Erik Huberman - Building A People-Based System To Achieve Your Vision

What I love about my business is you don't need any investors, you don't need outside capital. And I also personally have a passion for growing things and so quickly found that my business grew by growing other businesses. And it was like the perfect mix of like constantly jumping around helping other people, which is super fulfilling and fun, and growing my business and growing their business and constantly being growth minded was something I've always been attracted to.

This is an intro, intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float, Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf and Joe.

Hey, welcome back.

Hey. Hey. What are we doing today?

Today we are talking to a brilliant entrepreneur.

What makes this gentleman so brilliant, you say?

He just says some really smart shit.

Okay, you just impressed me.

Yeah.

No, he built up this agency that's monstrous. In fact, our notes said it was $75 million agency. And he's like, actually it's 180 million. So mass agency.

I don't think he did that on purpose. No, no, no.

I think.

No, it wasn't a typo. He said that he hasn't updated the.

Bio in a while.

He's been too busy making money and growing businesses and having a great time doing it.

I don't blame him. I know our bios can do some updating in some areas too.

His name is Eric Huberman and he is on this podcast and he is literally going to expand your mind.

If you have 2x on your podcast, you might want to maybe slow it down a little bit because you're going to learn a lot in a short period of time. I'm just going to say that this.

Is a dense episode with a lot of info crammed into it. So you're going to do it because we talk about how to improve the ltv, how to calculate the ltv, how to improve the LTV of a business. We talk about venture funding and how he started his venture fund. We talk about growing this monstrous agency.

That he's done well to that point. Let me just talk about him just for a hot second too, and why you got to listen because, yeah, he's the CEO. He's the founder of Hawk Media. It's the fastest growing marketing consultancy in the United States. He's what he's been fastest company, Fortune magazine's 50 best workspaces in Southern California. What, 30 under 30. Forbes. I mean, there's a whole bunch of accolades. It's crazy. Yeah. And he's worked with what, over 2,000 brands from small, tiny businesses all the way to Red Bull, Verizon, Alibaba, Barstool, sports. I mean, the dude is in. I don't know how many other projects he said he's been doing since he was 6 years old. Not the agency. That'd be impressive.

He's been an entrepreneur since six.

Yeah. So this is a hell of a story. And we go in many of the places and probably more than I cut you off.

Yeah.

Credit on his background with all these.

Big companies he worked with. We also talked about, like, what are some of the commonalities, like when you're working with these big companies, what are the things that you usually find yourself going into these businesses and saying, okay, this is what you need to fix. And he had a pretty clear answer of like, this is one thing that most people neglect. But I'll open that loop because it's powerful. It's something that luckily we're not neglecting, but we do know a lot of businesses do.

Many folks are. So you're going to love this episode. Like I said, you're going to get a lot. So get the action guides to this episode. You're going to find them for free within the first two weeks of this episode. Going live over@flowchartgroup.com. please enter your email address when it asks you. It's actually our Facebook group. Once you plug in your email address, that's how you get the action guide. So flowchartgroup.com lowchatgroup.com and you get the.

Benefit of being in a kick ass Facebook group.

True debt. A lot of cool people there hanging out, nothing else.

Go do that and then listen. Well, listen to this episode. Then go do that or do it at the same time.

We can wait. We have a pause button for a reason.

We do.

Just don't pause us too long.

All right, hold on, Let me just play some music here.

All right.

That was way too loud in my ears.

That was extremely loud. Hopefully Jacob can turn that down. Well, I'm sure he did. So thank you, Jacob.

Yeah. Hopefully that was enough time to sign up. We gave you, we gave you three.

Seconds again, pause vote.

All right, let's go talk to Eric.

All right, Eric, how you doing, man? Great to have you on the show.

Doing great. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Now, Brian Moncada. Yeah, he. He intro to us. So shout out to him. He was a favorite recently on the show and he like blew Everybody's minds about YouTube stuff.

He's a great guy.

No kidding. So he's like, got to have you on because you've done, you know, and we looked at your Track record. We're like, oh my God. Okay, not sure where to go. And that's what we were saying just a minute ago. But interesting story and I think it'd be really cool to cover that because you have a massive marketing agency and that's. Yeah, Hawk Media. And how, what, what do you like, how would you describe that?

Yeah, so basically we act as an outsourced CMO and marketing teams to companies. So we go in, identify holes and what a brand is doing, whether it's their staffing needs, their actual execution and strateg strategy needs. And then we'll spin up individual experts, all a la carte, month to month. So it could be a Facebook marketer, an email marketer, a web designer, a fractional cmo, et cetera. And we'll ebb and phone, change things on an ongoing basis depending on what the company needs.

Nice.

Okay. Yeah, so and I know what you. That's a $75 million company, like revenue or.

No, it's higher than that. We did about 180 last year.

Oh, okay.

I don't know. Like honestly. Yeah, it's hard to keep up. But yeah, we did about that last year.

Yeah.

And we've got about 120 full time people manage marketing for about 600 brands.

Yeah, no, I know a lot of recognizable ones too. That's why we were, we were just like, okay, maybe the backstory of how you got this thing started, how did you get in the game? Maybe where did it all start for you?

I mean there's a lot of starting points, so to speak, from trying to be an entrepreneur when I was 6 years old by stealing a bunch of my parents stuff and trying to sell it door to door because I decided they don't need it anymore.

But it really, I'd say the true story starts after college. I went to Arizona, got out, decided I wanted to be in commercial real estate and started one week to the day before Bleeman Brothers went bankrupt and the rest of the banking industry collapsed. And at the time no one really know what that meant, especially my 21 year old self. That had no context. And like is Bear Stearns going out of business a bad thing? Like what does that even mean? Doesn't that happen all the time? It's like, well they've been in business for 130something years or whatever. It was like, okay, that might be a bad thing.

And so I was in that industry for a year. I made $350 that year. About six months in, started scrambling to try to Figure out another alternative and ended up launching. I'm going to make a long, long story short. Launched a music company, built it for two years, got it to profitability, hired a CEO to take it over, and I just kind of kept falling into E comm. I then launched a T shirt subscription company called Swag of the Month with a partner. We built it for a year and then sold it. And then I joined Science the incubator that had just launched a company called Dollar Shave Club. Advised for them and a lot of their other portfolio and helped them also take a vitamin company and pivot it to be a women's activewear brand. Built that for a year, sold it to Bowie Total Fitness, and then started advising and consulting for a bunch of brands. Cause I didn't know what I wanted to do next and just saw over and over again how hard it is to find decent marketers, whether it's agencies or in house. It is, for lack of better word or clusterfuck. I don't know if I can swear.

On this, but you're totally good.

You're good.

All right, cool.

So, yeah, it seems to always be the best description of the ecosystem. And so navigating it sucks. Everybody that has a business, everyone's got a horror story with a marketing agency. It just, it's a par for the course. And that just doesn't make sense to me. And so after six months of being hit my head against the wall trying to help my clients find agencies and talent, I just decided to hire my own little SWAT team. So the model that we just alluded to, which is like everything, was a la carte month to month. We had like a Facebook marketer, email marketer, et cetera. And. And I just made it really simple. And that's how we started. And frankly had no intention of building an agency. I was actually building a tea company and was going to go with that. And then like drinking tea first month. Yeah, yeah, like drinking tea. It was fit. It was called Shape Tea. It was Fitness Melt teas. I still have, actually, I think they're like right here. Somewhere in here I still have like the first cans I made and I went to market and we did like 30 grand in revenue the first couple months. But the tea brand and I did 60 grand of revenue month one with Hawk Media. And I was like, I kind of like this business more. Even though, like I had been. When you come up in kind of the venture world and you know, out of that side, the word lifestyle business becomes like. Or the phrase lifestyle business becomes Like a bad word. Yeah, because it means it's not venture backable. And it's like it's never going to.

Be big, not scalable.

And then it's not scalable and you start to realize that a lot of that nuance is actually bullshit and that like a people business is very scalable. And I remember it took me a couple of years to figure this out in terms of like, in my heart I knew I could build a big business this way, but people would be like, how are you going to scale a service business? Like, you know, you can't really scale a service business. And then Accenture has been around for 30 years and has 400,000 employees. I think you can scale a service business, you know, Deloitte, ey, what's it. I mean the list goes on.

Yeah, they're all service businesses. Every, you know, McKinsey, Bain, BCG. Very scaled service businesses. And so you can do it and it's really not that complicated. And what I love about my business is you don't need any investors, you don't need outside capital. And I also personally have a passion for growing things and so quickly found that my business grew by growing other businesses. And it was like the perfect mix of like constantly jumping around helping other people, which is super fulfilling and fun and growing my business and growing their business and constantly being growth minded was something I've always been attracted to. So yeah, double down. That's how we kind of got kicked off.

That's a really good story. And yeah, I like how all the, yeah, all that stuff kind of amounted to a service business, but it's kind of doing a lot of what you said that all these different ventures and splinter projects even done, it's like all under one roof basically now.

Yeah, I would say the fun thing for me about the business, like when people ask like, you know, I'm very passionate about our mission as a business, which is accessibility to great marketing for everyone because they came from the frustrations that it wasn't accessible and like really wanted to make that. But also from a personal level, like what gets me fired up is sort of what we call the sandbox, like trying new things, testing new things, learning new things. And I've been able to position myself in the business as that guy. So when you see all these things that we're constantly spinning up. So we have our venture fund, our capital arm, our book will be coming out later this year. We own E Commerce Week in partnership with the city of LA, which is like New York Fashion Week. For LA&E commerce, we just launched the Brandy's, which is a brand awards. We're working on international expansion, et cetera, et cetera. Because I also am not one for tedium. So the moment things start to operate, thankfully I have a great business partner and a great executive team that take it over and move on to the next thing. And so the moment things become status quo, I break something or start something.

Or ramp something up.

Sounds familiar. That's so funny.

We were having that conversation earlier this week. So I'm curious, when you were first starting up Hawk Media, how were you getting the initial brands to come over to you? How did you get that initial credibility and traction?

Yeah, so it started.

So my last company, Ellie, was a huge success from a marketing standpoint and a flaming disaster from an operational standpoint. And thankfully that was really well known in the LE ecosystem. So I was in charge of marketing there and people knew that I'd done something really solid. And so I was offered a bunch of jobs when I left there, when we got rid of it. And so I didn't want to take a job. So. And because Ellie, I wasn't the boss. I was on the founding team, I was head of marketing. But I would. A lot of the decisions that got made were literally contrary to what I was advising them to do. And so like I don't want to do that again. I don't want to work for someone else that's going to make a bunch of stupid decisions on my time and I'm going to end up victim of their bad decisions. So I said, I'll consult. And so I ended up with a really solid consulting roster. And at this time I was 26 years old and within 3 months I was making 30 grand a month consulting, which is 3x any money I'd ever made in my life. So that's. I was like, when I legitimately just started consulting because I was working on that Tea brand and I didn't want to burn through my savings. So I was like, I'll just make some money on the side, so I need my mike. I remember my nut at that time was like three grand a month. So I was like, I gotta go figure out how to make three grand a month. And my first client paid me eight. I was like, okay, check that out. Yeah, exactly. But then people kept reaching out and asking me to help them. And I was like, I didn't realize I was this valuable, but cool. And then those companies started doing well. And so that's where it started to take Off. So immediately when we started, I already had this consulting book and we already had some success. And then I brought in this team, we had more success and then we just started writing that from there. Also a little bit of a cheat. One of my clients was a startup that was pretty much out of money by the time he got to me. And then he decided he wanted to pursue something else and asked if I'd take over and just take some equity in the business. And I said, sure. But he happened to be a writer for Forbes Pre. Like now anyone can get into Forbes. This was not the case back then. And so I'm like, hey, yeah, I'll do that. But I also want you to put an article about me in Forbes. And so Hawk Media was the name. There were zero employees, there was no business yet. And there's an article in Forbes. That's why you should outsource your marketing to Hawk Media.

That's pretty legit. Yeah, it's like some Ryan Holiday stuff right there.

Yeah, exactly.

I love it, man. I mean, I think something that stood out, a bunch of stuff stood out in a minute ago, like when you're explaining your agency, but the fact that you have a solid vision and you're bringing that to life. Because if you built this system of people basically that can share your vision because you're leading it and it's like through osmosis, you're going to get a lot of your projects created because you've created almost like fail safes. You're not going to break anything because you've done your front work, front loaded the thing, and now you have people you trust.

It's really smart, it's super important. And don't get me wrong, like it's.

You still have to be proactive.

Like I have a great head of sales. And there he was falling behind on. Not on in general, but just on a couple aspects of what he was doing. And I was like, hey man, like we talked about this a month ago. This didn't happen. Like, go get the resources you need, whatever you need to get it done. Like, if you're falling behind, is it. If you're bogged down by other stuff, go hire two people. Like, let's go. Like, go spend some money so that we can grow this thing. I don't want to just hear a month from now we're behind again, so let's get ahead of it. And like, you know, he came to me today and was like, hey, thank you for the kick in the ass the other day. By the Way, like sometimes you just need that again. He's super solid. Yeah, you still. I still have to play the role sometimes of the one that pushes. Thankfully, that's not a burden to me because I like being pushy. So it's actually always been like, I've pissed people off earlier in my career and as even my parents as a kid, because I was the one that was like, let's get it done. Like, you know, the moment I decided I wanted to do something or wanted something, something like, you know, I wanted to. I wanted electric. That was actually one of my first entrepreneurial endeavors was I wanted electric guitar. At 8, my dad literally told me, great, go get a job. Like, okay. So I was like, I started lemonade stand. That didn't work. Then I started buying and selling Beanie Babies. But then I inundated my parents. Like, I need to ride here, I need to drive here, I need to sell here, I need to buy here.

And like was all in. And they're like, just relax.

I'm like, I don't want to relax.

I'm motivated.

They're like, here, take the damn guitar.

And funny enough, I ended up making like $4,000 as an 8 year old selling Beanie Babies. And I bought the guitar, I bought a bmx. I saved some money for a car like that. That was my first true entrepreneurial endeavor that worked.

It's funny, I laugh because I have a 18 month old that's basically directing us around right now. So I'm like, she'll probably, yeah, become a president or a leader at a great company.

My parents were convinced I'd be a lawyer because I always argued. Everything is an argument.

Oh my God. And I have a crap ton of beading babies still around my house from way back in the day. I wish you sold them long, long time ago.

At one point I had like, I.

Think it was 85 or 90 of them and I. My parents taught me the word liquidated at the time. He's like, you got to liquidate. I'm like, yeah, I got to liquidate. And so I sold all of them except for like six that. I still have memories.

It's a hell of a lesson though, as a kid, that's for sure.

Yeah, that was great. Just the, the idea of how you, how you make money versus get paid money and like how you find a way to find value, present it, sell it versus this guy gave me a paycheck or girl, you know, and so I think that knowing the difference was super important at a young age.

Would you say that's like a really big thing that's carried you on into every venture you've gone into.

I think it gave me the confidence that that was something I could do. And then I also think there were, like, a few pivotal things. One, my dad's an entrepreneur. And I always don't. I don't like glazing over that because, like, I grew up thinking that that's what you did. Like, you run a business. Like, my dad did it, like, other people do it. Then I took a class in eighth grade that basically a friend's dad would take us around to local businesses and introduce us to the owner and how in local. Me, like the local bank. I grew up in a small town, so, like, local bank, the local health food store, et cetera. And so again, it was just like an option, like, oh, you can go run a business. You don't have to just get a job. And then I worked for one of those businesses, a local health food store, and six months in, found out I was training people, making, like 30% more than me. And I went to the GM and was like, what's going on here? He's like, well, you're. And it turned out my manager had been taking credit for all of my work and saying I wasn't doing anything. And they were basically just waiting for me to come to them so they could be like, this might not be working. I was like, wow, that sucks. And so they didn't want to fire me, but they're like, you got to step it up. I'm like, there's no step. Like, I'm doing every. And so I quit in an amicable way. But I realized, like, working for someone else and working on the. Someone's opinion of my value versus either being my own boss or being in sales. I was going to have to, because.

I could not stand that.

He's like, I need to design this. It needs to be my vision. This is the way it's going to execute.

I can be in charge as long as everything's objective. I can work well with others. I don't think I'll ever end up working for someone else again, but if I did, I think it'd be fine. As long as it's, again, objective, not subjective.

I could totally relate, too. My parents were both entrepreneurs growing up, so I totally relate to the. A lot of people didn't quite grasp that there's more than one option of getting a job versus I could just go build something and have my own time freedom. So I actually like grew up in a family where we would go on vacations more than other people and we would travel and get away from the business and like my parents kind of came and went whenever they wanted and that sort of thing. So like that was the reality that I grew up in. And so the idea of like entrepreneur versus getting a job was sort of always on my radar where I know for most people it probably wasn't.

It wasn't in my family.

Yeah, I always use, I use the.

Line I took it for granted but not the traditional use of the phrase but like I actually took it for granted. Like that's just what you do.

Yeah, exactly. So I'm curious, from all the companies that you've worked with and you know you've worked with some really big name brands and a lot of big companies, is there any sort of like common thing that you're going in and doing for them? Like from a marketing tactical standpoint, is there anything that so many companies maybe neglect and it's like if they were all just kind of doing this one thing that we come in and help them with, they would be so much better off?

Yeah, I'd say yes and no.

Like the by nature of the reason what separates us is we really do take a full funnel approach meaning like anywhere from building a brand to building a website to advertising to life cycle marketing and email and SMS and we.

Look at all the holes in their.

Business and plug everything that we need to and over time that's pretty much covers the gamut. The only things we don't do are experiential and prior but I will say most common overlooked. And I still to this day don't understand how people are in these industries like E commerce and don't understand this really the number one metric, ltv, like your lifetime value, your average order value, not your first purchase but how much money do you make off a customer over time. The reason I say that metric is because a lot of the actions people take around the first conversion, we just need to get the sale. And the problem is most of these companies end up surviving. The stable companies out there are built on lifetime value and repeat purchasing and coming back which means email marketing, sms, good content, good customer service, those are things that we end up having to coach companies on a lot more and getting into honestly even arguments with companies on. I had this this morning with a very successful guy and usually very bright that he's like, you know, you're running our Google and Facebook ads and they're not performing. What do you mean you're getting a crazy cost per weight. They're not converting. Well, your website sucks. We've talked about this. Your landing page is terrible. Your email marketing is non existent. Like these are all things that you're not doing. Like we're. And you won't let me do it either. So like I don't know, like this is. And you understand, like we can get them to the door but if your door is boarded shut we can't fucking help you. Right, right, that's. But that's not uncommon. Like people, the smart, some very smart people I know just that's not something they think about. Even we've talked to, you know, Fortune 1000s, Fortune 500s that don't have a lifecycle marketing strategy, they don't have a CRM, they don't have an email marketing strategy, they don't have an SMS strategy. Like that is where you make the most money in digital. But for some reason that's still something people miss and think that it's all about buying Facebook ads.

So when you're talking about LTV and even the follow ups and all that stuff, how would you walk a client through that if they just have no clue about it? Maybe they don't have the systems in place. What are the pillars that you'd walk them through?

Yeah, so comes down to this. There's something called a purchase cycle or consideration period and is the average time that it takes from someone to be introduced to your brand to when they actually buy. And so when we are running ads and we're introducing new people to your brand, they don't buy right away. It takes time. And to give you general averages in E commerce if it's usually very heavily correlated with average order value. So for a $50 average order it takes about three weeks for someone to buy on average for $100 it's about five weeks, $200, it's about six weeks and it trails off after that between two and three months for any type of impulse buy is what you're going to see. Which means when you're advertising, first off, if you're watching it on a daily basis, you're just like scaring yourself because the average person won't buy for three weeks. Why are you looking at it tomorrow? It's going to take time to see how this performs, which people hate. But it's my business partner's favorite line with this is nine women can't make a baby in a month. Not how this works.

True.

So it just takes time. And so, and so Figuring out your average sales cycle, purchase cycle, is critical so that you can analyze everything else well. So once you figure out your purchase cycle, then you can start monitoring it. Now the second part of this is, okay, so I introduced you to my brand three weeks ago. Let's say it's $50 in three weeks. So I introduce you to my brand and then I say nothing for three weeks. What's the chances of someone actually remembering and buying? So you're going to kill a lot of that life cycle. And so then bring in email marketing. You know, ask for their email up front, which you can, and most people, or not most, but a good percentage of serious buyers will give you. And then you collect emails and now you can follow up with them over the course of those three weeks, which will obviously increase your chance of that conversion as well as potentially accelerate that purchase cycle. Now we recently in the past couple years have gotten much heavier in SMS as well. We actually invested in a company called postscript that's become like Shopify's number one partner in it. And we just saw this coming. And the early stats we saw were the average open rate of an email in E Commerce is about 15% across the board. Click through is about 3. That's gotten better actually since COVID It's I think closer to 20 now in terms of open rate. Okay, and, but SMS, you're looking at about a 98% open rate and about a 30% click through. So 3 to 30, 10 times more effective. So SMS has become super powerful too. And then I think one thing people have a really hard time with, especially these sort of doctor marketers, the crowds we all are involved in direct marketing is content and brand building. Because there's no direct line to draw attribution to it. But it is one of the most valuable things a brand can do because it really does create that stability. Because if you can attract people and the way to build content is basically around answering your sort of brand aspirations. So people buy everything on an aspiration. And I don't mean that in some grandiose statement. What I mean is when you go make a purchase, it's because you want to change your current state. As simple as I have holes in my sock and I want socks without holes in them. Like it doesn't have to be something grand, but something simple. So figuring out what the main aspiration for your brand is, where you start, and then building content around that aspiration. The best case of this is Red Bull. All of their content has to do with having a lot of energy. Because that's what Red Bull does. It gives you energy. Yeah. Gives you wings. Gives you energy. So everything's about high energy, high energy, high energy. So when I watched their guy jumping out of space or watching, you know, I don't know if you just. They had a ski video that was amazing in Matterhorn Village. Guy, like, grinded down the power lines and like, it was nuts. Anyways, you watch these things and you're like, I need. I need energy. I need to go do this crazy stuff. And you want to drink a Red Bull. That's what you associate with energy. Now, if you can figure out what your aspiration is, why people buy your product, and then double down on that aspiration with all content, you can now attract people to come and interact with your brand above and beyond a purchase decision, which inherently will create more purchases. If I'm on your website or I'm interacting with your brand more often, I'm most likely. I'm more likely to buy stuff than I was when I didn't, definitely. So by nature, you're going to convert more. Also, word of mouth is still the biggest driver of business, hands down. You cannot afford to buy all your customers. You need a viral coefficient and people to talk about you. They are a lot more likely to share your content than your products. People are way more likely to send good content to each other than they are a product page. So creating good content now also allows a megaphone on your existing audience to go to their friends and their network. And so that the combination, along with building trust with your customers and really building a relationship, also helps with conversion rate, helps with lifetime value. Because they want to keep coming back. They like what you stand for. Case in point, Patagonia. These are things that really matter these days. And so content becomes super powerful. These are all the things that we talk through. And so that's a lot of times, as you ask, the conversation I'll get into when people are like, well, I just need to run a Facebook ads.

I don't want to do all this other stuff. But no, it makes sense.

Exactly.

Yeah. And that's. I like the aspirational content. I've never thought of it that way, but that really ties into now a brand's vision, their message they're putting out in the world. Well, that is the message. And it's probably the result that a lot of people are looking for as well. Like I would assume with. Or at least the feeling like with Red Bull, it's like, well, the results. They want more energy they want to get maybe pumped up, motivated and cool. Well, that's going to be probably a viral coefficient, the kind of content they're making too. It's very shareable.

Yeah. And for them, in case they actually, their media companies now, I think more money than their energy drink makes sense. Which is crazy. But. And yeah, for us, like I started my podcast six months ago or so, no more than that. Anyways, started it last year and the idea was I really wanted to learn more about really high achieving people and like how they got there and then quickly realized like, oh, that's perfect. Like that's what we're doing for companies. We're basically taking them down the path from origin to success. And so I basically have interviewed almost 50 people on their origin story and top in their field, you know, top Olympians and athletes and executives, et cetera. So yeah, that's the idea is it's really. And people are emotional creatures. They associate, they use logic to justify emotion, but that association is more emotional. So it doesn't have to be so cut and dry and obvious. Sometimes it can just be what emotional appeal are people looking for? And let's give them that.

So this is sort of a change of topic, but I wanted to circle back around to something you mentioned earlier about how you like to, you kind of like to build the things initially, but you don't like to do the ongoing maintenance. And that was something that I know Joe and I both like, really resonate with. We had that conversation the other day and you, you have a business partner luckily who sounds like they enjoy the operations part of it. But you know, what advice would you give to somebody that maybe doesn't have that operations partner, but they're, they love the building but not the sort of monotony of maintenance.

Yeah, there's options. So I mean like we do a.

Lot of M and A, we buy.

A lot of smaller agencies. So they scale it to a point, sell like you can, you can get to a certain point without needing deep operational expertise and attention. So you can kind of brute force it for a few years and get out or, or join a bigger platform. That happens a lot in our world. You can hire. There are operators out there looking for jobs. So I would always build a business model that I'm obsolete. Like that's super important. So if I can't hire someone for a job, then I probably shouldn't be doing it either. So I do believe that you should be able to hire ahead of operations.

And, or, you know, if neither of those are really an option and you can't find a partner like I did, then I would say, you know, got to suck it up and do it. It's really like, it's, it's. There's a few options, but at some point, like, none of them are perfect either. Like, it's hard to find a good partner. It's hard to hire people. Sometimes you don't want to sell, but then you don't want to be doing operationally. That's part of it too, is you kind of got to lead yourself into what you want to be doing and look for those options. Like, I still to this day have many parts of my job that I don't want to be doing, but I continue to try to optimize to get less and less of that. So I didn't. We're almost eight years in. I didn't have an expectation that day one, I'm not going to have to do anything. Like, I'm still to this day probably, though I work. I don't want to say hardest working. There's plenty of hardworking people in the company, but I work the longest hours of anyone because I love it, not because I. And that's not a jab at anyone. I own the company. I don't think that's unreasonable. But I. I am known as the workhorse, the joke. People call me the machine in our company. Like, it's like, it's because I love this stuff. So it's like, to me, it's like a hobby. If I have a few hours of free time, like, well, I'm gonna jump on and do some stuff. Like, it's still. And it hasn't lost that for me.

Well, like, what would you do? Because I'm curious, like on those hours where other people would probably just hang it off and be done for the day, what are the things that you would jump into?

Pretty much from like 7:30am to 6:00pm I'm on calls or meetings or podcasts. Whatever it is, I'm doing something, which means my emails are stacking up and if I have a break in between or a shorter meeting or something ends early, I'll catch up. But then I end up at the end of the day with some stuff there. So a lot of times I'll spend an hour or two having to catch up there. Then like every night this week I've had some different dinner event or some sort of event. Cause welcome back. Everyone's got vaccines. So I guess we're back to networking.

So everything at once. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a constant effort. And then let's say all of that is done and I still have some time. Then it's like, okay, well what project? Like literally finished our book and published. We signed with the publisher and that's going to come out later this year. We've got all these other big events and then honestly, the moment all of that is handled and things are calm, which happens. That's what I meant by like I start something or break something, then it's like, okay, I've got some time. What else do we need? And I can tell you like on our roadmap is hiring a tech team and starting to build our own technology. It's expanding internationally. And if all of that's happening, generally once or twice, twice or three times a year, I end up on some epic trip somewhere because that's the balance part for me. My wife and I go somewhere crazy.

Sweet, nice. I like that. I was going to bring. Oh, the book. Yeah, I wanted to. Because that's the hawk method, right? Yep. What's that all about? Is that breaking down the agency. You're thinking about all this or am I? Totally.

Yeah. It's always about the agency.

And more about just our methodology around marketing, how we think about marketing. It's about like we've always talked about. We look at the three pillars of marketing. Awareness, nurturing and trust. Just kind of alluded to that awareness is top of the funnel. How do you build that awareness? Nurturing is everything I just mentioned about the life cycle side of things. And then trust, also known as brand, and how you build trust in your company and eventually it becomes brand. People know what you're standing for. It's consistent like McDonald's as a brand. I don't need to hear from someone else on McDonald's is unless you're trying to change that perception. But initially when you don't have a very established brand, it's third party validation, like press and influencer and referrals and testimonials, those kind of things. So it's building out like kind of a 200 page framework as to how to look at your marketing strategy and how to identify where the holes are and a lot of the basic stuff we do to start that strategy.

That's going to be pretty cool because I mean you're covering everything except for what, like two little things. But you know, you were saying we.

Talk about press and experiential.

Oh yeah, yeah.

We just don't do it. But we do talk about how that plays in and we Got a lot of our partners and, and different vendors like Yacht POS in the book and Klaviyo and all these other guys to talk about the aspects that they complement as well and what their views are on it.

That's cool.

Yeah, I want to talk about the venture fund thing, but I don't totally know exactly where to start in on the conversation because that topic fascinates me.

Sure.

I can give you the narrative of how we got there.

Perfect.

So it's actually a fun story. It started with. So I got given some advice at the last company I was at LE by a older, more successful guy than me that said I spend my time on risky businesses and I put my money into real estate because it's secure. And I was like, I like that. That seems like a very cogent, logical way to build your wealth. So that was my plan. My plan was to build Hawk Media and Cash Flow IT and invest in real estate. And about a year in these two guys that I knew that were good guys, I had bought media from their email marketing company. They had like an email list and they said, hey, we're going to pivot our email list to E commerce and we want you to invest. Like guys, I don't invest in startups. I spend enough time on risk. I invest in real estate. They're like, no, no, no, we're not asking, we're telling you you're going to invest, but you can invest as little as you want. We just want you on the cap table. So I write us a small check. It's fine. I was like, all right, fine. So I wrote a small check into this company and that company, it was called FabFitFun. And if you guys aren't familiar, they're probably gonna IPO. I would guess this is a complete guess between 3 and 4 billion DOL.

So worked out.

Yeah, I'd say yeah.

Small check though.

So nothing's changing.

But still, it's still significant. Even with a small check. I think I'm. What was it? I'm going to be like 200x in that deal.

Not bad then.

So it's solid.

And so they've done great. But that took off right away. So right after that I was like, oh, I should stop being so close minded to this. I should think about angel investing. So continued into angel invest and we invested in a company called beautycon that did really well. A company called Rebel Mail that sold the salesforce. A company called Tapcart that has crushed it. It's like a mobile app part the biggest mobile app partner to Shopify and kept in things I knew or opportunities I got through my network. Then throughout that time, we also started doing a bunch of sweat equity deals. People would come to us and say, okay, I don't have all the money, but why don't you take equity in my business and then we can partner. I brought on a guy to help run that aspect. My partner came to me and said how we were doing, like, 5 to 10% of our business in equity. And he was like, hey, we have like 5 to 10% of our business in equity. Shouldn't someone monitor that? So we hired a guy. It's a pretty reasonable thing. And he came in and six months in, guy named Drew Leahy. He was like, hey, these angel investments are insane. You guys have crushed it.

I think we're. I can't remember the number.

It was like 20x on our angel investments or something. And he's like, but these sweat equity deals, you're basically taking equity in companies with no money and hoping that it works out. Like, this is a really stupid model. We shouldn't do this.

Been there, done that.

It was like, yeah, that's fair. He's like, but with your track record, I think we should raise a fund. And I was like, yeah. Oh, no. It started with, we should do more angel investing. I was like, well, I'm not.

I don't.

Like, at the time, we were growing Hawk a lot more. We're still growing a lot too. But we were thin on cash. We weren't. We were putting a lot of money back into the business. And so I was like, we aren't in a place to just keep running checks into angel investments. So we should. And then he's like, well, let's raise a fund. So we set out to do that. Took us about a. No, it took us a few months. We raised. We wanted to raise 5 million bucks. We raised 2.2 pretty quickly, did a first close, started investing, and I'll go into the thesis of the fund. And then took us another two years to raise the rest. And we closed earlier this year. 5.6 million.

Nice.

Congrats. Basically, it took no. No time to raise 2.2. Two years to raise another 1 million bucks and like three weeks to raise the other two.

Weird.

Yeah.

Okay.

Raising small funds is crazy because you're dealing with a lot of personal wealth and just wealthy people, they're like, I don't know, maybe, yeah, I'm in for 5 million.

Never mind.

Like, it's just craziness.

It's one of the worst things I've ever done was raising that fund in terms of like just one of the hardest professional things. Just because you haven't, I can't work harder to make it happen. I have no control over it.

Like it was frustrating.

But are they. They're silent, right? Like they have no. If it's a fund, it' right? Yeah, okay, correct.

But we raised from mostly strategic investors, so we actually invite them in a lot. We're very vocal and communicative. So a lot of VCs are like, God, don't deal with your LPs. For us it's actually the opposite. They're advisors, it's a great group. So like we do wine. We did a wine tasting recently and just had everyone get together and like those kind of things. So the thesis of the fund was originally like, okay, so we're seeing all these DTC brands, we have insight and benchmarking, we can invest better. And that was a good model too. But then we, through the angel investing, we invest in a couple pieces of software. I was like, well this is interesting. This software targets brands that need this piece of software for some aspect of their marketing. We manage 600 of them. So if we invest in a software that we believe in and we onboard our clients, we'll be a market maker for these guys. A SaaS business with 100 customers is a eight figure business. This is interesting. And so we started identifying softwares that we wanted to see or industries that we wanted to be in, et cetera. And so our first check was in a company called Yaguara that we ended up exiting for 4x in a year. And it was benchmarking or not benchmarking okrs and sort of a dashboard for E Comm that partnered with Shopify and did a great job. And then Shopify invested in them directly right after us at Forex. What we invested and we were like.

That is cool, it's good for you.

And so that was the first one and the second one came from a thesis back to sms, right? SMS marketing is going to take off. I looked at a few that I platforms and really liked Postscript. I thought they fit our thesis of how brands would want to work with it. We invested directly and that company Last raise was 21x what we put into it, but it's going to be way more than that.

And so this started to work and that's what happened was that last raise happened as well as a few others. So a couple years into this, people were like, holy Shit, you guys were right. And so we're going to, you know, we've deployed about 60% of this fund and then we'll start raising this next one soon because that's how that world goes.

It keeps going with a new thing. Yeah.

Yeah.

What were you pulling out of that? I thought you're a couple.

I was writing down like postscript and Fat Fit Fund and stuff because I want to go look them up after the show.

Yeah, they're good people.

All.

Both are great people. That's the fun thing too is we try to invest in companies that we really like, working with the founders and we're collaborative and that's been awesome.

Yeah. So when you're. When you're going out and pitching investors to bring in. In the. To bring in money for the fund, are you basically pitching on like, this is what we managed to do before the fund with some of these other companies. Like, what. What does the pitch look like to raise the investments?

That's the pitch. I can tell you from experience. No one gave a. That would be the pitch for fund two for sure is like, here's fund one and how we performed. But because angel investments are so like one off and kind of impulse that no one really took that as any type of evidence, most of our investors either knew me and were like, I'll bet on you. No one put in any money they're going to miss. Thankfully, I'd even told them not to. I'm like, I don't want you calling me desperate. This is like venture money. This is your high risk part that you're like, call me in five. If I make something, call me in five years. Hopefully it's like, oh, shit, cool. We'll keep it and let it roll. It's like your Vegas money. And so most people did. And that's why it's so hard to raise is because. Because when you get to 20 million plus in venture, you start raising institutional and it becomes a part of a portfolio strategy for a family office or a pension fund or something. 5 million you're raising from just a bunch of rich people. And those rich people. I had a guy fly private from New York to LA to write me a $250,000 check, which was cool, except for his flight, probably cost $250,000. I was like, I could have come to you. So it's those kind of things that you're like.

People just put that small amount in. But yeah, it's a grind. But they put in because either knew me, they knew Hawk Media they knew one of some of our other LPs that we're putting in. It was a lot of that. So it's very like a very community driven kind of LP approach.

Yeah. And it's. Who needs influencers when you have all the resources in house and, you know, you can call upon.

That's exactly it. We have like a lot of agency owners, a lot of private equity people, a lot of venture partners. Like those kind of people that, you know, can benefit from the strategic alliance.

With our fund too.

Not just putting money in.

So when a company is in, like underneath the fund when it's. Does Hawk Media go and do a lot of the marketing to help grow it so that the fund goes up in, you know, because of what Hawk Media is doing.

So it's available. There's a Venn diagram for sure. If they're doing terrible marketing, we'll step in and shout. But we also, we don't force it. Like they're separate entities. My partner Drew, who runs the fund, has no stake in Hawk Media intentionally so there's like a Chinese wall there that they necessarily have to. But we're focal if we think they're doing something wrong and should be. And we also give discounts, find ways to work with them, look out for them. And then again, most of our investments are marketing technology. So it's. We do help with some of their marketing, but a lot of times it's more the partnership side of our business. That's really helpful.

Yeah. Are there any, like areas that you're sort of excited about, maybe not invested in yet, but you're kind of bullish on?

It's funny, this is literally the thought exercise we go through a lot. There was. What were we looking at now? I'm of course blanking. We just talked about a category that we're looking at a couple and that was really good.

One thing I did just get excited about that we just put money in is a company called Local Drive that is for franchises to actually manage their marketing across a bunch of small franchises. So if you have like, if you're like Subway, doing marketing per store is a nightmare. And the franchisees don't do it, but the corporate can't do it because you can't manage that. This is a platform that really alleviates all that and was built by an agency owner that I've known for a decade, that I think he's really bright and he's built a great agency. And we've always been sort of frenemies, but more friends than enemies. For sure.

Yeah.

We've had many conversations about merging that never could go through but still have the conversations. So we like each other and so this was a way for. He actually invested in our fund and we turned around and invested in this company.

Oh, that's right. That's perfect. That's cool. Yeah. Interesting. How about, I think on your website you said you do some affiliate marketing for your clients. Do you have, do you do that, what internally as well, like as a, as a company. How does that all look?

Yeah, we bought an affiliate agency actually. So we, so we leverage all the platforms. We could leverage a C.J. or you know, whatever, Pepper Jam et cetera. But it was, it's more.

Pepper Jam even a thing anymore.

I don't know.

I'm throwing out like eight year old software. But yeah, they. We use all the different platforms but basically build out and then we have a whole PR aspect to it where we have a lot of partnerships with publishers that are willing to run articles and advertorials on affiliate. So that's how. That's where like our strategic side has come in. It's not just like put out the network and see who signs up, but also like having some relationships we can leverage. So getting you on a gift guide and things like that.

Got it.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Let me see. I think it'd be. Change of topic if. I don't know. Do you have anything, Matt? Anything?

I mean we covered a lot of ground.

I mean so we can. I can get 60 minutes into 42.

Pretty.

Yeah.

I think the last thing I was, I was curious about is just what's next? Because it seems like you've covered a lot. Is it going to be a lot more of this model continuing on or do you have some new ideas?

So yeah, fun part of this is like we've been offered to sell this thing for way more than I could ever retire off of and we're not doing it like I think it would. I know never say never but like I'm not even really taking the calls anymore. It's just why I like having this. So the vision of it is we're. Well, we should be international this year.

Next.

I'm hoping this year we'll at least be in Canada. But we're working, we're working up there as well as working. And then next year we're looking at London and Singapore. We already have a team in China and a team in the Philippines and so working on building out more internationally. We're staying remote, which is fun. We will end up with another LA headquarters probably pretty soon. But it will be a lot smaller and fun and more of like a hangout and party place than it is an office.

Is that where you live? You're up in around that area, right?

Yeah, I'm in Santa Monica.

Okay.

But our people are in literally 30 states now. We are going to build out the fund and continue to grow that. Our newest initiative that has launched is our is Hawk Capital, which is basically debt financing for ecom brands. So we can actually help with their working capital because we found that was a limitation we kept running into. And then we're going to be building out a software team. And the idea around our software is we're not looking to build like some separate sidewall that becomes like the next, you know, klaviyo or whatever we're trying to build. We want to build widgets no one wants to build that would be nice to have. But they're not a great business because we don't need them to be a great business. We need them to be good lead gen. We need them to be good for our clients. So we're trying to build something that we don't turn into a separate business. But what are the things that people won't build? To me it like this is a grandiose statement, but kind of like Google and Google Maps. Google Maps doesn't make Google money. They make money off search. But they have all this cash flow and by getting people in their ecosystem.

They make more and more money.

So that's the idea of our software arm. Similar thesis around it. We got the book, we got E Comm Week, we've got Brandy's. So yeah, a few things coming down the pipe.

How do you keep all this organized in your head? How do you keep on top of all the different projects that are going on?

There's a whiteboard right there.

It looks pretty clean. Man, I'm surprised.

Oh, I actually had my wife write it and it's just a list of those. My initiatives haven't changed that much because like I've got a good two year scope. So like I need to get all that done and teed up and passed off to the people operating it. That'll take me a while.

Right.

So once I get through that list and then yeah, we have a benchmarking.

Tool we want to build.

We have a nonprofit arm that we've been building out called Five Forward Academy where we teach inner city high school kids digital marketing classes on the weekends. We've been partnered with the basically South Central LA Economic Development Council. We're working on a certification for marketing professionals because it's like there's 200 and I think it's 230 licensed professions in California from your hairdresser to a guy, milk delivery guy. But Somehow we manage $180 million in other people's money and don't need any government oversight or license. Just seems insane. So working on that. We're also launching like we're starting to incubate a couple brands as a marketing partner. So I never want to like, I don't like the idea of like building our own brands. I think that's really.

Almost conceited to think that because I run marketing I could do everything else and I've built brands. I know what it takes. Like I'm good at marketing. I don't want to be the product development guy. I don't want to be the supply chain guy. So I'm now we're partnered on two brands. That one will be launching about six months. The other one, we're still working through timelines that are like with amazing partners, all star cast kind of thing that will be the marketing partner but have operators in it as well. So we're testing that out as a nuanced incubator model as well.

Wow, that's. I mean just the fact that yeah, you've siloed yourself as the marketing, you know, go to source for everything. But yeah, I love the idea of you don't need to be the creator of products and that's. That hits home for us as well because that's why we, we lend more on the affiliate marketing side. We want to be the promoters, the marketers. It's just, it just simplifies everything in your mind.

You know, as much as I do a lot of different things, I like being like staying in my lane too. And I've learned that over and over again. Like I. I've done it. I've built two E Comm brands and been or three E Commerce but two product brands. And I understand what it takes. Which also means I understand what it takes. Whenever I see like other agencies pivoting to launch their own products, I'm like, good luck. Like you don't understand like that you got to give up the agency then like do you got to do one you're not. You get end up with two masters and it doesn't work out.

Yeah. Oh, dude. Eric, I think this has been amazing. I've exhausted everything I planned for this and this has been ep.

Yeah. Talk about the event that's coming up in LA real quick.

That's right, yeah.

The E Comm la, it is virtual.

And I think like this is not actually announced so my team might kill me but we're trying to do viewing parties all over the country because we started planning this a few months ago where we're like we don't want to commit to an in person event. And it's September 27th to October 1st called Ecom Week. So EcomWeek LA. You can sign up for updates right now. And I think RSVPs are going to open July 1st and. But it's, you know, free tickets. Like we just want to get the crowd in. The idea is to give back to the community. But like last year we had Patrick Schwarzenegger speak. We've got the founders of FabFitFun, Meundies, Theragun. In the past we've had other events with like founders of Honest Company and dollar Shave and all these things. We try to get the biggest in there and so it should be a great event. It's five days of different topics from. It's not just marketing, it's also operational product development, finance and venture and how to navigate that. And we're gonna have a lot of different topics. So yeah, putting that. And we're again we're gonna do viewing parties I think so we're gonna have a lot of our partners around the country. So we'll host the one in la. I think we're gonna talk to other great partners that are part of this to host in Boston, in New York and in Austin and all over the place. So it should be fun if you're one in a major metro. We're gonna try to have that and if not come out to LA or it's virtual. You can just jump on Zoom. And the cool thing is we set it up so like there's some interactive parts, some just panels have it on in the background. I'm not pretentious about it. I want this just to be great content. We upload it all onto YouTube too. It's fun.

It's going to be a good time.

Ecomweek la, right? Yep.

Sweet.

We've got the Hawk Method book coming out. When do you think the book's coming out?

Right after that. Hopefully in October. Gotcha.

Okay, cool.

Not guaranteed yet. We still have to figure out print dates and all that, but that's what we're aiming for.

Yeah.

And do you still take on clients at Hawk Media? Can people?

Oh yeah. And yeah, I think I Wanted to note that, like, we started two grand a month. Like, we're not. Even though we work with Fortune 500, accessibility to great marketing is still our mission. So we've kept cost effective. So, you know, we do recommend that. Don't hire anyone if you're a brand. If you don't have, like, 10 grand a month to spend on marketing, like, go do it yourself before that. But once you're at that point, we're happy to work with you. And even if you're not, we're always happy to give guidance and some pointers and stuff like that, too.

Cool.

And so that's hawkmedia.com where they can go find. Cool.

Yep.

Hawk, sign up for a free consultation.

Yeah. And that's Hawk with an E. So H A W K E Media.

There you go. All right, Eric. Yes. This was good. It was a mind expander. I think Matt and I will be chatting for a long time after this one. We always do after these.

Perfect.

Well, thank you, guys.

Appreciate you. See you.

Yeah, absolutely.

All righty. Yo, yo.

That was a lot in a short period of time, and epic. Yeah, I loved it. Yeah.

That was like a sort of mini class on, like, five or six different topics all condensed into one podcast episode.

Yeah.

You know, we talked about increasing lifetime value. We talked sort of about how venture funds work.

We talked about equity deals, sweat equity equity deals.

We talked about, like, the marketing that we should be focused on in, you know, in the sense of like, owning your audiences and actually following up with.

People and building an agency, how that's run systems. Yeah.

So we covered a lot of topics in a short amount of time there.

Yeah, no, we were. You and I were just chatting about how it's just interesting to look at your company and almost like we could see ourselves. It's similar kind of setup. I mean, we've done, like, when we've had an agency, I feel like we've always seen it as a learning experience, a way to really grow other people, people's stuff. But at the same time.

You know, somehow shoot and lose my train of thought. Now I was looking at myself on the screen. Now I'm like, I took you away. You took me away.

Now that Joe can't stare at himself, he can't think anymore. Joe can only think while staring at himself.

We were all, we're in this, like, really cool, lit up studio right now. I was like, damn, that looks pretty cool. Which we're actually using the camera to record it. I completely lost my train of thought.

All right, so back to my original prompt, that was like a whole bunch of. Of mini courses.

There's a lot of mini courses.

Yeah.

I was basically saying it's like we kind of share the vision because there's a lot of what we've done. And, like, even I shared, you know, we share the vision of having an agency. It's a great testing ground. We've never built it with that kind of vision. But I love the fact that it's like he's not trying to create his own products. He's staying in his lane. I think that's like the marketing lane, you know, like, that's huge. Because it's easy to venture out into products and stuff, as we have done.

Yeah.

Sometimes. And then it gets really difficult sometimes to market your own thing.

Yeah.

And fulfill the price and do everything. That's why we like the affiliate marketing stuff. Yeah.

No, there's a lot of stuff that he said that I think kind of hit home with us. You know, first of all, I really liked when we were asking, when we were talking about, like, the various marketing things, like, what sort of marketing things do you kind of have to work on with all these various companies that come into your. Into Hawk Media? And it sounded like in so many words, he was saying you got to own your audiences.

Right.

You've got to bring them on a list, bring them on a text message, bring them to a Facebook community, bring them somewhere where you can follow up with them. Like so many. It sounds like so many businesses, they drive traffic to the sales page, and if they don't make that sale, that person's gone for good.

Or even if they do make the.

Sale, when they do make the sale, they still don't follow up with any of them, you know, And I think, you know, that that's something that I feel like we've preached on this show quite a bit, is own your damn audiences.

Oh, yeah.

On your list. Like, the reason we're so successful with affiliate marketing, the reason we can put out courses from time to time, is because we have an audience that's just ready for them when we're promoting them.

And I love the fact that it's very content heavy, too. Like, I liked his. The piece, that clip right there. I think it lit him up, talking about the LTV and that whole journey that he takes people on. But aspirational content being something like that whole concept of aspirational content, how he was relating to Red Bull and how the content's built to. Basically, it's aspirational. It's what that audience wants to see more of. So inherently shareable. There's this virality component, the network effect, to actually help you with marketing. Because he's like, you can't pay. That's what he was saying. He's like, you can't pay for every customer or lead you bring into your business.

Well, along those same lines too. He made a comment that I wrote down. I don't think he said it in these exact words, but the content is what goes viral. Your offer's not. The sales page is not going to go viral. He mentioned word of mouth. Most people aren't going to go like. I mean, there are some exceptions, but somebody bought like your widget online, you're probably not going to really spur the word of mouth very much. But if somebody read an article about how powerful this widget is and why you need the widget and explain the use cases and how you can use it, and by the end of this article you're like, oh man, I want this widget for myself. People might share that article, but they're unlikely to share like the offer page, the sales page. Here's where you go buy it.

And that's the, that's the crazy thing when people, you know, a lot of folks think you can't create or you don't need to create content, just throw a bunch of offers out there. It's like short term, maybe. Yeah, if you can, to the right people. But I think I feel like our.

Philosophy internally at Evergreen Profits is like the content is more important than the offers almost.

It's not more important than the offers, but we definitely put more focus on into the content side of things than the offer side of things.

Yeah, 80, 20, definitely. Or even more for sure. So that's. Yeah. That whole thing about content I thought was pretty damn brilliant. The fact that it's going to increase your LTV for all the points that we already said.

The other thing that hit home was when he was talking about how he was taking on a whole bunch of. When he was trying to grow his fund, he started by bringing in companies for sweat equity where he was getting equity in the company and then providing services. And then he brought in somebody to actually kind of pay closer attention to that side of the business. And the person went, yeah, this is stupid. Like, you're basically taking equity in companies that don't make money and then doing free work for these companies that your equity is not worth anything.

You're not ever gonna get paid for. You're gonna just wait forever on.

Yeah, yeah, that hits home.

No, I know in several. Been there, done that sometimes.

Yeah, it's just, it's a mistake that we've repeated.

Well, there's a lot of learning involved, but yeah, I mean if you look at the stuff that the other options of what you can do, arrange the pieces a little differently, there's probably some better deal structures out there and models, business models. Yeah, there's a lot of lessons in here to unpack. I like. Okay, so one thing I really do like, and I brought it up to him, but I'll bring it up again, is, you know, he has this vision to. I'm going to butcher them. But essentially allow marketing to like be very easy for all companies if they need it. Like they're in house CMOs. And so he has that vision and he has all these companies. He's basically crafted something that he can then be his best self at and then direct a team to kind of further his vision and also kind of grow all these brands. It's like this cool contained thing that he's built that then. Yeah, creates funds, it creates books, all this other stuff. It's a platform, essentially what he's built through scaling people. Yeah, that was the thing. It's like, it's just a lot of folks and I know we've kind of poo pooed this a little bit with agency is like, ah, agencies, people, you know, you gotta. Because let's be honest, like, it was pretty cool. Like he's like, I grew it through word of mouth and his referrals and I did good work. And then it's like, yeah, we kind of could have done that path and done it, but it's like a. Definitely a different way of thinking and approach that he's taken. And I don't know, it's just very interesting to see someone actually scale it that fast too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean find that many good people. And like, I mean, this is probably something we should have asked on the episode.

I probably get some of the best potential questions after the fact. You know, once you had some time to marinate on the episode, which we actually. She literally just finished recording. It's like 10 minutes before we hit record on this thing.

There's probably a lot more that will pop. We should really do these outros like the day after. Yeah, probably sometimes. Yeah.

So we could tell everybody the questions we should have asked.

Maybe not questions, but maybe the insights are the things that stuck. Yeah.

But what I was gonna say there was like, I'm always to me I think it's very impressive. Not that he managed to grow to that size, but that he was able to find that many good people to operate in his business.

Leadership, man.

I feel like finding good people can often be difficult. Like, you know, you go through some people and they're not quite a good fit.

We've been there, done that. It's a process, man. I mean, for a while we even had an operations manager helping us with all that. Shannon.

Yeah.

And. And she was great at it.

Yeah.

There's no freaking way we would ever be able to do that or want to do that. But, yeah, I mean, it's a process to scale. But I'm thinking back to like the Dale episode that we had. Yeah, Dale Beaumont. Beaumont, yeah. And one of the calls him Beaumont. I'm like, that's not. It's Beaumont.

He's Australian. Maybe it's pronounced Beaumont. I don't know.

I forget. But I mean, he scaled. It's all systems. Anything repeatable. He had a good one liner that I'm also forgetting. But basically, if you do something once or multiple times, systemize it.

Yeah.

And guaranteed, I'm sure Eric's got wacky systems that actually wrote down. I wanted to dig into systems, but it was almost like that would probably unpack. Like be a whole nother tangent that we didn't have time for.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or mental space for.

It's true.

But yeah. I don't know, it's just very, I think, scaling that amount of projects and things. And like you said, how do you keep all this stuff on track in your mind? Yeah, I mean, it's. We were talking about people who are wired differently. I mean, that's Eric's. There's a lot to learn there. And it's really freaking cool.

Yeah. And then. And then the venture capital thing too, or venture fund.

Venture fund.

That. That to me is just a really sort of fascinating world because I almost feel like for us at Evergreen, profits, I almost feel like that's our next evolution. That's almost like what we'll most likely go into next. And we're kind of dipping our toes in the waters there with our. The unicorn business we're involved in. But I feel like what we've been really, really good at over the years is, and we've talked about this a few times on the show is we've been really good curators.

Right.

We curate good people. We curate, like tools that we find helpful for people. We curate content that we find around the Internet. We curate ideas. We're really good at sort of finding the things and then putting them in front of others. Maybe not necessarily so much being the creators of all the things. You know, we're good creators of content, but the content is the form, is what this curation comes in the form of.

That's it.

And when I look at something like a venture fund, to me it almost just seems like the next evolution of curation.

Right.

We're going in and we're finding these. These companies that we feel like, okay, this is something people should be paying attention to, and you raise investment capital to do a fund of this kind of thing. It's sort of the next line that you can follow along the sort of curation journey.

Yeah, no, it's interesting because I'm just now learning about funds more and more and the different types of funds, and it's. Yeah. A venture fund in this space. I mean, it's interesting being a of part podcaster, us here in this, in these seats. We're meeting a lot of people. We're hearing, you know, cool stuff that they're working on. There's sometimes chats out off the air, too, that won't be recorded or aren't recorded that, like, they're like, you know, there's opportunities sometimes, or we're hearing trends or some crazy stat, and it's like, it kind of allows us the ability to maybe get in a deal early, you know, and support that with our audience as well and with. With other people in our network. I mean, it's.

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, like, when you. When we get guests on the show, when they start talking about their tools and their software and their vision and their roadmap.

Flowchart fund. Yeah, that's what it's gonna be.

Hustle and fund chart.

Ooh, maybe.

Fund hacker.

Fund hacker.

That might draw some red flags.

Come with me. Good point.

Yeah. But.

I think there could be something there. Oh, yeah. What I was gonna say was with the podcast, it's like we get people on and they share their excitement, their journey, their roadmap, where they're going. And sometimes we're sitting there, go like, in our heads, thinking, yeah, this is an interesting idea, but I don't know if it's really gonna pan out. And then other times, I'll hear them speak, and I'm like, this thing is gonna go somewhere.

They're gonna make it happen.

I could tell by the personality, by the vision, by the roadmap, like, holy shit, this person is going to take this somewhere. Right? And then every once In a while, you have guests where you're like, oh, that's a cool dream, buddy.

But you can tell by the personality. It's probably not gonna.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's true.

I'm just being honest. Sometimes I don't see the vision as much as our guests do.

No, I get it. Yeah. No, it's true. We can read people based off of the course of an interview. I just think it's very fascinating, because you're right. I do think it's part of our evolution. I don't know what that fund would look like, but it's cool to learn of a new business model, something that we can be a part of and be the gatherers of. Like, hey, let's raise some capital here for this portfolio of companies that we believe in.

The Elon Tweet Fund. A fund that literally the only holdings are things that you see Elon Tweet about. I bet that would work.

I bet it would.

Actually.

He'Ll go on SNL and drop it.

Yeah.

Drop the name dogecoin.

It's all. It's all Dogecoin.

Then it'll drop that. Day. Night. I digress. But, yeah, man, I think. I think what I really. My big takeaway here, maybe the last one for me, is just the way that Eric's thinking about how he approaches all this stuff. I mean, it's. He definitely is working like a beast, you know, way more than I think I would ever be willing to work, you know, unless. I don't know. I'm just gonna leave it at that.

Yeah, there's some wiring going on there, like, where he's wired in a way where, like, he wants to hustle and he loves it. He wouldn't have it any other way. For us, the hustle is draining to a point.

It depends on what we're doing. And maybe that goes back to how Eric's actually organized his company and how when he knows he's getting into some space that he's starting to break, shit that's bad. So he's engineered probably many systems in.

His life, only doing the stuff he loves.

Exactly. So, like, maybe. Maybe that's just it.

Yeah.

It's just engineering that and staying in your lane.

Yeah. I mean, it goes back to when we had Victoria on.

Right.

You know, find the thing that, like, creates the flow for you and figure out how to just stick with that.

Whatever your values are.

Right. Yeah.

Yeah. What it was. Yeah, man. Well, we're doing that. I know in our biz, it's kind of Like a constant thing we're doing. But I think it's. I don't know, it's a little something to pass on to you listening as well. Because it's cool to check yourself. You don't have to always be doing the thing before you wreck yourself. That too. Tm. But yeah, I mean like. So yeah, maybe start. Because I know we're doing this in art and kind of looking at things under a magnifying glass or sometimes it's. It's fucking take the glasses off, bro. It's right in the middle of your face. You gotta cut that shit.

Sometimes you're almost looking too closely at things where you just need to step back and see the big picture and go, oh, I didn't need a magnified glass, I needed a frickin wide angle lens.

Exactly.

There you go. I need to take a step back.

Yeah, but yeah, I mean we're gonna do a. We mentioned this on our. The most recent therapy session that we're gonna actually do a few less interviews here and there and do a little more. Just you and I chatting about what's going on. So we are gonna do a whole interview about. Or not a whole interview, but a whole discussion about some of the changes.

Watch that water. Matt. I just spilled water next to our mixing board.

I did. I just flung it all over Joe's face.

You dick. You just flung more. What the hell, bruv? On the splash zone. Sea World. Jesus.

Did you watch the Saturday Night Live this most recent Saturday?

No.

There's a whole like Weekend Update where.

This girl was there like splashing drinks on bourbon.

Yeah, she's drinking.

Did. That's actually the one thing I did. Okay, I did watch. That was really fucking funny.

It was.

I was done.

I was.

We should.

Yeah, well, anytime Michael Che and Colin Joe swap jokes too.

That was a brutal one. That was an especially. That was where I was really loud.

Well, what are your thoughts on Black Superman?

Just go and see what Colin Joe's thoughts are. We'll leave it there.

He had many thoughts. Yeah, go check it out on YouTube or something. And while you're at it, go check out HustleandFlowchart TV. Nice trip. You like that? And hit the. Hit the subscription, smash the subscribe and ding a ling on the bell. Ding the bell. I've never said any of those things in my life.

We're bad at being YouTubers. But we're gonna get better, I promise.

We promise. We have plans and agendas, but.

Although if you're listening to this part this part's not on the YouTubes, so.

Well, that's why we're asking politely to go check out Haso and Flowchart Doc TV. That'll take you to the YouTubes. Go check out what we're talking about.

Go watch the video version of this. He did show his whiteboard in one portion of the video, and you could see what was on it.

You could see the passion in his face, the fire in his eyes. Yes, all of the above.

And the. And the despair in Joe's. No, I'm just kidding.

Wow, that just got deep and dark. I'm about to.

It's happening.

Ouch.

You punch like.

Anyway, check out HustlinFlowchart TV for the video version, but go to Flowchart Group for the action guide. Flowchartgroup.com youm go there. You can join the Facebook group. One of the questions when you join the Facebook group will be your email. If you give us the email, we'll shoot you the action guide. So go to flowchartgroup.com and join and interact with us and the other listeners and tell us what you thought of the episode.

That would be a good decision. Plug in your email address over there.

Do it.

Yeah. All right. And special shout out to our friends over at the webinars that are all easy.

You're really, really, really hyped.

It is called Easy Webinar. What?

Easy Webinar.

All right. So, you know, we heard all about how Eric and, you know, he basically highlighted how important LTV is. Well, it comes down to having deeper relationships with the folks that are meeting you for the first time, your brand, and then maybe through a piece of content.

Right.

Typically, that's a shareable piece. Maybe it's a video, maybe it's blog post, something.

Yeah, you can always do something like a webinar that people think are really good, and then they share that webinar with their friends because they thought it was really good.

That's part of it. But where I was gonna go to here is that you can have it. You know, have a webinar as part of this relationship experience here for folks. Well, easy webinar helps you do that. You can actually have deeper relationships throughout the whole journey. So easy Webinar. There's a lot of things it does.

You talked about you were going into your William Shatner.

Yeah.

Voice.

I. I have been studying, actually. I miss that guy. I haven't. I haven't seen stuff from him in a while, but I know.

Yeah, he's probably.

I don't know if he's been active lately. Yeah, he might haven't seen Priceline commercials in a while. But that's not this commercial.

Easy webinar.com hustle yes, but the point.

Is, Easy Webinar is going to handle webinars for you. You can make them very engaging and yes, you can repurpose them or make them free, make them live stream. You can do all sorts of fun stuff with Easy Webinar. You can. So essentially, you can deepen the funnel or whatever your, your journey is that you're, you're probably gonna make a lot more money. Let's just say that. And it's gonna be a lot more easy. With Easy Webinar, they're hooking you up with a fat discount. It depends on what you choose. But there's a fat discount waiting for you@easywebinar.com hustle.

But it's only for Hustle and Flowchart listeners. So you're one of the lucky ones.

Don't tell other people. I mean, you could tell other people. I don't, I don't think Easy Webinar would really care.

Yeah, but tell them to go to Slash Hustle also.

Yes.

So that they get the discount. We don't get, we actually don't get a commission or anything if you go to Slash Hustle. Well, we get sponsoring sponsorships.

Yes. Easy Webinar is the place to be. So easywebinar.com hustle get it now go do it.

And share this episode around. I know there's, I know you have a friend who wants to know how venture funds work. And that friend should be direct, directed to this episode.

Yes. And maybe they'll learn a thing or two. Maybe. But that's up to them.

Yeah. All right.

Thank you very much for listening. Until next time. Goodbye.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliffs Notes version of every episode where you, you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

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