Why International Expansion Is a Huge Business Growth Hack

0:00Today, we're going to be talking about generating revenue from multiple countries. So in marketing, most people usually focus on the region where they live. We live in the United States. Single Rain mainly does work with US-based companies. But Eric, you get traffic from all over the world, right? Correct. What percentage of your traffic do you think is the United States? 65%. All right. Do you have clients from other parts of the world? We do. What other parts of the world? I think Australia, Spain, to name a few, and other regions. Yeah. So the point I'm trying to get at is an easy way to expand your marketing that I think most people mess up on is they only focus on their region.

0:40And you've been expanding and trying to generate revenue from outside of the United States for a bit, whether it's ebooks, courses, events, agency services work. And we do the same thing, too. So this economy is bad. Our U.S. agency got hit the hardest. It was also the largest. But we've been making up a lot of the differences by expanding overseas. and we're in 17 countries, I think right now. So if you're to blend, so you in the United States versus your blended international, what do you think would be the delta? International is growing 60 plus percent year to date. And then US is down. US is flat.

1:16Okay, it's flat. Okay, that's a big difference. Flat, maybe some months it could be down. Some months we do really well in this backup, but it's close enough to flat. You get what I mean? The delta isn't that much. It's not up much. It's not down much. It's pretty much flat. every month or quarter changes because once you can feel that. And international is compounding. International is compounding really fast. Got it. Okay. And I think that's a mistake that most marketers make. They just focus on the United States because, oh, I live in the United States or I'm going to focus on the UK because I live there.

1:42But there's people everywhere. There's people in India. There's people in Brazil. There's people in Mexico. There's people in Malaysia, Thailand. And even if these countries don't have as big of a GDP as let's say the United States, for many businesses, many sectors are not as competitive. so you can gobble up enough revenue to make it worth your while. It might be helpful to tell everyone how you're going about expanding right now. Because there's a, you don't need to give the exact playbook, but like, I'll give the playbook. How many different countries? How are you like seeding each country?

2:10Sure. So we're in 17 countries right now. I think we just added Netherlands, which would be the 17th. The person accepted the offer. So I'm counting it before he started. And I'm counting some of the other regions like Mexico. She hasn't started yet, but she starts in August. So that's one of the 17 as well. The lady who's running up Malaysia for us, she hasn't started yet, but she's starting up soon. And the playbook we're using is really simple. We look at a, the countries we have presence in. So we've talked about creating a media company, top of funnel. What regions are we getting traffic from and leads from?

2:43And then what we do is we look for people who work for our competitors and ran competing agencies. And we ask them to run our agency within that region. It's that simple. and we're hiring people with relationships. We're hiring people who have continually got promoted at competing companies. And we're looking for people who are leaders as well and they can just build it. We give them more traffic, more leads, more firing power. And when I speak firing power, more capital because currency exchange rates really do help when you're coming from the US. Funny story. So when we were both speaking in Dubai, I host these dinners, right?

3:18And so I hosted a dinner and then Neil actually met a guy in a dinner that happened to really understand agencies. I think it was Dentsu maybe. I think he worked at WPP. WPP. Okay. So large agency holding company. And Neil's very interested in expanding in Dubai. So by the way, I don't know how. He didn't end up working out. He didn't, but. More money too. His whole thing was, he's like, I want something different. I don't want to work in the agency. But what I love about Neil is he, after, so we are all going somewhere else. And Neil turned a dinner into like an interview. So literally the setup became, Neil said he got the head table on him on the side.

3:49It became an interview. I've never seen that happen before. you're like oh we guys are gonna go party i'm like oh it's okay let me just interview him and figure out right now he's a fit yeah but point being i mean he didn't want to do it anymore is the thing but it seemed like he knew the contacts to at least get it going funny enough we just interviewed someone who passed on us in the uae they kept asking for more and more and they weren't a cultural fit because they're asking for more and more they kept asking for more and more base compensation and they're talking about how they can bring two million dollars in revenue Oh, the incentive's not aligned.

4:22And the incentive's not aligned. They're like, I'm really confident I can bring$2 million. And I'm like, cool, I'll give you some commission on that. Yeah. And we brought up the base and the total comp to be more than what they were making. They're like, I'm really confident I'll close$2 million. They're like, no issues. And then at the very end, they're just like, I don't care too much about the commission. I just want to hire your base. So I was like, something's off here. And we wouldn't do it. And then they passed and went with another company. And we were fine with it. Cause I'm like, if you're telling me you're like 95 plus percent confident, you can bring two plus million dollars.

4:53I made the commission package where even if you close half of that, you'd make way more than you would have worked at your previous company. It's an integrity thing. Not integrity. In my mind. Something was just off. That's what I'm saying. Like you're saying something that doesn't add up. Correct. Yeah. And I wish they would have taken it. Cause then there's a good chance that they could have brought in$2 million from revenue. Cause if they brought in that, they would have really crushed it. Cause that combined with the leads and the revenue we would have brought for them for that region, we would have had a really fast growing agency.

5:19That's important. So like international expansion, you have to make sure people are aligned with your values and have a long-term vision, right? And we also make sure that people get along with other leadership within the company, other people, and their cultural fit, because we see so many people that on paper, they're qualified, but we know they're going to butt heads and not going to do things that we would like them to be done in. So we just don't want to work with them no matter how successful they are. We were close to hiring an executive, like a key executive. And I remember, I think I interviewed them.

5:49Yeah. You did interview them. Yeah. And something wasn't adding up because the amount of revenue they said that they brought to the company and they kept pushing for like a higher base. And we're like, no, if you want to be incentives aligned long-term, like, why aren't you talking about the commission? And then even my coach said the same things like something's not adding up. Why? Right. Yeah. So, but yeah, so going back to internationalization and expansion, hreflang to get your content in multiple languages and ranking in different countries. Look up H-R-E-F-L-A-N-G. Google has some articles about it.

6:20I have some articles about it. Eric may have some articles about it. It'll teach you how to expand your content into multiple regions and get the traffic, which then once you start adding in the headcount, you'll just start growing that much faster because you already have the eyeballs, which is our playbook. Yep. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. Let us know what you think. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe five stars and also hit us on YouTube and we'll see you tomorrow.