Why there will never be another Oprah, and Frame.io's $1.3B startup lessons

0:28All right. So welcome to the Agency Owners Association. lot of agency owners, they're struggling to grow faster. They're struggling to get more clients. They're struggling with operational issues, hiring issues. And both Neil and I have been through all that, right? So in terms of covering, getting an agency to six figures, seven figures, eight figures, Neil in his case, got his agency to nine figures, right? Maybe even 10 figures one day. But we wanted to share those experiences with you to help you grow faster. And there's a lot of value in this group. You'll see below all the bullet points on the things that we currently have.

0:57And we're going to continue to add value to this group over time. And the cool thing about this group is you can cancel at any time. So there's no commitment. You can sign up right now for whatever price it says down there. It's going to continue to grow up, grow and grow. I will tell you that this group initially started at 149 and it's going to continue to rise, right? So now it's going to be the best price to get in on it. You can cancel at any time. Just know that when you come back, it's going to be at the elevated price. And that's what we thought we'd do. And those of you that are doing seven to eight figures, once you join the group, or actually you can even see it, there's an application to join a live mastermind.

1:28So this is a live mastermind that where you'll be able to hang out with Neil and myself, and we'll have other agency owners at your level, but that's for agencies that are doing seven figures and above. I think once we have enough demand for maybe the six figure groups, we'll figure something out there. But for right now, seven and eight figures for an in-person mastermind and then online community, a bunch of other benefits. If you're doing six figures and below, you'll see that right below. and then we'll continue to figure out and grow this thing as we continue on. So without further ado, go ahead and sign up below.

1:59If it's not for you, that's totally fine too, but no commitment. Why not? If it helps you, if you think it can even help you 10X the price that you're paying for one month, then why not just give it a shot, right? So that's it for this little intro over here and just go sign up somewhere over here and we'll catch you inside. You know, I was listening to a podcast with Tim Ferriss. I think he did it with Kevin Rose and he said this a couple of times, But he said that there will never be another Oprah because the half-life of fame is going to come down so much, meaning that because of TikTok, because of Instagram, because of YouTube, there's a quick rise of people.

2:32But then there's always going to be someone else that rises up. It's quick up and down, up and down, up and down. And so like Oprah, a lot of these people back in the day, it was just a couple of channels, right? And then you have cable that came out. But they monopolized the attention, and that's how you became someone like an Oprah. And so that reinforces the need to work with these influencers as they come up and down because you just don't know. So you're almost going to need to have someone on your team that's a good talent spotter for these influencers that knows who's coming up and then what kind of deal to negotiate with them.

3:03Well, back in the day, it would take a while for Oprah to build up her brand. With the adoption of technology, just like you discussed earlier on how long it took for electricity to get around the world and for everyone to really adopt it, But it took, what did you say, 40, 50 years? 45, 50 years for electricity. And then color TV is like 20, 30 years, I think. And the smartphone was very, I don't know. Smartphone was maybe, you got to 75 % penetration in maybe like 10-ish years or so. AI penetration in like a year or two? AI penetration in the US, it's already reached 130, 125 million people or something.

3:39So that's a third of the population. It's kind of crazy. And I also think there's more people who are leveraging AI, but they're just not counted because they're using platforms that have AI like Google. And they just don't know. But if you look at influencers now, because of technology and mass distribution, they're actually growing way faster than Oprah grew. They're growing way faster, but the problem is because it's more democratized, nobody can hold all the attention for that long anymore. Which I think is a good thing. Because keep in mind, everyone, all the attention with media, like Fox News, CNBC, I don't care where you lean politically, they had distribution.

4:16And they could actually, like my parents used to say, when they're watching the news all the time, as if it's the most important thing in the world. But now, because of all the democratization of news, of information, we can all make decisions for ourselves. And we're not trying to get political here. And you can get the news whenever you want on demand. Yeah. Yeah, I'd definitely say. And then the other thing that you end up seeing is it's not only that these brands grow and they can fade really quickly, they're also not the hot thing anymore. And I'll give you an example. Remember when Uber came about?

4:43It was a hot thing for a while. Same with Warby Parker. Same with Pinterest. But now Pinterest is still a legitimate big company. And this happens with both personal and corporate brands. No one talks about a lot of these companies as much as they did in the past. You know what the key is? You have to keep reinventing yourself. So like when you look at The Rock, right? The Rock, even in WWE Rock, there's so many versions of The Rock. I don't know if you watch this, but like, you know, there was The Nation Rock. Then there was a Hollywood Rock, right? Wait, please explain these. I don't know what The Nation Rock is.

5:12So The Rock, I mean, he had an evolution in WWE, right? Like first he started out, nobody liked him. And then he joined a group called The Nation, right? And then later he became like the corporate Rock where he joined like Vince McMahon and Stephanie McMahon. And anyway, my point is he kept reinventing himself. And then he went to Hollywood. Then he actually went to Hollywood and became an actor. He owns tequila brands now. And now he's back in the WWE, turning it around. He's the owner of, what's it called again? The group TKO? The MMA group. Part owner of Endeavor? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Because WWE is owned by TKO.

5:47I think TKO. Yeah. So TKO, which is owned by Endeavor, owns WWE and UFC. Yes. And they bought a slapping championship too. Dude, I've seen that on Instagram. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so Dana, I think it's Dana White, right? He's like, oh no, everyone makes fun of it. It's the best thing ever. We're going to make it so big. And anyway, point is, so someone like The Rock, he's constantly reinventing himself. That's why he stays relevant, right? Mr. Beast, he's gone from spectacle videos, like short videos, quick cuts and everything, to not as many quick cuts. Now there's storytelling. Now there's emotion.

6:21There's different formats. He's constantly reinventing himself. Even in this podcast, we've reinvented it. We're having longer conversations now. We're talking about news. And we're going to have to continue to reinvent. Otherwise, people aren't going to listen anymore. That's right. But that's the only way to end up doing it. But it does get harder. Just look at single grain, okay? You guys try to reinvent yourself this year as an AI forward agency? Not really. We're doing a lot of things behind the scenes that I'm doing. But forward-wise, I haven't really. All right. Either way, you've been running the business for how many years?

6:52I've had the business for six, seven, no, like nine, nine years after Sujin. Yeah. Like fully. So you had nine years, nine, 10 years. Yeah. All right. You guys are decent sized. You have a good amount of employees. I was, Oh yeah. Yeah. Go on. How easy is it for you to continue to reinvent yourself to the public each year?

7:14It's hard. Yeah. It's hard. Yeah. Um, how do you, stay relevant? I think the difference now is if you ask me, okay, how long have you had MP Digital for? This will be our seventh year. How many years would you say in those seven years you were completely focused on MP Digital? All seven years. Okay. So I would say I was probably focused on single grain for this year. Now I'm completely focused, maybe the last two, three years or so. So I've probably been really focused on single grain for four out of the nine years. I would give you hardcore focus for like two or three of the years. I'll take it.

7:46I'll take it. Because even the other, if you're saying four, maybe you were, but you were also spending a lot of time on like the ammunition side, gaming stuff, old people's homes. And I'm not saying you weren't more focused on single grain, but if you look at your last two, three years, you've really cut down on everything. And you're just like, no, no, this is getting 110 % of my focus. Well, before you were getting more and more focused on single grain, but you still had distractions and you slowly cut them down. So instead of being, you know, 30%, it started going 40, 50, 60, 70. Although I would say year one, you were probably really focused on it because you were taking it.

8:25Yes. No. So year one, that's when I was probably, no, that's when I made it go from bad to worse. We dropped all the way down to one person. Really? In the first year of single brain. Yeah. I thought you had to clean it all up. No, no, no. I was trying to, but I remember I told you, I read a book called Let My People Go Surfing and I took it to literally because the Patagonia co-founder was like, oh yeah, I let my people go surfing at work. So I was like, oh, okay, well, I'm just not going to show up to the office anymore. And then everything started going downhill. So my fault at the end of the day, but that's what happened.

8:55All right. So the two, three years is actually pretty sound. Yeah. Two, three years, I would say, but going back to your question again about, um, about reinventing yourself. Yeah. I think if you're locked in on it to the outside, you look like your focus. If you're doing too many things and you're trying to reinvent yourself, you actually look like you're sloppy at the end of the day. And I heard this quote somewhere recently, but it's It's like, if you want to, and this is from a guy that does really well, I forgot his name, but if you want to operate, you can only operate one or two things max.

9:22If you want to manage, you can manage like up to six things and that's it. Unless you're Elon Musk. Yeah, he's operating many things. There's always an exception to the rule. You know I got rid of my Tesla, right? Yeah, you told me that for the third time already. And then I saw your driver this morning and I saw your new car. I was like, Phil, how many new cars does he need? right yeah yeah he just laughed at me i go through them like they're tic tacs yeah yeah so you know it's interesting by the way it's uh you gotta know your strengths and weaknesses at the end of the day one of neil's weaknesses is you just can't drive which is a fair it's a it's a fair weakness i'm a i'm a terrible driver eric is a really good driver you know what it's because interestingly enough neil can't focus when he drives i focus when i drive i can't i just think about work yeah but your life is not a lie it doesn't make any a lot and you're a logical person It doesn't make any logical sense.

10:15No, I can't turn off work. That's the problem. Yeah. Well, by the way, if you guys haven't seen Eric's car, he has one of the most beautiful cars that I've ever seen. The color is amazing. Except you haven't seen Neil's cars, which I will not even talk about his cars right now. So Neil has a few very nice cars. We'll just put it that way. They're very nice. Let's move on to a different topic. Yeah. Here, I got a good one here. So you know frame.io? Have you used it? But dude, I've been using Frame.io before it was even part of Adobe. Yeah, well, same here. When did you start using it? Like probably in the first week that it came out.

10:50When was this? Long time ago. We've been using it forever. I've been using it since like 2017. Yeah, we're an early customer of Frame. Yeah. Anyway, so they sold for$1.3 billion to Adobe, right? This guy Emery Wells, he tweeted this. So I built and sold Frame.io for$1.3 billion to Adobe. And along the way, I received plenty of advice that turned out to be entirely off the mark. Here's a look at some of the most glaring misdirections. So we're going to go through each one and react to each one, okay? So number one, we're going to start with number one. As CEO, focus on executive business tasks, right?

11:19That was the quote. So he says, this couldn't be further from the truth. The core purpose of any company is the product it offers. As CEO, your primary role is to ensure that this product is the most valuable it can be for your customers. It's not just about overseeing. It's about being integrally involved in delivering quality. Agree or disagree with that? I totally agree. I don't think CEOs should be focusing on executive tasks. We always tell our executives, we expect them to be player coaches. If they're not willing to get their hands dirty, they're not a fit for our business. As CEO though.

11:52As a CEO. Yeah. We tell everyone, executives and CEO. I think really what this says to me is, and I think you, so I would say we're both on the same page here because I used to not get involved with the details around the product and the service. I call it the product. It's the service, right? That we deliver services for our respective agencies. But at the end of the day, though, whatever you're selling, whatever you guys are servicing, it's a reflection of you. And you have to be somewhat involved in the details, like somewhat at the very least. My mistake in the past was not being involved with them.

12:24So that's the first one, right? So we agree on that. All right. Welcome to the marketing school, school group. Okay. So marketing school, S-K-O-O-L group, right? And so this is a free group that Neil and I are doing. And what I want to do with this free marketing community is I want to build a very strong group of people that are sharing the latest knowledge, the latest trends, the latest topics, and we'll share our content as well. And we just want people to engage with each other and build a strong community, right? Because people ultimately stay for community at the end of the day, people are logging for community.

12:57And we thought with all the free content that we do, well, what's been missing a free community where we can continue to help people level up in terms of their marketing. And hopefully we can help people find jobs in the group. We can even maybe even create a job board, but even offer a lot of our other content, package it up for you just to help you get better at whatever it is that you do in the world of marketing and whatever it is that you do in the world of business. So Neil and myself, we thought that from a retention standpoint, we do very well with acquisition on all the channels that we have, all the audiences that we have.

13:29But from a retention standpoint, building something that we think we can be proud of for a very long time, why not do a free group, right? So we have a paid group, obviously, called the Agency Owners Association for agency owners. And if you want to go to that, there'll be a link somewhere over here to that. But this group will always be free. And as long as people are continuing to engage, this group's continuing to grow, then we'll continue to invest more resources into it. But we thought this was a long time coming. So you can sign up for free, you might have to fill out some information or not.

13:58You might, you will have to fill out some information just so we get a sense for where you are. And then we can start to help segment the group too, right? Based on whatever it is that you're looking for, because we want to continue to add value. And hopefully we'll have a very strong database of people and you just tell us what you're looking for, what you need, and hopefully we can make those connections. So go ahead and sign up somewhere over here and we'll see you inside. Number two, to scale, you need to decentralize decision-making. Do you know what that means? you can't have all decisions go to you.

14:25Yeah. So he says, actually, the opposite is often more effective. As organizations grow more complex, centralized decision-making can slice through red tape and foster quicker action. Even in environments that champion decentralized processes, top-down leadership often proves to be the fastest route, which is what Jensen Huang does, right? He cuts out the middle managers, 60 direct reports, let's just get to it. We have it set up the same way. It's all centralized for us. So what does it look like for you guys? It's me and Mike and Mike make all the decisions in the company. Got it. And what level?

15:00Important decisions. If something is like five grand, we're not making a decision on, or even 10 grand. Okay, so this is like buying another company. This is like making an executive hire, right? Exactly. Expanding into a country. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. That makes sense. And you guys are, how often are you guys talking? Daily. Daily, like a couple times a day, right? Yes. Not always together, but we're pretty in sync. Got it. And by the way, everyone, these calls aren't scheduled. You guys are just calling. Yeah, we do ad hoc. All right. Number three, CEOs shouldn't get caught up in the details.

15:31This is a myth. Consider leaders like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Brian Chesky, and the Collison brothers. All are slash were deeply involved in intricacies of their businesses. Emulating their approach is not misguided. It's a blueprint for hands-on leadership. Remember a couple weeks ago we talked about how Mark Zuckerberg's like, no, I actually don't really believe in delegation. like you have to be very involved. I mean, here, I'll start first. Hey, I drank the hold co Kool-Aid, right? It's like, yeah, you know, you want to hire an operator and CEO and get out of their way as quickly as possible.

16:02And I'll tell you what, didn't really work out. And if you want to eat glass for a couple years, be my guest. So I will say being involved, like absolutely be caught up in the details because nobody's going to want to move it as quickly as you want to move it. Nobody's as incentivized as you are to move it forward. Go ahead. You already know what I'm going to answer with this one. By the way, Neil's a very detail-oriented person. We both took a personality test. His detail-oriented is like 99 % out of 100. Mine's 6%, just so everyone knows. We're going to finish this off. We're going to do four and five, and then we're going to wrap it up.

16:35Really quickly, all my executives and my co-founders are all very detail-oriented as well. But you didn't design it that way. No, but I tend to... Remember you were talking to me about your Gary Vee interview and you're talking about data versus creativity, most of my leadership is very similar to me where they're detail-oriented, they're very data-driven. So they're like you. In many ways, yes. So mine's the other way where I try to plug my weaknesses, but I think it's good to have a mix of both. I do focus on plugging the weaknesses, but culturally, if they're not data-driven, it's a hard fit where I know I'm not going to agree with them in the future.

17:13You're going to hate talking to them. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's actually plugging your weakness. because you realize you can't deal with it. Correct. So like, for example, our CEO is amazing at managing. I'm not, right? So that's plugging my weakness. And he knows the product and service better than me because he's been doing it for more than 20 years at an agency. And he gets in the weeds. If a client is churning, even if it's 300 grand, which is a very tiny percentage of revenue, he gets pissed off and wants to figure out why and how to fix it so it doesn't happen again. Yeah, I think the key thing here is you have to understand yourself if you're trying to take something away from this.

17:47you really have to do the work. If you need to go talk to your team and figure out your zone of genius, all these things, you need to actually go put in the work and be open to feedback at the end of the day. So number four, 10X engineers are a myth and believing in them is harmful. Quite the contrary. In many teams, a small fraction of the workforce often generates the majority of outcomes. Recognizing and nurturing high-performing individuals isn't just realistic, it's crucial. Yeah, we don't have big engineering teams. We feel that when you add people... But star players, with Mike and Mike, those are your star players.

18:19They're driving more than a 10X outcome than a regular person. Sure, but they're not engineers. But we also do have amazing engineers, but we don't have tons of them. We should just say the 10X employee is a myth. So in that case, yeah, we agree with this guy. Dude, right before we started recording this podcast, I was talking to my co-founder, Mike. My CEO is also named Mike, but my co-founder is named Mike as well. So I was talking to my co-founder and I was telling him how, you know, we're talking about the CEO and how he spends a lot of time generating new business, right? And working with clients and making sure clients are happy.

18:55And we both said, we wish we could buy 10 of them, like hire 10 of them. Not buy, but hire. Yeah. Wait to hire my AI agents. All right. Remember you said this? I remember you said this. I was like 24, 25 years old. And then you're like, man, it'd be nice if we could have like half an Eric or something. Yeah. This is way back in the day when we first met each other. But I think just to reinforce this fact, there are definitely 10x employees that are out there. I would argue that you finding your co-founder, Mike, I know for a while you're looking for that 10x partner. And I think once you found Mike, that was it right there.

19:29And then that was a big inflection point. Would you agree or disagree with that? He was able to solve a lot of the stuff I was weak at. He's really good at operations and managing sales teams. not only does he like learning which i do too but um he likes getting in the weeds and he pays attention to all the details but he does it for the stuff i'm weak at he's also pretty empathetic too yes yeah yeah yeah he's good at that 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 that's where framer comes in and it totally changes the game framer is the design first no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes i recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours.

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21:45Sign 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. Okay. Last one, last one, not least everyone. So So the quote here is, you must validate every decision with customer research. Contrary to popular belief, not all successful decisions stem from extensive customer research. Many of my pivotal choices were guided by my own instincts and preferences for the product. Trusting your vision and building a product that you would use yourself can lead to creating something that resonates deeply with your customers.