Justin Cooke - How To Hire A-Players In Your Company

I was worried that if you hire someone, they're gonna take what we're doing and just copy it, right? They're gonna take what we're doing and they're gonna copy it. Now we're just, like, training our competition and, like, why don't we just keep doing ourselves? We do it better anyway, right. And so, like, why hire someone to do it? And I think that's really just fear talking. That's, like, fearful thinking that isn't based in any kind of reality.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart.

Podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf.

And.

Welcome back.

Hey, I'm here.

Yeah, we're here.

Ready?

I'm ready.

Is Justin here? Who's Justin?

Justin's waiting in the green room right now.

Oh, he's in the green room?

Yeah.

So we'll bring him out.

We're bring him out in just a second right after you intro who the hell he is. I was going to say that was kind of a. I couldn't decide in the moment whether I was going to say heck or hell, so it kind of came out as hell.

Hell.

So why don't you.

I will, Matt. Thank you so much. Who was talking? Yeah, we used to be talking to another gentleman from the Empire Flipp conglomerate. I don't know conglomerate, but his name is Justin Cook. He is the founder and one of the founders and partners of Empire Flippers. You might have remembered Gregory. Greg Elfrink. We've had him on the podcast not that long ago. Maybe a month or two ago and another time, two years or so before that.

Awesome guy. You know, Justin is too, but Greg. So if you. If you want to, like, dive into what Empire Flippers does at, like, a deep level and all these kind of cool things and listen to that later. But Justin Cook, he's gonna kind of walk us through the whole background, how this thing got started, some cool parallels to our business and what we've done.

But he's gonna walk you through a whole process on how to hire team.

Members, apprentices, even some employees as well. And we talk a lot about. We're asking him about selling sites, so kind of you'll get another perspective, kind of like what Greg talked about on previous episodes. But you're gonna dig it. And these guys are doing some interesting stuff because they're not all remote, but a lot remote.

It's just really cool. So you're going to learn a ton from Justin. And they're doing huge things at Empire flippers and you're going to know their process on how they do that and get the people behind them.

Yep. So go grab the notes for this episode. The action guide for this episode. Go to flowchartgroup.com that'll redirect you to where you can join our Facebook group. If you join our Facebook group and give us your email, we will email you the action guide from this episode. So go over to flowchartgroup.com and you get the benefit of being in an awesome Facebook group that is super interactive and has a lot of badasses. So go over there. Flowchartgroup.com let's go talk to Justin.

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Yeah, buddy, thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate it.

For sure. Yeah. You guys can't even keep track of all the schedules. Greg L. Frank, we've had him on the show a couple times. Always a big hit with our folks. And yeah, I think he's pulling the same kind of hours you are whenever we're doing these shows.

Yeah, we're both in Vietnam. Yeah, we got to do these kind of like late night calls. My business partner, who's normally in the Philippines, he's now in Colombia, he's in Medellin. So he's in like a normal time zone.

I think he's.

Yeah, yeah. But he does like the morning calls and then I'll do kind of like the late night calls. So midnight one, I'm like, it's fine.

So you and Joe founded the company, right? Empire Flippers.

Yeah, we started off as a company called. Well, we originally an outsourcing company and then we had a side project that we called AdSense flippers. And really it was born out of us just building these small, little like an affiliate site, but based on AdSense, the monetization site from Google, you know, AdSense sites and just kind of having them make money. 50 bucks a month. A hundred bucks a month. And it was kind of a side gig for us to get started.

That's exactly how we got started blogging. And yeah, we thought we made it. When we were at like $100 a month, we're like, throw in the towel. We're done with the career, you know, I'm retiring, baby.

I'm out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It had some fumbles along the way, of course, but couple. Yeah, just a couple. But yeah, I mean, Empire Flippers as it is now, you said what, 80 hire or employees? Is that where you're at now?

Yeah, I think we just broke 80 full time employees. Maybe a little over 15 to 20 of those are out of the Philippines, but the rest are just kind of like all over the place. We've got, you know, Americans living in Colombia. We've got, you know, Europeans living in Hong Kong. So we got people all over. Totally distributed team.

Yeah, you're just showing everybody the world basically, huh? You're like hiring, they're going to fly you around here.

Well, it used to be like, pre Covid, like, we did a lot of travel. Like, we do meetups twice a year. Right. So we get our entire team together and just kind of like, ball out like we do. We'd rent a villa in Phuket and just have a blast. And so, like, all that's kind of gone. And so our value prop to new hires now it's like, well, you can stay at home and work. Like, it's cool. But, like, everyone's doing that now, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

So when you first started Empire Flippers, how did. How did you get that initial momentum going? How did you get traction and actually start getting people to come to your website and want to, you know, trust you enough to be the facilitator of these sales?

Yeah, so we, you know, we were originally just selling. We were like, well, we weren't gonna sell them at all. We were just building these sites and, you know, building for ourselves. We figured to cash flow them. That's kind of a side project we had. Our main business was the outsourcing company. And this was like, we had had one of our major customers pull back on us, and we needed some way to kind of like, you know, get this crew to pay for themselves. We didn't have to lay them off.

Right.

And so we started, you know, we looked for a couple of options, we tried a few things, and we started building out these small niche adsense sites. And they started to get a little bit of traction, right? Started getting a little bit of traction. But Joe and I were probably in the hole. Like, we'd spent maybe $10,000 on it, $12,000, and maybe we're making four or five hundred bucks a month, not enough to justify the kind of build spend. And at the time, that was a lot of money for us. And we were like, what do we do with this? Do we just keep dumping more money into this or what do we do? And so we realized, what if we could sell some of these sites off and reinvest that into building out more sites? And so that's kind of what we started doing. We realized that if we sold these off, like $100 a month site could sell for, at the time, 1500 bucks, maybe $2,000. And then we could take that and build out a bunch of new sites, right. At like 100 bucks per site or something. And so that's kind of how we got started there. And then we realized if we're going to sell these sites, we should probably build an audience of people that are interested in buying them. Right. That'd probably be helpful. And so we started talking about our process online and we just, you know, instead of everyone else who, like, kind of hides it behind like a paywall or whatever, this is kind of the way you would do it at the time. You like, you know, show like 70% of it and then hold the secrets back, you know, through a paid course or whatever. And we're like, let's break the mold and just tell everyone exactly how we do it. And so that garnered us a bunch of traction kind of early. Not a bunch, a little like we got like Pat Flynn from smart passive income to kind of go, hey, these guys are kind of cool and it's.

A good little promoter for you.

Yeah. Which helped, Right. It helped us get and get started and others did that for us. And, and we started to get like, you know, people start checking our stuff out. And what we realized is, you know, for every, you know, hundred subscribers, most of them were there just to learn how to build the sites. But a couple of them said, look, I don't want to build the sites. I'll just buy the sites from you. It's earning a hundred bucks a month. I'll just buy one of those sites. I don't want to, like, try and like, get started. I'm willing to spend a little bit of cash to kind of like, you know, get my feet wet in this. And that turned out to be kind of a real driver for people buying websites from us.

Yeah, there's a lot of parallels here because Matt and I, we've been in business together for what, 14ish years? Something like that.

Yeah, 2007 was when we started our first blog together.

Did a lot of site flipping. Yeah, and site flipping as well. I mean, we were, we were kind of using some other websites.

Didn't know about Flippa, Right? That's where we started. Yeah, we started on Flippa because that was like the only one. It was like the ebay for buying and selling sites, and so we started using them too. And, and that kind of got us started. And then what we had is we had people building courses around how to copy the sites. We were listing on Flippa, like specifically around our process. We're like, go here, look at their username, copy the sites. They're already in good niches and you can make money. So we were like, a lot of the sites we were selling to people, they would end up buying it and then have like 15, 20 competitors right away building sites in their Niche.

Oh, man.

And so we had buyers reach out to us. They're like, look, can you just not list the URL and not post it on Flippa and, like, just sell to us directly? And we're like, you don't even need to know the niche or whatever. They're like, no, tell me how much it's earning, tell me the general niche, and then we'll buy it from you. And we're like, okay, we won't be using Flippa. I guess. So, yeah, over on our site, we put up like a little. It was. You can use the Wayback Machine or something for, like, ads and flippers, like marketplace or whatever. But it was like just this kind of, like, table with like a PayPal button to buy the listings. It was literally like just the kind of funkiest little setup you've ever seen. But, like, people really dug it. They were like, yeah, I can buy these little earners. And, you know, we create a marketplace for it.

I think it was a super brilliant model. Yeah, because Matt and I did the same thing. We would spend some time to build the site. And yeah, we build it more with a course kind of thing behind it rather than for adsense. But it was. I mean, it helped a lot of people. We were able to reinvest that into whatever we were doing. We didn't stack it and continue doing more of the same kind of like what you did. But I like how the evolution stacked up into what Empire Flippers is now.

Yeah, we always call that, like our little, like, back of our pocket tool belt that, you know, if we ever needed quick cash. Oh, yeah, we can go within a week, have something, sell it on Flippa.

And 1500 bucks or whatever, make a.

Grand or two in a day or, you know, over a course of a week. And we've always had that in our back pocket of something. Like, if shit ever hits the fan, we know we can go do that.

Yeah, well, see, so that's the thing. So shit hit the fan for us. So, like, yeah, we were building these sites and, like, they were making money. We're like, oh, we're gonna scale this to the moon, right? So we had built up this, like, audience of buyers, and they were hungry for buying websites. So we were only limited by our own ability to produce supply. So, like, that's. There's a marketplace problem. I don't know if you guys are familiar with this, but you need to get, like, network effects and you need to solve one side of the equation first. So we'd solve the supply Side like we were delivering the supply until we weren't. Right. So these sites we were building they money at first, and then I think it was that there's a bunch of Google updates. One of them was the EMD update, the exact match domain update. And it crushed our process. Instead of like making profitable sites, we were like, we went down to barely profitable. A bunch of losers, a few winners that made up for it. But like it crushed our process. And so we'd had a bunch of people ask us, they're like, hey, you've got these audience of buyers. Can I just sell my site with you? And we always told them no. We were like, no way, man. Because like that's our money maker. Like, you know what I mean? Like that makes it. There's no way. Why would we do that and get, you know, a percentage of your sale? That's crazy town. And then when our sites weren't working out as well, we were like, okay, let's revisit that.

Hey Jim, you got that?

You want to sell? You can take a look at it.

So that's where the whole brokerage and this kind of thing began. Then shit hitting the fan, you know, pivot and then. And then what? It's kind of been that course ever since then. Sounds like.

Yeah, that's right. And you know, we started selling. I think we were selling, you know, a $15,000 site or $20,000 site. You know, something making 800 bucks a month. Thousand bucks a month. Right. We started taking those sites on and then, you know, started to grow it. So we started doing, you know, $50,000 sites. And then finally we broke, you know, the six figure sites and just continue to scale that up.

I think that was a recent thing you guys had, right? I think Greg might have mentioned it. You had a pretty big breakthrough of a sale. It might have been the six figure one, right?

No, no, no, we had three. Sorry. We've gotten much bigger. So this is like back in like 2012 and 13, we just did our first eight figure deal was, I think it was December of 2020. And now since then we've done three total. We've done three deals over $10 million.

Congrats, man. That's right.

So when you guys first started, it was you and your partner, Joe, right? What was the first hire that you brought on? Like what was the first. When you finally decided, okay, we need some extra help, who did you bring in first?

Yeah, so because we'd run an outsourcing company previously and we were already in the Philippines like, we had kind of a good base, a good team. They'd been trained for, like, other SEO projects we'd worked on for clients. So we already kind of had that staff in place, and they were very cost effective. They didn't cost a lot of money. But then we realized, you know, we need to hire someone that can do kind of some of the things that Joe and I are doing. We can't find someone that we can train and get up to speed here. So we started looking kind of like, you know, what the hiring process might look like. But our thought was, like, you know, we live in the Philippines. It's like, you know, half a world away from the U.S. nobody would want to come out here and work for, you know, a couple of jackasses like us. No one's interested in that. And then we made a connection with these guys from a blog and podcast called the Tropical mba. And we went and met up with them in the north, the Philippines. And they had just hired what they were calling Apprentice. And so, you know, this guy had just been hired, and I think he'd showed up, like, two days before. He'd, like, just gotten there. And we were like, oh, let's go meet this donkey, right? He's not gonna be like, he doesn't even know what he's in for here. And we met this guy, and he was, like, super sharp and very helpful. And we're like, God, if we had a guy like that, we'd crush it. So. And then, you know, the guys there, Dan. Andrew's like, dude, you guys should absolutely do this. I love the model. Kind of explained, you know, his apprenticeship model, and we were like, done. Dude, we're totally stealing this. So we went back to our place in south of the Philippines and put an ad out and hired our first apprentice.

Wow, that's really cool.

And I'm just drawing more parallels, too, because the head of content for our business right now, who's editing this podcast and editing all the video and putting it on YouTube, all that. He started as an apprentice in our business.

What up, Jacob? Yeah, now we went the, what, Gen M route. It was called that, but Acadium now. And, yeah, it's been almost two years or two years on the dot or so.

Pretty close. Yeah, we're getting there.

So what is that? The genm. What's that?

Gen M was a place where you can basically source apprentices. They rebranded as Acadium more recently, but it was basically a business. Could go to them, pay them 50 bucks a month at the Time, at least at the time. I don't know what it cost now, but at the time, you could pay GenM 50 bucks a month. They would match you with an apprentice, and then you didn't pay anything on top of that $50 a month. But after, what was it, like 30 days or 60 days or something like that, you had to choose whether or not you wanted to hire on the apprentice for full time or not full time. But if you want to hire on for more hours.

Right, right.

Gotcha. So let me explain kind of how the apprenticeship worked for ours. Like, it wasn't apprenticeship, but it was a paid apprenticeship. So our idea was like, look, we're bringing them halfway around the world. There's a couple of things we want to solve. First off, we don't want them like, oh, my God, where am I going to get an apartment? You know what? Who's going to take me around to look at places? How am I to get my visa sorted? Like, you know, all of those kind of issues you run into when you move abroad. So we were like, look, we're just gonna take care of all that for you. Joe and I had a townhouse. We had an extra bedroom. We're like, you're gonna be in this extra bedroom. Done. We've got maid service of the townhouse to take care of the cook, clean, take care of you. Like, all that's done. You know, your house, food is done. Like, you just come over here in our ads, you come over here, we're just gonna put you to work, man. That's it. Right? So, like, none of this other stuff. And then, you know, it wasn't a ton of money. I think it was. I think it was a thousand bucks a month. We started with. So everything paid for, and then you get an additional thousand bucks a month for kind of fun or whatever. Yeah, yeah. And it worked, you know, like, you know, it's in the Philippines too, right? So you're making dollars spending pesos, which was a pretty good deal. So, you know, we put this ad out and, you know, we knew we had an audience, but we didn't know, like, how well, a rollover. And it was amazing. We got a ton of applicants and had a very kind of like, it was a little bit of a mess at first, but a very kind of like, long process to kind of put them through and, you know, whittled it down to one person. Looking back, I'll just mention this. You know, we hired one, but there were three that were super good. Like, all three of those Guys would have crushed it in our business. The one guy we hired did a great job, but like, I feel like we missed out on talent. In fact, I know we missed out on talent because one of those guys went on to work a couple years later for another company, like a friend's company that we know, and just killed it. And I was, I was jealous, honestly, because he was super sharp. But yeah, I mean, I think if we, we were a little nervous about because it was a still kind of like we were young in our kind of entrepreneurial career, weren't sure about how long lasting it would be. You know, if we ran into problems, would we be able to pay them? Like, we were a little nervous about it, but I think looking back, we should have hired all three.

So is that kind of. I guess, yeah, because I'm thinking of some of the mistakes you had when we were just starting out. But you would have gone bigger, it sounds like, and kind of trusted yourself.

Yeah, we waited too long to hire that apprentice and then we should have hired more to start now. It would have amplified some problems we had, which we can get into.

But I think it also would have kind of like sped us through and got us to the answer sooner. For example, we were hiring these apprentices and we were telling them, six months to a year, you're going to be a baby bird out of the nest. We want to push you out and have you be an entrepreneur. And this was our kind of mindset. We thought we were hiring people that necessarily wanted to be entrepreneurs. And what we found where some of you were like, well, I could go, you know, start building sites or whatever, but I'd rather work with you guys. And so they started asking us about like, you know, you know, what's my long term pay look like? You know, am I going to get like health benefits? And we're like, what health benefits?

Wasn't ready for that.

Joking. You're joking, right? Like you're going to go be an entrepreneur. And they were like, they were asking us questions that we weren't ready for. And so we fumbled around a little bit with the first couple of apprentices trying to figure that out and solve that. I realized, you know, it is an apprenticeship, but they're going to stay on longer term and we're going to put them in kind of like, you know, more permanent positions and move them into, eventually move them into like roles of leadership in our company. And that's, that's one of the benefits. Like yes, it was cheaper pay for us to start, but we made it really easy for them, set them up completely, and they also had a seat at the table. So when Joe and I are in this, like, strategy meeting trying to figure out, like, what we're going to do or whether we're going to pivot or we ran into a problem or creating a new website, they were like seeing everything go down and.

Exactly everything.

Yeah, they were in the room where it happened, so to speak. You know what I mean? And like, that's super valuable to like a 20 something that wants to be an entrepreneur and it's like, you know, trying to figure it out.

Yeah, no, it's. I can just think of the strategy meetings Matt and I have, and I think I heard from some other podcasts, you and Joe. It's like, you know, there's things you'll want, you'll debate and sometimes it'll sound like arguments or, you know, and it's like, no, it's just figuring out the, the plan and, you know, or the goal of whatever the project is. So I would imagine it's so damn valuable to an apprentice to see that.

Yeah, yeah. Super. And fun and interesting. And it also provides another voice, like maybe Joe and I kind of make the decisions, but it also gives us some perspective and feedback. Right. So that's helpful, I'll tell you. By the way, you mentioned the strategy measuring. I don't know if you guys do this or any of your audience does this, but it has been like dramatically helpful for us over nearly a decade. So we do. And it's a quarterly strategy meeting where we sit down and we plan out exactly what we're gonna do. And I'll just kind of break it down how we do it. It started off as really basic and we just kind of put it into Google Doc. They're still in Google Docs, by the way. But we plan out kind of like, what's our long term vision? Like our, oh, shit, like we crushed it, we made it vision. What's that look like? Three to five years.

Okay, five. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. For us, we're so short term. Like three to five years. Like, what is our. What does our best kind of company look like? And then we kind of paint the picture and then that doesn't change very often. That's kind of every quarter. It's mostly the same. And then we break it down, we say, okay, what do we need to do this year to be on track for that three to five year plan? And so we do that in Q1 of every year. We'll do the Annual and then we do the quarterly. So we do what do we do last quarter, you know, to hit our goals and then what are we doing for this next quarter to make sure we're on track for our annual? And it started off just kind of like me, Joe and an apprentice or two kind of going through this and now we have like full on departmental sections and kind of what their goals are and how they're doing it. We like turn this into a real beast. But the thing is it's easy to just kind of like float in the breeze kind of based on what's going on or Google changes or Amazon changes or whatever. And this gives you like a goal and you're not going to get there directly. There's going to be some ups and downs, there's going to be some peaks and valleys, but like it gives you a path to get there and you can adjust the path, you can tweak it over time. But like just having that kind of like further out vision and a like short term path to like guide the way is super helpful.

What are some key things that are on that document that you plan for? So you know you have your further out vision, the three to five years. But what are those quarterly things that you're looking at?

Yeah, so things like.

Okay, like on the marketing team for example, right. Like we'll have particular goals on like what kind of KPIs we need for leads brought in for sellers. Right. So these are kind of the number, the number of sellers we need to bring in for this year. And we know based on how many sellers we bring in, we list this many and on average they list for this price. So it gives us a good idea on the sell side of the house, how many deals we'll do. And then so that's kind of the annual goal. And then quarterly it's broken down on, okay, here's how many sellers we brought in via this channel. Here's how many we're going to try to attract with this pass. So we're going to do X amount of podcast interviews or we're going to have this many guest posts go live or we're going to do a Reddit AMA this quarter to help boost kind of a growth. So we have all the different things on the marketing side targeting that KPI and so we do that for a bunch of different KPIs that we have.

Gotcha.

Nice. Yeah, no, I love that whole plan. So I guess maybe we go back to the apprenticeships now because I think this whole hiring thing is super fascinating. So speaking to our audience, they probably don't have 80 full time folks, most likely maybe a couple or maybe none. Maybe they don't know anything about employees and all that, you know, because there's a lot of stuff there. How does someone hire their first apprentice? And you know, maybe that goes back to back in the day when you were kind of figuring this out, because now you have it dialed in, like you were saying. But what are some of those steps that someone could take?

Yeah. So, you know, it helped that we already had an audience. So we already had an audience of people, of people that were kind of paying attention to us, reading our blog and, you know, listening to our podcast. And so that made it much easier for us. And if you don't have an audience, the benefit today is that there are gazillion job boards out there for hiring kind of remote workers. They're just all over the place. And so my friend runs Dynamite Jobs, but Dynamitejobs.com, but there's a bunch out there. And so hiring remote workers is relatively. There's paths, there's people that will help you do it today. So for us, we put our blog post up basically, and we kind of painted the picture on what the role would look like. And we, you know, we mentioned things like, this is the kind of job that we would have wanted 15 years ago. Like, you know, this is. We would have been hungry for something like this and we're hoping we can find the right person. And we were very like, this isn't going to be just a lifestyle, business lifestyle job. This isn't gonna be something where you just come and sit on the beach all day and pluck away at a keyboard every once in a while. Like, you're gonna be working, but you're also gonna be working directly with entrepreneurs. You're gonna have everything taken care of in terms of your housing, your food, your maid service. Like, all that's gonna be done for you, you shouldn't be able to bang it out. And so I think that really drew in hustlers, like people that were willing and interested in, like, really hustling it also. And not everyone's going to have this opportunity, but, like, we were able to take people kind of out of their comfort zone and have them come halfway around the world. So it's not like you're just kind of around everything you're used to and kind of fall into old patterns. You're in a completely new environment. And, like, I think that really helps. It's a Commitment level by people taking that step. Huge. And then it's really great for, like, kind of bonding and hanging out right. With your now, like, supervisor managers. But at the time, like, us, a good time for us to get to know you and for you to get to know us. So, I mean, if you're in the US and you're hiring someone in the US you can't do it exactly the same way, but you can do a thing where you make it. If you're there, you're having them come to you, then make it really easy for them. Get them the place, get them kind of set up, get them. Like, we would send out an email for people that were coming, and they would have, like, all these different things. Here's what to prepare as you make the move. Here's what you needed to check into. Here's like, what credit cards you should get. Here's what you should sign up for this bank account, like, that kind of stuff to make it super easy for you. And I think that helps you a lot. It really kind of like, you know, helps them to kind of take that leap.

Yeah. Well, it's almost like, here's your SOP manual for moving, you know, to this foreign land that you probably have never even heard of some of the towns or whatever it is over there.

Yeah. I think one of the other things we did is we.

Well, we required a video. So anyone that was applying for the job, we'd have asked them a bunch of questions. So we actually didn't care so much about resumes at all. We didn't care about your school. Like, that wasn't of interest to us. It was literally ask them questions to better understand kind of who they are and then had them submit a video. And so that helps weed out a bunch of people that aren't, like, terribly motivated. Like, if you're like, oh, I'll do the video later. Oh, couldn't find the time to do video. I mean, you just didn't follow directions. I want people that can follow directions. You're out. Right. So that's pretty helpful. If they didn't answer the questions or answer them poorly, it was just like, out, out, out. One of the most important things when you're hiring is to view it as a sales funnel. And you guys know this quite well. But the people at the top of the funnel, you want to spend the least amount of time on. Right. You want to filter them out pretty quickly. You want to get down to the good stuff. Right. And so having quick hits to get them off oh, they didn't submit a video. Oh, they answered these questions wrong. Oh, I won't be ready to come out for six months, for example, when we need them in two that you're out. And so having ways to kind of whittle them down to the kind of, like, qualified candidates is key. And you need to do that without spending too much time.

Yeah, that's like the stuff I remember in Odesk or upwork. Yeah, you say a couple things, or you, like, complete this sentence or put this word in the subject line and you know all these.

Yeah. And they started doing the double.

Yeah, they started.

They were like, okay, here's. Did you find. You got to find the carrot or whatever. And then they start doing, like, a second carrot.

I like the YouTube thing, though, because you see their personality, how they present themselves, if they follow directions, of course. But yeah, it just makes filtering so much easier for your team to do. Obviously, back in the day, it was probably you or Joe doing that. And you mentioned the whole audience too. I think that's super valuable because there's platforms out there. But even for us, whenever we're looking for someone to help us, if it's a contractor, video editor or even. And just looking for opportunities, post on Facebook, post on social media, because we're all connected to some people around us, they might know someone or pass your word around. Seems to work out. So it's kind of like your job posting concept.

I think it's much more understood now that everyone kind of has an audience, right? I mean, teenagers growing up today understand that they are a media machine on their own, right? And they have an audience, and everyone knows this. But, you know, 10, 15 years ago, that wasn't so apparent. You know, you have guys like Dan Norris, I think you had on the show previously. He's a really interesting case because, like, I've known him a long time, and, you know, he kind of built a kind of a marketing arm first and then, like, twiddled. I don't know, is that the right word? But, like, played around with, like, ideas, and he had, like, one product. I was like, a customer wanted his product, but then didn't really get traction. He kind of dropped that. And he would ask his audience, right? He was like, hey, you know, what do you guys need? What are you struggling with? And, like, kind of get ideas from this rather than just other entrepreneurs. And that's super helpful because if you're getting ideas from people who may actually pay you something, that's a lot better than just friends and family.

Right.

So, like, eventually, you know, he turned onto a couple of ideas that hit that were, you know, that got real traction and can really grow. And so he's just an interesting case of, like, kind of building an audience and not really having a business behind it and then turning that into a business. I don't think that works for everyone, but it can. It can in the right instance. And what it did with him, I.

Kind of feel that way about us, actually.

Totally, man.

So when it comes to hiring, how do you decide when to bring on the next hire? I feel like hiring is actually one of the most scary things for entrepreneurs to basically commit to investing in somebody else and knowing that that's going to be a monthly ongoing expense, and if that expense goes away, then that means somebody's life is being affected. And I think that is honestly one of the scariest things for me about being an entrepreneur and is just the thought of, like, there's other people dependent on me. So I'm really curious, like, how do you decide when to take the leap and bring on another person? You know, you're up to 80 now, but, you know, back in the. In the beginning, how did you kind of get past that comfort level? Did you have, like, a criteria, like, once we're doing this number in sales, we need to bring on this person, you know, how did you sort of navigate that?

Yeah, I mean, it's funny you mentioned, like, being uncomfortable, you know, kind of having someone else's reliance on you. I mean, I think that was the thing for me, too. Right. It's like, I don't want to. To fail them. I don't want to, you know, not like they're going to be providing for their family or, like, doing everything they need to do. And, like, if I fail them, like, I'm just amplifying my own failure. Right. And that would be scary and terrible for them and for me, so. But I think also that any entrepreneur that waits until they're ready to hire has waited way too long. Way too long. Like, you were way past the point. I mean, you should be doing at a point that's like, oh, I don't know. I don't know if this is the time that's probably that. Or maybe right before that is the time. You know, I don't have, like, a hard criteria on, like, what I think is, like, it'll flick and go, okay, this is the right time, but earlier than you think. And I know that, like, you know, with us there, there were things. One of the concerns, and I Bet some of your audience has this, too. It's like, you know, you're worried that. I was worried that if you hire someone, they're going to take what we're doing and just copy it, right? They're take what we're doing and they're going to copy it. Now we're just like, training our competition and, like, why don't we just keep doing ourselves? We do it better anyway, right? And so, like, why hire someone to do it? And I think that's really just fear talking. That's like fearful thinking that isn't based in any kind of reality. It's the same reason, like, you're not comfortable talking about, you know, potentially selling your business when you're selling it or raising money or struggles because you don't want anyone else's competition to know. That's all crazy sauce. It's fine to talk about all that, but I think I understand the fear, and I have the fear too. But one of the ways you can mitigate that is to have maybe really identify the critical piece in the work that you do a really good job at. And that is super critical to the success of whatever it is. So for us, for example, I'm building the AdSense niche sites. It was like niche selection, where I was like, determining the exact right niche to build the new site in. That was the most important thing. It wasn't like putting out the content. It wasn't like site development. It wasn't SEO. Those are all. And they can all be processed out as can the niche selection. But niche selection is a critical piece that you can't do without that. So if you're worried about someone who's coming on and taking that, just identify what the critical piece is and hang on to that. Literally, normally 70 to 80% of the rest of it can be done. And don't think, oh, you know what this is? Like, so much of it's in my head, right? Like, yeah, that's another thing is like, everyone's like, oh, you know, like, there's no way you could teach this. I'm just that good.

That's crazy town, dude. Absolutely. I mean, like, people build huge factories and processes for days. You guys know this. And you know, you abs, what you're doing isn't rocket science, I guarantee it.

Well, look at Elon. You just said he's a perfect example. Yeah, rocket science. Yeah, yeah.

And he did rocket science.

He's rocket stood up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's a good question.

Yeah. I mean, I'm just Thinking of our example with Jacob, who's listening and editing this show. Right. So originally, I didn't want to bring on an editor. I did all the editing for this podcast, and.

I thought it would be hard to train people to do that. Well, eventually Jacob came on board. I showed him how to do it, and now he's far surpassed me. Like, I stopped paying attention to the latest, like, editing techniques and how to improve the audio and what softwares are out there and, you know, how to do it now. And Jacob staying up with the times. So now if we ever had to hire anybody else to do audio editing, he'd have to train him because I have no clue anymore.

Yeah, yeah, it's funny you mentioned that. So my wife does our audio editing and, like, I have no idea what she does. I don't know how to do it. I've. And she was like, come on. So easy. She tells me, she's like, you know how to do. You could figure this out. I was like, yeah, maybe I could figure it out, but I literally couldn't. Like, if you just, you know, got hit by a bus or jeepney or whatever is what they use in the Philippines, like, we wouldn't have an editor. We'd be, you know, we don't know how to do it.

Yeah, man.

Yeah.

And it feels good to have someone empowered enough to continue with your vision, too. And I think that's the power of apprenticeships. Like, what you're saying here is you're getting them from day one and, you know, you're seeing them in their raw, I guess, with the YouTube video. So the way that they present themselves originally. And then, you know, there's the next step, which I'm curious about. What is the. I guess the first interview or the pass? You know, once you see this whole load of entries, you know, let's. You're sifting through all these. What does that look like after you plucked out like a handful of.

Yeah, so the first interview, I mean, we would typically do, you know, four.

Or five for every kind of, like one that we think is going to pass. It depends on how many applicants you get. Right. But if we're going to have like four or five in the final second interview, we might have 15 or so 15 to 20 in the first interview. And we're taking people that we think have an outside chance, an outside chance of potentially being hired and giving them a first interview saying, look, look, maybe they just didn't get great on their video. They were nervous, or maybe they just kind of flubbed this answer a little bit. If they were. If it was wrong or they didn't submit it, they're out. But if it was just a little off, we give them a shot for first interview. And we keep those really short, probably 15, 20 minutes. It's just to get a quick vibe on whether our initial kind of suspicions were right or if we're like, oh, no, yeah, they're fine for a second interview. And so we're going to cut a good portion of those. Right. So we're going to cut, you know, 80% of those people from going to second interview. So it's really, again, it's just looking for reasons to cut people out. So it's asking. That sounds harsh, but it's the funnel, like you said.

Right. You just go on a layer down.

Yeah. So it's like asking them questions again, like about when they'd be ready, what kind of. What's their background, how they deal with difficult situations. It wasn't so much the questions, it was more judging their kind of reactions to them. And so we look for reasons to get rid of people. And it's relatively easy still. I mean, on the first applications to like, first interview, it's super easy to get rid of the. Clearly didn't fill us out. It's easy. First interview, you're like, okay, it'd be a little more, you know, okay, we gotta make sure we select people. It's a second interview that gets much more difficult because now you're dealing with people that you would probably hire and you're kind of like reading them. And I found this out later. You're rating them. I think this person's better. And that may not have a lot of factuality once they actually come on board. It's just the best you can do. I think it works out over time if you do it right. But. But we had people interview three or four times and eventually hire them and they crush it. They were told no for a bunch of other jobs, but they end up crushing it for us. And we kind of missed it the first couple of times around.

What is something now after doing all these or your team doing them now, is there something that just stands out in the first and second interviews that you might have let pass or like, oh, okay, that was nice. But now you're just like, oh, hell no. That's a red flag now.

Yeah, like in the. In the second interview, either, you know.

The first or second. And maybe start with the first, since that's kind of the first time where you're like, okay, you got to start being a little bit more critical here.

Yeah. So in the first interview, again, it's pretty short, it's pretty quick, but just kind of following up on some of the answers they gave previously. If they say anything that contradicts themselves from what they said previously in their kind of written answers, that's a really good thing. So ask them for verification on things like that. Ask them, how much, like, what research did you do on our business? And when they say, oh, I did this, and then ask them specifics about your business, do they really know? Did they really do that? And if they're, you know, just kind of like, shotgun approach to applying for businesses, that's probably not the person you want to hire. You want someone that digs in a bit. You know, a helpful sign is when they follow up with you. So if they're sending an email, just thank you for the interview. Just wanted to hit back a couple of notes from our interview, and they're boom, boom. Here are these three or four things. That's a good thing. That's pretty cool. One of the best, I think the best, I don't know, last couple of years, but one of the best video interview or video submissions we had ever was this guy Vincent, who was applying for a marketing role. And he said, look, it's kind of weird to sit here and tell you about how great I am. So I got some other people to help. And so he got a whole bunch of people, John Lee Dumas, and a whole bunch of other people to say, hey, just wanted to let you know, Empire Flippers. Vincent connected with me, and he seems like a great guy. And, you know, someone else. He had a whole bunch of people do it and some authors, and we're like, dude, that's pretty smart, man. If you're gonna be a marketer and you're getting all these other people to either say, yeah, he's great, or, you know, just want to let you know he did reach out to me, and we connected. Like, that's pretty smart.

That just. Yeah, that just cleared out any kind of, you know, if you're looking for the referrals or, you know, all that stuff, you know, like. Yeah, well, we already heard from all these people, you know, testimonials. You're good.

Yeah, it's something else about, like. And I'll tell you guys this, but, like, you know, over. We've been doing this almost 10 years now, right from, like, first hiring apprentices. And we've seen a lot of these people kind of like go on to bloom and grow on their own either as entrepreneurs or working in other companies. And in a lot of cases we end up doing business with previous employees or like people that used to work for us who've done business now. I mean, I joke, but it's not a total joke. I could see there'd be some point in the future where I just love one of the companies they're running and I go work for them. So they're like one of the founders and I'm like, no, no, let me. I'll be an advis for this or I'll come work for it. Like I love your kind of project and there's a whole lot of this kind of not family style of the business but like connections with people that you've worked with. I mean I can see this in post empire flippers world. I could see us investing with some of our management team going in on deals together. So you're building this network of people that you're going to be able to do business with and invest with and do all these things much further into the future. And that's really, it's really cool. And there's this trust you build up right between you. Like they know how you work, you know how they work. And so there's a lot of deals to be done in the future. And so I tell our guys that all the time that whether it's with us or it's with other people at the company, like this is gonna be an opportunity for you.

Yeah, no, that's a, it's a small world, man. I mean, especially when you start connecting and seeing, seeing where all the dots do connect. I mean. Yeah, I mean if you're training someone with your culture and your mindset and you know, they already have great work ethic and all that, what's to say you can't be partners in the future? Maybe in some type of other arrangement. We've done that. It's freaking awesome.

100%. Yeah. We have a guy right now. We're starting a new project called EF Capital which is basically where we've had this problem of people a bunch of money but they don't have the skills at the time to really learn how to run a E commerce business or FBA business. But they like the space and they want to, they want to have some financial exposure to the market. And so we're like, that's a really interesting problem. They've got a shit ton of money and no time or they don't want to learn the skills, like, we should be getting some of that money. We got to figure out how to make that work. So we created this thing called EF Capital, where it's basically going to be a marketplace for skilled operators with a track record of building businesses to match up, pair up with these investors, right? So they can raise money from these investors. We'll help them manage the fund, manage the investors, and they can buy businesses from our platform. And, you know, we're working through the whole detail now. We've got our first round closed, and they're buying the businesses now. But, you know, this. This came about from one of our employees who we discussed and kind of like this problem with for a number of years. He is like, I think. I think I got a way to solve this, guys. And so we talked about it over a number of months and kind of set up the business through him as now it's now a separate entity. We're working with him on the business, and I think it's, you know, it's really exciting. There's lots of opportunities, you know, to do deals like that. One of the problems, unique problems we have, is a lot of our employees because we buy and sell businesses. We broker the sale of these business. You know, a lot of them are, like, super successful. So people bring us these businesses, and they're crushing it, dude. They're making like $200,000 in profit a month. Just crushing it. And our employees are like, dude, like, these successful businesses are everywhere. Like, anyone can be successful. Like, I talked to this guy and. And, you know, he's all right, but, like, he's not the smartest guy ever. Like, I think I could do that.

Figured it out.

And so. Yeah. So, you know, one thing we have to remind them is that, you know, we. It's a fallacy or like, a problem where we only see the successful ones. Right? So, like, if you're coming to list or sell your business with us, we don't see any of the guys that kind of failed in the junk heap of, like, was an idea, tried it, didn't work. Work. We don't see any people that actually started the business and, like, it didn't make money. We don't see any. Like, all of those. We don't see. And so we have this, like, bias of just seeing successful business after successful business brought to us.

Yeah, yeah.

And they're like, damn, it seems so easy. And they're kind of. Right. But they're missing all of the kind of failures along the way, right?

Yeah. I mean, it Makes it a lot easier for them to have that sort of abundance mindset all the time. Does your, do your team members, do they earn like a commission for when they broke? Like how does, how does that whole model work with them?

Yeah, so we have an interesting model where it's not a traditional brokerage. So you don't like when you come to us, you don't work with a broker. It's not like you're assigned a guy and like kind of that's your guy and he's gonna hold your hand through the process. It's very processed out. So you know, when you come to in buyer flippers, you're dealing with, you may be dealing with the sales or marketing on the front end. And then on the sales side, for example, you submit your business. You're now working with our vetting team. So it's kind of a compliance team that does all their checks and everything. And that will typically last a couple weeks. And then once you're past that, you'll be into the customer service team where you're dealing with salespeople. They're doing buyer, seller calls. So they're doing a prep call with you and then they will do a call and they'll manage that call with an actual buyer. And then once that call is over, then they'll do a follow up call with you to say, hey, here's kind of how that went and here's what we should expect next. And then once, once you've come to a deal, there's a lot of, you know, a lot of things involved there. But once you've come to an agreement with a buyer, you then hand it off to our migrations team. So we have a whole team of people dedicated to helping move the business from the seller to the buyer. So, you know, it's not like just a kind of a brokerage relationship. So we set up very differently, I think than, yeah, traditional kind of like service companies like ours. You asked about commissions, right?

Yeah.

And so I think it's interesting. Like, you know, we've, Joe and I have both been a part of sales organizations where you make an individual commission. Right. And so if you get the deal, you make the money. And so, you know, the problem with that is it's not very cooperative. Right. So if you're like, we were in the mortgage business, both Joe and I, and so like, I don't want to help the other guy with like a loan. He's out for the day. Like, I don't give him my money. I'm not Helping him? Yeah, yeah, those were buddies or something, maybe, but, like, I have no financial incentive to help him. So we didn't want a sales organization like that. Right. We wanted a more cooperative approach. So none of our salespeople make any individual commissions on the deal. We have a admittedly complicated approach where our entire team is part of a comp plan, and that's based on how the company does overall. It's tied to revenue for the company. But if we hit our goals and they get a certain percentage that they do above, they get a certain percentage, and that typically works out to sales having more of their pay through the comp plan marketing kind of like in the mid range and then operations kind of on the lower end. So they get more base and they get less of the comp plan, if that makes sense. So it's distributed across the team, kind of based on what department you're in, but it's not an individual kind of commission per deal. And I think we did it that way because we wanted the cooperative approach, but we're really happy with how that turned out.

Yeah, well, it seems like it's kind of the ethos of what Empire Flippers is too. It's like you guys are kind of this collective. It's seems like, you know, all the way from the apprenticeship and bringing them through your culture and living with you and not anymore, but, you know, like having that kind of thing, it's like, no, you're part of this crew, this family here, so let's all help each other win and succeed at this thing.

Yeah. My business partner likes to say team, not family. You know, we do this, you know. Cause, like, you know, if you have to fire someone, like, I want to fire my brother.

True to that. You know what I mean?

But like, I'm not firing my brother's my brother, but like, I will fire team if they're not making it, if they're hurting it for everyone else. We had an issue this earlier in 2020, where the pandemic was kicking in. It was like March, April, and business ground to a halt. Right. People were not spending money. It was like March and just all the money got sucked up and no one was spending anything. And we were like, oh, my God, what's going to happen here? I don't know what our company's going to look like. And so we're. We, you know, we're transparent, you know, kind of like about our company to our customers and kind of externally, but internally too, like, it's important us to let our team Know what's up. And so we brought them all together, you know, to all hands, basically. It was like, look, I don't know where we're going, but this is not looking good. And we got to batten down the hatches and we're going to do everything we can to, like, make it through this. You know, we're going to release. We told our master team we're released, some margin requirements. Meaning. Meaning if we need to spend a bit more and not get the profit margins we expected. Okay, let's release that. Whatever we need to do. Let's make it through this as best we can. Keep all the people we can, particularly for key roles, and let's just figure this out. And we were expecting a long haul on this. Now May turned around and just absolutely crushed it. It was our best month ever. So that went away really quickly, but it was like, from our perspective, we're like, look, let's just let everyone on the team know where we're at, kind of what's going on, because they're gonna be. They're gonna. That breeds trust, right? And they're gonna know that when we come to them and say, hey, look, we need to do this right now, like, this is where we need to go. They're gonna believe me.

They know why?

Because I'm telling them what's up.

Yeah, that's cool, man. Yeah. That transparency, even if it's not like, said clear. It's just known like, oh, I could trust them more now that. Okay, I can see the shit is hitting the fan right now, you know, but the fact that, you know, maybe it's more of a focus, more of a dedication to turning this thing around together.

Well, it also allows them to sort of mentally prepare like they could. If they're kind of hearing this stuff, they're starting to get ready like, okay, what's my plan B? If this goes the way it might go.

Yeah.

You know, so there's a little bit of peace of mind, at least on the entrepreneur's mind, that they actually are getting a little bit of leeway to kind of start thinking about some plan.

B's here for sure.

We had the same thing in the Philippines crew many years ago when we had to bring them together. We had to shut down our office at one point, which was. It was a thing we were. Didn't have the money, couldn't keep the office open, so everyone's gonna go home. Our initial going remote was kind of a force go remote because we couldn't pay for the office anymore. So we told everyone, look, this is rough. Like, we're not in the best financial shape right now. Our company's struggling. But, you know, we're gonna try and stick through it. And, you know, if you guys can stick it through. Through with us, that's great. If you can't, like, we completely understand, but let's. Let's try to pull together and see if we can make it or that's we're the best we can do. This is our plan. And, like, you know, ever since then, like, our crew would come back to us. They're like, we really appreciated that. Like, it just. It made us feel so much better. And, like, we don't think we lost anyone from that conversation. We lost people along the way for other reasons.

But.

But it wasn't like, oh, my God, you know, they're in trouble. It was like, oh, shit, let's bring this together. Let's make this happen, you know?

That's cool, man.

It kind of lights that fire.

It does. There's a couple things in my mind that are lingering actually, still from the hiring process. I want to, like, kind of close the loop. There is. I think we're at that second interview. So what we got the hiring phase I'm imagining, and then kind of this onboarding phase. Right. So how do those two pieces look like?

Yeah, so from the second interview, I mean, a lot of the second interview is just making sure there's a really good cultural fit. Like, would I have beers with this person? You know, we're going to be working really closely together. You know, is this someone that I can work with that I'm going to, you know, if we're arguing, like, what kind of arguments would we have together? What's their personality type? And how would that gel with mine? How would it gel with Joe's? Right. So that's kind of what we're figuring out in the second review. Most of the students, people are qualified in terms of, like, skills. And, you know, we would like them. We would have them work in our business. But now it's just kind of like picking and choosing, like, who we want to work there after that, after we invite them all or invite the people we're hiring and say no to everyone who's not, then there's, you know, there's going to be an onboarding process. So what that basically looked like was, like, look, we'd let the person that we hired know first. We'd say, look, you know, we need to know within 48 hours whether you're gonna take this position, otherwise we're gonna have to give it to someone else. And so we gave them. We had that kind of like breathing room before we told everyone else, no, you got this 48 hours. And then we'd normally get an answer back right away. Yes. And then we'd let everyone know once they're on board. It's normally like a month. It was like, I think three to six weeks before we'd expect them out. And so we do a bunch of things like sending them emails on, like, what content they should read of ours that we've put out to give them a really good sense of who we are. This is interviews or our own blog posts or podcasts. We gave them other people's kind of content to kind of help prepare for the role, and so they have a good sense on kind of what's going on in our space. And then we sent them emails about what to prepare, both personally and then professionally in terms of getting their shit together to move halfway around the world. So that was it. And then we actually had them early on, we had them buy their own flowers. So that was a big one. Yeah, we're like, you buy your own flight. Like, look, obviously we're going to pay you right away when you come out, no problem. But, like, you know, that's a commitment thing. And I think, I think one, one time we paid for someone's flight to come out because he was like, really young and we knew he didn't have any money, but like everyone else, we had them, had them pay. And it's again, it's a commitment if they're willing to do that. Everything else, once they get out there, we do everything for them, but just we want them to buy that flight. And it's kind of a step. We don't want to that stuff now. But yeah, it was interesting.

Yeah, man. I mean, just the fact getting that commitment to getting someone to fly across the world, and especially if they've never been there before, to anywhere new. But go ahead.

We've changed now. This has changed a ton is kind of the onboarding. But like, when we were starting out, we would have. I think it was a Google spreadsheet with all the logins they would need. And so we would just kind of go through and make sure they held the logins and then track it in the spreadsheet on what logins and access they had to everything thing to kind of get them started. And then we would just kind of like walk them through, you know, the basic kind of like process for different departments. This is what sales does. This is what marketing does. As we grew, this got really messy because, you know, you know, if you're. If you're in the. Let's say you're getting hired for an operational role, like the migrations team. Like, if you're the migrations person telling you what marketing does, like, you know, that person may have a totally different perspective than a salesperson telling you what marketing does. And so it was messy. So we decided instead of doing that, we had them go department to department. And in a small company, it may mean just, you know, the head of marketing or the only marketing guy sits down with any new hires and explains marketing, and then the operations person explains operations, the salesperson explains sales. And so that's a really good way to do it. Now we have an HR person that kind of like, kind of does that handholding. And then, you know, Joe and I would do kind of a founder story and kind of Q and A with the new hires, and we do that solely today.

Yeah, that's. I mean, it helps with all the podcasts. I think you have like, what, four or five podcasts or something like that. You have a whole bunch of them.

Yeah, it used to be there used to be the Justin and Joe show is what we lovingly called it, right? It was like us always doing podcasts. Like us always in the content. It was just us, us, us, hey, guys, all over the place. And look, I mean, hey, you know, it hurt. It helps because, you know, it's like your. It's personality driven brand, right? People get to know you, they like you, they trust you, but, like, you know, it's hard to like, build like a larger business that way. And so, you know, luckily we made the transition to, you know, allowing kind of other personalities in the space and taking some of the load off of Joe and I to where our team can start to be out there and start to get known for kind of the things that they do. And that's been a huge help to us in terms of, like, being business owners. So let's just take a step back from just banging out content all the time.

For sure.

Yeah. It reminds me of, you know, our friend Roland Frazier, and he is this thing that the dancing bear concept. It's like once you stop dancing, you know, the. The show stops, basically. And that's. That's if it's all you, everything, you know.

But that's so true, bro.

But I like integrating the team in there. We've done the same here and it's. It's cool to kind of share the stage or give the stage in some senses. And then again, it's like a culture thing.

It's also weird. I'll admit that there are times where I get a little, like, that's my spotlight. You know what I mean? Why are you stealing my thunder like that? So that's. As a marketer, like, that's something you have to like, I struggled with and handed over the reins. Like, Greg is a good example. I know that Greg on the show where there are times where I'm like, I want to go grab the reins from him and like, no, no, no, no, no. And I'm like, nope. You know what? He's got this man. I believe in this kid.

I wouldn't say it that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly. Yeah.

Well, any. You got anything else?

Yeah, I mean, I'll just circle back around to that other question.

If somebody was looking to get into, like, selling a website and they wanted to build something, bootstrap it and sell it on Empire Flippers, what sort of path would you recommend they take to set it up to sell?

Yeah, so it probably depends on the type of business you want to build. And, you know, there's so many different types. I think, like, for someone just getting started, like just affiliate sites, Amazon associate type sites are really the easiest. And you're going to learn all the things you need to learn. Learn about domains, hosting affiliate links, how to place them, like conversion, rate optimization, SEO. These are all basically no. For most online businesses. And it's a really easy way to start in terms of preparing to sale. I mean, there's a whole bunch that goes into that. I mean, if it's, you know, with us in particular, an Amazon associate site needs to be making at least $500 a month for six months. So those are kind of the minimums for any other type of business that's any more complicated. Fba, E Commerce, Kindle. It's a thousand bucks a month minimum. So you need to kind of cross that threshold and then you can get ready to sell. You normally want to be running it at least a year. So the business needs to be at least kind of a year aged before anyone's really going to be interested in buying it.

Generally, the larger sites tend to sell for much larger multiples. So if you're trying to sell a site in the like five figures, maybe like low six figures, you know, that same business five times larger is probably gonna actually be seven times larger, eight times larger because of a better multiple. For example, an affiliate site at, you know, that's worth like, you know, let's say $100,000 may sell at a 30 times net profit or it might sell at a 40, 45 times net profit if it's valued around a million. Wow, that makes sense.

Yeah, that's monthly net profit, right? Not annual net profit.

Yeah, monthly. Now some people are listening like, damn.

Yeah, I mean, we did dive into pretty deep down that rabbit hole when we had Greg on and we also had Matt Diggity on and we talked about some of that stuff with him as well. So we have some episodes where we dive pretty deep on that. I just, you know, wanted to, wanted to hear from your perspective to, to see if your answer lined up with.

Greg and wow, you're checking his work, huh?

Checking it. Yeah. There you go. Checking your hires. I hope you get the job.

There you go, Greg, we trust you.

We didn't trust you until just now, but now you're good.

Well, Justin, what else is, what's new? What's in the future for you? Joe Empire, Flippers? What do you got in the mind? Any kind of things you're going to steer towards in the vision?

Yeah, I mean one of the big things for us long term is kind of the EF Capital play. So here's kind of where we see a lot of. We see that being potentially billion dollar company territory. And the reason is because there's an emerging asset class with these kind of online businesses that are investable. You see it already definitely in the 10 million plus business. Plenty of private equity family offices that are looking to buy up 10, 15, 20, $25 million businesses. And they're just starting to move down to the smaller valuations, to the 4 million, to the 3 million businesses they're seeing. Wow, those are valuable. And in fact, there's not as many people looking for them. We can get them at much better discounts compared to a $20 million business. So more and more people are moving down that value chain. So the fact there's a lot of investable money focused in that space, I think that turning this part of our market into an actual investable asset class will be huge. So I don't know if it's going to be EF Capital that does it, but it's going to be us or it's going to be someone else in our space that really solves that. Lots of money, no skill problem. And I think that'll be a really big move in our industry.

I love that. That's something for all of us listening and Working on these kind of assets. Just have in mind, it's like these are all assets that we're building, and obviously there's ways to engineer them to get more multiples and all that stuff. Go check out the Greg episode. The previous one we did, but, yeah, that's fascinating, man. So I hope you guys pull it off. We'll keep an eye on me too, man.

Me too.

That sounds fun.

We'll come back on, we'll talk about it.

Oh, yeah, let's do it.

So empireflippers.com is your main website. Is there anywhere else you'd want people to go check out after listening to this episode? Or is that the place to go?

That's the place to go. I mean, you can check out our podcast, Empowers Podcast Opportunity Podcast. And I'm on Twitter. That's actually me, not some marketing apprentice. So Twitter, Empire of the worst.

Right on, Justin. Thank you, my man. It's been fun.

Thanks, man.

Hello, my friend.

Hi there.

Hi.

You've been next to me the whole time, but we haven't really chatted with each other, I guess. Huh?

Oh, I didn't see you there. I just realized you've been sitting there. This is weird. Yeah, it's weird when somebody's, what, 2ft, 18 inches away from you.

Yeah. Yeah. That's way too close for COVID Protocol.

Yeah, but we're both vaccine.

We are. Hey.

All right, so we just lost fans by me saying that. I'm sure.

Well. Oh, well.

You know, we're not gonna talk more about that, but that's fine. Yeah, we are. Justin. Let's talk about Justin.

Yeah.

Empire Flippers.

Empire Flippers. This is third episode with a gentleman from the Empire Flippers. Yeah, we had Greg on twice.

Greg's been on twice.

And then.

Yes. And then I think when we had Matt Diggity on, we talked about Empire Flippers there as well. Cause I think that's the platform he uses to sell his stuff.

I see. Why. So, Justin, he's one of the founders, him and his partner Joe. It was just a really cool story. I like to hear how that. I like all the parallels that, you know, our business kind of share with them. Yeah. Obviously they've stacked on that same kind of model with the flipping and turning into a brokerage kind of company there. And then with everything else with that EF Capital, ideally, that's gonna pan. I mean, that's. That just seems like a really cool opportunity. Or smaller companies that are doing, you know, this kind of stuff.

I think it's really freaking smart to, like, if you have a skill that you know can make money and you can duplicate that skill over and over and over again and make money with that skill. And if you had some investment capital, you can do that skill at a much bigger level. Like, this seems really smart to me. Like, flipping is just kind of like one example. Like, they obviously do this in real estate, right? Isn't that kind of what an REIT is where. I don't know. I don't know a lot about real estate, so I'm talking out of my ass right now.

Flip houses.

But yeah, but there's people that will basically pull money from investors and then they take that pooled money and then flip houses or purchase rental properties or.

Yeah, we should know this because we have a lot of our friends that do this and have talked to us about it. But yes, that model that's escaping me as well.

Yeah, I can't remember what they call that model. We've talked to multiple people on the show about that.

It might be R E, I T. No.

Well, I don't know.

I think I know now. We're just looking.

I know that's Real estate Investment Trust is what an REIT stands for, but I don't know if it's exactly what I explained it. I'm sure we'll hear from people who.

Will tell us, let us know, educate us, re. Educate us. But you're right, I mean, the fact that there's going to be capital. Syndicate.

Yes, that's the one.

You're right.

Syndicate deals.

Bam. You can still educate us on maybe there's another term or something. But yeah, yeah, it's cool that that is going to open up and they're seeing that opportunity and others are in smaller companies because they are assets. We're all building these assets and some might be more valuable than others, some might be more. A lot more sellable than others.

And that's cool. We've actually had some of our assets looked at by Greg recently and he was even telling us he's like, not totally sellable. But here's what I would do here and here's some of the things, things that you can really, like, enhance the value and maybe lead that direction if you wish. And obviously Justin talked about those Amazon affiliate sites and I know they sell a lot of those types of things, FBA sites.

And that to me blows me away too because it's like Amazon, I feel like, is penny affiliate commissions. It's like you could sell something for $100 and your commission on that's gonna be like three.

So it's crazy to me that Amazon businesses are actually. I mean I get the FBA Amazon, but Amazon affiliate sites, to me, I.

Don'T know much about it.

It's kind of crazy. I mean you gotta do some crazy high volume to make any sort of meaningful money.

Yeah.

Especially if you're trying to get 500 bucks a month. 500 bucks a month based on the commissions you're getting from Amazon. You gotta be doing fuckin six figures in sales or something like I don't get it.

Yeah. Kinda curious now. Well, a good way to learn is just go to Empire Flippers and start sorting through their list listings. I mean you can learn so much. Just, you know, we mentioned Flippa and he probably wasn't going to say the name but Justin said, I'm like, okay, we're going there. But like that's how we learned is going through the listings, remember? And we would like study. And obviously he said people would like rip them off, you know, the Empire Flipper sites, because they're like, well these guys are crushing. Probably should model them. We kind of did that back in the day. Justin Brooke, we modeled a lot.

He had a site called site fling fling.com or something like that. And basically he taught how to flip websites. We went through some of his training and Josh Bartlett also flipped websites too. And so Josh, it was that whole era. Yeah, yeah. So we were kind of. I think Josh was actually the person who first introduced us to site flipping and then we kind of learned more about it from Justin's content.

Mr. Bartlett of ThriveCart is definitely the catalyst of many things for us.

Yeah. And Easy Video suite.

Thank you. Thank you. Yes.

And Adela.

That's cool. Old school.

And Twitter fuel.

Oh yes, yes.

What are some of the other obscure softwares that he's built over the years?

Twitter people. I remember. I think that was the first one. I remember. I remember the graphics look really good.

Viral Elite was another one that he built, but I don't know if he ever sold it. I think it was one of those things that it was like Peter Duff. No, no. He used it as like a bonus for like launching something else software. He literally developed like a very basic software thing to promote a product as an affiliate. I don't remember what the product was at the time.

I think it was level shit, man.

It was like a Mike Filsane product. Product. We're getting so off track here, but this is a cool conversation.

Hey, just shout out to our buddy that's legit. Helped us for so many years now. Yeah, Josh.

But yeah, he was the one who originally introduced us to flipping, told us about Flippa. I think we also used to use a site called SitePoint as well.

Was that Justin Brooks or that's not his site?

No, no, no, no, that wasn't his site. That was like a big forum where you could sell sites if you wanted. But Flippa was much more organized.

My buddy Brenton knew the guy that ran that site. That's what it was way back in the day. Whole history there. We'll go down there. But yes, that website was huge. It might still be, but Empire Flippers, I mean, you can, I mean, fact is, go check out the site. Just if you're interested in how they do a lot of this stuff for the listings, they show you a lot of details and I think some, even the financials of these sites just so you can kind of understand where they're investing money.

Well, I think the seller could kind of decide how much, much detail and data they want to provide. So I think it's dependent on that. I know there's a lot of like, you got to sign an NWA if you want to even look at this offer. Nwa. Did I say NWA NDA.

You got to sign with nwa. No, you got to sign an NDA.

I love it.

But yeah, I know some of them.

They going to Compton later. What are we doing?

Yes, to sign my nwa. But no, there are some that make you sign this NWA to even see the name of the site that's being sold and stuff like that. Possibly even non competes, which I don't know how well that kind of stuff.

Holds up, but check it out, it's worth it. And also actually on the hiring front, because we talked a lot about the apprentice, their process, but also just hiring in general. Check out their website under the careers tab. I think I found it by going to their footer. But you can kind of see some of what Justin was saying in the episode in terms of how he. You know, there's a YouTube video and.

And you don't need to move to the Philippines or Vietnam if you want to work for them either.

Yeah, actually now, like, these are legit positions too. These aren't the apprenticeships on their site. But yeah, you don't have to. It's. It's work from home now, it seems like. But yeah, it's cool. So go take a peek at their site, see what they're up to.

I'll do that. Thank you.

Yeah, you should See.

See what other. See what sites I should build and flip myself.

Not you, though. Maybe you.

Yeah.

Yeah. Why not?

Probably.

I mean, I'll never do it, but you probably won't. I don't know when you're going to do it, but maybe we'll have a team do it. Anything else? I think it was just a cool interview. I mean, we kind of bounced all over the place, but probably in this edited version. It's a little cleaner.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, like, the big key of it was his hiring process, and I feel like he's got a pretty solid process that he mapped out, and I don't really feel I have a whole lot to add to that specific process.

They got it dialed, my friend. Yeah. I just like the. I like how their evolution has happened. Justin and Joze with Empire Flippers. And I could see some cool stuff in the future there, too. So likely, like Jess had said, we'll probably come back, ideally with EW Capital. Empire Flippers. No, EF Capital. EF Capital. Not ew. Yeah.

I don't know.

Pretty cool. So keeping on the trends and what's selling and what's happening right now in the marketplace, I think is super valuable for all us to kind of think of, because that's where the puck is going, right, Matt?

That's where the puck is going.

Pretty sure. Pretty sure. Yeah. That's what the kids say. Right?

So go get that puck.

Or Gretzky. One of the two. Yeah.

And, you know, we shouted out Jacob a bunch, so one last shout out for Jacob. We love you. You're amazing. You are a man.

Love.

Man love.

Man love.

Cool.

You go on there now.

Yeah. He's married, so.

Wow. That's fine. Can't stop the man. Love, Jacob.

You are awesome.

Hey. Hey. Sue's awesome, too.

Sue is very awesome.

Sue, we love you, too.

We love both of you.

Hell, yeah.

Yeah.

You were just giving them shout outs?

Just giving them shout outs.

Okay, cool. I didn't know if there was more to it.

I mean, they're both hearing this.

They are, so I would hope so.

You guys are awesome.

Well, let's give a shout out now to sue more so in the notes or the action guides, because we took a lot of them. She took the notes.

She did.

We did not. We'd be lying if we painstakingly took all the notes. She does that for us, so. Thank you.

Yes.

Don't know how you do that so fast either, but go get the action guides of this episode over@flowchart group.com. that is flowchartgroup.com. thank you, Matt. I knew you were going to do that for some reason. That's a redirect to our Facebook group. But please plug in your email address because that's how you get the action guides. And you got to be quick. Within two weeks of this episode going live. Well, after two weeks, they go away into our vault, never to be seen again.

Unless you pay for Evergreen Profits membership.

Exactly.

Which we're going to rebrand, but we'll talk about that in a future episode.

It's a no brainer thing, so you should just join it when you get the opportunity. You'll see it. Just go to flowchart group.com, plug in your email address, go join the community to hang out with us. Go shout us out. Go educate us on some real estate stuff that we don't know about.

Say you guys are dumb when it comes to real estate. You shouldn't talk about that.

Ever be so brutal.

No, that's what they would say.

Oh, yeah. Do you have thick skin, Matt?

Sometimes. Depends on.

Choose the day wisely when you want to throw some shit at Ben.

Depends on the. Yeah, if it's a Monday and. And I'm like, not feeling it.

Stay away from that on Mondays.

Actually, Mondays are too bad these days.

Yeah.

I really like how we structure our week, but that is a topic for a different day also.

Maybe we'll revisit that in our solo episode this afternoon.

Maybe we should. Cause that is the way we've.

I like that idea.

The way we've worked our weeks these days is pretty fricking awesome.

I feel like it's bringing us more happiness as well.

Yes.

Put her there, partner.

Boom.

All right, so let's wrap this puppy up with an easy webinar shout out. They are boys and girls.

Webinar.com hustle.

That's right. That's actually the site. So go there. Their main website is great. Easywebinar.com but you know, it's got one problem. What's that?

You don't get hooked up with a discount. If you go to easywebinar.com you would.

Just be giving them more money, which I'm sure they wouldn't argue. But let's go to EasyWebinar.com hustle and you'll see this fancy page they made for us and a guy. Actually a couple guys in plaid.

They photoshopped us.

Three guys in plaid in one shirt.

They photoshopped us into a room with a microphone and it was. It Made it look like we were speaking in front of an audience, but we were really speaking in front of two people.

That's some damn good Photoshop.

Yeah, but look at that.

There's three guys in plaid. We happen to be two of them. It's too much plaid in one space. Yeah, well, we used to wear a lot of plaid all the time.

I do still wear plaid when it's cool out.

You still wear that shirt all the time?

Actually, I don't very often.

No, you don't. But I still have that shirt. Yeah, it's getting a little tacky.

I do still have that shirt. I don't wear it very often. If you want to know what shirt we're talking about, go to EasyWebinar.com hustle.

I'm just going to keep talking about the picture until people. All right, I gotta go to easywebinar.com hustle.

Is that Christine in the picture?

No, Some random chick that I don't know. I think we. I don't know that this is an old market. It's an old shot from a marketing group we used to go to in San Diego all the time. Henry Evans's group. What up? All right, so back to Easy Webinar since they're paying for the spot. Thank you. Casey and team, go check out Easy Webinar because. Well, go check out the page. You'll see what we're talking about.

But it's amazing. Mind blowing.

It's. It's earth shattering even. I don't know what that would sound like, though. But I don't want to hear it. Yeah, if the earth shatters, that'd be bad. So that's why you need to go to easy webinar.com hustle if you are at all doing any kind of webinars or interested in doing webinars, this is your tool to do it all. And they do everything. I'm just going to leave it there. Yeah.

Comm slash Hustle. Go check it out. Go check out Justin Cook and Empire Flippers as well. Thanks for listening. Share this episode around. Leave us a review. One of these days we're actually gonna read some reviews.

How about we do that later today?

Okay.

On a different episode.

Yeah. Some of our next episodes that are coming out. Listen for the reviews because we're gonna read some off finally.

But if you leave one, make it awesome and we'll pick it.

Yes. Most likely the awesomer the review, the more likelier. I'm just making up words.

Keep going.

The more likelier you are to hear it read by Joe's mouth.

My mouth. What else would be reading it? Don't answer that. All right, see you next time. Love y'. All.

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 Cliff's Notes version of every episode where 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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