16 Years of Agency Strategies in 49 Minutes

Once you start to get into business, you respect the work, the pain, the excruciating pain that it takes to start things up and then continue to scale up and the amount of never-ending BS that you have to tolerate. Yeah, it's never-ending. So 16 years of business experience, I'm going to tell you my experiences and hopefully you'll learn a couple of things from this. Just to give you some context on this one, My main business is an ad agency called Single Grain. I've been operating it since about 2013 or so. But I've also, even in my early years of business, when I first started working, I would buy these small e-commerce sites too, right? So I've always kind of had a little knack for entrepreneurship and I wanted to share some of these scars with you and some of the lessons learned, right? And maybe the first story I'll share here is when I was about 25 years old or so, I had reached out to an entrepreneur that I looked up to in New York and this guy happened to run an agency. And his agency was called Likeable. His name is Dave Kerpin. And I reached out and I didn't— I really didn't know what to ask, but I remember I got one good question out of it. And the final question before we got off the line, I asked him, what was the biggest thing that changed your life as an entrepreneur? And he said, without a doubt, it was this one group called Entrepreneurs Organization. And so I was like, okay, I got to write that down. I'm going to write that down. I've got to protect that with my heart, right? I was, you know, heart was pumping there. I was like, okay, maybe I found a gem. And so after we got off that call, I looked into Entrepreneurs Organization and I found out that it was an entrepreneur-only peer group and you needed to do at least $1 million in revenue to qualify to join Entrepreneurs Organization. And at the time I was like, oh my God, how am I going to hit $1 million? I didn't even know how to even hit $100,000, right, for a business. And so basically in 2 years, so when I was 27 years old, I actually ended up joining Entrepreneurs Organization. And the key lesson here, the first lesson I would say is you want to make sure that you have like-minded friends around you if you're going to go down this path of operating a business and growing a business because it's a very lonely game. And even if you have a partner, there are some things you can say to your partner, there's some things that you can't say to your partner. Sometimes you're going to have partner disputes. So having like-minded friends around you, like-minded individuals who are also, they've experienced some of the things that you're experiencing. Maybe they're not exactly in the same business that you are, but they understand the pains of being an entrepreneur. And so, you know, I was in Entrepreneurs Organization for a while. I ended up joining another group called YPO a couple years ago, maybe 4 years ago or so. And what I would also say is joining groups like this, that's nice, but also finding there's mastermind groups that are out there. And I'm not talking about the ones that are, you know, groups of very money-hungry people that are all just about making money, even at the expense of other people, right? I'm talking about finding humble, hungry, smart people because you're going to learn a lot from these people. They are very motivated and they are always trying new things and something that might work really well in their industry that might give you ideas to apply to your industry. So one, you're going to have really close friends, lifelong friends even. And 2, you're going to learn a lot of things and ultimately that's going to help you grow your business more and that's going to allow you to take care of your family and your community more. And that's why this is so important. And the other thing I'll say too is in addition to joining these groups, put together your own mastermind groups too. Put together your own communities. So I have a group where we meet once a year. We've been to Turkey, we're planning to go to Morocco next. We've been to cool places like Lake Tahoe, we've been to Tulum as well. And some big business deals have also come out of these little founder retreats. I remember there's one business deal that came out of one, we're just sitting on a boat together And we had 2 separate boats and it just so happened that a conversation struck up. I was just kind of sitting in the middle and one person was like, hey, what's one keyword you really need to rank for, for your business? And the other person said, I really need to rank for this keyword. And person A ranked for that keyword 3 months later and probably has made $4 million off of that single conversation. And so again, you have to put yourself in those positions and if you can't find your way into some of these groups, then go ahead and make your own group, right? Nobody can ever take that away from you. And so that's what I would say. Kind of related to that too, some people ask me, well, Eric, how did you go about building your network? And for me, I'm actually a very introverted person. People think I'm very extroverted. I'm actually not. I prefer to just stay at home. But one of the things I've learned is that over time, if you create content and you keep compounding it over a long period of time, today this is not necessarily something new, but maybe 11 years ago or so, this whole idea of creating content for free and hoping people will come back to you, people couldn't really wrap their heads around it because they wanted to see a quick ROI. And they didn't understand that the whole idea of content is that you're building trust over time and that's eventually going to come back to you. And so that's kind of how I built my, I'll say my little audience, right? Around the world of marketing. And so that's always been helpful. I have my podcast Marketing School, I have my podcast Leveling Up. I have both of those are YouTube channels as well. And those have led me to go around speaking around the world. And then when I go speak around the world, I try to throw little dinners. I try to get people together. And so you want to let one thing lead to another, but you want to make the most of every opportunity that you come across. So it's like, okay, I get invited to speak somewhere. Okay, how can I make the most of that speaking opportunity? Okay, I'm going to invite people together and have dinner together. What else can I do, right? So I'm always thinking about what else can I do? What else can I do? What else can I do? That's what's helped me along the way when it comes to business. And so I've read a lot of business books and you can see generally, like even behind me too, I have a lot of books and I love reading. I love learning. I love teaching as well. And if you were to ask me if money were no object, what would I be doing? That's the real question. And the answer is I would just be learning and teaching. And I feel like I'm doing a lot of that right now, whether it's coaching people on my team, whether it is helping my friends out or whether it's the agency owners group that we have helping out agency owners in there or Whether it's the content that I put out there, I just really enjoy learning. I love articulating this stuff, and I mean, you know, I love learning so much that, for example, this book is breaking down over here, right? I read in the sauna too. You're not supposed to read in the sauna, and because the bindings start to come apart because it's so hot, right? So anyway, I digress. But my point is, you have to understand who you are and what your what your essence is, and and go from there. But also keep in mind too. At least for me, my hunger to learn and teach has led me into multiple other areas, multiple other interests too. But since I've read a lot of these business books, the point that I'm going towards is I read a lot of business books and they would often talk about the power of focus. They would often talk about you need to lock in on one thing and it's the people that lock in on one thing, those are the people that really grow a big business. And I'm not saying that it's necessarily wrong for everyone to do multiple things, to dabble. But it was wrong for me. And most entrepreneurs will find that. They learn that sooner or later, or the ones that don't learn, their businesses just stay small. And maybe they're okay with that. Maybe they need to dabble, right? At least for me though, I've learned that being unfocused on one end, having an agency, on the other end, buying 2 other agencies at the same time and handling the integrations there. And then also having a SaaS product and having an education product while also releasing a book at the same time. That is, that's a little bit much. And so I would say that one of the biggest scars that I've had that I've learned is one, it's being unfocused. It hurts like hell. It will come back to bite you. And you might think you're more talented than you actually are. But if you think about it, if you're one person attacking one project with all of your might, all of your brain space, you're going to be infinitely ahead of someone that's attacking 10 different things at once, right? And you know, all things considered equal. And I remember Peter Thiel; he actually has this quote saying that you know it can be very enticing to want to work on multiple things, and you might say you might try to justify that the ten different things that you work on they're all complementary to the main thing that you work on, and that's just not the reality, right? Because again, when you distract yourself and you try to think about five different things or twelve different things, again, your head is distracted. And you are not operating at your 100% capacity while someone else is. And how are you supposed to win all things considered equal? You can't win. And well, the beauty of business is that it is a free market and you'll get the results that you deserve at the end of the day. But when you become unfocused, it's hard to dive into the micro problems for each business because each business has very deep problems. The project that you have is is hundreds or thousands of different problems that need to be solved, right? But then when you do hundreds and thousands times 10 different projects, then you can never quite go deep. And that's going to prevent you from achieving the results that you want. And at least for me, I want to play the game where I played it at a very high level. And that's really my motivation at the end of the day. I've talked to a handful of my entrepreneur friends who've run these personality tests. And for me, I'm 99% intrinsically motivated, whereas Some of my more money-driven friends that have also taken the personality test, some that are even billionaires, right? They are very extrinsically motivated and they're very motivated by money. It's not the case for me. Again, I just love learning and teaching. And I'll give you a little side tangent here. If you really want to understand who you are as a person, then I would highly recommend that you go take the PrinciplesYOU personality test. So it's the word principles, plural, you.com. It's completely free to do. I'm not affiliated at all, but I'd say it's probably 90 to 95% accurate. Every single person I've had take it, whether I use it for recruiting people or in some cases I've used it when it comes to relationships, for example, it's worked out really well. And it will tell you if you are dependable. It'll tell you if you're detail-oriented. It'll tell you if you're a creative person. It'll tell you if you're a humble person. It'll tell you if you are a person that has good composure. Yeah. All these things, they'll tell you if you're a person that you can lead. And we have everyone at our company take these, right? So maybe that's another bit of wisdom. A lot of people talk about personality tests. I would say they're pretty important because once you start to figure out who you are as a business owner, what values you deem to be important, then you want to look for those values in other people. And by the way, this personality test works out well for us because our core values at my company, be improvement obsessed, be open-minded, and then be reliable. And those 3 things you can see, like, are those people, are these people growth-oriented? Are they dependable at all? And, and so on. All right, quick note, this is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. And so I want to talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. We're building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating From, from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website, and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint. And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more. And we'll see you inside. Going back to some of the business scars. I would also say that it's trusting but not verifying. And what I mean by that is I remember there's a situation where we had a great person who was helping us with recruiting, but I didn't verify how well we were following the process until maybe 8 months into it when I heard that this recruiter had said, hey, I just talked to this person. I think this person can be CEO. And then I talked to the person. I was like, oh, we're actually pretty far off. And so, I didn't really have to wait 8 months to do that. It's I gave my trust away too quickly and I also didn't verify. And when it's your company, when it's your business, you're one of the co-founders, you're one of the founders of the business, you'll eventually figure out if you haven't already that it's you who will drive the pace at the end of the day. If you don't drive the pace, nobody else is going to drive the pace. Even if you hire someone to drive the pace, they're not nearly as incentivized as you are to drive the pace. And if you don't keep your foot on the gas pedal, Then things are going to slow down. And when you start to defer, defer, defer, when you have this air of deference around you where it's you're hiring all these people that have been there, done that, you can't do that. You got to keep your foot on the pedal, on the gas to keep things moving because if you don't, then that's when things start to slow down. So another thing I'll say is this, wanting to sit back and watch someone grow is a very admirable thing to do. And my logic behind this has always been, look, I didn't do that well in school. And if someone like me can quote unquote figure things out, then I think anybody can figure things out, which might be true. But in an organization, if you are assigning something that is high risk and that person has low experience in that area, then you are not that smart because That is too risky for the company. Now, on the flip side of that, if someone is, let's say the responsibility is going to get coffee, for example. Okay, that's low risk and you don't need that much skill or experience for that. Okay, in that case, yeah, you can let someone learn and maybe they made the wrong order or whatever. That's not a major thing. That's a very minor thing. But you got to understand that again, the higher the risk and the less experience, You might have to get involved. And the lower the risk, the less experience needed, you probably don't need to be as involved, right? So you have to understand the bands of delegation. And some people just go way too far on delegation or not enough delegation, right? Too much control. And so you're going to have to figure out a balance there. And honestly, a lot of stuff when it comes to business is balance at the end of the day. So wanting to sit back and watch people grow, You can do that to an extent just with, I would say, lower risk roles. And keep in mind, again, if it's a high risk thing, guess who's going to have to clean it up if it doesn't work out? It's going to have to be you because not only are you going to have to fire the person, which is going to decrease morale, but you're going to have to jump in, which is going to take your time off of potentially higher leverage opportunities. So that's something you have to keep in mind, right? So yes, absolutely. You want to make sure that you that you hire someone that's on top of it. But if you're not there pushing the pace and you're kind of sitting back when it's a very high-risk thing, well, and it's a new thing too, then that's ultimately on you. So I would say you want to do the opposite of what I did there. And I would also say that not being involved. So I remember when we did these acquisitions a while back, I had hired a GM and this person had worked at an agency for, you know, she's worked at multiple agencies. And we hired this person and we were very excited about it. And little did I know that this person eventually would steal employees and would steal clients. And not only that, would kind of try to poison morale because I had talked to people after this all happened, this entire saga, right? But who's to blame at the end of the day? One, I'm to blame for hiring this person because I never really felt good about it. And maybe that's the next lesson I want to talk about. Yeah. And the second thing is I wasn't involved because I had drank all the Kool-Aid from all the things that I read, talked about with my friends. Yeah, you got to hire a CEO and just get out of their way. I hope— read this, read these M&A books, read all these things. You don't really know until you're in it. And then once I was doing that, by the way, where I was like, okay, I was not being as involved even though I wanted to be involved because I felt like I needed to be involved. I didn't do it, right? Because I felt like, oh, this is the stuff that I learned and I could feel it every single day. I can feel The sand kind of going through my grasp, right? I can feel me losing my grasp on what was going on. And slowly but surely, things got poisoned, right? And eventually we found out and we had to take action there. But I would say you want to make sure that you are involved, even if you're not running the day-to-day necessarily, that you're still involved in some way, shape, or form. You're looking at the numbers, you're still making decisions. Let's say you do hire a CEO, you build out an executive team, That if some things are broken, you're looking at it, you're looking at the numbers and you're calling things out. And if things aren't moving as quickly as you like, let's say you're the chairman, then you got to jump in and say, hey, you know what? I'm going to have to jump in. I believe we should make a change here. The other thing, I guess the follow-up would be that I had a gut feeling that this person wasn't the right fit, but I fell so much in love with the idea of this person, more so the idea of the role, That I really, I was just like, I just really wanted to step out because I'm like, I need to work above the business, right? You know, I need to work. And I don't disagree with that. You need to work above the business, but there's a time and place for that. I think, you know, in that situation, that wasn't the right time and place, but I just really loved the idea and I really wanted to execute on the idea before I really thought that we were ready for it. And I knew in the back of my mind. And so what I would say for you is, If you understand, if you've got this gut feeling inside of you, and by the way, your gut feeling comes from years of experience, it comes from wisdom. If you have a bad gut feeling about someone, it's probably right. And if you have a really, really amazing gut feeling about someone, then you're probably right as well. And I'm going to come back to that second part in a moment. So we've talked about a couple things, you know, being unfocused, trusting but not verifying, Taking my foot off the gas pedal, waiting to sit back and watch people grow, having like-minded friends. Those are just a couple of takeaways from these 16 years of business. And even if you could take one thing away from this, that would be great, right? Let me know one thing that you'd like to take away from this. Maybe one thing you're going to take action on in the comments, and I'm going to continue on here. So I don't care if you have a products business or a services business, everything is around people. It's around the level of people that you hire. And not hiring people that have been there, done that. And what I mean by that is people that have maybe 4 or 5+ years of tenure at one job and they've been promoted 2 or 3 times or so. That's someone that you want to hire because one, that company that they worked at saw enough value to promote them. And so just because someone stayed at 8, 10 years at a company, and we've hired people like that, stayed 8, 10 years at a company but never got promoted, that's a red flag actually, right? Because the company doesn't see enough value. to push them up. And so, you know, if they did get promoted 2 or 3 times and, you know, the company saw them as valuable to keep them for a while and they've shown that loyalty, then those are all green flags for you at the end of the day. And so you want to hire people that have been there, done that. Because going back to what I said earlier, wanting to sit back and watch people grow and hiring people for potential, you cannot trade on potential. And I learned that the hard way. So you want to make sure that you hire people that have been there, done that. And I'll give you a good example here. So my podcast co-host, Neil, He's got a 9-figure agency and he's not really involved in the day-to-day. His partner, Mike, did a really good job with finding people that have been there, done that. In fact, a lot of the people that they have have all worked at agency holding companies. They all kind of know each other. There's clients that follow them. There's employees that follow them. And so when you hire someone that's been there, done that, not only do they have experience, not only can they bring value themselves, they'll bring other people with them. They might bring other clients with them as well. So at least being in the agency type business, that's something that's very, very valuable. And the other thing I would say too is going back to, okay, you want to hire people that have been there, done that. And eventually what you might want to do is you might think about acquiring other companies too. And so I would say that in some cases when we acquired some of these agencies in the past, we didn't do enough due diligence. Again, we really fell in love with it and our broker pushed us really hard to get these deals done quickly, right? And we're like, okay, yeah, sounds good, right? But that's another example of phoning it in, trusting but not verifying. And in this case, we didn't do our due diligence, right? And interestingly enough, if you look at my— going back to the personality test, if you look at my principles view, when it comes to detail-oriented out of 100%, my score is 6%. We could have done more due diligence on the people, on the clients, more due diligence on the books just to understand what was going on. And I also get updated books as well to understand their current P&L. And I would say that, you know, that level of due diligence, I mean, it would've been helpful to have more people on my end because I didn't exactly have all the resources ready on my side to do these deals. And once we did, we had already done some of these deals, right? And so, you want to make sure that you hire people that cover your weaknesses. And so, something I look for when we hire people is I will, if I'm involved with the hiring process, I do want to take a look at their personality tests and look at how detail-oriented they are. because I want them to make up for my weaknesses. I want to plug my weaknesses. I don't just want to hire a bunch of people that are like me. And that actually brings me to another point. You think about Elon with SpaceX. So I believe up to the first 3,000 people or so, he was very involved with hiring, very involved. He met every single person. Same thing with the DoorDash CEO, Tony Hsieh. I think he met with a couple thousand people or at least the first 1,000 people or so. Jeff Bezos did something similar, I believe. Bill Gates did something similar. And so your true leverage comes from people at the end of the day. And being involved when it comes to hiring is something that might be irritating because you might feel, oh, I need to work on the product. I need to work on the service. Yes, that's very important, but you are also crafting the complexion of your organization. And if you start to let a bunch of bad apples in, especially when you have like 5 people or so, or 10 people or so, every one person you have, I mean, one person out of what, let's say you have 3, 4 bad people, 4 bad people out of 10. That's 40% bad people, right? And they're going to drag everyone else down. And nobody, I'll tell you, any A player, they want to work with A players. They know how it feels like to work with B players. They know how it feels like to work with C players. You cannot afford to have B and C players, especially when you're smaller. So you want to have people, when you're talking to me, it feels like they can lift you up. It feels like that gut feeling. It feels like this is right. And you'll know, like you just know immediately, right? And And the other thing I'll say with that is if you do find someone that's really good, it feels like they could be a 10x hire, you find a role for them no matter what. And I've had people on my team disagree with me on hires in the past and then only a couple months later to be like, okay, yeah, that was the right move. And so that's what I would say. If you find a 10x hire, try to make it work. Sometimes even if you can't afford it, maybe you need to stretch out the budget a little bit to try to make it work. And that brings me to my next point. You know, I come from the tech world. This is like 10+ years ago or so. I was about growth, growth, growth. Let's reinvest back in the business, reinvest back in the business. But what I would say now that I'm a little older is you should focus on profitability and you should focus on bringing cash flows to yourself because the cash flows will make you saner, okay? It makes you feel safer as well. And because you don't want to be operating a business where you're constantly worried all the time, right? And because that makes you tense up. And when you tense up, then you tend to make Worse decisions, and so aiming for profitability is not a bad thing. And one of my my my my good friends Syed said this: You know, instead of building for an exit, why don't you just build your business to have cash flows that give you an exit every single year so you can have an exit every single year? And that to me makes a lot more sense, and I would highly recommend you all think about it that way. So absolutely, you should think about profitability because look, that profitability is going to help you. Let's say you want to go buy another company. Okay. Well, if you want to do an equity swap, which is where you guys might trade some equity, well, you're going to want a higher valuation than theirs, right? A substantially higher valuation than theirs. Your profitability also helps you if you want to go get— if you want to go out there and get a loan, you can do that, right? The way your company is valued is based on the profitability at the end of the day, right? Now, there's a couple other things you can do. You know, we've talked about seller discretionary earnings where you might run a lot of your expenses through the business and maybe your $100K in profit for your business maybe $500K or more, you can basically do add-backs, but that's for another conversation. But that's what I would say. I mean, you want to make sure that, yeah, you're running the company for the long term and you're not necessarily building it to sell. But I would say that you do want to build it in a way that it's attractive to someone that might want to buy your company because private equity, the way they run things is yes, they're looking to make sure that the numbers are solid. And when you run things the right way, when you build your company to sell, not looking to sell, but you're building it to be attractive to a seller, you're operating it oftentimes with discipline. And that will help you go a long way, right? Because again, if you keep reinvesting back into business, the business is going to continue to suck cash. You can definitely do that. Maybe you do that for a couple of years or so, But ultimately, you're going to need to, you know, you can sacrifice all you want, but at the end of the day, your employees don't care, your customers don't care as well. But I'll tell you who does care. Your family cares and you care as well. So you got to make sure that you take care of yourself first and then make sure that then so you can do a better job of taking care of everyone else, right? So when you think about your, you know, plane, you put your oxygen mask on first and then you can put the oxygen mask on for other people. So that's what I would say. And the other thing too I would say is you want to overcommunicate things in general. And so you might think that just because you repeat something 3 times that everyone understands it, but only you are hanging out with yourself all the time. And so if you go out to somebody else and you're like, hey, our core values are to be improvement obsessed, to be open-minded, to be reliable. Even if you told me that, if I'm a fresh person, if you told me that 3 times, I probably still wouldn't remember. These are the types of things, the mission, vision, values, they need to be repeated over and over. And one other thing too is the way we communicate is we often, we write a ton of memos. And we took this from the Amazon way of doing things. And the Amazon way of doing things is they like to write memos. And if let's say I have an initiative that I want to bring up, Well, let's say it's a very big initiative. Maybe I'm writing a 6 or 7 page or 8 page memo. Maybe it's taking me 2 weeks to do so. Our memos typically don't take that long and they're typically shorter. But if I have an idea and I'm trying to clamor for resources, then I'm going to write a memo because the memo helps me articulate my thoughts better. And sometimes as I'm writing it, I might just stop and not write it anymore. But it forces me to think through the different scenarios, the different pieces on the battlefield, so to speak. Yeah. And sometimes I'll find myself, if I write a memo and I send it to people and there's so many different questions, it's pretty clear to me that, or it's not even the question, it's more so confusion. If there's confusion, then I haven't written a good memo, right? And so after I've done that a couple times, it's embarrassing to feel that. And that makes me want to do a better job for future memos. And that behavior carries on to other people too. And so at my company, at least, or any company that I'm at, If you want to push an idea forward, you're going to write a memo. If you're going to try to take other people's time, then you're going to put up the upfront work first to prove how serious you are about it. And that's what it is. And I found that to be extremely, extremely helpful. And we read the memos in the beginning of a meeting just so everyone reads it because sometimes you might have 10 people in a meeting or whatever and maybe it was like, hey, did everyone read it? Maybe 2 people didn't read it. I've been guilty of that before because you're just too busy, too many things going on, right? But when you set some time aside in the very beginning to talk about it and then you have a messy meeting to kind of discuss all the details and then you make a decision at the end of it, that's a good meeting at the end of the day, right? And that's what we aspire to do. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to Read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, "What do you like most about the group?" She said, "Having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too." Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian. He says, "The ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members. Getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric. Getting advice from other." And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside. We talked about hiring people that are competent, people that have been there, done that, looking for those 10x hires and hiring them no matter what, trying to find a role for them. We should also talk about firing quickly too. And what I would say is once you start to see something's off with someone, I'm not proud of this, but in some cases we fired people in the first week or in some cases actually after the first day. And that's a very bad mistake on our part, more so my part than anything because it's something that I signed off on. Because when you hire someone full-time, you are putting their life in your hands. Yeah. And when you make a decision to fire them on the first day or within the first week, it shows that you didn't do enough due diligence and you are now affecting their lives. And that's not a good thing. And by the way, if your team doesn't help you figure out, hey, like we've made these mistakes a couple times and nobody speaks up, well then you probably need to upgrade your team as well, right? When people start to sit around and they look around at each other, once that happens a couple times, That tells you that your team isn't good enough at the end of the day, right? By the way, if you want to know if your team is good enough, go on vacation. I've done this a couple of times in the past and you'll see where things break. You'll see where things fall apart. And by the way, people will never admit, hey, I really need you to hire someone else, or I don't think I'm a right fit for this type of role. People will seldom say that. And sometimes you just need to go to them and say, hey, hey, Jack, We talked about this a couple times when it comes to recruiting for this certain role or being proactive about it. It doesn't seem like it's quite there. And then Jack will be like, yeah, I'm going to be honest. My energy is more so in this area and this is what I'm world-class at. And I'm happy to do what you're asking me to do, but I just don't think I'm the best at it. I think we should find somebody else for that, right? If that's the case. And by the way, people are scared to say that. It takes a lot of courage for someone to say that because That instantly puts their job on the line, right? And so like my point of where this is all going is you want to fire people quickly and you want to give them warnings quickly, right? Like once you see something's off, ideally just nip it in the bud and say, hey, like when you did this over here, this doesn't quite align with our values here of being improvement obsessed or being reliable. And you just blame it on the values, right? And then after it happens like 2 or 3 times, just, you know, you want to send an email to people and just say, hey, like, you know, we saw this and that. That way you have a paper trail of what's going on. Yeah. And if you need to make a move, then you can make a move quickly, right? But what would be the worst is if you let this person sit around for 6 months, 8 months hoping that they'll get better, but they're just the same over and over. Because ultimately, not only are you going to have to cover the slack, your team's going to have to cover the slack and they're going to be unhappy about that. Again, people, A players like working with A players. And the way I think about this is an A player might do 125 to 150% of the work. And a B player might do 80 to 85%, but that 15 to 20% needs to be made up somewhere by someone else. And that A player, if they're being taken down, they're doing down— they're doing the work of multiple B players. Maybe then the A player's operating at 80% and they're operating at a B player level when they could be operating at an A player level, but other people are dragging them down or doing other people's work, right? So you got to think about that too, that the B players can drag your A players down into becoming B players. And C players might do 10% of the work, all right? And those are pretty easy to identify. It's the B players that are the ultimate passengers that you need to figure out how to move on from at the end of the day, right? Now, if you're a much larger organization, let's say you have tens of thousands of people, yes, you're going to have Bs, you're going to have Cs, right? But I would just encourage you, the smaller you are, as long as you could hold on to recruiting as a founder, hold on to that baby for as long as you can. Because the moment you start to let go, that's when things start to slow down a little bit, right? So you got to make sure that you're keeping the intensity up and your values are permeating throughout the organization, okay? And here's another thing I'll say about this, and maybe this will be a little controversial, but you know, a couple of years ago, you had the Coinbase founder saying, hey, look, you know, all these political issues, these social issues, that's not what our mission is. If that's your mission, then, you know, we offer you— we're offering you severance and you can resign. And 5% of his team, which is quite a bit, resigned. Wow. But you're seeing more organizations push back now at political or social issues that are not necessarily related to the mission of the company. And so I'll just encourage you that whoever you're hiring, especially people that might be in HR at the end of the day, because HR typically what I've noticed is that they follow trends and they follow these social trends, they follow these political trends. You just want to make sure and say, hey, you know what? The one thing that's most important to us is our mission and everything else is secondary to our mission. Our job is to do a good job for our customers and then for our employees. And that's what it is at the end of the day, right? Everything else is icing on the cake. And if you prioritize the other stuff above the mission of the company, then that's not going to work for us. And unfortunately, we're just going to have to part ways, right? That's what I would say without going into too much detail there because that stuff, the outside world stuff can start to become a distraction. And you've got to protect your company from all distractions, whether it's outside influences or getting distracted by other projects. So it all comes down to focus at the end of the day, which is what I talked about earlier in this conversation. The other thing I'll say too is if you're going to run a successful company, you should be thinking about taking breaks regularly. And I'm not saying every year, I'm saying every quarter. So maybe every quarter you go on a 5 to 7-day break. Yeah. And that's not a lot if you think about it at the end of the day. It's, let's say it's 5 times 4, okay, that's 20 days throughout the year, right? That is going to give you time to go recharge. That's going to give you time to go out there and strategize. That also when you're traveling somewhere also gives you perspective too. And I also love the benefits. Sometimes when you're flying long-haul flights, 10-hour flights, 14-hour flights or so, the flights don't have Wi-Fi. And so in that case, you're just really focused. You're locked in. Like for me, I'm not really watching movies as much. Yeah. I'm more so I'm reading stuff. So I'm trying to get ahead, trying to catch up on my reading. Maybe I'm reading books. Maybe I'm just thinking through strategy. Okay, what do we need to do to hit certain things? Who do we need to hire? Who do we need to acquire? All those things. And that level of focus is hard to get in a world where things are— we're looking at our phone all the time. Because by the way, when you're in the air, you can't really look at your phone as easily, right? Like Wi-Fi is getting better and all that, but it's not as easy, right? And so I think the For the next couple years, I think everyone's going to have Starlink in the air soon. And Starlink is really good when you're flying. But before we do, I would say take advantage of that level of focus and take advantage of those breaks. Bring a notepad with you. And I know like Bill Gates, every year he goes on like a— for a week or so, he just goes into the woods or whatever and just goes read. So think about The breaks that you can take quarterly, but also just think about how recharged you're going to be coming out from that. And you're going to have a lot of different ideas. You're going to be energized again. And your team needs you to be energized because again, who's going to bring the energy? You are. Who's going to bring intensity? You are. Who's going to bring the vision? You are. Who's going to uphold the values? You are. And that brings me to another point around it can really hurt sometimes in business if you don't have a partner. So, in some businesses I have partners and some I don't. So, My main business, Single Grain, the ad agency, I actually don't have a partner. And the reason you want a partner is you want someone to be able to share the burden with you. Because again, nobody's going to care as much as the co-founders, okay? Hopefully the co-founders. Sometimes one co-founder cares a lot more than the other one. But point is, when you have someone where you can divide and conquer with, so on one side someone's focusing on sales, Maybe they're focused on the product as well. On the other side, someone's focused on M&A, someone's focused on driving distribution, driving traffic. I don't care how good you are, I don't care how smart you are, I don't care how much of a Superman or Superwoman you think you are, you're still only one person at the end of the day. And I would say again, this entrepreneurship journey is extremely lonely and to not have a partner is difficult. And that's not to say, by the way, you can certainly partner up with another agency later and ask the or other business later. And you can swap equity or you can have them take a smaller share, but they can be partners in the business. And maybe if you acquire a bunch of different companies, I'm just going to say in my case, agencies. Let's say I go buy 10 different agencies and everyone in those, everyone that's running those agencies, they're a superstar. So there's 10 superstars there. Maybe these people can become the executive team and maybe some of those people can be on the board of advisors, right? You can have a board of advisors helping you out. Right. And I would also say too, you know, what I've also learned from a few friends is that if you have someone that you've worked with in the past that you really know, like, and trust, and they can bring a lot to the table, then do it. Like, for example, I had someone that I've worked with a long time ago and he was a COO, he was a CFO, and, you know, he's got an M&A background as well. And, you know, I've always kept in touch with him, right? And I just feel like someday we're going to do something together. And that's what I would say. You can eventually make someone like that one of your partners. And sometimes you could just hire someone even if they don't have the exact experience you're looking for. And sometimes you can take a bet because trust is very hard to come by and you can take a shot there. So that's what else I would say there. You also want to think about your business being the best engine for your financial growth. And I've talked to a lot of my friends about this and it's like, oh yeah, you know, maybe I should go invest my cash flows into these other businesses over here. They have better multiples, these SaaS companies. Or maybe I should do angel investing here. Maybe I should go invest into, you know, the Magnificent 7. Or I should go do, you know, I should go invest in real estate. But talk to all my friends who've done this for a while and we look at the returns and the best returns have always been from your own business. Because you have the most control at the end of the day. You have the most control, you have the most influence, and you know the space really well. You've been compounding in the space for a very long time. And so who better than you than to grow this thing and to grow this thing at 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% a year, right? I'm not saying that can happen forever, but at least in the very beginning. And in the very beginning, you might have like triple-digit growth or so every year. So that's what I'd say. And earlier we also talked about cash flowing to an exit every year instead of building for an exit. If you want to do this for the long term, I look at business as a marathon. I look at this as a game that I'm not going to play for just 1 year, for 5 years, for 10 years. I'm looking at now that I've gotten a little bit of wisdom, I'm looking to play this for multiple decades. And if you want to build something generational, it's going to take decades to do so. 10, 20, 30 years. You look at how long Oracle has been around. You look at how long Microsoft has been around. You look at how long Apple has been around. You look at how— you look at Nvidia has been around for a while as well, over 30 years. Amazon's been around for 30 years. You know, all of them, they just kept compounding over time. Apple almost died. Nvidia almost died multiple times, right? Microsoft didn't die, wasn't close to dying at any point. But a lot of these have had near-death experiences and maybe Microsoft did in the early days, right? But that's what it is. It's, uh, I've learned over the years that your power to endure is much more powerful than I would say any genius or talent that you might have. And so if you can kind of be like a cockroach or beat a tortoise in this race, you're going to win no matter what. It's just that most people give up too easily. Most people sell out too easily. Yeah. And you're not most people if you're listening to this. And because you're not most people, you also want to make sure that you develop the habits of what most people don't do. And so these are simple things, right? I'll start with the simplest of them all. Okay, well, you want to live for a very long time because you're going to be doing this for decades. Ideally, you're doing this to have a nice lifestyle too. You want to take care of your family. Well, you want to be able to play with your kids too, right? So ideally, you should probably have a healthy diet. Okay? So that's one piece of it, right? Eating whole foods, trying to avoid anything that might be inflammatory, and you're going to have to do research for yourself. But for me at least, I have had nutritionists in the past. There's concierge doctors that I've had. So I'll do my blood work every quarter just to understand how I'm trending. And then I can make adjustments with supplements or things that I might need to avoid from a food standpoint. And by the way, if you're in California or maybe you have a salad place near you, it's like we have a Sweetgreen. And Sweetgreen is not that expensive and it's all cooked with olive oil and it's pretty decent, right? And so, you don't need to spend necessarily an arm and a leg, or you could just cook yourself. That's probably the healthiest thing that you can do. And so, a healthy diet goes a long way. Obviously, lifting weights, getting to the gym, Doing cardio, that goes a long way too. Getting your zone 2, your zone 5. And, I'm not a doctor here, I just study a lot of longevity stuff. Making sure you have good sleep as well. So, I put my sleep tape over my mouth. I've been doing that for 8 years or so, so quite a while. And, it's been very beneficial. And, doing the things that are necessary. I'll just say that all these things that I do are to help me operate at a high level. And so, I used to be like, oh, the sauna, the cold plunge, that's stupid. Yeah. But since I have one here anyway, I'm like, okay, yeah, why don't I do it, right? And what's the benefit of that? Like just trying these things, what's the benefit? Oh, I feel sharper. There's an endorphin high too that lasts for a couple hours. It feels good. You get the toxins out of your body. And so again, this is not a longevity post necessarily, but it's just giving you a window into how you might want to think about this stuff because you are your machine and you're trying to optimize your machine as much as possible. So you can play the game for as long as you can. For the people that you like, you can play the game with the people that you like playing the game with for as long as you can, right? So the final thing I'll say is this, and I've kind of alluded to it, but I used to think it was all about the accolades and all about the cash or how much you make or whatever. And that was very early in my career. I quickly learned that was not the way. And then I would say a little later, I learned that the only thing that matters is really just friends and family at the end of the day. How's your community around you? Are you seeing people? Are you doing things that you like with people that you know, like, and trust? And I think that that's what it's all about. And I would even say that even though you have employees in your company, and I certainly, I used to view employees as friends and I realized an issue with that is you become too close and you start to make exceptions here and there. You start to play favorites. But I still think that You can still have employees as friends at the end of the day. It's just a little bit of a different relationship. And that's not to say that they are— I certainly enjoy working with people that I consider friends, but you just want to make sure that you're not playing favorites because that's something that will come back and bite you, right? So that's just something to keep in mind. But ultimately, the only thing that matters, I believe long-term, is friends and family. And you got to ask yourself too, do you actually enjoy what you're doing? And I'll just say, Maybe in the beginning when I took over this agency, because I came from tech, I thought that my poo-poo didn't stink and that I was too good for the agency. So my goal was always to get out of the agency and take the cash flows and reinvest it into other projects or reinvest that cash flows, those cash flows into other areas like other investments. But now I've rewired my mindset to think about, okay, well no, we're just going to compound this for multiple decades and see how big the outcome can be. Because that's going to show how good I am at playing the game. And because I enjoy playing the game, right? So I'm just playing this game right now. And I've always thought to myself when I was younger, because I played a lot of video games and I thought that, I thought that, man, I was going to be screwed in real life because I was like, if I can't find one thing that feels like a game in real life, I'm going to be screwed. And thank God I found marketing first, which felt like a game. And then I found business, which I believe is the ultimate game. So if you look at the work that you do as a game and a never-ending game, an infinite game, then that's something that you're going to play for a very long time. And that's not saying that you have to give it away to your family or whatever. You can decide what you want to do with your money at the end of the day. But if you're enjoying it, why not keep playing? I have friends that came to me and said, oh, I got an offer to sell my company for $500 million. Should I do it? And then I was like, well, then what would you do? And then the phone line goes silent. It's like, yeah, I don't know what I would do. And here's a good story to close things off. So when Yahoo offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion, Mark Zuckerberg would've gotten $250 million out of that. And one of the investors, Peter Thiel, who, you know, of PayPal fame, said, hey Mark, we should really sit down and talk about this. And when they got in the meeting, first 10 minutes or so, Mark was like, hey, I think we're just going to be able to end this in 10 minutes with Yahoo and just tell them we're not taking the offer. And everyone else was like, no, we should— you should really think about this, Mark. You're going to get $250 million, blah, blah, blah. But then Mark was like, well, then what would I do with the $250 million? I don't even know what I would do with it. And I, you know, if I sold the company, I'd probably go build another social network. And I kind of like what I already have right now. So I figure why don't I just keep going? And that's the type of mindset that I think is worth emulating. You can love billionaires or hate them. That's a whole nother conversation. I just think it's, once you start to get into business, you respect the work of people that have gotten to the highest levels. And you know the pain it takes, the excruciating pain that it takes to start things up. And then especially you have to continue to scale up. And the amount of never-ending BS that you have to tolerate, yeah, it's never-ending. And so, some of the things I talked about in here will help you deal with that never-ending BS. But Just understand that you're going to play this game. There's some never-ending BS that you're going to deal with, and that's what you signed up for. So don't cry about it. So that's what I got for you today, and this is about about 50 minutes of 16 years of business wisdom. And let me know what you think in the comments, and if you like videos like this, you want more videos like this, and I'll keep going. But other than that, hope you have a good rest of your day. Talk to you later. Bye.