From $0 to $13M: The 4 Cs Framework That Fueled This Agency's Growth | Agency Breakthrough Ep. 6

Once you dig into this, it like just opens your eyes. You start to see leverage. And leverage is how you win the game. It is. For example, let's take links. If I have economies of scale and my cost to acquire a link, it's the exact same link as someone else's, is less I'm going to win. If I can pay someone to do the labor from the exact same quality perspective, less I'm going to win. That's how you win the game. That's how you grow. That's how you scale. And once you see this, your eyes open. You see leverage everywhere. And you also see where you're improperly using it too.

Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Agency Breakthrough. This time we're doing things a little differently. We just finished recording these this episode with Chris Dreyer from Rankings IO really enjoyed this conversation. So we'll let you know about, you know, a little bit of a teaser of what's coming up in just a second. But first, Gray, I mean, we get to hang out. How are you?

I'm in chaos right now. Our whole, like one of the main lines that we talk about are our mission at Zen Pilot is like taking canceling chaos and creating clarity. And this transition from chaos to clarity needs to happen soon. But I'm in the middle of moving houses and just figuring out a bunch of stuff there. So between that and prepping for a bunch of stuff work wise with some conferences coming up and some speaking engagements, there's a lot of moving parts, but things are good. So that's my little crazy. By the way, Tiffany Souder from Element three, who you can look forward to hearing here on Agency Breakthrough, she had a great line that when someone asks you how are you? She never say good, because we all know you're not good. And you should never say I'm busy. Cuz we're all busy and we don't really care. So I kind of gave you the I'm busy with just a little bit more flavor on it. And that is my accurate honest life update. Um, so I'm doing good inside the the busyness, which is like the worst answer blend of the two. How about you?

Okay, so now I can't answer neither good nor busy. Okay. I am befuddled. I'm gonna pick beef aut. So the thing I'm on a journey of meaning making right now. And the reason I'm on that journey right now is. Well, last. Was that last weekend? Yeah, Quite recently I got my first tattoo. Okay. And what I did, I mean on the Video, you'll be able to see that I've got. Well, I thought the meaning was pretty simple, you know, because I was like, do A plus on my hand. Okay? Not hand, but, like, above my wrist. And that's that. I. I got it. My brother got the same thing, but more of an X than. Than a plus. And then I come back home and my wife says, oh, you.

You.

You got a cross there. Why? I'm like, well, yeah, if you look at it like that, it does look like a cross. And then I spent, like, two days, like, ruminating on what is that thing for me? And I realized on every day, it's like, every day it means something else. Then I realized it kind of looks like the. Kind of the. Like the. You know, when you're thinking of, like, a hospital, for example, you know, it could also symbolize healing to some extent. Tattoos are fascinating, man. I'm still getting used to it, but, yeah, that's how I have been recently. Just experimenting kind of in my mind with, like, one simple thing, one simple symbol. How many different things it can. It can mean. Okay, so that got a little bit heavy in there. Anyway, great. Tell us about our guest here, Chris Dreyer, that the listeners will listen to in just a second here on Agency Breakthrough.

Yeah, Chris is running an awesome agency called Rankings Websites. Rankings IO. You'll hear about it here in terms of their revenue size and how they're structured, and Breakthrough moments. I've known Chris for quite a while. He's on Agency Journey, our other podcast. Probably 2017, 2018, somewhere in there. Um, so we've kind of run in the same agency circles for a while, and super fun to have him on and dig into what he has. One of the things that I wanted to press him on, that we didn't spend as much time as I would have liked to. And so let me know if you'd like a. Part two is we did talk about compensation plans, but I would like to go even deeper and get even more specific in comp plans. So if you've got thoughts or questions about that, let me know. Shoot us a. A note. But how about from your side? What was the biggest thing that stuck out to you? Kuba.

Okay, so definitely the part when he was talking about labor, the cost of labor being kind of a taboo subject, that kind of made me perk up and listen closely. But I think the one word that I'm taking out from this episode is leverage. That part made me, you know, take a quick note and just ask ourselves, ask myself, like, where do we have leverage or do I have leverage? That thought really stuck with me. So definitely pay attention. When Chris starts mentioning that the four Cs that he got through, very interesting kind of framework of thinking of running a business and generally speaking, like very, how should I say this? Very insightful advice here from Chris. So I wouldn't want the listeners to wait any longer. Before we get into it, here's our episode with Chris. Enjoy it.

Hey, Chris, welcome to Agency Breakthrough. I would love to start with just kind of a quick profile of Rankings IO your firm. Can you give us a quick snapshot of kind of who's Chris, what is Rankings IO and who do you serve?

Yeah, guys, thanks for having me. Rankings is a law firm marketing agency. We're primarily SEO focused. We've been in business for about 10 plus years and we've been on the Inc. 5000 fastest growing list for the last six years in a row. I. Who am I? I am very, very, very competitive. I don't settle. I continue to drive and push my team to be uncomfortable. And that's one of the reasons why, is because I've surrounded myself with similar people like that.

Yeah, this podcast has kind of a wide range of guests. Folks who have, you know, like, are building massive agencies, folks who have smaller revenue ambitions and ambitions in other areas. But you're very ambitious, which I think comes from that competitive drive. Can you tell us a little bit? So everyone's got a frame to kind of bucket in where you are on your journey. Where are you guys now from a growth perspective? And then what's your ultimate goal?

Yeah, we're on target for 13 million this year. Last year we did 10, and next year it's an attainable, not stretch goal will be around 18 million. So the reason is because we know our numbers. You know, it's taken us 10 years to get there and we, we can kind of forecast a little bit better. Even though I've watched Shark Tank many a times, it's, it's the question that for whatever reason, we really never dug into and the, and how powerful that is really when you understand it and how you can utilize it.

Yeah, that's awesome. As you've grown. So we'll, we'll, we'll tackle a whole bunch of different things.

Sure.

Um, but I think like the podcast is called Agency Breakthrough. Cuba sent over a handful of like notes in a loom video on like, hey, here's some of the stuff that we typically dig into. And you shot back a couple different, basically asking like, hey, what are. What are some of the breakthroughs that you've had? And you shot back some bullet points, which were awesome. So I'm excited to dig into those.

But where.

So how old is the agency today? So we have a sense of growth and, like, has your ambition to, hey, I want to scale this, I want to grow this pretty aggressively. Has that always been there or has that kind of been awoken over at some period of time?

It's 10 years. So we've been in business 10 years and the ambition's always been there. And I had never even contemplated selling. In my opinion, until you hit eight figures for multiple years, the multiples don't make sense to sell because of the profitability outlay from a cash flow perspective that you get. So I think by the time you pay taxes and everything, and you gotta start from scratch, generally it's not worth it to sell before then. Everyone's different. Everyone has different, you know, goals and can live at different levels, but I just find, you know, those below 8x multiples, it's just really challenging for that to be enough in general. Again, I'm not trying to sound like this, you know, I actually live pretty below my means. And. And anyway, so that. That's what I find. Super hungry. I think that if you are focused on and. And I hate the definition between lifestyle and. And growth because there's so many, like, who doesn't want to take profitability on the way to growth? And a lot of times people equate that to lifestyle, which is just odd to me. So always grow. You gotta always improve. If you're just not pushing it, you're gonna lose. You're gonna. You're gonna, you know, churn clients, you're gonna just fall behind.

That makes sense. The multiple point, I think, is one that's. Yeah, there. I don't think that's even. At least in my experience, a lot of ambition is informed by what your eyes are kind of opened up to, like, what you see as possible. So somebody's listening to this right now saying, whoa, this guy Chris is at 13 million. Like, that's, you know, that is wild. I didn't even know an agency could get that big. And then other people who are at 20 million are like, hey, Chris has a. Has a decent agency. Like, it looks like he's on the.

Small agency, which is awesome.

I don't know, but. But, you know, like, that's been my experience at least, is that my ambition has grown as my eyes have been opened to what's possible over Time. So you saying the multiple thing, I think is a really helpful point. Is there any math that you. So obviously, for anyone who's not familiar, like most agencies are sold on a multiple of EBITDA or your profit. And so typically the lower your EBITDA is and the smaller your agency is, the lower that multiple will be. So if you've got a million dollar agency doing 30% profit margin, so you're bringing home 300 grand in profit, you know, your multiple might be two and a half to 4x somewhere in that range. And then what you're saying, Chris, is hey, once you get over eight figures and you cross the $10 million mark in top line revenue, then you know, assuming you've got some decent margin or growth or there's some space there, your multiple also increases. So it's not just that you have more ebitda, but also the multiple on that EBITDA goes up to 8, 10 plus X as you're exiting.

Yeah, and I'm not as experienced as other individuals in this field. I've definitely read a lot of books on it. I've listened to Greg Alexander, I've listened to the build to sell and just different people on this topic. I will say that the multiples definitely increase. Like if you have a team that you can, you know, you take this company in a box and you offload it, if you have technology that can increase your multiples, if you have long term contracts or return recurring revenue. So there's a lot of different facets to this. And yeah, it's, I think it's, it's very important for anyone to understand in terms of our, you know, kind of digging into that, like, what's our net profit? What, what are we bringing home? You know, we target anywhere from between 20 to 30%. I would like it to be higher if we decoupled and did a little bit more tack, decoupled from headcount and did a little bit more tech, AI software, a little bit more subcontractors, maybe a little bit more international arbitrage. We could definitely get, you know, 30 to 50%. It's there, I know how to get it. It's difficult to get there, especially when you start talking about people, right. Hey, you're doing a phenomenal job. But I can pay someone in South America half your, half your labor costs. Right. Like, so there's an emotional versus labor or robotic type of component when it comes into play to those decisions.

Chris, before we launch into the breakthrough story here, I did want to ask just out of curiosity. One question you mentioned your agency focuses primarily on SEO. I wanted to get your take on what's coming for Google search results, the kind of AI generated summary that's going to be at the top. I mean as somebody who has deep expertise, how do you think that's going to affect the SEO agency space?

Ooh, really good question. Search generator experience. The thing that I see on the beta and all the things that they previewed and what I've been involved in is the transactional bottom of the funnel. Queries is going to be more like an Amazon shopping cart where it's not just three in the map pack, it's going to be a whole list of options, they're going to aggregate reviews and that's going to exist. Like AI is not going to take away from that. You're still going to be able to manipulate it. Google's not going to change their compliance complete algorithm in regards to prominence and other things to determine who goes there. I mean I can't imagine the what that would take to change it entirely so that, that's going to be there. The thing that I think will change is the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel content, especially for, you know, those just common replies, those evergreening things that have already been covered. And what, what's really going to change is how content's created from a unique perspective because Google needs to fill the AI, it needs more original content, more data to fill the AI and it's really going to thrive and want to consume that information. So I think this is like AI is like article spinner 2.0 back in the affiliate days. You throw it in an article spinner, you swap out some keywords. Oh, it's unique, right? AI is kind of like that, but a little bit better. And so it just the demands for expertise and the quality is just going to be emphasized more in my opinion. I don't know that for certain, but that's just kind of where I'm leaning.

Okay, so I'm hearing you're saying there's going to be more emphasis on basically unique content. Unique in terms of the topic that it covers, which maybe hasn't been covered before because it's niche or in the way it covers a topic that might actually be popular.

That's a really tough question to answer. So unique and good. It's, it's Google's just trying to look for the best consumer, the best answer to an the best article to answer consumer intent. So does unique really matter? Maybe not. Maybe it's formulated and the the best and it has the most trusted sources and verified sources and it's the most trustworthy. It may not have to have to be necessarily unique. So I, I do think there is an going to be an emphasis to pull more information into their AI model, their learning model for unique. So things like okay, so in the legal vertical, the DOT depart Department of Transportation and without going down a rabbit hole, rabbit hole is several years behind. So if you were the person that took the unorganized data and said here is the percentage of of accidents that happen in these locations and you created this, this new information. Absolutely. You're going to get a benefit anyways. That's just a long went away saying there's more to it than just unique, I think.

Okay, yeah, that's awesome. That really eliminates what's happening there. Thanks for answering that. All right. I think at this point, given the nature of this podcast, the listeners are very curious about your agency breakthrough story. So let's launch into that. That's the whole idea of the podcast, the stories of how agency owners operators get kind of past the plateau, take their agency to the next level. Want to leave you some no space here to kind of tell the story in detail. So Chris, what is your agency breakthrough story?

There's been multiple. I will tell you that I listened to a book by Naval Ravikant. It was how to Get Rich and it talked about leverage. And I really clung to this idea of what leverage can do for your business. And he equates it to the 4C's capital code, collaboration and content. And I'll kind of go through each of these and we can dig into each of these topics as much as you want because they are very broad and very deep. And so let's just start with capital. What does capital do? A capital acquires you to get things for economies of scale. It allows you to take and I can give you many examples here. If I am in the agency space and I'm going to outsource content or links and I spend a hundred thousand dollars versus maybe ten, I may be able to get a discount. I may get certain preferences and treatment that I may not get had I not had that capital. Take Google Ads for example. If you're doing a client campaign and you bid a radius around a city, it's going to have a certain CPA versus the state or the nation. Economies of scale come into play in regards to negotiations where you're buying multiple things. And there is extreme advantages here and we can go deeper and deeper links Content, what have you. The next would be like buying ebitda. Capital allows you to accelerate growth. By buying ebitda. I can go up and buy. We just talked about those multiples earlier. If I have capital, I can buy EBITDA versus someone else can't. I mean, that's leverage.

Chris.

Yeah.

Could I stop you for a second? I'm sure still relatively fresh to this space, so I'll admit buying EBITDA flew over my head. Could you explain that in a little bit more detail? How does that happen?

Yeah, you can. There are many companies that sell agencies. So instead of building from scratch an agency, you could go buy an agency. Buy an agency that has operators, that has technicians, you could go buy their revenue. Warren Buffett has grown his empire by doing that. He. He buys and invests in good companies, and that's what capital allows you to do. It allows you to make certain moves that other individuals can't. I had this conversation with Joey and JJ on their podcast, and I know we mentioned this previously, the the Best Damn Agency podcast. I think it's the name of it.

Yep.

We were talking about business development and how to get leads, and a lot of times, like when I started my agency, I started with $15,000. What can I do? I have to do things that aren't scalable. I have to use my network. I can't do. Do Google Ads effectively or SEO or social or a podcast. It's 15 grand. So the amount of things that I can do from a capital perspective now when I'm investing, you know, last year I invested $2 million in our marketing. If you're an agency that only made $2 million, it's a different level of an advantage is capital and how you acquire capital. Do you acquire capital through bootstrap, through your. Your monthly cash flow? Do you go borrow capital? Capital is a tremendous point of emphasis, and that's one of these four components of leverages and understanding that I. Once you know your numbers, your cost to acquire a client, everything changes. And where. Which channels you choose and how you think of them from a growth perspective, sure, maybe SEO gives you a cpa. That's super low versus Google Ads. But is your Google Ads lower than your average? Does it provide. Can you still generate an roi? And it comes back to the saying Russell. I think it's Russell Brunson, the individual that can pay the most to acquire a client wins something along the lines of that. And that's what it means. Bezos says your margin is my opportunity.

Yeah, well, I was just Gonna ask on the capital point. So you mentioned, which I think is a great example, what you're spending on marketing to grow. How have you acquired capital? Has it been primarily cash flow? Have you like lines of credit investors?

Yeah. And it's for me, and that's why it's taken me 10 years to get to 13 million, is because I had an initial 15k when I launched my agency. I, it's just not very much capital. If I went out and borrowed 4 million now, I would have exploded things and burned things and maybe not had the profitability. But I guarantee if I'd have borrowed several million dollars out of the gate that I wouldn't be at 10 million. 10, you know, 10 years in, right? Maybe three years in.

Yeah. That's awesome. Let's talk about code. That's the second second C in Naval's book, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. See? So code from an agency perspective. The first one that comes to mind we just talked about is AI. What are the AI benefits here? Because we're talking about utilization, we're talking about delivery. And how does AI affect an agency? Well, typically if you're an SEO agency, the first thing that comes to mind is content, the content costs. There's twofold things have happened that I've seen. The first thing is your ability to do ideation, to make improvements, to just create content. It's significantly quicker. Um, if you think of it as a tool. The other thing that's happened is the commoditized content marketing agencies have decreased their costs because they have downward pressure because of other options. Yeah, that's what's not talked about is they have all reduced their prices. It's because they're a commodity in general. Sorry, content agencies. I've, I've had direct conversations with many of you, but if you're doing your 2000 word, 1000 word articles for volume and you don't do anything different than anybody else, we're judging you based upon price. And you know, AI has put downward pressure code on those companies. So it's really impacted profitability from an agency perspective. There are things like CRM automations, HubSpot sequences, things like that that can give you additional leverage, giving you additional deliverability. And some individuals create their own code or, and this is just what I see, right? It's, it's these types of components, these prompts, these different software really allow you to, to acquire profitability. And I would say for me, one of the, it's probably our biggest weakness in terms of the 4C's capital the amount that we're investing versus newer agencies, definitely there code. We are using AI. We are using it quite a bit, but I think we could use it more. We are using some tech, but I think we could do better here.

Question that comes to my mind is you're talking a lot about what's. Well, basically now, right. With the rise of generative AI, but with the 10 years of experience that your agency has, there must have been something that you did in the code space that, you know, put you forward. So what was the best step thus far that you made in this code area?

I would say one of the. One of the. For us in particular was how we do audits and analysis. It's utilizing AHREFS and their API. Uh, we have some custom code there. If you go to rankings IO/manticore, you can see some things that we've developed that give us a little bit of an insight, a little bit of a competitive advantage. We've utilized code from a strategy perspective where we've analyzed different marketing tactics. I know Brian Dean and other individuals have. Have released these data studies, but in general, those data studies are across all industries, not focused in. On one. So while in general, as an average, you may need to write longer content or you may need more links or blah, blah, blah. How do you take a look at that from a vertical perspective, a legal perspective, and that provides a certain level of intelligence. It helps you scope projects a little bit more. So we've done that from a code perspective. Take our, our SEO analysis. It used to take two days to do. Now we can do it in an hour or two, a really solid one. Just from the ability to use the API and use a refs and Semrush and things like that.

And that Ahrefs API solution, you called it Manticore.

Yeah, we have our own. It's. It's Rankings IO slash Manticore. I'm not. If you guys want to look at it, that's the only. I'm just giving you example. It's not something I'm trying to sell or it's just an example of code that we use.

Yeah, I just got really curious about the name. How did that come about?

Yeah, our. Our logo. So, complete aside, we're ranked kings. So we're thinking king of the jungle is a lion, and we didn't want to have a lion. So we're like, what's cooler than a lion? Oh, a Manticore's part lion.

Let's do that.

And if you actually look, people don't know this, but in the tail of the Manticore is a whistle and kind of to throw back to me being a coach, uh, it also has a little crown, a king. So that's where we came about that. So there's a lot more to it than just some generic logo we threw together.

I am so glad I asked. That's so cool. Yeah, yeah. So much depth.

Again, this is the one that I, I don't speak about as much as the others because it, it's. I'm weaker at it. It's an area of improvement and opportunity. Yeah, I think that, Yeah, I think there's just a tremendous opportunity here. Yeah, I think for most people will have the biggest impact. It's collaboration or labor. So here's the deal. A lot of times people associate revenue to headcount and they'll naturally say, well, how many people you have working at your company? Your mom asks you. They equate that to how big and how successful you are. Because if you need to move a pile of boulders, more people can help you move it quicker. But in terms of what you can do here is you can decouple headcount from your revenue. Well, how do you do that? You can utilize code, you can utilize subcontractors, you can. That's where pricing arbitrage goes into play. And this is a bit taboo. Although we're becoming more globalized, you know, a lot in the US are like, oh, you, you know, like, here's the deal. Even in the US let's just talk about just the US let's not even go the international. Okay. If I hire an SEO specialist in St. Louis, they're going to be less than California or New York or developer. It is what it is. There's. There's U.S. based labor arbitrage, right in the U.S. why would you. If you're, if you are an agency that's trying to get the best talent and not overspend, why would you open up the nationwide. It. It's completely ludicrous. You should keep it confined to those other areas. It has excellent talent. There's exceptions to that. And you go a step further and once you realize this, hey, I've got, you know, Canada and, and South America in the same time zone. Speak fluent English, less money for labor. You go the Philippines, India, Pakistan, all these different regions, you've got upwork to source talent. And I know people are like, people have this flawed mentality that other individuals. It's again, this is a taboo conversation that they can't do it. As well. But here's the deal. Maybe you're right. Maybe, maybe the talent's a little better in the U.S. who knows, right? I don't think that's true, but let's just say it is. Let's just say I'm paying 120,000 to a developer. Well, could that one developer outperform six to eight full time? Maybe. Chances are probably unlikely. So it gives you. Labor is the most under talked about conversation and a number to track that most agencies need to track. That will keep them out of trouble. That will keep them. Look, we're not, we, we didn't all go and get accounting degrees, right. I had issues with overing hiring at one time, about three or four years in. That's when I accrued some debt and I had to pay it off. I don't have any debt now. But at some time, at one point I overhired. I didn't forecast properly. If you, if you track revenue per employee and say you're, you're at 10 million and you've got 20 employees, that's 500,000 per head. That's amazing. When that number starts to dip below 200,000, you're in trouble. You need to look at other options. That's where it gets really challenging to be profitable because your biggest cost walks on two legs generally for professional services. Let points of conversation here. Anything you guys want to dig into.

I think that's big that that bar has really gone up over time. I mean the average agency today is actually not that, you know, like our data set is, you know, thousands of agencies and dozens of conversations every week. And the average agency that we're talking to, if you just said hey, we're at about 140 in revenue per FTE is, is still there. And then you get into the back end and get into the financials and you know, cause you've seen this too. Like there's not taking home any money. And it's really heartbreaking to talk to. There's an agency owner out of North Carolina a couple years ago, 3.1 million in top line. We looked at net margin 1%. Not like a joke, literally 1% in margin. They just weren't making anything. So Yeah, I think 200 is like, I think that's a healthy bar to say hey, if we're not above that, we got to rethink how we're packaging and pricing and how we're delivering on this and are we over servicing or not?

And a point here too. I'll just do one other Thing and this is where your compensation plans. Most agencies don't have a compensation plan policy. They're like, oh, Bobby did really well, I'm going to give him a 5% raise. Or oh, we look, that's not a compensation plan. And when you start to, when you're in business for 10 years and you do those 5% every year and they compound, it starts to get a little hefty and you can, you can tie it to variable incentives, which is a much better approach for bonuses or commissions. Tie it to that, that number that's affected. So, you know, those are just a couple things to add there.

Yeah, that makes sense. We might, might come back to the comp plan piece, but Kuba, I won't interrupt. I know you had something you're gonna jump in with.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So in a similar vein to the previous C, I wanted to ask about your best step thus far in the collaboration space, but I wanted to make it narrower. Getting great talent on board is of course a big challenge to surmount. But what about internal collaboration? Once you have these great people on board, how do you make them work well together? How do you bring out the best in them, help them leverage their strengths? What was the best thing you've done so far to, to make that happen?

Excellent question. I. We have cadences of communication where we're, we're attraction EOS based agency. So every Monday we have our Monday meetings in different department heads. We look at a scorecard of KPIs. Our KPIs are not our base utilization rates. Guys, go throw those in the trash. Literally. Why would you compare someone that's doing their job more efficiently or, or that are better trained that can, that has more out. You want to look at the outcome like what are you trying to do? Don't track the hours that your outreach specialist is working. How many links did they acquire? What are the quality of those links? Don't track the amount of time that your writer wrote content. Track how many articles they produced, how many sales were created. I don't give a shit about, sorry, about proposals. I don't care. I don't care if you sent a hundred or ten. How many deals did we win? And when you start looking at the outcome, it changes everything because that's what truly moves the business. And the thing is here you, yes, you can, you can do some leading indicators of success. But, but you want to start combining leading with lagging indicators and look at, be more outcome focused. The other thing I'll, I'll say is if you combine the, the outsourcing component so the agency today does not have to, to have all labor in house. You can use these specialized vendors when you purchase their resources, their throughput, it's typically an outcome. Yeah, yeah, you're going to go buy X amount of links right now. They have to do the lever to labor to get the high quality links. I'm not talking about, you know, some black hat links. I'm talking about good links that were built the way that you want them built, content. So that's the issue with most people is, and that's kind of a tangent is, is time tracking. It's you know, go flush harvest down the toilet. Like literally.

This is a great area for debate. How so in terms of the team, the way that you're structured right now, you get your Monday meetings, you run on a US. We've been running on the US since 2017 or whatever. How many different do you have? Like growth L10, client services, L10, operations L10 and then ultimately the exec L10 or what does that look like?

Yeah, great question. We, we don't call our leadership a leadership L10, which is our cross functional, all department heads plus our president. We call it a war room level 10. Even our, our core values. And I'm speaking specifically to us, even our core values. It's not team player, it's foxhole mentality. It's not, you know, execute. It's true grit. And so it's not, you know, our other third core value, send and delete, meaning I can send you something and I don't have to like hey, just check it in and see how it's done. Like no, it's. I send it to you, you delete. Okay, it's being done. We're, we're a team of executors. Back to your L10 question. Our company is divided into marketing sales accounts, which is client service and ops. I chose to split client service and ops because they have different incentives. Accounts is more an age, an advocate for the client. They don't care how much you spend. They just want the client to be happy because they have to hear about it. Versus ops is more agency centric about profitability. So it's kind of odd to have those under one umbrella. So we split those marketing sales accounts ops. So we'll have a war room level 10. We'll have a marketing level 10, sales accounts ops. And then we have one more that's a bit different. We have a retention level 10 I.e. accounts and Ops heads.

There Yep, makes sense. That's awesome. All right, we gotta see left here. Let's talk about content.

Content's one of my favorite. A lot of my agency peers, right, Other legal marketing owners, they always give me hell. Chris, why don't you go to any of the conferences? Why? You should go. You should speak on stage. And my answer to them is, it's not worth my time. And I'm not trying to be arrogant, I'm not trying to be an ass. But I host a podcast that gets 20,000 downloads a month. It's significantly bigger than a keynote every single week. So I'm giving a keynote presentation where I am the authority, every single week from my office, and I can have the biggest of the biggest guests on there. Had Seth Godin on there, had Mike Papantonio on there, like from my office versus I go on stage, I gotta travel, I gotta spend two or three days, you know, go in there. Yeah, I'm on the stage and I speak to 100, 200 people that don't really care that they're there to party and get their CLE credits. Now, there is something to be said from an authority perspective, right? You do get some authority speaking on stage, and that's an advantage. If you need that, you're an agency, you need some more authority. You don't gotta have those case studies, those testimonials, then by all means, go do that. But in general, that's one of my favorite is. Is leveraged for, from a content perspective, a podcast for distribution, owned assets versus going to speak on stage.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Can you tell us a little bit about. Again, I'm gonna be really repetitive here, but like, terms of growing the podcast, what was the best step or, you know, what was the key to making grow so much?

Yeah, really good question. The. The quality of your interview, the quality of your guests are. Is significant because you need to retain. Just like you want to retain your clients and need to provide a good service, you need to provide a good content to. To grow the podcast. The. There's this tipping point that affects that. That occurs once you have a certain inventory of content where you have options. So say, for example, you know, I may listen to my first million, or Joe Rogan or whoever. Let's. Let's just. Joe Rogan's probably the most popular, so let's use him as an example. I go to his podcast and I see, oh, he's talking. This comedian. That comedian kind of annoys me not listening to Joe. But Joe's got thousands of Other interviews. I still want to listen to Joe. I'll go listen to him talk to Naval. That's a great one. See so what happens, A lot of people give up their. They get their 50 to 200 downloads an episode and they're like this isn't working season one, this isn't working season two. And then this, this something starts to happen and you start, you, you become better, you be, you ask better questions, you get more experience, you have better guests because you've, you've had other guests on that you can use as leverage. And that's what happens now. Other tactics, you know an email, email newsletter, pumping social media ads. You can do some programmatic ads based upon on Apple and Spotify based upon the type of show you have. Mine was too narrow. We would get a whole bunch of subscribers and they had drop off the. So there's, there's a lot of those age old tactics. You can go on other podcasts because it's the medium of choice. You're not transitioning someone from YouTube to Apple. Well, that's not the best example. Let's say Instagram to Apple. If they're already on Apple listening to shows, you can do some mid rolls and different types of advertising there. You can also, if you have the right relationship, you could join a podcast network that already has distribution. So you know that's on the podcast. It's also. You can see this from a social media perspective. You can see this from a site that has a lot of authority to rank content from a distribution perspective and on and on and on. You know LinkedIn, you know, automation sequences, HubSpot sequences and that's kind of combination of content and tech. Right. Many, many ways to utilize this from a leverage perspective. When you think about it, marketing is just attention arbitrage. Gary Vee talks about this. It's where individuals congregate is the best opportunity to advertise. Specifically your target market. So if a ton of people go to the next social media network, whether it's threads, Threads is kind of dying. If people congregate there, it's an opportunity to advertise.

Yep, that was great.

Yeah. Once you dig into this, it like just opens your eyes. You, you start to see leverage and leverage is how you win the game. It is. For example, let's take links. If I have economies of scale and my cost to acquire a link that has the. It's the exact same link as someone else's is less. I'm gonna win if I can pay someone to produce to do the labor from the exact same quality perspective, less I'm gonna win all these com. That's how you win the game. That's how you grow. That's how you scale. And once you see this, your eyes open, you see leverage everywhere. And you also see where you're improperly using it too.

Yeah, okay. The leverage point. This is kind of like we've been trying to figure out how to work this more into our messaging. The idea of we're doing project management for agencies, helping them get project management right. And the idea of, hey, we need a stupid simple interface for your team members with really clear rules of engagement and strong accountability. Here's what you log into, here's the one screen, here's the button. Like, here's how you see and prioritize your work. We need that though, to go populate all the reports that you need. How does an account manager need to see this versus you know, the head of your accounts team versus the CEO or, you know, everyone needs. I need to see how client health is performing. I need to see what capacity is that. Sales needs to know who can we ship? Like, what, what's the opportunity? And so it's just that idea of leverage. How can you use code in that case to create that leverage? And yeah, once you start looking for it, then you start looking, you know, that that opens to your eyes again, back to the ambition point. Like, then you realize, wow, there's so many opportunities in everything that we're doing to create leverage and more efficient outcomes, which then increases your ability to pay more to go acquire and grow faster.

So, yeah, absolutely. This idea of leverage is such an unlock, like thinking again in the Zenpilot context, just one sentence about that, you know, based on what you were saying, Chris, I'm thinking, okay, what could I tell somebody considering us about the levers that we create? I would say, you know, imagine the levers you would have if your team members always knew what they're committed to and almost always kept their commitments because that's what the system allows them to do. But anyway, not to get too self promotional here.

No, no, no, let's, let's, let's talk about this. Right, so, so this is in the space a lot of agencies are trying to choose, you know, which project management tool do we use? Well, I can tell you right now I was a little stubborn moving over to ClickUp and I still don't love any project management tool, but the automation capabilities that it has versus others is a significant advantage. Also, not only that, the visibility from a just A strategic standpoint and unlocking different components there. So I'm not pushing anyone in a particular project management tool. You know, I grew for many years with base camp. Right. Old school. Base camp, not base camp, whatever it is now.

Yep.

So it's just. It's just learning as you go and growing.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, let's make the. Let's make the turn into third here. We've got our crisp cornucopia is what we've termed this segment, Chris. And these are like a couple quick questions that we've got. Some of them are more typical. I'm actually going to skip the first one, which is like, hey, are there any lesser known tools? We might come back to that one if we've done. I want to ask the question that I don't. I hear the tool question or like, what book have you read? Like, pretty often, but I rarely hear the service provider recommendation. And what I love is like, hey, who's good at this? Or who's good at that? Now, I've seen your stuff on a handful of sites. Your logo is, you know, thrown up there, and I would assume those are good experiences. Sometimes people just take client logos and slap it up there because they need client logos up there. But are there any service providers you've worked with? You know, like, it could be anything, but yeah, I think people generally think, oh, I've got an accounting firm or tax prep or I've got whatever else. Anyone who you can give a shout out to or recommend for providing exceptional service in your experience.

Ooh, my vendors listening. My strategic partners listening. Want to, want to shout out here. I will say Harry's team over at Lower street really helped our agency grow and they provide exceptional quality and they're an excellent podcast production company. I've used a few there in terms of quality and dependability. They're exceptional. The. I would say that on. From a podcast perspective, I also want to give a shout out to Ardent Growth, which is Skylar Reeves's company. Tremendous, tremendous. They do a mix of things. They can do some software, they can do some content creation. They do a lot of. They help rankings with a lot of the marketing. So they're phenomenal. I've used some others and like, here's the deal with some strategic partners, they are excellent at certain levels.

Yep.

Right. It's a lot of times take. Take a podcast, for example. And I'm not gonna go down a rabbit hole, but like, I knew I needed to do it for two years and just kept putting it off. And I eventually just signed up with an agency and it forced me to get it done. So anyways, that's going down a rabbit hole. I would say Lower street and Ardent Growth would be the two that come to mind.

That's awesome.

I've heard of Lower Street. Yeah, Shout out to them.

The longer segment here is going to be the vendors that you hate. No, I'm just kidding. That's not one of the. Not one of the questions, but that'd be very entertaining.

I've got a few.

Cool.

But take a question here.

I'm going to pick something that's not on the list, actually. So to ask you about something very different from what Gray asked about. What about your favorite mental frameworks? I'm using the word frameworks, like, very deliberately here. I have a very difficult relationship with mental models, but I'm thinking about stuff like. I don't know. For me, I love the Eisenhower Matrix. You know, urgent, not urgent, important, not important. I use that a lot. You must have some of those that you've used for years or they've may helped you make some big decisions. Your favorite mental frameworks, what would that be?

This is really good. Okay, so I don't know if this falls in the mental frameworks side of things. It could. I. I think of things like the iron triangle, Right. You can have two of the three. You can have good, fast, or cheap, but you can only have two. You can have something that's good and fast, but it's expensive. You can have something that's cheap and fast, but it's not good. Right. You can have something that's good and cheap, but it may take a long time. I think there's a lot of truth to this. That would be one. Geez, that is such a challenging question. Preto principle. I'm looking at that. That's pretty common. So I'm trying to get you one that's not super common. But yeah, th. Those are the two that come to mind if I revisit it. If you ask me in the future, I would have more, but those are a couple that I lean to. So.

You mentioned how to Get Rich by Naval Ravikant. I don't know if you still pay attention to any of his stuff. You mentioned my first million, which I listen to every episode. Who else are you following? Who's influential right now at this point in time?

Greg Alexander is an absolute monster. He is a monster. I mean, look at his story and what he's done. You want to talk about decoupling revenue from Headcount and what he did from an exit. His book the Boutique is phenomenal. Who else am I following? Geez, there, there are so many. I, here's the thing I just talked to my wife about recently is I said so I, I, I read anywhere from 50 to 100 books every year. Right. I'm on like 60 something right now. And they're business books, non fiction. You take an example of like a Titan for Rockefeller or Hinder Ford's book or Sam Walton, Made in America. These individuals changed the entire game for us and they're distilling all their experience in history into a book. Now a book it may take eight hours to read, but my God, the amount of knowledge and what they compartmentalize into it, it's just, it's unbelievable how much power it is. And I'm in the camp. Even though I read a volume of books. I read multiple books boutique I've read 6 times this year as an example. Ready, Fire, Aim. I probably read 10 plus times. 100 million offers Alex from Mosey, who knows? 10, 10 times. Right. It's, it's just this year. No, no total for Alex's book. The. Okay, but where, where I'm going with this is like based upon what you're going through as an agency will be what you cling to when you read it. So like the first time I read Ready Fire Aim. I'm looking at like these certain components. I kind of grab hold of that. Then the next time I'm looking at oh, this, this issue I had, I'm, I'm clinging to that and you start to understand what they're teaching you much better. So it's not always, I'm not always to the camp of read more. It's in terms of a volume perspective. It's, it's read the same book over and over again. And also I will say this, and this is a little tangent. It's much easier to get a book created and, and out the door. Now you will formally scribe. I don't know what they are now, but you had, you know, you got Ingram Sparks and kdp Kindle Direct publishing and all these different facets. I think there is more wisdom in the older books.

Yeah.

And I think that those typically can be more challenging to find, but I think they can provide more educational value.

I'd agree with that because the threshold was that much higher right to publish something in the first place. Whereas these days, sorry to say, you have some books that really should have just stayed as blog posts. It's just People want to say that they put out a book.

Thousand percent.

Okay. Yeah, gotcha. Well, Chris, we're nearing to the end of our time here, unfortunately, because this has been illuminating. Anything that we, I don't know, neglected to ask about that you also wanted to throw in there in the last couple of minutes before we close out.

I'll say one last thing here, and I'll say something about relationship capital is because. And I'm not going to go on the niching tangent, I think there's advantages and disadvantages to niching versus generalization. But I'll say that when you have a focus and you congregate with certain individuals and you build this community, it allows you to create this equity that you can move up the ladder. When I first got into legal, I couldn't go email Mike Papantonio and have him on my show. It's. It's not worth his time. But now that I know him, he can introduce me to the other individuals and. And so that's something to be said versus starting at ground zero from a flywheel perspective. And I would just. Relationship capital needs to go into one of those four Cs.

Yeah, I wonder how I would rephrase that. Well, C. Connections. You could say connections.

Right.

So let's leave that as the last one. Awesome. Chris, that was so great to hear from you and excellent last point. I think that's super important. And I suppose that'll be the end of our time here today. Chris, thank you so much for being on the show and answering our questions and being our guest here. Where can people find you, connect with you? What should they click on, what should they visit?

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm most active there. If you just search for Chris Dreyer and Dreiers. D R E Y E R. If you want to check out my site, it's Rankings IO.

All right, awesome. So definitely check out Chris on LinkedIn. Check out Rankings and if you have any other questions, then send them to Chris. Thank you so, so much, Chris, for being guest on the show. And we'll call it here. I'm going to press the stop button. Okay, guys, awesome.

Thanks for having me, guys.