Why is Organic Content So Expensive?

Dude, let's come back to content teams for a moment because I was looking at our costs and I was pretty pissed off. I was like, dude, we're like, it's already this year, it's like $250 grand. I'm like, how, how is this $250 grand? Right? And not only that—

You're spending $250 grand so far on internal content?

Correct. Yeah. Like brand team, like this type of stuff, like podcasts or like short-form video, long-form video.

That's a lot.

It's a lot. And I'm like, how is it so much? And I was just so irritated, right?

It's too high of a percentage for revenue.

Yeah. And so I'm like, okay, I'm going to cut, right? And then so But the thing I'll say too is with content teams, because you work with like agencies and all that, right? They're either like really good for their process in the beginning and then it tapers off. But what I found is that the quality is so bad that compared to like you think about working with your internal team, like you work with Solo or people like that, it's you get a very high quality consistently. But for whatever reason, when it comes to organic content, when you think about like, like some of the best content creators in the world, like let's use MrBeast as an example. So I've heard and I've seen this because I talked to people that have worked for him before. I've heard that his churn is extremely high, right? And so it's like, why is that exactly? I don't know if you've seen this, but I'm getting more and more irritated.

My guess is Hormozi has the same issue. I don't know.

He does. He does. From what I've heard too. Yeah. So, but I'm like, okay, you try to hold content creators to like these content editors, your content team to high standards, but they just can't meet the standard, right? But at the same time, you're paying an arm and a leg for this stuff too. And so, but I think my hypothesis here is that we need more people in-house, full-time, fully bought in. That's my take on it instead of using all these agencies.

But the cost is too high when you do that, when you're hiring them full-time.

Depends on from where.

That's true. If it's overseas, sure. I think part-time from overseas, the economics will work out for you. Nearshore.

So when we say overseas, by the way, we should talk about offshore versus nearshore. Nearshore would be like Argentina.

Yes.

Would be like same time zone.

Similar time zones.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not exact, but within a few hours here or there, 3, 4, 7, 8.

I think that would be better, but I wanted to get your take. What's your hypothesis on how come the quality, I don't know if you're facing this issue with your content team, not so much.

We've learned our lane. So when we create content for Views, It performs well from a decent views perspective. I'm not saying we go viral, but it doesn't drive revenue. So like this week I put a lot of franchise data out for franchise marketing.

Interesting.

It doesn't generate views at all, but we know for our business, franchises have been really good customers with low churn.

This is your YouTube channel, long form?

Uh, no, this is just charts. So that goes Instagram, YouTube, no, Instagram, not YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, Facebook.

Yep.

I may be missing one.

Yep.

But charts have worked out really well.

Yep.

So putting out data for niches like franchises, it will help drive revenue for us. That's our prediction because franchises—

Who do you hire for charts? Because I know like AirOps has like a research team, right? So what do you like? You have the researchers and then you have the data visualization people, or more so just call them designers.

Data visualization, I agree with you, Tessa, it's just a designer. We have templates that we do in-house and that we do quote unquote nearshore, as you would call it. The issue that we face with that is when you give them the data, sometimes if you don't double-check, there's an error in the chart and they misread it. Or like instead of a decimal, they put a comma or they misplace a zero, which makes a big difference. Adding a zero at the end is like 50% instead of 5%.

So I can see that's where you get irritated.

For sure. Okay.

That's what I'm talking about.

So, and then the data for it, we do a few things. One is run surveys. That's the easiest thing because we have a massive audience. 2, we collect data from Ubersuggest and to the public and we scrape. 3, we have data deals with a lot of other providers like Moz. We also get data from like Data for SEO. So that also provides us more data. 4 is we will go find independent research firms, companies, people out there that will go and gather data. That helps us. And then the last one is we'll pay nearshore people to do research, like using Google, ChatGPT, etc., and help us come up with concepts for the charts. And what I mean by the research is, let's say if I'm doing some data on the Apple App Store, okay, and I want to do a chart on how frequently are people updating their titles for their apps in the Apple App Store versus the Google Play Store to talk about title importance for app rankings, right? A subset of marketing, but we generate a good amount of revenue from apps. It's not the biggest percentage, it's single-digit percentiles for us, but still it all adds up. I can do research. I can find companies that already have a lot of this data. Pull it together. ChatGPT, Google, you know, AI mode, whatever you want to call it, it all helps speed up how long it takes us to do research. Cite the sources from different areas, double-check them. You can't really double-check the accuracy of the stats, but you can double-check if the AI platforms are actually giving you accurate stats because sometimes they'll say one thing and the website says something else, or it meant something else. So you just double-check it and then you can put it together, cite your sources in the footnote, and then boom, You got a chart. So it's a combination of one of those that is what allows us to produce charts on a massive quantity. We're not perfect where we do every single day out of the week. We hit most days, but I would say on a given year, if I had to guess, we probably miss 5 to 10 days. We're pretty consistent.

When you look at webinars versus charts, would you say those are like your top 2? No.

From a content standpoint or a marketing standpoint?

I'm just talking about leads.

Lead volume or leads that close into revenue?

Leads that close into revenue.

It is actually events. So—

So speaking and hosting your own events?

Kind of. All right. So I went to Milan last week.

Uh-huh. Okay.

I forgot the conference name. I don't speak Italian. I went in and out. It was a good event, but I went to Milan last week. Okay. They paid for first-class travel.

ITA Airways?

No, British Airways.

Okay.

So Milan from LA, you can't get a direct flight.

You have to fly into Rome and then—

I flew into London. London.

Okay. Got it. Got it.

And then from London, I went to Milan and then Milan, I went from Milan to Madrid and Madrid to London. And I did events in all 3 places.

That's right. Yeah.

But someone paid for the ticket and the hotel while I was in Milan. We paid for the rest. Inner country flights aren't that expensive. And I typically used to charge for speaking, but in certain countries they don't have the budgets like they do in the US or in some of these countries that don't have the funding. So we don't really look at how much money they're going to spend. We look at who's in the audience. So that event in Italy, I should know the name of this. I don't know why I don't know the name. It's supposedly the biggest marketing event in Italy every single year. So it's great for us to be there. And there are enterprise corporations there, but there's also startups. So we did get some good leads and good branding that helps us out. Call it like 3 years later after us giving speeches, we see it. It really does help, but it helps years later. What helps in the short run and long run, and this is better for us, Is when we go to these events to speak, we will then set up our own in-person events and we'll invite specific companies. So we'll reach out. Some of them may be clients, majority are not clients. We invite them into the room and we give a talk on something that they may be curious on, like how to deal with marketing budget changes in the world of AI. Big companies have that issue. CMOs are like, my CFOs are asking me to cut, right? Very specific problems to our ideal customer type or how to generate more sales and conversions when organic traffic is going down.

Yeah. And this is like what? This is intimate. This is like, we're talking 50, 100 people.

No, usually like 20 people. Okay.

20 max.

We try to pick the companies and do 20.

And you have like food and all that and you speak.

Food, everything. We speak, we'll ask questions. And typically when I'm speaking, if it's like a 30-minute speaking spot or 45 minutes, I may speak for like 30 minutes of the 45 and some people on the team will speak for 15. It shows them, it shows potential clients how our team is smart, they're valuable, all the data's not with me or all the knowledge is not with me. So then it helps them build relationships and look better too because they're speaking to audience.

And you're budgeting like probably 3, 5 grand for these?

Yeah, I don't know what it costs. Yeah, I should ask.

$3,500. I don't, I don't, $10,000 is expensive for 10 people.

And we're only taking a room for like a few hours, call it like 2 to 3 hours max.

Probably $1,000 to $5,000, $5,000 on the really high end, I think is what you're getting.

$5,000 seems expensive.

Yeah, $5,000 is really expensive.

Shouldn't be more than a few grand is my guess.

No, but if you're going luxury, you're going $5,000. Yeah.

No, it is at luxury hotels.

It's so, but like, it's like a standard lunch type of thing and you guys are in like a—

No, usually we don't do lunches.

What are you doing then?

We'll do like morning sessions, like 9:30. Yeah. So you already skipped breakfast. So you may have like little appetizers, cookies, biscuits.

Smart guy.

Smart guy. Frittatas, frittatas. I don't know what they're called. What are they called? Frittatas? Frittatas, I think. Spinach frittatas.

And then you have a little, it's like one of those little conference rooms and then everyone's like around, right?

Coffee. Someone's pouring water, giving people coffee. Okay.

It's like a, it's like a thousand. $2,000, $2,000 max.

Call it $2,000, $3,000 max.

Yeah.

Because it's at luxury hotels.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like 5-star hotels. So, but I don't think it's more than $3,000. I'm taking a guess here. And then we'll do Q&A and then we're talking with each of the people after we're done with the Q&A because we have the room for 3 hours. This helps us build our pipe. This helps us build relationships. This helps us get a lot of larger accounts that are paying millions of dollars a year.

This is the main thing.

This is the main thing that really helps.

And this for sure was not your idea. Whose idea was this?

Brazil kicked it off.

That's smart.

Brazil kicked it off years ago when I was traveling. They would do intimate events with like 50 to 100 people. That's where you got that number from. Because when I first told you about it and it worked for Brazil, we—

I was just guessing. I don't remember you telling me this.

Yeah, we told you we used to try to do 50 to 100. And very rarely were we ever at 100. It was more closer to like 50 to like 70.

Yeah.

And I would do a session and we would partner with the hotel with, and a lot of times the hotels would do it for free.

Yeah.

And the reason they would do it for free is because it was all A-list brands and they want their hotels to be more well-known for business travel. Oh, so you can also partner with the hotels and get some of those. Yeah.

You need to have someone managing this. Was, was Marina from your team managing it?

Uh, Marina combined with the country leaders.

Yeah.

Because we need someone on the ground.

There's a lot of logistics around this.

There's a lot of logistics.

Yeah. Like even doing this, like you do like a 3-day event, hardcore logistics. You do like even 3 hours, still a lot of logistics. So.

When I travel to each— when I travel, let's say I'm getting paid to go to Milan, I'll stop in other organizations or other countries and do these kinds of events wherever we have offices. Now, I didn't get a chance to stop by France because I had a—

You mean you invite them to your office?

Well, no, funny enough, I haven't seen most of our offices, but we invite them to these events at the hotel and it's usually the hotel I'm staying at.

Got it.

So super convenient for me.

Oh, so you just walk downstairs.

I walk downstairs because I'm typically jet-lagged. So I wake up for this. Do it and I go right back to sleep.

Oh.

So we'll do these. So I did it in Madrid, Italy, and I did it in London. Okay. On top of that, we do another kind of event. We have customers that we know we're talking to that we haven't closed. And we're talking to companies we've done outbound or doing outreach to companies we want to work with. that we haven't been able to get as a customer yet will offer me going to their office and talking to everyone in their marketing team about a certain type of marketing.

Oh, so you hit them outbound. This is like another part of the sequence where you're like, hey, nails and towels.

Or like if they've also come inbound as well. Yeah. So I'll give you a great example. Like in Italy, we were in a pitch for SEO with Generali. So Generali is an insurance company. I think their market cap is like a €50 billion or USD market cap. So massive company. So companies like this, when you go speak at their office, they actually have a conference room, not a conference room, they have auditoriums built into their buildings, right? So I gave a speech on SEO. They loved it. We did not win the deal. I don't know who we lost it to. I was kind of pissed off that we lost it.

Yeah, because you showed up too. Yeah.

Showed up, made the effort, but they probably had good reasons. Maybe we were priced too high. And I knew something was wrong because after my speech, a lot of people said, amazing speech, you know, your company would be amazing to work with, but, you know, I'm not the only decision maker. There's a lot of other things and budgets and other things that go involved to make it. So when I had like 2 or 3 people say that to me—

You knew it was over.

I knew there was a good shot that it was over. And I was also dealing with a local pitch, but we still kept a relationship with them.

Mm-hmm.

So now we pitch for me to go to their corporate event and me to speak about AISE or GE or whatever you want to end up calling it.

Mm-hmm.

Of course we would make 'em pay for at least the travel.

Yeah.

And we'll do this with a lot of corporations. A lot of times we don't generate any revenue and we lose the deal or we're not even invited to a deal, but I would say at least 15, 20% of the time, I know that's not a high rate. We end up getting a deal out of it.

But I think the key thing is that in-person touchpoint. They remember you. That, because most people aren't going to do that.

It's not just that they remember you.

I'm not saying that's the only factor, but that's a big factor.

No, no, no.

That is a huge factor.

Yeah. I want to go a little bit deeper on that thing where you say they remember you. Yes, they remember you. We've done this, dude. I did this with a lady. She worked at a huge company. I forgot which one it was. I think it was, was it Oracle? We didn't get the deal. She worked at another company, did it again. We didn't get the deal. Third one I believe was Thomson Reuters. And she said, I want to work with you at all my other companies and now I'm able to get the budget. So I want to work with you now.

Yeah.

And she ended up hiring us. I forgot for which region. But where I'm getting at is when I'm giving a speech at these big corporations, how many people do you think they have in marketing? If they have a $20 billion market cap, $50 billion, whatever it is.

50 to 100?

More globally, more, right? They're too big of companies. Like you probably have hundreds, if not thousands of people in marketing when you're worth $20 billion, $50 billion.

I'm saying when you go to like their main office. Yeah.

When I'm speaking at the main office, sometimes it's only 30 people. Sometimes it's 50 or 100. Sometimes it's 200, 300 if I'm lucky. But a lot of those people, how long do you think they're going to stay at that company?

Not very long. 2 years, 3 years, and then—

Yeah, some of them are lifers because some of them are executives.

Yeah.

But a lot of people switch.

Yeah. Then they fan out to other big organizations.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

And then they, they already know about us and then they invite us into new pitches.

That's my point. Like they got that touchpoint with you and not many people are going to show up in person. And that, that's why I like the in-person. That's why I've always liked the in-person stuff.

So we do that a lot.

Yeah.

The hard part is it's really time-consuming on my time. So much so, like, I still think about buying a jet today. Like, I was talking to my buddy Mustafa because he has a jet company here.

Mufasa?

Mustafa.

Oh, I thought it was from Lion King.

No, no, no, that's Mufasa, I believe. He has a jet company and deals with a lot of people out here. And I thought about buying a jet and one that would take me overseas. And I've contemplated it so many times.

How many days have you traveled this year?

I don't know, but my hours are a lot.

Yeah. Because they're quick. Do you think over 200 days this year?

No, this year was lower.

Yeah.

So we track my speaking, how many speaking requests we get. Uh, I believe the average we got for inquiries last year in 2024, I got a chart on this. I believe it was around 12 speaking inquiries per month. Not all of them are qualified. Plus our team does outbound. If you look at this year, it's 7 to 9. So let's average out an 8, 7 to 9 speaking spots a month or inquiries. So I've actually started getting hit up less. Could be I'm not as relevant or because I don't get as much Google traffic, so people aren't seeing me as much, or maybe I'm not getting as many social media views because my content type has— I've changed the type of content I've posted in the last year and a half. Now, when I go to events, people still want to take pictures. They still want to come Talks, so I haven't seen any changes there. If you look at a lot of the content I post today, would you agree that more of it is strategy, high level, targeted towards bigger companies and smaller companies, or would you disagree with that?

I'm looking at your profile now.

Okay.

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No, but today my webinar was on unlocking App Store optimization synergies.

Which is still kind of SEO to me.

Yeah, but the reason we did it is because a lot of the companies we work with, with ASO, are large enterprises like Dick's Sporting Goods, right? And we got hit up by Netflix. We lost the RFP on the Netflix ASO.

But my point is like, it's a form of SEO that you just kind of move to the side, right? Where like, it's still relevant to enterprises. And I'm looking at your, your, your reels right now. And sure, they might not get nearly as many views as you got like last year or so, but it's all targeted like Google Ads, SEO, or whatever.

It's targeted towards— would you agree it's targeted more towards my ideal customer? Yes.

Yes. And we still— 10,000 views per video is still a lot, I'd say.

Yes, but we used to get way more views. Like, I'll crank out trends at the end of this year, but if I—

Trends always gets views.

It always gets views. But if I did a video on like how to use AI, uh, to create a week's worth of social media content in less than a week and get double the amount of your average views, I think it would do so well, but I don't think I'd generate any revenue from it.

You get a bunch of individual contributors who want to execute on this.

So we went away from creating content like that because it wasn't driving revenue. Yeah.

Would you say that your Instagram, your Reels drive your revenue?

Not really.

You know, the thing is people will never refer that they saw a Reel and they converted. They probably saw it in passing, but it's like, to me it's just a touchpoint of like the— there's actually numbers on this. I forgot who did this, but remember we've been talking about the rule of 7 and then I said, I think it's like the rule of 21 now. I saw stats recently, I forgot which website this was, but it's like, it's actually the rule of 27 now. And so I think this is just one of the touchpoints.

Yeah, no, there's a lot of touchpoints. We think it's still worth it, don't get me wrong. It just ends up being that when we're trying to speak at events and drive revenue, we found that most events that want to pay me to speak don't drive revenue. So we don't We try to shy away from them. Like I get hit up a lot to go to the Middle East. We don't generate a lot of revenue from the Middle East. Like a lot of these government programs will hit me up and pay to speak and they'll pay a nice, you know, pretty penny to have me speak. But dude, I've been in some of these countries like Saudi Arabia where I'm getting paid an arm and a leg to speak like extremely well, plus a $20,000 airfare, right? Like, you know, the airfare is a drop in the bucket compared to what they're paying me. Mm-hmm. And then, no joke, I speak. Guess how many people are in the audience for a big event? One of their biggest conferences.

How many people are in the audience?

Yes.

Twenty thousand.

No.

More? No.

Sometimes it's like ten people, fifteen people. Wait, wait, wait.

For their biggest event? Uh huh. And they paid you an arm and a leg for that. There was ten people in the audience.

Uh huh. Ten, fifteen people. That's insane. And I even spoke with someone who was high up in Saudi Arabia. Really well-known celebrity. And then I think that one may have had like 30 people in the audience.

Yep.

But when I walk around the event, a lot of people want to say, come up, say hi, take pictures, talk to me. And one of the guys who brought me there, he's like, man, you had more people want to take pictures of you than the Skype co-founder. And I was like, well, the Skype co-founder has more money than me. So who gives a shit how many people want to take pictures of me? Like, I'd rather have his money than my money.

Dude, you want to know what's funny? This is, I was at a lunch yesterday, this is kind of, as you said that, I was like, I realized something. When you were speaking at the Global Marketing Summit this year, the YPO one, right? So I wasn't watching in the beginning, but one of my friends I was eating with yesterday, he's like, oh, did you watch Neil's talk? I was like, what did Neil say? He's like, yeah, so when Neil's question was like, so who here does over $50 million? It's like a bunch of hands go up, right? Who here does over $100 million? A bunch of hands are still up, right? Who here does over $2 billion? So 2 hands go up, right? And he's like, Why are you guys still here? I don't know why that reminded me of that, but it's, I think my point is, I don't know, you just triggered that. I was being honest 'cause you just never know.

You're giving them a million dollars, why are you in the audience right now?

You just never know who's going to be in the audience sometimes. Sometimes it might be like 10 people. Sometimes, by the way, one of those 10 people could be like the most powerful person in the world.

So yeah. But what I found, like even those events, Like your YPO event?

Yeah.

Great event. It's not a good event for us for generating business.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

But we're, because we're looking for publicly traded companies that issue out RFPs.

You should have gone. Are you still in YPO right now? I don't think so. The mistake, the mistake we made this week. So I was with him yesterday because he came for this global, uh, global business summit.

Oh yeah, that Sunny's running.

Yeah. So guess what? He's like, I was like, why are you at this event right now? Right? Because you're allowed to pitch each other at this event. So he's like, I'm here because last year when I went to this event, I got a Berkshire Pathway company. And then this company pays me about $4 million a year. And not only that, they're going to introduce me to other Berkshire portfolio companies because we've done such a good job. He's like, you never know who you're going to meet, right? And I'm like, goddammit. Like, I didn't want to go because I spoke at a conference last week at Capital Camp. Guess who's in the pipeline now? It's a GM from a division at Amazon. Like, you just never know. That was a Christian business conference. So sometimes you don't know who's going to be in the audience. You don't. I'll give you one more thing. I still get hit up a lot. Eric, when are you going to do Leveling Up again? When are you going to do Leveling Up again? When are you going to do Leveling Up again? I'm getting to the point where I'm like, maybe we should just do like another marketing school at some point. So yeah.

Dude, with speaking of Amazon, like when I was in UK, Amazon was in the audience and like we try to work out deals, right? So, but like those are the type of companies that we invite to our own personal events. Like there's not that many that are that size, but we're inviting a lot of companies that are worth over $100 billion or at least $20 to $50 billion.

And these aren't just all VPs. You're inviting like heads of, directors, like seniors.

You don't want a lot of CMOs and stuff like that because the CMOs, they may dictate the budget, but in big organizations, it's a lot of the directors and people like that.

They're pushing.

They're pushing and they're the ones who are vetting and the CMOs take their recommendation and you want to convince a lot of those people to work with you. You have to remember it, like if it's a billion-dollar company, sure, you want the CMO, but if someone's worth like Amazon, $2 trillion, $3 trillion, whatever they're worth, directors have a ton of power. They have more power than the CMOs at these smaller companies.

But you know, I will say something though, like I don't disagree with the content you're making right now, but what we're saying right now kind of does reinforce the need to create content because you never know who you're going to meet. I'll give you an example. So we made a video recently on this podcast. I was talking about this guy Marketing Max. Remember this? That video got about like 70,000 views, which is decent. But who, you know who ended up following me from that? It was like a highly paid NBA player. and a highly paid DJ, right? But these people also know other people too, and it kind of like fans out. Like people talk about query fan out, right? But I'm not saying this is the only way, but—

Yeah.

You look at Gary Vee as an example, like he creates more wider content, right? Like he'll do like Tea with Gary Vee and stuff. And I saw him on the School of Hard Knocks recently, right? And so he was like, so Gary, how much do you make right now? He's like, with Vayner, like just VaynerX or whatever, it's like $340 million a year. He's like, you combine everything else, $500 million, right? So remember Gary, you and Gary are kind of on the opposite sides. Gary's like, I want to be known by everybody, right? And I, but I understand that. I also understand your perspective too, where it's like, I just want to be focused on driving enterprise pipeline.

Yes.

So like there's no right or wrong way. I think it's just like what you prefer to do sometimes.

Yes. And what we found is you get, like, if I look at Vayner, I bet you majority of his revenue comes from not his personal brand, but from RFPs.

I think you're right. Okay.

I'm not saying what he's doing hasn't made him money because Gary also creates ancillary companies like Rezi. Was Rezi his? I think it was his.

He was a co-founder. I don't know how that works out. So yeah.

So, but he made money there and a lot of other companies and he's amazing marketer. So I think him having a massive TAM, like is it VeeCards or VeeFriends?

VeeFriends.

VeeFriends. He's making money in a lot of other areas. It's like good for him. The mass appeal works out. My play, I'm not saying it's better than his by any means, is more of a B2B play. And if I go to a YPO networking event and I meet some people, those type of customers are fine. The type of customers we get from RFPs are harder to get, cost a lot more money for us to try to get because we're spending so much money traveling and pitching in person.

Mm-hmm.

But when we land them as an account, they tend to stick for a long, long time. When I say a long, long time, I'm not talking about a year or 2 or 3. I'm talking about we've had clients for like, 7, 8 years that we've had from day one that are from RFPs.

Dude, so I was walking with my friend yesterday, you know what we said? So this is like a different conversation, but like within YPO, you actually have higher-ups at these large enterprises. So I'm talking Salesforce, I'm talking like, you can just say Goldman or whatever, they're all in. So he's like, he tells me that's how he, like, this is his way, right? He's like, he's actually got enterprise deals by going to these things. And I'm like, you're right. I think for most, for the most part, like YPO YPO's an entrepreneur group, right? You're probably right on most of the events, but this one in particular, because you can do deals, it actually attracts a lot of these enterprise executives. And he said he met a lot this time. So you just never know.

No, you never know. But like at the YPO event that I went to that you guys put on, it was mainly entrepreneurs.

Yes. Global Marketing Summit. Yeah, that one. Yeah.

So we tend not to generate as much revenue from entrepreneurs versus hired execs. Because hired execs typically work at larger corporations.

Yeah. And they also, by the way, hired execs, the reason why McKinsey and Bain, they do so well is because we call it the CYA insurance, the COVID your ass. So they need a throat to choke and they need it. It's easy to blame an agency, right? So yeah.

It really is.

Yeah. And so, hey, like we, like, this is customer service. You need to take it and take a licking sometimes. It is what it is. But anyway, all that to say, I think with this section, this session was like a 40-minute session. I think A lot of— sure, Neil and I like to hang out online and all that, but the in-person stuff is where the magic's at. And I think in-person is going to become even more valuable. And who knows? Well, I might bring back my events in the future. I don't know. But my friend was asking me, I was like, dude, I don't want to do it because it's a lot of work.

And you got to figure out, you know, the other point I would say from this last conversation Eric and I had just right now is you got to figure out the marketing that works for you. There's no one way. to skin a cat. There's many ways and I figured out what works for us, so we do more of it. Eric's figured out what works for him, so he does more of it. And neither approach is better or wrong or worse. It's just, you'll figure out what works for you. And what we found out like with events is the ones that are willing to pay me usually aren't the right events. So like Marina will do outbound to events. And yesterday she was talking to me, she's like, We're not getting too much of an uptake. And I'm like, what are you sending in the outbound email? Have you told them my speaker rating, some of the events I've spoken at? She's like, I'm telling them all that. I'm saying, hey, would you like Neil to speak? Here's info on him. It would be great. He would be open to speaking if you guys covered his costs, like travel costs. And I was like, I gave Marina an example of franchises. I'm like, if you told me to speak at 30 franchise events that had our ideal customers where they had like more than 200 locations each minimum. And we had to pay for our costs.

You did.

We would make way more money than if they even covered costs, paid me or anything like that. And she's like, yeah. So I was like, your problem on why outbound's not working so well is you're in the outbound, you're pretty much saying, give me money to cover our costs or else we're not going to do it. She's like, it doesn't work too well, but every once in a while we get people hitting us up. But I was like, you should just say, I'll speak for free. Just go find the right events.

So you're saying you lead for free first and then when you negotiate, cover our costs? No. Or you're saying you'll pay for everything?

I'll pay for everything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But she's pitching right now for the events that have our ideal customers because there's events that have like 3,000, 4,000 attendees and they're 100% our ideal customers. And a lot of those events, they want speakers to pay to speak. So it's the opposite of what we're used to.

Yeah.

And we tend not to go to those because we don't pay to speak.

And these are like the franchise ones. We're not even talking B2B anymore, right?

No, B2B, franchise, all of them. Yeah. Like there's one There's one in Germany, I think it's called like, uh, D'Mexico.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They, oh, they charge, they force you to pay?

Almost every speaker, if not every speaker is paying to speak there.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah.

Guess what? The founder of D'Mexico is a YPO guy.

I believe it.

Uh-huh.

So they hit me up and they wanted to do a deal because we were telling them how I could potentially be a draw. They're like, all right, we agree. But they're like, this is what we normally charge. We would do the deal for you to speak and give you a great center stage and all this kind of stuff if you paid X or at least bought a booth or something. My problem is I'm like, or our team's problem is like, we still got to pay because we're used to us getting paid for travel and getting to speak for free.

You're used to getting spoiled.

And we're used to also getting our team covered to some extent as well. So now it's flipped like, wait, you want us to pay to speak and pay for our own travel? And we're trying to work out with some of these conferences that we would just pay our own travel and not pay to speak, it's not working out as well for the bigger ones like the DeMexicos. Eventually we're going to have to go towards a model where we pay to speak.

Dude, let me tell you something. This will be probably not helpful for you because you wouldn't do this, but helpful for other people. So I remember I would go to these executive trainings like the Peter Diamandis executive program, right? So I paid for that. I ended up paying $15,000 for the year. So I learned a lot because I love this stuff, right? I love learning about the future and all that. So in the audience, one guy owns like a bunch of like franchises in Mexico, like multiple ones. Like he handles like the Burger Kings and all these things, right? Older dude. Another guy, he's part of a hedge fund. I think they own Juventus, the soccer club. There's another guy who's like a rear admiral for the Navy.

He was in—

and we ended up getting a pitch with the Navy for that one, right? And then the other, the Mexico guy I was talking about, He was in the audience too. He's a YPO guy. And then he like, he runs New Mexico. He's the entrepreneur. And then another guy who I became really good friends with, I hung out with him. He's a nice Indian guy. He is a CMO of one of the largest consumer companies in the world. Let's call it like a Procter Gamble type of thing.

Okay.

So all that to say is that sometimes you go to these executive programs to learn and you never know who you meet. Sure, it's expensive for the week, but that's the type of audience where it's Everyone, almost everyone in there is ICP fit for you.

Yes.

Yeah. But you would never sit through that. That wouldn't work for you. But I'm just saying to the audience, like, I'm like, in my mind, as we're talking about, I'm like, oh crap, why don't I just do more of that again? Because I do enjoy these executive programs.

Yeah. Yeah.

Again, you never know who you're going to meet.

No, you never know who you're going to end up meeting. I think some of this stuff is really well worth it if you can end up just Going to enough of these and be willing to weather the storm and put in like a year or 2 years, and then it'll start paying back.

Anyway, guys, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.