How to Go from Closing Your Inbound Agency to Building a Successful Facebook Ads Agency

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Welcome to Inbound Agency Journey.

This is the show where inbound agency leaders share the strategies, shortcomings and successes they've experienced in their journey toward building their dream agency. Now here are your hosts, Andrew and Gray. Hey, Rob.

Welcome back to Inbound Agency Journey. Excited to have you here, man. It's been a long time since we've chatted last and the reason I wanted to bring you back on the podcast is because you've kind of changed up your business model over the last few years. You're kind of in a new place right now and I want to chat through the kind of the journey that you took getting to this new place. So would you mind just kicking us off for people who didn't listen to your last episode, which is like number eight, I think, way back in the day. Could you just give an intro of who you are, the business since you're running right now, and then we'll kind of dive into the story a little bit.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited to be back. A lot has changed, a lot has improved. And yeah, I had a great time on the last call that we did the last interview, but I've got a lot to update you on. So first of all, I switched my agency from the inbound, full fledged marketing agency model to a very, very niche, specific, specific, very productized, service oriented business model. So now all I help is one type of client, which is gym owners, and I don't do anything else. So if another type of client calls me, I refer them out or tell them I can't help them. I've become very, very focused in that way. And in addition to that, we only really offer one service, which is lead generation for those clients. And so, you know, whereas before I used to be running, you know, we did design, development, content production, content distribution, marketing, automation, all that stuff. I really just went back to the drawing board and found out what I worked, who I or what worked. Excuse me, who I wanted to help and how I could scale it so that my team and my, my personal outcome could benefit from it too. Because last time we talked I was doing all right. But we can dig in a little bit to that. I was pretty unhappy now looking back, and now I am so much more happier with the new model that I'm running.

Awesome. That's what I want to dig into because I think that that's the place where a lot of agency owners find themselves, is they're in the trenches building, building, building. But maybe don't take the time to step back and look at that whiteboard and say, what am I building? And am I. Is this gonna help me achieve the goals that I have? If it all does work out, which isn't guaranteed to anybody, like, is it something that I want when I get there? So can you take us back to that point in your story where you were at that crossroads of, like, what am I gonna do now? And what. What was the trigger for you to go and change things up?

Yeah, good question. So I had a bit of an epiphany moment, if you will. You know, my. My agency did really well on paper. And by all counts, anybody looking at the agency, they thought we were doing really well. But the truth of the matter is, after three and a half ish years, there wasn't a whole lot left for my business partner. My. I had a business partner in our old agency, and, you know, there wasn't a whole lot left over for us to take home at the end of each month. Our overhead was really high. We had a beautiful office space in downtown San Diego, a great location. We had great clients. We had a lot of bigger clients. We thought that was the way, you know, to get success in our agency. And even my wife, to be honest, she was like, oh, my God, you guys are doing so well. You've had such fast growth for the agency world, like, all this stuff. And we did, but the profit margins were tiny. And each year that passed, like, we just got more and more burnt out because we were spending longer hours doing more different types of projects, helping different types of clients. Over time, the margins just started to evaporate seemingly. And at the time, I didn't know what the problem was, but I do now, so that's cool. But my epiphany moment was when my partner came to me and said, rob. And my partner is. We're still good friends, but he is a tremendously introverted person. Right? He. He does not like the front end stuff. I handled all that stuff at our agency, but he was spending so much time, like, grinding that he came to me one day and he bought me a beer. And he's like. He was scared to tell me, you know, I could tell. But he said, rob, I just can't do this anymore. And it still gets me a little bit choked up because for him, it meant, like, giving up. You know, that's how he felt, like he was letting me down. And it turns out that that was one of the best things that could have happened to both of us because we're both just so much happier now. But at the time, it felt like we were both a failure. So, I mean, what happened after that was I said, well, dude, I'm so glad you told me this. Like, let's work it out, you know, we can solve this problem. So we worked it out by deciding to amicably shut the business down over like a six month period. And we did that successfully. You know, we took good care of our clients, took good care of our team. We did everything right so that we felt good after doing it, you know, in a way that everybody could sort of have plenty of notice and just sort of end on a good note. We really cared that our clients felt served well, you know, and our team was served well. So.

Yeah.

But it was still very, very difficult for me. In fact, we had to get out of our lease at our office early and I had to make like a YouTube video to sell the property so we could get a sub lesser to buy our contract out. Wow. And so I made this YouTube video which was like, like a, like a walkthrough of the place, like kind of selling the amenities of it and everything. And I went home that night and just cried my freaking face off. I mean, I was just like, damn, this is real. Because like, we got. We got a hit right away and somebody locked it up. And I was like, dang, that's it, we're out. You know?

Yeah.

And it was the holidays. We decided to just make a clean break at the end of the year. The person coming in wanted the same thing. So it was like December 31st was literally our last day in the office. And I just felt like I let everybody down, you know, and so that was the moment where I was just like, dang, you know, I don't know how I arrived here, but that was fast, you know?

Yeah.

And the reason why I'm sharing this with, with people is because I know that this journey is not like there are people out there who sugarcoat the crap out of this. This journey. And I think that it's more like this than anything. You know, you have ups and downs, highs and lows, and it is more like a journey than it is just a straight trajectory up into the. Into outer space, into success. So. So what. What I ended up doing was I said, okay, well, I'm gonna, I'm not just gonna like, take my knocks and go get a job. In fact, my wife asked me if she thought I should go get a job, and I said, absolutely not. Just give me a couple months to figure this out. I still have a couple team members that want to come. Come do whatever's next. And. And so I spent about a month. It was like a month to six weeks just tearing our entire business plan apart, calling every friend that I could tap on the shoulder and say, hey, what do you think? You know, every expert that I, you know, and anybody who I knew that was either in an agency or who wanted to. Who was already doing what I wanted to do, like, you know, from an agency standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, I, like, used up all the favors. I went to the favor bank and just said, I just need 30 minutes of your time, and I'm happy to pay you for it, but here's where I'm at, and I'm just wondering what you see. Right, Cool. So I did that for, like, six weeks because I also tore apart our books and all of our services, and I started calculating the margins in each of the services that we provided, what client paid us for what line item, you know, on down the line, it turned out the stuff that we thought was making the most money, we were actually losing money on. And the stuff that was sneaky was like these little microservices, like running Facebook ads for clients that took very little time and got a massive output. And the problem was that we were, by volume of dollars, we were doing all the wrong services. The ones that, you know, were either little margin to zero margin to negative margin, you know, like, that was 80, 90% of our business. And then when I got down to those stuff that was super profitable, we were doing, like, 1 or 2% of it. You know, that's. That's what made up our billables. So I just was like, wow, this is crazy eye opening. And let me think about this. If I just did one high margin service or two high margin services, and those services can be taught to my team so that they can help me with the execution, I think I can do this thing the right way, second try. And so that's what I set out to do from there on.

Awesome. How long did it take to arrive at that kind of that moment where you pruned all those things out because you got. I mean, you were out selling that to people for years, that package of services. And so it's got to be a lot to convince yourself internally that, oh, there might be a better way to do all of this? What was that like?

Well, it's. It's hard to say with, you know, super clarity, because really, to be honest with you, Andrew, it was more mindset than anything. Like, I had to humle myself down to going like, you basically failed. That's okay. But, you know, let's figure out why. So you're not walking around doing the same thing for the rest of your life being a jerk idiot to yourself and your family. I mean, I kind of had to say that to myself and swallow that pill and then go, well, what do I really want out of this business? Cause everybody else was benefiting, you know, But I need to benefit too if I'm going to keep doing this, right?

Yeah, definitely.

So I kind of had to tell myself I was worthy of having the benefit too first. I know that sounds crazy, but a lot of us are like, if you're, especially if you're like the leader of your business, like it's. Everybody eats first, you know, like, there's a book called Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek, and it's a great book about leadership. But in business you have to eat too. You know, like you, like, my marriage will not work, I cannot feed my kids, I cannot keep the mortgage paid if the business does not work for me too. Right. So I have to take care of me first in order to serve and be a leader. And so I had to get past that. Took me like a few months to really get past all that. And I was kind of going through that, that as I was shutting the business down.

Okay.

And then it took about four to six weeks for me to. To test like my hypothesis, which was like, I think that doing these high, this high margin product I. Service is kind of the key. And so I started testing like crazy. In fact, I pulled out my credit card and just started doing ads for clients for free to get started. Just to test it. Yeah. And I was spending like a few hundred bucks here and there. It wasn't that much, but yeah, you know, I was like, I just want to see if this works. The fastest way to do that is like to fail forward. So I spent like, I want to say another month after that, just testing as fast as I could, client after client after client. And some stuff worked, some stuff didn't. But I figured it out real fast because I was just offering to do it for them for free just to get the data and, you know, build case studies for the stuff that worked. More importantly, learn what didn't work. Yeah, so. So it didn't take long, man, because what I started doing was running Facebook ads to fitness based businesses and actually started off doing it for real estate agents too. But I stopped doing that after a while because I didn't like that niche the fitness niche was awesome, and I loved working with the owners of the gems. They're usually pretty upbeat, positive people, optimistic people. And we would just flick the campaign on and they would start getting new members, like, pretty fast. You know, a day, two day, three days. They'd just start getting new business from it. And I was like, this is fun, right?

That's awesome.

That's awesome. Yeah, they love it. They love me. They love it. And so it didn't take a lot of it. I mean, I would say it took, like, the first quarter of that following year to. To really figure out that, like, this thing would work right, this new thing. So. So after that, I just. After I sort of figured that out, I. I went to my wife and I said, honey, I'm not going to go get a job. I'm going to get out there and rebuild this thing, but do it the right way. And she's like, well, what's the difference? And so I told her that, well, the biggest difference is that I don't have to do everything anymore, so I'm not going to be as stressed out. I could easily teach a team member how to do this, and they can go and run these client campaigns probably even better than I can eventually without me having to be involved in every little step. Which was a huge difference, because at my old agency, there's a question about a problem or. That was the best SEO on our team. I think there I was the best strategist at our old agency. I was like, I don't have to be the guy who has the answer to everything anymore. My team can help that you actually help, you know? So I was like, that's the biggest difference. But the other thing is that I can cookie cutter these campaigns out and just go get a bunch of different locations with the same exact campaign, and it will work in almost any market in the United States. In other words, I can have a gym five miles from another gym and go run the same campaign for them and it'll work just the same way. So all of the creative has been taken out of the equation. And that was another mindset thing that I had to get over because as a marketer, a lot of us tout like, oh, I'm a great creative. We're so good at coming up with new concepts and all that stuff. And to me, honestly, at this point, Andrew, I think it's totally effing overrated. I'm not. If we had a beer, I would tell you all of the reasons, but the biggest reason is a lot of that is just ego. You know, like if. If you're. If your true goal is to serve your clients and your business, so it's a win, win, and it serves the client's customers, which is a win, win, win, then you don't care about their creative. You just care about what works. Right. Like, if you're making all three of those things happy, then, you know, if that's your true goal, then the creative almost has nothing to do with it if it's working right. So, you know, I just started going like, oh, man, this is so awesome. Once we figure out an offer that works well in the marketplace, or a handful of offers that work well in the marketplace, we'll just go out there and I'll just, you know, approach every single business owner that I can see that I feel like it's a good fit for. And, you know, if you fast forward over to three years, this was like three years of doing this. I mean, we've helped like hundreds of clients at this point, and now we've gotten choosier about who we help. But, you know, we can add one new client a day right now and just get them phenomenal results. And it doesn't affect, you know, our business one bit. We just install the proven campaign. So, you know, we're basically just like reselling our intellectual property over and over and over again. Like, we talk about IP now in our company. Like, yeah, we figured this thing out so well that it's kind of hard for anybody else to even come close because our proven system just gets plugged into your marketplace and we turn the switch on and go. That's where we're at now.

That's cool. I think in the other, like, in the more traditional model of how we structure services, and like you said, making the creative so important or putting that up as a barrier against specialization, we lose that ability to really hone a system, hone a process over time, and become experts at the way you do business. Because if you tried to do try to go out and serve everybody, you're not going to be able to understand exactly what works for each of those industries. You're going to be relearning the wheel every single time.

Exactly.

But a client you sign up tomorrow is going to get the collective impact of all the lessons you've learned over the last three years.

And it allows us to work on the business daily. I mean, that's the biggest difference. So if you look at a client's certain niches, Problems, Right. So ours is gym owners, and we only help independent gym owners. So we don't help franchises and we don't help, like, personal trainers. We help independently own gyms who have membership programs. Right. And if you look at the problems that they're facing, like each quarter we're able to basically improve or, or, or solve a new, like improve the solving of a particular problem or solve a new problem that they're having. And so with each passing quarter, we're basically building something that is, is so insanely valuable to them. I mean, at this point, it's almost like our system is like a franchise level marketing and sales program. Cool. You know?

Yeah.

And so when we go in and put this stuff in, they immediately just see this like, increase in business and we wouldn't have been able to do that. I mean, that's like three or four or five layers deep into the onion. Right. Whereas, like, just contrast that with what we were doing before. You're really only able to get like one or two layers deep if you're doing that breadth of things. Because there's just no way to figure it out. You don't have the time or space to figure it out if that's the case.

Yeah, definitely. Or the, the clients that you're working with, you must, you got to have a much bigger budget to dive that deep with everyone, and it's not efficient at all.

Exactly.

Okay, walk me through just the. I'm curious about how you basically became an expert in the way to market for gyms. Like, how did, how did that learning curve happen? What made you decide to work in that niche to begin with? Because I think a lot of people think that niches are cool, but they don't know where to start. So how did you arrive at that conclusion now?

Yeah, for sure. So I kind of started with two niches as I described before. I have a lot of friends here in San Diego who are in real estate, like from high school and junior high and college and stuff, stuff like that. And so I was getting a lot of opportunities with mortgage brokers and real estate agents and stuff like that. And so I thought that was a good idea because I had current opportunities. Well, that niche was awful for me. I, I couldn't stand the starting and stopping. Most agents, they want to get a listing and then stop doing all marketing to save the money and then wait six months until it closes. I mean, that's like 99% of agents out there. And so really you have to either work with just top producers who usually sort of already have this thing figured out. Right. The the top producers kind of understand the business model behind this.

Yeah.

But you know, on top of that there was, there was a ton. And another part of it was I didn't want to live through another real estate market turn, which I think could be happening soon. But you know, if I spent the next two years to five years building this and the market changed and nobody wanted our service anymore, I thought that was a terrible, terrible way to position myself.

Yeah, definitely.

But so how did I find a good niche? So for those reasons, I did work the niche and I went in, you know, a few layers deep and everything, but I just looked at myself in the mirror and said, do I want to keep doing this for, you know, for the next however long? And I decided no. The way that I got into the fitness niche was I had a friend who loved the niche. He already was, has a marketing agency that is in that niche and he's had a lot of success with it and he likes it. And so he gave me a few ideas for testing some campaigns and I went in there with my first handful of test clients and plugged his stuff in and it just worked like crazy. I mean, part of the reason that I like doing it is selfish. Like, I like seeing a campaign working fast. Fast? Yeah, you know, I like getting the clients results fast. I like having the confidence to walk in and be like, look, just give us a week. We'll spend a few days building this stuff. We'll onboard it, onboard, you build it, and we'll flip the campaign on in under a week and you'll see within a couple days how well this thing does. You know, I like being able to walk in and say that, and I like being able to charge money like for getting them like a 10x ROI in the first month. You know, they're not sitting around waiting for that roi. Yeah, for years or whatever, you know. So gyms have very short sales cycles. I would say if you're picking a niche, you know, again, like you said, unless your clients have massive budgets and are very patient, do not go after niches that have long sales cycles. Like real estate's a good example of that in the consumer marketplace. It might take three months, six months, nine months for them to complete a sales cycle for an agent. And to me that I just didn't want to wait around that long, to be honest. I was motivated to help people faster and to get this thing going faster. So we like that. We like the part where we can go in and like fire up an ad and have a prospect raise their hand and say, yeah, I want to come in for a free, free pass and get in there that same day or the next day and become a member right away. It's like, that's really, really fast and exciting to me. So I would recommend starting off within a niche that has a shorter sales cycle. That's thing one, thing two is we specifically and very intentionally chose gyms because the ones that have membership models have a very, very, very nice cash flow model behind it. So I'll give you a quick example. Let's say a client gives us $500, and for $500, we get them 100 leads. Right now we're getting about $5 a lead on average in most markets and 100 leads. Let's just say they close 10 new members. Most of our clients are spending more. Excuse me, not spending more, but closing more than 10%. But let's just be conservative and say that 10 members signed up from 100 leads. Right? Well, most gyms, like if we're helping a CrossFit gym, for example, they're charging anywhere from 100 to 180 bucks a month. So 10 new members at 100 bucks a month is $1,000. Right. So they just made their ad spend back plus 500 bucks in the very first month.

That's awesome.

But what's exciting about that is they've got 90 people on their prospecting database to continue to market to. And in month two, those members, you don't have to pay to acquire them again. They're still here. Those members are spending $1,000 again and you don't have to close them on anything else. Right. In fitness, if the client has a good service or product, they can retain them for 12 months to 18 months, you know, so the average membership value for new members, like again, I'm just being super conservative with everything these numbers, but the low end is like a thousand dollars for CrossFit Gym. Right? So they're paying like pennies on the dollar to acquire clients. And to me, that's like, it's almost like a SaaS model, you know, where the, you know, these SaaS companies will like bleed on the front end to acquire customer, but over the long haul, they're going to make it back tenfold. Right. Well, in this gym membership model, you can profitably acquire clients in month one, meaning before you even get your credit card statement, you'll have a thousand bucks in the bank. And then when you get that bill, it's 500 bucks. So you're pocketing 500 bucks so there's no money out of pocket for the client and the memberships continue to increase over time over a 12 to 18 month period. So it's got a nice little snowball effect and we're really, really good at getting clients profitable month one and from there on out it just keeps getting better and better and better.

Dude, that is so cool. I love the criteria you've set to filter down to that. It's not, it's just, it's very objective the way you're breaking that down now for an agency to shift from a high ticket long sales process to a lower ticket shorter sales process, the key to actually building a profitable agency, there has to be the processes to scale it, to take it to where you can service hundreds of these people. You're not trying to, you can't just have 10 gyms here and make it profitable. How did you go through the process there of making kind of correcting the, correcting the errors I guess more so learning a lesson from your past agency to put the systems in place to make this business really scale and also support your lifestyle goals?

Yeah, for sure. That's a good question. So if you, if you go back to the previous interview I did with you, I talked a lot about the content marketers blueprint.

Yeah.

And that's. That system kind of gave me the systems and processes bug. Max Traylor, by the way, if any of you guys are not in contact with Max Traylor about the cmb, just go do it. I mean, hope that's hard to say, but yeah, definitely. He's got a brilliant mind for this stuff. I learned a lot of this stuff from him when I was doing inbound and doing the content marketers blueprint. So you know, but the concepts behind it can be applied to most anything. Right. So what we did was we said, we actually did, we calculated our client's profit backwards. So we went and said, you know, if our client is profitably acquiring new members using our system, what can we charge? So that it's a no brainer. Right. Meaning they'll still profit starting month one or maybe even just break even month one. But that's okay because each month after that they've got a profit increasing machine behind it and long term they're going to be like smiling all the way to the bank. Right. So we started there and then we created the framework around that and looked at our clients actual problems and needs. You know, we didn't, what we didn't do was just slap a tactic onto it and say, oh you need SEO. Oh, you need website development. Oh, you need social page management. Like, we actually just forgot about all the tactics for a minute and said, what does our client need in order to get like 25 to 30 new members a month? Is the number that we deciphered. Right. And so we built the whole system around that. And it actually came down to a couple of very simple things. And I didn't figure this out really well until about a year, about a year ago, because I had one gym client who the gym that I go to turned into a client. Yeah. Because I was walking down the street one day near my office and I was like, oh, there's a gym right there. I've never seen it. So I walk into this place and the guy who, who I met with, who gave me the tour, closed me for a thousand dollar year in advance membership on the spot. And I was like, I never do that. What the hell did I just do?

Dang.

Like, that guy is awesome. And so he and I had a great relationship after that. And he was the one who actually, like, vied for to hire me with the owner. So he's, he was like a great, great salesman at that job. He was a membership director there. He's closed over like 7,000 gym memberships in his career. And. And he has this really like, customer centric way of selling. And I recognize that it's actually a very inbound way to sell. I was like, dude, this guy knows what he's doing, you know? And so it turns out over about a year Spanish, with just about like $10,500 in ad spend, we got, we added over $50,000 a month in recurring revenue to that gym and new revenue. Right. And this is a big gym. It's kind of a global gym, but it's, it's independently owned. There's only one location and one owner. Right.

Okay.

It's not a franchise. So they have like 40,000 square feet. I mean, it's massive and all kinds of cool stuff in there. So not every gym can do that. But what happened during that process was my team started recognizing that Ryan was closing like two to three times more than any of our other clients. Right. So we had done a good job with building the lead generation machine and everything. But again, going back to that framework where we're like, what does it take to get our client from point A to point B? The. In the most linear, like, most predictable fashion. Right. And so I started talking to Ryan. He's like, you know, man, I've always wanted to do Something more. I would love to be an entrepreneur. I'm kind of like, I've done all I can in gyms, you know?

Yeah.

So I convinced him to come over and be my sales guy. So I kind of. I didn't poach him. He was gonna leave anyways. But I was like, well, this is convenient, you know? You expedited the process. Yeah. I was like, going over here, we might have an opportunity for you, buddy. So we worked out a deal. And long story short, what ended up happening was we figured out that the sales process for gems is, like, the thing that almost every gym does terribly. I can get them 100 leads a month, no problem. But not every gym can close 10 to 30% of those leads. They just can't, you know? And so especially because they're independent, they don't have a franchise telling them how to sell with the sales system and software and stuff like that. It's like they're just kind of flying off the cuff with it, you know? So what we did was we integrated those two things. So when we approach a client now, we. We say we're going to help you in two main areas. Right. We're going to get you new opportunities each and every month, meaning we're going to do a dump for you service where we're going to generate leads for you using our proven system. And then we're going to show you Ryan's onboarding and selling process so that these members not only sign up when they come in, but they stick around for a very long time. Ryan's got it literally down to a science.

That's awesome.

So, yeah, so what we ended up doing was we charge a consulting fee up front because the very first thing we do is Ryan teaches them, our clients, his sales system so that every walk in, every telephone inquiry, every referral, every whatever they have in front of them right now, they can start. They can use his system to start closing more memberships, like, day one. Right.

Okay.

And so a lot of times our clients without ad spend, are closing like, 10 to 30 new memberships in their first month. And we. We haven't even had a chance to turn the ads on yet. You know, they're like, don't turn that on yet. I'm still working leads. Like, this is awesome. And so they'll work all their organic and warm leads first, and then we turn it on, and it's like cheating, you know, after that. So that's kind of our secret sauce. We charge a little bit more upfront for the consulting fee. So we're kind of like not even low ticket anymore. And then our monthly retainer is like what you'd expect for somebody to just be doing like flat fee lead generation. So we charge $3800 as of today. It's $3800 in month one and every month thereafter is 1200 bucks a month for our service fee. So that's how we structured it.

Dude, that is awesome. Is there any ongoing aspect to that or is it like a one time session with Ryan and then they're off to the races?

Oh, no. So we have Ryan's got a video training library so they can access the stuff any time of the day, day or night. Gym owners typically are teaching classes on and off, you know, throughout the day. And so it's very hard to get them all like, you know, on one live call each week. But Ryan does one to two live calls each week where they can use it as a Q and A session or as a training opportunity for their sales staff, if they have sales staff.

Okay.

And then the evergreen videos are all in like a membership area so that people can get the core concepts, you know, 24, 7, 365.

That is sweet. Seeing the pain that people have being lead generation, knowing that they can't handle it. So giving them support there, systematizing the whole thing, you really understand your target Persona really, really well, and so you can give them results fast. Rob, that's awesome.

Yeah. So the system looks like this, like our internal system. So if you're looking at this from like an agency's perspective, our marketing generates leads. We use Facebook ads to generate leads and get applications and book phone calls. So it's paid advertising to an inbound funnel. And then Ryan gets on the phone with them, deciphers if they're a good fit, if they are a good fit. He extends an invitation to join our program. If the business owner says, yeah, that sounds good, our campaign manager does an onboarding call with them. Our campaign manager gathers everything she needs. Just a normal, you know, agency onboarding process really. And then they get access to a Facebook group, a membership site, and they get invited to the scheduled weekly calls that are live Q and A calls that I just described in the background. Our team goes and starts building the done for you lead generation campaign for Facebook ads while these guys are getting going with their sales process. And then after that, Betsy is, you know, touching them once a week and giving them a monthly report. And Ryan is helping them solve their sales problems as they come up. So Ryan's if somebody signs up month one, Ryan is still there month four, but he's helping them refine their process during these weekly calls and in the Facebook group. So if you notice anything about that, I am not involved in any way, shape or form part of that. I do do hands on things in the business, but that is the exact reverse of how my agency used to run my agency used to run. Every client problem was mine, every process was mine, every SEO thing was, you know, it was like, yeah, it was the exact reverse. Now I can architect our marketing campaigns, improve our processes, interview our clients for case studies, help with the really big problems. Right. Help solve those really tough, tough ones, give my team what they need to do their jobs well. Right. Things like that. And it's. I don't have a single employee on staff. Everybody works remote. Everybody is. We use Slack and we use Airtable for our project management systems. They're really light tools. And that's it. You know, like my whole. We have four, four people on our team who are basically on retainer and they're all over the country in the US here. And then we've got one person who just is more of like a project person who dips in and out as we need them. But that's our entire business front to back. So it's, it's vastly different than the old agency model.

That is awesome. Rob, thank you for your transparency, walking through kind of how you got to where you are. Because I think what you said about this being a journey, not just a just kind of aligned to success, is a really, really good point. And to be able to have the courage to step back and look at what you did and learn from those mistakes is a really valuable lesson. So just thank you for sharing everything. If anyone has like a follow up question or they want to reach out, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

Yeah, just friend me on Facebook. Basically, I'm super accessible. I didn't used to be. I used to play defense, but I am now, man, so that's a good feeling. And yeah, I'm pretty much an open book. Like we obviously can't just like give everybody all of our IP and our secret sauce, but I'm happy to answer questions. Just friend me on Facebook, send me a message. It's easy, no problem.

Cool, man. Well, thank you so much, Rob.

Yeah, brother, happy to.