Staying involved, Avoiding debt traps, and Maintaining accountability as an agency owner

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 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. Hope you enjoy the episode. All right, let's jump into it. So a couple things on my mind before we jump into things, and you guys can start to drop your questions in the chat. You know, Austin will monitor as well. So one thing I will say, I just did a book review on this book over here, and you know a book is really good when it has a bunch of dog ears like this at the bottom. So ignore the tacky title. The title is How to Be Rich, but it was written by the richest man in the world at the time, J. Paul Getty. And there's just a lot of timeless wisdom in here. It's kind of like Think and Grow Rich. There's just a lot of timeless wisdom. And so, How to Be Rich, there's a lot of great stuff in here. And I think I'm just going to share some of the key takeaways that stuck with me. And it's interesting because I spoke to a YPO guy yesterday who's probably like 75 or 80 years old. He's been through the wringer. He's been a convicted felon before. The FBI raided his place. You know, they tried to put him in prison for 5 years. And, you know, he had a company with 71 offices, you know, $200 million in revenue, and they're going to put him away for 5 years. And, you know, so anyway, he has a lot of business wisdom. He ended up getting out of that. He ended up settling with the government and paying them $100 or whatever. But it took like 8 years or 8 years to fight it off and $8 million in lawyers' fees. So the lawyers actually won at the end of the day. But my point of this is, you know, we're kind of talking about books yesterday and it was like a— it was supposed to be a 15-minute conversation, but it went for 40 minutes. And we talked about the concept of the working businessman, right? And a lot of you will read about, oh, you know, I built a holding company and I'm going to hire CEO and I'm just going to go fuck off and do something else, right? And you know what we're kind of joking about yesterday because I made that mistake. He's made that mistake before too. But at the end of the day, nobody's going to care as much as you will. And I think the problem with a lot of agency owners is that they just give up too quickly and they try to go do something else and their ADD gets the best of them and they decide to start 10 different things.

Yeah.

But if you just stay the course and you stay very involved, that's not saying you need to run every business necessarily, but if you can stay involved and be on top of things, you're talking to the CEOs maybe daily, every other day or so, making sure that there's some sense of accountability because at the end of the day, who owns the lion's share of the equity? You do. And because you own the lion's share of the equity, you're incentivized to move heaven and earth to make things happen. And if you don't, then that's your fault and you suck. And so you deserve to fail. And so, you know, it's harsh to say, but you know, the whole concept of the working businessman, like this guy, J. Paul Getty, he worked all the way till he died. Basically, he was still working 16 to 18 hours a day. He was very sad at the end for sure, right? Like he, there's someone did an interview with him. He is like, yeah, he just like, you know, wishes he was happier. He spent too much time working. Probably that's another lesson for you all. But, you know, he, this book came out a month before he died and even towards the end of it, you know, he contributed. One other thing I'll say is he does mention that you have to be frugal, that your employees are always going to ask for more resources and that's okay. Like they're strapped, right? They're always going to need more resources, but it's your job to push back and say no. I think in some cases he might've been a little too frugal because this is the guy where his grandson was kidnapped and there was a ransom. Of basically $118 million in today's day and age. So adjusted for inflation. And basically he's like, I'm not going to pay it. And then they cut off his grandson's ear and sent it to him. And then he's like, okay, I'll pay you like $2 million, which is like the most you can get away with in terms of writing off the $2.2 million. And so he did that. And apparently he never talked to that grandson again. Like, I don't know what happened there. But yeah, that is what it is. Get this book. It's great. There's a ton of lessons in here. And that being said, hopefully me talking for a couple minutes has jogged a couple questions for you guys. So feel free to raise your hand if you got any questions, or if not, we can end the call right now. So feel free to go. We got Elian over here. I'm just going to read this. Do agency owners use debt financing? In Japan, the interest rate is so low that businesses often raise funds through debt without specific purpose. You know, that, that whole Chaos that happened 2 weeks ago or 3, 4 weeks ago, Aliyan, the debt carry trade, right? Or Japan carry trade, I think, right? It's, you know what was happening there, right? They're taking on debt and then they were just like investing in growth stocks in the US and then they're making a spread on that, right?

Yeah.

So I would say, look, if you're at zero interest rates, you look at a couple years ago in America, everyone was taking on debt. Everyone was going crazy, right? And so I was just talking with Neil this morning. We would talk for about 30 minutes or so, and we were just talking about how it's beneficial to be profitable because the more profitable you are, the better terms you're going to get, the higher the debt that you can get from banks, and then you can take a shot, right? Which actually dovetails into like, there's like a There's like a but here too. If you raise too much debt, if it feels like the wheels are falling off, if your heart tells you not to do it, you probably shouldn't do it. And what I mean by that is in this book, he talks about the Firestone CEO saying that companies that grow too quickly or too inorganically, what happens to them is their customers their people can't take on the work, their customers suffer as well. And then what ends up happening is everyone suffers and the whole thing goes down, right? I've experienced that myself before. So I would just say if you're to do it, be cautious with it and don't try to over-leverage yourself too much. And then maybe dip your toe a little bit at a time. Don't get too over-aggressive. And even Neil this morning, like he got a little too over-aggressive and I knew he would with his global acquisitions and he admitted to it. So, I would say, Alian, if I had 0% interest rate, like fuck yeah, I'd go a little harder right now.

So, but do agency agencies need to? Are there is there any need to do that?

You don't need to do anything.

I mean, in Japan, there is a there is a sentiment that you have to you have to raise funds through debt because the interest rate is so low that. It's a kind of norm that you just go, why are you not going to banks and get loans out of it?

Yeah. The problem is once the banks raise the interest rate by even like, you know, like 25 basis points, right? It's like, uh-oh, right? A lot of people got margin called off of that, right? So those people were a little too aggressive. So I think you can do it. I think I certainly, this is not advice for you. I'm just talking about myself right now because I don't want to get you in trouble, right? So, I would personally take a look at it and just don't know. Again, don't know. Like here, what did Charlie Munger say? So Charlie Munger, late Charlie Munger over here, there's 3 things that will kill a man. It's ladies, liquor, and leverage, right? And the first 2 are just for fun. Ladies and liquor was just for fun. It's really leverage that will kill you.

I mean, I don't have any plans to raise funds, but yeah.

Certainly take a look at it, right? That part can't hurt you, but don't feel like— what happens is when you have outside pressures, when you're seeing everyone do it around you and you feel like you need to do it, that's not really you. At the end of the day, you have to do what feels right to you. And there's another book, it's a 36-hour audiobook called Reality Transurfing that my friend told me about. That one's really good because it does kind of explain the forces around you and everything trying to pull you in and you having to defend against it. But more than anything, the thing that sticks out to me from that book— here's another book for you, I guess— is that the more you try to control an outcome, or more so, the more importance you place on the outcome, the more it gets away from you, right? Whether it's you trying to get some type of business outcome or you trying to get some type of outcome when it comes to relationships, it never works. Think about it. When has that ever worked for you? Anybody here? Never, right? So yeah, anyway, that's my answer to you, Arian.

Thanks.

I gotta 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 Aliyan. 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 others as well. 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 In the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside. Go for it, Bill.

I wanna change it up a little bit, but this is top of mind for me about LinkedIn. Do you think that sending like too many cold DMs or just kind of like going hard on DMs kind of affects your profile post reach?

Yeah. Does it affect your post reach, your DMs? Yeah. I don't think it does.

No.

I've never seen any evidence that it does because it's such a different thing. Um, why are you, how many, how many, how many sales DMs are you sending?

Uh, well, last, about last year I was getting, you know, millions of views and just grew pretty fast. And, uh, yeah.

LinkedIn's just way harder now. I mean, it's, there's way more people posting and they're posting insufferable shit, right? Like that, that dude from, uh, that, that dude that said, uh, basically, you know, uh, some Amazon CEO screwed his wife and this is what he learned about B2B SaaS. Like, like that's the type of stuff you get now. Right. And then Marcos, by the way, is a LinkedIn ghostwriter. Um, so Marcos, you might have some things to say there, but I, I just don't think it affects reach. It like, it doesn't make sense that your DMs would affect your post reach.

I just, I saw like a correlation with like the, just kind of like the effect of the sending these DMs and going and the, the reach, but my content may just suck now. I have to talk to Marcos.

Maybe.

It doesn't, it should, it should actually help. Your reach realistically, because if you're sending outbound connection requests, those count as followers. So realistically, your views should be higher.

Marcos, could you, if you can email me afterwards with some of the work that you guys have done, I might be curious because there's an angle here. So I have one guy I used to intern for. Good to see you, Brennan. I like the new hair. But so this one guy I used to intern for, I was talking to the other guy that I interned for this week. I was like, dude, Sean, Sean's his name, right? I'm like, he's getting a lot of reach now and he's growing really quickly. Like he's got like 20 tweets that have over a million views. And he was thinking about firing his LinkedIn and his Twitter ghostwriters initially because like when I hired ghostwriters, they were really good at writing, but they're just writing shit that I just didn't care about, right? So who cares if I got like a million, 2 million views per post? I just didn't care about it. But what he does is he's like, okay, I'm going to help brainstorm the ideas. I'm going to help write all the outlines and then the ghostwriters are going to work with me. So I guess the question for you, Marcos, is, are you doing that for any of your clients? Because I think a lot of people expect it to be set and forget, but it just doesn't work that way if you want to actually drive impact.

Yeah, no, we did that. That was like the OG meta when ghostwriting was brand new, 2022. No, we only write within the parameters of what the client's industry is. Um, but the caveat is that we try to keep it in the bubble that's near it. If we're trying to go viral, you still have to branch a little. Like, for example, I think your opinion on MrBeast's brand or like the Ronaldo YouTube going to 30 mil subs might be relevant as a marketing owner, but it's not necessarily about Single Grain. So we try to keep it relevant for the most part if we're going to branch, but no, we're not going to write. The Feynman technique and the 80/20 on everybody's brand. Yeah.

What does it cost to hire a company like yours to do that?

It depends. So my company's niched down to info product sellers. So we charge like a retainer percentage. The industry average is $3,000 to $5,000 a month.

Cool.

Got it.

So, okay, you got it. You focus on infographic. Are you rucking right now?

I'm doing a Murph, but okay, now I'm walking.

The fuck is all this?

Got it.

Um, Allian says, Marcos, I saw you in my YouTube recommendations. Great work. There you go. Look at that.

Cool.

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. 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. Try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating 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.

I'm very undisciplined. I really want to scale LinkedIn, like specifically in the travel space. There's only 2 or other 2 or 3 other ones like us. But if I could just like be in front of everybody in the organic feed rather than spending $20 grand a month on LinkedIn paid, that would make me really happy.

Yeah. Well, Brennan, do you, do you do podcasts on your end?

Yeah, we run a podcast too.

Okay.

It does absolutely nothing.

Check this out. So I found this tool and I think I talked about, I don't think the episode's out yet, but let me show this to you guys. So here's, I found this tool, Gary Tan tweeted it out, Overlap. They're backed by YC. And so I've just been taking my YouTube videos and then I've been dumping it into this thing and it's really good. It's better than like Opus or any other tool that I found in terms of finding the right moments, right? Um, and I started testing it this week. And so like, these are some of the moments like, you know, buying versus building websites.

Okay.

Here's a little clip over here. I can download it if I want. Um, shortcuts will hurt you, right? Mastering. So basically my, cuz I'm not too active on LinkedIn or, or Twitter for that matter. Um, I, I do most of the damage, I guess, through SEO and like short form and, and maybe some on long form YouTube, but I'm like, okay, we need to step up our game on LinkedIn, Twitter. I'm just gonna test it out, test this out myself. And so I just started taking these short videos and I started writing some captions for them, and I'm getting anywhere from like 10 to 25x more reach on these posts. And I, this is just the very beginning right now. So like this Gary Vee one over here, it found a couple, a couple good moments. I threw one up on Twitter. It's got like 5K views, which is not bad because usually my views might be like a couple hundred or so. So again, it's called Overlap and it's completely free right now. The only problem with it Is you'll get like a watermark and it doesn't tell you exactly where it's clipping from. It just gives you a clip. Any questions or comments on this?

You had a chat with Adam Robinson, right? From RB2B. I think he mentioned in one of the videos.

I don't— I— we didn't do a live one. So he was okay. Like, you see this guy over here?

Call of some kind?

I don't know.

I don't know. So anyways, I was wondering if he had any interesting insights because he uses video Clips in his LinkedIn posts.

Mm-hmm.

And he finds that that decreases the reach but gives him better targeting on his ICP.

Yeah.

I think Chris Walker does the same thing.

I know what you're saying. So yeah, the videos don't drive like as much reach as like a video or like a document ad, for example. And there's been some numbers around this. But the good thing about the video is ultimately it drives more, you're building more rapport at scale because people are actually getting to know you more and it's a deeper connection. So I think mixing it up is good, but I'm just too lazy. And now my team has a process for this so they can just take and do it, take it and do it. But it's— I'm like, I've been thinking, like, going back to you, Brennan, if you have a podcast, it doesn't make sense not to do this.