Neil Patel and Eric Siu share career lessons from building their marketing agency. They emphasize targeting large markets, hiring the right people for each stage, and learning from mistakes rather than repeating them.
The biggest lesson that I learned in my career was when I was younger, I thought you had to create a differentiated business and you had to have something that's unique. I learned that's totally inaccurate. You just need a business in a massive TAM, and if you do a decent enough job, there's just money to be made. And what I think is more important than differentiation is a bigger TAM. And if you have such a massive TAM where like a market where people spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year, there's just money to be made. And even if you're a mediocre average version, you may not make all that hundreds of billions, but you can make a fraction of a percent where you may make $2, $3, $4 million a year. That's one of the biggest lessons that I've learned. And do I think you should have differentiation? Yes, I think those things are great and you can figure out your differentiation over time, but differentiation Isn't as important as first going after a really big market. And I think fundamentally in business, if you're going to be an entrepreneur and it's not after something that's a really massive TAM, right? Total addressable market. You're just, it's a recipe for disaster.
So I would say my biggest lesson, and maybe this will help you too, Brad, you're getting Neil's life wisdom and my life wisdom here. What Neil is talking about with TAM, those are all things that are learned over time as you continue to level up in business and life. Whether Neil likes to learn through talking to people, which is I like to learn through reading and joining these different groups and talking to people as well. As long as you, one, you keep learning, and two, you don't stop, as long as you keep going, and we've talked about this before, 10, 20, 30 years or so, there's no way in hell you don't have an outcome that impresses the hell out of the 18-year-old version of you. There's just no way. I don't care how dumb you think you are or how smart you think you are. It just is. The vast majority of the most successful people, like, Okay, I think Elon is significantly smarter than us. But I would say a lot of the smart people that we know that some might have, some might do a lot better than us, some might do like a lot worse than us or whatever. I don't think I'm way smarter than them, at least for me. I just think the hunger for learning never stops. And then the ability, the energy to keep going is heavily underrated.
Yeah, I actually look at it where a lot of people that do worse than me or better than me, a lot of them are smarter than I am. And I don't think there's a direct correlation with making money as entrepreneur. I'm not talking about making the billions of dollars or trillions or being on the Forbes list, but just succeeding as an entrepreneur. Most the millionaires I know are the millionaire next door that had the plumbing business or the HVAC business or the roofing business. And Eric's spot on for doing something long enough, it ends up adding up and driving a lot of revenue. If, which goes back to his first point, if you can learn from the mistakes. See, you don't have to be smart to do well. You just have to avoid making the same mistake over and over again, and eventually you'll be led down a path of success. And a great example of this, and this was a big learning for me as well, you know, when I raised money for Kissmetrics, my co-founder did most of the fundraising though, I remember during our board meetings, we had a board member named Phil Black, and he would just be like, you guys just got to hire the right people. It's all about getting the right staff. And it didn't really hit me at that time, but over the years, I eventually figured out what he meant. in which you don't have to figure everything out as an entrepreneur. No one's expecting you to, but if you can just hire amazing people, you'll do well. Like you look at an Elon Musk or even a Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, the reason they did so well isn't because they're exceptionally smart.
That is part of it.
But the other big part is, and I think this is even more important, is—
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They picked the right people to recruit, and they had the right culture and mindset for the employees that they recruited within their organization. And if you recruit terrible people, there goes your company, no matter how smart or how rich you are. If You can get the right people, you're going to be better off. And the right person varies depending on the stage you're in. Like, I believe when I was younger, oh, I hired this person, they're amazing, look at what they got me to. Well, just because they got you there doesn't mean they're the right person to get you to the next level. Every person has different skills. And a great example of this is I've been hit up to be the CMO of publicly traded companies before many times, and it's never been a good fit. And biggest reason why is, one, I'm already an entrepreneur and I don't want to work for someone else, but B, I'm not the right person to manage hundreds, if not thousands of employees. I'm a terrible manager. Now I can put someone else underneath me, but it's just not a role that I would shine in because I'm not passionate about it and I'm not a great manager.
Yeah. All right, guys, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to grow your agency faster and we'll see you tomorrow.
