Moe Abbas — Done For You Marketing Help For $50 Per Month

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flowchart with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf. Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. We hired an opera singer to come do this intro with us.

Joe Fears in the house. Hey, hey, hey, guys.

Now let's hear some falsetto.

No, no, that's you, Jo F.

You have the golden pipes, Mr. Matt.

All right, moving on.

All right, who do we have on the show today?

Today we're talking to somebody that we're kind of working with their business pretty closely these days and he's up to some cool stuff.

And I think more and more of y' all are going to be involved. Actually, a lot of folks have already kind of basically followed us down this vein of apprenticeship and really capitalizing on this awesome opportunity, but also giving back to apprentice who are interested in doing marketing work. That's exactly what Mo Abbas does with gnm.

Yeah, that's today. And it's a really amazing company because what he's doing is he's helping younger students get into the entrepreneurial world and learn marketing and learn skills that they'll actually be able to take into the workforce with them.

All these young people.

Well, yeah, not always young people. Sorry. But, you know, he's helping modify the education system by helping companies get apprentices. And right now it's just marketing apprentices to do things like SEO, social media management, content writing, content curation, things like that. But eventually he's going to evolve this into a place where you can find apprentices for any industry and any sort of niche. So really, really amazing stuff. And they're actually a sponsor of our show. So GenM is sponsoring the show and we actually have a special L. They'll get you 10 bucks off your, your price when you go and sign up@evergreenprofits.com genm and we're gonna really dive deep in how he developed this company. Well, how he came up with the idea, how he built the company, the challenges in building this company, things to look for when you're hiring somebody off the site.

Well, we went into a lot and Mo, just to let you know, is an extremely experienced marketer and business owner. And, you know, he's done stuff offline. So he built a massive construction based, industry based company doing millions and millions, tens of millions of dollars in Canada. And he breaks down his background of just starting with not much at all and transitioning into this whole, this whole, like, industry that he knew nothing of that eventually turned in, well that's actually still going. But genm was started out of this need that Matt was just saying is that the education system, especially for folks trying to get into the marketing entrepreneur space, really just business space, it changes so damn quick. So in what's getting taught in secondary schools and whatnot. Matt and I have both our business type degrees and don't really use them. So this is Mo's venture to essentially change that and create another way. And it's a really unique opportunity for us as business owners to help these folks out while they're helping you out for next to nothing.

So for 50 bucks a month, you can have new team members helping run your business. And let's go ahead and talk to Mo and learn about this awesome, awesome opportunity for you and for the entrepreneurial minded people that are in the system.

Onward to Mo.

Hey Mo, thanks so much for joining us today. How you doing?

I'm fantastic. Thanks for having me, guys.

Awesome. We're looking forward to this. As a lot of our listeners might already have realized, GenM is essentially the sponsor of our show. We talk about it at the beginning of all of our most recent episodes. And we're excited because we now have the founder of GenM on to dive a little deeper into what GenM does, who it's for, what types of things you can do with it and kind of get the backstory around it. So really, really excited to dive in.

Yeah, absolutely man. Super excited to be here.

Yeah, it's crazy. I was quickly telling you just a minute ago before we hit record that we've brought up this genm just concept to a lot of our smart marketing friends. Some, you know, virtual a lot in San Diego and we break it all down and they're like, holy crap, like what? How have I not heard of this thing? And then, and then from there it's just, they go for it.

It's kind of like a well kept secret in the marketing world. So it's, you know, if you know about GenM, it's something that gives you some social currency with your friends and businesses that don't because when you tell them, they kind of like, it's kind of like an unbelievable thing, right? I can get it. A student marketer to help market my business unpaid as part of their training. That's just kind of seems crazy for a lot of business owners. So when they hear about it, you know, they love to share it for sure.

Well, let's give the. So without like totally telling everybody what's kind of like what's your Background. What brought you to this point? Starting gnm. And then we'll dig into what it is too.

Sure.

You know, my family immigrated to Canada when we were very young, very poor. We grew up in subsidized housing, and there were a family of seven in this tiny little townhouse and didn't really have much resources. So I kind of grew up hustling on the streets, you could say, going door to door. You know, when I was 12 years old, they used to sell chocolates and services door to door. And then my mom and dad would take all my money, which we know was good and bad. Like, I like to help the family out, but it just taught you how to kind of hustle. And, you know, that was. That was kind of the start of my entrepreneurship. Right. Is that ability to sell. You know, sales is the key component of any successful business. And I learned that really, really early on. And, you know, as I got older, I got a little more experience. I had a chance to do some contract work out west and saved a bunch of money, came back to Ottawa and started my first business when I was 19, about 18, 19 years old again, going door to door doing landscaping. And, you know, I was making about $500 a day, cash doing that. And pretty quickly I hired one of my friends and then a couple of my friends, and then we started putting out crews. And, you know, for a solid two years, I would in the spring and fall do this landscaping, door to door services. And in the wintertime, what I would do is I go to Chapters. It's a bookstore like Indiegogo.

I was there every single day. And I would, you know, I didn't go to school. I didn't really believe in the traditional education system. It didn't make a whole lot of sense for me. It was really expensive. I didn't even have the money to do it, frankly, let alone the grades or the motivation for it. And I wasn't what you would call a good student. Not very many entrepreneurs are good students. Right.

And so what I did instead is I would go to Indiegogo every single day. And they had these couches there, and I would sit down and read for like six, seven, eight hours a day, get a coffee from Starbucks. And I started really teaching myself about business. Like, it's one thing to be a good salesperson. I was a really good salesperson, but I didn't understand business. And I knew that to really achieve the goals I wanted to, the freedom that I wanted to, I had to become an expert in business. That's what I did. I went and I read books on business and I expanded my horizons. Psychology, self help, you know, marketing books. And there was a time where, you know, I was. I could go into the bookstore. On every single nonfiction shelf, there was a book that I had read. You know, I even taught myself to speed read because I just wanted to consume content very quickly. Now I don't quite do that same type of learning as I got older. You know, when you're young, I call it, you know, in jiu jitsu, they say you're full of piss and vinegar, where you just have all this energy and just like, you know, you're just kind of shooting everywhere. Right.

But as I got older, I got a lot more, you know, a lot more technical, a lot more strategic, a lot more tactical in what I learn and what I do. So the landscaping companies, you know, I sold those companies. When I was 19, I got into construction, renovations. And I knew nothing about renovations.

I didn't know what drywall was. Never picked up a hammer in my life. And here I was, was 19 years old, you know, in the basement of a mall, to renovate a gym. It was like this massive contract. It was an old gym. It was like musty and moldy. And I'm like. I remember standing there, it was one night, it was like 2am and like I was working like 16 hours and my hands were bleeding, just moving cinder blocks. And I was all alone, and there was nobody in the whole mall. And I was just like, started to cry a little bit, saying, what the hell am I doing? Like, you know, I know nothing about construction. No employees, no knowledge. I wasn't getting paid. I was working like a dog. And I really wanted to quit. But great entrepreneurs, as you know, they don't quit. It's just not an option. Right. It just was never an option for me. Yeah, man, I pivoted, but I never quit.

And you jump into stuff too, without totally knowing the full picture. You're like, okay, I see an opportunity here, you know.

Yeah. So you get a little smarter at that when you get older, but, you know, younger. Yeah, I definitely just jumped in that opportunity. Right. And then it was good. I lost my shirt on that contract. You know, obviously it wasn't, wasn't. I didn't know what I was doing. And then the second contract, I got a little more knowledgeable. And then we started, you know, niching residential, then design, build residential. And then I did a million dollars in sales in my first year out of a Starbucks.

Nice.

Paying homage to My homeboys at the Starbucks who got you through it every day.

Yeah.

Became a regular there. And then eventually I got an office and I hired some childhood friends and there was a dozen of my childhood friends and then we took the whole basement of a building and then we expanded across Canada to create one of the largest design build renovation companies in the country. Was done in less than five years. And by 25, I reached the top of my industry. You know, I was an award winning entrepreneur. 30 under 30, 40 under 40, Immigrant Entrepreneur Award. I sat on the board of directors, the Chamber of Commerce and the Better Business Bureau. You know, I had kind of reached a pinnacle in that industry. Self made, man. A bunch of real estate properties, you know, making a lot of money. And just, you know, it was really tough. Don't get me wrong, I'm giving you like the highlight version of that. It was extremely grueling and long and huge personal sacrifices that had to be made. As many entrepreneurs know, you know, you build businesses with blood. There's no other way.

You gotta grind it out, man. And it sounds. That's amazing. So is that company still going or did you transition out of there?

I transitioned out because I'm still a partner in the company in my Ottawa location. I don't run it. I'll put in into it. I have partners that run the organization, but it's doing $10 million in sales this year. And then the Vancouver one's not that far behind. So they're pretty substantial organizations. And it allowed me to get financial freedom and, you know, they really gave me an opportunity, not only from an experience standpoint because we had hundreds of employees and trades.

You know, not only from a difficulty standpoint because it's such a, you know, building that kind of business to scale is very difficult.

But it was really the key to GenM. Like it really taught me so much. And the problem, you know, in the companies, in the renovation construction companies we used to hire, we used to get a lot of interns. Okay. Frankly, a quarter of my staff had started as volunteer interns.

Wow.

Okay. Who I eventually hired. Right. So I personally have worked with over 50 students in my companies that I've had. Right. Give you an idea. So before I started GenM, I had a significant amount of experience as a small business owner working with students. And I knew how to hire them, I knew how to train them. And then I never really thought of it from the student perspective. Right. How big of a problem it was for students to get work experience. For me, I was just being an Opportunistic small business owner. I was like, you know, I can get these students to help us. That's affordable, they're getting great experience. And well, look, look, I can actually even hire the really talented ones. And I did just that. And that was kind of how GenM was born. We said, well, you know what, we put up a marketing internship ad and I have like 200 applicants and nobody has experience. And they all are willing to volunteer for experience. But it was really hard to kind of onboard them and work with them. There's a lot of labor laws you had to watch out for. And it was just a really broken experience. And I had a lot of, I was like an expert at this and it was just not working right. So we said, well, when you do find one and you work with them, it's like a magical thing, right? You train them, you build this relationship. And almost all of them are either hired or left and got hired after the training. I said, you know, look at this, we're bringing students. And I used to classify, I used to say they were unhirable before they came to us. They would not get a job in the field because they had no work experience, right? And then they come in here and then they work with us and we train them and we hire them and they leave and get jobs. It's like, wow, you know, maybe there's something there, right? So we started investigating that. That was kind of how GenM was born is from that experience, that aha moment that maybe, maybe small businesses can train students, maybe they could even train them better than post secondary education. Now I knew firsthand that at the very least we can get them job ready better than post secondary. And then we set off on a mission. You know, I actually started to get into tech after leaving construction and then I had a team. And then, you know, me and my team, you know, we started going on this mission of building a free education system that's accessible to anyone and leads to jobs. And that was the birth of genim.

That's fascinating. That was actually the one thing I was thinking of. I mean, Matt and I both went through college and I have a marketing degree, he's got a finance degree and we feel like we don't really use them.

But as marketers you don't use your marketing degree, Right?

But the thing that fascinates me with JennM and exactly what you just said, and this is something I've been thinking about ever since we hired a few interns or apprentices, however you want to say. It is like this could be, or maybe this is the new beginning of someone entering the workplace actually starting a career. And it sounds like this is way better than most college experiences.

Yeah, that's the direction we're going. We're still really early on in our platform, but you should see the stuff that. You should see what it looked like a year ago. I mean, we've made tremendous progress in the last year. And what we have in the pipeline is quite unbelievable. And we do want to be the place where students come to launch their careers. We also want to be the place where small businesses come to grow by creating harmonious relationships between the two sides. And we specifically chose apprenticeships over internships because an internship is a relationship between a student and a business. An apprenticeship is a relationship between a student and a skilled. And a skilled person. In our case, it's a skilled business owner. So it's a person to person relationship, not a person to entity or corporation type of relationship. And that's just right off the bat. You see, you know, from the start we look at the things differently than how they're done. And we developed a whole, you know, we believe that apprenticeships like it was done back in the day. Right? Back in the day, you know, hundreds of years ago, before white collar jobs came about. You know, even 100 years ago, apprenticeships were the dominant way that people got into the job market. Right. And then post secondary comes and they start making machines of people. And. And it worked in the 80s, right? You went to school, you got a job for sure in the 80s and in 90, the system started breaking. In the 2000s it started becoming a big problem. And since 2008 it started reaching crisis levels. And now people are waking up and saying, you know what, the system's not working, it's overpriced, takes too long and it's not effective. So we want to bring back the old school apprenticeships into a modern format and we layer in coursework, certifications. And now our team is building out actual collaboration tools, fulfillment tools. So not only will we match the two sides and help them find an ideal fit, we'll also have tools that are coming in the next couple of months to help them work together during the apprenticeship.

Now I'm curious, what sort of challenges have you ran into developing out the genm? So Joe and I, we used to have a business, we've actually sold and exited from this business, but it was a mini to many model where, you know, there was many sort of people that would fulfill on a service and Then you had to market to many people that needed that service. And we found the many to many model to be very, very complex because you have to be a marketer on both sides, right? You have to market people wanting to use your platform and you have to market people coming to hire. So what sort of challenges have you run into and how have you overcome some of those challeng in ramping up GenM?

Absolutely. So, you know, early on when I first got into tech, I was, I kind of just thought I would be successful because I was successful in construction and renovations and in other businesses. I had a marketing company as well and really that wasn't the case. So what I learned after failing my first shot was you have to follow the right methodology. And in our business, in GenM, what you're describing is a two sided marketplace. On one side you have small business owners who have very specific problems and needs. On other sides you have students and they have a different set of problems and needs. You have to speak to them separately, differently, in different distribution channels, right? And then you have to get them to come to your platform at the same time, meet each other and then find a good fit between supply and demand and then facilitate the value of GenM, which for small businesses is getting a student marketer to help them grow and then for students is getting the work experience. So that's a very tricky business model, right? It's a marketplace business model. And early on I wanted to do it right. So obviously I started learning about marketplace business models. I studied Airbnb, Uber. There's a book called who gets what and why, Another book called the Platform Revolution. There's a site called Share Tribe. There's a handbook on marketplaces by Boris Wetz, who's an investor. I just kind of obsessively studied this business model and what are the mechanics like, right? So one of the key things you have to do is build liquidity. So you have to have both students and businesses on the platform at the same time with the same type of intent. So early on when we first started, we said, well, we're gonna do this for marketing and software engineers and bookkeepers, right? And we tried doing that and it just didn't work. It just, it was too broad. We had trouble getting enough businesses interested in one niche. It was too diluted. So then we made the decision early on to like, we're gonna focus on a very, very niche, right? We're gonna go to marketing. That's the niche that we're gonna focus on. And we're Gonna get a.

Beachhead. Right. And another book, Crossing the Chasm, or how do you scale products? They tell you very clearly, early, innovative products where people don't quite have, we're not competing, you know, we're very new and different. So we need to get a beachhead. And this is like an early community of evangelists who would really love our product. And to do that, we have to go very, very niche. So any small businesses who are listening to this, if you have an innovative product, you know, you have to go very, very, very niche and target a very specific type of customer. And that's what we did. We focused on small business owners. Traditionally, they are less than five employees. Many of them are solopreneurs who work from home or a small office somewhere. Many of them are Internet enabled. They e or they do most of their businesses online. These are E commerce companies. These are just small digital marketing agencies. They are life coaches. They are.

Small business owners. So we decided to target this very specific niche. And on the other side, it was students who are looking to get experience in digital marketing. So that was a challenge early on was, well, how do you find these two people? How do you speak to them? And how do you bring them onto your platform and make it easy for them to communicate? Connect and communicate. So we broke down our business into two units. You have matching, which is enabling the two sides to find each other. Airbnb does this very well. They have a similar problem. Right. Where if you want to rent a house in Airbnb, you probably have very specific requirements you're looking for. You need to make sure it accommodates the amount of guests that you have and the location that you're looking for with the amenities that you're looking for at the time you're looking for. Right, Right. So.

That'S a search. They call it a search marketplace. And then you have an on demand marketplace like Uber, where it doesn't really matter what kind of car picks you up, as long as it's here in the next five to 10 minutes. Right. So that's a more commoditized marketplace. On demand, we're more of a search marketplace where you want to find a good fit for your business. Right. So not every student marketer is going to be a great fit for you. You're going to have to search for one that's a good fit for you. And then that's something we realized early on is we're not selling a commoditized product. These are human beings. Right. It's not commoditized so we had to create profiles that were rich in details and get students to upload their resumes and tools they know how to use. And we iterate the profile so many times it used to be like, you know, have big content on it. Now it's bullet points. It used to be more like an application to a job board. Now it's a chat messenger system, more like a dating app.

You know and we used to, you know, we saw that business and students had trouble signing contracts. We built a one click labor contract to make it really easy to onboard. You know, you can see when the student was last online. You can see how much training they've done on GenM. You know, so we've kind of. You kind of. There's two things that you look for in business. Either you're solving a problem, there's a lot of those to solve in businesses, especially early on, or you're exploiting an opportunity. Right. So opportunity early on you probably need to do a little bit of mixture of both probably to make sure you're solving a problem as the company gets a little bit more bigger, a little bit more product market fit, which is a very important thing. It's product market fit. As you achieve product market fit, you want to look to try to exploit more opportunities if you can. Right. Because there's more growth opportunities on new channels and are necessarily in solving things that at work that maybe can be optimized. So there's all these kinds of challenges. But for us obviously marketing was a big challenge. You know, I have a background in growth marketing so I did pretty well on that. I knew how to create funnels and how to really create how to get to our clients. Right. You got to speak directly to your clients. And you know, for small businesses especially early on, I always advocate don't try to create automated sales. I mean I see this all the time, like this small business trying to create like scalable solutions. And I'm like, yep, that's the wrong way of doing it, you know, but that'll come.

We take that to heart too. And we are very like we're super personable. Not only after the sale, but definitely before. But do live chats, sometimes phone calls and yeah, like you said, it's that like we always call it just a personalized marketing. Like sales funnels don't fit everyone or even automated chatbot sequences or whatever it might be.

No, they don't use optimization thing.

Yeah.

Or at least use real chatting, real conversation to figure out what's going to work and then Automate those conversations. Once you figure it out, I think you're about to go in this direction. It can be automated, but you've got to figure out what works and what your customer needs and what the demographics are and get as much data through chatting first and then the automation could come in in the future.

You got it. I mean, you gotta ask yourselves, how many sales are you doing as a small business owner? 10, maybe 20 a day. Like, whatever product that you're selling, if it's more than that, good for you. You're on the way to significant growth. But like, can you talk to 10 clients a day? You probably could. Maybe a 10, 15 minute phone call. And the conversions between. So what we noticed early on is we had an automated buying process early on and what was happening was because we're a new product, businesses are not quite sure how to use our platform. It was early on as well. It's not as feature rich as it was today. Today it's way more feature rich. But back then it wasn't and it was automated, so the conversions were not that great because it was automated. And then we had higher churn because customers didn't quite know how to utilize our product. So we said, well, this doesn't make any sense. We have the ability to talk to our clients. Like, we're not selling 100 new members a day. We're not selling 1,000 new businesses a day. So we can. We have a team of onboarding specialists who actually will talk to every single person when you sign up to GenM. Even now, like, we're on our way to becoming a fairly significant company. And even now, and this is something I want to do as long as possible. Every single person who signs up, they hit a call wall and they have jump on a call and they learn how to host an apprenticeship, you know, and what this does, it really teaches your community early on about the best practices of how to use GenM or whatever product you may have. And number one, your conversions are way, way higher.

Oh yeah.

Like, people love talking to human beings. Like it's a thing. You know, let's not forget that.

It's crazy that you gotta remind people, but we've said that before on this podcast. It's crazy, you know, behind your screen, just forget about the human interaction.

The craziest thing that drives me nuts is like, you'll call a small business and they have an automated messenger that answers. I'm like, are you kidding me? I'm trying to buy your product. You're like, you're Selling maybe one of me a day. And you want me to deal with an automated message to make your time more efficient. Like, blows my mind. Yep.

No, that's why you're well on your way. I mean, we didn't directly interact with your, with your onboarding team, but our Shannon, our ops manager, did and she asked. Absolutely loved it. And she's the direct contact, you know, with everyone that we, we brought on. But exactly what you said, it's answered so many questions. It helped us find people exactly who we were looking for. It was amazing.

Well, and just like this sort of no brainer element of the offer has made it almost, it's almost gotten viral among our community, like our inner circle, because we had a guy. I'll do some name dropping because all of these people have been on the podcast. But so we have a buddy named Andrew o' Brien who is using Jennifer and absolutely loved it. He told our buddy Brad Costanza, who's a business partner in a different business, about it. He used it, absolutely loved it. He told us. We started using it, absolutely loved it. And now we're going around and spreading the word ourselves. So it's got this viral element just because of the cost effectiveness of it.

And the skill set. I mean, the skill set's perfect for marketing companies like us or just that element in every business that needs, I mean, really quickly, I know you're like honed in on the marketing niche, which is amazing. That was one of my questions. And I see exactly why you did it now. What are some common skill sets that you see, you know, people pairing up with.

So, yeah, I mean, right now we're definitely focused on digital marketing marketing, and we want to own this niche totally. So if any business or student wants to either launch a career or get help in marketing, we want to be the first place they come. I mean, other than the fact that it's the most affordable place to come first. I mean, price wins. I'm a believer that price wins on scale. We do see ourselves expanding into other niches. I mean, obvious niches would be things that complement digital marketing, where our existing business users can use an extra hand in. So if you have a marketing apprentice, could you maybe use a bookkeeping apprentice? Could you use a design apprentice, maybe.

Like a tech guy to get in and install some plugins in WordPress for me from time to time and things like that?

Yeah, software engineer apprentice, you know, like, could you use. So definitely the next niches would work well towards our existing businesses. We'd also look to see Job demand. Where's the highest job demand? Where post secondary is falling short. And you know, we can train these students fairly quickly through our methodology. Ultimately though, we see, you know, we're going to focus on digital. So it's all going to be, it's remote right now. It'll be remote for a little while and it'll be complementary to digital businesses, the business that we have currently. So software design, bookkeeping, project management, you can imagine those type of niches would do really well. And then you can also imagine that apprenticeships ultimately, fundamentally they are a skills transfer between a business and a student, between a professional, between a mentor and a mentee. It's a skills transfer. What is the limit really on a skills transfer between an expert and a novice? Do we really have a limit on the type of niches that we train?

Not at all, man.

Imagine in five years we'll go and we'll match people who are in your neighborhood who maybe want to learn, you know, you know, maybe cabinet making or carpentry or maybe entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship would be a really good one, actually. I know I could, I would definitely appreciate. I actually had an apprentice, two of them, and it was, it was marketing, but we're also doing entrepreneurship stuff. That's huge. You can imagine. Yeah, it's huge, huge, huge.

And so there's not really, I don't really see a limit as to. I mean there's some things like I don't think we're going to train lawyers anytime soon or physicists. I don't, I don't really see that being. I don't think, I don't think STEM is necessarily, you know, STEM is a very high in demand jobs.

Right.

You know, you go to school and use a higher probability you're going to get a job out of that. But you can imagine like journalism, like, you know, I don't really see much of a cap. I don't, I don't see a cap on this. It's, it's. I agree, really big opportunity.

So I mean some, some of the ways we're using it just to kind of give some of the listeners some ideas. You know, we have somebody on GenM who actually writes all of our show notes for us for this episode. So just a shout out to Steven, one of our genm guys. He's gonna be listening to this and writing the show notes. And so not only is he actually getting copywriting skills on how to actually write persuasively to get people to listen to the episode, but he's also getting all of the information that's coming out from within this episode as well. He's learning from every single episode and he's learning about copywriting through the feedback that we give him on him writing the show notes. We also have somebody doing our social media management for us. So they're, they're jumping onto Facebook and Twitter and into our various groups and pages and helping us moderate comments and make sure that stuff keeps on moving smoothly on social media and that people engagement, increasing engagement and people are coming back to us through organic social media. And then we also have somebody helping us with SEO so somebody going out and finding places to backlink to our website, who's looking internally on our website and finding places to cross link posts and to optimize the post that already exists for, for the keywords that they're already ranking for. So those are some of the ways that we're actually using GenM employees in our business right now. Are there some other ways that you're, you know, that are pretty common uses that you're seeing of the current base of students that are in there?

Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. You guys are fantastic business mentors and we definitely appreciate having the quality, your quality of businesses on GenM. You know, I'm really blown away sometimes at the type of businesses and students that are on our platform and I'm just like, wow, this is unbelievable. But yeah, social media SEO and then I see a lot of like there's the main things people do. Email marketing is another one. We had an apprentice go and build out an email marketing campaign for one of the businesses they're working with and they created a whole sequence of emails that go out. I think it was a product and it was just like, you know, an email 24 hours and days later and then like a month later on the product which has copywriting also has a funnel. So you create funnels in that? I've seen apprentices create landing pages, you know, using click funnels or lead pages for the businesses they're working with. I've seen apprentices source influencers groups manage Facebook communities is another popular one. Content marketing is super popular, creating articles and blogs and that either for helping the business deal with their customers or for traction.

Or for conversion funnels. I've seen some apprentices do paid ads as well. Those are probably more advanced apprentices, but they run paid ads through let's say Facebook or they optimize ads, they run like AB tests on ads that are working and they try to optimize those ads. I've seen apprentices We've even had some local people who match locally as well, who help set up events. That's not common because we don't match locally, but it has happened.

You know, it's crazy. It's pretty much any kind of digital marketing that you do that you can get help in. An apprentice can help you. And as long as you're a good communicator. I find communication to be number one requisite to successful apprenticeship are businesses that can communicate effectively. Effectively.

I love it. And these apprentices, I mean, I just. I want to hammer in the fact it's $50 a month and they'll work with you for 40 hours a month. That's.

Yeah.

I mean, that's crazy. So how did you settle on that price point?

Okay, so that's a. Another learning curve we had. So we used to charge $250 a month, and we actually sold quite a bit of that because it's still a really cheap way to get digital marketing. But then what we found was that the apprentices are being treated more like contractors than apprentices and students. So we said, look, when you're charging a small business owner $250 a month, that's a. That's a lot of money for a small business owner.

Yeah.

So they're gonna want to, like, squeeze every single dollar of value out of that. So. And we can't make it free because then they don't respect the students, and it's just not a good experience for anybody. So we said, well, what's a good price point where we can make it super affordable, where it's not really a big deal for a small business owner, but at the same time, it's not too high, but at the same time, it's not too low, and they are okay with providing some mentorship feedback and guidance to an apprentice. And he said, you know, $49 a month sounds like a good number.

A little over a dollar an hour.

It's significantly cheaper than the minimum wage.

And it's cheaper than hiring. To give you a comparison, the closest price point might be something like a Filipino va. And the thing with a Filipino va, they're extremely difficult to source. Very, very hard. They start, and if you find them, the cheapest you'll find is around $5 an hour. And typically, they're full time. And then you have huge cultural, language, and time zone differences.

Right.

And then that was the closest comparable. Right. And that's a nightmare to work with. We actually tried that early on for other businesses. We couldn't do it and we're like super tech savvy and we just could not source anybody.

So we said, you know, we want to make it really, really affordable, but not also make sure that the businesses are not paying so much money that the expectations are through the roof.

Makes sense. Yeah. And I think most listeners listening to us now have probably experimented with some VAs, especially over there in the Philippines or elsewhere. I know we have for 12 years now.

We do have a VA that's in the Philippines. Philippines right now, who I think we pay eight bucks an hour. But I mean, at the end of the day, I think we're paying her like something like 100 bucks a week. So it still doesn't even hold a candle that'll price for play.

But we love her, so she's staying with us.

She's good at what she does. She's great.

Yeah, exactly.

It's just cool. And like you said, the apprentices and the fact that our job as business owners, we give the value to them. So, like, for all of our apprentices, we're giving them access to our courses, all of our training. Like Matt was saying, Steven's listening to every episode.

So Steven and Carrie, another shout out to another GenM team member that we have, Kerry, who he listens to all of our episodes as well.

So it's just nice.

It's so fun to give it because, I mean, we are educators and I think most business owners want to give that to the people that work with us, especially ones that they see want to grow to something huge. And, I mean, that's why we even do this podcast. So the fact that we saw that, oh, holy crap, we can go educate people that can actually help us in the same time. It's a win, win. It's super cool, man.

And that's what I find, man. The type of relationship that you get from an apprentice, it's not like you're paying a contractor. Like, I've worked with tons of contractors and it's all great, but they're there to get paid. And obviously you can build a good relationship with a contractor as well. Don't get me wrong. But an apprentice is here because they want to work with you. They want to help you, they want to learn from you. And like, you know, when I had my apprentices, honestly, what I liked the most, sure, they helped me out. They did some projects for me. They reached out to some marketing profs, and that was great. They got me a little marketing plan that was great. But the most valuable thing that I enjoyed was Just having that person, right, like reach out to them and like the relationship. Right. Is mentoring them, giving them feedback. And like, they're so appreciative when you help them. And you know, that's a kind of experience that it's just really rare to find unless it's like a mentor, mentee type of relationship. And the way we structure in Gen n because it's three months, 10 hours a week, it's very structured. The value that they get from the mentorship and the type of relationship, it just feels great to give back to a student marketer. It's just a great feeling.

Yeah. And the fact that. And I'll just be quick, Matt. These people are go getters. Like, my wife actually has an apprentice as well, Oregon. Yeah, and she, she, it's for content writing and she goes to school at Princeton. She's doing some fellowships. I mean, she's doing so much stuff. And like you said, she's an amazing communicator, wants to learn so much. I'm just like, holy crap, man. It's tough to find a contractor like that. But then when you get a student, you're like, hell yeah, it's super cool.

How do students find out about GenM? How do they know that these apprenticeships exist?

So a lot of growth hacking, to be honest, earlier on.

And growth hacking evolved into many other ways. Right now we actually are just closed the partnership with Stukent, which is the largest marketing course provider to colleges and universities. They have about 50 to 75,000 students who are taking digital marketing in the class in college university. And now at the end of all of their courses, they are funneling their students to genm. Wow, that's a big boost, right? I mean, you're looking at like potentially 75,000 students who would now enter our apprenticeship pool. That's 2019. So that's a really big push there. We have a lot of organic growth. I mean, on the student side, you know, definitely a lot of organic growth there. Marketing profs talk about us. We have some school partnerships. We have a lot of people who are switching careers come to GenM as well. Business owners are also telling students they know to come to GenM. And it's funny, on the business side, actually almost half of our growth comes from referrals, which is really nice.

Yeah, man. Well, hopefully more from this podcast too.

And are most of the apprentices, are they mostly based in North America, like US and Canada?

Yeah, 80% are North America and Canada. We have some in the UK and Australia and then some are overseas in India or Africa. And they're different. Right. The ones in India and Africa, they're super motivated. It's like incredible, the motivation, but maybe their language is not as strong, maybe their Internet's not as good. And then you have people who are in North America who have their own specific value. They're really, really savvy. Some of them are actually blow my mind how smart they are and how motivated they are. But you know what? I don't want to. I also want to set the expectations. It's important to find a good fit. When you come to GenM, you should take the time to source a good student market. Not all students are great students. That is true. Some of them don't respond. Some of them may flake on a call. So you got to take your time and really source a good, good student. And we have a whole success checklist built into the app, a mobile app and web apps to help you do that.

Yeah, and that's actually a really good question because that's something. Shannon, our ops manager, she's like, hey, ask Mo this because she is the one that's filtered everyone. And there's definitely some that you're just like, eh, not a good fit. But is there a way that. And you mentioned the checklist, but some common red flags maybe to look out for first.

I like to set the expectations that you, you know, you gotta think of this like if you ever hired an employee or you went on a date with anybody, like if you're on Tinder or Bumble and you want to find somebody to become your girlfriend or go on a date, you know, you're probably chatting with quite a few people before you get on that date. Let's say right now in GenM, mind you, all the students have to go through a significant onboarding process. So the quality, you're gonna get better responses than, you know, maybe something like Tinder.

But yeah, depends on how you look, I guess.

I like to use that as a comparison. Right. Because sometimes people think it's like a magic switch. You turn it on and then you just have a student marketer, like, you know, at your door in an hour. You could get a student marketer within 24 hours. I could. I've done it within a day or two. I've seen businesses come and within two days they have a student marketer. They're very savvy. They message like 20 students right. When they get to the platform, they're really smart, keeping the messages short and concise. And then they're Very quickly to dismiss the ones that are not really that responsive. Right. If the student's not that responsive, you probably don't want them. As an apprentice, we suggest always getting on a phone call as quick as possible. We're actually releasing phone and video chat in the app this Friday. So you'll be able to call an apprentice and they're going to get a notification that you're calling them whether they're in the app or not. So kind of like, you know how Facebook has phone and video chat? We just built that into our mobile and web apps. So that's gonna be available on Friday. But, yeah, you just gotta qualify them. It's an HR process. You talk with them. Like I said, it's like Airbnb. Like, you're not. If you get matched with the house and you only got one option on Airbnb, it's probably not the right fit for you. Right. You've gotta check to see if it's available. You gotta. Now Airbnb, they launched Instant Book.

Which is a big, big hit for them. But it's not like Uber, where it's commoditized. These are human beings. It is kind of like dating. You gotta find somebody that you're gonna like to work with for three months.

Yeah. And I wanna just. I wanna say something to any. If there are any potential apprentices listening. The. One of the things that we really kind of judged people by first was the profile picture. Like, the profile picture is probably the most important thing. Cause we would scroll through and just by looking at their pic, if it was like. Like somebody taking a selfie with, like, duck lips or something, we're probably gonna scroll past you.

So that was one of our big criteria when we were looking for people, is we were looking at their. At their profile pic to see how seriously they were even taking their job listing.

I love that. In fact, you know what's funny is that we struggle more on the business side with profile pics and the student side sometimes. Same on the business side. For some reason, they just. Even though they never see each other in real life, the profile pick is such an important part of. Matt.

That's a good point, actually, because Shannon, our ops manager, again, she was heading up this whole process. Still does. She has. And this is one of the reasons I think you guys reached out to her was her profile was so decked out and she has a professional headshot. And I think she filled in every single possible option. So she just, you know, best foot forward from our side of things. Things was exactly what you just said there. So it worked out.

Yeah, that's smart. She's going to kill it consistently if her profile is decked out, she's going to have the top picks of students, I'll tell you that much.

There you go. It's not that hard. So if someone was to before, we kind of start wrapping up here. So if someone's interested, how does it work? Like how do they get started and what's the process look like?

Super easy. They come to our website, they sign up, they book a call. They can book a call 20 minutes from now, they can book a call immediately. Or if they want to book a call for next week, they have that option as well. We like to onboard all the businesses. They can become members without booking a call. But it's absolutely something we push very heavily. It's free. We onboard the businesses and then we walk them through how to host an apprenticeship. From there they just fill up their profile information and then boom, they're discoverable. They can start messaging students. You can get a student marketer within a few days of becoming a member. So you just got to go to genm Co like Generation Millennials. G E N M co sign up as a business. Super easy. You book a call from there. Our onboarding team will walk you through every step of the journey.

Yeah, we actually have a special link to evergreenprofits.com genm I believe gets them 10 bucks off for their free first month.

It gets them $25 off their first month and you guys also get 25. You guys will probably have a different kind of membership but they, they will save $25. You go use the link that that was just shared and you will receive $25 off of your first month, making it incredibly affordable.

It's, it's, it's a no brainer. Yeah, evergreenprofits.com is where to go and even reach out to us if you have questions for the listeners. Maybe we can take a screenshot of Shannon's profile so you can kind of use that as a template too to get the most success.

That's not a bad idea. Yeah.

So are there any things that people should not be considering GenM for? I want to set the expectations and make sure people know, okay, GenM is not for these things.

So part of the call with our onboarding specialists is they actually qualify businesses because sometimes business businesses come and they have the wrong intentions. So we want to make sure that the businesses are quality businesses with the right intentions. You have a website you need at Least a website. If you're going to get a student marketer or some kind of online presence.

You have to have at least a basic understanding of digital marketing or else how could you give them feedback and guidance? You don't have to be an expert by any means, but you just got to understand that if they post on social media, you know what that is.

Like. If you're like a mechanic, you're probably not a fit for GenM. I don't see how you would work successfully on GenM. So we like to make sure that it is a good fit. But if you're not sure, just book a call. It's free, it's 10 minutes and our team can quickly see if it is a fit for your business.

Yeah, it's easy enough. It's seriously that easy. And it's usually within what, two days or so has actually been our average two to three days of hiring an apprentice or getting them in there. So it's fast, it's fast.

Especially if you're responsive.

It's super fast, 100% so big thing. So you kind of mentioned you alluded to these different skills and other niches you want to get into. Where do you see GenM going in the next five years plus?

Yeah, absolutely. So that's something we talk about quite a bit is what's the vision for GenM? Ultimately our mission is to create a free education system for accessible to anyone in need to jobs over the next five years. We want to become the first place where students come to launch their careers. Whether that's a career in marketing or a career as a bookkeeper. Accounts payable. We want GenM to be the place to come to first because it's free, it's fast and we have, you know, so much proof that it works. But on the student side that's the goal there. There's a lot of details around that. Like we want to have local cohorts, we have another product that we're rolling out for students that's in intensive seven month program.

We have a lot coming around that you know, that's just. But on a high level we want to be where students come to launch their careers.

You know. And on the flip side of that, on the business side, we want to be the destination where small businesses come to grow. So if you're a small business owner and you need a hand growing and you're looking for talent, you know, we want GenM to be the first place that you come to. We want to be part of your daily workflow. We Want to position businesses to have not just one but multiple apprentices. We're building SaaS tools to enable small businesses to collaborate with the apprentices. We'll probably expand those tools so that they encompass entire solution for small businesses. We're giving that away for free as part of the journey because we want to add a stupid amount of value. We want businesses to come to GenM first. Anytime they're looking for digital marketing or whatever niche that we're going to launch in the future. We want them to come hire our graduates. We want them to come help in helping us achieve our mission of creating a free education system.

It's freaking awesome, man. Everything like education. We're so education focused just for not only our own business, but we're passionate about just education for kids and people in college and just making it easy to transition into whatever they want to do with their life. Oh yeah.

I mean that's a whole rabbit hole that we could potentially go down is the, you know how this system is designed to create. I'm not going to go there.

Don't go there. Now we're good.

We could go down that whole rabbit hole, but. All right, so we do have a couple wrap up questions that we like to ask everybody. At the beginning of the call you mentioned a handful of books that you kind of really dove into when you were building out this company. Are there any other books that you tend to recommend often or that you find yourself referring back to frequently?

All great entrepreneurs are constantly learning. You know, there's three points I live my life by. One of them is constantly learning growth mentality. So I listen to a lot of audiobooks. What I suggest for, you know, any new person who wants to become an entrepreneur, I think give a really light, nice to read easy book. Shoe Dog. It's just a great story about the founder of Nike and how he started that company company. So Shoe Dog is a great, you know, if you'd like entrepreneurship. That's an entry level book. Love it. It's great for that.

And it's told in story form too. You almost feel like you're reading a fictional book. I enjoyed that book a lot.

It was a great book just to get people in that mindset, you know, get people starting to read in the first place. Now I myself, my methodology now of consuming content is a little different. I consume content that is valuable to my business at the current stage that it's in. Early on I consumed any type of business books. Now as I was alluding to earlier when I was starting out the business. I read a lot of Marketplace books.

Recently. I was hiring, so I read a lot of books about hiring and Google's hiring practices, and they taught me a lot about that.

And then as the company was growing, I had to really optimize the KPIs in the company. So I started reading A Measure what Matters.

Right. When I was hiring, I read Work Rules. When I was thinking about the story about GenM and how we're gonna build the narrative, I read Building a Story Brand. Right.

That is one of the best books there. Forgetting your message across.

Yeah. Right. So, you know, now I'm reading about viral marketing, so I'm reading Contagious.

So there's all these, you know, it depends what stage of your business. But early on, just start reading. Get in the habit of reading. I use. I listen to podcasts when I'm driving or audiobooks and learn that way. Always, always. Sam Walton. Made in America is another good one.

One.

You got that one?

Yeah, those are some. The Everything Store by Jeff Bezos.

What podcast are you into? Just out of curiosity, since we're really big podcast fans ourselves, obviously.

Yeah. So obviously the Hospital and Flow is a good one.

And then the top two would be Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss are the top two I found.

All right.

Yep, you're preaching to the choir. Those are probably our two top shows that we listen to as well, so.

Well, you're the first. I think you're the first one on the show because we've asked this question pretty much since the beginning, but you're the first one that's like, no focus on what you're learning. Obviously, always learn, but apply it to what you want or what you're focusing on right now in business. And I don't think that can be said enough because you just have that overwhelming flow of information headed your way. It's so damn easy now with podcast, audiobooks, all that stuff. Blog post.

But.

Early on in my career, what I did is I did read all. Everything I can consume to build the baseline data set that I can reference from my business experience, my knowledge. Right. But now I read so specifically, I even pause an audio book and I'll reflect about how I could apply this knowledge in my business, you know, so I'm very conscious about consuming. I call it just in time, information.

Love it. One of the things that I actually do is when people send me articles and blog posts and podcasts and things to read online, I usually, you know, I value the people who send them to me. And I Want to read this stuff? So what I'll do is I'll actually save them to my Evernote, tag them with whatever the topic is, and then just let them sit in Evernote. And then when I'm focused, when I'm like, okay, I need to run some Facebook ads. I need to study some Facebook ads right now. I'll go into my Evernote, type in the Facebook ad tag and look at the last, like, 10 articles that people sent me around Facebook ads and just dive in, go to town, immerse myself and do what I got to do.

And that's an effective way of learning because it's knowledge means nothing if you can't apply it. It's just entertainment if there's no applicable if there's no application to it. Right?

Yeah, man.

It's just theory. So if you could apply it, that's the way to go. That's what GenM is all about. Really love it.

Sure.

Wrap it up.

So we got evergreenprofits.com genm. You're gonna get a nice discount by going to that link. Is there anywhere else you want to send them? What social media do you hang out on anything like that?

You can follow me on Instagram and Twitter. It's eal Moabas. Not the fake moabas. It's the real Moabas.

Yeah, I was the fake one. You know, I've been tweeting out and sending some cool pictures.

Other than that, go to GenM co. Go today. The sooner you get on board, the better you get, you know, more students to you. I'm sure we're gonna get a big rush after this podcast, so act now. Go to GenM co. Use the link that shared. Let's have you in the community. Get the value of GenM and spread the mission.

Love it. Say no more. Thank you for your time, Mo. It's been super fun.

Thank you, guys. Cheers. Have a good day. Cheers.

All right, thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing, is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training, and a whole bunch of other cool free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com. so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes, and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.