The Smartest Agency Businesses to Start in 2025 (w/ True Classic CEO)⏐Ep. #219

The path to getting a True Classic for a huge retainer is show, improve your value and do a bunch of work up free. If you want all the money, do a little bit upfront. You can charge 5, 10, 15, 20,000amonth, but you're creating overnight impact. It's unbelievable. What is five grand to them when they're going to be making 100 grand more per month?

What have you seen in your industry that could be an amazing business idea that people can execute on?

I have such a great one and this is revolutionary because no one is really doing it just yet.

Okay. So if you were around here recently, you probably heard my episode with Ryan Bartlett. He's the founder of True Classic, the company doing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in T shirt sales. Well, this guy's an idea machine and we talked for hours. So I wanted to get his unique insight on the industry, on E commerce, on agencies, service businesses, and find out what should we be launching today? What are some interesting ways we can launch an agency or an Internet business? And he did not disappoint. This episode is jam packed with tactical ideas and advice. You're gonna love it. Share with a friend. I'm curious. You've got a very unique insight. You've done a lot of things and we're going to have to do another episode where we talk about your poker days and your, your Vegas limo hack. I want to get into that on a future episode. But with your unique background, you know you've been distracted for a while. You've done the same thing for a while. What have you seen in your industry that could be an amazing business idea that people can execute on that maybe you're too focused on to go jump on, like something in a vendor that you've seen or into some software that you've used or maybe in apparel or a type of new apparel that's trending.

I have a great one. I have such a great one. And this is revolutionary because no one is really doing it just yet except a few companies. So like I told you early on that inventory bets are impossible. You essentially have to be a psychic to be in apparel because you just don't know how to forecast and what the demand is going to look like and all that. So you have to just guess, right? The reason that these sheen and quinces of the world have these incredible valuations is not because they're just so great at making product. It's because they have figured out that they have solved supply chain and the demand and market is starting to unite. Right. So what they've done is essentially, and there's a company we're talking to called Portless. And instead of, you know, coming up with an idea for a product, spending hundreds of thousands of ideas, guessing if it's going to work, getting the inventory here, like, that process is months and months and months and so much cash tied up into an idea that you might not even know is going to work out what an insane business that we're in. Right. What Portless has solved is your speed to market. So you can essentially do like, a hundred units of one style. And this three pl is in China. So it goes from the manufacturer in China, they drive it to this 3 PL in China, and then it ships directly to the customer. So now instead of making these enormous bets and investing in a style that we don't know is going to win, I can make bets on small product categories and. And shirts and things like that on a very small run. Improve it out first on, say, 100 units. And if it. If I blow through 100 units in one day, well, I'm. I'm into a winner. Let me reinvest, and then I can roll that out in a much larger unit size much later. So now we're taking all the guesswork out of it, and we're taking all the cash out of it as well. And it's like it goes back to the drop shipping thing. Dude, this is drop shipping for what I'm doing now. It's like it. It just. It mitigates all the risk and. And all the money. And this is how it's going to go in the future, by the way, because I can already see that, like, once people catch on to this, it won't make sense to go back to the old ways of how everyone's been doing apparel for the last 60, 70 years. This model will allow the customer to have more options. It'll hedge against all the other things that I said. So what a game changer, dude, I am so excited to test these guys out. We're going to go through a test here in the next month or two and see how it goes. And start ski, because we only roll out maybe a few styles a month. We're going to start being able to do 10, 20, maybe 50 styles a month at a hundred units per style.

Yeah.

And if it works, we just buy all the fabric and we scale it up and crush it. Right. But, like, dude, you're like a b.

Testing designs at scale.

Dude, what a model. This is what Quince does by the way I'm friends with the owners, some of the large manufacturers in the world. Dude, you know how many styles this is going to sound insane. You know me, Styles Quince is rolling out on a daily basis. 8,000. 8,000 in a day. No big deal, right?

Like crap.

When I heard that number, I looked at Ben, our CEO and we were just like, what are we doing? Like, yeah, no wonder they have a $5 billion valuation. Like what a model.

That's because of new technology like this. So how can someone sitting at home take advantage of technology like that to launch something or to test something?

Well, I mean you can test things now and like on a small scale you can just do it through AliExpress and you use Oberlo and, and connect that to your Shopify and you can do it on a small scale there. But at a certain point you will have to test into Portless and give them a shot. Now they're going to have minimums. Obviously they're not going to take on every client. And you have to get to a certain scale to really pique their interest and make it work for their economics. Yeah, I would say from the starting point, dude, just do AliExpress. It's like it's so easy to go on there and ship product directly to people from, from that location.

Did you ever drop ship directly from China with True Classic or did you just.

Never. Now the, the. So the portless transit time from purchase to landed with the customer is like six days.

It's crazy.

Yeah, this is not like we're gonna now have a 30 day wait time to get your product. We're talking six days, dude. You know how much now it's like five days in the US so we're adding a day with all this upside for the customer.

That's crazy.

It's exciting.

I heard of this kid in Atlanta who created this design. I'm sharing my screen right now here on the right. God is dope. And he went around Atlanta selling these for $5. Basically break even.

Yeah.

And his whole model was give these away for free. It's a great design. It's polarizing. It sends a message. Then people go to his website, God is dope.com and they start spending 20, $30 on t shirts with different designs. Like his loss leader, his viral marketing loss leader. What do you think about that strategy and is that, is that a good strategy?

I think is an amazing people copy that. No, dude, listen. This is what I always tell people when they ask about strategy as it relates to product. If you cannot feel comfortable about giving it away free, then you. You don't have a great product. Right. Like, if you feel like you have to charge people up front, then you need to go back to the drawing board. Essentially, Free to me is the ultimate gateway to getting customers to invest in you, because you've broken down the barrier completely. You actually don't even have to make them, you don't have to charge them. Just give them something for free and let the net, the rest net out on how much they like the product.

Yeah.

What a great message. I mean, how do you argue with that? You know, it's. Yeah, I think it's great strategy.

Would you say the same advice to someone wanting to start an ad agency, like, to get your first customer, do it for free, prove out the value, go from there.

If you're starting out and you have nothing, then yes. If you have proven it out, then no. Unless you have some unbelievable. Like, if I. So just to give you a little insight on the SEO agency, I'm pivoting away from it. I'm actually moving towards CRO conversion rate optimization, because I'm such a freak about that with True Classic. And we've done so much incredible work there that I'm pivoting the whole agency towards that. And really the biggest reason is, like, you create immediate value, like overnight.

Do you charge a percentage of what you improve on the conversion rate?

You could, you could do that model.

Or is that not what you're going to do?

No, I'm going to charge. Well, maybe in the future. Yeah, potentially. But in the beginning, I'm just going to charge a flat fee to use our services and. And basically, you know, you could charge 5, 10, 15, 20,000amonth, but you're creating overnight impact. It's unbelievable. You know, you go to like a product page and if you redesign that thing and it converts at like half a point better, you have just created such unbelievable value for that business that what is five grand to them when they're going to be making 100 grand more per month?

Yeah. So, yeah, I think a key differentiator with starting any agency is not just impact, but provable, attributable impact. Right. Because if you have like a. Let's say you have like a marketing strategy agency and you're going to get on calls and say, I would do this and I would do that and it's all kind of nebulous. It just doesn't work. Right. Or like fractional CFOs are exploding right now. Right. Instead of hiring someone for 10 grand a month to be a CFO. You know, your, your business isn't really big enough. You could pay $2,500 a month for someone to be a fractional CFO, et cetera. Yeah, that sells so well because it's directly tied to value. You get your P and L, you get your balance sheet every month. That's what you need. Right. But the reason that like fractional coos aren't really a thing is because it's like how do you tie it to the value as closely as in finances or if you had like an email marketing agency. I took your opening click through rate from this to this. That was because of me. $3,500 a month, please.

Right.

If you, if you can't do that, you're going to be fighting uphill the entire time.

So those are the ones you just named is exactly what I tell people to start if like they want to go into the service business. Because having lived on the other side of this as a brand, I can tell you that the two most impactful service based industries to go into in the future that will always have a life, no matter AI or not, is email marketing and CRO. Those two are, to your point, incredible immediate impact. And it's like not even a conversation. There's no, you don't have to prove anything. It's just like look at the numbers, look at the data, is it better or worse or whatever. And those are the quickest to propelling you to the next level. You dial in your CRO, you dial in your email and it is incredible overnight impact. And those agencies will just never lose. That's why SEO is so tough, is because it takes forever. So like gone are the days of like, well, it's going to take you a year to see results and it's going to take you a week with CRO.

Yeah.

So congratulations, you're on to something now. And for people that want to know tactically what to use on the CRO front, it's the program we use is IntelliGems and it is one of the best we've ever used. I love it. We use it every single day. We have tons of tests running and I'm going to use this platform with even my other agency still. Yeah, it's just the best. We've tried a bunch of them. Intelligence rules.

Well dude, one of my, one of my most favorite like pastimes is to log into our Klaviyo account and just start tinkering and just looking, messing with flows. One of my most popular newsletters of all time. I think it was called like how to quickest path to 20k a month. And it was basically join a Facebook group for e commerce business owners. Post and say, hey, I like Klaviyo. It's cool. I want to tinker. I want to improve your brand for free, 100% for free. Give me read only access to your Klaviyo account. Let me tinker around in there. I won't send anything before talking to you. In fact, I won't even have permission to send anything. Let me mess with your flows. Let me see if I can get your revenue per recipient up and then like get a couple free case studies. You're probably going to enjoy it, right? If you don't enjoy it, then find a different business. If you do keep going, pretty soon you're going to have people lined up to pay you $2,500 a month to improve their Klaviyo flows or to add new flows or cart abandonment or welcome email or Happy birthday you ordered a year ago. Like there's so many levers to pull inside Klaviyo. Or with CRO conversion rate optimization, like just start learning intelligence, geeking out. See if you can get their conversion rate from 3.1 to 3.15. Yes. That's interesting right?

What you just said about that, that process you just walked through. I try to tell people this all the time because they every I get pitched to use these agencies like a million times a day and I tell them, I'm like dude, all you would have to do to get me to sign up like within 10 seconds is do a shred of pro bono work. Just do a shred. Just show me something of value and. But no one wants to do that work, right? Yeah, everyone is just lead gen at scale. Let me just mass email every single business in the world and get them to sign up. Dude. The path to getting a true classic as for a huge retainer is doing exactly what you just said which is show, improve your value and do a bunch of work up free. If you want all the money, do a little bit upfront and and really show us and dial in and go because how are we going to say no to that, right? Like if you actually do that work and you show us the value and you've already spent the time and energy, there's almost zero chance I can say to know and even to this day when I get people that are like hey, I have this actor or this athlete that wants to work with you And I'm just like, okay. And then what? Like, you haven't done the work to tell me what that even means for True Classic. You're just saying, hey, I got this guy. Pay me this money. The end. That does not work for me. These days. I try to tell these agents, I'm like, you guys have got to spend time getting creative, coming up with a solution that works for us. What is on brand, what will work for our customers? Not just, hey, guy Price, do it together. It's like, dude, I'm out of that land. From. From you.

Yeah.

Just so you know, now. Now they have to go way back to the drawing board. And they're like, well, forget True Classic. This is like, I have to do work. Like, I'm out of here. Like, on to the next brand. Even with, like, you know, we do, like, these big partnerships now. Like, we're with the UFC or with the Clippers or with the Kings or with the Rams. Like, we're doing all these big, sexy brand deals. And even with them originally, they would. And UFC has been an amazing partner, by the way. Like, I have no complaints, but, like, some of these other ones that I have worked with, dude, they come with these proposals that's like, you know, a million, two million bucks a year. We're gonna put you on a. On the jumbotron with your logo. And the end.

Oh, my gosh. I've been pitched that before, too.

Are you talking about. Dude, like, unless you're taking little Johnny from the top of the rafters to courtside and making an impact, I don't want to hear it. So come back with your proposal that is filled with thoughtfulness. Let's show up for the fans. Let's give them free product. Let's create a moment for them, because that's what I'm trying to do. Like, if you don't come with impact, I don't want to hear it. Don't show me your sexy deck with big numbers and all these impressions.

You.

You're not going to win me over. Right. You come with thoughtfulness and initiatives and charity work and ways to show up for humans. Now, I give, and they leave those meetings like, like, so deflated. But I'll tell you, dude, when they come back to the table with those second and third proposals, they come correct because they know exactly what I'm looking for. And it's so different than all the other brands they work with, because they're like, well, Bud Light just says, like, here's some money, and then just do the thing. It's like, yeah, dude, we're not bud light. Like we're, we're scrappy a startup, just so you know, like we quantify our dollars. So like just don't go that route and you will get our business.

Oh, so good. Okay, so if we're talking agencies, if you were to rank from most to least promising or from most demand, but lowest supply, like the greatest asymmetric bets in starting a service business or an agency today or where would you rank them from? From best to worst?

Definitely CRO number one. Because even with email I would put email number two. But with email there is a bit of a ceiling where like the creativity like can just hit a bit of a limit. Even with us, like we've tried to.

Like the wealth lower ceiling.

Yeah, like the. Well, whereas like CRO, there's so many components to a website, right. Like on email, it's literally just an email, the end subject line. And even with email, like we've done some amazing things with like Maverick AI. Do you know what Maverick AI is? It's like where I sat in a room and they recorded me and I went through every name in the English language for like two hours and I said like, hey Jennifer, Hey Derek. And then they piece it all together and I tell a story with saying their name off the rip so that you like capture them, right? It's so mad. They love it. So like that is taking email to the next next level, but like beyond that there's nothing left. It's like we've already done it at the highest level. So now with CRO though, I'm telling you, dude, my in house guys come with a proposal every week and we sit there for like an hour and just riff on ideas and we come out with some of the most amazing stuff and it just evolves and evolves and evolves and then the next week it's something else and it never ends. Which means for an agency, you'll never run out of ideas. Like you'll just keep going email. I've seen these agencies, they come in, they do good work for like a month or two and then after like six to eight months, it's starting to like hit its limits already and they're out within a year. So like CRO, you get a good agency. Dude, they're never leaving because upside is tremendous. So.

Oh dude, I have a headache. In a good way. This has been really, really good.

I'm just happy to be here talking to you. And like minded entrepreneurs are, they're tough to find again. And even, like you, walking through some of your examples shows me that you're thinking about things the right way. That is a rare quality. And it's something I look for in people, even that we hire here. Like, we go through homework assignments and, like, we get to see how their train of thought works. And I will tell you that what we've learned over six years of hiring hundreds and hundreds of people, that what works best here are entrepreneurs. And what we know about them is that they might not be here that long because they are going to go start their own thing, and we're okay with that. But while we have them here, they think about things the right way. They think about the customer, they think about the journey. They think about thoughtfulness. They are scrappy. They're jack of all trades. Like, they're all the things you need for this business to work. Because that's who we are, Right? Like, we're those guys. We're kind of like masters of none, jack of all trades. And we're dangerous at every little thing. But we're not specialists. Now, you still need some specialists, like finance, for example. Like, you need those. But I heavily index on the jack of all trades, guys just like yourself. If I were to find a guy like you that was in the working environment, like, I would snatch him in a heartbeat. Because it's a rare quality.

Well, I hope that brings people comfort to hear that, because, you know, you get stressed out if you chase shiny objects and all these rabbits. And you know, a little bit about Facebook ads, a little bit about copywriting, a little bit about E commerce, like, lean into it. It doesn't make you unemployable. It makes you an even better employee if. If you decide to go that route or a better employer. Right. And over time, with all that surface area of little things that you've tested and tried, you're naturally going to find things that you love the most. And then you will become a specialist accidentally on certain things within all of those trades.

Yeah. The other thing I would say, as it relates to that, if we're talking about employees, the one thing that makes the biggest difference in the world is identifying impact versus busy work and putting all your energy towards impact. Now people would say, well, yeah, but I got to get the work done. Yes. I'm just saying energy deployed needs to be 80, 20, 80% of your energy towards impactful things for the business. 20% to busy work. And learn AI. Learn AI agents. Find ways to get that busy work off your plate. Because if you want to Go from intern to CEO. It will only be on impact. It will not be because you worked busier than the other busy bees in the company. It will because you identified something. You created opportunity. You found it, you did. You had the initiative and the insight to go after it and figure it out. That is true impact. And because of the thing that you found, it was wildly successful for the company. Impact is so tough to understand though. When you come into a company, you have to listen to your leaders, you have to talk to the business owners, you have to learn what is impactful to the business. Like if you were to come in today and you would go, ryan, what, what would work for True classic. What do you think I would say? I would say, dude, study CRO. I know you're in operations right now, but if you came out with a CRO win, you. You think I wouldn't credit you towards that and give you something out of that and excel you in the company? Like, I don't care where it comes from. It's just find a way to be impactful and you are really onto something as an employee.

I mean, just to just back of the napkin, let's say you, I imagine you have several million dollar days on your website, right? Dividing your annual sales by 365. Let's say you have a million dollar day, three and a half percent conversion rate.

Yeah, we're, we're averaging, you know, anywhere from on like a random day, it could be as low as like, you know, 250 days. All the way up to, you know, Black Friday. It gets into like multi million dollar days.

And then how many visitors per day on average are you getting?

It's somewhere between 100 to 150,000 a day.

Okay, so if you have 100,000 visitors a day, that's 3,500 orders at a three and a half percent conversion rate. If you find some intern that gets your conversion rate from 3.5 to 3.6, that's an extra a hundred orders, right? Is that right?

No, it could, I think it would be a little bit more. But like, I get where you're going with it, dude. If anything moves cvr, you are on your way. Like if I was a guy that knew nothing about that world and I had came up with an idea or I saw a post somewhere or I was surfing and I put it in that channel on Slack where all of us are and it did something. Dude, you have just now become wildly valuable even outside of whatever you do in your particular role. Like understanding impact as it relates to certain industries. And just putting an idea out there is so important. I mean, we have a. A channel in Slack called ideas. And that can come things. Inspiration can come from all sorts of different people in all sorts of different ways. And that really empowers people to just always be curious and learning and figuring things out and looking to what's next. And give us a nugget. And that nugget can turn into a mountain very quickly if it's great.

Even if you just give, like, the inkling of an idea that someone else turns into something real. Right. You're still the originator of the idea, and they're going to tie that to you.

That's what happened with the teacher initiative. It was one idea from, like, a social manager, and she was like, hey, we should, like, you know, it's the end of the school or beginning of the school year, and these people need help. And I was like, what is this? And I looked into it and, dude, I turned it into a mountain. I took that little nugget and I expanded on it, and I blew it up into this big thing. Within a month, we're on, like, every newscast. I was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on wish lists. And now I have this community of amazing teachers that support me and follow me, and they follow every move I make. And here I am every year spending all this money to help them. And it started from one little concept, from one person who was not that high up on the chain at all. But, dude, even in this conversation, her name is Tiffany. I give her credit in almost every podcast I'm on that they bring this up. I'm like, and I want to forever champion her and clap her up because she deserves it, dude. Yeah, she was there putting in the work, figuring out what people need and how to drive value to them.

You know what you very easily could have said, what most leaders would have said is, thanks, Tiffany. Super cool idea. We're just kind of focused on X, Y, Z right now. Exactly. But that's the magic that happens when you see a thread and you pull on it. It's like, where will this go? Where will this go? Chasing shiny objects, right?

And I'm obviously obsessed with impact. So the more I looked into it, I was just like, these poor teachers, dude, they have to spend their own money at these Title 1 schools. They have to spend their own money to get supplies for kids. I'm like, and I have three kids. I have three young kids. And I'm just like, I can't even imagine what that Looks like this is insane what they're going through. So it was like, how can I not show up for these guys?

Right? What's next for true classic public exit cash flow?

I definitely do not want to be in the public markets. I have a lot of friends that are in the public markets and what a life they live with all the stress. And I just. Dude, I am like, how do I de stress and make my life simpler and better and easier? I'm in that kind of part of my career. So I think what I'd like to do is potentially a big majority deal sometime next year or the following year. Because this business went through a huge growth year with wholesale. We're looking very attractive to investors. So I am in a place where I'm just like, let's either do like a, you know, a 40% or maybe a 60% if the price is right, and then I can go on and do these other things. Like what we were talking about developing some sort of operator school and just empowering entrepreneurs and helping them and teaching them, or some sort of a YouTube live show where people just come on. Similar to, like, the. I don't know if you've ever watched Gary Vee do his tea with Gary Vee, like a version of that, because I would just. I would crush those environments where people just come on and hit me with questions and, like, I just give them a little bit or I look at their website and I just start destroying their website and going, dude, you got to move this here. You got to do that. I could see something like that being great for people.

So we'll see, though. Oh, Ryan. Well, this was perfect. Even better than I had hoped, and I had high hopes. So where. Where do you want people to find you?

Basically, my name across all the socials. I'm sure we'll link it up somewhere, but Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn. Yeah, it's just my name, Ryan Bartlett. Across basically everything, you know, I can definitely be found. I'm happy to answer questions for entrepreneurs. It's something I love even to this day. People are hitting me a lot, and I'm taking a lot of time because I wish I had that when I was younger. Like, I really wish I had somebody kind of guiding me in the right direction. It would have saved me a lot of time and energy and money, frankly. Yeah, I'm easy to find on social if you just got to search for my name.

Okay. And then trueclassictes.com of course.

Yeah. Trueclassic.com I still haven't changed the URL.

Because I noticed that it redirects. Right.

I'm worried about the organic implications coming from the SEO world. I'm just like, I've seen so many disasters and I'm just like, ah, I'll just leave. It's fine.

All right, well, thank you.

Yeah, man, it was fun.

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