1885 – Digital Marketing Growth with Rahul Alim of Custom Creatives

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0:58with us right now it's rahul alim rahul you are the founder of gsd the website is join gsd.com we'll talk about what that stands for uh you're also the president of custom creatives.com rahul thank you so much for joining us hey thank you for having me well very apropos uh topic for us to talk about a lot of b2b folks um listen to this show so maybe start with just a quick overview of what custom creatives is and then again we'll get into gsd uh which stands for get stuff done yeah with a different ass which is fine i don't have a problem saying it but i i think my i always feel like my mom is looking over my shoulder yeah when i have an opportunity to drop a drop a swear word so uh but yeah rahul tell us a bit about your work and your impact in the world?

1:49Yeah. So with custom creatives, I started an agency, probably a very similar starter story to a lot of other people out there, quit a corporate job, wanted, I mean, I wanted freedom, but I didn't get it because I pretty much built my own jail cell for about five years because I worked way harder, way longer, way less pay in the beginning stages. Didn't know that was going to happen because like you kind of quit a job and you think things are going to be peaches and cream. But anyways, long story short, found a niche that I really, really love to go after for my target audience, found what I call like a hot dog stand.

2:21And I found my starving crowd, sold like crazy, stayed really focused on selling one thing to one audience, and then made some good progress in that space. And then kind of expanded from mastering one industry and then just slowly broadening things up. So I didn't screw up on my agency by going overly broad and expanding our services. So that's kind of like the very, very like 30 ,000, 50 ,000 foot level of how I got started in the agency to keep it like summarized. Yeah. Well, okay. Well, what were the, maybe for the kind of the tent pole things that you discovered that really improved your quality of life?

2:57From a work standpoint, like I was just, I just was self-aware of perfect imbalance. I knew what I was doing when I was doing it. And I purposely pushed other things off to the side and it sounds crazy. And maybe you guys can relate being other entrepreneurs out there is that family and friends got pushed to the bottom of the totem pole and then work and health were one and then two because I needed my operating system, which is my body to operate at peak. So I always worked out and then I needed significance because I didn't want to fail when I was early on. So I kept that work ethic really, really high.

3:31And as far as like pushing the perfect imbalance, it all kind of rotated back up. Then priorities shifted and the wheel of balance kind of came into tact. But I had to really kind of keep my full energy and my horse blinders on for the business primarily, my health so I can keep functioning at a high level for long hours. And then the family was just like, if I can get to you and talk to you, awesome, but I'll be there for important events once or twice a year. So before we get into GSD, tell me who Custom Creatives is for and what you do there. Yeah, so we have a marketing agency here. It's kind of like a full stack marketing agency, our primary audience is going to be people who are looking for lead gen, like a lot of people are.

4:11I think in this economy, you can't survive without leads, especially post pandemic, even more important, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, and SEO. Those are our three traffic pillars that we focus on. We rank fairly decent on our local area of people in California. So we attract like personal injury lawyers, kitchen cabinet companies that are our end customers. And then from that, it kind of blends into like what we talk about once we get into the GSD, how we built a coaching program off the agency. But those are typical clients of ours when they're finding and discovering us through like Google or whatnot.

4:46People who find and discover us through our ads on social media, we have a totally different target audience. That's when we're targeting, which sounds weird, is our direct competitors. We want them to hire us to do their marketing. And that's really our focal point on social media. So we have two different ways based on the channel that we're going after from our marketing strategy that we feel works the best. Yeah. Would you mind maybe illustrating that out a little bit more? Exactly. Yeah. So like when we do work for our end clients, like I'll just go with Google first, like we write blogs, write case studies, write content.

5:20So when we see a cluster of people in a good market, they can afford to pay us their long-term visionaries and they're thinking long term. They're not hiring marketing people to hop, skip and jump to the next shiny object. Those are the people we like to start working with because we're thinking, hey, we get you need to try us and and feel this relationship out if you want to marry us in the end of the day. So we have those like trial relationship build periods where we can kind of see our communication skills and whatnot, make sure that we're the good fit. Then we want a long term perspective of now that we've got the honeymoon stages out of the way, can we do something long term and really commit to each other so we can indulge into your business even deeper.

5:56Because from their perspective, we're not their employee. They can fire us at a moment's notice and whatnot because we're a vendor. We try to flip that relationship that we're so important to them. And by showing them our work, our communication, our authority, our ideations, like what's going through our brain so they feel like they're getting way more than what they paid for. So that's kind of our end customers where it's like lawyers, kitchen cabinet companies, et cetera. People who do like typically like millions of dollars a year in revenue. Now flipping it to the social media side, because there's so many coaches and so many consultants and they're all over Facebook, it's easier to attract them through Facebook ads because that's where they spend all their time.

6:35They're on all day. I bet all the agency owners probably log in Facebook probably 30, 40 times a day just by habit at this stage. Whereas the lawyers and the cabinet companies, they're searching for problems to be solved. I need a marketing company. They're actually looking for something. We're disrupting attention and kind of putting a shiny object right in front of their pain point of what they're looking for and just to have a starter conversation. So our strategy on social media is here's something for free or low cost, get to know our ecosystem, get into our group, follow our email list. We'll send webinar notices and just kind of understand that there's a customer journey that you don't trust us, you don't like us, you never wanted to meet us.

7:18And then our content has to flip the script on you and saying, hey, these guys know what they're talking about. So that's our hope. That's what we try to accomplish is just build that sophistication above and beyond the competition, but in a language that anybody can understand. Yeah. Where do you see a lot of maybe consultants and agencies really wasting time? It's funny because I used to work at a company called Realtor.com and the first decade of my business was targeted at real estate agents. So it was a difficult industry. And I always thought, what does a realtor wake up? What do they do at 9, 10, 11, 12?

7:54What can they do to only do 12 transactions a year? Like what's going on? So I think the same thing in the agency world. So, I mean, I think they waste their time by paralysis analysis, just thinking about doing the work versus just doing it. because, and we're all guilty of something. Like for instance, like you're an expert with like podcasting and doing these shows and whatnot. I'm sure there's a lot of podcasters out there that just don't know what microphone should I even get? What should I have in my background for a picture? So they get stuck on these little things that they don't move the needle.

8:26And sometimes - Yeah, truly. Sometimes they stay stuck for years too. Yeah. One silly thing. So I'm just thinking that's what a lot of people do. And it depends like what level you're at. The newer you are, the more time you're going to waste because you're going to be chasing clients and product pushing because a newer agency, they try to be one-stop shops. People who make money in the agency world are experts in one thing and may be capable of doing multiple things. So I'm a big fan of one niche, one offer, one product, one solution to attack the most important pain point in the client's life, understand that industry so well, and then you can contrast.

9:05because like it would be wild to say like people don't like people sometimes are shocked like how did you get started in marketing all i did was target real estate agents sold them literally banner ads not even graphic design of graphic design it was underneath it it was banner ads under banner it was only digital not print no nothing i didn't deal with cmyks and psd files and all that kind of crap that people needed for print it was like you have a banner on the internet I want to be known as the expert, the go-to guy. If you want a banner that gets clicks, that works, that converts, you go to me.

9:37If you want something else, you go to someone else. So that's how I positioned myself early on. And I would imagine then, you know, when you have a very narrow lane, which I'm a huge fan of, you know, there's so many reasons why you want to, you know, very narrowly define your scope. One thing I'll just tell you is in the actual operational working with clients, if you want to be all things to them, Buckle up, buttercup. You've just signed up for, that's a hard life if you're expected to be all things to your client, because that's just a huge scope now that you need to support and provide results on.

10:16That's a big team. I mean, there's so many reasons why that's hard. Yeah. I mean, the only way that model works is if you have the people that are willing to pay the price where you're profitable. And then for repeatability sake, it's like, I can like when I was when I had I had like 70 people running just the banner operation, just banner ads. And we had big clients, huge names, publicly traded company to the Mon Paws, we did well in that business. And the repeatability of it all was so simple, because I can take literally anybody, like it was my dream to have a product so easy, a complex product, but simplified in production, or I can literally hire anybody.

10:55I didn't care how, as long as it was legal age to work, because we paid them like four bucks above minimum wage at the time, because we just said, when you're here, we'll overpay, we'll pay a little bit more, but just work your ass off end to end when it comes to work, treat it like it's a sporting event. You get your breaks, your halftimes, et cetera. But while you're here, you're going to get paid a little bit more to just work your ass off harder than anything you've ever done. And that work ethic will either lead to more working with us into a better position in the future or just go somewhere else in life.

11:25And you're just going to have such a high work ethic that you won't even relate to the people who are so lazy in the next organization you work for. I mean, that's how I was raised. There's just high work ethic through like sports and all that kind of stuff and parenting. But anyways, it was just repeatability for that. I could take anybody like an 18 year old, a 25 year old, anybody without education in marketing, without knowing what a banner is, without knowing what Photoshop even looks like and make them an expert in about, I don't know, an hour based on our production. Cause we had SOPs that were just simple.

11:55And nobody can really screw it up. And if you screwed it up, we had to let you go really quickly. And Rahul, obviously, you know, when we talk about, you know, just really narrowly defining and focusing on who we are, what we do I think it's incredibly valuable to really appreciate the value of our networks. Right. And that's kind of a big part of what GSD is. Would you mind describing who joins Get Shit Done and like what that is, you know, how you work together with other agency owners? Yeah. So like I was sitting in a co-working space maybe five or six years ago and two guys that just recently graduated college, they didn't know what they want to do.

12:32They certainly knew they didn't want to go apply for a job. And they just asked me, will you help me start an agency or will you help me with marketing? All these questions kept arising and arising and I kept answering them days after days. And then one day he's like, can I just pay you for your time? Because you're giving me all this stuff. I just need to glue all this stuff together, get the A to the Z plan, the Waze application from where I am to the destination. And I said, no problem. And I didn't know what to charge because I've been mentoring people unknowingly for a very long time because I have employees.

13:00I had to mentor them. And then my employees would leave. And then they'd say, hey, I'm starting this company. Can you help me with ideas? And how do I get my clients? And I'm like, sure, no problem. And then I just started charging for it. I just said, hey, I'll pay me$1 ,500. I don't even know what I'm doing, but it's better than I'd rather get paid and talk to you as much as possible. And then it turned into a business. Then they started getting results. And the wild thing is, I remember one guy kind of made me realize, hey, this is pretty powerful because he came in looking for an office space in the building.

13:29And I said, why are you coming here? He's like, I have a marketing agency. I need an office. I need an address. And I said, how many clients? No clients. I said, what do you do? Real estate marketing. I'm like, well, welcome to my world. You're talking to the right dude because I know that business. So I'm like, sit down here because the guy who ran the space wasn't there. I said, sit down here. And I'm like, here's my pricing. Here's my contract. Here's my pitch. And the guy just asked me, why would you do this? And I'm like, here's why. I'm like, I want you to succeed. And I'm like, this is the deal.

13:54You said you have no money. You have no clients. You have no nothing. But you're smart, intelligent. Now you have everything I know in about an hour. I said, don't ever show your face here ever again. And I want to in the next seven days. I'm like, you have seven days to get one client. If you're lazy, I'll never see your ass again. If you actually give a about what you want to do in life, you'll come back to me within seven days. I'll be sitting right here, same seat, and you'll have clients. It's up to you. And I'm like, you have all my materials. Dude came back, closed over$16 ,000 in cash collected in that week.

14:27And I was like, all right, we got something here. So that's when I started doing the GSD where I'm like, all right, we need to come up with a blueprint, an easier way for these for agencies to like either start or when they're in their midpoint. I call midpoint because I'm thinking about smaller agencies, like$10 ,000 to$30 ,000 per month type stuff are the midpoint people. Those are the guys that are either going to screw everything up and burn the house down, which they mostly do. That's the highest probability of getting to$30 ,000. They peak out. They get burned out. The clients just waterfall and lose, get clobbered in like a month or two.

15:04And those are the people that have potential but then burn out, and that screws them up mentally. and then they may not be able to recover for years. Then there's going to be the elite, the guys who are like 50, 100,$200 ,000 a month where their mindset is like, I'm willing to buy anything. I'm willing to shift anything. I'm willing to pay anybody any amount of money for solving one individual very specific problem at a high level. So those are kind of the three avatars that we kind of look at and we create programs for each one, a starter stage, a mid stage, and then the more advanced people.

15:35And then we apply resources around where they are in their business. Because a new person, we can't say, hey, here's the seven figure blueprint. That would be stupid because they have no idea who their offer is, what their niche is, even if they like what they do. They're just copying and following somebody else they saw on social media and thinking that it's that easy when they don't know that guy's journey. Because everybody's journey could be a decade. It could be a month. It could be a long time. You don't know the sacrifice behind that level of success people have. So we kind of just show them like, here's the easy way to get your first five.

16:0710 clients, get yourself above that$5 ,000 to$10 ,000 mark. And then we can start to get into more system-based stuff and more operational efficiency. But the first thing is good offer, good niche, sell like freaking crazy. That's stage one. Next stage is going to be fixed delivery, automation, SOPs, and then hiring. The next stage is we got to solve leaks in the bucket the bigger you get, because the bigger you get, the more responsibility the founder has. The ball isn't a lot of courts, the delegations in a lot of courts. And now we just, my job is to leak thing, like small plug little leaks, like whether it's like a new email series, like where are we losing potential revenue is really all I really think about each day for maybe like a couple hours.

16:53And then I might have a good idea a week. And that good idea could be worth a couple hundred thousand dollars to our company or more. And obviously I think you get a lot of people that do ask for tactics, right? They want to know, you know, just in terms of trends, what you see working well right now, looks like you do a lot of collaborations, like you're a big fan of, you know, kind of other people's audiences. And that's, do you mind maybe just sharing just a little highlight of maybe some tactics that you're just, you're a big proponent of the right people, not for everybody, but certainly like when they're ready, oh man, I love X or Y or Z Yeah, no, no.

17:35Like my favorite way, like it was in front of me my entire career. I just didn't see it because I was either not paying attention or too blinded by like doing work way harder than I should have earlier on. But when I was going back to the banner business, this just changed my whole entire life and the trajectory of where I'm going. Like it's life changing stuff when you get this right. And when I say life changing, I'm talking about the money. When you make money, you tend to be a little bit happier. Stress level goes down and your relationships do get better. It's a vehicle to be able to create that freedom of getting the clouds out of your head and eliminating that chaos.

18:09So that's how I think about the relationship I personally have with money. But I was cold calling. I was cold emailing. I never door knocked. I sat behind a desk. I dressed the way I've been dressing for a very long period of time. I'm a hat, T-shirt, hoodie, board short type guy, being California. So I never really liked to go and suit up in ties and boardrooms and all that kind of stuff. I was just a hermit behind a desk and just liked to reach more people. And then I would just cold call one by one, individual, individual, individual, individual. And then I realized like some, a salesperson called me and they're like, hey, I have clients that can use your stuff.

18:43And I was like, cool. How many can you send? What do you need from me? Do you need big pricing? Do you need like a PDF that you can just forward them? Do you want to email me with them copied in? I take care of them, et cetera. So then the guy started sending me a bunch of business and I'm like, huh, if this is where the aha moment comes and it gets better than this. but like that sales rep started sending me like a bunch of leads and I'm like these are just these aren't even leads they're already I feel like I'm at Starbucks right now because I'm just an order and uh so I'm like this is cool what if there's more people that of sales reps that I can meet and do the same thing then it was like sales rep hopping then I went to regional manager hopping then it went from regional manager to the regional manager's manager hopping and then it went to One day I got called into a publicly traded company's office, my old employer, and they just said, hey, can you do this stuff?

19:32I literally thought we were going to negotiate or we're going to walk out of that room and they're going to use other people's pricing and like basically just bang us with negotiations. It didn't happen that way. I prepared for three weeks, stayed up all night every night with the huge deck that I was ready to rock it out. They just looked at it, put it aside. And I was like, damn, I spent like 50 bucks per unit on those. Those are in color too. They didn't even open it. They didn't give a shit. They're like, can you do this for this price? Can you handle this volume? And I said, yes, yes, and yes.

20:03And they're like, cool, we're going to use you. And that was the meeting. I'm like, that was quick. But it was the hard work of the sales reps, the regionals, the national manager. And they had already pre-endorsed me. So I called that bottom up selling. And then this led to my partnership model. I'm like, if I go to the top of the food chain for smaller companies, I can get all their clients to outsource to me for my banner. So that's where I started partnering with people. So I would go to ad companies and I'd say, hey, you guys sell display ads. I do the banners. What if we partnered? Then they'd say, no.

20:34I'd be like, cool. I have 100 people I can dial today because all I have to do is go to Google and type in top agencies in display ads in America or Dallas or San Francisco, Santa Monica, whatever, unlimited free lists. And everybody puts their beautiful photo, their title, their LinkedIn, their phone numbers on their about page. So it was the easiest way and like straight shot to a cold call and build a relationship because my mentality was when I buy bananas from the grocery store, the grocery store didn't grow them. They outsource them. Then the outsourcer outsource them. So there's a chain of command.

21:10So in agency world, my mentality was they always outsource this unit. So that's how I presented it. I just assumed, hey, you must be outsourcing the units, the graphics. Why don't you send it to me? So that strategy of the partner is close one person and they give you all of their clients through your reliability, your quality, your pricing, and your trust. And that was the most profitable thing I've ever done. Rahul, your website, joingsd.com. Obviously, there's customcreatives.com, but you've got some really great resources. You want to share someone's list or a conversation right now, maybe what you'd recommend they do next.

21:46Yeah. So if you guys are trying to grow your agency and you want to modernize maybe the outreach or the marketing strategies, if you go to joingsd.com, you can always go to our group too, which is joingsd.com forward slash group. But we have a couple, like I call these the evergreens. These are like really pillar type marketing that's going to work regardless for the next several years. It's our perfect stranger method. It's how to use like cold outreach, your social channels to create influence and drive traffic to you for inbounds and also tee yourself up for outbounds. We also have a whole free digital marketing course for anybody.

22:20It's really for starters. Like if you're just brand new, I would suggest get it. If you're already in the game, you can have it, but I wouldn't really see. I don't know if you'll see a lot of value if you're way ahead of the game, because then, but then we have our, our low ticket, which is we charge 97 bucks, which we get into pretty deep stuff live every week on Zooms. And then we have our flagship mentorship, where people hire us, newer people start off at a three-month level, kind of like college. It's like if you're new, you start off here. If you're medium, you start here. If you're like a junior, senior, you start here.

22:52So we kind of match things based off everybody's scenarios just so we kind of prescribe the right kind of whatever result that we're looking for. Rahul Alim, president of Custom Creatives, found on the web at customcreatives.com and the founder of Get You Done, joingsd.com. And then you can click on the group and you can join the free group as well. So Rahul, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

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