Bonus episode: A sneak peek of our AOA hangout

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you'll get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy the episode. There's a holding company in Canada and they started as a marketing agency and they ended up acquiring a lot of these different businesses, right? Um, the market cap for that company is maybe just call it $400 million CAD right now, Canadian dollars, right? And, um, you know, that's, that's pretty good. But what Neil and I were saying is like, what would've happened is if this guy focused, right? Because what ended up happening was the agency kicks out a ton of profit, but then he started buying a bunch of different businesses. Um, whereas when you look at, let's just look at Neil's agency, for example, it's bootstrapped. It does, I think, about $120 million a year and $30 million a year in profit. Right. Um, and so there's an argument to stay very focused. And I can tell you one of the biggest mistakes I made, uh, in the very beginning was I'm too good for agency. I don't want to do agency and I want to get back to SaaS. I want to get back to education. I want to do all these things. Right. And I started doing all these different things, but And you, we all have heard this a billion times. Yeah, you gotta focus, right? But I'm like, no, it's, it's fun to not focus. And it is fun to not focus. That, that's the trade-off at the end of the day. The trade-off is you just don't grow as big as you'd like to grow, right? So that I learned that lesson. And, uh, there's a period of time where we had a SaaS company, we had an education thing, we were launching a, launching a book. Um, and then also at the same time, you know, I was, I was angel investing in other companies, um, you know, speaking around the world, uh, you know, bought some companies, right? And then while running the agency as well. It's like, I don't care how smart you are. You just, it's, it's near impossible, right? Unless, you know, love him or hate him, you're Elon and you wanna work 120 to 140 hours a week.

Right.

Even then the guy's kind of breaking a little bit too, right? Like I, I really respect what he's built, but it's really hard to do that.

Right.

And so I think as, as painful as it is, like if you really wanna break 7 figures in the next, next 12 months or so, there's really just one word. It's focus.

Right.

And you've, you've, those of you that listen to the podcast, you've heard us share the Warren Buffett and Bill Gates story so many times around When reporters asked them what is the secret to their success, they both wrote one word on a piece, separate pieces of paper, and then turned it around and it said focus. Um, like I truly believe this agency thing is not as hard as we make it out to be. I know when, when it's like, man, it's gonna take forever to hit 7 figures. It's not that bad. And I would say another thing that changed my life is, um, and you guys have heard me talk about it, Neil used to make fun of me about this, is I, um, joined a group called EO. Right? Entrepreneurs Organization. And all of you right now, it's a worldwide organization. In, in fact, uh, Aliyan, when I went to Tokyo, um, in 2017, an EO guy took care of me. I, I looked at the EO network and EO is like, I don't know, 20 or 30,000 people in the world. And you have to be an entrepreneur. You have to do over 7 figures a year. So a million or more. And I reached out to a bunch of Japanese entrepreneurs. I was like, hey, I'm gonna be in town. Nobody responded except for this one guy. This guy, he took me in the first night. He took me in to eat 2 sushi dinners. One was like a pretty decent spot. The other one, when he took me to Ginza, which is like the Beverly Hills of Tokyo, right? And it's like super expensive sushi. Then he wakes up the next day, he wakes me up. He's like, be awake at 3:30 AM. He picks me up at 3:30 AM with his driver. We go to the fish market, right? Where they're auctioning all the fish and everything. And all that to say, like, he, I ended up hiring his daughter as an intern, but But the guy's super connected. His agency does $200 million a year, and he was the president of a chapter where it's all publicly traded companies. But he was taking care of a little guy like me, um, who just happened to be an EO member, right? And so it, it kind of becomes this cult thing. Um, Neil and I were in this group now called YPO, and it's, it's like, it's, it's a different kind of group. Um, but the first day that Neil joined YPO, he's like, I don't know why I listen to you. You know, all these things, this is a complete waste of time, blah, blah, blah. And then earlier this week when I saw him where we were recording podcasts, he's like, oh yeah, you know, I talked to someone that's doing $1 billion a year in revenue and they said they're in YPO. He's like, oh, I'm in YPO too. But it just instantly changes the conversation. Your deal cycle goes a lot faster. And because you're part of this cult, right? So you can look at EO, you can look at YPO, you can look at Hampton, right? YPO is $13 million a year or more, or like you can qualify on $20 million in valuation. EO's a million or more, but all of you here, if you're 6 figures, you can join EO Accelerator. That's for people that are doing 6 figures to help you get to 7 figures. So take a look at that. I'm not forcing you to do it right now, but I will say that's one of the biggest things that changed my life. 'Cause when I was 24, 25 years old, I had reached out to an entrepreneur who had a social media agency. His name's Dave Kerpin. He had a company called Likeable. And I was like, so like, tell me the biggest thing that changed your life as an entrepreneur. He's like, EO. And I was like 25 years old. I'm like, oh, 7 figures. I'll never qualify for that. Right. But then 2 years later, you know, we, we, we, I found a way to like angle into EO, right? So I'm just saying, hey, like you're in this community right now, Neil and I, we look at this group as the unbundling of YPO. So, you know, there's, there's groups for, there's a group called Dental Entrepreneurs Organization. We look at this as basically Agency Owners Association, right? It's the EO for agency owners. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't join the other ones because it's going to open up your network quite a bit. So I will shut up for a second. Does that make sense to everyone? Anybody have any follow-ups on that? Was that helpful at all?

Okay.

All right, real quick, I need to tell you about the group that Neil and I created called the Agency Owners Association. And this is a group that's similar to entrepreneurial organizations such as YPO or EO. By the way, Neil and I are both in YPO, but we thought it'd be really cool If we're able to create a group that's dedicated to agency owners to helping them scale. So you can be at 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures. We have different groups for different levels. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, that's marketingschool.io/agency and you can go there to apply. And I will tell you right now what we're doing is there's an online community. We do calls every now and then. There's stuff that we share in there that we don't share publicly. And you can at least the online community, you can cancel at any time. So you can go there to learn more about it. And that being said, back To the video. Now I'm gonna answer some of the questions that you guys can ask too, but I, I, because 3 of you upvoted Chris Schneider's question, he's not here today, but, um, he wanted to know the best platform to focus on from a B2B organic content standpoint. Um, is that a question still worth addressing in here? I see a thumbs up, John. Thumbs up, Amber. Okay, we're good.

Cool.

I feel like there's a good analogy here where it used to be that when you publish blog posts, that, um, that your blog posts would get reach. You would look forward to someone publishing blog posts like back in the day, like James Clear, for example, or, um, there are a bunch of tech writers that I would, I would follow. Now that's not the case anymore. Now a lot of people go to organic reach from LinkedIn or Twitter, right? Um, I would say, you know, if you guys are targeting B2B, I personally like testing my content on Twitter first because it doesn't penalize you for posting many times a day. Um, and seeing what takes off. Now you might say, hey, I don't have an audience on Twitter. Well, in that case, maybe just focus on LinkedIn more. But if you do have somewhat of an audience, let's say, I don't know, 500, 1,000, 2,000 followers or so on Twitter, it's worth, it's worth posting there. And then I look at social media as a slot machine, right? You just don't know what's gonna take off sometimes. Like I have some, some, some tweets that have, you know, a couple hundred thousand, uh, views on them and I don't know why. Um, some stuff just hits, some, some stuff doesn't. The stuff that does hit, Then I'll just carry it over to LinkedIn. I think the key thing is, so I showed some of you last time, I have an hourglass over here. This is a 30-minute hourglass, and this just— it's weird because like when I turn it around, it starts to go for 30 minutes, and I just, I'm like, okay, I need to lock in and focus on writing for the next 30 minutes. Ideally, if you can dedicate an hour a day to writing and compound, try that for just 30 days. That's going to go a long way. The other thing I would say Is I'm doing this. Um, any of you know the newsletter Morning Brew? Not really? Okay, whatever. Um, so the Morning Brew, one of the co-founders, uh, Alex Lieberman, we became accountability buddies for writing and, um, it's been really good. So he, he commits to writing for 30 minutes a day. I commit to writing 500 words per day. I'm behind by like 1,500 words right now, but we, we catch up, right? Sometimes he'll fall behind, but the key thing is each day we're, we're texting each other. It's like, 500 words. Here's what I wrote over here. Oh, would be keen to get your feedback over here. This one will love a little love, right? Um, I, I would like a little love on this post over here. And, um, having that accountability buddy, if, if, you know, you guys want to be accountability buddies here, try it for 30 days at least, because that's how long it takes to develop a new habit. It's like, oh, I have to do work. Of course you have to do work. Like, nobody's just going to give you a 7-figure business, right? Um, more on that later. But, you know, as an example, I spend a lot of time Creating content. I, I wish, I know, like there's no regrets for me every single day after I write. It's just like finishing a workout. I never say I regret a workout. It's the same thing. And those of you that are willing to do it, I guarantee you'll be able to build an audience. And here, I'll give you a good example here. Do you guys know retention.com? Okay. Some, some of you know, by the way, it's, it's, if you guys have clients in e-commerce, Go check out retention.com. It'll basically enrich the people visiting your website. There's a lot that you can do with it. So Adam Robinson, the founder, so he basically bootstrapped that company to $22 million a year in annual recurring revenue. And I was talking to him, we were both speaking at a conference maybe about a month ago, and he was just saying, oh my God, this LinkedIn thing, it's amazing. Like, I just started sharing things transparently and things are taking off for us. We're getting, you know, so much reach. We're getting— we got like 2,500 demos from LinkedIn in the last 90 days or so.

We got—

we have— we're Our sales team is engaging with people that are engaging with our posts. And I mean, there are agency owners that built their agencies just off of LinkedIn from $0 to $18 million a year. Um, there, there's, uh, Chris Walker from Refined Labs. That's a good example. There's actually, there's, there's, uh, Amber, there's someone else in Vancouver that I met. I think he built his agency to like $7 or $8 million a year just leveraging LinkedIn, right? So you guys have unique stories, you guys have unique experience shares. I think it's just a matter of finding your voice and, and getting the suckage out of your body. And then once you feel that, hey, I'm in a good flow, just keep doing it. And if you like it after 30 days, do it for the next 12 months or so, right? Challenge yourself. All right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about Leveling Up Founders. This is an event/mastermind for people doing 7, 8, 9 figures. These are founders that are doing that amount. And we've been doing this event for a couple of years now. We've had amazing speakers, but more than anything, it's about the people. What I mean by that is like-minded people want to hang out with like-minded people, and this is the best spot to connect with people of a certain caliber. And we vet every single person that comes through. So if people are— even though they make a lot of money, but their character, we don't really align with that, we're not necessarily going to let them in. We did this event in Beverly Hills, and it's happening in the beginning of August. All you have to do to learn more about it is just go to levelingup.com/founders. Again, it's levelingup.com/founders. If you want to hang out with amazing people, Neil, my podcast co-host, is going to be there. I'm going to be there. People like Syed Balkhi, he will be there as well. And again, it's going to be a great time. levelingup.com/founders to learn more, and we'll see you inside.

So, you know, general agency here, we don't have access to big platforms to grab numbers and all that kind of stuff and to serve a lot of wide range. You know, people are talking about all sorts of great content. Out there and there's just tons of noise. How in the world do you rise above that when you're just, you're, you're good at what you do, but you don't have unique insights per compared to marketing school, for instance, which has access to tons of data that's out there to provide new stuff. How do we raise above, rise above the noise when we're just a general agency that just does good work for their customers?

What's the most interesting experiment or win you've had in the last 30 days for your clients?

Well, there's a number of different ones, but most customers don't want you talking about that kind of stuff.

You don't need to cite them.

Fair.

Yeah. So you have a— these are experience shares, right? And in YPO and EO, when you're with your forum, like you saw earlier, I shared a couple of stories. These stories, like people align with stories at the end of the day, people align with experience shares. A lot of time I'll share examples, but I don't call out who it is. It's like, oh, I have this buddy that does, you know, $100 million a year. And like they ran this experiment over here and this increased their click-through rate on YouTube by like, you know, 4,000%. or something. Actually, there was a reel that I did. I was sharing a story about this one agency that charges $15,000. Oh no, sorry, $35,000 a month to produce like 5,000 short-form videos. And they will help people get hundreds of millions of views per month from these short forms. And that, I didn't expect that video to take off. It took off. And here's the funny thing. I think at least 16 people in the comments were like, Who's the agency? Who's the agency? Who's the agency? Who's the agency? And then I didn't reveal it because I didn't want to like call them out. But then that agency eventually found it and they're like, oh, it's us. Right. Um, and then from that one, I actually had 2 or 3 people reach out. I was like, should we work with them? Should we like, we'll pay the $35 grand a month. That's a lot of money, by the way. Um, so sharing these stories, there's a couple of, couple of threads here. Sharing these stories and then just anonymizing them works really well. And then the other lesson is it, it goes back to my slot machine theory. It's like, you just don't know what's going to take off. And so you just keep Keep playing.

And you're saying use LinkedIn as the predominant place for getting content out?

If your customers are there hanging out, yeah.

Sure.

Anybody else? Any other questions, follow-ups before we continue on?

I have a question not related to what you were talking about. That works.

Yeah, sure.

So recently there's been a lot of articles and blog posts talking about how Reddit is ranking in the SERPs. And Google said, or someone at Google, I believe, said how that wasn't really necessarily the case and they don't necessarily favor the content, but they also have like a $60, $70 million annual deal with Reddit. So I'm wondering what you think about all that.

Yeah, we, um, let me see if I can find that tweet. But, um, basically since I think a couple months ago, there's a graph, there's an Ahrefs graph for Quora and Reddit, and their traffic is just like parabolic right now. So whatever the Google rep says, you have, you know, they have to like protect themselves. Um, but when you do look at the, the, the SERPs from an SEO standpoint, yeah, Reddit is getting favored heavily and Quora. And the, I think it's when you, you gotta think about other engines too. You think about, um, generative engines such as Perplexity.ai, they actually cite Reddit quite a bit. And we're actually getting more inquiries now for people looking to optimize their Reddit, whether it's like their community management or just optimizing Reddit in general, because they know that Google's favoring it more. And I think we're going to continue to see that.