Eddie Maalouf | He Couldn’t Give Marketing Away For Free… Now His Agency Makes $18 Million/Year

0:00If I can sell, I can always make money. I always tell my wife, I'm like, babe, if we lose everything, I become like, we're in marketing and like everything changes. I could just go like do a real estate sales job and I will make us 45k a month because I can sell. I'm invincible in a way because you can sell. It's the best skill. The marketing mogul, the savage Eddie Maalouf. What's bad marketing going to do in revenue this year? Uh, around like 18 million. 18 million dollars. Bro, I'll help you with your videos. How many guys give me advice on my videos? I open their page and they have like 200 followers and seven videos.

0:25Terrible. I'm like, bro, like you're not even practicing what you preach. You are the top selling lifetime fitness sales rep in the country at one point in time. When I was there, I was like, what? Yeah. Are there any like crucial tactics that you took? Yeah, there's two things I did differently than everyone else that I just like ripped, right? So number one, you bought a chicken restaurant. Hell yeah. Tell us that story. This was a dog negotiated. They wanted a million dollars at first. This is a super risky business. I'm not paying a dollar over a **** and they laughed. Three days later, they text me.

0:53They're like, we'll take the deal. I've never heard such a savage story in my life. Savage, bro. I literally bought it for a penny. If all four of us sitting here were to die tomorrow and you could leave one more message with the younger generation watching right now, what would that be?

1:07What's going on, everyone? Welcome back to the School of Hard Knocks podcast. I'm James. I'm here with Jack and Josh, and we have an incredible guest for you all today. We are out here in Miami, Florida with the marketing mogul, the savage Eddie Maloof. It's great to be here with you, my man. Good to be here. Thank you for being on the pod, man. We go back, man. Josh and I met you when we were broke as hell in 2023 out in Denver at a mastermind. You had like 10 ,000 followers. Yeah, we were small, man. Now we got 26 million. For context,

1:35Eddie Maalouf: we were so broke, only two of us could go out there. We couldn't get back out. We were literally just like, we gotta get in the room. We only had enough money for two playing tennis. I think I even paid for your hookahs and stuff at that lounge because I felt bad. You definitely took care of it. I mean, these guys are coming up. Let me give them advice. Look where you are now, bro. You're bigger than me now. No, man. We appreciate you, brother. And you've built an incredible company yourself. Bad Marketing, you're the founder and CEO of this company. How big is Bad Marketing today? What's Bad Marketing going to do in revenue this year?

2:06Around like$18 million. $18 million. But we stopped it there on purpose. Why is that? Look, when you build a marketing agency, it's really cool to make like$100K a month,$300K,$400K,$500K. Once you get past like a million, a million five, it becomes not the sexiest business anymore. It becomes like very people dense. Like, for example, an e-commerce business, right? You could start off with one person. You get it to 100K a month with one person. And then maybe you get like three people, four, five people to do a million a month. In an agency to do a five million a month, you need like dozens of people.

2:39And if you're not efficient, which I, you know, wasn't even though we're doing great profit. I was at one point doing 196 people in the company. Like it's just like it's hard to think about that versus like in all my other businesses with significantly less people, we do the same or more revenue. Right. So at some point it becomes like a low leverage business. But it's one of the best businesses in the world to start with no money, no risk. Just like make your first hundred K a month. It's the best. Eddie, what percentage of marketing agencies are absolute bullshit? I'd say like 80 percent. 80 percent.

3:09Yeah, 80 percent is fair. But like it's not intentional bullshit. You get what I'm saying? It's not like it's like they're like, oh, I can't wait to go scam people. Right. it'd be like you guys starting out in content and you're like i'm gonna go help people with their content and then you go and you just can't do a good enough job and so you're you're just not there yet skill wise but you have to sell the retainers to be able to make the revenue to grow the company and so um i think the problem with marketing companies is not the marketing company though it's the clients a lot of times the clients um think the marketing companies are just gonna save the whole fucking company you know what i mean like you can't have a burning ship go put more gas in the ship and expect it to fucking go faster it's just gonna burn faster like oh i hire these guys sir it's gonna save everything save me bro i swear to you i've had people come to me like we lost 600k last month we have 60 days to turn around you guys got this i'm like what to be fair we did it right we did it we got them profitable in 60 days now they're doing millions a month a year later but like what a crazy ask you know what i mean i'm like fucking what kind of expectations are these so and so you met you mentioned that like obviously an agency it's a great business to come in, make your first 100K, stuff like that.

4:12But when I think about, you know, the marketing agency, just the industry as a whole, like, there's very few agencies that can really get up to that, like, eight-figure level. So what do you kind of feel like separated you guys from, like, you know, just that college kid who's starting, like, this is my first business, you know, I'm going to go do Facebook ads. Well, we were all that college kid, to be fair, right? Like, that's how I started, bro. Bro, for a year, I was literally trying to sell shit for free, and no one would buy it. I was like, bro, I'll do your marketing for free, just pay for the ads.

4:38No, bro. I'll do I'll bring I'll fill up your gym. All you got to do is just pay like 30 bucks a day in ad spend. I'll do it for free. But no, sorry. Not interested. I couldn't even sell it for free, bro. You know what I mean? Like there was there was no demand for it when I first started to. And like people didn't understand it. And then by the time they did, it became so diluted. Everyone's selling a course. Right. So we all had to start there. But what separated us is like one. We got really good at sales. Like I remember, bro, I was still working out of a bedroom in my mom's house. and we were closing one day we closed 14 new clients in one day which like for us was like a good month and i remember that day was a friday i'm like holy fuck like we got a serious business here it's just because we ran ads so the problem is like most of these marketing companies they're like bro it's like you being a content agency i know you guys see these guys all the time like bro i'll help you with your videos how many guys give me fucking advice on my videos i open their page and they have like fucking 200 followers and seven videos terrible i'm like bro like you're not even practicing what you preach so at one point it clicked i was like dude why don't we just do the shit we're doing for our clients for ourselves and then we were ripping it like we were just like bro we had booked demos 15 demos a day talking to businesses right so that changed our company from a revenue standpoint and then we took that revenue and instead of me going and like buying expensive and nice shit i still lived in a 1200 a month apartment in georgia i drove like a bmw m4 which at the time was like a pinnacle dream car for me right and like my bills were low it was like between both is like two grand a month right and we're making all this money and i was just investing it back in the business we bought camera equipment we had setups like this we just started building brand right and so over time we built the eddie brand we built the bad marketing brand and now like bro i haven't ran ads for bad marketing for like six months out of the last seven and like just before i came with you guys i was on a call with a creator that's like super huge five million on instagram 22 million total and she's like i want to work with you guys i only want to work with you guys but i think what you're saying is so powerful right there which is that you know nobody wants to work with people unless they've done it for themselves yeah and i think that's you know it's probably the biggest problem whether it is a marketing agency or any type of agency any type of coaching consulting courses it's like do the actual thing first before you start selling or promising people that you can get them the same results because otherwise why would people want to work i'm a big believer if you're if you're fat you're not selling me personal training it's impossible if you're if you're not rich you're not selling me wealth manager i don't care what company you work for and whose portfolios you manage i don't care how much money do you have oh i have 22 million dollars personally and i manage it myself great here's my money yep yeah

6:59Eddie Maalouf: You know what I mean? Oh, well, I manage$100 million of other people's money. Bro, that's not the same. You don't got the same fucking gut-like pain when shit goes wrong. It's someone else's money. You were talking about how you guys got really good at sales as a company. But even before you started bad marketing, you are – and I don't want to butcher this stat right here. Like the top-selling lifetime fitness sales rep in the country at all point in time. When I was there, I was – What? Yeah. Oh, you don't know this? No. Bro, I was such a dog. I was crazy. What's the statistic? You were like the number one.

7:30I was the number one volume in sales in the company for like, I worked there for six months. The last three months I was there, I did the number one most volume in the whole company, every location. The whole country. Wow. So Canada, US, it was crazy. But I'm sure you took a lot of those sales tactic into bad marketing as you were growing that business. Are there any like crucial tactics that you took? Yeah, there's two things I did differently than everyone else. And that's why actually three things that I just like ripped, right? So number one, from a selling standpoint, let's talk sales. So let's just say you come in here.

8:02You come in here, right? We're in the studio. They have a lot of things. They have marketing services. They have podcast rooms. They have all this stuff, right? What most of the guys in Lifetime do, because we have everything. We have rock climbing, yoga. They're giving them a tour on everything. Oh, here's our yoga rooms, and here's our group classes. I came, I brought them to my office. I sat them down. I'm like, what do you want? What do you care about? Oh, we have kids, family. We're never going to use the workout rooms. My wife might want to do some yoga. the kids want swim lessons cool that's all i'm going to show you so everything else i'd walk by i'm like oh yeah this is our um you know paddle courts whatever you know what i mean this is our weightlifting studio just so you know where it is move on everyone else is like oh this is our weightlifting and they're selling every feature whereas like i just focus on like what do these guys actually care about and need because the problem is most people think oh if i give more features like oh we do all these things then people are going to want to justify the the cost why it's so high because they have all these things.

8:52It's actually the opposite. People will justify why they shouldn't pay that much because they're not using most of the features. They're like, bro, I don't want to pay 200 bucks a month. I'm never going to use the weight room. I'm never going to use the group classes. You know what I mean? They start associating that with the value versus me. I'm just focused on the two, three things they want and that's enough value for them to be like, I want the membership. So that was one. Yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead. But that goes into marketing, right? So many people are like, oh I have the supplement and it's going to help you with sleep.

9:20because it'll help you with energy and your gut's going to feel better and all these things. Whereas, dude, if you just focus on like one hero angle and focus one angle at a time, one ad to one landing page that's different and you can split them up and see which one works the best, then you'll realize, oh my gosh, 70 % of the people just want gut health issues, right? And then you just hyper focus on that one angle and that's how you build a massive business. But as long as you're scattered and you're focusing on all these things, you're talking to everyone, which means you're talking to no one, right?

9:46And so that was like a big lesson I took. Number two, self-generated deal flow is like the best thing you can do. So all these other guys, what they were doing is like they're depending on someone walking in, someone filling out a web application, whatever. I was like, okay, how can I turn one into five? So what I did, and by the way, all of Lifetime Fitness did this after I left, by the way. So I started like the whole system. So basically what I did was I got a sheet. I put like VIP pass on the sheet and I put three names on the front. And it was like name, email, number, whatever, right? and when they finished the membership, they signed up.

10:19So post-purchase upsell and marketing is what we call this. I would basically, I'd be like, hey, listen, dude. Like I said, you get like two guest pass a month. You can bring them in for a day. But I got this VIP guest pass thing here. You can put three names and any people on your contact list, I'll give them a two-week pass anytime they want. They can come claim it whenever they want two weeks. I was like, and just to let you know, I got some other people that didn't put names. So if you flip it to the back on the empty page and just write as many names as you want, I'll give them all passes too.

10:48I'll just put them under someone else's name. So these guys would come, open their phone book, and just put like 15 of their closest friends that they would want to bring to the gym on the sheet. And then I'd go text all 15 of them and be like, yo, your boy James was here. He said, you guys want to play basketball together. He said, you want to live together. Let me know when you want to come in and claim my pass. They would come in. I'd sell them a membership, repeat the play again. So for context, let's say our club, their quota was 300 memberships. I was doing like 220 on a team of 10. by myself.

11:17You get what I'm saying? And the other nine guys were doing 80. Like that's the gap. And everyone's like, every minute, Eddie, you got a guest, Eddie, you got a guest. And bro, they were like, what the fuck is going on? It's just because I had every day I was making like, if I was selling five memberships, I was getting 50 new leads. You know what I mean? I was just bringing them all in every day.

11:34Eddie Maalouf: It's almost like you, you, you didn't, I don't even know if you realize what you were doing, but it's almost like you were using tactics that the best affiliate marketers and affiliates exactly right i had no idea it's like it's like hey we have a bro's destined to be be in marketing right yeah that's why i quit though i was like dude i'm tired of selling one-on-one i need to be able to sell like a thousand people at the same time yeah but but like what i didn't realize i was doing was like creating really good scarcity right if i just said bro you have these 14-day passes you know put as many as you want whatever they're like oh i could probably get this anytime but i was like bro you only get three but these other guys didn't fill it out yeah i could put your name on theirs and they're like oh i'm gonna milk that and then they'll just they're literally bro they'd open their contact book and be like james eddie and they'll just start writing everything i'm like why do you want him here basketball working out so when i texted them i knew exactly what they were gonna do you know there's there's a saying that we love it's not about what you say it's all about how you say it 100 that is uh i i love that and i'm just well so you started in lifetime fitness how did you why did you even get into the marketing game was there someone that influenced you did you take like tai lopez like what what dude i actually ran ads before so in 2015 14 15 i was in my dorm room or in like an apartment in college and i was running ads so i was running ads for my family's businesses like literally two dollars three dollars a day like just experimenting with ads sponsored posts it was just facebook instagram didn't even exist like there's no ads there um i was like literally the only sponsored post on the entire feed there's no one else so it was crazy bro i was spending i was spending like three dollars a day and my family was making like thousands of dollars more a week.

13:06Like it was that big of a gap. Yeah. My dad was geeking out. He's like, I've never seen a thousand people on the website at the same time. You know what I mean? He's like, this weekend's going to be crazy. You know what I mean? So I was back in those days, but I needed to go get a job. So I basically applied for marketing companies. And what you don't realize is like the biggest scam of college is all these, all people who are doing marketing degrees, you go apply to run a marketing job. I'm like, bro, I know ads. I know all this psychology, like let's go. I know social media. And so I applied for all these jobs and I did all these interviews.

13:34And every time in the interviews, I realized it was like a bait and switch. It was like, this is a marketing role. And then you go and it's like, oh, you're going to sell DirecTV and a Costco. You know what I mean? You're going to go door knocking. And I'm like, what the fuck is going on? So I remember leaving one of those job interviews. And I was like, dude, OK, if I'm just going to like have a temp job that I was always I always thought like an employer. OK, I never even like thought about life as an employee. So I was like, OK, if I'm going to work somewhere, I know I'm going to be invaluable.

14:00so I'm going to work somewhere that if I leave I'm not like detrimentally catastrophic to this business so I was like let me hit my gym on the way home because I've been going there for years and maybe it's a good bridge until I figure out the marketing thing so I went to the gym I was already in suit I walked in I was like I want to talk to Jeff the manager like Jeff's not here I'm like he's here I see him like I'm not leaving this chair I sat in the lobby I was like I'm not leaving until Jeff talks to me he's like we don't have jobs I'm like I don't care so then the assistant came out his name was also Eddie he sat with me I I talked to them.

14:29He's like, you're actually fucking sharp. I like you. I'm like, bro, make a spot. I'll make it happen. And that's how I got the job. And then I basically had my whole lifetime run. And then after six months, I was like, OK, I'm the peak of the company. This is the most money I'm going to make. And most importantly, it's the most experience I'm going to have. So they offered me like assistant manager position, all this stuff to go make more money. But I was like, dude, I'm already barely trying and making like closing everything out, being number one in the whole company. They're putting me on company wide calls, number one, whatever.

14:55And so I was like, dude, I'm I'm only 22. I need experience. Like the money will come. I know it will come. I realize I can make money, but if I can sell, I can always make money. I always tell my wife, I'm like, babe, if we lose everything, I become like retarded in marketing and like everything changes. I could just go like do a real estate sales job and I will make us 40, 50 K a month because I can sell. You know what I mean? It's like, I'm invincible in a way because you can sell. It's the best skill. So I was like, fuck it. I went there. They offered me a position. They're like, you know, 150 K base, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

15:24I was like, okay, let me go to lunch. Think about it. I went to lunch. I called my dad. I was like, Hey, I just want to go full-time run ads for all your businesses. What can you pay me? This is what I'm making now. He's like, I can pay you two grand a month. I'm like, I'm like, fuck it. I live with you. Like I don't have bills. Like I'll take it two grand a month, but give me 20 % of the increase of profit that the business does from this month to this month last year. He's like done. So I went in and I made them an extra million dollars that year. I made an extra 200 K on top of the 20, the two grand a month.

15:53And then that's when I started getting clients and like trying to go knock on doors for free and even with that they wouldn't fucking let me do their marketing for free that's how hard it was bro yeah you eventually rebranded to bad marketing but it didn't start out as that company what were the early days of building that business yeah so it originally started as for media the reason was like my last name is maloof m and then i had my best friend magra and then my best friend musa and musa so we were just for m so what could i do with four m's i was like for i'm drawing i was like for media whatever it's easy forums so we did for media and that's what we did and then um we got in a lawsuit with another group called for media group out of the uk because we got so big organically and on the ads and stuff that like so many clients and employees were applying to their company thinking it was us and then they would get on the calls and realize it's not a trademark game is crazy man it's crazy it's so wild but but think about how stupid he is so so this is the problem most business owners dude and that's why they're so small and they'll never grow is they're so greedy and like they just think about themselves and so think about how dumb this guy is bro he's getting free deal flow i'm i'm blowing up he's getting free deal flow on talent and free deal flow on clients right how many people don't even know it's him or me or whatever the difference is they're just signing up right and he's mad about the ones that realize that it's not and he's like well i don't like these guys uh feeling important basically that's all it was and but he wouldn't even get on a call with me he just lawyered a lawyer and literally in writing wrote um i don't even want to talk to this guy because i looked at his instagram and he seems like he's got money and i just wanted his money like that's how like he's like the 60 year old guy named tom or some shit bro how small i'm like bro i'm probably pumping millions of dollars a year to your company on accident you should just shut bro he should just zip and let me ride it and just made money behind the scenes like this guy's doing something that i can't and i'm gonna ruin it yeah instead he made me change my name which was like the fucking sickest move ever.

17:46I'm like, dude, now I'm credible. Now I got game. Like people know me. I got results. I got team. I got offices. Like I can do whatever the fuck I want. So we saw bad marketing. We're like, oh, another guy has this. But is this name good enough to like go fucking go to court and like pay this guy whatever, 100, 200 Gs to just shut up and give us a name, right? It is. What was the thought process behind the name? Dude, we tried to stand for something, right? Yeah, bold and disruptive. That's right, yeah. So basically, bro, we thought of 10 ,000 names. I'm not even joking. Like AI was out at the time.

18:19Chad G.B. 2 was like, fuck it, rip it. So we thought of like every name in the world. And every good name sounded more like a tech and software business. Nothing was like short enough or sexy enough. And then literally after weeks of thinking, my CFO was like sarcastically like, at this point, we can't even think of a name. We might as well call ourselves bad marketing. And I'm like, that's fucking brilliant. They're all laughing.

18:38Eddie Maalouf: They're like, oh, fucking retarded with that me. That's fucking brilliant. So I wrote B-A-D on the board and I started writing like what could it stand for. So I started writing like all the words with a B, all the words with a D, A and like trying to – I was like bold and disruptive like we're writing with it. So then I did research on the guy who had the website and he hadn't touched his website in three years. So here's how trademark law works in general in the U.S. So common law is above all law is basically how it works. And what common law says is if someone has a contract before you, like an actual business to business contract signed or business to customer signed doing business in the US before you, then they have the rights to the name.

19:15You can trademark it, but they have like a year to appeal it. And if they appeal the trademark, they'll win just because they have first use is what it's called. I learned so much about the shit with all these lawsuits. So I'm like, okay, cool. This guy has first use, but he hasn't updated his website in like fucking like three, four years, like not even a single update. So I'm like, maybe he's out of business. I was going to fill out the form and like ask him, like, could I buy the name? I was like, what am I doing? Let me just like be silent. Hope he never finds out. I'll trademark it. And in a year from today, it's mine.

19:42Guaranteed. So I did the trademark, all this stuff. Then like two months later, we announced it. Went crazy. Biggest thing ever. We ran ads. All the ads were performing better. All organic was performing better. It was just like everything was lifted. And I think it was like, I forgot the day, but let's say like April 27th was the day. April 26th. this motherfucker appeals it. And it's because some chick who's a lawyer follows me, and she's like actually a fan, like asked me for advice and shit. This girl saw that I went and took bad marketing, went and found the guy, went to him, and was like, hey, we can just go make a bag and fucking go like basically get Eddie to like pay us for the name.

20:19Eddie Maalouf: That is crazy. It's your own fan. Bro, and I know exactly who she is. She doesn't know I know. Now she probably does if she watches this, right? But like I knew exactly who she was. I was like, fuck this bitch. We're calling you out. We're calling you out. I can't wait for her to come ask me for marketing. Oh, I can't wait. I'm not getting to meet$180 ,000 because that's what I fucking paid for the name. So obviously, like when you first started out, like people wouldn't even let you do their ads for free. But then obviously growing bad marketing, like you've worked with some massive companies before.

20:45What was that experience like trying to obtain like those bigger clients? Dude. Okay. So what I've noticed is a few big clients have come through ads and stuff like that for sure. But we're talking big, big, big. They all come through people. it's all relationships it's all people we know it's all referral bro i'll tell you like um i signed yeezy for example this is how i signed yeezy just for context it's like the funniest brand right so um they split off from adidas and they had to like figure everything out so my friend hits my friend texted me they did this 10 30 at night my wife and a friend are literally like they're like decorating for like some crazy party we have going on and they're in the room and i i uh scoville my chicken spot we're testing a new spicy flavor to see how hot it is so i had just smoked a joint what year is eddie uh a year a year and a half not even a year ago let's let's say a year it's about a year ago so i had been on my balcony outside like i smoked a jay i'm chilling whatever i went inside and i ate that i'm fucking crying bro like like my face is red there's tears going down my face i just smoked like i'm fucking i'm like this is way too spicy guys we're gonna fucking kill people and my friend texts me hey uh kanye wants help with marketing Can you talk?

21:56I'm like, when? He's like, now. I'm like, kill me, bro. So I go like, I put eye drops. Like, I go wash my face. I bust out the laptop on my couch. I'm like, try to set up the background so I look like I'm not. Like, just fucking absolutely falling apart right now. When I get on the call, their whole exec team gets on like a FaceTime video call. And they start sharing their screen. I'm giving them all their marketing advice. I tell them exactly what to do. And then like two weeks later, we took over their account. But like, that's how that happened. but it's like, think about it. My organic content got me that guy who got me Kanye.

22:29Right. So I always tell people, I'm like, dude, your organic content, your follower count and all these followers is not the people that you're doing business with. If you think about them as your affiliates, the market is so much bigger. Right. I have 120 ,000 people who will talk about me as how I look at it. Right. When someone in their friend group goes, I need marketing help. They go, bro, you got to fucking talk to Eddie. Eddie's the man. You know what I mean? It's not just the people following me. And so I always tell people that like all my biggest deals come from that. That person I had never met in person, by the way, all online, Instagram, back and forth.

23:00He brought me a bunch of big accounts like that. I crushed it for all of them. It was a really good relationship. So now he brings me a lot. And just to show you how crazy it is, he lives here in Miami. I've never met him. I was in New York for a weekend. I went out with some friends. I'm at the club in New York. I'm partying with my boys. Some dude bumps into me and he's like, I'm so sorry. He looks at me like Eddie. I'm like, yeah, do I know you? He's like, bro, it's me and I'm like oh my god get the fuck and that's how we met each other but that's how crazy the internet is and social media and all these things you're doing that was the first time we met and it was two months ago bro and now we're hanging out in Miami because I moved here but like up to that point I didn't even like really know what he looked like in person besides you know everyone looks a little bit different than Instagram so I'm like god who the fuck is this guy Eddie when we think about most marketing agencies and most business owners right that are let's just say doing six figures really low seven figures you know when you ask them especially if we're talking to a marketing agency owner what all are you doing on the day-to-day in the business they're doing everything right i think some of the most important advice you can give to anybody owning a marketing agency i'm sure you would agree it's like you have to fire yourself to find great people what was that moment when you were building your agency where you're like man i'm doing i'm doing fucking everything here i need to go out and get like the right people to help be able to turn this into an eight-figure business can you take us back to that moment when mark you know when you know for media at the time you know starting to really explode and grow but you're like man we need to go get we need to go get the right people yeah so okay so here's how it started first of like I did everything like you're talking about.

24:18And then I got good at everything. And I was like, okay, what are the things that like take up the most of my time that have the least return? So like one was like cold messaging businesses to get them on calls. Number two was like sales calls because we had a lot at the time. Number three was like the actual ads management. So basically, I started going down the list of like who could save me the most time and money, but have the least gap in skill. This is the key here. So like the problem that most people do is they try to fire themselves. But it's like, what I made the mistake of is like, I'm a sales monster.

24:50And I fired myself from sales. And even and I was trying to make it work. So I'd coach the sales people and don't we still did good. But it's like when COVID hit, and we lost all our clients. I was like, okay, all of you different job roles. Now your account manager, your Facebook guy, whatever, I'm sales. And then I got all our company's revenue back in 30 days, just because I took over sales, right? So the skill gap of my sales was too big to close. So it wasn't worth giving out to someone yet versus like I could train someone on Facebook ads. I could train them on cold email. I could train them how to talk to a client.

25:22Those are roles that like the skill gap would be smaller or even the opposite. Maybe they're just way better than me at ads or reporting or creative or whatever it is, right? So I went down the list of all the things I was doing and I was like, which one am I most skilled at? Let's move them out. This is like stuff that it's going going to be hard to replace me. Like if you suck at sales, it's going to be very easy to replace you in sales because not many people are worse than you. You know what I mean? You're going to be able to find people better than you. For me, the people that are better than me in sales is like less than 1%.

25:48So like, it's going to be very hard to replace that role. So let me replace everything else. So as a business owner, I'm looking at like, where's the smallest skill gap? Where am I taking the least sacrifice by giving myself up out of this role and putting in someone else and what takes me the most time. And the combination of those two is where I'm starting and I'm going down the list. So for me, I trained media buyers. I didn't have money, bro. So I couldn't like go get a savage. I had to go get someone who was like, okay. And then I'm like, I'll train you and then teach them everything. And now they're still with me seven years later, those same people still work for me and they're dogs.

26:19Like they're running our biggest campaigns. They started from nothing right now because money has become less valuable than time, right? When you start a business, time is more valuable than money. Sorry. Money is more valuable in time because like you have so much time, you have no money. Then eventually you have money and you don't have time. So now it's the opposite. Now I'm like, okay, I'd rather just pay like top dollar to go get the sickest dog at this role and not even think about like, what am I going to train them or what am I going to do and bring them in? And when you're first starting, the key is you got to sell your team on the vision that you have and where you're going as a company, right?

26:52Like, like you guys, when you had nothing less than 10 ,000 followers, you're like, bro, one day we're going to do this and we're going to interview the most billionaires in the world. And that's what gets people excited. That's why we're around you. I'm like, bro, these guys, like they want it. They really want it. Like let's pour into these guys. Right. So, but if you're just like a rather do, Oh, I'm going to do this. You can just tell sometimes you're like, this guy's not going to do shit. Right. But that's what you have. All you have is like vision. So in order for me to get my best talent, I'd be like, listen, bro, I can't pay you shit right now.

27:16I can pay you 3k a month, but in two years, we're going to be working with Yeezy and Nike and all these guys. And here's what we're going to do. And you're going to put that on your portfolio and you're going to be in charge of their campaigns. Fuck bro. That sounds amazing. I'm ready. I'm ready. Let's do it right and they'll give up a job literally one guy gave up a hundred k a month salary in california he was going to move there from georgia to stay in georgia to get paid 2500 bucks a month to run my creative department now he runs creative department for like some of the best econ brands right he moved on but like we spent four years together and that was a big hire for me to like be able to get my company where it's at so it was all based on like where we're going not where we are right now and that excites a lot of people especially people in the early stages a lot of agencies, they have terrible profit versions.

27:56Like it's in some cases, not a great margin business, right? Just because of all the costs that go into it, right? All the people that are on payroll. What are some tactical strategies that you've implemented in all the agencies that you've owned to be able to strip out some of those costs and ultimately build a more profitable business? Yeah. Great question. So most of the agencies that have low margin is because they're hiring ahead. So I'll give an example. We're growing 20 % every month, right? So we start thinking, oh my gosh dude if we keep growing like this we're not going to be able to handle all these accounts let's go let's go get some more account managers we need more ads guys we so like we start hiring ahead to train them because we need them trained and onboarded so that they can take clients so we're we're hiring like 60 days ahead is when we're starting right so you hire you put these people on payroll whatever and then all this marketing and shit that you were doing that was working stops working and so you just front loaded like 20 more payroll but you lost revenue compared to where you thought you're going to be, your margin immediately goes from like 40 % to zero like that, you know?

28:56And so that's the hardest part of the agency game is like managing that hiring. So now what we do is we actually just wait list people instead of forcing ourselves to take them on. And then on the hiring and training side, we basically fill ourselves to capacity before we start a new team versus before we'd be like 70 % capacity. And we're like, dude, dude, at this rate, the team's going to be booked in 30 days. We need a new person, right? And then we'd like do all this stuff to keep pacing the way we want to. But now we're just like, bro, we don't need to force it like that. Like if we get there, we hit our ceiling of how much we can handle.

29:31Pause. Take people on wait lists. Let's train people now that we're maxed. We have the margin to bring in people without losing money now. And then we do it that way. Versus like when you're in it, bro, you're like, I want to grow as fast as possible. Fuck it, dude. Some months we were hiring like 22 people, bro.

29:47Eddie Maalouf: Yeah. And that's 22 people. If the average payroll is$5 ,000 a month, we're talking$110 ,000 a month extra. I have to make that up in sales just to keep my same dollar amount in profit. If I have a bad sales month, I just added$110 ,000 of cost. Maybe my entire margin was$150 ,000. Now I'm at$40 ,000 margin. The business looks like shit. So that's kind of the biggest problem in the agency space is that. Or they spend way too much money on marketing. Some of these guys will spend$5 ,000 to get a$5 ,000 client. I'm like bro your numbers are fucked so you just got to reduce marketing costs all these guys are brainwashed to think like uh if I spend 30 percent of my revenue on marketing that's good no it's not like we spend literally five to six percent of our revenue on marketing like someone's 10 if we're being aggressive you know what I mean you bought a chicken restaurant hell yeah tell us that story this is a good story this is this this was a dog negotiated this was like one of my favorites so um long uh just to put it this way this restaurant was like killing it in atlanta it was the best hot do you guys like hot chicken at all do you absolutely yeah oh really well you had my food didn't you how was it great like actually gas or you just yeah bro my friends like i forget some friends went like even here in miami he's like bro that was the best sandwich i'm like when the fuck did you go i forgot so so basically um i had to ask because like we like we were talking earlier like we're in austin like all these restaurants they they closed down and like our favorite spots you're saying you just got to go and you got to spend more money there we're just like well unfortunately like our like our favorite restaurant in austin at the time we were it was in the broke days yeah so we were just like man we got to open a spot like that's basically what happened to me bro yeah they these these guys basically like they had a really good product we go all the time us and our friends after football me and my wife on random days but i was driving 30 minutes to get a fucking fast food chicken sandwich like it's got to be fucking insane right and then they go they grow to nine locations and what happens in business when you go to nine locations you can't watch everything anymore so now this guy does it this way this guy does it this way the standard kind of went away right there's no more standard of like how how are we doing things everyone's packaging it differently cooking it differently cutting corners this guy's selling fucking fried rice what like you know what i mean it's like there's the weirdest shit so then they went from nine locations to five and then And the food started getting bad.

32:03And I was like, fuck, I'm going to stop coming here. And then they were kind of panicking. OK, all these locations aren't doing good anymore. What do we do? And my friends who own one, they're like, hey, bro, we know you wanted to buy one. But it was too small of a deal for you. Why don't you come buy the whole thing? I'm like, OK, fuck it. Let's do it. So I went. I talked to them. They wanted a million dollars at first. They're like, million dollars. You get the rights to the whole concept. All the locations are franchises. So I don't own any specific location at the time. I just own the rights.

32:29They all pay me royalties every month. and then I can go sell the brand. I was like, bro, a million dollars, you're out of your mind. I was like, 250. And they're like, they laughed. They're like, oh, it's whatever. I was like, okay, cool. So a couple weeks went by. We talked again. They're like, hey, we're willing to entertain 400. I'm like, 250, and I'm not moving, and here's why. And I was like, listen, you had one location. You went up to nine. You're back down to five, okay? Before you know it, you're going to be down to three, then two, then one. I was like, you're a Michelin star restaurant group.

32:56If you have a failed concept that went from one to nine locations super fast and went back to zero, no one's going to trust you to invest in future businesses anymore. You're going to take the L not on this business, but on every future business you have. Or you let me buy that bitch. If I buy it and it goes under, you go, bro, this dumbass named Eddie bought it and he sunk the whole business. It's his fault, not ours. Our business was doing great before. And if I go and I sell it for 200 locations, you go, we started that concept and now it's 200 locations and it sold for half a billion dollars.

33:22I'm like, you are clean both ways. Stop thinking about the burning ship. It's over. So let me deal with the burning ship and you save your reputation long term. And they're like, you know what? You're right. Fuck it. $250. So I was like, okay, before I do this, I want to meet with all the franchisees. I want to meet every guy that I'm going to work with, make sure they're down for my new rules. Because I got new rules here. I'm not going to run this way that you guys are running. So I meet with all of them. I look at all their P &Ls, all this stuff. And there's three of them like this. And two of them owned two locations each.

33:52Their second location was flopping. They were in bad locations. They built them cheap. Just what is not going to work. No way. Those guys can't even afford a$10 sandwich in that area. So I was like both of you are going to close your second locations. You're going to put your stuff in a storage unit Here's how you're going to negotiate with the landlord to cut the lease. I gave them all the game I was like go do it next day They cut their leases. They worked it out with the landlord. They pull all their stuff out put it in a storage unit What do you think I did? Went back to the owners. I said hey guys We agreed at five locations 250.

34:20We got three now Two closed. This is a super risky business. I'm not paying a dollar over 130k and I was like how I'm going to pay to give you 65k today and I'm going to give you 65k in three years from now and you're going to take it and they laughed they're like no fucking way three days later they text me they're like we'll take the deal so I paid 65k I bought the whole thing of Scoville yeah it's fucking crazy I still haven't even paid the second 65k yet bro it's due in December just for context and now we're opening 10 locations like right now so it's pretty crazy i've never heard such a savage story in my life i literally bought it for penny but we made more in royalties the first five months than i paid for the whole business so

35:07Eddie Maalouf: now you have the business it's struggling it's it's in shambles what's that initial playbook to get it off the ground and like okay let's stabilize this thing what's that initial playbook to get it off the ground okay so uh revenue solves most problems just out the gate important thing to know revenue solves most problems in the restaurant world it's very hard um to get a lot of new customers and keep them unless your food is like astounding because the competition is crazy there's fucking million guys on uber all this stuff so first thing i did in the contract that we signed to buy the business i forced the main chef to be with me for 48 hours i sat down i said bring me all the original shit that you used to make the way that you used to make it come make it here then we split test i shit you not like 100 different split tests like five different kinds of pickles, six different kinds of buns, different kinds of breadings, different kinds of seasoning, what hour mark we pull the chicken from the marinade.

35:58So for example, we marinated the chicken at 16 hours, 17 hours, 18, 19, 20, 24, all the way up to 30. And we marinated the same batch of chicken and just pulled them out one hour each and tested how salty it was, how flavorful it was, because at a certain point it becomes too tender or too chewy or too salty just on the hour So then we got exactly for like the tenders, how many hours we put it for the breast, how many hours we put it. And then I reshaped the whole formula. I changed the pickles. And then I cut the menu by 80%. I removed all this wasteful stuff. They were wasting like 11 % of their food cost.

36:35We waste less than 1 % right now. They had that cheesecake menu. You know, the cheesecake menu. You need to be more like Cane's. Exactly, right? And they have, yeah, exactly. So I was like, we need to be closer to Cane's. But like I can't give up the sandwich because it's like the best fucking chicken sandwich. So now I was like, okay, how do we just take breast, fries, and tenders and mix it up? So I was like, let's put the tenders on fries. So we made the new item, Dirty Fries. It's our most profitable item in the business. It makes us the best margin. It's the second highest selling item after the sandwich.

37:01Boom. That changes the whole profitability of the business. Our food costs, our food waste went from like 11 % to zero. I went and negotiated with the payment processors. Because, bro, in food, margin's small, right? So like, you know, how food works, just so you understand, is like you have fixed costs up to this line and your margin like basically is like this up to that line. So for everyone listening, let's just say, for example, at 80K a month, we break even. Whatever, just an example, right? After 80K a month, we make 70 % profit because all that's left is food cost. And food and like I'm not increasing labor.

37:35I don't need more staff to make more sandwiches. It's very easy. I don't need more rent. I don't need more marketing. It's all the same, right? So the only cost is food. And in restaurants, you make about 70 % margin on food. It's just like your cost comes from staff and rent and all this other stuff. So once you break that whatever 80K breakeven point, then it's just like you print money. So all these places that do like 150K and their breakeven is 80, that 70 grand is like all profit, right? So that's where you make money in the business. So every percent counts is what I'm trying to say because up to that 80, it's like tight.

38:06So I went even to payment processors and I negotiated inside of 3.3%. We have like 1.3 % now, right? So I did all these things to pull. I went to the distributors and negotiate our food costs. Like, so 1 % here, 2 % here, 5 % here, whatever. And then I save so much cost. I fix the menu so it's simpler. We don't have to like worry about making all these things and wasting food. And then I turned on marketing. And then when I turned on marketing, it's like for context, now that the food was so good and everything was so dialed, the average Uber Eats customer return rate in Atlanta market is 17%.

38:37So if you order from a restaurant for the first time, 17 % of the people that order the first time from that restaurant will buy again in the next month mine is 54 % wow it's more than triple the average in the Atlanta market because the food is so good so in restaurants that's the game it's like you only get one first impression in restaurants and I'm sure you guys can relate to this so like let's just say you go to a restaurant it's shit the first time you're never going back yeah no if it's good the first time and shit the second time you're like oh but it was really good the first time this must have been one-off I'll give it another shot yeah right because that first impression but if that first one's bad it takes five other friends being like no that place is gas but you must have had a bad experience otherwise you're never going back so i had to fix all that before i started pumping more customers in yeah him and i went to a like a mexican restaurant in austin like down to like downtown prime location you can't get any better than that probably the worst tacos i've ever had in my life i've never i don't even walk by the place but if your friend invites you there you're like Absolutely not.

39:38I'll go somewhere. So we've talked a lot about scale and marketing agencies, but I want to speak directly to all the business owners out there, right? Yeah. I'm convinced, right, the reason why businesses fail in today's world, the number one reason, it's lack of marketing. It 100 % is. Because you can have an incredible product or service, right? And the word of mouth may spread to a certain degree, but at the end of the day, it's like you need widespread marketing. What are some marketing or branding tactics that you would instill in any business owner to help them scale out to a million-dollar company?

40:06Okay, so the first thing in any business is determining if I'm in an inbound or outbound business, meaning car accidents, right? If I'm a car accident lawyer, like I can't like go tell someone, hey, you should be in a car accident. And then they get in a car accident, they become a client. You know what I mean? So I have to find people who are already in a car accident looking for me. So that's like a pull. I call it pull business, not push, right? So I know those mediums are like Google ads, search ad functions, people searching personal injury lawyer, car accident lawyer. That's where I need to focus on, right?

40:38If I'm that kind of business, pull business. People have a problem. It's not a time-based problem. It's just a random thing that they have and they come to me. Now, if people have an ongoing problem, I do push marketing. So Facebook, organic content, things like that. For example, I have a supplement that fixes whatever, sleep issues, right? I'll run ads for people with sleep issues. And it's broad enough of a topic that it's not like a time-based thing. Like you always have sleep issues. So then people are watching back. Oh my gosh, I have sleep issues. This is perfect for me. Push marketing.

41:08So first in a business, I have to dissect is this, this or this. Every company I go into, I'm trying to only go into companies that are push marketing based, not pull. Because pull is a finite source, right? There's only so many people searching for a problem that they are already aware of. but there is infinitely more people who are unaware of a solution to a problem. And I just need to remind them that they have this problem. And then now I am the source of education and I become the thing that they buy. Right. So I basically can go create my own market. So for example, like with remotely with the ads, right.

41:43I know there's a huge market of people who are like already hiring Filipinos and all these things. And they're super unsatisfied for whatever reason. I run ads and I just go like, stop hiring people from the Philippines. You should hire people from here and that angle crushes because i'm going and putting in their face and they have that problem already and i that business is scaling like crazy had i gone and built it around google where i'm like every time someone searches for remote talent uh we're going to come up and compete with all these big companies it's going to be a very slow business to build but i can go create my own market which is like these people aren't going to be like i hate filipino workers where else can i hire them from you know what i mean like no one's doing that but if i go bro do you hate having people from the Philippines, like there's a much better overseas option.

42:22That's the same price. That's way more, you know, way more savage. You should hire these people. Now they're like, oh my gosh. So I'm making my own market. Like none of these other recruiting companies are even talking to them like this. Right. So I'm making my own market from scratch. So as a business owner, I would always challenge you. Like, how can you make a market that's new inside of your market? Like as a chiropractor, everyone's talking about back pain, all this stuff. Could you talk about a different angle, whatever it is, headaches, knee pain instead of back pain, whatever. There are little angles that you could take inside of your market that you can create a sub market inside of it that makes you the first guy that at least the first guy to them.

42:59It doesn't matter if I'm actually the first guy. As long as like James sees my video and he thinks, oh my gosh, the first guy that's talked about this, then that's a new market that I made. I create my own market and my own demand. And so in every business I have, that's what I do. I'm able to make my own demand and I'm not going into a business unless I can make my own demand i'm not just going to depend on demand that already exists so we did an interview first in denver 2023 and we did another one did we yeah we did on the street not like this is our first like pod pod it didn't want to orlando we did another one in orlando and i want to talk about that orlando interview because i think this is september 2023 we went out to disney to celebrate it was like a million on tiktok or something like that and uh wow there was a i remember i asked you a question i remember it verbatim because we actually reference this answer that you gave periodically between each other really is that i asked you i said eddie what is it that separates middle class from wealthy people in today's world and you said wealthy people look at every dollar bill like a soldier you said that broke people it's like acorns to them they they they they hold it so eddie how important is it for people to not be afraid to spend their money to make more money.

44:10And when did you learn that in business? Dude, it's everything. So I'll give you, I'll give you an example yesterday. This is a little yesterday. So bro, I'm, I moved to Miami and I moved my whole company. You can imagine financially it's, it puts you in a tight spot. I just got an office. I had to deposit 500 grand to get the office built. Uh, besides the rent, besides paying for all my team to come down here in order to live where I live, I have to pay, I had to pay 200 grand upfront just to live where I live. Right. Like just upfront payment. Here you go. so that I could live there. So you can imagine the expenses.

44:41Like cash got tight really quick in this giant move to Miami, getting all the resources here, stuff like that. So I'm not in a position where I'm like, oh, I can't wait to go spend more cash right now, right? I'm like, okay, what can I do to like pile up more cash to get more aggressive? Last night, I'm sitting on my balcony talking about Scoville. We have a grand opening in two weeks. And they're like, okay, tomorrow the mailers go out for like free sandwiches, all this stuff. And I was like, dude, like how can I just do something that just like makes me like so much more noise? and I was like, fuck it, dude.

45:09I'm going to give away$20 ,000. Fuck the free sandwiches. I'm giving away$20 ,000. I'm like, I'm going to go to the bank tomorrow. I'm going to get$20 ,000. I'm just going to give it all away. And I'm going to give it as long as they can finish the food in X amount of time or X amount of bites or whatever it is. But make it something super easy where everyone watches like, bro, easy$20 ,000, I'll show up. Right? And I don't really care about, look, if I was spending$20 ,000 on a watch, I'd be like, hell no, I'm not going to spend it. No way. Zero. Can't even convince me no matter how good the watch is, unless it's worth 50k like you're not gonna convince me but i'm like dude if i spend this 20 grand not only am i gonna have hundreds or thousands of people lined up outside the door and those guys are gonna eat the food they're gonna be this is amazing i'm coming back anyways right but i'm gonna make so much content out of that that content is gonna turn into more people in the restaurants but it's gonna turn to more people building the restaurants right i guarantee you this 20 grand i spent and maybe a few grand and flying videographers out and getting everything done whatever let's call it 23 grand to run this 30 grand between everything to run this promo if i sell one scoville the franchise fee is 40 grand i'll probably sell 10 off this concept because once they see like thousands of people at the door trying to get into this place like that changes the perception of the demand of the brand right that's 20 g's bro i'm telling you right now you could not ask me to spend 20 g's anywhere bro anywhere i will not spend it because i'm like bro i'm not spending cash right now i'm trying to be smart because i'm moving everyone cash is bleeding at like six figures a month extra right now right so i'm like okay let me be smart with how i use my cash but there was zero flinching i was like idea 20 grand oh my gosh look how much this investment will bring back not now like my partner's like bro how are you gonna spend 20 grand we're not gonna get it's not gonna come back i'm like bro you're thinking too so you're thinking about this day i'm thinking about the company bro yeah this 20 grand how much attention is that gonna bring how much more investors is that gonna bring how many more customers is that gonna bring how much more hype is it gonna bring how many more influencers are gonna be like i gotta to go fucking check out this spot because all these people are there like that is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars because we spent 20 grand and so that's what i say when i go like you got to use your money as soldiers like that's 20 000 motherfucking soldiers i'm putting out there i'm flying to atlanta tomorrow at 5 a.m to literally go do the video myself not no one else and have 20 grand in my hand film the video just to shoot the video just this one video on short form to then fly back to miami to come back for my friend's birthday like all that just to film the video in the spot because of how valuable spending that 20 grand is going to be for the business right and i think people not only don't spend money but they also don't make content which is like yeah well i was going to ask about that it's like obviously like spending the money to get the content but like you can leverage that for your personal brand do so many different things like i guess my question is what's your advice for people like trying to build a personal brand on on social like asking you guys what the fuck are you asking me but you've also built a a great personal brand and became an expert authority in your space.

47:55There are people that have, you know, agencies or people who have companies that are worth, you know, 15 to$20 million a year, but it's just like, did it, you know, I'm sure that there's extra perks and relationships. Like we were talking about the, the, the, uh, you know, you said 120 ,000 people who are going to talk about me. And so I re I really liked that concept.

48:11Eddie Maalouf: Just to add context onto this, there's people with millions of followers. Okay. We, we know a lot of the biggest creators that are broke. Okay. They're genuinely, genuinely struggling. He talks about this a lot too. I remember when you were doing, go ahead. Think about your audience, right? It's 120 ,000 maybe a quarter of the size of some of the biggest creators But think about how valuable it is you have some of the richest people in the world the biggest brands the biggest business owners I posted a story like three months ago and got ten million dollars Tech story tell us that story I got I got I got a really good following and really good credibility, too And so again back to 120 ,000 people talking about me what what actually happens in personal brand is people don't realize So example today, got on a call with this girl.

48:55She's got 22 million followers. Super big deal. Used to follow her or whatever. Everyone knows who she is. Is it a good niche that she's in? Is she in like a good niche content? Yeah, travel and points and money and shit like that. You probably know. I mean, you know who she is. But anyway, so I get on the call and I'm like, oh, yeah, you know, I think I met you at some event, whatever. Don't even care. She's like, oh, I don't remember that. I was like, she's like, but I know we got some mutual friends. And she goes through the mutual friends on her Instagram. and then I know because like they all told me but she reached out to all my mutual friends with her and she's like what do you think about this guy and every one of them was like fucking stud work with him for sure all this stuff that's what personal brand does for me because she goes oh these people follow him too they're my friends let me go ask what they know and even if they haven't worked with me they're like oh he's fucking amazing he gave me advice he did this his content's amazing I've seen the money he makes my other friends like word just gets around so personal brand is like it's a segue into like a network of people who are real and on the ground and actually know each other in real life but we're just like connected in social media and they can see who's connected so they can go to all the connections and be like what do you think and all those people they follow you obviously so to some extent they must like you and so they're gonna put in a good word and then again 120 000 people talking about me this is what it leads to is that so that's what's good about my personal brand in general but here's what i was gonna people this people who have money crave attention and people of attention crave money so all these creators with a ton of followers followings views all this stuff they're just like bro help me make money i'm broke and then all these rich ass people who can't fucking who have no fame and have tens of millions of dollars they're like make me famous i want people to know me right they both have the opposite problem can we talk directly to those people with attention you know we all spoke at a created a conference about a year ago around the same time.

50:42You guys speaking again this year or what? I don't think so. We're going to be out of the country. Too bougie now?

50:47Eddie Maalouf: No, no, no, no, no. But anyways, I remember listening to part of most likely the whole thing last year, and a big focus was people that have a lot of attention and huge followings, but they're not making money compared to people that have less followings but have the business tactics. So why is it that so many creators are broke? Why is it that so many people that are famous that have these massive following struggle to make a lot of money? Okay. Most of these creators get famous on accident. Here's what I mean. Oh my gosh, I'm going to go make content. This is going to be such a sick thing. I'm going to get a lot of views.

51:23And then before you know it, oh my gosh, I'm getting so many views, engagement. They just keep going. They never stop to think, who do I want to attract? And how am I going to make money from these people? Their only idea of making money is, can I get brand deals? Can I just a basic shit that they get right? Can I get a story promo? Ad revenue. Ad revenue like basic stuff, right? They don't think okay If I'm building an audience in a community What is the audience that I could build that would be the most valuable to me to monetize later? Right. They all just build an audience. So like take my brother.

51:54He's got 300 million followers, right? Or sorry views per month followers would be crazy 300 to 500 million views a month is what he gets across the platforms, okay? that's not including like clipping and shit like that too so um so he does very well he he hosted like a$15 ,000 or$20 ,000 or something trip to Lebanon and he only opened up 10 spots because that's probably all he can move because the audience is so broad a bunch of broke people a bunch of this I will go post on my story sometime next week and be like hey at the end of the month I'm hosting like a half day 10 person thing at my house 10 grand and I'll sell those 10 spots within an hour.

52:34You know what I mean? That's because from the beginning, my intent was, I just want to talk to business owners. Business owners, whether they're new and getting into business because they'll learn from me and eventually pay me, or they're already an established business owner who already has the money and resources to work with me in the first place. I don't have a need to become famous. I actually don't want to become famous. And I'm sure you guys have this problem already. Bro, I hate going out and everyone recognizes me. sometimes I want my privacy bro I want to be able to go party at 11 and like no one fucking sees you you know what I mean I can't bro I go out with 11 with my friends and 15 random people come up bro Eddie big fan and I love it don't get me wrong like because for me all the people coming up to me I know what they run a business they're in some sort of good marketing position they have a business they're starting a business there's something involved there where we can do business and make money together so I know they're ambitious people so I actually like give them value entertain the conversations.

53:31But if I was like famous, like my brother, but we go to a restaurant and like 30 kids stand in line and take a picture with him. Like none of that is value to him in any way. None of those kids are going to transact with him in any way. And you just like basically kill your privacy permanently. And you can never get that back, bro. Right. So I'm, I would rather be famous in a niche and just be like, anyone outside of this doesn't know who I am. God bless. That's the best thing ever. Because at some point you realize like privacy is more valuable than fame. You know, Everyone wants to be famous, and then you're famous, and you're like, dude, I wish no one recognized me.

54:03So now I love going on trips to random countries with my friends and my wife and kids, whatever, because no one recognizes me. You know what I mean? And then, unfortunately, now they're starting to. So it's like, dude, I was in a random country, and people are just in the airport. Hey, bro, big fan. Could I ask for some advice? I'm like, dude, at this place? Out of all places? I'm like, dude, I don't even speak the language. So I know for you guys, it's probably even crazier, bro. Your face is probably recognized fucking everywhere in the world. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Well, I wanted to ask you, you were talking about doing some traveling.

54:31You spend a lot of time in Dubai. And I think all four of us sitting here are big fans of Dubai. What is the better city, Miami or Dubai? Where do I live? You live in Miami. I had the choice, bro. I got to pick between both. I lived in Dubai for three months. And then I came back to the US and I spent three out of four weeks a month in Miami for two months. and bro listen the motion and the volume of people in and out of miami is untouchable compared to dubai dubai is great but it's so far uh and the american market right now is the market for money and these people in america are going to buy once twice three times a year max right so when you're in dubai it's easier to get them because when i'm there i'm like bro some some famous dude rolls through i see i hit him up on instagram he's got nothing else to do it's not like he's got like this giant lineup of shit to do for the whole week he's like yeah let's connect we'll grab dinner it's very easy to connect with people for that reason Miami is the opposite there's so many people there's always time to connect so like every day I'm talking every day bro because now I've announced I live in Miami and my office is here once I post to the office people like oh he actually lives here now okay every day I get a message hey I'm coming to Miami tomorrow I'm coming to Miami tonight I'm coming to Miami this week every day every day like one to 10 messages, people that don't live here coming through.

55:49And I'm connecting with like the biggest, heaviest hitters online, uh, people who have good businesses, good families, good people you want to meet and connect with. And they're here 15 times a year. So the opportunities to meet these people is left abroad. Uh, two months ago I was partying in Miami, the table next to me was like Kevin Hart and Jamie Foxx and LeBron James. You know what I mean? Like, like I'm not going to get that in Dubai on a regular basis. I'll get it for like a month, but like, I'm not going to get that all year. And in Miami, like if I'm paying, you know 100 grand in rent between my office and my house like i'm doing that to be in proximity of people like this you know what i mean and no city in the world is going to give you that opportunity it just comes with a cost you got to pay a buck to live in miami you got to pay extra but there's places that are affordable to come live in miami that aren't the most expensive building in miami obviously where you can go for a couple grand two three grand a month and live by yourself but like if i'm anywhere and i'm trying to make it in business especially online there's not a city that's comparable but i mean yesterday i'm at a hookah spot and i see these guys yeah i got a private who could not like a big one like a private like there's 15 chairs and i walk out the door and these guys are sitting on the couch you know like like in dubai that's gonna happen like this much in miami is gonna happen every day yeah so it's hard to compare

57:00Eddie Maalouf: i got a i got a quick game for you okay and it's it's rapid fire okay you yes no's are just succinct answers okay you can only keep one your agency your restaurant business or your personal brand what survives personal brand why i'll just build another restaurant another agency and do everything but if i only keep the other ones i can't build the others your best friend wants you to invest which is a crazy answer by the way let's talk about that for a second i just gave up like a big ass company you know but that's the reality though i mean like yeah i'm i'm the engine behind Sorry, sorry. It's wrapping up.

57:39Go, go, go.

57:39Eddie Maalouf: That's good, though. It just proves to you how valuable the personal brand is. That's what I try to tell people. I'm like, bro, I'm literally filming all day today. Yeah. And I'm running multiple companies. And they all want me to film all day today. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. So number two, we have your best friend wants you to invest$500 ,000 into his business. You love him. But the numbers are mediocre. What do you do? Not investing shit. Zero dollars. I don't care how much I have. You're offered$40 million cash for bad tomorrow. No earn out. no strings attached are you taking it tomorrow 40 grand 40 million 40 million sorry i've been offered like a number close to that by the way okay um but i would say if tomorrow i did it now that i'm in miami with the infrastructure that i have in my other companies i'd probably take it okay two more you discover one of your top executives has been lying to you for six months but they're responsible for 24 25 of company revenue do you fire them immediately um i'm then I give you this in a different way okay and we have a water park in Lebanon our family over there uh-huh and one of the top employees always steals from the depot we know because we get invited to their house and they have the same food that we buy and the same bottles that we buy and like it's like you're not gonna buy these unless you're like in the company right so we knew he was like taking stuff so we got in the car and I was like dad like you know this guy's stealing from me.

59:03Why do you let them work for you? And he goes, I look at that as the cost of doing business. If this guy steals whatever, that's 20 % of his revenue, you know, that are 20%, 30 % of the cost I'm paying him in payroll. I view it as like additional payroll and paying this guy because everything else is going well and it's okay. And so sometimes if someone's worth it, then you chop it up to the cost of doing business. If they're affecting the rest of the company and the culture and all these other things, then that's when you cut them out.

59:31Eddie Maalouf: Cool. So this one actually relates to that you have an employee who's insanely talented but toxic to everyone around them you keep the killer protect the culture so story again real quick because it's a good one so i when i had about 50 people in the company i got my boardroom which was like my top six i sat them down i said hey i need you guys before we leave this meeting you're going to give me the top three names of the best culture fits in the company you're going to slack me them right now you're not allowed to leave the room until you do no one can talk to each other just direct message me I watched the names come in Two of the names were pretty much on every list And then the third name was like mixed, right?

1:00:07I was like, great, they were like packing up I was like, stop, before you leave, there's one more I was like, I need the bottom three I need the worst fits in the company, culture-wise They're like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna put these guys' names I'm like, don't worry, it's private, no one's gonna know who you put, whatever Everyone put the same kid's name, okay? Out of their three And they also put Name, and then they put But he might, I think he's the smartest person in the company Name, but he's the smartest person I know Name, but he's so intelligent. Name, but his IQ is 150. Fired him the next day.

1:00:35Because that affecting the culture, him thinking he's so smart or so good or whatever, made him feel like he's outside the law and the system. And everyone else could now operate that way too. And so if you make an example of someone who is that good, then everyone realizes we're all replaceable, right? And not to scare them. I don't want to replace anyone in the company. but like it's important for people to know you're not above the law when it comes to the team and the business and the culture and so if you're gonna if you're willing to get rid of this guy that means you're willing to get rid of anyone that steps outside the line and that made a really good example bro and our our culture and company like rocking for the last probably like 12 to 18 months after that because they were like oh shit like we're not gonna sit here and bend for anyone we're a team one unit and if anyone thinks they're better they're out i love that eddie we like to end these podcasts off with two questions for our guests.

1:01:27I'll start and Jack will finish it. But Eddie, if all four of us sitting here were to die tomorrow and you could leave one more message with the younger generation watching right now, what would that be? You always make it so intense. Why is everyone going to die? Come on. I'm saying. I'm saying.

1:01:42Eddie Maalouf: Hey, that last spill, we're getting some shisha. For sure. I'd say the best advice I could give is if you believe that you can do it and you actually have a game plan to do it, then you need to cancel all the noise, whether it's your parents, your friends. I don't care if it's your wife, your girl, whatever it is. Because if you make a plan and you believe in what you believe, then no one else's opinion should really matter unless they have what you want. But most people don't. So I ignore all opinions. And I say that to say because everyone's going to take you off your high horse that you're on.

1:02:16They're going to be like, bro, that idea sucks. Oh, bro, it's going to fail. It's going to this. And most people, they give you the advice because it's a self-reflection of what they think they can do. So if you're like, bro, I'm going to go build a channel of 20 million followers, what did I say? I was like, you're going to fucking do it, bro. What's your plan, right? That's how we started talking. Versus me being like, oh, bro, it's fucking impossible. What are you even saying, bro? You can't even get 10 ,000. How are you going to get 20 million? You know what I mean? And so that's a reflection of me thinking I can't do it.

1:02:43You know what I mean? It's not a reflection of me thinking you can. It's everyone just self-reflecting on themselves. Like, oh, I'm going to go break this world record. Bro, bro, you're not going to be able to. because in their head they're like i can't do that so why can he but if you believe you can and you have a good game plan of how to do it go fucking get it bro because in life you're going to get a lot more resets than you think you're going to lose everything fuck everything up start from zero do it again it's it's going to happen over and over again just like relationships with people you're going to invest all this time in a relationship then you're going to break up but like you can't look at him be like i wish i never got with this person you learn so much from that so your next relationship has a higher chance of becoming more successful every time and eddie when it's all said and done how do you want to be remembered bro i just want to be remembered as a guy who um did a lot of good in the world built a lot of really sick shit but most importantly helped like thousands of people figure out how to make more money and put their family and their employees in a much better financial situation uh bro i'll tell you like the money and all this sick shit is cool it's up and down all the time right but one thing that like always just like moves me like fucking crazy is when someone comes up to me and is like you changed my life my kids are in private school my wife doesn't work like this guy like i get goosebumps talking about it like this happens like every week multiple times especially at events and stuff like people come up to me and i really feel how much i've changed their life i don't even know who they are they've never bought from me they just watch stuff from me and take action and do stuff and i think compounding that over time i'm sure by the time i'm dead like hundreds of thousands of people will be in a much better financial position because of the stuff that we built and done and that's really what drives me to be honest with you i love it well eddie this was a fantastic conversation.

1:04:17We appreciate you being with us today, my friend. Really appreciate that, my man. Let's go. For everybody watching right now, be sure to like and subscribe for amazing content, amazing episodes coming every week to the Hard Knocks podcast. We're bringing the 8, 9, 10, and 11-figure business owners that you see us interview every week on the School of Hard Knocks directly here to the Hard Knocks podcast. We're also going to put the link down in the description for you all to follow along with Eddie Maloof, his personal brand, Bad Marketing, because he posts some incredible content. We're all tapped in, so you should be too.

1:04:43And lastly, we'll put a link down in the description to join the School of mentors, the number one community for entrepreneurs in the entire world, where every week we host live calls with the 8, 9, 10, and 11-figure entrepreneurs we interview, where you ask your questions directly to them. We can't wait to see you on the inside of the community. With that being said, we'll see you in the next episode.