Erik Huberman - Founder of Hawke Media

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What is going on?

Everyone?

Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode, we have Eric Huberman here with us. Eric Huberman is the founder and CEO of Hawk Media, the fastest growing marketing consultancy in the United states. Launched in 2014, Hawk Media has been valued at $75 million and has grown from seven to over 150 employees. In three locations. The company has serviced over 2,000 brands of all sizes. Hawk Media has taken home numerous industry awards, including Inclusion on the Inc. 50002020 list of fastest growing companies, Fortune magazine's 50 Best Workplaces in Southern California, and Huberman was named the International Business Awards Entrepreneur of the Year in the field of advertising, marketing and public relations with. With that being said, please take a moment to subscribe to the podcast, share this episode with a friend and enjoy today's episode with Eric Huberman. All right, what is going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. Today we have Eric Huberman here on the show, the CEO of Hawk Media. Thanks so much for coming on, Eric.

Yeah, no, thank you for having me.

So, Hawk Media, man, where did this begin? You guys are crushing it. You're a Forbes 30 under 30 member and I've been following you for the past couple of months and I'm super impressed from your story and your success.

Thank you, man. Yeah, it really came from, you know, I built a couple brands in my twenties and always hated the experience working with agencies or trying to hire marketers. And once I sold my last company, I started just advising and consulting for a bunch of brands and saw that it wasn't just me, that everyone had this pain point of like really easily accessing great marketing talent and wanted to find a way to fix that. It wasn't some now it sounds like a bigger, like bigger picture idea, but that really morphed over time. Originally it was just like, this sucks. I need to go build a team so these guys can actually get help with the things I'm advising on. And so started with my little SWAT team of marketers that could go in and help these companies and then just started growing. And so what are we, almost seven years old? We've grown from the original seven people on that SWAT team to about 170 people.

Wow, very cool, man. So 170 people now, seven years later. And you said you sold your last company. What company was that? For the people that may not know?

Yeah, so I've sold past two. The first one was called Swag of the month. It was T shirt subscription company, like pre dollar Shave Club and that whole subscription e commerce phase. So had some clout in there and then joined Science, the incubator that launched our Shave club right after they did and helped them with their portfolio, but really helped pivot a vitamin company into an activewear brand called Ellie. And we had like basically a subscription women's activewear brand as Lululemon kind of hit peak in terms of like when every single woman in the world was just wearing that around. So we, yeah, we jumped on a really solid sort of trend. That company skyrocketed. We sold it to Bali Total Fitness after a year and that's when Hawk started.

Yeah, very cool, man. So where did this even begin, your drive for launching brands, starting companies? Did you go to college? Where are you from? Where did this all start?

So sitting here now. Actually, I'm from Ojai. I was born in la, but moved to Ojai when I was six. Small town, north la. And we. Yeah, my dad's an entrepreneur. His dad was an entrepreneur. So I was just grew up thinking that's what you do. And I remember like at 6 years old, I ran around my parents house and grabbed things I thought they didn't need anymore and then literally walked door to door and sold them to my neighbors. So I actually tried the door to door sales at 6 years old just on my own and then did the lemonade thing. Sold flowers out of my mom's garden that I'd pick and go sell on the side of the road and loved running in front of cars to stop them because I knew I was young enough that car, they wouldn't hit me and they would feel bad and they didn't want to say no to me.

Yeah.

And that was always good. And then I remember at 8, I decided I wanted to be a professional guitarist and I wanted to get an electric guitar. And I told my dad and he looked at me and said, good, get a fucking job. And I was like, all right, I will. And so I started buying and selling Beanie Babies and that was really like the first success that I had. I made a few thousand bucks as an 8 year old trading Beanie Babies.

Yep, those things are going for a lot now.

I still have a few. I got to actually like see if any of them are worth okay. I moved and I found a box with like at one point I had like 85, 90 of them and I have like six left. But I've had them for, what is that, 26 years. So yeah, see what they're worth at this point. God, I'm getting fucking old. Anyway, love it. So, yeah, so did that. And then it was just, it was always something like I was always scheming and thinking and every time I took a job it was to learn something. Whether it was the discipline of working or an actual skill. That was always in my head from a young age, was like, that's why you take jobs, is to learn something to then eventually do it on your own.

Yep, I love that. Speaking on Hawk Media, I know you guys have worked with dozens of brands. Like, what would you say is the go to marketing strategy for brands, especially this year in 2020 with everything that has happened, people are not working at the office. Like, what do you think is the key to marketing this year in 2020?

Well, 2020, the only thing that I would say changed a lot is E commerce can't be ignored. But it wasn't by the smaller brands. Big brands were ignoring it in some ways. But like e commerce over 2x'd in the past 6 months and it hasn't really subsided. So it went from 13% share of consumer spending to 30 in Q2, back down to like 27 in Q3. So it's still over double. And yeah, I think that, that, you know, so the stuff we do, we do a lot of E commerce, a lot of digital. It just got better. It was easier. You know, all the, a lot of the big brands that cause advertising to get more expensive because it's all a bidding system. They pulled out. And so the cost to advertise went down 30%. The market share over doubled. Like it was. If you were in E Commerce and had a decent product in the past six months, you. You crushed it. Consumer spending only declined in things like travel and leisure and hospitality. They didn't decline in consumer goods. So that's what we've seen. So it's really just doing the stuff that we've always done, which is like Google marketing, Facebook influencer, email marketing, sms, chatbots, you know, good content building. Really holding on to your customer is important, but the stuff we've been doing for years, honestly, like there wasn't some new innovation. I think TikTok's coming, but it's not there yet.

Really? In terms of paid advertising on the back?

Yeah, they just haven't. And it's not because of the platform, it's. They haven't built a good ad product yet. Targeting stuff isn't there yet, but once it is, TikTok I think is gonna crush it.

Very cool. That's awesome, man. So on your website it says you're outsourced cmo. When you're working with brands, how vetted is it? I know on the site you've worked with some amazing brands, Red Bull, K, Swiss, Alibaba. When it comes to working with these clients, is it certain campaigns that you guys work on or how can a more boutique brand work with you guys?

Yeah, so I mean, that's frankly a little misleading. We work with our mission statements. Accessibility to great marketing for everyone. Our fees start at fifteen hundred dollars a month. So, you know. Yes, we've worked with massive brands because we're good at what we do and as I said, it's accessibility to great marketing. So we are definitely, you know, top tier in terms of how we execute, but we also try to keep it accessible. So we work. You kind of mentioned before that we've worked with dozens of brands. The answer is we've actually worked with over 3000 brands at this point.

Oh wow.

Yeah, it's, we, you know, we are constantly bringing in new brands, trying new startups, helping launch new companies. That's a big part of our business. And then we also work with some of the big guys too.

Yep, very cool. When working with all these brands and scaling the team over the last seven years, what has been the most important ingredient to scale at the level in which you have?

I'd say the biggest one is just, you know, doing the right thing for the right reasons. It's reputation's everything. And so we have built a good reputation of doing great work and being doing right by people. And you know, even I dealt with this yesterday, like mistakes happen when you're dealing with people always like the same way. I was just talking about this yesterday actually, which is a world renowned heart surgeon that's like known as one of the best heart surgeons in la made a mistake on a friend of mine's dad and now they're all talking about, oh, don't go to him. He made a mistake. And the guy's probably performed, you know, tens of thousands of heart surgeries. Like, yeah, at some point human nature kicks in and you're going to make a mistake. So mistakes happen, it's how you handle them. And we try to really treat our, you know, I've always thought of our business like a restaurant. And in the restaurant business they talk about pre social media. A bad experience will reach 252people. And so the key is to make sure that every bad experience is handled really delicately because or you're going to lose shitload of customers. And good experiences don't spread that fast. And we've seen that, you know, the moment someone has a bad experience, they're going to Google, you know, or Facebook or Yelp or whatever and everybody that we've crushed it for companies that we've taken from 30 grand a month in revenue to 5 million a month in revenue. I'm speaking about one specifically that we're working with now. That guy's never written a good review for me. He's happy. But I had a call with him yesterday and his call wasn't about like, thank you so much for everything you've done. It was, well, how the fuck are we going to double this month? You know, like the nature of a growth focused CEO. I'm the same way and it's totally fine. But like, you have to know that you have to really treat the bad experiences delicately, treat the good people and keep them with you and just treat people well, your employees, your clients, everything. Like if you do good there and then, then it comes down to doing great work, honestly. So it's reputational, doing great work. And then, you know, on top of that, what I think been a key to our success too is we do both of those and we have no barrier to entry. It's. We have, we're month to month ala carte, super straightforward with how to work with us. So we're really good at what we do, but we don't make it hard to try us.

Love that. What would you say this year has taught you as an entrepreneur?

Yeah, it's a couple things. One taught me to have a plan. I never like, it's. It would have been a lot less stressful in March if I had, you know, just some sort of rough idea of like if our Revenue drops xyz we do this. If it drops this like now I have that plan. But I didn't. And so I had to spend the first two weeks of COVID scrambling and like working day and night to try to figure out what is our backup plan. Because I had just expected trends to hold. And like most businesses run on forecasting and trends, you know, we know that based on historical data, this is what happening when something like Covid happens. That all goes out the window overnight for sure. And so number one was have contingency plans for what to do. Because if not because we didn't end up figuring it out, but because it would help me sleep better at night. Or it's just like, well, this is what we do in these situations. Like this is we have a plan, we're good. We just A, B or C. And we got to that point. But it took two weeks. So those two weeks sucked. And then I'd say number two, stay on offense was the biggest thing I learned from all my successful friends. What we saw work like, so many people have fucked themselves in Covid because they played scared E commerce companies that pulled back. We had a furniture client, great furniture company, decide to cut all their advertising spend in March and April when now it's been the biggest home buying market in history of the United States States. It's been the best. He's all e commerce, best E commerce, best E commerce time ever. And so we have other furniture clients that are literally fucking skyrocketing 3x4x what they were at the beginning of the year. And he pulled out because he was scared because he said I've been through a recession before was literally what he said to me. Wow, that is so fucking stupid. You have all the data in the world saying don't do this and you're trying to look around a corner, which does. And so the fear of the boogeyman kind of thing, that really is not the way to run a business.

That's crazy, man. Speaking on I've been seeing a lot recently. I saw you did a podcast with Gary Vee. You just launched the Hawk Talk podcast. Where did this idea for a podcast come about? I've been a podcaster for three years, so I always like to ask why people are getting involved with it.

Yeah, honestly, it's two things. Listen, a podcast is another avenue to market ourselves and to build content media and build our audience, so to speak, was a reason to look at it as just an overall medium and channel for the company. But so we always thought about It. But I also wouldn't create something unless there was value there. So I was like, I'm not just gonna. Like, I try. I actually recorded a few different podcasts before this where I recorded something I called Making the Marketer, where I started asking about how people got into marketing. After, like, five episodes, I realized it was really fucking boring. I'm not gonna go down that path. Then we had another one that was my. One of my team members interviewing different clients, and that was actually pretty cool. And I think we might kick that off at some point again, too. And then my head of sales just wanted to have comedy podcast because he actually ran the number one radio show in to bring that back. But with everything else going on, it was just too hard for him to stay on it. And so then I was like, all right, well, I know all these really cool people because of what I do and just being in LA and being in the network that have nothing to do with my business but are really fucking impressive. Like, and a lot of them have been on the podcast. But guys like Colin o' Brady that, you know, hiked across Antarctica and people like that, like, I know these guys. I'll never work with them. Like, Colin and I have nothing to do professionally. He's sponsored by what's the Canada Goose? And a few other companies, and he, you know, does crazy adventures. There's not really, like, maybe I can bring him a sponsor, but there's not a lot to do together. But I want to tell his story. And so to me, like, again, our mission is to create accessibility, great marketing, but our true purpose, in a sense, is to, like, help people succeed, help companies succeed, to grow businesses. And so taking people that are at the top level in their industries and introducing them to, you know, showing an audience, like, this is how they got there. And this is the path that is our job is, from a business standpoint, is to take them from, you know, small to great. And these are people that went from small to great in some sense. And so I like the, you know, the alignment on the brand and the storytelling and then an opportunity to actually tell the stories of all these cool people I meet along my way was really where it came from.

Very cool. What's your predictions as a marketer on the future of the podcast industry? With everything that's been going on the past year with different acquisitions and, you know, it's grown a lot the past 12 to 18 months, it's like, what's your thoughts on a marketer?

Yeah, I mean, I really am bullish on audio, I think that from a marketing perspective, I think people are sick, especially now Zoom's gotten old. People are sick of staring at screens and I think podcasts and other audio things. Clubhouse, I'm sure if you're familiar with.

Absolutely, I'm on it.

Cool. Yeah, same. And I think like that, you know, they're going to go through some different growing pains, but I think like these different platforms that allow people not to stare at their screen but still engage with people and still hear information. All that I think is awesome. I really do think that, you know, I think the next version of Clubhouse, I talked about this. I tried to get one of my college friends that's a developer to build this. Seven years ago we actually had a name for it and everything. We're going to call it Soapy, like standing on your soapbox.

Okay.

And I think think TikTok and it meets Clubhouse where it's prerecorded, bite sized, someone talking, but just it could be a blip of a song or could be someone just the news of the day or whatever and allow people. And the reason I liked it was when people are commuting, I was like, I don't want to listen to the radio anymore. I don't want to listen to the talk show. I want to hear like, I want the same digestible like bite sized information I get from scrolling through Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, but without having to look at my phone. So I think that's coming too. And I think all of it's going to be really interesting. We also invest, we have our venture fund, we invested in Instrumentic, which is speech advertising. So as you get into audio, you also can get into interactive audio where you can actually talk to it. So as that, that technology I think is really awesome and they're powering a lot of major apps already. And as you can actually create engaging advertisement through speech that you have to stare at it, I think it just becomes there's a whole interesting side to that that hasn't been capitalized on.

Yeah, that's very interesting, man. And moving into like you as an individual when you started as an entrepreneur, a lot of young people listen to this show. Hence rise the young. What's your advice of what you've learned up to this point and what advice would you give to an up and coming entrepreneur that's starting their first company today?

Sure. A few things. One, be careful to like do it for the wrong reasons. Like if you. This has been something I've been on a soapbox about A lot recently, and I brought up a few years ago, which is like, if you're doing this because you think buying a Lamborghini is a sign of success, you're going down the wrong path.

Yeah.

Because things happen. Like in March, like, I lost a lot of money in March, April of this year. I spent money to run my company. And that's what you go through. Like, don't get me wrong. And overall, I'm coming out just fine.

Yeah.

But it's. You have to be in it for the right reasons because if you're not, you'll fail. Like you will. It gets hard sometimes. You. It's not always glitz and glamour as an entrepreneur, you know, And Gary Vee actually said something at a talk, I think it was like 2015. He said something when we were talking that I thought was just poignant, which is, you know, being an entrepreneur is eating shit. And your ability to swallow that shit will tell you how successful you are. Like, as a business owner, you will always deal with the biggest problems of the business because every. All the other problems won't trickle up to you. So your job is to literally deal with that and so to be in it for, again, buying a fucking supercar. Like, those things cost less than my assistant makes. My. You know, honestly, my lowest level employee cost me more a month than a supercar would cost me.

Yeah.

The idea that that's a sign of success is fucking ridiculous. Yeah. So, you know, for young people, can you get into it, do it because you're. You love it, and then make sure you are actually creating value. Because I see, like, my industry is chock full of kids that, you know, 18, 19, 20 years old that have never marketed anything and start their first marketing agency.

Yeah.

And they don't know, like, how this actually plays out. They don't. And listen, there are some prodigy kids that actually probably do a great job, but a lot of people are just think it's a quick way to make cash because they watch too many Gary Vee videos. You gotta, you know, provide value. And there's ways to provide value when you're young. There's not a. Yeah, there's ways to provide value in young. There's. It's not. There's no. Like, you don't have to be a certain age. It's just more like make sure that's actually happening and don't be afraid to work for someone else early on to learn. Because, like, I think the average successful entrepreneur is something like 42, which I'm 33 by the way it's almost coming up. So I stuttered but it's the. So you can start young but like really find a way to create that value. Like my first business I started or actually I even helped start a business when I was 19 but with someone that knew the entire industry. And I was just a good sales kid and ran around doing sales. I had learned sales the whole year before. I spent my time working for a knife company, selling knives door to door. So you know, it's, it's again back to the point, like learn your trade, really hone it. I the biggest thing I'd say is spend your 20s learning. Even if it is starting your own business, by the way, that's fine. But really double down on the idea of learning and growing yourself because you don't need to be successful. You need to learn, you need to invest in yourself. And that could include if that learning might include again building a business. And maybe you're Mark Zuckerberg and at 18 you build a one of the most successful companies in the world. But if you're not, it's okay to chalk it up to learning experiences too.

I love that when it comes to. Because I'm 20 now and for the 18, 20 year olds out there, when you were 20, obviously things were different. If you're looking at someone that's starting a business today and you were to give them some marketing advice from a high level, what are the first things they need to look for for it or should know before they dive into it. And obviously there's technicalities and details and it's a, you know, there's a lot of depth in this. But from a high level, what would you suggest?

A couple things. One, hopefully you can get whatever business you're starting, have enough strategic relationships to be able to get it to about 20 grand in revenue a month before you start just investing in like Facebook ads and Google, everybody that posts there, like I took this company from 0 to 500,000 in revenue in 6 days is full of shit. Ask them what happened the next six days because if they were able to grow companies like that, they wouldn't be posting on Facebook. Successful people don't post these kind of like it's just not a thing. So it's be careful what you read about when you're seeing these posts, etc. And know that almost all businesses take time, take real time. And I don't know how long, how many years it was before Facebook made a dime and it was a pretty overnight success. So just understand that like you're going to have to put in the time. So make it sustainable. Which means you can't just start burning cash from the beginning unless you're from wealthy background or whatever. But still it's better to like be scrappy about it. And why, that's why I say like whatever you're starting have enough as a founder, enough strategic relationships or the ability to create them to get to that point where you can generate 20 grand a month in revenue, which is where you start to see traction. Like even from our venture fund.

Yep.

We, we wait till they're there to before we invest. Okay. And if it took a bunch of cash to get there and it's not some high tech, you know something, then usually it's the wrong founder. Honestly, as a founder you have to be able to drive revenue because if not, if it always takes cash, they're going to be times where cash gets tight. Every business goes through it and you're going to end up in a problem. So you got to be able to be scrappy about whatever that is. So I'd say that that hasn't changed. That's now that's then the only things that. I mean when I started business, I didn't have access. There wasn't Facebook ads didn't exist. When I was 20, Google Ads were still in their nascents. So when I was 20, what year is it? So that would be 2005-2006-2006-2007. Yeah, I mean Facebook had launched. I was on Facebook, but it was, there were no ads and it wasn't public and actually none of our parents were on it. It was college kids still.

Yeah.

And then you know, it just now you have so many easy ways to reach your audience. The big thing, the reason I say start with getting your own customers is you then can know who to reach. Because trying to guess and spend a bunch of money doing that is not the way.

I love that. Last question before we wrap up, Eric. You're talking about strategic relationships and having that advantage over your competitors when it comes to networking. This has been something for me that I've been religious about since I was 16 years old. Getting out there networking, building a brand and just, you know, meeting great people so that I can tap into those relationships. What would your advice be for someone that has no network, is coming from a small town and they want to go out and build their brand, build their network to have that advantage in the marketplace?

Yeah, it's have some value to provide. You're doing it with Your podcast, I'm sure. And we don't know each other that well, but I'm sure there's other things you've done for people that make them want to see you, want to introduce you to people, etc. Like, that's, you know, it's a cliche, but it's true. Like, start with providing value in some way so that people want to be around you, because networking for the sake of networking does nothing. That's. That's where the fallacy comes in. Like, you have to build relationships. You have to, like, do things for people and get. Get to the point where you naturally do that and, like, look for things and ways to help people, and you'll. Your network will never fall short. Like, you know, for me, now I've built enough of a brand around, I know how to market things that I'll give a lot of free marketing advice regularly. At some point, they come work with me or they tell someone else, et cetera and that. But that, you know, and that's part of it. I also now have a venture fund. I also now know an insane amount of people that I can introduce people to so that all. It all compounds. But in the beginning, it was being really gracious of people that gave me their time and trying to do something for them. Even when it was like I had my T shirt company and was 24 years old, I'd send them a free T shirt and say thank you. Like, just something that makes me, like, that was a good kid. That's important.

Love that. Eric, where's the best place for everyone to stay in touch with everything that you have going on? Listen to the podcast, etc.

Yeah, any social platform, ad or slash. Eric Cuberman. Super easy.

Cool. Well, Eric, thanks so much for coming on the show today, man. I definitely got a lot of value myself, and I'm sure the audience did as well.

Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Monarch Legacy of Monsters An Apple original series. The world is on fire. I decided to do something about it on November 17th. This place, it's not ours. Believe me. The most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise.

Oh, my God.

Go, go, go.

Monarch Legacy of monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV.

Plus.