https://www.listennotes.com/e/dbc18d2cebc54d5a9c818d484119e26a

Welcome to Executing the Vision podcast. I'm your host, Brad Hunter, president of Emerge Labs. On the podcast, we'll get to know the person behind the vision, their successes, their challenges, and their plans for the future. If you're interested in becoming a guest or know someone who might be a good fit, stick around to the end and we'll discuss how to apply. Now, enjoy the show. All right, everybody, welcome to another episode of Executing the Vision. I'm your host, Brad Hunter. Today we have JC Height and JC has a lot going on. One of JC's main businesses is the Heights, a digital marketing agency. Correct. Actually, more of you train digital marketing agencies. Would that be a more accurate description?

We got our agency, Height High Digital and got about eight offices across the US, 150 team members. And we do simple stuff, PPC, SEO, Facebook ads. We just like to say that we do it at a much higher level and that's been the core of our company. But then from that we had some success and so we started helping a few others. And it's a low key mastermind. About 30 million dollar agencies are in that. You got to be a million dollars in revenue. About 30 of them are in that community. And then we got events and different things like that that we execute on as well.

And now from the Mastermind perspective, how frequently are you guys getting together?

So our Mastermind is a little unique, I think. We meet four times a year in person and then we actually have. I don't know if John Maxwell is, but John's a personal mentor to my wife and I and we meet on a regular basis. And then every month he comes in and does a virtual session personally for our Mastermind as well. And then we end up meeting up with him at one of our Masterminds at one point in the year. And so it's not only myself, I've got five other owners in our Mastermind plus John. It's. It's more of a. Almost like a board of advisors set up than it is a. Let me coach you how to make ten grand a month in revenue. It's very unique and different, I think.

Yeah, geez, that's great. That guy's a legend. Yeah, awesome. And then, so what other type of things? Then I was looking on your website, you had for. Okay, so let's back up from that. Let's just talk about the idea of growing up. What was life like growing up? And then now from the business world, you've started several businesses, you have a lot going on now. So what was life like? Growing up. What lessons did you learn growing up that apply now to your business life?

A lot of grew up, I don't know, normal home had some really rough times as a child, but then some really good times. Some of the things that I guess heavily impact I. There's a, I think it's a great story of my granddad really influencing my decision. So my granddad was into real estate and bought homes and sold homes. I never knew he had any money and still this day, I don't know really what that looks like, but he was a man that liked to teach you how to fish. And, and so every day I'd come home from school, 13, 14 years old, I go to his house and immediately he was always, you got to put the, the paper, pencil to the paper and do the math. And so we would go to the newspaper, we look at the homes for sale and then we would start doing the math. What could we rent this for? What can we buy it for? What would be the insurance and the taxes and does. Is this cash flow? Does this work? And probably once or twice a week we would all, let's go look at it. And we'd go look at it. So this is 13, 14 years old. Never forget we went to this house on Crisp street in Searcy, Arkansas and we went and looked at it. It was, oh, it's a great deal. And Sandy always, what do you think? What do you think? What? And I a great deal. And said, why don't you buy it? Literally 14 years old, why don't you buy it? I said, sure, why not? You know, of course there I didn't know, you know, I was taught to not really have those limitations. And so my granddad set up a meeting with the bank. Obviously now I know that the bank doesn't loan money to a 14 year old, but my granddad and I have the same name, John Height. And so the president of the bank, who happened to be a minister at our church or an elder at our church, met with him for 45 minutes and he talked to me about lending. And you understand how this works, you understand how interest works. He printed out the loan documents, I had to sign the loan documents and really my granddad just did a loan with them. But in my mind I'm doing the loan and got my checks, everything and ended up buying this house. And 14 years old, my granddad made me show the house, he made me rent the house, he made me collect the deposit, he made me go, I did everything, couldn't even drive. But I Did everything. And there were so many lessons along that path and but one of the big lessons was I would again. I was 14 years old, so my rent was 550 and my mortgage was 400 and something. And then I paid my insurance and I had 60, 70, 80 left over. Right. This is a great cash flow investment. So what would any other 14 or 15 year old do? I'd spend it, you know, I'd write myself a check and spend the money my granddad let me. And all of a sudden a tree fell down on that house about a year after I bought. And I thought I was just like, I figured out the secrets of life. And that's when I learned that insurance has premiums. I didn't really understand that. And so my granddad made me sweat it out for a couple days and then gave me a loan. And that was one of my initial lessons in saving your profits. And how does this grow. I ended up building that real estate portfolio by the time I was 24. We had about 50 homes in total. And then there's a whole nother story that comes after that, but I'll leave that for another day. But I was growing up, grew up in a family that my parents were divorced. My mom lived a very simple life, trailer house most of the time. And my dad did a little bit better and was a little bit more stable home. And so I learned both of these ways and realized that I would much rather have a stable home for my family and some consistency. And then went through real estate, ended up working for that banker, by the way, the president of the bank, offered me a job at 18 and went to work for him for six years while I was building my real estate portfolio.

Now have you dealt in any of the creative funding side of the real estate? Have you ever dealt in any of that?

Yeah, all kind of course when I was 14, buying my first home. The banks. Yeah, sure. Like you could. I remember my first. Even at 18, I bought my first home with zero money down and. But then later on I got into a little bit more creative financing, owner financing, things like that.

Yeah, exactly. And do you still dabble in that or.

Yeah, so the story goes on. Did that. Ended up getting bored with the bank. Left the bank, started a tech ed company. You know a lot about technology. So we started a tech ed company where we were teaching English online. But then we were extracting data from that and selling it to big corporate companies. That was the idea. And through that process met my now wife and. And ended up getting engaged and it Was a great story. Two months before our wedding, actually like six months before our wedding happened, a big factory that I had about 30 homes of my 50 was in a, like a 3 mile radius of this factory. This big factory went under and about, let's call it 12 of my homes. People from that factory lived in and I couldn't kick them out. I couldn't collect rent, I couldn't. And we spent the three months leading up to our marriage basically losing everything. And the three months after our marriage making sure I didn't go bankrupt. We had to sell everything. We barely, I mean we couldn't, couldn't rent them, we couldn't keep people out. It was a worst thing in the world. And my wife and I moved into the maid's quarters of her father's house in Nicaragua in Central America. So the maid's quarter. So this is literally like twin size bed. You can see the commode was our first year of marriage and then we got the opportunity to rebuild from scratch in our marriage and we had a great lesson there of losing. And so I got really tired of real estate. Now we've started investing again. We got a big complex actually that we're building right now with 45 units in it and we're building that right now. We also have some beach development and things like that. But I'm slowly getting back into it. I got hurt there for a while.

Yeah, I went through some of the, in that 2000s, the early 2000s, I was acquiring real estate. I felt like doing it the right way, putting 20% down, getting 30 year fixed and everything. But then when the crash came, just the rents, same thing. When the lease would come up and you were looking at a 30% reduction in rent. So you went from making money to losing money on all of them.

Yeah.

Then suddenly. Yeah, yeah. So I lived through that same thing.

That's right.

And so, yeah. So talk to me about, so what other businesses now? So you got into, you started in real estate when you were younger. How did we get into the digital advertising space?

Space, yeah, was doing this, making enough money to feed my wife and I. Basically, that's it. My wife ended up going to work with this agency. And this agency was, they were starting to grow, they were starting to do really well. And the owners had reached out to me about, hey, let's get rid of your company. Come in. We need another partner. We want someone to lead all the service and product side of our business. I don't know, they liked me. And so I ended up coming in becoming a minority owner, not a founder, but a minority owner in the business. And we were on the 5000 list six years. Got up to about 300 something employees and. And I didn't, I wasn't a big part of that growth. They were already growing. But I got a lot of great experience in leading a big chunk of the business there and. But it was Wolf of Wall street, man. It was crazy. And my wife and I are pretty conservative human beings and faith based people. And we, but we were, we felt we were light and darkness there. You're talking cocaine, heroin. I remember Google reps would come into our offices and there wasn't a good enough party in the country. So we'd literally take a private jet to Panama, like the country of Panama and crazy junk. Google was giving us a million dollars a quarter in kickbacks alone. Like it was crazy stuff. And two months before we were gonna have little o our baby girl, she's six now. But we just said man, we can't do this. Like I would be embarrassed if my daughter came to this office. It was nuts. Crazy nuts. Beer Fridays, you just name it. And so I ended up waving my non compete, they ended up waving my non compete and exchanged for my equity and I went off and started height in the bedroom of our house and built up and that's really where we started to scale and to grow and. And we've been very blessed in having amazing, incredible people. I would say our superpower has been hiring really amazing people and building those relationships and that's helped us not only scale but in rougher times. Covid and even we had a huge hit in Q4 Q1 of this year. Surviving those and even getting on the other side and thriving forward.

And so what is height focus on now? You guys are focused on working with digital ad agencies and coaching them. Are you working directly with clients?

No. So height is our marketing agency. So we work with local SMBs typically. So roofers, plumbers, electricians, you name it. All the way up to large, much larger Texas A and M, things like this. Right on. Committed, which is our mastermind is called Committed. It then helps helps other agencies grow and scale. And so that's our mentorship mastermind program.

Okay, great. And then talk to me at the faith based stuff. So this, I don't know how you're familiar are with awakened church out here. I'm out in San Diego. They have a pretty big presence here. And then actually this weekend I'm going to one of their big events and this will be my First, I'm a part time goer. One of my buddies is real big into it and very close and so I'm interested and excited to see. But yeah, this weekend we're going to, it's an event they call Emerge, which apparently, I don't know, there were some pretty big speakers, pretty big thing. So I'm excited to get involved and see what that's all about.

But it's a men's conference, right?

Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. We're supposed to be doing all sorts of competitions. Like we've got a team, they're sending me training videos, we're doing like burpees.

At 5am There you go man. Let's go, let's go. Yeah, man. I'm like I said, raised. I split home. My mom would have said she was religious but probably didn't act on it as much or didn't have the opportunity to. And I found really quickly the difference between a home that had Jesus at the helm and was pointed that direction versus a home that didn't and quickly realized that I much prefer one that was a God fearing home. And so my wife and I have been very blessed to be in situations where we've made that a center point of everything we do. So even at height digital we lead prayers in the mornings and we got atheists, Muslims, Christian, you name it, that work for us from every type of belief system you can imagine. But our job is to just hopefully be like Jesus as much as we can and love on everybody as much as we can. And, and we've brought that into every sector of our, of our business. In fact, now we've really focusing a lot of our attention on the next season of our life going. How can we support faith based education in a big way, especially among teens and college students and elementary school it.

Is that on the idea of a homeschool pod type situation or.

No, no, it's more of there's some really great faith based schools out there. I'm actually sitting on campus right now at Harding University, which is a Vista school. Pepperdine, if Pepperdine out there. Yeah. And Harding's a great university that does amazing work and it's a little expensive to go to these private Christian universities and so but it's such a, a great opportunity to immerse yourselves in those aspects, especially in those first years of being away from the home. And so we're. My wife is a subject of that. So she got a full ride paid by Walmart actually to come to Harding University and, and not only get a Degree, but a degree surrounded in faith. And so we're big advocates of those type of education. We're not homeschoolers, man. We'd probably kill our children if we were around them 24 7. God bless those people. They're incredible and amazing. But we are looking at other ways of doing that.

Okay. Okay.

And then.

Yeah, okay, so now we've got. You've got real estate going on, you've got the marketing agency going on. What other things? What's the future look like?

Yeah, we own. What does the future look like? Future, Lord willing, is a lot more simple. And so we're in the season of replacing myself as the helm of every single one of these little companies to going, okay, we want really great leadership in each one. And. And we've almost done that actually at Height, which is our biggest company, and we're doing that on all the others. My, I love people. I love working with people. I love. I'd rather sit down and talk to you about your kids and your wife and marriage all day long than talking about systems and processes. And so I would love to get a stage of my life where I can be, in a odd, weird way, like the grandpa of the organization and just don't talk to me about business. I don't care. Let the numbers do it. The COO will take care of that. I just want to serve my team as much as possible in every way I can. And so that's where that looks like. And how do we. Lord Willing, anyways, so.

And are you finding in that process, is it searching for outside talent that can come in and fill a role, or has it been more the idea of really focusing on developing the people.

You have A little bit of both. You know, ideally, you're always in a situation of developing people. If you're hiring great people, you're always developing them up. And anytime you can put someone that's been there for 10 years in the role of CEO, they have a leg up on anyone else. With that being said, you got to be developing people and hiring the right people at the bottom. And so we've been blessed to do that in a couple of areas in our organization that we have an incredible COO at Height that, quite frankly, is better at leading than I am in a lot of ways. He's not good at the vision, necessarily. That's where I come in. But, like, he is really good at managing and operating a system that we've built. And it's probably a little bit of both. A little bit of both?

Yeah. I had a talk the other day with a guy that had started some different companies and he made a really interesting point I had not heard before that I really hit home for me was the idea is he said a mentor told him that his story, that his job as the owner is to focus on telling the story of the company and being like the story of the company and not the other. And if he came in every day and really did that with his employees, did that with the customers, that he would see real good results. Yeah. And now talk to me then. On the digital side of things, how are you guys acquiring customer? Who is your ideal customer?

And we, if you look at height, most agencies, if you look at them, a chunk of their team will be on the sales side. Because churn can be really high in this industry. We got one salesperson out of 140 and that's it. That's the only thing it's selling. And so we rely a lot on our strategic partners. So normally we're writing a check for those types of relationships. Right. But we worked for three years with Dave Ramsey. We work with a lot of different community leaders and things like that. And then we have a service based approach. So like how can I lead webinars and serve and help and coach and teach and lord willing maybe you want to work with us at some point if you decide you need digital marketing. And but we're heavily focused in the local sector. So if you have a business that you serve a local audience in some way, shape, form or fashion, like that's what we really like to, to, to work on.

And then what do you think about all the, the AI stuff? Because to me, so being like a person in tech, my perspective on AI has been a lot of it that I see is okay, cute but not really applicable to what I'm doing. These tools for what we're trying to do, none of these tools really make sense. But the one thing that I always do feel like is boy, as far as it being interrupter, it seems to me like the digital ad space is where it is really making a big difference and having a big impact. Those tools are quite applicable. So what do you think on that front? How are things been so far and like where do you see that going?

I think sometimes when people are referring to AI, they're talking about ChatGPT or Bard. Very specifically, Google Ads have been using AI for years now and it's gradually been getting better quarter over quarter. Facebook has been using AI for ads now for years and it's Gradually getting better year over year. Right. It just hasn't been like the masses have it at their fingertips to tell it to create an article. Right. Which is even though we're visibly seeing this like 0 to 100, it really hasn't been that way. To your point. I see a future in the next even four years where Google's AI is so good at ads. Like you just don't. There's nothing to manage there. What I do see marketing coming in is this like fractional marketing officer where you are leading the strategy between all these platforms. Google is not going to communicate with Facebook anytime in the near future. They're competitors. They want each other's ad spend. It's the same with TikTok or X or whatever the. You know and so you're going to need this person to be able to understand the data between all these platforms and be deciding where to show the funds is where I see the see the industry going. There are a lot of changes in terms of AI on content. We're still not 100% sure how Google is going to interact with that stuff. And so there's a lot of people writing just massive amounts of content via Google. So now all of a sudden the website just has a plethora of information. So far I have not seen Google docking you for that type of efforts but it's just, it's a click of a button for Google to be able to start doing that. So we're still not sure exactly what happens there. But man AI is like what you said, there's some really cool tricks there but the application of it on the day to day basis and a lot of our roles is just not existent there. It's a hype word. Crypto was a hype word not too long ago and it's still around, it's still doing stuff. They're still huge promoters of crypto. But right now you're in the season of AI is yeah.

In my. Do you have any cautions for people? Because for sure I think like everybody now you can jump on Chat GPT and have it rip out marketing materials like crazy. Is there any sort of cautions from like an industry insider that hey just be aware that content to me actually my lead developer came to me last week, we were talking about this and he's honestly I think what's happening right now with AI is everybody just can instantly see it's. They realize that you got that from Chat GPT. They realize because we use it for some different marketing platforms like an upwork to Try to get stuff there. And he's. I think it's really starting to backfire because everybody's just recognized, oh, wait a minute, that's just an AI thing that you're feeding me. And they get offended. Do you see that from a marketing perspective? Is there concern of that?

It's a good question. I don't know yet. I don't know. I'm a data guy and you're a tech guy. So you by nature of data, we don't know yet, to be frank. And even if people realize that it's from ChatGPT, they're still reading it, it looks like anyways. Right. And so it's still working. Doesn't really matter. Today there's a point where, oh, you have a virtual assistant. Oh, I don't want to work with you have overseas employees. I don't want to work with you. Now we know it. It's just we're okay with it. Right. And like, we don't. We're not bothered by the zoom interaction that we're on today. Right. So if the question is, do people realize and know that you're utilizing AI versus not. The answer to that, I think is becoming more and more prevalent at times. As AI gets better, maybe that becomes less prevalent. But either way, I think there's going to be a point where it's like, who cares? Doesn't matter.

Yeah.

It's just how they operate and work. And again, there's a time when the universities didn't allow you to use computers or a calculator because that's cheating. And that's going to obviously be changing dramatically over the next few years.

Okay. You've been through a lot of different businesses, done a lot of different things in life. What's can you give our listeners? Best piece of business advice? Best piece of life advice.

One of the same love covers a multitude of sins. And so when we built height, we, we set a mission to go, how do I level up every aspect of our service? So how do I make him being a team member at height? Like, how do I go above and beyond everyone I wanted to? Ron Kaufman wrote the book Levels of Service and then Leveling up Service and so how to every aspect. So if you work at height, not only do we like family, every single kid is on scholarship. Not only do we have an end of the year party, that end of the year party is typically in another country. Not only do we do that, we invite your, literally your entire family to those things. And we try to do a big one every other year. And so we have. We love our team to the extent the goal there is not. It's not about if we mess up one day, we're gonna mess up, we're gonna fall short, we're gonna not quite pay enough or we're not gonna. And so love covers a multitude of sins. And so we've built our company trying to build that trust and serve as much as we can. Go above and beyond. Go above and beyond. Go above and beyond. And hopefully that overcomes our weaknesses when we have them. And so that's how we grew our company. Literally every employee at height, we go through an hour long training on leveling up our service in every way.

Right. Yeah. I think that's wonderful advice. Okay. If people are interested what you have to say today, they want to get in touch with you. How? What's the best way to get in touch with you?

Probably Instagram. JC height On Instagram JC height. I don't think there's too many of us on there and follow me and any way I could serve. More than happy to have a conversation.

Okay, awesome. Thank you so much for your time. It's been great talking to you. Good luck with everything.

Appreciate you.

All right, have a good one. Thank you for listening to Executing the vision. If you'd like to be a guest, go to EmergeLabs US and click on the podcast page. If you like what you heard, please share the episode and subscribe. Ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show. You can find us on instagram @brad emergelabs as well as x Facebook and LinkedIn where we strive to provide valuable information on business and life. We'd love to hear your thoughts on the show and what you'd like to see in future episodes. Thank you again and have a great day.