Matt Hall - Scepter Marketing

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom pod. We have Matt Hall with us today. Uh, Matt Hall is the founder and CEO of Scepter Marketing since 16 years now. Also founded Ecom Circles in 2021. So we're going to talk about agency growth, AEO, SEO, PPC, everything in the realms of agencies today. Matt, welcome to the pod. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're building.

Thanks, Charles. Uh, happy to be here. And like I said, I have a digital marketing agency, and these days we're building everything. We're building internal tools, we're scrapping all of our tools that we were using, we're building better AI-first workflows. So there's, there's not a lot that we're leaving alone.

Okay, and how did you create that one? Uh, 16 years ago, uh, you had a couple of jobs here and then why start your own agency?

Uh, freedom, really, right? I didn't want to work for somebody else for the rest of my life, so I ended up, uh, actually trying some other businesses, learned how to make websites through those other ventures that I was, uh, that I was doing, and then said, hey, I can make websites this easy with WordPress, let's go ahead and try to sell websites to people. And that was the birth of the agency.

There's so many agencies nowadays, why should people pick yours?

Yeah, that's a great question. Uh, I think that not all agencies are equal, that is for sure. I think one of the things that we have, uh, in addition to the time that we've been around is the AI-first approach. And I think that we can say that we are doing that in ways that most other agencies aren't. I imagine that some are, um, but the landscape, as you are aware, I'm sure, changes on a week-to-week basis, right? There are new tools, new algorithm changes, not just for Google and SEO, but even now all of the LLMs, right? And so some of that information changes very frequently and it changes more frequently than a lot of agency owners are used to keeping up with. So we do our best to keep up with that and I think that's one of the things that makes us unique.

And what change have you seen in the market? AI's been here, I think people or agencies that use AI drastically outpace people that haven't been using AI. These other agencies lose their clients, in my opinion, and winner takes all. I've seen in the agency realm, so bigger agencies keep on getting bigger and stronger. Have you seen that as well?

Yeah, I think that's going to be the trend, right? I mean, even if you just look at basic economics, some small agencies, especially if they're just getting started, right? It's day one. They might not even have the money for a couple hundred dollars a month subscription for Claude or something, right? Because that would be too much of their budget for, you know, the one client that they have. And so that's just going to put them at a disadvantage versus agencies, you know, like ours that have multiple subscriptions that we're paying for. They're just not going to be able to keep up, let alone to, uh, with the— with getting the work done as quickly as other agencies are that are utilizing AI.

In your case, how do you ensure to keep on like putting the GTM engine like full throttle so that you can keep getting more clients and winning all sort of?

Yeah, so it's multifaceted, right? It's, uh, we do a lot of cold email, but we also have SEO, right? So we, you say, eat our own dog food, right? We are constantly trying new things. We have some internal projects that we use as tests. So that we don't have to, you know, burn or test things on some of our clients, right? So we have our own internal test that we're running, which is something that, again, not all agencies are even able to do. Um, something that we've wanted to do for a long time that AI has made easier for us to do. And so I think those things, uh, are advantages that we're implementing. And so it's kind of the flywheel, right? We have our website, we have our cold email, and, uh, you know, we will shortly be doing some better social media here as well, which is part of the reason me being on this podcast, right? So all those things kind of work together to brand us as a professional agency that people can trust, right?

Uh, what about being good at your own SEO and PPC? Like, uh, how much leads you generate with both of these, uh, channels?

Yeah, so off the top of my head, I don't, uh, I don't remember for our actual agency, but we have a sister company that I was just looking at details earlier today. And in the last month, I think we're up 168% in impressions and traffic. And so, and that's just from, you know, changes that we've implemented in the last 30 days, which was all AI-driven, right? Like, we redid that entire website with AI, pulled it off WordPress, deployed it with static pages. And now we have monitors that run just about every day or every couple of days checking things that would've just not really been feasible to check so frequently unless you had a massive team of VAs, right? Checking for keyword changes and stuff in Google Search Console and even in Bing. And we've implemented a lot of stuff with Bing actually because we can, because it's easier and faster now with the AI where we didn't even pay attention to Bing. So those kinds of things just give us cutting edge that again, not everybody's able to duplicate.

And I saw on your websites you still do WordPress, like having these platforms being replaced with Lovable and other platforms like that.

Yes and no. I mean, WordPress still powers whatever it is, 40+% of the internet, right? So it's not going anywhere anytime soon. But it will eventually, I think, be outmoded. And we've actually seen some security— you may have seen that with WordPress, they've shipped a— they shipped a hotfix basically a couple of weeks ago because they had some kind of security vulnerability or something. And so I think that's going to be just the way— not so much for WordPress itself, the core, but But when you have as many plugins as you have made by as many different developers as there are, the security is gonna become a real concern for WordPress. And I think that's gonna help to push people out of WordPress into more static databaseless solutions, right? Whether they're just hosting on Cloudflare or Vercel or whatever. And we've started to do the same, right? We've probably moved 30 websites from our portfolio off of WordPress in the last 60 or 90 days.

Interesting. And your clients, are they like in one specific niche, like B2B? Tell me about your ICP precisely.

Sure. So we have two major ones, right? So we actually have a few agencies that outsource all of their work to us. So that's actually been our bread and butter for the last decade or so, is we have some good relationships with some agencies that as they grow, we grow, right? So we continue to service them with their websites, with their SEO, and we try to provide more and better services for them in doing their website migrations, all of that. So part of that is actually what keeps us, uh, one of these stuck on WordPress, right? If it was up to me, we'd probably rip everything off of WordPress tomorrow, but we have clients and their clients want to be able to edit the websites themselves from time to time and whatever. And not everybody is tech savvy enough even to, uh, just to want to learn something else, like even if it's as simple as Lovable, right? So a lot of our clients are, uh, come from white label agencies that outsource to us, and then we have a handful of direct clients as well.

Okay, and the ICP, is it like founders? What size of business? Is there any industries precisely? Give me a bit more info.

So for the agencies, that is the, that is the niche, right? So it's digital marketing agencies that are, that actually have clients.

You serve other agencies?

Correct. Yep.

Interesting. Okay. As a partner or for them?

Um, so they outsource to us. That's actually the bulk of our business is working with other agencies. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. And you don't do much direct to client. It's mostly agency to agency.

Um, it's about, it's about 50/50. About half of our business comes from agencies and then the other half comes from direct clients.

Direct clients is small businesses, broad mostly?

Uh, it's actually more, I mean, technically small businesses, but more, um, uh, not small businesses in like the Main Street type businesses. We do some of those, right, like roofers or, um, or that kind of thing. But we have, uh, kind of a hodgepodge, right? We have a One of our clients is a political, like a political company and they do like lobbying and stuff like that. We've got another one that's, that's an urgent care facility that has multiple urgent care facilities around town. We have another one that sells a bunch of CNC machine tooling online, right? So it's a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but they're all kind of in that same like multi-million dollar a year businesses that actually want to partner, that they can come, that that will come alongside them and act as their digital marketing partner rather than kind of just looking to hire like a VA or something.

And these clients, they pay you a couple of grand per month? What's the ticket size usually?

So on the white label side, it's, you know, most of the clients have at least 5 or so clients that they're outsourcing us. So it's multiple thousands of dollars. For the direct clients, the average ticket size, is between like $1,000 a month and $12,000 a month.

Do you think most agencies should go with the white label model at your size and then later on just— can you, can you scale to like bigger sizes and just cut white label at some point of your growth?

Um, I think it might actually work the other way, right? I actually think, you know, back to your question about our agency is going to be outmoded by the bigger agencies. I think that we have the potential to be one of those bigger agencies by virtue of offering our services white label to other agencies. That gives them the ability to still get started and have a single point that they can just outsource everything to for a price that's going to be cheaper than they could possibly do it themselves, for resources that they wouldn't be able to obtain or utilize themselves. So I think that that's actually, uh, Um, one of our strategies here.

And how do you get these white labeling clients? Is it mostly SEO, PPC? And then what's the full funnel once you talk to them? Is it a longer sales cycle? Do you start with one of their clients? You start on them? Tell me a bit more about that.

Yeah, so at this point we offer, uh, so a lot of them, they either find us through our website or we have a, uh, GoHighLevel Marketplace app. So some of them them are looking for SEO and they see us inside of the GHL Marketplace and they go ahead and they install our app and that's the beginning of the funnel and getting in touch with us. Um, we'll use it depending on what they want. If they want websites, sometimes we'll do a homepage or make a homepage and internal pages so they can, for free, just so they can see the quality of our design because it's actually quite high, especially compared to most, uh, like white label providers. Um, and so we usually try to do something like that to give a value-add so they can really see the results. And then on the SEO side, we take a look at, you know, we usually do audits for free of a couple of their clients and let them know, hey, this is what we see, this is what we could do, and then this is obviously the price that we would take. And we try to keep it very simple in terms of our pricing so that they can, they don't have to worry about quoting, right? They can just have a really free-flowing conversation with their client and they know what the baseline is that they're gonna have to pay so they know that they can do their markup. And that works out pretty well for us.

And typically, how long do they stay? Is there like, uh, yeah, I must guess the churn is pretty low on them, but, uh, do they like compare you with their existing, um, team in the company or other, uh, providers? Like, how does that work? Like, once you unlock them, right?

Yeah, so it's a little bit of both. I think our longest-standing white label agency is roughly, I want to say, 2 and a half years or so we've been working with them. And then we have other ones that, you know, they sign up and they try us for a couple months and they think it's not for them, so they move on. And we've got some in between.

Interesting. Um, your goals for this year, I'm guessing, I think last time we spoke was like, uh, $50K to $100K. Where do you want that revenue to be at the end of the year?

Yeah, I think somewhere in the $150K to $250K range. I think with the utilization of AI that we have, I don't really see why we wouldn't be there, right? Because it's just more of doing what we're doing and we've already done a really good job at establishing our processes and what we can do. And so AI is just the accelerator for us. So that makes sense.

And how will you almost double in one year? You have like the current growth systems to do that? And is the existing team ready to onboard that many new clients?

Uh, so the existing team is ready. Um, you know, I say our team, but, uh, it's our team accelerated by AI, right? So we've systematically been, um, you know, sometimes team members leave, sometimes, um, it doesn't make sense for them to work with us anymore, sometimes we've laid them off, right? So we've actually downsized our team by over half, uh, since January. Yeah, since January. And, uh, we've been able to not miss a beat. In fact, our quality of work has actually gone up. So our team is more than ready to take on additional clients and work.. And so it's just a matter of executing on the marketing plan that we already have in place.

Interesting. So it's already yielding and it's linear so far. Is that what you're saying?

Say that again.

Yeah, it is. I mean, it's pretty rare to see like a growth plan that keeps on yielding month after month. That's what you're seeing right now. There's enough leads, enough new business that you, you're like highly confident that you'll reach this goal by the end of the year.

Yeah.

Okay, so what happened? Because you've been at this for like 16 years, right? And technically that should be your greatest MRR growth ever of like all times. What happened?

AI. I mean, it's really, uh, that simple. I mean, we've—

okay, tell me about these AI systems precisely. I need to know. Sure, sure.

So I would say that one of our internal struggles has always been execution, right? Like, we have ideas, we are getting leads from different places, but executing on all of the work and making sure that we, like, we are really sticklers for making sure that we're doing good work for our clients. It's easy to sell a client and then deliver nothing or deliver garbage or deliver, you know, crappy links or something, right? And we don't wanna do that. So we always have prioritized execution over more sales. And so that has allowed us to, you know, that's why we have a relationship with an agency that has dozens of clients that we've had for 2.5 years, right? And they continue to give us more. So they're planning on just doubling here by the end of the year, right? The, the amount of leads— or sorry, the amount of customers they've given us, uh, currently. So there's that, um, but because of that, AI has made all the execution way easier, right? Uh, especially in our space, right, in digital marketing with SEO and websites. The, uh, the amount of output is going through the roof and the amount of effort is going down, which is why we've been able to, uh, cut people from our team that, you know, weren't really necessary. And that's actually helped to increase our revenue as well. So It's kind of everything all at once, but AI is kind of in the center of it, helping to accelerate not just the amount of, like I said, the quality of our work has actually gone up. And so then it's also functioning as an accelerator of us bringing in more leads and more business as well.

And will you recruit more employees or do you feel comfortable at that size, you just outsourcing to AI agents?

We'll see how fast we get or how far we get with the AI agents. Um, you know, they get better every, every day. So, uh, our goal at this point is to try to hold off hiring as many people as possible. We'll hopefully just stick with the team that we have. We have a really solid team, but we'll see. I mean, if we have to hire somebody, I imagine that it would just be in the account relationship, you know, manager role, uh, somebody that's client-facing, that's going to have those conversations, that can jump on calls, make the customers feel comfortable, explain to them what's going on. Not so much the execution because every week after week, our execution gets better and faster with AI.

And what's your go-to system? Is it, uh, Claude Code and, um, your brain? Like, what, what is your favorite agent right now?

Yeah, 100% Claude Code. We have, like I said, multiple Claude Code subscriptions, and so, um, we burn tons and tons. But yeah, Claude Code all the way. Um, it's been, it's been a massive game changer for us. And we started back in February actually with Lovable, and we've had used ChatGPT even prior to that. But once we started using Claude Code, it's just been a massive game changer for us.

Have you used Claude Code for GTM so far?

A little bit for some of our cold email campaigns and structuring things and setting up the campaigns, being able to do everything from the terminal. Also saves a lot of time, right? Being able to just plug into everything using AI, from email verification systems to the inboxes that we're going to use, to all that kind of stuff. It makes everything a lot faster.

I guess an easy use case, like dump all your LinkedIn connections to it and then ask it to customize a message for each in a CSV, right? What would be the better offer for each customized message? And then connect to LinkedIn API and ask it deliver these message like 10 of them a day. That's a, that's one use case I've heard and seen a lot nowadays, which is pretty scary, right, for SaaSes that were specialized in LinkedIn outreach, right? I guess that's what they're referring to when they say SaaSpocalypse.

Oh, 100%. Yeah, it seems to me like the way I think about AI is it kind of started like this little dot, right? And then it kind of keeps growing. Keeps growing and growing like this black hole that just sucks all of these other softwares into it. So sometimes, you know, at some point even these, uh, these all-in-one softwares like ClickUp or Monday or whatever, right, you'll just be able to talk to Claude and just have it do whatever you want. It'll just manage everything for you, or Codex or whatever tool you want. Like, it's— you're just— I don't know how you're going to need other tools other than specific niche tools that do specific things.

Well, you're gonna need APIs, right? So that's not gonna disappear. Like, all— every SaaS is gonna have an API, and I guess they're just gonna make the core of their money through APIs rather than SaaS subscription. What do you think?

Uh, yeah, I think so. But I think a lot of this— I think a lot of the SaaS products are gonna just get eaten, right? They're like— you just said, like, I do— anybody that's doing cold outreach with LinkedIn, like, are you— is that really going to be necessary? You might have one tool that, does really, really well with their APIs. And so you might use them for their APIs because it's the best to be able to queue up those messages and send them out. Um, or maybe they have some kind of like browser automation that works really, really well and you don't want to build that yourself. Um, so cool then, like, but that's what's going to be the tools that are left are the ones that actually solve a unique problem or that structure the data so that the APIs can talk to, or the LLMs can talk to it through API.

So why wouldn't, uh, agencies be swallowed by that black hole like your agency?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think a lot of them will be actually. I don't know that the agency game is a super long-term thing. At this point, I think there's enough discrepancies between what the LLMs think they know and what agency owners who actually are doing a good job know and how they're able to function, right? Like if you, I mean, you can have, you can give your website to Claude and say, optimize this for me. And if you're at zero, right, you've never done any optimization, it'll probably be a net improvement, maybe 50%, 70% of what an agency would do, and that's gonna be great. But that other 30%, especially if you're a company that's actually making revenue currently, if you don't know what you're doing, you have a high risk of just royally messing up your website. And that's probably not a risk that companies that are actually making money wanna take, right? If their website's not doing any leads, go for it. It's not going to hurt anything. You're not getting any leads anyway. But if you're actually getting leads and business from your website or you have a reputation that you want to maintain, you're still going to need an agency for now, at least until the agents— until the LLMs get significantly better than they are now.

You know, one thing I can see with the agencies that we're at the front and center, we're client-facing, right? SaaSes are not. Most people started SaaSes so that they would never have to talk to a human, right, ever again. And they had like this shitty customer service and so forth. So Agency owners could still have like a pre— or could have a stronger foothold than most SaaSes is one of my theory. And technically the best agencies are gonna become API centers themselves, right? So they onboard this client and then they're like, hey, we're gonna build you this custom dashboard, this custom app just for you, right? And they're gonna help these humans connect their business to other businesses and other APIs sort of help them, handhold them to connect them in that full ecosystem. That's a vision that I can see. And some agencies might survive longer for that reason than others. But can you also picture that vision of like an agency becoming a software factory themselves and just like being API connected and building their full software stack?

Yeah, 100%. In fact, that's actually part of what we're doing for some of our bigger clients. For example, we have one that, um, we built a whole little mini app for him that mines eBay for particular leads, right? And so that was something that he was doing manually. It was working for him, he was getting results. And now we've been able to automate the whole thing so that he just has to open up his phone, scroll, click a couple buttons, and it's way faster and more efficient for him, right? So I think that that kind of thing is exactly what will help to keep agencies alive. I think that the, you know, a website agency, exclusively websites or just SEO, like, I think they're toast. Unless— because I think there will be companies like what we're trying to do, right, which is, uh, be able to plug into SEO kind of in an API type of way, right? So instead of just going to Claude and say, Claude, just optimize my website, you could come to us, you could sign up for our software, but it's kind of like an agency software hybrid. And I think that those, those hybrids will hopefully last a little bit longer. That's at least what we're banking on.

Okay, perfect. Um, well, I think, um, yeah, I like, uh, the, the answers provided today and the vision where the company is going. Uh, Matt, where can, uh, companies find out more about you?

Where—

what's your website?

Sure, so, uh, septermarketing.com is our website, so just like you see here on the shirt, s-e-p-t-e-r-marketing.com.

This is Matt and Charles for another Founder Wisdom podcast.