Marketing Agencies Are Feeling an Artificial Uptick in Business

Dude, can we talk about how agencies are struggling right now too? Because for whatever reason, that day when you called me earlier this week, multiple people that day from multiple agencies. So there's a guy that we know, mutual friend of ours. I thought they were doing, call it $20 million or so. And when I asked them how they were doing, they've decelerated, call it down to like $5.7 million. And granted, this is not his main business anymore. I think you know who I'm talking about.

Yeah.

I'm not going to name names, but—

I met him in Miami.

Yeah.

And then that was the one that I told him to merge with you. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. And I was like, but, but, but that's a pretty significant deceleration from 20.

He was, he was never at 20.

Yeah. So call it what it is.

I'm not saying he's lying. I don't think he actually was at 20. He's, he's never told me he was at 20. I think the miscommunication there.

Even if he was at 20.

But yes, he has.

I did hear, I did hear at least 14 before, you know what I mean? I heard that number before.

Yeah.

Right. So, but down to 5.7 and I'm like, okay. Interesting. And then we, you and I, you actually, you know, sent 2 people over. I'm just like, man, a lot of these people are struggling right now. And then that same day, an M&A firm was like, hey, are you buying anything right now? I was like, hey, you're reaching out right now. Like, are a lot of agencies struggling? He's like, yeah, they are.

So— Did you end up, are you going to do a deal with one of them?

I'm going to talk to that. I'm going to talk to that guy. So that's—

You haven't talked to him yet?

No, I have talked to him. I've talked to him. And then now he's put a data room together. And it looks like we might do something, so I'll give you a nice Christmas gift if we do something. I'll give you a nice Christmas gift anyway.

You can just buy me a free water.

Okay, I'll buy you free water. That sounds good. From Air One. It'll be a nice one.

No, no, that's the paid water. I said free.

Okay, I'll buy you a free water.

You can come to the Mandarin and give me one of their bottles of water.

I'll give you one of my nice Korean waters.

No, no, it's okay. I don't want anything.

Yeah.

But yeah, I know. I hope you get the deal because he hit me up late at night.

Uh-huh.

And it was a mutual friend of mine. Another—

I have a lot of friends that are good friends who are close with him. So that's a good one.

So another Indian dude hit me up on a text thread with him and said, you guys should meet about M&A and all this kind of stuff. And I talked to him that night and it was late because I remember getting up out of bed like at 9, 10 o'clock. There's, for some things I will do a call at any hour of the day, especially for deals. I'm like, oh, let's get up. And I'm energized. Like I don't ever drink coffee. I'm just energized naturally when it comes to deals. But I knew talking to him right then and there that this would be, I'm not saying that you should do the deal or not. I didn't do diligence. I only talked to him on the phone for maybe 15, 20 minutes.

Yep.

Because that business has been declining and he started going over his numbers and he started going over what his current customers pay and how you're more B2B and he's more B2C. I'm like, well, if you merge, you'll have B2C better on lockdown than you do currently. You have B2B, it'll open up the door to have a higher win rate for more customers because you'll have more of a track record. 2, they have a good community. You know how to leverage communities and you can work out a deal with them or figure that out.

Yeah.

3, the deal's screaming from a financial perspective for you, right? Without getting into too much there. And then 3, you're, I wouldn't say struggling, but You're, I would actually use the word struggling, that is the right word. You're struggling to hire quick enough.

Yes.

And he has supposedly, I haven't done any digging in, really good talent, including video talent. And what I saw was, hey, this can help you with some video stuff for your business.

It can help across the board.

And it'll offer you new services that you probably don't excel at right now because you're not really a creative shop, no offense.

No, no, you're right.

They don't do a ton in AI, so that's great cross-sell. And the other thing is, is what I saw is with their headcount, they don't do tons in AI. And I'm like, huh, how much more money and synergies can you create by leveraging technology? And you can probably improve the margins and you only need so many account managers and stuff like that.

And I was skeptical initially, I have to admit. And then once I talked and I started thinking exactly what you were thinking too, I was like, oh, this might potentially work. And so I I have some reviewing to do this afternoon. I'll just put it that way.

So. Yeah.

Yeah.

Just when, when you buy it, my only advice to you is don't buy the corporation.

I won't. It's assets. I would go for assets.

Uh-huh. And then you, and then you do a DBA.

Yeah.

And so that way you can take over the bank accounts.

But you should explain why you would not go do a stock deal. Why would you do it? Just so everyone knows.

Because whatever he potentially—

Let's say a lawsuit, for example.

Yeah. Liabilities. You're taking that over.

But that's a lesson for everyone too.

But you need to make sure the contracts could be assigned over.

Mm-hmm.

And you got to look at the contracts for that. But yeah, you would just take over everything. Yep.

Cool. Well, that's good. Just look, agencies are struggling right now, but there are situations where you can make a 1 plus 1 equals 10. The other one that you sent over, I was like, yeah, not, not, not good at all.

What was the other one I sent over?

You sent over—

Oh yeah, I sent over 2.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The other one I didn't talk to on the phone. He texted me.

Yeah.

And then I asked him his numbers on the phone and I already knew it wasn't for us, but, and he didn't try pitching it to me. I was just like, let me just do an intro to you. And I'm like, you have, there's no harm.

I intro'd you to him and you intro'd him back to me.

No, but you introduced him to me years ago.

Yeah, I know.

But you probably don't know his latest numbers today, at least.

I knew his numbers from the past and I didn't think there would be much difference.

But it's worth having a chat because what do you have to lose? Even if it's 5 minutes.

I have 5 minutes to lose.

Okay.

Be 5— I'm just kidding.

I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Be 5 minutes late with a date or something like that. I'm kidding.

Yeah. Anyway, continue.

Yeah. But I have that topic in here. Marketing agencies are feeling an artificial uptick in business and we're seeing some agencies struggle or a lot struggle. But of the recent months, we've been hearing a lot of agencies say, Oh, things are getting better for us.

For you and I, at the very least.

I don't know if things are actually getting better. So I started doing analysis from all the people who hit me up who said agencies are picking up. The biggest thing that I saw wasn't that their new business has picked up. Forget leads. Leads doesn't mean you're going to close more, right? Sure, if you get more leads, it is a quote unquote leading indicator, but it's not a guarantee. When most of these agencies have said the last few months have been really good, when I started diving into it, most of that uptick came from older deals that never signed and they were just ready to sign now. That's almost the majority of the growth when these agencies, the last few months have been really good for the majority that I talked to and I had them dive into it. That's where their growth came.

Is that what you've seen?

We saw that as well. When we look at going forward, leads are up for a lot of people, but People have not seen an increase in revenue from those net new leads coming in yet. Maybe it will, but the increase in revenue is coming from, oh, a lot of these people I pitched right when Trump announced the tariffs, paused and didn't do anything. Now they're signing up with us.

I would say it's different for us. So we are getting a little bit of that. So again, case-by-case basis, right? We're just, we're just one case. But there, there are some situations where they might've signed with somebody else and like, oh, the agency sucks. And they came back to us, right? We had that, that problem last year. So that happened a little bit, but when I look at the new logos that we brought in, they are net new from net new leads that came in like maybe like a month, 2, 3 months ago or so. And so it's a little different for us, but also it's, yeah.

See, I look at you as a very unique use case. And the reason I say this is you had operational issues that were hindering your revenue growth in the past and you fixed some, call it in the last 6 months. So you're seeing the results of it now because of sales cycle. So your growth, I don't really look at that as growth because of a change in market conditions. I see that as pure growth because you fixed some issues with your company.

We had a major bottleneck that we fixed. Yeah. Yeah.

So, and specifically you've rejiggered how you sell, and I think that's helped, but I don't look at that. And yes, that is growth and props to you for fixing it. But I don't look at that as the economy is affecting your revenue in a positive or negative way. You were wise enough to figure out the issues in the business and fixing those.

Do you think we're in a good economy right now?

No.

Yeah, me neither.

I think we're in a terrible economy. Lutnick said the other day, you're going to see crazy job growth sometime early next year or sometime next year. I hope so. Exactly. I don't know what they're saying is if it's going to come true or not, but all I can do is hope and I hope it actually goes that way.

I got someone that, I got one here that's kind of off the beaten path and we can get back on the marketing path. But I just, you know, obviously this week, you know, big thing happened with Charlie Kirk's assassination. And I just thought there's, from a marketing standpoint, this is interesting to me. So this is an example of how celebrating Charlie Kirk's assassination actually destroyed a business. And so what happened here was, if you can see, there's this woman here that's basically mocking his passing, right? And she's—

Like she's laughing?

Yeah, she's mocking it. She's like, let's throw a prayer and let's, a prayer.

Oh wow.

She's cheering.

She's cheering for his death. That's sad.

And actually, on X, you can see a lot of situations where they're, they're showing people on TikTok.

She's actually happy someone died. Wow, that's crazy.

It's all over TikTok right now. It's all over Bluesky. It's all over these things, right? But, um, so she said the— or this poster here, uh, Dr. Jebrah Fauci. She's a doctor? No, no, no, this, this person posted this, this reveal. So, so, so this is like This person said, after this, this woman posted a video celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, thousands of people on the internet found her husband's company and flooded the Yelp reviews with 1-star. It's got so bad that she had to remove the video. So I'm just saying that there's a lot of these situations where people are celebrating his death right now. And the problem is on X, which is more right-leaning, they're doxxing all these people, right? So you're better off just not posting and not engaging, or you get your—

in this case, she got her husband's business Well, it doesn't matter what beliefs someone has politically.

You should never celebrate someone's death.

You should never celebrate someone dying, kids losing one of their parents. It's just sad.

Dude, I actually, for fun yesterday, I decided to engage with someone, one of, let's call her an acquaintance on Instagram. She posted something about like not celebrating it, right? Or like basically saying that doesn't support the views and like, oh, all you people that were silent before about how his, like, he had violent rhetoric, or like speaking about his death. And I'm like, those are like, those can exist in the same world. You can actually agree with him and actually, you know, actually mourn his death, right? And she was just like going off. And so I've noticed, what I've noticed is if you log onto Threads and you log onto Bluesky, which are more left-leaning, a lot of people on those platforms, and this is, they're celebrating a death. And I don't, like, if I disagree with you or whatever, you say things I really don't disagree with, don't agree with, that's your opinion. But we shouldn't be celebrating anybody's death. And that's how far we've gotten.

We shouldn't want anyone to die. That's sad.

No. And there's like, but it's gotten so crazy now where it's, um, I think the, the, the United States at least has become a lot more polarized. But the key point from this one is celebrating anybody's death and getting a lot of views is actually not a good thing. You don't want to be seen doing that.

Just generally, ethically, you should not want want someone to die.

Yeah. And by the way, people say like he's had this hateful rhetoric or whatever. He was just talking. I don't know if you've seen his videos, but he was just speaking his views and he was very convincing as he did it. But even though he would— he's a hardcore Christian, right? Even if he would disagree with you being gay, for example, he would say, hey, we can still agree on other things and he'd be respectful about it. Right. And so anyway, I don't want to go too far and deep into this, but I think it's just sad, a sad state of things because when I saw it happen, man, I was like, dude, Like immediately I was like, this is going to cause a lot of problems and it already is.

So. People should just be respectful of others and not wish ill will against others. That's at least what we were taught when we were little kids. Yeah.

But what, like what we're being taught now is a lot different. So anyway, we can move on to another one. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.

Have you ever seen Roger Federer's speech?

Yeah.

On winning?

Uh-huh.

I just saw it for the first time yesterday.

What got you to watch it now?

It was just random on Instagram and someone sent it to me. Like, you know, like the messages, I check the messages in case there's any leads in there. One of my buddies sent it to me. It was a great speech. I did not know that he only played 1,526 games. That's a lot. He won almost 80% of them. But when you look at the points in each game—

54%.

54%. And there's 2 key takeaways that I got from the speech. To win, you don't have to win by a lot. Winning by a little is still winning. And that just shows how competitive it is. And it is like that in business. But doing things 1% better, 2% better, 3%, 4% better can make a huge difference. He has tons of trophies, right? He's one of the leaders when it comes to trophy count.

He was one of the big 3, Djokovic and Nadal and him.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Although the young players are now starting to come up.

Alcaraz and Sinner.

Uh-huh. And the other thing that he said in his speech that really resonated with me is, You got to control your emotions. Like when you are doing something, you got to go all in 110% and try to win. But the moment you lose and you messed up, that's okay. Move on. Don't let it bother you as hard as it may seem. And then go on to winning the next point. And if you lose that one, it's okay. Learn from it, move on and go try to win the next point and just take it, you know, one stroke at a time or one, You know, hit at a time. I don't know the tennis vernacular, but you could, you know, better than me. I don't play the game. But I really did love his speech. I thought it was a great perspective on how you can be great and what 4% really does when it comes to winning, being 4% better.

Yeah. So, you know, Howard Marks from Oaktree, right?

Okay.

And so when you look at his fund over time, he's not saying they're the highest performing, they're just a little above average, but they're a little above average for a very long period of time. If you're very, if you're just above average for let's say 10, 20+ years or so, you're actually a top 4% fund, right? So you don't need to be that much better than the other people. And so I think what's kind of the reason why you disconnected the two is that Roger Federer is basically saying, as long as you're consistent, you can manage your emotions and you play consistently for a long period of time, you're going to do just fine.

Yeah, I agree with that. And I always forget his name, the Lacoste one, the tall guy. Djokovic? Is it Djokovic?

Djokovic.

Djokovic is deep.

The Serbian one?

Serbian one.

Yeah.

He, yeah, I always know 'cause he's sponsored by Lacoste. He wears that everywhere.

Does he? They have billboards everywhere for him.

But he says something similar, like he's just like, you can't dread on when you lose. What makes a winner so great is they're able to control their emotions and bounce back. The one thing that I like about him from a marketing standpoint is he has a really funny personality. I don't know if you've seen like the clips of him.

Oh yeah, he's funny.

Yeah, he's funny. And he is a marketing, you know, dream for an apparel company because his personality really shines and he's entertaining in a good way, which I think will help sell more clothes.

Dude, I mean, speak— because we're talking about sports people right now, did you watch the America's Team Documentary on Netflix. I told you to watch it, remember?

America's Team? You told me to watch the Dallas Cowboys one.

That's what it's— Dallas Cowboys is America's Team.

Okay. I haven't watched it yet.

So I just want to talk about some business and marketing lessons from Dallas Cowboys. The Dallas Cowboys, America's Team. And so one, you know how Jerry Jones made his money?

You told me, but so I want you to go with this and get your clip.

So this is not going to be a good clip, so I don't need— I'll just explain it. But Just so everyone knows, Jerry Jones, he actually had a bunch of odd jobs coming out of Arkansas college. So they actually won a national championship, but his dream was always to own a football team. I actually didn't know that. So he would like sell insurance, he'd be like a door-to-door salesman. He'd be selling all these random things, right? He could, he actually couldn't figure things out. By age 28, he was trying to buy the Chargers at the time. And he actually went to the mafia, this mafia guy to get money. The mafia guy's like, okay, I'll give you money. Right? And his dad's like, dude, what are you doing? Like, what if you can't pay the bill? And his dad's like, Is that, that basically convinces him to not do that deal. At a certain point, he ends up betting everything. I think he reaches out to his father-in-law, like he scrounges up all the money he has, maybe borrows some money too. $800,000 at the time. I think this is in the late '70s, maybe early '70s, something like that. Or maybe '60s. He bets all of his money on one oil drill, one oil well. Okay. That $800,000 becomes $100 million. At the time, $100 million is worth way more, hundreds of millions of dollars today, right?

Yeah.

That's how he gets his money, right? The key thing as you look through his, the, so Dallas Cowboys won 3 championships in the '90s. They were the team of the '90s. He would not be afraid to try new things. He bet it all.

Okay.

He was the, he's known as the gambler. He also betted on a college coach that had never been in the NFL before, Jimmy Johnson. Okay. He also, he traded away his number 1 player, Herschel Walker. So Herschel Walker's a legendary running back, right? And he got 5 major, I think 5 first-round draft picks for that. Right? So he, he basically, that, that is a gamble too. And so if you look at the Dallas Cowboys over time, I think they're worth like $13 billion now or something like that. Um, if you look it up, but he constantly, he did very unconventional things. So he's still the GM of the company or the, the Dallas Cowboys for better or worse today.

$12.5 billion.

Okay.

Close enough.

But Jerry Jones is, I think he's in his 80s now or whatever, but he's still the GM of the company. There's no other owner who's the GM of the company. or the, of the team. The other thing too is this, this one's fun. This will be the last thing. But back in the day for the NFL, Coca-Cola was like the main drink, right? They had all these, Reebok was the main sneaker, right? He partnered up with Phil Knight and he partnered up with Pepsi and he got rid of all the Coca-Cola stuff. And so, but when you're part of the team back, the league back then, one of the owners, you're supposed to fall in line and everyone's supposed to push Reebok. Everyone's supposed to push Coca-Cola. He's like, screw that. I need to make more revenue. And that's how he got more revenue to do the things that he wanted to do.

Dude, that's crazy to think about. But yeah, I'll have to watch it.

No, you have to watch it. You'll love it.

He's a good businessman the way he's cornered all like the food stores and stalls within the NFL stadiums. And I think he partnered with the Los Angeles Rams for some of that kind of stuff. The owner there, Stan— Stanley, what's his name?

Kroenke. Kroenke, whatever. Yeah.

Yeah. Between both of those people, it looks like they've been really good at figuring out how to make more money from all the NFL teams.

Well, all his stuff, like it's a spectacle, right? It's like the largest screen in the NFL and then it's like America's team or America's cheerleaders.

And I think they have this roof so God could watch or something. Is that the slogan or something like that?

I think that was the old stadium. This stadium also has an open one too, but maybe you can look it up real quick. But the other thing too is he, back in the day, he created shows. So there's like the, The Michael Irvin Show. He would create shows like other spectacles for his players, and it was always a marketing thing.

So the saying is, Texas Stadium has a hole in the roof so God can watch his favorite team plays.

Yeah.

Refers to the actual hole in the roof of the former Dallas Cowboys home stadium, which is, you're right, it's a former one.

Dude, and you know where he got all this marketing prowess from? His dad.

What does his dad do?

His dad used to run a grocery store. So his dad used to run a grocery store, and he was, the way he got people to come to the grocery store was he would have like singers at the grocery store.

Wait, his dad or him?

His dad.

Okay.

His dad had a grocery store, so he would look at his dad make a spectacle out of everything. And that's how Jerry Jones made a spectacle out of everything. Biggest screen, America's team, these lawsuits. The NFL owners sued him to try to get his team because they didn't like the fact that he was doing things on his own.

So it worked out for him.

Yeah, worked out perfectly. But point here is that you gotta have the guts to go with it and to do things unconventionally for a very long time. And that's how he got to where he is by being, Authentically him.

It's worked. Yep. Sometimes you just gotta be you. It doesn't always work, but it works in—

I think it works the best long-term if you're just you. So, yeah.

Let's see. You're seeing, there's one here that's interesting, and this is from Ross Hudgens, who we both know. LinkedIn posts are seeing a surge in SEO traffic.

Yeah.

So they're just ranking higher, I'm guessing is what he's saying. Yeah.

So Ross Hudgens here. Um, so he's saying LinkedIn posts are seeing a surge in SEO traffic. This is a trend to watch closely. It feels like this could be a start of a Reddit, Quora type social acceleration trend and a reason to invest in organic social. So you can see here ChatGPT referral traffic drops 52%. But then this down here, this is, I think, traffic to LinkedIn and it's going up. And, you know, LinkedIn used to be more private. Now it's a little more open. And so it's something to watch out for.

I wonder how much of ChatGPT's traffic comes from Google.

That's a good question. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.