Eric Siu advises marketers and agency owners on navigating the COVID-19 crisis, starting with mindset: meditation, limiting news to 15 minutes daily, and sleep matter more than tactics. He notes hiring freezes at Bird and Airbnb, suggests service businesses pivot to performance-based contracts and educational offers, and highlights thriving sectors like tele-therapy and home-gym equipment.
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We're live. Not sure if we're totally live. Let me just double check right now. So let's look at this. Well, if you guys can hear me, type it in chat. If you guys can see me right now, type it in chat. Just want to make sure this thing is actually working, and tell me where you're coming from as we do this. Looks like I'm in the right chat now. Tell me where you're coming from. Let me know how you guys are all doing. And here we are live again, live again because we have today's the day for us to it's another brand new day, right? It's a brand new day during turbulent times. And, you know, it's important for us to stay connected, whether it's with friends, family, you know, we're all friends here. And, you know, just continue to help each other out. And hello, Virk from Fresno. I hope you're doing well. And we'll wait for a couple more people to come in as we do this. And then I'm probably going to start scheduling these. So if you'd like to see me start to schedule these, drop it into chat and say, hey, look, just type 1. Thank you, Virk. Neil and I are actually recording Marketing School This coming this coming Friday, and yeah, I hope you all are doing well right now. I think you know today what I really want to spend time talking about is ultimately mindset, and I think mindset's really important because hello, Innerdeep. Hello, LK. See, Innerdeep, you didn't think I was going to do it two days in a row, but here I am. LK, hello. Yeah, look, you know usually when you're doing work, you're so Kind of, you're in the world of work already, right? Like you're in the zone and you're flowing and you don't really think about your mindset that much. But I think during times like this, if you don't have your head screwed on straight, then everything's going to fall apart, right? So if you don't take care of your mind, if you don't take care of your health right now, and especially if you have people reporting to you, or let's say you're a leader of a company, if you don't have it down, everybody else is looking up to you. Yeah. Then you know you're going to be in trouble, right? You're going to have to make clear decisions, actually unclear decisions. So you're going to have to make unclear decisions with incomplete information, and you're going to have to make them quickly because if you're not quick enough, then you're going to be in trouble, right? Hello, Lance. So yeah, guys, I mean, you know today I want to spend time talking about this because I was thinking about yesterday, you know, and there's there's obviously there's a ton of tactical things you can do. Like for example, yes, meditation meditation works, right? You know, I kind of just sit here in the morning. I just look outside and then I just, you know, turn on my meditation app and, you know, we get that going so you can clear your mind a little bit. But, you know, other than that, I think it's thinking about, you know, the information that you're taking in right now. So, I know for when this stuff first started happening, I was looking at it maybe even 2 months ago already. I was paying attention. There starts to become a point of diminishing returns. So, if you look at Twitter all the time and you keep refreshing the news, It's crisis after crisis after crisis. You look at CNN, their headline, they're nicknamed Crisis News Network, right? And you gotta like, I would say, you know, one of the things you can do, one of the key things you can do is limit the amount of news that you're getting, especially around, you know, COVID-19. Maybe limit it to like 10 to 15 minutes a day because the problem is if you keep scrolling, you keep scrolling and you keep looking at more and more and more, it creates more and more anxiety for you, right? And I get scary. So I think, you know, that again, that goes into, you know, what comes in eventually comes out, right? So you have bad information or like negative information coming in, that's going to affect how you do work. That's going to affect how you communicate with your friends, your family members. That's going to have a trickle-down effect. So everything really starts with you as a leader. And when I say leader, I don't mean you don't necessarily need to have a company. I mean, I'm just, I'm saying even just leading yourself as well. Let's say you're just starting out right now. You're trying to start a business. You have to keep an even keel because there are going to be people that freak out, right? And that is something that you can control because if you freak out, other people see you freaking out, they're going to start freaking out and there's a trickle-down effect, right? So, you have to keep your head screwed on straight. And if it's just you working on your own stuff and you freak out, that's not really a good use of time, right? Sure, you should go for a walk, you should take a break, but I think if you're constantly freaking out and reading negative things, That's not going to help you at the end of the day. It doesn't matter what marketing tactics you know. It doesn't matter what strategies you know. If you just keep wallowing and you don't take action, and then that leads to you maybe not taking care of your health anymore, even going outside for a walk or even staying home and doing bodyweight workouts and doing meditation, getting good sleep. You don't do that stuff, then again, you're basically harming yourself. And if you harm yourself, you can't do good work, right? So, everything you want, your income goals, you want to hire employees for the year, all this stuff, that stuff right now almost takes a backseat because for the most part, most companies are hiring freeze, right? There's a list of a bunch of Silicon Valley companies. You can see who's actually hiring right now, who's firing, and then who's actually on a hiring freeze, right? For the vast majority of people, it's a hiring freeze. And there's a bunch of layoffs happening too. I mean, for example, scooter company Bird laid off, I think, 30 to 40% of the company. Airbnb is laying people off. You look at Lime, I mean, I think they're raising another emergency valuation, emergency round of funding at a much lower valuation. They're taking an 80% discount on their next round of funding. So look, this is all scary stuff. But again, this is stuff that's— it's not like this hasn't happened before. It's not like You know, change hasn't happened before where a big adjustment happens. And, you know, this is your opportunity to take advantage of it because if you don't have your head screwed on straight— and by the way, you guys should ask some questions, I'll answer some questions in a second— but you don't have your head screwed on straight, then you're gonna be screwed, right? And you don't want that to happen at the end of the day. So, right now, a lot of the stuff that I'm doing, sure, I have my podcast, sure, I'm doing videos like this, but part of this is to help people, you know, at scale. I'm doing a lot of one-on-one Zoom chats. Like, I was speaking with a VC yesterday. Wow. We were just meeting one-on-one and we were just talking and he just said Sunday he woke up and he had a panic attack just out of nowhere, right? And for me, at least yesterday, I was watching Ozark on Netflix and I was just kind of— afterwards, I was just kind of— I was just like, man, this kind of sucks, kind of what's going on and you just start to reflect on it. But I think that the key thing is sure, there probably is some time for sitting around and just kind of reflecting a little bit, but you got to spin that into action, right? I was— yesterday I was getting food downstairs and then there's an LAPD officer, so Los Angeles Police Department officer next to me. And I looked at him and I said, hey, how's the crime rate right now? He's like, it's actually decreased. And he's like, but you wait, just maybe 4 to 8 weeks when people don't have their paychecks anymore, it's going to start getting crazy. And I said, what kind of crazy are we talking? He's like, all the things you can imagine, right? So the cops here are preparing, you know, they're, they're, you can see what they're doing and they're patrolling. Like, I can see downstairs, I can see the streets right now. You know, I can see like there's always like a cop car every now and then driving by. But yeah, I mean, it's scary stuff, right? So what I'm saying is you got to think for yourself, like, what am I going to do for the day? But also think for the future too, because if I'm in downtown LA, I'll tell you, like, action item that I can do is think about, okay, At a certain point, if things start to get really bad, what do I do, right? And this again goes to mindset and actually doing things. It's actually taking action. It's not saying, oh, I should just sit and stay put and, you know, let things happen to me. I want to take control, right? And you got to take control of your own life. So I think that's really important. Anyway, I'll look at a couple questions over here. Angelo says, have you scaled back on paid ads or have you been spending more? What is your opinion? So We're actually continuing to spend on paid ads for our— hello, Lucian. But we're continuing to spend on paid ads for our Agency Accelerator program. So that's basically for any service providers, coaches, or consultants. You can basically book a call directly with myself. It's actually me right now and talk about a growth strategy to grow your services business. So you could go to singlegrain.com/call for that. And then we're basically running ads towards that. So you can check that out, singlegrain.com/call. If you want to have a chat with myself and, or it might be someone else from my team. But, you know, to answer your point, the vast majority of companies right now, what I'll say is this, agency-type businesses, they're lagging businesses. So whatever you see happen to outside, you know, the economy, it usually takes a month or 2 to start to hit agency-type businesses. So you need to be careful if you have an agency-type business. But if you're doing any type of educational type stuff right now, you're running ads, you know, you're probably, you're probably okay for now because more and more people are going home, more people want to learn, right? So I would say, you know, think about people's mindset and where they are right now, and maybe they can't afford something out the gate. Maybe you give them a 30-day trial or a 7-day trial of what you have, and then from there they can make a decision on whether they want to continue on with you or not. All right, so guys, keep your questions coming. I'm gonna keep this going for a little More and maybe talk through, you know, again, like people think, I think we're all rooted, like those of you that, I'm grateful that you guys are subscribed to the channel, but it's always, you know, we're thinking marketing tactics, we're thinking sales tactics, right? But if the economic system is broken right now, we can't really think about, oh, you know, let's try to drive more leads. We can't force it, right? So, I'll give you an example. On the single brain team, so on the the agency side of of of the business that I have, you know, some people are like, "Oh, we just need to go get more business right now. We just need to go get more business right now." Like, it doesn't work like that because if the economy is not working and people aren't buying, you cannot force people into doing something that they're not in the mood to do right now. That is not in their desire. Their current desires right now are to survive, and you got to figure out how to help people survive and then thrive. So. Doing things like this, hopefully it helps people. You know, give them an idea, spur some type of action to survive and thrive. If I can even help one person from these types of videos, you know, I'm gonna keep doing it. The reason I do the live is because the live sticks around afterwards as well. So that's what you want to do. And you know, the Zoom calls that I do, I do it with groups. I do it with people. I do it with friends. You know, I you know, I reach out to to my parents more. But ultimately, people want to survive and then thrive. You think about like my mom right now. Real estate agent can't even go outside right now, so she just says she's bored all the time. And immediately I think about mindset, right? What's going on in her mind right now? There's only so much time she can spend like walking outside, and then you know, you know maybe she doesn't have as many you know people that she can talk to. So my thing is okay, how can I help her? Right? So I'm texting her more. I'm calling her more. I used to just visit them all the time, but it's mindset because I know if I can't if I can't help her keep that balanced. She might slide towards depression, right? And that's what I think that the greater effect of— and I hope I'm wrong on all this stuff, but when you think about people, economy shutting down for a couple months or so, people being locked in for— people start to go crazy, right? And again, that ties back into mindset. You got to think about, okay, first order is, okay, we shut down the economy. Second order, okay, what happens? Second order is people are not going to have jobs, okay? So what are people going to do? If people don't have jobs, they cannot put food on the table. Okay, and then what, right? And then that means people might start to do irrational things, right? Or people might start to not feel as good. People might start to, you know, lapse into depression, right? Like these are all— you got to consider second, third, fourth order effects on this. And I'm not saying for sure they're going to have depression. I'm not saying for sure they're going to riot. But I'm saying these are considerations you should think about, right? So, and then it's like the 4th or 5th order effect for me is, okay, if that stuff starts to all happen, then it's like, okay, where's somewhere safe that I can go to, right? Um, but I'm just saying for you, you gotta— again, this ties back into, um, we're talking about, we're talking about your mindset. This is a mental model. 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th order consequences. If you don't think ahead, most people tend to think about surface level. You're lucky if they get to the 2nd level. Which is why they're most people, right? So, you know, you want to think about first level and then, okay, what happens? Typically what you want to do here is just say, okay, if this happens, then what? And then what happens after that? And then what happens after that, right? Then you can start to make good decisions. A lot of people just don't think about that. And this again, how does this all tie into marketing? Well, you know what? This does tie into marketing because if you have your mind screwed on straight, You can't do marketing well because marketing requires good thoughts, right? It requires good mindset. The greatest marketers are the greatest copywriters, and they understand how to tap into people's desires, their mindset. They know how to get people to take out their wallet and take an action, right? That's what marketing is. Marketing is psychology. So if marketing is psychology, then it is related to basically we're talking about mindset, right? All this stuff ties in together. You can't just think about it's marketing, it's sales, right? You think about how everything plays together. You understand systems, you understand mental models, and then you're going to be able to get ahead of the pack and get ahead of this whole thing, right? Because for most people right now, they're scared. They're scared poopless right now. And what you want to do is say, you know what? Sure, you can be scared, but you're going to take some damn action because there's so much opportunity that's going to start popping up in the next month or two, knock on wood. You are going to be able to Let's say you want to invest in a business. You're going to be able to get a discount. You want to— there's going to be a lot of people that are looking for jobs. You can get talent for cheaper, okay? There's potentially websites or businesses that you can buy, okay? That stuff you want to invest into. If you want to invest in the stock market, by all means, do it. You know, I'm not a financial advisor, but if you think, you know, that's what you're good at, do it. You think you understand certain sectors well, do it, right? There is opportunity coming, but your mind needs to be prepared for it because if your mind's not ready for it, Then you're going to go all cuckoo and then you're not going to be able to take advantage of these opportunities which are typically— I mean, this is the opportunity right now. I was talking to the VC yesterday. He's like, yeah, you know, now's the opportunity. The opportunity is coming. But if you're a company or startup right now, don't think about fundraising right now. Don't be naive. Don't think about, oh, I'm going to go get some funds right now. People aren't ready to give you funds right now, okay? That's not where people's minds is at. People want to survive and then they want to thrive. Just think about those 2 things. Survive and then thrive. Not, oh, you know, we got to help people generate more leads right now. Maybe there are some companies that can do that right now, but vast majority, no. Because I'll tell you this, even the companies that are doing really well right now, um, I'll give you an example. So the, um, in the survival space, I have a survival blog, gets a couple million visits a month. Our traffic and sales has tripled, tripled through this crisis, right? And A lot of the sales are driven through talking to affiliates, manufacturers. And the manufacturers say this, in a couple of weeks, we're out of inventory and we can only make a couple per day. And there's another guy I know, he sells home gyms. They're going to be out of inventory probably in the next week or two, right? So, not necessarily everyone's doing well. The people that are doing well probably right now are, let's say, online pharmacies, online therapy type stuff. You talk about, you know, there's— I forgot what company it was called, but in New York they send pills to your house so you don't have to wait in the pharmacy. So that's a good idea, right? There's life insurance company called Ethos. They're doing well. So the things that make sense for right now are obviously doing well. Okay. Let's see what other questions are in here right now. I'm going to answer some. So let's see. Lance needs a mentor to help me expand. Any advice on where to find one? So Lance, we do have a group coaching program for the Agency Accelerator. That's really for any service provider or coach or consultant. So you can go to singlebrain.com/call to apply, and then we'll see if it's a good fit. And then I'm just going to call you Abdal Hamid. Okay. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. If you're a small agency starting recently, how do you sell in these moments of crisis? Thanks. I appreciate the time. Okay. So during times like this, during times of crisis, It's hard to just reach out to people and say, hey, we're going to discount our services for you, right? If you really think you do a good job right now and you're okay deferring some of the payment, what I would say is you offer to work on a performance basis. So let's say I was doing conversion rate optimization for someone. So let's say I lift the website's conversion from 1% to 2%. I'll say, hey, if I'm able to double your conversion rate, you don't pay me anything right now, but if I do that for the next 12 months, I want 10 or 15% of the revenues, right? And they say yes or no, but you work on a performance basis. Same thing, you can, maybe you can do that with SEO as well, but that takes a little longer to kind of manifest, right? So it's a little harder with that. You know, chances are like if you have any terms with your contract, you're going to have to, you know, remove or adjust some of the terms. So if it's like typically 12 months, maybe you make it 6 months or 3 months. Typically, let's say you have a 30-day out, you make it no 30-day out. 'Cause people are struggling right now. People want discounts across the board. It's not an easy situation right now. And so, what I'm doing right now is I'm just trying to build as much goodwill as I can, right? Even doing lives like this. By the way, later today, guys, I have a webinar that I'm doing with Noah Kagan from Sumo Group, and I'm doing this with Patrick Campbell from ProfitWell. I will share the link with you inside of— I'm going to share inside of the chat right now. We're doing this at 12 PM Pacific. So it's going to be the 3 of us and you guys can answer questions like this. It'll be fun. So let me drop that into the chat right now. But basically what you're trying to do, Hamid, is you are trying to build as much goodwill as possible. So when this stuff all ends, they will remember who actually reached out to them to offer to help. Not trying to sell them, but to say who was genuinely helpful during this time. Who was trying to understand where I'm where I'm at, and you know they're going to remember you, right? So that's what you want to do. It's what you're trying to ultimately do is touch points. All right. So that's the link right there. Okay. And then say Faisal says, "I want to work with you, and I want an internship at your company." So you can go to singlegrain.com/careers for that. And then Verk says, "I'm a senior in high school." Can I get an internship? I know it's cliché. singlegrain.com/careers for that one. And for tiny URLs for SEO, yes, I would recommend that you keep it smaller and then have maybe the keyword in the URL slug if you can do that. And you generally want to have as— you don't want to have that many subdirectories. All right. So that's it on the SEO side. And then Do you think marketing agencies are hiring more? No, absolutely not right now. Most marketing agencies out every single agency business I've talked to right now is not hiring. In fact, every single one I've talked to has begun laying off people. They've either planned it or they've begun laying off people. So it's not a need. We're you know that that's something that's kind of you know on our mind as well. But yeah, I hope that helps. So anyway, guys, so I dropped the link for the Zoom webinar that's happening in about three hours or so. It's going to be. Again with Noah Kagan from Sumo, so AppSumo, SumoMe, the pop-up thing, and he's actually got a new tool too. And then you got Patrick Campbell, pricing expert from ProfitWell. He's going to share some unique data, and then I'm going to be speaking as well. And then Lucian asked, how's my SaaS doing? My SaaS is doing good. It's continuing to grow. So that's the one thing I will say to you is SaaS businesses are continuing to grow right now. So keep that in mind. And then yeah, guys, I mean, if you look, if you want to do a call with me, if you're looking to try to build your service business, Just go to singlegrain.com/call and then you can book a call with us. We're not able to take every single call, so we'll review your application, but you got to fill out the whole thing. There's 2 steps for that and then check it out. So that is it for today, everyone. I hope you all have a good rest of your day or your evening. I hope you all stay safe. I hope the mindset part was actually helpful. I know, you know, me sometimes I just like mindset, screw that, I want to do marketing, but I think it's really important. And if I can affect at least one of you to Make sure that you're continuing to tweak that mindset, just like you'd optimize a campaign. You know, you got to keep that that that that thing going, right? So if you don't have your mind right, you won't have your health right, and then you won't be able to have your have good marketing campaigns. So I hope you all stay safe, and I hope you all stay healthy. And maybe I'll do another one tomorrow. Maybe I'll do another one. I'm aiming for about eight thirty or so. But yeah, see you guys later.
