0341 | Kevin Urrutia

You're listening to Kevin Urutia from voymedia.com. you're listening to EA Interviews.

EA Interviews episode 341. Inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round.

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Join Mario Ficcini for today's Expert Authority effect interview. Started your company. You're past the startup phase. It's growing, you're ready to scale and things are looking up. But what do you do now to get to that next level? Paid advertising. That's why I'm excited to have Kevin Yarutia on today's episode number one, Facebook ad agency. And I'm gonna have to look, don't knock me down for this, but check this out. Startup week in Bay Area. Google, Intuit, Mint, Salesforce, just a couple of the companies he's worked with and Shark Tank. He has grown multiple companies and one of them here that really caught my attention. Growing his home cleaning business from 0 to 3 million in 18 months. There is so much more he's going to cover. I'm just going to bring them up. I can't wait to have him on today's show. Expert Authority World. Kevin Yarutiya. Every business needs a book, including yours. And that's why I'm launching my new book to help you, regardless of where you think your current writing abilities are. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Once again, that's eapublishing method book.com Kevin Yarutia how are you feeling today?

I'm feeling good. Great, exciting. It's a good day today. It's Tuesday, so absolutely.

One of the, my favorite day, one of my favorite days of the week. But you have such an impressive background. You've grown multiple companies. How did you decide after having successful companies to say I want to do a Facebook ads agency?

Yeah, so after I, the way the reason why I started it was, I guess Mary, you were talking about it earlier was I wanted to really meet more entrepreneurs. So I was going to meetups. I'm based out of here in New York City. So I was going to meetups. I was going to startup events and when I was basically programming because that's my background, I was doing a lot of these events, startup weekends, competing and I met so many founders and I met so many friends that way. And then once I started doing my own companies, I kind of stopped going to those events because I was like, oh, I'm just building my own Thing I'm like, really focused on growing my own products and services. And then I really wanted to go back into that, like meeting people, meeting founders, and not just meeting them, but I figured, hey, I did it before for my own companies, how can I also help them? And it was kind of what Void Media is now. I always tell people it's not what I really envisioned right now. It's much bigger than I thought it would be in the beginning. I really thought it was going to be like, few people and it would be a mix of marketing plus investing in startups. And that's kind of what I thought Void Media was going to be. That's Wilson, who's my partner. That's what we envisioned that, like, hey, let's just use it way to meet founders and invest in startups. And then so it's funny because I've never worked at an ad agency before or I never worked with one when I was running my own company. So learning how to price, learning how to traditional ad model is sort of what we consider ourselves right now. But that's like, we kind of stumbled upon that because everybody was like looking for that. And myself, I was like, hey, look, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a founder. I want equity in your company and I want like shared interests. Right. But a lot of them were just like, no, I don't know who you are. I'm not going to give you part of my company. So I was like, okay, well, like, how should we charge? And then we figured out like, okay, this is what everybody else is charging, but percentage of ad spend and, you know, whatever that is. So now I realize you're doing now.

The percentage of ad spend.

Yeah. So we do that for most, like almost 99% of the clients. There's maybe one or two where we are owning it. And that's because we realized as we were working with people that were like, okay, it's actually a good idea not to take equity because a lot of these founders have no clue what's going on. And we now don't want to be part of that business because, like, it makes no sense. And now we're basically work with one or two partners where we've been working them for two years. And then they say, hey, guys, I want to build a product. And I know you guys are good. Okay. I'm going to say, okay, great. Now let's take equity because it makes sense a lot of times, at least for me. And I've talked to other agency owners as well. Is that like Founders aren't growing as much as they want to grow. Like you probably heard, like, hey, I want to go fast. But then they don't hire internally, they have product issues, and then we just can't take them to the next level.

Well, that's a good way to go about it because I know people that do it the first way you mentioned where they say, hey, we want 5, 10% of the company or X amount of the sales generated each month. So when you take, take a look at the roas, they go, we're going to take X amount percentage.

Yep.

Yeah, but I think it's good also in. Some people just say it's a flat X amount of dollars in cash. But then there's the percentage of ad spend because the more you're spending, the more generally you are managing. Also, there's a difference from running 100 ads to 1,000 across 10 different product lines, let's say. So is your goal now to identify those companies that are more in the startup phase that they got to a point where they're, hey, we can see this being profitable, or are you still trying to go after a lot of the companies just to make the connections? In the beginning, no.

So right now, yeah, in the beginning it was very what you're saying before, which is like new companies.

But now as the agency becomes bigger, we sort of like any customer. We are now like going up scale, right? Moving companies that have more money and the ones that have a product market fit. So this is why for us, when we charge percentage of ad spend for them, it makes sense. Like a company that's making like a million, $2 million a month, they would probably almost never give you like, hey, give me 10% of sales. They say no. Right? So the model of what you're saying is what a lot of new companies want to do, saying, hey, I'll pay you when you make me sales. Basically that means, hey, I don't know if I can market my product. Can you market it for me? So it's a very different type of entrepreneur, very different type of person. So for us, we don't really like to do those too much unless we are like fully in control of the funnel. And even then it's kind of like a very rare case because it's just like a different type of marketing. I tell people, like, each agency specializes in a specific type of marketing. I think we're better at like, if you have traction, you come to us because you need help with creatives copy and taking you to the next level. Go to market strategy is a very different type of person. And it's just the way I think about it is a very different type of relationship with the client. And I think clients and agencies need to sort of realize what that is. That way you can expect the best. Because if a new company comes to us and they're saying, hey, I'd see you guys are good, but I want to work with you, we're like, hey, look like you might want to work with a freelancer or smaller company where that founder can actually talk to you almost every day. Where with us, it's like we're talking maybe twice a month. Because we're not here to like hand hold you. Right? We're here to make you money and then, and then just grow your business. That's all you care about is numbers. Whereas initial companies are like, hey, what should I make fonts be? What might your colors be? I'm like, okay, we're not that type of agency.

Yeah, and that's good because there's nothing wrong with either way. It's just being clear on it. Cause there's a lot of people who want that hand holding and they might find someone who doesn't have it and they just get the wrong impression. And conversely, there's companies that only go on the numbers, that they don't even tell people about the hand holding because sometimes they need it, sometimes they don't. But I totally get where you're coming from with the perspective of we're not going to teach you ads, we're not going to train you on how to do what we're doing every step of the way. And that's the same thing with marketing in general. Graphic design, websites, whatever. It's like, well, what are you doing this for? What do you. I mean, you don't ask the doctor, he doesn't teach you what you're doing, what he's doing every step of the way. It's, you have a problem, do you want it fixed? Great. Here's the date. And that's fantastic. You don't. Unless you're in that training, mentee, mentor, consulting relationship, or coaching, there's no reason for it. You say, hey, here's what we're looking for. So how do you identify the company? Do you do it based on dollar amount? You know they're doing 1 to 2 million a year, 5 million, 10, 20? Or can you just tell by the person that you don't care about that as much as you can just tell that this person's got 961,000 questions. When you said, where's your logo? How do you identify them? It's.

It's. That's a good question. It's a mix though, right? Yeah. Yeah.

You've said, hey, so you're considering ads and they asked 900 things and you're like, I don't even know what your product is or website. What are we selling?

Yeah, I tell people it's already a red flag when, like, they're saying, hey, let's get a call. But like, I knew you're signing like 3ndAs, I was like, I. All right, like, you probably think your idea is the best idea in the world and somehow I'm going to steal it. Right. Usually, like the best founders with like millions of dollars of revenue are just like, hey, here's what I'm building. What can you do? It's usually, it's usually brand new founders that make you sign it. And that's already one check mark in the red flags. Right? So. But really, kind of what you said, it's usually like some, some signs that you have product market fit are if you're talking to a digital marketing manager of the company, very obvious. That means that they themselves, the founders, have been able to step out of that role and identify that they need help. So talking to a digital marketing manager really helps. But again, we work with a lot of founders that sort of come to us saying, hey, I have a digital marketing team and they can't scale.

Because we've had that happen before saying, hey, look, like, my team can't scale and I've told them already and I'm looking for an agency. But again, we work with a lot of companies like that because that makes sense to us.

For a second because.

That'S a unique situation. And I've encountered it too, because I've been helping people with business book publishing for some time and they're like, oh, I've already written stuff. I've done this. That they've never done a book, though. They've done an article here or there and it's like, okay, you have 951,000 articles. You never thought to throw a cover? Okay, I'll behave. But the point is, what do you think about the people that have the marketing team or they just have that now? It sounds like you're running into the people that have the common sense to say, what we're doing isn't working. We need your help.

Yep.

I'm sure you've also run into the people who are like, oh, we're already doing I mean, you don't even get half a sentence out. And they're like, oh, we've tried that, we're doing this, that. And you can just tell they're shut off. Do you think it's good that they have a team and they're at a point? Do you think they maybe got them from A to B, but now they're going from B to C? Or do you think they just put people in place for the sake of people putting. Putting people in place?

Yeah, I think it's both. Like anything, it's like, even for our company or for my previous company, sometimes you get so busy that you just hire people just because, like, hey, look, I'm going to bring somebody because I need a body to do some work, right? It's like someone's got to upload ads. Someone's got to do something. And then you realize, like, it's. I mean, you've probably heard it, fire fast and hire slowly. But firing. Firing fast is so hard. It's like, it's not as easy as people say. It's like you develop relationships with people. You talk to them, they're kind of a cool person. It's like, maybe they'll get better, maybe if I switch their roles, you know, it's like, it's really hard. And so basically what happens I see is that, like, they probably hired the wrong person and now they're just like, hey, look, I'm looking for experts to come in and help. So that's kind of what I'm seeing for a lot of people. And sometimes they're just like, the people. It's interesting because I can see when you hire a marketing manager at a company how, like, during an interview, they sound great. Because we do it too when we hire people to our agency, like, oh, wow, this person's so great. And then we're just like, whoa, this person doesn't know anything.

Because of the interview they knew. So I can see why hiring is so hard. Like, the way I think about it, at least for me, it's like. And for me, it's interesting learning hiring in the marketing space because I came from a computer science background in computer science. Whenever I worked at Mint or Intuit, we had to do a, like, logical test. We had to do problem solving tests. Like, you don't even get an interview unless, like, you knew how to solve algorithms. So, like, you knew that you knew what something was going on in your brain. Where for, like, when I was doing interviews for, like, marketing, I'm like, like, they're like, oh, I can't. Like it was just talking like, hey, like, how do you think about marketing? What sales funnels? I'm like, okay, it looks like, you know, but then, you know, talking and implementing are very two different things and strategy different.

So I remember hearing this story about someone that put out a. Oh, what was it? A coder application, the resume in leet speak and then had a QR code at the bottom. And I was like, that's freaking genius. Because unless you know, you've weeded out everyone who doesn't know. And even then, that's just the starting point. I'm like, that's killer. I gotta do something like that. I don't need anyone right that right now, but I just want to do it and the thing too.

Like, at least for me, it's. I thought I. So like, we've tried to implement tests for like digital marketing managers and a lot of them just like, no, I don't do this. Where I think it's interesting because for coders we're kind of like trained that like you're gonna do this at an interview. So it's like the perk is that it is already there. Whereas, like introducing this to like people that haven't had it, it's like, why do you need this? I'm good enough. Right? So it's like that mentality is like, all right, like we're going to battle here where for coders, like, I knew that, like I had to like study coding interviews, books and that's like a whole section on Amazon on how to pass that coding interview. Right. So it's very interesting.

Yeah. And I think there's some people who are good at the front end, you know, they get good at saying the right stuff, wearing the right thing. They get good at like here. But when it comes down to it, like, we have a massive problem. It's Friday at 3:30 and this needs to be fixed before we leave for the weekend.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? That's a whole different mindset and that.

Exactly. It's about mindset. A lot of people, we've hired people where they're great talkers and then we see them execute and we're just like, whoa, like, where's your logic? Like, like, at least for ad stuff, right? At least for me, it's like, for me it's something. I'm like, it's so obvious. I'm like, hey, like, you spent 500 bucks. Your CPA was supposed to be 50. You haven't spent any. You haven't made any sales. So shouldn't you pause the ads? And they're like, oh yeah. I'm like, it's kind of obvious. Like, you know, for me, I'm like, where are we going wrong here? You know, what's going on? So. But again, like, that's the way I think about it. So going back to what we said before with like companies, I feel like everybody makes hiring mistakes. They come to us because we want to work with a team. And again, I think a lot of thing too is like going back to the way we pay and the way agencies charge. It's in the best interest of a company to say, hey, look, if I pay this company, I'm only going to pay them when they make me results. And going back to ad spend, we're only going to increase your ad spend when we're making you money because you'll tell us, hey, guys, spend more money. So for them, it's a very different incentive than maybe an employee that just gets a salary that, that just says, hey, yep, no matter what happens, you're still gonna get paid.

Yeah. And that's a great differentiation because I think every business wants to advertise. But when they're saying stuff like sign the 15ndAs before I tell you anything, like, okay, cool, maybe you do. I really wanna make a joke. Cause that's my personality. I was gonna make some, a joke about some variation of a soup spoon. But at the same time, I love entrepreneurship and creativity and I wanna honor whatever anyone created because I know what it's like to start off. But at the same token, it's like I think they're just scared to begin with. It's like everything. Like, don't tell them what microphone. In my case, don't tell them what microphone I'm using. Don't tell them how to print the book. You know, when you're going to publish it, it's like it doesn't matter. If you think that's your secret, you have a problem.

Yeah.

Would you agree?

Exactly. I think so too. And that's exact. So I know that feeling too because I used to think like that, like if I tell like my maid company, I'm like, oh my God, if I tell people what I'm doing to get bookings, they're going to copy me. Then you realize that like no one.

Wants, no one's willing to do it.

You could, no one's going to put.

The whole thing out in a 17 step process. Most people won't do it.

Most people won't do it. And the reason why is because people have their own ideas and they want to build what they want. They don't want to build what you want. Your idea might sound cool for like a minute and then like next day you're just like, I totally forgot what Kevin said. Like, because like his idea isn't my idea. And that's why, I guess it goes with the movie Inception. Right. It's like you can only. You really love your own ideas. And that's why it's so hard to convince somebody because we're humans, we're selfish. We would say, I want to build my own company with my idea because I think my idea is the best. Going back to what, why you want to sign an NDA because you think your idea is the best. But like you probably know Mario, as you sort of have done more companies, you realize it's not the idea. It's kind of like everything around that idea. Like the people, the traction, how you market, how you think about that. Because going back to like ideas in general, like Google for example, everybody knows Google, everybody knows Facebook. Those weren't the first search. Search engine. It wasn't the first like social network. But so that's an idea. But Mark and whatever, the Larry and Sergey, the Google guys had a different version of that idea. And that's sort of what I tell people all the time. It's your implementation of the idea. And obviously those companies are big companies. But another way I think about it for other people is I go down the street here in New York City, there's 20 coffee shops. It's coffee shops, the idea. But you still see 20 companies still existing. Variation of it, the variations of that. And that's what your idea is. Variation of the idea. And what this idea tells you, like a coffee shop, it tells you that there's demand. So people want it. That's a good thing. You don't want to come up with an idea that no one has ever heard about because that means you're going to have to educate the market and that's super expensive.

Yeah. And also say the goals in the heart too. You could have company a doing nefarious things and you know they're still successful dollar wise. But you could have a company that has more like Tom Shoes. We don't want to just be a successful company. We're also going to give back. There's people who just flat out they're not the right type of person and they don't want to do it. Also the goals, your goal Might just to be having one local restaurant, that's a great goal. I have clients that are like that. And I also know and have people who they want more, let's just say so it's not one's right or one's wrong. I mean, the food in question doesn't even come in the matter, even though they're two different things. But you know what I mean, what's the goal with it? And I think it's great everyone wants to advertise and everything, but where would you say they should start? Regardless of the business, regardless of the industry? What. Where should you say someone start if they're on the tipping point of I want to run ads, but I'm kind of hesitant about it. How do we get them past that hesitation.

In your words?

Yeah. So if we're to do like, I would think about two things here. Like, I love advertising. Like Facebook ads is what we do. But I love, like SEO even more. I think any business should be thinking about SEO. It's probably my favorite source of traffic. Why is business the reason why I like SEO? Because when you're building a product or service, you need to be thinking about what customers are searching for. Going back to what I said before, like, for us, we ran the maid company, made sellers. I always run to rank for. I saw that Cleaning Services NYC had about 2,000 search terms a month for New York only. So I said, hey, there's about 2,000 customers that I can get a month that's gonna need my cleaning company. And for me, that showed me that this idea or this thing I'm building has. Has traction or there's demand for. And again, the reason why I like SEO too is because it does take time in the beginning. But again, as you sort of build links, as you get content, that's sort of a compounding effect. You rank easier as the years go by. You know, you're one, two, and three, you realize that, like, you're getting all these customers, quote, unquote, for free. Not for free, obviously, as SEO costs money, but it's the customer acquisition cost isn't increasing as much as something like a Facebook or a Google. So that's how I think about it. And plus, SEO is a longer term. So I would say plan for at least six months of nothingness. And then all of a sudden I got traffic. Right? And then for SEO for Google and Facebook ads, I would say consider that if you have some money and you want to get customers in sales, so that's kind of like, like a hit of dopamine. It's like, all right, I got a customer. And you know, and then you keep going and it works, right? It's like. And of course you can make a big business through ads. Right? Like, um. But the way I would think about it is there's two channels. So if you have a product, let's say a product kind of like a shoes, for example. Toms, I think Google shopping ads is probably one of your best bets to get started. And the reason why is because, like I said, people are searching for shoes. Red shoes, blue shoes, you want to show up there. And that's a very buying intent keyword. So at least you know, you have a shot at getting a customer. Whereas let's say you have a service and again, let's say a brand new product or you have a little bit less money, then I would say maybe use Facebook. Because Facebook's very discovery based. You still are targeting people that like, like shoes. Or even now with the new iOS update, it's much harder. But now you really need to think about it. It's like more the content and creative. So if you don't have too much content or creative, such as videos or images, then Facebook's gonna be much harder for you because you're not gonna. Your stuff is not gonna look good. So then go back to Google where it's just the tech space. So, you know, add a keyword and you start advertising.

Yeah, that would be an advantage of Google. You just have a link and it goes straight to your site. You're good.

Yeah, so Facebook is like a little bit harder. That's. But like, like mostly I tell people.

Now, but it's a whole different opportunity also.

Yep. Yeah.

I mean, if you're going, if you're going, I want one over the other, regardless of where you fall. That's a whole different marketplace. You're just missing.

Yeah, it's complete. It's two completely different channels. And it just depends on what you want to start with first. If. If you have a lot of content, for example, like you're advertising socially. So for example, a lot of brands that we work with have never done Facebook ads, but they have a really big IG presence because that's sort of like organic growth. So we can use a lot of that content for Facebook ads because it's the same format that Facebook uses Instagram uses. So that's the way you want to think about it. And a lot of content these days is very simple to make. Just take your phone out and record yourself doing something so that's some of the best stuff that we see and is just tell your friends record doing something with your product.

So yeah, and also for the, the ads like you're saying the creative, the artwork, you know, for anyone that's listening when you see the ad, don't think that it's just the pictures at random and it's not a carefully crafted thumbnail or anything. There's so many different apps now to just create artwork even from a decade ago, let alone two decades ago that you, you would need some serious graphic design knowledge to even pull that off. And I see stuff all the time. It's like there's 15 different things you can do on your phone while you're riding your bike. And it's like, oh yeah, I started a campaign.

Yeah, it's like, wow, it's so simple now. Yeah. And the thing too, I tell people all the time like just use your IG stories editor. Like that's so good. There's so many filters on there, so many fonts. Like some of the best ads, I'm just like, this is crazy. Like we have a designer sometimes I'm just like, I don't know why we're using like InDesign anymore. Like just use like the video editor. Because you're paying thousands of dollars for the software that like it doesn't work as well as like the native stuff.

Like even the TikTok Facebook, like with the Facebook and Instagram creator studio. You know what people don't realize is if you can wrap your head around the company's not trying to hurt you, they're trying to help you. Because the more they help you, the more you stay on them and the more they make Instead of needing 13 third party softwares, I mean look what they did with Snapchat. And what's the other one TikTok like oh there's someone new company, let's try and buy them. Oh, they said no. Great. Hey coders, guess what your job is this month. Five weeks later, guess what? We're rolling out. They want you to stay on the platforms.

Yeah.

So I love the fact that it's now natively only took like eight years. But yeah, you know, thing they want us on their platform versus the other guy. Now I'm gonna shut my mouth. I was gonna say something about that can cut out the other things they're doing. But the fact is. Do you know the today's numbers? Because I looked recently, I'm sure it's higher. How many people are on Facebook now?

Like over A billion, right? Over a billion now, I don't remember.

That's a whole lot of people.

Yeah. One billion customers. And like, I think, like, out to the US Is like some of their biggest growth. So if you have a company or product, like, I think it's very interesting going back to like, products and ideas. Like, Facebook is great in the US but international growth for your company is probably something that most people don't really think about. But Facebook has grown year over year internationally. Not the US Anymore. Because us. Us is obviously a lot of people and you have a big market, but a lot of big company. A lot of. If your company becomes somewhat big and successful, you realize that you need to grow internationally. Like, for example, Uber, you know, Facebook. Maybe Uber's a better example for people. Uber was started in the US and almost grew so fast that like every country copied them. And what did Uber have to do? They basically had to buy them all out because the business model wasn't hard. It's just like, hey, an app with a taxi. But then Uber wanted to be everywhere, so they. So it's. So again, that's another opportunity for entrepreneurs. Look at a company in the U.S. see what's hot. Like, oh, it's not in Argentina. Great, let me go start in Argentina then. Right. So you have a company. It. It's. I mean, you probably know, Mario, there's like, there was a company that just did that.

I.

For what it's called, that literally just took USA companies and expanded them in South America and Europe. And basically what happened, like the main company that the US started, they would buy them. Literally, that was their whole business model, made tons of money. Yeah.

I mean, that's the great thing. I love entrepreneurship because it's kind of like the wild west. It's like there's a lot less rules than in a job, but at the same point, you still have to serve the market. If you're just doing stuff for yourself and you're not adding value, no matter what the business is, it's not gonna work. That's why I love the ads, because there's. I know more people than not that have great businesses, great hearts, they wanna grow, they just don't know what to do next.

Yep. Yeah.

So I think that you're talking about is a good way to do it. So would you say for someone that wants to do them, they should be focusing more on the images or the creative? What's more important to you? The text or the artwork?

I think the most important part is going to be the Text. And that's going to be the text on the image ads or the video ads. So and again when I say text I mean just really make it explicit about what you're selling or what your product does. Like for example we sell Facebook ads. We literally say like hey, we'll help you scale with Facebook ads. Just be very direct. I think a lot of people try to get too clever and cute like scale to the moon. Okay, what does that mean? Okay, like what does that mean? Yeah, yeah, you see like people try to get to like this is the way I think about it. Creative. Yeah, this is the way I think about it. I say like a lot of times entrepreneurs get great ideas from a bunch of these VC funded startups. You know they raised tens of millions of dollars and then they look at those ads, for example Nike, like you're not going to be Nike that can use one mess, one line and all of a sudden you're going to sell it a shoe for 400 bucks. That's like a hundred years of like experience. They're also paying celebrities billions of dollars. I say if you're a new entrepreneur, go look at the, go look at the non VC funded startups that actually have to make money online to survive and pay their employees because you know for a fact they're hiring people that are going to be performance focused. You either working with an agency that's performance focused and that they're looking to do to be profitable for their company. So look for those small businesses that are around two, three years that actually are continuing to grow with paid and organic because they're doing something right versus you know, VC funded companies that you know, have a great for them, that they raise money. Of course not saying it's bad but they have a different, very different mindset, Very different run business model. Yeah, and business model. Yep.

You know I, I've used the analogy for the Walmart. If you're trying to compete like Walmart, well you better have a billion dollars in sales, employees and being buying stuff in bulk. Oh well I'll just lower the price of everything like Walmart did. Yeah, you don't have the margins. You have a 15% margin and you lowered the cost 20%. Yeah, you're going to lose money the more you sell. The more you sell, the more you lose. You have to. And I'm glad you brought that up because that's the one thing I love about, you know, when we running our ads. Let's say you're doing 100 bucks a day, a thousand bucks A day, Whatever the case is. Like the example of the gentleman who didn't look at it. Our rule is like after 24, at most 48 hours, you know, you either tweak it or bail on it.

Yep.

You know, you don't run it for a week and go through the whole budget. If no one's clicking on it, the conversions don't go through or anything. So for direct response marketing, you know, you said for a million bucks, you have seven days to sell out of this online. You're not going to wait five or six days to see if the ads performing. You can get real time statistics with it. I believe it is real time now. At the very least you can see the yesterday's, today's numbers and yesterday's numbers at least quicker than wait for a campaign to roll out in the newspaper.

Yeah, exactly. And that's like, that's so important for media buyers, so important for entrepreneurs is like, that's why I like going back.

To what people say.

Facebook ads. Like, people hate them, but they're so important for small businesses because it just helps them grow. And, and yes, I think Facebook ads will still be there. I think you're just gonna be a little bit tougher. And so for me, it's like the way I think about it, it's good and bad. It means that you have to actually have a great product because obviously you probably see Mario, like a lot of products the last year too are just kind of like, what the hell are you selling? Like, is it actually good? Right. Like, and it's like another me too product. So now I think it's gonna be help with like true innovation. And that is sort of what entrepreneurs like are now. So I think about two ways. Last two, three years. Great. It means a lot of people got exposed to entrepreneurship. Oh, crap. I can make money online. Oh, that's great. But now it's like, oh, wait, now I can't make money at that easily. So let me actually innovate and think about new ideas and products. So that's the way that's my hopeful view of thinking. Because that's kind of reminds me of like back in the day when software first came out. I was like, whoa, what's this? All this new software, the World Wide web, like, who created this thing? Right. That was an innovation. Right. Um, where E Commerce. Right now you've probably seen it. It's kind of like almost the same product with like a different label. And it's like, which one do you buy now it's kind of like mattresses, like the beds, like when Casper first came out. True innovation. Now it's like, wait, there's like 20, 30 mattresses. Like, what's the difference now?

So, yeah, and also, who sticks through? It's like, great. I, you know, same thing with podcasting. Hey, you got a new show. Great. Excited. Fantastic. You know, congrats. Seriously, I hope it works out well for you. But it's like, give it six months or a year and see if they're still around. I know people who have told me candidly, you know, other authors, speakers, CEOs, and they're like, yeah, I usually wait to see if they have 5150 plus episodes to even consider them. And then everyone else is going, I just started a show. How do I get Oprah on it? Yeah, do a second one.

Do a third. I've heard that too. Yeah, I heard that. I mean, I've had my podcast since two years ago now, and it's like just consistency and. Yeah, it's like when I was first starting out, like, no, I could get on no one's podcast. I'm like, hey, look, I have like over a hundred episodes now. Like, I have over 400 reviews on iTunes. And it's like, consistency is sort of what matters in, like, not just podcasts, but you probably know, just any day, Any day. Life, business, like, learn something, read something. It's sort of what drives you and sort of what gets you to a point, A to B. It's just being consistent and not giving up. Because like anything, it's easy to give up. And podcasting is one that I see a lot of people just give up because it's. The views are like, it. I don't know. I don't want. People think podcasting is easy to start, but it's really hard to be consistent and to get listeners. So it's. It's.

Yeah. And I would even say not just with podcasting, but you can screw up upwards of 90% of whatever it is. But the fact that you're still going, people give you credit, and all it takes is one time of getting it right, and now you're on a whole another track. You know, business especially, oh, you did it bad for the first 10 years, but you're 11. Watch out. You know, always be careful what you're saying to someone.

Yeah.

Because life is long.

And it's so funny I say that because I always tell people a time, like, you just need to get lucky once. That's it. Like, I feel like once you get lucky, Once, like, everything is good and it's. Everything else can be like, okay. Like, everything else is a learning experience. Oh, yeah.

And.

Yeah. And that's. Yeah. It's so funny. I think about that too. I tell people all the time. Just. You seem to get lucky once. Like, even for me, with my business, like, I was doing it for. Since I was like, 18. And then I started my first, like, I also people, like, made sellers, like, the cleaning company. I also people. That's like my. That's like my first real business. But because before then, I was just, like, doing stuff, and it was just like building companies.

Let's talk about that for a hot minute. Because, you know, there's no way I didn't want to screw it up and. But I'm looking at. You have so many different things you've done successfully. But take us on a quick journey of growing home cleaning business from 0 to 3 million in 18 months. How the heck did you pull that off in a cleaning company?

Yeah.

What was the biggest. Biggest pivot milestone? What was the secret to that?

So I guess the biggest secret to that was SEO. Like, really? When I started doing that, that was, I think, 20, 20, 15, 2016. At that time, I just learned SEO because I was working at Zara, a startup. And the reason why I learned SEO was because I saw that Zarli again. We raised all this money, but we had no customers. So I was like. At the time, as an engineer, I was just like. I was like, hey, I'm working on programming stuff. But I was kind of doing some marketing things because I was part of the marketing team too. So I got into SEO and I was like, okay, this makes sense now. I know now we're not getting customers because we're trying to. We're talking about. We're something that I think engineers make. And like, people make is like, they have, like, their own, like, vernacular for words. I'm just like. But people don't describe it like that. I'm like. So I'm like, why are we calling it, like, this weird way? But, like, people call it, like, maid service. I'm like, but we're saying, like, a random. Another one in word, right? So anyways, I learned about SEO, and then that's when I got into learning more about home cleaning. The reason why we did home cleaning was because when I was working at Zarli, that sort of vertical was very popular for us. And I saw some of the issues that people were having where, like, you had a great maid, you couldn't bring her back because she was only one person. It was like her own business. It was like, a lot. A lot of freelancers. Right. Kind of like, you can't scale. So I was like, oh, what if I make it like a maid company of all these great maids? I was like, what if I'm like, Uber for maid cleaning? That's really what I used to call it, by the way. Uber for maid cleaning.

I see what you did.

Yeah. So I took all these, like, ideas, and I was like. And then at the time, I was living in California, so I was like, I'm gonna do in New York City. Because then I saw the search volume. I was like, oh, New York City has a lot of search volume.

When you said that and you said, I saw there was a search for 2000 in this niche, I was like, I think he leveraged this because what most people don't realize, and I want to point out, most people go, this is only 2,000. I'm looking for 5, 10, 15, 30. But the reality, if you get away from the computers, because I think with all the lights and all this trash, it's not real trash. I'm actually very thankful for it. But people, you lose touch with reality. And it's like, well, unless I'm talking to 900,000 people, it's like, you know how big of a room that would be? 2,000 people. If you could convert even half of those, that's a thousand clients. Could you handle 1000 people? Of which I would say, just guessing, let's just say 50% of those. So that's 500 on monthly recurring.

Yep, exactly. And then cleaning is recurring. And so it's like, that's a lot of exactly what you said. I was like, this is fine. Like, 500 customers, they each pay me 150 each. I was like, this is a pretty good business. I was like, okay, I don't need that much. And that's. That's sort of what I thought, because.

That'S a very high mrr.

Yeah. So we did a lot of money for that cleaning company because of, like, that same. And that's why, for me, I was like, oh, wow. People probably don't see this. People. I would have never thought about it unless I was working at Zara, which is kind of like, just lucky because I was working there. And I was like, oh, wow. Like, I never. I never knew cleaning companies would charge so much. And that's kind of where I got that insight. Right. It's like I told Time, you just get insights from anywhere. Like, that's what I was just like, oh. I just like, oh, pretty interesting.

So did you, did you exit from that completely to start voi or do you still have it going and it's just taking care of itself?

Yeah. So I sold it completely. So basically at its peak for mate sellers, we were in New York City. So we bought out a company in Chicago, we bought another company in Boston and we were in New Jersey. And then we also acquired three other cleaning companies in New York City. And the reason why I did that is because going back to SEO, I love SEO. I said, hey, these companies are like on page two. I know I'm good at SEO. I'm going to buy those page two companies and move them to page one. That way I can control the full homepage of like when people search for like maid service or home cleaning. Because it's funny because people call our companies and it's like we see their. The phone just ring, ring, ring, ring.

And now did you reach random all to the same company?

No, all rebranded a different company. So I did like, you know, baby Gap gap. Like just different companies all owned by the same sort of parent company, which is my company because that's where I.

As the sole proprietor or smaller company names you. You kept them all under your umbrella.

And all under an umbrella. But like one was called like Maid Sellers, other called like Planet Maids. Just different made names. That way people didn't know it was like the same. But of course in the footer, you know, you have like your legal name.

It's like, hey, how many subsidiaries did you have?

We, when before I sold that, we had maybe four or five.

Okay.

And then basically we did was like once we were having ranking, we, we would also rank them in other cities that we were in already. And then let's say we were in Chicago and we had like, we would just funnel the leads to like my main business. So it's, it was a little tough because.

Each, each business had its own like sort of software. So like it wasn't pulled into like one big like, you know, system of like, hey, here all the cleanings. It was like you had a cleanings for a cleaning, cleaning for company B. And it was like we. But we had the same pool of mates. And then the mates would be like, get a job from cleaning company A and company B. And then they'll be like, what's like so a little confusing there. But we wanted to make it work and we did it. So that's how we thought about it.

That's fantastic. So I've heard of split testing, like copy and ads, but it sounds like you split tested the business and just went with whatever was working more. Because maybe this company's ranking higher for these search terms. Correct me if I'm wrong in this city, but we'll rename it here and we'll get the better volume. Is that what you were doing?

Exactly what we did. And again, the thing too is, like, we tested pricing, we just raised the pricing because, like, hey, like, can we charge more? Right? Say, hey, look, like. So at its peak, I think right now the it's. The companies are bought out, so everybody's kind of the same price. But before we would we categorize ourselves like high price, medium price, and lower price and then just sort of at least get every part of the market. That was our initial idea.

Same thing with the hotel chains. Like, a lot of people don't realize, but, you know, there's only a few chains now. And if you go to the one I'm thinking of Marriott, you go on their site, they're just. They're just. There's like 30 of them. And it's top, you know, top luxury, top medium. Higher, higher, lower, lower. There's like five or six, seven different levels.

Yeah, and that's exactly like, I saw a lot of companies do that. And I tell people the time, like, this is a very common business practice that I just don't see people do that much. Like, hotels do it all the time. Clothing companies do a lot of time. I think it's very rare for companies not to do this. It just make. For me, it made sense. I was like, at least for me, with SEO, like, I know that the first three spots get all the clicks. So why am I not ranking for the first three spots? Like, yes, that's what I thought.

And yeah, and I'm glad you brought up the SEO, because even with the Facebook ads, you could say, well, what about the copy? What about the headline? What about the text? What about this, this, this, this, this? But it's like if you never even did a search, like, who are you targeting?

Yep.

What's the search volume? What words are gonna play the best? Because these might respond well with people, but if you're doing hardcore ads, which ones are getting the highest volume?

Yeah, and that's. And that thing it goes back to, we said, like, that's why SEO so important to Facebook ads too, because you should go and see what people are running for that keyword or like the main. What people call head term. Right. And There's a lot of tools out there, like Ahrefs, you probably heard of it, that will. You can input a competitor, let's say, like apple.com and you could see all the ads that they ran. So if you want to. Let's say potentially you want to do an ipod competitor, look at all the iPad ads that Apple's run and see what. How they're describing their product. Potentially use that on Facebook or Google as well. So I think, at least for me with marketing and anything in general, I say, like, I. The biggest thing I say is, like, I love looking at competitors. I love using spy tools to see what people have done before. That way I can learn. Um, I tell people, I'm like, yeah, go, go research. Like, there's. For direct response. Like, you probably know, it's like you literally are studying, like, letters from 20 years ago and just seeing, like, what copy can I steal? Or like, you know, model for my own version. Because, like, this has worked before. So I want to use it for my version too.

Now what about. Let's. Let's give the audience one. One super bonus that they might not know about on Facebook.

That you don't need any super tools for. And I'm trying to tell you without saying the answer, do you know what.

I'm getting at the ad library?

There you go.

Yeah, the Facebook ad library is really great.

I think recently Facebook made it a lot better. So if people go to it, like, obviously you can use it to spy on, you know, a Facebook page and see what ads they run. But I think. I'm not sure if people know this too, is you can actually just put in a keyword and it'll show you all the ads that contain that keyword. And that's another way. For example, we're doing research for, like, a FPG RPG game. We just type in RPG game or RPG download or RPG mobile, and you'll see all, like, the ads for that sort of genre. And you can do this, like your niche. Let's say you're doing, like, fitness T, you know, type in fit T and see what companies are running.

Yeah, I was shocked when they came out with that because.

I mean, it was a secret decoder ring. And I normally don't do this stuff, but maybe I feel like Joe Rogan here having here, it's facebook.com adlibrary but it will redirect you to some other link. I'll make sure it's in the show notes there. But this is why I have like 400,000 monitors yeah, I mean, it's a cool thing. That was so cool. You knew what I was saying. I was like, how do I tell him without typing in the chat?

Yeah, I think it's probably like, what.

I'm hearing a lot of is do competitive analysis before you start just even creating the ad, let alone spending hundreds and thousands of dollars.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And again, going back to. If you're doing Facebook ads and you're using the LAD library, go to competitor. One thing that you'll realize, similar to what you said, Mario, is like, if an ad's working, you're probably keep it running. Right. And if it isn't working, you don't kill it. So the way I like to think about it is find competitors that have been running ads for two, three months. If they're running for two, three months, it'll say like in the library. I'll say like, no, February. Like, that's when it started. If they're still running it in February and it's in August. Okay, this thing is probably working. Yeah, Let me go copy that ad. I tell my designers, okay, go. We're going to download this ad, copy it, and replace it with our stuff and we're going to run it and see why they're running it for so long. Yeah.

And scale, bail and tweak it. Don't run stuff for a week or two if it's not performing. Do you ever go past a day or two? I want to ask you that.

Yeah, we typically do at least three to five days. Um, again, it. But again, it depends on how much budget is behind that. So if we're doing like, let's say your CPA is 30, we're gonna run it for 150 a day for three to five days max. Unless it's like a promo. Like let's say, let's say like, you know, July 4th, and we're, we have like a thousand dollar budget on that within a few hours or kill it. Because we say, hey, look, this July 4th promo flopped. We're not gonna run it like the next day. It's no more July 4th. So that's. But again, it's with running ads and campaigns, everybody's slightly different. And that's kind of like what the science behind Facebook ads is. Like, everybody's got their own formulas, everybody's got their own intuition. And that's how you should think about it, too. Like, the way your business runs, you might know that, hey, it's weird that at 6 o' clock we're not getting any Sales, we know it's like the best time for us where another business, it's like, okay, yeah, six o'. Clock. We normally don't get sales. So this is why sometimes I tell people reading stuff online is sometimes not helpful, because everybody posts online their best results, you know, oh, my God, I'm getting you.

Like, my favorite was back in the day, and I still see it and I still chuckle. When email marketing really took off like 100 years ago, it's like, what is the best day to send an email? Yeah, Tuesday. What is the best day to send an email? Tuesday. Well, guess what? When everyone sees this after three to six to nine months and you get 47 emails on Tuesday, guess which one doesn't stand out anymore? So send it Wednesday.

Yeah. And what you're saying is sort of like, you're so right. And I think the way I think about it too, it's like if someone's, this is the way I think. And maybe it's just like an SEO someone taught me. This is like, if everybody's talking about it and saying it, that tactic or method probably doesn't work anymore because the best tactics are not getting revealed out. And the way I think about it is at least for Facebook, right? The guys that grew Facebook, they're like a growth team. Those guys are like, have never written one thing about how they grew Facebook because they probably are so ironclad NDA that Facebook's like, you discuss how we grew, you know, who, who do you think is gonna copy them? Snapchat? TikTok? Like, so I always tell people, it's funny when, like, people put this stuff online and I'm like, if it was really working well, trust me, you wouldn't tell people because you're gonna make all the money you can until it doesn't.

Yeah. And I, I, I was a little irritated when they stopped that, especially with the business pages where it was like, there was the module. It's like, invite all your friends. You could invite hundreds and hundreds of people. And now it's like maybe 50 a day.

50? Yeah.

Like, oh, we don't want you spamming people. Look, I just gave you 4,000 people. Give me a hundred bonus for this event that we're putting on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's interesting because they shifted from tell everyone, tell everyone, tell everyone to. Are you talking to people again? We already got all your friends.

Yeah, yeah. It's like growth at all costs until, like, wait, never mind. Like, we, we don't want to be doing that anymore. Like, same Thing with, like, the social graph, like, the API for developers to, like, hey, developers, connect all your friends. And they're like, actually, like, people are building apps to essentially, like, take people off Facebook. It's like, actually don't use our graph. It's actually our data, so you can't use it anymore. So it's like, I remember when they.

Launched it, and it was like, oh, this is the coolest thing ever. And I started think of ways I could help my clients. And then it was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Now it's privacy. You can't hook into this. You can't hook into that. I'm like, yeah, yeah.

I think it's interesting, too, because, like, this whole privacy thing is interesting for Facebook, as in, like, it's growth. Obviously, people are like, oh, my God, Facebook wants to fight privacy. Or, like, you know, they got to Congress, all that stuff for them. It's kind of like any new social media network is essentially getting handicapped now because basically, they can't use the growth tactics that Facebook use. Hey, download your whole contact and email them and spam them. Basically, they might block that now. And Facebook. And for Facebook, it's great because now it's gonna be a very different growth. And I mean, people. I'm not sure if people have heard the story, but Facebook buys out a lot of these, like, apps, like, these, like, sort of, like, VPN apps. And what they do is they then spy on the traffic, and then they see what. Which apps are getting a lot of traffic. And that's kind of. That's how they figured out Instagram was growing. That's how they. That's how they bought them out. Because obviously, a company like Facebook doesn't have that data, but they saw in their network that they were saying, this company is getting so much traffic, it's like, Facebook, whoa. It's like the growth is crazy. And then that's how they found them. The app is called Envalo. And Facebook buys out all these, like, random companies that you don't know. But behind the scenes, they're mining all the data and seeing what's happening.

So they don't want us taking their data, but at the same time, they don't have access to other. That's.

Yeah.

Props for the creativity. That's kind of.

That's very creative. But I was like, whoa. I was like, that's so smart because, yeah, VPNs, they. They see all the data. So then Facebook's, like, seeing what apps are getting traffic, and that's how they're figuring out, like, what to buy. I mean, I don't think they can do it anymore because obviously it got discovered. And like, it's sort of like all these.

What I'm hearing there is not just whether you should or shouldn't, but if something is in your way in business, what's another creative way? Like, like you're saying, like, we gave everyone the ad library.

Yeah.

You know, whether you want to copy or not, use it for inspiration or not, ignore it or not. It's like, how can you tell? How can you just look behind the scenes to see the real answers and, and just don't always go for the shiny objects because, like, you're saying, like, email marketing. You want to know the best day of the week to send an email when it's the best day for your audience. And I don't know why people think only one day a week is, oh, I have a newsletter, a monthly newsletter. Like, what is it, 2002?

Yeah. People read all the stuff. People read all the time.

You gotta be more.

Read emails all the time. Yeah. I tell people, like, you gotta send email at least maybe daily if possible. If a content interesting, interesting, then you're going to, you're going to read it. And I think people forget about that. Like, your content needs to be interesting. Like, you go to Facebook every day because it's interesting. You go to Instagram because it's interesting. Same thing with a newsletter.

Like, I don't want to do it and annoy them, then, you know, subconsciously you're not putting out good enough stuff. Because the reality is, you know, when I write my books, I make them as good as I possibly can and give everything. And same with the show. I put so much into it. You know, whether you like me or like the guest or whatever, you're never gonna accuse me of, like, holding back and not delivering. You might not like me, you might not like the guest, that's fine, whatever. But, you know, it was well produced and I gave it my all. Same thing with the books and everything. It's like, it might be for you, it might not, but you I'm never gonna get accused of. Well, he was just trying to sell me into the course and sell me into the. It's like, no, I'm trying to give you my very best at every single level. So to your point of.

You know, if you just want to pay for the book, pay for the course, pay for coaching, or have us do it concierge, there's something for you. I Don't really care what you choose. I'm just trying to give you the answers and help you.

Yeah. And I think that's the way I think about it, too. I'm like, hey, like, I have so many ways we can help your business. It could be ads, it could be coaching, it could be books. Just let me know what's best for you. Like, I know everybody has a different budget, but, like, when I talk to people or I pitch them, I'd say, hey, look, like, this is when it makes sense for you to work with me. This is when it doesn't. And if it doesn't, great. Like, let's let maybe find another way, buy my course, you know, whatever you want to do. But yeah, at least for me, too, when I'm pitching or talking to somebody, I'll tell them, like, hey, before we even sign anything, let me come up with a custom plan, custom solution for you. Let's see if it makes sense. If it does, great. Let's work together. If it doesn't, at least I knew that my team, we spent time thinking about their brand, thinking about the creators we want to make for them, and, and we gave it our best shot. And then the day that's all we can be proud of is like, hey, we gave her best shot. They want to work with us, fine. They steal our ideas. All right, whatever. Like, it's, it's, it's at least for me. Like, I know I did what I could do, and I'm, I'm fine with that.

Yeah, that's. It's what I've always told my clients, too. Like, especially when we do the book, the videos, you know, oh, if I put this out there, someone could steal it. Well, if you don't tell your audience, they're never going to know. And they're going to go for the person who is doing it because they're the one who's, you know, you know, they're just perceived as, oh, this person's, you know, we, we get in our minds of, well, if I say this, if I do this, that. But to the audience, to the prospects, it's this person seems like they're trying to help. This one doesn't. That's the first step. You at least have to qualify over here and go, do I like them? Do I, you know, trust them, do that? Are they putting good stuff out? Are they good fit for me? So it's no doubt you're doing the right stuff. I mean, congrats on all your success. I do have one question before we thank our sponsor.

It's the wheel of whatever. Yellow or black? That's not the question, though.

Yellow.

Oh, we're getting all yellows today. Fantastic. Or I mean, this week because I.

Don'T batch the episodes.

Oh, the question. So what's the next business that. What's the next business you'd love to start that you haven't done yet?

Good question. So I was actually thinking about this. This weekend. I want to do a search engine tracker for SEO. I tell you, I love SEO. Like, I.

Like, I was going to make a joke, but I'm like, is this creepy? If I'm like, yeah, I know. You were looking at. I was looking at your notes.

Yeah, yeah. I want to do like a search engine tracker. I. Something like, for me, I like SEO. I like paid. I want to do something in the search space because it's what I really like learning about and I still pay attention to it. And for me, like, it's not going anywhere either. Not going anywhere. And the search engine tracker, at least for me, I think about as a business model. Everybody needs to track their rankings. It's a. For me, it's like not a simple SaaS, but it's like one that people are paying money for it, 15, 20 bucks a month to track X amount of keywords. And, you know, it's getting better, you know, so I would love to do something like that, but again, I haven't yet because I've seen it. It's like, it's tough.

It's.

I've, you know, like anything. I've looked it up, like GitHub, like, how do you do it? You know, how do you search? How do you scrape Google without getting banned? Right. All that crazy terms. And so, but that's. I would love to do. Maybe not that, but I would love to still do a SaaS. Another software company, because that's my background.

Yeah, excellent. Well, that sounds like it would help a lot of people and a lot of fun. I developed one myself ten years ago. It's hard to believe to. To build WordPress. To build WordPress websites automatically in under five minutes.

Oh, damn. What was it called?

The IWD Now Freedom Platform.

Oh, I don't remember that one.

And it was just like we were doing websites when I first, first went full time in business. And, you know, people are like, oh, they're going away. Social media was on the rise and it was even before that, now that I think about it, but it was just like everything is a website. You think Facebook's not a Website? Oh, it's social media. You're stupid.

Yeah, it's a website.

Yeah. You know, and the SEO components, the back end to it. So, yeah, everything.

Yeah, everything. Everything. Even, like SEO for Facebook, people think about it. There was a. There was a recent article where Facebook did optimize for when you were searching for your own name. Like I say search was Kevin Urutia. Facebook would make a dummy page for you. That way you could say, hey, are you on Facebook? And create an account. So even companies like Facebook, and obviously firms like Facebook, do you think about SEO? Because it is a big source of traffic. Like Pinterest, for example. One of, like, this guy named Casey, I think worked there, and he's like a really top SEO guy, and he talks a lot about how Pinterest leverages traffic. Because if you search for, like, anything related to, like, anything, you probably will see a Pinterest page. Really?

Oh, for sure.

Yeah. So it's a big source of traffic, and that's why I like it. It's like a lot of people don't really think about it, but, like, big companies, like, there's a company I like called Zapier. Zapier. They. They grow. They have a really, really good SEO thing. Again, HubSpot as well. So a lot of these big companies, it's part of your growth channel. Like anything, right? Paid ads, Google, whatever. It's. It's a part of your. Part of your.

Yeah, I like that you said, don't try and copy Nike. And, you know, I made the joke about Walmart, but at the same time, it's like, if these companies are spending tens of millions of dollars to do something, you know, don't copy them. But maybe. Maybe watching one video on SEO basics might be in your good interest, because it's not going anywhere. The premise has been the same since inception. However, the algorithms and focus, you know, things get weighted differently. Things change with it, of course, but it's like riding the bike. It's like, once you know that, it's easier to do everything else. And one of my favorite quotes is, you know, the more you know, the easier it is to learn. Well, how does this relate to me right now? I don't know. But if I'd learned this, this year, this, this year, this, this year, the rest comes easier.

Exactly. And going back to what I said before with Facebook ads, too, like, you learn SEO and then you do Facebook ads, you're like, oh, yeah, like, I should use relevant copy to what people are searching for, because then it'll Resonate with them. And that's exactly what SEO. So it's like eventually Mark said like Facebook might go away, platforms might go away. For example, TikTok, who knew TikTok was coming in like five years ago, but there's still an advertising platform and what is it? It's just text and videos and you know how to do that already.

So you can go and crazy with TikTok is. I didn't realize it was musically.

Oh yeah, it was musically, yeah.

Until I made the account and it was like, you have videos on here. I'm like, what?

Yeah.

And it was like you said three, four years prior. It's like, ah, more acquisitions. Then I had to research it and figure out who the holding company was.

Yeah, some company in China to have all your data. So.

Yep. And that's why Facebook's going after them now too.

Yeah. And like again, Facebook wants to. Facebook. Facebook sees. I think Facebook sees TikTok as a huge, huge competitor, which makes sense.

Um, whoever is the people who download the TikTok video and put it on Instagram stories with the TikTok branding. It's like good for you for repurposing it. But.

Yeah, but, but also good for TikTok to know that people are going to do that and automatically impose the branding and the username. Yeah. So like it's a growth hack. I think it's, it's like very like, oh, it's. So these guys there are really smart. They know what they're doing because they, they probably knew, hey, Facebook is probably going to copy us because they probably saw Facebook copying everybody. So in order for us to sort of. We know we're going to get copied. Right. That should be the mentality. If we get a copy and we know users want to share their videos, then go maybe help there. But again, TikTok is.

Or put them on YouTube. Like, thanks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, YouTube. Yeah, yeah.

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Yes.

I got three questions for you. 60 second or less answers. The first one is what is the fastest path to the the cash?

I would say do something like a service based business where you provide a service to somebody for some time. Right.

Okay. Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making in the fastest way for them to fix it?

The I think it's not knowing if the product they have is actually like something customers want. Going back to I said before is does your product have demand? That's sort of like for me whenever I make something I make sure that there's enough volume or search traffic for that product.

Excellent. Number three, what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

It's like you have to have subscription base. That's the easiest way. Just ask customers subscription base. Think about it like I only when I think about new products I want to make, I need to say like can this company, this product be used within 30 to 60 days and if not it might be too hard to advertise online because of the cost of acquisition.

I love that mentality. And for anyone that's not familiar with subscription or I mentioned MRR earlier. It's monthly recurring revenue.

The whole point is it's a form of passive income that you know, it's recurring, you know, month to month or like you're saying 60 days, you know, you don't want to jump into something that's got an 18 month acquisition cycle and well, you might want to, but you'd be in a very small percentage of the population, I'd say.

Yeah. And I think too it's like it makes sense if you already have a business that has cash flow and then you can afford these longer cacs. Before I think it was the opposite which like hey, I want to make a pride that lasts like two years. Now it's like I want to make a product that lasts for 60 days because I want more money, I want to sell more and then let's make products that last longer because now I have the cash flow, I have the team and you can afford this long periods of time. So it's, I feel like it's switching now.

Yeah, a lot of people joke around with like what is it? Soaps, laundry detergent, household goods and stuff like that. But I've heard even the Sharks and Shark Tank, you know, they're looking for stuff that is the exact same thing because how often do you buy a big screen or a diamond ring or something fancy like a yacht, you're not buying them every month. You, it's a one time purchase and that's years later. Concrete, if you do a bad, you know the only way to make it recurring is doing a bad job but then you're going to go out of business. But if you do a good job, concrete's good for 25 to 30 years.

Yeah, it's, yeah, it's a very different mentality now. I think where before people wanted to make these products the last two, three years but they're realizing that like, well, like cost is going up. I can't, I can't sell another one.

It's.

Or you have to re. Innovate every time, make new products. Just a very different type of company. You know some companies are great like that. Look at a company like Apple, like even Apple is yearly products. Yeah.

Yeah, they're pushing yearly because they know they want that cash. So yeah, think about it like that. Like even a company like Apple that makes the best phone, they want to sell you a new one every single year. So.

But don't forget it's not the only thing in the lineup. I've noticed Samsung doing it with, oh, we got the new flagship, whatever Galaxy, but then they have the Note line and it's six months. Yeah, like hey, we don't care if you switch and switch back, we're gonna have something new. But you know, Apple's got the computers, the tablets. Is it insult if I say tablet and not iPad?

Like iPad.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

But yeah, the watch ecosystem.

Yeah, oh yeah.

The Apple tv.

Yeah. All that stuff now like the movies. Yeah. It's like every company wants this recurringness. Almost every company switching to recurring. And it's. I think it's interesting because like a few years ago like you're like, oh, would you pay for all this recurring stuff? You're like, no, I would never do that. Now it's like, oh yeah, it's obvious. Like yeah, of course I'm paying for that. Right. So it's very interesting to see the shift in. Yeah, it's like at least people, people seeing it now too with like Netflix, Disney plus like I have like everything now. I'm just like, I'm like paying for cable and all this stuff. I'm like, I'm paying more money than what I supposed to save. Right.

So yeah, well I'm glad you mentioned that. I. What books would you recommend to Expert Authority World?

So for me my favorite book is for marketing book. I would say it's Dot Com Secrets by Russell Brunson. I love that book. It's like, I think it's just, it's traffic agnostic, doesn't matter your Facebook, Google. But it teaches you about marketing and how to think about selling and funnels. So and I think that applies to any business no matter what you do, service or product or you know, anything in between.

Excellent. Where would you like people to learn more?

Just voi media.com that's my company website. So go there or just email me at Kevin Voymedia. So some of the best spots to find me.

Excellent. Well Kevin, it's been a pleasure. I thank you so much.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

All right, Expert Authority World. We have another great one here today. I'll see you tomorrow. Have a great day and God bless.

You're already the expert. But have you transformed your expertise into a tangible asset that will generate qualified leads while increasing profit for you 247 and if so, how well are you promoting it? With my new book, the Expert Authority Effect publishing method, I take you through my process step by step. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Visit eapublishingmethod book.com to get started. Now once again, that's eapublishingmethodbook.com thanks for listening to today's episode. I would love to know what you enjoyed most from it. If you haven't done so already. I invite you to connect with me on my new LinkedIn. You can go to it directly at eainterviews.com LinkedIn Once again, that's eainterviews.com LinkedIn. Lastly, check out the full eainterviews.com site for complete show notes, the full interview video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I'll see you on the next one.