may apply thanks google you didn't answer my question you didn't ask chat gpt okay ask chat gpt let's see if you actually get the answer okay here i'll ask right now see i have the app do you have the app no vertical length 4 500 miles yeah none of them are giving it to me i'm looking at like the top 10 results on the perimeter of africa I asked how many miles is the perimeter of Africa? 19 ,000 miles. That's right. You got it right? Yeah, 19 ,000 miles. 18, 1950, so 19 ,000 miles. 19 ,000 miles. How many marathons is that?

14:2619 ,000 divided by 26. He ran 730 marathons. Yeah, but how many days did it take him? Who cares? He ran 730 marathons. I can run a marathon or two. No, you can't, dude. No, I can run one or two. That's what I said. You can run it all straight? Yeah. I was a great runner in high school. Really? I still am a great runner. Did you run track? No. Dude, I weigh like - How did you say you're a great runner then? I didn't want to. I had the opportunity to. Oh, really? I weigh like 125 pounds. Oh. I'm like light on my feet. I can keep going. All right, next year we're running the LA Marathon. Okay, I'm down.

15:02What? Damn it. It's like you were saying he's down. Yeah, but like on the treadmill here, some days I'll just run like 10, 15 miles. Oh. I don't sweat. When I run 10 miles, I can just keep going. Okay. All right. Next year. And like when I used to work out with my buddy, Terry, at some places just for shits and giggles, we would crank up the treadmill to like 12 speed or 13. I can actually continue running. I can do a really quick mile. Wow. I can do a mile under five minutes. No problem. All right. I guess we're doing it. But on the flip side - It ends at where I live. I didn't know that. Yeah.

15:32On the flip side, when I was doing CrossFit and they had me run around the building with a tire strapped onto me with weight like a rope and tires. Dude, after I ran the perimeter of the building, nothing like Africa. I was the last one in the building. I was one of the first ones to leave. That's how slow I was. I was just dead and I couldn't work out the rest of the time. That's different. So like Gary Vee made a good point here. Like if you ask him to run, he can't run, right? But if you ask him to play basketball for four hours, he can do it. So it just depends on the form factor that you're using.

16:03Yeah, and those examples give me, just because I can run doesn't mean I'm the strongest or the fittest. If you give me a lot of weights and I have to go up crazy hills and stuff, I don't do well. But if you just tell me to run small hills or whatever, but if you're telling me to hike a mountain, dude, I'm screwed. Just running straight, no problem. So the key takeaway for everyone here is how can you run 730 marathons for what it is that you're trying to do? and other than that, I think that's a good place for us to end. So we're going to end it. Go to marketingschool.io slash agency if you want to grow your agency faster.

16:36That's the community that Neil and I have. We're like, community is everything. We think it's the next funnel, the next way of growing your audience through community. Check it out. Don't forget to rate, rate, rate, and subscribe. It helps us grow. Let us know what you continue to think about these long-form episodes and we'll see you in the next episode.