Here's How Our Businesses Are Being Impacted Right Now

On a side note, how's your business doing in this environment?

I think— so we were both talking about this at lunch. Neil and I were sitting with a few friends and business for me, it's similar to yours.

I would say it's really—

I would say it's slow because I feel like everyone's hesitant right now because of all the things that are going on. And I want to hear your thoughts in a second, but the other thing I would say too is that for me, lead flow has actually slowed down. It's not like our traffic has gone down, but lead flow has actually slowed down. And your lead flow is still the same, right?

No lead flow. Are you talking about total lead flow or enterprise lead flow?

Both.

Enterprise lead flow is up, shockingly. Okay, total lead flow is down. But I think enterprise— and I look at them as 2 different animals, right? Enterprise organization that's looking for a big contract for a company to help them in multiple regions. It goes back to the old saying for these type of companies, you never get fired for hiring IBM. I'm not saying my company's like IBM. We don't have that kind of trust. We haven't been around for 50 or 100 years. I don't know how old IBM is. I don't think they're 100, but they're probably quite old. But what we found is the longer we've been in market, the more RFPs we get, assuming we go to the right events like this or other ones where it's like true enterprise. And when I say true enterprise, I would say YPO for us is more mid-market. True enterprise would be like CMOs, VP of Marketing, where it's all company, most of them are publicly traded. And when I look at like, I was just looking at my Brazil numbers, even though my ad agency is around 7 years old, Brazil's at least 1 year older. So it's 8. They started the Brazil agency before we even started in the United States. They had 36 RFPs last year. Our website traffic is down in Brazil, I would say around 6x roughly, I'm rounding here.

Wow.

From its peak. But a lot of our website traffic wasn't driving RFPs. It was driving the wrong type of customers. So we shift our marketing strategy from focusing on website traffic to focusing on things like interviewing the CMO of McDonald's on a podcast. Do you still do that? Yeah, we still do that. We do a lot of that and we do it globally. So the leaders—

Do you like doing it?

No.

I do it.

But the leaders within the different countries do quite a bit of it. And then what we'll do is we'll speak at events like this. We'll do partnerships with others. We still do create web traffic like SEO, but it's more targeted towards keywords that would be more applicable to enterprise. But again, 36 last year to this year, we're already at 18 in April and this is just in Brazil. So it's on track to well exceeding last year's. And in the United States, last year we averaged 25 RFPs in 2024. So around 2 a month in the United States. So call it in April of last year in the United States, we are around 8 or 9, I'm guessing, because we ended up at 25, but average is 2 a month. I do know for a fact in the US, we actually have matched our Brazil number in which we're exactly at 18 RFPs in the United States. But we are seeing longer times to make decisions, people more hesitant. And the way I look at the whole space is Dude, even if marketing as an industry is getting hit and people are spending less because of tariffs and all this, you know, economic crap that's happening, if there was 10,000 RFPs that are going out in a given year— I'm making up a number, but it's something massive like that— and it's shrunken down to like 9,000 in this bad economy, or 8,000, well, dude, maybe last year— I don't know my total global numbers, but let's call it sub-200. We were such a small percentage that you can still grow when things are getting bad, at least when you're small like us.

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We'll play it longer than you." What do you mean by eat bitterness?

Eat bitterness means they know how to take pain. That's what it really means, right? Um, so they're saying, oh, oh, okay, you want to play this art of the deal thing? Okay, we'll play it out, and we'll play it out even longer than you guys, and we can take pain for a long time. And then the problem for them— the, the problem for us, actually, for the United States— is they dictate from the top down. So whatever they dictate from the top down, the people have to listen, right? In this— in our country, it's not really like that. And so I, I think what's happening right now is they're playing a game of chicken. Um, I do— I, I still hold out hope that a deal will be done, and And most things will go back to normal. I think we're gonna— everything's gonna come down to, for, for most countries where US is charging a 10% tariff on everything, that's where I think we land on everything.

Yeah, and the US, even though the president is top-down, he still has to deal with all the people underneath. I don't know how it is in China.

Yeah, you know, it's mostly just, you're gonna do as we say, and like, hopefully you trust me type of thing. And I'll be honest with you, I mean, um, if we, if we go back in time, you think about World War II real quick, um, it was Roosevelt, right? He was president, I think, for 12 or 16 years, and that's why the 2-term limit came in. Um, and he was a really good president, I think, for the most part. And basically what happened, the, the logic here is that because he, he was president for so long, he started to build like a— it almost appeared like a monarchy, right? And so that's why the government started becoming bigger and bigger, and, um, that's why our government is so bloated today. That's one of the reasons, right? Uh, my point of saying this is that if you have a really good, you know, leader who people would prefer that leader stay in power for a long time. I think right now, I don't know enough about China, but it seems like people are okay with it being dictated top-down.

I'm assuming they don't have the problems that— I wouldn't say problems, but in the United States, a lot of states, I think it was like 12, are trying to sue them over tariffs. I'm assuming they don't have those things in China.

No, they don't. In our country, yeah, the short answer is they don't have that problem because it's just like, no, you're going to listen to us. But here, Everyone's fighting each other and that's not productive. Like, imagine if you're running a company, everyone's fighting each other. How can you get anything done?

Well, I know a lot of people who donated to both political parties on the business end in the United States, both Harris and Trump. And a lot of these corporations and individuals are really wealthy. Like, uh, quite a few of them are on the Forbes list. No, I don't know Soros. Uh, I don't know anyone even close to him.

No, I mean Soros donated.

Yeah, he did. No, but I'm saying I personally know quite a few people who are wealthy on the Forbes list who donated, uh, on both sides. And the problem that people have, whether it's good or bad, rich people don't like their businesses. And most of them are invested in business directly from what they created, or their money is in businesses through the stock market. They don't like when things start going bad. Whether it's good for the long run or it's bad for the long run, they don't care. And my team and I, we were curious to see what people are concerned about the most recently. So instead of running a survey, which a lot of people do, saying like, this is, you know, like people ran a survey on Trump. I don't know if you saw, they said he has the worst ratings on the economy than he ever did on first term or currently.

Right now.

Yeah, right now. We just looked at all the news sites. And if you look at the news sites, they mainly talk about the economy, terrorists, recession, jobs, people spending less, people gambling less in Las Vegas, airlines reforecasting. You don't really see them talking as much about Ukraine. You don't really see them talking much about Israel. They're focused on the economy is bad. Is this gonna be recession? Are people gonna be in trouble? You mean the media? The media. That's what they're talking about more than anything else right now from what When we started scraping all the news sites to just quickly see what they're discussing.

Yeah, and that's what's top of mind right now. So, to your point, we're not wired to care about the long-term. But if you can think long-term, if you can wire yourself to care about the long-term like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, then you're going to be more successful than most people. But we're just not wired to think like that. You have to reframe your mind. I do believe though, like let's take Trump out of the equation for a second. When Scott Bessen says maybe we do need to take some medicine and to kind of, you know, You know, solve this can that we've been kicking down the road for a while. I do believe it needs to happen, um, as, as bad as it sounds. Like, I do think it's better for the long term, um, but that's just my, my 2 cents.

Yeah, the business is suffering right now and people are suffering. The question is, what are they gonna do? What is the right solution? People don't really— when you think about long-term, majority of the people barely have any money in their bank account.

Yeah, I mean, I think most people have less than a month saved. Like, most people can't even take out like $1,000 or $2,000 if they need to.

Correct. So, when you look at it from that perspective—

They don't care.

Yeah, they don't care because they won't be able to survive. And I'm not saying we shouldn't think about long-term. The tricky balance is for people in power, how do you solve long-term problems while not creating much short-term pain?

And that's beyond our pay grade, but that is a deep question, right? It's like, how do you solve that while not putting people— not putting the economy into a recession, which I actually believe we're in a recession right now. All right guys, so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. Let us know what you think about this episode where we recorded with the DJI Osmo. I set this up myself. We got another camera over there. So that being said, we'll see you tomorrow.

Peace.