How You Should Price Yourself as an Operator Creator

You and I have been talking about how we've been taking more influencer deals. And so I was just thinking about how you should price yourself as a creator-operator or an operator-creator. So how you should price yourself as an operator-creator. And what I mean by this is if you own a business and you also happen to be a content creator. And so Neil owns a business, I own a business, I see ourselves as kind of secondary content creators. Would you agree with that?

Yes.

Okay. So I believe that most creator-operators, Operators are, they're underpricing themselves. I think that if you're making less than $1 million a year, ideally you're not doing any of these deals at all where people are offering you to do a post. But if you're going to take one, maybe you're charging $3,000. Okay. If you're under $1 million, if you're doing $1 million to $5 million a year, maybe you're charging $5,000 to $10,000. If you're doing $5 to $10 million a year, you're charging $10,000 to $25,000. If you're making $10 million plus a year, charge $25,000. And what I mean by this is per post. Okay. So someone might ask Neil, do a video.

Okay.

Video is going to be $25,000. You want me to do a LinkedIn post? Okay, $25,000. In some cases, you know, it will be even more than that, right? But most of the time right now when people are messaging me, I don't know how it is for you, Neil. I just say, you know, I always say it starts at $25,000, okay? And I would say maybe 25 to 30% of people say, okay, let's talk. But the rest of them are like, they're like, oh, we can't afford it, right? And that's good. This is a good thing because the opportunity cost of being taken away from running your business is actually worth more than the $25,000 or whatever that you're being paid. And so, you know, I remember the other day, um, someone, someone sent us a message and they're like, oh, but you only get X amount of views. But it was very disrespectful, right? I'm like, yeah, that's why I charge, you know, $25,000 plus because I'd have to deal with people like you. And so I'm just saying that you have to have some standards when you're going to, when someone reaches out to you, because I think more and more of these B2B creator-operator, operator-creator type deals are going to pop up. Um, and the vast majority of time, I don't know about you, Neil, but I get irritated having to make them. Um, so yeah.

Yes. It's not, for me, it's not fun. Uh, but you may be like, all right, that's cool.

And the other problem too, as Neil looks at his phone. So the other problem I'll tell you is, is one, you don't want to do it. Okay. You end up doing it and you, and you start, you get treated like a, like a second-class citizen. And then it's not, then it takes you out of your, your mojo when it comes to running your business and operating your business.

Right.

It's not just like a, like a one, like a 5-minute post or whatever. You have to work on the script with them. Sometimes you even have to get on a call with them. And so it might not be—

I don't have to do any of that. I have a team that does any of that. I still don't like it though.

Yeah, but I'm saying the call has to happen and then they write the script for you and then you say something that you don't want to say. It's, it's a lot of like, it just doesn't feel like you, right? But my point of saying this is it sounds like maybe we're coming from a place of privilege and I would say maybe we are, but you're going to make a lot more money in the long term Focusing on your business. The other problem too is if you focus too many on too many of these creator deals, you end up getting sucked into this creator world because, you know, $10 grand a pop, $25 grand a pop, you do a few of these, it starts to add up and you're like, man, I'm really doing well right now. And you are personally, but it's not good for your business.

So funny. I'm like, oh, I, I don't want to buy a Tesla because it's too expensive, but I really want a new Tesla.

Is that what you're texting right now in the middle of this thing?

On the Tesla?

Yeah, someone's texting images of a Tesla. This guy, man, no microphone texting about Teslas. Look at this.

I want a new Tesla Model Y because it'll save me time every single day because I spend so much time driving.

Here's your problem. You keep talking about this one and then this one's like, I'm just like, you should just get it.

It's too expensive though. It's like $57 grand. But I was like, oh, I could do an influencer deal and I'll get it for less.

You had more expensive cars than this one and it's a way better car.

But I'm trying to live a, uh, an, an, uh, more modest life.

No, okay, see, that's the— that's BS. See, that is what we call disingenuous. Okay, so, but yeah, maybe you should do— you should— I I think 1 or 2 of these posts should get you that car.

Yeah. So I haven't done an influencer deal. Well, technically I did 2 in December. We're in December, but they were signed earlier. Now we get hit up a lot for influencer deals. We usually just ignore them and never respond back. We don't even respond with budget. We just don't respond. The 2 I did, they were with current clients. I tend to only do them in 2 circumstances. One, current clients. or B, with companies that I want as a client, but they're not going to be as a client. And I would look at who's hitting me up because if it's another ad agency hitting me up, it's not going to help me get them as a client. So I need the company to actually reach out and then I can get in the door and potentially get more contracts with them. But I don't do influencer deals unless it's one of those two. And I'm pretty flexible. I think I only just charge like $50 grand, but it's just for one post. And when I say I only charge $50 grand, I think I only charge $50 grand, not $49, not $45. It's just $50, take it or leave it. I've done deals where I charge $100,000, but then what I found is when you start charging like $100,000, they start wanting a lot more quote unquote involvement, and the involvement isn't worth it. At $50,000 though, I can jump on a call. I usually don't even have to jump on a call, but sometimes I'll jump on for like 5 minutes, introduce them to my team. My team handles the scripting and everything. We'll send it to me for my approval, then send it to them, coordinate everything, the postings, the scheduling, what they want. And then I just go in and when I'm filming my other content, no joke, it's usually short form. I can do it in less than 1 minute and 1 take, and that's it.

You know what's interesting? Um, this platform that we're hosting on, they actually just reached out recently. They're like, oh, we want to sponsor this and then the podcast, whatever. I was like, hey, we're podcast down, but hey, for the other ones, we're probably charging you at least $25, if not $50.

So— You know my favorite sponsor that we've ever had? Is what?

DreamHost.

Okay. Other than that one, uh, yes, Financi. That was a really amazing—

For the record, we'll give the details on the DreamHost one because it's been so long already.

That one's true.

For 3 years, they paid us $60 grand a month for 3 years. They never asked for any metrics, never asked for anything, and they were a great partner. We really—

We sent them metrics, but they didn't care for it. We would have to send them metrics.

Yes. And yeah, I mean, we're getting like 1.2 million downloads a month, so yeah.

Yeah. And I would say my favorite sponsor other than that is— I forgot the name. I should know it. The suitcase company.

Oh, Sterling Pacific.

Uh-huh. Sterling Pacific.

There you go. Do you use the suitcase?

I have used the suitcase. It's really good. Yeah. Have you used yours yet?

I haven't used it yet. I'm too scared. I keep using my old Rimowa here because I like— it's too beautiful to use. It's like a stupid reasoning in my head, but But it's like, here, look, I still have it over here.

Like, I still have it.

I still have it in its cover.

Dude, so check this out, okay? So I traveled with my Sterling Pacific suitcase, and my dad ended up taking me over to his house, picked me up, spent some time there. And then, what was it called? I had more luggage and stuff like that. I couldn't fit it all in my trunk because my dad wanted me to take some stuff that was mine. Like, I have a lot of old clothes at my dad's house and my wife was just like, hey, we should go sell this stuff. I forgot what website she uses, but you can sell like designer clothes and make some money. And I have like—

Etsy?

Uh, not Etsy. Uh, what is it? We get checks from them every once in a while. I should know the name, but like, I have so many designer clothes that I never wore in the past and now I just wear like Vuori or whatever it is. Um, so I didn't have room in the car for all the suitcases because I didn't want to put the suitcase on top of like suits and stuff. I had no joke. I sold 19 suits on that website. I only have one suit left, and that was a suit that I wore at your mom's funeral. And so my dad held the suitcase. So then when I got back the stuff from my suitcase, he was coming over to my house like a week later, and he's like, oh, mom washed your clothes. We'll just bring you all the clothes. Everything's clean. I was like, oh, thanks. Sounds good. He kept the suitcase, but gave me back the clean clothes.

I figured he kept it.

And he's like, I like the suitcase. He's like, you have so many. And he's like, but I cleaned your clothes for you. I was like, oh, thanks.

That's awesome. Yeah. But Sterling Pacific has been great. They worked. I mean, that was through a mutual friend of ours, Guy Tano. And I saw him with it. I was like, oh, this is a really nice suitcase. He put me in touch with them and then we got a very simple deal done and we talked about them. And then I think they ended up running ads towards that short-form video as well. So yeah, but the point that we bring that up is because they were very easygoing and we didn't need to charge them like, you know, $25,000 or $50,000 or something like that. It was just a great product and we're happy to talk about it. Yeah.

So, but no, I think that that model works out really well in getting sponsorships. You just have to make sure that you really love the brand, you care for it, because if you don't— because Eric and I have had a lot of potential sponsorship inquiries for Marketing School and we said no to most of them. And the reason we said And no to most of them, especially at the beginning, we're like, crap brand, crap brand, we don't like it, terrible product. It's just like, we don't want to end up pitching something that we really hate. It's just a shitty feeling. And then forget it getting out of your zone, it's just like you feel scummy to your followers.

Mm-hmm.

And it's just not the same feeling. And then I also believe that you lose trust at the same time. Yep.

That being said, I mean, look, if it's, again, if it's a big brand, we'll think about it and we'll take it. But the other thing too is, yes, you lose trust with your brand, or sorry, with your audience. But I don't know, I mean, again, if you go too far into the, I'm enjoying this content creation game and I like the commissions I'm getting paid or the sponsorships I'm getting paid, what ends up happening is you become a content creator, not a business person first. And I've seen, you and I have talked about this and we should talk about this for a sec because yesterday we were talking about business creators. You were sending me some reels. Right. And then we see one guy who's a CPA who Neil likes every single one of this guy's videos.

It's so legit because Eric's interviewed some of the people that he's had on his podcast in the past. And like, dude, they just spit so much bullshit. And I'm not a CPA, but I would say, you know, I'm pretty modest on when I say like, I'm decent at something. Like I'll say I'm a decent marketer, but I'll never say I'm the best.

You're pretty good at the tax stuff.

I'm pretty good at taxes. Like, I'm probably better than most CPAs.

Yeah, you're probably better at taxes than you are as a marketer. Would you say that?

I probably am better at taxes than I am as a marketer. That is probably a true statement.

So, okay, but going back to— and we should talk about like what were these creators in a second, because, um, what happens is there, there, there's nothing wrong with, with this, right? But they've been sucked into the creator world where everything's a sponsorship deal and everything is like, oh, I need, you know, managers to manage a sponsor and then I need this editing team over here, all these things. And you forget That, that's maybe not the best way to build a sustainable business for the long term. Um, and that when we look at these guys, what ends up happening is the content you create, you have to become more and more sensational. And what ends up happening is you start to bullshit your audience. And then what happens after that is you have guys like this CPA who start calling you out on your bullshit. And then what happens is you have to start to react to being called out and it starts to become a game that you shouldn't be playing in the first place. Yeah.

Like one of them, there was this girl called Your Rich BFF. Okay. And she created a video on the Trump family burying Donald Trump's ex-wife on his golf course. For tax purposes.

So he can get a whole write-off for his old golf course.

It doesn't work that way. Like, I don't even need to read a book on taxes to know this. And I read a lot of books and articles on taxes because I don't just focus on taxes in the United States. I focus on taxes in roughly 28 countries because we operate in 28 countries. So I learn all the taxes for every single country to not break the law, but to do what's efficient and makes sense from a legal aspect. I don't like playing in gray areas really, but it's more so just following the laws and being as tax efficient as you can. And it's just like people start creating content on just the most ridiculous things to get likes. Like, there was this other video that he went on and this girl's just like, You know, I bought a home with cash. I shouldn't have bought it with cash. I should have just put 20% down so I get a write-off on the whole thing. You can't get a write-off on your house. You can write off a portion of your interest if you're a real estate professional and it's a rental property and you list it for rent. You can start doing things like bonus depreciation, but you got to start proving these things. You've got to do cost segregation to do that. But like, when you think about all these tax loopholes and stuff like that, and I'm familiar with a lot of them, not just on a federal level or not just on a country level, But also on a state level, or at least for the United States, like when you do bonus depreciation, bonus depreciation on real estate property does not work in the state of California. It works federally, but it does not work on the state of California. State of California, you have to straight-line it anyways. You can do a cost segregation and certain things you can start depreciating a little bit quicker in the state, but they don't accept the bonus depreciation. the way the federal government does. And the point I'm getting at this is, Eric's spot on. We're starting to see way too many people on social media just create content that's just a ton of bullshit so they can get likes. And it makes me just start disliking these people and be like, I don't care if you claim you worked at Goldman Sachs, you have no clue what you're talking about. Focus on what you know. Stop talking about all this bullcrap.

Well, here's the thing. So there's a period of time, maybe 2, 3 years ago or so, where I was interviewing these people and I was enjoying the interviews, don't get me wrong, But it was actually distracting me from my business. So I saw a path where I was starting to pick the guests for the sake of how many views I could get. And sure, I enjoyed talking about sex, finance, relationships, all these things, right? Sure, hundreds of thousands of long-form views, but—

Hundreds of thousands?

Yeah.

You got millions of some of them.

That's short-form views.

Short-form, some of them, I bet you got over a million views, guaranteed.

No, short-form was like 7 to 8 million views on some of these, right? Um, actually, no, that 7 to 8 million views one was with you and me talking about discounts. So— Oh yeah, on the mall.

Yeah. Italy, but you had another one with Your Rich BFF, the same one that the guy called out, and she's talking about in your video, which went viral. If you want to do well in the corporate world, she's claiming that you need to switch jobs every, what, 2 years or a year and a half or something like that?

Yeah.

If you look at the most successful or the most— if you look at the CEOs with the highest comp packages who are billionaires now, Tim Cook, Satya from Microsoft, Sundar from Google, What have they done consistently? They've stayed with the same company for a very long time.

Yep.

Like, her gospel that you need to switch a job every year and a half or 2 years or whatever it is, it's just a bunch of bull. You know why some people keep switching jobs to get promotions? Because they suck at what they do. If you're really good at what you do, the company will see value and you should get promotions and do better. And if you can't, that means either the company you work for sucks, Or you suck and you just don't see it, or there's some sort of disconnect and your value is not seen by them and vice versa, right? But that concept that you need to switch jobs every year and a half, no, you need to get better at what you're trying to do so the company sees value in you.

I will say though, when I first, um, I think her advice on that one, it depends. Like, if you're early in your career, maybe the first couple years you can do that, but after that, people need to see consistency. They need to see tenure. They need to see a history of promotions because My very first year working full-time, Neil, I actually switched 5 jobs in the first year. And every job, I just, I got better and I got more pay each time. Um, and then I started to settle down, right? Because I, I was more so chasing the opportunity, not necessarily chasing money. I just didn't feel like I was growing quickly enough. So literally 2, 3 months in, I didn't feel like I was growing enough. I would switch. But your, your future employer doesn't want to see that. They want to see consistency because they want to know that they can rely on you for at least 2 to 3 years, if not more, because that's typical tenure. The final thing we'll say on this, and I want to move on, um, is again, I have— Neil has tried this too. We've tried going long-form wide TAM on this content before, and like, sure, it gets views, don't get me wrong, but it pulls us in the wrong direction. It doesn't feel good, and it doesn't drive conversions for our main business ultimately.

Yeah, and when we say it doesn't drive conversions for our main business, what Eric's saying is it doesn't drive conversions for us at all. Maybe if we wanted to do something else, it would drive conversions, but not for what we do. Some of Eric's friends know me from creating an article back in the day, like I spent X hundred thousand dollars on clothes and this is what it did for me. A lot of people came up to me for years after that being like, wow, you're the guy who spent all this money on clothes. That was a cool experiment. Generated $0 in revenue.

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Wait, wait, wait, who's telling him to do other work?

The manager, which this is what led to this tweet over here. Okay, so I put in air quotes over here. I said, look, people who say I don't have time to learn AI, I'm too busy with work, that's the biggest BS excuse because The definition of work, right, is you want to be useful to your company, but the definition of useful is changing. So the way you might have designed, you know, in the— back in the day is you might have designed creative by hand. Well, today you're orchestrating different workflows for maybe 10x the output or for recruiting us as an example. If we're sourcing, we're using sourcing and screening agents for 10x the output. Okay. And so that's the world that we're going into and we can't— we can bring you to water, but we can't make you drink. And in my mind, I'm just like, dude, there's no escaping this future, okay? We're going to bring you with us. Like, we want to bring our teams with us, and— but we're also going to move on very quickly from people who don't want to jump on the journey. And we're going to— like, my whole thing is you got to do it quickly because I just talked about last week, I spoke to Wade from Zapier, and he's like, yeah, we cut 10% of our staff. I'm like, why'd you cut 10%? He's like, because these people didn't want to come along for the journey. Obviously, there's other reasons too, but it just— if you're not— it's not even just the AI thing. This is a very easy way to see who's down to learn right now and get better and who's constantly trying to get 1% better every single day. And if you don't want to do it, it's okay. Just don't do it here. But I still see right now, like, I'm just— we're trying to bring— like, I'm very focused on AI fluency for 2026 because 2025 we talked about a lot, but we didn't do it. And no matter how much you try to show people, now we're going to bring people along for the ride. But if they still don't want to do it, like, you got to go, man.

And if you wanted to pick one thing for your team and marketing or anyone should get better on. One thing that I would recommend, because everyone's talking about AI right now, that's fine, but I think people lack data fluency and just basic understanding of how data works. And I'll give you a great example of this. So I was shooting long-form content yesterday because I'm traveling for a few weeks. I shot 4 videos yesterday. It took me, you know, almost a month's worth of content depending on if there's 4 weeks or 5 weeks, and we'll get the shorts from it too. But it took me no more than an hour and 30 minutes, maybe an hour and 20-ish minutes.

That's good timing.

Yeah, so I'm pretty efficient. And when I was recording, I take breaks in between because my back starts hurting and I stretch and get up and all that kind of stuff. But I did something called like the marketing roundtable with my team. All right. And it was the idea of some of the people that help us with our content creation. So we sat down in a room, we recorded for roughly an hour and just spitballing about the topic of search everywhere optimization. I thought the content was good. My view count wasn't that great, and the guy who's helping film my marketing stuff, he tells me yesterday, he's like, "You know what, Neil? We should do more of them." I'm like, "Why? The view counts were really terrible." He's like, "Yeah, but if you look at the hours watch, the hours watch and the comments were really amazing compared to your normal stuff. So it's equivalent if you look at hours watch." And I said, "Okay." I said, okay, that's interesting. And then I said, um, go through it and let me know every single person who commented and messaged related to that and let me know what their job title and the company they work at. All right. So then he's just like, you really want to do all that? I'm like, yeah, why wouldn't I want to do all that? And he started getting some of that data to me. I started seeing some of it this morning. All right. And guess what size companies they were if you had to take a guess?

Small businesses.

Really, really small businesses, not our ideal customers. It was actually mainly people who are interested in learning marketing versus corporations. So I was like, this is fine. I get you're saying hours. Even if the watch time was 10x, I wouldn't be as interested. And he said, why? And I said, because the people watching are learning marketing. And if you look at their titles on LinkedIn, they're not just learning marketing specifically, most of them are doing their own thing like as entrepreneurs and they're related to the marketing space, like creating agencies or they're being a freelancer and helping other people with their marketing. I'm like, this is not who's paying us for our work. But on the flip side, we've done some videos that get very terrible views on very specific topics like international SEO or charts on very specific topics like what people are doing with their budgets in 2026 marketing budgets. And they tell me, oh, we shouldn't publish as much of this stuff on your social media. I was like, why? They're like, the engagement isn't as good. I'm like, let's see all the people engaging with it. So we start going through it and they're like, oh, it's a lot of people who work at corporations. And I'm like, bingo, our ideal customer. And I'm like, just because something doesn't look as good from a data aspect, You got to actually dig in and look at the data that is relevant or irrelevant to your business and then make your call. You can't just look at surface-level numbers. And this is one of my biggest pet peeves with marketers. They just look at a number like likes or engagement and they make decisions based off that versus really diving in and figuring out, is this type of content worth us creating more of? Or is this type of content just getting us views but is never going to drive us revenue? Or is this the type of content, it doesn't get us a ton of views, But it gets us a lot of engagement with our ideal potential customers.

Dude, you just gave me an idea, um, based on what you just said. So yesterday I was using Comet. Have you used Perplexity's browser Comet? Okay, so for what—

I only tested it for, just as a heads up, I only tested it for like 30, 40 minutes. My fear with all these browsers is security, so I tend not to use them, and I use them on a random computer that is not my daily computer, so it doesn't have access to like banking information, financials, or anything, because they say a lot of these browsers aren't as secure as Chrome or Safari.

I think that's correct. I think so. A lot of these AI browsers like Comet, maybe not as secure, but I will say a novel use case for Comet yesterday. I was using it for, for example, your YouTube comments, right? So I agree, having someone research your YouTube comments and seeing who they are on LinkedIn, seeing how big their businesses are, that's obviously going to take time, human time, right? But when you pull up Comet and you pull up your YouTube comments, right? Comet is C-O-M-E-T, by the way, not comment. But it'll look at all your YouTube and it'll scan everything and it'll actually make a table for you based on who all these people are. And you can have someone doing that with Comet. And that, um, we actually have a lot of job postings up right now for people because we're on a hiring push for Q1. Um, and with job postings, guess what? Someone needs to review all the job postings to see if people follow the directions. Nobody wants to do that though. I was like, oh, huh, what if I do this for, for using Comet yesterday? I was doing all the work and it's better than any of these other, um, agentic browsers that I've seen. But Neil is right, there is a security thing. But I think with something that's maybe a lower lift, like the YouTube where anyone can view it, I think you can have Comet do that. That's in support of the data fluency thing that Neil is talking about. And going back to that, I think that's a starting point. Knowing how to talk about data and knowing how to think about it will help you better query these AI command centers for you so you can get the right data faster, so you can take action faster, so you can make revenue faster.

Yeah, and as a marketer, people look at like views, likes, engagement, or the other extreme is they look at revenue. Like what's my conversion rate, revenue, and profitability? Now both those metrics aren't bad and I'm not saying you shouldn't look at them. The one on the right about revenue and ROI and all that kind of stuff, definitely very important. But the problem with marketing is it's that big middle that drives a lot of revenue where people have multiple touchpoints. And you need to figure out in that big messy middle what is actually going to drive more ROI at the end. Because a lot of those touchpoints don't cause direct conversions, but they drive assists, right? Or indirect conversions. And if you don't know how to look at the data right, you're going to end up spending your time on the wrong stuff in the messy middle, which is going to screw up your numbers at the very bottom of your funnel.

All right guys, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe.