The Truth About Mainstream Media Nobody Talks About

0:28It's very difficult to trust mainstream media. media ripped Trump for saying that Liz Cheney should be shot or something like that, right? Do you remember that? Yes. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let's see how she feels about it. So CNN, Trump says Warhawk Liz Cheney should be fired upon in escalation of violent rhetoric against his opponents. PBS says Trump says Liz Cheney might not be such a Warhawk if she had rifles shooting at her. And then 19th News, Trump suggests Liz Cheney should be shot. And so, okay, whether you like Trump or not, what he mainly said was, hey, like if, if you were to go to war, you probably wouldn't be such a warmonger.

1:06That's basically what he was saying. Like anybody that goes to war, it's like, you don't want to put those people at risk. Right. If you understand what war looks like, it's a very ugly thing. Like you probably don't want to be fighting all these wars. Right. And that's what he was saying. But instead it's like, oh no, um, you know, Trump said Liz Cheney should be shot. And guys, when you manipulate someone's words like that, that to me is being dishonest. I don't care which side you're on. It could be Kamala Harris or Trump. I think when you manipulate it, that's unfair. And that's when people start to look for other mediums.

1:35And that's when they start to move over to new media. Which I think it creates a huge opportunity for us digital marketers. And that's why you should be optimizing for all these social platforms because it's less filtered. And a lot of people are moving their attention there. you can see the rise of popularity of social, right? It's just continually boom. The average person spends over an hour and I think it's 27 minutes, hour, 27 minutes a day. It's somewhere around there. And speaking of digital and growth, one thing is our agencies, you know, 2024 has been a tough year for both of us, but we still both seen growth.

2:09I'm knocking on wood for good luck. We both seen growth in 2024. You want to talk a little bit about what we've been doing to grow? Yeah. So we'll talk about kind of the usual suspects first, and we can move into some more advanced things. So the usual suspects for both of us, I think, are webinars work really well. That's one for sure. Partnerships, collaborations work really well. I think for both of us, SEO still works pretty well. And then I would say the fourth thing would be, interestingly enough, I told Neil this, that when I look at our gong phone calls, I type in the word podcast. 10 % of the conversations include the word podcast.

2:46and I type in YouTube, a little less than 10 % include the word YouTube in it. That's not saying everything comes from that, right? But it's saying maybe a good chunk comes from podcast YouTube. So being omnichannel? Being omnichannel works well. And then when people come up to us at conferences, sometimes it's to watch shorts, sometimes it's long-form videos. But we know the podcast is still a very important piece. It's hard to attribute back to this, but we know based on more qualitative insights, I would say, that we know it's moving in the right direction. This is why we spend money on this thing.

3:17Yeah, and Eric and I have been going to a lot of events in 2024, which I believe has helped both our businesses. I cut down on events this year. So usually I travel about 130 to 140 days a year. This year it's going to be around 60. Forget how many days, how many events though. Because a lot of times when you travel, you go for... It's usually for an event, but that means I've cut down on events. Yeah. So yeah. But you usually add on also some spare time for you to see the city or whatever. Not usually. Sometimes I do. So yeah, for example, this one, I'm just kind of going back. Yeah. All right.

3:48So I wanted to take a second to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. So this is a agency peer group ran by my podcast co-host Neil Patel and myself, Eric Su. And these were nine and eight figure agency owners respectively. And what I will say is at the end of the day, you want to learn from people that have been there, done that. If you want to grow your agency to seven figures, eight figures and beyond, this is the group for you. And we bring in other agency owners to speak as well. And it's a great peer group where you can help each other out. and you're going to learn how to acquire more clients.

4:14You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day-to-day and to build the business of your dreams. And the cool thing, till November 30th, we are holding a special price and you can apply at marketingschool.io slash agency. And the great thing about it as well, if you try to get into group, there's a seven day free trial, right? So once November 30th hits, we're going to increase the price by$200 per month. So right now you're getting it at the lowest price possible. So go to marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more and we'll see you inside. So we've done events. Events have helped us.

4:45Another thing that's really helped us is hiring really good people. I think both you and I have spent a lot of money in 2024. This year has been a game changer for hiring. I would say, you know, sometimes, you know, how Russell Brunson says, you're one funnel away. And then Eamon, who used to be the CEO of AppSumo, he's like, you're one hire away, right? And it's really true. One hire can really turn around your business. But if you pick up four or five superstars in a year, you're off to the races. Yeah, and Eric yesterday at dinner was mentioning, was it Peter Thiel or Elon Musk hiring philosophy on the younger people?

5:19Oh, yeah. Okay, so there's a great video on YouTube right now. So Keith Raboy did these episodes with Airbnb founder Brian Chesky and then also the CEO of Ramp, Eric Kleiman, I think. So Keith Raboy was just sharing a story. So you can search for The Art of Hiring on YouTube. Great video. I had my HR team watch it. and basically it's so Keith's boys like yeah Peter Teal couldn't say this back in the day but at PayPal um he was just saying that you know don't hire people above 30 basically saying that right in unsaid words and he's like okay so what's the reason for that well the reason for that is because Google and like a meta they've already taken all the people that are above 30 and they're amazing right and they're going to pay them an arm in a lake right yeah but people from 20 to 30 you're gonna you're gonna be able to afford them and they're gonna be crazy hard workers and some of them turn out to be superstars right who they have he had you know there was uh david sacks he picked up keith reboy right i think uh elon might have been in his 20s or so right um reed hoffman was probably in his 20s back in the day right max lefkin of a firm and so youtube founders youtube founders were there too right and so they just found these people that really wanted to grind and work on something that was like kind of world changing and um keith reboy was just like Those times were amazing because we found amazing.

6:35And the thing was, we hired all amazing people. And whenever we made a mistake on a bad hire, the amazing people would just push the bad ones out. Yeah, we on our end do a little bit of the opposite. We tend to hire more older, established people within our field. We do also hire younger people as well. I think the younger people may make up the majority. I'm guessing. I don't know. But for a lot of our leaders, what we found is when you hire senior people who have done it before in our experience, it just ends up saving you a lot of time and mistakes, although it costs more. You know, there's a story.

7:08So this is a raggedy guy. So this guy's drinking. This guy's like 39 years old. This guy's a programmer at IBM, and he's sitting in a bar. And then this raggedy guy comes in and sits next to him. He's like, so what do you do? He's like, oh, I'm a programmer at IBM, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, why don't you come work for me, right? He's like, what's it going to take for you to come work for me? He's like, well, I would like a Porsche and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, two weeks later, he has a Porsche on his driveway. and the raggedy guy that walked up to him was Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs, even back in the day, he was like, don't trust anyone above 30 except for this guy over here, except for this 39-year-old over here, right?

7:42So kind of like similar philosophies. I think what Neil's saying is, by the way, it depends on the business. So for agency, it's like an established type of business. There are a lot of people that have been there, done that. You can definitely hire these people, right? You balance the people that have been there, done that with kind of the people that will push. But if you're going for like Apple or if you're doing PayPal, which is payments back in the day, brand new, it might work out more in your favor if you go for the Peter Thiel rule, right? So we're not advocating for one or the other. There are different ways to do it.

8:10Also, Eric and I are in an industry where you're not innovating as much versus trying to create the next PayPal or ChatGPT. Of course, there's a ton of innovation. You need people to think outside the box. Whatever their ages are, those are the ones you want to end up trying to find. What else have we done this year to grow our agency? Oh, we created that group. Agency Owners Association? Yeah, and we all started sharing. That's been a fun community. Yeah, and we started sharing all the different ways we're growing and other people are growing, so that's helped us. Dude, speaking of hiring, the person that's running the group now, I can't list him out right now because that would give him away to his current employer, but he's been amazing, and he's helped this one company really stay relevant in the last eight years or so, and he understands a lot about community, and that's just an example.

8:54see it's like i i thought that that me speaking at one of these events wasn't going to pay off i'm like okay that pays off because we we picked him up and he's going to help grow the community and every by the way when you hire someone amazing they are literally speaking the future into you they're like hey here's what we're going to do for next six months what about this thing over here this thing this thing this thing oh my god just do all of it right and that's when you know you found someone amazing because they're six months ahead yes and you actually posted on that on LinkedIn. Oh, you liked it.

9:20I liked it. Yeah. Yeah. So good post. Do you remember what I said? Kind of, and I'll try to repeat it. You can correct me. You have talent in three buckets, someone who's amazing, average, and someone who sucks. A, B, and C player. Yeah. So the A player is six months ahead and you don't have to tell them to do anything. They're already doing the stuff you should be doing six months from now. The B player is just keeping up to date and current with the stuff they need to do. And sometimes you have to tell them a little bit of things here and there. The C player, you got to tell them what to do and they're behind many months.

9:56Yeah, they're behind six months. It's like, oh, I did this. Yeah, I should have done that six months ago, right? And so there's a big difference. If you audit your entire company, the last thing I think I'll say on people is, if you look at your entire staff right now, or maybe the people that you work with directly, keep asking yourself, would I rehire this person? Would I rehire this person? If you wouldn't rehire this person, ideally, let's say Neil hired me, right? Um, if you, if Neil wouldn't rehire me, he should have a conversation with me. He should be like, Hey, Eric, let's just have an uncomfortable conversation right now.

10:25Um, if you were to leave today, I would feel indifferent. Um, and so let's figure out how we can change that. Yeah. And when it comes to hiring, like when it comes to marketing, it's actually really simple. What did you do before that? We need help with them. Is it social media? Is it SEO? Pick a channel. What have they done before? And don't just hire them based off of that. Hey, here's our problems. Here's some of our data. what would you do to fix it? And just run a quick test and pay them for their time. And if they can actually do stuff that you like, now you got a potential hire on hand.

10:58If you don't, then something's off. So Brian Chesky said this, and then we can work on wrapping this, but Brian Chesky, founder, CEO of Airbnb, he said that when it comes to hiring, everyone is guilty until proven innocent. He's like, I don't know why we all go into hiring, believing that someone's great already. they're guilty until proven innocent. They need to prove that there's evidence of greatness. And I really like that line. And that's, that's a line that we push through now through it. It's like, yeah, we're looking for evidence of greatness. So sure. They can talk about ideas, but also like, what have you done in the past?

11:29And if it feels like this person's in Australia, they call them gunners, right? It feels like this person is a gunner, then you go for it. Right. Because hiring is a leap of faith at the end of the day. But what else have you done in terms of what else have we done this year as we work towards wrapping up here? We actually haven't done, we focus on creating a lot more content. We record a lot more videos. We create tons more content. We push it out on the social web. We've experimented with content types. Eric's done more interview formats. I've done more scripted content for shorts and stuff like that.

12:01Some of it's worked. Some of it hasn't for both of us. But if we had to sum it up, there's not a ton that we actually did from testing a hundred different ideas or anything like that it's more the stuff we talked about but we had focus and we really doubled down on it i think the younger us maybe 10 years ago we tried to talk about the new things all the time as we get older it's the standard blocking and tackling stuff and you realize it's the same boring stuff and um you just keep solving problems and you keep going um so we have a client you know they do over 100 million a year he's like yep i've just been doing this for 30 35 years nothing cute or anything like that and um you know that's the spirit of a real entrepreneur.

12:40So that's what we learned from this year. And we're going to end right on time here. So that is it for today. Again, from Frankfurt, Germany, this is Marketing School. And don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. I'm going to marketingschool.io slash agency if you want to join the Agency Owners Association. And we'll see you tomorrow.