Staying involved, Avoiding debt traps, and Maintaining accountability as an agency owner

0:28All right, so we have a little treat for you. A couple of things on my mind before we jump into things that you guys can start to drop your questions in the chat. You know, Austin will monitor as well. So one thing I will say, I just did a book review on this book over here. And you know, a book is really good when it has a bunch of dog ears like this at the bottom. So ignore the tacky title. The title is How to Be Rich, but it was written by the richest man in the world at the time, J. Paul Getty. And there's just a lot of timeless wisdom in here. It's kind of like Think and Grow Rich. there's just a lot of timeless wisdom.

1:00And so how to be rich, there's a lot of great stuff in here. And I think I'm just going to share some of the key takeaways that stuck with me. And it's interesting because I spoke to a YPO guy yesterday who's probably like 75 or 80 years old. He's been through the ringer. He's been a convicted felon before the FBI raided his place. They tried to put him in prison for five years. And he had a company with 71 offices, 200 million in revenue, and they're going to put him away for five years. And so anyway, he has a lot of business wisdom. He ended up getting out of that. He ended up settling with the government and paying them$100 or whatever.

1:36But it took like eight years or eight years to fight it off and$8 million in lawyer's fees. So the lawyers actually won at the end of the day. But my point of this is, we're kind of talking about books yesterday and it was supposed to be a 15 minute conversation, but it went for 40 minutes. and we talked about the concept of the working businessman right and a lot of you will read about oh you know um i built a holding company and i'm gonna hire ceo and i'm just gonna go fuck off and do something else right and you know we're kind of joking about yesterday because because i made that mistake he's made that mistake before too but at the end of the day nobody's gonna care as much as as you will and i think the problem with a lot of agency owners is that they just give up too quickly and they try to go do something else and their add gets the best of them and they decide to start 10 different things.

2:24But if you just stay the course and you stay very involved, that's not saying you need to run every business necessarily, but if you can stay involved and be on top of things, you're talking to the CEOs maybe daily every other day or so, making sure that there's some sense of accountability because at the end of the day, who owns a lion's share of the equity? You do. And because you own a lion's share of the equity, you're incentivized to move heaven and earth to make things happen. And if you don't, then that's your fault and you suck. And so you deserve to fail. And so, you know, it's harsh to say, but, you know, the whole concept of the working businessman, like this guy, J.

3:00Paul Getty, he worked all the way till till he died. Basically, he'll still working 16 to 18 hours a day. He's very sad at the end, for sure. Right. Like there's someone did an interview with him. He's like, yeah, he just like, you know, wishes he was happier and spent too much time working. Probably. That's another lesson for you all. but you know he this book came out a month before he died and even towards the end of it you know he contributed one other thing I'll say is he does mention that you have to be frugal that your employees are always going to ask for more resources and that's okay like they're strapped right they're always going to need more resources but it's your job to push back and say no I think in some cases he might have been a little too frugal because this is the guy where his grandson was kidnapped and there was a ransom, um, of basically$118 million in today's day and age.

3:50Um, so adjusted for inflation. And basically, um, he's like, I'm not going to pay it. And then they cut off his grandson's ear and sent it to him. And then he's like, okay, I'll pay you like 2 million, which is like the, the, the most you can get away with in terms of writing off the 2.2 million dollars. And so he did that. And apparently he never talked to that grandson again. Like, I don't know what happened there, but yeah, that is what it is. Get this book. It's great. There's a ton of lessons in here. And that being said, hopefully me talking for a couple of minutes has jogged a couple of questions for you guys.

4:23So feel free to raise your hand if you've got any questions or if not, we can end the call right now. So feel free to go. We got Alian over here. I'm just going to read this. Do agency owners use debt financing in Japan? The interest rate is so low that businesses often raise funds through debt without specific purpose. You know, that whole chaos that happened two weeks ago or three, four weeks ago, Alian, the debt carry trade, Japan carry trade, I think, right? You know what was happening there, right? They're taking on debt and then they were just investing in growth stocks in the US and then they're making a spread on that, right?

4:58So I would say, look, if you're at zero interest rates, you look at a couple of years ago in America, everyone was taking on debt. Everyone was going crazy, right? Right. And so I was just talking with Neil this morning. We would talk for about 30 minutes or so. And we were just talking about how it's beneficial to be profitable because the more profitable you are, the better terms you're going to get, the higher the debt that you can get from banks. And then you can take a shot. Right. Which actually dovetails into like there's like a there's like a there's like a there's like a. there's like a but here too.

5:33If you raise too much debt, if it feels like the wheels are falling off, if your heart tells you not to do it, you probably shouldn't do it. And what I mean by that is in this book, he talks about the Firestone CEO saying that companies that grow too quickly or too inorganically, what happens to them is their customers, their people can't take on the work, their customers suffer as well. And then what ends up happening is everyone suffers and the whole thing goes down. I've experienced that myself before. So I would just say, if you're to do it, be cautious with it and don't try to over-leverage yourself too much.

6:14And then maybe dip your toe a little bit at a time. Don't get too over-aggressive. And even Neil this morning, he got a little too over-aggressive. And I knew he would with his global acquisitions, and he admitted to it. So I would say, Alian, if I had 0 % interest rate, like, fuck yeah, I go a little harder right now. But do agencies need to, is there any need to do that? You don't need to do anything. In Japan, there's a sentiment that you have to raise funds through debt. Because the interest rate is so low that it's a kind of norm that you just go, why are you not going to banks and get loans out of it?

6:56Yeah. The problem is once the banks raise the interest rate by even like, you know, like a 25, 25 basis points, right? It's like, Oh, right. A lot of people got margin called off of that. Right. So those people were a little too aggressive. So I think you can do it. I think I certainly, this is not advice for you. I'm just talking about myself right now. Cause I don't want to get you in trouble. Right. So I would personally take a look at it. Um, and just don't know, again, don't know, like here, what did Charlie Munger say? So Charlie Munger, late Charlie Munger over here. there's three things that will kill a man.

7:28It's ladies, liquor, and leverage. The first two were just for fun. Ladies and liquor was just for fun. It's really leverage that will kill you. I mean, I don't have any plans to raise funds, but yeah. Certainly take a look at it, right? That part can't hurt you, but don't feel... What happens is when you have outside pressures, when you're seeing everyone do it around you and you feel like you need to do it, that's not really you at the end of the day. You have to do what feels right to you. And there's another book. It's a 36 hour audio book called reality trend surfing that my friend told me about.

8:03That one's really good. Cause it does kind of explain the forces around you and everything trying to pull you in and you having to defend against it. But more than anything, the thing that sticks out to me from that book, here's another book for you, I guess, is that the more you try to control an outcome or more so the more importance you place on the outcome, the more it gets away from you, right? Whether it's you trying to get some type of business outcome or you trying to get some type of outcome when it comes to relationships, it never worked. Think about it. When has that ever worked for you?

8:31Anybody here? Never, right? So yeah. Anyway, that's my answer to you, Allian. Thanks. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds.

9:06Great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketing school dot IOS slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. Go for it, Bill. I want to change up a little bit, but this is top of mind for me.

9:35About LinkedIn, do you think that sending too many cold DMs or just going hard on DMs affects your profile post-reach? Yeah. Does it affect your post-reach, your DMs? Yeah. I don't think it does. No. I've never seen any evidence that it does because it's such a different thing. How many sales DMs are you sending? Well, about last year, I was getting millions of views and just grew pretty fast. And, uh, yeah, well, LinkedIn's just way harder now. I mean, it's, there's way more people posting and they're posting insufferable shit, right? Like that, that dude from, uh, that, that dude that said, uh, basically, you know, uh, some Amazon CEO screwed his wife and this is what he learned about B2B SaaS.

10:23Like, like that's the type of stuff you get now. Right. And then Mark Marcos, by the way, is a LinkedIn ghostwriter. Um, so Marcos, you might have some things to say there, but I, I just don't think it affects reach. It's like, it doesn't make sense that your DMS would affect your post reach. I saw a correlation with the fact of sending these DMs and going and the reach, but my content may just suck now. I have to talk to Marcos. Maybe. It doesn't. It should actually help your reach, realistically, because if you're sending outbound connection requests, those accounts followers. So realistically, your views should be higher.

10:58Marcos, if you can email me afterwards with some of the work that you guys have done, I might be curious because there's an angle here. So I have one of, um, one guy I used to intern for, um, good to see you, Brennan. I like the new hair. Um, but so, so, um, this one guy used to intern for, I was talking to the other guy that I interned for this week. I was like, dude, like Sean, Sean's his name. Right. Um, I'm like, he's getting a lot of reach down. He's growing really quickly. Like he's got like 20 tweets that have over a million views. Um, and he was thinking about firing his, his LinkedIn and his Twitter ghostwriters initially, because like when, when I hired ghostwriters, they were really good at writing, but they're just writing shit that I just didn't care about.

11:33Right. So who cares if I got like a million, two million views per post? I just didn't care about it. But what he does is he's like, okay, I'm going to help brainstorm the ideas. I'm going to help write all the outlines. And then the ghostwriters are going to work with me. So I guess the question for you, Marcos, is are you doing that for any of your clients? Because I think a lot of people expect it to be said and forget, but it just doesn't work that way. If you want to actually drive impact. Yeah, no, we did that. That was like the OG meta when ghostwriting was brand new. 2022 um no we only write within the parameters of what the client's industry is um but the caveat is that we try to keep it in the bubble that's near it if we're trying to go viral you still have to branch a little like for example i think your opinion on mr beast brand or like the ronaldo youtube going to 30 mil subs might be relevant as a marketing owner but it's not necessarily about single grain so we try to keep it relevant for the most part if we're gonna branch but no we're not gonna write the Feynman technique in the 80 20 yeah on everybody's brand yeah what does it cost to hire a company like yours to do that um it depends so my company's niche down to info product sellers so we charge like a retainer percentage the industry average is three to five K a month.

12:58Cool. Yeah. So, okay. You got it. You focus on, on infographic. Are you rocking right now? I'm doing a Murph, but now I'm walking.

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13:50This black Friday joined the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash marketing school. That's shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this Black Friday one to remember. Got it. Alian says, Marcos, I saw you. My YouTube recommendation is great work. There you go. Look at that. Cool. All right. Quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain and And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. I want to talk about a couple of new strategies.

14:24And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website. and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint.

14:52And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more. And we'll see you inside. I'm very undisciplined. I really want to scale LinkedIn, like specifically in the travel space. There's only two or three other ones like us. But if I could just like be in front of everybody in the organic feed, rather than spending 20 grand a month on LinkedIn paid, That would make me really happy. Yeah. Well, Brennan, do you do podcasts on your end? Yeah, we run a podcast too. Okay. It does absolutely nothing.

15:27Check this out. So I found this tool and I think I talked about it. I don't think the episode's out yet, but let me show this to you guys. So here's, I found this tool. Gary Tan tweeted it out. Overlap, they're backed by YC. And so I've just been taking my YouTube videos and then I've been dumping it into this thing. And it's really good. It's better than like Opus or any other tool that I found. in terms of finding the right moments, right? And I started testing it this week. And so like, these are some of the moments like buying versus building websites. Okay, here's a little clip over here.

15:54I can download it if I want. Shortcuts will hurt you, right? Mastering. So basically my, because I'm not too active on LinkedIn or Twitter for that matter. I do most of the damage, I guess, through SEO and like short form and maybe some on long form YouTube. But I'm like, okay, we need to step up our game on LinkedIn, Twitter. I'm just going to test this out myself. And so I just started taking these short videos and I started writing some captions for them. And I'm getting anywhere from like 10 to 25X more reach on these posts. And this is just the very beginning right now. So like this Gary Vee one over here, they found a couple of good moments.

16:28I threw one up on Twitter. It's got like 5K views, which is not bad because usually my views might be like a couple hundred or so. So again, it's called Overlap and it's completely free right now. The only problem with it is you'll get like a watermark and it doesn't tell you exactly where it's clipping from. It just gives you a clip. any questions or comments on this you had a chat with Adam Robinson right from RB2B I think he mentioned it in one of the videos I don't we didn't do a live one so he was okay like you see this guy over here I don't know I don't remember I was wondering if he had any interesting because he uses video clips in his LinkedIn posts and he finds out that It decreases the reach, but gives him better targeting on his ICP.

17:19Yeah. I think Chris Walker does the same thing. I know what you're saying. So yeah, the videos don't drive as much reach as a video or a document ad, for example. And there's been some numbers around this. But the good thing about the video is ultimately you're building more rapport at scale because people are actually getting to know you more. And it's a deeper connection. So I think mixing it up is good, but I'm just too lazy. And now my team has a process for this, so they can just take it and do it. But I'm like, I've been thinking like going back to you, Brennan, if you have a podcast, it doesn't make sense not to do this.