The Ad Men Mastermind Miami (DAY 2)

Ladies and gentlemen.

We're all right. Yeah. You can get in close for the gap right there. Familia. Yeah. Yeah. All righty. All righty.

We're live in 3, 2, 1.

Let's go. Today is going to be more collaboration, a true mastermind. Right. So first session of today before lunch is going to be traffic. I think that makes sense because, you know, unless you have enough traffic to get enough leads, to get enough calls, to get enough clients, you really have no business probably hiring a team if you can't have them fulfill on anything. So we gotta solve the traffic piece first from the content side, from the ad side, and then after launch, we'll go into team and I'll obviously have my team involved in there and they'll be involved in the. In the first part as well. We can talk about team and how we've. We've built a pretty solid team so far here for the most part. And ultimately, I'm still learning as a leader. You know, I've made a lot of mistakes. I'm not perfect. But we'll share what. What has worked and more importantly, what hasn't worked for us as well. So when it comes to traffic, there's a few things that we could talk about. Right. There's content, there's traffic sources, there's paid ads. I just want to hear what questions you guys have specifically. And we'll just make it open forum, mastermind collaboration, and it won't be me just teaching everything. Right. I want involve you guys if. Because I know each and every one of you have a different skill set here, which is why I want us to be more open, open discussion, open forum. So. Yep. You started your content sooner. Yep. So when you were at Dean Graciosi, so. So I'm with clients on demand and I do my business on the side. But already with the amount of work that I have first, I don't know what to share, which I can overcome for sure. It's not a valid reason. How do you manage building a product and working and doing content at the same time? Yeah. So the first part about that. Right, is like when I was working for Dean and I was. I wished I was building my personal brand. How I would have done it back then, if I could go back in time, would I would have just literally been sharing what I was doing for Dean on a weekly, daily basis. So like with you being with Russ Ruffino, right. One of the biggest coaches in the entire high ticket coaching space, you're learning so much by working with him and it's actually a benefit and value add to him, in my opinion, because. Because you're also building and uplifting his brand while you're talking about what you're doing for him. Does that make sense? So the way I would approach it would be, you know, I would just simply share what you're working on with him on a daily basis. Right. Like today I was working with Russ on this VSL because we realized leading with done for you was attracting us the wrong clients. We've since switched back to the done with you approach, and now the team's happier, the clients are better, we're in more control, and everything's different. The lesson here is you don't have to switch your business model completely from done for you to done with you. But if you're someone who's experiencing client expectation issues, it might be the way you're approaching the messaging. So keep that in mind the next time you, you. You run an ad for your offer. You see how valuable that is for somebody, and all you're doing is sharing what you're already learning with him. The question comes like, what is the priority between creating content and creating the coaching? I would. Here's how I would approach it. Again, you already have your income, kind of solved with. With Russ. Right. So you're. You're already good. Like, you're building this other thing for you, and that's the best place to be, in my opinion. So I would just be documenting and posting content primarily first using the insights you're learning from Russ Ruffino, and that's going to help you build your product. I wouldn't, like, I would get. I wouldn't be so hard on yourself if, like, I have to have the product done in like, three months or whatever. And it'll take some tweaks and iterations, but I would dedicate, like, at least 90 minutes of the three hours a day on writing and then the other 90 minutes on building the product. Easy enough. Like one in the morning, one at night, maybe. Does that help?

Yeah.

Am I correct in saying you prioritize the email and then the email becomes the video? Email's the only thing I work on. Right. Interesting. Writing one email. So after I write about five emails throughout the week, whatever gets the most response, whatever gets the most feedback. So, like, for example. Right. You know who's seen my most recent YouTube video that I posted, I think last week? The morning formula. One. Anybody? Okay. Three. Three of you? Yeah. Four. Okay. So that came because I was writing about the morning formula before, but Then I did a team training with my team, sharing them my morning formula. The feedback I got from, from the team and the inspiration I saw on their faces, I was like, man, they got a lot of value from this. I wonder if I shared this on my YouTube channel, if my audience would get a lot of value from this. And you know, I was a little bit hesitant to do that because it was very vulnerable and you know, I fucking cried like a little baby on camera, on zoom. But if it helps one person build their own morning formula to approach 2024 with the right mindset of where they want to go, then that'll make all the difference. And then, sure enough, I trusted my gut, even though my ego is telling me not to do that. And it ended up being one of my best performing videos. It's getting the highest watch rate, the most likes to views on my entire channel. People are loving it. I'm like, wow. Like. But the reason that happened was because it was the email first. The email turned into the team training, the team training turned into feedback live. And then I used that to then create the next content. And again, I didn't even create a new YouTube video. I, I just took the recording of the team training and posted it on YouTube, which I believe is the best content. That's why the mastermind vlogs we do are really good content, because it's the real raw conversations we have. So the email becomes the YouTube video based off the response rate, the feedback rate, and then that just tells me what I need to know.

How do you know if you're not spilling the beans too much? Like in my head, there are two approaches. Either you tell everything, like every nitty gritty detail, or you just do the bird's eye view and leave out stuff intentionally to then get people on the phone message you and whatsoever. And in my head also, if I were to post every strategy, everything I'd be testing right now with clients.

Do.

I not lose my competitive edge? Like for example, if I discover a new idea, new idea, test it out, I know there's a life cycle on it. Maybe it will work for like a year very well before it gets mass adoption. So how do you. Maybe it's a mindset issue. How do you think about that?

Julian, you want to talk about this too? Nah, I've talked about it with Brian. Yesterday night, I think. Yeah, last night.

Okay.

Well, just share everything. That's where I just got to at this point. Well, let me ask you guys, what about my content? Do you guys, like, be honest Authenticity. Okay. Specifically how you're basically sharing all your processes, your emotion, and then you're like, basically selling the implementation if they work with you. So I think you're. It's very clear what you want from the audience, so it's just, like, easy to watch. You're not like, behind the scenes, like, oh, he's gonna, like, upsell me on the next video or something? Yeah. Okay.

Before ever you're even doing the mastermind when you released that first course. Yeah, I was one of those people.

That bought that course.

And the only reason that I bought it is because you were putting out enough content that I was like, this guy knows his stuff. And, like, not only does it know his stuff about YouTube, but he knows.

His stuff about business.

He knows his stuff about building a team. He knows his stuff about doing that. So it's like. And then going through the course, it was like, yeah, clearly this is good. And then everything you kept releasing, you were providing so much value, but you.

Weren'T holding really anything back.

You weren't like, oh, I'm trying to.

Keep a paywall here. So when the ask came around for.

The admin mastermind, I was like, piece of cake. This guy, what is he like? If, like. Because most people have the mindset of holding stuff back.

So I was like, if he's holding.

Stuff back, what else?

Yeah, if this is. If his free shit's so good, then what does this paycheck look like? Yeah. So there's a few things you guys said authenticity, but then the main thing was the authenticity plus the holding nothing back. So my. When I was talking with Julian about this yesterday, like, you guys are all so skilled at what you do. Like a cell with cold email, bro, I couldn't do that. That's why we hired you to do it for us. Right. That's why I recommend you for cold email to anybody that needs it to get more leads, to get more calls. Just talk about what you do and how you're doing it with, like, Maxime, again, for you, with what you're doing with Russ Rufino, dude, that's invaluable wisdom to people that are on their journey. Right. That are getting to learn from someone like you. And if you hold stuff back, you're ultimately going to limit yourself and hold yourself back, because what happens is you're not going to be seen as the expert to people, because you're going to be. They're going to feel like you're holding stuff back. And you can also feel it too.

I think you had said it before, like anybody who's trying to rip off your stuff anyways, they're just learning the stuff you already knew in the past. So any strategies that you're coming up.

With right now are already like 30.

Days to 60 days to potentially 180 days. Way ahead of this old strategy that.

You'Re now sharing with them. Yeah, for the most part, yes, I agree with that. They'll always be behind in a way, but at the same time, it's deeper than that. It's like the line I like to use for this is, dude, it doesn't matter if you have the world class recipe for the meal you're trying to cook, you'll still never be the fucking chef. Right? Like you're never going to be the person that invented the recipe, the one that came up with the recipe, the one that's used the recipe and made the recipe famous. So that's why it's your unique advantage. And building a personal brand and creating content and sharing as much as you can within reason, legally is going to be the difference between you and getting on a sales call and having buying resistance versus you getting on a sales call and then saying, dude, I've watched all your content already. I'm already pretty much sold. I just want to know what the price and details are. And then it's a lay down close. So when I asked myself, what's the one thing I can do to make everything else easier and necessary to get more lay down closes, it was produce more content. The more content I produce, the more lay down closes we get, the easier Jerry's job is, the easier my job is. Right. And the easier my team's job is because then the client experience is way better. So the more content you produce, the more they trust you. The more they like you, the more they know you. And then ultimately the easier it is for them to buy from you. So give it all away for the most part, yeah.

Because I have a competitor.

Dude, they're going to buy from you. They're going to buy from you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We've been talking extensively. I mean, the.

Yeah, dude, the collab, it's again, it's not about competition, bro. It's about collaboration. Like, when I first joined SAM Opens Quantum Mastermind, there was another YouTube ads agency owner in the Mastermind in the German market, actually. Yep, exactly. And dude, the whole time him and I were just, you know, collaborating on clients and like, you know, different issues with the agency and stuff like that. And you know, he's, he's a competitor, but it's also like, I learned something from him, he learned something from me. And, you know, now we're friends and we're sharing ideas and tips and strategies. So that's the best way to approach this, not competition. If you were starting from scratch, what would you do, Brian? Like, would you start with YouTube and then repurpose from there? So what I would do is sell. To answer your question, if I was starting all over from scratch again, is I would use Twitter as my writing platform to write the actual content. Like, you know how people produce those long form Google Docs, like loom videos, right? We got to write that, right? So it always starts with writing. So post your writing material on Twitter. So you would basically post on Twitter, right? Write your content for Twitter and post. So the way the framework here for Twitter, just so you guys know, I'll give you guys the, the secrets right now. Three tweets a day, okay? Three tweets a day. Two to three threads a week. Okay? So three tweets a day. These are just one tweet. You know, there's only a certain amount of characters in a tweet. Three tweets a day. Two to three threads a week. Okay, two to three threads a week. So these are where you're just writing tons of value, right? And then you want to do at least one case study every other day. Okay, one case study every other day. Now, of course, if you don't have a bunch of case studies to do one every other day, you would just use that to like share something that worked for you in your life, right? Or is working for one of your clients somehow in a little bit of a form, not a huge ROI benefit for them, but something. You just do that for a year, right? Well, you're going to get data and feedback of what's working from Twitter and then you're going to use that to post your long form video because your thread eventually becomes your YouTube video, right? Based off your threads and your tweets, you can turn that tweet into a full long form piece of content as well, if it hits. So I would use Twitter as my writing platform and then I would repurpose the content on YouTube once a week. One video on YouTube per week. Because like Cole was saying, Twitter, they follow you, they consume the information, they learn about how you are and what you value you've given them. Then they watch you on YouTube. YouTube is where they fall in love with you. Sam Oven said this to us in Quantum one time. And this Is exactly what I'm doing in 2024 for us@adspend.com is YouTube ads is to get people to know about you and your offer. Okay. YouTube ads to get more people to know about you and your offer. YouTube organic is to get people to fall in love with you. Your email list is to remind them about you and your offer. So there's a flywheel there. YouTube ads get more people to know about you and your offer. You're getting in front of more people, getting more leads. Your YouTube channel gets them to fall in love with you, and then your email list is to remind them about you and your offer.

So now, so with the coaching offer that I'm looking to do with paid ads, that's his thing. I'm like, 25 right now. That's separate from the agency. Yeah. And that's like, strictly organic. So I'm thinking is, like, right now the perfect time to diversify into pay dads.

No. Yeah. No, too soon. You could get that to 50k a month or organically just by doubling down on the Twitter. For you specifically, too. Yeah. Because, like, paid ads is gonna cost money, guys. Like, I mean, dude, we just spent 16 grand in December. I mean, didn't get one sale from Cold traffic, did we? Not right, Jerry? Not one. None yet. I like that. None yet. But, dude, I'm not even stressed about it. Like, 15 grand. We paid, we tested. Now we gotta reiterate. Like, we gotta optimize. That's how month one goes for most people. Right. Like, you know, that's. That's the reality. We're buying data here. We already have a proven offer. We know it's going to work. We just got to optimize it for cold traffic. So, you know, when some of you guys say you want to diversify to paid traffic, all I think about is like, okay, well, you got to spend at least five grand a month because you're all selling a five grand or higher service. You got to be okay with being able to maybe not break even with that money. Or worst case, best case, maybe break even the first month and then spend another five grand the second month and another five grand the third month. By the third month, you should be profitable, given you've made iterations with enough data. You need to spend that much money to actually get significance to be able to make the right tweaks and optimizations. So to do that, you got to have a little bit of a war chest, a budget built up, which is going to be at least 15k and you got to be okay with that 15k being like, okay, if I lose this, I'm not going to be too, too upset. I'm buying. I'm buying the information here. So I would personally not run paid. I mean, we didn't even run any paid ads ever until we were at 100k a month. Right.

Yeah, yeah, we got leads.

Yeah.

And those leads will turn into sales.

They will, yeah. Like, over the next three months. They'll be converting sometime. So, yeah, I would.

You're never lighting my own fire with ads unless I could get no leads. Yeah, it is possible. But, yeah, that's. That's the only time you're really lighting the money on fire. But no, we're. We're getting impressions, we're getting views. You're pixeling the account. Everything's good when you're. Yeah. So with the sales cycle being like 45 to 60 days, even for an agency, it might even be longer than that where it gets out to like 90 days. Like, the ads is going to be a process. And again, like you said, having the war chest, having 15k, 20k to invest and not, like, necessarily need that money is great. And then because you've got organic going already, it'll be a way easier process. So I think, in my opinion, you'd want to have that set up first.

Yeah. So we didn't run any paid ads until we're at 100k a month. We didn't need to. The personal brand, the organic content, that was all working already. Feedback on the kind of conversations you're having on Instagram, like, are they. Are they converting? Or is that not much of a high converting platform? So the way I view it, I've heard this once and I like this analogy, Right. I view Instagram as, like, picture yourself walking down, like, Manhattan, you know, Madison Avenue, right? There's a bunch of different shops on the left and right. Like, there's the Rolex store, there's the Timex store, there's the, you know, Ralph Lauren, whatever. Your Instagram profile is like the outside of the store, right. They're seeing at a glance what you're all about. But then when they click on your stories, that's when they actually enter the door and they're like, okay, let me see what he actually has to offer. Like, what is he actually talking about? So the reason why I share that analogy is because with your Instagram, the way I view it is not really to, like, sell people right now. It's just to get people again to, like, know and trust Me to get a glimpse into the lifestyle and actually see me and be like, okay, this guy actually is a cool guy and he's genuine and he truly wants to help people. So it's just building my brand even more to where eventually they want to DM me and they say, yo, I'm ready to go. Like, there's people that have been messaging me over the weekend and saying, I've seen the OR yesterday, and they're like, I'm gonna be at the next one. I'm gonna be at the next one. I'm like, all right, we'll see, you know, But I don't. I don't really work my DMs too much. If it's like a cold where he DMs me and he's like, yeah, I want to go like. I'm like, okay, let's book a call. And I just send him my link. And then they book or they don't, you know, So I forget to follow up with them sometimes. So I don't really work it too much like a setter.

Like, that's. That's kind of what I was saying with the Twitter questions was like, a lot of people actually, they're gonna follow Brian on Twitter, but then when they join the email list, that's when the CTAs are kind of happening. I think that's kind of what you guys were asking is like, when are the CTAs happen? It's mostly through email.

Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's. It's mostly through email. Because on social media, all I'm trying to do is funnel them to a call. I'm not trying to sell them on my social media. I'm trying to sell them on me and how I'm the expert. And then I'm trying to get them to book a call. And on my email list, which is how they book a call, right? When they get on the email list, then they're obviously going to be pitched at a certain point as far as.

Like, styles of the actual YouTube videos that you're making.

Like, what helped me discover you was.

Like the YouTube vlog type things of like masterminds, right? So I've been super, just talking head.

Sitting at my desk, like straight to camera. And I've been doing that for a while. We cracked like 1k subs like a couple months ago.

So that's cool, but, like, congrats.

Huge.

Thank you. Is there any iterations of style of video that help things do better?

Because I'm curious, like, I Think there's this scale of like showing personality and.

Just like straight education.

I think I'm heavy on education and like less personality and I think shapes might be born. So I'm curious if there's any iteration.

Of style or like showing more personality or you've seen work better.

Yeah. So like if I had to give you a template, it would be like for the easiest low hanging fruit would be like three. Like you do one YouTube video a week, right? That's four per month. Three of them would be talking head education, teaching style. One of them would be more vlog lifestyle behind the scenes. I mean, do you guys like watching behind the scenes content? Like showing someone showing you what their routines, like their daily life, like what their conversations are like. I love watching that content. So when I think about creating content, I'm thinking about what I would want to see. Right. Making sure that I'm doing the content for, for my audience is just what I would want to see, which is vlogs. So do one vlog a week, one lifestyle post a week, or one type of like that. I think honestly that's probably might be why your content might not be hitting as much either. Because they already know you're the guy now it's like, why are you the guy that they should trust? Well, it's because you're just like them or you've been. You have a similar story as them.

That's probably why I hate YouTube organic so much because I feel trapped. My business is trapped. So like I need to do this or the business will kind of dwindle. I want to get away from that so I can like take a month off or take a couple months off or maybe shift the YouTube channel into something more that I enjoy doing so I can learn to love it. So like, what do you think about that? Like going more ad centric and getting better at that? I know it'll probably be less profitable at first, but like, I don't know, I just kind of feel trapped in the YouTube game and I just don't, I don't want to be.

Well, you're already at 80k a month, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And you got from 30 to 60 with ads initially, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. So are you still running ads right now? Yeah. Okay. How much are you spending?

About 15k right now?

Per month?

Yeah.

Okay. And the problem you're experiencing is just the poor lead quality.

Yeah. Or is it closing? A little bit of both.

So it might not be the lead quality actually, because I learned this from. We learned this just from our experience. Right. It's like, whenever the lead quality is the issue, it's usually never the lead quality, typically. I mean, obviously there's gonna be people that are broke. I mean, people that want to start an Amazon FBA business. Majority of them are not gonna have money. Yeah, right. Like, but that doesn't mean they won't buy or they can't buy. It's usually the sales team that's just not trained enough to be able to close those leads compared to the people that already know, like, and trust you from your YouTube channel.

Yeah.

So what coaching, if any, are you doing right now to help the sales team with that sales process specifically for the cold leads? Like, have you changed the script for cold leads?

No, it's. It's pretty much stayed the same. I think that's probably the biggest issue is they've gotten so used to organic traffic that they're not really working hard for the cold leads because they expect it to be easy. And that's kind of where I go back and forth. Like, do I continue to make the cold leads, keep nurturing them, keep making that process better, to make it like. Like you were saying earlier, like, make that sales call as easy as possible, which is great. At the same time, do I just like. No, the sales rep just needs to be better.

Yeah. I mean, again, it's like, the answer is both, but if we don't master how to close cold leads, we're never going to be able to scale past 80k, 100k, 250k, 500k, a million.

Plenty of leads. We're just not closing the cold ones.

Yeah. So the way. The way you would do this is, are you taking sales calls right now?

Me, personally?

Yeah.

No.

Okay, so you're gonna hop back on the phones, you're gonna take 10 sales calls, you're gonna close at least three, because we're the founders, and you're going to be able to close at least three if they're obviously qualified for the most part. And once you've done that, now you have not only the inspiration pushback on your team because you're coming in as the leader and saying, all right, I'm going to fucking close these leads. Right. I'm going to show you how it's done. You close three out of ten, you've now closed three, and you've reviewed those calls with them. Your next thing you're going to do is review the calls with them, show them what you did, walk them through why you did it. They're not going to have three specific calls they can review on their own and watch of you doing it, which is going to allow them and give them confidence and inspire them. And then now if they, you know, don't close after that, well, it's more of just an ongoing training issue. But get back on the sales calls. Take at least 10 calls. Prove you can close the cold leads yourself, because that's going to inspire your team way more than you just, you know, expecting them to close, because a cold lead is different than a warm lead. But you can close them. And when you do, they'll be inspired. They'll learn from you, and then they'll start doing it. The number one reason I joined Mastermind is for these kind of things. Like, being a business owner can be lonely and like, sitting behind your computer. Even if I travel the world, I meet a lot of people, but these people are not playing at the level that I'm interested in. And if you really want to level up in your life, in your business, you need to learn from people who are one to 10 steps ahead of you. So you can see that if they did it, you can do it.

One thing about Brand I really admire is his, like, the meaning, why he creates it. Like, even with the administrators, the entire messaging with the Don Draper the messenger behind it, but also the community he's building. Like, if you see the room, like, everyone's coming together. They're all from similar industries, just all networking, communicating together. So I think the community, that's like a really good thing that he's grasped.

Let's get. Let's get the team up here. Let's get the team up here. Let's get them up here to share about the team. Nick, Billy, Jerry, Demi, John, come up here. Charlie, let's bring the team up here. Round of applause for the team. Let's get some team up here. I don't want this just to be about me teaching it. I want my team to chime in here too, because they're going to give you perspectives that I probably don't. You know, they're the ones obviously that work with me, so it's good to get their perspective. Let's start with. Let's go to. Let's work through the list. So qc. So basically it's around how to quality check the performance and the jobs being done appropriately as it's to going, going through. Okay, what would you guys have on this before I go?

I mean, I think micromanage until there's trust. And I think that's one Thing that, you know, us as a team definitely has battled with because you know, there been certain situations where specifically me just, you know, taking extreme ownership where I've just kind of had a leash for people that I felt like could do the job in a, in a, in a really good way. But at times what I failed to see is that it's always important to making sure that you're checking on the things that you bring people on to do. Because if you're not quality controlling that stuff, then there could be things that are being executed on to a standard that maybe you don't deem appropriate.

Right.

And I think it's something that you just have to get experience with and it's going to be uncomfortable to start, especially with the person that you're bringing on board if they're a new employee. But I mean if you're looking to run a successful business, you're looking to collect testimonials for the clients that you work with, you have to put attention on this and making sure that you're executing that these people that you're bringing on board are executing the things to the standards that you deem appropriate. And the only way to do that is to, is to really micromanage to an extent.

So it's, I think there's a bigger problem with quality control that's even higher. Right. It's like, you know, there's a few sub layers to this, right? There's how do you quality control, how do you quality check? Right. Specifically, like what's the task management software like? You can use ClickUp, you can use Monday, you can use Asana, you can use whatever to make sure the project's actually being completed on time and the work's being done. Right. But then there's also who quality checks that work, like Billy was saying. So that stems from the org chart though. So who in the org chart is in charge of managing that project or overseeing that scope? Right. But then if I hire someone to come in, for example, and do a certain job that I don't know how to do personally, I'm still going to make sure that I am micromanage managing them to make sure that they're hitting the KPIs that they're set to get for the company of why they're being brought on. Right. I've had to learn this lesson a pretty hard way because we brought on people that were good at a certain job, didn't manage them at all, and then had to make the hard decision. And the conversation months later after we realized when we started managing them, they weren't really doing much in the first place. And actually it created another layer of complexity that could have been solved by just removing that position completely. So then it's even worse. So you still have to meet with them and manage them every single day pretty much for at least the first 30 days. But every single time you hire someone, it's a 90 day trial every time. You always tell them that the first 90 days is going to be a trial period. That way you go into the expectations with the right mindset, they go into the job with the right mindset and it's ultimately going to give them the opportunity to step up. Or obviously not.

They matter a lot. But the problem is like, from what I was gathering, from what you were kind of just asking right there, was basically like, how do you hire for expertise? And then QC that expertise. What we've kind of dealt with as well is like, this is like really, you know, sans like two people. This is like the core team of adspend.com and like I don't see it getting that much bigger in the near future of the actual core team. Now that doesn't mean we're not going to hire on salespeople, normally 1099 contractors or really anyone else that can come help as a, as a 1099. But like you want to be very careful about like who you bring on full time as an actual team member and then who is a 1099 and when you bring on a full time team member, unless they're kind of at that like management or partnership level, which again, I don't really think anybody should really be doing unless you're going to partner. What you should be looking at is hiring the expert and then you're hiring them because they're an expert. So they really shouldn't be, they shouldn't need much management if they're coming in as a 1099. Again, salespeople are different because they think they almost always are 1099. They should be bringing that level of expertise to you and helping install that system. That's like an independent contractor in the United States and then like a W2.

Yeah.

Freelancer. Exactly. So you should be hiring a freelancer because they have the skills to be able to help you get to the next level. When you're hiring like people that you want to be doing stuff like fulfillment. Like, I mean, Brian knows how things need to be fulfilled on like that's like his whole thought process was oh, I just want to have a bunch of mini me's kind of running around doing things like I would, it's like, well, for that you're going to need to drill in QC really hard. You're going to need to have SOPs really hard. But like when you have the 1099s come in, come in that are experts, like, let's say they're doing like, for example, we might potentially bring in somebody to help on with video editing. And then for that video editing, what we would want is, or like specifically for shorts, we'd want them to bring the SOPs on exactly how to do it and then kind of take it in house, you know what I mean? We would want to pay them for their expertise on a 1099 basis and then get it and then have the SOPs and then be able to QC somebody that would bring, we would want to bring in house, basically. I mean, I won't draw the whole thing out, but the simplest way, like this is rocket fuel, by the way. So again, I know everyone's looking for the one thing if you haven't had it yet. And maybe team is yours. Upper management or like, you know, higher level businesses, they have what's called like skip levels. Has anybody, has anybody heard of that before? A skip level. So a skip level meeting is when. And basically like this person would meet with this person and it just like, dude, we're, we're like a team of like 14 people. Like, what do you mean we're doing skip levels? Like, this is like ridiculous. We're treating this like a Fortune 500 company. Like, there are no skip levels. Like, what do you mean? Like at one point we had like, down here we like to skip levels. And I'm like, there's like 14 people here. Like, what do you mean? Like, no, everybody can at least report to one person. Like, we can. You know, the Jeff Bezos role at Amazon was like, if you get, if you could feed a team well, if you couldn't feed a team with two pizzas, then the team was too big. When you're looking at how you're structuring everything, I would really implore you to look at three things. Sales and marketing, fulfillment and then operations and then like where these should be staffed. This is kind of where we'll be vulnerable. And we've like messed up in the past is we've almost had like too many people here in operations. Sorry guys that are ops focused, but we don't, we don't make money. We just, we keep the money. That's what we do. You Want all the money here. So like, when you look at the percentages, I mean, you want like for your, for your labor budget, you want almost everything in sales and marketing. You got to get more sales. And then you want the next highest to be fulfillment, and then the lowest one is operations for sure. And so that's why again, you guys are having a hard time like comping operations. Because, yeah, you don't, like, we don't, you know, they don't generate cash. Like, the only thing that really generates cash is sales and marketing. But then I can also look at fulfillment and they can do upsells, so they can also generate cash and yeah.

Testimonials, referrals, those are all inside sales.

And they keep the clients.

Yeah, and they keep the clients. Which continues making us money.

Exactly. So like, it's, it's easier to comp that. Like the hardest one to comp is operations. The hardest one because again, it's like, what do they, what do they really do that you know, adds as much value, you know, not as value, but just like it's not as tangible from like a dollar in, dollar out standpoint.

The thing for the SOP is technically we have different SOPs. You can structure it the way you want it, but the thing is, the most important thing in sop, it should be a document to the point wherein that person in that specific role would be on leave or would want to resign. And then you're going to be bring on other people. They have to like, can do the work by just following the SOPs that way. It should be structured for us. We have two types of SOPs. We have the document and we have the video SOP. So every time, what I do is create first the document and then I would go walk through it through loom videos, going through the document and also going on how the process goes. So that's how we do the SOPs. And also we also create like an SOP library. We called it adspend headquarters, where you can see all the video sop. If you need something you don't know how to file a leave, just go to that library. You can search the video, it's there. Even the onboarding call for our clients, we have a workflow guide so that when Charlie's not around and then Nick would go into like emergency onboarding call, he could just go through the document and boom, he can do the onboarding call with the clients.

So. And then when it comes to making sure the SOPs are getting done, Michael too. Right. That's where it comes back to like the micromanaging thing more than anything. Hard conversations is a. It's, it's not a tough thing. It's just a necessary thing. But you have to do it. If you don't do it, you have to. You're going to get pushed around in your own business. You're going to be stressed out, you're going to be empathetic about people. They're not going to be doing their jobs. They're not going to have the right expectations about what you want. It's exactly what Nick said. Like, we've had these hard conversations many times because with the expectations weren't clear. Also, what happens if the expectations aren't met? Aren't met. Weren't clear either. Meaning what's the bad thing that happens if they don't do this? What's the punishable action here? Are they going to be on a pip? Are they going to get a performance improvement plan PIP early and PIP often? What does that mean? Put people on a performance improvement plan early and put them on a performance improvement plan often. If they're not hitting their KPIs, you know, you got to tell them, look, we have this goal. It's not being hit. I'm going to help you by putting you on this performance improvement plan to make sure that you can be successful here. I'm doing this to help you. So you have two options right now. You can either step up to the plate and hit these goals and I'm going to do everything I can to help you by holding you accountable and micromanaging you to do this, or you can shy away from this, not step up, and then I'll have the answer right now. If you want to be here or not, and it's a coaching call for you, just hop on a one on with them. Yeah. Everything okay? What's on your mind? You feeling good? Cool. By the way, bro, you're doing 90% of the things right. Like, you're doing a lot of things right. I loved how you did this. I love that you did that. But there's this one thing that's been on my mind that honestly, I've been like, you know, pretty upset about and I've asked you about it five times and it's been five weeks and I want to clear the air right now with you on this call. Is that cool? It's about this thing. And you just address, you tell him how you feel, you be radically transparent with him and he'll probably tell you about why it hasn't gotten done and then hopefully find a solution from there. I'm sure it's not because he doesn't want to do it. It probably just might be he doesn't really know how to approach it, and maybe he just needs help. But I don't think he's doing it maliciously. Yeah, it's just.

I forget if it was at the vault, but just, like, maybe he would respond better to you having that hard conversation with him. Because now when you.

Yeah.

When, you know, I'm very big on. Be very direct with me. Like, there's a mutual level of respect between both of us. He holds me accountable to getting shit done. Just have that hard conversation with me. So that way we can just move forward together. Because maybe, you know, maybe you haven't been as direct as maybe you should have, or maybe in a way that he would respond to. And maybe that's what he needs.

Right.

Because I think everybody I know, I know Billy, Nick, a lot of people on this team, that's the way that we like to receive criticism. Just be super direct. Just call us out on what we need to get done, and then we can move past it together and start, you know, getting closer to the things that we want to accomplish.

Meeting structuring Cadence. Who asked this one? Okay, cool. Nick, you want to talk about this?

Yeah. So this one as well, I'm going to default to eos, for sure. So we follow the EOS template, and that's basically one weekly meeting. We choose to have that on Mondays. We have one leadership meeting. But again, like, I want to be very clear and personalize it to you guys as well. I know it's just four of you, and then basically just kind of you two on the leadership team. So, again, for anybody that's kind of around that size as well, you can really knock both those meetings out in the same time. Basically. Like, we call it our weekly kickoff. You know, always start out with wins. I am probably, like, the least, like, Tony Robbins, like, mindset, you know, person ever. But over the years, man, have I, like, drank the Kool Aid? Because it is. It's true. Like, you really want to start out with wins because it's just psychologically proven, like, with your brain to just have a positive association and just have a positive mindset. And you want to be surrounding yourself with just winning. And then we go into department headlines. Yeah, department headlines Again. Department headlines. You guys could probably nix that one just because, you know, you probably don't need those very specifically, but just do, like, a general update on you know, what the tasks were done last week, what the tasks you're working on this week are. And then we do go over the P and L like we were mentioning every single week, making sure that things looking well. Something that we did implement very recently, about a couple months ago was Demi goes through and helps with every everything billing wise. So like anything that's ar, she'll go through and say, hey, this client didn't pay. So that's why we implemented that for sure. And then yeah, pretty much got it up there.

And then so wins department updates, finance. Basically this is just the P and L like Nick said. Again, we do that, we share it weekly with the, the team and the announcements, anything that's coming up the event. Right. For example, leading up to this and then cascading messages. This is typically where I kind of round the meeting out as the leader. I'll usually go into, you know, something more tangible for the team to think about whether it's related to a core value. What we're focusing on that week, you know, what's coming up that's so important. Right. How this week is going to be something that's going to be beneficial for them and the company. What we should be focusing on, on as a team, more about mindset training and just, you know, setting the tone for the week of what we're going to be accomplishing.

Yeah. So for our end of days, it's like really simple and that what I would recommend for you guys to make it simple. We don't want it as tedious. So for us we have basically three questions. The first questions is, the first question is what are the top three things that you, you worked on today? Not necessarily three things, but basically what are the most important things that you've done today? And then the next question is all about ratings. What are the five ratings?

Yes.

The physiology, clarity, necessity, inspiration. And then how would I rate my.

On a scale of 1 to 5, physiology, clarity, necessity and inspiration.

And then the last thing is how did you feel today overall? So in this area, we want them to be as honest as possible, as raw as possible. Because this is where we like kind of know, what are you feeling today? Are you good? Are there any roadblocks? Are you feeling sick today? Or something like that? So for our team, we make it as raw as possible, how we did our day. And then the last thing is the overall rating for Nick to measure how did we go about our day.

The number one way you're gonna hire a talent that fit the culture and that Are easy to attract. Is your personal brand. Like, that's literally the answer? Yeah, like my net, I've. Everybody here is from my network for the most part. Right. Like, Nick, already a friend since college, right. Met him freshman year, rush, the same fraternity. Time played itself and then he. Time played itself out. I was building adspend.com bought the domain, wanted to build a team. He reached out to me. I like what you're doing. I want to be a part of it. How can I help? Said, come out here, learn this. I need someone to fulfill. Boom, Charlie. I recruited him because he was working at Facebook as an account manager for facebook.com he was managing 50 plus client accounts running Face, like managing their Facebook ad accounts for the actual company. And you know, he saw what I was doing. But, you know, we played golf. We caught up and I pitched him on the golf course. I said, hey man, like, I like what you're doing. I think you should do it for us. Come do this together. Like you're gonna do it with Facebook, but, like, why don't you just do it for us? YouTube's better. And he actually liked our Facebook ads basket VSL. And he was working for Facebook at the time when he said that too. So I was like, I planted the seed, pitched him on the golf course. You know, it was a long sales cycle, about three months. But he ended up joining because he saw the vision John came from. Our first video editor, who was Mike. He was friends with Mike. They dance together. They're really good dancers. And fun fact dancers, specifically b boys make great video editors. So if you're looking for a great video editor, look for someone in the Philippines who can dance and they know a lot of them. So we have basically a full video editing team in the Philippines that are all dancers that can dance hip hop and shit. It's pretty sick. In like a strategic order. It's a network. The first place is your network. Who do you know or who do you know that might know someone else? So asking your network, hey, Cole, who do you know that could be a good media buyer? For Adspend.com, we just let go of someone else. We need someone immediately. Do you know if anybody. Right. Asking your personal network. Easy. Number two, personal brand, right? Like people that already know, like, and trust you. Putting a social media post out there and asking your network, which is basically the same thing as number one and number three, clients of yours, right? In your offers, in your coaching programs, Asking clients of yours at the agency, who do you know as well right? And then besides that last would be like hiring and recruiting like job boards and stuff and having a recruiter do that. But I've never found that to be the best place for a players that fit the culture either.

My name is Michael and I own the business madwork together with my business partner Julian. To be honest, I just wanted to meet the whole team in person because I've gotten so much value from Brian and the team already and I thought if that's like the online version then in person it will just be 10 times more valuable than that. Adspend.com is the most thought after growth partner in the USA as far as I can tell. And I want to learn from the best and that's exactly why I'm here. And for me they are so incredibly transparent and holding nothing back so I can take exactly what has been working for them and implement it into my business.

SA.