The Challenges To Growing An Agency with Erik Huberman

Hey everybody and welcome to this week's episode of the Agency accelerator. I'm Rob DaCosta and this is the Agency Accelerator Podcast. As someone who has stood in your shoes, having started, grown and sold my own agency, I know just how it feels during the ups and the downs of agency life. So this podcast aims to ease your journey just a little by sharing mine and my guests experiences and advice as you navigate your way to growing a profitable, sustainable and enjoyable business. Today we are talking all about the challenges of growing and scaling an agency and I am really excited to have Eric Huberman with me now. Eric is the CEO of Hawk Media and he's also the author of the brand new book the Hawk Method, which I am super excited to read. Now Eric went from making only $350 in his first year of business, which I'm sure is something we can all relate to, to growing and selling to successful companies, companies and rather like me when Eric started, when I started my agency, Eric felt that he could do a better job of running an agency than others were doing at the time. And he also wanted to make sure that his agency was accessible to small businesses. So he launched Hawk Media eight years later and it's one of the fastest growing marketing agencies in the US and has been valued at over 150 million with 250 plus employees. So that's a pretty impressive quick track record, Eric. So first of all, welcome to the podcast and thank you so much for giving up some of your time to chat with us today.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Let me start off by asking you a sort of a big broad question. Tell me about why and how you started your agency, Hawk Media, eight years ago.

Yeah, as you mentioned, I had built and sold a couple companies and so I wasn't sure what I wanted to do next. I was working frankly on a tea company and I don't even drink tea, uh, or caffeine, just drinking a cup of tea. Yeah, I mean I listen, I enjoy it, but caffeine doesn't sit well with me. But I thought there was an opportunity in the health and fitness space and tea and I started working on that and was also consulting and advising a few brands while I figured out what I want to do. Because frankly I was being asked to come work for a bunch of companies and didn't want to take the job but wanted to help them anyways. So was working with some bigger brands like Red Bull, Verizon, HP as well as a lot of startups and just saw that some challenges I dealt with, with my own brands were actually more prominent in the industry than I thought they were, which is about 99% of agencies and marketers out there have no idea what they're doing. Like there's many, many, many agencies that are started by people that have never built a successful company. And there are many, many, many marketers that sell themselves as marketers that have never driven a successful company. And so they, you know, they tout themselves as these God's gift to marketing and throw up really short sighted metrics to try to say that they're doing the right thing. And the issue is the customer, whether it's CEOs or other heads of marketing don't know what they're doing either. And that's not to their fault. Like if you're the CEO of a company, you might not be meant to be a marketer. So and then the few that are good and the 1% of marketers and agencies that are good tend to quickly go up market, want to work with the bigger brands, want to make more money, want to have long contracts, high minimums, all the things that make them hard to work with. And so the end result is I found that there was an inaccessibility to great marketing and it frustrated me because it was something that affected me with my old companies, but it's also something that just didn't make sense to me. The people that need marketing the most can't get it. And so after six months of messing around with this, I just went, I'm just going to hire my own little SWAT team. Still no plan to build a big company, but hired seven people, each with their own expertise, like a Facebook marketer, an email marketer and web designer, a fractional cmo, et cetera, and went back to the companies I was advising for and said, hey, it's all a la carte, month to month, cheaper than hiring in house. But the idea is we can spin up what we need when we need it and ebb and flow as we need to and be flexible. And the idea is we'll be accessible but the best at what we do. And my original plan was maybe this will then parlay into being my own team for my own brand. And then after like a month I realized, oh wow, no people need this way more than I even thought they did. And it started to take off and from there I just doubled down on it and it really started to grow. So after seven people at the beginning of 2014, we ended 2014 with 17 people. And it just scaled from there. Frankly, and now I think we're about 320 even since you were sent that little piece of data.

Wow. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting, isn't it? Especially in this day and age where you can be someone that studied a bit of social media or SEO or PPC or something and set yourself up as a marketing agency and then going to do it. And of course, like you say, the clients that are buying you, they don't understand this black, this sort of magic art. So they're relying on the sort of ability of the person. And so it's kind of hard to separate the good from the bad these days.

Yep, that's exactly it. And it's, it, it's just one of the only industries I've seen that I can manage hundreds of millions of dollars of other people's money and there's no oversight, there's no test, there's no certification. It's just, I mean there, there are random certifications throughout the industry but no one looks for them. So it just, it's a, it's a weird industry. And wanting, I wanted to create something where it was a well known brand but again, easy to work with so that we can solve that for small and medium businesses. And we still work with a lot of the biggest brands out there. But that's not, that is not the only goal. We want to work with all brands, all sizes and still maintain our accessibility.

So tell me, once you had got to seven people and you decided, okay, this is an agency, this, this business model has, has legs. Did you have a sense of that you wanted to get to 300 people by 2022 or what kind of plan did you have at the beginning?

Yeah, good question. I actually did set a plan up for the next four years of the business and it was a revenue goal and what it would take to get there. So it was, I want to do 1 million the first year, 2 1/2 the second year, 5 the third year, and 10 the fourth year. I don't know where that came from, but that's what I laid out. And we came within 1% of every one of those goals. And frankly, one of the mistakes I made was I didn't really look up to figure out what was next until we hit 10. I was so focused on we're just going to do this that we actually had a couple, I'd say the most painful years of the business were the two years after hitting $10 million when we're, I was like, I don't know what to do now. Like, I guess we go to 20. And then we didn't hit 20, but we forecasted for it. And, you know, it turned into there was no real vision for the company in those two years. You know, my favorite explanation of it, one of my friends actually came to work for us for in that period and he said we were in our puberty stage where, like, our body didn't quite fit our head and like, it was just like, everything was a little discombobulated. We were trying to hire executives, but we couldn't quite afford it. We basically made no money those two years. Like, we made a little bit of profit, but it wasn't anything meaningful. And for a bootstrap company, just to be clear, you lose money, you fail. So, like, you do have to profit. And so it was, it was a. Yeah, it was an interesting time, but we had to work through it. And that's. Frankly, I look at almost. We do a lot of M and A now and buying other agencies, and I look at every agency and they all go through it at that stage. Like you, that sort of 10 to 20 million dollars range. It is really hard to maintain an agency because you have to bring in infrastructure, you have to have hr, you have to have, you know, some level of executive team, but you don't really have the revenue to afford it.

Yeah. And it's interesting that you said that your initial kind of goals were just revenue focused. And I always say to my clients, look, a plan and a vision is a lot more than just revenue and people. It's, you know, it's about who you are. It's about the products and services you sell. It's about who you sell them to. It's about the systems and processes you need to support that goes into it.

We have to simplify it, though. To me, it's a scoreboard. Like, if our revenue is growing, we probably are picking the right. Assuming we're maintaining profitability too. We're picking the right people, we're hiring the right people. We're taking care of our clients. Like we. We're month to month. If we don't take care of our clients, our revenue's not growing. So it's all those things go into that. So to me, I actually like to like, yes, these are. There's a billion things that can go into it. But my view of at least our business and a lot of businesses I've run is it's way easier to overcomplicate than to simplify. It's the same thing in writing, too. You know, you talk about like, writing a short story is a lot harder than a long story. Like to me it's like, what's the what? How do you distill it down to make it the most simple action item so that people can get their heads around it and start there and then you get like, the more complicated you make it, the harder it becomes for yourself to manage it as well.

Yeah, that's very true. Of course that's, you know, that's why infrastructures fail because they put so many complex systems and processes don't enable them and they don't always understand why they're doing it. So if you got, what's your vision for Hawk Media now moving forward? If you're at 300 people, what's the next eight years hold?

Marketing. World domination. No, I mean at this point, like it. It did take, as I mentioned, two years. So it wasn't. It wasn't until about the beginning of 2020 that I was like, this is what we need to do. This is what this business looks like. I have a vision now of what I want to do. And really started marching towards that. And then we started really ramping up again. Of course, Covid started with a little bit of a step back because we had to change our client type typology. Not completely, but we lost about a quarter of our clients when Covid hit like right away, two weeks, so we had to figure that out. But once we got through that, which didn't take that long because of the way we're built, then it's been, you know, a new vision of how we're building this business. And we've since then opened offices in China, Philippines, Canada, uk. We've expanded all across the us we're fully remote. We do some of the. We bought agencies. So our agency in the UK has an office, some of our subsidiaries have offices, but we're mainly remote. With a partnership with WeWork, we we've just found a new vision for this. We also closed our first venture fund during that time started investing in all the marketing technology and e commerce tech that we use. That went really well. So now we've raised our second fund. Be publicly announced soon, but it is closed. So we have a we 10x our fund. We launched a financing arm and it really became let's march all around this accessibility to great marketing for everyone. The idea being again, easy to work with, best at what we do and how wide can we go with that. And that has really been a driving factor.

Yeah. So I know in the Book. You talk about pivoting and you know that word that's been very overused in the last few years, but been really interesting to me that some agencies have thrived during the pandemic and some have disappeared and not known what to do. So you said you reacted pretty quickly. What are the things that you did, especially if you lost quarter of your clients?

Yeah, so we lost a quarter of our clients. And so the first thing I did was say, okay, well, I don't want to fire someone in a pandemic. Like, I don't know what this means for employment. Turns out it was the opposite. But at the time, I. I thought it was an immoral. If you didn't have to. To let people go. If we had dropped 80% of our revenue, I don't think we would have had a choice, obviously, but we. If we had the option, let's keep them. So I was like, all right, let's fight to keep our people. What do we need to do with that? Well, 25% of our people are under utilized right now. Why don't we have them do some of our own work, help us drum up some business, that kind of thing. So we actually created a board immediately. We. With all the marketing initiatives we could use help on. And a lot of people stepped up and jumped into helping on the. Our own marketing. So that was number one. Number two, we went really proactive on that side. So we actually hosted. I realized, so all starting in the beginning of March of 2020, all these conferences I was going to all started getting canceled. And so by mid March, when everything shut down, we were in the. The last week we were in the office, I was like, there's. Everyone else is in the same position. We all have these conferences we're banking on to drama, business and networking, and we don't have them. Why don't we throw a digital conference, throw up a slack channel, throw up a conference, et cetera. So April 7th of 2020, we threw the quarantine conference. And I called in every celebrity or big name person I could to try to get them to speak. And I got quite a few of them. And so we had like Damon John and Anthony Scaramucci and Dan Price and all Brandon Webb, all these people that were really big names talking about their different perspectives of how to navigate this situation. And obviously, Damon John's a great businessman. Anthony Scaramucci has been through a few things, but even Brandon Webb's a famous Navy seal. Like, from a military perspective, how do you navigate a crisis situation like this and we had 4,500 people, I think was the number. It was over 4,000, I think it was 4,500 people attend the session. It was a full day. And that our biggest event prior to that was 600 people that we had hosted. So like blew it out of the water. And we did it in three weeks. And we did it for, I think the whole thing cost me $10,000, but I'm pretty sure we raised 50,000 in sponsorships. So it was a huge success for us. Not financially, it's not a big deal, but more of like, you know, this ended up every metric killed it. And it also set us as, you know, sort of the wartime leader. And I realized at that point and like leading up to that, there was a quick period where it was like the we're all in this together period where everyone just wanted comfort and, and then people wanted information and knowledge and like, what am I going to do about this? Like, we can, you know, wallow in it for a couple weeks and then what the hell are we going to do? And that was like perfect timing that we became a thought leader by association and by hosting it in the space that then everybody start. I mean, the phone was ringing off the hook. How do I navigate this? And so April we dipped about 15% in revenue because that's when the loss of 25% of our clients hit. But we had replaced 10% of them in April. By May, we recovered. By June, we had a record month.

There's definitely, there's definitely a good moral in that story, I think, and it's interesting that if there's one positive thing that comes out of the pandemic, it taught us more efficient ways of working. So yeah, like you explained that that conference that you could reach so many more people than you would if it were in an in person conference.

Well, I think what I learned the most about that is we had it easy. I'm just going to be blunt. Like, we did have a scary few weeks and then we were okay. I have a friend that had a chain of 25 gyms across Canada. Canada, I think is still locked down. Like they don't know what to do with this thing. So Canada. So he called me that first weekend, whatever, March 15, and was like, I'm not sure what to do. He's a friend. And he decided within a few days, I've got like 400 full time trainers, I've got a ton of clients all over the country. They all still need to work out and the trainers still need to train, just charge him the same thing to do it virtually so all his revenue stayed intact, which is absurd. And so then he figured out a new business model that he's now scaled and raised money around. I think he's raised 2 million bucks and he's built an eight figure business around virtual training. Whereas I know of many other gyms that just shut down everything. We had clients like this that like, instead of trying to make a pivot and figure out how to adapt, they just stuck their head in the sand. And so to me there's like a little bit of Darwinism and survival of the fittest, but I don't know that fittest is easily defined anymore. I think there's an adaptability side of things that you just have to have in business because we talk about this all the time. Whether it's Covid, whether it's trade wars, whether it's a world war, whatever it is, or a local situation, a riot, or your own company getting sued, whatever that challenge is, they're always coming. And if you can't adapt and shift and change and you know, play with it, well, you're going to fail. So like just be ready for that and understand that that is the job of a business owner.

Yeah, I was just talking to a client this morning and they just had their technical director resign after being with them for 11 years and they've just recruited two other people, then someone else has resigned. And I was like, guys, this is business as usual. It might not feel like it right now, but it is the nature of running your business. So if you can cast your mind back to your early days because a lot of our listeners will be those sort of small to mid size agency owners. Talk us through some of those key challenges and hurdles and blockages that got in your way to sort of help some other agencies as they go through similar challenges.

Yeah, a few things. One, I think one of the biggest things we did wrong in those again, I always point back to those two years was that 20, 18 and 19. Cause it really was the, you know, what felt like the rough times at Hawk Media. We, we had outgrown a lot of our team and so we had people that did not want to like, we again, we, we hit that 10 million mark, which was all we talked about. We didn't talk about the money, we just talked about like, we gotta get to these numbers, we gotta get to the size, like. And then it was like, well that's what I signed up for. I guess we're done. Like what you know, and so then visions got convoluted and like, we had different executives that had been there since the beginning that were like, I don't wanna build a big business. I don't wanna have hundreds of people. Like, this sucks. I would, I wanna go back to 15 people. And so you have those people challenges. And what I found is every time you double the business, you outgrow its infrastructure. And that doesn't mean that people can't come along and, you know, flex into the next position. But a lot of people can't. A lot of some people can, but a lot of people can't. And so you end up outgrowing a lot of your team. And so we also like a lot of small businesses. We thought of our team as a family and we have to keep the family intact. We evolved that thinking from family to team sports, team kind of analogy where it's like, you love them, you have their back, you know, we're all wearing the same jersey. But you also have to mutually perform. You're relying on that person to do really well. And if they can't, they've got to be off the team. No hard feelings, but that's, that's part of it too. And so recruiting the best, continuing to build for what you're trying to get to, that, that's super important. Maintaining your profit. Again, I'm talking to agency owners that aren't raising money. And frankly, if you're an agency, don't raise money, don't get debt, like you're mismanaging it if you need either. And so with that, one big mistake we made was hiring ahead. Basing our hiring on our projections, not our actuals. It's much easier to make people work a little harder and flex when you're, you know, a little understaffed than to be overstaffed and trying to keep above water. So that, that was a huge mistake we made for a while that we just kind of, of churned. We, and we just sat there, you know, sort of hamster wheeling our business where like, yeah, we made revenue, but we couldn't profit at all, which meant we couldn't invest in more growth. It was, it was not a good situation. And so that was a big learning early on. I think one of the biggest learnings I had, someone told me that at least for the first two years, I'd be the main salesperson. And in my case that was three and a half. So three and a half years in, I was doing, still driving. We had three salespeople and I was still personally driving 85% of revenue. And I realized that was not scalable. Now keep in mind, at that point, we were, at the point I realized this, we were about a $7 million run rate and I was driving 85% of it. And then finally I went, okay, I can't grow past this. I've capped myself out. I now have to figure out how to scale better than this. And so there's a lot longer story to this, but I was sort of motivated and what do you call it, inspired to make that shift. And that's when I basically stepped out of sales, started pushing all the leads that I was getting to my team. And we dipped in revenue for a couple months, but then came back and I watched it closely. So it was a little nerve wracking. Like, I think it's going to be okay, but let's watch this. And then we got it going. So that was a big step. And then you just again, every time you double, you have to relook at the business and go, okay, so we're in a new phase. What do we need to change? What are we doing? And decide also when to take those steps in growth. Because I think the other thing is growth is expensive. So I've sacrificed profitability in exchange for growth because that's what drives me and that's what I want to do. That's not for everyone. You don't have to do it that way. And which frankly brings up, I think the most important point, which is build your business for what you want. Because we talk about like self retention is the most important part of this. Like whatever you're trying to build, like, you need to make sure that you enjoy it, you want to do it. You wake up in the morning ready to work. Because if you're having to deal with things you don't want to deal with, you have to do things. It's not going to stay and it's also not going to grow because you're not going to be passionate about driving it forward. The moment you get to check out, you check out. As opposed to, no, no, no, I have more work to do. I want to keep doing this. I get to do these exciting things. And you've got to keep it exciting and fun and engaging for yourself.

Yeah, that's such a. It's really interesting because one of the questions I just wrote down as you were talking, which you kind of answered, was how do you define success? Because I think in the early days a lot of agency owners will define success by money, but it isn't always that, is it?

Well, no, I. And I've said this. I got a. I got quoted on a podcast that has gone kind of viral, which is interesting about. You know, I've done a lot of research on, like, what does it take financially to get to a point where it's like, you're good and it's somewhere between 1 and 2 million bucks a year. Every wealthy person I know lives off that. It's 1 to 2 million. And that's like kids in private school, private jet, vacation homes, like, and then at that, after that, it's literally just a bigger plane, a bigger boat or a bigger house or more houses, like, or more of any of those. Like, that's it. Like, your lifestyle. You're going to the restaurants you want to go to, you're traveling where you want to go to. So money, like, there is a threshold. Don't get me wrong. Making one to two million dollars a year is a lot of money. But when people hear about 10 million, 50 million, 100 million, like that money, then it just becomes a different challenge of what do you do with the money, honestly? And if you're responsible, you're not blowing it. Like, there's. There's a little bit of a flash culture too, that I think is ridiculous. But that quick, that sort of goal of success gets accomplished quickly. And then money's just. It becomes literally a number in your bank account. And it really does. It's. It's.

And the more money you earn, the more stress you create for yourself because you've got to keep earning it for you and your team.

I guess on the revenue side of the business, yes, but in terms of personal wealth, it. It's just another thing I get to literally, like, I watch, I have friends, multi billionaire friends. We go to the same restaurants, we drive the same cars, we travel the same. Like, it's not a. There's not much of a difference. They might, again, they might have a. Their own jet and it might be bigger, but it's not. It's really not that big a deal. And so to me, success is more about being able to do what makes you happy and having the freedom to really do what you enjoy. And I feel that, like, I. Part of that quote that was happening is like, the reason I did all this is because I been offered to sell my company for a lot of money, more money than my grandkids would ever need. That the interest, in the worst case scenario is going to make more than 2 million bucks a year. So it's like that, okay, so if that's the case, do I want to do it? Because I already make good money? Do I need money for anything? The answer was no. And it's a weird thing to say, but then it becomes, okay, so what do I want to do? Well, I like growing and building this company. I like serving our clients. I like building a place that employees can thrive. Like, this is very rewarding for me, and I would be doing this regardless of how much money out of the bank. And so.

And do you think you've learned that through wisdom of experience of building businesses before? Or did you know that from the beginning, right when you were starting your first business?

No, I think I learned that from this business. I think if you had, like, I. Even in 2018, when we were through that, you know, painful part, I looked at selling the business and was like, what does it. What's out there? Didn't like what I got offered. But that started me on the path of, like, the issue. Part of the issue, I think, is we live in a world where that celebrates exits and selling your business. And so every business owner thinks that that's the point. And you realize that the richest people in the world never sold their business. They might have brought on investors or ipo, but they still run it and own it. I'm talking Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, you know, Tim Cook, but he's not the original founder, but Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, like, these are literally the richest people in the United States. Even Warren Buffett, he sells things, but he owns Berkshire Hathaway still, like, the richest people in the world stick with it and all of them. And it's one of those things where you look at that and go, okay. So that's actually the path, if you can find something that is sustainable, which goes back to the first point, which is you've still. You've got to build it. That that's what you would want to do. And so part of that, we got offered to sell the business a year in, and we decided not to. And my partner and I discussed, okay, if we're not going to sell, what are the things we would do if we did sell? So we can make this a marathon, not a sprint that we're, like, not waiting to, like, we got to get out of this in four years so we can do X. Why don't we just do X now? And for me, it was traveling at the time. This is again, seven years ago. I wanted to see the world. So I was like, I'm going to do two or three really cool trips, 10 day trips that take off five days and you know, weekend, a weekend kind of thing. I'm to do that three times, two to three times a year, I'm going to go somewhere cool. And he wanted to play golf every other Wednesday morning. Became a really good golfer, by the way. And we did it. And so then it was like, when we got off other offers, it was like, why? What then what? I don't need to, I don't want to travel more. Because frankly, even those trips, by the end of them I'm always like, all right, I'm ready to go back to work. This has been enough, so what's the point? And so, and then I knew that I wanted this to be a platform to be able to do things. Like you mentioned the book and launching this book that's coming out and doing all these different things that I get to do. Learning M and A, expanding internationally, running a venture fund, all these amazing things that, that's what drives me is I want to get the most out of life personally and professionally that I can. I want to experience everything. So I'm a hobby junkie. I got my pilot's license recently. I snowboard all the time. I do all these other things. And then with business it's like, okay, so now I've learned how to do business here. What do we do next? What do we break next? And I love that. And it's because it also drives the growth of the business, but it also frankly makes it. We're constantly managing. Growing pains would be the best way to put it. You know, it's, it's because I'm always throwing new wrenches in it. We bought an agency in Canada and after buying them realized that our payroll company didn't serve international employees. So we had to scramble and figure that out. And we're still fixing it with the employees got paid, but we literally have had to wire the original founder money into his bank account to pay the employees for months while we figure out how to fix it. These are things that I enjoy, as weird as that is. I like the challenges of growth and so I'm constantly seeking those.

Yeah, it's such good advice. I think a lot of people think that the ultimate definition of success is selling their business. But when you're selling a service based business, you have to be really honest about what it's worth. And you know, I sold my agency and I was tied into a very unpleasant two year earn out with the big agency that bought us. And you know, I kind of Feel like if I could give my. If I could go back in time and tell myself something different, I'd say, Rob, don't sell it. Bring in a management team to run it for you and give you the space to do the things that you want to do. But I didn't know anything that I know now. This is going back sort of to the early 2000s, so.

And I think again, if the education in the market wasn't you have to sell you, it's you keep it for 50 years, you would have naturally come to that conclusion of like, oh, I have to bring in a team and scale it because this is not. I'm not going to do this the whole time. So that's part of it. And I also. So I'm. I'm an organization called YPO that's called Young Presidents Organization. It's a lot of very successful people and a lot of other sort of entrepreneur groups have a lot of friends that have sold their business. And this is part of like you asked, where did this come from? Did I learn this in past businesses? I think this is probably the number one place I've learned it. That almost scares me. And as I watch tons of them sell their business and then spend years not quite depressed, but bored and just trying to figure out and throwing shit at the wall to try to find the next thing. But the thing is, if you've sold a business, let's say for $200 million, your next thing can't be a local coffee shop. You've got to figure out something that's going to be a win beyond that to actually get that satisfaction out of it. And so they start trying these crazy hair brain ideas that all are all over the place that have nothing to do with their and like they're lost is. Is kind of how it looks. I'm not saying everyone. There's plenty of people that sell their business. And like I. One one of my favorite ones he was on my podcast actually is Movement watches. That's one of the founders, Jake Casson. He basically was like I focused for a few years on my financial well being. Now I'm just focusing on my personal well being. So he's like meditating, taking yoga, working out all the time. Like he's like, I'm gonna get an incredibly healthy state like mentally, physically and that like when you have purpose after the sale, I think that's great. But if you're selling for the sake of selling, I think you end up lost a lot.

Yeah. And I can completely relate to that. I always say that once I'd sold my business, it was probably mental health wise, it was probably the worst time in my life because I just lost a sense of who I was and what my purpose was and I didn't have a clear plan. So my advice when I'm working with agencies who want to exit is you have to have a really good succession plan. You have to know what you're going to do next. You have to be motivated to achieve that thing. Not to just to achieve the sale because you'll probably be disappointed with, you know, what you get from it.

I just wanted to one thing there. I think it's key to remember that a person buying your agency is assuming they will make more money off buying your agency than you were selling it for. That's the point obviously. So if you could do that yourself, do you have a better place to spend your time or money like, or are you done? And that's a, that's a total respectable thing if you're one of either, whether it's retire or you're just done with running an agency. I get it. Like it's a nightmare sometimes. So like that's too, too. But then I think, yeah, having that alternative, because the, the alternative is just doing nothing gets old real fast for someone that's, you know, sort of ambitious enough to build an agency. Yeah, really, really good.

I could talk to you about this for ages. I just wanted to pick up on a couple of things that you mentioned to, to reinforce. One is this kind of concept of a family in a business. And often people are very proud to say that we have this family culture. And, and I'm always saying that's really unhealthy because when you think about dysfunctional families, that's what you end up in your agency. So I really like the sports team analogy. That's a much healthier way of looking at it. And I just want to ask you one other question. You talked about three and a half years in and you were still driving all the sales. And I think this is something everyone's going to relate to. But they, I think sometimes people, no matter what they try to do, find it really difficult to extricate themselves from either the sales or from even some of the client work because the client expects them to be on their account. So what, in a nutshell, how did you extricate yourself?

Well, let's start by getting away from the word difficult. It's just, it's not a productive word. Like what are the challenge? What are the actual roadblocks that stop you from doing it. Because everyone's. I'm going to say everyone's different in that sense. For me, I had three decent sellers I had already built that I already had started to try to hire. And I had to figure out how to get them as productive or close enough to me that I didn't have to do it. And so what I realized, first it was training them, obviously, and getting them up to speed and making sure that they could close at a decent rate, then getting them to generate their own business. And this is a lot longer explanation, but I'll try to buzz through it. Then it was figuring out that I was getting the best leads because it was my network sending me introductions and things. And I'd built a really good partnership network. And so if I'm going to eject out of it now that I know they can close business, I need to give them the business to close to. So I started giving them my leads. And then you realize salespeople aren't going to just replace you, meaning a salesperson isn't going to go drum up their own business, build their partnerships, do business development, and close deals. And so then you start to divide the job up into multiple parts. And so you create a closer. You create someone that's prospecting, you create a partnerships person. You start to split the job up, which is pretty much every facet of the business. You get more and more siloed on what the job does so you can create predictability. And that was the part that we learned on sales. That was probably one of the bigger hurdles. That, again, it's been years now, so that's why I didn't remember it, but it was, oh, salespeople aren't going to go drum up their own business, build partnerships, close their own. Like, you need to just say, close the business. You're getting like that. You know, make it really focused in that sense.

Yeah, that's good. Sorry to spring that question on you at the last minute. You've answered that in a really succinct way. And I think that's a mistake that a lot of entrepreneurial owners make. They get frustrated when everybody doesn't behave like they do. And I always say, well, if they were as entrepreneurial as you, they'd go off and run their own agencies.

Exactly. We used to. My favorite line, I love you. You say that. When we were like six months in, we had a great. A girl that ran our email department for like six years. She. I was talking to her and she was always just Great to, like, she was really, to the point, smart. And I was like, you know, Marissa, how do we just get our people to be more entrepreneurial? And she looks at me and she goes, I work for you. I'm not a f cking entrepreneur. Like, what? It's like, that's about as fair of a point as you can make. Like, if she was an entrepreneur and she actually became one, which was awesome. It was a great point. It was really poignant because that is. I think a lot of early stage founders fall into that. Like, why can't everyone just roll up their sleeves and figure it out? It's like, well, then they'd be your competitor.

As we speak, your book is just being published, I think, and hopefully a copy is winging its way to me. But tell us quickly about the Hawke method.

Yeah. So again, showed it a bit. The Hawk method. Basically, We've grown over 3,500 brands at this point. We have a methodology that we use to analyze and really figure out what to focus on on their marketing. And I realized, I started getting asked to speak a lot of different conferences over the past few, you know, eight years and talk to a lot of CEO groups on how to look at marketing. And you realize back to the reason I started the company, most people have no idea how just a general marketing plan works. And so I. We have a framework that we teach our people, that we train on, that we've been really successful in utilizing that. I got approached two and a half years ago by someone that's become a friend that ran a book marketing agency and said, hey, have you thought about putting out a book? And funny enough, I had. I had written a book, but I didn't like it and I didn't want to put it out there. It wasn't this. It was a book about doing business without being greedy. I just didn't like how it turned out with a writer I was working with. And so I told him, like, I think it would be interesting to write a book about our marketing methodology. And we spent, you know, six months putting it together and writing the book together. And he helped me a lot and how to structure it, how to put it together. I had the content, obviously, doing it and talking about it all the time. And then we edited it together and then built a marketing plan and found a publisher and did the whole thing. So two and a half year project. But we're excited because it really serves the exact mission of the company, which is accessibility to great marketing. Like, now we're literally able to give A book that's like, here's how it works, like we can do it for you, but if you want to go dive in yourself, go do it yourself. Here you go. Or now at least you understand what we're doing or whoever you're hiring for marketing, which is, I think the biggest problem is the people hiring agencies and the people hiring marketers. They're not marketers, so they have no idea how to manage or how to even check if the person's doing the right thing. And that's what the book's about, is this is the basic framework to understand marketing well.

So listeners, if you want to learn more about the book and dig deeper into obviously what Eric and I have been talking about today, then grab a copy of it and I'll make sure we include a link in the show notes. So my very last question that I ask all my guests, if you could go back in time and give your younger self a piece of advice, just starting out in business, what would it be?

Yeah, it's and I mentioned a little bit in this, but the biggest piece of advice I got that I try to give everyone now is as a business owner. So there's just quick story, big month in the business. I had this like what felt like a catastrophic event that I was maybe going to lose the whole business and longer story. But I Frank called my dad, who was an entrepreneur and told him the whole story was like 5 minute diatribe about oh my God, this is all going on. Da da. And he's listening. And then at the end of my rant he goes, yeah, that happens all the time. I got to run, talk to you later. And hangs up on me. I thought my world was ending. And apparently that happens all the time. I didn't learn that lesson for three more years or so. But you realize as a business owner, you're going to deal with the biggest problems of the business. Any problems that the rest of your team can't deal with are going to fall on your plate. And so that is the job. Especially if you're trying to build something bigger or grow, you're going to be constantly mentioned the, you know, paying the employees. That wasn't an issue. Like we figured it out right away. No one, it wasn't a big deal. But like those are going to pop up daily. Like you're going to have, someone's going to sue you at some point. Someone's like, it's just welcome to the United States at least. Like it sucks. But these things are all going to happen. And you're going to have to deal with them. And so I've learned that once you accept that and you also accept the fact that you chose to be a business owner, it's not, you're not forced into it. Everybody that says, oh, I could never work for someone else, yes, you could. Like, so it's not, it's an option. And once you accept that this is here, you're here by choice. So you have all the power. And the job that you chose to do is dealing with the biggest problems of a business on an ongoing basis forever. I used to forget, like, it took me a while to realize, like, the biggest companies in the world are dealing with antitrust law wars, like, all sorts of crazy stuff that affect your business when you're on a global scale. Like, my problems are nothing compared to theirs. And. But so there's no finish line. It just keeps going. And once you again accept that and realize that and change your mindset from problem to challenge, like, it's another challenge, you're going to have to deal with it then, and you're doing it by choice, the whole thing just becomes more fun because then when these things pop up, you're like, yeah, what are we gonna do about it? Great. Like, this is how it is. Like, let's fix it. You, you know, it just becomes like solving another puzzle versus, like, oh, my God. Because I think we're biologically wired, that our business being threatened is like our life being threatened. I've read things about this. So when you, you have that immediate, almost fight or flight response when something's attacking your business, but when you take yourself out of it and go, no, I could, I could walk away from this anytime. Maybe it's not the right thing to do, but literally, you could just tomorrow decide, I'm not doing this anymore. And so you have the choice to be here. Understand that choice, understand that this is what you signed up for and then attack. And I think it just becomes a lot more fun that way.

Yeah, I mean, mindset, having the right mindset is such a big part of success, isn't it? So I love that I haven't had anyone say that before. So, Eric, I really appreciate your time today. If people wanted to find out more about you and your business, where would they go? What's the best contact details?

Add or slash Eric Cuberman on any social channel. Super easy to find me.

Okay, fantastic. Well, we will include all of those links in the show notes. And once again, thank you so much for sharing such wisdom with us in a short period of time today. I'm sure the listeners will find this super useful.

Yeah. Thank you for having me.